by John Buchan
Scott passed into manhood with a remarkable assortment of knowledge, for from the age of five his mind had never been idle. He was a sound lawyer, especially well versed in feudal niceties. Philosophy he had never touched; nor theology, except what he had picked up from his Calvinistic tutor. In history he was widely and curiously read, and his memory for detail enabled him to retain every fragment of out-of-the-way learning which had colour and drama. He had browsed over the whole field of English literature, and was a mine of Shakespearean lore. He had enough French, German, Spanish and Italian to read the works in these languages which appealed to him; French he spoke after a fashion, but, as one of the attendants of the exiled Charles X said, it was the French of the good Sire de Joinville. He was still in the acquisitive rather than the critical stage of mental development, and his taste in poetry was for things like the lisping iambics of Mickle’s “Cumnor Hall.”
He was always of the opinion that a knowledge of Latin and Greek was the basis of every sound education. “Though some people,” he once wrote to his son Charles, “may have scrambled into distinction without it, it is always with the greatest difficulty, like climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door.” Greek, as we have seen, he had none; the chief of the later Homeridæ scarcely knew Homer’s alphabet. It was a lack, no doubt, for some acquaintance with the Greek masterpieces, some tincture of the Greek spirit, might have trimmed that prolixity which was to be his besetting sin. But of Latin he had a full measure. He was, indeed, never a good “pure scholar,” as the phrase goes, and could not detect a false quantity; but few men of his day, not professed scholars, had a wider acquaintance with Latin literature. He quotes constantly from Virgil and Horace, but that was the fashion of the age; more notable is the minute knowledge which he shows of Juvenal and Ovid, while he also can aptly cite Lucan, Catullus, Plautus, Terence, Livy and Tacitus.
[Apprenticeship to Letters]
It is the fashion to repeat that it was Scott’s weak leg alone that made him a writer, that otherwise he would have followed the profession of arms; and he himself once told Southey, speaking of his eldest son’s wish to enter the army, “I have no call to combat a choice which would have been my own had lameness permitted.” He might have been a soldier, even a great soldier, but he would most certainly have been also a writer; for the instinct to express his thoughts and moods in words was in the fibre of his being. In January, 1826, in the hour of disaster, he wrote to Lockhart, “I never knew the day that I would have given up literature for ten times my present income.” All his education was contributory to this purpose, for never had a creative writer a more happy apprenticeship. “What a life mine has been!” he wrote in later years, “half-educated, almost wholly neglected or left to myself, stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash.” Yet it was the education most consonant with his genius, most exquisitely fitted for the achievements of his life. Thomas Moore tells of a conversation he once had with him. “I said how well calculated the way in which Scott had been brought up was to make a writer of poetry and romance, as it combined all that knowledge of rural life and rural legend which is to be gained by living among the peasantry and joining in their sport, with all the advantages which an aristocratic education gives. I said that the want of this manly training showed itself in my poetry, which would, perhaps, have had a far more vigorous character if it had not been for the sort of boudoir education I had received.” Scott had the kind of childhood and youth which fits a man to follow what Aristotle calls the “main march of the human affections.” He had mingled ultimately with every class and condition of men; he had enough education to broaden his outlook but not enough to dim it; he was familiar alike with city and moorland, with the sown and the desert, and he escaped the pedantry of both the class-room and the drawing-room; above all he had the good fortune to stand at the meeting-place of two worlds, and to have it in him to be their chief interpreter.
CHAPTER III. — EARLY MANHOOD (1792-1799)
[1792-95]
A Scots advocate in his first years at the Bar has commonly a superfluity of leisure. He walks the floor of the Parliament House waiting to be hired, and shares in what used to be one of the most friendly and jovial of societies. That floor, looked down upon by the grave periwigged judges of the past, has always been a breeding-ground of good stories, and in this gentle art Walter Scott shone among his contemporaries. He was a famous mimic, especially of such farcical judicial figures as Lord Eskgrove, with his low muttering voice and projected chin, who would in sentencing a prisoner to death console him thus: “Whatever your relig-ious persua-shon may be, there are plenty of rever-end gentle-men who will be most happy for to show you the way to yeternal life.” Scott was noted for taking the tales of other men and sharpening their point — putting, as he said, “a cocked hat on their heads and a cane into their hands.”
