'Will ye no' come back again?' whatever happened to Sir Walter Scott? - Scottish author

Contemporary Review, May, 1993 by R.D. Kernohan

THE golden age of railways recalled earlier nineteenth-century victories at Waterloo or Austerlitz. Scotland's capital chose to honour triumphs of another sort by 'the author of Waverley'. The rail traveller still arrives in Edinburgh at a station called after Sir Walter Scott's romantic novel of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.

The traveller emerges from the station depths to see the Gothic pinnacle of the Scott monument on Princes Street. If he is thirsty, he is not far from the Abbotsford, called after Scott's Tweedside mansion, and the Kenilworth, with a gaudily recognisable sign-portrait of the 'Wizard of the North' swinging above the door. And if the traveller knows where to look, or arrives there inadvertently, he will find a homelier pub dedicated to The Heart of Midlothian heroine, Jeanie Deans, at the back door to the main police lock-up.

Scott's aura lingers in Edinburgh, and in the Borders he loved and romanticised. Across the country, on the Firth of Clyde, a Waverley paddle-steamer still survives, last of a long line bearing the names of his books, heroes, and heroines.

So it should be. He set out to introduce 'Scotland's natives in a more favourable light than hitherto', and succeeded beyond his farthest-fetched hopes. He made Scotland fashionable in ways whose potential was developed in the later age of Balmoral, Landseer, sporting estates, and first-class railway travel.

He also profoundly influenced European as well as English cultural tastes and fashions, not only in his direct impact but through such derivatives as Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Among other things, he shaped the historical novel, an art-form often imitated, sometimes debased, but by no means yet extinct. Scott's influence in America was so extensive, particularly on the Southern mind, that Mark Twain cited him as a cause of the war between the states.

He was the most famous Scotsman not just of his time but of the centuries since John Knox. He was phenomenally productive as well as successful (in literary ventures, though not in business ones). No-one in English literature, or perhaps any literature, has ever matched his dual success as poet and novelist.

Yet in many ways Scott is today a prophet with only rather superficial honour in his own country, a tourist-board hero rather than a popular one. Occasionally he is mentioned, if only to be derided by media columnists or modern writers of nationalist inclinations. 'Sir Walter Scott it was who turned us into a joke, and an especially bilious one at that', wrote one during this year's annual Robert Burns festivities. His royalism, romanticism, restraint, and reverence for social order are contrasted unfavourably with the roystering radicalism of Burns.

A far more serious matter may be that Scott remains much honoured in a distant and formal way, but is little read. Sixty years ago his biographer John Buchan was lamenting a falling-off in interest compared to the days when uniform editions of the Waverley Novels filled even cottage bookshelves. The process has gone much farther. The English-speaking world has not only lost the taste for the narrative poems on which Scott first built his reputation -- from The Lay of the Last Minstrel onwards -- but neglects his novels in a way that happily remains untrue for Dickens, Thackeray, or Fielding; and the neglect extends even to Edinburgh. In the city's best-stocked bookshop, a short walk from Scott's house at 39 North Castle Street where most of the Waverley Novels were written, a check on the Classics and Scottish Fiction sections revealed a combined total of nine of his novels and a collection of short stories -- long, long way short of The Collected Works.

Unfortunately there is one plausibly glib, if not ultimately convincing answer to the question 'Why is Scott now so little read?'. It is that he is unreadable -- or at lest unreadable without a readiness on the modern reader's part to make many changes in pace and mood, and extravagant concessions to unfashionable tastes and assumptions.

Such changes are not impossible. If they were, Jane Austen (born only four years after Scott) would neither retain her popularity nor induce readers to accept conventions and contexts even farther removed from most twentieth-century fiction than are those of Scott.

But Scott does make these necessary changes of attitude difficult. Take Waverley, the book that not only set a style and a fashion but gave the name of its rather pompous and very foolish hero to the series of two dozen or so novels. Its languorous opening chapters were (perhaps deservedly) tucked away for years in a drawer. But even to get to those chapters in a conventional edition of Scott's works means hacking a path through considerable undergrowth.

The Everyman edition, for example, follows tradition with Introduction, Dedication to George IV, Advertisement, General Preface, Appendix to General Preface, Second Appendix to General Preface, Third Appendix, Introduction to Waverley, and Preface to the Third Edition -- all before the reader comes on page 63 to Chapter One, itself headed 'Introductory'. This is surely the literary equivalent of the reputed extract from an old-fashioned Scots sermon: 'Seventhly, and lastly in conclusion of the first part...'.