I have just mentioned Lockhart’s letter to Scott about
Wilson’s agitation under the lash of
“Hypocrisy Unveiled.”
It is necessary to retrace a step, and, reverting to Lockhart’s
private history, to mention the origin of his relations with Scott.
This is the more needful, as Scott has been causelessly implicated in
a new sin of Blackwood,
the attack on Keats (August 1818). But
it were impertinent, and is superfluous, to re-tell here the story of that first interview
with Scott, which Lockhart has so admirably
narrated. (“Life of Scott,”
vol. v., chapter xli.) Lockhart had doubtless often seen Sir
Walter in public, in the Law Courts, in bookseller’s shops, even in
large gatherings. He first met Scott in private society, apparently
| 192 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
A few days later, Scott, through Ballantyne, offered to hand over to Lockhart his own task of compiling the historical part of the Edinburgh Annual Register. From a letter to Christie we learn that “the job,” as Hazlitt would have called it, was worth £500 a year. Sir Walter was eager enough to play the historian during Napoleon’s wars; he did not love celebrare domestica facta. The elder writer, it is plain, had “taken to” the young one, who, in turn, as Scott avers, “loved him like a son.” They often met, over business, or at Scott’s table, during the summer; they often examined together the legendary houses and heraldic blazons of the Old Town; and Lockhart’s pen, in the chapter cited, draws the happiest picture of Sir Walter’s domestic life, in Edinburgh, and at Abbotsford. Thither, in the following note—the first of the Shirra’s to his young friend—Lockhart was invited.
| NOTE FROM SCOTT | 193 |
“Dear Sir,—You were so good as to give me hopes of seeing you here this Vacation. I am very desirous that, if possible, you would come here with our friend Mr. Wilson on Thursday, 8th October, as Lord Melville is to spend a day or two with me, and I should be happy to introduce you to each other. Do not say me nay, but arrange matters so as to be with us by five o’clock, or as much earlier as you please, and to stay a day or two.—Believe me, very sincerely yours,
Lockhart and Wilson gladly accepted the invitation. They found Sir Walter in his own grounds, with some friends, and “I trust you have had enough of certain pranks with your friend Ebony,” Scott said, as he introduced the Leopard and the Scorpion to Lord Melville, “the great giver of good things in the Parliament House,”—so he had described that nobleman.
Now the truth of the matter is, that, far from being an accomplice of
Lockhart and Wilson in their Blackwoodian iniquities, Sir
Walter, from the first, and always, attempted to wean both men from
“that mother of mischief,” Blackwood, or, at least, from personal satire therein. He
began by offering Lockhart more remunerative and reputable work, as we
have seen. He repeated his gentle warning
| 194 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
1 There is some uncertainty on this point. 2 A letter of Scott to Laidlaw, of 1818, entirely bears out what Lockhart says about Sir Walter’s feelings, at this time, towards Mr. Blackwood. |
| SCOTTS CHUCKLE | 195 |
It is painful for a biographer to be obliged to confess his hero’s inexplicable attachment to “the mother of mischief.” But he is well assured that, while Scott did not, indeed, regard the offences of Maga with our modern horror, still he did most earnestly endeavour, on every occasion, to withdraw Lockhart and Wilson from the cup of her inexplicable sorceries. Alas, to each might have been said—
“La laide dame Sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!” |
Before this meeting at Abbotsford, in October 1818, there had appeared, in
August, the vulgar reviling of Keats. We have
already seen that Leigh Hunt, in the spirit of conceit
which offended Keats, suspected Scott of being the author of the attacks on himself and his associates.
Leigh Hunt, it is only fair to say, knew no more of
Scott personally than Lockhart, in 1818, knew of Keats. To
Lockhart, Keats was, at first, an uneducated
Cockney adulator of Leigh Hunt; as, to Leigh
Hunt, Scott was a wicked Tory, whom he had tried
| 196 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
Why?
Mr. Colvin’s reason is, “Such at least was the impression prevailing at the time,”—in the bosom of Leigh Hunt and his friends, for example. And again, because Severn “observed both in Scott and his daughter signs of pain and confusion which he could only interpret in the same sense,” when he talked to them about “Keats and his detractors” in Rome (1832). Something more is needed than Severn’s recollection of his impressions of Scott’s apparent “pain and confusion!” I repeat that Keats had been selected for attack, as a Huntian, and he knew it, before Scott and Lockhart ever met. That Anne Scott, who was a lively girl of sixteen when the crime was committed, should have betrayed painful emotion, when the subject was mentioned fourteen years later, is quite incredible.
Mr. Colvin adds a tale communicated, long after
date, by Keats’s friend Bailey, to Lord
Houghton.
| BAILEY AND KEATS | 197 |
Accepting Bailey’s account
of Lockhart as a traitor, what
confidence did he betray? That Keats’s “attachment to Leigh Hunt was personal, not
political”? The Reviewer asserts the very reverse:
“Keats belongs to the Cockney school of politics, as
well as to the Cockney school of poetry.” That Keats had no classical
education? Keats himself betrays that mischance in a dozen
| 198 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
The single solitary fact which Lockhart might have betrayed is, that Keats in early life had been “destined to the career of medicine, and bound apprentice to a worthy apothecary in town.” Now that fact might have been let slip inadvertently, or might well have been known through other channels. Where, in the review, are “the very facts which Bailey had confidentially communicated”? One expects to hear about the paternal livery stable, and so forth, but there is no such matter. If Bailey communicated private facts, they were not betrayed. There is not a word of Keats’s private affairs, except his medical studies.
