Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Sir Walter Scott's novels, a brief guide




Those dusty, dull-bound, heavy books lie like pre-Cambrian bedrock on the lower shelves of pubs and hotels. Such is the fate of the former best-seller, the man who popularised tartan shortbread tins, the man who speckled the suburbs of Birmingham with houses called Loch Lomond in streets called Waverley Crescent and Lammermoor Close, where the daughters were once named Rowena, the sons Nigel. 

Scott is the most under-rated writer in the canon of British literature, second only to Dickens among our great nineteenth-century novelists, readable, fertile, vivid, profound, a master. Like every great novelist, he has huge faults. His English prose style is clumsy and slipshod; he “sows from the sack, not from the hand” and the impact of his best work, essentially poetic, is hard to represent from quotations. His output is vast and many of his novels fail. He promulgated, if he did not initiate, the curious Victorian literary convention that sexual feelings don’t really exist; his scenery and weather are often perfunctory, his heroes and heroines are for the most part as stiff as bookmarks. He was also a Tory and a Unionist, which meets with little favour here. But his massive humanity, comedy and invention are triumphs: once discovered, he is never abandoned. So here goes: 25 novels in six pages, a lifetime of reading. 




THE SCOTTISH PERIOD (1814-1820)

Although these are his earliest novels, they are not beginner’s work. When he published Waverley anonymously he was already 40, a celebrated man of letters thanks to his sensationally popular narrative poems. The novels of this period include his greatest achievements. Some of the later novels are deeply immersed in (lowland) Scottish culture too, but here it’s a continuous presence, the lifeblood of the books.

1.  Waverley (1814)

Seminal, and deeply pondered over many years, this is the first historical novel worthy of the name in world literature. Perhaps his masterpiece, although subtler achievements were to follow. Here are all his great themes: the process of change in society, adolescence, humour, ideals, compromises, reconciliation, progress and extinction. Every adventure, every western movie, every sci-fi fantasy adventure you’ve ever read is indebted to this brilliantly innovative book; not to mention Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot... A great place to start.10 out of 10. (Longer Note on Waverley.)

2.  Guy Mannering (1815)

Scott with a head of steam up, this is frankly an improvisation. Despite its many wonderful scenes and characters, it’s carelessly executed and doesn’t run very deep. The Victorians loved it, but in our severer times: 7 out of 10.

3.  The Antiquary (1816)

On the surface this is even more chaotic and heterogeneous than Guy Mannering; but this time it all works out. This is Scott’s supreme book about conversation, conviviality and human company: a little-known delight. 9 out of 10.

But his sister understood these looks of ire (rescued from drowning, and no food in the house). “Ou dear! Monkbarns, what’s the use of making a wark?”

  “I make no wark, as ye call it, woman.”

  “But what’s the use o’ looking sae glum and glunch about a pickle bains? – an ye will hae the truth, ye maun ken the minister came in, worthy man – sair distressed he was, nae doubt, about your precaurious situation, as he ca’d it, (for ye ken how weel he’s gifted wi’ words,) and here he wad bide till he could hear wi’ certainty how the matter was likely to gang wi’ ye a’. He said fine things on the duty of resignation to Providence’s will, worthy man! that did he.” (The Antiquary, Ch 9)

4.  The Black Dwarf  and  5.  Old Mortality (1816)

Old Mortality is Scott's most exciting and perhaps greatest book, one of the best-imagined stories in English. A profound meditation on violence, fanaticism and repression; pick it up at Chapter 2 (as the Calders advise) and watch how Scott’s insidiously slack-limbed narration sucks you in. 10 out of 10. (Longer Note on Old Mortality. And a Follow-up Note: The Whig's Vault.)

The Black Dwarf, a short novel published alongside Old Mortality, has some fine pages but never gets far off the ground. 5 out of 10. (Longer Note on The Black Dwarf.)

