Life of Sir Walter Scott, with Abbotsford Notanda

by Robert Chambers; Robert Carruthers

PECUNIARY MISFORTUNES.

The years 1824 and 1825 were distinguished by an extraordinary mania for speculation, the consequence of which was, that, towards the close of the latter year, a scarcity of money began to be generally felt. A tightening of this kind always of course tells severely upon men who have been keeping up their trade by means of fictitious bills; and of this class it now appeared were Archibald Constable and Company. The leading member of this firm had been fortunate in the proprietorship of the Edinburgh Review, and the publishing of many of the works of Scott. Naturally grand in his ideas, and of an aspiring temper, at the same time that he despised, and in practice wholly overlooked, common mercantile calculations, he had come to conduct business in a manner which usually leads to ruin. We have seen that the bookselling concern of Scott (John Ballantyne and Company) was indebted to him for some important assistance in enabling it to wind up; the printing concern (James Ballantyne and Company) was also indebted to him for a vast amount of business; while Scott, more personally, was so imprudent as to take bill payments from him for works as yet unwritten, that he might help out his equally imprudent purchases of land. By these means, it came about very naturally that the name of James Ballantyne and Company—that is, Sir Walter Scott—was lent to Constable and Company for the raising of large sums amongst the banks. Scott, venerating the supposed sagacity of Constable, recked not of the danger of this traffic. Constable himself, inflated with a high sense of the literary property and stock which he held, regarded himself as a rich man, notwithstanding the large borrowings to which he condescended. James Ballantyne, venerating both, easy of nature, and unprepared by education or habit to keep a rigid supervision over business matters, gave no alarm regarding the immense compromise of his own and his friend’s name.

These explanations serve so far; for what more is necessary, it must, we fear, be admitted that the whole group of persons concerned in the poems and novels, including the mighty Magician himself, were naturally enough intoxicated to a certain degree by a literary success so infinitely exceeding all precedent. All of them, excepting James Ballantyne, had lived in an expensive manner. Scott himself had gone in this respect a good way beyond what prudence dictated, though it is also very certain that if his writings had been published under reasonably favourable circumstances for the realisation of profit, he might have bought land, and kept house as he did, without injury to anybody. All, moreover, had been culpably negligent about accounts and bargainings—Scott ridiculously so, to his own injury, as there appears no good reason for his dividing the six or eight thousand pounds realised by the first issues of his novels with his booksellers, to whom a commission on sales would have been remuneration sufficient. There was, however, at that time a much more loose and heedless fashion in most business affairs than now prevails, and this requires that some allowance should be made with regard to individual cases. So it was that one of the firmest, and, generally speaking, most sagacious men of his time, discovered, in the course of January 1826, that he was involved in obligations far exceeding the extent of his whole fortune—was, in short, a ruined man.

On the 18th December 1825, fearing bad news of Constable’s affairs, he says, in a diary which he kept, and surely few more touching words have ever fallen from any man’s pen: ‘Men will think pride has had a fall. Let them indulge their own pride in thinking that my fall will make them higher, or seem so at least. I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and to hope that some at least will forgive my transient wealth, on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. Sad hearts, too, at Darnick and in the cottages of Abbotsford. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest?—how live a poor indebted man, where I was once the wealthy, the honoured? I was to have gone there on Saturday, in joy and prosperity, to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish—but the thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things! I must get them kind masters. There may be yet those who, loving me, may love my dog, because it has been mine. I must end these gloomy forebodings, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet distress. I feel my dogs’ feet on my knees—I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere. This is nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things may be.’

The evil day had not yet come in all its reality. Mr Constable went to London, to endeavour to raise money on the copyrights he possessed, in order to put over the difficulties. Moderate-minded men of the present day read, as of something belonging to a different state of society, of this ‘Napoleon of the realms of print’ seriously expecting to raise one or two hundred thousand pounds on the pledge of his copyrights, one large section of which afterwards, at a fair auction, brought only £8500; his whole property being such as only in the long-run to pay 2s. 9d. a pound upon debts amounting to £256,000. Having utterly failed in raising money on any terms amongst those who deal in it, he induced Scott to advance him ten thousand, which the Laird of Abbotsford was only able to do by acting upon a right he had reserved in his son’s marriage-contract to borrow that sum on the security of his estate, for the benefit of his younger children. And this last sacrifice for Mr Constable he afterwards, very naturally, grudged more than all the rest. It was on the 17th of January that Scott finally ascertained the ruin of his affairs. ‘It was hard, after having fought such a battle,’ as he says in his diary; but he sustained the first shock with Roman firmness. His resolution was immediately taken, to accept of no grace from his creditors beyond time. ‘God grant me health and strength,’ he said in deep solemnity to his several friends, ‘and I will yet pay every man his due.’ To those marvellous powers which he had exerted for the purpose of buying land and keeping state, he trusted for the means of clearing off the tremendous encumbrance which had fallen upon him. At the same time, state was to be given wholly up. He resolved to sell his house in Edinburgh—‘dear 39’—and use a common lodging while obliged to attend his duties in the Court of Session. At other times he would join his family in strict retirement at Abbotsford, which obviously could have been put to no better use. There was no bravado in all this—nothing but a good, sound, honest resolution to redeem the painful obligations into which his imprudence had hurried him. In the same frame of mind, he declined many offers of money made to him by friends.

