Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  But in truth, Mr Morton, why should we care so much for death, light upon us or around us whenever it may? Men die daily — not a bell tolls the hour but it is the death-note of someone or other; and why hesitate to shorten the span of others, or take over-anxious care to prolong our own? It is all a lottery — when the hour of midnight came you were to die — it has struck, you are alive and safe, and the lot has fallen on those fellows who were to murder you. It is not the expiring pang that is worth thinking of in an event that must happen one day, and may befall us on any given moment — it is the memory which the soldier leaves behind him, like the long train of light which follows the sunken sun — that is all which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the brave or the ignoble. When I think of death, Mr Morton, as a thing worth thinking of, it is in the hope of pressing one day some well-fought and hard-won field of battle, and dying with the shout of victory in my ear — that would be worth dying for, and more, it would be worth having lived for!

  It would be easy to be critical of some of the details of this passage, but it has the movement and elevation of great prose.

  CHAPTER VII. — THE BROKEN YEARS (1817-1819)

  I

  [1816-17]

  The lawyer in Scott was fast disappearing into the background, and the forecast of Kerr of Abbotrule that a Lord President Scott might write poetry in the vacations as a Lord President Montesquieu had written philosophy was now outside the realm of the practicable. But in the winter of 1816-17 he had a sudden hankering after a legal office more dignified than his seat at the Clerks’ table. Like Jeffrey he craved for what Jeffrey called the “dignified ease of a Baron of Exchequer.” He was now the most famous living Scotsman, he was a sound enough lawyer to warrant a seat on the Bench, and his political friends were in power. “There is a difference in the rank,” he wrote to the Duke of Buccleuch, “and also in the leisure of a Baron’s situation; and a man may, without condemnation, endeavour at any period of life to obtain as much honour and ease as he may handsomely come by.” But the Duke had certain differences at the moment with the Government, and he was ailing; when a year later he was in a position to press Scott’s claims, Scott withdrew on the characteristic ground that he had a friend who had a better title to any vacant judgeship.

  The desire for greater ease was based on something more than ambition. For the first time Scott began to feel his strength flagging. He was now to enter on that testing period of middle life when a man has to make terms with his body. For three broken years he had to struggle against serious ill-health, and when he emerged from the contest he had dropped permanently to a lower plane of physical well-being.

  Since his youth he had borne too hardly on “his brother the ass.” He had played his part in the high-jinks of the Covenant Close and in those Edinburgh dinner-parties where “drinking square” was a gentleman’s duty. Ever since then he had kept his powers of mind and body at full stretch. One half of his life was sedentary, with its long hours in court or at his desk: the other was crowded with violent physical exertion. It is an old mistake to believe that the two forms of toil counteract the mischiefs of each other. Scott, with his heavy frame and immense breadth of shoulder, needed much fresh air and exercise to keep him in health, and for six months in the year he did not get it. He was compelled to live in extremes. His only safety lay in a careful régime like his father’s, but he was not the man to submit to such a discipline unless compelled. He had a hearty appetite for food, and he indulged it. His breakfast was like Dandie Dinmont’s; and this not only at Abbotsford, when he had a day on the hills before him, but in Edinburgh where he must sit cramped for hours in a stuffy court. He ate moderately in the evening, but Edinburgh dinners began early and finished late, and carried a full complement of wine and whisky-punch. He was careless in other ways. The amount of sleep he took was insufficient for such a life, for he would go to bed at midnight and rise at six, and spend an hour or so before he got up planning his day’s work. In the country he was often soaked to the skin and would remain for half a day in his wet clothes. His one concession to what we should call hygiene was his morning’s cold sponging of throat, chest and shoulders.

