by John Buchan
At long last he finished Napoleon, and the book was published in nine volumes in the middle of June. He had begun it two years before, but it was virtually the work of twelve months, and it contained as much matter as any five of the novels put together. Its first two editions produced no less than £18,000 for his creditors. It was well received by the public, and for the most part neglected by the critics — which was what he had foreseen, since it was not condemnatory enough to satisfy the Tories or rhapsodical enough for the Whigs, and the pedants of history looked askance at this romancer who had raided their preserves. For critics and pedants Scott cared not at all. “I see you have got a critic in the Athenæum” he once wrote to Lockhart, “Pray don’t take the least notice of so trumpery a fellow. There is a custom among the South American Indians to choose their chief by the length of time during which he is able to sustain a temporary interment in an owl’s nest. Literary respect and eminence is won by similar powers of endurance.” As for the pedants he classed them with schoolmasters, of whom he wrote that “no schoolmaster whatsoever has existed without his having some private reserve of extreme absurdity.”
Napoleon being off the stocks, he promptly began The Tales of a Grandfather, the history of Scotland as told to Hugh Littlejohn. This was to be his own book and not the creditors’, for he considered it a parergon outside his contract, and the Trust good-naturedly agreed. Sophia and her children were at Portobello for the summer, and when vacation came he found to his delight that the sick boy was strong enough to ride with him in the Abbotsford grounds. Scott had acquired a horse known as Douce Davie on which he ambled about the countryside, a sedate beast whose one foible was that, when drinking from a burn, he was apt to lie down in the water. That autumn was enlivened by a visit of Adolphus, and by an excursion to Durham to meet the Duke of Wellington. He felt more vigour in his bones, for two events occurred to jog him out of his servitude.
[Gourgaud and Abud]
The first was the rumour of a cartel on its way from General Gourgaud, who had taken offence at some plain speaking in Napoleon. Scott rose joyfully to the occasion — to the scandal of some of his more lady-like biographers; the scribe had had too long the upper hand and here was something for the rough-rider.
It is clear to me that what is least forgiven in a man of any mark or likelihood is want of that article blackguardly called pluck. All the fine qualities of genius cannot make amends for it. We are told the genius of poets especially is irreconcilable with this species of grenadier accomplishment. If so, quel chien de génie!
He selected Will Clerk as his second, and saw that Napoleon’s pistols, which he possessed, were in order. But the challenge never arrived. Scott sent to the press a careful statement of the case, Gourgaud made a furious rejoinder, and the matter dropped.
Upon the risk of a bullet followed the risk of imprisonment for debt. Two of the Ballantyne bills, amounting to £1760, had come into the hands of a Jew broker called Abud — let the unhallowed name be remembered! — who refused to accept the arrangement of the Trust and proceeded to take out “letters of horning” against the debtor. Scott had two courses open to him; he could let himself be sequestrated, thereby preventing Abud from obtaining any preference, or he could seek refuge in a debtor’s sanctuary from Abud’s diligence. To protect his other creditors, he decided upon the latter, and made preparations for taking up his quarters in the precincts of Holyroodhouse. There was some reason to believe that Abud had acquired the bills in the course of an usurious transaction, and the Trustees moved for a bill of suspension in the Court of Session. They lost their case, but in the meantime the matter was settled by Sir William Forbes paying the claim, and ranking for the amount as an ordinary creditor — a fact which was only known after Sir William’s death. So Scott had not to pack his traps and move down the Canongate, and the young Walter, who arrived in haste from Ireland breathing slaughter against all Hebrews, had no occasion for his valour.
