Chapter 3
CHAPTER III. SIR WALTER SCOTT AND HIS MOTHER THE MOTHER'S EDUCATION, THE SON'S TRAINING, DOMESTIC LOVE, AND SOCIAL DUTIES It was in the spring of 1758 that the daughter of a distinguished professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh changed her maiden name of Rutherford for her married name of Scott, having the happiness to unite her lot with one who was not only a scrupulously honorable man, but who, from his youth up, had led a singularly blameless life. well does coventry patmore sing who is the happy husband he who scanning his unwedded life thanks heaven with a conscience free twas faithful to his future wife such a husband as this was the
father of sir walter scott a writer to the signet or lawyer in a large practice in enborough he had never been led from the right way and when the less virtually inclined among the companions of his early life in Edinburgh found out that they could not corrupt him. They ceased after a little while to laugh at him, and learned to honor him and to confide in him, which is certainly, says he who makes the record on the authority of Mrs. Scott herself, a great inducement to the young
men in the outset of life to act a similar part. It does not appear that old Walter Scott sought for beauty of person in his bride, although no doubt the face he loved was more beautiful to him than that of the bonniest bell in Scotland, but beauty of mind and disposition she certainly had. Of her father it is told that when in practice as a physician, he never gave a prescription without silently invoking on it the blessing of heaven, and the piety which dictated the
custom had been inherited by his daughter. The mother's education. Mrs. Scott's education also had been an excellent one, giving, besides a good general grounding, an acquaintance with literature and not neglecting the more homely duties of the needle and the account book. Her manners, moreover, an important and too often neglected factor in a mother's influence over her children, were finished and elegant, though intolerably stiff in some respects, when compared with the
manners and habits of today. The maidens of today can scarcely realize, for instance, the asperity of the training of their embryo great-grandmothers, who were always made to sit in so spartanly upright a posture, that Mrs. Scott, in her 79th year, boasted that she had never allowed her shoulders to touch the back of her chair. The son's training. As young Walter was one of many children, he could not, of course, monopolize his mother's attention, but probably she recognized
the promise of his future greatness, unlike the mother of the Duke of Wellington, who thought Arthur, the family Dunn's, and gave him a special care. For speaking of his early boyhood, he tells us, I found much consolation in the partiality of my mother. And he goes on to say that she joined to a light and happy temper of mind a strong turn to study poetry and works of imagination. Like the mothers of the Ettrick, Shepard, and of Burns, she repeated to her son the
traditionary ballads she knew by heart, and so soon as he was sufficiently advanced, his leisure hours were usually spent in reading Pope's translation of Homer aloud to her, which, with the exception of a few ballads and some of Alan Ramsey's songs, was the first poetry he made acquaintance with. It must often have been with anxiety, and sometimes not without a struggle, that his mother, solicitous about every trifle which affected the training of her child,
decided on the books which she was to place in his hands. She wished him to develop his intellectual faculties, but not at the expense of his spiritual, and romantic frivolity and mental dissipation on the one hand, and a too-severe repression, dangerous in its after-reaction on the other, were the scylla and cherubis between which she had to steer.
The ascetic Puritanism of her training and surroundings would naturally have led her to the narrower and more restrictive view, in which her husband, austere or yet, would have heartily concurred. But her broad sense, quickened by the marvelous insight that comes from maternal love, led her to adopt the broader, and we may safely add, with Sir Walter's career and character before us, the better course. Her courage was, however, tempered with a wise discretion, and when
he read to her she was wont, he says, to make him pause upon those passages which expressed generous and worthy sentiments, a most happy method of education, and a most effective one in the case of an impressionable boy. A little later, when he passed from the educational care of his mother to that of a tutor, his relations to literature changed, as the following passage from his autobiography will show. My tutor thought it almost a sin to open a profane play or poem,
and my mother had no longer the opportunity to hear me read poetry as formerly. I found, however, in her dressing room, where I slept at one time, some odd volumes of Shakespeare. Nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sat up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment, until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me that it was time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely deposited since
nine o'clock. This is a suggestive as well as frank story. Supposing for a moment that instead of Shakespeare the room had contained some of the volumes of verse and romance which, though denying alike the natural and the supernatural virtues, are to be found in many a Christian home, how easily might he have suffered a contamination of the mind. Domestic love and social duty. It has been proudly said of Sir Walter as an author that he never forgot
the sanctities of domestic love and social duty in all that he wrote. And considering how much he did write, and how vast has been the influence of his work on mankind, we can scarcely overestimate the importance of the fact. Yet it might have been all wrecked by one little parental imprudence in this matter of books. And what excuse is there, after all, for running the terrible risk? Authors who are not fit to be read by the sons and daughters are rarely read without injury by
the fathers and mothers. And it would be better by far, Savonarola-like, to make a bonfire of all the literature of folly, wickedness, and infidelity, than run the risk of injuring a child simply for the sake of having a few volumes more on one's shelves. In The Balance of Heaven, there is no parity between a complete library and a lost soul. But this story has another lesson. It indicates once more the injury which may be done to character by undue limitations. Under the ill-considered
