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Title: Sir Walter Scott
Author: Lang, Andrew
Language: English
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LITERARY LIVES
EDITED BY
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL
SIR WALTER SCOTT
LITERARY LIVES
Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D.
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White.
COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmund Gosse.
ERNEST RENAN. By William Barry, D.D.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By Clement K. Shorter.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Andrew Lang.
_IN PREPARATION_
R. H. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll.
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden.
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney.
Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00 net. Postage 10 cts.
[Illustration: =Sir Walter Scott.=
From the painting by John Graham Gilbert.]
Literary Lives
SIR WALTER SCOTT
BY
ANDREW LANG
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published, March, 1906
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
TO
THE HON. MRS. MAXWELL-SCOTT
PREFACE
If all reading mankind had time to read Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, a
brief volume on Sir Walter would be a thing without excuse. I am
informed, however, by the Editor of this Series that the appreciation of
Time, in our age, does not permit Lockhart to be universally read. I
have therefore tried to compress as much as I may of the essence of
Lockhart’s great book into small space, with a few additions from other
sources. In such efforts one compiler will present matter for which
another cannot find room. The volume differs from its excellent
predecessors by the late Mr. Hutton, and by Mr. Saintsbury, in being the
work of one who comes from Sir Walter’s own countryside, and has worked
over much of his historical ground, and over most of the MS. materials
which were handled by Lockhart.
The late regretted Mr. David Carnegie, after twice crossing the
Australian desert, summed up his results in the saying that no explorer
need go thither again. The Abbotsford MSS. are not a desert, but
Lockhart has omitted nothing in them which is of value, nothing which
bore essentially on his theme. No explorer need go thither again, save
to confirm his appreciation of the merits of Lockhart’s work. All other
books on Scott are but its satellites, and their glow, be it brighter or
fainter, is a borrowed radiance.
ST. ANDREWS, December 25, 1905.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
ANCESTRY--CHILDHOOD--YOUTH--FIRST LOVE--MARRIAGE 1
CHAPTER II
EARLY MARRIED LIFE--BALLAD COLLECTING--“LAY
OF THE LAST MINSTREL”--“MARMION” 27
CHAPTER III
“QUARTERLY REVIEW”--“LADY OF THE LAKE”--“ROKEBY”--BALLANTYNE
AFFAIRS 59
CHAPTER IV
THE “WAVERLEY” NOVELS 83
CHAPTER V
“GUY MANNERING” TO “KENILWORTH” 110
CHAPTER VI
NOVELS--FINANCIAL RUIN--DEATH 157
CONCLUSION 205
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by John
Graham Gilbert _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Sir Walter Scott, after the Painting by Sir Henry
Raeburn 26
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by Sir David
Wilkie, R.A. 54
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by Sir John
Watson Gordon, R.A. 54
Sir Walter Scott and his Friends, from the Painting
by Thomas Faed, R.A. 80
The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820 108
“The Abbotsford Family,” after the Painting by
Sir David Wilkie, R.A. 134
Abbotsford 158
Sir Walter Scott, after the Painting by Sir Thomas
Lawrence 186
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by Sir Edwin
Landseer, R.A. 198
SIR WALTER SCOTT
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY, CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, FIRST LOVE, MARRIAGE
The visitor to Abbotsford, looking up at the ceiling of the hall,
beholds, in the painted shields, the heraldic record of the “heredity”
of Sir Walter Scott. In his time the doctrine of heredity had not won
its way into the realm of popular science, but no man was more
interested in pedigree than the Laird. His ancestors were part of
himself, though he was _not_ descended from a “Duke of Buccleuch of the
fourteenth century,” as the _Dictionary of National Biography_ declares,
with English innocence. Three of the shields are occupied by white
cloudlets on a blue ground; the arms of certain of the Rutherford
ancestors, cadets of Hunthill, could not be traced. For the rest, if we
are among those who believe that genius comes from the Celtic race
alone, we learn with glee that the poet was not without his share of
Celtic blood. He descended, on the female side, from the Macdougals of
Makerston, and the Macdougals are perhaps the oldest family in
Scotland, are certainly among the four or five oldest families. But they
stood for the English cause against Bruce, a sorrow, no doubt, to their
famous descendant. The wife, again, of Scott’s great grandfather,
“Beardie” the Jacobite, was a Miss Campbell of Silvercraigs, counting
cousins with the Campbells, (who are at least as much Douglases as
Campbells) of Blythswood. Finally, the name of Scott, I presume, was
originally borne by some infinitely remote forefather, who was called
“The Scot” because he was Irish by birth though his family was settled,
first in Lanarkshire, later among the Cymri and English of Ettrickdale
and Teviotdale. So much for the Celtic side of Sir Walter.
[Sidenote: ANCESTRY]
On the other hand, the Rutherfords--his mother was a Rutherford--are
probably sprung from the Anglo-Norman _noblesse_ who came into Scotland
with David I, and obtained the lands whence they derive their name. They
are an older family, on the Border, than the Scotts, who are not on
record in Rankilburn before 1296. One of them (from whose loins also
comes the present genealogist) frequently signs (or at all events seals)
the charters of David I about 1140. The Swintons, famous in our early
wars, and the Haliburtons, cadets of Dirleton, have a similar origin, so
that in Scott met the blood of Highlands and Lowlands, Celtic,
Teutonic, and Norman. “There are few in Scotland,” says Lockhart, “under
the titled nobility, who could trace their blood to so many stocks of
historical distinction.” All Scottish men have a share in Sir Walter.
The people of Scotland, “gentle” or “simple,” have ever set store on
such ancestral connexions, and they certainly were a source of great
pleasure to Scott.
His mind was, in the first place, historical; rooted in and turning
towards the past, as the only explanation of the present. Before he
could read with ease, say at the age of four or five, he pored over
Scott of Satchells’ rhyming _True History of several Honourable Families
of the Right Honourable Name of Scot_. “I mind _spelling_ these lines,”
he said, when Constable gave him a copy of the book, in 1818. Indeed, he
was always “spelling” the legends and history of his race, while he was
making it famous by his pen, since accident forbade him to make it
glorious by his sword. One legend of the Scotts of Harden, the most
celebrated of all, is, I think, a _Märchen_, or popular tale, the story
of Muckle Mou’d Meg and her forced marriage with young Harden. Suppose
the unlikely case that William Scott, younger, of Harden, did undertake
a long expedition to seize the cattle of Murray of Elibank, on the upper
Tweed. I deem this most improbable, in the reign of James VI, when he
was seated on the English throne. But suppose it occurred, who can
believe that Elibank would dare to threaten young Harden with hanging on
the Elibank doom tree? Even if Scots law would have borne him out,
Elibank dared not face the feud of the strongest name on the Border.
Thus it is not to be credited that young Harden chose “Muckle Mou’d
Meg,” Elibank’s daughter, as an alternative to the gallows. Moreover,
the legend, I am informed, recurs in a province of Germany. If so, the
tale may be much older than the Harden-Elibank marriage. The contract of
that marriage is extant, and is not executed “on the parchment of a
drum,” as Lockhart romantically avers. Scott, better than most men, must
have known how more than doubtsome is the old legend.
He let no family tradition drop: rather, he gave a sword and a cocked
hat, in his own phrase, to each story. The ballad of _Kinmont Willie_,
the tale of the most daring and bloodless of romantic exploits,
certainly owes much to him, and he “brought out with a wet finger” (in
Randolph’s phrase) all the dim exploits and fading legends of Tweed,
Ettrick, Ail, Yarrow, and Teviot; streams, Dr. John Brown says,
“_fabulosi_ as ever was Hydaspes.”
[Sidenote: ANCESTRY]
The son of a Writer to the Signet, Scott was grandson of a speculative
Border yeoman, who laid out the entire sum necessary for stocking his
farm on one mare, and sold her at a double advantage. Possibly Scott may
have inherited the sanguine disposition of this adventurer. He was born
to make all the world familiar with the life and history of an ancient
kingdom, that, as a kingdom, had ceased to be, and with adventures
rapidly winning their way to oblivion.
Just when Scotland, seventy years after she was “no longer Scotland”
(according to Lockhart of Carnwath), merged into England, Nature sent
Burns to make Scottish peasant life immortal, and Scott to give
immortality to chivalrous Scottish romance. There are traces of love of
history and traces of intellectual ability in Scott’s nearest kin. His
lawyer father, born in 1729, was naturally more devoted to “analysing
abstruse feudal doctrines,” and to studying “Knox’s and Spottiswoode’s
folios” of the history of Kirk and State, than to the ordinary business
of his calling. Scott’s maternal uncle, Dr. Rutherford, “was one of the
best chemists in Europe”--we have Sir Walter’s word for it. Scott’s
mother was not only fond of the best literature, but had a memory for
points of history and genealogy almost as good as his own. “She
connected a long period of time with the present generation.” Scott
wrote when she died (1819), “for she remembered, and had often spoken
with a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar....” She
knew all about the etiquette of the covenanting conventicles under the
Restoration, when the lairds’ wives, little to the comfort of their
lords, sat on their saddles on the ground, listening to preachers like
Walsh or Cameron.
[Sidenote: CHILDHOOD]
Fortunate indeed was Scott in his mother, who did not spoil him, though
he must have been her favourite child. His eldest brother who attained
maturity not only fought under the glorious Rodney, but “had a strong
talent for literature,” and composed admirable verses. His brother
Thomas was credited by Sir Walter with considerable genius, and was put
forward by popular rumour as the author of the _Waverley_ novels. His
only surviving sister, Anne (died 1801), “lived in an ideal world, which
she had framed to herself by the force of imagination.” Scott himself
was well aware of his own tendency “to live in fantasy,” in the kingdom
of dreams, and in the end he discovered that in the kingdom of dreams he
had actually been living, as regards his own affairs, despite his strong
practical sense, and “the thread of the attorney” in his nature. His
genius, in short, was the flower and consummation of qualities existing
in his family; while it was associated, though we may presume not
casually, with such maladies as are current amongst families in
general. There would be genius abundantly, if genius were merely a
“sport” of disease.
At Abbotsford, in Sir Walter’s desk, are six bright locks of the hair of
six brothers and sisters of his, who were born and died between 1759 and
1766, an Anne, a Jean, and a Walter, two Roberts, and a John. These
early deaths were suspected to be due to the air of the old house in
College Wynd, built on the site of Kirk o’ Field, where Darnley was
murdered, perhaps on the site of the churchyard. But it was not till
after the birth of the second Walter (August 15, 1771) that his father
flitted to the pleasant wide George’s Square, beside the Meadows, and
thereafter no children of the house died in childhood.
His own life-long malady was perhaps of an osseous nature. An American
specialist has advanced the theory that “the peak”, the singularly tall
and narrow head of Scott (“better be Peveril of the Peak than Peter of
the Paunch,” he said to “Lord Peter”), was due to the early closure of
the sutures of the skull. The brain had to force a way upwards, not
laterally! However that may be, at the age of eighteen months, after
gambolling one night like a _fey_ child, little Walter was seized with a
teething fever, and, on the fourth day, was found to have lost the use
of his right leg. The malady, never cured entirely, but always the
cause of lameness, probably deprived Wellington of a gallant officer,
for Scott was by nature a man of action. But Wellington had lieutenants
enough, and the accident made possible the career of a poet.
“The making of him” began at once, for the child was removed to the
grandpaternal farm of Sandy Knowe, beneath the crags whence the Keep of
Smailholme (in _The Eve of St. John_) looks over “Tweed’s fair flood,
and all down Teviotdale,” over the wide plain and blue hills that had
seen so many battles and border frays. Here he was “first conscious of
existence”--or first remembered his consciousness--swathed in the skin
of a newly slain sheep, and crawling along the floor after a watch
dangled by his kinsman, Sir George Macdougal of Makerstoun.
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.
[Sidenote: CHILDHOOD]
Sandyknowe was indeed “fit nurse for a poetic child,” “a sweet tempered
bairn, a darling with all about the house.” A miniature of three years
later shows us the tall forehead, the frank and eager air, the force and
charm of the child, certainly “a comely creature,” who, left alone among
the hills, “clapped his hands at the lightning, and cried ‘bonny, bonny’
at every flash.” He was “as eager to hear of the defeat of Washington,
as if I had had some deep and personal cause of antipathy to him”; while
he was already under the charm of the King over the Water, Charles,
lingering out his life at Florence, not answering the petition that he
would raise the standard among the faithful in America. “I remember
detesting the name of Cumberland with more than infant hatred,” for he
had heard, from an eye-witness, the story of the execution of the
Highland prisoners at Carlisle (1746). He learned by heart his first
ballad, a modern figment, _Hardiknute_; he shouted it through the house,
and disturbed an old divine who had seen Pope, and the wits of Queen
Anne’s time. It was not easy to keep young Walter “at the bit,” but his
aunt soon taught him “to read brawly.” He himself says that he “acquired
the rudiments of reading” at Bath, whither he was carried between the
ages of four and six.
Just afterwards, at Prestonpans, he made the acquaintance of a veteran
bearing the deathless name of Dalgetty, and of a Mr. Constable, in part
the original of Monkbarns, in _The Antiquary_, “the first person who
told me about Falstaff and Hotspur.” Returned to Edinburgh, he read
Homer (in Pope’s version), and the Border Ballads, with his mother, who
had “a strong turn to study poetry and works of devotion”--no poetry on
Sundays, a day “which in the end did none of us any good.”
We see “the making of him.” Before he was six Sir Walter was “made”; he
was a bold rider, a lover of nature and of the past, he was a Jacobite,
and the friend of epic and ballad. In short, as Mrs. Cockburn (a
Rutherford of the beautiful old house of Fairnalie-on-Tweed) remarked
before he was six, “he has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever
saw.... He reads like a Garrick.” No doubt his mother saw and kept these
things in her heart, but we do not hear that others of the family
recognized a genius in a boy who was a bookworm at home, and idle at
school.
He once, at this period, said a priggish thing, which Lockhart knew, but
has omitted. Some one, finding him at his book asked (as people do),
“Walter, why don’t you play with the other boys in the Square?”
“Oh, you can’t think how ignorant these boys are!”
[Sidenote: YOUTH]
One deeply sympathizes, but later he found nobody from whom he could not
learn something, were it but about “bend leather.”
Such were, in the old French phrase of chivalry, _Les Enfances
Gualtier_. Now the technical Age of Innocence was past, and, in October
1778, having seen seven summers, he went to the old Edinburgh High
School, to Mr. Frazer’s class. The age of entry was not, perhaps,
unnaturally early.[1]
“Duxships,” and gold medals, and the making of Greek Iambics were not
for Walter Scott. He was, he tells us, younger than the other boys in
the second class, and had made less progress than they in Latin. “This
was a real disadvantage,” as there was leeway to make up. He sat near
the bottom of the huge string of boys, perhaps eighty, and, as he truly
says, the boys used to fall into sets, “clubs and coteries,” according
to the benches which they occupied. There they used to sit, and play at
ingenious games--_e.g._ (in my time) a match between the Caesars and the
Apostles--conducted on the principle of a raffle; or a regatta of paper
boats blown across the floor. The tawse (a leather strap) descended on
their palms, but learning never came near them, and they moved up from
class to class by seniority, not by merit.
Scott was not always on the lowest benches, but flew to the top by
answering questions in “general information” (which nobody has), and
fell, by a rapid _dégringolade_, when topics were afoot about which
every industrious boy knew everything. He was the meteor of the form,
the translator of Horace or Virgil into rhyme, “the historian of the
class” (as Dr. Adam, the headmaster said), and he was “a bonny fechter.”
Owing to his lameness, he and his opponent used to fight sitting on
opposite benches--his victories were won, as he said, _in banco_. He
dared “the three kittle steps” on the narrow ledge of rock outside the
wall of Edinburgh Castle; helped to man the Cowgate in snowball riots,
and took part in the “stone bickers” against the street boys, which he
describes in the anecdote of Green Breeks. His private tutor had “a very
strong turn to anaticism,” and in argument with him Scott adopted the
side of Claverhouse and the Crown against Argyll and the Covenanters. “I
took up my politics at that period as King Charles II did his religion”
(King Charles is here much misunderstood), “from an idea that the
Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike of the two.”
[Sidenote: YOUTH]
In these controversies were the germs of _Old Mortality_. “The beastly
Covenanters,” wrote Scott to Southey in 1807, “hardly had any claim to
be called men, unless what was founded on their walking upon their hind
feet. You can hardly conceive the perfidy, cruelty, and stupidity of
these people, according to the accounts they have themselves preserved.”
But, when he came to write history, Scott adopted another view, and, out
of sheer love of fairness, was unfair to the Cavaliers. By “a nice
derangement of” dates, he introduced the worst cruelties of the
Cavaliers before they occurred, and did not mention at all the cause of
the severities--the Cameronian declaration of war by murder.
His old tutor could have done no better for “the good old cause,” but
modern popular historians do as much. Under the Headmaster, Dr. Adam,
“learned, useful, simple,” Scott rose to the highest form, though, like
St. Augustine, and for no better reason, he refused to learn Greek. He
certainly “never was a first-rate Latinist”--his quotations from Roman
poets prove that fact, no less than a false quantity in his only brace
of Latin elegiacs, for the tomb of his deerhound, Maida.[2]
Scott regretted his ignorance of Greek, “a loss never to be repaired,
considering what that language is, and who they were who employed it in
their compositions.” The most Homeric of later poets knew nothing of
Homer, which was to himself, certainly, an irreparable loss, for Pope
and Cowper could not impart to him a shadow of what Homer would have
been to him in the Greek. But great as is the delight which he missed,
it is not probable that a knowledge of Greek literature would have moved
Scott to imitate its order, its beauty, and its deep and poignant vein
of reflection on human destiny.
[Sidenote: YOUTH]
People blame Scott because he has not the depth of Shakespeare or of
Wordsworth, because Homer, a poet of war, of the sea, of the open air,
is far more prone than Scott was to melancholy reflection on the mystery
of human fortunes. But Scott was silent, not because he did not reflect,
but because he knew the futility of human reflection. _Humana perpessi
sumus_ is a phrase which escapes him in his age, when he looks back on a
lost and unforgotten love, on a broken life, on what might have been,
and what had been. “We are men, and have endured what men are born to
bear”--that is his brief philosophy. Why add words about it all? The
silence of Scott better proves the depth of his thought, and the
splendour of his courage, than the finest “reflections” that poets have
uttered in immortal words. It is not because his thought is shallow
that he never shows us the things which lie in the deep places of his
mind. “Men and houses have stood long enough, if they stand till they
fall with honour,” says his Baron Bradwardine. “Ilios must perish, the
city of Priam of the ashen spear,” says Homer--and what more is there to
say, for a man who does not wear his heart on his sleeve? Knowledge of
Greek poetry would not have induced Scott to write a line in the sense
of the melancholy of Greek epic poetry; a noble melancholy, but he will
utter none of its inspirations. On the side of precision, exquisite
proportion, rich delicacy of language, “loading every reef with gold,”
as Keats advised Shelley to do, Scott would have learned nothing from
Greece.
His genius was of another bent--
Flow forth, flow unconstrained, my Tale!
he says, knowing himself to be an improviser, not a minutely studious
artist. He knew his own path, and he followed it, holding his own art at
a lowly price. No critic is more severe on him for his laxities, for his
very “unpremeditated art” than he is himself. But, such as that art may
be, it was what he was born to accomplish, and, had he read as much
Greek as Tennyson, he would still have written as he rode
Without stop or stay down the rocky way,
and through the wan water of the river in spate. He was obedient to his
nature, and all the Greek Muses singing out of Olympus could not have
altered his nature, or changed the riding lilt of _Dick o’ the Cow_ for
more classical measures and a more chastened style.
For these reasons, as he was not, like Keats, a Greek born out of due
time, but a minstrel of the Mosstroopers, we need not regret that he was
ignorant of the greatest of all literatures. Of Latin, he had enough to
serve his ends. He seldom cites Virgil: he appears to have preferred
Lucan. He could read, at sight, such Latin as he wanted to read, which
was mainly medieval. His knowledge of Italian, German, Spanish, and
French was of the same handy homemade character. He picked up the
tongues in the course of reading books in the tongues, books of chivalry
and romance. His French, when he spoke in that language was, as one of
the Court of the exiled Charles X in Holyrood said, “the French of the
good Sire de Joinville.”
[Sidenote: YOUTH]
From childhood, and all through his schoolboy days, and afterwards, he
was a narrator. A lady who knew him in early boyhood says that he had a
myth for every occasion. “Even when he wanted ink to his pen he would
get up some ludicrous story about sending his doggie to the mill again.”
We are reminded of the two Stevensons, telling each other stories about
the continents and isles in the milk and porridge which they were
eating. “He used also to interest us ...” says a lady, “by telling us
the _visions_, as he called them, which he had when lying alone ... when
kept from going to church on a Sunday by ill-health ... misty and
sublime sketches of the regions above which he had visited in his
trance.” The lady thought that he had a tendency to “superstition,” but
he was only giving examples of the uprisings from the “subliminal”
regions which are open to genius. It was with invented stories that he
amused his friends, Irving and James Ballantyne, whom he met at a school
of which he was a casual pupil at Kelso. He once kept a fellow-traveller
awake all night, by his narrative of the foul murder of Archbishop
Sharp, told as they drove across Magus Moor, the scene of that “godly
fact.”
The men and women whom he met in boyhood, oddities, “characters,” people
his novels. Chance scraps of humour remained in the most retentive of
memories, reappeared in his romances, and made it impossible for his old
friends to doubt his authorship. His long country walks were directed
to places of historical interest, in which he found that scarce any one
else was interested, before he peopled them with the figures of his
dreams.
In his thirteenth year Scott matriculated at the town’s college of
Edinburgh. At this time he was once in the same room with Burns, whom he
enlightened as to the authorship of lines by Langhorne, written under a
weak engraving of Bunbury’s, a soldier dead in the snow beside his wife
and dog. It is curious that the author’s name, in fact, is printed under
the verses. Scott remarked of Burns’ eyes, that “he never saw their like
in a human head.” “His countenance was more massive than it looks in any
of the portraits.” The late Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews (A.K.H.B.) once
asked a sister of Burns which of the portraits of her brother was the
best likeness? “They a’ mak’ him ower like a gentleman,” she replied,
and no doubt she meant that they missed the massiveness of his
countenance. Scott thought Burns too humble in his attitude towards
young Ferguson, in whom he recognized his master; not wholly an error,
and a generous error at worst. Scott also thought himself “unworthy to
tie Burns’ shoes,” so noble was the generosity of either poet.
[Sidenote: YOUTH]
His fifteenth year saw Scott, already a lawyer’s apprentice, in the
Highlands, happy in the society of Stewart of Invernahyle, who had
fought a sword and target duel with Rob Roy (at Ardsheil, I think), had
been out with the Prince, and supplied the central incidents of
_Waverley_. “The blawing bleezing lairds” were not much to the taste of
the elder Mr. Scott, who was unconsciously sitting for his own portrait
as the elder Fairford in _Redgauntlet_, a picture rich in affectionate
humour. “The office,” in Edinburgh, swallows up a large proportion of
the schoolboys. To Mr. R. L. Stevenson, “the office” seemed a Minotaur,
but Scott found in it his profit. He acquired, as a copyist, the quality
of steady prolonged writing; the faculty of sitting at it which Anthony
Trollope called “rump.” He once covered, without interruption, a hundred
and twenty pages of folio, at three-pence the page, gaining thirty
shillings to spend on books or a dirk. Looking at the MSS. of his
novels, down to the never-to-be-published _Knights of Malta_, written
during his last voyage to Italy, we see the steady, unfaltering, speedy
hand of the law writer, with scarce a correction or an erasure. After
his ruin, after his breakdown in health, he once wrote the “copy” of
sixty printed pages of a novel in a day. He had acquired the power of
sitting at it, without which his colossal labours, in the leisure hours
of a busy official life, would have been impossible. He could not have
done this had he not been of Herculean strength, the strongest man in
the acquaintance of the Ettrick Shepherd. “Though you may think him a
poor lamiter, he’s the first to begin a row, and the last to end it,”
said a naval officer. Like his own Corporal Raddlebanes, he once fought
three men with his stick, for an hour by the Tron clock--not that of
Shrewsbury.
We are apt to forget how young Scott was, at this period. He was only
eighteen when he piloted a young English friend through the shoals and
reefs of early misadventure. He can scarcely have been nineteen when he
met _Le Manteau Vert_, Miss Stewart Belches (daughter of Sir John
Stewart Belches of Invermay), the object of his first and undying love.
His friends thought him cold towards the fair, but, in truth, he was
shielded by a pure affection. Concerning the lady, I have heard much,
from Mrs. Wilson (_née_ Macleod), whose aged aunt, or great-aunt, like
Scott, fell in love with the bride of William Forbes. “She was more like
an angel than a woman,” the old lady would say. Scott’s passion endured
for five years (“three years of dreaming and two of wakening,” he says),
inspiring him, as time went on, to severe application in his legal
studies, and to his first efforts in literature.
[Sidenote: FIRST LOVE]
Lockhart did not know the details of the ending of the vision. “What a
romance to tell--and told I fear it will one day be,” wrote Scott after
his ruin. But told the romance never will or can be, except in the
merest outline. Scott thought that he had something to complain of, as
appears from his poem, _The Violet_, about “my false love,” and in
verses describing Fitz James’ broken sleep, in _The Lady of the Lake_.
Then, ... from my couch may heavenly might
Chase that worst phantom of the night--
Again return the scenes of youth,
Of confident undoubting truth
* * * * *
They come, in dim procession led,
The cold, the faithless, and the dead.
* * * * *
Dreamed he of death, or broken vow,
Or is it all a vision now?
Scott, according to Lady Louisa Stuart, said that he always, in later
life, dreamed of his lost love before any great misfortune. In age and
sickness, his _Journal_ tells much of his thoughts of her, of the name
he had cut in runic characters on the grass below the tower of St.
Rule’s at St. Andrews, the name that “still had power to stir his
heart.” But years went by before the vision ended--the vision of the
lady of _Rokeby_, of _Redgauntlet_, and of the _Lay of the Last
Minstrel_; “by many names one form.”
It is because he knew passion too well that he is not a poet of passion.
There is nothing in Scott like the melancholy or peevish repining of the
lovers in _Locksley Hall_ and in _Maud_. Only in the fugitive farewell
caress of Diana Vernon, stooping from her saddle on the darkling moor
before she rides into the night, do we feel the heart-throb of Walter
Scott. Of love as of human life he knew too much to speak. He did not
“make copy” of his deepest thoughts or of his deepest affections. I am
not saying “They were pedants who could speak,” or blaming those who can
“unlock their hearts” with a sonnet or any other poetic key. But simply
it was not Sir Walter’s way; and we must take him with his
limitations--honourable to the man, if unfortunate for the poet.
We see him, a splendid figure, “tall, much above the usual stature, cast
in the very mould of a youthful Hercules; the head set on with singular
grace, the throat and chest after the truest model of the antique, the
hands delicately finished, the whole outline that of extraordinary
vigour, without as yet a touch of clumsiness.” The “lamiter” “could
persuade a pretty young woman to sit and talk with me, hour after hour,
in a corner of a ballroom, while all the world were capering in our
view.”
[Sidenote: FIRST LOVE]
This was the lad who shone in The Speculative Society; who roamed with
Shortreed from Charlieshope to Charlieshope, dear to all the Dandie
Dinmonts of Liddesdale, “sober or drunk, he was aye the gentleman.” You
could not wander in Liddesdale, in these days, without the risk of being
“fou”: though even among these “champion bowlsmen” Scott had the
strongest head. “How brawlie he suited himself to every body,” as to
“auld Thomas of Twizzlehope,” who possessed “the real lilt of _Dick o’
the Cow_,” and a punch bowl fatal to sobriety. The real lilt, or “a
genuine old Border war horn” was worth a headache. Mr. Hutton, in his
book on Scott, made his moan over the story of the arrival of a keg of
brandy that interrupted religious exercise in Liddesdale. _Autres temps,
autres moeurs_, and Scott, during these ballad-hunting expeditions, was
not yet twenty-one. In defending the Rev. Mr. Macnaught, before the
General Assembly, on a charge of lack of sobriety, and of “toying with a
sweetie wife” and singing sculdudery chants, Scott edified the General
Assembly by the distinction between _ebrius_ and _ebriosus_, between
being drunk and being a drunkard. But the Assembly decided that Mr.
Macnaught was _ebriosus_. In getting up this case Scott visited, for the
only time, the country of the Picts of Galloway, and of _Guy Mannering_.
The period of the Reign of Terror, in France, found Scott taking part
in anti-revolutionary “rows” in Edinburgh. Nothing hints that he, like
Wordsworth, conceived a passionate affection for the Revolution. The
Radicals had a plot of the good old Jacobite kind for seizing the Castle
(1794), but Scott rejected such romance, and was a volunteer on the side
of order. In 1795 he conceived that his love suit was prospering, as
appears plainly in a letter; despite “his habitual effort to suppress,
as far as words were concerned, the more tender feelings, which in no
heart were deeper than in his.” He translated Bürger’s ballad of Lenore
(a refashioning of a _volkslied_ current in modern Greece, and as _The
Suffolk Tragedy_, in England), and laid “a richly bound and blazoned
copy” at his lady’s feet (1796). The rhymes are spirited--
Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash, splash, along the sea,
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee!
[Sidenote: FIRST LOVE]
But the lady “gave to gold, what song could never buy,” as her unfriends
may have said. But as her chosen lover was William Forbes, of the house
of the good old Lord Pitsligo of the Forty-Five, and as Mr. (later Sir
William) Forbes remained the staunchest friend of Scott, we may be
certain that Green Mantle merely obeyed her heart.
“I shudder,” wrote a friend, “at the violence of his most irritable and
ungovernable mind.” He little knew Scott, who rode from his lady’s house
into the hills, “eating his own heart, avoiding the paths of men,” and
said nothing. The fatal October of his rejection (1796) saw the
publication of his first book, a slim quarto, containing translations of
Bürger’s ballads. The lady of Harden, a Saxon by birth, corrected “his
Scotticisms, and more especially his Scottish _rhymes_.” He had become
the minstrel of “the Rough Clan” of Scott, and was a friend of the
Houses of Harden (his chief’s) and of Buccleuch.
