by John Buchan
The story is swift and brief, a succession of masterly scenes, each of which makes a notable contribution to the drama’s development. Bucklaw’s short commons at Wolf’s Crag are contrasted with the Lord Keeper’s visit and Caleb’s raid on the village, when for one moment we enter the sunshine of comedy. Scott’s aim is clear — to set off the snugness of the homely burgher life against the poverty and pride of decayed nobility. The scene at the cooper’s cottage is more than a Dutch picture, it is an acute piece of social philosophy. Then for a little we are beguiled into cheerfulness, but the dusk gathers with the talk of the witch-wives sitting by the dead Alice, and we pass to deeper and still deeper gloom — Lucy signing the marriage contract and shrieking at the arrival of her rejected lover, her madness and death, Ravenswood riding at dawn to his doom across the wet sands, the old serving-man picking up the sable feather that is all that is left of his master, and placing it in his bosom.
[Ravenswood]
There is no fault to be found with the plot, but for a theme so tremendous the characters must be commensurate. On the whole it may be claimed that they do not fall below the true tragic stature. Ravenswood is no Byronic imitation. He is a fully realized type of the aristocrat upon whom the ends of the earth have fallen, impotent in his pride, unpractical in his nobility. He is the only one of Scott’s heroes who never ceases to dominate the story: in the words of Adolphus, he is “the ultimate and paramount object of every passion — whether admiration, hatred, love, hope or fear — which vary and animate the successive scenes.” Lady Ashton is a female of the same breed, whose pride has been hammered into a hard mercantile ambition — Lady Macbeth à bon marché. Bucklaw, the honest loutish country laird, is an admirable foil to the Master’s dark good-breeding, as is the led-captain Craigengelt to Bucklaw’s essential decency. Lucy Ashton is a passive creature, a green-sick girl unfit to strive with destiny, but her weakness does not make her unreal, and there is poignancy in her sad submissiveness.
“Dinna shut the cabinet yet,” said Henry, “for I must have some of your silver wire to fasten the balls to my hawk’s jesses. And yet the new falcon’s not worth them neither.... She just wets her singles in the blood of the partridge, and then breaks away and lets her fly; and what good can the poor bird do after that, you know, except pine and die in the first heather cow or whin-bush she can crawl into?”
“Right, Henry — right, very right,” said Lucy mournfully, holding the boy fast by the hand after she had given him the wire he wanted; “but there are more riflers in the world than your falcon, and more wounded birds that seek but to die in quiet, that can find neither brake nor whin-bush to hide their heads in.”
The great figures are firmly drawn, but — except for Bucklaw — on general lines; the lesser folk are more closely realized and more cunningly differentiated. Take such a one as the minister Bide-the-Bent, and the villagers, and the old crones; Caleb Balderston’s “humours” are perhaps a trifle overdone, but he is real enough; and in Mortsheugh, the grave-digger, Scott has drawn a character at once true to history and to human nature. Mortsheugh has been at Bothwell Brig as a henchman of the Ravenswoods, but he has no sentiment of loyalty. He regards himself as half a minister, “now that I’m a bedral in an inhabited parish,” but his solemn profession gives him no dignity. Under the shadow of tragedy he will have his prosaic grumble. From a tale conceived in the highest mood of romance Scott seems to set himself to strip off all that is conventionally romantic. The old women are consumed with hatred of rank and youth and beauty, and Mortsheugh has no pity for the decline of a family which had forgotten his class.
“If Lord Ravenswood protected his people, my friend, while he had the means of doing so, I think they might spare his memory,” replied the Master.
“Ye are welcome to your ain opinion, sir,” said the sexton; “but you winna persuade me that he did his duty, either to himsell or to huz puir dependent creatures, in guiding us the gate he has done. He might have gi’en us liferent tacks of our bits o’ houses and yards — and me, that’s an auld man, living in yon miserable cabin that is fitter for the dead than the quick, and killed wi’ rheumatise, and John Smith in my dainty bit mailing, and his window glazen, and a’ because Ravenswood guided his gear like a’ fule!”
