"I shall proffer you large proffers," said Sir Lancelot, "that is to say I shall unarm my head, and the last quarter of my body, all that may be unarmed, and I shall let bind my left hand behind me, so that it shall not help me, and right so I shall do battle with you."
FOREWORD.
A life of Walter Scott requires no apology. He is by far the greatest figure in Scottish literature, and has only one rival in the English tongue.
Without making any claim to finality, this volume is intended to represent that life in clearer outline than Lockhart's voluminous records succeed in doing, and with greater accuracy than they attempted to reach.
In particular, it endeavours to give an equitable and intelligible account of business transactions which were often much simpler in themselves than are the interpretations which have been loaded upon them - and to be equitable, not only to Scott himself, but to others who by the accident of association with him were drawn into the light of the same publicity.
In the presentation of the closing years it has been possible, through the courtesy of Messrs. Douglas & Foulis of Edinburgh, to quote from Sir Walter Scott's Journal as it was edited by Mr. David Douglas, and is published by them.
S. FOWLER WRIGHT.
Chapter I.
In the early April days of 1758, a young Edinburgh lawyer, Walter Scott, married Anne Rutherford, the eldest daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, Professor of Medicine at the University, and they set up house-keeping together at the end of the narrow sunless alley of the College Wynd, as the residential deficiencies of the Scottish capital, and their slender income permitted.
Walter Scott had not been born in Edinburgh. He was the eldest son of a Roxburgh farmer, Robert Scott of Sandy-Knowe, one of the Harden branch of that once-turbulent Border family, and he had come to the metropolis to make his way in the only form of civil warfare which survived the pacification of the Lowlands, and the English Union.
Anne Rutherford, though we meet her as the daughter of a city doctor, was of a kindred breed. Her father, like Walter Scott, had come to Edinburgh from an ancient moorland home, half fort, half farm, where the Rutherfords had held their own (and sometimes a few trifles to which the word was not originally applicable) through the bickering of centuries, while the law lay more lightly upon the land than the weight of a Border sword.
Her mother (dead now, and her father married again) was Sir John Swinton's daughter, bringing in another ancestry conspicuous for some previous centuries in Lowland politics, and civil and national warfare.
Perhaps, as we look backward, we should not omit a glance at Walter Scott's mother also, - Barbara Haliburton, of whom we know little beyond the fact that Robert and she were the parents of a large family whose after-records speak well for their upbringing in the rather primitive and strenuous life of the bleak moorland farm. The Haliburtons were a Berwickshire family of good repute, but somewhat quieter character than Scotts or Rutherfords or Swintons were ever likely to be. Still, like the Rutherfords, they had held their own, which had become a considerable area around Dryburgh and elsewhere, and it was an operation difficult to sustain without a good wit, and some toughness of fibre, through the disorders of the two previous centuries.
Such were the ancestries of the Edinburgh lawyer and the girl he brought to the narrow house at the corner of College Wynd. Our tale is not of these two, entering the romance of marriage under a shadow that they could not foresee, and would find difficult to understand, but they are necessary to know, and worth knowing.
Walter had been apprenticed by his father to George Chalmers, a Writer to the Signet, which is a professional description equivalent to that of an English solicitor, the Scottish legal fraternity having split into two branches, similar to those which have become so profitable to themselves and so oppressive to litigants in the Southern country. At this period, Writers to the Signet commonly took from one to several apprentices, of whom a minority only could establish themselves in the profession which they, or their parents, had chosen. But Walter Scott had shown character and ability which had caused him to be retained in George Chalmers's office when his apprenticeship ended, and to appear as a partner not very long afterwards.
At the time of his marriage, he had built up a good and growing practice, having the confidence of many clients among his numerous and important relatives in the Lowland counties. As the years passed, he became known as an expert conveyancer, adept in the intricacies of ancient title-deeds, a student of ecclesiastical history also, and one who, while advocating individual freedom, was yet conservative in his desire for the retention of old-established customs which were of the spirit of feudalism.
A strict Calvinist in religion, having the type of mind which would delight in the difficult intellectual gymnastics by which such systems of theology are sustained and defended, he yet appears to have been without bigotry or intolerance, and to have ruled his life by the broader and more vital principles of Christianity. Popular among his contemporaries, of a personal austerity towards physical indulgence which was conspicuous against the manners of the times rather than extreme in itself handsome in person, with a gracious kindliness of manner which tended somewhat to formality as the years passed, he stands out well in the white glare of enquiry which the light of his son's genius was to cast backward upon him.
His fault (if such it were) was one which might be anticipated when a man of generous mind, and of such combative ancestry, engaged in the civil warfare of litigation. His clients' interests would become his own, even to financing their quarrels personal to himself. His clients' honour would be interpreted by his own standards, so that those who left their funds in his hands, though they could be very sure that he would not apply them to his own use, could have less certainty that they would not be diverted to vicarious generosities toward some needy relative, whom (Mr. Scott had no doubt) they would have been prompt to relieve, had there been convenient opportunity to consult them before the urgent disbursement had to be made.
Those clients who instructed him in their quarrels would find that they would be ably and pertinaciously defended, and that the growing bill of costs, paid or unpaid, would not be allowed to check disbursement or weaken advocacy. It must take its time and its chance.
Had such a man been a fool, among such clients as the times would bring to his door, or had he been without a scrupulous personal integrity, he would have been speedily discredited in his profession, and ruined in his finances.
As it was, he made many bad debts. His opponents might find it hard to outwit him, but to an unscrupulous client it would be an easier thing. Yet his practice and reputation grew.
In his wife he seems to have made a very fortunate choice. Lockhart says that Anne was superior to her husband "in talents as well as tastes". We can believe that or not as we will. The praise would be equally convincing without the comparison. The fact seems to have been that they were different in details of intellectual interests, with strong outlines of similarity. It is of such diverse similarities that the most successful marriages may be made, and the best children come.
Anne had an equally deep-rooted religious faith, but we have her son's testimony that she wore the theological cloak with a considerable difference, which tended to mitigate the severities of the Sabbatarian tradition which would lie heavily, even then, upon the children of such a home.
She was a wide reader, of poetry in particular, a lover of old ballads, a skilful story-teller, and had the sense of humour which is almost the first necessity for successful motherhood, or successful marriage.
She was of a natural gaiety also, and had a stubborn and buoyant courage, of which she was to have need enough in the first years of married life, as we shall soon see.
She was 'short of stature, and by no means comely, at least after the days of her early youth'. Lockhart again. He could not have seen her, except at an advanced age, when her vivacity survived, but little else of the attractions of earlier days. You have to know Lockhart first to judge how much, or how little heed to give to his confident oracles. Standards of beauty differ. It is hard to imagine that Anne Rutherford - or Mrs. Walter Scott - was unattractive. Obviously there was one man - and he of a rather fastidious temper - who thought differently, and whose means of judging were much the better of the two.
It is curious to consider how greatly our conception of an individual depends upon the age at which he or she becomes an object of observation.
Keats and Shelley survive in the glamour of perpetual youth. Dr. Johnson was born a rather slovenly and obese old man. It is the penalty of those who produce genius that they are cast in the pageant of history for the parts of parents, who are usually elderly when they attract the biographer's notice. Yet they had their youth too.
Chapter II.
We need not doubt that Walter and Anne Scott set up housekeeping together very happily in College Wynd, having, many common interests, and a bond of love which would endure, but across the natural course of their marriage an inexplicable shadow fell - fell, and would not lift.
They were themselves in vigorous youth, and of an abundant vitality. They were of healthy stock, and their lives had been continent and well-ordered. Anne had children. They came rapidly. Babies that were strong at birth, as the children of such parents should be. But yet, after a few months, one after one, they tailed and died. It seems that love could not save them, nor any care. Family counsels were of no avail. The Professor of Medicine, with his grandchildren's lives at stake had no sufficient wisdom to give.
The fact seems to have been that these children, of such entirely moorland ancestry, could not thrive in the smoke - and germ-laden city atmosphere. There could be no enduring life for them in the sunless rooms of that narrow ungardened house, at the end of the College Wynd. They could not resist the infections which the slum-bred child, of weaker vitality, was adapted to overcome. But who was to know that? The bitter lesson which industrial England was to learn in the following century was still unguessed.
Other children of seemingly weaker stocks thrived well enough; or lived, if they did not thrive. But prayers and tears were of an equal vanity here. There must have been many prayers. There is nothing surer than that. But it seemed that they prayed to a deaf God.
Pregnant again, and near the time of a fifth birth, Anne folded up four little packets of hair. She was arranging her private drawer, as a woman should who is approaching the ordeal of childbirth, so that it should be left neatly if anything should go wrong, as we know it may, though we are not so cowardly as to talk of that. She wrote on the packet in her slanting Italian hand: All these are dead. With what thoughts or tears she wrote we cannot tell now. She knew herself a failure among mothers. Four times. Was there any value in those short frustrated lives? Immortal futures, as she would have said with confidence, in her darkest hour? Nothing but a physical failure, and the folly of unspaced births, as some of us, with an equal confidence, would assert today? Well, God knows.
But this time she was to be rewarded with a child that would not die. Robert they named him, after his grandfather, still farming at Sandy-Knowe. That was to be his name, and his destiny was a naval life. There was a Scottish obstinacy about this programme, - or was it a joke?
If it were so, we must go back a generation or two to understand its subtlety, for the elder Robert, life-long sheep-farmer at Sandy-Knowe, had been bred for the sea also, and that by a father of very obstinate disposition.
Robert's father had been another Walter by the christening rite, but it was as "Old Beardie" that he was remembered, the nickname earned by a flowing beard that he had vowed not to shave or trim till the Stuarts should be re-established on the Scottish throne.
But the Covenanters had held their ground, and the beard thrived.
Old Beardie, a man not to be lightly crossed, had destined his second son, Robert, to the sea, and to the sea he went. His first voyage was on a ship of which we know little more than that it took a northerly course, possibly for Scandinavia or the Baltic ports. But the North Sea was unkind. Robert's ship must have met a tempest from north or east, for it ended as a broken wreck on the Dundee coast. Robert got to the land alive, and on the land he would remain. He had a long walk home. When he arrived he said he had come to stay. He was emphatic about that. Old Beardie was emphatic too. He should go back to the sea, or he should never have another bawbee from him, or another meal at his board.
Robert agreed very cheerfully. He demonstrated his independence by turning Covenanter on the spot. It must have been a lively discussion.
He walked out, and went to John Scott of Harden, who was the chief of the clan. He asked for the lease of Sandy-Knowe, which was vacant. Sandy-Knowe was a high moorland farm with a poor soil. The ruins of Smailholm Tower stood at its centre, - one of those small square-built Lowland holds, which had been so numerous in the Border counties.
Perhaps the fact that Robert had quarrelled with his father was no bad credential to bring. Certainly Old Beardie's political activity must have been an embarrassment to the family. It had cost him the forfeiture of some ancestral lands. It had led him (he was a man of scholarly repute) to a club in Edinburgh where the members talked treason exclusively in the Latin tongue. It had once led him into the folly of active rebellion, from which he had escaped unhanged through the intervention of the Duke of Monmouth, which his wife, the Duchess of Buccleuch, had influenced in favour of this misguided member of her own clan.
Anyway, Robert got the farm.
As it must be stocked if it were to be of any profit, he next made a bargain with an old shepherd named Hogg, doubtless an ancestor of James, the Ettrick celebrity of that name, though the exact pedigree might not be easy to trace.
Hogg was to lend Robert the thirty pounds which he had accumulated in a life of penurious saving, and Robert was to appoint Hogg head-shepherd of a yet sheepless farm. Together, they were to buy sheep.
