Youth, twenty-five years 1771-1796.
Labour-time, thirty years 1796-1826.
Death-time, seven years 1825-1832.
The great period of mid-life is again divided exactly in the midst
by the change of temper which made him accurate instead of fantastic
in delineation, and therefore habitually write in prose rather than
verse. The 'Lady of the Lake' is his last poem, (1810). 'Rokeby,'
(1812) is a versified novel; the 'Lord of the Isles' is not so
much. The steady legal and historical work of 1810-1814, issuing
in the 'Essay on Scottish Judicature,' and the 'Life of Swift,'
with preparation for his long-cherished purpose of an edition and
'Life of Pope,' [60] ("the true deacon of the craft," as Scott
often called him,) confirmed, while they restrained and chastised,
his imaginative power; and 'Waverley,' (begun in 1805) was completed
in 1814. The apparently unproductive year of accurate study, 1811,
divides the thirty years of mid-life in the precise centre, giving
fifteen to song, and fifteen to history.
You may be surprised at my speaking of the novels as history. But
Scott's final estimate of his own work, given in 1830, is a perfectly
sincere and perfectly just one; (received, of course, with the
allowance I have warned you always to make for his manner of reserve
in expressing deep feelings). "He replied [61] that in what he had
done for Scotland as a writer, he was no more entitled to the merit
which had been ascribed to him than the servant who scours the brasses
to the credit of having made them; that he had perhaps been a good
housemaid to Scotland, and given the country a 'rubbing up;' and in
so doing might have deserved some praise for assiduity, and that was
all." Distinguish, however, yourselves, and remember that Scott always
tacitly distinguishes, between the industry which deserves praise,
and the love which disdains it. You do not praise Old Mortality for
his love to his people; you praise him for his patience over a bit
of moss in a troublesome corner. Scott is the Old Mortality, not of
tables of stone, but of the fleshly tables of the heart.
We address ourselves to-day, then, to begin the analysis of the
influences upon him during the first period of twenty-five years,
during which he built and filled the treasure-house of his own
heart. But this time of youth I must again map out in minor detail,
that we may grasp it clearly.
1. From birth to three years old. In Edinburgh, a sickly child;
permanent lameness contracted, 1771-1774.
2. Three years old to four. Recovers health at Sandy-Knowe. The dawn
of conscious life, 1774-1775.
3. Four years old to five. At Bath, with his aunt, passing through
London on the way to it. Learns to read, and much besides, 1775-1776.
4. Five years old to eight. At Sandy-Knowe. Pastoral life in its
perfectness forming his character: (an important though short interval
at Prestonpans begins his interest in sea-shore), 1776-1779.
5. Eight years old to twelve. School life, under the Rector Adams,
at High School of Edinburgh, with his aunt Janet to receive him at
Kelso, 1779-1783.
6. Twelve years old to fifteen. College life, broken by illness,
his uncle Robert taking good care of him at Rosebank, 1783-1786.
7. Fifteen to twenty-five. Apprenticeship to his father, and law
practice entered on. Study of human life, and of various literature
in Edinburgh. His first fee of any importance expended on a silver
taper-stand for his mother. 1786-1796.
You have thus 'seven ages' of his youth to examine, one by one;
and this convenient number really comes out without the least
forcing; for the virtual, though not formal, apprenticeship to his
father--happiest of states for a good son--continues through all
the time of his legal practice. I only feel a little compunction at
crowding the Prestonpans time together with the second Sandy-Knowe
time; but the former is too short to be made a period, though of
infinite importance to Scott's life. Hear how he writes of it, [62]
revisiting the place fifty years afterwards:--
"I knew the house of Mr. Warroch, where we lived," (see where the
name of the Point of Warroch in 'Guy Mannering' comes from!) "I
recollected my juvenile ideas of dignity attendant on the large gate,
a black arch which lets out upon the sea. I saw the Links where I
arranged my shells upon the turf, and swam my little skiff in the
pools. Many recollections of my kind aunt--of old George Constable--of
Dalgetty" (you know that name also, don't you?), "a virtuous half-pay
lieutenant, who swaggered his solitary walk on the parade, as he
called a little open space before the same port." (Before the black
arch, Scott means, not the harbour.) And he falls in love also there,
first--"as children love."
