by John Buchan
Castle Street, where Scott lived, ran across the ridge of the New Town, with the Firth on the north to show silver in the dawn, and to the south the great Castle rock to catch the last fires of evening. Scott’s library lay behind the dining-room, a small, high, square apartment which looked out upon the bleaching-green. It was always in perfect order — the volumes in the cases well cared for, with a wooden slip marking the place of a book which had been borrowed; the great table at which he wrote covered with papers neatly docketed; a massive antique inkstand; on the open space of wall above the fireplace a portrait of Claverhouse flanked by Highland targes and claymores. There Scott did his “day’s darg” before breakfast or during the evenings he spent at home. The big deerhound Maida, given him by Glengarry, kept him company on the hearth-rug, and when he was absent on leave the cat, Hinse of Hinsfeldt, descended from the top of the library ladder and mounted guard on a footstool. Scott used to talk to the animals while he worked, and would leave off every now and then to pat Maida’s head. Yet he wrote at high speed and with a profound concentration. When the work was tedious or inspiration flagged he forced himself to complete it before rising. “There is only one rule in such cases, not to let the ink dry in your pen till the task is done. ‘Gutta cavat lapidem non vi sed saepe cadendo,’ says the school copy-book, and on this principle a scribbler sometimes becomes agreeably surprised at the extent of tiresome and rugged road that he has got over.” He never planned out his task beforehand with any elaboration, so sometimes he came to a dead halt. “One page — or, I should say, one line — suggests another, and on coming to a stand-still, as it occasionally happens — for we are all liable to ebbs and flows — I very coolly lay it aside and take to something else, till, with the next change of the moon, there begins a new tide of thought.” Except in emergencies he considered three hours of literary labour sufficient for a day, but in Edinburgh he liked to be uninterrupted, so he preferred the early morning when others were asleep.
[An Edinburgh day]
His dress in town was sober black as became a court official; his gown was ancient and shabby, and his lame foot had made a huge hole in the skirt. When breakfast was over a coach arrived to take him to the Court, and there he sat all day in a dim litigious light, dozing a little, dreaming much, till he was roused by Lord Balmuto’s fierce grunt of “Where are your cautioners?” The actual court work was for the most part mechanical, though it involved the reading of many papers overnight, a task which Scott conscientiously performed. He had always a great gift of absenting his mind. At Abbotsford, while he was watching his foresters at work, his fancy would be busy with the novel he had in hand; so in court, while an advocate was droning along, he would be happy with his own dream. Sometimes, when his imagination had mounted its high horse, he would forget his environment altogether, and once, when on his way to an evening party, he wandered to the outskirts of the city and came to his senses at the bottom of a wet gravel-pit. The routine occupation he had found was perfect for his purpose, for it gave him long hours of silent meditation.
After court he sought fresh air and exercise, walking in fine weather, or driving in an open carriage with a friend or member of his family. His favourite rounds were the Blackford Hills; or to Ravelston and home by Corstorphine; or to the shore at Portobello, where his coachman was instructed to drive along the edge of the tide. Or he would explore the Old Town, and expound to a companion the tale of every crooked gable in the Cowgate or the Canongate. Then with a sharpened appetite he returned to his five o’clock dinner, for he had not eaten since nine. Scott was a heavy eater of plain food. When he dined at home he liked homely dishes, and from Abbotsford there came every week by the Melrose carrier a great hamper of butter, cheese, eggs, fowls, vegetables and cream, and, in their season, game and salmon. His palate was not delicate, and he had little sense of taste or smell: he never knew when venison was high, or wine was corked, and he could not tell sherry from madeira. Claret was his ordinary drink, and he regarded a pint of claret as each man’s share when the cloth was drawn; he liked champagne, which had come into fashion since the war; port he thought an unpleasant kind of physic; he was fond of small drams of whisky in a quaigh, and on the whole preferred whisky-toddy to any wine. He had smoked a good deal in his Ashestiel days, had given it up, but had resumed it under the influence of Lockhart and young Walter, and used to have a couple of cigars before going to bed.
