by John Buchan
He is often contented to leave the path of argument which must have conducted him to the fountain of truth, and to resort with indolence or indifference to the leaky cisterns which had been hewn out by former critics.
Never is the editor’s style more spirited than when discussing Dryden’s literary earnings.
[1809-14]
The next main venture in editing, the Swift which took six years to complete, was less fortunate. The price indeed was nearly doubled — £1500 from Constable; but, though the Dean of St Patrick’s was one of Scott’s favourite authors, he did not start, as in the case of Dryden, with a sound knowledge of the times, and he had not the interest in the intrigues of Whig and Tory that he had in Commonwealth and Restoration and Revolution. Moreover, to understand the intricacies of Swift’s character required a sharper psychological insight than Scott possessed, and to assess the virtues of his style a more fastidious ear for prose rhythms. Yet the preliminary memoir is well worth reading, for it is full of strong good sense, and sheds much light on Scott’s own philosophy of life and letters. In particular there is a passage on the art of fiction, which is one of the few occasions when Scott theorizes on the literary form in which he was to win his chief successes. I quote two other extracts which illuminate Scott’s own code. Take this on inverted snobbery: —
The whim of publicly sending the prime minister into the House of Commons to call out the first secretary of state, only to let him know that he would not dine with him if he dined late; the insisting that a duke should make him the first visit merely because he was a duke — these, and other capricious exertions of despotic authority over the usual customs of society, are unworthy of Swift’s good sense and penetration. In a free country, the barriers of etiquette between the ranks of society are but frail and low, the regular gate is open, and the tax of admittance a trifle; and he who, out of mere wantonness, overleaps the fence, may be justly supposed not to have attained a philosophical indifference to the circumstance of being born in the excluded district.
And this, which may be taken as the editor’s own rule of life: —
From the life of Swift, therefore, may be derived the important lesson, that, as no misfortunes should induce genius to despair, no rank or fame, however elevated, should encourage its possessor to presumption.
[1809-10. Miscellaneous Editions]
On the upper shelves of old libraries we may still find handsome quartos and octavos, the fruits of the Ballantyne press, which contain Scott’s other editorial labours, for the Dryden and the Swift were only the larger fish in a great shoal. There was Sir Ralph Sadleir’s State Papers in three volumes, and Somers’s Tracts in thirteen, the Memoirs of Sir Henry Slingsby and of Captain Hodgson, of Captain Carleton and of Robert Gary, Earl of Monmouth, besides lesser antiquarian curiosa. These things delighted Scott as an historian, and they provided work for James Ballantyne, but they did not pay the publishers. There was even a vast edition of the British novelists, projected by young Mr Murray, which fortunately had to be postponed. It was all a colossal labour, undertaken partly from enthusiasm, partly for gain, and largely out of kindness, for it gave Scott a chance of doing a good turn to less fortunate writers than himself. “I like well,” Constable once complained, “Scott’s ain bairns, but Heaven preserve me from those of his following!” “It was enough to tear me to pieces,” Scott once told Lockhart, “but there was a wonderful exhilaration about it all; my blood was kept at fever-pitch — I felt as if I could have grappled with anything and everything; then, there was hardly one of my schemes that did not afford me the means of serving some poor devil of a brother author. There were always huge piles of material to be arranged, sifted, or indexed — volumes of extracts to be transcribed — journeys to be made hither and thither, for ascertaining the little facts and dates — in short, I could commonly keep half a dozen of the ragged regiment of Parnassus in tolerable ease.” Like coal-wagons linked to an engine, Lockhart suggested. Scott laughed—”Yes, but there was a cursed lot of dung carts too.”
Nor were books all. There was a steady flow of contributions to the Edinburgh on topics as diverse as Spenser and cookery books, Ossian and Colonel Thornton’s Sporting Tour. Presently Scott began to find this connexion trying to his temper. Jeffrey, the editor, reviewed his work in a strain of high condescension, not free from acidity, and the politics of the review seemed to be becoming not Whiggish merely, but Jacobin. The number which contained the criticism of Marmion contained a paper on current politics which made the shrewd Mr Murray calculate that the alliance could not last, since “Walter Scott has feelings both as a gentleman and a Tory which these people have wounded.” An article on the Spanish situation, which we should describe to-day as “defeatist,” was the last straw, and Scott withdrew his subscription. In October 1808 Mr Murray arrived at Ashestiel with a proposal for a rival to the Edinburgh, a Tory review to be called the Quarterly, with behind it the old staff of the Anti-Jacobin, men like Canning and Hookham Frere, and with Heber, Ellis and Southey as contributors. Scott was offered and refused the editorship, which went to William Gifford, but he gladly promised his support, and thereby began a long connexion with the new review, under both Gifford and Lockhart. Some of his best essays appeared in its pages, for Scott, like other men of letters, had to have some outlet for episodic work, causeries which were often the expansion of his table talk. He was always a kindly and courteous critic, and held himself aloof from the bludgeoning treatment of the “Cockney school” and the new Jacobinical poets, for he had in literature a true spirit of freemasonry.