Mr. Colvin does not seem to have remarked, when he wrote the passage cited, that Lockhart had sources of information about Keats, apart from Bailey.1 On November 22, 1817, Keats wrote to Bailey himself—“I should have been here” (at Leatherhead) “a day earlier, but the Reynoldses persuaded me to stay in town to meet your friend Christie. There were Rice and Martin—we talked about ghosts.”2
By a curious freak of chance, Christie, Keats, John Hamilton Reynolds, Gleig, and Bailey were all “in touch,” and thus Lockhart might know,
1 Mr. Colvin’s recantation, as far as Scott is concerned, is in a note to p. 60 of his edition of Keats’s Letters. 2 “Letters of Keats,” 1895, p. 55. |
| LOCKHART ON KEATS | 199 |
There is no “malignity” in this private reference by Lockhart to Keats; Christie, in remonstrances about Blackwood, never refers to the treatment of Keats, whom he obviously liked, and there my information about this unhappy matter ends. I do not know who wrote the article. On September 15, 1820, Lockhart wrote to a Mr. Aitken, in Dunbar, “I have already attempted to say something kind about Mr. Keats, in Blackwood’s Magazine, but been thwarted, I know not well how. . . . I trust his health will mend, and that he will live to be a merry fellow. . . .”
For the rest, Keats’s temper, as to literary reviling, was as manly as Scott’s. “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict.” Could Keats have read Shelley’s letter to Leigh Hunt,1 it would have vexed him far more than the stingless insults of an anony-
1 “Correspondence of Leigh Hunt,” i. 158. |
| 200 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
That Lockhart, whatever his
literary offences at this period, kept a tender and loyal heart for the service of his
friends, appears from letters written to Christie,
just before and just after the visit to Abbotsford. A young man’s scrape, exaggerated
by fancy, had befallen one of the old Oxford set, and was complicated by a misunderstanding
with the sufferer’s father. “Your letter,” writes
Lockhart (Edinburgh, October 5, 1818), “has afflicted me
beyond all expression. I feel that fruitless sorrow is the only way by which any of us
shall have it in our power to express our feeling of our poor friend’s worth. I
am very sorry that Hamilton is out of town,
which deprives me of having any one to speak to about it. I have ventured to drop a few
lines to under cover to his father, and if he be at home they will reach him,—if
he be not there, they will come back
| A SCRAPE | 201 |
As to the nature of the story, as to the cause of the friend’s private sorrow, not a glimmer of light escapes the discretion of Lockhart—nor did he keep Mr. Christie’s letters on the subject. But his benevolence and friendly courage were engaged. On November 14, 1818, he writes from Edinburgh—“As ——’s own letter must have reached you before you receive this, I need not tell you the step I took in consequence of my knowledge of the cause of ——’s distress. I am apprehensive that you may, in one point of view, condemn it. All I can say is, that it was undertaken in consequence of the most sincere conviction, both in Hamilton’s mind and my own, that it was a proper one. The intentions of us both I can have no reason to justify, because I am sure you are in no danger of suspecting them.
“I have now received three or four letters from
——’s father, and were it not for the postage
I would send them, in order that you might see with your own eyes what a pure-minded,
feeling, affectionate, and estimable man he is, to whom I confided
| 202 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
“I trust that this is the last occasion on which I shall be put in the distressing situation of thinking myself called upon to do a thing so contrary to the common rules of friendship, and every way so hazardous. It will, however, be a consolation to me to hear from you that you do not seriously disapprove of what I have done. The affectionate manner in which —— himself writes on the occasion has endeared him to me more than ever. The longer I live” (he was twenty-four!) “the more do the ties of two or three old friendships strengthen round me. Living at a distance, and living in a different way, and with different pursuits in some respects, I always think of you as of brothers, and look forward to any prospect of meeting with you as a long absent voyager must do to a return to his home.”
| FRIENDSHIPS | 203 |
Such were the friendships of the antique world. In words like these, we catch a glimpse of the true, the inward Lockhart, earnest, simple, affectionate, loyal: daring, in the cause of friendship, and with the most fortunate results, to break “the common rules of friendship.” This is all unlike the aspect of “the mischievous Oxford puppy,” who, “with his cigar in his mouth, his one leg flung carelessly over the other, and without the symptoms of a smile on his face, or one twinkle of mischief in his dark grey eye,” would beguile the good Shepherd with all manner of nonsense. “The callant never tawld me the truth a’ his days but aince, an’ that was merely by chance, an’ without the least intention on his part,” said James Hogg, who himself rejoiced greatly in a bam or bite, he being an Ettrick man indeed, in whom was (properly speaking) no guile.
The deep thoughtfulness and considerate regard for friends which shine in
Lockhart’s letters are alien to the
reckless manner of his literary feuds. To his mind Leigh
Hunt, Keats, and Hazlitt were all cockney and conceited conspirators
against the constitution, common sense, and the English language. There were two aspects of
Leigh Hunt; he had, so to speak, “a double
personality,” like Lockhart himself. Keats
censured Hunt almost as severely in private as
Lockhart did in public, and for the same faults. Concerning that
other and admirable aspect of Hunt which shines, for example, in his
regrets for Shelley, and in his letter to Severn
| 204 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
1 See Leigh Hunt’s Letter in Lord Houghton’s “Keats,” ii. 95. |
| QUARREL WITH HAMILTON | 205 |
|
1 The Rev. Lawrence Lockhart has left a brief record of the cause of estrangement between Lockhart and Hamilton. It arose, he says (as we have remarked), from a hasty word of Sir William’s. But he dates it at the time of “The Chaldee,” and though his account is, no doubt, essentially correct, we find that, more than a year after the date of “The Chaldee,” Lockhart and Hamilton were on the best terms. |
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