by John Buchan
Such a man, with such a creed, will run two risks. His world of fancy and thought, since he refuses to parade it, may become a secret domain which, owing to its very seclusion from outer realities, may insensibly colour his whole attitude to life. Again, his robust insistence upon the value of common standards may induce a vein of worldliness, a false approbation of things as they are. The first peril is abundantly manifested in Scott’s career. During the dark days of 1826 he gave a list of his consolations to Lady Louisa Stuart, and one of the chief was his “quiet thoughts.” From these thoughts came the immortal part of his work, but also his disasters. “I have worn a wishing-cap, the power of which has been to divert present griefs by a turn of the wand of imagination, and gild over the future prospect by prospects more fair than can ever be realized.” If the task chimed in with his wishes, no man could be more painstaking and sagacious in practical affairs, but if not, he would take refuge in his waking dreams, and become a visionary and a gambler. Of this there were graver consequences than indolence in directing his own affairs. His secret world made him a little insensitive to the anomalies of the real one. It killed in him, except at rare moments, the soul of the reformer. It was a domain where the soul turned in upon itself, and dreams did not result in action. Being mainly concerned with the past it was a static thing, and bred few ideals for the future. The dweller in it could not be one of those
who rest not; who think long
Till they discern as from a hill
At the sun’s hour of morning song,
Known of souls only, and those souls free,
The sacred spaces of the sea.
More; the man who issued from it had his eyes dazzled, and the glamour of his dreams was apt to gild ugly realities.
Scott’s worldliness, which is Carlyle’s main charge against him, needs to be exactly stated. At its best, it was an acute appreciation of the conventions by which life is conducted; at its worst, it was an overvaluing of these conventions. It gave him the grasp of the mechanism of society which the novels reveal, but it shut out from his ken one side of the spiritual world and one type of human soul. It made him tolerant of public abuses which he would have rooted up had they shown themselves in his private life. But he had no abiding relish for the grosser material rewards and pomps of success; he might like the notion of them, but he was soon satiated by a little of the substance. Abbotsford was rather an aerial dream than a terrestrial pleasure house; it was endeared to him partly because it was a thing of his own creation, but largely because of the human relationships that grew up around it.
And there was nothing in it of what we call snobbery. Scott was too great a gentleman ever to feel insecure, and insecurity is the mark of the snob. He liked to live among long-descended and cultivated people, because they talked his own language, but since he took no liberties he permitted none. His relations with the chiefs of his own sept, the Buccleuchs, are a model of well-bred friendship. He had a romantic veneration for the great Border house and a warm affection for its successive heads, but when it came to shutting out the Selkirk people from the grounds of Bowhill he could speak his mind, so that Duke Charles wrote to him, “I have reason to thank God for many things, but especially for having given me friends who will tell me the truth.” He bore himself in any company with an easy modesty, and a breeding which Lord Dudley contrasted most favourably with Byron’s. In his parties at Abbotsford he singled out for special kindness the humbler guests. Could any man with a trace of the snob in his composition have tolerated for a moment the gaucheries of James Hogg? His chivalry was manifested not only in his manner to high-born ladies but in his treatment of every woman he met, from the preposterous Mrs Coutts to his cotters’ wives. Twice in his life he was guilty of a defect in generosity, once towards his brother and once towards Constable; but I can find no instance where he failed in that respect towards anyone humbler than himself.
II
[Politics]
Scott was pre-eminently a social being, living his life in close contact with his fellows, and he could not hold himself aloof from the problems of society. The French Revolution left no one in Britain unaffected: one class of mind it stimulated to speculative ardour and bold schemes of change: another, not less honest, it drove into a stiff conservatism. In the eyes of the latter the first duty was to preserve the historic fabric now threatened, even at the cost of perpetuating blemishes. To mend your roof in a gale might mean the destruction of the whole house. Scott was not interested in the political game for its own sake.
In general I care very little about the matter, and from year’s end to year’s end have scarce a thought connected with them, except to laugh at the fools who think to make themselves great men out of little by swaggering in the rear of a party. But either actually important events, or such as seemed so by their close neighbourhood to me, have always hurried me off my feet, and made me, as I have sometimes afterwards regretted, more forward and more violent than those who had a regular jog-trot way of busying themselves in public matters. That is to say, he had the occasional intemperance of the suddenly aroused layman; he had a natural bias against all change, and he hated wholeheartedly what he regarded as the central doctrine of the French Revolution, what Coleridge called that “science of cosmopolitanism without country, of philanthropy without neighbourliness or consanguinity, in short, of all the impostures of that philosophy ... which would sacrifice each to the shadowy idol of all.”
