University of Virginia Library

Proofreading Lockhart's Scott: The Dynamics of Biographical Reticence
by
Francis Russell Hart

Caricatures of Victorianism, mercifully defunct in more sharply defined areas of literary history, survive in chronicles of biography. Sir Harold Nicolson's sketch was drawn in the anti-Victorian ether of a long generation ago: "then came earnestness, and with earnestness hagiography descended on us with its sullen cloud." It was redrawn recently by Professor Garraty, who wrote of the year Victoria became queen, "Already the fiery reformist spirit of romanticism was degenerating into the smug moral earnestness of the era that bears her name. . . . John Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott . . . provided a foretaste of what was to come."[1] Now, the ascription to Lockhart of a culpable reticence would have seemed strange indeed to contemporary readers; to them, the work seemed painfully candid. However, the purpose of this essay is not to challenge the ascription. Rather, it is to depict the processes of composition and revision through which a degree of reticence evolved. The depiction is made possible by the survival of Lockhart's corrected proofsheets.[2] The proof-sheets

show Lockhart at work; but more than that, when considered in conjunction with pertinent correspondence in the National Library of Scotland, they allow us to detect the presence of significant influences on that work in its final stages of preparation.

Ultimately, my thesis will be that Lockhart's procedures cannot be properly understood without reference to those influences, to the conditions imposed by his own ideas of biographical form and style and by his inevitable dependence on the world of Scott's surviving contemporaries. The proofsheets offer noteworthy evidence in support of such a view. But it will be best to begin with their more obvious implications. During the past thirty years, authoritative editions of Lockhart's major documents — specifically, Scott's letters and diary—have revealed much about Lockhart's editorial attitudes toward his raw materials, and, incidentally, about his considerable skill as a compiler.[3] The proofsheets corroborate and illustrate what has been revealed.

His "unscientific" habits of "manipulating"[4] documents and anecdotes have been the subject of many a modern preachment. These habits, however reprehensible by modern editorial standards, were neither careless nor irresponsible, as should be clear to anyone who studies his fastidious structural workmanship. Obviously, Lockhart assumed that the responsibilities of the editor/biographer necessarily implied the freedom to excerpt, edit, and integrate his materials as form and emphasis required. Clearly indicative of that assumption is the scissors-and-paste process of compilation he used. He had before him a transcript of Scott's journal "from which I might when I chose clip out a fragment to stick into my page as I went on."[5] Contributors aided by responding to requests for Scott letters with transcripts "each on a

separate sheet & no writing on the off pages."[6] Suppliers of reminiscences and anecdotes understood that their contributions, too, were simply raw materials for Lockhart to adapt as and where he saw fit. Sending his memoranda, James Ballantyne assumed Lockhart would "desire to have no more than the mere materials, and indeed I hardly expect to be able to put them into shape; but this is to bring no disparagement on my taste, for I shall give you them all unboulted."[7] The "boulting" of raw materials continued even on the margins of the proofsheets, and so did the carrying out of the precept best expressed in a letter to Lockhart from Scott's friend Morritt of Rokeby: "nor would I print for another what he would not have printed himself."[8]

Evident at once is Lockhart's practice of correcting quotations and foreign expressions in Scott's letters and journals. One discovers such marginal requests as the following: "To Mr C[adell]. get some good latinist to see that this page is quite right—Archdeacon Williams E.g." (II, 184). If the request is to "be sure as to the Gaelic" (II, 315), the response is in a hand I assume to be that of "T.T.," Scott's friend Thomas Thomson, "first legal antiquary of our time in Scotland." Realizing Scott has unconsciously quoted Burns, Lockhart sets off the line as verse and corrects it from Scott's "when life draws near the closing" to the original, "When ance Life's day draws near the gloamin" (V, 230). When Scott misquotes II Henry IV II.3—"the old bore feeds in the old park"—Lockhart corrects it (VI, 80-81). Other letters and diary excerpts show, in proof, occasional clarifications of diction and syntax of the kinds already familiar to anyone who has collated Lockhart's versions with the originals.

