It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You
may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days
come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the
chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently
for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in
your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how
the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day
onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with
some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as
you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to
you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of
your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the
old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past. Yes,
it was the olive-green line of Scott’s novels which started me on to
rhapsody. They were the first books I ever owned—long, long before I
could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a
treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious
candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a
new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my “Ivanhoe” is
of a different edition from the others. The first copy was left in the
grass by the side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually
picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I
think I may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it.
Indeed, it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
breaking fresh ground.
I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when the
unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions of the
lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to
mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. It was, indeed, a
splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was allowed by the rules
of his Order to take part in so secular and frivolous an affair as a
tournament? It is the privilege of great masters to make things so, and
it is a churlish thing to gainsay it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who
described the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room with a couple of
facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them
loose on any play of fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If
Shakespeare gives a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an
English prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack—well, it _was_ so, and that’s
an end of it. “There is no second line of rails at that point,” said an
editor to a minor author. “I make a second line,” said the author; and
he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers’ conviction with
him.
But this is a digression from “Ivanhoe.” What a book it is! The second
greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every successive
reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott’s soldiers are always
as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak; but here, while the
soldiers are at their very best, the romantic figure of Rebecca redeems
the female side of the story from the usual commonplace routine. Scott
drew manly men because he was a manly man himself, and found the task a
sympathetic one.
He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he had
never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for a dozen
chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat—in the long stretch, for
example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the end of the Friar
Tuck incident—that we realize the height of continued romantic
narrative to which he could attain. I don’t think in the whole range of
our literature we have a finer sustained flight than that.
There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
Scott’s novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the
shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order are
traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how to live on
nothing a year as Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair,” or sandwiching in a
ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well might a dramatic author
rush up to the footlights and begin telling anecdotes while his play
was suspending its action and his characters waiting wearily behind
him. It is all wrong, though every great name can be quoted in support
of it. Our sense of form is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned
with the rest. But get past all that to a crisis in the real story, and
who finds the terse phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do
you remember when the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last
before the grim Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: “A
thousand marks or a bed of heather!” says he, as he draws. The Puritan
draws also: “The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” says he. No verbiage
there! But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the
few stern words, which haunt your mind. “Bows and Bills!” cry the Saxon
Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just what
they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the actual
battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn day when
they fought under the “Red Dragon of Wessex” on the low ridge at
Hastings. “Out! Out!” they roared, as the Norman chivalry broke upon
them. Terse, strong, prosaic—the very genius of the race was in the
cry.
Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they are
damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited? Something
of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as a young
signal midshipman, had taken Nelson’s famous message from the Signal
Yeoman and communicated it to the ship’s company. The officers were
impressed. The men were not. “Duty!” they muttered. “We’ve always done
it. Why not?” Anything in the least highfalutin’ would depress, not
exalt, a British company. It is the under statement which delights
them. German troops can march to battle singing Luther’s hymns.
Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy by a song of glory and of
Fatherland. Our martial poets need not trouble to imitate—or at least
need not imagine that if they do so they will ever supply a want to the
British soldier. Our sailors working the heavy guns in South Africa
sang: “Here’s another lump of sugar for the Bird.” I saw a regiment go
into action to the refrain of “A little bit off the top.” The martial
poet aforesaid, unless he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling,
would have wasted a good deal of ink before he had got down to such
chants as these. The Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I
remember reading of some column ascending a breach and singing lustily
from start to finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon
the crest with the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous
chant it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he
found that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was
“Ivan is in the garden picking cabbages.” The fact is, I suppose, that
a mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.
Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during the
most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged—the only war
in which it could have been said that they were stretched to their
uttermost and showed their true form—“Tramp, tramp, tramp,” “John
Brown’s Body,” “Marching through Georgia”—all had a playful humour
running through them. Only one exception do I know, and that is the
most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an outsider in time of
peace can hardly read it without emotion. I mean, of course, Julia Ward
Howe’s “War-Song of the Republic,” with the choral opening line: “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” If that were ever
sung upon a battle-field the effect must have been terrific.
