Sir Walter Scott

The Novels.

It was in the midst of these embarrassments that Scott opened up the rich new vein of the Waverley novels. He chanced upon the ms. of the opening chapters of Waverley which he had written in 1805, and resolved to complete the story. Four weeks in the summer of 1814 sufficed for the work, and Waverley was published by Constable without the author's name in July. Many plausible reasons might be given and have been given for Scott's resolution to publish anonymously. The reason given by Lockhart is that he considered the writing of novels be neath the dignity of a grave clerk of the Court of Sessions. The secret was an open one to all his Edinburgh acquaintances, yet why he kept up the mystification until the disclosure of the year 1827, is easily understood. He enjoyed it, and his formally initiated coadjutors enjoyed it; it relieved him from the annoy ances of foolish compliment; and it was not unprofitable—curi osity about "the Great Unknown" keeping alive the interest in his works. Meanwhile he kept on producing in his own name as much work as seemed humanly possible for an official who was to be seen every day at his post and as often in society as the most fashionable of his professional brethren. His treatises on chivalry, romance and the drama, besides an elaborate work in two volumes on Border antiquities, appeared in the same year with Waverley, and his edition of Swift in 19 volumes in the same week. In 1813 he published the romantic tale of The Bridal of Triermain in three cantos, enlarged from an earlier poem, printed in the Edin burgh Annual Register of 1809. The Lord of the Isles was pub lished in Jan. 1815 ; Guy Mannering, written in "six weeks about Christmas," in February; and The Field of Waterloo in the same year. Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk and The Antiquary appeared in 1816; the first series of the Tales of My Landlord, edited by "Jedediah Cleishbotham"—The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality— in the same year; Harold the Dauntless in 1817; the two volumes of The Border Antiquities of England and Scotland in 1814 and 1817. No wonder that the most positive interpreters of internal evidence were mystified. Scott's fertility is not absolutely un paralleled; Anthony Trollope claimed to have surpassed him in rate as well as total amount of production, having also business duties to attend to. But in speed of production combined with variety and depth of interest and weight and accuracy of histori cal substance Scott is unrivalled.

The immense strain of this double or quadruple life as sheriff and clerk, hospitable laird, poet, novelist, and miscellaneous man of letters, publisher and printer, though the prosperous excitement sustained him for a time, soon told upon his health. Early in 1817 began a series of attacks of agonizing cramp of the stomach, which recurred at short intervals during more than two years. But his appetite and capacity for work remained unbroken. He made his first attempt at play-writing (The Doom of Devorgoil) as he was recovering from the first attack; before the year was out he had completed Rob Roy, and within six months it was fol lowed by The Heart of Midlothian, which filled the four volumes of the second series of Tales of My Landlord, and has remained one of the most popular among his novels. The Bride of Lammer

moor, the Eegend of Montrose, forming the third series by "Jede diah Cleishbotham," and Ivanhoe (182o) were dictated to aman uenses, through fits of suffering so acute that he could not suppress cries of agony.

Throughout those two years of intermittent ill-health, which was at one time so serious that his life was despaired of and he took formal leave of his family, Scott's semi-public life at Abbots ford continued as usual—swarms of visitors coming and going, and the rate of production, on the whole, suffering no outward and visible check, all the world wondering at the novelist's pro digious fertility. The first of the series concerning which there were murmurs of dissatisfaction was The Monastery (182o) ; but its sequel, The Abbot (182o), in which Mary, Queen of Scots, is introduced, was generally hailed as fully sustaining the reputation of "the Great Unknown." Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1822), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1822), Quen tin Durward (1823), St. Ronan's Well (1824), Redgauntlet (1824) followed in quick succession in the course of three years, and it was not till the last two were reached that the cry that the author was writing too fast began to gather volume. St. Ronan's Well was very severely criticized and condemned, yet none of Scott's stories is of more absorbing or more brilliantly diversified interest. There must, of course, always be inequalities in a series so prolonged. The author cannot always be equally happy in his choice of sub ject, situation and character. Naturally also he dealt first with the subjects of which his mind was fullest. But any theory of falling off or exhaustion based upon plausible general considerations has to be qualified so much when brought into contact with the facts that very little confidence can be reposed in its accuracy. The Fortunes of Nigel comes comparatively late in the series and has often been blamed for its looseness of construction, yet some com petent critics prefer it to any other of Scott's novels. An attempt might be made to value the novels according to the sources of their materials, according as they are based on personal observa tion, documentary history or previous imaginative literature. On this principle Ivanhoe and The Tales of the Crusaders (1825, containing The Betrothed and The Talisman) might be adjudged inferior as being based necessarily on previous romance. But as a matter of fact Scott's romantic characters are vitalized, clothed with a verisimilitude of life, out of the author's deep, wide and discriminating knowledge of realities, and his observation of actual life was coloured by ideals derived from romance. He did not ex haust his accumulations from one source first and then turn to another, but from first to last drew from all as the needs of the occasion happened to suggest.

During the years 1821-25 he edited Richard Franck's Northern Memoirs (1821) , Chronological Notes of Scottish Affairs from the Diary of Lord Fountainhall (1822), Military Memoirs of the Great Civil War (1822), and The Novelists' Library (io vols., 1821-24), the prefatory memoirs to which were separately pub lished in 1828.