style

His style.

          While the carelessness of Scott is manifest in defects of construction and in curious
           contradictions in small details, it is more particularly apparent in the style of portions of merely
           narrative or descriptive passages. Yet, with all its frequent clumsiness, its occasional lapses into
           mere rodomontade, its often loosely interwoven paragraphs, and its occasionally halting
           grammar, his style is that of a great writer. Except when he overburdens it with lore, legal or
           antiquarian, it sparkles with interest, its phrases and epithets are often exceptionally happy,
           and, in his more emotional or more strikingly imaginative passages, he attains to an exceptional
           felicity of diction. This is the case throughout Wandering Willie’s Tale; and the description of
           the ghastly revellers in Redgauntlet castle beginning: “There was the fierce Middleton,” is
           unsurpassable in apt and graphic phraseology. The farewell of Meg Merrilies to Ellangowan
           has, also, been singled out by critics for special praise; but many of his purely descriptive
           passages are, likewise, wholly admirable. Take, for example, the account of the gathering
           storm in The Antiquary:

           The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the
           horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer
           evening, etc.

           Or the picture in The Abbot of the various personages and groups that traversed the vestibule
           of Holyrood palace: “Here the hoary statesman,” etc.; or the description of the Glasgow
           midnight in Rob Roy:

           Evening had now closed and the growing darkness gave to the broad, still and deep expanse
           of the brimful river, first a hue sombre and uniform then a dismal and turbid appearance,
           partially lighted by a waning and pallid moon, etc.

Or the woodland scene in The Legend of Montrose, where Dalgetty is pursued by the
bloodhounds of the marquis of Argyll:

           The moon gleamed on the broken pathway and on the projecting cliffs of rock round which it
           winded, its light intercepted here and there by the branches of bushes and dwarf trees, which
           finding nourishment in the crevices of the rocks, in places overshadowed the brow and ledge
           of the precipice. Below a thick copsewood lay in deep and dark shadow, etc.

           Passages such as these are common with Scott; and, as for his dialogues, though, in the
           English, he occasionally lapses into curious stiltednesses, the Scottish or semi-Scottish are
           invariably beyond praise, both for their apt expressiveness, and their revelation of character.

www.bartleby.com/222/0119.htm

Academic Year 1999-2000

Universitat de Vàlencia Press