Adventures in Criticism Part 7

And when Scott stops, his biographer and his commentators begin, and all with like liberal notions of s.p.a.ce and time. Nor do they deceive themselves. We take all they give, and call for more. Three years ago, and fifty-eight from the date of Scott's death, his Journal was published; and although Lockhart had drawn upon it for one of the fullest biographies in the language, the little that Lockhart had left unused was sufficient to make its publication about the most important literary event of the year 1890.

And now Mr. David Douglas, the publisher of the "Journal," gives us in two volumes a selection from the familiar letters preserved at Abbotsford. The period covered by this correspondence is from 1797, the year of Sir Walter's marriage, to 1825, when the "Journal"

begins--"covered," however, being too large a word for the first seven years, which are represented by seven letters only; it is only in 1806 that we start upon something like a consecutive story. Mr. Douglas speaks modestly of his editorial work. "I have done," he says, "little more than arrange the correspondence in chronological order, supplying where necessary a slight thread of continuity by annotation and ill.u.s.tration." It must be said that Mr. Douglas has done this exceedingly well. There is always a note where a note is wanted, and never where information would be superfluous. On the taste and judgment of his selection one who has not examined the whole ma.s.s of correspondence at Abbotsford can only speak on _a priori_ grounds. But it is unlikely that the writer of these exemplary footnotes has made many serious mistakes in compiling his text.

Man's perennial and pathetic curiosity about virtue has no more striking example than the public eagerness to be acquainted with every detail of Scott's life. For what, as a mere story, is that life?--a level narrative of many prosperous years; a sudden financial crash; and the curtain falls on the struggle of a tired and dying gentleman to save his honor. Scott was born in 1771 and died in 1832, and all that is special in his life belongs to the last six years of it. Even so the materials for the story are of the simplest--enough, perhaps, under the hand of an artist to furnish forth a tale of the length of Trollope's _The Warden_. In picturesqueness, in color, in wealth of episode and +peripeteia+, Scott's career will not compare for a moment with the career of Coleridge, for instance. Yet who could endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes? De Quincey, in an essay first published the other day by Dr. j.a.pp, calls the story of the Coleridges "a perfect romance ... a romance of beauty, of intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of prosperity suddenly overcast by the waywardness of the individual."

But the "romance" has been written twice and thrice, and desperately dull reading it makes in each case. Is it then an accident that Coleridge has been unhappy in his biographers, while Lockhart succeeded once for all, and succeeded so splendidly?

It is surely no accident. Coleridge is an ill man to read about just as certainly as Scott is a good man to read about; and the secret is just that Scott had character and Coleridge had not. In writing of the man of the "graspless hand," the biographer's own hand in time grows graspless on the pen; and in reading of him our hands too grow graspless on the page. We pursue the man and come upon group after group of his friends; and each as we demand "What have you done with Coleridge?" answers "He was here just now, and we helped him forward a little way." Our best biographies are all of men and women of character--and, it may be added, of beautiful character--of Johnson, Scott, and Charlotte Bronte.

There are certain people whose biographies _ought_ to be long. Who could learn too much concerning Lamb? And concerning Scott, who will not agree with Lockhart's remark in the preface to his abridged edition of 1848:--"I should have been more willing to produce an enlarged edition; for the interest of Sir Walter's history lies, I think, peculiarly in its minute details"? You may explore here, and explore there, and still you find pure gold; for the man was gold right through.

So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it to Scott's known character and test it thereby. The result is always the same; yet the employment does not weary. In themselves the letters cannot stand, as mere writing, beside the letters of Cowper, or of Lamb. They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last day remained too modest to believe in the extent of his own genius.

The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary matters are not Scott's, but Lady Louisa Stuart's, who appreciated the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits) with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary. Scott's literary observations (with the exception of one pa.s.sage where the att.i.tude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated thus--"he asks of it that it shall arouse him from his habitual contempt of what goes on about him") are much less amusing; and his letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the answers which Joanna Baillie sent. Best of all, perhaps, is the correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warmth and reserve. This alone would justify Mr. Douglas's volumes. But, indeed, while nothing can be found now to alter men's conception of Scott, any book about him is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to the beauty of his character.

June 15, 1895. A racial disability.

Since about one-third of the number of my particular friends happen to be Scotsmen, it has always distressed and annoyed me that, with the best will in the world, I have never been able to understand on what principle that perfervid race conducts its enthusiasms. Mine is a racial disability, of course; and the converse has been noted by no less a writer than Stevenson, in the story of his journey "Across the Plains":--

"There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my part I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this dose, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen."

The loss on my side, to be sure, would be immensely the greater, were it not happily certain that I _can_ make something of Scotsmen; can, and indeed do, make friends of them.

The Cult of Burns.

