by John Buchan
Four days later Scott’s fears were again aroused. “Here is a matter for a May morning, but much fitter for a November one” — this is the first hint which the Journal gives of the approaching disaster. He comforted himself by reflecting that he had “enough to pay forty shillings in the pound, taking matters at their very worst,” — an optimism which may be explained by his ignorance of the ultimate cross-ranking of the accommodation bills. He had a meeting that day with Constable, who arrived “lame as a duck upon his legs, but his heart and courage as firm as a rock.” Constable had been leading a harassed life and had had little sleep for days, for the embarrassments of Hurst and Robinson were now beyond question. But he was clear that they must be supported, and Scott agreed to join him in borrowing £5000 for the purpose. The latter was solemnized rather than alarmed, and resolved then and there to begin a course of rigid economies — no more building, no more purchase of land, books, or “gabions” for the present, and the clearing off of encumbrances with the proceeds of the year’s labour. On 5th December he said good-bye to the Lockharts, and turned straightway to his description of “that worshipful triumvirate, Danton, Robespierre and Marat.” His health was fairly good, apart from heart palpitations and fits of lassitude, and, all things considered, his spirits were equable. He found that he could still enjoy a walk home from the Court in wild weather. “No man that ever stepped on heather has less dread than I of catch-cold; and I seem to regain in buffeting with the wind a little of the high spirits with which, in younger days, I used to enjoy a Tam-o’-Shanter ride through darkness, wind and rain.” A little ominously he counts his mercies: —
I have much to comfort me in the present aspect of my family. My eldest son, independent in fortune, united to an affectionate wife — and of good hopes in his profession; my second, with a good deal of talent, and in the way, I think, of cultivating it to good purpose; Anne, an honest, downright good Scots lass, in whom I could only wish to correct a spirit of satire; and Lockhart is Lockhart, to whom I can most willingly confide the happiness of the daughter who chose him.... My dear wife, the partner of my cares and successes, is, I fear, frail in health — though I trust and pray she may see me out. Indeed, if this troublesome complaint goes on, it bodes no long existence.... Good-night Sir Walter about sixty. I care not, if I leave my name unstained and my family properly settled. Sat est vixisse.
[The rumours thicken]
As the year drew to its close the tidings from the south grew worse. In mid-December a great private bank stopped payment, and for a week panic reigned in the city of London. On 14th December Scott notes that he intended to borrow £10,000 on the security of Abbotsford, which his son’s marriage settlement entitled him to do. At the worst he thought that he would be left with a clear fortune of nearly £50,000.... On the 18th he heard from James Ballantyne that Hurst and Robinson were down and that the end had come, and at last he realized his true position. His first thoughts were for those who had made their home under his shadow:—”This news will make sad hearts at Darnick and in the cottages of Abbotsford”; for his dogs—”poor things, I must get them kind masters;” for Willie Laidlaw and Tom Purdie and James Ballantyne. His children would not suffer, since they were provided for. His wife, sick and suffering, was a little impatient with his fortitude, and blamed him for his past improvidence, but Anne was stoical. For himself “the feast of fancy” was over. “I can no longer have the delight of waking in the morning with bright ideas in my mind, hasten to commit them to paper, and count them monthly as the means of planting such groves and purchasing such wastes.” ... But the alarm was premature. In the evening came Cadell to say that Hurst and Robinson still stood, and next morning Ballantyne and Constable confirmed the glad tidings. “I love the virtues of rough and round men,” Scott wrote — a surprising tribute to the politic Mr Cadell. He flung himself with a redoubled energy on Napoleon, and scribbled “Bonnie Dundee” one evening before dinner. “Can’t say what made me take a frisk so uncommon of late years as to write verses of free-will. I suppose the same impulse which makes birds sing when the storm seems blown over.”
[1825-26]
But the sky was not clear, and that Christmas at Abbotsford was a shadowed as well as a lonely one. Scott had only Anne and his ailing wife for company in the big new house. He executed the mortgage for £10,000 and fretted because Constable remained obstinately at Polton, though the news from London was grave, and Hurst and Robinson were clearly still in danger. His own health was bad, for the day after Christmas he had an attack of kidney trouble, and closed the year on a diet of calomel. A visit of the Skenes did something to cheer him, and he forced himself to get on with his novel Woodstock, in which his interest had flagged. “I must take my own way, and write myself into good humour with my task. It is only when I dally with what I am about, look back and aside, instead of keeping my eyes straight forward, that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.” He had such a sinking on 14th January, when he had a mysterious letter from Constable saying that he had gone post to London, where Scott believed him to have been for a fortnight. “It strikes me to be that sort of letter which I have seen men write when they are desirous that their disagreeable intelligence should be rather apprehended than avowed.”
On the 16th he returned to Edinburgh in a black frost. “Came through cold roads to as cold news,” says the Journal. The news was that Hurst and Robinson had dishonoured a bill of Constable’s, thereby making bankruptcy certain. It would appear that Scott at first did not grasp its full meaning. He dined with Skene, said nothing about the news, and seemed to be in good spirits. But next morning James Ballantyne made the situation clear to him, and when Skene arrived very early he was greeted with, “My friend, give me a shake of your hand — mine is that of a beggar.”
