Quick Review

The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


As Scott goes, this one goes by at a whistle. There's not much to it, by length or substance, and in the end that strangely constitutes its chiefest charms. The more substantial numbers in the novels, and the Scots novels in particular, can be daunting even to the most devoted not-Scots Scott enthusiast in the 21st Century. The hang of it may be got just as easily by The Legend on Montrose, for example, at nearly the same length and a better book, and better history than here, but if what's wanted is a real romance in the shortest measure and the fastest pace, well here we are.

And what a wee thing it is, indeed. Originally planned as part of a greater scheme of the first series of the "Tales of My Landlord," Scott made Old Mortality out of the rest; one of his most lasting and accomplished tales of Scotland. This then might be a sort of pendant on that book, smaller in every way, set in the same time and surroundings, but with little in the way of real persons or politics, and to considerably less point as either art or history-lesson. Here instead are kidnapped dames, and raiding neighbors, noble poverty and ignoble plots, hidden nobility and broken hearts, etc., etc, etc.. All that, mind, in something less than 200 pages! Phew! At the heart of the tale, the little title fellow; a dark and brooding little brute who will have nothing to do with humanity but to curse the species as such, though, of course there's more to him in the end than his misanthropy and the goat or two he keeps for company in his hut. But you'll have guessed as much, long since, maybe even before you've started.

The absurdity of all this is redeemed by Scott's great and touching sincerity first. He never told a story but what he thought it worth telling, or better say he didn't until much later when bailiffs where at the door, and even then, poor broken soul, he tried. But here, 1816: still sunny days. It's story -- almost any story, so long as it's old -- that interests the great man first; antiquities, curiosities, folktales, legends, then history, then humanity. And yet, his was a generous and loving soul, I should say. He had a real affection for his fellow beings. (Rare enough, even in writers, though always in great ones.) It's Scott's sympathy then, with nearly everyone and all sides, that lets him tell nearly any tale, even one so absurd as this, not only with a straight face, as it were, but a kind eye. That's best in a novelist, necessary for genius as I've said and no bad thing in an historian. No guarantee of a good novel, but even in his worst there's nothing so bad as all that when handled by one of the best of his time and kind when he still had it in him. Now if Scott's characters, even as here his occasional grotesques, do not always grow much higher than the page, his grasp of the times in sight and sound and fact, carries the whole through to something like a proper, if not always plausible end. (It's invention and the necessity of it of which the great man had not much of a grasp, bless him.)

By any measure then this is pretty small beer, but no bad thing on a long summer afternoon.



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