NOVELS, FINANCIAL RUIN, DEATH
This period was the zenith of Scott’s apparent prosperity. Five thousand
guineas were given, or were to be given, by Constable for the remaining
copyright of _Ivanhoe_, _The Monastery_, _The Abbot_, and _Kenilworth_.
“Scott must have reckoned on clearing £30,000 at least in the course of
a couple of years, by the novels written within such a period,” says
Lockhart. Constable granted bills for four unnamed and unimagined “works
of fiction,” and they proved to be _Peveril_, _Quentin Durward_, _St.
Ronan’s Well_, and _Redgauntlet_. Scott’s eldest son was now in an
expensive cavalry regiment; his second son was preparing for the
University, Abbotsford was growing in extent and expense, and Scott was
keeping open house. Lockhart, then living in the tiny neighbouring
cottage of Chiefswood, was a man who did not suffer bores gladly, and he
saw Abbotsford full of bores of all kinds--inquisitive foreigners,
University prigs, condescending great people, and local lairds with
their families. He reckoned that at least a sixth of the peerage of
England passed through Abbotsford, and all the distinguished people of
Scotland! With these came obscure citizens of Edinburgh, old college
mates and office mates of Scott: “These were welcome guests, let who
might be under that roof,” and Scott “contrived to make them all equally
happy, with him, with themselves, and with each other.”
He was the genius of hospitality: he lavished his time on his guests,
who had him with them for the whole of the day, except when he rode
early to Chiefswood and wrote _The Pirate_ on a bureau which remains in
the cottage. He seemed the idlest of men, while scores of essays, and
letters not to be counted, in addition to the novels, flowed from his
pen in the unbroken hours of early morning. Only his extraordinary
strength and buoyancy could enable him to be at once the most lavish
host and the most prolific writer of his age, perhaps of any age. Merely
to “refresh the machine” he was writing these admirable imitations of
the correspondence of the sixteenth century which he called “Private
Letters.” They might have deceived the elect of Antiquarians, but they
could not have been popular with the public, though one character was a
_bona roba_, an unaccustomed apparition in Sir Walter’s work. He threw
the Letters aside, in his last days he fancied that he had
[Illustration: Abbotsford.
[Sidenote: “THE BEACON”]
Photo by Valentine & Sons. Dundee.]
finished them, and that they were a valuable asset. In fact, he turned
from them and began _Nigel_, a romance of the same period, apparently
before he had brought _The Pirate_ to a close.
That “splendid romance,” as Lockhart calls it, based on Scott’s visit to
the Orcades in 1814, was published in December 1821. Though the fair and
dark sisters, Minna and Brenda, were popular, and Cleveland himself had
a vogue, the humours of the Udaler and of the agriculturist were not
enjoyed, and Norna of the Fitful Head, a kind of civilized Ulrica, was
never much appreciated.
It is not necessary here to enter into the details about a luckless Tory
newspaper, _The Beacon_, which had Scott’s support, but was conducted in
an amateur and bludgeonly fashion, in spite of his advice. There was
nothing but blundering and bad language, and Scott declined to see the
paper. Yet he was one of its early supporters, and there is evidence
suggesting (I have not seen this evidence) that he was nearly involved
in a duel, while his friend, Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, was
unfortunately shot in an affair arising out of a successor to _The
Beacon_. “I have kept Lockhart out of this scrape, in which some of the
young men are knee deep,” writes Sir Walter. “I hope,” he wrote to
Lockhart, after Auchinleck’s duel, “that this catastrophe will end the
species of personal satire and abuse which has crept into our political
discussions. The lives of brave and good citizens were given them for
other purposes than to mingle in such unworthy affrays.”
_Nigel_ was published in May 1822, and Constable, who was in London, saw
people reading it, in Macaulay’s fashion, as they walked along the
streets. The ship which carried the edition arrived on a Sunday, by
Monday 7,000 copies had been dispersed. So Constable asked Scott to
write a trifle, like the poem of _Halidon Hall_ (for which he paid
£1,000) every quarter: every poem to be on a battle. Lockhart thought
that Constable’s brain was “well nigh unsettled.” Quite unsettled, if he
expected the public to buy £4,000 worth of battle poetry every year,
while the press was producing 30,000 volumes of _Peveril of the Peak_.
Ballantyne’s press was turning out at this date 145,000 volumes of works
by Scott, and Constable was about buying an estate called Balniel. Yet,
all the while, the old £12,000, the price for a set of copyrights, had
not been and never was fully paid. There seems to have been the
slenderest metallic basis for waggon loads of bills, which all concerned
looked on as being as good as bullion.
[Sidenote: “NIGEL”]
_The Fortunes of Nigel_ (May 1822) was the last novel written by Scott
before his labours produced an ominous change in his health. It is, no
doubt, as Lockhart says, in the first rank of his romances. The story is
_vécu_: Scott had lived as long among the dramas, pamphlets, histories,
and documents of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean times, as in any
part of our history, and his Scottish types of character he knew by
heart. All that Jacobean comedy, mainly the play of Ben Jonson, could
tell him, he had fresh in his memory, or could “bring out with a wet
finger.” Hence the brilliance and vivacity of the street scenes, the
rufflers in Alsatia, the scenes at Court, and at the ordinary. He caught
the moment when the heavy-hilted broad sword of the Scottish sire was
becoming the long rapier of the Scottish son. In gentle King Jamie he
had a model of which the grotesque absurdity needed pruning rather than
exaggeration, and of all Scott’s many portraits of Kings, the slobbering
trotting figure of James is the most truthful and the most comic. These
moralists who denounce dissimulation and incontinence, Baby Charles and
Steenie, are delicately touched: Ritchie Moniplies is a worthy pendant
to Andrew Fairservice: the prentices are as excellent as the bullies and
the old miser with his stern daughter in Alsatia: the whole life of
Jacobean London is placed before us as vividly as the life of Georgian
Edinburgh in _The Heart of Midlothian_. The “hero,” too, the unheroic
hero, is, for once, a living and even realistic character. The
ancestral Puritanism of Nigel degenerates into the cautious gambling of
“The Sparrow Hawk,” who plays with prentices for small sums, and takes
care to leave off a winner. Nobody can deny that this is a natural
metamorphosis, though the effect is to make us rather detest Nigel. He
is supposed to throw off his mean vice, but he cannot be styled amiable.
George Heriot is a better kind of man, and Ritchie is as superior to his
master, morally, as Strap to Roderick Random. The young women of the
tale, the pretty daughter of the goldsmith, and the mysterious lady, do
not distinguish themselves among Scott’s young women. But the book is
certainly in the foremost rank.
[Sidenote: VISIT OF GEORGE IV]
The visit of George IV to Edinburgh, with the death of Erskine, slain by
a calumny at which most men would have laughed, put a strain upon Scott,
in July and August 1822, from which he never recovered. The toil of
organizing the reception of the first crowned King of England who had
visited Scotland since 1650 fell upon Sir Walter. Scott was, in great
part, the cause of the Royal visit, and his whole strength was given to
organizing success. There was “a grand terryfication” (dramatization in
the manner of Terry the actor) “of the Holyrood chapters in _Waverley_.”
The Highlanders were much to the front, “all plaided and plumed in
their tartan array,” and the fat white legs of George IV appeared under
the once forbidden philabeg. His Majesty, a man of vivid imagination,
conceived himself to be a true Stuart, come to his own again; and Scott,
himself in the Campbell tartan and trews, appears to have accepted him
in that romantic character. He himself was the Baron Bradwardine of the
hour, and we know how the Baron sat down on a glass which had touched
the lips of His Most Sacred Majesty, and cut himself rather badly. In
the sultry weather he “had to arrange everything, from the ordering of a
procession to the cut of a button,” and he had also to amuse the
perplexed old poet Crabbe, who seized on this frantic moment for a visit
to a nation which he did not understand.
In one light the visit of George was very well. It reconciled the
furious feuds which had raged around _The Beacon_, and it was a proof
that Scotland, at last, was content with the Hanoverian in the disguise
of the Stuart dynasty. The Highland chiefs were anxious about their
precedence, which is said to have depended on the station occupied by
each clan at Bannockburn, a point probably to be decided on the
extremely diverse traditions of the clan bards or sennachies. Scott,
aided by General Stewart of Garth, the historian of the Highland
regiments, was the Montrose who brought harmony among the clans, no
easy task where Glengarry and Clanranald were at odds about the
chiefship of the Macdonalds, and Cluny and Mackintosh were not of one
mind as to the headship of Clan Chattan. Be it remarked that, when in
tartans, Scott wore the trews, not the philabeg. Glengarry, whether in
the philabeg or not, rode in the procession, followed by “_Tail_,”
pedestrians. The King, and Sir William Curtis, a stout dignitary of
London town, both wore the Royal Stuart tartans, invented, it was said,
for Prince Charles. No Stuart king, of course, had ever worn the
Highland costume, except in expeditions beyond the Highland line. These
amusing pageantries were “making every brain dizzy but his own,” when
the death of Erskine, the mild, quiet, timid man who had been his
dearest friend, fell upon Scott.
