by John Buchan
Public business, too, engrossed much of his time, and the development of new inventions which appealed to his practical mind. He became chairman of a company to manufacture oil gas and introduced the contrivance at Abbotsford, where it turned out to be far more expensive than candles, and had a bad effect on his health. “Any foreign student of statistics who should have happened to peruse the files of an Edinburgh newspaper for the period to which I allude, would, I think, have concluded that there were at least two Sir Walter Scotts in the place — one the miraculously fertile author whose works occupied two-thirds of its literary advertisements and critical columns — another some retired magistrate or senator of easy fortune and indefatigable philanthropy, who devoted the rather oppressive leisure of an honoured old age to the promotion of patriotic ameliorations, the watchful guardianship of charities, and the ardent patronage of educational institutions.”
In April he had news of the death in Canada of his brother Thomas, the last of the old family circle. Miss Edgeworth came to Scotland that summer and spent a fortnight at Abbotsford—”a very nice lioness,” Scott wrote to Terry, “full of fun and spirits, a little slight figure, very active in her motions, very good-humoured, and full of enthusiasm.” Meantime, in June, Quentin Durward had appeared, and at first had been coldly received, till the rapturous appreciation of Paris made the home public reconsider its verdict. Hitherto Scott had had little vogue on the Continent, except in Germany, but now his reputation spread like wild-fire, and began to threaten the pre-eminence of Byron. Constable, who had been growing nervous about the future of that popularity in which he had invested so heavily, was more than comforted, and Scott was encouraged to gamble a little with his reputation. One summer morning, while he rode with Lockhart and Laidlaw on the Eildons, he spoke of laying the scene of his next tale in Germany. Laidlaw dissented; “No, no, sir — take my word for it, you are always best, like Helen MacGregor, when your foot is on your native heath; and I have often thought that if you were to write a novel, and lay the scene here in the very year you were writing it, you would exceed yourself.” Scott liked the notion; he had not since The Antiquary written of contemporary Scotland, and he had a grim story in his mind which he had come across in the course of his duties as Sheriff; there was the comedy, too, of a land advancing in wealth and modishness at which he might try his hand. So during the autumn and early winter, while he was entertaining Adolphus and inspecting with Lockhart the young plantations of the Clydesdale lairds, and supervising the decoration of the new Abbotsford, he was hard at work upon St Ronan’s Well.
The book was a bold experiment. The high manner of romance was laid aside and Scott made himself the chronicler of the small beer of a provincial watering-place and a gentle satirist of the follies of fashion. Yet the scene was laid in his own countryside, and he had as a background the idiosyncrasies of his own people. The English public was a little perplexed, but Scottish readers recognized the pungent truth of the atmosphere of a Tweedside burgh and of many of the portraits. Unhappily the drama upon which the vitality of the book depended, the tragedy of Clara Mowbray, was fatally weakened by the prudishness of James Ballantyne, who protested that, while a mock marriage might be permitted, the seduction of a well-born girl would be resented. Scott had received from Laidlaw the inspiration of the tale, and he now accepted docilely Ballantyne’s remonstrance, and altered the crucial passage. James was a valued proof-reader and a sound counsellor on minor matters, but we may well regret that in this case Scott did not treat his advice as he was to treat it three years later.
I had a letter from Jem Ballantyne — plague on him! — full of remonstrances, deep and solemn, upon the carelessness of ‘Bonaparte.’ The rogue is right, too. But as to correcting my style to the ‘Jemmy jemmy linkum feedle’ tune of what is called fine writing, I’ll be damned if I do.