[On Circuit]
But his legal career was not wholly occupied with the pleasantries of the Outer House. In 1795 he was appointed one of the curators of the Advocates’ Library, an office reserved for the more literary members of the faculty. A certain amount of work reached him from his father’s office, chiefly the endless legal paperasserie known as “informations,” with which the administration of law was cumbered. He defended poor prisoners without a fee, and on circuit at Jedburgh had as clients local poachers and sheepstealers. One case took him for the first time into Galloway, and gave him the landscape for Guy Mannering. The minister of Girthon was accused of “toying with a sweetie-wife” at a penny-wedding and of singing doubtful songs, and Scott defended him before the General Assembly, drawing a nice distinction between ebrius and ebriosus, between being occasionally drunk and being a habitual drunkard. He lost his case, but his argument greatly edified his brethren of the Covenant Close.
[1792-99]
It was a life which enlarged his knowledge of the human comedy and took him into odd by-paths. If he won few guineas by it he was paid often in a better coin, as in the case of a housebreaker at Jedburgh who remunerated him with two pieces of advice — never to keep a watch-dog out of doors but to tie up a noisy terrier within, and to trust not to clever new locks but to the old heavy kind with the rude keys. As he once told Lord Meadowbank,
Yelping terrier, rusty key,
Was Walter Scott’s best Jeddart fee.
Cockburn has a tale of a dinner given by an old drunken Selkirk attorney to Scott, Cranstoun and Will Erskine, when Scott as a toper nearly triumphed over the host. “As they were mounting their horses to ride home, the entertainer let the other two go without speaking to them, but he embraced Scott, assuring him that he would rise high. ‘And I’ll tell ye what, Maister Walter — that lad Cranstoun may get to the tap of the bar if he can; but tak’ ma word for’t — it’s no’ be by drinking.’”
He learned more from his practice than the humours of humanity, for Scots law was one of the main educative influences in his life. Its complexity and exactness formed a valuable corrective to a riotous imagination. It was the one form of science which he ever cultivated. Moreover, when he became a novelist, it was to give immense point and gusto to his Scots conversations. In an older Scotland the language of the law, like the language of the Bible, interpenetrated the speech of every class. A smattering of it was considered proof of gravity and practical good sense. Consequently it was often misused, and this farcical side adds perpetual salt to his dialogues. His years at the Bar not only enabled him to draw characters like Pleydell and the elder Fairford, but also to give to some of his minor figures their most idiomatic humours — as witness the speech of Bailie Macwheeble, and mine host Mackitchinson, and Andrew Fairservice, and Bartoline Saddletree.
For the rest, as he wrote of Alan Fairford, he “laughed and made others laugh; drank claret at Bayle’s, Fortune’s and Walker’s, and ate oysters in the Covenant Close,” while on his desk “the new novel most in repute lay snugly intrenched beneath Stair’s Institutes or an open volume of Decisions,” and his table wa
s littered with every kind of document “but briefs and banknotes.” He was fortunate in his friends, some of whom we have already met. Will Clerk, his boyhood ally, remained an intimate, though he was a Whig in politics, and had no share in Scott’s literary and sporting interests. As the years of his youth passed an inner circle grew up for him in his immense acquaintanceship. Chief of that circle was William Erskine, the son of an Episcopalian clergyman in Perthshire, who became to Scott both an exacting literary censor and a second conscience. Erskine was a small, frail man, no lover of sport, awkward on horseback, a being of quick sensibilities and delicate nerves — a strange contrast to his big-boned, bluff, adventurous friend. The two men were complementary: Erskine rested upon Scott’s sanity and vigour, and Scott looked to Erskine’s finer perceptions to correct his own ebullience in letters and life. No two friends were ever closer together, or more complete partakers of each other’s intimate thoughts.