He went often to the theatre, sometimes in summer he drove abroad after dinner, and during the winter he frequently dined out. The Edinburgh dinner-party at that time might be as late as six, and was apt to be a formidable business. On state occasions Scott would array himself in white silk stockings, a scarlet silk waistcoat, and the dress coat of the Forest Club. There was a great deal of toast-drinking and giving of sentiments, and a generous consumption of wine. Later in the evening the supper-tables would appear, and the guests sit down to roast fowls and Welsh rarebits and broiled bones and huge bowls of punch. Scott was a noted figure at these Edinburgh parties, but he was at his best in his own house, where every Sunday night he entertained a few people. Thither came Skene and Erskine and Clerk and all the familiars. Sunday was the night for entertainment even in the strictest circles — did not Sir Henry Moncrieff give on that day his famous supper-parties in Queen Street? — but music was not permitted, so after the Sunday dinners there was no harp-playing or singing of Scots songs, but instead he used to read aloud to the company. Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Wordsworth, Southey, Crabbe and Byron were his favourites, and in passages of deep emotion he would become like one inspired. The critical Lockhart confessed that Scott read aloud “high poetry with far greater simplicity, depth, and effect than any other man I have ever heard.”
[Conversation]
Good conversation was one of the things for which Edinburgh was famous, but its excellences were of a special kind. The talkers were the lawyers and the professors, and the talk was largely made up of brilliant disquisitions by individuals and ingenious arguments between celebrated gladiators, while the rest of the company sat still and admired. This was not Scott’s native air, and for long he was considered as a little slow and commonplace. He spoke broadly, using many Scots words, and he was not greatly interested in the niceties of dialectic. Moreover, the good talkers were the young Whigs, and Scott’s Toryism made him apathetic towards speculations on the advancement of science and the march of reason. But by 1820 he had won a great repute for a kind of conversation peculiarly his own — a combination of rugged sagacity and humour which humanized and brightened the atmosphere. Into the play of academic and forensic wit he brought a kindlier fellowship. His Edinburgh table-talk was not that of Abbotsford, where he would let himself go in riotous mirth, but it had always a country flavour. He refused to be drawn into disputes, and he would check any controversy in which tempers were rising with some comic phrase or whimsical tale. In the presence of that wise, rugged, brooding face — as massive and as masculine as Tom Cribb’s — petty cleverness fell to a discount. “The strongest, purest and least observed of all lights,” Lockhart has written, “is daylight; and his talk was commonplace, just as sunshine is, which gilds the most indifferent objects and adds brilliancy to the brightest.... I can never forget the pregnant expression of one of the ablest of that school and party (the Whigs) — Lord Cockburn — who when some glib youth chanced to echo in his hearing the consolatory tenet of local mediocrity, answered quietly—’I have the misfortune to think differently from you — in my humble opinion Walter Scott’s sense is a still more wonderful thing than his genius.’” Cockburn indeed placed Scott as a talker on the same plane as Jeffrey himself. “Scarcely ever in his moods was he more striking or delightful than in society; when the halting limb, the bur in the throat, the heavy cheeks, the high Goldsmith-forehead, the unkempt locks, and general plainness of appearance, with the Scotch accent and stories and sayings, all graced by gaiety, simplicity and kindness, made a combination most worthy of being enjoyed.
”
[Edinburgh society]
He mixed with every element in the capital except the divines, for he rarely went to church. His sympathies were with Pleydell’s “suffering and Episcopal Church of Scotland”; he had a pew in St George’s church in York Place; and it was the English prayer-book that he read to his family; though his son Charles was baptized by Thomson of Duddingston, and he himself had become in 1806 an elder of that parish and had sat as such in presbytery, synod and General Assembly. Edinburgh had never seen a more varied and confident social life or so many celebrities on her pavements. Haydon, the painter, has described the winter scene. “Princes Street in a clear sunset, with the Castle and the Pentland Hills in radiant glory, and the crowd illumined by the setting sun.... First you would see limping Sir Walter, with Lord Meadowbank; then tripped Jeffrey, keen, restless and fidgety; you then met Wilson or Lockhart, or Allan, or Thomson, or Raeburn, as if all had agreed to make their appearance at once.” It was a pleasant place for the well-to-do, the successful and the physically strong; less pleasant for a dyspeptic youth like Thomas Carlyle, who was then living in Bristo Street and struggling to maintain himself by tutorships. Carlyle gives us the other side of the medal. When he trod the pavements in summer “hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace,” and met Scott, he cared nothing for what he was afterwards to call that “fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness;” he saw in him only the “literary restaurateur of Europe.” Below the comely surface there were new forces working of which even the illuminate Whigs knew little; but the surface was all cheerfulness, good fellowship and a modest pride.
