Great Scott!

Every so often an unexpected mystery is tossed my way. Last month it came in the form of an e-mail from a friend and former colleague, Cynthia Leal Massey. Many of you will recall Cindy, Scene In S.A.’s former managing editor until early 2008, when the greater glory of a Helotes City Council seat beckoned. Cindy won her election bid. She also remains an author of exceeding talent, with a number of books to her credit.

Her first “mystery” e-mail read as follows: “Charles, I need some help. I found this quote attributed to Sir Walter Scott, but can’t find the original source where he either wrote it or said it. It is: ‘I am a Scotsman; therefore I had to fight my way into the world.’ Can you help me?”

Cindy is a highly educated woman and far more versed in literature than am I; so for her to ask me is intriguing right off the bat. I figured she had already searched the Great Universal Mind of our times, Google. Nonetheless, I started there, as I myself have carried out searches and still missed my target —mainly because I inevitably find something else irresistibly interesting, and get distracted. It was a breeze. I found the quote easily in numerous citations.

“Come on Cindy,” I thought to myself, “what’s the problem? This is easy.”

Well, it wasn’t. As Cindy had indicated, the quote was there, almost everywhere, always attributed to Scott. But no one cited its source. Which of Scott’s works did it come from? What book, what essay, what speech?

A little background: For those of you who are victims of contemporary educations, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote many much-beloved historical novels and poems. He told stories of clashing cultures, and often of their grim effects on the humble and the mighty alike. The novels he is best known for today are Ivanhoe and Rob Roy.

Few have actually read them; more have seen the films based on them. (The latest and best is Rob Roy, with Liam Neeson in the title role. The final sword fight is gripping, to say the least.)

Scott’s birth in 1771 came 25 years after the crushing defeat of the Scottish in 1746 at the Battle of Culloden. Think of the conquered South and Reconstruction to understand the bitterness and grief the Scots felt.

Scott became a voice for the heart and soul of Scots and Scotland. Even many Britons came to love him. One essayist described him as “modest, amiable and generous.” He rose to international success and acclaim. Mark Twain despised his novels and blamed Scott for the Southern notions of chivalry and therefore the Civil War. He described Scott’s work as filled with inflated speech and juvenile romanticism of a dead past.

Alas, this may be fun but does not find the quote’s source. I searched for a couple of days, even resorting to Google Scholar, but got the same result; the quote, but no source. I know there are scholastic websites which are very thorough but they cost a bit of change. I was about to give up when…

I took another look at Scott sites in Scotland and found the Edinburgh University Library. Well. Hello, hello. I sent an e-mail and got a response from a source at the Walter Scott Digital Archive. I promised not to use the man’s name or e-mail address for reasons explained later. He solved the mystery:

“Dear Mr. Booker, Thank you for your query. As you say, it is a rather strange business. I think I may have worked out what has happened here. To cut a long story short, I’m almost certain that the quotation in circulation on the Internet is a paraphrased and much diluted version of the following original Scott quotation:

‘But I was born a Scotchman (sic), and a bare one, and was therefore born to fight my way with my left hand where my right failed me, and with my teeth, if they were both cut off.’

This comes from a letter to Scott’s friend J.B.S. Morritt, dated 2 March 1810, which was quoted in full in J. G. Lockhart’s 1837 biography of Scott. I think the transformation of the quotation into its present internet form occurs as follows.

First, Janet Adam Smith half-quotes, half-paraphrases Scott in her 1965 biography of John Buchan, rendering the quotation as: ‘I was born a Scotsman and a bare one. Therefore I was born to fight my way in the world.’ This is then quoted (as Scott’s own words) in Linda Colley’s very influential Britons: Forging the Nation (1992).

It then undergoes a further slight modification by Arthur Herman in his The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (2002). He refers to Scott’s ‘famous maxim’: ‘I am a Scot and therefore I had to fight my way into the world.’

I am fairly sure the quotations on the Internet (including Google Books) derive from Herman’s work—none of them precedes the current century.

I hope this is of some help. I have consulted a number of colleagues to see if I’ve overlooked anything, and am still expecting one or two replies. Best wishes.”

Naturally, I sent him a thankful response justly praising his skill and knowledge. I also offered to cite him by name. Here is his reply: “Dear Mr. Booker, I am glad to have been of some help, and thanks for your kind words. If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t use my email, as I’m not 100 percent certain about the path I plotted, and there’s a degree of institutional nervousness here about accusing people of sloppy scholarship!”

I give you, my friends, a modest, gentleman scholar of the old school. Well done, sir.

So what is the payoff? Well, in the first place, I love solving a mystery. Secondly, I will let Cindy’s last e-mail speak for itself: “Bless you, Charles! Thank you for following up on this; when this book gets published, you’ll be in the acknowledgments page!”

Well shucks ma’am, it weren’t nuthin’.