Through the Magic Door | Page 9

dignity and such
minuteness of detail, is, I should think, a most wonderful tour de force.
His failing health showed itself before the end of the novel, but had the
latter half equalled the first, and contained scenes of such humour as
Anna Comnena reading aloud her father's exploits, or of such majesty
as the account of the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the
Bosphorus, then the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful
place in the very front rank of the novels.
I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse of
the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was ever
anything in the world's history like it? It had what historical incidents
seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from the
half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem. Those
leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice. Godfrey the
perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous and formidable,
Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy the half-mad hero!
Here is material so rich that one feels one is not worthy to handle it.
What richest imagination could ever evolve anything more marvellous
and thrilling than the actual historical facts?
But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
romance of "The Talisman"; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life in
"The Pirate"; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England in
"Kenilworth"; the rich humour of the "Legend of Montrose"; above all,
bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a coarse age,
there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car, and it is borne in
upon one how great and noble a man was Walter Scott, and how high
the service which he did for literature and for humanity.
For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the same shelf
as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his admiring
friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly impartial man, with a
sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to tell the absolute truth.
One would like the frail, human side of a man as well as the other. I
cannot believe that anyone in the world was ever quite so good as the
subject of most of our biographies. Surely these worthy people swore a

little sometimes, or had a keen eye for a pretty face, or opened the
second bottle when they would have done better to stop at the first, or
did something to make us feel that they were men and brothers. They
need not go the length of the lady who began a biography of her
deceased husband with the words--"D--- was a dirty man," but the
books certainly would be more readable, and the subjects more lovable
too, if we had greater light and shade in the picture.
But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would
have admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country,
and I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of toddy occasionally
of an evening which would have laid his feeble successors under the
table. His last years, at least, poor fellow, were abstemious enough,
when he sipped his barley-water, while the others passed the decanter.
But what a high-souled chivalrous gentleman he was, with how fine a
sense of honour, translating itself not into empty phrases, but into years
of labour and denial! You remember how he became sleeping partner in
a printing house, and so involved himself in its failure. There was a
legal, but very little moral, claim against him, and no one could have
blamed him had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would
have enabled him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet
he took the whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his
life, spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort to
save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly a hundred
thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the creditors--a great
record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his life thrown in.
And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man
who has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single year.
I remember reading in some book of reminiscences--on second
thoughts it was in Lockhart himself--how the writer had lodged in some
rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen all evening the
silhouette of a man outlined on