Secondly, the soldier’s life, passing gradually, not in cowardice or under foreign conquest, but by his own increasing kindness and sense, into that of the shepherd; thus, without humiliation, leaving the war-wounded past to be recalled for its sorrow and its fame.
Thirdly, the extreme sadness of that past itself: giving pathos and awe to all the imagery and power of Nature.
Fourthly, (this a merely physical cause, yet a very notable one,) the beauty of the sound of Scottish streams.
I know no other waters to be compared with them;—such streams can only exist under very subtle concurrence of rock and climate. There must be much soft rain, not (habitually) tearing the hills down with floods; and the rocks must break irregularly and jaggedly. Our English Yorkshire shales and limestones merely form—carpenter-like—tables and shelves for the rivers to drip and leap from; while the Cumberland and Welsh rocks break too boldly, and lose the multiplied chords of musical sound. Farther, the loosely-breaking rock must contain hard pebbles, to give the level shore of white shingle, through which the brown water may stray wide, in rippling threads. The fords even of English rivers have given the names to half our prettiest towns and villages;—(the difference between ford and bridge curiously—if one may let one’s fancy loose for a moment—characterizing the difference between the baptism of literature, and the edification of mathematics, in our two great universities);—but the pure crystal of the Scottish pebbles,[12] giving the stream its gradations of amber to the edge, and the sound as of “ravishing division to the lute,” make the Scottish fords the happiest pieces of all one’s day walk. “The farmhouse itself was small and poor, with a common kailyard on one flank, and a staring barn of the doctor’s (‘Douglas’) erection on the other; while in front appeared a filthy pond, covered with ducks and duckweed,[13] from which the whole tenement had derived the unharmonious designation of ‘Clarty Hole.’ But the Tweed was everything to him: a beautiful river, flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless where, here and there, it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by the birches and alders which had survived the statelier growth of the primitive forest; and the first hour that he took possession he claimed for his farm the name of the adjoining ford.”[14] With the murmur, whisper, and low fall of these streamlets, unmatched for mystery and sweetness, we must remember also the variable, but seldom wild, thrilling of the wind among the recesses of the glens; and, not least, the need of relief from the monotony of occupations involving some rhythmic measure of the beat of foot or hand, during the long evenings at the hearth-side.
In the rude lines describing such passing of hours quoted by Scott in his introduction to the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’[15] you find the grandmother spinning, with her stool next the hearth,—“for she was old, and saw right dimly” (fire-light, observe, all that was needed even then;) “she spins to make a web of good Scots linen,” (can you show such now, from your Glasgow mills?) The father is pulling hemp (or beating it). The only really beautiful piece of song which I heard at Verona, during several months’ stay there in 1869, was the low chant of girls unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm, in the cottages among the olive-clad hills on the north of the city. Never any in the streets of it;—there, only insane shrieks of Republican populace, or senseless dance-music, played by operatic-military bands.
And one of the most curious points connected with the study of Border-life is this connection of its power of song either with its industry or human love, but never with the religious passion of its “Independent” mind. The definite subject of the piper or minstrel being always war or love, (peasant love as much honoured as the proudest,) his feeling is steadily antagonistic to Puritanism; and the discordance of Scottish modern psalmody is as unexampled among civilized nations as the sweetness of their ballads—shepherds’ or ploughmen’s (the plough and pulpit coming into fatalest opposition in Ayrshire); so that Wandering Willie must, as a matter of course, head the troop of Redgauntlet’s riotous fishermen with “Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife.” And see Wandering Willie’s own description of his gudesire: “A rambling, rattling chiel he had been, in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes;—he was famous at ‘Hoopers and Girders;’ a’ Cumberland could not touch him at ‘Jockie Lattin;’ and he had the finest finger for the back-lilt between Berwick and Carlisle;—the like o’ Steenie was na the sort they made Whigs o’.” And yet, to this Puritan element, Scott owed quite one of the most noble conditions of his mental life.
But it is of no use trying to get on to his aunt Janet in this letter, for there is yet one thing I have to explain to you before I can leave you to meditate, to purpose, over that sorrowful piece of Scott’s diary with which it began.
If you had before any thoughtful acquaintance with his general character, or with his writings, but had not studied this close of his life, you cannot but have read with surprise, in the piece of the diary I quoted, the recurring sentences showing the deep wounds of his pride. Your impression of him was, if thoughtfully received, that of a man modest and self-forgetful, even to error. Yet, very evidently, the bitterest pain under his fallen fortune is felt by his pride.
Do you fancy the feeling is only by chance so strongly expressed in that passage?
It is dated 18th December. Now read this:—