Scotland lost Burns in 1796, but did not yet take up Scott, whose
ballads literally served “to line a box,” as Tennyson says, and were
delivered over to the trunk-makers. He made no moan, and, in April 1797,
his heart, as he says, “was handsomely pierced.” At Gilsland he met the
dark-eyed Miss Charpentier, of French origin, daughter of M. Jean
Charpentier (_Ecuyer du Roi_), and fell in love. I think that, in Julia
Mannering, the lively dark beauty of _Guy Mannering_, we have a portrait
from the life of Scott’s bride. In personal appearance the two ladies
are unmistakably identical, and Miss Charpentier, in a letter of
November 27, 1797, chaffs her lover exactly as Julia Mannering chaffs
her austere father. Scott had written about his desire to be buried in
Dryburgh Abbey, and Miss Charpentier thought him dismal and premature.
She did not care for romance, she did not pamper Scott by pretending to
the faintest sympathy with his studies, but she was a merry bride, a
true wife, and, when the splendour of celebrity shone on Scott, it did
_not_ burn up (as a friend feared that it might) the unmoved Semele who
shared the glory. Scott was married at Carlisle, in the church of St.
Mary, on Christmas Eve, 1797.
I have often wondered whether, after his marriage, Scott was in the
habit of meeting his “false love” in the society of Edinburgh. His heart
was “handsomely pieced,” he says, but _haeret lethalis arundo_.
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
After a painting by Sir Henry Raeburn.]
CHAPTER II
EARLY MARRIED LIFE, BALLAD COLLECTING, _LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL_,
_MARMION_
The Scotts, at Edinburgh, dwelt first in George Street, then in South
Castle Street, and finally in the house in North Castle Street, where he
resided till the time of his misfortunes. The rooms were soon full of
old pikes and guns and bows, of old armour, and of old books. Already
Scott’s library was considerable. He had read enormously, and it is
curious that a man of his unrivalled memory made so many written notes
of his reading. “Reading makes a full man,” but Gillies, an intelligent
if unpractical bore, says that, when in the full tide of authorship
later, Scott read comparatively little. His summers were passed in a
cottage at Lasswade, in the society of his early friends, and of the
families of Melville, of the historian, Patrick Fraser Tytler,
Woodhouselee, and of Buccleuch. His early friends were around
him--William Erskine, a good man and fastidious critic, William Clerk,
of Penicuik, Fergusson (Sir Adam), and many others. Gillies says that
Scott lived “alone,” and doubts “whether there was any one intimately
connected with Sir Walter Scott whose mind and habits were exactly
congenial.” But it is a commonplace that we all “live alone,” and
certainly Scott seems to have believed that he found, especially in
“Will Erskine,” all the sympathy, literary and social, that he could
expect or desire. In 1798 he made a new acquaintance, Mat Lewis, famous
then for his romance, _The Monk_, and busy with his _Tales of Wonder_.
[Sidenote: EARLY MARRIED LIFE]
Lewis, though no poet, was a neat metrist, and tutored Scott in the
practical details of prosody. To Lewis Scott offered versions of German
ballads, and other materials from his increasing store of original or
traditional _Volkslieder_. He entered the realm of poetry, not by the
usual gate of “subjective” lyrics about his own emotions, but through
the antiquarian and historical gate of old popular ballads, newly opened
by Bishop Percy, Herd, Ritson the excitable antiquary, and others. Sir
Philip Sidney had loved these songs of “blind crowders,” Addison had
praised them, Lady Wardlaw had imitated them, Burns had expressed but a
poor opinion of them, but German research and imitation had given a new
vogue to the ballads, which Scott, in boyhood, had collected whenever
he possessed a shilling to buy a printed chant. The simplicity and
spirit of the narrative folk songs did much to inspire and give vogue to
Wolf’s theory that the Homeric poems were, in origin, a kind of highly
superior long ballads, handed down by oral tradition. In this theory
Scott had no interest, about its truth he had no opinion, sitting silent
and bored when it was debated by Coleridge and Morritt. “I never,” he
says, “was so bethumped with words.” The vogue of the ballads lent a new
blow at the poetical theories of the eighteenth century, and at the
poetry of Pope. But Scott would not have it said that Pope was no poet,
a poet he _was_, but he dealt with themes that were no longer so much
appreciated as they had been in the age of Anne. Though a literary
innovator Sir Walter was not a literary iconoclast, and he loved no
poetry better than the stately and manly melancholy of Dr. Johnson’s
imitations of Juvenal.
Mat Lewis’s ballads were delayed in publication, but in January 1799 he
negotiated with a Mr. Bell for the issue of Scott’s version of Goethe’s
_Goetz Von Berlichingen_, “a very poor and incorrect translation;” so a
former owner of my copy of Lockhart has pencilled on the margin.
_Goetz_, at all events, made no impression on Coleridge’s detested
“reading public,” and though Scott carried to London, in 1799, an
original drama, _The House of Aspen_, which was put in rehearsal by
Kemble, it never saw the footlights. In later life he expressed disgust
at the idea of writing for “low and ignorant actors” (who may be
supposed to know their own business); perhaps he had been mortified by
the ways of managers. At this time his father died of paralysis; says
Lockhart, “I have lived to see the curtain rise and fall once more on a
similar scene.” The _Glenfinlas_ ballad was written at this time,
founded on a legend of the murderous fairy women of the woods, which I
have heard from the lips of a boatman on Loch Awe, and which Mr.
Stevenson found, unmistakably the same, among the natives of Samoa. A
more important ballad, the first in which he really showed his hand, was
_The Eve of St. John_, a legend of Smailholme tower. Here we find the
true Border spirit, the superstitious thrill, the galloping metre, the
essence of _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_. _Cadyow_, a ballad of the
murder of the Regent Moray, is also of this period, and though not in
the traditional manner, is most spirited.
[Sidenote: BEGINNING OF BALLANTYNE]
Scott’s destiny was now clear enough, the country had in him a new
“maker.” But he had no idea of a life of authorship, agreeing with Kerr
of Abbotrule that “a Lord President Scott might well be a famous
poet--in the vacation time.” Literature, he said, was a good staff, but
a bad crutch, and he looked to advance his worldly prospects and secure
his livelihood by the profession of the Bar. Our other poets, as a rule,
have meditated the Muse in perfect leisure, with no professional
distractions. But Scott’s literary work was all done in hours stolen
from an active official life. “I can get on quite as well from
recollection of nature, while sitting in the Parliament House, as if
wandering through wood and wold,” he said to Gillies, “though liable to
be roused out of a descriptive dream, if Balmuto, with a fierce grunt,
demands, ‘Where are your cautioners?’” Shelley composed while watching
“the bees in the ivy bloom;” Keats, while listening to the nightingale;
Scott, in the Parliament House, under the glare of Lord Balmuto. The
difference in method is manifest in the difference of the results. But
_Marmion_ was composed during gallops among the hills of Tweedside.
At this date, the winter of 1799, Scott met his school friend James
Ballantyne, then publishing a newspaper at Kelso, and Ballantyne printed
twelve copies of the new ballads. Scott liked the typography, thought of
a small volume of the old Border ballads, to be executed by his friend,
and the die was cast. The success of _The Border Minstrelsy_ made him an
author, association with the printer helped him on the long road to
financial ruin.
[Sidenote: BALLAD COLLECTING]
The same date, December 1799, saw Scott made Sheriff Depute of
Selkirkshire, “the Shirra of the Forest.” He at once invited Ballantyne
to settle as a printer and publisher in Edinburgh, while in the Forest,
when ballad hunting, he made the acquaintance of Leyden, scholar and
poet, of William Laidlaw, his lifelong friend, and of James Hogg, then
an Ettrick swain, “the most remarkable man who ever wore the maud of a
shepherd.” Hogg had none of the education of Burns. “Self taught am I,”
he might have said, like the minstrel of Odysseus, “but the Muse puts
into my heart all manner of lays.” Hogg was indeed the survivor of such
Borderers as, writes Bishop Lesley (1576), “make their own ballads of
adventures for themselves.” He has left a graphic account of his first
meeting with Scott. “Oh, lad, the Shirra’s come,” said Scott’s groom.
“Are ye the chap _that makes_ the auld ballads?” Hogg replied, “I could
not say that I had made ony very auld ballads,” but did James tell the
truth? He is under suspicion of having made the “very auld ballad” of
_Auld Maitland_, which his mother at once chanted to the Shirra. Scott
was as happy as his own Monkbarns, when he overheard Elspeth of the
Burntfoot crooning the ballad of Harlaw. The old lady told the Shirra
that she had learned _Auld Maitland_ “frae auld Andrew Moor, and he
learned it frae auld Baby Metlin” (Maitland) “wha was housekeeper to the
first” (Anderson) “laird of Tushilaw. She was said to have been another
than a gude ane....”
Baby Metlin having this character, I sought for her, aided by the
kindness of the minister of Ettrick, in the records of the Kirk Session
of Ettrick, hoping to find her under Church censure for some lawless
love. But there is no documentary trace of Baby, and the question is,
could Hogg, then ignorant of libraries, above all of the Maitland MSS.,
have forged the ballad of _Auld Maitland_, and made his mother an
accomplice in the pious fraud? It is to be remarked that Scott himself
says that he obtained _Auld Maitland_ in manuscript, from a farmer
(Laidlaw), and that the copy was derived from the recital of “an old
shepherd” (1802). None the less Mrs. Hogg may also have recited it,
having learned it from the old shepherd, Auld Andrew Moor. It is a
delicate point in ballad criticism. Such a hoax, at this date, by the
wily shepherd, appears to me to be impossible, and I lean to a theory
that _Auld Maitland_, and _The Outlaw Murray_, are literary imitations
of the ballad, compiled late in the seventeenth or early in the
eighteenth century, on some Maitland and Murray traditions. In any
case, Hogg had won the interest of Scott, whose temper he often tried
but whose patience he never exhausted. For Leyden, a more trustworthy
collector of ballads, Scott secured an appointment in the East, “a
distant and a deadly shore.”
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
In 1802, the first two volumes of _The Border Minstrelsy_, later added
to and emended, were published in London, with all the treasures of
ancient lore in prefaces and notes; the first fruits, and noble fruits
they are, of Scott as an historian and writer in prose. Ballantyne,
still at Kelso, was the printer. Scott remarks that “I observed more
strict fidelity concerning my originals,” than Bishop Percy had done. To
what extent he altered and improved his originals cannot be known. He
confesses to “conjectural emendations” in _Kinmont Willie_, which he
found “much mangled by reciters.” Mr. Henderson credits him with verses
ix-xii, “mainly,” and with “numerous other touches.” I do not think that
in the ballad of Otterbourne he interpolated a passage bestowed on him
by Mr. Henderson, for he twice quoted the lines in moments of great
solemnity, and he was not the man to quote himself. The texts, though
they passed the scrutiny of the fierce Ritson, are much more
scientifically handled (with the aid of the Abbotsford and other MSS.)
by Professor Child, in his noble collection. He notes over forty minute
changes, in one ballad, from the MS. copy of Mrs. Brown. But _The Border
Minstrelsy_ gives the texts as the world knows them, as far as it _does_
know them, while the prose elevates “a set of men whose worth was hardly
known” to a pinnacle of romance. In their own days the Border riders
were regarded as public nuisances by statesmen, who only attempted to
educate them by the method of the gibbet. But now they were the delight
of “fine ladies, contending who shall be the most extravagant in
encomium.” A blessing on such fine ladies, who know what is good when
they see it!
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
Scott says, with his usual acuteness, that we “sometimes impute that
effect to the poet, which is produced by the recollections and
associations which his verses excite.” When a man has been born in the
centre of Scott’s sheriffdom, when every name of a place in the ballads
and the _Lay_ is dear and familiar to him, he cannot be the most
impartial, though he may be not the least qualified critic of the poet,
who, we must remember, wrote for his own people. By 1802, Scott
announced to Ellis that he was engaged on “a long poem of my own ... a
kind of romance of Border chivalry, in a light horseman sort of stanza.”
This poem was _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, which Borderers may be
excused for thinking the best, the freshest, and the most spontaneous of
all his romances in rhyme. The young Countess of Dalkeith (later,
Duchess of Buccleuch) had heard from Mr. Beattie of Mickledale a story
(known under another form, and as of recent date, in Glencoe) of a
mysterious being who made his appearance at a farm house, and there
resided. The being uttered the cry _Tint, tint, tint!_ (_Lost, lost,
lost!_), and was finally summoned away by a Voice calling to him by the
name of Gilpin Horner. This legend was “universally credited”: Lady
Dalkeith asked Scott to write a ballad on the theme, and thus Gilpin,
though criticized as an excrescence on the _Lay_, was really its only
begetter. While he was wondering what he could make of Gilpin, Scott
heard part of Coleridge’s _Christabel_, then in manuscript, recited by
Sir John Stoddart. The measure of _Christabel_ had previously been used
in comic verse, by Anthony Hall, Anstey, Wolcott and others, and Scott
seems to have assumed the right to employ it in a serious work. In this
he showed something of the deficient sense of _meum_ and _tuum_ which
marked his freebooting ancestors; and Coleridge, whose fragment was not
published till many years later, resented the appropriation and often
spoke of Scott’s poetry with contempt. A year passed before Scott
actually wrote the first stanzas of the _Lay_. He read them to Erskine
and Cranstoun, who said little, and he burned his manuscript. But later
he found that the critics were too much puzzled by the novelty of the
poem to give an opinion, and when one of them, probably Erskine,
suggested that an explanatory prologue was necessary, Scott introduced
the Last Minstrel, chanting to Monmouth’s widow, and went on with the
work, “at about the rate of a canto a week.”
In this casual manner he “found himself,” and his fame. The _Lay_ was
not published till 1805, and Scott’s energies were being given to an
edition of the romance of _Sir Tristrem_, and to elucidating the true
history of his favourite Thomas the Rymer, of Ercildoune. In later days
he purchased The Rymer’s Glen, so he chose to style it, below Eildon
tree, with the burn which murmurs by the cottage of Chiefswood. But _Sir
Tristrem_ and the Rymer were learned and unprofitable subjects. Despite
his need of money, Sir Walter was always ready to spend his time and
labour in literature which profited not, financially. “People may say
this or that of the pleasure or fame or profit as a motive of writing,”
he remarks. “I think the only pleasure is the actual exertion and
research....”
Society and his duties as Quartermaster-General of Volunteer horse were
combined with research and composition. Invasion seemed imminent, and
Scott worked both at his cavalry drill and at organizing the infantry
militia of his sheriffdom. In September 1803 he met Wordsworth and his
sister on their Scottish tour, when Wordsworth prayed for “an hour of
that Dundee” who drove the army of Mackay in rout through the pass of
Killiecrankie. It is curious to find Wordsworth, Ruskin and Scott united
among the friends of Claverhouse! Wordsworth professed himself “greatly
delighted” by Scott’s recitation of four cantos of the _Lay_, though
“the moving incident is not my trade,” any more than admiration of
contemporaries was Wordsworth’s foible. Later the admiration was mainly
on the side of Scott, though Wordsworth made noble amends in his
beautiful sonnet on Scott’s final and fated voyage to Italy.
[Sidenote: ASHESTIEL]
Matters of finance were now occupying Scott. At the Bar he had never
much more practice than that which came to him from his father’s office.
That was little indeed, usually under £200 a year, and grew less when
Scott’s father died, and his gifted but gay brother, Thomas, mismanaged
the business. With his sheriffdom, his private resources, and a legacy
of about £6,000 from an uncle, Scott was at the head of £1,000 a year.
He succeeded in obtaining the reversion of a Clerkship in the Court of
Sessions, doing the work for nothing while the holder, an old man,
lived; and, in the end of 1805, he put his £6,000 into the printing
business of James Ballantyne.
This was the beginning of evils. A barrister ought not to be a secret
partner in a commercial enterprise. Erskine alone knew the fact, and we
do not hear that Erskine remonstrated. Lockhart regretted that Scott,
who was now obliged to fix on a residence within his sheriffdom, did not
buy Broadmeadows with his windfall of £6,000. The place is beautifully
situated on the wooded left bank of Yarrow, between Hangingshaw and
Bowhill, and hard by the cottage of Mungo Park, the African traveller.
Here Scott might have lived happy and remote, in the heart of his own
country. But he was no hermit, he loved society, and he could not give
up his military duties. He left Lasswade, the Gandercleugh of his _Tales
of my Landlord_, and rented from a Russell cousin Ashestiel, a small
house, in part very old, on a steep cliff overhanging the Tweed, above
Yair. Only the hills behind the house severed him from Yarrow, the
fishing was excellent, hard by is Elibank, the tower of his ancestress,
“Muckle Mou’d Meg,” and Selkirk, where he administered justice, is
within an easy ride. The bridge over Tweed was not yet built, and Scott
had the unfading pleasure of risking his life in riding the flooded
ford. Here Scott reclaimed that honest poacher, Tom Purdie, his
lifelong retainer and friend, who, with rustic liberality of speech,
expressed his high opinion of Mrs. Scott’s attractions. Hard by is
Sunderland Hall, where Leslie’s troops bivouacked before they surprised
Montrose at Philiphaugh, and at Sunderland Hall was an excellent
antiquarian library open to the Shirra. Of him little trace remains at
Ashestiel, save the huge arm-chair which was borrowed for him in his
latest days of paralysis. At the Peel, within a few hundred yards, he
had an intelligent neighbour, Mrs. Laidlaw, wife of “Laird Nippy,” a
bonnet laird of an ancient line which lay under an old curse, not
unfulfilled. To Mrs. Laidlaw Scott presented all his poems, which, by
her bequest, have come into the hands of the present writer. Had Scott
been the owner, not the tenant, of Ashestiel, Abbotsford would never
have existed, “that unhappy palace of his race.”
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
It was in January 1805 that the _Lay_ was published by Messrs. Longman.
To appreciate the _Lay_ and its success, we must either have read it in
childhood, when “glamour” seems a probable art (as to some unknown
extent it really is), and when lamps that burn eternally in tombs
present no difficulties to the reason; or we must have imagination
enough to understand how perfectly and delightfully _novel_ was the
poem. There had been a long interregnum in poetry in England. Cowper, as
we learn from Miss Marianne Dashwood in _Sense and Sensibility_, was
Scott’s only rival, and Cowper is not romantic. Wordsworth and Coleridge
were practically unknown to “the reading public,” Burns was barred by
“the dialect,” the school of Pope had dwindled into _The Triumphs of
Temper_. Meanwhile Mrs. Radcliffe had kindled and fed the sacred lamp of
love for all that Catherine Morland thought “truly horrid,” and had been
a favourite of Scott himself. In the _Lay_ the eager public found
mysteries far exceeding in delightfulness those of Mrs. Radcliffe, found
magic genuine, all unlike her spells which are explained away; they
found many novel and galloping measures of verse; they found nature; and
they found a knowledge of the past such as has never been combined with
glowing poetic imagination.
Mr. Saintsbury says with truth that “a very large, perhaps the much
larger, part of the appeal of the _Lay_ was metrical.” Scott appeared to
be as much an innovator in metres as Mr. Swinburne was, sixty years
after him. Scott knew nothing at all (nor do I) about “the iambic
dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence, anacrusis, and
catalexis”: to him these terms were “bonny critic’s Greek,” and as
unintelligible as, to Andrew Fairservice, was “bonny lawyer’s Latin.”
But it does seem that he gave “extreme care” to his “scheme of metre”
in the _Lay_, not arranging it, as he said of one of his novels, “with
as much care as the rest, that is, with no care at all.” The result, to
quote Mr. Saintsbury, is “to some tastes, a medium quite unsurpassed for
the particular purpose,” and Scott’s later poems are, I venture to
think, in metre less exquisitely appropriate, and more monotonous. His
rhymed romances are in no sense epic, they are a new kind of composition
based on the ballad, but, owing to their length, in need of constant
variety of cadence. All these qualities were in the highest degree
novel, and never to be successfully imitated, seriously, though
susceptible of parody.
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
We do not now appreciate the charm of all this freshness. We live a
century later, “the gambol has been shown,” the Pegasus of romance has
been put through all his paces before generations of _blasés_ observers;
witches, goblins, and reivers are hackneyed, and only the young (for
whom Scott, like Theocritus, professedly sang) can recapture the joy
with which the world hailed the _Lay_. We have, moreover, what our
ancestors of 1805 had not, the verse of Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson,
Keats, and Coleridge present in our memories, verse deeply meditated,
rich in thought, delicate in expression, “every reef loaded with gold.”
Scott has these great rivals now, in 1805 he had no rivals save those
who filled the times, already remote, of great Elizabeth. Thus only the
young, and they who have in their hearts every name and memory of
Scott’s hills and waters, can offer to the _Lay_, or to his other
narrative poems, the welcome that the country gave in 1805. Only we, old
Borderers, or fresh boys and girls, are at the point of view. Others may
style the _Lay_ “a thirdrate _Waverley_ novel in rhyme,” “let ilka man
rouse the ford as he finds it”; it is a ford which I have many times
ridden with pleasure during many years. Out of the romance I choose an
episodic passage, in essence, though not in numbers, a ballad: it tells,
traditionally, how the clan of Scott won fair Eskdale. Probably they
obtained it on the forfeiture of a liege lord far from “tame,” that
Maxwell who, on the execution of the red Regent, took the Morton title,
dared the Douglas feud, and supported the Catholic cause to his ruin.
But tradition speaks otherwise.
Scotts of Eskdale, a stalwart band,
Came trooping down to Todshawhill;
By the sword they won their land,
And by the sword they hold it still.
Hearken, Ladye, to the tale,
How thy sons won fair Eskdale....
Earl Morton was lord of that valley fair,
The Beattisons were his vassals there.
The Earl was gentle, and mild of mood,
The vassals were warlike, and fierce, and rude;
High of heart and haughty of word,
Little they reck’d of a tame liege lord
The Earl into fair Eskdale came,
Homage and seignory to claim:
Of Gilbert the Galliard a heriot he sought,
Saying, “Give thy best steed, as a vassal ought.” ...
“Dear to me is my bonny white steed,
Oft has he help’d me at pinch of need;
Lord and Earl though thou be, I trow,
I can rein Bucksfoot better than thou.” ...
Word on word gave fuel to fire,
Till so highly blazed the Beattison’s ire,
But that the Earl the flight had ta’en,
The vassals there their lord had slain.
Sore he plied both whip and spur,
As he urged his steed through Eskdale muir;
And it fell down a weary weight,
Just on the threshold of Branksome gate.
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
The Earl was a wrathful man to see,
Full fain avenged would he be,
In haste to Branksome’s Lord he spoke,
Saying--“Take these traitors to thy yoke:
For a cast of hawks, and a purse of gold
All Eskdale I’ll sell thee to have and hold
Beshrew thy heart, of the Beattisons’ clan
If thou leavest on Eske a landed man;
But spare Woodkerrick’s lands alone,
For he lent me his horse to escape upon.”
A glad man then was Branksome bold,
Down he flung him the purse of gold;
To Eskdale soon he spurred amain,
And with him five hundred riders has ta’en.
He left his merrymen in the mist of the hill,
And bade them hold them close and still;
And alone he wended to the plain,
To meet with the Galliard and all his train.
To Gilbert the Galliard thus he said: ...
“Know thou me for thy liege-lord and head;
Deal not with me as with Morton tame,
For Scots play best at the roughest game.
Give me in peace my heriot due,
Thy bonny white steed, or thou shalt rue.
If my horn I three times wind,
Eskdale shall long have the sound in mind.” ...
Loudly the Beattison laugh’d in scorn;
“Little care we for thy winded horn.
Ne’er shall it be the Galliard’s lot
To yield his steed to a haughty Scott.
Wend thou to Branksome back on foot,
With rusty spur and miry boot.”...
He blew his bugle so loud and hoarse,
That the dun deer started at fair Craikcross;
He blew again so loud and clear,
Through the gray mountain-mist there did lances appear;
And the third blast rang with such a din
That the echoes answered from Pentoun-linn,
And all his riders came lightly in.
Then had you seen a gallant shock,
When saddles were emptied, and lances broke!
For each scornful word the Galliard had said,
A Beattison on the field was laid.
His own good sword the chieftain drew,
And he bore the Galliard through and through;
Where the Beattisons’ blood mix’d with the rill,
The Galliard’s Haugh men call it still.
The Scots have scatter’d the Beattison clan,
In Eskdale they left but one landed man.
The valley of Eske, from the mouth to the source,
Was lost and won for that bonny white horse.
For the rest, from fair Margaret, the lost love,
Lovelier than the rose so red,
Yet paler than the violet pale,
to Wat Tinnlin, and
The hot and hardy Rutherford
Whom men called Dickon-draw-the-sword,
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
the characters are all my ancient friends, and the time has been when
the romance was history to me. The history, of course, is handled with
all Scott’s freedom. Michael Scott had been dead for several centuries,
not for some seventy years, and the approximate date of the tale must be
the year of the religious revolution, 1559-1560; “the Regent” must be
Mary of Guise. Men no longer made their vows to St. Modan and St. Mary
of the Lowes, whose chapel the Scots burned in 1557: it had become
fashionable to wreck churches, thanks to preaching bakers and tailors,
Paul Methuen and Harlaw. Be these things as they may, and let critics be
critics as of old,
Still Yarrow, as he rolls along
Bears burden to the Minstrel’s song.
The _Lay_, as Scott wrote to Wordsworth, “has the merit of being written
with heart and good will, and for no other reason than to discharge my
mind of the ideas which from infancy have rushed upon it. I believe such
verses will generally be found interesting, because enthusiastic.” Whoso
reads the _Lay_ as it was written, “with heart and goodwill,” is not
likely to complain of its lack of interest. The opening dialogue of the
Spirits of river and hill, the ride of William of Deloraine through the
red spate of Ail water, the scene of fair Melrose beheld aright, the
opening of the Wizard’s tomb, in the splendour of the lamp that burns
eternally; the fluttering viewless forms that haunt the aisles; the
tilting between Cranstoun and Deloraine; the pranks of the page; the
courage of the young Buccleuch; his bluff English captors; the bustle of
the Warden’s raid; the riding in of the outlying mosstroopers; the final
scene of the Wizard’s appearance and the passing of the page; with the
beautiful ballads of the minstrels, make up a noble set of scenes, then
absolutely fresh and poignant.
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY” BEGUN]
While the public, unlike Sir Henry Eaglefield, did not need three
readings to convince them of the excellence of the _Lay_, the critics
were as wise as usual. It is never easy to keep one’s temper in reading
Jeffrey’s criticisms. If not “the ideal whipper-snapper,” at least he
was always thinking, not of the natural appeal of a poet “to the simple
primary feelings of his kind,” but of what Mr. Jeffrey could say to the
abatement of the poet’s merits. Ellis thought Jeffrey’s review “equally
acute and impartial,” and it _was_ impartial compared with his critique
of _Marmion_. The poem should have been something else, not what it was.
It should have “been more full of incident,” as if it _could_ be more
full of incident! The Goblin was “a merely local superstition,” to which
Scott, of all men, could most easily have replied by proofs that the
superstition, practically that of the Brownie, is universal. For example
Froissart gives us, in Orthon, a goblin page, though not a malevolent
specimen of the genus. Jeffrey said, and one would “like to have felt
Mr. Jeffrey’s bumps”--as Charles Lamb said of a less famous
dullard--that “Mr. Scott must either sacrifice his Border prejudices, or
offend his readers in the other parts of the Empire!” Jeffrey writes
like the snappish pedant of a provincial newspaper. When _Marmion_
appeared, Jeffrey found, on the other hand, that it was not Scottish
enough! Pitt and Fox equally admired the work, the public bought it as
poetry is no longer bought, and Scott sold his copyright at the ransom
of £500, which, with a royalty of £169 6_s._ on the first edition, and a
present of £100 to buy a horse, from Messrs. Longman, made up his whole
literary profits on the transaction.
The money probably went into his printing business, with Ballantyne &
Co., and already (1805) we find that firm “receiving accommodation from
Sir William Forbes,” the banker. They were always receiving or being
refused “accommodation”; Scottish business had a paper basis; its bills
represented fairy gold that turned to withered leaves; though Scott, as
an Editor (of Dryden’s works at this time), put large quantities of
business in the way of his printing firm. His practice at the Bar was a
thing of the past: he was waiting for dead men’s shoes as a Clerk of the
Court of Session; and, while toiling over Dryden’s works, he began
_Waverley_, hoping to publish it by Christmas 1805. He purposely did not
make a brilliant start, though the description of Edward Waverley’s
studies is a copy of his own, and William Erskine did not think highly
of the first seven chapters. So Scott threw the manuscript aside, to his
admirers a misfortune. _Waverley_ would have been as great a success as
it was nine years later: Scott would have worked the new vein, the
“Bonanza mine,” and for eighteen new Waverley novels (at the rate of
two yearly) we would cheerfully give up _Marmion_, _The Lady of the
Lake_, _Rokeby_, and _The Lord of the Isles_. _Dis aliter visum._
It was now that Scott adopted the system of rising from bed to write at
five in the morning. On one occasion he had the cruelty to return and
awake Mrs. Scott, with the tidings, which he knew to be wholly
uninteresting to her, that he had discovered the meaning of the name of
a burn that passes through his estate. While taking brief holiday at
Gilsland, he was summoned to mount and ride to Dalkeith, the rendezvous
of the Forest, by the beacon fire which proved to be a false alarm. The
story is told in _The Antiquary_. Scott met the Forest men pouring in
down every water, and I have heard, from my own people, that the
inhabitants of the little Border towns meant to burn them, if Napoleon
landed, drive their flocks into the hills, and fight it out in the old
Border way, a burnt country and a guerilla foe. It was during his ride
of a hundred miles in twenty-four hours that Scott composed the lines
beginning--
The forest of Glenmore is dree,
It is all of black pine and the dark oak tree.
[Sidenote: PARTY SPIRIT]
The April of 1806 saw Scott in London; already a “lion,” he was
presented at the tiny Court of Caroline, Princess of Wales, who at this
time was taken up by the Tories, as the Prince of Wales was then of the
Whig party; much as another Prince of Wales, Frederick, was something of
a Jacobite. He found that the Princess had an exaggerated freedom of
manner, and presently “it came to be thought so.” She called him “a
faint-hearted troubadour,” and he had no mind for the part of
Chastelard. In town he met Joanna Baillie, whose plays he appreciated
with more of generosity than critical faculty. His instalment as Clerk
of Session was not welcomed by the Whigs, and, in irritation, “he for
the first time put himself forward as a decided Tory partisan.” The
Tories, at all events, were not pro-French. It would have been well if
Scott could have taken the advice of Lord Dalkeith (Feb. 20, 1806), “Go
to the hills and converse with the Spirit of the Fells, or any Spirit
but the Spirit of Party, which is the fellest fiend that ever disturbed
Harmony and social pleasure.”
