QUARTERLY REVIEW, LADY OF THE LAKE, ROKEBY, BALLANTYNE AFFAIRS
As Scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a well paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the literary calling in 1808. Britain was not yet a wildly excitable and hysterical country. Rapidity of communication of news had not irritated the nerves of the community. We won or lost a battle, but as men knew nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. A few years after Scott’s death, a Parliamentary Commission inquired into the financial conditions of publishers and authors. The Commission learned, from one of Messrs. Longmans’ firm, that it was not unusual for
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 gentlemen to “form libraries” (the expression “every gentleman’s library” survives as a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now ceased to be.
The man who killed the formation of private libraries was Walter Scott. His Waverley appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any books except novels. Poetry soon became a “drug in the market,” and the taste for “the classics,” whether ancient or modern, died away: the novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the circulating library.
“QUARTERLY REVIEW”
It was the fortune of Scott to take full advantage of the traditional usage of “forming libraries” in the years between the appearance of the Lay and of Waverley. He edited Dryden in many volumes, and was fairly well paid. By doubling the price, Constable induced him to edit Swift’s works, and to write the best extant Life of Swift. He also edited the important Sadleir Papers, the diplomatic correspondence of the agent of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, a most valuable book to the historian, and he was concerned in many antiquarian publications. These were undertaken partly from love of the past, partly for the purpose of gaining employment for needy men of letters like Henry Weber, a German who later became insane and challenged Scott to a pistol duel
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 across a table! Constable was usually the publisher of the ventures, but Constable had a partner, a Mr. Hunter, a laird, no less, who bullied Weber, and behaved to Scott in a manner which he deemed insufferable.
Again, politics came between Constable and Scott. Constable was the publisher of the Edinburgh Review, which had filled up the measure of its iniquities. No man likes to be called an unpatriotic pedant, and Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, had called Scott both pedantic and unpatriotic. Again, the year 1808 saw the Spanish national rising against Napoleon. Backed by Britain and Wellington, and by the infatuation of Bonaparte himself,[4] by the fatuous Moscow expedition, and the revenge of Germany, the rising of the Peninsula overthrew the French Emperor. But the Edinburgh Review and the Whigs had no taste for a national rising in the name of freedom. The Spanish, they observed, were a Catholic and intolerant people, not like the liberal French. The Spanish insurrections began in massacres of unpopular officials, and, at Valencia (June 6, 7, 1808), in the murder of the whole colony of French merchants in the town. That French Republican mobs should massacre uncounted victims was very
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 well: it was intolerable to the Whigs that Spanish Catholic mobs should imitate them. The Spanish cause was both disreputable and desperate, said the Whigs. England, if she aided Spain, must perish in the same ruin. Such was the song of the Edinburgh Review, at that time the only critical journal conducted by educated men. Meanwhile Scott recognized the genius of Wellesley—“I would to God he were now at the head of the English in Spain!”
“QUARTERLY REVIEW”
For personal and political reasons then, as a patriot and a poet outraged, Scott determined not only to counteract the Edinburgh Review, but to set up a rival to Constable, its publisher. It is difficult to trace each step in his scheme of resistance to Constable and Whiggery. But John Murray, then a young publisher in London, saw his opportunity of winning Scott away from Constable; he determined to back, financially, the Ballantynes in London, and he visited Ashestiel in October 1808. He had heard of the nascent Lady of the Lake, he had heard of Waverley as “on the stocks,” and he wished to have his share. From a letter of Scott to his brother Thomas, we learn that the old staff of The Antijacobin, including Canning, now Prime Minister, and Frere, had been “hatching a plot” for a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. Scott had been offered the Editorship, with “great
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 prospects of emolument,” and the new serial was to have private information from Government. But for many obvious reasons, Scott could not take the Editorship, which fell to Gifford, a man of bad health, bad temper, and procrastinating habits, feared and unpopular as a satirist. Heber and Ellis, however, were ready to aid contributors, and Scott’s letters reveal his opinion of the state of literary criticism.