[Peveril of the Peak]
Peveril in truth “smells of the apoplexy.” It was written while Scott was much cumbered with the arrangements for the visit of George IV, saddened by Erskine’s death, and depressed by the premonition of a new disease. He chose a period of history in which he was not perfectly at home, and had to lean upon hastily-read documents. He was very conscious of the book’s imperfections, and in the preparatory letter thought it right to apologize for other defects besides anachronisms. The opening is laboured and the narrative drags, the ravelled skein of the plot is never properly wound up, and the ending is huddled; the fatigue of its composition is reflected in the style, which sinks often to abysses of verbiage. He handicapped himself unduly in making the action stretch over a period of twenty years, thereby condemning himself to longueurs. There is no craftsmanship in the story as a whole, and the good things are like comfortable inns scattered at long intervals through an unfeatured country.
The book is nearly half done before the action quickens with young Peveril’s journey from the Isle of Man to London. Once on the road we are for a little in the old atmosphere of romance. The scene at the inn where Edward Christian and Chiffinch first appear, the storming of Martindale, Sir Geoffrey’s farewell to his son—”God bless thee, my boy, and keep thee true to Church and King, whatever wind brings foul weather” — the attack on Moultrassie Hall, are episodes well conceived and vigorously told. So are many of the London scenes, such as the discussion between Buckingham and Jerningham, and especially the former’s interview with Christian. But the pictures of the Court lack the verisimilitude of those in Nigel, and Scott never succeeds in reproducing the hideousness of the Popish Plot and of those responsible for it. All the later chapters are heavy, uninspired labour against the collar. The characters have the same patchiness. Lady Derby, till the moment when she confronts Charles at Whitehall, is only a sounding name. Sir Geoffrey and Bridgenorth are creditable pieces of book-work, conventional portraits of Cavalier and Puritan, but the King is the least successful of Scott’s royal personages. He is happier when he gets into humble life, for Mrs Deborah and Lance and the jailers have a vitality denied to their betters. There are some skilful essays in historical reconstruction — in Buckingham, Christian, Chiffinch and Colonel Blood — and the dwarf, Sir Geoffrey Hudson, is done with humour and insight. Fenella, upon whom the plot hinges, is the most glaring failure. Scott avowedly borrowed her from Mignon in Wilhelm Meister and marred her grievously in the borrowing, for she is grotesque but not impressive.
The tale lacks verve and speed as it lacks glamour, for throughout the imaginative impulse flags. Yet there are many passages on statecraft and the condition of the country which show Scott’s masculine understanding at its best. Take one of Dumas’ masterpieces; compared with its light and colour Peveril is like a muddy lagoon contrasted with a mountain stream; but there is never in Dumas that background of broad and sane intelligence, that lively interest in how life was conducted in past ages, that insight into the social environment, which redeem Scott’s failures. The latter’s characters may stumble dully through their parts, but their platform is a real world, while Dumas’ figures dazzle and delight, but they move on a wooden stage amid painted scenery. Byron, said Goethe, is “great only as a creative poet; as soon as he reflects, he is a child.” It is Scott’s reflective power which atones sometimes, as in Peveril, for his defects in creation.
He was in the habit of consoling himself for a failure by an immediate attempt at something new. “If it isna well bobbit, we’ll bob it again” was a phrase often on his lips. There is no more remarkable proof of Scott’s mental resilience than that, after the dreary toil of Peveril, he could produce a thing so vital and glancing as Quentin Durward. The fifteenth century, when chivalry and the feudal system were beginning to break down, had always been with him a favourite epoch. He did not know very much about France, but he had an intuitive sense of its atmosphere and décor, as witness the passage in the introduction about the terrace of the Château of Sully, and France accepted the book as true to the spirit of her history. Not to the letter, perhaps, for there are many anachronisms, in a
ddition to those which he acknowledged. Louis refers to Nostradamus, who was not born till twenty years after his death, and he has an amazing metaphor drawn from fly-fishing for salmon, a sport of which fifteenth-century France never dreamed.
