CONCLUSION
It is natural--indeed the feeling is not merely easy of excuse, but
entitled to respect--that 'the pity of it,' the sombre close of so
brilliant a career as Scott's, should attract somewhat disproportionate
attention. Thus readers of his life are drawn more especially either to
sorrow for his calamities, or to admiration of this stoutest of all
hearts set to nearly the stiffest of all hills, or to casuistical debate
on the 'dram of eale' that brought about his own share in causing his
misfortunes. Undoubtedly, none of these things ought to escape our
attention. But, in the strict court of literary and critical audit, they
must not have more than their share. As a matter of fact, Scott's work
was almost finished--nothing distinctly novel in kind and first-rate in
quality, except the _Tales of a Grandfather_ and the Introduction to the
_Chronicles_, remained to be added to it--when that fatal bill of
Constable's was suffered by Hurst & Robinson to be returned. And the
trials which followed, though they showed the strength, the nobleness,
the rare balance and solidity of his character, did not create these
virtues, which had been formed and established by habit long before.
_Respice finem_ is not here a wise, at least a sufficient, maxim: we
must look along the whole line to discern satisfactorily and thoroughly
what manner of man this was in life and in letters.
What manner of man he was physically is pretty well-known from his
originally numerous and almost innumerably reproduced and varied
portraits; not extremely tall, but of a goodly height, somewhat
shortened by his lameness and massive make, the head being distinguished
by a peculiar domed, or coned, cranium. This made 'Lord Peter' Robertson
give him the nickname of 'Peveril of the Peak,' which he himself after a
little adopted, and which, shortened to 'Peveril,' was commonly used by
his family. His expression, according to the intelligence of those who
saw him and the mood in which he found himself, has been variously
described as 'heavy,' 'homely,' and in more complimentary terms. But the
more appreciative describers recognise the curiously combined humour,
shrewdness, and kindliness which animated features naturally irregular
and quite devoid of what his own generation would have called 'chiselled
elegance.' He himself asserts--and it seems to be the fact--that from
the time of the disappearance of his childish maladies to the attack of
cramp, or gallstones, or whatever the evil was which came on in 1818,
and from which he never really recovered, his health was singularly
robust; and he appears as quite a young man to have put it to
considerable, though not excessive, tests.
His conversation, like his countenance, has been variously
characterised, and it is probable that the complexion of both depended,
even more than it does with most men, on his company. He is acknowledged
never to have 'talked for victory,' an evil and barbarous practice,
which the Edinburgh wits seem to have caught from their great enemy and
guest, Dr. Johnson; to have (like all good men) simply abominated
talking about his own works, or indeed bookishly at all, full as his
conversation was of literature; and, though a great tale-teller, to have
been no monopoliser of the conversation in any way. He admits having
been in youth and early middle age not disinclined to solitude,--and he
does not appear to have at any time liked miscellaneous society much,
though he prided himself, and very justly, on having, from all but his
earliest youth, frequented many kinds of it, including the best. The
perfect ease of his correspondence with all sorts and conditions of men
and women may have owed something to this; but, no doubt, it owed as
much to the happy peculiarities and composition of his nature and
temperament.
The only fault or faults of which he has been accused with any
plausibility are those which attend or proceed from a somewhat too high
estimate of rank and of riches;--that is to say, a too great eagerness
to obtain these things, and at the same time a too great deference for
those who possessed them. From avarice, in any of the ordinary senses of
the word, he was, indeed, entirely free. His generosity, if not
absolutely and foolishly indiscriminate, was extraordinary, and as
unostentatious as it was lavish. He certainly had no delight in hoarding
money, and his personal tastes, except in so far as books, 'curios,' and
so forth were concerned, were of the simplest possible. Yet, as we have
seen, he was never quite content with an income which, after very early
years, was always competent, and when he launched into commercial
ventures, already, in prospect at least, considerable; while in the one
article of spending money on house and lands he was admittedly
excessive. So, too, he seems to have been really indifferent about his
title, except as an adjunct to these possessions, and as something
transmissible to, and serving to distinguish, the family he longed to
found. Yet no instance of the slightest servility on his part to
rank--much less to riches--has been produced. His address, no doubt,
both in writing and conversation, was more ceremonious than would now be
customary. But it must be remembered that this was then a point of good
manners, and that 'your Lordship' and 'my noble friend,' even between
persons intimate with each other and on the common footing of gentlemen,
were then phrases as proper and usual in private as they still are in
public life.[51] Attempts have been made to excuse his attitude, on the
plea that it was inherited from his father (_vide_ the scene between
Saunders Fairford and Herries), that it was national, that it was this,
that, and the other. For my own part, I have never read or heard of any
instance of it which seemed to me to exceed the due application to
etiquette of the rule of distributive justice, to give every man his
own. Scott, I think, would have accepted the principle, though not the
application, of the sentence of Timoleon de Cosse, Duke of Brissac--'God
has made thee a gentleman, and the king has made thee a duke.' And he
honoured God and the king by behaving accordingly.
