2110-5-12-7

34 Great King St. Edinburgh

April 12th 1932

My dear John

I hope you are keeping fit and well: and that the family are flourishing.

Now you aren't to answer this letter, which is just to thank you for your life of Sir Walter. It is a spendid portrait of the man; and a great and true appreciation of his work. I read it when it came out, since then it has been down at Ardwall where my mother enjoyed it immensely, and now I'm reading it again with as much pleasure as before. You were indeed the man for the task. One feels in it your love of the great Sir Walter; and you make the reader love him - in his human sympathy and kindness, his quality and generosity his

marvellous modesty and his fortitude and honourableness in misfortune. A well, there is something in being a Scotsman after all; and one of the advantages in it is that this man, by so far the greatest and best character in the history of letters, is so near to us, and so much easier understood by us. And that's the other great thing about your book - you understand Scott and all his surroundings and his background and the source of his inspiration, and the things that nourished his genius, and you understand his novels and his poetry in a way that no writer about him except yourself could do. You are so much at home in that life of Scotland - of the Capital and the country both; so conversant with

its economics, politics, finance, book producing and everything about it; and you have the same feeling for the past of Scotland that Scott himself had.

And you understand his work - a fellow craftsman, a fellow romantic and a brother Scot was the man needed to do the job. I hope your criticism of both the novels and the verse will start a new era in Scott criticism and Scott appreciation.

The time is apt fact. We ought to have passed through the reaction of the last fifty years or so. How well you expose the fact that the failure to appreciate Scott in so many moderns is a condemnation not of Scott but of themselves - their ideals, and their literary standards & conceptions. I thought your speech some years since at the Scott dinner

(which I see you very properly make a sort of kernel of criticism in the Life) the best thing I'd heard said on Scott.

Its a great piece of work: and it is most artistically woven together. Very difficult indeed must be the task of architecting such a work. How well you make all the motifs follow through - the literary side, and the domestic, professional, financial, etc. - and all in your easy flowing urbane, lucid, rippling style - that makes everything so pleasant.

Ah we are happy that can thoroughly know and enjoy Sir Walter's work: Will future generations understand the best of the Scottish novels; or will the tongue that Andrew Fairservice and the Bailie, Jeanie Deans, Meg Merrilees, Dandie Dinmont

Edie Ochiltree, Cuddie & Mause Headrigg spoke be so forgotten, that to read them will be like reading Chaucer - something that well rewards study, but is for the student. Was Scott, as you seem to say in your conclusion one who started a great new epoch for Scotland? or was he, as he says of himself in a passage that you quote, a loving child of Scotland who was offering sacrifice to the Manes of his country?

Well John, I started to write you a line of thanks: and here I've gone on blethering for pages about dear Sir Walter. God bless him! and you for writing so well about him! Love to Susie.

Yours ever

Johnny Jameson.

[ST: John Gordon Jameson son of Lord Ardwall, a lifelong friend of JB.]