Seventh Annual Dinner

1901

The Meeting took place in the Royal Hotel, on Wednesday 9^th January 1901.

The CHAIRMAN, in rising to propose "The Immortal -Memory of Sir Walter Scott," said Scott was by common consent one of the greatest men who distinguished the nineteenth century. I think I may say that beyond dispute he was the greatest literary man that our country has produced during that century. But we honour not only the author, we honour the man-and we honour at once the man and the author. In some cases, while we admire the greatness of an author's works, we find it necessary to apologise for the littlenesses of his life. In this case the works were worthy of the man, and his life was even greater than his works. There are many great works of genius in which there appears to be some abnormal development, in which there is something morbid, where one faculty is developed at the expense of the rest, but with Sir Walter Scott the great characteristic-that feature which everyone most admires in him and his works is his perfect health and the absolute sanity of everything that he left behind him. There was an equal development of the whole man, and a perfect balance of all the faculties. The process of growth- with Scott was not unduly rapid. He was no precocious genius. He grew as slowly as the oak. He was "making himself" for half his life. It was not until after he was thirty years old that he produced that work which will never be forgotten, "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," with his incomparable notes and introduction. The " Minstrelsy" was the prelude to that long series of original works which began with " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and ended with "Count Robert of Paris," a novel which, perhaps, would be more highly appreciated if it had not appeared in company with "Castle Dangerous."

In that magnificent series was exemplified perhaps more than ever before, or since, in literature, the saying that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." It was because the man was so full of life himself, that we have such an embodiment of his genius in his works.

We in Scotland may be specially proud when we reflect that Sir Walter Scott was essentially of Scottish growth. No man was ever more thoroughly saturated with Scotland, with its scenery, with its history, its songs, its legends, and its remains. Every part of Scotland was familiar to him-the Lowlands, the Highlands, the Border country. Every class in Scotland, high and low, he well knew, and was able to depict with unrivalled fidelity. He knew their strong and their weak points. He was not only able to draw a Jeanie Deans, but could paint to the life an Andrew Fairservice. He might have said with Burns, that there had been poured into his veins a flood of Scottish feeling which would boil along till the floodgates were closed in eternal rest. Never were lines more heartfelt than those in which he spoke of his own Border-country.

" By Yarrow's stream still let me stray,

Though none should guide my feeble way,

Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break

Although it chill my withered cheek."

Every Scotsman holds his head higher because Sir Walter Scott was born and bred in Scotland- and every Scotsman is proud to think that his country so largely contributed to the making of so great a man.

Scott lived the life of a man among men. He was no literary recluse. His own lines on William of Deloraine describe the stuff of which Sir Walter himself was made

" A stark moss-trooping Scott was he

As e'er couched Border-lance by knee."

The old Border spirit broke out on every occasion. Lockhart speaks of his extraordinary partiality for a ford when he had to cross,,, a river on horseback; he preferred an unsafe ford to a safe bridge:_ any day. Often as Scott plunged into the water would he shout out lines, which Lockhart suspected belonged to some early composition of his own

To To tak' the foord he aye was first,

Unless the English loons were near;

Plunge vassal than, plunge horse and matt

Auld Boltfoot rode into the rear."

Scott lived in stirring times, "'The Lay of the last Minstrel," appeared in the same year in which the Battle of Austerlitz was fought. The country for years was under the shadow of the threat of invasion, a very real threat indeed in those days. We cannot imagine Scott acting like his great contemporary in another country -Goethe-who, when he accompanied the German Army that invaded France at the time of the revolutionary war, lived in camp the life of a hermit, engaged as we are told, in the study of optics, and at a later date pursued his literary work within sight and hearing of the Battle of Jena.