The main results of “the right royal row,” as Scott called it, were
that, by his suggestion, the attainders of 1715 and 1745 were redressed,
and that Scott, pursued to Abbotsford by crowds of guests, appears to
have suffered from a slight seizure of an apoplectic kind. “I have not
been very well,” he wrote to Terry in November, “a whoreson thickness of
blood, and a depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends ...
have annoyed me much, and _Peveril_ will, I fear, smell of the
apoplexy.” This, says Lockhart, is the first allusion to Sir Walter’s
fatal malady, the malady which had caused the death of his father.
Lockhart suspected that he had sustained and concealed slight attacks of
this nature. The machine was showing signs of overwork, which appear in
the straggling _Peveril of the Peak_ with its missed opportunities. Yet
_Quentin Durward_ was in progress in company with _Peveril_, and there
is no smell of the apoplexy in that stirring tale, which made Scott’s
fortune in France. The pictures of Louis XI, of his strange funereal
servitors, of the delightful Le Balafré, a pendant of Dugald Dalgetty,
with the bustling events of the story, have won popularity, though the
romance, at first, was received with little enthusiasm. Perhaps this
coldness, or a relapse into commonsense, made Constable announce that he
would enter into no more bargains for books not only unchristened but
unborn. The novels were appearing in uniform collected editions: the
market was glutted. Scott thought of a set of dialogues on
“superstitious” beliefs, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and
witchcraft, as an alternative to romance. But the public was, by this
time, solely devoted to fiction. _Quentin Durward_, too, began to sell
in the old way, and Scott postponed his dealings with things
On the margin grey
’Twixt the soul’s life and day.
Scott had written no novel of contemporary society since _The
Antiquary_, and Laidlaw, on the Eildon hill above Melrose, suggested a
romance of the little town, in the actual year, 1823. The hint resulted
in _St. Ronan’s Well_ (December 1823); the scene is not Melrose, but the
Spa of Innerleithen on the upper Tweed. The plot of _St. Ronan’s Well_
was paralyzed by the prudery of James Ballantyne. A mischance on the
part of the heroine was suppressed, to please James, consequently there
is no reason in life for Clara’s ruined brain, or for anything else that
is essential to the progress and conclusion of the narrative. There is a
similar error, caused by a remonstrance from Jeffrey, in _Dombey and
Son_, where the conduct of Edith towards Mr. Carker is inexplicable, as
it is perfectly clear, from a passage which Dickens vainly tried to
explain away, that Edith had been Mr. Carker’s mistress. The third or
fourth rate society of the Spa may be true to nature, but is neither
convincing nor amusing, and Meg Dods cannot cover the multitude of sins
of confusion in _St. Ronan’s Well_. Miss Edgeworth wrote that the author
of the last thirty pages of the book should be “carbonadoed,” and,
practically, James Ballantyne would have been the sufferer, for he was
the only begetter of the “incredible and unaccountable conclusion.”
[Sidenote: “REDGAUNTLET”]
Meanwhile a very different romance, the last of Scott’s before ruin
fell on him, was in progress, _Redgauntlet_. In _Redgauntlet_ we may
surely say that Scott has found himself again, at his best, or very
nearly at his best. The form of narrative, partly told in letters, as by
Richardson, is no longer popular, and we are not sorry when the author
deserts it. The plot of the story is rather baffling, and, as the tale
goes on, we almost forget our curiosity as to why Darsie Latimer should
not go near the English border. The reason, when we do learn it, is far
fetched, Darsie was not worth all that mechanism of intrigue. But the
pictures of old Edinburgh life about 1763, of Scott’s own father as the
elder Fairford, with his good heart, and his “pernickety” ascetic
lawyer’s ways, is delightful. Peter Peebles, the litigant maddened by
law and drink, is pathetic no less than humorous; if the legal business
appears dull, it is, none the less, or perhaps the more, Balzacian,
supposing Balzac to have had the humour of Dumas. The Quakers are
borrowed from what Scott saw, in boyhood, of a Quaker household at
Kelso. Excellent is Geddes’s nonresisting courage, and his shamefaced
pride in his armorial bearings, the _ged_, or pike, the freebooter of
fresh water. The scene of salmon spearing on the Solway flats is a
description of a sport dear to Scott as pursued in a boat on Tweed.
Things like huge snow-shoes were used in my boyhood, the spearman stood
erect above the water, one foot in each wooden shoe, he could spear a
fish between them, and the exercise demanded much gift of balance, and a
cool head, while the torches flared above the swift black running
waters. Green-Mantle again recalls the _Manteau Vert_ of Scott’s youth.
He borrowed the horse-shoe frown of old Redgauntlet from the face of the
wicked witch, the sister of the Wizard, Major Weir, in the legend given
by Sinclair, in “Satan’s Invisible World Disclosed,” and he also
borrowed thence the name of the jackanapes in “Wandering Willie’s Tale.”
The scenes in the mysterious Redgauntlet’s cottage are as good romance
as those in the Provost’s house at Dumfries, with the story of “Pate in
Peril” are good comedy. The brokenhearted Nanty Ewart is full of an
original pathos not common in Scott; his story of his own life of
miserable adventure, with the foreknowledge of his doom, is a
masterpiece, and as a masterpiece “the fallen and faded Ascanius” of the
tale, Prince Charles, the battered stately wanderer, with the despotic
mistress, was universally accepted.
[Sidenote: “REDGAUNTLET”]
There is evidence that the Prince really did pursue his fleeting vision
of a crown into England, in 1763, and was actually seen by Murray, the
actor, a friend of Scott’s, then a boy. When the Prince was in England,
in disguise, there is always a complete break in his correspondence,
and I find such a gap at this period. He still had a few adherents, and
would stray across the Channel to see and frighten them, and slip back
again to his hermit life at Bouillon. Miss Walkinshaw, the original of
the lady who accompanies him in the tale, had forsaken him at the date
of the romance, and she was not a fair but a dark beauty. There is a
mournful grace in Charles’ last good-bye to the few Jacobite gentry who
surround him in the novel when “there was an end of an auld song.” The
romance “contains perhaps more of the author’s personal experiences than
any other, or even than all of them put together.” As for “Wandering
Willie’s Tale,” the corrections and admirable additions in the proof
sheets show p. 118 that this _chef d’oeuvre_, unlike “the rest of them,”
was written with all the care that it deserved. If it has anything to be
called a rival, that rival is Mr. Stevenson’s story of about the same
period, in the latest dusk of the day of the Covenant, _Thrawn Janet_.
But there is no rivalry--Scott’s legend is unapproachable.
There was but this one novel in 1824; if Scott’s advisers concealed from
him the relative slackness of his sales, they did not hesitate to warn
him against “over-cropping.” He wrote his tribute to Byron, on the news
of the poet’s death, and he worked at a new edition of his _Swift_. As
a Director of the Edinburgh Academy, founded in this year, Scott
remarked that he did not love his country better than truth, and that
Dr. Johnson was not wholly wrong when he said that, in learning, “every
Scot had a mouthful and none had a bellyful.” Boys were now to learn
Greek earlier, and to learn more Greek than in his own days at the High
School. In fact the new school has produced some Grecians of merit and
distinction in its eighty years of existence. Scott did not tell the
boys that of Greek he had less than Shakespeare, and he despised the
contemptible clamour over his own famous brace of false quantities in
the two elegiac lines for the epitaph of his deerhound Maida. One of the
false quantities, after all, was the fault of a transcriber who wrote
“jaces” in place of “dormis”; that transcriber was James Ballantyne. “We
could have written as good longs and shorts as the English, if it had
not been for the--Covenant,” an old gentleman used to say, but Porson
opened Buchanan on a false quantity, and surely Dr. Pitcairn erred when
he began his famous epitaph on Dundee (admirably Englished into poetry
by Dryden)--“_Ultime Scotorum_.” Yet he could hardly write _Ultime
Pictorum_, and so save his prosody at the expense of his ethnology.
