Bound up, for example, with the proofs furnished by the Diary of Scott’s prodigious literary industry, there is plenty of minute information as to his habits of composition and his rate of composition. I do not like that word “composition” in any such application, thinking it a miserable word for the description of the process by which a great writer marshals the contents of his mind and commits them to paper; but the word is current, and may serve for the nonce. Well, Scott’s rate of composition was about the fastest known in the history of literature. Of all his predecessors in the literary history of the British Islands, Shakespeare seems to have been the likest to him in this particular of fluent facility and swiftness of production. “His mind and hand went together,” is the well-known report concerning Shakespeare by his literary executors and editors: “his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” One has an impression, however, that Shakespeare, with all his facility when he had the pen in his hand, had it less constantly in his hand, was less “eident” in the use of it (as our good northern phrase goes), than Scott,—whether because he had less actual need to be “eident,” or because verse, which was Shakespeare’s main element, is intrinsically more difficult, takes more out of a man in a given time, and so is less favourable to “eidency,” than the prose element in which, latterly, Scott worked all but exclusively. At all events, “eidency” and “facility” taken together, the result, in the mere matter of quantity, was larger from Scott’s industry than from Shakespeare’s. But it is with the “facility” that we are now concerned, and with the proofs of this “facility” which are furnished by the Journal in particular. The mere look of the handwriting is one of these,—that rapid currente calamo look, without hesitation, and with hardly an erasure, stoppage to point, or any such thing, and with the words almost running into each other in their hurry, which is familiar to all who have seen facsimile reproductions of any portions of the copy of Scott’s novels, when they were written with his own hand, and not dictated. That, however, is a characteristic common to all his writings; and the specific interest of the Diary in this connection is that it gives us definite information as to the amount of writing per day which Scott usually got through in his currente calamo style. In entry after entry there is note of the number of pages he had prescribed to himself as a sufficient day’s “task” or “darg,” with growls when for any reason he had fallen short of it, and smiles of satisfaction when he had exceeded it; and from one entry we ascertain that his maximum per day when he was in good vein was eight pages of his own close manuscript, making forty pages of the usual type in which his copy was set up by the printers. One can compute the difference between that rate and any other rate of which one may happen to have knowledge or experience; but there is no need to conclude that Scott’s rate is to be passionately desired or universally aimed at, or that, because it suited Scott, it would suit others. On the contrary, one sees some disadvantages, even in Scott’s own case, counterbalancing the advantages of such extreme rapidity. He was aware of the fact himself; and he once quotes, with some approbation, an admirable maxim of Chaucer on the subject:—
“There n’ is no werkman, whatsoever he be,
That may both werken well and hastily.”
That Scott was an exception,—that he was, like Shakespeare, one of those workmen who could work both well and hastily,—was owing doubtless to the fact that, in this also resembling Shakespeare, he brought always to the act of writing a mind already full of matter, and of the very kinds of matter required for his occasions. One has but to recollect the extraordinary range and variety of his readings from his earliest youth, the extraordinary range and variety also of his observations of men and manners, and the extraordinary retentiveness of his memory, to see that never since he had begun authorship could he have had to spin, as so many have to do, the threads of his ideas or imaginations out of a vacuum. At the same time, and this notwithstanding, there is something more to be said, when the comparison is between Scott as an exceptionally rapid worker and Shakespeare as the same. Scott had a standard of the kind of matter that would answer for the purposes of his literary productions; and, though a very good standard, it was lower than Shakespeare’s standard for his writings. When Shakespeare was in the act of writing, or was meditating his themes by himself in the solitude of his chamber, or in his walks over the fields, before he proceeded to the act of writing, we see his mind rolling within itself, like a great sea-wash that would rush through all the deeps and caverns, and search through all the intricacies, of its prior structure and acquisitions,—so ruled and commissioned, however, that what the reflux should fetch back for use should not be any wreckage whatsoever that might be commonly relevant and interesting, but only things of gleaming worth and rarity, presentable