The intimate life of Sir Walter Scott

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Contents

CHAP.

I. By Way of Introduction

PAGE I

Chapter I By Way Of Introduction

There have been many Lives of Scott, though there is only one Life, which is Lockhart's ; and considering the number of those Lives and the fact that it is nearly a hundred years since Sir Walter died, the natural inquiry of the twentieth centurion is, " What is there new to say about Scott ? Is there anything new ? "

There is, indeed, a great deal that has never been interpreted before, and there is still more that has never yet received the emphasis it deserves ; but there is another consideration. Readers of books are yet alive who remember the time when it \yas stiU considered ridiculous to take Sir Walter's own estimate of his literary value. Year by year the world has been coming roimd to his way of thinking, and those who go to gaze now on the bright landscape he created on Tweed can join with him in his profound estimate of the tasks he did — " My oaks wiU outlast my laurels."

But just because his long poems are uninspired, and because people after a hundred years have admitted the truth of his opinion that what he called his " big bow-wow " method of writing prose was apt to become intolerable, there is room for a new estimate of Sir Walter. After all, let the literary say what they please, books are a small affair, and this was Sir Walter's opinion as well as mine. Architecture, sculpture, music, have profundities and subUmities that ... At any rate, life is more than books, and, though Sir Walter's have I lost a good deal of their freshness, his joyous personal life, which has never before been told as a consecutive narrative, has lost not a shade of its brightness. That is the justification of this book.

For this presentation of Sir Walter is new. It is not the picture of him that is given in the books of last century, and it may be unsatisfactory in the eyes of 2020, but it is a twentieth-century portrait that contains Hghts and ^shadows obscure or absent in previous representations. This is the first time, too, that his first love has been discussed with common sense, and that anyone has taken the trouble to master the details of Scott's involved connection with the business firms and with their failure.

It cannot be emphasised too much or too often that Sir Walter thought a great deal more of his daily hfe, of his friends, sports, plantings and jokes than of books, his own or anybody's else. Accordingly it is not surprising that his books should not have the stuff of endurance in them, nor, on the other hand, is it wonderful that his daily Mfe has provided his most satisfying story. Lockhart, when he wrote the Life of Scott, called himself " the compiler of these pages," and substantially he spoke truly. The book is chiefly composed of Scott's letters and journal, though some of Lockhart 's own reminiscences are Hfelike and poignant.

There is no other biography in our language to touch it except the surpassing Diary of Samuel Pepys. Boswell's Johnson, if one omits some too meagre details of our dearest Ohver, has always seemed to me rather verbiage for the bookworm than the substance of Hfe, though a masterpiece of presentation. The Life of Scott is Scott's best book. He hved it and he wrote it, a story that I can hardly imagine England or Scotland growing weary of.

I have repeated few of the best-known stories told by or about Scott, (but some of these ancient favomites have been essential to the presentation of his intimate hfe. Much material has been found in footnotes, asides, and stray places that reveal by accident the spirit and substance of the household, while all the mental energy of the writer is concentrated on the elaboration of matters of gravity and unimportance.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 3

Even when Scott kept a daily journal he was reticent

about his personal hfe. He knew Pepys, as far as Pepys was

then published, and delighted in his domesticities and open

confessions, but in this matter Pepys had no influence on

him. There was a curious dignity of bearing about that age.

The ceremonious manner of the eighteenth century, which

had been allied with such plainness of speech and writing that

its commonest words are now the shocking part of our language,

continued into the nineteenth century. The plainness of

speech was continued in private company, but it became

indecorous, for instance, to " intrude on the sanctities of

private hfe." I found by accident, in a casual remark of

Hogg's, that Scott at table wa^ accustomed to set the company

in a roar over Charles's latest bojdsh cleverness or blunder,

but it is certain that he would have thought it not only rude

but wrong if the^child's exquisite speeches had been noted in

the journal of any of his guests, and he himself never mentioned

them in his letters or his journal. This spirit of reticence,

which was only a passing characteristic of that generation, is

responsible for the loss of thousands of pleasant anecdotes

about Scott and his daily hfe.

