CHAPTER VIII - SCOTT AND THE NOVEL OF TERROR.
In 1775 we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking the circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her cloak novels of sensibility and of fashionable scandal. Some twenty years later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is "lost from all worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of Udolpho," and Isabella Thorpe is collecting in her pocket-book the "horrid" titles of romances from the German. In 1814, apparently, the vogue of the sentimental, the scandalous, the mysterious, and the horrid still persisted. Scott, in the introductory chapter to Waverley, disrespectfully passes in review the modish novels, which, as it proved, were doomed to be supplanted by the series of romances he was then beginning:
"Had I announced in my frontispiece, 'Waverley, A Tale of Other Days,' must not every novel reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing has been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps about the middle of the second volume were doomed to guide the hero or heroine to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title page? and could it have been possible to me with a moderate attention to decorum to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns? Or, if I had rather chosen to call my work, 'A Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her solitary hours, which she fortunately always finds means of transporting from castle to cottage, though she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window and is more than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a blowsy peasant girl, whose jargon she can scarcely understand? Or again, if my Waverley had been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal … a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four in Hand, with a set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street, East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office?"
Yet Scott himself had once trodden in these well-worn paths of romance. In the general preface to the collected edition of 1829, wherein he seeks to "ravel out his weaved-up follies," he refers to "a tale of chivalry planned thirty years earlier in the style of The Castle of Otranto, with plenty of Border characters and supernatural incident." His outline of the plot and a fragment of the story, which was to be entitled Thomas the Rhymer, are printed as an appendix to the preface. Scott intended to base his story on an ancient legend, found in Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, concerning the horn and sword of Thomas of Hercildoune. Cannobie Dick, a jolly horse-cowper, was led by a mysterious stranger through an opening in a hillside into a long range of stables. In every stall stood a coal-black horse, and by every horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand. All were as still and silent as if hewn out of marble. At the far end of a gloomy hall, illuminated, like the halls of Eblis, only by torches, there lay, upon an ancient table, a horn and a sword. A voice bade Dick try his courage, warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the horn or the sword. Dick, whose stout heart quailed before the supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn before unsheathing the sword. At the first feeble blast the warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely brandishing their weapons and clashing their armour. Dick made a fruitless attempt to snatch the sword. After a mysterious voice had pronounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a whirlwind of irresistible fury. He told his story to the shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.
Regarding this legend as "an unhappy foundation for a prose story," Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Nathan Drake. Such a story as that of the magic horn and sword might have been told in the simple words that occur naturally to a shepherd, "warmed to courage over his third tumbler," like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the terrible tale of Thrawn Janet, or to Wandering Willie, who declared:
"I whiles mak a tale serve the turn among the country bodies, and I have some fearsome anes, that mak the auld carlines shake on the settle, and bits o' bairns skirl on their minnies out frae their beds."
The personality of the narrator, swayed by the terror of his tale, would have cast the spell that Scott's carefully framed sentences fail to create. Another of Scott's disjecta membra, composed at the end of the eighteenth century, is the opening of a story called The Lord of Ennerdale, in which the family of Ratcliffe settle down before the fire to listen to a story "savouring not a little of the marvellous." As Lady Ratcliffe and her daughters
"had heard every groan and lifted every trapdoor in company with the noted heroine of Udolpho, had valorously mounted en croupe behind the horseman of Prague through all his seven translators, had followed the footsteps of Moor through the forests of Bohemia,"
and were even suspected of an acquaintance with Lewis's Monk, Scott was setting himself no easy task when he undertook to thrill these seasoned adventurers. After this prologue, which leads one to expect a banquet of horrors, only a very brief fragment of the story is forthcoming. Though he gently derides Lady Ratcliffe's literary tastes, Scott, too, was an admirer of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, and had been so entranced by Burger's Lenore that he attempted an English version.[111] It was after hearing Taylor's translation of this ballad read aloud that he uttered his dismal ejaculation: "I wish to heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones"—a whim that was speedily gratified. He, too, like Lady Ratcliffe, had read Die Räuber; and he translated Goethe's Gëtz von Berlichingen. He delighted in Lewis's Tales of Wonder (1801) where the verse gallops through horrors so fearful that the "lights in the chamber burn blue," and himself contributed to the collection. He wrote "goblin dramas"[112] as terrific in intention, but not in performance, as Lewis's Castle Spectre and Maturin's Bertram. His Latin call-thesis dealt with the kind of subject "Monk" Lewis or Harrison Ainsworth or Poe might have chosen—the disposal of the dead bodies of persons legally executed. Scott continually added to his store of quaint and grisly learning both from popular tradition and from a library of such works as Bovet's Pandemonium, or the Devil's Cloyster Opened, Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered, whence he borrowed the name of the jackanapes in Wandering Willie's Tale, and the horse-shoe frown for the brow of the Redgauntlets, Heywood's Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, Joseph Taylor's History of Apparitions, from which he quotes in Woodstock. He was familiar with all the niceties of ghostly etiquette; he could distinguish at a glance the various ranks and orders of demons and spirits; he was versed in charms and spells; he knew exactly how a wizard ought to be dressed. This lore not only stood him in good stead when he compiled his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), but served to adorn his poems and novels. There was nothing unhealthy in his attitude towards the spectral world. At an inn he slept soundly in one bed of a double room, while a dead man occupied the other. Twice in his life he confessed to having felt "eerie"—once at Glamis Castle, which was said to be haunted by a Presence in a Secret Chamber, and once when he believed that he saw an apparition on his way home in the twilight; but he usually jests cheerfully when he speaks of the supernatural. He was interested in tracing the sources of terror and in studying the mechanism of ghost stories.
