Part 4

Through life the subject of this sketch was unfortunate; nor has posthumous justice redressed the balance in his favour. His fellow-countrymen and fellow-craftsmen, Scott and Smollett--with whom, if below them, he is not unworthy to be mentioned--have long since been accorded high rank among the great novelists of English literature: Galt remains in obscurity. And yet it is easy to understand how his qualities have failed of recognition. For though his character was in the ordinary sense of the word exemplary, his genius extraordinary, yet in either there was something lacking. Indeed the study of his life and works reveals almost as much to be blamed as to be praised.

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John Galt was born at Irvine, in Ayrshire, on the 2nd May, 1779, in that humbler station of society, which--in so far as it dispenses with screens and concealments, and so brings a child the sooner face to face with life as it is--may be considered favourable to genius. In childhood he was of infirm constitution and somewhat effeminate disposition--defects which were, however, in due course amply rectified. At this time his passion for flowers and for music gave evidence of a sensibility which, if one is loth to condemn it as unwholesome, is at least of doubtful augury for happiness in a workaday world. To these affections he joined the love of ballads and story-books--in the midst of which he would often pass the day in lounging upon his bed. Nor did oral tradition fail him; for, frequenting the society of the indigent old women of the locality, from their lips he would drink in to his heart's content that lore of a departing age which he afterwards turned to such good account in his works. To his own mother, whom nature had gifted with remarkable mental powers, and in particular with a strong sense of humour and a faculty of original expression, his debt was admitted to be great. Not unnaturally Mrs Galt at first strenuously opposed her son's bookish propensities, though it is recorded that she lived to regret having done so. The father, who by profession was master of a West Indiaman, though, in his son's words, 'one of the best as he was one of the handsomest of men,' does not appear in mind and force of character to have risen above mediocrity.

The most striking incident in the childhood of the future novelist is his association with the 'Buchanites,' a religious sect who took their name from a demented female, Mrs Buchan. It happened that this person had been much impressed by the preaching of Mr White, the Relief Minister of Irvine, and had followed him from Glasgow to that place, where some weak-headed members of the congregation mistook her ravings for inspiration, and made her warmly welcome. White himself participated in their delusion, and when authoritatively required to dismiss his adherent, chose rather to resign his church. From this time meetings would be held in a tent, generally in the night time, and there Mrs Buchan would hold forth, announcing herself to be the woman spoken of in the twelfth chapter of the Revelations, and Mr White as the man-child whom she had brought forth. The proceedings attracted public attention, rioting followed, and it was found advisable to expel the evangelists from the town. Some forty or fifty disciples accompanied their exodus, who sang as they went, and declared themselves _en route_ for the New Jerusalem, and in the company of the crack-brained enthusiasts went the infant Galt, his imagination captivated by the strangeness of their doings. He had not proceeded far, however, ere that sensible woman, his mother, pounced upon him and bore him off home. Nevertheless the wild psalmody of the occasion abode in his memory, and when in later life, in his fine novel of _Ringan Gilhaize_, he came to describe the Covenanters, the recollection stood him in good stead. It is also recorded of him that, after reading Pope's Iliad, he was so deeply impressed by the book as to kneel then and there, and humbly and fervently pray that it might be vouchsafed to him to accomplish something equally great. It must not be thought, however, that in him imagination predominated to the exclusion of everything else. On the contrary, to the love of what was beautiful or strange, he united a pronounced mechanical and engineering turn, which led him, among other undertakings, to construct an Aeolian harp, and to devise schemes for improving the water-supply of Greenock, the town to which his family had in the meantime removed. Thus was first manifested that diversity of faculty which enabled him in later life with equal ease to pourtray men and manners and to found cities and subdue wastes.

Meantime his education, which had been begun at home and continued at the grammar-school of Irvine, was carried on at Greenock, where it was supplemented with advantage by independent reading in a well-chosen public library. In Greenock, also, where he spent some fifteen years, he was fortunate in having as associates a group of young men whom the spirit of intellectual emulation characterised, and of whom more than one was destined to attain distinction. Among these were Eckford, who is referred to as the future architect and builder of the United States' Navy, and Spence, afterwards the author of a treatise on Logarithmic Transcendents. But undoubtedly young Galt's most congenial companion was one James Park, a youth of elegant and scholarly tastes, who shared in his passion for the _belles-lettres_, and criticised in a friendly spirit the attempts which he was now beginning to make as a poet. Would that this young man's influence had been exerted to greater effect, for he seems to have been just the sort of mentor of whom Galt stood in need, and whose discipline throughout life he missed! 'He seemed,' says the _Autobiography_, 'to consider excellence in literature as of a more sacred nature than ever I did, who looked upon it but as a means of influence.' A means of influence! One would gladly believe this but the querulous insincere utterance of a disappointed man. Unhappily evidence is but too abundant that Galt was consistently lacking in the respect due to his high calling. Among his earliest poetical efforts was a tragedy on the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and in course of time he began to contribute to the local newspaper and to the _Scots Magazine_. With Park and other young men he also joined in essay and debating societies, a recreation which they varied by walking-tours to Edinburgh, Loch Lomond, the Border Counties, and elsewhere. Before this time he had been placed in the Custom House at Greenock, to acquire some training as a clerk, whence in due course he was transferred to work in a mercantile office. It was the period of the resumption of the war with France, and he took a leading part in the movement for forming local companies of volunteer riflemen.

This period of his adolescence strikes one as having been unusually prolonged. It came to a sudden and violent end. It appears that about this time a set of purse-proud upstarts, who stood much in need of schooling in more ways than one, had made their appearance in Glasgow. In relation to some matter of business, one of these had addressed an insolent letter to the firm with which Galt was connected. It was delivered into his hands. On discovering its contents his indignation was boundless, and he proceeded to action with all the impetuosity of a Hotspur. Missing the writer in Glasgow, he straightway tracked him to his quarters in Edinburgh, and having bolted the door of the room in which he sat, forced from him a written apology. So much was satisfactory; but the turmoil excited in the young man's brain did not subside immediately. He did not return to his employment, but, after spending some time in an indeterminate sort of fashion, set off for London 'to look about him.' In the _Autobiography_, written when he was old and an invalid, all this is detailed in a loose and cursory manner. There is no reference to emotion or the inner life, and the style is that of one who, having written many books, is grown very tired of writing. To the reader this is the reverse of stimulating; yet whatever may be stated and whatever kept back, we may feel sure that, in so emotional and imaginative a man, an intense inner life must have existed, and one in all probability not of the smoothest. At the time of leaving home, however, the writer acknowledges to having felt exceedingly depressed. Then follows a description of sensations experienced, whilst horses were being changed, on the road between Greenock and Glasgow. His father accompanied him on his journey.

'I walked back on the fields,' says the young man, 'alone, with no buoyant heart. The view towards Argyleshire, from the brow of the hill, is perhaps one of the most picturesque in the world. I have since seen some of the finest scenes, but none superior. At the time it seemed as if some pensive influence rested on the mountains, and silently allured me back; and this feeling was superstitiously augmented by my happening in the same moment to turn round and behold the eastern sky, which lay in the direction of my journey, sullenly overcast. On returning to the inn, the horses had been some time in harness, and my father was a little impatient at my absence, but conjecturing what was passing in my mind, said little; nor did we speak much to each other till the waiter of the inn opened the door for us to alight at Glasgow. In truth I was not blind to the perils which awaited me, but my obstinacy was too indulgently considered.' The above reads like a passage from _The Omen_. In it we see the true Galt, or at least one side of him--brooding, fantastic, the devotee of mysticism, discerning, at this momentous point in his career, the finger of fate where another would have seen but an ordinary process of nature!

As to the time he now spent in London, beyond an incidental admission that it was one of the least satisfactory periods of his career, Galt does not take us into his confidence. One guesses that had he consulted his own feelings only, he would have enjoyed the luxury of writing Confessions. But, after all, he was a Scotchman, though an unusual variety of the class, and Scotchmen do not indulge in luxuries of that kind. His Autobiography, when it came to be written, was in the main a piece of book-making; certainly it has nothing of the confessional character, and, indeed, what of self-revelation he at this time supplies must be sought in his letters to Park.

He had brought with him to the metropolis a goodly number of introductions, which procured him much civility but nothing more. Whilst waiting, however, to see what was to be done for him in the shape of practical assistance, he employed himself in preparing for the press a poem which had been inspired by his studies in antiquarianism, and written some time earlier. The title of this production was _The Battle of Largs_, and its theme the invasion of Scotland by Haco, King of Norway, in the year 1263,--a subject which had already prompted the Titanic suggestions of Lady Wardlaw's _Hardyknute_. The poem, as it survives in extracts, is turgid, crude, and immature, exhibiting the exact reverse of what is desirable in poetry--to wit, a great expenditure of means to produce a very small result. For 'tis in vain we are assured that desperate deeds are doing if we find it possible to remain completely unmoved. A strain of somewhat similar kind was afterwards taken up by Motherwell, and by Tom Stoddart in the unbridled fantasy of his only half-serious 'Necromaunt,' called _The Death-Wake_. To do Galt justice, he quickly realised that he had mounted the wrong Pegasus, and almost immediately suppressed his poem. He acted wisely, and here once for all it may be admitted that, in the specialised sense of the term, he was no poet. Fancy, imagination, dramatic power, and many another fine attribute of the poet he of course possessed in high degree, but, whether because lacking the 'accomplishment of verse,' or for some other reason, he failed to give expression to these gifts in poetry. Metre seems to have impeded rather than assisted him, and he is most poetic when writing in prose--a conclusion suggested by the poem now under consideration, and borne out by his _Star of Destiny_, his posthumous _Demon of Destiny_, and his poetic plays. From his own frank avowal that, when drawing up a list of his works for publication, an epic[3] was overlooked, we judge that not much of the labour of the file was expended upon his verse.

He waited for some months in London, whiling away the time, as he pretends, by dabbling in astrology, alchemy, and other studies which served to feed his love of the occult, and then at last, in despair, decided to shift for himself. This led to his entering into partnership with a young Scotchman named McLachlan, in a business which, for reasons unknown, is mentioned only under the vague name of a 'commercial enterprise.' Whatever may have been its nature, for Galt this undertaking started badly, and after a period of better success, at the end of three years ended in bankruptcy. The precise steps by which this final consummation was reached are carefully detailed by Galt, yet to minds unversed in commercial procedure they remain very far from clear. In general terms, however, we gather that the failure was due to the dishonesty of a debtor, occurring in conjunction with a succession of financial misfortunes.

Having failed in commerce, Galt's next thought was of the Law. He entered himself of Lincoln's Inn, and whilst waiting to be formally called to the Bar, went abroad in the hope of improving his health, which was not good at the time. He tells us that by this time he had realised that, without friends, there is no such thing as 'getting on' in life possible. These he was conscious of lacking, and when he now turned his back on England it was, in his own words, half desiring that no event might occur to make him ever wish to return. He betook himself in the first instance to Gibraltar, where, in the well-known Garrison Library, he had his first glimpse of a young man whose feelings, had they been revealed, might have been found to tally strangely with his own. Lord Byron, at that time known only as the author of a mordant satire, was starting upon the tour which was so soon to make him famous, and as Galt had him and Hobhouse for fellow-travellers to Malta and Sicily, he got to know them fairly well. It is noticeable that his first impressions of the Pilgrim betray prejudice; and that long afterwards, when he was called on to be his biographer, he complains that Moore's portrait reveals only the sunny side of his lordship's character, and is 'too radiant and conciliatory.'

After visiting Malta and Sicily, Galt proceeded to Athens. His active mind, abhorring idleness, was soon at work again. It may be remembered that this was the period of Buonaparte's endeavour to enforce his nefarious Berlin and Milan Decrees, which had been designed with the object of annihilating British commerce. Our traveller now conceived the idea that they might be evaded by introducing British goods into the Continent through Turkey. And here it may be noted that his biographers have united in representing this scheme as the object of his going abroad, whereas he himself distinctly, though incidentally, states that he left England for the benefit of his health,[4] and that his scheme first occurred to him when at Tripolizza.[5] This fact, immaterial in itself, is of importance as affording evidence that his circumstances at the time were fairly easy; for his travels must have been costly, yet they do not appear to have brought him in any return until after his written account of them had been published, when he was recouped for the whole, or a part, of his outlay.

In pursuance of the newly-devised scheme, it was now his object to find a locality where a depot of goods might be established. For this purpose, after visiting various out of the way places, he selected Mykoni, an island of the Archipelago, which possessed an excellent harbour, where he acquired a large building, suited for a storehouse, which had originally been erected by Orloff at a time when the Empress Catherine the Second had designs on these islands. Hence, in the summer of 1810, he returned to Malta, to make known and to develope his scheme, and whilst awaiting the result of communications with England, he filled up the time with further travels, visiting Constantinople and Widdin. Turkey was now in arms against Russia, and in the course of his present journey, which was performed in wintry weather, he saw something of the hardships as well as of the pomp of war. Without presuming to question that he kept business in view--as possibly also did George Borrow in his rambles in Spain--we note the fact that in his own account of his travels the details of his specific labours are kept well in the background, if not indeed out of sight. At the worst his journeys, which led him through some singularly wild and little known parts of the globe, by bringing him acquainted with many picturesque and unusual characters, must have been rich in suggestions of adventure and romance; and, indeed, there is evidence that some of his experience of primitive and martial life acquired at this time was afterwards turned to account in painting similar life at home for his historical novels. His expectations of patronage for his project were, however, disappointed, and he resolved to return without delay to England, in the hope of there finding support for it. In the meantime literature had not been entirely neglected. Keeping his eyes well about him, he had amassed the notes on which were subsequently based his _Voyages_, and _Letters from the Levant_; whilst a translation from Goldoni, executed in a single wet day at Missolonghi, and published in the 'New British Theatre' as _The Word of Honour_, together with the tragedy of _Maddalen_, composed whilst undergoing quarantine at Messina, belong also to this time.

Back in London, he had the mortification of finding his commercial scheme--as to the presumptive value of which one would wish to have specialist opinion--regarded coldly by the Foreign Office, whilst at the same time he seems to have satisfied himself of the inutility of proceeding further in his legal career. But, whatever may have been his defects, want of resourcefulness was certainly not among them. An outburst of literary industry followed, and the year 1812 saw the publication of his Voyages and Travels, his Life of Wolsey, and his Tragedies. But in justice to one who has sins enough of slipshod composition to answer for, it must be stated that most of the Life of Wolsey--one of the most carefully composed of his books--had been written at an earlier date.

Of his _Voyages and Travels in the years 1809, 1810, and 1811, containing statistical, commercial, and miscellaneous observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Cerigo and Turkey_, a competent critic remarks that, 'while containing some interesting matter, they are disfigured by grave faults of style and by rash judgments.' The public received them favourably, but a contemptuous notice in the _Quarterly Review_ was warmly resented by the author.

It was whilst standing in the quadrangle of Christchurch College, when on a visit to Oxford, that Galt had conceived the idea of his _Life of Wolsey_. He had worked hard at the book before he went abroad, and he claimed that it embodied new views, and the results of much original research. Notwithstanding this, the _Quarterly Review_ assailed him again, and this time so libellously as to lead him to think of a criminal prosecution. He, however, dropped the idea, with the result that when his Tragedies saw the light, the persecution--now as in the case of the Travels conducted by Croker in person--was renewed with additional pungency. In the general form of his _Maddalen, Agamemnon, Lady Macbeth, Antonia, and Clytemnestra_, the author followed Alfieri, whose works he had studied abroad and admired enthusiastically, though with reservations. The plays are of a tentative character, and certainly do not deserve Scott's condemnation as the 'worst ever seen.' _Lady Macbeth_, which the author thought the 'best or the worst' of the series, though not lacking in imaginative touches, is without progression or story, and besides provoking irresistible comparisons, fails by ending just where it began. And whilst on the subject of Galt's drama, we may mention _The Witness_, the most important of several plays contributed by him to the 'New British Theatre,' a publication undertaken by Colbourn at his instigation. Here the dramatist had a powerfully dramatic if also a somewhat inconsequent story to work upon--a subject, in fact, after his own heart. Unfortunately the execution of the piece is hasty, and by no means equal to its conception. It was performed for some nights in Edinburgh as _The Appeal_, when Scott wrote an Epilogue for it, said to be the only piece of humorous verse existing from his pen. Galt himself rehandled the subject in narrative form, under the title of _The Unguarded Hour_.

He now embarked on a journalistic enterprise, assuming for a time the editorship of the _Political Review_. But the work did not suit him. After about a month he began to tire of it, and it was soon abandoned. He also contributed lives of Hawke, Byron, and Rodney, to an edition of Campbell's _Lives of the Admirals_; whilst, in 1813, his _Letters from the Levant_ made their appearance. These contain 'views of the state of society, manners, opinions, and commerce, in Greece and several of the principal islands of the Archipelago,' and had actually been written as letters at the places from which they are dated, being subsequently but little altered.

Perhaps we have already seen enough of the subject of this sketch to convince us that any lengthy perseverance in one course of conduct must not be expected of him, and, sure enough, the next thing we hear of him is that he is bound for Gibraltar, on another commercial enterprise. Before setting out, he had taken occasion to revisit the scenes of his early years, going in turn to every place which he remembered having frequented, even to the churchyard, amid whose tombstones, like his own Andrew Wylie, he had haunted as a boy. Taking stock of himself and his surroundings, he tells us that he was sensible of change everywhere, but nowhere more than in his own hopes. 'I saw that a blight had settled on them, and that my career must in future be circumscribed and sober.' When it is remembered that he was now touching upon what is called the prime of life, his tone of disillusion is pathetic.

He had gone to Gibraltar as the emissary of Kirkman Finlay--a Glasgow merchant, who afterwards bore a spirited part in the Greek War of Independence--with a view to ascertain the feasibility of smuggling British goods into Spain. But the victories of the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula were unfavourable to his mission, and much against his will he found himself compelled to return to England, having accomplished nothing, to seek surgical treatment for a painful malady from which he was now suffering. Whilst in London he was married, his wife being the daughter of a Dr Tilloch, editor of the _Philosophical Magazine_, to which Galt was an occasional contributor. His marriage was a very happy one, and on the principle, perhaps, that the happiest countries have no history, his married life is not referred to in the biographies. In 1814, at the time of the Restoration in France, we find him visiting Holland and that country, with a view to promote yet another 'abortive scheme.'