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The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
CHAPTER I. | 1 |
FOOTNOTES: | 10 |
CHAPTER II. | 10 |
FOOTNOTES: | 17 |
CHAPTER III. | 17 |
FOOTNOTES: | 21 |
CHAPTER IV. | 21 |
FOOTNOTES: | 26 |
CHAPTER V. | 26 |
FOOTNOTES: | 35 |
CHAPTER VI. | 35 |
FOOTNOTES: | 40 |
CHAPTER VII. | 40 |
FOOTNOTES: | 44 |
CHAPTER VIII. | 44 |
FOOTNOTES: | 49 |
CHAPTER IX. | 49 |
FOOTNOTES: | 55 |
CHAPTER X. | 55 |
FOOTNOTES: | 72 |
CHAPTER XI. | 72 |
FOOTNOTES: | 75 |
CHAPTER XII. | 76 |
FOOTNOTES: | 79 |
CHAPTER XIII. | 79 |
FOOTNOTES: | 82 |
CHAPTER XIV. | 82 |
FOOTNOTES: | 87 |
CHAPTER XV. | 87 |
FOOTNOTES: | 95 |
CHAPTER XVI. | 95 |
FOOTNOTES: | 100 |
CHAPTER XVII. | 101 |
THE END. | 104 |
ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD.
Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father—a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor—was the first of his race to adopt a town life and a sedentary profession. Sir Walter was the lineal descendant—six generations removed—of that Walter Scott commemorated in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, who is known in Border history and legend as Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat’s son William, captured by Sir Gideon Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon’s lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being hanged on Sir Gideon’s private gallows, and marrying the ugliest of Sir Gideon’s three ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir William was a handsome man. He took three days to consider the alternative proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him who was to use his “meikle” mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden’s times—i. e., the middle of the sixteenth century—and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter’s great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor. This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction to the last canto of Marmion:—
“And thus my Christmas
still I hold,
Where my great grandsire came
of old,
With amber beard and flaxen
hair,
And reverend apostolic air,—
The feast and holy tide to
share,
And mix sobriety with wine,
And honest mirth with thoughts
divine;
Small thought was his in after
time
E’er to be hitch’d
into a rhyme,
The simple sire could only
boast
That he was loyal to his cost;
The banish’d race of
kings revered,
And lost his land—but
kept his beard.”
Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental Stuart bias which his better judgment condemned, but which seemed to be rather part of his blood than of his mind. And most useful to him this sentiment undoubtedly was in helping him to restore the mould and fashion of the past. Beardie’s second son was Sir Walter’s grandfather, and to him he owed not only his first childish experience of the delights of country life, but also,—in his own estimation at least,—that risky, speculative, and sanguine spirit which had so much influence over his fortunes. The good man of Sandy-Knowe, wishing to breed sheep, and being destitute of capital, borrowed 30_l._ from a shepherd who was willing to invest that sum for him in sheep; and the two set off to purchase a flock near Wooler, in Northumberland; but when the shepherd had found what he thought would suit their purpose, he returned to find his master galloping about a fine hunter, on which he had spent the whole capital in hand. This speculation, however, prospered. A few days later Robert Scott displayed the qualities of the hunter to such admirable effect with John Scott of Harden’s hounds, that he sold the horse for double the money he had given, and, unlike his grandson, abandoned speculative purchases there and then. In the latter days of his clouded fortunes, after Ballantyne’s and Constable’s failure, Sir Walter was accustomed to point to the picture of his grandfather and say, “Blood will out: my building and planting was but his buying the hunter before he stocked his sheep-walk, over again.” But Sir Walter added, says Mr. Lockhart, as he glanced at the likeness of his own staid and prudent father, “Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have a thread of the attorney in me,” which was doubtless the case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances, for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards conscientious, plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were, turned a great genius, which, especially considering the hare-brained element in him, might easily have been frittered away or devoted to worthless ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with so grand an impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude. Sir Walter’s father reminds one in not a few of the formal and rather martinetish traits which are related of him, of the father of Goethe, “a formal man, with strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately orderly (he thought a good book nothing without a good binding), and never so much excited as by a necessary deviation from the ‘pre-established harmony’ of household rules.” That description would apply almost wholly to the sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has given us under the thin disguise of Alexander Fairford, Writer to the Signet, in Redgauntlet, a figure confessedly
Sir Walter’s mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day, in spite of having been sent “to be finished off” by “the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie,” whose training was so effective, in one direction at least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a comfortable rest in her chair, but “took as much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie.” None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly, comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored, vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his mother’s death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says, “She had a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old, and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell’s subsequent entry into Edinburgh.” On the day before the stroke of paralysis which carried her off, she had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, “with great accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed out wherein it differed from the novel. She had all the names of the parties, and pointed out (for she was a great genealogist) their connexion with existing families."[1] Sir Walter records many evidences
“Mrs. Scott’s curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular appearance at a certain hour every evening of a sedan chair, to deposit a person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately ushered into her husband’s private room, and commonly remained with him there until long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family. Mr. Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness that irritated the lady’s feelings more and more; until at last she could bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as she heard the bell ring as for the stranger’s chair to carry him off, she made her appearance within the forbidden parlour with a salver in her hand, observing that she thought the gentlemen had sat so long they would be better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to bring some for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of distinguished appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the lady and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows, and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A moment afterwards the visitor withdrew, and Mr. Scott, lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left empty on the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement. The lady exclaimed for her china, but was put to silence by her husband’s saying, ’I can forgive your little curiosity, madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton’s.’
“This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late master’s adherents, when—
“Pitied by gentle hearts,
Kilmarnock died,
The brave, Balmerino were
on thy side."[3]
“Broughton’s saucer”—i. e. the saucer belonging to the cup thus sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against one who had redeemed his own life and fortune by turning king’s evidence against one of Prince Charles Stuart’s adherents,—was carefully preserved by his son, and hung up in his first study, or “den,” under a little print of Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind very vividly the character of Sir Walter’s parents. The eager curiosity of the active-minded woman, whom “the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie” had been able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife’s personal attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the penalty by dashing to pieces the cup which the king’s evidence had used,—again, the visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that the Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to reject the courtesy of the wife, though he could not get anything but cold legal advice from the husband:—all these are figures which must have acted on the youthful imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical kaleidoscope which was always before his mind’s eye, as he mused upon that past which he was to restore for us with almost more than its original freshness of life. With such scenes touching even his own home, Scott must have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind, the more romantic, against the more sober and rational considerations, which had so recently divided house against house, even in the same family and clan. That the stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so much of his grandfather Beardie’s respect for the adherents of the exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy as even more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the Stuarts’ professed partisans, and have lent a new sanction to the romantic drift of his mother’s old traditions, and one to which they must have been indebted for a great part of their fascination.
Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August, 1771. Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was the reason
“It was a barren scene
and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely
piled:
But ever and anon between
Lay velvet tufts of loveliest
green;
And well the lonely infant
knew
Recesses where the wall-flower
grew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the low crag and ruin’d
wall.
I deem’d such nooks
the sweetest shade
The sun in all its round survey’d;
And still I thought that shatter’d
tower
The mightiest work of human
power;
And marvell’d as the
aged hind
With some strange tale bewitch’d
my mind,
Of forayers, who, with headlong
force,
Down from that strength had
spurr’d their horse,
Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots
blue,
And, home returning, fill’d
the hall
With revel, wassail-rout,
and brawl.
Methought that still with
trump and clang
The gateway’s broken
arches rang;
Methought grim features, seam’d
with scars,
Glared through the window’s
rusty bars;
And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or
mirth,
Of lovers’ slights,
of ladies’ charms,
Of witches’ spells,
of warriors’ arms,
Of patriot battles, won of
old
By Wallace wight and Bruce
the bold;
Of later fields of feud and
fight,
When, pouring from their Highland
height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong
sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks
away.
While, stretch’d at
length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat
o’er,
Pebbles and shells in order
laid,
The mimic ranks of war display’d;
And onward still the Scottish
A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with that spirit was combined an active and subduing sweetness which could often conquer, as by a sudden spell, those whom the boy loved. Towards those, however, whom he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative, the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of a pet starling, which the child had partly tamed. “I flew at his throat like a wild-cat,” he said, in recalling the circumstance, fifty years later, in his journal on occasion of the old laird’s death; “and was torn from him with no little difficulty.” And, judging from this journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the laird of Raeburn. Towards those whom he loved but had offended, his manner was very different. “I seldom,” said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, “had occasion all the time I was in the family to find fault with him, even for trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of which he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang up, threw his arms about my neck and kissed me.” And the quaint old gentleman adds this commentary:—“By such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in a moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul melted into tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my tears with his.” This spontaneous and fascinating sweetness of his childhood was naturally overshadowed to some extent in later life by Scott’s masculine and proud character, but it was always in him. And there was much of true character in the child behind this sweetness. He had wonderful self-command, and a peremptory kind of good sense, even in his infancy. While yet a child under six years of age, hearing one of the servants beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing that if he listened, it would scare away his night’s rest, he acted for himself with all the promptness of an elder person acting for him, and, in spite of the fascination of the subject, resolutely muffled his head in the bed-clothes and refused to hear the tale. His sagacity in
Scott’s school reputation was one of irregular ability; he “glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to the other,” and received more praise for his interpretation of the spirit of his authors than for his knowledge of their language. Out of school his fame stood higher. He extemporized innumerable stories to which his school-fellows delighted to listen; and, in spite of his lameness, he was always in the thick of the “bickers,” or street fights with the boys of the town, and renowned for his boldness in climbing the “kittle nine stanes” which are “projected high in air from the precipitous black granite of the Castle-rock.” At home he was much bullied by his elder brother Robert, a lively lad, not without some powers of verse-making, who went into the navy, then in an unlucky moment passed into the merchant service of the East India Company, and so lost the chance of distinguishing himself in the great naval campaigns of Nelson. Perhaps Scott would have been all the better for a sister a little closer to him than Anne—sickly and fanciful—appears ever to have been. The masculine side of life appears to predominate a little too much in his school and college days, and he had such vast energy, vitality, and pride, that his life at this time would have borne a little taming under the influence of a sister thoroughly congenial to him. In relation to his studies he was wilful, though not perhaps perverse. He steadily declined, for instance, to learn Greek, though
[Footnote 1: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 172-3. The edition referred to is throughout the edition of 1839 in ten volumes.]
[Footnote 2: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, x. 241.]
[Footnote 3: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 243-4.]
[Footnote 4: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 128.]
YOUTH—CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.
As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and began his legal studies, first as apprentice to his father, and then in the law classes of the University, he became noticeable to all his friends for his gigantic memory,—the rich stores of romantic material with which it was loaded,—his giant feats of industry for any cherished purpose,—his delight in adventure and in all athletic enterprises,—his great enjoyment of youthful “rows,” so long as they did not divide the knot of friends to which he belonged, and his skill in peacemaking amongst his own set. During his apprenticeship his only means of increasing his slender allowance with funds which he could devote to his favourite studies, was to earn money by copying, and he tells us himself that he remembered writing “120 folio pages with no interval either for food or rest,” fourteen or fifteen hours’ very hard work at the very least,—expressly for this purpose.
In the second year of Scott’s apprenticeship, at about the age of sixteen, he had an attack of haemorrhage, no recurrence of which took place for some forty years, but which was then the beginning of the end. During this illness silence was absolutely imposed upon him,—two old ladies putting their fingers on their lips, whenever he offered to speak. It was at this time that the lad began his study of the scenic side of history, and especially of campaigns, which he illustrated for himself by the arrangement of shells, seeds, and pebbles, so as to represent encountering armies, in the manner referred to (and referred to apparently in anticipation of a later stage of his life than that he was then speaking of) in the passage from the introduction to the third canto of Marmion which I have already given. He also managed so to arrange the looking-glasses in his room as to see the troops march out to exercise in the meadows, as he lay in bed. His reading was almost all in the direction of military exploit, or romance and mediaeval legend and the later border songs of his own country. He learned Italian and read Ariosto. Later he learned Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose “novelas,” he said, “first inspired him with the ambition to excel in fiction;” and all that he read and admired he remembered. Scott used to illustrate the capricious affinity of his own memory for what suited it, and its complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of Meikledale’s answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented him on the strength of his memory. “No, sir,” said the old Borderer, “I have no command of my memory. It only retains what hits my fancy; and probably, sir, if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not be able, when you finished, to remember a word you had been saying.” Such a memory, when it belongs to a man of genius, is really a sieve of the most valuable kind. It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and assimilates what is suited to it. In his very last days, when he
It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes, Scott could scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though the inference would, I believe, be quite mistaken. His father, however, reproached him with being better fitted for a pedlar than a lawyer,—so persistently did he trudge over all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties of nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or legend. On one occasion when, with their last penny spent, Scott and one of his companions had returned to Edinburgh, living during their last day on drinks of milk offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and haws on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he had wished for George Primrose’s power of playing on the flute in order to earn a meal by the way, old Mr. Scott, catching grumpily at the idea, replied, “I greatly doubt, sir, you were born for nae better then a gangrel scrape-gut,”—a speech which very probably suggested his son’s conception of Darsie Latimer’s adventures with the blind fiddler, “Wandering Willie,” in Redgauntlet. And, it is true that these were the days of mental and moral fermentation, what was called in Germany the Sturm-und-Drang, the “fret-and-fury” period of Scott’s life, so far as one so mellow
“Sound, sound the clarion!
fill the fife!
To all the sensual
world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious
life
Is worth a world
without a name.”
And undoubtedly this gives us the key-note of Scott’s personal life as well as of his poetic power. Above everything he was high-spirited, a man of noble, and, at the same time, of martial feelings. Sir Francis Doyle speaks very justly of Sir Walter as “among English singers the undoubted inheritor of that trumpet-note, which, under the breath of Homer, has made the wrath of Achilles immortal;” and I do not doubt that there was something in Scott’s face, and especially in the expression of his mouth, to suggest this even to his early college companions.
“Eh me,” said Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these Liddesdale raids, “sic an endless fund of humour and drollery as he had then wi’ him. Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel’ to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsel’ the great man or took ony airs in the company. I’ve seen him in a’ moods in these jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and drunk—(this, however, even in our wildest rambles, was but rare)—but drunk or sober he was aye the gentleman. He looked excessively heavy and stupid when he was fou, but he was never out o’ gude humour.”
One of the stories of that time will illustrate better the wilder days of Scott’s youth than any comment:—
“On reaching one evening,” says Mr. Lockhart, “some Charlieshope or other (I forget the name) among those wildernesses, they found a kindly reception as usual: but to their agreeable surprise, after some days of hard living, a measured and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon after supper, at which a bottle of elderberry wine alone had been produced, a young student of divinity who happened to be in the house was called upon to take the ‘big ha’ Bible,’ in the good old fashion of Burns’ Saturday Night: and some progress had been already made in the service, when the good man of the farm, whose ‘tendency,’ as Mr. Mitchell says, ‘was soporific,’ scandalized his wife and the dominie by starting suddenly from his knees, and rubbing his eyes, with a stentorian exclamation of ’By ——! here’s the keg at last!’ and in tumbled, as he spake the word, a couple of sturdy herdsmen, whom, on hearing, a day before, of the advocate’s approaching visit, he had despatched to a certain smuggler’s haunt at some considerable distance in quest of a supply of run brandy from the Solway frith. The pious ‘exercise’ of the household was hopelessly interrupted. With a thousand apologies for his hitherto shabby entertainment, this jolly Elliot or Armstrong had the welcomePage 15
keg mounted on the table without a moment’s delay, and gentle and simple, not forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about it until daylight streamed in upon the party. Sir Walter Scott seldom failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale companions, to mimic with infinite humour the sudden outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of horses’ feet, which he knew to indicate the arrival of the keg, the consternation of the dame, and the rueful despair with which the young clergyman closed the book."[5]
No wonder old Mr. Scott felt some doubt of his son’s success at the bar, and thought him more fitted in many respects for a “gangrel scrape-gut."[6]
In spite of all this love of excitement, Scott became a sound lawyer, and might have been a great lawyer, had not his pride of character, the impatience of his genius, and the stir of his imagination rendered him indisposed to wait and slave in the precise manner which the prepossessions of solicitors appoint.
For Scott’s passion for romantic literature was not at all the sort of thing which we ordinarily mean by boys’ or girls’ love of romance. No amount of drudgery or labour deterred Scott from any undertaking on the prosecution of which he was bent. He was quite the reverse, indeed, of what is usually meant by sentimental, either in his manners or his literary interests. As regards the history of his own country he was no mean antiquarian. Indeed he cared for the mustiest antiquarian researches—of the mediaeval kind—so much, that in the depth of his troubles he speaks of a talk with a Scotch antiquary and herald as one of the things which soothed him most. “I do not know anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as trifling discussions about antiquarian old womanries. It is like knitting a stocking, diverting the mind without occupying it."[7] Thus his love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of a mind which only feeds on romantic excitements; rather was it that of one who was so moulded by the transmitted and acquired love of feudal institutions with all their incidents, that he could not take any deep interest in any other fashion of human society. Now the Scotch law was full of vestiges and records of that period,—was indeed a great standing monument of it; and in numbers of his writings Scott shows with how deep an interest he had studied the Scotch law from this point of view. He remarks somewhere that it was natural for a Scotchman to feel a strong attachment to the principle of rank, if only on the ground that almost any Scotchman might, under the Scotch law, turn out to be heir-in-tail to some great Scotch title or estate by the death of intervening relations. And the law which sometimes caused such sudden transformations, had subsequently a true interest for him of course as a novel writer, to say nothing of his interest in it as an antiquarian and historian who loved to repeople
All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in the humours of the law. By way of illustration take the following passage, which is both short and amusing, in which Saunders Fairford—the old solicitor painted from Scott’s father in Redgauntlet—descants on the law of the stirrup-cup. “It was decided in a case before the town bailies of Cupar Angus, when Luckie Simpson’s cow had drunk up Luckie Jamieson’s browst of ale, while it stood in the door to cool, that there was no damage to pay, because the crummie drank without sitting down; such being the circumstance constituting a Doch an Dorroch, which is a standing drink for which no reckoning is paid.” I do not believe that any one of Scott’s contemporaries had greater legal abilities than he, though, as it happened, they were never fairly tried. But he had both the pride and impatience of genius. It fretted him to feel that he was dependent on the good opinions of solicitors, and that they who were incapable of understanding his genius, thought the less instead of the better of him as an advocate, for every indication which he gave of that genius. Even on the day of his call to the bar he gave expression to a sort of humorous foretaste of this impatience, saying to William Clerk, who had been called with him, as he mimicked the air and tone of a Highland lass waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be hired for the harvest, “We’ve stood here an
[Footnote 5: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 269-71.]
[Footnote 6: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 206.]
[Footnote 7: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 221.]
LOVE AND MARRIAGE.
