Sir Walter Scott

by Andrew Lang

YOUTH

His fifteenth year saw Scott, already a lawyer’s apprentice, in the Highlands, happy in the society of Stewart of Invernahyle, who had fought a sword and target duel with Rob Roy (at Ardsheil, I think), had been out with the Prince, and supplied the central incidents of Waverley. “The blawing bleezing lairds” were not much to the taste of the elder Mr. Scott, who was unconsciously sitting for his own portrait as the elder Fairford in Redgauntlet, a picture rich in affectionate humour. “The office,” in Edinburgh, swallows up a large proportion of the schoolboys. To Mr. R. L. Stevenson, “the office” seemed a Minotaur, but Scott found in it his profit. He acquired, as a copyist, the quality of steady prolonged writing; the faculty of sitting at it which Anthony Trollope called “rump.” He once covered, without interruption, a hundred and twenty pages of folio, at three-pence the page, gaining thirty shillings to spend on books or a dirk. Looking at the MSS. of his novels, down to the never-to-be-published Knights of Malta, written during his last voyage to Italy, we see the steady, unfaltering, speedy hand of the law writer, with scarce a correction or an erasure. After his ruin, after his breakdown in health, he once wrote the “copy” of sixty printed pages of a novel in a day. He had acquired the power of sitting at it, without which his colossal labours, in the leisure hours of a busy official life, would have been impossible. He could not have done this had he not been of Herculean strength, the strongest man in the acquaintance of the Ettrick Shepherd. “Though you may think him a poor lamiter, he’s the first to begin a row, and the last to end it,” said a naval officer. Like his own Corporal Raddlebanes, he once fought three men with his stick, for an hour by the Tron clock—not that of Shrewsbury.

We are apt to forget how young Scott was, at this period. He was only eighteen when he piloted a young English friend through the shoals and reefs of early misadventure. He can scarcely have been nineteen when he met Le Manteau Vert, Miss Stewart Belches (daughter of Sir John Stewart Belches of Invermay), the object of his first and undying love. His friends thought him cold towards the fair, but, in truth, he was shielded by a pure affection. Concerning the lady, I have heard much, from Mrs. Wilson (née Macleod), whose aged aunt, or great-aunt, like Scott, fell in love with the bride of William Forbes. “She was more like an angel than a woman,” the old lady would say. Scott’s passion endured for five years (“three years of dreaming and two of wakening,” he says), inspiring him, as time went on, to severe application in his legal studies, and to his first efforts in literature.

FIRST LOVE

Lockhart did not know the details of the ending of the vision. “What a romance to tell—and told I fear it will one day be,” wrote Scott after his ruin. But told the romance never will or can be, except in the merest outline. Scott thought that he had something to complain of, as appears from his poem, The Violet, about “my false love,” and in verses describing Fitz James’ broken sleep, in The Lady of the Lake.

Then, ... from my couch may heavenly might
Chase that worst phantom of the night—
Again return the scenes of youth,
Of confident undoubting truth
* * * *
They come, in dim procession led,
The cold, the faithless, and the dead.
* * * *
Dreamed he of death, or broken vow,
Or is it all a vision now?

Scott, according to Lady Louisa Stuart, said that he always, in later life, dreamed of his lost love before any great misfortune. In age and sickness, his Journal tells much of his thoughts of her, of the name he had cut in runic characters on the grass below the tower of St. Rule’s at St. Andrews, the name that “still had power to stir his heart.” But years went by before the vision ended—the vision of the lady of Rokeby, of Redgauntlet, and of the Lay of the Last Minstrel; “by many names one form.”

It is because he knew passion too well that he is not a poet of passion. There is nothing in Scott like the melancholy or peevish repining of the lovers in Locksley Hall and in Maud. Only in the fugitive farewell caress of Diana Vernon, stooping from her saddle on the darkling moor before she rides into the night, do we feel the heart-throb of Walter Scott. Of love as of human life he knew too much to speak. He did not “make copy” of his deepest thoughts or of his deepest affections. I am not saying “They were pedants who could speak,” or blaming those who can “unlock their hearts” with a sonnet or any other poetic key. But simply it was not Sir Walter’s way; and we must take him with his limitations—honourable to the man, if unfortunate for the poet.

We see him, a splendid figure, “tall, much above the usual stature, cast in the very mould of a youthful Hercules; the head set on with singular grace, the throat and chest after the truest model of the antique, the hands delicately finished, the whole outline that of extraordinary vigour, without as yet a touch of clumsiness.” The “lamiter” “could persuade a pretty young woman to sit and talk with me, hour after hour, in a corner of a ballroom, while all the world were capering in our view.”

FIRST LOVE