Ragged Lion Page 3

  Moreover, a dead man filled my imagination. This was my great-grandfather, also Walter, who was known throughout Teviotdale as Beardie. His own father, Walter too, had walked in quiet paths, for he was a member of that pacific body of Christians known as Quakers, to whom I attempted to do some justice in that novel which is my own favourite among my works, if only because I put more of myself in that book than in any other, or indeed perhaps all of the others together – I mean Redgauntlet. But Beardie, it may be in rebellion against his father’s tranquil ways – a rebellion shared, it would seem, by an elder brother, who was killed in a duel – was of a different temper. He became a fierce Jacobite, who fought with Dundee and was out in the ’15, and was thought fortunate to have escaped a hanging. Thereafter, he never shaved his beard, having taken a vow not to do so till the exiled line of Stuart Kings was restored.

  I shall say somewhat more of my remoter ancestors, though I believe this is not to the modern taste. Well, the waur for the modern taste, say I, for a man who has no care for his ancestors has little reason to care for his posterity either. He is trapped in the narrow dark of his own time, like a prisoner sunk in a slit-dungeon. They were not great men, though formidable and not to be trifled with. I am a collateral connection of the Scotts of Buccleuch, and have enjoyed the friendship of three Dukes who bear that noble title, but my branch of the family had put out its shoots from the trunk before the Scotts of Buccleuch commenced their great ascent in the peerage, and I own Scott of Harden as the chief of my sept. In my ancestry I number that hero of the ballads, Auld Wat of Harden, who married Mary Scott, the Flower of Yarrow. Those were the raiding days, and the tradition is well-attested that when the larder grew scanty she would place a dish of spurs on the table as a sign to her husband and sons that it was time to go riding again. I have had cause to smile at this story, for my dear Charlotte, having learned my fondness for it, as a result, I fear, of that frequent repetition to which wives are compelled to submit, learned to turn it to her advantage: ‘Scott,’ she would say, ‘I must have a new dress; so you must write a new novel.’ A melancholy digression that memory is for me now.

  Auld Wat’s son William married the daughter of Sir Gideon Murray of Elibank, an ill-favoured lass known as ‘Mucklemou’d Meg’. It was a case of ‘tak the lass or feel the rope around your neck’, and being a prudent man he took the lass, who proved as demanding a wife as those not favoured by nature often are, feeling as they do a need to assert themselves that more fortunate ladies may be free of. Their third son became Laird of Raeburn and married a MacDougal of Makerstoun, which family has some claim to be the oldest in Scotland. (That was the Quaker, Beardie’s father.)

  My own father, Walter Scott, broke the mould and removed to Edinburgh, where he was apprenticed to the law, and became a Writer to the Signet. He married Miss Anne Rutherford, the eldest daughter of the Professor of Medicine at the University; her grandfather had been minister of Yarrow, and her mother was a Swinton of that Ilk, and a descendant of Ben Jonson’s friend, the poetic Earl of Stirling.

  So, altogether, I had a fit pedigree for either warrior or Border minstrel.

  My father was a good man, uncommonly handsome in youth, whose cast of mind made him a narrow one, but always affectionate. He was conscientious in his profession, to which he was devoted, with a high reverence for the Law, but – unlike many lawyers, I fear – had more care for his clients than for his own fortune. He was a devout Presbyterian who passed many of his leisure hours in the study of theology in which he was consequently deeply versed. His religion was Calvinism of the dourest kind, and the Sabbath was observed with the most rigid propriety in our household. He abstained from secular employment on the Lord’s day, and his bairns were compelled to abstain likewise from all reading but that of the Scriptures. He had nothing of the spirit of that Border worthy, who was reputed to have interrupted his reading of the Good Book with the words, ‘Had it no’ been the Lord’s will, this neist verse wad hae been better left oot, but since it is His will, I’ll just read it to you lichtly.’ Yet because my father was a man of infinite kindness, and neither prig nor hypocrite, this Sabbath restriction was less irksome than it might otherwise have been.

  My mother was less devout, but not one to cross her husband; or rather her devotion took a different, perhaps more practical, form, since it expressed itself principally in good works and charity. It was she who encouraged me in my taste for poetry; her head was stored with the ballads and more recent, formal verses also, for she was peculiarly fond of Pope. In her youth she could remember talking with a man who had fought at Dunbar in the Civil Wars and could recall Cromwell’s Ironsides marching up the High Street of Edinburgh, singing psalms. I was her favourite child, on account, I have always supposed, of my ill-health, for she feared that I would follow my six siblings to a child’s grave; she called me ‘Wattie, my lamb’, to the day of her death, when I was middle-aged, a father myself, and had won some repute for my verses; and I am not ashamed to recall her tenderness now. Indeed I would be ashamed to forget it, or omit mention of it.

