Lockhart's Life of Scott

I.

THE praise “ he deserved well of his country ” is an exceeding great reward, and should be bestowed only after grave deliberation. Some men prefer a wider reach, and nurse a hope that their memories will pass beyond national boundaries, unhindered as by the line of a meridian. There are others whose pride is to have deserved well of some ideal person, to have been “ friend to Sir Philip Sidney,” disciple to Socrates ; “ to have deserved well of his country ” is commendation, to be given sparingly, and when given not to be forgotten. We are too ready with this phrase, as if it were the cross of St. Olaf, a ribbon with the Black Eagle, or the Order of the Bath ; we give it too prodigally to those who gratify the appetite of the hour, to the man who gains a battle, or extends the landmarks of empire, or, may be, with heaped-up wealth founds a university. Such men may merit the epitaph, but there is a risk, in that first cheerfulness begotten by dissipated alarms, by lengthened purse, or by the comfortable prospect of a royal road to learning, lest our tongues should be too quickly loosed. It is so easy and seems so generous to grant great epithets to men who have staked their lives or hazarded their fortunes for the very complacent and laudable end that our lives and fortunes be made easier. The men who have indeed deserved well of their country are they who have set up a loftier standard for its gentlemen, who have in prosperity and adversity consistently followed the strait ways of honor, who have bestowed upon their fellow countrymen new cause to be proud of their native land, who have endeared her to other nations, or have given enjoyment to millions of her children. This is true service, and all this Sir Walter Scott did.

Three generations ago lived four very famous British men, of Westminster Abbey mortuary measure: Nelson, who from the Cape of Good Hope to the Arctic Ocean made England mistress of the seas ; Wellington, who from Talavera to Waterloo added glory upon glory to the British flag; Byron, who carried the breath of English liberty to downtrodden Italy and enslaved Greece ; and Walter Scott, who made Britain beloved by men of other countries, who, by his ideals of manhood, of chivalry, of honor, gave new incentives to Englishmen, and on his joyous and painful path through life bestowed more happiness upon his fellow men than any other British man has ever done.

It is wholly fit that Americans should go on pilgrimage to Abbotsford. A remembrance of virtue is there which we, at least, cannot find at Canterbury, Lourdes, or Loreto. There is but one comparable spot in Great Britain, and that is on the banks of Avon ; but at Stratford, encompassed by memorials of idolatry, surrounded by restoration and renovation, harried and jostled by tourists, the pilgrim wearily passes from bust to portrait, from Halliwell to Furness, from sideboard to second-best bedstead, with a sick sense of human immortality, till his eye lights upon the “ W. Scott ” scrawled on the windowpane. If Walter Scott made this pilgrimage, if his feet limped through the churchyard of Holy Trinity, if he looked at the ugly busts, if he, too, was elbowed by American women there, then welcome all, the sun shines fair on Stratford again.

Abbotsford has discomforts of its own, but there one has glimpses of Scott’s abounding personality. How wonderful was that personality ; how it sunned and warmed and breathed balm upon the lean and Cassius-like Lockhart, till that sweetened man became transfigured, as it were, and wrote one of the most acceptable and happy books of the world ; — a personality, so rich and ripe, that nature of necessity encased it in lovable form and features. In the National Portrait Gallery is a good picture of Scott, large-browed, blue-eyed, ruddyhued, the great out of door genius ; one of his dogs looks up at him with sagacious appreciation. There is the large free figure, the benevolent man, the mirthful host, the honest counselor, the chivalric friend ; but what can a painter with all his art tell us of a person whom we love ? How can he describe the noble career from boyhood to death; how can he narrate the wit, the laughter, the generosity, the high devotion, the lofty character, the dogged resolution, and the womanly tenderness of heart ? The biographer has the harder task. A hundred great portraits have been painted, from Masaccio to John Sargent, but the great biographies are a half dozen, and one of the best is this book of Lockhart’s.

