Читать книгу Sir Walter Scott - John Buchan - Страница 6

(1771-1792)

I

1771

The Elder Scott

The College Wynd was a mountain path from the ravine of the Cowgate to the ridge where stood the sixteenth-century College. It had been called in old days the Wynd of the Blessed Virgin-in-the-Fields, and the tall gabled house at the head of it was built on the site of the very Kirk-o'-Field where Darnley had met his death in the unhallowed February night of 1567. The house stood in the corner of a small court, the flats were reached by a foul common stair, and the narrow windows looked out upon wynds where refuse rotted in heaps, and pigs roamed as in a farmyard, and well-born children played barefoot in the gutters. Nowhere was there space or light, and the tenements, though their fireplaces might bear historic scutcheons, were habitations of filth and nursing grounds of disease. Eight children had been born to Mr Walter Scott, and six had died in infancy, so a little after the young Walter's birth he moved his household to one of the pleasant houses in the new George Square, near the Meadows, where the eye looked out on trim gardens and the air blew sweet from the Pentlands and the Firth.

A clear picture of the elder Scott has come down to us. His portrait shows him "uncommonly handsome," as his son boasted, but with an air of puzzled gentleness and melancholy which scarcely accords with the robust Border stock from which he sprang. It is possible that there was some delicacy of body which he transmitted to his family, for he had not the longevity of his race, dying at sixty-eight after two years of broken health. His industry and his love of dry legal details qualified him well for his profession, and he began with high prospects, for his father bought him a good partnership, he could count on the patronage of a clan of litigious sheep-farmers and lairds, and the Jacobite forfeitures had filled Edinburgh with legal business. But he was perhaps better suited to the upper than the lower branch of his craft. His son thought that he would have made a fine special pleader, had the Scots Bar known such a thing, and he was deeply learned in feudal tenures. For the business side he had little aptitude. He was ingenuous and simple, accepting men at their own high valuation; he refused to take advantage of their follies and necessities, and no Dandie Dinmont with his consent ever went to law with a Jock o' Dawston Cleugh; his quixotic zeal for his clients' welfare led to his being out of pocket over the work he did for them; his scruples were always at war with his interests. Such a man may acquire a large practice, but it will not be a lucrative one. He could on occasion be a genial host, but his usual habits were ascetic; in a toping age he drank little wine, and, if someone at his board praised the richness of the soup, he would dilute his own portion with water. He had no hobbies, and his notion of relaxation was sombre; he told his son, when presented with his notes of the Scots Law class copied out and bound, that they would provide pleasant reading for his leisure hours! The main interest of his life was theology, and in the seclusion of his study he was more often engaged with Knox and Spottiswoode than with Stair and Erskine. His religion was Calvinism, high and dry, not a dogma only but a stern discipline of life. The Sabbath days were filled with long diets of worship, the Sabbath evenings with the reading of lengthy sermons and the catechizing of a sleepy household. On that day he would neither speak nor think of secular affairs.

This pale gentleman in the black knee-breeches and snowy ruffles, with his kind, anxious face and formal manners, was a strange father for such a son. In the eyes of the one to "crucify the body," as the phrase went, to "mortify the flesh," was the first duty of a Christian, and life was a melancholy vale with no place for cordials; to the other the living, breathing world around him seemed a gift of God ordained for the enjoyment of His creatures. Some tastes the two had in common. The elder Scott had a profound clannishness, for he kept a record of the remotest collaterals, and diligently attended their funerals as a tribal rite. He had odd moments of romance, as when he flung from his window in George Square the cup out of which his wife had rashly given tea to the traitor Murray of Broughton. He had even a dim interest in stage plays, and private theatricals were permitted in his dining-room. But for the rest Calvinist and humanist had no common ground. There was also the secular conflict between age and youth, since the father had little tolerance for the whimsies of young blood, and measured success by standards which the son contemned. For the elder was in all things genteel, as Edinburgh understood the thing. Conscious of good blood in his veins, he was profoundly respectful to those who had it in an ampler measure, and not above an innocent condescension to those who lacked it. The Calvinism of eighteenth-century Edinburgh carried with it a worship of respectability. It was respectable to be a busy lawyer; it was not respectable to scribble verses, and tramp the roads, and hobnob with all and sundry. Between Walter and his father there was affection, and for the elder's integrity and kindness the younger had a deep regard. But there was no intimacy, and for long only an imperfect comprehension.