The most significant of Lockhart's habits as manipulator is the practice of amalgamating extracts from separate letters, or from journal entries, into what appear to be single texts. Modern scholars are understandably outraged by the practice; but it can be demonstrated that such "contamination" was, for Lockhart, merely an effective means of simplifying and clarifying the structure of his compilation. It allowed him to satisfy the contemporary demand for ungarbled originals—"in

publishing letters," wrote one editor, "the epistolary form and manner must be preserved"[9] —and at the same time to eliminate irrelevant or repetitious portions of documents otherwise valuable. Two good examples may be given from the proofsheets. The portion of narrative (with letters) relating to Joanna Baillie's The Family Legend seemed long and repetitious; the proofsheets show what was done about it. They contain a long letter of January 30, 1810, and parts of two others (January 31 and February 6) which, essentially, were continuations.[10] In order to condense, Lockhart crossed out the bulk of the other two letters and left two separate passages, above the first of which he wrote "P.S." The published result is a single letter with a coherent and relevant postscript (II, 260-267). The other instance involves three letters from Scott to James Ballantyne.[11] Whatever the Ballantyne partisans might have found blameworthy in Lockhart's excisions, it is significant that all three letters survived until the proofsheet stage. Then, apparently with nothing more than the desire to reduce the number of documents and eliminate irrelevancies, Lockhart made careful cuts. As a result, the three letters (with openings and closings removed) became one coherent whole (VI, 324-325). Thus did Lockhart retain the documentary directness of the biographical compilation and at the same time function successfully as a selective structural artist. The method must be understood as an artistic device, and not as an editorial sin.

For the most part, such excisions and revisions had been made before the work reached proof. In the area of Lockhart's textual emendations, however, the proofsheets do have one important contribution to make to Scott scholarship. Over two hundred of the Scott letters printed in the twelve-volume Centenary Edition are, owing to the failure to recover manuscripts, given in Lockhart's published versions. Some of these received editorial attention in Lockhart's proofsheets. Now, whatever changes may have been made before the letters reached

the proofsheet stage, it seems safe to assume that the proofsheet versions are at least closer to the missing originals than the versions eventually published. Specific examples will be given later; but to mention one prominent instance, the proofsheets show considerable editing of Scott's otherwise unrecovered letters to the actor-manager Daniel Terry, one of his largest and most important correspondences.

Since the manuscript of Scott's journal is now available for collation with Lockhart's extracts, we need not speak in detail here of the editorial attention given those extracts in the proofsheets. Suffice it to say that even at this late point in the work's composition, Lockhart still viewed such extracts as plastic elements in the total work, open to revision. Nor is it pertinent at present to scrutinize his manipulations of contributed memoranda, since they, too, belonged mostly to an earlier phase of composition. One example from the proofsheets will suffice. The minor changes in Basil Hall's lengthy journal extracts are characteristic: three paragraphs which open the published version were moved there from the end; Hall's own opening was moved to the end; and four short passages, repetitious or irrelevant, were eliminated (V, 374ff.).

Of greater interest to the student of biography is the fact that in the proofsheets Lockhart was still touching up conversations and the Boswellian "business" accompanying them. The specific instances are less important than the general fact. Hogg's nickname is added to Scott's command: "Take your pencil, [Jemmy] and I'll dictate your ballad to you" (V, 305). In the conversation of Scott and Constable at the inception of plans for Constable's Miscellany, Constable's remarks are stylistically modified, and the depiction of one or two of Scott's actions is altered slightly. In another of the exchanges which Lockhart reported from memory, the speech of John Ballantyne is augmented as follows: "True, indeed? [not one word of it!—] any blockhead may stick to truth" (IV, 171). In James Ballantyne's account of the conversation on the failure of The Lord of the Isles, Scott's own remark is similarly clarified: "Well, well, James, [so be it—] but you know we must not droop, for we can't afford to give over" (III, 323). A rare instance of the proofsheet revision of talk which alters fact is found in the account of Scott's day of ruin (in January, 1826). Skene, his close friend, comes to call in the morning and finds Scott at his table. Scott makes his famous pronouncement—"My friend, give me a shake of your hand—mine is that of a beggar," which, incidentally, is Lockhart's rendering of Skene's recollection: "Skene, this is the hand of a beggar.

