by John Buchan
My wound is deep — I fain would sleep —
Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And hide me beneath the bracken bush,
That grows on yonder lily lea.
At Milton Lockhart that evening he seemed to recover something of his spirits, but next morning he heard that his friend, Mr Elliot Lockhart of Borthwickbrae, whom he had met at dinner, had had a stroke and was believed to be dying. He insisted on leaving at once. “I must home to work while it is called day; for the night cometh when no man can work.”
Of the two novels of the year, Scott’s last publications, the critic can have little to say. They must be judged not by the canons of art, but as desperate deeds, the final blows struck by a failing man in the cause of honour. Count Robert is history rather than fiction, a compilation from Gibbon and the Alexiad, and as prolix as Anna Comnena herself. The court of Byzantium in the eleventh century was not a subject with which Scott had any natural affinities, and he was too languid to reproduce the drama of the clash of West and East in the first Crusade. There are moments of vigour, like the fight with the tiger in the dungeon, but everywhere lassitude weights his pen. In Castle Dangerous he had matter which in earlier days might have been wrought into a great novel, and he walked familiar ground. But the craftmanship is weak, though the style is good; the account of the friction between De Valence and De Walton is too lengthily done and is not strictly relevant to the plot; the adventures jar from their suddenness, and the final combat in St Bride’s kirk does not stir us as it should. He was too fatigued to rise to the mood of that furious Palm Sunday in Douglasdale. The oppression of his spirits is curiously reflected in the weather of the tale, for all the events take place under grey skies, in creeping mists and driving rain.
[Wordsworth’s farewell]
Scott had yielded to his doctors’ entreaties and consented to spend the coming winter out of England, and Lord Grey’s Government had magnanimously put a frigate at his disposal. Moreover, young Walter was given leave from his regiment in order to accompany him. The last autumn at Abbotsford had its cheerful hours. Adolphus came on a visit, and Burns’s soldier son, and Turner the artist, who had to be prevented from endowing all his Scots figures with the kilt. There were pilgrimages to Ettrick and Bemersyde, and dinners under the trees at Chiefswood. Scott mounted Douce Davie again, and looked on at the coursing at Cauldshiels loch, admiring the horsemanship of his elder son. He had convinced himself that his debts had been paid, and all conspired to foster the delusion; he was looking forward to his travels, too, though he could not forget that Fielding and Smollett had been driven abroad by ill-health and had never returned. The true farewell was appropriately spoken by the other great living king of letters. Wordsworth came to Abbotsford with his daughter, and on the last day of his stay the two poets visited Newark. They forded Tweed on their return when the hills were purple in an eerie gloaming. Wordsworth, himself sick and blind, saw in the mysterious light the presage of death, and his heart stirred for the old friend whom he widely differed from and deeply loved. That night he wrote this sonnet: —
A trouble, not of clouds, or weeping rain,
Nor of the setting sun’s pathetic light
Engendered, hangs o’er Eildon’s triple height;
Spirits of power assembled there complain
For kindred power departing from their sight;
While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain,
Saddens his voice again, and yet again.
Lift up your hearts, ye mourners! for the might
Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes:
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue
Than sceptred King or laurelled Conqueror knows
Follow this wondrous potentate. Be true,
Ye winds of ocean, and the Midland sea
Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope!
CHAPTER XII. — RELEASE (1831-1832)
“I am perhaps setting,” Scott wrote in the Journal in September. “Like a day that has been admired as a fine one, the light of it sets down amid mists and storms. I neither regret nor fear the approach of death if it is coming. I would compound for a little pain instead of this heartless muddiness of mind.... I have no fear on pecuniary matters. The ruin which I fear involves that of my King and country.” This was the mood in which he set out on his travels. But the change of scene revived his spirits. In London, though he could not dine out, he met many of his old friends, and though the air was full of tales of mob violence, he seems to have got an easier mind about politics. After all, the Duke of Wellington was still alive, and Ministers, Whigs though they were, had been uncommonly kind to himself. The doctors had examined him and found traces of incipient disease of the brain, but they were confident that, if he would only give up work, the malady could be averted.