Mrs Scott

The mother, Anne Rutherford, was "short of stature" says Lockhart, "and by no means comely." Her plain features were those of her father, the professor of medicine, whose portrait hangs on the walls of the Edinburgh College of Physicians. But it was a face of infinite sagacity, shrewdness, friendliness and humour. She had been bred in the old school of deportment, and to her dying day sat upright in her chair without touching its back. She was an anxious parent with her uncertain brood, and a notable mistress of a household. Unlike her husband's, her tastes had a wide range, for her head was stored with ballads and proverbs and tales. She was one of those women who are worthy of a long life, for she had the kind of mind which can profit and make the world profit by the processes of time, and she made a bridge between the generations. She lived to the verge of eighty, and saw Waterloo fought and Wellington enter Paris, and in her youth she had talked with a man who remembered the battle of Dunbar and Cromwell's entry into Edinburgh. Scott owed much to her, for she was able to recreate for him the immediate past—that period so dim to most of us, and it was she who first introduced him to the enchanted world of poetry. His boyish ailments established a special intimacy between them, and he was always her favourite child. She had that homely tenderness which the Scots call "innerliness," and when her son was the laird of Abbotsford and one of the most famous of living men, he was still to her "Wattie, my lamb." Her life was happy, for she rejoiced in his success, and she preserved her vigour of mind and body unimpaired, so that at eighty she was telling stories to her grandchildren at tea in her little house. "She was a strict economist," Scott wrote to Lady Louisa Stuart, "which she said enabled her to be liberal; out of her little income of about £300 a year she bestowed at least a third in well-chosen charities, and with the rest lived like a gentlewoman, and even with hospitality more general than seemed to suit her age; yet I could never prevail upon her to accept of any assistance."[1] A Baskerville Bible which she had given him he treasured to the last year of his life and bequeathed as an heirloom to his descendants; and when, after his death, his executors opened his desk, they found, arranged so that he might see them when at work, the boxes which had stood on her dressing-table, and the silver taper-stand which he had bought for her with his first fees.

Walter Scott had always a great love for mementoes. In the same desk were six locks of fair hair, relics of his six brothers and sisters who had died in infancy. There seems to have been talent in all the surviving children, mingled with something febrile and ill-balanced, derived perhaps from their father. All died in middle life, and only one left descendants. The eldest, Robert, was something of a tyrant to the young Walter, but won his love through their common passion for poetry. He entered the Navy, fought under Rodney, quarrelled with his superiors, joined the East India Company's service, and died of malaria at forty-one. John became a soldier, lost his health and died in Edinburgh in his mother's house at forty-seven. Thomas, two years younger than Walter and his favourite brother, succeeded to his father's law business, speculated and failed, and died in Canada as a regimental paymaster in his fiftieth year. Daniel the youngest, the family scapegrace, was in his grave before he was thirty. The one daughter, Anne, a year Walter's junior, was a nervous, ailing girl, the sport of every kind of accident, who died at the same age as Daniel, having passed her life "in an ideal world which she had framed for herself by the force of imagination."

1771-74

The early childhood of Walter Scott was not spent in the family circle. He was a robust infant, and having survived the perils of a first nurse who was suffering from consumption, might have grown to a physical stalwartness like that of his Border forbears. But, at the age of eighteen months he fell ill of a teething fever, and on the fourth day it was discovered that he had lost the use of his right leg, through some form of infantile paralysis. Physicians and surgeons could do nothing, and, on the advice of his grandfather, Dr Rutherford, it was decided to try what country air could do and to send him to his other grandfather at his farm of Sandy Knowe. So it fell out that the first memories of this city child were of country folk and the green spaces of Tweeddale.

