THE LAST YEARS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT[[8]]
After the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, a private journal of his, extending over the greater part of the last seven years of his life, and consisting of two thick vellum-bound volumes of close writing, carefully clasped and locked, came into the hands of his son-in-law Lockhart, to be used at his discretion for the biography of his great relative. Accordingly, when that biography was published in 1837, the last portion of it contained a large selection of extracts from this Diary. Naturally, however, the matter in many places being of a kind which it would have been premature then to make public, it was only a selection that could be given by Lockhart. For more than half a century, therefore, the original manuscript volumes have remained at Abbotsford, waiting for the time when it should be judged fit to make that more complete publication of their contents which Scott himself had contemplated as inevitable at some time or other. The time has now arrived; and one of the most interesting literary events of the present season is the publication, by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, of the great Sir Walter’s Journal in perfect form and with all requisite annotations.
The Journal is a record, in the first place, of indomitable manliness, and of prodigious industry. When it was begun, in November 1825, Scott was at the very height of his enormous prosperity and popularity. He had not advanced far in it, however,—had not, in fact, got through the first month of his entries in it,—when there came upon him the ominous signs of that commercial crash in which he and his fortunes were to be overwhelmed. In several entries, day after day, there are anticipations of this disaster, mixed with still struggling hopes that it might be averted; but by the middle of January 1826 all hope had ceased, and he was a ruined man. “Skene, this is the hand of a beggar,” was his salutation in his room in Castle Street, at seven o’clock in the morning of one of those cold January days, as he held out his hand to the confidential friend whom he had asked to call upon him at that early hour that they might consult over the news. All that he had possessed was swept away; and he was liable for debts, as it turned out, to the amount of about £130,000.
It is at this point that one may turn back, if one chooses, to the retrospect of that in Scott’s previous life for which, amid boundless admiration of him otherwise, strict opinion will probably always pronounce him blameworthy. What but his worldly ambition, it is asked, what but his passion for money-making on such a large scale as might enable him to practise lavish social hospitalities, and to found and support a hereditary Scottish lairdship of high rank and name,—what but this had led him to be dissatisfied with his merely literary earnings, and to link the pursuits and pleasures of authorship with the activities and anxieties of a clandestine partnership in hazardous forms of commerce? From one jotting in his Diary it would appear as if, in this matter, even the ruin in which he found himself at last had not taught him real repentance. Quoting a saying of a defunct old Scottish worthy which had been reported to him in these words,—“No chance of opulence is worth the risk of a competence,”—he appends this comment: “It was not the thought of a great man, but perhaps that of a wise one.” Evidently, the ruling passion in Scott had not yet been killed; and, had the hazards of his previous life been still to run, he would have dared them all over again.
More satisfactory it is to leave that retrospective question, and to read the story which the journal tells of his unparalleled exertions to right himself with the world, and with his own sense of honour, to the last farthing of his huge responsibilities. For a while, indeed,—the new shock of his wife’s death having come upon him in the very midst of the first troubles of his ruined condition, and his ability to sustain the load of his distresses being at the same time impaired by serious ill-health and frequent and intense bodily pains,—it is as if the downfall had been complete. Gloom seems to have settled on his spirits; and, though he bears a brave face to the world, we see him, in hours when he was alone, depressed secretly by crowding recollections of his happy past in comparison with the woeful present, and sunk sometimes in mere sobbings and tears. Gradually, however, he rouses himself; and what is it that we see then? Either still at Abbotsford, when his official duties in the Court of Session will allow him to leave town (for, by a family-prearrangement, he had still a life-rent tenure of Abbotsford, and could sequester himself there, when he chose, on a greatly reduced establishment), or else in one or other of those Edinburgh residences to which he removed after his house in Castle Street had been sold,—first, lodgings in North St. David Street, then a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally a house in Shandwick Place,—we see the widowed veteran struggling on in the vast enterprise to which he had set himself of the discharge ultimately of all his debts, dashing cares aside as well as he could, and, though liable still to solitary hours of melancholy and to interrupting worries with lawyers and creditors, yet always pen in