Chapter II Father And Mother

It has been said that the fathers and mothers of men of genius are themselves invariably of extraordinary character, but probably if a S57mpathetic record were made of any father and mother in the world they would be found to have many striking and original points. This is certainly the utmost that can be said of Walter Scott the elder and Anne Rutherford his wife. They present clear but not extraordinary personaHties ; they were brave and scrupulous and honest, content with appalling Presbj^erian routine ; they found their pleasures in strange but respectable places, and in spite of plentiful cash and prosperity were on the whole as unhappy as the rest of mankind.

Walter Scott the elder was bom in 1729. His father was Farmer Robert of Sandyknowe, a calculating man who reaUsed that a Borderer in the legal profession would do exceedingly weU among the wealthy peers and the quarrelsome lairds and farmers of Berwick, Roxburgh and Dumfries. Recall Dandie Dinmont's final excuse for going to law, after several fights with Jock o' Dawston Cleugh, about his boundary, the difference amounting to the feeding of one sheep : " Besides, a man's aye the better thought o' in our coimtry for having been afore the Fifteen," that is, for having a lawsuit in the Court of Session at Edinburgh. So young Walter, the eldest of the family, was duly sent to the capital and apprenticed to an attorney there. His father paid the handsome sum required of solicitors who join the Society of Writers to the Signet — ^at present it is about £500 — ^bought him also a partnership with another W.S., and the Border coimection brought hhn an extensive practice.

His portrait shows a face of soft sweetness and melancholy.

decidedly a conscientious face. He was noted among all his acquaintance for gentleness. Sir Walter said th^t his father's face and figure were uncommonly handsome, that his manners were rather formal — to the twentieth century this would mean a lot more than it meant in 1808 when Sir Walter wrote — and that his habits were abstemious, though when on occasion wine was produced a single glass or two exhilarated him greatly.

Mrs. Cockburn, the lady who spoiled the ancient ballad of The Flowers of the Forest and did worse by providing occasion for the supersession of the exquisite ancient melody — now raising itself again — was one of his early friends. Among the serious amusements at the parties of that young generation were toasts laboriously prepared beforehand in descriptive verse, and with no names mentioned. It was a point of honour that recognition of the description should be instantaneous and unanimous. Think of the pride of the young lawyer when he heard the following verses of Mrs. Cockburn's recited, and when the company, as generous of mind as himself, rose to their feet and all together pointing to him shouted, " To Walter Scott ! " :

" To a thing that's uncommon,

A youth of discretion.

Who though vastly handsome

Despises flirtation ; To the friend in affiction.

The heart of affection Who may hear the last trump

Without dread ofdetection."

In April 1758, when he was about twenty-nine, he married Anne Rutherford, eldest daughter of Dr. John Rutherford, professor of medicine in Edinburgh University. She was then either eighteen or nineteen. Her mother was a Swmton, and had died early ; her father had married again and had or was even to have several other children, one of whom. Christian Rutherford, the dearly loved Miss Christie, was to be to Sir Walter rather a sister than an aunt.

Even Lockhart significantly says that Anne Rutherford " was short of stature and by no means comely." It would hardly have been natural for the handsome Walter to have mated with his own type, and the world has good reason to thank him : he chose well. Her portrait shows her very plain indeed, with a sagacious face that I am sure could Ught up with laughter nearly as luminously as her son's. She had a light and happy temper, had great pleasure in verse, and was, as the respectable of her generation in Scotland all were, a bit reUgious.

