by John Buchan
[1778-79]
It was a hard transition stage for the “poetic child,” but the wind was tempered to him by his mother’s sympathy. With her he read Homer in Pope’s translation, and from her he acquired his undying passion for Shakespeare. He never forgot the rapture of reading the plays by the fire in her dressing-room, until the sound of the family rising from supper warned him that it was time to creep back to bed. He was inclined to be priggish, and objected to playing with the boys in the Square on the ground of their ignorance, but this foible was soon hammered out of him by hard-fisted brothers. To the elder Walter Scott he must have seemed only a loquacious child who was lamentably backward in sound learning, but his mother and his mother’s friends saw to it that the discipline necessary to fit him for normal life did not destroy his world of dreams. These friends were notable women. There was Mrs Cockburn, whom I have quoted, and who carried a merry heart through a long life of sorrows; there were his aunts, Janet (afterwards Mrs Russel of Ashestiel) and Christian Rutherford; there was old Lady Balcarres with her family of brilliant girls; above all there was Mrs Anne Murray Keith, who on his behalf did for an elder Edinburgh what his grandmother had done for the old life of the Border. She spoke the courtly Holyrood Scots, and illumined for him a world which had passed and which he was one day to refashion.
With his eighth year the first stage of childhood closed. The nuts, in
Martial’s phrase, had now to be left behind —
Jam tristis nucibus puer relictis
Clamoso revocatur a magiatro!
It had been a stage of supreme importance, for it saw the making of the man Walter Scott. As the sapling was then bent, so the tree was to grow. On a memory, which was wax to receive and granite to retain, had been impressed affections and interests which were to dominate his life. A certain kind of landscape had captured his heart — the green pastoral simplicity of Tweedside — and it remained his abiding passion. Scott’s love was never for the wilder scenes in the Border country, such as Gameshope and Loch Skene; it was for the pastoral fringes, for “Leaderhaughs and Yarrow,” for the Tweeddale champaign, where the moorland sank into meadows and gardens marched with the heather. This taste, born of those early years at Sandy Knowe, was the parent of Abbotsford. He won, too, an insight — the unconscious but penetrating insight of a child — into a society which was fast disappearing, the society from which the ballads had sprung. A whole lost world had been reborn in his brain, and the learning of after years was only to supplement the far more potent imaginative construction of childhood. The past had become a reality for him, since he had himself seen and touched its flying wing. Henceforth, in the words of de l’Isle Adam, “il gardait au coeur les richesses stériles d’un grand nombre de rois oubliés.”
II
[The High School]
In October 1779, at the age of eight, he entered Mr Luke Fraser’s second class in the ancient High School of Edinburgh. He was younger than most of his classmates and but ill grounded in his Latin rudiments, and, since Mr Fraser was no more than a grammarian, he at first made little progress. But three years later, when he attained to the class of the headmaster, Dr Adam, his ambition awoke, and Latin literature became for him a living interest. He read in class Cæsar, Livy and Sallust, Terence, Horace and Virgil, and Dr Adam pronounced that, while many were better scholars in the language, Walter Scott had few equals in probing to the author’s meaning. His verse translations from the Roman poets were approved — translations somewhat in the manner of Pope’s Homer — and he began to write verses on his own account, in which the chief influence seems to have been the Scottish Paraphrases. He had also a private tutor during these years, a certain James Mitchell, who ultimately became minister at Montrose, where Scott visited him at a critical hour of his life. Mr Mitchell was a stiff Calvinist and sabbatarian, and from arguments with him the boy imbibed a good deal of divinity and church history. “I, with a head on fire for chivalry,” he wrote, “was a Cavalier; my friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory and he was a Whig. I hated Presbyterians, and admired Montrose with his victorious Highlanders; he liked the Presbyterian Ulysses, the dark and politic Argyle, so that we never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were always amicable.”
