by John Buchan
[The Fair Maid of Perth]
The Fair Maid of Perth shows no weakening of power; indeed it must rank high among the novels which are based on book-work rather than on personal experience and a still living tradition. The scene was Scottish, and even on what Mrs Bethune Baliol called the “wildernesses in Scottish history” the writer’s imagination worked with ease and certainty. Though he wisely did not try to make his characters speak dialect, the idiomatic northern flavour is never absent. Partly the book is the familiar mediæval picture — a court, a tournament, the smug urban life of comedy, the quarrels of citizens and nobles, a too-gallant prince, a lovely burgher maiden. But Scott had so clear an insight into the old burghal life and such a wealth of knowledge about it that he repeoples the streets of Perth with folk who are anything but stage creations. Moreover Perth was near the Highland Line, and no book that I know of shows so vividly the contrast, as well as the ties, between the compact municipal life and the savage outlands. There is no “tushery” in the tale; he describes mediæval Perth as he would have described eighteenth century Peebles.
Catherine Glover till the later chapters is too conscientiously noble, and her pacifism becomes a burden, but her instructor, Father Clement, the Lollard, is drawn with historical insight. The villains like Ramorny and Bonthron and Henbane Dwining and the moss-troopers like Devil’s Dick are satisfying rascals, and all the court figures — the foolish amiable king, Rothsay, Albany, Douglas, March — are careful studies. So are the citizens, Simon Glover, and Hal o’ the Wynd, and the luckless Oliver Proudfute. But the character on whom Scott lavished most pains, his tribute to the manes of his own unhappy brother, is Conachar the young Highland chief, who “has drunk the milk of the white doe,” and, for all his spirit, fails in the commoner kinds of courage. In his later work Scott, as we have seen, had come to a deeper understanding of the Highland temperament, and Conachar is his best portrait of a character frustrate and divided. The book abounds in memorable scenes, such as the trial by combat, the clan battle on the North Inch, and the murder of Rothsay, scenes which in mere narrative skill rank with the best in the earlier novels. But there is one episode which is proof of the new technique to which Scott was feeling his way, that ironic subtlety which he had already shown in his picture of Croftangry — the scene where Dwining the apothecary is forced to cure the child of the man whose death he had compassed.
The year 1829 opened a little ominously with a return to the Journal. Anne of Geierstein, which was finished by the end of April, was a tough job, which he came to loathe before its completion. “I muzzled on,” he wrote, “I can call it little better. The materials are excellent, but the power of using them is failing.” He took to falling asleep over his work, and turned gladly for a change to the notes and prefaces of the Opus Magnum. He was happier over his next task, a two-volume survey of Scottish history for Lardner’s Cyclopædia, for which he received £1500. His chief comfort was the huge success which promised to attend the Opus. Eight volumes were issued before the end of the year, and the monthly sales reached 35,000. Over this he had a brief difference of opinion with Cadell, who was not inclined to let James Ballantyne have all the printing. James wrote a plaintive letter to Scott reminding him of his promise when the catastrophe came—”We are three mariners escaping from a common shipwreck, and as the plank is broad enough for all, I cannot think it right to push any off from it.” Scott was as good as his word, and the printing went to the Canongate house.
[Charities]
He continued to mingle a good deal in the social life of Edinburgh. The Blairadam Club saw him at all its meetings, and in March he attended the ceremony when “the auld murderess Mons Meg” was replaced in the Castle battery — a kind of Celtic saturnalia, presided over by Cluny Macpherson, and followed in the evening by a dinner of the Highland Club. Politics occupied some of his thoughts, for he was a strong supporter of Catholic emancipation, and did his best to curb Lockhart and Southey, thereby earning unwonted praise from Sir James Mackintosh and the Whigs. He gave, as usual, most of his time to lame dogs, for he was never content with the easy way of casual doles. Here is a typical entry in the Journal: —
A poor young woman came here this morning, well dressed and well behaved, with a strong northern accent. She talked incoherently a long story of a brother and a lover both dead. I would have kept her here till I wrote to her friends, particularly to Mr Sutherland (an Aberdeen bookseller), to inform them where she is, but my daughter and her maidens were frightened, as indeed there might be room for it, and so I sent her in one of Davidson’s chaises to the Castle at Jedburgh, and wrote to Mr Shortreed to see she is humanely treated. I have written also to her brother.
