MELROSE ABBEY AND SIR WALTER SCOTT
Always fond of fireside travels, I had, many a time, in imagination,
ridden with William of Deloraine from Branksome Hall, through the night
and into the ruins of Melrose Abbey. His errand was to visit the grave
of Michael Scott, whose fame had penetrated all Europe and whom even
Dante mentions in his deathless lines. Now, however, I had a purpose
other than seeing ruins. If possible, I was determined to pick a
flower, or a fern, from near the wizard’s grave to serve as ingredient
for a philter.
Does not Sir Walter, in his “Rob Roy,” tell us that the cailliachs, or
old Highland hags, administered drugs, which were designed to have the
effect of love potions? Who knows but these concoctions were made from
plants grown near the wonder-worker’s tomb? At any rate, I imagined
that one such bloom, leaf, or root, sent across the sea, to a halting
lover, might reinforce his courage to make the proposal, which I doubt
not was expected on the other side of the house. At least we dare say
this to the grandchildren of the long wedded pair.
So glorified were the gray ruins of Melrose, in Scott’s enchanting
poetry, that I almost feared to look, in common sunlight, upon the
broken arches and the shafted orioles; for does not Scott, who warns us
to see Melrose “by the pale moonlight,” tell us that
“The gay beams of lightsome day
Gild but to flout the ruin gray.”
Yet the tourist’s time, especially when in company, is not usually his
own, and for me, though often, later, at the abbey, the opportunity
never came of visiting “fair Melrose aright,” by seeing its
fascinations under lunar rays, or in
“the cold light’s uncertain shower.”
On the morning of July 11, we had our first view from the railway.
The ruins loomed dark and grand. Approaching on foot the pile,
closely surrounded as it was by houses and Mammonites and populated
chiefly by rooks, the first view was not as overpowering as if I had
come unexpectedly to it under the silver light of the moon. Yet, on
lingering in the aisles within the ruined nave and walking up and
down amid the broken marbles, imagination easily pictured again that
spectacular worship, so enjoyed in the Middle Ages and beloved by many
still, which makes so powerful and multitudinous an appeal to the
senses and emotions.
The west front and a large portion of the north half of the nave
and aisle of the abbey have perished, but the two transepts, the
chancel and the choir, the two western piers of the tower, and the
sculptured roof of the east end are here yet to enthral. I thought of
the processions aloft, of the monks, up and down through the interior
clerestory passage, which runs all around the church. Again, in the
chambers of fancy, the choir sang, the stone rood screen reflected
torch and candlelight, and the lamp of the churchman shed its rays,
while the “toil drops” of the knight William, “fell from his brows like
rain,” as “he moved the massy stone at length.”
A minute examination of the carving of windows, aisles, cloister,
capitals, bosses, and door-heads well repays one’s sympathetic
scrutiny, for no design is repeated. What loving care was that of
mediæval craftsmen, who took pride in their work, loving it more than
money! Proofs of this are still visible here. Such beauty and artistic
triumphs open a window into the life of the Middle Ages. From the south
of Europe, the travelling guilds of architects and masons, and of men
expert with the chisel, must have come hither to put their magic touch
upon the stone of this edifice, which was so often built, destroyed,
and built again. “A penny a day and a little bag of meal” was the daily
dole of wages to each craftsman. One may still trace here the monogram
of the master workman.
Under the high altar in this Scottish abbey, the heart of Robert the
Bruce was buried. Intensely dramatic is the double incident of its
being carried toward Palestine by its valorous custodian, who, in
battle with the Saracens, hurled the casket containing it at the foe,
with the cry, “Forward, heart of Bruce, and Douglas shall follow thee.”
In the chancel are famous tombs of men whose glory the poet has
celebrated. Here, traditionally, at least, is the sepulchre of Michael
Scott, visited, according to Sir Walter’s lay, by the monk accompanying
William of Deloraine. With torch in hand and feet unshod, the holy man
led the knight.
It was “in havoc of feudal war,” when the widowed Lady, mistress of
Branksome Hall, was called upon to decide whether her daughter Margaret
should be her “foeman’s bride.” “Amid the armed train” she called to
her side William of Deloraine and bade him visit the wizard’s tomb on
St. Michael’s night and get from his dead hand, “the bead, scroll, or
be it book,” to decide as to the marriage.
Now for Scott’s home! On the bank of Scotland’s most famous river,
the Tweed, two miles above Melrose, was a small farm called Clarty
Hole, which the great novelist bought in 1811. Changing the name to
Abbotsford, he built a small villa, which is now the western wing of
the present edifice. As he prospered, he made additions in the varied
styles of his country’s architecture in different epochs. The result
is a large and irregularly built mansion, which the “Wizard of the
North” occupied twenty-one years. It has been called “a romance in
stone and lime.” Knowing that the Tweed had been for centuries beaded
like a rosary with monasteries and that monks had often crossed at
the ford near by, Sir Walter coined the new name and gave it to the
structure in which so much of his wonderful work was done for the
delight of generations. Curiously enough, in America, while many places
have been named after persons and events suggested by Scott’s fiction,
only one town, and that in Wisconsin, bears this name of Abbotsford.
