the character of scott, and his place in literature, do not demand much discussion after all that has already been said. he was born to be at once a dweller in the realm of dreams, these dreams being mainly “retrocognitive” of the historic past; and a man of action and of this world; while he had a superabundance of joyous vitality, which overflowed into humorous rhyme, even in his worst hours of cerebral disease, and which inspired at once the central error of his life and the resolute sacrifice of life to honour. these elements of character were, all of them, carried to a pitch unusually high, while their combination, and their union with the most kindly nature, are unprecedented. this vitality, and this unfailing and universal sympathy, made friends for scott of all sentient creatures, from men, women and children of every rank, to the pig which joined the pack of many dogs and one cat, old hinse, that scoured the
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woods with him, and to the strangely sentimental hen which attached itself to sir walter. from george iv.—who admired and never turned on scott—to the hedgers and ditchers on abbotsford, scott was endeared to all; in his ruin his old servants refused to leave him, and the music master of his daughters offered him the entire savings of his life. yet there was no mawkish good nature in scott; when he bent the heavy arches of his brows the ettrick shepherd himself felt that he must “gang warily.” no man was served as he was by his household, and when he told his son that certain conduct would entail his highest displeasure, the young man knew the full meaning of the phrase.
conclusion
scott’s courtesy was spontaneous and universal—he spoke to all “as if he was their blood relation”—except when he deliberately meant to be discourteous, in one case, to lord holland, who had done no more than his duty. he had come athwart the interests of scott’s brother thomas, and scott took up the feud in the ancient spirit of clanship. yet he lived to pronounce lord holland “the most agreeable man he ever knew. in criticism, in poetry, he beats those whose whole study they have been.” thus scott must have expiated an error produced by political heat as well as by
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personal resentment; probably, like the baron bradwardine, he sent “letters of slains,” or other atonement. jeffrey says that “this was the only example of rudeness in scott that he ever witnessed in the course of a lifelong familiarity.” in this lonely case, the person “cut like an old pen” was a man of title and distinction.
it is hardly worth while to controvert the opinion that scott was a snob. in addressing persons of rank, however familiarly intimate he might be with them, he used their “honour-giving names,” as agamemnon bids menelaus do towards the princes of the achaeans. this was the customary rule of the period. byron was indignant when leigh hunt publicly addressed him as “my dear byron,” and byron was an extreme liberal, while scott was a tory. he paid the then recognized dues to rank; such dues are no longer welcome to their recipients. he lived much with people of the highest social position, but he could and did entertain them at the same table with the ettrick shepherd, and with guests known to him of old when a schoolboy or as a lawyer’s apprentice. he was observed to pay great deference to a gentleman without any apparent distinction, because he descended from a knight who fought by the side of wallace.
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in all this his conduct, as in everything else, was dictated by his reverence for the past. that reverence for things old, for what had once been, ideally at least, an ordered system of society, was the cause of scott’s toryism, increased by his patriotism during the struggle with bonaparte. the ideas and sympathies which made him a tory, made him also an opponent of the system which turned the highlands into sheep farms and deer forests, by the expulsion of the clansmen. his opinions on this head are expressed in the introduction to the legend of montrose. again, the feudal ideas at the root of his toryism made him the most attentive of all landlords to the wellbeing of every soul on his estates. in bad times he found the wisest and most economic way of providing them with employment at once honourable and remunerative, and he taught the duke of buccleuch to follow his example on a great scale. he felt pain and embarrassment in face of the gratitude of his poor cotters for a holiday feast and holiday presents: why, he asked himself, should he have more than they? his house was as a great hearth whence radiated light and comfort on the humblest within his radius. before mr. ruskin he endeavoured to bring the happiness of art into the region of the crafts.
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conclusion
“the most of the articles from london were only models for the use of two or three neat-handed carpenters whom he had discovered in the villages near him; and he watched and directed their operations as carefully as a george bullock could have done; and the results were such as even bullock might have admired. the great table in the library, for example (a most complex and beautiful one), was done entirely in the room where it now stands, by joseph shillinglaw of darnick—the sheriff planning and studying every turn as zealously as ever an old lady pondered the development of an embroidered cushion. the hangings and curtains, too, were chiefly the work of a little hunchbacked tailor, by name william goodfellow (save at abbotsford, where he answered to robin), who occupied a cottage on scott’s farm of the broomielees; one of the race who creep from homestead to homestead, welcomed wherever they appear by housewife and handmaiden, the great gossips and newsmen of the parish—in scottish nomenclature cardooers. proudly and earnestly did all these vassals toil in his service; and i think it was one of them that, when some stranger asked a question about his personal demeanour, answered in words already quoted ‘sir walter speaks to every man as if they were blood relations.’ not long after
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he had completed his work at abbotsford little goodfellow fell sick, and as his cabin was near chiefswood, i had many opportunities of observing the sheriff’s kind attention to him in his affliction. i can never forget the evening on which the poor tailor died. when scott entered the hovel he found everything silent, and inferred from the looks of the good women in attendance that their patient had fallen asleep, and that they feared his sleep was the final one. he murmured some syllables of kind regret; at the sound of his voice the dying tailor unclosed his eyes, and eagerly and wistfully sat up, clasping his hands with an expression of rapturous gratefulness and devotion that, in the midst of deformity, disease, pain, and wretchedness, was at once beautiful and sublime. he cried with a loud voice, ‘the lord bless and reward you,’ and expired with the effort.”