[Sidenote: THE FIRST AND LAST BALL]
“Surely if Sir Walter Scott be not a happy man, which he seems truly to
be, he deserves to be so,” wrote Basil Hall at Abbotsford in the
Christmas of 1824. January 7, 1825, saw “the first regular ball given at
Abbotsford--and the last.” As in _Marmion_,
It was his blithest and his last.
The occasion of the festivity was the wedding of Scott’s eldest son, a
young cavalry officer “of strict and even severe principles,” to a Miss
Jobson, of Lochore, “with a fortune of £50,000 in land.” The name of
Jobson is neither suggestive of wealth nor of heraldic additions to the
quarterings of the Scotts. Sir Walter speaks of his daughter-in-law with
unconcealed affection; she was a pretty, shy, candid, innocent girl, in
the manner of Rose Bradwardine. The lovers lately wed crossed to
Ireland, where the Regiment was quartered, and whither Scott himself
went for a holiday later in 1825. Scott now backed the credit of his
friend, the actor manager Terry, for £1,250, plus £500 guaranteed by
James Ballantyne. Whoever lends a friend money for the purposes of his
business is absolutely certain to see no more of the coins, and to lend
Terry money, Terry being a manager and lessee of a theatre, was laying
the longest possible odds on a hopeless horse. Like Steenie denouncing
incontinence, and Baby Charles reproving dissimulation, Scott read
Terry a lecture against raising money by bills and discounts, a ruinous
system, he declared, very wisely, which was assiduously practised by
Constable, and Ballantyne & Co.
[Sidenote: “NAPOLEON”]
Constable now had a new project, which Lockhart describes with infinite
humour. We have mentioned evidence given before a Parliamentary
Commission, to the effect that libraries ceased to be formed about the
time when _Waverley_ appeared (1814). The same evidence showed that real
books had never prospered since cheap little volumes of boiled down
information, the tinned meats of the intellectual life, were introduced.
It was Constable who now introduced them. He came out to Abbotsford
enormously big with a project. He unloaded himself of a packet, the
annual schedule of assessed taxes. From the items of taxes paid on many
things which profit not, such as hair powder, he inferred, justly, that
the British public spent money on every thing conceivable, except books.
Hundreds of thousands of people had obviously plenty of money, and in
the article of books alone did they economize. Scott remarked that all
down Tweed were the houses of lairds of whom none spent £10 yearly on
literature. Of course they did not, and of course they do not, and never
will. One extravagance our countrymen and country-women avoid, as they
would the devil, and that is buying a book. They are like the Highland
crofter who was implored to give at least five shillings to the
“Sustentation Fund,” and for the salvation of his immortal part. “Me
give five shillings to save my soul! I haena five shillings to buy
mysel’ tobacco!”
Constable admitted that the gentry were content with a magazine, and, at
most, a subscription to a circulating library. But _he_ would produce
books so cheap and good that even the gentry would buy them. To the
sanguine soul of the projector this seemed a splendid speculation,
though even he did not think of sinking to a sixpenny price. Monthly
volumes at half-a-crown or three-and-sixpence were in his eye, as if the
public could afford to give nearly forty shillings annually for books.
The public “has not time,” setting the pecuniary extravagance aside, to
read twelve volumes yearly. However Scott accepted the golden dream, and
proposed a short _Life of Napoleon_. It grew into ten tomes of
Constable’s _Miscellany_, and was mainly written after Sir Walter’s
ruin, in eighteen months. A critic mentions a dozen people then alive in
England, including Carlyle, who could have done a better _Life of
Napoleon_. Perhaps they could have done it, “if they had the mind,” but
certainly they could not have done it better than Scott, in eighteen
months. Constable provided about a hundred volumes of _Le Moniteur_, and
quantities of printed works, as materials, while MSS. were collected.
But no _Life_ written at that time could be satisfactory; most documents
were inaccessible, and Scott made great use of second-hand authorities.
Though the book won £18,000 for Sir Walter’s creditors, and though it is
very readable, the task work (and few forms of drudgery are so tedious
as history writing in a hurry) did not suit Scott, and adds nothing to
his reputation.
[Sidenote: RUIN]
[Sidenote: THE BALLANTYNE FIRM]
Meanwhile he wrote _The Betrothed_, which Ballantyne discouraged, and
_The Talisman_, a work as pleasing to boyhood as _Ivanhoe_. We all have
been fond of Coeur de Lion, and hated Conrad de Montserrat, and adored
Saladin. The book was amazingly popular, and _Woodstock_ was undertaken
next, and finished when the evil days began. Scott now made a pleasant
tour in Ireland, and visited Wordsworth on his homeward way. The two
poets eternally quoted the Bard of Rydal, but not the most distant
allusion was made by either, says Lockhart, to the verses of the
Minstrel of the Forest. On returning to Abbotsford it was a sad sight
for Lockhart to see Sir Walter “read, note, and index with the
pertinacity of some pale compiler in the British Museum,” for the
_Napoleon_, and rising from his toil, “not radiant and buoyant,” but
with an aching brow and weary eyes. Lockhart himself was leaving
Scotland for London, and the editorial chair of _The Quarterly Review_.
The shadows were thickening in the prison house, and the health of
Scott’s grandson, Lockhart’s son, was of all the shadows the deepest.
There were to be no more happy summers in the cottage of Chiefswood--the
scene, many years later, of happiness _cujus pars fui_. In November
1825, Lockhart, in London, wrote a long letter to Scott on rumours
unfavourable to Constable’s solvency. He anticipated nothing worse for
Scott than the loss of the price of _Woodstock_. Returning to
Chiefswood, he received a letter of warning, and showed it to Scott, who
made a night journey to see Constable, who reassured him. Lockhart now
suspected that Scott was deeply concerned in his publisher’s affairs. On
November 20 Scott began his famous _Journal_, now published in full. On
December 22 he wrote _Bonny Dundee_, new words to an old tune,
accompanying ribald words, in which the town, not the Viscount of
Dundee, is “bonny.” “I wonder if the verses are good,” Scott notes, and
laments poor Will Erskine--“thou couldst and wouldst have told me.” The
song is his latest and not least splendid tribute to Claverhouse, and
rings across the Empire with its “cavalry canter.” On Christmas Day
Scott wrote, “I have a particular call for gratitude.” “Thus does
Fortune banter us.” The earliest notes of 1826 show Scott already
anxious about the money affairs of Ballantyne and Constable. They also
(January 5) show him “much alarmed” by a sudden attack of _agraphia_,
impotence to write the words he would. He explained this as the result
of an anodyne, for his old complaint had returned with its cruel
agonies. On January 11 there is “anxious botheration about the money
market.” On January 14 there comes a mysterious letter from Constable,
then in London, where he made to Lockhart wild proposals for advances of
huge sums by Scott. On January 16, in Edinburgh, the blow fell. “Hurst
and Robinson let a bill come back upon Constable.” Nevertheless Scott
dined with Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, whose little daughter, recently dead
at a great age, regretted by all who knew her, was a child friend and
consoler of Sir Walter. Next day came James Ballantyne “with a face as
black as the crook”: Ballantyne & Co. must suspend payment. Scott at
once consulted Mr. John Gibson, W.S., and, as he would not consent to be
made bankrupt, his affairs were put under trustees, acting for the
creditors. If bankrupt, his financial position would improve, his future
gains would be his own. But he at once braced himself to pay off
everybody, pledging brain and life to that colossal task. He did not as
yet know the full extent of his losses.
By the admission of one of Ballantyne’s trustees, the books of the firm,
eleven years later, were still unbalanced. Into the affair of the bills
and counter bills between Ballantyne and Constable, whereby, according
to Lockhart, Scott’s business debts were doubled, it is not possible to
go in this place. Ballantyne’s representatives regarded the whole story
as the result of a confusion in the mind of Lockhart. But Lockhart’s
source was Mr. Cadell, the partner of Constable, and Mr. Cadell, in
1837, stood by his guns, and sent confirmatory documents. “John
Ballantyne suggested the double bills!”[7] Scott never blamed James
Ballantyne, who owed to him, he said, his difficulties in the present as
well as his prosperity in the past. But the books of the firm were never
balanced! Without balance-sheets, and there were none, how could Scott
know the amount of his liabilities? But, again, why did he not extort
accounts from the lazy James? Lockhart himself meted out the blame to
all concerned, as far as his knowledge, instructed by Mr. Cadell,
enabled him to do. He was blamed by the Press for making precisely the
statements which he never made. Scott, to his own loss, insisted on
employing James Ballantyne alone as his printer after 1826. But he
transferred his publishing business from Constable to Cadell, with good
reason. Constable “was all spectral together.” As late as 1851 Lockhart
wrote that “the details of Scott’s commercial perplexities remain in
great measure inexplicable.” Scott himself (January 29) writes:
“Constable’s business seems unintelligible ... neither stock nor debt to
show. No doubt trading almost entirely on accommodation is dreadfully
expensive.” So Scott had just warned Terry!
