THE END OF THE STRUGGLE.
Sir Walter certainly left his "name unstained," unless the serious
mistakes natural to a sanguine temperament such as his, are to be
counted as stains upon his name; and if they are, where among the sons
of men would you find many unstained names as noble as his with such a
stain upon it? He was not only sensitively honourable in motive, but,
when he found what evil his sanguine temper had worked, he used his
gigantic powers to repair it, as Samson used his great strength to
repair the mischief he had inadvertently done to Israel. But with all
his exertions he had not, when death came upon him, cleared off much
more than half his obligations. There was still 54,000_l._ to pay. But
of this, 22,000_l._ was secured in an insurance on his life, and there
were besides a thousand pounds or two in the hands of the trustees,
which had not been applied to the extinction of the debt. Mr. Cadell,
his publisher, accordingly advanced the remaining 30,000_l._ on the
security of Sir Walter's copyrights, and on the 21st February, 1833,
the general creditors were paid in full, and Mr. Cadell remained the
only creditor of the estate. In February, 1847, Sir Walter's son, the
second baronet, died childless; and in May, 1847, Mr. Cadell gave a
discharge in full of all claims, including the bond for 10,000_l._
executed by Sir Walter during the struggles of Constable and Co. to
prevent a failure, on the transfer to him of all the copyrights of Sir
Walter, including "the results of some literary exertions of the sole
surviving executor," which I conjecture to mean the copyright of the
admirable biography of Sir Walter Scott in ten volumes, to which I
have made such a host of references--probably the most perfect
specimen of a biography rich in great materials, which our language
contains. And thus, nearly fifteen years after Sir Walter's death, the
debt which, within six years, he had more than half discharged, was at
last, through the value of the copyrights he had left behind him,
finally extinguished, and the small estate of Abbotsford left cleared.
Sir Walter's effort to found a new house was even less successful than
the effort to endow it. His eldest son died childless. In 1839 he went
to Madras, as Lieutenant-Colonel of the 15th Hussars, and subsequently
commanded that regiment. He was as much beloved by the officers of his
regiment as his father had been by his own friends, and was in every
sense an accomplished soldier, and one whose greatest anxiety it was
to promote the welfare of the privates as well as of the officers of
his regiment. He took great pains in founding a library for the
soldiers of his corps, and his only legacy out of his own family was
one of 100_l._ to this library. The cause of his death was his having
exposed himself rashly to the sun in a tiger-hunt, in August, 1846; he
never recovered from the fever which was the immediate consequence.
Ordered home for his health, he died near the Cape of Good Hope, on
the 8th of February, 1847. His brother Charles died before him. He was
rising rapidly in the diplomatic service, and was taken to Persia by
Sir John MacNeill, on a diplomatic mission, as attaché and private
secretary. But the climate struck him down, and he died at Teheran,
almost immediately on his arrival, on the 28th October, 1841. Both the
sisters had died previously. Anne Scott, the younger of the two, whose
health had suffered greatly during the prolonged anxiety of her
father's illness, died on the Midsummer-day of the year following her
father's death; and Sophia, Mrs. Lockhart, died on the 17th May, 1837.
Sir Walter's eldest grandchild, John Hugh Lockhart, for whom the
_Tales of a Grandfather_ were written, died before his grandfather;
indeed Sir Walter heard of the child's death at Naples. The second
son, Walter Scott Lockhart Scott, a lieutenant in the army, died at
Versailles, on the 10th January, 1853. Charlotte Harriet Jane
Lockhart, who was married in 1847 to James Robert Hope-Scott, and
succeeded to the Abbotsford estate, died at Edinburgh, on the 26th
October, 1858, leaving three children, of whom only one survives.
Walter Michael and Margaret Anne Hope-Scott both died in infancy. The
only direct descendant, therefore, of Sir Walter Scott, is now Mary
Monica Hope-Scott who was born on the 2nd October, 1852, the
grandchild of Mrs. Lockhart, and the great-grandchild of the founder
of Abbotsford.
There is something of irony in such a result of the Herculean labours
of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott. When
fifteen years after his death the estate was at length freed from
debt, all his own children and the eldest of his grandchildren were
dead; and now forty-six years have elapsed, and there only remains one
girl of his descendants to borrow his name and live in the halls of
which he was so proud. And yet this, and this only, was wanting to
give something of the grandeur of tragedy to the end of Scott's great
enterprise. He valued his works little compared with the house and
lands which they were to be the means of gaining for his descendants;
yet every end for which he struggled so gallantly is all but lost,
while his works have gained more of added lustre from the losing
battle which he fought so long, than they could ever have gained from
his success.
What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen, had
the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was. Generous,
large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in
the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their
highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivalled
popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the
current of a stream,--these are characteristics, which, even when
enhanced as they were in his case, by the power to defy physical pain,
and to live in his imaginative world when his body was writhing in
torture, fail to touch the heroic point. And there was nothing in
Scott, while he remained prosperous, to relieve adequately the glare
of triumphant prosperity. His religious and moral feeling, though
strong and sound, was purely regulative, and not always even
regulative, where his inward principle was not reflected in the
opinions of the society in which he lived. The finer spiritual element
in Scott was relatively deficient, and so the strength of the natural
man was almost too equal, complete, and glaring. Something that should
"tame the glaring white" of that broad sunshine, was needed; and in
the years of reverse, when one gift after another was taken away, till
at length what he called even his "magic wand" was broken, and the old
man struggled on to the last, without bitterness, without defiance,
without murmuring, but not without such sudden flashes of subduing
sweetness as melted away the anger of the teacher of his
childhood,--that something seemed to be supplied. Till calamity came,
Scott appeared to be a nearly complete natural man, and no more. Then
first was perceived in him something above nature, something which
could endure though every end in life for which he had fought so
boldly should be defeated,--something which could endure and more than
endure, which could shoot a soft transparence of its own through his
years of darkness and decay. That there was nothing very elevated in
Scott's personal or moral, or political or literary ends,--that he
never for a moment thought of himself as one who was bound to leave
the earth better than he found it,--that he never seems to have so
much as contemplated a social or political reform for which he ought
to contend,--that he lived to some extent like a child blowing
soap-bubbles, the brightest and most gorgeous of which--the Abbotsford
bubble--vanished before his eyes, is not a take-off from the charm of
his career, but adds to it the very speciality of its fascination. For
it was his entire unconsciousness of moral or spiritual efforts, the
simple straightforward way in which he laboured for ends of the most
ordinary kind, which made it clear how much greater the man was than
his ends, how great was the mind and character which prosperity failed
to display, but which became visible at once so soon as the storm came
down and the night fell. Few men who battle avowedly for the right,
battle for it with the calm fortitude, the cheerful equanimity, with
which Scott battled to fulfil his engagements and to save his family
from ruin. He stood high amongst those--
"Who ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,"
among those who have been able to display--
"One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
And it was because the man was so much greater than the ends for which
he strove, that there is a sort of grandeur in the tragic fate which
denied them to him, and yet exhibited to all the world the infinite
superiority of the striver himself to the toy he was thus passionately
craving.
THE END.