“Waverley” is not, perhaps, the novel with which one would recommend a person anxious to find out whether or not Sir Walter can still be read, to begin his studies. The six chapters written in 1805 are prolix and unnecessary. A modern narrator would commence with Chapter VIII. “It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village or rather hamlet of Tully-Veolan,” and would find easy means of enlightening us as to who Captain Waverley was. One sentence in the long preliminary account of the hero refers to Scott himself. “He would exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary scenes are presented, in action as it were, to the eyes of the muser.” Like Dickens and Thackeray, Scott was a natural “visualizer,” seeing in his mind’s eye the aspects of his characters, and hearing their voices. Perhaps there is no poetic genius without this gift, which Mr. Galton has found almost absent among, and unknown to men of science, though the presence of the power of visualization by no means implies that it is accompanied by genius. Scott’s friends did not conceal from him that they were little interested in his tale, before they entered the village and chÂteau of Tully-Veolan. From that point all was new to most of them, while no romance of the Forty-Five, a theme now so hackneyed, or of Highland life and manners at the date of Sixty Years Since had ever been offered to the world. Indeed the death of the last of the male line of Stuart was almost contemporary with the year in which Scott began his romance, and while there remained a shadowy King over the water, a Jacobite romance might seem a thing in doubtful taste. We cannot, after a century, feel the absolute freshness of impression which the novel made on contemporary readers.

We know, in one way or another, all that can be said about Highland and Lowland life in 1745, and there are passages of Waverley in which we are almost reminded of Becker’s Charicles, and other instructive pictures of classical manners. Scott, of course, was accused of “slandering the Highlanders,” because he described the cattle stealings which, as contemporaries assert, were regularly organized by the furtive genius of Macdonnell of Barisdale, with intermediaries among the broken clan of the Macgregors, and the less reputable of the dwellers in Rannoch. The relations of Cluny Macpherson with the independent Highland companies had been not unlike those of Fergus MacIvor, a chief quite as much impelled by personal ambition, and the promise of a Jacobite earldom (Lovat was to be a duke, Glengarry an earl), as by any disinterested devotion to the White Rose. There were chiefs like Lochiel, as there were Lowlanders like the Oliphants of Gask, who fought purely for the sake of honour and devotion. The mass of the Jacobite clansmen were notoriously as loyal as steel to their Prince. But there are black sheep in every flock. “There is something,” says Scott, “in the severe judgment passed on my countrymen, that if they do not prefer Scotland to truth, they will always prefer it to inquiry.” Scott preferred inquiry, and gave us the results in Callum Beg and in the darker side of the character of Fergus MacIvor, which irritated some of the fiery Celts. Fergus redeems himself by the courage of his end, but the favourite characters of the novel are, as usual, the subordinates, that gallant, prosy, honourable pedant, the Baron Bradwardine, Davy Gellatley with his songs, Balmawhapple, Baillie Macwheeble, Evan Dhu Maccombich, the Gifted Gilfillan, the Prince himself, and how many others! The pictures of Holyrood and the Prince’s Court, of the rout of Prestonpans, and the march into England, are as brilliant as they then were unhackneyed, and though Waverley is not the best of the series of novels, it made an excellent beginning.

Meanwhile stern necessity urged Scott to that grinding of verses, invita Minerva, to which he said that “the peine forte et dure is nothing in comparison,” and his mood was “devilish repulsive” to the task of working on The Lord of the Isles. So he wrote the last three cantos in five weeks, and set out for Abbotsford to “refresh the machine” by writing Guy Mannering in six! He had only gleaned the story of the Astrologer on November 7, from Mr. Train, and between that date and some time in February 1815, he had finished both The Lord of the Isles and the novel of The Astrologer. He announced to Mr. Morritt at once that “The Lord of the Isles closes my poetic labours upon an extended scale,” this before the book proved not quite satisfactory to the public. He was wont to say that he abandoned poetry “on an extended scale” because Byron “beat” him, but he was now forty-five, was confessedly weary of “grinding verses,” and had found an easier, a more congenial, and a more lucrative form of work, one which suited his genius better, and was of a more permanent appeal than the romance in verse. Since his time, setting apart the temporary vogue of Byron’s Giaours and Laras, rhymed romances on Oriental themes, the world has steadily declined to read long narrative poems. Mr. William Morris alone, for a while, won some readers back to his peculiar form of this genre. In The Lord of the Isles we remember little but the Battle of Bannockburn, which has all the fiery energy of Scott in his Homeric mood, and makes a fit pendant to his Flodden Field. Though Scott, before he learned from Ballantyne that the book was a comparative failure, had meant to abandon rhymed romances, he was a little damped by knowledge of the fact, and, pointing to The Giaour, which Byron had sent to him, he remarked, “James, Byron hits the mark where I don’t even pretend to fledge my arrow.” Says Lockhart, “he always appeared to me quite blind to the fact that in The Giaour, in The Bride of Abydos, in Parisina, and indeed in all his early serious narratives, Byron owed at least half his success to clever though perhaps unconscious imitation of, Scott.” He also owed much to his Oriental themes, to the vogue of his beauty and life of adventure, and to his fluttering of the dovecotes of propriety. Byron spoke as generously of Scott as Scott did of Byron: neither felt for the other the indifference of Wordsworth nor the contempt of Coleridge. In contact with Scott all that is finest in Byron’s character glows like the diamond in the presence of radium.

Guy Mannering made up for Scott’s disappointment. His advisers, from the first, deemed it “more interesting” than Waverley, perhaps because it dealt with their own times and manners, for the topic is not in itself nearly so rich in romance. The strength of the book is in the characters, the donnert good humoured laird, that customary villain, the attorney, the smugglers, the gipsies, Meg Merrilees, honest Dandie Dinmont, and the lawyers whether at high jinks or in more sober mood, while the scene of the old maid’s funeral and the reading of her will cannot be surpassed. Dominie Sampson was a great favourite, though a sample of “Scott’s bores,” and too apt to return like a refrain, with his peculiarities, in the manner of some of Dickens’s characters.