[Sidenote: “WOODSTOCK”]
From his old rival, Sir William Forbes, from the Royal Bank, from an
unknown person, offering £30,000, Scott had many proffers of assistance.
But he took the whole debt, £117,000, on his own shoulders, he borrowed
from no man, he lived retired, and worked at _Woodstock_ steadily
throughout the days which brought Job’s messengers of ruin. “I
experience a sort of determined pleasure,” he said to Skene, “in
confronting the very worst aspect of this sudden reverse....” His mind
was free from the awful apprehension caused by his attack of _agraphia_.
“Few have more reason to feel grateful to the Disposer of all than I
have.” Any spleen which Scott may have felt, he worked off in _Malachi
Malagrowther’s Letters_, a criticism of an effort made by his own party
to dethrone the Scot’s one pound note, the Palladium of the ancient
kingdom.
On March 15 Scott left his house in Castle Street for the last time. _Ha
til mi tulidh_--“I return no more!” The words are those of the lament of
Macleod’s second-sighted piper, foreseeing his own fall in The Rout of
Moy (1746). At Abbotsford he finished _Woodstock_ on March 26. The book
sold for £8,228, a first instalment of the Sisyphean task of payment.
Tastes differ, but to myself _Woodstock_ seems to possess great merits.
Considering the circumstances in which it was written, it is a wonderful
book. Cromwell is not the conventional hypocrite of the then current
estimate: he is a religious man, something of a mystic, involved in
politics, and displaying the habitual “jesuitry” of political religious
men. Wildrake is a tipsy cavalier of the best, and of the best in his
song for King Charles. The various Puritan officers, and their various
conduct in face of the _poltergeist_, or noisy devil of Woodstock, are
excellently discriminated. Scott never could remember where he read that
“Funny Joe of Oxford” confessed to being the _poltergeist_, nor have I
been able to discover his source. My earliest trace of the explanation
is in Joseph Taylor’s _Apparitions_ (1815, Second Edition). Taylor gives
us Funny Joe Collins, his _pulvis fulminans_, and all the rest of it,
almost in the same words as Scott’s, who must have possessed Taylor’s
book. But who goes bail for Funny Joe? If he did make a confession, how
did it escape Dr. Plot, whose _Natural History of Oxfordshire_ is one of
Scott’s authorities? What Joe Collins may or may not have said is not
evidence, but what does common sense care for evidence, when an
explanation is wanted?
[Sidenote: HEALTH OF LADY SCOTT]
The plot of _Woodstock_ was unconsciously annexed by Thackeray in
_Esmond_. His charming but historically absurd James III is Charles II,
laughing and running after every girl, and making love to the sister and
mistress of the two good Royalists who protect him. Lockwood and his
sweetheart, in _Esmond_, are Jocelyn and his sweetheart in _Woodstock_.
James III is a more favoured lover than his uncle, and Beatrix outshines
all the women of Scott, but Scott’s is the invention of the situation,
down to the King’s offer of a duel. It is an astonishing case of
unconscious appropriation--and improvement at the expense of the
character of James, “the best of kings and men,” but the least humorous.
I profess myself an admirer of Trusty Tompkins, that unworthy
Independent; of Corporal Humgudgeon; of the noble Sir Henry Lee; and of
his hound Bevis; of Wildrake, of the _mise en scène_, of Cromwell, in
short of _Woodstock_ in general. But these opinions are the accidents
of personal likings, beyond which criticism, however it may disguise
them, never finds it easy to go.
Scott now began _The Chronicles of the Canongate_, with Cadell for
publisher. Constable was “spectral”: he had tried to borrow large sums
from Scott, “after all chance of recovery was over,” says Lockhart. But
to the sanguine Constable it could not seem that all chance was over.
Long ago he had bought Hunter out of his business at a vast
over-estimate, from which he never recovered. To act thus was in his
nature; we must not suppose him to have been in any degree dishonest.
The _Chronicles_ and _Napoleon_ now went on together, while (May 2)
Scott “almost despaired” of his wife’s recovery from illness. “Still she
welcomes me with a smile, and insists she is better.” She could not take
leave of him, when he was obliged to leave Abbotsford for dingy lodgings
in Edinburgh. On May 15 he heard of the death of Lady Scott. “I am
deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels.... She is sentient
and conscious of my emotions somewhere--somehow; _where_, we cannot
tell, _how_, we cannot tell; yet I would not at this moment resign the
mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for
all that this world can give me.” He writes of his lonely study: “Poor
Charlotte would have been in the room half a score of times to see if
the fire burned, and ask a hundred kind questions.” Such were the
relations of husband and wife. He turned to his story of _The Highland
Widow_: there was “no rest for Sir Walter.” “I will not be dethroned by
any rebellious passion that raises its standard against me.”
Scott visited London and Paris, partly in the interests of his
_Napoleon_. In February 1827, at a dinner to William Murray, the actor,
he acknowledged what could no longer be concealed, his authorship of the
novels. By June 10, 1827, the “millstone” of _Napoleon_ was off his
back. He and his amanuensis had been used to work from six in the
morning to six in the evening, without interruption except for meals. No
doubt there might have been better historians of the world’s greatest
genius, but who else would have worked a twelve hours’ day--and all for
the sake of duty and honour? Lockhart computes that twelve months were
occupied in the writing. Between the end of 1825 and the June of 1827,
Scott had written off £28,000 of his debts. To wipe them out, not to
produce an impeccable biography, was his aim, it must be admitted, but
we must remember that his general health was now very bad, with insomnia
and severe headaches.
[Sidenote: GOURGAUD]
August 1827 brought news that General Gourgaud was indignant about
Scott’s remarks on him in his _Napoleon_. Scott had told what he found
in our State Papers: “I should have been a shameful coward if I had
shunned using them.” Gourgaud had already fought Ségur, the brilliant
historian of the Moscow expedition. It may be that Gourgaud’s
information given to the English Government, about Napoleon in St.
Helena, was a “blind,” not a betrayal: one does not suspect his loyalty.
Scott rejected this excuse, as convicting Gourgaud of falsehood, “when
giving evidence upon his word of honour.” Scott was ready to give him a
meeting: chose his old friend, Clerk, as his second, and saw that
Napoleon’s own pistols, which he possessed, were in order. “I will not
baulk him, Jackie! He shall not dishonour the country through my sides,
I can assure him.” “The courage of bards,” according to a Gaelic
proverb, is a minus quantity. Scott was not to justify the proverb: if
he did not fight, he said, he would “die the death of a poisoned rat in
a hole, out of mere sense of my own degradation.”
Mr. Hutton is severe on Scott for this unchristian conduct. Probably, at
the same date, and in similar circumstances, Mr. Hutton would have been
found “on the sod.” The ideas of the age made fighting unavoidable, and,
as for the sin, Scott would rather trust his soul with God than his
honour to men, as Jeanne d’Arc said, after leaping from her prison
tower, that she would rather commit her soul to God than her honour to
the English. Gourgaud made “a fiery rejoinder” to Scott’s plain and
invincible statement of his case. Scott did not reply in any way, he did
not challenge Gourgaud, who himself had chivalry enough, or good sense
enough, to send no cartel. In fact one does not see how he could escape
from his dilemma. He had betrayed his master, or he had been guilty of a
dubious stratagem.
