Sir Walter Scott

Overview

About sixty-five pages, written by Thomas Carlyle for the London and Westminster Review in 1838, taking as its occasion John Gibson Lockhart’s monumental multi-volume biography of Sir Walter Scott, Lockhart’s own father-in-law, published a few years after Scott’s death in 1832. Scott had been, by any commercial or popular measure, the most successful writer of his era, the author of the immensely popular Waverley novels that essentially invented the historical novel as a major literary form and made him wealthy and internationally famous, and Carlyle’s review uses Lockhart’s detailed biographical material as an occasion to take the full measure of the man and, more searchingly, to weigh whether commercial and popular success of this scale amounted to genuine artistic greatness.

Carlyle’s verdict, worked out across the essay with real care and evident personal engagement, is neither simple dismissal nor simple celebration, and its refusal to settle into either position is what has made the essay a durable and still-debated piece of literary and biographical criticism, offering a model of how to hold genuine admiration for a person’s character and considerable talent alongside a serious, unresolved reservation about the ultimate scale of their achievement.

The argument

A healthy, honest, capable man. Carlyle begins by giving Scott genuine and extensive credit on nearly every count a biography can demonstrate: he finds him physically and psychologically healthy, straightforwardly honest in his personal and professional dealings, immensely capable both as a writer and as a man of practical affairs, and possessed of a manliness and good sense that Carlyle, elsewhere in his work deeply suspicious of affectation and weakness, plainly admires without reservation. This is not a hostile review working toward a predetermined negative verdict; Carlyle’s praise of Scott’s character is extensive, specific and evidently sincere.

Not, finally, great. Against this considerable praise, Carlyle sets his central and most contested judgment: that Scott, for all his talent, health and honesty, was not, in Carlyle’s considered assessment, a genuinely great writer, because he wrote fundamentally for money and for amusement, his own and his readers’, rather than out of what Carlyle calls inner necessity, the kind of artistic compulsion that Carlyle associates with the highest tier of literary achievement, tragedy, deep passion, work produced because the artist could not have done otherwise regardless of financial reward. Carlyle is careful to note that Scott himself did not particularly wish to be regarded chiefly as a literary man in this exalted sense, and that this modest self-assessment was, in its own way, honest and admirable, which complicates rather than simplifies Carlyle’s ultimate judgment.

The genuine achievement of the Waverley novels. Even while denying Scott the highest rank, Carlyle credits him with a real and, in Carlyle’s own account, lasting historical achievement: the Waverley novels, whatever their limitations as delineations of deep human passion or complex character, taught an entire reading public something genuinely important, that the past was populated by actual, living, particular men and women rather than by the abstractions, dates, treaties and state papers through which history had conventionally been presented. This achievement, Carlyle insists, should not be undervalued simply because it falls short of the tragic or passionate greatness he reserves for a smaller category of writers.

Abbotsford and the crash. The essay’s second half turns from literary judgment to biographical narrative, telling the story of Abbotsford, the substantial baronial estate Scott built, and repeatedly expanded and improved, well beyond what his considerable but not unlimited literary earnings could actually sustain, driven by a genuine, almost romantic desire to establish himself and his family as landed gentry in a manner his novels’ own aristocratic and historical subjects might have recognized. When the financial crash of 1826 revealed the full extent of Scott’s overextension, precipitated partly by the failure of his publishing partners, Scott, rather than declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh, took on personal responsibility for the enormous resulting debt and spent the remaining years of his life writing at an exhausting, ultimately fatal pace specifically to pay it off, a decision Carlyle treats with genuine respect for its honesty and its refusal to evade responsibility, while also framing the whole episode as a fundamentally tragic misdirection of extraordinary talent toward an object, land, status, a baronial estate, that did not deserve the sacrifice ultimately made for it.

The verdict. Carlyle’s closing assessment holds together admiration and reservation without fully resolving the tension between them: here also was a man, worthy of genuine respect and attention, whose tragedy was not failure or dishonesty but a kind of misdirected aim, spending a gift of real, considerable magnitude on building and furnishing an estate rather than on the highest objects Carlyle believed a writer of Scott’s actual capability might have pursued instead.

How to read it

Read the essay as a genuine act of biographical and critical judgment rather than as either simple celebration or simple dismissal, and notice how carefully Carlyle holds his praise and his central reservation together throughout, rather than letting one simply cancel out the other.

Pay close attention to what Carlyle means by inner necessity as the mark of genuine artistic greatness, and consider whether this is a fair or even coherent standard by which to judge a writer, since it requires distinguishing motive, why an author wrote, from the actual quality and effect of what was written, a distinction not every reader will find persuasive or even fully knowable from outside.

Notice how much weight Carlyle places on Scott’s genuine historical achievement, teaching readers that the past was populated by living individuals rather than abstractions, even while denying him the highest artistic rank. This is Carlyle refusing an all-or-nothing verdict, crediting a real accomplishment while still reserving judgment about ultimate greatness.

Read the Abbotsford narrative as the essay’s emotional and moral center, and consider what work Carlyle’s word tragedy is doing there. Scott’s crash was not a moral failure in any simple sense, by Carlyle’s own generous account of his honesty and responsibility, and yet Carlyle insists on framing the whole episode as tragic, worth sitting with as a considered use of that particular word.

Read this essay alongside Carlyle’s Characteristics and his Edinburgh address to see a consistent set of values running through his critical writing across the decade: suspicion of talent spent on lesser objects, whether showy cleverness or landed status, paired with genuine respect for honest, disciplined labor wherever he finds it, even when he believes that labor was ultimately misdirected.

Questions it raises

• Is Carlyle’s distinction between writing out of inner necessity and writing for money and amusement a fair or even a genuinely knowable basis for judging a writer’s ultimate greatness, given how difficult it is to verify an author’s actual motive from outside?
• Does crediting Scott with teaching readers that history was populated by living individuals count as a lesser achievement than the tragic or passionate greatness Carlyle reserves for other writers, or is Carlyle’s hierarchy itself worth questioning?
• Is Scott’s decision to spend his remaining years writing to pay off debt from Abbotsford, rather than declaring bankruptcy, best understood as admirable honesty, as a further instance of misdirected effort, or as both simultaneously?
• What does it mean for Carlyle to call Scott’s story a tragedy when Scott himself, by all accounts including Carlyle’s own, seems not to have experienced his life and choices as tragic, and pursued Abbotsford with real personal satisfaction?
• How much of Carlyle’s ultimate verdict on Scott reflects a genuine, defensible critical standard, and how much reflects Carlyle’s own particular literary values, formed by his interest in tragedy, prophecy and inner spiritual crisis, values not every reader or critic would share?
• Can a reader hold Carlyle’s extensive praise of Scott’s character together with his withholding of the title of greatness without the two positions undermining each other, or does the essay ultimately require choosing one emphasis over the other?