On this errand they journeyed to a Northumbrian fair, Robert carrying the money-bag. They separated on arrival and Hogg made a tour of the sheep-pens. When he had matured his opinions upon the prices and qualities that the market offered, he rejoined his master, who was now on horseback. There was no need to worry further about the price of sheep. The horse was bought, and the thirty pounds were gone.
Tradition says that there was some difficulty in explaining matters to the satisfaction of the ancient shepherd. As to that we may think what we will, and that Robert had to face a second interview of a lively kind is a very probable thing, but if we go on to suppose that this is no more than a tale of youth indiscretion we are miles out.
Robert could ride. In fact, he liked riding as much as he disliked having to swim. He rode that horse after the hounds when he got home. He was a judge of a good horse, and he knew how to take a fence. In a few days' time the horse was sold for a doubled price. After that, he bought sheep.
Robert settled down on the moorland farm, married Barbara Haliburton, and reared a numerous family. It was land from which a Welshman might have wrung a meagre living, and on which an English farmer would have promptly starved. But Robert had some uncommon qualities, beside the thriftiness of those who are reared on a shallow soil. Where he was, his success would be. He became a dealer in cattle, his operations extending from the Scottish Highlands to the midland counties of England. Shrewd, sagacious, quick of thought and speech, of a tireless activity, and with a name for scrupulous honesty, his reputation grew, and his business with it. We may think of him as sheep-farmer and cattle-drover, for such he was; but we must regard him also as a Harden Scott, whose name entitled him to meet the gentlefolk of the countryside on an equal footing, and whose thriving finances enabled him not only to establish his eldest son as an Edinburgh lawyer (as we have seen) but to provide on a similar scale for other members of the rather large family that he and Barbara raised beneath the shadow of Smailholm Tower, including a boy named Robert who was sent to sea!
He found time also for the games and field-sports in which he delighted, and in which he had a cultivated proficiency, not only in their exercise, but in their rules and traditions, as he had in other questions of country rites or usage, so that he became widely reputed as an arbiter of dispute. At the period to which we are coming, we must think of him as a white-haired man, of medium height, and a spare activity, the sporting proclivities of earlier years still symbolised in the jockey cap which is his usual head-gear. Barbara is alive also. She will outlive him, and with an activity and capacity which will carry on the farm when he is dead; but it is the gentleness of her disposition which is most impressive to those who meet her. When we remember the 'sweetness' which was remarked in more than one of her children, and particularly in the Walter with whom we have been concerned, which was hardly discernable as a characteristic of the earlier Scotts, we may confirm our thought that the Haliburtons must not be overlooked when we consider his ancestry, and that of his greater son.
Chapter III.
We have seen that there is a child at last in the corner house at the College Wynd, who is not destined to an infant's grave. He is to be named Robert, and, in defiance of the record of a previous holder of that name, he is also to go to sea.
Another son, John, followed after a short interval, and then - three years later - a third boy, who was named Walter after his father and Auld Beardie, and it would be hard to say how many other ancestors. It was not the first attempt to continue the name which Walter's parents had made. It is significant of a stubborn fighting quality which is persistent in the Scott family, generation after generation, that the living children repeated the names of those who had died in infancy before them.
The second Walter throve (in spite of an unfortunate experiment with a tuberculous foster-mother), and shortly after his birth the Scotts removed to a larger and lighter residence in George's Square. The shadow of those four children's deaths was a receding thing in a nursery which was made noisy by three vigorous boys, to which a baby girl had just been added when it threatened again in a new way.
Walter, now eighteen months old, had been very lively one night, as was remembered afterwards, and resisted capture when bed-time came, but the next morning he was in a state of fever. The wisdom of the nursery authorities attributed this to a coming tooth, but upon the fourth day it became an insufficient explanation of the fact that he could not move his right leg.
Anxious family consultations followed. The medical faculty of Edinburgh congregated around the child's cot, - Alexander Wood, the grandfather, Dr. Rutherford, and other names of repute at that time. Many treatments, blistering among them, were suggested, and tried in vain. The fever went. The child was otherwise well. But he crawled on the floor with the dragging weight of a useless limb.
A chicken, being vigorous at birth, may run about very-cheerfully for the first fortnight, even if it be badly fed and worse housed. It is when the down moults, and the growth of feathers makes the first call on its strength, that the effects of previous damp, or lack of exercise or sunlight or vitalising food are shown in weakness and death; while another, that was no stronger at birth, but which has had its necessities better supplied, will grow feathers as easily as it will swallow a worm. A child should grow its teeth in the same way, and it is a poor standard of rearing which anticipates trouble. But if there be any lack of initial vitality, or if there have been any serious deprivation of air or light or essential food, it is then that Nature will present a bill which the child must pay. Dr. Rutherford, if he failed with those four children before, has the credit of having spoken the right word now. "Try Sandy-Knowe." The proposal was quickly adopted by parents who remembered those four tiny graves of children who had been strong at birth, and then so soon, so inexplicably failed.
Walter was consigned to his grandparents' care. Mrs. Scott sent him to Sandy-Knowe in the charge of a maid in whom she must have felt that she had cause for sufficient confidence, but it was badly placed. The girl was mentally unstable. She was in a lunatic asylum soon afterwards.
She may have had good reasons of her own for desiring to return to Edinburgh. It may have been no more than a general dislike of a quiet country life, which often affects the town-dwellers whose minds are badly developed in our own day. For their own peace they require a surrounding clamour. They are dependent, almost for existence, upon that which happens outside themselves. Anyway, she conceived a longing for the city streets, and hatred of the child who was the unconscious cause of her detention from them. Concealing a pair of scissors, she went out with the baby in her arms. She climbed the crags with a purpose of cutting his throat, and burying him in the moss. Even if suspicion should fall upon her, there could be no proof. The child would have disappeared. After a few days, she would be allowed to go home. Her need to do that appeared more to her than the life of a deformed baby.
Had she carried out her purpose, there would have been a short trouble in George's Square; a crime, whether discovered or not, too unimportant for any permanent memory; and Robert Burns would have continued to be the greatest of Scottish poets. The English-speaking race would have lost one of its major intellectual impulses during the succeeding century, Tom Purdie would have gone to jail for poaching, Miss Charpentier would have found a different husband, and J. G. Lockhart a different wife. But the future development of English poetry (though Macauley would not have written the Lays of Ancient Rome) or of the English novel, would not have been very different, for reasons which we must not turn aside to consider here.
But, fortunately for many besides the child who was most concerned, the young woman altered her mind. She went back, and the peak of full insanity must have been very near, for she mentioned the unusual use to which she had thought of applying her scissors to Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, with the result that she was sent back to Edinburgh by the next coach, as her heart desired. Shortly afterwards, the wretched creature disappeared within the sinister silence of asylum walls.
It is a curious duplication of the exceptional that Walter Scott's life was again threatened many years later by a man who was crossing the threshold of lunacy. On that occasion (as we shall see in its place) he owed his safety to his own courage and self-control: on this one, his own part in the incident though it may not have been without importance, must have been of an unconscious kind.
So the child of pure Border blood is back in the farmhouse where his father was born. He is in his grandfather's charge. Alison Wilson, the old housekeeper, takes him into her care. The baby happy-tempered, very loving in baby ways, alert of mind, healthy but for the dragging limb, becomes the common pet of the farm. There is no nurse to restrain his activities, nor (by Heaven's mercy) a baby-carriage to confine him further. Tibby Hunter and the other farm-girls compete for the privilege of carrying 'the darling' on their backs when they go ewe-milking among the crags. Better than that, when Sandy Ormiston goes out to the flocks, he is on the old man's shoulder. He is laid down to roll and crawl in the heather as he will, or as he can with that dragging limb. He raises baby hands to pull the fleeces of the friendly sheep. He lies out in sun and rain and wind as the lambs lie.
Sandy has a whistle that he can blow at need from the crag's height on a note which will be heard in the kitchen at Sandy-Knowe, and one of the maids will come running to carry him in; but for the most part he is left in the heather's care, and once at least is forgotten, and must be sought through the torrent of moorland storm. . . It was his Aunt Janet who found him at last, looking up at the lightning with laughing eyes.
So, significantly enough, after half a generation of city life (or more on the mother's side) the child of Border blood, of Scotts and Rutherfords, Haliburtons and Swintons, is back on his native crags, the child who is to interpret, to the world's end, that Border country in itself, in its history, and its people, as it never otherwise would have been known; transfigured somewhat, if you will, by a valour and nobility which was of himself, and which to him must be in every tale for it to be worth the telling, but always with the breadth of the only roof which closed the vision of his waking hours, the wide sanity of the moorland sky.
Chapter IV.
For the next three or four years the younger Walter saw little of his parents' house in George's Square, where there was an ever-growing family, from which the curse of infant weakness seemed to have permanently lifted, but whether through the change of residence or the superior vitality which is frequently observable in the younger children of a large family might be hard to decide. Tom and Daniel are added to Robert and John and Anne. It seems to have been a happy, noisy family, in spite of the strict routine of its Calvinistic Sabbath. Its mother ruled it with a sympathetic gentleness. She had humour as well as courage and wisdom. Its father was absorbed in his growing practice. He was often absent on visits to his country clients. His reputation for chivalrous integrity, separating him somewhat from the practise of his brother lawyers, increased his clients, and in spite of some consequences of that quality, his income and status grew.
We shall see more of these children later, and of the mother of so many, dead or living, of whom our Walter (who, of course, ought not to have been born at all) was to write nearly forty years later that she "is, I am glad to say, perfectly well."
May there not be something to be said after all for the old gallant ignorant days? The days before we were so very sure that consumptives ought not be allowed to marry, or women to stake the risks of pregnancy, or a straightened income, against the gain of a child's life, and - in short, that we should always accept defeat without battle, unless we are quite sure of victory, and that we shall take no wound?
However that be, Walter lives, by whatever precedent folly, for which we may unite to be thankful. The year was young when they brought him to Sandy-Knowe, and as the summer came, and he lay through the long hours under the moorland sky, the curiosities of childhood, and of an exceptionally alert and adventurous mind, joined the vitalising influences of sun and wind, in the unhurried impulses by which he crawled, and then stood uncertainly on the shrunken limb, and then began to run upon it with an increasing freedom.
When the young woman of the scissors had brought him to Sandy-Knowe, it had been hard to rouse him to any activity. One of his first recollections was of his grandfather, with the jockey-cap on his short grey hair, still alert and active, though very near to his life's end, wrapping him in the skin of a just killed sheep, which was supposed to impart some mysterious vitality. And there was another old man there whose portrait was to be fixed indelibly on the child's abnormally retentive mind. Sir George MacDougall of Mackerstone his grandfather's cousin, once Colonel of the Greys, in "a small cocked hat, deeply laced, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, and light coloured coat, with milk-white locks tied in a military fashion." So he knelt, not guessing that he was winning for himself a curious immortality as he dragged his watch along the floor, and the boy struggled to follow the bright attraction, beneath the weight of the heavy skin.
The boy who would have grown up a crippled invalid in the city streets, gradually found it possible to engage in many robust activities. He would be able to ride well: to take long walks, though his progress might not be rapid. Determination can overcome much. Later, at Edinburgh High School, the difficulty of fighting on equal terms would be overcome in the same spirit, when he would chastise an enemy with the legs of both of them tied beneath the bench on which they fought. It is an arrangement which might well be considered by the promoters of boxing contests in our own day, with a view to prolonging their exhibitions of professional heavyweights, whose passion for the horizontal so often brings them to abrupt conclusion.
Walter who, by the attraction of his own loving and generous nature, was throughout his life to have very many and loyal friends, owed much to Janet Scott during the years that followed.
