Chapter XLII: Preface (9)

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 _blood_, _then_ the charm is firm and good.' The two frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London (the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation) are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque under this influence; and it is well worth while to get the number for the week ending April 3, 1880, of _Young Folks_--'A magazine of instructive and entertaining literature for boys and girls of all ages,' containing 'A Sequel to Desdichado' (the modern development of Ivanhoe), in which a quite monumental example of the kind of art in question will be found as a leading illustration of this characteristic sentence, "See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "_my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger._" The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the 'folly' of _Ivanhoe_; for folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators--their wisdom none will so much as hear, how much less follow!

In both of the Masters, it is always to be remembered that the evil and good are alike conditions of literal _vision_: and therefore also, inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the first elements of all Scott's errors were in the milk of his consumptive nurse, which all but killed him as an infant, L. i. 19--and was without doubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness (L. i. 20). Then came (if the reader cares to know what I mean by Fors, let him read the page carefully) the fearful accidents to his only sister, and her death, L. i. 17; then the madness of his nurse, who planned his own murder (21), then the stories continually told him of the executions at Carlisle (24), his aunt's husband having seen them; issuing, he himself scarcely knows how, in the unaccountable terror that came upon him at the sight of statuary, 31--especially Jacob's ladder; then the murder of Mrs. Swinton, and finally the nearly fatal bursting of the blood vessel at Kelso, with the succeeding nervous illness, 65-67--solaced, while he was being 'bled and blistered till he had scarcely a pulse left,' by that history of the Knights of Malta--fondly dwelt on and realised by actual modelling of their fortress, which returned to his mind for the theme of its last effort in passing away.

[157] 'Se dit par denigrement, d'un chretien qui ne croit pas les dogmes de sa religion.'--Fleming, vol. ii. p. 659.

[158] 'A son nom,' properly. The sentence is one of Victor Cherbuliez's, in _Prosper Randoce_, which is full of other valuable ones. See the old nurse's 'ici bas les choses vont de travers, comme un chien qui va a vepres, p. 93; and compare Prosper's treasures, 'la petite Venus, et le petit Christ d'ivoire,' p. 121; also Madame Brehanne's request for the divertissement of 'quelque belle batterie a coups de couteau' with Didier's answer. 'Helas! madame, vous jouez de malheur, ici dans la Drome, l'on se massacre aussi peu que possible,' p. 33.

[159] Edgeworth's _Tales_ (Hunter, 1827), 'Harrington and Ormond,' vol. iii. p. 260.

[160] Alice of Salisbury, Alice Lee, Alice Bridgnorth.

[161] Scott's father was habitually ascetic. 'I have heard his son tell that it was common with him, if any one observed that the soup was good, to taste it again, and say, "Yes--it is too good, bairns," and dash a tumbler of cold water into his plate.'--Lockhart's _Life_ (Black, Edinburgh, 1869), vol. i. p. 312. In other places I refer to this book in the simple form of 'L.'

[162] A young lady sang to me, just before I copied out this page for press, a Miss Somebody's 'great song,' 'Live, and Love, and Die.' Had it been written for nothing better than silkworms, it should at least have added--Spin.

[163] See passage of introduction to _Ivanhoe_, wisely quoted in L. vi. 106.

[164] See below, note, p. 25, on the conclusion of _Woodstock_.

[165] L. iv. 177.

[166] L. vi. 67.

[167] 'One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can last for ever? who ever lasted so long?'--Sydney Smith (of the _Pirate_) to Jeffrey, December 30, 1821. (_Letters_, vol. ii. p. 223.)

[168] L. vi. p. 188. Compare the description of Fairy Dean, vii. 192.

[169] All, alas! were now in a great measure so written. _Ivanhoe_, _The Monastery_, _The Abbot_ and _Kenilworth_ were all published between December 1819 and January 1821, Constable & Co. giving five thousand guineas for the remaining copyright of them, Scott clearing ten thousand before the bargain was completed; and before the _Fortunes of Nigel_ issued from the press Scott had exchanged instruments and received his bookseller's bills for no less than four 'works of fiction,' not one of them otherwise described in the deeds of agreement, to be produced in unbroken succession, _each of them to fill up at least three volumes, but with proper saving clauses as to increase of copy money in case any of them should run to four_; and within two years all this anticipation had been wiped off by _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan's Well_, and _Redgauntlet_.

[170] _Woodstock_ was finished 26th March 1826. He knew then of his ruin; and wrote in bitterness, but not in weakness. The closing pages are the most beautiful of the book. But a month afterwards Lady Scott died; and he never wrote glad word more.

