In our last chapter we took a breezy morning walk amid the Lake scenery of
England--more particularly that portion of it which lies between the old
homes of Wordsworth and of Southey; we found it a thirteen-mile stretch of
road, coiling along narrow meadows and over gray heights--beside mountains
and mountain tarns--with Helvellyn lifting mid-way and Skiddaw towering at
the end. We had our talk of Dr. Southey--so brave at his work--so generous
in his home charities--so stiff in his Churchism and latter-day
Toryism--with a very keen eye for beauty; yet writing poems--stately and
masterful--which long ago went to the top-shelves, and stay there.
We had our rough and ready interviews with that first of “War
Correspondents”--Henry Crabb Robinson--who knew all the prominent men of
this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we
all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that
strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey--he living a long
while in the Lake Country--and in his more inspired moments seeming to
carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the
borders of what we know and see. He swayed men; but he rarely taught them,
or fed them.
_Christopher North._
We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden
gateway--adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel--upon the “Elleray
woods,” amid which lived--eighty years ago--that stalwart friend of De
Quincey’s, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like
himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at
the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty
John Wilson--brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful, too,
of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He[12] was a native of
Paisley--his father having been a rich manufacturer there--and had come to
spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between
Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts
and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk--every
height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an
oarsman--making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through
the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his
wake--who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve
and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning;
and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.
This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wilson--not so well-known now
as he was sixty years ago--we collegians greatly admired in that far-off
day. He had written the _Isle of Palms_, and was responsible for much of
the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages of
_Blackwood’s Magazine_--in the chapters of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ and in
many a paper besides:--he had his first university training at Glasgow;
had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance
on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs.
Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit
of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed
him:--
“Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere
we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial
tears--having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the
blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and
kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls,
their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas--we were all
at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter
of Oxford’s Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell
upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our
youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel called the
Beautiful; we see the Saints on the stained windows; at the Altar
the picture of One up Calvary meekly ascending. It seemed then that
our hearts had no need even of the kindness of kindred--of the
country where we were born, and that had received the continued
blessings of our enlarging love! Yet away went, even then,
sometimes, our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons wafting
love messages beneath their unwearied wings.”[13]
We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet
it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he
cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and
into whatever sea of topics he plunged--early or late in life--he always
came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged
rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14] in Windermere to
which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow
there; his new roads--hewn through the forests--wind there; he plots a new
house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat
later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek
anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks
after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry;
but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of
his--into which his daughter gives us a peep--that show such entries as
this:--“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than
nine eggs;” and again--“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs
on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful,
will appear some bit of verse like this:--
“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee?
Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be,
That spends its life in beauty and in bliss;
Soft on thee fall the breath of time,
And still retain in heavenly clime
The bloom that charms in this.”
He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of the _Isle
of Palms_; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but
which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial
music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of
Byron.
Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one
who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the
splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of
controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate;
it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome--a gentle girlish treble of
sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of
manhood.
_Wilson in Scotland._
But all that delightful life amidst the woods of Elleray--with its
game-cocks, and boats, and mountain rambles, and shouted chorus of
Prometheus--comes to a sharp end. The inherited fortune of the poet, by
some criminal carelessness or knavery of a relative, goes in a day; and
our fine stalwart wrestler must go to Edinboro’ to wrestle with the fates.
There he coquets for a time with law; but presently falls into pleasant
affiliation with old Mr. Blackwood (who was a remarkable man in his way)
in the conduct of his magazine. And then came the trumpet blasts of
mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and
which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up
their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as
a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much
of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand--bating some
blackguardism--he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment--lighted
up with scholarly hues of color.
There was associated with Wilson in those days, in work upon _Blackwood_,
a young man--whom we may possibly not have occasion to speak of again,
and yet who is worthy of mention. I mean J. G. Lockhart,[15] who
afterwards became son-in-law and the biographer of Walter Scott--a slight
young fellow in that day, very erect and prim; wearing his hat well
forward on his heavy brows, and so shading a face that was thin, clean
cut, handsome, and which had almost the darkness of a Spaniard’s. He put
his rapier-like thrusts into a good many papers which the two wrought at
together. All his life he loved literary digs with his stiletto--which was
very sharp--and when he left Edinboro’ to edit the _Quarterly Review_ in
London (as he did in after days) he took his stiletto with him. There are
scenes in that unevenly written Lockhart story of _Adam Blair_--hardly
known now--which for thrilling passion, blazing out of clear sufficiencies
of occasion, would compare well with kindred scenes of Scott’s own, and
which score deeper colorings of human woe and loves and remorse than
belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not
entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge;
not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, but--subtle, psychologic,
touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and
fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer
of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads
into which he has put--under flowing English verse--all the clashing of
Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.
