II

In the following year, 1797, Scott married a Miss Charpentier, daughter

of a French refugee. She was not his first love, that place having been

usurped by a Miss Stuart Belches, for whom Scott had felt perhaps the

only deep passion of his life, and memory of whom was to come to the

surface touchingly in his old age. Miss Charpentier, or Carpenter, as

she was called, with her vivacity and quaint foreign speech "caught his

heart on the rebound"; there can be no doubt that, in spite of a certain

shallowness of character, she made him a good wife, and that his

affection for her deepened steadily to the end. The young couple went to

live at Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, on the Esk. Scott, in whom

the proprietary instinct was always very strong, took great pride in the

pretty little cottage. He made a dining-table for it with his own hands,

planted saplings in the yard, and drew together two willow-trees at the

gate into a kind of arch, surmounted by a cross made of two sticks.

"After I had constructed this," he says, "mamma (Mrs. Scott) and I both

of us thought it so fine that we turned out to see it by moonlight, and

walked backwards from it to the cottage door, in admiration of our

magnificence and its picturesque effect." It would have been well

indeed for them both if their pleasures of proprietorship could always

have remained so touchingly simple.

Now that he was married, Scott was forced to look a little more sharply

to his fortunes. He applied himself with more determination to the law.

In 1799 he became deputy-sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a salary of three

hundred pounds, which placed him at least beyond the reach of want. He

began to look more and more to literature as a means of supplementing

his income. His ballads in the _Tales of Wonder_ had gained him some

reputation; this he increased in 1802 by the publication, under the

title _Border Minstrelsy_, of the ballads which he had for several years

been collecting, collating, and richly annotating. Meanwhile he was

looking about for a congenial subject upon which to try his hand in a

larger way than he had as yet adventured. Such a subject came to him at

last in a manner calculated to enlist all his enthusiasm in its

treatment, for it was given him by the Countess of Dalkeith, wife of the

heir-apparent to the dukedom of Buccleugh. The ducal house of Buccleugh

stood at the head of the clan Scott, and toward its representative the

poet always held himself in an attitude of feudal reverence. The Duke of

Buccleugh was his "chief," entitled to demand from him both passive

loyalty and active service; so, at least, Scott loved to interpret their

relationship, making effective in his own case a feudal sentiment which

had elsewhere somewhat lapsed. He especially loved to think of himself

as the bard of his clan, a modern representative of those rude poets

whom the Scottish chiefs once kept as a part of their household to chant

the exploits of the clan. Nothing could have pleased his fancy more,

therefore, than a request on the part of the lady of his chief to treat

a subject of her assigning--namely, the dark mischief-making of a dwarf

or goblin who had strayed from his unearthly master and attached himself

as page to a human household. The subject fell in with the poet's

reigning taste for strong supernaturalism. Gilpin Horner, the goblin

page, though he proved in the sequel a difficult character to put to

poetic use, was a figure grotesque and eerie enough to appeal even to

Monk Lewis. At first Scott thought of treating the subject in

ballad-form, but the scope of treatment was gradually enlarged by

several circumstances. To begin with, he chanced upon a copy of Goethe's

_Götz von Berlichingen_, and the history of that robber baron suggested

to him the feasibility of throwing the same vivid light upon the old

Border life of his ancestors as Goethe had thrown upon that of the Rhine

barons. This led him to subordinate the part played by the goblin page

in the proposed story, which was now widened to include elaborate

pictures of medieval life and manners, and to lay the scene in the

castle of Branksome, formerly the stronghold of Scott's and the Duke of

Buccleugh's ancestors. The verse form into which the story was thrown

was due to a still more accidental circumstance, i.e., Scott's

overhearing Sir John Stoddard recite a fragment of Coleridge's

unpublished poem "Christabel." The placing of the story in the mouth of

an old harper fallen upon evil days, was a happy afterthought; besides

making a beautiful framework for the main poem, it enabled the author to

escape criticism for any violent innovations of style, since these could

always be attributed to the rude and wild school of poetry to which the

harper was supposed to belong. In these ways _The Lay of the Last

Minstrel_ gradually developed in its present form. Upon its publication

in 1805, it achieved an immediate success. The vividness of its

descriptive passages, the buoyant rush of its meter, the deep romantic

glow suffusing all its pages, took by storm a public familiar to

weariness with the decorous abstractions of the eighteenth century

poets. The first edition, a sumptuous quarto, was exhausted in a few

weeks; an octavo edition of fifteen hundred was sold out within the

year; and before 1830, forty-four thousand copies were needed to supply

the popular demand. Scott received in all something under eight hundred

pounds for the _Lay_, a small amount when contrasted with his gains from

subsequent poems, but a sum so unusual nevertheless that he determined

forthwith to devote as much time to literature as he could spare from

his legal duties; those he still placed foremost, for until near the

close of his life he clung to his adage that literature was "a good

staff, but a poor crutch."