[171] Compare Mr. Spurgeon's not unfrequent orations on the same subject.

[172] There are three definite and intentional portraits of himself, in the novels, each giving a separate part of himself: Mr. Oldbuck, Frank Osbaldistone, and Alan Fairford.

[173] Andrew knows Latin, and might have coined the word in his conceit; but, writing to a kind friend in Glasgow, I find the brook was called 'Molyndona' even before the building of the Sub-dean Mill in 1446. See also account of the locality in Mr. George's admirable volume, _Old Glasgow_, pp. 129, 149, &c. The Protestantism of Glasgow, since throwing that powder of saints into her brook Kidron, has presented it with other pious offerings; and my friend goes on to say that the brook, once famed for the purity of its waters (much used for bleaching), 'has for nearly a hundred years been a crawling stream of loathsomeness. It is now bricked over, and a carriage way made on the top of it; underneath the foul mess still passes through the heart of the city, till it falls into the Clyde close to the harbour.'

[174] The following fragments out of the letters in my own possession, written by Scott to the builder of Abbotsford, as the outer decorations of the house were in process of completion, will show how accurately Scott had pictured himself in Monkbarns.

'Abbotsford: April 21, 1817.

'Dear Sir,--Nothing can be more obliging than your attention to the old stones. You have been as true as the sundial itself.' [The sundial had just been erected.] 'Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it is to be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case of accidents it will be safest in your custody till I come to town again on the 12th of May. Your former favours (which were weighty as acceptable) have come safely out here, and will be disposed of with great effect.'

'Abbotsford: July 30.

'I fancy the Tolbooth still keeps its feet, but, as it must soon descend, I hope you will remember me. I have an important use for the niche above the door; and though many a man has got a niche _in_ the Tolbooth by building, I believe I am the first that ever got a niche out of it on such an occasion. For which I have to thank your kindness, and to remain very much your obliged humble servant,

'WALTER SCOTT.'

'August 16.

'My dear Sir,--I trouble you with this [_sic_] few lines to thank you for the very accurate drawings and measurements of the Tolbooth door, and for your kind promise to attend to my interest and that of Abbotsford in the matter of the Thistle and Fleur de Lis. Most of our scutcheons are now mounted, and look very well, as the house is something after the model of an old hall (not a castle), where such things are well in character.' [Alas--Sir Walter, Sir Walter!] 'I intend the old lion to predominate over a well which the children have christened the Fountain of the Lions. His present den, however, continues to be the hall at Castle Street.'

'September 5.

'Dear Sir,--I am greatly obliged to you for securing the stone. I am not sure that I will put up the gate quite in the old form, but I would like to secure the means of doing so. The ornamental stones are now put up, and have a very happy effect. If you will have the kindness to let me know when the Tolbooth door comes down, I will send in my carts for the stones; I have an admirable situation for it. I suppose the door itself' [he means, the wooden one] 'will be kept for the new jail; if not, and not otherwise wanted, I would esteem it curious to possess it. Certainly I hope so many sore hearts will not pass through the celebrated door when in my possession as heretofore.'

* * * * *

'September 8.

'I should esteem it very fortunate if I could have the door also, though I suppose it is modern, having been burned down at the time of Porteous-mob.

'I am very much obliged to the gentlemen who thought these remains of the Heart of Midlothian are not ill bestowed on their intended possessor.'

[175] Henceforward, not in affectation, but for the reader's better convenience, I shall continue to spell 'Ryme' without our wrongly added _h_.

[176] L. ii. 278.

[177] 'Che nella mente mia _ragiona_.' Love--you observe, the highest _Reasonableness_, instead of French _ivresse_, or even Shakespearian 'mere folly'; and Beatrice as the Goddess of Wisdom in this third song of the _Convito_, to be compared with the Revolutionary Goddess of Reason; remembering of the whole poem chiefly the line:--

'Costei penso chi che mosso l'universo.'

(See Lyell's _Canzoniere_, p. 104.)

[178] [Greek: horan tes terpsios]--Plato, _Laws_, ii., Steph. 669. 'Hour' having here nearly the power of 'Fate' with added sense of being a daughter of Themis.

[179] 'Gunpowder is one of the greatest inventions of modern times, _and what has given such a superiority to civilised nations over barbarous_'! (_Evenings at Home_--fifth evening.) No man can owe more than I both to Mrs. Barbauld and Miss Edgeworth; and I only wish that in the substance of what they wisely said, they had been more listened to. Nevertheless, the germs of all modern conceit and error respecting manufacture and industry, as rivals to Art and to Genius, are concentrated in '_Evenings at Home_' and '_Harry and Lucy_'--being all the while themselves works of real genius, and prophetic of things that have yet to be learned and fulfilled. See for instance the paper, 'Things by their Right Names,' following the one from which I have just quoted (The Ship), and closing the first volume of the old edition of the _Evenings_.