[Malta and Naples]
The journey started ill, for the Barham could not sail for a week, and the party had to kick their heels in a Portsmouth hotel. They sailed eventually on October 29th, but on November 2nd they were still beating off Land’s End, a very sea-sick company. When they had crossed the Bay of Biscay the weather improved, and Scott was much on deck, hobbling about with his creaking leg, and talking briskly to the ship’s officers. As they passed Cape St Vincent and Trafalgar and Gibraltar the traveller’s interest was stirred, and the mild airs improved his health; his Journal is full of jottings of what he saw; and when on November 22nd he entered Malta harbour he felt some vigour returning to both body and mind. He stayed three weeks in the island, living at a hotel though various private houses were offered to him, and was well enough to attend a ball given in his honour. The place gave him an idea for a new novel to be called The Siege of Malta, and a short story Il Bizarro, at which he worked for the next few months; both are still extant in manuscript, but it may be hoped that no literary resurrectionist will ever be guilty of the crime of giving them to the world.
At Naples, which was reached on December 17th, the party stayed for four months. Scott was not very ill and not very unhappy, but both his senses and his mind were a little blunted. He attended the Court in the uniform of a Scottish archer, and conversed with the king in his awkward French, and dined with the nonagenarian Archbishop of Tarentum. He saw all the sights, but he was no classic, and Pollio’s villa and Paestum meant little to him, while at Pompeii he could only ingeminate “The city of the Dead.” On January 16th 1832 news came of his grandson’s death, but Scott, who had sorrowed so deeply in anticipating it, merely notes in his Journal: “Poor Johnny Lockhart! The boy is gone whom we have made so much of. I could not have borne it better than I now do, and might have borne it much worse.” ... That evening he went to the opera.
It would appear that the decay of his brain had now begun in solemn earnest, and he moved in an interior world of his own. Sometimes the weight of his debts hung over him like a cloud; but more often he believed them paid off, and wrote cheerfully to Lockhart about the approaching purchase of Faldonside. He finished his Malta story and had great schemes of future literary work, including a poem in the style of The Lady of the Lake to be a postscript to the novels. The subject was to be a tale of chivalry connected with Rhodes, and for the purpose he meant to visit Sir Frederick Adam in the Ionian Islands and get him to accompany him to Greece. But the plan was only a sudden fancy, for his deepest desire was to go home. He saw the landscape of Italy in terms of his own land, and when he visited Avernus, which is not unlike a Highland loch, he was heard to murmur
Up the craggy mountain
And down the mossy glen,
We daurna gang a-milking
For Charlie and his men.
At Naples in March Scott had word of Goethe’s death. He had intended to visit him at Weimar on his return journey, and the tidings seemed to be his own summons. “He at least died at home,” he cried; “let us to Abbotsford,” and the phrase commonest on his lips was Politian’s “Grata quies patriæ.” Moreover, Sir Frederick Adam had been
recalled from the Ionian Islands, so the Greek plan dropped. A travelling carriage was bought, and in the middle of April the party turned their faces northward. Walter had had to rejoin his regiment, and Charles now took his place.
[Return home]
Three weeks were passed in Rome, but Scott, who in earlier years would have found the days spent there all too short, was sunk in listlessness. His thoughts, so far as they were more than vacant dreams, were all on Scotland. He was not ill or peevish—”As I am now good for nothing else,” he said, “I think it as well to be good humoured” — he was simply at the end of life and pleasure. The only sights which woke a response were the Cardinal of York’s villa with its Stuart portraits and St Peter’s with the Stuart tombs. On May 11th Rome was left behind, and the glimpse of the pines and the late snows on the Apennines pleased him, for they recalled Scotland. After that all was blank. Venice, Tirol, Munich, Heidelberg said nothing to him; there was a flicker of interest when they embarked on the Rhine, which he had recently described in Anne of Geierstein, but it died when they landed at Cologne.... Then on June 9th near Nimeguen the body followed the mind, and he had a fourth paralytic seizure. On the 11th he was lifted from his carriage into the boat at Rotterdam, and two days later was put to bed in a Jermyn Street hotel.
