EARLY MARRIED LIFE, BALLAD COLLECTING, _LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL_,
_MARMION_
The Scotts, at Edinburgh, dwelt first in George Street, then in South
Castle Street, and finally in the house in North Castle Street, where he
resided till the time of his misfortunes. The rooms were soon full of
old pikes and guns and bows, of old armour, and of old books. Already
Scott’s library was considerable. He had read enormously, and it is
curious that a man of his unrivalled memory made so many written notes
of his reading. “Reading makes a full man,” but Gillies, an intelligent
if unpractical bore, says that, when in the full tide of authorship
later, Scott read comparatively little. His summers were passed in a
cottage at Lasswade, in the society of his early friends, and of the
families of Melville, of the historian, Patrick Fraser Tytler,
Woodhouselee, and of Buccleuch. His early friends were around
him--William Erskine, a good man and fastidious critic, William Clerk,
of Penicuik, Fergusson (Sir Adam), and many others. Gillies says that
Scott lived “alone,” and doubts “whether there was any one intimately
connected with Sir Walter Scott whose mind and habits were exactly
congenial.” But it is a commonplace that we all “live alone,” and
certainly Scott seems to have believed that he found, especially in
“Will Erskine,” all the sympathy, literary and social, that he could
expect or desire. In 1798 he made a new acquaintance, Mat Lewis, famous
then for his romance, _The Monk_, and busy with his _Tales of Wonder_.
[Sidenote: EARLY MARRIED LIFE]
Lewis, though no poet, was a neat metrist, and tutored Scott in the
practical details of prosody. To Lewis Scott offered versions of German
ballads, and other materials from his increasing store of original or
traditional _Volkslieder_. He entered the realm of poetry, not by the
usual gate of “subjective” lyrics about his own emotions, but through
the antiquarian and historical gate of old popular ballads, newly opened
by Bishop Percy, Herd, Ritson the excitable antiquary, and others. Sir
Philip Sidney had loved these songs of “blind crowders,” Addison had
praised them, Lady Wardlaw had imitated them, Burns had expressed but a
poor opinion of them, but German research and imitation had given a new
vogue to the ballads, which Scott, in boyhood, had collected whenever
he possessed a shilling to buy a printed chant. The simplicity and
spirit of the narrative folk songs did much to inspire and give vogue to
Wolf’s theory that the Homeric poems were, in origin, a kind of highly
superior long ballads, handed down by oral tradition. In this theory
Scott had no interest, about its truth he had no opinion, sitting silent
and bored when it was debated by Coleridge and Morritt. “I never,” he
says, “was so bethumped with words.” The vogue of the ballads lent a new
blow at the poetical theories of the eighteenth century, and at the
poetry of Pope. But Scott would not have it said that Pope was no poet,
a poet he _was_, but he dealt with themes that were no longer so much
appreciated as they had been in the age of Anne. Though a literary
innovator Sir Walter was not a literary iconoclast, and he loved no
poetry better than the stately and manly melancholy of Dr. Johnson’s
imitations of Juvenal.
Mat Lewis’s ballads were delayed in publication, but in January 1799 he
negotiated with a Mr. Bell for the issue of Scott’s version of Goethe’s
_Goetz Von Berlichingen_, “a very poor and incorrect translation;” so a
former owner of my copy of Lockhart has pencilled on the margin.
_Goetz_, at all events, made no impression on Coleridge’s detested
“reading public,” and though Scott carried to London, in 1799, an
original drama, _The House of Aspen_, which was put in rehearsal by
Kemble, it never saw the footlights. In later life he expressed disgust
at the idea of writing for “low and ignorant actors” (who may be
supposed to know their own business); perhaps he had been mortified by
the ways of managers. At this time his father died of paralysis; says
Lockhart, “I have lived to see the curtain rise and fall once more on a
similar scene.” The _Glenfinlas_ ballad was written at this time,
founded on a legend of the murderous fairy women of the woods, which I
have heard from the lips of a boatman on Loch Awe, and which Mr.
Stevenson found, unmistakably the same, among the natives of Samoa. A
more important ballad, the first in which he really showed his hand, was
_The Eve of St. John_, a legend of Smailholme tower. Here we find the
true Border spirit, the superstitious thrill, the galloping metre, the
essence of _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_. _Cadyow_, a ballad of the
murder of the Regent Moray, is also of this period, and though not in
the traditional manner, is most spirited.
