SIR WALTER SCOTT
The question has begun to be asked about Scott which is asked about every great man: whether he is still read or still read as he ought to be read. I have been glad to see in some statistics of popular literature that the Waverley Novels are still among the books most frequently bought at railway stations, and scarcely surpassed even by 'Pickwick,' or 'David Copperfield.' A writer, it is said, is entitled to be called a classic when his books have been read for a century after his death. The number of books which fairly satisfies that condition is remarkably small. There are certain books, of course, which we are all bound to read if we make any claim to be decently educated. A modern Englishman cannot afford to confess that he has not read Shakespeare or Milton; if he talks about philosophy, he must have dipped at least into Bacon and Hobbes and Locke; if he is a literary critic, he must know something of Spenser and Donne and Dryden and the early dramatists; but how many books are there of the seventeenth century which are still read for pleasure by other than specialists? To speak within bounds, I fancy that it would be exceedingly difficult to make out a list of one hundred English books which after publication for a century are still really familiar to the average reader. Something like ninety-nine of those have in any case lost the charm of novelty, and are read, if read at all, from some vague impression that the reader is doing a duty. It takes a very powerful voice and a very clear utterance to make a man audible to the fourth generation. If something of the mildew of time is stealing over the Waverley Novels, we must regard that as all but inevitable. Scott will have succeeded beyond any but the very greatest, perhaps even as much as the very greatest, if, in the twentieth century, now so unpleasantly near, he has a band of faithful followers, who still read because they like to read and not because they are told to read. Admitting that he must more or less undergo the universal fate, that the glory must be dimmed even though it be not quenched, we may still ask whether he will not retain as much vitality as the conditions of humanity permit: Will our posterity understand at least why he was once a luminary of the first magnitude, or wonder at their ancestors' hallucination about a mere will-o'-the-wisp? Will some of his best performances stand out like a cathedral amongst ruined hovels, or will they all sink into the dust together, and the outlines of what once charmed the world be traced only by Dryasdust and historians of literature? It is a painful task to examine such questions impartially. This probing a great reputation, and doubting whether we can come to anything solid at the bottom, is especially painful in regard to Scott. For he has, at least, this merit, that he is one of those rare natures for whom we feel not merely admiration but affection. We may cherish the fame of some writers in spite of, not on account of, many personal defects; if we satisfied ourselves that their literary reputations were founded on the sand, we might partly console ourselves with the thought that we were only depriving bad men of a title to genius. But for Scott most men feel in even stronger measure that kind of warm fraternal regard which Macaulay and Thackeray expressed for the amiable, but, perhaps, rather cold-blooded, Addison. The manliness and the sweetness of the man's nature predispose us to return the most favourable verdict in our power. And we may add that Scott is one of the last great English writers whose influence extended beyond his island, and gave a stimulus to the development of European thought. We cannot afford to surrender our faith in one to whom, whatever his permanent merits, we must trace so much that is characteristic of the mind of the nineteenth century. Whilst, finally, if we have any Scotch blood in our veins, we must be more or less than men to turn a deaf ear to the promptings of patriotism. When Shakespeare's fame decays everywhere else, the inhabitants of Stratford-on-Avon, if it still exist, should still revere their tutelary saint; and the old town of Edinburgh should tremble in its foundation when a sacrilegious hand is laid upon the glory of Scott.
Let us, however, take courage, and, with such impartiality as we may possess, endeavour to sift the wheat from the chaff. And, by way of following an able guide, let us dwell for a little on the judgment pronounced upon Scott by one whose name I would never mention without profound respect, and who has a special claim to be heard in this case. Carlyle is (I must now say was) both a man of genius and a Scotchman. His own writings show in every line that he comes of the same strong Protestant race from which Scott received his best qualities. 'The Scotch national character,' says Carlyle himself, 'originates in many circumstances. First of all, the Saxon stuff there was to work on; but next, and beyond all else except that, in the Presbyterian gospel of John Knox. It seems a good national character, and, on some sides, not so good. Let Scott thank John Knox, for he owed him much, little as he dreamed of debt in that quarter! No Scotchman of his time was more entirely Scotch than Walter Scott: the good and the not so good, which all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him.' Nothing more true; and the words would be as strikingly appropriate if for Walter Scott we substitute Thomas Carlyle. And to this source of sympathy we might add others. Who in this generation could rival Scott's talent for the picturesque, unless it be Carlyle? Who has done so much to apply the lesson which Scott, as he says, first taught us—that the 'bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies, and abstractions of men'? If Scott would in old days—I still quote his critic—have harried cattle in Tynedale or cracked crowns in Redswire, would not Carlyle have thundered from the pulpit of John Knox his own gospel, only in slightly altered phraseology—that shams should not live but die, and that men should do what work lies nearest to their hands, as in the presence of the eternities and the infinite silences?
