The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
weeks previously. But, in fact, Leyden had sailed when they arrived.
They went to stay with M. Charles Dumergue as before. He was a French refugee who had known Charlotte’s parents intimately, and who was always ready to give them hospitality when they came up to London together.
Scott brought with him, among other things, the incomplete manuscript of a long poem, which had at first been no more than a ballad, intended for the third volume of the Minstrelsy, but had grown to a size which had made that an impossible medium of publication. It had been written—more or less—during the previous year: may, indeed, be said to have been the principal work of that period, while he appeared to be fully occupied with other things.
James Skene had seen him writing busily when they had been in barracks together at Musselburgh in the autumn, and Scott had received a kick from a horse which had laid him up for three days, and after that he had shown him the first canto of the poem in a fairly complete condition. But we must accept the idea of hasty composition with important reservations, if at all. To a large extent they are contradicted by circumstantial evidence as to the way in which it developed: they are rendered extremely improbable by the internal evidences of the poem itself.
But it must have been either in the course of the journey to London, or after his interviews with booksellers there, that he came to a definite decision as to the title and form which it should take, and the manner of publication, for it was shortly after his arrival that he wrote to James Ballantyne with instructions that he wished an advertisement to be included in the third volume of the Minstrelsy which was to be worded thus:
“In the press, and will speedily be published, the Lay of the last Minstrel, by Walter Scott, Esq., Editor of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
Also Sir Tristrem, a Metrical Romance, by Thomas Ercildoune, called the Rhymer, edited from an ancient MS., with an Introduction and Notes, by Walter Scott, Esq.”
No doubt, when Scott drafted that announcement (giving James Ballantyne authority to alter it at his discretion) he anticipated that its forecast would be realised, and that, when the third volume of the Minstrelsy should appear, the two volumes would be actually “in the press”. He must have looked on the completion of the “Lay” as a thing to be lightly and swiftly done. The third volume of the Minstrelsy was in an advanced condition of the proof-sheet stage. Scott’s letter would stimulate Ballantyne to renewed efforts, with the news that the first two volumes were going well, and that Longman was well pleased with the quality of the 1,000 extra copies of them which he had ordered last year, and which had been already delivered.
Ballantyne had moved to Edinburgh. He had not sold his business at Kelso. He had come up to the capital city carting his machinery with him. He had taken premises of a very limited size in a side street near Holyrood, and put up a sign, The Border Press. He had done this only three months ago—a bold, it might be a ruinous step, relying upon Scott’s encouragement, and upon the quality of his own work. They had each shown confidence in the other, and their first venture together had been a success, in which each had won praise of its own kind.
James Ballantyne had founded the Kelso Mail, and built up his printing business, on a very limited capital. He had neither wealthy relatives, nor powerful friends. He had known and overcome financial difficulties enough, to reach the measure of success, of reputation, which he had won when he set out for Edinburgh. Lockhart regards these circumstances as though looking down from a height. It is an attitude which has the absurdity of one who would disparage the victory of a chess player because it had been won with fewer pieces than are usually allotted, or than an opponent held.
It had been won, in part, because James Ballantyne was something more than a commercial printer—or less, if you will. He was an artist in type.
There was danger in that, as well as strength. But Scott and he were both confident of the future, and of themselves. Wordsworth, meeting Scott in the following year, was amazed at the audacity of the plans he made. It was as though Napoleon, Consul of France, had spread maps of continents which he planned to win. But the anticipations at which Wordsworth wondered were less than the facts of the years to be. It was a battle of giants to which we are coming, great with incredible victories, with a final tragedy when world-forces shall bear it back, and almost bear it down at the last; and Lockhart could look at it without understanding, without imaginative sympathy, as a “painful,” ignoble thing: only remembering complacently that, at the battle’s crisis, he had refused the (possibly worthless) help that Constable asked him to give...
As to how the Lay was written, let us have dates. When we come to consider it in detail, we shall be able to connect its opening stanzas with the summer of 1800. Skene observed Scott to be busy upon its first canto in the autumn of 1802. Now, in the spring of 1803, he has its title fixed, and anticipates that it will soon be finished. Going back from London, and stopping with George Ellis for a week at Sunninghill, with Heber and Douce in their company, a considerable part of the first two or three cantos was read aloud while picnicking in Windsor Forest. It is a reasonable presumption that the later cantos, if they existed at all, were too embryonic for production. In the following autumn, Wordsworth speaks of the first four cantos as having been read to him. The third volume of the Minstrelsy, which was first to have included the Lay, and then announced that it and Sir Tristrem were separately “in the press”, was published in May 1803. Sir Tristrem was published in May 1804. The Lay appeared in January 1805. So far from there being strong presumptive-evidence to support the common assertion that it was hastily written, the evidence is circumstantially and overwhelmingly opposite, and it is just what anyone with experience of writing poetry would expect. It has abundant internal evidences of being an experimental work that was neither swiftly nor completely born. It sprang first from a seed in the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who begot something which he could not have conceived. It groped blindly for shape, and grew to a final form and a final beauty, which its beginnings had not shown. Had the same years of careful work been spent (for instance) upon the Lord of the Isles, it would have been a more excellent thing. We cannot assess fairly the importance of the work of these years 1800-04, without realising that Scott was continually preoccupied with the construction or composition of the Lay during that period, but what it was we must leave to be dealt with later.
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Scotts travelled back to Lasswade by way of Oxford, in the company of Richard Heber, who was going to his own place, and they stayed there long enough to make the acquaintance of his brother, Reginald, who was not then a Calcutta Bishop, nor the world-known author of a missionary hymn, but had just won the poetry prize of the year at Brazenose College, and brought the manuscript with him to the breakfast table for Scott to see.
We might linger pleasantly at Oxford with the Scotts, or at Blenheim which they also visited, making new friends continually, but the difficulty is that to be introduced to all the friends that they made as the years passed is to stop to look at everyone of literary, most of political, and many of those of social or military reputation in the United Kingdom over a period of thirty or forty years. They crowd into the picture, each with his own individuality, his own background. To look at them once, is to be tempted to look again. The sentence becomes a paragraph, and the paragraph a chapter.
Unless we would have a universal biography of the period, we must turn resolutely aside. We have glanced at the group in Sunninghill, and beneath the oak trees in Windsor Forest, but we have avoided being introduced. We have not even looked at the ‘indefatigable and obliging’ Douce; and the London conversations with Rogers, and Mackintosh, and William Stewart Rose, have passed unheard.
After Oxford, there is no record of any further break in the return journey. The whole visit had been very short for so expensive and laborious an expedition as a journey to London was at that period. But Charlotte must have had many thoughts of the three small children that she had left in the Lasswade cottage, including a baby that was still only ten weeks old, and Scott had many interests to which to look forward on his return. In fact, he got back to Edinburgh in time to see the third volume of the Minstrelsy published at the end of May.
It was during this summer that there came the remonstrance from the Lord-Lieutenant of Selkirkshire to which allusion has been made already, and that it was recognised that the leaving