SIR WALTER SCOTT'S LETTERS.* SIR WALTER SCOTT'S familiar letters are
rather like a new visit from a very old friend, which brings back the familiar features of his frank and unaffected character in all their force and charm, than a new book. The letters to Lady Abercorn, indeed, contain now and then passages which have been hardly equalled in their confidential friend- ship by anything previously published ; but it is not pos- sible to say that even they throw any very new light on the man whom Lockhart had presented in such attractive and yet simple outlines. Everywhere we find new illustrations of the great man whom we knew so well before, but only new illustrations of the old qualities,—the same unfailing man-
liness and good sense, the same hearty respect for sober conventions, combined with the same unbounded delight in the times when sober conventions had not been naturalised in Scotland and when audacity counted for a great deal more than mere good sense ;—the same delight in romance and steady determination not to be romantic in action; the same
disposition to toy with superstitions tendencies, which are, on the whole, suppressed; the same large generosity ; the same genial humour and love of the peasantry ; the same soldier's heart, with all its resentful impulses to- wards impertinences in those above him, and magnani- mous sympathy with the shortcomings of those below him ; the same perfectly genuine underrating of all his own literary achievements, and the same disposition to exag- gerate greatly the literary achievements of his contemporaries and friends. These letters are new and refreshing proofs of the extraordinary fidelity and adequacy of Lockhart's great biography ; but while they multiply considerably the evidences for the real existence of that large and benignant character, they do not bring us any surprises ; nor should we be at all gratified if they did. To have discovered that that great and impressive portrait was in any single respect gravely inadequate, would have involved almost more disappointment than it would have been possible for any new insight into Scott's character, however fresh in its interest, to make up for. It is characteristic of Scott that he ends one of the most interesting letters he ever wrote, even to Lady Abercorn, with the sentence, "Excuse this long and tedious prattle," the "long and tedious prattle" having just concluded with a con- fession of the difficulty he felt in making Malcolm Graeme (the lover of the Lady of the Lake), in any sense interesting, —a statement which Scott accompanies with the following frank avowals
"I am very anxious the said poem should be such as Lord Aber- corn can stand godfather to with credit. The tale cannot be very well sent without the verses, being no great matter in itself; but I will soon send you a specimen, if not a whole canto. I have tried, according to promise, to make a knight of love who never broke a vow.' But well-a.-day, though I have succeeded tolerably with the damsel, my lover, spite of my best exertions, is like to turn out what the players call a walking gentleman. It is incredible the pains it has cost me to give him a little dignity. Notwith- standing this, I have had in my time melancholy cause to paint from experience, for I gained no advantage from three years' con- stancy, except the said experience and some advantage to my conversation and manners. Mrs. Scott's match and mine was of our own making, and proceeded from the most sincere affection on both sides, which has rather increased than diminished during twelve years' marriage. But it was something short of love in all its forms, which I suspect people only feel once in their lives ; folks who have been nearly drowned in bathing rarely venturing a second time out of their depth."
No touch could be more characteristic than that about the dread felt by those who had been nearly drowned of ever going out of their depth in love again. Scott, it would seem, never quite forgave himself for not succeeding in that first great enterprise of his life. Even in the Journal of his last sad years, the passage in which he recounts his interview with the mother of the lady he had so passionately desired to marry, betrays not only the great depth of his passion, and the tenderness with which he looked back upon it in his latest days, but something of the resentment against himself for not having had the power to command the means of succeed- ing in an endeavour which might have given to his whole life that tinge of romance for which he vainly longed. In a second letter to Lady Abercorn, Scott explains, with even more vivacity, the hankering of the Border blood in him after the lawless life of the old days :—
"The deuce take my lover,—I can make nothing of him; he is • Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott, Edinburgh David Douglas. a perfect automaton. It is very odd that the border blood seems to rise in my veins whenever I begin to try couplets, however torpid on other occasions. I am in my own person, as Hamlet says, indifferent honest, and a robber or captain of banditti never comes across we but he becomes my hero. I believe, had I been to write Gil Ras, Captain Rolando would have been the principal personage from beginning to end. But we are all as heaven made us, and if I come to see you in Ireland I will endeavour to avoid temptation, and not to become a leader of robbers in the Wicklow Mountains, which I have a notion must be one of the most divert- ing preferments in the world. You will see what has led to this rhapsody, if the verses have reached you, for Black Sir Roderick, the leader of a predatory clan of Highlanders, is in danger, despite all my resolutions to the contrary, of becoming the very chief of the story."
His sense of the " preferment " it would have been for him to be promoted to be a leader of bandits, is in humorous con- trast to the often almost ostentatiously sober and prudent and laborious industry of his own career. Yet that there was a hare-brained thread in Scott's nature, a dash of devil-may-carishness (reflected even in his eyes), his whole life clearly shows. In explaining to the same correspondent, the object with which he was composing and publishing The Vision of Don Roderick, he pours out another confession of a more serious and less mocking kind, which is no doubt in part the explanation of his hankerings after the Border bandit's life :— " The idea of forming a short lyric piece upon this subject has often glided through my mind, but I should never, I fear, have had the grace to turn it to practice if it were not that groping in my pockets to find some guineas for the suffering Portuguese, and detecting very few to spare, I thought I could only have recourse to the apostolic benediction, Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I will give unto you.' My friends and book- sellers, the Ballantynes of Edinburgh, have very liberally promised in-e a hundred guineas for this trifle, which I intend to send to the fund for relieving the sufferers in PortugaL I have come out to this wilderness to write my poem, and so soon as it is finished I will send you, my dear Lady Marchioness, a- copy—not that it will be worth your acceptance, but merely that you may be assured I am doing nothing that I would not yon knew of sooner than any one. I intend to write to the Chair- man of the Committee by to-morrow's post. I would give them a. hundred drops of my blood with the same pleasure, would it do them service, for my heart is a soldier's, and always has been, though my lameness rendered me unfit for the profession, which, old as I am, I would rather follow than any other. But times are waking dreams, in which I seldom indulge even to my kindest friends."
Scott's unsatisfied craving for the life of a soldier was no doubt at the root of a great part of his poetry and romance. Had he thrown himself into the life of a soldier, that literary safety-valve in which the surplus steam of his nature found a vent, might never have been opened. How keen was that spirit of what may be called military honour,—which even made him eager to fight a duel in his old and broken age, after his wife's death and all his other misfortunes had tamed him so far as he was tameable,—is also illustrated very effectively in a sentence of another letter to Lady Abercorn, to whom he seems to have confessed more of his inmost thoughts than to any one else, unless it were Lady Louisa Stuart :— " The feeling was born with me not to brook a disparaging look from an emperor, when I had the least means of requiting it in kind, and I have only to hope it is combined with the anxious wish never to deserve one were it from a beggar."
As we have said, there is no new revelation of Scott in these volumes. Nor can they show the grandeur of the man as the Journal shows it in those last days of tragic struggle with misfortune. But they are full of new illustrations of the cordiality, the frankness, the manliness, the supreme healthiness, and the romantic sympathies of the greatest English author who is really known to us by his life almost
as well as he is known by his writings.
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