The Journal of the early months of 1829 shows Scott in good spirits, pleased with solitude, when he is alone, but only if solitude does not mean lack of access to human company. In a little sportive dialogue with a Geni, or Djinn, he confesses to all his old delight in building castles in the air. “You need not repent,” says the Djinn, “most of your novels have previously been subjects for airy castles.” This means that, rapidly as the novels were written, they, or many of them, had long simmered in the author’s imagination: he had lived, he remarks, in the scenes and adventures which he describes. Among other things, he now wrote, for Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson, notes on the great Doctor’s Scottish tour. Busy as Sir Walter was, his time and work were still at the disposal of others. But some of these invaluable notes went astray in the post, and never were recovered. He wrote a short History of Scotland, for the Encyclopaedia of Thackeray’s victim, Dr. Lardner, and a review article to raise a sum of money for the ever unlucky Gillies, who visited Abbotsford in autumn, and noted one convenience “very rare,” he says, in country houses. In every room was abundance of pen, ink, and paper.
PARALYSIS
In Edinburgh, at the levee of the Commissioner to the General Assembly, Scott met Edward Irving. “I could hardly keep my eyes off him while we were at table. He put me in mind of the devil disguised as an angel of light, so ill did that horrible obliquity of vision harmonize with the dark tranquil features of his face, resembling that of our Saviour in Italian pictures, with the hair carefully arranged in the same manner.... He spoke with that kind of unction which is nearly allied to cajolerie....” In fact Scott liked Irving no more than he liked Father Clement. He had a great distrust of “enthusiasm” in religion, but Irving was not the quack whom Scott clearly suspected him of being. Other quacks, in his opinion, were the two brothers, then calling themselves “Hay Allan,” but later, “John and Charles Stuart,” sons of a son of Prince Charles by his wife. These gentlemen possessed a MS. called Vestiarium Scoticum, giving an account of the tartans of the Border as well as of the Highland clans, tartans otherwise unknown. There were two MSS., one, never seen of men, of the sixteenth century, another, still extant, of the eighteenth century. This MS. remains a mystery. I believe that neither in ink nor paper is there any trace of falsity, while the style is certainly beyond the powers of imitation possessed by the two brothers, in whose antiquarian probity Scott had no belief.
Scott’s friends were dying around him, Shortreed of the Liddesdale rambles, and Tom Purdie. Haec poena diu viventibus! His Diary flags in July, and is not reopened till May 1830. Scott read and reviewed that thrilling book, Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials. It was published by the Bannatyne Club, of which Scott was the animating spirit; for the Roxburghe Club he edited and presented the story of the Master of Sinclair, and his slaying of the Shaws of Greenock (1708). He dramatized the tale, from Pitcairn, of the Auchendrane Tragedy, the series of murders by the two Mures. There is much of spirit, fancy, and vigorous verse in The Ayrshire Tragedy, but the topic inevitably lacked dramatic interest.
It was on February 15, 1831, that the long threatened blow of paralysis fell on Sir Walter. He was alone, with a lady, examining her father’s manuscripts, when his face altered, he fell into a chair, but with the instinct of courtesy, contrived to stagger from the room and fell in the drawing-room, where his daughter Anne and Lockhart’s sister, Violet, happened to be.[8] He presently recovered speech, and, when he went abroad again, people observed no change. But he knew his own case. None the less, he toiled on at his Letters on Demonology, a work well worth reading, though marked by failing powers. That astonishing person, Professor Wilson, instantly attacked Scott, making the Shepherd in Noctes Ambrosianae speak of “Sir Walter wi’ his everlasting anecdotes, nine out o’ ten meaning naething, and the tenth itsel’ as auld as Eildon Hill.” Wilson also assailed the Letters: there was a great deal of Mr. Hyde in his composition, an element which broke out in furious attacks on old friends. Yet he never estranged Lockhart.
Scott declared that he felt no mental feebleness, and hoped that by 1835 he might clear off his debts; he had just paid £15,000 towards that end. He received a kind of proposal of marriage from a woman of rank, through her brother: he was told that he might hope! But he confided to his Journal that he did not hope to wed “a grim grenadier.” His creditors restored to him his
books, plate, furniture, and collection of works of art and curios, which he valued at £10,000. He resigned his Clerkship in November 1830, receiving a pension of £840. The change was unfortunate, as it gave him more time for overwork. Meanwhile, every letter from Ballantyne about his new novels betrayed its effect in nervous twitchings at the mouth. Cadell, to give him rest, suggested the composition of an anecdotic catalogue of his curiosities, “The Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck.” A glance at the opening of the MS., with its paralytic writing and examples of agraphia, shows how desperate was his mental and bodily condition for a short while.
Yet he was now thinking of Castle Dangerous, and he wrote a Tory pamphlet which, his advisers saw, showed ignorance of the political situation. The pamphlet was dropped, but his advisers had a struggle before they carried their point. “Sir Walter never recovered it,” says Mr. Cadell. I have no heart to speak of his political apprehensions and sufferings. What he feared was the overthrow of Society; what he endured from popular insult and even violence is too familiarly known. Certain excited and rude artisans had no more respect than Wilson for an old friend, the glory of the Border. Scott never forgot the scene, it haunted his dying hours. He acknowledged to a distinct stroke of paralysis in April 1831, and Cadell and Ballantyne remonstrated against the conclusion of Count Robert of Paris.
How amazing was the humour that supported his unconquerable courage! His letters—for example one of October 31, to Lady Louisa Stuart, on “Animal Magnetism,” show him in full force of intellect. He had an attack in November, and Laidlaw, his amanuensis for Count Robert of Paris, observed unmistakable signs of the end. He was bidden to drink water only, and to abandon writing. So he notes, in a parody of Burns:—