His Last
Years

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His last years were spent in an heroic struggle to retrieve his lost fortunes. He wrote more novels, but without much zest or inspiration: he undertook other works, such as the voluminous Life of Napoleon, for which he was hardly fitted, but which brought him money in large measure. In four years he had repaid the greater part of his debt, but mind and body were breaking under the strain. When the end came, in 1832, he had literally worked himself to death. The murmur of the Tweed over its shallows, music that he had loved since childhood, was the last earthly sound of which he was conscious. The house of Abbotsford, for which he had planned and toiled, went into strange hands, and the noble family which he had hoped to found died out within a few years. Only his work remains, and that endures the wear of time and the tooth of criticism.

The Poems of Scott. Three good poems of Scott are Marmion, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake; three others, not so good, are Rokeby, Vision of Don Roderick and Lord of the Isles. Among these The Lady of the Lake is such a favorite that, if one were to question the tourists who annually visit the Trossachs, a surprisingly large number of them would probably confess that they were led not so much by love of natural beauty as by desire to visit "Fair Ellen's Isle" and other scenes which Scott has immortalized in verse. We may as well admit frankly that even the best of these poems is not first-class; that it shows careless workmanship, and is lacking in the finer elements of beauty and imagination. But Scott did not aim to create a work of beauty; his purpose was to tell a good story, and in that he succeeded. His Lady of the Lake, for example, has at least two virtues: it holds the reader's attention; and it fulfills the first law of poetry, which is to give pleasure.

Another charm of the poems, for young readers especially, is that they are simple, vigorous, easily understood. Their Quality of rapid action and flying verse show hardly a trace of conscious effort. Reading them is like sweeping downstream with a good current, no labor required save for steering, and attention free for what awaits us around the next

the Poems

bend. When the bend is passed, Scott has always something new and interesting: charming scenery, heroic adventure, picturesque incidents (such as the flight of the Fiery Cross to summon the clans), interesting fragments of folklore, and occasionally a ballad like "Lochinvar," or a song like "Bonnie Dundee,” which stays with us as a happy memory long after the poem is forgotten.

A secondary reason for the success of these poems was that they satisfied a fashion, very popular in Scott's day, which we have not yet outgrown. That fashion was to attribute chivalrous virtues to outlaws and other merry men, who in their own day and generation were imprisoned or hanged, and who deserved their fate. Robin Hood's gang, for example, or the Raiders of the Border, were in fact a tough lot of thieves and cutthroats; but when they appeared in romantic literature they must of course appeal to ladies; so Scott made them fine, dashing, manly fellows, sacrificing to the fashion of the hour the truth of history and humanity. As Andrew Lang says:

"In their own days the Border Riders were regarded as public nuisances by statesmen, who attempted to educate them by means of the gibbet. But now they were the delight of fine ladies, contending who should be most extravagant in encomium. A blessing on such fine ladies, who know what is good when they see it! "1

Scott's Novels. To appreciate the value of Scott's work one should read some of the novels that were fashionable in his day,silly, sentimental novels, portraying the "sensibilities" of imaginary ladies.2 That Scott was influenced by this inane fashion appears plainly in some of his characters, his fine ladies especially, who pose and sentimentalize till we are mortally weary of them; but this influence passed when he discovered his real power, which was to portray men and women

1 Quoted in Nicoll and Seccombe, A History of English Literature, Vol. III, p. 957. 2 In America, Cooper's first romance, Precaution (1820), was of this artificial type. After Scott's outdoor romances appeared, Cooper discovered his talent, and wrote The Spy and the Leather-Stocking tales. Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen began to improve or naturalize the English novel before Scott attempted it.

SOME OF SCOTT'S NOVELS

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in vigorous action. Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, Redgauntlet, such stories of brave adventure were like the winds of the North, bringing to novel-readers the tang of the sea and the earth and the heather. They braced their readers for life, made them feel their kinship with nature and humanity. Incidentally, they announced that two new types of fiction, the outdoor romance and the historical novel, had appeared with power to influence the work of Cooper, Thackeray, Dickens and a host of minor novelists.

In the second group are the novels which reveal the romance of English history: Ivanhoe, dealing with Saxon and Norman in the stormy days when Richard Lionheart returned to his kingdom; Kenilworth, with the intrigues of Elizabeth's Court; The Fortunes of Nigel, with London life in the days of Charles First; Woodstock, with Cromwell's iron age; Peveril of the Peak, with the conflict between Puritan and Cavalier during the Restoration period.

In the third group are the novels which take us to foreign lands: Quentin Durward, showing us the French court as dominated by the cunning of Louis Eleventh, and The Talisman, dealing with the Third Crusade.

In the above list we have named not all but only the best of Scott's novels. They differ superficially, in scenes or incidents; they are all alike in motive, which is to tell a tale of adventure that shall be true to human nature, no matter what liberties it may take with the facts of history.

Quality of the Novels

In all these novels the faults are almost as numerous as the virtues; but while the faults appear small, having little influence on the final result, the virtues are big, manly, wholesome, such virtues as only the greatest writers of fiction possess. Probably all Scott's faults spring from one fundamental weakness: he never had a high ideal of his own art. He wrote to make money, and was inclined to regard his day's labor as "so much scribbling." Hence his style is frequently slovenly, lacking vigor and concentration; his characters talk too much, apparently to fill space; he caters to the romantic fashion (and at the same time indulges his Tory prejudice) by enlarging on the somewhat imaginary virtues of knights, nobles, feudal or royal institutions, and so presents a one-sided view of history.

On the other hand, Scott strove to be true to the great movements of history, and to the moral forces which, in the end, prevail in all human activity. His sympathies were broad; he mingled in comradeship with all classes of society, saw the best in each; and from his observation and sympathy came an enormous number of characters, high or low, good or bad, grave or ridiculous, but nearly all natural and human, because drawn from life and experience.

Another of Scott's literary virtues is his love of wild nature, which led him to depict many grand or gloomy scenes, partly Scene and for their own sake, but largely because they formed Incident a fitting background for human action. Thus, The Talisman opens with a pen picture of a solitary Crusader moving across a sun-scorched desert towards a distant island of green. Every line in that description points to action, to the rush of a horseman from the oasis, to the fierce trial of arms before the enemies speak truce and drink together from the same spring. Many another of Scott's descriptions of wild nature is followed by some gallant adventure, which we enjoy the more because we imagine that adventures ought to occur (though they seldom do) amid romantic surroundings.

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What to Read. At least one novel in each group should be read; but if it be asked, Which one? the answer is as much a matter of taste as of judgment. Of the novels dealing with Scottish life, Waverley, which was Scott's first attempt, is still an excellent measure of his story-telling genius; but there is more adventurous interest in Old Mortality or Rob Roy; and in The Heart of Midlothian (regarded by many as the finest of Scott's works) one feels closer to nature and human nature, and especially to the heart of Scotland. Ivanhoe is perhaps the best of the romances of English history; and of stories dealing with adventure in strange lands, The Talisman will probably appeal strongest to young readers, and Quentin Durward to their elders. To these may be added The Antiquary, which is a good story, and which has an element of personal interest in that it gives us glimpses of Scott him

self, surrounded by old armor, old legends, old costumes, mute testimonies to the dreams and deeds of yesterday's men and women.

Such novels should be read once for the story, as Scott intended; and then, if one should grow weary of modernproblem novels, they may be read again for their wholesome, bracing atmosphere, for their tenderness and wisdom, for their wide horizons, for their joy of climbing to heights where we look out upon a glorious Present, and a yet more glorious Past that is not dead but living.