Ragged Lion

by Allan Massie

  Yet the truth may simply be that the truth is never ascertainable in such matters. Who can determine, who can track, the vagaries of the heart? It is one reason why I have fought shy of any profound attempt at the delineation of the tender passion in my novels: that I do not believe in answers, or am at least aware of my inability to discern them.

  I was desolate, heart-broken for two years. Then my heart was handsomely pieced together. Nevertheless the crack will be with me till my dying day. It is like an old plate, good enough to use for the family breakfast table, but banished when guests are present. Some of my friends were anxious, as friends are on such occasions, for my sanity. It was reported to me that one said to another, ‘I shudder at the violence of his most irritable and ungovernable mind.’ His fears were groundless or at least exaggerated. The truth is that melancholy, by which I mean love-melancholy, is not so deeply seated in a robust and elastic mind as the sentimental school of novelists would have us suppose. It gives, it yields, to the busy hum of life. I wrote verses to Williamina, and that eased my pain.

  The violet in her greenwood bower,

  Where birchen boughs with hazels mingle,

  May boast itself the fairest flower

  In glen, or copse, or forest dingle.

  Though fair her gems of azure hue

  Beneath the dewdrop’s weight declining

  I’ve seen an eye of lovelier blue,

  More sweet through watery lustre shining

  The summer sun that dew shall dry,

  Ere yet the day be passed its morrow;

  Nor longer in my false love’s eye

  Remained the tear of parting sorrow . . .

  It was false itself to call her my ‘false love’, but poets maun be permitted their lies, and convention insists that any lost love has played the poet false.

  There is another convention: that the poet can rid himself of a sentiment by putting it in verse. Alas, that too is false. It so happens that as a young lover I carved Williamina’s name on the turf at the castle-gate in St Andrews, and returning there, half a lifetime later, when the poor lass was already in the grave, I sat on a nearby gravestone, and wondered why the name should still agitate my heart. Then, not long syne, with Williamina sixteen, seventeen, years dead, I met old Lady Jane at a reception in Edinburgh; and it was as if the tomb opened and the very grave surrendered its dead, for I fairly softened myself, like a daft old fool, with recalling stories and fond memories, and jests and smiles and all the pleasures and pains of our long-departed social intercourse, till I was fit for nothing but shedding tears and repeating sad verses the whole night long. Sad work, sad work. The very grave yawning, Eurydice sought for, and time rolls back these thirty years to add to my perplexities.

  But youth is resilient. ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love,’ as brave Rosalind has it. The cracked plate made a show of sorts. Some half-dozen months after Williamina wed Sir William, I made a tour of the English lakes with my friend Adam Ferguson (son of the philosopher) and my brother John. Something of the elder Ferguson’s philosophy had rubbed off on young Adam, and it may be by extension on me. No matter how it happened, but my spirits were buoyant as they have usually been when engaged on travel. In the little watering-place of Gilsland, pretty as a miniature of Highland scenery, I came upon a young lady, pretty as a miniature herself. She was brown and tawny where Williamina was pink and fair. She had more than a suspicion of a foreign accent, light as a robin, whereas Williamina spoke with an equal lightness, but slowly, with the thoughtfulness of that north-east corner of Scotland, hard-won from nature, from which she hailed. This young lady was the daughter of a French refugee, a royalist and a Huguenot from Lyon. Her name was Charlotte Charpentier, and her guardian in this country – the father being dead – was Lord Downshire. We exchanged glances, and she did not lower her eyes in any pretended bashfulness. We fell into conversation, and discovered that we agreed well, though there were few subjects beyond pleasantries on which we found that we cared to converse. (How often in the years to come I have heard her say, ‘Scott, I do not think thoughtful people can ever be truly happy.’ Sometimes, to amuse me, or attract more attention for the company, she would exaggerate the foreignness of her accent and drop the h from happy.) Our first encounter took place at a ball at which I wore my uniform of the Edinburgh Volunteer Light Horse. It delighted her to see men in full regimentals. I knew from earliest conversations that our very differences, allied to her good sense and lively humour, made it possible that we should live contentedly together. I proposed; she accepted me without any missish demur or pretence that my offer had so taken her by surprise that she would require to think about it. Her guardian’s consent was obtained; my father, alas in poor health with death staring him in the face, approved the thought that his gangrel loon was on the point of settling down, and the deed was accomplished. We were married in St Mary’s Church, Carlisle, on Christmas Eve 1797, and I have never regretted it.

  Years later, consulted by my friend Lady Abercorn about the proposed engagement of one of her children, and the advantages of a love-match as opposed to an arranged marriage, I wrote:

  Mrs Scott’s match and mine was of our own making, and proceeded from the most sincere affection on both sides, which has rather increased than diminished during twelve years of marriage. But it was something short of love in all its forms, which I suspect people only feel once in all their lives, folk who have been nearly drowned in bathing rarely venturing a second time out of their depth . . .

  My poor Charlotte. I owe much happiness to her, and I do not believe I ever caused her great pain. Perhaps that is as much as any husband can hope to say, and more than most can truthfully claim. She did not enter my dreams. She had no interest in what I wrote, and indeed I can conceive nothing more destructive of domestic happiness for an author than a bluestocking of a wife who subjects all his scribblings to the sort of criticism that belongs properly to the reviews. We understood each other, I believe, or at the very least she understood as much of me as I cared to have understood.