indeed to all, but appreciable in full only by kings and sages. Hear, on the other hand, in Scott’s own words, the definition of what satisfied him in his dealings with the public. “I am sensible,” he wrote, “that, if there be anything good about my poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition.” That Scott was grossly unfair to himself in this under-estimate will be the verdict now of universal opinion; and I shall have to touch again upon that point presently. Meanwhile there is one other difference to be noted between the two men in respect of that very circumstance of their marked similarity in one characteristic which has led us to view them together. Shakespeare’s boundless ease and fluency in writing did not prevent perfection in his literary execution. His grammar, with all its impetuosity and lightness of spring, is logical and accurate to the utmost demands of the most fastidious English scholarship; and, though he would have repudiated with scorn the name “stylist,” invented of late as a title of literary honour by some of our critics, and it would be profane to think of him under that execrable and disastrous appellation, he wrote always with the sure cunning of a disciplined artist in verbal expression,—an artist so highly self-disciplined that his art in such matters had become an instinct. Scott’s habitual style, on the other hand,—his style when he is not strongly moved either by vehement feeling or by high poetic conception,—is a kind of homely and comfortable slipshod, neglectful of any rule of extreme accuracy, and careless even of the most obvious grammatical solecisms. It is not exactly with reference to this difference between himself and Shakespeare that there occurs in one passage in his Diary a protest against being compared with Shakespeare at all. But the protest is worth quoting. “Like Shakespeare!” he exclaims, noticing the already formed habit of this perilous comparison among his most ardent admirers in his own lifetime,—“like Shakespeare! Not fit to tie his brogues!” It was the superlative of compliment on Scott’s side; but its very wording may be construed into a certain significance in connection with that point of dissimilarity between the two men to which I have just adverted. Shakespeare never wore “brogues.” In our present metaphorical sense, I mean; in the literal sense, I would not be sure but he may have found such articles convenient quite as often as Scott did. There were muddy roads about Stratford-on-Avon as well as about Abbotsford.
It would be wrong not to mention, however briefly, the confirmation furnished by the Journal of all our previous impressions of Scott’s high excellence among his fellow-men, not only in the general virtues of integrity, honour, courage, and persevering industry, but also in all those virtues which constitute what we call in a more particular sense goodness. “Great and good” is one of our common alliterative phrases; and it is a phrase which we seem to require when we would characterise the kind of human being that is entitled to supreme admiration. We feel that either adjective by itself would be inadequate in such a case, but that the doubling suffices. Another of our alliterative phrases, nearly the same in meaning at root, is “head and heart.” Only when there is a conjunction in a human being of what we call “heart” with what we call “intellect” are we quite satisfied even in cases of ordinary experience; and only when there is the conjunction of “great heart” with “great intellect” do we bow down with absolute veneration before this man or that man of historical celebrity. Common and simple though this word “heart” is, there is a world of unused applicability in it yet in many directions. In the criticism of literature, for example, it supplies a test that would make havoc with some high reputations. There have been, and are, writers of the most indubitable ability, and of every variety of ability, in whose writings, if you search them through and through, though you may find instruction in abundance, novelties of thought in abundance, and amusement in abundance, you will find very little of real “heart.” There is no such disappointment when you turn to Scott. Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others when he could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,—these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of his writings, and that receive, though they hardly need, additional and more intimate illustration in his Journal. Positively, when I contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how free he was all through his life from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of excellence,—for, born though he was in an old Scottish age of roughish habits and not over-squeamish speech, and carrying though he did the strong Scottish build of that age, and somewhat of its unabashed joviality, to the very last, his life was exemplary throughout in most particulars of personal conduct,—positively, I say, with all this in my mind, I can express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by declaring him to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.
