by John Buchan
Maria Edgeworth made a wise comment on the Abbotsford régime. “Dean Swift said he had written his books in order that people might learn to treat him like a great lord. Sir Walter Scott writes his that he may be able to treat his people as a great lord ought to do.” There lay the kernel of Scott’s purpose, the heart of his dream. He realized his romance far less in the pepper-box turrets of Abbotsford and the plaster copies of the Melrose gargoyles than in his re-creation of a fragment of what seemed to him an older and happier world. He was living in his ancestral countryside as a little king, with all the felicities and some of the burdens of kingship. It rejoiced him to be the tap-root from which a modest covert drew the sap. He had restored, though only in a corner, the liberal and kindly customs of more spacious days, mellowed, indeed, and civilized, but preserving intact their freedom and manliness and courtesy. If the dream was baseless it was assuredly not ignoble.
CHAPTER IX. — HIGH NOON (1820-1825)
The Abbot, published in the early autumn of 1820, retrieved much of the popularity which The Monastery had lost. It marked the beginning of a quinquennium which may be regarded as the high noon-tide of Scott’s life. His greatest work was behind him, but he had now trained himself to the craft of the historical novelist, who can take any period of history and in some measure shape it for his readers. He had become a figure of national importance, not only a kind of consul-general for the republic of letters, but a man whose advice and help were sought on the most diverse public affairs. He was completing Abbotsford in the grand manner, and paying for it by overdrafts on his future labours, and, while it was growing into a Gothick fantasy, he was entertaining there a large part of the rank and intelligence of Britain. It was for Scott a time of ceaseless industry and of much varied enjoyment, enjoyment not only of the exercise of creative power but of its material rewards. His body had recovered a moderate vigour, and freedom from pain released his old sunshine of spirit. I do not think that there is a parallel in the whole history of letters to the position which Scott filled among his countrymen in the years between 1820 and 1825.
In Edinburgh he had become even more than Jeffrey the leader of cultivated society. Pitt dinners, meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh of which he was now President, the feasts of a certain Highland Club (where he seems to have worn the tartan and had John of Skye in his tail) filled his evenings. In the beginning of 1821 after the publication of Kenilworth, he went to London on Court of Session business, arranged for his eldest son’s transfer from the 18th to the 15th Hussars, and had much to do with the establishment of the Royal Society of Literature. On the 16th of June, when Scott was busy on The Pirate, John Ballantyne died. He had amused himself in his last year by turning some old houses at Kelso into a fishing lodge which he called Walton Hall, and in starting a Novelists’ Library, unpleasing books in double columns for which Scott wrote a number of lives. He died with the proof-sheets beside his pillow, full to the last of new schemes, and, unaware of the hopeless insolvency of his affairs, he bequeathed £2000 for the fitting up of the new library at Abbotsford. When Scott stood beside his grave in the Canongate churchyard, the cloudy sky suddenly cleared; he turned to Lockhart and whispered: “I feel as if there would be less sunshine for me from this day forth.” It was a fitting epithet for Rigdumfunnidos. He had gravely embarrassed the life of his friend, but he had brightened it with his jollity and affection.
[The coronation]
In July Scott went to London for the coronation of George IV. He proposed to take James Hogg with him as a special reporter for the Scottish public, but Hogg refused to absent himself from St Boswell’s Fair. Scott wrote a vivid account of the ceremony in the Abbey for James Ballantyne’s paper, since an historic pageant was meat and drink to him, and he had a tribute paid to his fame which gave him the sincerest pleasure.