The book, Scott’s single unrelieved tragedy, stands apart from the rest. It has none of his mellow philosophy or his confidence in the ultimate justice of things. The shades of the prison-house are around it. There are passages in it strained and overdrawn, something bitter and violent, as if the delirium of sickness had broken the seal upon old passionate memories. Hence, for all its magnificence, it is outside the succession of the greatest tragedies, for it wounds without healing, and perturbs without consoling. Its tragedy is a ballad tragedy, cruel and inexplicable, for the ballads have no philosophy. The doom which overtakes Lucy and the Master is a blind doom, not due to any fault of their own, unless it be the girl’s passivity; Ravenswood is proud, but it is not his pride that works his undoing. The fates are permitted to snap illogical shears. The bar between the lovers is “an ancient house destroyed, an affectionate father murdered;” but such a bar is no more than the family feud of Montague and Capulet; it is no gulf the overpassing of which need wake a sleepless Nemesis. It is not with the Greeks that we can compare him, but with the Shakespeare who wrote Romeo and Juliet. The book lacks the clean noble lines of classic tragedy; rather it is of the fantastic Gothick pattern, with sometimes a tinge of the savagery of the lesser Elizabethans. In his sickness things came to Scott out of primordial deeps.
[The half-world]
But it has the quality of such defects in its mastery over that half-world, which is neither of nature nor outside nature, but is beyond our understanding. Nowhere else does Scott show such a power of awaking suspense and disquieting the mind with murmurings from another sphere. Take the scene where the old women talk in the churchyard: —
“He’s a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master ... and a comely personage — broad in the shoulders and narrow around the lungies — he wad make a bonny corpse — I wad like to hae the streeking and winding o’ him.”
“It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie, that hand of woman, or of man either, will never straught him — dead deal will never be laid on his back; make you your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure hand.”
“Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground, then, Ailsie Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the ball, as his forbears hae dune before him, mony ane o’ them?”
“Ask nae mair questions about it — he’ll no be graced sae far,” replied the sage.
“I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay — but wha tell’d ye this?”
“Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie,” answered the sibyl; “I hae it frae a hand sure enough.”
“But ye said ye never saw the foul thief,” reiterated her inquisitive companion.
“I hae it frae as sure a hand,” said Ailsie, “and frae them that spaed his fortune before the sark gaed ower his head.”
“Hark! I hear his horse’s feet riding off,” said the other; “they dinna sound as if good luck was wi’ them.”
“Make haste, sirs,” cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, “and let us do what is needfu’, and say what is fitting; for, if the dead corpse binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that will fear the best o’ us.”
Observe the art of the phrase “frae a sure hand”; observe the cumulative impression of the broken dialogue with its ghoulish details; observe, above all, the tremendous effect of the sound of the horse’s feet breaking in. It is a scene which for unearthly tension is not far behind the knocking at the door in Macbeth.
[Ivanhoe]
In Ivanhoe Scott opened a new lode in the mine of his fancy, a vein of poorer but most marketable ore. He had read widely in the mediæval chroniclers, and had in his head a mass of more or less accurate antiquarian knowledge, of arms, heraldry, monastic institutions, and the dress a
nd habits of the Middle Ages. He chose the reign of Richard I as his period, and tumbled into it a collection of other things which had caught his fancy. To the forests of the English midlands he would fit the appropriate romance, and do for them what he had already done for the Highlands and the Border of his own land. He got the sounding name of Ivanhoe from an old Buckinghamshire rhyme, and Front-de-Boeuf from the Auchinleck MSS., and he had Chaucer and Froissart and the ballads and a wealth of legendary lore to draw upon. He was writing fiction, not history, so his conscience was elastic. Freeman and others have pointed out the historical errors of the book. The customs of three centuries have been confused; Robin Hood, if he ever lived, belonged to a century later; Cedric and Athelstane are impossible figures for that time, and Edward the Confessor left no descendants; Ulrica is some hundreds of years out of date and her gods were never known to any Saxon pantheon. But such things matter little in romance, which is a revolt against the despotism of facts.