One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar, Scott offered his umbrella to a young lady of much beauty who was coming out of the Greyfriars Church during a shower; the umbrella was graciously accepted; and it was not an unprecedented consequence that Scott fell in love with the borrower, who turned out to be Margaret, daughter of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches, of Invernay. For near six years after this, Scott indulged the hope of marrying this lady, and it does not seem doubtful that the lady herself was in part responsible for this impression. Scott’s father, who thought his son’s prospects very inferior to those of Miss Stuart Belches, felt it his duty to warn the baronet of his son’s views, a warning which the old gentleman appears to have received with that grand unconcern characteristic of elderly persons in high position, as a hint intrinsically incredible, or at least unworthy of notice. But he took no alarm, and Scott’s attentions to Margaret Stuart Belches continued till close on the eve of her marriage, in 1796, to William Forbes (afterwards Sir William Forbes), of Pitsligo, a banker, who proved to be one of Sir Walter’s most generous and most delicate-minded friends, when his time of troubles came towards the end of both their lives. Whether Scott was in part mistaken as to the impression he had made on the young lady, or she was mistaken as to the impression he had made on herself, or whether other circumstances intervened to cause misunderstanding, or the grand indifference of Sir John gave way to active intervention when the question became a practical one, the world will now never know, but it does not seem very likely that a man of so much force as Scott, who certainly had at one time assured himself at least of the young lady’s strong regard, should have been easily displaced even by a rival of ability and of most generous and amiable character. An entry in the diary which Scott kept in 1827, after Constable’s and Ballantyne’s failure, and his wife’s death, seems to me to suggest that there may have been some misunderstanding between the young people, though I am not sure that the inference is justified. The passage completes the story of this passion—Scott’s first and only deep passion—so far as it can ever be known to us; and as it is a very pathetic and characteristic entry, and the attachment to which it refers had a great influence on Scott’s life, both in keeping him free from some of the most dangerous temptations of the young, during his youth, and in creating within him an interior world of dreams and recollections throughout his whole life, on which his imaginative nature was continually fed—I may as well give it. “He had taken,” says Mr. Lockhart, “for that winter [1827], the house No. 6, Shandwick Place, which he occupied by the month during the remainder of his servitude as a clerk of session. Very near this house, he was told a few days after he took possession, dwelt the aged mother of his first love; and he expressed
“The violet in her greenwood
bower,
Where birchen
boughs with hazels mingle,
May boast itself the fairest
flower
In glen, or copse,
or forest dingle.
“Though fair her gems
of azure hue,
Beneath the dewdrop’s
weight reclining,
I’ve seen an eye of
lovelier blue,
More sweet through
watery lustre shining.
“The summer sun that
dew shall dry,
Ere yet the day
be past its morrow;
Nor longer in my false love’s
eye
Remain’d
the tear of parting sorrow.”
These lines obviously betray a feeling of resentment, which may or may not have been justified; but they are perhaps the most delicate produced by his pen. The pride which was always so notable a feature in Scott, probably sustained him through the keen, inward pain which it is very certain from a great many of his own words that he must have suffered in this uprooting of his most passionate hopes. And it was in part probably the same pride which led him to form, within the year, a new tie—his engagement to Mademoiselle Charpentier, or Miss Carpenter as she was usually called,—the daughter of a French royalist of Lyons who had died early in the revolution. She had come after her father’s death to England, chiefly, it seems, because in the Marquis of Downshire, who was an old friend of the family, her mother knew that she should find a protector for her children. Miss Carpenter was a lively beauty, probably of no great depth of character. The few letters given of hers in Mr. Lockhart’s life of Scott, give the impression of an amiable, petted girl, of somewhat thin and espiegle character, who was rather charmed at the depth and intensity of Scott’s nature, and at the expectations which he seemed to form of what love should mean, than capable of realizing them. Evidently she had no inconsiderable pleasure in display; but she made on the whole a very good wife, only one to be protected by him from every care, and not one to share Scott’s deeper anxieties, or to participate in his dreams. Yet Mrs. Scott was not devoid of spirit and self-control. For instance, when Mr. Jeffrey, having reviewed Marmion in the Edinburgh in that depreciating and omniscient tone which was then considered the evidence of critical acumen, dined with Scott on the very day on which the review had appeared, Mrs. Scott behaved to him through the whole evening with the greatest politeness, but fired this parting shot in her broken English, as he took his leave,—“Well, good night, Mr. Jeffrey,—dey tell me you have abused Scott in de Review, and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you very well for writing it.” It is hinted that Mrs. Scott was, at the time of Scott’s greatest fame, far more exhilarated by it than her husband with his strong sense and sure self-measurement ever was. Mr. Lockhart records that Mrs. Grant of Laggan once said of them, “Mr. Scott always seems to me like a glass, through which the rays of admiration pass without sensibly affecting it; but the bit of paper that lies beside it will presently be in a blaze, and no wonder.” The bit of paper, however, never was in a blaze that I know of; and possibly Mrs. Grant’s remark may have had a little feminine spite in it. At all events, it was not till the rays of misfortune, instead of admiration, fell upon Scott’s life, that the delicate tissue paper shrivelled up; nor does it seem that, even then, it was the trouble, so much as a serious malady that had fixed on Lady Scott before
Poor Lady Scott! It was rather like a bird of paradise mating with an eagle. Yet the result was happy on the whole; for she had a thoroughly kindly nature, and a true heart. Within ten days before her death, Scott enters in his diary:—“Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting she is better.” She was not the ideal wife for Scott; but she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and tried to bear his adversity cheerfully. In her last illness she would always reproach her husband and children for their melancholy faces, even when that melancholy was, as she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her own death.
[Footnote 8: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 183-4.]
[Footnote 9: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 273.]
EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.
Scott’s first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Buerger’s Lenore, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but certainly not a specimen of the higher order of imaginative genius. However, it stirred Scott’s youthful blood, and made him “wish to heaven he could get a skull and two cross-bones!” a modest desire, to be expressed with so much fervour, and one almost immediately gratified. Probably no one ever gave a more spirited version of Buerger’s ballad than Scott has given; but the use to which Miss Cranstoun, a friend and confidante of his love for Miss Stuart Belches, strove to turn it, by getting it printed, blazoned, and richly bound, and presenting it to the young lady as a proof of her admirer’s abilities, was perhaps hardly very sagacious. It is quite possible, at least, that Miss Stuart Belches may have regarded this vehement admirer of spectral wedding journeys and skeleton bridals, as unlikely to prepare for her that comfortable, trim, and decorous future which young ladies usually desire. At any rate, the bold stroke failed. The young lady admired the verses, but, as we have seen, declined the translator. Perhaps she regarded banking as safer, if less brilliant work than the
“Tramp! tramp! along
the land they rode,
Splash! splash!
along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur
drops blood,
The flashing pebbles
flee,”
is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every one will remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady of Avenel, in The Monastery, and how vigorously she takes fords,—as vigorously as the sheriff himself, who was very fond of fords. On the whole, Scott was too sunny and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and cross-bones with which he ornamented his “den” in his father’s house, did not succeed in tempting him into the world of twilight and cobwebs wherein he made his first literary excursion. His William and Helen, the name he gave to his translation of Buerger’s Lenore, made in 1795, was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than for the weirdness of its effects.
If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such ballads as Buerger’s which first led Scott to test his own powers, his genius soon turned to more appropriate and natural subjects. Ever since his earliest college days he had been collecting, in those excursions of his into Liddesdale and elsewhere, materials for a book on The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and the publication of this work, in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was his first great literary success. The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and spirit of his own new ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at once a very high literary name. And the name was well deserved. The Border Minstrelsy was more commensurate in range with the genius of Scott, than even the romantic poems by which it was soon followed, and which were received with such universal and almost unparalleled delight. For Scott’s Border Minstrelsy gives more than a glimpse of all his many great powers—his historical industry and knowledge, his masculine humour, his delight in restoring the vision of the “old, simple, violent world” of rugged activity and excitement, as well as that power to kindle men’s hearts, as by a trumpet-call, which was the chief secret of the charm of his own greatest poems. It is much easier to discern the great novelist of subsequent years in the Border Minstrelsy than even in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake taken together. From those romantic poems you would never guess that Scott entered more eagerly and heartily into the common incidents and common cares of every-day human life than into the most romantic fortunes; from them you would never know how completely he had mastered the leading features of quite different periods of our history; from them you would never infer that you had before you one of the best plodders, as well as one of the most enthusiastic dreamers, in British literature. But all this might have been gathered from the various introductions and notes to the Border Minstrelsy, which are full of skilful illustrations,
So much as to the breadth of the literary area which this first book of Scott’s covered. As regards the poetic power which his own new ballads, in imitation of the old ones, evinced, I cannot say that those of the first issue of the Border Minstrelsy indicated anything like the force which might have been expected from one who was so soon to be the author of Marmion, though many of Scott’s warmest admirers, including Sir Francis Doyle, seem to place Glenfinlas among his finest productions. But in the third volume of the Border Minstrelsy, which did not appear till 1803, is contained a ballad on the assassination of the Regent Murray, the story being told by his assassin, which seems to me a specimen of his very highest poetical powers. In Cadyow Castle you have not only that rousing trumpet-note which you hear in Marmion, but the pomp and glitter of a grand martial scene is painted with all Scott’s peculiar terseness and vigour. The opening is singularly happy in preparing the reader for the description of a violent deed. The Earl of Arran, chief of the clan of Hamiltons, is chasing among the old oaks of Cadyow Castle,—oaks which belonged to the ancient Caledonian forest,—the fierce, wild bulls, milk-white, with black muzzles, which were not extirpated till shortly before Scott’s own birth:—
“Through the huge oaks
of Evandale,
Whose limbs a
thousand years have worn,
What sullen roar comes down
the gale,
And drowns the
hunter’s pealing horn?
“Mightiest of all the
beasts of chase
That roam in woody
Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his
race,
The mountain bull
comes thundering on.
“Fierce on the hunter’s
quiver’d band
He rolls his eyes
of swarthy glow,
Spurns, with black hoof and
horn, the sand,
And tosses high
his mane of snow.
“Aim’d well, the
chieftain’s lance has flown;
Struggling in
blood the savage lies;
His roar is sunk in hollow
groan,—
Sound, merry huntsman!
sound the pryse!”
It is while the hunters are resting after this feat, that Bothwellhaugh dashes among them headlong, spurring his jaded steed with poniard instead of spur:—
“From gory selle and
reeling steed,
Sprang the fierce
horseman with a bound,
And reeking from the recent
deed,
He dash’d
his carbine on the ground.”
And then Bothwellhaugh tells his tale of blood, describing the procession from which he had singled out his prey:—
“’Dark Morton,
girt with many a spear,
Murder’s
foul minion, led the van;
And clash’d their broadswords
in the rear
The wild Macfarlanes’
plaided clan.
“’Glencairn and
stout Parkhead were nigh,
Obsequious at
their Regent’s rein,
And haggard Lindsay’s
iron eye,
That saw fair
Mary weep in vain.
“’’Mid pennon’d
spears, a steely grove,
Proud Murray’s
plumage floated high;
Scarce could his trampling
charger move,
So close the minions
crowded nigh.
“’From the raised
vizor’s shade, his eye,
Dark rolling,
glanced the ranks along,
And his steel truncheon waved
on high,
Seem’d marshalling
the iron throng.
“’But yet his
sadden’d brow confess’d
A passing shade
of doubt and awe;
Some fiend was whispering
in his breast,
“Beware
of injured Bothwellhaugh!”
“’The death-shot
parts,—the charger springs,—
Wild rises tumult’s
startling roar!
And Murray’s plumy helmet
rings—
Rings on the ground
to rise no more.’”
This was the ballad which made so strong an impression on Thomas Campbell, the poet. Referring to some of the lines I have quoted, Campbell said,—“I have repeated them so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head which strong, pithy poetry excites."[10] I suppose anecdotes of this kind have been oftener told of Scott than of any other English poet. Indeed, Sir Walter, who understood himself well, gives the explanation in one of his diaries:—“I am sensible,” he says, “that if there be anything good about my poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active dispositions."[11] He might have included old people too. I have heard of two old men—complete strangers—passing each other on a dark London night, when one of them happened to be repeating to himself, just as Campbell did to the hackney coachmen of the North Bridge of Edinburgh, the last lines of the account of Flodden Field in Marmion, “Charge, Chester, charge,” when suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, “On, Stanley, on,” whereupon they finished the death of Marmion between
[Footnote 10: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 79.]
[Footnote 11: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 370.]
SCOTT’S MATURER POEMS.
Scott’s genius flowered late. Cadyow Castle, the first of his poems, I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one years of age. It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of his first great romance in verse, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four. The first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which Scott was cornet. The poem was originally intended to be included in the Border Minstrelsy, as one of the studies in the antique style, but soon outgrew the limits of such a study both in length and in the freedom of its manner. Both the poorest and the best parts of The Lay were in a special manner due to Lady Dalkeith (afterwards Duchess of Buccleugh), who suggested it, and in whose honour the poem was written. It was she who requested Scott to write a poem on the legend of the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, and this Scott attempted,—and, so far as the goblin himself was concerned, conspicuously failed. He himself clearly saw that the story of this unmanageable imp was both confused and uninteresting, and that in fact he had to extricate himself from the original groundwork of the tale, as from a regular literary scrape, in the best way he could. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott says,—“At length the story appeared so uncouth that I was fain to put it into the mouth of my old minstrel, lest the nature of it should be misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old. In the process of the romance, the page, intended to be a principal person in the work, contrived (from the baseness of his natural propensities, I suppose) to slink down stairs into the kitchen, and now he must e’en abide there."[12] And I venture to say that no reader of the poem ever has distinctly understood what the goblin page did or did not do, what it was that was “lost” throughout
Every one knows the lines to which Pitt refers:—
“The humble boon was
soon obtain’d;
The aged minstrel audience
gain’d.
But, when he reach’d
the room of state,
Where she with all her ladies
sate,
Perchance he wish’d
his boon denied;
For, when to tune the harp
he tried,
His trembling hand had lost
the ease
Which marks security to please;
And scenes long past, of joy
and pain,
Came wildering o’er
his aged brain,—
He tried to tune his harp
in vain!
The pitying Duchess praised
its chime,
And gave him heart, and gave
him time,
Till every string’s
according glee
Was blended into harmony.
And then, he said, he would
full fain
He could recall an ancient
strain
He never thought to sing again.
It was not framed for village
churls,
But for high dames and mighty
earls;
He’d play’d it
to King Charles the Good,
When he kept Court at Holyrood;
And much he wish’d,
yet fear’d, to try
The long-forgotten melody.
Amid the strings his fingers
stray’d,
And an uncertain warbling
made,
And oft he shook his hoary
head.
But when he caught the measure
wild
The old man raised his face,
and smiled;
And lighten’d up his
faded eye,
With all a poet’s ecstasy!
In varying cadence, soft or
strong,
He swept the sounding chords
along;
The present scene, the future
lot,
His toils, his wants, were
all forgot;
Cold diffidence and age’s
frost
In the full tide of song were
lost;
Each blank in faithless memory
void
The poet’s glowing thought
supplied;
And, while his harp responsive
rung,
’Twas thus the latest
minstrel sung.
* * * * *
Here paused the harp; and
with its swell
The master’s fire and
courage fell;
Dejectedly and low he bow’d,
And, gazing timid on the crowd,
He seem’d to seek in
every eye
If they approved his minstrelsy;
And, diffident of present
praise,
Somewhat he spoke of former
days,
And how old age, and wandering
long,
Had done his hand and harp
some wrong.”
These lines hardly illustrate, I think, the particular form of Mr. Pitt’s criticism, for a quick succession of fine shades of feeling of this kind could never have been delineated in a painting, or indeed in a series of paintings, at all, while they are so given in the poem. But the praise itself, if not its exact form, is amply deserved. The singular depth of the romantic glow in this passage, and its equally singular simplicity,—a simplicity which makes it intelligible to every one,—are conspicuous to every reader. It is not what is called classical poetry, for there is no severe outline,—no sculptured completeness and repose,—no satisfying wholeness of effect to the eye of the mind,—no embodiment of a great action. The poet gives us a breath, a ripple of alternating fear and hope in the heart of an old man, and that is all. He catches an emotion that had its roots deep in the past, and that is striving onward towards something in the future;—he traces the wistfulness and self-distrust with which age seeks to recover the feelings of youth,—the delight with which it greets them when they come,—the hesitation and diffidence with which it recalls them as they pass away, and questions the triumph it has just won,—and he paints all this without subtlety, without complexity, but with a swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed. Generally, however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to any feeling, however active in its bent. The cases in which he makes a study of any mood of feeling, as he does of this harper’s feeling, are comparatively rare. Deloraine’s night-ride to Melrose is a good deal more in Scott’s ordinary way, than this study of the old harper’s wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always simple; and his subject always romantic. But though romantic, it is simple almost to bareness,—one of the great causes both of his popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron “bet” him; and no doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he “bet” him, was in the variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness and bareness was of the essence of Scott’s idealism and romance. It was so in relation to scenery. He told Washington Irving that he loved the very nakedness of the Border country. “It has something,” he said, “bold and stern and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die."[14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his
However, Scott’s eye was very keen:—“It was commonly him,” as his little son once said, “that saw the hare sitting.” And his perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness of organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper and more vital of Scott’s romantic impressions; at least there is good reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at least diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated life—do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere backwaters of sensations, even if they do not directly tend towards artificial and indirect forms of character. Scott’s romance is like his native scenery,—bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong pure feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour in his pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out. And so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly characters. But as for subtleties
It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of The Lay, that Marmion, Scott’s greatest poem, was published. But I may as well say what seems necessary of that and his other poems, while I am on the subject of his poetry. Marmion has all the advantage over The Lay of the Last Minstrel that a coherent story told with force and fulness, and concerned with the same class of subjects as The Lay, must have over a confused and ill-managed legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve as the opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife. Scott’s poems have sometimes been depreciated as mere novelettes in verse, and I think that some of them may be more or less liable to this criticism. For instance, The Lady of the Lake, with the exception of two or three brilliant passages, has always seemed to me more of a versified novelette,—without the higher and broader characteristics of Scott’s prose novels—than of a poem. I suppose what one expects from a poem as distinguished from a romance—even though the poem incorporates a story—is that it should not rest for its chief interest on the mere development of the story; but rather that the narrative should be quite subordinate to that insight into the deeper side of life and manners, in expressing which poetry has so great an advantage over prose. Of The Lay and Marmion this is true; less true of The Lady of the Lake, and still less of Rokeby, or The Lord of the Isles, and this is why The Lay and Marmion seem so much superior as poems to the others. They lean less on the interest of mere incident, more on that of romantic feeling and the great social and historic features of the day. Marmion was composed in great part in the saddle, and the stir of a charge of cavalry seems to be at the very core of it. “For myself,” said Scott, writing to a lady correspondent at a time when he was in active service as a volunteer, “I must own that to one who has, like myself, la tete un peu exaltee, the pomp and circumstance of war gives, for a time, a very poignant and pleasing sensation."[16] And you feel this all through Marmion even more than in The Lay. Mr. Darwin would probably say that Auld Wat of Harden had about as much responsibility for Marmion as Sir Walter himself. “You
“Their light-arm’d
archers far and near
Survey’d
the tangled ground,
Their centre ranks, with pike
and spear,
A twilight forest
frown’d,
Their barbed horsemen, in
the rear,
The stern battalia
crown’d.