Then there was Thomas Thomson, the son of an Ayrshire minister; he became one of the most learned of Scottish antiquaries and was to Scott at once a boon-companion and an esteemed fellow-worker in the quarries of the past. Of all his friends, perhaps, Thomson was the one whom Scott most esteemed as a table companion. “I pray you of all loves,” so ran his usual invitation form, “to dine with me to-morrow at half-past five.” There was George Cranstoun, afterwards Lord Corehouse, who belonged to a family which Lord Dudley told Mrs Dugald Stewart — herself a member of it — was reputed to consist of “the cleverest but the oddest people in the world.” Cranstoun was shy, proud, notably able, an excellent critic and a storehouse of good sense. There was James Skene of Rubislaw, who was especially a brother sportsman. There were young women, too, in the circle, who played a part in Scott’s education — Erskine’s sister, Mary Anne; Cranstoun’s sister, Jane Anne, who became Countess Purgstall; the young Lady Harden, the wife of the head of his sept, who lent him German books and corrected his Scotticisms, the “first woman of real fashion,” he used to say, “that took me up.”
[The Revolution in France]
These were the years of the Revolution in France, but to Scott it was no blissful dawn, as it appeared to the young Wordsworth, but a carnival of disorder distasteful to the lawyer, and a menace to his country hateful to the patriot. He was always wholly insensitive to the appeal of abstract ideas. As we shall see, he developed a strong interest in the technique of government and the practical workings of society, and few novelists have had such a masculine grasp of its economic framework. But the political ideas which were beginning to work like yeast in many of the younger minds in Scotland, problems like the ultimate purpose of human society, and the relation between the power of the state and the rights of the individual, left him cold. His mind was in a high degree concrete and practical; he might take arms against a proven abuse but not against a dubious theory, and his devotion to the past made him abhor all that was speculative and rootless. He had none of his countrymen’s love of metaphysics, which was generally linked to the Calvinism of their training. Scott had early put behind him Calvinism and all that it implied, whether exemplified in his father or his tutor. He had escaped that fate which befell so many Scottish children and which was to befall Stevenson, a “Covenanting childhood.” Though he was the great-grandson of the minister of Yarrow, the traditional Scottish theology did not affect him; he neither fell under its burden nor reacted against it; he simply gave it the go-by. The new seeds of thought sown by the French Revolution found a prepared soil in minds accustomed to the toils of religious speculation, minds which were compelled to work out for themselves a reasoned philosophy of life. Scott never felt the compulsion. In practice he regarded all men as his brothers, but he would have nothing to do with whimsies about the Brotherhood of Man. He was a Tory, not on the philosophical grounds of Burke and Bolingbroke, but because as a poet he loved the old ways, and as a practical man would conserve them, however logically indefensible, so long as they seemed to serve their purpose. So he joined heartily in breaking the heads of Irish students who sang rebel songs in the theatre, and, when the volunteering movement began, wrote to Kelso for “a strong gelding such as would suit a stalwart dragoon,” to purchase which he was prepared to sell his collection of Scottish coins.
Scott’s experience as a volunteer was of value, for it gave him a means of working off his high spirits, and enabled one who was man of action as well as man of letters to satisfy at a critical stage both demands of his nature. In 1794 his brother Thomas was enrolled as a grenadier in an Edinburgh regiment, but Scott’s own lameness prevented him joining the infantry. In 1797, however, he had his chance when a cavalry corps, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, was embodied and he became its quartermaster. Stevenson has told us that his dream was always to be “the leader of a great horde of irregular cavalry,” and that on his sick bed he saw himself “turning in the saddle to look back at my whole command (some five thousand strong) following me at a hand gallop up the road out of the burning valley by moonlight.” Such fancies were at the back of Scott’s head as he manoeuvred on Portobello sands, or took part in the policing of an occasional meal riot. Once in Paris the Tsar of Russia, observing his uniform, asked in what battles he had been engaged, and was told “in some slight actions, such as the battle of the Cross Causeway and the affair of Moredoun Mill.” He was an exemplary volunteer, playing the game according to its extreme rigour, his heart making martial music within him, and thereby preparing himself for the galloping speed of his verses; and his humour and ardour were the inspiration of his corps. Lord Cockburn, the Whig, has a pleasant note on a performance with which he did not wholly sympathize: —
It was not a duty with him, or a necessity, or a pastime, but an absolute passion, indulgence in which gratified his feudal taste for war, and his jovial sociableness. He drilled, and drank, and made songs, with a hearty conscientious earnestness which inspired or shamed everybody within the attraction. I do not know if it is usual, but his troop used to practise, individually, with the sabre at a turnip, which was stuck on the top of a staff, to represent a Frenchman, in front of the line. Every other trooper, when he set forward in his turn, was far less concerned about the success of his aim at the turnip, than about how he was to tumble. But Walter pricked forward gallantly, saying to himself: “Cut them down, the villains, cut them down!” and made his blow, which from his lameness was often an awkward one, cordially, muttering curses all the while at the detested enemy.