With a jolly party of Americans, we entered the house, thinking of
Wolfert’s Roost at Tarrytown, New York, and its occupant Washington
Irving, who had been a warm friend of Sir Walter. It was he who gave
him, among other ideas, the original of Rebecca, a Jewish maiden of
Philadelphia, whose idealization appears, in Scott’s beautiful story
of “Ivanhoe,” as the daughter of Isaac of York. Memory also recalls
that Scott wrote poetry that is yet sung in Christian worship, for in
Rebecca’s mouth he puts the lyric,--
“When Israel of the Lord beloved.”
In the dim aisles of Melrose Abbey, before Michael Scott’s tomb, “the
hymn of intercession rose.” The mediæval Latin of “Dies Iræ” has
many stanzas, but Scott condensed their substance into twelve lines,
beginning;--
“That day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When Heaven and earth shall pass away.”
We were shown the novelist’s study and his library, the drawing-room
and the entrance hall. The roof of the library is designed chiefly
from models taken from Roslyn Chapel, with its matchless pillar that
suggests a casket of jewels. While many objects interested us both, it
is clear, on the surface of things, that our lady companion, Quandril,
was not so much concerned with what the cicerone told to the group of
listeners as were certain male students present, who, also, were slaves
of the pen: to wit, that when Sir Walter could not sleep, because of
abnormal brain activity, he would come out of his bedroom, through
the door, which was pointed out to us in the upper corner, and shave
himself. This mechanical operation, with industry applied to brush,
lather, steel, and stubble, diverted his attention and soothed his
nerves. More than one brain-worker, imitating Sir Walter, has found
that this remedy for insomnia is usually effectual.
Another fascinating monastic ruin is Dryburgh on the Tweed. It was once
the scene of Druidical rites. The original name was Celtic, meaning the
“bank of the oaks.” St. Modan, an Irish Culdee, established a sanctuary
here in the sixth century, and King David I, in 1150, built the fine
abbey. Here, in St. Mary’s aisle, sleeps the dust of the romancer
who re-created, to the imagination, mediæval Scotland. Certainly her
greatest interpreter in prose and verse is one of the land’s jewels and
a material asset of permanent value.
The fame of Sir Walter yields a revenue, which, though not recorded
in government documents, is worth to the Scottish people millions of
guineas. From all over the world come annually tens of thousands of
pilgrims to Scotland, and they journey hither because the “Wizard
of the North” has magnetized them through his magic pen. Probably a
majority are Americans. Not even Shakespeare can attract, to Stratford,
at least, so many literary or otherwise interested pilgrims of the
spirit, as does Burns or Scott.
[Illustration: DRYBURGH ABBEY]
We move next and still southward to Gretna Green--for centuries
mentioned with jest and merriment. Of old, those rigid laws of
State-Church-ridden England concerning marriage, which made the blood
of Free Churchmen boil, while rousing the contempt and disgust of
Americans, compelled many runaway couples from across the English
border to seek legal union under the more easy statutes of Scotland.
Gretna Green was the first convenient halting-place for those who
would evade the oppressive requirements of the English Marriage Act.
For generations, thousands of nuptial ceremonies were performed by
various local persons or officials, though chiefly by the village
blacksmith. Other places, like Lamberton, shared in the honors and
revenue also. One sign, visible for many years, read, “Ginger Beer Sold
Here, and marriages performed on the most reasonable terms.”
English law, framed by the House of Lords, compelled not only the
consent of parents and guardians, but also the publication of
banns, the presence of a priest of the Established Church, fixed
and inconvenient hours, and other items of delay and expense. All
that Scotland required, however, as in New York State, was a mutual
declaration of marriage, to be exchanged in presence of witnesses.
The blacksmith of Gretna Green was no more important than other village
characters, nor did his anvil and tongs have any ritual significance,
because any witness was eligible to solemnize a ceremony which could be
performed instantly. Gradually, however, as in so many other instances
of original nonentities in Church and State, the blacksmith gradually
assumed an authority which imposed upon the credulity of the English
strangers, who usually came in a fluttering mood. In that way, the
local disciple of St. Dunstan is said to have profited handsomely by
the liberality usually dispensed on such felicitous occasions. The
couple could then return at once to England, where their marriage was
recognized as valid, because the nuptial union, if contracted according
to the law of the place where the parties took the marital vow, was
legal in the United Kingdom.
