the poem which he then produced, at once placed him among the great
original writers of his country. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" was a
complete expansion of the old ballad into an epic form. "It seemed,"
says Prescott, "as if the author had transferred into his page the
strong delineations of the Homeric pencil, the rude but generous
gallantry of a primitive period, softened by the more airy and magical
inventions of Italian romance, and conveyed in tones of melody such as
had not been heard since the strains of Burns." Its popularity was
unprecedented, and its success determined the course of his future
life.
Scott's position enabled him to encounter the hazards of literary life
with comparative safety. He held two offices, that of Sheriff of
Selkirk, and Clerk of the Court of Sessions, which yielded him a
competent income. He received some accession to his fortune on his
marriage, and the tastes of his lady prevented her from indulging in
any of the extravagance of fashionable life. Domestic happiness and
rural retirement were favorable to literary exertion. He soon produced
a second poem, "Marmion," which many critics prefer to all his other
poems. It was, however, rather harshly attacked in the _Edinburgh
Review_ on its first appearance, which the author felt keenly, as he
had been himself a contributor to that journal. This was the origin of
the _Quarterly Review_, which was established mainly in consequence of
his exertions. About the same time he established a new _Annual
Register_, and became a silent partner in the great printing
establishment of the Ballantynes. This last step involved him in
grievous embarrassments, but it stimulated him to exertions such as
none but a man of his prodigious powers could attempt. His
biographical, historical, and critical labors, united with his
editorial toils, were of appalling magnitude, but in all his works he
proved himself to be vigorous and effective. "Poetry," he says in one
of his letters, "is a scourging crop, and ought not to be hastily
repeated. Editing, therefore, may be considered as a green crop of
turnips or peas, extremely useful to those whose circumstances do not
admit of giving their farm a summer fallow."
The "Lady of the Lake" was his next poem; it appeared in 1811, and
soon outstripped all his former productions in fame and popularity.
More than fifty thousand copies of it were sold, and the profits of
the author exceeded two thousand guineas. It may be noticed as a
curious proof of the effect it produced on the public mind, that the
post-horse duty rose to an extraordinary degree in Scotland, from the
eagerness of travellers to visit the localities described in the poem.
He was now at the zenith of his fame. The sale of his next poem,
"Rokeby," showed that his popularity had declined, and when this was
followed by the comparative failure of the "Lord of the Isles," he
resolved to abandon the field of poetry, and seek for fame in another
form of composition.
Ten years before this period he had commenced the novel of "Waverley,"
and thrown the manuscript aside; having accidentally discovered the
unfinished romance amid the old lumber of a garret, he completed it
for the press in 1814, and published it anonymously. Its appearance
created a greater sensation and marks a more distinct epoch in
literary history than that of his poetry. It was the great object of
his ambition to become a land-owner and to hold a high rank, not among
the literary characters, but the country gentlemen of Scotland, and
this was one of the causes of his being anxious to keep the authorship
of his novels a profound secret. The same ambition stimulated him to
exertion. He produced in rapid succession "Guy Mannering," "The
Antiquary," "Rob Roy," and the "Tales of my Landlord" in three series,
and at the same time published several pieces in his own name to
increase the mystification of the public. But his incognito was soon
detected; long before he avowed his romances, the world generally had
found out his secret; indeed, when he was created a baronet in 1820,
it was universally understood that this honor was conferred on him as
author of the Waverley Novels.
It is not necessary to enumerate all the fictions that emanated from
the brilliant imagination of the Northern Enchanter; the list would be
too long, but we must not omit to notice the energy with which he
labored. Even illness, that would have broken the spirits of most men,
as it prostrated the physical energies of Scott, opposed no impediment
to the progress of his compositions. When he could not write he could
dictate; and in this way, amid the agonies of a racking disease, he
composed "The Bride of Lammermoor," "The Legend of Montrose," and a
great part of the most fascinating of his works, "Ivanhoe." Never,
certainly, did mind exhibit so decisive a triumph over physical
suffering. "Be assured," he remarked to Mr. Gillies, "that if pain
could have prevented my application to literary work, not a page of
'Ivanhoe' would have been written. Now, if I had given way to mere
feelings and ceased to work, it is a question whether the disorder
would not have taken deeper root and become incurable."
The crowds of visitors that flocked to his baronial mansion at
Abbotsford, from all quarters, greatly added to the expenses which the
hospitable owner had to meet; but the unbounded popularity of his
novels appeared to him and to his publishers a never-failing source of
funds; and the Messrs. Constable accepted his drafts, to the amount of
many thousand pounds, in favor of works which were not only unwritten,
but even unimagined. Unfortunately, Scott, in return, could not refuse
to indorse the drafts of his publishers, and thus an amount of
liabilities was incurred which would appear quite inexplicable, if
experience had not shown that the dangerous facilities of
accommodation bills lead men on to an extent that they never discover
until the crash comes. In the great commercial crisis of 1825
Constables' house stopped payment; the assets proved to be very
trifling in comparison with the debts, and Sir Walter Scott was found
to be responsible to the startling amount of one hundred thousand
pounds!