On June 27, 1806, Scott wrote his “Health to Lord Melville,” the Tory
governing spirit of Scotland, whom the Whigs were impeaching. James
Ballantyne sang this lay at a public dinner on Lord Melville’s
acquittal. The Princess of Wales was saluted in this song, which
contained the words “Tally ho to the Fox” (C. J. Fox). This does not
appear an amazing indiscretion, in a parcel of party verses, but the
Whigs were greatly shocked. If a Briton must be a party man, he may as
righteously belong to one party as the other. But the Whigs ever
cherished the belief that they were the righteous. The worst effect of
Scott’s politics was his connexion with journals, from the stately
_Quarterly_ to the inglorious _Beacon_, which carried political rancour
into literary criticism. It is true that Hazlitt wrote as furiously and
vilely against Coleridge in _The Edinburgh Review_, which was Whig, as
any one ever did against Keats in _The Quarterly_, which is Tory. But
Whig offences, in history as in literature, are condoned by historians,
and forgotten by most people, while Gifford, of the _Quarterly_, and the
conductors of _Blackwood_ remain in the pillory. In any case, with the
brutal outrages of criticism Scott had nothing to do. He was foremost to
praise _Frankenstein_, supposing it to be by Shelley, when Shelley was
the target of Tory insults; and he invited Charles Lamb to Abbotsford,
when Lamb was being attacked as a leader of the Cockney School.[3] Lamb
missed the chance of coursing and salmon fishing with a Scot who would
not have aroused in him “an imperfect sympathy.”
However Lamb and Shelley were not known in Scotland in 1806, when the
affairs of Scott’s brother Thomas made it necessary for Walter to
[Sidenote: “MARMION”]
earn money by his pen. He received £1,000 from Constable for the
copyright of an unwritten poem, _Marmion_, and mortgaged his time and
genius to help a brother. Constable was then rather a dealer in rare old
books than a publisher, but he foresaw Scott’s success, and outbid
Messrs. Longman, if, indeed, they made any bid at all. To his brother
Thomas he wrote a series of letters, still, I think, unpublished, and
mainly noteworthy for the goodness of head, the wisdom, the benevolence
and tact of the writer. By the end of 1807 he was finishing at once his
_Life of Dryden_, and his _Marmion_; who, as he wrote to Lady Louisa
Stuart in January 1808, is “gasping upon Flodden Field,” though Scott
hoped, that day, “to knock him on the head with a few thumping stanzas.”
When we remember that, by his brother’s failure, the whole affairs of
the estates of the Marquis of Abercorn were thrown on his hands “in a
state of unutterable confusion,” and at his own responsibility, we may
estimate his industry. Describing the research needed by his _Dryden_ he
writes--
From my research the boldest spiders fled,
And moths retreating trembled as I read,
while at the same time he was leading Marmion from disgrace to death,
and was passing the heart of the day in his official duties (1807). But
by the end of February 1808, _Marmion_ was in the hands of the public,
equipped with the charming epistles to friends which precede the cantos.
Contrasting the over full life of Scott, and all his innumerable
distractions, with the “day long blessed idleness” of Tennyson, we
cannot expect from _Marmion_ the delicate finish of _The Idylls of the
King_. On the other hand, if Scott had enjoyed the leisure of Tennyson,
his rhymed romances would not have been better or other than they are.
In the Introduction to Canto Third, written to Erskine, he tells us that
criticism was wasted on him--
Then wild as cloud, or stream or gale,
Flow on, flow unconfined, my tale.
He will not imitate
those masters, o’er whose tomb
Immortal laurels ever bloom,
Instructive of the feeble bard
as the murmurs from the tomb may be. He will not even desert the fabled
past to chant the glories of the “Red Cross Hero” (Sir Sidney Smith),
nor of Sir Ralph Abercromby. But he foresees and predicts
The hour of Germany’s revenge,
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott, 1830.
From the painting by Sir John Watson Gordon, R.A.]
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
[Sidenote: “MARMION”]
From a painting by Sir David Wilkie, R.A.]
and that then
When breathing fury for her sake,
Some new Arminius shall awake,
Her champion, ere he strike, shall come,
To whet his sword on Brunswick’s tomb.
In few years the hour and the champion came, Field-Marshal Von Blücher.
A poet has seldom been a better prophet.
The plot of _Marmion_ is in one way strangely akin to the plot of
_Ivanhoe_. In both we have a hard-bitten, hard-hearted, and unscrupulous
knight, Marmion and the Templar. In both we have a pilgrim guide, who is
no pilgrim, but a knight in disguise, returned from exile, with a deep
grudge against the Templar, or Marmion (Wilfred, Wilton). Both sets of
partners are rivals in love, at least if Wilfred, as we believe, loved
Rebecca. In both we have a tourney between the rivals, in which Marmion
and the Templar are defeated by Wilton and Wilfred. But Marmion’s
behaviour, both in regard to his lady page, and in the matter of the
forgery, is much worse than that of the Templar at his worst, though,
amidst his infamy, he is a knight as bold and haughty as the traitor
Ganelon in the _Chanson de Roland_. The high revenge of the lady page,
Constance, as she goes to her death by hunger, stirred even Jeffrey.
“The scene of elfin chivalry” in which Marmion tilts with the phantom
knight, was suggested by a Latin legend, forged and sent to Scott by
Surtees of Mainsforth, who several times palmed off on the Sheriff
ballads of his own making. Pitscottie, the candid old Fifeshire
chronicler, supplied the omens which, as in the _Odyssey_, lead up to
the catastrophe of Flodden Field. Marmion was made to travel to
Edinburgh by a path that mortal man never took, Scott desiring to
describe the castles on the way, and a favourite view of Edinburgh from
Blackford Hill. This passage of landscape has been elaborately and
justly praised by Mr. Ruskin. For poetical purposes Lady Heron is
brought to Holyrood, though she was at her castle beneath Flodden Edge,
and the artifice is justified by her song of _Young Lochinvar_. But it
is the closing battle piece that makes the fortune of _Marmion_.
[Sidenote: JEFFREY]
“All ends in song,” and in song end Scotland’s sorrows for that fatal
unforgotten fight, in which all was lost but honour. Scarce a great
family but lost her sons, the yeomen and peasants died like paladins,
and the strongest of the Stuart kings made the best end of all of them,
rushing forth from the fighting “schiltrom” and falling, pierced with
arrows and hacked with bills, not a lance’s length from the English
general. For this we have Surrey’s own word, and true it is that if the
Scots were never led with less skill, they never did battle with more
indomitable courage. Had not every leader fallen, save Home, the next
day would have seen a renewal of the battle--
Where shivered was fair Scotland’s Spear,
And broken was her shield.
Flodden secured the success of _Marmion_, and gave the laurels to the
brow of Scott. But it is certain that our age could dispense with Clara
and her lover! The fiend of party, detested by Lord Dalkeith, moved the
Whigs to take umbrage because more moan was made for Pitt than for Fox
in one of the Introductory pieces, where by an error of the press
several lines of the lament for Fox were omitted in early copies. “All
the Whigs here are in arms against _Marmion_,” wrote Scott (March 13,
1808). Jeffrey now complained of “the manifest neglect of Scottish
feelings,” which had been so injuriously flattered in the _Lay_, to the
indignation of the rest of the Empire! Lockhart justly remarks that it
was the _British_ patriotism which vexed Jeffrey, whose _Edinburgh
Review_ did its best to throw cold water on the spirit of national
resistance to Napoleon. He professed that his stupid criticism was a
well meant effort to draw Scott from “so idle a task” as that in which
he displayed his “pedantry.” Scott could bear the spite till Jeffrey
charged him with want of patriotism, and that arrow rankled. Jeffrey
dined with him on the day when Scott read the critique, and was
cordially received, but his host ceased to write in the _Edinburgh
Review_, and raised up another like unto it, a rival, the Tory
_Quarterly_.
CHAPTER III
_QUARTERLY REVIEW_, _LADY OF THE LAKE_, _ROKEBY_, BALLANTYNE AFFAIRS
As Scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a
well paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the
literary calling in 1808. Britain was not yet a wildly excitable and
hysterical country. Rapidity of communication of news had not irritated
the nerves of the community. We won or lost a battle, but as men knew
nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with
their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening
newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without
wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. A few years after
Scott’s death, a Parliamentary Commission inquired into the financial
conditions of publishers and authors. The Commission learned, from one
of Messrs. Longmans’ firm, that it was not unusual for gentlemen to
“form libraries” (the expression “every gentleman’s library” survives as
a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now
ceased to be.
The man who killed the formation of private libraries was Walter Scott.
His _Waverley_ appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any
books except novels. Poetry soon became a “drug in the market,” and the
taste for “the classics,” whether ancient or modern, died away: the
novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the
circulating library.
[Sidenote: “QUARTERLY REVIEW”]
It was the fortune of Scott to take full advantage of the traditional
usage of “forming libraries” in the years between the appearance of the
_Lay_ and of _Waverley_. He edited Dryden in many volumes, and was
fairly well paid. By doubling the price, Constable induced him to edit
Swift’s works, and to write the best extant _Life of Swift_. He also
edited the important Sadleir Papers, the diplomatic correspondence of
the agent of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, a most valuable book to the
historian, and he was concerned in many antiquarian publications. These
were undertaken partly from love of the past, partly for the purpose of
gaining employment for needy men of letters like Henry Weber, a German
who later became insane and challenged Scott to a pistol duel across a
table! Constable was usually the publisher of the ventures, but
Constable had a partner, a Mr. Hunter, a laird, no less, who bullied
Weber, and behaved to Scott in a manner which he deemed insufferable.
Again, politics came between Constable and Scott. Constable was the
publisher of the _Edinburgh Review_, which had filled up the measure of
its iniquities. No man likes to be called an unpatriotic pedant, and
Jeffrey, in the _Edinburgh Review_, had called Scott both pedantic and
unpatriotic. Again, the year 1808 saw the Spanish national rising
against Napoleon. Backed by Britain and Wellington, and by the
infatuation of Bonaparte himself,[4] by the fatuous Moscow expedition,
and the revenge of Germany, the rising of the Peninsula overthrew the
French Emperor. But the _Edinburgh Review_ and the Whigs had no taste
for a national rising in the name of freedom. The Spanish, they
observed, were a Catholic and intolerant people, not like the liberal
French. The Spanish insurrections began in massacres of unpopular
officials, and, at Valencia (June 6, 7, 1808), in the murder of the
whole colony of French merchants in the town. That French Republican
mobs should massacre uncounted victims was very well: it was
intolerable to the Whigs that Spanish Catholic mobs should imitate them.
The Spanish cause was both disreputable and desperate, said the Whigs.
England, if she aided Spain, must perish in the same ruin. Such was the
song of the _Edinburgh Review_, at that time the only critical journal
conducted by educated men. Meanwhile Scott recognized the genius of
Wellesley--“I would to God he were now at the head of the English in
Spain!”
[Sidenote: “QUARTERLY REVIEW”]
For personal and political reasons then, as a patriot and a poet
outraged, Scott determined not only to counteract the _Edinburgh
Review_, but to set up a rival to Constable, its publisher. It is
difficult to trace each step in his scheme of resistance to Constable
and Whiggery. But John Murray, then a young publisher in London, saw his
opportunity of winning Scott away from Constable; he determined to back,
financially, the Ballantynes in London, and he visited Ashestiel in
October 1808. He had heard of the nascent _Lady of the Lake_, he had
heard of _Waverley_ as “on the stocks,” and he wished to have his share.
From a letter of Scott to his brother Thomas, we learn that the old
staff of _The Antijacobin_, including Canning, now Prime Minister, and
Frere, had been “hatching a plot” for a Tory rival to the _Edinburgh
Review_. Scott had been offered the Editorship, with “great prospects
of emolument,” and the new serial was to have private information from
Government. But for many obvious reasons, Scott could not take the
Editorship, which fell to Gifford, a man of bad health, bad temper, and
procrastinating habits, feared and unpopular as a satirist. Heber and
Ellis, however, were ready to aid contributors, and Scott’s letters
reveal his opinion of the state of literary criticism.
As is usual, periodical criticism revelled in “a facetious and rejoicing
ignorance.” Specialists could not write what the public would read;
editors like Jeffrey added flippancy to their dull lucubrations.
Reviewing had long been indolently good natured: the _Edinburgh Review_
had set the fashion of being tart and bitter; the fashion pleased, and
“the minor reviews give us all abuse and no talent.” The age of
“slashing” criticism had begun, and Scott held that “decent, lively, and
reflecting criticism” would be welcome. He knew Gifford’s temper, and
hoped to abate it. “We must keep our swords clear as well as sharp, and
not forget the gentlemen in the critics.” Had Scott accepted the
Editorship, with Heber, Ellis, Southey, and other gentlemen for his
_aides_, the _Quarterly_ would have been what he desired it to be. But a
satirist was the Editor, and for long the tone was “savage and
tartarly,” in cases well remembered. Many of Scott’s best essays,
however, appeared in the _Quarterly_.
His indignation, and we may say his infatuation, found vent in another
project. Lockhart may be too severe in his account of James Ballantyne’s
brother John, who, after failing in various undignified lines, was
started as a publisher by Scott, in 1809. Scott supplied most of the
capital; John was expected to manage the accounts, and so the fatal
business began. Nobody could call the Ballantynes “gentlemen,” whether
in a heraldic or any other sense of the word. But both, in several ways,
consciously or unconsciously amused Scott; he was deeply attached to
them, and they to him. That he had such henchmen was his own fault: they
were, so to speak, his Cochranes and Oliver Sinclairs, the unworthy
favourites who were the ruin of the old Stuart Kings. Lockhart says that
“a more reckless, thoughtless, improvident adventurer” than the festive
John “never rushed into the serious responsibilities of business,” while
James “never understood book-keeping or could bring himself to attend to
it with regularity.” Scott, on the other hand, thoroughly understood
business, and kept systematic accounts of his private expenditure.
[Sidenote: THE BALLANTYNE COMPANY]
But his success carried him, as it carried the great Emperor his
contemporary, beyond himself. He felt adequate to all labours, however
diverse; he was as confident as Napoleon in his own star; he entered on
this publishing business as Napoleon invaded Russia, without organized
supplies (for Mr. Murray soon withdrew from the Ballantyne alliance),
and disaster was always at his doors. Between 1805 and 1810 he invested
at least £9,000 in the Ballantyne companies, and night by night the
fairy gold won by his imagination changed into worthless paper. We
cannot here attempt to distribute exactly the shares of blame which fall
to Scott and to the Ballantynes. Mr. Cadell uses the word
“hallucination” to qualify Scott’s part in the business. I have examined
these complicated matters carefully,[5] and the gist of the explanation
lies in a remark of James Ballantyne. “The large sums received never
formed an addition to stock. In fact they were all expended by the
partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly
adopted my brother John’s sanguine results.” They accepted John’s
book-keeping at a venture, and, to use a slang phrase, they “blued” the
apparent profits. That is the secret.
To leave a repulsive theme, in 1809 Scott visited the Highlands, he
began _The Lady of the Lake_, which had long “simmered” in his mind, and
he rode Fitz James’s ride from Loch Vennachar to Stirling, finding it
practicable, though the ground, to be sure, must have been very
different in the days of James V, when lochs occupied what is now arable
land. At Buchanan House, on this tour, he read _English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers_, and briefly spoke of the author as “a whelp of a young Lord
Byron ... abusing me for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my
pen. God help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even
suck his own paws.” But, like the Moslems in Thackeray’s White Squall,
he “thought but little of it,” and did not dream of repaying Byron in
kind.
[Sidenote: NO SATIRIST]
As he wrote to Lady Abercorn, “If I did not rather dislike satire from
principle than feel myself altogether disqualified from it by nature, I
have the means of very severe retaliation in my power,” particularly
with respect to the Whigs of Holland House. Scott never used his powers
as a satirist. He was remarkably skilled in the playful imitation of the
styles of other poets, a faculty scarcely to have been expected from one
so careless of finish in his own productions. He could easily have
retaliated on Byron and others in the manner of Pope; but, as he
thought, satire is the lowest, because the least sincere, of all forms
of composition. Mankind is weary of the points and the feigned
indignation of the satirist, and as “damns have had their day,”
according to Bob Acres, versified satire too is fortunately in the limbo
of things obsolete.
Scott seems usually to have had in his mind the theme for his next poem
but one before he had finished its predecessor. In an excursion to
Stirling, during the autumn of 1808, he told Mrs. Scott that he hoped
one day “to make the earth yawn” at Bannockburn, “and devour the English
archery and knighthood, as it did on that celebrated day of Scottish
glory.” The design was long deferred, and when it was fulfilled, the
Earth is not the only person who yawns in the course of _The Lord of the
Isles._
In a life that was now very happy, whether spent in London, in
Edinburgh, or in coursing and spearing salmon with the Ettrick Shepherd
at Ashestiel, Scott occupied his morning hours with his edition of
Swift, with the editing of the Somers Tracts, and with _The Lady of the
Lake_, which appeared in May 1810.
The feud with Constable was now dying of natural decline, and Scott and
Jeffrey were quite forgetting their differences. Scott had never
concealed from Jeffrey his opinion that the critic knew nothing of the
heart and glow of poetry, and Jeffrey, before publishing his review of
_The Lady of the Lake_ sent his proof sheets to Scott, expressing his
regret for the “heedless asperities” in the criticism of _Marmion_.
“Believe me when I say that I am sincerely proud both of your genius and
your glory, and that I value your friendship more highly than most of
either my literary or political opinions.” Jeffrey was a good fellow at
heart, though, in criticising contemporary poetry, he spoke most highly
of a certain Professor Brown! He found _The Lady of the Lake_ “more
polished in its diction” than its predecessors, and certainly its
rhyming octosyllabic couplets are more monotonous than the varied
cadences of the _Lay_. “It never expresses a sentiment which it can cost
the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend,” which is true
enough, but is no less true of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. The
general chorus of praise, and the rush of tourists to Loch Katrine and
Ellen’s Isle, did not turn Scott’s head, or persuade him that he was a
poet of the first order. Miss Scott told James Ballantyne that she had
not read _The Lady of the Lake_. “Papa says there is nothing so bad for
young people as reading bad poetry.” Yet he confessedly wrote for “young
people of spirit.” He says, “I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself
from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it
was in the highest fashion with the million.”
[Sidenote: “LADY OF THE LAKE”]
Meanwhile, whosoever, in youth, has read the magical lines--
The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,
and has followed the chase across the Brig of Turk, to
The lone lake’s western boundary
has to thank Scott for leading him into the paradise of romance, and
cares not how low the literary critics may rate the Minstrel. Such a
reader has been with
mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Other enchanted lands there are, but to one Scott has given him the key,
to a land where the second-sighted man foretells the coming of the
stranger, and the prophet sleeps swathed in the black bull’s hide in the
spray of the haunted linn.
Never can we forget the hurrying succession of pictures that pass by the
bearer of the fiery cross, or the song of the distraught Blanche that
gives warning to Fitz James.
The toils are pitch’d, and the stakes are set,
Ever sing merrily, merrily;
The bows they bend, and the knives they whet,
Hunters live so cheerily.
It was a stag, a stag of ten,
Bearing his branches sturdily;
He came stately down the glen,
Ever sing hardily, hardily.
It was there he met with a wounded doe,
She was bleeding deathfully;
She warned him of the toils below,
Oh, so faithfully, faithfully!
He had an eye and he could heed,
Ever sing warily, warily;
He had a foot, and he could speed,
Hunters watch so narrowly.
On this passage the egregious Jeffrey wrote--
“No machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance
of a distressed hero, than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without
knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him, _by a song_, to take
care of the ambush that was set for him. The maniacs of poetry have
indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of Ophelia
downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make
them sing good sense, and to make sensible people be guided by them.”
[Sidenote: “LADY OF THE LAKE”]
Scott recked so lightly of this censure that he repeated the situation
(his novels often repeat the situations of his poems), the warning
lilts of a brainsick girl, in _The Heart of Midlothian_, in that most
romantic passage where Madge Wildfire’s snatches of song give warning to
the fugitive lover of Effie Deans. These parallelisms between the
structure of the rhymed and of the anonymous prose romances are frequent
and curious.
The whole poem of _The Lady of the Lake_ is inimitably vivacious, it has
on it the dew of morning in a mountain pass: the King is worthy of the
praise of Scott’s princes given to Byron by the Prince of Wales, who,
with all his faults, could appreciate Walter Scott and Jane Austen. “I
told the Prince,” Byron wrote to Scott, “that I thought you more
particularly the painter of Princes, as they never appeared more
fascinating than in _Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_. He was pleased
to coincide, and to dwell on the description of your James’s as no less
royal than poetical. He spoke alternately of Homer and yourself, and
seemed well acquainted with both.” A British king well acquainted with
Homer is hardly the idiot of Thackeray’s satire.
Scott said in taking farewell of his work--
Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp!
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway,
And little reck I of the censure sharp
May idly cavil at an idle lay.
Much have I owed thy strains on life’s long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawn’d wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devour’d alone,
That I o’erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own.
He had shown more of his heart than he cared to show, and passed the
confession off with a quotation from Master Stephen, who deemed
melancholy “a gentlemanly thing.”
Scott’s gains from _The Lady of the Lake_ must have been considerable,
though of course not nearly so great as the profits of a modern dealer
in fustian novels. A prudent poet would have regarded the money as
capital, and Scott, as we said, did place at least £9,000 in his
Ballantyne companies. But it appears that the money was no sooner in
than the profits were taken out again for the private expenditure of the
partners.
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY”]
It really seems that Scott often was deceived, or at least confused, as
to the state of his commercial accounts. He used to write to John
Ballantyne, his book-keeper, in the strain of an affectionate elder
brother, imploring “dear John” to “have the courage to tell disagreeable
truths to those whom you hold in regard,” “not to shut your eyes or
blind those of your friends upon the actual state of business.” The
advice was given in vain, says Lockhart, and he explains that Scott’s
own conduct made his counsels of no avail. The Ballantynes could not
inquire strictly into Scott’s “uncommercial expenditure,” because, while
he was the only moneyed partner, they had “trespassed largely, for their
own purposes, on the funds of the companies.” The same reason, namely
that the money was not theirs, made it impossible for them to check
Scott’s commercial expenditure on the publication of huge antiquarian
volumes, exquisitely ill done by the many literary hangers-on for whom
he wished to procure a livelihood. These piles of waste paper remained
on the hands of his publishing company, which was also bearing the
weight of that Old Man of the Sea, his Annual Register, irregularly
published at a loss of £1,000 a year. Thus, although the excitements of
the Peninsular and other wars did not prevent the public from buying
Scott’s poetry largely, the Ballantyne companies went from one bank to
another in search of accommodation, while Scott lived as joyously as La
Fontaine’s grasshopper, in the summer weather of his genius.
In 1810 he showed the fragment of _Waverley_ to James Ballantyne, who
looked on it without enthusiasm. James was to Scott what the old
housekeeper was to Molière, a touchstone of public taste; his remarks on
the margins of Scott’s proof-sheets show that he was rather below the
level of general ignorance, and rather more morally sensitive than the
common prude of the period. He could throw cold water on _Waverley_, but
could not restrain Scott from publishing Dr. Jamieson’s _History of the
Culdees_, and Weber’s egregious “Beaumont and Fletcher.” Business looked
so bad that in 1810 Scott entertained the notion of seeking a judicial
office in India.
His next poem, _Don Roderick_--“this patriotic puppet show” he called
it--he gave, since silver and gold he had none, as a subscription to the
fund for ruined Portuguese. Scott, in _Don Roderick_, passed Sir John
Moore over in silence, not because Moore was a Whig, but because Scott
did not appreciate the much disputed strategy of that great soldier and
good man. Neither Moore’s glorious death, nor his stand at Corunna,
expiated, in Scott’s opinion, the disasters of his hurried retreat. It
was at this time that his friend, Captain Fergusson, read _The Lady of
the Lake_ aloud, the sixth canto, to the men of his command, under
artillery fire.
[Sidenote: ABBOTSFORD]
A trifling piece, _The Inferno of Altesidora_, contained verses in the
manner of Crabbe, Moore, and himself; these are excellent imitations,
and, with a lyric, _The Resolve_, in the manner of the Caroline poets,
justify the opinion that Scott would have been a formidable satirist had
he chosen to attack Byron and the Whigs in the manner and measure of
Pope.
As Scott had now a near prospect of a salary of £1,300 a year, for his
hitherto unpaid labours as Clerk of Session, he yielded to the fatal
temptation of purchasing a small estate on Tweedside. This purchase was
really an antiquarian extravagance; he wished to add to his collection
the field of the last great Border clan battle, fought in 1526 between
the clans of Scott and Ker, including the stone called Turn Again, where
an Elliot checked the pursuit by spearing Ker of Cessford. The two farms
which he bought were styled Cartley or Clarty Hole, and Kaeside, “a bare
haugh and a bleak bank,” said Scott, and there was an ugly little
farmhouse at Clarty Hole, rechristened Abbotsford, in memory of the
monks of Melrose. It is not a good site, lying low, close to the
existing public road, and the proprietor had not the charter for salmon
fishing in the pools beneath his house. But the property was all
“enchanted land,” rich in legends and Border memories of Thomas of
Ercildoune and of battles, while Scott often cast longing eyes on the
adjacent Faldonside, once the home of Andrew Ker, the most ruffianly of
Riccio’s murderers, and on the perfect little peel tower of Darnick.
Washington Irving says that Scott spoke to him of a project of buying
Smailholme Tower. Like almost all Scots for many centuries, the Sheriff
longed to be a landed man; his lease of Ashestiel was ended, and, above
all, the land which he now purchased was rich in antiquarian interest.
So he collected farms, began to rebuild the house of Clarty Hole, and
entered on his private Moscow expedition, the Making of Abbotsford. The
first farm purchased was dear at the £4,000 which was its price.
Meanwhile, a source which, in our day, would have proved a mine of gold
to Scott, was by him unworked. He would not dramatize his poems, or,
later, his novels, for the stage, and every adventurer made prize of
them.
[Sidenote: “ROKEBY”]
Early in 1812 Scott began _Rokeby_, a poem on the home of his friend
Morritt, and in May he “flitted” in a gipsy-like procession from
Ashestiel to Abbotsford. But _Childe Harold_ appeared before _Rokeby_;
Scott disliked the popular misanthropy of _The Childe_, but privately
declared it to be “a poem of most extraordinary power, which may rank
its author with our first poets.” Scott burned the whole of his first
draft of _Rokeby_ (canto 1), because “I had corrected the spirit out of
it.” Meanwhile Scott and Byron became correspondents, in a tone, to
quote Lockhart, “of friendly confidence equally honourable to both these
great competitors, without rivalry, for the favour of the literary
world.” Of _Rokeby_, which appeared in the last days of 1812, Scott
said that it was a “pseudo romance of pseudo chivalry,” though he liked
the beautiful lyrics interspersed through the poem, and rather piqued
himself on the character of the outlaw Bertram, who has won the applause
of Mr. Swinburne. The scene of _Rokeby_ is English, and of the
characters Lockhart says that, in a prose romance “they would have come
forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groups Scott ever
created.” Scott told Miss Edgeworth that Matilda was drawn from “a lady
who is now no more,” his lost love, and that most of the other
personages “are mere shadows.” The poet never left much for his critics
to say in the way of disapproval.
The poem, _enfin_, was in no way a success. Mocking birds of song had
wearied the public of Scott by endless imitation.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed,
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.
Scott himself was imitating himself in _The Bridal of Triermain_, to
“set a trap for Jeffrey,” who was expected to take Erskine for the
author. He was boyishly reckless of his reputation; he easily resigned
the lists when Byron “beat him,” as he says, and in the year 1813 was
harassed by “the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment.”
A crisis had come in the affairs of Ballantyne & Co. The interest, for
us, lies in the light which the crisis throws on the character of Scott.
We have seen that a friend wrote, at the time of his disappointment in
love, about Scott’s “violent” and “ungovernable” character, while Scott
himself refers to “the family temper” as rather volcanic. The late Mr.
W. B. Scott, too, considered it worth while to tell the world in his
Memoirs, that, as a boy, he once heard Scott swear profane in a
printer’s office. The truth of the matter seems to be that Scott had a
large share of the family temper in boyhood, when he suffered from
serious illnesses, and that he was capable of relapses in his overworn
later years. But in the full health and vigour of his manhood, he
mastered his temper admirably.
[Sidenote: BALLANTYNE TROUBLES]
He was at Abbotsford, at Drumlanrig with the Duke of Buccleuch, and at
other country houses remote from Edinburgh, in the July and August of
1813. He was disturbed by frequent letters from John Ballantyne, always
at the very last moment demanding money to save the existence of the
firm, and always concealing the exact state of financial affairs. John
was like the proverbial spendthrift who never can be induced to give
his benevolent kinsfolk a full schedule of his debts. Thus harassed and
menaced with ruin, Scott wrote letters which are models of tact and
temper. He only asked to be told “in plain and distinct terms” how
affairs really stood, and to be told in good time. But John was as
unpunctual and untrustworthy as Scott was punctual and placable. He
would not write explicitly, he always sent unexpected demands, and it
was only certain that he was keeping others back. Scott had not an hour
of peace and safety, and he told Ballantyne as much, “in charity with
your dilatory worship.” “Were it not for your strange concealments, I
should anticipate no difficulty in winding up these matters.” Lockhart
says that he would as soon have hanged his favourite dog as turned John
Ballantyne adrift. The conclusion of the matter was that the Ballantyne
publishing company found a haven in the capacious bosom of Constable,
who believed in the Star of Scott, advanced some £4,000, and took off
the sinking ship the useless burden of the valueless books.
On the whole Scott could be patient, he knew that his copyrights and
library were valuable enough to secure all his creditors from ultimate
loss. But to avoid loss by the hurried sale of copyrights, he obtained
a guarantee for £4,000 from his friend and chief, the Duke of Buccleuch,
backed, it seems, by Messrs. Longman. At the same time he declined an
offer of the Poet Laureateship--vacant by the death of Pye--from the
Prince Regent. He supposed that the Laureateship was worth three or four
hundred pounds annually, a mistake. But as he held two other offices,
the Clerkship and Sheriffship, he deemed it wrong to take the money, and
secured the office for Southey, who lived solely by his pen. Another
motive, felt by Scott and urged by the Duke of Buccleuch, was the
ridicule which then was attached to the bays, and the necessity of
writing a Birthday Ode every year. The Regent removed that obsolete
necessity, and Southey, despite one famous error, redeemed the honour of
the laurels, next held by Wordsworth, and then by Tennyson. “Sir
Walter’s conduct,” Southey said, “was, as it always was,
characteristically generous, and in the highest degree friendly.”
