by John Buchan
So ended one of the most arduous chapters in Scott’s life. The King’s visit had amply fulfilled the purpose for which it had been planned and the monarchy had won a new popularity in Scotland. Scott had obtained a promise that that historic piece of ordnance, Mons Meg, would be sent back to Edinburgh Castle, and — what was still nearer his heart — that the peerages forfeited during the Jacobite rebellions should be restored. The visit completed the work which he himself had begun and brought the Highlands into a closer relation with Scottish life. It did more, for in the eyes of the outside world it gave certain Highland habits a national character which they have ever since retained. The kilt, the former garb of servants, was assumed to be the Scottish national dress, since it had been worn by the King. It was a golden age for the haberdashers. A bogus Celticism became the rage, and Scottish Lowland houses, whose ancestors would as readily have worn woad as the dress of their secular foes, were provided by imaginative tradesmen with family tartans.
[First threat of apoplexy]
The autumn of 1822 was spent quietly at Abbotsford, where the new buildings were now being roofed, and Scott was very busy corresponding with Terry about furniture. He had bought his land at high prices — it was a common saying in the countryside that a man “would wish for no ampler fortune than just the length and breadth of himself in land within half a mile of the Shirra’s house” — but he showed wisdom in other matters, and had much of the ironwork and woodwork done by local craftsmen whose merits he had discovered. The plot of Quentin Durward had entered his head; it cheered him, for he was finding Peveril heavy going. Indeed, the loss of Erskine and the herculean labours of July and August had drained his vitality both of mind and body. In November in a letter to Terry we have the first hint of a graver malady than his now chronic rheumatism. “I have not been well — a whoreson thickness of blood, and a depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends ... have annoyed me much; and Peveril will, I fear, smell of the apoplexy.”
The two novels of the preceding twelvemonth, The Pirate and The Fortunes of Nigel, have a connexion deeper than the chronological, for they show Scott as an artificer at his worst and his best. The first is a fine conception marred in the execution. His visit to the Orkneys and Shetlands in 1814 had left with him an abiding impression not only of a unique landscape but of a life widely different from that of the Scottish mainland. He found customs of a primordial simplicity, and a folk-lore in which still endured beliefs drawn from the heroic world of the Sagas. The sight of an American cruiser off the Hebrides had suggested to him how this remote Thule might be linked by sea with the greater world. In Bessie Millie at Stromness he had found a practising sibyl, and heard from her the true tale of John Gow the pirate who in the early eighteenth century had menaced the isles. What fitter subject for romance? He would show the impact upon the frugal island life of adventurers from tropic seas, blood-stained, lustful, babbling of gold and gems. He would reveal that in the islands which was akin to this foreign colour, the wild Norse fatalism and hardihood. Above all he would show the spell which the exotic world could cast over beauty and youth. And as his setting he would have the wind-scourged ocean, the bare pastoral hills, and the shadowy northern sky. Stevenson has rightly interpreted Scott’s purpose and the nature of his inspiration. “The figure of Cleveland — cast up by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness — moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple islanders — singing the serenade under the windows of his Shetland mistress — is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, ‘Through groves of palm,’ sung in such a scene and by such a lover, clinch, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built.”
