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SIR WALTER SCOTT



BY

RICHARD H. HUTTON.




London:

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1878




PREFATORY NOTE.


It will be observed that the greater part of this little book has been
taken in one form or other from Lockhart's _Life of Sir Walter Scott_,
in ten volumes. No introduction to Scott would be worth much in which
that course was not followed. Indeed, excepting Sir Walter's own
writings, there is hardly any other great source of information about
him; and that is so full, that hardly anything needful to illustrate
the subject of Scott's life remains untouched. As regards the only
matters of controversy,--Scott's relations to the Ballantynes, I have
taken care to check Mr. Lockhart's statements by reading those of the
representatives of the Ballantyne brothers; but with this exception,
Sir Walter's own works and Lockhart's life of him are the great
authorities concerning his character and his story.

Just ten years ago Mr. Gladstone, in expressing to the late Mr. Hope
Scott the great delight which the perusal of Lockhart's life of Sir
Walter had given him, wrote, "I may be wrong, but I am vaguely under
the impression that it has never had a really wide circulation. If so,
it is the saddest pity, and I should greatly like (without any censure
on its present length) to see published an abbreviation of it." Mr.
Gladstone did not then know that as long ago as 1848 Mr. Lockhart did
himself prepare such an abbreviation, in which the original
eighty-four chapters were compressed into eighteen,--though the
abbreviation contained additions as well as compressions. But even
this abridgment is itself a bulky volume of 800 pages, containing, I
should think, considerably more than a third of the reading in the
original ten volumes, and is not, therefore, very likely to be
preferred to the completer work. In some respects I hope that this
introduction may supply, better than that bulky abbreviation, what Mr.
Gladstone probably meant to suggest,--some slight miniature taken from
the great picture with care enough to tempt on those who look on it to
the study of the fuller life, as well as of that image of Sir Walter
which is impressed by his own hand upon his works.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.

ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH--CHOICE OF A PROFESSION

CHAPTER III.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE

CHAPTER IV.

EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY

CHAPTER V.

SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS

CHAPTER VI.

COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS

CHAPTER VII.

FIRST COUNTRY HOMES

CHAPTER VIII.

REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE

CHAPTER IX.

SCOTT'S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES

CHAPTER X.

THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

CHAPTER XI.

SCOTT'S MORALITY AND RELIGION

CHAPTER XII.

DISTRACTIONS AND AMUSEMENTS AT ABBOTSFORD

CHAPTER XIII.

SCOTT AND GEORGE IV

CHAPTER XIV.

SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN

CHAPTER XV.

SCOTT IN ADVERSITY

CHAPTER XVI.

THE LAST YEAR

CHAPTER XVII.

THE END OF THE STRUGGLE




SIR WALTER SCOTT.

CHAPTER I.

ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD.


Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding,
sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father--a Writer to the
Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor--was the first of his race to adopt a
town life and a sedentary profession. Sir Walter was the lineal
descendant--six generations removed--of that Walter Scott commemorated
in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, who is known in Border history and
legend as Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir
Gideon Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's
lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being hanged
on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugliest of Sir
Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying
off the prize of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir
William was a handsome man. He took three days to consider the
alternative proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed
lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the
poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine
talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of
his foes. Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large
mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him who was to use his
"meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather
more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times--i. e., the
middle of the sixteenth century--and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet
and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott
generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he
would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who
took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf
almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being
hanged as a traitor. This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks
in the introduction to the last canto of _Marmion_:--

"And thus my Christmas still I hold,
Where my great grandsire came of old,
With amber beard and flaxen hair,
And reverend apostolic air,--
The feast and holy tide to share,
And mix sobriety with wine,
And honest mirth with thoughts divine;
Small thought was his in after time
E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme,
The simple sire could only boast
That he was loyal to his cost;
The banish'd race of kings revered,
And lost his land--but kept his beard."

Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental Stuart bias which
his better judgment condemned, but which seemed to be rather part of
his blood than of his mind. And most useful to him this sentiment
undoubtedly was in helping him to restore the mould and fashion of
the past. Beardie's second son was Sir Walter's grandfather, and to
him he owed not only his first childish experience of the delights of
country life, but also,--in his own estimation at least,--that risky,
speculative, and sanguine spirit which had so much influence over his
fortunes. The good man of Sandy-Knowe, wishing to breed sheep, and
being destitute of capital, borrowed 30_l._ from a shepherd who was
willing to invest that sum for him in sheep; and the two set off to
purchase a flock near Wooler, in Northumberland; but when the shepherd
had found what he thought would suit their purpose, he returned to
find his master galloping about a fine hunter, on which he had spent
the whole capital in hand. _This_ speculation, however, prospered. A
few days later Robert Scott displayed the qualities of the hunter to
such admirable effect with John Scott of Harden's hounds, that he sold
the horse for double the money he had given, and, unlike his grandson,
abandoned speculative purchases there and then. In the latter days of
his clouded fortunes, after Ballantyne's and Constable's failure, Sir
Walter was accustomed to point to the picture of his grandfather and
say, "Blood will out: my building and planting was but his buying the
hunter before he stocked his sheep-walk, over again." But Sir Walter
added, says Mr. Lockhart, as he glanced at the likeness of his own
staid and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have a
thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the case; nor was
that thread the least of his inheritances, for from his father
certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards conscientious,
plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a
generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his obligations
to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were, turned a
great genius, which, especially considering the hare-brained element
in him, might easily have been frittered away or devoted to worthless
ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with so grand an
impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude. Sir Walter's father
reminds one in not a few of the formal and rather martinetish traits
which are related of him, of the father of Goethe, "a formal man, with
strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately orderly (he
thought a good book nothing without a good binding), and never so much
excited as by a necessary deviation from the 'pre-established harmony'
of household rules." That description would apply almost wholly to the
sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has given us under the thin
disguise of Alexander Fairford, Writer to the Signet, in
_Redgauntlet_, a figure confessedly meant, in its chief features, to
represent his father. To this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later
journals, the trait that his father was a man of fine presence, who
conducted all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur and
dignity of air, and "absolutely loved a funeral." "He seemed to
preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins merely for the
pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to
superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me
with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but
feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as
often as I could." This strong dash of the conventional in Scott's
father, this satisfaction in seeing people fairly to the door of life,
and taking his final leave of them there, with something of a
ceremonious flourish of observance, was, however, combined with a
much nobler and deeper kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used to say
that his father had lost no small part of a very flourishing business,
by insisting that his clients should do their duty to their own people
better than they were themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this
generous strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy
for others, the son had as much as the father.

Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a
physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day,
in spite of having been sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable
Mrs. Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction at
least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a
comfortable rest in her chair, but "took as much care to avoid
touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the
stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie." None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly,
comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored,
vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his mother's death, to
Lady Louisa Stewart, says, "She had a mind peculiarly well stored with
much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old,
and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least
exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past
age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the
past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented
me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation,
for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly
recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent
entry into Edinburgh." On the day before the stroke of paralysis which
carried her off, she had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with
great accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed
out wherein it differed from the novel. She had all the names of the
parties, and pointed out (for she was a great genealogist) their
connexion with existing families."[1] Sir Walter records many
evidences of the tenderness of his mother's nature, and he returned
warmly her affection for himself. His executors, in lifting up his
desk, the evening after his burial, found "arranged in careful order a
series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there
that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his
tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his
mother's toilette, when he, a sickly child, slept in her
dressing-room,--the silver taper-stand, which the young advocate had
bought for her with his first five-guinea fee,--a row of small packets
inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her
offspring that had died before her,--his father's snuff-box, and
etui-case,--and more things of the like sort."[2] A story,
characteristic of both Sir Walter's parents, is told by Mr. Lockhart
which will serve better than anything I can remember to bring the
father and mother of Scott vividly before the imagination. His father,
like Mr. Alexander Fairford, in _Redgauntlet_, though himself a strong
Hanoverian, inherited enough feeling for the Stuarts from his
grandfather Beardie, and sympathized enough with those who were, as he
neutrally expressed it, "out in '45," to ignore as much as possible
any phrases offensive to the Jacobites. For instance, he always called
Charles Edward not _the Pretender_ but _the Chevalier_,--and he did
business for many Jacobites:--

"Mrs. Scott's curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular
appearance at a certain hour every evening of a sedan chair, to
deposit a person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately
ushered into her husband's private room, and commonly remained with
him there until long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family.
Mr. Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness that
irritated the lady's feelings more and more; until at last she could
bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as she heard the bell
ring as for the stranger's chair to carry him off, she made her
appearance within the forbidden parlour with a salver in her hand,
observing that she thought the gentlemen had sat so long they would be
better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to bring some
for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of distinguished
appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the lady and accepted a cup;
but her husband knit his brows, and refused very coldly to partake the
refreshment. A moment afterwards the visitor withdrew, and Mr. Scott,
lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left empty on
the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement. The lady exclaimed for
her china, but was put to silence by her husband's saying, 'I can
forgive your little curiosity, madam, but you must pay the penalty. I
may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly
unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of
mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton's.'

