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TO
WIN READERS FOR SIR WALTER SCOTT:
A CONSULTATION WITH ASHEVILLE TORCH CLUB Remarks by Patrick Killough November 02, 2006 to the Torch Club of Asheville-Blue Ridge, North Carolina I.
INTRODUCTION
Our Asheville Torch Club presentations are magisterial, exploratory or fall somewhere in between. --(1) In magisterial mode, a speaker presents a subject about which he has thought hard and drawn lasting conclusions. Not only has he mastered his subject, but he has been its master for some time. The subject sounds new and fresh only to listeners. A master finishes on time and effectively sets the stage for us listeners to have a constructive 30 minutes of discussion. --(2) At the other, exploratory extreme, a Torch Club presenter may be tackling a topic for the very first time. In any case, she is far from finished. She is on a voyage of discovery. With us she is sharing her first word, not her last. An explorer pushes the outer limits of what she knows. She may run over time. In a magisterial talk, we expect superior rhetoric, composition and logic. In a voyage of discovery, by contrast, our speaker may sound breathless, excited, tentative, disorganized. Thought does not flow trippingly from thought. Proof might be stronger. The speaker's material is too much for one 30-minute talk. In practice, what we hear at our monthly meetings falls somewhere between voyage of discovery and display of mastery. This evening, I present Sir Walter Scott, a subject about which I know less than I will know six months or a year from now, when I plan still to be talking about and teaching Scotland's greatest novelist. I ask your help. Please use our follow-on half hour to show me how to win more readers for Sir Walter Scott. *****
When an American hears "Scotland," which noted Scotsmen or Scotswomen spring to mind? Actor Sean Connery does. Explorer David Livingstone, probably, as well. Certainly, Mary Stuart, the "Queen of Scots." Of course, Robert Burns, author of Auld Lang Syne. What about British Prime Minister Tony Blair, born and educated in Edinburgh? Or medieval makers of Scottish independence, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce? Have I forgotten someone? I have not mentioned Sir Walter Scott, Baronet (1771 - 1832). He turned down the poet laureateship in 1813. After 1805 Scott became the most widely read poet and teller of tales in both Europe and America until he ceded the bard's baton to Lord Byron and the novelist's palm to Charles Dickens. After WAVERLEY burst upon the world in 1814, Walter Scott delighted the world and the USA with 26 more historical novels before his debt-driven death in 1832. Only Shakespeare has inspired more operas than the 85 derived from Walter Scott. (1) Painters brought to life his best known characters. Beloved figures such as Ivanhoe, Rebecca and Rowena are statuettes in 64 niches on the Gothic 200 foot high Walter Scott monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh. Unlike some great writers (Sinclair Lewis and Graham Greene come to mind), Walter Scott was a kindly, conventionally decent man who lived without scandal and much as the great religions teach that men ought to live. Overcoming polio and other illnesses, he developed astonishing gifts of memory, intellect, will and imagination. *****
II.
SIX REASONS TO READ SIR
WALTER
SCOTT
Let me suggest to you and other Americans six of many promising entry points into Scott's work. As you hear each one, ask if you now want to read Walter Scott. If not, why not? What more would you care to hear? (1) We
All Quote Sir Walter Scott.
(2) Walter Scott is Part of America's Story. (3) Scott Invented the Historical and the Political Novel. (4) The Baronet Shaped the Romantic Movement in Literature. (5) Great People Hold High the Laird of Abbotsford. (6) Scott the Minstrel Created Memorable Characters. Consider IVANHOE. *****
(1) We
All Quote Sir Walter Scott.
Bartleby, a publisher of hundreds of literary texts on the internet (2), lists 79 of Scott's sayings. Here are five:
Bluid is thicker than water. (a)
Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive! (b) The sun never sets on the immense empire of Charles V. (c) Breathes there the man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd As home his footsteps he hath turn'd From wandering on a foreign strand? If such there breathe, go, mark him well! For him no minstrel raptures swell (d) and finally Hail to the chief ... ! (e) (2)
Walter Scott is Part of America's Story.
