The Man of Abbotsford

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 385, 8 November 1946, Page 23

The Man of Abbotsford

"THE Author of Waverley," the BBC’s half-hour programme on the life of Scott, is good hearing. It has no narrator, a device from which occasional relief is no bad thing-but the characters and conversations Carve unfold the stary are natural and ible, something exceedingly difficult to attain when two gentlemen have in the course of a casual exchange to make quite plain who they

are, what are their pursuits and interests, and what has recently happened to them, All this, moreover, in the broadest of Lowland Scots. However, the lucid formality of conversation in the age of real education in which Sir Walter lived enabled the author to get over that difficulty . without galling his reader with his characters’ pomposity towards one another or their patronisingly laborious and oblique explanations towards himself. The theme was Scott’s two descents into acute financial embarrassment, brought upoh him by the fecklessness of his partners, and the way in which he turned to novel-writing and wrote himself out of bankruptcy. It- was a personal story; though advertised as "The Story of a Literary Genius" it was rather the heroic persistence of the which we were called on to admire. Of his literary qualities, one was impressed mainly with the strength of regional character in him, the intense and vivid relation he had with the soil and river8 and place-names of his own Lowland country; and it was, of course, in the bringing of these to life and their incarnation in living characters that Scott’s greatness consisted. One puzzle remains from the broadcast: if the identity of "The Author of Waverley" was kept so long a secret, why was Scott being visited by peripatetic American litetary gentlemen and granted a baronetcy by the Prince Regent and so forth? Can it have been on the Ye of his poems?