O Friend... alone performing the funeral rites of Pompey the Great, .. thou shalt not have all this honour to bury the only and most famous captain of the Romans.' From any other point of view, I expostulate with Byron : Scotland! Still proudly claim thy native bard, My concatenation is oecumenical. But do not be alarmed. Of the many points of view from which the memory of Sir Walter Scott may be regarded, I shall occupy only three. There is one, remote indeed from the world's renown because intimate to any man born a Briton, which I cannot ignore. To the Briton, aware of his natal prerogatives, there are few better than this: that Walter Scott may be, first a living part of his childhood, and then the entertainer of his youth, before he becomes the companion of riper years. I remember vividly my delight on discovering the story of Rob Roy, when reading that wonderful book for the third time at the age of eleven. The earlier attempts had been breathless plunges into seas of incomprehensible dialect; adventures of a diver hazarded to snatch the pearls of freebooting. At eleven I was still rather shy of Diana Vernon.' Later on I fell in love with her, like the rest of you, and, after further reperusals, came at last to such an appreciation of Andrew Fairservice' as may be vouchsafed to a Briton who is not a Scot. But consider the subtle and complex charm of Scott's novels to any man who savours them in maturity after looting them as a boy; to any man who recalls the young companions with whom he impersonated their characters, 'all now,' in Scott's phrase, 'all now sequestered or squandered'-working at large in the far ranges of the Empire, or toiling each in his tunnel at home. Any such, though born a generation after Scott died, can truly say with Scott's friend, Lady Louisa Stuart, 'They awaken in me feelings I could hardly explain to another. They are to me less like books than like letters one treasures up, pleasant yet mournful to the soul, and I cannot open one of them without a thousand recollections.' That is one point of view. Yes; but turn the page in the Letters (i. 49) for Scott's reply to his friend, and you read-in the language of courteous formality which belonged to his time and in no way justifies the absurd charge of undue deference to rank sometimes preferred against him-'I am very glad your Ladyship found the tales in some degree worth your notice. It cost me a terrible effort to finish them, for between distress of mind and body I was unfit for literary composition. But in justice to my booksellers I was obliged to dictate while I was scarce able to speak for pain.' Thus, in the one year 1819, at the age of 48, did Scott give to Scotland and the world, in seven volumes, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Legend of Montrose, and Ivanhoe. And thus he fought on for thirteen more years, showering forth volumes each one of which was received with ecstasy by Europe; but, for himself, toiling and suffering, yet gentle and undaunted, through ruin due to the fault of others, through bereavement, through fear-the only fear he knew-lest increasing illness should destroy that magic faculty by which he was determined to vindicate a chivalrous point of honour and to safeguard the home on which his human affections were set. That, gentlemen, is another point of view. From it we may contemplate, not the story-teller who entranced our boyhood, nor the singer of Romance, nor the delineator of character, nor the patriot who revealed Scotland to herself as another Normandy of high-born hearts, nor the essayist, nor the biographer, nor the captain in a world-wide literary movement; but simply, a Man; a man so brave, so kind, so sensible, that he encourages our manhood and knocks the nonsense out of us all. What a man! Think of his magnanimity. He, of all men, wrote the only generous criticism on the Third Canto of Childe Harold (1816) at a moment when the world, for reasons, good, bad, and idiotic, united to crush the rival who had eclipsed his poetic fame. His criticism was generous. But it was just. Generosity as a rule is more true than detraction. What can be sounder than this, Almost all (his) characters . . . are more or less Lord Byron himself, and yet you never tire of them. It is the same set of stormy emotions acting on the same powerful mind. . . it is the same sea dashing on the same rocks, yet presented to us under such a variety of appearance that they have all the interest of novelty.' When Byron dies in 1824, it is Scott, the Bayard without reproach, who writes, 'I have been terribly distressed at poor Byron's death. In talents he was unequalled, and his faults were those rather of a bizarre temper . . . than any depravity of disposition. He was devoid of selfishness, which I take to be the basest ingredient in the human composition.' If that was his attitude towards the rival who had beaten him in poetry, so was it towards the partner who had ruined him in business. In the shock of the crash that levelled the whole edifice of his hopes, he can say, 'To nourish angry passions against a man whom I really liked, would be to lay a blister on my own heart.' Think of his sterling sense. He liked an artist to be a right good John Bull, bland and honest and open, without any . . . nonsensical affectation.' Having observed,' he writes, 'how very unhappy literary persons are made (not to say ridiculous into the bargain) by pitching their thoughts and happiness on popular fame,' I 'resolved to avoid at least that error.' Some recent contributors to a literary correspondence may be pained to hear that Scott cared for popularity only as a means to supporting his family and paying twenty shillings in the pound. For that he would work at the rate of £24,000 a year,' checked only by this saving reflection—' but then we must not bake buns faster than people have appetite to eat them.' He loved individual liberty. No cobbler, if he had his way, should lose his stall to facilitate street improvements. That was before the days of the London County Council. But turn from that to his public patriotism. When things were not going too well with our armies, and Joanna Baillie despaired to him of our country's future: 'I detest croaking,' says he; if true, it is unpatriotic, and if false, worse. . . . My only ambition,' he goes on, 'is to be remembered, if remembered at all, as one who knew and valued national independence, and would maintain it in the present struggle to the last man and the last guinea, tho' the last guinea were my own property, and the last man my own son.' The claims of individual liberty and public patriotism have blinded some men to the nicest scruples of personal honour. But they never blinded Scott. 'If,' he writes, "I were capable in a moment of weakness of doing anything short of what my honour demanded, I would die the death of a poisoned rat in a hole, out of mere sense of my own degradation.' No wonder that he fought on! Refusing a touching offer of help with the observation, 'There is much good in the world, after all. But I will involve no friend, either rich or poor. My own right hand shall do it.' It is not as if he liked labour. He loathed it. So he recalls his 'flourishing plantations,' and exclaims, Barbarus has segetes, I will write my finger-ends off first.' The morning rays of youthful enterprise faded out from the 'sober twilight' in which he laboured. But he is never gloomy. On the contrary, he illumines his solitude with beams of the mellowest humour and flashes of delightful wit. It is we who are sad; not he; haranguing 'Madam Duty' and calling her the plainest word in the English language. And, as Swinburne has pointed out, now that we have the Journal, we need no longer be sad. For we see him as he was, gay and buoyant to the last; not tortured by Fortune, as we thought, but rounding on the fickle goddess with the merriest quips, until weariness and suffering wring from him the first faltering note I often wish I could lie down and sleep without waking. But I will fight it out, if I can.' And he just could. Death released him in the moment of victory. He was wont, in his modesty, to disparage the writer by comparison with the soldier. But Wolfe did not die more gloriously on the Heights of Abraham. And when he died we are |