Chapter LIII
1817—Overwork and Illness—Kemble’s ‘Farewell Address’—The Kemble Dinner—Blackwood’s Magazine and the Reign of Terror in Edinburgh.
During the times of trouble with the Ballantyne affairs, Scott, as has been seen, taxed his strength to an extraordinary and dangerous extent. The effects were presently felt in that which was the permanently weak point of his physical constitution—the family tendency to paralysis. His first serious illness was in March 1817. From his letters to Morritt it appears that he had suffered all through the winter—while working as usual in Edinburgh—with cramps in the stomach. He had got temporary relief by means of drinking scalding water, but as the pains continued to recur more frequently he had been obliged reluctantly to have recourse to Dr. Baillie. ‘But’ (he says) ‘before his answer arrived, on the 5th, I had a most violent attack, which broke up a small party at my house, and sent me to bed roaring like a bull-calf. All sorts of remedies were applied, as in the case of Gil Blas’ pretended colic, but such was the pain of the real disorder, that it out-deviled the Doctor hollow. Even heated salt, which was applied in such a state that it burned my shirt to rags, I hardly felt when clapped to my stomach. At length the symptoms became inflammatory, and dangerously so, the seat being the diaphragm. They only gave way to very profuse bleeding and blistering, which, under higher assistance, saved my life. My recovery was slow and tedious from the state of exhaustion. I could neither stir for weakness and giddiness, nor read for dazzling in my eyes, nor listen for a whizzing sound in my ears, nor even think for lack of the power of arranging my ideas. So I had a comfortless time of it for about a week.’ Lockhart adds that his friends in Edinburgh were in great anxiety about him all the spring, the attacks being more than once repeated. But he resumed work almost immediately, planning out, in intervals of pain, the drama called The Doom of Devorgoil. Now also he wrote the magnificent ‘Farewell Address,’ instinct with heart-felt pathos, with which his friend John Philip Kemble took his leave of the Edinburgh stage, on the evening of Saturday the 29th March 1817. The character in which Kemble had appeared was Macbeth, and he wore the dress of the character while he spoke the lines. ‘Mr. Kemble’ (says James Ballantyne) ‘delivered these lines with exquisite beauty, and with an effect that was evidenced by the tears and sobs of many of the audience. His own emotions were very conspicuous. When his farewell was closed, he lingered long on the stage, as if unable to retire. The house again stood up, and cheered him with the waving of hats and long shouts of applause. At length he finally retired, and, in so far as regards Scotland, the curtain dropped upon his professional life for ever.’
‘My last part is played, my knell is rung,
When e’en your praise falls faltering from my tongue;
And all that you can hear, or I can tell,
Is Friends and patrons, hail, and Fare you well!’
A few days after, the great tragedian was entertained to dinner by his Edinburgh admirers. There was a company of about seventy notable persons—among them Lockhart, who says, ‘I was never present at any public dinner in all its circumstances more impressive.’ Jeffrey was chairman, and the croupiers were Walter Scott and John Wilson. From the Life of Jeffrey we extract a curious anecdote of this interesting scene. That evening Jeffrey ‘did what he never did before or since. He stuck a speech. He had to make the address and present a snuff-box to Kemble. He began very promisingly, but got confused, and amazed both himself and everybody else, by actually sitting down and leaving the speech unfinished; and, until reminded of that part of his duty, not even thrusting the box into the hand of the intended receiver. He afterwards told me the reason of this. He had not premeditated the scene, and thought he had nothing to do, except in the name of the company to give the box. But as soon as he rose to do this, Kemble, who was beside him, rose also, and with most formidable dignity. This forced Jeffrey to look up to his man; when he found himself annihilated by the tall tragic god; who sank him to the earth at every compliment, by obeisances of overwhelming grace and stateliness.’ The incident must have been awkward for Kemble, but it was a genuine and involuntary tribute to the majestic bearing of the great actor.
Shortly after this, in April 1817, there occurred an event which greatly stirred the peaceful waters of Edinburgh social and literary life, and with which Scott’s future son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, was to be very prominently associated. This was the founding of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine. The publisher was John Blackwood. Wishing to develop the magazine on lines of his own, this far-seeing and able gentleman, first shaking himself clear from the two editorial personages who were hampering his energies, started the periodical afresh at the seventh number under the title of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The famous No. VII. came like a thunderbolt. All the world wondered. From what sources had Blackwood evoked the wit, the tremendous energy, the boundless audacity of personal attack which at once shocked and delighted the public mind? The Whigs were both tortured and alarmed. The days of their sole literary domination were seen straightway to be over. For them especially a Reign of Terror had begun. They were now to be subjected to the lash of an incomparable, though often excessive, power of ridicule: a form of punishment which always hurts most sorely those to whom the saving grace of humour has been denied. Necessarily Blackwood’s Magazine was a political engine, the organ of high Toryism. As such, it was liable to the sneer of Cockburn (a sneer which tells with equal justness against all theoretical defenders of current politics): ‘In this department it has adhered with respectable constancy to all the follies it was meant to defend. It is a great depository of exploded principles; and indeed it will soon be valuable as a museum of old errors.’ But every device of mystification, an example set by Scott, was employed to keep the secret of who were really ‘Blackwood’s young Tory wags,’ and this was further secured by the entirely unsuspected fact, that the editor was actually Blackwood himself. The marvellous thing, now that the facts are known, is the enormous share performed by the two chiefs, Lockhart and Wilson. In their buoyant eagerness to break up the monopoly of Whig literary and political influence, they doubtless went too far, and sometimes knew it. Later on, these early defects were acknowledged and analysed, in Peter’s Letters, by the authors themselves. Even they, it may be, hardly realised how much pain they had given, but the almost solemn words of Lord Cockburn indicate very clearly how intense it must have been. ‘Posterity,’ he says, ‘can never be made to feel the surprise and just offence with which, till we were hardened to it, this work was received. The minute circumstances which impart freshness to slander soon evaporate; and the arrows that fester in living reputations and in beating hearts are pointless, or invisible to the eyes of those who search for them afterwards as curiosities.’ It was, in fact, the work of young and inexperienced men brimful of genius and spirit, but untaught to discern the dangers in the use of the weapons with which they played.