Richard Holt Hutton

“ Is my "belief" in the distinction between right and wrong, between holiness and sin, any less trustworthy than my belief in the asseverations of my memory? Did not Professor Huxley himself suggest in his closing remarks that the moral roots of our nature strike deeper than the intellectual roots; in other words, that if memory be much more than a "working hypothesis," if its trustworthiness be the condition without which no working hypothesis would be even possible, there are moral conditions of our nature quite as fundamental as even the trustworthiness of memory itself? ”

“ As Scott had always forestalled his income,—spending the purchase-money of his poems and novels before they were written,—such a failure as this, at the age of fifty-five, when all the freshness of his youth was gone out of him, when he saw his son's prospects blighted as well as his own, and knew perfectly that James Ballantyne, unassisted by him, could never hope to pay any fraction of the debt worth mentioning, would have been paralysing, had he not been a man of iron nerve, and of a pride and courage hardly ever equalled. ”

“ Bagehot held that in our own day that respect for action which was characteristic of the times when action was needed to form and mould the national character, is excessive. He thought that reserve of judgment, and especially reserve of resolve, is not half common enough. Men are over-eager to be doing what they are not sure of approving even when they have done it. The military instincts inherited from the age of drill precipitate us into all sorts of premature action, where we really want discussion and suspense of judgment till discussion has done its perfect work. ”

“ Can any one deny that any awakening, however rude its consequences, to the reality of Divine power, would be infinitely better than the rapidly growing habit of living as if behind Nature there were no God? I do not of course say this to any member of our society who doubts the reality of God's government, but only to those who, with Dr. Martineau, regard it as the very first of all truths. ”

“ Till calamity came, Scott appeared to be a nearly complete natural man, and no more. Then first was perceived in him something above nature, something which could endure though every end in life for which he had fought so boldly should be defeated,—something which could endure and more than endure, which could shoot a soft transparence of its own through his years of darkness and decay. ”

“ No poet ever equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises of his loved Border-land. ”

“ What can be better evidence that there is at least no a priori belief in the uniformity of Nature than the delight in fairy tales, which, certainly in childhood, are accepted with quite as much private belief that some great enchanter's wand will be triumphantly found at last, as are the dullest and most matter-of-fact of histories? ”

“ But further, if I might use the word "believe" loosely, though with much less looseness than that with which men who are not students of science habitually use it, I should not hesitate to avow a belief that the uniformity of Nature is proved by experience, for I should be only too glad to think that half the "demonstrated" beliefs of metaphysicians are even a tenth part as trustworthy as the great working hypothesis of science. ”

“ To some men the freedom of this disguise is a real danger and temptation. It never could have been so to Scott, who was in the main one of the simplest as well as the boldest and proudest of men. And as most men perhaps would admit that a good deal of even the best part of their nature is rather suppressed than expressed by the name by which they are known in the world, Scott must have felt this in a far higher degree, and probably regarded the manifold characters under which he was known to society, as representing him in some respects more justly than any individual name could have done. ”

“ What is a matter of the highest moment is whether or not they feel or do not feel their religious faith in every action of their life. If God is really ruling you, is it not better to feel his eye upon you, even though you show your sense of that vigilance unreasonably and foolishly, than to live on very much as you would do, if, as Isaiah said, God were on a journey or had gone to sleep? ”

“ But though Erskine was Scott's alter ego for literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not endure even the shadow of reproach,—like the ermine, which is said to pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. ”

“ Is not the early love of tales of marvel, and the later love of tales of wild adventure and hair-breadth escapes, and again, the deep pleasure which we all feel in that "poetic justice" which is so rare in actual experience, a sufficient proof that men retain, even to the last, a keen prepossession against the doctrine that laws of uniform antecedency and consequence can be traced throughout the most interesting phases of human life? ”

“ Generous, large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivalled popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the current of a stream,—these are characteristics, which, even when enhanced as they were in his case, by the power to defy physical pain, and to live in his imaginative world when his body was writhing in torture, fail to touch the heroic point. ”

“ Martineau, believes profoundly that the true worship of a righteous will is the highest end of all human life? Can anything be more superabundantly evident, more conspicuously and, so to say, oppressively clear, than that ninety-nine men out of every hundred live as if God were at most nothing more than a remote probability, which it is hardly worth while to take into account in the ordinary routine of life? ”

“ But the queen's excited imagination could by no entreaty be diverted from its course. 'Bid him come hither to our aid,' she said, 'and bring with him his lambs, as he calls them—Bowton, Hay of Talla, Black Ormiston and his kinsman Hob—Fie, how swart they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! closeted with Morton? Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the complot together, the bird when it breaks the shell will scare Scotland, will it not, my Fleming?' 'She grows wilder and wilder,' said Fleming. ”

“ Stephen is quite wrong in supposing that the matter can be settled as one of evidence alone. You must first overcome that violent prejudice in your minds which prevents you from vouchsafing even a glance at the evidence we should have to offer you. But I will, if the society permits me, leave that part of the subject, and return to the principal question before us—the impossibility of proving the uniformity of Nature from experience alone. ”

“ And yet it is clear that if Scott were to dabble in publishing at all, he really needed the check of men of larger experience, and less literary turn of mind. The great majority of consumers of popular literature are not, and indeed will hardly ever be, literary men; and that is precisely why a publisher who is not, in the main, literary,—who looks on authors' MSS. for the most part with distrust and suspicion, much as a rich man looks at a begging-letter, or a sober and judicious fish at an angler's fly,—is so much less likely to run aground than such a man as Scott. ”

“ When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die." [14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest ideal point. ”

“ Ruskin's remark that he had always been expecting the sun to stand still was to me peculiarly interesting, because, as I have formerly told the society, whatever may be the grounds for assuming the uniformity of Nature, I hold that there is nothing which the natural mind of man, unless subjected to a very serious discipline for the express purpose of producing that belief, is less likely to assume. A year or two ago I ventured to express in this room the opinion that credulity is the natural condition of almost every man. ”

“ In addition to these Scotch friends, Scott had made, even before the publication of his Border Minstrelsy, not a few in London or its neighbourhood,—of whom the most important at this time was the grey-eyed, hatchet-faced, courteous George Ellis, as Leyden described him, the author of various works on ancient English poetry and romance, who combined with a shrewd, satirical vein, and a great knowledge of the world, political as well as literary, an exquisite taste in poetry, and a warm heart. Certainly Ellis's criticism on his poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received ”