MORALITY AND RELIGION.
The very same causes which limited Scott's humour and irony to the
commoner fields of experience, and prevented him from ever introducing
into his stories characters of the highest type of moral
thoughtfulness, gave to his own morality and religion, which were, I
think, true to the core so far as they went, a shade of distinct
conventionality. It is no doubt quite true, as he himself tells us,
that he took more interest in his mercenaries and moss-troopers,
outlaws, gipsies, and beggars, than he did in the fine ladies and
gentlemen under a cloud whom he adopted as heroines and heroes. But
that was the very sign of his conventionalism. Though he interested
himself more in these irregular persons, he hardly ever ventured to
paint their inner life so as to show how little there was to choose
between the sins of those who are at war with society and the sins of
those who bend to the yoke of society. He widened rather than narrowed
the chasm between the outlaw and the respectable citizen, even while
he did not disguise his own romantic interest in the former. He
extenuated, no doubt, the sins of all brave and violent defiers of the
law, as distinguished from the sins of crafty and cunning abusers of
the law. But the leaning he had to the former was, as he was willing
to admit, what he regarded as a "naughty" leaning. He did not attempt
for a moment to balance accounts between them and society. He paid his
tribute as a matter of course to the established morality, and only
put in a word or two by way of attempt to diminish the severity of the
sentence on the bold transgressor. And then, where what is called the
"law of honour" comes in to traverse the law of religion, he had no
scruple in setting aside the latter in favour of the customs of
gentlemen, without any attempt to justify that course. Yet it is
evident from various passages in his writings that he held Christian
duty inconsistent with duelling, and that he held himself a sincere
Christian. In spite of this, when he was fifty-six, and under no
conceivable hurry or perturbation of feeling, but only concerned to
defend his own conduct--which was indeed plainly right--as to a
political disclosure which he had made in his life of Napoleon, he
asked his old friend William Clerk to be his second, if the expected
challenge from General Gourgaud should come, and declared his firm
intention of accepting it. On the strength of official evidence he had
exposed some conduct of General Gourgaud's at St. Helena, which
appeared to be far from honourable, and he thought it his duty on that
account to submit to be shot at by General Gourgaud, if General
Gourgaud had wished it. In writing to William Clerk to ask him to be
his second, he says, "Like a man who finds himself in a scrape,
General Gourgaud may wish to fight himself out of it, and if the
quarrel should be thrust on me, why, _I will not baulk him, Jackie_.
He shall not dishonour the country through my sides, I can assure
him." In other words, Scott acted just as he had made Waverley and
others of his heroes act, on a code of honour which he knew to be
false, and he must have felt in this case to be something worse. He
thought himself at that time under the most stringent obligations both
to his creditors and his children, to do all in his power to redeem
himself and his estate from debt. Nay, more, he held that his life was
a trust from his Creator, which he had no right to throw away merely
because a man whom he had not really injured, was indulging a strong
wish to injure him; but he could so little brook the imputation of
physical cowardice, that he was moral coward enough to resolve to meet
General Gourgaud, if General Gourgaud lusted after a shot at him. Nor
is there any trace preserved of so much as a moral scruple in his own
mind on the subject, and this though there are clear traces in his
other writings as to what he thought Christian morality required. But
the Border chivalry was so strong in Scott that, on subjects of this
kind at least, his morality was the conventional morality of a day
rapidly passing away.
He showed the same conventional feeling in his severity towards one of
his own brothers who had been guilty of cowardice. Daniel Scott was
the black sheep of the family. He got into difficulties in business,
formed a bad connexion with an artful woman, and was sent to try his
fortunes in the West Indies. There he was employed in some service
against a body of refractory negroes--we do not know its exact
nature--and apparently showed the white feather. Mr. Lockhart says
that "he returned to Scotland a dishonoured man; and though he found
shelter and compassion from his mother, his brother would never see
him again. Nay, when, soon after, his health, shattered by dissolute
indulgence, ... gave way altogether, and he died, as yet a young man,
the poet refused either to attend his funeral or to wear mourning for
him, like the rest of his family."[36] Indeed he always spoke of him
as his "relative," not as his brother. Here again Scott's severity was
due to his brother's failure as a "man of honour," i. e. in courage.
He was forbearing enough with vices of a different kind; made John
Ballantyne's dissipation the object rather of his jokes than of his
indignation; and not only mourned for him, but really grieved for him
when he died. It is only fair to say, however, that for this
conventional scorn of a weakness rather than a sin, Scott sorrowed
sincerely later in life, and that in sketching the physical cowardice
of Connochar in _The Fair Maid of Perth_, he deliberately made an
attempt to atone for this hardness towards his brother by showing how
frequently the foundation of cowardice may be laid in perfectly
involuntary physical temperament, and pointing out with what noble
elements of disposition it may be combined. But till reflection on
many forms of human character had enlarged Scott's charity, and
perhaps also the range of his speculative ethics, he remained a
conventional moralist, and one, moreover, the type of whose
conventional code was borrowed more from that of honour than from that
of religious principle. There is one curious passage in his diary,
written very near the end of his life, in which Scott even seems to
declare that conventional standards of conduct are better, or at least
safer, than religious standards of conduct. He says in his diary for
the 15th April, 1828,--"Dined with Sir Robert Inglis, and met Sir
Thomas Acland, my old and kind friend. I was happy to see him. He may
be considered now as the head of the religious party in the House of
Commons--a powerful body which Wilberforce long commanded. It is a
difficult situation, for the adaptation of religious motives to
earthly policy is apt--among the infinite delusions of the human
heart--to be a snare."[37] His letters to his eldest son, the young
cavalry officer, on his first start in life, are much admired by Mr.
Lockhart, but to me they read a little hard, a little worldly, and
extremely conventional. Conventionality was certainly to his mind
almost a virtue.
Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely; both in his
novels and in his letters and private diary. In writing to Lord Montague,
he speaks of such enthusiasm as was then prevalent at Oxford, and which
makes, he says, "religion a motive and a pretext for particular lines of
thinking in politics and in temporal affairs" [as if it could help doing
that!] as "teaching a new way of going to the devil for God's sake," and
this expressly, because when the young are infected with it, it disunites
families, and sets "children in opposition to their parents."[38] He gives
us, however, one reason for his dread of anything like enthusiasm, which
is not conventional;--that it interferes with the submissive and tranquil
mood which is the only true religious mood. Speaking in his diary of a
weakness and fluttering at the heart, from which he had suffered, he says,
"It is an awful sensation, and would have made an enthusiast of me, had I
indulged my imagination on religious subjects. I have been always careful
to place my mind in the most tranquil posture which it can assume, during
my private exercises of devotion."[39] And in this avoidance of indulging
the imagination on religious, or even spiritual subjects, Scott goes far
beyond Shakespeare. I do not think there is a single study in all his
romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character
as such, though Jeanie Deans approaches nearest to it. The same may be
said of Shakespeare. But Shakespeare, though he has never drawn a
pre-eminently spiritual character, often enough indulged his imagination
while meditating on spiritual themes.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 36: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 198-9.]
[Footnote 37: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 231.]
[Footnote 38: Ibid., vii. 255-6.]
[Footnote 39: Ibid., viii. 292.]