[Sidenote: BEGINNING OF BALLANTYNE]
Scott’s destiny was now clear enough, the country had in him a new
“maker.” But he had no idea of a life of authorship, agreeing with Kerr
of Abbotrule that “a Lord President Scott might well be a famous
poet--in the vacation time.” Literature, he said, was a good staff, but
a bad crutch, and he looked to advance his worldly prospects and secure
his livelihood by the profession of the Bar. Our other poets, as a rule,
have meditated the Muse in perfect leisure, with no professional
distractions. But Scott’s literary work was all done in hours stolen
from an active official life. “I can get on quite as well from
recollection of nature, while sitting in the Parliament House, as if
wandering through wood and wold,” he said to Gillies, “though liable to
be roused out of a descriptive dream, if Balmuto, with a fierce grunt,
demands, ‘Where are your cautioners?’” Shelley composed while watching
“the bees in the ivy bloom;” Keats, while listening to the nightingale;
Scott, in the Parliament House, under the glare of Lord Balmuto. The
difference in method is manifest in the difference of the results. But
_Marmion_ was composed during gallops among the hills of Tweedside.
At this date, the winter of 1799, Scott met his school friend James
Ballantyne, then publishing a newspaper at Kelso, and Ballantyne printed
twelve copies of the new ballads. Scott liked the typography, thought of
a small volume of the old Border ballads, to be executed by his friend,
and the die was cast. The success of _The Border Minstrelsy_ made him an
author, association with the printer helped him on the long road to
financial ruin.
[Sidenote: BALLAD COLLECTING]
The same date, December 1799, saw Scott made Sheriff Depute of
Selkirkshire, “the Shirra of the Forest.” He at once invited Ballantyne
to settle as a printer and publisher in Edinburgh, while in the Forest,
when ballad hunting, he made the acquaintance of Leyden, scholar and
poet, of William Laidlaw, his lifelong friend, and of James Hogg, then
an Ettrick swain, “the most remarkable man who ever wore the maud of a
shepherd.” Hogg had none of the education of Burns. “Self taught am I,”
he might have said, like the minstrel of Odysseus, “but the Muse puts
into my heart all manner of lays.” Hogg was indeed the survivor of such
Borderers as, writes Bishop Lesley (1576), “make their own ballads of
adventures for themselves.” He has left a graphic account of his first
meeting with Scott. “Oh, lad, the Shirra’s come,” said Scott’s groom.
“Are ye the chap _that makes_ the auld ballads?” Hogg replied, “I could
not say that I had made ony very auld ballads,” but did James tell the
truth? He is under suspicion of having made the “very auld ballad” of
_Auld Maitland_, which his mother at once chanted to the Shirra. Scott
was as happy as his own Monkbarns, when he overheard Elspeth of the
Burntfoot crooning the ballad of Harlaw. The old lady told the Shirra
that she had learned _Auld Maitland_ “frae auld Andrew Moor, and he
learned it frae auld Baby Metlin” (Maitland) “wha was housekeeper to the
first” (Anderson) “laird of Tushilaw. She was said to have been another
than a gude ane....”
Baby Metlin having this character, I sought for her, aided by the
kindness of the minister of Ettrick, in the records of the Kirk Session
of Ettrick, hoping to find her under Church censure for some lawless
love. But there is no documentary trace of Baby, and the question is,
could Hogg, then ignorant of libraries, above all of the Maitland MSS.,
have forged the ballad of _Auld Maitland_, and made his mother an
accomplice in the pious fraud? It is to be remarked that Scott himself
says that he obtained _Auld Maitland_ in manuscript, from a farmer
(Laidlaw), and that the copy was derived from the recital of “an old
shepherd” (1802). None the less Mrs. Hogg may also have recited it,
having learned it from the old shepherd, Auld Andrew Moor. It is a
delicate point in ballad criticism. Such a hoax, at this date, by the
wily shepherd, appears to me to be impossible, and I lean to a theory
that _Auld Maitland_, and _The Outlaw Murray_, are literary imitations
of the ballad, compiled late in the seventeenth or early in the
eighteenth century, on some Maitland and Murray traditions. In any
case, Hogg had won the interest of Scott, whose temper he often tried
but whose patience he never exhausted. For Leyden, a more trustworthy
collector of ballads, Scott secured an appointment in the East, “a
distant and a deadly shore.”
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
In 1802, the first two volumes of _The Border Minstrelsy_, later added
to and emended, were published in London, with all the treasures of
ancient lore in prefaces and notes; the first fruits, and noble fruits
they are, of Scott as an historian and writer in prose. Ballantyne,
still at Kelso, was the printer. Scott remarks that “I observed more
strict fidelity concerning my originals,” than Bishop Percy had done. To
what extent he altered and improved his originals cannot be known. He
confesses to “conjectural emendations” in _Kinmont Willie_, which he
found “much mangled by reciters.” Mr. Henderson credits him with verses
ix-xii, “mainly,” and with “numerous other touches.” I do not think that
in the ballad of Otterbourne he interpolated a passage bestowed on him
by Mr. Henderson, for he twice quoted the lines in moments of great
solemnity, and he was not the man to quote himself. The texts, though
they passed the scrutiny of the fierce Ritson, are much more
scientifically handled (with the aid of the Abbotsford and other MSS.)
by Professor Child, in his noble collection. He notes over forty minute
changes, in one ballad, from the MS. copy of Mrs. Brown. But _The Border
Minstrelsy_ gives the texts as the world knows them, as far as it _does_
know them, while the prose elevates “a set of men whose worth was hardly
known” to a pinnacle of romance. In their own days the Border riders
were regarded as public nuisances by statesmen, who only attempted to
educate them by the method of the gibbet. But now they were the delight
of “fine ladies, contending who shall be the most extravagant in
encomium.” A blessing on such fine ladies, who know what is good when
they see it!
