YOUTH--CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.
As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and began his legal
studies, first as apprentice to his father, and then in the law classes of
the University, he became noticeable to all his friends for his gigantic
memory,--the rich stores of romantic material with which it was
loaded,--his giant feats of industry for any cherished purpose,--his
delight in adventure and in all athletic enterprises,--his great enjoyment
of youthful "rows," so long as they did not divide the knot of friends to
which he belonged, and his skill in peacemaking amongst his own set.
During his apprenticeship his only means of increasing his slender
allowance with funds which he could devote to his favourite studies, was
to earn money by copying, and he tells us himself that he remembered
writing "120 folio pages with no interval either for food or rest,"
fourteen or fifteen hours' very hard work at the very least,--expressly
for this purpose.
In the second year of Scott's apprenticeship, at about the age of
sixteen, he had an attack of hæmorrhage, no recurrence of which took
place for some forty years, but which was then the beginning of the
end. During this illness silence was absolutely imposed upon him,--two
old ladies putting their fingers on their lips, whenever he offered
to speak. It was at this time that the lad began his study of the
scenic side of history, and especially of campaigns, which he
illustrated for himself by the arrangement of shells, seeds, and
pebbles, so as to represent encountering armies, in the manner
referred to (and referred to apparently in anticipation of a later
stage of his life than that he was then speaking of) in the passage
from the introduction to the third canto of _Marmion_ which I have
already given. He also managed so to arrange the looking-glasses in
his room as to see the troops march out to exercise in the meadows, as
he lay in bed. His reading was almost all in the direction of military
exploit, or romance and mediæval legend and the later border songs of
his own country. He learned Italian and read Ariosto. Later he learned
Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose "_novelas_," he said, "first
inspired him with the ambition to excel in fiction;" and all that he
read and admired he remembered. Scott used to illustrate the
capricious affinity of his own memory for what suited it, and its
complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of Meikledale's
answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented him on the strength of his
memory. "No, sir," said the old Borderer, "I have no command of my
memory. It only retains what hits my fancy; and probably, sir, if you
were to preach to me for two hours, I would not be able, when you
finished, to remember a word you had been saying." Such a memory, when
it belongs to a man of genius, is really a sieve of the most valuable
kind. It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and
assimilates what is suited to it. In his very last days, when he was
visiting Italy for the first time, Scott delighted in Malta, for it
recalled to him Vertot's _Knights of Malta_, and much, other mediæval
story which he had pored over in his youth. But when his friends
descanted to him at Pozzuoli on the Thermæ--commonly called the Temple
of Serapis--among the ruins of which he stood, he only remarked that
he would believe whatever he was told, "for many of his friends, and
particularly Mr. Morritt, had frequently tried to drive classical
antiquities, as they are called, into his head, but they had always
found his skull too thick." Was it not perhaps some deep literary
instinct, like that here indicated, which made him, as a lad, refuse
so steadily to learn Greek, and try to prove to his indignant
professor that Ariosto was superior to Homer? Scott afterwards deeply
regretted this neglect of Greek; but I cannot help thinking that his
regret was misplaced. Greek literature would have brought before his
mind standards of poetry and art which could not but have both deeply
impressed and greatly daunted an intellect of so much power; I say
both impressed and daunted, because I believe that Scott himself would
never have succeeded in studies of a classical kind, while he
might--like Goethe perhaps--have been either misled, by admiration for
that school, into attempting what was not adapted to his genius, or
else disheartened in the work for which his character and ancestry
really fitted him. It has been said that there is a real affinity
between Scott and Homer. But the long and refluent music of Homer,
once naturalized in his mind, would have discontented him with that
quick, sharp, metrical tramp of his own moss-troopers, to which alone
his genius as a poet was perfectly suited.
It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes, Scott could
scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though the inference would, I
believe, be quite mistaken. His father, however, reproached him with
being better fitted for a pedlar than a lawyer,--so persistently did
he trudge over all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties
of nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or legend.
