The Mentality of Walter Scott

I have used "mentality" in the title in the rather precise sense of the French mentalité, which includes not only intelligence and general outlook but also something like the sum total of attitudes and outlook that distinguishes one man and one culture from another.

We can begin with a few facts about his life.  We are lucky, in the case of Scott, to   have one of the best  biographies of any British or American literary figure,  the Life of Sir Walter Scott written by his son-in-law J.G .Lockhart, himself a writer and editor.   Lockhart's biography takes up five substantial volumes, filled--or rather stuffed--with extracts from Scotts letters and papers.  For impatient readers, there is also a one-volume edition made by Lockhart himself.    

Scott was born in 1771 and educated to the law.  His highly successful career culminated in his selection as sheriff of Selkirk.  His most serious interests, however, ran to literature and antiquarian studies.  He  began collecting ballads and folklore in his spare time and writing imitations and translation of traditional verse.  One great result was The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3), a  collection of ballads that follows on the heels of collection made by Bishop Percy.  Scott's original narrative poems made an instant sensation: The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Lord  of the Isles.  In what little spare time he had from legal duties and other writing,  he started work on a prose romance, set it aside, and went back  and finished what became Waverley (1814).  It was  published anonymously, thus all the novels known as "by the author of Waverley."    

Although Waverley has its boring spots, especially the first 60-70 pages of sometimes tedious exposition, it remains a masterpiece that has most of the qualities that distinguish Scott.  Set in the Jacobite uprising of 1714, explores the character of the Scottish peoples and provides a sympathetic account of their uprising on behalf of the exiled Stuarts.  The narrative begins in 18th century England with an affluent gentleman, leading a  conventional English life, who goes to Scotland in the army where he links up with the older Medieval customs of the Scots  in the person of a  lowland nobleman, the Baron of Bradwardine, who takes him by degrees to the ancient Celtic roots--the Highlands, where he finds himself on the side of the Pretender.  

For the average Scottish or English reader, Waverley must have been an exhilarating backwards trip through time and history, which enabled him to see both the feudal and tribal loyalties of Scots who adhered to the Stuart cause in much the same way their ancestors had flocked to the standards of Wallace and the Bruces.

Scott imaginatively recreated the story of Scotland and its identity in his poems and novels, but his studies began as painstaking and original scholarship.  His work was not the usual drudgery of  burrowing through old documents and borrowing from predecessors.  On the contrary, he  spent his holidays tramping through countryside, staying up all night drinking with farmers and herdsmen, hearing their tales and taking down their ballads.  He began this research  at  the age of 21 and  for seven years he was making frequent "raids" into Liddesdale.  His companion and guide on these excursions [Robert Shortreed] describes their rollicking course through the countryside, drinking toasts at every stop,

"Eh me, sic an endless fund o humour and drollery as he than had wi him!  Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing.  Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel to everybody! He never..made himself the great man or took ony airs in the company.  I've seen him in a moods in these jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious, rober and drunk....He looked excessively heavy and stupid when he was fou but he was never out of gude-humour." 

In all those rambles and literary raids, however, Scott was forming his own character. As one of his friends said of those days, "He was making himself."

Scott's letters are full of antiquarian questions, and not just British.  His interests encompassed the traditions of Spain and Germany.  Lockhart observes that  "Scott. was self-educated in every branch of knowledge which he ever turned to account in the works of his genius." and he applies to his father-in-law what Scott said of  of  Captain Waverley "driving through the sea of books like a vessel without pilot or rudder.

In the  18th century  the general opinion of  of tradition, particularly medieval traditions was shaped either the contempt of progressive philosophers for people without indoor plumbing and white bread or else a sickly fascination with the imagined depravities and superstitions of irrational and violent people.  Matthew Lewis's very popular Gothic novel, The Monk, was more filled with horrors than a commercial haunted house during Halloween.

Scott's affection and reverence for old traditions give him an almost obsessive interest in old legends, ruined castles and abbeys, and in strange local customs.  He set the fashion that dominated the entire Romantic era.   At the early age of 19, he wrote an intelligent essay on the  feudal system, in which he tried to prove "that it proceeds upon principles common to all nations when placed in a certain situation."   Medieval Europe was not a freak show but a decent society that pursued the same goals as most decent socities

His dislike of revolution  induced in Scott a  youthful hatred of George  Washington.  "I know not how this was combined with a very strong prejudice in favor of the Stuart family, which I had originally imbibed from the songs and tales of the Jacobites," he declared in a bit of autobiography.  In school, he says, "I with a head on fire for chivalry was a Cavalier..a Tory...I hated Presbyterians and admired Montrose with his victorious highlanders."

As an Scott an instinctive Tory, Scott was outspoken in his opposition to the principles of  the French Revolution.  He was, however, also a generous and open-hearted man  who for a time cheerfully collaborated on the Whiggish Edinburgh Review.  He was close with its brilliant editor, Francis Jeffrey, but the Review's ill-tempered criticism of Scott combined with their increasingly open "liberalism" caused a rupture.

