Modern English Books of Power | Page 6

GREATEST NOVELIST THE WORLD HAS KNOWN--HE
MADE HISTORY REAL AND CREATED CHARACTERS THAT
WILL NEVER DIE.
It is as difficult to sum up in a brief article the work and the influence
of Sir Walter Scott as it is to make an estimate of Shakespeare, for
Scott holds the same position in English prose fiction that Shakespeare
holds in English poetry. In neither department is there any rival. In
sheer creative force Scott stands head and shoulders above every other
English novelist, and he has no superior among the novelists of any
other nation. He has made Scotland and the Scotch people known to the
world as Cervantes made Spain and the Spaniards a reality for all
times.
But he did more than Cervantes, for his creative mind reached over the
border into England and across the channel to France and Germany,
and even to the Holy Land, and found there historical types which he
made as real and as immortal as his own highland clansmen. His was

the great creative brain of the nineteenth century, and his work has
made the world his debtor. His work stimulated the best story teller of
France and gave the world Monte Cristo and The Three Guardsmen. It
fired the imaginations of a score of English historical novelists; it was
the progenitor of Weyman's A Soldier of France and Conan Doyle's
Micah Clarke and The White Company.
Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters
of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as real
and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained story
telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an instant's
drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art can
accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did all these
things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We can not
imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his characters, as
Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his French types. He
was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was as human as
Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his friends about
him and his hearty enjoyment of good food and drink.
[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT THIS PORTRAIT IS TAKEN
FROM CHANTREY'S BUST NOW AT ABBOTSFORD, WHICH,
ACCORDING TO LOCKHART, "ALONE PRESERVES FOR
POSTERITY THE EXPRESSION MOST FONDLY REMEMBERED
BY ALL WHO EVER MINGLED IN HIS DOMESTIC CIRCLE"]
It has become the fashion among some of our hair-splitting critics to
decry Scott because of his carelessness in literary style, his tendency to
long introductions, and his fondness for description. These critics will
tell you that Turgeneff and Tolstoi are greater literary artists than Scott,
just as they tell you that Thackeray and Dickens do not deserve a place
among the foremost of English novelists. This petty, finical criticism,
which would measure everything by its own rigid rule of literary art,
loses sight of the great primal fact that Scott created more real
characters and told more good stories than any other novelist, and that
his work will outlive that of all his detractors. It ignores the fact that
Thackeray's wit, pathos, tenderness and knowledge of human nature

make him immortal in spite of many defects. It forgets that Dickens'
humor, joy of living and keen desire to help his fellow man will bring
him thousands of readers after all the apostles of realism are buried
under the dust of oblivion.
Scott had the ideal training for a great historical novelist. Yet his
literary successes in verse and prose were the result of accident. It is
needless here to review his life. The son of a mediocre Scotch lawyer,
he inherited from his father his capacity for work and his passion for
system and order. From his mother he drew his love of reading and his
fondness for old tales of the Scotch border. Like so many famous
writers, his early education was desultory, but he had the free run of a
fine library, and when he was a mere schoolboy his reading of the best
English classics had been wider and more thorough than that of his
teachers.
Forced by boyish illness to live in the country, he early developed a
great love for the Scotch ballads and the tales of the romantic past of
his native land. These he gathered mainly by word of mouth. Later he
was a diligent student and collector of all the old ballads. In this way
his mind was steeped in historical lore, while by many walking tours
through the highlands he came to know the common people as very few
have ever known them.
[Illustration: WHITE HORSE INN FROM AN ILLUSTRATION TO
"WAVERLEY" DRAWN BY G. CATTERMOLE AND ENGRAVED