NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
The following expression of the wounded feelings of the ‘Daily News’ is perhaps worth preserving:—
“Mr. Ruskin’s ‘Fors Clavigera’ has already become so notorious as a curious magazine of the blunders of a man of genius who has travelled out of his province, that it is perhaps hardly worth while to notice any fresh blunder. No one who writes on financial subjects need be at all surprised that Mr. Ruskin funnily misinterprets what he has said, and we have ourselves just been the victim of a misinterpretation of the sort. Mr. Ruskin quotes a single sentence from an article which appeared in our impression of the 3rd of March, and places on it the interpretation that ‘whenever you have reason to think that anybody has charged you threepence for a twopenny article, remember that, according to the “Daily News,” the real capital of the community is increased.’ We need hardly tell our readers that we wrote no nonsense of that kind. Our object was to show that the most important effect of the high price of coal was to alter the distribution of the proceeds of production in the community, and not to diminish the amount of it; that it was quite possible for real production, which is always the most important matter in a question of material wealth, to increase, even with coal at a high price; and that there was such an increase at the time we were writing, although coal was dear. These are certainly very different propositions from the curious deduction which Mr. Ruskin makes from a single short sentence in a long article, the purport of which was clear enough. There is certainly no cause for astonishment at the blunders which Mr. Ruskin makes in political economy and finance, if his method is to rush at conclusions without patiently studying the drift of what he reads. Oddly enough, it may be added, there is one way in which dear coal may increase the capital of a country like England, though Mr. Ruskin seems to think the thing impossible. We are exporters of coal, and of course the higher the price the more the foreigner has to pay for it. So far, therefore, the increased price is advantageous, although on balance, every one knows, it is better to have cheap coal than dear.”
Let me at once assure the editor of the ‘Daily News’ that I meant him no disrespect in choosing a ‘long’ article for animadversion. I had imagined that the length of his articles was owing rather to his sense of the importance of their subject than to the impulsiveness and rash splendour of his writing. I feel, indeed, how much the consolation it conveys is enhanced by this fervid eloquence; and even when I had my pocket picked the other day on Tower Hill, it might have soothed my ruffled temper to reflect that, in the beautiful language of the ‘Daily News,’ the most important effect of that operation was “to alter the distribution of the proceeds of production in the community, and not to diminish the amount of it.” But the Editor ought surely to be grateful to me for pointing out that, in his present state of mind, he may not only make one mistake in a long letter, but two in a short one. Their object, declares the ‘Daily News,’ (if I would but have taken the pains to appreciate their efforts,) “was to show that it was quite possible for real production to increase, even with coal at a high price.” It is quite possible for the production of newspaper articles to increase, and of many other more useful things. The speculative public probably knew, without the help of the ‘Daily News,’ that they might still catch a herring, even if they could not broil it. But the rise of price in coal itself was simply caused by the diminution of its production, or by roguery.
Again, the intelligent journal observes that “dear coal may increase the capital of a country like England, because we are exporters of coal, and the higher the price, the more the foreigner has to pay for it.” We are exporters of many other articles besides coal, and foreigners are beginning to be so foolish, finding the prices rise, as, instead of “having more to pay for them,” never to buy them. The ‘Daily News,’ however, is under the impression that over, instead of under, selling, is the proper method of competition in foreign markets, which is not a received view in economical circles.
I observe that the ‘Daily News,’ referring with surprise to the conclusions which unexpectedly, though incontrovertibly, resulted from their enthusiastic statement, declare they need hardly tell their readers they “wrote no nonsense of that kind.” But I cannot but feel, after their present better-considered effusion, that it would be perhaps well on their part to warn their readers how many other kinds of nonsense they will in future be justified in expecting.
WALTER of the BORDER-LAND.
Facsimile of Chantrey’s sketch from life.
[1] Far wiser than letting him gather them as valueless. [↑]
[2] Not translateable. In French, it has the form of a passionate oath, but the spirit of a gentle one. [↑]
[3] Head of house doing all he can do well, himself. If he had not had time to make the brooms well, he would have bought them. [↑]
[4] Do not calculate so closely how much you can afford to give for the price. [↑]
[5] Not meaning “you can cheat them afterwards,” but that the customer would not leave him for another broom-maker. [↑]
[7] “Aussi” also how happy she felt. Aussi is untranslateable in this pretty use; so hereafter I shall put it, as an English word, in its place. [↑]
[8] “Nigaud,” good for nothing but trifles; worthless, but without sense of vice; (vaut-rien, means viciously worthless). The real sense of this word here would be “Handless fool,” but said good-humouredly. [↑]
[9] Se mit à regarder. I shall always translate such passages with the literal idiom—put himself. [↑]
[10] A single batz, about three halfpence in bad silver, flat struck: I shall use the word without translating henceforward. [↑]
[11] Pushed it. No horse wanted. [↑]
[12] Coup de main, a nice French idiom meaning the stroke of hand as opposed by that of a senseless instrument. The phrase “Taking a place by a coup de main” regards essentially not so much the mere difference between sudden and long assault, as between assault with flesh or cannon. [↑]
[14] He is now a capitalist, in the entirely wholesome and proper sense of the word. See answer of ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ driven to have recourse to the simple truth, to my third question in last ‘Fors.’ [↑]
[15] See above, the first speech of the farmer to Hansli, “Many’s the year now,” etc. It would be a shame for a well-to-do farmer to have to buy brooms; it is only the wretched townspeople whom Hansli counts on for custom. [↑]
[16] Copeaux, I don’t understand this. [↑]
[17] The mistress of a farm; paysan, the master. I shall use paysanne, after this, without translation, and peasant, for paysan; rarely wanting the word in our general sense. [↑]
[18] “Du battu,” I don’t know if it means the butter, or the buttermilk. [↑]
[19] “Le bout du monde,” meaning, he never thought of going any farther. [↑]
[20] Compare, if you can get at the book in any library, my article on ‘Home and its Economies’ in the ‘Contemporary Review’ for May. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXXI.
Of the four great English tale-tellers whose dynasties have set or risen within my own memory—Miss Edgeworth, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray—I find myself greatly at pause in conjecturing, however dimly, what essential good has been effected by them, though they all had the best intentions. Of the essential mischief done by them, there is, unhappily, no doubt whatever. Miss Edgeworth made her morality so impertinent that, since her time, it has only been with fear and trembling that any good novelist has ventured to show the slightest bias in favour of the Ten Commandments. Scott made his romance so ridiculous, that, since his day, one can’t help fancying helmets were always pasteboard, and horses were always hobby. Dickens made everybody laugh, or cry, so that they could not go about their business till they had got their faces in wrinkles; and Thackeray settled like a meatfly on whatever one had got for dinner, and made one sick of it.
That, on the other hand, at least Miss Edgeworth and Scott have indeed some inevitable influence for good, I am the more disposed to think, because nobody now will read them. Dickens is said to have made people good-natured. If he did, I wonder what sort of natures they had before! Thackeray is similarly asserted to have chastised and repressed flunkeydom,—which it greatly puzzles me to hear, because, as far as I can see, there isn’t a carriage now left in all the Row with anybody sitting inside it: the people who ought to have been in it are, every one, hanging on behind the carriage in front.
What good these writers have done, is therefore, to me, I repeat, extremely doubtful. But what good Scott has in him to do, I find no words full enough to tell. His ideal of honour in men and women is inbred, indisputable; fresh as the air of his mountains; firm as their rocks. His conception of purity in woman is even higher than Dante’s; his reverence for the filial relation, as deep as Virgil’s; his sympathy universal;—there is no rank or condition of men of which he has not shown the loveliest aspect; his code of moral principle is entirely defined, yet taught with a reserved subtlety like Nature’s own, so that none but the most earnest readers perceive the intention: and his opinions on all practical subjects are final; the consummate decisions of accurate and inevitable common sense, tempered by the most graceful kindness.