A year before the publication of the _Lay_, Scott had removed to the

small country seat of Ashestiel, in Selkirkshire, seven miles from the

nearest town, Selkirk, and several miles from any neighbor. In the

introductions to the various cantos of _Marmion_ he has given us a

delightful picture of Ashestiel and its surroundings--the swift

Glenkinnon dashing through the estate in a deep ravine, on its way to

join the Tweed; behind the house the rising hills beyond which lay the

lovely scenery of the Yarrow. The eight years (1804-1812) at Ashestiel

were the serenest, and probably the happiest, of Scott's life. Here he

wrote his two greatest poems, _Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_. His

mornings he spent at his desk, always with a faithful hound at his feet

watching the tireless hand as it threw off sheet after sheet of

manuscript to make up the day's stint. By one o'clock he was, as he

said, "his own man," free to spend the remaining hours of light with his

children, his horses, and his dogs, or to indulge himself in his

life-long passion for tree-planting. His robust and healthy nature made

him excessively fond of all out-of-door sports, especially riding, in

which he was daring to foolhardiness. It is a curious fact, noted by

Lockhart, that many of Scott's senses were blunt; he could scarcely,

for instance, tell one wine from another by the taste, and once sat

quite unconscious at his table while his guests were manifesting extreme

uneasiness over the approach of a too-long-kept haunch of venison, but

his sight was unusually keen, as his hunting exploits proved. His little

son once explained his father's popularity by saying that "it was him

that commonly saw the hare sitting." What with hunting, fishing,

salmon-spearing by torchlight, gallops over the hills into the Yarrow

country, planting and transplanting of his beloved trees, Scott's life

at Ashestiel, during the hours when he was "his own man," was a very

full and happy one.

Unfortunately, he had already embarked in an enterprise which was

destined to overthrow his fortunes just when they seemed fairest. While

at school in Kelso he had become intimate with a school fellow named

James Ballantyne, and later, when Ballantyne set up a small printing

house in Kelso, he had given him his earliest poems to print. After the

issue of the _Border Minstrelsy_, the typographical excellence of which

attracted attention even in London, he set Ballantyne up in business in

Edinburgh, secretly entering the firm himself as silent partner. The

good sale of the _Lay_ had given the firm an excellent start; but more

matter was presently needed to feed the press. To supply it, Scott

undertook and completed at Ashestiel four enormous tasks of

editing--the complete works of Dryden and of Swift, the Somers' Tracts,

and the Sadler State Papers. The success of these editions, and the

subsequent enormous sale of Scott's poems and novels, would have kept

the concern solvent in spite of Ballantyne's complete incapacity for

business, but in 1809 Scott plunged recklessly into another and more

serious venture. A dispute with Constable, the veteran publisher and

bookseller, aggravated by the harsh criticism delivered upon _Marmion_

by Francis Jeffrey, editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, Constable's

magazine, determined Scott to set up in connection with the Ballantyne

press a rival bookselling concern, and a rival magazine, to be called

the _Quarterly Review_. The project was a daring one, in view of

Constable's great ability and resources; to make it foolhardy to madness

Scott selected to manage the new business a brother of James Ballantyne,

a dissipated little buffoon, with about as much business ability and

general caliber of character as is connoted by the name which Scott

coined for him, "Rigdumfunnidos." The selection of such a man for such a

place betrays in Scott's eminently sane and balanced mind a curious

strain of impracticality, to say the least; indeed, we are almost

constrained to feel with his harsher critics that it betrays something

worse than defective judgment--defective character. His greatest

failing, if failing it can be called, was pride. He could not endure

even the mild dictations of a competent publisher, as is shown by his

answer to a letter written by one of them proposing some salaried work;

he replied curtly that he was a "black Hussar" of literature, and not to

be put to such tame service. Probably this haughty dislike of dictation,

this imperious desire to patronize rather than be patronized, led him to

choose inferior men with whom to enter into business relations. If so,

he paid for the fault so dearly that it is hard for a biographer to

press the issue against him.

For the present, however, the wind of fortune was blowing fair, and all

the storm clouds were below the horizon. In 1808 _Marmion_ appeared, and

was greeted with an enthusiasm which made the unprecedented reception of

the _Lay_ seem lukewarm in comparison. _Marmion_ contains nothing which

was not plainly foreshadowed in the _Lay_, but the hand of the poet has

grown more sure, his descriptive effects are less crude and amateurish,

the narrative proceeds with a steadier march, the music has gained in

volume and in martial vigor. An anecdote is told by Mr. Hutton which

will serve as a type of a hundred others illustrative of the

extraordinary hold which this poetry took upon the minds of ordinary

men. "I have heard," he says, "of two old men--complete

strangers--passing each other on a dark London night, when one of them

happened to be repeating to himself, just as Campbell did to the

hackney coachman of the North Bridge of Edinburgh, the last lines of the

account of Flodden Field in _Marmion_, 'Charge, Chester, charge,' when

suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, 'On, Stanley, on,' whereupon

they finished the death of _Marmion_ between them, took off their hats

to each other, and parted, laughing." _The Lady of the Lake_, which

followed in little more than a year, was received with the same popular

delight, and with even greater respect on the part of the critics. Even

the formidable Jeffrey, who was supposed to dine off slaughtered authors

as the Giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk" dined off young Englishmen,

keyed his voice to unwonted praise. The influx of tourists into the

Trossachs, where the scene of the poem was laid, was so great as

seriously to embarrass the mail coaches, until at last the posting

charges had to be raised in order to diminish the traffic. Far away in

Spain, at a trying moment of the Peninsular campaign, Sir Adam Ferguson,

posted on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's fire, read to his men

as they lay prostrate on the ground the passage from _The Lady of the

Lake_ describing the combat between Roderick Dhu's Highlanders and the

forces of the Earl of Mar; and "the listening soldiers only interrupted

him by a joyous huzza when the French shot struck the bank close above

them." Such tributes--and they were legion--to the power of his poetry

to move adventurous and hardy men, must have been intoxicating to

Scott; there is small wonder that the success of his poems gave him, as

he says, "such a _heeze_ as almost lifted him off his feet."