No cymbal clash’d, no
clarion rang,
Still were the
pipe and drum;
Save heavy tread, and armour’s
clang,
The sullen march
was dumb.
There breathed no wind their
crests to shake,
Or wave their
flags abroad;
Scarce the frail aspen seem’d
to quake,
That shadow’d
o’er their road.
Their vanward scouts no tidings
bring,
Can rouse no lurking
foe,
Nor spy a trace of living
thing
Save when they
stirr’d the roe;
The host moves like a deep-sea
wave,
Where rise no rocks its power
to brave,
High-swelling,
dark, and slow.
The lake is pass’d,
and now they gain
A narrow and a broken plain,
Before the Trosach’s
rugged jaws,
And here the horse and spearmen
pause,
While, to explore the dangerous
glen,
Dive through the pass the
archer-men.
“At once there rose
so wild a yell
Within that dark and narrow
dell,
As all the fiends from heaven
that fell
Had peal’d the banner-cry
of Hell!
Forth from the
pass, in tumult driven,
Like chaff before
the wind of heaven,
The
archery appear;
For life! for
life! their plight they ply,
And shriek, and
shout, and battle-cry,
And plaids and
bonnets waving high,
And broadswords
flashing to the sky,
Are
maddening in the rear.
Onward they drive, in dreadful
race,
Pursuers and pursued;
But admirable in its stern and deep excitement as that is, the battle of Flodden in Marmion passes it in vigour, and constitutes perhaps the most perfect description of war by one who was—almost—both poet and warrior, which the English language contains.
And Marmion registers the high-water mark of Scott’s poetical power, not only in relation to the painting of war, but in relation to the painting of nature. Critics from the beginning onwards have complained of the six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the story. But I cannot see that the remark has weight. No poem is written for those who read it as they do a novel—merely to follow the interest of the story; or if any poem be written for such readers, it deserves to die. On such a principle—which treats a poem as a mere novel and nothing else,—you might object to Homer that he interrupts the battle so often to dwell on the origin of the heroes who are waging it; or to Byron that he deserts Childe Harold to meditate on the rapture of solitude. To my mind the ease and frankness of these confessions of the author’s recollections give a picture of his life and character while writing Marmion, which adds greatly to its attraction as a poem. You have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of the mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are brought back frankly, at fit intervals, from the one to the other, in the mode best adapted to help you to appreciate the relation of the poet to the poem. At least if Milton’s various interruptions of a much more ambitious theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes—and I never heard of any one who thought them so—I cannot see any reason why Scott’s periodic recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic mistakes either. If Scott’s reverie was less lofty than Milton’s, so also was his story. It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other. What can be more truly a part of Marmion, as a poem, though not as a story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches himself for attempting so great a subject and returns
Never at all events in any later poem was Scott’s touch as a mere painter so terse and strong. What a picture of a Scotch winter is given in these few lines:—
“The sheep before the
pinching heaven
To shelter’d dale and
down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage
pines,
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The wither’d sward and
wintry sky,
And from beneath their summer
hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon’s
rill.”
Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle’s able criticism,—(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the great story of human nature), he is certainly nearest to it in such a passage as this:—
“The Isles-men carried
at their backs
The ancient Danish battle-axe.
They raised a wild and wondering
cry
As with his guide rode Marmion
by.
Loud were their clamouring
tongues, as when
The clanging sea-fowl leave
the fen,
And, with their cries discordant
mix’d,
Grumbled and yell’d
the pipes betwixt.”
In hardly any of Scott’s poetry do we find much of what is called the curiosa felicitas of expression,—the magic use of words, as distinguished from the mere general effect of vigour, purity, and concentration of purpose. But in Marmion occasionally we do find such a use. Take this description, for instance, of the Scotch tents near Edinburgh:—
“A thousand did I say?
I ween
Thousands on thousands there
were seen,
That chequer’d all the
heath between
The streamlet
and the town;
In crossing ranks extending
far,
Forming a camp irregular;
Oft giving way where still
there stood
Some relics of the old oak
wood,
That darkly huge did intervene,
And tamed the glaring white
with green;
In these extended lines there
lay
A martial kingdom’s
vast array.”
The line I have italicized seems to me to have more of the poet’s special magic of expression than is at all usual with Scott. The conception of the peaceful green oak wood taming the glaring white of the tented field, is as fine in idea as it is in relation to the effect of the mere colour on the eye. Judge Scott’s poetry by whatever test you will—whether it be a test of that which is peculiar to it, its glow of national feeling, its martial ardour, its swift and rugged simplicity, or whether it be a test of that which is common to it with most other poetry, its attraction for all romantic excitements, its special feeling for the pomp and circumstance of war, its love of light and colour—and tested either way, Marmion will remain his finest poem. The battle of Flodden Field touches his highest point in its expression of stern patriotic feeling, in its passionate love of daring, and in the force and swiftness of its movement, no less than in the brilliancy of its romantic interests, the charm of its picturesque detail, and the glow of its scenic colouring. No poet ever equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott’s genius did not reach its highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous men, often makes it hammer fatiguingly against the brain of those who need the relief of a wider horizon and a richer world.
[Footnote 12: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 217.]
[Footnote 13: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 226.]
[Footnote 14: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, v. 248.]
[Footnote 15: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, v. 338.]
[Footnote 16: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 137.]
[Footnote 17: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 259.]
[Footnote 18: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 327.]
COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS.
I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott’s later poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some slight sketch of his chosen companions, and of his occupations in the first period of his married life. Scott’s most intimate friend for some time after he went to college, probably the one who most stimulated his imagination in his youth, and certainly one of his most intimate friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was called to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the son of John Clerk of Eldin,
In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as “a man of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehension, who, if he should ever shake loose the fetters of indolence by which he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be distinguished in the highest degree.” Whether for the reason suggested, or for some other, Clerk never actually gained any other distinction so great as his friendship with Scott conferred upon him. Probably Scott had discerned the true secret of his friend’s comparative obscurity. Even while preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go on alternate mornings to each other’s lodgings to read together, Scott found it necessary to modify the arrangement by always visiting his friend, whom he usually found in bed. It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of Darsie Latimer, the hero of Redgauntlet,—whence we should suppose him to have been a lively, generous, susceptible, contentious, and rather helter-skelter young man, much alive to the ludicrous in all situations, very eager to see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power of adapting himself equally to all these phases. Scott tells a story of Clerk’s being once baffled—almost for the first time—by a stranger in a stage coach, who would not, or could not, talk to him on any subject, until at last Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, “I have talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects—literature, farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws, horse-races, suits-at-law, politics, swindling, blasphemy, and philosophy,—is there any one subject that you will favour me by opening upon?” “Sir,” replied the inscrutable stranger, “can you say anything clever about ’bend-leather’?"[20] No doubt this superficial familiarity with a vast number of subjects was a great fascination to Scott, and a great stimulus to his own imagination. To the last he held the same opinion of his friend’s latent powers. “To my thinking,” he wrote in his diary in 1825, “I never met a man of greater powers,
If Clerk pricked, stimulated, and sometimes badgered Scott, another of his friends who became more and more intimate with him, as life went on, and who died before him, always soothed him, partly by his gentleness, partly by his almost feminine dependence. This was William Erskine, also a barrister, and son of an Episcopalian clergyman in Perthshire,—to whose influence it is probably due that Scott himself always read the English Church service in his own country house, and does not appear to have retained the Presbyterianism into which he was born. Erskine, who was afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord Kinnedder—a distinction which he did not survive for many months—was a good classic, a man of fine, or, as some of his companions thought, of almost superfine taste. The style apparently for which he had credit must have been a somewhat mimini-pimini style, if we may judge by Scott’s attempt in The Bridal of Triermain, to write in a manner which he intended to be attributed to his friend. Erskine was left a widower in middle life, and Scott used to accuse him of philandering with pretty women,—– a mode of love-making which Scott certainly contrived to render into verse, in painting Arthur’s love-making to Lucy in that poem. It seems that some absolutely false accusation brought against Lord Kinnedder, of an intrigue with a lady with whom he had been thus philandering, broke poor Erskine’s heart, during his first year as a Judge. “The Counsellor (as Scott always called him) was,” says Mr. Lockhart, “a little man of feeble make, who seemed unhappy when his pony got beyond a footpace, and had never, I should suppose, addicted himself to any out of door’s sports whatever. He would, I fancy, as soon have thought of slaying his own mutton as of handling a fowling-piece; he used to shudder when he saw a party equipped for coursing, as if murder was in the wind; but the cool, meditative angler was in his eyes the
“’Approach those
masters o’er whose tomb
Immortal laurels ever bloom;
Instructive of the feebler
bard,
Still from the grave their
voice is heard;
From them, and from the paths
they show’d,
Choose honour’d guide
and practised road;
Nor ramble on through brake
and maze,
With harpers rude of barbarous
days.”
And it is to Erskine that Scott replies,—
“For me, thus nurtured,
dost thou ask
The classic poet’s well-conn’d
task?
Nay, Erskine, nay,—on
the wild hill
Let the wild heath-bell flourish
still;
Cherish the tulip, prune the
vine,
But freely let the woodbine
twine,
And leave untrimm’d
the eglantine:
Nay, my friend, nay,—since
oft thy praise
Hath given fresh vigour to
my lays;
Since oft thy judgment could
refine
My flatten’d thought
or cumbrous line,
Still kind, as is thy wont,
attend,
And in the minstrel spare
the friend!”
It was Erskine, too, as Scott expressly states in his introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, who reviewed with far too much partiality the Tales of my Landlord, in the Quarterly Review, for January, 1817,—a review unjustifiably included among Scott’s own critical essays, on the very insufficient ground that the MS. reached Murray in Scott’s own handwriting. There can, however, be no doubt at all that Scott copied out his friend’s MS., in order to increase the mystification which he so much enjoyed as to the authorship of his variously named series of tales. Possibly enough, too, he may have drawn Erskine’s attention to the evidence which justified his sketch of the Puritans in Old Mortality, evidence which he certainly intended at one time to embody in a reply of his own to the adverse criticism on that book. But though Erskine was Scott’s alter ego for literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott’s own words, died “a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say,
Another friend of Scott’s earlier days was John Leyden, Scott’s most efficient coadjutor in the collection of the Border Minstrelsy,—that eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulated before the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine, prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six months’ notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India Company. It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy of a border ballad that was wanting for the Minstrelsy. Scott was sitting at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, “like that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel which scuds before it. The sounds increased as they approached more near; and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know him) burst into the room chanting the desiderated ballad with the most enthusiastic gesture, and all the energy of what he used to call the saw-tones of his voice."[22] Leyden’s great antipathy was Ritson, an ill-conditioned antiquarian, of vegetarian principles, whom Scott alone of all the antiquarians of that day could manage to tame and tolerate. In Scott’s absence one day, during his early married life at Lasswade, Mrs. Scott inadvertently offered Ritson a slice of beef, when that strange man burst out in such outrageous tones at what he chose to suppose an insult, that Leyden threatened to “thraw his neck” if he were not silent, a threat which frightened Ritson out of the cottage. On another occasion, simply in order to tease Ritson, Leyden complained that the meat was overdone, and sent to the kitchen for a plate of literally raw beef, and ate it up solely for the purpose of shocking his crazy rival in antiquarian research. Poor Leyden did not long survive his experience of the Indian climate. And with him died a passion for knowledge of a very high order, combined with no inconsiderable poetical gifts. It was in the study of such eccentric beings as Leyden that Scott doubtless acquired his taste for painting the humours of Scotch character.
Another wild shepherd, and wilder genius among Scott’s associates, not only in those earlier days, but to the end, was that famous Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg, who was always quarrelling with his brother poet, as far as Scott permitted it, and making it up again when his better feelings returned. In a shepherd’s dress, and with hands fresh from sheep-shearing, he came to dine for the first time with Scott in Castle Street, and finding Mrs. Scott lying on the sofa, immediately stretched himself at full length on another sofa; for, as he explained afterwards, “I thought I could not do better than to imitate the lady of the house.” At dinner, as the wine passed, he advanced from “Mr. Scott,” to “Shirra” (Sheriff), “Scott,” “Walter,” and finally “Wattie,” till at supper he convulsed every one by addressing Mrs. Scott familiarly as “Charlotte."[23] Hogg wrote certain short poems, the beauty of which in their kind Sir Walter himself never approached; but he was a man almost without self-restraint or self-knowledge, though he had a great deal of self-importance, and hardly knew how much he owed to Scott’s magnanimous and ever-forbearing kindness, or if he did, felt the weight of gratitude a burden on his heart. Very different was William Laidlaw, a farmer on the banks of the Yarrow, always Scott’s friend, and afterwards his manager at Abbotsford, through whose hand he dictated many of his novels. Mr. Laidlaw was one of Scott’s humbler friends,—a class of friends with whom he seems always to have felt more completely at his ease than any others—who gave at least as much as he received, one of those wise, loyal, and thoughtful men in a comparatively modest position of life, whom Scott delighted to trust, and never trusted without finding his trust justified. In addition to these Scotch friends, Scott had made, even before the publication of his Border Minstrelsy, not a few in London or its neighbourhood,—of whom the most important at this time was the grey-eyed, hatchet-faced, courteous George Ellis, as Leyden described him, the author of various works on ancient English poetry and romance, who combined with a shrewd, satirical vein, and a great knowledge of the world, political as well as literary, an exquisite taste in poetry, and a warm heart. Certainly Ellis’s criticism on his poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received; and had he lived to read his novels,—only one of which was published before Ellis’s death,—he might have given Scott more useful help than either Ballantyne or even Erskine.
[Footnote 19: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, i. 214.]
[Footnote 20: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 344.]
[Footnote 21: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 75.]
[Footnote 22: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 56.]
[Footnote 23: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 168-9.]
FIRST COUNTRY HOMES.
So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends, without also knowing his external surroundings and occupations. His first country home was the cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six miles from Edinburgh, which he took in 1798, a few months after his marriage, and retained till 1804. It was a pretty little cottage, in the beautification of which Scott felt great pride, and where he exercised himself in the small beginnings of those tastes for altering and planting which grew so rapidly upon him, and at last enticed him into castle-building and tree-culture on a dangerous, not to say, ruinous scale. One of Scott’s intimate friends, the master of Rokeby, by whose house and neighbourhood the poem of that name was suggested, Mr. Morritt, walked along the Esk in 1808 with Scott four years after he had left it, and was taken out of his way to see it. “I have been bringing you,” he said, “where there is little enough to be seen, only that Scotch cottage, but though not worth looking at, I could not pass it. It was our first country house when newly married, and many a contrivance it had to make it comfortable. I made a dining-table for it with my own hands. Look at these two miserable willow-trees on either side the gate into the enclosure; they are tied together at the top to be an arch, and a cross made of two sticks over them is not yet decayed. To be sure it is not much of a lion to show a stranger; but I wanted to see it again myself, for I assure you that after I had constructed it, mamma (Mrs. Scott) and I both of us thought it so fine, we turned out to see it by moonlight, and walked backwards from it to the cottage-door, in admiration of our own magnificence and its picturesque effect.” It was here at Lasswade that he bought the phaeton, which was the first wheeled carriage that ever penetrated to Liddesdale, a feat which it accomplished in the first August of this century.
When Scott left the cottage at Lasswade in 1804, it was to take up his country residence in Selkirkshire, of which he had now been made sheriff, in a beautiful little house belonging to his cousin, Major-General Sir James Russell, and known to all the readers of Scott’s poetry as the Ashestiel of the Marmion introductions. The Glenkinnon brook dashes in a deep ravine through the grounds to join the Tweed; behind the house rise the hills which divide the Tweed from the Yarrow; and an easy ride took Scott into the scenery of the Yarrow. The description of Ashestiel, and the brook which runs through it, in the introduction to the first canto of Marmion is indeed one of the finest specimens of Scott’s descriptive poetry:—
“November’s sky
is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red
and sear;
Late, gazing down the steepy
linn,
That hems our little garden
in,
Low in its dark and narrow
Selkirk was his nearest town, and that was seven miles from Ashestiel; and even his nearest neighbour was at Yair, a few miles off lower down the Tweed,—Yair of which he wrote in another of the introductions to Marmion:—
“From Yair, which hills
so closely bind
Scarce can the Tweed his passage
find,
Though much he fret, and chafe,
and toil,
Till all his eddying currents
boil.”
At Ashestiel it was one of his greatest delights to look after his relative’s woods, and to dream of planting and thinning woods of his own, a dream only too amply realized. It was here that a new kitchen-range was sunk for some time in the ford, which was so swollen by a storm in 1805 that the horse and cart that brought it were themselves with difficulty rescued from the waters. And it was here that Scott first entered on that active life of literary labour in close conjunction with an equally active life of rural sport, which gained him a well-justified reputation as the hardest worker and the heartiest player in the kingdom. At Lasswade Scott’s work had been done at night; but serious headaches made him change his habit at Ashestiel, and rise steadily at five, lighting his own fire in winter. “Arrayed in his shooting-jacket, or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner-time, he was seated at his desk by six o’clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favourite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of circumvallation. Thus, by the time the family assembled for breakfast, between nine and ten, he had done enough, in his own language, ’to break the neck of the day’s work.’ After breakfast a couple of hours more were given to his solitary tasks, and by noon he was, as he used to say, his ‘own man.’ When the weather was bad, he would labour incessantly all the morning; but the general rule was to be out and on horseback by one o’clock at the latest; while, if any more distant excursion had been proposed overnight, he was ready to start on it by ten; his occasional rainy days of unintermitted study, forming, as he said, a fund in his favour, out of which he was entitled to draw for accommodation whenever the sun shone with special brightness.” In his earlier days none of his horses liked to be fed except by their master. When Brown Adam was saddled, and the stable-door opened, the horse would trot round to the leaping-on stone of his own accord, to be mounted, and was quite
Scott’s amusements at Ashestiel, besides riding, in which he was fearless to rashness, and coursing, which was the chief form of sporting in the neighbourhood, comprehended “burning the water,” as salmon-spearing by torchlight was called, in the course of which he got many a ducking. Mr. Skene gives an amusing picture of their excursions together from Ashestiel among the hills, he himself followed by a lanky Savoyard, and Scott by a portly Scotch butler—both servants alike highly sensitive as to their personal dignity—on horses which neither of the attendants could sit well. “Scott’s heavy lumbering buffetier had provided himself against the mountain storms with a huge cloak, which, when the cavalcade was at gallop, streamed at full stretch from his shoulders, and kept flapping in the other’s face, who, having more than enough to do in preserving his own equilibrium, could not think of attempting at any time to control the pace of his steed, and had no relief but fuming and pesting at the sacre manteau, in language happily unintelligible to its wearer. Now and then some ditch or turf-fence rendered it indispensable to adventure on a leap, and no farce could have been more amusing than the display of politeness which then occurred between these worthy equestrians, each courteously declining in favour of his friend the honour of the first experiment, the horses fretting impatient beneath them, and the dogs clamouring encouragement."[24] Such was Scott’s order of life at Ashestiel, where he remained from 1804 to 1812. As to his literary work here, it was enormous.