The real blemish is that this romance is concerned only with externals. Scott was not depicting a life in whose soul he shared, as he could share in the ancient world of the Border ballads, or imaginatively construct for himself the confusion of the Scottish seventeenth century. Mediæval England was to him primarily a costume play. He was not like William Morris who, through some kink or fold of Time, became himself of the Middle Ages, acquiring their languor, their uniformity, even their endless prolixity. Nor could Scott, like Stendhal, think himself consciously into the mediæval mind. The scene he shapes is wholly literary, a mosaic of details put together by a learned craftsman, not the subtler creation of the spirit. We never find ourselves, as in the greater novels, “lone sitting by the shores of old romance,” but in a bright, bustling world, very modern except for the odd clothes and the quaint turns of speech. There is nothing of the peculiar mediæval charm and aroma. It is a tale of forests, but only of their green highways; we are not disquieted by any strange rustlings in the thicket.
What Scott has given us is a pageant so far-flung and glittering that, in spite of its artificiality, it captivates the fancy. There are no fewer than one hundred and fifty-three clearly individualized characters at some time or another on the stage. With generous profusion he piles excitement upon excitement, weaving, like his favourite Ariosto, many different narratives into one pattern, and managing it all with such skill that there are no gaps in the web. It is a success — though on a far greater scale — of the same type as Byron’s metrical romances. Improbabilities, impossibilities, coincidences are accepted because the reader’s mind is beguiled out of scepticism. The scene is so novel, the figures so vivid that we bow to the convention and forbear to doubt.
The artificiality being admitted, the plot is excellently managed. With two such figures as Ivanhoe and Richard at large, and with the woods full of Locksley’s merry men, he can put his characters into the direst straits and leave us assured that at the blast of a bugle they will be rescued. One stirring episode follows another: — the feast in Cedric’s hall; the fanfaronade of the Ashby tournament, with its sonorous heraldry; the revels of the Black Knight and Friar Tuck in the hermit’s cell; the siege of Torquilstone with its many episodes: the death of Front-de-Boeuf; Rebecca’s trial before the court of the Templars; Richard’s disclosure of himself to Locksley; Ivanhoe’s last contest with Bois-Guilbert; the arrest of Albert de Malvoisin; Rebecca’s farewell to Rowena. The speed and spirit of the narrative stifle criticism, and on two occasions only is the reader inclined to question. One is when Athelstane is surprisingly raised from the dead, a portent introduced to satisfy James Ballantyne. The other is Bois-Guilbert’s end, “a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.” The fact that something of the kind had once happened in the Edinburgh law-courts does not make this climax artistically more convincing.
[A romance for youth]
The characters, within their artificial sphere, are carefully drawn. Gurth and Wamba do not live like Andrew Fairservice and Caleb Balderstone, or Cedric like the Baron of Bradwardine, or Ulrica like Meg Merrilies. There is none of the familiar humour — save in the mention of a Norman called Jacques Fitzdotterel of whom we would gladly have heard more — for Wamba’s jests are for the most part clowning out of the old playbooks. But all the figures are real when they are in action, for the action is most concretely imagined, and all are held true to their conventional types — Isaac of York, Richard, Prince John, Ivanhoe, Locksley, Cedric, even the ponderous Athelstane. Moreover, Scott hit upon the right kind of speech for his people, always colourful and dignified, not too archaic to be difficult or too modern to break the illusion. But only two of his characters seem to me to have an independent life outside their parts in the tale. One is Friar Tuck, who has the jolly freedom of the woods in him. The other is Rebecca, in whom, as in Di Vernon, Scott revived his old dream of romantic maidenhood. He pairs off his hero according to his custom with the more marriageable heroine, but he leaves Ivanhoe, as he had been left himself, with long memories of Green Mantle. Thackeray’s skit, Rebecca and Rowena, is amply justified.
It is hard for us to-day to recapture the atmosphere in which Ivanhoe won its resounding success. To us the “halidoms” and “gramercys” are so much idle “tushery,” but then they were fresh and captivating. The world of the book has become too familiar to us from many repetitions. If we would understand what Scott’s age thought of it, we must cast back our memories to boyhood and recall how avidly we followed the fortunes of the Disinherited Knight and how anxiously we listened for Locksley’s horn. That was the mood in which Dumas read it, and became in that hour an historical novelist—”Oh! then, little by little the clouds that had veiled my sight began to lift, and I saw open before me ampler horizons.” It is secure in the immortality which follows upon the love of recurrent generations of youth. But it is work on a lower plane than the great novels that preceded it, for only once in it does Scott seem to me to rise to the rarer and truer romance, and set the bells of Elfland ringing. That is when, at Ashby, Locksley shoots at the butts, and craves permission “to plant such a mark as is used in the North Country.”