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
Scott says, with his usual acuteness, that we “sometimes impute that
effect to the poet, which is produced by the recollections and
associations which his verses excite.” When a man has been born in the
centre of Scott’s sheriffdom, when every name of a place in the ballads
and the _Lay_ is dear and familiar to him, he cannot be the most
impartial, though he may be not the least qualified critic of the poet,
who, we must remember, wrote for his own people. By 1802, Scott
announced to Ellis that he was engaged on “a long poem of my own ... a
kind of romance of Border chivalry, in a light horseman sort of stanza.”
This poem was _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, which Borderers may be
excused for thinking the best, the freshest, and the most spontaneous of
all his romances in rhyme. The young Countess of Dalkeith (later,
Duchess of Buccleuch) had heard from Mr. Beattie of Mickledale a story
(known under another form, and as of recent date, in Glencoe) of a
mysterious being who made his appearance at a farm house, and there
resided. The being uttered the cry _Tint, tint, tint!_ (_Lost, lost,
lost!_), and was finally summoned away by a Voice calling to him by the
name of Gilpin Horner. This legend was “universally credited”: Lady
Dalkeith asked Scott to write a ballad on the theme, and thus Gilpin,
though criticized as an excrescence on the _Lay_, was really its only
begetter. While he was wondering what he could make of Gilpin, Scott
heard part of Coleridge’s _Christabel_, then in manuscript, recited by
Sir John Stoddart. The measure of _Christabel_ had previously been used
in comic verse, by Anthony Hall, Anstey, Wolcott and others, and Scott
seems to have assumed the right to employ it in a serious work. In this
he showed something of the deficient sense of _meum_ and _tuum_ which
marked his freebooting ancestors; and Coleridge, whose fragment was not
published till many years later, resented the appropriation and often
spoke of Scott’s poetry with contempt. A year passed before Scott
actually wrote the first stanzas of the _Lay_. He read them to Erskine
and Cranstoun, who said little, and he burned his manuscript. But later
he found that the critics were too much puzzled by the novelty of the
poem to give an opinion, and when one of them, probably Erskine,
suggested that an explanatory prologue was necessary, Scott introduced
the Last Minstrel, chanting to Monmouth’s widow, and went on with the
work, “at about the rate of a canto a week.”
In this casual manner he “found himself,” and his fame. The _Lay_ was
not published till 1805, and Scott’s energies were being given to an
edition of the romance of _Sir Tristrem_, and to elucidating the true
history of his favourite Thomas the Rymer, of Ercildoune. In later days
he purchased The Rymer’s Glen, so he chose to style it, below Eildon
tree, with the burn which murmurs by the cottage of Chiefswood. But _Sir
Tristrem_ and the Rymer were learned and unprofitable subjects. Despite
his need of money, Sir Walter was always ready to spend his time and
labour in literature which profited not, financially. “People may say
this or that of the pleasure or fame or profit as a motive of writing,”
he remarks. “I think the only pleasure is the actual exertion and
research....”
Society and his duties as Quartermaster-General of Volunteer horse were
combined with research and composition. Invasion seemed imminent, and
Scott worked both at his cavalry drill and at organizing the infantry
militia of his sheriffdom. In September 1803 he met Wordsworth and his
sister on their Scottish tour, when Wordsworth prayed for “an hour of
that Dundee” who drove the army of Mackay in rout through the pass of
Killiecrankie. It is curious to find Wordsworth, Ruskin and Scott united
among the friends of Claverhouse! Wordsworth professed himself “greatly
delighted” by Scott’s recitation of four cantos of the _Lay_, though
“the moving incident is not my trade,” any more than admiration of
contemporaries was Wordsworth’s foible. Later the admiration was mainly
on the side of Scott, though Wordsworth made noble amends in his
beautiful sonnet on Scott’s final and fated voyage to Italy.
[Sidenote: ASHESTIEL]
Matters of finance were now occupying Scott. At the Bar he had never
much more practice than that which came to him from his father’s office.
That was little indeed, usually under £200 a year, and grew less when
Scott’s father died, and his gifted but gay brother, Thomas, mismanaged
the business. With his sheriffdom, his private resources, and a legacy
of about £6,000 from an uncle, Scott was at the head of £1,000 a year.
