[1]This year (1875) Disraeli, as Chairman of the Byron Memorial Committee, has started a subscription for the erection of a statue to Byron on some prominent site in London.
[1]This year (1875) Disraeli, as Chairman of the Byron Memorial Committee, has started a subscription for the erection of a statue to Byron on some prominent site in London.
This is the time to notice the man who was Byron's and Shelley's worst enemy and Coleridge's best friend, and who, inferior as his productions are to those of his friend, deserves also to have his name coupled with Coleridge's as a famous English Romanticist.
Robert Southey, born in Bristol in 1774, was the son of a linen-draper there, and to the end of his life a man who produced the impression that he had been born in narrow circumstances, in a corner of the world with a narrow spiritual horizon. After studying a short time at Oxford, he, like the other poets of the Lake School, became infected by the spirit of the Revolution. In 1794 he wrote an extremely Jacobinical poem,Wat Tyler. About the same time he composed the following inscription for the room in which Martin, the regicide, had been confined:—
"For thirty years secluded from mankindHere Martin linger'd. Often have these wallsEcho'd his footsteps, as with even treadHe paced around his prison. Not to himDid Nature's fair varieties exist;He never saw the sun's delightful beams,Save when through yon high bars he pour'd a sadAnd broken splendour. Dost thou ask his crime?He had rebell'd against the King, and satIn judgment on him; for his ardent mindShaped goodliest plans of happiness on earth,And peace and liberty. Wild dreams! but suchAs Plato lov'd...."
The following rather clever parody was inserted by Mr. Canning in theAnti-Jacobin:—
"INSCRIPTION FOR THE DOOR OF THE CELL IN NEWGATE, WHERE MRS. BROWNRIGG, THE 'PRENTICE-CIDE, WAS CONFINED, PREVIOUS TO HER EXECUTION.
"For one long term, or ere her trial came,Here Brownrigg linger'd. Often have these cellsEcho'd her blasphemies, as with shrill voiceShe scream'd for fresh geneva. Not to herDid the blithe fields of Tothill, or thy street,St. Giles, its fair varieties expand;Till at the last in slow-drawn cart she wentTo execution. Dost thou ask her crime?She whipp'd two female 'prentices to death,And hid them in the coal-hole.For her mindShaped strictest plans of discipline. Sage schemes!Such as Lycurgus taught...."
After Southey, too, had given up his project of emigration and won the hand ofhisMiss Fricker, he settled in London, in 1797. From 1807 onwards the Government granted him an annual allowance of £150, and after Pye's death he became Poet Laureate, with a salary of £300. This post, which entailed the obligation to compose a poem on the occasion of every special event in the royal family, had first been offered by the Prince Regent to Scott, who asked his friend and patron, the Duke of Buccleuch, for advice in the matter. The Duke wrote: "Only think of being chanted and recitatived by a parcel of hoarse and squeaking choristers on a birthday, for the edification of the bishops, pages, maids of honour, and gentlemen-pensioners! Oh horrible! thrice horrible!" &c., &c. Scott declined the proffered honour, and suggested Southey, a loyal and needy poet, as a fit recipient. For the greater part of his life Southey was obliged to live by his pen, and consequently often wrote under compulsion. Industrious, economical, a model of all the domestic virtues, he amassed a capital of £12,000. With him, as with the Germans, Romanticism, instead of precluding the bourgeois virtues, throve along with them. It had, after all, so little connection with real life. His respectable Philistinism did not forbid of his allowing his imagination to take the wildest Oriental flights.
During the first, the liberal-minded, stage of Southey's career, we are conscious of a sympathetic ardour in his writing. He possessed both enthusiasm and courage. His epic,Joan of Arc, published in 1797, is a poem inspired by as fervent an admiration for the heroine of France as that displayed by Schiller five years later in hisJungfrau von Orleans. Southey's work is, like Schiller's, of an exactly opposite character to Voltaire'sPucelle, which, the English poet in his preface informs his readers, is a book he has "never been guilty of looking into." InJoan of ArcSouthey is not yet the Romanticist. Once or twice he projects his vision as far as his own day. In the Third Book he extols Madame Roland as "the martyred patriot," in the Tenth he refers to Lafayette's as "the name that Freedom still shall love." And in his representation of Jeanne's exploits we have not, as in Schiller, any reference to witchcraft. At a decisive moment, when the Maid is being questioned as to her beliefs, she (and through her, her poet) makes such a frank confession of her faith in nature that we feel satisfied that in Southey's case too, the Naturalism which dominates the English poetry of the day is the foundation upon which everything rests.
"Woman," says a priest to Joan of Arc,—
"Woman, thou seem'st to scornThe ordinances of our holy Church;And, if I rightly understand thy words,Nature, thou say'st, taught thee in solitudeThy feelings of religion, and that nowMasses and absolution and the useOf the holy wafer, are to thee unknown.But how could Nature teach thee true religion,Deprived of these? Nature doth lead to sin,But 'tis the priest alone can teach remorse,Can bid St. Peter ope the gates of Heaven,And from the penal fires of purgatorySet the soul free."
The Maid replies:—
"Fathers of the holy Church,If on these points abstruse a simple maidLike me should err, impute not you the crimeTo self-will'd reason, vaunting its own strengthAbove eternal wisdom. True it isThat for long time I have not heard the soundOf mass high-chaunted, nor with trembling lipsPartook the holy wafer: yet the birdsWho to the matin ray prelusive pour'dTheir joyous song, methought did warble forthSweeter thanksgiving to Religion's earIn their wild melody of happiness,Than ever rung along the high-arch'd roofsOf man: ... yet never from the bending vinePluck'd I its ripen'd clusters thanklessly,Or of that God unmindful, who bestow'dThe bloodless banquet. Ye have told me, Sirs,That Nature only teaches man to sin!If it be sin to seek the wounded lamb,To bind its wounds, and bathe them with my tears,This is what Nature taught! No, Fathers, no!It is not Nature that doth lead to sin:Nature is all benevolence, all love,All beauty! In the greenwood's quiet shadeThere is no vice that to the indignant cheekBids the red current rush; no misery there;No wretched mother, who with pallid faceAnd famine-fallen hangs o'er her hungry babes,With such a look, so wan, so woe-begone,As shall one day, with damning eloquenceAgainst the oppressor plead!..."[1]
In this little harangue the attentive reader is conscious, not only of the echo of the revolutionary cries on the other side of the Channel, repeated in the language of English nature-worship, but also of the young poet's want of ability to give his subject the proper local colouring or to impart to it the spirit of the age. France and the Middle Ages are to him here what the East and the world of legend were to become—a costume in which his English and Protestant ideas figure. Of one thing, however, there is no doubt, namely, that it required courage to sing the praises of the French national heroine at a moment when the animosity to France was so strong; and the poem, in spite of its aridity both as regards feeling and colour, is a work which does honour to a young poet. But the brave spirit which elevated his talent was soon to disappear from his writings.