He had been about two years at Sandy-Knowe when someone suggested to his parents that the waters of Bath would be of benefit to the shrunken limb. The idea proved to be of no value, and the change was probably detrimental if weighed in a purely physical scale, but it seemed to the family to be a chance worth trying, though it was a more portentous and relatively expensive enterprise than it would be today. Coaches were slow. Roads were bad, and sometimes dangerous. Janet volunteered She was not young, as a woman's youth was reckoned at that period. She was over thirty. But it was a time when even mature women did not readily adventure such expeditions, with no company but that of a young child.
Walter, watching with a child's comprehending silence, and storing everything in a memory the range and accuracy of which have been rarely equalled, thought that she was reluctant to face the ordeal. But, if it were so, her affection for him was strong enough to dominate her weaker fears, or her private plans. Indeed, it is hard to see who else could have gone, unless it had been a younger aunt in Edinburgh, Christian Rutherford, for which, had she been willing, there might have been a score of difficulties which can only be guessed today. Rather than that he should miss an opportunity of being healed, or pass into the charge of strangers, Janet said she would take him.
It is an illuminating comment on the state of the Northern roads that it was considered safest to go to London by sea, and then complete the journey by the famous age-old thoroughfare of the Bath road.
So Janet, with her three-year-old charge, faced the primitive conditions of a voyage in the small sailing-vessels that traded between Leith and London at that period, and made an eventless passage in the Duchess of Buccleuch - a name which suggests that some members of the Scott family may have been among its owners - leaving us no record either of hindering storm or the sight of a pirate's sails, and landed safely in London, where they delayed their journey sufficiently to visit its most famous buildings, and other places of interest. Walter records that when he inspected the Abbey and the Tower of London twenty-five years later, he was surprised to find how accurately he had remembered them through the intervening years, and that this experience increased his confidence in other infant memories which could not be checked in the same way.
They remained at Bath for about a year, Walter going through the routines of the pump-room without any apparent benefit, and attending for three months at a dame's school which was near their lodging, where he learned to read.
He owed his most vivid memory of this period to Janet's sailor brother, Captain Robert Scott, (for though the first had jibbed, the second Robert, like the third, had been sent to sea, as though in propitiation of Auld Beardie's still-indignant ghost!) He visited Bath while they were there, and took them to a performance of As You Like It. It was Walter's first experience of the theatre; an intoxication of poetic pageantry which he could never forget.
To Captain Robert he owed a debt of another kind. He was already voracious in demand of tale and legend, and with an imagination which preferred such as were of a sombre horror or tragic magnificance. To his temperament, coming from the moorland scenes which were all that his memory knew, it is not very surprising that the sight of carved statuary, particularly such as portrayed the human form in grotesque or distorted shapes, impressed his childhood's imagination as a sinister and dreadful thing. Even the angels of Jacob's ladder, sculptured at the Abbey church, were a spectacle from which he drew back in horror.
Learning of this imaginative fear, his uncle patiently introduced him to a statue of Neptune, till he could approach it without dread, and by this familiarity enabled him to overcome what might have remained as a permanent obsession. We see here, as we shall see many times again, that he was very fortunate in his friends, and not least in those who were of a kindred blood.
Beyond these, his after-memories of Bath were no more than disconnected visions - of a toy-shop near the Orange Grove, and of looking across the Avon to cattle lowing upon the opposite hill.
He returned from Bath to a brief stay in Edinburgh in his parents' home, and then back with Janet to Sandy-Knowe, where he lived almost continuously for the next three or four years.
Chapter V.
In considering these early years of the town-born child we may observe a curious duplication of experience, such as can rarely be paralleled.
Scott's ancestry on all sides are of farming, cattle-raising, border stock: they are of the land, not the city. But his immediate parents have changed their environment, though they have not diluted their blood. Their experiences are those of the city schools, and the city streets. Walter begins on the land, as his race began. He looks up to a country sky, his infant hands pull the fleeces of living sheep, his infant ears hear the country legends) the country songs. But this is not the environment in which he completes his development. He will go also to the life of city schools and streets, and be informed by the same duality of experience which had been overlaid to form him before he was born.
This duplication of duality is of a vital significance. The breadth and sanity of the country-side is to become articulate, and not merely in self-interpretation. Its spirit is to inform and to interpret the whole panorama of human existence.
But widely though Walter Scott's interests were to reach, and universal as his sympathies were to be, it is worth observation, and has a lesson for some theorists of today, that their roots struck deeply into the tradition of the past, and their trunk was nourished with the artistic consciousness of his own race, and the local literature of its creation. He did not abandon his roots, as a means of enabling him to produce a new flower. . . .
A cold-blooded criticism may admit that Robert Burns is a grossly over-rated poet. Yet a sympathetic understanding will comprehend why he is so dear to the Lowland Scotsman. His poems were not written by one man; they are the songs of a nation: their distinctive lyric note, passionate and plaintive, was the creation of unrecorded names. In his aspirations and nobilities, he interpreted the spirit of the people of whom he came, as, in his vices, he exposed them upon their weaker side.
There is a degree in which, though on a higher plane, the earlier work of Walter Scott was of the same kind, and there is a sense in which it also is not an individual achievement, but the work of many.
His grandmother, Barbara, has her share, as have the authors of a score of forgotten ballads which she repeated to the eager child. So has Janet. So, then and later, have a dozen others, his mother prominently among them, who fed his imagination and stored his memory from the resources of their own minds. For much of that which he was to give to the common knowledge of men was not singular to his own conception. It was to he an interpretation, rather than a creation of genius. . . .
Janet's father, Robert Scott, was dead when she brought Walter back from Bath. Her mother carried on the farm, not without help from more than one of her children. Her eldest, Walter's father, was able to relieve her of any care for the legal aspect of her late husband's affairs. Her second son, Thomas, who had the management of the Crailing property for Mr. Scott of Danesfield - a relative, of course, though not of the closest - helped her with the farm in matters which were beyond the capacity of her advanced years and failing health. He came over once a week, and might be the only one who would visit them for such an interval. Walter would listen eagerly for the news he brought. The English settlers in America were fighting for independence of the Home Governments and Walter longed for news of the defeat of Washington, which he was not destined to hear.
It was only later in life that he observed the inconsistency of this desire with a hatred of the Hanoverian ruler, probably fiercer and less discriminating than Washington's own, which had developed in his infant mind, largely from listening to the tales of cruelty which followed the defeat of Culloden. One or two distant relatives of the family had been among those who were executed at Edinburgh or Carlisle, and it was all so recent that Mr. Curle at Yetbyre, who had married Janet's sister, and was an occasional visitor at the farm, had been present, and seen them die.
Walter lived for about four years in the quiet peace of the moorland farm, with his grandmother and Janet, having no regular tuition, and seeing no-one outside the household, except for the visits of relations, and that the parish clergyman, Dr. Duncan, a 'tall thin emaciated man' of over seventy, wearing clasped gambadoes on his legs, would call occasionally, and impatiently damn (but not using that word, of course,) the noisy ballad-shouting child who interrupted his sedater conversation.
Sixteen years later, Walter, then a young Edinburgh lawyer, called on Dr. Duncan, a fortnight before the old man's death, and recorded his wonder at the mental vigour and fortitude of this writer of a forgotten History of the Revolution, who had once been impatient of a child's noise. . . .
But though he had no set tuition during these years, his mind found material on which to feed, perhaps with the greater vigour because it was at its own freedom to take or leave.
There were a few books in the farmhouse of a congenial kind. Ramsey's Tea-table Miscellany was to be favourably remembered in later years. Josephus was so much loved, and Janet was so patient to repeat the reading of "favourite chapters" that the boy gave early evidence of prodigious memory by repeating long passages from memory before his own reading was sufficiently advanced to render him independent of his aunt's assistance.
His grandmother, sitting quietly by the fireside in the evening of a long life, with thoughts that went back beyond her dead husband and scattered family, may have found as much pleasure in telling, as he in hearing, the tales which her own childhood had known.
Tales which were fading into a doubtful tradition, and which were to be restored by the immortality of his own genius, had been near and vivid to her. She may have talked more of others than of the Scotts of Harden and Buccleuch, for we must remember that she was a Haliburton herself, from the next county. Her favourite tales were of the Deil of Littledean, an outlaw of much repute and many exploits, who had married her mother's sister, and might almost be regarded as one of the family.
But she told also of Watt of Harden, and of her husband's father, Old Beardie Walter's great-grandfather - and of much else which was to be the foundation of future knowledge.
And so the time passed, till the boy was in his eighth year, and he would run about, vigorously though awkwardly, on the shrunken limb, taking any comfort that he could from the fact that two of the ancestors of whom he had heard had (curiously enough) been lame too, and had overcome that obstacle to self-assertion, even in the days when the argument of physical fitness had been a first necessity for those who would come out on top in the rough struggle of Border life. Going far backward along the ancestral tree there was John Scott the Lamiter, (circ-1300) who, while avoiding the discipline of the monasteries, appears to have taken up a life of scholarship with sufficient success to marry and leave children and a good repute at his death, though how he contrived this is beyond saying. And six generations later there was a Scott of Harden, commonly known as William Boltfoot, who boldly recognised that a man on horseback maybe none the worse for a lame leg, and became of a widely dreaded reputation as a fearless rider, and one whose spear a prudent man would prefer to shun.
Walter, by his own account, must have been nearly eight (he was born in August) in the summer when Janet went with him to Prestonpans. His leg (he was told) was to benefit from sea-bathing, and the decision to send him there may have been taken with this hope, but there are indications of other adjustments. Changes at Sandy-Knowe may have rendered it necessary for him to leave that hospitable roof, to which he did not return. Prestonpans may have been chosen - if Janet chose it - because it was there that she could meet George Constable, as, in fact, she did.
George Constable was a friend of Walter's father. They had studied law together, but George had not practised, retiring to his own property, which was near Dundee. He was under fifty at this time. He seemed old to the child.
Yet it was clear that he was not only his father's friend. He was the friend of his father's sister also. They were constantly together, and Janet was not one to endure an uncongenial companionship. Yet it was a friendship which does not seem to have ended in discord, nor to have gained fruition in a closer intimacy. They both died unmarried. It is their matter, not ours.
Walter saw much of George Constable at a later date when, residing in Edinburgh, he used to be a regular guest at the Sunday dinner-table in George's Square. He observed his licensed tendency to lead the conversation from his father's Calvinistic austerities to subjects of history or antiquity, in which he more greatly delighted. He had humour, and was rich in anecdote, often drawn from his own experience. He remembered the '45. He professed a hatred of women, and the memories of the young man, while he sat respectfully silent, went back to those childhood days at Prestonpans, when he had observed Mr. Constable and his aunt together, - and he was not sure.
Afterwards, he reproduced some of Constable's peculiarities in the character of Jonathan Oldbuck, but without intending to give a recognisable portrait, and was surprised when George (Chalmers, a London solicitor who had known both Constable and his father, affirmed that he must be the author of the Antiquary as he recognised the original of that character.
But we are looking ahead. At Prestonpans, George Constable earned a grateful memory by finding intervals in his attentions to Janet in which he talked to the precocious child of Shakespeare's characters, being apparently unable to contribute to the supply of ballads and local traditions which were his first demand upon every friendly acquaintance.
At Prestonpans, he also made the acquaintance of a retired veteran 'Captain' Dalgety, from whose memories he took the toll which he was already practised to extract from all whose reading or experience could add to the stores of his own mind.
By his own account, it was the summer of that campaign which ended in the disaster of Saratoga. Cornwallis, coming down from Canada, was to march through the wilderness of the backwoods, and take the rebel army in the rear. What would become of Washington then, already defeated and driven out of Long Island?