[The Pirate]
Conceived; but, alas, not realized. The figures which should have pointed the contrast and fulfilled the inspiration are as shadowy as a Shetland sky. Cleveland is no more than a buckram pirate — never one half so alive as his friend Jack Bunce — and his ultimate repentance leaves the reader not even incredulous, but only cold. According to Lockhart, he pleased the public because of his novelty, as did the Udaller’s daughters, but later generations have not endorsed the verdict. Minna and Brenda are not less dim, and Minna’s talk is strange and wonderful, being drawn half from a Young Ladies’ Companion and half from a lexicon of northern antiquities. The whole of the exotic element is conceived in a bad theatrical vein; there is melodrama even in the alliterative names, Mordaunt Mertoun and Clement Cleveland, and the plot is a tangle of crude coincidences. As for Norna of the Fitful Head she is Scott’s supreme failure in the genre which had produced Meg Merrilies. As Sydney Smith noted, he was acquiring a habit of introducing a spae-wife and a pedant into all his tales; in The Pirate we can accept the pedant, Triptolemus Yellowley, but the spae-wife is beyond us. Norna’s prose is as preposterous as her poetry, and her poetry is as turgid as the runes of the White Lady of Avenel. It is interesting to note how bad Scott’s occasional verse becomes when his inspiration flags. Only twice in the book does it succeed in moving us; once when Cleveland sings the “Groves of Palm” serenade, and there the charm lies in the contrast of sentiment and scene rather than in any poetic merit; a second time when Mertoun is gravely wounded and Claud Halcro appears singing the wonderful lyric, “And ye shall deal the funeral dole.” On these occasions, and on these alone, the romance of Scott’s dream is given a local habitation.
He failed in his central purpose, since he could not bring out the full drama of the clash between the exotic and the insular because of his strained and ragged treatment of the former. But with the latter he amply succeeded. In none of the novels does he handle landscape with greater mastery. He reproduces for us the magic of the low benty hills, the tormented coasts, and the infinite chafing seas. The island life is described with gusto and humour, and in the sharpest detail. The plot, or what stands for a plot, soon fades from the reader’s memory, but certain scenes remain in vivid recollection — the storm when Cleveland is washed ashore and the islanders scramble for the wreckage; the feasting at Magnus Troil’s home; the whale hunt; the visit of Magnus to Norna’s dwelling; the trivialities of the Kirkwall burghers. In all of these it is the homely characters that dominate the scene, and it is by the delineation of such characters that the book must stand.
Chief is the Udaller, Magnus Troil. He is the patriarchal landowner, but different in kind from anything in the preceding gallery of chiefs and lairds. He shows Scott’s firm grasp of social conditions, for he is not only a vividly realized human being but the lawful product of his environment. He is an Homeric figure, like the son of Teuthras in the sixth book of the Iliad, who “built his dwelling by the roadside and entertained every wayfarer.” Not less real are his neighbours. It was a happy thought to make old Haagen a survival of Montrose’s last tragic expedition, who remembered nothing but its discomfort, and dashed Minna’s sentiment by expounding the superior wisdom of running away.
“And Montrose — what became of Montrose, and how looked he?”
“Like a lion with the hunters before him,” answered the old gentleman; “but I looked not twice his way, for my own lay right over the hills.”
“And so you left him?” said Minna in a tone of the deepest contempt.
“It was no fault of mine, Mistress Minna,” answered the old man, somewhat out of countenance. “But I was there with no choice of my own; and, besides, what good could I have done? — all the rest were running like sheep, and why should I have stayed?”
“You might have died with him,” said Minna.
“And lived with him to all eternity in immortal verse!” added Claud Halcro.
“I thank ye, Mistress Minna,” replied the plain-dealing Zetlander, “and I thank you, my old friend Claud; but I would rather drink both your healths in this good bicker of ale, like a living man as I am, than you should be making songs in my honour for having died forty or fifty years agone.”
There Sco
tt attains perfectly the contrast at which he aimed.
The “humours” of Triptolemus Yellowley, like those of Claud Halcro, are perhaps too much elaborated; but Triptolemus has a real comedy value, and his sister Baby’s hard sense is at once a foil to his pedantry and the touchstone of the normal by which to test the aberrations of sensibility. Excellent, too, is the jagger, Bryce Snailsfoot, with his “green-glazen eyes,” the unlovely combination of avarice and piety which Scott could handle so well.
“Grace to ye to wear the garment,” said the joyous pedlar, “and to me to guide the siller; and protect us from earthly vanities and earthly covetousness; and send you the white linen raiment, whilk is mair to be desired than the muslins and cambrics and lawns and silks of this world; and send me the talents which avail more than much fine Spanish gold, or Dutch dollars either.”
