by Allan Massie
There were three subjects to which he recurred. All surprised me. The first was whether, by making Abbotsford rather than his art the centre of his life, he had in some manner betrayed the gifts bestowed on him. I could scarcely believe he was asking this question – though in another manner of speaking I recalled that he had tackled it, or something like it, in the Introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel. When I assured him that it was not so, and that no one, who had given so much pleasure to so many, and been admired so greatly by the most distinguished of his contemporaries, instancing Wordsworth and Byron, could be floored by such an accusation, he looked at me for a long time, with the corners of his mouth drawn down, and then muttered: ‘What about posterity? What will posterity say? Will it dismiss me as one who abused his gifts in order to gratify his folly and ambition?’ I had never before known him to care for posterity, which I had heard him say was welcome to make any judgement that it chose; so I offered the light assurance that, if posterity was so foolish as to think in this manner, then the judgement of posterity would show itself much inferior to that of our own age. He fell silent again; but clearly the matter preyed on his mind, and is fully debated in the manuscript. I could argue the case, but shall content myself with saying that I consider his observation that Shakespeare may have cared more for his success as a theatre-manager than for his work as a poet and dramatist, but that this does not affect our reception of his plays, to have been a sound one.
His second matter of concern astonished me. He confessed one evening that he believed he had done my mother an injustice. ‘It was damaged goods and a cracked heart I brought her,’ he said. At the time I knew little of his earlier love for Miss Williamina Belsches – how many of us are interested in our parents’ early life and loves, at least in our own youth? – so I was at a loss how to answer. After some pause for reflection, I could only assert that I was confident that my mother had been extremely happy in their marriage, that I was certain she had felt nothing lacking, and that, in any case, he had frequently advised me that mutual affection and esteem – which they certainly possessed for each other – formed a better and more secure basis for marital happiness than Romantic love. ‘In general, yes,’ he replied, ‘but part of me was never with her; and she was never admitted to the secret world of my imagination.’ ‘Did she ever wish to be?’ I responded; and again he fell silent, while I repeated my assurance of my mother’s happiness. ‘And yet I failed her,’ he murmured.
Lockhart, I am sure, will judge otherwise; and so in all probability will any future reader – if there is one – of this work. All I can say myself – as one with no experience of the married state – is that I suspect that doubts of this sort are more likely to make a man a good and considerate husband than the certainty that he already is such a being.
If this astonished me, his third concern left me in a state of mystification. One night, in our last week in Rome, he recited the several stanzas in which Byron describes the gladiator slain in the Colosseum, three lines of which he quotes in the last chapter of this manuscript. Then he talked of the boy whom he called Greenbreeks, ‘the perfect specimen of the young Goth’ – of whom indeed I had never previously heard him speak. He blamed himself severely for never having attempted to discover what had become of the lad, in order that he might have tried to be of some assistance to him in his passage through life, ‘assistance such as I, from my superior position, could so easily and without discomfort to myself have afforded to provide’. Then he adjured me to make every effort myself to seek him out, and, if he had fallen into indigence, assist him to the best of our family’s ability. ‘I am incapable now,’ he said. ‘I have left undone too long that which I ought to have done; and there is no truth in me. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon me, miserable offender . . .’ then he paused and, collecting himself, said: ‘if he is indigent, then Walter must give him a cottage at Abbotsford and provide for him with a pension. But you, Charles, must seek him out. You have the capacity to do so. Swear to me that you will . . .’ What could I do but promise? I looked at his trembling hand, his eyes filled with tears, and his mouth twisted as a result of his successive seizures; it would have been too cruel to say that it would have overtaxed all the resources of the whole force of Bow Street Runners to have sought out an unknown boy who had inhabited a mean tenement in the Old Town of Edinburgh almost half a century earlier, and of whom all that was known was that he had once worn ragged green breeches. So I promised as he asked me to do, and I have indeed set enquiries in train; but, of course, they will come to nothing.
Why did he feel such guilt towards this boy? Again that is a matter for Lockhart to determine – though I jalouse he will prefer to ignore it, as an unfortunate aberration of my father’s disturbed old age. Having read the sheets concerning him, several speculations present themselves–and, since I am all but certain that Lockhart will indeed let the matter go unremarked, I may as well set them down.