It was one of those ideas that are strategically sound, but inadequately operated. The old man and the child leaned over the map together. The veterans military pride clashed with the imagination of his young companion as they gazed upon it. The old soldier foretold the military triumph of England. The child's eyes gazed upon the map, with its suggestions of wooded wilderness and rivers and entangling lakes, and the vital imagination and invincible sanity of judgement which would always enable him to see the strength and quality of the opposition darkened his mind with foreboding. The two disputed as to whether the news would be of disaster or triumph, and when the tale of Saratoga came, there was a cooling of this intimacy, for the veteran sulked.
That is Scott's own account; but there is a difficulty here, which we must explain as we can. He was born on August 15th, 1771. The surrender of Saratoga took place on October 15th, 1777. At this date he was not 'in his eighth year'. His age was six years and eight weeks. If we allow for the interval which must have elapsed - anything from six weeks to ten before the news could have reached Prestonpans, - he will have been a few weeks older, and the season proportionably less propitious for sea bathing on the North Sea coast.
There is not only the difficulty of the increased precocity of the child's understanding, which is implied by the alteration of date, there is the fact that, if we accept his statement as it stands, it alters the length of his stay at Sandy-Knowe, and the date at which he returned permanently to his parents' home, which seems an improbable mistake for him to have made, for several reasons. But there must be some error in his statement. It is chronologically impossible.
Was the whole episode imaginary? It seems extremely unlikely. He had remarked, in other connections, on how accurate he found his memory of the events of his early years, when he was able to check it.
Is it not more probable that there was more than one visit to Prestonpans? More than one occasion for Janet and George Constable to stroll on the sea-shore, while Walter played with shells on the turf, and sailed boats on the tidal pools, as he remembered doing so clearly when he revisited the scenes in his closing years? . . .
There is another memory of these early years which came back to him, and was recorded at the other end of his life, when he attended the funeral of his uncle Raeburn. That was a recollection of when he was four or five, and was staying at his uncle's home, Lessudden House. Under whatever circumstances, he must have been there for a considerable time, for he remembers half-taming a starling, which his uncle ruthlessly killed. He never forgot this, and though his uncle did, the two never liked each other afterwards. Scott did much for his family, and Raeburn showed no gratitude, taking it as being done for his wife and children rather than for him, and Scott, in his scrupulous justice, admitted the fairness of this in his own mind.
Chapter VI.
It was in the autumn following his eighth birthday, if we follow his own recollection and a balance of probabilities, that Walter returned to his parents' home in George's Square, which was to be his permanent residence until his marriage about eighteen years later.
Up to then he had been, in his own phrase, "a single indulged brat" and his first experience as an unimportant member of a large family left a recollection of misery which time did not obliterate, though he could analyse it without bitterness, and met it at the time with a measure of good sense and good temper which showed that character is something more than the product of its own environment.
Robert, the naval officer to be, and John, who was to take up a military life, were from three to five years older than himself; Anne was about a year his junior: Tom, destined to succeed to their father's practice, and Daniel, destined to nothing better than a life of failure, completed the family.
It was about this time than Anne suffered from the almost fatal accident which physically wrecked her life. She is one of those tragedies of human existence of whom no biographies are written, and whose lives are only regarded when they obtrude upon the stage of some more dominating personality. Yet had the scales of fate tilted a different way, as Walter might have remained at home to die of infantile paralysis, or might have been buried in moorland moss with the wound of a mad woman's scissors in his throat, so she might have used her gift of imagination to a purpose as great as he. We can do no more than guess, and perhaps, if we could see with clearer eyes, the difference would be no more than a little thing.
She was a child who walked blindly in a world of dreams. It was a quieter world than we know today, when such a one would end promptly beneath a lorry's wheels, but its dangers were too many for her. Her hand was badly crushed in a wind-swung door: her half-drowned body was dragged out of an old quarry-hole in the open ground, known as Brown's Park, which was then on the south side of George's Square: before she was six, her clothing had caught fire when she was in a room alone. She survived this last catastrophe, after a long illness, with a broken constitution and a disfigured face. She died before she was thirty. She was devoted to Walter, the lame brother who was so near in age to herself, and who dreamed to such different ends. She lived long enough to give swift friendship and loyal advocacy to Charlotte Charpentier, when Walter brought her, a gay, courageous, foreign, frightened girl, to be his wife in the cold Edinburgh atmosphere.
Looking at it as a whole, there seems to be a Divine cruelty in such a life as Anne's, which opens with a brightness of morning dreams, and is so quickly clouded. A barren, physically frustrated life, with an inward bitterness which was sometimes bitter to others. Yet the thought may be no more than the folly of ignorance. Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten of God?
Robert bullied the new-comer, to whom the experience did no harm. Indeed, the balance may have been in the other scale. But to Robert, his disposition being as it was, it was misfortune that he was the eldest of the five brothers.
He was a boy of many fine qualities rather floridly worn, but of an overbearing disposition. Afterwards, as a young naval officer, he did well. He was in 'almost all' Rodney's battles, and came safely through. Walter says that he was a lover of literature, music, and the mechanical arts, could sing a good song, tell a good tale, and even wrote a good elegy in the then-conventional manner on the April night of 1782, when he was a midshipman of sixteen, and the English fleet was cleared for the action of the following day.
And for these things? in spite of his "capricious tyranny", Walter 'loved him much'. But he was barely eighteen when the peace of 1782 apparently ended the prospects of rapid naval advancement, and so he resigned his commission, and joined the East India Company's service. That, at least, was the argument, but it was complicated by the fact that he considered that he had been badly treated by a superior officer. We know nothing of the rights and wrongs of this quarrel. The naval discipline of those days could not have been easy to endure, and the East may have called to Robert's imagination, as it has done to thousands of others before and since. But it was a fatal decision for him. He made two voyages, and contracted some tropical disease of which he died.
Walter held the belief that had Robert continued in the navy he would have made a name in the great wars that were soon to follow. Like Anne's, it is the record of a frustrated - perhaps we should say self-frustrated - life. The boy's adventurous, too-impatient spirit was soon quietened in its Indian grave. But before we call such a life vain, we might do well to define the standards of vanity by which we judge.
And as we trace the history, one by one, of the children of any numerous household, and watch the impact of character and circumstance, and the accidents of mortality, we may pause to consider the modern theory of the advantages of the limited family, the sheltered existence, the 'best' schools, the concentration of every approved stimulus upon a single life, and wonder, by several standards, whether its premises are quite sound.
Robert, who died young, has yet left a clear impression of personality, John, who lived longer, is a less emphatic figure in the family picture. He went into the army, and at the age of forty he held the rank of Brevet-Major in the 73rd regiment. So far, merit and seniority neither of much avail without influence at that period - appear to have been responsible for such promotions as he had gained; then the intervention of Mr. Canning secured his commission as major of the regiment's second battalion. But his health broke down almost at the same time. He retired from the army, lived an invalid's life with their mother for a few years, and died before he was forty-eight.
Of Walter's younger brothers there may be more to be seen, bad or good, at a later time.
Whatever hardship there might be for an indulged and sensitive child in adjusting his egotism to the routines and dominations of family life was mitigated by his mother, who gave him the understanding sympathy without which love itself may be vain. She found space for his bed in her own dressing-room: she found time to guide his reading, and to listen while he read aloud, - from Pope's Iliad in particular - and to discuss what was read. The child noticed the exertion of a gentle pressure: to divert his mind from the grotesque and terrible, in which at that time it most delighted, to the consideration of nobler and serener things. That he was not influenced by his mother's intellectual and moral standards would be too emphatic an assertion. His love and admiration for her continued to her life's then distant end, and with such relations prevailing, some influence there must have been. But his own personality, both in character and intellect, was too strong to be widely diverted either by the pressure of circumstance or the dominations of other minds. He might suffer 'internal agony' from the first impacts of unkindness, when subjected to his brother's capricious and bullying moods, but it did not blind him to that brother's more admirable qualities, nor alienate his natural affection from him; he was conscious of his mother's moral or literary preferences, but she could not lessen his own delight in tales of wonder or terror, about which he wrote many years after "I have remained a child, even unto this day".
But the sanctuary of his mother's dressing-room, in which he slept, through her protective partiality or the exigences of a rather crowded household, gave him the full advantages of all that her own mind could offer to his eager intellectual appetite, with access to the Shakespearean plays which she kept there for her own reading.
His own witness is that he owed more to his mother than to any other, more even than to his grandmother or Janet Scott, for the power to realise vividly and to accurately reproduce the incidents and characters of the legendary history of Scotland which were to provide the substance for so many future romances both in verse and prose.
It is with this return to his parents' home that the formal ritual of education began. It is customary to represent it as having been delayed by the ill-health of his early years, and to have been distinguished by some subsequent deficiencies both of conduct and opportunity. An examination of the facts gives little support to these impressions, for which he is himself partly responsible, by his deprecatory allusions to lack of scholarship, and which is partly due to Lockhart's more conventional prejudices.
His own statement is that he returned to Edinburgh from Prestonpans sometime after his seventh birthday (August 1778) and that he accompanied his brothers to the Edinburgh High School before the end of that year, where he was put into the second class, and found himself rather behind his class-mates, both in age and studies. Previously, he and his brothers had received home lessons in Latin from a private tutor. The possible interval for this private tuition appears short, and the suggestion occurs again that he might have had a period of home life during the earlier winter, but, in any event, his systematic education commenced before he was at an advanced age. But we must not overlook two facts if we are to assess his own and Lockhart's references justly. Education at that period meant primarily a knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages and literatures. If you had received that teaching you were educated: if you hadn't you weren't. Also, it was customary to commence this education at a very early age. The age (we might almost say the childhood) of his brother Robert when he became a midshipman in Rodney's navy is illuminating. Rodney himself had entered the navy when he was twelve. It is true that midshipmen of that age were expected to continue their studies - more or less - when they were not commanding a boat's crew, or carrying powder up from the magazine. More or less - and in times of active service less rather than more. It is evident that if you wished to make sure of acquiring the classical languages it was the safest way to commence young.
The conventional definition of education might have been worse, but lacked breadth. Walter Scott gained a good knowledge of Latin, and several other languages, but he never learned Greek. That was regrettable, as all ignorance is. But to obtain a correct perspective we must recognise that if he had learnt more Greek he must have learnt less of something else. The human mind cannot be occupied with two things at once. He was of an immense intellectual industry. His mind worked best on subjects which interested it most, as is the common experience. He had an extraordinary memory. He reached a prodigious scholarship. It was his gain and ours that it was not entirely on conventional lines. Lockhart appears to recognise this possibility in one luminous sentence. "As may be said, I believe, with perfect truth of every really great man, Scott was self-educated in every branch of knowledge which he ever turned to account in the works of his genius." The crowding superlatives of this sentence are an example of Lockhart's style at its worst, and its over-statement approaches nonsense, but it shows that he saw the truth for a moment, though (as often) he lacked the self-confidence and independence of mind that would have enabled him to do justice to his own perceptions. Lockhart constantly overestimates the influence of environment, and overvalues the conventional standards of the moment. Conversely, for all his admirable compilation of details, he fails to appreciate, though he sometimes mentions, the independence and force which may often be obscured by the tolerant breadth of Scott's emotional and intellectual sympathies.