“A marvel it is to think,” the Ranzelman tells the old housekeeper, “how few real judicious men are left in this land.... I ken few of consequence hereabouts — excepting always myself, and maybe you, Swertha — but what may, in some sense or other, be called fules.” The prosaic aspect of life was rarely depicted with more shrewdness and truth, and The Pirate would have been a masterpiece had the romantic side of the balance been as well weighted. It is the poetry which fails, not the prose.
Nigel, on the contrary, succeeds largely because of its craftsmanship. Scott’s reach is not too ambitious and his grasp never weakens. Its popularity was immediate, and Constable saw people reading it in the London streets. The critical Sydney Smith had no fault to find except that the plot was “execrable.” Scott’s purpose was to provide a companion piece to The Heart of Midlothian, and make George Heriot a masculine Jeanie Deans, a hero “who laid no claim to high birth, romantic sensibility, or any of the usual accomplishments of those who strut through the pages of this sort of composition.” Just as the loveliest part of a country is where the mountains break down into the lowlands, so he considered the most interesting age that in which barbarism was passing into civilization, and on this principle he chose his period. In the introductory epistle he sets out frankly his view of the novelist’s craft. He was anxious to give the public what it wanted. “No man shall find me rowing against the stream. I care not who knows it — I write for general amusement.” He would not waste too much time on architecture. “I should be chin-deep in the grave, man, before I had done with my task, and, in the meanwhile, all the quirks and quiddities which I might have devised for my readers’ amusement would lie rotting in my gizzard.” He claims the authority of Smollett and Le Sage, who had been “satisfied if they amused the reader upon the road, though the conclusion only arrived because the tale must have an end — just as the traveller alights at the inn because it is evening.” He defends, too, his rapidity of production. “A man should strike while the iron is hot, and hoist sail while the wind is fair. If a successful author keeps not the stage, another instantly takes his ground.” A mercantile creed, maybe, but it was in all likelihood the creed of Shakespeare.
Nigel is brilliant book-work, a reconstruction based on wide and minute research; but it differs from the other book-work novels in having various Scottish characters drawn from a rich first-hand experience. George Heriot is the Edinburgh burgher whom Scott had known, Richie Moniplies the familiar serving-man, and King James a compost of quiddities drawn from country lairds and Parliament House lawyers. The plot is negligible, the whole episode of the lost royal warrant and the wrongs of the Lady Hermione is most clumsily conceived, and the marriage bells at the end ring perfunctorily. But the crude machinery does not interfere with the ripple and glitter of the narrative, which Dumas never bettered. The impression given of the colour and pageantry of life is as vivid as the middle chapters of Monte Cristo. The scene in Ramsay’s shop, and the pictures of the brisk, bustling city are masterpieces of historical reconstruction, which nowhere smell of the lamp. Not less good are the Court chapters, for Scott was always at home in such an environment, and his eyes were not so dazzled by the tapestry on the walls as to miss the cobwebs in the corner. Alsatia, the enclave of blackguards in the midst of burgherdom, is brilliantly depicted, and the murder is an eery business. There are no scenes, perhaps, which rise to high drama, but that is because we cannot take Nigel and his troubles quite seriously, but there are many admirable comedy interludes. What, for example, could be better than the episode in the Greenwich inn and the talk of Kilderkin and Linklater, and the scene where Richie is hidden behind the arras and the King cries in the words of the old Scots children’s game, “Todlowrie, come out o’ your den?”
[King James]
The story lives by its colour and speed, and by the vigour of its characters. Some of these are poor enough, for Nigel and Dalgarno are only embodied moralities. But most of the lesser figures are competently drawn — Huntinglen, Trapbois the miser and his daughter, the Alsatian bullies, the prentice lads, and the sinister Dame Suddlechop. On a higher plane stand George Heriot, one of the most solidly realized merchants in fiction, and Sir Mungo Malagrowther, the old, peevish, dilapidated courtier. There must have been many Sir Mungos in Whitehall in those days. Higher still stands Richie Moniplies, whose humours and idioms are of the raciest, and whose career, from the days when he slept out in St Cuthbert’s kirkyard to his attainment of wealth and rank, escapes being farcical because the man himself is so wholly credible. He is at once insolent and kindly, sycophantic and independent, sordid and chivalrous, greedy and unselfish—”though I was bred at a flesher’s stall, I have not through my life had a constant intimacy with collops” — a perfect instance of one type of Scots adventurer.
