The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
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and she were the parents of a large family whose after-records speak well for their upbringing in the rather primitive and strenuous life of the bleak moorland farm. The Haliburtons were a Berwickshire family of good repute, but somewhat quieter character than Scotts or Rutherfords or Swintons were ever likely to be. Still, like the Rutherfords, they had held their own, which had become a considerable area around Dryburgh and elsewhere, and it was an operation difficult to sustain without a good wit, and some toughness of fibre, through the disorders of the two previous centuries.
Such were the ancestries of the Edinburgh lawyer and the girl he brought to the narrow house at the corner of College Wynd. Our tale is not of these two, entering the romance of marriage under a shadow that they could not foresee, and would find difficult to understand, but they are necessary to know, and worth knowing.
Walter had been apprenticed by his father to George Chalmers, a Writer to the Signet, which is a professional description equivalent to that of an English solicitor, the Scottish legal fraternity having split into two branches, similar to those which have become so profitable to themselves and so oppressive to litigants in the Southern country. At this period, Writers to the Signet commonly took from one to several apprentices, of whom a minority only could establish themselves in the profession which they, or their parents, had chosen. But Walter Scott had shown character and ability which had caused him to be retained in George Chalmers’s office when his apprenticeship ended, and to appear as a partner not very long afterwards.
At the time of his marriage, he had built up a good and growing practice, having the confidence of many clients among his numerous and important relatives in the Lowland counties. As the years passed, he became known as an expert conveyancer, adept in the intricacies of ancient title-deeds, a student of ecclesiastical history also, and one who, while advocating individual freedom, was yet conservative in his desire for the retention of old-established customs which were of the spirit of feudalism.
A strict Calvinist in religion, having the type of mind which would delight in the difficult intellectual gymnastics by which such systems of theology are sustained and defended, he yet appears to have been without bigotry or intolerance, and to have ruled his life by the broader and more vital principles of Christianity. Popular among his contemporaries, of a personal austerity towards physical indulgence which was conspicuous against the manners of the times rather than extreme in itself handsome in person, with a gracious kindliness of manner which tended somewhat to formality as the years passed, he stands out well in the white glare of enquiry which the light of his son’s genius was to cast backward upon him.
His fault (if such it were) was one which might be anticipated when a man of generous mind, and of such combative ancestry, engaged in the civil warfare of litigation. His clients’ interests would become his own, even to financing their quarrels personal to himself. His clients’ honour would be interpreted by his own standards, so that those who left their funds in his hands, though they could be very sure that he would not apply them to his own use, could have less certainty that they would not be diverted to vicarious generosities toward some needy relative, whom (Mr. Scott had no doubt) they would have been prompt to relieve, had there been convenient opportunity to consult them before the urgent disbursement had to be made.
Those clients who instructed him in their quarrels would find that they would be ably and pertinaciously defended, and that the growing bill of costs, paid or unpaid, would not be allowed to check disbursement or weaken advocacy. It must take its time and its chance.
Had such a man been a fool, among such clients as the times would bring to his door, or had he been without a scrupulous personal integrity, he would have been speedily discredited in his profession, and ruined in his finances.
As it was, he made many bad debts. His opponents might find it hard to outwit him, but to an unscrupulous client it would be an easier thing. Yet his practice and reputation grew.
In his wife he seems to have made a very fortunate choice. Lockhart says that Anne was superior to her husband “in talents as well as tastes”. We can believe that or not as we will. The praise would be equally convincing without the comparison. The fact seems to have been that they were different in details of intellectual interests, with strong outlines of similarity. It is of such diverse similarities that the most successful marriages may be made, and the best children come.
Anne had an equally deep-rooted religious faith, but we have her son’s testimony that she wore the theological cloak with a considerable difference, which tended to mitigate the severities of the Sabbatarian tradition which would lie heavily, even then, upon the children of such a home.
She was a wide reader, of poetry in particular, a lover of old ballads, a skilful story-teller, and had the sense of humour which is almost the first necessity for successful motherhood, or successful marriage.
She was of a natural gaiety also, and had a stubborn and buoyant courage, of which she was to have need enough in the first years of married life, as we shall soon see.
She was ‘short of stature, and by no means comely, at least after the days of her early youth’. Lockhart again. He could not have seen her, except at an advanced age, when her vivacity survived, but little else of the attractions of earlier days. You have to know Lockhart first to judge how much, or how little heed to give to his confident oracles. Standards of beauty differ. It is hard to imagine that Anne Rutherford—or Mrs. Walter Scott—was unattractive. Obviously there was one man—and he of a rather fastidious temper—who thought differently, and whose means of judging were much the better of the two.
It is curious to consider how greatly our conception of an individual depends upon the age at which he or she becomes an object of observation.
Keats and Shelley survive in the glamour of perpetual youth. Dr. Johnson was born a rather slovenly and obese old man. It is the penalty of those who produce genius that they are cast in the pageant of history for the parts of parents, who are usually elderly when they attract the biographer’s notice. Yet they had their youth too.
CHAPTER II.
We need not doubt that Walter and Anne Scott set up housekeeping together very happily in College Wynd, having, many common interests, and a bond of love which would endure, but across the natural course of their marriage an inexplicable shadow fell—fell, and would not lift.
They were themselves in vigorous youth, and of an abundant vitality. They were of healthy stock, and their lives had been continent and well-ordered. Anne had children. They came rapidly. Babies that were strong at birth, as the children of such parents should be. But yet, after a few months, one after one, they tailed and died. It seems that love could not save them, nor any care. Family counsels were of no avail. The Professor of Medicine, with his grandchildren’s lives at stake had no sufficient wisdom to give.
The fact seems to have been that these children, of such entirely moorland ancestry, could not thrive in the smoke—and germ-laden city atmosphere. There could be no enduring life for them in the sunless rooms of that narrow ungardened house, at the end of the College Wynd. They could not resist the infections which the slum-bred child, of weaker vitality, was adapted to overcome. But who was to know that? The bitter lesson which industrial England was to learn in the following century was still unguessed.
Other children of seemingly weaker stocks thrived well enough; or lived, if they did not thrive. But prayers and tears were of an equal vanity here. There must have been many prayers. There is nothing surer than that. But it seemed that they prayed to a deaf God.
Pregnant again, and near the time of a fifth birth, Anne folded up four little packets of hair. She was arranging her private drawer, as a woman should who is approaching the ordeal of childbirth, so that it should be left neatly if anything should go wrong, as we know it may, though we are not so cowardly as to talk of that. She wrote on the packet in her slanting Italian hand: All these are dead. With what thoughts or tears she wrote we cannot tell now. She knew herself a failure among mothers. Four times. Was there any value in those short frustrated lives? Immortal futures, as she would have said with confidence, in her darkest hour? Nothing but a physical failure, and the folly of unspaced births, as some of us, with an equal confidence, would assert today? Well, God knows.
But