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woods with him, and to the strangely sentimental11 hen which attached itself to Sir Walter. From George IV.—who admired and never turned on Scott—to the hedgers and ditchers on Abbotsford, Scott was endeared to all; in his ruin his old servants refused to leave him, and the music master of his daughters offered him the entire savings12 of his life. Yet there was no mawkish13 good nature in Scott; when he bent14 the heavy arches of his brows the Ettrick Shepherd himself felt that he must “gang warily15.” No man was served as he was by his household, and when he told his son that certain conduct would entail16 his highest displeasure, the young man knew the full meaning of the phrase.
CONCLUSION
Scott’s courtesy was spontaneous and universal—he spoke17 to all “as if he was their blood relation”—except when he deliberately18 meant to be discourteous19, in one case, to Lord Holland, who had done no more than his duty. He had come athwart the interests of Scott’s brother Thomas, and Scott took up the feud22 in the ancient spirit of clanship. Yet he lived to pronounce Lord Holland “the most agreeable man he ever knew. In criticism, in poetry, he beats those whose whole study they have been.” Thus Scott must have expiated23 an error produced by political heat as well as by
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personal resentment24; probably, like the Baron25 Bradwardine, he sent “Letters of Slains,” or other atonement. Jeffrey says that “this was the only example of rudeness in Scott that he ever witnessed in the course of a lifelong familiarity.” In this lonely case, the person “cut like an old pen” was a man of title and distinction.
It is hardly worth while to controvert26 the opinion that Scott was a snob27. In addressing persons of rank, however familiarly intimate he might be with them, he used their “honour-giving names,” as Agamemnon bids Menelaus do towards the princes of the Achaeans. This was the customary rule of the period. Byron was indignant when Leigh Hunt publicly addressed him as “My dear Byron,” and Byron was an extreme Liberal, while Scott was a Tory. He paid the then recognized dues to rank; such dues are no longer welcome to their recipients28. He lived much with people of the highest social position, but he could and did entertain them at the same table with the Ettrick Shepherd, and with guests known to him of old when a schoolboy or as a lawyer’s apprentice29. He was observed to pay great deference30 to a gentleman without any apparent distinction, because he descended31 from a knight32 who fought by the side of Wallace.
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In all this his conduct, as in everything else, was dictated33 by his reverence34 for the past. That reverence for things old, for what had once been, ideally at least, an ordered system of society, was the cause of Scott’s Toryism, increased by his patriotism35 during the struggle with Bonaparte. The ideas and sympathies which made him a Tory, made him also an opponent of the system which turned the Highlands into sheep farms and deer forests, by the expulsion of the clansmen. His opinions on this head are expressed in the Introduction to The Legend of Montrose. Again, the feudal36 ideas at the root of his Toryism made him the most attentive37 of all landlords to the wellbeing of every soul on his estates. In bad times he found the wisest and most economic way of providing them with employment at once honourable38 and remunerative39, and he taught the Duke of Buccleuch to follow his example on a great scale. He felt pain and embarrassment40 in face of the gratitude41 of his poor cotters for a holiday feast and holiday presents: why, he asked himself, should he have more than they? His house was as a great hearth42 whence radiated light and comfort on the humblest within his radius43. Before Mr. Ruskin he endeavoured to bring the happiness of art into the region of the crafts.
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CONCLUSION
“The most of the articles from London were only models for the use of two or three neat-handed carpenters whom he had discovered in the villages near him; and he watched and directed their operations as carefully as a George Bullock could have done; and the results were such as even Bullock might have admired. The great table in the library, for example (a most complex and beautiful one), was done entirely44 in the room where it now stands, by Joseph Shillinglaw of Darnick—the Sheriff planning and studying every turn as zealously45 as ever an old lady pondered the development of an embroidered46 cushion. The hangings and curtains, too, were chiefly the work of a little hunchbacked tailor, by name William Goodfellow (save at Abbotsford, where he answered to Robin), who occupied a cottage on Scott’s farm of the Broomielees; one of the race who creep from homestead to homestead, welcomed wherever they appear by housewife and handmaiden, the great gossips and newsmen of the parish—in Scottish nomenclature cardooers. Proudly and earnestly did all these vassals47 toil48 in his service; and I think it was one of them that, when some stranger asked a question about his personal demeanour, answered in words already quoted ‘Sir Walter speaks to every man as if they were blood relations.’ Not long after
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he had completed his work at Abbotsford little Goodfellow fell sick, and as his cabin was near Chiefswood, I had many opportunities of observing the Sheriff’s kind attention to him in his affliction. I can never forget the evening on which the poor tailor died. When Scott entered the hovel he found everything silent, and inferred from the looks of the good women in attendance that their patient had fallen asleep, and that they feared his sleep was the final one. He murmured some syllables49 of kind regret; at the sound of his voice the dying tailor unclosed his eyes, and eagerly and wistfully sat up, clasping his hands with an expression of rapturous gratefulness and devotion that, in the midst of deformity, disease, pain, and wretchedness, was at once beautiful and sublime50. He cried with a loud voice, ‘The Lord bless and reward you,’ and expired with the effort.”
