THE NOVELS, FROM _WAVERLEY_ TO _REDGAUNTLET_
In the opening introduction to the collected edition of the novels,
Scott has given a very full account of the genesis of _Waverley_. These
introductions, written before the final inroad had been made on his
powers by the united strength of physical and moral misfortune, animated
at once by the last glow of those powers, and by the indefinable charm
of a fond retrospection, displaying every faculty in autumn luxuriance,
are so delightful that they sometimes seem to be the very cream and
essence of his literary work in prose. Indeed, I have always wondered
why they have not been published separately as a History of the Waverley
Novels by their author. Yet the public, I believe, with what I fear must
be called its usual lack of judgment in some such matters, seems never
to have read them very widely. An exception, however, may possibly have
been made in the case of this first one, opening as it has long done
every new issue of the whole set of novels. At anyrate, in one way or
another, it is probably known, at least to those who take an interest in
Scott, that he had begun _Waverley_ and thrown it aside some ten years
before its actual appearance, at a time when he was yet a novice in
literature. He had also attempted one or two other things,--a completion
of Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_, the beginning of a tale about Thomas the
Rhymer, etc., which are now appended to the introduction itself,--and he
had once, in 1810, resumed _Waverley_, and again thrown it aside. At
last, when his supremacy as a popular poet was threatened by Byron, and
when, perhaps, he himself was a little wearying of the verse tale, he
discovered the fragment while searching for fishing-tackle in the old
desk where he had put it, and after a time resolved to make a new and
anonymous attempt on public favour.
By the time--1814--when the book actually appeared, considerable
changes, both for good and for bad, had occurred in Scott's
circumstances; and the total of his literary work, independently of the
poems mentioned in the last chapter, had been a good deal increased.
Ashestiel had been exchanged for Abbotsford; the new house was being
planned and carried out so as to become, if not exactly a palace,
something much more than the cottage which had been first talked of; and
the owner's passion for buying, at extravagant prices, every
neighbouring patch of mostly thankless soil that he could get hold of
was growing by indulgence. He himself, in 1811 and the following years,
was extremely happy and extremely busy, planting trees, planning rooms,
working away at _Rokeby_ and _Triermain_ in the general sitting-room of
the makeshift house, with hammering all about him (now, the hammer and
the pen are perhaps of all manual implements the most deadly and
irreconcilable foes!), corresponding with all sorts and conditions of
men; furnishing introductions and contributions (in some cases never yet
collected) to all sorts and conditions of books, and struggling, as best
he saw his way, though the way was unfortunately not the right one, with
the ever-increasing difficulties of Ballantyne & Company. I forget
whether there is any evidence that Dickens consciously took his humorous
incarnation of the duties of a 'Co.' from Scott's own experience. But
Scott as certainly had to provide the money, the sense, the good-humour,
and the rest of the working capital as Mark Tapley himself. The merely
pecuniary part of these matters may be left to the next chapter; it is
sufficient to say that, aggravated by misjudgment in the selection and
carrying out of the literary part, it brought the firm in 1814
exceedingly near the complete smash which actually happened ten years
later. One is tempted to wish that the crash had come, for it was only
averted by the alliance with Constable which was the cause of the final
downfall. Also, it would have come at a time when Scott was physically
better able to bear it; it could hardly in any degree have interfered
with the appearance of _Waverley_ and its followers; and it would have
had at least a chance of awakening their author to a sense of the double
mistake of engaging his credit in directly commercial concerns, and of
sinking his money in land and building. However, things were to be as
they were, and not otherwise.
How anxious Constable must have been to recover Scott (Hunter, the stone
of stumbling, was now removed by death) is evident from the mere list of
the titles of the books which he took over in whole or part from the
Ballantynes. Even his Napoleonic audacity quailed before the _Edinburgh
Annual Register_, with its handsome annual loss of a thousand a year, at
Brewster's _Persian Astronomy_, in 4to and 8vo, and at _General Views of
the County of Dumfries_. But he saddled himself with a good deal of the
'stock' (which in this case most certainly had not its old sense of
'assets'), and in May 1813, Scott seems to have thought that if John
Ballantyne would curb his taste for long-dated bills, things might go
well. Unluckily, John did not choose to do so, and Scott, despite the
warning, was equally unable to curb his own for peat-bogs, marl-pits,
the Cauldshiels Loch, and splendid lots of ancient armour. By July there
was again trouble, and in August things were so bad that they were only
cleared by Scott's obtaining from the Duke of Buccleuch a guarantee for
L4000. It was in consenting to this that the Duke expressed his approval
of Scott's determination to refuse the Laureateship, which had been
offered to him, and which, in consequence of his refusal and at his
suggestion, was conferred upon Southey. Even the guarantee, though it
did save the firm, saved it with great difficulty.
In the following winter Scott had an adventure with his eccentric German
amanuensis, Henry Weber, who had for some time been going mad, and who
proposed a duel with pistols (which he produced) to his employer in the
study at Castle Street. _Swift_ appeared at last in the summer, and it
was in June 1814 that the first of a series of wonderful _tours de
force_ was achieved by the completion, in about three weeks, of the last
half of _Waverley_. One of the most striking things in Lockhart is the
story of the idle apprentice who became industrious by seeing Scott's
hand traversing the paper hour after hour at his study window. The novel
actually appeared on July 7, and, being anonymous, made no immediate
'move,' as booksellers say, before Scott set off a fortnight later for
his long-planned tour with the Commissioners of Northern Lights--the
Scottish Trinity House--in their yacht, round the northern half of the
island and to Orkney and Shetland. To abstract his own admirable account
of the tour[27] would be a task grateful neither to writer nor to
reader, the latter of whom, if he does not know it already, had better
lose no time in making its acquaintance. On the return in September,
Scott was met by two pieces of bad and good tidings respectively--the
death of the Duchess of Buccleuch, and the distinct, though not as yet
'furious,' success of his novel.