Of his infinite merits as a host and a guest, as a friend and as a
relation, there is a superabundance of evidence. It does not appear that
he ever lost an old friend; and though, like most men who have more
talent for friendship than for acquaintance, he did not latterly make
many new ones, the relations existing between himself and Lockhart are
sufficient proof of his faculty of playing the most difficult of all
parts, that of elder friend to younger. I have said above that, though
in no sense touchy, he was a very dangerous person to take a liberty
with; he adopted to the full the morality of his time about duelling,
though he disapproved of it;[49] he was in all respects a man of the
world, yet without guile.
It is, moreover, quite certain that Scott, though never talking much
about religion (as, indeed, he never talked much about any of the deeper
feelings of the heart), was a man very sincerely religious. He was not a
metaphysician in any way, and therefore had no special inclination
towards that face or summit of metaphysics which is called theology. And
it is pretty clear that he had towards disputed points of doctrine,
ceremony, and discipline, a not sharply or decidedly formulated
attitude. But there is no doubt whatever that he was a thoroughly and
sincerely orthodox Christian, and there are some slight escapes of
confession unawares in his private writings, which show in what thorough
conformity with his death his life had been. Few men have ever so well
observed the one-half of the apostle's doctrine as to pure religion; and
if he did not keep himself (in the matter of the secret partnership and
others) altogether unspotted from the world, the sufferings of his last
seven years may surely be taken as a more than sufficient purification.
More blameless morally, I think, few men have been; fewer still better
equipped with the positive virtues. And, above all, we must recognise in
Scott (if we have any power of such recognition) what has been already
called a certain nobleness, a certain natural inclination towards all
things high, and great, and pure, and of good report, which is rarer
still than negative blamelessness or even than positive virtue.
To speak of Scott's politics is a little difficult and perhaps a little
dangerous; yet they played so large a part in his life and work that the
subject can hardly be omitted, especially as it comes just between those
aspects of him which we have already discussed, and those to which we
are coming. It has sometimes been disputed whether his Toryism was much
more than mere sentiment; and of course there were not wanting in his
own day fellows of the baser sort who endeavoured to represent it as
mere self-interest. But no impartial person nowadays, I suppose, doubts,
however meanly he may think of Scott's political creed, that that creed
was part, not of his interests, not even of his mere crotchets and
crazes, literary and other, but of his inmost heart and soul. That
reverence for the past, that distaste for the vulgar, that sense of
continuity, of mystery, of something beyond interest and calculation,
which the worst foes of Toryism would, I suppose, allow to be its nobler
parts, were the blood of Scott's veins, the breath of his nostrils, the
marrow of his bones. My friend Mr. Lang thinks that Scott's Toryism is
dead, that no successor has arisen on its ruins, that it was, in fact,
almost a private structure, of which he was the architect, a tree fated
to fall with its planter. Perhaps; but perhaps also
'The Little Tower with no such ease
Is won';
and there are enough still to keep watch and ward of it.
But we have of course here to look even more to his mental character
than to his moral, to do with him rather as a man of genius than as a
'man of good,' though it is impossible to overlook, and difficult to
overestimate, his singular eminence as both combined. Of his actual
literary accomplishment, something like a detailed view has been given
in this little book, and of some of its separate departments estimates
have been attempted.[48] But we may, or rather must, gather all these up
here. Nor can we proceed better than by the old way of inquiry--first,
What were the peculiar characteristics of his thought? and, secondly,
What distinguished his expression of this thought?
