LITERARY LIVES
EDITED BY
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL
—
SIR WALTER SCOTT

LITERARY LIVES

Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.

MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D.
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White.
COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmund Gosse.
ERNEST RENAN. By William Barry, D.D.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By Clement K. Shorter.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Andrew Lang.

IN PREPARATION

R. H. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll.
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden.
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney.

Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00 net. Postage 10 cts.

Sir Walter Scott.

From the painting by John Graham Gilbert.

Literary Lives

SIR WALTER SCOTT

BY
ANDREW LANG
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1906

Copyright, 1906, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published, March, 1906
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

TO
THE HON. MRS. MAXWELL-SCOTT

PREFACE

If all reading mankind had time to read Lockhart’s Life of Scott, a brief volume on Sir Walter would be a thing without excuse. I am informed, however, by the Editor of this Series that the appreciation of Time, in our age, does not permit Lockhart to be universally read. I have therefore tried to compress as much as I may of the essence of Lockhart’s great book into small space, with a few additions from other sources. In such efforts one compiler will present matter for which another cannot find room. The volume differs from its excellent predecessors by the late Mr. Hutton, and by Mr. Saintsbury, in being the work of one who comes from Sir Walter’s own countryside, and has worked over much of his historical ground, and over most of the MS. materials which were handled by Lockhart.

The late regretted Mr. David Carnegie, after twice crossing the Australian desert, summed up his results in the saying that no explorer need go thither again. The Abbotsford MSS. are not a desert, but Lockhart has omitted nothing in them which is of value, nothing which bore essentially on his theme. No explorer need go thither again, save to confirm his appreciation of the merits of Lockhart’s work. All other books on Scott are but its satellites, and their glow, be it brighter or fainter, is a borrowed radiance.

St. Andrews, December 25, 1905.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SIR WALTER SCOTT

CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY, CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, FIRST LOVE, MARRIAGE

The visitor to Abbotsford, looking up at the ceiling of the hall, beholds, in the painted shields, the heraldic record of the “heredity” of Sir Walter Scott. In his time the doctrine of heredity had not won its way into the realm of popular science, but no man was more interested in pedigree than the Laird. His ancestors were part of himself, though he was not descended from a “Duke of Buccleuch of the fourteenth century,” as the Dictionary of National Biography declares, with English innocence. Three of the shields are occupied by white cloudlets on a blue ground; the arms of certain of the Rutherford ancestors, cadets of Hunthill, could not be traced. For the rest, if we are among those who believe that genius comes from the Celtic race alone, we learn with glee that the poet was not without his share of Celtic blood. He descended, on the female side, from the Macdougals of Makerston, and the Macdougals are perhaps the oldest family in Scotland, are certainly among the four or five oldest families. But they stood for the English cause against Bruce, a sorrow, no doubt, to their famous descendant. The wife, again, of Scott’s great grandfather, “Beardie” the Jacobite, was a Miss Campbell of Silvercraigs, counting cousins with the Campbells, (who are at least as much Douglases as Campbells) of Blythswood. Finally, the name of Scott, I presume, was originally borne by some infinitely remote forefather, who was called “The Scot” because he was Irish by birth though his family was settled, first in Lanarkshire, later among the Cymri and English of Ettrickdale and Teviotdale. So much for the Celtic side of Sir Walter.

ANCESTRY

On the other hand, the Rutherfords—his mother was a Rutherford—are probably sprung from the Anglo-Norman noblesse who came into Scotland with David I, and obtained the lands whence they derive their name. They are an older family, on the Border, than the Scotts, who are not on record in Rankilburn before 1296. One of them (from whose loins also comes the present genealogist) frequently signs (or at all events seals) the charters of David I about 1140. The Swintons, famous in our early wars, and the Haliburtons, cadets of Dirleton, have a similar origin, so that in Scott met the blood of Highlands and Lowlands, Celtic, Teutonic, and Norman. “There are few in Scotland,” says Lockhart, “under the titled nobility, who could trace their blood to so many stocks of historical distinction.” All Scottish men have a share in Sir Walter. The people of Scotland, “gentle” or “simple,” have ever set store on such ancestral connexions, and they certainly were a source of great pleasure to Scott.

His mind was, in the first place, historical; rooted in and turning towards the past, as the only explanation of the present. Before he could read with ease, say at the age of four or five, he pored over Scott of Satchells’ rhyming True History of several Honourable Families of the Right Honourable Name of Scot. “I mind spelling these lines,” he said, when Constable gave him a copy of the book, in 1818. Indeed, he was always “spelling” the legends and history of his race, while he was making it famous by his pen, since accident forbade him to make it glorious by his sword. One legend of the Scotts of Harden, the most celebrated of all, is, I think, a Märchen, or popular tale, the story of Muckle Mou’d Meg and her forced marriage with young Harden. Suppose the unlikely case that William Scott, younger, of Harden, did undertake a long expedition to seize the cattle of Murray of Elibank, on the upper Tweed. I deem this most improbable, in the reign of James VI, when he was seated on the English throne. But suppose it occurred, who can believe that Elibank would dare to threaten young Harden with hanging on the Elibank doom tree? Even if Scots law would have borne him out, Elibank dared not face the feud of the strongest name on the Border. Thus it is not to be credited that young Harden chose “Muckle Mou’d Meg,” Elibank’s daughter, as an alternative to the gallows. Moreover, the legend, I am informed, recurs in a province of Germany. If so, the tale may be much older than the Harden-Elibank marriage. The contract of that marriage is extant, and is not executed “on the parchment of a drum,” as Lockhart romantically avers. Scott, better than most men, must have known how more than doubtsome is the old legend.

He let no family tradition drop: rather, he gave a sword and a cocked hat, in his own phrase, to each story. The ballad of Kinmont Willie, the tale of the most daring and bloodless of romantic exploits, certainly owes much to him, and he “brought out with a wet finger” (in Randolph’s phrase) all the dim exploits and fading legends of Tweed, Ettrick, Ail, Yarrow, and Teviot; streams, Dr. John Brown says, “fabulosi as ever was Hydaspes.”

ANCESTRY

The son of a Writer to the Signet, Scott was grandson of a speculative Border yeoman, who laid out the entire sum necessary for stocking his farm on one mare, and sold her at a double advantage. Possibly Scott may have inherited the sanguine disposition of this adventurer. He was born to make all the world familiar with the life and history of an ancient kingdom, that, as a kingdom, had ceased to be, and with adventures rapidly winning their way to oblivion.

Just when Scotland, seventy years after she was “no longer Scotland” (according to Lockhart of Carnwath), merged into England, Nature sent Burns to make Scottish peasant life immortal, and Scott to give immortality to chivalrous Scottish romance. There are traces of love of history and traces of intellectual ability in Scott’s nearest kin. His lawyer father, born in 1729, was naturally more devoted to “analysing abstruse feudal doctrines,” and to studying “Knox’s and Spottiswoode’s folios” of the history of Kirk and State, than to the ordinary business of his calling. Scott’s maternal uncle, Dr. Rutherford, “was one of the best chemists in Europe”—we have Sir Walter’s word for it. Scott’s mother was not only fond of the best literature, but had a memory for points of history and genealogy almost as good as his own. “She connected a long period of time with the present generation.” Scott wrote when she died (1819), “for she remembered, and had often spoken with a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar....” She knew all about the etiquette of the covenanting conventicles under the Restoration, when the lairds’ wives, little to the comfort of their lords, sat on their saddles on the ground, listening to preachers like Walsh or Cameron.

CHILDHOOD

Fortunate indeed was Scott in his mother, who did not spoil him, though he must have been her favourite child. His eldest brother who attained maturity not only fought under the glorious Rodney, but “had a strong talent for literature,” and composed admirable verses. His brother Thomas was credited by Sir Walter with considerable genius, and was put forward by popular rumour as the author of the Waverley novels. His only surviving sister, Anne (died 1801), “lived in an ideal world, which she had framed to herself by the force of imagination.” Scott himself was well aware of his own tendency “to live in fantasy,” in the kingdom of dreams, and in the end he discovered that in the kingdom of dreams he had actually been living, as regards his own affairs, despite his strong practical sense, and “the thread of the attorney” in his nature. His genius, in short, was the flower and consummation of qualities existing in his family; while it was associated, though we may presume not casually, with such maladies as are current amongst families in general. There would be genius abundantly, if genius were merely a “sport” of disease.

At Abbotsford, in Sir Walter’s desk, are six bright locks of the hair of six brothers and sisters of his, who were born and died between 1759 and 1766, an Anne, a Jean, and a Walter, two Roberts, and a John. These early deaths were suspected to be due to the air of the old house in College Wynd, built on the site of Kirk o’ Field, where Darnley was murdered, perhaps on the site of the churchyard. But it was not till after the birth of the second Walter (August 15, 1771) that his father flitted to the pleasant wide George’s Square, beside the Meadows, and thereafter no children of the house died in childhood.

His own life-long malady was perhaps of an osseous nature. An American specialist has advanced the theory that “the peak”, the singularly tall and narrow head of Scott (“better be Peveril of the Peak than Peter of the Paunch,” he said to “Lord Peter”), was due to the early closure of the sutures of the skull. The brain had to force a way upwards, not laterally! However that may be, at the age of eighteen months, after gambolling one night like a fey child, little Walter was seized with a teething fever, and, on the fourth day, was found to have lost the use of his right leg. The malady, never cured entirely, but always the cause of lameness, probably deprived Wellington of a gallant officer, for Scott was by nature a man of action. But Wellington had lieutenants enough, and the accident made possible the career of a poet.

“The making of him” began at once, for the child was removed to the grandpaternal farm of Sandy Knowe, beneath the crags whence the Keep of Smailholme (in The Eve of St. John) looks over “Tweed’s fair flood, and all down Teviotdale,” over the wide plain and blue hills that had seen so many battles and border frays. Here he was “first conscious of existence”—or first remembered his consciousness—swathed in the skin of a newly slain sheep, and crawling along the floor after a watch dangled by his kinsman, Sir George Macdougal of Makerstoun.

And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers’ slights, of ladies’ charms,
Of witches’ spells, of warriors’ arms,—
Of patriot battles won of old
By Wallace Wight and Bruce the Bold,—
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.

CHILDHOOD

Sandyknowe was indeed “fit nurse for a poetic child,” “a sweet tempered bairn, a darling with all about the house.” A miniature of three years later shows us the tall forehead, the frank and eager air, the force and charm of the child, certainly “a comely creature,” who, left alone among the hills, “clapped his hands at the lightning, and cried ‘bonny, bonny’ at every flash.” He was “as eager to hear of the defeat of Washington, as if I had had some deep and personal cause of antipathy to him”; while he was already under the charm of the King over the Water, Charles, lingering out his life at Florence, not answering the petition that he would raise the standard among the faithful in America. “I remember detesting the name of Cumberland with more than infant hatred,” for he had heard, from an eye-witness, the story of the execution of the Highland prisoners at Carlisle (1746). He learned by heart his first ballad, a modern figment, Hardiknute; he shouted it through the house, and disturbed an old divine who had seen Pope, and the wits of Queen Anne’s time. It was not easy to keep young Walter “at the bit,” but his aunt soon taught him “to read brawly.” He himself says that he “acquired the rudiments of reading” at Bath, whither he was carried between the ages of four and six.

Just afterwards, at Prestonpans, he made the acquaintance of a veteran bearing the deathless name of Dalgetty, and of a Mr. Constable, in part the original of Monkbarns, in The Antiquary, “the first person who told me about Falstaff and Hotspur.” Returned to Edinburgh, he read Homer (in Pope’s version), and the Border Ballads, with his mother, who had “a strong turn to study poetry and works of devotion”—no poetry on Sundays, a day “which in the end did none of us any good.”

We see “the making of him.” Before he was six Sir Walter was “made”; he was a bold rider, a lover of nature and of the past, he was a Jacobite, and the friend of epic and ballad. In short, as Mrs. Cockburn (a Rutherford of the beautiful old house of Fairnalie-on-Tweed) remarked before he was six, “he has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever saw.... He reads like a Garrick.” No doubt his mother saw and kept these things in her heart, but we do not hear that others of the family recognized a genius in a boy who was a bookworm at home, and idle at school.

He once, at this period, said a priggish thing, which Lockhart knew, but has omitted. Some one, finding him at his book asked (as people do), “Walter, why don’t you play with the other boys in the Square?”

“Oh, you can’t think how ignorant these boys are!”

YOUTH

One deeply sympathizes, but later he found nobody from whom he could not learn something, were it but about “bend leather.”

Such were, in the old French phrase of chivalry, Les Enfances Gualtier. Now the technical Age of Innocence was past, and, in October 1778, having seen seven summers, he went to the old Edinburgh High School, to Mr. Frazer’s class. The age of entry was not, perhaps, unnaturally early.[1]

“Duxships,” and gold medals, and the making of Greek Iambics were not for Walter Scott. He was, he tells us, younger than the other boys in the second class, and had made less progress than they in Latin. “This was a real disadvantage,” as there was leeway to make up. He sat near the bottom of the huge string of boys, perhaps eighty, and, as he truly says, the boys used to fall into sets, “clubs and coteries,” according to the benches which they occupied. There they used to sit, and play at ingenious games—e.g. (in my time) a match between the Caesars and the Apostles—conducted on the principle of a raffle; or a regatta of paper boats blown across the floor. The tawse (a leather strap) descended on their palms, but learning never came near them, and they moved up from class to class by seniority, not by merit.

Scott was not always on the lowest benches, but flew to the top by answering questions in “general information” (which nobody has), and fell, by a rapid dégringolade, when topics were afoot about which every industrious boy knew everything. He was the meteor of the form, the translator of Horace or Virgil into rhyme, “the historian of the class” (as Dr. Adam, the headmaster said), and he was “a bonny fechter.” Owing to his lameness, he and his opponent used to fight sitting on opposite benches—his victories were won, as he said, in banco. He dared “the three kittle steps” on the narrow ledge of rock outside the wall of Edinburgh Castle; helped to man the Cowgate in snowball riots, and took part in the “stone bickers” against the street boys, which he describes in the anecdote of Green Breeks. His private tutor had “a very strong turn to anaticism,” and in argument with him Scott adopted the side of Claverhouse and the Crown against Argyll and the Covenanters. “I took up my politics at that period as King Charles II did his religion” (King Charles is here much misunderstood), “from an idea that the Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike of the two.”

YOUTH

In these controversies were the germs of Old Mortality. “The beastly Covenanters,” wrote Scott to Southey in 1807, “hardly had any claim to be called men, unless what was founded on their walking upon their hind feet. You can hardly conceive the perfidy, cruelty, and stupidity of these people, according to the accounts they have themselves preserved.” But, when he came to write history, Scott adopted another view, and, out of sheer love of fairness, was unfair to the Cavaliers. By “a nice derangement of” dates, he introduced the worst cruelties of the Cavaliers before they occurred, and did not mention at all the cause of the severities—the Cameronian declaration of war by murder.

