ABSTRACT

No major British author has suffered more from changing literary fashions than Sir Walter Scott. During his lifetime (1771-1832) he became a figure of both national and European significance. To Goethe, for example, Waverley was one of ‘the best things that have ever been written in the world’; while the appearance of Quentin Durward (1832) created a literary sensation in Paris, which gave Scott the kind of continental reputation hitherto enjoyed among his compatriots only by Byron. Yet as early as the 187os we find Leslie Stephen speaking of ‘the decay of interest in Scott’, and voicing a suspicion that ‘the great “Wizard” has lost some of his magic power, and that the warmth of our first love is departed’. As for the Continent, what could be more damaging than the verdict of the Scandinavian critic Georg Brandes (quoted in John Buchan's biography of Scott) that he is a writer ‘whom all grown-up people have read, and no grown-up people read’?