NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I have been making not a few mistakes in Fors lately; and, indeed, am careless enough in it, not solicitous at all to avoid mistakes; for being entirely sure of my main ground, and entirely honest in purpose, I know that I cannot make any mistake which will invalidate my work, and that any chance error which the third Fors may appoint for me, is often likely to bring out, in its correction, more good than if I had taken the pains to avoid it. Here, for instance, is Dr. Brown’s letter, which I should not have had, but for my having confused George’s Street with George’s Square, and having too shortly generalized my experience of modern novel readers; and it tells me, and you, something about Scott and Dickens which is of the greatest use.
“My dear Friend,—I am rejoiced to see you upon Scott. It will be a permanent good, your having broken this ground. But you are wrong in two things—George’s Square is not in the detestable New Town, it is to the south of the very Old Town, and near the Meadows.
“Then you say ‘nobody now will read them’ (Miss Edgeworth and Sir Walter). She is less read than I think she should be, but he is enormously read—here and in America.
“In the twelve months ending June, 1873, Adam Black and his sons have sold over 250,000 Waverleys, and I know that when Dickens—that great master of fun and falsetto—went last to America, and there was a fury for him and his books, the sale of them only touched for a short time the ordinary sale of the Scott Novels, and subsided immensely, soon, the Scotts going steadily on increasing. Our young ‘genteel’ girls and boys, I fear, don’t read them as the same class did thirty years ago, but the readers of them, in the body of the people, are immense, and you have only to look at the four or five copies of the whole set in our public libraries to see how they are being read. That is a beautiful drawing of Chantrey’s, and new to me,—very like, having the simple, childlike look which he had. The skull is hardly high enough.”
A subsequent letter tells me than Dinlay is a big hill in Liddesdale; and enclosed (search for it being made) the tune of Sour Plums in Galashiels, of which I will only at present bid you farther observe that it is the first “touch of the auld bread-winner” that Wandering Willie plays to Darsie.
Another valued correspondent reminds me that people might get hold of my having spoken, a good many numbers back, of low sunshine “at six o’clock on an October morning;” and truly enough it must have been well on towards seven.
A more serious, but again more profitable, mistake, was made in the June Fors, by the correspondent (a working man) who sent me the examination paper, arranged from a Kensington one, from which I quoted the four questions,—who either did not know, or did not notice, the difference between St. Matthew and St. Matthias. The paper had been set in the schools of St. Matthew, and the chairman of the committee of the schools of St. Matthias wrote to me in violent indignation—little thinking how greatly pleased I should be to hear of any school in which Kensington questions were not asked,—or if asked, were not likely to be answered.
I find even that the St. Matthias children could in all probability answer the questions I proposed as alternative,—for they have flower shows, and prizes presented by Bishops, and appear to be quite in an exemplary phase of education: all of which it is very pleasant to me to learn. (Apropos of the equivoque between St. Matthew and St. Matthias, another correspondent puts me in mind of the promise I made to find out for you who St. Pancras was. I did; but did not much care to tell you—for I had put him with St. Paul only because both their names began with P; and found that he was an impertinent youth of sixteen, who ought to have been learning to ride and swim, and took to theology instead, and was made a martyr of, and had that mock-Greek church built to his Christian honour in Mary-le-bone. I have no respect whatever for boy or girl martyrs;—we old men know the value of the dregs of life: but young people will throw the whole of it away for a freak, or in a pet at losing a toy.)
I suppose I shall next have a fiery letter abjuring Kensington from the committee of the schools of St. Matthew:—nothing could possibly give me greater pleasure. I did not, indeed, intend for some time to give you any serious talk about Kensington, and then I meant to give it you in large print—and at length; but as this matter has been ‘forced’ upon me (note the power of the word Fors in the first syllable of that word) I will say a word or two now.