Besides finishing The Lay of the Last Minstrel,
writing Marmion, The Lady of the Lake,
part of The Bridal of Triermain, and part of
Rokeby, and writing reviews, he wrote a Life
of Dryden, and edited his works anew with some
care, in eighteen volumes, edited Somers’s
Collection of Tracts, in thirteen volumes, quarto,
Sir Ralph Sadler’s Life, Letters, and State
Page 44
Papers, in three volumes, quarto, Miss Seward’s
Life and Poetical Works, The Secret History
of the Court of James I., in two volumes, Strutt’s
Queenhoo Hall, in four volumes, 12mo., and various
other single volumes, and began his heavy work on
the edition of Swift. This was the literary work
of eight years, during which he had the duties of
his Sheriffship, and, after he gave up his practice
as a barrister, the duties of his Deputy Clerkship
of Session to discharge regularly. The editing
of Dryden alone would have seemed to most men of leisure
a pretty full occupation for these eight years, and
though I do not know that Scott edited with the anxious
care with which that sort of work is often now prepared,
that he went into all the arguments for a doubtful
reading with the pains that Mr. Dyce spent on the
various readings of Shakespeare, or that Mr. Spedding
spent on a various reading of Bacon, yet Scott did
his work in a steady, workmanlike manner, which satisfied
the most fastidious critics of that day, and he was
never, I believe, charged with hurrying or scamping
it. His biographies of Swift and Dryden are plain
solid pieces of work—not exactly the works
of art which biographies have been made in our day—not
comparable to Carlyle’s studies of Cromwell
or Frederick, or, in point of art, even to the life
of John Sterling, but still sensible and interesting,
sound in judgment, and animated in style.
[Footnote 24: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 268-9.]
REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE.
In May, 1812, Scott having now at last obtained the salary of the Clerkship of Session, the work of which he had for more than five years discharged without pay, indulged himself in realizing his favourite dream of buying a “mountain farm” at Abbotsford,—five miles lower down the Tweed than his cottage at Ashestiel, which was now again claimed by the family of Russell,—and migrated thither with his household goods. The children long remembered the leave-taking as one of pure grief, for the villagers were much attached both to Scott and to his wife, who had made herself greatly beloved by her untiring goodness to the sick among her poor neighbours. But Scott himself describes the migration as a scene in which their neighbours found no small share of amusement. “Our flitting and removal from Ashestiel baffled all description; we had twenty-five cartloads of the veriest trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, bare-headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys."[25]
To another friend Scott wrote that the neighbours had “been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gipsy groups of Callot upon their march."[26]
The place thus bought for 4000_l._,—half of which, according to Scott’s bad and sanguine habit, was borrowed from his brother, and half raised on the security of a poem at the moment of sale wholly unwritten, and not completed even when he removed to Abbotsford—“Rokeby”—became only too much of an idol for the rest of Scott’s life. Mr. Lockhart admits that before the crash came he had invested 29,000_l._ in the purchase of land alone. But at this time only the kernel of the subsequent estate was bought, in the shape of a hundred acres or rather more, part of which ran along the shores of the Tweed—“a beautiful river flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless here and there where it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by birches and alders.” There was also a poor farm-house, a staring barn, and a pond so dirty that it had hitherto given the name of “Clarty Hole” to the place itself. Scott renamed the place from the adjoining ford which was just above the confluence of the Gala with the Tweed. He chose the name of Abbotsford because the land had formerly all belonged to the Abbots of Melrose,—the ruin of whose beautiful abbey was visible from many parts of the little property. On the other side of the river the old British barrier called “the Catrail” was full in view. As yet the place was not planted,—the only effort made in this direction by its former owner, Dr. Douglas, having been a long narrow stripe of firs, which Scott used to compare to a black hair-comb, and which gave the name of “The Doctor’s Redding-Kame” to the stretch of woods of which it is still the central line. Such was the place which he made it the too great delight of the remainder of his life to increase and beautify, by spending on it a good deal more than he had earned, and that too in times when he should have earned a good deal more than he ought to have thought even for a moment of spending. The cottage grew to a mansion, and the mansion to a castle. The farm by the Tweed made him long for a farm by the Cauldshiel’s loch, and the farm by the Cauldshiel’s loch for Thomas the Rhymer’s Glen; and as, at every step in the ladder, his means of buying were really increasing—though they were so cruelly discounted and forestalled by this growing land-hunger,—Scott never realized into what troubles he was carefully running himself.
Of his life at Abbotsford at a later period when his building was greatly enlarged, and his children grown up, we have a brilliant picture from the pen of Mr. Lockhart. And though it does not belong to his first years at Abbotsford, I cannot do better than include it here as conveying probably better than anything I could elsewhere find, the charm of that ideal life which lured Scott on from one project to another in that scheme of castle-building, in relation to which he confused so dangerously the world of dreams with the harder world of wages, capital, interest, and rent.
“I remember saying to William Allan one morning, as the whole party mustered before the porch after breakfast, ’A faithful sketch of what you at this moment see would be more interesting a hundred years hence than the grandest so-called historical picture that you will ever exhibit in Somerset House;’ and my friend agreed with me so cordially that I often wondered afterwards he had not attempted to realize the suggestion. The subject ought, however, to have been treated conjointly by him (or Wilkie) and Edwin Landseer.
“It was a clear, bright September morning, with a sharpness in the air that doubled the animating influence of the sunshine, and all was in readiness for a grand coursing match on Newark Hill. The only guest who had chalked out other sport for himself was the staunchest of anglers, Mr. Rose; but he too was there on his shelty, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net, and attended by his humorous squire, Hinves, and Charlie Purdie, a brother of Tom, in those days the most celebrated fisherman of the district. This little group of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville’s preserve, remained lounging about to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted on Sybil, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip; and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as eager as the youngest sportsman in the troop, Sir Humphry Davy, Dr. Wollaston, and the patriarch of Scottish belles lettres, Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling, however, was persuaded with some difficulty to resign his steed for the present to his faithful negro follower, and to join Lady Scott in the sociable, until we should reach the ground of our battue. Laidlaw, on a long-tailed, wiry Highlander, yclept Hoddin Grey, which carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling-companion, for two or three days preceding this, but he had not prepared for coursing fields, and had left Charlie Purdie’s troop for Sir Walter’s on a sudden thought; and his fisherman’s costume—a brown hatPage 47
with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks, jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon,—made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and, with his noble, serene dignity of countenance, might have passed for a sporting archbishop. Mr. Mackenzie, at this time in the seventy-sixth year of his age, with a white hat turned up with green, green spectacles, green jacket, and long brown leather gaiters buttoned upon his nether anatomy, wore a dog-whistle round his neck, and had all over the air of as resolute a devotee as the gay captain of Huntly Burn. Tom Purdie and his subalterns had preceded us by a few hours with all the greyhounds that could be collected at Abbotsford, Darnick, and Melrose; but the giant Maida had remained as his master’s orderly, and now gambolled about Sibyl Grey, barking for mere joy, like a spaniel puppy.
“The order of march had been all settled, and the sociable was just getting under weigh, when the Lady Anne broke from the line, screaming with laughter, and exclaimed, ’Papa! papa! I know you could never think of going without your pet.’ Scott looked round, and I rather think there was a blush as well as a smile upon his face, when he perceived a little black pig frisking about his pony, and evidently a self-elected addition to the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers. Poor piggy soon found a strap round his neck, and was dragged into the background. Scott, watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the first verse of an old pastoral song:—
“What will I do gin
my hoggie die?
My joy, my pride, my hoggie!
My only beast, I had nae mae,
And wow! but I was vogie!”
The cheers were redoubled, and the squadron moved on. This pig had taken, nobody could tell how, a most sentimental attachment to Scott, and was constantly urging its pretension to be admitted a regular member of his tail, along with the greyhounds and terriers; but indeed I remember him suffering another summer under the same sort of pertinacity on the part of an affectionate hen. I leave the explanation for philosophers; but such were the facts. I have too much respect for the vulgarly calumniated donkey to name him in the same category of pets with the pig and the hen; but a year or two after this time, my wife used to drive a couple of these animals in a little garden chair, and whenever her father appeared at the door of our cottage, we were sure to see Hannah More and Lady Morgan (as Anne Scott had wickedly christened them) trotting from their pasture to lay their noses over the paling, and, as Washington Irving says of the old white-haired hedger with the Parisian snuff-box, ‘toPage 48
have a pleasant crack wi’ the laird.’"[27]
Carlyle, in his criticism on Scott—a criticism which will hardly, I think, stand the test of criticism in its turn, so greatly does he overdo the reaction against the first excessive appreciation of his genius—adds a contribution of his own to this charming idyll, in reference to the natural fascination which Scott seemed to exert over almost all dumb creatures. A little Blenheim cocker, “one of the smallest, beautifullest, and tiniest of lapdogs,” with which Carlyle was well acquainted, and which was also one of the shyest of dogs, that would crouch towards his mistress and draw back “with angry timidity” if any one did but look at him admiringly, once met in the street “a tall, singular, busy-looking man,” who halted by. The dog ran towards him and began “fawning, frisking, licking at his feet;” and every time he saw Sir Walter afterwards, in Edinburgh, he repeated his demonstration of delight. Thus discriminating was this fastidious Blenheim cocker even in the busy streets of Edinburgh.
And Scott’s attraction for dumb animals was only a lesser form of his attraction for all who were in any way dependent on him, especially his own servants and labourers. The story of his demeanour towards them is one of the most touching ever written. “Sir Walter speaks to every man as if they were blood-relations” was the common formula in which this demeanour was described. Take this illustration. There was a little hunchbacked tailor, named William Goodfellow, living on his property (but who at Abbotsford was termed Robin Goodfellow). This tailor was employed to make the curtains for the new library, and had been very proud of his work, but fell ill soon afterwards, and Sir Walter was unremitting in his attention to him. “I can never forget,” says Mr. Lockhart, “the evening on which the poor tailor died. When Scott entered the hovel, he found everything silent, and inferred from the looks of the good women in attendance that the patient had fallen asleep, and that they feared his sleep was the final one. He murmured some syllables of kind regret: at the sound of his voice the dying tailor unclosed his eyes, and eagerly and wistfully sat up, clasping his hands with an expression of rapturous gratefulness and devotion that, in the midst of deformity, disease, pain, and wretchedness, was at once beautiful and sublime. He cried with a loud voice, ’The Lord bless and reward you!’ and expired with the effort."[28] Still more striking is the account of his relation with Tom Purdie, the wide-mouthed, under-sized, broad-shouldered, square-made, thin-flanked woodsman, so well known afterwards by all Scott’s friends as he waited for his master in his green shooting-jacket, white hat, and drab trousers. Scott first made Tom Purdie’s acquaintance in his capacity as judge, the man being brought before him for poaching, at the time that Scott was living at Ashestiel. Tom gave so touching an account of his circumstances—work
[Footnote 25: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 6.]
[Footnote 26: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 3.]
[Footnote 27: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 238—242.]
[Footnote 28: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vii. 218.]
[Footnote 29: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 170.]
SCOTT’S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES.
Before I make mention of Scott’s greatest works, his novels, I must say a few words of his relation to the Ballantyne Brothers, who involved him, and were involved by him, in so many troubles, and with whose name the story of his broken fortunes is inextricably bound up. James Ballantyne, the elder brother, was a schoolfellow of Scott’s at Kelso, and was the editor and manager of the Kelso Mail, an anti-democratic journal, which had a fair circulation. Ballantyne was something of an artist as regarded
This, though a true, was probably a very imperfect account of Scott’s motives. He ceased practising at the bar, I do not doubt, in great degree from a kind of hurt pride at his ill-success, at a time when he felt during every month more and more confidence in his own powers. He believed, with some justice, that he understood some of the secrets of popularity in literature, but he had always, till towards the end of his life, the greatest horror of resting on literature alone as his main resource; and he was not a man, nor was Lady Scott a woman, to pinch and live narrowly. Were it only for his lavish generosity, that kind of life would have been intolerable to him. Hence, he reflected, that if he could but use his literary instinct to feed some commercial undertaking, managed by a man he could trust, he might gain a considerable percentage on his little capital, without so embarking in commerce as to oblige him either to give up his status as a sheriff, or his official duties as a clerk of session, or his literary undertakings. In his old schoolfellow, James Ballantyne, he believed he had found just such an agent as he wanted, the requisite link between literary genius like his own, and the world which reads and buys books; and he thought that,
And it is quite possible that Scott might have succeeded—or at all events not seriously failed—if he had been content to stick to the printing firm of James Ballantyne and Co., and had not launched also into the bookselling and publishing firm of John Ballantyne and Co., or had never begun the wild and dangerous practice of forestalling his gains, and spending wealth which he had not earned. But when by way of feeding the printing press of James Ballantyne and Co., he started in 1809 the bookselling and publishing firm of John Ballantyne and Co., using as his agent a man as inferior in sterling worth to James, as James was inferior in general ability to himself, he carefully dug a mine under his own feet, of which we can only say, that nothing except his genius could have prevented it from exploding long before it did. The truth was evidently that James Ballantyne’s respectful homage, and John’s humorous appreciation, all but blinded Scott’s eyes to the utter inadequacy of either of these men, especially the latter, to supply the deficiencies of his own character for conducting business of this kind with proper discretion. James Ballantyne, who was pompous and indolent, though thoroughly honest, and not without some intellectual insight, Scott used to call Aldiborontiphoscophornio. John, who was clever but frivolous, dissipated, and tricksy, he termed Rigdumfunnidos, or his “little Picaroon.” It is clear from Mr. Lockhart’s account of the latter that Scott not only did not respect, but despised him, though he cordially liked him, and that he passed over, in judging him, vices which in a brother or son of his own he would severely have rebuked. I believe myself that his liking for
And yet it is strange that he not only chose them, but chose the inferior and lighter-headed of the two for far the most important and difficult of the two businesses. In the printing concern there was at least this to be said, that of part of the business—the selection of type and the superintendence of the executive part,—James Ballantyne was a good judge. He was never apparently a good man of business, for he kept no strong hand over the expenditure and accounts, which is the core of success in every concern. But he understood types; and his customers were publishers, a wealthy and judicious class, who were not likely all to fail together. But to select a “Rigdumfunnidos,”—a dissipated comic-song singer and horse-fancier,—for the head of a publishing concern, was indeed a kind of insanity. It is told of John Ballantyne, that after the successful negotiation with Constable for Rob Roy, and while “hopping up and down in his glee,” he exclaimed, “’Is Rob’s gun here, Mr. Scott? Would you object to my trying the old barrel with a few de joy?’ ‘Nay, Mr. Puff,’ said Scott, ’it would burst and blow you to the devil before your time.’ ‘Johnny, my man,’ said Constable, ’what the mischief puts drawing at sight into your head?’ Scott laughed heartily at this innuendo; and then observing that the little man felt somewhat sore, called attention to the notes of a bird in the adjoining shrubbery. ‘And by-the-bye,’ said he, as they continued listening, ’’tis a long time, Johnny, since we have had “The Cobbler of Kelso."’ Mr. Puff forthwith jumped up on a mass of stone, and seating himself in the proper attitude of one working with an awl, began a favourite interlude, mimicking a certain son of Crispin, at whose stall Scott and he had often lingered when they were schoolboys, and a blackbird,
“Or, if to touch such
chord be thine,
Restore the ancient tragic
line,
And emulate the notes that
rung
From the wild harp which silent
hung
By silver Avon’s holy
shore,
Till twice a hundred years
roll’d o’er,—
When she, the bold enchantress,
came
With fearless hand and heart
on flame,
From the pale willow snatch’d
the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred
measure,
Till Avon’s swans, while
rung the grove
With Montfort’s hate
and Basil’s love,
Awakening at the inspired
strain,
Deem’d their own Shakespeare
lived again.”
Avon’s swans must have been Avon’s geese, I think, if they had deemed anything of the kind. Joanna Baillie’s dramas are “nice,” and rather dull; now and then she can write a song with the ease and sweetness that suggest Shakespearian echoes. But Scott’s judgment was obviously blinded by his just and warm regard for Joanna Baillie herself.
Of course with such interfering causes to bring unsaleable books to the house—of course I do not mean that John Ballantyne and Co. published for Joanna Baillie, or that they would have lost by it if they had—the new firm published all sorts of books which did not sell at all; while John Ballantyne himself indulged in a great many expenses and dissipations, for which John Ballantyne and Co. had to pay. Nor was it very easy for a partner who himself drew bills on the future—even though he were the well-spring of all the paying business the company had—to be very severe on a fellow-partner who supplied his pecuniary needs in the same way. At all events, there is no question that all through 1813 and 1814 Scott was kept in constant suspense and fear of bankruptcy, by the ill-success of John Ballantyne and Co., and the utter want of straightforwardness in John Ballantyne himself as to the bills out, and which had to be provided against. It was the publication of Waverley, and the consequent opening up of the richest vein not only in Scott’s own genius, but in his popularity with the public, which alone ended these alarms; and the many unsaleable works of John Ballantyne and Co. were then gradually disposed of to Constable and others, to their own great loss, as part of the conditions on which they received a share in the copyright of the wonderful novels which sold like wildfire. But though in this way the publishing business of John Ballantyne and Co. was saved, and its affairs pretty decently wound up, the printing firm remained saddled with some of their obligations; while Constable’s business, on which Scott depended for the means with which he was buying his estate, building his castle, and settling money on his daughter-in-law, was seriously injured by the purchase of all this unsaleable stock.
I do not think that any one who looks into the complicated controversy between the representatives of the Ballantynes and Mr. Lockhart, concerning these matters, can be content with Mr. Lockhart’s—no doubt perfectly sincere—judgment on the case. It is obvious that amidst these intricate accounts, he fell into one or two serious blunders—blunders very unjust to James Ballantyne. And without pretending to have myself formed any minute judgment on the details, I think the following points clear:—(1.) That James Ballantyne was very severely judged by Mr. Lockhart, on grounds which were never alleged by Scott against him at all,—indeed on grounds on which he was expressly exempted from all blame by Sir Walter. (2.) That Sir Walter Scott was very severely judged by the representatives of the Ballantynes, on grounds on which James Ballantyne himself never brought any charge against him; on the contrary, he declared that he had no charge to bring. (3.) That both Scott and his partners invited ruin by freely spending gains which they only expected to earn, and that in this Scott certainly set an example which he could hardly expect feebler men not to follow.
[Footnote 30: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 221.]
[Footnote 31: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, v. 218.]
THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.
In the summer of 1814, Scott took up again and completed—almost at a single heat,—a fragment of a Jacobite story, begun in 1805 and then laid aside. It was published anonymously, and its astonishing success turned back again the scales of Scott’s fortunes, already inclining ominously towards a catastrophe. This story was Waverley. Mr. Carlyle has praised Waverley above its fellows. “On the whole, contrasting Waverley, which was carefully written, with most of its followers which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore method.” This is, however, a very unfortunate judgment. Not one of the whole series of novels appears to have been written more completely extempore than the great bulk of Waverley, including almost everything that made it either popular with the million or fascinating to the fastidious; and it is even likely that this is one of the causes of its excellence.
“The last two volumes,” says Scott, in a letter to Mr. Morritt, “were written in three weeks.” And here is Mr. Lockhart’s description of the effect which Scott’s incessant toil during the composition, produced on a friend whose window happened to command the novelist’s study:—
“Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, I dined one day with the gentleman in question (now the Honourable William Menzies, one of the Supreme Judges at the Cape of Good Hope), whose residence was then in George Street, situated very near to, and at right angles with, North Castle Street. It was a party of very young persons, most of them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or care of the morrow. When my companion’s worthy father and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned to a library which had one large window looking northwards. After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell. ‘No,’ said he, ’I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will.’ I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. ’Since we sat down,’ he said, ’I have been watching it—it fascinates my eye—it never stops—page after page is finished, and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied; and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night—I can’t stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.’ ’Some stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably,’ exclaimed myself, ‘or some other giddy youth in our society.’ ’No, boys,’ said our host; ’I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.’"[32]
If that is not extempore writing, it is difficult to say what extempore writing is. But in truth, there is no evidence that any one of the novels was laboured, or even so much as carefully composed. Scott’s method of composition was always the same; and, when writing an imaginative work, the rate of progress seems to have been pretty even, depending much more on the absence of disturbing engagements, than on any mental irregularity. The morning was always his brightest time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill, writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost
Till near the close of his career as an author, Scott never avowed his responsibility for any of these series of novels, and even took some pains to mystify the public as to the identity between the author of Waverley and the author of Tales of my Landlord. The care with which the secret was kept is imputed by Mr. Lockhart in some degree to the habit of mystery which had grown upon Scott during his secret partnership with the Ballantynes; but in this he seems to be confounding two very different phases of Scott’s character. No doubt he was, as a professional man, a little ashamed
“Of
having been what one has been,
What one thinks one is, or
thinks that others suppose one.”
To some men the freedom of this disguise is a real danger and temptation. It never could have been so to Scott, who was in the main one of the simplest as well as the boldest and proudest of men. And as most men perhaps would admit that a good deal of even the best part of their nature is rather suppressed than expressed by the name by which they are known in the world, Scott must have felt this in a far higher degree, and probably regarded the manifold characters under which he was known to society, as representing him in some respects more justly than any individual name could have done. His mind ranged hither and thither over a wide field—far beyond that of his actual experience,—and probably ranged over it all the more easily for not being absolutely tethered to a single class of associations by any public confession of his authorship. After all, when it became universally known that Scott was the only author of all these tales, it may be doubted whether the public thought as adequately of the imaginative
When Scott wrote, such fertility as his in the production of novels was regarded with amazement approaching to absolute incredulity. Yet he was in this respect only the advanced-guard of a not inconsiderable class of men and women who have a special gift for pouring out story after story, containing a great variety of figures, while retaining a certain even level of merit. There is more than one novelist of the present day who has far surpassed Scott in the number of his tales, and one at least of very high repute, who has, I believe, produced more even within the same time. But though to our larger experience, Scott’s achievement, in respect of mere fertility, is by no means the miracle which it once seemed, I do not think one of his successors can compare with him for a moment in the ease and truth with which he painted, not merely the life of his own time and country—seldom indeed that of precisely his own time—but that of days long past, and often too of scenes far distant. The most powerful of all his stories, Old Mortality, was the story of a period more than a century and a quarter before he wrote; and others,—which though inferior to this in force, are nevertheless, when compared with the so-called historical romances of any other English writer, what sunlight is to moonlight, if you can say as much for the latter as to admit even that comparison,—go back to the period of the Tudors, that is, two centuries and a half. Quentin Durward, which is all but amongst the best, runs back farther still, far into the previous century, while Ivanhoe and The Talisman, though not among the greatest of Scott’s works, carry us back more than five hundred years. The new class of extempore novel writers, though more considerable than, sixty years ago, any one could have expected ever to see it, is still limited, and on any high level of merit will probably always be limited, to the delineation of the times of which the narrator has personal experience. Scott seemed to have had something very like personal experience of a few centuries at least, judging by the ease and freshness with which he poured out his stories of these centuries, and though no one can pretend that even he could describe the period of the Tudors as Miss Austen described the country parsons and squires of George the Third’s
The most striking feature of Scott’s romances is that, for the most part, they are pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and passions. With but few exceptions—(The Antiquary, St. Ronan’s Well, and Guy Mannering are the most important)—Scott’s novels give us an imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but of individuals as they are affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age. And this it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young, soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You can hardly read any novel of Scott’s and not become better aware what public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like Bulwer’s, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and parentage, he might have lived too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas the ordinary novel tends to make its readers rather less of one than before.
Next, though most of these stories are rightly called romances, no one can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic side. This was not true of Scott’s poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature, and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the ablest of Scott’s critics, has pointed out this admirably in his essay on The Waverley Novels. “Many historical novelists,” he says, “especially those who with care and pains have read up the detail, are often evidently in a strait how to pass from their history to their sentiment. The fancy of Sir Walter could not help connecting the two. If he had given us the English side of the race to Derby,
Scott often confessed his contempt for his own heroes. He said of Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was “a sneaking piece of imbecility,” and that “if he had married Flora, she would have set him up upon the chimney-piece as Count Borowlaski’s wife used to do with him. I am a bad hand at depicting a hero, properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of borderers, buccaneers, highland robbers, and all others of a Robin-Hood description."[33] In another letter he says, “My rogue always, in despite of me, turns out my hero."[34] And it seems very likely that in most of the situations Scott describes so well, his own course would have been that of his wilder impulses, and not that of his reason. Assuredly he would never have stopped hesitating on the line between opposite courses as his Waverleys, his Mortons, his Osbaldistones do. Whenever he was really involved in a party strife, he flung prudence and impartiality to the winds, and went in like the hearty partisan which his strong impulses made of him. But granting this, I do not agree with his condemnation of all his own colourless heroes. However much they differed in nature from Scott himself, the even balance of their reason against their sympathies is certainly well conceived, is in itself natural, and is an admirable expedient for effecting that which was probably its real use to Scott,—the affording an opportunity for the delineation of all the pros and cons of the case, so that the characters on both sides of the struggle should be properly understood. Scott’s imagination was clearly far wider—was far more permeated with the fixed air of sound judgment—than his practical impulses. He needed a machinery for displaying his insight into both sides of a public quarrel, and his colourless heroes gave him the instrument he needed. Both in Morton’s case (in Old Mortality), and in Waverley’s, the hesitation is certainly well described. Indeed in relation to the controversy between Covenanters and Royalists, while his political and martial prepossessions went with Claverhouse, his reason and educated moral feeling certainly were clearly identified with Morton.
It is, however, obviously true that Scott’s heroes are mostly created for the sake of the facility they give in delineating the other characters, and not the other characters for the sake of the heroes. They are the imaginative neutral ground, as it were, on which opposing influences are brought to play; and what Scott best loved to paint was those who, whether by nature, by inheritance, or by choice, had become unique and characteristic types of one-sided feeling, not those who were merely in process of growth, and had not ranged themselves at all. Mr. Carlyle, who, as I have said before, places Scott’s romances far below their real level, maintains that these great types of his are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live. “His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not created and made poetically alive, yet deceptively enacted as a good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character between a Scott and a Shakespeare or Goethe. Yet it is a difference literally immense; they are of a different species; the value of the one is not to be counted in the coin of the other. We might say in a short word, which covers a long matter, that your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them. The one set become living men and women; the other amount to little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons."[35] And then he goes on to contrast Fenella in Peveril of the Peak with Goethe’s Mignon. Mr. Carlyle could hardly have chosen a less fair comparison. If Goethe is to be judged by his women, let Scott be judged by his men. So judged, I think Scott will, as a painter of character—of course, I am not now speaking of him as a poet,—come out far above Goethe. Excepting the hero of his first drama (Goetz of the iron hand), which by the way was so much in Scott’s line that his first essay in poetry was to translate it—not very well—I doubt if Goethe was ever successful with his pictures of men. Wilhelm Meister is, as Niebuhr truly said, “a menagerie of tame animals.” Doubtless Goethe’s women—certainly his women of culture—are more truly and inwardly conceived and created than Scott’s. Except Jeanie Deans and Madge Wildfire, and perhaps Lucy Ashton, Scott’s women are apt to be uninteresting, either pink and white toys, or hardish women of the world. But then no one can compare the men of the two writers, and not see Scott’s vast pre-eminence on that side.
I think the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry. His conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too romantic. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character. With women of an inferior class, he had not this feeling. Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the dairy-woman and woman of business in Jeanie Deans, with the lover and the sister. But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her, that he could not go deep into her heart. He could no more have analysed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analysed Rosamond Vincy, than he could have vivisected Camp or Maida. To some extent, therefore, Scott’s pictures of women remain something in the style of the miniatures of the last age—bright and beautiful beings without any special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a picture, for instance, is that in A Legend of Montrose of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle’s attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his own liberation! Who could read that scene and say for a moment that Dalgetty is painted “from the skin inwards”? It was just Scott himself breathing his own life through the habits of a good specimen of the mercenary soldier—realizing where the spirit of hire would end, and the sense of honour would begin—and preferring, even in a dungeon, the audacious policy of a sudden attack to that of crafty negotiation. What a picture (and a very different one) again is that in Redgauntlet of Peter Peebles, the mad litigant, with face emaciated by poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by “an insane lightness about the eyes,” dashing into the English magistrate’s court for a warrant against his fugitive counsel. Or, to take a third instance, as different as possible from either, how powerfully conceived is the situation in Old Mortality, where Balfour of Burley, in his fanatic fury at the defeat of his plan for a new rebellion, pushes the oak-tree, which connects his wild retreat with the outer world, into the stream, and tries to slay Morton for opposing him. In such scenes and a hundred others—for these are mere random examples—Scott undoubtedly painted his masculine figures from as deep and inward a conception of the character of the situation as Goethe ever attained, even in drawing Mignon, or Klaerchen, or Gretchen. The distinction has no
And even in relation to women of a rank more fascinating to Scott, and whose inner character was perhaps on that account, less familiar to his imagination, grant him but a few hints from history, and he draws a picture which, for vividness and brilliancy, may almost compare with Shakespeare’s own studies in English history. Had Shakespeare painted the scene in The Abbot, in which Mary Stuart commands one of her Mary’s in waiting to tell her at what bridal she last danced, and Mary Fleming blurts out the reference to the marriage of Sebastian at Holyrood, would any one hesitate to regard it as a stroke of genius worthy of the great dramatist? This picture of the Queen’s mind suddenly thrown off its balance, and betraying, in the agony of the moment, the fear and remorse which every association with Darnley conjured up, is painted “from the heart outwards,” not “from the skin inwards,” if ever there were such a painting in the world. Scott hardly ever failed in painting kings or peasants, queens or peasant-women. There was something in the well-marked type of both to catch his imagination, which can always hit off the grander features of royalty, and the homelier features of laborious humility. Is there any sketch traced in lines of more sweeping grandeur and more impressive force than the following of Mary Stuart’s lucid interval of remorse—lucid compared with her ordinary mood, though it was of a remorse that was almost delirious—which breaks in upon her hour of fascinating condescension?—
“’Are they
not a lovely couple, my Fleming? and is it not
heart-rending to think
that I must be their ruin?’
“‘Not so,’ said Roland Graeme, ’it is we, gracious sovereign, who will be your deliverers.’ ‘Ex oribus parvulorum!’ said the queen, looking upward; ’if it is by the mouth of these children that heaven calls me to resume the stately thoughts which become my birth and my rights, thou wilt grant them thy protection, and to me the power of rewarding their zeal.’ Then turning to Fleming, she instantly added, ’Thou knowest, my friend, whether to make those who have served me happy, was not ever Mary’s favourite pastime. When I have been rebuked by the stern preachers of the Calvinistic heresy—when I have seen the fierce countenances of my nobles averted from me, has it not been because I mixed in the harmless pleasures of the young and gay, and rather for the sake of their happiness than my own, have mingled in the masque, the song or the dance,Page 66
with the youth of my household? Well, I repent not of it—though Knox termed it sin, and Morton degradation—I was happy because I saw happiness around me: and woe betide the wretched jealousy that can extract guilt out of the overflowings of an unguarded gaiety!—Fleming, if we are restored to our throne, shall we not have one blithesome day at a blithesome bridal, of which we must now name neither the bride nor the bridegroom? But that bridegroom shall have the barony of Blairgowrie, a fair gift even for a queen to give, and that bride’s chaplet shall be twined with the fairest pearls that ever were found in the depths of Lochlomond; and thou thyself, Mary Fleming, the best dresser of tires that ever busked the tresses of a queen, and who would scorn to touch those of any woman of lower rank—thou thyself shalt for my love twine them into the bride’s tresses.—Look, my Fleming, suppose then such clustered locks as these of our Catherine, they would not put shame upon thy skill.’ So saying she passed her hand fondly over the head of her youthful favourite, while her more aged attendant replied despondently, ’Alas, madam, your thoughts stray far from home.’ ‘They do, my Fleming,’ said the queen, ’but is it well or kind in you to call them back?—God knows they have kept the perch this night but too closely.—Come, I will recall the gay vision, were it but to punish them. Yes, at that blithesome bridal, Mary herself shall forget the weight of sorrows, and the toil of state, and herself once more lead a measure.—At whose wedding was it that we last danced, my Fleming? I think care has troubled my memory—yet something of it I should remember, canst thou not aid me? I know thou canst.’ ‘Alas, madam,’ replied the lady. ‘What,’ said Mary, ’wilt thou not help us so far? this is a peevish adherence to thine own graver opinion which holds our talk as folly. But thou art court-bred and wilt well understand me when I say the queen commands Lady Fleming to tell her when she led the last branle.’ With a face deadly pale and a mien as if she were about to sink into the earth, the court-bred dame, no longer daring to refuse obedience, faltered out, ’Gracious lady—if my memory err not—it was at a masque in Holyrood—at the marriage of Sebastian.’ The unhappy queen, who had hitherto listened with a melancholy smile, provoked by the reluctance with which the Lady Fleming brought out her story, at this ill-fated word interrupted her with a shriek so wild and loud that the vaulted apartment rang, and both Roland and Catherine sprung to their feet in the utmost terror and alarm. Meantime, Mary seemed, by the train of horrible ideas thus suddenly excited, surprised not only beyond self-command, but for the moment beyond the verge of reason. ‘Traitress,’ she said to the Lady Fleming, ’thou wouldst slay thy sovereign. Call my French guards—a moi! a moi! mes Francais!—I am beset with traitors in mine own palace—they have murdered my husband—Rescue!Page 67
Rescue! for the Queen of Scotland!’ She started up from her chair—her features late so exquisitely lovely in their paleness, now inflamed with the fury of frenzy, and resembling those of a Bellona. ’We will take the field ourself,’ she said; ’warn the city—warn Lothian and Fife—saddle our Spanish barb, and bid French Paris see our petronel be charged. Better to die at the head of our brave Scotsmen, like our grandfather at Flodden, than of a broken heart like our ill-starred father.’ ’Be patient—be composed, dearest sovereign,’ said Catherine; and then addressing Lady Fleming angrily, she added, ’How could you say aught that reminded her of her husband?’ The word reached the ear of the unhappy princess who caught it up, speaking with great rapidity, ’Husband!—what husband? Not his most Christian Majesty—he is ill at ease—he cannot mount on horseback—not him of the Lennox—but it was the Duke of Orkney thou wouldst say?’ ’For God’s love, madam, be patient!’ said the Lady Fleming. But the queen’s excited imagination could by no entreaty be diverted from its course. ‘Bid him come hither to our aid,’ she said, ’and bring with him his lambs, as he calls them—Bowton, Hay of Talla, Black Ormiston and his kinsman Hob—Fie, how swart they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! closeted with Morton? Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the complot together, the bird when it breaks the shell will scare Scotland, will it not, my Fleming?’ ’She grows wilder and wilder,’ said Fleming. ’We have too many hearers for these strange words.’ ‘Roland,’ said Catherine, ’in the name of God begone!—you cannot aid us here—leave us to deal with her alone—away—away!”