His old tutor could have done no better for “the good old cause,” but modern popular historians do as much. Under the Headmaster, Dr. Adam, “learned, useful, simple,” Scott rose to the highest form, though, like St. Augustine, and for no better reason, he refused to learn Greek. He certainly “never was a first-rate Latinist”—his quotations from Roman poets prove that fact, no less than a false quantity in his only brace of Latin elegiacs, for the tomb of his deerhound, Maida.[2]

Scott regretted his ignorance of Greek, “a loss never to be repaired, considering what that language is, and who they were who employed it in their compositions.” The most Homeric of later poets knew nothing of Homer, which was to himself, certainly, an irreparable loss, for Pope and Cowper could not impart to him a shadow of what Homer would have been to him in the Greek. But great as is the delight which he missed, it is not probable that a knowledge of Greek literature would have moved Scott to imitate its order, its beauty, and its deep and poignant vein of reflection on human destiny.

YOUTH

People blame Scott because he has not the depth of Shakespeare or of Wordsworth, because Homer, a poet of war, of the sea, of the open air, is far more prone than Scott was to melancholy reflection on the mystery of human fortunes. But Scott was silent, not because he did not reflect, but because he knew the futility of human reflection. Humana perpessi sumus is a phrase which escapes him in his age, when he looks back on a lost and unforgotten love, on a broken life, on what might have been, and what had been. “We are men, and have endured what men are born to bear”—that is his brief philosophy. Why add words about it all? The silence of Scott better proves the depth of his thought, and the splendour of his courage, than the finest “reflections” that poets have uttered in immortal words. It is not because his thought is shallow that he never shows us the things which lie in the deep places of his mind. “Men and houses have stood long enough, if they stand till they fall with honour,” says his Baron Bradwardine. “Ilios must perish, the city of Priam of the ashen spear,” says Homer—and what more is there to say, for a man who does not wear his heart on his sleeve? Knowledge of Greek poetry would not have induced Scott to write a line in the sense of the melancholy of Greek epic poetry; a noble melancholy, but he will utter none of its inspirations. On the side of precision, exquisite proportion, rich delicacy of language, “loading every reef with gold,” as Keats advised Shelley to do, Scott would have learned nothing from Greece.

His genius was of another bent—

Flow forth, flow unconstrained, my Tale!

he says, knowing himself to be an improviser, not a minutely studious artist. He knew his own path, and he followed it, holding his own art at a lowly price. No critic is more severe on him for his laxities, for his very “unpremeditated art” than he is himself. But, such as that art may be, it was what he was born to accomplish, and, had he read as much Greek as Tennyson, he would still have written as he rode

Without stop or stay down the rocky way,

and through the wan water of the river in spate. He was obedient to his nature, and all the Greek Muses singing out of Olympus could not have altered his nature, or changed the riding lilt of Dick o’ the Cow for more classical measures and a more chastened style.

For these reasons, as he was not, like Keats, a Greek born out of due time, but a minstrel of the Mosstroopers, we need not regret that he was ignorant of the greatest of all literatures. Of Latin, he had enough to serve his ends. He seldom cites Virgil: he appears to have preferred Lucan. He could read, at sight, such Latin as he wanted to read, which was mainly medieval. His knowledge of Italian, German, Spanish, and French was of the same handy homemade character. He picked up the tongues in the course of reading books in the tongues, books of chivalry and romance. His French, when he spoke in that language was, as one of the Court of the exiled Charles X in Holyrood said, “the French of the good Sire de Joinville.”

YOUTH

From childhood, and all through his schoolboy days, and afterwards, he was a narrator. A lady who knew him in early boyhood says that he had a myth for every occasion. “Even when he wanted ink to his pen he would get up some ludicrous story about sending his doggie to the mill again.” We are reminded of the two Stevensons, telling each other stories about the continents and isles in the milk and porridge which they were eating. “He used also to interest us ...” says a lady, “by telling us the visions, as he called them, which he had when lying alone ... when kept from going to church on a Sunday by ill-health ... misty and sublime sketches of the regions above which he had visited in his trance.” The lady thought that he had a tendency to “superstition,” but he was only giving examples of the uprisings from the “subliminal” regions which are open to genius. It was with invented stories that he amused his friends, Irving and James Ballantyne, whom he met at a school of which he was a casual pupil at Kelso. He once kept a fellow-traveller awake all night, by his narrative of the foul murder of Archbishop Sharp, told as they drove across Magus Moor, the scene of that “godly fact.”

The men and women whom he met in boyhood, oddities, “characters,” people his novels. Chance scraps of humour remained in the most retentive of memories, reappeared in his romances, and made it impossible for his old friends to doubt his authorship. His long country walks were directed to places of historical interest, in which he found that scarce any one else was interested, before he peopled them with the figures of his dreams.

In his thirteenth year Scott matriculated at the town’s college of Edinburgh. At this time he was once in the same room with Burns, whom he enlightened as to the authorship of lines by Langhorne, written under a weak engraving of Bunbury’s, a soldier dead in the snow beside his wife and dog. It is curious that the author’s name, in fact, is printed under the verses. Scott remarked of Burns’ eyes, that “he never saw their like in a human head.” “His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits.” The late Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews (A.K.H.B.) once asked a sister of Burns which of the portraits of her brother was the best likeness? “They a’ mak’ him ower like a gentleman,” she replied, and no doubt she meant that they missed the massiveness of his countenance. Scott thought Burns too humble in his attitude towards young Ferguson, in whom he recognized his master; not wholly an error, and a generous error at worst. Scott also thought himself “unworthy to tie Burns’ shoes,” so noble was the generosity of either poet.

YOUTH

His fifteenth year saw Scott, already a lawyer’s apprentice, in the Highlands, happy in the society of Stewart of Invernahyle, who had fought a sword and target duel with Rob Roy (at Ardsheil, I think), had been out with the Prince, and supplied the central incidents of Waverley. “The blawing bleezing lairds” were not much to the taste of the elder Mr. Scott, who was unconsciously sitting for his own portrait as the elder Fairford in Redgauntlet, a picture rich in affectionate humour. “The office,” in Edinburgh, swallows up a large proportion of the schoolboys. To Mr. R. L. Stevenson, “the office” seemed a Minotaur, but Scott found in it his profit. He acquired, as a copyist, the quality of steady prolonged writing; the faculty of sitting at it which Anthony Trollope called “rump.” He once covered, without interruption, a hundred and twenty pages of folio, at three-pence the page, gaining thirty shillings to spend on books or a dirk. Looking at the MSS. of his novels, down to the never-to-be-published Knights of Malta, written during his last voyage to Italy, we see the steady, unfaltering, speedy hand of the law writer, with scarce a correction or an erasure. After his ruin, after his breakdown in health, he once wrote the “copy” of sixty printed pages of a novel in a day. He had acquired the power of sitting at it, without which his colossal labours, in the leisure hours of a busy official life, would have been impossible. He could not have done this had he not been of Herculean strength, the strongest man in the acquaintance of the Ettrick Shepherd. “Though you may think him a poor lamiter, he’s the first to begin a row, and the last to end it,” said a naval officer. Like his own Corporal Raddlebanes, he once fought three men with his stick, for an hour by the Tron clock—not that of Shrewsbury.

We are apt to forget how young Scott was, at this period. He was only eighteen when he piloted a young English friend through the shoals and reefs of early misadventure. He can scarcely have been nineteen when he met Le Manteau Vert, Miss Stewart Belches (daughter of Sir John Stewart Belches of Invermay), the object of his first and undying love. His friends thought him cold towards the fair, but, in truth, he was shielded by a pure affection. Concerning the lady, I have heard much, from Mrs. Wilson (née Macleod), whose aged aunt, or great-aunt, like Scott, fell in love with the bride of William Forbes. “She was more like an angel than a woman,” the old lady would say. Scott’s passion endured for five years (“three years of dreaming and two of wakening,” he says), inspiring him, as time went on, to severe application in his legal studies, and to his first efforts in literature.

FIRST LOVE

Lockhart did not know the details of the ending of the vision. “What a romance to tell—and told I fear it will one day be,” wrote Scott after his ruin. But told the romance never will or can be, except in the merest outline. Scott thought that he had something to complain of, as appears from his poem, The Violet, about “my false love,” and in verses describing Fitz James’ broken sleep, in The Lady of the Lake.

Then, ... from my couch may heavenly might
Chase that worst phantom of the night—
Again return the scenes of youth,
Of confident undoubting truth
* * * *
They come, in dim procession led,
The cold, the faithless, and the dead.
* * * *
Dreamed he of death, or broken vow,
Or is it all a vision now?

Scott, according to Lady Louisa Stuart, said that he always, in later life, dreamed of his lost love before any great misfortune. In age and sickness, his Journal tells much of his thoughts of her, of the name he had cut in runic characters on the grass below the tower of St. Rule’s at St. Andrews, the name that “still had power to stir his heart.” But years went by before the vision ended—the vision of the lady of Rokeby, of Redgauntlet, and of the Lay of the Last Minstrel; “by many names one form.”

It is because he knew passion too well that he is not a poet of passion. There is nothing in Scott like the melancholy or peevish repining of the lovers in Locksley Hall and in Maud. Only in the fugitive farewell caress of Diana Vernon, stooping from her saddle on the darkling moor before she rides into the night, do we feel the heart-throb of Walter Scott. Of love as of human life he knew too much to speak. He did not “make copy” of his deepest thoughts or of his deepest affections. I am not saying “They were pedants who could speak,” or blaming those who can “unlock their hearts” with a sonnet or any other poetic key. But simply it was not Sir Walter’s way; and we must take him with his limitations—honourable to the man, if unfortunate for the poet.

We see him, a splendid figure, “tall, much above the usual stature, cast in the very mould of a youthful Hercules; the head set on with singular grace, the throat and chest after the truest model of the antique, the hands delicately finished, the whole outline that of extraordinary vigour, without as yet a touch of clumsiness.” The “lamiter” “could persuade a pretty young woman to sit and talk with me, hour after hour, in a corner of a ballroom, while all the world were capering in our view.”

FIRST LOVE

This was the lad who shone in The Speculative Society; who roamed with Shortreed from Charlieshope to Charlieshope, dear to all the Dandie Dinmonts of Liddesdale, “sober or drunk, he was aye the gentleman.” You could not wander in Liddesdale, in these days, without the risk of being “fou”: though even among these “champion bowlsmen” Scott had the strongest head. “How brawlie he suited himself to every body,” as to “auld Thomas of Twizzlehope,” who possessed “the real lilt of Dick o’ the Cow,” and a punch bowl fatal to sobriety. The real lilt, or “a genuine old Border war horn” was worth a headache. Mr. Hutton, in his book on Scott, made his moan over the story of the arrival of a keg of brandy that interrupted religious exercise in Liddesdale. Autres temps, autres moeurs, and Scott, during these ballad-hunting expeditions, was not yet twenty-one. In defending the Rev. Mr. Macnaught, before the General Assembly, on a charge of lack of sobriety, and of “toying with a sweetie wife” and singing sculdudery chants, Scott edified the General Assembly by the distinction between ebrius and ebriosus, between being drunk and being a drunkard. But the Assembly decided that Mr. Macnaught was ebriosus. In getting up this case Scott visited, for the only time, the country of the Picts of Galloway, and of Guy Mannering.

The period of the Reign of Terror, in France, found Scott taking part in anti-revolutionary “rows” in Edinburgh. Nothing hints that he, like Wordsworth, conceived a passionate affection for the Revolution. The Radicals had a plot of the good old Jacobite kind for seizing the Castle (1794), but Scott rejected such romance, and was a volunteer on the side of order. In 1795 he conceived that his love suit was prospering, as appears plainly in a letter; despite “his habitual effort to suppress, as far as words were concerned, the more tender feelings, which in no heart were deeper than in his.” He translated Bürger’s ballad of Lenore (a refashioning of a volkslied current in modern Greece, and as The Suffolk Tragedy, in England), and laid “a richly bound and blazoned copy” at his lady’s feet (1796). The rhymes are spirited—

Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash, splash, along the sea,
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee!

FIRST LOVE

But the lady “gave to gold, what song could never buy,” as her unfriends may have said. But as her chosen lover was William Forbes, of the house of the good old Lord Pitsligo of the Forty-Five, and as Mr. (later Sir William) Forbes remained the staunchest friend of Scott, we may be certain that Green Mantle merely obeyed her heart.

“I shudder,” wrote a friend, “at the violence of his most irritable and ungovernable mind.” He little knew Scott, who rode from his lady’s house into the hills, “eating his own heart, avoiding the paths of men,” and said nothing. The fatal October of his rejection (1796) saw the publication of his first book, a slim quarto, containing translations of Bürger’s ballads. The lady of Harden, a Saxon by birth, corrected “his Scotticisms, and more especially his Scottish rhymes.” He had become the minstrel of “the Rough Clan” of Scott, and was a friend of the Houses of Harden (his chief’s) and of Buccleuch.

Scotland lost Burns in 1796, but did not yet take up Scott, whose ballads literally served “to line a box,” as Tennyson says, and were delivered over to the trunk-makers. He made no moan, and, in April 1797, his heart, as he says, “was handsomely pierced.” At Gilsland he met the dark-eyed Miss Charpentier, of French origin, daughter of M. Jean Charpentier (Ecuyer du Roi), and fell in love. I think that, in Julia Mannering, the lively dark beauty of Guy Mannering, we have a portrait from the life of Scott’s bride. In personal appearance the two ladies are unmistakably identical, and Miss Charpentier, in a letter of November 27, 1797, chaffs her lover exactly as Julia Mannering chaffs her austere father. Scott had written about his desire to be buried in Dryburgh Abbey, and Miss Charpentier thought him dismal and premature. She did not care for romance, she did not pamper Scott by pretending to the faintest sympathy with his studies, but she was a merry bride, a true wife, and, when the splendour of celebrity shone on Scott, it did not burn up (as a friend feared that it might) the unmoved Semele who shared the glory. Scott was married at Carlisle, in the church of St. Mary, on Christmas Eve, 1797.

I have often wondered whether, after his marriage, Scott was in the habit of meeting his “false love” in the society of Edinburgh. His heart was “handsomely pieced,” he says, but haeret lethalis arundo.

Sir Walter Scott.

After a painting by Sir Henry Raeburn.

