by John Buchan
[Constable]
The centre figure in Scott’s affairs is henceforth Constable. The latter had saved the Ballantynes from bankruptcy and had many claims upon Scott’s gratitude, and, though I cannot believe that there could ever have been any warm friendship between the two, yet the relations might have been of the pleasantest but for John, who was always trying to frighten Constable into taking more dead stock by threatening that a new novel — or even a new edition of an old novel — would be carried elsewhere. On more than one occasion Scott lost his temper with his agent, but John was incorrigible. There is no prouder man than your rising Scots merchant with a lairdship in prospect, and it went against the grain with Constable to do business with the raffish John, whom he could not regard as his social equal. Hence there was no free and frank discussion with Scott himself, which might have led to the latter’s affairs being taken in hand by a man of real business acumen. Constable beyond doubt was treated at this time with scant consideration, and he was not in a position to protest. For Waverley had opened his eyes to Scott’s capacities, and it wrung his soul to think of losing this wonder-worker to a rival publisher. So he was compelled to submit to John’s exactions, and to be very complaisant over the Ballantyne bills. He was a self-made man, and had not amassed any great capital reserves. What he had was a host of friends and ample credit; the banks would discount his bills to any reasonable extent; but he had already strained this credit by his multitudinous undertakings. In self-justification he talked grandly about the new novels — the huge sums he had paid for them and the huge sums they earned; the world, even the banking world, believed him, and the credit of publisher and author rose so high that only very cool heads could have escaped a certain folie des grandeurs.
Such a head neither possessed. Constable was shrewd, but he was also adventurous and optimistic. Scott’s spirits, sunk low by reverses in a business which he did not properly comprehend, would soar at the first hint of better times. He had inherited some £12,000, and his wife had a few hundreds a year; he had an official income of £1600; he had received at least £10,000 for his poems, and he had made by his first two novels probably double that sum. By 1816 he had spent on land between £9000 and £10,000, and a good many thousands on buildings and furniture. Cadell estimated his total losses in the Ballantyne firms as £20,000, and if we take as large a figure as £15,000 as representing the loss accrued up to that date, his balance-sheet in 1816 was not too unwholesome. Much of the capital had indeed gone for good, but some was represented by solid assets like land, books and copyrights. Had Scott then cut himself loose from business, and continued his expenditure on the comparatively modest scale of the past, he would have been a wealthy man, even though he had only written a novel once every three years. Even as it was, the taking over of the printing firm seemed to be a wise step, for now he could learn for himself the exact position of the business, and could limit any future commitments.
It was to prove on the contrary a long stride towards his undoing. He never made any serious inquisition into the affairs of the printing house, and James Ballantyne was as easy-going as a salaried servant as he had been when a partner. Moreover, Scott had got a business which he could treat as his banker. When he wanted money for the purchase of land or anything else he used the name of the company by obtaining bills on Constable and granting acceptances in return. Constable, eager to retain his good will, made no demur. These bills were, of course, met or reduced from time to time by his large literary earnings, but he got into the habit of invariably forestalling such receipts. His expenditure in one year would be greater than his income, but there was the certainty of that year’s deficit being paid for by the next year’s earnings. Yet at any one moment he was always in arrears, and if a sudden crisis came and a balance had to be struck it might be heavily on the wrong side. In such a crisis Constable could not help him, for Constable too would be caught, his adventurous business methods being much the same. In this perpetual forestalling, through the medium of a company which obscured in his eyes its real improvidence, seems to me to lie the main secret of Scott’s disasters.
[The Black Dwarf]
Meanwhile John Ballantyne was busy. The Antiquary had not cleared Scott’s feet, but its author had an idea in his head which would. He had a scheme for a series of “Tales of my Landlord,” collected and reported by one Jedediah Cleishbotham, schoolmaster of the parish of Gandercleuch. Constable would not take any back stock, so they should go elsewhere, but, in order to save Constable’s face, the title-page would not bear the words “By the Author of Waverley.” John approached Murray, and Murray’s Edinburgh agent, Blackwood, an antiquarian bookseller in the Old Town, who readily accepted Scott’s terms and agreed also to take over £500 of back stock. John, indeed, made rather a mess of the bargaining, for he almost sold the copyright outright. Blackwood, a plain-spoken man, was allowed to criticize the plot of one of the tales, The Black Dwarf, and Scott, who would accept rebuke cheerfully from his equals, but from James Ballantyne alone of his inferiors, replied: “God damn his soul! Tell him and his coadjutor that I belong to the Black Hussars of Literature, who neither give nor receive criticism. I’ll be cursed if this is not the most impudent proposal that ever was made.” The quarrel was patched up, the first two tales were completed during the spring and summer of 1816, together with Scott’s narrative of the year 1814 for the Edinburgh Annual Register, and on the first day of December appeared in four volumes The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality.