[Political Partisanship]
But the alliance with the Quarterly was to bring him unhappily into the rancours of the political world. Scott escaped the maleficent extension of these rancours into literature, and never fell into the “facetious and rejoicing ignorance” of the swashbucklers on both sides. For, let it be remembered that the one was as bad as the other, and that the venom of the Quarterly towards Keats was paralleled by the savagery of the Edinburgh towards Wordsworth and Coleridge. The brisk complacency of Jeffrey, which made Wordsworth’s toe itch for his hinder parts, was bound sooner or later to revolt a man of Scott’s fundamental reverence and deep historic sense. But in his alliance with the Edinburgh’s opponents he did more than profess a different philosophy of life; he aligned himself definitely as a political partisan and acquired a party colour, which was, not altogether happily, to affect his career. Political views he had always had, but hitherto they had been confined to two simple loyalties — an affection for Britain, which made him a furious opponent of all that crippled her arms in the greatest war that she had ever fought, and a still deeper and more abiding affection for Scotland. To the illuminati of the Edinburgh, as to the illuminati in every age, such simple emotions were scarcely intelligible — they might be condescendingly approved, but could never be shared. Lockhart has a tale of Scott walking back with Jeffrey from a discussion on some proposed Scottish legal change, when the latter tried to treat the matter as a joke. “No, no,” Scott cried, “‘tis no laughing matter. Little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland shall remain.” And he turned away to hide his tears.
But now he had gone further, and had enlisted under the Tory flag, and, being a born fighter, was certain to lay lustily about him. A party affiliation is doubtless a good thing for the ordinary citizen, but it is less good for one who, not being a politician, acquires from his temperament the politician’s restless combativeness. It would have been well for his future peace if he had taken Lord Dalkeith’s advice:—”Talk not, think not, of Politics. Go to the hills and converse with the Spirit of the Fell, or any spirit but the Spirit of Party, which is the fellest fiend that ever disturbed harmony and social pleasure.”
Throughout all his editorial and journalistic labours the “regiment of horse” was still exercising in his head. He was still in his dreams leading his troops by moonlight out of the burning valley
. He wanted money to help his brother Thomas, and Constable offered a thousand guineas for a poem before he had seen a line of it. The new work, unlike the Lay, had not its origin in the Border lore of his youth, for it was a concocted tale of chivalry, with an elaborate plot, culminating in the great national tragedy of Flodden. Its inspiration was the martial fervour which ran in Scott’s veins, the ardent patriotism with which the spectacle of the great events on the Continent filled his mind. He put into it also the friendships which had come to fill his life, and the introductory epistles to the cantos are a happy diary of his Border wanderings and the sights and sounds of Ashestiel. He enjoyed every moment of the writing of it, and to the end of his life he used to recall happily places associated with its composition. The speed of the verse is due to the fact that passages like the description of Flodden were conceived while with his regiment on Portobello sands, or galloping among the hills between Tweed and Yarrow. He made no parade of a high poetic purpose. As it approached its close he wrote to Lady Louisa Stuart:—”Marmion is at this instant gasping upon Flodden Field, and there I have been obliged to leave him for these few days in the death pangs. I hope I shall find time enough this morning to knock him on the head with two or three thumping stanzas.”
[Marmion]
A poem, thus conceived in delight, was bound to please. Marmion was published in February 1808 and proceeded to race through editions. The critics were divided. Wordsworth thought that Scott had achieved his end, but added: “That it is not the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself, you will be well aware, from what you know of my notions of composition, both as to manner and matter.” Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, curiously enough, chose to regard it as insufficiently Scottish in spirit, and having “throughout neglected Scottish feelings and Scottish character.” The rest of the review was a solemn warning that the romance of chivalry was a bogus fashion which could not last. “Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk of donjons, keeps, tabards, scutcheons, caps of maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and I know not what beside; just as they did in the days of Dr Darwin’s popularity of gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however, passed rapidly away, and Mr Scott should take care that a different sort of pedantry does not produce the same effects.”
Jeffrey was attacking the genus without considering closely the particular example, for it is hard to find pedantry in Marmion. Halting lines, rhetoric which misses its mark, machinery that creaks — of these there is plenty. The plot is roughly that of Ivanhoe, a common-place of romance. But the virtue lies not in it, but in the speed of the journeys, the fire of the battle scenes, the many faithful and beautiful pictures of nature, the noble and disciplined eloquence of the lines on Nelson and Fox and Pitt. It was the tonic which the nation needed in a dark time to strengthen its heart, and if the critics were lukewarm the common reader was enchanted.