All the same, this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns _conversazione_, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world--and all under it, too, when their time comes--Scotsmen are preparing after-dinner speeches about Burns. The great globe swings round out of the sun into the dark; there is always midnight somewhere; and always in this s.h.i.+fting region the eye of imagination sees orators gesticulating over Burns; companies of heated exiles with crossed arms shouting "Auld Lang Syne"; lesser groups--if haply they be lesser--reposing under tables, still in honor of Burns. And as the vast continents sweep "eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon," and as new nations, with _their_ cities and villages, their mountains and seash.o.r.es, rise up on the morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, wend or are carried out of action with the dawn.

Scott and Burns.

None but a churl would wish this enthusiasm abated. But why is it all lavished on Burns? That is what gravels the Southron. Why Burns? Why not Sir Walter? Had I the honor to be a fellow-countryman of Scott, and had I command of the racial tom-tom, it seems to me that I would tund upon it in honor of that great man until I dropped. To me, a Southron, Scott is the most imaginative, and at the same time the justest, writer of our language since Shakespeare died. To say this is not to suggest that he is comparable with Shakespeare. Scott himself, sensible as ever, wrote in his _Journal_, "The blockheads talk of my being like Shakespeare--not fit to tie his brogues." "But it is also true," said Mr. Swinburne, in his review of the _Journal_, "that if there were or could be any man whom it would not be a monstrous absurdity to compare with Shakespeare as a creator of men and inventor of circ.u.mstance, that man could be none other than Scott." Greater poems than his have been written; and, to my mind, one or two novels better than his best. But when one considers the huge ma.s.s of his work, and its quality in the ma.s.s; the vast range of his genius, and its command over that range; who shall be compared with him?

These are the reflections which occur, somewhat obviously, to the Southron. As for character, it is enough to say that Scott was one of the best men who ever walked on this planet; and that Burns was not.

But Scott was not merely good: he was winningly good: of a character so manly, temperate, courageous that men read his Life, his Journal, his Letters with a thrill, as they might read of Rorke's Drift or Chitral. How then are we to account for the undeniable fact that his countrymen, in public at any rate, wax more enthusiastic over Burns?

Is it that the _homeliness_ of Burns appeals to them as a wandering race? Is it because, in farthest exile, a line of Burns takes their hearts straight back to Scotland?--as when Luath the collie, in "The Twa Dogs," describes the cotters' New Year's Day:--

"That merry day the year begins, They bar the door on frosty winds; The nappy reeks wi' mantling ream, An' sheds a heart-inspirin' steam; The luntin' pipe an' snees.h.i.+n' mill Are handed round wi' richt guid will; The cantie auld folks crackin' crouse, The young anes rantin' through the house,-- My heart has been sae fain to see them, That I for joy hae barkit wi' them."

That is one reason, no doubt. But there is another, I suspect. With all his immense range Scott saw deeply into character; but he did not, I think, see very deeply into feeling. You may extract more of the _lacrimae rerum_ from the story of his own life than from all his published works put together. The pathos of Lammermoor is taken-for-granted pathos. If you deny this, you will not deny, at any rate, that the pathos of the last scene of _Lear_ is quite beyond his scope. Yet this is not more certainly beyond his scope than is the feeling in many a single line or stanza of Burns'. Verse after verse, line after line, rise up for quotation--

"Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird That sings beside thy mate; For sae I sat, and sae I sang, And wist na o' my fate."

Or,

"O pale, pale now, those rosy lips I aft hae kissed sae fondly!

And closed for aye the sparkling glance That dwelt on me sae kindly!

And mouldering now in silent dust The heart that lo'ed me dearly-- But still within my bosom's core Shall live my Highland Mary."

Or,

"Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met--or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted."

Scott left an enormous ma.s.s of writing behind him, and almost all of it is good. Burns left very much less, and among it a surprising amount of inferior stuff. But such pathos as the above Scott cannot touch. I can understand the man who holds that these deeps of pathos should not be probed in literature: and am not sure that I wholly disagree with him. The question certainly is discutable and worth discussing. But such pathos, at any rate, is immensely popular: and perhaps this will account for the hold which Burns retains on the affections of a race which has a right to be at least thrice as proud of Scott.

However, if Burns is honored at the feast, Scott is read by the fireside. Hardly have the rich Dryburgh and Border editions issued from the press before Messrs. Archibald Constable and Co. are bringing out their reprint of the famous 48-volume edition of the Novels; and Mr. Barrie is supposed to be meditating another, with introductory notes of his own upon each Novel. In my own opinion nothing has ever beaten, or come near to beat, the 48-volume "Waverley" of 1829; and Messrs. Constable and Co. were happily inspired when they decided to make this the basis of their new edition. They have improved upon it in two respects. The paper is lighter and better. And each novel is kept within its own covers, whereas in the old editions a volume would contain the end of one novel and beginning of another. The original ill.u.s.trations, by Wilkie, Landseer, Leslie, Stanfield, Bonington, and the rest, have been retained, in order to make the reprint complete.

