Walter Scott

Robin Mayhead

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138675391
• eBook ISBN: 9781317199144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1968, this study is an exciting and challenging introduction to the writings of Sir Walter Scott. The author discusses the more striking features of Scott's style — his use of language and characterisation — and also evaluates the contemporary moral and political attitudes portrayed in the novels. The use of literary conventions of the time is examined with reference to Scott's work and extracts exemplify in particular the use of the Heroic. While admitting Scott's faults as a writer, the author presents a general view of him as one whose works deserve deeper study than was the prevailing opinion at the time. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

Characterisation

Scott’s characters may be divided into two main types: those who are dominated by some kind of idiosyncrasy, comic or otherwise, and those who reveal no markedly extreme traits of personality, but may be said to embody a moderate, rational norm of human behaviour. To leave the classification like that, however, is not to point to anything obviously peculiar to Scott, for the same broad division might be made between the characters of the two authors just mentioned, Dickens and Hardy. Hardy’s comic yokels, or a person such as Miss Flite in Bleak House, plainly belong to the idiosyncratic category, whilst a Gabriel Oak or an Esther Summerson represent the other side of the coin.

Perhaps the best approach to a more adequate definition of Scott’s characterisation may be made by way of the immediate examination of a particular passage. In a specimen of dialogue from The Antiquary we are introduced to three good ladies of Fairport-Mrs. Mailsetter the postmistress, and her friends Mrs. Heukbane and Mrs. Shortcake.

1

This is very often in country towns the period of the day when gossips find it particularly agreeable to call on the man or woman of letters, in order, from the outside of the epistles, and, if they are not belied, occasionally from the inside also, to amuse themselves with gleaning information, or forming conjectures about the correspondence and affairs of their neighbours. Two females of this description were, at the time we mention, assisting, or impeding, Mrs. Mailsetter in her official duty.

‘Eh, preserve us, sirs!’ said the butcher’s wife, ‘there’s ten-eleven-twall letters to Tennant and Co.-thae folk do mair business than a’ the rest o’ the burgh.’

‘Ay; but see, lass,’ answered the baker’s lady, ‘there’s twa o’ them faulded unco square, and sealed at the tae side—I doubt there will be protested bills in them.’

‘Is there any letters yet for Jenny Caxon?’ inquired the woman of joints and giblets; ‘the lieutenant’s been awa three weeks.’

‘Just ane on Tuesday was a week,’ answered the dame of letters.

‘Was’t a ship-letter?’ asked the Fornerina.

‘In troth Was’t.’

‘It wad be frae the lieutenant then,’ replied the mistress of the rolls, somewhat disappointed—’I never thought he wad hae lookit ower his shouther after her.’

‘Od, here’s another,’ quoth Mrs. Mailsetter. ‘A ship-letter-post-mark, Sunderland.’ All rushed to seize it.—’Na, na, leddies,’ said Mrs. Mailsetter, interfering; ‘I hae had eneugh o’ that wark-Ken ye that Mr. Mailsetter got an unco rebuke frae the secretary at Edinburgh, for a complaint that was made about the letter of Aily Bisset’s that ye opened, Mrs. Shortcake?’

‘Me opened!’ answered the spouse of the chief baker of Fairport; ‘ye ken yoursell, madam, it just cam open o’ free will in my hand-what could I help it?—folk suld seal wi’ better wax.’

‘Weel I wot that’s true, too,’ said Mrs. Mailsetter, who kept a shop of small wares, ‘and we have got some that I can honestly recommend, if ye ken anybody wanting it. But the short and the lang o’t is, that we’ll lose the place gin there’s any mair complaints o’ the kind.’

‘Hout, lass-the provost will take care o’ that.’

‘Na, na, I ‘II neither trust to provost nor bailie,’ said the postmistress,—‘but I wad aye be obliging and neighbourly, and I’m no again your looking at the outside of a letter neither-See, the seal has an anchor on’t—he’s done’t wi’ ane o’ his buttons, I’m thinking.’

‘Show me! show me!’ quoth the wives of the chief butcher and chief baker; and threw themselves on the supposed love-letter, like the weird sisters in Macbeth upon the pilot’s thumb, with curiosity as eager and scarcely less malignant. Mrs. Heukbane was a tall woman—she held the precious epistle up between her eyes and the window. Mrs. Shortcake, a little squat personage, strained and stood on tiptoe to have her share of the investigation.

The Antiquary, ch. 15

The most striking feature of this passage is its blend of the realistic with what is quite frankly non-realistic. No one would expect the three ladies, in ‘real life’, to bear names so neatly reflecting their respective places in the commercial activity of the town. And yet at the same time the gossips do come across to us as vividly ‘real’ human beings. The tones of their speech are convincingly caught, and although there is little specific visual detail, the reader is almost made to see the fingers of these women, itching to get at other people’s letters!

