by Allan Massie
I do not like that thought. There is an uncomfortable arrogance to it, and an evasiveness, as if I would escape judgement by pleading an alibi.
Yesterday, I had myself driven to Dryburgh Abbey to sit a half-hour by Charlotte’s grave, and to wonder, tranquilly – with a tranquillity indeed that I have not often known in latter days – how long it would be before I too should find rest there. On the way to Dryburgh and on the way back we stopped at that high point of the road, where the view extends over the lovely winding river to the distant Cheviots. On the outward journey the beauty of the landscape pricked my heart, and I felt a deep and powerful reluctance ever to take leave of it. It is a scene I have known since boyhood, and I have found nothing more beautiful though I have travelled much. But on the return journey that reluctance had died away, for I perceived that this landscape had become part of me, and that even in the grave I could never be separated from it. This may seem fanciful to anyone who happens on this memoir; and yet all I can say is that it came to me with the conviction of utter certainty.
If I have done anything good in my life, Abbotsford is at the heart of it. My writings have, I am aware, given pleasure to many, and may continue to do so; it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. Yet this sort of pleasure is an easy business, and for my part, there has been no merit in the achievement. Writing has been as natural to me as breathing. But at Abbotsford I believe I have set an example.
Some politician – I now forget which – used to say that he would willingly bring in one bill to make poaching a felony, another to encourage the breed of foxes, and a third to revive the decayed – and to me repulsive – amusements of cock-fighting and bull-baiting, if by doing so, by thus sacrificing his own feelings to the humours and prejudices of country gentlemen, he could prevail upon them to dwell on their estates, among their tenantry, and care for them in the good old way. For my part I have required no such incentive. I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to make of Abbotsford what I thought life should be.
We are all of us exiles from Eden, and it sometimes strikes me that the main object of our lives must be to find the route back. When I was but a bairn at Sandyknowe, I knew the reality of Eden; and it is the restoration of the sense of fitness which that knowledge insensibly secured for me that I have attempted in everything which I have done and made at Abbotsford. In doing so I have undoubtedly laid myself open to criticism, even mockery. It may be said – I jalouse that it is said – that in setting myself up as a laird in this fashion, I have gone clean against the spirit of the age. Then the waur for the spirit of the age is my response!
The paradox of man’s condition is that we are each of us isolated individuals, activated frequently by mean and selfish impulse – fear, resentment, hatred, greed. We are each conscious of our own uniqueness, and this feeling is intensified with the progress of civilization. Yet a man alone is but a paltry thing, for we are also tribal beings, and we flourish best in a community where we live in a state of reciprocal obligation towards our fellows. It was such a community that I tried to form at Abbotsford.
Now much is changed. The community is broken like Arthur’s table: Charlotte, on whose good sense and vivacity I relied more for my own good spirits than any but our family and a handful of intimates ever knew, is gone. Tom Purdie is no longer on this earth to demonstrate with his every word and action the richest mould of humanity. The children are grown and have their own lives, only Anne, poor lass, remaining to undertake the ever less agreeable task of caring for me, as my temper grows uncertain and my spirits depressed. Even my favourite grand-child, little Johnny Lockhart, has but a slender hold on the thread of life.
As for me, I pray that I may go before my wits leave me. Well, I have been near death before, but never longed for it, as I do now, which is not, I trust, a grievous sin, considering my condition. I would be happy to slip away, with no fuss, and be laid by Charlotte.