Thus in temper, in generosity, and in determination that no man should
be a loser by him, we see Scott at his best, while in the sanguine
hopefulness which led him to go on buying land, books, and old armour,
during the crisis, we mark the cause of his final misfortunes; and, in
his ceaseless industry
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott and His Friends.
[Sidenote: LAUREATESHIP]
From the painting by Thomas Faed, R.A.]
during these distractions, we note the courageous perseverance by which
he saved his honour at the expense of his life. Through his financial
troubles he worked doggedly at his Edition and _Life of Swift_, and
began _The Lord of the Isles_, though already he was the butt of every
bore, and the host of tedious uninvited guests, “the thieves of time.”
Simultaneously, he was assisting Maturin and other literary strugglers
with money, his constant practice. But he did cause the Income Tax
collectors to “abandon their claim upon the produce of literary labour.”
Lockhart chronicles this fact “in case such a demand should ever be
renewed hereafter!”
It is renewed, of course, and with perfect justice. What Scott resisted
was double taxation of literary earnings, first under the property tax,
next, yearly, under the Income Tax. He must not first be taxed on the
full price, say, of _Marmion_, as income, and then again yearly on the
interest of the price.[6]
In July 1814 the Edition and _Life of Swift_ appeared in nineteen
volumes, six years after this laborious work was begun. The _Life_,
which became popular, is perhaps, with that by Sir Henry Craik, the most
generous and sympathetic attempt to make intelligible one of the
greatest, most miserable, and most mysterious of mankind. Scott made
more allowance than Thackeray for what Lockhart calls “the faults and
foibles of nameless and inscrutable disease.”
CHAPTER IV
THE _WAVERLEY_ NOVELS
It must probably have been in 1813 that Scott, hunting for some fishing
tackle in an old bureau, found both the flies (they were red palmers
tied on several strands of grey horse hairs), and also the manuscript of
the first chapters of _Waverley_, begun in 1805 and reconsidered in
1810. The novel was advertised in _The Scots Magazine_ of February, as
to appear in March. But, very characteristically, Scott now dropped the
novel, and gave the spring months to composing the essays on “Chivalry”
and “Romance” for Constable’s new purchase, _The Encyclopaedia
Britannica_. Then, in June 1814, Lockhart, at a dinner party of young
men in George Street, saw through a window of North Castle Street the
writing hand “that never stops--page after page is finished and thrown
on that heap of MSS.; and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be
till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I
well know what hand that is--’tis Walter Scott’s,” said Lockhart’s
host.
Thus, in three summer weeks, Scott wrote the two last volumes of
_Waverley_, the anonymous romance that began a literary revolution.
Novels, of course, were written always, since the days of Richardson and
Fielding and Miss Burney. But Miss Burney had long been silent: Mrs.
Radcliffe had ceased to terrify and amaze, and Miss Edgeworth, in
Lockhart’s opinion, “had never realized a tithe of £700 by the best of
her Irish tales,” which Scott regarded as one source of his inspiration.
Novels were in 1814 abandoned, said Morritt, to the Lydia Languishes and
their maids; they were disdained by the then relatively serious members
of the reading public who “formed libraries.” _Waverley_ came with its
successors and with the swarm of imitations, and libraries were formed
no more. The public, indeed, still bought the poetry of Byron with
enthusiasm, but Shelley and Keats they rejected. I doubt if there was a
first edition of _Christabel_, and the reign of novels and nothing but
novels began. There were interruptions to this despotism when Tennyson
was in his golden prime, and when Macaulay and Froude wrote history, but
to-day the Novel is supreme, and--the novels are not _Waverley_ novels.
[Sidenote: YACHTING TOUR]
It was Scott, the greatest of readers, who inaugurated the reign of
novel-reading, and very much chagrined he would be could he see the
actual results: the absolute horror with which mankind shun every other
study. It could never have occurred to Scott, that, within less than a
hundred years, male and female novelists, often as ignorant of books as
of life, would monopolize the general attention, and would give
themselves out as authorities on politics, philosophy, ethics, society,
theology, religion, and Homeric criticism. Scott’s own tales never
usurped the office of the pulpit, the platform, or the Press; and, if he
did teach some readers all the history that they knew, he constantly
warned them that, in his romances, he was an historian with a very large
poetical licence.
No sooner had Scott read the proof-sheets of _Waverley_ than he sailed
from Leith (July 28, 1814) with a festal crew of friends, including
Erskine, on board the Lighthouse yacht. The Surveyor, Viceroy of the
jolly Commissioners of Lighthouses, was the ancestor of Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson, “a most gentlemanlike and modest man and well-known for his
scientific skill,” writes Scott in his _Diary_. That he kept a very
copious diary on a pleasure voyage is an example of his indomitable
habit of writing, unfatigued by the production of two volumes of a novel
in three weeks. He visited the ruined abbey of Arbroath, once held by
Cardinal Beaton, “for the third time, the first being--_eheu!_” On the
first visit he had been in the company of his unforgotten love: to be
absent from her, and divided from her by the river of death, was not to
be out of mind of her. He studied the strange ways of the Shetland and
Orkney islanders--we see the results in _The Pirate_; he examined the
extraordinary towers of the fourth to ninth centuries A.D. called
_Brochs_; he took notes of a superstitious practice which strongly
resembles an usage of the natives of Central Australia: he heard of the
great sea serpent’s recent visit to the coast, and he was presented with
a collection of neolithic axe heads. He met a witch of great age who
sold, as Æolus in the _Odyssey_ gave, favourable breezes to seamen. He
visited many island scenes of the distresses of Prince Charles, in 1746,
and at Dunvegan saw the Fairy Flag of M’Leod, and heard M’Crimmon’s
Lament played by a descendant of the M’Crimmon who was the only man
slain in the rout of the M’Leods at Moy. He beheld Loch
Coruisk--admirably described in _The Lord of the Isles_--and the ruins
of Ardtornish Castle, in which occurs the opening scene of that poem. On
September 4, he was saddened by news of the death of one of his dearest
friends, the Duchess of Buccleuch, and, on September 8, left the yacht
for Glasgow.
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY”]
In Edinburgh, on his way to Abbotsford, Scott found Constable about to
publish the third edition of _Waverley_--three thousand copies, at a
guinea, had already been disposed of, or were in the way of
disappearing. This was at that time an unexampled success for a new and
anonymous novel, unbacked by the favouring breezes of the modern puff
preliminary. The book, uncut and in three grey-clad volumes, is now
esteemed at a very high rate by bibliomaniacs. In most cases, purchasers
had the novels “murderously half-bound in calf,” and much cut down; and,
of _Waverley_ in particular, copies of the first edition are seldom
found in the original state. Constable had refused to give £1,000 for
the whole copyright, and rather ruefully divided the large profits with
the author.
At first only three people were in Scott’s confidence as to the
authorship of _Waverley_: they were Ballantyne, Erskine and Morritt.
Gradually, as the novels flowed on and on, about twenty persons were
entrusted with the secret, which could be no real secret to any one of
sense who had read the poems and the notes to the poems. As for Scott’s
intimates, they recognized him in dozens of details and traces. But the
public, not unnaturally, wished to believe that they had a new
entertainer. Thomas Scott, Jeffrey (of all people!), Erskine, and a
clergyman who lay under a very black cloud, were among the persons
suspected of the authorship.
It was vain to say that only Scott knew so much of Highlands and
Lowlands as the author knew: that no other man had his acquaintance with
the personal side of old history, that no other could have written the
snatches of verse in the romances. People enjoy a mystery, and Scott
enjoyed mystifying them, while his conscience permitted him a latitude
in denial warranted by the maxims of Father Holt, S.J., in _Esmond_. As
a loyal citizen might blamelessly say that King Charles was _not_ in the
oak tree--His Majesty being private there, and invisible to loyal
eyes--so Scott, if pressed, averred that he had no hand in the novels,
often adding that, even if he had, he would still deny his authorship.
Casuists may blame or exonerate him (Cardinal Newman discussed the
situation): it is certain that no man is bound to incriminate himself.
Jeffrey detected Scott, of course, and reviewed him with the usual
grotesque assumption of superiority. _O le grand homme, rien ne lui peut
plaire!_ The _Quarterly_ dullard probably did not recognize Scott’s
hand, and spoke of the Scots tongue as “a dark dialogue” (so in
Lockhart!) “of Anglified Erse,” a deathless exhibition of stupid
ignorance.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
The general characteristics, the merits and defects of the _Waverley_
novels may be reviewed, before we approach the history of each example
in its turn. In an age when an acquaintance with FitzGerald’s Rubáiyàt
of Omar Kháyyám, an exhaustive ignorance of all literature of the past,
and an especial contempt for Scott, whom FitzGerald so intensely
admired, are the equipment of many critics, we must be very cautious in
praising the _Waverley_ novels. They are not the work of a passionate, a
squalid, or a totally uneducated genius. They are not the work of any
Peeping Tom who studies woman in her dressing-room, and tries to spy or
smell out the secrets of the eternally feminine. We have novels
to-day--novels by males--full of clever spyings and dissections of
womankind, which Scott would have thrown into the fire. “I think,”
writes Mr. Hutton, “that the deficiency of his pictures of women ...
should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry.... He hardly
ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into
their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.”
Scott’s novels, again, are not the work of a man who desires to enforce
his social, or religious, or political ideals and ideas in his romances.
Like almost all great novels, except _Tom Jones_, they do not possess
carefully elaborated plots, any more than do most of the dramas of
Shakespeare. They are far from being the work of a conscientious
stylist, beating his brains for hours to find _le mot propre_, usually
the least natural word for any mortal to use in the circumstances. But
once Scott _did_ hunt for _le mot propre_, in Scots. He could not find
it, and came out to the lawn at Abbotsford where some workmen were
engaged. He turned a bucket upside down, and asked the men, “What did I
do just now?” “Ye _whummled_ the bowie,” said the men, and Scott had
found the word he wanted--to “whummle.” Mr. Saintsbury has a little
excursus on this word, “whummle,” or “whammle,” which Scott, he has
heard, picked up from a woman in the street. But every Scot knows it,
for to “whummle the bannock,” in the presence of a Menteith, was a
proverbial insult, as Menteith, or one of his men, is said, by whummling
the loaf, to have given the signal of betrayal, when English soldiers
lay in wait before seizing Sir William Wallace.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Far from being a conscientious stylist, Scott not infrequently proves
the truth of his own remark to Lockhart, that he never learned grammar.
I have found five “whiches” in a sentence of his, and five “_ques_” in a
sentence by Alexandre Dumas, his pupil and rival. Dumas had more of the
humour of Scott than Scott had of the wit of Dumas. Many parts of his
tales are prolix: his openings, as a rule, are dull. His heroes and
heroines often speak in the stilted manner of Miss Burney’s Lord
Orville, a manner (if we may trust memoirs and books like Boswell’s
_Johnson_, and Walpole’s _Letters_), in which no men and women of mould
ever did talk, even in the eighteenth century. But Catherine Glover, in
_The Fair Maid of Perth_, usually speaks from stilts. These pompous
discourses in which the speaker often talks of himself in the third
person, were in vogue, in novel writing, we do not know why, and they
are a stone of stumbling to readers who do not blench when a modern hero
mouths fustian in the tone of a demoniac at large. All these
unfashionable traits are to be found up and down the _Waverley_ novels,
combined with descriptive passages that, to some, are a weariness. These
are frank confessions from a zealot who has read most of the _Waverley_
novels many times, from childhood up to age, and finds them better,
finds fresh beauties in them, every time that he reads them. But there
are more serious defects than old-fashionedness, and prolixities (which
may be skipped), and laxity of style, and errors in grammar. There are
faults in “artistry,” and nobody knew them better, or put his finger on
them more ruthlessly, or apologized for them more ingenuously than Scott
himself.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
The Introductions to the Novels have frightened away many a painful
would-be student who has been told that, if you read a book, you must
read every line of it--from cover to cover. This is an old moral maxim
invented and handed on by the class of mortals who are not born
readers, and regard literature with moral earnestness as a duty, though
a painful duty. There must be no flinching! Scott, like Dr. Johnson,
“tore the heart out of a book,” rapidly assimilating what he needed, and
“skipping” what he did not need. He wrote his Introductions for the
curious literary student, not for the novel reader and the general
public. Doubtless he expected the general public to skip the
Introductions, and did not reflect that they would trouble persons who
adhere to the puritanic rule against what they call “desultory reading.”
But whosoever has any interest in Scott’s own theory of the conduct of
the historical novel, and in his confession of his own faults, cannot
afford to overlook the original Introduction of 1822 to _The Fortunes of
Nigel_. In these pages Captain Clutterbuck describes an interview with
“The Eidolon, or representative vision of The Author of _Waverley_.”
Scott, in fact, anticipates the modern “interview,” but he interviews
himself, and does the business better than the suave modern reporter.
After confessing that _The Monastery_, especially the White Lady of
Avenel, is rather a failure, Scott is asked by Captain Clutterbuck
whether his new book meets every single demand of the critics, whether
it opens strikingly, proceeds naturally, and ends happily, for critics
then applauded what they now denounce--“a happy ending.” Scott replies
that Hercules might produce a romance “which should glide, and gush, and
never pause, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on’t,” but that he
cannot. “There never was a novel written on this plan while the world
stood.” “Pardon me--_Tom Jones_,” says the Captain. There was also the
_Odyssey_, on which Wolf, the great sceptic as to the unity of the
_Iliad_, bestowed the praise of masterly composition which the Captain
gives to _Tom Jones_. But several modern German critics and Father
Browne of the Society of Jesus, assure us that the plot of the _Odyssey_
is a very bad piece of composition, a dawdling bit of patchwork by many
hands, in many ages, strung together by a relatively late Greek
“botcher,” though why he took the trouble nobody can imagine. Thus do
critical opinions differ, and a fair critic informs me that “_Tom Jones_
is the stupidest book in the English language.” Yet, if the _Odyssey_
triumphed over the Zoili of three thousand years, while _Tom Jones_ was
an undisputed masterpiece for a century and a half, we may doubt whether
the verdict of time and of the world is to be upset for ever by the
censures of a few moderns. To them, and to the contemners of Scott, we
may say, as Cromwell said to the Commissioners of the General Assembly,
“Brethren, in the bowels of Christ, believe that it is possible you may
be mistaken.” Scott remarks that, in Fielding’s masterpiece, the Novel,
for excellence of composition, “challenged a comparison with the Epic.”
Other “great masters,” like Smollett and Le Sage, “have been satisfied
if they amuse the reader on the road.” It is enough for himself if his
“scenes, unlaboured and loosely put together, have sufficient interest
in them to amuse in one corner the pain of the body; in another to
relieve anxiety of mind; in a third place to unwrinkle a brow bent with
the furrows of daily toil; in another to fill the place of bad thoughts,
or to suggest better; in yet another to induce an idler to study the
history of his country; in all ... to furnish harmless amusement.”
Such is Scott’s reply, in anticipation, to the censure of Carlyle, that
he has not a message, and a mission, and so forth. His mission was to
add enormously to human happiness: his message was that of honour,
courage, endurance, love, and kindness. The Captain, however, doubts not
that the new book needs an apology, and that the story “is hastily
huddled up,”--a favourite criticism of Scott’s friend, Lady Louisa
Steuart. Scott might have replied that his romances are not so hastily
“huddled up” at the close as many of Shakespeare’s plays.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
But it is curious that Hogg represents Scott as criticising _his_ tales
exactly as Captain Clutterbuck and Lady Louisa censured Scott’s own
romances.
“Well, Mr. Hogg, I have read over your proofs with a great deal of
pleasure, and, I confess, with some little portion of dread. In the
first place, the meeting of the two princesses at Castle Weiry is
excellent. I have not seen any modern thing more truly dramatic. The
characters are strongly marked, old Peter Chisholme’s in particular. Ah!
man, what you might have made of that with a little more refinement,
care, and patience! But it is always the same with you, just hurrying on
from one vagary to another, without consistency or proper arrangement.”
“Dear Mr. Scott, a man canna do the thing that he canna do.”
“Yes, but you _can_ do it. Witness your poems, where the arrangements
are all perfect and complete; but in your prose works, with the
exception of a few short tales, you seem to write merely by random,
without once considering what you are going to write about.”
“You are not often wrong, Mr. Scott, and you were never righter in your
life than you are now, for when I write the first line of a tale or
novel, I know not what the second is to be, and it is the same way in
every sentence throughout. When my tale is traditionary, the work is
easy, as I then see my way before me, though the tradition be ever so
short, but in all my prose works of imagination, knowing little of the
world, I sail on without star or compass.”
In the conversation with the Captain, Scott presently shows that, as
regards composition, the Sheriff and the Shepherd sailed in the same
rudderless boat. “You should take time at least to arrange your story,”
says the Captain. Scott replies, as Hogg replied to himself, that “A man
canna do what he canna do.”
“That is a sore point with me, my son. Believe me, I have not been
fool enough to neglect ordinary precautions. I have repeatedly laid
down my future work to scale, divided it into volumes and chapters,
and endeavoured to construct a story which I meant would evolve
itself gradually and strikingly, maintain suspense, and stimulate
curiosity; and which, finally, should terminate in a striking
catastrophe. But I think there is a demon who seats himself on the
feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from
the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are
multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase; my
regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is closed
long before I have attained the point I proposed.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
“_Captain._--Resolution and determined forbearance might remedy
that evil.
“_Author._--Alas! my dear sir, you do not know the force of
paternal affection. When I light on such a character as Bailie
Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagination brightens, and my conception
becomes clearer at every step which I take in his company, although
it leads me many a weary mile away from the regular road, and
forces me to leap hedge and ditch to get back into the route again.
If I resist the temptation, as you advise me, my thoughts become
prosy, flat, and dull; I write painfully to myself, and under a
consciousness of flagging which makes me flag still more; the
sunshine with which fancy had invested the incidents, departs from
them, and leaves every thing dull and gloomy. I am no more the same
author I was in my better mood, than the dog in a wheel, condemned
to go round and round for hours, is like the same dog merrily
chasing his own tail, and gambolling in all the frolic of
unrestrained freedom. In short, sir, on such occasions, I think I
am bewitched.”
Scott next professes that he cannot write plays, as the Captain urges
him to do, if he would. The applauded scraps of “Old Play” which head
many of his chapters, are borrowed from manuscript dramas about which he
tells a fable. As to the charge of making money--
_O, if it were a mean thing,
The Gentles would not use it;
And if it were ungodly,
The clergy would refuse it._
Moreover, “No man of honour, genius, or spirit, would make the mere love
of gain, the chief, far less the only, purpose of his labours. For
myself, I am not displeased to find the game a winning one; yet while I
pleased the public, I should probably continue it merely for the
pleasure of playing; for I have felt as strongly as most folks that love
of composition, which is perhaps the strongest of all instincts, driving
the author to the pen, the painter to the palette, often without either
the chance of fame or the prospect of reward. Perhaps I have said too
much of this.”
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Such is Scott’s confession and apology. To plan a work to scale, to
pursue a predetermined course, does not “set his genius,” as Alan Breck
says. Nor did it set the genius of an artist so conscientious as Alan’s
creator, Mr. Stevenson. The pre-arranged programme or _scenario_ of his
_Kidnapped_, was very unlike the actual romance as it stands. The
preeminent merit of Scott was that of a creator of characters. These
personages became living, and, because they were living, spontaneous and
uncontrollable. What began as a “Legend of Montrose,” left the great
Marquis in the background, and became the Odyssey of Thackeray’s
favourite, Dugald Dalgetty, “of Drumthwacket that should be,” that
inimitable and immortal man of the sword. So it is throughout the
_Waverley_ novels. The characters _will_ “gang their ain gait.” They
come across the author’s fancy, as Mrs. Gamp, who had no part in the
original plan of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, came across the fancy of Dickens,
and they work their will on plot and author. In fact, the almost
mechanical merit of construction or _charpentage_ is rarely found in the
great novels of the great masters. _Vanity Fair_ “has no outline,” as
Mr. Mantalini says of the lady of rank, and, if _Pendennis_ “has an
outline, it is a demned outline.” Of _Esmond_ the motto may hold good--
_Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet._
But this merit, from the days of Cervantes downwards, has been the least
sought after by the greatest novelists. Scott tells us that at night he
would leave off writing without an idea as to how he was to get his
characters out of a quandary, and that, in the half-hour after waking,
all would become clear to him. Charlotte Brontë makes a similar
confession. In his manuscript, Scott never goes back to delete and
alter--better would it have been had he taken the trouble. But his
proof-sheets show that he took a good deal of pains in adding and
improving, especially in that impeccable little _chef d’oeuvre_,
“Wandering Willie’s Tale” in _Redgauntlet_. We are thus obliged to
confess that he was on occasion culpably indolent. Mr. Stevenson cites a
romantic passage of _Guy Mannering_ in which Scott, rather than go back
and indicate, in an earlier passage, the presence of a fountain which he
suddenly finds that he needs, hurries forward and drags the fountain
into a long, trailing, shapeless sentence. _Guy Mannering_, we know, was
“written in six weeks at Christmas,” for the purpose of “refreshing the
machine.” Undeniably it would be better, good as it is, had a fortnight
been given to revision.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Scott’s “architectonic,” his principles in the composition of historical
novels, are well known, and the method was all his own. Others before
him had attempted the historical novel, but wholly without his knowledge
of history, and of the actual way of living and thinking in various
periods of the past. He first made the dry bones of history live, and
Macaulay and Froude follow his method, perhaps rather too closely.
Several of Mr. Froude’s most dramatic scenes never, as a matter of fact,
occurred. It is probable that a too hasty glance at notes from original
documents misled him, and his dramatic instinct did the rest, without a
backward look at the original papers, a look which would have made
re-writing necessary--and caused the dramatic situation to disappear!
Scott, of course, wrote novels under no historical trammels of accuracy.
He deliberately committed the most glaring anachronisms, bringing the
dead Amy Robsart to life long after her mysterious death, introducing
Shakespeare as a successful dramatist at an age when he was creeping
unwillingly to school--and then Scott would confess his anachronisms in
a note. Modern historical novelists, though they write from the results
of “cram,” and not from a mind already charged with history, try at
least to subject themselves to the actual circumstances of the past, and
not to subject historical circumstances to themselves. They dare not
bring Charles II to Woodstock, in his flight after Worcester, because it
is too well known that the King did not make by way of Woodstock for the
south coast. On such points of composition, Scott was as reckless as
Turner was in landscape; both were satisfied, as the reader usually is,
if they got their effects. Mr. Swinburne, in his drama of _Mary Stuart_,
is not more nice. Lady Boyne (Mary Beaton) was never near Mary Stuart in
England, though a play turns on her presence there.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
Scott’s plan was never to make a famous character of history the central
personage of his tale. Thus he never could have written a novel of which
the fortunes of Mary Stuart were the central interest. He deemed that
the facts were too well known to be trifled with, and that, in such
matters, romance could not cope with actuality. Thus the unhappy Queen
appears as a subordinate character--not as heroine, that is to
say--while, in the scene in which the night of Darnley’s murder is
recalled to her memory, she reaches the height of tragedy. These two
principles, not to make the protagonists of history his central
characters; not to cope with the records of actual events, are the
guiding, if negative principles of Scott. He invents heroes and heroines
who never existed, nor could have existed. There could be no Henry
Morton in 1679! He uses them mainly as pivots round which the characters
revolve. The heroes and heroines themselves, as a rule, interest their
creator, and his readers, but little. What can you make of a _jeune
premier_? He must be brave, modest, handsome, good, and not too
clever--an ideal son-in-law, and he must be a true lover. Scott
pronounced his earliest hero, Edward Waverley, “a sneaking piece of
imbecility.... I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so-called.”
True, but what kind of hero is Martin Chuzzlewit, or Clive Newcome, and
is there any hero at all in _Vanity Fair_? Tom Jones and Captain Booth
take leading parts, but are nothing less than heroic. They are
_characters_, however, and Scott’s heroes, except Quentin Durward,
Roland Graeme, Harry Gow, and the Master of Ravenswood (_un beau
ténébreux_), are not of much account as characters.
Unlike Thackeray, Dickens, and possibly Fielding, Scott never drew his
hero from himself. In politics they are usually what he was--_when he
wrote history_--they take the middle path, they are in the sober _juste
milieu_. Waverley is only a Jacobite to please his lady; Henry Morton is
an extremely moderate constitutional Whig. Nobody can take much interest
in Vanbeest Brown, the wandering heir of _Guy Mannering_, despite his
proficiency on the flageolet. When we have a true hero like Montrose, we
are scarcely allowed to look on his face and hear his voice. Ivanhoe,
like an honourable gentleman, curbs his passion for Rebecca, and is true
to Rowena, though we see that the memory of Rebecca never leaves his
heart. Ivanhoe behaves as, in his circumstances, Scott would have
behaved, in place of giving way to passion. Novels of the most poignant
interest are constantly beginning, in private life, and then break off,
because the living characters are persons of honour and self-control.
_Ivanhoe_ would have been more to the taste of to-day, if the hero had
eloped with the fair Hebrew--but then, Ivanhoe and Rowena are persons of
honour and self-control. I found, in Scott’s papers, a letter from an
enthusiastic schoolboy, a stranger--“Oh, Sir Walter, how _could_ you
kill the gallant cavalier, and give the lady to the crop-eared Whig?”
This was the remark of the natural man. Scott kept the natural man in
subjection. The heroes, except when they are “bonny fechters” like Harry
Gow, Roland Graeme, and Quentin Durward--that canny soldier of
fortune--are little more than parts of the machinery, and modes of
introducing the pell-mell of nominally subordinate, but really essential
characters of all ranks and degrees--the undying friends with whom Scott
brings us acquainted.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
The heroines, though it seems a paradox to say so, are really more
successful than the heroes. In _The Heart of Midlothian_ there is no
hero except the heroine, Jeanie Deans, certainly one of the great
creations of literature. Scott has made goodness without beauty, without
overmastering tragedy, without “wallowing naked in the pathetic,” and
without passion, as interesting as Becky Sharp. Who has rivalled this
feat? Rose Bradwardine, with her innocent self-betrayed affection, is an
elder sister of Catherine Morland in _Northanger Abbey_. Though rather
stilted, in the manner of the period, Rebecca is a noble creature.
Catherine Seyton, of _The Abbot_, is a delightfully spirited girl, and
Diana Vernon is peerless. Our hearts warm even to the prematurely
puritan Fair Maid of Perth, when she runs, with loose hair, like a wild
creature, to her lover’s door, on the false news of his death. Fair eyes
were wont to weep over Lucy Ashton, the Ophelia of Scott; but now Lucy
is out of fashion though her end, surely, is poignant enough, when the
weak mind is broken, and the animal stands at bay, like a wild cat, and
breaks the hunter’s toils, and dies a maiden in the bridal chamber.
* * * * *
As Molière never had the heart to draw a jealous woman, among all his
pictures of men who knew, like himself, the torments of jealousy, so
Scott never had the heart to draw a young and beautiful woman who is
wicked. This ancient familiar source of poignant interest he passes by,
out of his great chivalry. There was nothing to prevent him from writing
a romance on the passionate, wretched tale of the once beautiful Ulrica,
in Ivanhoe, a fair traitress driven on the winds of revenge, treachery,
parricide, and incest. Here was a theme for a “realistic” novel of
England after the Conquest, but Scott sketches it lightly, as a
Thyestean horror in the background. In his work such a piece of
“realism” stands alone, like the story of Phoenix in Homer’s work (in
the Ninth Book of the _Iliad_). Both artists, Scott and Homer, had a
sense of reverence of human things: they did not lack the imagination
necessary for the portrayal of the evil and terrible, but they did not
seek success in that popular region. Scott was no prude, but he held the
young in reverence, knowing that among them he must have many readers.
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
I am unable to think the worse of him because he imposed on himself
limitations which Byron triumphantly broke through, though Scott’s
limits now militate against a high appreciation of his work by the
admirers of M. Guy de Maupassant and M. Catulle Mendès. “A man canna do
what he canna do,” and Scott could not have treated the favourite themes
of these masters, if he would. He had funds enough to draw upon in human
life and character, without hunting for personages and situations in
dark malodorous corners. The glory of his work is, of course, not merely
his wealth of incident, and his natural gift of story telling, but his
crowd of characters, from his princes, such as James VI, an immortal
picture, Louis XI, Elizabeth, Mary, Charles II in flight or in such
prosperity as he loved, to his Highland chiefs, his ploughmen, his
lairds, Bucklaw and old Redgauntlet, the persecutor; his copper captains
in Alsatia, his baillies, his Covenanting preachers, his Claverhouse,
his serving men, his Andrew Fairservice, his yeomen, his Dandie Dinmont,
with the Dinmont family and terriers, his wild women, Meg Merrilees, and
Madge Wildfire; his smugglers, his lawyers, from Pleydell to the elder
Fairford, and even his bores, who, like Miss Austen’s bores, are
certainly too much with us, who can number the throng of such
characters, all living and delightful? The novels are _vécus_: the
author has, in imagination, lived closely and long with his people,
whether of his own day, or of the past, before he laid brush to canvas
to execute their portraits. It is in this capacity, as a creator of a
vast throng of living people of every grade, and every variety of
nature, humour, and temperament, that Scott, among British writers, is
least remote from Shakespeare. No changes in taste and fashion as
regards matters unessential, no laxities and indolence of his own, no
feather-headed folly, or leaden stupidity of new generations can deprive
Scott of these unfading laurels. The novels that charmed Europe and
America, that were the inspiration of Dumas, that have been
affectionately discussed by the greatest of modern British statesmen,
were as conspicuously open to criticism, and were as severely handled by
reviewers, in Scott’s own day as in our own. But, if we may judge by
endless new editions of all sorts, and at various prices, the
_Waverley_ novels are not less popular now, than are, for their little
span, the most successful flights of all-daring ignorance and bombastic
presumption. It was on his characters, especially on his characters
sketched among his own people, that Scott believed the interest of his
romances to depend. He generously recognized Miss Edgeworth as his
teacher: “If I could but hit Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of
vivifying all her persons, and making them live as _beings_ in your
mind, I should not despair,” he said.
Meanwhile, outside of “the big bow wow” line, he regarded Miss Austen as
his superior, nor was he wrong; that queen of fiction has come to her
own again. In his brief, and on the whole admirable, _Scott_, the late
Mr. Hutton defended Scott’s power of character-drawing better than I can
hope to do, if it needs defence, against Mr. Carlyle, who had some
slight private bitterness against Sir Walter, on a matter of an
unanswered letter. He calls Scott’s men and women “little more than
mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons.” This is the Carlyle
who conceded to Cardinal Newman the possession of intellectual powers
equivalent to those of a rabbit; _un vrai lapin_! Scott “fashions his
characters from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.”
