UPTON,
Feb. 9, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I hope you have got Lockhart's Life of Scott with
you; if not, I will send it out to you. I have been reading it lately,
and I have a strong wish that you should do the same. It has not all
the same value; the earlier part, the account of the prosperous years,
is rather tiresome in places. There is something boisterous,
undignified--even, I could think, vulgar--about the aims and ambitions
depicted. It suggests a prosperous person, seated at a well-filled
table, and consuming his meat with a hearty appetite. The desire to
stand well with prominent persons, to found a family, to take a place
in the county, is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire; but it is a
commonplace ambition. There is a charm in the simplicity, the
geniality, the childlike zest of the man; but there is nothing great
about it. Then comes the crash; and suddenly, as though a curtain drew
up, one is confronted with the spectacle of an indomitable and
unselfish soul, bearing a heavy burden with magnificent tranquillity,
and settling down with splendid courage to an almost intolerable task.
The energy displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of
debt that hung round his neck is superhuman, august. We see him
completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to
finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows,
ill-health, all closing in upon him. The quality of the work he thus
did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when under
normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen down. But the
spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine courage is one that
goes straight to the heart. It is then that one realises that the
earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast; one
recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can
dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that
overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but
gifts from the very hand of the Father--to purify a noble soul from the
dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of
living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example.
I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble
and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years.
The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. There
are no illusions about himself or his work. He hears that Southey has
been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says
plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel
case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than
emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console.
Again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if
there is anything good about his poetry or prose, "It is a hurried
frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous
touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared: "I have
been no sigher in shades--no writer of
Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays
Framed on fancies and whistled on reeds."
A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says that
"he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work."
That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as
Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware that
methods differ. What, for instance, could be more extraordinary than
the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott with his "You know I
don't care a curse about what I write;" and Wordsworth, whose chief
reading in later days was his own poetry. Whenever the two are brought
into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth is all pose and self-absorption;
Scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. Wordsworth staying at
Abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and stays at
home with his daughter. When the party return, they find Wordsworth
sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own Excursion.
A party of travellers arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise,
to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books they have
with them. When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference;
he quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which
the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent bows.
But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall a single
syllable from which one could gather that he was aware that his host
had ever put pen to paper.
Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his pomposity
out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little more deeply
the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have infused Wordsworth
with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put just a
little stiffening into Scott. He ought to have felt--and he did
not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a
sham seigneur.
But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together, and
Tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds uncomplaining and
undaunted on his way: "I did not like them to think that I could ever
be beaten by anything," he says. But at length the hand, tired with the
pen, falls, and twilight creeps upon the darkening mind.
I paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to
Abbotsford. I don't think I ever described it to you. My first feeling
was one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the place,
testifying to a certain imprudent prosperity. But the sight of the
rooms themselves; the desk, the chair, the book-lined library, the
little staircase by which, early or late, Scott could steal back to his
hard and solitary work; the death-mask, with its pathetic smile; the
clothes, with hat and shoes, giving, as it were, a sense of the very
shape and stature of the man--these brought the whole thing up with a
strange reality.
Of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about the
place; the plaster beams, painted to look like oak; the ugly
emblazonries; the cruel painted glass; the laboriously collected
objects--all these reveal the childish side of Scott, the superficial
self which slipped from him so easily when he entered into the cloud.
And then the sight of his last resting-place; the ruined abbey, so
deeply embowered in trees that the three dim Eildon peaks are
invisible; the birds singing in the thickets that clothe the ruined
cloisters--all this made a parable, and brought before one with an
intensity of mystery the wonder of it all. The brief life, so full of
plans for permanence; the sombre valley of grief; the quiet end, when
with failing lips he murmured that the only comfort for the dying heart
was the thought that it had desired goodness, however falteringly,
above everything.
I can't describe to you how deeply all this affects me--with what a
hunger of the heart, what tenderness, what admiration, what wonder. The
very frankness of the surprise with which, over and over again, the
brave spirit confesses that he does not miss the delights of life as
much as he expected, nor find the burden as heavy as he had feared, is
a very noble and beautiful thing. I can conceive of no book more likely
to make a spirit in the grip of sorrow and failure more gentle,
hopeful, and brave; because it brings before one, with quiet and
pathetic dignity, the fact that no fame, no success, no recognition,
can be weighed for a moment in the balance with those simple qualities
of human nature which the humblest being may admire, win, and
display.--Ever yours,