Of the four great English tale-tellers whose dynasties have set
or risen within my own memory--Miss Edgeworth, Scott, Dickens, and
Thackeray--I find myself greatly at pause in conjecturing, however
dimly, what essential good has been effected by them, though they all
had the best intentions. Of the essential mischief done by them, there
is, unhappily, no doubt whatever. Miss Edgeworth made her morality
so impertinent that, since her time, it has only been with fear and
trembling that any good novelist has ventured to show the slightest
bias in favour of the Ten Commandments. Scott made his romance so
ridiculous, that, since his day, one can't help fancying helmets were
always pasteboard, and horses were always hobby. Dickens made everybody
laugh, or cry, so that they could not go about their business till
they had got their faces in wrinkles; and Thackeray settled like a
meatfly on whatever one had got for dinner, and made one sick of it.
That, on the other hand, at least Miss Edgeworth and Scott have indeed
some inevitable influence for good, I am the more disposed to think,
because nobody now will read them. Dickens is said to have made
people good-natured. If he did, I wonder what sort of natures they
had before! Thackeray is similarly asserted to have chastised and
repressed flunkeydom,--which it greatly puzzles me to hear, because,
as far as I can see, there isn't a carriage now left in all the Row
with anybody sitting inside it: the people who ought to have been in
it are, every one, hanging on behind the carriage in front.
What good these writers have done, is therefore, to me, I repeat,
extremely doubtful. But what good Scott has in him to do, I find
no words full enough to tell. His ideal of honour in men and women
is inbred, indisputable; fresh as the air of his mountains; firm as
their rocks. His conception of purity in woman is even higher than
Dante's; his reverence for the filial relation, as deep as Virgil's;
his sympathy universal;--there is no rank or condition of men of which
he has not shown the loveliest aspect; his code of moral principle is
entirely defined, yet taught with a reserved subtlety like Nature's
own, so that none but the most earnest readers perceive the intention:
and his opinions on all practical subjects are final; the consummate
decisions of accurate and inevitable common sense, tempered by the
most graceful kindness.
That he had the one weakness--I will not call it fault--of desiring
to possess more and more of the actual soil of the land which was so
rich to his imagination, and so dear to his pride; and that, by this
postern-gate of idolatry, entered other taints of folly and fault,
punished by supreme misery, and atoned for by a generosity and solemn
courage more admirable than the unsullied wisdom of his happier days,
I have ceased to lament: for all these things make him only the more
perfect to us as an example, because he is not exempt from common
failings, and has his appointed portion in common pain.
I said we were to learn from him the true relations of Master and
Servant; and learning these, there is little left for us to learn;
but, on every subject of immediate and vital interest to us,
we shall find, as we study his life and words, that both are as
authoritative as they are clear. Of his impartiality of judgment,
I think it is enough, once for all, to bid you observe that, though
himself, by all inherited disposition and accidental circumstances,
prejudiced in favour of the Stewart cause, the aristocratic character,
and the Catholic religion,--the only perfectly noble character in
his first novel is that of a Hanoverian colonel, [42] and the most
exquisitely finished and heroic character in all his novels, that of
a Presbyterian milkmaid.
But before I press any of his opinions--or I ought rather to say,
knowledges--upon you, I must try to give you some idea of his own
temper and life. His temper, I say; the mixture of clay, and the
fineness of it, out of which the Potter made him; and of his life,
what the power of the Third Fors had been upon it, before his own hands
could make or mar his fortune, at the turn of tide. I shall do this
merely by abstracting and collating (with comment) some passages out
of Lockhart's life of him; and adding any elucidatory pieces which
Lockhart refers to, or which I can find myself, in his own works,
so that you may be able to read them easily together. And observe,
I am not writing, or attempting to write, another life of Scott; but
only putting together bits of Lockhart's life in the order which my
side-notes on the pages indicate for my own reading; and I shall use
Lockhart's words, or my own, indifferently, and without the plague
of inverted commas. Therefore, if anything is wrong in my statement,
Lockhart is not answerable for it; but my own work in the business
will nevertheless be little more than what the French call putting
dots on the i's, and adding such notes as may be needful for our
present thought.
Sir Walter was born on the 15th August, 1771, in a house belonging to
his father, at the head of the College Wynd, Edinburgh. The house was
pulled down to make room for the northern front of the New College;
and the wise people of Edinburgh then built, for I don't know how
many thousand pounds, a small vulgar Gothic steeple on the ground,
and called it the "Scott Monument." There seems, however, to have
been more reason than usual for the destruction of the College Wynd,
for Scott was the first survivor of seven children born in it to his
father, and appears to have been saved only by the removal to the house
in George's Square, [43] which his father always afterwards occupied;
and by being also sent soon afterwards into the open country. He
was of purest Border race--seventh in descent from Wat of Harden and
the Flower of Yarrow. Here are his six ancestors, from the sixteenth
century, in order:--
1. Walter Scott (Auld Wat) of Harden.
2. Sir William Scott of Harden.
3. Walter Scott of Raeburn.
4. Walter Scott, Tutor of Raeburn.
5. Robert Scott of Sandy-Knowe.
6. Walter Scott, citizen of Edinburgh.