Scott visited London and Paris, partly in the interests of his Napoleon. In February 1827, at a dinner to William Murray, the actor, he acknowledged what could no longer be concealed, his authorship of the novels. By June 10, 1827, the “millstone” of Napoleon was off his back. He and his amanuensis had been used to work from six in the morning to six in the evening, without interruption except for meals. No doubt there might have been better historians of the world’s greatest genius, but who else would have worked a twelve hours’ day—and all for the sake of duty and honour? Lockhart computes that twelve months were occupied in the writing. Between the end of 1825 and the June of 1827, Scott had written off £28,000 of his debts. To wipe them out, not to produce an impeccable biography, was his aim, it must be admitted, but we must remember that his general health was now very bad, with insomnia and severe headaches.
GOURGAUD
August 1827 brought news that General Gourgaud was indignant about Scott’s remarks on him in his Napoleon. Scott had told what he found in our State Papers: “I should have been a shameful coward if I had shunned using them.” Gourgaud had already fought Ségur, the brilliant historian of the Moscow expedition. It may be that Gourgaud’s information given to the English Government, about Napoleon in St. Helena, was a “blind,” not a betrayal: one does not suspect his loyalty. Scott rejected this excuse, as convicting Gourgaud of falsehood, “when giving evidence upon his word of honour.” Scott was ready to give him a meeting: chose his old friend, Clerk, as his second, and saw that Napoleon’s own pistols, which he possessed, were in order. “I will not baulk him, Jackie! He shall not dishonour the country through my sides, I can assure him.” “The courage of bards,” according to a Gaelic proverb, is a minus quantity. Scott was not to justify the proverb: if he did not fight, he said, he would “die the death of a poisoned rat in a hole, out of mere sense of my own degradation.”
Mr. Hutton is severe on Scott for this unchristian conduct. Probably, at the same date, and in similar circumstances, Mr. Hutton would have been found “on the sod.” The ideas of the age made fighting unavoidable, and, as for the sin, Scott would rather trust his soul with God than his honour to men, as Jeanne d’Arc said, after leaping from her prison tower, that she would rather commit her soul to God than her honour to the English. Gourgaud made “a fiery rejoinder” to Scott’s plain and invincible statement of his case. Scott did not reply in any way, he did not challenge Gourgaud, who himself had chivalry enough, or good sense enough, to send no cartel. In fact one does not see how he could escape from his dilemma. He had betrayed his master, or he had been guilty of a dubious stratagem.
“THE FAIR MAID OF PERTH”
Scott thought of taking sanctuary in Holyrood precincts from, not Gourgaud, but a Hebrew creditor named Abud, who insisted on receiving at once the full measure of his due. Sir William Forbes settled the affair privately, and Scott did not need to dwell where his hero, Croftangry, abides, in The Chronicles of the Canongate, now published. The autobiographical part, in Croftangry, is as excellent as it is melancholy. The book was well received, and The Fair Maid of Perth, the last of his good novels, was begun. The pictures of burgess life, and of the distracted Court, are excellent. Poor Oliver Proudfute is a good comic character with a tragic end. The fighting Smith, with his love of poetry and romance, is a most original and sympathetic person, and Simon the Glover is as good as a father, citizen, and friend, as Sir Patrick Charteris is in the quality of knightly Provost. The Fair Maid, when she deigns to be natural, is very natural indeed; the Clan fight is one of the best in fiction, and in Conachar, who “has drunk the milk of the white doe,” his foster mother, Scott expiates his extreme harshness to a ne’er-do-well brother, who had shown the white feather in the West Indies. This harshness he bitterly repented. With the terrible true story of the Duke of Rothesay’s doom, with Ramorny and Bonthron and Dwining for villains, with the studies of the good helpless Roi Fainéant, Albany, Douglas, and poor Louise, and with the scene of the chief’s funeral, The Fair Maid of Perth abounds in merits, pressed down and running over. Even Father Clement (whom Scott does not quite like), with the fanaticism that attended the Reformation from the first, and with a touch of “Jesuitry,” is well drawn, and how excellent is the Glover’s account of what he liked in the Father’s sermons, his denunciations of the rabble and the nobles, and his appreciation of the Scottish middle class—absurdly said to have been a creation of John Knox. Commerce, not religion, made the burghs and the burghers, who liked to listen to Father Clement, “proving, as it seemed to me, that the sole virtue of our commonweal, its strength, and its estimation, lay among the burgher craft of the better class, which I received as comfortable doctrine, and creditable to the town.”
Scott ends with commendations of Father Clement, but he liked the man no more than he says that Simon Glover did. As a politician, he was even unscrupulously opposed to Catholics, as being under priestly dominion no less than the Covenanters were under preachers’ dominion. He would have no imperium in imperio. But, in his novels, the old faith is spoken of so tenderly that George Borrow frequently and intemperately accuses him of betraying souls to the
Lady in Babylon bred,
Addicted to flirting and dressing in red.
He regarded our victory at Navarino as very well, but our policy as on the level of what that of the Turks would have been, had they sent a plenipotentiary to regulate our behaviour towards the Irish Catholics.
The December of 1827 saw the publication of the tiny square volumes of The Tales of a Grandfather, addressed to Lockhart’s son, “Master Hugh Littlejohn.” They had an appropriate result: the small boy dirked his brother (not seriously) with a pair of scissors, and requested Scott