CHAPTER II
EARLY MARRIED LIFE, BALLAD COLLECTING, LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, MARMION

The Scotts, at Edinburgh, dwelt first in George Street, then in South Castle Street, and finally in the house in North Castle Street, where he resided till the time of his misfortunes. The rooms were soon full of old pikes and guns and bows, of old armour, and of old books. Already Scott’s library was considerable. He had read enormously, and it is curious that a man of his unrivalled memory made so many written notes of his reading. “Reading makes a full man,” but Gillies, an intelligent if unpractical bore, says that, when in the full tide of authorship later, Scott read comparatively little. His summers were passed in a cottage at Lasswade, in the society of his early friends, and of the families of Melville, of the historian, Patrick Fraser Tytler, Woodhouselee, and of Buccleuch. His early friends were around him—William Erskine, a good man and fastidious critic, William Clerk, of Penicuik, Fergusson (Sir Adam), and many others. Gillies says that Scott lived “alone,” and doubts “whether there was any one intimately connected with Sir Walter Scott whose mind and habits were exactly congenial.” But it is a commonplace that we all “live alone,” and certainly Scott seems to have believed that he found, especially in “Will Erskine,” all the sympathy, literary and social, that he could expect or desire. In 1798 he made a new acquaintance, Mat Lewis, famous then for his romance, The Monk, and busy with his Tales of Wonder.

EARLY MARRIED LIFE

Lewis, though no poet, was a neat metrist, and tutored Scott in the practical details of prosody. To Lewis Scott offered versions of German ballads, and other materials from his increasing store of original or traditional Volkslieder. He entered the realm of poetry, not by the usual gate of “subjective” lyrics about his own emotions, but through the antiquarian and historical gate of old popular ballads, newly opened by Bishop Percy, Herd, Ritson the excitable antiquary, and others. Sir Philip Sidney had loved these songs of “blind crowders,” Addison had praised them, Lady Wardlaw had imitated them, Burns had expressed but a poor opinion of them, but German research and imitation had given a new vogue to the ballads, which Scott, in boyhood, had collected whenever he possessed a shilling to buy a printed chant. The simplicity and spirit of the narrative folk songs did much to inspire and give vogue to Wolf’s theory that the Homeric poems were, in origin, a kind of highly superior long ballads, handed down by oral tradition. In this theory Scott had no interest, about its truth he had no opinion, sitting silent and bored when it was debated by Coleridge and Morritt. “I never,” he says, “was so bethumped with words.” The vogue of the ballads lent a new blow at the poetical theories of the eighteenth century, and at the poetry of Pope. But Scott would not have it said that Pope was no poet, a poet he was, but he dealt with themes that were no longer so much appreciated as they had been in the age of Anne. Though a literary innovator Sir Walter was not a literary iconoclast, and he loved no poetry better than the stately and manly melancholy of Dr. Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal.

Mat Lewis’s ballads were delayed in publication, but in January 1799 he negotiated with a Mr. Bell for the issue of Scott’s version of Goethe’s Goetz Von Berlichingen, “a very poor and incorrect translation;” so a former owner of my copy of Lockhart has pencilled on the margin. Goetz, at all events, made no impression on Coleridge’s detested “reading public,” and though Scott carried to London, in 1799, an original drama, The House of Aspen, which was put in rehearsal by Kemble, it never saw the footlights. In later life he expressed disgust at the idea of writing for “low and ignorant actors” (who may be supposed to know their own business); perhaps he had been mortified by the ways of managers. At this time his father died of paralysis; says Lockhart, “I have lived to see the curtain rise and fall once more on a similar scene.” The Glenfinlas ballad was written at this time, founded on a legend of the murderous fairy women of the woods, which I have heard from the lips of a boatman on Loch Awe, and which Mr. Stevenson found, unmistakably the same, among the natives of Samoa. A more important ballad, the first in which he really showed his hand, was The Eve of St. John, a legend of Smailholme tower. Here we find the true Border spirit, the superstitious thrill, the galloping metre, the essence of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Cadyow, a ballad of the murder of the Regent Moray, is also of this period, and though not in the traditional manner, is most spirited.

BEGINNING OF BALLANTYNE

Scott’s destiny was now clear enough, the country had in him a new “maker.” But he had no idea of a life of authorship, agreeing with Kerr of Abbotrule that “a Lord President Scott might well be a famous poet—in the vacation time.” Literature, he said, was a good staff, but a bad crutch, and he looked to advance his worldly prospects and secure his livelihood by the profession of the Bar. Our other poets, as a rule, have meditated the Muse in perfect leisure, with no professional distractions. But Scott’s literary work was all done in hours stolen from an active official life. “I can get on quite as well from recollection of nature, while sitting in the Parliament House, as if wandering through wood and wold,” he said to Gillies, “though liable to be roused out of a descriptive dream, if Balmuto, with a fierce grunt, demands, ‘Where are your cautioners?’” Shelley composed while watching “the bees in the ivy bloom;” Keats, while listening to the nightingale; Scott, in the Parliament House, under the glare of Lord Balmuto. The difference in method is manifest in the difference of the results. But Marmion was composed during gallops among the hills of Tweedside.

At this date, the winter of 1799, Scott met his school friend James Ballantyne, then publishing a newspaper at Kelso, and Ballantyne printed twelve copies of the new ballads. Scott liked the typography, thought of a small volume of the old Border ballads, to be executed by his friend, and the die was cast. The success of The Border Minstrelsy made him an author, association with the printer helped him on the long road to financial ruin.

BALLAD COLLECTING

The same date, December 1799, saw Scott made Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire, “the Shirra of the Forest.” He at once invited Ballantyne to settle as a printer and publisher in Edinburgh, while in the Forest, when ballad hunting, he made the acquaintance of Leyden, scholar and poet, of William Laidlaw, his lifelong friend, and of James Hogg, then an Ettrick swain, “the most remarkable man who ever wore the maud of a shepherd.” Hogg had none of the education of Burns. “Self taught am I,” he might have said, like the minstrel of Odysseus, “but the Muse puts into my heart all manner of lays.” Hogg was indeed the survivor of such Borderers as, writes Bishop Lesley (1576), “make their own ballads of adventures for themselves.” He has left a graphic account of his first meeting with Scott. “Oh, lad, the Shirra’s come,” said Scott’s groom. “Are ye the chap that makes the auld ballads?” Hogg replied, “I could not say that I had made ony very auld ballads,” but did James tell the truth? He is under suspicion of having made the “very auld ballad” of Auld Maitland, which his mother at once chanted to the Shirra. Scott was as happy as his own Monkbarns, when he overheard Elspeth of the Burntfoot crooning the ballad of Harlaw. The old lady told the Shirra that she had learned Auld Maitland “frae auld Andrew Moor, and he learned it frae auld Baby Metlin” (Maitland) “wha was housekeeper to the first” (Anderson) “laird of Tushilaw. She was said to have been another than a gude ane....”

Baby Metlin having this character, I sought for her, aided by the kindness of the minister of Ettrick, in the records of the Kirk Session of Ettrick, hoping to find her under Church censure for some lawless love. But there is no documentary trace of Baby, and the question is, could Hogg, then ignorant of libraries, above all of the Maitland MSS., have forged the ballad of Auld Maitland, and made his mother an accomplice in the pious fraud? It is to be remarked that Scott himself says that he obtained Auld Maitland in manuscript, from a farmer (Laidlaw), and that the copy was derived from the recital of “an old shepherd” (1802). None the less Mrs. Hogg may also have recited it, having learned it from the old shepherd, Auld Andrew Moor. It is a delicate point in ballad criticism. Such a hoax, at this date, by the wily shepherd, appears to me to be impossible, and I lean to a theory that Auld Maitland, and The Outlaw Murray, are literary imitations of the ballad, compiled late in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century, on some Maitland and Murray traditions. In any case, Hogg had won the interest of Scott, whose temper he often tried but whose patience he never exhausted. For Leyden, a more trustworthy collector of ballads, Scott secured an appointment in the East, “a distant and a deadly shore.”

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

In 1802, the first two volumes of The Border Minstrelsy, later added to and emended, were published in London, with all the treasures of ancient lore in prefaces and notes; the first fruits, and noble fruits they are, of Scott as an historian and writer in prose. Ballantyne, still at Kelso, was the printer. Scott remarks that “I observed more strict fidelity concerning my originals,” than Bishop Percy had done. To what extent he altered and improved his originals cannot be known. He confesses to “conjectural emendations” in Kinmont Willie, which he found “much mangled by reciters.” Mr. Henderson credits him with verses ix-xii, “mainly,” and with “numerous other touches.” I do not think that in the ballad of Otterbourne he interpolated a passage bestowed on him by Mr. Henderson, for he twice quoted the lines in moments of great solemnity, and he was not the man to quote himself. The texts, though they passed the scrutiny of the fierce Ritson, are much more scientifically handled (with the aid of the Abbotsford and other MSS.) by Professor Child, in his noble collection. He notes over forty minute changes, in one ballad, from the MS. copy of Mrs. Brown. But The Border Minstrelsy gives the texts as the world knows them, as far as it does know them, while the prose elevates “a set of men whose worth was hardly known” to a pinnacle of romance. In their own days the Border riders were regarded as public nuisances by statesmen, who only attempted to educate them by the method of the gibbet. But now they were the delight of “fine ladies, contending who shall be the most extravagant in encomium.” A blessing on such fine ladies, who know what is good when they see it!

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

Scott says, with his usual acuteness, that we “sometimes impute that effect to the poet, which is produced by the recollections and associations which his verses excite.” When a man has been born in the centre of Scott’s sheriffdom, when every name of a place in the ballads and the Lay is dear and familiar to him, he cannot be the most impartial, though he may be not the least qualified critic of the poet, who, we must remember, wrote for his own people. By 1802, Scott announced to Ellis that he was engaged on “a long poem of my own ... a kind of romance of Border chivalry, in a light horseman sort of stanza.” This poem was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which Borderers may be excused for thinking the best, the freshest, and the most spontaneous of all his romances in rhyme. The young Countess of Dalkeith (later, Duchess of Buccleuch) had heard from Mr. Beattie of Mickledale a story (known under another form, and as of recent date, in Glencoe) of a mysterious being who made his appearance at a farm house, and there resided. The being uttered the cry Tint, tint, tint! (Lost, lost, lost!), and was finally summoned away by a Voice calling to him by the name of Gilpin Horner. This legend was “universally credited”: Lady Dalkeith asked Scott to write a ballad on the theme, and thus Gilpin, though criticized as an excrescence on the Lay, was really its only begetter. While he was wondering what he could make of Gilpin, Scott heard part of Coleridge’s Christabel, then in manuscript, recited by Sir John Stoddart. The measure of Christabel had previously been used in comic verse, by Anthony Hall, Anstey, Wolcott and others, and Scott seems to have assumed the right to employ it in a serious work. In this he showed something of the deficient sense of meum and tuum which marked his freebooting ancestors; and Coleridge, whose fragment was not published till many years later, resented the appropriation and often spoke of Scott’s poetry with contempt. A year passed before Scott actually wrote the first stanzas of the Lay. He read them to Erskine and Cranstoun, who said little, and he burned his manuscript. But later he found that the critics were too much puzzled by the novelty of the poem to give an opinion, and when one of them, probably Erskine, suggested that an explanatory prologue was necessary, Scott introduced the Last Minstrel, chanting to Monmouth’s widow, and went on with the work, “at about the rate of a canto a week.”

In this casual manner he “found himself,” and his fame. The Lay was not published till 1805, and Scott’s energies were being given to an edition of the romance of Sir Tristrem, and to elucidating the true history of his favourite Thomas the Rymer, of Ercildoune. In later days he purchased The Rymer’s Glen, so he chose to style it, below Eildon tree, with the burn which murmurs by the cottage of Chiefswood. But Sir Tristrem and the Rymer were learned and unprofitable subjects. Despite his need of money, Sir Walter was always ready to spend his time and labour in literature which profited not, financially. “People may say this or that of the pleasure or fame or profit as a motive of writing,” he remarks. “I think the only pleasure is the actual exertion and research....”

Society and his duties as Quartermaster-General of Volunteer horse were combined with research and composition. Invasion seemed imminent, and Scott worked both at his cavalry drill and at organizing the infantry militia of his sheriffdom. In September 1803 he met Wordsworth and his sister on their Scottish tour, when Wordsworth prayed for “an hour of that Dundee” who drove the army of Mackay in rout through the pass of Killiecrankie. It is curious to find Wordsworth, Ruskin and Scott united among the friends of Claverhouse! Wordsworth professed himself “greatly delighted” by Scott’s recitation of four cantos of the Lay, though “the moving incident is not my trade,” any more than admiration of contemporaries was Wordsworth’s foible. Later the admiration was mainly on the side of Scott, though Wordsworth made noble amends in his beautiful sonnet on Scott’s final and fated voyage to Italy.

ASHESTIEL

Matters of finance were now occupying Scott. At the Bar he had never much more practice than that which came to him from his father’s office. That was little indeed, usually under £200 a year, and grew less when Scott’s father died, and his gifted but gay brother, Thomas, mismanaged the business. With his sheriffdom, his private resources, and a legacy of about £6,000 from an uncle, Scott was at the head of £1,000 a year. He succeeded in obtaining the reversion of a Clerkship in the Court of Sessions, doing the work for nothing while the holder, an old man, lived; and, in the end of 1805, he put his £6,000 into the printing business of James Ballantyne.

This was the beginning of evils. A barrister ought not to be a secret partner in a commercial enterprise. Erskine alone knew the fact, and we do not hear that Erskine remonstrated. Lockhart regretted that Scott, who was now obliged to fix on a residence within his sheriffdom, did not buy Broadmeadows with his windfall of £6,000. The place is beautifully situated on the wooded left bank of Yarrow, between Hangingshaw and Bowhill, and hard by the cottage of Mungo Park, the African traveller. Here Scott might have lived happy and remote, in the heart of his own country. But he was no hermit, he loved society, and he could not give up his military duties. He left Lasswade, the Gandercleugh of his Tales of my Landlord, and rented from a Russell cousin Ashestiel, a small house, in part very old, on a steep cliff overhanging the Tweed, above Yair. Only the hills behind the house severed him from Yarrow, the fishing was excellent, hard by is Elibank, the tower of his ancestress, “Muckle Mou’d Meg,” and Selkirk, where he administered justice, is within an easy ride. The bridge over Tweed was not yet built, and Scott had the unfading pleasure of risking his life in riding the flooded ford. Here Scott reclaimed that honest poacher, Tom Purdie, his lifelong retainer and friend, who, with rustic liberality of speech, expressed his high opinion of Mrs. Scott’s attractions. Hard by is Sunderland Hall, where Leslie’s troops bivouacked before they surprised Montrose at Philiphaugh, and at Sunderland Hall was an excellent antiquarian library open to the Shirra. Of him little trace remains at Ashestiel, save the huge arm-chair which was borrowed for him in his latest days of paralysis. At the Peel, within a few hundred yards, he had an intelligent neighbour, Mrs. Laidlaw, wife of “Laird Nippy,” a bonnet laird of an ancient line which lay under an old curse, not unfulfilled. To Mrs. Laidlaw Scott presented all his poems, which, by her bequest, have come into the hands of the present writer. Had Scott been the owner, not the tenant, of Ashestiel, Abbotsford would never have existed, “that unhappy palace of his race.”