When I was very ill ten years ago, and lying in our house in Castle Street, the old Earl of Buchan, as absurd a man as his brothers Thomas and Henry Erskine were intelligent, called to see me. Peter Mathieson, my honest coachman, whose evening psalm was one of my pleasures at Abbotsford when I took a walk by the bowling-green near his cottage, but who on this occasion was acting as a doorkeeper, told the Earl that I was too ill to receive visitors. Since Peter’s face could assume a lugubrious air that the greatest actor might envy, this would have convinced any man but the Earl, who however, insisting that he must see me, pushed past Peter and mounted the stairs. Peter followed him expostulating, and the noise drew my daughter Sophia from the sick-room. She supported Peter’s opinion. In vain: the Earl would see me, and he would have pushed past Sophia had Peter not grabbed him by the coat-tails, spun him round, and shoved him down the stairs, not leaving off till the noble lord was back on the pavement. When I inquired the cause of the disturbance and was told, I was afraid lest Peter’s forcefulness might have done the old man some injury. I therefore asked James Ballantyne who was sitting with me to follow the Earl home and explain that I really was so very ill and the family in such bewilderment that the ordinary rules of civility had been dispensed with, etc. James found the old man in his library in a high state of indignation, ‘grumbling like a bubbly-jock’. However, James being a dab hand at the art of mollification – which it occurs to me now he had practised on many a creditor – at last appeased his Lordship, who therefore furnished him with an explanation for his extraordinary conduct.
‘I wished’, he said, ‘to embrace Walter Scott before he died, and to relieve his mind by informing him that I had long considered it as a satisfactory circumstance that he and I were destined to rest together in the same place of burial at Dryburgh Abbey, he on account of his connection with the worthy family of Haliburton, I as the hereditary proprietor of the said lands. Moreover, to lay bare the principal purpose of my visit, so rudely forestalled – I wished to relieve his mind as to the arrangements for his funeral, and to show him a plan which I have prepared for the procession – in short, in one word, Mr Ballantyne, to assure him that I take upon myself the whole conduct of the ceremonial at Dryburgh, and the full responsibility. And this – had I been permitted to deliver my message – would have been of great comfort to him.’
Whereupon, for some half-hour, he treated James to a full account of the formal programme, which he had devised, and which existed in writing – ‘ready to be sent to the printers instanter, in short, to you, Mr Ballantyne, if you so desire it’ – in which programme there could be no doubt that the central figure was not Walter Scott, but David, Earl of Buchan.
Well, the hare-brained old man has beaten me to his resting-place at Dryburgh, and the worms have been at him these two years.
As to my own state, I had a nasty jar when I was in London last Spring. At some party a young lady called Miss Arkwright sang very charmingly. One song especially pleased me, and I whispered to Lockhart, ‘Capital – but whose words are they? – Byron’s, I suppose, but I cannot place them . . .’ ‘No,’ said Lockhart, ‘they are your own, from The Pirate.’ I was much distressed. If memory goes, I thought, then all is gone, for that has ever been my strong point. And it is going.
Tom Purdie’s death was the severest blow I have had since Charlotte passed away; he was my rock. While Tom watched over Abbotsford, for which he felt like all good servants a proprietorial interest that in his case extended even to my literary works, for he took early to referring to them as ‘our buiks’, it seemed a safe stronghold – ‘ein festes burg’, as Luther puts it in his hymn. He came home from work in the woods one evening, laid his head on the table, and fell asleep, never to wake again. I was so shocked, and made wretched by this, that for the first time, I wished to be quit of Abbotsford, and back in the town. I cannot turn a corner in the place without expecting to encounter the comfort of Tom’s presence. When I stood by his grave in Melrose, and let a handful of earth fall on his coffin, I knew that nothing, not even Abbotsford, would be the same again; and that my own c
reated Eden was slipping from me like a dream from which I had wakened.
20
Last Days, 1831–2
It was determined I should go abroad for my health’s sake – a sentence that discloses the shipwreck which is old age. For more than forty years I had made my own decisions in all important matters, as befitted one of the Black Hussars of Literature which I held myself to be. But now all was changed. It had become a case of ‘Sir Walter, you must’ and ‘Sir Walter, you must not’. This was to be less than a man, less than myself, but in my enfeebled state I lacked the force or resolution to assert my own will. And indeed I did not know truly what that was, for I found myself thrown about like high branches in a big wind, and I was wild, changeable, and erratic as Lear.
Warm-naked come we to the world, cold-naked take our leave
And King and Fool and Clown and Knave the grave gapes to receive;
In black night’s wilderness of storm we all alike are tossed
Like chuckie-stanes that bairns cast till a’ distinction’s lost.
