The Country of Sir Walter Scott

by Charles S. Olcott

Yet in many ways Scott was not successful. Judged by that test which is the only one allowed to many men, his life was distinctly a failure. In the ordinary usage of the term, a man is accounted successful if he accomplishes his chief aim in life. Wealth is the aim of so many that rich men are usually considered successful, and those who die poor are commonly supposed to be failures.

Scott aimed to write a popular kind of poetry, and in this he succeeded. He then turned to fiction and here he was even more successful. But this kind of success did not represent his supreme desire. He sought to make it the means to an end, and the dream of his life was, after all, wealth. Not riches for himself. He was never mean enough for that, and selfishness did not enter into his nature. It was wealth for his family that he desired. He was a man of great pride and the old feudal system was full of attractiveness. He knew every detail of the history of the Scott family for centuries. He revered the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch as the head of his clan. As his writings, year after year, brought him financial returns almost fabulous in size, he began to cherish the desire to found a new branch of the Scott Clan. The irresistible impulse to add new lands to Abbotsford, regardless of cost, and to erect a great mansion, fit for the residence of an earl, all sprang from this one motive. The readiness with which he purchased a captaincy in the army for his eldest son, at a cost of £3500, and the cheerfulness with which he settled nearly the whole of Abbotsford upon young Walter and his affianced bride, promising that if he should be spared ten years he would give them as much more, are striking indications of his intense longing to establish the Scotts of Abbotsford among the great families of Scotland.

In this, the greatest ambition of his life, Scott was completely thwarted. Though Abbotsford was saved from the wreck of his fortunes by an almost superhuman effort, the estate which passed to his heirs was not so large as he had expected, nor did his sons live long to enjoy it. The eldest, Walter, died in 1847, and as he had no son, the baronetcy expired with him. The younger son, Charles, had died in 1841.

The failure of Scott's hopes was the result of a long chain of circumstances. In early life he had undertaken the practice of law, and continued for ten years without rising above the level of mere drudgery, his earnings for the first five years averaging only eighty pounds annually and probably not rising very much higher during the subsequent years. Finding it necessary, at length, to give up the law entirely, he arranged to secure an appointment as Clerk of the Court of Session, to succeed an aged incumbent of that office. The agreement was that Scott should do the work while his predecessor drew the pay, in consideration of which he was to have the entire emolument after the old gentleman's death. The office was worth eight hundred pounds a year and offered a very fair substitute for the small earnings at the bar. Unfortunately the gentleman was so inconsiderate as to prolong his existence for six years after the bargain was made.

Scott was already in possession of a private income of one thousand pounds, to which the office of Sheriff of Selkirk added three hundred pounds, and was beginning to receive large rewards for his literary labour, 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' bringing him £769 6s. for the first and second editions. It might be supposed that such an income would satisfy a young man not yet thirty-four. Scott, however, was ambitious, and feeling the need of the additional income which did not at once materialize from the clerkship, sought to make up the deficiency by investing nearly all his capital in a commercial venture. He entered into a secret partnership with James Ballantyne in the printing business, which proved, with one exception, to be the greatest mistake of his life. The exception, which marked, in Lockhart's phrase, 'the blackest day in his calendar,' was in connecting his fortunes with John Ballantyne in the publishing business.

James Ballantyne's greatest fault was a tendency to rely too much upon Scott's judgment, and the latter was too much swayed by generous motives to be a prudent business manager. He would favour the publication of an unmarketable book rather than disappoint a friend. Moreover, his own great interest in works of an historical or antiquarian nature often led him astray. His judgment of good literature was better than his knowledge of what the public was likely to buy. The firm became loaded with unprofitable enterprises, which they, in turn, unloaded, in part, upon Constable, thus contributing one of the causes of the latter's downfall. Another weakness of James Ballantyne, who was an excellent printer and in many ways an exemplary man, was his distaste for figures and utter indifference to his balance-sheets—a fatal error for a business man.

John Ballantyne, a younger brother of James, was a light-headed, happy-go-lucky, careless little fellow, who could amuse a company of friends with comic songs and droll mimicry, who loved all kinds of sports, drove a tandem down the Canongate, was fond of dissipation and gay company, and without the slightest capacity for business or interest in it. Like his brother he was intensely fond of Scott and loyal to him, but a reckless adventurer and spendthrift. Scott nicknamed him 'Rigdumfunnidos' and was always amused by him, but could scarcely have had respect for his business qualities. It must always remain a mystery why he entrusted so large an interest in his own fortunes to such a weakling.

An alliance, and, what is worse, a secret one, with two such men, who could not in any sense act as a brake upon Scott's own impulses nor steady him with the business experience which he sadly lacked, was mistake enough; but Scott himself committed a serious error in his own affairs. He fell into the habit of selling his literary productions before they were written, and carried this folly to such an extreme that about the time of the issue of 'The Fortunes of Nigel,' he had received payment, by notes, from the bookseller, for no less than four works of fiction, which at that time had not even been planned. They subsequently appeared as 'Peveril of the Peak,' 'Quentin Durward,' 'St. Ronan's Well,' and 'Redgauntlet.' The proceeds were spent upon the castle at Abbotsford before the books were even named. John Ballantyne was rapidly spending money which his firm had not earned, and Scott, who ought to have remonstrated against such rashness, was committing the same fault on a larger scale. Under the circumstances the only wonder is that the disaster was so long averted. When it came, Scott found himself involved in the debts of the Ballantynes to the extent of £117,000.