Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  [The baronetcy]

  The intimacy thus begun ripened fast. That autumn Lockhart, returning with John Wilson from the English lakes, paid his first visit to Abbotsford, and was given a glimpse of its feudal retinue and its feudal hospitality. It was a melancholy autumn for Scott, for the Duke of Buccleuch was dying, and his letter to Lord Montagu shows the depth of his anxiety. The offer of a baronetcy in November was only accepted when he got the news that his wife’s brother, Charles Carpenter, had bequeathed the residue of his fortune to his sister’s family. The cost of Abbotsford and his enlarged estate and his desire to equip his eldest son for the cavalry made him agree to sell all his copyrights to Constable for the sum of £12,000; in 1826 the price had not been fully paid.

  With the opening of 1819 the shadows again descended. The baronetcy had pleased him more than he cared to admit. He was glad that his ancient Border name should be given a handle which it had often had in history; he anticipated the obvious quotation from Henry IV, “I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath,” and he hoped to go to London in the Easter vacation to receive the accolade. But now the spasms of cramp returned with increased violence and the remedies used to relieve them brought on jaundice. His attacks of pain would last sometimes for ten hours, to be followed by deadly sickness. “I have been ill — very — very ill,” he told the Duke of Buccleuch, and to Southey he wrote: —

  If I had not the strength of a team of horses I could never have fought through it, and through the heavy fire of medicinal artillery, scarce less exhausting — for bleeding, blistering, calomel and ipecacuanha have gone on without intermission — while, during the agony of the spasms, laudanum became necessary in the most liberal doses, though inconsistent with the general treatment. I did not lose my senses, because I resolved to keep them, but I thought once or twice they would have gone overboard, top and top-gallants. I should be a great fool, and a most ungrateful wretch to complain of such afflictions as these. My life has been, in all its private and public relations, as fortunate perhaps as was ever lived, up to this period; and whether pain or misfortune may lie behind the dark curtain of futurity, I am already a sufficient debtor to the bounty of Providence to be resigned to it. Fear is an evil that has never mixed with my nature, nor has even unwonted good fortune rendered my love of life tenacious.

  In May the Duke of Buccleuch died, and at that time Scott must have believed that he would not long survive his friend. Between the bouts of pain he was so weak that the shortest letter fatigued him. “When I crawl out on Sybil Grey,” he wrote, “I am the very image of Death on the pale horse, lanthorn-jawed, decayed in flesh, stooping as if I meant to eat the poney’s ears, and unable to go above a foot-pace.” When Lockhart went to Abbotsford at the end of the spring vacation he found a shrunken figure, with a yellow face and snow-white hair; but he found, too, fire in Scott’s eye and a most resolute will to live. “He sat at table while we dined, but partook only of some rice pudding; and after the cloth was drawn, while sipping his toast and water, pushed round the bottles in his old style, and talked with easy cheerfulness of the stout battle he had fought and which he now seemed to consider as won.” That night Scott was in agony, but next morning he took his visitor for a trot up Yarrow vale and did some political canvassing among the farmers. When he returned to Edinburgh he found that for weeks at a time he could not take his seat at the Clerks’ table. He had attacks which seemed to his friends to presage death, and Lord Buchan, the master-bore of his generation, tried to comfort him by a promise that he himself would take charge of the funeral ceremonies at Dryburgh. One night in June it appeared that the end had come. Lockhart has told the tale on his wife’s evidence.

  He then called his children about his bed, and took leave of them with solemn tenderness. After giving them one by one such advice as suited their years and characters, he added: “For myself, my dears, I am unconscious of ever having done any man an injury, or omitting any fair opportunity of doing any man a benefit. I well know that no human life can appear otherwise than weak and filthy in the eyes of God, but I rely on the merits and intercession of our Redeemer.” He then laid his hands on their heads and said, “God bless you! Live so that you may all hope to meet each other in a better place hereafter. And now leave me that I may turn my face to the wall.”

  But it was not the end, it was rather the crisis of the malady, for he fell into a sleep, and from that night his slow convalescence began.

  Yet those months of weakness and pain were also months of intense literary activity. All spring he was busy on The Bride of Lammermoor, dictating it either to the swift and alert James Ballantyne or to the innocent Will Laidlaw, who was apt to interrupt with “Gude keep us a’!” and “Eh, sirs! Eh, sirs!” Scott refused to pause during his spasms of pain. “Nay, Willie,” he told Laidlaw, “only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as to giving over work, that can only be done when I am in woollen.” He did the same with The Legend of Montrose, and the two were published by Constable in June in the third series of “Tales of my Landlord” — four volumes full of misprints, since the author was too ill to correct the proofs. The tales would have been received with indulgence by those who knew the circumstances of their composition, but to his friends’ amazement no indulgence was required, for the old afflatus was there in ample measure. James Ballantyne tells how, when the printed volumes of The Bride of Lammermoor were put into his hand, Scott read them anxiously, for “he did not recollect one single incident, character or conversation.” He had dictated the book in a half-conscious world of suffering upon which memory had closed the door.