Scott went up to London with his laurels fresh, and met Byron; the pair, in Homeric fashion, exchanged gifts, Scott offering a gold-hilted Oriental dagger, and Byron a silver vase, containing the dust of Athenian men of old. Scott remarked in Byron a trait of Rousseau’s, starts of suspicion, when he seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret, and perhaps offensive, meaning in something casually said to him. At times he was “almost gloomy,” and, in short, he must have been “gey ill to live with.” But Scott quietly allowed the black dog to leave his shoulder, and consoled himself with the less perilous gaieties of the Prince Regent. Scott always denied the story that the Prince asked him point blank whether he was the author of Waverley. The Duke of York, however, said “my brother went rather too near the wind about Waverley, but nobody could have turned the thing more prettily than Walter Scott did.” In fact his reply sailed as near the wind as the insinuation of the Prince.

The news of Waterloo, the triumph of his nation, allured Scott to the scene of the battle. He left London for the Continent a month after the fight. His expenses and more were paid by Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, journal letters written to the Abbotsford circle. These contain so perfect a picture of the man at this juncture that, if people had time to read Lockhart’s Life of him, the book might well be added to it as a supplementary volume of autobiography. Scott’s enthusiasm for the national victory did not swallow up his observation of every trait of foreign life, or his excitement over “the tiniest relics of feudal antiquity.” He saw the battlefield under the guidance of Costar, the peasant who, according to his own account, accompanied Napoleon, a point on which there were sceptics.

Already the British myth of the battle was current, and is reported by Scott in a letter to the Duke of Buccleuch. The legend was that the Prussian fire was not heard, nor did the Prussian columns appear from within the woods, till the moment when a part of the French Imperial Guard made the last attack on our position. Now the Prussians really made themselves felt on the French right about four or half-past four o’clock, and three hours were occupied by them in furious fighting at Planchenoit, while the French captured La Haye Sainte on our front; and the Prussians, in reinforcements constantly coming up, were doing the business on the French right, and beginning to menace the French rear, when the last charge by a portion of their Guard was made and failed. Scott understands all this in his Life of Napoleon, though even there he does not quite make clear the length and severity of the Prussian task. But even British officers engaged at Waterloo seem to have gravely misconceived the magnitude of BlÜcher’s share in the victory.

“France is not, and cannot be crushed,” said Scott, and, in 1815, he foresaw the Orleanist conspiracy of fifteen years, and the fall of the Bourbons. On meeting the Duke of Wellington he felt those emotions of awe which he attributes to Roland Graeme in the presence of the Regent Moray, “the eminent soldier and statesman, the wielder of a nation’s power, and the leader of its armies.” “To have done things worthy to be written was, in his eyes, a dignity to which no man had made any approach, who had only written things worthy to be read.” The gallant Wolfe expressed the converse opinion, when he recited Gray’s Elegy in the boat, on the way to the capture of Quebec, and to his death, Scott’s belief in doing as far superior to writing, embraced the achievements of peace as well as of war. He “betrayed painful uneasiness when his works were alluded to as reflecting honour on the age that had produced Watt’s improvement of the steam engine, and the safety lamp of Sir Humphry Davy.” In brief, Scott was a born man of action, and only the accident of his lameness prevented him from being the mate of Hill and Picton in the field, and perhaps the rival of Napier as the historian of warfare. That gift of seeing with the mind’s eye, which was noted in Wellington as well as in Napoleon, would have served his purposes as a general.

He came home, with presents for all the people on his estate, and with that poem of Waterloo which was the subject of amusing banter,

The emendations made by John Ballantyne on the proof sheets of this effort show considerable intelligence and taste, and in several cases were approved of and accepted by the author, though he once said that he was “the Black Brunswicker of literature who neither took nor gave criticism.” In fact he took rather too much, in some cases, as in St. Ronan’s Well, altered and spoiled to please the prudery of James Ballantyne. The profits of the first edition of Waterloo went to the fund for the widows and orphans of soldiers. By December 1815, Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk were published, and the “sweet heathen of Monkbarns,” The Antiquary, was in hand.

In this novel Scott wrote of his own day, and with one or two old friends, was himself the composite model for The Antiquary. As usual, the reader cares not much for Lovel and his lady, Miss Wardour, but the humour of the portraits of the sturdy Whig antiquary, his sense, and his foibles, and of his rival and friend the foolish Tory, Sir Arthur Wardour, are perennially delightful. Perhaps only archÆological amateurs can thoroughly appreciate the learning of which Monkbarns is so profuse, and this, no doubt, is a drawback to the popularity of the tale. The charlatan, Dousterswivel, is in a rather forced vein of humour, but the figures of Edie Ochiltree, of the gossips in the village post-office, of the barber, and all the country folk, with the incident of the escape from the rising tide, and the romance of Elspeth of the Burnfoot and the stoicism of Mucklebackit, are, in their various ways, examples of Scott at his very best, while the ballad of the Red Harlaw stands absolutely alone, far above all modern attempts to imitate ancient popular Volkslieder.

In this novel Scott began his practice of inventing mottoes, mainly from “Old Plays,” for the headings of his chapters, and among these scraps are plain warrants for his title of poet. When they were collected into a little volume he owned that he could not, in all cases, profess to be certain of his authorship. His memory of the works of others was better than his memory of his own. “Pretty verses these, are they Byron’s?” he said, on hearing some lady sing Cleveland’s song from The Pirate. Of his memory Hogg tells the following anecdote, which may be given verbatim, as Hogg’s Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott is a rather rare little book.

“He, and Skene of Rubislaw, and I were out one night about midnight, leistering kippers in Tweed, about the end of January, not long after the opening of the river for fishing, which was then on the tenth, and Scott having a great range of the river himself, we went up to the side of the rough haugh of Elibank; but when we came to kindle our light, behold, our peat was gone out. This was a terrible disappointment, but to think of giving up our sport was out of the question, so we had no other shift save to send Bob Fletcher all the way through the darkness, the distance of two miles, for another fiery peat.

“The night was mild, calm, and as dark as pitch, and while Fletcher was absent we three sat down on the brink of the river, on a little green sward which I will never forget, and Scott desired me to sing them my ballad of ‘Gilman’s-cleuch.’ Now, be it remembered that this ballad had never been printed, I had merely composed it by rote, and, on finishing it three years before, had sung it once over to Sir Walter. I began it, at his request, but at the eighth or ninth stanza I stuck in it, and could not get on with another verse, on which he began it again and recited it every word from beginning to end. It being a very long ballad, consisting of eighty-eight stanzas, I testified my astonishment, knowing that he had never heard it but once, and even then did not appear to be paying particular attention. He said he had been out with a pleasure party as far as the opening of the Frith of Forth, and, to amuse the company, he had recited both that ballad and one of Southey’s (‘The Abbot of Aberbrothock’), both of which ballads he had only heard once from their respective authors, and he believed he recited them both without misplacing a word.”