Next year Scott visited the Highlands, for he had long had it in mind to produce a northern pendant to the Lay and Marmion. More scrupulous than most poets, he rode the course from the mouth of Loch Vennachar to Stirling Castle to make certain that his hero could do it in three hours. At Buchanan he recited bits of his new poem to Lady Douglas and Lady Louisa Stuart, and in May 1810 it was given to the world under a title reminiscent of Arthurian legend, The Lady of the Lake. No one of Scott’s poems was more eagerly awaited or more ardently received. It made the Trossachs a classic country, to which the curious flocked in post-chaises. It brought the Highlands, of which Scott knew next to nothing, inside the comprehension of the Lowlands and of England. So great was its verisimilitude that Border farmers argued hotly about the details of the stag-hunt, and so enthralling its interest that Adam Ferguson, serving under Wellington in the Peninsula with the “Black Cuffs,” obtained extra rations because of his reading of the poem aloud, and on one occasion read the battle scene to keep his company steady while under fire. Such tributes are not paid to a pedantic muse.
The book marks the height of Scott’s popularity as a poet, for 20,000 copies were sold in a few months. For once the critics were unanimous in their verdict, and Jeffrey in the Edinburgh was as cordial as Ellis in the Quarterly. The success was so extraordinary, Scott himself wrote, “as to induce me for a moment to conclude that I had at last fixed a nail in the proverbially inconstant wheel of Fortune.” Re-read to-day, the poem has not lost its freshness. There are perhaps too many Gothick echoes, to which a Celtic subject always made Scott prone, and there is much slipshod verse. But it begins magically; everywhere there are lovely glimpses of scene and weather; the stag-hunt, the dispatch of the fiery cross, the battle, the final “recognition” have still power to thrill hearts that have not forgotten their youth; and the intercalated lyrics, like Blanche’s song, and the “Coronach,” and “Soldier, rest, thy warfare o’er,” foreshadowed what the novels were to reveal, a Shakespearean gift of producing little snatches of music which fit into their place with an exquisite and effortless aptness.
IV
[1804-12]
The Ashestiel years are the pleasantest to contemplate in Scott’s life. If they were not the time of greatest achievement, and if they were not altogether unbroken by anxieties, they had the wide horizons and the fresh colours which come only once in a man’s career.
[Clerk of Session]
He was fortunate to begin with to find a permanent post which relieved him of anxiety about the future. Mr George Home of Wedderburn had been a Clerk of Session for more than thirty years and was very willing to retire, on condition that he was allowed to retain his emoluments during his life. Scott was nominated his successor, and his appointment was ratified by the Whig government which came into office on Pitt’s death. So after the spring recess in 1806 he took up his duties, sitting below the judges for from four to six hours daily during nearly six months of the year. His fellow Clerks were intimate friends, and the work kept him in close touch with the Bar and Bench, and gave him a wonderful viewpoint from which to study that large section of humanity which goes to law. It was — or would be, when Mr Home was gathered to his fathers — an ideal crutch for a man of letters.
His office not only provided a ritual for his days, but bound him to the life of the capital, and prevented him rusticating on the Border. He continued his volunteer service, and, while in Cumberland in the autumn of 1805, was summoned north by a mistaken rumour that a French invasion was imminent, and rode a hundred miles in twenty-four hours to join the muster at Dalkeith. He paid various visits to London, staying either with his friends the Doumergues in Piccadilly or with Morritt in Portland Place. In London he was now something of a figure, met most of the great people in literature and politics, was presented at the little Court at Blackheath to Caroline, Princess of Wales, whom he found embarrassingly flirtatious, and even dined at Holland House. He made many trips up and down Scotland, including a visit to the Western Isles in 1810, where he projected a poem which took shape later as The Lord of the Isles, and acquired a new store of Highland legends. Once, after the publication of The Lady of the Lake, he dreamed of a bolder journey, of “taking a peep at Lord Wellington and his merry men in Portugal”; for his imagination had been fired by the adventure of a civilian friend, who had been mixed up with the retreat to Torres Vedras, had stumbled on a Scottish regiment, and had served with it as a volunteer sharpshooter at Busaco. For such an experience Scott would have given a year’s income. But he had to content himself with writing patriotic prose and militant verse, and with drinking Lord Wellington’s health at the dinners of the Friday Club.
For more than six months of the year he was at Ashestiel and to Ashestiel came many friends. It was not a large house, but any roof that sheltered Scott was elastic in its hospitality. Thither came his Edinburgh legal colleagues, intimates like Skene and Erskine and Morritt, publishers like young Mr Murray, fellow bookmen like Southey and Heber, and a great clan of country neighbours. No man was more popular than Scott in the Forest with gentle and simple alike, and Laird Nippy
next door at the Peel, an austere and parsimonious Presbyterian, became a regular attendant of a Sunday at the Sheriff’s readings from the English prayer-book. Scott carried his guests far and wide over the Border — to Melrose and Dryburgh, to course hares on the steep green hills above St Mary’s Loch, and to the clippings and kirns of Yarrow and Ettrick. As a host he had every virtue, and there is ample evidence that at his own table he was a famous story-teller, full of drollery and wild fun. His recitations of poetry, too, were memorable, but, though his head was full of books, his talk was not often of literature. “He always maintained the same estimate of it,” says Morritt, “as subordinate and auxiliary to the purposes of life, and rather talked of men and events than of books and criticism.” Even Hogg, who liked the sound of his own voice and was a severe judge of after-dinner tales, admits that he never heard him tell the same story twice.