And now we can begin to count the rosary of his youth, bead by bead.
1st period--From birth to three years old.
I have hitherto said nothing to you of his father or mother, nor
shall I yet, except to bid you observe that they had been thirteen
years married when Scott was born; and that his mother was the
daughter of a physician, Dr. Rutherford, who had been educated under
Boerhaave. This fact might be carelessly passed by you in reading
Lockhart; but if you will take the pains to look through Johnson's
life of Boerhaave, you will see how perfectly pure and beautiful and
strong every influence was, which, from whatever distance, touched
the early life of Scott. I quote a sentence or two from Johnson's
closing account of Dr. Rutherford's master:--
"There was in his air and motion something rough and artless, but so
majestic and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him
without veneration, and a kind of tacit submission to the superiority
of his genius. The vigour and activity of his mind sparkled visibly
in his eyes, nor was it ever observed that any change of his fortune,
or alteration in his affairs, whether happy or unfortunate, affected
his countenance.
"His greatest pleasure was to retire to his house in the country,
where he had a garden stored with all the herbs and trees which
the climate would bear; here he used to enjoy his hours unmolested,
and prosecute his studies without interruption." [63]
The school of medicine in Edinburgh owed its rise to this man, and it
was by his pupil Dr. Rutherford's advice, as we saw, that the infant
Walter's life was saved. His mother could not nurse him, and his
first nurse had consumption. To this, and the close air of the wynd,
must be attributed the strength of the childish fever which took away
the use of the right limb when he was eighteen months old. How many
of your own children die, think you, or are wasted with sickness,
from the same causes, in our increasing cities? Scott's lameness,
however, we shall find, was, in the end, like every other condition
of his appointed existence, helpful to him.
A letter from my dear friend Dr. John Brown, [64] corrects (to my great
delight) a mistake about George's Square I made in my last letter. It
is not in the New Town, but in what was then a meadow district,
sloping to the south from old Edinburgh; and the air of it would be
almost as healthy for the child as that of the open country. But the
change to George's Square, though it checked the illness, did not
restore the use of the limb; the boy wanted exercise as well as air,
and Dr. Rutherford sent him to his other grandfather's farm.
II. 1774--1775. The first year at Sandy-Knowe. In this year, note
first his new nurse. The child had a maid sent with him to prevent
his being an inconvenience to the family. This maid had left her
heart behind her in Edinburgh (ill trusted), [65] and went mad in
the solitude;--"tempted by the devil," she told Alison Wilson, the
housekeeper, "to kill the child and bury it in the moss."
"Alison instantly took possession of my person," says Scott. And
there is no more said of Alison in the autobiography.
But what the old farm-housekeeper must have been to the child, is
told in the most finished piece of all the beautiful story of 'Old
Mortality.' Among his many beautifully invented names, here is one
not invented--very dear to him.
"'I wish to speak an instant with one Alison Wilson, who resides here,'
said Henry.
"'She's no at hame the day,' answered Mrs. Wilson in propriâ
personâ--the state of whose headdress perhaps inspired her with this
direct mode of denying herself--'and ye are but a mislear'd person to
speer for her in sic a manner. Ye might have had an M under your belt
for Mistress Wilson of Milnwood.'" Read on, if you forget it, to the
end, that third chapter of the last volume of 'Old Mortality.' The
story of such return to the home of childhood has been told often;
but never, so far as I have knowledge, so exquisitely. I do not doubt
that Elphin's name is from Sandy-Knowe also; but cannot trace it.
Secondly, note his grandfathers' medical treatment of him; for both
his grandfathers were physicians,--Dr. Rutherford, as we have seen,
so professed, by whose advice he is sent to Sandy-Knowe. There,
his cattle-dealing grandfather, true physician by diploma of Nature,
orders him, whenever the day is fine, to be carried out and laid down
beside the old shepherd among the crags or rocks around which he fed
his sheep. "The impatience of a child soon inclined me to struggle
with my infirmity, and I began by degrees to stand, to walk, and to
run. Although the limb affected was much shrunk and contracted, my
general health, which was of more importance, was much strengthened
by being frequently in the open air; and, in a word, I, who in a city
had probably been condemned to hopeless and helpless decrepitude,
(italics mine,) was now a healthy, high-spirited, and, my lameness
apart, a sturdy child,--non sine dîs animosus infans."
