With great joy I send you Roy.
'T was a tough job,
But we're done with Rob.
“Rob Roy” was published on the last day of 1817. The toughness of the job
was caused by constant pain, and by struggles with “the lassitude of
opium.” So seldom sentimental, so rarely given to expressing his
melancholy moods in verse, Scott, while composing “Rob Roy,” wrote the
beautiful poem “The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill,” in which, for this once,
“pity of self through all makes broken moan.”
Some stress may be laid on the state of Sir Walter's health at this
moment, because a living critic has tried to show that, in his case,
“every pang of the stomach paralyses the brain;” that he “never had a fit
of the cramp without spoiling a chapter.”--[Mr. Ruskin's “Fiction Fair
and Foul,” “Nineteenth Century,” 1880, p. 955.]--“Rob Roy” is a
sufficient answer to these theories. The mind of Scott was no slave to
his body.
The success of the story is pleasantly proved by a sentence in a review
of the day: “It is an event unprecedented in the annals either of
literature or of the custom-house that the entire cargo of a packet, or
smack, bound from Leith to London, should be the impression of a novel,
for which the public curiosity was so much upon the alert as to require
this immense importation to satisfy.”
Ten thousand copies of a three-volume novel are certainly a ponderous
cargo, and Constable printed no fewer in his first edition. Scott was
assured of his own triumph in February 1819, when a dramatised version of
his novel was acted in Edinburgh by the company of Mr. William Murray, a
descendant of the traitor Murray of Broughton. Mr. Charles Mackay made a
capital Bailie, and the piece remains a favourite with Scotch audiences.
It is plain, from the reviews, that in one respect “Rob Roy” rather
disappointed the world. They had expected Rob to be a much more imposing
and majestic cateran, and complained that his foot was set too late on
his native heather. They found too much of the drover and intriguer, too
little of the traditional driver of the spoil. This was what Scott
foresaw when he objected to “writing up to a title.” In fact, he did not
write up to, it, and, as the “Scots Magazine” said, “shaped his story in
such a manner as to throw busybodies out in their chase, with a slight
degree of malicious finesse.” “All the expeditions to the wonderful cave
have been thrown away, for the said cave is not once, we think, mentioned
from beginning to end.”
“Rob Roy” equals “Waverley” in its pictures of Highland and Lowland
society and character. Scott had clearly set himself to state his
opinions about the Highlands as they were under the patriarchal system of
government. The Highlanders were then a people, not lawless, indeed, but
all their law was the will of their chief. Bailie Nicol Jarvie makes a
statement of their economic and military condition as accurate as it is
humorous. The modern “Highland Question” may be studied as well in the
Bailie's words as in volumes of history and wildernesses of blue-books.
A people patriarchal and military as the Arabs of the desert were
suddenly dragged into modern commercial and industrial society. All old
bonds were snapped in a moment; emigration (at first opposed by some of
the chiefs) and the French wars depleted the country of its “lang-leggit
callants, gaun wanting the breeks.” Cattle took the place of men, sheep
of cattle, deer of sheep, and, in the long peace, a population grew up
again--a population destitute of employment even more than of old,
because war and robbery had ceased to be outlets for its energy. Some
chiefs, as Dr. Johnson said, treated their lands as an attorney treats
his row of cheap houses in a town. Hence the Highland Question,--a
question in which Scott's sympathies were with the Highlanders.
“Rob Roy,” naturally, is no mere “novel with a purpose,” no economic
tract in disguise. Among Scott's novels it stands alone as regards its
pictures of passionate love. The love of Diana Vernon is no less
passionate for its admirable restraint. Here Scott displays, without
affectation, a truly Greek reserve in his art. The deep and strong
affection of Diana Vernon would not have been otherwise handled by him
who drew the not more immortal picture of Antigone. Unlike modern
novelists, Sir Walter deals neither in analysis nor in rapturous
effusions. We can, unfortunately, imagine but too easily how some writers
would peep and pry into the concealed emotions of that maiden heart; how
others would revel in tears, kisses, and caresses. In place of all these
Scott writes:--
She extended her hand, but I clasped her to my bosom. She sighed as
she extricated herself from the embrace which she permitted, escaped
to the door which led to her own apartment, and I saw her no more.
Months pass, in a mist of danger and intrigue, before the lovers meet
again in the dusk and the solitude.
“Mr. Francis Osbaldistone,” cries the girl's voice through the
moonlight, “should not whistle his favourite airs when he wishes to
remain undiscovered.”
