Robert Cadell first edition - 1832
By early 1830, Walter Scott was clearly an ill man - in February he collapsed at home after a Court Session. Throughout that year, his bodily strength ebbed. In November he had another slight apoplectic seizure, but he refused to slacken his workload. He was busy with his novel about the court of Byzantium in the late eleventh century, Count Robert of Paris. As John Buchan says, he had chosen an arid subject and he could not give the dry bones life. Neither Ballantyne nor the published Cadell liked it. Then, on 16th April 1831, Scott had a severe paralytic stroke; but, within a fortnight, he was back at his desk, struggling with the novel. It pleased nobody, so its publication was delayed. This, then, is the background to his penultimate story.
In fact, there's not much I want to say about the novel. I found it steady but not particularly inspiring reading. The most alive characters (in fact, one was quickly put to death) were the tiger and Silvan, the orang-outang and man of the woods, both first encountered in one of the author's favourite set pieces, a dungeon. Scott had clearly read up on the period; or, rather, read Gibbon and Anna's paean to her father, but the result is a rather dry regurgitation of History interspersed with the usual overlong 'dialogue' or monologues. His forays into irrelevant topics (essentially 'padding') was even more blatant than usual. Of the main characters, Bertha is the only one of the four females - Anna Comnena, her mother the Empress Irene, and Brenhilda being the others) - who elicited any sympathy from this reader; Hereward the Varangian, Count Robert and the Emperor Alexius had their moments, but the Scott of a decade earlier would surely have 'fleshed them out' to greater purpose. Nicephorus Briennius, the 'Caesar', Agelastes, the crafty philosopher who is deservedly done to death by Silvan, and Achilles Tatius also fulfilled their parts, if not much more.
Sylvan the Smart, Killer Orangutang
John Buchan argues that Count Robert is history rather than fiction, a compilation from Gibbon and the Alexiad and as prolix as Anna Comnena herself...he was too languid to reproduce the drama of the clash of West and East in the first Crusade. There are moments of vigour, like the fight with the tiger in the dungeon, but everywhere lassitude weights his pen.
Hesketh Pearson has this to say: The chief blot on both (Castle Dangerous as well) stories is their confusion and consequent tedium. There is material in Count Robert for a first-class romance of court intrigue, and the characters of 'Hereward', 'Count Robert' and 'Alexius' are well enough outlined to show that Scott could have drawn them a great deal better. The astonishing thing is that, in the author's condition, the books were produced at all...
Other reviewers are also damning: Angus and Jenny Calder suggest Count Robert is probably the least successful product of his career; Andrew Lang, apparently, thought it was Scott's worst novel. Scott himself, in a letter to Cadell, feared it would never be better than mended china.
A positive aspect of owning these four volumes is that they once belonged to John Meade Falkner, whose bookplates are on the front pastedowns (in Volume III, he clearly wasn't concentrating as he first put one on the back pastedown upside down!). I bought them as long ago as 16th August 1984 (from Robin Waterfield in Oxford, alas long closed) and have only just got around to reading them, thirty-eight years later.
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