This, then, is the beginning of Scott's conscious existence,--laid
down beside the old shepherd, among the rocks, and among the sheep. "He
delighted to roll about in the grass all day long in the midst of the
flock, and the sort of fellowship he formed with the sheep and lambs
impressed his mind with a degree of affectionate feeling towards them
which lasted throughout life." [66]
Such cradle, and such companionship, Heaven gives its favourite
children.
In 1837, two of the then maid-servants of Sandy-Knowe were still
living in its neighbourhood; one of them, "Tibby Hunter, remembered
the child Scott's coming, well. The young ewe-milkers delighted, she
says, to carry him about on their backs among the crags; and he was
'very gleg (quick) at the uptak, and soon kenned every sheep and lamb
by head-mark as well as any of them.' His great pleasure, however,
was in the society of the 'aged hind' recorded in the epistle to
Erskine. 'Auld Sandy Ormistoun,' called, from the most dignified part
of his function, 'the cow-bailie,' had the chief superintendence of
the flocks that browsed upon 'the velvet tufts of loveliest green.' If
the child saw him in the morning, he could not be satisfied unless
the old man would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to
keep him company, as he lay watching his charge.
"The cow-bailie blew a particular note on his whistle which signified
to the maid-servants in the house below when the little boy wished
to be carried home again."
"Every sheep and lamb by head-mark;"--that is our first lesson;
not an easy one, you will find it, if you try the flock of such a
farm. Only yesterday (12th July, 1873,) I saw the dairy of one half
filled with the 'berry-bread' (large flat-baked cakes enclosing layers
of gooseberries) prepared by its mistress for her shearers;--the
flock being some six or seven hundred, on Coniston Fells.
That is our first lesson, then, very utterly learned 'by heart.' This
is our second, (marginal note on Sir Walter's copy of Allan Ramsay's
Tea-table Miscellany, ed. 1724): "This book belonged to my grandfather,
Robert Scott, and out of it I was taught 'Hardiknute' by heart before
I could read the ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt,
the last I shall ever forget." [67] He repeated a great part of it,
in the forests of La Cava, in the spring of the year in which he died;
and above the lake Avernus, a piece of the song of the ewe-milkers:--
"Up the craggy mountain, and down the mossy glen,
We canna' go a-milking, for Charlie and his men."
These I say, then, are to be your first lessons. The love, and care,
of simplest living creatures; and the remembrance and honour of the
dead, with the workmanship for them of fair tombs of song.
The Border district of Scotland was at this time, of all districts of
the inhabited world, pre-eminently the singing country,--that which
most naturally expressed its noble thoughts and passions in song.
The easily traceable reasons for this character are, I think, the
following; (many exist, of course, untraceably).
First, distinctly pastoral life, giving the kind of leisure which,
in all ages and countries, solaces itself with simple music, if other
circumstances are favourable,--that is to say, if the summer air is
mild enough to allow repose, and the race has imagination enough to
give motive to verse.
The Scottish Lowland air is, in summer, of exquisite clearness and
softness,--the heat never so great as to destroy energy, and the
shepherd's labour not severe enough to occupy wholly either mind or
body. A Swiss herd may have to climb a hot ravine for thousands of
feet, or cross a difficult piece of ice, to rescue a lamb, or lead
his flock to an isolated pasture. But the borderer's sheep-path on
the heath is, to his strong frame, utterly without labour or danger;
he is free-hearted and free-footed all the summer day long; in winter
darkness and snow finding yet enough to make him grave and stout
of heart.
Secondly, the soldier's life, passing gradually, not in cowardice or
under foreign conquest, but by his own increasing kindness and sense,
into that of the shepherd; thus, without humiliation, leaving the
war-wounded past to be recalled for its sorrow and its fame.
Thirdly, the extreme sadness of that past itself: giving pathos and
awe to all the imagery and power of Nature.
Fourthly, (this a merely physical cause, yet a very notable one,)
the beauty of the sound of Scottish streams.