Besides, my spirits were sore oppressed, and the agitation for parliamentary reform preyed on my weary mind. I scribbled some stuff anent the matter, for it was seldom long absent from my thoughts. But my friends persuaded me it would not do. My arguments, they said, were stale; I was too much ‘out of things’ to be aware of how the debate had proceeded. It was a further sadness that this mere political affair should be the cause of a coolness between me and James Ballantyne, the first time ever, I think, that a difference of opinion on such a matter divided us one from the other. Moreover, friends, on whom I relied, let it be known, in the kindest, and therefore most humiliating, manner, that they considered my attitude to this question wholly incomprehensible. They had forgotten what I could never forget – how the Revolution in France had begun with mild measures, widely approved, even welcomed with enthusiasm, by many men of sense and discrimination; but had then degenerated rapidly, proceeding to vile destruction for destruction’s sake, and to acts of wanton, unspeakable, and unforgivable cruelty.
I endeavoured to make this argument at a meeting of the freeholders of Roxburghshire held at Jedburgh in March, but received an ill-hearing and was howled down. My hand trembled as I took my leave, the infirmity of the body betraying the spirit: ‘moriturus, vos saluto’, I said; but believe my words were not heard, or, if heard, not understood.
Then, in April, I suffered yet another, and most severe, apoplectic seizure, which told me that my time on earth must be short. My medical men urged rest upon me. ‘Abandon work for the time being, Sir Walter, and there is hope of recovery. We cannot answer for the consequences, however, if you continue to subject yourself to intellectual strain.’ I would have none of it, and disregarded the interdict. Like Vespasian, I believed that an emperor should die standing on his feet. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I must home to work while it is yet day; for the night cometh when no man can work. I had that text inscribed on my dial-stone, many a year ago; it has often preached to me in vain, in my idle moments; but now I must heed it.’
I struggled with Count Robert of Paris, dictating to my faithful and dear Willie Laidlaw, and, though discouraged by the dislike for the novel expressed by both James Ballantyne and Robert Cadell, yet persevered, for, as I said to Willie, ‘we maun aye set a stoot hert tae a stey brae, and the waur the omens, the mair siccar it is we maun grind on,’ or, as Addison has it:
’Tis not in Mortals to command success;
But we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it . . .
It had been easy to preach the Stoic virtues when in health and afflicted only by financial calamity; difficult, but necessary to do so, when my dear Charlotte was taken from me; and I would have deemed it shameful to abandon them now that I was subject to both bodily and mental infirmity, as if a philosophy of Fortitude was not to be maintained when the weather was at its foulest.
The onset of the Elections in May necessarily interrupted me in my task. They tried – daughters, Lockhart, friends and doctors, all – to dissuade me from attending the hustings in Jedburgh, but the Tory candidate was my kinsman, Henry Scott, younger of Harden, to whose father I owed allegiance, and to whom personally I therefore felt loyalty and a due sense that I was obliged to offer my support; and I would not be thwarted.
Jedburgh was in a lively state, having been invaded by a throng of drunken and Radical weavers from Hawick – up to a thousand of the rogues, it was said, all hell-bent on disruption and intimidation of anyone bold enough to set himself against the proposed and pernicious reforms. Recognizing my coach, and being well acquaint with my sympathies, they gave us a rough reception. Stones were thrown, almost as numerous, and more dangerous, as insults. ‘Ha,’ said I, ‘the Jacquerie are already on the march.’
We took breakfast with my old friends the Shortreeds in their house under the walls of the old abbey, and I made a fair go at the porridge and the kippered salmon, as if to feed my resolution; but I declined the proffered quaich of usquebaugh, lest in my uncertain and enfeebled condition it should have a visible effect upon me; then, thus refreshed, we made our way to the Court-House, exposed to insults, abuse, and threats, for which I cared not a docken. Young Harden was returned by 40 votes to 19, thus proving that the hearts of the freeholders were still sound; but the result incited the mob to still greater fury, so that some of the gentlemen of the other – that is, the Whig – party became concerned for our safety after we had made our way with some difficulty – but not, I think, actual danger – to the Spread Eagle inn. At any rate they came to us and entreated us not to think of bringing our coach to the front entrance, for they averred that, if we did so, no man could answer for our safety. I was for ignoring this advice, however kindly given, in order to display my contempt for the mob, but was persuaded to accede to it on account of the evident anxiety – for my safety, let it be said – of the other members of our party. Then a certain Whig gentleman, Captain Russell Elliott, recently retired from the Royal Navy, offered to guide us by a back route from the inn to his villa residence on the edge of the town. This was achieved without detection, though not without a degree of shame on my part, even while I naturally recognized the generous care for our safety displayed by a political opponent.