I have lying beside me on my table, in a bright orange cover, the seventh edition of the ‘Young Mechanic’s Instructor; or, Workman’s Guide to the various Arts connected with the Building Trades; showing how to strike out all kinds of Arches and Gothic Points, to set out and construct Skew Bridges; with numerous Illustrations of Foundations, Sections, Elevations, etc. Receipts, Rules, and Instructions in the art of Casting, Modelling, Carving, Gilding, Dyeing, Staining, Polishing, Bronzing, Lacquering, Japanning, Enamelling, Gasfitting, Plumbing, Glazing, Painting, etc. Jewellers’ Secrets, Miscellaneous Receipts, Useful Tables, etc., and a variety of useful information designed specially for the Working Mechanic.—London: Brodie and Middleton, 79, Long Acre; and all Booksellers in Town and Country. Price, 2s. 6d.’
From pages 11, 20, and 21 of the introduction to this work, I quote the following observations on St. Paul’s, the Nineveh sculptures, and the Houses of Parliament.
I. OF ST. PAUL’S.
“Since London was first built, which we are led to believe was about the year 50, by the Romans, there has not been a more magnificent building erected in it than St. Paul’s—this stupendous edifice which absorbs the attention, and strikes with wonder all who behold it, was founded by Ethelbert, the fifth King of Kent, in the year 604 A.D. And it is certain that since the completion of this building succeeding generations have made no progress in the construction of public buildings.”
II. OF THE NINEVEH SCULPTURES.
“There is one feature in the Nineveh sculptures which most beautifully illustrates and corroborates the truth of the Scriptures; any person who has carefully read the Scriptures, and has seen the Nineveh sculptures, cannot fail to see the beautiful illustration; it will be remembered that the king is spoken of in many places as riding in his chariot, and of the king’s armour-bearer following him to the battle. In the Nineveh sculptures you will see the fact exemplified—the king in his chariot, and his armour-bearer defending him with his shield.”
III. OF THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.
“Of all the Gothic buildings that we have in our country, both of ancient and modern date, the Houses of Parliament are the best and most elaborate; the first step of its grandeur is, that it stands parallel to the majestic stream of the River Thames, and owing to its proximate distance to the river, there is no thoroughfare between it and the water; its open situation gives it a sublime view from the opposite side; but especially from Westminster Bridge its aspect is grand and magnificent in the extreme. Its superb tracery glitters in the distance, in the sight of the spectator, like the yellow autumnal foliage of some picturesque grove, which beautifies the verdant valleys and bedecks the silvery hills. The majestic figures in their stately order, encanopied in their Gothic palaces, bring to our remembrance the noble patriarchs of old, or the patriots of recent days. Its numerous pinnacles, turrets, and towers, rise up into the smoky and blue atmosphere like forest trees, which will stand as an everlasting memento of the great and noble-minded generation who raised this grand and magnificent structure, so that after-generations may say, ‘Surely our forefathers were great and illustrious men, that they had reached the climax of human skill, so that we cannot improve on their superb and princely buildings.’ ”
These three extracts, though in an extreme degree, are absolutely and accurately characteristic of the sort of mind, unexampled in any former ages for its conceit, its hypocrisy, and its sevenfold—or rather seventy times sevenfold—ignorance, the dregs of corrupted knowledge, which modern art-teaching, centralized by Kensington, produces in our workmen and their practical ‘guides.’ How it is produced, and how the torturing examinations as to the possible position of the letters in the word. Chillianwallah, and the collection of costly objects of art from all quarters of the world, end in these conditions of paralysed brain and corrupted heart, I will show you at length in a future letter.
[2] Portion omitted short, and of no moment just now. I shall refer to it afterwards. [↑]
[3] The actual toil gone through by him is far greater during the last years than before—in fact it is unceasing and mortal; but I count only as the true labour-time that which is healthy and fruitful. [↑]
[4] If my own life is spared a little longer, I can at least rescue Pope from the hands of his present scavenger biographer; but alas, for Scott’s loving hand and noble thought, lost to him! [↑]
[5] To the speech of Mr. Baillie of Jerviswoode; vol. vii., p. 221. [↑]
[7] Not to break away from my text too long, I add one or two farther points worth notice, here:—
“Boerhaave lost none of his hours, but when he had attained one science attempted another. He added physick to divinity, chemistry to the mathematicks, and anatomy to botany.