6.  Rob Roy (1818)

A brief, fiery and penetrating book lies hidden inside a baggier, more uneven one. In no book does Scott come closer to a critique of the conventional ruling class that he approved, in no book is the fact of the Highlands more challengingly posed. But we have to wade through a lot of idling and Gothic plotting in Northumberland to get to the serious heart of this, so all in all: 7.5 out of 10.  (Longer Note on Rob Roy. And a Follow-up Note: A Sentence in Rob Roy.
  
7.  The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818)

Scott told the publishers, before he had written a word of it, that it was going to be his best book. And after many readings I've come to feel that he was probably right. The mundane, terrible, triumphant yet ultimately sad story of Jeanie and her family has a psychological penetration that Scott never deployed so fully elsewhere. And great as that story is, there's much more to this longest and most complex of the novels. Still, it's problematic in some ways. Even back when it was published some readers wondered if the fourth volume was really needed (it really is!). It regularly switches genres in a way that admirers of other classic novels might find unsettling, is sometimes demanding (e.g. on Scottish religious history) and sometimes uneven. So to deter readers who aren't already passionate Scott fans, I'm giving it a paltry 9.5 out of 10. (Longer Note on The Heart of Midlothian. And another note: Time trouble in The Heart of Midlothian.)

8.  The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)

Rumoured to have been dictated in delirium and subsequently unremembered by its author (whose life was a catalogue of sicknesses), this is the most un-Scott-like of his masterpieces: a brilliant, bleak, secretive tragedy that operates with intense restraint. Beautifully structured, it shows (along with Old Mortality, Kenilworth etc) that Scott was the most naturally gifted designer of a novel in our tradition. (The French equivalent, in this respect, is Balzac’s Une ténébreuse affaire.)  9 out of 10.

9.  A Legend of Montrose (1819)

This is Scott’s book about war; but that scarcely does it justice. It's a book about violence of peculiar ferocity; a book about war crimes might be nearer the mark. The topic is pondered via unmitigated highland blood-feuds and, in very fertile contrast, the amoral mercenary Dugald Dalgetty.  The book is seriously under-rated. A bit thin and creaky in places, certainly, but fully deserving of 8 out of 10. (Longer Note on A Legend of Montrose.)


THE COSTUME DRAMAS (1820-1826)

It’s commonly supposed that the unprecedented success of Ivanhoe, his first book set outside Scotland, turned Scott’s head, and led him away from the true sources of his inspiration (with the anomalous exception of Redgauntlet). The reality is more complicated. Scott’s books always occupied the borderland with romance anyway, and the best books of this period (e.g. The Abbot, Kenilworth) are as good as all but the very best of his earlier novels – and arguably stranger.

10.  Ivanhoe (1820)

Anyone who wants to understand the Victorian imagination needs to start with this. England went Ivanhoe-crazy; this is the public-school boy’s book par excellence. So did America. So did Europe. And today? Well, it’s a rich and humane adventure with a few deeper chords (Rebecca, the greenwood...). But when all’s said, only half of Scott’s greatness is on view here. 6 out of 10. (Longer Note on Ivanhoe.)

11.  The Monastery  (1820)

This was considered a failure even at the time of its first publication, so is now never read. The November weather, the Tweed and the reformation period suit Scott well, and though the story doesn’t quite add up he’s in easy spirits throughout. 6 out of 10.

The river was not in flood, but it was above its ordinary level – a heavy water, as it is called in that country, through which the monk had no particular inclination to ride, if he could manage the matter better.

  “Peter, my good friend,” cried the sacristan, raising his voice; “my very excellent friend Peter, be so kind as to lower the drawbridge. Peter, I say, dost not hear? – it is thy gossip, Father Philip, who calls thee.”

