| Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) On Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), 1838 |
|
For the rest, we will call it a most valuable tendency this; indispensable
to mankind. Without it, where were star-and-garter, and significance of
rank; where were all ambition, money-getting, respectability of gig or
no gig; and, in a word, the main impetus by which society moves, the main
force by which it hangs together? A tendency, we say, of manifold results;
of manifold origin, not ridiculous only, but sublime; - which some incline
to deduce from the mere gregarious purblind nature of man, prompting him
to run, 'as dim-eyed animals do, towards any glittering object, were it
but a scoured tankard, and mistake it for a solar luminary,' or even 'sheeplike,
to run and crowd because many have already run'! It is indeed curious
to consider how men do make the gods that themselves worship. For the
most famed man, round whom all the world rapturously huzzahs and venerates,
as if his like were not, is the same man whom all the world was wont to
jootle into the kennels; not a changed man, but in every fibre of him
the same man. Foolish world, what went ye out to see? A tankard scoured
bright: and do there not lie, of the self-same pewter, whole barrowfuls
of tankards, though by worse fortune all still in the dim state? And yet, at bottom, it is not merely our gregarious sheeplike quality,
but something better, and indeed best: which has been called 'the perpetual
fact of hero-worship'; our inborn sincere love of great men! Not the gilt
farthing, for its own sake, do even fools covet; but the gold guinea which
they mistake it for. Veneration of great men is perennial in the nature
of man; this, in all times, especially in these, is one of the blessedest
facts predicable of him. In all times, even in these seemingly so disobedient
times, 'it remains a blessed fact, so cunningly has Nature ordered it,
that whatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but obey. Show the dullest
clodpole, show the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself
is actually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and
worship.' So it has been written; and may be cited and repeated till known
to all. Understand it well, this of 'hero-worship' was the primary creed,
and has intrinsically been the secondary and ternary, and will be the
ultimate and final creed of mankind; indestructible, changing in shape,
but in essence unchangeable; whereon polities, religions, loyalties, and
all highest human interests have been and can be built, as on a rock that
will endure while man endures. Such is hero-worship; so much lies in that
our inborn sincere love of great men! In favour of which unspeakable benefits
of the reality, what can we do but cheerfully pardon the multiplex ineptitudes
of the semblance; cheerfully wish even lion-soirees, with labels for their
lions or without that improvement, all manner of prosperity? Let hero-worship
flourish, say we; and the more and more assiduous chase after gilt farthings
while guineas are not yet forthcoming. Herein, at lowest, is proof that
guineas exist, that they are believed to exist, and valued. Find great
men, if you can; if you cannot, still quit not the search; in defect of
great men, let there be noted men, in such number, to such degree of intensity
as the public appetite can tolerate. Whether Sir Walter Scott was a great man, is still a question with some;
but there can be no question with any one that he was a most noted and
even notable man. In this generation there was no literary man with such
a popularity in any country; there have only been a few with such, taking-in
all generations and all countries. Nay, it is farther to be admitted that
Sir Walter Scott's popularity was of a select sort rather; not a popularity
of the populace. His admirers were at one time almost all the intelligent
of civilised countries; and to the last included, and do still include,
a great portion of that sort. Such fortune he had, and has continued to
maintain for a space of some twenty or thirty years. So long the observed
of all observers: a great man or only a considerable man; here surely,
if ever, is a singular circumstanced, is a 'distinguished' man! In regard
to whom, therefore, the 'instinctive tendency' on other men's part cannot
be wanting. Let men look, where the world has already so long looked.
And now, while the new, earnestly expected Life 'by his son-in-law and
literary executor' again summons the whole world's attention round him,
probably for the last time it will ever be so summoned; and men are in
some sort taking leave of a notability, and about to go their way, and
commit him to his fortune on the flood of things, - why should not this
Periodical Publication likewise publish its thought about him? Readers
of miscellaneous aspect, of unknown quantity and quality, are waiting
to hear it done. With small inward vocation, but cheerfully obedient to
destiny and necessity, the present reviewer will follow a multitude: to
do evil or tw do no evil, will depend not on the multitude but on himself.
One thing he did decidedly wish; at least to wait till the Work were finished:
for the six promised Volumes, as the world knows, have flowed over into
a Seventh, which will not for some weeks yet see the light. But the editorial
powers, wearied with waiting, have become peremptory; and declare that,
finished or not finished, they will have their hands washed of it at this
opening of the year. Perhaps it is best. The physiognomy of Scott will
not be much altered for us by that Seventh Volume; the prior Six have
altered it but little; - as, indeed, a man who has written some two hundred
volumes of his own, and lived for thirty years amid the universal speech
of friends, must have already left some likeness of himself. Be it as
the peremptory editorial powers require. First, therefore, a word on the Life itself. Mr. Lockhart's known powers
justify strict requisition in his case. Our verdict in general would be,
that he has accomplished the work he schemed for himself in a creditable
workmanlike manner. It is true, his notion of what the work was, does
not seem to have been very elevated. To picture-forth the life of Scott
according to any rules of art or composition, so that a reader, on adequately
examining it, might say to himself, "There is Scott, there is the
physiognomy and meaning of Scott's appearance and transit on this earth;
such was he by nature, so did the world act on him, so he on the world,
with such result and significance for himself and us": this was by
no manner of means Mr. Lockhart's plan. A plan which, it is rashly said,
should preside over every biography! It might have been fulfilled with
all degrees of perfection, from that of the Odyssey down to Thomas Ellwood
or lower. For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a
biography, the life of a man: also, it may be said, there is no life of
a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or
unrhymed. It is a plan one would prefer, did it otherwise suit; which
it does not, in these days. Seven volumes sell so much dearer than one;
are so much easier to write than one. The Odyssey, for instance, what
were the value of the Odyssey sold per sheet? One paper of Pickwick; or
say, the inconsiderable fraction of one. This, in commercial algebra,
were the equation: Odyssey equal to Pickwick divided by an unknown integer. There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature, that of paying
literary men by the quantity they do not write. Nay, in sober truth, is
not this actually the rule in all writing; and, moreover, in all conduct
and acting? Not what stands above ground, but what lies unseen under it,
as the root and subterrene element it sprang from and emblemed forth,
determines the value. Under all speech that is good for anything there
lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity: speech is
shallow as Time. Paradoxical does it seem? Woe for the age, woe for the
man, quack-ridden, bespeeched, bespouted, blown about like barren Sahara,
to whom this world-old truth were altogether strange! - Such we say is
the rule, acted on or not, recognised or not; and he who departs from
it, what can he do but spread himself into breadth and length, into superficiality
and saleability; and, except as filigree, become comparatively useless?
One thinks, Had but the hogshead of thin wash, which sours in a week ready
for the kennels, been distilled, been concentrated! Our dear Fenimore
Cooper, whom we started with, might, in that way, have given us one Natty
Leatherstocking, one melodious synopsis of Man and Nature in the West
(for it lay in him to do it), almost as a Saint-Pierre did for the Islands
of the East; and the hundred Incoherences, cobbled hastily together by
order of Colburn and Company, had slumbered in Chaos, as all incoherences
ought if possible to do. Verily this same genius of diffuse-writing, of
diffuse-acting, is a Moloch; and souls pass through the fire to him, more
than enough. Surely, if ever discovery was valuable and needful, it were
that above indicated, of paying by the work not visibly done! Which needful
discovery we will give the whole projecting, railwaying, knowledge-diffusing,
march-of-intellect and otherwise promotive and locomotive societies in
the Old and New World, any required length of centuries to make. Once
made, such discovery once made, we too will fling cap into the air, and
shout, "Io Paean! the Devil is conquered"; - and, in the mean
while, study to think it nothing miraculous that seven biographical volumes
are given where one had been better; and that several other things happen,
very much as they from of old were known to do, and are like to continue
doing. Mr. Lockhart's aim, we take it, was not that of producing any such highflown
work of art as we hint at: or indeed to do much other than to print, intelligently
bound together by order of time, and by some requisite intercalary exposition,
all such letters, documents and notices about Scott as he found lying
suitable, and as it seemed likely the world would undertake to read. His
Work, accordingly, is not so much a composition, as what we may call a
compilation well done. Neither is this a task of no difficulty; this too
is a task that may be performed with extremely various degrees of talent:
from the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, for instance, up to this
Life of Scott, there is a wide range indeed! Let us take the Seven Volumes,
and be thankful that they are genuine in their kind. Nay, as to that of
their being seven and not one, it is right to say that the public so required
it. To have done other, would have shown little policy in an author. Had
Mr. Lockhart laboriously compressed himself, and instead of well-done
compilation, brought out the well-done composition, in one volume instead
of seven, which not many men in England are better qualified to do, there
can be no doubt but his readers for the time had been immeasurably fewer.
If the praise of magnanimity be denied him, that of prudence must be conceded,
which perhaps he values more. The truth is, the work, done in this manner too, was good to have: Scott's
Biography, if uncomposed, lies printed and indestructible here, in the
elementary state, and can at any time be composed, if necessary, by whosoever
has a call to that. As it is, as it was meant to be, we repeat, the work
is vigorously done. Sagacity, decision, candour, diligence, good manners,
good sense: these qualities are throughout observable. The dates, calculations,
statements, we suppose to be all accurate; much laborious inquiry, some
of it impossible for another man, has been gone into, the results of which
are imparted with due brevity. Scott's letters, not interesting generally,
yet never absolutely without interest, are copiously given; copiously,
but with selection; the answers to them still more select. Narrative,
delineation, and at length personal reminiscences, occasionally of much
merit, of a certain rough force, sincerity and picturesqueness, duly intervene.
The scattered members of Scott's Life do lie here, and could be disentangled.
In a word, this compilation is the work of a manful, clear-seeing, conclusive
man, and has been executed with the faculty and combination of faculties
the public had a right to expect from the name attached to it. One thing we hear greatly blamed in Mr. Lockhart: that he has been too
communicative, indiscreet, and has recorded much that ought to have lain
suppressed. Persons are mentioned, and circumstances, not always of an
ornamental sort. It would appear there is far less reticence than was
looked for! Various persons, name and surname, have 'received pain': nay,
the very Hero of the Biography is rendered unheroic; unornamental facts
of him, and of those he had to do with, being set forth in plain English:
hence 'personality,' 'indiscretion,' or worse, 'sanctities of private
life,' etc., etc. How delicate, decent is English Biography, bless its
mealy mouth! A Damocles' sword of Respectability hangs forever over the
poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general),
and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said 'there
are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the
nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day.' The English biographer
has long felt that if in writing his Man's Biography, he wrote down anything
that could by possibility offend any man, he had written wrong. The plain
consequence was, that, properly speaking, no biography whatever could
be produced. The poor biographer, having the fear not of God before his
eyes, was obliged to retire as it were into vacuum; and write in the most
melancholy, straitened manner, with only vacuum for a result. Vain that
he wrote, and that we kept reading volume on volume: there was no biography,
but some vague ghost of a biography, white, stainless; without feature
or substance; vacuum, as we say, and wind and shadow, - which indeed the
material of it was. No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to
elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. His life
is a battle, in so far as it is an entity at all. The very oyster, we
suppose, comes in collision with oysters: undoubtedly enough it does come
in collision with Necessity and Difficulty; and helps itself through,
not as a perfect ideal oyster, but as an imperfect real one. Some kind
of remorse must be known to the oyster; certain hatreds, certain pusillanimities.
But as for man, his conflict is continual with the spirit of contradiction,
that is without and within; with the evil spirit (or call it, with the
weak, most necessitous, pitiable spirit), that is in others and in himself.
His walk, like all walking (say the mechanicians), is a series of falls.
To paint man's life is to represent these things. Let them be represented,
fitly, with dignity and measure; but above all, let them be represented.
No tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire!
No ghost of a biography, let the Damocles' sword of Respectability (which,
after all, is but a pasteboard one) threaten as it will. One hopes that
the public taste is much mended in this matter; that vacuum-biographies,
with a good many other vacuities related to them, are withdrawn or withdrawing
into vacuum. Probably it was Mr. Lockhart's feeling of what the great
public would approve, that led him, open-eyed, into this offence against
the small criticising public: we joyfully accept the omen. Perhaps then, of all the praises copiously bestowed on his Work, there
is none in reality so creditable to him as this same censure, which has
also been pretty copious. It is a censure better than a good many praises.
He is found guilty of having said this and that, calculated not to be
entirely pleasant to this man and that; in other words, calculated to
give him and the thing he worked in a living set of features, not leave
him vague, in the white beatified-ghost condition. Several men, as we
hear, cry out, "See, there is something written not entirely pleasant
to me!" Good friend, it is pity; but who can help it? They that will
crowd about bonfires may, sometimes very fairly, get their beards singed;
it is the price they pay for such illumination; natural twilight is safe
and free to all. For our part, we hope all manner of biographies that
are written in England will henceforth be written so. If it is that they
be written otherwise, then it is still fitter that they be not written
at all: to produce not things but ghosts of things can never be the duty
of man. The biographer has this problem set before him: to delineate a likeness
of the earthly pilgrimage of a man. He will compute well what profit is
in it, and what disprofit; under which latter head this of offending any
of his fellow-creatures will surely not be forgotten. Nay, this may so
swell the disprofit side of his account, that many an enterprise of biography,
otherwise promising, shall require to be renounced. But once taken up,
the rule before all rules is to do it, not to do the ghost of it. In speaking
of the man and men he has to deal with, he will of course keep all his
charities about him; but all his eyes open. Far be it from him to set
down aught untrue; nay, not to abstain from, and leave in oblivion much
that is true. But having found a thing or things essential for his subject,
and well computed the for and against, he will in very deed set down such
thing or things, nothing doubting, having, we may say, the fear of God
before his eyes, and no other fear whatever. Censure the biographer's
prudence; dissent from the computation he made, or agree with it; be all
malice of his, be all falsehood, nay, be all offensive avoidable inaccuracy,
condemned and consumed; but know that by this plan only, executed as was
possible, could the biographer hope to make a biography; and blame him
not that he did what it had been the worst fault not to do. As to the accuracy or error of these statements about the Ballantynes
and other persons aggrieved, which are questions much mooted at present
in some places, we know nothing at all. If they are inaccurate, let them
be corrected; if the inaccuracy was avoidable, let the author bear rebuke
and punishment for it. We can only say, these things carry no look of
inaccuracy on the face of them; neither is anywhere the smallest trace
of ill-will or unjust feeling discernible. Decidedly the probabilities
are, and till better evidence arise, the fair conclusion is, that this
matter stands very much as it ought to do. Let the clatter of censure,
therefore, propagate itself as far as it can. For Mr. Lockhart it virtually
amounts to this very considerable praise, that, standing full in the face
of the public, he has set at naught, and been among the first to do it,
a public piece of cant; one of the commonest we have, and closely allied
to many others of the fellest sort, as smooth as it looks. The other censure, of Scott being made unheroic, springs from the same
stem; and is, perhaps, a still more wonderful flower of it. Your true
hero must have no features, but be white, stainless, an impersonal ghost-hero!