[Quentin Durward]
Pedantic criticism would be absurd, for the book is a fairy tale, with all the merits of those airy legends which the folk-mind of Europe invented to give colour to drab lives. Crèvecoeur is right when he tells Quentin that he has had “a happy journey through Fairy-land — all full of heroic adventure, and high hope, and wild minstrel-like delusion, like the garden of Morgaine la Fée.” Quentin, from the Glen of the Midges, is the eternal younger son who goes out to seek his fortune, as Louis is the treacherous step-mother. There are plenty of ogres and giants on the road — the Boar of the Ardennes, Tristan L’Hermite and Trois-Eschelles and Petit-André; there are good companions like Le Balafré and Dunois; the Bohemians are the malicious elves and Galeotti the warlock; the Lady Isabelle is the conventional fairy-tale princess; when Quentin, during the sack of Liège, leaves his pursuit of de la Marck to save Gertrude, he is behaving exactly as the fairy-tale hero behaves when he gives his cake to the old woman by the wayside; and Crèvecoeur’s final comment is in the right tradition: “Fortune has declared herself on his side too plainly for me to struggle further with her humoursome ladyship — but it is strange, from lord to horse-boy, how wonderfully these Scots stick by each other.” Nor is there wanting the douche of cold sense, to which the fairy tale is partial: —
“My lord of Crèvecoeur,” said Quentin, “my family — —”
“Nay, it was not utterly of family that I spoke,” said the Count, “but of rank, fortune, high station, and so forth, which place a distance between various classes of persons. As for birth, all men are descended from Adam and Eve.”
“My Lord Count,” repeated Quentin, “my ancestors, the Durwards of Glen-houlakin — —”
“Nay,” said the Count, “if you claim a farther descent for them than from Adam, I have done! Good even to you.”
Quentin Durward is Scott’s main achievement in the vein in which Dumas excelled, and is therefore sure of its market with youth. It is a better performance, I think, than Ivanhoe, for it swings to its triumphant close without a single hitch or extravagance. The opening is provocative, and once inside the man-traps and snares of Plessis-les-Tours the expectation is keyed high. Nor is the expectation disappointed, for one masterly scene follows another — the reception of the Burgundian envoy, Quentin’s vigil in the castle gallery, the frustrated ambuscade by the Maes, the death of the Bishop, Quentin’s outfacing of de la Marck, Louis at Peronne, the midnight interview between the necromancer and the King, the assault on Liège, the whole chain of breathless vicissitudes till the Wild Boar’s grisly head dangles from Le Balafré’s gauntlet. It is all Dumas at his highest, but Dumas with an undercurrent of sound historical reflection. Quentin himself is the best of Scott’s young heroes, because he is content to make him only young, chivalrous and heroic, and over-weights him with no moralities. With the Archers of the Guard he was of course on his own ground, and Le Balafré is own brother to Dugald Dalgetty and Corporal Raddlebanes and all the clan of stout men-at-arms. As for the others, they live by their deeds and at the worst are real enough for a fairy-tale. The dominant figure is the King, who like a great spider spins webs which entangle half a continent. We need not ask if Scott has given us the true Louis XI; modern research has found more light and less shadow in that strange career; but at any rate he has given us a being in whom we must needs believe, one who must rank with King James in Nigel as the most careful and subtle of his portraits of the great. We accept Louis’ treachery and superstition as we accept his iron courage, and so masterful is his vitality that we forget his crooked morals in admiration of his power.
IV
The year 1824 produced only one novel, Redgauntlet, which was published in June and indifferently received; Scott had taken to heart the warning against “over-cropping.” He was at work on a new edition of his Swift and on two tales of the Crusades, a subject which he had long had in mind. For the rest he was very busy with household concerns. His plantations were sufficiently advanced to need thinning and he and Tom Purdie made the woods ring. Tom had no liking for the American axe with which his master had been presented by an admirer, and which he declared was only fit to pare cheese. In the autumn the Abbotsford fabric was at last completed, and all that summer Scott’s mind was buried in upholstery. Terry in London was his chief correspondent, and from him came cabinets, tapestries, furniture, pictures, and cheap lots of caricatures to paper the lavatories. Gifts, too, flowed to the new house from all over the land, every kind of “gabion,” including a chair made from the beams of the house at Robroyston where Wallace was betrayed, a hundred volumes of the classics from the faithful Constable, and a set of Montfaucon in scarlet morocco from the King. One last addition had a melancholy interest — a “louping-on stone” on which was carved the recumbent figure of the dog Maida, whose long life ended in October, and which bore an inscription by Scott in doubtful Latinity.