His conduct on this occasion was truly noble; he put up his house and
furniture in Edinburgh to auction, delivered over his personal
effects--plate, books, furniture, etc.--to be held in trust for his
creditors (the estate itself had been settled on his eldest son when
he married), and bound himself to discharge annually a certain amount
of the liabilities of the insolvent firm. He then, with his
characteristic energy, set about the performance of his herculean
task. He took cheap lodgings, abridged his usual enjoyments and
recreations, and labored harder than ever. The death of his beloved
lady increased the gloom which the change of circumstances produced,
but though he sorrowed he did not relax his exertions. One of his
first tasks was the "Life of Bonaparte," which he completed in the
short space of thirteen months. For this he received from the
publishers the sum of L14,000, and such was its great circulation that
they had no reason to repent of their bargain. In the same year that
this work appeared, he took an opportunity of publicly avowing his
authorship of the Waverley Novels, declaring "that their merits, if
they had any, and their faults were entirely imputable to himself."
Sir Walter Scott's celebrity made everything that he produced
acceptable to the public. He did not allow these favorable impressions
to fade for want of exercise, and the list of the works, great and
small, which he produced to satisfy his creditors, is an unexampled
instance of successful labors. No one of these enterprises was so
profitable as the republication of his novels in a uniform series,
with his own notes and illustrations. It was not given to Sir Walter
Scott to see the complete restoration of his former position; his
exertions were too severe and pressed heavily on the springs of
health, already deprived by age of their elasticity and vigor. In the
short space of six years he had, by his sacrifices and exertions,
discharged more than two-thirds of the debt for which he was
responsible, and he had fair prospects of relieving himself from the
entire sum. But in 1831 he was seized with a terrible attack of
paralysis, to which his family had a constitutional tendency, and he
was advised to try the effect of a more genial climate in Southern
Europe. The British Government placed a ship at his disposal to convey
him to Italy; and when he came to London, men of every class and party
vied with each other in expressing sympathy for his sufferings and
hopes for his recovery.
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford.]
In Italy he was received with the greatest enthusiasm, and under the
influence of its sunny skies he seemed, for a while, to be recovering.
But his strength was gone, his heart was in his own home at
Abbotsford, and, almost an imbecile, he returned there. He died
September 20, 1832.
* * * * *
The following letter was written by him to his son Walter, in 1819,
soon after the young man had entered the army. It illustrates at once
his strong affections and his knowledge of the world.
"DEAR WALTER.
"... I shall be curious to know how you like your brother officers,
and how you dispose of your time. The drills and riding-school will,
of course, occupy much of your mornings for some time. I trust,
however, you will keep in view drawing, languages, etc. It is
astonishing how far even half an hour a day, regularly bestowed on one
object, will carry a man in making himself master of it. The habit of
dawdling away time is easily acquired, and so is that of putting every
moment either to use or to amusement.
"You will not be hasty in forming intimacies with any of your brother
officers, until you observe which of them are most generally respected
and likely to prove most creditable friends. It is seldom that the
people who put themselves hastily forward to please are those most
worthy of being known. At the same time you will take care to return
all civility which is offered, with readiness and frankness. The
Italians have a proverb, which I hope you have not forgot poor
Pierrotti's lessons so far as not to comprehend--'_Volto sciolto e
pensieri stretti_.' There is no occasion to let any one see what you
exactly think of him; and it is the less prudent, as you will find
reason, in all probability, to change your opinion more than once.
"I shall be glad to hear of your being fitted with a good servant.
Most of the Irish of that class are scapegraces--drink, steal, and lie
like the devil. If you could pick up a canny Scot it would be well.
Let me know about your mess. To drink hard is none of your habits, but
even drinking what is called a certain quantity every day hurts the
stomach, and by hereditary descent yours is delicate. I believe the
poor Duke of Buccleuch laid the foundation of that disease which
occasioned his premature death in the excesses of Villar's regiment,
and I am sorry and ashamed to say, for your warning, that the habit of
drinking wine, so much practised when I was a young man, occasioned, I
am convinced, many of my cruel stomach complaints. You had better
drink a bottle of wine on any particular occasion, than sit and soak
and sipple at an English pint every day.
"All our bipeds are well. Hamlet had an inflammatory attack, and I
began to think he was going mad, after the example of his great
namesake, but Willie Laidlaw bled him, and he has recovered. Pussy is
very well. Mamma, the girls, and Charlie join in love. Yours
affectionately,
"W. S.