Never near the broken
[Sidenote: THE NOVELS]
[Illustration: The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.]
stoical heart of Saunders Mucklebackit; of the fallen Bradwardine, happy
in unsullied honour; never near the heart of the maddened Peter Peebles;
never near the flawless Christian heart of Bessie M’Clure; or the heart
of dauntless remorse of Nancy Ewart; or the heart of sacrificed love in
Diana Vernon; or the stout heart of Dalgetty in the dungeon of
Inveraray; or the secret soul of Mary Stuart, revealed when she is
reminded of Bastian’s bridal mask, and the deed of Kirk o’ Field? _Quid
plura_, Thomas Carlyle wrote splenetic nonsense: “he was very capable of
having it happen to him.”
CHAPTER V
_GUY MANNERING_ TO _KENILWORTH_
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY”]
“Waverley” is not, perhaps, the novel with which one would recommend a
person anxious to find out whether or not Sir Walter can still be read,
to begin his studies. The six chapters written in 1805 are prolix and
unnecessary. A modern narrator would commence with Chapter VIII. “It was
about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village or
rather hamlet of Tully-Veolan,” and would find easy means of
enlightening us as to who Captain Waverley was. One sentence in the long
preliminary account of the hero refers to Scott himself. “He would
exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary
scenes are presented, in action as it were, to the eyes of the muser.”
Like Dickens and Thackeray, Scott was a natural “visualizer,” seeing in
his mind’s eye the aspects of his characters, and hearing their voices.
Perhaps there is no poetic genius without this gift, which Mr. Galton
has found almost absent among, and unknown to men of science, though
the presence of the power of visualization by no means implies that it
is accompanied by genius. Scott’s friends did not conceal from him that
they were little interested in his tale, before they entered the village
and château of Tully-Veolan. From that point all was new to most of
them, while no romance of the Forty-Five, a theme now so hackneyed, or
of Highland life and manners at the date of Sixty Years Since had ever
been offered to the world. Indeed the death of the last of the male line
of Stuart was almost contemporary with the year in which Scott began his
romance, and while there remained a shadowy King over the water, a
Jacobite romance might seem a thing in doubtful taste. We cannot, after
a century, feel the absolute freshness of impression which the novel
made on contemporary readers.
[Sidenote: “GUY MANNERING”]
We know, in one way or another, all that can be said about Highland and
Lowland life in 1745, and there are passages of _Waverley_ in which we
are almost reminded of Becker’s _Charicles_, and other instructive
pictures of classical manners. Scott, of course, was accused of
“slandering the Highlanders,” because he described the cattle stealings
which, as contemporaries assert, were regularly organized by the furtive
genius of Macdonnell of Barisdale, with intermediaries among the broken
clan of the Macgregors, and the less reputable of the dwellers in
Rannoch. The relations of Cluny Macpherson with the independent Highland
companies had been not unlike those of Fergus MacIvor, a chief quite as
much impelled by personal ambition, and the promise of a Jacobite
earldom (Lovat was to be a duke, Glengarry an earl), as by any
disinterested devotion to the White Rose. There were chiefs like
Lochiel, as there were Lowlanders like the Oliphants of Gask, who fought
purely for the sake of honour and devotion. The mass of the Jacobite
clansmen were notoriously as loyal as steel to their Prince. But there
are black sheep in every flock. “There is something,” says Scott, “in
the severe judgment passed on my countrymen, that if they do not prefer
Scotland to truth, they will always prefer it to inquiry.” Scott
preferred inquiry, and gave us the results in Callum Beg and in the
darker side of the character of Fergus MacIvor, which irritated some of
the fiery Celts. Fergus redeems himself by the courage of his end, but
the favourite characters of the novel are, as usual, the subordinates,
that gallant, prosy, honourable pedant, the Baron Bradwardine, Davy
Gellatley with his songs, Balmawhapple, Baillie Macwheeble, Evan Dhu
Maccombich, the Gifted Gilfillan, the Prince himself, and how many
others! The pictures of Holyrood and the Prince’s Court, of the rout of
Prestonpans, and the march into England, are as brilliant as they then
were unhackneyed, and though _Waverley_ is not the best of the series of
novels, it made an excellent beginning.
Meanwhile stern necessity urged Scott to that grinding of verses,
_invita Minerva_, to which he said that “_the peine forte et dure_ is
nothing in comparison,” and his mood was “devilish repulsive” to the
task of working on _The Lord of the Isles_. So he wrote the last three
cantos in five weeks, and set out for Abbotsford to “refresh the
machine” by writing _Guy Mannering_ in six! He had only gleaned the
story of the Astrologer on November 7, from Mr. Train, and between that
date and some time in February 1815, he had finished both _The Lord of
the Isles_ and the novel of _The Astrologer_. He announced to Mr.
Morritt at once that “_The Lord of the Isles_ closes my poetic labours
upon an extended scale,” this before the book proved not quite
satisfactory to the public. He was wont to say that he abandoned poetry
“on an extended scale” because Byron “beat” him, but he was now
forty-five, was confessedly weary of “grinding verses,” and had found an
easier, a more congenial, and a more lucrative form of work, one which
suited his genius better, and was of a more permanent appeal than the
romance in verse. Since his time, setting apart the temporary vogue of
Byron’s _Giaours_ and _Laras_, rhymed romances on Oriental themes, the
world has steadily declined to read long narrative poems. Mr. William
Morris alone, for a while, won some readers back to his peculiar form of
this genre. In _The Lord of the Isles_ we remember little but the Battle
of Bannockburn, which has all the fiery energy of Scott in his Homeric
mood, and makes a fit pendant to his Flodden Field. Though Scott, before
he learned from Ballantyne that the book was a comparative failure, had
meant to abandon rhymed romances, he was a little damped by knowledge of
the fact, and, pointing to _The Giaour_, which Byron had sent to him, he
remarked, “James, Byron hits the mark where I don’t even pretend to
fledge my arrow.” Says Lockhart, “he always appeared to me quite blind
to the fact that in _The Giaour_, in _The Bride of Abydos_, in
_Parisina_, and indeed in all his early serious narratives, Byron owed
at least half his success to clever though perhaps unconscious imitation
of, Scott.” He also owed much to his Oriental themes, to the vogue of
his beauty and life of adventure, and to his fluttering of the dovecotes
of propriety. Byron spoke as generously of Scott as Scott did of Byron:
neither felt for the other the indifference of Wordsworth nor the
contempt of Coleridge. In contact with Scott all that is finest in
Byron’s character glows like the diamond in the presence of radium.
[Sidenote: “GUY MANNERING”]
_Guy Mannering_ made up for Scott’s disappointment. His advisers, from
the first, deemed it “more interesting” than _Waverley_, perhaps because
it dealt with their own times and manners, for the topic is not in
itself nearly so rich in romance. The strength of the book is in the
characters, the donnert good humoured laird, that customary villain, the
attorney, the smugglers, the gipsies, Meg Merrilees, honest Dandie
Dinmont, and the lawyers whether at high jinks or in more sober mood,
while the scene of the old maid’s funeral and the reading of her will
cannot be surpassed. Dominie Sampson was a great favourite, though a
sample of “Scott’s bores,” and too apt to return like a refrain, with
his peculiarities, in the manner of some of Dickens’s characters.
Scott went up to London with his laurels fresh, and met Byron; the pair,
in Homeric fashion, exchanged gifts, Scott offering a gold-hilted
Oriental dagger, and Byron a silver vase, containing the dust of
Athenian men of old. Scott remarked in Byron a trait of Rousseau’s,
starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there
had not been a secret, and perhaps offensive, meaning in something
casually said to him. At times he was “almost gloomy,” and, in short, he
must have been “gey ill to live with.” But Scott quietly allowed the
black dog to leave his shoulder, and consoled himself with the less
perilous gaieties of the Prince Regent. Scott always denied the story
that the Prince asked him point blank whether he was the author of
_Waverley_. The Duke of York, however, said “my brother went rather too
near the wind about _Waverley_, but nobody could have turned the thing
more prettily than Walter Scott did.” In fact his reply sailed as near
the wind as the insinuation of the Prince.
The news of Waterloo, the triumph of his nation, allured Scott to the
scene of the battle. He left London for the Continent a month after the
fight. His expenses and more were paid by _Paul’s Letters to his
Kinsfolk_, journal letters written to the Abbotsford circle. These
contain so perfect a picture of the man at this juncture that, if people
had time to read Lockhart’s _Life_ of him, the book might well be added
to it as a supplementary volume of autobiography. Scott’s enthusiasm for
the national victory did not swallow up his observation of every trait
of foreign life, or his excitement over “the tiniest relics of feudal
antiquity.” He saw the battlefield under the guidance of Costar, the
peasant who, according to his own account, accompanied Napoleon, a point
on which there were sceptics.
[Sidenote: WATERLOO]
Already the British myth of the battle was current, and is reported by
Scott in a letter to the Duke of Buccleuch. The legend was that the
Prussian fire was not heard, nor did the Prussian columns appear from
within the woods, till the moment when a part of the French Imperial
Guard made the last attack on our position. Now the Prussians really
made themselves felt on the French right about four or half-past four
o’clock, and three hours were occupied by them in furious fighting at
Planchenoit, while the French captured La Haye Sainte on our front; and
the Prussians, in reinforcements constantly coming up, were doing the
business on the French right, and beginning to menace the French rear,
when the last charge by a portion of their Guard was made and failed.
Scott understands all this in his _Life of Napoleon_, though even there
he does not quite make clear the length and severity of the Prussian
task. But even British officers engaged at Waterloo seem to have gravely
misconceived the magnitude of Blücher’s share in the victory.
“France is not, and cannot be crushed,” said Scott, and, in 1815, he
foresaw the Orleanist conspiracy of fifteen years, and the fall of the
Bourbons. On meeting the Duke of Wellington he felt those emotions of
awe which he attributes to Roland Graeme in the presence of the Regent
Moray, “the eminent soldier and statesman, the wielder of a nation’s
power, and the leader of its armies.” “To have done things worthy to be
written was, in his eyes, a dignity to which no man had made any
approach, who had only written things worthy to be read.” The gallant
Wolfe expressed the converse opinion, when he recited Gray’s _Elegy_ in
the boat, on the way to the capture of Quebec, and to his death, Scott’s
belief in doing as far superior to writing, embraced the achievements of
peace as well as of war. He “betrayed painful uneasiness when his works
were alluded to as reflecting honour on the age that had produced Watt’s
improvement of the steam engine, and the safety lamp of Sir Humphry
Davy.” In brief, Scott was a born man of action, and only the accident
of his lameness prevented him from being the mate of Hill and Picton in
the field, and perhaps the rival of Napier as the historian of warfare.
That gift of seeing with the mind’s eye, which was noted in Wellington
as well as in Napoleon, would have served his purposes as a general.
He came home, with presents for all the people on his estate, and with
that poem of _Waterloo_ which was the subject of amusing banter,
None, by sabre or by shot,
Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.
[Sidenote: “THE ANTIQUARY”]
The emendations made by John Ballantyne on the proof sheets of this
effort show considerable intelligence and taste, and in several cases
were approved of and accepted by the author, though he once said that he
was “the Black Brunswicker of literature who neither took nor gave
criticism.” In fact he took rather too much, in some cases, as in _St.
Ronan’s Well_, altered and spoiled to please the prudery of James
Ballantyne. The profits of the first edition of _Waterloo_ went to the
fund for the widows and orphans of soldiers. By December 1815, _Paul’s
Letters to his Kinsfolk_ were published, and the “sweet heathen of
Monkbarns,” _The Antiquary_, was in hand.
In this novel Scott wrote of his own day, and with one or two old
friends, was himself the composite model for _The Antiquary_. As usual,
the reader cares not much for Lovel and his lady, Miss Wardour, but the
humour of the portraits of the sturdy Whig antiquary, his sense, and his
foibles, and of his rival and friend the foolish Tory, Sir Arthur
Wardour, are perennially delightful. Perhaps only archæological amateurs
can thoroughly appreciate the learning of which Monkbarns is so profuse,
and this, no doubt, is a drawback to the popularity of the tale. The
charlatan, Dousterswivel, is in a rather forced vein of humour, but the
figures of Edie Ochiltree, of the gossips in the village post-office, of
the barber, and all the country folk, with the incident of the escape
from the rising tide, and the romance of Elspeth of the Burnfoot and
the stoicism of Mucklebackit, are, in their various ways, examples of
Scott at his very best, while the ballad of the Red Harlaw stands
absolutely alone, far above all modern attempts to imitate ancient
popular _Volkslieder_.
Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle,
And listen, great and sma’,
And I will sing of Glenallan’s Earl
That fought on the red Harlaw.
The cronach’s cried on Bennachie,
And doun the Don and a’,
And hieland and lawland may mournfu’ be
For the sair field of Harlaw.
They saddled a hundred milk-white steeds,
They hae bridled a hundred black,
With a chafron of steel on each horse’s head,
And a good knight upon his back.
They hadna ridden a mile, a mile,
A mile, but barely ten,
When Donald came branking down the brae
Wi’ twenty thousand men.
Their tartans they were waving wide,
Their glaives were glancing clear,
The pibrochs rung frae side to side,
Would deafen ye to hear.
[Sidenote: HARLAW]
The great Earl in his stirrups stood
That Highland host to see;
“Now here a knight that’s stout and good
May prove a jeopardie:
“What wouldst thou do, my squire so gay,
That rides beside my reyne,
Were ye Glenallan’s Earl the day,
And I were Roland Cheyne?
“To turn the rein were sin and shame,
To fight were wondrous peril,
What would ye do now, Roland Cheyne,
Were ye Glenallan’s Earl?”
“Were I Glenallan’s Earl this tide
And ye were Roland Cheyne,
The spur should be in my horse’s side,
And the bridle upon his mane.
“If they hae twenty thousand blades,
And we twice ten times ten,
Yet they hae but their tartan plaids,
And we are mail-clad men.
“My horse shall ride through ranks sae rude,
As through the moorland fern,
Then ne’er let the gentle Norman blude
Grow cauld for Highland kerne.”
In this novel Scott began his practice of inventing mottoes, mainly from
“Old Plays,” for the headings of his chapters, and among these scraps
are plain warrants for his title of poet. When they were collected into
a little volume he owned that he could not, in all cases, profess to be
certain of his authorship. His memory of the works of others was better
than his memory of his own. “Pretty verses these, are they Byron’s?” he
said, on hearing some lady sing Cleveland’s song from _The Pirate_. Of
his memory Hogg tells the following anecdote, which may be given
verbatim, as Hogg’s _Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott_ is a rather
rare little book.
“He, and Skene of Rubislaw, and I were out one night about midnight,
leistering kippers in Tweed, about the end of January, not long after
the opening of the river for fishing, which was then on the tenth, and
Scott having a great range of the river himself, we went up to the side
of the rough haugh of Elibank; but when we came to kindle our light,
behold, our peat was gone out. This was a terrible disappointment, but
to think of giving up our sport was out of the question, so we had no
other shift save to send Bob Fletcher all the way through the darkness,
the distance of two miles, for another fiery peat.
[Sidenote: HOGG]
“The night was mild, calm, and as dark as pitch, and while Fletcher was
absent we three sat down on the brink of the river, on a little green
sward which I will never forget, and Scott desired me to sing them my
ballad of ‘Gilman’s-cleuch.’ Now, be it remembered that this ballad had
never been printed, I had merely composed it by rote, and, on finishing
it three years before, had sung it once over to Sir Walter. I began it,
at his request, but at the eighth or ninth stanza I stuck in it, and
could not get on with another verse, on which he began it again and
recited it every word from beginning to end. It being a very long
ballad, consisting of eighty-eight stanzas, I testified my astonishment,
knowing that he had never heard it but once, and even then did not
appear to be paying particular attention. He said he had been out with a
pleasure party as far as the opening of the Frith of Forth, and, to
amuse the company, he had recited both that ballad and one of Southey’s
(‘The Abbot of Aberbrothock’), both of which ballads he had only heard
once from their respective authors, and he believed he recited them both
without misplacing a word.”
In May 1816 _The Antiquary_ appeared; in April he had begun _The Tales
of my Landlord_, he wrote the historical part of _The Annual Register_,
and he trifled with _Harold the Dauntless_, while as busy as ever with
official duties, society, and sport, adding 850 acres to his estate, by
purchases of small farms at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile he did not
clear off the cargoes of encumbrances of useless books, and wind up the
Ballantyne affairs. Instead of making a firm bargain with Constable,
John Ballantyne negotiated the business of _The Black Dwarf_ and _Old
Mortality_ with Mr. Blackwood and Mr. Murray--the volumes were not to
bear the name of “the Author of _Waverley_.” Now Mr. Blackwood, very
naturally, did not care for _The Black Dwarf_, and “without seeking any
glossy periphrase,” spoke out his demand for alterations to James
Ballantyne. Scott’s temper was not governed on this occasion, but James
did not report to Mr. Blackwood the very unparliamentary terms of the
reply to his “most impudent proposal.”
[Sidenote: “OLD MORTALITY”]
_Old Mortality_ and _The Black Dwarf_ came out, at the end of 1816, in
four volumes. _The Black Dwarf_ is of little account, but _Old
Mortality_ is in the first three of the _Waverley_ novels in merit.
Scott knew the Covenanting literature well, and, if he has made errors,
for example where he writes as if the English Liturgy were in use, in
the Scotland of the Restoration, he may be merely seeking effect. But
the learned Dr. M’Crie, the biographer of Knox, a most painful student
of manuscript sources, published a long set of criticisms historical, in
an Edinburgh serial, to which Scott thought fit to reply in a review of
the romance in _The Quarterly_. Erskine wrote the literary parts of the
criticism, while Scott replied, with much humour and great good humour,
to his clerical censor. The Covenanters of the Restoration were a
peculiar people. In 1660, when the King came to his own, the leaders of
the milder party were ready to abate the claims of the preachers to
“rule the roast” in politics; and one of the leaders wished to see the
preachers of the fiercer party banished to the Orkneys. The zealots, on
the other hand, desired Charles II to put down the Church of England in
England, which meant civil war. But both parties were equally struck at
by the introduction of Episcopacy without a Liturgy. Like the zealots on
divers occasions, the Governors under Charles II expelled the
Non-conformists from their pulpits. A rising followed, and then a
skimble-skamble Government which offered “Indulgences” to Presbyterians.
The milder sort were satisfied with being tolerated, the wilder sort
wished to be intolerant, and the Kirk split into divers sections, hating
each other nearly as much as they hated prelatists. Strange wandering
prophets, prophesying balderdash, scoured the country, pursued by
dragoons, and in their utterances are many ludicrous things and anarchic
doctrines, reprobated by the more peaceful section.
Scott knew all the parties, and was not tender to the absurdities. He
had written a novel, not a history, and had used the licence of a
novelist. Meanwhile in the beautiful character of Bessie Maclure, Scott
surely made amends for his maniac preacher, his indulged preacher, and
the rest of his warring Covenanters. The Claverhouse of the novel is
not, of course, the actual Claverhouse of history, but he is more like
the man than the absurd Claverhouse of Macaulay. One fault is attributed
to the gallant Graham which he did not possess. Far from being reckless
of plebeian as opposed to “gentle” blood, he urged the policy of sparing
the multitude and punishing their “gentle leaders.” It is improbable
that Claverhouse was given to quoting Froissart, as in the novel, but he
did quote Lucan, an author admired by Scott.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “OLD MORTALITY”]
We cannot go into a criticism of the historical accuracy of a novel.
_Old Mortality_ is not only one of Scott’s most stirring tales, but it
contains even an unusual number of his most admirable characters, Cuddie
and Mause Headrigg, Gudyill, the Major, Goose Gibbie, Old Milnwood (a
true “Laird Nippy”), the murderer Burly, Bessie Maclure, Jenny Dennison,
that unscrupulous coquette, Milnwood’s housekeeper, the fallen Bothwell,
the fanatics of every shade, and Claverhouse himself. Indeed, be the
inaccuracies of detail what they may, and they are trivial, no romance
based on book knowledge displays so correct a general picture of the
men and the times.
Old Mortality himself, about whom Scott heard much from his friend, Mr.
Train (who suggested the novel), had been met by the author in his youth
at Dunottar Castle among the graves of the Covenanters who died of
ill-usage in the castle dungeons. That a number of soldiers in like
manner perished of hunger when the Whigs got the upper hand at Edinburgh
in 1688 is a circumstance generally omitted by the Whiggish Muse of
Modern History. What would not have been said had hundreds of prisoners
taken by Montrose been starved to death? Yet even Mr. Gardiner does not
mention the hundreds of Royalist prisoners taken by Cromwell at Dunbar,
immured in Durham Cathedral, and there permitted to die of hunger. To be
sure the levies of Montrose took very few prisoners indeed, but settled
all scores with the claymore.
_Old Mortality_ contains a striking scene in which the appearance of
Henry Morton is taken by Edith for his apparition, after or at the
moment of death. The novels, like the poems, are seldom without a touch
of “the supernatural,” which, in the case of Morton’s appearance, was
the normal. In _Waverley_ there is the death warning to Fergus MacIvor;
in _Guy Mannering_ there is the fulfilled horoscope: in _The Antiquary_
the apparition to the hero is explained away, to some extent, but yields
the desired effect. Scott was very much interested in phantasms and
witchcraft, his library is rich in rare old books full of ghostly
narratives, Bovet, Lavaterus, Sinclair, Petrus Thyraeus and crowds of
others. Neither his friends nor he himself knew the precise frontiers of
his belief and disbelief. At an inn he slept soundly in one bed of a
double-bedded room, while a dead man occupied the other. He was
insensible to fear, in these airy matters, and says that he had only
twice in his life felt “eery.” Once it was at Glamis Castle, haunted for
long by a legend of a Presence in a secret chamber. The secret of the
chamber is no secret, and the Presence is borrowed bodily from a story
current, in the eighteenth century, about Vale Royal in Cheshire. The
other occasion on which Scott felt “eery” is not given by Lockhart, but
is probably revealed by this anecdote of Gillies.
[Sidenote: GHOST STORIES]
“The most awkward circumstance about _well-authenticated_ hobgoblins,”
said he, “is that they, for the most part, come and disappear without
any intelligible object or purpose, except to frighten people; which,
with all due deference, seems rather foolish! Very many persons have
either seen a ghost, or something like one, and I am myself among the
number; but my story is not a jot better than the others I have heard,
which, for the most part, were very inept. The _good_ stories are sadly
devoid of evidence; the _stupid_ ones only are authentic.
“There is a particular turning of the high road through the Forest near
Ashestiel, at a place which affords no possible means of concealment;
the grass is smooth, and always eaten bare by the sheep; there is no
heather, nor underwood, nor cavern, in which any mortal being could
conceal himself. Towards this very spot I was advancing one evening on
horseback--please to observe it was _before_ dinner, and not long after
sunset, so that I ran no risk either of _seeing double_, or wanting
sufficient light for my observations. Before me, at the distance of
about a quarter of a mile, there stood a human figure, sharply enough
defined by the twilight. I advanced; it stalked about with a long staff
in its hand, held like a wand of office, but only went to and fro,
keeping at the same corner, till, as I came within a few yards, my
friend all in an instant vanished. I was so struck with his eccentric
conduct, that although Mrs. Scott was in delicate health, and I was
anxious to get home to a late dinner, I could not help stopping to
examine the ground all about, but in vain; he had either dissolved into
air, or sunk into the earth, where I knew well there was no coal-pit to
receive him. Had he lain down on the greensward, the colour of his
drapery, which was dusky brown, would have betrayed him at once, so that
there was no practicable solution of the mystery.
“I rode on, and had not advanced above fifty yards, when, on looking
back, my friend was there again, and even more clearly visible than
before. ‘Now,’ said I to myself, ‘I most certainly have you!’ so wheeled
about and spurred Finella; but the result was as before, he vanished
instantaneously. I must candidly confess I had now got enough of the
phantasmagoria; and whether it were from a love of home, or a
participation in my dislike of this very stupid ghost, no matter,
Finella did her best to run away, and would by no means agree to any
further process of investigation. I will not deny that I felt somewhat
uncomfortable, and half inclined to think that this apparition was a
warning of evil to come, or indication, however obscure, of misfortune
that had already occurred. So strong was this impression, that I almost
feared to ask for Mrs. Scott when I arrived at Ashestiel; but, as Dr.
Johnson said on a similar occasion, ‘nothing ever came of it.’”
[Sidenote: SECOND SIGHT]
The strange disturbances at Abbotsford, as if all the heavy furniture
were being moved about, did not make Scott “eery.” He arose,
Bolt upright
And ready to fight,
armed for war with the sword of his Jacobite ancestor, Auld Beardie. But
when the noises, never accounted for, were found to have been coincident
with the death of the purveyor of the furniture, Mr. Bullock, in London,
Lockhart admits that Scott was not only puzzled but considerably
impressed.
Such rackets, preceding or accompanying a death, are familiar to writers
whom he knew well, Lavaterus, Thyraeus, Theophilus Insulanus on the
Second Sight, and the rest, and persist among the beliefs of Highlands
and Lowlands. There is always a hammering in the shop of a certain
Highland carpenter, on the night before a coffin is ordered. On the
whole Scott’s frame of mind was akin, on this point, to that of Kant,
who did not believe in any special ghost story, but did not disbelieve
in ghost stories in general. He would say that the only men known to him
who had seen ghosts were either mad, or later went mad, yet he had seen
some kind of apparition himself. Everything connected with hypnotism
(then styled Animal Magnetism) he dismissed as part of “the peck of
dirt,” which each generation must eat in its turn. Yet he was anxious to
investigate the ink-gazing of Egypt, which he could easily have done,
with a glass ball, at home. In short he enjoyed the human thrill which
is awakened by good stories of the “supernormal,” and communicated the
thrill in Wandering Willie’s Tale, in the appearance of the death wraith
of old Alice to the Master of Ravenswood (the best wraith in fiction),
in _My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_, and in the terrible story, gleaned from
Hannah More, of _The Tapestried Chamber_. His _Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft_ are the work of his declining age, and adopt the dull line
of sturdy common-sense. But his explanation of the information received
in a dream, in _The Antiquary_, is that of St. Augustine, and even, in
many cases, of Mr. F. W. H. Myers, with his theory of the more normal
workings of the “Subliminal Self.”
[Sidenote: HEALTH]
For more than twenty years Scott had enjoyed unbroken health, and had
treated “the machine,” his body and brain, as few men except Napoleon
have overtaxed that engine. In Edinburgh he lived, he says, “too
genially.” Lockhart has described his plain but Gargantuan breakfasts;
he took little or no exercise, driving to court with other advocates,
and we must remember that the dinner parties of that age began early and
ended late, while the champagne and sherry and port and Burgundy were
followed by a “shass caffy” (as Mr. Henry Foker calls it), in the shape
of rummers of whisky and water, “hot, with.” A healthier generation is
justly horrified by these excesses of conviviality, in which Scott took
his part, like other advocates and judges of his time, rising at five
o’clock next morning to write twenty or thirty printed pages of his
novel. At Abbotsford, he said, he never sat down, as in Edinburgh he was
always seated, at one kind of table or another. His task done before
breakfast, he rode or drove, or worked in his plantations, or underwent
the toil of receiving bores, he coursed, he passed the midnight hours in
“burning the water,” that is, spearing salmon by torchlight, a
picturesque but now, happily, an illegal pastime.
The refreshment of the machine was writing at a furious pace, and, in
1817, the longsuffering mechanism resented its treatment. Scott had
still eight years of apparent prosperity before him, but he had no more
years of unbroken health. Violent “cramps in the stomach,” as they were
called, seized him, and drove this stoic, “bellowing like a bull,” forth
from the guests at his own table. He tells us, and Hogg tells us, that
heated salt, which burned his shirt to ashes, was applied to the seat of
his malady, “and I hardly felt it,” says the sufferer. Then came the
heroic remedies of profuse bleeding and blistering, and diet of toast,
with only three glasses of wine daily. It was _in tormentis_ that he
finished _Rob Roy_ and dictated _The Bride of Lammermoor_, the story
being often interrupted by his outcries of pain. Fortunately he now had
Will Laidlaw with him as amanuensis. That he undertook _Rob Roy_ (for
once “writing up to a name,” to please Constable) in such circumstances
of recurring agony and weakness, was an example, perhaps of his courage,
certainly, in the words of St. Francis, an instance of his hardness on
“his brother the ass,” his fleshly body. Much heavy labour on history
for _The Annual Register_, and on other essays, accompanied his work in
fiction, and he was reduced to a state of languor in which, for once in
the tone of self pity, he wrote the beautiful lines beginning
The sun upon the Weirdlaw hill,
In Ettrick’s vale is sinking sweet.
Scott was still adding acre to acre, but _Rob Roy_ and the gallant price
offered by Constable, enabled him to redeem the bond for £4,000 of which
the Duke of Buccleuch was guarantor. At this time Lockhart and
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ came into his life. In Lockhart he was to find a
son rather
[Illustration: “The Abbotsford Family.”
[Sidenote: LOCKHART]
After the painting by Sir David Wilkie, R.A.]
than a son-in-law, though he could not wean him from that perilous
enchantress, Maga, which was then in the wild heyday of its stormy
youth. He declared that _Rob Roy_ (December 1817), “smells of the
cramp”; he had to wind it up more rapidly than he intended, but his
fatally buoyant spirits led him to hope that in four or five years he
might add the considerable estate of Faldonside to his acres, a dream
which haunted his enfeebled mind in his ultimate decrepitude. Meanwhile
expense on the estate of Abbotsford, and on the acquisition of curios
for the collection, went on briskly, Scott paying prices probably too
high, and conducting his affairs with the people on his land with a
profuse but judicious generosity. He discovered, as others have done,
real taste and artistic power amongst the craftsmen in wood and stone in
the district, and encouraged it to the best of his power. His gold was
not spent in vain, but the need for money grew with every year, and he
did not measure his own labour by his failing strength.