Anyway, if we accept Scott's own memory, at the age of seven-and-a-half he was in the second class of the Edinburgh High School, studying Latin with about eighty other children, most of whom were rather older, and knew more. The boys were not seated alphabetically, but were arranged according to their real or estimated ability, and he found himself near the foot of the class with some dull-witted seniors. He accepted this position and companionship very cheerfully. His mind was full of many things beside the study of Latin. It was occupied with romantic imaginations, and the intoxicating music of words. The fascination of the art which weds emotion and imagination to verbal melody caused him to love the reciting aloud of the poetry which he memorised so readily. But he had learned already that this might arouse derision in minds incapable of its appreciation, and he would prefer to recite in solitude, being sensitive to ridicule at this time, as children are.
That he did not advance more rapidly in the study of a dead language was owing to no lack of parental effort. His father supplemented the High School teaching of his sons by engaging a tutor, a Mr. James Mitchell, who assisted them in the preparation of their home tasks, and taught writing and arithmetic also. He had been the minister of a sea-port kirk, and had quarrelled with his congregation on the question of whether their fishing-boats should set sail on the Sabbath. They thought it brought them luck, and he thought that damnation would be more likely to follow. Rather than surrender his opinion, he resigned his living. Scott says drily that "the calibre of this young man's understanding may be judged of by this anecdote". But the stubborn honesty of his character may have seemed a more important recommendation to the elder Walter, who may also have agreed with him upon the theological aspects of the point on which he wrecked his worldly prospects. For though, in other ways, the household at George's Square seems to have been driven on a light rein, and with wisdom as well as love, the Sabbath observance was a strict rule, strictly enforced; "and in the end" Scott gave his deliberate tolerant judgement in after years, "it did none of us any good".
But even Mr. James Mitchell was able to contribute something more than a teaching of arithmetic, and the hearing of lessons in Latin and French. He was a student of the early history of the Church of Scotland, and Walter discovered that knowledge, and took the toll that he extracted from the mental stores of all with whom he came in contact during these early days.
And so life went on for the next three years, during which he developed physically in a manner which enabled him to engage in many active exercises, in spite of the difficulty of a lameness which was now recognised as permanent. And the spirit in which he strove to overcome this physical handicap united with that which caused him to be quicker to help a companion's task than to excel in his own, to win him a general popularity among his school companions. The experiences of his boyhood contrast with those of many poets of more morbid or egotistic moods during this period of life, and, characteristically, looking back, he attributed his popularity to the natural nobility of the nature of the youthful male. "Boys," he reflected, "are uncommonly just in their feelings, and at least equally generous." It is not a proposition to which Shelley would have given a ready assent. It may be doubted whether the idea would have occurred without qualification to Byron, Coleridge, or Wordsworth. Yet it may have at least as much truth as would be contained in a meaner judgement. He offered the courage and generosity of his own nature, and he found ready response.
He gained a reputation also among his companions in those early years for the skill with which he could narrate his ' inexhaustible ' tales, and there was emulation among them for the privilege of sitting nearest to him at the winter fireside on such occasions. . . .
At the age of ten, he was promoted to the class over which the head of the school, Dr. Adam, himself presided. Dr. Adam may have magnified his office, and his own importance. Watching the careers of the many boys who passed through his class, he may have been disposed to attribute their successes too much to his own exertions, and their failures to an excessive measure of original sin. But it was a fault of zeal, if fault it can be called, and the after-records of his scholars were a legitimate source of pride. He recognised the ability of a sometimes-indolent sometimes-inattentive boy, and succeeded in making him realise that knowledge was worth a disciplined effort to win. During the next two years, Walter gained a proficiency in the construing of the Latin classics which took him into the higher form of the two over which Dr. Adam presided. For the first time, he felt the confidence of scholastic ability, and a new pride of proficiency in studies which he had previously regarded as a boring interference with the independent activities of his own imaginations.
For the first time, also, he owed and recognised a clear debt to the deliberate influence of another mind. Not that he had previously gained nothing from others. But when he had plundered such stores as he considered worth the carrying away from the memories and imaginations of Janet Scott, and Barbara Haliburton, of his mother, Anne Rutherford, and of a score of others, he had done it of his own free will, as a corsair will empty hulls. But he allowed Dr. Adam to lay a hand on his mind's helm, and to deflect its course. The importance of this was not that he learnt more Latin, though there was gain in that, but that he was induced to discipline his mind, which he found difficult to his life's end. As is frequent with those of strong imagination, he could not easily concentrate on a set task. His mind was not idle, but of a prodigious activity. It had a restless waywardness which hated harness. Dr. Adam succeeded in convincing him that his mental powers should be subdued to be tools rather than tyrants, and he recognised the importance of this lesson in later years.
When he had been two years under Dr. Adam's tuition, Lord Buchan called to inspect the school.
We know Lord Buchan best as an old man, a fussing busybody, of a conceit which sometimes achieved unconscious comedy. Scott, with a rare contempt, alludes to him in his journal as 'a trumpery body'. But, like the rest of us, he had been young once. He was a young man when some whim of self-importance took him on this visit of inspection to the Edinburgh High School. Walter Scott, in disgrace for an aggravated negligence, was seated near the foot of the class, as the custom was under such circumstances. But Dr. Adam forgot that his pupil was exiled from the seats of honour in the desire to show the best ability of his school. He called him out to repeat the passage from the Aeneid in which Hector's ghost appears. The recitation was a success, and was warmly applauded. It was the first time that his passion for poetry had met a stranger's approbation, and it became an enduring memory. Many years after, it inclined him to patient endurance of the tiresome follies of Lord Buchan's declining years.
Chapter VII.
During the four or five years that Walter was at the Edinburgh High School, he had made frequent visits, for the length of the school vacations, to his Aunt Janet, who was now living in a house in Kelso, which was at that time his father's property, the farm at Sandy-Knowe having been given up when her mother died. Kelso is a village delightfully situated where Tweed and Teviot meet. "The most beautiful, if not the most romantic village in Scotland," Scott called it in later years. His health benefited by these visits, and they cultivated his passionate love for that locality which was to be one of the inspiring and controlling influences of his life, both for good and evil.
It was springtime, in the course of his thirteenth year, when his term at the High School ended, and in the natural order he would have gone on at once to the greater freedom of college tuition. But he was growing fast, and a suggestion that he should spend the summer at Kelso was readily adopted, doubtless to his delight, and not at all to the detriment of his education. For the Kelso schoolmaster, Mr. Lancelot Whale, was one of those men, so commonly met in the records of a period in which ability exceeded opportunity, who are too good for the positions they fill. An arrangement was made by which Walter read Latin with Mr. Whale and the other senior scholars, and helped in the school by teaching elementary subjects to the junior class. He has recorded that Mr. Whale gave him more than his fair share of attention, and he looked back on that summer as a time when he learnt much, and in many ways. It was during these months at Kelso that he became consciously aware of the beauty of his surroundings, and that the romantic pageantry of creation captured his imagination through a medium other than the printed page.
For he had become an insatiable and (to his own memory) an indiscriminate reader, and this notorious appetite had found its own means of gratification. A free lending library - a subscription library - his mother's volumes of Shakespeare, (wickedly devoured after he was supposed to be in bed, by the light and warmth of her bedroom fire, with an apprehensive ear for the ascending footsteps which would send him scuttling back to his dressing-room bed) - these, and the school-book classics, had been magically supplemented by the fact that Dr. Blacklock - a name deservedly honoured in the Edinburgh records of that time - had noticed the boy's omnivorous appetite, and given him the freedom of his private library. He gave him wise guidance also, introducing him, in particular, to the poetry of Edmund Spencer, which became probably the strongest single influence upon his own creations in later years.
Edmund Spencer is regrettably neglected today, and his place is only grudgingly recognised in the front rank of English poets. But to Walter Scott, even in boyhood, the Fairie Queen had nothing to offer to which he could not respond with the high quality of an equal appreciation. The rich and seemingly-inexhaustible varieties of verbal melody, the luxuriance of imagination, the continually changing wonders of light and colour, the high chivalrous conception of the purpose of life in which nobility is normality, and 'No service lothsome is to gentle kind', all these were of the substance of the reader's own intellect, and of his own character. It is no wonder that the poem which is to many a forbidding wilderness, and to others a magic forest in which they cannot tire to wander, became to him an intoxication, till a "really marvellous" number of its myriad stanzas became part of the enduring furniture of his own mind.
With the autumn opening of the College term, he returned to Edinburgh, and commenced to take the Greek and Latin University courses. Under the laxer college discipline, students were not compelled to application. They could work or not as they pleased. It was their own choice, and their own (or their parents') loss, if they neglected to do so. With this freedom, Scott is emphatic in self-condemnation. So far as the Greek class is concerned, he didn't please in the least. He had learnt no Greek up to that time, and he found himself among boys who had already mastered the rudiments of the language. His mind was full of other interests, and (he says) he asserted an obstinate opinion that Greek wasn't worth learning. His class-master, Professor Dalzell, an enthusiastic classical scholar, expostulated in vain. Being required to write an essay upon the comparative merits of the authors they had studied, Scott perversely infuriated the Professor by producing an ingenious comparison of Homer and Ariosto, to the detriment of the earlier poet. The "quality of out-of-the-way knowledge" which the essay displayed surprised Professor Dalzell, but was impotent to soothe his anger at this audacious heresy.
Protest came also from a fellow-pupil, an innkeeper's son, who came to George's Square to argue in favour of the language and literature to which he was himself devoted. He offered to give free help in the evenings to assist in its study, but it was a rejected kindness. Scott blamed himself afterwards very severely for this attitude, which was foolish enough, and, looking back, he had an uneasy self-contemptuous fear that the boy's social inferiority may have influenced the repulse. If so, it was as unlike himself to have acted from such a motive as it was characteristic that he should make public acknowledgement subsequently.
But the fact is that he was attracted rather by the living cargo which the world's literature carries than by the dry bones of scholarship. It was noticed by his first Latin master that he might be slower than some others on points of construction or syntax, but that he would be the first to extract the vital meaning of the passage with which they dealt.
There may have been another reason why his neglect of the Greek classes met with less opposition than would otherwise have been the case.
It was his father's purpose that he should enter his own profession, though it was not resolved whether he should follow the 'higher' branch, or succeed to the management of the business which his father had built up. He accepted this programme with complacence, if without enthusiasm. The legal profession had much use for Latin, but little for Greek. Had the elder Walter heard that his son was treating the Latin tongue with contempt, there might have been more said. As a fact, his father seems to have shown no dissatisfaction at this period either with his abilities or application. The abortive attempt upon the Greek tongue ended of itself in the second term, when another breakdown of health resulted in a second prolonged visit to Kelso, and to the desultory reading which may have been of far greater value than his own assessment allows. Subsequently, on returning to Edinburgh, he took courses in Mathematics, in History, in Moral Philosophy, and in Ethics, in which last he had the honour of being chosen to read an essay before Professor Robertson.
The subjects appear to have been of his father's selection, and he attributes the fact that they were not more numerous to the parental desire that he should have ample leisure for legal studies. He took the University courses in Civil and Municipal Law.
His father wisely considered that, even if he were destined for the Bar, he would gain much by a detailed knowledge of the routines of a solicitor's work, and early in his fifteenth year he commenced a five-years' apprenticeship in his father's office.
To the ideas of today, he had left College at an absurdly early age. He had acquired a wide range of knowledge, and had a keen appetite for acquiring more, which school teaching does not always give. His time had not been wasted, as the sequel showed.
His own judgement of these years of study was afterwards given in these words: "it is with the deepest regret that I recollect in my manhood the opportunities of learning which I neglected in my youth; that through every part of my literary career I have felt pinched and hampered by my own ignorance; and that I would at this moment give half the reputation I have had the good fortune to acquire, if by so doing I could rest the remaining part upon a sound foundation of learning and science."
It is a severe judgement, in which humility weights the scale. Conscious of what he might have gained, he may have undervalued that which he would have lost to acquire it.