That he had the one weakness—I will not call it fault—of desiring to possess more and more of the actual soil of the land which was so rich to his imagination, and so dear to his pride; and that, by this postern-gate of idolatry, entered other taints of folly and fault, punished by supreme misery, and atoned for by a generosity and solemn courage more admirable than the unsullied wisdom of his happier days, I have ceased to lament: for all these things make him only the more perfect to us as an example, because he is not exempt from common failings, and has his appointed portion in common pain.
I said we were to learn from him the true relations of Master and Servant; and learning these, there is little left for us to learn; but, on every subject of immediate and vital interest to us, we shall find, as we study his life and words, that both are as authoritative as they are clear. Of his impartiality of judgment, I think it is enough, once for all, to bid you observe that, though himself, by all inherited disposition and accidental circumstances, prejudiced in favour of the Stewart cause, the aristocratic character, and the Catholic religion,—the only perfectly noble character in his first novel is that of a Hanoverian colonel,[1] and the most exquisitely finished and heroic character in all his novels, that of a Presbyterian milkmaid.
But before I press any of his opinions—or I ought rather to say, knowledges—upon you, I must try to give you some idea of his own temper and life. His temper, I say; the mixture of clay, and the fineness of it, out of which the Potter made him; and of his life, what the power of the Third Fors had been upon it, before his own hands could make or mar his fortune, at the turn of tide. I shall do this merely by abstracting and collating (with comment) some passages out of Lockhart’s life of him; and adding any elucidatory pieces which Lockhart refers to, or which I can find myself, in his own works, so that you may be able to read them easily together. And observe, I am not writing, or attempting to write, another life of Scott; but only putting together bits of Lockhart’s life in the order which my side-notes on the pages indicate for my own reading; and I shall use Lockhart’s words, or my own, indifferently, and without the plague of inverted commas. Therefore, if anything is wrong in my statement, Lockhart is not answerable for it; but my own work in the business will nevertheless be little more than what the French call putting dots on the i’s, and adding such notes as may be needful for our present thought.
Sir Walter was born on the 15th August, 1771, in a house belonging to his father, at the head of the College Wynd, Edinburgh. The house was pulled down to make room for the northern front of the New College; and the wise people of Edinburgh then built, for I don’t know how many thousand pounds, a small vulgar Gothic steeple on the ground, and called it the “Scott Monument.” There seems, however, to have been more reason than usual for the destruction of the College Wynd, for Scott was the first survivor of seven children born in it to his father, and appears to have been saved only by the removal to the house in George’s Square,[2] which his father always afterwards occupied; and by being also sent soon afterwards into the open country. He was of purest Border race—seventh in descent from Wat of Harden and the Flower of Yarrow. Here are his six ancestors, from the sixteenth century, in order:—
- 1. Walter Scott (Auld Wat) of Harden.
- 2. Sir William Scott of Harden.
- 3. Walter Scott of Raeburn.
- 4. Walter Scott, Tutor of Raeburn.
- 5. Robert Scott of Sandy-Knowe.
- 6. Walter Scott, citizen of Edinburgh.
I will note briefly what is important respecting each of these.
I. Wat of Harden. Harden means ‘the ravine of hares.’ It is a glen down which a little brook flows to join the river Borthwick, itself a tributary of the Teviot, six miles west of Hawick, and just opposite Branxholm. So long as Sir Walter retained his vigorous habits, he made a yearly pilgrimage to it, with whatever friend happened to be his guest at the time.[3]
Wat’s wife, Mary, the Flower of Yarrow, is said to have chiefly owed her celebrity to the love of an English captive,—a beautiful child whom she had rescued from the tender mercies[4] of Wat’s moss-troopers, on their return from a Cumberland foray. The youth grew up under her protection, and is believed to have written both the words and music of many of the best songs of the Border.[5]
This story is evidently the germ of that of the ‘Lay of the last Minstrel,’ only the captivity is there of a Scottish boy to the English. The lines describing Wat of Harden are in the 4th canto,—
“Marauding chief; his sole delight
The moonlight raid, the morning fight.
Not even the Flower of Yarrow’s charms,
In youth, might tame his rage for arms;
And still in age he spurned at rest,
And still his brows the helmet pressed,
Albeit the blanchèd locks below
Were white as Dinlay’s spotless snow.”[6]
With these, read also the answer of the lady of Branksome, 23rd and 24th stanzas,—
“ ‘Say to your lords of high emprize,
Who war on women and on boys,—
For the young heir of Branksome’s line,
God be his aid; and God be mine:
Through me no friend shall meet his doom;
Here, while I live, no foe finds room.’
Proud she looked round, applause to claim;
Then lightened Thirlstane’s eye of flame;
His bugle Watt of Harden blew.
Pensils[7] and pennons wide were flung,
To heaven the Border slogan rung,
‘St. Mary, for the young Buccleugh.’ ”
Let us stop here to consider what good there may be in all this for us. The last line, “St. Mary for the young Buccleugh,” probably sounds absurd enough to you. You have nothing whatever to do, you think, with either of these personages. You don’t care for any St. Mary; and still less for any, either young or old, Buccleugh?
Well, I’m sorry for you:—but if you don’t care for St. Mary, the wife of Joseph, do you care at all for St. Mary-Anne, the wife of Joe? Have you any faith in the holiness of your own wives, who are here, in flesh and blood? or do you verily wish them, as Mr. Mill[8] would have it—sacrifice all pretence to saintship, as to holy days—to follow “some more lucrative occupation than that of nursing the baby”? And you don’t care for the young Buccleugh? Cut away the cleugh, then, and read the Buc backwards. Do you care for your own cub as much as Sir Walter would have cared for his own beast? (see, farther on, how he takes care of his wire-haired terrier, Spice,) or as any beast cares for its cub? Or do you send your poor little brat to make money for you, like your wife; as though a cock should send his hen and chickens to pick up what they could for him; and it were the usual law of nature that nestlings should feed the parent birds? If that be your way of liberal modern life, believe me, the Border faith in its Mary and its master, however servile, was not benighted in comparison.
But the Border morals? “Marauding chief, whose sole delight,” etc. Just look for the passages indicated under the word ‘theft’ in my fine new index to the first two volumes of ‘Fors.’ I will come back to this point: for the present, in order to get it more clearly into your minds, remember that the Flower of Yarrow was the chieftainess to whom the invention of serving the empty dish with two spurs in it, for hint to her husband that he must ride for his next dinner, is first ascribed. Also, for comparison of the English customs of the same time, read this little bit of a letter of Lord Northumberland’s to Henry VIII. in 1533.[9]
“Please it your most gracious Highness to be advertised that my comptroller, with Raynold Carnaby, desired licence of me to invade the realm of Scotland, to the annoyance of your Highness’s enemies, and so they did meet upon Monday before night, at Warhope, upon North Tyne water, to the number of 1500 men: and so invaded Scotland, at the hour of eight of the clock at night, and actively did set upon a town[10] called Branxholm, where the Lord of Buccleugh dwelleth, albeit that knight he was not at home. And so they burnt the said Branxholm, and other towns, and had ordered themselves so that sundry of the said Lord Buccleugh’s servants, who did issue forth of his gates, were taken prisoners. They did not leave one house, one stack of corn, nor one sheaf without the gate of the said Lord Buccleugh unburnt; and so in the breaking of the day receded homeward. And thus, thanks be to God, your Highness’s subjects, about the hour of twelve of the clock the same day, came into this, your Highness’s realm, bringing with them above forty Scotsmen prisoners, one of them named Scott, of the surname and kin of the said Lord of Buccleugh. And of his household they brought also three hundred nowte” (cattle), “and above sixty horses and mares, keeping in safety from loss or hurt all your said Highness’s subjects.”
They had met the evening before on the North Tyne, under Carter Fell; (you will find the place partly marked as “Plashett’s coal-fields” in modern atlases;) rode and marched their twenty miles to Branxholm; busied themselves there, as we hear, till dawn, and so back thirty miles down Liddesdale,—a fifty miles’ ride and walk altogether, all finished before twelve on Tuesday: besides what pillaging and burning had to be done.
Now, but one more point is to be noticed, and we will get on with our genealogy.
