Part 7 (1/2)

And when Scott stops, his biographer and his coin, and all with like liberal notions of space and tiive, and call for ht from the date of Scott's death, his Journal was published; and although Lockhart had drawn upon it for one of the fullest biographies in the language, the little that Lockhart had left unused was sufficient to make its publication about the most important literary event of the year 1890

And now Mr David Douglas, the publisher of the ”Journal,” gives us in two volumes a selection from the familiar letters preserved at Abbotsford The period covered by this correspondence is froe, to 1825, when the ”Journal”

begins--”covered,” however, being too large a word for the first seven years, which are represented by seven letters only; it is only in 1806 that we start upon solas speaks modestly of his editorial work ”I have done,” he says, ”little ical order, supplying where necessary a slight thread of continuity by annotation and illustration” It ly well There is always a note where a note is wanted, and never where informent of his selection one who has not examined the whole mass of correspondence at Abbotsford can only speak on _a priori_ grounds But it is unlikely that the writer of these exe his text

Man's perennial and pathetic curiosity about virtue has no erness to be acquainted with every detail of Scott's life For what, as a mere story, is that life?--a level narrative of many prosperous years; a sudden financial crash; and the curtain falls on the struggle of a tired and dying gentleman to save his honor Scott was born in 1771 and died in 1832, and all that is special in his life belongs to the last six years of it Even so the h, perhaps, under the hand of an artist to furnish forth a tale of the length of Trollope's _The Warden_ In picturesqueness, in color, in wealth of episode and +peripeteia+, Scott's career will not coe, for instance Yet who could endure to read the life of Coleridge in six volumes? De Quincey, in an essay first published the other day by Dr japp, calls the story of the Coleridges ”a perfect romancea romance of beauty, of intellectual power, of misfortune suddenly illuminated from heaven, of prosperity suddenly overcast by the ardness of the individual”

But the ”romance” has been written twice and thrice, and desperately dull reading it e has been unhappy in his biographers, while Lockhart succeeded once for all, and succeeded so splendidly?

It is surely no accident Coleridge is an ill ood man to read about; and the secret is just that Scott had character and Coleridge had not In writing of the rapher's own hand in ti of hie We pursue the roup of his friends; and each as we dee?” answers ”He was here just now, and we helped hiraphies are all of men and women of character--and, it may be added, of beautiful character--of Johnson, Scott, and Charlotte Bronte

There are certain people whose biographies _ought_ to be long Who could learn too ree with Lockhart's reed edition of 1848:--”I should have been ed edition; for the interest of Sir Walter's history lies, I think, peculiarly in its minute details”? You old; for the h

So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it to Scott's known character and test it thereby The result is always the same; yet the employment does not weary In the, beside the letters of Cowper, or of Lamb They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last day reenius

The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary matters are not Scott's, but Lady Louisa Stuart's, who appreciated the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits) with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary Scott's literary observations (with the exception of one passage where the attitude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated thus--”he asks of it that it shall arouse hioes on about hi; and his letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the anshich Joanna Baillie sent Best of all, perhaps, is the correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warlas's volu can be found now to alter men's conception of Scott, any book about him is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to the beauty of his character

June 15, 1895 A racial disability

Since about one-third of the number of my particular friends happen to be Scotsmen, it has always distressed and annoyed me that, with the best will in the world, I have never been able to understand on what principle that perfervid race conducts its enthusiasms Mine is a racial disability, of course; and the converse has been noted by no less a writer than Stevenson, in the story of his journey ”Across the Plains”:--

”There were no erants direct from Europe--save one Gerri through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could reat of the Cornish; forof theinal than that of Babel, keeps this dose, esoteric falishmen”

The loss on reater, were it not happily certain that I _can_of Scotsmen; can, and indeed do, make friends of them

The Cult of Burns

All the sahs me doith a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns _conversazione_, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns All over the world--and all under it, too, when their ti after-dinner speeches about Burns The great globe swings round out of the sun into the dark; there is always ion the eye of i over Burns; co Syne”; lesser groups--if haply they be lesser--reposing under tables, still in honor of Burns And as the vast continents sweep ”eastering out of the high shadohich reaches beyond the es, their -side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, wend or are carried out of action with the dawn

Scott and Burns

None but a churl would wish this enthusiasravels the Southron Why Burns? Why not Sir Walter? Had I the honor to be a fellow-countryman of Scott, and had I command of the racial tom-toreat inative, and at the sae since Shakespeare died To say this is not to suggest that he is comparable with Shakespeare Scott himself, sensible as ever, wrote in his _Journal_, ”The blockheads talk of ues” ”But it is also true,” said Mr Swinburne, in his review of the _Journal_, ”that if there were or could be any man whom it would not be a monstrous absurdity to compare with Shakespeare as a creator of men and inventor of circumstance, that man could be none other than Scott” Greater poems than his have been written; and, to my mind, one or two novels better than his best But when one considers the huge mass of his work, and its quality in the enius, and its coe; who shall be compared with him?

These are the reflections which occur, somewhat obviously, to the Southron As for character, it is enough to say that Scott was one of the best men who ever walked on this planet; and that Burns was not

But Scott was not ood: of a character so eous that men read his Life, his Journal, his Letters with a thrill, as they ht read of Rorke's Drift or Chitral How then are we to account for the undeniable fact that his countrymen, in public at any rate, wax more enthusiastic over Burns?

Is it that the _ho race? Is it because, in farthest exile, a line of Burns takes their hearts straight back to Scotland?--as when Luath the collie, in ”The Twa Dogs,” describes the cotters' New Year's Day:--

”That ins, They bar the door on frosty winds; The nappy reeks wi'ream, An' sheds a heart-inspirin' steam; The luntin' pipe an' sneeshi+n' uid will; The cantie auld folks crackin' crouse, The young anes rantin' through the house,-- My heart has been sae fain to see them, That I for joy hae barkit wi' them”

That is one reason, no doubt But there is another, I suspect With all his ie Scott saw deeply into character; but he did not, I think, see very deeply into feeling You may extract more of the _lacrimae rerum_ from the story of his own life than froether The pathos of Laranted pathos If you deny this, you will not deny, at any rate, that the pathos of the last scene of _Lear_ is quite beyond his scope Yet this is notin le line or stanza of Burns' Verse after verse, line after line, rise up for quotation--

”Thou'lt break s beside thy , And wist na o' my fate”

Or,

”O pale, pale now, those rosy lips I aft hae kissed sae fondly!

And closed for aye the sparkling glance That dwelt onnow in silent dust The heart that lo'ed hland Mary”