But connected with this, there is a hypothesis now current, due probably
to some man of name, for its own force would not carry it far: That Mr.
Lockhart at heart has a dislike to Scott, and has done his best in an
underhand treacherous manner to dishero him! Such hypothesis is actually
current: he that has ears may hear it now and then. On which astonishing
hypothesis, if a word must be said, it can only be an apology for silence,
- "That there are things at which one stands struck silent, as at
first sight of the Infinite." For if Mr. Lockhart is fairly chargeable
with any radical defect, if on any side his insight entirely fails him,
it seems even to be in this: that Scott is altogether lovely to him; that
Scott's greatness spreads out for him on all hands beyond reach of eye;
that his very faults become beautiful, his vulgar worldlinesses are solid
prudences, proprieties; and of his worth there is no measure. Does not
the patient Biographer dwell on his Abbots, Pirates, and hasty theatrical
scene-paintings; affectionately analysing them, as if they were Raphael-pictures,
time-defying Hamlets, Othellos? The Novel-manufactory, with its 15,000l.
a-year, is sacred to him as creation of a genius, which carries the noble
victor up to Heaven. Scott is to Lockhart the unparalleled of the time;
an object spreading-out before him like a sea without shore. Of that astonishing
hypothesis, let expressive silence be the only answer. And so in sum, with regard to Lockhart's Life of Scott, readers that
believe in us shall read it with the feeling that a man of talent, decision
and insight wrote it; wrote it in seven volumes, not in one, because the
public would pay for it better in that state; but wrote it with courage,
with frankness, sincerity; on the whole, in a very readable, recommendable
manner, as things go. Whosoever needs it can purchase it, or purchase
the loan of it, with assurance more than usual that he has ware for his
money. And now enough of the written Life; we will glance a little at
the man and his acted life. Into the question whether Scott was a great man or not, we do not propose
to enter deeply. It is, as too usual, a question about words. There can
be no doubt but many men have been named and printed great who were vastly
smaller than he: as little doubt moreover that of the specially good,
a very large portion, according to any genuine standard of man's worth,
were worthless in comparison to him. He for whom Scott is great may most
innocently name him so; may with advantage admire his great qualities,
and ought with sincere heart to emulate them. At the same time, it is
good that there be a certain degree of precision in our epithets. It is
good to understand, for one thing, that no popularity, and open-mouthed
wonder of all the world, continued even for a long series of years, can
make a man great. Such popularity is a remarkable fortune; indicates a
great adaptation of the man to his element of circumstances; but may or
may not indicate anything great in the man. To our imagination, as above
hinted, there is a certain apotheosis in it; but in the reality no apotheosis
at all. Popularity is as a blaze of illumination, or alas, of conflagration,
kindled round a man; showing what is in him; not putting the smallest
item more into him; often abstracting much from him; conflagrating the
poor man himself into ashes and caput mortuum! And then, by the nature
of it, such popularity is transient; your 'series of years,' quite unexpectedly,
sometimes almost all on a sudden, terminates! For the stupidity of men,
especially of men congregated in masses round any object, is extreme.
What illuminations and conflagrations have kindled themselves, as if new
heavenly suns had risen, which proved only to be tar-barrels and terrestrial
locks of straw! Profane Princesses cried out, "One God, one Farinelli!"
- and whither now have they and Farinelli danced? In Literature too there have been seen popularities greater even than
Scott's, and nothing perennial in the interior of them. Lope de Vega,
whom all the world swore by, and made a proverb of; who could make an
acceptable five-act tragedy in almost as many hours; the greatest of all
popularities past or present, and perhaps one of the greatest men that
ever ranked among popularities. Lope himself, so radiant, far-shining,
has not proved to be a sun or star of the firmament; but is as good as
lost and gone out; or plays at best in the eyes of some few as a vague
aurora-borealis, and brilliant ineffectuality. The great man of Spain
sat obscure at the time, all dark and poor, a maimed soldier; writing
his Don Quixote in prison. And Lope's fate withal was sad, his popularity
perhaps a curse to him; for in this man there was something ethereal too,
a divine particle traceable in few other popular men; and such far-shining
diffusion of himself, though all the world swore by it, would do nothing
for the true life of him even while he lived: he had to creep into a convent,
into a monk's cowl, and learn, with infinite sorrow, that his blessedness
had lain elsewhere; that when a man's life feels itself to be sick and
an error, no voting of bystanders can make it well and a truth again. Or coming down to our own times, was not August Kotzebue popular? Kotzebue,
not so many years since, saw himself, if rumour and hand-clapping could
be credited, the greatest man going; saw visibly his Thoughts, dressed-out
in plush and pasteboard, permeating and perambulating civilised Europe;
the most iron visages weeping with him, in all theatres from Cadiz to
Kamtchatka; his own 'astonishing genius' meanwhile producing two tragedies
or so per month: he, on the whole, blazed high enough: he too has gone
out into Night and Orcus, and already is not. We will omit this of popularity
altogether; and account it as making simply nothing towards Scott's greatness
or non-greatness, as an accident, not a quality. Shorn of this falsifying nimbus, and reduced to his own natural dimensions,
there remains the reality, Walter Scott, and what we can find in him:
to be accounted great, or not great, according to the dialects of men.
Friends to precision of epithet will probably deny his title to the name
'great.' It seems to us there goes other stuff to the making of great
men than can be detected here. One knows not what idea worthy of the name
of great what purpose, instinct or tendency, that could be called great,
Scott ever was inspired with His life was worldly; his ambitions were
worldly. There is nothing spiritual in him; all is economical, material,
of the earth earthy. A love of picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous and
graceful things; a genuine love, yet not more genuine than has dwelt in
hundreds of men named minor poets: this is the highest quality to be discerned
in him. His power of representing these things, too, his poetic power, like his
moral power, was a genius in extenso, as we may say, not in intenso. In
action, in speculation, broad as he was, he rose nowhere high; productive
without measure as to quantity, in quality he for the most part transcended
but a little way the region of commonplace. It has been said, 'no man
has written as many volumes with so few sentences that can be quoted.'
Winged words were not his vocation; nothing urged him that way: the great
Mystery of Existence was not great to him; did not drive him into rocky
solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish.
He had nothing of the martyr; into no 'dark region to slay monsters for
us,' did he, either led or driven, venture down: his conquests were for
his own behoof mainly, conquests over common market-labour, and reckonable
in good metallic coin of the realm. The thing he had faith in, except
power, power of what sort soever, and even of the rudest sort, would be
difficult to point out. One sees not that he believed in anything; nay,
he did not even disbelieve; but quietly acquiesced, and made himself at
home in a world of conventionalities; the false, the semi-false and the
true were alike true in this, that they were there, and had power in their
hands more or less. It was well to feel so; and yet not well! We find
it written, 'Woe to them that are at ease in Zion'; but surely it is a
double woe to them that are at ease in Babel, in Domdaniel. On the other
hand, he wrote many volumes, amusing many thousands of men. Shall we call
this great? It seems to us there dwells and struggles another sort of
spirit in the inward parts of great men! Brother Ringletub, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo man-god,
who had set up for godhood lately, What he meant to do, then, with the
sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answered, He had fire enough
in his belly to burn-up all the sins in the world. Ram-Dass was right
so far, and had a spice of sense in him; for surely it is the test of
every divine man this same, and without it he is not divine or great,
- that he have fire in him to burn-up somewhat of the sins of the world,
of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there? Far be
it from us to say that a great man must needs, with benevolence prepense,
become a 'friend of humanity'; nay, that such professional self-conscious
friends of humanity are not the fatalest kind of persons to be met with
in our day. All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and nought.
And yet a great man without such fire in him, burning dim or developed,
as a divine behest in his heart of hearts, never resting till it be fulfilled,
were a solecism in Nature. A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists
speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon himself, not the superfinest of great men, and ballasted sufficiently
with prudences and egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea
to start with: the idea that Democracy was the Cause of Man, the right
and infinite Cause. Accordingly he made himself 'the armed Soldier of
Democracy'; and did vindicate it in a rather great manner. Nay, to the
very last, he had a kind of idea; that, namely, of 'La carriere ouverte
aux talens, The tools to him that can handle them'; really one of the
best ideas yet promulgated on that matter, or rather the one true central
idea, towards which all the others, if they tend anywhither, must tend.
Unhappily it was in the military province only that Napoleon could realise
this idea of his, being forced to fight for himself the while: before
he got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head
by much victory grew light (no head can stand more than its quantity);
and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack,
and was hurled out; leaving his idea to be realised; in the civil province
of things, by others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children
of the idea; or, in Ram-Dass' phraseology, furnished with fire to burn-up
the miseries of men. Conscious or unconscious, latent or unfolded, there
is small vestige of any such fire being extant in the inner-man of Scott. Yet on the other hand, the surliest critic must allow that Scott was
a genuine man, which itself is a great matter. No affectation, fantasticality
or distortion dwelt in him; no shadow of cant. Nay, withal, was he not
a right brave and strong man, according to his kind? What a load of toil,
what a measure of felicity, he quietly bore along with him; with what
quiet strength he both worked on this earth, and enjoyed in it; invincible
to evil fortune and to good! A most composed, invincible man; in difficulty
and distress knowing no discouragement, Samson-like carrying off on his
strong Samson-shoulders the gates that would imprison him: in danger and
menace laughing at the whisper of fear. And then, with such a sunny current
of true humour and humanity, a free joyful sympathy with so many things;
what of fire he had all lying so beautifully latent, as radical latent
heat, as fruitful internal warmth of life; a most robust, healthy man!
The truth is, our best definition of Scott were perhaps even this, that
he was, if no great man, then something much pleasanter to be, a robust,
thoroughly healthy and withal very prosperous and victorious man. An eminently
well-conditioned man, healthy in body, healthy in soul; we will call him
one of the healthiest of men. Neither is this a small matter: health is a great matter, both to the
possessor of it and to others. On the whole, that humorist in the Moral
Essay was not so far out, who determined on honouring health only; and
so instead of humbling himself to the high-born, to the rich and well-dressed,
insisted on doffing hat to the healthy: coroneted carriages with pale
faces in them passed by as failures, miserable and lamentable; trucks
with ruddy-cheeked strength dragging at them were greeted as successful
and venerable. For does not health mean harmony, the synonym of all that
is true, justly-ordered, good; is it not, in some sense, the net-total,
as shown by experiment, of whatever worth is in us? The healthy man is
the most meritorious product of Nature so far as he goes. A healthy body
is good; but a soul in right health, - it is the thing beyond all others
to be prayed for; the blessedest thing this earth receives of Heaven.
Without artificial medicament of philosophy, or tight-lacing of creeds
(always very questionable), the healthy soul discerns what is good, and
adheres to it, and retains it; discerns what is bad, and spontaneously
casts it off. An instinct from Nature herself, like that which guides
the wild animals of the forest to their food, shows him what he shall
do, what he shall abstain from. The false and foreign will not adhere
to him; cant and all fantastic diseased incrustations are impossible;
- as Walker the Original, in such eminence of health was he for his part,
could not, by much abstinence from soap-and-water, attain to a dirty face!
This thing thou canst work with and profit by, this thing is substantial
and worthy; that other thing thou canst not work with, it is trivial and
inapt: so speaks unerringly the inward monition of the man's whole nature.
No need of logic to prove the most argumentative absurdity absurd; as
Goethe says of himself, 'all this ran down from me like water from a man
in wax-cloth dress.' Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent,
sweetly cooperative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive
one! In the harmonious adjustment and play of all the faculties, the just
balance of oneself gives a just feeling towards all men and all things.
Glad light from within radiates outwards, and enlightens and embellishes.
Now all this can be predicated of Walter Scott, and of no British literary
man that we remember in these days, to any such extent, - if it be not
perhaps of one, the most opposite imaginable to Scott, but his equal in
this quality and what holds of it: William Cobbett! Nay, there are other
similarities, widely different as they two look; nor be the comparison
disparaging to Scott: for Cobbett also, as the pattern John Bull of his
century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities
shining through his thick skin, is a most brave phenomenon. So bounteous
was Nature to us; in the sickliest of recorded ages, when British Literature
lay all puking and sprawling in Werterism, Byronism, and other Sentimentalism
tearful or spasmodic (fruit of internal wind). Nature was kind enough
to send us two healthy Men, of whom she might still say, not without pride,
"These also were made in England; such limbs do I still make there!"
It is one of the cheerfulest sights, let the question of its greatness
be settled as you will. A healthy nature may or may not be great; but
there is no great nature that is not healthy. Or, on the whole, might we not say, Scott, in the new vesture of the
nineteenth century, was intrinsically very much the old fighting Borderer
of prior centuries; the kind of man Nature did of old make in that birthland
of his? In the saddle, with the foray-spear, he would have acquitted himself
as he did at the desk with his pen. One fancies how, in stout Beardie
of Harden's time, he could have played Beardie's part; and been the stalwart
buff-belted terrae filius he in this late time could only delight to draw.
