by Allan Massie
‘And vowing she would ne’er consent, consented,’ Byron laughed.
So the afternoon ran on, with Byron again, as I had seen him before, merry as a kitten.
When we took our leave, I said that I hoped that I might see him at Abbotsford before long, though I warned him that the accommodation was not of the finest, for it was still a building-site.
‘I hope I may,’ he said. ‘Nothing could give me greater pleasure than to be your guest in your ain keep. But . . . temple-haunting martlets, as I daresay you have, who can tell? I have a presentiment . . . no, that is foolishness. I may however go abroad again before long. England confines me finer than a coffin, and my affairs are in such disorder – “sic a sotter” as my old nurse used to say – that I really do not know.’
‘Try the air of Scotland, my Lord,’ Gala said. ‘It’s caller air, and we’d be blithe to see you in the Borders.’
‘You cannot think’, he said, ‘how often I dream of Deeside where I spent my youth. I was born half a Scot and bred a whole one. One last thing, before we part . . . I am about to become a father. If the child is a boy, will you stand godfather, and consent that I name him Walter?’
‘Nothing could give me more pleasure.’
He embraced me impulsively, in a manner French, Italian or Greek, rather than Scots – and certainly not in the chilly English fashion which depressed his spirits.
My last memory of him is of a smile that lit up that beautiful countenance, and yet left his eye melancholy.
He never paid that visit to Abbotsford. I wish he had. If he had returned from Greece . . . but that, like so much now, doesn’t bear thinking on.
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Abbotsford: Its Building and Significance, 1830
Horace asked only for ‘a little piece of land, with a garden, near the house a spring of living water, and a small wood besides’. When Maecenas granted him his farm in the Sabine Hills, he asked ‘no more, Mercury, but this: make it mine for ever’.
Nothing runs deeper in our nature than the desire for a bit land of our ain, and Horace could not have loved his Sabine farm more, or more truly, than I have loved Abbotsford.
Some have censured me, I know, for what they call my lust for land, and others have thought the zeal with which I added to the little hundred acres, that was all that came with the farm-cottage I bought by the banks of the Tweed, a sign of craziness. They did not understand. I had no lust for possessions as such, and had I never made my fortune could have been content with a but-andben and a small piece of ground. But having opened for myself, as I found, a seemingly inexhaustible treasure-house, I could not deny myself the opportunity to make dreams reality.
When my crash came, and my world was in ruins, it was my greatest fear that I would be dislodged from my Sabine farm. It even crossed my mind that Abbotsford had played the part of Delilah, and that, in drawing so freely from the firms of Ballantyne and Constable, I had allowed her, as it were, to deprive me of my strength as the Philistine woman did Samson. But these were the cheating thoughts of delirium.
My ambition was, I think, a simple one, and not ignoble. I wanted to demonstrate, first to my own satisfaction, and then to the world’s, that it was aye possible in this harsh mercantile age, when value is always to be measured – aye, and in pounds, shillings and pence – to make of life something finer, to gather around me family, friends and dependants, between whom relations should be measured in a different scale, not one of coinage, but rather of humanity and virtue. Without withdrawing from the world, which I could never have done and which would have been foolishness in one circumstanced as I was, I sought to make a different world around me, one in which men and women would be valued for what they were, and not for what they were deemed to be worth.
Now, in my decrepitude, I take a slow and painful turn around the place, and do not believe that in this, my chief endeavour, I have failed, though the world may think me a failure in other respects. I look on my trees, and believe my oaks will outlast the literary laurels with which I have been crowned; and find that thought good. There are few things to compare with the exquisite delight of the tree planter. He is like a painter laying his colours on the canvas; at every moment he sees his effects realized. There is no art or occupation that I know to be compared to it; it is full of past, present, and future enjoyment. I look back to when the land around me was a bare heath, and now I see thousands of trees, all of which I know as I knew the sheep on my grandfather’s farm of Sandyknowe so long ago. There is no end to it, it goes on from day to day, year to year, and my trees will grow more beautiful and splendid long after I am in the grave. The planter is a little God, creating his private Eden. I have never cared for farming my land. The pleasure of seeing my cattle grow is cancelled out by the necessity of killing the poor beasts, which I hate to do. But with trees, you exercise such a benevolent command over nature; the writing of novels and poems is a shallow pleasure compared to that.