She had had what was considered a good education, and was " finished off " by the Hon. Mrs. Ogilvie, a lady who trained her pupils to a style of manners which was very soon to be considered intolerably stiff. It is said that women live greatly on the memory of a good school. This is not true of those women who fall in love joyously and once for ever in youth, but of others it may be very true. It certainly must have been true of Anne Scott. So intensely was this correctness of school deportment burned into the souls of those children that even when about eighty years old Mrs. Scott took extreme care to avoid touching her chair with her back.

The young couple began their married Ufe in a house or flat belonging to the lawyer in the College W5md, apparently on the site of the existing Chambers Street, and here thirteen years afterwards Sir Walter was bom. But disaster after disaster overwhelmed the bride and bridegroom. AU their first six children were bom ahve and perished in infancy. It is curious that Sir Walter was the second child to be named Walter and that Robert, the eldest who survived, Was the third who bore that name. Apparently Walter Scott the elder was not easily frightened by superstitious notions of ill-luck, but he di^ ultimately come to the conclusion that the confined surroundings and general lack of sanitation of College Wynd were responsible for the deaths of his children. Accordingly in 1771, shortly after Walter was bom, the family removed to George Square, a locaMty which even yet is roomy and open. About that time there was a general exodus of the upper classes from the huge tenements of the walled city, with its manureheaps on the streets, and with its roaming fat pigs on whose backs might occasionally be seen the future leaders of fashion, exercising at the age of seven or nine their instincts of publicity. Just then began the building of the spacious and stately New

Town of Edinburgh, the plan of which as an example of civics before 1800 is even more worthy of the attention of strangers than the Castle and Holyrood, and is a great contrast to the narrow and confined development of the city since then.

Mrs. Scott's father, the professor of medigine, lectured to his students in Latin. When prescribing for his patients it was his custom at the same time to offer a prayer for the accompanying blessing of heaven, " a laudable practice," says the Rev. Mr. Mitchell, the tutor of the children, " in which I fear he has not been generally imitated by those of his profession." The reverend gentleman afterwards obtained a church in Montrose, and got " an electrical shock " when Walter Scott, advocate, spent a night at Montrose and said that he was collecting " ancient ballads and traditional stories about fairies, witches and ghosts." This was the gentleman who wrote that he was generally given to understand that the Novels were of a more pure and unexceptionable nature than characterised other writings of the kind.

But I return to the prayer from which the reverend gentleman, one of a thousand beautiful characters associated with Scott, beguiled us. Professor Rutherford no doubt increased the number of his patients by his addition to the dreary routine of his half-dozen prescriptions. Picture the sensations of the patient of to-day, who in such a manner should have his faith in the infalhble bottle destroyed by the prescriber himself.

Of the six children who survived and matured one was a girl, Aime, a year younger than Sir Walter, who observed that from her cradle she was the hunted victim of mischance, that her childhood was full of escapes from the most perilous accidents, maiming, burning, drowning, and that she hved chiefly in a world of her own imagination. She was never well, and she died at twenty-nine.

Robert, the eldest of the family, entered the Navy, but quarrelled with his fellow-officers and resigned. He joined the East, India Company's service and died of fever before 1808, when he could not have been more than forty-one.

John, the second, was bom about 1769. He got a commission in the Army, but when campaigning ruined his health he retired with the rank of major and stayed in Edinburgh with his mother. He died in 1816 at the age of forty-seven.

Thomas, the poet's favourite brother, was two years younger than he. He inherited the law business of his father, speculated, failed, fled, and after some vicissitudes died in 1823 at the age of fifty.

Lastly, the youngest of the family, Daniel, the black sheep and the heart-break, died before he was thirty, leaving as a last blow to the proud family an illegitimate son whom Mrs. Scott either took into her house or supported elsewhere till she died. At her death Walter, who had refused even to go to Dajiiel's funeral, a frightful blow from a Scott, became responsible for the boy's support.