The same stout self-help was in him; the same oak and triple brass round
his heart. He too could have fought at Redswire, cracking crowns with
the fiercest, if that had been the task; could have harried cattle in
Tynedale, repaying injury with compound interest; a right sufficient captain
of men. A man without qualms or fantasticalities; a hard-headed, sound-hearted
man, of joyous robust temper, looking to the main chance, and fighting
direct thitherward; valde stalwartus homo! - How much in that case had
slumbered in him, and passed away without sign! But indeed who knows how
much slumbers in many men? Perhaps our greatest poets are the mute Miltons;
the vocals are those whom by happy accident we lay hold of, one here,
one there, as it chances, and make vocal. It is even a question, whether,
had not want, discomfort and distress-warrants been busy at Stratford-on-Avon,
Shakespeare himself had not lived killing calves or combing wool! Had
the Edial Boarding-school turned out well, we had never heard of Samuel
Johnson; Samuel Johnson had been a fat schoolmaster and dogmatic gerundgrinder,
and never known that he was more. Nature is rich: those two eggs thou
art eating carelessly to breakfast, could they not have been hatched into
a pair of fowls, and have covered the whole world with poultry? But it was not harrying of cattle in Tynedale, or cracking of crowns
at Redswire, that this stout Border-chief was appointed to perform. Far
other work. To be the song-singer and pleasant tale-teller to Britain
and Europe, in the beginning of the artificial nineteenth century; here,
and not there, lay his business. Beardie of Harden would have found it
very amazing. How he shapes himself to this new element; how he helps
himself along in it, makes it to do for him, lives sound and victorious
in it, and leads over the marches such a spoil as all the cattle-droves
the Hardens ever took were poor in comparison to; this is the history
of the life and achievements of our Sir Walter Scott, Baronet; - whereat
we are now to glance for a little! It is a thing remarkable; a thing substantial;
of joyful, victorious sort; not unworthy to be glanced at. Withal, however,
a glance here and there will suffice. Our limits are narrow; the thing,
were it never so victorious, is not of the sublime sort, nor extremely
edifying; there is nothing in it to censure vehemently, nor love vehemently;
there is more to wonder at than admire; and the whole secret is not an
abstruse one. Till towards the age of thirty, Scott's life has nothing in it decisively
pointing towards Literature, or indeed towards distinction of any kind;
he is wedded, settled, and has gone through all his preliminary steps,
without symptom of renown as yet. It is the life of every other Edinburgh
youth of his station and time. Fortunate we must name it, in many ways.
Parents in easy or wealthy circumstances, yet unencumbered with the cares
and perversions of aristocracy; nothing eminent in place, in faculty or
culture, yet nothing deficient; all around is methodic regulation, prudence,
prosperity, kindheartedness; an element of warmth and light, of affection,
industry, and burgherly comfort, heightened into elegance; in which the
young heart can wholesomely grow. A vigorous health seems to have been
given by Nature; yet, as if Nature had said withal, "Let it be a
health to express itself by mind, not by body," a lameness is added
in childhood; the brave little boy, instead of romping and bickering,
must learn to think; or at lowest, what is a great matter, to sit still.
No rackets and trundling-hoops for this young Walter; but ballads, history-books
and a world of legendary stuff, which his mother and those near him are
copiously able to furnish. Disease, which is but superficial, and issues
in outward lameness, does not cloud the young existence; rather forwards
it towards the expansion it is fitted for. The miserable disease had been
one of the internal nobler parts, marring the general organisation; under
which no Walter Scott could have been forwarded, or with all his other
endowments could have been producible or possible. 'Nature gives healthy
children much; how much! Wise education is a wise unfolding of this ;
often it unfolds itself better of its own accord.' Add one other circumstance: the place where; namely, Presbyterian Scotland.
The influences of this are felt incessantly, they streamin at every pore.
'There is a country accent,' says La Rochefoucauld, 'not in speech only,
but in thought, conduct, character and manner of existing, which never
forsakes a man.' Scott, we believe, was all his days an Episcopalian Dissenter
in Scotland; but that makes little to the matter. Nobody who knows Scotland
and Scott can doubt but Presbyterianism too had a vast share in the forming
of him. A country where the entire people is, or even once has been, laid
hold of, filled to the heart with an infinite religious idea, has 'made
a step from which it cannot retrograde.' Thought, conscience, the sense
that man is denizen of a Universe, creature of an Eternity, has penetrated
to the remotest cottage, to the simplest heart. Beautiful and awful, the
feeling of a Heavenly Behest, of Duty God-commanded, over-canopies all
life. There is an inspiration in such a people: one may say in a more
special sense, 'the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.'
Honour to all the brave and true; everlasting honour to brave old Knox,
one of the truest of the true! That, in the moment while he and his cause,
amid civil broils, in convulsion and confusion, were still but struggling
for life, he sent the schoolmaster forth to all corners, and said, "Let
the people be taught"; this is but one, and indeed an inevitable
and comparatively inconsiderable item in his great message to men. His
message, in its true compass, was, "Let men know that they are men;
created by God, responsible to God; who work in any meanest moment of
time what will last throughout eternity." It is verily a great message.
Not ploughing and hammering machines, not patent-digesters (never so ornamental)
to digest the produce of these: no, in no wise; born slaves neither of
their fellow-men, nor of their own appetites; but men! This great message
Knox did deliver, with a man's voice and strength; and found a people
to believe him. Of such an achievement, we say, were it to be made once only, the results
are immense. Thought, in such a country, may change its form, but cannot
go out; the country has attained majority; thought, and a certain spiritual
manhood, ready for all work that man can do, endures there. It may take
many forms: the form of hard-fisted money-getting industry, as in the
vulgar Scotchman, in the vulgar New Englander; but as compact developed
force and alertness of faculty, it is still there; it may utter itself
one day as the colossal Scepticism of a Hume (beneficent this too though
painful, wrestling Titan-like through doubt and inquiry towards new belief);
and again, some better day, it may utter itself as the inspired Melody
of a Burns: in a word, it is there, and continues to manifest itself,
in the Voice and the Work of a Nation of hardy endeavouring considering
men, with whatever that may bear in it, or unfold from it. The Scotch
national character originates in many circumstances; first of all, in
the Saxon stuff there was to work on; but next, and beyond all else except
that, in the Presbyterian Gospel of John Knox. It seems a good national
character; and on some sides not so good. Let Scott thank John Knox, for
he owed him much, little as he dreamed of debt in that quarter! No Scotchman
of his time was more entirely Scotch than Walter Scott: the good and the
not so good, which all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him. Scott's childhood, school-days, college-days, are pleasant to read of,
though they differ not from those of others in his place and time. The
memory of him may probably enough last till this record of them become
far more curious than it now is. "So lived an Edinburgh Writer to
the Signet's son in the end of the eighteenth century," may some
future Scotch novelist say to himself in the end of the twenty-first!
The following little fragment of infancy is all we can extract. It is
from an Autobiography which he had begun, which one cannot but regret
he did not finish. Scott's best qualities never shone out more freely
than when he went upon anecdote and reminiscence. Such a master of narrative
and of himself could have done personal narrative well. Here, if anywhere,
his knowledge was complete, and all his humour and good-humour had free
scope: 'An odd incident is worth recording. It seems, my mother had sent a maid
to take charge of me, at this farm of Sandy-Knowe, that I might be no
inconvenience to the family. But the damsel sent on that important mission
had left her heart behind her, in the keeping of some wild fellow, it
is likely, who had done and said more to her than he was like to make
good. She became extremely desirous to return to Edinburgh; and, as my
mother made a point of her remaining where she was, she contracted a sort
of hatred at poor me, as the cause of her being detained at Sandy-Knowe.
This rose, I suppose, to a sort of delirious affection; for she confessed
to old Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, that she had carried me up to the
craigs under a strong temptation of the Devil to cut my throat with her
scissors, and bury me in the moss. Alison instantly took possession of
my person, and took care that her confidant should not be subject to any
farther temptation, at least so far as I was concerned. She was dismissed
of course, and I have heard afterwards became a lunatic. 'It is here, at Sandy-Knowe, in the residence of my paternal grandfather,
already mentioned, that I have the first consciousness of existence; and
I recollect distinctly that my situation and appearance were a little
whimsical. Among the odd remedies recurred to, to aid my lameness, some
one had recommended that so often as a sheep was killed for the use of
the family, I should be stripped, and swathed-up in the skin warm as it
was flayed from the carcass of the animal. In this Tartar-like habiliment
I well remember lying upon the floor of the little parlour in the farmhouse,
while my grandfather, a venerable old man with white hair, used every
excitement to make me try to crawl. I also distinctly remember the late
Sir George M'Dougal of Mackerstown, father of the present Sir Henry Hay
M'Dougal, joining in the attempt. He was, God knows how, a relation of
ours; and I still recollect him, in his old-fashioned military habit (he
had been Colonel of the Greys), with a small cocked-hat deeply laced,
an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, and a light-coloured coat, with milk-white
locks tied in a military fashion, kneeling on the ground before me, and
dragging his watch along the carpet to induce me to follow it. The benevolent
old soldier, and the infant wrapped in his sheepskin, would have afforded
an odd group to uninterested spectators. This must have happened about
my third year (1774), for Sir George M'Dougal and my grandfather both
died shortly after that period.'2
We will glance next into the 'Liddesdale Raids.' Scott has grown-up to
be a brisk-hearted jovial young man and Advocate: in vacation-time he
makes excursions to the Highlands, to the Border Cheviots and Northumberland;
rides free and far, on his stout galloway, through bog and brake, over
the dim moory Debatable Land, over Flodden and other fields and places,
where, though he yet knew it not, his work lay. No land, however dim and
moory, but either has had or will have its poet, and so become not unknown
in song. Liddesdale, which was once as prosaic as most dales, having now
attained illustration, let us glance thitherward: Liddesdale too is on
this ancient Earth of ours, under this eternal Sky; and gives and takes,
in the most incalculable manner, with the Universe at large! Scott's experiences
there are rather of the rustic Arcadian sort; the element of whisky not
wanting. We should premise that here and there a feature has, perhaps,
been aggravated for effect's sake: 'During seven successive years,' writes Mr. Lockhart (for the Autobiography
has long since left us), 'Scott made a raid, as he called it, into Liddesdale
with Mr. Shortreed, sheriff-substitute of Roxburgh, for his guide; exploring
every rivulet to its source, and every ruined peel from foundation to
battlement. At this time no wheeled carriage had ever been seen in the
district; - the first, indeed, was a gig, driven by Scott himself for
a part of his way, when on the last of these seven excursions. There was
no inn nor publichouse of any kind in the whole valley; the travellers
passed from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse, and again from
the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the rough and jolly welcome of
the homestead; gathering, wherever they went, songs and tunes, and occasionally
more tangible relics of antiquity, even such a "rowth of auld knicknackets"
as Burns ascribes to Captain Grose. To these rambles Scott owed much of
the materials of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and not less of
that intimate acquaintance with the living manners of these unsophisticated
regions, which constitutes the chief charm of one of the most charming
of his prose works. But how soon he had any definite object before him
in his researches seems very doubtful. "He was makin' himsell a'
the time," said Mr. Shortreed; "but he didna ken maybe what
he was about till years had passed: at first he thought o' little, I daresay,
but the queerness and the fun." '"In those days," says the Memorandum before me, "advocates
were not so plenty - at least about Liddesdale," and the worthy Sheriff-substitute
goes on to describe the sort of bustle, not unmixed with alarm, produced
at the first farmhouse they visited (Willie Elliot's at Millburnholm),
when the honest man was informed of the quality of one of his guests.
When they dismounted, accordingly, he received Mr. Scott with great ceremony,
and insisted upon himself leading his horse to the stable. Shortreed accompanied
Willie, however; and the latter, after taking a deliberate peep at Scott,
"out-by the edge of the door-cheek," whispered, "Weel,
Robin, I say, de'il hae me if I's be a bit feared for him now; he's just
a chield like ourselves, I think." Half-a-dozen dogs of all degrees
had already gathered round "the advocate," and his way of returning
their compliments had set Willie Elliot at once at his ease. 'According to Mr. Shortreed, this good man of Millburnholm was the great
original of Dandie Dinmont.' * * * 'They dined at Millburnholm; and, after
having lingered over Willie Elliot's punchbowl, until, in Mr. Shortreed's
phrase, they were "half-glowrin'," mounted their steeds again,
and proceeded to Dr. Elliot's at Cleughhead, where ("for," says
my Memorandum, "folk werena very nice in those days") the two
travellers slept in one and the same bed, - as, indeed, seems to have
been the case with them throughout most of their excursions in this primitive
district. Dr. Elliot (a clergyman) had already a large ms. collection
of the ballads Scott was in quest of.' * * * 'Next morning they seem to
have ridden a long way for the express purpose of visiting one "auld
Thomas o' Tuzzilehope," another Elliot, I suppose, who was celebrated
for his skill on the Border pipe, and in particular for being in possession
of the real lilt3 of Dick o' the Cowe. Before starting, that
is, at six o'clock, the ballad-hunters had, "just to lay the stomach,
a devilled duck or twae and some London porter." Auld Thomas found
them, nevertheless, well disposed for "breakfast" on their arrival
at Tuzzilehope; and this being over, he delighted them with one of the
most hideous and unearthly of all specimens of "riding music,"
and, moreover, with considerable libations of whisky-punch, manufactured
in a certain wooden vessel, resembling a very small milkpail, which he
called "Wisdom," because it "made" only a few spoonfuls
of spirits, - though he had the art of replenishing it so adroitly, that
it had been celebrated for fifty years as more fatal to sobriety than
any bowl in the parish. Having done due honour to "Wisdom,"
they again mounted, and proceeded over moss and moor to some other equally
hospitable master of the pipe. "Ah me," says Shortreed, "sic
an endless fund o' humour and drollery as he then had wi' him! Never ten
yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we
stopped, how brawlie he suited himsell to everybody! He aye did as the
lave did; never made himself the great man, or took any airs in the company.
I've seen him in a' moods in these jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious,
sober and drunk - (this, however, even in our wildest rambles, was rare)
- but, drunk or sober, he was aye the gentleman. He lookit excessively
heavy and stupid when he was fou, but he was never out o' gude humour."'
