The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
a quite different cause, there is a similar process of denudation on the moors of Yorkshire today, where the heather advances and the birch-woods dwindle, and it is equally disregarded. But we may conclude that if Scott shall come to the owning of land in the time to be, it will be a good day for the land.
In the autumn of this year, on a sudden impulse, born of James Ballantyne’s importunity, Scott ceased the alterations and additions to the Lay on which he had been engaged since he got settled at Ashestiel, and gave it to him to go to press. He could not foresee the success it would win, but he knew it to be a greater thing than the ballads with which he had gained the position he already held. For these years, while it had been taking gradual shape, he had felt like a general who sees the fight go well, but knows that his best troops are still held back in reserve. He may well look with confidence to the hour when they will sweep forward across a field which is already won.
It is an axiom of prosody that a long poem cannot sustain its highest notes either of emotional intensity or verbal melody. There must be flat stretches between the hills. The prosodic standard for the long poem differs from that of the lyric, and is, in some respects, lower. We do not look for continuous gold. If a line sparkle here and there, we have our reward: the gold flashes amid the quartz. But it is the distinctive quality of the Lay that the lyric level is sustained, in which respect it did not conform to the accepted standards, or limitations, of epic, narrative or lyric poetry. It was a new thing.
Its lyric qualities support the evidences of substance and construction to prove that it was not hastily written. James Skene, having no experience of the writing of poetry, might believe that two cantos were the work of as many idle days. But, if it were so, it was not an act of genius: it was an act of God.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Lockhart explained Scott in his earlier years, as being the product of a mentor, a monitor, and a “lady of fashion,” to which trinity we should be proportionately grateful for what they gave us. In his thirty-fifth year, he can load him with laudatory adjectives, but he is still unwilling that he should stand alone. William Erskine, the monitor, is still beside him, and is still able to give the literary advice and guidance which he so obviously needs. He had two monitors now. William Erskine—and James Ballantyne! They are the joint reasons why he may prudently publish the Lay without sending it to Sunninghill for George Ellis to put it into shape. “With two such faithful friends within his reach, the author of the Lay might safely dispense with sending his MS. to be revised, even by George Ellis.”
That George Ellis would have had the stupidity (or the impudence) to attempt to revise the poem, had it been sent to him in MS., is an improbability which has no documentary support beyond the fact that he wrote proposing that Flaxman might illustrate it. Scott, with better judgement, thought Flaxman to be an unsuitable artist, and declined the suggestion. He did this by a letter written in the tone of deferential courtesy which he always used to those friends whom he admitted to an intellectual intimacy, and which often obscured the fact that, on essential points, he continued his own course. He added politely that he would have been pleased for Ellis to see the MS., and to have his “opinions and corrections”—but it had already gone to press.
That William Erskine ever altered as much as two words of the Lay, or attempted to do so, is an improbability unsupported by anything but Lockhart’s guessing, and when he guesses he is a very dangerous guide.
As to James Ballantyne, his position was different, and throughout the whole of Scott’s literary life, from this date almost to the end, he acted a very natural and necessary part.
The days of typewriters, of stenographers and dictaphones, had not yet dawned. Scott wrote with his own hand, at first on folio, but afterwards always on quarto sheets, in the small, neat, rapid script which he had practised as a copyist in his father’s office. He sent these sheets to the printer, to be set in type, and for the proofs to be returned for his own correction. For many years the output of Scott’s pen was the main financial support of the Border Press, and its greatest activity. James Ballantyne made the oversight and correction of these proofs his personal concern. He corrected obvious clerical errors in the rapidly written script, which were not frequent: he referred back to the author anything which was not clear to the compositor or himself.
When poetry gave place to fiction, this might be one of Ballantyne’s main occupations. There were times when Scott was writing incessantly—writing against time in the endeavour to get a novel rapidly through the press. It was being set in type, day by day, as its composition proceeded. Day by day, the new script went to the press, and the proofs of the previous sheets would come back for correction. Scott struggled to keep up with the press, or the press struggled to keep up with him.
At such times, it is more than possible that some of the “mere” commercial interests of the printing business—it is Lockhart’s adjective, not mine—may have been subordinated by both Ballantyne and Scott to their literary preoccupations, or they may have been delegated to less competent hands. If this were done to their own ultimate loss, we have no cause for complaint. It was to our gain, and it was they who suffered, not we. And, even by mere commercial standards, they might have shown some justification, for they laboured at the most vital point, either for attack or defence.
In these ways, the services that James Ballantyne rendered, though not of a monitorial kind, approached those of a secretary, and their value, within their natural limits, is beyond reasonable challenge. He was such a secretary as any author should be glad to have.
He took a keen interest in the advancing narrative of a novel, as its proofs passed through his hands, and if the author’s rapid writing left any point of incident or character obscure, he would naturally call attention to it, in the fourfold capacities of friend, partner, proof-corrector and printer. There were occasions, as the years passed, when he ventured expostulation in respect of features of plots which he thought would be unpopular. In the two instances of which we know, because Scott gave way to his importunity, and that of others—the weakening of the tragedy in St. Ronan’s Well, and the resurrection of Athelstan in Ivanhoe—Ballantyne was clearly wrong, as it might be expected that he would be. It is a distortion of fact to represent that Scott depended upon him, or anyone, at any time, for revision of what he wrote, and it would be absurd to discuss such a point, did not Lockhart imply it from time to time with a quiet persistence which gradually destroys the perspective in which Scott should be regarded, particularly in respect of his literary creations, in relation to his surrounding friends.
It is true that, in separate sentences, Lockhart states explicitly that Scott went his own way in these matters. (Yet, if so, why say it at all? Most authors do.) But, having done so, he will, in the course of a single paragraph, be as explicit in contradiction of his own assurance as when he says that Ballantyne “conveyed his mind on such matters with equal candour and delicacy during the whole of Scott’s brilliant career. In the vast majority of instances he found his friend acquiesce at once in the propriety of his suggestions.. Mr. Erskine was the referee whenever the poet hesitated about taking the hints of the zealous typographer; and his refined taste and gentle manners rendered his critical alliance highly valuable.”
Lockhart, though he wrote some forgotten novels, was a critic rather than an originator, of literature. He did not understand that great poets and great novelists usually write their own books.
CHAPTER XXX.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel was published in London in 1805, and had an instant success, on a scale which was beyond anticipation or precedent. A century later, it had become fashionable in literary circles to depreciate the genius of Scott, particularly as a poet. Smaller men, of meaner ideals and baser instincts, moved restlessly beneath so great a shadow. Literary neurotics questioned the possibility of great art taking on serene or courageous forms. Literary decadents were equally sure that art and obscenity were inseparable friends. Scott, they told each other, was in eclipse, and those who regarded them as intelligent guides repeated the clap-trap phrases in which they dismissed him to a decent obscurity. But it may be doubted whether the eclipse had much reality even then. He gave a light which did not penetrate to their own minds, but it was visible to a million others. And, today, the tide turns. Even the cant formula in which he is said to have been a greater