On one occasion when, with their last penny spent, Scott and one of
his companions had returned to Edinburgh, living during their last day
on drinks of milk offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and
haws on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he had wished
for George Primrose's power of playing on the flute in order to earn a
meal by the way, old Mr. Scott, catching grumpily at the idea,
replied, "I greatly doubt, sir, you were born for nae better then a
gangrel scrape-gut,"--a speech which very probably suggested his son's
conception of Darsie Latimer's adventures with the blind fiddler,
"Wandering Willie," in _Redgauntlet_. And, it is true that these were
the days of mental and moral fermentation, what was called in Germany
the Sturm-und-Drang, the "fret-and-fury" period of Scott's life, so
far as one so mellow and genial in temper ever passed through a period
of fret and fury at all. In other words these were the days of rapid
motion, of walks of thirty miles a day which the lame lad yet found no
fatigue to him; of mad enterprises, scrapes and drinking-bouts, in one
of which Scott was half persuaded by his friends that he actually sang
a song for the only time in his life. But even in these days of
youthful sociability, with companions of his own age, Scott was always
himself, and his imperious will often asserted itself. Writing of this
time, some thirty-five years or so later, he said, "When I was a boy,
and on foot expeditions, as we had many, no creature could be so
indifferent which way our course was directed, and I acquiesced in
what any one proposed; but if I was once driven to make a choice, and
felt piqued in honour to maintain my proposition, I have broken off
from the whole party, rather than yield to any one." No doubt, too, in
that day of what he himself described as "the silly smart fancies that
ran in my brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, as brilliant
to my thinking, as intoxicating, as evanescent," solitude was no real
deprivation to him; and one can easily imagine him marching off on his
solitary way after a dispute with his companions, reciting to himself
old songs or ballads, with that "noticeable but altogether
indescribable play of the upper lip," which Mr. Lockhart thinks
suggested to one of Scott's most intimate friends, on his first
acquaintance with him, the grotesque notion that he had been "a
hautboy-player." This was the first impression formed of Scott by
William Clerk, one of his earliest and life-long friends. It greatly
amused Scott, who not only had never played on any instrument in his
life, but could hardly make shift to join in the chorus of a popular
song without marring its effect; but perhaps the impression suggested
was not so very far astray after all. Looking to the poetic side of
his character, the trumpet certainly would have been the instrument
that would have best symbolized the spirit both of Scott's thought and
of his verses. Mr. Lockhart himself, in summing up his impressions of
Sir Walter, quotes as the most expressive of his lines:--
"Sound, sound the clarion! fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth a world without a name."
And undoubtedly this gives us the key-note of Scott's personal life as
well as of his poetic power. Above everything he was high-spirited, a
man of noble, and, at the same time, of martial feelings. Sir Francis
Doyle speaks very justly of Sir Walter as "among English singers the
undoubted inheritor of that trumpet-note, which, under the breath of
Homer, has made the wrath of Achilles immortal;" and I do not doubt
that there was something in Scott's face, and especially in the
expression of his mouth, to suggest this even to his early college
companions. Unfortunately, however, even "one crowded hour of glorious
life" may sometimes have a "sensual" inspiration, and in these days of
youthful adventure, too many such hours seem to have owed their
inspiration to the Scottish peasant's chief bane, the Highland whisky.
In his eager search after the old ballads of the Border, Scott had
many a blithe adventure, which ended only too often in a carouse. It
was soon after this time that he first began those raids into
Liddesdale, of which all the world has enjoyed the records in the
sketches--embodied subsequently in _Guy Mannering_--of Dandie Dinmont,
his pony Dumple, and the various Peppers and Mustards from whose breed
there were afterwards introduced into Scott's own family, generations
of terriers, always named, as Sir Walter expressed it, after "the
cruet." I must quote the now classic record of those youthful
escapades:--
"Eh me," said Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these
Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and
drollery as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were
either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped,
how brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as
the lave did; never made himsel' the great man or took ony
airs in the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these
jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and
drunk--(this, however, even in our wildest rambles, was but
rare)--but drunk or sober he was aye the gentleman. He
looked excessively heavy and stupid when he was _fou_, but
he was never out o' gude humour."