"This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart
as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition,
condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence
against the noblest of his late master's adherents, when--

"Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died,
The brave, Balmerino were on thy side."[3]

"Broughton's saucer"--i. e. the saucer belonging to the cup thus
sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against one who had
redeemed his own life and fortune by turning king's evidence against
one of Prince Charles Stuart's adherents,--was carefully preserved by
his son, and hung up in his first study, or "den," under a little
print of Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind very
vividly the character of Sir Walter's parents. The eager curiosity of
the active-minded woman, whom "the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been
able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the
desire to unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing
glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife's
personal attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the
penalty by dashing to pieces the cup which the king's evidence had
used,--again, the visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that
the Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness
and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to reject the courtesy of
the wife, though he could not get anything but cold legal advice from
the husband:--all these are figures which must have acted on the
youthful imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped
themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical kaleidoscope
which was always before his mind's eye, as he mused upon that past
which he was to restore for us with almost more than its original
freshness of life. With such scenes touching even his own home, Scott
must have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind, the more
romantic, against the more sober and rational considerations, which
had so recently divided house against house, even in the same family
and clan. That the stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so
much of his grandfather Beardie's respect for the adherents of the
exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy as even
more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the Stuarts' professed
partisans, and have lent a new sanction to the romantic drift of his
mother's old traditions, and one to which they must have been indebted
for a great part of their fascination.

Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died
in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August,
1771. Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the
one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have
pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the
boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was
the reason why the child was sent to reside with his grandfather--the
speculative grandfather, who had doubled his capital by buying a
racehorse instead of sheep--at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower of
Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of _The Eve of St.
John_, in the neighbourhood of some fine crags. To these crags the
housemaid sent from Edinburgh to look after him, used to carry him up,
with a design (which she confessed to the housekeeper)--due, of
course, to incipient insanity--of murdering the child there, and
burying him in the moss. Of course the maid was dismissed. After this
the child used to be sent out, when the weather was fine, in the safer
charge of the shepherd, who would often lay him beside the sheep. Long
afterwards Scott told Mr. Skene, during an excursion with Turner, the
great painter, who was drawing his illustration of Smailholm tower for
one of Scott's works, that "the habit of lying on the turf there among
the sheep and the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for
these animals, which it had ever since retained." Being forgotten one
day upon the knolls when a thunderstorm came on, his aunt ran out to
bring him in, and found him shouting, "Bonny! bonny!" at every flash
of lightning. One of the old servants at Sandy-Knowe spoke of the
child long afterwards as "a sweet-tempered bairn, a darling with all
about the house," and certainly the miniature taken of him in his
seventh year confirms the impression thus given. It is sweet-tempered
above everything, and only the long upper lip and large mouth, derived
from his ancestress, Meg Murray, convey the promise of the power which
was in him. Of course the high, almost conical forehead, which gained
him in his later days from his comrades at the bar the name of "Old
Peveril," in allusion to "the peak" which they saw towering high above
the heads of other men as he approached, is not so much marked beneath
the childish locks of this miniature as it was in later life; and the
massive, and, in repose, certainly heavy face of his maturity, which
conveyed the impression of the great bulk of his character, is still
quite invisible under the sunny ripple of childish earnestness and
gaiety. Scott's hair in childhood was light chestnut, which turned to
nut brown in youth. His eyebrows were bushy, for we find mention made
of them as a "pent-house." His eyes were always light blue. They had
in them a capacity, on the one hand, for enthusiasm, sunny brightness,
and even hare-brained humour, and on the other for expressing
determined resolve and kindly irony, which gave great range of
expression to the face. There are plenty of materials for judging what
sort of a boy Scott was. In spite of his lameness, he early taught
himself to clamber about with an agility that few children could have
surpassed, and to sit his first pony--a little Shetland, not bigger
than a large Newfoundland dog, which used to come into the house to be
fed by him--even in gallops on very rough ground. He became very early
a declaimer. Having learned the ballad of Hardy Knute, he shouted it
forth with such pertinacious enthusiasm that the clergyman of his
grandfather's parish complained that he "might as well speak in a
cannon's mouth as where that child was." At six years of age Mrs.
Cockburn described him as the most astounding genius of a boy, she
ever saw. "He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made
him read on: it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose
with the storm. 'There's the mast gone,' says he; 'crash it goes; they
will all perish.' After his agitation he turns to me, 'That is too
melancholy,' says he; 'I had better read you something more amusing.'"
And after the call, he told his aunt he liked Mrs. Cockburn, for "she
was a _virtuoso_ like himself." "Dear Walter," says Aunt Jenny, "what
is a _virtuoso_?" "Don't ye know? Why, it's one who wishes and will
know everything." This last scene took place in his father's house in
Edinburgh; but Scott's life at Sandy-Knowe, including even the old
minister, Dr. Duncan, who so bitterly complained of the boy's
ballad-spouting, is painted for us, as everybody knows, in the picture
of his infancy given in the introduction to the third canto of
_Marmion_:--