“He knew the importance of his own writings to mankind, and lest he might, by a roughness and barbarity of style too frequent among men of great learning, disappoint his own intentions, and make his labours less useful, he did not neglect the politer arts of eloquence and poetry. Thus was his learning at once various and exact, profound and agreeable.
“But his knowledge, however uncommon, holds in his character but the second place; his virtue was yet much more uncommon than his learning.
“Being once asked by a friend, who had often admired his patience under great provocations, whether he knew what it was to be angry, and by what means he had so entirely suppressed that impetuous and ungovernable passion, he answered, with the utmost frankness and sincerity, that he was naturally quick of resentment, but that he had, by daily prayer and meditation, at length attained to this mastery over himself.” [↑]
[10] His own words to Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, vol. i., p. 83, spoken while Turner was sketching Smailholm Tower, vol. vii., p. 302. [↑]
[11] The Ballad of Hardiknute is only a fragment—but one consisting of forty-two stanzas of eight lines each. It is the only heroic poem in the Miscellany; of which—and of the poem itself—more hereafter. The first four lines are ominous of Scott’s own life:—
“Stately stept he East the wa’,
And stately stept he West;
Full seventy years he now had seen,
With scarce seven years of rest.”
[12] Lockhart, in the extract just below, calls them “milk-white.” This is exactly right of the pale bluish translucent quartz, in which the agatescent veins are just traceable, and no more, out of the trap rocks; but the gneissitic hills give also exquisitely brilliant pure white and cream-coloured quartz, rolled out of their vein stones. [↑]
[13] With your pardon, Mr. Lockhart, neither ducks nor duckweed are in the least derogatory to the purity of a pool. [↑]
[14] Vol. ii., p. 358; compare ii., 70. “If it seemed possible to scramble through, he scorned to go ten yards about, and in fact preferred the ford,” etc. [↑]
[16] Vol. vii., pp. 164, 166, 196. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXXIII.
I find some of my readers are more interested in the last two numbers of Fors than I want them to be.
“Give up your Fors altogether, and let us have a life of Scott,” they say.
They must please to remember that I am only examining the conditions of the life of this wise man, that they may learn how to rule their own lives, or their children’s, or their servants’; and, for the present, with this particular object, that they may be able to determine, for themselves, whether ancient sentiment, or modern common sense, is to be the rule of life, and of service.
I beg them, therefore, to refer constantly to that summary of modern common sense given by Mr. Applegarth, and quoted with due commendation by the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ (above, XXVIII., 22):—
“One piece of vigorous good sense enlivened the discussion. It was uttered by Mr. Applegarth, who observed that ‘no sentiment ought to be brought into the subject.’ ”
No sentiment, you observe, is to be brought into your doing, or your whistling, according to Mr. Applegarth.
And the main purpose of Fors is to show you that there is, sometimes, in weak natural whistling quite as much virtue as in vigorous steam whistling. But it cannot show you this without explaining what your darg, or ‘doing,’ is; which cannot be shown merely by writing pleasant biographies. You are always willing enough to read lives, but never willing to lead them. For instance, those few sentences, almost casually given in last Fors, about the Scottish rivers, have been copied, I see, into various journals, as if they, at any rate, were worth extract from the much useless matter of my books. Scotchmen like to hear their rivers talked about, it appears! But when last I was up Huntly Burn way, there was no burn there. It had all been drawn off to somebody’s ‘works;’ and it is painful for me, as an author, to reflect that, “of all polluting liquids belonging to this category (liquid refuse from manufactories), the discharges from paper works are the most difficult to deal with.”[1]
At Edinburgh there is a railroad station instead of the North Loch; the water of Leith is—well, one cannot say in civilized company what it is;[2] and at Linlithgow, of all the palaces so fair,—built for a royal dwelling, etc.,—the oil, (paraffin,) floating on the streams, can be ignited, burning with a large flame.[3]
My good Scottish friends, had you not better leave off pleasing yourselves with descriptions of your rivers as they were, and consider what your rivers are to be? For I correct my derivation of Clarty Hole too sorrowfully.[4] It is the Ford that is clarty now—not the Hole.
