by John Buchan
Scott was now a man in early middle life, strong in body, unshaken in health, keeping down his inclination to heaviness by hard exercise, with an overflowing zest for both work and play. At Lasswade he had been in the habit of writing and reading late into the night, but, with his new accumulation of work, he realized that he must revise his ways, since the midnight oil gave him headaches. So at Ashestiel he rose at five, lit his own fire, if a fire were needed, and was at his desk in breeches and shooting jacket by six o’clock. There, with a dog at his feet, he worked till between nine and ten, when he breakfasted with his family. By then he had, in his own phrase, “broken the neck of the day’s work,” and after another couple of hours he was free. He was usually in the saddle by one o’clock. On a wet day he would work longer, so as to provide a reserve which he could draw upon when an expedition was planned which meant starting after breakfast. He answered every letter the day it arrived, and he kept his papers and books in perfect order, so that no time was wasted. On Sunday he read prayers in the parlour to his household and such neighbours as cared to attend; the horses were never taken out on that day, but, if fine, he and the family would picnic out of doors, and, if it rained, he would tell them Bible stories.
[Children]
There were now four children, Sophia, born in 1799, Walter (whom the family called “Gilnockie”), born in 1801, Anne, born in the beginning of 1803, and Charles, who was born the day before the Christmas of 1805. Scott was a great lover of the plain human child, such as were his own, for the young Scotts had none of the precocious brilliance of Marjorie Fleming. As soon as they could move about they became his companions, and were allowed to run in and out of his study as they pleased. He disliked the idea of boarding-schools, so the girls had a governess, while the boys went to the High School in Edinburgh, and at Ashestiel were tutored by their father, who yawned prodigiously over the Latin grammar. He taught them old songs and tales, played with them, rode and walked with them, and let them sit up to supper as a reward of virtue — that close companionship which is the greatest formative force in childhood. Above all he taught them his own cheerful stoicism.
There was one thing, however, on which he fixed his heart hardly less than the ancient Persians of the Cyropædia; like them, next to love of truth, he held love of horsemanship for the prime point of education. As soon as his eldest girl could sit a pony, she was made the regular attendant of his mountain rides; and they all, as they attained sufficient strength, had the like advancement. He taught them to think nothing of tumbles, and habituated them to his own reckless delight in perilous fords and flooded streams; and they all imbibed in great perfection his passion for horses — as well. I may venture to add, as his deep reverence for the more important article of that Persian training. “Without courage,” he said, “there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue.”
In that household there was little talk of modern books and none at all of the father’s work. Apart from the fact that he did not regard his own poetry as of supreme merit, Scott had the good sense to see that an atmosphere of domestic admiration is bad for both admired and admirer. James Ballantyne once asked Sophia what she thought of The Lady of the Lake, and her answer was, “Oh, I have not read it. Papa says there’s nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry.” Young Walter was dubbed the Lady of the Lake at the High School, and, not having heard of the work, assumed that he had been called a girl, and engaged in violent fisticuffs. But the supreme instance of that indifference to their father’s poetic fame which the father so notably shared is Lockhart’s tale of how the same boy was once cross-examined by one of Scott’s colleagues in the Court as to why people made so much fuss about his father. The child pondered for a little and then answered gravely: “It’s commonly him that sees the hare sitting.”
Next to the children in the family circle came the dogs, the first of the retinue which attended Scott all his days. There were a couple of greyhounds, Douglas and Percy, who leaped in and out of the open study window, and were noted performers on the hill. Especially there was Camp, the bull-terrier, to whom Scott always spoke as he would to a man, a wise old fellow as compared to the lighthearted grews. Camp began to fail in 1808, and could no longer accompany his master’s pony, but waited on the hearth-rug to greet his homecoming. The old dog died in Edinburgh in the beginning of the following year and was buried in the little garden behind the house in Castle Street, while the whole family stood in tears round the grave.
