Walter Scott was the most popular novelist of all time, based on percentage of novels sold that were penned by him. He was also a renowned poet.
His reputation has waned over the past century or so, as critics have preferred psychological nuance and realism to adventure and bombast. G.K. Chesterton (writing about Scott) said that he who fears bombast will never rise to eloquence. Scott (like Shakespeare before him, but unlike some who followed) never feared bombast.
His descriptive prose was serviceable at best – a bit long-winded and polysyllabic for modern tastes. But his characters could speechify like nobody’s business. From memory (I’m too lazy to look them up right now), when Rebecca has to choose between marrying de Bois-Gilbert or being burned at the stake she suspects that de Bois-Guilbert will break his promise to marry her. “All the laws of God and man I have broken,” says the Templar. “But my word, never!”
In Scott’s diary (acc. a C.S. Lewis essay on Scott I just read), on June 7, 1826, Scott was kept awake all night be a howling dog. He was in poor health. His wife had died three weeks beforehand. He was working feverishly to pay off a debt.
He commented in his journal: “Poor cur! I daresay he has his distresses, as I have mine.”
Scott was generous to all his characters, and his villains spoke as nobly as his heroes --- often even more so. “Die!” cries the hero to the villain in “Old Mortality”. “Die hoping nothing, believing nothing….”
“And fearing nothing,” brags the villain.
Like God, Scott loved all his creations, be they saints or sinners. Lewis compares Scott to Oriosto and “Orlando Furioso” (high praise indeed, but Scott’s characters have some of the same nobility mixed with sinfulness)
Scott was an almost exact contemporary of Jane Austen, and a great admirer of her novels. At the time, he was a famous and respected literary lion, she, an unknown. But the novel went her way instead of his. That’s probably for the best, but what modern novels can be compared to “Furioso”?
Lewis claims that Scott captured the mood and tenor of “period” in his historical novels in a way his predecessors did not. Shakespeare’s characters were Elizabethans, even when they were ancient Scots or Greeks. Certainly Scott's Scottish novels invoke the place and the time.
Scott’s characters make bombastic speeches. The villains are a bunch of windbags. But that’s because they take themselves seriously. The notion that high-fallutin’ speechifying is out of character or "artificial" just isn’t true. Villainous de Bois-Guilbert is indeed. Aritificial? No.
Walter Scott. Will his reputation ever make a comeback?