quarterly review, lady of the lake, rokeby, ballantyne affairs
as scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a well paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the literary calling in 1808. britain was not yet a wildly excitable and hysterical country. rapidity of communication of news had not irritated the nerves of the community. we won or lost a battle, but as men knew nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. a few years after scott’s death, a parliamentary commission inquired into the financial conditions of publishers and authors. the commission learned, from one of messrs. longmans’ firm, that it was not unusual for
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gentlemen to “form libraries” (the expression “every gentleman’s library” survives as a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now ceased to be.
the man who killed the formation of private libraries was walter scott. his waverley appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any books except novels. poetry soon became a “drug in the market,” and the taste for “the classics,” whether ancient or modern, died away: the novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the circulating library.
“quarterly review”
it was the fortune of scott to take full advantage of the traditional usage of “forming libraries” in the years between the appearance of the lay and of waverley. he edited dryden in many volumes, and was fairly well paid. by doubling the price, constable induced him to edit swift’s works, and to write the best extant life of swift. he also edited the important sadleir papers, the diplomatic correspondence of the agent of henry viii and elizabeth, a most valuable book to the historian, and he was concerned in many antiquarian publications. these were undertaken partly from love of the past, partly for the purpose of gaining employment for needy men of letters like henry weber, a german who later became insane and challenged scott to a pistol duel
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across a table! constable was usually the publisher of the ventures, but constable had a partner, a mr. hunter, a laird, no less, who bullied weber, and behaved to scott in a manner which he deemed insufferable.
again, politics came between constable and scott. constable was the publisher of the edinburgh review, which had filled up the measure of its iniquities. no man likes to be called an unpatriotic pedant, and jeffrey, in the edinburgh review, had called scott both pedantic and unpatriotic. again, the year 1808 saw the spanish national rising against napoleon. backed by britain and wellington, and by the infatuation of bonaparte himself,[4] by the fatuous moscow expedition, and the revenge of germany, the rising of the peninsula overthrew the french emperor. but the edinburgh review and the whigs had no taste for a national rising in the name of freedom. the spanish, they observed, were a catholic and intolerant people, not like the liberal french. the spanish insurrections began in massacres of unpopular officials, and, at valencia (june 6, 7, 1808), in the murder of the whole colony of french merchants in the town. that french republican mobs should massacre uncounted victims was very
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well: it was intolerable to the whigs that spanish catholic mobs should imitate them. the spanish cause was both disreputable and desperate, said the whigs. england, if she aided spain, must perish in the same ruin. such was the song of the edinburgh review, at that time the only critical journal conducted by educated men. meanwhile scott recognized the genius of wellesley—“i would to god he were now at the head of the english in spain!”
“quarterly review”
for personal and political reasons then, as a patriot and a poet outraged, scott determined not only to counteract the edinburgh review, but to set up a rival to constable, its publisher. it is difficult to trace each step in his scheme of resistance to constable and whiggery. but john murray, then a young publisher in london, saw his opportunity of winning scott away from constable; he determined to back, financially, the ballantynes in london, and he visited ashestiel in october 1808. he had heard of the nascent lady of the lake, he had heard of waverley as “on the stocks,” and he wished to have his share. from a letter of scott to his brother thomas, we learn that the old staff of the antijacobin, including canning, now prime minister, and frere, had been “hatching a plot” for a tory rival to the edinburgh review. scott had been offered the editorship, with “great
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prospects of emolument,” and the new serial was to have private information from government. but for many obvious reasons, scott could not take the editorship, which fell to gifford, a man of bad health, bad temper, and procrastinating habits, feared and unpopular as a satirist. heber and ellis, however, were ready to aid contributors, and scott’s letters reveal his opinion of the state of literary criticism.
as is usual, periodical criticism revelled in “a facetious and rejoicing ignorance.” specialists could not write what the public would read; editors like jeffrey added flippancy to their dull lucubrations. reviewing had long been indolently good natured: the edinburgh review had set the fashion of being tart and bitter; the fashion pleased, and “the minor reviews give us all abuse and no talent.” the age of “slashing” criticism had begun, and scott held that “decent, lively, and reflecting criticism” would be welcome. he knew gifford’s temper, and hoped to abate it. “we must keep our swords clear as well as sharp, and not forget the gentlemen in the critics.” had scott accepted the editorship, with heber, ellis, southey, and other gentlemen for his aides, the quarterly would have been what he desired it to be. but a satirist was the editor, and for long the tone was “savage and tartarly,” in cases well remembered. many of
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scott’s best essays, however, appeared in the quarterly.
