by John Buchan
It is the same with other forms of ugliness. He loves freaks and oddities but he has a clean palate and avoids the rancid. He reverences humanity too deeply to emphasize the side which humanity shares with the animal creation. He has no curiosity about sexual aberrations —
the simple vice of brutes
That own no lust because they have no law.
His interest, like Shakespeare’s, is in the “innocence of love”; but he had not, like Shakespeare, been down into the dark abysses, and he has no trace of that repulsion towards the mere fact of sex which we find in Lear, and Timon, and Hamlet, and Measure for Measure. It is not prudishness, as Balzac thought, but moral sanity and a due sense of proportion. There is a wonderful little scene in The Antiquary, when Mrs Mailsetter and her gossips meet, and Mrs Heukbane recalls the gallantries of her youth: —
Ah! lasses, an ye had kend his brother as I did — mony a time he wad slip in to see me wi’ a brace o’ wild-deukes in his pouch, when my first gudeman was awa at the Falkirk tryst — weel, weel — we’se no speak n’ that e’enow.
In that scene you have the essence of all the sordid amours of the small Scots village, and Scott just notes their existence, and then goes his way to better things. He was not inclined to make the kitchen-midden the family altar.
As compared with many of his successors, Scott develops his characters in a limited space. He has no such elaborate studies in personality, where the whole is built up cell by cell like a honeycomb, as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, or Tolstoy’s Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and Levin, Anna Karenina and Natasha. He works with loins girt inside a narrower field. But he led the way in showing his figures in relation to their environment. No novelist has ever painted in more convincingly a social and historical background, for he anticipated Stendhal and Balzac in regarding each character as largely the product of certain material conditions. His Dinmonts and Nicol Jarvies and David Deanses and Croftangrys have as logical a relation to the world from which they spring as that marvellous company of Balzac’s — Goriot, and Poiret, and Grandet, and Rubempré, Philippe Brideau and cousin Bette. He has not the gift of tracing every strand in the social web, which makes Balzac in some ways the greatest of novelists, but he has the same close consciousness of the interlocking of human lives. It is this constant sense of background which enables him to draw to perfection the ordinary man — people like Tolstoy’s Vronsky, who in line and tint have a strict fidelity to life. Compared to these figures most of the characters in Thackeray and Dickens seem bookish. The background, too, which he draws, is as large as life itself, for it is limited to no one social grade, no enclave of space or time; almost alone among English novelists he is at his ease both in the city and in the wilds.
IV
[His vision of life]
The novel at its greatest is subject to the tests by which all imaginative creation is ultimately tried. It must present life in the round, in the deeps, and on the heights. It must possess that “stellar and undiminishable something” which can
tease us out of thought,
As doth eternity.
It must have a high seriousness and a profound vision of life. If this is wanting in Scott, then he must be excluded from the inner circle of greatness and relegated to the populous borderland of mere skilful entertainers. Wordsworth found the lack in his poetry. “As a poet Scott cannot live, for he has never in verse written anything addressed to the immortal part of man.” Others have found it in the novels. “We have mind, manners, animation,” says Bagehot, “but it is the stir of this world. We miss the consecrating power.” Carlyle is no less emphatic. “They do not found themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial ones; not on the perennial, perhaps not even on the lasting;” and he shakes the disapproving head of a fellow Scot, who would fain revere but can only admire:—”Not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for edification, for building up and elevating in any shape! The sick heart will find no healing here, the darkly struggling heart no guidance; the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice.”
Much of Carlyle’s criticism is clearly beside the point. He hankered after something which we have no right to ask from an imaginative creator, something for which we must go to the professed philosophers and to certain poets — a definite, formulated creed of life. He was a very serious man, a Reformer born out of season, come of a serious stock and belonging to a perplexed generation. Dr Chalmers said of him after a conversation, “That young man prefers seriousness to truth.” He wanted a message, a formula, but it is not easy to pin the greatest imaginative writers down to one moral, or even to a code of morals. What is the teaching of Homer? What is the lesson of Shakespeare? It would wrong their magnificence to force them into the bonds of any creed.