hand, and working, working, working. Extend the view over the six years from 1826 to 1831, and what a prolonged labour of Hercules! The voluminous Life of Napoleon Bonaparte; the novel of Woodstock; the double series of “The Chronicles of the Canongate,” including The Two Drovers, The Highland Widow, The Surgeons Daughter, and The Fair Maid of Perth; the separate extra novels of Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous; the quadruple series of The Tales of a Grandfather, with a collateral History of Scotland; the Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft; the completion and publication of the verse-dramas called The Doom of Devorgoil and The Ayrshire Tragedy; a collective edition of the Miscellaneous Prose Works; the commencement of the author’s magnum opus, as it was termed, in the shape of the revised and annotated reissue of the whole of the Waverley Novels: these, together with a number of more casual performances, such as the Malachi Malagrowther Letters and contributions to Reviews, formed the astonishing total of Scott’s literary achievements during those six years, in addition to the previous total at which the world had already wondered. What it is most pleasing now to observe in the progress through this dense forest of labour, as it is recorded month after month in the Diary, is the evidence there furnished of Scott’s elasticity of spirits, and of his ready resumption of his old habits of generous sociability, in exact proportion to the success of his exertions. It is as if the immense mass of his debts had stood before him as a huge black rock, and as if, on beholding portion after portion of this rock blasted away by the successive charges of dynamite, large or small, which he was able to insert into its clefts in the shape of successive deposits of new money-earnings,—now, as in the case of his Life of Napoleon, a £10,000 or so at once, and again a more moderate sum of £1000 or £2000 only,—he watched each explosion, and each fall of detached slab or block, with a gleeful “Hurrah! the whole big brute will be down at last!” And, as he thus became himself again, Abbotsford became itself again,—its old hospitalities renewed in as frank and gallant a fashion as was consistent with proper economy in the circumstances, and relays of visitors arriving, and sometimes occupying his working-time too inconsiderately, while at other times it was his happiness to scribble on uninterruptedly, through whole mornings or whole rainy days, with no other recreation than a trudge through his plantations, accompanied by his dogs, and leaning on the arm of his faithful Tom Purdie. In Edinburgh the revival of his old habits in the prospect of his retrieved fortunes was much the same. Though he had not now such accommodation for his own hospitalities there as had been afforded by his former house in Castle Street, Edinburgh society could delight in the full possession of him once more after his temporary seclusion and eclipse. At select dinner-parties, or in other evening gatherings, he was present again hardly less often than had been his previous custom,—the life of every such company still by his overflowing good humour and endless stock of anecdotes and good stories; and, through the day, as he limped along Princes Street, on his way to or from the Parliament House, all heads were turned to look at him,—a greater and more popular Sir Walter than ever, now that it was no longer a mere accepted conjecture that he was the author of the Waverley Novels, but the mask had been thrown aside and the secret had been publicly divulged. He records, by the way, in his Diary, that it was a real addition to his comfort when they presented him with a key of the Princes Street Gardens, then a private property of the Princes Street householders, so that he might walk to or from the Parliament House on soft velvet turf, amid quiet green shrubbery, and thus lessen the trouble caused by his stiffened joints and the increasing pain of his lameness. Nor was it within the circuit of Edinburgh only, or at Abbotsford only, that there was restored sunshine round his path. We hear of occasional excursions to the country seats of Scottish friends of his north of Edinburgh; and twice we follow him on leisurely posting journeys into England, for the purpose of a week or two in London again, and a round of calls and engagements in the busy whirl of London society. Once he crosses the Channel, revisits Paris, and spends some time amid the gaieties of that capital. Hardly from the entries in his Diary relating to those journeys,—so modest always are his mentions of himself,—should we learn what a pressure of admiring curiosity, rising sometimes into tumults of enthusiasm and applause, gathered about him wherever he went. Whosoever else might be present,—ambassador, statesman, peer, scion of royalty, or even (as happened several times) the great Duke of Wellington himself,—it was always to Sir Walter Scott in chief, the contemporary memoirs tell us, that the eyes of the assembly were turned. New veneration for him, by reason of the diffused knowledge of the heroic contest which he had begun and was still maintaining with adverse fortune, mingled now, it seems, with all the former feelings which his name and recollections of his writings called up; and for thousands on thousands, whether at home or abroad, he was the most interesting man in all Europe.
