THE BALLANTYNE FIRM

Meanwhile he wrote The Betrothed, which Ballantyne discouraged, and The Talisman, a work as pleasing to boyhood as Ivanhoe. We all have been fond of Coeur de Lion, and hated Conrad de Montserrat, and adored Saladin. The book was amazingly popular, and Woodstock was undertaken next, and finished when the evil days began. Scott now made a pleasant tour in Ireland, and visited Wordsworth on his homeward way. The two poets eternally quoted the Bard of Rydal, but not the most distant allusion was made by either, says Lockhart, to the verses of the Minstrel of the Forest. On returning to Abbotsford it was a sad sight for Lockhart to see Sir Walter “read, note, and index with the pertinacity of some pale compiler in the British Museum,” for the Napoleon, and rising from his toil, “not radiant and buoyant,” but with an aching brow and weary eyes. Lockhart himself was leaving Scotland for London, and the editorial chair of The Quarterly Review. The shadows were thickening in the prison house, and the health of Scott’s grandson, Lockhart’s son, was of all the shadows the deepest. There were to be no more happy summers in the cottage of Chiefswood—the scene, many years later, of happiness cujus pars fui. In November 1825, Lockhart, in London, wrote a long letter to Scott on rumours unfavourable to Constable’s solvency. He anticipated nothing worse for Scott than the loss of the price of Woodstock. Returning to Chiefswood, he received a letter of warning, and showed it to Scott, who made a night journey to see Constable, who reassured him. Lockhart now suspected that Scott was deeply concerned in his publisher’s affairs. On November 20 Scott began his famous Journal, now published in full. On December 22 he wrote Bonny Dundee, new words to an old tune, accompanying ribald words, in which the town, not the Viscount of Dundee, is “bonny.” “I wonder if the verses are good,” Scott notes, and laments poor Will Erskine—“thou couldst and wouldst have told me.” The song is his latest and not least splendid tribute to Claverhouse, and rings across the Empire with its “cavalry canter.” On Christmas Day Scott wrote, “I have a particular call for gratitude.” “Thus does Fortune banter us.” The earliest notes of 1826 show Scott already anxious about the money affairs of Ballantyne and Constable. They also (January 5) show him “much alarmed” by a sudden attack of agraphia, impotence to write the words he would. He explained this as the result of an anodyne, for his old complaint had returned with its cruel agonies. On January 11 there is “anxious botheration about the money market.” On January 14 there comes a mysterious letter from Constable, then in London, where he made to Lockhart wild proposals for advances of huge sums by Scott. On January 16, in Edinburgh, the blow fell. “Hurst and Robinson let a bill come back upon Constable.” Nevertheless Scott dined with Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, whose little daughter, recently dead at a great age, regretted by all who knew her, was a child friend and consoler of Sir Walter. Next day came James Ballantyne “with a face as black as the crook”: Ballantyne & Co. must suspend payment. Scott at once consulted Mr. John Gibson, W.S., and, as he would not consent to be made bankrupt, his affairs were put under trustees, acting for the creditors. If bankrupt, his financial position would improve, his future gains would be his own. But he at once braced himself to pay off everybody, pledging brain and life to that colossal task. He did not as yet know the full extent of his losses.

By the admission of one of Ballantyne’s trustees, the books of the firm, eleven years later, were still unbalanced. Into the affair of the bills and counter bills between Ballantyne and Constable, whereby, according to Lockhart, Scott’s business debts were doubled, it is not possible to go in this place. Ballantyne’s representatives regarded the whole story as the result of a confusion in the mind of Lockhart. But Lockhart’s source was Mr. Cadell, the partner of Constable, and Mr. Cadell, in 1837, stood by his guns, and sent confirmatory documents. “John Ballantyne suggested the double bills!”[7] Scott never blamed James Ballantyne, who owed to him, he said, his difficulties in the present as well as his prosperity in the past. But the books of the firm were never balanced! Without balance-sheets, and there were none, how could Scott know the amount of his liabilities? But, again, why did he not extort accounts from the lazy James? Lockhart himself meted out the blame to all concerned, as far as his knowledge, instructed by Mr. Cadell, enabled him to do. He was blamed by the Press for making precisely the statements which he never made. Scott, to his own loss, insisted on employing James Ballantyne alone as his printer after 1826. But he transferred his publishing business from Constable to Cadell, with good reason. Constable “was all spectral together.” As late as 1851 Lockhart wrote that “the details of Scott’s commercial perplexities remain in great measure inexplicable.” Scott himself (January 29) writes: “Constable’s business seems unintelligible ... neither stock nor debt to show. No doubt trading almost entirely on accommodation is dreadfully expensive.” So Scott had just warned Terry!