Unfortunately this view was more than a revolt against those unstable progressives who were for ever itching to tinker at the social machine. It was more than Falkland’s philosophical conservatism—”When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change;” or Burke’s classic warning—”The old building stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, and part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then, indeed, it may come down upon our heads altogether in much uniformity of ruin.” Scott opposed change even when the old building stood very ill. The notorious instance is the matter of Scottish reforms. Scotland in his day was, as Cockburn put it, no better than a village at a great man’s gate, the electoral system was rotten to the core, and the best elements in the land were unrepresented in public life. There were only 2600 voters on the county rolls and 1300 town councillors elected the burgh members. Of this farcical situation Scott was fully aware; yet he called men scamps for desiring a juster system. The judicial edifice was no more satisfactory than the political, but he resisted every attempt to better it. In both cases the reason was the same; he feared that if reform once began it would pull down the good with the bad, and destroy that Scotland which he knew and loved. Hazlitt’s famous rhodomontade on the subject of his politics is ludicrously unjust, with its declamation against one who “stooped to the unworthy arts of adulation and abetted the views of the great with the pettifogging feelings of the meanest dependant on office ... who repaid the public liberality by striking a secret and envenomed blow at every one who was not the ready tool of power;” but impartial observers might well have been perplexed by this relic-worship, so inconsistent with Scott’s practical good sense.
[The Whigs]
To his prepossession against change, a feeling born of fear and love, must be added two other causes which determined his political views. As we have seen, his mind was wholly unspeculative. He had no theory of the state, no philosophy of society, and the pruritus disputandi of Edinburgh dinner-parties had sickened him of the whole subject. Like Lady Louisa Stuart, he hated “marches of ages and all that vile slang.” His mind was eminently concrete, he had no interest in what was valuable in the Whig speculative activity, and he was acutely sensitive to what was bad. For in the Whiggism of the time there was much that was shallow and foppish. Scott had Burke’s conviction that life could not be conducted by abstract reasoning.
The Whigs will live and die in the heresy that the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches, and that if you can sufficiently demonstrate that a line o
f conduct is most consistent with men’s interest, you have therefore and thereby demonstrated that they will at length, after a few speeches on the subject, adopt it of course.
He was not disposed to set much value on new theories of society and morals, for he put all theory in the second class of importance. If he was told that such and such a thing was in accordance with the spirit of the age, he replied that the spirit of the age might be a lying spirit with no claim to infallibility. The rejoicing dialectic of his Whig contemporaries left him cold and suspicious. He admitted their enthusiasm and honesty, but the truth they proclaimed he thought at the best a half-truth. The deeper verities of the imagination and instinct seemed to him to be eternally beyond their dapper logic. “This will never do,” Jeffrey had written of Wordsworth, and the sentence was a flashlight to reveal the whole arid world of Whiggism. If Scott was a little blind to the merits of the new school, he saw with acid clearness its limitations.
A second reason predisposed him against them. Their practice seemed to him to limp far behind their professions. They contented themselves with cultivating at high tension emotions towards humanity at large, but they had little themselves of the human touch. Scott knew the commonalty of Scotland better than any man of his day, and he was an assiduous practical philanthropist; he resented — as many have resented since his time — the claims of a little coterie of intellectuals to speak for a people of whom they knew nothing. Their creed was noble, their performance trivial. They were like Obadiah’s bull in Tristram Shandy, “who, though he never certainly did produce a calf, nevertheless went about his business with so much gravity, that he commanded the respect of the whole parish.” He felt about them as Lady Louisa Stuart felt about the Welsh hierarchy. She found one bishop who “was liberal, proposed to equalize the sees, argued against the wealth and power of the Church, and, being enraged against not getting the highest preferment himself, never dreamed of troubling his head about his paltry diocese. The illiberal prejudiced bishops come and reside.”
Yet, apart from certain Scottish questions, it would be an error to regard Scott as a Tory of the Eldon type. Like Burns in his great days, he was a Pittite, rather an anti-revolutionary than an anti-reformer. In the last months of his life he told a friend that he was no enemy to reform—”if the machine does not work well, it must be mended — but it should be by the best workmen you have.” This last phrase gives the key to his faith. He believed in persons rather than in policies. “Away,” he would have exclaimed with Canning, “with the cant of ‘measures not men,’ the idle supposition that it is the harness, and not the horses, that draws the chariot along!” He had deep in him the instinct to find a leader and cleave to him, and he found what he sought in Wellington. Wellington might have led him very far on the path of radical progress, but in the newer men, the Greys and Russells, and in the talkative lawyers like Brougham, he did not find the quality he could trust.