The lower the flood of unselfish enthusiasm for the great tasks and dreams of humanity ebbed in Southey's soul, the stronger became the impulse to remedy the aridity by pouring in a stream of purely external Romanticism. He had by degrees attained to a certain mastery over the resources of language, had acquired the art of writing loosely constructed but melodious verse, expressive in spite of its vagueness and monotony. Employing this melodious, flexible metre in the representation of the superstitions of Arabia and the most fantastic dreams of the Oriental races, he now produced his two principal works,The Curse of KehamaandThalaba the Destroyer. The Oriental tendency is common to Romanticism in every country. Oehlenschläger, the Dane, displays it simultaneously with Southey; it reaches France a little later, when Victor Hugo writesAly et GulhyndiandLes Orientales. But in the case of the English poets, the colourless, Protestant life of their own country, with its severe, cold propriety, must have invested the East with a peculiarly attractive charm. It required an Irishman, however—Thomas Moore, a colourist with Celtic blood in his veins—to arrive at anything resembling an understanding of a race like the ancient Persians and of their legends, and to reproduce the nature of the East in a style loaded with jewels and barbaric ornaments.Lalla Rookhis no masterpiece; its personages and ideas are far too European and tame; butThalaba, a work which enjoyed a certain amount of celebrity in its day, is tame in comparison withLalla Rookh, and as moral as an English sermon. It suffers from the sharp contrast between the gaudy tinsel of the scenery and the sober modesty of the feelings represented. We are transplanted into a world which is not less marvellous than that of theThousand and One Nights, but a world in which, nevertheless, love of our fellow-men and faith in one God are perpetually inculcated. The hero's life is presided over by the most special providence. When the fit time has arrived for him to leave his foster-father's house, the flight of a swarm of Syrian grasshoppers, pursued by a flock of birds, is directed so as to pass above the house. A grasshopper which one of the birds drops from its bill bears on its forehead in minute letters the inscription:—
"When the sun shall be darkened at noon,Son of Hodeirah, depart!"
But even though the poet employs such miraculous machinery as this, he can no more refrain here than he did inJoan of Arcfrom safeguarding his reader against the erroneous religious ideas of the period and the country. All his chief characters are rationalists in so far as their Oriental religion is concerned, and do not fall far short of being good Protestants. When the swarm of grasshoppers comes, Thalaba's foster-father, Moath, says:—
"Deemest thouThe scent of water on some Syrian mosquePlaced with priest mummery and fantastic ritesWhich fool the multitude, hath led them hereFrom far Khorassan? Allah who appointsYon swarms to be a punishment of man,These also hath he doomed to meet their way."
A pure-bred Arabian could not well view things in a more rationalistic light than this. And we have the same sort of thing throughout. Southey piles up fantastic edifices, only to topple them over with the help of some Gospel text when he is tired of them, or thinks that his reader requires an admonition.
Upon his finger Thalaba wears a ring which is a talisman against evil spirits. One day the evil spirit, Lobaba, who is determined to rob him of it, tries to draw it off his finger while he is asleep. But one of the good genii sends a wasp which stings Thalaba's finger close to the edge of the ring, making it impossible for the evil one to slip the ring over the swollen part. All Lobaba's plans are defeated in some such manner. At last the dread sorcerer, Mohareb, succeeds in ensnaring the youth. After Thalaba has defeated Mohareb repeatedly, the latter jeers at him because he defeats his enemies, not in open conflict, but with the aid of a talisman. He barbs his jeers so successfully that at last Thalaba casts the ring into an abyss. Then the struggle begins anew. We expect that Thalaba, now defenceless against the supernatural power of his foes, will be overcome. Not at all! He conquers. How, and why? A voice from heaven informs us. The ring was not the true talisman: "The Talisman is Faith!" Why, then, all the machinery?
The poet conducts us into subterranean caves, where human heads have to be thrown to the serpents who guard the entrances, where the taper can only be carried in the hewn-off hand of a hanged murderer, &c., &c.—in short, into a world which has no points of resemblance with Great Britain. But the whole is nothing but a ballet; the scene suddenly changes; the Oriental garments and trappings vanish, and the prompter reads aloud one of the Thirty-nine Articles. After this the ballet begins again. The scene represents a banquet, with costly dishes, with delicious wines in golden goblets—"ruby and amber, rosy as rising morn, or softer gleam of saffron like the sunny evening mist." But all these temptations are of no avail. Thalaba is far too good a Mussulman to allow himself to be led astray:—
"But Thalaba took not the draught;For rightly he knew had the Prophet forbiddenThat beverage, the mother of sins.Nor did the urgent hostsProffer a second time the liquid fire,When in the youth's strong eye they sawNo movable resolve."
He might be a member of an English Total Abstinence society, this "Destroyer"—he will drink nothing but spring water; and along with it he eats water melons.
"Anon a troop of females form'd a dance,Their ancles bound with bracelet bellsThat made the modulating harmony.Transparent garments to the greedy eyeExposed their harlot limbs,Which moved, in every wanton gesture skill'd."
But there is no cause for alarm. Thalaba is a determined adversary of the polygamy of his native country. Like a young Englishman travelling abroad, he fortifies himself with the thought of the girl at home to whom he is engaged:—
"And Thalaba, he gazed,But in his heart he bore a talisman,Whose blessed alchemyTo virtuous thoughts refinedThe loose suggestions of the scene impure.Oneiza's image swam before his sight.His own Arabian maid."
Thalaba was born in England about the time when Aladdin saw the light in Denmark. (The Curse of Kehamawas published in 1810,Aladdinin 1804, Thalaba in 1801.) What a cold-blooded animal he is compared with his Danish brother!
He attains the object of his desire; he is married to his "own Arabian maid." That everything may be thoroughly edifying and pious, the bride is made to die on the wedding night. To restore the Oriental character to the proceedings, Thalaba is compelled by his fate to kill an innocent young girl, named Laila. But that things may end in a satisfactorily Christian manner, his last recorded act is to forgive the sorcerer who has caused all his misfortunes—who proves to be the man he has been in search of all his life for the purpose of avenging the death of his father—and who is now unable to escape from him. In the course of a pompous funeral oration—
"'Old Man, I strike thee not!' said Thalaba;'The evil thou hast done to me and mineBrought its own bitter punishment.'"
Thalaba! you speak like a book—but like one of the books we open only to close again.
Let us closeThalaba, then, and give a parting glance at its author. Even Thackeray, who cannot say enough in praise of Southey as a man, is obliged, in writing of his chief works, to allow the possibility that, in the struggle between Thalaba the Destroyer and the destroyer Time, the latter will remain master of the field. It would be interesting to know how many living Englishmen have read the poem. To our own generation Southey's name is chiefly known, as it will be to posterity, by his hysteric assaults on Byron, and Byron's inimitable retorts. We have Southey'sVision of Judgmentto thank for Byron's—and for this service we are ready to forgive him both theCurse of KehamaandThalaba. We observe, however, in these poems, what is not to be observed in the works of the German Romanticists, namely, that the empty fantasticalness gives place to something better, when it is nature that is described. In the midst of all the Romantic confusion the Englishman's quiet realism asserts itself. Undeniably beautiful is the very first stanza ofThalaba, with its description of night in the desert, the sweet cadences of which the youthful Shelley imitated in hisQueen Mab.