As a piece of typical small-town comedy, the episode is deftly put together. Both Mrs. Heukbane and Mrs. Short-cake being connected with trade, a fact which is emphasised every time they are mentioned, their first speculations are aroused by the letters addressed to Tennant and Co., and the evidence they give of the prosperity (or otherwise) of the firm. With the inquiry regarding Jenny Caxon, however, the conversation turns eagerly to personalities. (Note the comically gruesome description of Mrs. Heukbane as ‘the woman of joints and giblets’; one can imagine her butchering reputations in the way her husband cuts up carcasses.) The indecent rush of the two women to inspect the letter from Sunderland is checked by Mrs. Mailsetter, not out of any consideration for the writer or the addressee, but purely out of fear that Mrs. Shortcake may repeat her past letter-opening performance and bring disaster on the Mailsetters’ heads. Mrs. Shortcake, of course, indignantly denies having done anything of the sort (all her outraged respectability is implicit in the reference to her as ‘the spouse of the chief baker of Fairport’), and the postmistress is not one to insist on her accusation. She, indeed, is responsible for the most blatantly curious speculation of them all—‘See, the seal has an anchor on’t-he’s done’t wi’ ane o’ his buttons, I’m thinking.’ The comedy reaches a climax with the comparison of Mrs. Heukbane and Mrs. Shortcake to Shakespeare’s Witches. It is hard to resist thinking of the butcher’s wife as the one who hacks ingredients for the cauldron, while the baker’s wife lights the fire underneath!

Now the reader Inay feel like saying ‘This is all very well, but why should Scott spoil the effect of a lively piece of realistic social observation by giving the gossips names in which we cannot possibly believe?’ The answer is that the effect is spoilt only if the reader insists strictly upon the kind of ‘photographic’ realism that became more or less the norm for serious fiction later in the nineteenth century. For although Scott is partly concerned to make the three ladies seem as ‘real’ as, for example, Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma, he is also working in an old tradition of stylised characterisation, a tradition that reaches back to the personification of Vices and Virtues in the Morality Plays and in medieval vernacular preaching, and recalls the drama of Ben Jonson. The names of the three gossips are used as deliberately, indeed, as those of such Jonsonian figures as Sir Politick Would-Be, Knowell, and Brainworm, though Scott here employs them to denote commercial position rather than peculiarity of character.

To mention Ben Jonson is to be reminded of two major novelists who are in many ways his successors : Fielding and, once again, Dickens. The device of characterising a personage (in one case morally, in the other physically) by the use of a typifying name, is to be seen in Fielding’s Mr. Allworthy and Mrs. Slipslop. And of course such powerfully idiosyncratic Dickensian characters as Mr. Krook and Mr. Chadband, though their names are perhaps not so immediately evocative, are drawn with a boldly simplifying technique very similar to that which Jonson uses to embody his magnificently obsession-ridden stage monsters. But if Scott recalls both these novelists in his manner of presenting some of his characters, there are features of his use of a stylised technique that set him apart from them.

It is here that the specifically Scottish nature of the writer has to be remembered. When Scott draws characters so violently idiosyncratic in their different ways as the Baron of Bradwardine and Balfour of Burley (both discussed later in this section), it is not simply to gratify a personal taste for the extreme or the eccentric. His choice of type and technique is dictated by his wish dramatically to embody and highlight important aspects of the social and cultural history of Scotland. The national issue is expressed through the idiosyncrasy or obsessive passion. Moreover, not only do many of the idiosyncratic characters put us in mind of ‘type’ figures in Scots vernacular literature (e.g. David Lindsay’s Satyre of the Three Estaitis or the satirical poems of Bums), but the great verbal outpourings of the more especially comic ones take us back to the virtuoso ‘flyting’ poems of Dunbar. Indeed, the best poetry of Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns shows that the tradition of verbal virtuosity (often of a vituperative kind!) was still very much alive in that eighteenth century in which Scott was nurtured.

One of Scott’s most diverting eccentric virtuosi of the spoken word is Meg Dads, the inn-keeper in St. Ronan’s Well. This is not one of the very finest novels, though well worth reading as an amusing portrayal of the fashionable world of Scott’s own day. The hero, Francis Tyrrel, has just asked Mrs. Dads why the mineral waters of the Well have acquired so great a reputation.