In May 1816 The Antiquary appeared; in April he had begun The Tales of my Landlord, he wrote the historical part of The Annual Register, and he trifled with Harold the Dauntless, while as busy as ever with official duties, society, and sport, adding 850 acres to his estate, by purchases of small farms at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile he did not clear off the cargoes of encumbrances of useless books, and wind up the Ballantyne affairs. Instead of making a firm bargain with Constable, John Ballantyne negotiated the business of The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality with Mr. Blackwood and Mr. Murray—the volumes were not to bear the name of “the Author of Waverley.” Now Mr. Blackwood, very naturally, did not care for The Black Dwarf, and “without seeking any glossy periphrase,” spoke out his demand for alterations to James Ballantyne. Scott’s temper was not governed on this occasion, but James did not report to Mr. Blackwood the very unparliamentary terms of the reply to his “most impudent proposal.”

Old Mortality and The Black Dwarf came out, at the end of 1816, in four volumes. The Black Dwarf is of little account, but Old Mortality is in the first three of the Waverley novels in merit. Scott knew the Covenanting literature well, and, if he has made errors, for example where he writes as if the English Liturgy were in use, in the Scotland of the Restoration, he may be merely seeking effect. But the learned Dr. M’Crie, the biographer of Knox, a most painful student of manuscript sources, published a long set of criticisms historical, in an Edinburgh serial, to which Scott thought fit to reply in a review of the romance in The Quarterly. Erskine wrote the literary parts of the criticism, while Scott replied, with much humour and great good humour, to his clerical censor. The Covenanters of the Restoration were a peculiar people. In 1660, when the King came to his own, the leaders of the milder party were ready to abate the claims of the preachers to “rule the roast” in politics; and one of the leaders wished to see the preachers of the fiercer party banished to the Orkneys. The zealots, on the other hand, desired Charles II to put down the Church of England in England, which meant civil war. But both parties were equally struck at by the introduction of Episcopacy without a Liturgy. Like the zealots on divers occasions, the Governors under Charles II expelled the Non-conformists from their pulpits. A rising followed, and then a skimble-skamble Government which offered “Indulgences” to Presbyterians. The milder sort were satisfied with being tolerated, the wilder sort wished to be intolerant, and the Kirk split into divers sections, hating each other nearly as much as they hated prelatists. Strange wandering prophets, prophesying balderdash, scoured the country, pursued by dragoons, and in their utterances are many ludicrous things and anarchic doctrines, reprobated by the more peaceful section.

Scott knew all the parties, and was not tender to the absurdities. He had written a novel, not a history, and had used the licence of a novelist. Meanwhile in the beautiful character of Bessie Maclure, Scott surely made amends for his maniac preacher, his indulged preacher, and the rest of his warring Covenanters. The Claverhouse of the novel is not, of course, the actual Claverhouse of history, but he is more like the man than the absurd Claverhouse of Macaulay. One fault is attributed to the gallant Graham which he did not possess. Far from being reckless of plebeian as opposed to “gentle” blood, he urged the policy of sparing the multitude and punishing their “gentle leaders.” It is improbable that Claverhouse was given to quoting Froissart, as in the novel, but he did quote Lucan, an author admired by Scott.

We cannot go into a criticism of the historical accuracy of a novel. Old Mortality is not only one of Scott’s most stirring tales, but it contains even an unusual number of his most admirable characters, Cuddie and Mause Headrigg, Gudyill, the Major, Goose Gibbie, Old Milnwood (a true “Laird Nippy”), the murderer Burly, Bessie Maclure, Jenny Dennison, that unscrupulous coquette, Milnwood’s housekeeper, the fallen Bothwell, the fanatics of every shade, and Claverhouse himself. Indeed, be the inaccuracies of detail what they may, and they are trivial, no romance based on book knowledge displays so correct a general picture of the men and the times.

Old Mortality himself, about whom Scott heard much from his friend, Mr. Train (who suggested the novel), had been met by the author in his youth at Dunottar Castle among the graves of the Covenanters who died of ill-usage in the castle dungeons. That a number of soldiers in like manner perished of hunger when the Whigs got the upper hand at Edinburgh in 1688 is a circumstance generally omitted by the Whiggish Muse of Modern History. What would not have been said had hundreds of prisoners taken by Montrose been starved to death? Yet even Mr. Gardiner does not mention the hundreds of Royalist prisoners taken by Cromwell at Dunbar, immured in Durham Cathedral, and there permitted to die of hunger. To be sure the levies of Montrose took very few prisoners indeed, but settled all scores with the claymore.

Old Mortality contains a striking scene in which the appearance of Henry Morton is taken by Edith for his apparition, after or at the moment of death. The novels, like the poems, are seldom without a touch of “the supernatural,” which, in the case of Morton’s appearance, was the normal. In Waverley there is the death warning to Fergus MacIvor; in Guy Mannering there is the fulfilled horoscope: in The Antiquary the apparition to the hero is explained away, to some extent, but yields the desired effect. Scott was very much interested in phantasms and witchcraft, his library is rich in rare old books full of ghostly narratives, Bovet, Lavaterus, Sinclair, Petrus Thyraeus and crowds of others. Neither his friends nor he himself knew the precise frontiers of his belief and disbelief. At an inn he slept soundly in one bed of a double-bedded room, while a dead man occupied the other. He was insensible to fear, in these airy matters, and says that he had only twice in his life felt “eery.” Once it was at Glamis Castle, haunted for long by a legend of a Presence in a secret chamber. The secret of the chamber is no secret, and the Presence is borrowed bodily from a story current, in the eighteenth century, about Vale Royal in Cheshire. The other occasion on which Scott felt “eery” is not given by Lockhart, but is probably revealed by this anecdote of Gillies.