The Napoleonic Wars, having closed the Continent to travel, had sent many scions of great English houses to Edinburgh to study at the university, and this had introduced an agreeable cosmopolitanism, which in 1820 had not wholly disappeared. But the scene was still idiomatically Scottish. Figures still survived from an older world, notably some of the famous race of Scots gentlewomen—”strong handed, warm hearted and high spirited; the fire of their temper not always latent; merry even in solitude; very resolute; indifferent about the modes and habits of the modern world; and adhering to their own ways, so as to stand out, like primitive rocks, above ordinary society.” Many of the great academic figures had gone, but Dugald Stewart and John Playfair were alive; there was a national school of science and philosophy as well as of letters, and there were scholarly country gentlemen, like Clerk of Eldin and Sir William Forbes, to make a bridge between learning and society. Edinburgh was a true capital, a clearing-house, for the world’s culture and a jealous repository of Scottish tradition.
Above all there were the Bar and the Bench to emphasize her individuality. Never had the profession of the law flowered into so engaging a variety of character and attainment. There was Lord Newton, whose purple visage looks down at us from Raeburn’s canvas, whose legal lore was as deep as his potations, and whose one fear was that, as the times degenerated, he should be left the only claret-drinker on the face of the earth; there was William Adam, the Chief Commissioner of the new jury court, whose judgments according to Lord Glenlee were like an act of Parliament, with all the appearance of precision and all the reality of confusion; at the Bar there was still John Clerk, the brother of Scott’s friend, a prodigiously successful advocate, lame, dishevelled, always in a fury of excitement, the joy of clients and the terror of judges. And one fantastic figure had only just left the scene, Adam Rolland the consulting counsel, who walked abroad in mulberry velvets and satins “like one of the creatures come to life again in a collection of dried butterflies,” and whose waxen cheeks were rouged like a doll’s.
[The younger Whigs]
Scotland was only now emerging from the dark ages. Up till 1799 the colliers and salters had been slaves; there was no popular voice in the Government and neither a free press nor free speech; every institution, municipal, political and judicial, stood in need of drastic reform. But the long war, the terror of Napoleon, and the hegemony of Henry Dundas had officially stilled the voice of criticism, and in the reaction against foreign extravagance change was identified with revolution. It needed courage to profess liberal opinions, since they shut the avenues to success. So the younger Whigs were driven to form a coterie, which suffered a little from the defect of coteries in cultivating spiritual pride. The vast bulk of educated opinion was against them, but they included most of the ablest living Scotsmen — Jeffrey and his fellow reviewers, Henry Cockburn, Playfair, Scott’s friends George Cranstoun and Thomas Thomson, almost every one, except Scott, who carried weight with the larger public. They made a pleasant warm-hearted group, deeply attached to each other as companions in adversity, and the incomparable charm and gentleness of Henry Erskine in the previous generation had left them with a tradition of good manners and social urbanity. With their straiter opponents they had no dealings, but they mixed generally in society, and Scott filled the part which Erskine had once played and acted as a trait d’union. For Jeffrey especially, in spite of many feuds, he had a sincere affection. He loved the spirit in the small body, the ardour and candour of the bright dark eyes, and he would have agreed with Carlyle’s estimate—”not deep enough, pious or reverent enough, to have been great in literature, but a man intrinsically of veracity.” Six years later he wrote in his journal: “I do not know why it is that, when I am with a party of my Opposition friends, the day is often merrier than when with our own set. Is it because they are cleverer? Jeffrey and Harry Cockburn are, to be sure, very extraordinary men, but it is not owing to that entirely. I believe both parties meet with the feeling of something like novelty. We have not worn out our jests in daily contact.” There could be friendship with political opponents, but not habitual intercourse.
True intimacy for Scott demanded his own way of political thinking, or no politics at all. Like many men with a vast acquaintanceship his innermost circle was small. When he escaped from the Parliament House and descended the Mound, it was generally in the company of Will Erskine, the frail figure with the hectic cheek and the soft brown eyes, or of Will Clerk, with his shabby clothes and shrewd glances from under his pent-house brows. Closer still, perhaps, was James Skene, the Aberdeenshire laird, who had been his frequent guest since the first days at Ashestiel and who shared all his tastes in sport and letters. Two others of the inner circle were at first sight less obviously kindred souls. George Cranstoun, with his deathly pallor and finicking manners and minute legal pedantry, was endeared by long association, and Scott was one of the few who could penetrate to the man behind the exquisite formalist. There was a still stranger ally in Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, connoisseur, antiquary, reactionary and wit, who walked the streets in a fantastic wig, and in a thin soprano voice poured scorn on a vulgar world and on all in it that was not long-descended. But Sharpe was a sound scholar in his way and had a heart beneath his corsets, and in Scott’s presence the acid dandy became genial and human.