Sandy Knowe

The leg did not improve, but the Border winds dispelled the malaise of Edinburgh, and gave him abounding health and spirits. The world opened to him as a wide wind-blown country, with a prospect of twenty miles past the triple peaks of Eildon to the line of Cheviot, the homely fragrance and bustle of a moorland farm, the old keep of Smailholm as a background, and a motley of figures out of an earlier age. His tenacious memory preserved those first impressions. He remembered his grandfather, though he died when the boy was three, a magnificent old man, who apart from the lameness and the high peak of the head, looked much as he looked himself in after life. He remembered being wrapped in the new-flayed skin of a sheep—a device out of some hoar-ancient medical lore, and an old gentleman, who was his grandfather's second cousin, Sir George MacDougal of Makerstoun, "with a small cocked hat deeply laced, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, and a light-coloured coat, with milk-white locks tied in a military fashion," kneeling on the parlour floor and dragging his watch along the carpet to induce him to crawl. He was sweet-tempered and very talkative, so that the aged parish minister on his visits declared that "one may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that child is." The ewe-milkers carried him up to the crags above the house, and he learned to know every sheep by head-mark. Once he was forgotten there during a thunderstorm and was found clapping his hands at the lightning and crying "Bonny, bonny!" His sworn henchman was Sandy Ormistoun, the cow-baillie, on whose shoulder he peregrinated the farm. Neighbours dropped in, and the child's quick ears heard the news of the American War and Jacobite tales from a man who had seen the Carlisle executions. On the winter evenings his grandmother sat beside the fire at her spinning-wheel, and his grandfather opposite in his elbow-chair, while he lay on the floor and heard his Aunt Janet read, or his grandmother tell of the Border merry men and their wild ways out of a memory in which they were a living tradition. In his aunt's reading the Bible was varied with one or two books from a pile on the window-seat—an odd volume of Josephus, that portentous author whom few Scottish children in older days escaped, and Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany. From the latter he learned by heart the ballad of "Hardicanute," which he shouted about the house.

1774-75

In his fourth year there came an interlude, for it was resolved, as a remedy for his lameness, to exchange raw sheepskins for the waters of Bath. Miss Janet took charge of him and they went by sea to London, where he saw the Tower and Westminster Abbey. At Bath they were joined by his uncle Captain Robert Scott, home on leave from India. There they stayed for the better part of a year; the baths did no good to his lameness, but his general health was now excellent, and at a dame's school he learned to read. His chief recollection was of meeting John Home, author of Douglas, now a very old man, and of seeing his first play in the company of his uncle Robert. "The play was As You Like It, and the witchery of the whole scene is alive in my mind at this moment," he wrote more than thirty years later. "I made, I believe, noise more than enough, and remember being so much scandalized by the quarrel between Orlando and his brother in the first scene that I screamed out 'An't they brothers?'"

Return to Edinburgh

From Bath, with a pronounced English accent, he returned for a few weeks to his family in George Square, where, after four years among indulgent elders, he was to learn the possibility of fraternal bickering. Of the boy at this stage we have a glimpse in a letter of a kinswoman of his mother's, Mrs Cockburn, the author of the modern version of "The Flowers of the Forest," who had been Alison Rutherford of Fairnilee;—

I last night supped at Mr Walter Scott's. He has the most extraordinary genius of a boy I 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." I proposed a little chat and asked his opinion of Milton and other books he was reading, which he gave me wonderfully. One of his observations was, "How strange it is that Adam, just new come into the world, should know everything—that must be the poet's fancy," says he. But when he was told that he was created perfect by God, he instantly yielded. When taken to bed last night, he told his aunt he liked that lady. "What lady?" says she. "Why, Mrs Cockburn, for I think she is a virtuoso, like myself." "Dear Walter," says Aunt Jenny, "what is a virtuoso?" "Don't you know? Why, it's one that wishes and will know everything." Now, sir, you will think this a very silly story. Pray, what age do you suppose that boy to be? Name it now, before I tell you. Why, twelve or fourteen. No such thing; he is not quite six years old. He has a lame leg, for which he was a year at Bath, and has acquired the perfect English accent, which he has not lost since he came, and he reads like a Garrick. You will allow this an uncommon exotic.

1775-78

The solitary stage of his childhood was not yet closed, for presently he went back to Sandy Knowe for the better part of two years. There he continued to listen to his grandmother's tales and Aunt Janet's reading, but he was now able on his own account to adventure in books.[2] He got his first pony, a tiny Shetland mare called Marion; he was less with the ewe-milkers now, and more with the cow-baillie and the shepherds; the world extended for him, and he became aware of the lovely environs, the woods of Mertoun and the shining reaches of Tweed. He was sent to Prestonpans for sea-bathing, and there discussed the war in America with an ancient ensign, and prophesied with only too much truth that trouble awaited Burgoyne. The ensign's name was Dalgetty. At Prestonpans, too, he met his father's friend George Constable, the antiquary, who remembered the 'Forty-five and talked to him of Shakespeare's characters, and who was to appear one day in the character of Jonathan Oldbuck.