  Peter heard him perfectly well, and saw him into the bargain; but, as he had considered the sacristan as peculiarly his enemy in his dispute with the convent, he went quietly to bed, after reconnoitring the monk through his loop-hole, observing to his wife that “riding the water in a moonlight night would do the sacristan no harm, and would teach him the value of a brig the neist time, on whilk a man might pass high and dry, winter and summer, flood and ebb.” (The Monastery, Ch 5)

12.  The Abbot (1820)

Characteristically, Scott’s response to his first avowed failure was to write a sequel to it.  Roland and Catherine are Scott’s most lively young couple, and the tension of the theme (Protestantism outlawing Catholism) make this a romance with an edge. 8 out of 10.

  “You talk riddles, my lord,” said Mary; “I will hope the explanation carries nothing insulting with it.”

  “You shall judge, madam,” answered Lindesay. “With this good sword was Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, girded on the memorable day when he acquired the name of Bell-the-Cat, for dragging from the presence of your great-grandfather, the third James of the race, a crew of minions, flatterers, and favourites, whom he hanged over the bridge of Lauder, as a warning to such reptiles how they approach a Scottish throne. With this same weapon, the same inflexible champion of Scottish honour and nobility slew at one blow Spens of Kilspindie, a courtier of your grandfather, James the Fourth, who had dared to speak lightly of him in the royal presence. They fought near the brook of Fala; and Bell-the-Cat, with this blade, sheared through the thigh of his opponent, and lopped the limb as easily as a shepherd’s boy slices a twig from a sapling.” (The Abbot, Ch 21)

13.  Kenilworth (1821)

Perhaps his most under-rated book, this tragedy of ostentation and gorgeous surfaces is a not unworthy companion to The Bride of Lammermoor, the extended description of the revels at Kenilworth unmatched in moral and dramatic intensity. Scott’s sixteenth-century England is utterly unlike what we expect, a nightmare of fortune-hunters and trapdoors that unfolds with a dreadful logic and expires like a thunderclap on the last page. 8 out of 10.

14.  The Pirate (1822)

Scott had loved visiting the Shetlands, but he couldn’t raise a good novel out of it. The things that had moved him were untranslateable into any fiction even he could imagine. Dreary, tame and unconvincing. 3 out of 10.

15.  The Fortunes of Nigel (1822)

Like all the other books he set in the seventeenth century, Scott’s London novel suffers from the inevitable comparison with his own Old Mortality, and in a different way with the Jacobean city comedies from which he plundered so much material. Nigel is colourful but inadequately felt, and dead from the waist down. 4 out of 10. 

16.  Peveril of the Peak (1822)

Much derided, this long book is good for about half its length before finally coming apart at the seams. The prelude is excellent, and Peveril’s journey across England beautifully poised, but Scott abandons his most arresting characters and the ending turns into a wearisome game of chess. 4 out of 10.

17.  Quentin Durward (1823)

If the marks were for literary historical significance, then Durward would come near the top; it opened the floodgates to historical romance in Europe. It's architectural, expansive, finely conceived and often penetrating. You also have to put up with some of Scott's most slovenly prose. 6 out of 10. (Longer Note on Quentin Durward. And a Follow-up Note: Quentin Durward again.)

18.  St Ronan’s Well (1824)

Strange book. Often seems remarkably un-Scott-like: What's with that scene with the tableaux from Shakespeare? Set nearly, but not quite, in the present day (some "twenty years" ago, a similar time-gap to The Antiquary). Compared to Durward or The Talisman, the author's sharp intelligence seems to have sprung to life; it's comparable even to Redgauntlet in that respect. But I keep getting the feeling that I ought to enjoy it much more than I do. Scott as satirist, his lack of  sympathy for most of the characters, is maybe part of the problem. And then there's the very damaging suppression of the most shocking element in the plot, insisted on by James Ballantyne. So all in all, 5 out of 10. (Longer Note on St Ronan's Well.)

19.  Redgauntlet (1824)

For many, his greatest book. Beneath its casual surface is a profoundly poetic meditation on romance itself, intuitive, mature and brilliantly imagined. Its innovative structure incorporates, along with much else, that supreme short story, “Wandering Willie’s Tale”. The closing chapters in Cumberland, alas, fall a bit short. 9 out of 10.