  [Recovery]

  There were other proofs of his miraculous vitality. After he left Edinburgh that summer he had begun a novel, Ivanhoe, which broke wholly new ground, for, fearing lest his public might grow weary of Scottish life, he marched horse and foot into England and occupied one of the classic lists of English romance. Moreover, he was engaged in all kinds of miscellaneous duties — political articles for James Ballantyne’s Edinburgh Weekly Journal, fitting out his son Walter for his cornetcy in the 18th Hussars, entertaining at Abbotsford the prince who was afterwards to be King of the Belgians, recruiting — to keep the peace which he believed to be threatened by the new Radicals — a corps of Buccleuch Foresters, and pushing the interests of the youth among his own villagers, by whom he was known as the “Duke of Darnick.” He was also casting a proprietary eye over Nicol Milne’s estate of Faldonside, and contemplating its purchase for £30,000; he believed that he could put £10,000 down, and pay off the rest in a few years by his literary earnings. From this rash project he was not deterred by what had happened to his friend, Sir John Riddell of Riddell, who had become bankrupt from spending too much on farming. “Here they have been,” he moralizes, “for a thousand years; and now all the inheritance is to pass away, merely because one good worthy gentleman could not be content to enjoy his horses, his hounds, and his bottle of claret, like thirty or forty predecessors, but must needs turn scientific agriculturist, take almost all his fair estate into his own hand, superintend for himself perhaps a hundred ploughs, and try every new nostrum that has been tabled by the quackish improvers of the time. And what makes the thing ten times more wonderful is that he kept his day-book and ledger and all the rest of it as accurately as if he had been a cheesemonger in the Grassmarket.” Scott himself kept minute accounts, and he too was spending capital which he hoped to realize out of future profits, but he did not see that Sir John Riddell’s course was paralleled by his own.

  With 1819 the broken years came to an end. By Christmas his health was virtually restored, though he had lost for good one-half of his physical strength. Now at the age of forty-eight he was an elderly man. It had been a year of bereavement as well as of bodily pain, for in the bitter December weather he lost in a single week his mother, his uncle Dr Rutherford, and his aunt Christian Rutherford, one of the best loved of his relatives. Spirituall
y he emerged from the valley of the shadow a stronger and riper man, for he had looked calmly in the face of death. His eyes were graver, as of one who had been keeping watch over man’s mortality. His cheerful creed, that the good were the happy, and, in the main, the successful, had been better adjusted to reality. The fate of Rebecca in Ivanhoe is a proof of this new philosophy. “A character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp,” he wrote in this connexion, “is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense that Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit.... A glance on the great picture of life will show that the virtue of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away.”

  III

  The five novels conceived and written during the broken years, represent the peak of Scott’s creative power. They were the work of something less than thirty months, a fecundity for which in literary history there is scarcely a parallel. They were produced during, and in the intervals of, deadly sickness; but, with one exception, the shadow of pain does not fall on them, for they present the normal world of his imagination in all its sunlit spaciousness.

  [Rob Roy]

  In Rob Roy especially there is no hint of the shadows, for the quality of delightfulness which was conspicuous in Guy Mannering has made it for many good judges — Lord Rosebery was one and Stevenson another — the favourite among the novels. In Rob Roy himself, Scott had a figure which had long filled his imagination — a Highlander with Lowland affiliations, who continued the old banditry of the Highland Line almost into modern days. The Northumbrian scene he knew from his many journeys across the Cheviots; he had been often in Glasgow on circuit, and had an affection for its people not commonly felt by “pridefu’ Edinburgh folk.” In 1817 with Adam Ferguson he had explored the Lennox and the Macgregor country, renewing his impressions of a quarter of a century before when, as a lawyer’s apprentice, he had set forth to do legal execution upon the Maclarens. He had recollections of his father to help him in his portrait of the elder Osbaldistone, and in the adorable Diana Vernon there are fleeting memories of his first love.

  In construction the novel is one of his worst. The plot is in essence picaresque, the main interest being movement in space, but the purpose of such movement is casually conceived. The preliminaries are out of all decent proportion, and many a reader has stuck fast in them and never crossed the Border. The hero is only a name, Edward Waverley many degrees further removed from reality. The whole business of the missing bills and Rashleigh’s villainy is obscure, and there are other signs of carelessness; some of the journeys, for example, take an unconscionable time, and Scott seems never to have made up his mind at what season of the year the events befell. The book is for the first third a somewhat languid chronicle of manners, and for the rest a headlong adventure. Yet the lengthy introduction has merits of its own. There is a careful study of the elder Osbaldistone, who, “as a man of business, looked upon the labours of poets with contempt; and, as a religious man and of the dissenting persuasion, considered all such pursuits as equally trivial and profane.” The romance of commerce is sympathetically presented, through the mouths both of Owen and of the Bailie. Indeed Scott never wrote brisker and better economics than in his account in Chapter XXVI of the basis of Glasgow’s prosperity and of the condition of the neighbouring Highlands. Nor did he often write sounder political history. Take the Bailie on the Union: —

  Whisht, sir! — whisht! It’s ill-scraped tongues like yours that makes mischief between neighbourhoods and nations. There’s naething sae gude on this side o’ time but it might have been better, and that may be said o’ the Union. Nane were keener against it than the Glasgow folk, wi’ their rabblings and their risings, and their mobs, as they ca’ them nowadays. But it’s an ill wind that blaws naebody gude — let ilka ane roose the ford as they find it. — I say, let Glasgow flourish! whilk is judiciously and elegantly putten round the town’s arms by way of byword. Now, since St Mungo catched herrings in the Clyde, what was ever like to gar us flourish like the sugar and tobacco trade? Will anybody tell me that, and grumble at a treaty that opened us a road west-awa’ yonder?

