SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN.
Scott usually professed great ignorance of politics, and did what he
could to hold aloof from a world in which his feelings were very
easily heated, while his knowledge was apt to be very imperfect. But
now and again, and notably towards the close of his life, he got
himself mixed up in politics, and I need hardly say that it was always
on the Tory, and generally on the red-hot Tory, side. His first hasty
intervention in politics was the song I have just referred to on Lord
Melville's acquittal, during the short Whig administration of 1806. In
fact Scott's comparative abstinence from politics was due, I believe,
chiefly to the fact that during almost the whole of his literary life,
Tories and not Whigs were in power. No sooner was any reform proposed,
any abuse threatened, than Scott's eager Conservative spirit flashed
up. Proposals were made in 1806 for changes--and, as it was thought,
reforms--in the Scotch Courts of Law, and Scott immediately saw
something like national calamity in the prospect. The mild proposals
in question were discussed at a meeting of the Faculty of Advocates,
when Scott made a speech longer than he had ever before delivered, and
animated by a "flow and energy of eloquence" for which those who were
accustomed to hear his debating speeches were quite unprepared. He
walked home between two of the reformers, Mr. Jeffrey and another,
when his companions began to compliment him on his eloquence, and to
speak playfully of its subject. But Scott was in no mood for
playfulness. "No, no," he exclaimed, "'tis no laughing matter; little
by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and
undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall
remain!" "And so saying," adds Mr. Lockhart, "he turned round to
conceal his agitation, but not until Mr. Jeffrey saw tears gushing
down his cheek,--resting his head, until he recovered himself, on the
wall of the Mound."[47] It was the same strong feeling for old Scotch
institutions which broke out so quaintly in the midst of his own worst
troubles in 1826, on behalf of the Scotch banking-system, when he so
eloquently defended, in the letters of _Malachi Malagrowther_, what
would now be called Home-Rule for Scotland, and indeed really defeated
the attempt of his friends the Tories, who were the innovators this
time, to encroach on those sacred institutions--the Scotch one-pound
note, and the private-note circulation of the Scotch banks. But when I
speak of Scott as a Home-Ruler, I should add that had not Scotland
been for generations governed to a great extent, and, as he thought
successfully, by Home-Rule, he was far too good a Conservative to have
apologized for it at all. The basis of his Conservatism was always the
danger of undermining a system which had answered so well. In the
concluding passages of the letters to which I have just referred, he
contrasts "Theory, a scroll in her hand, full of deep and mysterious
combinations of figures, the least failure in any one of which may
alter the result entirely," with "a practical system successful for
upwards of a century." His vehement and unquailing opposition to
Reform in almost the very last year of his life, when he had already
suffered more than one stroke of paralysis, was grounded on precisely
the same argument. At Jedburgh, on the 21st March, 1831, he appeared
in the midst of an angry population (who hooted and jeered at him till
he turned round fiercely upon them with the defiance, "I regard your
gabble no more than the geese on the green,") to urge the very same
protest. "We in this district," he said, "are proud, and with reason,
that the first chain-bridge was the work of a Scotchman. It still
hangs where he erected it a pretty long time ago. The French heard of
our invention, and determined to introduce it, but with great
improvements and embellishments. A friend of my own saw the thing
tried. It was on the Seine at Marly. The French chain-bridge looked
lighter and airier than the prototype. Every Englishman present was
disposed to confess that we had been beaten at our own trade. But
by-and-by the gates were opened, and the multitude were to pass over.