"How beautiful is night!A dewy freshness fills the silent air;No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stainBreaks the serene of heaven.In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divineRolls through the dark blue depths.Beneath her steady rayThe desert-circle spreads,Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.How beautiful is night!"
This rivals the description of moonlight falling on the desert sands given in The Caravan Song in the fifth act ofAladdin. And many such pictures are to be found in Southey's poems. When he describes the timid antelope, hearing the wanderers' steps, and standing, doubtful where to turn in the dim light; and the ostrich which, blindly hastening, meets them full; and the deep, moveless mist which mantles all (Book I v., Canto 19), we are aware that this is not scenery in the German Romantic style, but a picture of the East which is faithful to nature, a picture which we owe to the English habit of observation.
It would be difficult to find another man of the same doubtful political and literary reputation whose friends and contemporaries have borne such high testimony to his personal character as did Southey's. He was Wordsworth's trusted friend; he was Coleridge's chief and most unwearied benefactor; and, a fact which carries as much weight as any, Walter Savage Landor honoured him, in spite of their diametrically opposite political opinions, with a friendship which was only put an end to by death, and of which there are many reminiscences in Landor'sImaginary Conversations. On the 15th of May 1833, Emerson wrote: "I dined with Landor. He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?" So we see that Landor tried to make friends for his friend. And Thackeray, when in search of a typical English gentleman, did not hesitate to take as his model the poor, industrious, generously helpful Robert Southey.
But no testimony in favour of Southey's personal character can clear his literary reputation. It is stained by his eulogies of the English royal family and his denunciation of Byron. That he, like the other members of the Lake School, should assume a cold and hostile attitude to this new and alarming literary phenomenon was natural. But that he, himself a poet, should inflame the educated mob against another poet, an infinitely greater one than himself, by a mean accusation of immorality and irreligion, is a crime which history cannot forgive, and which it punishes by recording Southey's name only in an appendix to Byron's life.
At the time of the publication ofDon Juan, Southey wrote:—"I am well aware that the public are peculiarly intolerant of literary innovations. Would that this literary intolerance were under the influence of a saner judgment, and regarded the morals more than the manners of a composition! Would that it were directed against these monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety, with which English poetry has, in our days, first been polluted! For more than half a century English literature had been distinguished by its moral purity, the effect, and, in its turn, the cause of an improvement in national manners. A father might, without apprehension of evil, have put into the hands of his children any book which issued from the press, if it did not bear, either in its title-page or frontispiece, manifest signs that it was intended as furniture for the brothel. There was no danger in any work which bore the name of a respectable publisher, or was to be procured at any respectable bookseller's. This was particularly the case with regard to our poetry. It is now no longer so; and woe to those by whom the offence cometh! The greater the talents of the offender, the greater is his guilt, and the more enduring will be his shame. Whether it be that the laws are in themselves unable to abate an evil of this magnitude, or whether it be that they are remissly administered, and with such injustice that the celebrity of an offender serves as a privilege whereby he obtains impunity, individuals are bound to consider that such pernicious works would neither be published nor written if they were discouraged as they might, and ought to be, by public feeling; every person, therefore, who purchases such books or admits them into his house promotes the mischief, and thereby, as far as in him lies, becomes an aider and abettor of the crime.
"The publication of a lascivious book is one of the worst offences which can be committed against the well-being of society. It is a sin, to the consequences of which no limits can be assigned, and those consequences no after-repentance in the writer can counteract. Whatever remorse of conscience he may feel when his hour comes (and come it must!) will be of no avail. The poignancy of a deathbed repentance cannot cancel one copy of the thousands which are sent abroad.... Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hate that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horror which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied."
It was necessary to give this long specimen of Southey's Biblical eloquence, because it is so typical of him and of men of his description; besides, every passionate outbreak of a strong party-spirit possesses historical interest. But Nemesis was not asleep. In 1821, the same year in which Southey discharged this volley of abuse, an unauthorised edition of his own old revolutionary work,Wat Tyler, was brought out by a bookseller who thought it might be a profitable speculation. Southey went to law, hoping to have the edition suppressed and the publisher punished. But Nemesis struck again, harder than before. Lord Eldon discharged the appeal, on the ground that it was illegal to grant any author right of property in works calculated to do injury to public morality! It was in this same year that Southey, on the occasion of the death of the old, deranged King, George III, wrote his long, dullVision of Judgment, a poem in hexameters, which it is interesting (not only because of the resemblance in subject, but also because of the employment of the supernatural element in both) to compare with Victor Hugo's loyal poem,La Vision. Southey characteristically apotheosised poor old George III. on the ground of his possessing the virtues which were the only ones the poet himself understood—and, indeed, the only ones George did possess—the domestic and bourgeois virtues; he was a faithful husband, a kind father, &c., qualities which no more make a man a good king than they make him a good poet. Byron could stand no more. The insulted Apollo rose in his wrath, seized the wretched Marsyas by the ear, and flayed him alive with merciless satire in hisVision of Judgment.
[1]Joan of Arc, Book iii.
[1]Joan of Arc, Book iii.
Let us turn from Southey to a better man, to the author who, building on the groundwork of national character and history, originated the distinctively British type of Romanticism. This man did not, like his contemporaries of the Lake School, require to play the renegade in order to become conservative in religion and politics; he was conservative from his earliest youth, but without animosity to men of the opposite tendency. Pure-minded and gentle by nature, of a noble, resolute character, richly endowed with the creative gift, he for twenty years provided all the countries of Europe with wholesome, entertaining literature; and so original was his conception of race-character and history, that his influence in every civilised country upon the writing of history was not less great than his influence on fiction.
Walter Scott, the ninth child of a family "of gentle blood," was born in Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1771. His father, a lawyer by profession, resembled Goethe's father in his severe sense of order; the old merchant inRob Royis said to be a portrait of him. Ardent loyalty, displaying itself in devotion, first to the Stuarts, then to the house of Hanover, was one hereditary quality in the family; and orthodox piety was another. In his earliest infancy Walter was healthy and strong, but in his second year he suddenly became lame in the right leg. The sweet temper with which throughout life he bore this physical infirmity, presents a remarkable contrast to the resentful impatience which his great English rival displayed with regard to a similar affliction. The boy grew up an ardent Jacobite and a lover of the old songs and ballads which tell of the Scottish wars and raids, Highland and Lowland. When he was little more than an infant, he could repeat most of that ballad of Hardicanute with which in 1815 he drew tears from Byron's eyes. Anything of the nature of a story, especially if it was in rhyme, he learned with ease, but—a fact significant of the character of his future productions—dates andgeneral principleswere things which he assimilated with difficulty. The little lame boy, who rode about on a pony not much bigger than a Newfoundland dog, was an admirer of Percy's collection of old poems and fragments; and, what is more remarkable, himself collected old ballads and songs, as other children collect coins or seals. At the age of ten he had several volumes of them; and he continued to be a ballad-hunter all his life. Keen observation of his surroundings was another thing that developed early in Scott; he had an eye for every ruin, every monument of antiquity, every curious old stone; but he had not Wordsworth's intensity of regard for nature as simply nature; it was its historical and poetic interest that attracted him. A group of old trees which had grown together was not in itself capable of arousing in him the devotional spirit which it did in Wordsworth; but if he was told: Under this tree Charles II. rested; or: That tree was planted by Mary Queen of Scots—he broke a twig to keep in memory of his visit to the place, and never forgot these trees.