"Few ever read so much," he says of those years, "and to so little purpose." It is an opinion with which few will be likely to agree.
Chapter VIII.
Although we may dissent from Scott's modest estimate of his own scholarship, it is evident that he expressed genuine feelings of regret and deficiency in the quotations given in the previous chapter.
Even a century ago, the world of knowledge was not considered beyond the travelling capacity of a single mind. Either you had taken the grand tour of its dominions, or you had not. It was a question of fact, about which there could be no ambiguity. If you had, you were educated, even though you had forgotten half you had seen: otherwise you were not.
The same idea is still dominant in the practice of giving a University degree for a minimum proficiency in a group of subjects, instead of a certificate of proficiency for each or any. The most profound knowledge of ancient languages will not avail a man who declines or is unable to attain a set standard of mathematical ability. Nor will the most profound knowledge of mathematics be honoured in another, if he persists in disregarding all languages but his own.
These composite standards of judgement may be condemned as stupid and inequitable, - as they are - but they are based upon the sound principle that we have not mastered any subject unless we understand it in its relations to others. We do not know a continent because we have separately explored its countries, unless we know their relations to one another, and where their boundaries meet. The effect of a furnished room is something more than the sum of the effect of its items of furniture; and if we are conversant with only half its contents, and regard them separately, no closeness of scrutiny will alter the fact that we are of an inferior knowledge to one who sees the whole, even though it be in a poor light.
We have warning examples of this result of specialisation today in men who have attained eminence in one branch of knowledge, and have then made public demonstration of some childish credulity by which they mislead the simple, who fail to see that their concentration upon physics or anthropology may have resulted in a peculiar ignorance of other subjects, and that a reputed proficiency in one branch of research does not demonstrate exceptional soundness of judgement, and may be consistent with an amazing absence of common-sense. So that wide publicity is given to authoritative nonsense such as that fishes do not learn from experience, that the ghost of Napoleon can be summoned by an illiterate medium to chatter "roses, roses all the way," or (from a scientifically-omniscient bishop) that there was a recent period during which women commonly produced twelve children, of which only three survived. Such people, whatever their reputation or degrees, may properly be described as uneducated, not because they are ignorant, as we all are, but because they are unaware of their limitations.
To be truly educated - it is the most we can hope, and should be the least at which we should rest content - is to be aware of the nature and extent of the realms of knowledge which we do not explore, and to be prepared to enter them so far as time allows and occasion calls. All knowledge is then at our disposition, and may be used to good purpose so far as we have trained ourselves to the logic and toleration which are necessary to that end. To burden memory with endless accumulations of detail is as foolish as to endeavour to carry all our material possessions continually on our backs.
This was as true a century ago as it is today, and by such standard Walter Scott was far better educated than most of those whose claims he would have readily conceded to be superior. But he had no inclination to magnify his own attainments or creations, as men of less genius are apt to do. He looked high and far, seeing all that he was not, and could never be. Seeing himself as he was, he thanked God for a small thing. By his own vision he may have been right, but if we agree with him we convict ourselves. . . .
Having entered his father's office, he took on the work which it required with a conscientious diligence, which brought its own rewards. He hated the confinement, but on his own testimony, which certainly did not err in leniency of self-judgement, he was no 'idle apprentice'. His statement on this point might be worth consideration by all who plead the "artistic temperament" as an excuse for inability to undertake their fair share of the prosaic work of the world, and those who condone the shallow egotism of such an attitude. "The drudgery of the office I disliked, and the confinement I altogether detested; but I loved my father, and I felt the rational pride and pleasure of rendering myself useful to him. I was ambitious, also; and among my companions in labour the only way to gratify ambition was to labour hard and well."
He had his ultimate reward in becoming a more than competent lawyer: his immediate incentive in a system of copy-money which was the apprentices' slender remuneration for the clerical work they undertook, and which enabled him, whose shillings had been infrequent and few, to indulge in an occasional visit to the theatre, or the acquisition of some otherwise inaccessible book. With such incentives, he remembered once fair-copying 120 folio pages without interval either for food or sleep. . .
We must not linger unduly over these years of legal apprenticeship, but there are a few recorded incidents which are of intrinsic interest, and illuminating quality.
It was about at this period that he met Robert Burns for the first time and the last, except for casual street-encounters when he was (quite naturally) not recognised by the older man. There is kindness and admiration in his memory of this event, and its cruelty is without intention. It was at Professor Fergusson's, amid a group of several of those who were of literary reputation in Edinburgh at the moment, Dugald Stewart among them. It was Burns' first visit to Edinburgh, and he was the centre of the gathering. He was shown a print of one of Bunbury's pictures, with some lines of Langhorne's ('Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain') beneath it. The sloppy sentimentality of the lines are rivalled by the bathos of the print. Dead soldier in snow - faithful dog howling beside him - widow also punctually present, with (need it be said?) a baby on her mourning breast. Burns 'seemed much affected by the print. He actually shed tears.' He wanted to know who wrote those pathetic lines about
The literary gentlemen looked at each other, but were unable to supply the information. Scott, modestly in the background as became his youth, whispered Langhorne's name to a bolder companion, who spoke it for him. Burns "rewarded me with a look and word which, though of mere civility, I then received, and still recollect, with very great pleasure". It is a curious fact that Langhorne's name was printed under the lines, but the eyes of all the company may have been blurred with tears.
Scott makes no criticism of Scotland's national bard. He probably believed to his life's end that he had stood in the presence of a greater man than himself. He says: "Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he" (Burns) "expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty."
It is a good witness. But what judgement it is on the man that such testimony should be considered worth putting on record! . . .
Wishing to read the old French romances in the original, this boy of fourteen, who is so dissatisfied at his neglect of his early opportunities, had already mastered their language, and now, with the lure of Ariosto and Tasso - he had only seen the latter in the 'flatness' of Hoole's translation, not, it seems, having encountered Fairfax's livelier version, or the real poetry of Carey's fragment - he determined to learn Italian. The cost of two evening classes a week became a first charge upon the shillings which his penmanship earned.
But in spite of the confinement of office hours, the learning of Italian, and his insatiable reading, his life at this time was far from sedentary. Lockhart hints that his fellow-apprentices were a rather boorish lot. He could not have known them, and there is some explicit contrary evidence. Scott's special friend, both at High School and subsequently, John Irving, was certainly not of that description. The two boys lived near to one another, and had found a congenial fellowship from a very early age, taking Song walks together, and narrating romances to one another, which they composed in turns. It was an occupation kept secret to themselves, lest it should provoke ridicule, but Walter had discovered that his friend's mother was a preserver of ancient ballads, both in her own head and their original printings, and Mrs. Irving was added to the list of those upon whom he made distraint to store the resources of his own mind.
As the years passed, and his strength grew, these walks increased in length, his eager vitality overcoming the reluctance of the shrunken leg, as it had done when he first crawled among the sheep in the heathered moorland of Sandy-Knowe.
It appears to have been at a later period of his fifteenth year - probably in the summer of 1786 that he was able to visit the Highlands for the first time. He went on the invitation of one of his father's Highland clients, - for the firm's practice had spread far beyond the original relationships in the Lowland counties, an accession of business which may have originated with grandfather Robert's cattle-dealing connections; and when we probe the origins of this invitation we come upon another of Walter's childhood memories.
Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle was a Jacobite patriarch who had survived participations in the '15 and '45, and would visit Edinburgh in connection with various litigations which had superseded more primitive and congenial methods of settling differences with his Highland neighbours. Walter's first memory of him was at the time when Edinburgh was expecting attack from that picturesque Yankee 'pirate', Paul Jones, and the ancient claymore-girded warrior was volunteering assistance in defence of his country's capital. That was in September 1779. Alexander can scarcely have been under eighty, and Walter was just eight. The incident must have occurred at his father's home or office, and Walter cannot have been at Sandy-Knowe or Prestonpans at that time.
Seven years later, Mr. Stewart still flourished, and his legal business still necessitated visits to his attorney at Edinburgh. Here he renewed acquaintance with the younger Walter, and joined the goodly company of those who had contributed to the wealth of legend and reminiscence which were being stored in the young law-student's mind. Such conversations led to an invitation to visit the Highland chieftain in his own home, and so the first materials were made available for the future Waverley.
It was probably in the spring after this visit, or in the following year - the exact date is again in doubt - that Walter's health broke down seriously. His own statement is that it had become 'uncertain and delicate' from rapid growth 'and other causes', and that a blood-vessel broke. The medical treatment which was considered suitable for his condition was of a drastic kind, with some surprising features, but it was justified by its results. He was bled and blistered ' till he had scarcely a pulse left'. He was starved both of warmth and food. It was northern spring weather, cold and raw, but it was part of the remedial treatment that his bloodless body should shiver beneath a single blanket. He had a meagre diet of vegetables, which did little to satisfy a hunger which had become ravenous. He was not even allowed to talk. He might play chess and he might read.
He lay thus for several weeks. An arrangement of mirrors enabled him to watch troops exercising on the promenade. His own exercise was of the imagination only. He read military history, and set out its battles in childlike games with shells and pebbles and seeds, with toy cross-bows for artillery, and with a wooden fortress which a friendly carpenter - when was he ever to lack the friend of his need? - had helped him to model.
He says that he was afflicted at this time by a nervousness which he had never experienced before, and from which he never subsequently suffered. His inclination was to attribute this condition to the hated vegetables, which continued to be his sole diet during the convalescence of the following summer, though he is fair enough to say that it may very possibly have been the result of the disorder, and not of the cure.
Anyway, cured he was, and he recovered to a more robust and vigorous health than he had previously known. For the next thirty years he was clear of the doctors' hands, and pains and remedies were alike forgotten.
During the remaining years of his apprenticeship he took much riding exercise. He rode well. He resumed and lengthened his pedestrian wanderings. He was not easily wearied, and the lame leg "disfigured rather than disabled" him in these activities.
Once he walked with three fellow-apprentices to breakfast at Prestonpans, spent the day in wandering among the Seton ruins and the adjoining battlefield, and back to Edinburgh in the evening (after a dinner of haddocks, and two bottles of port for the four) without any toll of fatigue for the thirty miles he had covered.
Such walks were frequent at that period, and though the half-bottles of port may have been less so, they also have their significance. Walter, like his father, was then, and at all times of life, of abstemious habits. But the word must be used comparatively. At the period, and among his own social order, the taking of large and steady quantities of alcohol was a routine, which on convivial occasions became a ritual also. To many of those who led robust open-air lives it appeared to do little harm till they approached or passed their fiftieth year, but during the following decade they aged very rapidly, and apoplexy, gout, and diseases of liver and kidneys, were almost as general among them as the indulgences from which they came. To those who had abandoned the healthier and more active country life for the occupations of the city courts, offices, colleges, and consulting-rooms, a companion habit of gluttony appears to have been regarded too-frequently as the natural condition of their later and more leisurely years. Of Scott's three closest business associates, two became of such bulk in the days of their prosperity that their deaths were more probably hastened by their physical appetites than their business troubles.
Scott himself was too active in habits, as he was too strong in self-discipline, to surrender to such indulgences, and if he did so at times it was rather from the claims of good-fellowship than a physical craving. To suggest that at any period of his life he ate or drank excessively would be an overstatement which would have the effect of falsehood. Yet it is no more than he would have freely admitted to say that if he had drank less than he did he might have lived longer and died differently. . . .
But this love of long rides and of wandering walks - mainly he says, for the delight he experienced in discoveries of romantic scenery - developed until they were protracted beyond the limits of single days, and his parents were first alarmed and then reconciled to his irregular absences. Remonstrance went no further than his father's irritable remark that he must have been born to be a strolling pedlar, and the circumstance throws a kindly light upon the relations of parents and son, and the confidence that must have been felt that these all-night absences were not the indications of any serious escapade.