As generations roll on, the past drifts more and more from the field of our vision; the England of Scott’s day has become a classic time, the subjects of George III. are strangers of foreign habits ; tastes change, customs alter, books multiply, and with all the rest the Waverley Novels likewise show their antique dress and betray their mortality ; but the life of a great man never loses its interest. As a time recedes into remoteness, its books, saving the few on which time has no claim, become unreadable, but a man’s life retains and tightens its hold upon us. It is hardly too much to say that Lockhart has done for Scott’s fame almost as much as Scott himself. The greatest of Scotsmen in thirty novels and half a dozen volumes of poetry has sketched his own lineaments, but Lockhart has filled out that sketch with necessary amplification, admiring and just. What would we not give for such a biography of Homer or Cicero, of Dante or Shakespeare ? But if we possessed one, dare we hope for a record of so much virtue and happiness, of so much honor and heroic duty ?

Walter Scott is not only a novelist, not only a bountiful purveyor of enjoyment ; his life sheds a light as well as a lustre on England. Of right he ought to be seated on St. George’s horse, and honored as Britain’s patron saint, for he represents what Britain’s best should be, he, the loyal man, the constant friend, joyous in youth, laborious in manhood, high-minded in the sad decadent years, thinking no evil, and faithful with the greatest faith, that in virtue for virtue’s sake. Every English-speaking person should be familiar with that noble life.

One sometimes wonders if a change might not without hurt be made in the studies of boys; whether Greek composition, or even solid geometry, — studies rolled upward like a stone to roll down again at the year’s end with a glorious splash into the pool of oblivion, — might not be discontinued, and in its stead a course of biography be put. I would have my boys read and read again the biographies of the men who to my thinking deserved well of their country. The first two should be the History of Don Quixote and Lockhart’s Life of Scott. In young years, so fortified against enclitics and angles, yet unfolding and docile to things which touch the heart, would not the boy derive as much benefit from an enthusiastic perusal of Lockhart’s volumes as from disheartening attempts to escalade the irregular aorist? It was not for nothing that the wise Jesuits bade their young scholars read the Lives of the Saints. Are there no lessons to be learned for the living of life ?

Don Quixote and Sir Walter Scott look very unlike, one with his cracked brain and the other with his shrewd good sense, but they have this in common, that the one is an heroic man whose heroism is obscured by craziness and by the irony under which Cervantes hid his own great beliefs, and the other is an heroic man, whose heroism is obscured by success and by the happiness under which Scott concealed daily duty faithfully done. In the good school of hero-worship these men supplement one another, the proud Spaniard, the canny Scot, great-hearted gentlemen both. Our affection for them is less a matter of argument than of instinct; their worthiness is demonstrated by our love. I cannot prove to you my joy in the month of May ; if you feel dismal and Novembrish, why, turn up your collar and shiver lustily. The Spaniard is rather for men who have failed as this world judges; the Scot for those who live in the sunshine of life.

English civilization, which with all its imperfections is to many of us the best, is a slow growing plant; though pieced and patched with foreign graftings, it still keeps the same sap which has brought forth fruit this thousand years. It has fashioned certain ideals of manhood, which, while changing clothes and speech and modes of action, maintain a resemblance, an English type, not to be likened to foreign ideals, beautiful as those may be ; we have much to learn from their great examples, but the noble type of the English is different. Sir Thomas Malory’s Round Table, Philip Sidney, Falkland, Russell, Howard the philanthropist, Robertson the priest, Gordon the soldier, — choose whom you will, — have a national type, not over - flexible, but of a most enduring temper. The traditions which have gathered about these men have wrought a type of English gentleman, which we honor in our unreasonable hearts. Our ideals are tardy and antiquated ; they savor of the past, of the long feudal past. We listen politely to the introducer of new doctrines of righteousness, of new principles of morality, and nod a cold approval, “ How noble ! ” “ What a fine fellow ! ” “ Excellent man ! ” but there is no touch of that enthusiasm with which we cry, “ There ! there is a gentleman ! ” A foolish method, no doubt, and worthy of the raps and raillery it receives, but it is the English way. Educated men, with their exact training in sociology and science, smile at us, mock us, bewail us, and still our cheeks flush with pleasure as we behold on some conspicuous stage the old type of English hero ; and we feel, ignorantly, that there is no higher title than that of gentleman, no better code of ethics than that of chivalry, rooted though it be on the absurd distinction between the man on horseback and the man on foot.