After the severity of the English law, under the hammering of the Free
Church had been modified, Gretna Green was spoiled as a more or less
romantic place of marriages, and held no charms for elopers. Scottish
law, also, was so changed as to check this evasion of the English
statutes. No irregular marriage of the kind, formerly and extensively
in vogue, is now valid, unless one of the parties has lived in Scotland
for twenty-one days before becoming either bride or groom. Gretna Green
no longer points a joke or slur except in the preterite sense.
Sir Walter Scott, who sentinels for us the enchanted land we are
entering, was in large measure the interpreter of Scotland, but he was
more. In a sense, he was his native country’s epitome and incarnation.
His literary career, however, illustrated, in miniature, almost all
that Disraeli has written in his “Curiosities of Literature,” and
especially in the chapter concerning “the calamities of authors.”
Happily, however, Scott’s life was free from those quarrels to which
men of letters are so prone, and of which American literary history is
sufficiently full. Millions have been delighted with his poetry, which
he continued to write until Byron, his rival, had occulted his fame.
He is credited with having “invented the historical novel”--an award
of honor with which, unless the claim is localized to Europe, those
who are familiar with the literature of either China or Japan cannot
possibly agree. Yet, in English, he was pioneer in making the facts of
history seem more real through romance.
Scott was born in a happy time and in the right place--on the
borderland, which for ages had been the domain of Mars. Here, in
earlier days, the Roman and the Pict had striven for mastery. Later,
Celtic Scot and invaders of Continental stock fought over and stained
almost every acre with blood. Still later, the Lowlanders, of
Teutonic origin, and the southern English battled with one another
for centuries. On a soil strewn with mossy and ivied ruins, amid a
landscape that had for him a thousand tongues, and in an air that was
full of legend, song, and story, Scott grew up. Though not much of a
routine student, he was a ravenous reader. Through his own neglect of
mental discipline, in which under good teachers he might have perfected
himself, he entered into active life, notably defective on the
philosophic side of his mental equipment, and somewhat ill-balanced in
his perspective of the past, while shallow in his views of contemporary
life.
Despite Scott’s brilliant imagery, and the compelling charm of his
pageants of history, there were never such Middle Ages as he pictured.
For, while the lords and ladies, the heroes and the armed men, their
exploits and adventures in castle, tourney, and field, are pictured
in rapid movement and with fascinating color, yet of the real Middle
Ages, which, for the mass of humanity, meant serfdom and slavery, with
brutality and licentiousness above, weakness and ignorance below, with
frequent visits of plague, pestilence, and famine, Scott has next to
nothing to say. As for his anachronisms, their name is legion.
Nevertheless Scott had the supreme power of vitalizing character. He
has enriched our experience, through imaginative contact with beings
who are ever afterwards more intimately distinct and real for us than
the people we daily meet. None could surpass and few equal Scott in
clothing a historical fact or fossil with the pulsing blood and radiant
bloom of life, compelling it to stand forth in resurrection of power.
Scott thus surely possesses the final test of greatness, in his ability
to impress our imagination, while haunting our minds with figures and
events that seem to have life even more abundantly than mortal beings
who are our neighbors.
Critics of to-day find fault with Scott, chiefly because he was
deficient in certain of the higher and deeper qualities, for which they
look in vain in his writings, while his poetry lacks those refinements
of finish which we are accustomed to exact from our modern singers.
However, those to whom the old problems of life and truth are yet
unsettled, and who still discuss the questions over which men centuries
ago fought and for which they were glad to spill their blood in
defence and attack, accuse Scott of a partisanship which to them seems
contemptible. Moreover, his many anachronisms and grave historical
blunders, viewed in the light of a larger knowledge of men and nations,
seem ridiculous.
Yet after all censure has been meted out and judgment given, it is
probable that in frank _abandon_ for boldness and breadth of effect,
and in painting with words a succession of clear pictures, his poems
are unexcelled in careless, rapid, easy narrative and in unfailing
life, spirit, vigorous and fiery movement. Had Scott exercised over
his prose writings a more jealous rigor of supervision, and had he
eliminated the occasional infusions of obviously inferior matter,
his entire body of writings would have been even more familiar and
popular than they are to-day. It is safe to say that only a selection
of the most notable of his works is really enjoyed in our age, though
undoubtedly there will always be loyal lovers of the “Magician of the
North,” who still loyally read through Scott’s entire repertoire.
Indeed, we have known some who do this annually and delightedly. Taking
his romances in chronological order, one may travel in the observation
car of imagination through an enchanted land, having a background of
history; while his poems surpass Baedeker, Black, or Murray as guide
books to Melrose Abbey, through the Trossachs, to Ellen’s Isle, or
along Teviot’s “silver tide.”