Gourgaud and Abud between them did Scott a world of good in rousing him from the mechanical stupor in which he wrought. He was in danger of becoming a mere writing automaton. The first series of the Chronicles of the Canongate appeared in the early winter and was not well received. In the second series, immediately begun, Scott proposed to include more short stories, but both Cadell and Ballantyne objected and he embarked instead on The Fair Maid of Perth. Meanwhile the Tales of a Grandfather were running smoothly from his pen. “This morning was damp, dripping and unpleasant; so I even made a work of necessity, and set to the Tales like a dragon. I murdered Maclellan of Bomby at the Thrieve Castle; stabbed the Black Douglas in the town of Stirling; astonished King James before Roxburgh; and stifled the Earl of Mar in his bath in the Canongate.” In Edinburgh that winter he leased the house of Jane’s mother, No. 6 Shandwick Place, and the Abbotsford footman, John Nicholson, replaced Dalgleish as his attendant. In December the Tales appeared and were more warmly received than any of the novels since Ivanhoe.
This eased his private finances, and he had also the comforting thought that he was doing well by his creditors. The Constable trustees proposed to put on the market the copyrights of the novels owned by that estate. Now it was essential that the copyrights should be in the hands of Scott’s own Trust in view of future annotated editions. At the auction they were bought by Cadell for £8500, a joint purchase on behalf of Scott and himself. Two days before the Trust had paid its first dividend — six shillings in the pound. In two years Scott had won for it £40,000, which meant that he who had made about £10,000 a year when he wrought for himself, had been earning at the rate of £20,000 a year for his creditors. He began to see light far ahead in the fog, and his Christmas reflections in the Journal have a sober contentment.
If I die in the harness, which is very likely, I shall die with honour; if I achieve my task I shall have the thanks of all concerned ... and the approbation of my own conscience ... I am now perfectly well in constitution, and though I am still in troubled waters, yet I am rowing with the tide, and less than the continuation of my exertions of 1827 may, with God’s blessing, carry me successfully through 1828, when we may gain a more open sea, if not exactly a safe port.... For all these great blessings it becomes me well to be thankful to God, who in His good time and good pleasure sends me good as well as evil.
III
[Napoleon]
If Napoleon is judged in relation to the circumstances of its composition it must appear as one of Scott’s most remarkable achievements. It was task-work, no doubt, but a prodigious feat of task-work. Most of it was written in haste, with a mind overwrought and a heart distracted by cares. The materials were not available for a full and accurate chronicle, even had Scott had the capacity and the desire to use them. It is avowedly history for the ordinary reader and not for the scholar, and in such work the qualities necessary are a just perspective of view, a well-proportioned narrative, and vigour and colour in the telling. The first the book possesses in a high degree, for it might have been written after the lapse of centuries instead of almost under the shadow of the terror which for twenty years overhung Europe. Scott is dispassionate about Napoleon; he thinks him a bad man but a very great one, and he labours to do justice to that greatness. His comments are always dignified, judicious and detached. “The term of hostility,” he wrote, “is ended when the battle has been won and the foe exists no longer.” The architecture, too, of the book is good, amazingly good considering the manner of its production. The events of the life are in due proportion, and the expository matter is skilfully interwoven. It was this sanity of outlook and clarity of exposition which attracted Goethe. “What could now be more delightful to me,” he wrote in his Kunst und Alterthum, “than leisurely and calmly to sit down and listen to the discourses of such a man, while clearly, truly, and with all the skill of a great artist he recalls to me the incidents on which through life I have meditated.”
The weakness lies in the third of the qualities I have cited. No one, I think, can read the nine
volumes in the “Miscellaneous Works” without a good deal of admiration and a good deal of boredom. The inspiration flags, as it might not have flagged had Scott kept to his first intention to write something on the scale of Southey’s Nelson; the colours grow dim, the story limps, the end is reached many times before the last page. Scott, had the chance been given him, might have written a great piece of biographical history on some topic which warmly engaged his affections; but Napoleon was not a potent enough inspiration to keep his interest at stretch over so long a period. For such a task there was required the emotion of either worship or hate. What this lack meant can be seen if we turn to Hazlitt’s Life, with which Scott’s is properly compared. Both are productions of men of genius; both are on a vast scale; neither is the work of a careful scholar. In point of manners and equipoise Scott’s is incomparably the better. Hazlitt is the perfervid Radical who is rapt into an ecstasy of adoration at Napoleon’s name and is grossly unjust to his opponents. He can write such a sentence as this of Sir John Moore’s death:—”He was buried on the ramparts and ‘left alone with his glory’ — such as it was!” But he has a creed which he holds with a passionate conviction, and a man to exemplify it who commands all his loyalties. Hence, with all its ill-breeding, false rhetoric and absurdity, it has a vitality denied to Scott’s mellower task-work.