There is no doubt that the early fragments in tale-telling which have
been noticed above do not display any particular skill in the art; nor
is there much need to quarrel with those who declare that the opening of
_Waverley_[26] itself ranks little, if at all, above them. I always read
it myself; but I believe most people plunge almost at once into the
Tullyveolan visit. By doing so, however, they miss not merely the
critical pleasure of comparing a man's work (as can rarely be done)
during his period of groping for the way, with his actual stumble into
it for the first time, but also such justification as there is for the
hero's figure. Nobody ever judged the unlucky captain of Gardiner's
better than his creator, who at the time frankly called him 'a sneaking
piece of imbecility,' and avowed, with as much probability as right,
that 'if he had married Flora, she would have set him up on the
chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski's[25] wife used to do.' But his
weaknesses have at least an excuse from his education and antecedents,
which does not appear if these antecedents are neglected.
Still, the story-interest only begins when Waverley rides into the
bear-warded avenue; it certainly never ceases till the golden image of
the same totem is replaced in the Baron of Bradwardine's hand. And it is
very particularly to be observed that this interest is of a kind
absolutely novel in combination and idiosyncrasy. The elements of
literary interest are nowhere new, except in what is, for aught we know,
accidentally the earliest literature _to us_. They are all to be found
in Homer, in the Book of Job, in the _Agamemnon_, in the _Lancelot_, in
the _Poem of the Cid_. But from time to time, in the hands of the men of
greater genius, they are shaken up afresh, they receive new adjustments,
and a touch of something personal which transforms them. This new
adjustment and touch produced in Scott's case what we call the
Historical Novel.[24] It is quite a mistake to think that he was limited
to this. _Guy Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ among the earlier novels,
_St. Ronan's Well_ and the exquisite introductory sketch to the
_Chronicles of the Canongate_ among the later, would disprove that. But
the historical novel was the new kind that he was 'born to introduce,'
after many failures in many generations. It is difficult to say whether
it was accident or property which made his success in it co-existent
with his success in depicting national character, scenery, and manners.
Attempts at this, not always unsuccessful attempts, had indeed been made
before. It had been tried frequently, though usually in the sense of
caricature, on the stage; it had been done quite recently in the novel
by Miss Edgeworth (whom Scott at least professed to regard as his
governess here), and much earlier in this very department of Scotch
matters by Smollett. But it had never been done with really commanding
ability on the great scale.
In _Waverley_ Scott supplied these two aspects, the historical-romantic
and the national-characteristic, with a felicity perhaps all the more
unerring in that it seems to have been only partly conscious. The
subject of 'the Forty-five' was now fully out of taboo, and yet retained
an interest more than antiquarian. The author had the amplest stores of
knowledge, and that sympathy which is so invaluable to the artist when
he keeps it within the limits of art. He seems to have possessed by
instinct (for there was nobody to teach him) the paramount secret of the
historical novelist, the secret of making his central and prominent
characters fictitious, and the real ones mostly subsidiary. On the other
hand, the knowledge of his native country, which he had been
accumulating for almost the whole of his nearly four-and-forty years of
life, was joined in him with that universal knowledge of humanity which
only men of the greatest genius have. I am, indeed, aware that both
these positions have been attacked. I was much pleased, some time after
I had begun to write this little book, to find in a review of the
present year of grace these words: 'Scott only knew a small portion of
human nature, and he was unable to portray the physiognomy of the past.'
I feared at first that this might be only one of the numerous flings of
our young barbarians, a pleasant, or pleasantly intended, flirt of the
heels of the New Humour. But the context showed that the writer was in
deadly earnest. I shall not attempt here to explain to him, in a popular
or any other style, that he is, perhaps, not quite right. Life itself is
not long enough--'little books' are decidedly too short--for a
demonstration that the Pacific Ocean is not really a small portion of
the terrestrial water-space, or that Alexander was able to overrun
foreign countries. We may find a little room in the Conclusion to say
something more about Scott's range and his faculty. Here it will be
enough to wear our friend's rue with a slight difference, and to say
that _Waverley_ and its successors showed in their author knowledge,
complete in all but certain small parts, of human nature, and an almost
unlimited faculty of portraying the physiognomy of the past.
It was scarcely to be expected that a book which was anonymous, and of
which only a very few persons knew the real authorship, while even those
who guessed it at all early were not so very many, should attain
immediate popularity. Lockhart says that the slowness of the success was
exaggerated, but his own figures prove that it was somewhat leisurely.
Five editions, one (the second) of two thousand, the others of one
thousand each, supplied the demand of the first six months, and a
thousand copies more that of the next eighteen months--a difference from
the almost instantaneous myriads of the poems, quite sufficient to show
very eloquently how low the prose novel then stood in popular favour. It
is the greatest triumph of Scott, from this low point of view, that his
repeated blows heated the public as they did, till at the fourth
publication, within but a year or two, Constable actually dared to start
with ten thousand copies at once, and they were all absorbed in no time.
Scott had always been a rapid worker, but it was only now, under the
combined stimulus of the new-found gift, the desire for more land and a
statelier Abbotsford, and the pressure of the affairs of Ballantyne &
Co., that he began to work at the portentous rate which, though I do
not believe that it at all injured the quality of his production, pretty
certainly endangered his health. During 1814 he had written nearly all
his _Life of Swift_, nearly all _Waverley_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and
an abundance of 'small wares,' essays, introductions, and what not. The
major part of _Guy Mannering_--perhaps the very best of the novels, for
merit of construction and interest of detail--seems to have been written
in less than a month, at the extreme end of this year and the beginning
of 1815. The whole appears to have been done in six weeks, to 'shake
himself free of _Waverley_'--probably the most gigantic exhibition of
the 'hair of the dog' recorded in literature.
