Walter Scott and the English Language

I

THE London Observer of March 15, 1931, propounded, by way of competition, the question, ‘Which of the immortals would you choose as companion for half an hour’s walk?’ The six candidates who headed the poll were Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Socrates, Sir Walter Scott, Julius Cæsar. If all the competitors, before recording their votes, had reread Washington Irving’s charming description of his visit to Abbotsford and his walks with the ‘Shirra’ in 1817, it is possible that Scott might have headed the list. ‘It was,’ says the American essayist, ‘as if I were admitted to a social communion with Shakespeare, for it was with one of a kindred, if not equal genius. . . . The play of his genius was so easy that he was unconscious of its mighty power. ... I do not recollect a sneer throughout his conversation any more than there is throughout his works.’ In fact, to quote the same authority, a ‘golden-hearted man.’

It is rather the fashion just now with the illiterate and the immature to depreciate Scott. He is, says a manufacturer of shockers, unreadable. A contemporary lady novelist records her horror at having been suspected of reading Dickens, explaining that she felt almost as distressed as though she had been accused of reading Scott. It is a pity she did not add Shakespeare, so as to include in one condemnation the three greatest creators of character in English literature, perhaps even in the literature of the world. The result of the Observer election, recording the opinion of the most educated newspaper ‘constituency’ in the British Isles, would seem to indicate that, for the lettered, Scott is far from being a back number.

The recent publication of two new lives of Walter Scott is a reminder that 1932 is the centenary of that great man’s death. We may no doubt look forward to a considerable literary output of Scottiana in the immediate future, but the object of this modest article is to call attention to Scott’s contribution to the vocabulary and phraseology of modern English, and to suggest that some student of language should handle the subject with the fullness for which the present writer has not the necessary leisure. It will, I think, be found that next to Shakespeare, whose influence on English is a phenomenon unique in the history of language, Scott has been our greatest verbal benefactor.

He is not one of the very quotable poets. Leaving out Shakespeare, who stands alone, it may be said that the greatest poets are often not the most quotable. Each of the immortals has given us a few phrases which have become an integral part of the English vocabulary, but from all the magnificent poetry of the nineteenth century cannot be drawn a supply of quotations to compare with that furnished in the eighteenth century by Pope alone, the neat and sententious. To Scott’s vigorous and galloping verse we owe such effective phrases as ‘Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung,’ ‘Caledonia! stern and wild,’ ‘to beard the lion in his den, ’ ‘ foemen worthy of their steel ’; and, although he was a landsman, he is our first literary authority for the phrase ‘ to nail the colours to the mast,’ which occurs in the Introduction to ‘Marmion,’ an example overlooked by the Oxford Dictionary. This may not seem a very large contribution to English phraseology, but it is probably as great as that of any other nineteenth-century poet. The ‘crowded hour of glorious life,’ which is attributed to him in some anthologies of quotations, is really a quotation from a poem by T. O. Mordaunt, used by Scott as an epigraph to a chapter of Old Mortality.

It is to the prose works that we must go to estimate Scott’s importance as a word maker and phrase maker. The Waverley Novels fall into two groups. We have the romantic mediæval tales that delighted our boyhood, and which the modem consumer of thrillers finds long-winded and dull. Such are Ivanhoe, The Talisman, and Quentin Durward, the greatest of these being Ivanhoe. Then there are the immortal stories dealing with periods not too remote from the author’s own times, with the scene laid upon his ‘native heath’ (his own phrase), the Border country and the Lowlands, regions so rich in that legendary lore which Scott began to absorb in childhood and in which he never ceased to revel. It is to these — Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy, and the like — that we turn in our mature years, when the perusal of some ‘courageous’ modern novel impels us to seek the disinfecting society of Dandie Dinmont, Mr. Oldbuck, Davie Deans, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and the rest of a society of characters and oddities unequaled outside Shakespeare’s works, except perhaps by Dickens. In these two groups of novels Scott speaks two separate languages. In the first group we have the conventional and unreal language of imaginative romance, in the second the natural pithy speech, racy of the soil, which he had heard all his life from the Lowland burgess and peasant.