After this bit of the Earl’s letter, you will better understand the speech of the Lady of Buccleugh, defending her castle in the absence of her lord, and with her boy taken prisoner. And now look back to my 25th letter, for I want you not to forget Alice of Salisbury. King Edward’s first sight of her was just after she had held her castle exactly in this way, against a raid of the Scots in Lord Salisbury’s absence. Edward rode night and day to help her; and the Scots besiegers, breaking up at his approach, this is what follows, which you may receive on Froissart’s telling as the vital and effectual truth of the matter. A modern English critic will indeed always and instantly extinguish this vital truth; there is in it something inherently detestable to him; thus the editor of Johnes’ Froissart prefaces this very story with “the romance—for it is nothing more.” Now the labyrinth of Crete, and the labyrinth of Woodstock, are indeed out of sight; and of a real Ariadne or Rosamond, a blockhead might be excused for doubting; but St. George’s Chapel at Windsor—(or Winde-Rose, as Froissart prettily transposes it, like Adriane for Ariadne) is a very visible piece of romance; and the stones of it were laid, and the blue riband which your queen wears on her breast is fastened, to this day, by the hand of Alice of Salisbury.
“So the King came at noon; and angry he was to find the Scots gone; for he had come in such haste that all his people and horses were dead-tired and toiled. So every one went to rest; and the King, as soon as he was disarmed, took ten or twelve knights with him, and went towards the castle to salute the Countess, and see how the defence had been made. So soon as the Lady of Salisbury knew of the King’s coming, she made all the gates be opened,” (inmost and outmost at once,) “and came out, so richly dressed that every one was wonderstruck at her, and no one could cease looking at her, nor from receiving, as if they had been her mirrors, the reflection of her great nobleness, and her great beauty, and her gracious speaking and bearing herself. When she came to the King, she bowed down to the earth, over against him, in thanking him for his help, and brought him to the castle, to delight him and honour him—as she who well knew how to do it. Every one looked at her, even to amazement, and the King himself could not stop looking at her, for it seemed to him that in the world never was lady who was so much to be loved as she. So they went hand in hand into the castle, and the Lady led him first into the great hall, and then into her own chamber, (what the French now call a pouting-room, but the ladies of that day either smiled or frowned, but did not pout,) which was nobly furnished, as befitted such lady. And always the King looked at the gentle Lady, so hard that she became all ashamed. When he had looked at her a long while, he went away to a window, to lean upon it, and began to think deeply. The Lady went to cheer the other knights and squires; then ordered the dinner to be got ready, and the room to be dressed. When she had devised all, and commanded her people what seemed good to her, she returned with a gladsome face before the King,”—in whose presence we must leave her yet awhile, having other matters to attend to.
So much for Wat of Harden’s life then, and his wife’s. We shall get a little faster on with the genealogy after this fair start.
II. Sir William Scott of Harden.
Wat’s eldest son; distinguished by the early favour of James VI.
In his youth, engaging in a foray on the lands of Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, and being taken prisoner, Murray offers him choice between being hanged, or marrying the plainest of his daughters. The contract of marriage, written on the parchment of a drum, is still in possession of the family of Harden.[11]
This is Lockhart’s reading of the circumstances, and I give his own statement of them in the note below. But his assumption of the extreme plainness of the young lady, and of the absolute worldly-mindedness of the mother, are both examples of the modern manner of reading traditions, out of which some amusement may be gathered by looking only at them on the grotesque side, and interpreting that grotesqueness ungenerously. There may, indeed, be farther ground than Lockhart has thought it worth while to state for his colour of the facts; but all that can be justly gathered from those he has told is that, Sir Gideon having determined the death of his troublesome neighbour, Lady Murray interfered to save his life; and could not more forcibly touch her husband’s purpose than by reminding him that hostility might be better ended in alliance than in death.
The sincere and careful affection which Sir William of Harden afterwards shows to all his children by the Maid of Elibank, and his naming one of them after her father, induce me still farther to trust in the fairer reading of the tradition. I should, indeed, have been disposed to attach some weight, on the side of the vulgar story, to the curiously religious tendencies in Sir William’s children, which seem to point to some condition of feeling in the mother, arising out of despised life. Women are made nobly religious by the possession of extreme beauty, and morbidly so by distressed consciousness of the want of it; but there is no reason for insisting on this probability, since both the Christian and surname of Sir Gideon Murray point to his connection with the party in Scotland which was at this time made strong in battle by religious faith, and melancholy in peace by religious passion.
III. Walter Scott, first Laird of Raeburn; third son of Sir William and this enforced bride of Elibank. They had four sons altogether; the eldest, William, becomes the second Sir William of Harden; their father settled the lands of Raeburn upon Walter; and of Highchester on his second son, Gideon, named, after the rough father-in-law, of Elibank.
Now about this time (1657), George Fox comes into Scotland; boasting that “as he first set his feet upon Scottish ground he felt the seed of grace to sparkle about him like innumerable sparks of fire.” And he forthwith succeeds in making Quakers of Gideon, Walter, and Walter’s wife. This is too much for Sir William of Harden, the eldest brother, who not only remains a staunch Jacobite, but obtains order from the Privy Council of Scotland to imprison his brother and brother’s wife; that they may hold no further converse with Quakers, and also to “separate and take away their children, being two sons and a daughter, from their family and education, and to breed them in some convenient place.” Which is accordingly done; and poor Walter, who had found pleasantly conversible Quakers in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, is sent to Jedburgh, with strict orders to the Jedburgh magistrates to keep Quakers out of his way. The children are sent to an orthodox school by Sir William; and of the daughter I find nothing further; but the two sons both became good scholars, and were so effectually cured of Quakerism, that the elder (I don’t find his Christian name), just as he came of age, was killed in a duel with Pringle of Crichton, fought with swords in a field near Selkirk—ever since called, from the Raeburn’s death, “the Raeburn meadow-spot;”—and the younger, Walter, who then became “Tutor of Raeburn,” i.e., guardian to his infant nephew, intrigued in the cause of the exiled Stewarts till he had lost all he had in the world—ran a narrow risk of being hanged—was saved by the interference of Anne, Duchess of Buccleugh—founded a Jacobite club in Edinburgh, in which the conversation is said to have been maintained in Latin—and wore his beard unclipped to his dying day, vowing no razor should pass on it until the return of the Stewarts, whence he held his Border name of “Beardie.”
It is only when we remember how often this history must have dwelt on Sir Walter’s mind that we can understand the tender subtlety of design with which he has completed, even in the weary time of his declining life, the almost eventless story of ‘Redgauntlet,’ and given, as we shall presently see, in connection with it, the most complete, though disguised, portion of his own biography.
IV. Beardie. I find no details of Beardie’s life given by Scott, but he was living at Leasudden when his landlord, Scott of Harden,[12] living at Mertoun House, addressed to him the lines given in the note to the introduction to the sixth canto of ‘Marmion,’ in which Scott himself partly adopts the verses, writing from Mertoun House to Richard Heber.
“For course of blood, our proverbs dream,
Is warmer than the mountain stream.
And thus my Christmas still I hold
Where my great-grandsire came of old,[13]
‘With amber beard and flaxen hair,
And reverend apostolic air,
The feast and holytide to share,
And mix sobriety with wine,
And honest mirth with thoughts divine.’
Small thought was his, in after-time,
E’er to be hitched into a rhyme.
The simple sire could only boast
That he was loyal to his cost,
The banished race of kings revered,
And lost his land—but kept his beard,—”
“a mark of attachment,” Scott adds in his note, “which I suppose had been common during Cromwell’s usurpation; for in Cowley’s ‘Cutter of Coleman Street’ one drunken cavalier upbraids another that when he was not able to pay a barber, he affected to ‘wear a beard for the King.’ ”
Observe, here, that you must always be on your guard, in reading Scott’s notes or private letters, against his way of kindly laughing at what he honours more deeply than he likes to confess. The house in which Beardie died was still standing when Sir Walter wrote his autobiography, (1808), at the north-east entrance of the churchyard of Kelso.