As to the first point, it has been pretty generally admitted--though the
admissions have in some cases been carried almost too far--that we are
not to look for certain things in Scott. We are not to look for any
elaborately or at least scholastically minute faculty or practice of
analysis or of argument. But to proceed from this to a general denial of
'philosophy' to him--that is to say, to allow him a merely superficial
knowledge of human nature--is an utter mistake. I have quoted elsewhere,
but the book from which the quotation is made is so rare that I may well
quote here again, some remarkable words on this subject from M. Milsand,
Mr. Browning's friend, and the recipient of the Dedication of the
reprint of _Sordello_.[50] It is certain that this praise might be
supported with a large anthology of passages in the novels and even the
poems--passages indicating an anthropological science as intimate as it
is unpretentiously expressed. To some good folk in our days, who think
that nothing can be profound which is naturally and simply spoken, and
who demand that a human philosopher shall speak gibberish and wear his
boots on his brows, the fact may be strange, but it is a fact. And it
may be added that even if chapter and verse could not thus be produced,
a sufficient proof, the most sufficient possible, could be otherwise
provided. Scott, by the confession of all competent judges, save a very
few, has created almost more men and women, undoubtedly real and
lifelike, than any other prose novelist. Now you cannot create a man or
a woman without knowing whereof a man and a woman are made, though the
converse proposition is unfortunately by no means so universally
predicable. He was content, as a rule, to put this great science of his
into practice rather than to expound it in theory, to demonstrate it
rather than to lecture on it, but that is all.
In the second place, we are not to look to him for any great intensity
of delineation of passion, especially in the sense to which that word is
more commonly confined. He has nowhere left us (as some other men of
letters have) any hint that he abstained from doing this because the
passion would have been so tremendous that it was on the whole best for
mankind that they should not be exposed to it. The qualities of humour
and of taste which were always present with Scott would have prevented
this. But I should doubt whether he felt any temptation to unbosom
himself, or any need to do so. The slight hints given at the time of the
combined action of his misfortunes and the agitation arising from his
renewed communications with Lady Jane Stuart, are almost all the
indications that we have on the subject, and they are too slight to
found any theory upon. It is evident that this was not his vein, or
that, if the vein was there, he did not choose to work it.
To pass from negations to positives, the region in which Scott's power
of conception and expression did lie, and which he ruled with wondrous
range and rarely equalled power, was a strangely united kingdom of
common-sense fact and fanciful or traditional romance. No writer who has
had such a sense of the past, of tradition, of romantic literature, has
had such a grasp of the actual working motives and conduct of mankind;
none who has had the latter has even come near to his command of the
former. We may take Spenser and Fielding as the princes of these
separate principalities in English literature, and though each had gifts
that Scott had not,--though Scott had gifts possessed by neither,--yet
if we could conceive Spenser and Fielding blended, the blend would, I
think, come nearer to Scott's idiosyncrasy than anything else that can
be imagined. He had advanced (or rather returned) from that one-sided
eighteenth-century conception of nature which was content to know
_human_ nature pretty thoroughly up to a certain point, and to dismiss
'prospects,' in Johnson's scornful language to Thrale, as one just like
the other. But he had retained the eighteenth-century grasp of man
himself, while recovering the path to the Idle Lake and the Cave of
Despair, to the many-treed wood through which Una and her knight
journeyed, and the Rich Strand where all the treasures of antiquity lay.
We may think--apparently some of us do think--that we have improved on
him in the recovery, and even in the retaining grasp. The fact of the
improvement on him will take a great deal of proving, I am inclined to
think; of the fact of his achievement there is no doubt.
If I must select Scott's special literary characteristic, next to that
really magical faculty of placing scenes and peopling them with
characters in the memory of his readers which I have noticed before, I
should certainly fix on his humour. It is a good old scholastic
doctrine, that the greatest merit of anything is to be excellent in the
special excellence of its kind. And in that quality which so gloriously
differentiates English literature from all others, Scott is never
wanting, and is almost always pre-eminent. If his patriotism, intense as
it is, is never grotesque or offensive, as patriotism too often is to
readers who do not share it; if his pathos never touches the maudlin; if
his romantic sentiment is always saved by the sense of solid fact,--and
we may assert these things without hesitation or qualification,--it is
due to his humour. For this humour, never merely local, never bases its
appeal on small private sympathies and understandings and pass-words
which leave the world at large cold, or mystified, or even disgusted.