A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts at
the other side of the Magic Door. You can’t pull one out without a
dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott’s soldiers that I was
talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no
posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero abominates),
but just the short bluff word and the simple manly ways, with every
expression and metaphor drawn from within his natural range of thought.
What a pity it is that he, with his keen appreciation of the soldier,
gave us so little of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries—the
finest, perhaps, that the world has ever seen! It is true that he wrote
a life of the great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one piece of
hackwork of his career. How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training
had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such
a theme? But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of
all men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not
give for a portrait of one of Murat’s light-cavalrymen, or of a
Grenadier of the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the
Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers of the French King’s Guard in
“Quentin Durward”?
In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men who
during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also the
redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from the
sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much romantic
figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling cavaliers of
his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular veteran, with his
views upon the Duke, would be as striking as Dugald Dalgetty from the
German wars. But then no man ever does realize the true interest of the
age in which he happens to live. All sense of proportion is lost, and
the little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a distance. It is
easy in the dark to confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for
example, the Old Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St.
Sebastians, while Columbus was discovering America before their very
faces.
I have said that I think “Ivanhoe” the best of Scott’s novels. I
suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the second
best? It speaks well for their general average that there is hardly one
among them which might not find some admirers who would vote it to a
place of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels which deal with
Scottish life and character have a quality of raciness which gives them
a place apart. There is a rich humour of the soil in such books as “Old
Mortality,” “The Antiquary,” and “Rob Roy,” which puts them in a
different class from the others. His old Scottish women are, next to
his soldiers, the best series of types that he has drawn. At the same
time it must be admitted that merit which is associated with dialect
has such limitations that it can never take the same place as work
which makes an equal appeal to all the world. On the whole, perhaps,
“Quentin Durward,” on account of its wider interests, its strong
character-drawing, and the European importance of the events and people
described, would have my vote for the second place. It is the father of
all those sword-and-cape novels which have formed so numerous an
addition to the light literature of the last century. The pictures of
Charles the Bold and of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily
vivid. I can see those two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing
the herald, and clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel
mirth, more clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested
upon.
The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and is
the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like rival. It
is not often that historical characters work out in their actual
physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the High
Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles which
might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin, ascetic,
varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It is hard on
us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas, when, for
example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man with a noble,
olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read beneath it that it is
the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally, however, as at Innsbruck, we
are absolutely satisfied. I have before me on the mantelpiece yonder a
portrait of a painting which represents Queen Mary’s Bothwell. Take it
down and look at it. Mark the big head, fit to conceive large schemes;
the strong animal face, made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman;
the brutally forceful features—the mouth with a suggestion of wild
boars’ tusks behind it, the beard which could bristle with fury: the
whole man and his life-history are revealed in that picture. I wonder
if Scott had ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family
seat?
Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which the
critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the last from
his tired pen. I mean “Count Robert of Paris.” I am convinced that if
it had been the first, instead of the last, of the series it would have
attracted as much attention as “Waverley.” I can understand the state
of mind of the expert, who cried out in mingled admiration and despair:
“I have studied the conditions of Byzantine Society all my life, and
here comes a Scotch lawyer who makes the whole thing clear to me in a
flash!” Many men could draw with more or less success Norman England,
or mediaeval France, but to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so
plausible a way, with such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I
should think, a most wonderful _tour de force_. His failing health
showed itself before the end of the novel, but had the latter half
equalled the first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena
reading aloud her father’s exploits, or of such majesty as the account
of the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then
the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very
front rank of the novels.
I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse of
the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was ever
anything in the world’s history like it? It had what historical
incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from the
half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem. Those
leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice. Godfrey the
perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous and formidable,
Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy the half-mad hero!
Here is material so rich that one feels one is not worthy to handle it.
What richest imagination could ever evolve anything more marvellous and
thrilling than the actual historical facts?
But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
romance of “The Talisman”; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life in
“The Pirate”; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England in
“Kenilworth”; the rich humour of the “Legend of Montrose”; above all,
bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a coarse age,
there is not one word to offend the most sensitive ear, and it is borne
in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter Scott, and how high
the service which he did for literature and for humanity.
