“Under which King, Bezonian? Speak, or die!”

Henry IV., Part II.
Editor’s Introduction to Waverley.

“What is the value of a reputation that probably will not last above one or two generations? “Sir Walter Scott once asked Ballantyne. Two generations, according to the usual reckoning, have passed; “‘T is Sixty Years since” the “wondrous Potentate” of Wordsworth’s sonnet died, yet the reputation on which he set so little store survives. A constant tide of new editions of his novels flows from the press; his plots give materials for operas and plays; he has been criticised, praised, condemned: but his romances endure amid the changes of taste, remaining the delight of mankind, while new schools and little masters of fiction come and go.

Scott himself believed that even great works usually suffer periods of temporary occultation. His own, no doubt, have not always been in their primitive vogue. Even at first, English readers complained of the difficulty caused by his Scotch, and now many make his “dialect” an excuse for not reading books which their taste, debauched by third-rate fiction, is incapable of enjoying. But Scott has never disappeared in one of those irregular changes of public opinion remarked on by his friend Lady Louisa Stuart. In 1821 she informed him that she had tried the experiment of reading Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling” aloud: “Nobody cried, and at some of the touches I used to think so exquisite, they laughed.” 6 His correspondent requested Scott to write something on such variations of taste, which actually seem to be in the air and epidemic, for they affect, as she remarked, young people who have not heard the criticisms of their elders.7 Thus Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Heloise,” once so fascinating to girls, and reputed so dangerous, had become tedious to the young, Lady Louisa says, even in 1821. But to the young, if they have any fancy and intelligence, Scott is not tedious even now; and probably his most devoted readers are boys, girls, and men of matured appreciation and considerable knowledge of literature. The unformed and the cultivated tastes are still at one about Scott. He holds us yet with his unpremeditated art, his natural qualities of friendliness, of humour, of sympathy. Even the carelessness with which his earliest and his kindest critics — Ellis, Erskine, and Lady Louisa Stuart — reproached him has not succeeded in killing his work and diminishing his renown.

It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt, that secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his own defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): “A solecism in point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent to me. I never learned grammar. . . . I believe the bailiff in ‘The Goodnatured Man’ is not far wrong when he says: ‘One man has one way of expressing himself, and another another; and that is all the difference between them.’” The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered “stylists” among writers not so very good, is essential. About Shakspeare it was said that he “never blotted a line.” The observation is almost literally true about Sir Walter. The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an erasure, whether in the “Waverley” fragment of 1805 or the unpublished “Siege of Malta” of 1832.8

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