“WOODSTOCK”

From his old rival, Sir William Forbes, from the Royal Bank, from an unknown person, offering £30,000, Scott had many proffers of assistance. But he took the whole debt, £117,000, on his own shoulders, he borrowed from no man, he lived retired, and worked at Woodstock steadily throughout the days which brought Job’s messengers of ruin. “I experience a sort of determined pleasure,” he said to Skene, “in confronting the very worst aspect of this sudden reverse....” His mind was free from the awful apprehension caused by his attack of agraphia. “Few have more reason to feel grateful to the Disposer of all than I have.” Any spleen which Scott may have felt, he worked off in Malachi Malagrowther’s Letters, a criticism of an effort made by his own party to dethrone the Scot’s one pound note, the Palladium of the ancient kingdom.

On March 15 Scott left his house in Castle Street for the last time. Ha til mi tulidh—“I return no more!” The words are those of the lament of Macleod’s second-sighted piper, foreseeing his own fall in The Rout of Moy (1746). At Abbotsford he finished Woodstock on March 26. The book sold for £8,228, a first instalment of the Sisyphean task of payment.

Tastes differ, but to myself Woodstock seems to possess great merits. Considering the circumstances in which it was written, it is a wonderful book. Cromwell is not the conventional hypocrite of the then current estimate: he is a religious man, something of a mystic, involved in politics, and displaying the habitual “jesuitry” of political religious men. Wildrake is a tipsy cavalier of the best, and of the best in his song for King Charles. The various Puritan officers, and their various conduct in face of the poltergeist, or noisy devil of Woodstock, are excellently discriminated. Scott never could remember where he read that “Funny Joe of Oxford” confessed to being the poltergeist, nor have I been able to discover his source. My earliest trace of the explanation is in Joseph Taylor’s Apparitions (1815, Second Edition). Taylor gives us Funny Joe Collins, his pulvis fulminans, and all the rest of it, almost in the same words as Scott’s, who must have possessed Taylor’s book. But who goes bail for Funny Joe? If he did make a confession, how did it escape Dr. Plot, whose Natural History of Oxfordshire is one of Scott’s authorities? What Joe Collins may or may not have said is not evidence, but what does common sense care for evidence, when an explanation is wanted?

HEALTH OF LADY SCOTT

The plot of Woodstock was unconsciously annexed by Thackeray in Esmond. His charming but historically absurd James III is Charles II, laughing and running after every girl, and making love to the sister and mistress of the two good Royalists who protect him. Lockwood and his sweetheart, in Esmond, are Jocelyn and his sweetheart in Woodstock. James III is a more favoured lover than his uncle, and Beatrix outshines all the women of Scott, but Scott’s is the invention of the situation, down to the King’s offer of a duel. It is an astonishing case of unconscious appropriation—and improvement at the expense of the character of James, “the best of kings and men,” but the least humorous. I profess myself an admirer of Trusty Tompkins, that unworthy Independent; of Corporal Humgudgeon; of the noble Sir Henry Lee; and of his hound Bevis; of Wildrake, of the mise en scène, of Cromwell, in short of Woodstock in general. But these opinions are the accidents of personal likings, beyond which criticism, however it may disguise them, never finds it easy to go.

Scott now began The Chronicles of the Canongate, with Cadell for publisher. Constable was “spectral”: he had tried to borrow large sums from Scott, “after all chance of recovery was over,” says Lockhart. But to the sanguine Constable it could not seem that all chance was over. Long ago he had bought Hunter out of his business at a vast over-estimate, from which he never recovered. To act thus was in his nature; we must not suppose him to have been in any degree dishonest. The Chronicles and Napoleon now went on together, while (May 2) Scott “almost despaired” of his wife’s recovery from illness. “Still she welcomes me with a smile, and insists she is better.” She could not take leave of him, when he was obliged to leave Abbotsford for dingy lodgings in Edinburgh. On May 15 he heard of the death of Lady Scott. “I am deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels.... She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere—somehow; where, we cannot tell, how, we cannot tell; yet I would not at this moment resign the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me.” He writes of his lonely study: “Poor Charlotte would have been in the room half a score of times to see if the fire burned, and ask a hundred kind questions.” Such were the relations of husband and wife. He turned to his story of The Highland Widow: there was “no rest for Sir Walter.” “I will not be dethroned by any rebellious passion that raises its standard against me.”