The rest of the via dolorosa is soon traced. More fortunate than Leyden, he was to die at home. He lay for some three weeks in London, sunk for the most part in a painless coma, but able to recognize his children. The faithful Cadell arrived from Edinburgh, and the Lockharts and Anne watched beside his bed, while every newspaper chronicled the progress of his malady, and the royal family made daily inquiries. Outside in Jermyn Street Allan Cunningham found a group of working men, who asked him, “Do you know, sir, if this is the street where he is lying?” There were many besides Newman to pray for the Minstrel. In his waking moments he longed for home, and on July 7th he was carried on board ship, while a great crowd lined the pavements. Two days later he reached Newhaven, and on the 11th he began the journey to Tweeddale. As the carriage descended the glen of Gala water he woke to consciousness and murmured familiar names, and when it rounded the hill at Ladhope and the Eildons came into view he exclaimed in delight. Tweed being in spate he had to go round by Melrose bridge, and could scarcely be kept in the carriage. At Abbotsford Laidlaw and his dogs were waiting. “Ha! Willie Laidlaw!” he cried. “O man, how often have I thought of you!”
For a few days there was a break in the clouds and a brief clearness revisited his mind. He was wheeled by Lockhart and Laidlaw out of doors among the roses, and up and down the hall and the library. “I have seen much,” he repeated often, “but nothing like my ain house.” He would sit peacefully at the library window looking on Tweed, or in a shady corner of the grounds, while Lockhart read aloud to him from Crabbe and the Gospel of St John. One day he revived so far that he desired to be set in his chair at his desk and given his pen. But the pen dropped from his hand, and he fell back weeping among his pillows. “No repose for Sir Walter but in the grave.”
That was all but the last gleam of light. He retired into a melancholy half-consciousness while his great bodily strength slowly ebbed — talking to the dead Tom Purdie, repeating the Jedburgh mob’s cry of “Burke Sir Walter,” or in a happier mood reciting the Stabat Mater, and texts of Scripture, and verses of the Scottish psalms. On the morning of Monday, September 17th, Lockhart was called to his bedside and found him conscious again, but in the last extremity of weakness. “Lockhart,” he said, “I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, 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.” Walter and Charles were summoned, and in the presence of all his family Scott died in the early afternoon of September 21st. His eldest son kissed his eyes and closed them, while through the open window in the bright autumn weather came the gentle murmur of Tweed.
He was buried, by right of his Haliburton blood, in the ruined abbey of Dryburgh. The day was sombre and cloudy with a high wind, and the whole countryside in the same dark livery followed the coffin to the grave. A century later another great Borderer was brought from Bemersyde to lie near him. For Walter Scott and Douglas Haig the line of Homer, which Lockhart quotes, is the fittest epitaph —
There lay he, mighty and mightily fallen, having
done with his chivalry.
CHAPTER XIII. — THE WRITER
The appeal of Scott to his own age was immediate and universal, and his influence on his contemporaries and successors was as great as Byron’s and more enduring. The literature of every civilized country bears witness to it. In France Alfred de Vigny, Mérimée, Dumas, Balzac and Victor Hugo drew from him their first inspiration; in Germany and Italy he was the patron of a new school of romance, Manzoni was his disciple, and the reading of Quentin Durward made Ranke an historian; he was the earliest master of the Russian Dostoevsky; in Spain he had a host of imitators, and he was the acknowledged source of the eager romanticism out of which Catalan nationalism sprang; in Scandinavia, Tegner and Almquist and Runeberg were his followers, and so different a writer as Strindberg confessed that before he approached an historical subject he steeped himself in Scott. He has been translated into every tongue, and no English writer save Shakespeare is so continuously reprinted in so many lands.
