BOOKS.
THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD.*
EXCEPT for a certain bitterness of tone shown towards some individuals, which, though not unnatural, and perhaps not unjustifiable, has the odour of stale controversy, we should say that this is as good a biography as one can expect a daughter to give of a father. It is modest, although affectionate ; heart and genius are done justice to, but there are no raptures over either. We should say, too, that this is the final biography of the Ettrick Shepherd, who, when all is said and done, stands second to Burns,—and second ?nap° intervallo,—among thepoets who have succeeded him, and at the same time have used the Scotch dialect (we beg pardon, language) as their chief vehicle for " applying ideas to life." Mrs. Garden claims for the volume she has given to the public as a tribute to the memory of her father, no higher title than that of " Memorials," mainly because materials for a complete Life are not in existence. Shortly after the death of Hogg, Professor Wilson undertook to write the biography of his friend; and letters, papers, and unpublished pieces were placed iu his hand. But, for a variety of reasons—including the great sorrow of Wilson's life, the death of his wife, but including also, it most bo admitted, his habit of procrastination—the book he had promised was never written, and the documents placed at his disposal were lost. Nevertheless, the work now published " may serve," as Professor Veitch, of Glasgow University, says in a warmly appreciative, and in many respects excellent, preface, "from the directness and authenticity of the materials,—especially the letters of Hogg himself,—to shed a truer light on the man, his character, and his life," than anything that has yet been written of him. Apart from his power, if not of imagination, at least of fancy, which enabled him to soar far above the circumstances of his life, above the majority of his Scotch poetical contemporaries, and in " Kilmeny," above Allan Ramsay, whom he resembled much more closely than he resembled Burns, James Hogg was one of the simplest and most innocent of men. " The Lord had sent him a gude conceit o' himsel," no doubt, which may have brought him into difficulties with hiseducated friends, Scott and Wilson, and certainly did lead to some unfortunate animadversions on him by Lockhart. But his vanity was utterly free from malice and uncharitableness, injured no one but himself, and was, perhaps, a support to him in his pecuniary and other troubles. He had his foibles and weaknesses. He could not keep money when he made it. He was unsuccessful in many, both of his farming and of his literary speculations. Mrs. Garden is evidently indignant at the picture drawn in the Nodes Ambroslams of her father as a colossal eater and a Thor-like drinker,— rather too indignant, for nobody, at this time of day, at all events, considers that picture as a portrait, but only as an Aristophanic sketch. Bnt Hogg, although neither guilty of gluttony nor of the'commoner and more dangerous but scarcely more degrading vice, joined in the convivialities of his time, his country, and his Edinburgh comrades, and indeed bears testi • Memorials of Jaws Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. Edited by his daughter, Mrs. Garden. With Preface by Professor Veitch. London and Paisley: Alexander Gardner. 1895.
mony to the fact in a rather amusing fashion. He happened to be on a visit to London in 1831-32, at the time of the first cholera panic, and being then at the height of his fame, dined out a good deal in literary and other society. He thus writes to his wife :—" I am for my own part exceedingly well, indeed I never was better ; and although completely in the public, and generally in great companies, I have never spent a more sober winter season. The people here are all sober, there being no deep drinking here, as in Scotland; and you will think it strange when I assure you that in this great overgrown Metropolis for these last six weeks, night and day, Sunday and Saturday, I have not seen one drunk person, neither poor nor rich." To this Mrs. Hogg,
who is revealed in this volume as a devoted wife and a sensible (Scotties, "sagacious") woman, replies with that pawkiness which is an accompaniment of, or rather the arch manifestation of, Scotch affection, " It gives me great satisfaction to hear you are so well and healthy, and that there is little drinking. You
are so much out, I was afraid you might be exposed to that sort of thing, which is so dangerous at this time." But whatever failings Hogg had, they all leaned to the side of generosity; and of his life, so far as that means a record of " passions " resisted or yielded to, story, in the sense of revelation, there is none to tell.
James Hogg, in fact, lives in his works, in his" Queen's Wake," above all things in " Kilmeny " and "The Skylark," and in those of his prose tales, which are realistic without being extravagant. His daughter does not show his career to have been
more eventful than has commonly been supposed. He was born in the Vale of Ettrick, Selkirkshire, and probably on November 25th, 1770. Hogg himself was for a time under the impression that the date of his birth was January 25th, 1772 ;
but we are quite willing to believe Mrs. Garden, when she says that this belief did not originate in a deliberate attempt to identify his memory in a sentimental fashion with that of Burns, whose birthday was also January 25th. He belonged to a family of shepherds; and in his boyhood, we had almost said childhood, he tended cows and sheep. A circulating library at Peebles proved to Hogg the gateway to the knowledge of fairy-land and Border romance ; and happily for him, though not before he had shown his powers in a quite independent fashion, he was introduced by the well-known William Laidlaw to Sir Walter Scott, and made the acquaintance of Wilson, Lockhart, and the rest of the Edinburgh Tory men-of-letters of the period. Ia 1813 appeared "The Queen's Wake," and with it its author's fortune was made. In 1820 he was married ; and, although his wife was nearly twenty years younger than himself, their union was a very happy one, Hogg being a kind husband and father. The rest of his life,—his .attempts at farming, especially at Mount Benger, which he leased from the Duke of Buccleuch, his publication of various works in prose and verse, none of which, however, not even the blank verse " The Pilgrims of the Sun," can be said to have come up to the mark of "The Queen's Wake,"—is generally known. It was not free from disappointments, and it was
marked by struggles of various kinds, for Hogg did not fare -very much better at the hands of publishers than his friend Scott did ; but it cannot be said to have been unhappy. His health began to fail in the autumn of 1835; and, on November -21st of that year, he died.