[1824-25]
That autumn his second son Charles was entered at Brasenose, having given up the nomination to the East India service offered by Lord Bathurst, and Scott, with this educational venture in mind, delivered himself of his views on the training of youth at the opening of the new Edinburgh Academy. They were eminently wise. He pled for a comprehensive view of the subject which would aim at a true discipline of the mind. He urged the study of Greek, about which he had once been contemptuous. It was not information that should be sought, but education, the production not of smatterers but of scholars. “The observation of Dr Johnson was well known, that in learning Scotland resembled a besieged city, where every man had a mouthful, but no man a bellyful. It might be said in answer to this, that it was better education should be divided into mouthfuls than served up at the banquet of some favoured individual, while the great mass were left to starve. But, sturdy Scotsman as he was, he was not more attached to Scotland than to truth.”
[The Abbotsford house-warming]
Christmas saw a great house-warming at Abbotsford, to which came a clan of friends and relatives, including his brother Thomas’s widow and daughters. Basil Hall, the sailor and explorer, who was the son of a Berwickshire laird, was a guest, and has described the elaborate festivities. The party roamed the hills when the weather was fine, and at night, under the blaze of oil gas, the host read aloud from “Christabel” and the ballads, or told them stories, and Adam Ferguson sang his songs, and the New Year was ushered in with bumpers. Then came a spate in Tweed and stormy skies, which promised ill for the great ball on the 9th of January, the first and last ball which Scott saw in Abbotsford. But the weather cleared and the whole countryside flocked to the carnival; there were enough poor folk outside the door, said Dalgleish the butler, to fill a decent-sized parish kirk. The occasion was more than a house-warming. Adam Ferguson had a niece, a Miss Jobson of Lochore in Fife, a young woman with a pretty fortune and a pleasing appearance. Her father was dead and she was in the care of a somewhat difficult mother. Sir Adam desired to make a match between her and the young Walter, and Scott was not unwilling, for he liked the girl, and her dowry of £60,000 would be a useful buttress to the family which he had founded. The Jobsons were at Gattonside during the summer of 1824, and the wooing progressed happily. At Christmas the affair was settled, and at the Abbotsford ball Miss Jobson was the guest of honour, though the engagement was not formally announced.
It was the last unclouded Christmas and Hogmanay in Scott’s life, and to his guests he seemed to be in his sunniest mood. The miracle of miracles had happened, and success so far from spoiling him had made him only more modest and considerate. “He has been for many years,” Basil Hall wrote, “the object of most acute and vigilant observation, and as far as my own opportunities have gone, I must agree with the general report — namely, that on no occasion has h
e ever betrayed the smallest symptom of vanity or affectation, or insinuated a thought bordering on presumption, or even a consciousness of his own superiority in any respect whatsoever. Some of his oldest and most intimate friends assert that he has even of late years become more simple and kindly than ever; that this attention to those about him, and absence of all apparent concern about himself go on, if possible, increasing with his fame and fortune. Surely if Sir Walter Scott be not a happy man, which he seems truly to be, he deserves to be so.” ... The trumpets still rang out bravely, but the hour for the muffled drums was drawing near.
The completion of Abbotsford, his romance in stone and lime, marked the end also of Scott’s great era of creation. In his last two books he had returned to his native soil, and had not only shown the special qualities of the early novels but had given promise of new and unexpected powers, a promise which he was not fated to fulfil. No student of Scott can pass hastily over St Ronan’s Well and Redgauntlet.