When he was between seven and eight he returned to George Square, and Sandy Knowe became only a place for summer holidays. The virtuoso had now to go through a short space of disillusionment and discipline. "I felt the change," he wrote, "from being a single indulged brat, to becoming a member of a large family, very severely; for under the gentle government of my kind grandmother, who was meekness itself, and of my aunt, who, although of a higher temper, was exceedingly attached to me, I had acquired a degree of license which could not be permitted in a large family. I had sense enough, however, to bend my temper to my new circumstances, but such was the agony that I had internally experienced, that I have guarded against nothing more in the education of my own family, than against their acquiring habits of self-willed caprice and domination." His formal education had scarcely begun, and he had to start at the beginning in a private school in Bristo Port, and, when this experiment failed, under a tutor, a young probationer called Fraser, who taught him the Latin rudiments.

1778-79

It was a hard transition stage for the "poetic child," but the wind was tempered to him by his mother's sympathy. With her he read Homer in Pope's translation, and from her he acquired his undying passion for Shakespeare. He never forgot the rapture of reading the plays by the fire in her dressing-room, until the sound of the family rising from supper warned him that it was time to creep back to bed. He was inclined to be priggish, and objected to playing with the boys in the Square on the ground of their ignorance, but this foible was soon hammered out of him by hard-fisted brothers. To the elder Walter Scott he must have seemed only a loquacious child who was lamentably backward in sound learning, but his mother and his mother's friends saw to it that the discipline necessary to fit him for normal life did not destroy his world of dreams. These friends were notable women. There was Mrs Cockburn, whom I have quoted, and who carried a merry heart through a long life of sorrows; there were his aunts, Janet (afterwards Mrs Russel of Ashestiel) and Christian Rutherford; there was old Lady Balcarres with her family of brilliant girls; above all there was Mrs Anne Murray Keith, who on his behalf did for an elder Edinburgh what his grandmother had done for the old life of the Border. She spoke the courtly Holyrood Scots, and illumined for him a world which had passed and which he was one day to refashion.

1779

With his eighth year the first stage of childhood closed. The nuts, in Martial's phrase, had now to be left behind—

Jam tristis nucibus puer relictis

Clamoso revocatur a magiatro!

It had been a stage of supreme importance, for it saw the making of the man Walter Scott. As the sapling was then bent, so the tree was to grow. On a memory, which was wax to receive and granite to retain, had been impressed affections and interests which were to dominate his life. A certain kind of landscape had captured his heart—the green pastoral simplicity of Tweedside—and it remained his abiding passion. Scott's love was never for the wilder scenes in the Border country, such as Gameshope and Loch Skene; it was for the pastoral fringes, for "Leaderhaughs and Yarrow," for the Tweeddale champaign, where the moorland sank into meadows and gardens marched with the heather. This taste, born of those early years at Sandy Knowe, was the parent of Abbotsford. He won, too, an insight—the unconscious but penetrating insight of a child—into a society which was fast disappearing, the society from which the ballads had sprung. A whole lost world had been reborn in his brain, and the learning of after years was only to supplement the far more potent imaginative construction of childhood. The past had become a reality for him, since he had himself seen and touched its flying wing. Henceforth, in the words of de l'Isle Adam, "il gardait au coeur les richesses stériles d'un grand nombre de rois oubliés."