  In his picture, too, of Osbaldistone Hall Scott showed for the first time his power of presenting a scene and a mode of life outside his own experience and tradition.

  [The Aberfoyle Inn]

  The drama begins slackly, but our expectations are early roused, when the deep voice of the “Scotch sort of a gentleman,” the drover Campbell, is heard in the Darlington inn. These preparatory hints are cunningly scattered throughout the Northumbrian chapters, as when Diana from the hill-top shows Frank the far-off speck of whitish rock and tells him how in two hours his horse will carry him into Scotland. Very good is the scene with Mr Justice Inglewood, and Jobson the attorney is one of Scott’s best legal comic figures, but the tale only finds its true key when Frank, with Andrew Fairservice as his Sancho Panza, rides off in the darkness for the north. Thereafter we are in the grip of epic narrative. The midnight scene in the Glasgow prison, the journey to Aberfoyle, the night in the clachan alehouse, the fight on the lake shore, the Bailie’s encounter with Helen Macgregor, Rob Roy’s escape from Ewan of Brigglands at the ford, the meeting with Diana on the darkening heath — all are conceived in the highest vein of romantic invention. “Drama,” Stevenson has told us, “is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance,” and in the scene at the Aberfoyle inn the two are most artfully joined. Out of the night come the travellers from a prosaic world; around them are the shadowy mountains where death lurks, and by the inn fire are men of a wild world; at the threat of danger the prosaic is transformed into the heroic, and with a red-hot plough coulter snatched from the hearth the Bailie makes the Stuart’s plaid “smell like a singit sheep’s head.” Every detail of that wonderful scene, which Scott never bettered, is at the same high pitch — not least when the half-drunken Garschattachin airs his Jacobitism —

  The banes of a loyal and a gallant Grahame hae lang rattled in their coffin for vengeance on thae Dukes of Guile and Lords for Lorn. There ne’er was treason in Scotland but a Cawmil was at the bottom o’t; and now that the wrang side’s uppermost, wha but the Cawmils for keeping doun the right? But this warld winna last lang, and it will be time to sharp the maiden for shearing o’ craigs and thrapples. I hope to see the auld rusty lass linking at a bluidy harst again.

  Into the parochial affairs of merchants and blackmailers comes the high baronial note of an elder Scotland.

  Of the characters it may be said fairly that none are weak except the young hero. Rob Roy is a brilliant study of two different worlds marred in the joining; his wife, though she verges on melodrama, is not without a tragic verisimilitude; and every Highlander that crosses the stage is vigorously presented. But three figures by common consent stand out as among Scott’s masterpieces. In Diana Vernon he produced his one wholly satisfactory portrait of a young gentlewoman. Not only is the reader vividly conscious of her charm of person and manner and her fineness of spirit, but he is aware of a notable intelligence; for she is the ancestress of another Diana, her of the Crossways. Her speech, indeed, sometimes belies her, for she can talk like a governess from Miss Pinkerton’s academy. “We are still allies,” she can say, “bound, like other confederate powers, by circumstances of mutual interest, but I am afraid, as will happen in other cases, the treaty of alliance has survived the amicable disposition in which it had its origin.” Worse still, she can address Rashleigh thus: “Dismiss from your company the false archimage, Dissimulation, and it will better ensure your free access to our classical consultations.” But these are only specks on the sun. At other times her talk can be gay, vivacious and gallant, and she has a wild subtlety of her own. Whatever she says or does, we are her devout henchmen
, believing fiercely in her beauty, her goodness and her brains. We learn from her the kind of woman that Scott most admired, for no other of his own class is so lovingly drawn. He had little liking for foolish sylphs.

  [Andrew Fairservice]

  Andrew Fairservice is one of the great serving-men in literature, and he is one of Scott’s foremost creations, for, just as Falstaff seems to have got out of Shakespeare’s hand and attained an independent life of his own, so Andrew is now and then too much for his creator. He is a real but a low type of Scot, cunning, avaricious, indifferently loyal, venturesome in his own interest but a craven in the face of bodily peril, an incorrigible liar and braggart, and never more impudent than when his bluff is called. But vitality has nothing to do with ethics, and Andrew lives for us as vividly as Falstaff or Sairey Gamp. Scott has a half-ashamed liking for the rogue, but no admiration, and he delights to exhibit him in the ugliest light. But Andrew refuses to be degraded as successfully as Falstaff when he is renounced by Prince Hal; whenever he appears he takes the centre of the stage, and obscures the Bailie and Rob Roy himself.