Sir Walter Scott by His Own Hand

THE publication entire of the journal of Sir Walter Scott,¹ though liberal use of it was made by Lockhart, offers the great advantage that the reader, being interrupted by no comment save that of the elucidating footnotes, draws closer and closer to the character of Scott, and sees at last the full-length portrait of a great man, painted by himself in the day of his greatest strength.

To ask why a man writes about himself, and how he writes, is to go far toward an inquiry into the self-consciousness of the man. Scott once began an autobiographic sketch. “ That I have had more than my own share of popularity,” he writes, “ my contemporaries will be as ready to admit as I am to confess that its measure has exceeded not only my hopes, but my merits, and even wishes. I may be, therefore, permitted, without an extraordinary degree of vanity, to take the precaution of recording a few leading circumstances (they do not merit the name of events) of a very quiet and uniform life, that, should my literary reputation survive my temporal existence, the public may know from good authority all that they are entitled to know of an individual who has contributed to their amusement.”

When he penned these words, Scott was thirty-seven years of age. He was in the flush of a double success. He had witnessed the enthusiasm with which Marmion was received, and the publication of his Dryden had brought him a proposition immediately to undertake Swift at an increased compensation. He had achieved some fame, but still more he was conscious of his power. He was on the eve of that magnificent period of literary enterprises which began with his association with the Ballantynes, and continued until the fall of the combined interests of the Ballantynes, Constable, and Hurst and Robinson, in which his own fortunes were inextricably bound. The sketch which he wrote at this time carried his life only as far as his admission to the bar, and was written probably at one or two sittings. Its chief concern is plainly to account for himself, first by a reference to his honorable ancestry, and then by a description of the conditions under which he received his training for active life. There is little analysis of his own nature, but a very hearty recognition of his masters and companions, and a loving appreciation of the Scottish world upon which his eyes rested. Yet, underlying the whole of this brief sketch, there is a fine dignity as of a man who had a serene consciousness of his own worth, social and personal, which needed no demonstration to himself or to others. Eighteen years later he added a significant note to this manuscript autobiography, in which he says : —

“ I do not mean to say that my success in literature has not led me to mix familiarly in society much above my birth and original pretensions, since I have been readily received in the first circles in Britain. But there is a certain intuitive knowledge of the world, to which most well-educated Scotchmen are early trained, that prevents them from being much dazzled by this species of elevation. A man who to good nature adds the general rudiments of good breeding, provided he rest contented with a simple and unaffected manner of behaving and expressing himself, will never be ridiculous in the best society, and so far as his talents and information permit may be an agreeable part of the company. I have therefore never felt much elevated, nor did I experience any violent change in situation, by the passport which my poetical character afforded me into higher company than my birth warranted,”

This was written by Scott not long after he had begun to keep his journal, and when, doubtless, as that journal shows, he was reflecting a good deal on his condition and brooding over his changed fortunes. In commenting thus on his early sketch he was plainly writing his judgment on himself for public view. Did he also, in his journal, have in mind posthumous publication ? We think it probable that he expected a use to be made of the journal, but Scott’s self-consciousness was not of the ignoble sort, and the frankness or his communication with himself is not the posturing of a man who never forgets that his greatness has spectators.

The journal was begun at a most significant point in its author’s career. He was in his fifty-fifth year, at the height of worldly prosperity to all appearances, and not the least in his own eyes. Abbotsford was the outward sign of his inward ambition, and with the marriage of his eldest son he could look with still greater contentment upon the fortune and labor which had made him the founder of a name. He appears to have had no misgivings of the quicksand upon which his personal property rested. In his literary schemes he stood at the entrance of a new and most inviting field. Although he had not openly disclosed the secret of the Waverley novels, the only fact really needing the attestation of his voice was the fact that he was the sole wielder of the magic wand. But with the publication of Redgauntlet, though Woodstock had been commenced, he was contemplating a change of literary activity hardly less important than his passage from verse to fiction, namely, the abandonment of novel-writing for the more serious task of historical narrative.

The immediate impulse to journalizing was given by a sight of Byron’s journal in the hands of Moore, and quite likely, also, by the pleasure which he had been taking in Pepys’s Diary, which was the only book Scott had carried with him on his recent tour in Ireland. The first entries intimate the special use to which he designed putting his new industry. He was eager to record his recollection of men and events interesting to him ; for his interest always was in what we may call briefly the narrative side of life. It is significant that almost the last entry he made in his journal, when his cramped handwriting could scarcely be deciphered, was the story of the captain of a gang of banditti, told him by an acquaintance whom he fell in with at Naples. There is a slight suggestion accompanying the transcript that Sir Walter had it in view as possible material for a tale to be fashioned some day at length ; and no doubt he had more or less in mind the service which his journal might render as a storehouse of literary material, but we suspect this to have afforded a very slight motive for the persistency with which he kept his record.

