POEMS.
It was not Scott’s destiny to attain distinction as a lawyer. While never neglecting his professional duties, his mind had its main bent towards literature. Having learned German, he translated and published a version of Goethe’sGoetz von Berlichingen, a drama of such a romantic cast as harmonised entirely with his peculiar taste. He also was induced, by Mr M. G. Lewis, the well-known author ofThe Monk, to write two or three ballads on supernatural themes for a collection which was to be entitledTales of Wonder.Goetzappeared in February 1799, but met the fate of the former publication. When theTales of Wondercame out, Scott’s ballads, though unfortunate in their association, obtained some praise, yet, on the whole, might also be considered as a failure. These would have been disappointments to a man who had set his heart on literary reputation. To Scott, who was at all periods of his careerhumble-minded about his literary efforts, they were nothing of the kind. In this respect, he was a pattern to all authors, present and to come.
The circumstances seem to have been almost accidental which led him to make his first serious adventure in the literary world. His schoolfellow, James Ballantyne, was now settled at Kelso in the management of a weekly newspaper. Merely to give employment to his friend’s types during the intervals of their ordinary use, Scott proposed to print a small collection of the old ballads which for some years he had been collecting on the Border. When the design was formed, he set about preparing the work, for which he soon obtained some assistance from Richard Heber and John Leyden—the former an Englishman of fortune, and an enthusiastic collector of books; the latter a Scottish peasant’s son, who had studied for the church, and become a marvel of learning, especially in languages and antiquities. TheMinstrelsy of the Scottish Borderthus grew upon his hands, until it became such an assemblage of ballads, ancient and modern, and of historical annotation, as could only be contained in three octavo volumes. The first two made their appearance in January 1802, and met a favourable reception. Many of the ballads were entirely new to the world; even those which had been published before, here appeared in superior versions. Industry in the collection of copies, and taste in the selection of readings, had enabled the editor to present this branch of popular literature with attractions it never possessed before; while the graceful and intelligent prose interspersed throughout, rich with curious learning, and enlivened by many a pleasant traditionary anecdote, served to constitute the whole as a most agreeablemélange. The work gave Scott at once a respectable place in the literary republic, more indeed as an editor than as an author, though one would suppose few could be altogether insensible to the spirit and graphic power displayed in the ballads of his own composition.
The public generally, and the booksellers in particular, were agreeably surprised to find theMinstrelsy, while bearing the unwonted imprint of ‘Kelso,’ a marvel of beautiful typography; a circumstance owing to the good taste of James Ballantyne, and which was of some avail in increasing the popularity of the work. It appears that Scott, besides some gains from the first edition, obtained soon after £500 for the copyright.
About this time he inherited between five and six thousand pounds from a paternal uncle. This, with his share of his deceased father’s property, his sheriffship, and his wife’s allowance from her brother, now advancing to fortune in India, made his income altogether about a thousand a year. He had been ten years at the bar with little success; his gains seldom reaching two hundred a year, and these from the merest drudgeries of the profession. It began, therefore, to appear to him that, in as far as any further income might be required to support his station in life, and advance the prospects of his children, it would be well to look for it rather to some post in the Court of Session, such as one of the principal clerkships, than to practice as a barrister. Assured in the meantime against want, and trusting to such a prospect being realisable by his friends the Buccleuchs and Melvilles, he gradually became disposed to give more of his regards to literature. As to income from this source, he had little hope or faith. Literary research and composition were as yet their own rewardwith him; if any more solid remuneration accrued, he was happy to receive it; but he would not depend on such gains. Let literature, he said, be at the utmost a staff—not a crutch. It was natural for a prudent man of the world to form these ideas at that time, when literary biography was little besides a record of privation and sorrow. But it would have, nevertheless, been well for Scott if he had been content with his secured income, and the prospect of only such contingent additions to it as a fixed post or the profits of literature might hold out. To his over-anxious mind, when the temptation came, it appeared different, as we shall presently see.
It was about the time when theMinstrelsywas issuing from the press, that Scott was asked by the lovely and amiable Countess of Dalkeith to write a ballad upon a traditionary goblin story respecting the Buccleuch family. He commenced such a composition accordingly, adopting for its measure that of a recent poem of Coleridge; but it grew upon his hands far beyond ballad size. It became, in short, a long romantic narrative, divided into cantos, andsetin a subordinate narrative, wherein the author represented it as a recitation by the last survivor of the fraternity of minstrels. This was published in January 1805, asThe Lay of the Last Minstrel, and at once placed Scott in the first rank as an original poet, besides determining his fate as henceforth chiefly that of a man of letters. Immediately on the first edition proving successful, the publishers gave £600 for the copyright.