But Carlyle has still to be reckoned with. We are entitled to demand from the greatest not only a picture of the superficies of life, but an interpretation, something profitable for doctrine and edification. Bagehot’s phrase is the best. There must be a “consecrating power.”
It is because I find this in Scott in the highest degree — higher than in any other English novelist, higher than in Balzac, as high as in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky at their best — that I feel assured of his immortality. He has the largeness and rightness of the immortals. He makes our world more solemn by his sure instinct for the tragic, which is the failure of something not ignoble, through inherent weakness or through a change of circumstances to which it cannot adapt itself. Previous chapters contain many instances of such figures revealed in some great moment of drama. They are mirrors in which we can discern the futility of our dearest hopes. Always in his bustling world Scott is aware of the shadow of mortality. It is a gay world, but at the last it is a solemn world, and few can so cunningly darken the stage and make the figures seem no longer men and women, but puppets moving under the hand of the Eternal.
[The classic reconciliation]
In such passages we can read Scott’s purpose, which lay deep in his consciousness, to inculcate “reverence and godly fear.” He has a very clear philosophy, of which the basis is the eternity and the wisdom of the divine ordering of things. His aim is that of Greek tragedy, to secure a valiant acquiescence in the course of fate and in the dispensations of human life. To him Zeus always governs; Prometheus may be a fine fellow, but Zeus is still king of gods and men. He believed that in the world as it was created there was a soul of goodness, and that, in spite of evil, the “inward frame of things” was wiser than its critics. Throughout history there have been rebels against this doctrine. The passionate worship of the Virgin in the Middle Ages was a symptom of the revolt against the austerities of the Father and the Son. “Mary concentrated in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prison-house.” Scott’s purpose is the classic reconciliation. Like Meredith’s Lucifer in starlight, he is always aware of the “army of unalterable law.” To him peace and fortitude are to be found in a manly and reverent submission. In la sua volontade è nostra pace.
But his reconciling power lies not only in submission to law but in his joyous recognition of its soul of goodness. If he makes the world more solemn he also makes it more sunlit. That is the moral consequence of comedy, and of comedy in the widest sense Scott is an especial master. He has Shakespeare’s gift of charging our life with new and happier values. His people do not, like Tourgeniev’s, fight a losing battle; they are triumphant, they must be triumphant, for there is that in them which is in tune with the inner nature of things. The novels enlarge our vision, light up dark corners, break down foolish barriers, and make life brighter and more spacious. If they do not preach any single maxim they, in Shelley’s words, “repeal large codes of fraud and woe.” They restore faith in humanity by revealing its forgotten graces and depths.
We have noted, in considering the novels as they appeared, the many cases
where Scott in high tragic moments performs the task which Aristotle attributed to tragedy, of purifying the emotions by pity and fear. Such moments dignify life for us and link it with the universal, they widen our terrestrial horizons and reveal the infinite heavens above us. This gift alone would rank him with the great creative forces in literature. But I find in him another and a rarer gift, in which tragedy and comedy seem to blend, and to which heart and brain subtly contribute — the power of looking at life with such clear and compassionate eyes that he can find in its ironies both mirth and pity. The result is not an intensifying but a calming of the emotions, for the discords are resolved in an ultimate harmony. Swinburne writes somewhere of finding “in love of loving-kindness, light,” and in that word loving-kindness we have Scott’s secret. It is the quality which we meet when, in Homer, the Elders of Troy see Helen on the battlements and because of her beauty forgive her all the woes she has brought upon them: when Odysseus comes upon his father digging alone in the vineyard in shabby gaiters, with his old hands protected by gauntlets against the thorns: when Don Quixote finds that there are no birds in last year’s nest. We feel the pity of things, but also, strangely, their mercy.