CONCLUSION
Of Scott’s great charity, which lay in giving affection as well as material aid, examples have been displayed in his latest years. His charity did but begin with these gifts; he was brotherly in all human intercourse51. The slightest notoriety brings bores around a man: letter-writing bores, bores who want information accessible in any encyclopaedia52; bores who give voluminous undesired information; bores who ask advice, bores who solicit53 an inter21
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view—countless are the tribes of these thieves of time. At the celebrity54 of Scott they all flew, like sea-fowls against a beacon55 above the midnight sea, and he “with a frolic welcome took” their attentions. They “bestowed all their tediousness on him,” and he accepted it, suffering them gladly. He answered their ceaseless letters (as from a boy asking him to contribute to The Giggleswick School Magazine!), he replied to them with thought, care, and courtesy; he considered their worthless manuscripts, paying £10 in postage for two MSS. of The Cherokee Lovers: A Tragedy, by a young American lady. “I might at least have asked him to dinner,” he murmured, when a bore of the first head had at last taken his leave. This is indeed charity which endures all things, making itself subject to the needs of all men.
CONCLUSION
Sir Walter had everything of the saint except (what is indispensable) the psychology56 of the saint. He was naturally good, born to be so. “Are all Tories born bad?” said a little boy of a Whig family. “They are born bad, and they make themselves worse,” replied his lady mother. Scott was born good, and, by controlling his natural temper, and by reflection, he made himself better. But, though sincerely religious and, we know, a prayerful man, he was no saint, but a man of this
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world. He was not haunted, as a saint must be, by the desire of ideal perfection. It is not certain whether he was to be reckoned of the Presbyterian or Prelatist form of belief. “Bishops, I care not for them,” he might have said, like the great Montrose on his dying day. But he did prefer the Liturgy57 of the Church of England to the “conceived prayers” of the Scottish pulpit, and read the service on Sundays to his family, when far from a kirk at Ashestiel, and to whomsoever of his neighbours cared to come and listen. He was married in an English church; the burial service of that Church was read at his funeral. I am informed that he was at one time an Elder of the Kirk at Duddingstone, which is partly of Norman architecture, but Lockhart says that, in later life, he adhered to the Church of the Cavaliers. Yet he recognized a great genius in Dr. Chalmers; there was no bigotry58 in his Episcopal tendencies; as a matter of taste he preferred the Anglican manner of conducting public worship. He was on the best terms with many ministers; the only profession of whose followers59 he speaks with a certain lack of sympathy was the profession of school-mastering. In every dominie he believed that there lay “a vein60 of absurdity,” and on one occasion he reproves himself for thinking that he had met an exception to the
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rule. One of his own schoolmasters once knocked him down, in boyhood, and apologized by saying (as if he had driven into the party in front of him at golf), that he “did not know he could hit so hard.” This apology seldom mends matters!
We all have our foibles. That of Scott was the effort to live in an idealized past. He knew the points at which his reason crossed his judgment61. The fairest of historians, he would not write a biography of Queen Mary “because his opinion was contrary to his feeling.” “She may have been criminal,” he says, in The Tales of a Grandfather, telling the story as fairly as may be, within his space. Lockhart observes that he often speaks of George IV (he must mean George III) as “de jure King,” on the death of the Cardinal62 Duke of York. “Yet who could have known better than he that whatever rights the exiled males of the Stuart line ever possessed63 must have remained entire with their female descendants?” Had Scott lived in his father’s time, I misdoubt that he would have worn the black cockade, not the white, for, except in his expenditure64, he always had a saving grain of commonsense65. Scott was a great and strong man as any of his knights66, but the nature which gave him strength made him a poet who
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“lived in fantasy.” He tried to make his dreams real, and he forgot realities. Any ideal set before him gave him pleasure; he certainly and confessedly took a stern delight in the ideal of working off his debts with his own hand. His earlier years of grinding task work were not, as such, unhappy. Sir Walter had, in fact, the most fortunate kind of genius—a genius for happiness, which cannot exist without making life more joyous for all within the radius of its influence.
