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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.
[Illustration: =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
CHAPTER I
PAGE
ANCESTRY--CHILDHOOD--YOUTH--FIRST LOVE--MARRIAGE 1
CHAPTER II
EARLY MARRIED LIFE--BALLAD COLLECTING--“LAY
OF THE LAST MINSTREL”--“MARMION” 27
CHAPTER III
“QUARTERLY REVIEW”--“LADY OF THE LAKE”--“ROKEBY”--BALLANTYNE
AFFAIRS 59
CHAPTER IV
THE “WAVERLEY” NOVELS 83
CHAPTER V
“GUY MANNERING” TO “KENILWORTH” 110
CHAPTER VI
NOVELS--FINANCIAL RUIN--DEATH 157
CONCLUSION 205
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by John
Graham Gilbert _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Sir Walter Scott, after the Painting by Sir Henry
Raeburn 26
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by Sir David
Wilkie, R.A. 54
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by Sir John
Watson Gordon, R.A. 54
Sir Walter Scott and his Friends, from the Painting
by Thomas Faed, R.A. 80
The Chantrey Bust of Sir Walter Scott, 1820 108
“The Abbotsford Family,” after the Painting by
Sir David Wilkie, R.A. 134
Abbotsford 158
Sir Walter Scott, after the Painting by Sir Thomas
Lawrence 186
Sir Walter Scott, from the Painting by Sir Edwin
Landseer, R.A. 198
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.
[Sidenote: 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.”
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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!”
[Sidenote: 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.”
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.”
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.”
[Sidenote: 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!
[Sidenote: 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_.
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
After a painting by Sir Henry Raeburn.]