“The most awkward circumstance about well-authenticated hobgoblins,” said he, “is that they, for the most part, come and disappear without any intelligible object or purpose, except to frighten people; which, with all due deference, seems rather foolish! Very many persons have either seen a ghost, or something like one, and I am myself among the number; but my story is not a jot better than the others I have heard, which, for the most part, were very inept. The good stories are sadly devoid of evidence; the stupid ones only are authentic.

“There is a particular turning of the high road through the Forest near Ashestiel, at a place which affords no possible means of concealment; the grass is smooth, and always eaten bare by the sheep; there is no heather, nor underwood, nor cavern, in which any mortal being could conceal himself. Towards this very spot I was advancing one evening on horseback—please to observe it was before dinner, and not long after sunset, so that I ran no risk either of seeing double, or wanting sufficient light for my observations. Before me, at the distance of about a quarter of a mile, there stood a human figure, sharply enough defined by the twilight. I advanced; it stalked about with a long staff in its hand, held like a wand of office, but only went to and fro, keeping at the same corner, till, as I came within a few yards, my friend all in an instant vanished. I was so struck with his eccentric conduct, that although Mrs. Scott was in delicate health, and I was anxious to get home to a late dinner, I could not help stopping to examine the ground all about, but in vain; he had either dissolved into air, or sunk into the earth, where I knew well there was no coal-pit to receive him. Had he lain down on the greensward, the colour of his drapery, which was dusky brown, would have betrayed him at once, so that there was no practicable solution of the mystery.

“I rode on, and had not advanced above fifty yards, when, on looking back, my friend was there again, and even more clearly visible than before. ‘Now,’ said I to myself, ‘I most certainly have you!’ so wheeled about and spurred Finella; but the result was as before, he vanished instantaneously. I must candidly confess I had now got enough of the phantasmagoria; and whether it were from a love of home, or a participation in my dislike of this very stupid ghost, no matter, Finella did her best to run away, and would by no means agree to any further process of investigation. I will not deny that I felt somewhat uncomfortable, and half inclined to think that this apparition was a warning of evil to come, or indication, however obscure, of misfortune that had already occurred. So strong was this impression, that I almost feared to ask for Mrs. Scott when I arrived at Ashestiel; but, as Dr. Johnson said on a similar occasion, ‘nothing ever came of it.’”

The strange disturbances at Abbotsford, as if all the heavy furniture were being moved about, did not make Scott “eery.” He arose,

armed for war with the sword of his Jacobite ancestor, Auld Beardie. But when the noises, never accounted for, were found to have been coincident with the death of the purveyor of the furniture, Mr. Bullock, in London, Lockhart admits that Scott was not only puzzled but considerably impressed.

Such rackets, preceding or accompanying a death, are familiar to writers whom he knew well, Lavaterus, Thyraeus, Theophilus Insulanus on the Second Sight, and the rest, and persist among the beliefs of Highlands and Lowlands. There is always a hammering in the shop of a certain Highland carpenter, on the night before a coffin is ordered. On the whole Scott’s frame of mind was akin, on this point, to that of Kant, who did not believe in any special ghost story, but did not disbelieve in ghost stories in general. He would say that the only men known to him who had seen ghosts were either mad, or later went mad, yet he had seen some kind of apparition himself. Everything connected with hypnotism (then styled Animal Magnetism) he dismissed as part of “the peck of dirt,” which each generation must eat in its turn. Yet he was anxious to investigate the ink-gazing of Egypt, which he could easily have done, with a glass ball, at home. In short he enjoyed the human thrill which is awakened by good stories of the “supernormal,” and communicated the thrill in Wandering Willie’s Tale, in the appearance of the death wraith of old Alice to the Master of Ravenswood (the best wraith in fiction), in My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror, and in the terrible story, gleaned from Hannah More, of The Tapestried Chamber. His Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft are the work of his declining age, and adopt the dull line of sturdy common-sense. But his explanation of the information received in a dream, in The Antiquary, is that of St. Augustine, and even, in many cases, of Mr. F. W. H. Myers, with his theory of the more normal workings of the “Subliminal Self.”

For more than twenty years Scott had enjoyed unbroken health, and had treated “the machine,” his body and brain, as few men except Napoleon have overtaxed that engine. In Edinburgh he lived, he says, “too genially.” Lockhart has described his plain but Gargantuan breakfasts; he took little or no exercise, driving to court with other advocates, and we must remember that the dinner parties of that age began early and ended late, while the champagne and sherry and port and Burgundy were followed by a “shass caffy” (as Mr. Henry Foker calls it), in the shape of rummers of whisky and water, “hot, with.” A healthier generation is justly horrified by these excesses of conviviality, in which Scott took his part, like other advocates and judges of his time, rising at five o’clock next morning to write twenty or thirty printed pages of his novel. At Abbotsford, he said, he never sat down, as in Edinburgh he was always seated, at one kind of table or another. His task done before breakfast, he rode or drove, or worked in his plantations, or underwent the toil of receiving bores, he coursed, he passed the midnight hours in “burning the water,” that is, spearing salmon by torchlight, a picturesque but now, happily, an illegal pastime.

The refreshment of the machine was writing at a furious pace, and, in 1817, the longsuffering mechanism resented its treatment. Scott had still eight years of apparent prosperity before him, but he had no more years of unbroken health. Violent “cramps in the stomach,” as they were called, seized him, and drove this stoic, “bellowing like a bull,” forth from the guests at his own table. He tells us, and Hogg tells us, that heated salt, which burned his shirt to ashes, was applied to the seat of his malady, “and I hardly felt it,” says the sufferer. Then came the heroic remedies of profuse bleeding and blistering, and diet of toast, with only three glasses of wine daily. It was in tormentis that he finished Rob Roy and dictated The Bride of Lammermoor, the story being often interrupted by his outcries of pain. Fortunately he now had Will Laidlaw with him as amanuensis. That he undertook Rob Roy (for once “writing up to a name,” to please Constable) in such circumstances of recurring agony and weakness, was an example, perhaps of his courage, certainly, in the words of St. Francis, an instance of his hardness on “his brother the ass,” his fleshly body. Much heavy labour on history for The Annual Register, and on other essays, accompanied his work in fiction, and he was reduced to a state of languor in which, for once in the tone of self pity, he wrote the beautiful lines beginning

