by John Buchan
And then the defiance: —
Grace me no grace. Since you are to shed Vich Ian Vohr’s blood, the only favour I would accept from you is to bid them loose my hands and gie me my claymore, and bide you just a minute sitting where ye are!
Small wonder that the world first rubbed its eyes in astonishment, and then clamoured for more of this novelty, which was also truth. When Goethe in his old age re-read Waverley, he was constrained to place it “alongside the best things that have ever been written in the world.”
During the autumn of 1814 Scott finished The Lord of the Isles at a pace which surpassed any of his earlier feats in the making of verse. He corrected the proofs before setting out for Abbotsford on Christmas Day. The poem was published on January 18th of the following year; the reviewers praised it but with many reserves; the public bought fewer copies of it than even of Rokeby, and far fewer than of Byron’s contemporary romances. The general impression, as James Ballantyne confessed, was one of disappointment. Byron, Scott told him, “hits the mark where I don’t even pretend to fledge my arrow.” He accepted the popular decision with cheerful resignation and turned to his new novel.
[Guy Mannering]
This had been begun late in the previous November, and two volumes had been completed in something less than two months. A Galloway exciseman, Joseph Train, for whom the Ballantynes had published a volume of poems, told him a story of an astrologer who had predicted the future of a child born in a house which he was visiting, a story which Scott had heard from other sources in his youth. That was in the first week of November, and Scott must have begun at once to make a novel out of it. The book was finished in six weeks, when the author professed to be taking a holiday to “refresh the machine,” and was published under the title of Guy Mannering on February 24, 1815. Train’s story, an indifferent Durham ballad, and the celebrated Dormont case, decided in the Court of Session two years before, supplied the groundwork. The Galloway scene was remembered from Scott’s early circuit tours, and the Liddesdale landscape was never out of his mind. For the chief characters he drew from many sources. In Colonel Mannering there are hints of himself, and in Julia something of his wife. The piety of commentators has found prototypes for Tod Gabbie in Tod Willie, who hunted the hills above Loch Skene, and for Tib Mumps in Margaret Teasdale of Gilsland. Traits of Dandie Dinmont may have been borrowed from James Davidson of Hyndlee — at any rate the famous terriers came from the Hyndlee kennel. Dominie Sampson seems to have been drawn from George Thomson, the son of the parish minister of Melrose, with features added from one Sanson of Leadhills. Pleydell was admittedly based on Adam Holland for demeanour and learning, while the “high-jinks” side of him was suggested by Andrew Crosbie, one of the heroes of the old Crochallan Fencibles. But in Scott’s case the search for authentic models is idle. He picked a trait here and a feature there, and blended them as he pleased.
The book is both a novel of character and a comedy of contemporary manners. The theme is one of the oldest in literature, that stuff of a thousand folk-tales, the “missing heir.” Scott’s first intention was to make it a psychological study, with the astrological prediction the central fact — the story of a man conscious of a predestined fate and bracing himself to meet it; but he wisely decided that such a subject was not for him. It required, he said modestly, “not only more talent than the author could be conscious of possessing, but also involved doctrines and discussions of a nature too serious for his purpose and for the character of the narration.” He could not cumber himself with psychology when he had a host of vivid mortals in his mind waiting to dance at his bidding. Written as it was in six weeks, after a laborious year, it is notably more careless than Waverley, which had been simmering in his head for a decade. The hero is stockish to the last degree, the most wooden thing he ever glued together. Many of the minor episodes, such as the Indian incidents, are crudely conceived and casually told. The love-making is never more than perfunctory, and Julia Mannering, though she lives in a sense, is largely a borrowing from the conventional fiction of the day: her letters are in the worst tradition, and her vivacity leaves the reader unmoved. Scott was not often happy in his younger gentlewomen. There is much coy and cumbrous writing of this sort:—”We omit here various execrations with which these honest gentlemen garnished their discourse, retaining only such of their expletives as are least offensive”; and Bertram’s reflections in the jail in Chapter XLVIII are in the worst vein of prose-poetry. There are pieces of clumsy artifice, as when Pleydell in Chapter XLIX is made to praise the good looks of the Dutch in order to drag in the hero by the heels. Lastly there is a fault of which the beginnings were to be seen in Bradwardine and MacWheeble and which was to grow upon Scott — the trick of exaggerating and repeating a single odd trait of a character. Dominie Sampson’s “Prodigious!!” tends to become the mechanical squeaking of a doll.