[Servants]
At Ashestiel, too, Scott laid the foundation of the clan of serving-men who played so large a part in his life. One day in the Selkirk sheriff-court a poacher called Tom Purdie came up for trial, and escaped on some formality. Scott liked his looks, and took him into his employ as shepherd, and presently Tom became the “laird’s man,” factotum, guardian and affectionate tyrant — a familiar Scots relationship. He was the most faithful of henchmen, and his manner was a kind of genial ferocity. Years later, when Tom was fifty-seven, Scott drew what seems to be his portrait in Redgauntlet: “His brow was not much furrowed, and his jet-black hair was only grizzled, not whitened, by the advance of age.... Though rather undersized, he had very broad shoulders, was square made, thin-flanked, and apparently combined in his frame muscular strength and activity.... A hard and harsh countenance, eyes far sunk under projecting eyebrows which were grizzled like his hair, a wide mouth furnished from ear to ear with a range of unimpaired teeth of uncommon whiteness, and of a size and breadth which might have become the jaws of an ogre.” Then there was Tom Purdie’s brother-in-law, Peter Mathieson, the coachman, who was a safer charioteer in the rough fords of Tweed than his master. Nor must the portly butler be omitted, John Macbeth, who regarded with disfavour those guests who kept Scott up into the small hours over rummers of toddy.
There was a little farm at Ashestiel on which Scott tried his amateur’s hand at sheep. When he first took the place, as he wrote to Ellis, “long sheep and short sheep, and tups, and gimmers, and hogs, and dinmonts made a perfect sheepfold of my understanding.” To begin with he had a notion of getting James Hogg to superintend the business, which would have led to disaster, for Hogg, though he wrote a book on the diseases of sheep, was a muddler in practice. Mrs Scott had a chicken-run, which was devastated by a formidable local breed of wild-cat. His own main interest was forestry, and at Ashestiel, though the land was only leased, he began those experiments in planting which were later to clothe the Abbotsford braes. Scott was never intended for a farmer, for, as he told Joanna Baillie, it gave him no pleasure to see his turnips better than his neighbour’s, and he preferred his shearers to be happy rather than efficient. All his employees were sportsmen—”my hind shall kill a salmon, and my plough-boy find a hare sitting with any man in the Forest” — and he would not have had it otherwise.
Sport, indeed, was, apart from letters, the serious business of Ashestiel. Scott liked to be ten hours a day in the open air, shooting, fishing, coursing and riding, a “rattle-skulled half-lawyer, half-sportsman,” as he called himself. In fishing he was no great performer in the orthodox parts, but he loved to “burn the water” of an autumn night, when the salmon were “turning up their sides like swine.” On such occasions he was as much in the river as out of it, and indeed he seems to have had an extraordinary talent for falling into fords and pools and bogs and emerging unharmed. He was constantly wet, and rarely troubled to change, thereby sowing the seeds of his later rheumatism. He was noted for the boldness of his riding in a countryside of bold riders. It was a common prophecy that some day he would be brought home with his feet foremost. He rode horses which no one else could mount, and he was also an assiduous horse-master, loving the ritual of their management. “Mr Scott, that’s the maddest deil o’ a beast,” Hogg cried on one occasion. “Can ye no’ gar him tak’ a wee mair time? He’s just out o’ ae lair intil another wi’ ye.”
In those happy days, quartering the Border hills, mixing freely with all class
es, sitting as judge in the little sheriff-court, or in his seat below the Edinburgh Bench watching that panorama of the law which is a reflex of the panorama of life, Scott was amassing stores of knowledge which needed for their outlet something greater than romantic lays. The novelist was in the making. What was taken in by the eye was ruminated upon in the long sessions of thought which fall to those who tramp the moors or watch by the riverside. The creative imagination was beginning its work. “While Tom marks out a dyke or a drain as I directed him, my fancy may be running its ain riggs in another world.”