Constable has failed and I am ruined du fond au comble."[12] The proofsheet revision follows:

Proof (VI, 214)

• He requested his friend to apologize for his absence from the Court, and added, "Don't fancy I am staying at home to brood idly on what can't be helped. I was at work upon Woodstock when you came in, and I shall take up the pen the moment you go."

Revised

• He added, "Don't fancy I am going to stay at home to brood idly on what can't be helped. I was at work upon Woodstock when you came in, and I shall take up the pen the moment I get back from Court."

Such is the sort of evidence the proofsheets offer in corroboration of what has been known, though less directly, of Lockhart's editorial procedures, of his confident manipulations of raw materials. Less obvious, but of greater general importance, the proofsheets help make it possible to trace the social circumstances of the work's completion, and lead to the realization that this biography which contemporary readers found distressingly candid would have been more so had Lockhart really enjoyed and preserved the independent control of the work which his modern critics assume.

Let me recall the circumstances. Lockhart commenced publication of his seven volumes in March, 1837, a mere four-and-one-half years after the death of a national institution and an international idol. Scott's life and correspondence included a world of public prominence up to and including the British throne; many of the participants were still alive, some at the peak of their prominence. Nevertheless, Lockhart conceived his work largely in terms of that correspondence and the relationships it embodied. Named Scott's literary executor, Lockhart was one to whom Scott had been father, patron, literary counsellor, and symbol of responsible aristocracy. In the years following the dissolution of old Toryism and the passing of the first Reform Bill, he might well have viewed Scott's career with the jaundiced eye of Scott's crusty political persona Malachi Malagrowther; further, the sympathies of the fellow Scot and the demands of his role as Quarterly editor should have been enough to complete his ruination as a responsible biographer. That he accomplished even limited candor and objectivity, then, is a striking proof of moral independence.

Edinburgh Whigdom, in the person of Lord Cockburn (no friend of Lockhart's), was surprised: "nothing is kept back or misrepresented so as to exhibit Scott in a false light." Cockburn could recall "no

biography which gives a truer account of its subject." For Robert Southey it was "the most compleat biography that has ever appeared of a great man." William Wordsworth conceded that nothing remained for Lockhart "but to act as openly and sincerely as you have done." The historian Lord Mahon acknowledged that Lockhart had avoided the dangers of his domestic perspective; and R. H. Cheney praised the work's moderation of tone, citing its "union . . . of the greatest candour with that affectionate veneration which the public requires of those who approach one of its former idols."[13] For some, however, this union was too subtle. Harriet Martineau and J. F. Cooper mistook Lockhart's candor for moral obtuseness and censured as needless the exposure of "motives that are never admitted by the upright, and never avowed by the sensitive."[14] Cockburn, too, felt needless exposure to be the work's weakness; and George Ticknor, reporting on the transatlantic disillusionment the work had effected, conceded that Scott's letters were delightful, but protested that "in some of them Sir Walter is made to expose himself. There was no need of this, and it has given great pain."[15] Indeed, some were so pained that they gave currency to the startling hypothesis, ridiculed by Carlyle, "that Mr. Lockhart at heart had a dislike to Scott, and has done his best in an underhand treacherous manner to dishero him!"[16] Such were the earlyimpressions of Lockhart's candor.

Some of the honesty and fullness of his account was, of course, unavoidable. "So much of Sir Walter's affairs" had become "objects of public investigation," wrote Wordsworth, that there was no alternative.[17] Lockhart was aware that with Scott dead, the tourists and peeping Toms who had infested Abbotsford would spring into print to capitalize on their eavesdroppings. Disclosures had been made already, often in inaccurate or misleading form; others would be made, and only by anticipating the efforts of those who would flood the English-speaking world with irresponsible Scottiana could Lockhart hope to control the inundation. "I feel that you are right in anticipating all injurious disclosures," wrote one in close touch with Lockhart's aims and procedures; "You have done this well, and by truly exhibiting the

mixed motives on which Scott really acted you have done him full justice."[18]

Some of his candor was more deliberate. To B. R. Haydon he expressed the faith that had sustained him: "I trusted to the substantial greatness and goodness of the character, and thought I should only make it more effective in portraiture by keeping in the few specks."[19] He voiced the same sentiment to the Lord High Commissioner Adam, while the work was still in progress: "I really could not have any pleasure in my task unless I carried with me throughout the strong and perfect faith that by telling the truth in all things I shall ultimately leave the character of Scott as high & pure as that of perhaps any man ever can appear after being subjected to a close scrutiny."[20] To Scott's factor and amanuensis Laidlaw, he spoke of a "stern sense of duty" which impelled him to tell the truth in all things.[21] One feels that faith and that sense operative in the work.