conclusion
of scott’s great charity, which lay in giving affection as well as material aid, examples have been displayed in his latest years. his charity did but begin with these gifts; he was brotherly in all human intercourse. the slightest notoriety brings bores around a man: letter-writing bores, bores who want information accessible in any encyclopaedia; bores who give voluminous undesired information; bores who ask advice, bores who solicit an inter
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view—countless are the tribes of these thieves of time. at the celebrity of scott they all flew, like sea-fowls against a beacon above the midnight sea, and he “with a frolic welcome took” their attentions. they “bestowed all their tediousness on him,” and he accepted it, suffering them gladly. he answered their ceaseless letters (as from a boy asking him to contribute to the giggleswick school magazine!), he replied to them with thought, care, and courtesy; he considered their worthless manuscripts, paying £10 in postage for two mss. of the cherokee lovers: a tragedy, by a young american lady. “i might at least have asked him to dinner,” he murmured, when a bore of the first head had at last taken his leave. this is indeed charity which endures all things, making itself subject to the needs of all men.
conclusion
sir walter had everything of the saint except (what is indispensable) the psychology of the saint. he was naturally good, born to be so. “are all tories born bad?” said a little boy of a whig family. “they are born bad, and they make themselves worse,” replied his lady mother. scott was born good, and, by controlling his natural temper, and by reflection, he made himself better. but, though sincerely religious and, we know, a prayerful man, he was no saint, but a man of this
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world. he was not haunted, as a saint must be, by the desire of ideal perfection. it is not certain whether he was to be reckoned of the presbyterian or prelatist form of belief. “bishops, i care not for them,” he might have said, like the great montrose on his dying day. but he did prefer the liturgy of the church of england to the “conceived prayers” of the scottish pulpit, and read the service on sundays to his family, when far from a kirk at ashestiel, and to whomsoever of his neighbours cared to come and listen. he was married in an english church; the burial service of that church was read at his funeral. i am informed that he was at one time an elder of the kirk at duddingstone, which is partly of norman architecture, but lockhart says that, in later life, he adhered to the church of the cavaliers. yet he recognized a great genius in dr. chalmers; there was no bigotry in his episcopal tendencies; as a matter of taste he preferred the anglican manner of conducting public worship. he was on the best terms with many ministers; the only profession of whose followers he speaks with a certain lack of sympathy was the profession of school-mastering. in every dominie he believed that there lay “a vein of absurdity,” and on one occasion he reproves himself for thinking that he had met an exception to the
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rule. one of his own schoolmasters once knocked him down, in boyhood, and apologized by saying (as if he had driven into the party in front of him at golf), that he “did not know he could hit so hard.” this apology seldom mends matters!
we all have our foibles. that of scott was the effort to live in an idealized past. he knew the points at which his reason crossed his judgment. the fairest of historians, he would not write a biography of queen mary “because his opinion was contrary to his feeling.” “she may have been criminal,” he says, in the tales of a grandfather, telling the story as fairly as may be, within his space. lockhart observes that he often speaks of george iv (he must mean george iii) as “de jure king,” on the death of the cardinal duke of york. “yet who could have known better than he that whatever rights the exiled males of the stuart line ever possessed must have remained entire with their female descendants?” had scott lived in his father’s time, i misdoubt that he would have worn the black cockade, not the white, for, except in his expenditure, he always had a saving grain of commonsense. scott was a great and strong man as any of his knights, but the nature which gave him strength made him a poet who
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“lived in fantasy.” he tried to make his dreams real, and he forgot realities. any ideal set before him gave him pleasure; he certainly and confessedly took a stern delight in the ideal of working off his debts with his own hand. his earlier years of grinding task work were not, as such, unhappy. sir walter had, in fact, the most fortunate kind of genius—a genius for happiness, which cannot exist without making life more joyous for all within the radius of its influence.
the scots are, according to old proverbs, a jealous people. the race has no two sons more opposite in their ideals than walter scott and john knox. yet they had this virtue in common, that neither in the preacher nor the poet does analysis detect a grain of professional jealousy. scott could, indeed, see the blemishes on the poetry of southey; nor could the faults of byron escape him. but in other contemporary poets whom he mentions, he seems to behold nothing but their excellences, which he often exaggerates. if byron “beat him,” as he said, he seems seriously to have believed that the triumph was deserved. this is, surely, unexampled generosity.
conclusion
“scott’s chivalrous imagination threw a certain air of courteous gallantry into his relations with his daughters.... though there could
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not be a gentler mother than lady scott, ... on those delicate occasions most interesting to young ladies, they always made their father the first confidant.” in his works of imagination, the relation of father and daughter is always touched with peculiar grace and tenderness. his dressing-room was “a little chapel of the lares” fitted up with relics of his father and mother. in every relation of life and literature his motto was “à léal souvenir”; he kept the pious trust of all things old that were of good report, and handed on the sacred bequest to all who follow him. as to his place in literature, we leave it to the judgment of the world and of the unborn. they “cannot say but he has had the crown.”
tides of criticism come and go; they may leave the fame and name of walter scott deserted, like the cairn of a forgotten warrior forsaken by a receding sea, or they may fill the space with the diapason of their waves. we cannot prophesy. but one sound will not cease, if men dead remember, the carol of the lark that sang above scott’s grave at the funeral of the dearest of his daughters. that song of praise for such happiness as—
sceptred king not laurelled conqueror
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can give, has followed “this wondrous potentate” from three generations who have warmed their hands at the hearth of his genius, who have drunk of his enchanted cup, and eaten of his fairy bread, and been happy through his gift.