II

To write a realistic historical novel of the Middle Ages is, from the language point of view, an obvious impossibility. In Ivanhoe, for instance, one half of the characters would have to talk late Anglo-Saxon, and the other half old Norman-French. To give an archaic atmosphere to the setting, the author goes in for what Stevenson called ‘tushery,’ and the result is, to the philological reader, an artificial absurdity. Even in the ‘props’ the most conscientious romance writer may go hopelessly wrong. To take a simple example: In Ivanhoe Wamba says to the Black Knight, ‘I have twice or thrice noticed the glance of a morrion from amongst the green leaves.’ In ‘Marmion’ Fitz-Eustace speaks of his ‘ basnet.’ A morrion, the brimmed helmet of late Tudor times, is as impossible in the days of Cœur-de-Lion as a basnet, the basin-helmet of the early mediæval warrior, at Flodden Field. This may seem pernickety criticism, but I doubt whether a laborious consulter of sources like Charles Reade was ever guilty of any such trifling blunder in The Cloister and the Hearth.

When we come to the question of language, the incongruities often become ludicrous. Conan Doyle’s White Company is a rather good yarn, but the speech of the characters is often laughable. For instance, the epithet ‘young rooster’ applied by a veteran to a prentice warrior is a transplantation to fourteenth-century English of an Americanism not recorded before 1820. Leslie Stephen has somewhere likened Ivanhoe to the plaster and stucco imitations of ancient carved oak and stonework with which Scott adorned Abbotsford, but all this artificiality does not prevent it from being one of the most picturesque stories ever written. We can be thrilled by the picture of Ivanhoe and the Templar rushing from the opposite ends of the lists ‘with the speed of lightning’ and meeting ’with the shock of a thunderbolt,’though we know that, in point of fact, they lumbered awkwardly up against each other on dray horses and jabbed away clumsily with their barge-pole implements till one of them overbalanced and rolled off.

It was Spenser who first, inspired by admiration for Chaucer, set the example of adorning romantic narrative with archaic or pseudo-archaic language. Naturally he committed some howlers, the most famous of which is ‘derring-do,’which he uses repeatedly in the sense of ‘manhood and chivalry.’ It is really a misunderstanding of Chaucer. Some of us may be able to recall the thrill which we got from this mouth-filling word in Scott’s description of the assault on the castle of Torquilstone, in Ivanhoe. Just as Scott lifted the ghost word ‘ derring-do ’ from Spenser, so he borrowed the unexplained ‘arm-gaunt’ from Shakespeare. Nobody knows what is meant by Antony’s ‘arm-gaunt steed,’ nor did any other writer use the word till Scott introduced an ‘arm-gaunt charger’ into Old Mortality. Occasionally, falling into a trap like Spenser, he made a new word. He is rather fond of ‘bartizan,’ supposed to mean an outwork of a mediæval castle. It first occurs in ‘Marmion,’ and is apparently due to his misunderstanding of ‘bartisene,’ an illiterate early Scotch spelling of ‘bratticing,’ from ‘brattice,’ timber work. It is described by the Oxford Dictionary as a sham antique.

A word of which the modern currency is entirely due to Scott is ‘henchman.’ A ‘henchman,’ originally a horse groom, was in Tudor times a kind of page. The ‘royal henchmen,’ also called ‘enfants d’honneur,’ were in the service of the crown till the corps was dissolved in 1565, after which the word dropped out of use. One of its last records is its solitary occurrence in Shakespeare, who uses it of the subject of the quarrel between Oberon and Titania: —

Early in the eighteenth century the word made a mysterious reappearance in the Scottish Highlands, being recorded and explained in Edward Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland. It would appear that Burt blundered somewhere, but Scott, always eager for picturesque words, pounced on this apparent Shakespearean survival and used it in ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ repeating, in one of his notes, Burt’s very dubious explanation of the term. Like many other words rescued by Scott, ‘henchman’ is now very much alive. It has acquired in America a sense unknown in England — namely, that of an unscrupulous political adherent.

