Only an old house-keeper was in charge, who had fallen into that dreadful parrot-like way of telling visitors what things were best worth seeing—which frets one terribly. What should you or I care (fresh from Guy Mannering or Kenilworth) whether a bit of carving came from Jedburgh or Kelso? or about the jets in the chandelier, or the way in which a Russian Grand Duke wrote his name in the visitors’ book?
But when we catch sight of the desk at which the master wrote, or of the chair in which he sat, and of his shoes and coat and cane—looking as if they might have been worn yesterday—these seem to bring us nearer to the man who has written so much to cheer and to charm the world. There was, too, a little box in the corridor, simple and iron-bound, with the line written below it, “Post will close at two.” It was as if we had heard the master of the house say it. Perhaps the notice was in his handwriting (he had been active there in 1831-2—just thirteen years before)—perhaps not; but—somehow—more than the library, or the portrait bust, or the chatter of the well-meaning house-keeper, it brought back the halting old gentleman in his shooting-coat, and with ivory-headed cane—hobbling with a vigorous step along the corridor, to post in that iron-bound box a packet—maybe a chapter of Woodstock.
I have spoken of the vacant house—family gone: The young Sir Walter Scott, of the British army, and heir to the estate—was at that date (1845) absent in the Indies; and only two years thereafter died at sea on his voyage home. Charles Scott, the only brother of the younger Sir Walter, died in 1841.[22] Miss Anne Scott, the only unmarried daughter of the author of Waverley, died—worn-out with tenderest care of mother and father, and broken-hearted—in 1833. Her only sister, Mrs. (Sophia Scott) Lockhart, died in 1837. Her oldest son—John Hugh, familiarly known as “Hugh Little John”—the crippled boy, for whom had been written the Tales of a Grandfather, and the darling of the two households upon Tweed-side—died in 1831. I cannot forbear quoting here a charming little memorial of him, which, within the present year, has appeared in Mr. Lang’s Life of Lockhart.
“A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where Lockhart read the manuscript of the Fortunes of Nigel, fancy may see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he called the Tweed. While children study the Tales of a Grandfather, he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”—P. 75, vol. ii.
A younger son of Lockhart, Walter Scott by name, became, at the death of the younger Walter Scott, inheritor of all equities in the landed estate upon Tweed-side, and the proper Laird of Abbotsford. His story is a short and a sad one; he was utterly unworthy, and died almost unbefriended at Versailles in January, 1853.
His father, J. G. Lockhart, acknowledging a picture of this son, under date of 1843, in a letter addressed to his daughter Charlotte—(later Mrs. Hope-Scott,[23] and mother of the present proprietress of Abbotsford), writes with a grief he could not cover:—
“I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”
I have not spoken—because there seemed no need to speak—of the way in which those marvellous romantic fictions of Sir Walter came pouring from the pen, under a cloud of mystery, and of how the great burden of his business embarrassments—due largely to the recklessness of his jolly, easy-going friends, the Ballantynes—overwhelmed him at last. Indeed, in all I have ventured to say of Scott, I have a feeling of its impertinence—as if I were telling you about your next-door neighbor: we all know that swift, brilliant, clouded career so well! But are those novels of his to live, and to delight coming generations, as they have the past? I do not know what the very latest critics may have to say; but, for my own part, I have strong belief that a century or two more will be sure to pass over before people of discernment, and large humanities, and of literary appreciation, will cease to read and to enjoy such stories as that of the Talisman of Kenilworth and of Old Mortality. I know ’tis objected, and with much reason, that he wrote hastily, carelessly—that his stories are in fact (what Carlyle called them) extemporaneous stories. Yet, if they had been written under other conditions, could we have counted upon the heat and the glow which gives them illumination?
No, no—we do not go to him for word-craft; men of shorter imaginative range, and whose judgments wait on conventional rule, must guide us in such direction, and pose as our modellers of style. Goldsmith and Swift both may train in that company. But this master we are now considering wrote so swiftly and dashed so strongly into the current of what he had to say, that he was indifferent to methods and words, except what went to engage the reader and keep him always cognizant of his purpose. But do you say that this is the best aim of all writing? Most surely it is wise for a writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words.