Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition.I first read that passage probably fifty years ago, and have encountered it a few times since. But this week I was surprised by a passage in Chateaubriand's memoirs. In late April of 1832, the Duchesse de Berry had landed in France to try to stir up a revolution: her attempt may have outdone the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 for incompetence and futility. By mid-May, she was in hiding in the Vendée, and sent a message to a group of legitimists in Paris:
... there arrived from Nantes a merchant captain who told us where the heroine was. The captain is a handsome young man, brave as sailor, original as a Breton. He disapproved of the the business; he found it foolish; but he said, "If Madame will not leave, it's a question of dying, that's all. And then, counselors, see that you hang Walter Scott--he's the real culprit."(Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Book 35, Chapter 3) The editor notes that the duchesse was a great reader of Scott.
Twain read widely, and on the face of it there is no reason he mightn't have read Chateaubriand. Yet I find it hard to imagine him reading Chateaubriand with any patience. Paine's biography of Twain has no entry for Chateaubriand in the index, though for that matter it has none for Sir Walter Scott. I suppose this is a case of writers--or perhaps a skipper and a pilot--thinking alike.
Coincidence or connections? Hmmm.
ReplyDeleteMost interesting speculation, George.
George, this is a terrific find. Nearly all of my reading about Scott has focused on his influence in the U.S., but this week I hope to find time to go back through my notes and see if I jotted down anything about his cultural influence in Europe. I've always had a vague sense of a sociopolitical component to Scott's popularity on the other side of the Atlantic, but I'm really quite ignorant of the details.
ReplyDeleteThere was a comment by Jeff that somehow disappeared, and which had to do with the Scott's reputation in Europe. There I can only say that Stendhal disliked Scott's work, partly because their political views were opposed, partly for reasons that I have previously quoted in http://dc20011.blogspot.com/2013/12/stendahl-on-scott.html . But one would like to know what other writers thought.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's interesting... I've heard the Twain remark many times but not the other.
ReplyDeleteLiving in Cooperstown, I think of Cooper and Scott: "...we are talking about literature, where we often find a line of writers who incorporate ideas that they find in the works of their contemporaries, but modify these to give them new and divergent meanings. In this fashion, Cooper's novel The Pioneers (1823) responds to two historical novels by Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1817), both dealing with the civil war-like uprisings in Scotland ending in the victory of the forward-looking party. Cooper's success and the persistent popularity of Scott's novels inspired Lydia Maria Child to write Hobomok (1824), a tale about early New England Puritans. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), a novel that also deals with early New England life, picks up certain aspects in the novels of Cooper and Scott as well as from Child's Hobomok." --'Wizards of the West'? How Americans respond to Sir Walter Scott, the 'Wizard of the North'" by Barbara Buchenau (Goettingen University.)
I have a copy of The Pioneers that I haven't got around to reading, but may this spring. Cooper in the couple of novels I have read seems to me like bad Scott--though I bet the Marx brothers could have made a fine movie out of The Spy.
DeleteWas Scott the Wizard of the North? Kant called Hamann the Magus of the North, and I think Hamann embraced the name.