To return to our sentimental work, however, for a while. I left in my last letter one or two of the most interesting points in the first year at Sandy-Knowe unnoticed, because I thought it best to give you, by comparison with each other, some idea of the three women who, as far as education could do it, formed the mind of Scott. His masters only polished and directed it. His mother, grandmother, and aunt welded the steel.
Hear first this of his mother. (Lockhart, vol. i., p. 78.)
“She had received, as became the daughter of an eminently learned physician, the best sort of education then bestowed on young gentlewomen in Scotland.” The poet, speaking of Mrs. Euphemia Sinclair, the mistress of the school at which his mother was reared, to the ingenious local antiquary, Mr. Robert Chambers, said that “she must have been possessed of uncommon talents for education, as all her young ladies were, in after-life, fond of reading, wrote and spelled admirably, were well acquainted with history and the belles lettres, without neglecting the more homely duties of the needle and accompt-book, and perfectly well-bred in society.” Mr. Chambers adds, “Sir Walter further communicated that his mother, and many others of Mrs. Sinclair’s pupils, were sent afterwards to be finished off by the Honourable Mrs. Ogilvie, a lady who trained her young friends to a style of manners which would now be considered intolerably stiff. Such was the effect of this early training upon the mind of Mrs. Scott, that even when she approached her eightieth year, she took as much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie.”
You are to note in this extract three things. First, the singular influence of education, given by a master or mistress of real power. “All her young ladies” (all, Sir Walter! do you verily mean this?) “fond of reading,” and so forth.
Well, I believe that, with slight exception, Sir Walter did mean it. He seldom wrote, or spoke, in careless generalization. And I doubt not that it is truly possible, by first insisting on a girl’s really knowing how to read, and then by allowing her very few books, and those absolutely wholesome,—and not amusing!—to give her a healthy appetite for reading. Spelling, I had thought was impossible to many girls; but perhaps this is only because it is not early enough made a point of: it cannot be learned late.
Secondly: I wish Mr. Chambers had given us Sir Walter’s words, instead of only the substance of what he “further communicated.” But you may safely gather what I want you to notice, that Sir Walter attributes the essentials of good breeding to the first careful and scholarly mistress; and only the formality, which he somewhat hesitatingly approves, to the finishing hand of Mrs. Ogilvie. He would have paid less regard to the opinion of modern society on such matters, had he lived to see our languid Paradise of sofas and rocking-chairs. The beginning, and very nearly the end, of bodily education for a girl, is to make sure that she can stand, and sit, upright; the ankle vertical, and firm as a marble shaft; the waist elastic as a reed, and as unfatiguable. I have seen my own mother travel from sunrise to sunset, in a summer’s day, without once leaning back in the carriage.
Thirdly: The respectability belonging in those days to the profession of a schoolmistress. In fact, I do not myself think that any old lady can be respectable, unless she is one, whether she be paid for her pupils or not. And to deserve to be one, makes her Honourable at once, titled or untitled.
This much comes, then, of the instructions of Mrs. Sinclair and Mrs. Ogilvie; and why should not all your daughters be educated by Honourable Mrs. Ogilvies, and learn to spell, and to sit upright? Then they will all have sons like Sir Walter Scott, you think?
Not so, good friends. Miss Rutherford had not wholly learned to sit upright from Mrs. Ogilvie. She had some disposition of her own in that kind, different from the other pupils, and taught in older schools. Look at the lines in the Lay, where Conrad of Wolfenstein,
“In humour highly crossed
About some steeds his band had lost,
High words to words succeeding still,
Smote with his gauntlet stout Hunthill;
A hot and hardy Rutherford,
Whom men call Dickon Draw-the-Sword.