By and by my coachman, honest Peter Mathieson, whom no bullies could deter, brought our coach by a circuitous route to Captain Elliott’s where we had meanwhile been refreshed with cakes and wine, of which however I partook but very moderately, mixing the wine with water, and sipping less than half a glass, only indeed accepting any on account of my natural desire to disguise my extreme weakness of health from our honest protector. We then left town, amidst more abuse and a shower of stones delivered to us at the bridge. A sadder set of blackguards I never encountered in any Border town. Lockhart said later that he believed there would have been a determined onset made on us at that point but for the stout-hearted defence offered by four or five of my tenants from Darnick, marshalled by the worthy Joseph Shillinglaw, carpenter. A sad day when such was necessary, but my gratitude to them all the greater. As it was, we left the town with the cries of ‘Burke, Sir Walter’ ringing in our ears, this referring to the method of murder employed by the villains of the West Port, Burke and Hare, who procured bodies for the Anatomy School of Doctor Knox in this efficient and callous manner.
Well, I suppose if the Bill for Reform is carried, young Harden will be outed next time – Troia Fuit, the brave days are done, and what will be the fate of my poor Scotland exposed to the ignorant passions of democracy? As it is, I am much obliged to the brave lads of Jeddart for their confirmation of the wisdom of my judgement as to the advisability of the measure. Their conduct made me think of what used to be called ‘Jeddart Justice’ – hang the knave and speir his guilt subsequently. But I believe the Hawick blackguards were more at fault; and no doubt drink had its part in enflaming the temper of the mob, as is generally the case in Scotland.
A few days later the Selkirkshire Election came on. T
his I was obliged to attend in my capacity as Sheriff, and was therefore able to disregard the fears expressed by my daughters, who dreaded a like occurrence, with less appearance of mere wilfulness on my part. But the good folk of Selkirk retained sufficient respect, and perhaps affection, for their Shirra, to behave in a seemly and decent fashion. I saw only one attempt to rabble or hustle a Tory voter, and took pleasure, as the Shirra, in clapping the delinquent in the gaol to cool his heels and teach him better manners.
In the summer I felt myself stronger, and was able to enforce my will, that I should bide at Abbotsford till the autumn. I set aside poor Count Robert to take up a tale that had long been in my mind, and to which I had animadverted in my Essay on Chivalry for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was to be called Castle Dangerous, and the setting was the Romantic and dramatic Douglas Castle in Lanarkshire, which now survives merely as a ruined tower, though the late Duke of Douglas commenced the building of a magnificent palace within sight of the old keep. I had written some sheets of this new romance, but, being anxious to refresh my memory of the Castle and its surroundings, which I had visited only once in my youth, prevailed upon Lockhart to accompany me on an expedition thither. I was especially eager to view again the tombs of the Douglas family in the old abbey kirk of St Bride, the saint to which that redoubtable clan of warriors paid particular reverence. We set off on a gloomy and heavy morning, with a hint of thunder in the air, but the journey up the Tweed past so many scenes that had delighted me so long – Yair, Ashiestiel itself, Innerleithen, and Traquair with its bear gates – awoke my spirits to a level which I had scarcely imagined they could attain again. I felt the years fall away, and when at last on the point of the ridge between Tweed and Clyde we came on the majestic ruin of Drochel Castle, raised by the Regent Morton, one of the murderers of Darnley, and a Douglas who displayed in the most extreme and sulphurous form the vast ambition which distinguished the family, it was all that Lockhart could do to restrain me from attempting the ascent of the hill to view the ruin more minutely. Then we pushed on to Biggar where we were detained towards sunset by the want of fresh horses, and where the people, informed of who I was, crowded round with respectful curiosity.