In many ways he misread the signs of the times, as in his belief in the rising of the north-country colliers and weavers which led him to organize the Buccleuch legion, and in the tragic fears of his last illness. What had happened in France haunted him like a spectre. When Sir John Sinclair told Adam Smith that the country would be ruined, the dying economist replied, “My dear young man, there is a good deal of ruin in a country.” But if Scott is to be blamed for sometimes losing faith in the soundness of heart of the nation, it may well be argued that he was alive to a peril to which too many of his contemporaries were blind. Looking back to-day, it is clear that Britain in the two decades after Waterloo was treading a far more perilous path than she had trod in the war with Napoleon. Liverpool, Eldon and the rest blundered many times, but those stiff and prosaic gentlemen had in them something of the heroic, and they brought the country out of the jaws of destruction, for other and showier people to win the credit. Scott saw the fires smouldering beneath the crust, though he may have underestimated the crust’s strength, and he was impatient, rightly impatient, with the sciolists and dreamers who believed that they walked on impregnable rock. He was not prepared to see his country ruined to make a belletristic holiday. “Fallait-il laisser périr l’Angleterre pour plaire aux poètes?”
[His sense of community]
The Whig creed was potent in its day, and it had many beneficent consequences, but, since it was concerned chiefly with the form of things, with mechanism, it has long since ceased to be a living force among us. So far as it attempted to provide an organic philosophy of politics, it signally failed. Let us turn to the positive substance of Scott’s faith, which was a deeper thing than his antipathy to Whig merits and Whig defects. Its first element was nationalism. He believed firmly in the virtue of local patriotism and the idiomatic life of the smaller social unit. Whenever Scotland was concerned he was prepared to break with his party, with his leaders, and with the whole nobility, gentry and intellectuality of Britain. “The Tories and Whigs may go be damned together, as names that have disturbed old Scotland, and torn asunder the most kindly feelings since the days they were invented.” This was no mere petulant parochialism, but a deep conviction that on the strength and individuality of the part depended the value of the whole. The second element was a sense of community, of society as an organic thing where every man’s life was linked with that of his fellows. For this reason he disliked the intense preoccupation of a man with his own soul, which he thought had been the weakness of Scottish Calvinism, and which the imported evangelicalism from England was reviving north of the Tweed. For this reason, too, he detested the selfishness of the new industrialism.
This latter was the public question on which he felt most passionately. “God’s justice is requiting, and will yet further requite, those who have blown up this country into a state of unsubstantial opulence, at the expense of the health and morals of the lower classes.” He agreed with Southey’s terrible comparison of the submerged classes to the dogs of Constantinople, “a nuisance to the community while they live, and dying miserably at last.” But he was fair on the matter, and did not attempt to set up a golden past against a dingy present. Take the discussion between Christie Steele and Croftangry —
“An older family, perhaps, and probably more remembered and regretted than later possessors?” ...
“Mair regretted — mair missed? I liked ane of the auld family very weel, but I winna say that for them a’. How should they be mair missed than the Treddleses? The cotton mill was such a thing for the country! The mair bairns a cotter body had the better; they would make their own keep frae the time they were five years auld, and a widow wi’ three or four bairns was a wealthy woman in the time of the Treddleses.”
“But the health of those poor children, my good friend — their education and religious instruction — —”
“For health,” said Christie, looking gloomily at me, “ye maun ken little o’ the world, sir, if ye dinna ken that the health of the poor man’s body, as weel as his youth and his strength, are all at the command of the rich man’s purse. There never was a trade so unhealthy yet but men would fight to get wark at it for twa pennies a day above the common wage. But the bairns were reasonably cared for in the way of air and exercise, and a very responsible youth heard them their Carritch, and gied them lessons in Readiemadeasy. Now, what did they ever get before? Maybe on a winter day they would be called out to beat the wood for cock or siclike; and then the starving weans would maybe get a bite of broken bread, and maybe no, just as the butler was in humour.”
It is Scott’s own voice speaking; he had no illusions about the eternal problem of the poor.
A friend of mine, a famous professor of economics, once proposed to write a book on the political economy of Scott, for he held that he had a stronger grasp of the subject than most of its professional exponents. It was the fashion in his day for the pundits of both parties to sneer at his romancer’s economics, but the whirligig of time has avenged him. We have learned in recent years that so-called economic laws are in the main deductions
from contemporary data and have no universal validity, and we have been compelled to look upon facts with shrewder eyes than the classic theorists. Just as Whig views of the mechanism of the state have now only an historic interest, so the economic dogmatism of the early nineteenth century is a speech strange to our ears. But Scott remains singularly up to date, for he had imagination, and was very close to the imperishable things in life. Malachi Malagrowther will well repay study, for, apart from its sane and honourable nationalism, it is full of acute economic thinking. He argues for the localization of the issue of credit, which involved the slight inflation that the circumstances of Scotland required, very much in the language of to-day. He feared the craze for uniformity, because he realized that it would bring to Scotland the disasters of the unreformed English poor law, and he made merry with the extreme laissez-faire dogma merely by stating it.