Stern Rutherford right little said,
But bit his glove, and shook his head.—
A fortnight thence, in Inglewood,
Stout Conrad, cold and drenched in blood,
His bosom gored with many a wound,
Was by a woodman’s lyme-dog[5] found;
Unknown the manner of his death,
Gone was his brand, both sword and sheath;
But ever from that time, ’twas said
That Dickon wore a Cologne blade.”
Such the race,—such the school education,—of Scott’s mother. Of her home education, you may judge by what she herself said of her father to her son’s tutor (whose exquisitely grotesque letter, for the rest, vol. i., p. 108,) is alone enough to explain Scott’s inevitable future perception of the weakness of religious egotism.
“Mrs. Scott told me that, when prescribing for his patients, it was Dr. Rutherford’s custom to offer up, at the same time, a prayer for the accompanying blessing of heaven,—a laudable practice, in which, I fear, he has not been generally imitated by those of his profession.”
A very laudable practice indeed, good Mr. Mitchell; perhaps even a useful and practically efficacious one, on occasion; at all events one of the last remains of noble Puritanism, in its sincerity, among men of sound learning.
For Dr. Rutherford was also an excellent linguist, and, according to the custom of the times, delivered his prelections to the students in Latin, (like the conversation in Beardie’s Jacobite Club). Nowadays, you mean to have no more Latin talked, as I understand; nor prayers said. Pills—Morison’s and others—can be made up on cheaper terms, you think,—and be equally salutary?
Be it so. In these ancient manners, however, Scott’s mother is brought up, and consistently abides; doubtless, having some reverence for the Latin tongue, and much faith in the medicine of prayer;—having had troubles about her soul’s safety also; perhaps too solicitous, at one time, on that point; but being sure she has a soul to be solicitous about, which is much; obedient herself to the severest laws of morality and life; mildly and steadily enforcing them on her children; but naturally of light and happy temper, and with a strong turn to study poetry and works of imagination.
I do not say anything of his father till we come to the apprenticeship,—except only that he was no less devout than his mother, and more formal. Of training which could be known or remembered, neither he nor the mother give any to their boy until after the Sandy-Knowe time. But how of the unremembered training? When do you suppose the education of a child begins? At six months old it can answer smile with smile, and impatience with impatience. It can observe, enjoy, and suffer, acutely, and, in a measure, intelligently. Do you suppose it makes no difference to it that the order of the house is perfect and quiet, the faces of its father and mother full of peace, their soft voices familiar to its ear, and even those of strangers, loving; or that it is tossed from arm to arm, among hard, or reckless, or vain-minded persons, in the gloom of a vicious household, or the confusion of a gay one? The moral disposition is, I doubt not, greatly determined in those first speechless years. I believe especially that quiet, and the withdrawal of objects likely to distract, by amusing the child, so as to let it fix its attention undisturbed on every visible least thing in its domain, is essential to the formation of some of the best powers of thought. It is chiefly to this quietude of his own home that I ascribe the intense perceptiveness and memory of the three-years’-old child at Sandy-Knowe; for, observe, it is in that first year he learns his Hardiknute; by his aunt’s help he learns to read at Bath, and can cater for himself on his return. Of this aunt, and her mother, we must now know what we can. You notice the difference which Scott himself indicates between the two: “My grandmother, who was meekness itself, and my aunt, who was of a higher temper.” Yet his grandmother, Barbara Haliburton, was descended from the so-called, in speciality of honour, ‘Standard-bearer’ of the Douglases; and Dryburgh Abbey was part of her family’s estate, they having been true servants to the monks of it, once on a time. Here is a curious little piece of lecture on the duties of master and servant,—Royal Proclamation on the 8th of May, 1535, by James the Fifth:[6] “Whereas we, having been advised, and knowing the said gentlemen, the Halliburtons, to be leal and true honest men, long servants unto the saide abbeye, for the saide landis, stout men at armes, and goode borderers against Ingland; and doe therefore decree and ordaine, that they shall be re-possess’d, and bruik and enjoy the landis and steedings they had of the said abbeye, paying the use and wonte: and that they sall be goode servants to the said venerabil father, like as they and their predecessours were to the said venerabil father, and his predecessours, and he a good master to them.” The Abbot of Dryburgh, however, and others in such high places, having thus misread their orders, and taken on themselves to be masters instead of ministers, the Reformation took its course; and Dryburgh claims allegiance no more—but to its dead.