These are questionable doings, questionably narrated; but what shall
we say of the following, wherein the element of whisky plays an extremely
prominent part? We will say that it is questionable, and not exemplary,
whisky mounting clearly beyond its level; that indeed charity hopes and
conjectures here may be some aggravating of features for effect's sake! 'On reaching, one evening, some Charlieshope or other (I forget the name)
among those wildernesses, they found a kindly reception, as usual; but,
to their agreeable surprise after some days of hard living, a measured
and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon after supper, at which
a bottle of elderberry-wine alone had been produced, a young student of
divinity, who happened to be in the house, was called upon to take the
"big ha' Bible," in the good old fashion of Burns' "Saturday
Night"; and some progress had been already made in the service, when
the good-man of the farm, whose "tendency," as Mr. Mitchell
says, "was soporific," scandalised his wife and the dominie
by starting suddenly from his knees, and, rubbing his eyes, with a stentorian
exclamation of "By ___, here's the keg at last!" and in tumbled,
as he spoke the word, a couple of sturdy herdsmen, whom, on hearing a
day before of the advocate's approaching visit, he had despatched to a
certain smuggler's haunt, at some considerable distance, in quest of a
supply of run brandy from the Solway Frith. The pious "exercise"
of the household was hopelessly interrupted. With a thousand apologies
for his hitherto shabby entertainment, this jolly Elliot, or Armstrong,
had the welcome keg mounted on the table without a moment's delay; and
gentle and simple, not forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about
it until daylight streamed-in upon the party. Sir Walter Scott seldom
failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale companion, to mimic
with infinite humour the sudden outburst of his old host on hearing the
clatter of horses' feet, which he knew to indicate the arrival of the
keg - the consternation of the dame - and the rueful despair with which
the young clergyman closed the book.'4
From which Liddesdale raids, which we here, like the young clergyman,
close not without a certain rueful despair, let the reader draw what nourishment
he can. They evince satisfactorily, though in a rude manner, that in those
days young advocates, and Scott like the rest of them, were alive and
alert, - whisky sometimes preponderating. But let us now fancy that the
jovial young Advocate has pleaded his first cause; has served in yeomanry
drills; been wedded, been promoted Sheriff, without romance in either
case; dabbling a little the while, under guidance of Monk Lewis, in translations
from the German, in translation of Goethe's Gotz with the Iron Hand; -
and we have arrived at the threshold of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border, and the opening of a new century. Hitherto, therefore, there has been made out, by Nature and Circumstance
working together, nothing unusually remarkable, yet still something very
valuable; a stout effectual man of thirty, full of broad sagacity and
good humour, with faculties in him fit for any burden of business, hospitality
and duty, legal or civic: - with what other faculties in him no one could
yet say. As indeed, who, after lifelong inspection, can say what is in
any man? The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears
to the unuttered unconscious part a small unknown proportion; he himself
never knows it, much less do others. Give him room, give him impulse;
he reaches down to the Infinite with that so straitly-imprisoned soul
of his; and can do miracles if need be! It is one of the comfortablest
truths that great men abound, though in the unknown state. Nay, as above
hinted, our greatest, being also by nature our quietest, are perhaps those
that remain unknown! Philosopher Fichte took comfort in this belief, when
from all pulpits and editorial desks, and publications periodical and
stationary, he could hear nothing but the infinite chattering and twittering
of commonplace become ambitious; and in the infinite stir of motion nowhither,
and of din which should have been silence, all seemed churned into one
tempestuous yeasty froth, and the stern Fichte almost desired 'taxes on
knowledge' to allay it a little; - he comforted himself, we say, by the
unshaken belief that Thought did still exist in Germany; that thinking
men, each in his own corner, were verily doing their work, though in a
silent manner.5
Walter Scott, as a latent Walter, had never amused all men for a score
of years in the course of centuries and eternities, or gained and lost
several hundred thousand pounds sterling by Literature; but he might have
been a happy and by no means a useless, - nay, who knows at bottom whether
not a still usefuler Walter! However, that was not his fortune. The Genius
of rather a singular age, - an age at once destitute of faith and terrified
at scepticism, with little knowledge of its whereabout, with many sorrows
to bear or front, and on the whole with a life to lead in these new circumstances,
- had said to himself: What man shall be the temporary comforter, or were
it but the spiritual comfit-maker, of this my poor singular age, to solace
its dead tedium and manifold sorrows a little? So had the Genius said,
looking over all the world, What man? and found him walking the dusty
Outer Parliament-house of Edinburgh, with his advocate-gown on his back;
and exclaimed, That is he! The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border proved to be a well from which
flowed one of the broadest rivers. Metrical Romances (which in due time
pass into Prose Romances); the old life of men resuscitated for us: it
is a mighty word! Not as dead tradition, but as a palpable presence, the
past stood before us. There they were, the rugged old fighting men; in
their doughty simplicity and strength, with their heartiness, their healthiness,
their stout self-help, in their iron basnets, leather jerkins, jack-boots,
in their quaintness of manner and costume; there as they looked and lived:
it was like a new-discovered continent in Literature; for the new century,
a bright El Dorado, - or else some fat beatific land of Cockaigne, and
Paradise of Donothings. To the opening nineteenth century, in its languor
and paralysis, nothing could have been welcomer. Most unexpected, most
refreshing and exhilarating; behold our new El Dorado; our fat beatific
Lubberland, where one can enjoy and do nothing! It was the time for such
a new Literature; and this Walter Scott was the man for it. The Lays,
the Marmions, the Ladys and Lords of Lake and Isles, followed in quick
succession, with ever-widening profit and praise. How many thousands of
guineas were paid-down for each new Lay; how many thousands of copies
(fifty and more sometimes) were printed off, then and subsequently; what
complimenting, reviewing, renown and apotheosis there was: all is recorded
in these Seven Volumes, which will be valuable in literary statistics.
It is a history, brilliant, remarkable; the outlines of which are known
to all. The reader shall recall it, or conceive it. No blaze in his fancy
is likely to mount higher than the reality did. At this middle period of his life, therefore, Scott, enriched with copyrights,
with new official incomes and promotions, rich in money, rich in repute,
presents himself as a man in the full career of success. 'Health, wealth,
and wit to guide them' (as his vernacular Proverb says), all these three
are his. The field is open for him, and victory there; his own faculty,
his own self, unshackled, victoriously unfolds itself, - the highest blessedness
that can befall a man. Wide circle of friends, personal loving admirers;
warmth of domestic joys, vouchsafed to all that can true-heartedly nestle
down among them; light of radiance and renown given only to a few: who
would not call Scott happy? But the happiest circumstance of all is, as
we said above, that Scott had in himself a right healthy soul, rendering
him little dependent on outward circumstances. Things showed themselves
to him not in distortion or borrowed light or gloom, but as they were.
Endeavour lay in him and endurance, in due measure; and clear vision of
what was to be endeavoured after. Were one to preach a Sermon on Health,
as really were worth doing, Scott ought to be the text. Theories are demonstrably
true in the way of logic; and then in the way of practice they prove true
or else not true: but here is the grand experiment, Do they turn-out well?
What boots it that a man's creed is the wisest, that his system of principles
is the superfinest, if, when set to work, the life of him does nothing
but jar, and fret itself into holes? They are untrue in that, were it
in nothing else, these principles of his; openly convicted of untruth;
- fit only, shall we say, to be rejected as counterfeits, and flung to
the dogs? We say not that; but we do say, that ill-health, of body or
of mind, is defeat, is battle (in a good or in a bad cause) with bad success;
that health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive
to be healthy! He who in what cause soever sinks into pain and disease,
let him take thought of it; let him know well that it is not good he has
arrived at yet, but surely evil, - may, or may not be, on the way towards
good. Scott's healthiness showed itself decisively in all things, and nowhere
more decisively than in this: the way in which he took his fame; the estimate
he from the first formed of fame. Money will buy money's worth; but the
thing men call fame, what is it? A gaudy emblazonry, not good for much,
- except, indeed, as it too may turn to money. To Scott it was a profitable
pleasing superfluity, no necessary of life. Not necessary, now or ever!
Seemingly without much effort, but taught by Nature, and the instinct
which instructs the sound heart what is good for it and what is not, he
felt that he could always do without this same emblazonry of reputation;
that he ought to put no trust in it; but be ready at any time to see it
pass away from him, and to hold on his way as before. It is incalculable,
as we conjecture, what evil he escaped in this manner; what perversions,
irritations, mean agonies without a name, he lived wholly apart from,
knew nothing of. Happily before fame arrived, he had reached the mature
age at which all this was easier to him. What a strange Nemesis lurks
in the felicities of men! In thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey, in
thy belly it shall be bitter as gall! Some weakly-organised individual,
we will say at the age of five-and-twenty, whose main or whole talent
rests on some prurient susceptivity, and nothing under it but shallowness
and vacuum, is clutched hold of by the general imagination, is whirled
aloft to the giddy height; and taught to believe the divine-seeming message
that he is a great man: such individual seems the luckiest of men: and,
alas, is he not the unluckiest? Swallow not the Circedraught, O weakly-organised
individual; it is fell poison; it will dry up the fountains of thy whole
existence, and all will grow withered and parched; thou shalt be wretched
under the sun! Is there, for example, a sadder book than that Life of Byron by Moore?
To omit mere prurient susceptivities that rest on vaccum, look at poor
Byron, who really had much substance in him. Sitting there in his self-exile,
with a proud heart striving to persuade itself that it despises the entire
created Universe; and far off, in foggy Babylon, let any pitifulest whipster
draw pen on him, your proud Byron writhes in torture, - as if the pitiful
whipster were a magician, or his pen a galvanic wire struck into the Byron's
spinal marrow! Lamentable, despicable, - one had rather be a kitten and
cry mew! O son of Adam, great or little, according as thou art lovable,
those thou livest with will love thee. Those thou livest not with, is
it of moment that they have the Alphabetical letters of thy name engraved
on their memory, with some signpost likeness of thee (as like as I to
Hercules) appended to them? It is not of moment; in sober truth, not of
any moment at all! And yet, behold, there is no soul now whom thou canst
love freely, - from one soul only art thou always sure of reverence enough;
in presence of no soul is it rightly well with thee! How is thy world
become desert; and thou, for the sake of a little babblement of tongues,
art poor, bankrupt, insolvent not in purse, but in heart and mind! 'The
Golden Calf of self-love,' says Jean Paul, 'has grown into a burning Phalaris'
Bull, to consume its owner and worshipper.' Ambition, the desire of shining
and outshining, was the beginning of Sin in this world. The man of letters
who founds upon his fame, does he not thereby alone declare himself a
follower of Lucifer (named Satan, the Enemy) and member of the Satanic
school?
It was in this poetic period that Scott formed his connexion with the
Ballantynes; and embarked, though under cover, largely in trade. To those
who regard him in the heroic light, and will have Vates to signify Prophet
as well as Poet, this portion of his biography seems somewhat incongruous.
Viewed as it stood in the reality, as he was and as it was, the enterprise,
since it proved so unfortunate, may be called lamentable, but cannot be
called unnatural. The practical Scott, looking towards practical issues
in all things, could not but find hard cash one of the most practical.
If by any means cash could be honestly produced, were it by writing poems,
were it by printing them, why not? Great things might be done ultimately;
great difficulties were at once got rid of, - manifold higglings of booksellers,
and contradictions of sinners hereby fell away. A printing and bookselling
speculation was not so alien for a maker of books. Voltaire, who indeed
got no copyrights, made much money by the war-commissariat, in his time;
we believe, by the victualling branch of it. St. George himself, they
say, was a dealer in bacon in Cappadocia. A thrifty man will help himself
towards his object by such steps as lead to it. Station in society, solid
power over the good things of this world, was Scott's avowed object; towards
which the precept of precepts is that of Iago, Put money in thy purse. Here, indeed, it is to be remarked, that perhaps no literary man of any
generation has less value than Scott for the immaterial part of his mission
in any sense: not only for the fantasy called fame, with the fantastic
miseries attendant thereon; but also for the spiritual purport of his
work, whether it tended hitherward or thitherward, or had any tendency
whatever; and indeed for all purports and results of his working, except
such, we may say, as offered themselves to the eye, and could, in one
sense or the other, be handled, looked at and buttoned into the breeches-pocket.
Somewhat too little of a fantast, this Vates of ours! But so it was: in
this nineteenth century, our highest literary man, who immeasurably beyond
all others commanded the world's ear, had, as it were, no message whatever
to deliver to the world; wished not the world to elevate itself, to amend
itself, to do this or to do that, except simply pay him for the books
he kept writing. Very remarkable; fittest, perhaps, for an age fallen
languid, destitute of faith and terrified at scepticism? Or, perhaps,
for quite another sort of age, an age all in peaceable triumphant motion?
Be this as it may, surely since Shakspeare's time there has been no great
speaker so unconscious of an aim in speaking as Walter Scott. Equally
unconscious these two utterances: equally the sincere complete products
of the minds they came from: and now if they were equally deep? Or, if
the one was living fire, and the other was futile phosphorescence and
mere resinous firework? It will depend on the relative worth of the minds;
for both were equally spontaneous, both equally expressed themselves unencumbered
by an ulterior aim. Beyond drawing audiences to the Globe Theatre, Shakspeare
contemplated no result in those plays of his. Yet they have had results!
Utter with free heart what thy own daemon gives thee: if fire from heaven,
it shall be well; if resinous firework, it shall be - as well as it could
be, or better than otherwise! The candid judge will, in general, require that a speaker, in so extremely
serious a Universe as this of ours, have something to speak about. In
the heart of the speaker there ought to be some kind of gospel-tidings,
burning till it be uttered; otherwise it were better for him that he altogether
held his peace. A gospel somewhat more decisive than this of Scott's,
- except to an age altogether languid, without either scepticism or faith!
These things the candid judge will demand of literary men; yet withal
will recognise the great worth there is in Scott's honesty if in nothing
more, in his being the thing he was with such entire good faith. Here
is a something, not a nothing. If no skyborn messenger, heaven looking
through his eyes; then neither is it a chimera with his systems, crotchets,
cants, fanaticisms, and 'last infirmity of noble minds,' - full of misery,
unrest and ill-will; but a substantial, peaceable, terrestrial man. Far
as the Earth is under the Heaven does Scott stand below the former sort
of character; but high as the cheerful flowery Earth is above waste Tartarus
does he stand above the latter. Let him live in his own fashion, and do
honour to him in that. It were late in the day to write criticisms on those Metrical Romances:
at the same time, we may remark, the great popularity they had seems natural
enough. In the first place, there was the indisputable impress of worth,
of genuine human force, in them. This, which lies in some degree, or is
thought to lie, at the bottom of all popularity, did to an unusual degree
disclose itself in these rhymed romances of Scott's. Pictures were actually
painted and presented; human emotions conceived and sympathised with.
