Ragged Lion

by Allan Massie

  I proceeded, as I have ever done, more by instinct, happy or otherwise, than by deliberate ratiocination. It has ever been my belief that any considerable work of art – though it is not for me to say whether the Lay can be so regarded – derives less from the intellect, though that must exercise a controlling and shaping power, than from some deep well on which the maker draws, ignorant though he must be of the springs which feed it. If the Lay has any peculiar merit, I believe it rests in something which I find difficult to describe, if only because I fancy there was a certain novelty in my method; and it is ever hard to find the right words for what has not been done before. The Lay is not precisely an imitation of earlier times, for the reader, or auditor, must always be conscious that the Minstrel is a creation of the present day, that he is observed by the author who is a man of our own time, and who acts as both a filter and a commentator. It is perhaps presumptuous or pretentious in me to call this a species of double-vision; and yet I do not know how else I might describe it.

  I wrote the Lay fast, with all the ardour of a huntsman in pursuit of a noble quarry. I was doing something new to me, and also delightful. I have never pretended an indifference to the material rewards to be expected from a work of literature, and indeed I should be ashamed to proclaim such indifference. There is good sense in Johnson’s observation that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’, for writing is hard labour; but it is also delight, and I have – till recently at least, alas – felt powerfully that joy in composition, which is one of the purest of passions that can move the heart, and which draws the painter to his palette, the musician to his instrument, the dancer to the dance, and the poor struggling author to his writing-table.

  The Lay pleased me, and a work which gives no pleasure to its author is unlikely to please the public. Indeed, there is a great impertinence, it has always seemed to me, displayed by those authors who contemn their own productions, which they are nevertheless ready to lay before the public. It is like a man who makes a joke, or tells a humorous anecdote, at which he does not laugh himself; it is as if he says, ‘This may be good enough to amuse you, or please you, but, forgive me, I am made of finer stuff. To say this is not to proclaim that one is altogether delighted by one’s own productions, or blind to their faults; on the contrary, it is merely to say, ‘This is the best that I have contrived to do with this material; I am not ashamed to offer it to you. Make of it what you will.’

  Again, the author who deprecates his own work is like the hostess of an inn who lays on the table food that is inferior to that which she will herself consume in the kitchen. (Alas, in my travels, I have met too many of whom I fear that may have been true.) But there is a nicety in our refined age which encourages many authors to practise a sort of mock-modesty, which is itself corrupting, for it may lead them in time to offer work to the public which in truth is of a quality which really demands modesty. My own work has been of variable worth, but with my hand on my heart I may say that it has always been the best I could do with that material at that time.

  I was fortunate that the Lay pleased. It pleased Lady Dalkeith who had requested it; and since it was natural for me to honour the house of Buccleuch, that was my first reward. It pleased some of the great ones of the world; both Mr Pitt and Mr Fox spoke in praise of it, and perhaps Fox’s praise meant more to me, for I was opposed to his politics and an adherent of Pitt. It pleased some of those whom I could now term my fellow-poets. Jeffrey in his Edinburgh Review offered a degree of commendation which he denied many of my later poetic efforts, though even at this early stage he uttered a warning – ‘Mr Scott must either sacrifice his Border prejudices or offend his readers in other parts of the Empire’ – a warning which I was happy to ignore. Best of all, it pleased the general public. I have no time for the author who writes for a precious few. Once, when my daughter Anne condemned something as ‘vulgar’, I reproved the poor lass, more harshly than she deserved perhaps, and told her that what was called ‘vulgar’ was what appealed to the generality of mankind, and that nothing truly great or good has been uncommon.

  So I was launched on a new career to supplement my lawyerhood. (The first edition of the Lay brought me £169 6s in royalties, and when a second was called for I sold the copyright to messrs Longman for £500 and another £100 to buy a horse.) But it was never my intention to become only an author. I held fast to my father’s dictum that authorship was a good staff but an ill crutch. Moreover, though I say this with hesitation, since it may offend some of my friends, a man who is only an author is in general a puir cratur. I would make an exception of a pure poet like Wordsworth, or even of Pope, who was handicapped by his crippled state. But Johnson, whom I revere, observed that ‘every man thinks the worse of himself for not having been a soldier’, and Johnson, that noble, struggling soul, was the last man to adopt the airs and pretensions of fellows who think themselves superior to the common run of mankind because they possess the facility to string one sentence on another. I have ever entertained the suspicion that Shakespeare himself thought more highly of the skill he showed as a man of affairs in the management of his theatre than he did of his literary productions, which, no doubt, with the happy ignorance of genius, he cobbled together to set the box-office ticking. And Johnson too, I recall, was filled with enthusiastic pride when his brewer friend, Mr Thrale, made him executor of his will.