He succeeded in obtaining the reversion of a Clerkship in the Court of
Sessions, doing the work for nothing while the holder, an old man,
lived; and, in the end of 1805, he put his £6,000 into the printing
business of James Ballantyne.
This was the beginning of evils. A barrister ought not to be a secret
partner in a commercial enterprise. Erskine alone knew the fact, and we
do not hear that Erskine remonstrated. Lockhart regretted that Scott,
who was now obliged to fix on a residence within his sheriffdom, did not
buy Broadmeadows with his windfall of £6,000. The place is beautifully
situated on the wooded left bank of Yarrow, between Hangingshaw and
Bowhill, and hard by the cottage of Mungo Park, the African traveller.
Here Scott might have lived happy and remote, in the heart of his own
country. But he was no hermit, he loved society, and he could not give
up his military duties. He left Lasswade, the Gandercleugh of his _Tales
of my Landlord_, and rented from a Russell cousin Ashestiel, a small
house, in part very old, on a steep cliff overhanging the Tweed, above
Yair. Only the hills behind the house severed him from Yarrow, the
fishing was excellent, hard by is Elibank, the tower of his ancestress,
“Muckle Mou’d Meg,” and Selkirk, where he administered justice, is
within an easy ride. The bridge over Tweed was not yet built, and Scott
had the unfading pleasure of risking his life in riding the flooded
ford. Here Scott reclaimed that honest poacher, Tom Purdie, his
lifelong retainer and friend, who, with rustic liberality of speech,
expressed his high opinion of Mrs. Scott’s attractions. Hard by is
Sunderland Hall, where Leslie’s troops bivouacked before they surprised
Montrose at Philiphaugh, and at Sunderland Hall was an excellent
antiquarian library open to the Shirra. Of him little trace remains at
Ashestiel, save the huge arm-chair which was borrowed for him in his
latest days of paralysis. At the Peel, within a few hundred yards, he
had an intelligent neighbour, Mrs. Laidlaw, wife of “Laird Nippy,” a
bonnet laird of an ancient line which lay under an old curse, not
unfulfilled. To Mrs. Laidlaw Scott presented all his poems, which, by
her bequest, have come into the hands of the present writer. Had Scott
been the owner, not the tenant, of Ashestiel, Abbotsford would never
have existed, “that unhappy palace of his race.”
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
It was in January 1805 that the _Lay_ was published by Messrs. Longman.
To appreciate the _Lay_ and its success, we must either have read it in
childhood, when “glamour” seems a probable art (as to some unknown
extent it really is), and when lamps that burn eternally in tombs
present no difficulties to the reason; or we must have imagination
enough to understand how perfectly and delightfully _novel_ was the
poem. There had been a long interregnum in poetry in England. Cowper, as
we learn from Miss Marianne Dashwood in _Sense and Sensibility_, was
Scott’s only rival, and Cowper is not romantic. Wordsworth and Coleridge
were practically unknown to “the reading public,” Burns was barred by
“the dialect,” the school of Pope had dwindled into _The Triumphs of
Temper_. Meanwhile Mrs. Radcliffe had kindled and fed the sacred lamp of
love for all that Catherine Morland thought “truly horrid,” and had been
a favourite of Scott himself. In the _Lay_ the eager public found
mysteries far exceeding in delightfulness those of Mrs. Radcliffe, found
magic genuine, all unlike her spells which are explained away; they
found many novel and galloping measures of verse; they found nature; and
they found a knowledge of the past such as has never been combined with
glowing poetic imagination.
Mr. Saintsbury says with truth that “a very large, perhaps the much
larger, part of the appeal of the _Lay_ was metrical.” Scott appeared to
be as much an innovator in metres as Mr. Swinburne was, sixty years
after him. Scott knew nothing at all (nor do I) about “the iambic
dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence, anacrusis, and
catalexis”: to him these terms were “bonny critic’s Greek,” and as
unintelligible as, to Andrew Fairservice, was “bonny lawyer’s Latin.”
But it does seem that he gave “extreme care” to his “scheme of metre”
in the _Lay_, not arranging it, as he said of one of his novels, “with
as much care as the rest, that is, with no care at all.” The result, to
quote Mr. Saintsbury, is “to some tastes, a medium quite unsurpassed for
the particular purpose,” and Scott’s later poems are, I venture to
think, in metre less exquisitely appropriate, and more monotonous. His
rhymed romances are in no sense epic, they are a new kind of composition
based on the ballad, but, owing to their length, in need of constant
variety of cadence. All these qualities were in the highest degree
novel, and never to be successfully imitated, seriously, though
susceptible of parody.