Considering what wretched Della-Cruscan and other vamping-up of old worn-out
tatters was the staple article then, it may be granted that Scott's excellence
was superior and supreme. When a Hayley was the main singer, a Scott might
well be hailed with warm welcome. Consider whether the Loves of the Plants,
and even the Loves of the Triangles, could be worth the loves and hates
of men and women! Scott was as preferable to what he displaced, as the
substance is to wearisomely repeated shadow of a substance. But, in the second place, we may say that the kind of worth which Scott
manifested was fitted especially for the then temper of men. We have called
it an age fallen into spiritual languor, destitute of belief, yet terrified
at Scepticism; reduced to live a stinted half-life, under strange new
circumstances. Now vigorous whole-life, this was what of all things these
delineations offered. The reader was carried back to rough strong times,
wherein those maladies of ours had not yet arisen. Brawny fighters, all
cased in buff and iron, their hearts too sheathed in oak and triple brass,
caprioled their huge war-horses, shook their death-doing spears; and went
forth in the most determined manner, nothing doubting. The reader sighed,
yet not without a reflex solacement: "O, that I too had lived in
those times, had never known these logic-cobwebs, this doubt, this sickliness;
and been and felt myself alive among men alive!" Add lastly, that
in this new-found poetic world there was no call for effort on the reader's
part; what excellence they had, exhibited itself at a glance. It was for
the reader, not the El Dorado only, but a beatific land of Cockaigne and
Paradise of Donothings! The reader, what the vast majority of readers
so long to do, was allowed to lie down at his ease, and be ministered
to. What the Turkish bathkeeper is said to aim at with his frictions,
and shampooings, and fomentings, more or less effectually, that the patient
in total idleness may have the delights of activity, - was here to a considerable
extent realised. The languid imagination fell back into its rest; an artist
was there who could supply it with high-painted scenes, with sequences
of stirring action, and whisper to it, Be at ease, and let thy tepid element
be comfortable to thee. 'The rude man,' says a critic, 'requires only
to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to
feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.' We named the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border the fountain from which
flowed this great river of Metrical Romances; but according to some they
can be traced to a still higher, obscurer spring; to Goethe's Gotz von
Berlichingen with the Iron Hand; or which, as we have seen, Scott in his
earlier days executed a translation. Dated a good many years ago, the
following words in a criticism on Goethe are found written; which probably
are still new to most readers of this Review: 'The works just mentioned, Gotz and Werter, though noble specimens of
youthful talent, are still not so much distinguished by their intrinsic
merits as by their splendid fortune. It would be difficult to name two
books which have exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature
of Europe than these two performances of a young author; his first-fruits,
the produce of his twenty-fourth year. Werter appeared to seize the hearts
of men in all quarters of the world, and to utter for them the word which
they had long been waiting to hear. As usually happens too, this same
word, once uttered, was soon abundantly repeated; spoken in all dialects,
and chanted through all notes of the gamut, till the sound of it had grown
a weariness rather than a pleasure. Sceptical sentimentality, view-hunting,
love, friendship, suicide and desperation, became the staple of literary
ware; and though the epidemic, after a long course of years, subsided
in Germany, it reappeared with various modifications in other countries,
and everywhere abundant traces of its good and bad effects are still to
be discerned. The fortune of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, though less
sudden, was by no means less exalted. In his own country, Gotz, though
he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an innumerable
progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian
performances; which, though long ago deceased, made noise enough in their
day and generation: and with ourselves his influence has been perhaps
still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's first literary enterprise was
a translation of Gotz von Berlichingen: and, if genius could be communicated
like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause
of Marmion and the Lady of the Lake, with all that has followed from the
same creative hand. Truly, a grain of seed that has lighted in the right
soil! For if not firmer and fairer, it has grown to be taller and broader
than any other tree; and all the nations of the earth are still yearly
gathering of its fruit.' How far Gotz von Berlichingen actually affected Scott's literary destination,
and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the prose romances
of the Author of Waverley, would not have followed as they did, must remain
a very obscure question; obscure and not important. Of the fact, however,
there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which may be named Gotzism
and Werterism, of the former of which Scott was representative with us,
have made, and are still in some quarters making the tour of all Europe.
In Germany too there was this affectionate half-regretful looking-back
into the Past; Germany had its buff-belted watch-tower period in literature,
and had even got done with it before Scott began. Then as to Werterism,
had not we English our Byron and his genus? No form of Werterism in any
other country had half the potency; as our Scott carried Chivalry Literature
to the ends of the world, so did our Byron Werterism. France, busy with
its Revolution and Napoleon, had little leisure at the moment for Gotzism
or Werterism; but it has had them both since, in a shape of its own: witness
the whole 'Literature of Desperation' in our own days; the beggarliest
form of Werterism yet seen, probably its expiring final form: witness
also, at the other extremity of the scale, a noble-gifted Chateaubriand,
Gotz and Werter both in one. - Curious: how all Europe is but like a set
of parishes of the same county; participant of the self-same influences,
ever since the Crusades, and earlier; - and these glorious wars of ours
are but like parish-brawls, which begin in mutual ignorance, intoxication
and boastful speech; which end in broken windows, damage, waste and bloody
noses; and which one hopes the general good sense is now in the way towards
putting down, in some measure! But leaving this to be as it can, what it concerned us here to remark,
was that British Werterism, in the shape of those Byron Poems, so potent
and poignant, produced on the languid appetite of men a mighty effect.
This too was a 'class of feelings deeply important to modern minds; feelings
which arise from passion incapable of being converted into action, which
belong to an age as indolent, cultivated and unbelieving as our own'!
The 'languid age without either faith or scepticism' turned towards Byronism
with an interest altogether peculiar: here, if no cure for its miserable
paralysis and languor, was at least an indignant statement of the misery;
an indignant Ernulphus' curse read over it, - which all men felt to be
something. Half-regretful lookings in the Past gave place, in many quarters,
to Ernulphus' cursings of the Present. Scott was among the first to perceive
that the day of Metrical Chivalry Romances was declining. He had held
the sovereignty for some half-score of years, a comparatively long lease
of it; and now the time seemed come for dethronement, for abdication:
an unpleasant business; which however he held himself ready, as a brave
man will, to transact with composure and in silence. After all, Poetry
was not his staff of life; Poetry had already yielded him much money;
this at least it would not take back from him. Busy always with editing,
with compiling, with multiplex official commercial business, and solid
interests, he beheld the coming change with unmoved eye. Resignation he was prepared to exhibit in this matter; - and now behold
there proved to be no need of resignation. Let the Metrical Romance become
a Prose one; shake off its rhyme-fetters, and try a wider sweep! In the
spring of 1814 appeared Waverley; an event memorable in the annals of
British Literature; in the annals of British Bookselling thrice and four
times memorable. Byron sang, but Scott narrated; and when the song had
sung itself out through all variations onwards to the Don Juan one, Scott
was still found narrating, and carrying the whole world along with him.
All bygone popularity of chivalry-lays was swallowed up in a far greater.
What 'series' followed out of Waverley, and how and with what result,
is known to all men; was witnessed and watched with a kind of rapt astonishment
by all. Hardly any literary reputation ever rose so high in our Island;
no reputation at all ever spread so wide. Walter Scott became Sir Walter
Scott, Baronet, of Abbotsford; on whom Fortune seemed to pour her whole
cornucopia of wealth, honour and worldly goods; the favourite of Princes
and of Peasants, and all intermediate men. His 'Waverley series,' swift-following
one on the other apparently without end, was the universal reading; looked
for like an annual harvest, by all ranks, in all European countries. A curious circumstance superadded itself, that the author though known
was unknown. From the first most people suspected, and soon after the
first, few intelligent persons much doubted, that the Author of Waverley
was Walter Scott. Yet a certain mystery was still kept up; rather piquant
to the public; doubtless very pleasant to the author, who saw it all;
who probably had not to listen, as other hapless individuals often had,
to this or the other long-drawn 'clear proof at last,' that the author
was not Walter Scott, but a certain astonishing Mr. So-and-so; - one of
the standing miseries of human life in that time. But for the privileged
Author it was like a king travelling incognito. All men know that he is
a high king, chivalrous Gustaf or Kaiser Joseph; but he mingles in their
meetings without cumber of etiquette or lonesome ceremony, as Chevalier
du Nord, or Count of Lorraine: he has none of the weariness of royalty,
and yet all the praise, and the satisfaction of hearing it with his own
ears. In a word, the Waverley Novels circulated and reigned triumphant;
to the general imagination the 'Author of Waverley' was like some living
mythological personage, and ranked among the chief wonders of the world. How a man lived and demeaned himself in such unwonted circumstances,
is worth seeing. We would gladly quote from Scott's correspondence of
this period; but that does not much illustrate the matter. His letters,
as above stated, are never without interest, yet also seldom or never
very interesting. They are full of cheerfulness, of wit and ingenuity;
but they do not treat of aught intimate; without impeaching their sincerity,
what is called sincerity, one may say they do not, in any case whatever,
proceed from the innermost parts of the mind. Conventional forms, due
consideration of your own and your correspondents' pretensions and vanities,
are at no moment left out of view. The epistolary stream runs on, lucid,
free, gladflowing; but always, as it were, parallel to the real substance
of the matter, never coincident with it. One feels it hollowish under
foot. Letters they are of a most humane man of the world, even exemplary
in that kind; but with the man of the world always visible in them; -
as indeed it was little in Scott's way to speak, perhaps even with himself,
in any other fashion. We select rather some glimpses of him from Mr. Lockhart's
record. The first is of dining with Royalty or Prince-Regentship itself;
an almost official matter: 'On hearing from Mr. Croker (then Secretary to the Admiralty) that Scott
was to be in town by the middle of March (1815), the Prince said, "Let
me know when he comes, and I'll get-up a snug little dinner that will
suit him;" and after he had been presented and graciously received
at the levee, he was invited to dinner accordingly, through his excellent
friend Mr. Adam (now Lord Chief Commissioner of the Jury Court in Scotland),
who at that time held a confidential office in the royal household. The
Regent had consulted with Mr. Adam, also, as to the composition of the
party. "Let us have," said he, "just a few friends of his
own, and the more Scotch the better;" and both the Commissioner and
Mr. Croker assure me that the party was the most interesting and agreeable
one in their recollection. It comprised, I believe, the Duke of York -
the Duke of Gordon (then Marquess of Huntly) - the Marquess of Hertford
(then Lord Yarmouth) - the Earl of Fife - and Scott's early friend, Lord
Melville. "The Prince and Scott," says Mr. Croker," were
the two most brilliant story tellers, in their several ways, that I have
ever happened to meet; they were both aware of their forte, and both exerted
themselves that evening with delightful effect. On going home, I really
could not decide which of them had shone the most. The Regent was enchanted
with Scott, as Scott with him; and on all his subsequent visits to London,
he was a frequent guest at the royal table." The Lord Chief Commissioner
remembers that the Prince was particularly delighted with the poet's anecdotes
of the old Scotch judges and lawyers, which his Royal Highness sometimes
capped by ludicrous traits of certain ermine sages of his own acquaintance.
Scott told, among others, a story, which he was fond of telling, of his
old friend the Lord Justice- Clerk Braxfield; and the commentary of his
Royal Highness on hearing it amused Scott, who often mentioned it afterwards.
The anecdote is this: Braxfield, whenever he went on a particular circuit
was in the habit of visiting a gentleman of good fortune in the neighbourhood
of one of the assize towns, and staying at least one night, which, being
both of them ardent chess-players, they usually concluded with their favourite
game. One Spring circuit the battle was not decided at daybreak; so the
Justice-Clerk said, "Weel, Donald, I must e'en come back this gate,
and let the game lie ower for the present:" and back he came in October,
but not to his old friend's hospitable house; for that gentleman had in
the interim been apprehended on a capital charge (of forgery), and his
name stood on the Porteous Roll, or list of those who were about to be
tried under his former guest's auspices. The laird was indicted and tried
accordingly, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Braxfield forthwith
put on his cocked hat (which answers to the black cap in England), and
pronounced the sentence of the law in the usual terms - "To be hanged
by the neck until you be dead; and may the Lord have mercy upon your unhappy
soul!" Having concluded this awful formula in his most sonorous cadence,
Braxfield, dismounting his formidable beaver, gave a familiar nod to his
unfortunate acquaintance, and said to him in a sort of chuckling whisper,
"And now, Donald my man, I think I've checkmated you for ance."
The Regent laughed heartily at this specimen of Macqueen's brutal humour;
and "I' faith, Walter," said he, "this old big-wig seems
to have taken things as coolly as my tyrannical self. Don't you remember
Tom Moore's description of me at breakfast "The table spread with tea and toast, Death-warrants and the Morning
Post?" 'Towards midnight the Prince called for "a bumper, with all the
honours, to the Author of Waverley"; and looked significantly, as
he was charging his own glass, to Scott. Scott seemed somewhat puzzled
for a moment, but instantly recovering himself, and filling his glass
to the brim, said "Your Royal Highness looks as if you thought I
had some claim to the honours of this toast. I have no such pretensions;
but shall take good care that the real Simon Pure hears of the high compliment
that has now been paid him." He then drank-off his claret; and joined
with a stentorian voice in the cheering, which the Prince himself timed.