This wide popular acceptance as a classic has had a paralysing effect on the critical study of Scott. He has been too much taken for granted, as if he were a statue in a public place. He has had detractors such as Borrow and idolaters such as Ruskin, but he has been praised and blamed in a spirit of rhetoric rather than of science. The really penetrating criticism of Scott could be collected in a slim volume — his own and that of Lockhart, Lady Louisa Stuart, Adolphus, Nassau Senior, Bagehot, and in our own day A. W. Verrall and Professor Elton. For the rest we have had to content ourselves with appreciations by writers who were too much in love with the man to look judicially upon his work, and with essays in belittlement by adherents of some minor coterie. Yet he is worth the attention of the well-equipped critic, for at his best he stands the test of the most searching examination and the austerest standards.
I offer in this chapter modestly and tentatively my own conclusions. In the study of a practitioner of an art so rapidly developing as that of fiction, it is idle to attempt to devise a calculus of merit or to fix his exact rank in a hierarchy. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon. The novel is the world as seen through the temperament of the novelist, and his success depends upon the depth of his insight and the richness of his temperament, the twin powers of perception and interpretation. In assessing his value the points which concern us are his competence as a student of life; the nature of the technique by which he presents his conclusions; and in the last resort his power of transforming and sublimating his world, that “stellar and undiminishable something” which was Emerson’s definition of greatness.
I
[Prose style]
Let us begin with the lesser matters, and take first his prose style, which has found many critics. The complaint on this score needs to be exactly stated. Obviously we cannot expect to find in him anything esoteric in the use of words, any delicate exercises in verbal dry-point, any of what Professor Elton has called “those false associations of painful, choice and fastidious language that have gathered for half a century round the word art.” To Scott, as to Balzac and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, writing was a natural process; not, as to Tourgeniev and Flaubert, a ritual. There is a revealing confession in the Journal. “I am sensible that, if there be anything good about my poetry or my prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active dispositions.” Had Scott indulged in any finesse of language he would have been guilty of a grave fault of craftsmanship, and the result would have been as preposterous as the insertion of point-lace in a buff coat. In the mere verbal dandyism of style the world will never seri
ously interest itself, for it does not understand how the manner of saying something can have merit independent of the thing said. The mot juste, it holds rightly, is futile unless it be the right word for the right thing. To the monotonous exquisiteness of Flaubert it prefers the irregular movement and the more varied rhythms of less self-conscious writers, because it believes that the latter is the better art.
The real charge is a more serious affair. It is that Scott, from carelessness and ineptitude in the use of words, spoiled the artistic effect of his narrative; that his tools were so blunt that they often failed to do their work; that his extreme facility kept him always on the edge, and sometimes led him over the edge, of banality: and that he attains his great moments by a kind of happy accident in defiance of his style. The charge has been made by Stevenson, an admirer and follower, and it has been made in uncompromising terms. “His characters ... will be wading forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words.... He could ... often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle.... He conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly patience to describe it.... He was a great day-dreamer ... but hardly a great artist; hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all.”
There is some truth in this solemn bill of attainder. Scott was a master but not a schoolmaster of language, and sometimes grammar and syntax go by the board. Like Shakespeare he wrote fast, and like Shakespeare he could write abominably. He could produce fustian and jargon and “polite English” and false rhetoric. His sentences can trip up each other’s heels, and he can weaken his effects by an idle superabundance of words. In previous chapters I have given many instances of these blemishes. The truth is that any man, whose business it is to portray life in action and who is caught up in the white heat of his task, is certain at times to take the first phrase that comes into his head, and jar the ear and the taste of a fastidious reader.
