by John Buchan
[Scott’s Ancestry]
So much for the details of pedigree. The child born in August, 1771, to Anne Rutherford and Walter Scott at the head of the College Wynd, had a more varied ancestry than falls to the lot of most men. No doubt the ancestry of all of us is oddly mixed, but in his case the record was known. He was linked collaterally through the Buccleuchs with the greater noblesse. He had behind him the most historic of the Border stocks in Scott and Murray and Rutherford and Swinton. He had Celtic blood from MacDougal and Campbell. Of the many painted shields on the ceiling of the hall at Abbotsford which enshrine his pedigree, only three lack a verified heraldic cognizance. Among his forbears were saints and sinners, scholars and sportsmen and men-at-arms, barons and sheep-farmers, divines and doctors of medicine, Whigs and Jacobites, Cavaliers and Quakers. Above all he had that kindest bequest of the good fairies at his cradle, a tradition, bone of his bone, of ancient pastoral, of a free life lived among clear waters and green hills as in the innocency of the world.
CHAPTER II. — BOYHOOD AND YOUTH (1771-1792)
I
[1771. The Elder Scott]
The College Wynd was a mountain path from the ravine of the Cowgate to the ridge where stood the sixteenth-century College. It had been called in old days the Wynd of the Blessed Virgin-in-the-Fields, and the tall gabled house at the head of it was built on the site of the very Kirk-o’-Field where Darnley had met his death in the unhallowed February night of 1567. The house stood in the corner of a small court, the flats were reached by a foul common stair, and the narrow windows looked out upon wynds where refuse rotted in heaps, and pigs roamed as in a farmyard, and well-born children played barefoot in the gutters. Nowhere was there space or light, and the tenements, though their fireplaces might bear historic scutcheons, were habitations of filth and nursing grounds of disease. Eight children had been born to Mr Walter Scott, and six had died in infancy, so a little after the young Walter’s birth he moved his household to one of the pleasant houses in the new George Square, near the Meadows, where the eye looked out on trim gardens and the air blew sweet from the Pentlands and the Firth.
A clear picture of the elder Scott has come down to us. His portrait shows him “uncommonly handsome,” as his son boasted, but with an air of puzzled gentleness and melancholy which scarcely accords with the robust Border stock from which he sprang. It is possible that there was some delicacy of body which he transmitted to his family, for he had not the longevity of his race, dying at sixty-eight after two years of broken health. His industry and his love of dry legal details qualified him well for his profession, and he began with high prospects, for his father bought him a good partnership, he could count on the patronage of a clan of litigious sheep-farmers and lairds, and the Jacobite forfeitures had filled Edinburgh with legal business. But he was perhaps better suited to the upper than the lower branch of his craft. His son thought that he would have made a fine special pleader, had the Scots Bar known such a thing, and he was deeply learned in feudal tenures. For the business side he had little aptitude. He was ingenuous and simple, accepting men at their own high valuation; he refused to take advantage of their follies and necessities, and no Dandie Dinmont with his consent ever went to law with a Jock o’ Dawston Cleugh; his quixotic zeal for his clients’ welfare led to his being out of pocket over the work he did for them; his scruples were always at war with his interests. Such a man may acquire a large practice, but it will not be a lucrative one. He could on occasion be a genial host, but his usual habits were ascetic; in a toping age he drank little wine, and, if someone at his board praised the richness of the soup, he would dilute his own portion with water. He had no hobbies, and his notion of relaxation was sombre; he told his son, when presented with his notes of the Scots Law class copied out and bound, that they would provide pleasant reading for his leisure hours! The main interest of his life was theology, and in the seclusion of his study he was more often engaged with Knox and Spottiswoode than with Stair and Erskine. His religion was Calvinism, high and dry, not a dogma only but a stern discipline of life. The Sabbath days were filled with long diets of worship, the Sabbath evenings with the reading of lengthy sermons and the catechizing of a sleepy household. On that day he would neither speak nor think of secular affairs.
This pale gentleman in the black knee-breeches and snowy ruffles, with his kind, anxious face and formal manners, was a strange father for such a son. In the eyes of the one to “crucify the body,” as the phrase went, to “mortify the flesh,” was the first duty of a Christian, and life was a melancholy vale with no place for cordials; to the other the living, breathing world around him seemed a gift of God ordained for the enjoyment of His creatures. Some tastes the two had in common. The elder Scott had a profound clannishness, for he kept a record of the remotest collaterals, and diligently attended their funerals as a tribal rite. He had odd moments of romance, as when he flung from his window in George Square the cup out of which his wife had rashly given tea to the traitor Murray of Broughton. He had even a dim interest in stage plays, and private theatricals were permitted in his dining-room. But for the rest Calvinist and humanist had no common ground. There was also the secular conflict between age and youth, since the father had little tolerance for the whimsies of young blood, and measured success by standards which the son contemned. For the elder was in all things genteel, as Edinburgh understood the thing. Conscious of good blood in his veins, he was profoundly respectful to those who had it in an ampler measure, and not above an innocent condescension to those who lacked it. The Calvinism of eighteenth-century Edinburgh carried with it a worship of respectability. It was respectable to be a busy lawyer; it was not respectable to scribble verses, and tramp the roads, and hobnob with all and sundry. Between Walter and his father there was affection, and for the elder’s integrity and kindness the younger had a deep regard. But there was no intimacy, and for long only an imperfect comprehension.
