25 November: Boreham on John Lockhart

The Perfect Biographer
Today marks the anniversary of the death of the most finished biography of all time. All the circumstances of his birth and early training conspired to prepare John Gibson Lockhart for that enviable supremacy. The son of a Scottish manse, he was gently though strictly nurtured, and was most carefully educated. "He read everything that came his way," Lady Eastlake tells us, "and what he had once devoured he never forgot. His memory was so retentive that, in after-life, he seldom found it necessary to verify a quotation. No livelier boy—merry and mischievous—ever lived; in and out of school his sense of fun and humour, expressed in joke, sarcasm and pencil caricatures, was irrepressible." At college he was extremely popular; carried of all the prizes at classics; and, while yet in his teens, spoke and read German, French, Italian, and Spanish with the utmost ease.

Destined to become the biographer of Sir Walter Scott, it was in May, 1818, that the two men first met. Lockhart was then 24; Scott was 47. They became fast friends at once. The elder took the younger into his heart and into his home, with the result that two years later, Lockhart married Scott's eldest daughter. The two homes—Chiefwood and Abbotsford—being near together, Scott and Lockhart found ample opportunity for intimate intercourse and collaboration.

Two Classic Biographies Contrasted
Which is the stateliest biography in the English language—Boswell's Johnson or Lockhart's Scott? It is difficult to dogmatise. The relationship subsisting between Johnson and Boswell contrasts sharply with that between Scott and Lockhart. The atmosphere of the Johnson-Boswell connection is the atmosphere of Gough Square, of the coffee-house, of the club. The atmosphere of the Scott-Lockhart connection is the atmosphere of the open air—the wooded hills, the flowery valleys and the heather-draped moorland. Boswell is always the parasite, the sycophant, the slave; he fawns, he cringes, he crawls, he ceaselessly plays the jackal to Johnson's lion. In Lockhart's attitude towards Scott, however, there is never the slightest suspicion of obsequiousness or servility, and in Scott's attitude towards Lockhart, there is never the faintest suggestion of superiority or patronage. Each held, through all the years, the unqualified respect and whole-hearted admiration of the other. So far from playing the roles of lion and jackal, these two resembled a pair of handsome and friendly stags, ranging together the rugged uplands, tramping together across the heather in the mist and the rain, and fording together the silver streams and brawling torrents that meandered about the foothills. Lockhart knew Scott infinitely better than Boswell knew Johnson. Macaulay says that Johnson regarded Boswell as a buzzing and pestilential fly, whom he could not brush away. He heartly despised him. But between Scott and Lockhart the harmony was ideal. Lockhart was Scott's honoured relative and trusted confidant. He was to Scott as perfect words to perfect music set.

In one respect only—the quality that makes them both such admirable biographers—do Boswell and Lockhart closely resemble each other. They are neither of them, afraid of giving us all those little insignificances and irrelevances of which we love to hear. A good biographer must be a clever gossip. It is the glory of Boswell that he reveals to us all the grotesque mannerisms, the elephantine oddities and the crude tastes of Dr. Johnson. Macaulay praises him for telling us all about the great man's appetite for veal pie, his thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of measuring up scraps of orangepeel, and so on. Similarly, it is the glory of Lockhart that he tells us what Sir Walter ate for breakfast, what he said to his dogs, what he wore when he set off in the rain for Melrose, and how he looked on all sorts of occasions and in all kinds of circumstances. In describing, for example, that very first meeting with Scott in 1818, he gives us every detail concerning the room, the view from the window, the pictures, the chairs, and, particularly, the man. He stresses the restlessness of Scott's fingers, always folding or tearing up scraps of paper, tapping noiselessly on the table, or patting the fine head of one of his dogs. In this graphic and virile manner every sentence of Lockhart's monumental work is drafted.

Truth Made More Fascinating Than Fiction
The biography moves with precision, with dignity, and with deep human sympathy through all the fierce lights and dense shadows of Sir Walter's dramatic and eventful career to that poignant climax that has been the admiration and the despair of all subsequent compilers of personal memoirs. In no novel of Sir Walter's is there an ending of such tragic splendour, of such pure and delicate pathos, and of such vivid and picturesque beauty as Lockhart presents in his closing pages. His portrayal of the death-scene has become a classic—an incomparable example of intense emotion and noble restraint. Everybody knows it:

"Scott then desired to be wheeled through his rooms to the bath chair. We moved him leisurely for an hour or more up and down the hall and the great library. 'I have seen much,' he kept saying, 'but nothing like my ain hoose; give me one turn more!' Next morning he desired to be drawn into the library and placed by the central window... that he might look down upon the Tweed. Here he expressed a wish that I should read to him. I asked from what book. 'Need you ask?' he exclaimed, 'there is but one!' I chose the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel. He listened with mild devotion, and, when I had finished reading of the Father's house and the many mansions, he said: 'That is a great comfort!'"

Within walking distance of Abbotsford, amidst scenes of sylvan loveliness as romantic, as exquisite and as bewitching as anything that even Scotland could produce, Sir Walter's bones were laid to rest amidst the crumbling and ivy-covered ruins of Dryburgh Abbey. And when, twenty-two years later, Lockhart also passed away, it was ordained that he should be borne to the same secluded spot and laid at his great master's feet. It was as both men would have wished it.

F W Boreham

Image: John Gibson Lockhart