[Sidenote: “THE FAIR MAID OF PERTH”]
Scott thought of taking sanctuary in Holyrood precincts from, not
Gourgaud, but a Hebrew creditor named Abud, who insisted on receiving at
once the full measure of his due. Sir William Forbes settled the affair
privately, and Scott did not need to dwell where his hero, Croftangry,
abides, in _The Chronicles of the Canongate_, now published. The
autobiographical part, in Croftangry, is as excellent as it is
melancholy. The book was well received, and _The Fair Maid of Perth_,
the last of his good novels, was begun. The pictures of burgess life,
and of the distracted Court, are excellent. Poor Oliver Proudfute is a
good comic character with a tragic end. The fighting Smith, with his
love of poetry and romance, is a most original and sympathetic person,
and Simon the Glover is as good as a father, citizen, and friend, as
Sir Patrick Charteris is in the quality of knightly Provost. The Fair
Maid, when she deigns to be natural, is very natural indeed; the Clan
fight is one of the best in fiction, and in Conachar, who “has drunk the
milk of the white doe,” his foster mother, Scott expiates his extreme
harshness to a ne’er-do-well brother, who had shown the white feather in
the West Indies. This harshness he bitterly repented. With the terrible
true story of the Duke of Rothesay’s doom, with Ramorny and Bonthron and
Dwining for villains, with the studies of the good helpless Roi
Fainéant, Albany, Douglas, and poor Louise, and with the scene of the
chief’s funeral, _The Fair Maid of Perth_ abounds in merits, pressed
down and running over. Even Father Clement (whom Scott does not quite
like), with the fanaticism that attended the Reformation from the first,
and with a touch of “Jesuitry,” is well drawn, and how excellent is the
Glover’s account of what he liked in the Father’s sermons, his
denunciations of the rabble and the nobles, and his appreciation of the
Scottish middle class--absurdly said to have been a creation of John
Knox. Commerce, not religion, made the burghs and the burghers, who
liked to listen to Father Clement, “proving, as it seemed to me, that
the sole virtue of our commonweal, its strength, and its estimation, lay
among the burgher craft of the better class, which I received as
comfortable doctrine, and creditable to the town.”
Scott ends with commendations of Father Clement, but he liked the man no
more than he says that Simon Glover did. As a politician, he was even
unscrupulously opposed to Catholics, as being under priestly dominion no
less than the Covenanters were under preachers’ dominion. He would have
no _imperium in imperio_. But, in his novels, the old faith is spoken of
so tenderly that George Borrow frequently and intemperately accuses him
of betraying souls to the
Lady in Babylon bred,
Addicted to flirting and dressing in red.
He regarded our victory at Navarino as very well, but our policy as on
the level of what that of the Turks would have been, had they sent a
plenipotentiary to regulate our behaviour towards the Irish Catholics.
The December of 1827 saw the publication of the tiny square volumes of
_The Tales of a Grandfather_, addressed to Lockhart’s son, “Master Hugh
Littlejohn.” They had an appropriate result: the small boy dirked his
brother (not seriously) with a pair of scissors, and requested Scott
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
[Sidenote: “TALES OF A GRANDFATHER”]
After a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence.]
to write no more about Civilization, “he dislikes it extremely.” One
remembers how tiresome were the chapters on Civilization, except that on
the Feudal System. Of the little that the world used to know about
Scottish history, three-quarters were learned from _The Tales of a
Grandfather_. Necessarily much more “scientific” information has since
been acquired, and Mr. Fraser Tytler’s _History_ is a monument of
impartial industry. But Scott, as impartial as Tytler, gives us the
cream of the anecdotes and semi-historical legends, which are what
everybody ought to know. He does not disdain the garrulous Pitscottie,
and the lively memoirs of Sir James Melville, these pillars of “history,
as she is wrote,” and ought not, scientifically speaking, to be written
any longer.
Yet there are senses in which _The Tales of a Grandfather_ are
scientifically composed. There is little science in writing books so
dull that no mortal can read them, and this reef ahead of the modern
pedant Scott successfully avoids. He lets “the violet of a legend blow”
in periods of the utmost aridity, he “loads every reef,” however
granitic, with the gold of every anecdote that reveals the character of
individuals or of the time. If a scrap of ballad illustrates his topic,
he has that scrap in his wallet. Thus the great Montrose fought for a
sacred cause, the wretched Lord Lewis Gordon, an unworthy leader of a
clan of soldiers, fought from caprice. The ballad verse runs,
If you with Lord Lewis go,
You’ll get reif and prey enough,
If you with Montrose go,
You’ll get grief and wae enough--
hard won victories and forced marches. Scott’s treatment of that
battlefield of rival sentimentalists, Kirk and Cavalier--the time of the
Civil War and the Restoration--is marked by lucidity, conciseness, and
impartiality. Any boy of ten can understand it if he pleases, and the
writer flatters neither Presbyterian nor King’s man.
[Sidenote: “TRAITOR SCOT”]
I quote what he says about the surrender of the King to the English by
the Scots at Newcastle. The position of the Scots Commissioners was
perplexing, whether they deliberately lured Charles to come to them or
not. They could not keep him in Scotland: they would have had to fight
England, and to defy the preachers who rode them. They could not safely
let Charles embark secretly at Tynemouth, as Sir Walter suggests: the
prospect of a King over the water was agreeable neither to the English
nor to the Covenanters. But, says Scott, “Even if the Scots had
determined that the exigencies of the times, and the necessity of
preserving the peace betwixt England and Scotland, together with their
engagements with the Parliament of England, demanded that they should
surrender the person of their King to that body, the honour of Scotland
was intimately concerned in so conducting the transaction that there
should be no room for alleging that any selfish advantage was stipulated
by the Scots as a consequence of giving him up. I am almost ashamed to
write that this honourable consideration had no weight.
“The Scottish army had a long arrear of pay due to them from the English
Parliament, which the latter had refused, or at least delayed to make
forthcoming. A treaty for the settlement of these arrears had been set
on foot; and it had been agreed that the Scottish forces should retreat
into their own country, upon payment of two hundred thousand pounds,
which was one half of the debt finally admitted. Now, it is true that
these two treaties, concerning the delivery of the King’s person to
England and the payment by Parliament of their pecuniary arrears to
Scotland, were kept separate, for the sake of decency; but it is certain
that they not only coincided in point of time, but bore upon and
influenced each other. No man of candour will pretend to believe that
the Parliament of England would ever have paid this considerable sum,
unless to facilitate their obtaining possession of the King’s person;
and this sordid and base transaction, though the work exclusively of a
mercenary army, stamped the whole nation of Scotland with infamy. In
foreign countries they were upbraided with the shame of having made
their unfortunate and confiding Sovereign a hostage, whose liberty or
surrender was to depend on their obtaining payment of a paltry sum of
arrears; and the English nation reproached them with their greed and
treachery, in the popular rhyme,--
Traitor Scot
Sold his king for a groat.
“The Scottish army surrendered the person of Charles to the
Commissioners for the English Parliament, on receiving security for
their arrears of pay, and immediately evacuated Newcastle, and marched
for their own country. I am sorry to conclude the volume with this
mercenary and dishonourable transaction; but the limits of the work
require me to bring it thus to a close.”
[Sidenote: “TALES OF A GRANDFATHER”]
By their Covenant, as interpreted by their preachers, the Scots had
brought themselves to this pass, and the only course open to them which
was not conspicuously base they did not take. A nation is judged by the
rulers whom it accepts, and though not a man in a hundred, north of
Tweed, approved the course (so a contemporary tells us), “the whole
nation of Scotland was stamped with infamy.” Scott does not prefer
Scotland to truth, but he does misrepresent, by defect of information,
the effectual cause of Argyll’s death. He did not die merely because he
expressed, in letters to Monk, “a zeal for the English interest.” He
gave information as to the movements of the forces that stood for his
King, and were commanded by his own son. Writing for the instruction of
the young Scott laid aside all Cavalier sentiment and prejudice; in the
opinion of M. Amédée Pichot, he wrote as a Whig. But the Whigamores have
never welcomed him as an ally. Even to-day a student who “has no time”
cannot gain so rapid and so correct a view of Scottish history from any
book as he will find in _The Tales of a Grandfather_.
Sir Walter’s next task was the _Magnum Opus_, the preparation of a
literary history of the work of his life, especially of the novels and
poems. That history took the shape, not wholly fortunate, of new
Introductions and new notes. They are of the most genial interest, but
perhaps it would have been wiser to write the literary history in
separate volumes, than to clog the Authors’ Favourite Edition with so
much prefatory matter that the modern reader is frightened away,
believing that he will never survive to read the romance in each case.
The _format_ and typography of the volumes were excellent, the plates
were not better than most illustrations and rather worse than some.
Cadell had bought in the copyright at £8,500 on the luckiest of days for
Sir Walter’s creditors. Now it was that Scott, having no money to give
to a Reverend Mr. Gordon, gave him the copyright of two sermons which he
had already written for him, at a moment when he feared that Gordon was
too ill and nervous to write sermons for himself. Gordon sold the
copyright for £250. Scott disliked appearing as a lay preacher, but good
nature carried the day. He would not, however, again oblige James
Ballantyne, who pleaded for the life of Oliver Proudfute, in _The Fair
Maid of Perth_. To please James he had ruined _St. Ronan’s Well_, he had
brought back Athelstane in _Ivanhoe_ from the dead, and that was enough,
and more than enough.