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

It was in January 1805 that the Lay was published by Messrs. Longman. To appreciate the Lay and its success, we must either have read it in childhood, when “glamour” seems a probable art (as to some unknown extent it really is), and when lamps that burn eternally in tombs present no difficulties to the reason; or we must have imagination enough to understand how perfectly and delightfully novel was the poem. There had been a long interregnum in poetry in England. Cowper, as we learn from Miss Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, was Scott’s only rival, and Cowper is not romantic. Wordsworth and Coleridge were practically unknown to “the reading public,” Burns was barred by “the dialect,” the school of Pope had dwindled into The Triumphs of Temper. Meanwhile Mrs. Radcliffe had kindled and fed the sacred lamp of love for all that Catherine Morland thought “truly horrid,” and had been a favourite of Scott himself. In the Lay the eager public found mysteries far exceeding in delightfulness those of Mrs. Radcliffe, found magic genuine, all unlike her spells which are explained away; they found many novel and galloping measures of verse; they found nature; and they found a knowledge of the past such as has never been combined with glowing poetic imagination.

Mr. Saintsbury says with truth that “a very large, perhaps the much larger, part of the appeal of the Lay was metrical.” Scott appeared to be as much an innovator in metres as Mr. Swinburne was, sixty years after him. Scott knew nothing at all (nor do I) about “the iambic dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence, anacrusis, and catalexis”: to him these terms were “bonny critic’s Greek,” and as unintelligible as, to Andrew Fairservice, was “bonny lawyer’s Latin.” But it does seem that he gave “extreme care” to his “scheme of metre” in the Lay, not arranging it, as he said of one of his novels, “with as much care as the rest, that is, with no care at all.” The result, to quote Mr. Saintsbury, is “to some tastes, a medium quite unsurpassed for the particular purpose,” and Scott’s later poems are, I venture to think, in metre less exquisitely appropriate, and more monotonous. His rhymed romances are in no sense epic, they are a new kind of composition based on the ballad, but, owing to their length, in need of constant variety of cadence. All these qualities were in the highest degree novel, and never to be successfully imitated, seriously, though susceptible of parody.

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

We do not now appreciate the charm of all this freshness. We live a century later, “the gambol has been shown,” the Pegasus of romance has been put through all his paces before generations of blasés observers; witches, goblins, and reivers are hackneyed, and only the young (for whom Scott, like Theocritus, professedly sang) can recapture the joy with which the world hailed the Lay. We have, moreover, what our ancestors of 1805 had not, the verse of Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, and Coleridge present in our memories, verse deeply meditated, rich in thought, delicate in expression, “every reef loaded with gold.” Scott has these great rivals now, in 1805 he had no rivals save those who filled the times, already remote, of great Elizabeth. Thus only the young, and they who have in their hearts every name and memory of Scott’s hills and waters, can offer to the Lay, or to his other narrative poems, the welcome that the country gave in 1805. Only we, old Borderers, or fresh boys and girls, are at the point of view. Others may style the Lay “a thirdrate Waverley novel in rhyme,” “let ilka man rouse the ford as he finds it”; it is a ford which I have many times ridden with pleasure during many years. Out of the romance I choose an episodic passage, in essence, though not in numbers, a ballad: it tells, traditionally, how the clan of Scott won fair Eskdale. Probably they obtained it on the forfeiture of a liege lord far from “tame,” that Maxwell who, on the execution of the red Regent, took the Morton title, dared the Douglas feud, and supported the Catholic cause to his ruin. But tradition speaks otherwise.

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

Scotts of Eskdale, a stalwart band,
Came trooping down to Todshawhill;
By the sword they won their land,
And by the sword they hold it still.

Hearken, Ladye, to the tale,
How thy sons won fair Eskdale....
Earl Morton was lord of that valley fair,
The Beattisons were his vassals there.

The Earl was gentle, and mild of mood,
The vassals were warlike, and fierce, and rude;
High of heart and haughty of word,
Little they reck’d of a tame liege lord
The Earl into fair Eskdale came,
Homage and seignory to claim:
Of Gilbert the Galliard a heriot he sought,
Saying, “Give thy best steed, as a vassal ought.” ...
“Dear to me is my bonny white steed,
Oft has he help’d me at pinch of need;
Lord and Earl though thou be, I trow,
I can rein Bucksfoot better than thou.” ...
Word on word gave fuel to fire,
Till so highly blazed the Beattison’s ire,
But that the Earl the flight had ta’en,
The vassals there their lord had slain.
Sore he plied both whip and spur,
As he urged his steed through Eskdale muir;
And it fell down a weary weight,
Just on the threshold of Branksome gate.

The Earl was a wrathful man to see,
Full fain avenged would he be,
In haste to Branksome’s Lord he spoke,
Saying—“Take these traitors to thy yoke:
For a cast of hawks, and a purse of gold
All Eskdale I’ll sell thee to have and hold
Beshrew thy heart, of the Beattisons’ clan
If thou leavest on Eske a landed man;
But spare Woodkerrick’s lands alone,
For he lent me his horse to escape upon.”
A glad man then was Branksome bold,
Down he flung him the purse of gold;
To Eskdale soon he spurred amain,
And with him five hundred riders has ta’en.
He left his merrymen in the mist of the hill,
And bade them hold them close and still;
And alone he wended to the plain,
To meet with the Galliard and all his train.
To Gilbert the Galliard thus he said: ...
“Know thou me for thy liege-lord and head;
Deal not with me as with Morton tame,
For Scots play best at the roughest game.
Give me in peace my heriot due,
Thy bonny white steed, or thou shalt rue.
If my horn I three times wind,
Eskdale shall long have the sound in mind.” ...
Loudly the Beattison laugh’d in scorn;
“Little care we for thy winded horn.
Ne’er shall it be the Galliard’s lot
To yield his steed to a haughty Scott.
Wend thou to Branksome back on foot,
With rusty spur and miry boot.”...
He blew his bugle so loud and hoarse,
That the dun deer started at fair Craikcross;
He blew again so loud and clear,
Through the gray mountain-mist there did lances appear;
And the third blast rang with such a din
That the echoes answered from Pentoun-linn,
And all his riders came lightly in.
Then had you seen a gallant shock,
When saddles were emptied, and lances broke!
For each scornful word the Galliard had said,
A Beattison on the field was laid.
His own good sword the chieftain drew,
And he bore the Galliard through and through;
Where the Beattisons’ blood mix’d with the rill,
The Galliard’s Haugh men call it still.
The Scots have scatter’d the Beattison clan,
In Eskdale they left but one landed man.
The valley of Eske, from the mouth to the source,
Was lost and won for that bonny white horse.

For the rest, from fair Margaret, the lost love,

Lovelier than the rose so red,
Yet paler than the violet pale,

to Wat Tinnlin, and

The hot and hardy Rutherford
Whom men called Dickon-draw-the-sword,

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

the characters are all my ancient friends, and the time has been when the romance was history to me. The history, of course, is handled with all Scott’s freedom. Michael Scott had been dead for several centuries, not for some seventy years, and the approximate date of the tale must be the year of the religious revolution, 1559-1560; “the Regent” must be Mary of Guise. Men no longer made their vows to St. Modan and St. Mary of the Lowes, whose chapel the Scots burned in 1557: it had become fashionable to wreck churches, thanks to preaching bakers and tailors, Paul Methuen and Harlaw. Be these things as they may, and let critics be critics as of old,

Still Yarrow, as he rolls along
Bears burden to the Minstrel’s song.

The Lay, as Scott wrote to Wordsworth, “has the merit of being written with heart and good will, and for no other reason than to discharge my mind of the ideas which from infancy have rushed upon it. I believe such verses will generally be found interesting, because enthusiastic.” Whoso reads the Lay as it was written, “with heart and goodwill,” is not likely to complain of its lack of interest. The opening dialogue of the Spirits of river and hill, the ride of William of Deloraine through the red spate of Ail water, the scene of fair Melrose beheld aright, the opening of the Wizard’s tomb, in the splendour of the lamp that burns eternally; the fluttering viewless forms that haunt the aisles; the tilting between Cranstoun and Deloraine; the pranks of the page; the courage of the young Buccleuch; his bluff English captors; the bustle of the Warden’s raid; the riding in of the outlying mosstroopers; the final scene of the Wizard’s appearance and the passing of the page; with the beautiful ballads of the minstrels, make up a noble set of scenes, then absolutely fresh and poignant.

“WAVERLEY” BEGUN

While the public, unlike Sir Henry Eaglefield, did not need three readings to convince them of the excellence of the Lay, the critics were as wise as usual. It is never easy to keep one’s temper in reading Jeffrey’s criticisms. If not “the ideal whipper-snapper,” at least he was always thinking, not of the natural appeal of a poet “to the simple primary feelings of his kind,” but of what Mr. Jeffrey could say to the abatement of the poet’s merits. Ellis thought Jeffrey’s review “equally acute and impartial,” and it was impartial compared with his critique of Marmion. The poem should have been something else, not what it was. It should have “been more full of incident,” as if it could be more full of incident! The Goblin was “a merely local superstition,” to which Scott, of all men, could most easily have replied by proofs that the superstition, practically that of the Brownie, is universal. For example Froissart gives us, in Orthon, a goblin page, though not a malevolent specimen of the genus. Jeffrey said, and one would “like to have felt Mr. Jeffrey’s bumps”—as Charles Lamb said of a less famous dullard—that “Mr. Scott must either sacrifice his Border prejudices, or offend his readers in the other parts of the Empire!” Jeffrey writes like the snappish pedant of a provincial newspaper. When Marmion appeared, Jeffrey found, on the other hand, that it was not Scottish enough! Pitt and Fox equally admired the work, the public bought it as poetry is no longer bought, and Scott sold his copyright at the ransom of £500, which, with a royalty of £169 6s. on the first edition, and a present of £100 to buy a horse, from Messrs. Longman, made up his whole literary profits on the transaction.

The money probably went into his printing business, with Ballantyne & Co., and already (1805) we find that firm “receiving accommodation from Sir William Forbes,” the banker. They were always receiving or being refused “accommodation”; Scottish business had a paper basis; its bills represented fairy gold that turned to withered leaves; though Scott, as an Editor (of Dryden’s works at this time), put large quantities of business in the way of his printing firm. His practice at the Bar was a thing of the past: he was waiting for dead men’s shoes as a Clerk of the Court of Session; and, while toiling over Dryden’s works, he began Waverley, hoping to publish it by Christmas 1805. He purposely did not make a brilliant start, though the description of Edward Waverley’s studies is a copy of his own, and William Erskine did not think highly of the first seven chapters. So Scott threw the manuscript aside, to his admirers a misfortune. Waverley would have been as great a success as it was nine years later: Scott would have worked the new vein, the “Bonanza mine,” and for eighteen new Waverley novels (at the rate of two yearly) we would cheerfully give up Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, and The Lord of the Isles. Dis aliter visum.

It was now that Scott adopted the system of rising from bed to write at five in the morning. On one occasion he had the cruelty to return and awake Mrs. Scott, with the tidings, which he knew to be wholly uninteresting to her, that he had discovered the meaning of the name of a burn that passes through his estate. While taking brief holiday at Gilsland, he was summoned to mount and ride to Dalkeith, the rendezvous of the Forest, by the beacon fire which proved to be a false alarm. The story is told in The Antiquary. Scott met the Forest men pouring in down every water, and I have heard, from my own people, that the inhabitants of the little Border towns meant to burn them, if Napoleon landed, drive their flocks into the hills, and fight it out in the old Border way, a burnt country and a guerilla foe. It was during his ride of a hundred miles in twenty-four hours that Scott composed the lines beginning—

The forest of Glenmore is dree,
It is all of black pine and the dark oak tree.

PARTY SPIRIT

The April of 1806 saw Scott in London; already a “lion,” he was presented at the tiny Court of Caroline, Princess of Wales, who at this time was taken up by the Tories, as the Prince of Wales was then of the Whig party; much as another Prince of Wales, Frederick, was something of a Jacobite. He found that the Princess had an exaggerated freedom of manner, and presently “it came to be thought so.” She called him “a faint-hearted troubadour,” and he had no mind for the part of Chastelard. In town he met Joanna Baillie, whose plays he appreciated with more of generosity than critical faculty. His instalment as Clerk of Session was not welcomed by the Whigs, and, in irritation, “he for the first time put himself forward as a decided Tory partisan.” The Tories, at all events, were not pro-French. It would have been well if Scott could have taken the advice of Lord Dalkeith (Feb. 20, 1806), “Go to the hills and converse with the Spirit of the Fells, or any Spirit but the Spirit of Party, which is the fellest fiend that ever disturbed Harmony and social pleasure.”

On June 27, 1806, Scott wrote his “Health to Lord Melville,” the Tory governing spirit of Scotland, whom the Whigs were impeaching. James Ballantyne sang this lay at a public dinner on Lord Melville’s acquittal. The Princess of Wales was saluted in this song, which contained the words “Tally ho to the Fox” (C. J. Fox). This does not appear an amazing indiscretion, in a parcel of party verses, but the Whigs were greatly shocked. If a Briton must be a party man, he may as righteously belong to one party as the other. But the Whigs ever cherished the belief that they were the righteous. The worst effect of Scott’s politics was his connexion with journals, from the stately Quarterly to the inglorious Beacon, which carried political rancour into literary criticism. It is true that Hazlitt wrote as furiously and vilely against Coleridge in The Edinburgh Review, which was Whig, as any one ever did against Keats in The Quarterly, which is Tory. But Whig offences, in history as in literature, are condoned by historians, and forgotten by most people, while Gifford, of the Quarterly, and the conductors of Blackwood remain in the pillory. In any case, with the brutal outrages of criticism Scott had nothing to do. He was foremost to praise Frankenstein, supposing it to be by Shelley, when Shelley was the target of Tory insults; and he invited Charles Lamb to Abbotsford, when Lamb was being attacked as a leader of the Cockney School.[3] Lamb missed the chance of coursing and salmon fishing with a Scot who would not have aroused in him “an imperfect sympathy.”