Missing his carriage, he had to return home on foot from Westminster after the banquet — that is to say, between two and three o’clock in the morning — when he and a young gentleman, his companion, found themselves locked in the crowd, somewhere near Whitehall, and the bustle and tumult were such that his friend was afraid some accident might happen to the lame limb. A space for the dignitaries was kept clear at that point by the Scots Greys. Sir Walter addressed a Serjeant of this celebrated regiment, begging to be allowed to pass by him into the open ground in the middle of the street. The man answered shortly that his orders were strict — that the thing was impossible. While he was endeavouring to persuade the Serjeant to relent, some new wave of turbulence approached from behind, and his young companion exclaimed in a loud voice, “Take care, Sir Walter Scott, take care!” The stalwart dragoon, on hearing the name, said, “What! Sir Walter Scott? He shall get through anyhow!” He then addressed the soldiers near him. “Make room, men, for Sir Walter Scott, our illustrious countryman!” The men answered “Sir Walter Scott! God bless him!” — and he was in a moment within the guarded line of safety.
That autumn was a pleasant season. Scott brought back from London the plans for the completion of Abbotsford. The jasmine-covered porch of the old cottage had to go at last, and the main part of the present dwelling was begun — the new library and drawing-room, the courtyard and the lattice screen of stone between the house and the gardens. Sophia’s first child had been born in the early spring, John Hugh, the “Hugh Little John” of the Tales of a Grandfather, and in the autumn the Lockharts took up their country quarters at the little cottage of Chiefswood, beside the burn which flows from the Rhymer’s Glen. There Scott could escape from his visitors, and, while Lockhart was correcting the proofs of his Valerius, he would be busy on The Pirate in an upstairs dressing-room, from which he would descend to labour in the tiny garden and train on the walls the creepers he had brought from Abbotsford. He was amusing himself with a pastiche in the shape of imaginary letters of the seventeenth century, an enterprise out of which grew The Fortunes of Nigel, and before he returned to Edinburgh for the session he had contracted to sell to Constable the copyright of his last four novels for £5000. That meant that by these works, which had taken little more than a year to write, he had already earned £15,000. As he watched the masons beginning on the Abbotsford extension, and the whole place, as he said, “like a cried fair,” he may have reflected with satisfaction that the money would easily be forthcoming for the bills.
[1820-21]
The three novels of the sixteenth century group themselves naturally together, for their inspiration is of a different kind from that of the earlier masterpieces. They are based in the main on book-work, on Scott’s wide miscellaneous reading. He is less concerned with the human drama than with the pageantry of the times and with the intricacies of court politics of which he had an instinctive understanding. With none of his characters do we feel that his affections are very seriously engaged, nor, as in Old Mortality, is the public conflict one in which he has a strong emotional interest. Consequently the merit of the books is to be found mainly in their craft, their conscious handiwork. At their best they are sound pieces of historical reconstruction; at their worst they fall into melodramatic artifice, and what Professor Elton has called “a kind of Elizabethan comic bluster and hard animal spirits.” As novels judged from the higher standpoint they are notably inferior to his best, for they rarely go deeper than the externals of life. He is on unfamiliar ground, dealing with things of which he has not secure possession, since they have not become part of his blood and brain.
[The Monastery]
Yet in the weakest of the three, The Monastery, he is in his own countryside, describing a landscape which he could see from Abbotsford and people whose descendants were his neighbours. His purpose was to show the crumbling of the old Church at the Reformation and the downfall of a great religious house; he had also a notion of bringing in the heart of Bruce, which was buried at Melrose, but forgot his intention and had to make it the heart of the last abbot. But the subject was not fortunately chosen. In the first place there was no dramatic cataclysm in
the Lowlands, since the old Church was dead long before it fell. The true drama came later when the people discovered the burdens of the new religion. The early Reformation in Scotland was too easy a business for tragedy. In the second place Scott had little understanding of Catholicism. This man, for whom when he was dying John Henry Newman besought the prayers of the faithful, cherished a blunt Protestantism, to which he was never weary of testifying. He can describe vividly the secular aspects of Melrose, its routine, its polity and its humours, but, since he had no insight into its secret things, the mystic brotherhood of an ordered community set in the heart of darkness, he cannot move us by his tale of its fall. Boniface, Eustace, and even Edward Glendinning are only embodied humours and virtues. Scott understood perfectly the surface logic of the quarrel between the Church and the Reformers, and can state it with scrupulous fairness, but his heart was with neither side, and the preacher, Henry Warden, is as much a lay figure as the monks.
