SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832) BY ANDREW LANG FTEN as it has been my fortune to write about Sir Walter Scott, I never sit down to do so without a sense of happiness and elation. It is as if one were meeting a dear friend, or at the least were to talk with other friends about him. This emotion is so strong, no doubt, because the name and memory and magic of Sir Walter are entwined with one's earliest recollections of poetry, and nature, and the rivers and hills of home. Yet the phrase of a lady, a stranger, in an unpublished letter to Scott, "You are such a friendly author," contains a truth not limited to Scott's fellow-countrymen and fellow-Borderers. To read him, to read all of him almost, to know his works familiarly, is to have a friend, and as it were, an invisible playmate of the mind. Goethe confessed this spell; it affected even Carlyle; all Europe knew its charm; Alexandre Dumas, the Scott of France, not only felt it but can himself inspire it, the spell of a great, frank, wise, humorous, and loving nature, accompanied by a rich and sympathetic imagination, and equipped with opulence of knowledge. In modern England, few men have had wider influence than two who in many respects are all unlike Scott, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Ruskin; yet their writings are full of admiration for "the Magician who dwelleth in the castle on the Border." To-day, some very "modern" people of letters, in no way remarkable either for knowledge, fancy, or humor, affect to speak of Scott with disdain. The latest criticism which I chanced to read talked of his "romances of chivalry," as if they had no connection with actual "life." He wrote only about three prose "romances of chivalry." It is life itself that throbs in a score, perhaps a hundred, of his characters. Davie Deans, Jeanie Deans, Bessie Maclure, Nantie Ewart, Wandering Willie, Andrew Fairservice, Louis XI., James VI., Ratcliffe, Madge Wildfire, the Dugald Creature, Callum Beg, Diana Vernon, Dugald Dalgetty, the fishers of The Antiquary,' Baillie Nicol Jarvie, Claverhouse, Meg Dods,- these are but a few of Scott's immortally living characters. From kings to gillies, they all display life as it has been, and is, and will be lived. Remoteness and strangeness of time and place and society can never alter nature, |