CHAPTER V. — FAREWELL TO POESY (1810-1814)
I
In the envoy to The Lady of the Lake, when the Minstrel bids farewell to his harp, there are these lines: —
Much have I owed thy strains on life’s long way,
Through secret woes the world has never known,
When on the weary night dawn’d wearier day
And bitterer was the grief devour’d alone.
That I o’erlive such woes, Enchantress! is thine own.
The reference is, of course, to his old love affair with Williamina Stuart, but there may be other things included, for Scott had many thorns in his bed of life. One was his kindred. For as he advanced in the world his brothers declined.
[Thomas and Daniel Scott]
Thomas, who had inherited the family business and had been his brother’s chief client, so mismanaged his affairs that he became insolvent. He had been appointed the Edinburgh “doer” for the Abercorn estate, and Scott, since he had been one of his guarantors, was compelled to take a hand in clearing up the mess, for which settlement, as we have seen, Constable’s advance on Marmion fell in opportunely. Thomas, pending an arrangement with his creditors, was compelled to withdraw to the sanctuary of the Isle of Man, where Scott tried to persuade him to cultivate letters and to become one of the Quarterly’s contributors. Thomas, however, preferred to dabble in soldiering, took a hand in raising the new Manx Fusiliers, and ultimately became paymaster of the 70th Regiment. Presently his brotherly kindness involved Scott in an unpleasant affair. When Thomas’s finances grew embarrassed, a subordinate post in the Court became vacant to which Scott had the right of presentation. He promoted a veteran official, but gave his brother the smaller office thus vacated, worth about £250 a year. The duties were the merest routine, and could be performed, as they had often been in the past, by deputy, so Thomas in the Isle of Man could still be the nominal holder and draw the salary. But, when the appointment was made, a Commission of Judicature was at work, pruning some of the dead wood from the tree of Scots law, and it was certain that Thomas’s little sinecure would be one of the first to disappear. Sure enough the Commission recommended it for abolition, and assessed the compensation to the holder at £130 per annum. This was a loss to the refugee Thomas, which Scott did his best to make up to him, but worse was to follow. The bill, embodying the Commission’s findings, came before the House of Lords in 1810, and two Whig peers, Lord Lauderdale and Lord Holland, attacked the proposed compensation as a flagrant Tory job, arguing that Thomas had been appointed when the end of the office was foreseen, and that the Isle of Man was not the best place for performing the work of an Edinburgh Court official. The bill duly passed, but Scott was furious at the insult. The thing had been a job, no doubt, but such jobs were sanctioned by long custom, and he believed that, in refusing to appoint his brother to the better paid post, he had behaved with quixotic scrupulousness. Lauderdale was a crazy Jacobin, but Holland should have known better, and he markedly cut the latter nobleman at a dinner of the Friday Club.
The case of his youngest brother was a far deeper vexation. Daniel Scott, having taken to evil courses, was shipped off to the West Indies. But Jamaica proved no cure, he went downhill in mind and body, and during a negro rebellion on the plantation where he was employed he did not show the family courage. He returned home with this stigma on his name, was taken into his mother’s house, and soon died. Scott would not see him; he called him his “relative,” not his brother; he declined to go to his funeral or wear mourning for him. In those high-flying days he could forgive most faults, but not cowardice, and he felt that by the unhappy Dan the family scutcheon had been indelibly stained. It was almost the only case where Scott’s abundant charity failed him. The years were to bring him to a humaner mind, and in The Fair Maid of Perth he attempted in his account of Conachar the justification of a temporary coward, an expiation, he told Lockhart, to the manes of poor Dan. “I have now learned to have more tolerance and compassion than I had in those days.”
