by Allan Massie
In general I have written best when I have written fast, and those parts of a novel which have given me the most trouble and over which I have laboured longest have too often come feebly off. Some have reproached me – with reason – for carelessness of construction. In my defence I may say that I have repeatedly set out a scheme for my future work, dividing it into volumes and chapters, and have attempted to write according to a pattern which should lead inevitably to the conclusion or catastrophe. But there is some daemon who seats himself on the feather of my pen, and drives me on, often astray from my purpose. Characters, of whom I wist nothing when I commenced the tale, expand of their own accord, incidents multiply; the story lingers perhaps while I take my ease by a burnside and entertain my characters at an inn. In short my mansion, planned according to the best principles of a Classical architect, turns into a Gothic extravagance; and the thing may be completed even before I have attained the destination I originally proposed.
I scarcely regret this. Others may work more regularly, but I cannot, except when my imagination is slack and the ship rocks on the waves of a windless sea. But when I happen on a character like Bailie Nicol Jarvie, who, as I remember, was first intended to play but a very minor role in the story of Frank Osbaldistone and Rob Roy, why, my imagination brightens, and I am like a man mounted on a mettlesome steed, which he can scarce control, who decides that the better wisdom is to give the horse its head, cling on for dear life, and see where he arrives at. So I may be led many a mile from my road, and it is hard work to return thither with many a ditch or hedge to be louped. Yet if I resist this temptation, and work according to plan, my thoughts are dull, prosy, and flat. Then I write by effort and will, oppressed with a consciousness of flagging – which makes me flag all the more. I am like a dog turning the wheel of a spit. No, I maun go where the devil rides, even if I think myself bewitched the while.
I cannot reproach myself either for the speed of my productions or for the quantity. If I had written only Waverley, I might, I suppose, have secured myself a charming little reputation and be revered as a petit maître. The critics will ever have a tenderness for an author whose production is exiguous, who writes little, short, and seldom; and they will happily join to laud and boost him, for he renders their own task so much easier. But an author who bedevils them with a new work every six month can scarce expect to receive their constant indulgence. ‘Here he comes again,’ they cry, ‘will the damned fellow never give over?’ I understand their feelings, and can even sympathize; yet I have ever scorned to follow their recommended route. It is some consolation too to reflect that the best authors in all countries have been the most voluminous; and in general posterity plucks its favourites from those who have won the greatest success in their own day. A worthy book which fails to please the public is fortunate indeed if it is rescued from obscurity at a later date. Besides, I cannot think so ill of the taste of our own time as to suppose that posterity will utterly reject it.
Still, no man can tell the future, and reputation is a tender plant in which it is folly to trust. In this connection I am reminded of a learned advocate friend of mine who was charged with the defence of the notorious Jem McCoul, accused of having robbed the Bank of Glasgow of £20,000. The advocate-depute, appearing for the Crown, laid great emphasis on Jem’s refusal to answer certain questions, which, he said, any man with a regard for his reputation would not hesitate to reply to. ‘My client’, said my friend, indicating Jem who was standing behind him, ‘is so unfortunate as to have no regard for his reputation, and I should deal very uncandidly with the Court, should I say that he had any that was worth his attention.’ I may not be precisely in the same case, but, where literature is concerned, I share Jem’s happy state of indifference. My works have served me and my purposes well; I am grateful to those who have purchased the books, and happy if they have afforded them some amusement. But as to my future reputation, I must leave that to fortune. It would be gross to contemn the favour the public has shown me, and imitate the Irish judge, who discharged a prisoner with the words: ‘You have been acquitted by a Limerick jury, and you leave this Court with no other stain upon your character and reputation’; yet I have never doubted that the favour of the public could be withdrawn as abruptly, and perhaps as deservedly, as it was granted. If the future is indifferent to me, so be it.
I have often been asked by kind friends which of my novels please me most. Now this is different from asking which I think the best, a matter that an author is rarely fitted to judge, for he may well give his approval to that which caused him most trouble, just as a fond mother may come to feel most warmly to the scapegrace among her sons – as indeed in the end I believe my own dear mother entertained the warmest, because most protective, love towards poor Dan, he seeming to require a greater expenditure of maternal affection. But the question which pleases me most is a fair one, and of another order.
I make a distinction between two categories among my novels. There are first the Scotch ones, especially those set in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century; and there are those set in more remote ages or in other countries. Now the distinction is this: that the former class, though supported by a ballast of solid reading, are nevertheless made on something of the same principles as the ballads. They concern a society which I knew intimately, and my reading is supported by observation and also by personal reminiscence. Moreover the conflicts portrayed in these novels are matters which touched me dearly and which are still in a sense or to some extent unresolved. I may say that these novels are, in a manner of speaking, conversations or sometimes arguments with myself.
The second class, however, are the result of bookwork. They may portray scenes of which I have at best a traveller’s knowledge, and societies which I never encountered. The points at issue, though I would hope of some general application, are nevertheless matters long resolved by the passage of time, and such as cannot be supposed to touch me closely. The remoteness of the matter from the author gives the best of these novels a certain, perhaps curious, lightness; but in too many of them there are passages when I found it hard going and could only bring a chapter to a conclusion by the exercise of my will and the exhortation ‘tis dogged as does it’.