It is dif&cult to give a complete picture of the household at George Square as the children grew up. The intense care and watchfulness of the mother and the anxiety of the father may be assumed from their pathetic search for a ciu-e of the lameness that resulted from Walter's acute poUomyeUtis or infantile paralysis. Few things that money could supply, however, were lacking to the children of the prosperous attorney. As the boys grew he gave them a tutor who lived in the house with them. Walter at one time had lessons in painting and drawing from two diflerent masters, though he afterwards said that he could make progress in neither. A singing-master was provided for the children, and as is so often the case with instruction, in the arts in this island, it was wasted. The lady next door, exasperated at the yowls of the young Scotts, sent a message begging that the children might not all be flogged precisely at the same hour, because the noise when they yelled together was really dreadful, though, she added, no doubt their punishment was deserved. Robert was the only one of the six who could sing.

Walter Scott, senior, was intensely reUgious. He and his wife were Presbyterian of the Presb5^erians and took their family to the long sermons of the kirk at least twice every Sunday. On the Sunday evenings father and mother sat in their chairs in the drawing-room of a darkened silent house, surrounded by the whole roU of the children. The father read a long gloomy sermon from beginning to inexorable end.

Then . . . another. And another. The servants were called

in, and both servants and children were examined on the

Church catechism and on the two sermons they had heard at

church. The children and servants disposed of, the family

tutor, who had passed through the theological college but

had not yet succeeded in obtaining a church, examined the

head of the house and the lady, and " concluded with prayer."

Walter, the boy with the marvellous memory, rather

puzzled his father at these Sunday evening examinations.

He was always of a drowsy disposition, and in spite of example

and precept he slept in church. Apparently he listened to

the text and to the preacher's preliminary statement of the

divisions he proposed to discuss, then settled to sleep : his

imagination or experience or possibly a few odd moments of

WEikefulness supphed the rest, for he was always ready to tell

everything the minister had said — an example to the other

children of the intellectual benefits of sleep.

In early manhood, when writing to Miss Christie, he let himself go on the subject of the Fast week which preceded the half-yearly communion. "This being sermon week we are looking very religious and very sour at home. However, it is with some folk that in proportion as they are pure themselves they are entitled to render uncomfortable those whom they consider less perfect." This is a hit at his father.

These were Sir Walter's boyhood Sundays. The impatient, silent children endured them with rebellion in their hearts, and awaited the moment when the intolerable gloom would lift and they would, be allowed to breathe the clear air of The Pilgrim's Progress and one half-dozen other permitted books, or at least would be allowed to talk. Looking back on it all from his serene manhood and from his success. Sir Walter dismissed the sombre repression with impatient contempt. " In the end it did none of us any good," he said.

It was partly an affair of the age and partly an expression of the temperament of the Writer to the Signet. He was a very serious man. Curious to think of a W.S. sitting alone in his real study, where he must not be disturbed (no golf links, theatres, week-ends or even dinners in his mind), and supposed by wife and children to be busy over Dirleton's Douhts or

Stair's Decisions, heavy lawbooks, but really wrapt up in complete enjojmient hour after hour of Spottiswood's or Woodrow's theological works.

A rich farmer about Haddington who had a case in the Court of [Session came up from the country and approached Walter Scott, senior, one Sunday, asking for a look at the papers in the case. The Sabbatarian lawyer suggested that the next day would do equally well, but the client was not to be denied. Scott found the papers, delivered them to the farmer, and said that it was not his habit to do business on Sundays, but added a trifle bitterly that the farmer would have no difiiculty in finding lawyers in Edinburgh who would have no such scruple ; and so he washed his hands of a good case.

His religion must have meant a great deal to him, but in one instance it appeared to affect his judgment. Scott himself told Lockhart that it was a common thing at table, if anybody said that the soup was good, for his father to taste it again and say, " Yes, it is too good, bairns ! " and pour a tumbler of cold water into his own plate.

Apparently if attention had not been called to the merits of the soup, Scott would have enjoyed it warm and flavoured, but simply because attention was drawn to its goodness he sacrificed it to the envious gods.