But before the company could resume their seats, his Royal Highness, "Another
of the same, if you please, to the Author of Marmion, - and now, Walter
my man, I have checkmated you for ance." The second bumper was followed
by cheers still more prolonged: and Scott then rose, and returned thanks
in a short address, which struck the Lord Chief Commissioner as "alike
grave and graceful." This story has been circulated in a very perverted
shape.' * * * 'Before he left town he again dined at Carlton House, when
the party was a still smaller one than before, and the merriment if possible
still more free. That nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several
capital songs.'6
Or take, at a very great interval in many senses, this glimpse of another
dinner, altogether unofficially and much better described. It is James
Ballantyne the printer and publisher's dinner, in St. John Street, Canongate,
Edinburgh, on the birth-eve of a Waverley Novel: 'The feast was, to use one of James' own favourite epithets, gorgeous;
an aldermanic display of turtle and venison, with the suitable accompaniments
of iced punch, potent ale, and generous Madeira. When the cloth was drawn,
the burly praeses arose, with all he could master of the port of John
Kemble, and spouted with a sonorous voice the formula Macbeth, "Fill full! I drink to the general joy of the whole table!" This was followed by "the King, God bless him!" and second
came - "Gentlemen, there is another toast which never has been nor
shall be omitted in this house of mine: I give you the health of Mr. Walter
Scott, with three times three!" All honour having been done to this
health, and Scott having briefly thanked the company, with some expressions
of warm affection to their host, Mrs. Ballantyne retired; - the bottles
passed round twice or thrice in the usual way; and then James rose once
more, every vein on his brow distended; his eyes solemnly fixed on vacancy,
to propose, not as before in his stentorian key, but with "bated
breath," in the sort of whisper by which a stage-conspirator thrills
the gallery, - "Gentlemen, a bumper to the immortal Author of Waverley!"
- The uproar of cheering, in which Scott made a fashion of joining, was
succeeded by deep silence; and then Ballantyne proceeded "In his Lord-Burleigh look, serene and serious, A something of imposing
and mysterious" to lament the obscurity, in which his illustrious but too modest correspondent
still chose to conceal himself from the plaudits of the world; to thank
the company for the manner in which the nominis umbra had been received;
and to assure them that the Author of Waverley would, when informed of
the circumstance, feel highly delighted - "the proudest hour of his
life," etc., etc. The cool, demure fun of Scott's features during
all this mummery was perfect; and Erskine's attempt at a gay nonchalance
was still more ludicrously meritorious. Aldiborontiphoscophornio, however,
bursting as he was, knew too well to allow the new Novel to be made the
subject of discussion. Its name was announced, and success to it crowned
another cup; but after that, no more of Jedediah. To cut the thread, he
rolled out unbidden some one of his many theatrical songs, in a style
that would have done no dishonour to almost any orchestra - The Maid of
Lodi, or perhaps The Bay of Biscay, O! - or the Sweet little cherub that
sits up aloft. Other toasts followed, interspersed with ditties from other
performers; old George Thomson, the friend of Burns, was ready, for one,
with The Moorland Wedding, or Willie brew'd a peck o' maut; and so it
went on, until Scott and Erskine, with any clerical or very staid personage
that had chanced to be admitted, saw fit to withdraw. Then the scene was
changed. The claret and olives made way for broiled bones and a mighty
bowl of punch; and when a few glasses of the hot beverage had restored
his powers, James opened ore rotundo on the merits of the forthcoming
Romance. "One chapter - one chapter only!" was the cry. After
'Nav by'r Lady, nay!" and a few more coy shifts, the proof-sheets
were at length produced, and James, with many a prefatory "hem,"
read aloud what he considered as the most striking dialogue they contained. 'The first I heard so read was the interview between Jeanie Deans, the
Duke of Argyle and Queen Caroline, in Richmond Park; and, notwithstanding
some spice of the pompous tricks to which he was addicted, I must say
he did the inimitable scene great justice. At all events, the effect it
produced was deep and memorable; and no wonder that the exulting typographer's
one bumper more to Jedediah Cleishbotham preceded his parting-stave, which
was uniformly The Last Words of Marmion, executed certainly with no contemptible
rivalry of Braham.7
Over at Abbotsford things wear a still more prosperous aspect. Scott
is building there, by the pleasant banks of the Tweed; he has bought and
is buying land there; fast as the new gold comes in for a new Waverley
Novel, or even faster, it changes itself into moory acres, into stone,
and hewn or planted wood. 'About the middle of February' (1820), says Mr. Lockhart, 'it having
been ere that time arranged that I should marry his eldest daughter in
the course of the spring, - I accompanied him and part of his family on
one of those flying visits to Abbotsford, with which he often indulged
himself on a Saturday during term. Upon such occasions, Scott appeared
at the usual hour in court, but wearing, instead of the official suit
of black, his country morning-dress, green jacket and so forth, under
the clerk's gown' - 'At noon, when the Court broke up, Peter Mathieson
was sure to be in attendance in the Parliament Close; and, five minutes
after, the gown had been tossed off; and Scott, rubbing his hands for
glee, was under weigh for Tweedside. As we proceeded,' etc. 'Next morning there appeared at breakfast John Ballantyne, who had at
this time a shooting or hunting-box a few miles off, in the vale of the
Leader, and with him Mr. Constable, his guest; and it being a fine clear
day, as soon as Scott had read the church-service and one of Jeremy Taylor's
sermons, we all sallied out before noon on a perambulation of his upland
territories; Maida (the hound) and the rest of the favourites accompanying
our march. At starting we were joined by the constant henchman, Tom Purdie,
- and I may save myself the trouble of any attempt to describe his appearance,
for his master has given us an inimitably true one in introducing a certain
personage of his Redgauntlet: - "He was, perhaps, sixty years old;
yet his brow was not much furrowed, and his jet-black hair was only grizzled,
not whitened, by the advance of age. All his motions spoke strength unabated;
and, though rather undersized, he had very broad shoulders, was square-made,
thin-flanked, and apparently combined in his frame muscular strength and
activity; the last somewhat impaired, perhaps, by years, but the first
remaining in full vigor. A hard and harsh countenance; eyes far sunk under
projecting eyebrows, which were grizzled like his hair; a wide mouth,
furnished from ear to ear with a range of unimpaired teeth of uncommon
whiteness, and a size and breadth which might have become the jaws of
an ogre, completed this delightful portrait." Equip this figure in
Scott's cast-off green jacket, white hat and drab trousers; and imagine
that years of kind treatment, comfort and the honest consequence of a
confidential grieve8 had softened away much of the hardness
and harshness originally impressed on the visage by anxious penury, and
the sinister habits of a black-fisher; - and the Tom Purdie of 1820 stands
before us.
'We were all delighted to see how completely Scott had recovered his
bodily vigour, and none more so than Constable, who, as he puffed and
panted after him, up one ravine and down another, often stopped to wipe
his forehead, and remarked, that "it was not every author who should
lead him such a dance." But Purdie's face shone with rapture as he
observed how severely the swag-bellied bookseller's activity was tasked.
Scott exclaimed exultingly, though, perhaps, for the tenth time, "This
will be a glorious spring for our trees, Tom!" - "You may say
that, Sheriff," quoth Tom, - and then lingering a moment for Constable
- "My certy," he added, scratching his head, "and I think
it will be a grand season for our buiks too." But indeed Tom always
talked of our buiks, as if they had been as regular products of the soil
as our aits and our birks. Having threaded first the Hexilcleugh and then
the Rhymer's Glen, we arrived at Huntly Burn, where the hospitality of
the kind Weird Sisters, as Scott called the Miss Fergusons, reanimated
our exhausted bibliopoles, and gave them courage to extend their walk
a little farther down the same famous brook. Here there was a small cottage
in a very sequestered situation' (named Chiefswood), 'by making some little
additions to which Scott thought it might be converted into a suitable
summer residence for his daughter and future son-in-law.' * * * 'As we
walked homeward, Scott being a little fatigued, laid his left hand on
Tom's shoulder, and leaned heavily for support, chatting to his "Sunday
pony," as he called the affectionate fellow, just as freely as with
the rest of the party; and Tom put-in his word shrewdly and manfully,
and grinned and grunted whenever the joke chanced to be within his apprehension.
It was easy to see that his heart swelled within him from the moment the
Sheriff got his collar in his gripe.'9
That Abbotsford became infested to a great degree with tourists, wonder-hunters,
and all that fatal species of people, may be supposed. Solitary Ettrick
saw itself populous: all paths were beaten with the feet and hoofs of
an endless miscellany of pilgrims. As many as 'sixteen parties' have arrived
at Abbotsford in one day; male and female; peers, Socinian preachers,
whatsoever was distinguished, whatsoever had love of distinction in it!
Mr. Lockhart thinks there was no literary shrine ever so bepilgrimed,
except Ferney in Voltaire's time, who, however, was not half so accessible.
A fatal species! These are what Schiller calls the 'flesh-flies'; buzzing
swarms of bluebottles, who never fail where any taint of human glory or
other corruptibility is in the wind. So has Nature decreed. Scott's healthiness,
bodily and mental, his massive solidity of character, nowhere showed itself
more decisively than in his manner of encountering this part of his fate.
That his bluebottles were blue, and of the usual tone and quality, may
be judged. Hear Captain Basil Hall (in a very compressed state): 'We arrived in good time, and found several other guests at dinner. The
public rooms are lighted with oil-gas, in a style of extraordinary splendour.
The' etc. - 'Had I a hundred pens, each of which at the same time should
separately write down an anecdote, I could not hope to record one half
of those which our host, to use Spenser's expression, "welled out
alway."' 'Entertained us all the way with an endless string of anecdotes;'
- 'came like a stream of poetry from his lips;' - 'path muddy and scarcely
passable, yet I do not remember ever to have seen any place so interesting
as the skill of this mighty magician had rendered this narrow ravine.'
- 'Impossible to touch on any theme, but straightway he has an anecdote
to fit it.' - 'Thus we strolled along, borne, as it were, on the stream
of song and story.' - 'In the evening we had a great feast indeed. Sir
Walter asked us if we had ever read Christabel.' - 'Interspersed with
these various readings were some hundreds of stories, some quaint, some
pathetical.' - 'A breakfast today we had, as usual, some 150 stories -
God knows how they came in.' - 'In any man so gifted - so qualified to
take the loftiest, proudest line at the head of the literature, the taste,
the imagination of the whole world!' - 'For instance, he never sits at
any particular place at table, but takes' etc. etc.10
Among such worshippers, arriving in 'sixteen parties a-day,' an ordinary
man might have grown buoyant; have felt the god, begun to nod, and seemed
to shake the spheres. A slightly splenetic man, possessed of Scott's sense,
would have swept his premises clear of them: Let no blue bottle approach
here, to disturb a man in his work, - under pain of sugared squash (called
quassia) and king's yellow! The good Sir Walter, like a quiet brave man,
did neither. He let the matter take its course; enjoyed what was enjoyable
in it; endured what could not well be helped; persisted meanwhile in writing
his daily portion of romance-copy, in preserving his composure of heart;
- in a word, accommodated himself to this loud-buzzing environment, and
made it serve him, as he would have done (perhaps with more ease) to a
silent, poor and solitary one. No doubt it affected him too, and in the
lamentable way fevered his internal life, though he kept it well down;
but it affected him less than it would have done almost any other man.
For his guests were not all of the bluebottle sort; far from that. Mr.
Lockhart shall furnish us with the brightest aspect a British Ferney ever
yielded, or is like to yield: and therewith we will quit Abbotsford and
the dominant and culminant period of Scott's life: 'It was a clear, bright September morning, with a sharpness in the air
that doubled the animating influence of the sunshine, and all was in readiness
for a grand coursing-match on Newark Hill. The only guest who had chalked-out
other sport for himself was the stanchest of anglers, Mr. Rose; but he
too was there on his shelty, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net,
and attended by his Hinves, and Charlie Purdie, a brother of Tom, in those
days the most celebrated fisherman of the district. This little group
of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville's preserve, remained lounging
about, to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted
on Sibyl, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip;
and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to
laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as eager as
the youngest sportsman in the troop, Sir Humphry Davy, Dr. Wollaston,
and the patriarch of Scottish belles-lettres, Henry Mackenzie. The Man
of Feeling, however, was persuaded with some difficulty to resign his
steed for the present to his faithful negro follower, and to join Lady
Scott in the sociable, until we should reach the ground of our battue.
Laidlaw, on a strong-tailed wiry Highlander, yclept Hoddin Grey, which
carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground
as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious
inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling,
and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling companion,
for two or three days preceding this; but he had not prepared for coursing
fields, or had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden
thought, and his fisherman's costume - a brown hat with flexible brim,
surrounded with line upon line of catgut, and innumerable fly-hooks-jack-boots
worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood
of salmon, made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white-cord breeches,
and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about
him. Dr. Wollaston was in black; and with his noble serene dignity of
counterance might have passed for a sporting archbishop. Mr. Mackenzie,
at this time in the 76th year of his age, with a white hat turned up with
green, green spectacles, green jacket, and long brown leathern gaiters,
buttoned upon his nether anatomy, wore a dog-whistle round his neck, and
had, all over, the air of as resolute a devotee as the gay captain of
Huntly Burn. Tom Purdie and his subalterns had preceded us by a few hours
with all the greyhounds that could be collected at Abbotsford, Darnick,
and Melrose; but the giant Maida had remained as his master's orderly,
and now gambolled about Sibyl Grey, barking for mere joy like a spaniel
puppy. 'The order of march had been all settled, and the sociable was just getting
under weigh, when the Lady Anne broke from the line, screaming with laughter,
and exclaimed, "Papa, papa, I knew you could never think of going
without your pet!" Scott looked round, and I rather think there was
a blush as well as a smile upon his face, when he perceived a little black
pig frisking about his pony, and evidently a self-elected addition to
the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at
the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers.
Poor piggy soon found a strap round its neck, and was dragged into the
background; - Scott, watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the
first verse of an old pastoral song "What will I do gin my hoggie die? My joy, my pride, my hoggie!