You notice the phrase, “good borderers against England.” Lest I should have to put it off, too long, I may as well, in this place, let you know the origin of the tune which Scott’s uncle was so fond of. From the letter of one of his friends to Dr. Brown I gratefully take the following passage:—
“In the fourteenth century some English riders were slaking their thirst on the banks of the Tweed, nearly opposite Cartley Hole,—now Abbotsford,—where wild plums grew. The borderers came down upon them unexpectedly, and annihilated them, driving some into the Tweed, at a place called the Englishman’s Dyke. The borderers accordingly thought their surprise sourer fruit to the invaders than the plums they went to pluck, and christened themselves by the soubriquet of ‘Sour Plums in Galashiels,’ which gave a text for the song and tune, and a motto for the arms of the town of Galashiels.”
There is something to think of for you, when next you see the blackthorn blow, or the azure bloom spread on its bossed clusters of fruit. I cannot find any of the words of the song; but one beautiful stanza of the ballad of Cospatrick may at least serve to remind you of the beauty of the Border in its summer time:—
“For to the greenwood I maun gae
To pu’ the red rose and the slae,
To pu’ the red rose and the thyme,
To deck my mother’s bour and mine.”
“Meekness itself,” and yet possibly with some pride in her also, this Barbara, with the ruins of her Dryburgh still seen grey above the woods, from the tower at whose foot her grandchild was playing. So short the space he had to travel, when his lameness should be cured,—the end of all travel already in sight!
Some pride in her, perhaps: you need not be surprised her grandchild should have a little left.
“Many a tale” (she told him) “of Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of Aikwood (Oakwood), Jamie Tellfer of the fair Dodhead, and other heroes—merry men, all of the persuasion and calling of Robin Hood and Little John. A more recent hero, but not of less note, was the celebrated De’il of Little Dean, whom she well remembered, as he had married her mother’s sister. Of this extraordinary person I learned many a story—grave and gay, comic and warlike”—(dearest, meek, grandmamma!)
“Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat were explored for my amusement in the tedious winter days. Automathes[7] and Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany were my favourites, although, at a later period, an odd volume of Josephus’s Wars of the Jews divided my partiality.”
“Two or three old books in the window-seat,” and “an odd volume of Josephus.” How entertaining our farm library! (with the Bible, you observe;) and think how much matters have changed for the better: your package down from Mudie’s monthly, with all the new magazines, and a dozen of novels; Good Words—as many as you choose,—and Professor Tyndall’s last views on the subject of the Regelation of Ice. (Respecting which, for the sake of Scott’s first love, and for the sake also of my own first love—which was of snow, even more than water,—I have a few words to say to Professor Tyndall, but they must be for next month, as they will bitterly interrupt our sentimental proceedings.)
Nay—with your professional information that when ice breaks you can stick it together again, you have also imaginative literature of the rarest. Here—instead of Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany, with its Hardiknute and other ballads of softer tendency,—some of them not the best of their kind, I admit,—here you have Mr. Knatchbull-Huguessen, M.P.’s, Tales at Tea-time,[8] dedicated to the schoolroom teapot, in which the first story is of the “Pea Green Nose,” and in which (opening at random) I find it related of some Mary of our modern St. Mary’s Lochs, that “Mary stepped forward hastily, when one of the lobsters sprang forward, and seized her arm in his claw, saying, in a low, agitated tone of voice,” etc. etc.
You were better off, little as you think it, with that poor library on the window-seat. Your own, at worst, though much fingered and torn;—your own mentally, still more utterly; and though the volume be odd, do you think that, by any quantity of reading, you can make your knowledge of history, even?
