II.
It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure.
You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull
days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to
fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait
so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which
marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see,
like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for
literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities,
but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your
mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually
the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with
your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at
last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for
all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green
line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were
the first books I ever owned--long, long before I could appreciate
or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they
were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the
dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the
story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is of a different
edition from the others. The first copy was left in the grass by the
side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually picked up
three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I think I
may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed,
it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
breaking fresh ground.
I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when
the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions
of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a
challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar.
It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was
allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and
frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is the privilege of great
masters to make things so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay
it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who described the prosaic man, who
enters a drawing-room with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned
bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose on any play of
fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If Shakespeare gives
a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English
prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack--well, it was so, and that's an end
of it. "There is no second line of rails at that point," said an
editor to a minor author. "I make a second line," said the author;
and he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers'
conviction with him.
But this is a digression from "Ivanhoe." What a book it is! The
second greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every
successive reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott's
soldiers are always as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak;
but here, while the soldiers are at their very best, the romantic
figure of Rebecca redeems the female side of the story from the
usual commonplace routine. Scott drew manly men because he was a
manly man himself, and found the task a sympathetic one.
He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he
had never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for
a dozen chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat--in the long
stretch, for example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the
end of the Friar Tuck incident--that we realize the height of
continued romantic narrative to which he could attain. I don't
think in the whole range of our literature we have a finer
sustained flight than that.
There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
Scott's novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make
the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order
are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how
to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well
might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin
telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his
characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every
great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get
past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse
phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when
the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim
Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: "A thousand marks or
a bed of heather!" says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also:
"The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" says he. No verbiage there!
But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few
stern words, which haunt your mind. "Bows and Bills!" cry the Saxon
Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the
actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn
day when they fought under the "Red Dragon of Wessex" on the low
ridge at Hastings. "Out! Out!" they roared, as the Norman chivalry
broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic--the very genius of the
race was in the cry.
Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they
are damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?
Something of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as
a young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson's famous message from
the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship's company. The
officers were impressed. The men were not. "Duty!" they muttered.
"We've always done it. Why not?" Anything in the least highfalutin'
would depress, not exalt, a British company. It is the under
statement which delights them. German troops can march to battle
singing Luther's hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy
by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets need not
trouble to imitate--or at least need not imagine that if they do
so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors
working the heavy guns in South Africa sang: "Here's another lump of
sugar for the Bird." I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain
of "A little bit off the top." The martial poet aforesaid, unless
he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a
good deal of ink before he had got down to such chants as these. The
Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I remember reading of
some column ascending a breach and singing lustily from start to
finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest
with the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous chant
it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he found
that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was "Ivan
is in the garden picking cabbages." The fact is, I suppose, that a
mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.
Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during
the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged--the
only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched
to their uttermost and showed their true form--"Tramp, tramp,
tramp," "John Brown's Body," "Marching through Georgia"--all had a
playful humour running through them. Only one exception do I know,
and that is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an
outsider in time of peace can hardly read it without emotion. I
mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe's "War-Song of the Republic," with
the choral opening line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord." If that were ever sung upon a battle-field the
effect must have been terrific.
A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts
at the other side of the Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
a dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I
was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical,
no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly
ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his
natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who
were his own contemporaries--the finest, perhaps, that the world
has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier
Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How
could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a
portrait of one of Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of
the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister
of Gustavus or the archers of the French King's Guard in "Quentin
Durward"?
In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men
who during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also
the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from
the sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much
romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling
cavaliers of his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular
veteran, with his views upon the Duke, would be as striking as
Dugald Dalgetty from the German wars. But then no man ever does
realize the true interest of the age in which he happens to live.
All sense of proportion is lost, and the little thing hard-by
obscures the great thing at a distance. It is easy in the dark to
confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for example, the Old
Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St. Sebastians,
while Columbus was discovering America before their very faces.
I have said that I think "Ivanhoe" the best of Scott's novels. I
suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the
second best? It speaks well for their general average that there is
hardly one among them which might not find some admirers who would
vote it to a place of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels
which deal with Scottish life and character have a quality of
raciness which gives them a place apart. There is a rich humour of
the soil in such books as "Old Mortality," "The Antiquary," and "Rob
Roy," which puts them in a different class from the others. His old
Scottish women are, next to his soldiers, the best series of types
that he has drawn. At the same time it must be admitted that merit
which is associated with dialect has such limitations that it can
never take the same place as work which makes an equal appeal to all
the world. On the whole, perhaps, "Quentin Durward," on account of
its wider interests, its strong character-drawing, and the European
importance of the events and people described, would have my vote
for the second place. It is the father of all those sword-and-cape
novels which have formed so numerous an addition to the light
literature of the last century. The pictures of Charles the Bold and
of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily vivid. I can see those
two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing the herald, and
clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth, more
clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested upon.