II

The High School

In October 1779, at the age of eight, he entered Mr Luke Fraser's second class in the ancient High School of Edinburgh. He was younger than most of his classmates and but ill grounded in his Latin rudiments, and, since Mr Fraser was no more than a grammarian, he at first made little progress. But three years later, when he attained to the class of the headmaster, Dr Adam,[3] his ambition awoke, and Latin literature became for him a living interest. He read in class Cæsar, Livy and Sallust, Terence, Horace and Virgil, and Dr Adam pronounced that, while many were better scholars in the language, Walter Scott had few equals in probing to the author's meaning. His verse translations from the Roman poets were approved—translations somewhat in the manner of Pope's Homer—and he began to write verses on his own account, in which the chief influence seems to have been the Scottish Paraphrases. He had also a private tutor during these years, a certain James Mitchell, who ultimately became minister at Montrose, where Scott visited him at a critical hour of his life.[4] Mr Mitchell was a stiff Calvinist and sabbatarian, and from arguments with him the boy imbibed a good deal of divinity and church history. "I, with a head on fire for chivalry," he wrote, "was a Cavalier; my friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory and he was a Whig. I hated Presbyterians, and admired Montrose with his victorious Highlanders; he liked the Presbyterian Ulysses, the dark and politic Argyle, so that we never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were always amicable."

1779-83

The real education of these years was not in the High School, not even in Dr Adam's class, but in the playground and the Edinburgh streets, and in the boy's private adventures among books. The story of his escapades may be read in Lockhart. He was desperately pugnacious, and, since his lameness put him at a disadvantage, was permitted to fight his battles, as he said, "in banco," both combatants being strapped to a deal board. He scrambled over the Salisbury Crags, and ascended the "kittle nine stanes" on the Castle Rock. In winter he helped to "man the Cowgate Port" in the snowball fights, and he was a leader in the bickers with the street boys, where stones were the chief missiles, and broken heads were the common fortune of war. He was a leader in other things, for he was the saga-man of his class, a spinner of tales, a maker of phrases, a dreamer of dreams, who was often carried away by his fancies. Had Scott never put pen to paper, he would still have told himself stories. He was also busy with his own private reading, in which occasionally he found a like-minded friend to share during a holiday afternoon among the hills. Presently he had devoured Shakespeare, and any other plays that came his way; he fell in love with, but soon tired of, Ossian; he read Tasso and Ariosto in translations; Spenser he knew by heart, and, since his memory retained whatever impressed his mind, could repeat an immense number of stanzas. From his mother and his mother's friends he collected old ballads, and out of penny chap-books laid the foundations of a library. We have one glimpse from a fellow-pupil of the dreaming boy:—"In walking he used always to keep his eyes turned downward as if thinking, but with a pleasing expression of countenance, as if enjoying his thoughts."

1783

Kelso

Scott left the High School in the spring of 1783, and, since he was not due to enter college before the autumn, he was sent for six months to his Aunt Janet, who had now moved from Sandy Knowe to Kelso. There he was to spend many of his later holidays, and we may fairly regard the Kelso period as a formative stage in his education. The little house stood in a large garden, which was decorated with mazes, labyrinth and bowers according to the fashion of the period, and in front of which rolled the "glittering and resolute streams of Tweed." It was his first real introduction to the spell of that noble river, for at Sandy Knowe Tweed had been too far away for a child's feet. He attended the Kelso school, where his Latin improved, and he sat on the same bench as the son of a local tradesman, a certain James Ballantyne, whose life was to be curiously linked with his. At Kelso he discovered Percy's Reliques, which he first read under a great plane-tree in the garden, and thereafter recited to all who would listen. There, too, his æsthetic sense received a new stimulus.

1783-86

To this period—he wrote—I can trace the awakening of that delightful feeling for the beauties of natural objects which has never since deserted me. The neighbourhood of Kelso, the most beautiful, if not the most romantic village in Scotland, is eminently calculated to awaken these ideas. It presents objects not only grand in themselves, but venerable from their associations.... The romantic feelings which I have described as predominating in my mind, naturally rested upon and associated themselves with these grand features of the landscape around me, and the historical incidents, or traditional legends connected with many of them, gave to mv admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion.

College

He was confirmed in that preference which he had half-consciously acquired at Sandy Knowe—for a pastoral land interpenetrated with the poetry of man's endeavour. In his love of nature he was always the humanist, never the metaphysician.

