Читать книгу The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 15

CHAPTER XI.

The Faculty of Advocates required, as a condition of admission to the Bar, a course of study which could not be less than two years, the first being occupied with Roman and the second with Scottish Law. Walter Scott’s twentieth and twenty-first years were almost entirely occupied with these studies, and on July 6th, 1792, about a month before his twenty-first birthday, he passed the final examination with honours, as did William Clerk at the same time, the two friends acquiring the right to practice, and assuming the gown in public, five days later together.

Walter may have seen little of Williamina during these two years, and she may have given him no very decided encouragement, but the determination to win her, distant as it might be, and doubtful as it might seem to others, had become the strongest motive that ruled his life. For the first time, he bears witness of himself without qualification that he had applied himself to study “with stern, steady, and undeviating industry”. It was a discipline which cannot have been easily self-imposed, to one of his alert mind and varied interests. It was not only poetry and literature which must be repressed. He had been making obstinate attempts to paint (William Clerk painted with ease and skill) and would not readily admit that he could not reach artistic expression through this medium. He had endeavoured to understand music, for which he had not more than an elementary appreciation. He had actually had a singing-master at one time, (if Robert could sing, why not he?) and, curiously enough, the singing-master was better satisfied with his efforts in this direction than were his other auditors.

There was a reason for that. Alexander Campbell, who taught him, had some private financial troubles which, Scott recorded afterwards, “I could relieve, if I could not remove”. What he was able to do at that early age, by monetary or legal assistance, is not clear, but it won a measure of gratitude which would not admit that the young man was unable to sing if he wished to do so.

Lady Cumming, who lived next door at George’s Square, was under no such obligation, and her opinion differed. She sent in a jocularly sarcastic note of expostulation. Would Mr. Scott kindly cease flogging his sons at precisely the same hour each day? She had no doubt the punishment was deserved, but the noise was dreadful.... After that, we may suppose that the songs ceased.

But now poetry and history, painting and music, were alike discarded, at the call of ambition, and the memory of Williamina’s eyes. And Williamina at Invermay, though she might give some thought to the young lawyer-lover, whom her mother favoured so strongly, was giving others to Willie Forbes of Pitsligo, the heir of the banker-baronet, Sir William Forbes, who also loved, or might be persuaded to love her. And far south, born in a French town, and now living in London) was a dark, vital, vivacious girl, who had her own dreams, and who could give Walter love and loyalty of a good kind, if they should ever meet, which it was millions to one that they never would. Is it all law? Or all chance? Call it as we will, we may still ask, do we weave it ourselves, or is it the dancing pattern of a Creator’s dream? Seeing no more of the future than others do, Walter Scott followed a lying light, and toiled at the law.

To give him quiet time for his studies, it had been found possible to allot a semi-basement room at George’s Square to his sole use. The home was already breaking apart. Robert had gone by the sea’s way. John could only be home on rare occasions. Walter need not sleep in the dressing-room now. His father’s health no longer permitted the entertaining which had done so much for the business, and brought so many diverse people in earlier years under a child’s all-observant eyes. Only intimate friends now enter the quieter rooms. There is Dr. Rutherford—not Anne’s father, who came once to give the wisdom of his advice to save the life of a palsied child—it is Anne’s brother who is the Dr. Rutherford of today. And Christian Rutherford comes rather frequently: she is Anne’s half-sister, the child of her father’s second wife, a clever, even brilliant girl, so much younger than Anne that she is like a sister to Walter, though he must call her aunt.

Tom and Daniel complete the family, with the invalid sister who has her mother’s name, and who now has difficult moods, which call for the patience of others. She is passionately attached to Walter, her favourite brother, and the one (as it is easy to guess) who is most understanding of the tragic isolation in which her spirit still survives in the fire-wrecked body....