But this seems to me a pity; for a number of them were bad to begin with, and will be worse than ever now, being reproduced (as I understand) from impressions of the original plates. To do without ill.u.s.trations were a counsel of perfection. But now that the novels have become historical, surely it were better to ill.u.s.trate them with authentic portraits of Scott, pictures of scenery, facsimiles of MSS., and so on, than with (_e.g._) a worn reproduction of what Mr. F.P.

Stephanoff thought that Flora Mac-Ivor looked like while playing the harp and introducing a few irregular strains which harmonized well with the distant waterfall and the soft sigh of the evening breeze in the rustling leaves of an aspen which overhung the fair harpress--especially as F.P. Stephanoff does not seem to have known the difference between an aspen and a birch.

In short, did it not contain the same ill.u.s.trations, this edition would probably excel even that of 1828. As it is, after many disappointments, we now have a cheap Waverley on what has always been the best model.

A Protest.

'SIR,--In your 'Literary Causerie' of last week ... the question is discussed why the name of Burns raises in Scotsmen such unbounded enthusiasm while that of Scott falls comparatively flat. This question has puzzled many another Englishman besides 'A.T.Q.C.' And yet the explanation is not far to seek: Burns appeals to the hearts and feelings of the ma.s.ses in a way Scott never does. 'A.T.Q.C.' admits this, and gives quotations in support. These quotations, however excellent in their way, are not those that any Scotsman would trust to in support of the above proposition. A Scotsman would at once appeal to 'Scots wha hae,' 'Auld Lang Syne,' and 'A man's a man for a' that.' The very familiarity of these quotations has bred the proverbial contempt.

Think of the soul-inspiring, 'fire-eyed fury' of 'Scots wha hae'; the glad, kind, ever fresh greeting of 'Auld Lang Syne'; the manly, st.u.r.dy independence of 'A man's a man for a' that,' and who can wonder at the ever-increasing enthusiasm for Burns' name?

Is there for honest poverty That hangs his head and a' that?

The coward slave we pa.s.s him by-- We dare be poor for a' that.'

'The rank is but the guinea stamp-- The man's the gowd for a' that.'

"Nor is it in his patriotism, independence, and conviviality alone that Burns touches every mood of a Scotsman's heart. There is an enthusiasm of humanity about Burns which you will hardly find equalled in any other author, and which most certainly does not exist in Scott.

'Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.'

'Why has man this will and power To make his fellow mourn?'

"These quotations might be multiplied were it necessary; but I think enough has been said to explain what puzzles 'A.T.Q.C.' I have an unbounded admiration of Sir W. Scott--quite as great as 'A.T.Q.C.' Indeed, I think him the greatest of all novelists; but, as a Scot, somewhat Anglicised by a residence in London of more than a quarter of a century, I unhesitatingly say that I would rather be the author of the above three lyrics of Burns'

than I would be the author of all Scott's novels. Certain I am that if immortality were my aim I should be much surer of it in the one case than the other. I cannot conceive 'Scots wha hae,'

'Auld Lang Syne,' etc., ever dying. Are there any of Scott's writings of which the same could be said? I doubt it....

--I am yours, etc., "J.B.

"London, June 18th, 1895."

The hopelessness of the difficulty is amusingly, if rather distressingly, ill.u.s.trated by this letter. Here again you have the best will in the world. Nothing could be kindlier than "J.B.'s" tone.

As a Scot he has every reason to be impatient of stupidity on the subject of Burns: yet he takes real pains to set me right. Alas! his explanations leave me more than ever at sea, more desperate than ever of understanding _what exactly it is_ in Burns that kindles this peculiar enthusiasm in Scotsmen and drives them to express it in feasting and oratory.

After casting about for some time, I suggested that Burns--though in so many respects immeasurably inferior to Scott--frequently wrote with a depth of feeling which Scott could not command. On second thoughts, this was wrongly put. Scott may have _possessed_ the feeling, together with notions of his own, on the propriety of displaying it in his public writings. Indeed, after reading some of his letters again, I am sure he did possess it. Hear, for instance, how he speaks of Dalkeith Palace, in one of his letters to Lady Louisa Stuart:--

"I am delighted my dear little half G.o.d-daughter is turning out beautiful. I was at her christening, poor soul, and took the oaths as representing I forget whom. That was in the time when Dalkeith was Dalkeith; how changed alas! I was forced there the other day by some people who wanted to see the house, and I felt as if it would have done me a great deal of good to have set my manhood aside, to get into a corner and cry like a schoolboy.

Every bit of furniture, now looking old and paltry, had some story and recollections about it, and the deserted gallery, which I have seen so happily filled, seemed waste and desolate like Moore's

'Banquet hall deserted, Whose flowers are dead, Whose odours fled, And all but I departed.'

But it avails not either sighing or moralising; to have known the good and the great, the wise and the witty, is still, on the whole, a pleasing reflection, though saddened by the thought that their voices are silent and their halls empty."

Yes, indeed, Scott possessed deep feelings, though he did not exhibit them to the public.