by John Buchan
But, as a matter of plain fact the firm could not succeed, because no one of the partners understood the craft of publishing. James Ballantyne was first and last a printer; he had a printer’s taste in types and some literary judgment, but no under standing of finance; John was a will-o’-the-wisp, light-headed and irresponsible, whose chief talent lay in the dubious game of obtaining credit. Neither had any notion of the rudiments of sound trading. Scott could not oversee the details, but he believed that he had an instinct for what the public wanted — true enough, but he needed Constable’s good sense to make that instinct marketable. He was apt to assume that because his own writings interested the multitude, all that interested himself would also infallibly attract other people. Moreover he had his ragged regiment of Parnassus to provide for. So he planted upon the new firm’s history of the Culdees which no one could read, and an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher by an impecunious and distraught German, of whom Constable had very properly fought shy.
[The publishing firm]
The new firm started with a good connexion among the London booksellers, and especially with John Murray. It published The Lady of the Lake, a profitable venture. But before the end of 1810 the business was becoming embarrassed, and the two yearly volumes of the new Edinburgh Annual Register were beyond the capacity of the public to absorb. John Ballantyne was an adept at the vicious practice by which two firms, whose personnel and assets were the same, could obtain credit by backing each other’s bills. But there were limits to this device, and Scott’s life was constantly harassed by demands for a few hundreds here and a few hundreds there to tide over an awkward moment. He found himself becoming the milch-cow of a firm from which he could never obtain a balance-sheet or a plain statement of profit and loss. But his affection for the partners prevented his irritation resulting in any practical reform. John’s melting eye and James’s snuffy optimism always induced him to postpone the day of account-taking.
[1810-11]
Yet he was profoundly uneasy, and the dread of what might be the true state of the Hanover Street ledgers came between him and his comfort. The legal side of his work too, promised difficulties, for he foresaw and disliked certain imminent judicial innovations. By November 1810 the exhilaration caused by the success of The Lady of the Lake had died away and he was seriously contemplating a complete change of life. He toyed with the notion of becoming a high Indian official. To his brother Thomas he wrote: “I have no objection to tell you in confidence that, were Dundas (Lord Melville) to go out as Governor-General to India and were he willing to take me with him in a good situation, I would not hesitate to pitch the Court of Session and the booksellers to the Devil, and try my fortune in another climate.” He was not yet forty, still young enough to pull up his roots, and he may have dreamed of a taste of that life of action for which he had always hankered, and the possibility of returning in a few years with a fortune which would enable him to live as he desired for the rest of his days.
But in the summer of the following year Lord Melville died, and the Indian project had, perforce, to be forgotten. Scott was a careful business man, as the keeping of his own private accounts shows, but he had a curious shrinking from cross-examining his partners, partly perhaps because he had provided nearly all the capital and regarded them as his dependents and retainers. Towards retainers he could not behave otherwise than royally. And yet he was virtually the sole partner and the sole capitalist in both the printing and the publishing businesses; James and John were men of straw, and disaster would fall wholly on his shoulders. Strange that such a man with such a sword hanging over him did not attempt to envisage the truth. The firm paid away in dividends every penny it earned and was consequently without adequate capital and without reserves. Profits, often delusive profits, were drawn out and spent as soon as they accrued. “The large sums received,” James Ballantyne confessed, “never formed an addition to stock. In fact they were all expended by the partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly adopted my brother John’s sanguine results.”
Meantime Scott must earn money and do more than toil at his edition of Swift. In 1811 he published The Vision of Don Roderick, an exercise in the Spenserian stanza, the profits of which went to the relief of the sufferers from Masséna’s campaign in Portugal. He had another poem in his head on an English subject, which he believed would please. Already in 1810 he had written a few prose chapters in a new vein — an attempt at a novel, but James Ballantyne had received them tepidly and they had been laid aside. But during the course of the year 1811 he began to see more light in his future. A superannuation scheme had been introduced into the Scottish Courts, which meant that the emoluments of his Clerkship of Session would soon be his own, and that from the first day of 1812 he would have an official salary of £1300 a year. All his own fortune and past earnings were in the Ballantyne firm, but with his sheriffdom and his wife’s income he could now count on a certain £2000 a year — a very substantial revenue in those days for a country gentleman. Moreover, even if there were no printing or publishing profits, he could reckon on making at least a thousand a year by his pen. The skies cleared for him, his spirits rose, and he could turn his mind to what had long been a darling scheme. The lease of Ashestiel was nearly up; he would purchase a small lairdship and build himself a house.
[Scott leaves Ashestiel]
His thoughts turned to the wider part of the Tweed valley, the opening of that champaign country which had always been his dream. On the road between Melrose and Selkirk, overlooking Tweed a little above where it receives the Gala, was the site of the last clan battle in Border history, that fought in 1526 between the Kers and the Scotts. The spot, too, was in the heart of the world of fairy legend. There was a little farm there of about a hundred acres, called Cartley Hole, belonging to Dr Douglas, the minister of Galashiels. The buildings were poor, and the land consisted of a bit of marshy haugh, some rough hill pastures, and a solitary plantation of ragged firs. It looked out upon low moorish uplands and was without obvious picturesqueness, except for the noble streams of Tweed at its door. But it was a place which could be “made,” and Scott had always in him much of the pioneer. He paid an astonishing price for it, no less than £4000, and to meet the purchase he borrowed £2000 from his elder brother John, and £2000 from the Ballantyne firm on the security of a poem of which he had not yet written a line. This last was a fateful step. For the first time he put Pegasus between the shafts, and counted upon literature to meet the normal expenses of his life.