My only beast, I had na mae, And wow! but I was vogie!" -the cheers were redoubled - and the squadron moved on. 'This pig had taken, nobody could tell how, a most sentimental attachment
to Scott, and was constantly urging its pretensions to be admitted a regular
member of his tail along with the greyhounds and terriers: but, indeed,
I remember him suffering another summer under the same sort of pertinacity
on the part of an affectionate hen. I leave the explanation for philosophers;
but such were the facts. I have too much respect for the vulgarly calumniated
donkey, to name him in the same category of pets with the pig and the
hen; but a year or two after this time, my wife used to drive a couple
of these animals in a little garden-chair, and whenever her father appeared
at the door of our cottage, we were sure to see Hannah More and Lady Morgan
(as Anne Scott had wickedly christened them) trotting from their pasture,
to lay their noses over the paling, and, as Washington Irving says of
the old white-haired hedger with the Parisian snuff-box, "to have
a pleasant crack wi' the laird."11
'There' at Chiefswood 'my wife and I spent this summer and autumn of
1821; the first of several seasons which will ever dwell on my memory
as the happiest of my life. We were near enough Abbotsford to partake
as often as we liked of its brilliant and constantly varying society;
yet could do so without being exposed to the worry and exhaustion of spirit
which the daily reception of newcomers entailed upon all the family, except
Sir Walter himself. But, in truth, even he was not always proof against
the annoyances connected with suchb a style of open housekeeping. Even
his temper sank sometimes under the solemn applauses of learned dulness,
the vapid raptures of painted and periwigged dowagers, the horse-leech
avidity with which underbred foreigners urged their questions, and the
pompous simpers of condescending magnates. When sore beset at home in
this way, he would every now and then discover that he had some very particular
business to attend to on an outlying part of his estate; and, craving
the indulgence of his guest over-night, appear at the cabin in the glen
before its inhabitants were astir in the morning. The clatter of Sibyl
Grey's hoofs, the yelping of Mustard and Spice, and his own joyous shout
of reveillee under our windows, were the signal that he had burst his
toils, and meant for that day to "take his ease in his inn."
On descending, he was to be found seated with all his dogs and ours about
him, under a spreading ash that overshadowed half the bank between the
cottage and the brook, pointing the edge of his woodman's axe, and listening
to Tom Purdie's lecture touching the plantation that most needed thinning.
After breakfast he would take possession of a dressing-room upstairs,
and write a chapter of The Pirate; and then, having made-up and despatched
his packet for Mr. Ballantyne, away to join Purdie wherever the foresters
were at work - and sometimes to labour among them as strenuously as John
Swanston - until it was time either to rejoin his own party at Abbotsford,
or the quiet circle of the cottage. When his guests were few and friendly,
he often made them come over and meet him at Chiefswood in a body towards
evening; and surely he never appeared to more amiable advantage than when
helping his young people with their little arrangements upon such occasions.
He was ready with all sorts of devices to supply the wants of a narrow
establishment; he used to delight particularly in sinking the wine in
a well under the brae ere he went out, and hauling up the basket just
before dinner was announced, - this primitive device being, he said, what
he had always practised when a young housekeeper, and in his opinion far
superior in its results to any application of ice: and in the same spirit,
whenever the weather was sufficiently genial, he voted for dining out
of doors altogether, which at once got rid of the inconvenience of very
small rooms, and made it natural and easy for the gentlemen to help the
ladies, so that the paucity of servants went for nothing.'12
Surely all this is very beautiful; like a picture of Boccaccio's; the
ideal of a country life in our time. Why could it not last? Income was
not wanting: Scott's official permanent income was amply adequate to meet
the expense of all that was valuable in it; nay, of all that was not harassing,
senseless and despicable. Scott had some 2,000l. a-year without writing
books at all. Why should he manufacture and not create, to make more money;
and rear mass on mass for a dwelling to himself, till the pile toppled,
sank crashing, and buried him in its ruins, when he had a safe pleasant
dwelling ready of its own accord? Alas, Scott, with all his health, was
infected; sick of the fearfulest malady, that of Ambition! To such a length
had the King's baronetcy, the world's favour and 'sixteen parties a day,'
brought it with him. So the inane racket must be kept up, and rise ever
higher. So masons labour, ditchers delve; and there is endless altogether
deplorable correspondence about marble-slabs for tables, wainscoting of
rooms, curtains and the trimmings of curtains, orange-coloured or fawn-coloured:
Walter Scott, one of the gifted of the world, whom his admirers call the
most gifted, must kill himself that he may be a country gentleman, the
founder of a race of Scottish lairds. It is one of the strangest, most tragical histories ever enacted under
this sun. So poor a passion can lead so strong a man into such mad extremes.
Surely, were not man a fool always, one might say there was something
eminently distracted in this, end as it would, of a Walter Scott writing
daily with the ardour of a steam-engine, that he might make 15,000l. a-year,
and buy upholstery with it. To cover the walls of a stone house in Selkirkshire
with nicknacks, ancient armour and genealogical shields, what can we name
it but a being bit with delirium of a kind? That tract after tract of
moorland in the shire of Selkirk should be joined together on parchment
and by ring-fence, and named after one's name, - why, it is a shabby small
type edition of your vulgar Napoleons, Alexanders, and conquering heroes,
not counted venerable by any teacher of men! 'The whole world was not half so wide To Alexander when he cried Because
he had but one to subdue, As was a narrow paltry tub to Diogenes; who
ne'er was said, For aught that ever I could read, To whine, put finger
i' the eye and sob, Because he had ne'er another tub.' Not he! And if, 'looked at from the Moon, which itself is far from Infinitude,'
Napoleon's dominions were as small as mine, what, by any chance of possibility,
could Abbotsford landed-property ever have become? As the Arabs say, there
is a black speck, were it no bigger than a bean's eye, in every soul;
which once set it a-working, will overcloud the whole man into darkness
and quasi-madness, and hurry him balefully into Night! With respect to the literary character of these Waverley Novels, so extraordinary
in their commercial character, there remains, after so much reviewing,
good and bad, little that it were profitable at present to say. The great
fact about them is, that they were faster written and better paid for
than any other books in the world. It must be granted, moreover, that
they have a worth far surpassing what is usual in such cases; nay, that
if Literature had no task but that of harmlessly amusing indolent languid
men, here was the very perfection of Literature; that a man, here more
emphatically than ever elsewhere, might fling himself back, exclaiming,
"Be mine to lie on this sofa, and read everlasting Novels of Walter
Scott!" The composition, slight as it often is, usually hangs together
in some measure, and is a composition. There is a free flow of narrative,
of incident and sentiment; an easy masterlike coherence throughout, as
if it were the free dash of a master's hand, 'round as the O of Giotto.13
It is the perfection of extemporaneous writing. Farthermore, surely he
were a blind critic who did not recognise here a certain genial sunshiny
freshness and picturesqueness; paintings both of scenery and figures,
very graceful, brilliant, occasionally full of grace and glowing brightness
blended in the softest composure; in fact, a deep sincere love of the
beautiful in Nature and Man, and the readiest faculty of expressing this
by imagination and by word. No fresher paintings of Nature can be found
than Scott's; hardly anywhere a wider sympathy with man. From Davie Deans
up to Richard Coeur-de-Lion; from Meg Merrilies to Die Vernon and Queen
Elizabeth! It is the utterance of a man of open soul; of a brave, large,
free-seeing man, who has a true brotherhood with all men. In joyous picturesqueness
and fellow-feeling, freedom of eye and heart; or to say it in a word,
in general healthiness of mind, these Novels prove Scott to have been
amongst the foremost writers.
Neither in the higher and highest excellence, of drawing character, is
he at any time altogether deficient; though at no time can we call him,
in the best sense, successful. His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys
(for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves
out for; they are, if not created and made poetically alive, yet deceptively
enacted as a good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For
the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader,
much. It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character
between a Scott, and a Shakespeare, a Goethe. Yet it is a difference literally
immense; they are of different species; the value of the one is not to
be counted in the coin of the other. We might say in a short word, which
means a long matter, that your Shakespeare fashions his characters from
the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never
getting near the heart of them! The one set become living men and women;
the other amount to little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted
automations. Compare Fenella with Goethe's Mignon, which, it was once
said, Scott had 'done Goethe the honour' to borrow. He has borrowed what
he could of Mignon. The small stature, the climbing talent, the trickiness,
the mechanical case, as we say, he has borrowed; but the soul of Mignon
is left behind. Fenella is an unfavorable specimen for Scott; but it illustrates
in the aggravated state, what is traceable in all the characters he drew. To the same purport indeed we are to say that these famed books are altogether
addressed to the every-day mind; that for any other mind there is next
to no nourishment in them. Opinions, emotions, principles, doubts, beliefs,
beyond what the intelligent country gentleman can carry along with him,
are not to be found. It is orderly, customary, it is prudent, decent;
nothing more. One would say, it lay not in Scott to give much more; getting
out of the ordinary range, and attempting the heroic, which is but seldom
the case, he falls almost at once into the rose-pink sentimental, - descries
the Minerva Press from afar, and hastily quits that course; for none better
than he knew it to lead nowhither. On the whole, contrasting Waverley,
which was carefully written, with most of its followers, which were written
extempore, one may regret the extempore method. Something very perfect
in its kind might have come from Scott; nor was it a low kind: nay, who
knows how high, with studious self-concentration, he might have gone;
what wealth Nature had implanted in him, with his circumstances, most
unkind while seeming to be kindest, had never impelled him to unfold? But after all, in the loudest blaring and trumpeting of popularity, it
is ever to be held in mind, as a truth remaining true forever, that Literature
has other aims than that of harmlessly amusing indolent languid men: or
if Literature have them not, then Literature is a very poor affair; and
something else must have them, and must accomplish them, with thanks or
without thanks; the thankful or thankless world were not long a world
otherwise! Under this head there is little to be sought or found in the
Waverley Novels. Not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for edification,
for building up or elevating, in any shape! The sick heart will find no
healing here, the darkly-struggling heart no guidance: the Heroic that
is in all men no divine awakening voice. We say, therefore, that they
do not found themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial
ones; not on the perennial, perhaps not even on the lasting. In fact,
much of the interest of these Novels results from what may be called contrasts
of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress and life, belonging
to one age, is brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes
of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it, an altogether
temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques,
and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? The stuffed Dandy, only
give him time, will become one of the wonderfulest mummies. In antiquarian
museums, only two centuries hence, the steeple-hat will hang on the next
peg to Franks and Company's patent, antiquarians deciding which is uglier:
and the Stulz swallow-tail, one may hope, will seem as incredible as any
garment that ever made ridiculous the respectable back of man. Not by
slashed breeches, steeple-hats, buff-belts, or antiquated speech, can
romance-heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the
long-run, by being men. Buff-belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes
are transitory; man alone is perennial. He that has gone deeper into this
than other men, will be remembered longer than they; he that has not,
not. Tried under this category, Scott, with his clear practical insight,
joyous temper, and other sound faculties, is not to be accounted little,
- among the ordinary circulating-library heroes he might well pass for
a demigod. Not little, yet neither is he great; there were greater, more
than one or two, in his own age: among the great of all ages, one sees
no likelihood of a place for him. What, then, is the result of these Waverley Romances? Are they to amuse
one generation only? One or more! As many generations as they can; but
not all generations: ah no, when our swallow-tail has become fantastic
as trunk-hose, they will cease to amuse! - Meanwhile, as we can discern,
their results have been several-fold. First of all, and certainly not
least of all, have they not perhaps had this result: that a considerable
portion of mankind has hereby been sated with mere amusement, and set
on seeking something better? Amusement in the way of reading can go no
farther, can do nothing better, by the power of man; and men ask, Is this
what it can do? Scott, we reckon, carried several things to their ultimatum
and crisis, so that change became inevitable; a great service, though
an indirect one. Secondly, however, we may say, these Historical Novels have taught all
men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown
to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages
of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers,
controversies and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they, not
diagrams and theorems; but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with
colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms,
features and vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive
of great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought of it.
Her faint hearsays of 'philosophy teaching by experience' will have to
exchange themselves everywhere for direct inspection and embodiment: this,
and this only, will be counted experience; and till once experience have
got in, philosophy will reconcile herself to wait at the door. It is a
great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott has done; a great
truth laid open by him; - correspondent indeed to the substantial nature
of the man; to his solidity and veracity even of imagination, which, with
all his lively discursiveness, was the characteristic of him. A word here as to the extempore style of writing, which is getting much
celebrated in these days. Scott seems to have been a high proficient in
it. His rapidity was extreme; and the matter produced was excellent, considering
that: the circumstances under which some of his Novels, when he could
not himself write, were dictated, are justly considered wonderful. It
is a valuable faculty this of ready-writing; nay, farther, for Scott's
purpose it was clearly the only good mode. By much labour he could not
have added one guinea to his copyright; nor could the reader on the sofa
have lain a whit more at ease. It was in all ways necessary that these
works should be produced rapidly; and, round or not, be thrown off like
Giotto's O. But indeed, in all things, writing or other, which a man engages
in, there is the indispensablest beauty in knowing how to get done. A
man frets himself to no purpose; he has not the sleight of the trade;
he is not a craftsman, but an unfortunate borer and bungler, if he know
not when to have done. Perfection is unattainable: no carpenter ever made
a mathematically accurate right-angle in the world; yet all carpenters
know when it is right enough, and do not botch it, and lose their wages,
by making it too right. Too much painstaking speaks disease in one's mind,
as well as too little. The adroit sound-minded man will endeavour to spend
on each business approximately what of pains it deserves; and with a conscience
void of remorse will dismiss it then. All this in favour of easy-writing
shall be granted, and, if need were, enforced and inculcated. And yet, on the other hand, it shall not less but more strenuously be
inculcated, that in the way of writing, no great thing was ever, or will
ever be done with ease, but with difficulty! Let ready-writers with any
faculty in them lay this to heart. Is it with ease, or not with ease,
that a man shall do his best, in any shape; above all, in this shape justly
named of 'soul's travail,' working in the deep places of thought, embodying
the True out of the Obscure and Possible, environed on all sides with
the uncreated False? Not so, now or at any time. The experience of all
men belies it; the nature of things contradicts it. Virgil and Tacitus,
were they ready-writers? The whole Prophecies of Isaiah are not equal
in extent to this cobweb of a Review Article. Shakespeare, we may fancy,
wrote with rapidity; but not till he had thought with intensity: long
and sore had this man thought, as the seeing eye may discern well, and
had dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes, though his great soul
is silent about all that. It was for him to write rapidly at fit intervals,
being ready to do it. And herein truly lies the secret of the matter:
such swiftness of mere writing, after due energy of preparation, is doubtless
the right method; the hot furnace having long worked and simmered, let
the pure gold flow out at one gush. It was Shakespeare's plan; no easy-writer
he, or he had never been a Shakespeare. Neither was Milton one of the
mob of gentlemen that write with ease; he did not attain Shakespeare's
faculty, one perceives, of even writing fast after long preparation, but
struggled while he wrote. Goethe also tells us he 'had nothing sent him
in his sleep'; no page of his but he knew well how it came there. It is
reckoned to be the best prose, accordingly, that has been written by any
modern. Schiller, as an unfortunate and unhealthy man, 'konnte nie fertig
werden, never could get done'; the noble genius of him struggled not wisely
but too well, and wore his life itself heroically out. Or did Petrarch
write easily? Dante sees himself 'growing lean' over his Divine Comedy;
in stern solitary death-wrestle with it, to prevail over it, and do it,
if his uttermost faculty may: hence, too, it is done and prevailed over,
and the fiery life of it endures forevermore among men. No: creation, one would think, cannot be easy; your Jove has severe pains,
and fire-flames, in the head out of which an armed Pallas is struggling!
