The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
this, and though his uncle did, the two never liked each other afterwards. Scott did much for his family, and Raeburn showed no gratitude, taking it as being done for his wife and children rather than for him, and Scott, in his scrupulous justice, admitted the fairness of this in his own mind.
CHAPTER VI.
It was in the autumn following his eighth birthday, if we follow his own recollection and a balance of probabilities, that Walter returned to his parents’ home in George’s Square, which was to be his permanent residence until his marriage about eighteen years later.
Up to then he had been, in his own phrase, “a single indulged brat,” and his first experience as an unimportant member of a large family left a recollection of misery which time did not obliterate, though he could analyse it without bitterness, and met it at the time with a measure of good sense and good temper which showed that character is something more than the product of its own environment.
Robert, the naval officer to be, and John, who was to take up a military life, were from three to five years older than himself; Anne was about a year his junior: Tom, destined to succeed to their father’s practice, and Daniel, destined to nothing better than a life of failure, completed the family.
It was about this time than Anne suffered from the almost fatal accident which physically wrecked her life. She is one of those tragedies of human existence of whom no biographies are written, and whose lives are only regarded when they obtrude upon the stage of some more dominating personality. Yet had the scales of fate tilted a different way, as Walter might have remained at home to die of infantile paralysis, or might have been buried in moorland moss with the wound of a mad woman’s scissors in his throat, so she might have used her gift of imagination to a purpose as great as he. We can do no more than guess, and perhaps, if we could see with clearer eyes, the difference would be no more than a little thing.
She was a child who walked blindly in a world of dreams. It was a quieter world than we know today, when such a one would end promptly beneath a lorry’s wheels, but its dangers were too many for her. Her hand was badly crushed in a wind-swung door: her halt-drowned body was dragged out of an old quarry-hole in the open ground, known as Brown’s Park, which was then on the south side of George’s Square: before she was six, her clothing had caught fire when she was in a room alone. She survived this last catastrophe, after a long illness, with a broken constitution and a disfigured face. She died before she was thirty. She was devoted to Walter, the lame brother who was so near in age to herself, and who dreamed to such different ends. She lived long enough to give swift friendship and loyal advocacy to Charlotte Charpentier, when Walter brought her, a gay, courageous, foreign, frightened girl, to be his wife in the cold Edinburgh atmosphere.
Looking at it as a whole, there seems to be a Divine cruelty in such a life as Anne’s, which opens with a brightness of morning dreams, and is so quickly clouded. A barren, physically frustrated life, with an inward bitterness which was sometimes bitter to others. Yet the thought may be no more than the folly of ignorance. Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten of God?
Robert bullied the new-comer, to whom the experience did no harm. Indeed, the balance may have been in the other scale. But to Robert, his disposition being as it was, it was misfortune that he was the eldest of the five brothers.
He was a boy of many fine qualities rather floridly worn, but of an overbearing disposition. Afterwards, as a young naval officer, he did well. He was in ‘almost all’ Rodney’s battles, and came safely through. Walter says that he was a lover of literature, music, and the mechanical arts, could sing a good song, tell a good tale, and even wrote a good elegy in the then-conventional manner on the April night of 1782, when he was a midshipman of sixteen, and the English fleet was cleared for the action of the following day.
And for these things? in spite of his “capricious tyranny”, Walter ‘loved him much’. But he was barely eighteen when the peace of 1782 apparently ended the prospects of rapid naval advancement, and so he resigned his commission, and joined the East India Company’s service. That, at least, was the argument, but it was complicated by the fact that he considered that he had been badly treated by a superior officer. We know nothing of the rights and wrongs of this quarrel. The naval discipline of those days could not have been easy to endure, and the East may have called to Robert’s imagination, as it has done to thousands of others before and since. But it was a fatal decision for him. He made two voyages, and contracted some tropical disease of which he died.
Walter held the belief that had Robert continued in the navy he would have made a name in the great wars that were soon to follow. Like Anne’s, it is the record of a frustrated—perhaps we should say self-frustrated—life. The boy’s adventurous, too-impatient spirit was soon quietened in its Indian grave. But before we call such a life vain, we might do well to define the standards of vanity by which we judge.
And as we trace the history, one by one, of the children of any numerous household, and watch the impact of character and circumstance, and the accidents of mortality, we may pause to consider the modern theory of the advantages of the limited family, the sheltered existence, the ‘best’ schools, the concentration of every approved stimulus upon a single life, and wonder, by several standards, whether its premises are quite sound.
Robert, who died young, has yet left a clear impression of personality, John, who lived longer, is a less emphatic figure in the family picture. He went into the army, and at the age of forty he held the rank of Brevet-Major in the 73rd regiment. So far, merit and seniority neither of much avail without influence at that period—appear to have been responsible for such promotions as he had gained; then the intervention of Mr. Canning secured his commission as major of the regiment’s second battalion. But his health broke down almost at the same time. He retired from the army, lived an invalid’s life with their mother for a few years, and died before he was forty-eight.
Of Walter’s younger brothers there may be more to be seen, bad or good, at a later time.
Whatever hardship there might be for an indulged and sensitive child in adjusting his egotism to the routines and dominations of family life was mitigated by his mother, who gave him the understanding sympathy without which love itself may be vain. She found space for his bed in her own dressing-room: she found time to guide his reading, and to listen while he read aloud—from Pope’s Iliad in particular—and to discuss what was read. The child noticed the exertion of a gentle pressure: to divert his mind from the grotesque and terrible, in which at that time it most delighted, to the consideration of nobler and serener things. That he was not influenced by his mother’s intellectual and moral standards would be too emphatic an assertion. His love and admiration for her continued to her life’s then distant end, and with such relations prevailing, some influence there must have been. But his own personality, both in character and intellect, was too strong to be widely diverted either by the pressure of circumstance or the dominations of other minds. He might suffer ‘internal agony’ from the first impacts of unkindness, when subjected to his brother’s capricious and bullying moods, but it did not blind him to that brother’s more admirable qualities, nor alienate his natural affection from him; he was conscious of his mother’s moral or literary preferences, but she could not lessen his own delight in tales of wonder or terror, about which he wrote many years after “I have remained a child, even unto this day”.
But the sanctuary of his mother’s dressing-room, in which he slept, through her protective partiality or the exigences of a rather crowded household, gave him the full advantages of all that her own mind could offer to his eager intellectual appetite, with access to the Shakespearean plays which she kept there for her own reading.
His own witness is that he owed more to his mother than to any other, more even than to his grandmother or Janet Scott, for the power to realise vividly and to accurately reproduce the incidents and characters of the legendary history of Scotland which were to provide the substance for so many future romances both in verse and prose.
It is with this return to his parents’ home that the formal ritual of education began. It is customary to represent it as having been delayed by the ill-health of his early years, and to have been distinguished by some subsequent deficiencies both of conduct and opportunity.