The great cause of Sir Walter Scott’s popularity during life and fame after death is that he put into words the chivalric ideas of England, that he declared in poem, in romance, and in his actions the honorable service rendered by the Cavalier to society, because his stories stirred the deep instinctive affections — prejudices if you will — of British conservatism. He founded the Romantic School in Great Britain, not because he was pricked on by Border Ballads or by Götz von Berlichingen, but because, descended from the Flower of Yarrow and great-grandson of a Killiecrankie man, he had been born and bred a British gentleman, with all his poetic nature sensitive to the beauty and charm of chivalry. History as seen by a poet is quite different from history as seen by a Social Democrat, and the Cavalier — if we may draw distinctions that do not touch any question of merit — requires a historian of different temper and of different education from the historian of the clerk or the ploughman. The youth filled with rich enthusiasm for life, kindled into physical joy by a hot gallop, quickened by a fine and tender sympathy between man and beast, crammed with fresh air, health, and delight, vivified with beauty of April willows and autumnal heather, is remote, stupidly remote perhaps, from the scrivener at his desk, or the laborer with his hoe. The difference is not just, it is not in accord with sociological theories, it must pass away ; yet it has existed in the past and still survives in the present, and a Cavalier to most of us is the accepted type of gentleman, and “ chivalric ” is still the proudest adjective of praise. Of this section of life Sir Walter Scott is the great historian, and he became its historian, not so much because he was of it, as because he delighted in it with all his qualities of heart and head.

We still linger in the obscurity of the shadow cast by the Feudal Period ; we cannot avoid its errors, let us not forget the virtues which it prescribes ; let us remember the precepts of chivalry, truthtelling, honor, devotion, enthusiasm, compassion, reckless self-sacrifice for an ideal, love of one woman, and affection for the horse. For such learning there is no textbook like this Life of Scott. Moreover, in Lockhart’s biography, we are studying the English humanities, we learn those special qualities which directed Scott’s genius, those tastes and inclinations which, combining with his talents, enabled him to shift the course of English literature from its eighteenthcentury shallows into what is known as the Romantic movement.

It is a satisfaction that America should render to Scott’s memory this homage of generous print, broad margin, and that comfortable weight that gives the hand a share in the pleasure of the book and yet exacts no further service. What would the boy Walter Scott have said, if in vision these stately volumes, like Banquo’s issue royally appareled, had risen before him one after one, to interrupt his urchin warfare in the streets of Edinburgh ? But the physical book, admirable as it is, equipped for dress parade and somewhat ostentatious in its pride of office, is but the porter of its contents. Miss Susan M. Francis, with pious care, excellent judgment, and sound discrimination, worthy indeed of the true disciple, has done just what other disciples have long been wishing for. At appropriate places in the text, as if Lockhart had paused to let Miss Francis step forward and speak, come, in modest guise as footnotes, pertinent passages from Scott’s Journal, and letters from Lady Louisa Stuart, John Murray, and others. The Familiar Letters, the Journal, and many another book to which Lockhart had no access, have supplied Miss Francis with the material for these rich additions. The reader’s pleasure is proof of the great pains, good taste, and long experience put to use in compiling these notes. The editor’s is an honest service honorably performed. As a consequence — and perhaps I speak as one of many — I now possess an edition of Lockhart, which, strong in text, notes, and form, may make bold to stand on the shelf beside what for me is the edition of the Waverley Novels. This edition published in Boston — it bears the name Samuel H. Parker — has a binding, which by some ordinance of Nature or of Time, the two great givers of rights, has come to be the proper dress of the Waverley Novels. Its color varies from a deep mahogany to the lighter hues of the horsechestnut ; what it may have been before it was tinted by the hands of three generations cannot be guessed. This ripe color has penetrated within and stained the pages with its shifting browns. It is plain that Time has pored and paused over these volumes, hesitating whether he should not lay aside his scythe ; he will travel far before he shall find again so pleasant a resting-place. This Parker edition used to stand on a shelf between two windows, with unregarded books above and below. On another bookcase stood the Ticknor and Fields edition of Lockhart, 1856, according to my Benedict Arnold memory, its back bedecked with claymores and a filibeg, or some such thing ; the designer seems to have thought that Scott was a Highland chief. But, though exceeding respectable, that edition was obviously of lower rank than the Parker edition of the novels ; be-claymored and filibegged it stood apart and ignored, while the novels were taken out as if they had been ballroom belles. In fact, there is something feminine, something almost girlish, about a delightful book ; without wooing it will not yield the full measure of its sweetness. In those days we always made proper preparation— a boy’s method of courtship — to read Scott. The proper preparation — but who has not discovered it for himself ? — is to be young and to put an apple, a gillyflower, into the right pocket, two slices of buttered bread, quince jam between, into the left, thrust the mahogany volume into the front pouch of the second-best sailor suit, then, carefully protecting these protuberant burdens, shinny up into a maple tree, and there among the branches, hidden by the leaves, which half hinder and half invite the warm, green sunshine, sit noiseless; the body be-appled and be-jammed into quiescent sympathy, while the elated spirit swims dolphin-like over the glorious sea of romance. That one true way of reading the Waverley Novels poor Mr. Howells never knew. He must have read them, if he has read them at all, seated on a high stool, rough and hard, with teetering legs, in a dentist’s parlor.