However Lamb and Shelley were not known in Scotland in 1806, when the affairs of Scott’s brother Thomas made it necessary for Walter to

“MARMION”

earn money by his pen. He received £1,000 from Constable for the copyright of an unwritten poem, Marmion, and mortgaged his time and genius to help a brother. Constable was then rather a dealer in rare old books than a publisher, but he foresaw Scott’s success, and outbid Messrs. Longman, if, indeed, they made any bid at all. To his brother Thomas he wrote a series of letters, still, I think, unpublished, and mainly noteworthy for the goodness of head, the wisdom, the benevolence and tact of the writer. By the end of 1807 he was finishing at once his Life of Dryden, and his Marmion; who, as he wrote to Lady Louisa Stuart in January 1808, is “gasping upon Flodden Field,” though Scott hoped, that day, “to knock him on the head with a few thumping stanzas.” When we remember that, by his brother’s failure, the whole affairs of the estates of the Marquis of Abercorn were thrown on his hands “in a state of unutterable confusion,” and at his own responsibility, we may estimate his industry. Describing the research needed by his Dryden he writes—

From my research the boldest spiders fled,
And moths retreating trembled as I read,

while at the same time he was leading Marmion from disgrace to death, and was passing the heart of the day in his official duties (1807). But by the end of February 1808, Marmion was in the hands of the public, equipped with the charming epistles to friends which precede the cantos.

Contrasting the over full life of Scott, and all his innumerable distractions, with the “day long blessed idleness” of Tennyson, we cannot expect from Marmion the delicate finish of The Idylls of the King. On the other hand, if Scott had enjoyed the leisure of Tennyson, his rhymed romances would not have been better or other than they are.

In the Introduction to Canto Third, written to Erskine, he tells us that criticism was wasted on him—

Then wild as cloud, or stream or gale,
Flow on, flow unconfined, my tale.

He will not imitate

those masters, o’er whose tomb
Immortal laurels ever bloom,
Instructive of the feeble bard

as the murmurs from the tomb may be. He will not even desert the fabled past to chant the glories of the “Red Cross Hero” (Sir Sidney Smith), nor of Sir Ralph Abercromby. But he foresees and predicts

The hour of Germany’s revenge,

“MARMION”

and that then

When breathing fury for her sake,
Some new Arminius shall awake,
Her champion, ere he strike, shall come,
To whet his sword on Brunswick’s tomb.

In few years the hour and the champion came, Field-Marshal Von Blücher. A poet has seldom been a better prophet.

The plot of Marmion is in one way strangely akin to the plot of Ivanhoe. In both we have a hard-bitten, hard-hearted, and unscrupulous knight, Marmion and the Templar. In both we have a pilgrim guide, who is no pilgrim, but a knight in disguise, returned from exile, with a deep grudge against the Templar, or Marmion (Wilfred, Wilton). Both sets of partners are rivals in love, at least if Wilfred, as we believe, loved Rebecca. In both we have a tourney between the rivals, in which Marmion and the Templar are defeated by Wilton and Wilfred. But Marmion’s behaviour, both in regard to his lady page, and in the matter of the forgery, is much worse than that of the Templar at his worst, though, amidst his infamy, he is a knight as bold and haughty as the traitor Ganelon in the Chanson de Roland. The high revenge of the lady page, Constance, as she goes to her death by hunger, stirred even Jeffrey. “The scene of elfin chivalry” in which Marmion tilts with the phantom knight, was suggested by a Latin legend, forged and sent to Scott by Surtees of Mainsforth, who several times palmed off on the Sheriff ballads of his own making. Pitscottie, the candid old Fifeshire chronicler, supplied the omens which, as in the Odyssey, lead up to the catastrophe of Flodden Field. Marmion was made to travel to Edinburgh by a path that mortal man never took, Scott desiring to describe the castles on the way, and a favourite view of Edinburgh from Blackford Hill. This passage of landscape has been elaborately and justly praised by Mr. Ruskin. For poetical purposes Lady Heron is brought to Holyrood, though she was at her castle beneath Flodden Edge, and the artifice is justified by her song of Young Lochinvar. But it is the closing battle piece that makes the fortune of Marmion.

JEFFREY

“All ends in song,” and in song end Scotland’s sorrows for that fatal unforgotten fight, in which all was lost but honour. Scarce a great family but lost her sons, the yeomen and peasants died like paladins, and the strongest of the Stuart kings made the best end of all of them, rushing forth from the fighting “schiltrom” and falling, pierced with arrows and hacked with bills, not a lance’s length from the English general. For this we have Surrey’s own word, and true it is that if the Scots were never led with less skill, they never did battle with more indomitable courage. Had not every leader fallen, save Home, the next day would have seen a renewal of the battle—

Where shivered was fair Scotland’s Spear,
And broken was her shield.

Flodden secured the success of Marmion, and gave the laurels to the brow of Scott. But it is certain that our age could dispense with Clara and her lover! The fiend of party, detested by Lord Dalkeith, moved the Whigs to take umbrage because more moan was made for Pitt than for Fox in one of the Introductory pieces, where by an error of the press several lines of the lament for Fox were omitted in early copies. “All the Whigs here are in arms against Marmion,” wrote Scott (March 13, 1808). Jeffrey now complained of “the manifest neglect of Scottish feelings,” which had been so injuriously flattered in the Lay, to the indignation of the rest of the Empire! Lockhart justly remarks that it was the British patriotism which vexed Jeffrey, whose Edinburgh Review did its best to throw cold water on the spirit of national resistance to Napoleon. He professed that his stupid criticism was a well meant effort to draw Scott from “so idle a task” as that in which he displayed his “pedantry.” Scott could bear the spite till Jeffrey charged him with want of patriotism, and that arrow rankled. Jeffrey dined with him on the day when Scott read the critique, and was cordially received, but his host ceased to write in the Edinburgh Review, and raised up another like unto it, a rival, the Tory Quarterly.

CHAPTER III
QUARTERLY REVIEW, LADY OF THE LAKE, ROKEBY, BALLANTYNE AFFAIRS

As Scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a well paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the literary calling in 1808. Britain was not yet a wildly excitable and hysterical country. Rapidity of communication of news had not irritated the nerves of the community. We won or lost a battle, but as men knew nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. A few years after Scott’s death, a Parliamentary Commission inquired into the financial conditions of publishers and authors. The Commission learned, from one of Messrs. Longmans’ firm, that it was not unusual for gentlemen to “form libraries” (the expression “every gentleman’s library” survives as a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now ceased to be.

The man who killed the formation of private libraries was Walter Scott. His Waverley appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any books except novels. Poetry soon became a “drug in the market,” and the taste for “the classics,” whether ancient or modern, died away: the novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the circulating library.

“QUARTERLY REVIEW”

It was the fortune of Scott to take full advantage of the traditional usage of “forming libraries” in the years between the appearance of the Lay and of Waverley. He edited Dryden in many volumes, and was fairly well paid. By doubling the price, Constable induced him to edit Swift’s works, and to write the best extant Life of Swift. He also edited the important Sadleir Papers, the diplomatic correspondence of the agent of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, a most valuable book to the historian, and he was concerned in many antiquarian publications. These were undertaken partly from love of the past, partly for the purpose of gaining employment for needy men of letters like Henry Weber, a German who later became insane and challenged Scott to a pistol duel across a table! Constable was usually the publisher of the ventures, but Constable had a partner, a Mr. Hunter, a laird, no less, who bullied Weber, and behaved to Scott in a manner which he deemed insufferable.

Again, politics came between Constable and Scott. Constable was the publisher of the Edinburgh Review, which had filled up the measure of its iniquities. No man likes to be called an unpatriotic pedant, and Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, had called Scott both pedantic and unpatriotic. Again, the year 1808 saw the Spanish national rising against Napoleon. Backed by Britain and Wellington, and by the infatuation of Bonaparte himself,[4] by the fatuous Moscow expedition, and the revenge of Germany, the rising of the Peninsula overthrew the French Emperor. But the Edinburgh Review and the Whigs had no taste for a national rising in the name of freedom. The Spanish, they observed, were a Catholic and intolerant people, not like the liberal French. The Spanish insurrections began in massacres of unpopular officials, and, at Valencia (June 6, 7, 1808), in the murder of the whole colony of French merchants in the town. That French Republican mobs should massacre uncounted victims was very well: it was intolerable to the Whigs that Spanish Catholic mobs should imitate them. The Spanish cause was both disreputable and desperate, said the Whigs. England, if she aided Spain, must perish in the same ruin. Such was the song of the Edinburgh Review, at that time the only critical journal conducted by educated men. Meanwhile Scott recognized the genius of Wellesley—“I would to God he were now at the head of the English in Spain!”

“QUARTERLY REVIEW”

For personal and political reasons then, as a patriot and a poet outraged, Scott determined not only to counteract the Edinburgh Review, but to set up a rival to Constable, its publisher. It is difficult to trace each step in his scheme of resistance to Constable and Whiggery. But John Murray, then a young publisher in London, saw his opportunity of winning Scott away from Constable; he determined to back, financially, the Ballantynes in London, and he visited Ashestiel in October 1808. He had heard of the nascent Lady of the Lake, he had heard of Waverley as “on the stocks,” and he wished to have his share. From a letter of Scott to his brother Thomas, we learn that the old staff of The Antijacobin, including Canning, now Prime Minister, and Frere, had been “hatching a plot” for a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. Scott had been offered the Editorship, with “great prospects of emolument,” and the new serial was to have private information from Government. But for many obvious reasons, Scott could not take the Editorship, which fell to Gifford, a man of bad health, bad temper, and procrastinating habits, feared and unpopular as a satirist. Heber and Ellis, however, were ready to aid contributors, and Scott’s letters reveal his opinion of the state of literary criticism.

As is usual, periodical criticism revelled in “a facetious and rejoicing ignorance.” Specialists could not write what the public would read; editors like Jeffrey added flippancy to their dull lucubrations. Reviewing had long been indolently good natured: the Edinburgh Review had set the fashion of being tart and bitter; the fashion pleased, and “the minor reviews give us all abuse and no talent.” The age of “slashing” criticism had begun, and Scott held that “decent, lively, and reflecting criticism” would be welcome. He knew Gifford’s temper, and hoped to abate it. “We must keep our swords clear as well as sharp, and not forget the gentlemen in the critics.” Had Scott accepted the Editorship, with Heber, Ellis, Southey, and other gentlemen for his aides, the Quarterly would have been what he desired it to be. But a satirist was the Editor, and for long the tone was “savage and tartarly,” in cases well remembered. Many of Scott’s best essays, however, appeared in the Quarterly.

His indignation, and we may say his infatuation, found vent in another project. Lockhart may be too severe in his account of James Ballantyne’s brother John, who, after failing in various undignified lines, was started as a publisher by Scott, in 1809. Scott supplied most of the capital; John was expected to manage the accounts, and so the fatal business began. Nobody could call the Ballantynes “gentlemen,” whether in a heraldic or any other sense of the word. But both, in several ways, consciously or unconsciously amused Scott; he was deeply attached to them, and they to him. That he had such henchmen was his own fault: they were, so to speak, his Cochranes and Oliver Sinclairs, the unworthy favourites who were the ruin of the old Stuart Kings. Lockhart says that “a more reckless, thoughtless, improvident adventurer” than the festive John “never rushed into the serious responsibilities of business,” while James “never understood book-keeping or could bring himself to attend to it with regularity.” Scott, on the other hand, thoroughly understood business, and kept systematic accounts of his private expenditure.

THE BALLANTYNE COMPANY

But his success carried him, as it carried the great Emperor his contemporary, beyond himself. He felt adequate to all labours, however diverse; he was as confident as Napoleon in his own star; he entered on this publishing business as Napoleon invaded Russia, without organized supplies (for Mr. Murray soon withdrew from the Ballantyne alliance), and disaster was always at his doors. Between 1805 and 1810 he invested at least £9,000 in the Ballantyne companies, and night by night the fairy gold won by his imagination changed into worthless paper. We cannot here attempt to distribute exactly the shares of blame which fall to Scott and to the Ballantynes. Mr. Cadell uses the word “hallucination” to qualify Scott’s part in the business. I have examined these complicated matters carefully,[5] and the gist of the explanation lies in a remark of James Ballantyne. “The large sums received never formed an addition to stock. In fact they were all expended by the partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly adopted my brother John’s sanguine results.” They accepted John’s book-keeping at a venture, and, to use a slang phrase, they “blued” the apparent profits. That is the secret.

To leave a repulsive theme, in 1809 Scott visited the Highlands, he began The Lady of the Lake, which had long “simmered” in his mind, and he rode Fitz James’s ride from Loch Vennachar to Stirling, finding it practicable, though the ground, to be sure, must have been very different in the days of James V, when lochs occupied what is now arable land. At Buchanan House, on this tour, he read English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and briefly spoke of the author as “a whelp of a young Lord Byron ... abusing me for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my pen. God help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws.” But, like the Moslems in Thackeray’s White Squall, he “thought but little of it,” and did not dream of repaying Byron in kind.

NO SATIRIST

As he wrote to Lady Abercorn, “If I did not rather dislike satire from principle than feel myself altogether disqualified from it by nature, I have the means of very severe retaliation in my power,” particularly with respect to the Whigs of Holland House. Scott never used his powers as a satirist. He was remarkably skilled in the playful imitation of the styles of other poets, a faculty scarcely to have been expected from one so careless of finish in his own productions. He could easily have retaliated on Byron and others in the manner of Pope; but, as he thought, satire is the lowest, because the least sincere, of all forms of composition. Mankind is weary of the points and the feigned indignation of the satirist, and as “damns have had their day,” according to Bob Acres, versified satire too is fortunately in the limbo of things obsolete.

Scott seems usually to have had in his mind the theme for his next poem but one before he had finished its predecessor. In an excursion to Stirling, during the autumn of 1808, he told Mrs. Scott that he hoped one day “to make the earth yawn” at Bannockburn, “and devour the English archery and knighthood, as it did on that celebrated day of Scottish glory.” The design was long deferred, and when it was fulfilled, the Earth is not the only person who yawns in the course of The Lord of the Isles.

In a life that was now very happy, whether spent in London, in Edinburgh, or in coursing and spearing salmon with the Ettrick Shepherd at Ashestiel, Scott occupied his morning hours with his edition of Swift, with the editing of the Somers Tracts, and with The Lady of the Lake, which appeared in May 1810.