My first thought was that Green-breeks – and it seems absurd to name him so, indeed the designation seems more ridiculous each time I write it, but I know no other – well, yes, let me call him by the name of greater distinction which my father also applied – ‘the young Goth’ – well then, it occurred to me that the young Goth might have been my father’s half-brother, a byblow of my grandfather’s. This is of course possible, but improbable, for I do not see how my father could have had the means either of knowing or suspecting it. Moreover, my grandfather seems to have been a man of conspicuous virtue, who, had he fallen into temptation, as even the most godly and virtuous may do, would himself have provided for the child. One cannot be certain of this, of course; and yet the speculation appears to me too wild to be probable. Moreover, my grandfather’s comment, when told in later years of the incident – that he wished he had known of it at the time, so that he might have been of some assistance to such a gallant lad – would seem to me to acquit him of responsibility for the young Goth’s existence.
My second speculation was perhaps equally wild, and, I am afraid, unworthy. It occurred to me that the youth who seized the small hunting-knife, or hanger, and delivered the blow to the young Goth’s head, might have been none other than my father himself. I find this hard to credit, for my father never in my experience told a lie – except – a fairly large exception, you may say – in his denial of the authorship of his novels. Yet I do not believe he would have concealed his responsibility at the time, and I am certain he would not have done so in an intimate memoir of this nature, wherein he reproaches himself for so many real, or imagined, failings. Yet I cannot entirely dismiss the possibility, if only because it is, I understand, well-established that the mind – that cunning instrument – is capable of blotting into oblivion the most unwelcome memories, which however, lurking below its conscious level, may rise to assail it in unexpected manner. If this may indeed have happened on this occasion, it would account for my father’s strange agitation concerning the young Goth, even if his memory continued to deny the cause.
There is a third, and more probable, explanation. In concealing the injury the boy suffered, my father, who prized courage above all other things, was guilty for perhaps the sole time in his life of cowardice, of a failure of moral courage. That knowledge was certainly enough to prey on his increasingly uneasy mind; and I suspect this is the true and sufficient explanation of his belated interest in the young Goth’s fortunes.
And yet – though this is the probable truth – I cannot stop there. It occurs to me that my father saw the young Goth as his alter ego, his Double. Their position in life might so easily have been exchanged – and if so, what of Sir Walter then? This makes a perfectly common-sensical explanation of his enduring, or perhaps revived, interest. This boy, so like himself in spirit and temper – noble, brave, generous – might naturally enough excite his imagination, especially in its infirmity, so that he came not only to wonder what had befallen him – as both he and his brother, Mr Thomas Scott, had wondered years earlier – but to fe
el a desire to assure himself that all was well with his former antagonist; and so assume responsibility for him in his old age.
Having advanced so far, let me plunge further. He may have come to see him as his alter ego in a darker, more macabre sense: the appearance of the young Goth in one of my poor father’s fantasies, dancing with the girl who is the Temptress, the Enchantress, the Queen of Elfland, seems to offer two contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, in begging me to seek out his boyhood antagonist, my father may have wished for assurance that his alter ego had not in fact surrendered himself to the spirits of darkness; on the other hand, the vision itself seems expressive of a desire for that very surrender, on his part rather than on that of his alter ego.
(I could not write this to Lockhart, who would dismiss it as the veriest and most reprehensible nonsense.)
For one thing has been made clear to me by my reading of this, his last work and perhaps testament: that my father was a stranger, more uncanny, being than I had supposed. I never knew a man of more robust good sense, of greater intellectual capacity or sounder judgement; I have never known, nor expect to know, anyone more agreeable, sociable, hospitable, or, in the fullest sense of the word, virtuous. And yet, he was also, at heart, a solitary, living in the strange and secret world of the imagination much of the time. The Shirra – that model of good sense – also wanted to be True Thomas or the young Tamlane, carried away to Elfland. At the same time he wanted to be the great Montrose, or a Highlander assisting in the escape of the Prince, or a Jacobite exile mourning his lost Scotland. He brought all sides of his nature together in his work – at its best – and perhaps also at Abbotsford, for his conception of himself there, as Laird, re-creating a society of feudal obligation and dependence as the image of the good life, a society which was crumbling elsewhere, and which had indeed, I suppose, never existed in the ideal Paradisal form he attempted – that, too, may be judged a species of fantasy. Lastly, he also wished, while being a loving and considerate husband, father, and friend, to be the old magician Michael Scott, delving into the ultimate mysteries – matter which in company and the ordinary everyday life he resolutely shunned.