  [First illness]

  Before the end of 1816 he had had attacks of intestinal pain, which he had combated by drinking hot water. Suddenly, on March 5, 1817, the long-suffering body rebelled. He was giving a dinner-party in Castle Street, when he was seized with violent cramp in the stomach, which sent him to bed “roaring like a bull-calf.” “All sorts of remedies were applied,” he wrote to Morritt, “as in the case of Gil Blas’ pretended colic, but such was the pain of the real disorder that it outdeviled the doctor hollow. Even heated salt, which was applied in such a state that it burned my shirt to rags, I hardly felt when clapped to my stomach. At length the symptoms became inflammatory, and dangerously so, the seat being the diaphragm. They only gave way to very profuse bleeding and blistering, which, under higher assistance, saved my life. My recovery was slow and tedious from the state of exhaustion. I could neither stir for weakness and giddiness, nor read for dazzling in my eyes, nor listen for a whizzing sound in my ears, nor even think for lack of the power of arranging my ideas. So I had a comfortless time of it for about a week.”

  He had a comfortless time for more than three years. The malady was due to gall-stones, and his doctors, who left him “neither skin nor blood,” did not touch the root of the mischief. Their one useful act was to put him on a diet, reduce his breakfast to porridge, and limit strictly his allowance of wine. He protested against the tyranny, but he obeyed, and this dieting, with frequent hot baths, and opium for the bouts of pain, became his rule of life. He rose from his bed to go back to his duties, scaring his friends by his drawn face and wan colour. Many believed that he had got his death-blow, including James Ballantyne, who was nearly felled by James Hogg for giving voice to his fears. All the summer and autumn he struggled against languor, and found every exertion a burden, so that a cry of weariness was forced at last from one who had never before complained. Viewing the familiar scene from the hill above Cauldshiels loch, part of his latest purchase, he found its beauties dimmed to his sick eyes.

  The quiet lake, the balmy air,

  The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree —

  Are they still such as once they were,

  Or is the dreary change in me?

  Alas, the warp’d and broken board,

  How can it bear the painter’s dye!

  The harp of strain’d and tuneless chord,

  How to the minstrel’s stroke reply!

  To aching eyes each landscape lowers,

  To feverish pulse each gale blows chill;

  And Araby’s or Eden’s bowers

  Were barren as this moorland hill.

  It was his only word of complaint. To his friends he made light of his troubles, and he tightened instead of slackening his habits of toil. The reaction of a man to the ebbing of bodily strength in middle age is a certain proof of character, and Scott revealed that tough stoicism which can laugh even when the mouth is wry with pain. He must labour if he would keep the place he had won, and he forced himself to it though every sense and nerve rebelled. In one thing he was fortunate: he found a perfect helper. His friend of seventeen years, William Laidlaw, formerly the tenant of Blackhouse, had been unlucky in his sheep-farming, so Scott proposed that he should occupy the house of Kaeside and act as the Abbotsford factor. Innocent, sentimental and Whiggishly inclined, Laidlaw had little in common with Scott except his love of the Border, but the affection between the two was deep and abiding. He had a slender literary talent and so was able in emergencies to do the work of secretary. But in his presence, even more than in his usefulness, lay his comfort to his master. To listen to his perpetual “What for no?” was for Scott to be convinced that the homely simplicities were not gone from the world.

  The agony of that first bout in March had scarcely abated before Scott was at work on an indifferent play, ultimatel
y known as The Doom of Devorgoil. In May he contracted with Constable for a new novel, Rob Roy — the title was suggested by the publisher — and on the green at Abbotsford, though he had had an attack of pain the day before, he talked in the highest spirits of the hit he would make with “a Glasgow weaver whom he would ravel up with Rob,” and extemporized some of their conversations. It was a bleak summer, and by the 8th of June there was not an ash tree in leaf, so Scott was the less tempted to leave his desk. He finished the novel in the middle of December, most of it having been hard collar-work done in the intervals of pain and lassitude. One day James Ballantyne found him sitting with a blank sheet before him. “Ay, ay, Jemmy,” said Scott, “‘tis easy for you to bid me get on, but how the deuce can I make Rob Roy’s wife speak with such a curmurring in my guts?”