He left three sons. Any that remain of the family of the elder are long since settled in America (male heirs extinct). James Scott, well known in India as one of the original settlers of Prince of Wales Island, was a son of the youngest, who died at Lasswade, in Midlothian (first mention of Scott’s Lasswade).
But of the second son, Scott’s grandfather, we have to learn much.
V. Robert Scott of Sandy-Knowe, second son of Beardie. I cannot shorten Scott’s own account of the circumstances which determined his choice of life.
“My grandfather was originally bred to the sea, but being shipwrecked near Dundee in his trial voyage, he took such a sincere dislike to that element, that he could not be persuaded to a second attempt. This occasioned a quarrel between him and his father, who left him to shift for himself. Robert was one of those active spirits to whom this was no misfortune. He turned Whig upon the spot, and fairly abjured his father’s politics and his learned poverty. His chief and relative, Mr. Scott of Harden, gave him a lease of the farm of Sandy-Knowe, comprehending the rocks in the centre of which Smailholm or Sandy-Knowe Tower is situated. He took for his shepherd an old man called Hogg, who willingly lent him, out of respect to his family, his whole savings, about £30, to stock the new farm. With this sum, which it seems was at the time sufficient for the purpose, the master and servant[14] set off to purchase a stock of sheep at Whitsun-tryste, a fair held on a hill near Wooler, in Northumberland. The old shepherd went carefully from drove to drove, till he found a hirsel likely to answer their purpose, and then returned to tell his master to come up and conclude the bargain. But what was his surprise to see him galloping a mettled hunter about the race-course, and to find he had expended the whole stock in this extraordinary purchase! Moses’ bargain of green spectacles did not strike more dismay into the Vicar of Wakefield’s family than my grandfather’s rashness into the poor old shepherd. The thing, however, was irretrievable, and they returned without the sheep. In the course of a few days, however, my grandfather, who was one of the best horsemen of his time, attended John Scott of Harden’s hounds on this same horse, and displayed him to such advantage that he sold him for double the original price. The farm was now stocked in earnest, and the rest of my grandfather’s career was that of successful industry. He was one of the first who were active in the cattle trade, afterwards carried to such an extent between the Highlands of Scotland and the leading counties in England, and by his droving transactions acquired a considerable sum of money. He was a man of middle stature, extremely active, quick, keen, and fiery in his temper, stubbornly honest, and so distinguished for his skill in country matters that he was the general referee in all points of dispute which occurred in the neighbourhood. His birth being admitted as gentle, gave him access to the best society in the county, and his dexterity in country sports, particularly hunting, made him an acceptable companion in the field as well as at the table.”
Thus, then, between Auld Wat of Harden, and Scott’s grandfather, we have four generations, numbering approximately a hundred and fifty years, from 1580 to 1730,[15] and in that time we have the great change in national manners from stealing cattle to breeding and selling them, which at first might seem a change in the way of gradually increasing honesty. But observe that this first cattle-dealer of our line is “stubbornly honest,” a quality which it would be unsafe to calculate upon in any dealer of our own days.
Do you suppose, then, that this honesty was a sudden and momentary virtue—a lightning flash of probity between the two darknesses of Auld Wat’s thieving and modern cozening?
Not so. That open thieving had no dishonesty in it whatsoever. Far the contrary. Of all conceivable ways of getting a living, except by actual digging of the ground, this is precisely the honestest. All other gentlemanly professions but this have taint of dishonesty in them. Even the best—the physician’s—involves temptation to many forms of cozening. How many second-rate mediciners have lived, think you, on prescriptions of bread pills and rose-coloured water?—how many, even of leading physicians, owe all their success to skill unaided by pretence? Of clergymen, how many preach wholly what they know to be true without fear of their congregations? Of lawyers, of authors, of painters, what need we speak? These all, so far as they try to please the mob for their living, are true cozeners,—unsound in the very heart’s core. But Wat of Harden, setting my farm on fire, and driving off my cattle, is no rogue. An enemy, yes, and a spoiler; but no more a rogue than the rock eagles. And Robert the first cattle-dealer’s honesty is directly inherited from his race, and notable as a virtue, not in opposition to their character, but to ours. For men become dishonest by occult trade, not by open rapine.
There are, nevertheless, some very definite faults in our pastoral Robert of Sandy-Knowe, which Sir Walter himself inherits and recognizes in his own temper, and which were in him severely punished. Of the rash investment of the poor shepherd’s fortune, we shall presently hear what Sir Walter thought. Robert’s graver fault, the turning Whig to displease his father, is especially to be remembered in connection with Sir Walter’s frequent warnings against the sacrifice to momentary passion of what ought to be the fixed principles of youth. It has not been enough noticed that the design of his first and greatest story is to exhibit and reprehend, while it tenderly indicates the many grounds for forgiving, the change of political temper under circumstances of personal irritation.
But in the virtues of Robert Scott, far outnumbering his failings, and above all in this absolute honesty and his contentment in the joy of country life, all the noblest roots of his grandson’s character found their happy hold.
Note every syllable of the description of him given in the introduction to the third canto of ‘Marmion:’
“Still, with vain fondness, could I trace
Anew each kind familiar face
That brightened at our evening fire;
From the thatched mansion’s grey-haired sire,
Wise without learning, plain, and good,
And sprung of Scotland’s gentler blood;
Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen,
Showed what in youth its glance had been;
Whose doom discording neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought,
To him, the venerable priest,
Our frequent and familiar guest.”
Note, I say, every word of this. The faces “brightened at the evening fire,”—not a patent stove; fancy the difference in effect on the imagination, in the dark long nights of a Scottish winter, between the flickering shadows of firelight, and utter gloom of a room warmed by a close stove!
“The thatched mansion’s.”—The coolest roof in summer, warmest in winter. Among the various mischievous things done in France, apparently by the orders of Napoleon III., but in reality by the foolish nation uttering itself through his passive voice, (he being all his days only a feeble Pan’s pipe, or Charon’s boatswain’s whistle, instead of a true king,) the substitution of tiles for thatch on the cottages of Picardy was one of the most barbarous. It was to prevent fire, forsooth! and all the while the poor peasants could not afford candles, except to drip about over their church floors. See above, 6, 17.
“Wise without learning.”—By no means able, this Border rider, to state how many different arrangements may be made of the letters in the word Chillianwallah. He contrived to exist, and educate his grandson to come to something, without that information.
“Plain, and good.”—Consider the value there is in that virtue of plainness—legibility, shall we say?—in the letters of character. A clear-printed man, readable at a glance. There are such things as illuminated letters of character also,—beautifully unreadable; but this legibility in the head of a family is greatly precious.
“And sprung of Scotland’s gentler blood.”—I am not sure if this is merely an ordinary expression of family pride, or whether, which I rather think, Scott means to mark distinctly the literal gentleness and softening of character in his grandfather, and in the Lowland Scottish shepherd of his day, as opposed to the still fiery temper of the Highland clans—the blood being equally pure, but the race altogether softer and more Saxon. Even Auld Wat was fair-haired, and Beardie has “amber beard and flaxen hair.”
“Whose doom discording neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought.”—
Here you have the exactly right and wise condition of the legal profession.
All good judging, and all good preaching, must be given gratis. Look back to what I have incidentally said of lawyers and clergy, as professional—that is to say, as living by their judgment, and sermons. You will perhaps now be able to receive my conclusive statement, that all such professional sale of justice and mercy is a deadly sin. A man may sell the work of his hands, but not his equity, nor his piety. Let him live by his spade; and if his neighbours find him wise enough to decide a dispute between them, or if he is in modesty and simplicity able to give them a piece of pious advice, let him do so, in Heaven’s name, but not take a fee for it.
Finally, Robert Scott is a cattle-dealer, yet a gentleman, giving us the exact balance of right between the pride which refuses a simple employment, and the baseness which makes that simple employment disgraceful, because dishonest. Being wholly upright, he can sell cattle, yet not disgrace his lineage. We shall return presently to his house; but must first complete, so as to get our range of view within due limits, the sketch of the entire ancestral line.