However, Lockhart's duty was not just to an abstract ideal. Neither the responsibility he espoused nor the image he struck off could be merely personal. Boswell, wrote Geoffrey Scott, "knew the best he could do must still fall short of that platonic standard, the idea of Johnson, laid up, in those who knew him, incommunicably, behind all words."[22] Lockhart's scepticism was even stronger, and in addition he was determined to avoid the disproportion and limited perspective of Boswell's work. But though he had known Scott better and had lived close to the center of Scott's life for several years, he recognized that he alone could not measure the degree of verisimilitude. So much he conceded to Laidlaw: "my chief anxiety on the appearance of the book will be, not to hear what is said by the world, but what is thought by you and the

few others who can really compare the representation as a whole with the facts of the case."[23] Thus, he was ready to share his authority over the work with those few.

Of course, some of the control was delegated involuntarily. His biographical ideal of copious detail and fullness made him hugely dependent on living contributors, and every contributor was to some extent editor of his own materials and memories. Some owners sent originals of Scott letters; but often, their notes to Lockhart refer instead to "faithful transcripts," even to such disquieting aids as that supplied by Harriet Scott of Harden, who had difficulty reading Scott's hand and put in a few words he seemed to have left out. Some contributors, like C. K. Sharpe, did their own selecting: "what I think may be of use to you shall be transcribed." Lady Louisa Stuart picked out the "most characteristic" of her letters.[24] Some transcribed and interwove their letters with reminiscences; while some, supplying reminiscences, sought to retain editorial control by specifying what must or must not be printed.

There were a few, however, to whom Lockhart delegated authority more voluntarily, and the proofsheets supply evidence of the influence they wielded. When the work reached proof, Lockhart's independent efforts had been largely completed. He had begun the collection of materials at Scott's death, September 21, 1832.[25] Two years later he reported he was about to begin writing the work "for which I have hitherto been collecting and arranging the vast mass of materials." In March, 1836, it was again reported that he had commenced writing; he worked throughout that year, but, as his wife explained, he had been "arranging it so long in his mind" that it would not take long to write. Thus the proofs, circulating throughout 1837, represented the biography after Lockhart had worked over four years selecting, editing, compiling, and integrating materials. Had it appeared as it then stood, it would have been a fuller, darker picture, giving those who felt pain additional cause for dismay. That it did not is, in some measure, attributable to the influences we can trace in the proofsheets.

In a letter to Laidlaw, Lockhart named and defined the most

obvious influence: "I have waived all my own notions as to the manner of publication, etc., in deference to the bookseller, who is still so largely our creditor, and, I am grieved to add, will probably continue to be so for many years to come." "Cadell," he specifies elsewhere, "is at my request a copious annotator on my proofsheets & I fancy he will keep a pretty strict watch over me when either Whigs or personal cronies of Constable are handled. But indeed I shall on all serious points take good care that I take him with me."[26] That Cadell was an unreliable traveling companion has been a principal theme of Sir Herbert Grierson's strictures.[27] Cadell was cannily aware of his own position in the Life: "here is Lockhart," he wrote, "telling about all of us to posterity. We will all be handed down as appendages to the great man." Of the Ballantyne-Constable part of Scott's world, he alone survived, "having cuckooed all these men out of their nests."[28] Thus, he was in a position to shape the history of Scott's business affairs. At the outset Lockhart's trust in him was considerable, as Basil Hall hints in replying to a Lockhart letter: "I am truly glad to see you writing in such terms of Cadell & I feel well assured that you will never have reason to alter this tone. At least I never yet met a person with whom I have acted so confidentially & so long without a shade of suspicion." When the shade crossed Lockhart's mind, it was too late. "I dare say," he wrote Murray in 1838, "you have seen a Ballantyne pamphlet nominally against me but really against Cadell whose evidence as to the affairs of Constable & Co. I relied on & thought I might well do so as it seemed criminative of his own house at least as much as of the other parties."[29]