He has had need to draw a prodigal portion from his Fortunatus’ purse of our respect and affection to justify his wayward obliquity toward Scott. I wish that I were in a sailor’s blouse again, that I might shinny back into that maple tree, in the company of Mr. Howells, with Miss Francis’s volumes of Lockhart (one at a time), to read and re-read the story of Sir Walter Scott, and feel again the joy which comes from the perusal of a biography written by a wise lover and edited by a wise disciple, with no break in the chain of affection between us and the object of our veneration. Perhaps Miss Francis would do us the honor to take a ladder and join our party. But youth and jam and gillyflowers are luxuries soon spent, and Miss Francis has done her best to make amends for their evanescence. She has done a public kindness, and she has had a double reward, first, in living in familiar converse with Scott’s spirit, second, in the thanks which must come to her thick and fast from all Scott lovers.

We might well wish that every young man and every boy were reading these big-printed volumes, adorned with pictures of our hero, of his friends, both men and dogs, and of the places where he lived. Let a man economize on his sons’ clothes, on their puddings, and toys, but the wise father is prodigal with books. A good book should have the pomp and circumstance of its rank, it should betray its gentle condition to the most casual beholder, so that he who sees it on a shelf shall be tempted to stretch forth his hand, and having grasped this fruit of an innocent tree of knowledge, shall eat, digest, and become a wiser, a happier, and a better man or boy.

II.

Without meaning to disparage the Future, — it will have its flatterers, — or the Present, which is so importunately with us always, there is much reason with those who think that the home of poetry is in the Past. There our sentiments rest, like rays of light which fall through storied windows and lie in colored melancholy upon ancient tombs. That which was once a poor, barren Present, no better than our own, gains richness and mystery, and, as it drifts through twilight shades beyond the disturbing reach of human recollection, grows in refinement, in tenderness, in nobility. Memory is the great purgatory ; in it the commonness, the triviality of daily happenings become cleansed and ennobled, and our petty lives, gliding back into the Eden from which they seem to issue, become altogether innocent and beautiful.

In this world of memory there is an aristocracy ; there are ephemeral things and long-lived things, there is existence in every grade of duration, but almost all on this great backward march gain in beauty and interest. It is so in the memory of poets, it is so with everybody. There is a fairy, benevolent and solemn, who presides over memory ; she is capricious and fantastic, too, and busies herself with the little as well as with the big things of life. If we look back on our boarding-school days, what do we remember ? Certainly not our lessons, nor the rebukes of our weary teachers, nor the once everlasting study hour; but we recall every detail of the secret descent down the fire-escape to the village pastrycook’s, where, safeguarded by a system of signals stretching continuous to the point of danger, we hurriedly swallowed creamcakes, Washington pies, raspberry turnovers, and then with smeared lips and skulking gait stealthily crept and climbed back to a sleep such as few of the just enjoy.

This fairy of memory was potent with Walter Scott. He loved the Past, he never spoke of it but with admiration and respect, he studied it, explored it, honored it; not the personal Past, which our egotism loves, but the great Past of his countrymen. This sentiment is the master quality in his novels, and gives them their peculiar interest. There have been plenty of historical novels, but none others bear those tender marks of filial affection which characterize the Waverley Novels.