You are so proud of having learned to read too, and I warrant you could not read so much as Barbara Haliburton’s shield: Or, on a bend azure, three mascles of the first; in the second quarter a buckle of the second. I meant to have engraved it, but shall never get on to aunt Jessie at this rate.
“My kind and affectionate aunt, Miss Janet Scott, whose memory will ever be dear to me, used to read these works to me, with admirable patience, until I could repeat long passages by heart.”
Why admirable, Sir Walter? Surely she might have spent her time more usefully—lucratively at least—than in this manner of ‘nursing the baby.’ Might you not have been safely left, to hunt up Hardiknute, in maturer years, for yourself?
By no manner of means, Sir Walter thinks; and justly. With all his gifts, but for this aunt Janet,—for his mother,—and for Lilias Redgauntlet,—he had assuredly been only a hunting laird, and the best story-teller in the Lothians.
We scarcely ever, in our study of education, ask this most essential of all questions about a man, What patience had his mother or sister with him?
And most men are apt to forget it themselves. Pardon me for speaking of myself for a moment; (if I did not know things by my own part in them, I would not write of them at all). You know that people sometimes call me a good writer: others like to hear me speak. I seldom mis-spell or mis-pronounce a word, grossly; and can generally say what I want to say. Well, my own impression about this power, such as it may be, is that it was born with me, or gradually gained by my own study. It is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise,—toil on both sides equal,—by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn all the Scotch paraphrases by heart, and ever so many chapters of the Bible besides, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one,—try it, good reader, in a leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the “of” in the lines
“Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn?”
I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it, “The ashes of the urn.” It was not, I say, till after three weeks’ labour, that my mother got the accent laid upon the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it, I had been simply an avaricious picture collector, or perhaps even a more avaricious money collector, to this day; and had she done it wrongly, no after-study would ever have enabled me to read so much as a single line of verse.
It is impossible, either in history or biography, to arrange what one wants to insist upon wholly by time, or wholly by rational connection. You must observe that the visit to England, of which I am now going to speak, interrupts, with a brilliant display of pyrotechnic light, the steady burning of the stars above Scott’s childhood. From the teaching of his aunt, before he could read, I should like, for several reasons, to go on at once to the teaching of his mother, after he could read; but I must content myself, for the moment, with adding the catalogue of mamma’s library to that of aunt Jessie’s. On the window-seat of Sandy-Knowe—only to be got at the pith of by help of auntie—we had the odd volume of Josephus, Automathes, and two or three old books not named. A year later, mamma provides for us—now scholars ourselves—Pope’s Homer, Allan Ramsay’s Evergreen, and, for Sundays, Bunyan, Gesner’s Death of Abel, and Rowe’s (Mrs.) Letters from the Other World. But we have made our grand tour in the meantime, and have some new ideas of this world in our head; of which the reader must now consider.
“I was in my fourth year when my father was advised that the Bath waters might be of some advantage to my lameness. My affectionate aunt—although such a journey promised to a person of her retired habits anything but pleasure or amusement—undertook as readily to accompany me to the wells of Bladud, as if she had expected all the delight that ever the prospect of a watering-place held out to its most impatient visitants.”
And why should she not? Does it not seem somewhat strange to you, from what you know of young, or even middle-aged, aunt Jessies of the present day, that Miss Scott should look upon the journey to Bath as so severe a piece of self-denial; and that her nephew regards her doing so as a matter of course?
