“QUARTERLY REVIEW”
For personal and political reasons then, as a patriot and a poet outraged, Scott determined not only to counteract the Edinburgh Review, but to set up a rival to Constable, its publisher. It is difficult to trace each step in his scheme of resistance to Constable and Whiggery. But John Murray, then a young publisher in London, saw his opportunity of winning Scott away from Constable; he determined to back, financially, the Ballantynes in London, and he visited Ashestiel in October 1808. He had heard of the nascent Lady of the Lake, he had heard of Waverley as “on the stocks,” and he wished to have his share. From a letter of Scott to his brother Thomas, we learn that the old staff of The Antijacobin, including Canning, now Prime Minister, and Frere, had been “hatching a plot” for a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. Scott had been offered the Editorship, with “great prospects of emolument,” and the new serial was to have private information from Government. But for many obvious reasons, Scott could not take the Editorship, which fell to Gifford, a man of bad health, bad temper, and procrastinating habits, feared and unpopular as a satirist. Heber and Ellis, however, were ready to aid contributors, and Scott’s letters reveal his opinion of the state of literary criticism.
As is usual, periodical criticism revelled in “a facetious and rejoicing ignorance.” Specialists could not write what the public would read; editors like Jeffrey added flippancy to their dull lucubrations. Reviewing had long been indolently good natured: the Edinburgh Review had set the fashion of being tart and bitter; the fashion pleased, and “the minor reviews give us all abuse and no talent.” The age of “slashing” criticism had begun, and Scott held that “decent, lively, and reflecting criticism” would be welcome. He knew Gifford’s temper, and hoped to abate it. “We must keep our swords clear as well as sharp, and not forget the gentlemen in the critics.” Had Scott accepted the Editorship, with Heber, Ellis, Southey, and other gentlemen for his aides, the Quarterly would have been what he desired it to be. But a satirist was the Editor, and for long the tone was “savage and tartarly,” in cases well remembered. Many of Scott’s best essays, however, appeared in the Quarterly.
His indignation, and we may say his infatuation, found vent in another project. Lockhart may be too severe in his account of James Ballantyne’s brother John, who, after failing in various undignified lines, was started as a publisher by Scott, in 1809. Scott supplied most of the capital; John was expected to manage the accounts, and so the fatal business began. Nobody could call the Ballantynes “gentlemen,” whether in a heraldic or any other sense of the word. But both, in several ways, consciously or unconsciously amused Scott; he was deeply attached to them, and they to him. That he had such henchmen was his own fault: they were, so to speak, his Cochranes and Oliver Sinclairs, the unworthy favourites who were the ruin of the old Stuart Kings. Lockhart says that “a more reckless, thoughtless, improvident adventurer” than the festive John “never rushed into the serious responsibilities of business,” while James “never understood book-keeping or could bring himself to attend to it with regularity.” Scott, on the other hand, thoroughly understood business, and kept systematic accounts of his private expenditure.
THE BALLANTYNE COMPANY
But his success carried him, as it carried the great Emperor his contemporary, beyond himself. He felt adequate to all labours, however diverse; he was as confident as Napoleon in his own star; he entered on this publishing business as Napoleon invaded Russia, without organized supplies (for Mr. Murray soon withdrew from the Ballantyne alliance), and disaster was always at his doors. Between 1805 and 1810 he invested at least £9,000 in the Ballantyne companies, and night by night the fairy gold won by his imagination changed into worthless paper. We cannot here attempt to distribute exactly the shares of blame which fall to Scott and to the Ballantynes. Mr. Cadell uses the word “hallucination” to qualify Scott’s part in the business. I have examined these complicated matters carefully,[5] and the gist of the explanation lies in a remark of James Ballantyne. “The large sums received never formed an addition to stock. In fact they were all expended by the partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly adopted my brother John’s sanguine results.” They accepted John’s book-keeping at a venture, and, to use a slang phrase, they “blued” the apparent profits. That is the secret.
To leave a repulsive theme, in 1809 Scott visited the Highlands, he began The Lady of the Lake, which had long “simmered” in his mind, and he rode Fitz James’s ride from Loch Vennachar to Stirling, finding it practicable, though the ground, to be sure, must have been very different in the days of James V, when lochs occupied what is now arable land. At Buchanan House, on this tour, he read English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and briefly spoke of the author as “a whelp of a young Lord Byron ... abusing me for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my pen. God help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws.” But, like the Moslems in Thackeray’s White Squall, he “thought but little of it,” and did not dream of repaying Byron in kind.
NO SATIRIST
As he wrote to Lady Abercorn, “If I did not rather dislike satire from principle than feel myself altogether disqualified from it by nature, I have the means of very severe retaliation in my power,” particularly with respect to the Whigs of Holland House. Scott never used his powers as a satirist. He was remarkably skilled in the playful imitation of the styles of other poets, a faculty scarcely to have been expected from one so careless of finish in his own productions. He could easily have retaliated on Byron and others in the manner of Pope; but, as he thought, satire is the lowest, because the least sincere, of all forms of composition. Mankind is weary of the points and the feigned indignation of the satirist, and as “damns have had their day,” according to Bob Acres, versified satire too is fortunately in the limbo of things obsolete.
Scott seems usually to have had in his mind the theme for his next poem but one before he had finished its predecessor. In an excursion to Stirling, during the autumn of 1808, he told Mrs. Scott that he hoped one day “to make the earth yawn” at Bannockburn, “and devour the English archery and knighthood, as it did on that celebrated day of Scottish glory.” The design was long deferred, and when it was fulfilled, the Earth is not the only person who yawns in the course of The Lord of the Isles.