TORY ROMANCE
Upon our first visit to Scotland we kept low company; but now we return
to dwell in a castle, and play the host to our Sovereign Lord the King.
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a prosperous
lawyer who held the high office of sheriff. The father made a specialty
of his country’s antiquities, and the boy was brought up, as it were, in
the property-room of a moving picture studio. He was lame, which made it
impossible for him to repeat the valorous deeds of his ancestors; so he
took to dreams, and gave the world a new form of art, the historical
romance.
The French revolution occurred in his youth, and he reacted from it as
did all his class. It was the job of British Toryism to crush the
republican idea; with money derived from the trade of the whole world,
it subsidized the kings and emperors of Europe in their attacks upon
France. The result was to raise up Napoleon, and before Napoleon was
beaten Europe had waded through twenty-five years of blood. Walter
Scott’s function was to glorify the ancient loyalties and pieties in
whose name that world-crime was committed; and for his services he was
made a baronet, and paid a million dollars, equal to five or ten times
as much in our money.
Personally he was a generous and kindly gentleman, but he lent his name
and influence to the most vicious rowdies of his party. Nor was he
content with writing; he turned out and did his part as a smasher of the
“Reds.” At the age of forty-one we find him writing to the poet Southey
like an earlier incarnation of Attorney-General Palmer. “You are quite
right in apprehending a _Jacquerie_; the country is mined below our
feet.” He goes on to tell how he discovered a meeting of weavers in a
large manufacturing village, and how he did his duty as an officer of
the law. “I apprehended the ringleaders and disconcerted the whole
project; but in the course of my inquiries, imagine my surprise at
discovering a bundle of letters and printed manifestoes, from which it
appeared that the Manchester Weavers’ Committee corresponds with every
manufacturing town in the South and West of Scotland, and levies a
subsidy of 2s. 6d. per man--(an immense sum)--for the ostensible purpose
of petitioning Parliament for redress of grievances, but doubtless to
sustain them in their revolutionary movements. An energetic
administration, which had the confidence of the country, would soon
check all this; but it is our misfortune to lose the pilot when the ship
is on the breakers. But it is sickening to think of our situation.”
Walter Scott’s literary career began with narrative poems based upon the
love-makings and quarrelings of old Scottish chieftains. Then he began
writing novels on these same themes, and it was as if he had struck a
pick into a pit full of golden nuggets. To his Tory age he came as a
heaven-sent magician with exactly the right spells to prop up the
tottering old system. The public began to buy the Waverley novels so
fast that it was impossible to get them bound in time. England went wild
over them, and Europe as well; one million, four hundred thousand
volumes were sold in France alone. This was the time of the “Holy
Alliance,” and another King Louis had been set upon the French throne.
It was not quite the proper thing for an eminent legal gentleman to
write novels, so Scott published the books anonymously, and always
denied their authorship; but he did not refuse to take the money. He was
a fluent writer, and could turn out a volume in a month or six weeks,
and would get a thousand pounds before he had finished it. Never was
there such prosperity, since the days of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp.
Our Tory novelist was a big overgrown boy; he could never have written
such propaganda otherwise. He began to spend his money as a boy would
spend it--to make real the world of chivalry and romance in nineteenth
century Scotland, fully launched into the age of capitalist
industrialism! He built himself an imitation castle of colossal size,
“with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zigzagged gables ... a
myriad of indentations and parapets, and machicolated eaves; most
fantastic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted glass
... stones carved with heraldries innumerable.” And inside, of course,
were all the stage properties, “cuirasses, helmets, swords of every
order, from the claymore and rapier to some German executioner’s
swords.” Here our hero kept open house to all the world of rank and
fashion, with gay hunting parties and dances, drinking bouts, and
singing of ballads and the sounding of pibrochs. It was his aim, in his
own words, “to found a family”; besides becoming a baron, he married his
eldest son to an heiress, and the climax of his career came when King
George IV came to visit his northern dominion, and to be the novelist’s
guest.
It so happened that this king was an odious fat lecher; but that made no
difference, he was Sir Walter’s Most Gracious and Sovereign Lord. In an
ecstasy of loyalty, the novelist took possession of a glass from which
His Majesty had drunk a toast. This was to be preserved as the most
sacred of the treasures of Abbotsford; but, alas, the novelist put it in
his pocket, and in a moment of absent-mindedness sat down on it, and cut
himself severely! It did not occur to his pious soul that this might be
an effort of Providence to teach him something about drinking, or about
the worship of lecherous kings.
Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we
see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting
them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards
and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors.
And just so it is in the novels of Sir Walter: the costumes and scenery
are those of old-time Scotland, but the characters are the gentlemen and
servants and tenants of Scott’s own neighborhood. He had creative energy
and a sense of humor, he makes the game very real, and we can enjoy it,
provided we know what we are getting. It is not even Scott’s own time,
it is merely the Tory propaganda of that time. It is medievalism and
absolutism dressed up and glorified, with every trace of blood and filth
and horror wiped away; a fictionized sermon upon the text: Vote the
Conservative ticket.
But alas for the dreams of stand-pat poets! First came the ruin of his
personal hopes. Among the rascals of his gang were two who persuaded him
into a publishing business, to reap the millions out of his popularity.
They stole everything in sight, and then went bankrupt, and left him at
the age of fifty-five with a debt of a hundred and seventeen thousand
pounds. He set to work to write pot-boilers and pay it off; an action
which has made him a hero to his biographers. And of course, it is an
honorable thing for an artist to pay his debts; we all know that most
disagreeable of characters, the Bohemian genius who borrows from
everybody he meets and repays nothing. But it seems necessary to point
out that a novelist owes two debts; one to his business creditors, and
the other to those who are to read his books in future time. We are not
satisfied with Sir Walter’s pot-boilers, and we deny that a man of
genius has a right to drive himself to death and bring on a stroke of
paralysis in four years, in order to satisfy a romantic dream of honor.
Equally pitiful was the wreck of Sir Walter’s political ideals. In vain
did he glorify the loyalty of the Scotch peasants, their fidelity to
their lairds; in vain was all his hounding of the rebellious weavers
with the weapons of the law. They continued to organize, and the
peasants began to mutter and snarl; they wanted the vote, they clamored
for rights both political and economic. A most wicked project known as
the Reform Bill came up before Parliament, to give the vote to common
working people; and Sir Walter, sixty years old and ill, persisted in
taking part in the campaign. He made a speech in which he warned the
audience that all these licentious movements came from France. This was
forty years after the French revolution, and the Bolshevik bogie had
lost its power to terrify; Sir Walter was hissed by his audience. Later
on he personally saw to the arrest of a radical rascal on the street,
and got himself stoned and mobbed. It was a shock he never got over, and
he carried the memory to his grave a year or two later.
Fate is usually kind to aged Tories of this sort; it takes them off the
stage of life before the failure of their hopes is too apparent. Imagine
the shock to this chivalrous old soul if he could come out of his grave
today, and visit the House of Parliament, and hear the “left wing”
members, elected from his beloved highlands, shouting for the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Now indeed would he say: “The country
is mined below our feet!”