SIR WALTER SCOTT
SIR WALTER SCOTT
At the age of fifteen he made acquaintance with the picturesque Scottish Highlands, which were ere long to be of such importance to him, as providing his fictitious characters with a background of scenery as yet totally unknown to Europe. From the moment when he became conscious of his poetic calling, he studied nature in the manner of the painter who takes sketches. Before describing any district he took a special journey there, made a minute record of the appearance of the hills, of the lie and shape of the woods, even of the nature and outlines of the clouds at a given moment. He actually noted single flowers and bushes by the road-side or at the entrance to a cave. Though he had, in common with the Romanticists of Germany and Denmark, the poetic eye for nature, this did not stand in the way of vigorous, exact realism in description. Whilst Oehlenschläger long contented himself with "speedwell" and roses, Scott, as he himself said, knew hill, brook, dell, rock, and stone, and the whole flora of his country.
Before the young man's true vocation was revealed to him, he had made of himself a reliable, industrious lawyer, who engrossed his legal documents in the typical law hand in which he was afterwards to write so many famous books. In spite of his lameness he was healthy, active, and strong, and so well-trained in manly exercises that he was able to defend himself with his stick for a whole hour against three men who attacked him one day on a lonely road. It is of interest, in the case of such a man, to note the fact that this perfect health was not accompanied by any corresponding perfection of the sensual organs. Scott had hardly any sense of smell, and his Homeric appetite was the opposite of dainty; he never learned to distinguish good wine from bad, or well-cooked from badly-cooked food—in both of these points forming the antipodes of his younger contemporary, Keats. His feelings towards the other sex were so cold that his companions were always teasing him on the subject. Nevertheless he had, in his youth, a romantic attachment to a lady who chose another mate. Scott controlled his feelings so perfectly that no one suspected this attachment. He soon recovered from his disappointment, and, at the age of twenty-six, with a chaste, tranquil youth behind him, married Miss Carpenter, a lady of French Protestant family, whose father had died at the time of the Revolution. Most of the winter of 1796-97, during which an invasion of Scotland by the French was expected, he spent in assisting to raise regiments of volunteers. In his enthusiasm he himself undertook the duties of quartermaster, paymaster, and secretary of one of these regiments.
His first translations from the German have already been noticed. He had long been a living repertory of songs, ballads, and tales; in 1803 he published, under the title ofMinstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, which he dedicated to his native land, the "dearest half of Albion." Part Third of this book,Modern Imitations, contains poems by Scott himself.[1]In one of the criticisms of the day occurred the prophetic remark, that the book "contained the elements of a hundred historical romances."
With all his loyalty to the English royal family, Scott never felt himself anything but the thoroughbred Scotchman; indeed, there can be no doubt that what lies at the very root of his originality is his Scottish character. His strong interest in the poetry of history is a Scottish interest. One of the most pronounced characteristics of Scotchmen in every age has been an intense spirit of nationality. The phrasePerfervidum ingenium Scotorum, used centuries ago on the Continent to express the idea of the Scottish character then universally current, had originally no other meaning than this. If we for a moment overlook the many internal dissensions, which do not really undermine the feeling of community, we feel how difficult it would be to match in any other country the solidarity of this small nation placed on the frontier of one so much larger and more powerful, which speaks the same language. The Englishman, too, has an intense spirit of nationality, but it is much less salient and active; it is purely of a corroborative nature—corroboration of the claim advanced by his country to the possession of many and various attributes. The Scotchman's spirit of nationality is continuously active, constantly on the alert, because it is essentially of a negative character. When the Englishman says: I am an Englishman—he means exactly what he says; but when the Scotchman says or thinks: I am a Scotchman—it is tantamount to: I am not an Englishman.[2]
To understand this feeling properly, we must remember the smallness of the nation in comparison with its great neighbour. When we learn that in the year 1707 the entire population of Scotland did not exceed a million, we understand what concord, what determination, what defensive pugnacity, were imperative in the less numerous race if its individuality was not to be flooded out or stamped out by the other. Thus it came about that bleak and rugged Scotland, as compared with verdant, fertile England, was the object of a very special love and admiration; its hills, its moors, its mists, inspired an almost martial patriotism. And it is therefore not surprising that, at the period when the spirit of nationality was breaking forth into poetry all over Europe, this country should produce a great descriptive, great narrative, poet—that it should be Scotland which brings forth the first and the most vigorous fruits of historical, ethnological Romanticism. What more natural than that an author in such a country as Scotland should be deeply interested in the peculiar customs of the Highlanders, and take pleasure in describing them in their picturesque garb! What more natural than that the man whose very name seemed to stamp him as a personification of his country, should endeavour, by recalling its great historical achievements in the past, to efface, as it were, the impression of its smallness and present insignificance!
Scottish national feeling was, then, in the first instance, distinguished by its solidarity; the subordinate nation felt itself more one than the greater nation; there were fewer conflicting interests at work within it. Scott frequently describes this strong feeling of kinship among his countrymen—nowhere more beautifully than in theHeart of Midlothianthe poor peasant heroine of which is encouraged by it to apply for help to the Duke of Argyle almost as if he were a relative. But Scottish national feeling possessed another distinguishing feature; being, in its character of attachment to an ancient; once entirely independent, state, itself a tradition, it was related to every other old tradition. This explains Scott's exaggerated reverence for royalty, its emblems and appurtenances. When he was a member of the Commission entrusted to institute a search after the ancient regalia of Scotland, the discovery of it filled him with such reverential emotion that, when one of the other Commissioners proposed to try the crown on a young lady's head, he could not help shouting: "By God, no!"
The first great feeling of separate nationalism brought in its train a whole host of new separative feelings. If there were not many nations that rivalled the Scotch in the way they held together as a people, there were still fewer that could show such inward division into parties and camps. The individual's feeling of his public duty did not begin with the nation, but with the tribe, the clan, nay, the family.
Hence we find Scott, the true Scotchman, showing preference, as a ballad-writer, for the legends which treat of the exploits of his own ancestors or kin, and in his private life exhibiting strong family feeling. He was a model son and husband; he was, as his letters to his eldest son show, a devoted father; in the education of his children he neglected neither body nor soul—though his chief requirements of them seem to have been the ancient Persian ones, that they should ride well and speak the truth; but his conception even of these relations was not modern. In his private life as in his poetry, the family was more to him than the individual. He had a brother, Daniel by name, who fell into bad habits, and, though he never did anything actually dishonourable, was a disgrace to the family. Scott procured a small appointment in the West Indies for this brother, but in his correspondence about him never called him anything but "relation," and also required of him that he should never divulge the nearness of the relationship. He refused to see Daniel when the latter returned to Scotland, never mentioned his name, and would neither attend his funeral nor wear mourning for him. Such behaviour as this shows the bad side of the society-preserving virtues. It is not surprising that the man who, with all his tender-heartedness, could sacrifice so much on the altar of "family," was unable to become the poet of personality, and was stamped as of the past the moment Byron appeared.