In the autumn of 1783 Scott laid aside the round black hat, the gaudy waistcoat, and the brown corduroy breeches of the High School boy, and matriculated at the town's college of Edinburgh. It was the old college, an ancient shabby place of small courts and dingy classrooms, where world-famous professors lectured to lads of thirteen and fourteen. He attended the Latin or Humanity class, where he forgot most of what he had learned at school, for that class seems to have been what Lord Cockburn found it ten years later, "the constant scene of unchecked idleness and disrespectful mirth." He attended the first Greek class under Dalzell, but, since he had to begin by learning the alphabet, and discovered that all his fellow-students started at a higher level, he tried to carry off his incompetence by announcing his contempt for the language and comparing Homer unfavourably with Ariosto. Yet the gentle enthusiasm of the professor might well have won his respect, for he shared most of the boy's prejudices. Dalzell used to maintain that Presbytery had killed classical scholarship in Scotland, and Sydney Smith once heard him murmur to himself: "If it had not been for that confounded Solemn League and Covenant, we would have made as good longs and shorts as England."[5] Scott was a pupil also in the logic class, and studied mathematics with a private tutor. Four years later, when he was a law student, he sat under Lord Woodhouselee in history and Dugald Stewart in moral philosophy; but Stewart was not to him, as he was to many of his contemporaries, an inspiring revelation. Likewise he took lessons in drawing and painting, in which he did not conspicuously progress, and in music, where he did not progress at all. Like Burns, he had much music in his soul, and little in his voice.

During these years his attendance at college was intermittent, for his health was weak, since he had outgrown his strength. In his convalescence he was again at Kelso, this time at the villa which his uncle, Captain Robert Scott, had acquired on Tweed a little below the town. Meantime the voracious reading went on. If he neglected the Latin classics he was dabbling in Buchanan and Matthew Paris and the monkish chronicles, and if Greece was a sealed book to him he was beginning to explore the literatures of Italy and France.

In May 1786 when he was not yet fifteen, he signed indentures for five years as his father's apprentice. The elder Scott had decided that his son should follow the profession of the law, but had not yet determined which branch it should be. The church seems to have been considered, but, though it offered good prospects, it was not pressed, for it was clear that the boy had no vocation in that quarter.[6] So the young Walter found himself set to a desk for many hours every day, immured in the dreariest of labours. He was not an idle apprentice, for he had always a remarkable capacity for solid, plodding toil. "The drudgery of the office," he confesses, "I disliked, and the confinement I altogether detested; but I loved my father, and I felt the natural pride and pleasure of rendering myself useful to him. I was ambitious also; and among my companions in labour the only way to gratify ambition was to labour hard and well." The tasks had one alleviation. The copying of legal documents was paid for at the rate of threepence per folio, and by these means he could acquire pocket-money for books and the theatre. Once he wrote one hundred and twenty folio pages (probably about ten thousand words) without a single interval for food or rest. This was an invaluable training for his later feats of scribing, and it gave him a good running hand. Till the end of his life he continued to finish off a page with a flourish of the pen, and at Abbotsford used to be heard to mutter, "There goes the old shop again." The work brought him closer to his father, who, if he did little to mould his mind, taught him habits of care and application. He won an insight into the eternal disparities of father and son, and he learned to make allowances for the rigid, buttoned-up old gentleman whom he had come to comprehend as well as to love. The portrait of Saunders Fairford in Redgauntlet is a tribute, at once shrewd and affectionate, to the taskmaster of the young apprentice.

1787

When he was sixteen, he burst a blood-vessel in his bowels, and had to lie for weeks on his back in a room with open windows, his only resources chess, military history and the poets. But after that he seemed to outgrow his early delicacy. He shot up into a tall, broad-shouldered lad, very deep in the chest, and with arms like a blacksmith's. His lameness did not embitter him, as it embittered Byron; there were heroes in his pantheon, like Boltfoot and John the Lamiter, who had had the same handicap. He could walk thirty miles in a day, and ride as long as a horse could carry him. A year or two later he defended himself with his stick against three assailants for an hour by the Tron clock, like Corporal Raddlebanes in Old Mortality. When he was come to full strength James Hogg considered him the strongest man of his acquaintance, and Ettrick Forest did not breed weaklings.[7] Among other feats he could with one hand lift a smith's anvil by the horn.[8] His spirit matched his body. Said a naval officer: "Though you may think him a poor lamiter, he's the first to begin a row, and the last to end it."

