This Day in Literary History (Sir Walter Scott, Father of the Historical Novel—and Object of Twain Scorn—Born)

Aug. 15, 1771— Sir Walter Scott, who fostered Scottish pride with his vast output of novels, poems, plays and histories, pioneered the historical novel as a genre, and served as an example to later authors and how to gain and lose a fortune, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In a prior post, I discussed how Hollywood has looked to Scott properties like Ivanhoe and Rob Roy for content, and how Mark Twain took a various revenge on him for polluting the consciousness of the antebellum South with fake notions of medieval chivalry by sending the steamboat The Walter Scott to a watery grave in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It wasn’t until I read Ray Perman’s essay from last weekend’s edition of The Financial Times that I discovered that Twain, to his mortification, had more in common (besides the resort to pen names early in his career) than he would have liked with Scott: i.e., spendthrift ways and foolhardy investments that almost capsized the fortune he made from his work.

As I explained in this post from seven years ago, Twain, once he achieved success, built a 19-room red mansion whose whimsical design—filled with turrets, balconies, verandas and embrasures—also looks, from a certain angle, like a steamboat. It was a reminder of the start of his professional career, as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. The kind of convivial lifestyle he enjoyed in the house was a New England version of what Scott possessed at Abbotsford, his fantasy castle.

Both Scott and Twain came into their fortunes during economic booms that followed convulsive wars: The Napoleonic Wars in Scott’s Great Britain, to the Civil War in Twain’s America. Both writers numbered industrial magnates among their close friends.

Rash investments led both Scott and Twain to insolvency. Scott saw the foundation of his fortune rocked by reverses in three companies, while Twain poured $300,000 ($6 million in today’s currency) into the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine so complex (with 18,000 parts) that only one was successfully built. Both authors worked frenetically to extricate themselves from bankruptcy: Scott through writing (nine books in his last six years), and Twain through an intensive worldwide lecture tour.

Other 19^th century authors (notably, Washington Irving) were transatlantic celebrities who made money off their works, but Scott and Twain pointed the way on new, influential means of doing so. Scott helped pay (at least for a while) the expenses on his home through publishers’ advances before he had sat down in earnest to write some titles. Twain found that his lectures (often crafted with specific audiences in mind) not only boosted his career at the start but also were useful in publicizing his new books.

Each author also heavily influenced the development of literature in their country. Scott did so by pioneering historical fiction as a genre through his so-called “Waverly Novels” (named for the book that thrust him into the limelight in the first place), inserting fictional characters into real-life events. Though Twain was hardly the first American author to use dialect, he was the first to use it naturally so that, even today, the speech of his characters remains recognizable.

Photo of the Day: Sir Walter Scott Statue, Central Park, NYC

Central Park, among other points of interest in its 843 acres, contains “Literary Walk,” s series of statues dedicated to writers. In prior posts, I discussed those dedicated to Robert Burns and William Shakespeare.

There was a time, a century and a half ago, when the fame of Sir Walter Scott here in the United States was nearly a match for either of them. Even though he remains a figure of note and pride in his native Scotland, where his romantic vision of the land sparked an interest in tourism that continues to this day, his novels and poems haven’t worn as well here. Those aware of his work here in the U.S. are likely to know it secondhand, through the TCM staple Ivanhoe (the 1951 film starring Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor) and the 1995 flick Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange (neither, of course, a Scot).

Blame some of the decline in Scott’s reputation on Mark Twain. In Life on the Mississippi, the American saw Scott as having “so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the [Civil War], that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain takes a gleeful revenge by having his two runaways from the South, Huck and the slave Jim, board the sunken steamship the Walter Scott, which had “killed herself on a rock.”

(Incidentally, for all his annoyance with Scott, Twain found his influence inescapable.He felt compelled to use historical fiction, a genre that the Scot had advanced more than any other writer, in writing about a French adolescent girl of the late Middle Ages. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc turned out to be Twain’s favorite among his own writings.)

Twain’s biting comments came before the commissioning and creating of a Central Park tribute to Scott. In 1871, the centennial of Scott’s birth, a group of Scottish-Americans managed to get a statue in his honor along what is now Literary Walk. Sir John Steell (also responsible for the park’s Burns statue) created a bronze replica of his 1845 marble of Scott in the two men’s native Edinburgh. Unveiled in November 1872, it shows Scott dressed in a flowing cloak with workingman’s shoes, book and pen in hand, and his favorite dog, Maida, at his feet. This is what I saw when I took this photograph three years ago this past May.