In 1802 theEdinburgh Reviewwas founded. Scott was a contributor to it from the beginning. Its editor was his fellow-countryman, Jeffrey, a man whose critical pronouncements were regarded as of the utmost importance by the authors of the day, though his only gift as a critic was a kind of untrained, straightforward common-sense. Scott's contributions ceased in 1809, when, dissatisfied with the liberal-minded attitude assumed by theEdinburgh Reviewin the Catholic question, and annoyed by Jeffrey's disparaging notice ofMarmion, he founded theQuarterly Review.
Scotts first narrative poem,The Lay of the Last Minstrel, appeared in 1805. It was a remarkable success. The reading public rejoiced at this return to nature and to national poetry. Pitt expressed the opinion that in several passages Scott had succeeded in producing the effect of a fine painting, and his opponent Fox was for once of the same opinion with him. Scott's personal amiability as Sheriff of Selkirkshire had, ere this, made him such a favourite that, as Wordsworth wrote in 1803, his name acted asan open sesamethroughout the Border country; now he became equally beloved as a poet. In a very short time 30,000 copies of his work were sold. In it he introduced his readers, with something approaching historical accuracy, to the Scotland of the sixteenth century. The acceptance with which his descriptions of the Border customs were received, suggested the idea of writing something of the same kind in prose, an idea which in its embodiment received the name ofWaverley. In the meantime interest had been aroused in the Middle Ages, chivalry, feudal conditions, and Scottish national characteristics generally. English tourists began to make romantic pilgrimages to the ruins of the old castles, and to the battle-field of Killiecrankie, where their countrymen had been defeated by the bare-legged, tartan-clad monsters.
Until this time Scott had been in the habit of writing in the evening, and far on into the night; but after he devoted himself entirely to authorship, the early morning became his working time. He rose before five, went first to the stables to visit his horses and favourite dogs and other domestic animals, then seated himself at his desk and wrote so easily and fast that by the time the family assembled for breakfast, between nine and ten, he had, to use his own words, "broken the neck of the day's work." He left his study at twelve, and spent the rest of the day with his family and his guests. Scott's works were, thus, written in the fresh morning hours, whilst Byron, characteristically enough, wrote his at night. And we seem, even when the two poets are likest each other, to feel the influence of the bright, and the influence of the dark, hour of conception.
It is in the poem which he began in November 1806,Marmion, a Tale of Flodden Field, that Scott is most like Byron. As far as the plot is concerned, this work is quite in Scott's usual style; the scene is laid in sixteenth-century Scotland, and it is the life of the castle and the court that is described. But the hero's character makes him an unmistakable forerunner of the Byronic heroes, and the whole poem is written in the easy-flowing, but somewhat monotonous, four-footed iambics which Byron employed in most of his poetical narratives. Marmion is a proud and brave, but also wicked knight. A young, beautiful nun, Constance of Beverley, whom he has abducted, follows him everywhere, disguised as a page; but he grows tired of her, and is determined to compel a young girl of high birth to marry him, though he knows that she loves another. In her jealous despair, Constance makes an attempt on Marmion's life; and he, indifferent and cruel, gives her up to the convent to suffer punishment as a runaway nun. The abbess pronounces sentence; and, in a Romantic scene of horror of the kind which Byron painted frequently, and with much less consideration for his readers' nerves, we see Constance immured alive in an underground vault.
There is not much psychology in Scott's poem. The gorgeousness of the knight's armour, the gloom of the convent crypt, the architecture of the old castle, are of more importance to him than complicated emotions. Nevertheless he has given us inMarmionsomething very like a first sketch ofThe Giaourand ofLara. The Giaour's mistress suffers a terrible death; Lara's follows him everywhere, in the disguise of a page; and the scene inMarmion, in which the hero is publicly put to shame, has a certain resemblance to the scene in which Lara's past is brought to mind. Is there not something almost Byronic in the lines?—
"Marmion, whose steady heart and eyeNe'er changed in worst extremity;Marmion, whose soul could scantly brook,Even from his king, a haughty look;Whose accent of command controlled,In camps, the boldest of the bold—Thought, look, and utterance failed him now,Fallen was his glance, and flushed his brow;For either in the tone,Or something in the Palmer's look,So full upon his conscience strookThat answer he found none."
And the lines which describe his pangs of conscience:—
"High minds, of native pride and force,Most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse!Fear for their scourge mean villains have,Thou art the torturer of the brave!"
do they not seem to foreshadow the famous passage inThe Giaour?—
"The mind that broods o'er guilty woes,Is like the scorpion girt by fire;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The sting she nourished for her foes,Whose venom never yet was vain,Gives but one pang and cures all pain,And darts into her desperate brain."
There is not merely a certain similarity between Marmion's and Lara's position and character; they also die in the same manner—fall on the battle-field, unyielding and ungodly to the last moment of their lives.
But this is all the resemblance between them; and it is just sufficient to throw Byron's distinguishing characteristics into relief. To Scott, Marmion's personality is not the principal matter; he makes use of it for the purpose of grouping round it figures and incidents illustrative of his country's past; he requires the vices of his hero to set his simple tale going, but he is not the least absorbed in them, and describes them quiteimpersonally. When Byron, on the other hand, describes his earliest criminal heroes, his main object is to arouse interest in them. Their countenances attract the attention and interest of every one that sees them, and suggest pride, guilt, hatred, and defiance; never once in their lives are they, like Marmion, unable to look their accusers in the face; they live the life of the fabulous scorpion, "around it flame, within it death." Without hope in heaven, without solace upon earth, their hearts writhe in haughty agony until they cease to beat. Marmion was a stony-hearted, selfish knight, but his last thought and his last words were given to England; he is part of a greater whole than his own egoistic life. It is quite different with Byron's earliest heroes. They live entirely in their own inner life, which forms, as it were, a complete and separate world in itself; and the poet has been careful to allow the reader to catch sight of a similar dark, complete, and separate world in his, Byron's, soul. We catch a glimpse of his ownEgobehind the fictitious one; we are conscious of a heart that has suffered, and that seeks relief in veiled confessions and mysterious outbursts: the manner of presentation is, in short, personal in the highest degree; and this means a revolution in English poetical art.
The success of Scott's genuinely epic poem was not due to its hero, but to its events, and especially to the battle scenes in the last canto, which enthusiastic critics declared to be the finest out of Homer. And if the poem was well adapted to excite the admiration of Scott's sedate countrymen, it was not less adapted to please the court. Byron was right when he said to the Prince Regent that Scott struck him as being "more particularly the poet ofPrinces, as they never appeared more fascinating than inMarmionandThe Lady of the Lake." It is even probable that there are inMarmiondirect allusions to the Prince Regent and his wife. The former can hardly have read unmoved the description of King James in his gorgeous court dress:—
"For royal was his garb and mien,His cloak of crimson velvet piled,Trimmed with the fur of marten wild;His vest of changeful satin sheen,The dazzled eye beguiled."—Marmion, v. 8.
