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  It was about this time, during an intermittence in my illness, that I had my one meeting with Robert Burns. It was at an evening at Professor Ferguson’s house at Sciennes. Being but a lad, I was naturally silent and anxious to observe rather than participate; but it happened that Burns’s eye was caught by a print, and that he was moved by the verse attached. He read it aloud, and asked the company if any knew its provenance. By a lucky chance I recalled that the lines came from an almost forgotten poem by Langhorne, with the unpromising title ‘The Justice of the Peace’. I imparted this information, in a whisper, to my neighbour, who passed it on to Burns, indicating that I was the source. He thanked me with a graciousness which I am still happy to recall.

  What impressed me was his eye. It was large and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such an eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time. It was a penetrating gaze, which seemed to draw on deep reserves, on a profound well of intellect and emotion.

  With that illness childhood passed away. I rose from my bed, taller, robust, despite the vegetable diet. I was ready for any adventure, though bound by my father’s wish, to the desk of my apprenticeship. Yet my mind ran free. I do not think I can ever have had the temerity to describe myself as well-educated, for there was no pattern in my extensive reading. I read for pleasure and my own peculiar enlightenment. There have been times when I could have wished to have had a more perfectly formed mind, but in general I have had the sense to put these thoughts behind me. My education made me what I am, and a more regular one might have stifled these impulses which have made me minstrel, poet, novelist. I went where the wind blew me, but with a certain native prudence I kenned the airt from which it came.

  3

  Tamlane, Fairies and Superstition: Reflections, 1826

  All day in the Court the old rhyme ran in my head:

  I quit my body when I please,

  Or unto it repair;

  We can inhabit, at our ease,

  In either earth or air.

  As I made my way down the Mound, with a sharp wind throwing the haar from the Firth in my face, I found my hand cramped on the head of my stick, and a pain – heart? – heartache? – I do not know – caught me behind the breastbone. For a moment the hum of the town was strangely still, as if I had been carried from it . . .

  There came a wind out of the north,

  A sharp wind and a snell;

  And a dead sleep came over me,

  And frae my horse I fell.

  We belong to a rational age. I hear that on all sides, and would think myself a credulous fool if I doubted it. But then I think myself equally credulous for accepting the dictum. Superstition is foolishness we have gotten ourselves beyond; yet, in the mirk light, in the owl-time, in solitude, can any man of imagination not feel other worlds pressing about him? Can he be certain that reality yields itself only to the intellect?

  James Hogg tells me – swears to me – that his grandfather, old Will o’ the Phaup, saw the fairies dance at Carterhaugh, less than a mile from the Duke’s seat of Bowhill. In that meadow, between Yarrow and Ettrick, I have had an old woman indicate to me the electrical rings which she assured me were the trace of fairy revels.

  ‘Just there, shirra,’ she said, ‘just there, they put the stands of milk, and of watter, in whilk young Tamlane was dunkit, tae restore him to mortal man . . .’ Then she led me a few yards further, and remarked how no grass grew where the stands had been placed, and gestured to a thicket of alder and hawthorn, where, she said, Miles Cross (a corruption, as I think, of Mary’s Cross) had stood, beside which Janet in the Ballad had waited for the arrival of the Fairy host.

  When I got one version of that Ballad from old Mistress Hogg, James’s worthy mother, she said to me:

  ‘But you’ll nae prent that, shirra, for it wadna please the gude neighbours to see the words written doon . . .’

  The ‘good neighbours’ is the term which the old folk of Selkirkshire still apply to the fairies. It is no doubt intended to propitiate them, in the same manner as in some parts of Scotland, the Devil is referred to as ‘the good man’. This, however, can have another signification, for the ‘gudeman’ in our Scotch tongue is the name given to the tenant of a farm or piece of land; and so Satan or Lucifer is taken to be the tenant of the infernal regions. It used also to be the custom to leave a portion of a field unploughed, which was known as the ‘gudeman’s croft’. This was almost certainly an act of propitiation.