We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by
that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection with
_Blackwood_ that the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro’
University--which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas
Brown--fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his
friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by
two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing
should be put forward--in such a staid city as Edinboro’, and against
such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton--for a Chair which had been held
by Dugald Stewart! But he _was_ so put forward, and successfully; Walter
Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely
to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for
the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at
quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under
limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that
he had never put to any intellectual work before.[16] But there were
very many people in Edinboro’ who had been aggrieved by the
appointment--largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come.
There was, naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the
opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:--
“I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him
down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection
of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks,
I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound
silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory
introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to
decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice
of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept
up--unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause--a flow of
rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors,
never delivered in the same place. Not a word--not a murmur escaped
his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down
unanimous burst of applause.”[17]
From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the
place, and won a popularity with his annual relays of pupils that was
unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly
have been written by others elsewhere--more close, more compact, more
thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid
and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished
system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their
places. But they made up a series--continuous, and lapping each into each,
by easy confluence of topic--of discourses on moral duties and on moral
relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk--sometimes in his
heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times
bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as
much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the
rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a
duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm.
From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully
occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with which his name
had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years’
teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of
travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in
his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are
twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to
resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt
figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro’
streets.
His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of
to-day; but one who has known _Blackwood_ of old, can hardly wander
anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections
of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech.
_Thomas Campbell._
Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one
of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he
is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last.
A verse or two from one of the little poems he wrote will bring him to
your memory:
“On Linden when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow,
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”
And again:
“Then shook the hills with thunder riven,
Then rushed the steed to battle driven,
And louder than the bolts of heaven,
Far flashed the red artillery.”
If Thomas Campbell[18] had never written anything more than that page-long
story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all
the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for
seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of
declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of
battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small
provincial journal in Scotland--as not coming up to the true poetic
standard![19]
I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in
Scotland--following his university career at Glasgow--and a starveling
tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)--he went to
London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a
long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of
which may possibly have grown his _Gertrude of Wyoming_; his father was
for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however
a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet
became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock
was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.
The first _coup_ by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright,
polished poem--with its couplets all in martinet-like order--called the
_Pleasures of Hope_. We all know it, if for nothing more, by reason of
the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland:
“Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time!
Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;
Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,
Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe!
Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,
Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career,
Hope for a season bade the world farewell,
And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”
Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried
him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful
Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon
the coffin of the poet.
But in addition to its glow of liberalism, this first poem of Campbell
was, measured by all the old canons of verse, thoroughly artistic. Its
pauses, its rhymes, its longs and shorts were of the best prize order;
even its errors in matters of fact have an academic tinge--as, for
instance,--
“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along!”
The truth is, Mr. Campbell was never strong in his natural history; he
does not scruple to put flamingoes and palm trees into the valley of
Wyoming. Another reason why the first poem of Campbell’s, written when he
was only twenty-one, came to such success, was the comparatively clear
field it had. The date of publication was at the end of the century. Byron
was in his boyhood; Scott had not published his _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
(1805); Southey had printed only his _Joan of Arc_ (1796), which few
people read; the same may be said of Landor’s _Gebir_, (1797); Cowper was
an old story; Rogers’s _Pleasures of Memory_ (1792), and Moore’s
translation of _Anacreon_ (1799-1800), were the more current things with
which people who loved fresh poetry could regale themselves. The _Lyrical
Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge had indeed been printed, perhaps a
year or two before, down in Bristol; but scarce any one read _these_; few
bought them;[20] and yet--in that copy of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was lying
_perdu_--almost unknown and uncared for--the “Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.”
_Gertrude of Wyoming_, a poem, written at Sydenham, near London, about
1807, and which, sixty years ago, every good American who was collecting
books thought it necessary to place upon his shelves, I rarely find there
now. It has not the rhetorical elaboration of Campbell’s first poem; never
won its success; there are bits of war in it, and of massacre, that are
gorgeously encrimsoned, and which are laced through and through with
sounds of fife and warwhoop; but the landscape is a disorderly
exaggeration (I have already hinted at its palm trees) and its love-tale
has only the ardors of a stage scene in it; we know where the tragedy is
coming in, and gather up our wraps so as to be ready when the curtain
falls.