Walter found a natural pleasure in the first living-room that he could call his own. It was here that Francis Jeffrey came to visit him, after hearing him read an essay on ballads at the Speculative Club, and found it crowded with ‘dingy’ books which overflowed the shelves and must be piled on the floor, and ornamented with Broughton’s saucer, and an old Lockaber axe and claymore that Alexander had given him, a cabinet of collected coins, and other accumulations. It is significant of the growing freedom of Walter’s life, and the atmosphere of the quietening home, that he took this unexpected and welcome visitor out, and gave him a dinner at a neighbouring tavern.

The fact that William Clerk and he commenced the two years’ study for the Bar at the same time, drew them into a closer intimacy at this period, as Walter’s absorption in his work tended to loosen the ties which he had formed with others. William lived at the end of Prince’s Street, about two miles away, and they made a compact to meet alternately at each other’s house in the early mornings (Sundays excepted) to undergo a system of mutual examinations upon an agreed portion of the range of study that was before them. Walter did his part, but he waited vainly on the mornings when his friend should have appeared at George’s Square. Lockhart’s paragon would not leave his bed. They did not fall out over the discovery-of these “fetters of indolence”, neither did the plan fall through. It was characteristic of the mingled determination and complaisance of Scott’s character that he agreed to do all the walking. Before seven every morning, be the weather what it might, he would be hammering on the door in Prince’s Street, prepared to examine his friend, and to be himself examined, upon the self-set reading of yesterday. The severe discipline of this method endured (apart from the usual vacations) for the two years of study. It is not surprising that they both passed with honours. We have nothing beyond Lockhart’s imagination to support the suggestion that William persuaded Walter to undertake these examinations. There is better evidence of the debt which was owed to Walter by his lazier friend. The fact may still be that William brushed his clothes better than Walter up to the close of Walter’s nineteenth year, after which there was a dead heat in the measure of this activity. It may even be true that, at the earlier period, William was rather uppish to Walter in allusions to his superior neatness. The evidence is not easy to find, but it is a point on which we may be content that Lockhart shall have his way. Had this tireless biographer understood how to thin out the forest of facts amid which he wandered, some of his best trees might have been better grown.

There can be no doubt that Lockhart had a sincere admiration for Scott, both for his literary genius, and his personal character. He had a real affection also for an older man of most lovable attributes who was his wife’s father, and his own friend. In intimacy, in admiration, in many personal qualifications, he was particularly suited to be his biographer, and his work remains a mine of information and a monument of literary industry. But though he is not sparing in adjectives of laudation, and sometimes acute in criticism, we feel that he was writing of a man whom he had observed from the outside, but whom he could never know.

And this ignorance concentrates itself in one fatuous amazing paragraph in which he assures us that during the period of his studies for the Bar, and the first years of legal practice, when he was concentrating his energies to hasten the day when he could make a formal offer of marriage to the girl he loved, he was not consorting with prostitutes, nor seducing housemaids.

Lockhart gravely tells us that he does not bear this witness without careful enquiry. Before venturing to give such an assurance he collected the “concurrent testimony of all the most intimate among his surviving associates”!

The letters which Scott wrote at that period, or at least those which survive, are not numerous, but Lockhart had access to a large quantity which had been addressed to him, and which obviously were not meant for publication. He remembered Southey’s idea that such letters reveal the character of him who receives, as much as those who write them, and lest there should be anything which the “concurrent testimony” had failed to expose, he went through them diligently in search of any “coarse or even jocular suggestion” which might reflect by implication upon the recipient. Naturally he failed to find that which he should have known without looking would not be there.

It may be suggested—it may be likely enough—that a physical licentiousness in the conduct of his own life would have broken down the deep reticence with which Scott always treated the emotional contacts of lovers, both in verse and prose. Had that been so, it would not have been a gain to literature, but an incalculable loss.

His conception of a love which is worthy of song or tale is one in which the spiritual element dominates. It is not that physical passion is weak or absent, but that there is something which transcends it, of which it is no more than the carnal garment.

