Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

549
SCOTT
long as he could, but as bill after bill came due he was
obliged to make urgent application to Scott, and the truth
was thus forced from him item by item. He had by no
means revealed all when Scott, who behaved with admir¬
able good-nature, was provoked into remonstrating, “For
heaven’s sake, treat me as a man and not as a milch-cow.”
The proceeds of Rokeby (January 1813) and of other labours
of Scott’s pen were swallowed up, and bankruptcy was
inevitable, when Constable, still eager at any price to secure
Scott’s services, came to the rescue. With his help three
crises were tided over in 1813.
It was in the midst of these ignoble embarrassments
that Scott opened up the rich new vein of the Waverley
novels. He chanced upon the manuscript of the opening
chapters of Waverley, and resolved to complete the story.
Four weeks in the summer of 1814 sufficed for the work,
and Waverley appeared without the author’s name in July.
Many plausible reasons might be given and have been
given for Scott’s resolution to publish anonymously. The
quaintest reason, and possibly the main one, though it is
hardly intelligible now, is that given by Lockhart, that he
considered the writing of novels beneath the dignity of a
grave clerk of the Court of Session. Why he kept up the
mystification, though the secret was an open one to all his
Edinburgh acquaintances, is more easily understood. He
enjoyed it, and his formally initiated coadjutors enjoyed
it; it relieved him from the annoyances of foolish compli¬
ment • and it was not unprofitable,—curiosity about “ the
Great Unknown” keeping alive the interest in his works.
The secret was so well kept by all to whom it was de¬
finitely entrusted, and so many devices were used to throw
conjecture off the scent, that even Scott’s friends, who were
certain of the authorship from internal evidence, were
occasionally puzzled. He kept on producing in his own
name as much work as seemed humanly possible for an
official who was to be seen every day at his post and as
often in society as the most fashionable of his professional
brethren. His treatises on chivalry, romance, and the
drama, besides an elaborate work in two volumes on Border
antiquities, appeared in the same year with Waverley, and
his edition of Swift in nineteen volumes in the same week.
The Lord of the Isles was published in January 1815 ; Guy
Mannering, written in “six weeks about Christmas,” in
February; PauVs Letters to his Kinsfolk and The Field of
Waterloo in the same year. Harold the Dauntless,1 not to
mention the historical part of the Annual Register, appeared
in the same year with The Antiquary, The Black Dwarf, and
Old Mortality (1816). No wonder that the most positive
interpreters of internal evidence were mystified. It was
not as if he had buried himself in the country for the
summer half of the year. On the contrary, he kept open
house at Abbotsford in the fine old feudal fashion and
was seldom without visitors. His own friends and many
strangers from a distance, with or without introductions,
sought him there, and found a hearty hospitable country
laird, entirely occupied to all outward appearance with
local and domestic business and sport, building and plant¬
ing, adding wing to wing, acre to acre, plantation to
plantation, with just leisure enough for the free-hearted
entertainment of his guests and the cultivation of friendly
relations with his humble neighbours. How could such a
man find time to write two or three novels a year, besides
what was published in his own name ? Even the few
intimates who knew how early he got up to prepare his
packet for the printer, and had some idea of the extra¬
ordinary power that he had acquired of commanding his
faculties for the utilization of odd moments, must have
1 This poem, like the Bridal of Triermain, did not bear his name
on the title-page, but the authorship was an open secret, although he
tried to encourage the idea that the author was his friend Erskine.
wondered at times whether he had not inherited the arts
of his ancestral relation Michael Scot, and kept a goblin
in some retired attic or vault.
Scott’s fertility is not absolutely unparalleled; the late
Mr Trollope claimed to have surpassed him in rate as well
as total amount of production, having also business duties
to attend to. But in speed of production combined with
variety and depth of interest and weight and accuracy of
historical substance Scott is still unrivalled. On his
claims as a serious historian, which Carlyle ignored in his
curiously narrow and splenetic criticism, he was always,
with all his magnanimity, peculiarly sensitive. A certain
feeling that his antiquarian studies were undervalued seems
to have haunted him from his youth. It was probably
this that gave the sting to Jeffrey’s criticism of Marmion,
and that tempted him to the somewhat questionable pro¬
ceeding of reviewing his own novels in the Quarterly upon
the appearance of Old Mortality. He was nettled besides
at the accusation of having treated the Covenanters un¬
fairly, and wanted to justify himself by the production of
historical documents. In this criticism of himself Scott
replied lightly to some of the familiar objections to his
work, such as the feebleness of his heroes, Waverley, Ber¬
tram, Lovel, and the melodramatic character of some of
his scenes and characters. But he argued more seriously
against the idea that historical romances are the enemies
of history, and he rebutted by anticipation Carlyle’s ob¬
jection that he wrote only to amuse idle persons who like
to lie on their backs and read novels. His apologia is
worth quoting. Historical romances, he admits, have
always been failures, but the failure has been due to the
imperfect knowledge of the writers and not to the species
of composition. If, he says, anachronisms in manners
can be avoided, and “the features of an age gone by can
be recalled in a spirit of delineation at once faithful and
striking, . . . the composition itself is in every point of
view dignified and improved; and the author, leaving
the light and frivolous associates with whom a careless
observer would be disposed to ally him, takes his seat on
the bench of the historians of his time and country. In
this proud assembly, and in no mean place of it, we are
disposed to rank the author of these works. At once a
master of the great events and minute incidents of history,
and of the manners of the times he celebrates, as distin¬
guished from those which now prevail, the intimate thus
of the living and of the dead, his judgment enables him
to separate those traits which are characteristic from those
that are generic; and his imagination, not less accurate
and discriminating than vigorous and vivid, presents to
the mind of the reader the manners of the times, and in¬
troduces to his familiar acquaintance the individuals of
the drama as they thought and spoke and acted.” This
defence of himself shows us the ideal at which Scott
aimed, and which he realized. He was not in the least
unconscious of his own excellence. He did not hesitate
in this review to compare himself with Shakespeare in
respect of truth to nature. “The volume which this
author has studied is the great book of nature. He has
gone abroad into the world in quest of what the world
will certainly and abundantly supply, but what a man of
great discrimination alone will find, and a man of the very
highest genius will alone depict after he has discovered it.
The characters of Shakespeare are not more exclusively
human, not more perfectly men and women as they live
and move, than those of this mysterious author.”
The immense strain of Scott’s double or quadruple life
as sheriff and clerk, hospitable laird, poet, novelist, and mis¬
cellaneous man of letters, publisher and printer, though
the prosperous excitement sustained him for a time, soon
told upon his health. Early in 1817 began a series of