_Rob Roy_, whether it “smelled of the cramp” or not, was as popular as
its hero has ever been in Scotland, where he has the same sort of
reputation as Robin Hood. The novel is unusually defective in
composition, the mystery of Rashleigh’s compound of commercial
malfeasance with bills, and of treacherous Jacobitism has always baffled
the reader. The melodrama of Helen Macgregor is, in Mr. Stevenson’s
phrase, “too steep,” and the whole plot is not more lucid than some
plots of Dickens. While Diana Vernon[1] is, by popular acclaim, peerless
among the heroines of Scott, while her love story is a real love story,
her wooer is not more interesting than the general run of Scott’s
heroes. The book is saved by Diana, by the reiver himself, by the
delightful Baillie, and by that flower of serving Men, the canny
Scottish gardener Andrew Fairservice. In this novel the secret of
authorship was let out, but passed unobserved. The long lecture by the
Baillie on the state of the Highlands is taken straight from a
manuscript of Graham of Gartmore, from whom Scott purchased his most
authentic relic, the sword of the great Montrose. Scott lent the
manuscript to Jamieson, who published it in his edition of Burt’s
_Letters from the North_, acknowledging his debt to Scott. Now as Scott
used his manuscript in _Rob Roy_, here was a plain _pièce de
conviction_, but no hunter after proof of authorship of the _Waverley_
novels ever detected the facts, in fact I believe that I was the first
person who observed them!
[Foonote 1: That Diana Vernon is drawn from Scott’s friend, Miss
Cranstoun, the Countess von Purgstall, is an uncertain theory of Basil
Hall’s.]
[Sidenote: “ROB ROY”]
[Sidenote: “HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN”]
The next novel, perhaps less permanently popular (for _Rob Roy_ holds
the stage in London as I write), but more excellent, was _The Heart of
Midlothian_ (June 1818). Lady Louisa Steuart wrote that she “was a
little tired of your Edinburgh lawyers in the Introduction,” and they
are fatiguing; not so the lawyers of whom Saddletree converses with so
much freedom. English people are welcome to be impatient of the passages
alluding to Scottish law throughout, but Scottish readers cannot weary
of these admirably humorous pictures of the jovial and learned old
national Bar, one of the few institutions not denationalized by the
Union of 1707. The lover of Effie Deans is by far too melodramatic, too
“satanic.” For once, in this failure of a character, Scott was imitating
Byron’s heroes, whether he knew it or not, as Byron imitated figures
like the Schedoni of Mrs. Radcliffe. The story does break down at
Rosneath, as Lady Louisa said: that portion is only redeemed by “the
gracious Duncan,” a most amusing “slander on the Highlanders.” Then we
have Dumbiedykes, and Rory Bean, and the very pearl of belated
Covenanters Davie Deans. He is “lifted” straight from that honest,
brave, absurd Peter or Patrick Walker, who suffered torture as a mere
boy during the Restoration, and lived well into the eighteenth century,
compiling his biographies of Covenanting characters, such as Cameron and
Peden. Walker was to them what Izaak Walton was to the great divines of
the Church of England in his long and well-contented day. How true Davie
Deans is to his model the reader may discover in Mr. Hay Fleming’s
_Saints of the Covenant_, a reprint of Walker’s Biographies with notes.
When we add Ratclifte, the pleasing rogue, the wild singer, Madge
Wildfire, the thrilling interest of the Porteous mob, the study of the
great Duke of Argyll, the scene with the Queen, the adventures of the
road, and the matchless character of Jeanie Deans, with her foil in the
pretty wilful Effie, we must acknowledge that, if _The Heart of
Midlothian_ is not absolutely the first, alone in place, of the
_Waverley_ novels, it is certainly second to none. “I should have found
you out,” wrote Lady Louisa, in that one parenthesis, “for the man was
mortal and had been a schoolmaster.” No number of formal histories can
convey nearly so full and true a picture of Scottish life about 1730-40,
as _The Heart of Midlothian_. As social history it is unrivalled. In
Edinburgh Lockhart had never witnessed “such a scene of all engrossing
enthusiasm,” in any literary matter, as on the appearance of this novel.
To think of it is to wish to throw down the pen, and take the book again
from the shelf, as Thackeray says when he chances to mention Dugald
Dalgetty. But young people now, as they did in 1818, according to Lady
Louisa, “never heard of the Duke of Argyll before. ‘Pray who was Sir
Robert Walpole?’ they ask me, ‘and when did he live?’ or, perhaps, ‘was
not the great Lord Chatham in Queen Anne’s days?’” Readers who are
exhaustively ignorant of and unconcerned about the past, cannot be
expected to read Scott, and such readers were common in his own time,
not to speak of our educated age.
_The Bride of Lammermoor_ appears to have been begun before _The Heart
of Midlothian_ was published. At the end of 1818 Scott received a
baronetcy, and though he at once anticipated the quotation (which Hogg
incontinently made),
I like not
Such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath,
no doubt he liked very well the revival of the old Border name, “Sir
Walter Scott.” That he should enjoy the title was perfectly natural, and
its gift, as the Prince Regent really was fond of literature, seems no
less in nature.
With the winter, and with the sedentary life of Edinburgh, the terrible
cramps returned. He sold his copyrights to Constable for £12,000, and
had Constable paid, before 1826, the bond of 1818, Scott would have had
no later interest in this valuable property. But, characteristically,
the debt was not fully discharged before Constable’s ruin in 1826. The
spring of 1819 was passed under torment, and under the medical artillery
of bleeding, blistering, calomel, and ipecacuanha. As a better remedy
Scott’s Highland piper selected twelve stones from twelve southward
running streams; on these the patient was to sleep. Scott, however, said
that the charm stones only worked if wrapped in the petticoat of a widow
who had never wished to marry again, and Science, in the person of the
piper, abandoned the case. Removal to Abbotsford did not alleviate the
pangs, but here Scott dictated _The Bride of Lammermoor_ to Will Laidlaw
and John Ballantyne. He was interrupted by cries wrung from him in
agony, and it is not wonderful, perhaps, that when he saw the book in
print, he could not remember a single line of it, but read in fear and
trembling, for who knew what absurdity it might contain? Thackeray had
the same experience as to part of _Pendennis_, written before a serious
illness. In Scott’s case perhaps the incredible amount of opiates with
which he was drugged may explain his forgetfulness. “As to giving over
work,” he said to Laidlaw, “that can only be when I am in woollen.”
[Sidenote: “BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR”]
When Lockhart visited Scott, in May 1819, the colour of his hair had
changed from a brindled grey to snow white, at the age of forty-seven.
His face “was meagre, haggard, and of the deadliest yellow of the
jaundice.” That night, in a fresh fit of pain, his cries were distinctly
audible at a considerable distance from the house, but by eleven o’clock
next day he mounted his horse and rode with Lockhart past Philiphaugh
and up Yarrow, discoursing of Montrose’s defeat, and in high spirits
about a pending election. Yet, a month later, when _The Bride of
Lammermoor_ and _The Legend of Montrose_ appeared, Scott was believed to
be on his deathbed. One night he took leave of his family, expressing in
simple terms his Christian faith, “and now leave me that I may turn my
face to the wall.” He slept, and the crisis passed over. By July 19 he
had nearly finished a volume of _Ivanhoe_, which he expected to complete
in September. Such enthusiasm of industry, in such circumstances, is
without parallel in literary history. _The Bride of Lammermoor_ is a
subject which leaves an author no choice; he must make his novel end
badly: he cannot avoid the tragic, and tragedy scarcely suits the genius
of Scott. He knew the tale of the mysterious death of Stair’s daughter,
from tradition in his family, and, after his illness, he remembered the
legend as well as ever: of his own handling of the tale he could
remember nothing. As to the real facts of the case, Dr. Hickes heard
them from the Duke of Lauderdale, and, again, from the father of the
Bride himself, but Hickes declined to write the story down, lest his
memory might be at fault. Scott was not aware of these historical facts,
which are certainly tantalizing, as the real facts are unknown.
[Sidenote: “BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR”]
Not only are the data of the story things of unrelieved gloom, but Scott
has chosen to show Fate dealing with a heroine gentle, innocent, and
weak. Of all heroes of novels, perhaps only two frankly tell their lady
loves that their fathers are not gentlemen! One of these candid wooers
is Darcy, in _Pride and Prejudice_, and Elizabeth causes him to rue his
candour. The other is the Master of Ravenswood, and Lucy Ashton does not
resent his words. It is on this poor pathetic broken creature, as
harmless as Rose Bradwardine, that Fate deals a blow which might have
crushed these old Royal Greek protagonists, whom Aristotle deemed the
only proper central figures of tragedy. The results are really rather
miserable than tragic in the strict sense of the word, the victim only
ceases to be feeble when she ceases to be sane. Her lover, again, the
Master, is a personage quite alien to the nature of Scott. The Master,
to be sure, is very unfortunate indeed, a disinherited knight, like
Ivanhoe, but he is not more bereaved and impoverished than Quentin
Durward is at the opening of his tale. But Quentin bears a merry heart,
and goes all the way, like hundreds of his countrymen through several
centuries, finding fortune, honour, and a bride in French service. The
Master, on the other hand, mopes in his gloomy tower, thinks of
assassinating his supplanter, Sir William Ashton, but declines into
saving him from a bull, like Johnny Eames in _The Small House at
Allingham_, and falls in love with the daughter of his supplanter.
Tennyson chose to revive the set of situations in his _Maud_, where the
hero is much more peevish and hysterical than the Master of Ravenswood,
while of the heroine we practically know nothing, except that, at
sixteen, Maud was tall and stately, and had a classical profile. The
situations were not, we repeat, adapted to Scott’s genius, but they were
congenial to the foreseen and inevitable conclusion of the story, as
given by history. Lockhart tells us that Caleb Balderwood was never
regarded as a successful humorous character, and we fall back on Bucklaw
and that inimitable captain, Craigingelt, for humorous relief, while the
genuine tragic element is supplied by old Alice, by the eery scene in
which her wraith appears to the Master, and by the Chorus, as it were,
of the poor old envious women, suspected of sorcery, the watchers of the
dead. Scott never surpassed his dealings with these horrible creatures.
The conclusion when
The last Lord of Ravenswood to Ravenswood doth ride,
To woo a dead maiden to be his bride,
with the mystery of all that befell in the bridal bower and the ride of
Lucy to church, her hand clay cold in that of her boyish brother,
himself admirably sketched, are entirely worthy of the genius of the
author. When we consider the circumstances in which he dictated the
tale, we may well marvel that he could rise to such height of power. But
otherwise the novel is not to be reckoned among his best: it lacks much
of the usual happy humour. Yet it has had admirers among good judges who
set it in the forefront of his romances.
[Sidenote: DUGALD DALGETTY]
Thackeray, an excellent judge, greatly preferred to the sombre Master
the redoubted Rittmeister, Dugald Dalgetty, of the _Legend of Montrose_,
which was published in company with _The Bride of Lammermoor_. Dugald is
a garrulous pedant, and may be styled “one of Scott’s bores,” but he
never bores us, whether when he sets forth his simple reasons for
serving with the King’s army, not with the Covenanters; or criticises
the various services of Europe, or lectures on the propriety of
fortifying the sconce of Drumsnab, or faces Argyll in Inveraray, or
masters him in the dungeon, or wheedles the Presbyterian chaplain, or
mocks the bows and arrows of his allies the Children of the Mist: or
does deeds of _derring do_ at Inverlochy, or swaggers about in the fresh
glories of his title of Knight Banneret. Dugald is always a perfect joy,
even if we be little interested, as we are, in the loves of Annot Lyle
and in the second-sighted man with his gloom and his visions. It is
difficult to guess what Scott may have originally meant to do with
Montrose, the most sympathetic figure in the long pageant of Scottish
history. With the romance of his life and character fiction cannot cope:
nothing can match his actual history. In Argyll, again, Scott
encountered a personage whose psychology was too intricate for his hasty
methods. But his fingers, as he says in a letter of this period,
sometimes seemed to him to work automatically, against his conscious
purpose. There was, as has been said of Molière, a _lutin_ that rode his
pen. The good horse Gustavus, in fact, “with Dalgetty up,” ran away with
Scott, and the romance became practically the story of one man, the
Rittmeister.
In the whirl of his multifarious activities, Scott remained canny enough
to consider his profession of romance as a manufactory subject to
changes of fashion and taste. His “tweeds,” so to speak, his tales of
Scottish manners, might go out of vogue, though there was as yet little
competition on the part of other makers. Deliberately, therefore, so he
declares, he determined to turn out a new article of a nature as remote
as possible from his Scottish fabrics, a romance of English mediaeval
life. In that period no character is so romantic and popular as Richard
I, and there is no more popular figure in legend than Robin Hood, though
his date (if he be more than a mere ideal outlaw) is unknown, some facts
point vaguely to his era as that of Edward II. Again, there was the
picturesque contrast between the manners of the conquered English and
conquering Normans, which, once pointed out by Scott, attracted the
studies of Thierry, the French historian. A forgotten play, _Runimede_,
by the half-forgotten and “unfortunate Logan,” had been seen by Scott,
and, he says, suggested his idea, while the old rhyme of “Tring, Wing,
and Ivanhoe” gave him a sonorous name which (a great point with Scott)
revealed nothing of the nature and scope of his narrative. He disliked
“writing up” to names of familiar associations, such as “Rob Roy” and
“Kenilworth.” With “Ivanhoe” people did not know what to expect, and
could not be disappointed.
[Sidenote: “IVANHOE”]
Mr. Freeman spoke severely of the incorrect history and archaeology of
_Ivanhoe_. There can be no such name as Cedric, the Confessor had no
“sprouts”--of whom Athelstane, in some mysterious way, is a survivor.
But these were matters of indifference to the novelist, as he candidly
explained, and he gratified Ulrica with heathen deities, not familiar to
her remotest ancestors, but preferred by her to the Christian creed. In
fact he sounded his kettle drums by night, like Claverhouse’s troopers
in _Old Mortality_, for the sake of the effect, and careless of the
circumstance that, at night, the kettle drums do not clash on the march,
just as he gave Claverhouse a post of command which he did not hold. He
admitted that he had blended the manners of several distinct centuries,
but what matter? “Such errors will escape the general class of readers,”
and the author helps himself from Froissart, when The Monk of Croyland
does not serve his turn. Here is “confession and avoidance,” and the
general reader, any reader of sense, cares no more for Mr. Freeman’s
censures than for the precise truth about the palisade at Senlac. Sir
Walter was really hit by a criticism of one of his blazons, metal upon
metal, but he found an authentic parallel case, and remarked that
heraldry was in its infancy, and had not developed half of its rules. An
account of the German Jews, given by Skene of Rubislaw, suggested Isaac
of York and Rebecca, the sudden death of an advocate in court gave the
hint which, in the very unlooked for demise of The Templar, rescues
Ivanhoe from a situation out of which the reader sees “no outgait.” But
surely we should have had some previous warning that the hardy Templar
suffered from a cardiac affection? Scott did not think of that, and
caught at a kind of miracle, which, I own, seemed to me far fetched and
unsatisfactory at the uncritical age of ten. A thunderstorm over the
lists and lightning attracted by The Templar’s lance appeared an
“outgait” more picturesque, and, considering the robust health of The
Templar, rather more probable, while vindicatory of divine justice to a
remarkable degree. Cannot you see the combatants clashing in the mirk,
unbeheld by the spectators; you see the flash descend with the
torrential rain, and the marshals of the lists, penetrating the veil of
mist, find The Templar a clay cold corpse, and the Disinherited Knight
“quite safe, though very wet,” like the people in the play of _The
Stranger_.
However, Scott was otherwise inspired! The appearance of _Ivanhoe_, in
December 1819, marked the flood-tide of his popularity. The English
rejoiced at being freed from “the dialect,” which was and remains to
them a stumbling block, though they find no difficulty in the lingo of
the modern “Kailyard.” Lockhart says that, after _Ivanhoe_, the sale of
Scott’s novels fell off, though Constable managed to conceal the
circumstance from the author, an ill-judged proceeding.
[Sidenote: “THE MONASTERY”]
As Lockhart says, the next three or four years were the most expensive
in Scott’s life, through his ignorance of the truth, whereas they should
have been years of retrenchment. It became proportionately difficult for
Sir Walter to “pull up” in his expenditure, and the mine was laid that
exploded seven years later. _Ivanhoe_ remains one of the best known of
Scott’s novels, probably because it is precisely suited to the taste of
boyhood, when the eyes of studious boys can be diverted from the
mysteriously bewitching romances of the late Mr. Henty. We have all
sighed with Rebecca, we have all been of Thackeray’s opinion about the
“very English” respectable Rowena, we have all hated Front de Boeuf;
“_amo Locksley_,” says Thackeray, and so say all of us; we have
delighted in Friar Tuck, laughed with Wamba, and over the
much-criticised scene, due to Scott’s good nature, of the resurrection
of a trencherman so resolute as Athelstane. No mere knock on the head
could get rid of so thick-skulled a thane as the lord of Coningsburgh.
While Scott’s health was recovered, while Abbotsford was full of guests,
and the Abbotsford Hunt was, as the farmer said, the thing worth living
for in the year, _The Monastery_ was being written, and proved a not
undeserved failure, relatively speaking. The only disaster of Scott, in
his treatment of visionary things, is the White Lady of Avenel, and of
all his bores, the Euphuist, Sir Percy Shafton is the least humorous,
and was regarded as the most tedious. The business of the bodkin, and
the tailor ancestry of the really gallant though rather distraught
knight, did not amuse, and the historical setting is not handled in a
manner worthy of the opportunity, the sudden fall of the ancient Church.
[Sidenote: “THE ABBOT”]
Never, surely, was such a _bouleversement_ as the religious revolution
taken so quietly as in Scotland. The only change, said the keeper of a
hostel at St. Andrews, was that where the Dean had sat and called for
claret, the Moderator sat and shouted for more toddy! This is a story of
Scott’s, probably apocryphal, for toddy did not come in with
Presbyterianism, and Darnley is the only whisky drinker whom I have
remarked in the documents of the period. The truth is that, in many
districts of the South, Catholicism was dead before it fell. The love of
“a new day,” as they called it, and relief from priestly dues, with the
fun of havoc and pillage, were universally attractive, and only a
remnant, in outlying parishes, mourned for the Mass that had become a
capital offence. Very few sentimental regrets accompanied the flight of
the ancient faith, and the Abbot of Unreason jigged joyously through the
roofless cathedrals. Thus perhaps the dramatic opportunity of Scott was
less excellent than it seems at a first glance. Only Knox’s “rascal
multitude” began to discover, after they had helped to wreck the
monasteries, that life was as hardly ground down by lay as by clerical
landlords, that gaiety was gone, that holidays were curtailed, that the
penances of the new Kirk were harsher than those of the old, and that
Sunday, from a feast, had become a day of gloom. Under James VI a
preacher observed that he feared the rabble more than he did the
Catholic earls, but rabble and earls were alike brought under the yoke.
All this had not been foreseen, and thus the Reformation was taken
lightly, not with the terrible struggles of contemporary France.
Far from being depressed, and abandoning his theme, Scott deliberately
reverted to it, continuing some of the characters of _The Monastery_ in
_The Abbot_. To Lockhart, now his son-in-law, he sent a copy, with the
inscription,
Up he rose in a funk, lapped a toothful of brandy,
And to it again ... any odds upon Sandy?
The Introduction to _Nigel_ contains, with the rest of Scott’s _Ars
Poetica_, a half apology for “The White Lady of Avenel.” She disappears
from _The Abbot_, which, by virtue of the picture of Queen Mary and her
Loch Leven adventures, and of Catherine Seyton, with all the lively
scenes in old Marian Edinburgh, helped to restore the author’s shaken
popularity.
John Ballantyne had ventured a “Novelists’ Library,” heavy books in
double columns, and Scott contributed charming introductory essays, but
in the summer of 1821 he lost this favourite henchman, and remarked that
the sun would never shine so brightly again for himself. John clearly
was no man of business, his possessions were a minus quantity, though he
believed himself to have some property, and bequeathed a visionary
£2,000 to Scott.
[Sidenote: “KENILWORTH”]
Sir Walter went to London for the Coronation of George IV. Others, “the
_non est tanti_ men,” might sneer, he said, at such pageants, might be
“crucified to them”--as the Covenanting Laird of Brodie prayed to be
crucified to the glories of the Lord Mayor’s Show--but Scott defended
“the natural and unaffected pleasure which men like me receive from
sights of splendour and sounds of harmony.” The Coronation wholly
pleased him, but for the error of the Champion, who used a Highland
target, “instead of a three-cornered or _beater shield_, which, in time
of tilt, was suspended round the neck.” Scott had made the Highland
target too fashionable: hence the heresy of the Champion. Scott was
recognized by the Scots Greys with cries of “God bless Sir Walter,” and
was allowed to pass on foot through the tabooed space which they
guarded on the outside of the Abbey. At this time was executed the bust
of Scott by Chantrey, no doubt by far the best representation of the
man. Raeburn, as Scott remarked, painted him as “a somewhat
chowder-headed” person. Indeed no portrait caught the vivacity of his
changeful expression, all, except the bust, are more or less
“chowder-headed.”
Before John Ballantyne’s death Scott had begun _Kenilworth_. Constable
appears to have suggested _The Armada_ as a subject, and to have
collected many rare Elizabethan books for Sir Walter’s use. Then he
preferred the title of _The Nunnery_, while Scott’s fancy went back to
his favourite lines in Meikle’s ballad, and to the title of _Cumnor
Hall_. But he chose _Kenilworth_, to please Constable. His motto, “No
scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” directed his course. Though a patriotic
Scot, he was too chivalrous to avenge on Queen Elizabeth the wrongs of
Mary Stuart. By the most daring of anachronisms he deserted the real
period of the affair of Amy Robsart, when scandal, not unprovoked, about
Elizabeth was rife in the popular mouth and in every Court of Europe
(1560). In the mystery of Amy Robsart’s death, Scott had a psychological
subject. Leicester and Amy had been married, not secretly but publicly,
in the reign of Edward VI. During that of Mary Tudor a strong
attachment sprang up between Elizabeth and Leicester, then Lord Robert
Dudley. On Elizabeth’s accession to the throne she loaded her favourite
and Master of the Horse with unprecedented honours. Dudley was ever at
Court, his wife lived retired at Cumnor Hall, and it was now said that
she had a fatal disease, now that attempts were being made to poison
her.
[Sidenote: “KENILWORTH”]
Meanwhile the triumphant Scottish Protestants, with the leader of the
conquered Catholics, Archbishop Hamilton, were united for once in
proposing that the Queen of England should marry the next heir to the
throne of Scotland, the Earl of Arran, a Protestant, the friend of Knox.
But, not to speak of other reasons, the favour of Dudley with Elizabeth
stood in the way. Cecil spoke of the danger of Lady Robert Dudley in the
gloomiest terms, to the Spanish ambassador. To the English agent in
Scotland, Randolph, Cecil wrote a letter, which has been destroyed, but
which chilled Randolph’s heart. The death of Darnley was not more
clearly foreseen, in 1567, than the death of Dudley’s wife in 1560.
Then, a few days after Cecil’s letter to Randolph, news of Lady Robert’s
death came to Windsor. How she died no man knows to this day. The
verdict of the coroner’s jury, an open verdict apparently, cannot be
discovered. Amy had sent all her household except two or three ladies
to a fair at Abingdon. Their story was that, on returning, they found
their mistress lying dead, with a broken neck, at the foot of a flight
of stairs. She had suddenly left her ladies, who made no inquiries, and
now she was dead. Elizabeth told an envoy of her ambassador at Paris
that there had been “an attempt” at Cumnor Hall, but that none of
Leicester’s retainers was present. We know no more, but Mr. Froude, by a
misunderstanding of the evidence, made it seem almost impossible to
doubt that Elizabeth had what could not be guiltless foreknowledge of
the catastrophe. This is an error; this is not warranted by the
evidence. The behaviour of Dudley, again, on receiving the news of his
wife’s death, was that of an innocent man: he did all that he could to
secure an investigation without favour.
So the case stands, and Sir Walter might have avenged Mary Stuart by
showing that Elizabeth was in no better position, as regards the death
of Amy, than is Mary as regards the death of Darnley. But Scott rejected
the temptation: he chose to say that Dudley’s marriage was a secret, and
unknown to Elizabeth, and by keeping Amy alive for many years after her
death, he contrived a meeting between the unconscious rivals, the Queen
and the bride, at the festivals of Kenilworth. Such is his audacious
handling of the facts, and he has given Elizabeth a more dignified part
than she was wont to play, where Leicester was concerned: he has made
her a right royal lady. She is magnificent in the meeting with Amy, and
in her challenge of Leicester. The novel has thus always been a
favourite in England, and there are even critics who put this romance
based on bookwork before the best of all in which Scott delineates the
manners best known to him, those of his own countrymen. Yet the novel is
far better than many other critics admit. Amy is a spirited, lovely, and
interesting heroine. Leicester is flattered, but the portrait is fine.
The village humours, and the ruffianly soldier of fortune, Mike
Lambourne, are very happily handled. Varney comes as near Iago in his
resolute wickedness as it was in the power of Scott to go; and there is
good in Flibbertigibbet, though we see too much of him; and more good in
Tony Fire the Faggot, though Tony’s character, in real life, appears to
have escaped censure: his epitaph, at least, is alive to testify to
that, though the rewards heaped by Leicester on the occupant of Cumnor
Hall “do something smack.”
CHAPTER VI
NOVELS, FINANCIAL RUIN, DEATH
This period was the zenith of Scott’s apparent prosperity. Five thousand
guineas were given, or were to be given, by Constable for the remaining
copyright of _Ivanhoe_, _The Monastery_, _The Abbot_, and _Kenilworth_.
“Scott must have reckoned on clearing £30,000 at least in the course of
a couple of years, by the novels written within such a period,” says
Lockhart. Constable granted bills for four unnamed and unimagined “works
of fiction,” and they proved to be _Peveril_, _Quentin Durward_, _St.
Ronan’s Well_, and _Redgauntlet_. Scott’s eldest son was now in an
expensive cavalry regiment; his second son was preparing for the
University, Abbotsford was growing in extent and expense, and Scott was
keeping open house. Lockhart, then living in the tiny neighbouring
cottage of Chiefswood, was a man who did not suffer bores gladly, and he
saw Abbotsford full of bores of all kinds--inquisitive foreigners,
University prigs, condescending great people, and local lairds with
their families. He reckoned that at least a sixth of the peerage of
England passed through Abbotsford, and all the distinguished people of
Scotland! With these came obscure citizens of Edinburgh, old college
mates and office mates of Scott: “These were welcome guests, let who
might be under that roof,” and Scott “contrived to make them all equally
happy, with him, with themselves, and with each other.”
He was the genius of hospitality: he lavished his time on his guests,
who had him with them for the whole of the day, except when he rode
early to Chiefswood and wrote _The Pirate_ on a bureau which remains in
the cottage. He seemed the idlest of men, while scores of essays, and
letters not to be counted, in addition to the novels, flowed from his
pen in the unbroken hours of early morning. Only his extraordinary
strength and buoyancy could enable him to be at once the most lavish
host and the most prolific writer of his age, perhaps of any age. Merely
to “refresh the machine” he was writing these admirable imitations of
the correspondence of the sixteenth century which he called “Private
Letters.” They might have deceived the elect of Antiquarians, but they
could not have been popular with the public, though one character was a
_bona roba_, an unaccustomed apparition in Sir Walter’s work. He threw
the Letters aside, in his last days he fancied that he had
[Illustration: Abbotsford.
[Sidenote: “THE BEACON”]
Photo by Valentine & Sons. Dundee.]
finished them, and that they were a valuable asset. In fact, he turned
from them and began _Nigel_, a romance of the same period, apparently
before he had brought _The Pirate_ to a close.
That “splendid romance,” as Lockhart calls it, based on Scott’s visit to
the Orcades in 1814, was published in December 1821. Though the fair and
dark sisters, Minna and Brenda, were popular, and Cleveland himself had
a vogue, the humours of the Udaler and of the agriculturist were not
enjoyed, and Norna of the Fitful Head, a kind of civilized Ulrica, was
never much appreciated.
It is not necessary here to enter into the details about a luckless Tory
newspaper, _The Beacon_, which had Scott’s support, but was conducted in
an amateur and bludgeonly fashion, in spite of his advice. There was
nothing but blundering and bad language, and Scott declined to see the
paper. Yet he was one of its early supporters, and there is evidence
suggesting (I have not seen this evidence) that he was nearly involved
in a duel, while his friend, Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, was
unfortunately shot in an affair arising out of a successor to _The
Beacon_. “I have kept Lockhart out of this scrape, in which some of the
young men are knee deep,” writes Sir Walter. “I hope,” he wrote to
Lockhart, after Auchinleck’s duel, “that this catastrophe will end the
species of personal satire and abuse which has crept into our political
discussions. The lives of brave and good citizens were given them for
other purposes than to mingle in such unworthy affrays.”
_Nigel_ was published in May 1822, and Constable, who was in London, saw
people reading it, in Macaulay’s fashion, as they walked along the
streets. The ship which carried the edition arrived on a Sunday, by
Monday 7,000 copies had been dispersed. So Constable asked Scott to
write a trifle, like the poem of _Halidon Hall_ (for which he paid
£1,000) every quarter: every poem to be on a battle. Lockhart thought
that Constable’s brain was “well nigh unsettled.” Quite unsettled, if he
expected the public to buy £4,000 worth of battle poetry every year,
while the press was producing 30,000 volumes of _Peveril of the Peak_.
Ballantyne’s press was turning out at this date 145,000 volumes of works
by Scott, and Constable was about buying an estate called Balniel. Yet,
all the while, the old £12,000, the price for a set of copyrights, had
not been and never was fully paid. There seems to have been the
slenderest metallic basis for waggon loads of bills, which all concerned
looked on as being as good as bullion.
[Sidenote: “NIGEL”]
_The Fortunes of Nigel_ (May 1822) was the last novel written by Scott
before his labours produced an ominous change in his health. It is, no
doubt, as Lockhart says, in the first rank of his romances. The story is
_vécu_: Scott had lived as long among the dramas, pamphlets, histories,
and documents of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean times, as in any
part of our history, and his Scottish types of character he knew by
heart. All that Jacobean comedy, mainly the play of Ben Jonson, could
tell him, he had fresh in his memory, or could “bring out with a wet
finger.” Hence the brilliance and vivacity of the street scenes, the
rufflers in Alsatia, the scenes at Court, and at the ordinary. He caught
the moment when the heavy-hilted broad sword of the Scottish sire was
becoming the long rapier of the Scottish son. In gentle King Jamie he
had a model of which the grotesque absurdity needed pruning rather than
exaggeration, and of all Scott’s many portraits of Kings, the slobbering
trotting figure of James is the most truthful and the most comic. These
moralists who denounce dissimulation and incontinence, Baby Charles and
Steenie, are delicately touched: Ritchie Moniplies is a worthy pendant
to Andrew Fairservice: the prentices are as excellent as the bullies and
the old miser with his stern daughter in Alsatia: the whole life of
Jacobean London is placed before us as vividly as the life of Georgian
Edinburgh in _The Heart of Midlothian_. The “hero,” too, the unheroic
hero, is, for once, a living and even realistic character. The
ancestral Puritanism of Nigel degenerates into the cautious gambling of
“The Sparrow Hawk,” who plays with prentices for small sums, and takes
care to leave off a winner. Nobody can deny that this is a natural
metamorphosis, though the effect is to make us rather detest Nigel. He
is supposed to throw off his mean vice, but he cannot be styled amiable.