  There are parts of my own life which I prefer to leave unexamined – and some might term that a species of moral ‘gudeman’s croft’. Again, of course, there is a reasonable explanation, which satisfies . . . reason: that I consider the habit of self-examination pernicious and debilitating.

  When I wrote in the Minstrelsy a long introduction to the ballad of Tamlane – as in subsequent writings on Witchcraft and Demonology – I adopted the robust sceptical tone proper to an educated man of this generation; and I do not doubt that I was right. The cruelties that have been perpetrated on account of the widespread belief in these matters are abominable, and it is good that we have got beyond such nonsense.

  Yet I had a lurcher bitch once that would not pass a wood where a man had hanged himself. Reason told me the wood was not altered by that action; the dog’s reluctance, which must have been occasioned by something imperceptible to me, contradicted reason:

  I quit my body when I please,

  Or unto it repair;

  We can inhabit, at our ease,

  In either earth or air.

  It is not difficult to formulate an exegesis of the belief, formerly almost universally held, in the presence and power of fairies, elves, goblins and other sprites. They may be considered the residual deities of the old religion that flourished before Christianity opened men’s eyes to truth.

  Another more recent memory comes upon me. It so happened that one night I found myself in the Cowgate, that sad street once the abode of the great nobility of Scotland; the great Cardinal Beaton, murdered in his castle of St Andrews by John Knox and other fanatical reformers, who included the black-hearted Sir James Balfour, had his Edinburgh palace there. The street is now sadly decayed and given over to the poorer sort of folk. It runs parallel, I must explain to those ignorant of Edinburgh, to the High Street, but at a lower level. Memories hang about it, of both revelry and dark deeds. I have heard it called a secret street of blood. Now I had been drinking in a tavern, but not so deep as to dull my senses. Indeed they were rather at that point when they seemed more alert than usual, when the eye picks out with unaccustomed clarity relations between buildings and the sky to which it is habitually blind. For some reason that escapes me I turned off up the steps that lead to a noisome close that goes by the name of Hastie’s, and, being in a contemplative frame of mind, and, as I say, alert to the relation of objects, I leaned against a wall and lit a cheroot. My mood was placid and I even made verses in my head, as has often been my wont in such a condition – verses that on the occasion of which I speak have quite fled from me. As I rested there, at peace with man and the world, I felt even in that dead night a chill wind strike against my cheek, and there came upon me a sudden fear. Music started around me, but music such as I have rarely heard, a thin dancing fiddle that played a tune with no melody, and yet seemed to summon the listeners to a dance. A cloud slid over the moon, and I was assailed by a consciousness of a circumvallent evil. The houses were dark and still; no sound came from them, and I knew that the fiddle was played by no earthly being. I say ‘I knew’, because at that moment I had no doubt. I would have fled. I count myself a man of at least ordinary courage; yet I would have fled. But my feet would not respond to my will. Then the threat offered by the music died away. Its tone altered. I heard in it a softer invitation, and involuntarily my feet now mounted the steps in the direction in which the fiddle seemed to beckon. I looked up and, at the top of the steps, I saw three fig
ures: the first, the fiddler, in sharp profile, with long hair over his shoulders; the second, an old dame crouched on a stool and smoking a pipe; and the third, myself, Walter Scott. The old woman turned to him, and took his hand, and indicated with her pipe at a fourth figure now emerging from the gloom: a slim girl, barefoot and with her head thrown back as if she was laughing. Yet no sound came but that of the mocking and inviting fiddle.

  Then there was silence. A universal darkness covered all. I do not know if my will had rebelled. I only recall the inclination which I had experienced, and the feeling of sadness and loss which now suffused me.

  And was I called to Elfland, cuddy,

  Where the white lilies bloom

  Or to that mirk, mirk land, cuddy,

  The shades ayont the tomb.

  My fear fled with the vision and the dying of the fiddle. I shook myself like a spaniel emerging from the Tweed.

  ‘Weel, this is unco strange,’ I said, ‘is it no, Walter Scott, o’ the Faculty of Advocates?’

  But however reason re-asserts itself, such things cannot be forgotten.