Lockhart's reliance may be seen in the proofsheets. He depended on Cadell for bibliographical facts and figures: marginal notes and corrections on the size of editions are signed "RC"; blanks left for the actual monetary obligations of the various houses at the time of the crash are filled in by Cadell. In his role as Edinburgh agent, he "saw to" Latin, Gaelic, and law phraseology. He was Lockhart's intermediary with Scott's Edinburgh friends, and through him their opinions and recollections were brought to bear on the work in progress. For one example, in the margin beside Lockhart's account of the advance printing of "Lenore," which Scott was alleged to have presented to Miss

Belsches, Cadell has written: "Thomson and other comrades doubt the separate printing."[30]

Of greater importance are the proofsheet revisions of passages relating to Cadell's own role in the Scott-Constable dealings. Especially suggestive is the difficulty and delay over the proof of the third chapter of the sixth volume.[31] This is the chapter that introduces Scott's journal and deals extensively with "commercial affairs." In it, Lockhart recalls the warning of financial chaos he had brought Scott in the autumn of 1825, and describes Scott's midnight ride for reassurance, allegedly from Abbotsford to Constable's house at Polton and back to the Lockharts' at Chiefswood in time for breakfast. Sir Herbert Grierson has argued that the ride could not have taken place; a more moderate view is that Lockhart's incident is a narrative adaptation of fact.[32] But what concerns us is that it was Cadell who gave Scott deceptive reassurance at this time, and hence, the proofsheet attempts to mystify or generalize the account of this early warning can be explained only as effects of Cadell's influence. Here is a short paragraph as it appears in the proof:

Several attempts were made at revision of the second sentence: "rested" became "originated"; "A trifling enough" was added at the beginning of the sentence; "in the first week" became "early in." Finally, the whole sentence was vigorously crossed out, I believe by Cadell's pen, and Lockhart substituted the vague second sentence of the published version: "Sir Walter's first guess as to its origin proved correct." An excision in the opening of the following paragraph further obscures the timetable. Originally, Lockhart's allusion to Murray was followed by: "with whom I had formed a very strict connexion in the preceding month."

Such exclusions of detail, when they conceal Cadell's role in the commercial affairs of 1825-26, tend to increase the severity of Lockhart's presentation of Constable. There is, for a related example, the mystery of Lockhart's reported second meeting with Constable in London (January, 1826), at which Constable is alleged to have proposed that Scott borrow 20,000 pounds and forward it to Constable in London. James Glen has concluded that no such proposal was made, and Grierson has recalled that Scott's pointless advances were made at the insistence of Cadell.[33] In view of these assertions and Grierson's argument that the second Lockhart-Constable meeting did not occur, one finds significance in the fact that this "scene of the same kind a day or two afterwards" was written into the proofsheet by Lockhart after Cadell's reading (VI, 177).

This is not the only instance in the proofs of the birth of an incident by binary fission. Another influence on the Life was John Wilson Croker, sometime Secretary of the Admiralty and longtime political mainstay of the Quarterly Review. In January, 1837, Lockhart wrote to ask Croker if he could recall any circumstances of Scott's first dinner as guest of the Prince Regent at Carlton House. "Can you recall for instance what song it was that the Prince sung—for Scott in a minor poem alludes to having heard him perform in that way & I take it on that occasion." Anxious to depict the Prince in song, he wrote to Adam with the same request. Adam, who had already sent an account of the dinner, could not help on "the subject of the songs": "it was the only dinner at Carlton House where I met Sir Walter; . . . I soon after left London & was never there at the same time again with Sir Walter— There was no singing at that dinner. Croker was not there, indeed I never dined with Croker at Carlton House." Croker was not sure he remembered Adam's being there, either; and he reported Lord Hertford's certainty that Adam was not present. Yet they all claimed to be recounting the same dinner of twenty-two years before.[34]