[Liddesdale]
He spent his holidays in exploring Scotland, not a common occupation in those days of comfortless travelling. He visited a dozen country houses from Angus to Lennox — Glamis, Meigle, Craighall, Newton, Tullibody, Cambusmore, Keir, Blairdrummond — which, being situated near the half-moon of the Highland Line, gave him some knowledge of the northern borderland. But it was to his own Border that he devoted most of his leisure. He had already explored the main valleys of Tweed and Teviot, and both sides of the central Cheviots, and now he began to push farther into the wild hill country that bounded the Debatable Land. In the autumn of 1792, along with Robert Shortreed, the Sheriff-substitute of Roxburghshire, he made his first incursion into Liddesdale, and thereafter for seven successive years the raid was annually repeated. In those days there were no roads for a wheeled carriage in Liddesdale, and therefore no tolls, and on the first journey the only expense which the travellers incurred was the feed of corn for their horses at Riccarton Mill. They slept in cot-houses or farms or manses as their road led them, and enjoyed an Homeric hospitality. Scott, as a young advocate, at first inspired some awe, till the herds and store-farmers discovered that “he was just a chield like ourselves.” A chield he was, for he could drink and jest, hunt and fish, walk and ride with any Dandie Dinmont. “Drunk or sober,” Shortreed reported, “he was aye the gentleman.” Family worship would suddenly be broken up by the arrival of a keg of smuggled brandy from the Solway shore, whisky punch was drunk out of milk-pails, and breakfast would consist of po
rter and devilled ducks. Those days in sun and rain on the Liddesdale bent and nights by the peat-fire were filled with more than roystering. Scott was getting deeper into the ancient Border life and enlarging his knowledge of mankind and himself: “makin’ himsell a’ the time,” said his companion. He was collecting ‘gabions’ too, like Border war horns and steel bonnets, and — more important — the songs and tunes and tales of a vanishing world.
His literary education followed the fashionable groove. Henry Mackenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling, read a paper to the Edinburgh Royal Society in April 1788 which started in the capital a craze for German literature. Scott in 1792 joined a class to study the subject, and a few years later was stirred to enthusiasm by hearing Mrs Barbauld read a translation of Bürger’s “Lenore.” Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, his friend’s sister, and the young Lady Harden encouraged his interest and corrected his German. It was the peak moment of Gothick extravagance, for in 1794 Mrs Radcliffe published her Mysteries of Udolpho, and a certain odd, undersized youth of twenty-one, Matthew Lewis by name, next year issued a tale, Ambrosia or The Monk, which took the town by storm. Scott fell deeply under the glamour of this pasteboard romance. “I wish to Heaven,” he declared to a friend, “I could get a skull and two cross-bones.” In October 1796 he published in a slim quarto his own verse translations of “Lenore” and “Der Wilde Jäger,” which were perhaps not much worse than the originals, and revealed some talent for fluent verse. Three months before a poet worth a thousand Bürgers had died in Dumfries, but Scott had forgotten all about Burns, of whom he had been thrilled to get a casual glimpse as a boy. He was passing through the inevitable stage in a literary education, when the foreign seems marvellous because it is strange, and the domestic humdrum because it is familiar. He was soon to return by way of Liddesdale and the ballads to his own kindly earth.