And equally fine is the scene in Kenilworth in which Elizabeth undertakes the reconciliation of the haughty rivals, Sussex and Leicester, unaware that in the course of the audience she herself will have to bear a great strain on her self-command, both in her feelings as a queen and her feelings as a lover. Her grand rebukes to both, her ill-concealed preference for Leicester, her whispered ridicule of Sussex, the impulses of tenderness which she stifles, the flashes of resentment to which she gives way, the triumph of policy over private feeling, her imperious impatience when she is baffled, her jealousy as she grows suspicious of a personal rival, her gratified pride and vanity when the suspicion is exchanged for the clear evidence, as she supposes, of Leicester’s love, and her peremptory conclusion of the audience, bring before the mind a series of pictures far more vivid and impressive than the greatest of historical painters could fix on canvas, even at the cost of the labour of years. Even more brilliant, though not so sustained and difficult an effort of genius, is the later scene in the same story, in which Elizabeth drags the unhappy Countess of Leicester from her concealment in one of the grottoes of Kenilworth Castle, and strides off with her, in
And yet, as every one knows, Scott was excessively free in his manipulations of history for the purposes of romance. In Kenilworth he represents Shakespeare’s plays as already in the mouths of courtiers and statesmen, though he lays the scene in the eighteenth year of Elizabeth, when Shakespeare was hardly old enough to rob an orchard. In Woodstock, on the contrary, he insists, if you compare Sir Henry Lee’s dates with the facts, that Shakespeare died twenty years at least before he actually died. The historical basis, again, of Woodstock and of Redgauntlet is thoroughly untrustworthy, and about all the minuter details of history,—unless so far as they were characteristic of the age,—I do not suppose that Scott in his romances ever troubled himself at all. And yet few historians—not even Scott himself when he exchanged romance for history—ever drew the great figures of history with so powerful a hand. In writing history and biography Scott has little or no advantage over very inferior men. His pictures of Swift, of Dryden, of Napoleon, are in no way very vivid. It is only where he is working from the pure imagination,—though imagination stirred by historic study,—that he paints a picture which follows us about, as if with living eyes, instead of creating for us a mere series of lines and colours. Indeed, whether Scott draws truly or falsely, he draws with such genius that his pictures of Richard and Saladin, of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, of Margaret of Anjou and Rene of Provence, of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, of Sussex and of Leicester, of James and Charles and Buckingham, of the two Dukes of Argyle—the Argyle of the time of the revolution, and the Argyle of George II., of Queen Caroline, of Claverhouse, and Monmouth, and of Rob Roy, will live in English literature beside Shakespeare’s pictures—probably less faithful if more imaginative—of John and Richard and the later Henries, and all the great figures by whom they were surrounded. No historical portrait that we possess will take precedence—as a mere portrait—of Scott’s brilliant study of James I. in The Fortunes of Nigel. Take this illustration for instance, where George Heriot the goldsmith (Jingling Geordie, as the king familiarly calls him) has just been speaking of Lord Huntinglen, as “a man of the old rough world that will drink and swear:”—
“‘O Geordie!’ exclaimed the king, ’these are auld-warld frailties, of whilk we dare not pronounce even ourselves absolutely free. But the warld grows worse from day to day, Geordie. The juveniles of this age may weel say with the poet,—
“AEtas
parentum pejor avis tulit
Nos
nequiores—”
This Dalgarno does not drink so much; aye or swear so much, as his father, but he wenches, Geordie, and he breaks his word and oath baith. As to what ye say of the leddy and the ministers, we are all fallible creatures, Geordie, priests and kings as weel as others; and wha kens but what that may account for the difference between this Dalgarno and his father? The earl is the vera soul of honour, and cares nae mair for warld’s gear than a noble hound for the quest of a foulmart; but as for his son, he was like to brazen us all out—ourselves, Steenie, Baby Charles, and our Council, till he heard of the tocher, and then by my kingly crown he lap like a cock at a grossart! These are discrepancies betwixt parent and son not to be accounted for naturally, according to Baptista Porta, Michael Scott de secretis, and others. Ah, Jingling Geordie, if your clouting the caldron, and jingling on pots, pans, and veshels of all manner of metal, hadna jingled a’ your grammar out of your head, I could have touched on that matter to you at mair length.’ ... Heriot inquired whether Lord Dalgarno had consented to do the Lady Hermione justice. ’Troth, man, I have small doubt that he will,’ quoth the king, ’I gave him the schedule of her worldly substance, which you delivered to us in the council, and we allowed him half an hour to chew the cud upon that. It is rare reading for bringing him to reason. I left Baby Charles and Steenie laying his duty before him, and if he can resist doing what they desire him, why I wish he would teach me the gate of it. O Geordie, Jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.’ ‘I am afraid,’ said George Heriot, more hastily than prudently, ’I might have thought of the old proverb of Satan reproving sin.’ ’Deil hae our saul, neighbour,’ said the king, reddening, ’but ye are not blate! I gie ye licence to speak freely, and by our saul, ye do not let the privilege become lost, non utendo—it will suffer no negative prescription in your hands. Is it fit, think ye, that Baby Charles should let his thoughts be publicly seen? No, no, princes’ thoughts are arcana imperii: qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare. Every liege subject is bound to speak the whole truth to the king, but there is nae reciprocity of obligation—and for Steenie having been whiles a dike-louper at a time, is it for you, who are his goldsmith, and to whom, I doubt, he awes an uncomatable sum, to cast that up to him?”
Assuredly there is no undue favouring of Stuarts in such a picture as that.
Scott’s humour is, I think, of very different qualities in relation to different subjects. Certainly he was at times capable of considerable heaviness of hand,—of the Scotch “wut” which has been so irreverently treated by English critics. His rather elaborate jocular introductions, under the name of Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly laborious at times. And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law, which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine. Not unfrequently, too, his stereotyped jokes weary. Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he would do in real life,—which is a great fault in art. Bradwardine becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond endurance. Like some other Scotchmen of genius, Scott twanged away at any effective chord till it more than lost its expressiveness. But in dry humour, and in that higher humour which skilfully blends the ludicrous and the pathetic, so that it is hardly possible to separate between smiles and tears, Scott is a master. His canny innkeeper, who, having sent away all the peasemeal to the camp of the Covenanters, and all the oatmeal (with deep professions of duty) to the castle and its cavaliers, in compliance with the requisitions sent to him on each side, admits with a sigh to his daughter that “they maun gar wheat flour serve themsels for a blink,”—his firm of solicitors, Greenhorn and Grinderson, whose senior partner writes respectfully to clients in prosperity, and whose junior partner writes familiarly to those in adversity,—his arbitrary nabob who asks how the devil any one should be able to mix spices so well “as one who has been where they grow;”—his little ragamuffin who indignantly denies that he has broken his promise not to gamble away his sixpences at pitch-and-toss because he has gambled them away at “neevie-neevie-nick-nack,”—and similar figures abound in his tales,—are all creations which make one laugh inwardly as we read. But he has a much higher humour still, that inimitable power of shading off ignorance into knowledge and simplicity into wisdom, which makes his picture of Jeanie Deans, for instance, so humorous as well as so affecting. When Jeanie reunites her father to her husband by reminding the former how it would sometimes happen that “twa precious saints might pu’ sundrywise like twa cows riving at the same hayband,” she gives us an admirable instance of Scott’s higher humour. Or take Jeanie Deans’s letter to her father communicating to him the pardon of his daughter and her own interview with the Queen:—
“DEAREST AND TRULY HONOURED FATHER.—This comes with my duty to inform you, that it has pleased God to redeem that captivitie of my poor sister, in respect the Queen’s blessed Majesty, for whom we are ever bound to pray, hath redeemed her soul from the slayer, granting the ransom of her, whilk is ane pardon or reprieve. And I spoke with the Queen face to face, andPage 71
yet live; for she is not muckle differing from other grand leddies, saving that she has a stately presence, and een like a blue huntin’ hawk’s, whilk gaed throu’ and throu’ me like a Highland durk—And all this good was, alway under the Great Giver, to whom all are but instruments, wrought for us by the Duk of Argile, wha is ane native true-hearted Scotsman, and not pridefu’, like other folk we ken of—and likewise skeely enow in bestial, whereof he has promised to gie me twa Devonshire kye, of which he is enamoured, although I do still haud by the real hawkit Airshire breed—and I have promised him a cheese; and I wad wuss ye, if Gowans, the brockit cow, has a quey, that she suld suck her fill of milk, as I am given to understand he has none of that breed, and is not scornfu’ but will take a thing frae a puir body, that it may lighten their heart of the loading of debt that they awe him. Also his honour the Duke will accept ane of our Dunlop cheeses, and it sall be my faut if a better was ever yearned in Lowden.”—[Here follow some observations respecting the breed of cattle, and the produce of the dairy, which it is our intention to forward to the Board of Agriculture.]—“Nevertheless, these are but matters of the after-harvest, in respect of the great good which Providence hath gifted us with—and, in especial, poor Effie’s life. And oh, my dear father, since it hath pleased God to be merciful to her, let her not want your free pardon, whilk will make her meet to be ane vessel of grace, and also a comfort to your ain graie hairs. Dear Father, will ye let the Laird ken that we have had friends strangely raised up to us, and that the talent whilk he lent me will be thankfully repaid. I hae some of it to the fore; and the rest of it is not knotted up in ane purse or napkin, but in ane wee bit paper, as is the fashion heir, whilk I am assured is gude for the siller. And, dear father, through Mr. Butler’s means I hae gude friendship with the Duke, for there had been kindness between their forbears in the auld troublesome time byepast. And Mrs. Glass has been kind like my very mother. She has a braw house here, and lives bien and warm, wi’ twa servant lasses, and a man and a callant in the shop. And she is to send you doun a pound of her hie-dried, and some other tobaka, and we maun think of some propine for her, since her kindness hath been great. And the Duk is to send the pardon doun by an express messenger, in respect that I canna travel sae fast; and I am to come doun wi’ twa of his Honour’s servants—that is, John Archibald, a decent elderly gentleman, that says he has seen you lang syne, when ye were buying beasts in the west frae the Laird of Aughtermuggitie—but maybe ye winna mind him—ony way, he’s a civil man—and Mrs. Dolly Dutton, that is to be dairy-maid at Inverara: and they bring me on as far as Glasgo’, whilk will make it nae pinch to win hame, whilk I desire of all things. May the Giver of all good things keep ye in your outgauns and incomings, whereof devoutly prayeth your loving dauter,
“JEAN DEANS.”
This contains an example of Scott’s rather heavy jocularity as well as giving us a fine illustration of his highest and deepest and sunniest humour. Coming where it does, the joke inserted about the Board of Agriculture is rather like the gambol of a rhinoceros trying to imitate the curvettings of a thoroughbred horse.
Some of the finest touches of his humour are no doubt much heightened by his perfect command of the genius as well as the dialect of a peasantry, in whom a true culture of mind and sometimes also of heart is found in the closest possible contact with the humblest pursuits and the quaintest enthusiasm for them. But Scott, with all his turn for irony—and Mr. Lockhart says that even on his death-bed he used towards his children the same sort of good-humoured irony to which he had always accustomed them in his life—certainly never gives us any example of that highest irony which is found so frequently in Shakespeare, which touches the paradoxes of the spiritual life of the children of earth, and which reached its highest point in Isaiah. Now and then in his latest diaries—the diaries written in his deep affliction—he comes near the edge of it. Once, for instance, he says, “What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb like the tide, and show us the state of people’s real minds!
’No eyes the rocks discover
Which lurk beneath the deep.’
Life could not be endured were it seen in reality.” But this is not irony, only the sort of meditation which, in a mind inclined to thrust deep into the secrets of life’s paradoxes, is apt to lead to irony. Scott, however, does not thrust deep in this direction. He met the cold steel which inflicts the deepest interior wounds, like a soldier, and never seems to have meditated on the higher paradoxes of life till reason reeled. The irony of Hamlet is far from Scott. His imagination was essentially one of distinct embodiment. He never even seemed so much as to contemplate that sundering of substance and form, that rending away of outward garments, that unclothing of the soul, in order that it might be more effectually clothed upon, which is at the heart of anything that may be called spiritual irony. The constant abiding of his mind within the well-defined forms of some one or other of the conditions of outward life and manners, among the scores of different spheres of human habit, was, no doubt, one of the secrets of his genius; but it was also its greatest limitation.
[Footnote 32: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 171-3.]
[Footnote 33: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 175-6.]
[Footnote 34: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 46.]
[Footnote 35: Carlyle’s Miscellaneous Essays, iv. 174-5.]
MORALITY AND RELIGION.
The very same causes which limited Scott’s humour and irony to the commoner fields of experience, and prevented him from ever introducing into his stories characters of the highest type of moral thoughtfulness, gave to his own morality and religion, which were, I think, true to the core so far as they went, a shade of distinct conventionality. It is no doubt quite true, as he himself tells us, that he took more interest in his mercenaries and moss-troopers, outlaws, gipsies, and beggars, than he did in the fine ladies and gentlemen under a cloud whom he adopted as heroines and heroes. But that was the very sign of his conventionalism. Though he interested himself more in these irregular persons, he hardly ever ventured to paint their inner life so as to show how little there was to choose between the sins of those who are at war with society and the sins of those who bend to the yoke of society. He widened rather than narrowed the chasm between the outlaw and the respectable citizen, even while he did not disguise his own romantic interest in the former. He extenuated, no doubt, the sins of all brave and violent defiers of the law, as distinguished from the sins of crafty and cunning abusers of the law. But the leaning he had to the former was, as he was willing to admit, what he regarded as a “naughty” leaning. He did not attempt for a moment to balance accounts between them and society. He paid his tribute as a matter of course to the established morality, and only put in a word or two by way of attempt to diminish the severity of the sentence on the bold transgressor. And then, where what is called the “law of honour” comes in to traverse the law of religion, he had no scruple in setting aside the latter in favour of the customs of gentlemen, without any attempt to justify that course. Yet it is evident from various passages in his writings that he held Christian duty inconsistent with duelling, and that he held himself a sincere Christian. In spite of this, when he was fifty-six, and under no conceivable hurry or perturbation of feeling, but only concerned to defend his own conduct—which was indeed plainly right—as to a political disclosure which he had made in his life of Napoleon, he asked his old friend William Clerk to be his second, if the expected challenge from General Gourgaud should come, and declared his firm intention of accepting it. On the strength of official evidence he had exposed some conduct of General Gourgaud’s at St. Helena, which appeared to be far from honourable, and he thought it his duty on that account to submit to be shot at by General Gourgaud, if General Gourgaud had wished it. In writing to William Clerk to ask him to be his second, he says, “Like a man who finds himself in a scrape, General Gourgaud may wish to fight himself out of it, and if the quarrel should be thrust on me, why, I will not baulk him, Jackie. He shall not dishonour the country through my sides, I can assure him.” In
He showed the same conventional feeling in his severity towards one of his own brothers who had been guilty of cowardice. Daniel Scott was the black sheep of the family. He got into difficulties in business, formed a bad connexion with an artful woman, and was sent to try his fortunes in the West Indies. There he was employed in some service against a body of refractory negroes—we do not know its exact nature—and apparently showed the white feather. Mr. Lockhart says that “he returned to Scotland a dishonoured man; and though he found shelter and compassion from his mother, his brother would never see him again. Nay, when, soon after, his health, shattered by dissolute indulgence, ... gave way altogether, and he died, as yet a young man, the poet refused either to attend his funeral or to wear mourning for him, like the rest of his family."[36] Indeed he always spoke of him as his “relative,” not as his brother. Here again Scott’s severity was due to his brother’s failure as a “man of honour,” i. e. in courage. He was forbearing enough with vices of a different kind; made John Ballantyne’s dissipation the object rather of his jokes than of his indignation; and not only mourned for him, but really grieved for him when he died. It is only fair to say, however, that for this conventional scorn of a weakness rather than a sin, Scott sorrowed sincerely later in life, and that in sketching the physical cowardice of Connochar in The Fair Maid of Perth, he deliberately made an attempt to atone for this hardness towards his brother by showing how frequently the foundation of cowardice may be laid in perfectly involuntary physical temperament, and pointing out with what noble elements of disposition it may be combined. But till reflection on many forms of human character had enlarged Scott’s charity, and perhaps also the range of his speculative ethics, he remained a conventional
Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely; both in his novels and in his letters and private diary. In writing to Lord Montague, he speaks of such enthusiasm as was then prevalent at Oxford, and which makes, he says, “religion a motive and a pretext for particular lines of thinking in politics and in temporal affairs” [as if it could help doing that!] as “teaching a new way of going to the devil for God’s sake,” and this expressly, because when the young are infected with it, it disunites families, and sets “children in opposition to their parents."[38] He gives us, however, one reason for his dread of anything like enthusiasm, which is not conventional;—that it interferes with the submissive and tranquil mood which is the only true religious mood. Speaking in his diary of a weakness and fluttering at the heart, from which he had suffered, he says, “It is an awful sensation, and would have made an enthusiast of me, had I indulged my imagination on religious subjects. I have been always careful to place my mind in the most tranquil posture which it can assume, during my private exercises of devotion."[39] And in this avoidance of indulging the imagination on religious, or even spiritual subjects, Scott goes far beyond Shakespeare. I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character as such, though Jeanie Deans approaches nearest to it. The same may be said of Shakespeare. But Shakespeare, though he has never drawn a pre-eminently spiritual character, often enough indulged his imagination while meditating on spiritual themes.
[Footnote 36: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 198-9.]
[Footnote 37: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 231.]
[Footnote 38: Ibid., vii. 255-6.]
[Footnote 39: Ibid., viii. 292.]
DISTRACTIONS AND AMUSEMENTS AT ABBOTSFORD.
Between 1814 and the end of 1825, Scott’s literary labour was interrupted only by one serious illness, and hardly interrupted by that,—by a few journeys,—one to Paris after the battle of Waterloo, and several to London,—and by the worry of a constant stream of intrusive visitors. Of his journeys he has left some records; but I cannot say that I think Scott would ever have reached, as a mere observer and recorder, at all the high point which he reached directly his imagination went to work to create a story. That imagination was, indeed, far less subservient to his mere perceptions than to his constructive powers. Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk—the records of his Paris journey after Waterloo—for instance, are not at all above the mark of a good special correspondent. His imagination was less the imagination of insight, than the imagination of one whose mind was a great kaleidoscope of human life and fortunes. But far more interrupting than either illness or travel, was the lion-hunting of which Scott became the object, directly after the publication of the earlier novels. In great measure, no doubt, on account of the mystery as to his authorship, his fame became something oppressive. At one time as many as sixteen parties of visitors applied to see Abbotsford in a single day. Strangers,—especially the American travellers of that day, who were much less reticent and more irrepressible than the American travellers of this,—would come to him without introductions, facetiously cry out “Prodigious!” in imitation of Dominie Sampson, whatever they were shown, inquire whether the new house was called Tullyveolan or Tillytudlem, cross-examine, with open note-books, as to Scott’s age, and the age of his wife, and appear to be taken quite by surprise when they were bowed out without being asked to dine.[40] In those days of high postage Scott’s bill for letters “seldom came under 150_l._ a year,” and “as to coach parcels, they were a perfect ruination.” On one occasion a mighty package came by post from the United States, for which Scott had to pay five pounds sterling. It contained a MS. play called The Cherokee Lovers, by a young lady of New York, who begged Scott to read and correct it, write a prologue and epilogue, get it put on the stage at Drury Lane, and negotiate with Constable or Murray for the copyright. In about a fortnight another packet not less formidable arrived, charged with a similar postage, which Scott, not grown cautious through experience, recklessly opened; out jumped a duplicate copy of The Cherokee Lovers, with a second letter from the authoress, stating that as the weather had been stormy, and she feared that something might have happened to her former MS., she had thought it prudent to send him a duplicate.[41] Of course, when
And Scott was not only thoughtful in his own planting, but induced his neighbours to become so too. So great was their regard for him, that many of them planted their estates as much with reference to the effect which their plantations would have on the view from Abbotsford, as with reference to the effect they would have on the view from their own grounds. Many was the consultation which he and his neighbours, Scott of Gala, for instance, and Mr. Henderson of Eildon Hall, had together on the effect which would be produced on the view from their respective houses, of the planting going on upon the lands of each. The reciprocity of feeling was such that the various proprietors acted more like brothers in this matter, than like the jealous and exclusive creatures which landowners, as such, so often are.
Next to his interest in the management and growth of his own little estate was Scott’s interest in the management and growth of the Duke of Buccleuch’s. To the Duke he looked up as the head of his clan, with something almost more than a feudal attachment, greatly enhanced of course by the personal friendship which he had formed for him in early life as the Earl of Dalkeith. This mixture of feudal and personal feeling towards the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch continued during their lives. Scott was away on a yachting tour to the Shetlands and Orkneys in July and August, 1814, and it was during this absence that the Duchess of Buccleuch died. Scott, who was in no anxiety about her, employed himself in writing an amusing descriptive epistle to the Duke in rough verse, chronicling his voyage, and containing expressions of the profoundest reverence for the goodness and charity of the Duchess, a letter which did not reach its destination till after the Duchess’s death. Scott himself heard of her death by chance when they landed for a few hours on the coast of Ireland; he was quite overpowered by the news, and went to bed only to drop into short nightmare sleeps, and to wake with the dim memory of some heavy weight at his heart. The Duke himself died five years later, leaving a son only thirteen years of age (the present Duke), over whose interests, both as regarded his education and his estates, Scott watched as jealously as if they had been those of his own son. Many were the anxious letters he wrote to Lord Montague as to his “young chief’s” affairs, as he called them, and great his pride in watching the promise of his youth. Nothing can
[Footnote 40: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, v. 387.]