Before this time, Mr Ballantyne had set up a printing-office in Edinburgh, partly by the assistance of a loan from his old friend. Getting rapidly into a considerable business, which his skill and taste amply justified, hecame to require additional capital, and Scott at length agreed to advance the needful sum, on condition of his being made a partner, but a secret one, in the concern. His dread of dependence on literary gains seems to have blinded him to the fact, that mercantile gains are also precarious, and usually attended by risks.
By the interest of his titled friends, he soon after obtained an appointment to the duties of a clerkship in the Court of Session; the salary, however, which afterwards was fixed at £1300 a year, was not to be realised till the death of a superannuated predecessor in office, and, in fact, Scott touched nothing of it till 1812. With such an addition to his solid prospects, one cannot but wonder at the eagerness and assiduity with which he commenced and pursued literary labours of a severely tasking kind; such as an edition of the works of Dryden, a publication of Sadler’s State Papers, and a reprint of Somers’s collection of Tracts. It seems as if a naturally ambitious and ardent spirit had at length found a vent for its energies, and felt a self-rewarding pleasure in their exercise. At the same time, he gave much of his time to volunteer soldiering, to politics, and to the affairs of literary men less fortunate than himself. The recollections of his friends present a charming picture of his ordinary life at his summer retreat of Ashestiel on the Tweed, where he had found it necessary to establish himself on account of his duties as sheriff of Selkirkshire. His household, enlivened by four healthy children, and superintended by Mrs Scott, was marked by simple elegance. On Sundays, being far from church, he read prayers and a sermon to his family; then, if the weather was good, he would walk with them, servants and all, to some favourite spot at a convenient distance, and dinewith them in the open air. Frequent excursions on horseback, and coursing-matches, varied the tenor of common domestic life. Friends coming to pay visits found him in constant good-humour, and at all times willing to introduce them to the fine scenery and interesting antiquities of the district. In the evenings, his conversation, in which stories and anecdotes formed a large part, was a sure resource against ennui. As a husband and father, he was most kind and indulgent. His children had access to his room at all times; and when they came—unconscious of the nature of his studies—and asked for a story, he would take them on his knee, repeat a tale or a ballad, kiss them, and then set them down again to their sports, never apparently feeling the least annoyance at the interruption. His dogs, of which he always had two or three, were even more privileged, for he kept his window open in nearly all weathers, that they might leap out and in as they pleased.
These were the happiest days of Scott’s life, when as yet in the enjoyment of full vigour of body and mind, rather acquiring than reposing upon fame, and unembarrassed by possessions and dignities which afterwards made his position false and dangerous. He occasionally visited London, and allowed himself to go through that kind of exhibition calledlionising, to which everything famous, or even notorious, is liable to be subjected in the metropolis; but he never was in the slightest degree spoiled by such idolatry. He fully shewed that he estimated it at its real worth, and, after good-naturedly submitting to it, could laugh at its absurdity. It is less pleasant to record a change in his arrangements for study which took place about thistime. Finding the day apt to be broken in upon by little duties and by visitors, he adopted the habit of rising and commencing his literary toils at six in the morning, usually finishing them at twelve, after the interruption of breakfast at ten. His biographer, Mr Lockhart, tells us how careful he was to dress neatly before sitting down, but he says nothing of his preparing for the duty before him by taking food. We have come to understand such things better now, and can easily see what fatal effects might arise in a few years from a habit of performing the principal duties of life with an exhausted system.
The year 1808 saw his poetical reputation brought to its zenith by the publication of the admirable romantic tale ofMarmion, for which, to the astonishment of the public, Mr Constable undertook beforehand to pay a thousand guineas. Not long after, his zeal in Tory politics, or, as he thought it, solicitude for the honour and safety of his country, then harassed by the Bonaparte wars, led to his quarrelling with this eminent publisher, and to his taking an interest in the establishment of theQuarterly, as an opposition to theEdinburgh Review. It would have been well if he had stopped here; but the same feelings, helped, perhaps, by that trafficking spirit which had entered into him since he lost hopes at the bar, induced the false step of his setting up a publishing-house in Edinburgh, under thefirmof John Ballantyne and Company, the ostensible manager being a younger brother of the printer, a clever comical being, not overstocked with worldly prudence, and possessed of few qualifications for business beyond a knowledge of accounts.