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
We do not now appreciate the charm of all this freshness. We live a
century later, “the gambol has been shown,” the Pegasus of romance has
been put through all his paces before generations of _blasés_ observers;
witches, goblins, and reivers are hackneyed, and only the young (for
whom Scott, like Theocritus, professedly sang) can recapture the joy
with which the world hailed the _Lay_. We have, moreover, what our
ancestors of 1805 had not, the verse of Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson,
Keats, and Coleridge present in our memories, verse deeply meditated,
rich in thought, delicate in expression, “every reef loaded with gold.”
Scott has these great rivals now, in 1805 he had no rivals save those
who filled the times, already remote, of great Elizabeth. Thus only the
young, and they who have in their hearts every name and memory of
Scott’s hills and waters, can offer to the _Lay_, or to his other
narrative poems, the welcome that the country gave in 1805. Only we, old
Borderers, or fresh boys and girls, are at the point of view. Others may
style the _Lay_ “a thirdrate _Waverley_ novel in rhyme,” “let ilka man
rouse the ford as he finds it”; it is a ford which I have many times
ridden with pleasure during many years. Out of the romance I choose an
episodic passage, in essence, though not in numbers, a ballad: it tells,
traditionally, how the clan of Scott won fair Eskdale. Probably they
obtained it on the forfeiture of a liege lord far from “tame,” that
Maxwell who, on the execution of the red Regent, took the Morton title,
dared the Douglas feud, and supported the Catholic cause to his ruin.
But tradition speaks otherwise.
Scotts of Eskdale, a stalwart band,
Came trooping down to Todshawhill;
By the sword they won their land,
And by the sword they hold it still.
Hearken, Ladye, to the tale,
How thy sons won fair Eskdale....
Earl Morton was lord of that valley fair,
The Beattisons were his vassals there.
The Earl was gentle, and mild of mood,
The vassals were warlike, and fierce, and rude;
High of heart and haughty of word,
Little they reck’d of a tame liege lord
The Earl into fair Eskdale came,
Homage and seignory to claim:
Of Gilbert the Galliard a heriot he sought,
Saying, “Give thy best steed, as a vassal ought.” ...
“Dear to me is my bonny white steed,
Oft has he help’d me at pinch of need;
Lord and Earl though thou be, I trow,
I can rein Bucksfoot better than thou.” ...
Word on word gave fuel to fire,
Till so highly blazed the Beattison’s ire,
But that the Earl the flight had ta’en,
The vassals there their lord had slain.
Sore he plied both whip and spur,
As he urged his steed through Eskdale muir;
And it fell down a weary weight,
Just on the threshold of Branksome gate.
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
The Earl was a wrathful man to see,
Full fain avenged would he be,
In haste to Branksome’s Lord he spoke,
Saying--“Take these traitors to thy yoke:
For a cast of hawks, and a purse of gold
All Eskdale I’ll sell thee to have and hold
Beshrew thy heart, of the Beattisons’ clan
If thou leavest on Eske a landed man;
But spare Woodkerrick’s lands alone,
For he lent me his horse to escape upon.”
A glad man then was Branksome bold,
Down he flung him the purse of gold;
To Eskdale soon he spurred amain,
And with him five hundred riders has ta’en.
He left his merrymen in the mist of the hill,
And bade them hold them close and still;
And alone he wended to the plain,
To meet with the Galliard and all his train.
To Gilbert the Galliard thus he said: ...
“Know thou me for thy liege-lord and head;
Deal not with me as with Morton tame,
For Scots play best at the roughest game.
Give me in peace my heriot due,
Thy bonny white steed, or thou shalt rue.
If my horn I three times wind,
Eskdale shall long have the sound in mind.” ...
Loudly the Beattison laugh’d in scorn;
“Little care we for thy winded horn.
Ne’er shall it be the Galliard’s lot
To yield his steed to a haughty Scott.
Wend thou to Branksome back on foot,
With rusty spur and miry boot.”...
He blew his bugle so loud and hoarse,
That the dun deer started at fair Craikcross;
He blew again so loud and clear,
Through the gray mountain-mist there did lances appear;
And the third blast rang with such a din
That the echoes answered from Pentoun-linn,
And all his riders came lightly in.
Then had you seen a gallant shock,
When saddles were emptied, and lances broke!
For each scornful word the Galliard had said,
A Beattison on the field was laid.
His own good sword the chieftain drew,
And he bore the Galliard through and through;
Where the Beattisons’ blood mix’d with the rill,
The Galliard’s Haugh men call it still.
The Scots have scatter’d the Beattison clan,
In Eskdale they left but one landed man.
The valley of Eske, from the mouth to the source,
Was lost and won for that bonny white horse.
