THE MONASTERY
Scott had some strange ways of seeking relaxation from the strain of
his work. On Christmas Day, 1814, he wrote Constable that he was
'setting out for Abbotsford to refresh the machine.' During the year
he had written his first great novel, 'Waverley'; one of his longer
poems, 'The Lord of the Isles'; nearly the whole of his 'Life of
Swift'; two essays for an encyclopædia; a two-volume family memoir for
a friend; and kept up a voluminous personal correspondence,--an amount
of industry which is best described by Dominie Sampson's word,
_prodigious_. Surely the 'machine' needed 'refreshment,' and it
consisted in producing, in six weeks' time, another great novel, 'Guy
Mannering'! In the same way, while dictating 'Ivanhoe,' in spite of
severe bodily pain which prevented the use of his pen, he sought
refreshment by starting another novel, 'The Monastery.' 'It was a
relief,' he said, 'to interlay the scenery most familiar to me with the
strange world for which I had to draw so much on imagination.'
'The Monastery' was the first of Scott's novels in which the scenery is
confined to the immediate vicinity of his own home. It is all within
walking distance of Abbotsford and much of it had been familiar to the
author from childhood. Melrose, or Kennaquhair, is only about two
miles away. This little village is as ancient as the abbey from which
it takes its name, and {256} that splendid ruin dates from 1136, when
the pious Scottish king, known as St. David, founded the monastery and
granted extensive lands to the Cistercian Order of Monks for its
maintenance. The village has followed the fortunes of the
abbey--prospering when the monks prospered, and suffering the blight of
war whenever the English kings descended upon it. Its present
prosperity, so far as it has any, is the gift of Sir Walter Scott.
Hawthorne, who rambled through the country in 1856, noted in his
journal that 'Scotland--cold, cloudy, barren little bit of earth that
it is--owes all the interest that the world feels in it to him.' I
cannot endorse this view of Scotland, for it left quite the opposite
impression upon my mind, but the last part of the remark is certainly
true of Melrose. It bears about the same relation to Scotland that
Stratford does to England. Thousands go there every year to see the
work of art, glorious even in ruins, which represents the highest
development of the Gothic architecture and to marvel at the rich
carvings in stone which, after the lapse of nearly six hundred years,
still remain as a monument to the patience, skill, and devotion of the
monks of St. Mary's. But they go because the great Wizard of the North
has thrown the glamour of his genius over the whole of the Border
country, of which Melrose is the natural centre. And when they arrive,
they find the abbey interpreted in the words of 'The Lay of the Last
Minstrel,' which the custodians of the ruin, for fourscore years, have
never tired of quoting.
In the novel, no attempt is made to describe the beauty of the ruin.
The poem had already done that to perfection. But the monks spring
into life again, the {257} venerable ruin is transformed into a church,
the monastic buildings resume their former shape, and the palace of
their ruler is refurnished in all its original magnificence. A fire of
glowing logs gives warmth to the apartments. An oaken stand, with a
roasted capon and 'a goodly stoup of Bourdeaux of excellent flavour,'
suggests the truth of the old rhyme:--
The monks of Melrose made fat kail
On Fridays when they fasted,
Nor wanted they gude beef and ale
So lang's their neighbours' lasted.
In a richly carved chair before the fire sits a portly abbot, with
round face, rosy cheeks, and good-natured, laughing eyes, the product
of a long life of good feeding and indolent ease. By his side stands
the sub-prior, a cadaverous, sharp-faced little man, with piercing grey
eyes bespeaking a high order of intellect, his emaciated features
testifying to rigid fastings and relentless self-abasement. The abuse
of the monastic privileges, common enough at the time, is thus
contrasted with the conscientious observance of all the rules of the
order. In and out of the cloisters, the refectory, and the palace,
monks in black gowns and white scapularies are continually passing.
The old ruin has been restored by the genius of the novelist to the
life and activity of the sixteenth century.
The earliest date referred to in the story is 1547, the year of the
battle of Pinkie, when the Scottish forces met with a disaster exceeded
only by Flodden Field. In this battle Simon Glendinning, a soldier
fighting for the 'Halidome' of St. Mary's, met his death. His son
Halbert was then nine or ten years old. The story comes {258} to a
close when he is nineteen, which would be 1557. The hostility of Henry
VIII had caused great anxiety to the abbots of Melrose long before this
time and the persecution reached a climax in 1545. Sir Ralph Ewers and
Sir Brian Latoun systematically ravaged the Scottish Border, burning
hundreds of towns, castles, and churches, slaughtering and imprisoning
the people by the thousands and driving off their cattle and horses.