The Scots are, according to old proverbs, a jealous people. The race has no two sons more opposite in their ideals than Walter Scott and John Knox. Yet they had this virtue67 in common, that neither in the preacher nor the poet does analysis detect a grain of professional jealousy68. Scott could, indeed, see the blemishes69 on the poetry of Southey; nor could the faults of Byron escape him. But in other contemporary poets whom he mentions, he seems to behold70 nothing but their excellences71, which he often exaggerates. If Byron “beat him,” as he said, he seems seriously to have believed that the triumph was deserved. This is, surely, unexampled generosity72.
CONCLUSION
“Scott’s chivalrous73 imagination threw a certain air of courteous20 gallantry into his relations with his daughters.... Though there could
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not be a gentler mother than Lady Scott, ... on those delicate occasions most interesting to young ladies, they always made their father the first confidant.” In his works of imagination, the relation of father and daughter is always touched with peculiar74 grace and tenderness. His dressing-room was “a little chapel75 of the Lares” fitted up with relics76 of his father and mother. In every relation of life and literature his motto was “à léal souvenir”; he kept the pious77 trust of all things old that were of good report, and handed on the sacred bequest78 to all who follow him. As to his place in literature, we leave it to the judgment of the world and of the unborn. They “cannot say but he has had the crown.”
Tides of criticism come and go; they may leave the fame and name of Walter Scott deserted79, like the cairn of a forgotten warrior80 forsaken81 by a receding82 sea, or they may fill the space with the diapason of their waves. We cannot prophesy83. But one sound will not cease, if men dead remember, the carol of the lark84 that sang above Scott’s grave at the funeral of the dearest of his daughters. That song of praise for such happiness as—
sceptred king not laurelled conqueror85
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can give, has followed “this wondrous86 potentate” from three generations who have warmed their hands at the hearth of his genius, who have drunk of his enchanted87 cup, and eaten of his fairy bread, and been happy through his gift.
The End
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dweller
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| n.居住者，住客 | |
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joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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overflowed
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cerebral
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resolute
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| adj.坚决的，果敢的 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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unprecedented
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sentient
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| adj.有知觉的，知悉的；adv.有感觉能力地 | |
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scoured
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| 走遍（某地）搜寻（人或物）( scour的过去式和过去分词 )； （用力）刷； 擦净； 擦亮 | |
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sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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savings
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mawkish
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| adj.多愁善感的的；无味的 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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warily
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| adv.留心地 | |
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entail
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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discourteous
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| adj.不恭的，不敬的 | |
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courteous
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inter
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feud
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| n.长期不和；世仇；v.长期争斗；世代结仇 | |
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expiated
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resentment
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baron
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| n.男爵；(商业界等)巨头，大王 | |
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controvert
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snob
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recipients
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| adj.接受的；受领的；容纳的；愿意接受的n.收件人；接受者；受领者；接受器 | |
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apprentice
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deference
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descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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knight
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| n.骑士，武士；爵士 | |
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dictated
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| v.大声讲或读( dictate的过去式和过去分词 )；口授；支配；摆布 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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patriotism
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feudal
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attentive
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honourable
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remunerative
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embarrassment
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gratitude
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hearth
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radius
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entirely
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zealously
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| adv.热心地；热情地；积极地；狂热地 | |
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embroidered
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vassals
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toil
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syllables
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sublime
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intercourse
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encyclopaedia
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solicit
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celebrity
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beacon
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psychology
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liturgy
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bigotry
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followers
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vein
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judgment
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cardinal
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possessed
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expenditure
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commonsense
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knights
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| 骑士； （中古时代的）武士( knight的名词复数 )； 骑士； 爵士； （国际象棋中）马 | |
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virtue
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jealousy
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blemishes
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behold
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excellences
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| n.卓越( excellence的名词复数 )；（只用于所修饰的名词后）杰出的；卓越的；出类拔萃的 | |
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generosity
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chivalrous
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peculiar
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chapel
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relics
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pious
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bequest
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deserted
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warrior
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Forsaken
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| adj. 被遗忘的, 被抛弃的 动词forsake的过去分词 | |
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82
receding
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的现在分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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83
prophesy
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| v.预言；预示 | |
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84
lark
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| n.云雀，百灵鸟；n.嬉戏，玩笑；vi.嬉戏 | |
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85
conqueror
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| n.征服者，胜利者 | |
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86
wondrous
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| adj.令人惊奇的，奇妙的；adv.惊人地；异乎寻常地；令人惊叹地 | |
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87
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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