[His “consecrating power”]
Scott was wholly free from sensibility, the crying fault of his age. He could write its jargon in his careless moods, but when he came to serious business there is a noble austerity in his reading of character. But there is also the insight of the healer and the reconciler. He has the Greek quality of sophrosyne, which means literally the possession of “saving thoughts.” He can penetrate to the greatness of the humble, the divine spark in the clod. No other writer has done quite the same thing for the poor. Many have expounded their pathos and their humours, and some few have made them lovable and significant, but Scott alone has lifted them to the sublime. Through their mouths he proclaims his evangel. It is not the kings and captains who most eloquently preach love of country, but Edie Ochiltree the beggar, who has no belongings but a blue gown and a wallet. It is not a queen or a great lady who lays down the profoundest laws of conduct, but Jeanie Deans, the peasant girl. It is Bessie Maclure, a lone widow among the hills, who in the Covenant strife has the vision of peace through a wider charity.
Scott has what Stevenson found in Dostoevsky, a “lovely goodness.” He lacks the flaming intensity of the Russian; his even balance of soul saves him from the spiritual melodrama to which the latter often descends. But like him he loves mankind without reservation, is incapable of hate, and finds nothing created altogether common or unclean. This Border laird, so happy in his worldly avocations that some would discard him as superficial, stands at the end securely among the prophets, for he gathers all things, however lowly and crooked and broken, within the love of God.
A feckless loon o’ a Straven weaver, that had left his loom and his bein house to sit skirling on a cauld hill-side, had catched twa dragoon naigs, and he could gar them neither hup nor wind, sae he took a gowd noble for them baith. — I suld hae tried him wi’ half the siller, but it’s an unco ill place to get change in.
CHAPTER XIV. — THE MAN
A writer lives by his books, and in our judgment of his art the man himself does not concern us. But since humanity is interested in itself, and will always look for the person behind the achievement, we are bound to speculate on the character of the author, and, if other evidence be wanting, to seek to deduce that character from his work. The blind Homer will be sought behind his epics, and the man Shakespeare behind the plays. Had we known nothing of Dr Johnson except his publications a great figure would be absent from our pantheon, and without Keats’s letters we should have gone far astray in our verdict on the poet. With Scott the case is different. Out of the immense and varied mass of his work a picture of the worker emerges which is substantially the truth. Even without Lockhart and the Journal we should have had a full and true conception of Walter Scott. The man and his achievements were of a piece, and there was no schism between fact and dream.
It is not difficult to make a picture of one whose nature is all crude lights and shadows and sharp angles, for a character with anything of the fantastic or perverse in it lends itself to easy representation. But it is hard to draw on a little canvas the man whose nature is large and central and human, without cranks or oddities. The very simplicity and wholesomeness of such souls defy an easy summary, for they are as spacious in their effect and as generous in their essence as daylight or summer. In these days of emotional insecurity we are apt to confuse the normal with the mediocre, and to assume that largeness is also shallowness. We are a little afraid of the high road and find more attraction in the crooked by-ways. Such a mood is not conducive to a fair judgment of Scott, or even to an understanding of him at all. For he is the normal man raised to the highest power, eschewing both fantastic vices and freakish virtues.
He stood at the heart of life, and his interests embraced everything that interested his fellows. That is the keystone of his character and mind — they were central and universal. He was impatient of nothing that God had made; and he did not merely tolerate, for he was eager to understand. His interest was as acute in the way a merchant managed his counting-house and a banker his credits as in the provenance of a ballad or some romantic genealogy. No lover of the past had ever his feet more firmly planted in the present. He was pre-eminently a social being, recognizing his duty to others and the close interconnexion of humanity. The problem of his character is, therefore, the way in which imaginative genius and practical sagacity ran in harness, how the spiritual detachment of the dreamer was combined with this lively sense of community.
I
[A Freemason of letters]
The first question we ask is how he regarded the craft which gave him his fame and his livelihood. Of one thing there can be no doubt — he loved it and gave to it his deepest interest and the best powers of his mind. The instinct to express himself in words was at the root of his being; he must always be writing, and if there was no more urgent task there was the Journal, and letters to friends, or scraps of verse in which he could give rein to his fancies. He felt himself a member of a great fraternity and cherished a masonic loyalty towards his colleagues. But he had no heroics about it and claimed for it no privileges. The rewards it brought were so utterly incommensurate with the pains that his attitude was always a little apologetic, as of one to whom the gods had given too generous gifts.