For the rest, from fair Margaret, the lost love,
Lovelier than the rose so red,
Yet paler than the violet pale,
to Wat Tinnlin, and
The hot and hardy Rutherford
Whom men called Dickon-draw-the-sword,
[Sidenote: “LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”]
the characters are all my ancient friends, and the time has been when
the romance was history to me. The history, of course, is handled with
all Scott’s freedom. Michael Scott had been dead for several centuries,
not for some seventy years, and the approximate date of the tale must be
the year of the religious revolution, 1559-1560; “the Regent” must be
Mary of Guise. Men no longer made their vows to St. Modan and St. Mary
of the Lowes, whose chapel the Scots burned in 1557: it had become
fashionable to wreck churches, thanks to preaching bakers and tailors,
Paul Methuen and Harlaw. Be these things as they may, and let critics be
critics as of old,
Still Yarrow, as he rolls along
Bears burden to the Minstrel’s song.
The _Lay_, as Scott wrote to Wordsworth, “has the merit of being written
with heart and good will, and for no other reason than to discharge my
mind of the ideas which from infancy have rushed upon it. I believe such
verses will generally be found interesting, because enthusiastic.” Whoso
reads the _Lay_ as it was written, “with heart and goodwill,” is not
likely to complain of its lack of interest. The opening dialogue of the
Spirits of river and hill, the ride of William of Deloraine through the
red spate of Ail water, the scene of fair Melrose beheld aright, the
opening of the Wizard’s tomb, in the splendour of the lamp that burns
eternally; the fluttering viewless forms that haunt the aisles; the
tilting between Cranstoun and Deloraine; the pranks of the page; the
courage of the young Buccleuch; his bluff English captors; the bustle of
the Warden’s raid; the riding in of the outlying mosstroopers; the final
scene of the Wizard’s appearance and the passing of the page; with the
beautiful ballads of the minstrels, make up a noble set of scenes, then
absolutely fresh and poignant.
[Sidenote: “WAVERLEY” BEGUN]
While the public, unlike Sir Henry Eaglefield, did not need three
readings to convince them of the excellence of the _Lay_, the critics
were as wise as usual. It is never easy to keep one’s temper in reading
Jeffrey’s criticisms. If not “the ideal whipper-snapper,” at least he
was always thinking, not of the natural appeal of a poet “to the simple
primary feelings of his kind,” but of what Mr. Jeffrey could say to the
abatement of the poet’s merits. Ellis thought Jeffrey’s review “equally
acute and impartial,” and it _was_ impartial compared with his critique
of _Marmion_. The poem should have been something else, not what it was.
It should have “been more full of incident,” as if it _could_ be more
full of incident! The Goblin was “a merely local superstition,” to which
Scott, of all men, could most easily have replied by proofs that the
superstition, practically that of the Brownie, is universal. For example
Froissart gives us, in Orthon, a goblin page, though not a malevolent
specimen of the genus. Jeffrey said, and one would “like to have felt
Mr. Jeffrey’s bumps”--as Charles Lamb said of a less famous
dullard--that “Mr. Scott must either sacrifice his Border prejudices, or
offend his readers in the other parts of the Empire!” Jeffrey writes
like the snappish pedant of a provincial newspaper. When _Marmion_
appeared, Jeffrey found, on the other hand, that it was not Scottish
enough! Pitt and Fox equally admired the work, the public bought it as
poetry is no longer bought, and Scott sold his copyright at the ransom
of £500, which, with a royalty of £169 6_s._ on the first edition, and a
present of £100 to buy a horse, from Messrs. Longman, made up his whole
literary profits on the transaction.
The money probably went into his printing business, with Ballantyne &
Co., and already (1805) we find that firm “receiving accommodation from
Sir William Forbes,” the banker. They were always receiving or being
refused “accommodation”; Scottish business had a paper basis; its bills
represented fairy gold that turned to withered leaves; though Scott, as
an Editor (of Dryden’s works at this time), put large quantities of
business in the way of his printing firm. His practice at the Bar was a
thing of the past: he was waiting for dead men’s shoes as a Clerk of the
Court of Session; and, while toiling over Dryden’s works, he began
_Waverley_, hoping to publish it by Christmas 1805. He purposely did not
make a brilliant start, though the description of Edward Waverley’s
studies is a copy of his own, and William Erskine did not think highly
of the first seven chapters. So Scott threw the manuscript aside, to his
admirers a misfortune. _Waverley_ would have been as great a success as
it was nine years later: Scott would have worked the new vein, the
“Bonanza mine,” and for eighteen new Waverley novels (at the rate of
two yearly) we would cheerfully give up _Marmion_, _The Lady of the
Lake_, _Rokeby_, and _The Lord of the Isles_. _Dis aliter visum._
It was now that Scott adopted the system of rising from bed to write at
five in the morning. On one occasion he had the cruelty to return and
awake Mrs. Scott, with the tidings, which he knew to be wholly
uninteresting to her, that he had discovered the meaning of the name of
a burn that passes through his estate. While taking brief holiday at
Gilsland, he was summoned to mount and ride to Dalkeith, the rendezvous
of the Forest, by the beacon fire which proved to be a false alarm. The
story is told in _The Antiquary_. Scott met the Forest men pouring in
down every water, and I have heard, from my own people, that the
inhabitants of the little Border towns meant to burn them, if Napoleon
landed, drive their flocks into the hills, and fight it out in the old
Border way, a burnt country and a guerilla foe. It was during his ride
of a hundred miles in twenty-four hours that Scott composed the lines
beginning--
The forest of Glenmore is dree,
It is all of black pine and the dark oak tree.