The _donnee_ of this novel was furnished by a Dumfries surveyor of
taxes, Mr. Train, the scenery by that early visit to Galloway, in the
interest of the reverend toyer with sweetie-wives, which has been
recorded. Other indebtedness, such as that of Hatteraick to the
historical or legendary free-trader, Yawkins, and the like, has been
traced. But the charm of the whole lies in none of these things, nor in
all together, but in Scott's own fashion of working them up. Nothing at
first could seem to be a greater contrast with _Waverley_ than this
tale. No big wars, no political hazards; but a double and tenfold
portion of human nature and local colour. This last element had in the
earlier book been almost entirely supplied by Tullyveolan and its
master; for Fergus and the Highland scenes, good as they are, are not
much more than a furbishing up of the poem-matter of this kind,
especially in the _Lady of the Lake_. But here the supply of character
was liberal and the variety of scenery extraordinary. We cannot judge
the innovation fully now, but let anyone turn to the theatrical
properties of Godwin and Holcroft, of Mrs. Radcliffe and 'Monk' Lewis,
and he will begin to have a better idea of what _Guy Mannering_ must
have been to its first readers. As usual, the personages who head the
_dramatis personae_ are not the best. Bertram, though less of a
nincompoop than Waverley, is not very much; Lucy is a less lively _ange
de candeur_ than Rose, and nothing else; and Julia's genteel-comedy
missishness does not do much more than pair off with Flora's
tragedy-queen air. 'Mannering, Guy, a Colonel returned from the Indies,'
is, perhaps, also too fair a description of the player of the
title-part.[23] But we trouble ourselves very little about these persons.
As for characters, the author opens fire on us almost at the very first
with Dominie Sampson and Meg Merrilees, and the hardly less excellent
figure of Bertram's well-meaning booby of a father; gives us barely time
to make their acquaintance before we meet Dandie Dinmont; brings up
almost superfluous reinforcements with Mr. Pleydell, and throughout
throws in Hatteraick and Glossin, Jock Jabos and his mistress, and Sir
Robert Haslewood, the company at Kippletringan, and at the funeral, and
elsewhere, in the most reckless spirit of literary lavishness. Nor is he
less prodigal of incident and scene. The opening passage of Mannering's
night-ride could not have been bettered if the painter had taken
infinitely more pains. Bertram's walk and the skirmish with the prowlers
are simply first-rate; the Edinburgh scenes have always excited
admiration as the very best of their kind; and the various passages
which lead to the working out of justice on Glossin and Hatteraick are
not merely told with a gusto, but arranged with a craftsmanship, of
which the latter is unfortunately less often present than the former in
the author's later work. There is hardly any book of Scott's on which it
is more tempting to dwell than this. Although the demand had not yet
reached anything like its height, two thousand copies were sold in
forty-eight hours, and five thousand in three months.
In March 1815 Scott went to London, and met two persons of distinction,
the Regent and Lord Byron. There seems to be a little doubt whether
George did or did not adapt the joke of the hanging judge, about
'checkmating this time,' to the authorship of the _Waverley_ novels; but
there is no doubt that he was very civil. With Byron Scott was at once
on very good terms, for Scott was not the man to bear any grudge for the
early fling in _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_; and Byron, whatever
his faults, 'had more of lion' in him than to be jealous of such a
rival. The difference of their characters was such as to prevent them
from being in the strict sense friends; and Scott's comparison of Byron,
after the separation, to a peacock parted from the hen and lifting up
his voice to tell the world about it, has a rather terribly far-reaching
justice, both of moral and literary criticism, on that noble bard's
whole life and conversation. But there were no little jealousies between
them, and apparently some real liking.
This visit to London was extended to Brussels and Paris, with the result
in verse of the already mentioned and not particularly happy _Field of
Waterloo_, in prose of the interesting _Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk_,
an account of the tour. Both were published (the poem almost
immediately, _Paul_ not till the new year) after Scott's return to
Abbotsford at the end of September; and he set to work during the later
autumn on his third novel, _The Antiquary_. The book appeared in May
1816, at about the time of the death of Major John Scott, the last but
one of the poet's surviving brothers. It was not at first so popular as
_Guy Mannering_, which, however, it very rapidly caught up even in that
respect: nor is this bad start surprising. To good judges nowadays the
book appeals as strongly at least as any other of its author's--in fact,
Monkbarns and the Mucklebackits, the rescue of Sir Arthur and Isabel,
the scenes in the ruins of St. Ruth's, and especially Edie Ochiltree,
were never surpassed by him. But the story was a daring innovation, or
return, among the novels of its own day. It boldly rejected most of the
ordinary sources of romance interest. It had very little plot; its
humorous characters, though touched with the rarest art, were not
caricatured; and (for which it certainly cannot be praised) that
greatest fault of Scott's,--perhaps his only great fault as a
novelist,--the 'huddling up' of the end, appears in it for the first,
though unluckily by no means for the last, time. But it would have been
a very sad thing for the public taste if it had definitely refused _The
Antiquary_. A book which contains within the compass of the opening
chapters such masterpieces as the journey to the Hawes, the description
of the Antiquary's study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a
generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful.
Moreover, it had, as Scott's unwearied biographer has already noted, a
new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes,
invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its
chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite
equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; but
what is certain is that he in them discovered, with extraordinary
felicity, skill in three different kinds of novel--the historical, the
romantic-adventurous, and that of ordinary or almost wholly ordinary
life; and that even he never exactly added a fourth kind to his
inventions, though he varied them wonderfully within themselves. The
romance partly historical, the romance mainly or wholly fictitious, and
the novel of manners; these were his three classes, and hardly any
others.
It is not entirely explained what were the reasons which determined
Scott to make his next venture, the _Tales of my Landlord_, under a
fresh pseudonym, and also to publish it not with Constable, but with
Murray and Blackwood. Lockhart's blame of John Ballantyne may not be
unfair; but it is rather less supported by documentary evidence than
most of his strictures on the Ballantynes. And the thing is perhaps to
be sufficiently accounted for by Scott's double dislike, both as an
independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his
work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments
on the public--a fancy itself not wholly, though partially,
comprehensible. As a matter of fact, _Old Mortality_ and the _Black
Dwarf_ were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and
Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of 'old
stock.' The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence
of some critical remarks of his on the end of the _Black
Dwarf_,--remarks certainly not inexcusable,--and of Scott's famous
letter in reply, will doubtless receive further elucidation in the
forthcoming chronicle of the House of 'Ebony'; but it is told with fair
detail, in the second edition of Lockhart, from the actual archives.
Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the
historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the _Edinburgh Annual
Register_, yet the two _Tales_ were ready in November, and appeared on
the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must
be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and
received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as
an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of
falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. 'I assure
you,' he writes, 'I have never read a volume of them till they were
printed,' a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and
means absolutely nothing. Nobody but a magician, and no ordinary
magician, could read a _volume_ (which in the usual parlance means a
printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott
offered to review himself in the _Quarterly_, which he did. I certainly
do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as
sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults
and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate
state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what
the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one
out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke
than anything else.
Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first
foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned,
if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture
of the Covenanters given in _Old Mortality_. No one who knows the
documents is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of
view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott's
humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find
quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron,
and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical
novel, it is a far greater one than _Waverley_. Drumclog, the siege of
Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved
from murder by his own party, surpass anything in the earlier book. But
greater than any of these single things is one of the first and the
greatest of Scott's splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the
stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to
sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie's Tale later are
here put in detail and justified.
As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the
earlier part of the _Black Dwarf_ as happy as all but the best of
Scott's work. But the character of the _Dwarf_ himself was not one that
he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete.
Isabel's father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo's
antithesis between _scelerat_ and _maroufle_ comes in here), and even
Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete
_insouciance_ as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat
here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of
the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can
hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its
admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil.
Between the first and the second sets of _Tales_, the 'Author of
_Waverley_,' true to his odd design of throwing the public off the
scent, reappeared, and the result was _Rob Roy_. Perhaps because it was
written under the first attacks of that 'cramp of the stomach' which,
though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no
doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott
did not at first much like _Rob_. But he was reconciled later; and
hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot
taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is
even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have
dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but
Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which
lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the
major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular,
even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be
denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly
from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice,
to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner
equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped stitch, no false
note. Nor in any book are there so many of Scott's own characters, and
others not quite so much his own. Helen Macgregor, perhaps, does not
'thrill our blood and overpower our reason,' as she did Lady Louisa's,
simply because we were born some hundred years later than that acute and
accomplished granddaughter of Lady Mary; and Rashleigh pretty
frequently, Rob himself now and then, may also savour to us a little of
the boards and the sawdust. But, as a rule, Rob does not; and for nobody
else, not even for the fortunate Frank,--who has nothing to do but to
walk through his part creditably, and does it,--need any allowance be
made. The Bailie is, with Shallow, his brother justice (upon whom he
justly looks down, but to whom he is, I think, kind) in Arthur's bosom;
Andrew Fairservice and the Dougal creature, Justice Inglewood and Sir
Hildebrand, are there too. As for Die Vernon, she is the one of Scott's
heroines with whom one _has to_ fall in love, just as, according to a
beautiful story, a thoughtless and reluctant world _had to_ believe the
Athanasian Creed. It is painful to say that persons on whom it is
impossible to retort the charge, have sometimes insinuated a touch of
vulgarity in Di. For these one can but pray; and, after all, they are
usually of her sex, which in such judgments of itself counts not. All
men, who are men and gentlemen, must delight in her. And here, as
always, to all but the very last, even in the twilight of _Anne of
Geierstein_, the succession of scenes hurries the reader along without
breath or time to stop and criticise, with nothing to do, if he is a
reasonable person, but to read and enjoy and admire.
Lockhart has taken the opportunity of this point of time (1817-1818),
which may be said to mark the zenith of Scott's prosperity, if not of
his fame, to halt and to give a sort of survey of his father-in-law's
private life at Castle Street and at Abbotsford. It forms one of the
pleasantest portions of his book, containing nothing more tragic than
the advent of the famous American tragedy of _The Cherokee Lovers_,
which its careful author sent, that Scott might approve and publish it,
in duplicate, so that the unfortunate recipient had to pay five pounds
twice over for the postage of the rubbish. Of course things were not
entirely as they seemed. The cramps with which, as mentioned, Scott had
been already seized, during the progress of _Rob Roy_, were, though
probably not caused, yet all too much helped and hastened, by the
ferocious manner in which he worked his brains. For it must be doubted
whether social intercourse, or even bodily exercise in company with
others, is really the best refreshment after very severe mental labour.
Both distract and amuse; but they do not refresh, relax, relieve, like a
bath of pure solitude.
Divers events of importance happened to Scott, in the later course of
the year 1818[21] (besides a much worse recurrence of his disorder),
after the _Heart of Midlothian_ (the second series of the _Tales_) had
been published in June, and the _Bride of Lammermoor_ (the third series)
had been begun. The Duke of Buccleuch, his chief, his (as he would
himself have cheerfully allowed) patron, his helper in time of need, and
his most intimate friend, died. So did his brother-in-law, Charles
Carpenter, this latter death adding considerably, though to an extent
exaggerated at first and only reversionary, to the prospects of Scott's
children. He gave up an idea, which he had for some time held, of
obtaining a judgeship of the Scotch Exchequer; but he received his
baronetcy in April 1820. Abbotsford went on gradually and expensively
completing itself; the correspondence which tells us so much and is such
delightful reading continued, as if the writer had nothing else to write
and nothing else to do. But for us the chief matters of interest are the
two novels mentioned, and that admirable supplement to the second of
them, the _Legend of Montrose_.
There can be little doubt, I think, that in at least passages, and those
very large ones, of the _Heart of Midlothian_, Scott went as high as he
ever had done, or ever did thereafter. I have never agreed with Lady
Louisa Stuart that 'Mr. Saddletree is not amusing,' nor that there is
too much Scots law for English readers. It must be remembered that until
Scott opened people's eyes, there were some very singular conventions
and prejudices, even in celestial minds, about novels. Technical details
were voted tedious and out of place--as, Heaven knows! M. Zola and
others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made.
