Читать книгу The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 26

CHAPTER XXII.

Before suggesting to James Ballantyne that he should remove his business to Edinburgh, Scott had given him expectation of an order for a book which could be printed at Kelso, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a project which may have been in his mind for a long previous period, and was now taking definite shape.

For the past ten or fifteen years he had been collecting Scottish ballad poetry with a tireless energy, and with the assistance of every friend he could discover who had a kindred interest.

Now, if not earlier, this work was being pursued with the definite object of ultimate publication, and Scott was anxious that the date should not be long deferred.

He had new helpers during this winter. Mr. Richard Heber, a scholar who specialised in the literature of the Middle Ages, and who sat in Parliament as representative of Oxford University, spent some months in Edinburgh, and was of assistance, not only by his own knowledge and the resources of his own library, but indirectly to a greater extent by his discovery of John Leyden.

John Leyden was a literary phenomenon, who, like so many of the numberless friends whom Scott accumulated, deserves a central stage rather than the passing reference which is all that there is space to give.

Born in poverty, in a cottage hovel in Roxburghshire, he was at this time a self-taught youth whose exact and various scholarship could confound those who were of greater repute in a dozen branches of learning. Rough and uncouth in speech and manner, he is said to have united the characteristics of boor and scholar in a way which was as bewildering as his own attainments. He had no money to purchase books, but Archibald Constable, a young man who had started a small second-hand store in a side-street of Edinburgh, would let him come to his shop, and read as long as he would.

Mr. Heber, searching for worm-eaten treasures, came to Constable’s shop also, and his attention was attracted by the uncouth visitor, and the recondite nature of the volumes with which he would observe him to be sitting absorbed, either on stool or ladder. Conversation followed, and when Heber discovered that Leyden’s miscellaneous learning included an exceptional knowledge of, and enthusiasm for the old ballad-poetry of the country, he told Scott, and Scott came quickly on the scene.

From that time, for the two years that they were working together, the assistance which John Leyden gave to Scott’s enterprise was of a primary importance, and was not overpaid by the fact that their friendship opened many doors of social or literary eminence to the poorer man.

John Leyden had already contributed for several years under the semi-anonymity of his own initials to Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. He had shown himself to be an expert translator of the poetry of several languages. Now he contributed an original ballad to Lewis’s slowly-growing collection. His suggestions enlarged the intended scope of Scott’s own scheme of a Border Minstrelsy volume. It was now to be two volumes or more, with an original section, to which Leyden would contribute three ballads. The work of preparation went on during these spring months with a two-fold energy.

Heber went back to London when the spring came, and was followed by a letter from Scott, asking him to look out for a phaeton, which Mrs. Scott was very anxious to have. It was to cost no more than £31. 10. 0 and was to be “strong, low, and handsome”. There is significance in this combination of qualities. Doubtless the handsome aspect was for Charlotte’s contentment, and it must be strong and low because they had planned that she should be with him on his next summer’s raid into Liddesdale, which was therefore to be undertaken with more thought for comfort than had been his custom. The phaeton was destined for many spring-straining jolts on pathless hills and moors, where no wheeled vehicle had ventured previously.

The difficult commission appears to have been successfully executed. Anyway, there was a phaeton in the Lasswade coach-house when the summer came, a phaeton that found its way over the hills to Hermitage, where Lord Dalkeith had made timely provision that its occupants should have a welcome somewhat more liberal, if not more kindly, than the moorland farmers would have been able to give.

It was during this summer that Sir John Stoddart, touring Scotland, paid a visit to Lasswade, to which he made reference in an account of his wanderings which he published in the following year. He had a pleasant memory of the encounter, and gushed accordingly. It appears that he observed Scott to be engaged inter alia in ‘the daily exercise of the most precious sympathies as a husband, a father, and a friend’. His fatherhood was “daily exercised” at this time upon one baby girl of about nine months. No doubt Sir John was well entertained, and saw the interior of a happy well-ordered home, but there would be more cause to thank him had he recorded a single fact, instead of a paragraph of vague superlatives.

Scott was an excellent father, showing love and sympathy, and a discreet wisdom, tolerant yet without weakness, as the years passed. His attitude towards small babies was that to which a large number of men would plead guilty, if they had the courage to do so, as is shown by a note in his Journal, nearly thirty years later, when that nine-months baby was herself a mother, and he was in London inspecting his own grandchildren. “My name-son, a bright and blue-eyed rogue, with flaxen hair, screams and laughs like an April morning; and the baby is that species of dough which is called a fine baby. I care not for children till they care a little for me.”

It was during this summer of 1800 that Scott also made the acquaintance of the Laidlaw family, and of the “Ettrick Shepherd,” James Hogg.

He came on the Laidlaw household when he was making; one of the sojourns in Selkirkshire that his office required, and rode out from his lodgings at the inn in Clovenford to explore the upper part of the Yarrow valley. Up Douglas-burn, fifteen miles or more from Clovenford, at the further end of the county, he halted at Blackhouse farm, and was well received by its in-mates. Among them was William Laidlaw, the son of the house, little more than a youth at that time, but one of kindred tastes to his own, of exceptional intellectual abilities, united to a very gentle and loveable character. Scott’s genius for choosing and making friends asserted itself again, and a few weeks of meeting and correspondence laid the firm foundations of a life long intimacy.

William Laidlaw introduced him to a shepherd who had been in his father’s employment for nine previous years, but had recently left to take service with a neighbouring farmer, and to the man’s aged mother, Mrs. Hogg (herself a Laidlaw), whose mind proved to be another of those wells of ballad-treasure which Scott’s ceaseless diligence was continually discovering. Her son, James, was a ballad-maker in his own right. Like Leyden he was self-educated, but, unlike him, he cared little for knowledge: for its own sake, and he was content with a very elementary standard of scholarship, which was probably all that he was mentally fitted to reach. But he was an exceptional poet, who never became more than half articulate; though, under the influence of praise and patronage, he became voluminous at a later time. He was of the Burns order, but without the coarse vitality or exuberance of that more popular poet. After a life-time of effort, he was to leave one poem, Kilmeny, which, had he not written it, no one would have believed that he could ever write. He was an incomparably better lover than Burns, and a worse farmer. His father’s methods had been to save money penuriously as a shepherd, which was difficult, and lose it as a sheep-farmer, which was quite easy to do. James pursued this sequence with the regularity of routine. At this time he was saving carefully for the first disaster.

He was about nine months older than Scott, and had already got some occasional magazine publicity. His contact with Scott at this time, and the generous recognition of his ability which he received from him, may have their shares of responsibility for the hurried publication of a first volume of his verses a few months later, which was admittedly premature. Later, he did better. With childlike vanity, he professed that his birthday was that of Burns, which was a mistake. He gradually rose to the opinion that his poetry was equal to that of Scott, which was another. But there are many worse and smaller men in the records of Scottish poetry, in which his own place is one of honour, and stands secure.