  [Purchase of land]

  Meantime at Abbotsford he had enlarged his bounds by the purchase for £10,000 of the estate of Toftfield, which made him master of all the haunts of Thomas the Rhymer. The house he re-christened Huntly Burn, and he settled there his old friend Adam Ferguson, now retired from the army. Abbotsford — the first plan of it — was approaching completion, a queer jumble of masonry new and old. Even in his sickness Scott was filling the house with curious mementoes of the past — painted glass representing the Scottish kings copied from a ceiling in Stirling Castle, the old fountain from the Cross of Edinburgh, plaster models of the Melrose Abbey gargoyles — and buying freely books, armour, pictures and “gabions.” He was full of plans for turning the steading of one of his farms into a model hamlet of labourers, to be called Abbotstown. Guests were plentiful, among them Washington Irving, who has left a delightful account of his visit, and Wilkie the artist, and that tragic lady, Byron’s forsaken wife. Scott found that autumn that he must give up shooting, since he could not keep pace with the dogs, but in the intervals of his cramps he could potter about his lands for six hours at a time. Whenever the pain lifted and the giddiness produced by narcotics passed off, his spirits revived, and when God sent a cheerful hour he did not refrain. Take this letter to Jeffrey, written in the same month as the melancholy lines quoted above:

  Can you not borrow from your briefs and criticisms a couple of days to look about you here? I dare not ask Mrs Jeffrey till next year, when my hand will be out of the mortar-tub; and at present my only spare bed was, till of late, but accessible by the feudal accommodation of a drawbridge made of two deals; and still requires the clue of Ariadne. Still, however, there it is, and there is an obliging stage-coach called the Blucher, which sets down my guests within a mile of my mansion (at Melrose bridge-end) three times a week, and restores them to their families in like manner after five hours’ travelling. I am like one of Miss Edgeworth’s heroines, master of all things in miniature — a little hill and a little glen, and a little horse-pond of a loch, and a little river, I was going to call it — the Tweed, but I remember the minister was mobbed by his parishioners for terming it, in his statistical report, an inconsiderable stream. So pray do come and see me.

  II

  Rob Roy was published by Constable in the beginning of 1818, the first edition, which was exhausted in a fortnight, reaching the large figure of 10,000 copies. In the previous November an agreement had been signed for a new series of “Tales of my Landlord.” Owing to the dexterity of John Ballantyne and Constable’s fear of the books going to Blackwood, whose new magazine was now bearding his own Edinburgh Review, the terms were very high, including the taking over of the remaining unsaleable stock in Hanover Street. With the advance he received Scott was able to cancel his bond of £4000 to the Duke of Buccleuch. He had now discharged all his debts to personal friends, but at the cost of mortgaging far ahead his creative powers.

  [The Scottish regalia]

  In February he was cheered by the fulfilment of an old hope. He had raised with the Prince Regent the question of disinterring the ancient regalia of Scotland from the lumber of the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle; a commission of inquiry had been appointed, and on 4th February the question was settled which had long disquieted the country, whether the regalia, which by the Act of Union were never to be removed from Scottish soil, had not in fact been sent to London. The great dusty chest was opened, and therein were found, in perfect order, the Crown and the Sceptre fashioned in the reign of James V, and the noble Sword of State presented to James IV by Pope Julian II, as well as the silver mace of the Treasurer of Scotland. To Scott the ceremony was of a sacramental gravity, and his feeling was shared by his daughter Sophia, who all but fainted when the chest was opened. One of the commissioners proposed to put the Crown on the head of one of the young ladies present, but was deterred by Scott’s passionate cry of “By God, No!” That day Edinburgh learned that its genteel antiquarianism was a very different thing from Scott’s burning reverence for the past. So far did he carry it that he was willing to domesticate as family chaplain an uncle of Laidlaw, an aged Cameronian minister, merely because Richard Cameron had been chaplain to one of his own ancestors — a project which fortunately failed. He wrote to Laidlaw—”If, as the King of Prussia said to Rousseau, ‘a little persecution is necessary to make his home entirely to his mind,’ he shall have it; and, what persecutors seldom promise, I will stop whenever he is tired of it. I have a pair of thumbikins also much at his service, if he requires their assistance to glorify God and the Covenant. Seriously I like enthusiasm of every kind so well, especially when united with worth of character, that I shall be delighted with this old gentleman.”