[Sidenote: THE “JOURNAL”]
The year 1829 saw the completion of _Anne of Geierstein_, but as the
author of Anne’s being frankly damned her, I am not inclined to plead in
her favour, leaving her advocacy to Mr. Saintsbury, who places Anne “on
a level with anything and above most things later than _The Pirate_.” To
deem _Anne_ on a level with _Redgauntlet_, or even with _Woodstock_, and
_The Fair Maid of Perth_, seems, in Lethington’s words, “a devout
imagination.” My friend, Mr. Saintsbury, indeed speaks here of _Anne_
“as a mere romance,” not counting “the personal touches which exalt
_Redgauntlet_ and the Introduction to the _Chronicles_.” But what is
there in _Anne_ that comes home to us like Nanty Ewart, Wandering
Willie, and Peter Peebles? No Scot can doubt that Sir Walter is at his
best in the bounds of “his ain countrie,” this was an inevitable
limitation of his genius.
The _Journal_ of the early months of 1829 shows Scott in good spirits,
pleased with solitude, when he is alone, but only if solitude does not
mean lack of access to human company. In a little sportive dialogue with
a Geni, or Djinn, he confesses to all his old delight in building
castles in the air. “You need not repent,” says the Djinn, “most of your
novels have previously been subjects for airy castles.” This means that,
rapidly as the novels were written, they, or many of them, had long
simmered in the author’s imagination: he had _lived_, he remarks, in the
scenes and adventures which he describes. Among other things, he now
wrote, for Croker’s _Boswell’s Johnson_, notes on the great Doctor’s
Scottish tour. Busy as Sir Walter was, his time and work were still at
the disposal of others. But some of these invaluable notes went astray
in the post, and never were recovered. He wrote a short _History of
Scotland_, for the Encyclopaedia of Thackeray’s victim, Dr. Lardner,
and a review article to raise a sum of money for the ever unlucky
Gillies, who visited Abbotsford in autumn, and noted one convenience
“very rare,” he says, in country houses. In every room was abundance of
pen, ink, and paper.
[Sidenote: PARALYSIS]
In Edinburgh, at the levee of the Commissioner to the General Assembly,
Scott met Edward Irving. “I could hardly keep my eyes off him while we
were at table. He put me in mind of the devil disguised as an angel of
light, so ill did that horrible obliquity of vision harmonize with the
dark tranquil features of his face, resembling that of our Saviour in
Italian pictures, with the hair carefully arranged in the same
manner.... He spoke with that kind of unction which is nearly allied to
cajolerie....” In fact Scott liked Irving no more than he liked Father
Clement. He had a great distrust of “enthusiasm” in religion, but Irving
was not the quack whom Scott clearly suspected him of being. Other
quacks, in his opinion, were the two brothers, then calling themselves
“Hay Allan,” but later, “John and Charles Stuart,” sons of a son of
Prince Charles by his wife. These gentlemen possessed a MS. called
_Vestiarium Scoticum_, giving an account of the tartans of the Border as
well as of the Highland clans, tartans otherwise unknown. There were
two MSS., one, never seen of men, of the sixteenth century, another,
still extant, of the eighteenth century. This MS. remains a mystery. I
believe that neither in ink nor paper is there any trace of falsity,
while the style is certainly beyond the powers of imitation possessed by
the two brothers, in whose antiquarian probity Scott had no belief.
Scott’s friends were dying around him, Shortreed of the Liddesdale
rambles, and Tom Purdie. _Haec poena diu viventibus!_ His Diary flags in
July, and is not reopened till May 1830. Scott read and reviewed that
thrilling book, Pitcairn’s _Criminal Trials_. It was published by the
Bannatyne Club, of which Scott was the animating spirit; for the
Roxburghe Club he edited and presented the story of the Master of
Sinclair, and his slaying of the Shaws of Greenock (1708). He dramatized
the tale, from Pitcairn, of the Auchendrane Tragedy, the series of
murders by the two Mures. There is much of spirit, fancy, and vigorous
verse in _The Ayrshire Tragedy_, but the topic inevitably lacked
dramatic interest.
It was on February 15, 1831, that the long threatened blow of paralysis
fell on Sir Walter. He was alone, with a lady, examining her father’s
manuscripts, when his face altered, he fell into a chair, but with the
instinct of courtesy, contrived to stagger from the room and fell in
the drawing-room, where his daughter Anne and Lockhart’s sister, Violet,
happened to be.[8] He presently recovered speech, and, when he went
abroad again, people observed no change. But he knew his own case. None
the less, he toiled on at his _Letters on Demonology_, a work well worth
reading, though marked by failing powers. That astonishing person,
Professor Wilson, instantly attacked Scott, making the Shepherd in
_Noctes Ambrosianae_ speak of “Sir Walter wi’ his everlasting anecdotes,
nine out o’ ten meaning naething, and the tenth itsel’ as auld as Eildon
Hill.” Wilson also assailed the _Letters_: there was a great deal of Mr.
Hyde in his composition, an element which broke out in furious attacks
on old friends. Yet he never estranged Lockhart.
Scott declared that he felt no mental feebleness, and hoped that by 1835
he might clear off his debts; he had just paid £15,000 towards that end.
He received a kind of proposal of marriage from a woman of rank, through
her brother: he was told that he might hope! But he confided to his
_Journal_ that he did not hope to wed “a grim grenadier.” His creditors
restored to him his
[Sidenote: EVIL DAYS]
books, plate, furniture, and collection of works of art and curios,
which he valued at £10,000. He resigned his Clerkship in November 1830,
receiving a pension of £840. The change was unfortunate, as it gave him
more time for overwork. Meanwhile, every letter from Ballantyne about
his new novels betrayed its effect in nervous twitchings at the mouth.
Cadell, to give him rest, suggested the composition of an anecdotic
catalogue of his curiosities, “The Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck.” A
glance at the opening of the MS., with its paralytic writing and
examples of _agraphia_, shows how desperate was his mental and bodily
condition for a short while.
Yet he was now thinking of _Castle Dangerous_, and he wrote a Tory
pamphlet which, his advisers saw, showed ignorance of the political
situation. The pamphlet was dropped, but his advisers had a struggle
before they carried their point. “Sir Walter never recovered it,” says
Mr. Cadell. I have no heart to speak of his political apprehensions and
sufferings. What he feared was the overthrow of Society; what he endured
from popular insult and even violence is too familiarly known. Certain
excited and rude artisans had no more respect than Wilson for an old
friend, the glory of the Border. Scott never forgot the scene, it
haunted his dying hours. He acknowledged to a distinct stroke of
paralysis in April 1831, and Cadell and Ballantyne remonstrated against
the conclusion of _Count Robert of Paris_.
How amazing was the humour that supported his unconquerable courage! His
letters--for example one of October 31, to Lady Louisa Stuart, on
“Animal Magnetism,” show him in full force of intellect. He had an
attack in November, and Laidlaw, his amanuensis for _Count Robert of
Paris_, observed unmistakable signs of the end. He was bidden to drink
water only, and to abandon writing. So he notes, in a parody of Burns:--
Dour, dour, and eident was he,
Dour and eident, but and ben,
Dour against their barley water,
And eident on the Bramah pen.[9]
In July Scott began _Castle Dangerous_, and paid his last visit to the
tombs of the Douglases. The country people received him gladly,
following him in a procession. I must quote what Lockhart says about the
close of this day, spent beside the graves of that stern and haughty
race who had been, now the savers, now the betrayers, of their country.
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
From the painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.]
[Sidenote: AT THE DOUGLAS GRAVES]
“It was again a darkish, cloudy day, with some occasional mutterings of
distant thunder, and perhaps the state of the atmosphere told upon Sir
Walter’s nerves; but I had never before seen him so sensitive as he was
all the morning after this inspection of Douglas. As we drove over the
high tableland of Lesmahago he repeated I know not how many verses from
Winton, Barbour, and Blind Harry, with, I believe, almost every stanza
of Dunbar’s elegy on the deaths of the Makers (poets). It was now that I
saw him, such as he paints himself in one or two passages of his Diary,
but such as his companions in the meridian vigour of his life never saw
him--‘the rushing of a brook, or the sighing of the summer breeze,
bringing the tears into his eyes not unpleasantly.’ Bodily weakness laid
the delicacy of the organization bare, over which he had prided himself
in wearing a sort of half-stoical mask. High and exalted feelings,
indeed, he had never been able to keep concealed, but he had shrunk from
exhibiting to human eye the softer and gentler emotions which now
trembled to the surface. He strove against it even now, and presently
came back from the Lament of the Makers to his Douglases, and chanted,
rather than repeated, in a sort of deep and glowing, though not
distinct recitative, his first favourite among all the ballads--
“It was about the Lammas tide,
When husbandmen do win their hay,
That the doughty Douglas bownde him to ride
To England to drive a prey,
down to the closing stanzas, which again left him in tears--
“My wound is deep--I fain would sleep--
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me beneath the bracken-bush
That grows on yonder lily lee ...