[Tales of a Grandfather]
Very different is the case with The Tales of a Grandfather. Here Scott is writing about what he knew and liked best, the long pageant of Scottish history. Since he is writing for his darling grandson he curbs his prejudices, and he admits a little, a very little instruction to balance the heroics. “When you find anything a little too hard for you to understand at this moment,” he tells Hugh Little John in the preface, “you must consider that you will be better able to make out the sense a year or two afterwards; or perhaps you may make a great exertion and get at its meaning, just as you might contrive to reach something placed upon a high shelf by standing on your tiptoes.” The book is never written down to children, but it is all within the comprehension of a child’s mind, for the narrative is easy and natural with the sound of a living voice behind it, and every paragraph has something to catch the youthful fancy. When Scott wrote, the history of Scotland had not been attempted on scientific lines, and he often accepts traditions which later research has exposed. Nevertheless he gives us truth, the truth of spirit, and a noble impartiality. Hugh Littlejohn, like many a child since, was properly excited by it all, and set out to dirk his young brother with a pair of scissors. But he could not away with the instructive matter. His views were communicated through Mrs Hughes of Uffington: “He very much dislikes the chapter on Civilization, and it is his desire that you will never say anything more about it, for he dislikes it extremely.”
In St Ronan’s Well Scott seemed to be on the verge of acquiring a new manner and entering fields hitherto regarded as foreign to his genius. In the third work published during 1827 we are tantalized by the same hint of unsuspected gifts, flowering too late in the autumn of his days to come to fruit. The first series of The Chronicles of the Canongate, a collection of three short stories, is chiefly notable for the figure of the narrator. “The Highland Widow” is a picture of the disruption of the old Highland life after the ‘Forty-five, and, if Elspeth MacTavish is perhaps too reminiscent of Helen MacGregor, there is tragedy in her stubborn savagery and the son Hamish is drawn with sober faithfulness. In “The Two Drovers” we have a glimpse into the perverse but logical Highland ethics and an unforgettable picture of the old world of the drove-roads. There is no trace of falsetto in Robin Oig, and his tragic fate is made as inevitable as the return of the seasons. In these stories Scott brought to the study of the Highland character a new psychological insight. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” contains an admirable portrait of a country doctor, based on his old friend Dr Ebenezer Clarkson of Selkirk. The charm of the piece lies in the contrast between the homely world of Middlemas and the mysterious East, and, though Scott’s knowledge of India was wholly at second hand, he succeeds in creating a sense of the exotic, and in the scene where Hyder Ali reveals himself he achieves a stirring coup de théâtre. But we have the feeling throughout that he does not take his puppets quite seriously; they are Croftangry’s creations, and with Croftangry he is mainly concerned.
It is the narrator of the tale, and the narrator’s friends, that give the book its virtue. Scott is writing from his own shadowed retrospect. Croftangry is himself, and Mrs Bethune Baliol has much of his own mother and of his childhood’s friend, Mrs Anne Murray Keith. Here there is none of the trait-portraiture, the rejoicing comedy “humours” of the earlier novels. The figures of Croftangry’s world are seen in a cold autumnal light which has lost the riotous colours of summer. All of them — Croftangry, Mrs Bethune Baliol, Christie Steele, Fairscribe, Janet MacEvoy — are done with a sure touch and with a delicate and humorous wistfulness. Croftangry himself is a convincing figure of regret and disillusioned philosophy, and Scott never wrote anything more moving than the scenes where the returning exile finds his old friend the lawyer a helpless paralytic, and where his mother’s housekeeper shivers his palace of dreams. Here there is a new philosophy, a “Winter’s Tale” philosophy, and a new technique. He paints in finer strokes and in quieter tints, but with an economy and a certainty which recall some of the best work of Tourgeniev. The ebbing of the currents of life seems to have left him with clearer eyes.