Walter Scott wrote little about North America. In the poem ROKEBY and THE PIRATE, a novel, important characters had spent time in the New World. But they were 17th Century pirates who removed back to Britain. There are scattered references to Indians; and at the end of THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, set in the mid 18th Century, The Whistler, brutish young bastard son of a villain, having killed his father, is kidnapped and transported to Virginia in a flourishing Scottish trade in human flesh. There he is indentured to a cruel master, whom he slays, and runs away to join an Indian tribe. During the American revolution Captain John Paul Jones raided near Walter Scott's home in Edinburgh. But American independence became a fact when Scott was still a boy and did not fire his genius. THE LADY OF THE LAKE is a narrative poem published in 1810 about a disguised King James V, father of Mary Queen of Scots. In one vivid scene a hundred Highlanders bend over their oars on Loch Katrine and row rhythmically as they sing the praises of their chief, Roderick Dhu, and his banner of the pine. Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Honored and blessed be the ever-green Pine! Within a year THE LADY OF THE LAKE was a stage play. Its Edinburgh production then ran in Philadelphia in 1812 including "Hail to the Chief" as a tune set to music by James Sanderson. Scott's themes of contending values resonated well in the USA during the War of 1812. The song was played in 1815 to celebrate peace. Hail to the Chief was performed for Andrew Jackson in 1829 and became associated with Presidents Martin Van Buren, John Tyler and James K. Polk. Music buff Harry Truman researched the tune's history. Since 1954, with changed lyrics, "Hail to the Chief" has been the Department of Defense's official musical tribute to the President. (3) Walter Scott did not write historical novels about North America, but his imitator James Fenimore Cooper, dubbed "the American Scott," did so with gusto in his five Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper's first, THE PIONEERS, is the one most like a Scott novel. In THE PIONEERS past and future first confront each other in American fiction -- out on an ever moving frontier. Later, Mark Twain not entirely absurdly blamed Scott for inspiring the romantic, Highlander-evoking old-timey rebellious plantation spirit that led the American South to secede.. Then comes Sir Walter Scott and
... sets the world in love
with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion;
with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses
and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a
brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm;
more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that
ever wrote. ...
Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. (4) When Stephen Vincent Benet won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for his epic poem JOHN BROWN'S BODY, he echoed Sir Walter Scott's themes to many a reader. (3) Scott
Invented the Historical and the
Political Novel.
Homer's ILIAD and ODYSSEY were many centuries earlier than any lengthy heroic tales, poetry or prose, told by Walter Scott. So were medieval and renaissance metrical romances. Seventeenth century prose romances had swept across Europe, many Gothic, some set in the exotic East. Scott knew them all, as well as the cooler 18th Century novels by Fielding, Goldsmith and others. The latter were full of realism, dialog and concrete social settings. So what did Sir Walter do new when he created the "historical novel?" In what quickly became a huge, flexible genre in the hands of Cooper, Dumas and others, Scott more often than not set down ordinary, often bewildered fictitious men and women in lavishly described real times and places of yesteryear. His first novel WAVERLEY, or, 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE (published in 1814, but narrated as from 1805) is the story of Edward Waverley, a dreamy young Englishman who travels north into Scotland to join his English regiment, unknowingly just before the great rising of 1745 - 1746 under Prince Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie." After some time among aristocratic lowlanders in Perthshire, young Waverley moves up into the highlands and, following some setbacks, joins the Prince and his court in Edinburgh. He marches with the Scottish army into England. Throughout his ups and downs, Waverley acts morally, saves lives and begins clumsily to define himself as a more realistic adult. In WAVERLEY, THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR and other novels, Scott sketches leading political fanatics on both sides of a revolution or its aftermath scheming alongside ordinary people who are just trying to make lives for themselves under new, sometimes impossible circumstances. His novels show that life goes on in times of catclysmic changes: the Crusades, Prince John's usurpation of power in England, the rise of Napoleon. Even under stress, "the simple folk" woo and wed. The middle class pursue their hobbies, antiquarian or otherwise. They change religions. They are generally clueless as to the meaning of the great events of the age in which they live. Typically, a Walter Scott hero is trapped between two murderous fanaticisms (Catholic v. Protestant, Highlander v. Lowlander, Scot v. English, etc.) under revolutionary or pre-revolutionary conditions. Politics is presented as ruthless, inhuman and ruinous, but family life and friendship are more basic and define the selfhood of the heroes and heroines if, as is usual, some of them live to a happy ending. (5) (4) The
Baronet Shaped the Romantic
Movement in Literature.