And Diana Vernon--for she, wrapped in a horseman's cloak, was the
last speaker--whistled in playful mimicry the second part of the
tune, which was on my lips when they came up.
Surely there was never, in story or in song, a lady so loving and so
light of heart, save Rosalind alone. Her face touches Frank's, as she
says goodbye for ever “It was a moment never to be forgotten,
inexpressibly bitter, yet mixed with a sensation of pleasure so deeply
soothing and affecting as at once to unlock all the floodgates of the
heart.”
She rides into the night, her lover knows the _hysterica passio_ of poor
Lear, but “I had scarce given vent to my feelings in this paroxysm ere I
was ashamed of my weakness.”
These were men and women who knew how to love, and how to live.
All men who read “Rob Roy” are innocent rivals of Frank Osbaldistone.
Di Vernon holds her place in our hearts with Rosalind, and these airy
affections, like the actual emotions which they mimic, are not matters
for words. This lady, so gay, so brave, so witty and fearless, so tender
and true, who “endured trials which might have dignified the history of a
martyr, . . . who spent the day in darkness and the night in vigil, and
never breathed a murmur of weakness or complaint,” is as immortal in
men's memories as the actual heroine of the White Rose, Flora Macdonald.
Her place is with Helen and Antigone, with Rosalind and Imogen, the
deathless daughters of dreams. She brightens the world as she passes, and
our own hearts tell us all the story when Osbaldistone says, “You know
how I lamented her.”
In the central interest, which, for once, is the interest of love, “Rob
Roy” attains the nobility, the reserve, the grave dignity of the highest
art. It is not easy to believe that Frank Osbaldistone is worthy of his
lady; but here no man is a fair judge. In the four novels--“Waverley,”
“Guy Mannering,” “The Antiquary,” and “Rob Roy”--which we have studied,
the hero has always been a young poet. Waverley versified; so did
Mannering; Lovel “had attempted a few lyrical pieces;” and, in
Osbaldistone's rhymes, Scott parodied his own
blast of that dread horn
On Fontarabian echoes borne.
All the heroes, then, have been poets, and Osbaldistone's youth may have
been suggested by Scott's memories of his own, and of the father who
“feared that he would never be better than a gangrel scrapegut.” Like
Henry Morton, in “Old Mortality,” Frank Osbaldistone is on the political
side taken by Scott's judgment, not by his emotions. To make Di Vernon
convert him to Jacobitism would have been to repeat the story of
Waverley. Still, he would have been more sympathetic if he had been
converted. He certainly does not lack spirit, as a sportsman, or “on an
occasion,” as Sir William Hope says in “The Scots' Fencing Master,” when
he encounters Rashleigh in the college gardens. Frank, in short, is all
that a hero should be, and is glorified by his affection.
Of the other characters, perhaps Rob Roy is too sympathetically drawn.
The materials for a judgment are afforded by Scott's own admirable
historical introduction. The Rob Roy who so calmly “played booty,” and
kept a foot in either camp, certainly falls below the heroic. His
language has been criticised in late years, and it has been insisted that
the Highlanders never talked Lowland Scotch. But Scott has anticipated
these cavils in the eighteenth chapter of the second volume. Certainly no
Lowlander knew the Highlanders better than he did, and his ear for
dialect was as keen as his musical ear was confessedly obtuse.
Scott had the best means of knowing whether Helen MacGregor would be
likely to soar into heroics as she is apt to do. In fact, here “we may
trust the artist.”
The novel is as rich as any in subordinate characters full of life and
humour. Morris is one of the few utter cowards in Scott. He has none of
the passionate impulses towards courage of the hapless hero in “The Fair
Maid of Perth.” The various Osbaldistones are nicely discriminated by
Diana Vernon, in one of those “Beatrix moods” which Scott did not always
admire, when they were displayed by “Lady Anne” and other girls of flesh
and blood. Rashleigh is of a nature unusual in Scott. He is, perhaps, Sir
Walter's nearest approach, for malignant egotism, to an Iago. Of Bailie
Nicol Jarvie commendation were impertinent. All Scotland arose, called
him hers, laughed at and applauded her civic child. Concerning Andrew
Fairservice, the first edition tells us what the final edition leaves us
to guess--that Tresham “may recollect him as gardener at Osbaldistone
Hall.” Andrew was not a friend who could be shaken off. Diana may have
ruled the hall, but Andrew must have remained absolute in the gardens,
with “something to maw that he would like to see mawn, or something to
saw that he would like to see sawn, or something to ripe that he would
like to see ripen, and sae he e'en daikered on wi' the family frae year's
end to year's end,” and life's end. His master “needed some carefu' body
to look after him.”