Scott was still adding acre to acre, but Rob Roy and the gallant price offered by Constable, enabled him to redeem the bond for £4,000 of which the Duke of Buccleuch was guarantor. At this time Lockhart and Blackwood’s Magazine came into his life. In Lockhart he was to find a son rather

than a son-in-law, though he could not wean him from that perilous enchantress, Maga, which was then in the wild heyday of its stormy youth. He declared that Rob Roy (December 1817), “smells of the cramp”; he had to wind it up more rapidly than he intended, but his fatally buoyant spirits led him to hope that in four or five years he might add the considerable estate of Faldonside to his acres, a dream which haunted his enfeebled mind in his ultimate decrepitude. Meanwhile expense on the estate of Abbotsford, and on the acquisition of curios for the collection, went on briskly, Scott paying prices probably too high, and conducting his affairs with the people on his land with a profuse but judicious generosity. He discovered, as others have done, real taste and artistic power amongst the craftsmen in wood and stone in the district, and encouraged it to the best of his power. His gold was not spent in vain, but the need for money grew with every year, and he did not measure his own labour by his failing strength.

Rob Roy, whether it “smelled of the cramp” or not, was as popular as its hero has ever been in Scotland, where he has the same sort of reputation as Robin Hood. The novel is unusually defective in composition, the mystery of Rashleigh’s compound of commercial malfeasance with bills, and of treacherous Jacobitism has always baffled the reader. The melodrama of Helen Macgregor is, in Mr. Stevenson’s phrase, “too steep,” and the whole plot is not more lucid than some plots of Dickens. While Diana Vernon[1] is, by popular acclaim, peerless among the heroines of Scott, while her love story is a real love story, her wooer is not more interesting than the general run of Scott’s heroes. The book is saved by Diana, by the reiver himself, by the delightful Baillie, and by that flower of serving Men, the canny Scottish gardener Andrew Fairservice. In this novel the secret of authorship was let out, but passed unobserved. The long lecture by the Baillie on the state of the Highlands is taken straight from a manuscript of Graham of Gartmore, from whom Scott purchased his most authentic relic, the sword of the great Montrose. Scott lent the manuscript to Jamieson, who published it in his edition of Burt’s Letters from the North, acknowledging his debt to Scott. Now as Scott used his manuscript in Rob Roy, here was a plain piÈce de conviction, but no hunter after proof of authorship of the Waverley novels ever detected the facts, in fact I believe that I was the first person who observed them!

[Foonote 1: That Diana Vernon is drawn from Scott’s friend, Miss Cranstoun, the Countess von Purgstall, is an uncertain theory of Basil Hall’s.]

The next novel, perhaps less permanently popular (for Rob Roy holds the stage in London as I write), but more excellent, was The Heart of Midlothian (June 1818). Lady Louisa Steuart wrote that she “was a little tired of your Edinburgh lawyers in the Introduction,” and they are fatiguing; not so the lawyers of whom Saddletree converses with so much freedom. English people are welcome to be impatient of the passages alluding to Scottish law throughout, but Scottish readers cannot weary of these admirably humorous pictures of the jovial and learned old national Bar, one of the few institutions not denationalized by the Union of 1707. The lover of Effie Deans is by far too melodramatic, too “satanic.” For once, in this failure of a character, Scott was imitating Byron’s heroes, whether he knew it or not, as Byron imitated figures like the Schedoni of Mrs. Radcliffe. The story does break down at Rosneath, as Lady Louisa said: that portion is only redeemed by “the gracious Duncan,” a most amusing “slander on the Highlanders.” Then we have Dumbiedykes, and Rory Bean, and the very pearl of belated Covenanters Davie Deans. He is “lifted” straight from that honest, brave, absurd Peter or Patrick Walker, who suffered torture as a mere boy during the Restoration, and lived well into the eighteenth century, compiling his biographies of Covenanting characters, such as Cameron and Peden. Walker was to them what Izaak Walton was to the great divines of the Church of England in his long and well-contented day. How true Davie Deans is to his model the reader may discover in Mr. Hay Fleming’s Saints of the Covenant, a reprint of Walker’s Biographies with notes. When we add Ratclifte, the pleasing rogue, the wild singer, Madge Wildfire, the thrilling interest of the Porteous mob, the study of the great Duke of Argyll, the scene with the Queen, the adventures of the road, and the matchless character of Jeanie Deans, with her foil in the pretty wilful Effie, we must acknowledge that, if The Heart of Midlothian is not absolutely the first, alone in place, of the Waverley novels, it is certainly second to none. “I should have found you out,” wrote Lady Louisa, in that one parenthesis, “for the man was mortal and had been a schoolmaster.” No number of formal histories can convey nearly so full and true a picture of Scottish life about 1730-40, as The Heart of Midlothian. As social history it is unrivalled. In Edinburgh Lockhart had never witnessed “such a scene of all engrossing enthusiasm,” in any literary matter, as on the appearance of this novel. To think of it is to wish to throw down the pen, and take the book again from the shelf, as Thackeray says when he chances to mention Dugald Dalgetty. But young people now, as they did in 1818, according to Lady Louisa, “never heard of the Duke of Argyll before. ‘Pray who was Sir Robert Walpole?’ they ask me, ‘and when did he live?’ or, perhaps, ‘was not the great Lord Chatham in Queen Anne’s days?’” Readers who are exhaustively ignorant of and unconcerned about the past, cannot be expected to read Scott, and such readers were common in his own time, not to speak of our educated age.

The Bride of Lammermoor appears to have been begun before The Heart of Midlothian was published. At the end of 1818 Scott received a baronetcy, and though he at once anticipated the quotation (which Hogg incontinently made),

no doubt he liked very well the revival of the old Border name, “Sir Walter Scott.” That he should enjoy the title was perfectly natural, and its gift, as the Prince Regent really was fond of literature, seems no less in nature.