And the unfortunate, disgraced Princess of Wales, whose personal acquaintance Scott made when he was lionised in London for the first time, in 1806, and to whose party he, as a Tory, belonged, may well have applied to her own case the poem's description of the forsaken Queen Margaret, who led such a lonely life whilst the chivalrous, dissolute monarch spent his time with his mistresses.
Begun in 1806,Marmionwas published in 1808, and when, in the following year, Scott for the second time visited London, he met with a reception that would have turned any other man's head. He played his part of lion with a good-nature and humour rare in a man who is the hero of the moment in a great metropolis. We read that once, after he had been entertaining a large company with his stories and quaint humour, when most of the guests had gone; leaving him with only a few intimate friends, he laughed at himself and quoted: "I know that I one Snug the joiner am—no lion fell." And so modest was he that, when the conversation one day turned on himself in connection with Burns, he emphatically declared himself unworthy to be named on the same day as that great poet.
But if Scott was a tame, gentle lion, he was a remarkably fierce Tory. The special purpose of his journey to London was the enlistment of contributors to theQuarterly Review. He desired that this periodical should be conducted on strictly Conservative principles, and he was especially firm on the subject of Catholic Emancipation. His theory was that if a particular sect of religionists areipse factoconnected with foreign politics and placed under the spiritual direction of a class of priests of unrivalled dexterity and activity, the state ought to be excused from entrusting them with confidential posts. "If a gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of gunpowder in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may at least be permitted to exclude him from the seat next the fire." Scott continued all his life to be of this opinion. Only a few years before his death, he said to his son-in-law: "I hold Popery to be such a mean and depraving superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed before 1780. But now that you have taken the plaster off the old lady of Babylon's mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in Parliament." We understand in what need the English public stood of poets like Moore, like Byron and Shelley, when we hear a man of Scott's noble nature and culture express himself with such shameful and cruel narrow-mindedness.
In 1810 appeared theThe Lady of the Lake, a work which still further increased its author's popularity. The fresh breezes from the woods and hills which blow through this beautiful poem, its gentle ardour, its genuine feeling, which never becomes wild passion, its story, the effect of which is not, as so often with Wordsworth, destroyed by the introduction of charitable sentiments and religious exhortations—all this captivated the reading public. As a proof of the interest taken in the book, it may be mentioned that the receipts of the post-houses nearest the district where its scene is laid were doubled. To find a parallel incident we must again turn to the pages which tell the story of Scott's life. WhenGuy Mannering, of which 6000 copies were sold in two days, came out, it was reported that Scott had called Dandie Dinmont's two dogs, Pepper and Mustard, after two actually existing terriers, to which a Liddesdale farmer had given these odd names. This man, whose name was Davidson, and who was not really portrayed in the novel at all, became so famous that people took long journeys to see him; a lady of rank, who desired to possess a couple of dogs of the famous breed, but who did not know the farmer's name, addressed her letter to "Dandie Dinmont," and it reached its proper destination.
The Lady of the Lakemet with an almost equally cordial reception. We read that on the day when it reached Sir Adam Fergusson, a Scottish captain serving in Portugal, he was posted with his company on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's artillery. The men were ordered to lie prostrate on the ground, and while they kept that attitude, the captain, kneeling at their head, read aloud the description of the battle in Canto vi., and the listening soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza whenever the French shot struck the bank close above them.
What the modern and foreign reader of this poem finds in it now is, in the first place, strong national feeling; the memories of ancient days, of feudal customs, of Scottish royalty, of the clan's fidelity to its chief, are chanted in lucid, vivid, simple verse. Along with this, he finds descriptions of nature with the dew as fresh on them as on Christian Winther's. What he does not find is any attempt at psychological character portrayal. There is an old bard, Allan by name, and another Romantic old character, half Druid, half prophet, Brian by name; there are Romantic dreams which come true, and prophecies which are fulfilled. But these personages and incidents have their place in the poem because they belong to the period and the people, not because they are mysterious. There is not a trace to be found of the Romantic belief in horrors. For, much as Scott enjoyed hearing or writing anything of the nature of a ghost story, he was, unlike the German Romanticists, totally unimpressionable as regarded the mysteriously horrible. He tells somewhere that, having arrived one evening at a country inn, he was informed that there was no bed for him. "No place to lie down at all?" said he. "No," said the people of the house, "none, except a room in which there is a corpse lying." "Well," said he, "did the person die of any contagious disorder?" "Oh no; not at all," said they. "Well, then," continued he, "let me have the other bed." "So," said Sir Walter, "I laid me down, and never had a better night's sleep in my life."
There is no want of freshness in the Romantic flavour ofThe Lady of the Lake; what really takes away from its attractiveness for us, nowadays, is the theatricalness of its representation of manners and customs. Scott has not succeeded in steering quite clear of this most perilous of reefs for the Romantic epic, the reef on which Southey suffered shipwreck. Take, for example, the description of the call of the clan to arms by the youth bearing the blood-stained cross. Everything is pushed to an extreme to produce the theatrical effect. The young man comes first to a house where funeral rites are being held, and forces the son to leave his father's corpse and his weeping mother; then he meets a wedding procession, and takes the bridegroom away from the bride. We seem to see the procession crossing the stage, and to feel the impressive effect produced by the sudden appearance of the cross-bearer from behind the scenes. Things happen just as they do in the theatre: a loud whistle, and empty valleys are filled and bare heights covered with armed men—a wave of the hand, and they disappear again. They aregeneral effectsthat we are conscious of; we feel that the poet is interested in the people, not in the individual. His first and chief aim was to represent in strong relief the beautiful traditional customs of his country: the stranger is welcomed in the hut without a question being asked—the combatant chivalrously shares his plaid with his exhausted antagonist. His second aim was to excite his reader pleasurably by means of surprises: Fitzjames's Highland guide suddenly makes himself known as the redoubted chief, Roderick Dhu—Fitzjames himself proves to be the King of Scotland. But how light and joyous and healthfully pure is the flow of this hymn of praise of Scotland and the Scotch! The King, high-spirited and honourable as one of Calderon's kings, masters his own passion; and the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, men and women, have their hearts in the right place. We enjoy the glimpse into the harmonious world, and do not miss Wordsworth's castigatory and admonitory psychology.
We have a really interesting counterpart toThe Lady of the Lakein Wordsworth'sWhite Doe of Rylstone, a narrative poem founded on one of the ballads in Percy's collection, and also begun in 1809. It is in this work that the poet of Rydal Mount, who probably felt the spirit of rivalry stir within him, approaches nearest to Scott's peculiar domain. No one would dream of denying that the feeling in Wordsworth's poem is much deeper. His dislike of dazzling virtues and brilliant vices has led him to choose a hero who, although an obedient son and a valiant knight, refuses, from a sense of duty, to follow his father and his brother when they raise the standard of revolt against Queen Elizabeth of England, and who, misunderstood and repudiated, is obliged, without taking his share of the danger, to witness his kinsmen's defeat and ignominious punishment. Wordsworth has endowed this hero with self-abnegation, fortitude, generosity, and Christian piety; but there is too much affectation of profundity in the poem, too much dragging in of the half-supernatural, too much sentimentality and unction. Scott viewed nature and the old customs with the eye of a lover of the chase, Wordsworth with the eye of the moralist. Wordsworth's ponderous cargo-boat ploughs its way heavily through the water; Scott's poet's skiff flies along with all sails set, leaving only light bubbles of fancy behind in the reader's memory; it is like the boat in the Third Canto of his poem, which flies so fast that
"The bubbles where they launched the boatWere all unbroken and afloat,Dancing in foam and ripple still,When it had neared the mainland hill."