In the first category I am inclined to put The Heart of Midlothian highest, but, though it is set in my native Edinburgh, though it has my favourite female character in Jeannie Deans, and though I fancy I never wrote a finer passage of sustained narrative than my account of the Porteous Affair (which on account of the discipline displayed is perhaps miscalled a riot), yet I do not place it among my favourites.
I have a tenderness for Guy Mannering because its setting recalls happy scenes of my early manhood. Moreover, I have done few things better than the character of Dandie Dinmont (and I am amused to learn that the type of scruffy and tenacious terriers which I gave him is now being called by his name). The heroine, Julia Mannering, shares certain traits with my dear Charlotte, which also serves to make me think kindly of the book.
Let me say in passing that I have often been sair deeved, as we say in Scotland, by enthusiasts who profess to recognize friends and acquaintances in the characters who people my fiction. In truth the creation or depiction of character in a novel is a far more complicated and uncertain matter than those who seek out originals, with the zeal of a spaniel seeking game, can suppose. In the first place they neglect the obvious truth that a real person is invariably bigger, more complicated, and has been afforded far more experience, than any character in a novel can be. The person depicted in a novel consists of a few lines of description, a few snatches of dialogue, and a few actions which the author gives him or her to perform: what is that in comparison with a life that has been lived? Even when I have taken a true historical character, Claverhouse or Jamie the Saxt, about both of whom I am well informed, the personage in the novel is at best a sketch. I hit on a few aspects of the historical figure which I hope may convey an impression and, if I am lucky, even his essence; but it i
s no more the real man than one of Raeburn’s admirable portraits can descend from the wall and mix himself a glass of toddy.
So what these enthusiasts call ‘an original’ is at best a starting-point offering material for a sketch.
Yet the matter is more complicated still, for three reasons. First, the author may take a trait from one person and another from another. He is like, too, to take the most of them from himself, and I confess I am as ready to charge myself with being the villain of any of my tales as to boast myself the hero. Second, the act of creating a character is for the most part unconscious, and I have known resemblances pointed out to me between the character in a novel and a real person of which I was perfectly unaware. Third, it has sometimes happened to me that in the course of a novel I have realized that he whom I thought a creation of my imagination was developing a resemblance to some friend or acquaintance, and on occasion, I have wrenched him in another airt.
Novels are made of what the author has known and what he has imagined, but the boundary between knowledge and imagination is a Debateable Land, nowhere more so than in this question of the relationship between fictional characters and the author’s acquaintances.
There are passages in Rob Roy of which I think well, and I believe that that period in the history of the Jacobite cause is well and truly depicted; but I cannot acquit myself of passages of considerable tedium in that novel, while the villain Rashleigh is but a feeble creation, and the hero Frank Osbaldistone a dull stick even in comparison with some of my other heroes. Nor do I think as well of Diana Vernon as some kind critics have done.
No, the three Scotch novels of which I think most kindly may surprise some of my admirers, for they are not, I believe, those which have been best received.
The first is The Antiquary. The plot is sadly mishandled, and indeed I have a memory that I was well into the book before I had the faintest notion of my destination. Here, too, the villain is a mere piece of cardboard, though one who gave me a certain amusement in the writing, which, however, I doubt if many readers have shared. But the tone of his book pleases me. There is a holiday feel to much of it, and a humour that recalls good conversation. I derived much amusement too from poking fun at my own antiquarian interests, and I think the two lairds Oldbuck and Wardour genial creations. When I finished it, I wrote to my friend, the actor Daniel Terry, ‘it wants the romance of Waverley and the adventure of Guy Mannering’ – these being its two predecessors – ‘and yet there is some salvation about it, for if a man will paint from nature, he will be likely to amuse those who are daily looking at it.’
I was a great admirer of the clever, elegant, and acute novels of Miss Austen, a young lady who died far too early, long before she had given all of which she was capable to the world. The precision of her writing delighted me, and also her ability to compose a truthful and significant narrative from the trivia of everyday life. I remarked once that I could do ‘the Big Bow-wow strain’ as well as any man, but that Miss Austen’s ability to treat of the ebb and flow of everyday social life was unrivalled. In The Antiquary, however, as later in St Ronan’s Well, I was bold enough to make at least an incursion into her territory, though in the former novel, I displayed a certain prudence by inserting a sub-plot in the big bow-wow manner.
There is another reason for my affection for this novel. It pays tribute, I believe, to the dignity, decency, and courage with which simple unlettered folk can meet disaster. I have written few scenes in which I take greater satisfaction than that in which the old fisherman Saunders Mucklebackit is found mending ‘the auld black bitch of a boat’ in which his son had been sailing when the winds rose, he was driven against the rocks, and drowned. Saunders’s question, ‘What would you have me do, unless I wanted to see four children starve because ane is drooned?’ stands as a reproach to the self-indulgent grief in which more fortunate folk may wallow, and which they mistakenly believe evidence of their more refined sensibilities, when it testifies only to their easy circumstances.