That seems to me to be charity of the early Christian pattern — or of Dr Johnson’s. But this practiser of Christianity was not happy among its official exponents. He records a meeting with Edward Irving, where he was deeply impressed with the dark beauty of the face marred by the terrible squint of the eyes, but rebelled against the unction of the talk. Scott did not like those who were at ease in Zion.
As the year went on his health steadily worsened. Apart from his chronic ailments like rheumatism, indigestion and palpitation, he was subject to fits of giddiness, for which he was cupped, and to long spells of painful lethargy. Though he did not know it, these were the precursors of apoplexy. Also, though he had moments of exhilaration when Cadell brought him the figures of the sales of the Opus, and had even dreams of buying Faldonside after all, he found melancholy creeping over him. The friends of his youth and middle life were fast slipping away — Shortreed, who had been his companion in his first incursion into Liddesdale; Terry who had been his ally in the equipment of Abbotsford; Lady Jane, the mother of Williamina; Sir William Forbes, Williamina’s husband and his own most loyal friend. Neighbours and political allies, like Sir Alexander Don and the first Lord Melville, were gone, and Canning had finished his brief, bright day; Constable would puff no more along the High Street, and Lord Buchan had been gathered to those ancestors who were the pride of his life. Some of the living, too, were changed. James Ballantyne was no longer the jolly companion he had been, for he had lost his wife, retired to the country, and taken to Whiggism and piety. But the heaviest blow was the death of Tom Purdie, which befell in October. “There is a heart cold,” Scott wrote to Laidlaw, “that loved me well.” One by one the supports were falling from his house of life.
[Anne of Geierstein]
Anne of Geierstein, his only book of the year, is the last of the novels written under anything like normal conditions. It was the work, he tells us, of his scanty leisure in Edinburgh, not of quiet mornings in the country, and, no library being at hand, the history was taken from memory. This story of the epoch of Quentin Durward from the Burgundian side has never, I think, had its merits fully recognized; it has been too much used for the instruction of youth to have been considered seriously as a piece of literature. It is not one of the great novels, but it is a vigorous and competent one. The first thing to be said about it is that the history, like all Scott’s history, is excellent. The long discussion between Oxford and Charles of Burgundy gives us the substantial truth about the high politics of the age, and Scott rarely wrote better battle-pieces than the descriptions of Granson and Murten. The troubadour court, too, of old René of Provence is a piece of sound historical reconstruction. The second thing to be noted is that, deprived of books of reference, he went back, as old men will, to the influences of his youth. Anne of Geierstein is drawn from deep wells of memory. One half of it is high-coloured melodrama — Arthur and Anne facing each other across the Alpine chasm, the dungeons and the secret passages of Breisach, the black priest of St Paul, Anne’s necromantic ancestry, John Mengs’s inn, the descending bed, and the whole business of the Vehmic tribunal. This was the machinery of the Gothick romance, which had fascinated Scott in his early days, and now he returned to it with a hand practised in more delicate crafts. Also, as Lockhart notes, he recaptured from reco
llection the standpoint of youth. Arthur and Anne are among the most natural of his lovers, Annette and Sigismund and the Swiss lads among his best portraits of young men and women. There is no sadness in the book; its spirit is happy, for Scott was living over in it again his own happy springtide.
V
On the 15th of February 1830, the four years of incessant toil exacted their price. Scott returned from the Court early in the afternoon, staggered into the drawing-room, and fell fainting at Anne’s feet. For ten minutes he lost the power of speech, but in the evening, after being bled and cupped, he recovered possession of his faculties. In a day or two he was about again as if nothing had happened, though his friends noticed an odd nervous twist of the mouth and an occasional stammer. He submitted to a most drastic régime, scarcely touched wine or spirits, and gave up his evening cigar. The doctors tactfully told him that it was “from the stomach,” but he knew the symptoms of a malady which had carried off his father and elder brother, and was aware that he had shaken hands with death. “It looks woundy like palsy or apoplexy,” he wrote. “Well, be it what it will, I can stand it.”