“It liveth not in fierce desire

With dead desire it doth not die.”

We may observe that he did not refuse to look at any of the facts of human life with steady, tolerant, and understanding eyes. But he knew obscenity for the comparative triviality which it is, and his work was always free from the defect which reduces so much of modern fiction to a diseased sterility. He was neither under the necessity of asserting, nor the folly of supposing, that the lowest gutter gives the broadest view....

On the day following that on which the two friends assumed the dignity of the barrister’s gown (Scott’s first guinea fee having been received that afternoon) the Court of Session rose for the Autumn vacation, and he was able to escape to Kelso, and indulge in a holiday well earned by the two years of successful study. He stayed there for a short time—on this occasion with Captain Robert Scott, who will be remembered as having visited Bath when his sister Janet was there with their infant nephew, and who demonstrated the harmless nature of statuary by introducing the child to a familiar intercourse with a sculptured Neptune, which was a very natural selection for a mariner to make.

Captain Scott had now retired from the East Indian service, and followed Janet’s choice of Kelso as a residence for his declining years. He was easily persuaded by his nephew’s youthful impetuosity that he would enjoy a holiday in Northumberland, and they adventured as far as Hexham together.

The holiday was without recorded incident, and is of no separate significance. But Scott’s wanderings during this and succeeding years have an importance which cannot be overlooked.

His life from this time divides itself conveniently into five periods.

First, there are the five years of legal practice and wandering holidays which preceded his marriage.

Next there are the ten careless years—probably the happiest of his life—of assured and growing income and reputation, of congenial occupations which could be carried on without haste or weariness, and of quiet and happy domesticity—the years of Lasswade and Ashestiel.

Then there are the ten years during which he had the reputation of the greatest living poet: the succeeding ten years during which he had the reputation of the greatest of living novelists, ending with that sudden absolute disaster which left him widowed, bankrupt, broken in health, and loaded with a fantastic total of liabilities: and finally the five years during which he camped stubbornly upon the field of battle where he would not admit defeat.

During the first ten or fifteen years of this period, it is common to represent him as one who had not ‘found himself’, and who was unaware of the potentialities of his creative powers. But there is little evidence to support this judgement, and there is much to oppose it. He did not, of course, see the details of his successes—he could not have known that his work would win its immense popularity, and bring him an income such as he could have obtained in no other way. In these first years he looked, naturally and necessarily, to the profession he had adopted to support his home, and he gave it the major portion of his time and energies. He had the broad sanity of judgement which told him that home-making is more important than the rhyming of couplets, and if anyone had advised him that he could improve the prospects of a literary career by deferring marriage, he would not have thanked him for the suggestion, nor delayed the ceremony.

But it seems clear, from the evidence of a hundred details, and his own most definite statements, that his ambitions were directed from an early age to the distinction of literary achievement. He was so tireless in these years in the collections of material upon which his published work was afterwards constructed, that it is, at least, difficult to suggest how he could have employed his energies to more direct advantage, had he foreseen the future in detail.

It is also to be considered that creation must precede publication, and that this precedence is of uncertain length in the absence of direct evidence of the period of composition. The Lay of the Last Minstrel is founded upon the traditions and ballads which were his earliest learning. The Lady of the Lake centres round Loch Katrine and the Trossachs, to which we have seen him make a spectacular journey in his nineteenth year. Marmion is a tale of Flodden Field. The visit to Hexham was his second expedition into Northumberland. He had found means and opportunity to visit Flodden at an even earlier age.

When we come to the novels, we find similar evidence. It is not only that Waverley is known to have been partly written at a period much earlier than that at which it was published. Guy Mannering, which was the next to follow it, was produced with such celerity, under the stress of financial need, as to support its internal evidences of having been largely designed and possibly written at a much earlier date.

It is true that there are records of the actual composition of some of these works, both verse and prose, which date them definitely at later periods, (Waverley was completed at a known time, and an amazing speed,) but the doubt remains as to whether there may have been considerable drafts or partial compositions in previous existence: flowering which is profuse and sudden could come only from nourished roots and buds in which the petals were shaped already.