There is another quality in Scott closely connected with his feeling for the Past, which we in America, with our democratic doctrines, find it more difficult to appreciate justly. This quality, respect for rank, — a very inadequate and inexact phrase, — is part and parcel of a social condition very different from our own. Scott had an open, generous admiration for that diversity which gave free play to the virtues of loyalty and gratitude on one side, and of protection and solicitude on the other. The Scottish laird and his cotters had reciprocal duties ; instead of crying “ Each man for himself ! ” they enjoyed their mutual dependence. The tie of chieftain and clansman bore no great dissimilarity to that of father and son, new affections were called out, a gillie took pride in his chief, and the chief was fond of his gillie.

Scott’s respect for rank was as far removed from snobbery as he from Hecuba ; it was not only devoid of all meanness, but it had a childlike, a solemn, and admirable element, a kind of acceptance of society as established by the hand of God. Added to this solemn acceptance was his artistic pleasure in the picturesque variety and gradation of rank, as in a prospect where the ground rises from flatness, over undulating meadows, to rolling hills and ranges of mountains. It is exhilarating to behold even seeming greatness, and the perspective of rank throws into high relief persons of birth and office, and cunningly produces the effect of greatness. That patriotism which clings to flag or king, with Scott attached itself to the social order. He was intensely loyal to the structure of society in which he lived, not because he was happy and prosperous under it, but because to him it was noble and beautiful. When a project for innovations in the law courts was proposed, he was greatly moved. “No, no,” said he to Jeffrey, “little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain ; ” and the tears gushed down his cheeks. The social system of clanship, “We Scots are a clannish body,” made this sentiment easy ; he felt toward his chief and his clan as a veteran feels toward his colonel and his regiment.

To Scott’s historic sentiment and tenderness of feeling for the established social order was added a love of place, begotten of associations with pleasant Teviotdale, the Tweed, Leader Haughs, the Braes of Yarrow, bequeathed from generation to generation. We Americans, men of migratory habits, who do not live where our fathers have lived, or, if so, pull their houses down that we may build others with modern luxury, are strangers to the deep sentiment which a Scotsman cherishes for his home ; — not the mere stones and timber, which keep him dry and warm, but the hearth at which his mother and his forefathers sat and took their ease after the labor of the day, the ancient trees about the porch, the heather and honeysuckle, the highroad down which galloped the post with news of Waterloo and Culloden, the little brooks of border minstrelsy, and the mountains of legend ; we do not share his inward feeling that his soul is bound to the soul of the place by some rite celebrated long before his birth, that for better or worse they two are mated, and not without some hidden injury can anything but death part them. Perhaps such feelings are childish, they certainly are not modish according to our American notions, but over those who entertain them they are royally tyrannical. It was so with Scott, and though when left to ourselves we may not feel that feeling, he teaches us a lively sympathy with it, and gives us a deeper desire to have what we may really call a home.

Scott also possessed a great theatrical imagination. He looked on life as from an upper window, and watched the vast historical pageant march along ; his eye caught notable persons, dramatic incidents, picturesque episodes, with the skill of a sagacious theatre manager. Not the drama of conscience, not the meetings and maladjustments of different temperaments and personalities, not the whims of an over-civilized psychology, not the sensitive indoor happenings of life: but scenes that startle the eye, alarm the ear, anti keep every sense on the alert; the objective bustle and much ado of life; the striking effects which contrast clothes as well as character, bringing together Highlander and Lowlander, Crusader and Saracen, jesters, prelates, turnkeys, and foresters. That is why the Waverley Novels divide honors with the theatre in a boy’s life. I can remember how easy seemed the transition from my thumbed and dog-eared Guy Mannering to the front row of the pit, which my impatience reached in ample time to study the curtain resplendent with Boccaccio’s garden before it was lifted on a wonderful world of romance wherein the jeune premier stepped forward like Frank Osbaldistone, Sir Kenneth, or any of “ my insipidly imbecile young men,” as Scott called them, to play his difficult, ungrateful part, just as they did, with awkwardness and self-conscious inability, while the audience passed him by, as readers do in the Waverley Novels, to gaze on the glittering mise en scène, and watch the real heroes of the piece.

