Sir Walter Scott.
After a painting by Sir Henry Raeburn.
CHAPTER II
EARLY MARRIED LIFE, BALLAD COLLECTING, LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, MARMION
The Scotts, at Edinburgh, dwelt first in George Street, then in South Castle Street, and finally in the house in North Castle Street, where he resided till the time of his misfortunes. The rooms were soon full of old pikes and guns and bows, of old armour, and of old books. Already Scott’s library was considerable. He had read enormously, and it is curious that a man of his unrivalled memory made so many written notes of his reading. “Reading makes a full man,” but Gillies, an intelligent if unpractical bore, says that, when in the full tide of authorship later, Scott read comparatively little. His summers were passed in a cottage at Lasswade, in the society of his early friends, and of the families of Melville, of the historian, Patrick Fraser Tytler, Woodhouselee, and of Buccleuch. His early friends were around him—William Erskine, a good man and fastidious critic, William Clerk, of Penicuik, Fergusson (Sir Adam), and many others. Gillies says that Scott lived “alone,” and doubts “whether there was any one intimately connected with Sir Walter Scott whose mind and habits were exactly congenial.” But it is a commonplace that we all “live alone,” and certainly Scott seems to have believed that he found, especially in “Will Erskine,” all the sympathy, literary and social, that he could expect or desire. In 1798 he made a new acquaintance, Mat Lewis, famous then for his romance, The Monk, and busy with his Tales of Wonder.
EARLY MARRIED LIFE
Lewis, though no poet, was a neat metrist, and tutored Scott in the practical details of prosody. To Lewis Scott offered versions of German ballads, and other materials from his increasing store of original or traditional Volkslieder. He entered the realm of poetry, not by the usual gate of “subjective” lyrics about his own emotions, but through the antiquarian and historical gate of old popular ballads, newly opened by Bishop Percy, Herd, Ritson the excitable antiquary, and others. Sir Philip Sidney had loved these songs of “blind crowders,” Addison had praised them, Lady Wardlaw had imitated them, Burns had expressed but a poor opinion of them, but German research and imitation had given a new vogue to the ballads, which Scott, in boyhood, had collected whenever he possessed a shilling to buy a printed chant. The simplicity and spirit of the narrative folk songs did much to inspire and give vogue to Wolf’s theory that the Homeric poems were, in origin, a kind of highly superior long ballads, handed down by oral tradition. In this theory Scott had no interest, about its truth he had no opinion, sitting silent and bored when it was debated by Coleridge and Morritt. “I never,” he says, “was so bethumped with words.” The vogue of the ballads lent a new blow at the poetical theories of the eighteenth century, and at the poetry of Pope. But Scott would not have it said that Pope was no poet, a poet he was, but he dealt with themes that were no longer so much appreciated as they had been in the age of Anne. Though a literary innovator Sir Walter was not a literary iconoclast, and he loved no poetry better than the stately and manly melancholy of Dr. Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal.
Mat Lewis’s ballads were delayed in publication, but in January 1799 he negotiated with a Mr. Bell for the issue of Scott’s version of Goethe’s Goetz Von Berlichingen, “a very poor and incorrect translation;” so a former owner of my copy of Lockhart has pencilled on the margin. Goetz, at all events, made no impression on Coleridge’s detested “reading public,” and though Scott carried to London, in 1799, an original drama, The House of Aspen, which was put in rehearsal by Kemble, it never saw the footlights. In later life he expressed disgust at the idea of writing for “low and ignorant actors” (who may be supposed to know their own business); perhaps he had been mortified by the ways of managers. At this time his father died of paralysis; says Lockhart, “I have lived to see the curtain rise and fall once more on a similar scene.” The Glenfinlas ballad was written at this time, founded on a legend of the murderous fairy women of the woods, which I have heard from the lips of a boatman on Loch Awe, and which Mr. Stevenson found, unmistakably the same, among the natives of Samoa. A more important ballad, the first in which he really showed his hand, was The Eve of St. John, a legend of Smailholme tower. Here we find the true Border spirit, the superstitious thrill, the galloping metre, the essence of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Cadyow, a ballad of the murder of the Regent Moray, is also of this period, and though not in the traditional manner, is most spirited.
BEGINNING OF BALLANTYNE
Scott’s destiny was now clear enough, the country had in him a new “maker.” But he had no idea of a life of authorship, agreeing with Kerr of Abbotrule that “a Lord President Scott might well be a famous poet—in the vacation time.” Literature, he said, was a good staff, but a bad crutch, and he looked to advance his worldly prospects and secure his livelihood by the profession of the Bar. Our other poets, as a rule, have meditated the Muse in perfect leisure, with no professional distractions. But Scott’s literary work was all done in hours stolen from an active official life. “I can get on quite as well from recollection of nature, while sitting in the Parliament House, as if wandering through wood and wold,” he said to Gillies, “though liable to be roused out of a descriptive dream, if Balmuto, with a fierce grunt, demands, ‘Where are your cautioners?’” Shelley composed while watching “the bees in the ivy bloom;” Keats, while listening to the nightingale; Scott, in the Parliament House, under the glare of Lord Balmuto. The difference in method is manifest in the difference of the results. But Marmion was composed during gallops among the hills of Tweedside.