II
[Disaster]
The details of the disaster will always be obscure, but the chief facts are plain. The sudden crack had come which split the whole complex fabric of credit. The banks had lent money in the fat years without any strict investigation, but they were in a privileged position, since they ranked before other creditors, and the crazy system of counter-bills doubled their security for each advance. There had been the same traffic in bills and counter-bills between Constable and Hurst and Robinson as between the former and James Ballantyne. When the London firm got into difficulties they discounted every scrap of Constable’s paper, and he did the same with the Ballantyne bills. When Hurst and Robinson found themselves unable to meet their liabilities, their creditors had recourse to Constable, and Constable to Ballantyne, and so their fall brought down the whole connexion. The floating debt of the Ballantyne firm had increased to some £46,000 — largely through accommodation to Scott, though part was no doubt due to James Ballantyne’s own considerable drawings, and to the fact that the accounts were carelessly kept and the books never balanced. Much of this sum was doubled by the granting to Constable of counter-bills. Constable owed Scott a large amount for recently purchased copyrights, and Scott in turn owed Constable for advances made on account of future literary work. The consequence was that the Ballantyne liability — which was Scott’s — amounted to about £130,000, most of it due on bills held by the banks, though a few were in the hands of private traders and speculators. There was, of course, a large counter-claim on Constable — four years later it was estimated at £64,000 — but not much of this could be reckoned among the assets. Hurst and Robinson paid 1s. 3d. in the pound on their debts of £300,000; Constable 2s. 9d. on his total of £256,000; Ballantyne in the end paid every penny.
In that doleful January, Constable, gouty, dropsical and half-crazed with anxiety, made a desperate fight of it. He tried to get Lockhart to go with him to the Bank of England to raise anything up to £200,000 on his copyrights; he would have had Scott borrow £20,000 in Edinburgh and send it to him forthwith; his devices were many, and all of a bottomless futility. Thomas Constable was of opinion that his father might have been saved if these proposals had been lis
tened to, but it is hard to see how; any fresh loan would have gone into the pit which had already received the proceeds of the Abbotsford mortgage. It was these wild shifts, together with the futile Abbotsford borrowing, which broke Scott’s trust in Constable. The gallant old gambler did not give up hope till the last. As late as 18th January he wrote to Cadell in a strain of high confidence.
But for Scott the time for illusion was gone. He saw that, whatever Hurst and Robinson and Constable might ultimately pay, the Ballantyne firm was down and he himself insolvent. He was advised to make a trust of his property, and he was determined with his own hand to pay off every penny of debt. He turned straightway to work, and in that dark week he wrote a chapter of Woodstock every day. At the moment he had no hope of saving Abbotsford or anything else from the wreck. “Naked we entered the world,” he wrote in the Journal, “and naked we leave it — blessed be the name of the Lord!” But the very magnitude of the disaster tightened his courage. Six days after he knew the worst he wrote: —
I feel neither dishonoured nor broken.... I have walked my last on the domains I have planted — sate my last in the halls I have built. But death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared them. My poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to turn up against, me in this run of ill-luck; i.e. if I should break my magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my fortune. Then Woodstock and Bony may both go to the paper-maker, and I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or turn devotee, and intoxicate the brains another way. In prospect of absolute ruin, I wonder if they would let me leave the Court of Session. I would like, methinks, to go abroad,
“And lay my bones far from the Tweed.”
But I find my eyes moistening, and that will not do. I will not yield without a fight for it. It is odd, when I set myself to write doggedly, as Dr Johnson would say, I am exactly the same man that I ever was, neither low-spirited nor distrait. In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and power of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and bracer; the fountain is awakened from its inward recesses, as if the spirit of affliction had troubled it in his passage.
[His friends]
He slept badly these days, for he was little out of doors. On 24th January he went back to the Court for the first time since the tragedy, feeling “like the man with the large nose,” that everybody was talking about him. Offers of help flowed in from the most diverse quarters. Old friends like Sir William Forbes proffered aid, and one unknown admirer was prepared to put up £30,000; his servants desired to forgo their wages, and an old music-master tendered his savings; his daughter-in-law wanted to sell out her holding in the funds; the universal feeling was that which Lord Dudley expressed to Morritt: “Good God, let every man to whom he has given months of delight give him a sixpence, and he will rise to-morrow morning richer than Rothschild.” There was even a proposal that the Government should do something. To all this spontaneous friendliness Scott had one answer. He was annoyed when the newspapers suggested a subscription, “calling upon men and gods to assist a popular author who, having choused the public of many thousands, had not the sense to keep wealth when he had it.” He would have no charity, nor would he take the easy road of bankruptcy. The Ballantyne firm might have obtained a speedy discharge; the creditors would have had a right to the life-rent and to the reversionary interest of Abbotsford, but the future printing profits and Scott’s future literary earnings would have been his own. Such would have been the natural course for a business man to follow, but Scott viewed it differently, for he saw a principle involved. No man should lose by him if it lay in his power to prevent it; otherwise in a court of honour he would deserve to lose his spurs. “No, if they permit me, I will be their vassal for life, and dig in the mine of my imagination to find diamonds (or what they sell for such) to make good my engagements, not to enrich myself. And this from no reluctance to allow myself to be called the Insolvent, which I probably am, but because I will not put out of the power of my creditors the resources, mental or literary, which yet remain to me.”