He set out on one occasion, not alone, but with a party of other lawyers-to-be, to fish the lake above Howgate. They got there in time for breakfast, fished all day, stayed the night, and started back early next morning. His constant friend, John Irving, was one of the party. General Abercromby's son, George, was another. A third was William Clerk.
Pennycuik House, the residence of Sir John Clerk, lay a little off the track of their return. William Clerk took the opportunity of introducing his friends. They were warmly received, William Clerk and John Irving for themselves, "and I for their sakes" as Scott modestly says. They were "overwhelmed with kindness" and persuaded to stay for a day or two. But the remainder of the party had gone on, without noticing those who had turned aside, and there was alarm at George's Square that night, while Walter's mind was obliviously occupied with the beauty of his surroundings, the "fine pictures" that the house contained, and the pleasant hospitality that he was experiencing.
William Clerk must have more than a passing reference, for he became an intimate and life-long friend. Scott's own statement is that John Irving was his closest friend at this period. Lockhart puts Irving quietly aside, and installs Clerk in that position. Indeed, Lockhart will have it that Clerk was a guiding influence over a weaker man. The question of who was his closest friend is one on which Scott himself is the best authority. Whether he or Clerk would be likely to have the stronger influence on the other is a point of opinion which we must decide as we will, looking at the characters and records of the two men. Scott had a readiness to recognise the force of an opponent's arguments, an unselfish generosity, a willingness to yield ground on non-essentials, that combined to give an impression of his being far more pliable than he really was.
But there was a difference between the social status of the two friends which could not fail to influence Lockhart's mind, though its effect on that of Scott would have been nothing at all. Clerk was to become a barrister. Irving's home was near that of the Scotts in George's Square. He could not introduce his friends to a country seat with the dignity of Pennycuik House. Lockhart's class-consciousness was constant and unashamed. When he met Constable he was moved to wonder that a bookseller could behave like a gentleman. He felt it natural, if not necessary, to record this astonishment, and the evidences on which he felt that Scott might be excused for such an association.
But we must not tip the scale to the other side. Scott's friendship with William Clerk was a close one, which endured as the years passed. Clerk was one of those men who are content to be, rather than to do. Life came easily to him, and he ruled it with a negative wisdom, leaving a record without achievement, and free from folly. Scott said of him in later years that he was unsurpassed in strength and acuteness of faculties by any man he had conversed with familiarly. It is high praise, even from Scott, who praised generously, but not loosely. Clerk is (more or less) portrayed as the Darsie of Redgauntlet
So much is true; but Lockhart's suggestion that "it was Clerk who first or mainly awakened his social ambition: it was he that drew him out of the company of his father's apprentices, and taught him to rise above their clubs and festivities, and the rough irregular habits of all their intervals of relaxation," is simply silly.
It is needless to consider what ground, if any, Lockhart had for this general inditement of the office apprentices, because Scott had always shown an aptitude to chose congenial friends, and however sociable he might be with men of every type and class, he walked in his own ways. Indeed, in his whole account of this friendship, Lockhart shows a profound ignorance of Scott's character, and his own unfitness to be his biographer. We owe much to Lockhart. He was a diligent collector of facts. He was an acute observer of the events that came under his own eyes in later years. But his witness cannot be trusted, even when his prejudices are not aroused, unless we are careful to distinguish between observations and deductions therefrom. There were sides of Scott's character which he was unable to interpret because they were too alien from his own nature. He did not adequately interpret his romantic ideality, his love of jeopardy for its own sake, his essential democracy, because he did not understand them - and, had he done so, he would have felt that they were for excuse rather than admiration.
Chapter IX.
Scott's apprenticeship lasted from his fourteenth year to his nineteenth. Before it closed, his decision had been made to adopt the profession of advocacy rather than that of an attorney, and even this choice is ascribed by Lockhart to the influence of William Clerk, with which "another influence must have powerfully co-operated". There is neither evidence nor inherent probability that either of these influences - to the second of which we have still to come - were exerted in such direction, or would have been decisive upon it. It is more reasonable to suppose that the decision came from Scott's own inclination, and his father's counsel.
At this time, his younger brother, Tom, had also entered the office. It was a business which might have found occupation for both, apart from which, Walter, as the elder may be said to have had the first claim. But it was not a matter, the Scotts being what they were, which was likely to be settled on such a point. Walter may have seemed to his father, and may have been, the more likely to succeed as a barrister. It had some obvious advantages for the brothers to divide their energies between the two branches of the profession. Tom was anxious to be an attorney, though he was certainly not of the temperament to object to Walter as a senior partner. There was a close and genuine affection between the brothers which would outlast the days of a common prosperity. Would Walter have succeeded as a solicitor? Would he have done better than Tom? It is hard to guess. Neither father nor sons were typical of the successful lawyer. They lacked the narrow cautious selfishness which is the lawyer's safeguard. In spite of personal probity, and far more than average abilities, they had characteristics which might be more advantageous to their clients than to themselves and which might even threaten possibilities of final disaster in which client and attorney would have suffered together. It is a frequent paradoxical fact that (defaulting solicitors are not the worst of their kind. Not that there was any question of default here. The elder Walter was nearing the time when he could gradually withdraw himself, as his health weakened, from a long record of honourable practice. He had built up a flourishing business. If he had made some bad debts on a large scale, he had yet made good provision for a numerous family; he had lived in a state or increasing comfort, though without ostentation; and he had acquired considerable property.
Incidentally, he had at last brought to a triumphant conclusion certain litigation on behalf of Mr. Stewart of Appin (a brother of Alexander of Invernahyle of whom we know) against certain Maclarens, his insurgent tenants in the neighbourhood of Loch Katrine. There had been a legal process to be served personally by the Courts order upon these defeated litigants. Someone from the office must go. It is easy to imagine that Walter was an eager applicant for this rather perilous enterprise, which his father allowed him to undertake. The Highlands had become comparatively quiet since they were subdued after the '45, but that the bearer of such a document would have a friendly reception was not a likely thing. Walter rode to Stirling alone, and obtained an escort of a sergeant and six men from the regiment stationed there. He found the sergeant to have a fund of anecdotes in which Rob Roy and himself were about equally prominent, and he picked his brains in the usual way. So, at eighteen, he rode into the Trossachs pass, which he was afterwards to immortalise as the scene of perhaps the best imaginary skirmish that the world's literature contains, not with a twilight forest of southern spears, but with the glitter of six bayonets behind him to enforce his will.
The 'other influence' which Lockhart thinks may have inclined him to adopt the profession of the Bar, was the determination which he formed to marry Williamina Stuart, the daughter of Sir John Stuart Belches of Invermay. Lockhart appears to be impressed by a social gulf which he supposed would be lessened by the adoption of the higher branch of the legal profession. But here prejudice ignores fact. The obstacle (apart from the question of the girl's own inclination) was not social but financial. Williamina was one of the richest heiresses in Scotland, but, even so, her parents did not oppose the intimacy. His decision involved two further years of unprofitable study, to be followed by the precarious income of those who commence to practice at the Bar. Had he adopted the attorney's profession, he might have felt in a position to make a formal proposal of marriage two or three years earlier than he actually did, and very many things might have developed and ended differently.
But there is another reason why Lockhart's suggestion that his desire to win Williamina Stuart influenced his decision on this matter cannot be regarded seriously. It is clear from Scott's own account that the decision was taken before - and probably a considerable time before - the termination of his apprenticeship. His articles began when he was just over fourteen, and terminated shortly after his nineteenth birthday. Williamina was born in October 1776. She was a full five years younger than Walter, being just fourteen years old when his articles ended. It is certain that they were both young when they met, but it is, at least, improbable that he fell in love with her when she was thirteen. It is more probable that the acquaintance began when he had already commenced his studies for the Bar, and that it was the incentive which (as we shall shortly see) was to drag William Clerk out of bed a good deal earlier than that indolent gentleman had been accustomed to rise.
This probability is increased by Scott's own statement that he had "three years of dreaming, and two of awakening". Williamina married Willie Forbes on Jan. 19th, 1797, her age then being twenty years and four months. If we conclude that the acquaintance began when Walter returned to Edinburgh after the vacation which followed the completion of his articles in the autumn or winter of 1790-1, everything else falls into line, and only Lockhart's inherently improbable suggestion that she influenced his choice of a profession has to go to the scrap-heap.
He met her first, as the tale goes, in the porch of the Greyfriars Church. She had no umbrella and was faced by a sudden storm, so he offered his, and they went home together. That may have been the occasion on which they first spoke, but how long he may have desired such an opportunity of acquaintance is another matter. Sir John's Edinburgh residence was near to George's Square. They found (they may have known it before) that they went the same way home. . . . But they are not usually alone. Their two mothers come to church also. The elder ladies recognise each other. Thirty years ago, more or less, they were school friends, though they have not met since. They have common subjects of conversation. The Edinburgh pavements of that time were not adapted for four people to walk abreast. We may guess how the pairing went.
So far, all went well. The mothers did not oppose, and Williamina did not repulse. In fact, she gave a willing friendship at this time, if not more. She was observed to sit out dances with a boy whose lameness withheld him from that diversion. Walter's father knew nothing of the growing intimacy. We may deduce that he had given up going to Church. He had the excuse of weakening health, though he appears to have been able to attend to his professional work for several subsequent years.
But the time came when Sir John and his family went back to Invermay, and Walter found that a holiday in that neighbourhood had become an urgent necessity. The obstinacy of his selection of the locality intrigued his father's mind, and explanations followed.
His father did not directly oppose the acquaintance, but he was disturbed by doubts. Did Sir John know what was happening? It appeared that Sir John didn't. Like Mr. Walter Scott he stands convicted by this ignorance. He also must have given up the habit of going to Church. Well, he must know Without telling his son, who, in fact, was in ignorance of the event until many years afterwards, he wrote to Sir John? telling him what his son's position and prospects were. It led to nothing, for Sir John declined to interfere. We may conclude that it was the women - the two elder women - who had their way. There came a time when the younger woman had her way also - but that is looking ahead.
Chapter X.
Fortunately, we are not dependent upon Lockhart's surmises for the reasons which led to Scott's choice of the advocate's rather than the attorney's profession. Against his suggestion of exterior influences we have Scott's own statement, which is clear and explicit. He says: "My father behaved with the most parental kindness. He offered, if I preferred his own profession, immediately to take me into partnership with him, which, though his business was much diminished, still afforded me an immediate prospect of a handsome independence. But he did not disguise his wish that I should relinquish this situation to my younger brother, and embrace the more ambitious profession of the Bar. I had little hesitation in making my choice - for I was never very fond of money; and in no other particular do the professions admit of a comparison. Besides, I knew and felt the inconveniences attached to that of a Writer; and I thought (like a young man) many of them were ' ingenio non subounda meo'. The appearance of personal dependence which that profession requires was disagreeable to me; the sort of connection between the client and the attorney seemed to render the latter more subservient than was quite agreeable to my nature; and, besides, I had seen many sad examples, while overlooking my father's business, that the utmost exertions and the best-meant services do not secure the man of business, as he is called, from great loss, and most ungracious treatment on the part of his employers. The Bar, though I was conscious of my deficiencies as a public speaker, was the line of ambition and liberty; it was that also for which most of my contemporary friends were destined. And, lastly, although I would willingly have relieved my father of the labours of his business, yet I saw plainly that we could not have agreed on some particulars if we had attempted to conduct it together, and that I should disappoint his expectations if I did not turn to the Bar. So to that object my studies were directed with great ardour and perseverence during the years 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792."
