The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
engrossing occupations, and a note in his journal, written twenty-two years later, shows how little he had the temperament which successful advocacy requires.
“Was engaged the whole day,” (he noted) “upon Sheriff Court processes. There is something sickening in seeing poor devils drawn into great expenses about trifles by interested attorneys. But too cheap access to litigation has its evils on the other hand, for the proneness of the lower class to gratify spite and revenge in this way would be a dreadful evil were they able to endure the expense. Very few cases come before the Sheriff Court at Selkirk that ought to come anywhere.... I try to check it, as well as I can....”
CHAPTER XXVII.
The publication of Sir Tristrem was not placed with a London firm. It was entrusted to Archibald Constable, the young bookseller at whose shop Richard Heber had met John Leyden two or three years earlier.
Archibald Constable’s book-selling business increased, and he had already made one or two successful publishing ventures. As to Sir Tristrem, he had a clear opinion as to how it should be produced, and sufficient force of character to have his own way.
It was not a book from which substantial profit could be reasonably anticipated. The edition should be limited to 150 highly-priced copies. So it was agreed, not without reluctance. They were sold at £2. 2. 0. each. The cost of paper and printing was covered. The production of the Border Press was admired. The author’s pocket may not have benefited, but his reputation grew.
It was at the beginning of May 1804 that Sir Tristrem appeared, and the decision to leave Lasswade was already definite, and the new home had been found.
Hesitant search in other directions had been abruptly ended by the death of an uncle, Colonel Russell, who had had a house on the Tweedside, a few miles from Selkirk. Colonel Russell had married one of Anne Rutherford’s sisters, one of the elder family. He had children of his own—cousins of Walter Scott, of whom we may hear again—but his death broke up the home, his eldest son being in India. The house was not for sale, but was offered to Scott on lease. There was a small farm beside it, which he also took.
While these negotiations were approaching completion, Captain Robert Scott died at Kelso. He left Rosebank, and thirty acres of fertile land around it to his favourite nephew. There was some temptation to Scott to live in a house that was his own freehold, and Kelso was a place of pleasant memories, and delightfully situated. But it was not quite where he wished to be, and the rural qualities of Rosebank were being reduced by surrounding building. It was neither country nor town. On the other hand, it would sell well. The final decision was to sign the Ashestiel lease, and to let Rosebank go. Later in the year, it was sold for £5,000, and Scott found his finances substantially improved
As an alternative to Ashestiel, there was a small estate called Broadmeadows, on Yarrow-bank, which it was known would be put up for sale during the summer, and the idea of using the proceeds of Rosebank to acquire this property had an allurement which was not easily put aside. Lockhart considers it “in one point of view, the greatest misfortune of his life” that Scott did not do this. He points out that he now had an income, jointly with Charlotte, of about £1,000, without any great personal exertion. He could have avoided the “mere” commercial direction in which the bulk of the money was ultimately invested.
It is a point of view with which many will sympathise. It is possible that poems and novels such as he afterwards gave to the world might have been written in a retirement of quiet peace. It is possible, but much less than sure. It is certain that Scott, being what he was, would not have accepted such a scheme of life in his thirty-fourth year. Besides, he had an obligation to Ballantyne in honour, if not in law, and it was in that direction, a few months later, that a large part of the money was to be invested, as we shall see when we come to the events of the next year.
It is useless, at any stage of his life, to represent Scott as being driven by stronger forces, which Lockhart will continually attempt to do. Because he spoke with a smile to those among whom he moved: because he was always ready to give help to the extent of his own wisdom or his purse’s depth, with the understanding sympathy which is more than wisdom or gold, Lockhart fails to see that he dominated, though he may not have domineered, and in doing this he reduces an epic to the dimensions of his own mind.
He does not see that Scott was a born adventurer, whether in life or art. He would have been of this disposition at any time, in any circumstances, in any occupation. Born at any period of the world’s history, whether on a conspicuous stage or in some village obscurity, he would have played high, whether to success or disaster.
Ballantyne may have made many mistakes, he may have committed many imprudences—follies—neglects—he may have been of a doubtful honour, he may have eaten and drunk to excess as the years passed. He may—or he may not. But it was Scott’s audacious dreaming which loaded up the Kelso printing-presses on the road to Edinburgh: it was Scott’s genius which made those audacious dreams come true. Scott planned the campaigns. Ballantyne, at the most, was no more than Soult to his own Napoleon. If it be said that Ballantyne commanded on the commercial wing, and it was that wing, at the last, which was driven in, the reply is not only that, time after time, as the years passed, and some crisis of financial battle came, Scott was in personal control of the operations; it goes beyond that to ask what Napoleon have we here, who is alleged to have appointed a muddle-headed, incompetent, slothful field-marshal, and continued to entrust him with that position for nearly thirty years?
It is also to be remembered that defeat does not always imply incompetence in those who sustain it. Twenty years later, in an extremity of world-wide financial crisis, similar to, but more acute than that of 1931-2, the great book-distributing firm of Hurst & Robinson went down. That disaster involved the ruin of Archibald Constable, and his ruin involved that of Ballantyne & Co., which involved that of Walter Scott, who was a partner in the printing business. These events caused the exposure of many financial transactions and circumstances which would otherwise have been private to the parties concerned. Lockhart recounted them in some detail, and with the implication that Scott was deserving of serious condemnation, which he would have avoided if he could, had not the facts been too plain. He uses the curious adjective “painful”. He says explicitly in the course of the subsequent controversy which he provoked, that he made “no such ridiculous attempt” as to show that Scott was “without blame in the conduct of his pecuniary affairs”. He assumed, as those who only understand commercial matters from the outside are apt to do, that failure and disgrace are synonymous. But he represented Scott’s position as being due mainly to over-confidence in James Ballantyne and his brother John, by whom, and through whose incompetence, that confidence was abused and betrayed. He also represented that Scott was imprudent in investing the very large profits that his novels made in the purchase of land. And though this may sound somewhat remote as a cause of failure, popular imagination, which likes its explanations to be simple and picturesque, has seized upon this idea, and, rightly or wrongly, Scott is now commonly believed to have overreached himself through an inordinate and rather vulgar ambition to become a great landowner, and to have contrived his own ruin in consequence.
The friends of James Ballantyne did not accept Lockhart’s account of these events with complaisance. They issued a pamphlet, which they entitled Refutations of the Misstatements and Calumnies contained in Mr. Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, by the Trustees and Son of the late James Ballantyne.
The title of this pamphlet is indicative of its authors’ style. It pours words. It makes explicit accusations of mendacity against Lockhart, some of which cannot be dismissed without serious examination. It asserts that James Ballantyne was ruined entirely through having placed his confidence in Sir Walter Scott, that he had made large profits which he had left in the business, and that, through Scott’s reckless speculative follies, all the accumulations of a life of successful industry had been swept away.
Many of its assertions were extremely disputable, and some were palpably false. Lockhart replied, in a spirit of contempt, and with far greater controversial skill. He carried war into the enemies’ country, showing the weakness of their positions rather than the strength of his own.
It is proverbially easy to be wise after the event, but it is less so to judge precedent