But the masterpiece is the King, a masterpiece both of imaginative presentation and of historical truth. Scott makes James ridiculous and also somehow impressive. His vanity has quality behind it, and he has little gusts of tenderness and moods of melting sentiment. There is dignity even in his panics, and his buffoonery has a substratum of hard good sense—”O Geordie, Jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence.” He is endeared to us because of his acute perception of the whimsies of life, and the oddities of other people, though he may be a little blind to his own. The portrait is one of the subtlest and most carefully studied which Scott has given us, and from first to last James is consistent with himself. His speech is a delight, for it has the idiom of one who is both Scot and scholar. It never sinks below a high pitch of shrewd vivacity from the moment in the palace ante-room where we first hear his broad accents—”Admit him instanter, Maxwell. Have ye hairboured sae lang at the Court, and not learned that gold and silver are ever welcome?” His Scottish memories remind the reader of the homely world of the north from which he came, and thereby point the ironic contrast of the man and his office. “And John Anderson was Provost that year. The carle grat for joy; and the Bailies and Councillors danced bareheaded in our presence like five-year-auld colts.” Much of the success of his talk depends upon the sentences of Latinized jargon followed by pithy Scots translations. Appropriately the two main comedy figures are conjoined at the close.
He took the drawn sword, and with averted eyes, for it was a sight he loved not to look on, endeavoured to lay it on Richie’s shoulder, but nearly stuck it into his eye. Richie, starting back, attempted to rise, but was held down by Lowestoffe, while, Sir Mungo guiding the royal weapon, the honour-bestowing blow was given and received: “Surge, carnifex. Rise up, Sir Richard Moniplies of Castle Collop! —— And, my lords and lieges, let us all to our dinner, for the cock-a-leekie is cooling.”
III
In January 1823 Peveril of the Peak was published, a lengthy novel of which Lockhart thought the plot “clumsy and perplexed,” and which Sydney Smith considered a “good novel, but not good enough for such a writer,” though he added that Scott’s worst was better than other people’s best. Meanwhile, with the help of a copy of Commines, a French gazeteer, a map of Touraine, and his reco
llections of his visit to France in 1815, he was making in Quentin Durward his first attempt at a romance of which the scene was laid outside Britain.
[Edinburgh life]
Though he was not a politician, he had largely inherited Henry Dundas’s mantle as the “manager” of Scotland. In the first place he was the acknowledged leader in all literary and intellectual matters. David Hume had once held the position and Adam Smith had succeeded him. Henry Mackenzie had followed, but the “Man of Feeling” was now nearing his seventieth year, and Scott inherited the primacy. In the Edinburgh of that day social pre-eminence followed upon such leadership. He was the man to whom all well-accredited strangers brought introductions, the premier host and the public orator of Scotland. In the club life of the day, of which the fashion was spreading, he was a conspicuous figure. In 1818 he had been elected a member of The Club, Dr Johnson’s famous foundation, and he was Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Academy, the post created for Goldsmith. In Scotland he had the Friday Club, the Blairadam Club, the Highland Club, and, for decorous high-jinks, the Gowks, which met on All Fools’ Day when every member contributed his best wine, and of which old Henry Mackenzie was the poet-laureate. In 1823 the “Author of Waverley” was chosen to fill a vacancy in the Roxburghe Club, and Scott was permitted to represent the Unknown. At the same time he was establishing in Edinburgh a Scottish counterpart of that classic fraternity — the Bannatyne Club, which was the first of several societies which have done excellent work in reprinting the older documents in Scottish history and literature. He was assiduous in his duties as president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and appeared in the forefront of every charitable enterprise.