[1779-83]
The real education of these years was not in the High School, not even in Dr Adam’s class, but in the playground and the Edinburgh streets, and in the boy’s private adventures among books. The story of his escapades may be read in Lockhart. He was desperately pugnacious, and, since his lameness put him at a disadvantage, was permitted to fight his battles, as he said, “in banco,” both combatants being strapped to a deal board. He scrambled over the Salisbury Crags, and ascended the “kittle nine stanes” on the Castle Rock. In winter he helped to “man the Cowgate Port” in the snowball fights, and he was a leader in the bickers with the street boys, where stones were the chief missiles, and broken heads were the common fortune of war. He was a leader in other things, for he was the saga-man of his class, a spinner of tales, a maker of phrases, a dreamer of dreams, who was often carried away by his fancies. Had Scott never put pen to paper, he would still have told himself stories. He was also busy with his own private reading, in which occasionally he found a like-minded friend to share during a holiday afternoon among the hills. Presently he had devoured Shakespeare, and any other plays that came his way; he fell in love with, but soon tired of, Ossian; he read Tasso and Ariosto in translations; Spenser he knew by heart, and, since his memory retained whatever impressed his mind, could repeat an immense number of stanzas. From his mother and his mother’s friends he collected old ballads, and out of penny chap-books laid the foundations of a library. We have one glimpse from a fellow-pupil of the dreaming boy:—”In walking he used always to keep his eyes turned downward as if thinking, but with a pleasing expression of countenance, as if enjoying his thoughts.”
[1783. Kelso]
Scott left the High School in the spring of 1783, and, since he was not due to enter college before the autumn, he was sent for six months to his Aunt Janet, who had now moved from Sandy Knowe to Kelso. There he was to spend many of his later holidays, and we may fairly regard the Kelso period as a formative stage in his education. The little house stood in a large garden, which was decorated with mazes, labyrinth and bowers according to the fashion of the period, and in front of which rolled the “glittering and resolute streams of Tweed.” It was his first real introduction to the spell of that noble river, for at Sandy Knowe Tweed had been too far away for a child’s feet. He attended the Kelso school, where his Latin improved, and he sat on the same bench as the son of a local tradesman, a certain James Ballantyne, whose life was to be curiously linked with his. At Kelso he discovered Percy’s Reliques, which he first read under a great plane-tree in the garden, and thereafter recited to all who would listen. There, too, his æsthetic sense received a new stimulus.
[1783-86]
To this period — he wrote — I can trace the awakening of that delightful feeling for the beauties of natural objects which has never since deserted me. The neighbourhood of Kelso, the most beautiful, if not the most romantic village in Scotland, is eminently calculated to awaken these ideas. It presents objects not only grand in themselves, but venerable from their associations.... The romantic feelings which I have described as predominating in my mind, naturally rested upon and associated themselves with these grand features of the landscape around me, and the historical incidents, or traditional legends connected with many of them, gave to mv admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers’ piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion.
[College]
He was confirmed in that preference which he had half-consciously acquired at Sandy Knowe — for a pastoral land interpenetrated with the poetry of man’s endeavour. In his love of n
ature he was always the humanist, never the metaphysician.
In the autumn of 1783 Scott laid aside the round black hat, the gaudy waistcoat, and the brown corduroy breeches of the High School boy, and matriculated at the town’s college of Edinburgh. It was the old college, an ancient shabby place of small courts and dingy classrooms, where world-famous professors lectured to lads of thirteen and fourteen. He attended the Latin or Humanity class, where he forgot most of what he had learned at school, for that class seems to have been what Lord Cockburn found it ten years later, “the constant scene of unchecked idleness and disrespectful mirth.” He attended the first Greek class under Dalzell, but, since he had to begin by learning the alphabet, and discovered that all his fellow-students started at a higher level, he tried to carry off his incompetence by announcing his contempt for the language and comparing Homer unfavourably with Ariosto. Yet the gentle enthusiasm of the professor might well have won his respect, for he shared most of the boy’s prejudices. Dalzell used to maintain that Presbytery had killed classical scholarship in Scotland, and Sydney Smith once heard him murmur to himself: “If it had not been for that confounded Solemn League and Covenant, we would have made as good longs and shorts as England.” Scott was a pupil also in the logic class, and studied mathematics with a private tutor. Four years later, when he was a law student, he sat under Lord Woodhouselee in history and Dugald Stewart in moral philosophy; but Stewart was not to him, as he was to many of his contemporaries, an inspiring revelation. Likewise he took lessons in drawing and painting, in which he did not conspicuously progress, and in music, where he did not progress at all. Like Burns, he had much music in his soul, and little in his voice.