his indignation, and we may say his infatuation, found vent in another project. lockhart may be too severe in his account of james ballantyne’s brother john, who, after failing in various undignified lines, was started as a publisher by scott, in 1809. scott supplied most of the capital; john was expected to manage the accounts, and so the fatal business began. nobody could call the ballantynes “gentlemen,” whether in a heraldic or any other sense of the word. but both, in several ways, consciously or unconsciously amused scott; he was deeply attached to them, and they to him. that he had such henchmen was his own fault: they were, so to speak, his cochranes and oliver sinclairs, the unworthy favourites who were the ruin of the old stuart kings. lockhart says that “a more reckless, thoughtless, improvident adventurer” than the festive john “never rushed into the serious responsibilities of business,” while james “never understood book-keeping or could bring himself to attend to it with regularity.” scott, on the other hand, thoroughly understood business, and kept systematic accounts of his private expenditure.
the ballantyne company
but his success carried him, as it carried the great emperor his contemporary, beyond himself.
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he felt adequate to all labours, however diverse; he was as confident as napoleon in his own star; he entered on this publishing business as napoleon invaded russia, without organized supplies (for mr. murray soon withdrew from the ballantyne alliance), and disaster was always at his doors. between 1805 and 1810 he invested at least £9,000 in the ballantyne companies, and night by night the fairy gold won by his imagination changed into worthless paper. we cannot here attempt to distribute exactly the shares of blame which fall to scott and to the ballantynes. mr. cadell uses the word “hallucination” to qualify scott’s part in the business. i have examined these complicated matters carefully,[5] and the gist of the explanation lies in a remark of james ballantyne. “the large sums received never formed an addition to stock. in fact they were all expended by the partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly adopted my brother john’s sanguine results.” they accepted john’s book-keeping at a venture, and, to use a slang phrase, they “blued” the apparent profits. that is the secret.
to leave a repulsive theme, in 1809 scott visited the highlands, he began the lady of the lake, which had long “simmered” in his mind, and he
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rode fitz james’s ride from loch vennachar to stirling, finding it practicable, though the ground, to be sure, must have been very different in the days of james v, when lochs occupied what is now arable land. at buchanan house, on this tour, he read english bards and scotch reviewers, and briefly spoke of the author as “a whelp of a young lord byron ... abusing me for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my pen. god help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws.” but, like the moslems in thackeray’s white squall, he “thought but little of it,” and did not dream of repaying byron in kind.
no satirist
as he wrote to lady abercorn, “if i did not rather dislike satire from principle than feel myself altogether disqualified from it by nature, i have the means of very severe retaliation in my power,” particularly with respect to the whigs of holland house. scott never used his powers as a satirist. he was remarkably skilled in the playful imitation of the styles of other poets, a faculty scarcely to have been expected from one so careless of finish in his own productions. he could easily have retaliated on byron and others in the manner of pope; but, as he thought, satire is the lowest, because the least sincere, of all forms of composition. mankind is weary of the points and the
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feigned indignation of the satirist, and as “damns have had their day,” according to bob acres, versified satire too is fortunately in the limbo of things obsolete.
scott seems usually to have had in his mind the theme for his next poem but one before he had finished its predecessor. in an excursion to stirling, during the autumn of 1808, he told mrs. scott that he hoped one day “to make the earth yawn” at bannockburn, “and devour the english archery and knighthood, as it did on that celebrated day of scottish glory.” the design was long deferred, and when it was fulfilled, the earth is not the only person who yawns in the course of the lord of the isles.
in a life that was now very happy, whether spent in london, in edinburgh, or in coursing and spearing salmon with the ettrick shepherd at ashestiel, scott occupied his morning hours with his edition of swift, with the editing of the somers tracts, and with the lady of the lake, which appeared in may 1810.
the feud with constable was now dying of natural decline, and scott and jeffrey were quite forgetting their differences. scott had never concealed from jeffrey his opinion that the critic knew nothing of the heart and glow of poetry, and jeffrey, before publishing his review of the lady
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of the lake sent his proof sheets to scott, expressing his regret for the “heedless asperities” in the criticism of marmion. “believe me when i say that i am sincerely proud both of your genius and your glory, and that i value your friendship more highly than most of either my literary or political opinions.” jeffrey was a good fellow at heart, though, in criticising contemporary poetry, he spoke most highly of a certain professor brown! he found the lady of the lake “more polished in its diction” than its predecessors, and certainly its rhyming octosyllabic couplets are more monotonous than the varied cadences of the lay. “it never expresses a sentiment which it can cost the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend,” which is true enough, but is no less true of the iliad and the odyssey. the general chorus of praise, and the rush of tourists to loch katrine and ellen’s isle, did not turn scott’s head, or persuade him that he was a poet of the first order. miss scott told james ballantyne that she had not read the lady of the lake. “papa says there is nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry.” yet he confessedly wrote for “young people of spirit.” he says, “i can, with honest truth, exculpate myself from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it was in the highest fashion with the million.
