The Lay, as Scott wrote to Wordsworth, “has the merit of being written with heart and good will, and for no other reason than to discharge my mind of the ideas which from infancy have rushed upon it. I believe such verses will generally be found interesting, because enthusiastic.” Whoso reads the Lay as it was written, “with heart and goodwill,” is not likely to complain of its lack of interest. The opening dialogue of the Spirits of river and hill, the ride of William of Deloraine through the red spate of Ail water, the scene of fair Melrose beheld aright, the opening of the Wizard’s tomb, in the splendour of the lamp that burns eternally; the fluttering viewless forms that haunt the aisles; the tilting between Cranstoun and Deloraine; the pranks of the page; the courage of the young Buccleuch; his bluff English captors; the bustle of the Warden’s raid; the riding in of the outlying mosstroopers; the final scene of the Wizard’s appearance and the passing of the page; with the beautiful ballads of the minstrels, make up a noble set of scenes, then absolutely fresh and poignant.
“WAVERLEY” BEGUN
While the public, unlike Sir Henry Eaglefield, did not need three readings to convince them of the excellence of the Lay, the critics were as wise as usual. It is never easy to keep one’s temper in reading Jeffrey’s criticisms. If not “the ideal whipper-snapper,” at least he was always thinking, not of the natural appeal of a poet “to the simple primary feelings of his kind,” but of what Mr. Jeffrey could say to the abatement of the poet’s merits. Ellis thought Jeffrey’s review “equally acute and impartial,” and it was impartial compared with his critique of Marmion. The poem should have been something else, not what it was. It should have “been more full of incident,” as if it could be more full of incident! The Goblin was “a merely local superstition,” to which Scott, of all men, could most easily have replied by proofs that the superstition, practically that of the Brownie, is universal. For example Froissart gives us, in Orthon, a goblin page, though not a malevolent specimen of the genus. Jeffrey said, and one would “like to have felt Mr. Jeffrey’s bumps”—as Charles Lamb said of a less famous dullard—that “Mr. Scott must either sacrifice his Border prejudices, or offend his readers in the other parts of the Empire!” Jeffrey writes like the snappish pedant of a provincial newspaper. When Marmion appeared, Jeffrey found, on the other hand, that it was not Scottish enough! Pitt and Fox equally admired the work, the public bought it as poetry is no longer bought, and Scott sold his copyright at the ransom of £500, which, with a royalty of £169 6s. on the first edition, and a present of £100 to buy a horse, from Messrs. Longman, made up his whole literary profits on the transaction.
The money probably went into his printing business, with Ballantyne & Co., and already (1805) we find that firm “receiving accommodation from Sir William Forbes,” the banker. They were always receiving or being refused “accommodation”; Scottish business had a paper basis; its bills represented fairy gold that turned to withered leaves; though Scott, as an Editor (of Dryden’s works at this time), put large quantities of business in the way of his printing firm. His practice at the Bar was a thing of the past: he was waiting for dead men’s shoes as a Clerk of the Court of Session; and, while toiling over Dryden’s works, he began Waverley, hoping to publish it by Christmas 1805. He purposely did not make a brilliant start, though the description of Edward Waverley’s studies is a copy of his own, and William Erskine did not think highly of the first seven chapters. So Scott threw the manuscript aside, to his admirers a misfortune. Waverley would have been as great a success as it was nine years later: Scott would have worked the new vein, the “Bonanza mine,” and for eighteen new Waverley novels (at the rate of two yearly) we would cheerfully give up Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, and The Lord of the Isles. Dis aliter visum.
It was now that Scott adopted the system of rising from bed to write at five in the morning. On one occasion he had the cruelty to return and awake Mrs. Scott, with the tidings, which he knew to be wholly uninteresting to her, that he had discovered the meaning of the name of a burn that passes through his estate. While taking brief holiday at Gilsland, he was summoned to mount and ride to Dalkeith, the rendezvous of the Forest, by the beacon fire which proved to be a false alarm. The story is told in The Antiquary. Scott met the Forest men pouring in down every water, and I have heard, from my own people, that the inhabitants of the little Border towns meant to burn them, if Napoleon landed, drive their flocks into the hills, and fight it out in the old Border way, a burnt country and a guerilla foe. It was during his ride of a hundred miles in twenty-four hours that Scott composed the lines beginning—
The forest of Glenmore is dree,
It is all of black pine and the dark oak tree.
PARTY SPIRIT
The April of 1806 saw Scott in London; already a “lion,” he was presented at the tiny Court of Caroline, Princess of Wales, who at this time was taken up by the Tories, as the Prince of Wales was then of the Whig party; much as another Prince of Wales, Frederick, was something of a Jacobite. He found that the Princess had an exaggerated freedom of manner, and presently “it came to be thought so.” She called him “a faint-hearted troubadour,” and he had no mind for the part of Chastelard. In town he met Joanna Baillie, whose plays he appreciated with more of generosity than critical faculty. His instalment as Clerk of Session was not welcomed by the Whigs, and, in irritation, “he for the first time put himself forward as a decided Tory partisan.” The Tories, at all events, were not pro-French. It would have been well if Scott could have taken the advice of Lord Dalkeith (Feb. 20, 1806), “Go to the hills and converse with the Spirit of the Fells, or any Spirit but the Spirit of Party, which is the fellest fiend that ever disturbed Harmony and social pleasure.”
On June 27, 1806, Scott wrote his “Health to Lord Melville,” the Tory governing spirit of Scotland, whom the Whigs were impeaching. James Ballantyne sang this lay at a public dinner on Lord Melville’s acquittal. The Princess of Wales was saluted in this song, which contained the words “Tally ho to the Fox” (C. J. Fox). This does not appear an amazing indiscretion, in a parcel of party verses, but the Whigs were greatly shocked. If a Briton must be a party man, he may as righteously belong to one party as the other. But the Whigs ever cherished the belief that they were the righteous. The worst effect of Scott’s politics was his connexion with journals, from the stately Quarterly to the inglorious Beacon, which carried political rancour into literary criticism. It is true that Hazlitt wrote as furiously and vilely against Coleridge in The Edinburgh Review, which was Whig, as any one ever did against Keats in The Quarterly, which is Tory. But Whig offences, in history as in literature, are condoned by historians, and forgotten by most people, while Gifford, of the Quarterly, and the conductors of Blackwood remain in the pillory. In any case, with the brutal outrages of criticism Scott had nothing to do. He was foremost to praise Frankenstein, supposing it to be by Shelley, when Shelley was the target of Tory insults; and he invited Charles Lamb to Abbotsford, when Lamb was being attacked as a leader of the Cockney School.[3] Lamb missed the chance of coursing and salmon fishing with a Scot who would not have aroused in him “an imperfect sympathy.”
However Lamb and Shelley were not known in Scotland in 1806, when the affairs of Scott’s brother Thomas made it necessary for Walter to