John Davison's talk on Sir Walter Scott, by Gillian Southgate

On December 11^th John Davison gave an insightful talk to the Literary Society on Sir Walter Scott, whose enviable personality seems to have combined rationality, self-control and astuteness, with the ability to love, and to inspire love for himself in others. According to his biographer, he had ‘a wide ranging sympathy for, and a belief in, the human heart.’ Scott’s sympathies for doomed causes, as well as his fierce patriotism, led to novels featuring bold clansmen like Rob Roy, and noble heroes such as Ivanhoe, both made famous, in simplified form, in Boys’ Own literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. These works were hugely popular, featuring as they do dramatic scenes and characters, and revealing something of a loftiness of moral tone. Like Dickens’s, Scott’s characters frequently have whimsical names, or are the missing heirs to a fortune or an aristocratic lineage.  To look at Scott’s soul, John told us, we had only to read the Waverley novels. It wasn’t surprising, then, to discover that on one occasion Scott found himself on the brink of fighting a duel.  It was clearly what one of his heroes might have done.

A lawyer, the Sheriff Deputy for Selkirk, the founder of the Quarterly magazine and the editor of the Scots Ballads, he had a huge and influential circle of friends and admirers, two of whom were the Kings of England and France. His novel Marmion was a bestseller, and the Waverley novels were the most successful in the English language – overlaid, it has to be said, with a Scots dialect that sometimes became tedious for his readers. He was his own best critic, and generous in his praise for those he saw as superior poets – Lord Byron and he, though markedly different in character, liked and respected each other. He was also a close friend of William Wordsworth. Married and settled in his house ‘Abbotsford’, he showed the strength of his character when there was a catastrophic failure of the financial system in 1825, and he lost all his money.

His response to this blow was characteristic.  He wrote his way out of debt. His output was prodigious, and though not of the quality of Marmion and the earlier works, it eventually enabled him to pay off his debts. Eight years later, however, he was dead, and one has to speculate that the energy thrown into this enterprise actually wore him out.  Scott is acknowledged as the founder of the historical novel, and his fame resulted in the Waverley railway station in Edinburgh, and in a memorial monument so large and impressive that it eclipses even Prince Albert’s.  A good friend, an idealist but with a cool nature when he needed to call on it, an acquaintance of the high and mighty, but neither cynical nor pompous, he is famed for having also invented the cult of Scotland - tartan, pithy aphorisms and all.  Scott isn’t read much these days, and John enjoined us all to try him. Most  left the Court Hall resolving to do so. Even to his own most appropriate name, Scott could not have done more to put the character, landscape and culture of his homeland on the map, where it continues to state its case right into our own century.