How Charlotte used to be bored by my rhapsodies on the subject! How I wish she was still here to reprove me!
The house itself grew almost insensibly. It was never a fully formed intention that it should be what it has become; and yet when my Grand Babylon was complete, it pleased me to think that I had made a sort of Romance in stone, built in the style of an old Scottish manor house; and yet with none of the chill and sense of foreboding that such houses often convey.
It pleased me too to throw my grounds open to the people of the neighbourhood. Nothing could have induced me to put up boards declaring them private and threatening prosecution. I saw to it only that some walks in the immediate vicinity of the house were reserved for the ladies, that they might not be alarmed by rude strangers. But for the rest, anyone who chose might wander over my land at will; I believe that was the good old way; and I often wonder how much of Burns’s inspiration was due to his being able to ramble through the woods of Ballochmyle when he was but a ragged callant.
Perhaps because I passed so many hours alone, in solitary elaboration of my fancies, talking only to Jeannie Deans or the Laird of Monkbarns – listening to him, rather – or hearing Redgauntlet deplore the manners of the age and the death of loyalty – I delighted in the company of family and friends whenever I was free of my desk. Charlotte sometimes complained that we might as well keep an inn as Abbotsford, except, she said, that it is the hosts, Scott, and not the guests that pay the reckoning. But she always managed. Once when we heard that Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the Regent’s son-in-law, was passing through Selkirk, where it behoved me as Sheriff to greet him, it occurred to me that if he intended to pass on to Melrose as I suspected, it would be civil to invite him to call at Abbotsford. I mentioned this to Charlotte as she was lying in bed in the morning. She emitted a scream.
‘What have we to give him?’
‘Oh, wine and cake, nothing more, that will serve very well.’
‘Cake! Where am I to get cake?’
So I pointed out that his visit was very improbable, and, that being so, he could not expect us to have made great provision for an invitation extended on the spur of the moment, and – I insisted – probably declined. So, somewhat mollified, she agreed to come into Selkirk with me to catch a glimpse of the Prince. As it happened, he said he could not see Melrose, but would very much like to call at Abbotsford. So Charlotte turned Merse forayer, until with a long face she said that the town could provide nothing but a bit of cold lamb. Yet, when the Prince arrived, she had ready for him a collation of salmon, blackcock and partridges – and I never learned how she contrived it.
The installation of my old friend William Laidlaw at Kaeside, and of my still older friend Colonel Adam Fergusson – still older for we had been school-fellows – at Tofthills, which was now renamed, at the request of his sisters, Huntly Burn, added to the pleasure of life at Abbotsford, for in the country there are few things more important than congenial neighbours. Adam had but recently retired from the army on half-pay after serving in the Peninsula. Af
ter a long intermission of friendship, owing to our being in different parts of the world, he had written to me to say how delighted his troop had been by a reading of The Lady of the Lake, which was gratifying, though to me improbable.
The greatest day of the year was when we held the Abbotsford Hunt. This was commonly celebrated on the 28th October, young Walter’s birthday, and to it I invited all the lairds of the neighbourhood and my tenants, any other farmers or yeomen I esteemed, and indeed anyone I cared to have. We were never less than thirty in number, and I have known more than forty sit to the supper that succeeded the Hunt. The Hunt itself was followed either on the braes above Cauldshiels Loch, or on the moors of the Gala estate. In the old manner we chased the hare, and there were few years that we did not return with at least one hare for every cottager at Abbotsford. It makes me sigh to think of the joy of that bodily exertion, for I now have to be held on a fat old pony that cannot muster even a trot; and if we had a hunt I would be obliged to follow it in a carriage as best I could. But this good custom was intermitted, like so many others, on account of my financial misfortunes and declining health. Yet I can still enjoy it in retrospect, and as I do so, the songs that were sung of the evening rise up and sound again in my memory.