But these are small things. Lovers of Scott will always dispute which is his best novel, but all will put Guy Mannering among the first three. He wrote of a land which he knew intimately and of people whom he understood and loved, and he devised an appropriate tale for their revelation. In sheer narrative skill the book is among the best. It begins with tremendous events happening in a tense atmosphere of excitement and mystery; the interest is never allowed to flag, but rises to a climax still more tense and exciting. And yet there is no hint of melodrama. The wild doings follow naturally from the characters of the protagonists.
Save for the hero and the heroine, Scott never for an instant loses his grasp upon his people. Colonel Mannering, the pivot of the tale, is a careful and credible portrait, drawn even more closely than Edward Waverley from the writer himself, and revealing the stiff, imperious element in Scott which underlay his habitual good-nature. Admirable, too, is Godfrey Bertram, the slack-lipped, degenerating laird, whose weakness is cunningly accentuated by his proud genealogy. The lesser figures, such as Macmorlan, Mrs MacCandlish and Jock Jabos, are perfectly etched in; Scott reveals the same power of describing the confused popular mind, in his account of the gossip of Kippletringan, as he was later to show in “Wandering Willie’s Tale”; and it would be hard to find a more masterly picture of manners than the funeral ceremonies of Mrs Margaret Bertram. The villains, Gilbert Glossin and Dirk Hatteraick, are what villains should be, formidable but conceivable, not weary in ill-doing, and Glossin’s terrors in Chapter XXXIII are as subtly depicted as they are dramatically right.
[Dandie Dinmont]
There are two centres of gravity in the book, two oases of peace in a disturbed country, which bring back the tale to normality, and rest and balance the reader’s mind. One is Pleydell, and the other is Dandie Dinmont. Pleydell is a lawyer after Scott’s heart, a lover at once of mirth and law, human nature and humane letters. “A lawyer,” he declares, “without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these he may venture to call himself an architect.” He is the pick of the city as Dinmont is the pick of the countryside. As for Dandie he remains one of the most complete, four-square, three-dimensioned and vital figures in literature. We know him better than we know our daily companions. Wherever he appears he humanizes the scene, for he is triumphant humanity. As has been well said, he is “wise like a wise dog, with a limit to his intelligence but none to his fidelity.” Like a fairy-tale hero we believe him immortal and unconquerable; when he appears we feel a sense of security; we are no longer anxious about young Bertram in the jail at Portanferry when we hear Dandie’s step on the stair. The scenes at Charlieshope, skilfully led up to by the adventure on Bewcastle Waste, belong to an ancient happy world of pastoral, and wherever Dandie goes he takes with him that charmed atmosphere of essential sagacity, kindness and courage. He is like a hill-wind that cleanses and vitalizes the world, and, like all the major heroes in literature, he is kin both to poetry and to reality.
Such a tale as Guy Mannering depends for its drama upon the Aristotelian “reversal of fortune” and “rec
ognition.” Therefore it must include an element of tragedy, something which troubles and solemnizes the mind. This is given by Meg Merrilies, the greatest figure that Scott has drawn from the back-world and the underworld of Scotland. Half-crazy, wild as a hawk, savage yet with nobility in her savagery, when she appears the eery light of romance falls on the scene. Wherever we meet her — like some wise-woman of the Sagas by the ruins of Derncleugh laying her curse upon the house of Ellangowan, or speaking riddles in Tib Mumps’s hostelry, or in the wonderful scene with Dominie Sampson at the Kaim of Derncleugh, or in the sea-cave when Dirk Hatteraick’s bullet finds her breast — she is the fate that presides over the action, an embodied destiny working her secret purpose, a reminder in the midst of comedy of the mystery of life. Her speech is that of a great tragic heroine, descending now to an idiomatic homeliness, now rising to the heights of poetry, but always rhythmical and compelling and exquisitely faithful.