One of the stories of that time will illustrate better the wilder days
of Scott's youth than any comment:--
"On reaching one evening," says Mr. Lockhart, "some
Charlieshope or other (I forget the name) among those
wildernesses, they found a kindly reception as usual: but to
their agreeable surprise, after some days of hard living, a
measured and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon
after supper, at which a bottle of elderberry wine alone had
been produced, a young student of divinity who happened to
be in the house was called upon to take the 'big ha' Bible,'
in the good old fashion of Burns' Saturday Night: and some
progress had been already made in the service, when the good
man of the farm, whose 'tendency,' as Mr. Mitchell says,
'was soporific,' scandalized his wife and the dominie by
starting suddenly from his knees, and rubbing his eyes, with
a stentorian exclamation of 'By ----! here's the keg at
last!' and in tumbled, as he spake the word, a couple of
sturdy herdsmen, whom, on hearing, a day before, of the
advocate's approaching visit, he had despatched to a certain
smuggler's haunt at some considerable distance in quest of a
supply of _run_ brandy from the Solway frith. The pious
'exercise' of the household was hopelessly interrupted. With
a thousand apologies for his hitherto shabby entertainment,
this jolly Elliot or Armstrong had the welcome _keg_ mounted
on the table without a moment's delay, and gentle and
simple, not forgetting the dominie, continued carousing
about it until daylight streamed in upon the party. Sir
Walter Scott seldom failed, when I saw him in company with
his Liddesdale companions, to mimic with infinite humour the
sudden outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of
horses' feet, which he knew to indicate the arrival of the
keg, the consternation of the dame, and the rueful despair
with which the young clergyman closed the book."[5]
No wonder old Mr. Scott felt some doubt of his son's success at the
bar, and thought him more fitted in many respects for a "gangrel
scrape-gut."[6]
In spite of all this love of excitement, Scott became a sound lawyer,
and might have been a great lawyer, had not his pride of character,
the impatience of his genius, and the stir of his imagination rendered
him indisposed to wait and slave in the precise manner which the
prepossessions of solicitors appoint.
For Scott's passion for romantic literature was not at all the sort of
thing which we ordinarily mean by boys' or girls' love of romance. No
amount of drudgery or labour deterred Scott from any undertaking on
the prosecution of which he was bent. He was quite the reverse,
indeed, of what is usually meant by sentimental, either in his manners
or his literary interests. As regards the history of his own country
he was no mean antiquarian. Indeed he cared for the mustiest
antiquarian researches--of the mediæval kind--so much, that in the
depth of his troubles he speaks of a talk with a Scotch antiquary and
herald as one of the things which soothed him most. "I do not know
anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as trifling
discussions about antiquarian _old womanries_. It is like knitting a
stocking, diverting the mind without occupying it."[7] Thus his love
of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of a mind
which only feeds on romantic excitements; rather was it that of one
who was so moulded by the transmitted and acquired love of feudal
institutions with all their incidents, that he could not take any deep
interest in any other fashion of human society. Now the Scotch law
was full of vestiges and records of that period,--was indeed a great
standing monument of it; and in numbers of his writings Scott shows
with how deep an interest he had studied the Scotch law from this
point of view. He remarks somewhere that it was natural for a
Scotchman to feel a strong attachment to the principle of rank, if
only on the ground that almost any Scotchman might, under the Scotch
law, turn out to be heir-in-tail to some great Scotch title or estate
by the death of intervening relations. And the law which sometimes
caused such sudden transformations, had subsequently a true interest
for him of course as a novel writer, to say nothing of his interest in
it as an antiquarian and historian who loved to repeople the earth,
not merely with the picturesque groups of the soldiers and courts of
the past, but with the actors in all the various quaint and homely
transactions and puzzlements which the feudal ages had brought forth.