[Footnote 41: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, v. 382.]
[Footnote 42: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 288.]
[Footnote 43: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vii. 287-8.]
[Footnote 44: Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, xxi. 22-3.]
SCOTT AND GEORGE IV.
The first relations of Scott with the Court were, oddly enough, formed with the Princess, not with the Prince of Wales. In 1806 Scott dined with the Princess of Wales at Blackheath, and spoke of his invitation as a great honour. He wrote a tribute to her father, the Duke of Brunswick, in the introduction to one of the cantos of Marmion, and received from the Princess a silver vase in acknowledgment of this passage in the poem. Scott’s relations with the Prince Regent seem to have begun in an offer to Scott of the Laureateship in the summer of 1813, an offer which Scott would have found it very difficult to accept, so strongly did his pride revolt at the idea of having to commemorate in verse, as an official duty, all conspicuous incidents affecting the throne. But he was at the time of the offer in the thick of his first difficulties on account of Messrs. John Ballantyne and Co., and it was only the Duke of Buccleuch’s guarantee of 4000_l._—a guarantee subsequently
“Our King, too—our
Princess,—I dare not say more, sir,—
May Providence watch them with mercy and might!
While there’s one Scottish hand that can
wag a claymore, sir,
They shall ne’er want a friend to stand
up for their right.
Be damn’d he that dare not—
For my part I’ll spare not
To beauty afflicted a tribute to give;
Fill it up steadily,
Drink it off readily,
Here’s to the Princess, and long may
she live.”
But whoever “stood up” for the Princess’s right, certainly Scott did not do so after his intimacy with the Prince Regent began. He mentioned her only with severity, and in one letter at least, written to his brother, with something much coarser than severity;[45] but the king’s similar vices did not at all alienate him from what at least had all the appearance of a deep personal devotion to his sovereign. The first baronet whom George IV. made on succeeding to the throne, after his long Regency, was Scott, who not only accepted the honour gratefully, but dwelt with extreme pride on the fact that it was offered to him by the king himself, and was in no way due to the prompting of any minister’s advice. He wrote to Joanna Baillie on hearing of the Regent’s intention—for the offer was made by the Regent at the end of 1818, though it was not actually conferred till after George’s accession, namely, on the 30th March, 1820,—“The Duke of Buccleuch and Scott of Harden, who, as the heads of my clan and the sources of my gentry, are good judges of what I ought to do, have both given me their earnest opinion to accept of an honour directly derived from the source of honour, and neither begged nor bought, as is the usual fashion. Several of my ancestors bore the title in the seventeenth century, and, were it of consequence, I have no reason to be ashamed of the decent and respectable persons who connect me with that period when they carried into the field, like Madoc,
“The Crescent at whose
gleam the Cambrian oft,
Cursing his perilous tenure,
wound his horn,”
so that, as a gentleman, I may stand on as good a footing as other new creations."[46] Why the honour was any greater for coming from such a king as George, than it would have been if it had been suggested by Lord Sidmouth, or even Lord Liverpool,—or half as great as if Mr. Canning had proposed it, it is not easy to conceive. George was a fair judge of literary merit, but not one to be compared for a moment with that great orator and wit; and as to his being the fountain of honour, there was so much dishonour of which the king was certainly the fountain too, that I do not think it was very easy for two fountains both springing from such a person to have flowed quite unmingled. George justly prided himself on Sir Walter Scott’s having been the first creation of his reign, and I think the event showed that the poet was the fountain of much more honour for the king, than the king was for the poet.
When George came to Edinburgh in 1822, it was Sir Walter who acted virtually as the master of the ceremonies, and to whom it was chiefly due that the visit was so successful. It was then that George clad his substantial person for the first time in the Highland costume—to wit, in the Steuart Tartans—and was so much annoyed to find himself outvied by a wealthy alderman, Sir William Curtis, who had gone and done likewise, and, in his equally grand Steuart Tartans, seemed a kind of parody of the king. The day on which the king arrived, Tuesday, 14th of August, 1822, was also the day on which Scott’s most intimate friend, William Erskine, then Lord Kinnedder, died. Yet Scott went on board the royal yacht, was most graciously received by George, had his health drunk by the king in a bottle of Highland whiskey, and with a proper show of devoted loyalty entreated to be allowed to retain the glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health. The request was graciously acceded to, but let it be pleaded on Scott’s behalf, that on reaching home and finding there his friend Crabbe the poet, he sat down on the royal gift, and crushed it to atoms. One would hope that he was really thinking more even of Crabbe, and much more of Erskine, than of the royal favour for which he had appeared, and doubtless had really believed himself, so grateful. Sir Walter retained his regard for the king, such as it was, to the last, and even persuaded himself that George’s death would be a great political calamity for the nation. And really I cannot help thinking that Scott believed more in the king, than he did in his friend George Canning. Assuredly, greatly as he admired Canning, he condemned him more and more as Canning grew more liberal, and sometimes speaks of his veerings in that direction with positive asperity. George, on the other hand, who believed more in number one than in any other number, however large, became much more conservative after he became Regent than he was before,
[Footnote 45: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 229-30.]
[Footnote 46: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 13, 14.]
SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN.
Scott usually professed great ignorance of politics, and did what he could to hold aloof from a world in which his feelings were very easily heated, while his knowledge was apt to be very imperfect. But now and again, and notably towards the close of his life, he got himself mixed up in politics, and I need hardly say that it was always on the Tory, and generally on the red-hot Tory, side. His first hasty intervention in politics was the song I have just referred to on Lord Melville’s acquittal, during the short Whig administration of 1806. In fact Scott’s comparative abstinence from politics was due, I believe, chiefly to the fact that during almost the whole of his literary life, Tories and not Whigs were in power. No sooner was any reform proposed, any abuse threatened, than Scott’s eager Conservative spirit flashed up. Proposals were made in 1806 for changes—and, as it was thought, reforms—in the Scotch Courts of Law, and Scott immediately saw something like national calamity in the prospect. The mild proposals in question were discussed at a meeting of the Faculty of Advocates, when Scott made a speech longer than he had ever before delivered, and animated by a “flow and energy of eloquence” for which those who were accustomed to hear his debating speeches were quite unprepared. He walked home between two of the reformers, Mr. Jeffrey and another, when his companions began to compliment him on his eloquence, and to speak playfully of its subject. But Scott was in no mood for playfulness. “No, no,” he exclaimed, “’tis no laughing
But though Sir Walter persuaded himself that his Conservatism was all founded in legitimate distrust of reckless change, there is evidence, I think, that at times at least it was due to elements less noble. The least creditable incident in the story of his political life—which Mr. Lockhart, with his usual candour, did not conceal—was the bitterness with which he resented a most natural and reasonable Parliamentary opposition to an appointment which he had secured for his favourite brother, Tom. In 1810 Scott appointed his brother Tom, who had failed as a Writer to the Signet, to a place vacant under himself as Clerk of Session. He had not given him the best place vacant, because he thought it his duty to appoint an official who had grown grey in the service, but he gave Tom Scott this man’s place, which was worth about 250_l._ a year. In the meantime Tom Scott’s affairs did not render it convenient for him to be come-at-able, and he absented himself, while they were being settled, in the Isle of Man. Further, the Commission on the Scotch system of judicature almost immediately reported that his office was one of supererogation, and ought to be abolished; but, to soften the blow, they proposed to allow him a pension of 130_l._ per annum. This proposal was discussed with some natural jealousy in the House of Lords. Lord Lauderdale thought that when Tom Scott was appointed, it must have been pretty evident that the Commission would propose to abolish his office, and that the appointment therefore should not have been made. “Mr. Thomas Scott,” he said, “would have 130_l._ for life as an indemnity for an office the duties of which he never had performed, while those clerks who had laboured for twenty years had no adequate remuneration.” Lord Holland supported this very reasonable and moderate view of the case; but
One more illustration of Scott’s political Conservatism, and I may leave his political life, which was not indeed his strong side, though, as with all sides of Scott’s nature, it had an energy and spirit all his own. On the subject of Catholic Emancipation he took a peculiar view. As he justly said, he hated bigotry, and would have left the Catholics quite alone, but for the great claims of their creed to interfere with political life. And even so, when the penal laws were once abolished, he would have abolished also the representative disabilities, as quite useless, as well as very irritating when the iron system of effective repression had ceased. But he disapproved of the abolition of the political parts of the penal laws. He thought they would have stamped out Roman Catholicism; and whether that were just or unjust, he thought it would have been a great national service. “As for Catholic Emancipation,” he wrote to Southey in 1807, “I am not, God knows, a bigot in religious matters, nor a friend to persecution; but if a particular set of religionists are ipso facto connected with foreign politics, and placed under the spiritual direction of a class of priests, whose unrivalled dexterity and activity are increased by the rules which detach them from the rest of the world—I humbly think that we may be excused from entrusting to them those places in the State where the influence of such a clergy, who act under the direction of a passive tool of our worst foe, is likely to be attended with the most fatal consequences. If a gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of gunpowder in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may at least be permitted to exclude him from the seat next to the fire."[49] And in relation to the year 1825, when Scott visited Ireland, Mr. Lockhart writes, “He on all occasions expressed manfully his belief that the best thing for Ireland would have been never to relax the strictly political enactments of the penal laws, however harsh these might appear. Had they been kept in vigour for another half-century, it was his conviction that Popery would have been all but extinguished in Ireland. But he thought that after admitting Romanists to the elective franchise, it was a vain notion that they could be permanently or advantageously deterred from using that franchise in favour of those of their own persuasion.”
In his diary in 1829 he puts the same view still more strongly:—“I cannot get myself to feel at all anxious about the Catholic question. I cannot see the use of fighting about the platter, when you have let them snatch the meat off it. I hold Popery to be such a mean and degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed before 1780. They must and would, in course of time, have smothered Popery; and I confess that I should have seen the old lady of Babylon’s mouth stopped with pleasure. But now that you
[Footnote 47: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 328.]
[Footnote 48: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, x. 47.]
[Footnote 49: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 34.]
[Footnote 50: Ibid., ix. 305.]
SCOTT IN ADVERSITY.
With the year 1825 came a financial crisis, and Constable began to tremble for his solvency. From the date of his baronetcy Sir Walter had launched out into a considerable increase of expenditure. He got plans on a rather large scale in 1821 for the increase of Abbotsford, which were all carried out. To meet his expenses in this and other ways he received Constable’s bills for “four unnamed works of fiction,” of which he had not written a line, but which came to exist in time, and were called Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan’s Well, and Redgauntlet. Again, in the very year before the crash, 1825, he married his eldest son, the heir to the title, to a young lady who was herself an heiress, Miss Jobson of Lochore, when Abbotsford and its estates were settled, with the reserve of 10,000_l._, which Sir Walter took power to charge on the property for purposes of business. Immediately afterwards he purchased a captaincy in the King’s Hussars for his son, which cost him 3500_l._ Nor were the obligations he incurred on his own account, or
As Scott had always forestalled his income,—spending the purchase-money of his poems and novels before they were written,—such a failure as this, at the age of fifty-five, when all the freshness of his youth was gone out of him, when he saw his son’s prospects blighted as well as his own, and knew perfectly that James Ballantyne, unassisted by him, could never hope to pay any fraction of the debt worth mentioning, would have been paralysing, had he not been a man of iron nerve, and of a pride and courage hardly ever equalled. Domestic calamity, too, was not far off. For two years he had been watching the failure of his wife’s health with increasing anxiety, and as calamities seldom come single, her illness took a most serious form at the very time when the blow fell, and she died within four months of the failure. Nay, Scott was himself unwell at the critical moment, and was taking sedatives which discomposed his brain. Twelve days before the final failure,—which was announced to him on the 17th January, 1826,—he enters in his diary, “Much alarmed. I had walked till twelve with Skene and Russell, and then sat down to my work. To my horror and surprise I could neither write nor spell, but put down one word for another, and wrote nonsense. I was much overpowered at the same time and could not conceive the reason. I fell asleep, however, in my chair, and slept for two hours. On my waking my head was clearer, and I began to recollect that last night I had taken the anodyne left for the purpose by Clarkson, and being disturbed in the course of the night, I had not slept
There is nothing in its way in the whole of English biography more impressive than the stoical extracts from Scott’s diary which note the descent of this blow. Here is the anticipation of the previous day: “Edinburgh, January 16th.—Came through cold roads to as cold news. Hurst and Robinson have suffered a bill to come back upon Constable, which, I suppose, infers the ruin of both houses. We shall soon see. Dined with the Skenes.” And here is the record itself: “January 17th.—James Ballantyne this morning, good honest fellow, with a visage as black as the crook. He hopes no salvation; has, indeed, taken measures to stop. It is hard, after having fought such a battle. I have apologized for not attending the Royal Society Club, who have a gaudeamus on this day, and seemed to count much on my being the praeses. My old acquaintance Miss Elizabeth Clerk, sister of Willie, died suddenly. I cannot choose but wish it had been Sir W. S., and yet the feeling is unmanly. I have Anne, my wife, and Charles to look after. I felt rather sneaking as I came home from the Parliament-house—felt as if I were liable monstrari digito in no very pleasant way. But this must be borne cum coeteris; and, thank God, however uncomfortable, I do not feel despondent."[51] On the following day, the 18th January, the day after the blow, he records a bad night, a wish that the next two days were over, but that “the worst is over,” and on the same day he set about making notes for the magnum opus, as he called it—the complete edition of all the novels, with a new introduction and notes. On the 19th January, two days after the failure, he calmly resumed the composition of Woodstock—the novel on which he was then engaged—and completed, he says, “about twenty printed pages of it;” to which he adds that he had “a painful scene after dinner and another after supper, endeavouring to convince these poor creatures” [his wife and daughter] “that they must not look for miracles, but consider the misfortune as certain, and only to be lessened by patience and labour.” On the 21st January, after a number of business details, he quotes from Job, “Naked we entered the world and naked we leave it; blessed be the name of the Lord.” On the 22nd he says, “I feel neither dishonoured nor broken down by the bad, now truly bad, news I have received. I have walked my last in the domains I have planted—sat the last time in the halls I have built. But death would have taken them from me, if misfortune
The heaviest blow was, I think, the blow to his pride. Very early he begins to note painfully the different way in which different friends greet him, to remark that some smile as if to say, “think nothing about it, my lad, it is quite out of our thoughts;” that others adopt an affected gravity, “such as one sees and despises at a funeral,” and the best-bred “just shook hands and went on.” He writes to Mr. Morritt with a proud indifference, clearly to some extent simulated:—“My womenkind will be the greater sufferers, yet even they look cheerily forward; and, for myself, the blowing off of my hat on a stormy day has given me more uneasiness."[53] To Lady Davy he writes truly enough:—“I beg my humblest compliments to Sir Humphrey, and tell him, Ill Luck, that direful chemist, never put into his crucible a more indissoluble piece of stuff than your affectionate cousin and sincere well-wisher, Walter Scott."[54] When his Letters of Malachi Malagrowther came out he writes:—“I am glad of this bruilzie, as far as I am concerned; people will not dare talk of me as an object of pity—no more ‘poor-manning.’ Who asks how many punds Scots the old champion had in his pocket when
’He set a bugle to his
mouth,
And blew so loud
and shrill,
The trees in greenwood shook
thereat,
Sae loud rang
every hill.’
This sounds conceited enough, yet is not far from truth."[55] His dread of pity is just the same when his wife dies:—“Will it be better,” he writes, “when left to my own feelings, I see the whole world pipe and dance around me? I think it will. Their sympathy intrudes on my present affliction.” Again, on returning for the first time from Edinburgh to Abbotsford after Lady Scott’s funeral:—“I again took possession of the family bedroom and my widowed couch. This was a sore trial, but it was necessary not to blink such a resolution. Indeed I do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be beaten.” And again:—“I have a secret pride—I fancy it will be so most truly termed—which impels me to mix with my distresses strange snatches of mirth, ‘which have no mirth in them.’"[56]
But though pride was part of Scott’s strength, pride alone never enabled any man to struggle so vigorously and so unremittingly as he did to meet the obligations he had incurred. When he was in Ireland in the previous year, a poor woman who had offered to sell him gooseberries, but whose offer had not been accepted, remarked, on seeing his daughter give some pence to a beggar, that they might as well give her an alms too, as she was “an old struggler.” Sir Walter was struck with the expression, and said that it deserved to become classical, as a name for those who take arms against a sea of troubles, instead of yielding to the waves. It was certainly a name the full meaning of which he himself deserved. His house in Edinburgh was sold, and he had to go into a certain Mrs. Brown’s lodgings, when he was discharging his duties as Clerk of Session. His wife was dead. His estate was conveyed to trustees for the benefit of his creditors till such time as he should pay off Ballantyne and Co’s. debt, which of course in his lifetime he never did. Yet between January, 1826, and January, 1828, he earned for his creditors very nearly 40,000_l._ Woodstock sold for 8228_l._, “a matchless sale,” as Sir Walter remarked, “for less than three months’ work.” The first two editions of The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, on which Mr. Lockhart says that Scott had spent the unremitting labour of about two years—labour involving a far greater strain on eyes and brain than his imaginative work ever caused him—sold for 18,000_l._ Had Sir Walter’s health lasted, he would have redeemed his obligations on behalf of Ballantyne and Co. within eight or nine years at most from the time of his failure. But what is more remarkable still, is that after his health failed he struggled on with little more than half a brain, but a whole will, to work while it was yet day, though the evening was dropping fast. Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous were really the compositions of a paralytic patient.