Of much of this he was well aware. I am persuaded that his conspicuous modesty derived from his consciousness of his own powers, and indeed his own strangeness. But then he knew the strangeness of other men too. When he remarks that it is just as well that while we are seated round the social table we should be unaware of the thoughts throbbing in the brains of our companions, that seems to me a recognition of his understanding of the complex and secret nature of a man. (I know very well I should be horrified if all my thoughts were known to others – especially since I took up my post here at the Naples Legation!)
Many things in this manuscript pained and dismayed me; yet I find its total effect exactly the contrary.
In his last months of lucidity, my father sometimes talked of turning back to poetry. The examples of verse here – often perhaps carelessly and perfunctorily thrown off – may not represent him at his finest, but they are sufficiently so, to suggest, to me at least, that he would not have made the return in vain.
I know Lockhart will disregard much here; but he may find some things of value to him. Then I suspect he will – out of a wish to protect my father’s good name of which he is the very jealous guardian – a wish that, in my view, would be quite mistaken – destroy the copy I send him. But it will be only one copy. I am determined – and have grown more so the longer I write – that some day this revelation of how even in suffering and confusion my father remained triumphantly himself will be given to the world.
Ch Scott
Naples
March 1833
Glossary of Scots Words
agley
askew, awry
ahint
behind
aiblins
perhaps
ain
own
airt
direction
ance
once
ane
one
anent
concerning
auld
old
awethegither
altogether
aye
always
ayont
beyond
bairn
child
bannock
flat cake or biscuit
bield
shelter
brow, brawly
fine, finely
breid
bread
bubbly-jock
turkey
bucht
sheepfold
callant
lad, youngman
caller
fresh
cantrip
piece of trickery, witch’s spell
cauld
cold
channering
fretting
chiel
fellow
chuckie-stanes
pebbles
collops
slices of meat
corbie
crow
crabbit
crabbed
cratur
creature
criwens
expression of surprise/dismay
cuddy
(orig.) donkey, horse, pony; (by extension) term of endearment
daith
death
daw
dawn
deeve
to plague
deil
devil
ding
to strike
docken
a dock
dominie
schoolmaster
dule
grief
dunk
to dip
dunt
a blow
ee, een
eye, eyes
eek
also
eneuch
enough
fain
eager
feck
the bulk, the most
flittin’
removal (of houses)
gangrel
wandering
gar
to compel
gey
quite
gin
if
girny
complaining
greeting
weeping
grilse
young salmon
gude/guid
good
gyte
mad
haar
mist, fog
hae
have
hairst
harvest
hame
home
hinna
have not
hinny
honey
hosen
stockings
ilka
every
ingle-neuk
fireside corner
jalouse
to suspect
keening
lamentation
kelpie
water-spirit/water-horse
ken
to know
kirk
church
kirkyaird
churchyard
kye
cattle
landlouper
a vagabond, vagrant
lave
the rest, remainder
laverlock
lark
lawin’
the reckoning
licht, lichtly
light, lightly
ligg
to lie
lily leven
lily lawn
loaning
part of field used for milking
loon
a boy
loup
to leap
lug
ear
lum
chimney
maun
must
merse
mar
shland
mirk
dark or half-dark
muckle
much, large
nane
none
neist
next
nouther
neither
quaich
drinking-cup
redd up
to prepare
rickle
loose collection or pile (usually of stones)
roose
to praise
sair
sore
saut-poke
salt-box
shilpit
puny, sickly-looking
shirra
sheriff
siccar
certain, sure
sicht
sight
siller
silver, money
smoor