He was a born actor--in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the
on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of
the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped
always and everywhere to consider his _pose_.
There is little of interest in Campbell’s personal history; he married a
cousin; lived, as I said, mostly in London, or its immediate
neighborhood. He had two sons--one dying young, and the other of weak
mind--lingering many years--a great grief and source of anxiety to his
father, who had the reputation of being exacting and stern in his family.
He edited for a long time the _New Monthly Magazine_, and wrote much for
it, but is represented to have been, in its conduct, careless,
hypercritical, and dilatory. He lectured, too, before the Royal Institute
on poetry; read oratorically and showily--his subject matter being
semi-philosophical, with a great air of learning and academically dry;
there was excellent system in his discourses, and careful thinking on
themes remote from most people’s thought. He wrote some historical works
which are not printed nowadays; his life of Mrs. Siddons is bad; his life
of Petrarch is but little better; some poems he published late in life are
quite unworthy of him and are never read. Nevertheless, this prim,
captious gentleman wrote many things which have the ring of truest poetry
and which will be dear to the heart of England as long as English ships
sail forth to battle.
_A Minstrel of the Border._
Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten--whether British
ships go to battle, or idle at the docks--is Walter Scott.[21] I scarce
know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well--thanks to the
biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its
minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know--as we know about a
neighbor’s child--of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh
sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the
strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and
free rein--amongst other game--the old wives’ tales and border ballads
which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into
large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish
love-chase--beginning in Grey Friar’s church-yard; she, however, who
sprung the race--presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he
goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these
experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad of
_William and Helen_, founded on the German Lenore:--
“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode!
Splash, splash! along the sea!
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee!”
And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as
marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their
spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his
succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The
elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the
law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For the
_Border Minstrelsy_ comes spinning its delightfully musical and tender
stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long
poem--the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_--which waked all Scotland and England
to the melody of the new master. He was thirty-four then; ripening later
than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published his _Pleasures of Hope_.
There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all
precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language--stepping
from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and
with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing
master’s; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of
care, and a swift pace that made the “pebbles fly.” Just as unlike, too,
was this racing freedom of Scott’s--which dragged the mists away from the
Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming
heather over the moors--from that other strain of verse, with its
introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth
was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the
rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a
little landscape picture--let us say from _Marmion_--and contrasting with
it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more before
_Marmion_ was published. First, then, from Scott--and nothing prettier
and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,--
“November’s sky is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red and sear;
Late gazing down the steepy linn
That hems our little garden in.”
(I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott’s
home surroundings at Ashestiel.)
“Low in its dark and narrow glen
You scarce the rivulet might ken,
So thick the tangled greenwood grew,
So feeble trilled the streamlet through;
Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen
Through brush and briar, no longer green,
An angry brook it sweeps the glade,
Breaks over rock and wild cascade,
And foaming brown with double speed
Marries its waters to the Tweed.”
There it is--a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is
like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook.
Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern
Abbey:--
“Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone.”
(Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen
dwellers there); and again:--
“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity!
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of men
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains.”
This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in
the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth putting _his_ all
on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and
languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying
only--look--and be glad!
In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the
one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing.
I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced
nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be
apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this
page in that category:--As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and
large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and
clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the
pages of the _Minstrel_ and of _Marmion_--needed apology! Apology or no, I
think Scott’s poems will be read for a good many years to come. The guide
books and Highland travellers--and high-thoughted travellers--will keep
them alive--if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better
fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs than
_Marmion_, and the _Lady of the Lake_.
_The Waverley Dispensation._
Meantime, our author has married--a marriage, Goldwin Smith says, of
“intellectual disparagement”; which I suppose means that Mrs. Scott was
not learned and bookish--as she certainly was not; but she was honest,
true-hearted, and domestic. Mr. Redding profanely says that she was used
to plead, “Walter, my dear, you must write a new book, for I want another
silk dress.” I think this is apocryphal; and there is good reason to
believe that she gave a little hearty home huzza at each one of Mr.
Scott’s quick succeeding triumphs.