The difference between Scott and the "Scotch Reviewers"  was  apparent in their opposite views of the legal reform movement.  Henry Brougham, whom Scott described as "the god of whiggish idolatry," was a leading exponent of legal reform.   Meeting Brougham one day on the street, Scott warmed him  that they could whittle and whittle and whittle and some day there would be nothing left of Scotland.      

When the Reform Bill, turning Britain into direct democracy, was being debated, Scott told  a local meeting that he thought  the English should not take lessons from the French in politics, and when crowd hissed him, said: "I can't help suspecting that the manufacturers of  this  new constitution are like a parcel of school-boys taking to pieces a watch which used to go tolerably well for all practical purposes, in the conceit that they can put it together far better than the old watchmaker."   In the end, Scott concluded, "They will simply have broken the spring.."    Hissed down again, "I regard your gabble as no more than geese on the green."  After another attempt to speak, he calmly bowed and exited with words of gladiator: moriturus vos saluto."  He was dead a year later.

Scott had concluded, early in his life, that Whigs, liberals, and reformers perversely misunderstand human nature:   Speaking of Francis Jeffries'  address to workmen against "combinations," he shrewdly observed that "The Whigs will live and die in the heresey that the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches, and that if you can sufficiently demonstrate that a line of conduct is most consistent with men's interest, you have therefore demonstrated that they will at length after a few speeches adopt it of course.  In this case we should have no need of laws of churches..."

Like most great novelists, Walter Scott was a serious moralist, which is not to say that he had drawn up a comprehensive code of ethics.  As he wrote to a friend in 1824, "The gods have not made me philosophical."   Scott often strikes  democratic Americans as a snob.  He was naturally pleased to associate with the magnates of his day, proud of his connection with the Scotts of Buccleugh, and  eager to earn the money that would enable him to establish an almost baronial estate.  At the same time, he deplored the class distinctions that were emerging in England, and the falseness of social climbing. He wrote to his son Charles that he was pleased to introduce him to "Stowe, one of the first houses certainly in England" because the best society will teach the young man to despise "the low, strutting, straddling make-believe sort of fashion which generally consists in caricaturing the manners of the great..."  When his daughter Ann referred to something as "vulgar," he rebuked her, saying, "My love...you speak like a very young lady...vulgar...is only common; nothing that is common except wickedness, can deserve to be spoken of in a tone of contempt."

Respect for rank and society was an important part of Scott's determination to  lead a normal life.  He particularly despised the affectations of literary men who believed their genius elevated them above social conventions.  Lockhart summarized his view: "It was always his favorite tenet, in contradiction to what he called the cant of sonneteers, that there is no necessary connection between genius and an aversion or contempt for any of the common duties of life."   In addition to time spent on his legal duties, Scott was a passionate sportsman, loved horses, and was active in his local militia.  

As Douglas Young pointed out in his book on Edinburgh in the Age of Walter Scott, the Scottish capital, unlike London, was not socially stratified by neighborhood.  As in ancient Rome, where rich, middle, and blue-collar people lived on different floors of the same house,  Edinburgh was characterized by a far greater degree of social solidarity, which tended to reduce class warfare. 

In a letter of 1817, he wrote: "In Scotland men of all ranks, but especially the middling and lower classes, are linked by ties which give them a strong interest in each other's success in life, and it is amazing the exertion which men will make to support and assist persons with whom you would suppose them connected by very remote ties of consanguinity...They have in the lower ranks a wholesome horror of seeing a relation on the Poor's role of the parish; it is a dishonor." 

For all his deep sense of Christian charity, Scott took a dim view of government supplied welfare: "When the recurrence to their assistance becomes a matter of common course, poor rates...strike at the very heart of industry and providence," but he also condemned an early form of work-fare which made resentment and  dependency,  and made young people "as much improved as if they had been taking a turn with the convicts."    He acutely disliked  all forms of  do-goodism: When someone spoke of the pains taken to provide the poor with receipts for making good dishes out of their ordinary messes, he objected: "I dislike all such interferences...all your domiciliary, kind, impertinent visits; they pretty much feel like insults and do no manner of good: let people go in their own way, in God's name.  How would you like to have a nobleman coming to you to teach you how to dish up your beefsteak into a French kickshaw?'

Scott was,  in fact, a reactionary critic of capitalism.  Traveling through England's industrial north, he reacted as Dickens would later in The Old Curiosity Shop, to horror inflicted on displaced farmers and weavers condemned to slavery in factories: "God's justice is requiting and will yet farther requite those who have blown up this country into a state of unsubstantial opulence at the expesne of the health and morals of the lower classes."   Socialism, let it never be forgotten is nature's vengeance on industrial capitalism and on that classical liberalism which is perfectly represented in Ebeneezer Scrooge and proclaimed by liberals from Smith and Mill to Mises and Friedman.