It began to swing rather formidably beneath the pressure of the good
company; and by the time the architect, who led the procession in
great pomp and glory, reached the middle, the whole gave way, and
he--worthy, patriotic artist--was the first that got a ducking. They
had forgot the middle bolt,--or rather this ingenious person had
conceived that to be a clumsy-looking feature, which might safely be
dispensed with, while he put some invisible gimcrack of his own to
supply its place."[48] It is strange that Sir Walter did not see that
this kind of criticism, so far as it applied at all to such an
experiment as the Reform Bill, was even more in point as a rebuke to
the rashness of the Scotch reformer who hung the first successful
chain-bridge, than to the rashness of the French reformer of reform
who devised an unsuccessful variation on it. The audacity of the first
experiment was much the greater, though the competence of the person
who made it was the greater also. And as a matter of fact, the
political structure against the supposed insecurity of which Sir
Walter was protesting, with all the courage of that dauntless though
dying nature, was made by one who understood his work at least as well
as the Scotch architect. The tramp of the many multitudes who have
passed over it has never yet made it to "swing dangerously," and Lord
Russell in the fulness of his age was but yesterday rejoicing in what
he had achieved, and even in what those have achieved who have altered
his work in the same spirit in which he designed it.
But though Sir Walter persuaded himself that his Conservatism was all
founded in legitimate distrust of reckless change, there is evidence,
I think, that at times at least it was due to elements less noble. The
least creditable incident in the story of his political life--which
Mr. Lockhart, with his usual candour, did not conceal--was the
bitterness with which he resented a most natural and reasonable
Parliamentary opposition to an appointment which he had secured for
his favourite brother, Tom. In 1810 Scott appointed his brother Tom,
who had failed as a Writer to the Signet, to a place vacant under
himself as Clerk of Session. He had not given him the best place
vacant, because he thought it his duty to appoint an official who had
grown grey in the service, but he gave Tom Scott this man's place,
which was worth about 250_l._ a year. In the meantime Tom Scott's
affairs did not render it convenient for him to be come-at-able, and
he absented himself, while they were being settled, in the Isle of
Man. Further, the Commission on the Scotch system of judicature almost
immediately reported that his office was one of supererogation, and
ought to be abolished; but, to soften the blow, they proposed to allow
him a pension of 130_l._ per annum. This proposal was discussed with
some natural jealousy in the House of Lords. Lord Lauderdale thought
that when Tom Scott was appointed, it must have been pretty evident
that the Commission would propose to abolish his office, and that the
appointment therefore should not have been made. "Mr. Thomas Scott,"
he said, "would have 130_l._ for life as an indemnity for an office
the duties of which he never had performed, while those clerks who had
laboured for twenty years had no adequate remuneration." Lord Holland
supported this very reasonable and moderate view of the case; but of
course the Ministry carried their way, and Tom Scott got his unearned
pension. Nevertheless, Scott was furious with Lord Holland. Writing
soon after to the happy recipient of this little pension, he says,
"Lord Holland has been in Edinburgh, and we met accidentally at a
public party. He made up to me, but I remembered his part in your
affair, and _cut_ him with as little remorse as an old pen." Mr.
Lockhart says, on Lord Jeffrey's authority, that the scene was a very
painful one. Lord Jeffrey himself declared that it was the only
rudeness of which he ever saw Scott guilty in the course of a
life-long familiarity. And it is pleasant to know that he renewed his
cordiality with Lord Holland in later years, though there is no
evidence that he ever admitted that he had been in the wrong. But the
incident shows how very doubtful Sir Walter ought to have felt as to
the purity of his Conservatism. It is quite certain that the proposal
to abolish Tom Scott's office without compensation was not a reckless
experiment of a fundamental kind. It was a mere attempt at diminishing
the heavy burdens laid on the people for the advantage of a small
portion of the middle class, and yet Scott resented it with as much
display of selfish passion--considering his genuine nobility of
breeding--as that with which the rude working men of Jedburgh
afterwards resented his gallant protest against the Reform Bill, and,
later again, saluted the dauntless old man with the dastardly cry of
"Burk Sir Walter!" Judged truly, I think Sir Walter's conduct in
cutting Lord Holland "with as little remorse as an old pen," for
simply doing his duty in the House of Lords, was quite as ignoble in
him as the bullying and insolence of the democratic party in 1831,
when the dying lion made his last dash at what he regarded as the foes
of the Constitution. Doubtless he held that the mob, or, as we more
decorously say, the residuum, were in some sense the enemies of true
freedom. "I cannot read in history," he writes once to Mr. Laidlaw,
"of any free State which has been brought to slavery till the rascal
and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical
government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military
despotism." But he does not seem ever to have perceived that educated
men identify themselves with "the rascal and uninstructed populace,"
whenever they indulge on behalf of the selfish interests of their own
class, passions such as he had indulged in fighting for his brother's
pension. It is not the want of instruction, it is the rascaldom, i. e.
