Next it is objected to these old favorites of ours, that they are not clever in the exhibit and explication of mental processes, and their analysis of motives is incomplete. Well, I suppose this to be true; and that he did, to a certain extent (as Carlyle used to allege grumblingly), work from the outside-in. He did live in times when men fell straightforwardly in love, without counting the palpitations of the heart; and when heroes struck honest blows without reckoning in advance upon the probable contractile power of their biceps muscles. Again, it is said that his history often lacks precision and sureness of statement. Well, the dates are certainly sometimes twisted a few years out of their proper lines and seasons; but it is certain, also, that he does give the atmosphere and the coloring of historic periods in a completer and more satisfying way than many much carefuller chroniclers, and his portraits of great historic personages are by common consent—even of the critics—more full of the life of their subjects, and of a realistic exhibit of their controlling characteristics, than those of the historians proper. Nothing can be more sure than that Scott was not a man of great critical learning; nothing is more sure than that he was frequently at fault in minor details; but who will gainsay the fact that he was among the most charming and beneficent of story-tellers?
There may be households which will rule him out as old fashioned and stumbling, and wordy, and long; but I know of one, at least, where he will hold his place, as among the most delightful of visitors—and where on winter nights he will continue to bring with him (as he has brought so many times already) the royal figure of the Queen Elizabeth—shining in her jewels, or sulking in her coquetries; and Dandie Dinmont, with his pow-wow of Pepper and Mustard; and King Jamie, with Steenie and jingling Geordie; and the patient, prudent, excellent Jeanie Deans; and the weak, old, amiable mistress of Tillietudlem; and Rebecca, and the Lady in the Green Mantle, and Dominie Sampson, and Peter Peebles, and Di Vernon, and all the rest!
Glints of Royalty.
They tell us Scott loved kings: why not? Romanticism was his nurse, from the days when he kicked up his baby heels under the shadows of Smailholme Tower, and Feudalism was his foster-parent. Always he loved banners and pageantry, and always the glitter and pomp which give their under or over tones to his pages of balladry. And if he stood in awe of titles and of rank, and felt the cockles of his heart warming in contact with these, ’twas not by reason of a vulgar tuft-hunting spirit, nor was it due to the crass toadyism which seeks reflected benefit; but it grew, I think, out of sheer mental allegiance to feudal splendors and traditions.
Whether Scott ever personally encountered the old king, George III., may be doubtful; but I recall in some of his easy, family letters (perhaps to his eldest boy Walter), most respectful and kindly allusions to the august master of the royal Windsor household—who ordered his home affairs so wisely—keeping “good hours;” while, amid the turbulences and unrest which belonged to the American and French Revolutions—succeeding each other in portentous sequence—he was waning toward that period of woful mental imbecility which beset him at last, and which clouded an earlier chapter[24] of our record. The Prince Regent—afterward George IV.—was always well disposed toward Scott; had read the Minstrel, and Marmion, with the greatest gratification (he did sometimes read), and told Lord Byron as much; even comparing the Scot with Homer—which was as near to classicism as the Prince often ran. But Byron, in his English Bards, etc., published in his earlier days, had made his little satiric dab at the Minstrel—finding a lively hope in its being the Last!
Murray, however, in the good Christian spirit which sometimes overtakes publishers, stanched these wounds, and brought the poets to bask together in the smiles of royalty. The first Baronetcy the Prince bestowed—after coming to Kingship—was that which made the author of Waverley Sir Walter; the poet had witnessed and reported the scenes at the Coronation of 1820 in London; and on the King’s gala visit to Edinboro’—when all the heights about the gray old city boomed with welcoming cannon, and all the streets and all the water-ways were a-flutter with tartans and noisy with bagpipes—it was Sir Walter who virtually marshalled the hosts, and gave chieftain-like greeting to the Prince. Scott’s management of the whole stupendous paraphernalia—the banquets, the processions, the receptions, the decorations (of all which the charming water-colors of Turner are in evidence)—gave wonderful impressions of the masterful resources and dominating tact of the man; now clinking glasses (of Glenlivet) with the mellow King (counting sixty years in that day); now humoring into quietude the jealousies of Highland chieftains; again threading Canongate at nightfall and afoot—from end to end—to observe if all welcoming bannerols and legends are in place; again welcoming to his home, in the heat of ceremonial occupation, the white-haired and trembling poet Crabbe; anon, stealing away to his Castle Street chamber for a new chapter in the Peveril of the Peak (then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury, and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine (Lord Kinnedder),[25] out by Queensferry to his burial.
It was only eight years thereafter, when this poet manager of the great Scotch jubilee—who seemed good for the work of a score of years—sailed, by royal permission (an act redeeming and glorifying royalty) upon a Government ship—seeking shores and skies which would put new vigor (if it might be) into a constitution broken by toil, and into hopes that had been blighted by blow on blow of sorrow.
Never was a royal favor more worthily bespoken; never one more vainly bestowed. ’Twas too late. No human eye—once so capable of seeing—ever opened for a first look so wearily upon the blue of the Mediterranean—upon the marvellous fringed shores of lower Italy—upon Rome, Florence, and the snowy Swiss portals of the Simplon.