Professional matters, the lower middle classes, etc., were thought
'low,' as Goldsmith's audience had had it, 'vulgar,' as Madame de Stael
said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist's book is
absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows
what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other
hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale,--it has been
admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,--and personally I
have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how
much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and
the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of
such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be
said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same
Lady Louisa's admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so
much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman
sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection--her
father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbiedykes,
Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her
old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as
are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his
actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such
an extent and in such proportion again.
He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in _The Bride of
Lammermoor_, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the _Black
Dwarf_ aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose.
Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest
respect, thought differently--thought it, indeed, 'the most pure and
perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned.' Perhaps there is
something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in
his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy _per se_ was
certainly not Scott's forte to the same extent as were comedy and
history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the
other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House
of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the
'conditions,' in the old sense, of its last representative are not such
as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of
that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy
creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even
play the easy and perennially attractive part of _desdichado_ so as to
keep our compassion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it
is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would
have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a
repulsive virago, and the father a time-serving and almost vulgar
intriguer. Moreover--and all this is not in the least surprising, since
he was in agonies during most of the composition, and nearly died before
its close[20]--the author has, contrary to his wont, provided very few
subsidiary characters to support or carry off the principals. Caleb
Balderstone has been perhaps unduly objected to by the very persons who
praise the whole book; but he is certainly somewhat of what the French
call a _charge_. Bucklaw, though agreeable, is very slight; Craigengelt
a mere 'super'; the Marquis shadowy. Even such fine things as the hags
at the laying-out, and the visit of Lucy and her father to Wolf's Crag,
and such amusing ones as Balderstone's _fabliau_-like expedients to
raise the wind in the matter of food, hardly save the situation; and
though the tragedy of the end is complete, it leaves me, I own, rather
cold.[19] One is sorry for Lucy, but it was really her own fault--a
Scottish maiden is not usually unaware of the possibilities and
advantages of 'kilting her coats of green satin' and flying from the lad
she does not love to the lad she does. The total disappearance of Edgar
is the best thing that could happen to him, and the only really
satisfactory point is Bucklaw's very gentlemanlike sentence of arrest on
all impertinent questioners.
But if the companion of the first set of _Tales_ was a dead-weight
rather than a make-weight, the make-weight of the third would have
atoned for anything. Sometimes I think, allowing for scale and
conditions, that Scott never did anything much better than _A Legend of
Montrose_. First, it is pervaded by the magnificent figure of Dugald
Dalgetty. Secondly, the story, though with something of the usual huddle
at the end, is interesting throughout, with the minor figures capitally
sketched in. Menteith, though merely outlined, is a good fellow, a
gentleman, and not a stick; Allan escapes the merely melodramatic;
'Gillespie Grumach' is masterly in his brief appearances; and Montrose
himself seems to me to be brought in with a skill which has too often
escaped notice. For it would mar the story to deal with the tragedy of
his end, and his earlier history is a little awkward to manage.
Moreover, that faculty of hurrying on the successive _tableaux_ which is
so conspicuous in most of Scott's work, and so conspicuously absent in
the _Bride_ (where there are long passages with no action at all) is
eminently present here. The meeting with Dalgetty; the night at
Darnlinvarach, from the bravado of the candlesticks to Menteith's tale;
the gathering and council of the clans; the journey of Dalgetty, with
its central point in the Inverary dungeon; the escape; and the battle of
Inverlochy,--these form an exemplary specimen of the kind of interest
which Scott's best novels possess as nothing of the kind had before
possessed it, and as few things out of Dumas have possessed it since.
Nor can the most fervent admirer of Chicot and of Porthos--I know none
more fervent than myself--say in cool blood that their creator could
have created Dalgetty, who is at once an admirable human being, a
wonderful national type of the more eccentric kind, and the embodiment
of an astonishing amount of judiciously adjusted erudition.
Many incidents of interest and some of importance occurred in Scott's
private life between the date of 1818 and that of 1820, besides those
mentioned already. One of these was the acquisition by Constable of the
whole of his back-copyrights for the very large sum of twelve thousand
pounds, a contract supplemented twice later in 1821 and 1823 by fresh
purchases of rights as they accrued for nominal sums of eleven thousand
pounds in addition. Unfortunately, this transaction, like almost all his
later ones, was more fictitious than real. And though it was lucky that
the publisher never discharged the full debt, so that when his
bankruptcy occurred something was saved out of the wreck which would
otherwise have been pure loss, the proceeding is characteristic of the
mischievously unreal system of money transactions which brought Scott to
ruin. Except for small things like review articles, etc., and for his
official salaries, he hardly ever touched real money for the fifteen
most prosperous years of his life, between 1810 and 1825. Promises to
receive were interchanged with promises to pay in such a bewildering
fashion that unless he had kept a chartered accountant of rather
unusual skill and industry perpetually at work, it must have been
utterly impossible for him to know at any given time what he had, what
he owed, what was due to him, and what his actual income and expenditure
were. The commonly accepted estimate is that during the most flourishing
time, 1820-1825, he made about fifteen thousand a year, and on paper he
probably did. Nor can he ever have spent, in the proper sense of the
term, anything like that sum, for the Castle Street house cannot have
cost, even with lavish hospitality, much to keep up, and the Abbotsford
establishment, though liberal, was never ostentatious. But when large
lump sums are constantly expended in purchases of land, building,
furnishing, and the like; when every penny of income except official
salaries goes through a complicated process of abatement in the way of
discounts for six and twelve months' bills, fines for renewal, payments
to banks for advances and the like--the 'clean' sums available at any
given moment bear quite fantastic and untrustworthy relations to their
nominal representatives. It may be strongly suspected, from the admitted
decrease of a very valuable practice under Walter Scott _pere_, and from
its practical disappearance under Thomas, that the genius of the Scott
family did not precisely lie in the management of money.
The marriage of Sophia Scott to Lockhart, and the purchase of a
commission for her eldest brother Walter in the 18th Hussars, made gaps
in Scott's family circle, and also, beyond all doubt, in his finances.