The melodramatic theatre indicates certain fundamental truths of human nature. We have inherited traits of the savage, we delight in crimson and sounding brass, in soldiers and gypsies, nor can we conceal, if we would, that other and nearer ancestry, betrayed by the poet; — “ The child is father to the man : ” the laws of childhood govern us still, and it is to this common nature of Child and Man that Scott appeals so strongly.

Scott was a master of the domain of simple theatrical drama. What is there more effective than his bravado scenes, which we watch with that secret sympathy for bragging with which we used to watch the big boys at school, for we know that the biggest words will be seconded by deeds. “ Touch Ralph de Vipont’s shield — touch the Hospitaller’s shield ; he is your cheapest bargain.” “ ‘ Who has dared,’ said Richard, laying his hands upon the Austrian standard, ‘who has dared to place this paltry rag beside the banner of England ? ’ ” “ ‘ Die, bloodthirsty dog ! ’ said Balfour, ‘ die as thou hast lived ! die, like the beasts that perish — hoping nothing — believing nothing ’ — ‘ And fearing nothing ! ’ said Bothwell.” These, and a hundred such passages, are very simple, but simple with a simplicity not easy to attain ; they touch the young barbarian in us to the quick.

In addition to these traits, Scott had that shrewd practical understanding, which is said to mark the Scotsman. Some acute contemporary said that “ Scott’s sense was more wonderful than his genius.” In fact, his sense is so all-pervasive that it often renders the reader blind to the imaginative qualities that spread their great wings throughout most of the novels. It was this good sense that enabled Scott to supply the admirable framework of his stories, for it taught him to understand the ways of men, — farmers, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, lairds, graziers, smugglers, — to perceive how all parts of society are linked together, and to trace the social nerves that connect the shepherd and the blacksmith with historic personages. Scott had great powers of observation, but these powers, instead of being allowed to yield at their own will to the temptation of the moment, were always under the control of good sense. This controlled observation, aided by the extraordinary healthiness of his nature, enabled him to look upon life with so much largeness, and never suffered his fancy to wander off and fasten on some sore spot in the body social, or on some morbid individual; but held it fixed on healthy society, on sanity and equilibrium. Natural, healthy life always drew upon Scott’s abundant sympathy. Dandie Dinmont, Mr. Oldbuck, Baillie Jarvie, and a hundred more show the greatest pigment of art, the good color of health. Open a novel almost at random and you meet a sympathetic understanding. For example, a fisherwoman is pleading for a dram of whiskey : “ Ay, ay, — it’s easy for your honor, and like o’ you gentlefolks, to say sae, that hae stouth and routh, and fire and fending, and meat and claith, and sit dry and canny by the fireside. But an’ ye wanted fire and meat and dry claise, and were deeing o’ cauld, and had a sair heart, whilk is warst ava’, wi’ just tippence in your pouch, wadna ye be glad to buy a dram wi’ it, to be eilding and claise, and a supper and heart’s ease into the bargain till the morn’s morning ? ”

It is easy to disparage common sense and the art of arousing boyish interest, just as it is easy to disparage romantic affections for the past, for rank, and for place, but Scott had a power which transfigured common sense, theatrical imagination, and conservative sentiments; Scott was a poet. His poetic genius has given him one great advantage over all other English novelists. As we think of the famous names, Fielding, Richardson, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Meredith ; according to our taste, our education, or our whimsies, we prefer this quality in one, we enjoy that in another, and we may, as many do, put others above Scott in the hierarchy of English novelists, but nobody, not even the most intemperate, will compare any one of them with Scott as a poet. Scott had great lyrical gifts. It has been remarked how many of his poems Mr. Palgrave has inserted in the Golden Treasury. Palgrave did well. There are few poems that have the peculiar beauty of Scott’s lyrics. Take, for example, —