  There is a house in the West Bow, uninhabited for more than a hundred and fifty years because it was the dwelling-place of Major Weir, known as ‘Angelical Thomas’ on account of his fervour in preaching, till he confessed his dealings with the Devil, and was burnt at the stake, refusing the consolations of religion and crying out, ‘I have lived like a beast. Let me die like a beast.’

  Will o’ Wisp before them went,

  Sent forth a twinkling light;

  And soon she saw the Fairy bands

  All riding in her sight.

  And first gaed by the black black steed,

  And then gaed by the brown;

  But fast she gript the milk-white steed,

  And pu’d the rider down . . .

  You have to be a man of determined narrow rationality to find such stuff merely fanciful; and if you are such a man, go and stand in Hastie’s Close on a night twixt moon and mirk.

  4

  First and Second Love, 1791–1826

  There are men who make love, love affairs, and the pursuit of women the main business of life. It has never been my way, and, truth to tell, I consider it a more proper mode of conduct for a Frenchman than a Scot. There is something demeaning, even unmanly, about it. Of course there are others – Byron, I fancy, was one of them – who are themselves so frequently, even incessantly, the objects of pursuit – women’s prey – that they can scarcely be blamed for succumbing more often than may be thought decorous or moral. I am thankful that I have belonged to neither type, for when one considers how many hours must be passed in the whole weary rigmarole of seduction, or being seduced, it can be no wonder that the poor wretches are so often not only exhausted, but unfitted for, and denied, many of the more varied and even vigorous pleasures of existence. Old Baret in Elizabeth’s reign describes such carpet-knights as ‘those which serve abominable and filthy idleness’; to see a French fop enter a drawing-room has ever been enough to turn my stomach, usually a robust organ.

  Conversely, however, the man who knows not love may be compared to a miser of the emotions. It is true that I have never been a great hand at depicting the tender passion in my novels, and this may fairly be accounted a deficiency. Yet when I read a book such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Monsieur Laclos – though I can admire the skill of its execution – my ain deficiency is one which I do not regret but rather thole happily.

  And yet, and yet, if I cannot summon up the complacency of Sir Andrew and say ‘I was adored once too’, I can turn it round and confess that I have adored.

  It began in the kirk, Greyfriars Kirk, on a wet Sunday in I forget which month of the year 1791. Looking across the pews, during a sermon that was even longer and more soporific than young men of sense usually discover sermons to be, I caught sight of a profile of such perfection that . . . that what? – that in the language of cheap romance, I was smitten. It was a young girl of no more than fifteen or sixteen. When she turned towards me I saw that the full face was worthy of the profile, but it was nevertheless the profile that ensnared me. She had large blue eyes, soft dark chestnut ringlets that framed the profile exquisitely, a complexion of cream and roses which turned more rosy as she caught my eye upon her, a generous mouth, and lips inviting the madness of kissing. Ever since, I have never been able to mock the young who declare their belief in that phenomenon ‘love at first sight’. Indeed I would rather agree with Marlowe that ‘whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?’

  As we left the kirk, the rain – cold, sleety, Edinburgh rain blown slanting on the wind – had come on, and I was delighted to see that she was without an umbrella. I unfurled mine like a warship hoisting sail in pursuit, and was by her side, gallant as any cavalier. She accepted the protection I offered with a smile of the utmost sweetness, and then before we could engage in conversation – which was perhaps just as well since my tongue was tied as tight as a sailor’s knot – her mother, umbrellaed, hove into sight.