VI
The Black Dwarf was an admitted failure, admitted by Scott himself, who felt his impetus slacken and huddled it to a close in a single volume. The Dwarf, Elshie, is a piece of Gothick extravagance, Matt Lewis crossed with Byron, and his speech a language which was never yet on sea or land. Cleishbotham in his introduction is at his clumsiest. Hobbie Elliot, the young Borderer, is a good portrait of the Dinmont school; Westburnflat and Mareschal will pass muster; but, well or ill drawn, the characters have no scope to exhibit themselves within the narrow melodrama of the plot. The Scots dialogue is always a delight, and sets in high relief the Dwarf’s ponderous soliloquies. This could scarcely be bettered as an example of the warm, compassionate, whimsical Border speech.
Wi’ the young leddie’s leave, I wad fain take doun Elshie’s skeps o’ bees, and set them in Grace’s bit flower yard at the Heughfoot — they shall ne’er be smeekit by ony o’ huz. And the puir goat, she would be negleckit about a great toun like this; and she could feed bonnily on our lily lee by the burn side, an’ the hounds wad ken her in a day’s time and never fash her, and Grace wad milk her ilka morning wi’ her ain hand, for Elshie’s sake; for though he was thrawn and cankered in his converse, he likeit dumb creatures weel.
There are one or two good scenes, like the gathering of the Jacobite gentlemen at Ellieslaw, and there are many lame and impotent ones. Scott had met the original of the Dwarf in Manor valley when he visited Adam Ferguson at Kailyards and walked with Skene over the hills from Megget, and felt bound to make a tale of him, but the inspiration lagged behind the duty. It is an instance of his occasional blunders in leaning too much upon fact.
[Old Mortality]
The failure was amply atoned for by Old Mortality. Lockhart thought it “the Marmion of the novels,” and its only rival for the first place, it seems to me, is The Heart of Midlothian. In it Scott attempted the historical romance in its most difficult form, a reconstruction of a period of history far outside living experience but furiously alive in popular memory. The Covenanters had become to the majority of the people of Scotland a race of demigods and saints, and their story had been written, even by sophisticated Edinburgh lawyers, in a vein of hagiography. This perplexed epoch Scott set forth through the eyes of a sober, reasonable, if platitudinous hero, with the same detached fairness with which he had described the French nation in Paul’s Letters. He does not blink the ugly side of Covenanter or Cavalier, nor is he blind to their rival nobilities. His is the moderate, central mind, lik
e that of Montrose or Robert Leighton; he has the true historical sense, which was needed also for true dramatic effect, since it alone could present the moving contrasts. His history was violently attacked at the time by the biographer of Knox, the “learned and unreadable McCrie,” and Scott replied in a review of his own novel in the Quarterly, in which the literary criticism was provided by Erskine. The historian of to-day cannot be in doubt as to the side to which truth leaned in the controversy. Scott for the first time brought a legend into the searching light of day, and set in honest perspective what had been hitherto seen through a magnifying and distorting mist. If I may speak as one whose studies have lain much in that period, I think that he does ample justice to the best in the Covenant and does not exaggerate the worst; if he errs at all in fairness it is in his portrait of Claverhouse. Scott had read himself deeply into the literature of the time, and from books and the conversation of his old tutor he had mastered at least the forms of Calvinistic divinity.
