COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS.
I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's later
poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some
slight sketch of his chosen companions, and of his occupations in the
first period of his married life. Scott's most intimate friend for
some time after he went to college, probably the one who most
stimulated his imagination in his youth, and certainly one of his most
intimate friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was called
to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the son of John Clerk of
Eldin, the author of a book of some celebrity in its time on _Naval
Tactics_. Even in the earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had
been Scott's fellow-apprentices in his father's office, saw with some
jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk, and remonstrated
with Scott on the decline of his regard for them, but only succeeded
in eliciting from him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness
which anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on his own
interior liberty of choice always provoked. "I will never cut any
man," he said, "unless I detect him in scoundrelism, but I know not
what right any of you have to interfere with my choice of my company.
As it is, I fairly own that though I like many of you very much, and
have long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you all put
together."[19] Scott never lost the friendship which began with this
eager enthusiasm, but his chief intimacy with Clerk was during his
younger days.
In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as "a man of the most acute intellects and
powerful apprehension, who, if he should ever shake loose the fetters of
indolence by which he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be
distinguished in the highest degree." Whether for the reason suggested, or
for some other, Clerk never actually gained any other distinction so great
as his friendship with Scott conferred upon him. Probably Scott had
discerned the true secret of his friend's comparative obscurity. Even
while preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go on alternate
mornings to each other's lodgings to read together, Scott found it
necessary to modify the arrangement by always visiting his friend, whom he
usually found in bed. It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of
Darsie Latimer, the hero of _Redgauntlet_,--whence we should suppose him
to have been a lively, generous, susceptible, contentious, and rather
helter-skelter young man, much alive to the ludicrous in all situations,
very eager to see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power
of adapting himself equally to all these phases. Scott tells a story of
Clerk's being once baffled--almost for the first time--by a stranger in a
stage coach, who would not, or could not, talk to him on any subject,
until at last Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, "I have
talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects--literature,
farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws, horse-races, suits-at-law,
politics, swindling, blasphemy, and philosophy,--is there any one subject
that you will favour me by opening upon?" "Sir," replied the inscrutable
stranger, "can you say anything clever about '_bend-leather_'?"[20] No
doubt this superficial familiarity with a vast number of subjects was a
great fascination to Scott, and a great stimulus to his own imagination.
To the last he held the same opinion of his friend's latent powers. "To my
thinking," he wrote in his diary in 1825, "I never met a man of greater
powers, of more complete information on all desirable subjects." But in
youth at least Clerk seems to have had what Sir Walter calls a
characteristic Edinburgh complaint, the "itch for disputation," and though
he softened this down in later life, he had always that slight
contentiousness of bias which enthusiastic men do not often heartily like,
and which may have prevented Scott from continuing to the full the close
intimacy of those earlier years. Yet almost his last record of a really
delightful evening, refers to a bachelor's dinner given by Mr. Clerk, who
remained unmarried, as late as 1827, after all Sir Walter's worst troubles
had come upon him. "In short," says the diary, "we really laughed, and
real laughter is as rare as real tears. I must say, too, there was a
_heart_, a kindly feeling prevailed over the party. Can London give such a
dinner?"[21] It is clear, then, that Clerk's charm for his friend survived
to the last, and that it was not the mere inexperience of boyhood, which
made Scott esteem him so highly in his early days.
If Clerk pricked, stimulated, and sometimes badgered Scott, another of
his friends who became more and more intimate with him, as life went
on, and who died before him, always soothed him, partly by his
gentleness, partly by his almost feminine dependence. This was William
Erskine, also a barrister, and son of an Episcopalian clergyman in
Perthshire,--to whose influence it is probably due that Scott himself
always read the English Church service in his own country house, and
does not appear to have retained the Presbyterianism into which he was
born. Erskine, who was afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord
Kinnedder--a distinction which he did not survive for many months--was
a good classic, a man of fine, or, as some of his companions thought,
of almost superfine taste. The style apparently for which he had
credit must have been a somewhat mimini-pimini style, if we may judge
by Scott's attempt in _The Bridal of Triermain_, to write in a manner
which he intended to be attributed to his friend. Erskine was left a
widower in middle life, and Scott used to accuse him of philandering
with pretty women,--- a mode of love-making which Scott certainly
contrived to render into verse, in painting Arthur's love-making to
Lucy in that poem. It seems that some absolutely false accusation
brought against Lord Kinnedder, of an intrigue with a lady with whom
he had been thus philandering, broke poor Erskine's heart, during his
first year as a Judge. "The Counsellor (as Scott always called him)
was," says Mr. Lockhart, "a little man of feeble make, who seemed
unhappy when his pony got beyond a footpace, and had never, I should
suppose, addicted himself to any out of door's sports whatever. He
would, I fancy, as soon have thought of slaying his own mutton as of
handling a fowling-piece; he used to shudder when he saw a party
equipped for coursing, as if murder was in the wind; but the cool,
meditative angler was in his eyes the abomination of abominations. His
small elegant features, hectic cheek and soft hazel eyes, were the
index of the quick, sensitive, gentle spirit within." "He would
dismount to lead his horse down what his friend hardly perceived to be
a descent at all; grew pale at a precipice; and, unlike the white lady
of Avenel, would go a long way round for a bridge." He shrank from
general society, and lived in closer intimacies, and his intimacy with
Scott was of the closest. He was Scott's confidant in all literary
matters, and his advice was oftener followed on questions of style and
form, and of literary enterprise, than that of any other of Scott's
friends. It is into Erskine's mouth that Scott puts the supposed
exhortation to himself to choose more classical subjects for his
poems:--
"'Approach those masters o'er whose tomb
Immortal laurels ever bloom;
Instructive of the feebler bard,
Still from the grave their voice is heard;
From them, and from the paths they show'd,
Choose honour'd guide and practised road;
Nor ramble on through brake and maze,
With harpers rude of barbarous days."