It is easy to understand that Scott's writings, with their glorification of the chivalrous virtues, of daring and courage, even when displayed by rebel chiefs, pirates, gipsies, smugglers, &c.; in short, with its tendency in the direction of Byronic partiality for the bold and wild, were, from one point of view, highly objectionable in the eyes of the moral and Christian poets of the Lake School. Coleridge charged his novels with "ministering to the depraved appetite for excitement, and creating sympathy for the vicious and infamous, solely because the fiend is daring"; and he concluded his ill-natured attack with the incorrect prophecy: "Not twenty lines of Scott's poetry will ever reach posterity; it has relation to nothing."
In 1812 the first two cantos ofChilde Haroldsaw the light. Not long after their publication, Byron wrote a most friendly letter to Scott, containing a hearty apology for the foolish attack inEnglish Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The younger poet had hastily taunted and reproached the elder, not only with choosing as his favourite hero a mixture of felon and knight ("not quite a felon, yet but half a knight"), but with accepting payment for his works ("racking his brains for lucre, not for fame")—a thing which, in his youth, Byron's aristocratic pride prevented his doing, much as he stood in need of money. After he left England for the second time, he, too, learned to make his art a lucrative profession. He repented his rash condemnation of Scott as heartily as he repented all his other hasty judgments of the same nature, and the strained relationship between the two great and noble-hearted men gave way to the most friendly feeling.
The influence ofChilde Haroldon Scott's literary career was decisive. He was unbiassed enough to see plainly that he could not compete with Byron in narrative poetry, and he therefore determined to turn his attention to another branch of literature, that in which he was soon to stand unrivalled.
The various utterances on this subject, and all the utterances regarding Byron, which are to be found in Scott's Life and Letters testify to the kindly disposition and attractive frankness of the great Scottish author. In 1821 he said to a friend: "In truth, I have long given up poetry. I have had my day with the public; and being no great believer in poetical immortality, I was very well pleased to rise a winner, without continuing the game till I was beggared of any credit I had acquired. Besides, I felt the prudence of giving way before the more forcible and powerful genius of Byron. If I were either greedy, or jealous of poetical fame, I might comfort myself with the thought, that I would hesitate to strip myself for the contest so fearlessly as Byron does; or to command the wonder and terror of the public by exhibiting, in my own person, the sublime attitude of the dying gladiator. But with the old frankness of twenty years since, I will fairly own, that this same delicacy of mine may arise more from conscious want of vigour and inferiority, than from a delicate dislike to the nature of the conflict." And when, the year before his death, he was asked why he had relinquished poetry, he said quite simply: "Because Byron beat me." The gentleman with whom he was talking rejoined that he, for his part, remembered as many passages of his friend's poetry as of Byron's. Scott replied: "That may be, but he beat me out of the field in the description of the strong passions, and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart." The recognition of this fact must have been a blow to Scott, but he could seek solace in the thought which he himself expressed thus: "If I had occasion to be mortified by the display of genius which threw into the shade such pretensions as I was then supposed to possess, I might console myself that, in my own case, the materials of mental happiness had been mingled in a greater proportion."
Waverley, published anonymously in February 1814, was the first of the long series of novels which made Scott and his country famous throughout the whole civilised world. These works appeared at the time when the conclusion of peace with France and the hopeful prospects of the country generally, had occasioned a special access of national pride. They are not works which, like those of the greatest writers, Goethe and Shelley, for instance, indicate different stages of their author's development and culture; nor are they works inspired by profoundly moving personal experiences; they are the mature productions of an inexhaustible gift of story-telling and an extraordinary talent for description both of men and things. They mark a distinct advance in two matters—the understanding of history, and the representation of the life of the middle and lower classes.
The historians of the eighteenth century, who saw, or expected, the realisation of the ideal in their own day, took up the position rather of orators than of authors; they occupied themselves with theoretical questions of government and civilisation, without consideration of the influence of climatic and geographical conditions, or of the past history of a nation—the conception of a nation as a race seldom suggesting itself to them. Sir Walter Scott, on the other hand, made it his endeavour as a writer of historical fiction to give a vivid impression of the peculiarities of certain periods and countries; and he felt the less temptation to endow his heroes with the characteristics of his own day, as he in his inmost heart preferred the bright, stirring life of the past to the colourless reasonableness of that of his own century.
A few years previously, Chateaubriand had, inLes Martyrs, made the first attempt to measure each age by its own standard, and to present the past to us in living pictures. But Scott was the real discoverer and first employer of thatlocal colouringin literature which became the basis of the whole production of French Romanticism. Hugo, Mérimée, and Gautier took to it at once. And Scott's historic sense not only made him the pioneer of a whole school of poetry; it gave his unassuming novels an immense influence over the whole historical literature of the new century. It was, for example, hisIvanhoe, with its description of the strained relations between the Normans and the Saxons, which first suggested to Augustin Thierry the idea that the original force which produced such results as the exploits of Clovis, Charlemagne, and Hugo Capet, was the racial antagonism between the Gauls and the Franks. The man whose gift of insight into the inner life of the modern individual human being was so slight, and who in an age of peculiarly independent individual development, was hampered and biassed by the prejudices of patriotism, loyalty, and orthodox piety—this man, thanks to his vigorous Naturalism, had, when he observed these same individuals as a clan, as a nation, or as a race, a perfect understanding of their character as such. Accustomed as he was to reflect on the difference between Scotchmen and Englishmen, it was not unnatural that the idea of the racial antipathy between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans should, as by an inspiration, occur to him; and his understanding in such matters makes his descriptions of the same value to the student of racial, as Byron's are to the student of individual, psychology.
And to this merit has to be added the great merit of his tales as descriptions of typical representatives of all classes of society. In the novels of the eighteenth century—Fielding's, for example—we pass from one tavern scene to another; in Scott's we are introduced into private life, with all its domestic details. The descriptions owe their peculiar excellence to the vigorous realism with which each separate personage is depicted. Englishmen have always specially prized in their authors the gift of describing with such distinct, tangible detail that the object described stands out in relief before the reader's eye; their sturdy, healthy intellects enjoy the graphic vigour. They like the poetical picture executed in such strong colours that we see it before us as if it were a coat of arms painted on a shield. Scott, as a novelist, gratified this taste. His readers gladly forgave him the terrible prolixity of his descriptions and his conversations, because the result was a graphic representation, attained either by enumerating a long list of attributes or by perpetual insistence upon some one characteristic trait. And there is no doubt, that, tiresome as his procedure may sometimes be, he is one of the greatest character portrayers in all literature. Romanticism has produced nothing finer than such female characters as Diana Vernon inRob Royand Jeanie Deans inThe Heart of Midlothian, or such a historic portrait as Louis XI. inQuentin Durward.
