The Crown of Wild Olive also Munera Pulveris;...

[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 'Louvécienne' (Lucienne) of Gaboriau—she, province-born and bred; and opposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstress friend. 'De ce Paris, où elle était née, elle savait tout—elle connaissait tout. Rien ne l'étonnait, nul ne l'intimidait. Sa science des détails matériels de l'existence était inconcevable. Impossible de la duper!—Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si économe n'avait même pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l'honneur de la femme. Je n'avais pas idée d'une si complète absence de sens moral; d'une si inconsciente dépravation, d'une impudence si effrontément naïve.'—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 dénigrement, d'un chrétien 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 à vêpres, p. 93; and compare Prosper's treasures, 'la petite Vénus, et le petit Christ d'ivoire,' p. 121; also Madame Brehanne's request for the divertissement of 'quelque belle batterie à coups de couteau' with Didier's answer. 'Hélas! madame, vous jouez de malheur, ici dans la Drôme, 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.'