As for manufacture, that is a different matter, and may become easy or
not easy, according as it is taken up. Yet of manufacture too, the general
truth is that, given the manufacturer, it will be worthy in direct proportion
to the pains bestowed upon it; and worthless always, or nearly so, with
no pains. Cease, therefore, O ready-writer, to brag openly of thy rapidity
and facility; to thee (if thou be in the manufacturing line) it is a benefit,
an increase of wages; but to me it is sheer loss, worsening of my pennyworth:
why wilt thou brag of it to me? Write easily, by steam if thou canst contrive
it, and canst sell it; but hide it like virtue! "Easy writing,"
said Sheridan, "is sometimes d--d hard reading." Sometimes;
and always it is sure to be rather useless reading, which indeed (to a
creature of few years and much work) may be reckoned the hardest of all. Scott's productive facility amazed everybody; and set Captain Hall, for
one, upon a very strange method of accounting for it without miracle;
- for which see his Journal, above quoted from. The Captain, on counting
line for line, found that he himself had written in that Journal of his
almost as much as Scott, at odd hours in a given number of days; 'and
as for the invention,' says he, 'it is known that this costs Scott nothing,
but comes to him of its own accord.' Convenient indeed! - But for us,
too, Scott's rapidity is great, is a proof and consequence of the solid
health of the man, bodily and spiritual; great, but unmiraculous; not
greater than that of many others besides Captain Hall. Admire it, yet
with measure. For observe always, there are two conditions in work: let
me fix the quality, and you shall fix the quantity! Any man may get through
work rapidly who easily satisfies himself about it. Print the talk of
any man, there will be a thick octavo volume daily; make his writing three
times as good as his talk, there will be the third part of a volume daily,
which still is good work. To write with never such rapidity in a passable
manner, is indicative not of a man's genius, but of his habits; it will
prove his soundness of nervous system, his practicality of mind, and in
fine, that he has the knack of his trade. In the most flattering view,
rapidity will betoken health of mind: much also, perhaps most of all,
will depend on health of body. Doubt it not, a faculty of easy-writing
is attainable by man! The human genius, once fairly set in this direction,
will carry it far. William Cobbett, one of the healthiest of men, was
a greater improviser even than Walter Scott: his writing, considered as
to quality and quantity, of Rural tides, Registers, Grammars, Sermons,
Peter Porcupines, Histories of Reformation, ever-fresh denouncements of
Potatoes and Paper-money, seems to us still more wonderful. Pierre Bayle
wrote enormous folios, one sees not on what motive principle: he flowed-on
forever, a mighty tide of ditchwater; and even died flowing, with the
pen in his hand. But indeed the most unaccountable ready-writer of all
is, probably, the common Editor of a Daily Newspaper. Consider his leading
articles; what they treat of, how passably they are done. Straw that has
been thrashed a hundred times without wheat; ephemeral sound of a sound;
such portent of the hour as all men have seen a hundred times turn out
inane: how a man with merely human faculty, buckles himself nightly with
new vigour and interest to this thrashed straw, nightly thrashes it anew,
nightly gets-up new thunder about it; and so goes on thrashing and thundering
for a considerable series of years; this is a fact remaining still to
be accounted for, in human physiology. The vitality of man is great. Or shall we say, Scott, among the many things he carried towards their
ultimatum and crisis, carried this of ready-writing too, that so all men
might better see what was in it? It is a valuable consummation. Not without
results; results, at some of which Scott as a Tory politician would have
greatly shuddered. For if once Printing have grown to be as Talk, then
Democracy (if we look into the roots of things) is not a bugbear and probability,
but a certainty, asd event as good as come! 'Inevitable seems it me.'
But leaving this, sure enough the triumph of ready-writing appears to
be even now; everywhere the ready-writer is found bragging strangely of
his readiness. In a late translated Don Carlos, one of the most indifferent
translations ever done with any sign of ability, a hitherto unknown individual
is found assuring his reader, 'The reader will possibly think it an excuse,
when I assure him that the whole piece was completed within the space
of ten weeks, that is to say, between the sixth of January and the eighteenth
of March of this year (inclusive of a fortnight's interruption from over-exertion);
that I often translated twenty pages a-day, and that the fifth act was
the work of five days.'14 O hitherto unknown individual, what
is it to me what time it was the work of, whether five days or five decades
of years? The only question is, How well hast thou done it?
So, however, it stands: the genius of Extempore irresistibly lording
it, advancing on us like ocean-tides, like Noah's deluges of ditch-water!
The prospect seems one of the lamentablest. To have all Literature swum
away from us in watery Extempore, and a spiritual time of Noah supervene?
That surely is an awful reflection; worthy of dyspeptic Matthew Bramble
in a London fog! Be of comfort, O splenetic Matthew; it is not Literature
they are swimming away; it is only Book-publishing and Book-selling. Was
there not a Literature before Printing or Faust of Mentz, and yet men
wrote extempore? Nay, before Writing or Cadmus of Thebes, and yet men
spoke extempore? Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls; this, by
the blessing of God, can in no generation be swum away, but remains with
us to the end. Scott's career, of writing impromptu novels to buy farms with, was not
of a kind to terminate voluntarily, but to accelerate itself more and
more; and one sees not to what wise goal it could, in any case, have led
him. Bookseller Constable's bankruptcy was not the ruin of Scott; his
ruin was, that ambition, and even false ambition, had laid hold of him;
that his way of life was not wise. Whither could it lead? Where could
it stop? New farms there remained ever to be bought, while new novels
could pay for them. More and more success but gave more and more appetite,
more and more audacity. The impromptu writing must have waxed ever thinner;
declined faster and faster into the questionable category, into the condemnable,
into the generally condemned. Already there existed, in secret, everywhere
a considerable opposition party; witnesses of the Waverley miracles, but
unable to believe in them, forced silently to protest against them. Such
opposition party was in the sure case to grow; and even with the impromptu
process ever going on, ever waxing thinner, to draw the world over to
it. Silent protest must at length have come to words; harsh truths, backed
by harsher facts of a world-popularity overwrought and worn-out, behoved
to have been spoken; - such as can be spoken now without reluctance, when
they can pain the brave man's heart no more. Who knows? Perhaps it was
better ordered to be all otherwise. Otherwise, at any rate, it was. One
day the Constable mountain, which seemed to stand strong like the other
rock mountains, gave suddenly, as the icebergs do, a loud-sounding crack;
suddenly, with huge clangor, shivered itself into ice-dust; and sank,
carrying much along with it. In one day Scott's high-heaped money-wages
became fairy-money and nonentity; in one day the rich man and lord of
land saw himself penniless, landless, a bankrupt among creditors. It was a hard trial. He met it proudly, bravely, - like a brave proud
man of the world. Perhaps there had been a prouder way still: to have
owned honestly that he was unsuccessful, then, all bankrupt, broken, in
the world's goods and repute; and to have turned elsewhither for some
refuge. Refuge did lie elsewhere; but it was not Scott's course, or fashion
of mind, to seek it there. To say, Hitherto I have been all in the wrong,
and this my fame and pride, now broken, was an empty delusion and spell
of accursed witchcraft! It was difficult for flesh and blood! He said,
I will retrieve myself, and make my point good yet, or die for it. Silently,
like a proud strong man, he girt himself to the Hercules' task of removing
rubbish-mountains, since that was it; of paying large ransoms by what
he could still write and sell. In his declining years, too; misfortune
is doubly and trebly unfortunate that befalls us then. Scott fell to his
Hercules' task like a very man, and went on with it unweariedly; with
a noble cheerfulness, while his life-strings were cracking, he grappled
with it, and wrestled with it, years long, in death-grips, strength to
strength; - and it proved the stronger; and his life and heart did crack
and break: the cordage of a most strong heart! Over these last writings
of Scott, his Napoleons, Demonologies, Scotch Histories, and the rest,
criticism, finding still much to wonder at, much to commend, will utter
no word of blame; this one word only, Woe is me! The noble war-horse that
once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to toil himself
dead, dragging ignoble wheels! Scott's descent was like that of a spent
projectile; rapid, straight down; - perhaps mercifully so. It is a tragedy,
as all life is; one proof more that Fortune stands on a restless globe;
that Ambition, literary, warlike, politic, pecuniary, never yet profited
any man. Our last extract shall be from Volume Sixth; a very tragical one. Tragical,
yet still beautiful; waste Ruin's havoc borrowing a kind of sacredness
from a yet sterner visitation, that of Death! Scott has withdrawn into
a solitary lodging-house in Edinburgh, to do daily the day's work there;
and had to leave his wife at Abbotsford in the last stage of disease.
He went away silently; looked silently at the sleeping face he scarcely
hoped ever to see again. We quote from a Diary he had begun to keep in
those months, on hint from Byron's Ravenna Journal: copious sections of
itrender this Sixth Volume more interesting than any of the former ones: 'Abbotsford, May 11 (1826). - * * It withers my heart to think of it,
and to recollect that I can hardly hope again to seek confidence and counsel
from that ear, to which all might be safely confided. But in her present
lethargic state, what would my attendance have availed? - and Anne has
promised close and constant intelligence. I must dine with James Ballantyne
today en famille. I cannot help it; but would rather be at home and alone.
However, I can go out too. I will not yield to the barren sense of hopelessness
which struggles to invade me.' 'Edinburgh, - Mrs. Brown's lodgings, North St. David Street - May 12.
I passed a pleasant day with kind J. B., which was a great relief from
the black dog, which would have worried me at home. He was quite alone.' 'Well, here I am in Arden. And I may say with Touchstone, "When
I was at home I was in a better place"; I must, when there is occasion,
draw to my own Bailie Nicol Jarvie's consolation - "One cannot carry
the comforts of the Saut-Market about with one." Were I at ease in
mind, I think the body is very well cared for. Only one other lodger in
the house, a Mr. Shandy, - a clergyman, and, despite his name, said to
be a quiet one.' 'May 14. - A fair good-morrow to you, Mr. Sun, who are shining so brightly
on these dull walls. Methinks you look as if you were looking as bright
on the banks of the Tweed; but look where you will, Sir Sun, you look
upon sorrow and suffering. - Hogg was here yesterday, in danger, from
having obtained an accommodation of 100l. from James Ballantyne, which
he is now obliged to repay. I am unable to help the poor fellow, being
obliged to borrow myself.' 'May 15. - Received the melancholy intelligence that all is over at Abbotsford.' 'Abbotsford, May 16. - She died at nine in the morning, after being very
ill for two days - easy at last. I arrived here late last night. Anne
is worn out, and has had hysterics, which returned on my arrival. Her
broken accents were like those of a child, the language as well as the
tones broken, but in the most gentle voice of submission. "Poor mamma
- never return again - gone forever - a better place." Then, when
she came to herself, she spoke with sense, freedom and strength of mind,
till her weakness returned. It would have been inexpressibly moving to
me as a stranger - what was it then to the father and the husband? For
myself, I scarce know how I feel; sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock,
sometimes as weak as the water that breaks on it. I am as alert at thinking
and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet, when I contrast what this
place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will
break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family - all but poor Anne; an impoverished,
an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels,
who could always talk-down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which
break the heart that must bear them alone. - Even her foibles were of
service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections. 'I have seen her. The figure I beheld is, and is not, my Charlotte -
my thirty-years companion. There is the same symmetry of form, though
those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic - but that
yellow mask, with pinched features, which seems to mock life rather than
emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression?
I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little changed, because the
latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances
of extreme pain. Mine go back to a period of comparative ease. If I write
long in this way, I shall write-down my resolution, which I should rather
write-up, if I could.' May 18. - * * Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth
must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of
my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins
of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No,
no.' 'May 22. - * * Well, I am not apt to shrink from that which is my duty,
merely because it is painful; but I wish this funeral-day over. A kind
of cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem
to be doing and talking.' 'May 26. - * * Were an enemy coming upon my house, would I not do my
best to fight, although oppressed in spirits; and shall a similar despondency
prevent me from mental exertion? It shall not, by Heaven!' 'Edinburgh, May 30. - Returned to town last night with Charles. This
morning resume ordinary habits of rising early, working in the morning,
and attending the Court. I finished correcting the proofs for the Quarterly;
it is but a flimsy article, but then the circumstances were most untoward.
- This has been a melancholy day - most melancholy. I am afraid poor Charles
found me weeping. I do not know what other folks feel, but with me the
hysterical passion that impels tears is a terrible violence - a sort of
throttling sensation - then succeeded by a state of dreaming stupidity,
in which I ask if my poor Charlotte can actually be dead.'15
This is beautiful as well as tragical. Other scenes, in that Seventh
Volume, must come, which will have no beauty, but be tragical only. It
is better that we are to end here. And so the curtain falls; and the strong Walter Scott is with us no more.
A possession from him does remain; widely scattered; yet attainable; not
inconsiderable. It can be said of him, When he departed, he took a Man's
life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together
in that eighteenth century of Time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its
shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the
Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it; -
ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. We shall never forget it; we shall
never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our
proud and sad farewell. Source London and Westminster Review, No. 12. - Memoirs of the Life
of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, Vols. i. - vi., Edinburgh, 1837.] reprinted in, Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873. Autobiography ; Essay on liberty /
John Stuart Mill. |