Walter Scott created the historical novel. But he was only one of many writers in late 18th Century and early 19th Century European Romantic literature. He had translated Goethe's GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN and made Britons aware of Germany's raging "Storm and Stress." Yet he had come of age inside the post-Baroque period of the Scottish Enlightenment, based in Edinburgh, with its cool, detached, rationalist writers, scientists and philosophers to whom emotion was the enemy of intellect. As a new-fangled Romantic, Scott sympathetically probed simpler, more primitive periods in Britain and elsewhere. He greatly disliked superstitions but accepted that in all ages they were salient to people, and he wrote sympathetically of such earlier beliefs and practices. He made room in his tales of olden days for spectral ladies, seers, doom predictors and omens. His characters were often passionate, and destructive. Walter Scott was depressed by the violence which stained centuries of Scottish history. But he treated violence honestly. G.K. Chesterton thought Walter Scott the greatest Romantic writer and judged that romanticism is at the heart of the human condition. Scott better than any understood that scenes and nature evoke the depths of the human soul and he made virtually personified scenery, vistas, storms, costumes, armor and weapons integral to his poems and novels. Romanticism personifies objects like swords, armor and mountain ponds and is, among other things, also theatrical and oratorical, where Realism is quiet and often plodding. Scott's works, being theatrical, inspired scores of operas. Being oratorical, Scott 's works also abound in great talk and speeches. (5) Great
People Hold High The Laird of
Abbotsford
Walter Scott was 42 when his first novel, WAVERLEY, appeared anonymously in July 1814. In September, Jane Austen, four years his junior in life, though senior as a novelist, had no doubt that the work was Scott's and respected but feared his competition. (6) As a youth, John Henry Newman waited impatiently for the sun to rise bearing light enough to read the latest Waverley novel. (7) In 1832, when Scott was declining toward death, the future Cardinal often prayed for him, recalling John Keble's poetic exhortation to "Think on the minstrel as ye kneel." (8) In the summer of 1828, Edward Bouverie Pusey would soon become a colleague of Newman and Keble in the triumvirate leading the Oxford Movement to bring the Church of England back to pre-Reformation roots. With his bride, Pusey called on the Baronet at his 1000 acre country manor, Abbotsford, southeast of Edinburgh. The couple were honoring the poet of ROKEBY, whose lines they had read together during their courtship. (9) In 1821 George Gordon, Lord Byron's diary said, "I have read all W Scott's novels at least fifty times ... wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him." (10) Georges Simenon, creator of French Detective Inspector Maigret, when he first saw the 200 foot high monument to Walter Scott in Edinburgh and hearing what it was, exclaimed, "What? They put that up to one of us? To a novelist? Well, after all, why not? He invented us all." (11) Like Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton was aware of Scott's faults. But GKC saw in the Laird of Abbotsford a titan of romance and rhetoric. He wrote:
Scott distributes his noble
orations
equally
among saints and villains. He may deny a villain every virtue or
triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling word; he will ruin
a man but he will not silence him. ... "Die," cries Balfour of Burley
to the villain in 'Old Mortality.' "Die, hoping nothing,
believing nothing --" "And fearing nothing," replies the other."
This is the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was
practiced by the great worthies of antiquity. (12)
(6) Scott
the Minstrel created Memorable
Characters.
Consider IVANHOE. Most of us remember some of the people in IVANHOE, the most popular Scott novel in his lifetime and since. Transplanted Plantagenets and their swaggering Norman barons rule 12th Century England's sullen Saxon majority. Norman knights led by the Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and the brutish lord Reginald Front de Boeuf prop up Prince John who had usurped rule when his brother Richard The Lion-heart went Crusading. King Richard Plantagenet has now returned, disguised as the Black Knight. We see Isaac of York and especially his daughter Rebecca, learned in medicine and literature, who falls in love with Richard's loyal knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe. But a Jewess may not marry a Christian. Before he dies conscience-stricken in combat with Ivanhoe, the Templar Bois-Guilbert admits that he had broken many Commandments, but never his word -- another grand rhetorical brag by a Walter Scott villain. Look over there! In staggers tipsy Friar Tuck, with Little John and their leader Robin of Locksley. Who can hear enough of Wamba the jester and Gurth the swineherd? They are a comic but effective dynamic duo within the Saxon guerrilla resistance to Norman overlordship. As with the Bard of Avon, what many especially love in the Minstrel of Abbotsford, is how Scott lifts characters from his inkwell to three dimensional color in our imagination. So, if you remember and love the people of IVANHOE, there are hundreds more other "Scott-landers" ready to make your acquaintance. Think of simple Jeanie Dean in THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN. She would not tell a lie in court to save her innocent sister's life. But she did save that life by walking from Edinburgh to London, winning a pardon from the wife of King George II. Scott's Old Mortality was a real Scotsman, Robert Paterson. Like his younger American contemporary Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman), Paterson embraced a life-long one-man outdoor mission: to move about Scotland restoring graves and memorials of Covenanting Presbyterian martyrs to cruelty of the last Stuart Kings. The novel narrates stories heard from Old Mortality, amplified by a fictional narrator's research into competing points of view. Would that THE PIRATE were made into a movie or BBC mini series! Show us on screen that ancient Norwegian aristocracy still powerful in the late 17th Century on Scotland's Shetland and Orkney Islands. Look, here comes 'auld Norna of Fitful Head, the most fearful woman in all the isles,' with terrifying powers to still the winds and forecast the future. Born Ulla Troil, Norna is of ancient Norse nobility, near kin of the powerful island magnate Magnus Troil and his two daughters, dark-haired mystical Minna and blond unsuperstitious Brenda. Not many months ago I knew few of these or dozens of other great fictional people of many lands and times. May my new friends now be yours! III.