He was engaged at the time of his misfortunes in writing the Life of Bonaparte, taking up his new novel of Woodstock at intervals, by way of relief. These tasks he continued with steady perseverance in the midst of all his distresses. Even on the day which brought him assurance of the grand catastrophe, he resumed in the afternoon the task which had engaged him in the morning. There was more triumph over circumstances here than might be supposed, for he had lately begun to feel the first touches of the infirmities of age—age, to which ease, not hard work, is naturally appropriate. His sleep was now less sound than it had been; his eyesight was failing; and, above all, he felt that backwardness of the intellectual power which is inseparable from years. The will, however, was green as ever, and, under the prompting of an honourable spirit, it did its work nobly. Doggedly, doggedly did this glorious old man rouse himself from his melancholy couch, and set to his task at an hour when gaiety has little more than sought his. Firmly did he keep to his desk during long hours, till he could satisfy himself that he had done his utmost. The temptations of society, the more insinuating claims of an overworked system for rest, were alike resolutely rejected. The world must ever hear with wonder, that between the third day after his bankruptcy and the fifteenth day thereafter, he had written a volume of Woodstock, although several of these days had been spent in comparative vacancy, to allow the imagination time for brooding. He believed that, for a bet, he could have written this volume in ten days! Just a fortnight after his final breach with fortune, he says in his journal: ‘I have now no pecuniary provisions to embarrass me, and I think, now the shock of the discovery is past and over, I am much better off on the whole.... I shall be free of a hundred petty public duties imposed on me as a man of consideration—of the expense of a great hospitality—and, what is better, of the waste of time connected with it. I have known in my day all kinds of society, and can pretty well estimate how much or how little one loses by retiring from all but that which is very intimate.... If I could see those about me as indifferent to the loss of rank as I am, I should be completely happy. As it is, time must salve that sore, and to time I trust it.’ With such philosophy could Scott regard his reverses, even in the very crisis of their occurrence, and yet from many other passages we find a keen sensibility to the circumstances of his downfall. It was rectitude of mind, and not stoicism, which enabled him to rise above his misfortunes. Nothing, indeed, of sensibility appeared in his external demeanour, even to his children. To them, as to the world, it must have been a lost secret, but for his diary.

The obligations of James Ballantyne and Company—that is, of Sir Walter Scott—were finally ascertained to amount to £117,000, of which only £46,000 were the proper liabilities of his company.

Early in spring, the ministry made an effort to correct the unsound state of things which had led to the late fatal mania, by attempting to pass a bill for the limitation of bank circulation. It was determined to suppress all notes under five pounds. In Scotland, where there is a vast faith in the utility of one-pound bank-notes, and no other circulation is so much liked, this measure was very unpopular. By the banks, it was regarded as fraught with ruin to their interests. Scott, who had disapproved of some recent changes affecting old Scottish institutions, and whose mind, serene as it was, perhaps required some kind of vent for its own vexations, was led to take a strong, perhaps exaggerated view of this question, under which he wrote three letters, in the character of Malachi Malagrowther, originally published in a newspaper, afterwards as a pamphlet. His great humour and fund of droll anecdote gave wings to this production, and helped to rouse the Scottish people to an attitude of resistance, to which, in the long-run, the ministry gave way. The affair presented Scott in a new light—namely, as one setting himself up against authority, and appealing to popular sentiment on the adverse side. The public was somewhat surprised; the ministers, some of whom were his friends, felt hurt at opposition from such a quarter; and there was actually some dryness between him and Lord Melville for a short time. The explanation is, that Scott never was a servile friend of power, but one only as far as his view of what was good for the country led him; and there was a manliness and independence in his character which admitted of no hesitation about a course, when he saw only men on the one side, and the land of his birth on the other. It is gratifying to think that Scott lost no friendship by his conduct on this occasion, beyond a temporary coldness on the part of a few persons.

The novel of Woodstock came rapidly to completion, and, early in April, the first edition of it was sold in the printed sheets for £8228, in itself a proof that the author might have all along had a better market for his works if he had chosen. This was a cheering omen of what he was to do for his creditors. Removing at the close of the winter session to Abbotsford, he continued there his habits of application with unabated vigour, although, as appears from the diary, not without some battlings between duty and inclination. The daily amount of work he set to himself in the writing of Napoleon’s life was four sheets of manuscript a day, making about twenty-four of the printed pages. We find him on one occasion finishing this before noon—a surprising effort, considering that reference to his authorities or materials must have often been necessary during the progress of the work. At the same time he commenced another work of fiction, a series of tales entitled Chronicles of the Canongate, for he felt the one task as a relief to the other.

He now of course received no company at his rural retreat. Only a few intimate friends of his neighbourhood occasionally joined the family circle. It was a melancholy spring to one whose life in the country had hitherto been a constant holiday. To add to his griefs, the health of his wife had sunk to a low pitch. His kind-hearted Charlotte died on the 16th of May, of water in the chest, the end being somewhat accelerated by the late disasters. Scott, absent at the moment on duty in Edinburgh, quickly hurried home. The event itself, and the grief of his younger daughter on the occasion, powerfully affected him. He thus communes with himself in his journal: ‘It would have been inexpressibly moving to me as a stranger—what was it, then, to the father and the husband! For myself, I scarce know how I feel—sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock, sometimes as weak as the water that breaks on it. I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet, when I contrast what this place now is with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family—all but poor Anne; an impoverished, an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone. Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.’