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
This Essay appeared in the Anglo-FrenchReview, August, 1919, and I am obliged tothe Editor and Publisher for leave to reprint it.
W. P. K.
When I was asked to choose a subject for alecture at the Sorbonne, there came into mymind somehow or other the incident of Scott'svisit to Paris when he went to see Ivanhoe atthe Odéon, and was amused to think how thestory had travelled and made its fortune:—
'It was an opera, and, of course, the story sadlymangled and the dialogue in great part nonsense. Yetit 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, nowrecited in a foreign tongue, and for the amusement ofa strange people. I little thought to have survived thecompleting of this novel.'
It seemed to me that here I had a text for mysermon. The cruel circumstances of the compositionof Ivanhoe might be neglected. Theinteresting point was in the contrast betweenthe original home of Scott's imagination and[2]the widespread triumph of his works abroad—onthe one hand, Edinburgh and Ashestiel, thetraditions of the Scottish border and the Highlands,the humours of Edinburgh lawyers andGlasgow citizens, country lairds, farmers andploughmen, the Presbyterian eloquence of theCovenanters and their descendants, the dialecthardly intelligible out of its own region, andnot always clear even to natives of Scotland; onthe other hand, the competition for Scott's novelsin all the markets of Europe, as to which I takeleave to quote the evidence of Stendhal:—
'Lord Byron, auteur de quelques héroïdes sublimes,mais toujours les mêmes, et de beaucoup de tragédiesmortellement ennuyeuses, n'est point du tout le chefdes romantiques.
'S'il se trouvait un homme que les traducteurs à latoise se disputassent également à Madrid, à Stuttgard,à Paris et à Vienne, l'on pourrait avancer que cethomme a deviné les tendances morales de son époque.'
If Stendhal proceeds to remark in a footnotethat 'l'homme lui-même est peu digne d'enthousiasme,'it is pleasant to remember that LordByron wrote to M. Henri Beyle to correct hislow opinion of the character of Scott. This isby the way, though not, I hope, an irrelevantremark. For Scott is best revealed in his friend[3]ships;and the mutual regard of Scott and Byronis as pleasant to think of as the friendship betweenScott and Wordsworth.
As to the truth of Stendhal's opinion aboutthe vogue of Scott's novels and his place as chiefof the romantics, there is no end to the list ofwitnesses who might be summoned. Perhapsit may be enough to remember how the youngBalzac was carried away by the novels as theycame fresh from the translator, almost immediatelyafter their first appearance at home.
One distinguishes easily enough, at home inScotland, between the novels, or the passages inthe novels, that are idiomatic, native, homegrown,intended for his own people, and thenovels not so limited, the romances of English orforeign history—Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, QuentinDurward. But as a matter of fact these latter,though possibly eas