  So, although I was now established as an author, thoughts of authorship occupied but a small part of my mind and time. I had my law business, of which more later, and at Ashiestiel I threw myself with ardour into the life of a country gentleman. I did my literary work before the feck of the household had left their beds, and then spent ten hours a day out of doors, engaged either in riding, fishing, shooting (though in later years I have grown more tender and come to dislike the killing of birds and beasts except for the larder), or in supervising the planting of trees and laying out of the policies, which soon became an abiding and overwhelming passion. As this grew upon me, I became ever more strongly aware that I held Ashiestiel only on a lease, and I began to look about me for a property I could call my ain. There is an old saying that as soon as a Scotsman gets his head above water, he begins to think of land. I contemplated buying the property of Broadmeadows in Yarrow, a house in a bonny situation, but one which offered insufficient scope for development. My uncle had died and left me the property of Rosebank in Kelso, but that being in Roxburghshire was without my shrievalty. I therefore sold it, and resolved to employ the capital I realized in purchasing my ain place, as soon as I happened on somewhere suitable.

  Meanwhile I engaged in a new venture, though one which I felt bound, on account of my position in the legal profession, to keep secret. I invested funds in James Ballantyne’s printing business, for I could see many advantages in this; the unfortunate author frequently being like the poor man at the end of the line who gets the thinnest gruel. But again, more of this at a later date, if I survive to continue this memoir.

  There was only one dissentient from the chorus of praise directed at the Lay.

  Charlotte read the first canto and shook her head:

  ‘Scott, Scott,’ she said, ‘why is your mind always on these boring old knights and minstrels?’

  Well, as Tom Purdie says, ‘A fond wife is near aye richt, Shirra, and that’s some consolation whan ye’re warsted, as a man commonly is, in a matrimonial argument.’

  Oh Tom, how grateful I have often been for your robust good sense.

  7

  On Death, Wordsworth and Shakespeare, 1826–7

  As I limped, weary, down the Mound from Parliament House in the dying of the afternoon, I was accosted by Sir John Sinclair – Cavalier Jackasso, as I call him – who vies with the Earl of Buchan for the title of the greatest fool in Scotland. Opening on the matter with his habitual pomposity, he finished by offering the suggestion that it would be no great trouble for him to arrange a match between me and the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe.

  ‘It would
be a great thing, Scott, a great thing for you,’ he said, ‘it would elevate you in Society, and solve your financial problems, for I happen to know that her widow’s jointure is a handsome one.’

  It was all I could do to refrain from striking him with my walking-stick; such impudence, such tastelessness, with my poor Charlotte not long in the grave.

  But I contented myself with the reply that if I was to marry again, which seemed to me in the highest degree improbable, I remained capable of choosing my own wife. I now see, however, that I have fallen low indeed, if I have become an object of pity and concern to such as the Cavalier; I wonder how many others are girding themselves up to make new arrangements for me. I’ll have none of it.

  I ate a solitary supper of salted herring and boiled potatoes, in an acute misery; a fit of low spirits which nothing can cure but work. I took a dram of whisky after, and that failed to enliven me. I smoked a cheroot though I am inclined to think the tobacco makes my fits of giddiness worse. Yet there is some solace in the activity of smoking, the Lord knows how or why. It is a sad business when a man is reduced to finding comfort in what he formerly took for granted, and yet how else should it be? I sit hunched at my desk, with the manuscript of Woodstock before me; and I can do nothing. I see nothing before me but toil which no longer delights. Let me consider my blessings: that I have been fortunate much of my life, and that, unlike the generality of mankind, I have been permitted to find profound satisfaction in my labours. No more: yet as Corporal Nym said, ‘Things must be as they may’, and there is no arguing with fate. If it is my destiny to die in misery, then it has been my good fortune to live most of my life abundantly. But still, what paltry things we are – lords of nature, as we term ourselves. Why, consider that something of inconceivably minute origin, the pressure of a bone, or the inflammation of a particle of the brain takes place, and the emblem of the Deity, man made in God’s image, destroys himself, or, worse, someone else. We hold our health and our reason – aye, our reason – on terms slighter than one would desire were it in their choice to hold an Irish cabin or a black-house in the Hebrides.

  I sleep badly. Last night, I woke with a sharp cramp, which disturbed a dream in which the figure of Green-breeks appeared before me, in his youthful Gothic splendour as if time had rolled back upon itself. I have a notion that in the dream we conversed, as I have often wished we had been able to do, and as we never found occasion to: but I repeat myself, for I have already recorded the impression he made, indelibly, upon me. Be it so; it is, if not the privilege, then at least the affliction and penalty of age and failing powers, that we find ourselves going over old ground, casting on pools where we have already determined no fish are lurking.

  Young Cadell, who has a scheme to publish a complete edition of my novels, which he describes, without irony, as the magnum opus, has been urging me on.

  ‘Sir Walter,’ he said, ‘believe me, you are a magician still.’

  It was kind and gentlemanly of him to say so, but the wand is broken.

  Broke the wand, and broke the spell,

  In fancy’s realm no more to dwell.

  The king of beasts condemned to be

  Caged in sad perplexity;

  Or like the hind that makes his way,

  Heavy-legged at end of day,

  Homeward to an ashy hearth,

  A vacant hut, by cheerless path,

  Condemned to solitude and gloom

  And endless toil before the tomb

  Opens to receive him in,

  Sick of life’s resounding din.

  That last line is vile, but I am too weary to mend it.

  When I was last at Abbotsford, they had to hold me upright on an old pony, I that used to be accounted the rashest and most reckless rider in the countryside.

