A GREAT MAN

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 404, 13 December 1932, Page 7

A GREAT MAN

SIR WALTER SCOTT DIED WORN OUT AND BURDENED BY DEBT. J. B. PRIESTLY'S TRIBUTE. Sir Walter Scott died worn out. Six years before he had undertalcen to pay off the debts owed by the publisliing firm with which he had was connected, and these were £130,000. At that time he was 55; he had overworked liimself for years; his health was failing; hut, 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 home 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 dayis. pulling our grandfatber's' heroes to j pieces, nobody worth listening to would fiispute that verdict. Scott was a great man. He had his failings, of course, His high Toryism antiquarianism were rather absurd. He walsted far too much time and money on the bogus Abbotsford. He should never have allowed himself to hecome a party to th'e financial shufflings of his publishers. His reverence for the contemptible George the Fourth was ridiculouis. H.is Failings. As a writer he had his failings, too. Most of his poetry is second-rate versifying, which has been as dead as mutton for many a year. He did not take enough trouble with his novels, which' are frequently written in clumsy prose, are full of an.achronisms and loose ends in the narrative, and usually have a h'ero 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. Yet the fact remains that Scott was a great man and a great writer. To deny this is to ha blind,1 to both life and literature. If he were aliye and working to-day there would be just as much fuss .about him as there wais when he was a little king at Abbotsford. There was about him a grand, simple nobility that would be worth more than his weight in radium to us to-day. Though his long narrative poems seem to us now mere hoy's galloping stuff, h'e was, in lyric flashes, a real poet, and a poet for everybody, like Burnsi. If you want to taste his quality at its ibest, take the nearest

.anthology of English lyrics and read j his "Proud Maisie." That is the j genuine thing, the water from the rock, the miracle. Easy to Criticise. As a novelist he is easy enough to criticise, hecause every little arrow can hit that huge target. Just as. a i grefat man is not a man without fail- j ings, so, too, a great novelist is not a i writer without faults. Greiatness is j not a negative thing. It rasides in i huge positive virtues, and Scott's fic- j tion has them in abundance. There fare schoolgirls writing novels to-day ; who can successfully avoid his weak- ; nesses, who can he unfailingly new ■ and hright and very frank about ©ex, I but th'e best novelist of .our time , cannot beat him at his own grand game. He hlad two 'immensely valuable I gifts. These gifts are rare enough i singly in a writer, but they are hardly ! ever found together. The first gift is ' that of creative power. When you have this, you can sit down and write like a madman for days tand days, wordis pouring out of you, and yet at the end you will find that your ima,-g-ination, working at this fever heat, has shaped and coloured everything justly for you. It turns literiature into something that looks like a conjuring trick. One of the best of Scott's novels is "Guy Maimering," and he wi-ote it in six weeks. Now I am in the trade myself and am not generally regarded as: a' slow worker, but "Guy Mannering" in six weeks is so terrific it almost frightens me to thinlc of it. This is to have the creative energy of a giant. Great Knowledge. Along with this, h'owever, he had a second gift. This was a really mas/sive knowledge of human nature, especially as it is observed in the ordinary hurly-burly of life. His heroes and heroines are not very lifelike, choiefly hecause Scott was not much interested in them, and put them in on principle, because he thought a novel ought to have a stoclc pair of , lovers. But, on the other hand, he was tremendously interested in near- ^ ly everybody else, and this means j whole crowds of characters. I His novels. are filled with people in whose existenoe we have to ibelieve. ' And Scott, we fell, was always — >or nearly always — ahsolutely right ahout 1 them. He has ereated a large number I of comic characters, but they diifer I from th'e eomic characters of most other novelists — even of Dickens — j in the faee that they are not entirely , made up of comic istuff, but h'avei at j the cone of them a real human dignity. [ They laxe men and women and not * merely walking jokes. A Democrat. And though Scott is regarded as a , devotee of the ai'istocratic principle, ' there is something essentially democratic about him as a novelist, if only hecause his poor men and women stand firmly on their own ground and can rataliate eloquently. There is !a , land of equality of opportunity for

Scott's characters, just as these is for Shakaspeare's. He invented the historical novel as we know it now, and should be given credit for it, but there is far too much talk of him simply as an historical novelist. One reason why he is not enjoyed as much' as he ought to be nowadays is that many people make his acquaintance first at school, where they are ordered to retad "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 be thought 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," i "The Heart of Midlothian," and "Red Gauntlet."