the violent _esprit de corps_ of a selfish class, which "naturally
leads" to violent remedies. Such rascaldom exists in all classes, and
not least in the class of the cultivated and refined. Generous and
magnanimous as Scott was, he was evidently by no means free from the
germs of it.
One more illustration of Scott's political Conservatism, and I may
leave his political life, which was not indeed his strong side,
though, as with all sides of Scott's nature, it had an energy and
spirit all his own. On the subject of Catholic Emancipation he took a
peculiar view. As he justly said, he hated bigotry, and would have
left the Catholics quite alone, but for the great claims of their
creed to interfere with political life. And even so, when the penal
laws were once abolished, he would have abolished also the
representative disabilities, as quite useless, as well as very
irritating when the iron system of effective repression had ceased.
But he disapproved of the abolition of the political parts of the
penal laws. He thought they would have stamped out Roman Catholicism;
and whether that were just or unjust, he thought it would have been a
great national service. "As for Catholic Emancipation," he wrote to
Southey in 1807, "I am not, God knows, a bigot in religious matters,
nor a friend to persecution; but if a particular set of religionists
are _ipso facto_ connected with foreign politics, and placed under the
spiritual direction of a class of priests, whose unrivalled dexterity
and activity are increased by the rules which detach them from the
rest of the world--I humbly think that we may be excused from
entrusting to them those places in the State where the influence of
such a clergy, who act under the direction of a passive tool of our
worst foe, is likely to be attended with the most fatal consequences.
If a gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of
gunpowder in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may
at least be permitted to exclude him from the seat next to the
fire."[49] And in relation to the year 1825, when Scott visited
Ireland, Mr. Lockhart writes, "He on all occasions expressed manfully
his belief that the best thing for Ireland would have been never to
relax the strictly _political_ enactments of the penal laws, however
harsh these might appear. Had they been kept in vigour for another
half-century, it was his conviction that Popery would have been all
but extinguished in Ireland. But he thought that after admitting
Romanists to the elective franchise, it was a vain notion that they
could be permanently or advantageously deterred from using that
franchise in favour of those of their own persuasion."
In his diary in 1829 he puts the same view still more strongly:--"I
cannot get myself to feel at all anxious about the Catholic question.
I cannot see the use of fighting about the platter, when you have let
them snatch the meat off it. I hold Popery to be such a mean and
degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself
liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed
before 1780. They must and would, in course of time, have smothered
Popery; and I confess that I should have seen the old lady of
Babylon's mouth stopped with pleasure. But now that you have taken the
plaster off her mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see
the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in
Parliament. Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink into dust,
with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk.
The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of
nonsense will always find believers."[50] That is the view of a
strong and rather unscrupulous politician--a moss-trooper in
politics--which Scott certainly was. He was thinking evidently very
little of justice, almost entirely of the most effective means of
keeping the Kingdom, the Kingdom which he loved. Had he
understood--what none of the politicians of that day understood--the
strength of the Church of Rome as the only consistent exponent of the
principle of Authority in religion, I believe his opposition to
Catholic emancipation would have been as bitter as his opposition to
Parliamentary reform. But he took for granted that while only "silly"
persons believed in Rome, and only "infidels" rejected an
authoritative creed altogether, it was quite easy by the exercise of
common sense, to find the true compromise between reason and religious
humility. Had Scott lived through the religious controversies of our
own days, it seems not unlikely that with his vivid imagination, his
warm Conservatism, and his rather inadequate critical powers, he might
himself have become a Roman Catholic.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 47: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 328.]
[Footnote 48: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, x. 47.]
[Footnote 49: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 34.]
[Footnote 50: Ibid., ix. 305.]