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”
“lady of the lake”
meanwhile, whosoever, in youth, has read the magical lines—
the stag at eve had drunk his fill
where danced the moon on monan’s rill,
and has followed the chase across the brig of turk, to
the lone lake’s western boundary
has to thank scott for leading him into the paradise of romance, and cares not how low the literary critics may rate the minstrel. such a reader has been with
mountains that like giants stand
to sentinel enchanted land.
other enchanted lands there are, but to one scott has given him the key, to a land where the second-sighted man foretells the coming of the stranger, and the prophet sleeps swathed in the black bull’s hide in the spray of the haunted linn.
never can we forget the hurrying succession of pictures that pass by the bearer of the fiery cross, or the song of the distraught blanche that gives warning to fitz james.
the toils are pitch’d, and the stakes are set,
ever sing merrily, merrily;
the bows they bend, and the knives they whet,
hunters live so cheerily.
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it was a stag, a stag of ten,
bearing his branches sturdily;
he came stately down the glen,
ever sing hardily, hardily.
it was there he met with a wounded doe,
she was bleeding deathfully;
she warned him of the toils below,
oh, so faithfully, faithfully!
he had an eye and he could heed,
ever sing warily, warily;
he had a foot, and he could speed,
hunters watch so narrowly.
on this passage the egregious jeffrey wrote—
“no machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance of a distressed hero, than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him, by a song, to take care of the ambush that was set for him. the maniacs of poetry have indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of ophelia downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make them sing good sense, and to make sensible people be guided by them.”
“lady of the lake”
scott recked so lightly of this censure that he repeated the situation (his novels often repeat the situations of his poems), the warning lilts
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of a brainsick girl, in the heart of midlothian, in that most romantic passage where madge wildfire’s snatches of song give warning to the fugitive lover of effie deans. these parallelisms between the structure of the rhymed and of the anonymous prose romances are frequent and curious.
the whole poem of the lady of the lake is inimitably vivacious, it has on it the dew of morning in a mountain pass: the king is worthy of the praise of scott’s princes given to byron by the prince of wales, who, with all his faults, could appreciate walter scott and jane austen. “i told the prince,” byron wrote to scott, “that i thought you more particularly the painter of princes, as they never appeared more fascinating than in marmion and the lady of the lake. he was pleased to coincide, and to dwell on the description of your james’s as no less royal than poetical. he spoke alternately of homer and yourself, and seemed well acquainted with both.” a british king well acquainted with homer is hardly the idiot of thackeray’s satire.
scott said in taking farewell of his work—
yet, once again, farewell, thou minstrel harp!
yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway,
and little reck i of the censure sharp
may idly cavil at an idle lay.
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much have i owed thy strains on life’s long way,
through secret woes the world has never known,
when on the weary night dawn’d wearier day,
and bitterer was the grief devour’d alone,
that i o’erlive such woes, enchantress! is thine own.
he had shown more of his heart than he cared to show, and passed the confession off with a quotation from master stephen, who deemed melancholy “a gentlemanly thing.”
scott’s gains from the lady of the lake must have been considerable, though of course not nearly so great as the profits of a modern dealer in fustian novels. a prudent poet would have regarded the money as capital, and scott, as we said, did place at least £9,000 in his ballantyne companies. but it appears that the money was no sooner in than the profits were taken out again for the private expenditure of the partners.
“waverley”
it really seems that scott often was deceived, or at least confused, as to the state of his commercial accounts. he used to write to john ballantyne, his book-keeper, in the strain of an affectionate elder brother, imploring “dear john” to “have the courage to tell disagreeable truths to those whom you hold in regard,” “not to shut your eyes or blind those of your friends upon the actual state of business.” the advice was given in vain, says lockhart, and he explains that scott’s own conduct
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made his counsels of no avail. the ballantynes could not inquire strictly into scott’s “uncommercial expenditure,” because, while he was the only moneyed partner, they had “trespassed largely, for their own purposes, on the funds of the companies.” the same reason, namely that the money was not theirs, made it impossible for them to check scott’s commercial expenditure on the publication of huge antiquarian volumes, exquisitely ill done by the many literary hangers-on for whom he wished to procure a livelihood. these piles of waste paper remained on the hands of his publishing company, which was also bearing the weight of that old man of the sea, his annual register, irregularly published at a loss of £1,000 a year. thus, although the excitements of the peninsular and other wars did not prevent the public from buying scott’s poetry largely, the ballantyne companies went from one bank to another in search of accommodation, while scott lived as joyously as la fontaine’s grasshopper, in the summer weather of his genius.