"P.S.--Always mention what letters of mine you have received, and
write to me whatever comes into your head. It is the privilege of
great boys when distant, that they cannot tire papas by any length of
detail upon any subject."
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
(1770-1850)
[Illustration: William Wordsworth.]
William Wordsworth, the poet, was born at Cockermouth, on the Derwent,
in Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. His parentage offers a curious
parallel to Scott's; he was the son of an attorney, law-agent to the
Earl of Lonsdale, a prosperous man in his profession, descended from
an old Yorkshire family of landed gentry. On the mother's side, also,
Wordsworth was connected with the middle territorial class; his
mother, Anne Cookson, was the daughter of a well-to-do mercer in
Penrith; but her mother was a Crackanthorpe, whose ancestors had been
lords of the manor of Newbiggin, near Penrith, from the time of Edward
III. He was thus, as Scott put it in his own case, come of "gentle"
kin, and, like Scott, he was proud of it, and declared the fact in his
short fragment of prose autobiography. The country squires and farmers
whose blood flowed in Wordsworth's veins were not far enough above
local life to be out of sympathy with it, and the poet's interest in
the common scenes and common folk of the North Country hills and dales
had a traceable hereditary bias.
Though his parents were of sturdy stock, both died prematurely, his
mother when he was five years old, his father when he was thirteen,
the ultimate cause of death in his mother's case being exposure to
cold in "a best bedroom" in London; in his father's, exposure on a
Cumberland hill, where he had been befogged and lost his way. At the
age of eight Wordsworth was sent to school at Hawkshead, in the
Esthwaite Valley, in Lancashire. His father died while he was there,
and at the age of seventeen he was sent by his uncle to St. John's
College, Cambridge. He did not distinguish himself in the studies of
the university, and for some time after taking his degree of B.A.,
which he did in January, 1791, he showed what seemed to his relatives
a most perverse reluctance to adopt any regular profession. His mother
had noted his "stiff, moody, and violent temper" in childhood, and it
seemed as if this family judgment was to be confirmed in his manhood.
After taking his degree he was pressed to take holy orders, but would
not; he had no taste for the law; he idled a few months aimlessly in
London, a few months more with a Welsh college friend, with whom he
had made a pedestrian tour in France and Switzerland, during his last
Cambridge vacation; then, in November of 1791, he crossed to France,
ostensibly to learn the language, made the acquaintance of
revolutionaries, sympathized with them vehemently, and was within an
ace of throwing in his lot with the Brissotins, to give them the
steady direction that they needed. When it came to this his relatives
cut off his supplies, and he was obliged to return to London toward
the close of 1792. But still he resisted all pressure to enter any of
the regular professions, published "An Evening Walk" and "Descriptive
Sketches," in 1793, and in 1794, still moving about to all appearance
in stubborn aimlessness among his friends and relatives, had no more
rational purpose of livelihood than drawing up the prospectus of a
periodical of strictly republican principles, to be called The
_Philanthropist_. At this stage, at the age of twenty-four, Wordsworth
seemed to his friends a very hopeless and impracticable young man.
But all the time from his boyhood upward a great purpose had been
growing and maturing in his mind. Nature was little more than a
picture-gallery to him; the pleasures of the eye had all but absolute
dominion; and he
"Roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock,
Still craving combinations of new forms,
New pleasures, wide empire for the sight,
Proud of her own endowments, and rejoiced
To lay the inner faculties asleep."
But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was
inwardly bent, all the time that his relatives saw in him only a
wayward and unpromising aversion to work in any regular line, upon
poetry as "his office upon earth."
In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy, who
with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A
timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A
friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Raisley Calvert,
son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who had large estates in
Cumberland, died early in 1795, leaving him a legacy of L900. And here
it may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully
remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue
his poetic career without distraction. Calvert's bequest came to him
when he was on the point of concluding an engagement as a journalist
in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks
to her frugal management, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By
the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth's father a
large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay
it, died, and his successor paid the debt with interest. His wife,
Mary Hutchinson, whom he married in 1802, brought him some fortune;
and in 1813, when, in spite of his plain living, his family began to
press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-distributor for
Westmoreland, with an income of L500, afterward nearly doubled by the
increase of his district. By this succession of timely godsends,
Wordsworth, though he did not escape some periods of sharp anxiety,
was saved from the necessity of turning aside from his vocation.