Our author has also changed his home; first from the pretty little village
of Lasswade, which is down by Dalkeith, to Ashestiel by the Yarrow; and
thence again to a farm-house, near to that unfortunate pile of Abbotsford,
which stands on the Tweed bank, shadowed by the trees he planted, and
shadowed yet more heavily by the story of his misfortunes. I notice a
disposition in some recent writers to disparage this notable country home
as pseudo-Gothic and flimsy. This gives a false impression of a structure
which, though it lack that singleness of expression and subordination of
details which satisfy a professional critic, does yet embody in a
singularly interesting way, and with solid construction, all the
aspirations, tastes, clannish vanities and archæologic whims of the great
novelist. The castellated tower is there to carry the Scottish standard,
and the cloister to keep alive reverent memory of old religious houses;
and the miniature Court gate, with its warder’s horn; and the Oriole
windows, whose details are, maybe, snatched from Kenilworth; the mass,
too, is impressive and smacks all over of Scott’s personality and of the
traditions he cherished.
I am tempted to introduce here some notes of a visit made to this locality
very many years ago. I had set off on a foot-pilgrimage from the old
border town of Berwick-on-Tweed; had kept close along the banks of the
river, seeing men drawing nets for salmon, whose silvery scales flashed in
the morning sun. All around swept those charming fields of Tweed-side,
green with the richest June growth; here and there were shepherds at their
sheep washing; old Norham Castle presently lifted its gray buttresses into
view; then came the long Coldstream bridge, with its arches shimmering in
the flood below; and after this the palace of the Duke of Roxburgh. In
thus following up leisurely the Tweed banks from Berwick, I had slept the
first night at Kelso; had studied the great fine bit of ruin which is
there, and had caught glimpses of Teviot-dale and of the Eildon Hills; had
wandered out of my way for a sight of Smailholme tower, and of Sandy
Knowe--both associated with Scott’s childhood; I passed Dryburgh, where he
lies buried, and at last on an evening of early June, 1845, a stout
oarsman ferried me across the Tweed and landed me in Melrose.
I slept at the George Inn--dreaming (as many a young wayfarer in those
lands has since done), of Ivanhoe and Rebecca, and border wars and _Old
Mortality_. Next morning, after a breakfast upon trout taken from some
near stream (very likely the Yarrow or the Gala-water), I strolled two
miles or so along the road which followed the Tweed bank upon the southern
side, and by a green foot-gate entered the Abbotsford grounds. The forest
trees--not over high at that time--were those which the master had
planted. From his favorite outdoor seat, sheltered by a thicket of
arbor-vitæ, could be caught a glimpse of the rippled surface of the Tweed
and of the turrets of the house.
It was all very quiet--quiet in the wood-walks; quiet as you approached
the court-yard; the master dead; the family gone; I think there was a yelp
from some young hound in an out-building, and a twitter from some birds I
did not know; there was the unceasing murmur of the river. Besides these
sounds, the silence was unbroken; and when I rang the bell at the entrance
door, the jangle of it was very startling; startling a little terrier,
too, whose quick, sharp bark rang noisily through the outer court.
Only an old house-keeper was in charge, who had fallen into that dreadful
parrot-like way of telling visitors what things were best worth
seeing--which frets one terribly. What should you or I care (fresh from
_Guy Mannering_ or _Kenilworth_) whether a bit of carving came from
Jedburgh or Kelso? or about the jets in the chandelier, or the way in
which a Russian Grand Duke wrote his name in the visitors’ book?
But when we catch sight of the desk at which the master wrote, or of the
chair in which he sat, and of his shoes and coat and cane--looking as if
they might have been worn yesterday--these seem to bring us nearer to the
man who has written so much to cheer and to charm the world. There was,
too, a little box in the corridor, simple and iron-bound, with the line
written below it, “Post will close at two.” It was as if we had heard the
master of the house say it. Perhaps the notice was in his handwriting (he
had been active there in 1831-2--just thirteen years before)--perhaps not;
but--somehow--more than the library, or the portrait bust, or the chatter
of the well-meaning house-keeper, it brought back the halting old
gentleman in his shooting-coat, and with ivory-headed cane--hobbling with
a vigorous step along the corridor, to post in that iron-bound box a
packet--maybe a chapter of _Woodstock_.
I have spoken of the vacant house--family gone: The young Sir Walter
Scott, of the British army, and heir to the estate--was at that date
(1845) absent in the Indies; and only two years thereafter died at sea on
his voyage home. Charles Scott, the only brother of the younger Sir
Walter, died in 1841.[22] Miss Anne Scott, the only unmarried daughter of
the author of _Waverley_, died--worn-out with tenderest care of mother and
father, and broken-hearted--in 1833. Her only sister, Mrs. (Sophia Scott)
Lockhart, died in 1837. Her oldest son--John Hugh, familiarly known as
“Hugh Little John”--the crippled boy, for whom had been written the _Tales
of a Grandfather_, and the darling of the two households upon
Tweed-side--died in 1831. I cannot forbear quoting here a charming little
memorial of him, which, within the present year, has appeared in Mr.