With the winter, and with the sedentary life of Edinburgh, the terrible cramps returned. He sold his copyrights to Constable for £12,000, and had Constable paid, before 1826, the bond of 1818, Scott would have had no later interest in this valuable property. But, characteristically, the debt was not fully discharged before Constable’s ruin in 1826. The spring of 1819 was passed under torment, and under the medical artillery of bleeding, blistering, calomel, and ipecacuanha. As a better remedy Scott’s Highland piper selected twelve stones from twelve southward running streams; on these the patient was to sleep. Scott, however, said that the charm stones only worked if wrapped in the petticoat of a widow who had never wished to marry again, and Science, in the person of the piper, abandoned the case. Removal to Abbotsford did not alleviate the pangs, but here Scott dictated The Bride of Lammermoor to Will Laidlaw and John Ballantyne. He was interrupted by cries wrung from him in agony, and it is not wonderful, perhaps, that when he saw the book in print, he could not remember a single line of it, but read in fear and trembling, for who knew what absurdity it might contain? Thackeray had the same experience as to part of Pendennis, written before a serious illness. In Scott’s case perhaps the incredible amount of opiates with which he was drugged may explain his forgetfulness. “As to giving over work,” he said to Laidlaw, “that can only be when I am in woollen.”

When Lockhart visited Scott, in May 1819, the colour of his hair had changed from a brindled grey to snow white, at the age of forty-seven. His face “was meagre, haggard, and of the deadliest yellow of the jaundice.” That night, in a fresh fit of pain, his cries were distinctly audible at a considerable distance from the house, but by eleven o’clock next day he mounted his horse and rode with Lockhart past Philiphaugh and up Yarrow, discoursing of Montrose’s defeat, and in high spirits about a pending election. Yet, a month later, when The Bride of Lammermoor and The Legend of Montrose appeared, Scott was believed to be on his deathbed. One night he took leave of his family, expressing in simple terms his Christian faith, “and now leave me that I may turn my face to the wall.” He slept, and the crisis passed over. By July 19 he had nearly finished a volume of Ivanhoe, which he expected to complete in September. Such enthusiasm of industry, in such circumstances, is without parallel in literary history. The Bride of Lammermoor is a subject which leaves an author no choice; he must make his novel end badly: he cannot avoid the tragic, and tragedy scarcely suits the genius of Scott. He knew the tale of the mysterious death of Stair’s daughter, from tradition in his family, and, after his illness, he remembered the legend as well as ever: of his own handling of the tale he could remember nothing. As to the real facts of the case, Dr. Hickes heard them from the Duke of Lauderdale, and, again, from the father of the Bride himself, but Hickes declined to write the story down, lest his memory might be at fault. Scott was not aware of these historical facts, which are certainly tantalizing, as the real facts are unknown.

Not only are the data of the story things of unrelieved gloom, but Scott has chosen to show Fate dealing with a heroine gentle, innocent, and weak. Of all heroes of novels, perhaps only two frankly tell their lady loves that their fathers are not gentlemen! One of these candid wooers is Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, and Elizabeth causes him to rue his candour. The other is the Master of Ravenswood, and Lucy Ashton does not resent his words. It is on this poor pathetic broken creature, as harmless as Rose Bradwardine, that Fate deals a blow which might have crushed these old Royal Greek protagonists, whom Aristotle deemed the only proper central figures of tragedy. The results are really rather miserable than tragic in the strict sense of the word, the victim only ceases to be feeble when she ceases to be sane. Her lover, again, the Master, is a personage quite alien to the nature of Scott. The Master, to be sure, is very unfortunate indeed, a disinherited knight, like Ivanhoe, but he is not more bereaved and impoverished than Quentin Durward is at the opening of his tale. But Quentin bears a merry heart, and goes all the way, like hundreds of his countrymen through several centuries, finding fortune, honour, and a bride in French service. The Master, on the other hand, mopes in his gloomy tower, thinks of assassinating his supplanter, Sir William Ashton, but declines into saving him from a bull, like Johnny Eames in The Small House at Allingham, and falls in love with the daughter of his supplanter. Tennyson chose to revive the set of situations in his Maud, where the hero is much more peevish and hysterical than the Master of Ravenswood, while of the heroine we practically know nothing, except that, at sixteen, Maud was tall and stately, and had a classical profile. The situations were not, we repeat, adapted to Scott’s genius, but they were congenial to the foreseen and inevitable conclusion of the story, as given by history. Lockhart tells us that Caleb Balderwood was never regarded as a successful humorous character, and we fall back on Bucklaw and that inimitable captain, Craigingelt, for humorous relief, while the genuine tragic element is supplied by old Alice, by the eery scene in which her wraith appears to the Master, and by the Chorus, as it were, of the poor old envious women, suspected of sorcery, the watchers of the dead. Scott never surpassed his dealings with these horrible creatures. The conclusion when

with the mystery of all that befell in the bridal bower and the ride of Lucy to church, her hand clay cold in that of her boyish brother, himself admirably sketched, are entirely worthy of the genius of the author. When we consider the circumstances in which he dictated the tale, we may well marvel that he could rise to such height of power. But otherwise the novel is not to be reckoned among his best: it lacks much of the usual happy humour. Yet it has had admirers among good judges who set it in the forefront of his romances.

Thackeray, an excellent judge, greatly preferred to the sombre Master the redoubted Rittmeister, Dugald Dalgetty, of the Legend of Montrose, which was published in company with The Bride of Lammermoor. Dugald is a garrulous pedant, and may be styled “one of Scott’s bores,” but he never bores us, whether when he sets forth his simple reasons for serving with the King’s army, not with the Covenanters; or criticises the various services of Europe, or lectures on the propriety of fortifying the sconce of Drumsnab, or faces Argyll in Inveraray, or masters him in the dungeon, or wheedles the Presbyterian chaplain, or mocks the bows and arrows of his allies the Children of the Mist: or does deeds of derring do at Inverlochy, or swaggers about in the fresh glories of his title of Knight Banneret. Dugald is always a perfect joy, even if we be little interested, as we are, in the loves of Annot Lyle and in the second-sighted man with his gloom and his visions. It is difficult to guess what Scott may have originally meant to do with Montrose, the most sympathetic figure in the long pageant of Scottish history. With the romance of his life and character fiction cannot cope: nothing can match his actual history. In Argyll, again, Scott encountered a personage whose psychology was too intricate for his hasty methods. But his fingers, as he says in a letter of this period, sometimes seemed to him to work automatically, against his conscious purpose. There was, as has been said of MoliÈre, a lutin that rode his pen. The good horse Gustavus, in fact, “with Dalgetty up,” ran away with Scott, and the romance became practically the story of one man, the Rittmeister.