He soon recovered a measure of serenity. On 26th January he could write to Laidlaw: “For myself, I feel like the Eildon hills — quite firm, though a little cloudy. I do not dislike the path that lies before me. I have seen all that society can show, and enjoyed all that wealth can give me, and I am satisfied much is vanity, if not vexation of spirit.” More, he felt that old lift of the heart with which he had always faced a crisis. “It is not nature,” he wrote to Miss Edgeworth, “to look upon what can’t be helped with any anxious or bitter remembrances.... The fact is I belong to that set of philosophers who ought to be called Nymmites after their good founder Corporal Nym, and the fundamental maxim of whose school is ‘Things must be as they may.’” He was resolute in his magnanimity and would blame no one but himself for his disaster. For James Ballantyne he had only compassion. “I owe it to him to say that his difficulties, as well as his advantages are owing to me.” He had a grievance against Constable, but he would not let Lockhart hint at it. “While I live,” he wrote, “I shall regret the downfall of Constable’s house, for never did there exist so intelligent and so liberal an establishment. They went too far when money was plenty, that is certain; yet if every author in Britain had taxed himself half a year’s income, he should have kept up the house which first broke in upon the monopoly of the London trade, and made letters what they now are.”
Nevertheless the breach with Constable could not be healed. Scott could forgive him his old extravagant optimism, but not his ultimate supineness, and the futile Abbotsford mortgage rankled. He watched tenderly over the Ballantyne interests; James became manager of the printing business under the Trust, and was soon enabled to repurchase it for himself, while Scott insisted that he should do all his printing. The Ballantynes had been his retainers; his galleon had towed their little cockboat into prosperous seas; he had given them a merry life, and but for him they would have been nothing but insolvent country tradesmen; on that score he had no reproaches. But Constable was different. For Constable he had had admiration but no real affection, and, however rash his own conduct had been, Constable’s had exceeded it. “He paid well and promptly,” he told Skene, “but, devil take him, it was all spectral together. He sowed my field with one hand, and as liberally scattered the tares with the other.” Cadell broke with his partner, and Scott unhesitatingly followed Cadell. There was a painful interview in Castle Street, when Constable arrived, “puffing in like a steamboat,” and found Scott’s manner unwontedly chilly. Of all his ventures he had now only the Miscellany left, and the success of this depended upon Scott’s help. He pretended to be jocose, but his heartiness faltered, and he saw clearly that the end had come. With a final effort he tried to thaw the ice. “Come, come, Sir Walter,” he said, “matters may come round, and I trust that you and I may yet crack a cheerful bottle of port together at Abbotsford.” But Scott was adamant. “Mr Constable,” he replied, “whether we ever meet again in these conditions must depend upon circumstances which yet remain to be cleared up.”
They rarely met again — certainly never on the old footing, though they exchanged letters of a reasonable friendliness. Here I find it difficult to acquit Scott of a defect in generosity. Constable was a suffering, indeed a dying, man, for next year he was in his grave. He had fallen from a giddy height, and now, cumbered with debt and disease, was struggling to climb a step or two out of the pit. He faced misfortune as gallantly as Scott himself, and with heavier handicaps. He had been lavish to a fault, had showered upon Scott gifts and kindnesses, and had laboured to provide him with material for the novels. He was perhaps the greatest publisher in the history of English letters. But the tribute which Scott readily paid to the bookseller he would not pay to the man. There had always been something about Constable’s complacency, his bustling competence, which antagonized him, and he had never placed him, as he had placed the Ballantynes, in the circle of his friends. So he l
et the broken man hobble down the Castle Street stairs without a word of kindness.
[Scott’s decision]
“My own right hand shall pay my debt.” Scott’s decision was based on a clear-eyed survey of the past. He knew that he had been grievously to blame, for he had been perfectly aware of the slippery ground he had been treading. The sudden “check” had come of which he had warned Terry, and had thrown him on his back; the fates had not granted him the time on which he had reckoned to clear his feet. He had suffered from Constable’s rashness and James Ballantyne’s slovenliness, but his main undoer had been himself. He had gambled with his eyes open and had lost; it remained for him with his eyes open to make restitution. So at the age of fifty-five, already weary and in broken health, he took upon himself a mountain of debt, and thereby condemned himself to servitude for such years as remained to him. It was a simple and faithful following out of his creed, not quixotic or fantastic, but a plain fidelity to his high standard of honour. He had no sympathy, as he said, with the virtues “that escaped in salt rheum, sal-volatile, and a white pocket-handkerchief.” He could not believe that rules of morality which held in the case of the ordinary man, should be slackened for the artist. Like his own James IV at Flodden, he “saw the wreck his rashness wrought,” and offered his all in atonement.