In the course of their raids, they reached Melrose with a force of five
thousand men and vented their spite on the beautiful old abbey. The
Scots took prompt vengeance. They quickly raised an army, and under
the leadership of Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, met the English and
defeated them with heavy losses. Both Ewers and Latoun were among the
slain, and the monks of Melrose buried them in the abbey with great
satisfaction. 'The Monastery' does not refer to this event, but its
graphic picture of the unsettled state of the country and the
consequent anxiety of the monks constitutes its chief value.
North of the abbey and across the Tweed is a green hillside, at the
base of which is a weir or dam. This is the place where the sacristan
of St. Mary's was pitched out of his saddle into the stream by the
'White Lady of Avenel,' who dipped him in the water two or three times
to make sure that 'every part of him had its share of wetting.'
The old bridge, which the sacristan was prevented from crossing by the
perversity of old Peter, the bridge-tender, was about a mile and a half
up the stream. Such a bridge once existed, though now there are no
traces visible. Scott used to see the foundations {259} occasionally
when drifting down the river at night in pursuit of one of his
favourite pastimes, spearing salmon by torchlight. There were three
towers in the water. A keeper lived in the middle one and controlled
the traffic by raising or lowering the draws at his pleasure. Those
who refused to pay his price, or whom he did not wish to accommodate,
might ford the stream, but at some stages of the water this was a
perilous operation.
The river Allan flows into the Tweed near the site of this bridge. It
is a little mountain brook that flows, in serpentine course, through
the valley of Glendearg. A mile or so up the rivulet there is a
picturesque and shady glen called Fairy Dean. After a flood, little
pieces of curious stones, in fantastic shapes, are often found, the
play of the waters having transformed the fragments of rock into fairy
cups and saucers, guns, boats, cradles, or whatever a childish
imagination might suggest. This was the abode of the fairies where the
little elfin folk held their nightly carnivals, and who knows but Queen
Titania herself might have held her moonlight revels upon this very
spot? At any rate, the neighbouring people, for centuries, by common
consent, recognized the feudal rights of the fairy race to this little
dell, and left them undisturbed. It must have been the abode of the
White Lady, and no doubt stood in the author's mind for the secluded
glen which he calls, in Celtic, _Corrie nan Shian_, meaning 'Hollow of
the Fairies,' where Halbert Glendinning found the huge rock, the wild
holly tree, and the spring beneath its branches. Here, doubtless, for
no more appropriate spot can be found, Halbert summoned the mystic
maiden with the words:--
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Thrice to the holly brake--
Thrice to the well:--
I bid thee awake,
White Maid of Avenel!
Noon gleams in the Lake--
Noon glows on the Fell--
Wake thee, O wake,
White Maid of Avenel!
At the head of the glen there are three ruined peel-houses or Border
towers, known as Hillslap, Colmslie, and Langshaw. The first of these
may fairly stand for the original of Glendearg, the home of the
Glendinnings. This old tower has a sculptured date on the lintel of
the entrance which seems to indicate that it was built in 1585--a
little too late for the story, to be sure, but trifles like that never
worried Sir Walter. He wanted to place the Widow Glendinning and her
two children in a tower suited to the ancient family connexions of her
husband who might have been able to defend his secluded retreat against
all comers for many years, had not the necessities of the time required
his service in the wars for the defence of his country. Hillslap
offered an excellent type of such a Border fortalice, and its situation
at the head of the glen, well protected by the surrounding mountains
and isolated by its remoteness from the ordinary lines of travel, made
it suitable for the purposes of the tale.
Referring to the castle of Julian Avenel, Scott, in a footnote, remarks
that it is vain to search near Melrose for any such castle, but adds
that in Yetholm Loch, a small sheet of water southeast of Kelso, there
is a small castle on an island, connected with the mainland by a {261}
causeway, but it is much smaller than Avenel. Of course we must take
the author's word for this, and yet, whether he did it with conscious
purpose or not, he succeeded in putting into his description some
features which irresistibly suggest a castle only seven miles from
Melrose, the tower of Smailholm, associated with the dearest memories
of his childhood.
