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‘Yes, and see what it all came to in the end.’

Not so, dark-virulent Minos-Mucklewrath; the end came of quite other things: of these, came such length of days and peace as Scott had in his Fatherland, and such immortality as he has in all lands.

Nathless, firm, though deeply courteous, rebuke, for his sometimes overmuch light-mindedness, was administered to him by the more grave and thoughtful Byron. For the Lord Abbot of Newstead knew his Bible by heart as well as Scott, though it had never been given him by his mother as her dearest possession. Knew it, and, what was more, had thought of it, and sought in it what Scott had never cared to think, nor been fain to seek.

And loving Scott well, and always doing him every possible pleasure in the way he sees to be most agreeable to him–as, for instance, remembering with precision, and writing down the very next morning, every blessed word that the Prince Regent had been pleased to say of him before courtly audience,–he yet conceived that such cheap ryming as his own Bride of Abydos, for instance, which he had written from beginning to end in four days, or even the travelling reflections of Harold and Juan on men and women, were scarcely steady enough Sunday afternoon’s reading for a patriarch-Merlin like Scott. So he dedicates to him a work of a truly religious tendency, on which for his own part he has done his best,–the drama of Cain. Of which dedication the virtual significance to Sir Walter might be translated thus. Dearest and last of Border soothsayers, thou hast indeed told us of Black Dwarfs, and of White Maidens, also of Grey Friars, and Green Fairies; also of sacred hollies by the well, and haunted crooks in the glen. But of the bushes that the black dogs rend in the woods of Phlegethon; and of the crooks in the glen, and the bickerings of the burnie where ghosts meet the mightiest of us; and of the black misanthrope, who is by no means yet a dwarfed one, and concerning whom wiser creatures than Hobbie Elliot may tremblingly ask ‘Gude guide us, what’s yon?’ hast thou yet known, seeing that thou hast yet told, nothing.

Scott may perhaps have his answer. We shall in good time hear.

JOHN RUSKIN

FOOTNOTES:

[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 ‘Louvecienne’ (Lucienne) of Gaboriau–she, province-born and bred; and opposed to Parisian civilisation in the character of her sempstress friend. ‘De ce Paris, ou elle etait nee, elle savait tout–elle connaissait tout. Rien ne l’etonnait, nul ne l’intimidait. Sa science des details materiels de l’existence etait inconcevable. Impossible de la duper!–Eh bien! cette fille si laborieuse et si econome n’avait meme pas la plus vague notion des sentiments qui sont l’honneur de la femme. Je n’avais pas idee d’une si complete absence de sens moral; d’une si inconsciente depravation, d’une impudence si effrontement naive.’–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!