Do you see that blackit and broken end of a sheeling? There my kettle boiled for forty years — there I bore twelve buirdly sons and daughters. Where are they now? — Where are the leaves that were on that auld ash-tree at Martinmas? — the west wind has made it bare, and I’m stripped too. Do you see that saugh tree? It’s but a blackened rotten stump now — I’ve sat under it mony a bonnie summer afternoon, when it hung its gay garlands ower the poppling water. I’ve sat there and ... I’ve held you on my knee, Henry Bertram, and sung ye sangs of the auld barons and their bloody wars. —— It will ne’er be green again, and Meg Merrilies will never sing sangs mair, be they blithe or sad. But ye’ll no forget her, and ye’ll gar big up the auld wa’s for her sake? And let somebody live there that’s ower gude to fear them of another world. For if ever the dead came back among the living, I’ll be seen in this glen mony a night after these crazed banes are in the mould.
With a sure instinct, though Meg is the instrument of the “reversal of fortune,” Scott does not make her the chief agent in the accompanying “recognition,” since the latter belongs to comedy and the former to tragedy. It is the bleaching-girl’s song about the woods of Warroch Head which awakens the hero’s memory of the place, and the preposterous Dominie who recalls to him his true name.
The epithet “delightful” was used by contemporary writers of the book, and the delightfulness of Guy Mannering is the quality by which it lives. It does not take us into the sounding arena of great deeds, or plumb — save at odd moments — the deeper wells of life. It is concerned with plain country people in a remote corner of Scotland, and the malefactors are humble folk — a swindling local attorney and a homicidal smuggler. Nor is there any serious love-interest. But nevertheless it is true romance, for it both stirs and calms, both excites and satisfies; it is what Bagehot calls a “union of life with measure, of spirit with reasonableness.” The strange and the romantic are made to flower from the normal, and thereby their effect is heightened, while the normal is portrayed with a sober geniality which makes it in itself romantic. In no other of his novels is there quite the same happy spirit, the same delight in plain human goodness, the same conviction of the cheerfulness of the race of men. Nor do we find in any other novel quite the same gusto of creation — a marvel when we remember the circumstances of its production. The explanation, I think, is twofold. Waverley had been long on the stocks, and it was a reshaping of an historic scene with which Scott’s studies from boyhood had been closely concerned. But in Guy Mannering he was entering upon a new field and using material which he had never before attempted. To find that it grew so readily under his hand gave him that highest of pleasures, the discovery of a new kind of creative power. Again, more than any other of the novels, it explored the inner life of his own Borderland. He was drawing upon the happy days when he had scoured Liddesdale for ballads, he was describing the land and the people most intimately linked with his lost youth. Was it to be wondered at that something of that young freshness of spirit should have returned to inspire his mature experience?
III
[Visit to London]
The year 1815, having opened laboriously, was to be relieved by holidaying. When the courts rose in March Scott set off by sea for London, accompanied by his wife and his elder daughter Sophia, who was now a child of fifteen. The parents stayed with the Doumerges in Piccadilly, and Sophia was deposited with Joanna Baillie in her little house at Hampstead. Scott was in the best of spirits, for Guy Mannering was a success beyond his dreams, and the terms he had got for it included a certain lightening of the dead stock of the Ballantynes’ publishing business; another novel — he had many themes in his head — and that weariful concern would be a thing of the past. Moreover it was a great moment in the national history. The Corsican had been vanquished and was now safe in the island prison of Elba, a Bourbon sat again on the throne of France, and a twenty-years’ load of anxiety had been lifted from honest hearts.
He found London in holiday mood, and, if his welcome had been cordial six years before, now it was roses everywhere. His poems had revealed Scotland to the south and brought northward troops of visitors, and there was a universal curiosity to see the magician himself. Moreover, there were the two new novels, which lay on every table, novels which opened up a richer wonderland. Scott’s, beyond doubt, was the general verdict, but a glamour of mystery hung about them, and mystery is always attractive. “Make up your mind,” Joanna Baillie wrote to him, “to be stared at only a little less than the Czar of Muscovy and old Blücher.”