But the sore which never ceased to gall the steed was the long-drawn bickering with his publishers, and all that it involved. We have seen his quarrel with Constable over the Edinburgh, but there was more than politics in the disagreement. Constable was well enough in his way — he was a shrewd man with some pretensions to manners, but he had a partner whom Scott could not abide. This was one Alexander Gibson Hunter, an Angus laird who had a good head for figures and a rough tongue, and who seemed to Scott to reduce every question to a matter of pounds and pence. Hunter was undoubtedly impetuous and plain-spoken, and had the insensitiveness of a gross eater and drinker; but his letters reveal him as a man of education and judgment, and something very far from the mere parsimonious tradesman. When Scott showed a tendency to dally with John Murray, Hunter demanded, not unnaturally, that he should first finish his Swift, for which Constable had paid so monstrous a price. The consequence was a complete estrangement. The oak, in Constable’s phrase, considered that it could now support itself. Scott was determined to cut the comb of a firm which had wounded his feelings and talked to him like a huckster. He was not content to be his own printer, but with the assistance of John Murray and his London friends he would be his own publisher.
[John Ballantyne]
Now James Ballantyne had a younger brother, John by name, who had begun life in his father’s shop, had spent some time in business in London, had returned to the Kelso counter where he had not prospered, and was now chief clerk in the Canongate printing-house. John was a small vivacious creature, as lean as his brother was plump, with the large melting eyes and the nervous hilarity of the consumptive. He was a wag and a mimic, could sing an excellent song — the “Cobbler of Kelso” was his masterpiece — loved all forms of sport, and had a taste for raffish dandyism. He had not much education, but he was full of ideas, usually bad ones; and a smattering of banking knowledge which he had picked up, made him pose as the complete financier. It would be hard to imagine a more dangerous business ally, but Scott, in his fit of pique, resolved to set up the two brothers in a publishing business that should rival Constable’s. In July 1809 the firm of John Ballantyne and Co., publishers, opened in Hanover Street. Scott contributed one half of the capital and advanced the money for the fourth, which was John’s portion.
The venture is hard to defend on any ground of common sense. It was undertaken in a not very justifiable fit of temper. Constable had not behaved ill; indeed to the end of his life his behaviour to Scott was consistently generous and loyal. He was not responsible for the views of his Edinburgh contributors, and, even if he had been, the offence was amply avenged by the setting up of the new Quarterly. No doubt his partner was tactless, but Hunter’s bad temper had some justification, and his warning to Scott against making his name too cheap was timely and wise. The truth is that Scott had no real affection for Constable, though he respected his abilities. The “Emperor” was not the kind of man who appealed to him. He did not regard him as an equal in birth and education, moving on the same plane as Erskine and Clerk and Morritt. Nor could he patronize him as he patronized James the plump and John the lean, for whom he had the pet names of “Aldiborontiphoscophornio” and “Rigdumfunnidos.” He could work comfortably with only two types of man — his indubitable equals and those upon whom he could condescend. Constable he did not regard as an equal, and Constable would not allow himself to be patronized. Scott loved “characters,” and th
e Ballantynes were such, which Constable emphatically was not; he was the ambitious, four-square, normal, middle-class merchant, whose value in his calmer moments Scott willingly recognized. But now he was not calm. “Convince my understanding,” he once wrote, “and I am perfectly docile; stir my passions by coldness or affronts and the devil would not drive me from my purpose.” He believed that he had had coldness from Constable and affronts from Hunter.
On the business side the enterprise was a wild folly. The printing concern had been more or less limited in its liability. James Ballantyne might be compelled now and then to await the booksellers’ convenience in the settlement of an account, but the printing-house worked for orders and knew within reasonable limits its commitments. But this safeguard disappeared once it became also a publishing house. It had now to undertake liabilities to authors, to paper-makers and binders, and to its own printing-house, and it had to meet them from the public sale of its productions. No more firm orders for the presses from the publishers, for it was its own publisher. In the case of unsuccessful books it would be left with a load of stock. A consistently successful list would involve the frequent raising of fresh capital, since the profits, being belated in their realization, would not suffice; an unsuccessful list would load it with debt. Scott embarked in it the greater part of his recent literary earnings, but as the firm extended its operations, however successful these might be, more capital would be needed. If it had many failures there would be liabilities and no profits to meet them, and that meant recourse to Scott himself, and to the crazy system of bills and counter bills then in vogue among the Scottish banks.