In the whirl of his multifarious activities, Scott remained canny enough to consider his profession of romance as a manufactory subject to changes of fashion and taste. His “tweeds,” so to speak, his tales of Scottish manners, might go out of vogue, though there was as yet little competition on the part of other makers. Deliberately, therefore, so he declares, he determined to turn out a new article of a nature as remote as possible from his Scottish fabrics, a romance of English mediaeval life. In that period no character is so romantic and popular as Richard I, and there is no more popular figure in legend than Robin Hood, though his date (if he be more than a mere ideal outlaw) is unknown, some facts point vaguely to his era as that of Edward II. Again, there was the picturesque contrast between the manners of the conquered English and conquering Normans, which, once pointed out by Scott, attracted the studies of Thierry, the French historian. A forgotten play, Runimede, by the half-forgotten and “unfortunate Logan,” had been seen by Scott, and, he says, suggested his idea, while the old rhyme of “Tring, Wing, and Ivanhoe” gave him a sonorous name which (a great point with Scott) revealed nothing of the nature and scope of his narrative. He disliked “writing up” to names of familiar associations, such as “Rob Roy” and “Kenilworth.” With “Ivanhoe” people did not know what to expect, and could not be disappointed.

Mr. Freeman spoke severely of the incorrect history and archaeology of Ivanhoe. There can be no such name as Cedric, the Confessor had no “sprouts”—of whom Athelstane, in some mysterious way, is a survivor. But these were matters of indifference to the novelist, as he candidly explained, and he gratified Ulrica with heathen deities, not familiar to her remotest ancestors, but preferred by her to the Christian creed. In fact he sounded his kettle drums by night, like Claverhouse’s troopers in Old Mortality, for the sake of the effect, and careless of the circumstance that, at night, the kettle drums do not clash on the march, just as he gave Claverhouse a post of command which he did not hold. He admitted that he had blended the manners of several distinct centuries, but what matter? “Such errors will escape the general class of readers,” and the author helps himself from Froissart, when The Monk of Croyland does not serve his turn. Here is “confession and avoidance,” and the general reader, any reader of sense, cares no more for Mr. Freeman’s censures than for the precise truth about the palisade at Senlac. Sir Walter was really hit by a criticism of one of his blazons, metal upon metal, but he found an authentic parallel case, and remarked that heraldry was in its infancy, and had not developed half of its rules. An account of the German Jews, given by Skene of Rubislaw, suggested Isaac of York and Rebecca, the sudden death of an advocate in court gave the hint which, in the very unlooked for demise of The Templar, rescues Ivanhoe from a situation out of which the reader sees “no outgait.” But surely we should have had some previous warning that the hardy Templar suffered from a cardiac affection? Scott did not think of that, and caught at a kind of miracle, which, I own, seemed to me far fetched and unsatisfactory at the uncritical age of ten. A thunderstorm over the lists and lightning attracted by The Templar’s lance appeared an “outgait” more picturesque, and, considering the robust health of The Templar, rather more probable, while vindicatory of divine justice to a remarkable degree. Cannot you see the combatants clashing in the mirk, unbeheld by the spectators; you see the flash descend with the torrential rain, and the marshals of the lists, penetrating the veil of mist, find The Templar a clay cold corpse, and the Disinherited Knight “quite safe, though very wet,” like the people in the play of The Stranger.

However, Scott was otherwise inspired! The appearance of Ivanhoe, in December 1819, marked the flood-tide of his popularity. The English rejoiced at being freed from “the dialect,” which was and remains to them a stumbling block, though they find no difficulty in the lingo of the modern “Kailyard.” Lockhart says that, after Ivanhoe, the sale of Scott’s novels fell off, though Constable managed to conceal the circumstance from the author, an ill-judged proceeding.

As Lockhart says, the next three or four years were the most expensive in Scott’s life, through his ignorance of the truth, whereas they should have been years of retrenchment. It became proportionately difficult for Sir Walter to “pull up” in his expenditure, and the mine was laid that exploded seven years later. Ivanhoe remains one of the best known of Scott’s novels, probably because it is precisely suited to the taste of boyhood, when the eyes of studious boys can be diverted from the mysteriously bewitching romances of the late Mr. Henty. We have all sighed with Rebecca, we have all been of Thackeray’s opinion about the “very English” respectable Rowena, we have all hated Front de Boeuf; “amo Locksley,” says Thackeray, and so say all of us; we have delighted in Friar Tuck, laughed with Wamba, and over the much-criticised scene, due to Scott’s good nature, of the resurrection of a trencherman so resolute as Athelstane. No mere knock on the head could get rid of so thick-skulled a thane as the lord of Coningsburgh.

While Scott’s health was recovered, while Abbotsford was full of guests, and the Abbotsford Hunt was, as the farmer said, the thing worth living for in the year, The Monastery was being written, and proved a not undeserved failure, relatively speaking. The only disaster of Scott, in his treatment of visionary things, is the White Lady of Avenel, and of all his bores, the Euphuist, Sir Percy Shafton is the least humorous, and was regarded as the most tedious. The business of the bodkin, and the tailor ancestry of the really gallant though rather distraught knight, did not amuse, and the historical setting is not handled in a manner worthy of the opportunity, the sudden fall of the ancient Church.

Never, surely, was such a bouleversement as the religious revolution taken so quietly as in Scotland. The only change, said the keeper of a hostel at St. Andrews, was that where the Dean had sat and called for claret, the Moderator sat and shouted for more toddy! This is a story of Scott’s, probably apocryphal, for toddy did not come in with Presbyterianism, and Darnley is the only whisky drinker whom I have remarked in the documents of the period. The truth is that, in many districts of the South, Catholicism was dead before it fell. The love of “a new day,” as they called it, and relief from priestly dues, with the fun of havoc and pillage, were universally attractive, and only a remnant, in outlying parishes, mourned for the Mass that had become a capital offence. Very few sentimental regrets accompanied the flight of the ancient faith, and the Abbot of Unreason jigged joyously through the roofless cathedrals. Thus perhaps the dramatic opportunity of Scott was less excellent than it seems at a first glance. Only Knox’s “rascal multitude” began to discover, after they had helped to wreck the monasteries, that life was as hardly ground down by lay as by clerical landlords, that gaiety was gone, that holidays were curtailed, that the penances of the new Kirk were harsher than those of the old, and that Sunday, from a feast, had become a day of gloom. Under James VI a preacher observed that he feared the rabble more than he did the Catholic earls, but rabble and earls were alike brought under the yoke. All this had not been foreseen, and thus the Reformation was taken lightly, not with the terrible struggles of contemporary France.