The dinner or rather supper, for there was nothing formal about it, was on a scale suited to men who had passed the day in the saddle. The auld dominie, George Thompson, who had been my sons’ tutor before they went to school, and whom I had retained as a species of chaplain – for, poor man, his peculiarities were such that he could scarcely hope to hold a charge of souls, virtuous and honest man as he was, but with something simple and unformed to him – was commissioned to say the Grace. Though his wooden leg had prevented him from participating in the Hunt, you would not have thought so to hear the Grace he gave us – one ‘as long as my arms’ in Burns’s phrase. He habitually began by offering thanks to the Almighty who out of his bountiful providence had given man dominion over all the beasts of the field and fowls of the air, and who maun therefore be muckle pleased to see with what zeal and consideration that dominion had been exercised the day. He then, casting an eye, from which the signs of a more than healthy appetite were not absent, proceeded to enumerate the dishes on the table, calling on us to witness how each one testified to the Lord’s tender care for his creation. Next he expatiated on the blessings that individual members of the company had, to his certain knowledge, received at the Lord’s hand since we were last gathered together. In short, as I said on one occasion, he gave us everything but the ‘View Halloo’, and indeed I am not certain that that was altogether lacking. The first year we held the Hunt, the dominie’s long grace aroused a degree of impatience among some of those assembled; but, with each year that passed, it became established more and more firmly as an institution that was an integral part of the proceedings; until eventually, I believe, the regular attenders would have sacrificed one of their favourite dishes rather than have lost the Dominie’s invocation; which offers testimony not only to the humour of mankind but to the effect of the dominie’s essential goodness.
At last he desisted, and all were able to turn their attention to the viands. These were of the robust sort – none of your French sauces and kickshawses, no delicate fricassees or ‘made dishes’, such as a cook may produce to demonstrate his skill rather than to satisfy hungry appetites. There was aye a baron of beef at one end of the table and a noble piece of salted silverside or brisket at the other. There were tureens of hare soup, and hotch-potch, and an assortment of fowl – geese, turkeys, chicken and wild duck – both teal and mallard. There was a singed sheep’s head, which I regard as a necessary feature of a country dinner, and which is in any case a dish that only a delicate-stomached fool would decline; and we could not omit the great chieftain o’ the pudden race, the haggis. Then for the second course, blackcock and other moorfowl would make their appearance, supported by black puddings and mealy puddings, and great pyramids of pancakes. There was claret for those who wished it, but, in the rural manner, ale – brown, nutty, sweet and strong – was the favourite drink, supported, in the best fashion, by quaichs of Glenlivet. The port decanter made a formal but perfunctory circuit or two, but was soon supplanted by cries for hot punch, in the concoction of which, at my request, James Hogg took the lead, acting as manufacturer, taster, and master of ceremonies.
It does a man, now condemned to toast and soda water, good to recall such an occasion.