It was never given to Sir Walter to drink "delight of battle with his peers," but he smelt the battle afar off. We have to-night heard of volunteering, and of home defence. We know what kind of volunteer Scott was. You may recollect the story told by Lord Cockburn in his reminiscences, how the Edinburgh Light Horse (I do not know whether the manoeuvre still exists or not) were wont to practise their swordsmanship by cutting at a turnip at the end of a pole. Many, according to Lord Cockburn, thought more of keeping their own seats than of bringing down the turnip, but Scott pricked gallantly forward, muttering to himself, "Cut them down, the villains, cut them down." With what rapture would Sir Walter Scott have hailed our guest of this evening! Lord Dundonald would have been a man after his own heart ; and I fully believe that Sir Walter would have given up years of his life, and all his literary fame, if that had been possible, for "one crowded hour of glorious life" spent in the relief of Ladysmith.

In Scott we find exemplified one of the most characteristic indications of perfect health, and that is the combination of imagination and common sense. His sentiment was never overstrained, and he never lost touch of the facts of life. His feet were always on solid earth, however high his fancy's flight.

It was said by one of the great Whigs of Edinburgh, when some pert young gentleman took upon himself to say that Scott was a great genius, but somewhat lacking in commonsense: "I have the misfortune to differ from you, young man. '1 o my mind, Sir Walter Scott's sense is even more wonderful than his genius."

Take one instance from his works. In no scene in the whole of his writings, is feeling wrought up to a higher point than in the trial of Effie Deans in the Heart of Midlothian. Many writers might have been capable of describing with thrilling pathos the trial scene, but would have been tempted to represent the audience as so carried away by what they had witnessed that they could think of nothing else, and that their life did not at once resume its ordinary course. Such, however, are not the facts of life, and such was not the way in which Scott described the sequel to that trial scene. As he puts it, the audience crowded out of the Court of justice, and in the excitement of movement and of animal spirits, soon forgot, to a great extent, any emotions that had been engendered by the scene that they had just witnessed. The professional spectators walked away discussing the statute under which the girl had been convicted, the nature of the evidence, the arguments of counsel, and even the summing up of the judge. Mrs Howden and Miss Darnahoy resumed their sparring. Mr Saddletree prosed as he had prosed before. Mrs Saddletree snubbed her husband, and scolded her servant lass. The whole stream of life in the novel went on as it would have gone on in reality. Romance writers are sometimes said to transport us into an unreal world. With Scott that is never so. We are always in this world. The sentiment never overshoots the mark, and we feel that while we are reading of events of the greatest interest, we are not parting company with our every day surroundings.

Another of Scott's characteristics as an author is the entire absence of morbid introspection. He describes life. He does not take us into the dissecting room, or the pathological theatre. He describes life and action; he describes character as it is exhibited in life and action, and when he describes nature, he depicts to us nature as she is-nature as she appears to the healthy man, with a sound mind in a sound body, not too much preoccupied by the joy or sorrow of the moment to listen to the message which nature has to give. Ruskin, in language of unrivalled eloquence, expresses the idea which I am endeavouring to convey "instead of making nature anywise subordinate to himself, he makes himself subordinate to her -follows her lead simply does not venture to bring his own cares and thoughts into her pure and quiet presence-paints her in her simple and universal truth, adding no result of momentary passion or fancy, and appears, therefore, at first, shallower than other poets, being in reality wider and healthier."

May I illustrate this by quoting from one poem of Sir Walter's, written when he was rendered by illness incapable for the time of deriving his wonted pleasure from a well-known landscape. The view described is familiar to many of you ; it is from the hill above Cauldshiels Loch. The opening lines are these:

The The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill,

In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet;

The westland wind is hush and still,

The lake lies sleeping at my feet."

After describing the familiar features, he asks himself

"Are they still such as once they were?

Or is the dreary change in me?"

But then how clearly he recognises in the next stanza that is what she ever was--that it is himself who is changed

Alas Alas the warp'd and broken board,

How can it bear the painter's dye?

The harp of strained and tuneless chord

How to the minstrel's skill reply

To aching eyes each landscape lowers,

To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;

And Araby's or Eden's bowers

Were barren as this moorland hill."