George Heriot is a better kind of man, and Ritchie is as superior to his
master, morally, as Strap to Roderick Random. The young women of the
tale, the pretty daughter of the goldsmith, and the mysterious lady, do
not distinguish themselves among Scott’s young women. But the book is
certainly in the foremost rank.
[Sidenote: VISIT OF GEORGE IV]
The visit of George IV to Edinburgh, with the death of Erskine, slain by
a calumny at which most men would have laughed, put a strain upon Scott,
in July and August 1822, from which he never recovered. The toil of
organizing the reception of the first crowned King of England who had
visited Scotland since 1650 fell upon Sir Walter. Scott was, in great
part, the cause of the Royal visit, and his whole strength was given to
organizing success. There was “a grand terryfication” (dramatization in
the manner of Terry the actor) “of the Holyrood chapters in _Waverley_.”
The Highlanders were much to the front, “all plaided and plumed in
their tartan array,” and the fat white legs of George IV appeared under
the once forbidden philabeg. His Majesty, a man of vivid imagination,
conceived himself to be a true Stuart, come to his own again; and Scott,
himself in the Campbell tartan and trews, appears to have accepted him
in that romantic character. He himself was the Baron Bradwardine of the
hour, and we know how the Baron sat down on a glass which had touched
the lips of His Most Sacred Majesty, and cut himself rather badly. In
the sultry weather he “had to arrange everything, from the ordering of a
procession to the cut of a button,” and he had also to amuse the
perplexed old poet Crabbe, who seized on this frantic moment for a visit
to a nation which he did not understand.
In one light the visit of George was very well. It reconciled the
furious feuds which had raged around _The Beacon_, and it was a proof
that Scotland, at last, was content with the Hanoverian in the disguise
of the Stuart dynasty. The Highland chiefs were anxious about their
precedence, which is said to have depended on the station occupied by
each clan at Bannockburn, a point probably to be decided on the
extremely diverse traditions of the clan bards or sennachies. Scott,
aided by General Stewart of Garth, the historian of the Highland
regiments, was the Montrose who brought harmony among the clans, no
easy task where Glengarry and Clanranald were at odds about the
chiefship of the Macdonalds, and Cluny and Mackintosh were not of one
mind as to the headship of Clan Chattan. Be it remarked that, when in
tartans, Scott wore the trews, not the philabeg. Glengarry, whether in
the philabeg or not, rode in the procession, followed by “_Tail_,”
pedestrians. The King, and Sir William Curtis, a stout dignitary of
London town, both wore the Royal Stuart tartans, invented, it was said,
for Prince Charles. No Stuart king, of course, had ever worn the
Highland costume, except in expeditions beyond the Highland line. These
amusing pageantries were “making every brain dizzy but his own,” when
the death of Erskine, the mild, quiet, timid man who had been his
dearest friend, fell upon Scott.
The main results of “the right royal row,” as Scott called it, were
that, by his suggestion, the attainders of 1715 and 1745 were redressed,
and that Scott, pursued to Abbotsford by crowds of guests, appears to
have suffered from a slight seizure of an apoplectic kind. “I have not
been very well,” he wrote to Terry in November, “a whoreson thickness of
blood, and a depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends ...
have annoyed me much, and _Peveril_ will, I fear, smell of the
apoplexy.” This, says Lockhart, is the first allusion to Sir Walter’s
fatal malady, the malady which had caused the death of his father.
Lockhart suspected that he had sustained and concealed slight attacks of
this nature. The machine was showing signs of overwork, which appear in
the straggling _Peveril of the Peak_ with its missed opportunities. Yet
_Quentin Durward_ was in progress in company with _Peveril_, and there
is no smell of the apoplexy in that stirring tale, which made Scott’s
fortune in France. The pictures of Louis XI, of his strange funereal
servitors, of the delightful Le Balafré, a pendant of Dugald Dalgetty,
with the bustling events of the story, have won popularity, though the
romance, at first, was received with little enthusiasm. Perhaps this
coldness, or a relapse into commonsense, made Constable announce that he
would enter into no more bargains for books not only unchristened but
unborn. The novels were appearing in uniform collected editions: the
market was glutted. Scott thought of a set of dialogues on
“superstitious” beliefs, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and
witchcraft, as an alternative to romance. But the public was, by this
time, solely devoted to fiction. _Quentin Durward_, too, began to sell
in the old way, and Scott postponed his dealings with things
On the margin grey
’Twixt the soul’s life and day.
Scott had written no novel of contemporary society since _The
Antiquary_, and Laidlaw, on the Eildon hill above Melrose, suggested a
romance of the little town, in the actual year, 1823. The hint resulted
in _St. Ronan’s Well_ (December 1823); the scene is not Melrose, but the
Spa of Innerleithen on the upper Tweed. The plot of _St. Ronan’s Well_
was paralyzed by the prudery of James Ballantyne. A mischance on the
part of the heroine was suppressed, to please James, consequently there
is no reason in life for Clara’s ruined brain, or for anything else that
is essential to the progress and conclusion of the narrative. There is a
similar error, caused by a remonstrance from Jeffrey, in _Dombey and
Son_, where the conduct of Edith towards Mr. Carker is inexplicable, as
it is perfectly clear, from a passage which Dickens vainly tried to
explain away, that Edith had been Mr. Carker’s mistress. The third or
fourth rate society of the Spa may be true to nature, but is neither
convincing nor amusing, and Meg Dods cannot cover the multitude of sins
of confusion in _St. Ronan’s Well_. Miss Edgeworth wrote that the author
of the last thirty pages of the book should be “carbonadoed,” and,
practically, James Ballantyne would have been the sufferer, for he was
the only begetter of the “incredible and unaccountable conclusion.”
[Sidenote: “REDGAUNTLET”]
Meanwhile a very different romance, the last of Scott’s before ruin
fell on him, was in progress, _Redgauntlet_. In _Redgauntlet_ we may
surely say that Scott has found himself again, at his best, or very
nearly at his best. The form of narrative, partly told in letters, as by
Richardson, is no longer popular, and we are not sorry when the author
deserts it. The plot of the story is rather baffling, and, as the tale
goes on, we almost forget our curiosity as to why Darsie Latimer should
not go near the English border. The reason, when we do learn it, is far
fetched, Darsie was not worth all that mechanism of intrigue. But the
pictures of old Edinburgh life about 1763, of Scott’s own father as the
elder Fairford, with his good heart, and his “pernickety” ascetic
lawyer’s ways, is delightful. Peter Peebles, the litigant maddened by
law and drink, is pathetic no less than humorous; if the legal business
appears dull, it is, none the less, or perhaps the more, Balzacian,
supposing Balzac to have had the humour of Dumas. The Quakers are
borrowed from what Scott saw, in boyhood, of a Quaker household at
Kelso. Excellent is Geddes’s nonresisting courage, and his shamefaced
pride in his armorial bearings, the _ged_, or pike, the freebooter of
fresh water. The scene of salmon spearing on the Solway flats is a
description of a sport dear to Scott as pursued in a boat on Tweed.
Things like huge snow-shoes were used in my boyhood, the spearman stood
erect above the water, one foot in each wooden shoe, he could spear a
fish between them, and the exercise demanded much gift of balance, and a
cool head, while the torches flared above the swift black running
waters. Green-Mantle again recalls the _Manteau Vert_ of Scott’s youth.
He borrowed the horse-shoe frown of old Redgauntlet from the face of the
wicked witch, the sister of the Wizard, Major Weir, in the legend given
by Sinclair, in “Satan’s Invisible World Disclosed,” and he also
borrowed thence the name of the jackanapes in “Wandering Willie’s Tale.”
The scenes in the mysterious Redgauntlet’s cottage are as good romance
as those in the Provost’s house at Dumfries, with the story of “Pate in
Peril” are good comedy. The brokenhearted Nanty Ewart is full of an
original pathos not common in Scott; his story of his own life of
miserable adventure, with the foreknowledge of his doom, is a
masterpiece, and as a masterpiece “the fallen and faded Ascanius” of the
tale, Prince Charles, the battered stately wanderer, with the despotic
mistress, was universally accepted.
[Sidenote: “REDGAUNTLET”]
There is evidence that the Prince really did pursue his fleeting vision
of a crown into England, in 1763, and was actually seen by Murray, the
actor, a friend of Scott’s, then a boy. When the Prince was in England,
in disguise, there is always a complete break in his correspondence,
and I find such a gap at this period. He still had a few adherents, and
would stray across the Channel to see and frighten them, and slip back
again to his hermit life at Bouillon. Miss Walkinshaw, the original of
the lady who accompanies him in the tale, had forsaken him at the date
of the romance, and she was not a fair but a dark beauty. There is a
mournful grace in Charles’ last good-bye to the few Jacobite gentry who
surround him in the novel when “there was an end of an auld song.” The
romance “contains perhaps more of the author’s personal experiences than
any other, or even than all of them put together.” As for “Wandering
Willie’s Tale,” the corrections and admirable additions in the proof
sheets show p. 118 that this _chef d’oeuvre_, unlike “the rest of them,”
was written with all the care that it deserved. If it has anything to be
called a rival, that rival is Mr. Stevenson’s story of about the same
period, in the latest dusk of the day of the Covenant, _Thrawn Janet_.
But there is no rivalry--Scott’s legend is unapproachable.
There was but this one novel in 1824; if Scott’s advisers concealed from
him the relative slackness of his sales, they did not hesitate to warn
him against “over-cropping.” He wrote his tribute to Byron, on the news
of the poet’s death, and he worked at a new edition of his _Swift_. As
a Director of the Edinburgh Academy, founded in this year, Scott
remarked that he did not love his country better than truth, and that
Dr. Johnson was not wholly wrong when he said that, in learning, “every
Scot had a mouthful and none had a bellyful.” Boys were now to learn
Greek earlier, and to learn more Greek than in his own days at the High
School. In fact the new school has produced some Grecians of merit and
distinction in its eighty years of existence. Scott did not tell the
boys that of Greek he had less than Shakespeare, and he despised the
contemptible clamour over his own famous brace of false quantities in
the two elegiac lines for the epitaph of his deerhound Maida. One of the
false quantities, after all, was the fault of a transcriber who wrote
“jaces” in place of “dormis”; that transcriber was James Ballantyne. “We
could have written as good longs and shorts as the English, if it had
not been for the--Covenant,” an old gentleman used to say, but Porson
opened Buchanan on a false quantity, and surely Dr. Pitcairn erred when
he began his famous epitaph on Dundee (admirably Englished into poetry
by Dryden)--“_Ultime Scotorum_.” Yet he could hardly write _Ultime
Pictorum_, and so save his prosody at the expense of his ethnology.
[Sidenote: THE FIRST AND LAST BALL]
“Surely if Sir Walter Scott be not a happy man, which he seems truly to
be, he deserves to be so,” wrote Basil Hall at Abbotsford in the
Christmas of 1824. January 7, 1825, saw “the first regular ball given at
Abbotsford--and the last.” As in _Marmion_,
It was his blithest and his last.
The occasion of the festivity was the wedding of Scott’s eldest son, a
young cavalry officer “of strict and even severe principles,” to a Miss
Jobson, of Lochore, “with a fortune of £50,000 in land.” The name of
Jobson is neither suggestive of wealth nor of heraldic additions to the
quarterings of the Scotts. Sir Walter speaks of his daughter-in-law with
unconcealed affection; she was a pretty, shy, candid, innocent girl, in
the manner of Rose Bradwardine. The lovers lately wed crossed to
Ireland, where the Regiment was quartered, and whither Scott himself
went for a holiday later in 1825. Scott now backed the credit of his
friend, the actor manager Terry, for £1,250, plus £500 guaranteed by
James Ballantyne. Whoever lends a friend money for the purposes of his
business is absolutely certain to see no more of the coins, and to lend
Terry money, Terry being a manager and lessee of a theatre, was laying
the longest possible odds on a hopeless horse. Like Steenie denouncing
incontinence, and Baby Charles reproving dissimulation, Scott read
Terry a lecture against raising money by bills and discounts, a ruinous
system, he declared, very wisely, which was assiduously practised by
Constable, and Ballantyne & Co.
[Sidenote: “NAPOLEON”]
Constable now had a new project, which Lockhart describes with infinite
humour. We have mentioned evidence given before a Parliamentary
Commission, to the effect that libraries ceased to be formed about the
time when _Waverley_ appeared (1814). The same evidence showed that real
books had never prospered since cheap little volumes of boiled down
information, the tinned meats of the intellectual life, were introduced.
It was Constable who now introduced them. He came out to Abbotsford
enormously big with a project. He unloaded himself of a packet, the
annual schedule of assessed taxes. From the items of taxes paid on many
things which profit not, such as hair powder, he inferred, justly, that
the British public spent money on every thing conceivable, except books.
Hundreds of thousands of people had obviously plenty of money, and in
the article of books alone did they economize. Scott remarked that all
down Tweed were the houses of lairds of whom none spent £10 yearly on
literature. Of course they did not, and of course they do not, and never
will. One extravagance our countrymen and country-women avoid, as they
would the devil, and that is buying a book. They are like the Highland
crofter who was implored to give at least five shillings to the
“Sustentation Fund,” and for the salvation of his immortal part. “Me
give five shillings to save my soul! I haena five shillings to buy
mysel’ tobacco!”
Constable admitted that the gentry were content with a magazine, and, at
most, a subscription to a circulating library. But _he_ would produce
books so cheap and good that even the gentry would buy them. To the
sanguine soul of the projector this seemed a splendid speculation,
though even he did not think of sinking to a sixpenny price. Monthly
volumes at half-a-crown or three-and-sixpence were in his eye, as if the
public could afford to give nearly forty shillings annually for books.
The public “has not time,” setting the pecuniary extravagance aside, to
read twelve volumes yearly. However Scott accepted the golden dream, and
proposed a short _Life of Napoleon_. It grew into ten tomes of
Constable’s _Miscellany_, and was mainly written after Sir Walter’s
ruin, in eighteen months. A critic mentions a dozen people then alive in
England, including Carlyle, who could have done a better _Life of
Napoleon_. Perhaps they could have done it, “if they had the mind,” but
certainly they could not have done it better than Scott, in eighteen
months. Constable provided about a hundred volumes of _Le Moniteur_, and
quantities of printed works, as materials, while MSS. were collected.
But no _Life_ written at that time could be satisfactory; most documents
were inaccessible, and Scott made great use of second-hand authorities.
Though the book won £18,000 for Sir Walter’s creditors, and though it is
very readable, the task work (and few forms of drudgery are so tedious
as history writing in a hurry) did not suit Scott, and adds nothing to
his reputation.
[Sidenote: RUIN]
[Sidenote: THE BALLANTYNE FIRM]
Meanwhile he wrote _The Betrothed_, which Ballantyne discouraged, and
_The Talisman_, a work as pleasing to boyhood as _Ivanhoe_. We all have
been fond of Coeur de Lion, and hated Conrad de Montserrat, and adored
Saladin. The book was amazingly popular, and _Woodstock_ was undertaken
next, and finished when the evil days began. Scott now made a pleasant
tour in Ireland, and visited Wordsworth on his homeward way. The two
poets eternally quoted the Bard of Rydal, but not the most distant
allusion was made by either, says Lockhart, to the verses of the
Minstrel of the Forest. On returning to Abbotsford it was a sad sight
for Lockhart to see Sir Walter “read, note, and index with the
pertinacity of some pale compiler in the British Museum,” for the
_Napoleon_, and rising from his toil, “not radiant and buoyant,” but
with an aching brow and weary eyes. Lockhart himself was leaving
Scotland for London, and the editorial chair of _The Quarterly Review_.
The shadows were thickening in the prison house, and the health of
Scott’s grandson, Lockhart’s son, was of all the shadows the deepest.
There were to be no more happy summers in the cottage of Chiefswood--the
scene, many years later, of happiness _cujus pars fui_. In November
1825, Lockhart, in London, wrote a long letter to Scott on rumours
unfavourable to Constable’s solvency. He anticipated nothing worse for
Scott than the loss of the price of _Woodstock_. Returning to
Chiefswood, he received a letter of warning, and showed it to Scott, who
made a night journey to see Constable, who reassured him. Lockhart now
suspected that Scott was deeply concerned in his publisher’s affairs. On
November 20 Scott began his famous _Journal_, now published in full. On
December 22 he wrote _Bonny Dundee_, new words to an old tune,
accompanying ribald words, in which the town, not the Viscount of
Dundee, is “bonny.” “I wonder if the verses are good,” Scott notes, and
laments poor Will Erskine--“thou couldst and wouldst have told me.” The
song is his latest and not least splendid tribute to Claverhouse, and
rings across the Empire with its “cavalry canter.” On Christmas Day
Scott wrote, “I have a particular call for gratitude.” “Thus does
Fortune banter us.” The earliest notes of 1826 show Scott already
anxious about the money affairs of Ballantyne and Constable. They also
(January 5) show him “much alarmed” by a sudden attack of _agraphia_,
impotence to write the words he would. He explained this as the result
of an anodyne, for his old complaint had returned with its cruel
agonies. On January 11 there is “anxious botheration about the money
market.” On January 14 there comes a mysterious letter from Constable,
then in London, where he made to Lockhart wild proposals for advances of
huge sums by Scott. On January 16, in Edinburgh, the blow fell. “Hurst
and Robinson let a bill come back upon Constable.” Nevertheless Scott
dined with Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, whose little daughter, recently dead
at a great age, regretted by all who knew her, was a child friend and
consoler of Sir Walter. Next day came James Ballantyne “with a face as
black as the crook”: Ballantyne & Co. must suspend payment. Scott at
once consulted Mr. John Gibson, W.S., and, as he would not consent to be
made bankrupt, his affairs were put under trustees, acting for the
creditors. If bankrupt, his financial position would improve, his future
gains would be his own. But he at once braced himself to pay off
everybody, pledging brain and life to that colossal task. He did not as
yet know the full extent of his losses.
By the admission of one of Ballantyne’s trustees, the books of the firm,
eleven years later, were still unbalanced. Into the affair of the bills
and counter bills between Ballantyne and Constable, whereby, according
to Lockhart, Scott’s business debts were doubled, it is not possible to
go in this place. Ballantyne’s representatives regarded the whole story
as the result of a confusion in the mind of Lockhart. But Lockhart’s
source was Mr. Cadell, the partner of Constable, and Mr. Cadell, in
1837, stood by his guns, and sent confirmatory documents. “John
Ballantyne suggested the double bills!”[7] Scott never blamed James
Ballantyne, who owed to him, he said, his difficulties in the present as
well as his prosperity in the past. But the books of the firm were never
balanced! Without balance-sheets, and there were none, how could Scott
know the amount of his liabilities? But, again, why did he not extort
accounts from the lazy James? Lockhart himself meted out the blame to
all concerned, as far as his knowledge, instructed by Mr. Cadell,
enabled him to do. He was blamed by the Press for making precisely the
statements which he never made. Scott, to his own loss, insisted on
employing James Ballantyne alone as his printer after 1826. But he
transferred his publishing business from Constable to Cadell, with good
reason. Constable “was all spectral together.” As late as 1851 Lockhart
wrote that “the details of Scott’s commercial perplexities remain in
great measure inexplicable.” Scott himself (January 29) writes:
“Constable’s business seems unintelligible ... neither stock nor debt to
show. No doubt trading almost entirely on accommodation is dreadfully
expensive.” So Scott had just warned Terry!
[Sidenote: “WOODSTOCK”]
From his old rival, Sir William Forbes, from the Royal Bank, from an
unknown person, offering £30,000, Scott had many proffers of assistance.
But he took the whole debt, £117,000, on his own shoulders, he borrowed
from no man, he lived retired, and worked at _Woodstock_ steadily
throughout the days which brought Job’s messengers of ruin. “I
experience a sort of determined pleasure,” he said to Skene, “in
confronting the very worst aspect of this sudden reverse....” His mind
was free from the awful apprehension caused by his attack of _agraphia_.
“Few have more reason to feel grateful to the Disposer of all than I
have.” Any spleen which Scott may have felt, he worked off in _Malachi
Malagrowther’s Letters_, a criticism of an effort made by his own party
to dethrone the Scot’s one pound note, the Palladium of the ancient
kingdom.
On March 15 Scott left his house in Castle Street for the last time. _Ha
til mi tulidh_--“I return no more!” The words are those of the lament of
Macleod’s second-sighted piper, foreseeing his own fall in The Rout of
Moy (1746). At Abbotsford he finished _Woodstock_ on March 26. The book
sold for £8,228, a first instalment of the Sisyphean task of payment.
Tastes differ, but to myself _Woodstock_ seems to possess great merits.
Considering the circumstances in which it was written, it is a wonderful
book. Cromwell is not the conventional hypocrite of the then current
estimate: he is a religious man, something of a mystic, involved in
politics, and displaying the habitual “jesuitry” of political religious
men. Wildrake is a tipsy cavalier of the best, and of the best in his
song for King Charles. The various Puritan officers, and their various
conduct in face of the _poltergeist_, or noisy devil of Woodstock, are
excellently discriminated. Scott never could remember where he read that
“Funny Joe of Oxford” confessed to being the _poltergeist_, nor have I
been able to discover his source. My earliest trace of the explanation
is in Joseph Taylor’s _Apparitions_ (1815, Second Edition). Taylor gives
us Funny Joe Collins, his _pulvis fulminans_, and all the rest of it,
almost in the same words as Scott’s, who must have possessed Taylor’s
book. But who goes bail for Funny Joe? If he did make a confession, how
did it escape Dr. Plot, whose _Natural History of Oxfordshire_ is one of
Scott’s authorities? What Joe Collins may or may not have said is not
evidence, but what does common sense care for evidence, when an
explanation is wanted?
[Sidenote: HEALTH OF LADY SCOTT]
The plot of _Woodstock_ was unconsciously annexed by Thackeray in
_Esmond_. His charming but historically absurd James III is Charles II,
laughing and running after every girl, and making love to the sister and
mistress of the two good Royalists who protect him. Lockwood and his
sweetheart, in _Esmond_, are Jocelyn and his sweetheart in _Woodstock_.
James III is a more favoured lover than his uncle, and Beatrix outshines
all the women of Scott, but Scott’s is the invention of the situation,
down to the King’s offer of a duel. It is an astonishing case of
unconscious appropriation--and improvement at the expense of the
character of James, “the best of kings and men,” but the least humorous.
I profess myself an admirer of Trusty Tompkins, that unworthy
Independent; of Corporal Humgudgeon; of the noble Sir Henry Lee; and of
his hound Bevis; of Wildrake, of the _mise en scène_, of Cromwell, in
short of _Woodstock_ in general. But these opinions are the accidents
of personal likings, beyond which criticism, however it may disguise
them, never finds it easy to go.
Scott now began _The Chronicles of the Canongate_, with Cadell for
publisher. Constable was “spectral”: he had tried to borrow large sums
from Scott, “after all chance of recovery was over,” says Lockhart. But
to the sanguine Constable it could not seem that all chance was over.
Long ago he had bought Hunter out of his business at a vast
over-estimate, from which he never recovered. To act thus was in his
nature; we must not suppose him to have been in any degree dishonest.
The _Chronicles_ and _Napoleon_ now went on together, while (May 2)
Scott “almost despaired” of his wife’s recovery from illness. “Still she
welcomes me with a smile, and insists she is better.” She could not take
leave of him, when he was obliged to leave Abbotsford for dingy lodgings
in Edinburgh. On May 15 he heard of the death of Lady Scott. “I am
deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels.... She is sentient
and conscious of my emotions somewhere--somehow; _where_, we cannot
tell, _how_, we cannot tell; yet I would not at this moment resign the
mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for
all that this world can give me.” He writes of his lonely study: “Poor
Charlotte would have been in the room half a score of times to see if
the fire burned, and ask a hundred kind questions.” Such were the
relations of husband and wife. He turned to his story of _The Highland
Widow_: there was “no rest for Sir Walter.” “I will not be dethroned by
any rebellious passion that raises its standard against me.”
Scott visited London and Paris, partly in the interests of his
_Napoleon_. In February 1827, at a dinner to William Murray, the actor,
he acknowledged what could no longer be concealed, his authorship of the
novels. By June 10, 1827, the “millstone” of _Napoleon_ was off his
back. He and his amanuensis had been used to work from six in the
morning to six in the evening, without interruption except for meals. No
doubt there might have been better historians of the world’s greatest
genius, but who else would have worked a twelve hours’ day--and all for
the sake of duty and honour? Lockhart computes that twelve months were
occupied in the writing. Between the end of 1825 and the June of 1827,
Scott had written off £28,000 of his debts. To wipe them out, not to
produce an impeccable biography, was his aim, it must be admitted, but
we must remember that his general health was now very bad, with insomnia
and severe headaches.
[Sidenote: GOURGAUD]
August 1827 brought news that General Gourgaud was indignant about
Scott’s remarks on him in his _Napoleon_. Scott had told what he found
in our State Papers: “I should have been a shameful coward if I had
shunned using them.” Gourgaud had already fought Ségur, the brilliant
historian of the Moscow expedition. It may be that Gourgaud’s
information given to the English Government, about Napoleon in St.
Helena, was a “blind,” not a betrayal: one does not suspect his loyalty.
Scott rejected this excuse, as convicting Gourgaud of falsehood, “when
giving evidence upon his word of honour.” Scott was ready to give him a
meeting: chose his old friend, Clerk, as his second, and saw that
Napoleon’s own pistols, which he possessed, were in order. “I will not
baulk him, Jackie! He shall not dishonour the country through my sides,
I can assure him.” “The courage of bards,” according to a Gaelic
proverb, is a minus quantity. Scott was not to justify the proverb: if
he did not fight, he said, he would “die the death of a poisoned rat in
a hole, out of mere sense of my own degradation.”
Mr. Hutton is severe on Scott for this unchristian conduct. Probably, at
the same date, and in similar circumstances, Mr. Hutton would have been
found “on the sod.” The ideas of the age made fighting unavoidable, and,
as for the sin, Scott would rather trust his soul with God than his
honour to men, as Jeanne d’Arc said, after leaping from her prison
tower, that she would rather commit her soul to God than her honour to
the English. Gourgaud made “a fiery rejoinder” to Scott’s plain and
invincible statement of his case. Scott did not reply in any way, he did
not challenge Gourgaud, who himself had chivalry enough, or good sense
enough, to send no cartel. In fact one does not see how he could escape
from his dilemma. He had betrayed his master, or he had been guilty of a
dubious stratagem.
[Sidenote: “THE FAIR MAID OF PERTH”]
Scott thought of taking sanctuary in Holyrood precincts from, not
Gourgaud, but a Hebrew creditor named Abud, who insisted on receiving at
once the full measure of his due. Sir William Forbes settled the affair
privately, and Scott did not need to dwell where his hero, Croftangry,
abides, in _The Chronicles of the Canongate_, now published. The
autobiographical part, in Croftangry, is as excellent as it is
melancholy. The book was well received, and _The Fair Maid of Perth_,
the last of his good novels, was begun. The pictures of burgess life,
and of the distracted Court, are excellent. Poor Oliver Proudfute is a
good comic character with a tragic end. The fighting Smith, with his
love of poetry and romance, is a most original and sympathetic person,
and Simon the Glover is as good as a father, citizen, and friend, as
Sir Patrick Charteris is in the quality of knightly Provost. The Fair
Maid, when she deigns to be natural, is very natural indeed; the Clan
fight is one of the best in fiction, and in Conachar, who “has drunk the
milk of the white doe,” his foster mother, Scott expiates his extreme
harshness to a ne’er-do-well brother, who had shown the white feather in
the West Indies. This harshness he bitterly repented. With the terrible
true story of the Duke of Rothesay’s doom, with Ramorny and Bonthron and
Dwining for villains, with the studies of the good helpless Roi
Fainéant, Albany, Douglas, and poor Louise, and with the scene of the
chief’s funeral, _The Fair Maid of Perth_ abounds in merits, pressed
down and running over. Even Father Clement (whom Scott does not quite
like), with the fanaticism that attended the Reformation from the first,
and with a touch of “Jesuitry,” is well drawn, and how excellent is the
Glover’s account of what he liked in the Father’s sermons, his
denunciations of the rabble and the nobles, and his appreciation of the
Scottish middle class--absurdly said to have been a creation of John
Knox. Commerce, not religion, made the burghs and the burghers, who
liked to listen to Father Clement, “proving, as it seemed to me, that
the sole virtue of our commonweal, its strength, and its estimation, lay
among the burgher craft of the better class, which I received as
comfortable doctrine, and creditable to the town.”
Scott ends with commendations of Father Clement, but he liked the man no
more than he says that Simon Glover did. As a politician, he was even
unscrupulously opposed to Catholics, as being under priestly dominion no
less than the Covenanters were under preachers’ dominion. He would have
no _imperium in imperio_. But, in his novels, the old faith is spoken of
so tenderly that George Borrow frequently and intemperately accuses him
of betraying souls to the
Lady in Babylon bred,
Addicted to flirting and dressing in red.
He regarded our victory at Navarino as very well, but our policy as on
the level of what that of the Turks would have been, had they sent a
plenipotentiary to regulate our behaviour towards the Irish Catholics.
The December of 1827 saw the publication of the tiny square volumes of
_The Tales of a Grandfather_, addressed to Lockhart’s son, “Master Hugh
Littlejohn.” They had an appropriate result: the small boy dirked his
brother (not seriously) with a pair of scissors, and requested Scott
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
[Sidenote: “TALES OF A GRANDFATHER”]
After a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.]
to write no more about Civilization, “he dislikes it extremely.” One
remembers how tiresome were the chapters on Civilization, except that on
the Feudal System. Of the little that the world used to know about
Scottish history, three-quarters were learned from _The Tales of a
Grandfather_. Necessarily much more “scientific” information has since
been acquired, and Mr. Fraser Tytler’s _History_ is a monument of
impartial industry. But Scott, as impartial as Tytler, gives us the
cream of the anecdotes and semi-historical legends, which are what
everybody ought to know. He does not disdain the garrulous Pitscottie,
and the lively memoirs of Sir James Melville, these pillars of “history,
as she is wrote,” and ought not, scientifically speaking, to be written
any longer.