As is usual, periodical criticism revelled in “a facetious and rejoicing ignorance.” Specialists could not write what the public would read; editors like Jeffrey added flippancy to their dull lucubrations. Reviewing had long been indolently good natured: the Edinburgh Review had set the fashion of being tart and bitter; the fashion pleased, and “the minor reviews give us all abuse and no talent.” The age of “slashing” criticism had begun, and Scott held that “decent, lively, and reflecting criticism” would be welcome. He knew Gifford’s temper, and hoped to abate it. “We must keep our swords clear as well as sharp, and not forget the gentlemen in the critics.” Had Scott accepted the Editorship, with Heber, Ellis, Southey, and other gentlemen for his aides, the Quarterly would have been what he desired it to be. But a satirist was the Editor, and for long the tone was “savage and tartarly,” in cases well remembered. Many of
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 Scott’s best essays, however, appeared in the Quarterly.
His indignation, and we may say his infatuation, found vent in another project. Lockhart may be too severe in his account of James Ballantyne’s brother John, who, after failing in various undignified lines, was started as a publisher by Scott, in 1809. Scott supplied most of the capital; John was expected to manage the accounts, and so the fatal business began. Nobody could call the Ballantynes “gentlemen,” whether in a heraldic or any other sense of the word. But both, in several ways, consciously or unconsciously amused Scott; he was deeply attached to them, and they to him. That he had such henchmen was his own fault: they were, so to speak, his Cochranes and Oliver Sinclairs, the unworthy favourites who were the ruin of the old Stuart Kings. Lockhart says that “a more reckless, thoughtless, improvident adventurer” than the festive John “never rushed into the serious responsibilities of business,” while James “never understood book-keeping or could bring himself to attend to it with regularity.” Scott, on the other hand, thoroughly understood business, and kept systematic accounts of his private expenditure.
THE BALLANTYNE COMPANY
But his success carried him, as it carried the great Emperor his contemporary, beyond himself.
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 He felt adequate to all labours, however diverse; he was as confident as Napoleon in his own star; he entered on this publishing business as Napoleon invaded Russia, without organized supplies (for Mr. Murray soon withdrew from the Ballantyne alliance), and disaster was always at his doors. Between 1805 and 1810 he invested at least £9,000 in the Ballantyne companies, and night by night the fairy gold won by his imagination changed into worthless paper. We cannot here attempt to distribute exactly the shares of blame which fall to Scott and to the Ballantynes. Mr. Cadell uses the word “hallucination” to qualify Scott’s part in the business. I have examined these complicated matters carefully,[5] and the gist of the explanation lies in a remark of James Ballantyne. “The large sums received never formed an addition to stock. In fact they were all expended by the partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly adopted my brother John’s sanguine results.” They accepted John’s book-keeping at a venture, and, to use a slang phrase, they “blued” the apparent profits. That is the secret.
To leave a repulsive theme, in 1809 Scott visited the Highlands, he began The Lady of the Lake, which had long “simmered” in his mind, and he
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 rode Fitz James’s ride from Loch Vennachar to Stirling, finding it practicable, though the ground, to be sure, must have been very different in the days of James V, when lochs occupied what is now arable land. At Buchanan House, on this tour, he read English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and briefly spoke of the author as “a whelp of a young Lord Byron ... abusing me for endeavouring to scratch out a living with my pen. God help the bear if, having little else to eat, he must not even suck his own paws.” But, like the Moslems in Thackeray’s White Squall, he “thought but little of it,” and did not dream of repaying Byron in kind.