VI. Walter Scott, of George’s Square, Edinburgh, Scott’s father, born 1729.
He was the eldest son of Robert of Sandy-Knowe, and had three brothers and a sister, namely, Captain Robert Scott, in East India Service; Thomas Scott, cattle-dealer, following his father’s business; a younger brother who died early, (also) in East India Service; and the sister Janet, whose part in Scott’s education was no less constant, and perhaps more influential, than even his mother’s. Scott’s regard for one of his Indian uncles, and his regret for the other’s death, are both traceable in the development of the character of Colonel Mannering; but of his uncle Thomas, and his aunt Jessie, there is much more to be learned and thought on.
The cattle-dealer followed his father’s business prosperously; was twice married—first to Miss Raeburn, and then to Miss Rutherford of Knowsouth—and retired, in his old age, upon a handsome independence. Lockhart, visiting him with Sir Walter, two years before the old man’s death, (he being then eighty-eight years old,) thus describes him:
“I thought him about the most venerable figure I had ever set my eyes on,—tall and erect, with long flowing tresses of the most silvery whiteness, and stockings rolled up over his knees, after the fashion of three generations back. He sat reading his Bible without spectacles, and did not, for a moment, perceive that any one had entered his room; but on recognizing his nephew he rose with cordial alacrity, kissing him on both cheeks, and exclaiming, ‘God bless thee, Walter, my man; thou hast risen to be great, but thou wast always good.’ His remarks were lively and sagacious, and delivered with a touch of that humour which seems to have been shared by most of the family. He had the air and manners of an ancient gentleman, and must in his day have been eminently handsome.”
Next read Sir Walter Scott’s entry made in his copy of the Haliburton Memorials:—
“The said Thomas Scott died at Monklaw, near Jedburgh, at two of the clock, 27th January, 1823, in the 90th year of his life, and fully possessed of all his faculties. He read till nearly the year before his death; and being a great musician on the Scotch pipes, had, when on his deathbed, a favourite tune played over to him by his son James, that he might be sure he left him in full possession of it. After hearing it, he hummed it over himself, and corrected it in several of the notes. The air was that called ‘Sour Plums in Galashiels.’ When barks and other tonics were given him during his last illness, he privately spat them into his handkerchief, saying, as he had lived all his life without taking doctors’ drugs, he wished to die without doing so.”
No occasion whatever for deathbed repentances, you perceive, on the part of this old gentleman; no particular care even for the disposition of his handsome independence; but here is a bequest of which one must see one’s son in full possession—here is a thing to be well looked after, before setting out for heaven, that the tune of “Sour Plums in Galashiels” may still be played on earth in an incorrupt manner, and no damnable French or English variations intruded upon the solemn and authentic melody thereof. His views on the subject of Materia Medica are also greatly to be respected.
“I saw more than once,” Lockhart goes on, “this respectable man’s sister (Scott’s aunt Janet), who had married her cousin Walter, Laird of Raeburn, thus adding a new link to the closeness of the family connection. She also must have been, in her youth, remarkable for personal attractions; as it was, she dwells on my memory as the perfect picture of an old Scotch lady, with a great deal of simple dignity in her bearing, but with the softest eye and the sweetest voice, and a charm of meekness and gentleness about every look and expression. She spoke her native language pure and undiluted, but without the slightest tincture of that vulgarity which now seems almost unavoidable in the oral use of a dialect so long banished from courts, and which has not been avoided by any modern writer who has ventured to introduce it, with the exception of Scott, and I may add, speaking generally, of Burns. Lady Raeburn, as she was universally styled, may be numbered with those friends of early days whom her nephew has alluded to in one of his prefaces as preserving what we may fancy to have been the old Scotch of Holyrood.”
To this aunt, to his grandmother, his mother, and to the noble and most wise Rector of the High School of Edinburgh, Dr. Adam, Scott owed the essential part of his “education,” which began in this manner. At eighteen months old his lameness came on, from sudden cold, bad air, and other such causes. His mother’s father, Dr. Rutherford, advised sending him to the country; he is sent to his grandfather’s at Sandy-Knowe, where he first becomes conscious of life, and where his grandmother and aunt Janet beautifully instruct, but partly spoil him. When he is eight years old, he returns to, and remains in, his father’s house at George’s Square. And now note the following sentence:—
“I felt the change from being a single indulged brat, to becoming a member of a large family, very severely; for under the gentle government of my kind grandmother, who was meekness itself, and of my aunt, who, though of a higher temper, was exceedingly attached to me, I had acquired a degree of license which could not be permitted in a large family. I had sense enough, however, to bend my temper to my new circumstances; but such was the agony which I internally experienced, that I have guarded against nothing more, in the education of my own family, than against their acquiring habits of self-willed caprice and domination.”
The indulgence, however, no less than the subsequent discipline, had been indeed altogether wholesome for the boy, he being of the noble temper which is the better for having its way. The essential virtue of the training he had in his grandfather’s and father’s house, and his aunt Jessie’s at Kelso, I will trace further in next letter.
[1] Colonel Talbot, in ‘Waverley;’ I need not, surely, name the other:—note only that, in speaking of heroism, I never admit into the field of comparison the merely stage-ideals of impossible virtue and fortune—(Ivanhoe, Sir Kenneth, and the like)—but only persons whom Scott meant to be real. Observe also that with Scott, as with Titian, you must often expect the most tender pieces of completion in subordinate characters. [↑]
[2] I beg my readers to observe that I never flinch from stating a fact that tells against me. This George’s Square is in that New Town of Edinburgh which I said, in the first of these letters, I should like to destroy to the ground. [↑]
[3] Lockhart’s Life, 8vo. Edinburgh: Cadell, 1837. Vol. i. p. 65. In my following foot-notes I shall only give volume and page—the book being understood. [↑]
[4] i. 67. What sort of tender mercies were to be expected? [↑]
[5] His name unknown, according to Leyden, is perhaps discoverable; but what songs? Though composed by an Englishman, have they the special character of Scottish music? [↑]
[7] Pensil, a flag hanging down—‘pensile.’ Pennon, a stiff flag sustained by a cross arm, like the broad part of a weathercock. Properly, it is the stiff-set feather of an arrow.
“Ny autres riens qui d’or ne fust
Fors que les pennons, et le fust.”
‘Romance of the Rose,’ of Love’s arrows: Chaucer translates,
“For all was gold, men might see,
Out-take the feathers and the tree.”
[8] People would not have me speak any more harm of Mr. Mill, because he’s dead, I suppose? Dead or alive, all’s one to me, with mischievous persons; but alas! how very grievously all’s two to me, when they are helpful and noble ones. [↑]
[9] Out of the first of Scott’s notes to the Lay, but the note is so long that careless readers are sure to miss the points; also I give modern spelling for greater ease. [↑]
[10] A walled group of houses: tynen, Saxon, to shut in (Johnson). [↑]
[11] i. 68. “The indignant laird was on the point of desiring his prisoner to say a last prayer, when his more considerate dame interposed milder counsels, suggesting that the culprit was born to a good estate, and that they had three unmarried daughters. Young Harden, it is said, not without hesitation, agreed to save his life by taking the plainest of the three off their hands.” [↑]
[12] Eldest son, or grandson, of Sir William Scott of Harden, the second in our genealogy. [↑]
[13] Came, by invitation from his landlord, Scott of Harden. [↑]
[14] Here, you see, our subject begins to purpose! [↑]
[15] I give the round numbers for better remembering. Wat of Harden married the Flower of Yarrow in 1567; Robert of Sandy-Knowe married Barbara Haliburton in 1728. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXXII.
I do not know how far I shall be able in this letter to carry you forward in the story of Scott’s life; let me first, therefore, map its divisions clearly; for then, wherever we have to stop, we can return to our point in fit time.
First, note these three great divisions—essentially those of all men’s lives, but singularly separate in his,—the days of youth, of labour, and of death.
Youth is properly the forming time—that in which a man makes himself, or is made, what he is for ever to be. Then comes the time of labour, when, having become the best he can be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short: but always a time. The ceasing to breathe is only the end of death.