How old was aunt Jessie, think you? Scott’s father, the eldest of a large family, was born in 1729,—in this year, therefore, was forty-six. If we uncharitably suppose Miss Jessie the next oldest, she would be precisely of the age of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble; and one could fancy her, it seems to me, on the occasion of this unforeseen trip to the most fashionable watering-place in England, putting up her “rose-collard neglegay with green robins, and her bloo quilted petticot,” without feeling herself in the position of a martyr led to the stake. But aunt Jessie must really have been much younger than Mrs. Tabitha, and have had the advantage of her in other particulars besides spelling. She was afterwards married, and when Lockhart saw her (1820?)—forty years or so after this—had still “the softest eye and the sweetest voice.” And from the thatched mansion of the moorland, Miss Jessie feels it so irksome and solemn a duty—does she?—to go to “the squares, the circus, and the parades, which put you” (Miss Lydia Melford) “in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and pictures; and the new buildings, such as Prince’s Row, Harlequin’s Row, Bladud’s Row, and twenty other rows besides,”—not to speak of a real pump in a pump-room, with a handle to it, and other machinery, instead of the unpumped Tweed!
Her nephew, however, judges her rightly. Aunt Jessie could give him no truer proof of faithful affection than in the serenity with which she resolves to take him to this centre of gaiety.
Whereupon, you are to note this, that the end of all right education for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place; that she should as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.
For her boy, however, there are things to be seen in Bath, and to be learned. “I acquired the rudiments of reading from an old dame near our lodgings, and I had never a more regular teacher, though I think I did not attend her more than a quarter of a year. An occasional lesson from my aunt supplied the rest.” Yes, little Walter. If we indeed have a mind to our book, that is all the teaching we want; we shall perhaps get through a volume or two in time.
“The circumstances I recollect of my residence in Bath are but trifling; yet I never recall them without a feeling of pleasure. The beauties of the Parade (which of them I know not), with the river Avon winding around it, and the lowing of the cattle from the opposite hills, are warm in my recollection, and are only rivalled by the splendours of a toy-shop somewhere near the Orange Grove. I had acquired, I know not by what means, a kind of superstitious terror for statuary of all kinds. No ancient Iconoclast or modern Calvinist could have looked on the outside of the Abbey Church (if I mistake not, the principal church at Bath is so called,) with more horror than the image of Jacob’s Ladder, with all its angels, presented to my infant eye. My uncle[9] effectually combated my terrors, and formally introduced me to a statue of Neptune, which perhaps still keeps guard at the side of the Avon, where a pleasure-boat crosses to Spring Gardens.”
“A sweet retreat”—Spring Gardens (again I quote Miss Lydia)—“laid out in walks, and ponds, and parterres of flowers, and hard by the Pamprom is a coffee-house for the ladies, but my aunt says young girls are not admitted, inasmuch as the conversation turns upon politics, scandal, philosophy, and other subjects above our capacity.” Is aunt Janet old enough and clever enough for the company, I wonder? And Walter—what toys did he mostly covet in the Orange Grove?
The passage about the effect of sculpture upon him is intensely interesting to me, partly as an indication of the state of his own nascent imagination, partly as illustrative of the power of religious sculpture, meant to terrify, on the minds of peasant children of high faculty. But I cannot dwell on this point here: I must get on to his first sight of a play. The third Fors—still favourable to him—appoints it to be “As you like it.”
A never-to-be-forgotten delight, influencing him in his whole nature thenceforward. It is uncle Robert’s doing this, aunt Jessie having been probably doubtful on the matter, but irresistibly coaxed. Uncle Robert has much to answer for! How much, I can’t tell you to-day; nor for a while now, for I have other matters on hand in the next Fors or two—Glacier theory, and on the road to it I must not let you forget the broom-market between Berne and Thun; and I’ve got to finish my notes on Friedrich and his father, who take more noticing than I expected; besides that I’ve Friedrich II. of Germany to give some account of; and all my Oxford work besides. I can only again and again beg the many valued correspondents whose letters I must abruptly answer, to remember that not one word on any of these subjects can be set down without care; and to consider what the length of a day is, under existing solar arrangements.
Meantime, here is a point for you to think of. The boy interrupts the first scene of the play by crying aloud, “An’t they brothers?”—(the third Fors had appointed for him that one day he should refuse to speak to his own;)—and long remembers the astonishment with which he “looked upon the apathy of the elder part of our company, who, having the means, did not spend every evening at the theatre.”