GIANT SCOTT

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 123, 21 November 1932, Page 3

GIANT SCOTT

CREATIVE ENERGY

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

PRIESTLEY'S TRIBUTE

Sir Walter Scott died worn out. Six years beforo ho had undertaken to pay. off the debts owed by tho publishing J firm with which he was connected, and these were £130,000. At that time ho was 55; he had overworked himself for years; his health was failing; ,but, nevertheless, he saddled himself with this gigantic debt. In two years he made £40,000, but the pace was too much for him. He had several paralytic seizures, between which he wrote, in a kind of sad twilight, his last tales, went abroad, and then came homo to die, writes J. B. Priestley in the "Daily Mail." -

"When he departed," said Carlyle, who was no lenient judge of men, "he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time." And even now, when' we spend half our days pulling our grandfathers' heroes to pieces, nobody worth listening to would dispute that verdict. Scott was a great man. He had his failings, of course. Hi's high Toryism and romantic antiquarianism were rather absurd. He wasted far too much time and money on the bogus Abbotsford. He should never have allowed himself to become a party to the financial shufflings of his publishers. His reverence for the contemptible George the Fourth was ridiculous. HIS FAILINGS. As a writer he had his failings, too. Most of his poetry is second-rate versifyirigj which has been as "dead as. mutton for many a year. He did not take enough trouble with Ms novels, which are frequently written in clumsy prose, are full of anachronisms and loose ends in the narrative, and usually have a hero and a heroine who are nothing more than a pair of sticks. His novels are equally devoid of passion and ideas. They are nearly always clumsy, untidy, and timid pieces of fiction. Xet the fact remains that Scott was a great man and a great writer. To deny this is to be blind to both-life and literature. If he were alive and working to-day there would bo just as much fuss about him as there was when he was a little king at Abbotsford. There was about' him a grand, simple nobility that would be worth more than Ms weight in radium to us today. • ■ • Though his long ■■ narrative poems seem to us now mere boys' galloping stuff, he was, in lyrical flashes, a real poet, and a poet for everybody, like Burns. If you want to tasto his quality at its best, take the nearest anthology of English lyrics and read his "Proud Maisie." That is the genuine thing, the water from the rock, the miracle. EASY TO CEITICISE. As a novelist he is easy enough to criticise, because every little arrow can hit that huge target. Just as a great man is not a man without failings, so, too, a great novelist is riot a writer without faults. ' Greatness is not a negative thing. It resides in huge positive virtues, and Scott's fiction has them in abundance. There are schoolgirls writing novels .to-day who can successfully avoid his weaknesses, -who can be unfailingly neat.an.d bright and very frank about sex, but the best novelists of our time -cannot beat him at his own grand game. : •'" . He' had two immensely! valuable gifts. These gifts aro rare enough singly in a writer, but they are hardly ever found together. The first gift is that of creative energy. When you have this, you can sit down and write like a madman for daj's and days, words pouring out of you, and yet at the end you will find that your imagination, working at this fever heat, has shaped and coloured everything justly for you. It turns literature into something that looks like a conjuring trick. One. of the best'of Scott's novels is "Guy Mannering," and he wrote it in six weeks. Now lam in the trade myself and am hot generally regarded as a slow worker, but "Guy Mannering" in sis weeks is so terrific it almost frightens me to think of ft. This is to have the creative energy of a giant. GREAT KNOWLEDGE. Along with this, however, he had a second gift. This wa3 a really massive knowledge of human nature, especially as it is observed in the ordinary hurly-burly of life. His heroes and heroines are not very lifelike, chiefly because Scott was not much interested in them, and put them in on principle, be.cause he thought a novel ought to have a stock pair of lbvers. But, on the other hand, he was tremendously interested in nearly everybody else, and this means whole crowds of characters. His novels are filled with people in whose existence we have to believe. And Scott, we feel, was always—or nearly always—absolutely right about them. He has. created a large number of comic characters, but they differ from the comic characters of most other novelists—even of Dickens—in the fact that they are not entirely made up of comic stuff, but have at tho core of them a real;human dignity. They are men and women and not merely walking jokes. A DEMOCRAT. And though Scott is regarded as a devotee of tho .aristocratic principle, there ia something essentially democratic about him as a novelist, if only because his poor men and women stand firmly on their own ground and can retaliate eloquently. There is a kind of equality of opportunity for Scott's characters, just as there is for Shakespeare's. Ho invented the historical novel as wo know it now, and should be given credit for it, but there is1 far too much talk of him simply as an historical novelist. One reason why he is not enjoyed as much as he ought to bo nowadays is that many people make his acquaintance first at school, where they are ordered to read "Ivanhoe" or "Kenilworth." That is frequently the last they see of Scott. They think of him simply as a master of what is sometimes called "tushery," and a rather dreary master at that. Now there are good things in "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth," but they are not Scott at his' best. He should bethought of not so much as an historical romance, but as a Scots novelist, who did for Scotland what Fielding and Dickens did for England. So, if you want to know Scott, plunge into "Guy Mannering" "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Midlothian," and "Bedgauntlet."