Another feature of Scott's robust and masculine nature is that he never dwells on topics of an offensive kind. No works are more perfectly pure than those of Scott. A claim is sometimes made on behalf of Art, that it may describe in detail any subject, however unpleasing, and that we ought to look, if we really understood Art, only to the skill of the artist; that however repulsive the minutia may be, the gifts of the artist may be properly exercised upon them. Surely that view is unsound. One object of Art is to give pleasure, but it is to give pleasure to a healthy nature. There are some subjects; some facts of life, which must be recognised, but on which no healthy mind cares to linger. If the skill of the artist, whether he be author, or whether he be painter, is so exerted as to pain a healthy moral sense, it is quite as indefensible-and I am speaking purely from the artistic point of view-as if a man painted a most beautiful picture, which pleased the eye, but with materials which offended the nose. That you please one sense is no excuse for offending another. In this respect, Scott the author was the same as Scott the man. Within a few months of his death, he was able to use words which I think can not be too often recalled, when we try to remember what manner of man and what manner of author he was:-"It is a comfort to me to think that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles, and that I have written nothing which on my death-bed I should wish blotted."

With Scott there was a total absence of all those weaknesses that sometimes beset men of letters. If jealousy of a rival might ever have been forgiven, it would have been in the case of Scott, when his fame as a poet was for a time eclipsed by Byron. Byron had learnt a great deal from Scott, and in the poem by which he first became known he had handled Scott with a little roughness. But Scott's nature was too "healthy, sound, and clear, and whole," to entertain, even for a moment, any of that jealousy to which some of the members of the "genus irritable datum" have been prone. The most generous appreciation of Byron's works proceeded from Scott's pen. He hailed every fresh triumph of his successful rival, and when Byron was taken from the world of letters, it was from Scott's pen that there proceeded one of the most admirable tributes to his memory.

Another and even more striking proof of the robust healthiness of Scott's nature was afforded by his demeanour when the great crash in his fortunes came, just seventy-five years ago. His bearing is a lesson for all time. It appears to me to be greater even than all his works.

When I read that interesting book in which Lord Rosebery has told the story of the last years of the great Napoleon at St Helena, I could not help comparing the last years of Napoleon with the last years of Scott. Scott was the victim of a humbler tragedy; but, after all, in human affairs the scale of events is comparatively nothing; it is the moral qualities that they evoke, or make manifest, that are the really important things, and I venture to say that for all the essential elements of human greatness, we should look rather to those six years at Edinburgh than to the six years at St Helena. When his fortunes were ruined, Scott was engaged in the composition of "Woodstock." He never flagged in his task for one moment. He prosecuted it to the end, and I would defy the most acute critic to find any trace of the catastrophe through which the author passed while that work was being composed. The work as a whole ranks high, but, if I were to choose I should prefer the latter part-with the intended duel between the disguised King and Markham Everard, the escape of the king from Woodstock, and the final vagaries of one of the best characters of the kind, Wildrake - written after the crash had come. Ruskin speaks somewhere of the manuscript of " Woodstock " as one of his most cherished possessions, the handwriting, he says, bears no trace of change, and erasures and alterations are as rare in the later as in the earlier part of the work. There is one entry in his journal which I should like to read; it is one of the most pathetic, and yet noblest things in literature. Writing on 19th January, 1826, when the members of his family, his wife and daughter, could hardly realise what had befallen them, he says, "Before and after dinner I finished about twenty printed pages of ` Woodstock,' but to what effect others must judge. A painful scene after dinner and another after supper endeavouring to convince these poor dear creatures that they must not look for miracles, but consider the misfortune as certain and only to be lessened by patience and labour."

For six years the heroic struggle went on, and during those six years, besides a mass of work that might have made the fortune of half-a-dozen literary men, he produced two works of imagination, which rank high in the list even of his achievements -,'The Fair Maid of Perth," and "Anne of Geierstein." The double tragedy in the "Fair Maid" is one of the most moving things to be found in fiction. Who that has read it can forget the voyage of the Duke of Rothesay down the Tay on his fatal journey to Falkland, to the sad strains of the music of poor Louise, with the shadows of impending doom darkening above him? But his tragedy pales before that of the remorse of Eachin. "The faithful nine are still pursuing me, they say with feeble voice, Strike but one blow in our revenge, we all died for you." "Anne of Geierstein " falls short indeed of " Quentin Durward," but particularly in its later part, where Margaret of Anjou, and Charles the Bold are depicted, it contains scenes of extraordinary power.