He was not an absolute bigot : though religious he apparently gave way to reason in play-acting, the special horror and ignorance of the pious of that age. The children had their own little theatricals in the dining-room, and were countenanced if not encouraged. When they tackled scenes from Richard iii. it was Walter who remarked that he would do Gloucester, because the limp would do well enough to represent the hump.

In those days a successful lawyer thought it a shame that a beggar (though duly hcensed to beg) should have mutton to his dinner, whether his begging was successful or not. Let those who do not know or do not remember the exquisite story of Scott and the old Bluegown beggar read it in chapter vi. of Lockhart's Life. The point I wish to make is its more exquisite conclusion. Walter told his mother how he had dined

FATHER AND MOTHER ii

oft a gigot of mutton, potatoes and whisky (he was nineteen) at the house of his fellow-stucjent, son of the beggar, and asked her whether the student could be preferred to a place as tutor in some gentleman's family. He suggested that his father would have influence enough, but his mother's knowledge of his father made ^n unexpected objection.

" Dinna speak to your father about it," she said. " If it had been a shoulder he might have thought less, hut he will say the gigot was a sin. I'll see what I can do." And sure enough her minister got the lad a position as tutor.

But Mrs. Scott was able to take extreme liberties with her husband when she cared. A sedan chair came to the house door every evening of one autumn and a man, very much muffled, came out of it, was immediately ushered into the lawyer's study, and worked there with him till long after the bedtime of the rest of the family. Mrs. Scott repeatedly asked who and what he was, but the lawyer evaded her inquiries and told her nothing. Another man would have gone to his office and would have received his visitor there, but the open-hearted lawyer was not built that way. He told his wife that the man was not worth bothering about, and refused to discuss him. To this generation, when it is beUeved that Cabinet ministers inform not only their wives but even *their newspapers of anything and everything of importance, this distaste or distrust seems strange, and stiU more curious appears the independent way in which Mrs. Scott solved the problem.

One evening just as the stranger was about to go she went into the room and made a httle speech about the cup of tea she brought on a tray. So she got a good stare at the stranger. Thunder sat on her meek husband's brow and he refused to take the tea, but the well-mannered stranger took his. He was Murray of Broughton, who had been secretary to Prince Charles, and whose evidence had sent many to the scaffold. Walter Scott though apparently bound to do some business with him, detested himj and would not show him any hospjjtality nor exchange any act of friendship with him. \

When he left the lawyer opened the window and flung into the street the cup from which the stranger had drunk.

How hmited the amusements of this conscientious lawyer were, and how painstaMng his son was, another anecdote shows. Walter copied out twice his notes of the Scots Law class, had one set of volumes bound, and gave them to his father. The old man declared that he was highly pleased with them, not only as proof of Walter's assiduity but because the lectures would give him very pleasant reading for leisure hours.

He positively loved funerals. The man who had buried his six firstborn might have had enough of the ceremonies attendant on death, but his appetite for melancholy grew with indulgence. This is common in Scotland, and probably elsewhere. One aspect of the attraction of funerals is illustrated in the story of the working farmer, who cautiously approached his one ploughman with news of a soiree.

" I thocht o' gaein to Jock's funeral mysel'," ventured the farmer.

" I winna hae't. There's mair fun at ae guid funeral than at fifty sorrees."

It was not the whisky and the dinner, however, but the sombre pageant that appealed to the lawyer. He cut a stately figure in his black kneebreeches, with laced coat and ruffles, and he enjoyed himself immensely. He kept a long Ust of cousins, second-cousins, cousins by marriage and other remote relations continually in coimtenance, and his son's opinion was that this interest in them was chiefly to attend their funerals, some of which he even paid for. Considering what funerals were in the eighteenth century, this must have been an expensive hobby.