Nor is it perhaps uncritical to set down that pre-eminently happy use,
without abuse, of dialect, which has attracted the admiration of almost
all good judges, to this same humour, warning him alike against the
undisciplined profusion and the injudicious selection which have not
been and are not unknown in some followers of his. And, further, his
universal quality is free from some accompanying drawbacks which must be
acknowledged in the humour of some of the other very great humorists. It
is not coarse--a defect which has made prigs at all times, and
especially at this time, affect horror at Aristophanes; it is not grim,
like that of Swift; it is free from any very strong evidences of its
owner having lived at a particular date, such as may be detected by the
Devil's Advocate even in Fielding, even in Thackeray. No tricks or
grimaces, no mere elaboration, no lingering to bespeak applause; but a
moment of life and nature subjected to the humour-stamp and left
recorded and transformed for ever--there is Scott.
That the necessary counterpart and companion of this breadth of humour
should be depth of feeling can be no surprise to those who accept the
only sound distinction between humour and wit. Scott himself never wore
his heart on his sleeve; but to those who looked a little farther than
the sleeve its beatings were sufficiently evident. The Scott who made
that memorable exclamation on the Mound, and ejaculated 'No, by----!' at
the discovery of the Regalia,[47] who wrote Jeanie's speech to Queen
Caroline and Habakkuk Mucklewrath's to Claverhouse, had no need ever to
affect emotion, because it was always present, though repressed when it
had no business to exhibit itself. And his romantic imagination was as
sincere as his pathos or his indignation. He never lost the clue to 'the
shores of old romance'; and, at least, great part of the secret which
made him such a magician to his readers was that the spell was on
himself--that the regions of fancy were as open, as familiar as Princes
Street or the Parliament Square to this solid practical Clerk of
Session, who avowed that no food could to his taste equal Scotch broth,
and in everything but the one fatal delusion was as sound a man of
business as ever partook of that nourishing concoction.
In his execution both in prose and verse, but especially, or at least
more obviously, in the latter there are certain peculiarities, in the
nature (at least partly) of defect, which strike every critical eye at
once. At no time, and in no case, was Scott of the order of the careful,
anxious miniaturists of work, who repaint every stroke a hundred times,
adjust every detail of composition over and over again, and can never
have done with rehandling and perfecting. Nor did he belong to that very
rare class whose work seems to be, at any rate after a slight
apprenticeship, faultless from the first, to whom inelegancies of style,
incorrect rhymes, licences of metre--not deliberate and intended to
produce the effect they achieve, but the effect of carelessness or of
momentary inability to do what is wanted--are by nature or education
impossible. His nature did not give him this endowment, and his
education was of the very last sort to procure it for him. He himself,
not out of pique or conceit, things utterly alien from his nature, still
less out of laziness, but, I believe, as a genuine, and, what is more, a
correct self-criticism, has left in his private writings repeated
expressions of his belief that revision and correction in his case not
only did not improve the work, but were in most cases likely to do it
positive harm, that the spoon was made or the horn spoiled (to adapt his
country proverb) at the first draft, and once for all. I think that this
was a correct judgment, and I do not see that it implies any inferiority
on his part. It is not as if he ever aimed at the methods of the
precisians and failed, as if it was his desire to be a 'correct' writer,
a careful observer of proportion and construction, a producer of artful
felicities in metre, rhythm, rhyme, phrase. We may yield to no one in
the delight of tracing the exact correspondence of strophe and
antistrophe in a Greek chorus, the subtle vowel-music of a Latin hymn or
a passage of Rossetti's. But I cannot see why, because we rejoice in
these things, we should demand them of all poetry, or why, because we
rejoice in the faultless construction of Fielding or the exquisite
finish of Jane Austen as novelists, we should despise the looser
handling and more sweeping touch of Scott in prose fiction. It is
extremely probable that, as Mr. Balfour suggested the other day in
unveiling the Westminster Abbey monument, this breadth of touch obtained
him his popularity abroad, nor need it impair his fame at home.