IV
The year 1828 was for Scott a period of better health, renewed vitality and a moderate cheerfulness. He was busy now with The Fair Maid of Perth which was published in April, with its successor Anne of Geierstein, with more Tales of a Grandfather for which the public appetite was insatiable, and with his prefaces and notes for what he called his Opus Magnum, the complete reprint of the novels which Cadell’s purchase of the copyrights had made possible. There were also various magazine articles, and two sermons of irreproachable orthodoxy issued by Colburn, the fashionable London bookseller. The tale of these last is curious. He had a friend, Huntly Gordon, the son of a half-pay officer in Brussels, who had entered the ministry, found that his deafness prevented his getting a charge, and had been doing hack-work for the Ballantynes. Gordon was chronically impecunious, and, in order to clear a debt, sought and obtained Scott’s permission to publish two sermons which the latter had written for him when he was taking orders. In estimating Scott’s labours we must not forget the demands which his unfailing charity made on his time and his purse. More than half his correspondence was devoted to helping lame dogs, and in his worst days he managed to scrape together a pound or two for some of the ragged regiment of Parnassus. Most of his protégés, like Gillies, were impossible people, doomed to fail in everything they undertook, but Scott never lost patience nor wearied in his well-doing.
This year his work went smoothly on the whole. His manuscript was as neat as ever, but his handwriting had become villainously cramped; he found that it took him longer to read than to write a page, and even James Ballantyne deciphered it with difficulty. The flood of fancy, too, was liable to sudden ebbs, and there was nothing to be done but to wait till it returned. When he had begun a novel he had never known how it would end, but now he would come to a dead stop in the middle of a chapter. An extra glass of wine at dinner and a night’s sleep often brought back his inspiration. “I had thought on the subject for several days with something like the despair which seized the fair princess, commanded by her ugly stepmother to assort a whole garret full of tangled silk-threads of every kind and colour, when in comes Prince Percinet with a wand, whisks it over the miscellaneous mass, and lo! all the threads are as nicely arranged as in a seamstress’s housewife.” His preoccupation with wholesome external interests is shown by the fact that from the beginning of July till the end of the year there is no entry in the Journal. Cockburn visited him at Abbotsford in September, and found his talk as good as ever. “His simplicity and naturalness after all his fame are absolutely incre
dible.” In his evening dress he was “like any other comfortably ill-dressed gentleman,” but in the morning “with his large coarse jacket, great stick and leather cap, he was Dandy Dinmont or Dick Hattrick — a smuggler or poacher.”
That year, in the spring vacation, he made his last journey to London as a comparatively hale man. It was the saddest event of the year, for he found poor Hugh Little John sadly changed from the boy who had ridden with him the summer before in the Abbotsford woods. On his way south he visited Stratford-on-Avon, admired the view from Edgehill, and was pleased to find that the rich land in the vale of Aylesbury brought a lower rent than that which he got for some of his acres at Huntly Burn. He found Walter with his regiment at Hampton Court and Charles at the Foreign Office; and was delighted with the Lockharts’ new house in Sussex Place with its enchanting outlook over the Regent’s Park; he dined in the company of Coleridge, who delivered a harangue on the Samothracian mysteries and then attacked the unity of Homer—”Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words”; he got a road bill rectified which threatened the amenities of Abbotsford; he dined and slept at Holland House, and dined with the Duchess of Kent, where he was presented to the little Princess Victoria, whom he thought plain but pleasing, and whose name he hoped would be changed before she came to the throne. Besides Johnnie Lockhart’s health he had Terry’s affairs to distress him, for that cheerful being had become a bankrupt. “It is written,” he wrote in his Journal, “that nothing shall flourish under my shadow — the Ballantynes, Terry, Nelson, Weber, all came to distress. Nature has written on my brow: ‘Your shade shall be broad, but there shall be no protection derived from it to aught you favour.’” It is almost the only doleful entry of the year.