CONCLUSION
Much I have passed over: illnesses in Scott's life, the polio which shriveled his right leg when he was only 18 months old. Nor have I dwelt on his distinguished career in the law or his rejection by his first love for a richer man, or the financial collapse which made a hell of his last years of life as he wrote his way out of debt, potboiler by health-destroying potboiler: all to avoid bankruptcy and selling his beloved but costly estate, Abbotsford. I have not talked about the Laird of Abbotsford's pathbreaking, perceptive, sympathetic, tolerant insights into religions: Christian, Muslim and Jewish; as well as into Christian denominations and sects: Catholics, Calvinists, Covenanters, Cameronians and others. I have shared with you fleeting glimpses of a great story-teller who placed his mark on historical scholarship and on Scotland's world image, of a man who created the historical novel and put a moderate stamp on an often fantastic, irrational Romantic movement. You have heard that great men held the Minstrel in high regard or, in Mark Twain's case, argued that he caused our Civil War. You have seen a handful of his memorable characters and heard some of his often quoted remarks. So, do you now want to read this man? If so, can you and I together win new readers for Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, "the Laird of Abbotsford?" 3037 words 11/03/06 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- SOURCES OF THE FIVE QUOTATIONS FROM WALTER
SCOTT
(a) GUY
MANNERING. Chap. xxxviii.
(b) MARMION. Canto vi. Stanza 17. (c) LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. (February, 1807.) (d) LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. Canto vi. Stanza 1. (e) LADY OF THE LAKE. Canto ii. Stanza 19. END
NOTES
(1) Mitchell
(1996), 7; (1977), 9.
(2) On line at http://www.bartleby.com/100/338.htm. (3) For the history of the song see web site http://memory.loc.gov/cocoon/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200000009/default.html. "Hail to the Chief" always invokes the American Presidency. It pops up in book titles such as Robert Dallek's study of the presidents and even Ed McBain, in his 87th Precinct series, uses it to invoke Richard Nixon. (4) Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. On line see http://www.twainquotes.com/SirWalterScott.html Walter Scott died 20 years before 1852's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to which Abraham Lincoln gave some credit for starting the Civil War. (5) For a good, short description of Scott's two inventions, the historical novel and the political novel, see Lamont, Introduction to WAVERLEY, xiv, f. "Scott
was the
first novelist with an imaginative
understanding of the past, with the ability to relive life in an
earlier society." "In Waverley
Scott chose a past setting in order to recreate and explain an earlier
society."
(6) See R. W. Chapman, JANE AUSTEN'S LETTERS, 2nd edition 1952, p. 404. Cited by Lamont, Introduction to WAVERLEY, vii. Walter
Scott has no business to write
novels, especially good ones. -- It is not fair. -- He has Fame and
Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of
other people's mouths. -- I do not like him, & do not mean to like
Waverley if I can help it -- but fear I must.
(7) Wilson, 104 (8) Wilson, 89. John Keble, THE CHRISTIAN YEAR, Sixth Sunday After Trinity. If ever, floating from faint earthly lyre, Was wafted to your soul one high desire, By all the trembling hope ye feel, Think on the minstrel as ye kneel. (9) Wilson, 88. (10) Massie, 3. (11) Massie, 6. McLaren, 229f. (12)
Chesterton 56, 58.