But they agreed as to the absence of singing, and the proofsheets

show what Lockhart did about that. Originally, the account of the Prince's "several capital songs" made up part of the account of the first dinner, following the Prince's quoting of Tom Moore and immediately preceding the "Author of Waverley" toast. In the proofs, the brief paragraph has been cut out of that position and pasted in following the end of the account, where it is introduced by these words written in the margin: "Before [Scott deleted] he left town he again dined [w deleted] at Carlton House, when the party was a still smaller one than before, and the merriment if possible still more free." Thus, one dinner has become two (III, 336-339). Croker found the account "disgraceful" even after this change; and Lockhart, in a note added to his second edition, attributed the misunderstanding to Adam's confusion of this 1815 dinner with another at Dalkeith in 1822. Meanwhile, Adam was dead, and the account stood—in spite of Croker.

But his influence was by no means disregarded in other areas. Among the Scott letters he forwarded to Lockhart were two of the 4th and 5th of February, 1818, in which Scott tells Croker of the discovery of the Scottish Regalia. The second of these letters is known only in Lockhart's published version; the proofsheet version contains a hint of Scott's hope that a traditional office associated with the Regalia might be revived in his favor. The bracketed portion of the following has been crossed out:

The excision must have been dictated by Croker, for Lockhart, in his letter of acknowledgment, expresses his "doubt about suppressing his hint as to the Knight Marischalship."[35]

Lockhart continues with a request for further information: "At all events tell me whether the P.R. at the time shewd any disposition to comply w Scotts request." The direct embodiment of Croker's reply in a passage of narrative must, to Croker, have seemed disturbingly indiscreet, for the passage in the proofsheet was cancelled. Originally it followed the sentence ending "a revenue sufficient for remunerating responsible and respectable guardianship":

In the published Life, only a revised allusion to Captain Ferguson's appointment remains.

But the area in which Croker's restraining influence was most apt to appear was that of Scott's later political activities. Years after the Life was published, Lockhart explained to Croker his editing of Scott's journal. He looked ahead to the time when an heir would "sell the complete Diary for a larger sum than my book brought for the relief of his immediate representative," and predicted: "Posterity will know that I at least endeavoured to avoid the offending of Scotts surviving contemporaries and you will not doubt that I had to spare Tories about as often as Whigs the castigation of diarizing Malagrowther."[36] The problematical relationship of Croker, Malagrowther, and Malagrowther's Tory biographer may account for other signs of reticence in the proofsheets. Some such influence, at least, is apparent in chapters and journal extracts dealing with the London reaction to Malagrowther's defense of the Scottish banks. Journal entries have received considerable excision and modification, but of greater practical interest here is a small group of letters pertaining to the same subject, whose suppressed passages have never been published.

For example, there is the undated letter (early Spring, 1826), to Sir Robert Dundas, pertaining to Lord Melville's continued kind feelings for Scott, and expressing Scott's continued resistance to Lord Melville's policies. But this expression is faint once Lockhart has suppressed the end of the long first paragraph (following "opinions are waxing old"):

Such exchanges occurred during Lockhart's first months in London. That his career was implicated in Malagrowther's wars is evident from this passage, suppressed in the Croker letter that follows Scott's to Dundas: Scott's reply, published by Grierson from Lockhart and the Croker Papers,[37] is much fuller in the proofsheet, where it has been considerably altered. From it have been cut Scott's assurances of Malagrowther's local support, and also, two months after the financial disaster, this bland denial of concern for his loss:

Such cuts are better understood as parts of a larger pattern of reticence, a pattern which points to the influence of a far more important adviser than Croker. Lockhart dedicated the work to Scott's intimate friend, Morritt of Rokeby—and with good reason. Though it has been known that Morritt helped Lockhart select the diary extracts to be published, it has not, to my knowledge, been previously remarked that Morritt exerted a considerable influence on the Life as a whole.[38]

