Chapter LII
1816—The Antiquary—Death of Major John Scott—The Aged Mother—Buying Land—The Ballantynes—The Black Dwarf and Blackwood—Scott and a Judgeship—Anecdote of Authorship of Waverley.
The year 1816, says Lockhart, ‘has almost its only traces in the successive appearance of nine volumes, which attest the prodigal genius and hardly less astonishing industry’ of Walter Scott. Among these were the Antiquary and Old Mortality. The former appeared in the beginning of May, and about the same time occurred the death of the author’s brother, Major John Scott, who had long been in weak health. Writing to Morritt on this occasion Scott says, ‘It is a heavy consideration to have lost the last but one who was interested in our early domestic life, our habits of boyhood, and our first friends and connexions. It makes one look about and see how the scene has changed around him, and how he himself has been changed with it. My mother, now upwards of eighty, has now only one child left to her out of thirteen whom she had borne. She is a most excellent woman, possessed, even at her advanced age, of all the force of mind and sense of duty which have carried her through so many domestic griefs, as the successive deaths of eleven children, some of them come to men and women’s estate, naturally infers. She is the principal subject of my attention at present, and is, I am glad to say, perfectly well in body and composed in mind.’
In the same letter he speaks of the Antiquary as being ‘not so interesting’ as its predecessors, but more fortunate than any of them in the sale, six thousand copies having gone off in a week. Meantime he was fast purchasing land to add to his estate. By this time it had grown from 150 acres to nearly a thousand. There were signs that might have warned him to be careful. At the time of James Ballantyne’s fall he appears to have been owing over £3000 to Scott of personal debt. But Scott was sanguine by nature, and it was the interest of the Ballantynes to keep their businesses going. ‘Therefore, in a word’ (this is Lockhart’s deliberate charge), ‘John appears to have systematically disguised from Scott the extent to which the whole Ballantyne concern had been sustained by Constable—especially during his Hebridean tour of 1814, and his Continental one of 1815—and prompted and enforced the idea of trying other booksellers from time to time, instead of adhering to Constable, merely for the selfish purposes—first of facilitating the immediate discount of bills;—secondly, of further perplexing Scott’s affairs, the entire disentanglement of which would have been, as he fancied, prejudicial to his own personal importance.’
It was in this way that the Tales of my Landlord (that is, the Black Dwarf and Old Mortality) came to be published by Murray and Blackwood. The latter, alarmed by Gifford’s disapprobation of the Black Dwarf, proposed that if the author would recast the later chapters, he would gladly take upon himself the expense of cancelling the sheets. Scott’s reply, in a letter to Ballantyne, was emphatic: ‘Tell him and his coadjutor that I belong to the Black Hussars of Literature, who neither give nor receive quarter. I’ll be cursed, but this is the most impudent proposal that ever was made.’
An interesting fact in Scott’s personal history which had previously been unknown even to Lockhart, was discovered by the latter when Scott’s letters to the Duke of Buccleuch came into his hands after the death of the Duke. During the winter of 1816-1817, it appears, Scott made an attempt to exchange his Clerkship for a seat on the Bench of the Court of Exchequer. The Duke was naturally most anxious to second the proposal, but private reasons prevented him from exercising his influence at that juncture. This seems to have set the matter at rest. In later years, when such a step was suggested, Scott seems to have become convinced that the less conspicuous position was more fit and desirable for a literary man, and more especially a poet and novelist. At all events the Tory party lost the opportunity of making Walter Scott ‘Lord Abbotsford.’
After the publication of Tales of my Landlord by Murray, Scott, in conjunction with his friend Erskine, contributed to the Quarterly a general review of the Waverley Novels and a reply to Dr. M’Crie’s strictures on the treatment of the Covenanters in Old Mortality. The criticisms were the work of Erskine, though Scott was severely censured after, as if he had been puffing his own works unfairly. The paper closed with an allusion to the report of Thomas Scott’s being the author of Waverley. ‘A better joke,’ says Lockhart, ‘was never penned, and I think it includes a confession over which a misanthrope might have chuckled.’ This is the conclusion: ‘We intended here to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain Transatlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a different author to these volumes than the party suspected by our Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused seizing upon the nearest suspicious person, on the principle happily expressed by Claverhouse in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver, who used to hold forth at conventicles: “I sent for the webster (weaver), they brought in his brother for him; though he, may be, cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well-principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give him the trouble to go to jail with the rest.”’
At this point we shall cease to attempt any detailed account of the various novels and their publication. Our plan calls now only for a few striking scenes in the closing years of the life whose outward surroundings and personal environment in Edinburgh it is our main aim to illustrate. We may, however, conclude this chapter with the admirable summary by Lockhart of the qualities of Old Mortality, a work which was the product of Scott’s greatest intellectual effort, and which is usually, and justly, ranked with Guy Mannering as one of the best of the Scotch Novels. ‘The story,’ he says, ‘is framed with a deeper skill than any of the preceding novels; the canvas is a broader one; the characters are contrasted and projected with a power and felicity which neither he nor any other master ever surpassed; and notwithstanding all that has been urged against him as a disparager of the Covenanters, it is to me very doubtful whether the inspiration of romantic chivalry ever prompted him to nobler emotions than he has lavished on the reanimation of their stern and solemn enthusiasm. The work has always appeared to me the Marmion of his novels.’