  With her I read Homer’s Iliad in Pope’s translation, and from her I acquired my passion for Shakespeare, which has never deserted me, and which is not the least of my debt to her. Debts to parents are what can never be repaid, and the consciousness of this grows as one sees them sink into the decrepitude of age. I owe much to her friends, my aunts Janet and Christian, and Miss Alison Rutherford of Fairnilee (later Mrs Cockburn and author of an affecting version of The Flowers of the Forest) and Mrs Anne Murray Keith; all of whom spent many hours talking with the sickly child, or reading to him. Not the least of my debts to these ladies is to the language they spoke, Mrs Keith in particular speaking the old court-Scots of Holyrood, which has now quite died away, though I have attempted, with what success I know not, to preserve it in some of my fictions. There is nothing that can have a more profound influence on a child with any gift for composition than hearing language that is rich and precise; and I do not believe I would have become the writer I am if I had not enjoyed this experience in childhood.

  I began Latin at my first school, a private academy kept by a Mr Fraser, but made little progress, for Fraser, though a worthy man, was but a grammarian, and plaguey dull. Yet he ground something of the elements of the tongue into me. We had by this time left College Wynd, without regret save on my part, for it excited my youthful imagination to know that that noisome alley stood on the site of the house of Kirk o’ Fields, where in the winter of 1566 Lord Darnley had been murdered. Our new quarters were in the recently built George Square and they were not only more healthy but provided evidence of my father’s advancement in his profession.

  I then proceeded to the High School of Edinburgh, which in those days was kept by Dr Adam, a considerable scholar, and capable of imparting his enthusiasm to his students, though in other respects a man of unfortunate judgement, which would lead him into political affiliations generally thought disgraceful at the time of the Revolution in France. With him, I read the standard Latin authors, following Caesar’s campaigns with what I think must have been an intelligent interest, and feeling the melancholy beauty of Virgil. I was never an exact scholar, for I cared more to draw the meaning from the work, the essence as you might say, than for the niceties of grammar and syntax. Yet I got enough to be able still to read Latin for my own pleasure, and for that I am very grateful.

  My father, eager for my success, provided me with a tutor to supplement the teaching of the High School. This was a certain Mr James Mitchell, a virtuous man who later became minister at Montrose. He was a stiff scholar, too, and equally rigid in his religious and political persuasion, which was of the Calvinist and Whig mode. I was soon accustomed to disputing with him, for my political opinions were already clean opposite: I was a Cavalier and he a Roundhead and Covenanter. I admired the gallant Montrose; he the dark and politic Argyll. I took my politics of those days, not from any general principle, but on the same ground that Charles II did
his religion: my conviction that the Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike of the two. Thought and experience – I may say in justice to myself – have confirmed much of my youthful prejudice. I believe in the value of tradition and accustomed ways of thought as of life, and I have learned to distrust all political abstraction and the theorists that delight in it.

  I would not wish to suggest that life was all study. Indeed, though I read so widely and with such zest, I could never credit myself with being either studious or scholarly. I roved as I pleased, and read without method. My memory was of the best, but it retained only what pleased it. I have always relished the reply of an old Borderer when complimented by his minister on the strength of this faculty in him: ‘I hae nae command of it,’ he said. ‘It retains what hits its fancy, and I misdoubt me, sir, that gin ye were to preach twae hour, I wadna be able to recall a word o’ what you had been saying when you were finished.’

  Edinburgh was an unruly and rowdy city in those days, as I believe the young – if they have a mind to it – can find most places to be. One feature of our lives in which we took the greatest pleasure was the strife in which we regularly–and in other respects irregularly – engaged with the lads of the neighbouring quarter: the Crosscauseway, Potterrow and Bristo Square. These encounters were known to us as ‘bickers’ and since the neighbouring quarter was inhabited by a poorer sort of folk, they partook somewhat of the struggles between the Patricians and Plebeians in Ancient Rome. They were fought with stones and sticks, and with much grappling and wrestling when we came to close quarters. Sometimes they would last for a whole evening, and, though there was ferocity, they were enjoyed on both sides, and a certain respect grew between the antagonists. One such stands out in my memory, for he was ever foremost in the opposing army: a tall, finely made blue-eyed boy, with long fair hair – the very image, it strikes me now – of a youthful Goth. This lad was ever first in the charge and last in the retreat – the Achilles or Ajax of the Crosscauseway. We never knew his name, but called him ‘Green-breeks’, from the breeches he wore, which indeed with a ragged shirt in some coarse material formed his only garment, for he fought barefoot and bare-armed.

  One evening, when the battle was at its fiercest, Green-breeks got himself separated from his cohorts, and had laid hands on our standard, when one of our army, who had – deplorably and I know not how – got possession of a hunting-knife or small hanger, struck out at him, and laid his head open. He fell insensible to the ground, and the noise of battle was stilled by our horror of what we saw and what we feared. To our common shame, both armies melted away, leaving poor Green-breeks, his bright hair blood-boltered, to the charge of the watchman who soon appeared on the scene. Meanwhile, the bloody hanger was thrown into one of the Meadows ditches, and the boy who had wielded it slunk away in renewed shame and terror. Green-breeks was carried to the Infirmary, where his wound was tended, and where he remained for a few days. He was questioned closely, but, with true nobility, declined to give any account of how he had come by his wound or to offer any identification of his assailant. When we learned of this, our hearts were touched by his gallantry, and we took up a collection for him, which he disdained to accept, saying he would not sell his blood; he would take, he said, only some snuff for his grandmother, if we would be so obliging as to obtain it, for she was devoted to snuff and could ill afford it.