During these years his attendance at college was intermittent, for his health was weak, since he had outgrown his strength. In his convalescence he was again at Kelso, this time at the villa which his uncle, Captain Robert Scott, had acquired on Tweed a little below the town. Meantime the voracious reading went on. If he neglected the Latin classics he was dabbling in Buchanan and Matthew Paris and the monkish chronicles, and if Greece was a sealed book to him he was beginning to explore the literatures of Italy and France.
In May 1786 when he was not yet fifteen, he signed indentures for five years as his father’s apprentice. The elder Scott had decided that his son should follow the profession of the law, but had not yet determined which branch it should be. The church seems to have been considered, but, though it offered good prospects, it was not pressed, for it was clear that the boy had no vocation in that quarter. So the young Walter found himself set to a desk for many hours every day, immured in the dreariest of labours. He was not an idle apprentice, for he had always a remarkable capacity for solid, plodding toil. “The drudgery of the office,” he confesses, “I disliked, and the confinement I altogether detested; but I loved my father, and I felt the natural 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.” The tasks had one alleviation. The copying of legal documents was paid for at the rate of threepence per folio, and by these means he could acquire pocket-money for books and the theatre. Once he wrote one hundred and twenty folio pages (probably about ten thousand words) without a single interval for food or rest. This was an invaluable training for his later feats of scribing, and it gave him a good running hand. Till the end of his life he continued to finish off a page with a flourish of the pen, and at Abbotsford used to be heard to mutter, “There goes the old shop again.” The work brought him closer to his father, who, if he did little to mould his mind, taught him habits of care and application. He won an insight into the eternal disparities of father and son, and he learned to make allowances for the rigid, buttoned-up old gentleman whom he had come to comprehend as well as to love. The portrait of Saunders Fairford in Redgauntlet is a tribute, at once shrewd and affectionate, to the taskmaster of the young apprentice.
When he was sixteen, he burst a blood-vessel in his bowels, and had to lie for weeks on his back in a room with open windows, his only resources chess, military history and the poets. But after that he seemed to outgrow his early delicacy. He shot up into a tall, broad-shouldered lad, very deep in the chest, and with arms like a blacksmith’s. His lameness did not embitter him, as it embittered Byron; there were heroes in his pantheon, like Boltfoot and John the Lamiter, who had had the same handicap. He could walk thirty miles in a day, and ride as long as a horse could carry him. A year or two later he defended himself with his stick against three assailants for an hour by the Tron clock, like Corporal Raddlebanes in Old Mortality. When he was come to full strength James Hogg considered him the strongest man of his acquaintance, and Ettrick Forest did not breed weaklings. Among other feats he could with one hand lift a smith’s anvil by the horn. His spirit matched his body. Said a naval officer: “Though you may think him a poor lamiter, he’s the first to begin a row, and the last to end it.”
[1787-89. The Middle Teens]
The diversions of his middle teens were many. In those days boys went to college at twelve, and at fifteen they were guests at grown-up dinner-parties. A gentleman, however young, was expected to drink his share of wine, and to carry it well, and till this skill was attained there were apt to be disastrous experiments. Edinburgh society was not the best school of health, and Scott lived to censure the extravagances of his youth; but it is very certain that he never repented of them. In March, 1827, he wrote:
There is a touch of the old spirit in me yet that bids me brave the tempest — the spirit that in spite of manifold infirmities made me a roaring boy in my youth, a desperate climber, a bold rider, a deep drinker, and a stout player at singlestick.