Lang’s _Life of Lockhart_.
“A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the
little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where
Lockhart read the manuscript of the _Fortunes of Nigel_, fancy may
see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he
called the Tweed. While children study the _Tales of a Grandfather_,
he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy
who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”--P. 75, vol. ii.
A younger son of Lockhart, Walter Scott by name, became, at the death of
the younger Walter Scott, inheritor of all equities in the landed estate
upon Tweed-side, and the proper Laird of Abbotsford. His story is a short
and a sad one; he was utterly unworthy, and died almost unbefriended at
Versailles in January, 1853.
His father, J. G. Lockhart, acknowledging a picture of this son, under
date of 1843, in a letter addressed to his daughter Charlotte--(later
Mrs. Hope-Scott,[23] and mother of the present proprietress of
Abbotsford), writes with a grief he could not cover:--
“I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to
recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for
Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became
clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is
another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”
I have not spoken--because there seemed no need to speak--of the way in
which those marvellous romantic fictions of Sir Walter came pouring from
the pen, under a cloud of mystery, and of how the great burden of his
business embarrassments--due largely to the recklessness of his jolly,
easy-going friends, the Ballantynes--overwhelmed him at last. Indeed, in
all I have ventured to say of Scott, I have a feeling of its
impertinence--as if I were telling you about your next-door neighbor: we
all know that swift, brilliant, clouded career so well! But are those
novels of his to live, and to delight coming generations, as they have the
past? I do not know what the very latest critics may have to say; but, for
my own part, I have strong belief that a century or two more will be sure
to pass over before people of discernment, and large humanities, and of
literary appreciation, will cease to read and to enjoy such stories as
that of the _Talisman of Kenilworth_ and of _Old Mortality_. I know ’tis
objected, and with much reason, that he wrote hastily, carelessly--that
his stories are in fact (what Carlyle called them) extemporaneous stories.
Yet, if they had been written under other conditions, could we have
counted upon the heat and the glow which gives them illumination?
No, no--we do not go to him for word-craft; men of shorter imaginative
range, and whose judgments wait on conventional rule, must guide us in
such direction, and pose as our modellers of style. Goldsmith and Swift
both may train in that company. But this master we are now considering
wrote so swiftly and dashed so strongly into the current of what he had to
say, that he was indifferent to methods and words, except what went to
engage the reader and keep him always cognizant of his purpose. But do you
say that this is the best aim of all writing? Most surely it is wise for a
writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of
the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by
directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls
for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to
follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can
accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words.
Next it is objected to these old favorites of ours, that they are not
clever in the exhibit and explication of mental processes, and their
analysis of motives is incomplete. Well, I suppose this to be true; and
that he did, to a certain extent (as Carlyle used to allege grumblingly),
work from the outside-in. He did live in times when men fell
straightforwardly in love, without counting the palpitations of the heart;
and when heroes struck honest blows without reckoning in advance upon the
probable contractile power of their biceps muscles. Again, it is said that
his history often lacks precision and sureness of statement. Well, the
dates are certainly sometimes twisted a few years out of their proper
lines and seasons; but it is certain, also, that he does give the
atmosphere and the coloring of historic periods in a completer and more
satisfying way than many much carefuller chroniclers, and his portraits of
great historic personages are by common consent--even of the critics--more
full of the life of their subjects, and of a realistic exhibit of their
controlling characteristics, than those of the historians proper. Nothing
can be more sure than that Scott was not a man of great critical learning;
nothing is more sure than that he was frequently at fault in minor
details; but who will gainsay the fact that he was among the most charming
and beneficent of story-tellers?
There may be households which will rule him out as old fashioned and
stumbling, and wordy, and long; but I know of one, at least, where he will
hold his place, as among the most delightful of visitors--and where on
winter nights he will continue to bring with him (as he has brought so
many times already) the royal figure of the Queen Elizabeth--shining in
her jewels, or sulking in her coquetries; and Dandie Dinmont, with his
pow-wow of Pepper and Mustard; and King Jamie, with Steenie and jingling
Geordie; and the patient, prudent, excellent Jeanie Deans; and the weak,
old, amiable mistress of Tillietudlem; and Rebecca, and the Lady in the
Green Mantle, and Dominie Sampson, and Peter Peebles, and Di Vernon, and
all the rest!