I know no other waters to be compared with them;--such streams can
only exist under very subtle concurrence of rock and climate. There
must be much soft rain, not (habitually) tearing the hills down with
floods; and the rocks must break irregularly and jaggedly. Our English
Yorkshire shales and limestones merely form--carpenter-like--tables
and shelves for the rivers to drip and leap from; while the Cumberland
and Welsh rocks break too boldly, and lose the multiplied chords of
musical sound. Farther, the loosely-breaking rock must contain hard
pebbles, to give the level shore of white shingle, through which the
brown water may stray wide, in rippling threads. The fords even of
English rivers have given the names to half our prettiest towns and
villages;--(the difference between ford and bridge curiously--if one
may let one's fancy loose for a moment--characterizing the difference
between the baptism of literature, and the edification of mathematics,
in our two great universities);--but the pure crystal of the Scottish
pebbles, [68] giving the stream its gradations of amber to the edge,
and the sound as of "ravishing division to the lute," make the Scottish
fords the happiest pieces of all one's day walk. "The farmhouse itself
was small and poor, with a common kailyard on one flank, and a staring
barn of the doctor's ('Douglas') erection on the other; while in front
appeared a filthy pond, covered with ducks and duckweed, [69] from
which the whole tenement had derived the unharmonious designation of
'Clarty Hole.' But the Tweed was everything to him: a beautiful river,
flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless
where, here and there, it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet
only by the birches and alders which had survived the statelier growth
of the primitive forest; and the first hour that he took possession
he claimed for his farm the name of the adjoining ford." [70] With
the murmur, whisper, and low fall of these streamlets, unmatched
for mystery and sweetness, we must remember also the variable, but
seldom wild, thrilling of the wind among the recesses of the glens;
and, not least, the need of relief from the monotony of occupations
involving some rhythmic measure of the beat of foot or hand, during
the long evenings at the hearth-side.
In the rude lines describing such passing of hours quoted by Scott
in his introduction to the 'Border Minstrelsy,' [71] you find the
grandmother spinning, with her stool next the hearth,--"for she was
old, and saw right dimly" (fire-light, observe, all that was needed
even then;) "she spins to make a web of good Scots linen," (can you
show such now, from your Glasgow mills?) The father is pulling hemp
(or beating it). The only really beautiful piece of song which I heard
at Verona, during several months' stay there in 1869, was the low
chant of girls unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm, in the cottages
among the olive-clad hills on the north of the city. Never any in the
streets of it;--there, only insane shrieks of Republican populace,
or senseless dance-music, played by operatic-military bands.
And one of the most curious points connected with the study of
Border-life is this connection of its power of song either with its
industry or human love, but never with the religious passion of its
"Independent" mind. The definite subject of the piper or minstrel being
always war or love, (peasant love as much honoured as the proudest,)
his feeling is steadily antagonistic to Puritanism; and the discordance
of Scottish modern psalmody is as unexampled among civilized nations
as the sweetness of their ballads--shepherds' or ploughmen's (the
plough and pulpit coming into fatalest opposition in Ayrshire); so
that Wandering Willie must, as a matter of course, head the troop of
Redgauntlet's riotous fishermen with "Merrily danced the Quaker's
wife." And see Wandering Willie's own description of his gudesire:
"A rambling, rattling chiel he had been, in his young days, and could
play weel on the pipes;--he was famous at 'Hoopers and Girders;' a'
Cumberland could not touch him at 'Jockie Lattin;' and he had the
finest finger for the back-lilt between Berwick and Carlisle;--the
like o' Steenie was na the sort they made Whigs o'." And yet, to this
Puritan element, Scott owed quite one of the most noble conditions
of his mental life.
But it is of no use trying to get on to his aunt Janet in this letter,
for there is yet one thing I have to explain to you before I can
leave you to meditate, to purpose, over that sorrowful piece of
Scott's diary with which it began.
If you had before any thoughtful acquaintance with his general
character, or with his writings, but had not studied this close of
his life, you cannot but have read with surprise, in the piece of the
diary I quoted, the recurring sentences showing the deep wounds of his
pride. Your impression of him was, if thoughtfully received, that of
a man modest and self-forgetful, even to error. Yet, very evidently,
the bitterest pain under his fallen fortune is felt by his pride.
Do you fancy the feeling is only by chance so strongly expressed in
that passage?