This was the lad who shone in The Speculative Society; who roamed with Shortreed from Charlieshope to Charlieshope, dear to all the Dandie Dinmonts of Liddesdale, “sober or drunk, he was aye the gentleman.” You could not wander in Liddesdale, in these days, without the risk of being “fou”: though even among these “champion bowlsmen” Scott had the strongest head. “How brawlie he suited himself to every body,” as to “auld Thomas of Twizzlehope,” who possessed “the real lilt of Dick o’ the Cow,” and a punch bowl fatal to sobriety. The real lilt, or “a genuine old Border war horn” was worth a headache. Mr. Hutton, in his book on Scott, made his moan over the story of the arrival of a keg of brandy that interrupted religious exercise in Liddesdale. Autres temps, autres moeurs, and Scott, during these ballad-hunting expeditions, was not yet twenty-one. In defending the Rev. Mr. Macnaught, before the General Assembly, on a charge of lack of sobriety, and of “toying with a sweetie wife” and singing sculdudery chants, Scott edified the General Assembly by the distinction between ebrius and ebriosus, between being drunk and being a drunkard. But the Assembly decided that Mr. Macnaught was ebriosus. In getting up this case Scott visited, for the only time, the country of the Picts of Galloway, and of Guy Mannering.
The period of the Reign of Terror, in France, found Scott taking part in anti-revolutionary “rows” in Edinburgh. Nothing hints that he, like Wordsworth, conceived a passionate affection for the Revolution. The Radicals had a plot of the good old Jacobite kind for seizing the Castle (1794), but Scott rejected such romance, and was a volunteer on the side of order. In 1795 he conceived that his love suit was prospering, as appears plainly in a letter; despite “his habitual effort to suppress, as far as words were concerned, the more tender feelings, which in no heart were deeper than in his.” He translated Bürger’s ballad of Lenore (a refashioning of a volkslied current in modern Greece, and as The Suffolk Tragedy, in England), and laid “a richly bound and blazoned copy” at his lady’s feet (1796). The rhymes are spirited—
Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash, splash, along the sea,
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee!
FIRST LOVE
But the lady “gave to gold, what song could never buy,” as her unfriends may have said. But as her chosen lover was William Forbes, of the house of the good old Lord Pitsligo of the Forty-Five, and as Mr. (later Sir William) Forbes remained the staunchest friend of Scott, we may be certain that Green Mantle merely obeyed her heart.
“I shudder,” wrote a friend, “at the violence of his most irritable and ungovernable mind.” He little knew Scott, who rode from his lady’s house into the hills, “eating his own heart, avoiding the paths of men,” and said nothing. The fatal October of his rejection (1796) saw the publication of his first book, a slim quarto, containing translations of Bürger’s ballads. The lady of Harden, a Saxon by birth, corrected “his Scotticisms, and more especially his Scottish rhymes.” He had become the minstrel of “the Rough Clan” of Scott, and was a friend of the Houses of Harden (his chief’s) and of Buccleuch.
Scotland lost Burns in 1796, but did not yet take up Scott, whose ballads literally served “to line a box,” as Tennyson says, and were delivered over to the trunk-makers. He made no moan, and, in April 1797, his heart, as he says, “was handsomely pierced.” At Gilsland he met the dark-eyed Miss Charpentier, of French origin, daughter of M. Jean Charpentier (Ecuyer du Roi), and fell in love. I think that, in Julia Mannering, the lively dark beauty of Guy Mannering, we have a portrait from the life of Scott’s bride. In personal appearance the two ladies are unmistakably identical, and Miss Charpentier, in a letter of November 27, 1797, chaffs her lover exactly as Julia Mannering chaffs her austere father. Scott had written about his desire to be buried in Dryburgh Abbey, and Miss Charpentier thought him dismal and premature. She did not care for romance, she did not pamper Scott by pretending to the faintest sympathy with his studies, but she was a merry bride, a true wife, and, when the splendour of celebrity shone on Scott, it did not burn up (as a friend feared that it might) the unmoved Semele who shared the glory. Scott was married at Carlisle, in the church of St. Mary, on Christmas Eve, 1797.
I have often wondered whether, after his marriage, Scott was in the habit of meeting his “false love” in the society of Edinburgh. His heart was “handsomely pieced,” he says, but haeret lethalis arundo.