  When she lay on her deathbed, those brown sparkling eyes, which once caused one of our sons to tell her that what he admired most in her was ‘her laughing philosophy’, now dulled with pain and with the laudanum they had given her to try to alleviate her suffering, she yet raised her head from the pillow, and with a smile and a sigh, said reproachfully, ‘you all ‘ave such melancholy faces’.

  I trust that when my time comes to depart I may equal her Roman stoicism, a stoicism which could surprise only those whose sole knowledge of her was as a bright social being.

  I have never admired the uxorious man, for there are parts of a man’s life which should properly remain separate from a woman’s; and the uxorious man diminishes himself and denies a large part of his nature, but I contemn the bad, the careless, and the selfish husband utterly, and I trust I may acquit myself of this charge.

  Indeed I may go further. The time may come in this disjointed memoir, written to staunch the pain of these hours of grievous fortune, when I choose to talk, as I have ever shrunk from talking, about the works that have proceeded from my imagination; but I shall say this now. Critics have complained that my heroines are for the most part dull. So they are, I fear, plaguey dull. It is strange, for I have lived much of my life among fine ladies, ladies of quality; and am no great hand at depicting them in my novels. The reason is plain, though perhaps hidden from my critics. It is that I do not hear them talk. They do not speak to my imagination, and when a character fails to do that, the words lie leaden on the page. Yet when I happen on an old crone like Madge Wildfire or Meg Merrilees, my prose takes wing. Perhaps my father was right when he said I was born to be a strolling pedlar. That was in the time of my youth when I spent whole days, even weeks, wandering the hills, with no purpose but movement and the making of strange acquaintances. ‘Whaur’s Wattie?’ they would speir at home. ‘Somewhere atween the Tweed and the Pentlands.’ The accusa
tion of being a strolling pedlar did not and does not, displease me, for what, when all is said and done, is a minstrel and story-teller but a species of pedlar?

  And then Jeannie Deans: her douce scrupulous Presbyterian voice conceals its warm humanity aneath a dour rectitude. When I was writing The Heart of Midlothian, her voice dinged in my lugs. Oh, Jeannie, you are worth a clutch of my fine ladies.

  If Charlotte had known Jeannie, she would have admired her character, but she would not have been comfortable with it, and Williamina – Williamina would have shaken that bonny head and wondered at the strange airt my imagination led me in. But then, if I had married Williamina, would it have remained active, or would I have directed myself with more determination towards my career in the Law? Married to her, might I have become Lord President of the Court of Session? Strange are the ways of Providence, that bitter disappointment and heartbreak can drive a man to fulfil himself in other ways.

  5

  On Mortality, 1826

  When I cast back over the past in this manner, my pen runs with its old easy gait. I have ever been a rapid writer, rarely pausing in my execution, a habit or attribute that I credit to my practice of telling myself stories in the hour before I rise from my bed, so that the day’s work is half-formed before ever I settle myself at my desk. When I have gone most flowingly at my task, the words have run like the Tweed in spate, for it has aye been as if I was remembering rather than inventing.

  But now, in these dark watches, as the wind rattles the lums, and the moon scuds along the roof-tops, and I wait, sleepless, for another dawn that promises nothing but more toil, my thoughts move with an old man’s nervous and hesitating step. There is something gruesome about the dawn sky in a city: oh to be on the braes above Abbotsford, and hear the laverock and the whaups. But I am unjust; the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, or in the city sky, but in myself.

  I look mortality in the face.

  I dreamed last night I walked with death

  Upon a barren strand

  The wind blew chill, and cold his breath;

  I felt his fleshless hand.

  I have never said, like medieval folk, ‘timor mortis conturbat me’, for I have seen too many good Christian deaths to fear the hour when we are led like little children into the dark. What disturbs me and keeps me from my bed, or from sleep when I venture there, is something both more awful and less absolute than death. It is easy to say ‘Be absolute for death. Or life or death shall thereby be the sweeter.’ It is an undiscovered country, and if no traveller returns from its bourn, why then . . . but these are foolish night thoughts. It is Lear’s cry, ‘Let me not be mad, sweet heaven,’ that rings in my ears.

  How the world would wonder, and many laugh, if they could see me in this dark wood: Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, of Abbotsford, Sheriff of Selkirkshire, known – I do not flatter myself – for robust sanity, a man fixed in his own mind, and therefore in the eyes of others, for courage in adversity. Courage in adversity: that’s the thing to keep a hold of. But I think of Bothwell chained in that dungeon in that Danish castle, the name of which I forget. I have always prided myself on my memory. It is on account of its excellence that I have aye been able to work so fast. Where other men have been delayed in their labours by the necessity of consulting books to mak siccar of their references, I have drawn them up from what seemed to me an inexhaustible well. And now the springs have begun to run dry. That frightens me.