For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the same
shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his
admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly impartial
man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to tell the
absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a man as well
as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world was ever quite
so good as the subject of most of our biographies. Surely these worthy
people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen eye for a pretty face,
or opened the second bottle when they would have done better to stop at
the first, or did something to make us feel that they were men and
brothers. They need not go the length of the lady who began a biography
of her deceased husband with the words—“D—— was a dirty man,” but the
books certainly would be more readable, and the subjects more lovable
too, if we had greater light and shade in the picture.
But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would have
admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country, and
I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of toddy occasionally of
an evening which would have laid his feeble successors under the table.
His last years, at least, poor fellow, were abstemious enough, when he
sipped his barley-water, while the others passed the decanter. But what
a high-souled chivalrous gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of
honour, translating itself not into empty phrases, but into years of
labour and denial! You remember how he became sleeping partner in a
printing house, and so involved himself in its failure. There was a
legal, but very little moral, claim against him, and no one could have
blamed him had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have
enabled him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took
the whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life,
spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort to
save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly a hundred
thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the creditors—a great
record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his life thrown in.
And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who
has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single year.
I remember reading in some book of reminiscences—on second thoughts it
was in Lockhart himself—how the writer had lodged in some rooms in
Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen all evening the
silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the opposite house. All
evening the man wrote, and the observer could see the shadow hand
conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to the pile at the side. He
went to a party and returned, but still the hand was moving the sheets.
Next morning he was told that the rooms opposite were occupied by
Walter Scott.
A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction is shown
by the fact that he wrote two of his books—good ones, too—at a time
when his health was such that he could not afterwards remember one word
of them, and listened to them when they were read to him as if he were
hearing the work of another man. Apparently the simplest processes of
the brain, such as ordinary memory, were in complete abeyance, and yet
the very highest and most complex faculty—imagination in its supreme
form—was absolutely unimpaired. It is an extraordinary fact, and one to
be pondered over. It gives some support to the feeling which every
writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to
him in some strange way from without, and that he is only the medium
for placing it upon the paper. The creative thought—the germ thought
from which a larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a
bullet. He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of
having originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the
unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the least
sense of personal effort.
And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical
powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man’s materialism
at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual
uses? It is an old tag that
“Great Genius is to madness close allied,
And thin partitions do those rooms divide.”
But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work
seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the body.
Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns, Shelley,
Keats, Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band, yet Burns
was only thirty-eight when he passed away, “burned out,” as his brother
terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died by accident, and
Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a sign of a morbid
state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he
was banker first and poet afterwards. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and
Browning have all raised the average age of the poets, but for some
reason the novelists, especially of late years, have a deplorable
record. They will end by being scheduled with the white-lead workers
and other dangerous trades. Look at the really shocking case of the
young Americans, for example. What a band of promising young writers
have in a few years been swept away! There was the author of that
admirable book, “David Harum”; there was Frank Norris, a man who had in
him, I think, the seeds of greatness more than almost any living
writer. His “Pit” seemed to me one of the finest American novels. He
also died a premature death. Then there was Stephen Crane—a man who had
also done most brilliant work, and there was Harold Frederic, another
master-craftsman. Is there any profession in the world which in
proportion to its numbers could show such losses as that? In the
meantime, out of our own men Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry
Seton Merriman, and many another.
Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had rounded
off their career were really premature in their end. Thackeray, for
example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52; Dickens attained the
age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life,
although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately
for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is as
much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I
believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who were
not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous disease;
that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his signature.
Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special scourge of the
imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more, were its victims. As
to the tradition, first mentioned long after his death, that he died of
a fever contracted from a drinking bout, it is absurd on the face of
it, since no such fever is known to science. But a very moderate
drinking bout would be extremely likely to bring a chronic nervous
complaint to a disastrous end.
One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green
volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account of
his character is complete which does not deal with the strange,
secretive vein which ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was
the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met him
day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the whole of
Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his pecuniary
liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the
first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might
trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish
Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret
through the long chapters of so many of his novels.
It’s a sad book, Lockhart’s “Life.” It leaves gloom in the mind. The
sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing
intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of
literature. But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is the
memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but faced
Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper. He sampled
every human emotion. Great was his joy and great his success, great was
his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the sons of men I don’t
think there are many greater than he who lies under the great slab at
Dryburgh.