To return, however, to the course of his life from the time when he
resolved to labor with all his powers in the office of poet. The first
two years, during which he lived with his self-sacrificing sister at
Racedown, in Dorset, were spent in half-hearted and very imperfectly
successful experiments--satires in imitation of Juvenal, the tragedy
of "The Borderers," and a poem in the Spenserian stanza, the poem now
entitled "Guilt and Sorrow." How much longer this time of doubtful,
self-distrustful endeavor might have continued is a subject for
curious speculation; an end was put to it by a fortunate incident, a
visit from Coleridge, who had read his first publication, and seen in
it, what none of the public critics had discerned, the advent of "an
original poetic genius." It would be impossible to exaggerate the
importance for Wordsworth of the arrival of this enthusiastic
Columbus. Under his sister's genial influence he was groping his way
doubtfully out of the labyrinth of poetic conventions, beginning to
see a new pathos and sublimity in human life, but not yet convinced,
except by fits and starts, of the rightness of his own vision.
Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly
voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself.
Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He read to his
visitor one of his experiments, the story of the ruined cottage,
afterward introduced into the first book of "The Excursion."
Coleridge, who had already seen original poetic genius in the poems
published before, was enthusiastic in his praise of them as having "a
character by books not hitherto reflected," and his praise gave new
heart and hope to the poet, hitherto hesitating and uncertain.
June, 1797, was the date of this memorable visit. So pleasant was the
companionship on both sides that, when Coleridge returned to Nether
Stowey, in Somerset, Wordsworth, at his instance, changed his quarters
to Alfoxden, within a mile and a half of Coleridge's temporary
residence, and the two poets lived in almost daily intercourse for the
next twelve months. During that period Wordsworth's powers rapidly
expanded and matured; ideas that had been gathering in his mind for
years, and lying there in dim confusion, felt the stir of a new life
and ranged themselves in clearer shapes under the fresh, quickening
breath of Coleridge's swift and discursive dialect. The radiant
restless vitality of the more variously gifted man stirred the stiffer
and more sluggish nature of the recluse to its depths, and Coleridge's
quick and generous appreciation of his power gave him precisely the
encouragement that he needed.
It is interesting to compare with what he actually accomplished, the
plan of life-work with which Wordsworth finally settled at Grasmere,
in the last month of the eighteenth century. The plan was definitely
conceived as he left the German town of Goslar, during a trip on the
Continent, in the spring of 1799. Tired of the wandering, unsettled
life that he had led hitherto; dissatisfied also with the fragmentary,
occasional, and disconnected character of his lyrical poems, he longed
for a permanent home among his native hills, where he might, as one
called and consecrated to the task, devote his powers continuously to
the composition of a great philosophical poem on Man, Nature, and
Society. The poem was to be called "The Recluse." He communicated the
design to Coleridge, who gave him enthusiastic encouragement to
proceed. In the first transport of the conception he felt as if he
needed only solitude and leisure for the continuous execution of it.
But, though he had still before him fifty years of peaceful life amid
his beloved scenery, the work in the projected form at least was
destined to remain incomplete. Doubts and misgivings soon arose, and
favorable moments of felt inspiration delayed their coming. To sustain
him in his resolution he thought of writing as an introduction, or, as
he put it, an antechapel to the church which he proposed to build, a
history of his own mind up to the time when he recognized the great
mission of his life. It appears from a letter to his friend, Sir
George Beaumont, that his health was far from robust, and in
particular that he could not write without intolerable physical
uneasiness. We should probably not be wrong in connecting his physical
weakness with his rule of waiting for favorable moments. His next
start with "The Prelude," in the spring of 1804, was more prosperous;
he dropped it for several months, but, resuming again in the spring of
1805, he completed it in the summer of that year. But still the
composition of the great work to which it was intended to be a portico
proceeded by fits and starts. It was not till 1814 that the second of
the three divisions of "The Recluse," ultimately named "The
Excursion," was ready for publication; and he went no further in the
execution of his great design.
We shall speak presently of the reception of the "The Excursion."
Meantime, we must look elsewhere for the virtual accomplishment of the
great design of "The Recluse." The purpose was not, after all,
betrayed; it was really fulfilled, though not in the form intended, in
his various occasional poems. In relation to the edifice that he
aspired to construct, he likened these poems to little cells,
oratories, and sepulchral recesses; they are really the completed
work, much more firmly united by their common purpose than by any
formal and visible nexus of words. Formally disconnected, they really,
as we read and feel them, range themselves to spiritual music, as the
component parts of a great poetic temple, finding a rendezvous amid
the scenery of the district where the poet had his local habitation.
The Lake District, as transfigured by Wordsworth's imagination, is the
fulfilment of his ambition after an enduring memorial. The Poems,
collected and published in 1807, compose in effect "a philosophical
poem on Man, Nature, and Society," the title of which might fitly have
been "The Recluse," "as having for its principal subject the
sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." As a
realization of the idea of "The Recluse," these poems are, from every
poetical point of view, infinitely superior to the kind of thing that
he projected and failed to complete.