His ambition was modest. He wanted no more than a country cottage to comply with his obligations as Sheriff, where he could spend the vacations, potter about with a little forestry, and entertain an occasional friend; a second Ashestiel, but his very own. He wrote to Joanna Baillie: “My present intention is to have only two spare bedrooms, with dressing-rooms, each of which will have at a pinch a couch bed; but I cannot relinquish my Border principle of accommodating all the cousins and duniwastles, who will rather sleep on chairs, and on the floor, and in the hay-loft, than be absent when folks are gathered together; and truly I think Ashestiel was very like the tent of Paribanou, in the Arabian Nights, that suited alike all numbers of company equally; ten people fill it at any time, and I remember its lodging thirty-two without any complaint.”
[Beginning of Abbotsford]
An architect was engaged, masons were set to work, and in London Scott’s friend Daniel Terry, the actor, busied himself in buying “auld knicknackets” for the new cottage. It was to be called Abbotsford, since there was a ford in Tweed below it, and the land had once belonged to Melrose Abbey. One day in the end of May 1812, Scott left Ashestiel, with many a long look behind him, and took up his quarters in what had been the farmhouse of Cartley Hole amid the din and dust of the new building. A letter to Lady Alvanley describes the “flitting”:
The neighbours have been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets and lances made a very cons
picuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient Border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan, attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading poneys, greyhounds and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gypsy groups of Callot upon their march.
II
The new home, thus light-heartedly entered, was not at first to be a domain of peace. The summer of 1812 was a busy season. Scott spent every week-end and all the vacations at Abbotsford, where he was out most of the day superintending his new plantations of oaks and Spanish chestnuts, and stringing verses which he wrote down when he got to his desk. That desk stood in a corner of the single living-room of the old farm, which had to serve for drawing-room, dining-room, school-room and study. “As for the house and the poem, there are twelve masons hammering at the one, and one poor noddle at the other.” The poem was Rokeby, which he had begun at Ashestiel, a romance of Cavalier and Roundhead which, being laid in an English scene, would, he hoped, attract a wider public than the Scots pieces. He devoted especial care to its composition, for his financial future seemed to depend upon its success. He had written to his friend Morritt, the squire of Rokeby, for books and information. “Pray help me in this — by truth, or fiction, or tradition — I care not which, if it be picturesque.” He destroyed his draft of the first canto, because he felt that he had corrected all the spirit out of it. In the autumn he and his wife visited Teesdale to revive his memories, and he took immense pains with the local details. He made notes of the flowers in the Brignall quarries, and, when Morritt protested against such scrupulosity, made the remarkable answer: —
That in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his description, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination, would find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth. Besides which, local names and peculiarities make a fictitious story look so much better in the face.
These novel solicitudes show how much Scott felt to be at stake in the new poem.
But the success, æsthetic and commercial, of Rokeby, which was published in the last days of 1812, was not “answerable to the honesty and simplicity of the design.” The story limped; the elaborate landscape did not delight and convince as the less studied Border and Highland scenes had delighted; the poet seemed to have left his [Greek: physíxoos aia] behind him. Morritt thought it the best of the poems, but the world did not endorse his view. Scott himself called it a “pseudo-romance of pseudo-chivalry,” and we need not cavil at the description. Yet it had many fine things, some of them new and unexpected. Its lyrics “Brignall Banks” and “Allen-a-dale” and “A weary lot is thine, fair maid,” were the best he had yet written, and to the discerning it was clear that a man who could create a character like Bertram — whom Swinburne pronounced “a figure alive to the very finger tips” — had all the novelist’s gifts. Lockhart has said with justice that the substance of Rokeby would have made a great prose romance. But as a poem it was a comparative failure. There were profits indeed, and the Ballantyne firm was recouped for its advance, but the profits were not on the old scale. Others had stolen the seed and were growing the flower, and the public ear was getting a little dulled to his octosyllables. During the composition of Rokeby Scott had amused himself by scribbling another poem, The Bridal of Triermain, which was published anonymously in March 1813, as a piece of mystification. He wanted it to be attributed to Erskine, but only George Ellis in the Quarterly was deceived, and presently it was issued under Scott’s name. It is a curious production, a blend of Tom Moore and himself in his minor vein, but it contains eight of his most haunting lines: —
Bewcastle now must keep the hold,
Speir-Adam’s steeds must bide in stall,
Of Hartley-burn the bowmen bold
Must only shoot from battled wall;
And Liddesdale may buckle spur,
And Teviot now may belt the brand,
Taras and Ewes keep nightly stir,
And Eskdale foray Cumberland.
