by John Buchan
Scott put into him all the baser traits of his countrymen, but he added their quick interest in life, their speculative boldness, their sentiment, their vivid consciousness of the past. Andrew comments freely and fearlessly on any topic, and he is always shrewd and humorous. He is a lamp to light the reader through the undergrowth of Scots prejudices and idiosyncrasies. He reveals for Frank’s benefit the trade of the Scots packman; the life of the Scots burghs “yoked on end to end like ropes of ingans”; the downfall of local government with the loss of the Scots Parliament—”If ae kail-wife pou’d aff her neighbour’s mutch, they wad hae the twasome o’ them into the Parliament House o’ Lunnon”; his contempt for episcopacy—”clouts o’ cauld parritch ... mair like a penny wedding than a sermon”; his smattering of law—”bonny writer words ... a’ that Andrew got for a lang law plea, and four ankers o’ as gude brandy as was e’er coupit ower craig;” the tale of the cleansing of Glasgow’s cathedral at the Reformation from the “rags o’ the muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for her auld hinder end;” his taste in letters—”He aince telled me (puir blinded creature) that the Psalms of David were excellent poetry! as if the holy Psalmist thought o’ rattling rhymes in a blether like his ain silly clinkum-clankum things that he ca’s verse. Gude help him! twa lines o’ Davie Lindsay wad ding a’ he ever clerkit!” He never opens his disgraceful mouth but there flows from it a beautiful rhythmical Scots. Take this: —
I have been flitting every term these four-and-twenty years; but when the time comes, there’s aye something to saw that I would like to see sawn — or something to maw that I would like to see mawn — or something to ripe that I would like to see ripen — and sae I e’en daiker on wi’ the family frae year’s end to year’s end.... But if your honour wad wush me to ony place where I wad hear pure doctrine, and hae a free cow’s grass, and a cot, and a yard, and mair than ten punds of annual fee, and where there’s nae leddy about the town to count the apples, I’se hold mysell muckle indebted t’ ye.
[Bailie Nicol Jarvie]
Bailie Nicol Jarvie was regarded by Scott from the first as one of the twin pillars of the tale. He is the foil to Frank Osbaldistone — the shrewd middle-aged man of business set against the young dreamer; the foil to Rob — the pragmatic and progressive Lowlander against the champion of a lost world: the foil to Andrew Fairservice, since his idiomatic pawkiness is based on courage and lit by generosity. His Whiggism is always coloured by honest sentiment, his carefulness by a large kindliness, and he has his own homespun poetry. Alone of all the characters he is perfectly at ease in the world and perfectly sure of his road. He is a conscientious man and must always be moralizing; when he compounds a bowl of brandy-punch he tells the company that he had the receipt from one Captain Coffinkey—”a decent man when I kent him, only he used to swear awfully. But he’s dead, and gaen to his account, and I trust he’s accepted — I trust he’s accepted.” He has his ambitions, and dreams not only of the provostship, but of letting his lights burn before the Duke of Argyll—”for wherefore should they be hidden under a bushel?” He is for the plain man and his rights, since his father the deacon had carried his sword to Bothwell Brig, but he has also a deep respect for gentle blood. Into his counting-house came wafts from a different world, and he sighs as he shuts the door on them.
It’s a queer thing o’ me, gentlemen, that am a man of peace mysell, and a peacefu’ man’s son, for the deacon my father quarrelled wi’ nane out o’ the town-council — it’s a queer thing, I say, but I think the Hieland blude o’ me warms at thae daft tales, and whiles I like better to hear them than a word o’ profit, gude forgie me! —— But they are vanities — sinfu’ vanities — and, moreover, again the statute law — again the statute and gospel law.
There is steel in him as well as fire, for he can not only fight at a pinch, but, with his honest knees knocking together, can outface Rob Roy’s terrible wife. In a word he is the triumphant bourgeois, the type which endures when aristocracies and proletariats crumble, but the Scots type of that potent class. His portrait is painted with a thousand subtle touches and every word he utters adds something to our understanding. I sometimes fear that the knowledge of the older Scots world, which is needed to make the Bailie wholly comprehensible, is fast passing away; but, when I re-read him I seem to find behind the idioms something universal, which lifts him out of any narrow orbit of space and time, and sets him with the creatures of Moliere and Shakespeare.
The Heart of Midlothian had for its basis the tradition of a remoter Edinburgh than that of the ‘Forty-five, the jealous burgher life whose smouldering resentment at the Union of 1707 was fanned to a flame by the misdeeds of Captain Porteous. Scott welcomed the chance of recounting a vivid episode in the history of his own romantic city, and for the plot itself he had a true tale to work on — that of Helen Walker of Irongray, the “puirest o’ a’ puir bodies,” who, like Jeanie Deans, walked to London to save her sister’s life. Around these centres he gathered a motley crowd of burgesses, tacksmen, bonnet-lairds, smugglers and ne’er-do-wells; he carried his tale to the Court of London and into the dens of the underworld; and he made the network of that underworld cover both Scotland and England, for he knew that crime and misery overleap national boundaries. In no other novel is his canvas so large, or the figures so many and so varied.