And it is to Erskine that Scott replies,--
"For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask
The classic poet's well-conn'd task?
Nay, Erskine, nay,--on the wild hill
Let the wild heath-bell flourish still;
Cherish the tulip, prune the vine,
But freely let the woodbine twine,
And leave untrimm'd the eglantine:
Nay, my friend, nay,--since oft thy praise
Hath given fresh vigour to my lays;
Since oft thy judgment could refine
My flatten'd thought or cumbrous line,
Still kind, as is thy wont, attend,
And in the minstrel spare the friend!"
It was Erskine, too, as Scott expressly states in his introduction to
the _Chronicles of the Canongate_, who reviewed with far too much
partiality the _Tales of my Landlord_, in the _Quarterly Review_, for
January, 1817,--a review unjustifiably included among Scott's own
critical essays, on the very insufficient ground that the MS. reached
Murray in Scott's own handwriting. There can, however, be no doubt at
all that Scott copied out his friend's MS., in order to increase the
mystification which he so much enjoyed as to the authorship of his
variously named series of tales. Possibly enough, too, he may have
drawn Erskine's attention to the evidence which justified his sketch
of the Puritans in _Old Mortality_, evidence which he certainly
intended at one time to embody in a reply of his own to the adverse
criticism on that book. But though Erskine was Scott's _alter ego_ for
literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious,
not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to
cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's
own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I
should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not
endure even the shadow of reproach,--like the ermine, which is said to
pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by
his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. Erskine was indeed
almost feminine in his love of Scott; but he was feminine with all the
irritable and scrupulous delicacy of a man who could not derogate from
his own ideal of right, even to serve a friend.
Another friend of Scott's earlier days was John Leyden, Scott's most
efficient coadjutor in the collection of the _Border Minstrelsy_,--that
eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a
shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulated
before the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the
Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine,
prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six
months' notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India
Company. It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and
back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy
of a border ballad that was wanting for the _Minstrelsy_. Scott was sitting
at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, "like
that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel
which scuds before it. The sounds increased as they approached more near;
and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know
him) burst into the room chanting the desiderated ballad with the most
enthusiastic gesture, and all the energy of what he used to call the
_saw-tones_ of his voice."[22] Leyden's great antipathy was Ritson, an
ill-conditioned antiquarian, of vegetarian principles, whom Scott alone of
all the antiquarians of that day could manage to tame and tolerate. In
Scott's absence one day, during his early married life at Lasswade, Mrs.
Scott inadvertently offered Ritson a slice of beef, when that strange man
burst out in such outrageous tones at what he chose to suppose an insult,
that Leyden threatened to "thraw his neck" if he were not silent, a threat
which frightened Ritson out of the cottage. On another occasion, simply in
order to tease Ritson, Leyden complained that the meat was overdone, and
sent to the kitchen for a plate of literally raw beef, and ate it up solely
for the purpose of shocking his crazy rival in antiquarian research. Poor
Leyden did not long survive his experience of the Indian climate. And with
him died a passion for knowledge of a very high order, combined with no
inconsiderable poetical gifts. It was in the study of such eccentric beings
as Leyden that Scott doubtless acquired his taste for painting the humours
of Scotch character.
Another wild shepherd, and wilder genius among Scott's associates, not
only in those earlier days, but to the end, was that famous Ettrick
Shepherd, James Hogg, who was always quarrelling with his brother
poet, as far as Scott permitted it, and making it up again when his
better feelings returned. In a shepherd's dress, and with hands fresh
from sheep-shearing, he came to dine for the first time with Scott in
Castle Street, and finding Mrs. Scott lying on the sofa, immediately
stretched himself at full length on another sofa; for, as he explained
afterwards, "I thought I could not do better than to imitate the lady
of the house." At dinner, as the wine passed, he advanced from "Mr.
Scott," to "Shirra" (Sheriff), "Scott," "Walter," and finally
"Wattie," till at supper he convulsed every one by addressing Mrs.
Scott familiarly as "Charlotte."[23] Hogg wrote certain short poems,
the beauty of which in their kind Sir Walter himself never approached;
but he was a man almost without self-restraint or self-knowledge,
though he had a great deal of self-importance, and hardly knew how
much he owed to Scott's magnanimous and ever-forbearing kindness, or
if he did, felt the weight of gratitude a burden on his heart. Very
different was William Laidlaw, a farmer on the banks of the Yarrow,
always Scott's friend, and afterwards his manager at Abbotsford,
through whose hand he dictated many of his novels. Mr. Laidlaw was
one of Scott's humbler friends,--a class of friends with whom he seems
always to have felt more completely at his ease than any others--who
gave at least as much as he received, one of those wise, loyal, and
thoughtful men in a comparatively modest position of life, whom Scott
delighted to trust, and never trusted without finding his trust
justified. In addition to these Scotch friends, Scott had made, even
before the publication of his _Border Minstrelsy_, not a few in London
or its neighbourhood,--of whom the most important at this time was the
grey-eyed, hatchet-faced, courteous George Ellis, as Leyden described
him, the author of various works on ancient English poetry and
romance, who combined with a shrewd, satirical vein, and a great
knowledge of the world, political as well as literary, an exquisite
taste in poetry, and a warm heart. Certainly Ellis's criticism on his
poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received; and had he
lived to read his novels,--only one of which was published before
Ellis's death,--he might have given Scott more useful help than either
Ballantyne or even Erskine.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 214.]
[Footnote 20: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 344.]
[Footnote 21: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 75.]
[Footnote 22: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 56.]
[Footnote 23: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 168-9.]