  * * *

  An hour later: only an hour. I fell asleep in my chair, my cheroot in my mouth and woke to find ash scattered over my dressing-gown. Then, seeking solace, I have been reading Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. There is the true magic there, which makes my own efforts at versifying seem like the mewling of an infant.

  The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction . . .

  And yet, when I last saw Wordsworth, though he was as assured of his own merit, indeed genius, as ever, I knew that his wand too was broken, though not his health. The gates of wonder have closed on him, and he is like a man held in an image of himself which he can no longer sustain. We are permitted only brief moments when we seem to see beyond the common light of day. ‘Our birth’, he says, ‘is but a sleep and a forgetting.’ I know that feeling; there are such strange moments of illumination scattered through the ballads. ‘I do not think thoughtful people can ever be truly ‘appy’, as poor Charlotte used to say; so be it, yet they are granted those rare and precious occasions when they can say with St Paul: ‘Then I saw through a glass darkly, but now face to face’.

  I have never thought of myself as a visionary, for I have ever held that I was rooted in common sense, of the earth earthly; and yet

  He slept the summer day in green,

  He woke to find the corn gold;

  The milk-white stag was briefly seen,

  Ere wreaths of snow obscured the fold.

  It is natural for a man to brood on death and what lies beyond the grave, natural and profitless.

  As I work also, intermittently and without zest, on my life of Napoleon, it occurs to me to wonder what thoughts ran through his head as he lay dying. They say his last words were ‘tête de l’armée’, as if he still dwelt on military glory. Well, I have ever responded to the trumpet’s sound, but now, such glory seems but a trumpery ambition. The Duke of Wellington, a wiser and more humane man than his great adversary, told me once that a battle lost was only a degree more terrible than a battle won. There must come a moment in the life of any generous-hearted soldier when the thought of war and slaughter revolts him; and yet they say that when Napoleon was asked which had been his greatest battle, he replied ‘Borodino – it was so far from home’. On the retreat from Moscow the French army cried out in horror at the stench of the unburied corpses as they retraced their path across that fatal field.

  Even so, war displaying man at his extremity is a thing to wonder at. When Napoleon’s Guard was retreating from Waterloo, after their Emperor had fled back towards Paris, instead of dying on the field as a true hero would have chosen to do, they were called on to surrender. ‘La garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas’ was the reply, and when I first heard that gallantry, my eyes brimmed with tears.

  Honest Sam Johnson, who held the Christian faith with as devout determination as any man could, confessed himself terrified of death; but, if Wordsworth is right when he calls ‘birth but a sleep and a forgetting’, is death then a remembering? As in dreams perhaps? Did my dream of Green-breeks last night denote that that brave youth is dead?

  This habit of introspection is new to me, and cannot be healthy. I have aye held that a man is better, and wiser, not to subject himself to overmuch examination. A healthy man is naturally blithe; are our spirits then determined merely by the condition of the liver?

  I have loved Shakespeare all my life, but in these last days, the plays I turn to most readily are Antony and Cleopatra and the two parts of Henry IV. The former is a strange choice for a man who would never have believed the world well lost for love, or have imagined himself in Antony’s position, or indeed put any of his imaginary creations in such a state. But the end is magnificent: ‘the soldier’s pole is broken’ – like my wand, and ‘there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon’. The strength of that epithet ‘visiting’ – as for Henry IV – the conversations between Falstaff and Mr Justice Shallow (who is near to being as great an idiot as the Earl of Buchan or Sir John Sinclair) – why, there is the stuff of sad mortality in them. ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight.’ And Falstaff’s ‘tush, man, mortal men, mortal men . . .’. there is all the blithe indifference to death of the healthy man in tha
t observation, even if it is the deaths of others that he is contemplating.

  Dawn pricks the sky – another night without sleep. I dare not read Lear. It comes too close. Sometimes I think I might take to dram-drinking in a regular fashion, though I have always despised drunkards, while loving conviviality as well as any man.

  Wordsworth again – how his lines run in my poor head:

  Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,

  And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

  Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life . . .

  There is the true magic there again. When he is in full flow, he strikes that note more truly than any man since Shakespeare.

  But then his vanity always amused me also. Hogg once visited him in the Lakes and, seeking to make agreeable conversation, remarked that there could rarely have been such a constellation of poets . . . (I think Southey was with them, or perhaps Coleridge). Wordsworth was offended. ‘Constellation, what means the fellow?’ There is something of Pope’s portrait of Addison in that remark. ‘Bear, like the Turk, no brother near his throne . . .’ Jamie was offended in his turn by Wordsworth’s implicit denial of his right to call himself a poet; so when the great man proposed that they carry their excursion further to view another of his beloved lakes, Jamie replied, ‘na, na, I dinna want to see ony mair dubs. Let’s awa to the public and hae a drap of whusky.’ I rather think Jamie drank alone that night.

  There are three hours yet till I must be at the Court. If I throw off this lethargy, and set myself to my task, I can do aiblins six sheets of Woodstock, a tale of Cavaliers and Roundheads. But what, I ask myself, have I to do with either? Nevertheless, the thing must, and shall, be done.