This deed was done at the Otterburne,
About the dawning of the day.
Earl Douglas was buried by the bracken-bush,
And the Percy led captive away.”
[Sidenote: VOYAGE TO ITALY]
The new Whig Government put a ship of war at the service of their great
antagonist. He was to visit Italy, and Cadell kept the type of his two
last tales set up; they were revised and altered in Scott’s absence
abroad. One incident in _Count Robert of Paris_, an incident terribly
expressive of the author’s condition, was expunged. Sir Walter felt the
consolatory delusion that he had succeeded in his task, that his debts
were paid. The last autumn at Abbotsford was full of the charm of
sunset. Turner came, and painted Abbotsford on a tea tray, at a picnic.
Young Walter Scott came, a joy to his father’s eyes, “a handsomer fellow
never put foot into stirrup.” Wordsworth, too, was there, as his verses
on Yarrow testify, and his noble sonnet--
A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain.
On the voyage to Italy Scott still was writing, the _Journal_, letters,
the tale of _Il Bizarro_, the novel of _The Knights of Malta_; the
manuscript is still the old closely serried manuscript, but the
handwriting is wofully altered. I am informed that many passages are
full of the old spirit, but care has been taken that this work shall
never appear as a “literary curiosity.”
At Naples Scott heard of Goethe’s death. “At least he died at home. Let
us to Abbotsford!” The party, with Mr. Charles Scott, passed on to Rome.
At Lake Avernus, which, says Lockhart, is like a Highland loch, Scott
repeated--
We daurna go a’ milking
For Charlie and his men.
The classic scene reminded him of his dear hills. At Rome, with great
difficulty, he visited the tomb of James III. (so his epitaph proclaims
him,) and of Prince Charles and the Cardinal Duke of York; the latest
minstrel stood by the dust of the last of the royal line. The rest “can
hardly be told too briefly,” says Lockhart.
In passing through Germany, Scott wrote what his son Charles endorses as
“The last letter written by my dear father.” It is a brief note of
courtesy to Arthur Schopenhauer, the famous philosopher, regretting that
he was too unwell to receive Schopenhauer’s visit. The note is clearly
written and well expressed. It is in the Laing MSS. in Edinburgh
University Library. Once again Scott wrote, or tried to write, in the
packet boat crossing the Channel. Pen and ink were borrowed for him from
Mrs. Sherwood, the author of _The Fairchild Family_.
[Sidenote: THE END]
The sufferer reached London on June 13, 1832. On July 7 he took ship for
Leith. On July 11 he travelled by carriage to Abbotsford, waking from
his torpor as they drove down Gala water, past Torwoodlee. Arrived, his
dogs welcomed him, and “he alternately sobbed and smiled over them till
sleep oppressed him.” In his last days he was heard to murmur passages
from the Bible, the Litany, the Scottish metrical psalms, and the
_Stabat Mater Dolorosa_. It was on September 17 that he bade Lockhart
“be a good man, my dear, be virtuous, be religious, be a good man.” On
the twenty-first “he breathed his last in the presence of all his
children. It was a beautiful day--so warm that every window was wide
open--and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious
to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was
distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed
and closed his eyes.”
He sleeps, with Lockhart at his feet, where the sound of the Border
water fills the roofless aisles of the abbey of Dryburgh.
* * * * *
“Good-night, Sir Walter!”
Scott had given his life to pay his debts. Of these he actually repaid
about £70,000 between 1826 and 1832. The rest was wiped away by his
copyrights, through the spirited and judicious management of Mr. Cadell,
by the exertions of Lockhart as editor, and by the profits of Lockhart’s
_Life of Scott_. As to the later fortunes of Sir Walter’s family, but
one of his grandchildren survived; she married Mr. Hope Scott, the
eminent barrister, and was the mother of the Honourable Mrs.
Maxwell-Scott, an only child, _spes exigua et extrema_. This lady has
evinced the ancestral love of history in her works, _The Tragedy of
Fotheringhay_, in her essays, entitled _The Making of Abbotsford_, and
in her recent brief book on _Jeanne d’Arc_. One of her sons has done
honour to the houses of Maxwell and Scott by his distinguished services
in the war in South Africa. Thus the long descended name of the great
cadet of Harden has not vanished from the Border.
CONCLUSION
The character of Scott, and his place in literature, do not demand much
discussion after all that has already been said. He was born to be at
once a dweller in the realm of dreams, these dreams being mainly
“retrocognitive” of the historic past; and a man of action and of this
world; while he had a superabundance of joyous vitality, which
overflowed into humorous rhyme, even in his worst hours of cerebral
disease, and which inspired at once the central error of his life and
the resolute sacrifice of life to honour. These elements of character
were, all of them, carried to a pitch unusually high, while their
combination, and their union with the most kindly nature, are
unprecedented. This vitality, and this unfailing and universal sympathy,
made friends for Scott of all sentient creatures, from men, women and
children of every rank, to the pig which joined the pack of many dogs
and one cat, old Hinse, that scoured the woods with him, and to the
strangely sentimental hen which attached itself to Sir Walter. From
George IV.--who admired and never turned on Scott--to the hedgers and
ditchers on Abbotsford, Scott was endeared to all; in his ruin his old
servants refused to leave him, and the music master of his daughters
offered him the entire savings of his life. Yet there was no mawkish
good nature in Scott; when he bent the heavy arches of his brows the
Ettrick Shepherd himself felt that he must “gang warily.” No man was
served as he was by his household, and when he told his son that certain
conduct would entail his highest displeasure, the young man knew the
full meaning of the phrase.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Scott’s courtesy was spontaneous and universal--he spoke to all “as if
he was their blood relation”--except when he deliberately meant to be
discourteous, in one case, to Lord Holland, who had done no more than
his duty. He had come athwart the interests of Scott’s brother Thomas,
and Scott took up the feud in the ancient spirit of clanship. Yet he
lived to pronounce Lord Holland “the most agreeable man he ever knew. In
criticism, in poetry, he beats those whose whole study they have been.”
Thus Scott must have expiated an error produced by political heat as
well as by personal resentment; probably, like the Baron Bradwardine,
he sent “Letters of Slains,” or other atonement. Jeffrey says that “this
was the only example of rudeness in Scott that he ever witnessed in the
course of a lifelong familiarity.” In this lonely case, the person “cut
like an old pen” was a man of title and distinction.
It is hardly worth while to controvert the opinion that Scott was a
snob. In addressing persons of rank, however familiarly intimate he
might be with them, he used their “honour-giving names,” as Agamemnon
bids Menelaus do towards the princes of the Achaeans. This was the
customary rule of the period. Byron was indignant when Leigh Hunt
publicly addressed him as “My dear Byron,” and Byron was an extreme
Liberal, while Scott was a Tory. He paid the then recognized dues to
rank; such dues are no longer welcome to their recipients. He lived much
with people of the highest social position, but he could and did
entertain them at the same table with the Ettrick Shepherd, and with
guests known to him of old when a schoolboy or as a lawyer’s apprentice.
He was observed to pay great deference to a gentleman without any
apparent distinction, because he descended from a knight who fought by
the side of Wallace.
In all this his conduct, as in everything else, was dictated by his
reverence for the past. That reverence for things old, for what had once
been, ideally at least, an ordered system of society, was the cause of
Scott’s Toryism, increased by his patriotism during the struggle with
Bonaparte. The ideas and sympathies which made him a Tory, made him also
an opponent of the system which turned the Highlands into sheep farms
and deer forests, by the expulsion of the clansmen. His opinions on this
head are expressed in the Introduction to _The Legend of Montrose_.
Again, the feudal ideas at the root of his Toryism made him the most
attentive of all landlords to the wellbeing of every soul on his
estates. In bad times he found the wisest and most economic way of
providing them with employment at once honourable and remunerative, and
he taught the Duke of Buccleuch to follow his example on a great scale.
He felt pain and embarrassment in face of the gratitude of his poor
cotters for a holiday feast and holiday presents: why, he asked himself,
should he have more than they? His house was as a great hearth whence
radiated light and comfort on the humblest within his radius. Before Mr.