Morritt's letters to Lockhart make clear that he and W. S. Rose read and annotated Lockhart's proofsheets. For example, "I sent you this morning the proofs of the whole 2nd Volume with a swinging long

letter enclosing also a sheet of references and comments noted on the margin."[39] We needn't—nor can we—identify all Morritt's alterations. But we can see that he wasn't ignored. It was Morritt who contributed the sceptical comment on Scott's report of "50,000 blackguards . . . ready to rise between Tyne and Wear" for which Cockburn credited Lockhart. It was Morritt who urged the cutting of two passages which "clog the march of narrative"—the account of Joanna Baillie's Family Legend, and the extracts from Scott's "Essay on Judicial Reform"; and they were cut. Some of his suggestions signify nothing more than a desire to protect or conceal himself. To conceal his authorship of the account of Scott and Jeffrey in 1808, he has, he tells Lockhart, "mystified and generalized" the description. Finding a letter written by himself to Scott, in which he speaks impertinently of "the Earl of Darlington now Duke of Cleveland," he insists it be changed: "I will recast it as I wish it to stand or leave it out altogether in revising the proof."

In themselves, these are insignificant; yet they indicate his general attitude. Consider his support of a cut urged by Cadell. Cadell had questioned some early expressions of Scott's financial fears and a hint of subsequent dubious transactions. Morritt's position is clear: "it were better to suppress even the heart rending appeal here made to our posthumous sympathy than to expose his character to malignant comment, for subsequent inadvertency at a more sanguine moment." Concerning the same passage he adds this broad directive to Lockhart: "I would at all events not name Gillies, or indeed any innocent or unfortunate name in private transactions. I have on the same principle & stronger feeling begged quarter for other more distinguished names as you will see. Do not 'make one worthy man' (or woman) his foe, or your own. 'Non est tanti,' for rogues, fools, & coxcombs lay it on & spare not; & there are plenty to season the book."

Morritt was free to revise, and one of his characteristic revisions involves a particular editorial license for which Lockhart has been blamed. Among other "improvements" of his documents, Lockhart has been charged with the cultural betrayal of "correcting" Scott's Scotticisms. The charge seems most peculiar in the face of other evidence. One thinks, for example, of the strong cultural nationalism of Dr. Peter Morris's view of Scott. One recalls this statement in a letter from Lockhart to Allan Cunningham: "I shall never cease to have some difference of opinion w you as to the Scotch tongue—which nobody uses quite to my satisfaction but Sir Walter. . . . he alone writes what

is all over Scotland Scotch National." One thinks of Lockhart's later enjoyment of Lord Cockburn's style in the Life of Jeffrey: "the locality of all his views with the Scotch of his style are to me among the attractions of the book."[40] Why, then, would Lockhart have yielded to the murderous snobbery of Anglicization in the case of his ultimus Scotorum?

The answer is simply that he did not. Morritt's sheet of "References and Comments" identifies the ubiquitous editorial hand sprinkling "shalls" and "shoulds" through the proofsheets. "Rose agrees with me in all the substitutions I have made of words and sometimes of collocations, except where he has dissented in red ink. They are chiefly in Scott's own letters, and are Scotticisms or at least not English, (shalls, wills, etc.) I would alter these that they may not be of example to our hackney writers, and confound the language by giving them authority and precedent like this." Lockhart yielded to Morritt and Rose. He yielded to Morritt's pleas, too, in the excision of "damns" from diary and letters: "they are banished from print," Morritt argues, quoting Bob Acres on their obsolescence; "nor would I print for another what he would not have printed himself."

Apparently applying the same principle, Morritt urged reticence in the depiction of Scott's mental deterioration during his last months. Nor was he alone in this. Laidlaw had found a few letters written from Malta and Naples and vowed he would not even give them to Lockhart if he thought they would be printed: "Although it seems to be well known that this powerfull [sic] mind went utterly out of joint it is not for you or me to print his letters written in that state."[41] Lockhart answered with a plea to see what use might be made of them, and the proofsheets indicate that he had gone far in trying to accomplish the purpose he described to Laidlaw: "to put together a picture that will be highly touching of a great mind shattered, but never degraded, and always to the last noble."[42] Then came Morritt's plea: "Do not print a line of the diary that indicates decay of mind, or relate except in a general way the painful close of the scene in which he only partook of the universal lot of all mortality. Facts serviceable to medical science may be medically told, but as Benjamin Constant told Lady Davy when she objected to some superfluous improprieties of his heroine as indecorous in his book, 'Je mettrai cela dans une note.'"