Of the interest of the miscellaneous contents of the book, as including individual incidents in Scott’s life, sketches of the physiognomies and characters of his Edinburgh contemporaries and London contemporaries, descriptions of scenes and places, curious Scottish and other anecdotes, literary criticisms, and expressions of Scott’s opinions on public questions and on men and things in general, no adequate idea can be formed except from itself. As to Scott’s opinions on all the various questions, public or private, on which he had occasion to make up his mind and express what he felt, we may venture on one general remark. They are shrewd opinions, and often or generally just,—the judgments of a man of strong natural sagacity, and mature business-experience, adhering in the main to use and wont, but ready for an independent consideration of exigencies as they arose, and for any clear and safe improvement. Even in politics, though his partisanship in that department was obdurate, avowed, unflinching, and sometimes uproarious, his shrewdness in the forecast of what was possible, or his private determination in favour of what he thought just and desirable, led him sometimes,—especially where Scottish nationality was concerned, and the Thistle seemed to be insulted,—into dissent from his party, and the proclamation of opinions peculiarly his own. It is when we leave the plain ground of such practical and everyday questions, and either ascend to those higher levels, or descend to those deeper, at which the human intellect finds its powers more hardly tasked,—it is then that we observe what is usually reckoned a defect in Scott in comparison with many who have been far inferior to him in other intellectual respects. There was little in his mind of what may be called the purely noetic organ, that faculty which speculates, investigates, deals with difficult problems of science or philosophy, and seeks in every subject for ultimate principles and a resting-ground of final conclusions. He either refrained from such exercises of mind entirely, or was content with proximate and easily accessible axioms. Even in literary criticism, where he might be supposed to have been most at home, it is sagacious extempore judgments that he offers, honest expressions of his own immediate likings or dislikings, rather than suggestions or deductions from any code of reasoned principles. So in matters of higher and more solemn concern. From that simpler kind of philosophy which has been defined as a constant Meditation of Death Scott did not refrain, because no good or serious man can. There is evidence in his Journal that in his solitary hours he allowed himself often enough to lapse into this profoundest of meditations, and rolled through his mind the whole burthen of its everlasting mysteries. But the inscrutable for Scott, in this subject as in others, began at a short distance from his first cogitations or his inherited creed. “I would, if called upon, die a martyr for the Christian Religion,” he writes once in his Diary; and no one can doubt that the words were written with the most earnest sincerity. But, when we interpret them duly by the light of other passages, and of all that we know independently, it is as if we saw Scott standing upright with flushed face and clenched hands, and saying to those about him who might want to trouble him too much on so sacred a subject,—“This is the faith that has been transmitted to us from far-back generations; this is the faith in which millions of abler men than I am, or than you are, have lived and died; I hold by that faith, without seeking too curiously to define it or to discuss its several tenets; and, if you come too near me, to pester me with your doubts and questionings, and new inquiries and speculations, and all the rest of your clever nineteenth-century metaphysics, I warn you that the soul of all my fathers will rise in me, and I shall become dangerous.” In plainer words, on this subject, as on others, it was in Scott’s constitution to rest in that kind of wisdom which declines thinking beyond a certain distance.
Here, again, and in a new connection, we come round to Shakespeare. In him, no one needs to be reminded, the noetic faculty existed in dimensions absolutely enormous, working wonderfully in conjunction with his equally enormous faculty of imagination, and yet with the incessant alertness, the universal aggressiveness, and the self-enjoying mobility, of a separate mental organ. Hence those glances from heaven to earth and to the underworld which earth conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight into the roots of all things, those lightning gleams of speculation to its last extreme, that wealth of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling and double-distilling the essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays, those hints and reaches towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature and of human life, which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and will make them henceforth, a perennial amazement. Well, after what has just been said of Scott, are we bound, on this account, to give up the customary juxtaposition of the two men? Hardly so, I think; for there is a consideration of some importance yet in reserve. I will introduce it by a little anecdote taken from the Journal itself.