CHAPTER VIII. — EDINBURGH AND ABBOTSFORD (1820)
I
At the opening of the year 1820 Scott had recovered much of his bodily vigour. Ivanhoe, just published, promised to be the most popular of all his works, and the success of this extra-territorial adventure opened to his pen the whole realm of recorded history. In February his elder daughter Sophia became engaged to Lockhart, and her marriage took place in Edinburgh on the evening of 29th April. In March Scott visited London, when he sat to Sir Thomas Lawrence for his portrait, commissioned by the King for the great gallery at Windsor, and to Chantrey for the famous bust. His baronetcy was gazetted on 30th March and he returned home full of grandiose plans for enlarging and beautifying Abbotsford. In May he was offered a doctor’s degree by both Oxford and Cambridge. Meantime, in March, The Monastery, which he had begun before Ivanhoe was finished, had been published by Longman and Constable, and had been coldly received; but Scott during the summer was busy with its successor The Abbot, which pleased him better and which duly appeared in September. In it he drew a picture of Mary of Scots, and he had promised Constable a companion picture of Elizabeth in his next novel, for which Constable suggested the title of “Kenilworth.” The relations between publisher and author were for the moment harmonious, for now that Scott had embarked upon the broad seas of historical fiction the former’s bibliographical learning became of the utmost service; suggestions were freely offered and gratefully received, and Constable in his high moods used to strut about the room and claim that he was all but the author of the novels. Things were prosperous with the new baronet. Young Walter was doing well in his regiment, Charles was preparing for Oxford, Sophia was happily married; he had plans for a more spacious Abbotsford which filled him with delight, for this kind of creation fascinated him as much as any other; he had no pressing financial troubles, and he saw years ahead of substan
tial earnings from the new lode of which Ivanhoe had been the first sample. Above all he had got his health back and could enjoy life again.
Scott, like Dr Johnson and unlike most men of letters, does not live for us only in his books. We think of him as we think of famous men of action — as a living and breathing human being and not a dim shade from a library. Fortunately we have ample material for his life, apart from its reflection in his writings. A hundred contemporaries besides Lockhart have recorded their impressions, and from such evidence we can make a picture of his full and varied days.
II
[Edinburgh in 1820]
Edinburgh in 1820 had grown into a modern city, but had not yet lost the amenities of the country burgh. Up on its back-bone of hill the Old Town was fast changing, but much still remained from the Middle Ages. Those “black banditti” the City Guard, with their red coats and Lochaber axes, had disappeared three years before and had been replaced by ordinary police; water was being brought in pipes from the neighbouring hills, and the water-caddies, bent double under their barrels, were no longer seen; there was a perpetual tinkering going on around Parliament Close, and the Krames, the toy-sellers’ booths planted like wasps’ nests on the north side of St Giles’, were no more the delight of childhood; but the narrow wynds and the tall houses remained, and the old Canongate gardens, and the elms which lined the ridge above what was once the Nor’ Loch. The Edinburgh of that day was a leafy place, for all Leith Walk and the Calton slopes and Lauriston were set with trees. In the New Town classic squares still abutted on meadows. Lord Moray’s lands, north of Charlotte Square, were ancient pasture dropping down to the thickets along the Water of Leith. The citizen on his evening walk could look north to the Firth and the Highland hills over meadows as rustic as Tweeddale. “How can I forget,” Lord Cockburn cries, “the glory of that scene on a still night in which, with Rutherfurd and Richardson and Jeffrey, I have stood in Queen Street, or the opening at the north-west corner of Charlotte Square, and listened to the ceaseless rural corn-craiks, nestling happily in the dewy grass!” And the west wind still brought from the Pentlands the scent of moorburn in March and of heather in August.