The first was altogether happy for him. It did not, for at anyrate some
years, absolutely sever him from the dearest of his children, a lady
who, to judge from her portraits, must have been of singular charm, and
who seems to have been the only one of the four with much of his mental
characteristics; it provided him with an agreeable companion, a loyal
friend, and an incomparable biographer. Of Sir Walter Scott the second
and last, not much personal idea is obtainable. The few anecdotes handed
down, and his father's letters to him (we have no replies), suggest a
good sort of person, slightly 'chuckle-headed' and perfervid in the
wrong places, with next to no intellectual gifts, and perhaps more his
mother's son than his father's. He had some difficulties in his first
regiment, which seems to have been a wild one, and not in the best form;
he married an heiress of the unpoetical name of Jobson, to whom and of
whom his father writes with a pretty old-fashioned affection and
courtesy, which perhaps gave Thackeray some traits for Colonel Newcome.
Of the younger brother Charles, an Oxford man, who went into the Foreign
Office, even less is recorded than of Walter. Anne Scott, the third of
the family, and the faithful attendant of her father in his last evil
days, died in her sister's house shortly after Sir Walter, and Mrs.
Lockhart herself followed before the _Life_ was finished. Scott can
hardly be said to have bequeathed good luck to any of these his
descendants.
It was at the end of 1819, after Walter the younger left home, and
before Sophia's marriage, that the next in order of the _Waverley
Novels_ (now again such by title, and not _Tales of my Landlord_)
appeared. This was _Ivanhoe_, which was published in a rather costlier
shape than its forerunners, and yet sold to the extent of twelve
thousand copies in its three-volume form. Lockhart, perhaps with one of
the few but graceful escapes of national predilection (it ought not to
be called prejudice) to be noticed in him, pronounces this a greater
work of art, but a less in genius than its purely Scottish predecessors.
As there is nothing specially English in _Ivanhoe_, but only an attempt
to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an
Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the
positive part of Lockhart's judgment and demurs to the negative.
Although the worst of Scott's cramps were past, he was still in anything
but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated,
not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have
had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms
which have brought on _Ivanhoe_ the wrath of Dryasdust. But Dryasdust is
_adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit_, and the book is a
great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it
have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the
point of view of literary 'document.' The picturesque opening; the
Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Passage of Arms; the more
splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular
stories of the 'King-and-the-Tanner' kind into the episodes of the Black
Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of
Bois-Guilbert, the pendant in prose to Marmion; the more admirable
contrast of Rebecca and Rowena; and the final Judgment of God, which for
once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a
novel,--with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac,
Front-de-Boeuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the
final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others--give
such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as nobody but Scott
has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal hero, it is to be
observed, escapes the curse of most of Scott's young men (the young men
to several of whom Thackeray would have liked to be mother-in-law), and
if he is not worthy of Rebecca, he does not get her. As for Richard, no
doubt, he is not the Richard of history, but what does that matter? He
is a most admirable re-creation, softened and refined, of the Richard of
a romance which, be it remembered, is itself in all probability as old
as the thirteenth century.
After speaking frankly of the _Bride of Lammermoor_ and of some others
of Scott's works, it may perhaps be permissible to rate the successor to
_Ivanhoe_ rather higher than it was rated at the time, or than it has
generally been rated since. _The Monastery_ was at its appearance (March
1820) regarded as a failure; and quite recently a sincere admirer of
Scott confided to a fellow in that worship the opinion that 'a good deal
of it really is rot, you know.' I venture to differ. Undoubtedly it does
not rank with the very best, or even next to them. In returning to
Scottish ground, Scott may have strengthened himself on one side, but
from the distance of the times and the obscure and comparatively
uninteresting period which he selected (just after the strange and rapid
panorama of the five Jameses and before the advent of Queen Mary), he
lost as much as he gained. An intention, afterwards abandoned, to make
yet a fresh start, and try a new double on the public by appearing
neither as 'Author of _Waverley_' nor as Jedediah Cleishbotham, may have
hampered him a little, though it gave a pleasant introduction. The
supernatural part, though much better, as it seems to me, than is
generally admitted, is no doubt not entirely satisfactory, being
uncertainly handled, and subject to the warning of _Nec deus intersit_.
There is some return of that superabundance of interval and inaction
which has been noted in the _Bride_. And, above all, there appears here
a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase
upon Scott,--the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of
great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular
says, 'tail off.' The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural
and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he
is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except
Scott should we grumble, if we had the admirable descriptions of
Glendearg, the scenes in the Abbey, the night-ride of poor Father
Philip, the escape from the Castle of Avenel, the passage of the
interview of Halbert with Murray and Morton? Even the episode of Sir
Piercie Shafton, though it is most indisputably true that Scott has not
by any means truly represented Euphuism, is good and amusing in itself;
while there are those who boldly like the White Lady personally. She is
more futile than a sprite beseems; but she is distinctly 'nice.'
At any rate, nobody could (or indeed did) deny that the author, six
months later, made up for any shortcoming in _The Abbot_, where, except
the end (eminently of the huddled order), everything is as it should be.
The heroine is, except Die Vernon, Scott's masterpiece in that kind,
while all the Queen Mary scenes are unsurpassed in him, and rarely
equalled out of him. Nor was there any falling off in _Kenilworth_ (Jan.
1821), where he again shifted his scene to England. He has not indeed
interested us very much personally in Amy Robsart, but as a hapless
heroine she is altogether the superior of Lucy Ashton. The book is,
among his, the 'novel without a hero,' and, considering his defects in
that direction, this was hardly a drawback. It cannot be indeed said to
have any one minor character which is a success of the first class. But
the whole is interesting throughout. The journeys of Tressilian to
Devonshire and of Amy and Wayland to Kenilworth have the curious
attraction which Scott, a great traveller, and a lover of it, knew how
to give to journeys, and the pageantry and Court scenes, at Greenwich
and elsewhere, command admiration. Indeed, _Kenilworth_ equals any of
the novels in sustained variety of interest, and, unlike too many of
them, it comes to a real end.