The story has a fitting prologue, the beautiful tale of that real Old Mortality whose chisel clinked on the martyrs’ headstones up and down Scotland. Of the greater novels it is one of the best constructed and its movement is the most swift and even. There is none of the delightfulness of Guy Mannering or the romantic sunset charm of Waverley; it is on the whole a grim tale, moving among ungenial folk on the highroad of national destiny, and rarely does it pause to rest and sport in the shade. It is indeed a very stern and conscientious piece of realism. There is little of Scott’s customary trait-portraiture; only Lady Margaret Bellenden, with her stories of his “sacred Majesty’s disjune,” has her “humours”; the rest of the people are firmly drawn in the round. There is no weak scene, except the love-making between hero and heroine. There are no weak characters except Edith Bellenden and Henry Morton, though the latter is perhaps flat rather than weak, since his mental processes are most adequately portrayed. And the book rises to scenes of tragic intensity which Scott never excelled, and contains figures of the most masterful vitality. Curiously objective figures they are, for we feel that none of them strongly excites the author’s sympathy; in no other novel do his characters live a life so independent of their creator.
It opens with a brilliant comedy scene in Niel Blane’s tavern after the Wapinschaw, when the host and his daughter discuss the economics of innkeeping in troubled times. Then there enters the Archbishop’s murderer, the red-headed man who “skellied fearfully with one eye,” and when he and Morton go out into the night romance takes the road with them. Henceforth the moderate is linked with the fanatic and drawn unwillingly into a wild drama, always protesting, always holding fast to his own reasonable faith, and thereby providing a touchstone for the reader by which he can judge the aberrations of the rest. Morton is one such punctum indifferens, an oasis of common sense, and Niel Blane, with his canny indifference to all heroics, is another.
Let Bauldy drive the pease and bear meal to the camp at Drumclog — he’s a Whig, and was the auld gudewife’s pleughman — the mashlum bannocks will suit their muirland stamacks weel. He maun say it’s the last unce o’ meal in the house, or, if he scruples to tell a lie (an it’s no likely he will when it’s for the gude o’ the house) he may wait till Duncan Glen, the auld drucken trooper, drives up the aitmeal to Tillietudlem, wi’ my dutifu’ services to my Leddy and the Major, and I haena as muckle left as will mak my parritch.
[The Covenanters]
With such a reminder of the prosaic world in the background, Scott sweeps us into strange, grim, but always credible drama — the tortured meditations of Burley, the battle-scene of Drumclog, Morton’s deadly peril in the moorland cottage, Bothwell Brig, Morton’s return and his “recognition,” and the great final encounter with Burley in the cave. At the proper moment the narrative rises to the appropriate intensity in some culminating incident, such as the death of Sergeant Bothwell at Drumclog, or Morton’s escape from Burley by his leap across the chasm, and such incidents are told with an economy and a speed which Scott never surpassed. Take the scene in the cottage when the swords are out for Morton’s death —
“Hist!” he said, “I hear a distant noise.”
“It is the rushing of the brook over the pebbles,” said one.
“It is the sough of the wind among the bracken,” said another.
“It is the galloping of horse,” said Morton to himself.... “God grant they may come as my deliverers!”
This fierce activity is supported by characters none of whom fall below the dignity of great drama. Of the royalists, Claverhouse, Bothwell, Cornet Grahame, Lord Evandale, and old Major Bellenden are all in different ways adequately realized and vigorously presented. But it is with the Covenanters that Scott reaches the height of his power. Balfour of Burley is the eternal fanatic, inspired by a wild logic of his own, tortured and terrible but never base. The ministers — Poundtext the trimmer, the madman Habakkuk Mucklewrath, common clay like Gabriel Kettledrummle, pure perverted spirit like Macbriar — are excellently done; their wildest extravagances are not caricature, as anyone will admit who remembers Naphthali and Shields and Patrick Walker. Macbriar’s sermon in Chapter XVIII is both superb prose and historically true. It is hard to see how Scott can be accused of maligning the Covenanters when in Macbriar’s defiance of the Privy Council he has shown to what heights of courage they could attain, and in his picture of Bessie Maclure has revealed tenderly and subtly the beauty of holiness in the most humble. He has divined the essence of what Lockhart calls their “stern and solemn enthusiasm” far more truly than their conventional apologists.