What maiden could resist, —

Scott’s poetic nature, delicate and charming as it is in his lyrics, picturesque and vigorous as it is in his long poems, finds its sturdier and most natural expression in his novels ; in them it refines the prodigal display of pictorial life, it bestows lightness and vividness, it gives an atmosphere of beauty, and a joyful exhilaration of enfranchisement from the commonplace ; it mingles the leaven of poetry into ordinary life, and causes what we call romance. Take, for example, a subject like war. War, as it is, commissariat, dysentery, muletrains, six-pounders, disemboweled boys, reconcentration, water-cure, lying, and swindling, has been described by Zola and Tolstoi with the skill of that genius which is faithful to the nakedness of fact. But for the millions who do not go to the battlefield, hospital, or burial-ditch, war is another matter ; for them it is a brilliant affair of colors, drums, uniforms, courage, enthusiasm, heroism, and victory ; it is the most brilliant of stageshows, the most exciting of games. This is the familiar conception of war; and Scott has expressed his thorough sympathy with immense poetical skill. Let the sternest Quaker read the battle scene in Marmion, and he will feel his temper glow with warlike ardor ; and the fighting in the novels, for instance the battle in Old Mortality, is still better. In like manner in the pictures of Highland life the style may be poor, the workmanship careless, but we are always aware that what we read has been written by one who looked upon what he describes with a poet’s eye.

The poetry that animates the Waverley Novels was not, as with some men, a rare accomplishment kept for literary use, but lay deep in Scott’s life. As a young man he fell in love with a lady who loved and married another, and all his life her memory, etherealized no doubt after the manner of poets and lovers, stayed with him, so that despite the greatest worldly success, his finer happiness lay in imagination. But as he appeared at Abbotsford, gayest among the gay, prince of good fellows, what comrade conjectured that the poet had not attained his heart’s desire ?

III.

It is easy to find fault with Scott; he has taken no pains to hide the bounds of his genius. He was careless to slovenliness, he hardly ever corrected his pages, he worked with a glad animal energy, writing two or three hours before breakfast every morning, chiefly in order to free himself from the pressure of his fancy. So lightly did he go to work that when taken sick after writing The Bride of Lammermoor he forgot all but the outline of the plot. His pen coursed like a greyhound; at times it lost the scent of the story and strayed away into tedious prologue and peroration, or in endless talk, and then, the scent regained, it dashed on into a scene of unequaled vigor and imagination. There are few speeches that can rank with that of Jeanie Deans to Queen Caroline : “ But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body — and seldom may it visit your Leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours — O my Leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we line dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly. And the thoughts that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow.”

Scott was a vigorous, happy man, who rated life far higher than literature, and looked upon novel - writing as a money-getting operation. “ ‘ I’d rather be a kitten and cry Mew,’ ” he said, “ than write the best poetry in the world on condition of laying aside common sense in the ordinary transactions and business of the world.” He would have entertained pity, not untouched by scorn, for those novelists who apply to a novel the rules that govern a lyric, and come home fatigued from a day spent in seeking an adjective. Scott wrote with what is called inspiration ; when he had written, his mind left his manuscript and turned to something new. No doubt we wish that it had been otherwise, that Scott, in addition to his imaginative power, had also possessed the faculty of self-criticism ; perhaps Nature has adopted some self-denying ordinance, that, where she is so prodigal with her right hand, she will be somewhat niggard with the left. We are hard to please if we demand that she shall add the delicate art of Stevenson to the virile power of Walter Scott.

There is a second fault; archæologists tell us that no man ever spoke like King Richard, Ivanhoe, and Locksley. Scott, however, has erred in good company. Did Moses and David speak as the Old Testament narrates ? Did knights - errant ever utter such words as Malory puts into the mouth of Perceval ? Or did the real Antony have the eloquence of Shakespeare ? Historical and archæological mistakes are serious in history and archæology, and shockingly disfigure examination papers, but in novels the standards are different. Perhaps men learned in demonology are put out of patience by Paradise Lost and the Inferno, and scholars in fairy lore vex themselves over Ariel and Titania; but Ivanhoe is like a picture, which at a few feet shows blotches and daubs, but looked at from the proper distance, shows the correct outline and the true color. The raw conjunction of Saxon and Norman, the story how the two great stocks of Englishmen went housekeeping together, is told better than in any history. A multitude of little errors congregate together and yet leave a historic whole, which if not true to Plantagenet England, is yet correct in its delineation of a great period of social change, and of those phenomena that attend the struggle of social orders for self-preservation and dominion. So it is with The Talisman. The picture of the crusading invasion of Palestine is no doubt wholly incorrect in all details, and yet what book equals it in enabling us to understand the romantic attitude of Europe and the great popular Christian sentiment which expressed itself in unchristian means and built so differently from what it knew ? But we need not quarrel in defense of Ivanhoe, or Quentin Durward, or The Talisman. Unquestionably the Scottish novels are the best, Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of Mid-Lothian ; in them we find portraiture of character, drawn with an art that must satisfy the most difficult advocate of studies from life ; and probably all of Scott’s famous characters were drawn from life.

