The Crown of Wild Olive
Spezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and close
brushwood at Coniston.
And, lastly, also in the whole group of us, glows volcanic instinct of
Astraean justice returning not to, but up out of, the earth, which will
not at all suffer us to rest any more in Pope's serene 'whatever is, is
right;' but holds, on the contrary, profound conviction that about
ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: conviction
making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders of
revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous
to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine,
into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and the
implacableness of Fate.
In Byron the indignation, the sorrow, and the effort are joined to the
death: and they are the parts of his nature (as of mine also in its
feebler terms), which the selfishly comfortable public have, literally,
no conception of whatever; and from which the piously sentimental
public, offering up daily the pure emotion of divine tranquillity,
shrink with anathema not unembittered by alarm.
Concerning which matters I hope to speak further and with more precise
illustration in my next paper; but, seeing that this present one has
been hitherto somewhat sombre, and perhaps, to gentle readers, not a
little discomposing, I will conclude it with a piece of light biographic
study, necessary to my plan, and as conveniently admissible in this
place as afterwards;--namely, the account of the manner in which
Scott--whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient and
palpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is of
the Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, damnable,--spent his Sunday.
As usual, from Lockhart's farrago we cannot find out the first thing we
want to know,--whether Scott worked after his week-day custom, on the
Sunday morning. But, I gather, not; at all events his household and his
cattle rested (L. iii. 108). I imagine he walked out into his woods, or
read quietly in his study. Immediately after breakfast, whoever was in
the house, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read prayers at eleven, when I
expect you all to attend' (vii. 306). Question of college and other
externally unanimous prayers settled for us very briefly: 'if you have
no faith, have at least manners.' He read the Church of England service,
lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (_ibid._). After
the service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After the sermon,
if the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests,
to _cold_ picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblical
novelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, by
heart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). These
lessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whether
there was picnic or not. For the rest of the afternoon he took his
pleasure in the woods with Tom Purdie, who also always appeared at his
master's elbow on Sunday after dinner was over, and drank long life to
the laird and his lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whiskey
or a tumbler of wine, according to his fancy (vi. 195). Whatever might
happen on the other evenings of the week, Scott always dined at home on
Sunday; and with old friends: never, unless inevitably, receiving any
person with whom he stood on ceremony (v. 335). He came into the room
rubbing his hands like a boy arriving at home for the holidays, his
Peppers and Mustards gambolling about him, 'and even the stately Maida
grinning and wagging his tail with sympathy.' For the usquebaugh of the
less honoured week-days, at the Sunday board he circulated the champagne
briskly during dinner, and considered a pint of claret each man's fair
share afterwards (v. 339). In the evening, music being to the Scottish
worldly mind indecorous, he read aloud some favourite author, for the
amusement or edification of his little circle. Shakespeare it might be,
or Dryden,--Johnson, or Joanna Baillie,--Crabbe, or Wordsworth. But in
those days 'Byron was pouring out his spirit fresh and full, and if a
new piece from _his_ hand had appeared, it was _sure to be read by Scott
the Sunday evening afterwards_; and that with such delighted emphasis as
showed how completely the elder bard had kept up his enthusiasm for
poetry at pitch of youth, and all his admiration of genius, free, pure,
and unstained by the least drop of literary jealousy' (v. 341).
With such necessary and easily imaginable varieties as chanced in having
Dandy Dinmont or Captain Brown for guests at Abbotsford, or Colonel
Mannering, Counsellor Pleydell, and Dr. Robertson in Castle Street, such
was Scott's habitual Sabbath: a day, we perceive, of eating the fat,
(_dinner_, presumably not cold, being a work of necessity and
mercy--thou also, even thou, Saint Thomas of Trumbull, hast thine!) and
drinking the sweet, abundant in the manner of Mr. Southey's cataract of
Lodore,--'Here it comes, sparkling.' A day bestrewn with coronations and
sops in wine; deep in libations to good hope and fond memory; a day of
rest to beast, and mirth to man, (as also to sympathetic beasts that can
be merry,) and concluding itself in an Orphic hour of delight,
signifying peace on Tweedside, and goodwill to men, there or far
away;--always excepting the French, and Boney.