The story begins with a happy preface. Captain Clutterbuck, the Scots Fusilier, is for once entertaining, the portrait of the landlord of the George is excellent, and so is the introduction of the Benedictine—”a virtuoso, a clean virtuoso — a sad-coloured stand of claithes, and a wig like the curled back of a mug-ewe.” But the tale belies the promise of the beginning. The plot is limping and confused, and the whole business of the lost Bible is clumsily conceived, as is that of Sir Piercie Shafton and the bodkin. The Euphuist, indeed, I do not find as tedious as most critics have found him, and a vast deal of curious learning has gone to the making of his absurdities, but nevertheless he has no business in the tale. For the White Lady of Avenel there can be no defence. She is neither credible nor awesome, her orations in indifferent verse are tedious, and repeatedly she carries the tale into the realm, not of fantasy, but of farce. Scott perversely turns a romance of deeds into a kind of parody of Comus. The conclusion, when Halbert Glendinning finds fortune and Julian Avenel gets his deserts, is hurried and unconvincing.
Yet there are many things in the book which it is hard to forget, for if Scott failed grievously in his main purpose he could not avoid incidental felicities. Nothing could be better than the spectacle of Moray’s army as seen by Halbert and the pedlar advancing on the Glasgow road. The household in the tower of Glendinning is vividly presented, and any peasant that shows his or her face is a foursquare being whose talk is a delight. Tibb and old Martin, the Miller and his daughter, have a vitality foreign to the churchmen and the gentlefolk; Dame Glendinning is the homely Scots matron, whose good sense rarely fails her; the Border pricker, Christie of the Clint-hill, is true both to nature and to history, and Halbert is the eternal boy, more real in his youth than in his successful maturity.
I hate the monks, with their drawling nasal tones like so many frogs, and their long black petticoats like so many women, and their reverences, and their lordships, and their lazy vassals that do nothing but paddle in the mire with plough and harrow from Yule to Michaelmas. I will call none lord but him who wears a sword to make his title good; and I will call none man but he that bears himself manlike and masterful.
In that confession we have the spirit that was the efficient cause of the Reformation.
[The Abbot]
The Abbot, the sequel to The Monastery, begins dolefully with lengthy speeches, an intolerable boy, and a religious maniac. It is not till the eleventh chapter that Catherine Seyton’s sudden laughter wakes the reader to attention. Thereafter the story marches strongly with scarcely a halt, and with but one incongruity — the impossible figure of Catherine’s brother. Scott had that romantic devotion to Mary of Scots which few of his countrymen can escape, but he was wise enough not to make her his heroine or to base his plot on a main incident in her life, like Darnley’s murder. She enters from the wings, as an accessory in the love story of Catherine and Roland Graeme. The book is full of brilliant pictures: the election of the last Melrose abbot and the irruption upon the solemnities of the Abbot of Unreason — a scene not without its tragic irony; the pageant of Marian Edinburgh and Roland’s visit to the mansion of the Seytons; the weary days at Lochleven, and the escape, the only defect in the plot is that it has no adequate conclusion, for the Queen has become so much the dominant figure that it is to her fortunes rather than to those of Roland that the reader’s interest is pledged. Langside, which is not one of Scott’s best battle pieces, is clearly not the end; that lay years ahead in the intrigues and dolours of an English prison. But it may fairly be said that the book fulfils the most exacting standards of historical romance. It is perhaps a little too full of antiquarian pedantries, which sometimes check the flow of narration; but it atones for them by many acute glimpses into the contemporary mind. Take the scene between the Reforming Lords and the Queen in Chapter XXII, when Ruthven sets out a bitter indictment of Mary, and old Lindesay subscribes to it with a generous hesitation. “Lady,” he said, “thou art a noble creature, even though thou hast abused God’s choicest gifts. I pay that devotion to thy manliness of spirit, which I would not have paid to the power thou hast undeservedly wielded — I kneel to Mary Stuart, not to the Queen.” And later he tells Ruthven, “I would I had as deep cause to be this lady’s friend as I have to be her enemy — thou shouldst see if I spared life and limb in her quarrel.”