One of the medical prescriptions he refused to accept — to slacken his habits of work. This he would not do, for madness lay the way of idleness. So in 1830 his pen covered as many sheets as in 1829. He was busy at a series of letters on demonology and witchcraft for Murray’s Family Library (an enterprise the profits of which, being outside the Trust, went to his own pocket), at further Tales of a Grandfather, dealing with French history, at notes for the Opus, and at a new novel on a Byzantine subject, not to speak of magazine articles. The Demonology is in no way to be despised, for, though the style and arrangement are sometimes confused, it is a delightful compendium of eerie tales drawn from his capacious memory, and he analyses the evidence with all his lawyer’s shrewdness. But over the others has fallen the shadow of dissolution. He was suffering now not only from disease but from decay.
[Resigns Clerkship of Court]
That year was his last as a Clerk of Court, for it was convenient both to the Government and to himself that he should resign. He was given a retiring allowance of £800, thereby losing £500 of income, but he refused (the Trust assenting) to permit the authorities to make up the loss by a pension. George IV died in June, but before his death he had tried to do honour to the retirement from official life of his old friend. Scott was nominated chairman of a commission to examine and edit the manuscript collections of the Cardinal of York, a scheme which unfortunately came to nothing, and he was offered and refused a privy councillorship. “When one is poor,” he wrote, “one ought to avoid taking rank.”
By the late autumn he was free to live all the year at Abbotsford, and was beginning to comfort himself with the thought that by 1832 his feet would be clear. In October the Trust paid a second dividend of three shillings in the pound, and, on the motion of Gibson-Craig, requested Scott to accept the library and the plenishing of Abbotsford, “as the best means the creditors have of expressing their very high sense of his most honourable conduct, and in grateful acknowledgment for the unparalleled and most successful exertions he has made, and continues to make for them.”
This was a pleasant god-speed for his retirement. But his recovered home was to give him neither health nor peace. He had virtually completed the task he had set himself, but there was not to be that quiet evening, that
old age, serene and bright
And lovely as a Lapland night,
which his strenuous life deserved. The Lockharts, who were at Chiefwood that summer, saw with pain the ebbing of his bodily strength. In the autumn there were more visitors than ever, and the labour of entertaining them taxed his powers to the uttermost. John Nicholson was now his butler, and endeavoured also to take Tom Purdie’s place, but beyond an occasional amble on Douce Davie and a slow walk in the grounds Scott was little out of doors. In November he had another slight apoplectic seizure, and found his lameness of thigh, knee and ankle sorely increased. To make matters worse he was obsessed with a morbid passion for work, and could not be persuaded to leave his desk. Lockhart and Cadell tried to induce him to be content with light tasks, such as the notes for his Opus and a catalogue of his library, but he stuck grimly to his Byzantine tale, Count Robert of Paris, which was going as ill as possible. He had chosen an arid subject and he could not give the dry bones life. Ballantyne criticized the early chapters harshly and Cadell did not conceal his disappointment. Scott was plunged in gloom, but mercifully Willie Laidlaw, who was again his secretary, liked the tale, and his simple-minded “Keep us a’!” did something to console the weary man.
There was another painful business. The news from London to Scott’s sick ears seemed to be of red ruin and the break-up of society. The Duke of Wellington ceased to be Prime Minister in November, and was succeeded by Lord Grey with a ministry pledged to reform. There was unrest everywhere in the land, and to his horror he found many of his old friends inclining to the new policy. The time had come when he felt that he must stand in the gate. He began a pamphlet on the Malachi lines, which was to be a trumpet-call to awaken the nation’s conscience. Cadell and James Ballantyne posted down to Abbotsford in dismay, for they realized that political excitement might kill Scott, and that the kind of pamphlet he proposed would gravely damage his repute. An author is often in love with his least deserving work, and though the Whig Laidlaw seems to have been impressed with the eloquence of the new Malachi, Cadell and Ballantyne criticized it so trenchantly that Scott in high dudgeon flung it into the fire. But he did not change his purpose. He was determined, while life was left to him, to fight against what old Henry Mackenzie had called “epidemic insanity.” To Lady Louisa Stuart he wrote: —
Your acquaintance with Shakespeare is intimate, and you remember why, and where, it is said
“He words me, girl, he words me.”