Unquestionably, though he had many minor gifts and graces, including
that of incomparable lyric snatch, from the drums and fifes of
'Lochinvar' and 'Bonnie Dundee' to the elfin music of 'Proud Maisie,'
his faculty of weaving a story in prose or in verse, with varied
decorations of dialogue and description and character, rather than on a
cunning canvas of plot, was Scott's main forte. If it is in verse--and
admirable as it is here, I think we must allow it to be--less
pre-eminent than in prose, it is, first, because minor formal defects
are more felt in verse than in prose; secondly, because the scope of the
medium is less; and thirdly, because the medium itself was in reality
not what he wanted. The verse romance of Scott is a great achievement
and a delightful possession: it has had extraordinary influence on
English literature, from the work of Byron, which it directly produced,
and which pretty certainly would never have been produced without it, to
that of Mr. William Morris, which may not impossibly have been its last
echo--transformed and refreshed, but still an echo--for some time to
come. But there was a little of the falsetto in it, and the interludes,
of which the introductions to _Marmion_ and to the _Bridal_ are the most
considerable, show that it gave no outlets, or outlets only awkward, for
much of what he wanted to say. He defines his own general literary
object admirably in a letter to Morritt. 'I have tried to induce the
public to relax some of the rules of criticism, and to be amused with
that medley of tragic and comic with which life presents us, not only in
the same course of action, but in the same character.' The detailed
remarks which have been given in earlier chapters make it unnecessary to
bring out the application of this to all his work, both verse and prose.
And it need but be pointed out in passing how much more satisfactorily
the form of prose fiction lent itself, than the form of verse romance,
to the expression of a creed which, as it had been that of Shakespeare,
so it was the creed of Scott.
But a few words must be added in reference to the complaint which is
often openly made, and which, I understand, is still more often secretly
entertained, or taken for proved, by the younger generation--to wit, the
complaint that Scott is 'commonplace' and 'conventional,' not merely in
thought, but in expression. As to the thought, that is best met by the
reply churlish, if not even by the reproof valiant. Scott's thought is
never commonplace, and never merely conventional: it can only seem so to
those who have given their own judgments in bondage to a conventional
and temporary cant of unconventionality. In respect of expression, the
complaint will admit of some argument which may best take the form of
example. It is perfectly true that Scott's expression is not
'quintessenced'--that it has to a hasty eye an air of lacking what is
called distinction; and, especially, that it has no very definite savour
of any particular time. At present, as at other periods during the
recorded story of literature, there is a marked preference for all these
things which it is not; and so Scott is, with certain persons, in
disfavour accordingly. But it so happens that the study of this now
long record of literature is itself sufficient to convince anyone how
treacherous the tests thus suggested are. There never, for instance, was
an English writer fuller of all the marks which these, our younger
critics, desiderate in Scott, and admire in some authors of our own day,
than John Lyly, the author of _Euphues_, of a large handful of very
charming and interesting court dramas, and of some delightful lyrics.
Those who have to teach literature impress the importance, and try to
impress the interest, of Lyly on students and readers, and they do
right. For he was a man not merely of talent, but (with respect to my
friend Mr. Courthope, who thinks differently), I think, of genius. He
had a poetical fancy, a keen and biting wit, a fairly exact proficiency
in the scholarship of his time. He eschewed the obvious, the commonplace
in thought, and still more in style, as passionately as any man ever has
eschewed it, and, having not merely will and delicacy, but power, he not
only achieved an immense temporary popularity, but even influenced the
English language permanently. Yet--and those who thus praise him know
it--he, the apostle of ornate prose, the model of a whole generation of
the greatest wits that England has seen, the master of Shakespeare in
more things than one, including romantic comedy, the originator of the
English analytic novel, the 'raiser' (as I think they call it) 'of his
native language to a higher power,' is dead. We shall never get anybody
outside the necessarily small number of those who have cultivated the
historic as well as the aesthetic sense in literature, to read him except
as a curiosity or a task, because he not merely cultivated art, but
neglected nature for it; because he fooled the time to the top of its
bent, and let the time fool him in return; because, instead of making
the common as though it were not common, he aimed and strained at the
uncommon _in_ and _per se_.