The axioms which he lays down are sound and suggestive:
"Ghosts should not appear too often or become too chatty. The magician shall evoke no spirits, whom he is not capable of endowing with manners and language corresponding to their supernatural character. Perhaps, to be circumstantial and abundant in minute detail and in one word … to be somewhat prosy, is the secret mode of securing a certain necessary degree of credulity from the hearers of a ghost story… The chord which vibrates and sounds at a touch remains in silent tension under continued pressure."[113]
Scott's ghost story, The Tapestried Chamber, or the Lady in the Sacque[114] which he heard from Miss Anna Seward, who had an unexpected gift for recounting such things at country house parties, gives the impression of being carefully planned according to rule. As a human being the Lady in the Sacque had a black record, but, considered dispassionately as a ghost, her manners and deportment are irreproachable. The ghost-seer's independence of character are so firmly insisted upon that it seems impertinent to doubt the veracity of his story. My Aunt Margaret's Mirror was told to Scott in childhood by an ancient spinster, whose pleasing fancy it was to read alone in her chamber by the light of a taper fixed in a candlestick which she had formed out of a human skull, and who was learned in superstitious lore. She describes accurately the mood, when "the female imagination is in due temperature to enjoy a ghost story":
"All that is indispensable for the enjoyment of the milder feeling of supernatural awe is that you should be susceptible of the slight shuddering which creeps over you when you hear a tale of terror—that well-vouched tale which the narrator, having first expressed his general disbelief of all such legendary lore, selects and produces, as having something in it which he has been always obliged to give up as inexplicable. Another symptom is a momentary hesitation to look round you, when the interest of the narrative is at the highest; and the third, a desire to avoid looking into a mirror, when you are alone, in your chamber, for the evening."[115]
In her story "Aunt Margaret" describes how, in a magic mirror belonging to Dr. Baptista Damiotti, Lady Bothwell and her sister Lady Forester see the wedding ceremony of Sir Philip Forester and a young girl in a foreign city interrupted by Lady Forester's brother, who is slain in the duel that ensues. Scott regarded these two stories as trifles designed to while away a leisure hour. On Wandering Willie's Tale—a masterpiece of supernatural terror—he bestowed unusual care. The ill fa'urd, fearsome couple—Sir Robert with his face "gash and ghastly as Satan's," and "Major Weir," the jackanape, in his red-laced coat and wig—Steenie's eerie encounter with the "stranger" on horseback, the ribald crew of feasters in the hall are described so faithfully and in such vivid phrases that it is no wonder Willie should remark at one point of the story: "I almost think I was there mysell, though I couldna be born at the same time." The power of the tale, which fascinates us from beginning to end and which can be read again and again with renewed pleasure, depends partly on Wandering Willie's gifts as a narrator, partly on the emotions that stir him as he talks. With unconscious art, he always uses the right word in his descriptions, and chooses those details that help us to fix the rapidly changing imagery of his scenes; and he reproduces exactly the natural dialogue of the speakers. He begins in a tone of calm, unhurried narration, with only a hint of fear in his voice, but, at the death of Sir Robert, grows breathless with horror and excitement. The uncanny incident of the silver whistle that sounds from the dead man's chamber is skilfully followed by a matter-of-fact account of Steenie's dealings with the new laird. The emotion culminates in the terror of the hall of ghastly revellers, whose wild shrieks "made Willie's gudesire's very nails grow blue and chilled the marrow in his banes." So lifelike is the scene, so full of colour and movement, that Steenie's descendants might well believe that their gudesire, like Dante, had seen Hell.
The notes, introductions and appendices to Scott's works are stored with material for novels of terror. The notes to Marmion, for instance, contain references to a necromantic priest whose story "much resembles that of Ambrosio in the Monk," to an "Elfin" warrior and to a chest of treasure jealously guarded for a century by the Devil in the likeness of a huntsman. In The Lady of the Lake there is a note on the ancient legend of the Phantom Sire, in Rokeby there is an allusion to the Demon Frigate wandering under a curse from harbour to harbour. To Scott "bogle-wark" was merely a diversion. He did not choose to make it the mainspring either of his poems or his romances. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel he had, indeed, intended to make the Goblin Page play a leading part, but the imp, as Scott remarked to Miss Seward, "by the natural baseness of his propensities contrived to slink downstairs into the kitchen." The White Lady of Avenel, who appears in The Monastery (1830)—a boisterous creature who rides on horseback, splashes through streams and digs a grave—was wisely withdrawn in the sequel, The Abbot. In the Introduction Scott states:
"The White Lady is scarcely supposed to have possessed either the power or the inclination to do more than inflict terror or create embarrassment, and is always subjected by those mortals who … could assert superiority over her."