'Yes, and see what it all came to in the end.'
Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite other
things: of _these_, came such length of days and peace as Scott had in
his Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands.
Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes
overmuch light-mindedness, was administered to him by the more grave and
thoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heart
as well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother as
her dearest possession. Knew it, and, what was more, had thought of it,
and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain to
seek.
And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in
the way he sees to be most agreeable to him--as, for instance,
remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning,
every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of him
before courtly audience,--he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as his
own _Bride of Abydos_, for instance, which he had written from beginning
to end in four days, or even the travelling reflections of Harold and
Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon's
reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates to him a work
of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done his
best,--the drama of _Cain_. Of which dedication the virtual significance
to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Border
soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of White
Maidens, also of Grey Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies
by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the
black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the
glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest
of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed
one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may
tremblingly ask 'Gude guide us, what's yon?' hast thou yet known, seeing
that thou hast yet told, _nothing_.
Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear.
JOHN RUSKIN
FOOTNOTES:
[154] Nell, in the _Old Curiosity Shop_, was simply killed for the
market, as a butcher kills a lamb (see Forster's _Life_), and Paul was
written under the same conditions of illness which affected Scott--a
part of the ominous palsies, grasping alike author and subject, both in
_Dombey_ and _Little Dorrit_.
[155] Chourineur' not striking with dagger-point, but ripping with
knife-edge. Yet I do him, and La Louve, injustice in classing them with
the two others; they are put together only as parts in the same
phantasm. Compare with La Louve, the strength of wild virtue in the
'Louvecienne' (Lucienne) of Gaboriau--she, province-born and bred; and
opposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstress
friend. 'De ce Paris, ou elle etait nee, elle savait tout--elle
connaissait tout. Rien ne l'etonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa science
des details materiels de l'existence etait inconcevable. Impossible de
la duper!--Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si econome n'avait meme
pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme.
Je n'avais pas idee d'une si complete absence de sens moral; d'une si
inconsciente depravation, d'une impudence si effrontement
naive.'--_L'Argent des autres_, vol. i. p. 358.
[156] The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence
of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing
especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity, complicated
with grossness. Horace, in the _Epodes_, scoffs at it, but not without
horror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeply
struck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almost
beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, and
suspended satyrs of his arabesques round the polyglot Lord's Prayer; it
takes entire possession of Balzac in the _Contes Drolatiques_; it struck
Scott in the earliest days of his childish 'visions' intensified by the
axe-stroke murder of his grand aunt; L. i. 142, and see close of this
note. It chose for him the subject of the _Heart of Midlothian_, and
produced afterwards all the recurrent ideas of executions, tainting
_Nigel_, almost spoiling _Quentin Durward_--utterly the _Fair Maid of
Perth_: and culminating in _Bizarro_, L. x. 149. It suggested all the
deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious sleep--Kennedy, Eveline
Neville (nearly repeated in Clara Mowbray), Amy Robsart, the Master of
Ravenswood in the quicksand, Morris, and Corporal Grace-be-here--compare
the dream of Gride, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, and Dickens's own last
words, _on the ground_, (so also, in my own inflammation of the brain,
two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out on
the other side). In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all
the figures of the Lay Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy,
Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella, and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like manner
gives Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and
wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in _Barnaby Rudge_,
where, with a _corps de drame_ composed of one idiot, two madmen, a
gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a
blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in
ribands--carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the
hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the
gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the
shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content without
shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a
wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in _two_
wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign
manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love
of thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limbless
serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare _Modern Painters_,
vol. iv., 'Chapter on the Mountain Gloom,' s. 19); and in _all_ forms of
it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the blood, whence the
last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--'cool it with a baboon's