The special value of this work lies, perhaps, in the interesting letters from friends and contemporaries of Hogg, — Scott, Wilson, Lockhart, Allan Cunningham, and many others,— which it contains, and which are now published for the first time. Here is a characteristically sensible one from Scott, -ez propos of some attack that had been made on Hogg in Blackwood's Magazine z- " My DEAR Hoeo,—I am very sorry to observe from the tenor of your letter that you have permitted the caricature in Blackwood's Magazine to sit so near your feelings, though I am not surprised that it should have given pain to Mrs. Hogg. Amends, or if you please revenge, is the natural wish of human nature when it receives these sort of provocations ; but in general it cannot be gratified without entailing much worse consequences than could possibly flow from the first injury. No human being who has common-sense can possibly think otherwise of you than he did before, after reading all the tirade of extravagant ridicule with which the article is filled. It is plain to me that the writer of the article neither thought of you as he has expressed himself, nor expected or desired the reader to do so. He only wished to give you momentary pain ; and were I you, I would not let him see that in this he has succeeded. To answer such an article seriously, would be fighting with a shadow and throwing atones at moonshine. If a man says that I am guilty of some partieider fact, I would vindicate myself if I could ; but if he caricatures my person and depreciates my talents, I would cents nt myself w:t'l thinking that the world will judge of my exterior and of my powers of composition by the evidence of their own eyes and of my works. I cannot as a lawyer and a friend advise you to go to law. A defence would be certainly set up upon the Chaldee manuscript, and upon many passages in your own account of your own life, and your complaint of personality would be met with the proverb, that be who plays at bowls must meet with rubbers.' As to knocking oat of brains, that is talking nohow ; if you would knock any bruins into a bookseller you would have my consent, but not to knock out any part of the portion with which Heaven has endowed them. I know the advice to be quiet under injury is hard to flesh and blood. But, nevertheless, I give it under the firmest conviction that it is the best for your peace, happiness, and credit. The public has shown their full sense of your original genius, and I think this unjust aggression and extravagant affectation of depreciating you, will make no impression upon their feelings. I would also distrust the opinion of those friends who urge you to hostilities. They may be over-zealous in your behalf, and overlook the preservation of your ease and your comfort, like the brewer's man who pushed his guest into the boiling vat that he might be sure to give him drink enough ; or they may be a little malicious, and have no objection (either from personal motives or for the mere fun's sake), to egg-on and encourage a quarrel. In all the literary quarrels of my time, and I have seen many, I remember none in which both parties did not come off with injured peace of mind and diminished reputation. It is as if a decent man was seen boxing in the street."
Lockhart's letters to Hogg are all so cordial and sprightly, though not otherwise remarkable, that we cannot but regret he should have written as he subsequently did of his friend, even if the latter did give him—and still more Scott—genuine offence. A glimpse of the heart of poor" Satan " Montgomery is afforded in a letter addressed to Hogg, from Edinburgh, in 1831 :—" The voice of kindness and the eye of sympathy have become almost strange to me. Were my soul not supported by its own undying and unquenchable energies, the infamous system of malice and misrepresentation which some fourteen or fifteen reviewers have carried on against me during the last year, though it has not martyred one single hope, has rendered me almost callous to sympathy and deaf to applause. No matter ; as Sheridan says, it is in me, and it shall come out of me.' They shall abuse me more or praise me more before I finish my career." While he was in London, Hogg made the acquaintance of the father of Mr. John Ruskin, who thus wrote him about his son, then a boy between fourteen and fifteen : " His faculty of composition is unbounded, without, however, any very strong indication of originality. He writes verse and prose perpetually, check him as we will. Last summer we spent four months in Switzerland and Italy, of which tour every scene is sketched in verse, or prose, or picture. I have seen productions of youth far superior, and of earlier date, but the rapidity of composition is to us (unlearned in the ways of the learned) quite wonderful. Ho is now between fourteen and fifteen, and has indited thousands of lines. That I may not select, I send his last eighty or hundred lines, produced in one hour, while he waited for me in the City. Do not suppose we are fostering a poetical plant or genius, to say we keep a poet. It is impossible for any parents to make less of a gift than we do of this, partly from its small intrinsic value, as yet unsuspected in him ; and next, because we dread the sacrifice of our offspring by making him a victim to the pangs of despised verse, a sacrifice to a thankless world, who read, admire, and trample on the greatest and the best."
Following this is a letter from the boy himself to Hogg, in which he says :—" If I could write one piece of poetry in my lifetime at all resembling the description of the battle of Flodden Field, I think towards the conclusion of Marnzion, it would be enough honour for me."
Previous page