It was in 1821 that a book now necessarily much forgotten and even rare
(it is comparatively seldom that one sees it in catalogues), Adolphus's
_Letters on the Author of Waverley_, at once showed the interest taken
in the identity of the 'Great Unknown,' and fixed it as being that of
the author of the _Lay_, with a great deal of ingenuity and with a most
industrious abundance of arguments, bad and good. After such a proof of
public interest, neither Scott nor Constable could be much blamed for
working what has been opprobriously called the 'novel manufactory' at
the highest pressure; and _The Pirate_, _The Fortunes of Nigel_,
_Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan's Well_, and
_Redgauntlet_ were written and published in the closest succession.
These books, almost all of wonderful individual excellence (_Peveril_, I
think, is the only exception), and of still more wonderful variety, were
succeeded, before the crash of 1825-26, by the _Tales of the Crusaders_,
admirable in part, if not wholly. When we think that all these were,
with some other work, accomplished in less than five years, it scarcely
seems presumption in the author to have executed, or rashness in the
bookseller to have suggested, a contract for four of them in a batch--a
batch unnamed, unplanned, not even yet in embryo, but simply existing
_in potentia_ in the brain of Walter Scott himself.
In surveying together this batch, written when the first novelty of the
novels was long over, and before there was any decadence, one obtains,
as well perhaps as from any other division of his works, an idea of
their author's miraculous power. Many novelists since have written as
much or more in the same time. But their books for the most part, even
when well above the average, popular, and deservedly popular too, leave
next to no trace on the mind. You do not want to read them again; you
remember, even with a strong memory, nothing special about their plots;
above all, their characters take little or no hold on the mind in the
sense of becoming part of its intellectual circle and range.
How different is it with these six or eight novels, 'written with as
much care as the others, that is to say, with none at all,' as the
author wickedly remarked! _The Pirate_ (December 1821) leads off, its
scenery rendered with the faithfulness of recent memory, and yet
adjusted and toned by the seven years' interval since Scott yachted
round Orkney and Shetland. Here are the admirable characters of Brenda
(slight yet thoroughly pleasing), and her father, the not too
melodramatic ones of Minna, Cleveland, and Norna, the triumph of Claud
Halcro (to whom few do justice), and again, the excellent keeping of
story and scenery to character and incident. _The Fortunes of Nigel_
(May 1822) originated in a proposed series of 'Letters of the
Seventeenth Century,' in which others were to take part, and perhaps
marks a certain decline, though only in senses to be distinctly defined
and limited. Nothing that Scott ever did is better than the portrait of
King James, which, in the absence of one from the hand of His Majesty's
actual subject for some dozen years, Mr. William Shakespeare of New
Place, Stratford, is probably the most perfect thing of the kind that
ever could have been or can be done. And the picture of Whitefriars,
though it is borrowed to a great extent, and rather anticipated in point
of time, from Shadwell's _Squire of Alsatia_, sixty or seventy years
after date, is of the finest, whilst Sir Mungo Malagrowther[18] all but
deserves the same description. But this most cantankerous knight is not
touched off with the completeness of Dalgetty, or even of Claud Halcro.
Lord Glenvarloch adds, to the insipidity which is the bane of Scott's
good heroes, some rather disagreeable traits which none of them had
hitherto shown. Dalgarno in the same way falls short of his best bad
heroes. Dame Suddlechop suggests, for the first time _un_favourably, a
Shakespearean ancestress, Mistress Quickly, and the story halts and
fails to carry the reader rapidly over the stony path. Even Richie
Moniplies, even Gentle Geordie, good as both are, fall short of their
predecessors. Ten years earlier _The Fortunes of Nigel_ would have been
a miracle, and one might have said, 'If a man begins like this, what
will he do later?' Now, thankless and often uncritical as is the chatter
about 'writing out,' we can hardly compare _Nigel_ with _Guy Mannering_,
or _Rob Roy_, or even _The Abbot_, and not be conscious of something
that (to use a favourite quotation of Scott's own), 'doth appropinque an
end,' though an end as yet afar off. The 'bottom of the sack,' as the
French say, is a long way from us; but it is within measurable distance.
Even a friendly critic must admit that this distance seemed to be
alarmingly shortened by _Peveril of the Peak_ (January 1823), which
among the full-sized novels seems to me quite his least good book, worse
even than 'dotages,' as they are sometimes thought, like _Anne of
Geierstein_ and _Count Robert_. No one has defended the story, which,
languid as it is, is made worse by the long gaps between the passages
that ought to be interesting, and by a (for Scott) quite abnormal and
portentous absence of really characteristic characters. Lockhart pleads
for some of these, but I fear the plea can hardly be admitted. I imagine
that those who read Scott pretty regularly are always sorely tempted to
skip _Peveril_ altogether, and that when they do read it, they find the
chariot wheels drive with a heaviness of which elsewhere they are
entirely unconscious.
But in the same year (1823), _Quentin Durward_ not only made up for
_Peveril_, but showed Scott's powers to be at least as great as when he
wrote _The Abbot_, if not as great as ever. He has taken some liberties
with history, but no more than he was perfectly entitled to take; he has
paid the historic muse with ample interest for anything she lent him, by
the magnificent sketch of Louis and the fine one of Charles; he has
given a more than passable hero in Quentin, and a very agreeable if not
ravishing heroine in Isabelle. Above all, he has victoriously shown his
old faculty of conducting the story with such a series of enthralling,
even if sometimes episodic passages, that nobody but a pedant of
'construction' would care to inquire too narrowly whether they actually
make a whole. Quentin's meeting with the King and his rescue from
Tristan by the archers; the interviews between Louis and Crevecoeur,
and Louis and the Astrologer; the journey (another of Scott's admirable
journeys); the sack of Schonwaldt, and the feast of the Boar of
Ardennes; Louis in the lion's den at Peronne,--these are things that are
simply of the first order. Nor need the conclusion, which has shocked
some, shock any who do not hold, with critics of the Rymer school, that
'the hero ought always to be successful.' For as Quentin wins Isabelle
at last, what more success need we want? and why should not Le Balafre,
that loyal Leslie, be the instrument of his nephew's good fortune?