*****
SIX WRITERS
CITED IN THE END
NOTES
--Gilbert Keith CHESTERTON. "The Position of Sir Walter Scott," in TWELVE TYPES (1902), pp. 53 -59. Sandy, Utah, Quiet Vision Publishing, 2004. 59 pp. ISBN 1-57646-839-9. --Clair LAMONT, editor, WAVERLEY; OR, 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford University Press/ 1986. Paper 1986, 1998. xxxii. 464 pp. ISBN 0-19-283601-3 (pbk) --Allan MASSIE. "Why We Should Read Scott Today," pp. 3 - 13, BULLETIN, 2003, The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. --Moray McLAREN. SIR WALTER SCOTT: THE MAN AND PATRIOT. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1970. xi. 244 pp. --Jerome MITCHELL. THE WALTER SCOTT OPERAS: AN ANALYSIS OF OPERAS BASED ON THE WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. University, Alabama. University of Alabama Press. 1977. xiv. 402 pp. ISBN 0-8173-6401-3. --Jerome MITCHELL. MORE SCOTT OPERAS: FURTHER ANALYSES OF OPERAS BASED ON THE WORKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. Lanham (Maryland). University Press of America, Inc. 1996. 328 pp. ISBN 0-7618-0260-6 --A.N. (Anthony Norman) WILSON. THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD: A VIEW OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. New York. Oxford University Press. reprint 1989. paper. 197 pp. FOR
FOLLOW-ON READING:
Seven Recommended Works by Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832) -1810. THE LADY OF THE LAKE: A POEM IN SIX CANTOS. Chicago. Donohue, Henneberry & Company. From the latest Edinburgh edition. undated. apparently reprint of 1830 edition. 335. pp --1814. WAVERLEY: 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. New York. Oxford University Press. Paper. 1986. 1998. xxxii. 464 pp. --1816. THE TALE OF OLD MORTALITY. New York. Penguin. 1999. Paper. xlvi. 447 pp. Glossary 428 - 447 pp. -1818. THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN. New York. Oxford University Press. Oxford World Classics. 1982. 1999. Paperback. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Claire Lamont. xl. 583 pp. GLOSSARY 571 - 583. --1819. IVANHOE. New York. TOR Books. Paper. 2000. x. 534 pp. --1819. (1820 on title-page) THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR. New York. Penguin Books. Paper. Edited by J.H. Alexander. Introduction by Kathryn Sutherland. Has long Chronology of Walter Scott. xlix. 346 pp. --1821. THE PIRATE. Reprint of 1871 Centenary edition. Lerwick, Shetlands. The Shetland Times Ltd. 1996. With foreword (i - xxiv) by Andrew Wawn. paper. 363 pp. ISBN 1 898852 17 0. -OOO- 11/01/2006 Revisited 10/25/2008 DEVELOPMENTS
AFTER 11/02/2006
NOTE: The talk which I gave to Asheville Torch Club in early November 2006 was an important early milestone in a projected 18 month personal effort to make Sir Walter Scott better known to my fellow Americans. Discussion after my Asheville remarks was brisk and constructive. I learned that one club member, mathematician Bill Currie, has the collected Waverley Novels, an inheritance from his father. Another wondered about the curious mistake which some booksellers make referring to Sir Walter Bart Scott! Most interest went to Mark Twain's views of The Minstrel and the American Civil War. After reading the online text of my remarks, Lee Simpson of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club called to my attention a talk given in October 2004 by Professor Andrew W. Hook on "Scott in America" in the 2005 Club Bulletin. I had not yet read this text and duly added it to my Scott bibliography at http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/sirws.html just below an earlier visit to the same subject by Professor Hook. I have also acquired the text of Twain's LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and will read it all to get the overall "Southern" context of his approach to Scott. At this moment, I believe that Twain v. Scott may be among the top two "entry points" to Walter Scott for American readers. We may not know much of Mark Twain, but we know more than we do about Walter Scott! A related entry point for new friends of Walter Scott may be the possible inspiration of Scott for the American secret society, the Ku Klux Clan via Chapter 30 of his 1829 novel ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN. On December 24, 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the KKK's founders, all of Scottish descent, launched their Knighthood of the White Camelia. See also today's successor organization's website at http://www.wckkkk.com/. Linking Walter Scott and the KKK is a highly debatable thesis. But debating it might win new readers. I hope to probe Twain v. Scott and related themes January 17 -21 in Eureka Springs, Arkansas at an elderhostel embedded in a Celtic celebration. See http://www.elderhostel.org/programs/programdetail.asp?RowId=1%2D2XOFM8&DateId= ==-=-=-=-=-=-= 07/04/2007. Time Rolls along. August 10, 2007 I shall speak in Pittsburgh on "SIR WALTER SCOTT AND JOHN HENRY NEWMAN" at the 2007 Convention of the Venerable John Henry Newman Association. This will be my third non-scholarly appearance before some of the world's most formidable Newmanists. Stay tuned! 10/25/2008 For the Dallas talk, with notes, etc. see http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/sirws_jhn.html Patrick Killough Black Mountain, North Carolina Thursday 11/17/2006 Revisited 12/27/2006 and 07/04/2007 |