Sham country, but not sham bard
As Edinburgh prepares for its annual round of summer arts festivals, a new book examines the life and influences of the poet who made modern Scotland
Jul 29th 2010
Scott-land: The Man who Invented a Nation. By Stuart Kelly. Polygon; 328 pages; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
SIR WALTER SCOTT was a phenomenon. A poet whose first long poem, published in 1805, was such a success that he received an unprecedented advance of 1,000 guineas for his second, he was offered the post of poet laureate at the age of 42. At the time, an agricultural labourer would have earned about 40 guineas a year, yet Scott declined the honour, and turned to writing novels. These he produced at speed and in quantity: 27 in 18 years, compared with Charles Dickens’s 16 in 34, or George Eliot’s seven in 17. Many of Scott’s works were hugely popular; the first in the “Waverley” series, published anonymously, sold out in two days. He made a fortune from them, built a fairy-tale castle called Abbotsford in the Scottish Borders and, after his death in 1832, was commemorated in central Edinburgh by a colossal monument that would not have looked out of place on the launching pad of a 19th-century Cape Canaveral.
Scott’s popularity extended far beyond his native land. The English, many of them anyway, lapped him up. Thomas Hardy put the “Iliad” “almost in the ‘Marmion’ class” (“Marmion” was Scott’s second poem) and Algernon Swinburne, among others, compared him to Shakespeare. Americans were equally smitten, especially Henry Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper. Goethe rated “Waverley”, Scott’s first novel, “alongside the best things ever written”. Stendhal called Scott “our father” who “invented us all”. Rossini turned “Ivanhoe” into an opera and Donizetti did the same (loosely) for “The Bride of Lammermoor”.
Not everyone loved Scott, though. John Ruskin saw in the fakery of Abbotsford, a sort of Scottish version of William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, a reflection of all he considered false in Scott. Walter Bagehot and William Hazlitt were both critical. Mark Twain hated almost everything about Scott, arguing that he “had so large a hand in making Southern character…that he is in great measure responsible for the [American civil] war”.
Fate was no kinder to Scott than his critics. In addition to his own reckless spending, mainly on Abbotsford, came some unlucky—some would say foolish—investment, mostly on rackety schemes that, with a banking collapse and the pricking of a speculative share bubble, were to leave Scott actually, if not legally, bust. He spent his last years crippled by strokes, desperately trying to pay off his debts.
Posterity then put the boot in. The omnipresent, if not dominant, author of the 19th century became, in the 20th, the great unread. With some notable exceptions, ranging from Virginia Woolf and Ho Chi Minh to Tony Blair and Georg Lukacs, a Marxist critic, people gave up on Scott.
The Scots, who had once gushed that “Cervantes has done much for Spain and Shakespeare for England, but not a tithe of what Sir Walter Scott has accomplished for us,” now rejected Scott and turned to Rabbie Burns as their literary hero. The simple Ayrshire labourer (never mind that he was also a tax collector) has suited the new mood of Scottish nationalism far better than the Tory Unionist and self-made laird of Abbotsford, whose greatest non-literary achievement was to bring King George IV north of the border for the first time to hold court in a kilt, the garment banned by his grandfather after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. It is Scott who is blamed for creating a mythical Scotland, a land of bogus romanticism, festooned in newly minted tartan and ripe for the Victorian Balmoralisation that was to follow. He has thus become the avowed enemy of nationalism.
This paradox is at the heart of Stuart Kelly’s book, even if its explanation is not his main aim. Mr Kelly suggests his real interest is not the author’s life but his afterlife, not the phenomenon itself, as it were, but the epiphenomenon. Yet his book is part biography, part literary criticism, part exploration of Scottish identity. It is also part journey of self-discovery. The bite-sized chapters jump from scholarly discussion of Scott’s works to apparently pointless descriptions of the author’s experiences in queues for cashpoints, references to current television shows, marginal figures like Jeffrey Archer and Alastair Campbell, and chatty stuff about his dad. The confusion of aims raises doubts about the seriousness of the endeavour, reinforced by the absence of footnotes and the inclusion of only a most inadequate index.
The upshot is that the “imaginative space” called Scott-land is never really explored. It is seen to be bogus, even if Scott is not, or not altogether. He indeed emerges as a character more sympathetic than others have painted him. For all his posturing and self-importance, Scott is capable of deliberate self-parody, generosity of spirit and some perspicacity, for instance, about the talents of Jane Austen. His books are not bad, either, though Mr Kelly, who disavows the aim of making them popular again, could have done more to explain why he has come to reconsider his youthful rejection of them.
In truth, Scott’s influence went well beyond a few now-unfashionable Victorians. Some modern critics are struck above all by his adventurousness and the way in which the “Waverley” series as a whole opened up all sorts of possibilities for Victorian and later novelists. “Redgauntlet” alone shows how Scott developed earlier uses of different forms—epistolary, first-person, short-story, the journal and so on. And other novels showed his part in the development not just of the historical novel, but also of the tragic (“The Bride of Lammermoor”), the epic (“Old Mortality”) and the comic (“The Antiquary”).
As for Scotland’s identity, if Scott-land is a sham country, so is the new-nationalist, Burns-burnished alternative, a nation forged of feel-hard-done-by Braveheart movies, Celtic lettering on tawdry signs and synthetic rage at ancient clearances. Mr Kelly mentions the vacuum at Scotland’s centre that the poet Edwin Muir alluded to 70 years ago. It still exists. But Muir, though he called Scott (and Burns) “sham bards of a sham nation”, also called Scott a genius. He was.
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