_Glints of Royalty._
They tell us Scott loved kings: why not? Romanticism was his nurse, from
the days when he kicked up his baby heels under the shadows of Smailholme
Tower, and Feudalism was his foster-parent. Always he loved banners and
pageantry, and always the glitter and pomp which give their under or over
tones to his pages of balladry. And if he stood in awe of titles and of
rank, and felt the cockles of his heart warming in contact with these,
’twas not by reason of a vulgar tuft-hunting spirit, nor was it due to the
crass toadyism which seeks reflected benefit; but it grew, I think, out of
sheer mental allegiance to feudal splendors and traditions.
Whether Scott ever personally encountered the old king, George III., may
be doubtful; but I recall in some of his easy, family letters (perhaps to
his eldest boy Walter), most respectful and kindly allusions to the august
master of the royal Windsor household--who ordered his home affairs so
wisely--keeping “good hours;” while, amid the turbulences and unrest which
belonged to the American and French Revolutions--succeeding each other in
portentous sequence--he was waning toward that period of woful mental
imbecility which beset him at last, and which clouded an earlier
chapter[24] of our record. The Prince Regent--afterward George IV.--was
always well disposed toward Scott; had read the _Minstrel_, and _Marmion_,
with the greatest gratification (he did sometimes read), and told Lord
Byron as much; even comparing the Scot with Homer--which was as near to
classicism as the Prince often ran. But Byron, in his _English Bards_,
etc., published in his earlier days, had made his little satiric dab at
the _Minstrel_--finding a lively hope in its being _the Last_!
Murray, however, in the good Christian spirit which sometimes overtakes
publishers, stanched these wounds, and brought the poets to bask together
in the smiles of royalty. The first Baronetcy the Prince bestowed--after
coming to Kingship--was that which made the author of Waverley Sir Walter;
the poet had witnessed and reported the scenes at the Coronation of 1820
in London; and on the King’s gala visit to Edinboro’--when all the heights
about the gray old city boomed with welcoming cannon, and all the streets
and all the water-ways were a-flutter with tartans and noisy with
bagpipes--it was Sir Walter who virtually marshalled the hosts, and gave
chieftain-like greeting to the Prince. Scott’s management of the whole
stupendous paraphernalia--the banquets, the processions, the receptions,
the decorations (of all which the charming water-colors of Turner are in
evidence)--gave wonderful impressions of the masterful resources and
dominating tact of the man; now clinking glasses (of Glenlivet) with the
mellow King (counting sixty years in that day); now humoring into quietude
the jealousies of Highland chieftains; again threading Canongate at
nightfall and afoot--from end to end--to observe if all welcoming
bannerols and legends are in place; again welcoming to his home, in the
heat of ceremonial occupation, the white-haired and trembling poet Crabbe;
anon, stealing away to his Castle Street chamber for a new chapter in the
_Peveril of the Peak_ (then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury,
and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a
bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine
(Lord Kinnedder),[25] out by Queensferry to his burial.
It was only eight years thereafter, when this poet manager of the great
Scotch jubilee--who seemed good for the work of a score of years--sailed,
by royal permission (an act redeeming and glorifying royalty) upon a
Government ship--seeking shores and skies which would put new vigor (if it
might be) into a constitution broken by toil, and into hopes that had been
blighted by blow on blow of sorrow.
Never was a royal favor more worthily bespoken; never one more vainly
bestowed. ’Twas too late. No human eye--once so capable of seeing--ever
opened for a first look so wearily upon the blue of the
Mediterranean--upon the marvellous fringed shores of lower Italy--upon
Rome, Florence, and the snowy Swiss portals of the Simplon.
Royalty (in person of William IV., then on the throne) asked kindly after
the sick magician--who was established presently on a sick bed in London;
while the cabmen on street corners near by talked low of the “great mon”
who lay there a-dying. A little show of recovery gave power to reach
home--Abbotsford and Tweed-side--once more. There was no hope; but it took
time for the great strength in him to waste.
Withal there was a fine glint of royalty at the end. “Be virtuous, my
dear,” he said to Lockhart; “be a good man.” And that utterance--the
summing up of forty years of brilliant accomplishment, and of baffled
ambitions--emphasized by the trembling voice of a dying man--will dwell
longer in human memories, and more worthily, than the empty baronial pile
we call Abbotsford, past which the scurrying waters of the Tweed ripple
and murmur--as they did on the day Sir Walter was born, and on the day he
was buried at Dryburgh.