The result is obvious in the proofsheets. References to and manifestations of the mental effects of Scott's illness have been cut from letters, journals, narrative links, and reminiscences. The following is cut from Lockhart's narrative: "His bookseller and printer had before them daily evidence that, whatever the origin of the ailment might have been, it had not left either the mind or the hand exactly what they had used to be" (VII, 202). Also cut (and hence absent from the Grierson edition) is a long extract of a letter to Cadell on Castle Dangerous and Scott's pathetic determination to salvage Count Robert. It ends: "I will talk to you about my plan when I see you, for which I am sufficiently eager, and will show you also what I have thought of as to Count Robert—but I fear it will always be liker mended china than whole. However, it must not be lost; but I wish to start with something on which I have bestowed the pains I am now taking. We must play our best bout at the ceasing of this long frost, and show, if we can, that Richard is himself again" (VII, 289). Large cuts are made in accounts by Sir William Gell and Edward Chency of Scott in Italy. Gell's manuscript is in print.[43] The whereabouts of Cheney's are unknown to me; but the proofsheets contain valuable suppressed passages. "He spoke of his last work with contempt," says Cheney. "'Never read it,' he said, 'it smells of the apoplexy.'" Lockhart prints: "'No author,' he continued, 'has ever had so much cause to be grateful to the public as I have. All I have written has been received with indulgence.'" He suppresses all that follows: "'I was astonished at my own success. At first I wrote for amusement, and from the pleasure I had in spending money I acquired so readily, and surely no man's money was ever more his own than mine, for I made every halfpenny by the sweat of my own brain—latterly I wrote from necessity, and to satisfy my creditors; and my last thing has served my turn—for it cleared me'" (VII, 378). Suppressed, too, is the opening of Dr. Ferguson's account of Scott's homecoming: "During Sir Walter's absence from this country, I heard from his family that he had lost all control over his appetite, and was at times so irritable and excitable, as to render him nearly unmanageable. He was tormented by an incessant desire to return home, but believed there was a conspiracy to prevent his doing so. This fixed wish extinguished every other; and he scarcely ever evinced the slightest desire to see or explore any of the objects which his situation presented" (VII, 384).

Such suppressions are in keeping with Morritt's views—and, incidentally,

with the views of other older members of the Scott circle whose influence was less directly felt. But it will be suggested that Lockhart accepted only that advice with which he agreed. In answer we might appeal to the very fact that the suppressions were not made earlier, to the fact that Morritt had to state his case so strongly and repeatedly, to the fact that surviving correspondence shows Lockhart for years in the position of one pleading for permission to be honest and full in his use of materials. But there is an admirable bit of evidence to show that on a crucial moral issue Lockhart might yield somewhat to Morritt's demands that the portrait be softened, and yet persist in his own judgment. On Scott's blacksheep brother Daniel, Morritt wrote: Lockhart added Morritt's last phrases in the proof—but only after they had been fused with his own: "Thus sternly, when in the height and pride of his blood, could Scott, whose heart was never hardened against the distress of an enemy, recoil from the disgrace of a brother" (II, 247).

When issues were less crucial, the proofsheets stand as evidence that during the final months of work, when Lockhart was in "painful anxiety" about his wife, or in mourning for her, he was willing to delegate authority. This is not to say that the delegates ever took sharp exception to his views. Lockhart, a bafflingly complex man, experienced strikingly various feelings and attitudes in his relationship with Scott. His combination of Calvinist severity with philosophic hero-worship recalls that other West Scot, his admirer Carlyle. At times, provoked by the worldliness of Scott's "energetic & tumultuous existence," the austere puritan would prevail. To Commissioner Adam, for example, he revealed the limits of his sympathy for Scott:

An influence such as Morritt's sanctioned some feelings at the expense of others. Had Lockhart heard less from Morritt, and from interested parties such as Cadell and Croker, had he received more of Adam's frank encouragement, more backthumping adjurations like Basil Hall's —"be bold—let yourself out—d-n the expence—dont be afraid—express heartily and manfully all you yourself feel and think—and be well assured that this is the genuine inspiration in matters of biography especially"[45] —perhaps the sterner tone would have sounded more insistently.

Notes