Critics as diverse as Lady Louisa Stuart, Walter Savage Landor and Edward Fitzgerald have given it first place among his works; and, though in Scott’s case the scale of precedence is hard to fix, I think the judgment is right, for every merit which the others possess is shown here in a high degree. The first five-sixths of the book are almost perfect narrative. The start, after his fashion, is a little laboured, while he is sketching in the historical background; but when the action once begins there is no slackening, and the public and private dramas are deftly interwoven. The last chapters have been generally condemned as weak and careless, a picking up of loose ends and tying them into a clumsy knot; and indeed there is no defence to be made for the death of Sir George Staunton at the hands of his own son. There was a story there of the Greek tragedy type, but it demanded a different kind of telling; as it stands, the reader is not awed by dramatic justice but staggered by inconsequent melodrama. Yet, apart from this blemish, I feel that the conception of the Roseneath chapters is right. Scott was always social historian as well as novelist, and he wanted to show Scottish life passing into a mellower phase in which old unhappy things were forgotten. Artistically, too, the instinct was sound. The figures, who have danced so wildly at the bidding of fate, should find reward in a gentle, bright, leisurely old age. Even so Tolstoy rounded off his War and Peace.
The other novels, even the best of them, resemble a flat and sometimes dull country, where the road occasionally climbs to the heights, but in The Heart of Midlothian the path is all on a tableland, in tonic air and with wonderful prospects. One great scene follows close on another, but there is no overstraining of the tension, for the comic and the tragic, the solemn and the fantastic, are most artfully mingled. Interpolated in the horrors of the Porteous Mob is the gossip of the Saddletrees and Mrs Howden, Peter Plumdamas and Miss Grizel Damahoy; David Deans and his rigid decencies are set off by the pagan death of old Dumbiedykes and the capers of his son; the suspense of Effie’s trial is relieved by the legal absurdities of Bartoline Saddletree; Madge Wildfire with her songs flits among the midnight shadows of Muschat’s Cairn; Jeanie’s journey begins with the comedy of Dumbiedykes, passes through the terrors of Gunnerby Hill, and ends, as romance should, in the courts of princes. There is no fault to be found with this brilliant panorama; but since each episode depends with perfect logic and naturalness upon the characters of the protagonists, so that it seems to happen inevitably and to owe nothing to invention, it is the characters that constitute the glory of the book.
[Jeanie Deans]
Of these Jeanie Deans is the chief. She dominates the book because she alone is perfectly secure;
she has a philosophy of life which withstands the fieriest trials, and which makes the most foursquare of the others — her father, Reuben Butler, the Duke — seem by contrast like saplings to an oak. She is such a figure as is not found elsewhere to my knowledge in literature; the puritan in whom there is neither sourness nor fanaticism, whose sane, rational instincts are wholly impregnable, whose severity is for herself alone and not for others. Scott gives her a homely person and few feminine graces, but he makes her adorable from her invincible goodness. She is no milk-and-water heroine, no type of passive, suffering virtue, for her courage is that of a man-at-arms, and is blown by the storms to a stronger flame. “‘I fearna for his life — I ken how strong-hearted he is — I ken it,’ laying her hand on her bosom, ‘by my ain heart at this minute.’” She is a careful, practical soul, and her letters to her father and to Butler during her journey mention a cure for the muir-ill which she has heard of, and are full of housewifely details and shrewd observations about the strange land she is exploring. She is quick-witted and sternly logical; she confounds the English rector by her theology, and gives the Duke sage advice as to how to deal with the Queen, and can even argue her father out of his pedantries. She has an intense pride, the deeper because it is free from vanity:—”I can only say, that not for all the land that lies between the twa ends of the rainbow wad I be the woman that should wed your son.” She has an eye, too, for the whimsicalities of life, as when she contemplates the retreating figure of her suitor, Dumbiedykes, borne off by Highland Rory.—”He’s a gude creature, and a kind — it’s a pity he has sae willyard a powny.”
This most human and companionable of women is involved in a crisis from which there seems no outlet but tragedy. Scott never wrote anything more profound psychologically than the scene between Jeanie and her father, when he learns that on her word depends Erne’s life, and that between the two sisters in prison. Jeanie stands firm — she could not do otherwise — but she directs the same unyielding courage to the task of rescue. Like Jacob she wrestles with the dark angel and compels him to bless her. The climax is triumph, when she wins her sister’s life from the Queen; and at that great moment she, whose speech has hitherto had the homeliness of a country girl, rises, like Edie Ochiltree, to a grave eloquence: —
Alas! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think of other people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, and we are for righting our ain wrongs and fighting our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body — and seldom may it visit your leddyship — and when the hour of death comes that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours —— Oh, my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for ithers, that we think on maist pleasantly. And the thought that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow.