in 1810 he showed the fragment of waverley to james ballantyne, who looked on it without enthusiasm. james was to scott what the old housekeeper was to molière, a touchstone of public taste; his remarks on the margins of scott’s proof-sheets show that he was rather below the level of general
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ignorance, and rather more morally sensitive than the common prude of the period. he could throw cold water on waverley, but could not restrain scott from publishing dr. jamieson’s history of the culdees, and weber’s egregious “beaumont and fletcher.” business looked so bad that in 1810 scott entertained the notion of seeking a judicial office in india.
his next poem, don roderick—“this patriotic puppet show” he called it—he gave, since silver and gold he had none, as a subscription to the fund for ruined portuguese. scott, in don roderick, passed sir john moore over in silence, not because moore was a whig, but because scott did not appreciate the much disputed strategy of that great soldier and good man. neither moore’s glorious death, nor his stand at corunna, expiated, in scott’s opinion, the disasters of his hurried retreat. it was at this time that his friend, captain fergusson, read the lady of the lake aloud, the sixth canto, to the men of his command, under artillery fire.
abbotsford
a trifling piece, the inferno of altesidora, contained verses in the manner of crabbe, moore, and himself; these are excellent imitations, and, with a lyric, the resolve, in the manner of the caroline poets, justify the opinion that scott would have been a formidable satirist had he chosen to attack
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byron and the whigs in the manner and measure of pope.
as scott had now a near prospect of a salary of £1,300 a year, for his hitherto unpaid labours as clerk of session, he yielded to the fatal temptation of purchasing a small estate on tweedside. this purchase was really an antiquarian extravagance; he wished to add to his collection the field of the last great border clan battle, fought in 1526 between the clans of scott and ker, including the stone called turn again, where an elliot checked the pursuit by spearing ker of cessford. the two farms which he bought were styled cartley or clarty hole, and kaeside, “a bare haugh and a bleak bank,” said scott, and there was an ugly little farmhouse at clarty hole, rechristened abbotsford, in memory of the monks of melrose. it is not a good site, lying low, close to the existing public road, and the proprietor had not the charter for salmon fishing in the pools beneath his house. but the property was all “enchanted land,” rich in legends and border memories of thomas of ercildoune and of battles, while scott often cast longing eyes on the adjacent faldonside, once the home of andrew ker, the most ruffianly of riccio’s murderers, and on the perfect little peel tower of darnick. washington irving says that scott spoke to him of a project of buying smailholme tower. like
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almost all scots for many centuries, the sheriff longed to be a landed man; his lease of ashestiel was ended, and, above all, the land which he now purchased was rich in antiquarian interest. so he collected farms, began to rebuild the house of clarty hole, and entered on his private moscow expedition, the making of abbotsford. the first farm purchased was dear at the £4,000 which was its price. meanwhile, a source which, in our day, would have proved a mine of gold to scott, was by him unworked. he would not dramatize his poems, or, later, his novels, for the stage, and every adventurer made prize of them.
“rokeby”
early in 1812 scott began rokeby, a poem on the home of his friend morritt, and in may he “flitted” in a gipsy-like procession from ashestiel to abbotsford. but childe harold appeared before rokeby; scott disliked the popular misanthropy of the childe, but privately declared it to be “a poem of most extraordinary power, which may rank its author with our first poets.” scott burned the whole of his first draft of rokeby (canto 1), because “i had corrected the spirit out of it.” meanwhile scott and byron became correspondents, in a tone, to quote lockhart, “of friendly confidence equally honourable to both these great competitors, without rivalry, for the favour of the literary world.” of rokeby, which
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appeared in the last days of 1812, scott said that it was a “pseudo romance of pseudo chivalry,” though he liked the beautiful lyrics interspersed through the poem, and rather piqued himself on the character of the outlaw bertram, who has won the applause of mr. swinburne. the scene of rokeby is english, and of the characters lockhart says that, in a prose romance “they would have come forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groups scott ever created.” scott told miss edgeworth that matilda was drawn from “a lady who is now no more,” his lost love, and that most of the other personages “are mere shadows.” the poet never left much for his critics to say in the way of disapproval.
the poem, enfin, was in no way a success. mocking birds of song had wearied the public of scott by endless imitation.
