Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/254

518 Could such a struggle be either useless or unsuccessful? The result was thus summed up, soon after the grave had closed upon him, by one who could well appreciate his worth, as well as commemorate it for the instruction of posterity:—

"In the course of the last fifteen or twenty years, Scott had steadily become one of the most note-worthy of native artists. Without fortune, without office, without professional success commensurate with his undisputed superiority, and living in a state of seclusion, if not alienation from society, he exhibited a wonderful series of pictures from year to year; recognized by all but the most frivolous spectators to be the manifestations of a powerful and exalted soul. The superficial observer was frequently so much startled, as to find no suitable expression for his perplexity, except in the sneer of presumptuous folly; the technical critic was often confounded by the careless pride with which his rules were set at defiance and superseded; the deeper judge of painting, considered as one of the forms of art, might occasionally descry some reason to question the principles of the artist's procedure; but the thoughtful were always sure of the striking and original utterance of some new insight into the nature of man, or into the resources of art. Everybody capable of forming and pronouncing such a judgment, was aware that only genius of the most personal and lofty order could have even endeavoured to give itself expression in the large majority of those singular pieces of work. Even those who may have been the most inflexibly disposed, upon well considered aesthetical grounds, to dispute the painter's whole idea of art, both in its scope and in its materials, were also free to confess that he could be nothing less than a gifted and self-reliant poet at heart. All men felt that they stood before the works of a mind grandly endowed with ’the faculty divine,' if they were likewise of opinion that he had not completely achieved 'the accomplishment of verse.' Nor can there be any doubt but that the mass of discerning people did invariably assign him a far higher rank in the hierarchy of intellect than all his competitors in the race of fame, even while they honestly refused to his intensely idiosyncratic productions an equal meed of praise and more substantial encouragement."

The following account of David Scott's artistic and social everyday life, as given by the same pen, is too important to be omitted: "In fact, the large and solemn studio in which he painted and preserved his picture-poems, had gradually become one of the most curious and significant features of Edinburgh and its school of art; and its master-spirit, one of the most individual of Scottish characters belonging to the age in which we live. It was there that men of eminence in the church, in politics and law, in science, in literature, and in life, discovered what manner of man he was, and left him with surprise, seldom unmingled with pain, and always ennobled by admiration. It was there that intellectual strangers, of all the more elevated classes of mental character, found another 'wise man in a little city,' not without astonishment that they had scarcely heard of him before. It was there that many a tender-hearted lover of whatsoever is great and good, was at once melted and uplifted by the spectacle of so much cool self-possession, such unquenchable perseverance, such intrepid independence, and such height of contemplation, displayed in circumstances which were evidently the reverse of propitious. It was there that the enamoured students of poetry, in its essence rather than in its manifold embodiment, stood with reverence by his side, and, perhaps as proudly indifferent to particulars as he sometimes was himself, penetrated, by means of imaginative sympathy, to the soul of truth and beauty, that stirred under the surface of all