From this house issued, in May 1810, his mostpleasing poem, theLady of the Lake, which experienced even greater popularity than either of its two predecessors, and might, if anything could, have made its author a vain man. In this and his two preceding poems, the chief charm lay in the vividness with which the author brought the past before the minds of his readers. He gave the grace, the dignity, the gallantry of old times, free from all their rudeness and grossness. All was done, too, in such an easy and fluent style, that the reader was never wearied. The singular fascination of these writings shewed itself in numberless ways; for one thing, there was a rush of tourists to the scene of theLady of the Lake, so great, as to produce a marked rise of the amount of post-horse duty raised in Scotland. Scott’s own firm, in connection with another, undertook to pay two thousand guineas for theLady of the Lake, a fact in authorship at that time without anything approaching to a parallel. Meanwhile, he was urging into print, as a publisher, anAnnual Register(to commence with the year 1808); an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, under the care of a drudging German of the name of Weber; a huge quarto, under the title ofTixall Poetry; an edition of Defoe’s novels; theSecret Memoirs of the Court of James I.; and some other books agreeable to his own taste, but hardly to that of the public.
These huge indigestible masses of paper and print had brought his outlay in the printing and publishing concerns up to £9000 before the end of this year. Scarcely ever did the most thoughtless of the tuneful tribe make a more unfortunate adventure than this publishing affair was destined to prove itself. If Scott had instituted some safe and modest copartnery,to give himself the publishing profits of his own writings, diminished only by expenses and the small profits due to his acting associates, he would have been doing what perhaps it will yet be seen all authors of decided popularity may rightly do. But he had an antiquarian taste, and a disposition to over-estimate all literary productions save his own—he indulged these tendencies in his firm of John Ballantyne and Company, and unavoidably became a great loser. Before it was fully seen that such was to be his fate as a man of business—namely, in the summer of 1811—he had thought so well of his means and prospects—the clerkship salary being now on the eve of realisation—as to resolve on purchasing a hundred acres of land on Tweedside, in order to build a cottage residence for himself, and this notwithstanding that the £4000 requisite in the very first place had to be borrowed, the one half as a permanent burden on the property. Such was the origin of his estate of Abbotsford, where ultimately he reared a castle. The purchase would have been perfectly a right one, if he had not involved his superfluous fortune in business: as things actually stood, it was only preparing for himself needless embarrassments.
His removal to the little estate which he had purchased took place in May 1812, and he soon became involved in the pleasant but costly labours attendant on building, planting, and what is calledmaking a place. At the same time, besides attending to other literary avocations, he was composing a fourth romance in verse, which appeared just before the close of the year under the title ofRokeby, but in point of popularity proved a comparative failure. Ere this time, the concerns of John Ballantyne and Company were seriously embarrassed,insomuch that Scott was glad to accept of a little credit from his friend Mr Morritt of Rokeby Park. The difficulties had only increased during the early months of 1813, and it then became necessary for those who had begun in rivalry to Mr Constable, to resort to that publisher for his friendly aid. To give an idea of the fatality of the whole adventure, it appears that the single publication ofTixall Poetry, which proved a dead failure, involved an outlay of £2500, while theEdinburgh Annual Registerwas attended by an annual loss of £1000. At the same time, all the parties concerned were living in a style rather suited to their hopes than to their realised profits. To sustain so severe a drainage, the private fortune of Scott, and even his unprecedented literary gains, were inadequate. Fortunately, the hope of regaining the author ofMarmionas an adherent of his house, induced Mr Constable to grant relief to some extent by the purchase of stock, trusting that the rival house would as soon as possible be extinguished. The Duke of Buccleuch also extended the favour of his credit for the sum of £4000, by means of which, and of further sales of stock to other publishers, the principal difficulties were passed, though not without the most serious vexation to Scott for the greater part of a year. In the midst of his worst perplexities, he resigned an offer of the laureateship to Mr Southey, and was liberal as usual to unfortunate men of letters, sending, for one thing, fifty pounds to Mr Maturin, the Irish novelist.