Scott did just the contrary. He never tried to be unlike somebody else;
if he hit, as he did hit, upon great new styles of
literature,--absolutely new in the case of the historical novel, revived
after long trance in the case of the verse tale,--it was from no desire
to innovate, but because his genius called him. Though in ordinary ways
he was very much a man of his time, he did not contort himself in any
fashion by way of expressing a (then) modern spirit, a Georgian
idiosyncrasy, or anything of that sort; he was content with the language
of the best writers and the thoughts of the best men. He was no amateur
of the topsy-turvy, and had not the very slightest desire to show how a
literary head could grow beneath the shoulders. He was satisfied that
his genius should flow naturally. And the consequence is that it was
never checked, that it flows still for us with all its spontaneous
charm, and that it will flow _in omne volubilis aevum_. Among many
instances of the strength which accompanied this absence of strain one
already alluded to may be mentioned again. Scott is one of the most
literary of all writers. He was saturated with reading; nothing could
happen but it brought some felicitous quotation, some quaint parallel to
his mind from the great wits, or the small, of old. Yet no writer is
less _bookish_ than he; none insults his readers less with any parade,
with any apparent consciousness of erudition; and he wears his learning
so lightly that pedants have even accused him of lacking it because he
lacks pedantry. His stream, to resume the simile, carries in solution
more reading as well as more wit, more knowledge of life and nature,
more gifts of almost all kinds than would suffice for twenty men of
letters, yet the very power of its solvent force, as well as the vigour
of its current, makes these things comparatively invisible.
In dealing with an author so voluminous and so various in his kinds and
subjects of composition, it is a hard matter to say what has to be said
within prescribed limits such as these, just as it is still harder to
select from so copious a store of biographical information details which
may be sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to give a firm and
distinct picture of his life. Yet it may perhaps be questioned whether
very elaborate handling is necessary for Scott. No man probably,
certainly no man of letters, is more of a piece than he. As he has been
subjected to an almost unparalleled trial in the revelation of his
private thoughts, so his literary powers and performances extend over a
range which is unusual, if not absolutely singular, in men of letters of
the first rank. Yet he is the same throughout, in romance as in review,
in novel as in note-writing. Except his dramatic work, a department for
which he seems to have been almost totally unfitted (despite the
felicity of his 'Old Play' fragments), nothing of his can be neglected
by those who wish to enjoy him to the full. Yet though there is no
monotony, there is a uniformity which is all the more delightfully
brought out by the minor variations of subject and kind. The last as the
first word about Scott should perhaps be, 'Read him. And, as far as may
be, read all of him.'
When, in comparatively early days of his acquaintance with Lockhart,
Scott, thinking himself near death in the paroxysms of his cramps,
bequeathed to his future son-in-law, in the words of the ballad, 'the
vanguard of the three,' the duty of burying him and continuing his work,
if possible, he had himself limited the heritage to the defence of
ancient faith and loyalty--a great one enough. But his is, in fact, a
greater. From generation to generation, whosoever determines, in so far
as fate and the gods allow, to hold these things fast, and, moreover, to
love all good literature, to temper erudition with common sense, to let
humour wait always upon fancy, and duty upon romance; whosoever at least
tries to be true to the past, to show a bold front to the present, and
to let the future be as it may; whosoever 'spurns the vulgar' while
endeavouring to be just to individuals, and faces 'the Secret' with
neither bravado nor cringing,--he may take, if not the vanguard, yet a
place according to his worth and merit, in the legion which this great
captain led. Of the frequent parallels or contrasts drawn between him
and Shakespeare it is not the least noteworthy that he is, of all men of
letters, that one of whom we have the most intimate and the fullest
revelation, while of Shakespeare we have the least. There need be very
little doubt that if we knew everything about Shakespeare, he would
come, as a man of mould might, scathless from the test. But we do know
everything, or almost everything, about Scott, and he comes out nearly
as well as anyone but a faultless monster could. For all the works of
the Lord in literature, as in other things, let us give thanks--for
Blake and for Beddoes as well as for Shelley and for Swift. But let
everyone who by himself, or by his fathers, claims origin between
Tol-Pedn-Penwith and Dunnet Head give thanks, with more energy and more
confidence than in any other case save one, for the fact that his is the
race and his the language of Sir Walter Scott.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] So, in a still earlier generation, Johnson, after calling his
step-daughter 'my dearest love,' and writing in the simplest way, will
end, and quite properly, with, 'Madam, your obedient, humble servant.'
[48] He made, as is well known, preparations to 'meet' General Gourgaud,
who was wroth about the _Napoleon_, but who never actually challenged
him.
[49] Most injustice has perforce been done to his miscellaneous verse
lying outside the great poems, and not all of it included in the novels.
It would be impossible to dwell on all the good things, from _Helvellyn_
and _The Norman Horseshoe_ onward; and useless to select a few. Some of
his best things are among them: few are without force, and fire, and
unstudied melody. The song-scraps, like the mottoes, in his novels are
often really marvellous snatches of improvisation.