[180] Carlyle, _French Revolution_ (Chapman, 1869), vol. ii. p. 70; conf. p. 25, and the _Ca ira_ at Arras, vol. iii. p. 276.

[181] _Ibid._ iii. 26.

[182] Carlyle, _French Revolution_, iii. 106, the last sentence altered in a word or two.

[183] I have been greatly disappointed, in taking soundings of our most majestic mountain pools, to find them, in no case, verge on the unfathomable.

[184] 'It must be put by the original, stanza for stanza, and verse for verse; and you will see what was permitted in a Catholic country and a bigoted age to Churchmen, on the score of Religion--and so tell those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy.

'I write in the greatest haste, it being the hour of the Corso, and I must go and buffoon with the rest. My daughter Allegra is just gone with the Countess G. in Count G.'s coach and six. Our old Cardinal is dead, and the new one not appointed yet--but the masquing goes on the same.' (Letter to Murray, 355th in Moore, dated Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1828.) 'A dreadfully moral place, for you must not look at anybody's wife, except your neighbour's.'

[185] See quoted _infra_ the mock, by Byron, of himself and all other modern poets, _Juan_, canto iii. stanza 86, and compare canto xiv. stanza 8. In reference of future quotations the first numeral will stand always for canto; the second for stanza; the third, if necessary, for line.

[186] _Island_, ii. 16, where see context.

[187] _Juan_, viii. 5; but, by your Lordship's quotation, Wordsworth says 'instrument'--not 'daughter.' Your Lordship had better have said 'Infant' and taken the Woolwich authorities to witness: only Infant would not have rymed.

[188] _Juan_, viii. 3; compare 14 and 63, with all its lovely context 61--68: then 82, and afterwards slowly and with thorough attention, the Devil's speech, beginning, 'Yes, Sir, you forget' in scene 2 of _The Deformed Transformed_: then Sardanapalus's, act i. scene 2, beginning 'he is gone, and on his finger bears my signet,' and finally, the _Vision of Judgment_, stanzas 3 to 5.

[189] _Island_, iii. 3, and compare, of shore surf, the 'slings its high flakes, shivered into sleet' of stanza 7.

[190] A modern editor--of whom I will not use the expressions which occur to me--finding the 'we' a redundant syllable in the iambic line, prints 'we're.' It is a little thing--but I do not recollect, in the forty years of my literary experience, any piece of editor's retouch quite so base. But I don't read the new editions much; that must be allowed for.

[191] _Island_, ii. 5. I was going to say, 'Look to the context.' but am fain to give it here; for the stanza, learned by heart, ought to be our school-introduction to the literature of the world.

'Such was this ditty of Tradition's days,
Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys
In song, where fame as yet hath left no sign
Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine;
Which leaves no record to the sceptic eye,
But yields young history all to harmony;
A boy Achilles, with the centaur's lyre
In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire.
For one long-cherish'd ballad's simple stave
Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave,
Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side,
Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide,
Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear,
Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear;
Invites, when hieroglyphics are a theme
For sages' labours or the student's dream;
Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil--
The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil.
Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude,
But such inspired the Norseman's solitude,
Who came and conquer'd; such, wherever rise
Lands which no foes destroy or civilise,
Exist; and what can our accomplish'd art
Of verse do more than reach the a waken'd heart?'

[192] _Shepherd's Calendar._ 'Coronation,' loyal-pastoral for Carnation; 'sops in wine,' jolly-pastoral for double pink; 'paunce,' thoughtless pastoral for pansy; 'chevisaunce' I don't know, (not in Gerarde); 'flowre-delice'--pronounce dellice--half made up of 'delicate' and 'delicious.'

[193] Herrick, _Dirge for Jephthah's Daughter_.

[194] _Passionate Pilgrim._

[195] In this point, compare the _Curse of Minerva_ with the _Tears of the Muses_.

[196] 'He,'--Lucifer; (_Vision of Judgment_, 24). It is precisely because Byron was _not_ his servant, that he could see the gloom. To the Devil's true servants, their Master's presence brings both cheerfulness and prosperity;--with a delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue; and of the 'progress' of things in general:--in smooth sea and fair weather,--and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom.

[197] _Island_, ii. 4; perfectly orthodox theology, you observe; no denial of the fall,--nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay, nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in its civilisation.

THE

ELEMENTS OF DRAWING

IN

THREE LETTERS TO BEGINNERS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR