Grand Tour couldn't charm Sir Walter Scott away from Scotland

Until now no one has thought it worthwhile to ­reconstruct and reconsider Scott the traveller or, more fruitfully, to ponder the role of travel in his ­intellectual or artistic life. The reasons for his procrastination, and an account of the journeys he did make, are insightfully discussed by Iain ­Gordon Brown in a highly readable and ­exhaustively ­researched work, Frolics in the Face of Europe ­(Fonthill, £25).

Prince James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender

This year being the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter, many forms of celebration are planned, no doubt leading to re-evaluations of the poet, the novelist, the historian and creator of a ­certain view of Scotland, perhaps of the man of the law and even the honest bankrupt, but Brown’s book will be ­invaluable, not only in describing ­travels real and imagined but also in discussing what this ­journeying reveals of Scott’s character, hopes, ­aspirations and ultimately of his disappointments, self-delusions and even ­limitations.

Various factors impeded even his best laid his plans. The age of the Grand Tour was drawing to a close, although Scott knew men, such as his ­Borders neighbour, Patrick Brydone, whose book on his ­experiences in Sicily and Malta had been such an international success, who had done the full tour in its heyday. Further, for a large part of Scott’s life Britain was at war with France. Scott also busied himself with a professional life as an advocate and sheriff, and later he worked tirelessly to pay off debts incurred with the collapse of a publishing firm with which he was involved.

Perhaps the main reason was that Scott was never happier than when supervising work at Abbotsford (below), and absorbing himself with Scotland, its history and its culture.

 

The vocabulary Scott employs when talking of his projected but aborted trips abroad is tellingly ­frivolous. He spoke of a “scamper to the Continent”, while another term “frolics” gives Brown the title of his own book, but there was nothing light-headed or fun-seeking about some of his intentions. He planned, or more precisely dreamt, of visiting Spain during or after the Peninsular War, partly because of his love of such Spanish writers as Cervantes, but also because of a desire for the military life, a career scarcely compatible with his near lameness. Oddly Stevenson, another life-long invalid, nursed the same martial ambition. Brown writes that Scott made that imaginary journey to Spain “almost as a war-reporter or war-correspondent, albeit that his ‘reporting’ was likely to take a poetical form”.

Perhaps this suppressed wish for the soldier’s life accounted for his fascination with Napoleon, which produced his least read work, a nine-volume biography of the Emperor. He visited Brussels for purposes of research and strode across the field of Waterloo in August 1815, less than two months after the battle. Other more nimble British tourists had been there first and gathered gruesome souvenirs of the slaughter, as Scott may have done. Brown speculates that he “was actually disappointed not to have seen more ghastly remains of the carnage, heads cleft to the chin, bodies cut in two by cannon shot”, these being war relics described by some of the more excitable visitors.

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It was on the same trip, quixotically ­described as a “sudden frisk to Paris”, that he made his first of two visits visit to the French capital, but he was not charmed by the city. He tut-tutted censoriously at what he witnessed, or believed he witnessed, in the superior, disapproving tones which had been, and would long continue to be, the common reactions of Brits abroad. Private and public conduct in Paris was scandalous and he judged the area around the Palais Royal as an abomination “in whose saloons and porticos Vice has established a public and open school for gambling and licentiousness”.

Prince James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender

FOLLOWING Scott’s advice, we too will shudder and avert our eyes from this shameful scene, but pause to consider Scott’s first exposure to Italian art in Paris, where the work of the Old Masters which Napoleon had looted was still on display.

He was taken by the spectacle of two Highland soldiers with their wives admiring the artwork exhibited in the Louvre and “criticising the works of Titian and Raphael”. The scene plainly intrigued him, but this is the kind of vivid image Scott could routinely create. Significantly he is silent on his own response, and seemingly did not warm to the works of the Old Masters themselves.

As he would later demonstrate in Italy, he had, in Brown’s words, “little visual sense”. Although he corresponded with Stendhal, he was unlikely to suffer from that unbalanced excess of ­aesthetic ­elation which became known as the “Stendhal syndrome”. He was largely ­immune to the appeal of painting and sculpture, arts sited in a cosmos he viewed respectfully but without ­engagement.

He returned later to France even more unwillingly, and also spent time in ­Ireland, an experience which Brown describes as a Grand Tour in Microcosm, but it was Italy which was for him, as for all Europeans of the time, the real land of heart’s desire.

“Methinks I will not die happy until I have seen something of that Rome of which I have heard so much”, he wrote in 1817, but he delayed disastrously until he was elderly and ailing. He was an old man by the standards of the time when in 1831 circumstances came together to allow him to make that trip. He had suffered two strokes, so his friends offered conflicting advice. The warm south was supposedly a mecca for people of poor health, but on the other hand there was the concern over whether his health could withstand the rigours of travel. ­Dickens later ­described Scott as ­making the ­journey only when he was a ­“driveller”, a warning to Dickens when he was choosing when to travel to Italy.

Scott’s national status was such that he was invited to make the journey by sea as the guest of the Royal Navy. He set off with his daughter Anne and his younger son, Walter, intending to visit Naples where his other son, Charles, was ­employed at the British Embassy.

The first stop was Malta, where he had to go into quarantine. Then as now, Europe was facing a pandemic, ­cholera, whose impact was felt from Malta to Edinburgh. Scott was released early and spent three weeks on the island. He showed little interest in contemporary society or in classical antiquity but was fascinated by the history of the Knights Hospitaller who had made Malta their headquarters after being expelled by Turks from Rhodes.

Medieval history was the area where his mind was at home, and he found it preserved in aspic in the tombs which line the floor of the Cathedral, in the architecture of the Grand Master’s Palace and in the colourful documents in the library.

The result of these researches was his last novel, The Siege of Malta, a work which has embarrassed his admirers. John Buchan expressed the hope that no “resurrectionist” would ever attempt to publish it, but that dire fear has been ­disregarded.

Scott wished to go to Sicily, but the HMS Barham took him directly to ­Naples, where he spent over three months. He was disappointed that Etna was not in eruption as the ship passed but somewhat mollified when Vesuvius greeted him with smoke and flames. It is interesting to note similarities in the response of visitors to Naples then and now. It is still a city where life is lived more intensely than elsewhere, with a perpetual hurly-burly of noise and bustle that can dismay or delight, and a panorama of magnificent palaces and churches side by side with poverty, all of which which leaves the unsuspecting visitor ­suspended between stunned enthusiasm and hesitant bemusement.

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Naples was still an independent kingdom ruled by the Bourbons and Scott’s celebrity won him an invitation to meet King Ferdinand. The fact that neither man spoke the other’s language may well have contributed to the success of the encounter. He wrote a short story, Il Bizarro, featuring a Calabrian bandit killed by his wife, his only work with an Italian setting.

WHEN he could be tempted out of ­libraries, he was lionised by both Neapolitan and ex-pat British society, but their receptions often took the form of grand balls, unsuited to the tastes and abilities of an elderly, lame man. There was one ball at which all the guests dressed as characters from the Waverley series, and Brown has located one distraught maiden whose Catholic family would not permit her to dress as Rebecca, because she was Jewish.

Scott was taken in hand by William Gell, a long-time resident and a classical scholar, who became his Boswell for the period of his stay and later wrote a dull but valuable account of those days in ­Italy. He was dismayed by his guest’s ­lack of ­interest in classical civilisation and ­totally baffled by his obsession with ­Scottish history even when visiting ­ancient sites.

One day Gell took him to Pozzuoli, the land of myth, containing a temple of Apollo and Lake Avernus, the Virgilian entrance to Hades. The guide plainly pushed himself to the limits of his learning and oratory in explaining the ­beliefs associated with the mysterious place, but was disconcerted when in reply Scott, “in grave tones and with a great emphasis”, came out with some ­jingle from Jacobite poetry: “Up the craggy mountain and down the mossy glen/We canna gang a milking for Charlie and his men”. It is easy to sympathise with Gell’s bewilderment. The episode revealed Scott at his worst as a traveller, his mind stubbornly un-broadened.

Pompeii was a necessary port of call, but the visit was made in unusual circumstances as the two elderly men required to be carried in invalid chairs. Gell noted that Scott did not appear moved by the spectacle of the excavated streets or the vivacity of the recently recovered ­frescoes, but went around repeating the one phrase, “The City of the Dead”.

At first sight, this could be taken to imply that he was tired and fed-up, ­although he did cheer up at lunch which was served in the forum. Brown offers another, more probing interpretation of those gnomic words as symptomatic of a change in sensibility, the dawning of a romantic mindset, already apparent in the shift from a classical Grand Tour to a vision of the Grand Tour more in keeping with Romanticism.

Recent critics have striven to place Scott as a Romantic poet, but while he admired Byron and parts of Wordsworth, he was out of sympathy with the newer poets of that school.

From Naples, the party made its way to Rome, and found accommodation in the city centre not far from the Piazza di Spagna, where John Keats died in a house which now contains the Keats-Shelley museum. Scott he showed no interest in this place. Keats is buried in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls, and the heart of Shelley, who was cremated on the beach in La Spezia after his drowning, was placed in the same tomb. Scott did not get out of his coach at the graveyard. Nor did he descend at the catacombs.

He did attend a papal blessing and it ­appears that the Pope was willing to meet him, but no such meeting took place. Gell noted that the Colosseum and the ­Cloaca Maxima, the ancient underground sewage system “seem to have taken his ­fancy”.

The impression is that for Walter Scott Rome was the city of the exiled Stuarts. GK Chesterton once wrote that generations of Scottish writers were romantic Jacobites but ideological Whigs, and that judgement was true of the author of ­Redgauntlet. He visited the Palazzo Muti (below), where the Old Pretender resided and where Bonnie Prince Charlie was born, and made the uncomfortable journey out and also made what must have been a pilgrimage to the tomb of the Stuarts, designed by the great Canova, in St Peter’s.

Palazzo Muti Papazzurri, Rome, Italy, from Il quarto libro del novo Teatro delli palazzi in prospettiva di Roma moderna dato in luce sotto il pontificato di Papa Innocenzo XII (The fourth book of the new Theatre of the palaces in perspective of modern

Gell was not present, so we have no record of his reaction, beyond the picturesque fact that he tied a scarf to his walking stick to prevent him slipping on the marble floor.

The fate of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, who died abroad, weighed with him, and the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom he had hoped to visit on the return journey through Germany, made a deep impression. The party decided to take the most direct route home, although they stopped a couple of days in Venice, which he largely saw through Byron’s eyes.

He made it home to his beloved ­Abbotsford, where he died, in the place he wished to breathe his last.