1787-89

The Middle Teens

The diversions of his middle teens were many. In those days boys went to college at twelve, and at fifteen they were guests at grown-up dinner-parties. A gentleman, however young, was expected to drink his share of wine, and to carry it well, and till this skill was attained there were apt to be disastrous experiments. Edinburgh society was not the best school of health, and Scott lived to censure the extravagances of his youth; but it is very certain that he never repented of them. In March, 1827, he wrote:

There is a touch of the old spirit in me yet that bids me brave the tempest—the spirit that in spite of manifold infirmities made me a roaring boy in my youth, a desperate climber, a bold rider, a deep drinker, and a stout player at singlestick.[9]

There were debating societies, where young men talked the sun down. There were celebrities to be gazed at with reverence and addressed with circumspection—John Home, whom he had met in Bath, the blind poet Blacklock, Robert Burns whom he saw as a schoolboy in Sibbald's circulating library, and much later at the house of Adam Ferguson—which meeting he has described in one of his best pieces of prose.[10] There was his circle of friends—chief among them John Irving, the young Adam Ferguson, and William Clerk, son of that Sir John Clerk of Eldin who forecast the tactics to which Rodney owed his victories—with whom he roamed the hills on summer holidays. And sometimes romance fluttered the pages even of his legal folios. In the first autumn of his apprenticeship he visited Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, who had been out in both the 'Fifteen and the 'Forty-five, and he had that vision of the champaign of the lower Tay which he describes in the introduction to The Fair Maid of Perth. Another year he was sent north on business, to enforce execution against some refractory Maclarens, tenants of Stewart of Appin. With an escort of a sergeant and six men from Stirling Castle, each with loaded arms, the romantic lawyer's clerk most fittingly made his first entry into the Trossachs.

1789-92

Youth in Edinburgh

At seventeen his future was determined. He was to follow the higher branch of the legal calling, and he began his law classes at the college. The two elder brothers had chosen the Army and the Navy, and, apart from his lameness, it was inevitable that he should pursue the third of the normal callings of a gentleman. The three years which followed were a period of serious preparation. Scott, who never claimed a virtue which he did not abundantly possess, wrote: "Let me do justice to the only years of my life in which I applied to learning with stern, steady, and undeviating industry." He and William Clerk worked together, examining themselves daily in points of law, and every morning in summer Scott would walk the two miles to the west end of Princes Street to beat up his friend. The two passed their final trials on July 11th, 1792, and assumed the gown of the advocate.[11] After the ceremony they mingled with the crowd in the Parliament Hall, and Scott, mimicking the voice of a Highland girl at a hiring fair, complained to his companion; "We've stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and deil a ane has speired our price." But a friendly solicitor gave him his first guinea before the courts rose.

1792

In the law classes Scott met his old school friends and many others—Irving and Ferguson, George Cranstoun, Francis Jeffrey, George Abercromby, Edmonstone of Newton, Murray of Ochtertyre, and Murray of Simprin—a brilliant coterie, not a few of whom rose to the Scottish Bench. He had now left his boyhood behind him, for in those days men matured early, and he plunged heartily into the delights of a very social city. He learned to drink square, and, though he had a head like a rock, he used to complain in later life that these bouts were the source of some of his stomach troubles. He indulged in herculean walking trips, sometimes not returning home till the next morning, so that his father was moved to complain that he was "born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut." He belonged to many clubs; the Literary Society, where his antiquarian learning won him the name of Duns Scotus; a body called The Club, which met in Carrubber's Close; a Teviotdale Club, where he renewed acquaintance with his Kelso friend, James Ballantyne: and finally in 1791, the famous Speculative Society, the nursery of so much literary and legal talent. He abandoned his former carelessness in dress, and became a point-device young man, able to talk to women without shyness. Meantime on every holiday he was off to his beloved Border, to Kelso, to Jedburgh, to the Northumbrian side of the Cheviots, whence he wrote rollicking epistles to his friends. We have a glimpse of him at home in George Square, where Jeffrey found him in a small den in the basement surrounded by dingy books, cabinets of curios, and rusty armour. He was a good boon-companion and a delightful comrade for the road, but he left on his friends also an impression of whinstone good sense. We find him at eighteen intervening to reconcile a foolish boy with his family, and when quarrels broke out over the wine he was the chief peacemaker.