The only apology Scott could offer to the critics who derided his wraith was that the readers "ought to allow for the capriccios of what is after all but a better sort of goblin." She was suggested by the Undine of De La Motte Fouqué. In his next novel, The Fortunes of Nigel, Scott formally renounced the mystic and the magical: "Not a Cock Lane scratch—not one bounce on the drum of Tedworth—not so much as the poor tick of a solitary death-watch in the wainscot." But Scott cannot banish spectres so lightly from his imagination. Apparitions—such as the Bodach Glas who warns Fergus M'Ivor of his approaching death in Waverley, or the wraith of a Highlander in a white cockade who is seen on the battlefield in The Legend of Montrose—had appeared in his earlier novels, and others appear again and again later. In The Bride of Lammermoor—the only one of Scott's novels which might fitly be called a "tale of terror"—the atmosphere of horror and the sense of overhanging calamity effectually prepare our minds for the supernatural, and the wraith of old Alice who appears to the master of Ravenswood is strangely solemn and impressive. But even more terrible is the description of the three hags laying out her corpse. The appearance of Vanda with the Bloody Finger in the haunted chamber of the Saxon manor in The Betrothed is skilfully arranged, and Eveline's terror is described with convincing reality. In Woodstock, Scott adopted the method of explaining away the apparently supernatural, although in his Lives of the Novelists he expressly disapproves of what he calls the "precaution of Snug the joiner." Charged by Ballantyne with imitating Mrs. Radcliffe, Scott defended himself by asserting:
"My object is not to excite fear of supernatural things in my reader, but to show the effect of such fear upon the agents of the story—one a man in sense and firmness, one a man unhinged by remorse, one a stupid, unenquiring clown, one a learned and worthy but superstitious divine."[116]
As Scott in his introduction quotes the passage from a treatise entitled The Secret History of the Good Devil of Woodstock, which reveals that the mysteries were performed by one Joseph Collins with the aid of two friends, a concealed trap-door and a pound of gunpowder, he cannot justly be accused of deceiving his readers. There are suggestions of Mrs. Radcliffe's method in others of his novels. In The Antiquary, before Lovel retires to the Green Room at Monkbar, he is warned by Miss Griselda Oldbuck of a "well-fa'urd auld gentleman in a queer old-fashioned dress with whiskers turned upward on his upper lip as long as baudrons," who is wont to appear at one's bedside. He falls into an uneasy slumber, and in the middle of the night is startled to see a green huntsman leave the tapestry and turn into the "well-fa'urd auld gentleman" before his very eyes. In Old Mortality, Edith Bellenden mistakes her lover for his apparition, just as one of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines might have done. In Peveril of the Peak, Fenella's communications with the hero in his prison, when he mistakes her voice for that of a spirit, have an air of Gothic mystery. The awe-inspiring villain, who appears in Marmion and Rokeby, may be distinguished by his scowl, his passion-lined face and gleaming eye. Rashleigh, in Rob Roy, who, understanding Greek, Latin and Hebrew, "need not care for ghaist or barghaist, devil or dobbie," and whose sequestered apartment the servants durst not approach at nightfall for "fear of bogles and brownies and lang-nebbit things frae the neist world," is of the same lineage. Sir Robert Redgauntlet, too, might have stepped out of one of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. His niece is not unlike one of her heroines. She speaks in the very accents of Emily when she says:
"Now I have still so much of our family spirit as enables me to be as composed in danger as most of my sex, and upon two occasions in the course of our journey—a threatened attack by banditti, and the overturn of our carriage—I had the fortune so to conduct myself as to convey to my uncle a very favourable idea of my intrepidity."
Jeanie Deans, the most admirable and the most skilfully drawn of Scott's women, is a daring contrast to the traditional heroine of romance. The "delicate distresses" of persecuted Emilies shrink into insignificance amid the tragedy and comedy of actual life portrayed in The Waverley Novels. The tyrannical marquises, vindictive stepmothers, dark-browed villains, scheming monks, chattering domestics and fierce banditti are thrust aside by a motley crowd of living beings—soldiers, lawyers, smugglers, gypsies, shepherds, outlaws and beggars. The wax-work figures, guaranteed to thrill with nervous suspense or overflow with sensibility at the appropriate moments, are replaced by real folk like "Old Mortality," Andrew Fairservice, Dugald Dalgetty and Peter Peebles, whose humour and pathos are those of our own world. The historical background, faint, misty and unreal in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, becomes, in those of Scott, arresting and substantial. The grave, artificial dialogue in which Mrs. Radcliffe's characters habitually discourse descends to some of Scott's personages, but is often exchanged for the natural idiom of simple people. The Gothic abbey, dropped down in an uncertain, haphazard fashion, in some foreign land, is deserted for huts, barns inns, cottages and castles, solidly built on Scottish soil. We leave the mouldy air of the subterranean vault for the keen winds of the moorland. The terrors of the invisible world only fill the stray corners of his huge scene. He creates romance out of the stuff of real life.