I may say also that the manner in which I contrive to have an awareness of a supernatural world march alongside the ordinary conversation of social life still pleases me.
My second favourite among the Scotch novels may also surprise many, for it was widely condemned as exaggerated, melodramatic and overstrained. Yet I have a peculiar feeling for The Bride of Lammermoor. The story was drawn from a grisly legend which has attached itself to one of the great houses of our Scotch noblesse de la robe. There is no Scots lawyer who does not have a reverence for the great Viscount Stair, whose Institutes of the Law of Scotland have left succeeding generations in his debt. And yet repute has it that this polite and politic gentleman endured a family tragedy of well-nigh unspeakable horror, partly on account of the character of his Lady, who was better-born than her aspiring husband, and possessed of a pride as lofty as her lineage.
Lord Stair’s rise in fortune, and his Lady’s imperious and terrifying manner, were such that it was soon put about that she was a witch, in league with the Devil. She was freely compared to the Witch of Endor, before whom King Saul humbled himself, and it was even reported that she had been seen, in the guise of a cat, sitting on a cushion beside her husband while he acted as Lord High Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The improbability of this tale no doubt added to the zest with which it was related.
The Stairs had a daughter, Janet Dalrymple, a modest, comely girl, who fell in love with Allan, Lord Rutherford, and went so far as to form an engagement to him without her parents’ knowledge. The young man was not acceptable to them either on account of his political principles – for he was a Cavalier opposed to the Revolution Settlement, while Lord Stair was a devout Presbyterian and Whig – or of his want of fortune. But the girl, with the obstinacy sometimes shown by tender natures, refused to give him up. Another suitor presented himself, or was found, and Lady Stair pushed his cause. In vain; Janet remained obdurate. Lord Rutherford also insisted on his rights, saying he would abandon his own claim only if Miss Janet herself requested him to do so. Lady Stair was therefore compelled to agree to an interview between the young lovers, which she intended should be their last, and which she sanctioned only on the acceptance of her demand that she should be present at it. Both she and Lord Rutherford argued their case with high passion, Lady Stair resting hers on the authority of the Scriptures and the Old Testament text (Numbers XXX v 2–5), which declared that a vow of engagement made by a daughter should not be binding unless her father had given the intended match his consent. Meanwhile the wretched girl, who had been subjected to weeks of bullying and moral pressure from her fierce mother, remained mute, pale, and motionless as a statue.
At last, when her mother commanded her to reject her lover, she tore from her neck the piece of broken gold which he had given her as a pledge of their engagement, and returned it to him. He flew into a passion, cursed both mother and daughter, and soon afterwards left Scotland, dying in France or Flanders a few years later.
Meanwhile Lady Stair hurried on preparations for her daughter’s wedding to the groom she had chosen, a certain David Dunbar of Baldoon. The girl acquiesced, in a state of complete passivity, which must have aroused either the suspicion or the sympathy of a less determined woman than Lady Stair. On the wedding day she rode to the kirk behind her younger brother who afterwards recalled that her hand had been as cold and damp as marble.
The wedding was celebrated and the feast was followed by dancing. The bride and groom retired to the chamber, which had been set aside for them, and, according to custom, the groom’s man pocketed the key, that no impertinent guests might break in on the first evening of conjugal felicity. But the festivities were interrupted by a series of terrible screams coming from the bridal chamber. The door was opened, and they found the bridegroom lying on the floor; he had been stabbed and was bleeding copiously. At first, in the dim light, there was no sign of the bride. Then they found her crouched in the corner of the chimney. She was dressed only
in a shift, and that too was bloody. There was fixed on her face a smile of the utmost vacancy, and her head rocked from side to side. She uttered only one sentence: ‘Tak up your bonny bridegroom.’
The lass never recovered and was dead and buried within the fortnight.
The young man was healed of his wounds, but refused to give any account of what had happened, and threatened anyone who inquired of him with a duel.
I had at one time considered making a long poem of this terrible and Romantic tale, and might have done so had I not turned to prose. I sharpened the conflict between the families of the doomed lovers, whom I called Ashton and Ravenswood, by making Sir William Ashton the new proprietor of the ancestral lands of Ravenswood, confiscated from the young lover’s father as a result of his adherence to the exiled Stuart line. Then since I did not choose to attach to Lady Ashton the reputation actually enjoyed by Lady Stair for necromancy and acquaintance with the Black Arts, but was unwilling to deprive myself of an element of the supernatural, I invented a prophecy concerning the ill-fated house of Ravenswood . . .
When the last Laird of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride,
And woo a dead maiden to be his bride,
He shall stable his horse in the Kelpie’s flow,
And his name shall be lost for evermore.
The device served well, I believe, to heighten the emotion, and it is perhaps some evidence of my success that no fewer than four different versions of The Bride have, I am informed, been staged in the opera-houses of Italy.