The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright

loyal friends, owed much to Janet Scott during the years that followed.

      He had been about two years at Sandy-Knowe when someone suggested to his parents that the waters of Bath would be of benefit to the shrunken limb. The idea proved to be of no value, and the change was probably detrimental if weighed in a purely physical scale, but it seemed to the family to be a chance worth trying, though it was a more portentous and relatively expensive enterprise than it would be today. Coaches were slow. Roads were bad, and sometimes dangerous. Janet volunteered She was not young, as a woman’s youth was reckoned at that period. She was over thirty. But it was a time when even mature women did not readily adventure such expeditions, with no company but that of a young child.

      Walter, watching with a child’s comprehending silence, and storing everything in a memory the range and accuracy of which have been rarely equalled, thought that she was reluctant to face the ordeal. But, if it were so, her affection for him was strong enough to dominate her weaker fears, or her private plans. Indeed, it is hard to see who else could have gone, unless it had been a younger aunt in Edinburgh, Christian Rutherford, for which, had she been willing, there might have been a score of difficulties which can only be guessed today. Rather than that he should miss an opportunity of being healed, or pass into the charge of strangers, Janet said she would take him.

      It is an illuminating comment on the state of the Northern roads that it was considered safest to go to London by sea, and then complete the journey by the famous age-old thoroughfare of the Bath road.

      So Janet, with her three-year-old charge, faced the primitive conditions of a voyage in the small sailing-vessels that traded between Leith and London at that period, and made an eventless passage in the Duchess of Buccleuch—a name which suggests that some members of the Scott family may have been among its owners—leaving us no record either of hindering storm or the sight of a pirate’s sails, and landed safely in London, where they delayed their journey sufficiently to visit its most famous buildings, and other places of interest. Walter records that when he inspected the Abbey and the Tower of London twenty-five years later, he was surprised to find how accurately he had remembered them through the intervening years, and that this experience increased his confidence in other infant memories which could not be checked in the same way.

      They remained at Bath for about a year, Walter going through the routines of the pump-room without any apparent benefit, and attending for three months at a dame’s school which was near their lodging, where he learned to read.

      He owed his most vivid memory of this period to Janet’s sailor brother, Captain Robert Scott, (for though the first had jibbed, the second Robert, like the third, had been sent to sea, as though in propitiation of Auld Beardie’s still-indignant ghost!) He visited Bath while they were there, and took them to a performance of As You Like It. It was Walter’s first experience of the theatre; an intoxication of poetic pageantry which he could never forget.

      To Captain Robert he owed a debt of another kind. He was already voracious in demand of tale and legend, and with an imagination which preferred such as were of a sombre horror or tragic magnificance. To his temperament, coming from the moorland scenes which were all that his memory knew, it is not very surprising that the sight of carved statuary, particularly such as portrayed the human form in grotesque or distorted shapes, impressed his childhood’s imagination as a sinister and dreadful thing. Even the angels of Jacob’s ladder, sculptured at the Abbey church, were a spectacle from which he drew back in horror.

      Learning of this imaginative fear, his uncle patiently introduced him to a statue of Neptune, till he could approach it without dread, and by this familiarity enabled him to overcome what might have remained as a permanent obsession. We see here, as we shall see many times again, that he was very fortunate in his friends, and not least in those who were of a kindred blood.

      Beyond these, his after-memories of Bath were no more than disconnected visions—of a toy-shop near the Orange Grove, and of looking across the Avon to cattle lowing upon the opposite hill.

      He returned from Bath to a brief stay in Edinburgh in his parents’ home, and then back with Janet to Sandy-Knowe, where he lived almost continuously for the next three or four years.

      CHAPTER V.

      In considering these early years of the town-born child we may observe a curious duplication of experience, such as can rarely be paralleled.

      Scott’s ancestry on all sides are of farming, cattle-raising, border stock: they are of the land, not the city. But his immediate parents have changed their environment, though they have not diluted their blood. Their experiences are those of the city schools, and the city streets. Walter begins on the land, as his race began. He looks up to a country sky, his infant hands pull the fleeces of living sheep, his infant ears hear the country legends) the country songs. But this is not the environment in which he completes his development. He will go also to the life of city schools and streets, and be informed by the same duality of experience which had been overlaid to form him before he was born.

      This duplication of duality is of a vital significance. The breadth and sanity of the country-side is to become articulate, and not merely in self-interpretation. Its spirit is to inform and to interpret the whole panorama of human existence.

      But widely though Walter Scott’s interests were to reach, and universal as his sympathies were to be, it is worth observation, and has a lesson for some theorists of today, that their roots struck deeply into the tradition of the past, and their trunk was nourished with the artistic consciousness of his own race, and the local literature of its creation. He did not abandon his roots, as a means of enabling him to produce a new flower....

      A cold-blooded criticism may admit that Robert Burns is a grossly over-rated poet. Yet a sympathetic understanding will comprehend why he is so dear to the Lowland Scotsman. His poems were not written by one man; they are the songs of a nation: their distinctive lyric note, passionate and plaintive, was the creation of unrecorded names. In his aspirations and nobilities, he interpreted the spirit of the people of whom he came, as, in his vices, he exposed them upon their weaker side.

      There is a degree in which, though on a higher plane, the earlier work of Walter Scott was of the same kind, and there is a sense in which it also is not an individual achievement, but the work of many.

      His grandmother, Barbara, has her share, as have the authors of a score of forgotten ballads which she repeated to the eager child. So has Janet. So, then and later, have a dozen others, his mother prominently among them, who fed his imagination and stored his memory from the resources of their own minds. For much of that which he was to give to the common knowledge of men was not singular to his own conception. It was to he an interpretation, rather than a creation of genius...

      Janet’s father, Robert Scott, was dead when she brought Walter back from Bath. Her mother carried on the farm, not without help from more than one of her children. Her eldest, Walter’s father, was able to relieve her of any care for the legal aspect of her late husband’s affairs. Her second son, Thomas, who had the management of the Crailing property for Mr. Scott of Danesfield—a relative, of course, though not of the closest—helped her with the farm in matters which were beyond the capacity of her advanced years and failing health. He came over once a week, and might be the only one who would visit them for such an interval. Walter would listen eagerly for the news he brought. The English settlers in America were fighting for independence of the Home Governments and Walter longed for news of the defeat of Washington, which he was not destined to hear.

      It was only later in life that he observed the inconsistency of this desire with a hatred of the Hanoverian ruler, probably fiercer and less discriminating than Washington’s own, which had developed in his infant mind, largely from listening to the tales of cruelty which followed the defeat of Culloden. One or two distant relatives of the family had been among those who were executed at Edinburgh or Carlisle, and it was all so recent that Mr. Curle at Yetbyre, who had married Janet’s sister, and was an occasional visitor at the farm, had been present, and seen them die.

      Walter lived for about four years in the quiet peace of the moorland farm, with his grandmother and Janet, having no regular tuition, and seeing no one outside the household, except for the visits of