[David Deans]
Of the other characters no one is feebly drawn except Effie’s Byronic lover. Effie herself is true woman, the passionate spoiled beauty, with the good breeding which in any class may accompany bodily loveliness. Dumbiedykes, Reuben Butler, the Edinburgh burgesses, the inimitable Captain of Knockdunder are all carefully studied, even in their extravagances, as are the macabre figures from the underworld like Daddy Ratcliffe and Meg Murdockson; while in Madge Wildfire Scott shows that sure hand in portraying madness which belongs only to the eminently sane. But, after Jeanie, the dominant figure is her father. David Deans is the Covenanter who has lived into peaceable times which have a little mellowed his austerity. He cherishes the memory of his stormy past, and has still something of the wild poetry of the hill-folk. “It has been with me as with the worthy John Semple, called Carspharn John, upon a like trial — I have been this night on the banks of Ulai, plucking an apple here and there.” But if he has the leaven of high devotion he carries also a gross weight of spiritual pride. “How muckle better I hae thought mysell than them that lay saft, fed sweet, and drank deep, when I was in the moss-haggs and moors wi’ precious Donald Cameron, and worthy Mr Blackadder, called Guess-again!” “I wish every man and woman in this land had kept the true testimony, and the middle and straight path, as it were on the ridge of the hill, where wind and water shear, avoiding right-hand snares and extremes and left-hand way-slidings, as weel as Johnny Dodds of Farthing’s Acre, and ae man mair that shall be nameless.” To such a man his daughter’s shame is a cataclysm, and his agony of spirit is subtly and tenderly portrayed. He is weaker than Jeanie because there is vanity in his pride; he throws back upon her the responsibility for decision; but he is strong enough not to plead with her for what he desires but his principles condemn. “I wunna fret the tender conscience of one bairn — no, not to save the life of the other.” The depth of the old man’s suffering is beautifully shown by his greeting to Jeanie on her return: —
Jeanie — my ain Jeanie — my best — my maist dutiful bairn — the Lord of Israel be thy father, for I am hardly worthy of thee! Thou hast redeemed our captivity — brought back the honour of our house. Bless thee, my bairn, with mercies promised and purchased!”
The Legend of Montrose is based upon one episode in the most miraculous of Scottish epics, the murder after the battle of Tippermuir of the young Lord Kilpont by James Stewart of Ardvoirlich. Wisely Scott did not attempt a full portrait of Montrose, for, if he had, he must have failed. For one thing that great figure was still little realized by the world; for another Scott’s genius did not lie in the understanding of the searching and introspective intellect and the character in whom pure reason becomes a flame fiercer than any romantic devotion. Nor could he have coped with the doubts and subtleties of Argyll. He chose an episode in which he could give rein to his fancy, and bring upon the stage as the central figure a Scottish mercenary drawn from his readings in Turner and Monro. Sir James Turner indeed provided him with the very words of the mercenary’s creed. “I had swallowed without chewing in Germanie a very dangerous maxime, which military men there too much follow: which was, that so we serve our master honestlie, it is no matter what master we serve.”
The book is like much of Dumas, swift, competent, careless narrative. It lives by virtue of a single character, the immortal Rittmaster. Dugald Dalgetty, compounded of Fluellen and Bobadil and Lesmahagow, and crossed with the divinity student of Marischal College, is one of those creations which, as Scott confessed, sat on the feather of his pen and led it away from its purpose. He has his own way with the tale, and, when he is on the stage, the Sons of the Mist and Annot Lyle and Montrose himself sink into the background. He is a delight whenever he speaks, whether he is laying down the maxims of conduct for a soldier, or planning the fortification of the sconce of Drumsnab, or discussing sermons with Argyll’s chaplain, or ridiculing the methods of Highland warfare. He will fight for any cause, confident that he has “fought knee-deep in blood many a day for one that was ten degrees worse than the worst of them all.” The scenes in the dungeon of Inveraray when Dugald’s sober sense is contrasted with the heroics of Ronald, and when later he discomfits Argyll, are among the happiest that Scott ever conceived. We rejoice to know that Dugald lived to a good age, “very deaf, and very full of interminable stories about the immortal Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North,” and our hearts go with him, as with Falstaff, to Arthur’s bosom or wheresome’er he be.
[The Bride of Lammermoor]
In The Bride of Lammermoor we have the one novel written during the broken years which is overcast by their shadow. It was not the work of the ordinary Scott, but of a “fey” man, living in a remote world of pain; as we have seen, he had no recollection of its composition, and pronounced it, after his first anxious reading, to be “monstrous, gross and grotesque.” It was the product of a drugged and abnormal condition, even as Coleridge composed “Kubla Khan” in an opiate dream, from which he was roused by an inopportune “person from Porlock.”
When the last laird of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride
And woo a dead maiden to be his bride,
He shall stable his steed in the Kelpie’s flow,
And his name shall be lost for evermoe!
The landscape is artfully managed, and becomes, like Egdon Heath in Mr Hardy’s The Return of the Native, almost a protagonist in the tale. The eastern end of the Lammermoors, where they break down to the sea, is to most people a green, open and friendly land where salt and heather mingle, but Scott makes it secret, dark and ominous. He never wrote better descriptive prose than in his picture of Wolf’s Crag in Chapter VII.