The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and
is the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like
rival. It is not often that historical characters work out in their
actual physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the
High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles
which might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin,
ascetic, varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It
is hard on us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas,
when, for example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man
with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read
beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally,
however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. I have
before me on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which
represents Queen Mary's Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. Mark
the big head, fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face,
made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful
features--the mouth with a suggestion of wild boars' tusks behind
it, the beard which could bristle with fury: the whole man and his
life-history are revealed in that picture. I wonder if Scott had
ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family seat?
Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which
the critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the
last from his tired pen. I mean "Count Robert of Paris." I am
convinced that if it had been the first, instead of the last, of
the series it would have attracted as much attention as "Waverley."
I can understand the state of mind of the expert, who cried out in
mingled admiration and despair: "I have studied the conditions of
Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer who
makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!" Many men could draw
with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but
to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with
such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think,
a most wonderful tour de force. His failing health showed itself
before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the
first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena reading
aloud her father's exploits, or of such majesty as the account of
the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then
the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very
front rank of the novels.
I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse
of the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was
ever anything in the world's history like it? It had what historical
incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from
the half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem.
Those leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice.
Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous
and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy
the half-mad hero! Here is material so rich that one feels one is
not worthy to handle it. What richest imagination could ever evolve
anything more marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical
facts?
But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
romance of "The Talisman"; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life
in "The Pirate"; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England
in "Kenilworth"; the rich humour of the "Legend of Montrose"; above
all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a
coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car,
and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter
Scott, and how high the service which he did for literature and
for humanity.
For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the
same shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law
and his admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly
impartial man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to
tell the absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a
man as well as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world
was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.
Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen
eye for a pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would
have done better to stop at the first, or did something to make us
feel that they were men and brothers. They need not go the length
of the lady who began a biography of her deceased husband with the
words--"D--- was a dirty man," but the books certainly would be
more readable, and the subjects more lovable too, if we had greater
light and shade in the picture.
But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would
have admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking
country, and I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of
toddy occasionally of an evening which would have laid his feeble
successors under the table. His last years, at least, poor fellow,
were abstemious enough, when he sipped his barley-water, while
the others passed the decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous
gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of honour, translating
itself not into empty phrases, but into years of labour and denial!
You remember how he became sleeping partner in a printing house,
and so involved himself in its failure. There was a legal, but very
little moral, claim against him, and no one could have blamed him
had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have enabled
him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took the
whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life,
spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort
to save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly
a hundred thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the
creditors--a great record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his
life thrown in.
And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who
has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single
year. I remember reading in some book of reminiscences--on second
thoughts it was in Lockhart himself--how the writer had lodged
in some rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the
opposite house. All evening the man wrote, and the observer could
see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to
the pile at the side. He went to a party and returned, but still
the hand was moving the sheets. Next morning he was told that the
rooms opposite were occupied by Walter Scott.
A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction
is shown by the fact that he wrote two of his books--good ones,
too--at a time when his health was such that he could not afterwards
remember one word of them, and listened to them when they were read
to him as if he were hearing the work of another man. Apparently
the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were
in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex
faculty--imagination in its supreme form--was absolutely unimpaired.
It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives
some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work
must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way
from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon
the paper. The creative thought--the germ thought from which a
larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a bullet.
He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having
originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of
the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the
least sense of personal effort.
And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail
physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's
materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these
spiritual uses? It is an old tag that
"Great Genius is to madness close allied,
And thin partitions do those rooms divide."
But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work
seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the
body.
Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns,
Shelley, Keats, Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band,
yet Burns was only thirty-eight when he passed away, "burned out,"
as his brother terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died
by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a
sign of a morbid state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost
a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards.
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age
of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late
years, have a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled
with the white-lead workers and other dangerous trades. Look at the
really shocking case of the young Americans, for example. What a
band of promising young writers have in a few years been swept away!
There was the author of that admirable book, "David Harum"; there
was Frank Norris, a man who had in him, I think, the seeds of
greatness more than almost any living writer. His "Pit" seemed to me
one of the finest American novels. He also died a premature death.
Then there was Stephen Crane--a man who had also done most brilliant
work, and there was Harold Frederic, another master-craftsman. Is
there any profession in the world which in proportion to its numbers
could show such losses as that? In the meantime, out of our own men
Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton Merriman, and many
another.
Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had
rounded off their career were really premature in their end.
Thackeray, for example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52;
Dickens attained the age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his
61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was
over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career
than most of his brethren.
He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is
as much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I
believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who
were not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous
disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his
signature. Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special
scourge of the imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more,
were its victims. As to the tradition, first mentioned long after
his death, that he died of a fever contracted from a drinking bout,
it is absurd on the face of it, since no such fever is known to
science. But a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely
likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint to a disastrous end.
One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green
volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account
of his character is complete which does not deal with the strange,
secretive vein which ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was
the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met
him day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the
whole of Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his
pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told
her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A
psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the
numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep
their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of
his novels.
It's a sad book, Lockhart's "Life." It leaves gloom in the mind.
The sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing
intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of
literature. But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is
the memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but
faced Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper.
He sampled every human emotion. Great was his joy and great his
success, great was his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the
sons of men I don't think there are many greater than he who lies
under the great slab at Dryburgh.