  I have often thought of Green-breeks and wondered what became of him. My younger brother, Mr Thomas Scott, who had also kept a warm memory of the lad, once proposed him as the subject of a novel, suggesting that he might be carried to Canada and involved in adventures with the colonists there. But nothing was made of it. Years later, when we dared to inform my father of this event, he reproached us, saying he wished he had been told at the time for he would have made it his business to help a boy of such spirit and nobility to establish himself in life. At the time, of course, on account of the sword, we were ashamed and afraid to speak, a circumstance which I now recall without surprise – for such feelings were natural to us at our age – but yet also with a degree of self-contempt.

  It is at odd moments – sometimes in dreams – that the image of the young Goth returns to me. I cannot believe that he will have dwindled into a mean or humdrum way of life. I never spoke to him, save on that occasion when he refused our proferred recompense and asked for snuff ‘for the auld woman’, but he has haunted my imagination strangely. When I met the young Lord Byron I could not but think of Green-breeks, for he had the same impetuosity, courage, and fire. But of that perhaps more later.

  I left the High School in the spring of 1783, and passed six months at my aunt’s in Kelso, where I attended the local Grammar School for a few hours a day, and formed a friendship with James Ballantyne, with whom I have ever since been so closely connected. My aunt’s house stood on the bank of the glittering and resolute Tweed, and there under a spreading plane-tree in her garden I first read Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry. I read throughout the summer day, dinner forgotten, till towards dusk anxiety grew and I was fetched back into the house.

  It is to this period of my life also that I trace the awakening of that feeling of delight in the natural beauty of the earth which has never deserted me, and to which I cling fast even now. The neighbourhood of Kelso – the most beautiful, if not the most Romantic, village in Scotland – is well calculated to arouse that feeling, for the landscape is not only lovely in itself, but rich in historical and legendary lore and associations, which to me are necessary for the complete enjoyment of natural beauty. This enjoyment is intensified when the associations belong also to one’s own immediate inheritance:

  ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ as the Israelites asked, exiled, by the waters of Babylon . . .

  Or, in a piece of doggerel, that has stuck in my mind since I first happened upon it:

  The streams of the southland are grand to the ee,

  But the streams o’ the southland are no’ part of me . . .

  That autumn I put away the black bonnet, the bright waistcoat and the brown corduroy breeches of the High School boy, and matriculated at the town’s college otherwise known as the University of Edinburgh. (If James VI and I had had his way it would have been known as King James’s College, for on his return visit to Edinburgh in 1618 he was so impressed by the manner of the Latin addresses to him that he proposed to bestow this royal recognition. But he went south again, and the thing or intention was, I suppose, forgotten.) I attended the class in Humanity which was ill conducted and where I made accordingly little progress. I also frequented Dr Dalzell’s Greek class, but since I was commencing ab initio while most of my fellow scholars had already mastered the basic grammar, I found myself all at sea, and covered my confusion by declaring that I saw no merit in Greek since Homer was in any case inferior to Ariosto, through whose works I had picked my way while at Kelso. This impudence aroused the contempt of Dr Dalzell, who therefore had little time for me. I sympathize with his impatience, and regret my attitude all the more, for I discovered later that he shared many of my prejudices. He used to maintain that Presbyterianism had killed Classical Scholarship in Scotland – ‘smoored it wi’ theology’, he said; and the celebrated English divine, the Revd Sydney Smith, once told me that Dalzell had complained to him that ‘If it had not been for that confounded Solemn League and Covenant, we would have made as good longs and shorts as England . . .’ Maybe so; certes, our best Classical Scholars in that seventeenth century so deformed by a narrow religious fanaticism were Cavaliers and subsequently Jacobites. But there’s ‘nae yeese greeting ower a spiled hairst’ as farmers say.

  That I derived little benefit from the College was not entirely my fault, however, for I suffered renewed ill-health during the first years of my attendance, and was confined to bed and a lowering vegetable diet:

  In my lone chamber lying,

  I span imaginary tops,

  I dreamed of knightly deeds,

  And eek of mutton cho
ps.

  My most prolonged spell in bed came during my second year of apprenticeship to my father’s law firm, though it was not – I think – a mere nervous reaction to the drudgery of my office work, my dislike for which I in any case endeavoured – with success, I believe – to conceal from my father, whose own reverence for the Law was such that my sentiments must have distressed him.

  The vegetable diet – coupled with the command that I must not even speak, which was a considerable deprivation for one of my conversational bent – affected me with a species of nervousness which I had never known before, and of which I am glad to say I have been free ever since, at least till these last months. I would start upon even slight alarms – I experienced a want of decision in even small matters – I was acutely sensible to what at other times would have been mere trifling inconvenience. All this I associated with my restricted diet, and have never been able to rid myself of the conviction that the association was just, though reason tries to persuade me that the condition may have been the result of the disease rather than the prescribed cure.