Hence though, as a matter of fact, Scott never made much figure as an
advocate, he became a very respectable, and might unquestionably have
become a very great, lawyer. When he started at the bar, however, he
had not acquired the tact to impress an ordinary assembly. In one case
which he conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of
Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened with deposition
for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour, he certainly missed the proper
tone,--first receiving a censure for the freedom of his manner in
treating the allegations against his client, and then so far
collapsing under the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and
urgency necessary to produce an effect on his audience. But these were
merely a boy's mishaps. He was certainly by no means a Heaven-born
orator, and therefore could not expect to spring into exceptionally
_early_ distinction, and the only true reason for his relative failure
was that he was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of
the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional
proceedings, that he never gained the credit he deserved for the
general common sense, the unwearied industry, and the keen
appreciation of the ins and outs of legal method, which might have
raised him to the highest reputation even as a judge.
All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in the humours of
the law. By way of illustration take the following passage, which is
both short and amusing, in which Saunders Fairford--the old solicitor
painted from Scott's father in _Redgauntlet_--descants on the law of
the stirrup-cup. "It was decided in a case before the town bailies of
Cupar Angus, when Luckie Simpson's cow had drunk up Luckie Jamieson's
browst of ale, while it stood in the door to cool, that there was no
damage to pay, because the crummie drank without sitting down; such
being the circumstance constituting a Doch an Dorroch, which is a
standing drink for which no reckoning is paid." I do not believe that
any one of Scott's contemporaries had greater legal abilities than he,
though, as it happened, they were never fairly tried. But he had both
the pride and impatience of genius. It fretted him to feel that he was
dependent on the good opinions of solicitors, and that they who were
incapable of understanding his genius, thought the less instead of the
better of him as an advocate, for every indication which he gave of
that genius. Even on the day of his call to the bar he gave expression
to a sort of humorous foretaste of this impatience, saying to William
Clerk, who had been called with him, as he mimicked the air and tone
of a Highland lass waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be hired for
the harvest, "We've stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and deil a
ane has speered our price." Scott continued to practise at the
bar--nominally at least--for fourteen years, but the most which he
ever seems to have made in any one year was short of 230_l._, and
latterly his practice was much diminishing instead of increasing. His
own impatience of solicitors' patronage was against him; his
well-known dabblings in poetry were still more against him; and his
general repute for wild and unprofessional adventurousness--which was
much greater than he deserved--was probably most of all against him.
Before he had been six years at the bar he joined the organization of
the Edinburgh Volunteer Cavalry, took a very active part in the drill,
and was made their Quartermaster. Then he visited London, and became
largely known for his ballads, and his love of ballads. In his eighth
year at the bar he accepted a small permanent appointment, with
300_l._ a year, as sheriff of Selkirkshire; and this occurring soon
after his marriage to a lady of some means, no doubt diminished still
further his professional zeal. For one third of the time during which
Scott practised as an advocate he made no pretence of taking interest
in that part of his work, though he was always deeply interested in
the law itself. In 1806 he undertook gratuitously the duties of a
Clerk of Session--a permanent officer of the Court at Edinburgh--and
discharged them without remuneration for five years, from 1806 to
1811, in order to secure his ultimate succession to the office in the
place of an invalid, who for that period received all the emoluments
and did none of the work. Nevertheless Scott's legal abilities were so
well known, that it was certainly at one time intended to offer him a
Barony of the Exchequer, and it was his own doing, apparently, that it
was not offered. The life of literature and the life of the Bar hardly
ever suit, and in Scott's case they suited the less, that he felt
himself likely to be a dictator in the one field, and only a postulant
in the other. Literature was a far greater gainer by his choice, than
Law could have been a loser. For his capacity for the law he shared
with thousands of able men, his capacity for literature with few or
none.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 269-71.]
[Footnote 6: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 206.]
[Footnote 7: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 221.]