NO SATIRIST
As he wrote to Lady Abercorn, “If I did not rather dislike satire from principle than feel myself altogether disqualified from it by nature, I have the means of very severe retaliation in my power,” particularly with respect to the Whigs of Holland House. Scott never used his powers as a satirist. He was remarkably skilled in the playful imitation of the styles of other poets, a faculty scarcely to have been expected from one so careless of finish in his own productions. He could easily have retaliated on Byron and others in the manner of Pope; but, as he thought, satire is the lowest, because the least sincere, of all forms of composition. Mankind is weary of the points and the
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 feigned indignation of the satirist, and as “damns have had their day,” according to Bob Acres, versified satire too is fortunately in the limbo of things obsolete.
Scott seems usually to have had in his mind the theme for his next poem but one before he had finished its predecessor. In an excursion to Stirling, during the autumn of 1808, he told Mrs. Scott that he hoped one day “to make the earth yawn” at Bannockburn, “and devour the English archery and knighthood, as it did on that celebrated day of Scottish glory.” The design was long deferred, and when it was fulfilled, the Earth is not the only person who yawns in the course of The Lord of the Isles.
In a life that was now very happy, whether spent in London, in Edinburgh, or in coursing and spearing salmon with the Ettrick Shepherd at Ashestiel, Scott occupied his morning hours with his edition of Swift, with the editing of the Somers Tracts, and with The Lady of the Lake, which appeared in May 1810.
The feud with Constable was now dying of natural decline, and Scott and Jeffrey were quite forgetting their differences. Scott had never concealed from Jeffrey his opinion that the critic knew nothing of the heart and glow of poetry, and Jeffrey, before publishing his review of The Lady
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 of the Lake sent his proof sheets to Scott, expressing his regret for the “heedless asperities” in the criticism of Marmion. “Believe me when I say that I am sincerely proud both of your genius and your glory, and that I value your friendship more highly than most of either my literary or political opinions.” Jeffrey was a good fellow at heart, though, in criticising contemporary poetry, he spoke most highly of a certain Professor Brown! He found The Lady of the Lake “more polished in its diction” than its predecessors, and certainly its rhyming octosyllabic couplets are more monotonous than the varied cadences of the Lay. “It never expresses a sentiment which it can cost the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend,” which is true enough, but is no less true of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The general chorus of praise, and the rush of tourists to Loch Katrine and Ellen’s Isle, did not turn Scott’s head, or persuade him that he was a poet of the first order. Miss Scott told James Ballantyne that she had not read The Lady of the Lake. “Papa says there is nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry.” Yet he confessedly wrote for “young people of spirit.” He says, “I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it was in the highest fashion with the million.
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”
“LADY OF THE LAKE”
Meanwhile, whosoever, in youth, has read the magical lines—
The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,
and has followed the chase across the Brig of Turk, to
The lone lake’s western boundary
has to thank Scott for leading him into the paradise of romance, and cares not how low the literary critics may rate the Minstrel. Such a reader has been with
mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Other enchanted lands there are, but to one Scott has given him the key, to a land where the second-sighted man foretells the coming of the stranger, and the prophet sleeps swathed in the black bull’s hide in the spray of the haunted linn.
Never can we forget the hurrying succession of pictures that pass by the bearer of the fiery cross, or the song of the distraught Blanche that gives warning to Fitz James.
The toils are pitch’d, and the stakes are set,
Ever sing merrily, merrily;
The bows they bend, and the knives they whet,
Hunters live so cheerily.
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It was a stag, a stag of ten,
Bearing his branches sturdily;
He came stately down the glen,
Ever sing hardily, hardily.
It was there he met with a wounded doe,
She was bleeding deathfully;
She warned him of the toils below,
Oh, so faithfully, faithfully!
He had an eye and he could heed,
Ever sing warily, warily;
He had a foot, and he could speed,
Hunters watch so narrowly.
On this passage the egregious Jeffrey wrote—
“No machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance of a distressed hero, than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him, by a song, to take care of the ambush that was set for him. The maniacs of poetry have indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of Ophelia downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make them sing good sense, and to make sensible people be guided by them.”
“LADY OF THE LAKE&rdqu............