Only Shakspeare and Scott could have given us medicines to make us like
this cowardly, conceited “jimp honest” fellow, Andrew Fairservice, who
just escapes being a hypocrite by dint of some sincere old Covenanting
leaven in his veins. We make bold to say that the creator of Parolles and
Lucie, and many another lax and lovable knave, would, had he been a Scot,
have drawn Andrew Fairservice thus, and not otherwise.
The critics of the hour censured, as they were certain to censure, the
construction, and especially the conclusion, of “Rob Roy.” No doubt the
critics were right. In both Scott and Shakspeare there is often seen a
perfect disregard of the denouement. Any moderately intelligent person
can remark on the huddled-up ends and hasty marriages in many of
Shakspeare's comedies; Moliere has been charged with the same offence;
and, if blame there be, Scott is almost always to blame. Thackeray is
little better. There must be some reason that explains why men of genius
go wrong where every newspaper critic, every milliner's girl acquainted
with circulating libraries, can detect the offence.
In the closing remarks of “Old Mortality” Scott expresses himself
humorously on this matter of the denouement. His schoolmaster author
takes his proofsheets to Miss Martha Buskbody, who was the literary set
in Gandercleugh, having read through the whole stock of three circulating
libraries. Miss Buskbody criticises the Dominic as Lady Louisa Stuart
habitually criticised Sir Walter. “Your plan of omitting a formal
conclusion will never do!” The Dominie replies, “Really, madam, you must
be aware that every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting
as the author draws to a conclusion,--just like your tea, which, though
excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup.”
He compares the orthodox happy ending to “the luscious lump of
half-dissolved sugar” usually found at the bottom of the cup. This topic
might be discussed, and indeed has been discussed, endlessly. In our
actual lives it is probable that most of us have found ourselves living
for a year, or a month, or a week, in a chapter or half a volume of a
novel, and these have been our least happy experiences. But we have also
found that the romance vanishes away like a ghost, dwindles out, closes
with ragged ends, has no denouement. Then the question presents itself,
As art is imitation, should not novels, as a rule, close thus? The
experiment has frequently been tried, especially by the modern geniuses
who do not conceal their belief that their art is altogether finer than
Scott's, or, perhaps, than Shakspeare's.
In his practice, and in his Dominie's critical remarks, Sir Walter
appears inclined to agree with them. He was just as well aware as his
reviewers, or as Lady Louisa Stuart, that the conclusion of “Rob Roy” is
“huddled up,” that the sudden demise of all the young Baldistones is a
high-handed measure. He knew that, in real life, Frank and Di Vernon
would never have met again after that farewell on the moonlit road. But
he yielded to Miss Buskbody's demand for “a glimpse of sunshine in the
last chapter;” he understood the human liking for the final lump of
sugar. After all, fiction is not, any more than any other art, a mere
imitation of life: it is an arrangement, a selection. Scott was too kind,
too humane, to disappoint us, the crowd of human beings who find much of
our happiness in dreams. He could not keep up his own interest in his
characters after he had developed them; he could take pleasure in giving
them life,--he had little pleasure in ushering them into an earthly
paradise; so that part of his business he did carelessly, as his only
rivals in literature have also done it.
The critics censured, not unjustly, the “machinery” of the story,--these
mysterious “assets” of Osbaldistone and Tresham, whose absence was to
precipitate the Rising of 1715. The “Edinburgh Review” lost its heart
(Jeffrey's heart was always being lost) to Di Vernon. But it pronounces
that “a king with legs of marble, or a youth with an ivory shoulder,”
heroes of the “Arabian Nights” and of Pindar, was probable, compared with
the wit and accomplishments of Diana. This is hypercriticism. Diana's
education, under Rashleigh, had been elaborate; her acquaintance with
Shakspeare, her main strength, is unusual in women, but not beyond the
limits of belief. Here she is in agreeable contrast to Rose Bradwardine,
who had never heard of “Romeo and Juliet.” In any case, Diana compels
belief as well as wins affection, while we are fortunate enough to be in
her delightful company.
As long as we believe in her, it is not of moment to consider whether her
charms are incompatible with probability.
“Rob Roy” was finished in spite of “a very bad touch of the cramp for
about three weeks in November, which, with its natural attendants of
dulness and, weakness, made me unable to get our matters forward till
last week,” says Scott to Constable. “But,” adds the unconquerable
author, “I am resting myself here a few days before commencing my new
labours, which will be untrodden ground, and, I think, pretty likely to
succeed.” The “new labours” were “The Heart of Mid-Lothian.”