A more serious charge is that Scott is not interested in the soul, that the higher domains of human faculties, love and religion, are treated not at all or else inadequately. At first sight there seems to be much justice in this complaint, for if our minds run over the names of the Waverley Novels, — the very titles, like a romantic tune, play a melody of youth, — we remember no love scene of power, nor any lovable woman except Diana Vernon, and the religion in them is too much like that which fills up our own Sunday mornings between the fishballs of breakfast and the cold roast beef of dinner. Carlyle has expressed his dissatisfaction with Scott’s shortcomings, after the manner of an eloquent advocate who sets forth his case, and leaves the jury to get at justice as best they may. He denies that Scott touches the spiritual or ethical side of life, and therefore condemns him. But Carlyle does not look for ethics except in exhortations, nor for spiritual life except in a vociferous crying after God ; whereas the soul is wayward and strays outside of metaphysics and of righteous indignation. That Scott himself was a good man, in a very high and solemn significance of those words, cannot be questioned by any one who has read his biography and letters. No shadow of selfdeception clouded his mind when, in moments of great physical pain, he said : “ I should be a great fool, and a most ungrateful wretch, to complain of such inflictions as these. My life has been in all its private and public relations as fortunate, perhaps, as was ever lived, up to this period ; and whether pain or misfortune may lie behind the dark curtain of futurity, I am already a sufficient debtor to the bounty of Providence to be resigned to it; ” nor when he thought he was dying : “ For myself I am unconscious of ever having done any man an injury or omitted any fair opportunity of doing any man a benefit.” Every one knows his last words : “ Lockhart, be a good man — be virtuous — be religious — be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.”

Ethics has two methods, one is the way of the great Hebrew prophets who cry, “ Woe to the children of this world ! Repent, repent! ” and Carlyle’s figure, as he follows their strait and narrow way, shows very heroic on the skyline of life ; but there is still room for those teachers of ethics who follow another method, who do not fix their eyes on the anger of God, but on the beautiful world which He has created. To them humanity is not vile, nor this earth a magnified Babylon ; they look for virtue and they find it; they see childhood ruddy-cheeked and light-hearted, youth idealized by the enchantment of first love ; they rejoice in a wonderful world ; they laugh with those who laugh, weep with mourners, dance with the young, are crutches to the old, tell stories to the moping, throw jests to the jolly, comfort cold hearts, and leave everywhere a ripening warmth like sunlight, and a faith that happiness is its own justification. This was the way of Walter Scott.

No doubt spiritual life can express itself in cries and prophecies, yet for most men, looking over chequered lives, or into the recesses of their own hearts, the spiritual life is embodied not in loud exhortations and threats, but rather in honor, loyalty, truth; and those who let this belief appear in their daily life are entitled to the name, toward which they are greatly indifferent, of spiritual teachers. Honor, loyalty, truth, were very dear to Walter Scott; his love for them appears throughout his biography. He says, “ It is our duty to fight on, doing what good we can and trusting to God Almighty, whose grace ripens the seeds we commit to the earth, that our benefactions shall bear fruit.” Among the good seeds Scott committed to the earth are his novels, which, if they are not spiritual, according to the significance of that word as used by prophet and priest, have that in them which has helped generations of young men to admire manliness, purity, fair play, and honor, and has strengthened their inward resolutions to think no unworthy thoughts, to do no unworthy deeds. Literature, not preaching, has been the great civilizer ; if it has not been as quick to kindle enthusiasm for large causes, it has acted with greater sureness and has built more permanently ; and of all the great names in literature as a power for good, who shall come next to Shakespeare, Dante, and Cervantes, if not Walter Scott ?

H. D. Sedgwick, Jr.