This Day in Classical Music History (Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony Premieres)

March 3, 1842—Conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performance of his own work, Felix Mendelssohn premiered what would turn out to be his last symphony, 12 years after a trip to Scotland that inspired it.

The 20-year-old composer’s visit to the British Isles was a creatively fertile period for him. He was also eagerly anticipating what he would find—he was coming, he told his traveling companion, “with a rake for folk songs, an ear for the lovely, fragrant countryside, and a heart for the bare legs of the natives”—and he received thousands of visual and aural impressions that found their way into Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Opus 56—the “Scottish Symphony”—as well as his Hebride Overture.

Most notable was his visit to the Palace of Holyrood in Edinburgh, which he recounted in a letter home:

“In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door: up this way they came and found Rizzio in that dark corner, where they pulled him out, and three rooms off there is a dark corner, where they murdered him. The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything round is broken and mouldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish Symphony.”

The musical notes that Mendelssohn jotted down right after this visit found its way into the andante opening of the Scottish Symphony. Still, it would be over a decade before Mendessohn could bear down enough to finish this composition.

Three months after the Leipzig performance, Mendelssohn dedicated his composition to Queen Victoria of Great Britain and consort Prince Albert, who had sung his songs when he visited them.

The composer’s habit of naming his compositions after a motif or setting, while imparting a handle by which to recall the work, also inadvertently inspired an amusing anecdote. Robert Schumann, mistakenly believing that he had just heard the composer’s Italian Symphony, wrote that the symphony was "so beautiful as to compensate for a hearer who has never been to Italy."

As it happens, the Italian Symphony was spotlighted in one of the most delightful films of the past 50 years, the 1979 coming-of-age comedy Breaking Away. The memory of it made me wonder if the Scottish Symphony had also been featured on the big screen. The answer is yes, in, appropriately, enough, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While that 1935 Warner Brothers film features more prominently Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the Shakespeare comedy, the final movement of the symphony is also used, with lyrics by an anonymous writer, adapted by Erich Maria Korngold; and sung by James Cagney and five other stars in the movie.

Photo of the Day: Burns, Scots' Pride, in Central Park

For the past two weeks, with all the anticipation about the vote on Scottish independence, I wondered how I could touch on it in this blog. Then I remembered this photo I took of a statue of the Scottish “national poet,” Robert Burns.

"National.” Well, more in consciousness of heritage than diplomatically, following the decisive vote. But I’m sure that something stirs in many a Scot when they come across this bronze statue by Sir John Steell, as I did late this spring, while out on “Literary Walk” in New York’s Central Park. (For another major figure on this walk, see my prior post on William Shakespeare.)

Within two generations of the crushing defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Burns was writing with wounded pride of his native land in “The Answer”:

“Ev'n then a wish (I mind its power)

A wish, that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast;

That I for poor auld Scotland's sake

Some useful plan, or book could make,

Or sing a sang at least.”

The short, unhappy life of this precursor of Romantic poetry is one manifestation of what Alastair Reid, in an essay in the Winter 1994 issue of The Wilson Quarterly, termed “The Scottish Condition,” which, he noted, “can show itself fleetingly in the smallest of gestures, a sniff or a sigh, or it can take a voluble spoken form, but it has lurked for a long time in the undercurrents of Scottish life. It wells from ancestral gloom, from the shadows of a severe Calvinism, and from a gritty mixture of disappointment and indignation, and it mantles the Scottish spirit like an ancient moss.”

The Scottish plebiscite this week was, if nothing else, about the power of the wish that Burns noted in his poem above. The England-dominated “United Kingdom” had better be careful that it does not repeat Margaret Thatcher’s mistake in alienating further such a significant part of its country with its economic policies and cold-shoulder attitude.

Quote of the Day (John Muir, on Summer Work in the 19th Century)

“In summer the chores were grinding scythes, feeding the animals, chopping stove-wood, and carrying water up the hill from the spring on the edge of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or hay-field. I was foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men. An hour was allowed at noon for dinner and more chores. We stayed in the field until dark, then supper, and still more chores, family worship, and to bed; making altogether a hard, sweaty day of about sixteen or seventeen hours. Think of that, ye blessed eight-hour-day laborers!”— Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)