Failing health never broke his spirits nor relaxed his efforts. "His wound was deep, he fain would sleep," but he never bated heart or hope. He fought on till death came to him in his own beloved Borderland, and he died, as we are told, within hearing of that sound which in life had been ever most delicious to his ear, the murmur of the Tweed over her bed of pebbles.

Looking to the works of Scott we cannot but be struck with the essential unity of all he wrote. The minstrelsy, the poems, the novels, the historical sketches, all form one coherent whole. In style he had a certain negligent greatness. In him we find from time to time what Pope remarked as characteristic of Homer, "a brave neglect," with which one would not part for the world. As in his style, so in his plots, Scott's maxim was "As the tree has fallen, so let it lie." It would have been well if this rule had admitted of no exception. In two cases-the resurrection of Athelstane in "Ivanhoe," and the alteration of that event on which the whole plot of "St Ronan's Well" depended, he was unfortunately persuaded by the remonstrances of friends into changing the direction in which the tree had fallen.

"The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" was said, at the time it appeared, by a contemporary critic to contain within itself the elements of a hundred romances, and never was a truer word of criticism. As the acorn contains the oak in miniature, so we may find in the "Minstrelsy" in miniature, the poems, the romances, the novels, and the history. Lockhart says of the "Minstrelsy" that Scott hardly interpolated a line in the ballads which he collected. I do not know whether the possible exception indicated by Lockhart's phrase covered one of the best verses in "The Song of the Outlaw Murray," which forms a conspicuous feature in that collection. I refer to the stanza in which the King gave his answer to the Laird of Buccleuch, when the latter expostulated with him, on going to see the Outlaw in the Forest of Ettrick, on the ground that

" For a king to gang an outlaw till

Is beneath his state and his dignity."

You remember the King's answer

" Then out and spak' the noble king

And round him cast a wilie e'e ;

`Now hand thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott,

Nor speak of reif nor felony,

For had every honest man his awin kye

A richt pair clan thy name wad be.'"

In that verse, if I mistake not, we can trace the hand of the master.

Scott not only saved from loss our Scottish ballads, but was so thoroughly embued with their spirit that he excelled them. The ballad of the Battle of Harlaw sung by Elspeth in "The Antiquary" is a finer ballad than any even in "The Minstrelsy," with the possible exception of the Douglas Tragedy. What a series of pictures do his poems call up-the Wizard's Grave in the "Lay," the Duel in the "Lady of the Lake," Flodden Field in "Marmion,"-the most stirring, and, to us Scots at least, the most pathetic of all battle pieces."

It is impossible to select scenes from that great picture gallery, the Waverley Novels, for there a man must choose what he likes most himself. Over and over again he will revert to those pictures in which he finds what best suits his own mind.

There are of course, two great groups of characteristics in the Waverley Novels. We have those portions of them which delineate character and especially Scottish character, and the Romances Both of these elements we have most happily combined in one, which I would put very nearly, if not altogether, at the top of the list, "Old Mortality." Nowhere is there a more admirable delineation of Scottish character. Caddie Headrigg as a type of Scottish peasant will be almost as immortal as the man who delineated him; and in the more serious parts of the story what pathos, what depth of interest we have! Scott himself said at a later period of his life, that if he had to do the work again he would have drawn more favourably the character of the moderate Presbyterians; but into his picture of the heroism and suffering of the Covenanters, what an amount of genius, of heart, and feeling, has he thrown! I know of no scene more thrilling and sublime than that before the Privy Council when Macbriar is tortured and sentenced to death, and when the extremest agonies only serve to bring into relief the heroic fervour of the religious enthusiast.

