The Upton Letters | Page 5

his
own sympathy has always been practical rather than emotional; his own
tendency has been to help rather than to console. Again, speaking of his
own writings, he says that he realises that if there is anything good
about his poetry or prose, "It is a hurried frankness of composition,
which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active
disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous touch to the above,
which he was great enough to have spared: "I have been no sigher in
shades--no writer of
Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays Framed on fancies and
whistled on reeds."
A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says that
"he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work."
That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as
Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware
that methods differ. What, for instance, could be more extraordinary
than the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott with his "You
know I don't care a curse about what I write;" and Wordsworth, whose
chief reading in later days was his own poetry. Whenever the two are
brought into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth is all pose and
self-absorption; Scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. Wordsworth
staying at Abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and
stays at home with his daughter. When the party return, they find
Wordsworth sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own
Excursion. A party of travellers arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to
the chaise, to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books

they have with them. When the two are together, Scott is all courteous
deference; he quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately
compliments, which the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff,
complacent bows. But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never
lets fall a single syllable from which one could gather that he was
aware that his host had ever put pen to paper.
Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his
pomposity out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little more
deeply the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have infused
Wordsworth with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put
just a little stiffening into Scott. He ought to have felt--and he did
not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a
sham seigneur.
But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together,
and Tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds uncomplaining
and undaunted on his way: "I did not like them to think that I could
ever be beaten by anything," he says. But at length the hand, tired with
the pen, falls, and twilight creeps upon the darkening mind.
I paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to
Abbotsford. I don't think I ever described it to you. My first feeling was
one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the place, testifying to
a certain imprudent prosperity. But the sight of the rooms themselves;
the desk, the chair, the book-lined library, the little staircase by which,
early or late, Scott could steal back to his hard and solitary work; the
death-mask, with its pathetic smile; the clothes, with hat and shoes,
giving, as it were, a sense of the very shape and stature of the
man--these brought the whole thing up with a strange reality.
Of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about the
place; the plaster beams, painted to look like oak; the ugly
emblazonries; the cruel painted glass; the laboriously collected
objects--all these reveal the childish side of Scott, the superficial self
which slipped from him so easily when he entered into the cloud.
And then the sight of his last resting-place; the ruined abbey, so deeply

embowered in trees that the three dim Eildon peaks are invisible; the
birds singing in the thickets that clothe the ruined cloisters--all this
made a parable, and brought before one with an intensity of mystery the
wonder of it all. The brief life, so full of plans for permanence; the
sombre valley of grief; the quiet end, when with failing lips he
murmured that the only comfort for the dying heart was the thought
that it had desired goodness, however falteringly, above everything.
I can't describe to you how deeply all this affects me--with what a
hunger of the heart, what tenderness, what admiration, what wonder.
The very frankness of the surprise with which, over and over again, the
brave spirit confesses that he does not miss the delights of life as much
as he expected, nor find the burden as heavy