At this time, he had only been back in Kelso for a few days of pleasant idleness when he started out for Jedburgh, and though he may have gone in search of legal business at the Michaelmas head-court there, his introduction to Mr. Robert Shortreed, the Sheriff-substitute of Roxburghshire, led to another of those profitable friendships which he was so adept at forming. They had scarcely made each other’s acquaintance before they were setting off together into the wilderness of Liddesdale. The young barrister had expressed his desire to explore its desolate uplands, and the sheriff had volunteered to guide him!

The county of Roxburghshire, with which Scott is so peculiarly identified, had endured the stress of almost continual border warfare from the tenth century, when the Saxons surrendered it to the Scottish king, with other Lothian territory, to-the date of the English Union, nearly eight hundred years later. Its surface was strewn with half-ruined castles and peels which had once protected the lives of its hardy scanty population, or had been sacked and burned when the English raiders had been too strong for successful resistance. The bleak moorlands of its southern portion, rising at times to mountainous heights, and broken by narrow stream-filled hollows, were better adapted to discourage or resist invasion than to support a numerous population; but in its northern valleys—that of the Tweed, the Esk and Teviot dales—the twenty miles, more or less, which separated their inhabitants from the English border had allowed time for the beacon-signals to give warning of hostile invasion, and for men to gather in formidable strength. It resulted that it had been possible to follow the pursuit of agriculture in relative security, and some urban industries, such as the weaving of ‘tweed’ cloth, had grown up to a modest extent in Hawick, Kelso and Jedburgh, with populations of some thousands at each of these centres. There were fields of barley and oats stretching beneath the wooded slopes of the valleys; and the orchards around Melrose and Kelso were justly famed.

But further south, the moors, the high hills, green to their rounded summits, had been no better than precarious sheep-walks for the best part of a thousand years. Their spare population had depended for its security upon the rude poverty of its existence, as much as upon the strength of the walls behind which it sheltered when the beacons flared. A small force would turn back, baffled by the strong-walled towers, with their narrow windows, and single room on each storey: a large force would pass them by, seeking for richer spoils in the further valleys.

Of all this barren desolate southern portion of the county, the wildest and most desolate was the district of Liddesdale in the extreme south, where the moors slope downwards to Cumberland, and the Liddell flows to join the Eden and the Irish Sea.

When Walter Scott came to Jedburgh, Liddesdale—twenty to thirty miles to the south—was still as wild and little known as the remotest Highlands. Here and there, was a sheep-farmer’s isolated house. Less frequently, a little church might be found, or a lonely manse, or the ruins of a deserted tower. It had no roads—no inns. No wheeled vehicle had ever attempted the roughness of its mountain tracks. It was a country where few dwelt, and to which no one came.

Here, it seemed to Scott, there might be treasure of old ballads and old tales to be gained by one who would take the trouble to seek them, and who could win the friendship of its lonely inhabitants. Old Border riding-songs might still be sung.

He could have no better guide than the Sheriff-substitute, the one man of his own status who knew the country, who knew the Elliots and Armstrongs who occupied its lonely farms, and who was known and trusted by them. The new friends set out on horseback together, and by night-time they were sleeping in the same bed (as they would have to become accustomed to do) at the farm at Millburnholm, and between fatigue and Willie Elliot’s toddy, we may be sure that they slept well.

There followed for Scott a very happy and successful week. They spent nothing, being received at manse and farm with a free and equal hospitality. Scott was introduced by Shortreed with the strange and frightening dignity of being an Advocate of the Edinburgh Court, such as had never been known to visit the dale before. They found him to be a tall, handsome, attractive boy, very active, in spite of a shrunken leg, very willing to be ‘just a cheild like ourselves’, very quick to make friends with every dog that he met, full of inexhaustible anecdotes, and with a smile that charmed the confidence of the shyest of these lonely dwellers on the moors. For he was at home here as much as ever he would be in the streets of Edinburgh. The hardy Cheviot sheep might have been those among which the baby with the dragging leg had crawled above the crags of Sandy-Knowe. It was the same moor, and the same sky.