The feud with Constable was now dying of natural decline, and Scott and Jeffrey were quite forgetting their differences. Scott had never concealed from Jeffrey his opinion that the critic knew nothing of the heart and glow of poetry, and Jeffrey, before publishing his review of The Lady of the Lake sent his proof sheets to Scott, expressing his regret for the “heedless asperities” in the criticism of Marmion. “Believe me when I say that I am sincerely proud both of your genius and your glory, and that I value your friendship more highly than most of either my literary or political opinions.” Jeffrey was a good fellow at heart, though, in criticising contemporary poetry, he spoke most highly of a certain Professor Brown! He found The Lady of the Lake “more polished in its diction” than its predecessors, and certainly its rhyming octosyllabic couplets are more monotonous than the varied cadences of the Lay. “It never expresses a sentiment which it can cost the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend,” which is true enough, but is no less true of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The general chorus of praise, and the rush of tourists to Loch Katrine and Ellen’s Isle, did not turn Scott’s head, or persuade him that he was a poet of the first order. Miss Scott told James Ballantyne that she had not read The Lady of the Lake. “Papa says there is nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry.” Yet he confessedly wrote for “young people of spirit.” He says, “I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it was in the highest fashion with the million.”

“LADY OF THE LAKE”

Meanwhile, whosoever, in youth, has read the magical lines—

The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

and has followed the chase across the Brig of Turk, to

The lone lake’s western boundary

has to thank Scott for leading him into the paradise of romance, and cares not how low the literary critics may rate the Minstrel. Such a reader has been with

mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.

Other enchanted lands there are, but to one Scott has given him the key, to a land where the second-sighted man foretells the coming of the stranger, and the prophet sleeps swathed in the black bull’s hide in the spray of the haunted linn.

Never can we forget the hurrying succession of pictures that pass by the bearer of the fiery cross, or the song of the distraught Blanche that gives warning to Fitz James.

The toils are pitch’d, and the stakes are set,
Ever sing merrily, merrily;
The bows they bend, and the knives they whet,
Hunters live so cheerily.

It was a stag, a stag of ten,
Bearing his branches sturdily;
He came stately down the glen,
Ever sing hardily, hardily.

It was there he met with a wounded doe,
She was bleeding deathfully;
She warned him of the toils below,
Oh, so faithfully, faithfully!

He had an eye and he could heed,
Ever sing warily, warily;
He had a foot, and he could speed,
Hunters watch so narrowly.

On this passage the egregious Jeffrey wrote—

“No machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance of a distressed hero, than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him, by a song, to take care of the ambush that was set for him. The maniacs of poetry have indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of Ophelia downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make them sing good sense, and to make sensible people be guided by them.”

“LADY OF THE LAKE”

Scott recked so lightly of this censure that he repeated the situation (his novels often repeat the situations of his poems), the warning lilts of a brainsick girl, in The Heart of Midlothian, in that most romantic passage where Madge Wildfire’s snatches of song give warning to the fugitive lover of Effie Deans. These parallelisms between the structure of the rhymed and of the anonymous prose romances are frequent and curious.

The whole poem of The Lady of the Lake is inimitably vivacious, it has on it the dew of morning in a mountain pass: the King is worthy of the praise of Scott’s princes given to Byron by the Prince of Wales, who, with all his faults, could appreciate Walter Scott and Jane Austen. “I told the Prince,” Byron wrote to Scott, “that I thought you more particularly the painter of Princes, as they never appeared more fascinating than in Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. He was pleased to coincide, and to dwell on the description of your James’s as no less royal than poetical. He spoke alternately of Homer and yourself, and seemed well acquainted with both.” A British king well acquainted with Homer is hardly the idiot of Thackeray’s satire.

Scott said in taking farewell of his work—

Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp!
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway,
And little reck I of the censure sharp
May idly cavil at an idle lay.

Much have I owed thy strains on life’s long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawn’d wearier day,
And bitterer was the grief devour’d alone,
That I o’erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own.

He had shown more of his heart than he cared to show, and passed the confession off with a quotation from Master Stephen, who deemed melancholy “a gentlemanly thing.”

Scott’s gains from The Lady of the Lake must have been considerable, though of course not nearly so great as the profits of a modern dealer in fustian novels. A prudent poet would have regarded the money as capital, and Scott, as we said, did place at least £9,000 in his Ballantyne companies. But it appears that the money was no sooner in than the profits were taken out again for the private expenditure of the partners.

“WAVERLEY”

It really seems that Scott often was deceived, or at least confused, as to the state of his commercial accounts. He used to write to John Ballantyne, his book-keeper, in the strain of an affectionate elder brother, imploring “dear John” to “have the courage to tell disagreeable truths to those whom you hold in regard,” “not to shut your eyes or blind those of your friends upon the actual state of business.” The advice was given in vain, says Lockhart, and he explains that Scott’s own conduct made his counsels of no avail. The Ballantynes could not inquire strictly into Scott’s “uncommercial expenditure,” because, while he was the only moneyed partner, they had “trespassed largely, for their own purposes, on the funds of the companies.” The same reason, namely that the money was not theirs, made it impossible for them to check Scott’s commercial expenditure on the publication of huge antiquarian volumes, exquisitely ill done by the many literary hangers-on for whom he wished to procure a livelihood. These piles of waste paper remained on the hands of his publishing company, which was also bearing the weight of that Old Man of the Sea, his Annual Register, irregularly published at a loss of £1,000 a year. Thus, although the excitements of the Peninsular and other wars did not prevent the public from buying Scott’s poetry largely, the Ballantyne companies went from one bank to another in search of accommodation, while Scott lived as joyously as La Fontaine’s grasshopper, in the summer weather of his genius.

In 1810 he showed the fragment of Waverley to James Ballantyne, who looked on it without enthusiasm. James was to Scott what the old housekeeper was to Molière, a touchstone of public taste; his remarks on the margins of Scott’s proof-sheets show that he was rather below the level of general ignorance, and rather more morally sensitive than the common prude of the period. He could throw cold water on Waverley, but could not restrain Scott from publishing Dr. Jamieson’s History of the Culdees, and Weber’s egregious “Beaumont and Fletcher.” Business looked so bad that in 1810 Scott entertained the notion of seeking a judicial office in India.

His next poem, Don Roderick—“this patriotic puppet show” he called it—he gave, since silver and gold he had none, as a subscription to the fund for ruined Portuguese. Scott, in Don Roderick, passed Sir John Moore over in silence, not because Moore was a Whig, but because Scott did not appreciate the much disputed strategy of that great soldier and good man. Neither Moore’s glorious death, nor his stand at Corunna, expiated, in Scott’s opinion, the disasters of his hurried retreat. It was at this time that his friend, Captain Fergusson, read The Lady of the Lake aloud, the sixth canto, to the men of his command, under artillery fire.

ABBOTSFORD

A trifling piece, The Inferno of Altesidora, contained verses in the manner of Crabbe, Moore, and himself; these are excellent imitations, and, with a lyric, The Resolve, in the manner of the Caroline poets, justify the opinion that Scott would have been a formidable satirist had he chosen to attack Byron and the Whigs in the manner and measure of Pope.

As Scott had now a near prospect of a salary of £1,300 a year, for his hitherto unpaid labours as Clerk of Session, he yielded to the fatal temptation of purchasing a small estate on Tweedside. This purchase was really an antiquarian extravagance; he wished to add to his collection the field of the last great Border clan battle, fought in 1526 between the clans of Scott and Ker, including the stone called Turn Again, where an Elliot checked the pursuit by spearing Ker of Cessford. The two farms which he bought were styled Cartley or Clarty Hole, and Kaeside, “a bare haugh and a bleak bank,” said Scott, and there was an ugly little farmhouse at Clarty Hole, rechristened Abbotsford, in memory of the monks of Melrose. It is not a good site, lying low, close to the existing public road, and the proprietor had not the charter for salmon fishing in the pools beneath his house. But the property was all “enchanted land,” rich in legends and Border memories of Thomas of Ercildoune and of battles, while Scott often cast longing eyes on the adjacent Faldonside, once the home of Andrew Ker, the most ruffianly of Riccio’s murderers, and on the perfect little peel tower of Darnick. Washington Irving says that Scott spoke to him of a project of buying Smailholme Tower. Like almost all Scots for many centuries, the Sheriff longed to be a landed man; his lease of Ashestiel was ended, and, above all, the land which he now purchased was rich in antiquarian interest. So he collected farms, began to rebuild the house of Clarty Hole, and entered on his private Moscow expedition, the Making of Abbotsford. The first farm purchased was dear at the £4,000 which was its price. Meanwhile, a source which, in our day, would have proved a mine of gold to Scott, was by him unworked. He would not dramatize his poems, or, later, his novels, for the stage, and every adventurer made prize of them.

“ROKEBY”

Early in 1812 Scott began Rokeby, a poem on the home of his friend Morritt, and in May he “flitted” in a gipsy-like procession from Ashestiel to Abbotsford. But Childe Harold appeared before Rokeby; Scott disliked the popular misanthropy of The Childe, but privately declared it to be “a poem of most extraordinary power, which may rank its author with our first poets.” Scott burned the whole of his first draft of Rokeby (canto 1), because “I had corrected the spirit out of it.” Meanwhile Scott and Byron became correspondents, in a tone, to quote Lockhart, “of friendly confidence equally honourable to both these great competitors, without rivalry, for the favour of the literary world.” Of Rokeby, which appeared in the last days of 1812, Scott said that it was a “pseudo romance of pseudo chivalry,” though he liked the beautiful lyrics interspersed through the poem, and rather piqued himself on the character of the outlaw Bertram, who has won the applause of Mr. Swinburne. The scene of Rokeby is English, and of the characters Lockhart says that, in a prose romance “they would have come forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groups Scott ever created.” Scott told Miss Edgeworth that Matilda was drawn from “a lady who is now no more,” his lost love, and that most of the other personages “are mere shadows.” The poet never left much for his critics to say in the way of disapproval.

The poem, enfin, was in no way a success. Mocking birds of song had wearied the public of Scott by endless imitation.

Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed,
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.

Scott himself was imitating himself in The Bridal of Triermain, to “set a trap for Jeffrey,” who was expected to take Erskine for the author. He was boyishly reckless of his reputation; he easily resigned the lists when Byron “beat him,” as he says, and in the year 1813 was harassed by “the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment.”

A crisis had come in the affairs of Ballantyne & Co. The interest, for us, lies in the light which the crisis throws on the character of Scott. We have seen that a friend wrote, at the time of his disappointment in love, about Scott’s “violent” and “ungovernable” character, while Scott himself refers to “the family temper” as rather volcanic. The late Mr. W. B. Scott, too, considered it worth while to tell the world in his Memoirs, that, as a boy, he once heard Scott swear profane in a printer’s office. The truth of the matter seems to be that Scott had a large share of the family temper in boyhood, when he suffered from serious illnesses, and that he was capable of relapses in his overworn later years. But in the full health and vigour of his manhood, he mastered his temper admirably.

BALLANTYNE TROUBLES

He was at Abbotsford, at Drumlanrig with the Duke of Buccleuch, and at other country houses remote from Edinburgh, in the July and August of 1813. He was disturbed by frequent letters from John Ballantyne, always at the very last moment demanding money to save the existence of the firm, and always concealing the exact state of financial affairs. John was like the proverbial spendthrift who never can be induced to give his benevolent kinsfolk a full schedule of his debts. Thus harassed and menaced with ruin, Scott wrote letters which are models of tact and temper. He only asked to be told “in plain and distinct terms” how affairs really stood, and to be told in good time. But John was as unpunctual and untrustworthy as Scott was punctual and placable. He would not write explicitly, he always sent unexpected demands, and it was only certain that he was keeping others back. Scott had not an hour of peace and safety, and he told Ballantyne as much, “in charity with your dilatory worship.” “Were it not for your strange concealments, I should anticipate no difficulty in winding up these matters.” Lockhart says that he would as soon have hanged his favourite dog as turned John Ballantyne adrift. The conclusion of the matter was that the Ballantyne publishing company found a haven in the capacious bosom of Constable, who believed in the Star of Scott, advanced some £4,000, and took off the sinking ship the useless burden of the valueless books.

On the whole Scott could be patient, he knew that his copyrights and library were valuable enough to secure all his creditors from ultimate loss. But to avoid loss by the hurried sale of copyrights, he obtained a guarantee for £4,000 from his friend and chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, backed, it seems, by Messrs. Longman. At the same time he declined an offer of the Poet Laureateship—vacant by the death of Pye—from the Prince Regent. He supposed that the Laureateship was worth three or four hundred pounds annually, a mistake. But as he held two other offices, the Clerkship and Sheriffship, he deemed it wrong to take the money, and secured the office for Southey, who lived solely by his pen. Another motive, felt by Scott and urged by the Duke of Buccleuch, was the ridicule which then was attached to the bays, and the necessity of writing a Birthday Ode every year. The Regent removed that obsolete necessity, and Southey, despite one famous error, redeemed the honour of the laurels, next held by Wordsworth, and then by Tennyson. “Sir Walter’s conduct,” Southey said, “was, as it always was, characteristically generous, and in the highest degree friendly.”

Thus in temper, in generosity, and in determination that no man should be a loser by him, we see Scott at his best, while in the sanguine hopefulness which led him to go on buying land, books, and old armour, during the crisis, we mark the cause of his final misfortunes; and, in his ceaseless industry

Sir Walter Scott and His Friends.

From the painting by Thomas Faed, R.A.

LAUREATESHIP

during these distractions, we note the courageous perseverance by which he saved his honour at the expense of his life. Through his financial troubles he worked doggedly at his Edition and Life of Swift, and began The Lord of the Isles, though already he was the butt of every bore, and the host of tedious uninvited guests, “the thieves of time.” Simultaneously, he was assisting Maturin and other literary strugglers with money, his constant practice. But he did cause the Income Tax collectors to “abandon their claim upon the produce of literary labour.” Lockhart chronicles this fact “in case such a demand should ever be renewed hereafter!”

It is renewed, of course, and with perfect justice. What Scott resisted was double taxation of literary earnings, first under the property tax, next, yearly, under the Income Tax. He must not first be taxed on the full price, say, of Marmion, as income, and then again yearly on the interest of the price.[6]

In July 1814 the Edition and Life of Swift appeared in nineteen volumes, six years after this laborious work was begun. The Life, which became popular, is perhaps, with that by Sir Henry Craik, the most generous and sympathetic attempt to make intelligible one of the greatest, most miserable, and most mysterious of mankind. Scott made more allowance than Thackeray for what Lockhart calls “the faults and foibles of nameless and inscrutable disease.”

CHAPTER IV
THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

It must probably have been in 1813 that Scott, hunting for some fishing tackle in an old bureau, found both the flies (they were red palmers tied on several strands of grey horse hairs), and also the manuscript of the first chapters of Waverley, begun in 1805 and reconsidered in 1810. The novel was advertised in The Scots Magazine of February, as to appear in March. But, very characteristically, Scott now dropped the novel, and gave the spring months to composing the essays on “Chivalry” and “Romance” for Constable’s new purchase, The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then, in June 1814, Lockhart, at a dinner party of young men in George Street, saw through a window of North Castle Street the writing hand “that never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MSS.; and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand that is—’tis Walter Scott’s,” said Lockhart’s host.