People are still alive who have had personal acquaintance with Miss Stirling Graham,—the lady who died as recently as 1877 at the venerable age of ninety-five years, and who, some fifty or sixty years before that, was famous in Edinburgh society for what were called her mystifications. These consisted in her power of assuming an imaginary character (generally that of an old Scottish lady), dressing up in that character, appearing so dressed up unexpectedly in any large company in a drawing-room, or even in the private study of some eminent lawyer or judge, and carrying on a long rigmarole conversation in the assumed character with such bewildering effect that her auditor or auditors were completely deceived, and supposed the garrulous intruder to be some crazy eccentric from a country-house or some escaped madwoman. It was on the 7th of March 1828 that Sir Walter Scott witnessed, in the house of Lord Gillies, after dinner, one of those “mystifications” of Miss Stirling Graham; and he describes it in his Journal thus:—“Miss Stirling Græme, a lady of the Duntroon family, from whom Clavers was descended, looks like thirty years old, and has a face of the Scottish cast, with a good expression in point of good sense and good-humour. Her conversation, so far as I have had the advantage of hearing it, is shrewd and sensible, but noways brilliant. She dined with us, went off as if to the play, and returned in the character of an old Scottish lady. Her dress and behaviour were admirable, and her conversation unique. I was in the secret, of course, and did my best to keep up the ball; but she cut me out of all feather. The prosing account which she gave of her son, the antiquary, who found an auld wig in a slate-quarry, was extremely ludicrous; and she puzzled the Professor of Agriculture with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the parks around her old mansion-house. No person to whom the secret was not entrusted had the least guess of an imposture, except one shrewd young lady present, who observed the hand narrowly, and saw that it was plumper than the age of the lady seemed to warrant.” From a note appended to this entry by Mr. Douglas we learn what Sir Walter said to Miss Stirling Graham on this occasion, by way of complimenting her on her performance after it was over. “Awa’, awa’!” he said; “the Deil’s ower grit wi’ you.” There was, he saw, something supernatural in her when she was in the mood and attitude of her one most congenial function. All the gifts that were latent in the shrewd and sensible-looking, but noways brilliant lady, flashed out upon others, and were revealed even to herself, in the act of her personations.
With the lesson in our minds which this little story supplies, we may return to the matter of Scott’s reputed deficiency in the speculative or purely noetic faculty:—Noetic faculty! Noetic fiddlestick! This faculty, with a score of others perhaps for which our meagre science of mind has no names, you will find in Scott too, if you know how to look for them. When and where would you have looked for the noetic faculty in Nelson? Not, certainly, as he was to be seen in common life, a little man of slouching gait, with his empty right arm-sleeve pinned to his breast, and gravely propounding as an unanswerable argument in his own experience for the immateriality of the soul the fact that, though there was now an interval of half a yard from the stump of his lost arm and the place where his fingers had been, he could still sometimes feel twitches of rheumatism in those merely spectral finger-tips. No! but see him on his own great wooden three-decker, as he was taking her into action between the enemy’s lines, when the battle-roar and the battle-flashes had brought the electric shiver through his veins, and he stood among his sailors transmuted into the real Nelson, seamanship incarnate and a fighting demigod! So, with the necessary difference for the purpose now in view, in the case of Scott. His various faculties of intellect were involved inextricably somehow in that imaginative faculty which he did possess, and also in enormous degree, in common with Shakespeare. When Scott was engaged on any of his greater works,—a Lay of the Last Minstrel, a Marmion, a Lady of the Lake, a Waverley, a Guy Mannering, an Antiquary, an Old Mortality, a Heart of Midlothian, an Ivanhoe, or a Redgauntlet,—when he was so engaged, and when the poetic phrenzy had seized him strongly,—then what happened? Why, then that imaginative faculty which seemed to be the whole of him, or the best of him, revealed itself somehow as not a single faculty, but a complex composition of various faculties, some of them usually dormant. This it did by visibly splitting itself, resolving itself, into the multiplicity of which it was composed; and then the plain everyday man of the tall upright head, sagacious face, and shaggy eyebrows, was transmuted, even to his own surprise, into a wizard that could range and speculate,—range and speculate incalculably. It was, I say, as if then there were loosened within him, out of his one supposed faculty of phantasy, a simultaneous leash of other faculties, a noetic faculty included, that could spring to incredible distances from his ordinary self, each pursuing its appropriate prey, finding it, seizing it, sporting with it, and coiling it back obediently to the master’s feet. In some such way, I think, must be explained the splendour of the actual achievements of Scott’s genius, the moderate dimensions of his purely reasoning energy in all ordinary circumstances notwithstanding. His reasoning energy was locked up organically, let us say, in his marvellous imagination. And so, remembering all that Scott has left us,—those imperishable tales and romances which no subsequent successes in the British literature of fiction have superseded, and by the glamour of which his own little land of brown heath and shaggy wood, formerly of small account in the world, has become a dream and fascination for all the leisurely of all the nations,—need we cease, after all, from thinking of him in juxtaposition, due interval allowed, with England’s greatest man, the whole world’s greatest man, of the literary order, or abandon the habit of speaking of Sir Walter Scott as our Scottish Shakespeare?