Our modern men of the day have done this to the country. They have devised a new phraseology to convert good into evil and evil into good, and the ass’s ears of John Bull are gulled with it as if words alone made crime or virtue. Have they a mind to excuse the tyranny of Buonaparte? Why, the Lord love you, he only squeezed into his government a grain too much of civilization. The fault of Robespierre was too active liberalism; a noble error. Thus the most blood-thirsty anarchy is glossed over by opening an account in a new name. The varnish might be easily scraped off all this trumpery.
[The reform election]
But he had not the strength for the task. Count Robert, the later chapters of which satisfied his critics no better than the earlier, was laid aside for the moment, and he began a novel about Douglas castle and the War of Independence. In April 1831 Parliament was dissolved, and the sole issue at the election was parliamentary reform. The result could not be in doubt; Scott decided that the old constitution had fallen, “thrown away like a child’s toy”; but he was resolved to strike a last blow for it. He electioneered up and down the Border, and on the 21st of March addressed a meeting at Jedburgh where he told the weavers that Lord Grey and his colleagues were like a parcel of schoolboys taking to pieces a watch which they could not put together again. He was howled down, and left the place with the words “Moriturus vos saluto.”
The use of the participle was just, for on Saturday, April 16th, he had a severe paralytic stroke. He bore it, as Dr Johnson bore the same affliction, with humility, fortitude and thankfulness. Within a fortnight he was back at work struggling with Count Robert and notes for the Opus. He would not take Cadell’s advice to keep out of politics. “They are not worth your while,” wrote that wise man; “the river is in flood at present, and no one man, not even the King himself, can stop it. Many will incite you, many will hurry you on, but the kicklers and clappers of hands will not consider that the gallant actor may hurt himself, and probably may come in for a kick from some cart nag with not a drop of breeding in his carcase.” The prophecy fell true, for the kick from the cart nag came on election day at Jedburgh. A band of weavers from H
awick paraded the streets, Scott’s carriage was stoned, and he was smuggled out of the place pursued by cries of “Burke Sir Walter.” “Much obliged to the brave lads of Jeddart,” he wrote in his Journal. “Troja fuit.”
The world had become grievously out of joint for him. Count Robert pleased nobody, so its publication was delayed, and he turned to Castle Dangerous without zest or hope. Yet work was his only tie to life, and this was clear to Cadell and Lockhart, so that they dared not dissuade him. Cadell has been blamed for flogging the weary steed, but his intention seems to have been of the kindliest, and he was even prepared, in order to comfort Scott, to publish a Malachi outpouring when the election was over. He was a pawky, timid being, a follower in other men’s tracks, who succeeded where Constable the pioneer had failed, but the fact that he ultimately made a large fortune out of Scott’s works is not to his discredit. It is no crime to be a successful tradesman. As Cadell entered more into Scott’s affairs, James Ballantyne disappeared. He had become valetudinarian and devout, and an ardent reformer. In April he had written to Scott, a week after his stroke, advising him to become a total abstainer — a tactless prescription for a man who had for long been living on prison fare. He came to Abbotsford in July on a last visit, and left on the Sunday morning without saying good-bye, on the ground that he needed stronger spiritual nourishment than the reading of the church service. The two ancient friends were not destined to meet again.
[Douglasdale]
That summer Scott made his last expedition in his native land. For the purposes of Castle Dangerous he wished to visit Douglasdale, so he and Lockhart set out on July 18th. He had long realized that his days were numbered, and on this journey his son-in-law reached the sad conclusion that the powers of memory and brain were already weakening. It was a heavy lowering day when they visited St Bride’s kirk and the ruins of the castle, and as they drove away over the Lesmahagow moors Scott repeated verses from the old poets, particularly from Dunbar’s “Lament of the Makars.” Then he turned to “Otterburn,” and broke down in tears when he came to the verse