Thus, in three summer weeks, Scott wrote the two last volumes of Waverley, the anonymous romance that began a literary revolution. Novels, of course, were written always, since the days of Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney. But Miss Burney had long been silent: Mrs. Radcliffe had ceased to terrify and amaze, and Miss Edgeworth, in Lockhart’s opinion, “had never realized a tithe of £700 by the best of her Irish tales,” which Scott regarded as one source of his inspiration. Novels were in 1814 abandoned, said Morritt, to the Lydia Languishes and their maids; they were disdained by the then relatively serious members of the reading public who “formed libraries.” Waverley came with its successors and with the swarm of imitations, and libraries were formed no more. The public, indeed, still bought the poetry of Byron with enthusiasm, but Shelley and Keats they rejected. I doubt if there was a first edition of Christabel, and the reign of novels and nothing but novels began. There were interruptions to this despotism when Tennyson was in his golden prime, and when Macaulay and Froude wrote history, but to-day the Novel is supreme, and—the novels are not Waverley novels.

YACHTING TOUR

It was Scott, the greatest of readers, who inaugurated the reign of novel-reading, and very much chagrined he would be could he see the actual results: the absolute horror with which mankind shun every other study. It could never have occurred to Scott, that, within less than a hundred years, male and female novelists, often as ignorant of books as of life, would monopolize the general attention, and would give themselves out as authorities on politics, philosophy, ethics, society, theology, religion, and Homeric criticism. Scott’s own tales never usurped the office of the pulpit, the platform, or the Press; and, if he did teach some readers all the history that they knew, he constantly warned them that, in his romances, he was an historian with a very large poetical licence.

No sooner had Scott read the proof-sheets of Waverley than he sailed from Leith (July 28, 1814) with a festal crew of friends, including Erskine, on board the Lighthouse yacht. The Surveyor, Viceroy of the jolly Commissioners of Lighthouses, was the ancestor of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, “a most gentlemanlike and modest man and well-known for his scientific skill,” writes Scott in his Diary. That he kept a very copious diary on a pleasure voyage is an example of his indomitable habit of writing, unfatigued by the production of two volumes of a novel in three weeks. He visited the ruined abbey of Arbroath, once held by Cardinal Beaton, “for the third time, the first being—eheu!” On the first visit he had been in the company of his unforgotten love: to be absent from her, and divided from her by the river of death, was not to be out of mind of her. He studied the strange ways of the Shetland and Orkney islanders—we see the results in The Pirate; he examined the extraordinary towers of the fourth to ninth centuries A.D. called Brochs; he took notes of a superstitious practice which strongly resembles an usage of the natives of Central Australia: he heard of the great sea serpent’s recent visit to the coast, and he was presented with a collection of neolithic axe heads. He met a witch of great age who sold, as Æolus in the Odyssey gave, favourable breezes to seamen. He visited many island scenes of the distresses of Prince Charles, in 1746, and at Dunvegan saw the Fairy Flag of M’Leod, and heard M’Crimmon’s Lament played by a descendant of the M’Crimmon who was the only man slain in the rout of the M’Leods at Moy. He beheld Loch Coruisk—admirably described in The Lord of the Isles—and the ruins of Ardtornish Castle, in which occurs the opening scene of that poem. On September 4, he was saddened by news of the death of one of his dearest friends, the Duchess of Buccleuch, and, on September 8, left the yacht for Glasgow.

“WAVERLEY”

In Edinburgh, on his way to Abbotsford, Scott found Constable about to publish the third edition of Waverley—three thousand copies, at a guinea, had already been disposed of, or were in the way of disappearing. This was at that time an unexampled success for a new and anonymous novel, unbacked by the favouring breezes of the modern puff preliminary. The book, uncut and in three grey-clad volumes, is now esteemed at a very high rate by bibliomaniacs. In most cases, purchasers had the novels “murderously half-bound in calf,” and much cut down; and, of Waverley in particular, copies of the first edition are seldom found in the original state. Constable had refused to give £1,000 for the whole copyright, and rather ruefully divided the large profits with the author.

At first only three people were in Scott’s confidence as to the authorship of Waverley: they were Ballantyne, Erskine and Morritt. Gradually, as the novels flowed on and on, about twenty persons were entrusted with the secret, which could be no real secret to any one of sense who had read the poems and the notes to the poems. As for Scott’s intimates, they recognized him in dozens of details and traces. But the public, not unnaturally, wished to believe that they had a new entertainer. Thomas Scott, Jeffrey (of all people!), Erskine, and a clergyman who lay under a very black cloud, were among the persons suspected of the authorship.

It was vain to say that only Scott knew so much of Highlands and Lowlands as the author knew: that no other man had his acquaintance with the personal side of old history, that no other could have written the snatches of verse in the romances. People enjoy a mystery, and Scott enjoyed mystifying them, while his conscience permitted him a latitude in denial warranted by the maxims of Father Holt, S.J., in Esmond. As a loyal citizen might blamelessly say that King Charles was not in the oak tree—His Majesty being private there, and invisible to loyal eyes—so Scott, if pressed, averred that he had no hand in the novels, often adding that, even if he had, he would still deny his authorship.

Casuists may blame or exonerate him (Cardinal Newman discussed the situation): it is certain that no man is bound to incriminate himself.

Jeffrey detected Scott, of course, and reviewed him with the usual grotesque assumption of superiority. O le grand homme, rien ne lui peut plaire! The Quarterly dullard probably did not recognize Scott’s hand, and spoke of the Scots tongue as “a dark dialogue” (so in Lockhart!) “of Anglified Erse,” a deathless exhibition of stupid ignorance.

THE NOVELS

The general characteristics, the merits and defects of the Waverley novels may be reviewed, before we approach the history of each example in its turn. In an age when an acquaintance with FitzGerald’s Rubáiyàt of Omar Kháyyám, an exhaustive ignorance of all literature of the past, and an especial contempt for Scott, whom FitzGerald so intensely admired, are the equipment of many critics, we must be very cautious in praising the Waverley novels. They are not the work of a passionate, a squalid, or a totally uneducated genius. They are not the work of any Peeping Tom who studies woman in her dressing-room, and tries to spy or smell out the secrets of the eternally feminine. We have novels to-day—novels by males—full of clever spyings and dissections of womankind, which Scott would have thrown into the fire. “I think,” writes Mr. Hutton, “that the deficiency of his pictures of women ... should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry.... He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.”

Scott’s novels, again, are not the work of a man who desires to enforce his social, or religious, or political ideals and ideas in his romances. Like almost all great novels, except Tom Jones, they do not possess carefully elaborated plots, any more than do most of the dramas of Shakespeare. They are far from being the work of a conscientious stylist, beating his brains for hours to find le mot propre, usually the least natural word for any mortal to use in the circumstances. But once Scott did hunt for le mot propre, in Scots. He could not find it, and came out to the lawn at Abbotsford where some workmen were engaged. He turned a bucket upside down, and asked the men, “What did I do just now?” “Ye whummled the bowie,” said the men, and Scott had found the word he wanted—to “whummle.” Mr. Saintsbury has a little excursus on this word, “whummle,” or “whammle,” which Scott, he has heard, picked up from a woman in the street. But every Scot knows it, for to “whummle the bannock,” in the presence of a Menteith, was a proverbial insult, as Menteith, or one of his men, is said, by whummling the loaf, to have given the signal of betrayal, when English soldiers lay in wait before seizing Sir William Wallace.

THE NOVELS

Far from being a conscientious stylist, Scott not infrequently proves the truth of his own remark to Lockhart, that he never learned grammar. I have found five “whiches” in a sentence of his, and five “ques” in a sentence by Alexandre Dumas, his pupil and rival. Dumas had more of the humour of Scott than Scott had of the wit of Dumas. Many parts of his tales are prolix: his openings, as a rule, are dull. His heroes and heroines often speak in the stilted manner of Miss Burney’s Lord Orville, a manner (if we may trust memoirs and books like Boswell’s Johnson, and Walpole’s Letters), in which no men and women of mould ever did talk, even in the eighteenth century. But Catherine Glover, in The Fair Maid of Perth, usually speaks from stilts. These pompous discourses in which the speaker often talks of himself in the third person, were in vogue, in novel writing, we do not know why, and they are a stone of stumbling to readers who do not blench when a modern hero mouths fustian in the tone of a demoniac at large. All these unfashionable traits are to be found up and down the Waverley novels, combined with descriptive passages that, to some, are a weariness. These are frank confessions from a zealot who has read most of the Waverley novels many times, from childhood up to age, and finds them better, finds fresh beauties in them, every time that he reads them. But there are more serious defects than old-fashionedness, and prolixities (which may be skipped), and laxity of style, and errors in grammar. There are faults in “artistry,” and nobody knew them better, or put his finger on them more ruthlessly, or apologized for them more ingenuously than Scott himself.

THE NOVELS

The Introductions to the Novels have frightened away many a painful would-be student who has been told that, if you read a book, you must read every line of it—from cover to cover. This is an old moral maxim invented and handed on by the class of mortals who are not born readers, and regard literature with moral earnestness as a duty, though a painful duty. There must be no flinching! Scott, like Dr. Johnson, “tore the heart out of a book,” rapidly assimilating what he needed, and “skipping” what he did not need. He wrote his Introductions for the curious literary student, not for the novel reader and the general public. Doubtless he expected the general public to skip the Introductions, and did not reflect that they would trouble persons who adhere to the puritanic rule against what they call “desultory reading.” But whosoever has any interest in Scott’s own theory of the conduct of the historical novel, and in his confession of his own faults, cannot afford to overlook the original Introduction of 1822 to The Fortunes of Nigel. In these pages Captain Clutterbuck describes an interview with “The Eidolon, or representative vision of The Author of Waverley.” Scott, in fact, anticipates the modern “interview,” but he interviews himself, and does the business better than the suave modern reporter. After confessing that The Monastery, especially the White Lady of Avenel, is rather a failure, Scott is asked by Captain Clutterbuck whether his new book meets every single demand of the critics, whether it opens strikingly, proceeds naturally, and ends happily, for critics then applauded what they now denounce—“a happy ending.” Scott replies that Hercules might produce a romance “which should glide, and gush, and never pause, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on’t,” but that he cannot. “There never was a novel written on this plan while the world stood.” “Pardon me—Tom Jones,” says the Captain. There was also the Odyssey, on which Wolf, the great sceptic as to the unity of the Iliad, bestowed the praise of masterly composition which the Captain gives to Tom Jones. But several modern German critics and Father Browne of the Society of Jesus, assure us that the plot of the Odyssey is a very bad piece of composition, a dawdling bit of patchwork by many hands, in many ages, strung together by a relatively late Greek “botcher,” though why he took the trouble nobody can imagine. Thus do critical opinions differ, and a fair critic informs me that “Tom Jones is the stupidest book in the English language.” Yet, if the Odyssey triumphed over the Zoili of three thousand years, while Tom Jones was an undisputed masterpiece for a century and a half, we may doubt whether the verdict of time and of the world is to be upset for ever by the censures of a few moderns. To them, and to the contemners of Scott, we may say, as Cromwell said to the Commissioners of the General Assembly, “Brethren, in the bowels of Christ, believe that it is possible you may be mistaken.” Scott remarks that, in Fielding’s masterpiece, the Novel, for excellence of composition, “challenged a comparison with the Epic.” Other “great masters,” like Smollett and Le Sage, “have been satisfied if they amuse the reader on the road.” It is enough for himself if his “scenes, unlaboured and loosely put together, have sufficient interest in them to amuse in one corner the pain of the body; in another to relieve anxiety of mind; in a third place to unwrinkle a brow bent with the furrows of daily toil; in another to fill the place of bad thoughts, or to suggest better; in yet another to induce an idler to study the history of his country; in all ... to furnish harmless amusement.”

Such is Scott’s reply, in anticipation, to the censure of Carlyle, that he has not a message, and a mission, and so forth. His mission was to add enormously to human happiness: his message was that of honour, courage, endurance, love, and kindness. The Captain, however, doubts not that the new book needs an apology, and that the story “is hastily huddled up,”—a favourite criticism of Scott’s friend, Lady Louisa Steuart. Scott might have replied that his romances are not so hastily “huddled up” at the close as many of Shakespeare’s plays.

THE NOVELS

But it is curious that Hogg represents Scott as criticising his tales exactly as Captain Clutterbuck and Lady Louisa censured Scott’s own romances.

“Well, Mr. Hogg, I have read over your proofs with a great deal of pleasure, and, I confess, with some little portion of dread. In the first place, the meeting of the two princesses at Castle Weiry is excellent. I have not seen any modern thing more truly dramatic. The characters are strongly marked, old Peter Chisholme’s in particular. Ah! man, what you might have made of that with a little more refinement, care, and patience! But it is always the same with you, just hurrying on from one vagary to another, without consistency or proper arrangement.”

“Dear Mr. Scott, a man canna do the thing that he canna do.”

“Yes, but you can do it. Witness your poems, where the arrangements are all perfect and complete; but in your prose works, with the exception of a few short tales, you seem to write merely by random, without once considering what you are going to write about.”

“You are not often wrong, Mr. Scott, and you were never righter in your life than you are now, for when I write the first line of a tale or novel, I know not what the second is to be, and it is the same way in every sentence throughout. When my tale is traditionary, the work is easy, as I then see my way before me, though the tradition be ever so short, but in all my prose works of imagination, knowing little of the world, I sail on without star or compass.”

In the conversation with the Captain, Scott presently shows that, as regards composition, the Sheriff and the Shepherd sailed in the same rudderless boat. “You should take time at least to arrange your story,” says the Captain. Scott replies, as Hogg replied to himself, that “A man canna do what he canna do.”

“That is a sore point with me, my son. Believe me, I have not been fool enough to neglect ordinary precautions. I have repeatedly laid down my future work to scale, divided it into volumes and chapters, and endeavoured to construct a story which I meant would evolve itself gradually and strikingly, maintain suspense, and stimulate curiosity; and which, finally, should terminate in a striking catastrophe. But I think there is a demon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase; my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is closed long before I have attained the point I proposed.

THE NOVELS

“Captain.—Resolution and determined forbearance might remedy that evil.

