Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne
Ker William Paton
English
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Below is a summary of Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne
SIR WALTER SCOTT
A Lecture at the Sorbonne,
May 22, 1919, in the series of
_Conférences Louis Liard_
BY
WILLIAM PATON KER, LL.D.
GLASGOW
MACLEHOSE, JACKSON AND CO.
PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY
1919
NOTE
This Essay appeared in the _Anglo-French Review_, August, 1919, and
I am obliged to the Editor and Publisher for leave to reprint it.
W. P. K.
Sir Walter Scott
When I was asked to choose a subject for a lecture at the Sorbonne,
there came into my mind somehow or other the incident of Scott's visit
to Paris when he went to see _Ivanhoe_ at the Odéon, and was amused to
think how the story had travelled and made its fortune:--
'It was an opera, and, of course, the story sadly mangled and
the dialogue in great part nonsense. Yet it was strange to
hear anything like the words which (then in an agony of pain
with spasms in my stomach) I dictated to William Laidlaw at
Abbotsford, now recited in a foreign tongue, and for the
amusement of a strange people. I little thought to have
survived the completing of this novel.'
It seemed to me that here I had a text for my sermon. The cruel
circumstances of the composition of _Ivanhoe_ might be neglected. The
interesting point was in the contrast between the original home of
Scott's imagination and the widespread triumph of his works abroad--on
the one hand, Edinburgh and Ashestiel, the traditions of the Scottish
border and the Highlands, the humours of Edinburgh lawyers and Glasgow
citizens, country lairds, farmers and ploughmen, the Presbyterian
eloquence of the Covenanters and their descendants, the dialect hardly
intelligible out of its own region, and not always clear even to natives
of Scotland; on the other hand, the competition for Scott's novels in
all the markets of Europe, as to which I take leave to quote the
evidence of Stendhal:--
'Lord Byron, auteur de quelques héroïdes sublimes, mais
toujours les mêmes, et de beaucoup de tragédies mortellement
ennuyeuses, n'est point du tout le chef des romantiques.
'S'il se trouvait un homme que les traducteurs à la toise se
disputassent également à Madrid, à Stuttgard, à Paris et à
Vienne, l'on pourrait avancer que cet homme a deviné les
tendances morales de son époque.'
If Stendhal proceeds to remark in a footnote that 'l'homme lui-même est
peu digne d'enthousiasme,' it is pleasant to remember that Lord Byron
wrote to M. Henri Beyle to correct his low opinion of the character of
Scott. This is by the way, though not, I hope, an irrelevant remark. For
Scott is best revealed in his friendships; and the mutual regard of
Scott and Byron is as pleasant to think of as the friendship between
Scott and Wordsworth.
As to the truth of Stendhal's opinion about the vogue of Scott's novels
and his place as chief of the romantics, there is no end to the list of
witnesses who might be summoned. Perhaps it may be enough to remember
how the young Balzac was carried away by the novels as they came fresh
from the translator, almost immediately after their first appearance at
home.
One distinguishes easily enough, at home in Scotland, between the
novels, or the passages in the novels, that are idiomatic, native,
homegrown, intended for his own people, and the novels not so limited,
the romances of English or foreign history--_Ivanhoe_, _Kenilworth_,
_Quentin Durward_. But as a matter of fact these latter, though possibly
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