The working of his mind in this respect is more intelligible when, as soon occurred, the journal became his confidant in the struggle upon which he was called to enter. He began his diary in November, 1825. For a week he was busy with it as a mémoire a pour servir. Then the storm burst, and in the months that followed one reads with keenest sensations the almost daily record of Scott’s hopes and fears. The last illness of Lady Scott fell in this period, when he was battling with misfortune. It is profoundly moving to read such an entry as this under date of May 13, 1826:

” As I must pay back to Terry some cash in London, £170, together with other matters here, I have borrowed from Mr. Alexander Ballantyne the sum of £500, upon a promissory note for £512 10s., payable 15th November, to him or his order. If God should call me before that time, I request my son Walter will, in reverence to my memory, see that Mr. Alexander Ballantyne does not suffer for having obliged me in a sort of exigency ; he cannot afford it, and God has given my son the means to repay him.” And then, a few lines later: " May 15. Received the melancholy intelligence that all is over at Abbotsford. . . . Lonely, aged, deprived of my family, — all but poor Anne, — an impoverished and embarrassed man, I am deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone. Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.”

The death of Lady Scott and the removal of the Lockharts to London, occurring near the same time, threw Scott in upon himself. He could not relieve his mind of its worries by talking with his wife ; he had not the companionship of his son-in-law. He was, moreover, touched in his pride, and for a while kept himself aloof from men, with the instinct of a wounded stag. All these circumstances conspired with his natural inclination to lead him to talk with himself through the pages of his journal, and the habit once established grew a fixed one. More than once Scott records, half jestingly, half seriously, the willfulness of his mind which left him obstinate in the presence of work, and ready to do anything but the task in hand. It was at such moments often that he fell upon his journal and took a wayward pleasure in gossiping with himself, very likely by this means getting his hand in for serious business.

From these several causes the journal is a pretty full reflection of Sir Walter’s mind, and thus a special interest attaches to his silences. He is silent, for example, as to what people say and think of him. Once or twice, when he was suffering most keenly from the mortification of his losses, he lets a word escape which intimates that, with all his consciousness of rectitude, he shrinks from publicity; but the entire absence of a morbid self-consciousness is striking in so candid a revelation. Nor is there any repining or complaint of a hard world. Neither does the rough usage he endures shake his confidence in God, or render him bitter or morose. On the contrary, though he cries out in his suffering repeatedly, and smites his journal for relief, and registers his aches and pains, it is with an almost savage spirit, as though he scorned himself and his poor shattered body. There is a break in the journal between July, 1829, and May, 1830, and upon resuming his companionship with this dumb friend he notes:—

“ About a year ago I took a pet at my Diary, chiefly because I thought it made me abominably selfish, and that by recording my gloomy fits I encouraged their recurrence, whereas out of sight out of mind, is the best way to get rid of them ; and now I hardly know why I take it up again ; but here goes. I came here [Abbotsford] to attend Raeburn’s funeral. I am near of his kin, my great-grandfather, Walter Scott, being the second son or first cadet of this small family.” Then follows a spirited account of a quarrel with his kinsman.

The reader who has followed the journal is perhaps better able than Scott to explain why it was resumed. The same nature which wanted a dog by him when he was writing, that friendly spirit which craved companionship and yet was sturdily independent, turned to the pages of his diary for solace. It was like patting a dog’s head to set down thus the overflow of his communicative mind. We wonder often at the voluminousness of Scott’s work. His correspondence alone was no mean achievement in bulk, and his daily court duties are never counted in. Add his wholly voluntary journal, and we catch some notion of the wonderful flow of this great nature. He was giving, giving, the whole time. Think of him, as the journal bears testimony, when he was entangled in the net of his own misfortunes, and writing heroically for relief not so much of himself as of his creditors, stopping in the most natural manner in the world to write articles for poor Gillies, to help that ne’er-do-weel out of his troubles !

Of course, the one mighty disclosure which the journal makes to the attentive reader is of the magnificent pluck which Scott displayed in facing his difficulties and setting about the removal of them, it brings tears to the eyes to see, as one may, the cheerful, not sullen resolution with which this giant wrought at his task, all the while sinking beneath the load he was bearing. The steady decay of his physical powers and the persistence of his energetic will confront one at every turn. While the world lasts, this noble spectacle will stir the hearts of men, and make many a poet exclaim: —

But there are other revelations of Scott’s nature scarcely less affecting. The noble grief over his wife’s death, and the entire absence of comment on the weak side of her character as it reveals itself to readers of Lockhart’s life, is one mark of his generous affection ; and another is to be found in the exquisite tenderness of all his expressions regarding little John Lockhart. He hangs over the fate of this appealing child with almost breathless concern, and the reserve which Lockhart naturally showed is here removed to make way for a most sweet demonstration. Doubtless Scott’s own disability, which brought him increase of suffering in his decline, intensified his compassion for the pale little cripple. Incidentally, also, the character of Anne Scott stands revealed in a very lovable light.

The Journal is a book to last. No king in literature has such a chronicle, and as Scott in his novels has made his principal characters now and again serve as heroes of the tale without being conscious of their heroism, so here, without egotism, without pettiness, yet with minute detail, he has drawn his own superb figure with a strength which is ineffaceable. It is a cause for congratulation, also, that the editing of the work was entrusted to one so painstaking and so sure in his judgment and taste as Mr. David Douglas has shown himself to be.