2

‘I dinna ken, sir-they used to be thought good for naething, but here and there for a puir body’s bairn, that had gotten the cruells, and could not afford a penni worth of salts. But my Leddy Penelope Penfeather had fa’an ill, it’s like, as nae other body had ever fell ill, and sae she was to be cured some gate naebody was ever cured, which was naething mair than was reasonable-and my leddy, ye ken, has wit at wull, and has a’ the wise folk out from Edinburgh at her house at Windywa’s younder, which it is her leddyship’s will and pleasure to call Air-castle-and they have a’ their different turns, and some can clink verses, wi’ their tale, as weel as Rob Burns or Allan Ramsay-and some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to pieces wi’ hammers, like sae mony road-makers run daft-they say it is to see how the warld was made!-and some that play on all manner of ten-stringed instruments-and a wheen sketching souls, that ye may see perched like craws on every craig in the country, e’en working at your ain trade, Mister Francie; forby men that had been in foreign parts, or said they had been there, whilk is a’ ane, ye ken, and maybe twa or three draggle-tailed misses, that wear my Leddy Penelope’s follies when she has dune wi’ them, as her queans of maids wear her second-hand claithes. So, after her leddy-ship’s happy recovery, as they ca’d it, down cam the hail tribe of wild geese, and settled by the Well, to dine there-out on the bare grund, like a wheen tinklers; and they had sangs, and tunes, and healths, nae doubt, in praise of the fountain, as they ca’d the Well, and of Leddy Penelope Penfeather; and, lastly, they behov’d a’ to take a solemn bumper of the spring, which, as I am tauld, made unco havoc among them or they wan hame; and this they ca’d Picknick, and a plague to them! And sae the jig was begun after her leddyship’s pipe, and mony a mad measure has been danced sin’ syne; for down cam masons and murgeon-makers, and preachers and player-folk, and Episcopalians and Methodists, and fools and fiddlers, and Papists and pie-bakers, and doctors and drug-sters; by the shop-folk, that sell trash and trumpery at three prices-and so up got the bonny new Well, and down fell the honest auld town of St. Ronan’s, where blythe decent folk had been heartsome eneugh for many a day before ony o’ them were born, or ony sic vapouring fancies kittled in their cracked brains.’

St. Ronan’s Well, ch. 2

Note: ‘the cruells’—Escrouelles, King’s Evil. Scott’s notes on obscure expressions will be reproduced where necessary; otherwise readers are referred to the glossaries printed in most editions of the Waverley Novels.

Mrs. Dods is distinguished by a generally bellicose temper, a violent hostility towards the smart company at the Well, and above all a splendid repertoire of exuberantly contemptuous abuse. Observe the sarcasm in her tone whenever Lady Penelope is mentioned (e.g. the reference to ‘Windywa’s’ and ‘Air-castle’, and ‘her leddyship’s happy recovery’). And consider the part played by alliteration in the final peroration from ‘down cam masons and mur-neon-makers’ to the magnificently vitriolic ‘kittled in their cracked brains’. This mood and manner are associated with Meg throughout the book, as are the words ‘and what for no?’ (‘and why not?’), absent from the passage quoted but often defiantly hurled at her interlocutors. The whole personage, indeed, is embodied in a peculiarity of temperament and way of speaking-a technique foreshadowing Dickens, no doubt, yet still very much Scott’s own in its vernacular gusto.

The Antiquary, from which the next passage comes, is essentially a comedy of country life, as John Buchan pointed out. Here the central figure himself, Jonathan Old buck of Monk barns, and Sir Arthur Wardour of Knock-winnock Castle, who aspires to outdo Oldbuck on his own ground, are particularly close to such Jonsonian characters as Sir Epicure Mammon in The Alchemist. Each has his peculiar ‘humour’. Just as Sir Epicure is obsessed with anticipation of the delights that wealth can bring, so is Oldbuck dominated by his antiquarian theories, and Sir Arthur by his absurdly inflated family pride. In Chapter VI the nominal ‘hero’ of the book, Lovel, remarks that the Picts have left but ‘slight vestiges’ of their language to posterity.

3

‘You are in error,’ said Sir Arthur; ‘it was a copious language, and they were a great and powerful people; built two steeples-one at Brechin, one at Abernethy. The Pictish maidens of the blood-royal were kept in Edinburgh Castle, thence called Castrum Puellarum.’

‘A childish legend,’ said Oldbuck, ‘invented to give consequence to trumpery womankind. It was called the Maiden Castle, quasi lucus a non lucendo, because it resisted every attack, and women never do.’

‘There is a list of the Pictish kings,’ persisted Sir Arthur, ‘well authenticated, from Crentheminachcryme (the date of whose reign is somewhat uncertain) down to Druster-stone, whose death concluded their dynasty. Half of them have the Celtic patronymic Mac prefixed-Mac, id est filius;-what do you say to that, Mr. Oldbuck? There is Drust Macmorachin, Trynel Maclachlin (first of that ancient clan, as it may be judged), and Gormach Macdonald, Alpin Macmetegus, Drust Mactallargam’ (here he was interrupted by a fit of coughing)—‘ugh, ugh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Walter Scott—His Life and Works
• Scheme of Extracts
• Characterisation
• Scott’s Treatment of the Heroic
• Tensions in a Changing Society
• Political and Religious Issues
• Scott and the Vernacular
• Appendix: Biographical Note
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Select Bibliography