A careful examination of this statement will show that Lockhart's picture of the youth diverted from boorish companionships and an attorney's desk by the impulses of ambitious love and the influences of a mentor of superior social position is not merely conjectural, but of a demonstrable falsehood. The decision was taken at least as far back as 1789 - when he was no more than eighteen, at no very great distance from his illness. It is also worth notice that he mentions that he was influenced (though it can be no more than a very subordinate consideration) by the fact that the Bar was the profession to which "most of his contemporary friends" were destined. We may transform this into the singular, and take it to refer exclusively to William Clerk, if we will, but it would be an unreasonable perversity. So far as we have any authoritative evidence, his closest friends at this time, apart from Irving and Clerk, were George (afterwards Lord) Abercromby, David Boyle (afterwards Lord Justice Clerk) Thomas Grierson, the Hon. Thomas Douglas (afterwards Earl of Selkirk), Adam Fergusson (Professor Fergusson's son), and James Ramsey. Judging by the careers of these men, it is not a boorish list.
The fact is that, while no man would be more sympathetic to human weakness, or tolerant of human folly, Scott was always honest with himself and others in seeing failures for what they were, and calling them by plain names. Through all his life, in the highest sense of the word, he was the neighbour of those around him. He was helpful to thousands. But he chose his friends with discrimination.
His suggestion that, while he would have felt competent to take over his father's practice entirely, he saw the elements of probable friction if they should have been in partnership, is interesting, and may have been a well-founded fear. They were 'both men, in spite of the "sweetness" of disposition which was attributed to them, of strong opinions and strong wills. The elder man was in gradually failing health, and relaxing energies. The practice, though it could still have spared an ample income for an incoming partner, tended to contract as old clients died or drifted away. There were probably many leakages which a younger man could have stopped: debts which he would have been more energetic to collect: parasites which he would have brushed away. Youth is intolerant, and not always wise. Values would have differed. He may have seen his father's weaknesses more clearly than he would see his own at a later day. They were both capable of romantic perversities, which a prosaic wisdom cannot defend.
There is an earlier incident, authenticated in after-years by a still existing saucer, which illuminates the characters of both - and of Mrs. Scott also.
The lawyer did not talk about his clients' business at home. Not even to Anne. That was understood. But when a closely cloaked stranger came to George's Square, night after night, to hurry with a muffled face from his sedan chair to her husband's private room, and to remain there in conferences which sometimes lasted long into the night-hours, and when Anne's natural questions as to the identity of this mysterious visitor were turned aside, her curiosity was aroused. That can be understood too.
A direct answer being refused, Anne did not badger her husband, or make it a cause of quarrel. Neither did she watch surreptitiously, nor abandon her resolution to know who the secret caller might be. She waited up till the ringing of a bell from her husband's room announced that his visitor was about to leave, and his sedan-chair must be summoned to the door. Then she appeared on the scene with a hospitable tea-tray, and the suggestion that the gentleman would be glad to have some refreshment after so long a conference.
The stranger thanked her, and drank. Walter Scott sat silently before his untasted tea. When his client had gone, he rose and took up the emptied cup. He opened the window. The night-air came in, and the precious china was flung out. He turned to his indignant wife to say that he did not blame her curiosity, but neither he nor her should put lip to cup where Murray of Broughton drank.
The name means nothing to us today. Fame and infamy go down to the same oblivion. This was the man who had been secretary to Charles Stuart in his invasion of England in '45, and had afterwards bought his own life by giving evidence through which others died.
The lawyer had no use for the Stuarts. He looked for an ordered government which would bring even the wilder northern counties to the benefit of a settled peace. He might feel also that Murray, in these last shameful years, had troubles to which he could not refuse his professional aid. But his inward scorn of the man was of an intensity to give birth to that illogical destruction. For the cup would have washed. The china of that day was a treasured thing. A sentimentalist might have washed it twice. But the incident is profoundly significant of the strain of unpractical ideality which is observable in the Scott family from generation to generation. If spiritual and material values clash, the material goes carelessly to the gutter, or is flung there to the flinger's loss.
We are reminded of the younger Walter's refusal (afterwards bitterly repented) to stand by his brother Daniel's dis-honoured grave, or of his conception of the parting of Douglas and Marmion. When Murray entered the lawyer's room, we may be sure that he was not met with an outstretched hand.
At the time, the boy reacted differently, though in an equally characteristic way. Awake in his mother's dressing-room, or reading surreptitiously by the light of her bedroom fire, he may have heard the cup scatter its fragments upon the pavement of the silent Square. Anyway, he learned what had occurred. He discovered that his father's picturesque indignation had not extended to the saucer from which the cup had been lifted to desecration. He added it to the accumulation of his private relics. The same ironic fate led the saucer to a prolonged existence and the cup to a violent end.
Did Murray of Broughton hear the cup crash on the pavement as he entered his sedan-chair? Did he understand its significance? It would be pleasant to think he did.
Chapter XI.
The Faculty of Advocates required, as a condition of admission to the Bar, a course of study which could not be less than two years, the first being occupied with Roman and the second with Scottish Law. Walter Scott's twentieth and twenty-first years were almost entirely occupied with these studies, and on July 6th, 1792, about a month before his twenty-first birthday, he passed the final examination with honours, as did William Clerk at the same time, the two friends acquiring the right to practice, and assuming the gown in public, five days later together.
Walter may have seen little of Williamina during these two years, and she may have given him no very decided encouragement, but the determination to win her, distant as it might be, and doubtful as it might seem to others, had become the strongest motive that ruled his life. For the first time, he bears witness of himself without qualification that he had applied himself to study "with stern, steady, and undeviating industry". It was a discipline which cannot have been easily self-imposed, to one of his alert mind and varied interests. It was not only poetry and literature which must be repressed. He had been making obstinate attempts to paint (William Clerk painted with ease and skill) and would not readily admit that he could not reach artistic expression through this medium. He had endeavoured to understand music, for which he had not more than an elementary appreciation. He had actually had a singing-master at one time, (if Robert could sing, why not he?) and, curiously enough, the singing-master was better satisfied with his efforts in this direction than were his other auditors.
There was a reason for that. Alexander Campbell, who taught him, had some private financial troubles which, Scott recorded afterwards, "I could relieve, if I could not remove". What he was able to do at that early age, by monetary or legal assistance, is not clear, but it won a measure of gratitude which would not admit that the young man was unable to sing if he wished to do so.
Lady Cumming, who lived next door at George's Square, was under no such obligation, and her opinion differed. She sent in a jocularly sarcastic note of expostulation. Would Mr. Scott kindly cease flogging his sons at precisely the same hour each day? She had no doubt the punishment was deserved, but the noise was dreadful. . . . After that, we may suppose that the songs ceased.
But now poetry and history, painting and music, were alike discarded, at the call of ambition, and the memory of Williamina's eyes. And Williamina at Invermay, though she might give some thought to the young lawyer-lover, whom her mother favoured so strongly, was giving others to Willie Forbes of Pitsligo, the heir of the banker-baronet, Sir William Forbes, who also loved, or might be persuaded to love her. And far south, born in a French town, and now living in London) was a dark, vital, vivacious girl, who had her own dreams, and who could give Walter love and loyalty of a good kind, if they should ever meet, which it was millions to one that they never would. Is it all law? Or all chance? Call it as we will, we may still ask, do we weave it ourselves, or is it the dancing pattern of a Creator's dream? Seeing no more of the future than others do, Walter Scott followed a lying light, and toiled at the law.
To give him quiet time for his studies, it had been found possible to allot a semi-basement room at George's Square to his sole use. The home was already breaking apart. Robert had gone by the sea's way. John could only be home on rare occasions. Walter need not sleep in the dressing-room now. His father's health no longer permitted the entertaining which had done so much for the business, and brought so many diverse people in earlier years under a child's all-observant eyes. Only intimate friends now enter the quieter rooms. There is Dr. Rutherford, - not Anne's father, who came once to give the wisdom of his advice to save the life of a palsied child - it is Anne's brother who is the Dr. Rutherford of today. And Christian Rutherford comes rather frequently: she is Anne's half-sister, the child of her father's second wife, a clever, even brilliant girl, so much younger than Anne that she is like a sister to Walter, though he must call her aunt.
Tom and Daniel complete the family, with the invalid sister who has her mother's name, and who now has difficult moods, which call for the patience of others. She is passionately attached to Walter, her favourite brother, and the one (as it is easy to guess) who is most understanding of the tragic isolation in which her spirit still survives in the fire-wrecked body. . . .
Walter found a natural pleasure in the first living-room that he could call his own. It was here that Francis Jeffrey came to visit him, after hearing him read an essay on ballads at the Speculative Club, and found it crowded with 'dingy' books which overflowed the shelves and must be piled on the floor, and ornamented with Broughton's saucer, and an old Lockaber axe and claymore that Alexander had given him, a cabinet of collected coins, and other accumulations. It is significant of the growing freedom of Walter's life, and the atmosphere of the quietening home, that he took this unexpected and welcome visitor out, and gave him a dinner at a neighbouring tavern.
The fact that William Clerk and he commenced the two years' study for the Bar at the same time, drew them into a closer intimacy at this period, as Walter's absorption in his work tended to loosen the ties which he had formed with others. William lived at the end of Prince's Street, about two miles away, and they made a compact to meet alternately at each other's house in the early mornings (Sundays excepted) to undergo a system of mutual examinations upon an agreed portion of the range of study that was before them. Walter did his part, but he waited vainly on the mornings when his friend should have appeared at George's Square. Lockhart's paragon would not leave his bed. They did not fall out over the discovery-of these "fetters of indolence", neither did the plan fall through. It was characteristic of the mingled determination and complaisance of Scott's character that he agreed to do all the walking. Before seven every morning, be the weather what it might, he would be hammering on the door in Prince's Street, prepared to examine his friend, and to be himself examined, upon the self-set reading of yesterday. The severe discipline of this method endured (apart from the usual vacations) for the two years of study. It is not surprising that they both passed with honours. We have nothing beyond Lockhart's imagination to support the suggestion that William persuaded Walter to undertake these examinations. There is better evidence of the debt which was owed to Walter by his lazier friend. The fact may still be that William brushed his clothes better than Walter up to the close of Walter's nineteenth year, after which there was a dead heat in the measure of this activity. It may even be true that, at the earlier period, William was rather uppish to Walter in allusions to his superior neatness. The evidence is not easy to find, but it is a point on which we may be content that Lockhart shall have his way. Had this tireless biographer understood how to thin out the forest of facts amid which he wandered, some of his best trees might have been better grown.
CHAPTER XI. (Chapter error in original)
There can be no doubt that Lockhart had a sincere admiration for Scott, both for his literary genius, and his personal character. He had a real affection also for an older man of most lovable attributes who was his wife's father, and his own friend. In intimacy, in admiration, in many personal qualifications, he was particularly suited to be his biographer, and his work remains a mine of information and a monument of literary industry. But though he is not sparing in adjectives of laudation, and sometimes acute in criticism, we feel that he was writing of a man whom he had observed from the outside, but whom he could never know.
And this ignorance concentrates itself in one fatuous amazing paragraph in which he assures us that during the period of his studies for the Bar, and the first years of legal practice, when he was concentrating his energies to hasten the day when he could make a formal offer of marriage to the girl he loved, he was not consorting with prostitutes, nor seducing housemaids.
Lockhart gravely tells us that he does not bear this witness without careful enquiry. Before venturing to give such an assurance he collected the "concurrent testimony of all the most intimate among his surviving associates"!
The letters which Scott wrote at that period, or at least those which survive, are not numerous, but Lockhart had acce