‘Henchman’ may or may not be a blunder, but Scott’s misuse of ‘ warison ’ is on a par with Spenser’s ‘ derring-do.’ ‘ Warison ’ is an obsolete word with a variety of meanings, such as wealth, possession, reward. In the last of these senses it occurs in the old ballad on the Battle of Otterburn (or Chevy Chase), printed in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765): —

Scott, who, like all the Romantics, was an eager student of the Reliques, apparently misinterpreted the lines and understood a ‘ warison ’ to be the signal for the onset, in fact, a ‘ warry sound ’! Hence we find in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel ’: —

‘Warison’ has not had the fortunate fate of some other sham antiques, though Byron, in ‘Don Juan,’ uses it playfully in his rhyming gymnastics: —

Some of our author’s coinages are so like genuine antiques that they have not only been accepted as such, but have proved to be useful additions to the figurative material of the language. It is difficult to think of ‘free-lance’ journalism by any other name, and the free-lance journalist would certainly prefer that description to the old label of ‘penny-a-liner’; but the term is no older than Ivanhoe, in which it is de Bracy’s description of his company of mercenaries. It is thus purely Scott’s invention. Old Scottish law contains allusions to murderers taken ‘with the red hand,’ but it was Scott who, in the same novel, put the adjective ‘redhanded’ into the mouth of Front-de-Bœuf. Whenever things get lively in Parliament, we are sure to read in our morning papers of a ‘passage of arms’ between Mr. X and Mr. Y. This name for a tournament or jousting encounter did not exist in English till Scott wrote of ‘the gentle and joyous passage of arms of Ashby,’ which is one of the two set pieces of Ivanhoe. The word ‘Norseman’ seems the natural alternative for Viking, but does not occur before Scott used it in ‘Harold the Dauntless,’ the last of the long poems he composed before, eclipsed by the meteoric fame of Byron, he turned from poetry to his true vocation.

III

If Scott had no other title to our gratitude, he would deserve it for the number of Shakespearean words and phrases he revived. The eighteenth century knew something about Shakespeare, but, under French and Johnsonian influence, had come to regard his language as part of a rugged and uncouth past. Scott was saturated in Tudor literature, and to him, more than to any of his brother Romantics, is due the salving of many of the most expressive words and phrases in the language. Shakespeare himself was apparently the ‘only begetter’ of the word ‘fitful,’ which he used once only, though in one of his most perfect lines: —

Scott revived it in the opening lines of ‘The Lady of the Lake,’ thus adding a most expressive word to our vocabulary. There is no literary record of a ‘towering passion ’ between Hamlet and Rob Roy, nor of ’coign of vantage’ between Macbeth and The Heart of Midlothian. It may sound hyperbolical but is nevertheless true that, if Shakespeare had never lived, the English language would be, from the point of view of forceful expression, quite other than it is; but it is equally true that, but for Scott, part of this inestimable element in the language would have been missing. Another of Scott’s revivals is ‘yeoman’s service,’ first used by Hamlet in describing good and faithful service such as may be expected from a trusty adherent.