Scott records the beginning of his own in the following entry in his diary, which reviews the life then virtually ended:—
“December 18th, 1825.[1]—What a life mine has been!—half educated, almost wholly neglected, or left to myself; stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash, and undervalued by most of my companions for a time; getting forward, and held a bold, clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer; broken-hearted for two years; my heart handsomely pieced again, but the crack will remain till my dying day. Rich and poor four or five times: once on the verge of ruin, yet opened a new source of wealth almost overflowing. Now to be broken in my pitch of pride.[2]…
“Nobody in the end can lose a penny by me; that is one comfort. Men will think pride has had a fall. Let them indulge in their own pride in thinking that my fall will make them higher, or seem so at least. I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and to hope that some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. Sad hearts, too, at Darnick, and in the cottages of Abbotsford. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest?—how live a poor, indebted man, where I was once the wealthy, the honoured? I was to have gone there on Saturday, in joy and prosperity, to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish, but the thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must get them kind masters! There may be yet those who, loving me, may love my dog because it has been mine. I must end these gloomy forebodings, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I feel my dogs’ feet on my knees; I hear them whining, and seeking me everywhere.”
He was fifty-four on the 15th August of that year, and spoke his last words—“God bless you all,”—on the 21st September, 1832: so ending seven years of death.
His youth, like the youth of all the greatest men, had been long, and rich in peace, and altogether accumulative and crescent. I count it to end with that pain which you see he remembers to his dying day, given him by—Lilias Redgauntlet, in October, 1796. Whereon he sets himself to his work, which goes on nobly for thirty years, lapping over a little into the death-time[3] (‘Woodstock’ showing scarcely a trace of diminution of power).
Count, therefore, thus:—
| Youth, twenty-five years | 1771–1796. |
| Labour-time, thirty years | 1796–1826. |
| Death-time, seven years | 1825–1832. |
The great period of mid-life is again divided exactly in the midst by the change of temper which made him accurate instead of fantastic in delineation, and therefore habitually write in prose rather than verse. The ‘Lady of the Lake’ is his last poem, (1810). ‘Rokeby,’ (1812) is a versified novel; the ‘Lord of the Isles’ is not so much. The steady legal and historical work of 1810–1814, issuing in the ‘Essay on Scottish Judicature,’ and the ‘Life of Swift,’ with preparation for his long-cherished purpose of an edition and ‘Life of Pope,’[4] (“the true deacon of the craft,” as Scott often called him,) confirmed, while they restrained and chastised, his imaginative power; and ‘Waverley,’ (begun in 1805) was completed in 1814. The apparently unproductive year of accurate study, 1811, divides the thirty years of mid-life in the precise centre, giving fifteen to song, and fifteen to history.
You may be surprised at my speaking of the novels as history. But Scott’s final estimate of his own work, given in 1830, is a perfectly sincere and perfectly just one; (received, of course, with the allowance I have warned you always to make for his manner of reserve in expressing deep feelings). “He replied[5] that in what he had done for Scotland as a writer, he was no more entitled to the merit which had been ascribed to him than the servant who scours the brasses to the credit of having made them; that he had perhaps been a good housemaid to Scotland, and given the country a ‘rubbing up;’ and in so doing might have deserved some praise for assiduity, and that was all.” Distinguish, however, yourselves, and remember that Scott always tacitly distinguishes, between the industry which deserves praise, and the love which disdains it. You do not praise Old Mortality for his love to his people; you praise him for his patience over a bit of moss in a troublesome corner. Scott is the Old Mortality, not of tables of stone, but of the fleshly tables of the heart.
We address ourselves to-day, then, to begin the analysis of the influences upon him during the first period of twenty-five years, during which he built and filled the treasure-house of his own heart. But this time of youth I must again map out in minor detail, that we may grasp it clearly.
1. From birth to three years old. In Edinburgh, a sickly child; permanent lameness contracted, 1771–1774.
2. Three years old to four. Recovers health at Sandy-Knowe. The dawn of conscious life, 1774–1775.
3. Four years old to five. At Bath, with his aunt, passing through London on the way to it. Learns to read, and much besides, 1775–1776.
4. Five years old to eight. At Sandy-Knowe. Pastoral life in its perfectness forming his character: (an important though short interval at Prestonpans begins his interest in sea-shore), 1776–1779.
5. Eight years old to twelve. School life, under the Rector Adams, at High School of Edinburgh, with his aunt Janet to receive him at Kelso, 1779–1783.
6. Twelve years old to fifteen. College life, broken by illness, his uncle Robert taking good care of him at Rosebank, 1783–1786.
7. Fifteen to twenty-five. Apprenticeship to his father, and law practice entered on. Study of human life, and of various literature in Edinburgh. His first fee of any importance expended on a silver taper-stand for his mother. 1786–1796.
You have thus ‘seven ages’ of his youth to examine, one by one; and this convenient number really comes out without the least forcing; for the virtual, though not formal, apprenticeship to his father—happiest of states for a good son—continues through all the time of his legal practice. I only feel a little compunction at crowding the Prestonpans time together with the second Sandy-Knowe time; but the former is too short to be made a period, though of infinite importance to Scott’s life. Hear how he writes of it,[6] revisiting the place fifty years afterwards:—
“I knew the house of Mr. Warroch, where we lived,” (see where the name of the Point of Warroch in ‘Guy Mannering’ comes from!) “I recollected my juvenile ideas of dignity attendant on the large gate, a black arch which lets out upon the sea. I saw the Links where I arranged my shells upon the turf, and swam my little skiff in the pools. Many recollections of my kind aunt—of old George Constable—of Dalgetty” (you know that name also, don’t you?), “a virtuous half-pay lieutenant, who swaggered his solitary walk on the parade, as he called a little open space before the same port.” (Before the black arch, Scott means, not the harbour.) And he falls in love also there, first—“as children love.”
And now we can begin to count the rosary of his youth, bead by bead.
1st period—From birth to three years old.
I have hitherto said nothing to you of his father or mother, nor shall I yet, except to bid you observe that they had been thirteen years married when Scott was born; and that his mother was the daughter of a physician, Dr. Rutherford, who had been educated under Boerhaave. This fact might be carelessly passed by you in reading Lockhart; but if you will take the pains to look through Johnson’s life of Boerhaave, you will see how perfectly pure and beautiful and strong every influence was, which, from whatever distance, touched the early life of Scott. I quote a sentence or two from Johnson’s closing account of Dr. Rutherford’s master:—
“There was in his air and motion something rough and artless, but so majestic and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him without veneration, and a kind of tacit submission to the superiority of his genius. The vigour and activity of his mind sparkled visibly in his eyes, nor was it ever observed that any change of his fortune, or alteration in his affairs, whether happy or unfortunate, affected his countenance.
“His greatest pleasure was to retire to his house in the country, where he had a garden stored with all the herbs and trees which the climate would bear; here he used to enjoy his hours unmolested, and prosecute his studies without interruption.”[7]
The school of medicine in Edinburgh owed its rise to this man, and it was by his pupil Dr. Rutherford’s advice, as we saw, that the infant Walter’s life was saved. His mother could not nurse him, and his first nurse had consumption. To this, and the close air of the wynd, must be attributed the strength of the childish fever which took away the use of the right limb when he was eighteen months old. How many of your own children die, think you, or are wasted with sickness, from the same causes, in our increasing cities? Scott’s lameness, however, we shall find, was, in the end, like every other condition of his appointed existence, helpful to him.
A letter from my dear friend Dr. John Brown,[8] corrects (to my great delight) a mistake about George’s Square I made in my last letter. It is not in the New Town, but in what was then a meadow district, sloping to the south from old Edinburgh; and the air of it would be almost as healthy for the child as that of the open country. But the change to George’s Square, though it checked the illness, did not restore the use of the limb; the boy wanted exercise as well as air, and Dr. Rutherford sent him to his other grandfather’s farm.
