“There is a particular turning of the high road through the Forest near Ashestiel, at a place which affords no possible means of concealment; the grass is smooth, and always eaten bare by the sheep; there is no heather, nor underwood, nor cavern, in which any mortal being could conceal himself. Towards this very spot I was advancing one evening on horseback—please to observe it was before dinner, and not long after sunset, so that I ran no risk either of seeing double, or wanting sufficient light for my observations. Before me, at the distance of about a quarter of a mile, there stood a human figure, sharply enough defined by the twilight. I advanced; it stalked about with a long staff in its hand, held like a wand of office, but only went to and fro, keeping at the same corner, till, as I came within a few yards, my friend all in an instant vanished. I was so struck with his eccentric conduct, that although Mrs. Scott was in delicate health, and I was anxious to get home to a late dinner, I could not help stopping to examine the ground all about, but in vain; he had either dissolved into air, or sunk into the earth, where I knew well there was no coal-pit to receive him. Had he lain down on the greensward, the colour of his drapery, which was dusky brown, would have betrayed him at once, so that there was no practicable solution of the mystery.
“I rode on, and had not advanced above fifty yards, when, on looking back, my friend was there again, and even more clearly visible than before. ‘Now,’ said I to myself, ‘I most certainly have you!’ so wheeled about and spurred Finella; but the result was as before, he vanished instantaneously. I must candidly confess I had now got enough of the phantasmagoria; and whether it were from a love of home, or a participation in my dislike of this very stupid ghost, no matter, Finella did her best to run away, and would by no means agree to any further process of investigation. I will not deny that I felt somewhat uncomfortable, and half inclined to think that this apparition was a warning of evil to come, or indication, however obscure, of misfortune that had already occurred. So strong was this impression, that I almost feared to ask for Mrs. Scott when I arrived at Ashestiel; but, as Dr. Johnson said on a similar occasion, ‘nothing ever came of it.’”
SECOND SIGHT
The strange disturbances at Abbotsford, as if all the heavy furniture were being moved about, did not make Scott “eery.” He arose,
Bolt upright
And ready to fight,
armed for war with the sword of his Jacobite ancestor, Auld Beardie. But when the noises, never accounted for, were found to have been coincident with the death of the purveyor of the furniture, Mr. Bullock, in London, Lockhart admits that Scott was not only puzzled but considerably impressed.
Such rackets, preceding or accompanying a death, are familiar to writers whom he knew well, Lavaterus, Thyraeus, Theophilus Insulanus on the Second Sight, and the rest, and persist among the beliefs of Highlands and Lowlands. There is always a hammering in the shop of a certain Highland carpenter, on the night before a coffin is ordered. On the whole Scott’s frame of mind was akin, on this point, to that of Kant, who did not believe in any special ghost story, but did not disbelieve in ghost stories in general. He would say that the only men known to him who had seen ghosts were either mad, or later went mad, yet he had seen some kind of apparition himself. Everything connected with hypnotism (then styled Animal Magnetism) he dismissed as part of “the peck of dirt,” which each generation must eat in its turn. Yet he was anxious to investigate the ink-gazing of Egypt, which he could easily have done, with a glass ball, at home. In short he enjoyed the human thrill which is awakened by good stories of the “supernormal,” and communicated the thrill in Wandering Willie’s Tale, in the appearance of the death wraith of old Alice to the Master of Ravenswood (the best wraith in fiction), in My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, and in the terrible story, gleaned from Hannah More, of The Tapestried Chamber. His Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft are the work of his declining age, and adopt the dull line of sturdy common-sense. But his explanation of the information received in a dream, in The Antiquary, is that of St. Augustine, and even, in many cases, of Mr. F. W. H. Myers, with his theory of the more normal workings of the “Subliminal Self.”
HEALTH
For more than twenty years Scott had enjoyed unbroken health, and had treated “the machine,” his body and brain, as few men except Napoleon have overtaxed that engine. In Edinburgh he lived, he says, “too genially.” Lockhart has described his plain but Gargantuan breakfasts; he took little or no exercise, driving to court with other advocates, and we must remember that the dinner parties of that age began early and ended late, while the champagne and sherry and port and Burgundy were followed by a “shass caffy” (as Mr. Henry Foker calls it), in the shape of rummers of whisky and water, “hot, with.” A healthier generation is justly horrified by these excesses of conviviality, in which Scott took his part, like other advocates and judges of his time, rising at five o’clock next morning to write twenty or thirty printed pages of his novel. At Abbotsford, he said, he never sat down, as in Edinburgh he was always seated, at one kind of table or another. His task done before breakfast, he rode or drove, or worked in his plantations, or underwent the toil of receiving bores, he coursed, he passed the midnight hours in “burning the water,” that is, spearing salmon by torchlight, a picturesque but now, happily, an illegal pastime.
The refreshment of the machine was writing at a furious pace, and, in 1817, the longsuffering mechanism resented its treatment. Scott had still eight years of apparent prosperity before him, but he had no more years of unbroken health. Violent “cramps in the stomach,” as they were called, seized him, and drove this stoic, “bellowing like a bull,” forth from the guests at his own table. He tells us, and Hogg tells us, that heated salt, which burned his shirt to ashes, was applied to the seat of his malady, “and I hardly felt it,” says the sufferer. Then came the heroic remedies of profuse bleeding and blistering, and diet of toast, with only three glasses of wine daily. It was in tormentis that he finished Rob Roy and dictated The Bride of Lammermoor, the story being often interrupted by his outcries of pain. Fortunately he now had Will Laidlaw with him as amanuensis. That he undertook Rob Roy (for once “writing up to a name,” to please Constable) in such circumstances of recurring agony and weakness, was an example, perhaps of his courage, certainly, in the words of St. Francis, an instance of his hardness on “his brother the ass,” his fleshly body. Much heavy labour on history for The Annual Register, and on other essays, accompanied his work in fiction, and he was reduced to a state of languor in which, for once in the tone of self pity, he wrote the beautiful lines beginning