[Mrs Scott]
The mother, Anne Rutherford, was “short of stature” says Lockhart, “and by no means comely.” Her plain features were those of her father, the professor of medicine, whose portrait hangs on the walls of the Edinburgh College of Physicians. But it was a face of infinite sagacity, shrewdness, friendliness and humour. She had been bred in the old school of deportment, and to her dying day sat upright in her chair without touching its back. She was an anxious parent with her uncertain brood, and a notable mistress of a household. Unlike her husband’s, her tastes had a wide range, for her head was stored with ballads and proverbs and tales. She was one of those women who are worthy of a long life, for she had the kind of mind which can profit and make the world profit by the processes of time, and she made a bridge between the generations. She lived to the verge of eighty, and saw Waterloo fought and Wellington enter Paris, and in her youth she had talked with a man who remembered the battle of Dunbar and Cromwell’s entry into Edinburgh. Scott owed much to her, for she was able to recreate for him the immediate past — that period so dim to most of us, and it was she who first introduced him to the enchanted world of poetry. His boyish ailments established a special intimacy between them, and he was always her favourite child. She had that homely tenderness which the Scots call “innerliness,” and when her son was the laird of Abbotsford and one of the most famous of living men, he was still to her “Wattie, my lamb.” Her life was happy, for she rejoiced in his success, and she preserved her vigour of mind and body unimpaired, so that at eighty she was telling stories to her grandchildren at tea in her little house. “She was a strict economist,” Scott wrote to Lady Louisa Stuart, “which she said enabled her to be liberal; out of her little income of about £300 a year she bestowed at least a third in well-chosen charities, and with the rest lived like a gentlewoman, and even with hospitality more general than seemed to suit her age; yet I could never prevail upon her to accept of any assistance.” A Baskerville Bible which she had given him he treasured to the last year of his life and bequeathed as an heirloom to his d
escendants; and when, after his death, his executors opened his desk, they found, arranged so that he might see them when at work, the boxes which had stood on her dressing-table, and the silver taper-stand which he had bought for her with his first fees.
Walter Scott had always a great love for mementoes. In the same desk were six locks of fair hair, relics of his six brothers and sisters who had died in infancy. There seems to have been talent in all the surviving children, mingled with something febrile and ill-balanced, derived perhaps from their father. All died in middle life, and only one left descendants. The eldest, Robert, was something of a tyrant to the young Walter, but won his love through their common passion for poetry. He entered the Navy, fought under Rodney, quarrelled with his superiors, joined the East India Company’s service, and died of malaria at forty-one. John became a soldier, lost his health and died in Edinburgh in his mother’s house at forty-seven. Thomas, two years younger than Walter and his favourite brother, succeeded to his father’s law business, speculated and failed, and died in Canada as a regimental paymaster in his fiftieth year. Daniel the youngest, the family scapegrace, was in his grave before he was thirty. The one daughter, Anne, a year Walter’s junior, was a nervous, ailing girl, the sport of every kind of accident, who died at the same age as Daniel, having passed her life “in an ideal world which she had framed for herself by the force of imagination.”
[1771-74]
The early childhood of Walter Scott was not spent in the family circle. He was a robust infant, and having survived the perils of a first nurse who was suffering from consumption, might have grown to a physical stalwartness like that of his Border forbears. But, at the age of eighteen months he fell ill of a teething fever, and on the fourth day it was discovered that he had lost the use of his right leg, through some form of infantile paralysis. Physicians and surgeons could do nothing, and, on the advice of his grandfather, Dr Rutherford, it was decided to try what country air could do and to send him to his other grandfather at his farm of Sandy Knowe. So it fell out that the first memories of this city child were of country folk and the green spaces of Tweeddale.
[Sandy Knowe]
The leg did not improve, but the Border winds dispelled the malaise of Edinburgh, and gave him abounding health and spirits. The world opened to him as a wide wind-blown country, with a prospect of twenty miles past the triple peaks of Eildon to the line of Cheviot, the homely fragrance and bustle of a moorland farm, the old keep of Smailholm as a background, and a motley of figures out of an earlier age. His tenacious memory preserved those first impressions. He remembered his grandfather, though he died when the boy was three, a magnificent old man, who apart from the lameness and the high peak of the head, looked much as he looked himself in after life. He remembered being wrapped in the new-flayed skin of a sheep — a device out of some hoar-ancient medical lore, and an old gentleman, who was his grandfather’s second cousin, Sir George MacDougal of Makerstoun, “with a small cocked hat deeply laced, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, and a light-coloured coat, with milk-white locks tied in a military fashion,” kneeling on the parlour floor and dragging his watch along the carpet to induce him to crawl. He was sweet-tempered and very talkative, so that the aged parish minister on his visits declared that “one may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is.” The ewe-milkers carried him up to the crags above the house, and he learned to know every sheep by head-mark. Once he was forgotten there during a thunderstorm and was found clapping his hands at the lightning and crying “Bonny, bonny!” His sworn henchman was Sandy Ormistoun, the cow-baillie, on whose shoulder he peregrinated the farm. Neighbours dropped in, and the child’s quick ears heard the news of the American War and Jacobite tales from a man who had seen the Carlisle executions. On the winter evenings his grandmother sat beside the fire at her spinning-wheel, and his grandfather opposite in his elbow-chair, while he lay on the floor and heard his Aunt Janet read, or his grandmother tell of the Border merry men and their wild ways out of a memory in which they were a living tradition. In his aunt’s reading the Bible was varied with one or two books from a pile on the window-seat — an odd volume of Josephus, that portentous author whom few Scottish children in older days escaped, and Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany. From the latter he learned by heart the ballad of “Hardicanute,” which he shouted about the house.