There is one feature of the novels that I have sometimes thought might form the subject of an essay by itself. I refer to the names which Scott selected, or invented, for his places and characters. You all recollect the parish of "Skreigh-me-dead," to which David Deans was anxious that there should be moderated a harmonious call for Reuben Butler. There is the parish of Dreepdaily, which had the honour of giving birth to Andrew Fairservice. What a name for a law agent was Nichol Novit, and what a name for a leading counsel was auld Whilliewha. Many a schoolmaster might deserve the name of Whackbairn; it sounds so natural that one can hardly regard it as an invented name. Scottish lairds are represented by the Laird of Langcale, and Mattie's near cousin, the Laird of Limmerfield. There is a fund of humour in all these names which might be worth exploiting, hut after all it is possibly better that works like Scott's should not be too much dissected. These things are enjoyed most when we come upon them in the natural setting of the story itself.

There are two occasional tales in the novels which I should wish to recal to your recollection. One of them, Wandering Willie's Tale, I own I can hardly read even at noonday without a very uncanny feeling, the other is the story of Nanty Ewart's Life as told to Alan Fairford in "Redgauntlet," in which the recklessness of the narrator serves but to deepen the pathos of the tragedy.

When one approaches Scott's heroines, one is rather on delicate ground. Many think that they are not his strongest point. We have, however, some pictures among them, not easy to match-- Minna on her pony hanging over the cliff; Rebecca on the battlements; Die Vernon bending from her horse to bid what seemed to be an eternal farewell to her lover. Above all we have Jeanie Deans, whose portrait shows how thoroughly Scott understood his country. We have sometimes had presented to us delineations of Scotland in the eighteenth century which might lead one to suppose that it was a sort of squalid pandemonium. In such delineations one side only of the picture is given. Scott knew his country as a whole, and the best answer to any such one-sided view is to point to Jeanie Deans.

Shall I confess to a juvenile weakness for Edith Blended? Many judicious friends have told me that I ought to be ashamed of it. I can only say that whether my judgment be right or wrong, its persistency shows how difficult it is to eradicate an early attachment.

One other of Scott's portraits cannot be omitted in reviewing that great gallery, one to which we often turn in our lighter mood. It is that of Major Dalgetty in "The Legend of Montrose." Was there ever anything more inimitable than his assuring the Marquis of Argyle at a crisis calculated to shake the nerves of any man, that if any prejudice happened to his person or to his horse, Montrose would hold the Marquis accountable? You remember when Ranald of the Mist on his deathbed spoke of his foes in the spirit of the line which we have just heard sung, "Give their roof to the flame, and their flesh to the eagles," how the Major remonstrated on the ground that though every soldier had to take part in storming of towns, burning of suburbs, and wasting of the country, yet in all well regulated services, it was the rule when death approached to express sorrow for such deeds, and utter some comfortable prayer ; and how when Ranald was about to die as he had lived, the Major assured him that he should take care that as few saw him as possible, as he could not think his departure at all creditable to a Christian army. I have said nothing of one work which will appeal to many of us, "The Tales of a Grandfather." We used to be brought up on that book. I know we learned the history of Scotland from it at the Edinburgh Academy, and I cannot forget the horror with which I found, when, now many years ago, I revisited my old school, that "The Tales of a Grandfather" had been superseded by some modern compendium. We are told "The Tales" are inaccurate. People have said the same thing of Herodotus. Such works convey a great deal more truth than the most carefully written of dull histories. These compilations leave in the mind at best but a blurred outline. "'The Tales of a Grandfather" impress on the mind of the reader a picture as vivid as if he had been present at every scene in Scottish history which Scott described. This book ought to be part of the education of every Scottish child. I am glad we have among us our distinguished friend, Sir Henry Craik. There is one practical suggestion which I recommend for his consideration, and it is, that it should be made a condition of the Government grant to any Scottish school that the "Tales of a Grandfather " should be read there.

I ask you to drink to "The Immortal Memory of Sir Walter Scott, the great author, the great man, the good man."

The toast was drunk in silence.

The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.

www.eswsc.com

Scanned from the original 1901 Bulletin and converted by Lee A. Simpson in Feb 2007.

Complete transcript of the proceedings available upon request.

lee@walterscottclub.org.uk