[50] Il y a plus de philosophie dans ses ecrits ... que dans bon nombre
de _romans philosophiques_.
[51] When some tactless person tried to play tricks with the Crown.
INDEX
SCOTT, SIR WALTER:
Ancestry and parentage, 9, 10;
birth, 10;
infancy, 11;
school and college days, _ibid._;
apprenticeship, _ibid._;
friends and early occupations, 12, 13;
call to the Bar, 12, 14;
first love, 14-16;
engagement and marriage, 16;
briefs, fights, and volunteering, 17;
journeys to Galloway and elsewhere, 18, 19;
slowness of literary production and its causes, 20, 21;
call-thesis and translations of Buerger, 22;
reception of these last and their merit, 23;
contributes to _Tales of Wonder_, 24;
remarks on _Glenfinlas_ and _The Eve of St. John_, 25, 26;
_Goetz von Berlichingen_ and _The House of Aspen_, 26;
dramatic work generally, 27, _note_;
friendship with Leyden, Ritson, and Ellis, 28;
_Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 28-33;
contributes to the _Edinburgh Review_, 33-35;
his domestic life for the first seven years after his marriage, 35-37;
_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, 38-46;
partnership with Ballantyne, 46-50;
children and pecuniary affairs, 50, 51;
Clerkship of Session, 51;
politics during Fox and Grenville administration, 52;
anecdote of, on Mound, _ibid._;
_Marmion_, 52-55;
coolness with _Edinburgh_ and starting of _Quarterly Review_, 55, 56;
quarrel with Constable, 56, 57;
affair of Thomas Scott's appointment, 58, 59;
_The Lady of the Lake_, 59, 60;
_The Vision of Don Roderick_, 61;
_Rokeby_, 61-63;
_The Lord of the Isles_, 63, 64;
_The Bridal of Triermain_, 64-66;
_Harold the Dauntless_, 66, 67;
remarks on the verse romances generally, 67, 68;
_Waverley_, its origin, character, and reception, 69-76;
settlement at Abbotsford, 70, 71;
danger of Ballantyne & Co., and closer alliance with Constable, 71, 72;
yachting tour, 72;
_Guy Mannering_, 77-79;
introduced in London to the Regent and to Byron, 79;
journey to Brussels, _Field of Waterloo_, and _Paul's Letters_, 79;
_The Antiquary_, 80;
original mottoes, 81 and _note_;
_Old Mortality_ and _Black Dwarf_, 81-84;
quarrel with Blackwood, 82;
_Rob Roy_, 84, 85;
domestic affairs, 85-87;
_Heart of Midlothian_, 87, 88;
_Bride of Lammermoor_ and _Legend of Montrose_, 88-91;
attacked by cramp, 84, 86, 89, _note_;
domestic affairs, 91-93;
_Ivanhoe_, 93, 96;
_The Monastery_, 95, 96;
_The Abbot_ and _Kenilworth_, 96, 97;
_The Pirate_, 97, 98;
_The Fortunes of Nigel_, 99;
_Peveril of the Peak_, 100;
_Quentin Durward_, 100, 101;
_St. Ronan's Well_, 101, 102;
_Redgauntlet_, 102, 103;
_Tales of the Crusaders_, 104, 105;
domestic affairs, to tour in Ireland, 105, 106;
commercial crisis and fall of Constable and Ballantyne, 106, 107;
discussion of the facts, 107-114;
the _Journal_, 114-117;
death of Lady Scott, 116;
_Life of Napoleon_, 118-121;
_Woodstock_, 121-123;
_Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_, 123;
'Bonnie Dundee,' _ibid._;
_Chronicles of the Canongate_, 124-126;
_Tales of a Grandfather_, 126, 127;
_The Fair Maid of Perth_ and the '_Magnum Opus_,' 128;
_Anne of Geierstein_, 129;
declining health, 130;
success of the '_Magnum_,' _ibid._;
stroke of paralysis and resignation of Clerkship, 131;
_Letters on Demonology_ and Christopher North's criticism, 131, 132;
_Count Robert of Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_, 133;
political annoyances and insults at Jedburgh, 134;
last visit of Wordsworth and departure for Italy, 135;
sojourn on the Mediterranean, 136;
return and death, 137;
settlement of debts, _ibid._;
monuments to Scott, 138;
general view of Scott desirable, 139;
his physique and conversation, 140;
his alleged subserviency to rank, 141, 142;
his moral and religious character, 142, 143;
his politics, 144;
characteristics of his thought, 145-147;
his combination of the practical and the romantic, 147;
his humour, 148;
his feeling, 149;
his style, 150;
his power of story, 151;
not 'commonplace,' 151, 154;
comparison with Lyly, 153;
final remarks, 155, 156.