The relief from the stress is found in the marvellous chorus of plain folk which accompanies the action and brings the mind back to the variety and comedy of the ordinary world. They are always there at the right moment to humanize the tale. Niel Blane and his daughter provide the contrast for the advent of Burley; Gudyill the butler and Guse Gibbie leaven the cavalier heroics, and Jenny Dennison’s homely good sense is a corrective to Edith Bellenden’s conventional nobility. Above all Mause Headrig, torn between piety and maternal cares, is the element needed to relax the tension of the grim hill-folk, and her son Cuddie is a foil both to the hill-folk and to his mother. Scott shows the greatness of his art in the skill with which he blends the tragic and the comic, and portrays religious ecstasy and madness always against the prosaic background of life. He never raises the tale to a false key, and when Morton returns and meets old Ailie Wilson, his uncle’s housekeeper, the emotion of recognition is preceded by an account of the death of the miser, true to type to the last. “And sae he fell out o’ ae dwaum into anither, and ne’er spoke a word mair, unless it were something we couldna mak out, about a dipped candle being gude eneugh to see to dee wi’.”
The Scots speech is beyond praise, so exquisitely apt it is, so full of pregnant simplicities and vivid idioms and subtle humours. It is cunningly varied, too, to suit the characters, for the waiting-maid does not talk like the housekeeper or the ploughman like the butler. A forgotten Scotland lives again when Cuddie declares of Kettledrummle, “He routed like a cow in a fremd loaning,” and Alison Wilson says of the Duke, “That was him that lost his head at London — folk said it wasna a very gude ane, but it was aye a sair loss to him, puir gentleman.” The height is reached in the discourses of Cuddie and his mother. Mause has all the Scriptures in her head and makes noble use of them — farcical often, but never wholly farcical, and sometimes rising to a confused magnificence, while the Laodicean Cuddie is always at hand to pull her down to earth. Take the scene with Cuddie before he confronts the Privy Council —
At that moment his shoulder was seized by old Mause, who had contrived to thrust herself forward into the lobby of the apartment.
“O ninny, ninny!” said she to Cuddie, hanging upon his neck, “glad and proud and sorry and humbled am I, a’ in ane and the same instant, to see my bairn ganging to testify for the truth gloriously with his mouth in council, as he did with his weapon in the field.”
“Whisht, whisht, mither!” cried Cuddie impatiently. “Odds, ye daft wife, is this a time to speak o’ thae things? I tell ye I’ll testify naething either ae gate or anither. I hae spoken to Mr Poundtext, and I’ll tak the Declaration, or whate’er they ca’ it, and we’re a’ to win free off if we do that — he’s gotten life for himsell and a’ his folk, and that’s a minister for my siller; I like nane o’ your sermons that end in a psalm at the Grassmarket.”
“O, Cuddie, man, laith wad I be they suld hurt ye,” said old Mause, divided grievously between the safety of her son’s soul and that of his body, “but mind, my bonny bairn, ye hae battled for the faith, and dinna let the dread o’ losing creature comforts withdraw ye frae the gude fight.”
“Hout, tout, mither,” replied Cuddie, “I hae fought e’en ower muckle already, and, to speak plain, I’m wearied o’ the trade. I hae swaggered wi’ a’ thae arms, and muskets and pistols, buff-coats and bandoliers lang eneugh, and I like the plough-paidle a hantle better. I ken naething suld gar a man fight (that’s to say, when he’s no angry) by and out-taken the dread o’ being hanged or killed if he turns back.”
“But, my dear Cuddie,” continued the persevering Mause, “your bridal garment! Oh, hinny, dinna sully the marriage garment.”
“Awa, awa, mither,” replied Cuddie, “dinna ye see the folk waiting for me —— Never fear me —— I ken how to turn this far better than ye do — for ye’re bleezing awa about marriage, and the job is how we are to win by hanging.”
There is little fault to be found with the prose of the narrative. Morton’s conscientious troubles are told simply and lucidly, the landscape is vividly described, and in general there is an absence of the turgidity to which Scott was prone. The explanation seems to be that throughout the book the inspiration never flags; he escapes longueurs because he is caught up by a wholly impersonal purpose; his imagination is so absorbed by the task of historical re-creation that he has no time to turn back upon himself. Indeed, in the famous outburst of Claverhouse, he reaches the high-water mark of his English style.