Of the main characters the women excel the men. Roland is drawn on conventional lines, Moray and Morton are only sketches, and the rough-handed Lords of the Congregation make too brief appearances. Some of the lesser figures, like the quack doctor Luke Lundin and the anabaptist Jasper Dryfesdale, have a fantastic life of their own, and the English falconer Adam Woodcock is one of Scott’s incomparable serving-men. Adam, indeed, is something more, for he is the embodiment of English good sense and good nature in contrast to the dark enthusiasms of the North. His robust philosophy makes a cool oasis in a feverish world, and it is he who puts most eloquently the pathos of the Queen’s downfall: —
They may say what they will, many a true heart will be sad for Mary Stewart, e’en if all be true men say of her; for look you, Master Roland, she was the loveliest creature to look upon that ever I saw with eye, and no lady in the land liked better the fair flight of a falcon. I was at the great match on Roslin Moor betwixt Bothwell — he was a black sight to her that Bothwell — and the Baron of Roslin, who could judge a hawk’s flight as well as any man in Scotland. A butt of Rhenish and a ring of gold was the wager, and it was flown as fairly for as ever was red gold and bright wine. And to see her there on her white palfrey, that flew as if it scorned to touch more than the heather blossom; and to hear her voice, as clear and sweet as the mavis’s whistle, mix among our jolly whooping and whistling; and to mark all the nobles dashing round her — happiest he who got a word or a look — tearing through moss and hagg, and venturing neck and limb to gain the praise of a bold rider, and the blink of the bonny Queen’s bright eye! — She will see little hawking where she lies now. Ay, ay, pomp and pleasure pass away as speedily as the wap of a falcon’s wing!
[Mary of Scots]
Among the women Mary is the chief, though Lady Lochleven is not far behind. Catherine Seyton is of the school of Di Vernon but more hoydenish and artificial, while Magdalen Graeme is not the most successful of Scott’s sibyls, a Romish Mause Headrigg without Mause’s humour. Mary is the best of Scott’s pictures of famous women in history, for we are made to realize her compelling power — not only her beauty of person and grace of manner, but her brain and her flawless courage. We are assured that nothing in heaven or earth could make her afraid, and this assurance is increased by her sudden storm of nerves when she cries for Bothwell.
Bid him come hither to our aid, and bring with them his Lambs as he calls them — Bowton, Hay of Talla, Black Ormiston, and his kinsman Hob. Fie! how swart they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! Closeted with Morton? Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the complot together, the bird, when it breaks the shell, will scare Scotland.
She is a queen in dignity and fortitude
, and something more than a queen in brains. It is this last which is Scott’s real triumph. In the wit of her talk, in her subtle baiting of Lady Lochleven, he has portrayed a brilliant allure of both mind and body.
[Kenilworth]
The third novel, Kenilworth seems to me to be Scott’s masterpiece in sheer craftmanship as distinct from inspiration. He wrote it at Constable’s request, wisely, however, declining the publisher’s suggestion to make the Armada the central incident, for he realized the necessity of the historical romancer keeping off the main roads. To the making of it he brought an immense stock of miscellaneous lore, acquired from ballads, chapbooks, chronicles, and especially from the Elizabethan plays. His learning was more voluminous than exact, and he took bold liberties with history. He makes Dudley’s marriage to Amy a secret one, whereas it had been publicly celebrated in the reign of Edward VI; he postdates her death by many years so that he may compass a meeting between her and Elizabeth at Kenilworth; he traduces, contrary to the evidence, both Varney and Tony Foster. There are many minor inaccuracies; Kenilworth, for example, did not belong to Leicester in Amy’s lifetime, and Shakespeare is made a familiar name at Court at a time when he was a small boy in Stratford. Such anachronisms matter nothing, and Scott handles his material with freedom and skill. The plot is one of his most intricate, but there are no gaps in it. He rarely wrote narrative which was better knit.