Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

545
SCOTT
his habits of mind and work. We learn from himself the
secret—as much at least as could be ascribed to definite ex¬
traneous accident—of the “ extempore speed ” in romantic
composition against which Carlyle protested in his famous
review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott.1 The indignant critic
assumed that Scott wrote “ without preparation ”; Scott
himself, as if he had foreseen this cavil, is at pains to show
that the preparation began with his boyhood, almost with
his infancy. The current legend when Carlyle wrote his
essay was that as a boy Scott had been a dunce and an
idler. With a characteristically conscientious desire not to
set a bad example, the autobiographer solemnly declares
that he was neither a dunce nor an idler, and explains how
the misunderstanding arose. His health in boyhood was
uncertain;2 he was consequently irregular in his attend¬
ance at school, never became exact in his knowledge of
Latin syntax, and was so belated in beginning Greek that
out of bravado he resolved not to learn it at all.
Left very much to himself throughout his boyhood in
the matter of reading, so quick, lively, excitable, and un¬
certain in health that it was considered dangerous to
press him and prudent rather to keep him back, Scott
began at a very early age to accumulate the romantic
lore of which he afterwards made such splendid use. As
a child he seems to have been an eager and interested
listener and a great favourite with his elders, apparently
having even then the same engaging charm that made
him so much beloved as a man. Chance threw him in
the way of many who were willing to indulge his delight
in stories and ballads. Not only his own relatives—the
old women at his grandfather’s farm at Sandyknowe, his
aunt, under whose charge he was sent to Bath for a year,
his mother—took an interest in the precocious boy’s ques¬
tions, told him tales of Jacobites and Border worthies of
his own and other clans, but casual friends of the family
—such as the military veteran at Prestonpans, old Dr
Blacklock the blind poet, Home the author of Douglas,
Adam Ferguson the martial historian of the Roman
republic—helped forward his education in the direction
in which the bent of his genius lay. At the age of six
1 Latest edition in 10 vols. fcap. 8vo, Edinburgh, 1847-48.
2 Dr Charles Creighton supplies us with the following medical note
on Scott’s early illness :—“ Scott’s lameness was owing to an arrest of
growth in the right leg in infancy. ' When he was eighteen months old
he had a feverish attack lasting three days, at the end of which time
it was found that he ‘had lost the power of his right leg,’—i.e., the
child instinctively declined to move the ailing member. The malady
was a swelling at the ankle, and either consisted in or gave rise to
arrest of the bone-forming function along the growing line of cartilage
which connects the lower epiphysis of each of the two leg-bones with
its shaft. In his fourth year, when he had otherwise recovered, the
leg remained ‘ much shrunk and contracted. ’ The limb would have
been blighted very much more if the arrest of growth had taken place
at the upper epiphysis of the tibia or the lower epiphysis of the femur.
The narrowness and peculiar depth of Scott’s head point to some more
general congenital error of bone-making allied to rickets but certainly
not the same as that malady. The vault of the skull is the typical
‘ scaphoid ’ or boat-shaped formation, due to premature union of the two
parietal bones along the sagittal suture. When the bones of the cranium
are universally aifected with that arrest of growth along their formative
edges, the sutures become prematurely fixed and effaced, so that the
brain-case cannot expand in any direction to accommodate the growing
brain. This universal synostosis of the cranial bones is what occurs in
the case of microcephalous idiots. It happened to me to show to an
eminent French anthropologist a specimen of a miniature or micro-
cephalic skull preserved in the Cambridge museum of anatomy ; the
French savant, holding up the skull and pointing to the ‘ scaphoid ’ vault
of the crown and the effaced sagittal suture, exclaimed ‘ Yoila Walter
Scott! ’ Scott had fortunately escaped the early closure or arrest of
growth at other cranial sutures than the sagittal, so that the growing
brain could make room for itself by forcing up the vault of the skull
bodily. When his head was opened after death, it was observed that
‘ the brain was not large, and the cranium thinner than it is usually
found to be. ’ In favour of the theory of congenital liability it has to
be said that he was the ninth of a family of whom the first six died
in ‘ very early youth.’ ”
he was able to define himself as “a virtuoso,” “one who
wishes to and will know everything.” At ten his collec¬
tion of chap-books and ballads had reached several volumes,
and he was a connoisseur in various readings. Thus he
took to the High School, Edinburgh, when he was strong
enough to be put in regular attendance, an unusual store
of miscellaneous knowledge and an unusually quickened
intelligence, so that his master “ pronounced that, though
many of his schoolfellows understood the Latin better,
Gualterus Scott was behind few in following and enjoying
the author’s meaning.”
Throughout his school days and afterwards when he
was apprenticed to his father, attended university classes,
read for the bar, took part in academical and professional
debating societies, Scott steadily and ardently pursued
his own favourite studies. His reading in romance and
history was really study, and not merely the indulgence
of an ordinary schoolboy’s promiscuous appetite for excit¬
ing literature. In fact, even as a schoolboy he special¬
ized. He followed the line of overpowering inclination;
and even then, as he frankly tells us, “fame was the
spur.” He acquired a reputation among his schoolfellows
for out-of-the-way knowledge, and also for story-telling,
and he worked hard to maintain this character, which
compensated to his ambitious spirit his indifferent distinc¬
tion in ordinary school-work. The youthful “ virtuoso,”
though he read ten times the usual allowance of novels
from the circulating library, was carried by his enthusiasm
into fields much less generally attractive. He was still a
schoolboy when he mastered French sufficiently well to
read through collections of old French romances, and not
more than fifteen when, attracted by translations to Italian
romantic literature, he learnt the language in order to read
Dante and Ariosto in the original. This willingness to
face dry work in the pursuit of romantic reading affords
a measure of the strength of Scott’s passion. In one of the
literary parties brought together to lionize Burns, when
the peasant poet visited Edinburgh, the boy of fifteen
was the only member of the company who could tell the
source of some lines affixed to a picture that had attracted
the poet’s attention,—a slight but significant evidence
both of the width of his reading and of the tenacity of
his memory. The same thoroughness appears in another
little circumstance. He took an interest in Scottish family
history and genealogy, but, not content with the ordinary
sources, he ransacked the MSS. preserved in the Advocates’
Library. By the time he was one and twenty he had
acquired such a reputation for his skill in deciphering old
manuscripts that his assistance was sought by professional
antiquaries.
This early, assiduous, unintermittent study was the
main secret, over and above his natural gifts, of Scott’s
extempore speed and fertility when at last he found forms
into which to pour his vast accumulation of historical and
romantic lore. He was, as he said himself, “like an
ignorant gamester who keeps up a good hand till he
knows how to play it.” That he had vague thoughts
from a much earlier period than is commonly supposed
of playing the hand some day is extremely probable, if,
as he tells us, the idea of writing romances first occurred
to him when he read Cervantes in the original. This was
long before he was out of his teens; and, if we add that
his leading idea in his first novel was to depict a Jacobitic
Don Quixote, we can see that there was probably a long
interval between the first conception of Waverley and the
ultimate completion.
Scott’s preparation for painting the life of past times was
probably much less unconsciously such than his equally
thorough preparation for acting as the painter of Scottish
manners and character in all grades of society. With all
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