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