  I spent years once preparing a complete edition of Swift, solid labour, for though I admire the manner of his writing beyond measure, and though the matter often pleased me on account of his power of invention and his gift for the unexpected yoking together of otherwise discordant ideas, it was still hard pounding because his misanthropy revolted me: and now all that comes to mind, or rather the first thing that comes to mind when I think of him, is that he was a poor devil who feared he would die from the top, his mind gone; and that his fears were confirmed.

  I have always accounted myself a good Christian – saving always the reservation that I would not make a parade of Christian virtues. ‘When you pray, do not pray as the Pharisees do . . .’ I have ever abhorred enthusiasm, and indeed when I abandoned the Established Church of Scotland to adhere to the Episcopal Kirk, I gave it as my reason that as an Episcopalian, I did not have to gang to the kirk sae often. There were other reasons, which I may call historical-political, and I have sympathy too with Charles II who became a Roman Catholic because he said it was the most gentlemanly religion, which is what I thought of Episcopalianism. I was dismayed by the unction of so many of our Presbyterian preachers, and their insistence that they belonged to the Elect, and that even the Moderates among them accounted themselves the unco gude. But now, last night, I fell on my knees, with some difficulty on account of my rheumatism, and tried to pray, but the words would not come. The words would not come to me, who has never been short of words. My poor Charlotte once met Dr Wilson who operated on my tongue when I was a bairn, and said to him, ‘Why, Dr Wilson, you must be accounted the cleverest surgeon in all Britain, for you set Scott’s tongue going then, and it has never stopped since.’

  Yet when I tried to pray, there were no words.

  Is it a judgement on my folly? Yet the Lord is said to have a tenderness for fools.

  I wonder when I am dead, where this journal will be found? In a chest in some obscure lodging-house, where I have hung up my scutcheon, and have died, perhaps like the great Duke of Buckingham, in the worst inn’s worst room? Or will it be discovered in the library at Abbotsford, and will folk then laugh indulgently at these moments when I approach the yawning jaws of despair. Facilis descensus Averni, but the way up is hard, for you must first find and pluck the golden bough.

  A glass of toddy and a cheroot may steady me.

  When I die, will folk shake their head and say, ‘puir gentleman, puir gentleman, naebody’s enemy but his ain. What a peety he took thon foolish title.’

  ‘Lead us not into temptation’, but I ran towards it, waiting for no leader.

  In 1659, the Earl of Traquair, Lord Treasurer in King Charles’s Privy Council in the 1630s, was found begging in the streets of Edinburgh without even the means of pay for the cobbling of his boots. The great financier of the Covenant, Sir William Dick of Braid, died in a debtors’ prison in England.

  Is it any wonder that such thoughts oppress me? It was easy – and manly and admirable – to say, when they confronted me with the debts that had been accumulated in I know not what sort of fashion posterity will decide, ‘My own right hand shall save me’. But if I fail? What awaits me then?

  And if my memory is failing, how can I succeed?

  These are night thoughts that will vanish with the dawn.

  The happiness of so many hangs on my labours – my family, my dependants at Abbotsford, even my poor dogs.

  That is another thought that oppresses me.

  If only I could sleep. If I cannot sleep, if only I could pray. Perhaps if I could pray, I could sleep.

  The rose that blooms at Glastonbury

  Flowers on Christmas Day,

  A sign to Christian men, they say,

  That if we think on Glastonbury,

  Sorrow and sin will pass away.

  The old carol pleases me.

  The rose that blooms at Glastonbury

  Springs from the Cross of shame,

  A sign to Christian men, they claim,

  That if we think on Glastonbury

  We have our share in Christ’s own name.

  I mind an old man I came upon dying in a poor cottage in Liddesdale who said to me, ‘Shirra, shirra, I hae lang been yare tae meet my Maker, but I would fain have been blithe tae see another lambing and the broom yalla on the braeside.’

  My heart went out to him, but there were still wreaths of snow by the dykes of the sheep fold, and he slipped away between the rising of the moon and cockcrow, babbling like Falstaff of what he could never have again.

  Shall I g
o like him, easy but regretful, or like Bothwell screaming as the demons assailed him?

  When thou from hence away art past,

  – Every nighte and alle,

  To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last;

  And Christe receive thy saule . . .

  That verse, from a dirge, sung by the lower ranks of Roman Catholics in the north of England, while watching a body prior to interment, has haunted me – the whole dirge has haunted me – since I first heard it. I included it in my Minstrelsy, and Mr Frank, the executor of the late Mr Ritson who had discovered it in a manuscript of the Cotton Library, containing an account of Cleveland in Yorkshire in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was kind enough to send me the following note:

  When any dieth, certaine women sing a song to the dead bodie, recyting the journey that the partye deceased must goe; and they are of beliefe (such is their fondnesse) that once in their lives, it is good to give a pair of shoes to a poore man, for as much as, after this life, they are to pass barefoote through a great launde, full of thorns and furzen, except by the meryte of the almes aforesaid they have redeemed the forfeyte; for, at the edge of the launde, an oulde man shall meet them with the same shoes that were given to the partye when he was lyving; and, after he hath shodde them, dismisseth him to go through thick and thin, without scratch or scalle . . .

  I suppose it is a memory of the parable of the Good Samaritan.