Yet there are senses in which _The Tales of a Grandfather_ are
scientifically composed. There is little science in writing books so
dull that no mortal can read them, and this reef ahead of the modern
pedant Scott successfully avoids. He lets “the violet of a legend blow”
in periods of the utmost aridity, he “loads every reef,” however
granitic, with the gold of every anecdote that reveals the character of
individuals or of the time. If a scrap of ballad illustrates his topic,
he has that scrap in his wallet. Thus the great Montrose fought for a
sacred cause, the wretched Lord Lewis Gordon, an unworthy leader of a
clan of soldiers, fought from caprice. The ballad verse runs,
If you with Lord Lewis go,
You’ll get reif and prey enough,
If you with Montrose go,
You’ll get grief and wae enough--
hard won victories and forced marches. Scott’s treatment of that
battlefield of rival sentimentalists, Kirk and Cavalier--the time of the
Civil War and the Restoration--is marked by lucidity, conciseness, and
impartiality. Any boy of ten can understand it if he pleases, and the
writer flatters neither Presbyterian nor King’s man.
[Sidenote: “TRAITOR SCOT”]
I quote what he says about the surrender of the King to the English by
the Scots at Newcastle. The position of the Scots Commissioners was
perplexing, whether they deliberately lured Charles to come to them or
not. They could not keep him in Scotland: they would have had to fight
England, and to defy the preachers who rode them. They could not safely
let Charles embark secretly at Tynemouth, as Sir Walter suggests: the
prospect of a King over the water was agreeable neither to the English
nor to the Covenanters. But, says Scott, “Even if the Scots had
determined that the exigencies of the times, and the necessity of
preserving the peace betwixt England and Scotland, together with their
engagements with the Parliament of England, demanded that they should
surrender the person of their King to that body, the honour of Scotland
was intimately concerned in so conducting the transaction that there
should be no room for alleging that any selfish advantage was stipulated
by the Scots as a consequence of giving him up. I am almost ashamed to
write that this honourable consideration had no weight.
“The Scottish army had a long arrear of pay due to them from the English
Parliament, which the latter had refused, or at least delayed to make
forthcoming. A treaty for the settlement of these arrears had been set
on foot; and it had been agreed that the Scottish forces should retreat
into their own country, upon payment of two hundred thousand pounds,
which was one half of the debt finally admitted. Now, it is true that
these two treaties, concerning the delivery of the King’s person to
England and the payment by Parliament of their pecuniary arrears to
Scotland, were kept separate, for the sake of decency; but it is certain
that they not only coincided in point of time, but bore upon and
influenced each other. No man of candour will pretend to believe that
the Parliament of England would ever have paid this considerable sum,
unless to facilitate their obtaining possession of the King’s person;
and this sordid and base transaction, though the work exclusively of a
mercenary army, stamped the whole nation of Scotland with infamy. In
foreign countries they were upbraided with the shame of having made
their unfortunate and confiding Sovereign a hostage, whose liberty or
surrender was to depend on their obtaining payment of a paltry sum of
arrears; and the English nation reproached them with their greed and
treachery, in the popular rhyme,--
Traitor Scot
Sold his king for a groat.
“The Scottish army surrendered the person of Charles to the
Commissioners for the English Parliament, on receiving security for
their arrears of pay, and immediately evacuated Newcastle, and marched
for their own country. I am sorry to conclude the volume with this
mercenary and dishonourable transaction; but the limits of the work
require me to bring it thus to a close.”
[Sidenote: “TALES OF A GRANDFATHER”]
By their Covenant, as interpreted by their preachers, the Scots had
brought themselves to this pass, and the only course open to them which
was not conspicuously base they did not take. A nation is judged by the
rulers whom it accepts, and though not a man in a hundred, north of
Tweed, approved the course (so a contemporary tells us), “the whole
nation of Scotland was stamped with infamy.” Scott does not prefer
Scotland to truth, but he does misrepresent, by defect of information,
the effectual cause of Argyll’s death. He did not die merely because he
expressed, in letters to Monk, “a zeal for the English interest.” He
gave information as to the movements of the forces that stood for his
King, and were commanded by his own son. Writing for the instruction of
the young Scott laid aside all Cavalier sentiment and prejudice; in the
opinion of M. Amédée Pichot, he wrote as a Whig. But the Whigamores have
never welcomed him as an ally. Even to-day a student who “has no time”
cannot gain so rapid and so correct a view of Scottish history from any
book as he will find in _The Tales of a Grandfather_.
Sir Walter’s next task was the _Magnum Opus_, the preparation of a
literary history of the work of his life, especially of the novels and
poems. That history took the shape, not wholly fortunate, of new
Introductions and new notes. They are of the most genial interest, but
perhaps it would have been wiser to write the literary history in
separate volumes, than to clog the Authors’ Favourite Edition with so
much prefatory matter that the modern reader is frightened away,
believing that he will never survive to read the romance in each case.
The _format_ and typography of the volumes were excellent, the plates
were not better than most illustrations and rather worse than some.
Cadell had bought in the copyright at £8,500 on the luckiest of days for
Sir Walter’s creditors. Now it was that Scott, having no money to give
to a Reverend Mr. Gordon, gave him the copyright of two sermons which he
had already written for him, at a moment when he feared that Gordon was
too ill and nervous to write sermons for himself. Gordon sold the
copyright for £250. Scott disliked appearing as a lay preacher, but good
nature carried the day. He would not, however, again oblige James
Ballantyne, who pleaded for the life of Oliver Proudfute, in _The Fair
Maid of Perth_. To please James he had ruined _St. Ronan’s Well_, he had
brought back Athelstane in _Ivanhoe_ from the dead, and that was enough,
and more than enough.
[Sidenote: THE “JOURNAL”]
The year 1829 saw the completion of _Anne of Geierstein_, but as the
author of Anne’s being frankly damned her, I am not inclined to plead in
her favour, leaving her advocacy to Mr. Saintsbury, who places Anne “on
a level with anything and above most things later than _The Pirate_.” To
deem _Anne_ on a level with _Redgauntlet_, or even with _Woodstock_, and
_The Fair Maid of Perth_, seems, in Lethington’s words, “a devout
imagination.” My friend, Mr. Saintsbury, indeed speaks here of _Anne_
“as a mere romance,” not counting “the personal touches which exalt
_Redgauntlet_ and the Introduction to the _Chronicles_.” But what is
there in _Anne_ that comes home to us like Nanty Ewart, Wandering
Willie, and Peter Peebles? No Scot can doubt that Sir Walter is at his
best in the bounds of “his ain countrie,” this was an inevitable
limitation of his genius.
The _Journal_ of the early months of 1829 shows Scott in good spirits,
pleased with solitude, when he is alone, but only if solitude does not
mean lack of access to human company. In a little sportive dialogue with
a Geni, or Djinn, he confesses to all his old delight in building
castles in the air. “You need not repent,” says the Djinn, “most of your
novels have previously been subjects for airy castles.” This means that,
rapidly as the novels were written, they, or many of them, had long
simmered in the author’s imagination: he had _lived_, he remarks, in the
scenes and adventures which he describes. Among other things, he now
wrote, for Croker’s _Boswell’s Johnson_, notes on the great Doctor’s
Scottish tour. Busy as Sir Walter was, his time and work were still at
the disposal of others. But some of these invaluable notes went astray
in the post, and never were recovered. He wrote a short _History of
Scotland_, for the Encyclopaedia of Thackeray’s victim, Dr. Lardner,
and a review article to raise a sum of money for the ever unlucky
Gillies, who visited Abbotsford in autumn, and noted one convenience
“very rare,” he says, in country houses. In every room was abundance of
pen, ink, and paper.
[Sidenote: PARALYSIS]
In Edinburgh, at the levee of the Commissioner to the General Assembly,
Scott met Edward Irving. “I could hardly keep my eyes off him while we
were at table. He put me in mind of the devil disguised as an angel of
light, so ill did that horrible obliquity of vision harmonize with the
dark tranquil features of his face, resembling that of our Saviour in
Italian pictures, with the hair carefully arranged in the same
manner.... He spoke with that kind of unction which is nearly allied to
cajolerie....” In fact Scott liked Irving no more than he liked Father
Clement. He had a great distrust of “enthusiasm” in religion, but Irving
was not the quack whom Scott clearly suspected him of being. Other
quacks, in his opinion, were the two brothers, then calling themselves
“Hay Allan,” but later, “John and Charles Stuart,” sons of a son of
Prince Charles by his wife. These gentlemen possessed a MS. called
_Vestiarium Scoticum_, giving an account of the tartans of the Border as
well as of the Highland clans, tartans otherwise unknown. There were
two MSS., one, never seen of men, of the sixteenth century, another,
still extant, of the eighteenth century. This MS. remains a mystery. I
believe that neither in ink nor paper is there any trace of falsity,
while the style is certainly beyond the powers of imitation possessed by
the two brothers, in whose antiquarian probity Scott had no belief.
Scott’s friends were dying around him, Shortreed of the Liddesdale
rambles, and Tom Purdie. _Haec poena diu viventibus!_ His Diary flags in
July, and is not reopened till May 1830. Scott read and reviewed that
thrilling book, Pitcairn’s _Criminal Trials_. It was published by the
Bannatyne Club, of which Scott was the animating spirit; for the
Roxburghe Club he edited and presented the story of the Master of
Sinclair, and his slaying of the Shaws of Greenock (1708). He dramatized
the tale, from Pitcairn, of the Auchendrane Tragedy, the series of
murders by the two Mures. There is much of spirit, fancy, and vigorous
verse in _The Ayrshire Tragedy_, but the topic inevitably lacked
dramatic interest.
It was on February 15, 1831, that the long threatened blow of paralysis
fell on Sir Walter. He was alone, with a lady, examining her father’s
manuscripts, when his face altered, he fell into a chair, but with the
instinct of courtesy, contrived to stagger from the room and fell in
the drawing-room, where his daughter Anne and Lockhart’s sister, Violet,
happened to be.[8] He presently recovered speech, and, when he went
abroad again, people observed no change. But he knew his own case. None
the less, he toiled on at his _Letters on Demonology_, a work well worth
reading, though marked by failing powers. That astonishing person,
Professor Wilson, instantly attacked Scott, making the Shepherd in
_Noctes Ambrosianae_ speak of “Sir Walter wi’ his everlasting anecdotes,
nine out o’ ten meaning naething, and the tenth itsel’ as auld as Eildon
Hill.” Wilson also assailed the _Letters_: there was a great deal of Mr.
Hyde in his composition, an element which broke out in furious attacks
on old friends. Yet he never estranged Lockhart.
Scott declared that he felt no mental feebleness, and hoped that by 1835
he might clear off his debts; he had just paid £15,000 towards that end.
He received a kind of proposal of marriage from a woman of rank, through
her brother: he was told that he might hope! But he confided to his
_Journal_ that he did not hope to wed “a grim grenadier.” His creditors
restored to him his
[Sidenote: EVIL DAYS]
books, plate, furniture, and collection of works of art and curios,
which he valued at £10,000. He resigned his Clerkship in November 1830,
receiving a pension of £840. The change was unfortunate, as it gave him
more time for overwork. Meanwhile, every letter from Ballantyne about
his new novels betrayed its effect in nervous twitchings at the mouth.
Cadell, to give him rest, suggested the composition of an anecdotic
catalogue of his curiosities, “The Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck.” A
glance at the opening of the MS., with its paralytic writing and
examples of _agraphia_, shows how desperate was his mental and bodily
condition for a short while.
Yet he was now thinking of _Castle Dangerous_, and he wrote a Tory
pamphlet which, his advisers saw, showed ignorance of the political
situation. The pamphlet was dropped, but his advisers had a struggle
before they carried their point. “Sir Walter never recovered it,” says
Mr. Cadell. I have no heart to speak of his political apprehensions and
sufferings. What he feared was the overthrow of Society; what he endured
from popular insult and even violence is too familiarly known. Certain
excited and rude artisans had no more respect than Wilson for an old
friend, the glory of the Border. Scott never forgot the scene, it
haunted his dying hours. He acknowledged to a distinct stroke of
paralysis in April 1831, and Cadell and Ballantyne remonstrated against
the conclusion of _Count Robert of Paris_.
How amazing was the humour that supported his unconquerable courage! His
letters--for example one of October 31, to Lady Louisa Stuart, on
“Animal Magnetism,” show him in full force of intellect. He had an
attack in November, and Laidlaw, his amanuensis for _Count Robert of
Paris_, observed unmistakable signs of the end. He was bidden to drink
water only, and to abandon writing. So he notes, in a parody of Burns:--
Dour, dour, and eident was he,
Dour and eident, but and ben,
Dour against their barley water,
And eident on the Bramah pen.[9]
In July Scott began _Castle Dangerous_, and paid his last visit to the
tombs of the Douglases. The country people received him gladly,
following him in a procession. I must quote what Lockhart says about the
close of this day, spent beside the graves of that stern and haughty
race who had been, now the savers, now the betrayers, of their country.
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
From the painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.]
[Sidenote: AT THE DOUGLAS GRAVES]
“It was again a darkish, cloudy day, with some occasional mutterings of
distant thunder, and perhaps the state of the atmosphere told upon Sir
Walter’s nerves; but I had never before seen him so sensitive as he was
all the morning after this inspection of Douglas. As we drove over the
high tableland of Lesmahago he repeated I know not how many verses from
Winton, Barbour, and Blind Harry, with, I believe, almost every stanza
of Dunbar’s elegy on the deaths of the Makers (poets). It was now that I
saw him, such as he paints himself in one or two passages of his Diary,
but such as his companions in the meridian vigour of his life never saw
him--‘the rushing of a brook, or the sighing of the summer breeze,
bringing the tears into his eyes not unpleasantly.’ Bodily weakness laid
the delicacy of the organization bare, over which he had prided himself
in wearing a sort of half-stoical mask. High and exalted feelings,
indeed, he had never been able to keep concealed, but he had shrunk from
exhibiting to human eye the softer and gentler emotions which now
trembled to the surface. He strove against it even now, and presently
came back from the Lament of the Makers to his Douglases, and chanted,
rather than repeated, in a sort of deep and glowing, though not
distinct recitative, his first favourite among all the ballads--
“It was about the Lammas tide,
When husbandmen do win their hay,
That the doughty Douglas bownde him to ride
To England to drive a prey,
down to the closing stanzas, which again left him in tears--
“My wound is deep--I fain would sleep--
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me beneath the bracken-bush
That grows on yonder lily lee ...
This deed was done at the Otterburne,
About the dawning of the day.
Earl Douglas was buried by the bracken-bush,
And the Percy led captive away.”
[Sidenote: VOYAGE TO ITALY]
The new Whig Government put a ship of war at the service of their great
antagonist. He was to visit Italy, and Cadell kept the type of his two
last tales set up; they were revised and altered in Scott’s absence
abroad. One incident in _Count Robert of Paris_, an incident terribly
expressive of the author’s condition, was expunged. Sir Walter felt the
consolatory delusion that he had succeeded in his task, that his debts
were paid. The last autumn at Abbotsford was full of the charm of
sunset. Turner came, and painted Abbotsford on a tea tray, at a picnic.
Young Walter Scott came, a joy to his father’s eyes, “a handsomer fellow
never put foot into stirrup.” Wordsworth, too, was there, as his verses
on Yarrow testify, and his noble sonnet--
A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain.
On the voyage to Italy Scott still was writing, the _Journal_, letters,
the tale of _Il Bizarro_, the novel of _The Knights of Malta_; the
manuscript is still the old closely serried manuscript, but the
handwriting is wofully altered. I am informed that many passages are
full of the old spirit, but care has been taken that this work shall
never appear as a “literary curiosity.”
At Naples Scott heard of Goethe’s death. “At least he died at home. Let
us to Abbotsford!” The party, with Mr. Charles Scott, passed on to Rome.
At Lake Avernus, which, says Lockhart, is like a Highland loch, Scott
repeated--
We daurna go a’ milking
For Charlie and his men.
The classic scene reminded him of his dear hills. At Rome, with great
difficulty, he visited the tomb of James III. (so his epitaph proclaims
him,) and of Prince Charles and the Cardinal Duke of York; the latest
minstrel stood by the dust of the last of the royal line. The rest “can
hardly be told too briefly,” says Lockhart.
In passing through Germany, Scott wrote what his son Charles endorses as
“The last letter written by my dear father.” It is a brief note of
courtesy to Arthur Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher, regretting that
he was too unwell to receive Schopenhauer’s visit. The note is clearly
written and well expressed. It is in the Laing MSS. in Edinburgh
University Library. Once again Scott wrote, or tried to write, in the
packet boat crossing the Channel. Pen and ink were borrowed for him from
Mrs. Sherwood, the author of _The Fairchild Family_.
[Sidenote: THE END]
The sufferer reached London on June 13, 1832. On July 7 he took ship for
Leith. On July 11 he travelled by carriage to Abbotsford, waking from
his torpor as they drove down Gala water, past Torwoodlee. Arrived, his
dogs welcomed him, and “he alternately sobbed and smiled over them till
sleep oppressed him.” In his last days he was heard to murmur passages
from the Bible, the Litany, the Scottish metrical psalms, and the
_Stabat Mater Dolorosa_. It was on September 17 that he bade Lockhart
“be a good man, my dear, be virtuous, be religious, be a good man.” On
the twenty-first “he breathed his last in the presence of all his
children. It was a beautiful day--so warm that every window was wide
open--and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious
to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was
distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed
and closed his eyes.”
He sleeps, with Lockhart at his feet, where the sound of the Border
water fills the roofless aisles of the abbey of Dryburgh.
* * * * *
“Good-night, Sir Walter!”
Scott had given his life to pay his debts. Of these he actually repaid
about £70,000 between 1826 and 1832. The rest was wiped away by his
copyrights, through the spirited and judicious management of Mr. Cadell,
by the exertions of Lockhart as editor, and by the profits of Lockhart’s
_Life of Scott_. As to the later fortunes of Sir Walter’s family, but
one of his grandchildren survived; she married Mr. Hope Scott, the
eminent barrister, and was the mother of the Honourable Mrs.
Maxwell-Scott, an only child, _spes exigua et extrema_. This lady has
evinced the ancestral love of history in her works, _The Tragedy of
Fotheringhay_, in her essays, entitled _The Making of Abbotsford_, and
in her recent brief book on _Jeanne d’Arc_. One of her sons has done
honour to the houses of Maxwell and Scott by his distinguished services
in the war in South Africa. Thus the long descended name of the great
cadet of Harden has not vanished from the Border.
CONCLUSION
The character of Scott, and his place in literature, do not demand much
discussion after all that has already been said. He was born to be at
once a dweller in the realm of dreams, these dreams being mainly
“retrocognitive” of the historic past; and a man of action and of this
world; while he had a superabundance of joyous vitality, which
overflowed into humorous rhyme, even in his worst hours of cerebral
disease, and which inspired at once the central error of his life and
the resolute sacrifice of life to honour. These elements of character
were, all of them, carried to a pitch unusually high, while their
combination, and their union with the most kindly nature, are
unprecedented. This vitality, and this unfailing and universal sympathy,
made friends for Scott of all sentient creatures, from men, women and
children of every rank, to the pig which joined the pack of many dogs
and one cat, old Hinse, that scoured the woods with him, and to the
strangely sentimental hen which attached itself to Sir Walter. From
George IV.--who admired and never turned on Scott--to the hedgers and
ditchers on Abbotsford, Scott was endeared to all; in his ruin his old
servants refused to leave him, and the music master of his daughters
offered him the entire savings of his life. Yet there was no mawkish
good nature in Scott; when he bent the heavy arches of his brows the
Ettrick Shepherd himself felt that he must “gang warily.” No man was
served as he was by his household, and when he told his son that certain
conduct would entail his highest displeasure, the young man knew the
full meaning of the phrase.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Scott’s courtesy was spontaneous and universal--he spoke to all “as if
he was their blood relation”--except when he deliberately meant to be
discourteous, in one case, to Lord Holland, who had done no more than
his duty. He had come athwart the interests of Scott’s brother Thomas,
and Scott took up the feud in the ancient spirit of clanship. Yet he
lived to pronounce Lord Holland “the most agreeable man he ever knew. In
criticism, in poetry, he beats those whose whole study they have been.”
Thus Scott must have expiated an error produced by political heat as
well as by personal resentment; probably, like the Baron Bradwardine,
he sent “Letters of Slains,” or other atonement. Jeffrey says that “this
was the only example of rudeness in Scott that he ever witnessed in the
course of a lifelong familiarity.” In this lonely case, the person “cut
like an old pen” was a man of title and distinction.
It is hardly worth while to controvert the opinion that Scott was a
snob. In addressing persons of rank, however familiarly intimate he
might be with them, he used their “honour-giving names,” as Agamemnon
bids Menelaus do towards the princes of the Achaeans. This was the
customary rule of the period. Byron was indignant when Leigh Hunt
publicly addressed him as “My dear Byron,” and Byron was an extreme
Liberal, while Scott was a Tory. He paid the then recognized dues to
rank; such dues are no longer welcome to their recipients. He lived much
with people of the highest social position, but he could and did
entertain them at the same table with the Ettrick Shepherd, and with
guests known to him of old when a schoolboy or as a lawyer’s apprentice.
He was observed to pay great deference to a gentleman without any
apparent distinction, because he descended from a knight who fought by
the side of Wallace.
In all this his conduct, as in everything else, was dictated by his
reverence for the past. That reverence for things old, for what had once
been, ideally at least, an ordered system of society, was the cause of
Scott’s Toryism, increased by his patriotism during the struggle with
Bonaparte. The ideas and sympathies which made him a Tory, made him also
an opponent of the system which turned the Highlands into sheep farms
and deer forests, by the expulsion of the clansmen. His opinions on this
head are expressed in the Introduction to _The Legend of Montrose_.
Again, the feudal ideas at the root of his Toryism made him the most
attentive of all landlords to the wellbeing of every soul on his
estates. In bad times he found the wisest and most economic way of
providing them with employment at once honourable and remunerative, and
he taught the Duke of Buccleuch to follow his example on a great scale.
He felt pain and embarrassment in face of the gratitude of his poor
cotters for a holiday feast and holiday presents: why, he asked himself,
should he have more than they? His house was as a great hearth whence
radiated light and comfort on the humblest within his radius. Before Mr.
Ruskin he endeavoured to bring the happiness of art into the region of
the crafts.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
“The most of the articles from London were only models for the use of
two or three neat-handed carpenters whom he had discovered in the
villages near him; and he watched and directed their operations as
carefully as a George Bullock could have done; and the results were such
as even Bullock might have admired. The great table in the library, for
example (a most complex and beautiful one), was done entirely in the
room where it now stands, by Joseph Shillinglaw of Darnick--the Sheriff
planning and studying every turn as zealously as ever an old lady
pondered the development of an embroidered cushion. The hangings and
curtains, too, were chiefly the work of a little hunchbacked tailor, by
name _William_ Goodfellow (save at Abbotsford, where he answered to
_Robin_), who occupied a cottage on Scott’s farm of the Broomielees; one
of the race who creep from homestead to homestead, welcomed wherever
they appear by housewife and handmaiden, the great gossips and newsmen
of the parish--in Scottish nomenclature _cardooers_. Proudly and
earnestly did all these vassals toil in his service; and I think it was
one of them that, when some stranger asked a question about his personal
demeanour, answered in words already quoted ‘Sir Walter speaks to every
man as if they were blood relations.’ Not long after he had completed
his work at Abbotsford little Goodfellow fell sick, and as his cabin was
near Chiefswood, I had many opportunities of observing the Sheriff’s
kind attention to him in his affliction. I can never forget 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 their 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.”
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Of Scott’s great charity, which lay in giving affection as well as
material aid, examples have been displayed in his latest years. His
charity did but begin with these gifts; he was brotherly in all human
intercourse. The slightest notoriety brings bores around a man:
letter-writing bores, bores who want information accessible in any
encyclopaedia; bores who give voluminous undesired information; bores
who ask advice, bores who solicit an interview--countless are the
tribes of these thieves of time. At the celebrity of Scott they all
flew, like sea-fowls against a beacon above the midnight sea, and he
“with a frolic welcome took” their attentions. They “bestowed all their
tediousness on him,” and he accepted it, suffering them gladly. He
answered their ceaseless letters (as from a boy asking him to contribute
to _The Giggleswick School Magazine_!), he replied to them with thought,
care, and courtesy; he considered their worthless manuscripts, paying
£10 in postage for two MSS. of _The Cherokee Lovers: A Tragedy_, by a
young American lady. “I might at least have asked him to dinner,” he
murmured, when a bore of the first head had at last taken his leave.
This is indeed charity which endures all things, making itself subject
to the needs of all men.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Sir Walter had everything of the saint except (what is indispensable)
the psychology of the saint. He was naturally good, born to be so. “Are
all Tories born bad?” said a little boy of a Whig family. “They are born
bad, and they make themselves worse,” replied his lady mother. Scott was
born good, and, by controlling his natural temper, and by reflection, he
made himself better. But, though sincerely religious and, we know, a
prayerful man, he was no saint, but a man of this world. He was not
haunted, as a saint must be, by the desire of ideal perfection. It is
not certain whether he was to be reckoned of the Presbyterian or
Prelatist form of belief. “Bishops, I care not for them,” he might have
said, like the great Montrose on his dying day. But he did prefer the
Liturgy of the Church of England to the “conceived prayers” of the
Scottish pulpit, and read the service on Sundays to his family, when far
from a kirk at Ashestiel, and to whomsoever of his neighbours cared to
come and listen. He was married in an English church; the burial service
of that Church was read at his funeral. I am informed that he was at one
time an Elder of the Kirk at Duddingstone, which is partly of Norman
architecture, but Lockhart says that, in later life, he adhered to the
Church of the Cavaliers. Yet he recognized a great genius in Dr.
Chalmers; there was no bigotry in his Episcopal tendencies; as a matter
of taste he preferred the Anglican manner of conducting public worship.
He was on the best terms with many ministers; the only profession of
whose followers he speaks with a certain lack of sympathy was the
profession of school-mastering. In every dominie he believed that there
lay “a vein of absurdity,” and on one occasion he reproves himself for
thinking that he had met an exception to the rule. One of his own
schoolmasters once knocked him down, in boyhood, and apologized by
saying (as if he had driven into the party in front of him at golf),
that he “did not know he could hit so hard.” This apology seldom mends
matters!
We all have our foibles. That of Scott was the effort to live in an
idealized past. He knew the points at which his reason crossed his
judgment. The fairest of historians, he would not write a biography of
Queen Mary “because his opinion was contrary to his feeling.” “She may
have been criminal,” he says, in _The Tales of a Grandfather_, telling
the story as fairly as may be, within his space. Lockhart observes that
he often speaks of George IV (he must mean George III) as “_de jure_
King,” on the death of the Cardinal Duke of York. “Yet who could have
known better than he that whatever rights the exiled males of the Stuart
line ever possessed must have remained entire with their female
descendants?” Had Scott lived in his father’s time, I misdoubt that he
would have worn the black cockade, not the white, for, except in his
expenditure, he always had a saving grain of commonsense. Scott was a
great and strong man as any of his knights, but the nature which gave
him strength made him a poet who “lived in fantasy.” He tried to make
his dreams real, and he forgot realities. Any ideal set before him gave
him pleasure; he certainly and confessedly took a stern delight in the
ideal of working off his debts with his own hand. His earlier years of
grinding task work were not, as such, unhappy. Sir Walter had, in fact,
the most fortunate kind of genius--a genius for happiness, which cannot
exist without making life more joyous for all within the radius of its
influence.
The Scots are, according to old proverbs, a jealous people. The race has
no two sons more opposite in their ideals than Walter Scott and John
Knox. Yet they had this virtue in common, that neither in the preacher
nor the poet does analysis detect a grain of professional jealousy.
Scott could, indeed, see the blemishes on the poetry of Southey; nor
could the faults of Byron escape him. But in other contemporary poets
whom he mentions, he seems to behold nothing but their excellences,
which he often exaggerates. If Byron “beat him,” as he said, he seems
seriously to have believed that the triumph was deserved. This is,
surely, unexampled generosity.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
“Scott’s chivalrous imagination threw a certain air of courteous
gallantry into his relations with his daughters.... Though there could
not be a gentler mother than Lady Scott, ... on those delicate
occasions most interesting to young ladies, they always made their
father the first confidant.” In his works of imagination, the relation
of father and daughter is always touched with peculiar grace and
tenderness. His dressing-room was “a little chapel of the Lares” fitted
up with relics of his father and mother. In every relation of life and
literature his motto was “_à léal souvenir_”; he kept the pious trust of
all things old that were of good report, and handed on the sacred
bequest to all who follow him. As to his place in literature, we leave
it to the judgment of the world and of the unborn. They “cannot say but
he has had the crown.”
Tides of criticism come and go; they may leave the fame and name of
Walter Scott deserted, like the cairn of a forgotten warrior forsaken by
a receding sea, or they may fill the space with the diapason of their
waves. We cannot prophesy. But one sound will not cease, if men dead
remember, the carol of the lark that sang above Scott’s grave at the
funeral of the dearest of his daughters. That song of praise for such
happiness as--
sceptred king not laurelled conqueror
can give, has followed “this wondrous potentate” from three generations
who have warmed their hands at the hearth of his genius, who have drunk
of his enchanted cup, and eaten of his fairy bread, and been happy
through his gift.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] My kinsman, the late Professor Sellar, went to the Edinburgh
Academy at seven, and was _Dux_, as the head boy used to be called, at
fourteen.
[2] Edward Fitzgerald (_Omar Kháyyám_) says that Lockhart introduced
a false quantity. In fact, James Ballantyne was guilty. cf. p. 204.
_infra._
[3] I noticed Lamb’s reply, declining the invitation, in the MSS. at
Abbotsford.
[4] Έφῆσιν άτασθαλίῃσιν ύπὲρ μόρον ᾀλγὲ ἒχουσιν
[5] _Life of Lockhart_, vol. ii. pp. 126-172.
[6] Thus, at least, I understand the point. Cf. Lockhart iv. pp.
142-144.
[7] _Life of Lockhart_, ii. pp. 146-150.
[8] Miss Ferrier published a painful narrative of these occurrences.
[9] _Eident_, of course, means “eager.”
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