Ruskin he endeavoured to bring the happiness of art into the region of
the crafts.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
“The most of the articles from London were only models for the use of
two or three neat-handed carpenters whom he had discovered in the
villages near him; and he watched and directed their operations as
carefully as a George Bullock could have done; and the results were such
as even Bullock might have admired. The great table in the library, for
example (a most complex and beautiful one), was done entirely in the
room where it now stands, by Joseph Shillinglaw of Darnick--the Sheriff
planning and studying every turn as zealously as ever an old lady
pondered the development of an embroidered cushion. The hangings and
curtains, too, were chiefly the work of a little hunchbacked tailor, by
name _William_ Goodfellow (save at Abbotsford, where he answered to
_Robin_), who occupied a cottage on Scott’s farm of the Broomielees; one
of the race who creep from homestead to homestead, welcomed wherever
they appear by housewife and handmaiden, the great gossips and newsmen
of the parish--in Scottish nomenclature _cardooers_. Proudly and
earnestly did all these vassals toil in his service; and I think it was
one of them that, when some stranger asked a question about his personal
demeanour, answered in words already quoted ‘Sir Walter speaks to every
man as if they were blood relations.’ Not long after he had completed
his work at Abbotsford little Goodfellow fell sick, and as his cabin was
near Chiefswood, I had many opportunities of observing the Sheriff’s
kind attention to him in his affliction. I can never forget the evening
on which the poor tailor died. When Scott entered the hovel he found
everything silent, and inferred from the looks of the good women in
attendance that their patient had fallen asleep, and that they feared
his sleep was the final one. He murmured some syllables of kind regret;
at the sound of his voice the dying tailor unclosed his eyes, and
eagerly and wistfully sat up, clasping his hands with an expression of
rapturous gratefulness and devotion that, in the midst of deformity,
disease, pain, and wretchedness, was at once beautiful and sublime. He
cried with a loud voice, ‘The Lord bless and reward you,’ and expired
with the effort.”
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Of Scott’s great charity, which lay in giving affection as well as
material aid, examples have been displayed in his latest years. His
charity did but begin with these gifts; he was brotherly in all human
intercourse. The slightest notoriety brings bores around a man:
letter-writing bores, bores who want information accessible in any
encyclopaedia; bores who give voluminous undesired information; bores
who ask advice, bores who solicit an interview--countless are the
tribes of these thieves of time. At the celebrity of Scott they all
flew, like sea-fowls against a beacon above the midnight sea, and he
“with a frolic welcome took” their attentions. They “bestowed all their
tediousness on him,” and he accepted it, suffering them gladly. He
answered their ceaseless letters (as from a boy asking him to contribute
to _The Giggleswick School Magazine_!), he replied to them with thought,
care, and courtesy; he considered their worthless manuscripts, paying
£10 in postage for two MSS. of _The Cherokee Lovers: A Tragedy_, by a
young American lady. “I might at least have asked him to dinner,” he
murmured, when a bore of the first head had at last taken his leave.
This is indeed charity which endures all things, making itself subject
to the needs of all men.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
Sir Walter had everything of the saint except (what is indispensable)
the psychology of the saint. He was naturally good, born to be so. “Are
all Tories born bad?” said a little boy of a Whig family. “They are born
bad, and they make themselves worse,” replied his lady mother. Scott was
born good, and, by controlling his natural temper, and by reflection, he
made himself better. But, though sincerely religious and, we know, a
prayerful man, he was no saint, but a man of this world. He was not
haunted, as a saint must be, by the desire of ideal perfection. It is
not certain whether he was to be reckoned of the Presbyterian or
Prelatist form of belief. “Bishops, I care not for them,” he might have
said, like the great Montrose on his dying day. But he did prefer the
Liturgy of the Church of England to the “conceived prayers” of the
Scottish pulpit, and read the service on Sundays to his family, when far
from a kirk at Ashestiel, and to whomsoever of his neighbours cared to
come and listen. He was married in an English church; the burial service
of that Church was read at his funeral. I am informed that he was at one
time an Elder of the Kirk at Duddingstone, which is partly of Norman
architecture, but Lockhart says that, in later life, he adhered to the
Church of the Cavaliers. Yet he recognized a great genius in Dr.
Chalmers; there was no bigotry in his Episcopal tendencies; as a matter
of taste he preferred the Anglican manner of conducting public worship.
He was on the best terms with many ministers; the only profession of
whose followers he speaks with a certain lack of sympathy was the
profession of school-mastering. In every dominie he believed that there
lay “a vein of absurdity,” and on one occasion he reproves himself for
thinking that he had met an exception to the rule. One of his own
schoolmasters once knocked him down, in boyhood, and apologized by
saying (as if he had driven into the party in front of him at golf),
that he “did not know he could hit so hard.” This apology seldom mends
matters!
We all have our foibles. That of Scott was the effort to live in an
idealized past. He knew the points at which his reason crossed his
judgment. The fairest of historians, he would not write a biography of
Queen Mary “because his opinion was contrary to his feeling.” “She may
have been criminal,” he says, in _The Tales of a Grandfather_, telling
the story as fairly as may be, within his space. Lockhart observes that
he often speaks of George IV (he must mean George III) as “_de jure_
King,” on the death of the Cardinal Duke of York. “Yet who could have
known better than he that whatever rights the exiled males of the Stuart
line ever possessed must have remained entire with their female
descendants?” Had Scott lived in his father’s time, I misdoubt that he
would have worn the black cockade, not the white, for, except in his
expenditure, he always had a saving grain of commonsense. Scott was a
great and strong man as any of his knights, but the nature which gave
him strength made him a poet who “lived in fantasy.” He tried to make
his dreams real, and he forgot realities. Any ideal set before him gave
him pleasure; he certainly and confessedly took a stern delight in the
ideal of working off his debts with his own hand. His earlier years of
grinding task work were not, as such, unhappy. Sir Walter had, in fact,
the most fortunate kind of genius--a genius for happiness, which cannot
exist without making life more joyous for all within the radius of its
influence.
The Scots are, according to old proverbs, a jealous people. The race has
no two sons more opposite in their ideals than Walter Scott and John
Knox. Yet they had this virtue in common, that neither in the preacher
nor the poet does analysis detect a grain of professional jealousy.
Scott could, indeed, see the blemishes on the poetry of Southey; nor
could the faults of Byron escape him. But in other contemporary poets
whom he mentions, he seems to behold nothing but their excellences,
which he often exaggerates. If Byron “beat him,” as he said, he seems
seriously to have believed that the triumph was deserved. This is,
surely, unexampled generosity.
[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
“Scott’s chivalrous imagination threw a certain air of courteous
gallantry into his relations with his daughters.... Though there could
not be a gentler mother than Lady Scott, ... on those delicate
occasions most interesting to young ladies, they always made their
father the first confidant.” In his works of imagination, the relation
of father and daughter is always touched with peculiar grace and
tenderness. His dressing-room was “a little chapel of the Lares” fitted
up with relics of his father and mother. In every relation of life and
literature his motto was “_à léal souvenir_”; he kept the pious trust of
all things old that were of good report, and handed on the sacred
bequest to all who follow him. As to his place in literature, we leave
it to the judgment of the world and of the unborn. They “cannot say but
he has had the crown.”
Tides of criticism come and go; they may leave the fame and name of
Walter Scott deserted, like the cairn of a forgotten warrior forsaken by
a receding sea, or they may fill the space with the diapason of their
waves. We cannot prophesy. But one sound will not cease, if men dead
remember, the carol of the lark that sang above Scott’s grave at the
funeral of the dearest of his daughters. That song of praise for such
happiness as--
sceptred king not laurelled conqueror
can give, has followed “this wondrous potentate” from three generations
who have warmed their hands at the hearth of his genius, who have drunk
of his enchanted cup, and eaten of his fairy bread, and been happy
through his gift.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] My kinsman, the late Professor Sellar, went to the Edinburgh
Academy at seven, and was _Dux_, as the head boy used to be called, at
fourteen.
[2] Edward Fitzgerald (_Omar Kháyyám_) says that Lockhart introduced
a false quantity. In fact, James Ballantyne was guilty. cf. p. 204.
_infra._
[3] I noticed Lamb’s reply, declining the invitation, in the MSS. at
Abbotsford.
[4] Έφῆσιν άτασθαλίῃσιν ύπὲρ μόρον ᾀλγὲ ἒχουσιν
[5] _Life of Lockhart_, vol. ii. pp. 126-172.
[6] Thus, at least, I understand the point. Cf. Lockhart iv. pp.
142-144.
[7] _Life of Lockhart_, ii. pp. 146-150.
[8] Miss Ferrier published a painful narrative of these occurrences.
[9] _Eident_, of course, means “eager.”