20.  The Betrothed  and 21.  The Talisman (1825)

The first of the “Tales of the Crusaders” is indisputably minor, a book that can be read (like The Pirate) only for the pleasure of hearing its author’s voice. 3 out of 10. The second is intermittently lively, and Scott's excursion into Palestine is an intriguing record of western conceptions of Islam. 5 out of 10. (Longer Note on The Talisman.

RUIN AND DECLINE (1826-1832)

In 1826, the fragile financial system of the printing and publishing trade collapsed. Scott, who was a secret partner in his own printing house, was brought down with it. Rather than plead bankruptcy, he offered to pay his creditors off with the proceeds of future writing. It was a decision that saved his honour and his home, at the cost of literally writing himself to death. (Apart from the novels, these last years produced such daunting monuments as his gigantic Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, now never seen or read: also, his private Journal, a grievous and brilliant book.)

22.  Woodstock (1826)

This intricately rotating microcosm in the unsettled backwash of the English civil war was half-completed when financial ruin, bereavement and illness dropped on its author in quick succession. But in the finished novel it doesn’t show; Scott was a stoic at noon and midnight; the full but sombre palette is there from the start. 6 out of 10. (Longer Note on Woodstock.)

23.  The Fair Maid of Perth (1828)

The best novel of his last period, this warm and wintry adventure, full of incident and humour, shows that Scott had lost none of his inner wisdom and imagination, if only circumstances would allow him to deploy them. 7 out of 10.

24.  Anne of Geierstein (1829)

More interesting than I expected. The book concerns the later history of Charles the Bold, previously seen in Quentin Durward. The initially arresting narrative doesn't manage to retain its hold on us, but the book is rich in detail (it feels long) and it never declines below the level of an impressively sombre history.  4.5 out of 10.

25.  Count Robert of Paris  and 26.  Castle Dangerous (1832)

I've led you astray -- I still haven’t read these two. Universally described, by those few who have ventured in, as the worst novels he wrote. Count Robert is set in eleventh-century Byzantium, Castle Dangerous in medieval Scotland.  (Some of Count Robert was quietly rewritten by Lockhart after Scott refused to modify the story as the publisher wanted; Scott was never told.) Presumably 1 or 2 out of 10.

27.  The Siege of Malta

Desperately ill, Scott went on a recuperative trip to the Mediterranean, collapsing during his return and dying in his own bed. While abroad, he wrote this book and also a novella called Bizarro. Lockhart decided they were not publishable and when they eventually appeared (in 2008) you could see why. No amount of tidying up broken sentences can disguise the calamitous decay of the author’s mind. These spasms of compulsive writing are fascinating from a medical point of view. The imaginative faculty is the first thing to go, and the second half of The Siege of Malta is a bare-bones re-telling of history with no fictional characters at all.



My other Scott-related posts:

Scott's translation of Goethe's Goetz of Berlichingen.
Scott's Life of Dryden:
The Lady of the Lake:
William Laidlaw:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-poems-of-william-laidlaw.html
Ann Radcliffe (A Sicilian Romance):
Scott and American violence:
J.C. Trewin's Selected Prose of Sir Walter Scott:



*


Scott has probably lost his popular audience forever, but I don't want to give the impression that reading him needs to be a solitary experience. It's true that I've found the Wikipedia entries for his novels to be mostly pretty poor, containing little other than contentious plot-summaries. (I haven't checked them out recently and some may have improved.) But Scott is certainly not neglected by scholars. His presence looms too large over the cultural history of Scotland, Britain, Europe and America. There's masses of enthusiastic and thought-provoking academic work out there. I'd urge you e.g. to sign up for a free account on JStor and get access to hundreds of Scott articles.

Here's a few other things that I've happened across:

The Walter Scott Digital Archive (Edinburgh University Library) gathers lots of useful information and links. (Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have been kept up to date since about 2011.)
Don't miss the Image Database, with its wealth of visual materials and realia from the Corson Collection.

