The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
man’ of over seventy, wearing clasped gambadoes on his legs, would call occasionally, and impatiently damn (but not using that word, of course,) the noisy ballad-shouting child who interrupted his sedater conversation.
Sixteen years later, Walter, then a young Edinburgh lawyer, called on Dr. Duncan, a fortnight before the old man’s death, and recorded his wonder at the mental vigour and fortitude of this writer of a forgotten History of the Revolution, who had once been impatient of a child’s noise....
But though he had no set tuition during these years, his mind found material on which to feed, perhaps with the greater vigour because it was at its own freedom to take or leave.
There were a few books in the farmhouse of a congenial kind. Ramsey’s Tea-table Miscellany was to be favourably remembered in later years. Josephus was so much loved, and Janet was so patient to repeat the reading of “favourite chapters” that the boy gave early evidence of prodigious memory by repeating long passages from memory before his own reading was sufficiently advanced to render him independent of his aunt’s assistance.
His grandmother, sitting quietly by the fireside in the evening of a long life, with thoughts that went back beyond her dead husband and scattered family, may have found as much pleasure in telling, as he in hearing, the tales which her own childhood had known.
Tales which were fading into a doubtful tradition, and which were to be restored by the immortality of his own genius, had been near and vivid to her. She may have talked more of others than of the Scotts of Harden and Buccleuch, for we must remember that she was a Haliburton herself, from the next county. Her favourite tales were of the Deil of Littledean, an outlaw of much repute and many exploits, who had married her mother’s sister, and might almost be regarded as one of the family.
But she told also of Watt of Harden, and of her husband’s father, Old Beardie Walter’s great-grandfather—and of much else which was to be the foundation of future knowledge.
And so the time passed, till the boy was in his eighth year, and he would run about, vigorously though awkwardly, on the shrunken limb, taking any comfort that he could from the fact that two of the ancestors of whom he had heard had (curiously enough) been lame too, and had overcome that obstacle to self-assertion, even in the days when the argument of physical fitness had been a first necessity for those who would come out on top in the rough struggle of Border life. Going far backward along the ancestral tree there was John Scott the Lamiter (circa 1300) who, while avoiding the discipline of the monasteries, appears to have taken up a life of scholarship with sufficient success to marry and leave children and a good repute at his death, though how he contrived this is beyond saying. And six generations later there was a Scott of Harden, commonly known as William Boltfoot, who boldly recognised that a man on horseback maybe none the worse for a lame leg, and became of a widely dreaded reputation as a fearless rider, and one whose spear a prudent man would prefer to shun.
Walter, by his own account, must have been nearly eight (he was born in August) in the summer when Janet went with him to Prestonpans. His leg (he was told) was to benefit from sea-bathing, and the decision to send him there may have been taken with this hope, but there are indications of other adjustments. Changes at Sandy-Knowe may have rendered it necessary for him to leave that hospitable roof, to which he did not return. Prestonpans may have been chosen—if Janet chose it—because it was there that she could meet George Constable, as, in fact, she did.
George Constable was a friend of Walter’s father. They had studied law together, but George had not practised, retiring to his own property, which was near Dundee. He was under fifty at this time. He seemed old to the child.
Yet it was clear that he was not only his father’s friend. He was the friend of his father’s sister also. They were constantly together, and Janet was not one to endure an uncongenial companionship. Yet it was a friendship which does not seem to have ended in discord, nor to have gained fruition in a closer intimacy. They both died unmarried. It is their matter, not ours.
Walter saw much of George Constable at a later date when, residing in Edinburgh, he used to be a regular guest at the Sunday dinner-table in George’s Square. He observed his licensed tendency to lead the conversation from his father’s Calvinistic austerities to subjects of history or antiquity, in which he more greatly delighted. He had humour, and was rich in anecdote, often drawn from his own experience. He remembered the ’45. He professed a hatred of women, and the memories of the young man, while he sat respectfully silent, went back to those childhood days at Prestonpans, when he had .observed Mr. Constable and his aunt together—and he was not sure.
Afterwards, he reproduced some of Constable’s peculiarities in the character of Jonathan Oldbuck, but without intending to give a recognisable portrait, and was surprised when George (Chalmers, a London solicitor who had known both Constable and his father, affirmed that he must be the author of the Antiquary as he recognised the original of that character.
But we are looking ahead. At Prestonpans, George Constable earned a grateful memory by finding intervals in his attentions to Janet in which he talked to the precocious child of Shakespeare’s characters, being apparently unable to contribute to the supply of ballads and local traditions which were his first demand upon every friendly acquaintance.
At Prestonpans, he also made the acquaintance of a retired veteran ‘Captain’ Dalgety, from whose memories he took the toll which he was already practised to extract from all whose reading or experience could add to the stores of his own mind.
By his own account, it was the summer of that campaign which ended in the disaster of Saratoga. Cornwallis, coming down from Canada, was to march through the wilderness of the backwoods, and take the rebel army in the rear. What would become of Washington then, already defeated and driven out of Long Island?
It was one of those ideas that are strategically sound, but inadequately operated. The old man and the child leaned over the map together. The veterans’ military pride clashed with the imagination of his young companion as they gazed upon it. The old soldier foretold the military triumph of England. The child’s eyes gazed upon the map, with its suggestions of wooded wilderness and rivers and entangling lakes, and the vital imagination and invincible sanity of judgement which would always enable him to see the strength and quality of the opposition darkened his mind with foreboding. The two disputed as to whether the news would be of disaster or triumph, and when the tale of Saratoga came, there was a cooling of this intimacy, for the veteran sulked.
That is Scott’s own account; but there is a difficulty here, which we must explain as we can. He was born on August 15, 1771. The surrender of Saratoga took place on October 15, 1777. At this date he was not ‘in his eighth year’. His age was six years and eight weeks. If we allow for the interval which must have elapsed—anything from six weeks to ten before the news could have reached Prestonpans—he will have been a few weeks older, and the season proportionably less propitious for sea bathing on the North Sea coast.
There is not only the difficulty of the increased precocity of the child’s understanding, which is implied by the alteration of date, there is the fact that, if we accept his statement as it stands, it alters the length of his stay at Sandy-Knowe, and the date at which he returned permanently to his parents’ home, which seems an improbable mistake for him to have made, for several reasons. But there must be some error in his statement. It is chronologically impossible.
Was the whole episode imaginary? It seems extremely unlikely. He had remarked, in other connections, on how accurate he found his memory of the events of his early years, when he was able to check it.
Is it not more probable that there was more than one visit to Prestonpans? More than one occasion for Janet and George Constable to stroll on the sea-shore, while Walter played with shells on the turf, and sailed boats on the tidal pools, as he remembered doing so clearly when he revisited the scenes in his closing years...?
There is another memory of these early years which came back to him, and was recorded at the other end of his life, when he attended the funeral of his uncle Raeburn. That was a recollection of when he was four or five, and was staying at his uncle’s home, Lessudden House. Under whatever circumstances, he must have been there for a considerable time, for