[Sidenote: PARTY SPIRIT]
The April of 1806 saw Scott in London; already a “lion,” he was
presented at the tiny Court of Caroline, Princess of Wales, who at this
time was taken up by the Tories, as the Prince of Wales was then of the
Whig party; much as another Prince of Wales, Frederick, was something of
a Jacobite. He found that the Princess had an exaggerated freedom of
manner, and presently “it came to be thought so.” She called him “a
faint-hearted troubadour,” and he had no mind for the part of
Chastelard. In town he met Joanna Baillie, whose plays he appreciated
with more of generosity than critical faculty. His instalment as Clerk
of Session was not welcomed by the Whigs, and, in irritation, “he for
the first time put himself forward as a decided Tory partisan.” The
Tories, at all events, were not pro-French. It would have been well if
Scott could have taken the advice of Lord Dalkeith (Feb. 20, 1806), “Go
to the hills and converse with the Spirit of the Fells, or any Spirit
but the Spirit of Party, which is the fellest fiend that ever disturbed
Harmony and social pleasure.”
On June 27, 1806, Scott wrote his “Health to Lord Melville,” the Tory
governing spirit of Scotland, whom the Whigs were impeaching. James
Ballantyne sang this lay at a public dinner on Lord Melville’s
acquittal. The Princess of Wales was saluted in this song, which
contained the words “Tally ho to the Fox” (C. J. Fox). This does not
appear an amazing indiscretion, in a parcel of party verses, but the
Whigs were greatly shocked. If a Briton must be a party man, he may as
righteously belong to one party as the other. But the Whigs ever
cherished the belief that they were the righteous. The worst effect of
Scott’s politics was his connexion with journals, from the stately
_Quarterly_ to the inglorious _Beacon_, which carried political rancour
into literary criticism. It is true that Hazlitt wrote as furiously and
vilely against Coleridge in _The Edinburgh Review_, which was Whig, as
any one ever did against Keats in _The Quarterly_, which is Tory. But
Whig offences, in history as in literature, are condoned by historians,
and forgotten by most people, while Gifford, of the _Quarterly_, and the
conductors of _Blackwood_ remain in the pillory. In any case, with the
brutal outrages of criticism Scott had nothing to do. He was foremost to
praise _Frankenstein_, supposing it to be by Shelley, when Shelley was
the target of Tory insults; and he invited Charles Lamb to Abbotsford,
when Lamb was being attacked as a leader of the Cockney School.[3] Lamb
missed the chance of coursing and salmon fishing with a Scot who would
not have aroused in him “an imperfect sympathy.”
However Lamb and Shelley were not known in Scotland in 1806, when the
affairs of Scott’s brother Thomas made it necessary for Walter to
[Sidenote: “MARMION”]
earn money by his pen. He received £1,000 from Constable for the
copyright of an unwritten poem, _Marmion_, and mortgaged his time and
genius to help a brother. Constable was then rather a dealer in rare old
books than a publisher, but he foresaw Scott’s success, and outbid
Messrs. Longman, if, indeed, they made any bid at all. To his brother
Thomas he wrote a series of letters, still, I think, unpublished, and
mainly noteworthy for the goodness of head, the wisdom, the benevolence
and tact of the writer. By the end of 1807 he was finishing at once his
_Life of Dryden_, and his _Marmion_; who, as he wrote to Lady Louisa
Stuart in January 1808, is “gasping upon Flodden Field,” though Scott
hoped, that day, “to knock him on the head with a few thumping stanzas.”
When we remember that, by his brother’s failure, the whole affairs of
the estates of the Marquis of Abercorn were thrown on his hands “in a
state of unutterable confusion,” and at his own responsibility, we may
estimate his industry. Describing the research needed by his _Dryden_ he
writes--
From my research the boldest spiders fled,
And moths retreating trembled as I read,
while at the same time he was leading Marmion from disgrace to death,
and was passing the heart of the day in his official duties (1807). But
by the end of February 1808, _Marmion_ was in the hands of the public,
equipped with the charming epistles to friends which precede the cantos.
Contrasting the over full life of Scott, and all his innumerable
distractions, with the “day long blessed idleness” of Tennyson, we
cannot expect from _Marmion_ the delicate finish of _The Idylls of the
King_. On the other hand, if Scott had enjoyed the leisure of Tennyson,
his rhymed romances would not have been better or other than they are.
