Modern History Sourcebook:
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881):
On Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), 1838
Part IAmerican Cooper asserts, in one of his books, that there is "an instinctive
tendency in men to look at any man who has become distinguished." True, surely: as
all observation and survey of mankind, from China to Peru, from Nebuchadnezzar to Old
Hickory, will testify! Why do men crowd towards the improved-drop at Newgate, eager to
catch a sight? The man about to be hanged is in a distinguished situation. Men crowd to
such extent, that Greenacre's is not the only life choked-out there. Again, ask of these
leathern vehicles, cabriolets, neat-flies, with blue men and women in them, that scour all
thoroughfares, Whither so fast? To see dear Mrs. Rigmarole, the distinguished female;
great Mr. Rigmarole, the distinguished male! Or, consider that crowning phenomenon, and
summary of modern civilisation, a soiree of lions. Glittering are the rooms, well-lighted,
thronged; bright flows their undulatory flood of blonde-gowns and dress-coats, a soft
smile dwelling on all faces; for behold there also flow the lions, hovering distinguished:
oracles of the age, of one sort or another. Oracles really pleasant to see; whom it is
worthwhile to go and see: look at them, but inquire not of them, depart rather and be
thankful. For your lion-soiree admits not of speech; there lies the specialty of it. A
meeting together of human creatures; and yet (so high has civilisation gone) the primary
aim of human meeting, that soul might in some articulate utterance unfold itself to soul,
can be dispensed with in it. Utterance there is not; nay, there is a certain grinning play
of tongue-fence, and make-believe of utterance, considerably worse than none. For which
reason it has been suggested, with an eye to sincerity and silence in such lion-soirees,
Might not each lion be, for example, ticketed, as wine-decanters are? Let him carry, slung
round him, in such ornamental manner as seemed good, his silver label with name engraved;
you lift his label, and read it, with what farther ocular survey you find useful, and
speech is not needed at all. Of Fenimore Cooper, it is most true there is 'an instinctive
tendency in men to look at any man that has become distinguished'; and, moreover, an
instinctive desire in men to become distinguished and be looked at!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.Part IINow 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
[Footnote 2: Vo. i. pp. 15-17.]
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."'
[Footnote 3: Loud tune: German, lallen.]
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
[Footnote 4: Vol. i. pp. 195-199.]
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
[Footnote 5: Fichte, Uber das Wesen des Gelehrten.]
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 alphabetic 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?Part IIIIt 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
[Footnote 6: Vol. iii, pp. 340-343.]
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
[Footnote 7: Vol. iv. pp. 166-168.]
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.
[Footnote 8: Overseer; German, graf.]
'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
[Footnote 9: Vol. iv. pp. 349-353.]
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
[Footnote 10: Vol. v. pp. 375-402.]
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
[Footnote 11: Vol. v. pp. 7-10. On this subject let us report an anecdote furnished by
a correspondent of our own, whose accuracy we can depend on: 'I myself was acquainted with
a little Blenheim cocker, one of the smallest, beautifulest and wisest of lap-dogs or
dogs, which, though Sir Walter knew it not, was very singular in its behaviour towards
him. Shandy, so hight this remarkable cocker, was extremely shy of strangers: promenading
on Princes Street, which in fine weather used to be crowded in those days, he seemed to
live in perpetual fear of being stolen; if any one but looked at him admiringly, he would
draw-back with angry timidity, and crouch towards his own ladymistress. One day, a tall,
irregular, busy-looking man came halting by; the little dog ran towards him, began
fawning, frisking, licking at his feet: it was Sir Walter Scott! Had Shandy been the most
extensive reader of Reviews, he could not have done better. Every time he saw Sir Walter
afterwards, which was some three or four times in the course of visiting Edinburgh, he
repeated his demonstrations, ran leaping, frisking, licking the author of Waverley's feet.
The good Sir Walter endured it with good humour; looked down at the little wise face, at
the silky shagcoat of snow-white and chestnut-brown; smiled, and avoided hitting him as
they went on, - till a new division of streets or some other obstacle put an end to the
interview. In fact, he was a strange little fellow, this Shandy. He has been known to sit
for hours looking out at the summer moon, with the saddest, wistfulest expression of
countenance; altogether like a Werterean Poet. He would have been a poet, I daresay, if he
could have found a publisher. But his moral tact was the most amazing. Without reason
shown, without word spoken, or act done, he took his likings and dislikings; unalterable;
really almost unerring. His chief aversion, I should say, was to the genus quack, above
all, to the genus acrid-quack, these, though never so clear-starched, bland-smiling and
beneficent, he absolutely would have no trade with. Their very sugar-cake was unavailing.
He said with emphasis, as clearly as barking could say it: "Acrid-quack,
avaunt!" Would to Heaven many a prime-minister and high-person in authority had such
an invaluable talent! On the whole, there is more in this universe than our philosophy has
dreamt of. A dog's instinct is a voice of Nature too; and farther, it has never babbled
itself away in idle jargon and hypothesis, but always adhered to the practical, and grown
in silence by continual communion with fact. We do the animals injustice. Their body
resembles our body, Buffon says; with its four limbs, with its spinal marrow, main organs
in the head, and so forth: but have they not a kind of soul, equally the rude draught and
imperfect imitation of ours? It is a strange, an almost solemn and pathetic thing to see
an intelligence imprisoned in that dumb rude form; struggling to express itself out of
that; - even as we do out of our imprisonment; and succeed very imperfectly!']
'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
[Footnote 12: Vol. v. pp. 123, 124.]
Part IVSurely 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.
[Footnote 13: Venne a Firenze' (il cortigiano del Papa), 'e andato una mattina in
bottega di Giotto, che lavorava, gli chiese un poco di disegno per mandarlo a sua Santita,
Giotto, che garbatissimo era, prese un foglio, ed in quello con un pennello tinto di
rosso, fermato il braccio al fianco per farne compasso, e girato la mano fece un tondo si
pari di sesto e di profilo, che fu a vederlo una maraviglia. Cio fatto ghignando disse al
cortigiano, Eccovi il disegno.' . . . 'Onde il Papa, e molti cortigiani intendenti
conobbero percio, quanto Giotto avanzasse d' eccelenza tutti gli altri pittori del suo
tempo. Divolgatasi poi questa cosa, ne nacque il proverbio, che ancora e in uso dirsi a
gli uomini di grossa pasta: Tu sei piu tondo che l' O di Giotto.' - Vasari, Vite (Roma,
1759), i. 46.]
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?
[Footnote 14: Don Carlos, a Dramatic Poem, from the German of Schiller. Mannheim and
London, 1837.]
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
[Footnote 15: Vol. vi. pp. 297-307.]
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.
Characteristics ; Inaugural address ; Essay on Scott / Thomas Carlyle ; with introductions
and notes. New York, Collier [c1909] The Harvard classics v. 25.
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