Then the hum of conversation was broken into by a call for music, and Adam Fergusson might give a lead with ‘Hey, Johnnie Cope’ or some other Jacobite song; my old friend Bob Shortreed would reply with the old ballad of ‘Dick o’ the Cow’. His son Thomas excelled in the macabre ballad of ‘The Twa Corbies’, while James Hogg set the company aroar and beating time with their spoons by his rendition of ‘The Kye Come Hame’. At some point in the evening Willie Laidlaw would be persuaded to cast his modesty aside and sing his tender ballad ‘Lucy’s Flittin’ which brought tears to many an eye unaccustomed to them. Johnnie Ballantyne, while he was yet with us, would cheer the company with his incomparable ‘Cobbler of Kelso’. The Melrose doctor sang ‘The Minstrel Boy’, and sea-shanties jostled with Border ballads, while in the intervals my piper John of Skye sounded his warlike or melancholy notes. So the evening wore on, in the perfection of good fellowship – and indeed I do not recall a single quarrel breaking out at the dinner of the Abbotsford Hunt, though several of the company might be men quick to take imagined offence on other such convivial nights. At last some farmer, who had perhaps twenty miles to travel, would begin to mutter that his wife and dochters would be getting ‘sair anxious’ about his crossing of the fords that lay between him and his home. So a deoch-an-doruis was called for of the best Glenlivet, and the party began to break up, though it was not uncommon for some of the guests to have several more stirrup-cups than they had stirrups; and on one occasion, James Hogg, having taken a wager that he could loup on to his horse’s back without assistance from stirrups, louped so briskly that he went clean over his wall-eyed pony, and broke his nose on landing. Yet, mirabile dictu, I never heard of one who failed to find his way home.
And one of the greatest compliments I ever received came by way of a farmer’s wife who told me that her husband on his return home said, even as he crossed the threshold, ‘Ailie, my woman, I’m ready for my bed – and oh lass, I wish I could sleep for a towmont, for there’s only ae thing in this warld that’s worth living for, and that’s the Abbotsford Hunt’ – a tribute I would rather have had than all the eulogia bestowed upon my books.
It was my pleasure, as I conceived it also my duty, to keep all the traditional festivals of the year. So we aye had a ‘kirn’ or ‘harvest home’ at the end of November, when I gave a supper and a dance to all the peasantry, their friends and kindred, on the estate. There would come as many as the barn would hold, and they would dance the night away, with many a reel, and fortified by ale, hot toddy, and, for the more delicate of the ladies, copious pots of tea.
Christmas I liked to keep as a family occasion, which we celebrated with more gusto than this feast is commonly accorded in our dour Presbyterian Scotland. Nothing to my mind exhibits more clearly the narrow and chilly temper of the Reformers of the sixteenth century than their hostility to the old feasts of the Church. It seems to me that the refusal to celebrate Christmas, when the Son of God became flesh, and Easter, when he suffered that we might be redeemed, is to deny our religion that mystery which deepens our appreciation of the power and benevolence of the Almighty, and the sense of wonder which his works should arouse.
The end of the year, which in Scotland is known as ‘the daft days’, we celebrated in traditional style. I would have thought it uncanny not to welcome the New Year in the midst of my family, and among old friends, with the time-honoured het pint. But I derived even greater pleasure from the visit made to me by all the children on the estate on the last morning of the Old Year when:
The cottag
e bairns syng blythe and gay
At the ha’ door for hogmanay
And I would reward them for their coming and their expression of good wishes by small gifts of cake and bannock and other sweetmeats, and a few coins a-piece – more, I daresay, than some of the poorest among them ever had in their hand on any other day of the year, though few, alas, for all that. The good sense and dignity they displayed on such occasions fortified me in my impression that the members of the Scotch labouring classes are, in their natural state, among the best, most intelligent, and kindhearted of human beings.
There recurs to me now an odd thought that came to me one frosty New Year’s morning when I was taking a turn around my grounds. It is said that the whole human frame in all its parts and divisions is gradually, but perpetually, in the act of decaying and being renewed. It would be a curious timepiece that could indicate to us the very moment when this slow and imperceptible change had been accomplished, so that no atom of the original person who had started out on life’s journey now remained; but instead there existed a different person having apparently the same appearance, the same limbs and trunk, the same countenance (though bearing marks of age), even, in his own estimation, the same consciousness, but who was yet utterly changed. It seemed to me then to be a singular thought – a singular sensation to be at once another and the same.
Now it is less the singularity than the reality of this which strikes me. To the world no doubt, I still appear to be Walter Scott, Bart, of Abbotsford, the Author of Waverley, and all that; in my heart I know that that being is no more. He has vanished utterly, and the wreck that now waits, with an impatience he can sometimes scarce control, is another, and inferior, person.