restrictions of his tutor, which ran counter to the good sense of his mother, whose wisdom was justified by the event, Walter Scott might easily have fallen into tricks of concealment and forfeited his candor. That candor which developed into the noble probity which marked his conduct to the last. Without candor there cannot be truth, and as he himself has said, there can be no other virtue without truth. Fortunately for him, by the wise sanction his mother had given to his perusal of
imaginative writings, she had robbed them of a mystery unhealthy in itself, and he came through these stolen readings substantially unharmed, because he knew that his fault was only the lighter one of sitting up when he was supposed to be lying down. Luckily, this tutor's stern rule did not last long, and when a severe illness attacked the youth, then advanced to be a student at Edinburgh College, and brought him under his mother's charge once more, the bed on which he lay
was piled with a constant succession of works of imagination, and he was allowed to find consolation in poetry and romance, those fountains which flow forever for the ardent and the young. It was in relation to Mrs. Scott's control of her son's reading that he wrote with gratitude late in life, my mother had good natural taste and great feeling. And after her death, in a letter to a friend, he paid her this tribute. She had a mind peculiarly well stored. If I had been able to do
anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me. She was a strict economist, which, she said, enabled her to be liberal. Out of her little income of about $1,500 a year, she bestowed at least a third in charities. Yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance. Her charity, as well as her love for genealogy and her aptitude for storytelling, was transmitted to her son. It found expression in him,
not only in material gifts to the poor, but in a conscientious care and consideration for the feelings of others. This trait is beautifully exhibited by many of the facts recorded by Lockhart in his famous memoir, and also by a little incident not included there which I have heard Sir Henry Taylor tell, and which, besides illustrating the subject, deserves for its own sake a place in print. The great and now venerable author of Philip Van Arteveld,
dined at Abbotsford only a year or two before the close of its owner's life. Sir Walter had then lost his old vivacity, though not his simple dignity, but for one moment during the course of the evening he rose into animation, and it happened thus. There was a talk among the party of an excursion which was to be made on the following day, and during the discussion of the plans, Miss Scott mentioned that two elderly maiden ladies
living in the neighborhood, were to be of the number, and hinted that their company would be a bore. The chivalrous kindliness of her father's heart was instantly aroused. I cannot call that good breeding, he said, in an earnest and dignified tone, a rebuke which echoed the old-fashioned teaching on the duties of true politeness he had heard from his mother half a century before. We would gladly know more than we do of Mrs. Scott's attitude toward her son when
his first penchant for authorship was shown. That she smiled on his early evidences of talent and fostered them, we may well imagine. And the tenderness with which she regarded his early compositions is indicated by the fact that a copy of verses written in a boyish scrawl was carefully preserved by her and found after her death, folded in a paper on which was inscribed, my Walter's first lines, 1782, that she gloried in his successes when they came, we gather.
For when speaking late in life to Dr. Davy about his brother, Sir Humphrey's distinction, Sir Walter, doubtless drawing on his own home memories, remarked, I hope, Dr. Davy, that your mother lived to see it. There must have been great pleasure in that to her. But with whatever zeal Mrs. Scott may have unfolded Sir Walter's mind by her training, by her praise, by her motherly enthusiasm, it is certain that from first to last she loved his soul
and sought its interest in and above all. Her final present to him before she died was not a Shakespeare or a Milton, but an old Bible, the book she loved best, and for her sake Sir Walter loved it too. Happy was Mrs. Scott in having a son who in all things reciprocated the affection of his mother. With the first five guinea fee he earned at the bar, he bought a present for her, a silver taper stand, which stood on her mantelpiece many a year. When he became enamored
of Miss Carpenter, he filially wrote to consult his mother about the attachment and to beg her blessing upon it. When, in 1819, she died at an advanced age, he was in attendance at her side, and full of occupations though he was, we find him busying himself to obtain for her body a beautifully situated grave. Thirteen years later, he also rested from his labors. During the last hours of his lingering life, he desired to be read to from the New Testament. And when his memory for
secular poetry had entirely failed him, the words and the imports of the sacred volume were still in his recollection, as were also some of the hymns of his childhood, which his grandson, aged six years repeated to him. Lockhart, he said to his son-in-law, I have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man. Be virtuous, be religious, be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here. So pass the great author of Waverly away. And when,
in due course, his executors came to search for his testament and lifted up his desk, we found says one of them arranged in careful order a series of little objects which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks there were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilet table when he a sickly child slept in her dressing room the silver taper stand which the young advocate
bought for her with his first fee a row of small packets inscribed by her hand and containing the hair of such of her children as had died before her, and more odds and ends of a like sort, pathetic tokens of a love which bound together for a little while here on earth, and binds together forevermore in heaven, Christian mother and son. Sir Walter of the land of song and old romance, tradition in his cunning hand, obedient as the lance. His valiant black knight bore,
wove into literature the legend, myth, and homely lore which now for us endure, to charm our weary hours, to rouse our stagnant hearts, and leave the sense of newborn powers which never more departs. We thank him in the name of one who sits on high, and I abides in every fame which makes a brighter sky. End of chapter three.