Scott passed into manhood with a remarkable assortment of knowledge, for from the age of five his mind had never been idle. He was a sound lawyer, especially well versed in feudal niceties. Philosophy he had never touched; nor theology, except what he had picked up from his Calvinistic tutor. In history he was widely and curiously read, and his memory for detail enabled him to retain every fragment of out-of-the-way learning which had colour and drama. He had browsed over the whole field of English literature, and was a mine of Shakespearean lore. He had enough French, German, Spanish and Italian to read the works in these languages which appealed to him; French he spoke after a fashion, but, as one of the attendants of the exiled Charles X said, it was the French of the good Sire de Joinville. He was still in the acquisitive rather than the critical stage of mental development, and his taste in poetry was for things like the lisping iambics of Mickle's "Cumnor Hall."[12]

He was always of the opinion that a knowledge of Latin and Greek was the basis of every sound education. "Though some people," he once wrote to his son Charles, "may have scrambled into distinction without it, it is always with the greatest difficulty, like climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door." Greek, as we have seen, he had none; the chief of the later Homeridæ scarcely knew Homer's alphabet. It was a lack, no doubt, for some acquaintance with the Greek masterpieces, some tincture of the Greek spirit, might have trimmed that prolixity which was to be his besetting sin. But of Latin he had a full measure. He was, indeed, never a good "pure scholar," as the phrase goes, and could not detect a false quantity; but few men of his day, not professed scholars, had a wider acquaintance with Latin literature. He quotes constantly from Virgil and Horace, but that was the fashion of the age; more notable is the minute knowledge which he shows of Juvenal and Ovid, while he also can aptly cite Lucan, Catullus, Plautus, Terence, Livy and Tacitus.[13]

Apprenticeship to Letters

It is the fashion to repeat that it was Scott's weak leg alone that made him a writer, that otherwise he would have followed the profession of arms; and he himself once told Southey, speaking of his eldest son's wish to enter the army, "I have no call to combat a choice which would have been my own had lameness permitted." He might have been a soldier, even a great soldier, but he would most certainly have been also a writer; for the instinct to express his thoughts and moods in words was in the fibre of his being. In January, 1826, in the hour of disaster, he wrote to Lockhart, "I never knew the day that I would have given up literature for ten times my present income." All his education was contributory to this purpose, for never had a creative writer a more happy apprenticeship. "What a life mine has been!" he wrote in later years, "half-educated, almost wholly neglected or left to myself, stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash." Yet it was the education most consonant with his genius, most exquisitely fitted for the achievements of his life. Thomas Moore tells of a conversation he once had with him. "I said how well calculated the way in which Scott had been brought up was to make a writer of poetry and romance, as it combined all that knowledge of rural life and rural legend which is to be gained by living among the peasantry and joining in their sport, with all the advantages which an aristocratic education gives. I said that the want of this manly training showed itself in my poetry, which would, perhaps, have had a far more vigorous character if it had not been for the sort of boudoir education I had received." Scott had the kind of childhood and youth which fits a man to follow what Aristotle calls the "main march of the human affections." He had mingled ultimately with every class and condition of men; he had enough education to broaden his outlook but not enough to dim it; he was familiar alike with city and moorland, with the sown and the desert, and he escaped the pedantry of both the class-room and the drawing-room; above all he had the good fortune to stand at the meeting-place of two worlds, and to have it in him to be their chief interpreter.

[1] Lockhart, IV. 339.

[2] "I cannot at the moment tell how or when I learned to read, but it was by fits and snatches, as one aunt or another in the old rumble-tumble farmhouse could give me a lift, and I am sure it increased my love and habit of reading more than the austerities of a school could have done." Scott to Lockhart, 3rd March 1826.

[3] "He was born to teach Latin, some Greek, and all virtue." Cockburn, Mem., 5.

[4] See p. 53.

[5] Cockburn, Mem., 21.

[6] Lang, I. 406.

[7] Dom. Manners, 128.

[8] Journal, I. 114.

[9] Journal, I. 379.

[10] Lockhart, I. 136-8.

[11] Scott's thesis for admission, "Disputatio Juridica de Cadaveribus Damnatorum, Just. Dig., lib. XLVIII. tit. xxiv.," is a very creditable piece of legal Latin. It was dedicated to Lord Braxfield. See W. K. Dickson, "Sir Walter Scott and the Parliament House," Juridical Review, March 1930.

[12] Preface to Kenilworth.

[13] See Vernon Randall's "Scott and the Latin classics," in S. Q., 129-138.