That last parallel reminds us that if there are points of similarity, there are contrasts both wide and deep. The rugged old apostle had probably a very low opinion of moss-troopers, and Carlyle has a message to deliver to his fellow-creatures, which is not quite according to Scott. And thus we see throughout his interesting essay a kind of struggle between two opposite tendencies—a genuine liking for the man, tempered by a sense that Scott dealt rather too much in those same shams to pass muster with a stern moral censor. Nobody can touch Scott's character more finely. There is a charming little anecdote which every reader must remember: how there was a 'little Blenheim cocker' of singular sensibility and sagacity; how the said cocker would at times fall into musings like those of a Wertherean poet, and lived in perpetual fear of strangers, regarding them all as potentially dog-stealers; how the dog was, nevertheless, endowed with 'most amazing moral tact,' and specially hated the genus quack, and, above all, that of acrid-quack. 'These,' says Carlyle, 'though never so clear-starched, bland-smiling, and beneficent, he absolutely would have no trade with. Their very sugar-cake was unavailing. He said with emphasis, as clearly as barking could say it, "Acrid-quack, avaunt!"' But once when 'a tall, irregular, busy-looking man came halting by,' that wise, nervous little dog ran towards him, and began 'fawning, frisking, licking at the feet' of Sir Walter Scott. No reader of reviews could have done better, says Carlyle; and, indeed, that canine testimonial was worth having. I prefer that little anecdote even to Lockhart's account of the pig, which had a romantic affection for the author of 'Waverley.' Its relater at least perceived and loved that unaffected benevolence, which invested even Scott's bodily presence with a kind of natural aroma, perceptible, as it would appear, to very far-away cousins. But Carlyle is on his guard, and though his sympathy flows kindly enough, it is rather harshly intercepted by his sterner mood. He cannot, indeed, but warm to Scott at the end. After touching on the sad scene of Scott's closing years, at once ennobled and embittered by that last desperate struggle to clear off the burden of debt, he concludes with genuine feeling. 'It can be said of Scott, when he departed he took a man's life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity, and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it, ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. We shall never forget it—we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen; take our proud and sad farewell.'
If even the Waverley Novels should lose their interest, the last journals of Scott, recently published by a judicious editor, can never lose their interest as the record of one of the noblest struggles ever carried on by a great man to redeem a lamentable error. It is a book to do one good.
And now it is time to turn to the failings which, in Carlyle's opinion, mar this pride of all Scotchmen, and make his permanent reputation doubtful. The faults upon which he dwells are, of course, those which are more or less acknowledged by all sound critics. Scott, says Carlyle, had no great gospel to deliver; he had nothing of the martyr about him; he slew no monsters and stirred no deep emotions. He did not believe in anything, and did not even disbelieve in anything: he was content to take the world as it came—the false and the true mixed indistinguishably together. One Ram-dass, a Hindoo, 'who set up for god-head lately,' being asked what he meant to do with the sins of mankind, replied that 'he had fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world.' Ram-dass had 'some spice of sense in him.' Now, of fire of that kind we can detect few sparks in Scott. He was a thoroughly healthy, sound, vigorous Scotchman, with an eye for the main chance, but not much of an eye for the eternities. And that unfortunate commercial element, which caused the misery of his life, was equally mischievous to his work. He cared for no results of his working but such as could be seen by the eye, and in one sense or other, 'handled, looked at, and buttoned into the breeches' pocket.' He regarded literature rather as a trade than an art; and literature, unless it is a very poor affair, should have higher aims than that of 'harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men.' Scott would not afford the time or the trouble to go to the root of the matter, and is content to amuse us with mere contrasts of costume, which will lose their interest when the swallow-tail is as obsolete as the buff-coat. And then he fell into the modern sin of extempore writing, and deluged the world with the first hasty overflowings of his mind, instead of straining and refining it till he could bestow the pure essence upon us. In short, his career is summed up in the phrase that it was 'writing impromptu novels to buy farms with'—a melancholy end, truly, for a man of rare genius. Nothing is sadder than to hear of such a man 'writing himself out;' and it is pitiable indeed that Scott should be the example of that fate which rises most naturally to our minds. 'Something very perfect in its kind,' says Carlyle, 'might have come from Scott, nor was it a low kind—nay, who knows how high, with studious self-concentration, he might have gone: what wealth nature implanted in him, which his circumstances, most unkind while seeming to be kindest, had never impelled him to unfold?'
There is undoubtedly some truth in the severer criticisms to which some more kindly sentences are a pleasant relief; but there is something too which most persons will be apt to consider as rather harsher than necessary. Is not the moral preacher intruding a little too much on the province of the literary critic? In fact we fancy that, in the midst of these energetic remarks, Carlyle is conscious of certain half-expressed doubts. The name of Shakespeare occurs several times in the course of his remarks, and suggests to us that we can hardly condemn Scott whilst acquitting the greatest name in our literature. Scott, it seems, wrote for money; he coined his brains into cash to buy farms. Did not Shakespeare do pretty much the same? As Carlyle himself puts it, 'beyond drawing audiences to the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare contemplated no result in those plays of his.' Shakespeare, as Pope puts it,
Whom you and every playhouse bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will,
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.