The recovery was perfectly well maintained in _St. Ronan's Well_ (still
1823) and _Redgauntlet_ (1824), the last novels of full length before
the downfall. They were also, be it noticed, the first planned (while
_Quentin_ itself was completed) after some early symptoms of apoplectic
seizure, which might, even if they had not been helped by one of the
severest turns of fortune that any man ever experienced, have punished
Scott's daring contempt of ordinary laws in the working of his
brains.[17] The harm done to _St. Ronan's Well_ by the author's
submission to James Ballantyne's Philistine prudery in protesting
against the original story (in which Clara did not discover the cheat
put on her till a later period than the ceremony) is generally
acknowledged. As it is, not merely is the whole thing made a much ado
about nothing,--for no law and no Church in Christendom would have
hesitated to declare the nullity of a marriage which had never been
consummated, and which was celebrated while one of the parties took the
other for some one else,--but Clara's shattered reason, Tyrrel's
despair, and Etherington's certainty that he has the cards in his hand,
are all incredible and unaccountable--mere mid-winter madness.
Nevertheless, this, Scott's only attempt at actual contemporary fiction,
has extraordinary interest and great merit as such, while Meg Dods would
save half a dozen novels, and the society at the Well is hardly
inferior.
And then came _Redgauntlet_. A great lover of Scott once nearly invoked
the assistance of Captain M'Turk to settle matters with a friend of his
who would not pronounce _Redgauntlet_ the best of all the novels, and
would only go so far as to admit that it contains some, and many, of the
best things. The best as a novel it cannot be called, because the action
is desultory in the extreme. There are wide gaps even in the chain of
story interest that does exist, and the conclusion, admirable in itself,
has even for Scott a too audacious disconnection with any but the very
faintest concern of the nominally first personages. But even putting
'Wandering Willie's Tale' aside, and taking for granted the merits of
that incomparable piece (of which, it may yet be gently hinted, it was
not so very long ago still a singularity and mark of daring to perceive
the absolute supremacy), the good things in this fascinating book defy
exaggeration. The unique autobiographic interest--so fresh and keen and
personal, and yet so free from the odious intrusion of actual
personality--of the earlier epistolary presentment of Saunders and Alan
Fairford, of Darsie and Green Mantle; Peter Peebles, peer of Scott's
best; Alan's journey and Darsie's own wanderings; the scenes at the
Provost's dinner-table and in Tam Turnpenny's den; that unique figure,
the skipper of the _Jumping Jenny_; the extraordinarily effective
presentment of Prince Charles, already in his decadence, if not yet in
his dotage; the profusion of smaller sketches and vignettes everywhere
grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper
Steenie,--who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again
in a single book. There is something in it which it is hardly fanciful
to take as a 'note of finishing,' as the last piece of the work, that,
gigantic as it was, was not exactly collar work, not sheer hewing of
wood and drawing of water for the taskmasters. And it was fitting that
the book, so varied, so fresh, so gracious and kindly, so magnificent in
part, with a magnificence dominating Scott's usual range, should begin
with the beginnings of his own career, and should end with the practical
finish, not merely of the good days, but of the days that dawned with
any faint promise of goodness, in the career of the last hope of the
Jacobite cause.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] _Lockhart_, iv. chaps. xxviii.-xxxiii.
[18] The name, which, as many people now know since Aldershot Camp was
established, is a real one, had been already used with the double
meaning by Charlotte Smith, a now much-forgotten novelist, whom Scott
admired.
[19] The once celebrated 'Polish dwarf.'
[20] I may be permitted to refer--as to a _piece justificatif_ which
there is no room here to give or even abstract in full--to a set of
three essays on this subject in my _Essays in English Literature_.
Second Series. London, 1895.
[21] This part, however, has a curious adventitious interest, owing to
the idea--fairly vouched for--that Scott intended to delineate in the
Colonel some points of his own character. His pride, his generosity, and
his patronage of the Dominie, are not unrecognisable, certainly. And a
man's idea of himself is often, even while strange to others, perfectly
true to his real nature.
[22] All who do not skip such things must have enjoyed these scraps,
sometimes labelled particularly, sometimes merely dubbed 'Old Play'; and
they are well worth reading together, as they appear in the editions of
the _Poems_. At the same time, they have been, in some cases, too
hastily attributed to Sir Walter himself. For instance, that in _The
Legend of Montrose_, ch. xiv., assigned to _The Tragedy of Brennoralt_
(not '_v_alt,' as misprinted), is really from Sir John Suckling's
sententious play (act iv. sc. 1), though loosely quoted.
[23] In the earlier months had taken place that famous rediscovery of
the Regalia of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle, which was one of the
central moments of Scott's life, and in which, as afterwards in the
restoring of Mons Meg, he took a great, if not the chief, part. His
influence with George IV. as Prince and King had much to do with both,
and in the earlier he took the very deepest interest. The effect on
himself (and on his daughter Sophia) of the actual finding of the Crown
jewels is a companion incident to that previously noticed (p. 52) as
occurring on the Mound. Those who cannot sympathise with either can
hardly hope to understand either Scott or his work.
[24] From March to May 1819 he had a series of attacks of the cramp, so
violent that he once took solemn leave of his children in expectation of
decease, that the eccentric Earl of Buchan forced a way into his
bedchamber to 'relieve his mind as to the arrangements of his funeral,'
and that he entirely forgot the whole of the _Bride_ itself. This, too,
was the time of his charge to Lockhart (_Familiar Letters_, ii. 38), as
to his successor in Tory letters and politics--
'Take thou the vanguard of the three,
And bury me by the bracken-bush
That grows upon yon lily lee.'
[25] It has always struck me that the other form of the legend
itself--that in which the 'open window' suggests that the bridegroom's
wounds were due to his rival--has far greater capabilities.
[26] Said to embody certain mental peculiarities of that ingenious
draughtsman, but rather unamiable person, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.
[27] He had said in a letter to Terry, as early as November 20, 1822,
that he feared _Peveril_ 'would smell of the apoplexy.' But he made no
definite complaint to any one of a particular seizure, and the date,
number, and duration of the attacks are unknown.