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE "FAMOUS SCOTS" SERIES.
Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. MACPHERSON, the _British Weekly_ says:--
"We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive
appearance of the first volume of their new series. The
typography is everything that could be wished, and the binding
is most tasteful.... We heartily congratulate author and
publishers on the happy commencement of this admirable
enterprise."
The _Literary World_ says:--
"One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far
outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we
are familiar."
The _Scotsman_ says:--
"As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle's
place in literature and his influence in the domains of morals,
politics, and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care
and fairness, but insight and a large capacity for original
thought and judgment."
The _Glasgow Daily Record_ says:--
"Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a
national series such as they have projected."
The _Educational News_ says:--
"The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking
manner."
Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by OLIPHANT SMEATON, the _Scotsman_ says:--
"It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer,
taking genuine interest in his subject, and bestowing
conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well in hand,
and has used them to produce a portrait that is both lifelike
and well balanced."
The _People's Friend_ says:--
"Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as
well as a well-balanced estimate and review of his works."
The _Edinburgh Dispatch_ says:--
"The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his
task."
The _Daily Record_ says:--
"The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in
Mr. Smeaton's pages."
The _Glasgow Herald_ says:--
"A careful and intelligent study."
Of HUGH MILLER, by W. KEITH LEASK, the _Expository Times_ says:--
"It is a right good book and a right true biography.... There is
a very fine sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a
Scotsman; there is also a fine choice of language in making it
ours."
The _Bookseller_ says:--
"Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the
simplicity, and yet the greatness, of his hero, and the broad
result of his life's work is very plainly and carefully set
forth. A short appreciation of his scientific labours, from the
competent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie, and a useful bibliography
of his works, complete a volume which is well worth reading for
its own sake, and which forms a worthy installment in an
admirable series."
The _Daily News_ says:--
"Leaves on us a very vivid impression."
Of JOHN KNOX, by A. TAYLOR INNES, Mr. Hay Fleming, in the _Bookman_
says:--
"A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and
of that famous Scot who helped so much to shape them."
The _Freeman_ says:--
"It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the
great Reformer's life, and in its estimate of his character and
work it is calm, dispassionate, and well balanced.... It is a
welcome addition to our Knox literature."
The _Speaker_ says:--
"There is vision in this book, as well as knowledge."
The _Sunday School Chronicle_ says:--
"Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes's exquisite
lecture on Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is
just the man to do justice to the great Reformer, who is more to
Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no
forgiveness.' His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with
Scottish ecclesiastical life, his religious insight, his
chastened enthusiasm, have enabled the author to produce an
excellent piece of work.... It is a noble and inspiring theme,
and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to perfection."
Of ROBERT BURNS, by GABRIEL SETOUN, the _New Age_ says:--
"It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good
as Carlyle's Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr. Nichol of
Glasgow."
The _Methodist Times_ says:--
"We are inclined to regard it as the very best that has yet been
produced. There is a proper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does
neither praise nor blame too copiously.... A difficult bit of
work has been well done, and with fine literary and ethical
discrimination."
_Youth_ says:--
"It is written with knowledge, judgment, and skill.... The
author's estimate of the moral character of Burns is temperate
and discriminating; he sees and states his evil qualities, and
beside these he places his good ones in their fulness, depth,
and splendour. The exposition of the special features marking
the genius of the poet is able and penetrating."
Of THE BALLADISTS, by JOHN GEDDIE, the _Birmingham Daily Gazette_
says:--
"As a popular sketch of an intensely popular theme, Mr. Geddie's
contribution to the 'Famous Scots Series' is most excellent."
The _Publishers' Circular_ says:--
"It may be predicted that lovers of romantic literature will
re-peruse the old ballads with a quickened zest after reading
Mr. Geddie's book. We have not had a more welcome little volume
for many a day."
The _New Age_ says:--
"One of the most delightful and eloquent appreciations of the
ballad literature of Scotland that has ever seen the light."
The _Spectator_ says:--
"The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable
value to the literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a
book in which the subject has been treated with deeper sympathy
or out of a fuller knowledge."