Smailholm is one of the most perfect examples of the old feudal keeps
to be found in Scotland. A very small pool lies on one side of the
tower, but it is suggestive of the loch which once surrounded the
entire castle, making it a retreat of great security. 'The surprise of
the spectator was chiefly excited by finding a piece of water situated
in that high and mountainous region, and the landscape around had
features which might rather be termed wild, than either romantic or
sublime.' It was a surprise to me to find even a small pool of water
in such a locality, and I cannot help thinking that at least some
recollections of the peculiar situation of Smailholm may have been in
the author's mind when he wrote this description.
Scott has himself mentioned a prototype of the vulgar, brutal, and
licentious Julian Avenel in the person of the Laird of Black Ormiston,
a friend and confidant of Bothwell and one of the agents in the murder
of Darnley.
The concluding scene of the novel represents a sorrowful procession of
monks, in long black gowns and cowls, marching solemnly to the
market-place of the town, where they formed a circle around 'an ancient
cross of curious workmanship, the gift of some former monarch of
Scotland.' This old Mercat Cross still stands {262} in the centre of
the market-place of Melrose. It is about twenty feet high and is
surmounted by the figure of the unicorn and the arms of Scotland. It
requires a vivid imagination to identify the unicorn, however, the
ravages of time giving it more the aspect of a walrus, rampant.
'The Monastery,' following so soon after Scott's greatest success,
suffers severely by comparison with 'Ivanhoe,' and, perhaps for this
reason, was considered something of a failure. The cause, generally
assigned by the critics, was twofold, or rather, may be attributed to
two characters, which did not appeal to the public as Scott had
expected. One of these was the 'White Lady of Avenel' and the other,
Sir Piercie Shafton.
Scott had always manifested a fondness for ghosts, goblins, witches,
and the supernatural. The goblin-page made a nuisance of himself in
'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' and came near spoiling the poem; Marmion
had to fight a phantom knight, and so did Bertram Risingham, but in
both cases a rational explanation dispelled the mystery; the Baron of
Triermain visited a phantom castle in the Valley of St. John; Bruce
landed on the shores of Carrick, guided by a weird supernatural light;
Fergus MacIvor was dismayed by the Bodach Glas, a cheerful sort of
family ghost which always appeared when disaster was impending; the
guest of the Antiquary was compelled to sleep in a haunted chamber; a
mysterious fountain had a fatal influence upon the life of the Bride of
Lammermoor; and so throughout the pages of Scott's poems and novels we
find these strange incidents and phantom appearances. The real
orthodox ghost only peeps in at you occasionally and quickly vanishes.
{263} Although you may be frightened a little, you delight,
nevertheless, in the mystery. But there is something too substantial
about a female ghost who climbs up behind a man on horseback, guides
him into a stream of deep water, and ducks him three times, meanwhile
reciting long stanzas of poetry. And when the same ghost appears again
and again, as though the whole plot depended upon her personal
exertions, the constant exposure to the limelight causes the illusion
to melt away. This, I fancy, is the reason the Maid of Avenel failed
to appeal to Scott's readers.
Sir Piercie Shafton, the Euphuist, seems in like manner to have been
overdone. A suggestion of the foppery and absurdities of the coxcombs
of Queen Elizabeth's court might have been interesting, but Sir Piercie
remains on the stage too long and becomes a bore. The pedantic Baron
of Bradwardine in 'Waverley' is a bore, but we like him. The garrulous
Dalgetty is tiresome, but we could not do without him. Sir Piercie, on
the contrary, has no redeeming traits.
Aside from the failure of these two characters to please the public,
the novel lacks the interest that attaches to all its predecessors.
There is no Dandie Dinmont, nor Meg Merrilies, nor Dominie Sampson; no
Jonathan Oldbuck nor Edie Ochiltree; no historical personage of
interest like Rob Roy or King Richard; no Jeanie Deans; no Flora
MacIvor; no Die Vernon; no Rebecca.
On the other hand, it has some fine pictures of the sturdy Scotch
character, it gives a glimpse of monastic life in the sixteenth
century, and has an historical value in its presentation of the
conflict of cross-currents of {264} thought and feeling, as they
affected the people who lived amid the furious contentions of the
Reformation. Father Eustace is a fine type of the able, intelligent,
and devoted Catholic priest, and Henry Warden of the brave,
unflinching, determined apostle of the reformed doctrines.
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