Far from being depressed, and abandoning his theme, Scott deliberately reverted to it, continuing some of the characters of The Monastery in The Abbot. To Lockhart, now his son-in-law, he sent a copy, with the inscription,

The Introduction to Nigel contains, with the rest of Scott’s Ars Poetica, a half apology for “The White Lady of Avenel.” She disappears from The Abbot, which, by virtue of the picture of Queen Mary and her Loch Leven adventures, and of Catherine Seyton, with all the lively scenes in old Marian Edinburgh, helped to restore the author’s shaken popularity.

John Ballantyne had ventured a “Novelists’ Library,” heavy books in double columns, and Scott contributed charming introductory essays, but in the summer of 1821 he lost this favourite henchman, and remarked that the sun would never shine so brightly again for himself. John clearly was no man of business, his possessions were a minus quantity, though he believed himself to have some property, and bequeathed a visionary £2,000 to Scott.

Sir Walter went to London for the Coronation of George IV. Others, “the non est tanti men,” might sneer, he said, at such pageants, might be “crucified to them”—as the Covenanting Laird of Brodie prayed to be crucified to the glories of the Lord Mayor’s Show—but Scott defended “the natural and unaffected pleasure which men like me receive from sights of splendour and sounds of harmony.” The Coronation wholly pleased him, but for the error of the Champion, who used a Highland target, “instead of a three-cornered or beater shield, which, in time of tilt, was suspended round the neck.” Scott had made the Highland target too fashionable: hence the heresy of the Champion. Scott was recognized by the Scots Greys with cries of “God bless Sir Walter,” and was allowed to pass on foot through the tabooed space which they guarded on the outside of the Abbey. At this time was executed the bust of Scott by Chantrey, no doubt by far the best representation of the man. Raeburn, as Scott remarked, painted him as “a somewhat chowder-headed” person. Indeed no portrait caught the vivacity of his changeful expression, all, except the bust, are more or less “chowder-headed.”

Before John Ballantyne’s death Scott had begun Kenilworth. Constable appears to have suggested The Armada as a subject, and to have collected many rare Elizabethan books for Sir Walter’s use. Then he preferred the title of The Nunnery, while Scott’s fancy went back to his favourite lines in Meikle’s ballad, and to the title of Cumnor Hall. But he chose Kenilworth, to please Constable. His motto, “No scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” directed his course. Though a patriotic Scot, he was too chivalrous to avenge on Queen Elizabeth the wrongs of Mary Stuart. By the most daring of anachronisms he deserted the real period of the affair of Amy Robsart, when scandal, not unprovoked, about Elizabeth was rife in the popular mouth and in every Court of Europe (1560). In the mystery of Amy Robsart’s death, Scott had a psychological subject. Leicester and Amy had been married, not secretly but publicly, in the reign of Edward VI. During that of Mary Tudor a strong attachment sprang up between Elizabeth and Leicester, then Lord Robert Dudley. On Elizabeth’s accession to the throne she loaded her favourite and Master of the Horse with unprecedented honours. Dudley was ever at Court, his wife lived retired at Cumnor Hall, and it was now said that she had a fatal disease, now that attempts were being made to poison her.

Meanwhile the triumphant Scottish Protestants, with the leader of the conquered Catholics, Archbishop Hamilton, were united for once in proposing that the Queen of England should marry the next heir to the throne of Scotland, the Earl of Arran, a Protestant, the friend of Knox. But, not to speak of other reasons, the favour of Dudley with Elizabeth stood in the way. Cecil spoke of the danger of Lady Robert Dudley in the gloomiest terms, to the Spanish ambassador. To the English agent in Scotland, Randolph, Cecil wrote a letter, which has been destroyed, but which chilled Randolph’s heart. The death of Darnley was not more clearly foreseen, in 1567, than the death of Dudley’s wife in 1560. Then, a few days after Cecil’s letter to Randolph, news of Lady Robert’s death came to Windsor. How she died no man knows to this day. The verdict of the coroner’s jury, an open verdict apparently, cannot be discovered. Amy had sent all her household except two or three ladies to a fair at Abingdon. Their story was that, on returning, they found their mistress lying dead, with a broken neck, at the foot of a flight of stairs. She had suddenly left her ladies, who made no inquiries, and now she was dead. Elizabeth told an envoy of her ambassador at Paris that there had been “an attempt” at Cumnor Hall, but that none of Leicester’s retainers was present. We know no more, but Mr. Froude, by a misunderstanding of the evidence, made it seem almost impossible to doubt that Elizabeth had what could not be guiltless foreknowledge of the catastrophe. This is an error; this is not warranted by the evidence. The behaviour of Dudley, again, on receiving the news of his wife’s death, was that of an innocent man: he did all that he could to secure an investigation without favour.

So the case stands, and Sir Walter might have avenged Mary Stuart by showing that Elizabeth was in no better position, as regards the death of Amy, than is Mary as regards the death of Darnley. But Scott rejected the temptation: he chose to say that Dudley’s marriage was a secret, and unknown to Elizabeth, and by keeping Amy alive for many years after her death, he contrived a meeting between the unconscious rivals, the Queen and the bride, at the festivals of Kenilworth. Such is his audacious handling of the facts, and he has given Elizabeth a more dignified part than she was wont to play, where Leicester was concerned: he has made her a right royal lady. She is magnificent in the meeting with Amy, and in her challenge of Leicester. The novel has thus always been a favourite in England, and there are even critics who put this romance based on bookwork before the best of all in which Scott delineates the manners best known to him, those of his own countrymen. Yet the novel is far better than many other critics admit. Amy is a spirited, lovely, and interesting heroine. Leicester is flattered, but the portrait is fine. The village humours, and the ruffianly soldier of fortune, Mike Lambourne, are very happily handled. Varney comes as near Iago in his resolute wickedness as it was in the power of Scott to go; and there is good in Flibbertigibbet, though we see too much of him; and more good in Tony Fire the Faggot, though Tony’s character, in real life, appears to have escaped censure: his epitaph, at least, is alive to testify to that, though the rewards heaped by Leicester on the occupant of Cumnor Hall “do something smack.”