"It was a barren scene and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely piled:
But ever and anon between
Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green;
And well the lonely infant knew
Recesses where the wall-flower grew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the low crag and ruin'd wall.
I deem'd such nooks the sweetest shade
The sun in all its round survey'd;
And still I thought that shatter'd tower
The mightiest work of human power;
And marvell'd as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitch'd my mind,
Of forayers, who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurr'd their horse,
Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue,
And, home returning, fill'd the hall
With revel, wassail-rout, and brawl.
Methought that still with trump and clang
The gateway's broken arches rang;
Methought grim features, seam'd with scars,
Glared through the window's rusty bars;
And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers' slights, of ladies' charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms,
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While, stretch'd at length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat o'er,
Pebbles and shells in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war display'd;
And onward still the Scottish lion bore,
And still the scattered Southron fled before.
Still, with vain fondness, could I trace
Anew each kind familiar face
That brighten'd at our evening fire!
From the thatch'd mansion's grey-hair'd sire,
Wise without learning, plain and good,
And sprung of Scotland's gentler blood;
Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen,
Show'd what in youth its glance had been;
Whose doom discording neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought;
To him the venerable priest,
Our frequent and familiar guest,
Whose life and manners well could paint
Alike the student and the saint;
Alas! whose speech too oft I broke
With gambol rude and timeless joke;
For I was wayward, bold, and wild,
A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child;
But, half a plague and half a jest,
Was still endured, beloved, caress'd."

A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with that spirit was
combined an active and subduing sweetness which could often conquer,
as by a sudden spell, those whom the boy loved. Towards those,
however, whom he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative,
the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of a pet
starling, which the child had partly tamed. "I flew at his throat like
a wild-cat," he said, in recalling the circumstance, fifty years
later, in his journal on occasion of the old laird's death; "and was
torn from him with no little difficulty." And, judging from this
journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the laird of
Raeburn. Towards those whom he loved but had offended, his manner was
very different. "I seldom," said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, "had
occasion all the time I was in the family to find fault with him, even
for trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of which
he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang up, threw his arms
about my neck and kissed me." And the quaint old gentleman adds this
commentary:--"By such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in
a moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul melted into
tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my tears with his." This
spontaneous and fascinating sweetness of his childhood was naturally
overshadowed to some extent in later life by Scott's masculine and
proud character, but it was always in him. And there was much of true
character in the child behind this sweetness. He had wonderful
self-command, and a peremptory kind of good sense, even in his
infancy. While yet a child under six years of age, hearing one of the
servants beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing
that if he listened, it would scare away his night's rest, he acted
for himself with all the promptness of an elder person acting for him,
and, in spite of the fascination of the subject, resolutely muffled
his head in the bed-clothes and refused to hear the tale. His sagacity
in judging of the character of others was shown, too, even as a
school-boy; and once it led him to take an advantage which caused him
many compunctions in after-life, whenever he recalled his skilful
puerile tactics. On one occasion--I tell the story as he himself
rehearsed it to Samuel Rogers, almost at the end of his life, after
his attack of apoplexy, and just before leaving England for Italy in
the hopeless quest of health--he had long desired to get above a
schoolfellow in his class, who defied all his efforts, till Scott
noticed that whenever a question was asked of his rival, the lad's
fingers grasped a particular button on his waistcoat, while his mind
went in search of the answer. Scott accordingly anticipated that if he
could remove this button, the boy would be thrown out, and so it
proved. The button was cut off, and the next time the lad was
questioned, his fingers being unable to find the button, and his eyes
going in perplexed search after his fingers, he stood confounded, and
Scott mastered by strategy the place which he could not gain by mere
industry. "Often in after-life," said Scott, in narrating the
manoeuvre to Rogers, "has the sight of him smote me as I passed by
him; and often have I resolved to make him some reparation, but it
ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance with
him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of the
courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead; he took
early to drinking."[4]

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