It is difficult at times to regard the ways of Providence with patience. Who does not know men of sixty and seventy, even one or two of eighty, who are with impimity gluttonous, hard drinkers, self-indulgent ? Yet it was to this conscientious, abstemious man of regular habits that apoplexy, popularly supposed to be the result of over-indulgence, came at the age of sixty-eight. For two years he Hngered, irritable with everybody, thankless, passionate, driving the household distracted, while the undaunted httle wife and mother, daughterless though she was, attended on him and sacrificed herself to him.

There is not much said by Lockhart about the relations of father and son, but I suspect that there was some estrangement, and that there were occasional rows even before the father's shock. The father objected to the son's walking tours, especially when he went off for a day and stayed for a week, objected also to Walter's lack of concentration. He appears to have objected heartily and openly to the publication of verse by the young advocate, and I have little doubt that the poet's lack of success at the Bar worried the ageing father greatly. On the other side the son objected to the sourness and gloom of the religious observances forced by the elder on the whole household, and when he lost both parents it was chiefly his mother's memory that he cherished. His letter to her, written from London when he got the news of his father's death, is an appalUng document :

" Your own principles of virtue and religion will, I well know, be your best support in this heaviest of human afflictions.' The removal of my regretted parent from this earthly scene is to him doubtless the happiest change. ..."

There is a terrible paragraph of sixteen words in Lockhart. After illustrating the burden that old Walter during his illness was to his family, treating his womenfolk to passionate outbursts and continual unreasonableness, he adds :

" I have lived to see the curtain rise and fall once more on a Hke scene."

Anne Scott hved for twenty years and a half after her husband. The house that for two years had been all gloom brightened again ; she received visitors, especiaUy deUghted in Walter's children, and opened her maternal heart to nurse another strong man fallen by the wayside, her son John, who retired from the Army broken in health. He, too, died before her, and at the age of sevtaty-nine or eighty she was his

constant nurse. ^ ,, . ■,

She had about £300 a year, of which a good third went m charities of her own. On the remainder she was able to keep a quietly hospitable house. Out of his superabundance Sir

Walter often offered her assistance, which she scornfully and affectionately refused every time. She Hved to see her lame son a baronet, to read not only his verses but his novels, and to point out to her visitors the discrepancies between Walter's plots and the real stories. He attributed a good deal of his knowledge of the manners and habits of the two or three* preceding generations to her conversation. She had a fine memory and a gift for telling stories, had all the Scottish passion for genealogy, and could rattle off the ancestry of everybody she knew or had ever heard of. She had proverbs also for every occasion, and two of them were often in Sir Walter's mouth :

" We must do as we dow," that is, as we can do, and

" Well betides Her that bides."

Both of these illustrate a patient mind and a happy knack of minimising present trouble.

On a Saturday in December 1819 the baronet visited his mother and found her well. Next day the girls Sophia and Anne had tea with her, and found the old lady in fine spirits, teDing her best stories over again with great gusto, as we all do. On the Monday she had a seizure. Helpless, but apparently suffering no pain, she gradually slept away on Christmas Eve.

A few days before her death the trembUng hand of eighty had inscribed her dearest possession, a large Bible in two volumes and a gift from her father, " To my dear son, Walter Scott, from his affectionate mother, Anne Rutherford."

It gave Sir Walter an exquisite pang of grief when he came into her house after she had for ever parted from him, to behold the array of presents that she had bought or made ready with her hands for him and the rest of her dear ones against the New Year. His letter to Lady Louisa Stuart telling her of his mother's death is tender and proud and homely, a beautiful expression of affection.

When in September 1832, merely thirteen years afterwards, Sir Walter's own executors, searching for his will, opened his desk, they found arranged in it in careful order a series of articles that had apparently been placed so that he might have them before his eyes as he began his morning tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had stood on his mother's dressing-table which he had studied a thousand times when as a sickly child he had slept in her bedroom ; the silver taper-stand that he had bought her with his first fiveguinea fee ; his father's snuff-box and etui-case and other such things.