J. G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott is available on Gutenberg. Indispensable, even though Lockhart evidently "managed" his father-in-law's reputation. [The first chapter is Scott's own fragment of an autobiography, written in 1808.] This link is to the the first volume (of ten):

If you or your library card has access to Oxford resources, you can see David Hewitt's very comprehensive entry on Scott in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, revised 2008): 

The Maclise Portrait-Gallery is now partially available on Wikisource (2021). A remarkable book, containing Daniel Maclise's 1830s drawings, with an entertaining prose commentary added in 1883 by William Bates. The link below is to the chapter on Scott; many of his friends and contemporaries are also here.

Noctes Ambrosianae (1822-1835), mostly by John Wilson (=Christopher North), is a highly readable series of table-talk colloquies, mostly on matters Scottish and literary, first published in Blackwoods magazine. (One of the other regular drinking companions is James Hogg.) There are some searchable but almost unreadable texts out there, and some unsearchable but readable texts in image format. The following link takes you to volume 1 of Ferrier's edition:




Sir Walter Scott Finding the Manuscript of Waverley in an Attic, 1890 painting by Charles Martin Hardie












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8 Comments:

At 4:33 pm, Blogger Unknown said...

An interesting, useful (and utilised!) set of signposts through the large body of work that is Waverley

 
At 5:40 pm, Blogger Michael Peverett said...

Thank you very much, that's great to hear!

 
At 5:38 pm, Blogger Unknown said...

Thank you. Just what I needed. I haven't read any Scott yet. I am going to start with "Old Mortality".

 
At 7:20 am, Blogger Michael Peverett said...

Good call I reckon. That was the first one I read, too.

 
At 9:14 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for this guide - I have been wanting to read some Scott for years but have never known where to start.
I have now galloped through The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Waverley and the Bride of Lammermoor - up next is The Legend of Montrose.
Scott is now my 2nd favourite novelist after Dickens.
Could you recommend a biography about him?
Thanks once again,
Lee

 
At 11:23 am, Blogger Michael Peverett said...

Hi Lee, it's great to hear there's another admirer out there.

Many years ago, I read slowly through Edgar Johnson's "The Great Unknown" and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it's very long -- not far short of Lockhart's classic biography. For a more concise Life I'd recommend A.N. Wilson's lively book. I'm sure John Sutherland's revisionist biography supplies plenty of food for thought, but I haven't read it yet.

 
At 1:42 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

An excellent, pithy survey of Sir Walter’s work, very useful. I’ve read most of the first Scottish novels, with Guy Mannering as a particular standout – the opening scene is a real spell-binder, like the wonderful watery entrance to the brigand’s camp in Waverly. I thought Ivanhoe was a real dud – doesn’t he spend about half of the novel flat on his back in a coma? Some hero! But the treatment of Rebecca and her father was certainly refreshing. Meanwhile, Kenilworth has just arrived, Quentin is on the way, and I’ll spend some time later this year hunting up Montrose and The Fair Maid in Edinburgh’s musty 2nd hand shops. What about the Buchan biography? I've heard good things about it.

 
At 11:24 am, Blogger Michael Peverett said...

Thank you ! I agree with you about that great opening scene of Guy Mannering, a novel I feel I haven't done justice to. Yes Buchan is excellent reading, if you can make allowances for the Buchanisms and absence of doubt and the habit of interpretation by character types that are common to his imperial era. ("Balfour of Burley is the eternal fanatic"... "the shrewd middle-aged man of business set against the young dreamer" . . . "She is no milk-and-water heroine, no type of passive, suffering virtue, for her courage is that of a man-at-arms" . . .). I found him particularly interesting on Scott's business dealings and political opinions. Buchan is illuminating because he shared so much of Scott's regional and cultural background. Incidentally his Scott book is available online, on Gutenberg Canada:

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/buchanj-sirwalterscott/buchanj-sirwalterscott-00-h-dir/buchanj-sirwalterscott-00-h.html

 

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