[1774-75]
In his fourth year there came an interlude, for it was resolved, as a remedy for his lameness, to exchange raw sheepskins for the waters of Bath. Miss Janet took charge of him and they went by sea to London, where he saw the Tower and Westminster Abbey. At Bath they were joined by his uncle Captain Robert Scott, home on leave from India. There they stayed for the better part of a year; the baths did no good to his lameness, but his general health was now excellent, and at a dame’s school he learned to read. His chief recollection was of meeting John Home, author of Douglas, now a very old man, and of seeing his first play in the company of his uncle Robert. “The play was As You Like It, and the witchery of the whole scene is alive in my mind at this moment,” he wrote more than thirty years later. “I made, I believe, noise more than enough, and remember being so much scandalized by the quarrel between Orlando and his brother in the first scene that I screamed out ‘An’t they brothers?’”
[Return to Edinburgh]
From Bath, with a pronounced English accent, he returned for a few weeks to his family in George Square, where, after four years among indulgent elders, he was to learn the possibility of fraternal bickering. Of the boy at this stage we have a glimpse in a letter of a kinswoman of his mother’s, Mrs Cockburn, the author of the modern version of “The Flowers of the Forest,” who had been Alison Rutherford of Fairnilee; —
I last night supped at Mr Walter Scott’s. He has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I ever saw. He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made him read on; it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the storm. “There’s the mast gone,” says he. “Crash it goes! They will all perish!” After his agitation he turns to me. “That is too melancholy,” says he. “I had better read you something more amusing.” I proposed a little chat and asked his opinion of Milton and other books he was reading, which he gave me wonderfully. One of his observations was, “How strange it is that Adam, just new come into the world, should know everything — that must be the poet’s fancy,” says he. But when he was told that he was created perfect by God, he instantly yielded. When taken to bed last night, he told his aunt he liked that lady. “What lady?” says she. “Why, Mrs Cockburn, for I think she is a virtuoso, like myself.” “Dear Walter,” says Aunt Jenny, “what is a virtuoso?” “Don’t you know? Why, it’s one that wishes and will know everything.” Now, sir, you will think this a very silly story. Pray, what age do you suppose that boy to be? Name it now, before I tell you. Why, twelve or fourteen. No such thing; he is not quite six years old. He has a lame leg, for which he was a year at Bath, and has acquired the perfect English accent, which he has not lost since he came, and he reads like a Garrick. You will allow this an uncommon exotic.
[1775-78]
The solitary stage of his childhood was not yet closed, for presently he went back to Sandy Knowe for the better part of two years. There he continued to listen to his grandmother’s tales and Aunt Janet’s reading, but he was now able on his own account to adventure in books. He got his first pony, a tiny Shetland mare called Marion; he was less with the ewe-milkers now, and more with the cow-baillie and the shepherds; the world extended for him, and he became aware of the lovely environs, the woods of Mertoun and the shining reaches of Tweed. He was sent to Prestonpans for sea-bathing, and there discussed the war in America with an ancient ensign, and prophesied with only too much truth that trouble awaited Burgoyne. The ensign’s name was Dalgetty. At Prestonpans, too, he met his father’s friend George Constable, the antiquary, who remembered the ‘Forty-five and talked to him of Shakespeare’s characters, and who was to appear one da
y in the character of Jonathan Oldbuck.
When he was between seven and eight he returned to George Square, and Sandy Knowe became only a place for summer holidays. The virtuoso had now to go through a short space of disillusionment and discipline. “I felt the change,” he wrote, “from being a single indulged brat, to becoming a member of a large family, very severely; for under the gentle government of my kind grandmother, who was meekness itself, and of my aunt, who, although of a higher temper, was exceedingly attached to me, I had acquired a degree of license which could not be permitted in a large family. I had sense enough, however, to bend my temper to my new circumstances, but such was the agony that I had internally experienced, that I have guarded against nothing more in the education of my own family, than against their acquiring habits of self-willed caprice and domination.” His formal education had scarcely begun, and he had to start at the beginning in a private school in Bristo Port, and, when this experiment failed, under a tutor, a young probationer called Fraser, who taught him the Latin rudiments.