But in his production of fiction, Scott was from the beginning guilty of one great malpractice, a malpractice which descended to a whole group of talented novelists of a younger generation, namely, the inartistic hurry with which, tempted by the prospect of an enormously high price, he produced book after book as if they had been so many articles of manufacture. In 1809, he had entered into business relations with a firm of printers and publishers of the name of Ballantyne, who printed and published theQuarterly Reviewfor him; after he began to write novels he actually became a partner in this firm, which was, unfortunately, a more enterprising than safe one.Guy Manneringwas written and printed in twenty-five days; and Scott was soon producing at the average rate of twelve volumes in a year; it was quite an ordinary thing for him to write forty printed pages in a morning. The sale corresponded to the enormous production; 10,000 copies ofRob Roywere sold in one week; and the later novels were disposed of even faster. In the year 1822, 145,000 volumes of the novels, old and new, were issued. The prices Scott received increased with the circulation of his books. For the two first editions of theLife of Napoleonhe was paid £18,000, and his yearly receipts until 1826 were never less than £12,000. He spent his money in improving and enlarging his estate of Abbotsford, and in the erecting thereon of a castle-like mansion, where, with princely hospitality, he entertained hosts of visitors, many of whom settled down and made a lengthy stay. His fame and popularity increased steadily.
On the occasion of a visit to London in 1815, during which he wasfêted, not only as the author, but as the patriot—the distinguished citizen of Edinburgh who had made himself conspicuous by his ardent hatred of Napoleon—he was presented to the Prince Regent, who showed him many marks of favour. An anecdote has been preserved which gives an idea of the kind of wit with which the heir-apparent succeeded in ingratiating himself for a short time with those whose friendship he desired. There was a supper-party at the Prince Regent's, and Scott, as the guest of the evening, had been kept talking and telling stories almost without intermission, the Prince all the time trying, jestingly, to inveigle him into owning himself to be the author of the Waverley Novels. Scott skilfully extricated himself from one dilemma after another. To prevent further questioning he entertained the company with a true story of an old acquaintance, the Scottish judge, Lord Braxfield. When on circuit, Braxfield was in the habit of spending a night at the house of a wealthy landed proprietor, who, like himself, was a keen chess-player. They often left a game to be finished the following year. The said landed proprietor committed a forgery, and it fell to Braxfield's lot to pronounce the sentence of death on his friend, and opponent in the game. He put on the black cap and read the sentence, which ends with the words, "to be hanged by the neck until you be dead." Having concluded the awful formula with due solemnity, he took off the cap, and with a satisfied smile and nod to his old partner, added: "And now, Donald, my man, I think I've checkmated ye for ance." The words were hardly out of Scott's mouth when the Prince Regent shouted: "A bumper with all the honours to the author ofWaverley!and another of the same to the author ofMarmion!" adding, with a laugh at Scott's conscious expression and gestures of denial: "And now, Walter, my man, I have checkmated you forance!"
The Heart of Midlothianone of the best of Scott's works, appeared in 1818, and raised him to the height of his fame. It was followed, in December 1819, byIvanhoe, which was also received with the most enthusiastic approbation. We learn, in connection with this masterly novel, how few and how insignificant were the elements of reality which Scott required as a foundation for his imaginary world. A certain Mr. Skene, who had been travelling in Germany, told him a good deal about the condition of the Jews there, their peculiar dress and customs, and the severity with which they were treated. This was enough foundation for a story of such quality as that of Isaac and Rebecca. Scott in private life held, as we have seen, extremely narrow-minded opinions on the question of the political rights of dissenters from the established religion of the country; it is, consequently, all the greater honour to him that, as an author, he was unprejudiced enough to make a Jewess the heroine of his novel, and to endow her with such a matchlessly ideal and yet natural character.
In 1823 appearedQuentin Durward, a work in which Sir Walter for the first time chose a foreign theme, and which made his fame as great in France, Germany, and Italy as it already was in England and America. A perusal of the journal of Mr. Skene's tour in France was all that was necessary to enable the author to give his tale its admirable local colouring.
Scott's name was now in every one's mouth, and was familiar even to the most uneducated of his countrymen. In London, at the time of the coronation of George IV., he got into a crowd on the line of the royal procession, and was in actual danger because of his lameness. He addressed a sergeant, begging to be allowed to pass by him into the open ground in the middle of the street. The man answered shortly that his orders were strict, that the thing was impossible. Some new wave of turbulence approaching from behind, Sir Walter's companion cried in a loud voice: "Take care, Sir Walter Scott, take care!" The stalwart dragoon, on hearing the name, said: "What! Sir Walter Scott! He shall get through anyhow!" He then addressed the soldiers near him—"Make room, men, for Sir Walter Scott, our great countryman!" The men answered: "Sir Walter Scott!—God bless him!"—and he was in a moment within the guarded line of safety. We are reminded of the story of the French army in Africa receiving Horace Vernet with flourish of trumpet and beat of drum, and all the military honours due to a general. One can hardly imagine a greater triumph for an artist than this homage of the people.
In 1826 came a turn in the great man's fortunes. The firm of Ballantyne, in which he was a partner, failed; and to the horror of Sir Walter, who in all private money matters was scrupulously exact, the deficit proved to amount to the enormous sum of £117,000. He bore his ruin like a man. The Royal Bank sent a deputation to him with the message that it placed itself at his disposal; he received an anonymous offer of a gift of £30,000; but these and all other offers of assistance he refused. He heroically resolved on the desperate course of endeavouring to pay off the enormous debt with his pen, determining to work without respite until he had discharged the liabilities with which the recklessness and carelessness of others had burdened him. It is not surprising that from this time onwards the quality of his works degenerated steadily. The unfortunate author signed contracts for books—bound himself to produce so and so many volumes per year, of the contents of which, nay, of the very titles of which he had not even thought.
At this unhappy time, only a few months after the failure, he lost his beloved wife. The pressure of business was such that he was unable to sit by her deathbed. He wrote ceaselessly—half a volume ofWoodstockin four days—harassed all the time by the claims of unfortunate creditors. The man who was accustomed to have his house full of visitors, now lived the life of a hermit. Captain Basil Hall has described the painful impression it made on him to see Sir Walter Scott, who had been in the habit of taking his meals with his wife opposite him and friends and strangers round his table, sitting down alone, to a table laid for one.
He undertook several journeys—one to Paris, for the purpose of collecting authentic anecdotes concerning Napoleon. On this occasion a deputation of thedames de la hallepresented him with a monster bouquet. He issued a complete edition of his works; of the first nine volumes 35,000 copies were sold. He paid many of his debts. The political reforms in England were a subject of great grief to him; in 1830 he declared: "England is no longer a place for an honest man." Exhausted, ill, with part of his face disfigured by a stroke of paralysis, he went abroad for the last time. In Naples he actually still busied himself in collecting the greatest possible number of old Italian ballads and songs. He became so ill that he hastened home to die in his own country, and breathed his last at Abbotsford in September 1832, exactly six months after Goethe.