It was in September, 1830, that the first of these tales was begun. As early as the 15th February of that year he had had his first true paralytic seizure. He had been discharging his duties as clerk of session as usual, and received in the afternoon a visit from a lady friend of his, Miss Young, who was submitting to him some manuscript memoirs of her father, when the stroke came. It was but slight. He struggled against it with his usual iron power of will, and actually managed to stagger out of the room where the lady was sitting with him, into the drawing-room where his daughter was, but there he fell his full length on the floor. He was cupped, and fully recovered his speech during the course of the day, but Mr. Lockhart thinks that never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and terseness. A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began to be visible. In the course of the year he retired from his duties of clerk of session, and his publishers
When he dictated to Laidlaw,—for at this time he could hardly write himself for rheumatism in the hand,—he would frequently pause and look round him, like a man “mocked with shadows.” Then he bestirred himself with a great effort, rallied his force, and the style again flowed clear and bright, but not for long. The clouds would gather again, and the mental blank recur. This soon became visible to his publishers, who wrote discouragingly of the new novel—to Scott’s own great distress and irritation. The oddest feature in the matter was that his letters to them were full of the old terseness, and force, and caustic turns. On business he was as clear and keen as in his best days. It was only at his highest task, the task of creative work, that his cunning began to fail him. Here, for instance, are a few sentences written to Cadell, his publisher, touching this very point—the discouragement which James Ballantyne had been pouring on the new novel. Ballantyne, he says, finds fault with the subject, when what he really should have found fault with was the failing power of the author:—“James is, with many other kindly critics, perhaps in the predicament of an honest drunkard, when crop-sick the next morning, who does not ascribe the malady to the wine he has drunk, but to having tasted some particular dish at dinner which disagreed with his stomach.... I have lost, it is plain, the power of interesting the country, and ought, injustice to all parties, to retire while I have some credit. But this is an important step, and I will not be obstinate about it if it be necessary.... Frankly, I cannot think of flinging aside the half-finished volume, as if it were a corked bottle of wine.... I may, perhaps, take a trip to the Continent for a year or two, if I find Othello’s occupation gone, or rather Othello’s reputation."[57] And again, in a very able letter written on the 12th of December, 1830, to Cadell, he takes a view of the situation with as much calmness and imperturbability as if he were an outside spectator. “There were many circumstances in the matter which you and
But with the beginning of 1831 came new alarms. On January 5th Sir Walter enters in his diary,—“Very indifferent, with more awkward feelings than I can well bear up against. My voice sunk and my head strangely confused.” Still he struggled on. On the 31st January he went alone to Edinburgh to sign his will, and stayed at his bookseller’s (Cadell’s) house in Athol Crescent. A great snow-storm set in which kept him in Edinburgh and in Mr. Cadell’s house till the 9th February. One day while the snow was still falling heavily, Ballantyne reminded him that a motto was wanting for one of the chapters of Count Robert of Paris. He went to the window, looked out for a moment, and then wrote,—
“The storm increases; ’tis no sunny shower,
Foster’d in the moist breast of March or April,
Or such as parched summer cools his lips with.
Heaven’s windows are flung wide; the inmost deeps
Call, in hoarse greeting, one upon another;
On comes the flood, in all its foaming horrors,
And where’s the dike shall stop it?
The Deluge: a Poem.”
Clearly this failing imagination of Sir Walter’s was still a great deal more vivid than that of most men, with brains as sound as it ever pleased Providence to make them. But his troubles were not yet even numbered. The “storm increased,” and it was, as he said, “no sunny shower.” His lame leg became so painful that he had to get a mechanical apparatus to relieve him of some of the burden of supporting it. Then, on the 21st March, he was hissed at Jedburgh, as I have before said, for his vehement opposition to Reform. In April he had another stroke of paralysis which he now himself recognized as one. Still he struggled on at his novel. Under the date of May 6, 7, 8, he makes this entry in his diary:—“Here is a precious job. I have a formal remonstrance from those critical people, Ballantyne and Cadell, against the last volume of Count Robert, which is within a sheet of being finished. I suspect their opinion will be found to coincide with that of the public; at least it is not very different from my own. The blow is a stunning one, I suppose, for I scarcely feel it. It is singular, but it comes with as little surprise as if I had a remedy ready; yet God knows I am at sea in the dark, and the vessel leaky, I think, into the bargain. I cannot conceive that I have tied a knot with my tongue which my teeth cannot untie. We shall see. I have suffered terribly, that is the truth, rather in body than mind, and I often wish I could lie down and sleep without waking. But I will fight it out if I can."[58] The medical men with one accord tried to make him give up his novel-writing. But he smiled and put them by. He took up Count Robert of Paris again, and tried to recast it. On the 18th May he insisted on attending the election for Roxburghshire, to be held at Jedburgh, and in spite of the unmannerly reception he had met with in March, no dissuasion would keep him at home. He was saluted in the town with groans and blasphemies, and Sir Walter had to escape from Jedburgh by a back way to avoid personal violence. The cries of “Burk Sir Walter,” with which he was saluted on this occasion, haunted him throughout his illness and on his dying bed. At the Selkirk election it was Sir Walter’s duty as Sheriff to preside, and his family therefore made no attempt to dissuade him from his attendance. There he was so well known and loved, that in spite of his Tory views, he was not insulted, and the only man who made any attempt to hustle the Tory electors, was seized by Sir Walter with his own hand, as he got out of his carriage, and committed to prison without resistance till the election day was over.
A seton which had been ordered for his head, gave him some relief, and of course the first result was that he turned immediately to his novel-writing again, and began Castle Dangerous in July, 1831,—the last July but one which he was to see at all. He even made a little journey in company with Mr. Lockhart, in order to see the scene of the story he wished to tell, and on his return set to work with all his old vigour to finish his tale, and put the concluding touches to Count Robert of Paris. But his temper was no longer what it had been. He quarrelled with Ballantyne, partly for his depreciatory criticism of Count Robert of Paris, partly for his growing tendency to a mystic and strait-laced sort of dissent and his increasing Liberalism. Even Mr. Laidlaw and Scott’s children had much to bear. But he struggled on even to the end, and did not consent to try the experiment of a voyage and visit to Italy till his immediate work was done. Well might Lord Chief Baron Shepherd apply to Scott Cicero’s description of some contemporary of his own, who “had borne adversity wisely, who had not been broken by fortune, and who, amidst the buffets of fate, had maintained his dignity.” There was in Sir Walter, I think, at least as much of the Stoic as the Christian. But Stoic or Christian, he was a hero of the old, indomitable type. Even the last fragments of his imaginative power were all turned to account by that unconquerable will, amidst the discouragement of friends, and the still more disheartening doubts of his own mind. Like the headland stemming a rough sea, he was gradually worn away, but never crushed.
[Footnote 51: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 197.]
[Footnote 52: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 203-4.]
[Footnote 53: Ibid., viii. 235.]
[Footnote 54: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 238.]
[Footnote 55: viii. 277.]
[Footnote 56: viii. 347, 371, 381.]
[Footnote 57: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, x. 11, 12.]
[Footnote 58: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, x. 65-6.]
THE LAST YEAR.
In the month of September, 1831, the disease of the brain which had long been in existence must have made a considerable step in advance. For the first time the illusion seemed to possess Sir Walter that he had paid off all the debt for which he was liable, and that he was once more free to give as his generosity prompted. Scott sent Mr. Lockhart 50_l._ to save his grandchildren some slight inconvenience, and told another of his correspondents that he had “put his decayed fortune into as good a condition as he could desire.” It was well, therefore, that he had at last consented to try the effect of travel on his health,—not that he could hope to arrest by it such a disease as his, but that
’My eyes are dim with
childish tears,
My heart is idly
stirr’d,
For the same sound is in my
ears
Which in those
days I heard.
Thus fares it still in our
decay,
And yet the wiser
mind
Mourns less for what age takes
away
Than what it leaves
behind.’"[60]
Sir Walter’s memory, which, in spite of the slight failure of brain and the mild illusions to which, on the subject of his own prospects, he was now liable, had as yet been little impaired—indeed, he could still quote whole pages from all his favourite authors—must have recurred to those favourite Wordsworthian lines of his with singular force, as, with Wordsworth for his companion, he gazed on the refuge of the last Minstrel of his imagination for the last time, and felt in himself how much of joy in the sight, age had taken away, and how much, too, of the habit of expecting it, it had unfortunately left behind. Whether Sir Walter recalled this poem of Wordsworth’s on this occasion or not—and if he recalled it, his delight in giving pleasure would assuredly have led him to let Wordsworth know that he recalled it—the mood it paints was unquestionably that in which his last day at Abbotsford was passed. In the evening, referring to the journey which was to begin the next day, he remarked that Fielding and Smollett had been driven abroad by declining health, and that they had never returned; while Wordsworth—willing perhaps to bring out a brighter feature in the present picture—regretted that the last days of those two great novelists had not been surrounded by due marks of respect. With Sir Walter, as he well knew, it was different. The Liberal Government that he had so bitterly opposed were pressing on him signs of the honour in which he was held, and a ship of his Majesty’s navy had been placed at his disposal to take him to the Mediterranean. And Wordsworth himself added his own more durable token of reverence. As long as English poetry lives, Englishmen will know something of that last day of the last Minstrel at Newark:—
“Grave thoughts ruled
wide on that sweet day,
Their dignity
installing
In gentle bosoms, while sere
leaves
Were on the bough
or falling;
But breezes play’d,
and sunshine gleam’d
The forest to
embolden,
Redden’d the fiery hues,
and shot
Transparence through
the golden.
“For busy thoughts the
stream flow’d on
In foamy agitation;
And slept in many a crystal
pool
For quiet contemplation:
No public and no private care
The free-born
mind enthralling,
We made a day of happy hours,
Our happy days
recalling.
* * * * *
“And if, as Yarrow through
the woods
And down the meadow
ranging,
Did meet us with unalter’d
face,
Though we were
changed and changing;
If then some natural
shadow spread
Our inward prospect
over,
The soul’s deep valley
was not slow
Its brightness
to recover.
“Eternal blessings on
the Muse
And her divine
employment,
The blameless Muse who trains
her sons
For hope and calm
enjoyment;
Albeit sickness lingering
yet
Has o’er
their pillow brooded,
And care waylays their steps—a
sprite
Not easily eluded.
* * * * *
“Nor deem that localized
Romance
Plays false with
our affections;
Unsanctifies our tears—made
sport
For fanciful dejections:
Ah, no! the visions of the
past
Sustain the heart
in feeling
Life as she is—our
changeful Life
With friends and
kindred dealing.
“Bear witness ye, whose
thoughts that day
In Yarrow’s
groves were centred,
Who through the silent portal
arch
Of mouldering
Newark enter’d;
And clomb the winding stair
that once
Too timidly was
mounted
By the last Minstrel—not
the last!—
Ere he his tale
recounted.”
Thus did the meditative poetry, the day of which was not yet, do honour to itself in doing homage to the Minstrel of romantic energy and martial enterprise, who, with the school of poetry he loved, was passing away.
On the 23rd September Scott left Abbotsford, spending five days on his journey to London; nor would he allow any of the old objects of interest to be passed without getting out of the carriage to see them. He did not leave London for Portsmouth till the 23rd October, but spent the intervening time in London, where he took medical advice, and with his old shrewdness wheeled his chair into a dark corner during the physicians’ absence from the room to consult, that he might read their faces clearly on their return without their being able to read his. They recognized traces of brain disease, but Sir Walter was relieved by their comparatively favourable opinion, for he admitted that he had feared insanity, and therefore had “feared them.” On the 29th October he sailed for Malta, and on the 20th November Sir Walter insisted on being landed on a small volcanic island which had appeared four months previously, and which disappeared again in a few days, and on clambering about its crumbling lava, in spite of sinking at nearly every step almost up to his knees, in order that he might send a description of it to his old friend Mr. Skene. On the 22nd November he reached Malta, where he looked eagerly at the antiquities of the place, for he still hoped to write a novel—and, indeed, actually wrote one at Naples, which was never published, called The Siege of Malta—on the subject of the Knights of Malta, who had interested him so much in his youth. From Malta Scott went to Naples, which he reached on the 17th December, and where he found much pleasure in the society of Sir William Gell, an invalid like himself, but not one who, like himself, struggled against the admission of his infirmities, and refused to be carried when his own legs would not safely carry him. Sir William Gell’s dog delighted the old man; he would pat it and call it “Poor boy!” and confide to Sir William how he had at home “two very fine favourite dogs, so large that I am always afraid they look too large and too feudal for my diminished income.” In all his letters home he gave some injunction to Mr. Laidlaw about the poor people and the dogs.
On the 22nd of March, 1832, Goethe died, an event which made a great impression on Scott, who had intended to visit Weimar on his way back, on purpose to see Goethe, and this much increased his eager desire to return home. Accordingly on the 16th of April, the last day on which he made any entry in his diary, he quitted Naples for Rome, where he stayed long enough only to let his daughter see something of the place, and hurried off homewards on the 21st of May. In Venice he was still strong enough to insist on scrambling down into the dungeons adjoining the Bridge of Sighs; and at Frankfort he entered a bookseller’s shop, when the man brought out a lithograph of Abbotsford, and Scott remarking, “I know that already, sir,” left the shop unrecognized, more than ever craving for home. At Nimeguen, on the 9th of June, while in a steamboat on the Rhine, he had his most serious attack of apoplexy, but would not discontinue his journey, was lifted into an English steamboat at Rotterdam on the 11th of June, and arrived in London on the 13th. There he recognized his children, and appeared to expect immediate death, as he gave them repeatedly his most solemn blessing, but for the most part he lay at the St. James’s Hotel, in Jermyn Street, without any power to converse. There it was that Allan Cunningham, on walking home one night, found a group of working men at the corner of the street, who stopped him and asked, “as if there was but one death-bed in London, ’Do you know, sir, if this is the street where he is lying?’” According to the usual irony of destiny, it was while the working men were doing him this hearty and unconscious homage, that Sir Walter, whenever disturbed by the noises of the street, imagined himself at the polling-booth of Jedburgh, where the people had cried out, “Burk Sir Walter.” And it was while lying here,—only now and then uttering a few words,—that Mr. Lockhart says of him, “He expressed his will as determinedly as ever, and expressed it with the same apt and good-natured irony that he was wont to use.”
Sir Walter’s great and urgent desire was to return to Abbotsford, and at last his physicians yielded. On the 7th July he was lifted into his carriage, followed by his trembling and weeping daughters, and so taken to a steamboat, where the captain gave up his private cabin—a cabin on deck—for his use. He remained unconscious of any change till after his arrival in Edinburgh, when, on the 11th July, he was placed again in his carriage, and remained in it quite unconscious during the first two stages of the journey to Tweedside. But as the carriage entered the valley of the Gala, he began to look about him. Presently he murmured a name or two, “Gala water, surely,—Buckholm,—Torwoodlee.” When the outline of the Eildon hills came in view, Scott’s excitement was great, and when his eye caught the towers of Abbotsford, he sprang up with a cry of delight, and while the towers remained in sight it took his physician, his son-in-law, and his
After this Sir Walter never left his room. Occasionally he dropped off into delirium, and the old painful memory,—that cry of “Burk Sir Walter,”—might be again heard on his lips. He lingered, however, till the 21st September,—more than two months from the day of his reaching home, and a year from the day of Wordsworth’s arrival at Abbotsford before his departure for the Mediterranean, with only one clear interval of consciousness, on Monday, the 17th September. On that day Mr. Lockhart was called to Sir Walter’s bedside with the news that he had awakened in a state of composure and consciousness, and wished to see him. “‘Lockhart,’ he said, ’I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man,—be virtuous,—be religious,—be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.’ He paused, and I said, ‘Shall I send for Sophia and Anne?’ ‘No,’ said he, ’don’t disturb them. Poor souls! I know they were up all night. God bless you all!’” With this he sank into a very tranquil sleep, and, indeed, he scarcely afterwards gave any sign of consciousness except for an instant on the arrival of his sons. And so four days afterwards, on the day of the autumnal equinox in 1832, at half-past one in the afternoon, on a glorious autumn day, with every window wide open, and the ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles distinctly audible in his room, he passed away, and “his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.” He died a month after completing his sixty-first year. Nearly seven years earlier, on the 7th December, 1825, he had in his diary taken a survey of his own health in relation to the age reached by his father and other members of his family, and had stated as the result of his considerations, “Square the odds and good night, Sir Walter, about sixty. I care not if I leave my name unstained and my family property settled. Sat est vixisse.” Thus he lived just a year—but a year of gradual death—beyond his own calculation.
[Footnote 59: Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 63.]
[Footnote 60: The Antiquary, chap. x.]
THE END OF THE STRUGGLE.
Sir Walter certainly left his “name unstained,” unless the serious mistakes natural to a sanguine temperament such as his, are to be counted as stains upon his name; and if they are, where among the sons of men would you find many unstained names as noble as his with such a stain upon it? He was not only sensitively honourable in motive, but, when he found what evil his sanguine temper had worked, he used his gigantic powers to repair it, as Samson used his great strength to repair the mischief he had inadvertently done to Israel. But with all his exertions he had not, when death came upon him, cleared off much more than half his obligations. There was still 54,000_l._ to pay. But of this, 22,000_l._ was secured in an insurance on his life, and there were besides a thousand pounds or two in the hands of the trustees, which had not been applied to the extinction of the debt. Mr. Cadell, his publisher, accordingly advanced the remaining 30,000_l._ on the security of Sir Walter’s copyrights, and on the 21st February, 1833, the general creditors were paid in full, and Mr. Cadell remained the only creditor of the estate. In February, 1847, Sir Walter’s son, the second baronet, died childless; and in May, 1847, Mr. Cadell gave a discharge in full of all claims, including the bond for 10,000_l._ executed by Sir Walter during the struggles of Constable and Co. to prevent a failure, on the transfer to him of all the copyrights of Sir Walter, including “the results of some literary exertions of the sole surviving executor,” which I conjecture to mean the copyright of the admirable biography of Sir Walter Scott in ten volumes, to which I have made such a host of references—probably the most perfect specimen of a biography rich in great materials, which our language contains. And thus, nearly fifteen years after Sir Walter’s death, the debt which, within six years, he had more than half discharged, was at last, through the value of the copyrights he had left behind him, finally extinguished, and the small estate of Abbotsford left cleared.
Sir Walter’s effort to found a new house was even less successful than the effort to endow it. His eldest son died childless. In 1839 he went to Madras, as Lieutenant-Colonel of the 15th Hussars, and subsequently commanded that regiment. He was as much beloved by the officers of his regiment as his father had been by his own friends, and was in every sense an accomplished soldier, and one whose greatest anxiety it was to promote the welfare of the privates as well as of the officers of his regiment. He took great pains in founding a library for the soldiers of his corps, and his only legacy out of his own family was one of 100_l._ to this library. The cause of his death was his having exposed himself rashly to the sun in a tiger-hunt, in August, 1846;
There is something of irony in such a result of the Herculean labours of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott. When fifteen years after his death the estate was at length freed from debt, all his own children and the eldest of his grandchildren were dead; and now forty-six years have elapsed, and there only remains one girl of his descendants to borrow his name and live in the halls of which he was so proud. And yet this, and this only, was wanting to give something of the grandeur of tragedy to the end of Scott’s great enterprise. He valued his works little compared with the house and lands which they were to be the means of gaining for his descendants; yet every end for which he struggled so gallantly is all but lost, while his works have gained more of added lustre from the losing battle which he fought so long, than they could ever have gained from his success.
What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen, had the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was. Generous, large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivalled popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the current of a stream,—these are characteristics, which, even when enhanced as they were in his case, by the
“Who ever with a frolic
welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine,
and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,”
among those who have been able to display—
“One equal temper of
heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate,
but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield.”
And it was because the man was so much greater than the ends for which he strove, that there is a sort of grandeur in the tragic fate which denied them to him, and yet exhibited to all the world the infinite superiority of the striver himself to the toy he was thus passionately craving.