It was an age of dining clubs, where men could talk their own talk and pass the bottle with no need to join the ladies. Scott loved such entertainments, and it was he who in 1803 first started the Friday Club. That sodality was broadly based, for it included as many Whigs as Tories; Playfair, Sydney Smith, Francis Horner and Kennedy of Dunure were members as well as Scott and Erskine and Henry Mackenzie, and Jeffrey and his friends found it for forty years the pleasantest thing in Edinburgh. There was another club which met from Friday till Tuesday at Blairadam, the country house of Chief Commissioner Adam, whom Lockhart thought the only man who rivalled Scott “in uniform graciousness of bonhomie and gentleness of humour.” This was a smaller fraternity, nine in number, which included a Fife laird or two, Thomas Thomson, his brother the minister of Duddingston, Adam Ferguson and Will Clerk. The Saturdays and Mondays were spent in visits to famous spots in Fife and Kinross and ramblings over Benarty and the Cleish hills — the landscape of The Abbot — and the Sundays in church-going and talk. Till his last illness Scott never missed a meeting.
[Booksellers]
There were the booksellers, too, as part of his circle, the men upon whom his fortunes were grounded. Scott would often step from the Parliament House to Constable’s office in the High Street, where daily the great publisher arrived in his sober barouche and pair. But he went there on business only, for he was never quite at ease with the “Emperor,” and too many of the Edinburgh Review set haunted the place. More often he would turn down the Canongate and thread Coull’s Close to the old building called Paul’s Work under the shadow of the Calton Hill, where James Ballantyne reigned among his machines. Whatever James’s imperfections in finance, he was an excellent manager of a printing shop, and he had a staff as eager and competent as himself. In 1822, besides much other work, he issued 145,000 volumes from Scott’s pen alone, no small achievement in those days of the old hand-presses. Sometimes Scott would be a guest at James’s house in St John Street near-by, where on the eve of a new novel there would be a mighty feast — none of John’s French kickshaws, but turtle and venison and solid beef and mutton, and ample allowance of strong ale, iced punch and madeira. At such banquets James would sing his best songs, and with a voice sacramentally hushed would give the toast of “The Great Unknown.” Later in the evening, when the toddy bowl had appeared, the host would produce the proof-sheets of the new novel and roll out some dramatic scene in his rich bass, while every muscle of his face twitched in sympathy.
Sometimes on his way home Scott would be taken by Lockhart to William Blackwood’s fine new shop in Princes Street. There was always a certain constraint in these visits, for he was a little shy of the noisy “Maga” group, and he was not attracted by Blackwood’s blunt manner and the steady grey eyes under the shaggy brows. Yet, had he been in Blackwood’s hands rather than in Constable’s, his fate might well have been different, for the former was the canniest mind in the book-trade, one who would never venture where he could not comfortably retreat. But if Scott did not altogether take to Lockhart’s friends, Lockhart violently disapproved of one of Scott’s. The son-in-law had no taste for raffish Bohemianism, and he winced when the great man was hailed in the street by a fantastic little figure in the loudest sporting garb, driving a bright blue curricle. He disliked accompanying Scott to John Ballantyne’s auction-room in Hanover Street where that sprightly being sold bibelots with melting eloquence. Still less did he approve of John’s exotic dinners at Harmony Hall, where the wandering planets of the stage and the opera congregated. Lockhart liked neither of the Ballantynes, he could not understand Scott’s taste for them, and he does imperfect justice to their merits. For James was a true pioneer in fine printing and a skilful manager in his actual craft, while John was stuffed with whimsical romance. He bought Montrose’s sword from Graham of Gartmore and piously presented it to Scott, and his buttons, which less piously he wore on his own shooting-jacket. He must have had gifts of drollery amounting almost to genius. One has only to read the tributes of Hogg and Wilson to realize that to many of his contemporaries the ultimate wells of fun seemed to be sealed at John’s death.
