I find some of my readers are more interested in the last two numbers
of Fors than I want them to be.
"Give up your Fors altogether, and let us have a life of Scott,"
they say.
They must please to remember that I am only examining the conditions of
the life of this wise man, that they may learn how to rule their own
lives, or their children's, or their servants'; and, for the present,
with this particular object, that they may be able to determine,
for themselves, whether ancient sentiment, or modern common sense,
is to be the rule of life, and of service.
I beg them, therefore, to refer constantly to that summary of modern
common sense given by Mr. Applegarth, and quoted with due commendation
by the 'Pall Mall Gazette' (above, XXVIII., 22):--
"One piece of vigorous good sense enlivened the discussion. It was
uttered by Mr. Applegarth, who observed that 'no sentiment ought to
be brought into the subject.'"
No sentiment, you observe, is to be brought into your doing, or your
whistling, according to Mr. Applegarth.
And the main purpose of Fors is to show you that there is, sometimes,
in weak natural whistling quite as much virtue as in vigorous steam
whistling. But it cannot show you this without explaining what
your darg, or 'doing,' is; which cannot be shown merely by writing
pleasant biographies. You are always willing enough to read lives,
but never willing to lead them. For instance, those few sentences,
almost casually given in last Fors, about the Scottish rivers, have
been copied, I see, into various journals, as if they, at any rate,
were worth extract from the much useless matter of my books. Scotchmen
like to hear their rivers talked about, it appears! But when last I
was up Huntly Burn way, there was no burn there. It had all been drawn
off to somebody's 'works;' and it is painful for me, as an author,
to reflect that, "of all polluting liquids belonging to this category
(liquid refuse from manufactories), the discharges from paper works
are the most difficult to deal with." [74]
At Edinburgh there is a railroad station instead of the North Loch;
the water of Leith is--well, one cannot say in civilized company what
it is; [75] and at Linlithgow, of all the palaces so fair,--built for
a royal dwelling, etc.,--the oil, (paraffin,) floating on the streams,
can be ignited, burning with a large flame. [76]
My good Scottish friends, had you not better leave off pleasing
yourselves with descriptions of your rivers as they were, and consider
what your rivers are to be? For I correct my derivation of Clarty Hole
too sorrowfully. [77] It is the Ford that is clarty now--not the Hole.
To return to our sentimental work, however, for a while. I left in
my last letter one or two of the most interesting points in the first
year at Sandy-Knowe unnoticed, because I thought it best to give you,
by comparison with each other, some idea of the three women who, as
far as education could do it, formed the mind of Scott. His masters
only polished and directed it. His mother, grandmother, and aunt
welded the steel.