II. 1774—1775. The first year at Sandy-Knowe. In this year, note first his new nurse. The child had a maid sent with him to prevent his being an inconvenience to the family. This maid had left her heart behind her in Edinburgh (ill trusted),[9] and went mad in the solitude;—“tempted by the devil,” she told Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, “to kill the child and bury it in the moss.”
“Alison instantly took possession of my person,” says Scott. And there is no more said of Alison in the autobiography.
But what the old farm-housekeeper must have been to the child, is told in the most finished piece of all the beautiful story of ‘Old Mortality.’ Among his many beautifully invented names, here is one not invented—very dear to him.
“ ‘I wish to speak an instant with one Alison Wilson, who resides here,’ said Henry.
“ ‘She’s no at hame the day,’ answered Mrs. Wilson in propriâ personâ—the state of whose headdress perhaps inspired her with this direct mode of denying herself—‘and ye are but a mislear’d person to speer for her in sic a manner. Ye might have had an M under your belt for Mistress Wilson of Milnwood.’ ” Read on, if you forget it, to the end, that third chapter of the last volume of ‘Old Mortality.’ The story of such return to the home of childhood has been told often; but never, so far as I have knowledge, so exquisitely. I do not doubt that Elphin’s name is from Sandy-Knowe also; but cannot trace it.
Secondly, note his grandfathers’ medical treatment of him; for both his grandfathers were physicians,—Dr. Rutherford, as we have seen, so professed, by whose advice he is sent to Sandy-Knowe. There, his cattle-dealing grandfather, true physician by diploma of Nature, orders him, whenever the day is fine, to be carried out and laid down beside the old shepherd among the crags or rocks around which he fed his sheep. “The impatience of a child soon inclined me to struggle with my infirmity, and I began by degrees to stand, to walk, and to run. Although the limb affected was much shrunk and contracted, my general health, which was of more importance, was much strengthened by being frequently in the open air; and, in a word, I, who in a city had probably been condemned to hopeless and helpless decrepitude, (italics mine,) was now a healthy, high-spirited, and, my lameness apart, a sturdy child,—non sine dîs animosus infans.”
This, then, is the beginning of Scott’s conscious existence,—laid down beside the old shepherd, among the rocks, and among the sheep. “He delighted to roll about in the grass all day long in the midst of the flock, and the sort of fellowship he formed with the sheep and lambs impressed his mind with a degree of affectionate feeling towards them which lasted throughout life.”[10]
Such cradle, and such companionship, Heaven gives its favourite children.
In 1837, two of the then maid-servants of Sandy-Knowe were still living in its neighbourhood; one of them, “Tibby Hunter, remembered the child Scott’s coming, well. The young ewe-milkers delighted, she says, to carry him about on their backs among the crags; and he was ‘very gleg (quick) at the uptak, and soon kenned every sheep and lamb by head-mark as well as any of them.’ His great pleasure, however, was in the society of the ‘aged hind’ recorded in the epistle to Erskine. ‘Auld Sandy Ormistoun,’ called, from the most dignified part of his function, ‘the cow-bailie,’ had the chief superintendence of the flocks that browsed upon ‘the velvet tufts of loveliest green.’ If the child saw him in the morning, he could not be satisfied unless the old man would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to keep him company, as he lay watching his charge.
“The cow-bailie blew a particular note on his whistle which signified to the maid-servants in the house below when the little boy wished to be carried home again.”
“Every sheep and lamb by head-mark;”—that is our first lesson; not an easy one, you will find it, if you try the flock of such a farm. Only yesterday (12th July, 1873,) I saw the dairy of one half filled with the ‘berry-bread’ (large flat-baked cakes enclosing layers of gooseberries) prepared by its mistress for her shearers;—the flock being some six or seven hundred, on Coniston Fells.
That is our first lesson, then, very utterly learned ‘by heart.’ This is our second, (marginal note on Sir Walter’s copy of Allan Ramsay’s Tea-table Miscellany, ed. 1724): “This book belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and out of it I was taught ‘Hardiknute’ by heart before I could read the ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.”[11] He repeated a great part of it, in the forests of La Cava, in the spring of the year in which he died; and above the lake Avernus, a piece of the song of the ewe-milkers:—
“Up the craggy mountain, and down the mossy glen,
We canna’ go a-milking, for Charlie and his men.”
These I say, then, are to be your first lessons. The love, and care, of simplest living creatures; and the remembrance and honour of the dead, with the workmanship for them of fair tombs of song.
The Border district of Scotland was at this time, of all districts of the inhabited world, pre-eminently the singing country,—that which most naturally expressed its noble thoughts and passions in song.
The easily traceable reasons for this character are, I think, the following; (many exist, of course, untraceably).
First, distinctly pastoral life, giving the kind of leisure which, in all ages and countries, solaces itself with simple music, if other circumstances are favourable,—that is to say, if the summer air is mild enough to allow repose, and the race has imagination enough to give motive to verse.
The Scottish Lowland air is, in summer, of exquisite clearness and softness,—the heat never so great as to destroy energy, and the shepherd’s labour not severe enough to occupy wholly either mind or body. A Swiss herd may have to climb a hot ravine for thousands of feet, or cross a difficult piece of ice, to rescue a lamb, or lead his flock to an isolated pasture. But the borderer’s sheep-path on the heath is, to his strong frame, utterly without labour or danger; he is free-hearted and free-footed all the summer day long; in winter darkness and snow finding yet enough to make him grave and stout of heart.
Secondly, the soldier’s life, passing gradually, not in cowardice or under foreign conquest, but by his own increasing kindness and sense, into that of the shepherd; thus, without humiliation, leaving the war-wounded past to be recalled for its sorrow and its fame.
Thirdly, the extreme sadness of that past itself: giving pathos and awe to all the imagery and power of Nature.
Fourthly, (this a merely physical cause, yet a very notable one,) the beauty of the sound of Scottish streams.
I know no other waters to be compared with them;—such streams can only exist under very subtle concurrence of rock and climate. There must be much soft rain, not (habitually) tearing the hills down with floods; and the rocks must break irregularly and jaggedly. Our English Yorkshire shales and limestones merely form—carpenter-like—tables and shelves for the rivers to drip and leap from; while the Cumberland and Welsh rocks break too boldly, and lose the multiplied chords of musical sound. Farther, the loosely-breaking rock must contain hard pebbles, to give the level shore of white shingle, through which the brown water may stray wide, in rippling threads. The fords even of English rivers have given the names to half our prettiest towns and villages;—(the difference between ford and bridge curiously—if one may let one’s fancy loose for a moment—characterizing the difference between the baptism of literature, and the edification of mathematics, in our two great universities);—but the pure crystal of the Scottish pebbles,[12] giving the stream its gradations of amber to the edge, and the sound as of “ravishing division to the lute,” make the Scottish fords the happiest pieces of all one’s day walk. “The farmhouse itself was small and poor, with a common kailyard on one flank, and a staring barn of the doctor’s (‘Douglas’) erection on the other; while in front appeared a filthy pond, covered with ducks and duckweed,[13] from which the whole tenement had derived the unharmonious designation of ‘Clarty Hole.’ But the Tweed was everything to him: a beautiful river, flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless where, here and there, it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by the birches and alders which had survived the statelier growth of the primitive forest; and the first hour that he took possession he claimed for his farm the name of the adjoining ford.”[14] With the murmur, whisper, and low fall of these streamlets, unmatched for mystery and sweetness, we must remember also the variable, but seldom wild, thrilling of the wind among the recesses of the glens; and, not least, the need of relief from the monotony of occupations involving some rhythmic measure of the beat of foot or hand, during the long evenings at the hearth-side.
In the rude lines describing such passing of hours quoted by Scott in his introduction to the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’[15] you find the grandmother spinning, with her stool next the hearth,—“for she was old, and saw right dimly” (fire-light, observe, all that was needed even then;) “she spins to make a web of good Scots linen,” (can you show such now, from your Glasgow mills?) The father is pulling hemp (or beating it). The only really beautiful piece of song which I heard at Verona, during several months’ stay there in 1869, was the low chant of girls unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm, in the cottages among the olive-clad hills on the north of the city. Never any in the streets of it;—there, only insane shrieks of Republican populace, or senseless dance-music, played by operatic-military bands.
