2110-5-11-4

From Major E.Dawson 7A Grove Hill, Tunbridge Wells.

Sunday 13 March 1932

Dear Mr. Buchan

Will you please allow a stranger (for such I must be to you, though I did once, many years ago, have a few minutes talk with you on the threshold of your chambers in the Temple) to offer you his humble and hearty thanks for your admirable and delightful book, "Sir Walter Scott". I have enjoyed every page of it immensely. To my sorrow, I have never been in Scotland, but the Border country, the Lowlands and Edinburgh have, for as long as I remember, had a special charm and fascination for me, which I owe largely to Sir Walter and Stevenson - and perhaps to The Thirty Nine Steps.

one thing that particularly pleases me in this new book is its emphasis upon the character of Sir Walter. Of course, his character influenced his works and shines through them so much that a reader of his novels and the poems alone could build up for himself a fairly full portrait of Scott, and I think it is largely due to this that so many thousands of people not only admire the writer but love and revere the man.

A year or two ago I was staying with a friend who was acting as honorary Public Librarian in a small country town. He asked me to write some descriptive notes of the books in the library, to be laid as a table with a view of attracting casual young people to the shelves. About Scott's books I wrote -

+ + +. It may be freely admitted that the art of fiction-writing has much developed since Scott wrote his immortal novels. Also, that with this huge increase in quantity there has grown up a higher average of quality. So that, if it were possible to imagine that Sir Walter had not existed then, and that he lived in the 20th century and produced the same work now, the conclusion is that his books would not have this immense popular success, under present conditions, which they had when they were published.

But, such a feat of imagination is not possible, because Scott himself was the pioneer of that very development, and every writer of fiction since owes a great debt to him. There is not one among the great novelists of the 19th century who would not willingly have admitted this, and most of them have explicitly done so, and with pride. And not English literature alone, but the

literature of the world, has been influenced by the Waverley novels; not only Lytton and Hardy and Dickens and Stevenson and scores of lesser writers, but also Goethe and deVigny and Hugo and Manzoni and Tourgueneff. In short, the world of letters would today have been a different world if Sir Walter had not written, and it is safe to say that it would not have been a better one.

It is better to read him than to try to criticise. It was said of him that "he treated every man as though he had been a blood relation", and in reading his books one has the sensation of reading a letter to a friend. Let us all read him, in that spirit, and be friends of Sir Walter!

Please accept my very cordial thanks and congratulations.

Yours sincerely and gratefully

E.Dawson