What need to continue this sketch farther? The rest is known, in a general way, to every one. He had reached his sixtieth year,—not absolutely victorious as yet over the whole of the mass of debt against which he had been exerting himself, but with absolute victory within sight if he should live but a few years longer,—when it became evident that no such extension of his life was to be looked for. Signs of premature old age had become manifest in the complete whitening of his hair and the worn aspect of his visage; there had been distinct premonitions of failing powers in the inferior literary quality of some of his later productions; and three paralytic or apoplectic seizures in rapid succession, the last in April 1831, finished the process of wreck. A journey to the Mediterranean was recommended; and thither he went,—conveyed first to London by land, and then, by sea-voyage in a Government frigate, to Malta. From Malta, which he reached late in November 1831, he removed, about the middle of December, to Naples; whence the proposal was that he should pass northwards through the rest of Italy, visiting Rome and other famous Italian cities. All in vain! He grew worse and worse; brain and speech lost their normal functions; his restlessness and impatience became ungovernable. The Mediterranean, Italy, Rome, blue skies and classical cities,—what are they all to me?
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.
They conveyed him back by slow stages, seeing this and that continental sight on his homeward-route, but hardly knowing what he saw. He was in London again for a week or two in June and July 1832, attended medically in a hotel in Jermyn Street. Brought thence by sea to Edinburgh, he passed a night, a day, and another night, in a hotel in St. Andrew Square, in a state of utter unconsciousness; and on the 11th of July they took him to Abbotsford. On their way thither through the old familiar scenery he began to recognise places and objects, and to mutter their names,—Gala Water, Buckholm, Torwoodlee; and, when they approached Abbotsford itself, and he caught sight of its towers, he sprang up in such a state of excitement that they could hardly hold him in the carriage. “Ha! Willie Laidlaw! O man, I have often thought of you,” were his first words, after his old friend and amanuensis Laidlaw, who was waiting in the porch, had assisted the rest in carrying him into the house, and seating him in a chair in the dining-room. The return of consciousness which this recognition signified became more and more marked, at least at intervals, in the two months and ten days through which he still lingered. He talked with those of his family who were about him, could be shifted from room to room or even wheeled in a Bath chair through parts of his grounds, and could listen to readings and seem to take an interest in them. Once he insisted on being placed at his writing-table, with paper, pens, and ink before him in the accustomed order, and wanted to be left to himself; but, when the pen had been put into his hand and his fingers refused to hold it, tears trickled down his cheeks, and he gave up the attempt. There were, as often in such cases of brain-paralysis, some days of almost frantic vehemence, when it was painful to be near him; but these were succeeded by a feeble quietude and a gradual ebbing-away of life. On the 21st of September 1832, with the ripple of the Tweed heard by those who stood round his bed, Sir Walter Scott, then only in the sixty-second year of his age, breathed his last.
In the Diary itself the narrative of those closing years of Scott’s life is broken short at the point where they were bringing him back from Italy as a dying invalid. The last few months are a total blank in the Diary; where, indeed, the entries for the later years of the included seven are scantier and more intermittent than those for the earlier. But it is not solely as an exact autobiographic record of the incidents of so many memorable years of a memorable life that the Diary is now of interest. Implicated in that main interest, and catching the attention of the reader again and again as he advances through the pages, are certain recurring particular informations as to Scott’s character and ways which possess an independent interest, and may be reverted to separately.