Even more important, or at any rate more natural, is the enrichment of English by words from the Border dialects with which Scott was familiar from childhood, and of which he knew the more archaic forms from traditional balladry, from Barbour’s ‘Bruce’ and Blind Harry’s ‘Wallace.’ The very word ‘Borderer,’ with its implication of lawless ‘ moss-trooping ’ (another Scott revival), is not found between Shakespeare and Scott. Shakespeare, in Henry V, refers to the ‘pilfering borderers’ who will ‘make road’ upon the north during the King’s absence in France, and the Oxford Dictionary has no further record before Scott’s application of the term to that ‘ stark, mosstrooping Scott,’ William of Deloraine. What should we call that pleasing accompaniment of modern warfare known as an ‘air raid’ if Scott had not, in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ revived ‘raid,’ the Scottish form of ‘road’ (that is, inroad, foray), which had not made its appearance since Lindesay of Pitscottie’s Chronicle of Scotland was written toward the end of the sixteenth century? ‘Blackmail,’ an inseparable concomitant of our civilization, originally the tribute levied by Highland freebooters on the landowners of the Lowlands, was an obsolescent Scottish term, when it was used, with a long explanatory note and Rose Bradwardine’s classic definition, in Waverley. Macaulay was perhaps the first to give it a figurative sense, but its modern currency and meaning appear to have started in America about 1870.

It was Macaulay also who first used ‘slogan’ of a political rallying cry, but I am not sure which side of the Atlantic is responsible for the contemporary and idiotic use of this ‘vogue-word,’ as Mr. Fowler would call it. Among my cuttings I find: —

JUDGE. ‘ What do you mean by a slogan ?'
BARRISTER. ‘It is an American advertising term, my lord.’
JUDGE. ‘Really! I thought it was the war cry of a Highland clan.’

The judge is right, as a judge should be. ‘Slogan’ is a Gaelic word meaning army yell. Adopted by the Lowlands, it became ‘sloggorn,’ a corrupted form which led Chatterton to include it in his pseudo-antique vocabulary as the name of a trumpet (‘slug-horn’), an absurdity copied by Browning. It was Scott who made the word familiar: —

And, greatly as I admire Scott, I almost wish he had left ‘slogan’ to sleep undisturbed.

Another of his picturesque revivals is the ‘fiery cross,’ the cross burnt at one end and dipped in blood at the other, which was passed from hand to hand to assemble the clansmen for war. It is not recorded after 1641, when it is found, oddly enough, in Milton, until the famous description in ‘The Lady of the Lake.’

It must be remembered that Scott was only the culmination of a great poetic renaissance in Scotland. As early as 1826 there was published at Königsberg a small dictionary intended To promote the understanding of the works of Sir Walter Scott, Rob. Burns, Allan Ramsay, etc.,’for German readers, so that the credit for the introduction into English of many expressive Scotticisms may have to be shared. Still, it must be remembered that, where Burns had one English reader, Scott had a hundred; hence, whether we find the first record of a new word in his works or elsewhere, its actual adoption is mostly to be ascribed to him. If not the reviver, he was at least the popularizer of ‘ canny ’ and ‘uncanny.’ The first has been the southron’s natural epithet for Scott’s fellow countrymen since Edie Ochiltree, in The Antiquary, answered an awkward question ‘with the caution of a canny Scotchman.’ ‘Uncanny,’ now an indispensable word, dates from Dandie Dinmont’s impression of Meg Merrilies, in Guy Mannering. The somewhat kindred adjective ‘gruesome’ was also unknown in literary English before the vogue of the Waverley Novels.

Few words convey more of poetic suggestion than ‘glamour.’ It has that obscurité indispensable which Baudelaire regarded as a chief element in the poetic. ‘ Glamour ’ is the same word as ‘grammar,’ its change of meaning reflecting the mediæval conviction that the learning of the clerk bordered on the magical. Burns actually rhymes ‘glamour’ with ‘hell’s black grammar.’ In the eighteenth century it was used in Scottish vernacular literature of a magic spell, in the phrase ‘ to cast the glamour.’ Its occurrence in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ made it familiar to English readers. It must be remembered that this famous poem, published in 1805, had with the limited reading public of the day a success which is now attained only by the lucky thriller or pornographic novel. Other Scottish writers had used ‘glamour’ before Scott, but he is solely responsible for reviving its older form ‘gramarye,’ unrecorded between the fifteenth century and the ‘Lay.’ No doubt he found it in Percy’s Reliques. Unlike ‘glamour,’ now an everyday word, ‘gramarye’ is restricted to the vocabulary of ‘tushery.’ It is curious to compare with these romantic words the commonplace and bookish ‘vituperate,’ which fell into disuse in the seventeenth century to be reintroduced by Scott in his novels.