The year 1813 therefore opened in disappointment, and the shadows darkened as the summer advanced. It was plain to Scott that his vogue as a poet was declining. Moore in the Twopenny Post-Bag had made fun of Rokeby, and suggested that Scott was working his way south through the various gentlemen’s seats, preparing a metrical guide to the best houses. If people could talk thus, his verse must have lost its glamour. Moreover, a new star had appeared in the firmament. Byron in 1812 published the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which took the town by storm. Three years before, at Buchanan, Scott had read English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and the phrase “Apollo’s venal son” had rankled. “It is funny enough,” he wrote to Southey, “to see a whelp of a young Lord Byron abusing me, of whose circumstances he knows nothing, for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my pen. God help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws. I can assure the noble imp of fame that it is not my fault that I was not born to a park and £5000 a year.” But Childe Harold profoundly impressed one who never allowed a private grievance to warp his literary judgment. He wrote to Joanna Baillie urging her to read it, though he disliked its misanthropy and questioned its morals. Presently John Murray reported a conversation with the author, who had quoted and endorsed some friendly remarks of the Prince Regent on Scott, and the latter took the occasion to open a correspondence with his former assailant. He praised the new poem, and explained the circumstances under which Marmion had been published and on which Byron had based his charge of venality. Scott heeded ordinary criticism not at all, but he did not like to be misunderstood by those whom he admired. Byron replied in the friendliest spirit, and recapitulated all the pleasant things which the Prince Regent had said. It was the beginning of a correspondence which did equal credit to both. But the mere fact that he now numbered Byron among his friends sharpened the realization that here was a rival against whom he could not stand. How could a middle-aged Scottish lawyer compete with the romantically-minded against a young and handsome lordling, who had about him the glamour of a wild life and a broken heart? How could the homely glens of his own land vie with the glittering cities of the South and the magic of the ancient East? Scott beheld a large part of his occupation gone.
[The Ballantyne Difficulties]
Yet he had never had greater need to earn money, for in 1813 the affairs of the Ballantyne firm were moving straight to disaster. That year saw the last throes of the struggle with Napoleon, as well as a fantastic war with the United States. In Britain prices soared, the people were starving and mutinous, bankruptcies filled the Gazette, and even firms of ancient stability were tottering. In such yeasty waters the Ballantyne cockle-shell could not hope to live. Morritt and others had backed its bills, but credit was now at an end. Wherever Scott went, at Abbotsford, at Drumlanrig, at Rokeby, he was pursued by the wailful choir of the brethren. At last his even temper cracked, and in May he forced himself to a resolution which he should have taken long before. The publishing business, which was the more speculative one, must be wound up. But how was this to be done without that bankruptcy which Edinburgh gossip had long anticipated? Bankruptcy could not be thought of, for it would reveal the Sheriff of the Forest, the Clerk of Court, and the world-famous poet as the chief partner in a wild-cat concern, and would involve the forced sale of valuable copyrights. The sole hope lay in some brother publisher who would take the reconstruction in hand, and that publisher could only be Constable. The obnoxious H
unter was now dead, and Constable had got as partners a well-mannered Writer to the Signet, Mr Cathcart, and Cathcart’s brother-in-law, a discreet young man named Robert Cadell. Scott swallowed his pride, and approached the friend with whom four years before he had quarrelled.
Constable was willing to help — on his own terms. The first question was how to surmount the immediate trouble. He would not take over the disastrous Annual Register, which had been losing a steady thousand a year, but he would buy a quarter share in the Rokeby copyright, and some of the Ballantyne stock, thereby helping the firm to the extent of £2000. He promised also to make a careful examination of the whole position. His report came in August and it was not cheerful. The two concerns, taken together, might be just solvent, assets and liabilities balancing at about £15,000, but in an immediate winding up the assets would be difficult to realize. Four thousand pounds must be got at once, and he himself was not in a position to provide the sum. Scott must either raise the money or part with his share in the copyrights. After an anxious week help was forthcoming from the young Duke of Buccleuch, who guaranteed Scott’s overdraft for £4000. Then in October came the victories of Leipzig and Vittoria, business revived in Britain, credit became easier, and the Ballantyne firm was saved. The publishing business was kept alive only till its stock could be realized, and John Ballantyne migrated to the more suitable activities of an auctioneer. Scott at one moment decided to cut his connexion with the printing business also (which would have involved its winding up), but was prevented by his care for James Ballantyne’s interests and his disinclination to lose the considerable sum he had already invested in it.
The misfortune was that, though distracted by worries, he did not fully realize the gravity of the crisis through which he had passed. That at the worst moment he should have continued to lend money to impecunious friends may be set down to his credit, but he was also commissioning Terry in London to buy him old armour, and he had begun to negotiate for the ground which ran back behind Abbotsford to Cauldshiels loch. Land hunger had laid its spell on him. The British victories on the Continent had sent his spirits soaring, and once again the future seemed rosy. He was quit for the moment of the Ballantyne incubus, and would find a way to live at Abbotsford like a gentleman. There were many shots in the locker — principally a new poem of the Highlands which he had begun, to be called The Lord of the Isles. Surely the great Bruce would make as strong an appeal to the world as any Greek bandit or turbaned Mussulman.