And one of the most curious points connected with the study of Border-life is this connection of its power of song either with its industry or human love, but never with the religious passion of its “Independent” mind. The definite subject of the piper or minstrel being always war or love, (peasant love as much honoured as the proudest,) his feeling is steadily antagonistic to Puritanism; and the discordance of Scottish modern psalmody is as unexampled among civilized nations as the sweetness of their ballads—shepherds’ or ploughmen’s (the plough and pulpit coming into fatalest opposition in Ayrshire); so that Wandering Willie must, as a matter of course, head the troop of Redgauntlet’s riotous fishermen with “Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife.” And see Wandering Willie’s own description of his gudesire: “A rambling, rattling chiel he had been, in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes;—he was famous at ‘Hoopers and Girders;’ a’ Cumberland could not touch him at ‘Jockie Lattin;’ and he had the finest finger for the back-lilt between Berwick and Carlisle;—the like o’ Steenie was na the sort they made Whigs o’.” And yet, to this Puritan element, Scott owed quite one of the most noble conditions of his mental life.
But it is of no use trying to get on to his aunt Janet in this letter, for there is yet one thing I have to explain to you before I can leave you to meditate, to purpose, over that sorrowful piece of Scott’s diary with which it began.
If you had before any thoughtful acquaintance with his general character, or with his writings, but had not studied this close of his life, you cannot but have read with surprise, in the piece of the diary I quoted, the recurring sentences showing the deep wounds of his pride. Your impression of him was, if thoughtfully received, that of a man modest and self-forgetful, even to error. Yet, very evidently, the bitterest pain under his fallen fortune is felt by his pride.
Do you fancy the feeling is only by chance so strongly expressed in that passage?
It is dated 18th December. Now read this:—
“February 5th, 1826.—Missie was in the drawing-room, and overheard William Clerk and me laughing excessively at some foolery or other in the back room, to her no small surprise, which she did not keep to herself. But do people suppose that he was less sorry for his poor sister, or I for my lost fortune? If I have a very strong passion in the world, it is pride; and that never hinged upon world’s gear, which was always, with me—Light come, light go.”
You will not at first understand the tone of this last piece, in which two currents of thought run counter, or, at least, one with a back eddy; and you may think Scott did not know himself, and that his strongest passion was not pride; and that he did care for world’s gear.
Not so, good reader. Never allow your own conceit to betray you into that extremest folly of thinking that you can know a great man better than he knows himself. He may not often wear his heart on his sleeve for you; but when he does, depend upon it, he lets you see deep, and see true.
Scott’s ruling passion was pride; but it was nobly set—on his honour, and his courage, and his quite conscious intellectual power. The apprehended loss of honour,—the shame of what he thinks in himself cowardice,—or the fear of failure in intellect, are at any time overwhelming to him. But now, he felt that his honour was safe; his courage was, even to himself, satisfying; his sense of intellectual power undiminished; and he had therefore recovered some peace of mind, and power of endurance. The evils he could not have borne, and lived, have not been inflicted on him, and could not be. He can laugh again with his friend;—“but do people suppose that he was less sorry for his poor sister, or I for my lost fortune?”
What is this loss, then, which he is grieving for—as for a lost sister? Not world’s gear, “which was always, with me, Light come, light go.”
Something far other than that.
Read but these three short sentences more,[16] out of the entries in December and January:—
“My heart clings to the place I have created: there is scarce a tree on it that does not owe its being to me.”
“Poor Will Laidlaw—poor Tom Purdie—such news will wring your hearts; and many a poor fellow besides, to whom my prosperity was daily bread.”
“I have walked my last on the domains I have planted, sate the last time 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!”
Nor did they love him less. You know that his house was left to him, and that his “poor people” served him until his death—or theirs. Hear now how they served.
“The butler,” says Lockhart, visiting Abbotsford in 1827, “instead of being the easy chief of a large establishment, was now doing half the work of the house, at probably half his former wages. Old Peter, who had been for five-and-twenty years a dignified coachman, was now ploughman-in-ordinary, only putting his horses to the carriage upon high and rare occasions; and so on with all the rest that remained of the ancient train. And all, to my view, seemed happier than they had ever done before. Their good conduct had given every one of them a new elevation in his own mind; and yet their demeanour had gained, in place of losing, in simple humility of observance. The great loss was that of William Laidlaw, for whom (the estate being all but a fragment in the hands of the trustees and their agent) there was now no occupation here. The cottage which his taste had converted into a loveable retreat had found a rent-paying tenant; and he was living a dozen miles off, on the farm of a relation in the Vale of Yarrow. Every week, however, he came down to have a ramble with Sir Walter over their old haunts, to hear how the pecuniary atmosphere was darkening or brightening, and to read, in every face at Abbotsford, that it could never be itself again until circumstances should permit his re-establishment at Kaeside.
“All this warm and respectful solicitude must have had a preciously soothing influence on the mind of Scott, who may be said to have lived upon love. No man cared less about popular admiration and applause; but for the least chill on the affection of any near and dear to him, he had the sensitiveness of a maiden. I cannot forget, in particular, how his eyes sparkled when he first pointed out to me Peter Mathieson guiding the plough on the haugh. ‘Egad,’ said he, ‘auld Pepe’ (this was the children’s name for their good friend), ‘auld Pepe’s whistling at his darg. The honest fellow said a yoking in a deep field would do baith him and the blackies good. If things get round with me, easy shall be Pepe’s cushion.’ ”
You see there is not the least question about striking for wages on the part of Sir Walter’s servants. The law of supply and demand is not consulted, nor are their wages determined by the great principle of competition—so rustic and absurd are they; not but that they take it on them sometimes to be masters instead of servants:—
“March 21.—Wrote till twelve, then out upon the heights, and faced the gale bravely. Tom Purdie was not with me; he would have obliged me to keep the sheltered ground.”[17]
You are well past all that kind of thing, you think, and know better how to settle the dispute between Capital and Labour.
“What has that to do with domestic servants?” do you ask? You think a house with a tall chimney, and two or three hundred servants in it, is not properly a house at all; that the sacred words, Domus, Duomo, cannot be applied to it; and that Giotto would have refused to build a Buzzing Tower, by way of belfry, in Lancashire?
Well, perhaps you are right. If you are merely unlucky Williams—borrowing colossal planes—instead of true servants, it may well be that Pepe’s own whistling at his darg must be very impossible for you, only manufactured whistling any more possible. Which are you? Which will you be?
I am afraid there is little doubt which you are;—but there is no doubt whatever which you would like to be, whether you know your own minds or not. You will never whistle at your dargs more, unless you are serving masters whom you can love. You may shorten your hours of labour as much as you please;—no minute of them will be merry, till you are serving truly: that is to say, until the bond of constant relationship—service to death—is again established between your masters and you. It has been broken by their sin, but may yet be recovered by your virtue. All the best of you cling to the least remnant or shadow of it. I heard but the other day of a foreman, in a large house of business, discharged at a week’s warning on account of depression in trade,—who thereupon went to one of the partners, and showed him a letter which he had received a year before, offering him a situation with an increase of his salary by more than a third; which offer he had refused without so much as telling his masters of its being made to him, that he might stay in the old house. He was a Scotchman—and I am glad to tell the story of his fidelity with that of Pepe and Tom Purdie. I know not how it may be in the south; but I know that in Scotland, and the northern Border, there still remains something of the feeling which fastened the old French word ‘loial’ among the dearest and sweetest of their familiar speech; and that there are some souls yet among them, who, alike in labour or in rest, abide in, or will depart to, the Land of the Leal.
“Sire, moult me plaist vostre escole
Et vo noble conseil loial,
Ne du trespasser n’ay entente;
Sans lui n’aray ne bien ne mal.
Amours ce vouloir me présente,
Qui veult que tout mon appareil
Soit mis à servir soir et main
Loiauté, et moult me merveil
Comment homs a le cuer si vain
Qu’il a à fausetié réclaim.”