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Page 30
An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as
'Hawthorne and delirium tremens.' I am not aware that extreme orderliness,
masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a predetermined effect
are characteristics of the visions of delirium. If they be, then there is a
deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens in your
style. But your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of
fancy and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr.
Hawthorne had at his command. He was a great writer--the greatest writer in
prose fiction whom America has produced. But you and he have not much in
common, except a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy
allegories about the workings of conscience.
I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American
fiction. These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about
brevity and the steady working to one single effect. Probably you would not be
very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your
countrymen's favourite novelist. He is long, he is didactic, he is eminently
uninspired. In the works of one who is, what you were called yourself, a
Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute observation, the subtlety,
and the unfailing distinction. But, destitute of humour as you unhappily but
undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the charm of 'Daisy Miller.' You
would admit the unity of effect secured in 'Washington Square,' though that
effect is as remote as possible from the terror of 'The House of Usher' or the
vindictive triumph of 'The Cask of Amontillado.'
Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to the
hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet among poetasters,
dowered with a scholar's taste without a scholar's training, embittered by his
sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his consolations.
XV.
To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
Rodono, St. Mary's Loch:
Sept. 5, 1885.
Sir,--In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of all
men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for you, and
that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your company. If some
Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of turning mortals into
swine, and had given me a choice, into that fortunate pig, blessed among his
race, would I have been converted! You, almost alone among men of letters,
still, like a living friend, win and charm us out of the past; and if one
might call up a poet, as the scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades,
who would not, out of all the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who
that ever meddled with letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed
even a tithe of your simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of
jealousy, that envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they
came, but never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but
the Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?
Were the word 'genial' not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old term
might be applied, above all men, to 'the Shirra.' But perhaps we scarcely need
a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare, or rather so
lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott. Here, in the heart
of your own country, among your own grey round-shouldered hills (each so like
the other that the shadow of one falling on its neighbour exactly outlines
that neighbour's shape), it is of you and of your works that a native of the
Forest is most frequently brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and
the hill, all the dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all
the memory of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have
combined to inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in
your song. It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as
in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless you.
It is not 'Sixty Years Since' the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell for the
last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is altered! But two
generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from Edinburgh to
Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still vending, in George
Street, old books and new. Of politics I have not the heart to speak. Little
joy would you have had in most that has befallen since the Reform Bill was
passed, to the chivalrous cry of 'burke Sir Walter.' We are still very Radical
in the Forest, and you were taken away from many evils to come. How would the
cheek of Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The
Soudan, Maiwand, and many others that recall political cowardice or military
incapacity! On the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of
Gordon, or wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with
Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among the
bravest! Only he who told how
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