Perhaps no reputational decline in English literature has been as precipitous as that of Sir Walter Scott. Honored for much of the nineteenth century as the preeminent European novelist, he has since been reduced to a footnote. If he lingers in the popular literary consciousness, or what of it still exists, it is generally as a purveyor of pseudo-medieval swashbuckling adventure in Ivanhoe.
This is an injustice to the pioneer of the historical novel—a description that, though loosely correct, diminishes Scott’s true stature as an artist. To appreciate this stature, however, it may be helpful to reconsider the way the novel was intellectualized as a literary form after his death. To truly appreciate Scott’s work, we would do well to approach the novel more flexibly, as essentially a form of entertainment, however edifying or insightful it can be.
The downward spiral of Scott’s literary stock can be traced back to the early twentieth century. By 1930, when E. M. Forster dismissed Scott as a mere storyteller unworthy of adult readers’ time, the literary novel had largely become a means of exploring psychological states, with excursions into philosophical point-making in the manner of Dostoevsky. By that standard, Scott certainly falls short: his characters are drawn externally and often in broad strokes, although at times with more craft (or restraint) than one expects.
But if one accepts a novel in which the characters serve the story rather than the other way around, Scott’s greatness is obvious. His stories, the best of them at least, are neither the childish adventures Forster seemed to think them nor unreflective nostalgia, as Mark Twain derided them (the latter went so far as to blame the Civil War on Scott). Instead, they are pictures of complete and complex worlds, not created by a true philosopher, surely, but written with an eye to what would interest one. To read Scott is to remember that the novel can engage a thoughtful mind without pretensions to philosophy or psychological analysis and that reading for pleasure can provide intellectual rewards in an incidental way. Scott is the thinking man’s storyteller.
A tour through his novels will reveal why a Scott revival is in order. Nowhere is Scott’s ability to combine excitement and depth—and without intellectual ostentation—more evident than in Waverley (1814). What at first glance may seem a picaresque novel culminating in a propagandistic paean to British pragmatism and the Hanoverian status quo proves instead to be a well-rounded and frequently moving epic. One can hardly read Scott, here or elsewhere, to be on the side of the Jacobite rebels, or even friendly to them; Twain was wrong to find in Scott a simple glamorization of nostalgia and lost causes. But the defeat of Waverley’s Jacobites, epitomized in the downfall of Fergus Mac-Ivor, is not so much a vindication of the so-called Glorious Revolution as a proper tragedy. The Highlanders lose their old world not because it was a bad one but because of vainglory, squabbling, and poor judgment. It is precisely because Scott is more storyteller than philosopher, psychologist, or satirist that he can show the reader, often keenly, the appeal of each faction and worldview, all while emphasizing the human element in the triumph or loss of any cause. Colonel Talbot finally secures Waverley’s Hanoverian loyalty, but the picture of the rougher and yet somehow more tender virtues of the Highland Jacobites who first helped win over Waverly to the Chevalier is indelible.
Scott was not always so careful to avoid the whiff of sheer propaganda, though. In Old Mortality (1816), it is hard to take seriously the spectacle of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment man Henry Morton fighting alongside the crazed seventeenth-century Calvinist radicals he disdains just because he thinks they should be left alone. Even so, Scott the storyteller is at his cleverest here as Morton’s anachronistic sensibility carries him through the post-1688 political realignment (and reunites him with his sweetheart in the process). This approach is extremely effective from a literary point of view and keeps the expected happy resolution from seeming unearned or contrived.
In Rob Roy (1817), by contrast, Scott brings more subtlety to the implicit polemics (Rashleigh as scheming Jesuit excepted) than to the plot at large. It is hard to imagine a more brazen contrivance than the way all the Northumberland Osbaldistones die off to allow Frank to marry Diana; but where Rob himself is in the picture—too little of the time, alas—Scott is back in the world of Waverley, not just in the theme of Jacobite rebellion but in the juxtaposition of modern English pragmaticism and mercantilism with Highland grievance. The former has its benefits in terms of stability and prosperity, which carry the day—but without effacing the reader’s sense of the greater grandeur and exhilaration the admittedly cruder Highland traditions may offer. Scott in this vein dramatizes the gradual emergence of the modern world, not as a Hegelian moralization of history but as a series of changes with both advantages and disadvantages, which readers must weigh for themselves.
On that note, the final installment in the “Jacobite trilogy,” Redgauntlet (1824), has its admirers, and its author, who was by no means incapable of self-criticism, seemed pleased with it, but it treats the succession dispute without the poignant resonance of Waverly or the best parts of Rob Roy. The Jacobite cause becomes a mere curiosity in the persons of the villainously Quixotic title character and the ineffectual aging Chevalier; and the plot, which is meandering even by nineteenth-century standards, depends too much on sensationalistic devices such as a love interest who turns out to be a long-lost sister. These are exceptions: the other Jacobite novels show us the rebels as often sympathetic figures with real and varied motives, and sometimes vivid grievances. Even in his formulaic plot points, romances for instance, Scott typically avoids stretching credibility, or at least leavens the fanciful with humor. A Scott novel as a whole tends to ring true even in the absence of modern naturalism.
All this talk about history and the emergence of modernity should not be taken to suggest that Scott’s literary greatness is solely as a pioneer and master of the historical novel as a kind of genre piece, or as a dramatizer of great political and cultural conflicts. Certainly he was drawn to these as subjects and felt comfortable writing about them, comparing himself unfavorably to Jane Austen, whose ability to enliven pedestrian situations he thought he lacked. He could not match her for wit, sparkle, and absolute refinement, but he could be surprisingly moving when working on a smaller thematic canvas. The Antiquary (1816), which an early biographer claimed as Scott’s own favorite among his novels, is a fine example of this talent: an improbably warm light comedy about a Latin-spouting pedant.
Scott does not try for Austen’s more naturalistic approach to characterization in this novel; there is little obvious concern with psychology or personal development, although the titular pedant, a mere crank much of the time, is ever so subtly, even organically, softened during the course of the story. But if with Austen there can be an air of ennui in the depiction of the idle classes’ world, in which nothing is more important than who marries whom, Scott creates here a tapestry with a sense of depth. Virginia Woolf, in rare twentieth-century praise for Scott, spoke of his Shakespearean ability to make his characters reveal themselves in speech, and there is indeed a grandeur and directness in much of his dialogue.
Equally Shakespearean is his ability to seamlessly shift tonal registers, and there is perhaps no better example than the scenes toward the end of The Antiquary with the Earl of Glenallan and those surrounding the death of Elspeth. Without batting an eye, Scott takes us from comedy to tragedy—a tragedy stark enough to be really moving—and then just as gracefully leads us back into the sunlight for a happy resolution, made all the more moving, in spite of some contrivance, by the way in which Oldbuck, the titular antiquary, seems to have been made somewhat more human by the notes of tragedy. That the tragic turn does not come off as an awkward interpolation is due in part to the vividly realized range of character types populating the book: the village gossips, the haughty but not unsympathetic Sir Arthur Wardour, the conniving Dousterswivel, and especially the benevolent yet self-assured and unsentimental Edie Ochiltree. Nothing can feel out of place in this world; it has a completeness and balance despite what can seem like a shapeless plot.
The Antiquary is a comic novel, but rather in the way Wagner’s Meistersinger is a comic opera: generally lighthearted, sometimes farcical, never a laugh-fest. Scott did not have a natural flair for comedy, and Oldbuck is in the vein of Waverley’s Baron of Bradwardine and The Heart of Midlothian’s David Deans (1818): comic relief through loquacious pomposity, although Deans’s is of a less polished, unscholarly kind, which can grow irksome.
Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby suggests the same thing more pithily and colorfully with Mr. Curdle’s obsession with “preserving the unities.” Scott tries to treat this type of character more broadly with Dominie Sampson in Guy Mannering (1815), but there he tends to err in the opposite direction, making Sampson so hapless and ridiculous as to be an object of pity instead of fun, for all the mockery he sustains, obliviously, within the story. But Scott was too observant to be truly unfunny, and as labored as his humor can be, it seldom rings false.
If Scott’s comic efforts, however respectable, are no match for Dickens, or for that matter the more refined satire of Austen, he far surpasses Dickens in avoiding bathos and achieving the simplicity of emotion required for true tragedy, or triumph. In The Heart of Midlothian, Scott gives us in Jeanie Deans the purely virtuous heroine Dickens always tried to portray but never managed to bring to life convincingly and without being cloying. (Bleak House works so well partly because, by making Esther Summerson a narrator, Dickens paradoxically takes much of the focus off of her less than ideally rounded personality.) With Scott, one feels Jeanie’s anguish over her sister’s imprisonment and conviction; one believes in her wholehearted unwillingness to help her sister by lying and by the urgency and selflessness with which she seeks and finds a way to save her in good conscience. Through all this, into the overlong depiction of her later domestic life that comes toward the end of the book, she remains a real person and not a thinly disguised angel. There was a real Jeanie Deans, from whose life Scott borrowed the basic scenario—but the realization of the character is all his, and it is a great achievement.
And Deans is just one counterexample to the canard that Scott’s characters are cardboard cutouts. Scott seldom put a young woman at the center of a novel as he did in Midlothian, and some of his heroines are female Edward Waverleys—pleasantly unremarkable plot devices, foils for the more interesting characters—but Ivanhoe’s Rebecca has much of Jeanie Deans’s quiet dignity and fortitude, and Rob Roy’s Diana some of her sheer largesse of spirit. And this is to say nothing of Guy Mannering’s aged Meg Merrilies, who could easily have been grotesque in other hands but has a movingly craggy power in Scott’s, or of Midlothian’s own Madge Wildfire, who would be grotesque if she were not tragic.
Scott is more sweeping than Austen, less sentimental than Dickens, less grim than Hawthorne, and more subtle than Dostoevsky in handling intellectual or philosophical themes, but by no means are his virtues purely negative ones. His best novels combine a unique warmth and cumulative power with just enough brilliance of detail. The nineteenth century had a point in granting him pride of place among novelists, a point we may see more easily if we don’t insist on reading novels as primary sources for philosophy or psychology. He deserves to be embraced once again as a literary giant of his age.