In the Introduction to Canto Third, written to Erskine, he tells us that
criticism was wasted on him--
Then wild as cloud, or stream or gale,
Flow on, flow unconfined, my tale.
He will not imitate
those masters, o’er whose tomb
Immortal laurels ever bloom,
Instructive of the feeble bard
as the murmurs from the tomb may be. He will not even desert the fabled
past to chant the glories of the “Red Cross Hero” (Sir Sidney Smith),
nor of Sir Ralph Abercromby. But he foresees and predicts
The hour of Germany’s revenge,
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott, 1830.
From the painting by Sir John Watson Gordon, R.A.]
[Illustration: Sir Walter Scott.
[Sidenote: “MARMION”]
From a painting by Sir David Wilkie, R.A.]
and that then
When breathing fury for her sake,
Some new Arminius shall awake,
Her champion, ere he strike, shall come,
To whet his sword on Brunswick’s tomb.
In few years the hour and the champion came, Field-Marshal Von Blücher.
A poet has seldom been a better prophet.
The plot of _Marmion_ is in one way strangely akin to the plot of
_Ivanhoe_. In both we have a hard-bitten, hard-hearted, and unscrupulous
knight, Marmion and the Templar. In both we have a pilgrim guide, who is
no pilgrim, but a knight in disguise, returned from exile, with a deep
grudge against the Templar, or Marmion (Wilfred, Wilton). Both sets of
partners are rivals in love, at least if Wilfred, as we believe, loved
Rebecca. In both we have a tourney between the rivals, in which Marmion
and the Templar are defeated by Wilton and Wilfred. But Marmion’s
behaviour, both in regard to his lady page, and in the matter of the
forgery, is much worse than that of the Templar at his worst, though,
amidst his infamy, he is a knight as bold and haughty as the traitor
Ganelon in the _Chanson de Roland_. The high revenge of the lady page,
Constance, as she goes to her death by hunger, stirred even Jeffrey.
“The scene of elfin chivalry” in which Marmion tilts with the phantom
knight, was suggested by a Latin legend, forged and sent to Scott by
Surtees of Mainsforth, who several times palmed off on the Sheriff
ballads of his own making. Pitscottie, the candid old Fifeshire
chronicler, supplied the omens which, as in the _Odyssey_, lead up to
the catastrophe of Flodden Field. Marmion was made to travel to
Edinburgh by a path that mortal man never took, Scott desiring to
describe the castles on the way, and a favourite view of Edinburgh from
Blackford Hill. This passage of landscape has been elaborately and
justly praised by Mr. Ruskin. For poetical purposes Lady Heron is
brought to Holyrood, though she was at her castle beneath Flodden Edge,
and the artifice is justified by her song of _Young Lochinvar_. But it
is the closing battle piece that makes the fortune of _Marmion_.
[Sidenote: JEFFREY]
“All ends in song,” and in song end Scotland’s sorrows for that fatal
unforgotten fight, in which all was lost but honour. Scarce a great
family but lost her sons, the yeomen and peasants died like paladins,
and the strongest of the Stuart kings made the best end of all of them,
rushing forth from the fighting “schiltrom” and falling, pierced with
arrows and hacked with bills, not a lance’s length from the English
general. For this we have Surrey’s own word, and true it is that if the
Scots were never led with less skill, they never did battle with more
indomitable courage. Had not every leader fallen, save Home, the next
day would have seen a renewal of the battle--
Where shivered was fair Scotland’s Spear,
And broken was her shield.
Flodden secured the success of _Marmion_, and gave the laurels to the
brow of Scott. But it is certain that our age could dispense with Clara
and her lover! The fiend of party, detested by Lord Dalkeith, moved the
Whigs to take umbrage because more moan was made for Pitt than for Fox
in one of the Introductory pieces, where by an error of the press
several lines of the lament for Fox were omitted in early copies. “All
the Whigs here are in arms against _Marmion_,” wrote Scott (March 13,
1808). Jeffrey now complained of “the manifest neglect of Scottish
feelings,” which had been so injuriously flattered in the _Lay_, to the
indignation of the rest of the Empire! Lockhart justly remarks that it
was the _British_ patriotism which vexed Jeffrey, whose _Edinburgh
Review_ did its best to throw cold water on the spirit of national
resistance to Napoleon. He professed that his stupid criticism was a
well meant effort to draw Scott from “so idle a task” as that in which
he displayed his “pedantry.” Scott could bear the spite till Jeffrey
charged him with want of patriotism, and that arrow rankled. Jeffrey
dined with him on the day when Scott read the critique, and was
cordially received, but his host ceased to write in the _Edinburgh
Review_, and raised up another like unto it, a rival, the Tory
_Quarterly_.