most can raise the flowers now,
for all have got the seed,
and now again the people
call it but a weed.
scott himself was imitating himself in the bridal of triermain, to “set a trap for jeffrey,” who was expected to take erskine for the author. he was boyishly reckless of his reputation; he easily resigned the lists when byron “beat him,” as he says,
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and in the year 1813 was harassed by “the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary embarrassment.”
a crisis had come in the affairs of ballantyne & co. the interest, for us, lies in the light which the crisis throws on the character of scott. we have seen that a friend wrote, at the time of his disappointment in love, about scott’s “violent” and “ungovernable” character, while scott himself refers to “the family temper” as rather volcanic. the late mr. w. b. scott, too, considered it worth while to tell the world in his memoirs, that, as a boy, he once heard scott swear profane in a printer’s office. the truth of the matter seems to be that scott had a large share of the family temper in boyhood, when he suffered from serious illnesses, and that he was capable of relapses in his overworn later years. but in the full health and vigour of his manhood, he mastered his temper admirably.
ballantyne troubles
he was at abbotsford, at drumlanrig with the duke of buccleuch, and at other country houses remote from edinburgh, in the july and august of 1813. he was disturbed by frequent letters from john ballantyne, always at the very last moment demanding money to save the existence of the firm, and always concealing the exact state of financial affairs. john was like the proverbial spendthrift
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who never can be induced to give his benevolent kinsfolk a full schedule of his debts. thus harassed and menaced with ruin, scott wrote letters which are models of tact and temper. he only asked to be told “in plain and distinct terms” how affairs really stood, and to be told in good time. but john was as unpunctual and untrustworthy as scott was punctual and placable. he would not write explicitly, he always sent unexpected demands, and it was only certain that he was keeping others back. scott had not an hour of peace and safety, and he told ballantyne as much, “in charity with your dilatory worship.” “were it not for your strange concealments, i should anticipate no difficulty in winding up these matters.” lockhart says that he would as soon have hanged his favourite dog as turned john ballantyne adrift. the conclusion of the matter was that the ballantyne publishing company found a haven in the capacious bosom of constable, who believed in the star of scott, advanced some £4,000, and took off the sinking ship the useless burden of the valueless books.
on the whole scott could be patient, he knew that his copyrights and library were valuable enough to secure all his creditors from ultimate loss. but to avoid loss by the hurried sale of copy
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rights, he obtained a guarantee for £4,000 from his friend and chief, the duke of buccleuch, backed, it seems, by messrs. longman. at the same time he declined an offer of the poet laureateship—vacant by the death of pye—from the prince regent. he supposed that the laureateship was worth three or four hundred pounds annually, a mistake. but as he held two other offices, the clerkship and sheriffship, he deemed it wrong to take the money, and secured the office for southey, who lived solely by his pen. another motive, felt by scott and urged by the duke of buccleuch, was the ridicule which then was attached to the bays, and the necessity of writing a birthday ode every year. the regent removed that obsolete necessity, and southey, despite one famous error, redeemed the honour of the laurels, next held by wordsworth, and then by tennyson. “sir walter’s conduct,” southey said, “was, as it always was, characteristically generous, and in the highest degree friendly.”
thus in temper, in generosity, and in determination that no man should be a loser by him, we see scott at his best, while in the sanguine hopefulness which led him to go on buying land, books, and old armour, during the crisis, we mark the cause of his final misfortunes; and, in his ceaseless industry
sir walter scott and his friends.
from the painting by thomas faed, r.a.
laureateship
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during these distractions, we note the courageous perseverance by which he saved his honour at the expense of his life. through his financial troubles he worked doggedly at his edition and life of swift, and began the lord of the isles, though already he was the butt of every bore, and the host of tedious uninvited guests, “the thieves of time.” simultaneously, he was assisting maturin and other literary strugglers with money, his constant practice. but he did cause the income tax collectors to “abandon their claim upon the produce of literary labour.” lockhart chronicles this fact “in case such a demand should ever be renewed hereafter!”
it is renewed, of course, and with perfect justice. what scott resisted was double taxation of literary earnings, first under the property tax, next, yearly, under the income tax. he must not first be taxed on the full price, say, of marmion, as income, and then again yearly on the interest of the price.[6]
in july 1814 the edition and life of swift appeared in nineteen volumes, six years after this laborious work was begun. the life, which became popular, is perhaps, with that by sir henry craik, the most generous and sympathetic attempt
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to make intelligible one of the greatest, most miserable, and most mysterious of mankind. scott made more allowance than thackeray for what lockhart calls “the faults and foibles of nameless and inscrutable disease.
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”
