Sir Walter Scott...

... yes, I'm still writing a thesis on him. I've just... neglected this bit of web-space for a while. I think I've averaged a post a month this year, or something terrible like that. In any case, here's a few more quotes on Scott. I've gotten about a 1/4 of my thesis finished (or something near that). We'll see how it continues. I officially leave for Moscow on Friday, but I'm leaving Nac on Thursday to hang out in DFW and see a Rangers game. :-)

From “Scott and the Corners of Time” by Edgar Johnson, City University of New York.

“Romanticism is a state of feeling, not a body of subject matter. Intrinsically there is nothing more romantic about portcullises than about plumbing, about wimples than about atomic warheads. Those who cannot see the difference between the past in Scott and the past in Dumas cannot tell a hawk from a handsaw, and I intend to waste no time on them. Certainly Scott, like almost all of us, had a romantic strain, but the fundamental nature of his mind and feeling was realistic, rationalistic, and stoic. What Francis Russell Hart calls the ‘arid debate over whether Scott was Romantic or anti-Romantic’ may well be transcended in the realization that for Scott the existence and power of romantic feeling was incorporated in his realistic vision of the totality of human experience.
Within that vision the past was not a refuge from the present, but the matrix in which the present had been formed. Its struggles were in fact the paradigms of the problems that still confront us; its fascination for Scott was not that it was remote but that it was relevant. History is the great public world in which we are all embroiled, and if we refuse to draw light from its past victories and defeats we condemn ourselves to repeat its disasters.
This, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is the dominant theme that runs through the entire body of Scott’s work… … That theme is the clash of loyalties battling on the stage of time, of men struggling in the torrent of history. More profoundly still, it is the collisions of history itself, the contention between different degrees of civilization and different stages of society, between a predatory tribalism and the establishment of an ordered society, between the endeavor to hold back – sometimes even to turn back – the clock of history and the forward movement of its hand, between the desire to hold on to ways of life rooted in the past and the forces making for progress, between the powers of stability and change.
The exploration was lifelong. The great struggle extends through all Scott’s work—Highlander and Lowlander, pastoral Scotland and commercial England, Catholicism and Protestantism, Established Church and Covenanter, freedom of conscience and orthodoxy, law and rebellion, tyranny and constitutional government, feudalism and nationalism, barbarism and culture, Europe and Byzantium, Christianity and Islam. These fell encounters of mighty opposites dominate Scott’s greatest work and provide his most exciting theme.
The corners of history—as men turn them, or half turn them, or fail to turn them—both through the contentious early nineteenth century in which Scott himself lived, with its tremendous political, social, and economic problems, and throughout the past from which it had descended—all these multiple corners of time were the cruces of Scott’s theme. And past and present are not discrete, but interconnected. Scott’s history, as Morse Peckham has pointed out, is an analogue for his vision of the present, which was a product of that history.” – pp. 26-28
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“The aspects of that past that Scott chooses for representation are those great watershed moments in history, those corners of time, that are pregnant for men’s lives. He does not sentimentalize his rendering of them; he shows the past as, like the present, full of ferocity, ignorance, prejudice, and suffering, but shot through, too, again like the present—his present and our present—by gleams of heroism and nobility. His work, therefore, in its meaning for the present, is not only still relevant—it is superbly luminous. ‘To be steeped in his books’, wrote one of my teachers, John Erskine, ‘is to be on familiar terms with the noble men and women who dwell in them, to share their courage, their zest in life, their self-reliance, their intellectual sincerity, until their outlook becomes our own—this would be a good protection against most of the romances which today it is our frailty rather than our fate to read…’
Scott’s great theme was always the struggle between the dying and the emerging, between spiritual stultification and spiritual fruition, between the life-denying and the life-fulfilling. That great theme he explored and developed with unexampled fertility. The courage with which he confronted the problems of his own time was clarified by his realization that the present is the child of the past. No novelist in his century saw life more sanely or portrayed it more lucidly. That is his heritage to us. Under his gaze the corners of time are not quaint and obscure crannies; they are light-filled openings into meaning and enlargements of understanding and the spirit.” – p. 37