There were debating societies, where young men talked the sun down. There were celebrities to be gazed at with reverence and addressed with circumspection — John Home, whom he had met in Bath, the blind poet Blacklock, Robert Burns whom he saw as a schoolboy in Sibbald’s circulating library, and much later at the house of Adam Ferguson — which meeting he has described in one of his best pieces of prose. There was his circle of friends — chief among them John Irving, the young Adam Ferguson, and William Clerk, son of that Sir John Clerk of Eldin who forecast the tactics to which Rodney owed his victories — with whom he roamed the hills on summer holidays. And sometimes romance fluttered the pages even of his legal folios. In the first autumn of his apprenticeship he visited Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, who had been out in both the ‘Fifteen and the ‘Forty-five, and he had that vision of the champaign of the lower Tay which he describes in the introduction to The Fair Maid of Perth. Another year he was sent north on business, to enforce execution against some refractory Maclarens, tenants of Stewart of Appin. With an escort of a sergeant and six men from Stirling Castle, each with loaded arms, the romantic lawyer’s clerk most fittingly made his first entry into the Trossachs.
[1789-92. Youth in Edinburgh]
At seventeen his future was determined. He was to follow the higher branch of the legal calling, and he began his law classes at the college. The two elder brothers had chosen the Army and the Navy, and, apart from his lameness, it was inevitable that he should pursue the third of the normal callings of a gentleman. The three years which followed were a period of serious preparation. Scott, who never claimed a virtue which he did not abundantly possess, wrote: “Let me do justice to the only years of my life in which I applied to learning with stern, steady, and undeviating industry.” He and William Clerk worked together, examining themselves daily in points of law, and every morning in summer Scott would walk the two miles to the west end of Princes Street to beat up his friend. The two passed their final trials on July 11th, 1792, and assumed the gown of the advocate. After the ceremony they mingled with the crowd in the Parliament Hall, and Scott, mimicking the voice of a Highland girl at a hiring fair, complained to his companion; “We’ve stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and deil a ane has speired our price.” But a friendly solic
itor gave him his first guinea before the courts rose.
In the law classes Scott met his old school friends and many others — Irving and Ferguson, George Cranstoun, Francis Jeffrey, George Abercromby, Edmonstone of Newton, Murray of Ochtertyre, and Murray of Simprin — a brilliant coterie, not a few of whom rose to the Scottish Bench. He had now left his boyhood behind him, for in those days men matured early, and he plunged heartily into the delights of a very social city. He learned to drink square, and, though he had a head like a rock, he used to complain in later life that these bouts were the source of some of his stomach troubles. He indulged in herculean walking trips, sometimes not returning home till the next morning, so that his father was moved to complain that he was “born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut.” He belonged to many clubs; the Literary Society, where his antiquarian learning won him the name of Duns Scotus; a body called The Club, which met in Carrubber’s Close; a Teviotdale Club, where he renewed acquaintance with his Kelso friend, James Ballantyne: and finally in 1791, the famous Speculative Society, the nursery of so much literary and legal talent. He abandoned his former carelessness in dress, and became a point-device young man, able to talk to women without shyness. Meantime on every holiday he was off to his beloved Border, to Kelso, to Jedburgh, to the Northumbrian side of the Cheviots, whence he wrote rollicking epistles to his friends. We have a glimpse of him at home in George Square, where Jeffrey found him in a small den in the basement surrounded by dingy books, cabinets of curios, and rusty armour. He was a good boon-companion and a delightful comrade for the road, but he left on his friends also an impression of whinstone good sense. We find him at eighteen intervening to reconcile a foolish boy with his family, and when quarrels broke out over the wine he was the chief peacemaker.