  As it happened she knew me – ‘young Mr Scott,’ says she, ‘how kind of you’, not adding the words that flew into my mind ‘to a damsel in distress’. I recognized her, too, as Lady Jane Belsches of Fettercairn, an acquaintance of my parents – perhaps her husband was one of my father’s clients, but of that I cannot at this distance of time be certain. The mother’s arrival freed my tongue. I was able to talk of common everyday matters, attempting to do so in a manner that might show off what I had of wit and intelligence without exposing me to the charge of coxcombery. I escorted them home, was invited in to take a dish of tea, accepted willingly. Conversation ensued – again memory tells me nothing of what was said; but I was conscious that even in my state of immediate and utter besotment, I did not acquit myself too badly. When I dared – that is to say, when Lady Jane’s glance was abstracted – I shot a look at the girl, whom I had discovered to be called Williamina. That look was intended to convey to her that I had constituted myself her knight, that the gesture with the umbrella meant at least as much as Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cloak on the puddle before Queen Elizabeth. She responded to this evidence of my passion with a demure lowering of those cornflower eyes, an action which intensified, if that were possible, my emotion, for it suggested to me that she was not wholly indifferent. Then, with a tact which I can still admire, I took my leave while my presence was yet welcome, a gesture of civility which was rewarded by an assurance from Lady Jane that she hoped I should feel free to call on them again. Free to call upon them again? I should have felt free to scale the wall of the tenement which they inhabited.

  Our acquaintance ripened. To attempt to recall the conversation of two young people falling in love would be absurd at such a distance of time. No doubt for the most part like the generality of lovers we spoke a mixture of nonsense, reticence, and the occasional expression revealing something of our deepest feelings, from which, no doubt, with a like characteristic modesty, we retired with a blush and a stammer.

  Certainly, however, we grew closer together, so much so that my father, honest man, thought it proper to speak to Sir John about the matter. He was, and it is to his credit, fully aware of the difference in rank, for not only was Sir John a baronet, but Lady Jane was the daughter of the Earl of Leven and Melville. Some may think this paternal intervention harsh. Nevertheless I see now – and, I believe, felt even then – that his warning proceeded from his certainty of what was in my own best interests, for he could not believe that Williamina’s parents would consent to what at that period in my life and our family’s history must have been judged by the world to be a misalliance; he did not wish to expose me to the charge of being a fortune-hunter; and he hoped – I am certain – that by nipping the affair in the bud, he would save me from pain, disappointment, and the censure of the world. That such intervention must cause me immediate pain may not have occurred to the worthy man, whose virtues did not extend to a great degree of sensitivity in matters of the heart. Yet even
if it had occurred to him, he would not have refrained from performing what he considered to be his duty.

  Curiously, perhaps, Sir John did not appear to be perturbed. He thanked my father for his care for the interests of all concerned, but assured him that he had formed a great respect for ‘the young man’, as he called me, and was therefore not disposed to bring matters to a halt. It would be presumptuous in me to suggest that he had discerned gifts or qualities in my character of which I had not as yet given any sign to the world in general. It may rather be that he enjoyed my company, for he certainly responded to my youthful enthusiasm, and frequently urged me on to wilder flights of conversational fancy and anecdote. But I think it most probable that he assumed that the affair, like the bonfires gardeners make of autumn leaves, would, unlike the bush that summoned Moses to the service of the Almighty, consume itself in its own good time.

  Be that as it may, for three years I was in a dream of love. My friends were accustomed to toast my devotion to the ‘Lady of the Green Mantle’ as we agreed, in chivalric fashion, to term her. My hopes ran high, especially when, in the spring of 1796, I paid a prolonged visit to the family seat at Fettercairn. I was on the verge of proposing marriage, though in truth my material circumstances did not yet warrant such a step, at least in connection with such a bride. And then all evaporated. In the autumn, Williamina’s engagement was announced to the banker Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, who had been a friend of mine in College and in the Edinburgh Volunteer Light Horse.

  I do not know what determined her. She had an affection for Sir William, but then she had an affection for me also. Perhaps there was something wild and uncertain in me which alarmed her – I was already translating German poetry, not, I would propose, an activity alarming in itself, but one suggestive of a strain in my nature which she may have found disconcerting. A man is bound to seek explanations for the preference shown to a rival in love, and it is unlikely that he will hit on the true one. Perhaps Lady Jane persuaded her. I do not know, for, though she had always stood my friend, there is a profound gulf fixed between the enjoyment of the company of a young man and his acceptability as a son-in-law. Certainly Sir William had more to offer in material terms, and no wise mother will disregard such a consideration.