With his usual luck (if that be the word to use) he found a friend of the right kind in a doctor at Cleughhead—an Elliot like the rest, who had been collecting manuscript ballads for some previous years for his own satisfaction. Dr. Elliot, under the impetus of the enthusiasm of the younger man, undertook this work with a new energy. For many years after, he made an occupation of seeking out these dying traditional songs, oral or written, and sending them as a willing tribute to the young Edinburgh lawyer whose genius would put them to immortal use.

It was only the first of many ‘raids’ which Scott was to make upon the Liddesdale country in the same company during succeeding summers, but Shortreed remembered and told long afterwards the intoxications (mental and too-nearly physical) of that first excursion. “Eh me!” he said, “sic an endless fund o’ humour and drollery as he then had wi’ him. Never ten yards hut we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himself to everybody! He ay did as the lave did—” Scott’s mind reacted buoyantly from the hard self-imposed discipline of the two previous years, that had brought him with honours through the examinations of a month ago. He was released from that ordeal, and, for the moment, free. He had the genius of sympathetic imagination which made him all things to all men. But he took their confidences rather than gave his own. All his life he would be the willing confidant and helper of those around him. They would sometimes think him pliable. Where they would think to constrain him to a mile they would sometimes find that he would go two. But it would be of his own will.

Only occasionally would he give emphatic rebuff to some too-impudent liberty. But his sympathies would seldom deflect his judgement. His own soul would remain apart, almost aloof,

in a reticence only to be partially broken at last in the Journal of his closing years, when he would write ‘God help us: earth cannot’, and find the help for which he looked was there....

The farmers of Liddlesdale had two occupations which relieved the healthy monotony of the sheep-walks, otherwise only varied as the seasons changed, or by the occasional visits to Hawick, or Jedburgh, or Hexham fair. They had the stimulus of alcohol; and the emotional exercise of their religion, with the intellectual acrobatics of the theological guise it wore. The young lawyer appears to have avoided, as far as courtesy would permit, the excesses of convivial hospitality. Shortreed remarked that he was rarely ‘fou’ and never showed any of the usual symptoms of drunkenness, but it was not always easy to be abstemious at that time, if one would mix sociably with all conditions of men. There came a day when they reached a remote hill-farm where they were relieved to find that the warmth of their reception was not immediately interpreted in terms of alcoholic refreshment. But it was a respite only. The eager host had sent at express speed to a smuggler on the Solway Firth, when he heard of his approaching visitors. A sober supper, at which the home-brewed elderberry wine was the only beverage, was followed by the customary religious ceremony, through which the light of Christianity was maintained in these scattered homes. A young ‘student of divinity’, who was of the party, was conducting the solemn service when there was a sound of horses’ feet on the stony road. Two herdsmen burst into the room with the keg of brandy for which the anxious farmer had been listening ever since his visitors had arrived too soon. Religious habit and self-control gave way at the joyful sound. He leapt up from his knees. “By God, here’s the keg at last!” Scott would always remember the look of despair on the face of the young clergyman, as he closed the book.

He rode back to Jedburgh with a Border war-horn slung around his neck, the gift of Dr. Elliot, and found (it is said) at the ruins of Hermitage. It is not clear whether he actually visited the relics of that sombre isolated castle, the outpost of the Scottish borders, which the Douglases had held so stubbornly against the raids of Cumberland, on this occasion, or in the following year. He had resolved that he would return to Liddesdale at the first chance he had, but, for the time, he must turn his mind to the profession from which his income must be earned. In November, the Court was sitting again at Edinburgh, and Walter Scott was in regular attendance at Parliament House.