[His view of his craft]
This point of view needs further analysis, for it was different in kind from Byron’s aristocratic condescension. There were baser elements in it, no doubt, for in the Edinburgh of his day the business of letters, at least of the lighter letters, was not too well regarded. Scott would not have been his father’s son if he had not felt an unwilling respect for the professions which carried with them social predominance, like politics, the services, and the law. But the true source lay deeper. In the first place he did not rank his own achievements very high. He would have been ready to give Shakespeare a place far above any prince or potentate, but he did not consider himself to be in the same world as Shakespeare. He thought quite seriously that many of his contemporaries wrote better than he did; consequently he was as wholly free from literary jealousies as any man that ever lived. For Wordsworth and Coleridge and Jane Austen, who could do things outside his powers, he had a sincere reverence. He was eager to discern every scintilla of merit among his contemporaries, and to praise it generously. Apart from his own ragged regiment of Parnassus he was the friend and encourager of every man and woman who used the pen. He could appreciate writers who were at opposite poles from himself; he went out of his way to praise Mrs Shelley’s Frankenstein because he thought that Shelley had written it; he took no part in the attack on the “Cockney School,” though Leigh Hunt gave him ample provocation; and he tried to induce Charles Lamb to visit him at Abbotsford. Such a spirit of catholic appreciation was possible only for a man who had no vanity. He had none of that peasant vice of jeal
ous irritation into which at times Carlyle sank.
There was a graver element in his view of his craft. He was free from the social vulgarity which made even so wise a woman as Lady Louisa Stuart write of Maria Edgeworth that she “was as good a gentlewoman as any of us had she not drowned her gentility in her inkpot.” But he had something of Byron’s dislike of the “mere writer.” He considered that the man who retired from the bustle of the world to spin his fancies was something of a deserter from the combatant ranks of humanity. He had so many fighting strains in his ancestry that he hungered always for action, for a completer life than could be lived only in the mind. Dr Johnson once angrily withdrew Mansfield from the category of “mere lawyers,” and Scott had the same impatience of professional limitations. It was this instinct which was responsible for his commercial and political ventures and — largely — for the folie des grandeurs of Abbotsford, but it also gave him his insight into the heart and the prepossessions of the ordinary man. He never lost himself in the stuffy parlours of self-conscious art.
In the main it was a sound instinct, for it was based on his conviction of the overriding importance of character. The plain fellow who shouldered a musket for his country seemed to him to have a moral dignity to which the belauded artist had no claim. His deepest respect was for the homespun virtues. He told his daughter that he thanked God that “nothing really worth having or caring about in this world is uncommon.” “I fear,” he once chid Lockhart, “you are too apt to measure things by some reference to literature — to disbelieve that anybody can be worth much care who has no knowledge of that sort of thing or taste for it. God help us! What a poor world this would be if that was the true doctrine! I have read books enough, and observed and conversed with enough of eminent and splendidly cultivated minds, too, in my time; but I assure you, I have heard higher sentiments from the lips of poor uneducated men and women, when exerting the spirit of severe yet gentle heroism under difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their simple thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of friends and neighbours, than I ever yet met with out of the pages of the Bible.” When he was warmly greeted by Wellington he could not believe, that it was due to his literary fame—”What would the Duke of Wellington think of a few bits of novels?” Great deeds performed in a great spirit seemed to him the only source of honour. In Lockhart’s words, “To have done things worthy to be written was in his eye a dignity to which no man made any approach who had only written things worthy to be read.” This ethical bias may have been overweighted, but it was the faith which moved him to the heroism of his last years. Let it be remembered that it was shared also by Keats, who in a famous letter dismissed the view that “works of genius were the finest things in the world,” and set far above them the “probity and disinterestedness” of one of his friends.