Читать книгу The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 11

CHAPTER VII.

During the four or five years that Walter was at the Edinburgh High School, he had made frequent visits, for the length of the school vacations, to his Aunt Janet, who was now living in a house in Kelso, which was at that time his father’s property, the farm at Sandy-Knowe having been given up when her mother died. Kelso is a village delightfully situated where Tweed and Teviot meet. “The most beautiful, if not the most romantic village in Scotland,” Scott called it in later years. His health benefited by these visits, and they cultivated his passionate love for that locality which was to be one of the inspiring and controlling influences of his life, both for good and evil.

It was springtime, in the course of his thirteenth year, when his term at the High School ended, and in the natural order he would have gone on at once to the greater freedom of college tuition. But he was growing fast, and a suggestion that he should spend the summer at Kelso was readily adopted, doubtless to his delight, and not at all to the detriment of his education. For the Kelso schoolmaster, Mr. Lancelot Whale, was one of those men, so commonly met in the records of a period in which ability exceeded opportunity, who are too good for the positions they fill. An arrangement was made by which Walter read Latin with Mr. Whale and the other senior scholars, and helped in the school by teaching elementary subjects to the junior class. He has recorded that Mr. Whale gave him more than his fair share of attention, and he looked back on that summer as a time when he learnt much, and in many ways. It was during these months at Kelso that he became consciously aware of the beauty of his surroundings, and that the romantic pageantry of creation captured his imagination through a medium other than the printed page.

For he had become an insatiable and (to his own memory) an indiscriminate reader, and this notorious appetite had found its own means of gratification. A free lending library—a subscription library—his mother’s volumes of Shakespeare, (wickedly devoured after he was supposed to be in bed, by the light and warmth of her bedroom fire, with an apprehensive ear for the ascending footsteps which would send him scuttling back to his dressing-room bed)—these, and the school-book classics, had been magically supplemented by the fact that Dr. Blacklock—a name deservedly honoured in the Edinburgh records of that time—had noticed the boy’s omnivorous appetite, and given him the freedom of his private library. He gave him wise guidance also, introducing him, in particular, to the poetry of Edmund Spencer, which became probably the strongest single influence upon his own creations in later years.

Edmund Spencer is regrettably neglected today, and his place is only grudgingly recognised in the front rank of English poets. But to Walter Scott, even in boyhood, the Fairie Queen had nothing to offer to which he could not respond with the high quality of an equal appreciation. The rich and seemingly-inexhaustible varieties of verbal melody, the luxuriance of imagination, the continually changing wonders of light and colour, the high chivalrous conception of the purpose of life in which nobility is normality, and ‘No service lothsome is to gentle kind’, all these were of the substance of the reader’s own intellect, and of his own character. It is no wonder that the poem which is to many a forbidding wilderness, and to others a magic forest in which they cannot tire to wander, became to him an intoxication, till a “really marvellous” number of its myriad stanzas became part of the enduring furniture of his own mind.

With the autumn opening of the College term, he returned to Edinburgh, and commenced to take the Greek and Latin University courses. Under the laxer college discipline, students were not compelled to application. They could work or not as they pleased. It was their own choice, and their own (or their parents’) loss, if they neglected to do so. With this freedom, Scott is emphatic in self-condemnation. So far as the Greek class is concerned, he didn’t please in the least. He had learnt no Greek up to that time, and he found himself among boys who had already mastered the rudiments of the language. His mind was full of other interests, and (he says) he asserted an obstinate opinion that Greek wasn’t worth learning. His class-master, Professor Dalzell, an enthusiastic classical scholar, expostulated in vain. Being required to write an essay upon the comparative merits of the authors they had studied, Scott perversely infuriated the Professor by producing an ingenious comparison of Homer and Ariosto, to the detriment of the earlier poet. The “quality of out-of-the-way knowledge” which the essay displayed surprised Professor Dalzell, but was impotent to soothe his anger at this audacious heresy.

Protest came also from a fellow-pupil, an innkeeper’s son, who came to George’s Square to argue in favour of the language and literature to which he was himself devoted. He offered to give free help in the evenings to assist in its study, but it was a rejected kindness. Scott blamed himself afterwards very severely for this attitude, which was foolish enough, and, looking back, he had an uneasy self-contemptuous fear that the boy’s social inferiority may have influenced the repulse. If so, it was as unlike himself to have acted from such a motive as it was characteristic that he should make public acknowledgement subsequently.

But the fact is that he was attracted rather by the living cargo which the world’s literature carries than by the dry bones of scholarship. It was noticed by his first Latin master that he might be slower than some others on points of construction or syntax, but that he would be the first to extract the vital meaning of the passage with which they dealt.

There may have been another reason why his neglect of the Greek classes met with less opposition than would otherwise have been the case.

It was his father’s purpose that he should enter his own profession, though it was not resolved whether he should follow the ‘higher’ branch, or succeed to the management of the business which his father had built up. He accepted this programme with complacence, if without enthusiasm. The legal profession had much use for Latin, but little for Greek. Had the elder Walter heard that his son was treating the Latin tongue with contempt, there might have been more said. As a fact, his father seems to have shown no dissatisfaction at this period either with his abilities or application. The abortive attempt upon the Greek tongue ended of itself in the second term, when another breakdown of health resulted in a second prolonged visit to Kelso, and to the desultory reading which may have been of far greater value than his own assessment allows. Subsequently, on returning to Edinburgh, he took courses in Mathematics, in History, in Moral Philosophy, and in Ethics, in which last he had the honour of being chosen to read an essay before Professor Robertson.

The subjects appear to have been of his father’s selection, and he attributes the fact that they were not more numerous to the parental desire that he should have ample leisure for legal studies. He took the University courses in Civil and Municipal Law.

His father wisely considered that, even if he were destined for the Bar, he would gain much by a detailed knowledge of the routines of a solicitor’s work, and early in his fifteenth year he commenced a five-years’ apprenticeship in his father’s office.

To the ideas of today, he had left College at an absurdly early age. He had acquired a wide range of knowledge, and had a keen appetite for acquiring more, which school teaching does not always give. His time had not been wasted, as the sequel showed.

His own judgement of these years of study was afterwards given in these words: “it is with the deepest regret that I recollect in my manhood the opportunities of learning which I neglected in my youth; that through every part of my literary career I have felt pinched and hampered by my own ignorance; and that I would at this moment give half the reputation I have had the good fortune to acquire, if by so doing I could rest the remaining part upon a sound foundation of learning and science.”

It is a severe judgement, in which humility weights the scale. Conscious of what he might have gained, he may have undervalued that which he would have lost to acquire it.

“Few ever read so much,” he says of those years, “and to so little purpose.” It is an opinion with which few will be likely to agree.