IV

It is possible for the authority of a great writer to give to a word a new shade of meaning which gradually replaces the original. This has happened to ‘gloom,’ formerly used of a lowering, sullen aspect. The current sense of darkness dates only from Milton, for whom the association between the two ideas was naturally very close. What Shakespeare has done in this way is almost beyond computation. As we have seen, Scott occasionally misunderstood the meaning of an archaic word. ‘Thew,’ which we scarcely use except in the plural, originally meant habit, quality, feature. By Shakespeare’s time it had come to be used of the general physique or ‘habit of body.’ Scott revived it in a mistaken sense and, by regularly linking it with ‘sinews,’ gave it the muscular connotation which has prevailed over its true sense. The adjective ‘bluff’ now suggests a combination of the frank, the hearty, and the burly. In Ivanhoe the epithet is applied to Friar Tuck. Up to the eighteenth century it meant arrogant, blustering. Horace Walpole speaks of Henry VIII’s ‘bluff haughtiness.’ This may have suggested Scott’s ‘ bluff King Hal,’ the phrase from which the change of meaning apparently dates.

From about 1600 to 1800 our ancestors had to do without the adjective ‘stalwart.’ It was a very common epithet in Middle English (‘stalworth’) and early Scottish (‘stalwart’), with an original sense of steadfast, unshakable, but used also as a vague intensive epithet. For example, it could be applied to a castle, a fight, or a tempest, as well as to a man. Scott either found it in the old romantic literature in which he delighted or picked it up orally as a dialect survival, and it became one of his favorite epithets, its first occurrence being in his description of Marmion, ‘a stalworth knight, and keen.’ It is now one of the few English adjectives that can be used as nouns. A ‘stalwart’ is an uncompromising adherent or admirer, a sense which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, quoting the New York Nation, was first used by Mr. Blaine in 1877 to designate those Republicans who were unwilling to give up hostility and distrust of the South as a political motive. Of ‘smouldering’ Dr. Johnson says, ‘This word seems a participle, but I know not whether the verb “smoulder” be in use.’ The records of the Oxford Dictionary show that the Doctor’s doubts were justified. The verb was practically obsolete by about 1600, but Scott revived it in ‘The Lady of the Lake,’giving it especially the figurative sense in which it is now most familiar: —

Mr. John Buchan, in No-Man’s Land, speaks of a young gentleman who had ‘ spent his substance too freely at Oxford’ and was now ‘dreeing his weird’ in the backwoods. In the eighteenth century this would have been unintelligible, except perhaps to a North-Country peasant. ‘Dree,’ to perform, endure, still lingers in the Border counties of England and Scotland, though a few more years of ‘education’ will probably expel it from country speech. It is in this one phrase, reintroduced into literature by Scott after a lapse of three or four centuries, that ‘weird’ preserves its original sense of fate, destiny, its conversion into a modern adjective having taken place via the ‘weird sisters,’ the Fates, introduced by Shakespeare into Macbeth.

A writer in the Atlantic Monthly for April 1930 describes a class of school children as a ‘sea of faces.’ The phrase ‘sea of upturned faces’ perhaps owes its American vogue to a speech delivered by Daniel Webster in 1842. It is one of the clichés pilloried by Mr. Cabell in his Something about Eve. But, if we turn to Rob Roy, we find a Presbyterian congregation described as a ‘sea of upturned faces which bent their eyes on the pulpit as a common centre.’ The figure is so natural that it may not necessarily be of Scott’s invention, but at any rate his is the earliest record.