[The Prince Regent]
He met all the literary and political celebrities whom he had known before, and made a new friend in Sir Humphry Davy. But the two men chiefly associated with this visit were the Prince Regent and Byron. The Prince had long admired Scott’s poetry and had commended his behaviour over the Laureateship, so his friend Adam, afterwards Chief Commissioner of the new jury court in Scotland, was ordered to invite him to a little dinner at Carlton House. Croker was of the party, and Lord Melville, the Duke of York, Lord Huntly, Lord Fife, and that formidable nobleman, Lord Hertford, who was to figure variously in literature as Lord Steyne and Lord Monmouth. It was a merry occasion; the Prince and Scott, both noted raconteurs, capped each other’s tales; and at midnight the host, looking towards his guest, asked for a bumper to the author of Waverley. Scott, an adept at this game, promised to convey the compliment to the real Simon Pure, and the Prince countered with the health of the author of Marmion. The Prince called him by his Christian name from their first introduction, gave another little dinner for him, at which he sang his favourite songs, and sent him a gold snuff-box set in brilliants with a medallion of the royal head on the lid. Scott was naturally pleased; he had an old-fashioned reverence for royalty, and it was much for one of his prepossessions to be treated as an intimate by the heir-apparent. As his later correspondence shows, he had no illusions about George the Fourth, and condemned as strongly as any radical the grossness and folly of much of his career; but it was given him to see that odd being at his best, to come under the spell of manners which could be most gracious and winning, and to get a glimpse of the genuine talents of one who was far more than the half-witted debauchee of the caricaturists. Scott had a singular gift of eliciting what was worthiest in a man, and the Prince Regent’s relations with him are among the few creditable things in a dubious record.
It was the same with Byron. Scott met him first at John Murray’s house, and the stately compliments of the previous letters were replaced by a friendly intimacy not without affection. The truth is that it was an attraction of opposites; each was slightly mystified by the other, which is no bad basis for friendship. They agreed in contemning the man who was a writer and nothing else, but their aspirations towards the completer life took different roads. Byron was impressed by Scott’s gusto and security and broad humanity; Scott by Byron’s exotic beauty and the glamour of one who lived romance. He told a friend afterwards that no portrait did him justice. “The lustre is there, but it is not lighted up. Byron’s countenance is a thing to dr
eam of.” He found that they agreed uncommonly well on most topics except religion and politics, and he decided that on these Byron had no very fixed opinions. He told him that he would probably end by joining the Roman church, and Byron seemed to assent. Byron’s radicalism he could not take seriously: it seemed to him to be partly due to a love of paradox, and partly to disgust with certain Ministers. The two met nearly every day during the London visit, and like the heroes of Homer they exchanged gifts. These were in the best romantic fashion — Scott’s to Byron a gold-mounted dagger which had belonged to Elfi Bey, and Byron’s a sepulchral vase of silver from the Long Walls of Athens containing the bones of ancient Greeks. Their last meeting was in the early autumn when Scott was on his way home from France. On this occasion he found Byron cold towards his tales of Waterloo heroism, though he was to use them in the second part of Childe Harold. They were not fated to meet again, but in all the difficult later years Scott remained Byron’s champion, and Byron cherished one of his few esteems for a man whose humanity had sweetened his bitterness and warmed a corner of his bleak house of life. Seven years later he wrote that he owed to Scott “far more than the usual obligation for the courtesies of literature and common friendship.... You disclaim ‘jealousies.’ But I would ask, as Boswell did of Johnson, ‘of whom could you be jealous?’ Of none of the living certainly, and (taking all and all into consideration) of which of the dead?”
The Scotts returned to Edinburgh in May, after the Hundred Days had begun and the gaze of the world was fixed upon Napoleon’s last desperate bid for power. For a little men held their breath, till Waterloo let them draw it again. Then followed a riot of patriotic exultation, for was it not Wellington who had shaken down the spoiler? An Edinburgh surgeon, Sir Charles Bell, had gone out to assist the medical staff after the battle, and a letter of his set Scott on fire. He had longed to visit the Peninsula during the campaign; he could at any rate now visit Flanders and see the foot-prints of war, and hear the British bugles sounded beside the walls of Paris. He collected two young country neighbours, Scott of Gala and Pringle of Whytbank, and an advocate friend, and on the 30th of August took ship from Harwich. But first he provided for the expenses of the trip by arranging for regular letters to be printed by Ballantyne and published jointly by Constable, Murray and Longman, letters which would first be passed round among his family and friends.