  Meantime he was busy on the new “Tales of my Landlord.” At first he had intended to include two stories in the new series, but the first, The Heart of Midlothian, so grew under his hand that it was published alone in June in four volumes. It was received both in England and Scotland with a universal approbation not accorded to any of the other novels, for it pleased both the critical and the uncritical. “I am in a house,” Lady Louisa Stuart wrote from Sheffield Place, “where everybody is tearing it out of each other’s hands, and talking of nothing else. So much for its success — the more flattering because it overcomes a prejudice. People were beginning to say the author would wear himself out; it was going on too long in the same key, and no striking notes could possibly be produced. On the contrary, I think the interest is stronger here than in any of the former ones (always excepting my first love, Waverley), and one may congratulate you upon having effected what many have tried to do and nobody yet succeeded in — making a perfectly good character the most interesting.” This, from his best critic, was good news for one who sorely needed heartening.

  [Lockhart]

  In the summer of that year at an Edinburgh dinner-party Scott met a young man, who entertained him with an account of a recent visit to Goethe at Weimar, and was promptly bidden to Abbotsford. The young man was one John Gibson Lockhart, a briefless advocate who dabbled in literature. Scott invited him to do some work on the Edinburgh Annual Register, and during the rest of the summer session had many talks with him. Lockhart was then approaching his twenty-fourth birthday, an uncommonly handsome youth, with a pale, clean-cut face, a shapely head, and wonderful dark eyes. His manner, like his appearance, had a touch of the hidalgo in it; his slight deafness made him self-contained, though his shyness disappeared in congenial society; he had a biting wit, did not gladly suffer fools, and was apt to have the air of being superior to his company. His father was a Lanarkshire minister and his mother a minister’s daughter; it must not be forgotten that Lockhart had in his blood that Calvinistic tincture which does not make for humility. He had other strains, for paternally he counted kin with the high race of the Lockharts of the Lee, one of whom had ridden with Douglas in the pilgrimage of the Heart of Bruce. He had been educated at Glasgow University, and had then proceeded to Balliol with a Snell exhibition. At Oxford he had done well, had become a good classical scholar, and had read widely in foreign literatures; had a fellowship been possible for a Scots Presbyterian, he might have remained there happily for the re
st of his days. As it was, he returned to Glasgow, which he found uncongenial, and in 1816 was called to the Scottish Bar.

  In Edinburgh he fell into the company of John Wilson, who had been a gentleman-commoner at Magdalen, and the two, having no practice, were engaged by William Blackwood to write in his new magazine. Blackwood, an astute, rough-grained man, decided that the elegant acerbity of the Edinburgh Review must be fought with stronger and coarser acids, and the first years of “ma Maaga,” as he called his journal, were notorious for its offences against literary decency. The magazine was high Tory in politics, orthodox in religion, and intolerant of all things that did not conform to its strait canons. The Lake School and the Cockney School of poets were attacked — not by Lockhart — with blustering malevolence. In the “Chaldee Manuscript,” a clumsy Biblical parody in which Lockhart had a considerable share, it presented contemporary figures in a mood of ferocious banter. Lockhart was never the typical Blackwood man; that part was better filled by John Wilson and by Hogg in his cups; but something frustrate and irritable in his soul made him consent to its extravagances. He was always a little at odds with his environment and his generation.

  At first sight there would seem to have been nothing in common between the superfine Oxford scholar, with a sneer on his handsome lips, and one who looked upon all men as his brothers. Scott, who disliked Blackwood and had no special love for its proprietor, cannot have been predisposed in favour of the young man who on that May evening took wine with him at Mr Home Drummond’s table. But his reading of his fellows was rarely mistaken. Lockhart lived up to the badge of his family, the “heart within the fetterlock,” and hid the depth and fineness of his humanity under a hard protective sheath. Scott’s insight penetrated to the man beneath, and he detected a spirit too rare for rowdy Edinburgh journalism, while Lockhart’s chilly soul was warmed by the sympathy of the one man who ever commanded his full reverence. Scott thought that he saw in this well-equipped stripling a successor to whom he might hand on the torch of his own loyalties, and in those weary days he was thinking much of his latter end. The result was the beginning of one of the sincerest friendships in the history of letters, through which the older man was to elicit what was best in the younger, and the younger was to give to the world an immortal picture of his master.