“Author.—Alas! my dear sir, you do not know the force of paternal affection. When I light on such a character as Bailie Jarvie, or Dalgetty, my imagination brightens, and my conception becomes clearer at every step which I take in his company, although it leads me many a weary mile away from the regular road, and forces me to leap hedge and ditch to get back into the route again. If I resist the temptation, as you advise me, my thoughts become prosy, flat, and dull; I write painfully to myself, and under a consciousness of flagging which makes me flag still more; the sunshine with which fancy had invested the incidents, departs from them, and leaves every thing dull and gloomy. I am no more the same author I was in my better mood, than the dog in a wheel, condemned to go round and round for hours, is like the same dog merrily chasing his own tail, and gambolling in all the frolic of unrestrained freedom. In short, sir, on such occasions, I think I am bewitched.”

Scott next professes that he cannot write plays, as the Captain urges him to do, if he would. The applauded scraps of “Old Play” which head many of his chapters, are borrowed from manuscript dramas about which he tells a fable. As to the charge of making money—

O, if it were a mean thing,
The Gentles would not use it;
And if it were ungodly,
The clergy would refuse it.

Moreover, “No man of honour, genius, or spirit, would make the mere love of gain, the chief, far less the only, purpose of his labours. For myself, I am not displeased to find the game a winning one; yet while I pleased the public, I should probably continue it merely for the pleasure of playing; for I have felt as strongly as most folks that love of composition, which is perhaps the strongest of all instincts, driving the author to the pen, the painter to the palette, often without either the chance of fame or the prospect of reward. Perhaps I have said too much of this.”

THE NOVELS

Such is Scott’s confession and apology. To plan a work to scale, to pursue a predetermined course, does not “set his genius,” as Alan Breck says. Nor did it set the genius of an artist so conscientious as Alan’s creator, Mr. Stevenson. The pre-arranged programme or scenario of his Kidnapped, was very unlike the actual romance as it stands. The preeminent merit of Scott was that of a creator of characters. These personages became living, and, because they were living, spontaneous and uncontrollable. What began as a “Legend of Montrose,” left the great Marquis in the background, and became the Odyssey of Thackeray’s favourite, Dugald Dalgetty, “of Drumthwacket that should be,” that inimitable and immortal man of the sword. So it is throughout the Waverley novels. The characters will “gang their ain gait.” They come across the author’s fancy, as Mrs. Gamp, who had no part in the original plan of Martin Chuzzlewit, came across the fancy of Dickens, and they work their will on plot and author. In fact, the almost mechanical merit of construction or charpentage is rarely found in the great novels of the great masters. Vanity Fair “has no outline,” as Mr. Mantalini says of the lady of rank, and, if Pendennis “has an outline, it is a demned outline.” Of Esmond the motto may hold good—

Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet.

But this merit, from the days of Cervantes downwards, has been the least sought after by the greatest novelists. Scott tells us that at night he would leave off writing without an idea as to how he was to get his characters out of a quandary, and that, in the half-hour after waking, all would become clear to him. Charlotte Brontë makes a similar confession. In his manuscript, Scott never goes back to delete and alter—better would it have been had he taken the trouble. But his proof-sheets show that he took a good deal of pains in adding and improving, especially in that impeccable little chef d’oeuvre, “Wandering Willie’s Tale” in Redgauntlet. We are thus obliged to confess that he was on occasion culpably indolent. Mr. Stevenson cites a romantic passage of Guy Mannering in which Scott, rather than go back and indicate, in an earlier passage, the presence of a fountain which he suddenly finds that he needs, hurries forward and drags the fountain into a long, trailing, shapeless sentence. Guy Mannering, we know, was “written in six weeks at Christmas,” for the purpose of “refreshing the machine.” Undeniably it would be better, good as it is, had a fortnight been given to revision.

THE NOVELS

Scott’s “architectonic,” his principles in the composition of historical novels, are well known, and the method was all his own. Others before him had attempted the historical novel, but wholly without his knowledge of history, and of the actual way of living and thinking in various periods of the past. He first made the dry bones of history live, and Macaulay and Froude follow his method, perhaps rather too closely. Several of Mr. Froude’s most dramatic scenes never, as a matter of fact, occurred. It is probable that a too hasty glance at notes from original documents misled him, and his dramatic instinct did the rest, without a backward look at the original papers, a look which would have made re-writing necessary—and caused the dramatic situation to disappear! Scott, of course, wrote novels under no historical trammels of accuracy. He deliberately committed the most glaring anachronisms, bringing the dead Amy Robsart to life long after her mysterious death, introducing Shakespeare as a successful dramatist at an age when he was creeping unwillingly to school—and then Scott would confess his anachronisms in a note. Modern historical novelists, though they write from the results of “cram,” and not from a mind already charged with history, try at least to subject themselves to the actual circumstances of the past, and not to subject historical circumstances to themselves. They dare not bring Charles II to Woodstock, in his flight after Worcester, because it is too well known that the King did not make by way of Woodstock for the south coast. On such points of composition, Scott was as reckless as Turner was in landscape; both were satisfied, as the reader usually is, if they got their effects. Mr. Swinburne, in his drama of Mary Stuart, is not more nice. Lady Boyne (Mary Beaton) was never near Mary Stuart in England, though a play turns on her presence there.

THE NOVELS

Scott’s plan was never to make a famous character of history the central personage of his tale. Thus he never could have written a novel of which the fortunes of Mary Stuart were the central interest. He deemed that the facts were too well known to be trifled with, and that, in such matters, romance could not cope with actuality. Thus the unhappy Queen appears as a subordinate character—not as heroine, that is to say—while, in the scene in which the night of Darnley’s murder is recalled to her memory, she reaches the height of tragedy. These two principles, not to make the protagonists of history his central characters; not to cope with the records of actual events, are the guiding, if negative principles of Scott. He invents heroes and heroines who never existed, nor could have existed. There could be no Henry Morton in 1679! He uses them mainly as pivots round which the characters revolve. The heroes and heroines themselves, as a rule, interest their creator, and his readers, but little. What can you make of a jeune premier? He must be brave, modest, handsome, good, and not too clever—an ideal son-in-law, and he must be a true lover. Scott pronounced his earliest hero, Edward Waverley, “a sneaking piece of imbecility.... I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so-called.” True, but what kind of hero is Martin Chuzzlewit, or Clive Newcome, and is there any hero at all in Vanity Fair? Tom Jones and Captain Booth take leading parts, but are nothing less than heroic. They are characters, however, and Scott’s heroes, except Quentin Durward, Roland Graeme, Harry Gow, and the Master of Ravenswood (un beau ténébreux), are not of much account as characters.

Unlike Thackeray, Dickens, and possibly Fielding, Scott never drew his hero from himself. In politics they are usually what he was—when he wrote history—they take the middle path, they are in the sober juste milieu. Waverley is only a Jacobite to please his lady; Henry Morton is an extremely moderate constitutional Whig. Nobody can take much interest in Vanbeest Brown, the wandering heir of Guy Mannering, despite his proficiency on the flageolet. When we have a true hero like Montrose, we are scarcely allowed to look on his face and hear his voice. Ivanhoe, like an honourable gentleman, curbs his passion for Rebecca, and is true to Rowena, though we see that the memory of Rebecca never leaves his heart. Ivanhoe behaves as, in his circumstances, Scott would have behaved, in place of giving way to passion. Novels of the most poignant interest are constantly beginning, in private life, and then break off, because the living characters are persons of honour and self-control. Ivanhoe would have been more to the taste of to-day, if the hero had eloped with the fair Hebrew—but then, Ivanhoe and Rowena are persons of honour and self-control. I found, in Scott’s papers, a letter from an enthusiastic schoolboy, a stranger—“Oh, Sir Walter, how could you kill the gallant cavalier, and give the lady to the crop-eared Whig?” This was the remark of the natural man. Scott kept the natural man in subjection. The heroes, except when they are “bonny fechters” like Harry Gow, Roland Graeme, and Quentin Durward—that canny soldier of fortune—are little more than parts of the machinery, and modes of introducing the pell-mell of nominally subordinate, but really essential characters of all ranks and degrees—the undying friends with whom Scott brings us acquainted.

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The heroines, though it seems a paradox to say so, are really more successful than the heroes. In The Heart of Midlothian there is no hero except the heroine, Jeanie Deans, certainly one of the great creations of literature. Scott has made goodness without beauty, without overmastering tragedy, without “wallowing naked in the pathetic,” and without passion, as interesting as Becky Sharp. Who has rivalled this feat? Rose Bradwardine, with her innocent self-betrayed affection, is an elder sister of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Though rather stilted, in the manner of the period, Rebecca is a noble creature. Catherine Seyton, of The Abbot, is a delightfully spirited girl, and Diana Vernon is peerless. Our hearts warm even to the prematurely puritan Fair Maid of Perth, when she runs, with loose hair, like a wild creature, to her lover’s door, on the false news of his death. Fair eyes were wont to weep over Lucy Ashton, the Ophelia of Scott; but now Lucy is out of fashion though her end, surely, is poignant enough, when the weak mind is broken, and the animal stands at bay, like a wild cat, and breaks the hunter’s toils, and dies a maiden in the bridal chamber.

As Molière never had the heart to draw a jealous woman, among all his pictures of men who knew, like himself, the torments of jealousy, so Scott never had the heart to draw a young and beautiful woman who is wicked. This ancient familiar source of poignant interest he passes by, out of his great chivalry. There was nothing to prevent him from writing a romance on the passionate, wretched tale of the once beautiful Ulrica, in Ivanhoe, a fair traitress driven on the winds of revenge, treachery, parricide, and incest. Here was a theme for a “realistic” novel of England after the Conquest, but Scott sketches it lightly, as a Thyestean horror in the background. In his work such a piece of “realism” stands alone, like the story of Phoenix in Homer’s work (in the Ninth Book of the Iliad). Both artists, Scott and Homer, had a sense of reverence of human things: they did not lack the imagination necessary for the portrayal of the evil and terrible, but they did not seek success in that popular region. Scott was no prude, but he held the young in reverence, knowing that among them he must have many readers.

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I am unable to think the worse of him because he imposed on himself limitations which Byron triumphantly broke through, though Scott’s limits now militate against a high appreciation of his work by the admirers of M. Guy de Maupassant and M. Catulle Mendès. “A man canna do what he canna do,” and Scott could not have treated the favourite themes of these masters, if he would. He had funds enough to draw upon in human life and character, without hunting for personages and situations in dark malodorous corners. The glory of his work is, of course, not merely his wealth of incident, and his natural gift of story telling, but his crowd of characters, from his princes, such as James VI, an immortal picture, Louis XI, Elizabeth, Mary, Charles II in flight or in such prosperity as he loved, to his Highland chiefs, his ploughmen, his lairds, Bucklaw and old Redgauntlet, the persecutor; his copper captains in Alsatia, his baillies, his Covenanting preachers, his Claverhouse, his serving men, his Andrew Fairservice, his yeomen, his Dandie Dinmont, with the Dinmont family and terriers, his wild women, Meg Merrilees, and Madge Wildfire; his smugglers, his lawyers, from Pleydell to the elder Fairford, and even his bores, who, like Miss Austen’s bores, are certainly too much with us, who can number the throng of such characters, all living and delightful? The novels are vécus: the author has, in imagination, lived closely and long with his people, whether of his own day, or of the past, before he laid brush to canvas to execute their portraits. It is in this capacity, as a creator of a vast throng of living people of every grade, and every variety of nature, humour, and temperament, that Scott, among British writers, is least remote from Shakespeare. No changes in taste and fashion as regards matters unessential, no laxities and indolence of his own, no feather-headed folly, or leaden stupidity of new generations can deprive Scott of these unfading laurels. The novels that charmed Europe and America, that were the inspiration of Dumas, that have been affectionately discussed by the greatest of modern British statesmen, were as conspicuously open to criticism, and were as severely handled by reviewers, in Scott’s own day as in our own. But, if we may judge by endless new editions of all sorts, and at various prices, the Waverley novels are not less popular now, than are, for their little span, the most successful flights of all-daring ignorance and bombastic presumption. It was on his characters, especially on his characters sketched among his own people, that Scott believed the interest of his romances to depend. He generously recognized Miss Edgeworth as his teacher: “If I could but hit Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them live as beings in your mind, I should not despair,” he said.

Meanwhile, outside of “the big bow wow” line, he regarded Miss Austen as his superior, nor was he wrong; that queen of fiction has come to her own again. In his brief, and on the whole admirable, Scott, the late Mr. Hutton defended Scott’s power of character-drawing better than I can hope to do, if it needs defence, against Mr. Carlyle, who had some slight private bitterness against Sir Walter, on a matter of an unanswered letter. He calls Scott’s men and women “little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons.” This is the Carlyle who conceded to Cardinal Newman the possession of intellectual powers equivalent to those of a rabbit; un vrai lapin! Scott “fashions his characters from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.” Never near the broken

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The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820.

stoical heart of Saunders Mucklebackit; of the fallen Bradwardine, happy in unsullied honour; never near the heart of the maddened Peter Peebles; never near the flawless Christian heart of Bessie M’Clure; or the heart of dauntless remorse of Nancy Ewart; or the heart of sacrificed love in Diana Vernon; or the stout heart of Dalgetty in the dungeon of Inveraray; or the secret soul of Mary Stuart, revealed when she is reminded of Bastian’s bridal mask, and the deed of Kirk o’ Field? Quid plura, Thomas Carlyle wrote splenetic nonsense: “he was very capable of having it happen to him.”

CHAPTER V
GUY MANNERING TO KENILWORTH

“WAVERLEY”

“Waverley” is not, perhaps, the novel with which one would recommend a person anxious to find out whether or not Sir Walter can still be read, to begin his studies. The six chapters written in 1805 are prolix and unnecessary. A modern narrator would commence with Chapter VIII. “It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village or rather hamlet of Tully-Veolan,” and would find easy means of enlightening us as to who Captain Waverley was. One sentence in the long preliminary account of the hero refers to Scott himself. “He would exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary scenes are presented, in action as it were, to the eyes of the muser.” Like Dickens and Thackeray, Scott was a natural “visualizer,” seeing in his mind’s eye the aspects of his characters, and hearing their voices. Perhaps there is no poetic genius without this gift, which Mr. Galton has found almost absent among, and unknown to men of science, though the presence of the power of visualization by no means implies that it is accompanied by genius. Scott’s friends did not conceal from him that they were little interested in his tale, before they entered the village and château of Tully-Veolan. From that point all was new to most of them, while no romance of the Forty-Five, a theme now so hackneyed, or of Highland life and manners at the date of Sixty Years Since had ever been offered to the world. Indeed the death of the last of the male line of Stuart was almost contemporary with the year in which Scott began his romance, and while there remained a shadowy King over the water, a Jacobite romance might seem a thing in doubtful taste. We cannot, after a century, feel the absolute freshness of impression which the novel made on contemporary readers.

“GUY MANNERING”