DAVID RITCHIE.
(Elshender the Recluse.)
The particulars of David Ritchie’s life, which are in themselves sufficiently meagre, have been more than once already laid before the public. In Blackwood’s Monthly Magazine for June, and in the Edinburgh Magazine for October, 1817, accounts of the supposed original of the Black Dwarf are given, evidently from no mean authority, if we may judge from the style in which these narratives are written. A separate production, also, of a very interesting nature, embellished with a striking and singularly correct likeness of the dwarf, appeared in 1820, and comprised every anecdote of this singular being previously uncollected. It is therefore conceived totally unnecessary to detail at any length a subject which, independent of its want of elegance and interest, has been already so completely exhausted. To give a few sketches of the character and habits of David Ritchie, and contrast them with those of the more sublime Elshender, will, it is hoped, prove a more grateful entertainment.
David Ritchie was a pauper, who lived the greater part of a long life, and finally died so late as the year 1811, in a solitary cottage situated in the romantic glen of Manor in Peebles-shire. This vale, now rendered classic ground by the abode of the Black Dwarf, was otherwise formerly remarkable as having been the retirement of the illustrious and venerable Professor Ferguson.[20]
His person coincided singularly well with the description of the fictitious recluse. He had been deformed and horrible since his birth in no ordinary degree, which was probably the cause of the analogous peculiarities of his temper. His countenance, of the darkest of dark complexions, was half covered with a long grisly black beard, and bore, as the centre of its system of terrors, two eyes of piercing black, which were sometimes, in his excited moments, lighted up with wild and supernatural lustre. His head was of a singular shape, conical and oblong, and might now form no unworthy subject for the studies of the Phrenological Society. To speak in their language, he must have had few of the moral or intellectual faculties developed in any perfection; for his brow retreated immediately above the eyebrows, and threw nearly the whole of his head, which was large, behind the ear, where, it is said, the meaner organs of the brain are situated—giving immense scope to cruelty, obstinacy, self-esteem, etc. His nose was long and aquiline; his mouth wide and contemptuously curled upward; and his chin protruded from the visage in a long grisly peak. His body, short and muscular, was thicker than that of most ordinary men, and, with his arms, which were long and of great power, might have formed the parts of a giant, had not nature capriciously curtailed his form of other limbs conformable to these proportions. His arms had the same defect with those of the celebrated Betterton, and he could not lift them higher than his breast; yet such was their strength, that he has been known to tear up a tree by the roots, which had baffled the united efforts of two labourers, who had striven by digging to eradicate it. His legs were short, fin-like, and bent outwards, with feet totally inapplicable to the common purposes of walking. These he constantly endeavoured to conceal from sight by wrapping them up in immense masses of rags. This ungainly part of his figure is remarkable as the only one which differs materially from the description of “Cannie Elshie,” whose “body, thick and square, was mounted upon two large feet.”
He was the son of very poor parents, who, at an early period of his life, endeavoured to place him with a tradesman in the metropolis to learn the humble art of brushmaking; which purpose he however soon deserted in disgust, on account of the insupportable notice which his uncouth form attracted in the streets. His spirit, perhaps, also panted for the seclusion of his native hills, where he might have ease to indulge in that solitude so appropriate to the outcast ugliness of his person, and free from the insulting gaze of vulgar curiosity. Here, in the valley of his birth, he formed the romantic project of building a small hut for himself, in which, like the Recluse of the tale, he might live for ever retired from the race for whose converse he was unfitted, and give unrestrained scope to the moods of his misanthropy. He constructed this hermitage in precisely the same manner with the Black Dwarf of Mucklestane Moor. Huge rocks, which he had rolled down from the neighbouring hill, formed the foundation and walls, to which an alternate layer of turf, as is commonly used in cottages, gave almost the consistency and fully the comfort of mortar. He is said to have evinced amazing bodily strength in moving and placing these stones, such as the strongest men, with all the advantages of stature and muscular proportion, could hardly have equalled. This corporeal energy, which lay chiefly in his arms, will remind the reader of the exertions of the Black Dwarf, as witnessed by Hobbie Elliot and young Earnscliff, on the morning after his first appearance, when employed in arranging the foundations of his hermitage out of the Grey Geese of Mucklestane Moor.—See pp. 78, 79.
When the young hermit had finished his hut, and succeeded in furnishing it with a few coarse household utensils, framed chiefly by his own hands, he began to form a garden. In the cultivation and adornment of this spot, he displayed a degree of natural taste and ingenuity that might have fitted him for a higher fate than the seclusion of a hermitage. In a short time he had stocked it with such a profusion of fruit-trees, herbs, vegetables, and flowers, that it seemed a little forest of beauty—a shred of Eden, fit to redeem the wilderness around from its character of desolation—a gem on the swarth brow of the desert. Not only did it exhibit the finest specimens of flowers indigenous to this country, but he had also contrived to procure a number of exotics, whose Linnæan names he would roll forth to the friends whom he indulged with an admission within its precincts, with a pomposity of voice that never failed to enhance their admiration. It soon came to be much resorted to by visitors, being accounted, with the genius of the place, one of the most remarkable curiosities of the county. Dr. Ferguson used sometimes to visit the eccentric solitary, as an amusement in that retired spot; and Sir Walter Scott, who was a frequent guest at the house of that venerable gentleman, is said to have often held long communings with him; likewise several other individuals of literary celebrity.
There is something more peculiarly romantic and poetical in the circumstance of the Misanthrope’s attachment to his garden than can be found in any of the other habits and qualities attributed to him. The care of that beautiful spot was his chief occupation, and may be said to have been the only pleasure his life was ever permitted to experience. On it alone he could employ that faculty of affection with which every heart, even that of the cynic, is endowed. Shut out from the correspondence and sympathy of his own fellow-creatures by the insurmountable pale of his own ugliness, there existed, in the whole circle of nature, no other object that could receive his affections, or reply to the feelings he had to impart. In flowers alone, those lineal and undegenerate descendants of Paradise, the Solitary found an object of attachment that could do equal honour to his feelings and to his taste. His garden was a perfect seraglio of vegetable beauties, and there he could commune with a thousand objects of affection, that never shrunk from the touch which threatened horror and pollution to all the world beside.
By the peculiarities of his person, as well as by the other abject circumstances of his condition, it may be easily supposed that the Hermit of Manor was entirely excluded from that great solace of the miseries of man, the sympathy to be derived from the tenderness and affections of woman. He was irredeemably condemned, as it were, to a dreary bachelorhood of the heart, which knew that there was for it no hope, no possibility of enjoyment. Perhaps the constant sense of loathsomeness in the eyes of the fair part of creation might help to increase the natural wretchedness of his existence. The misanthropy of Elshender is pathetically represented in the tale as springing chiefly from sources of disappointment like this. It happens, also, that his humble prototype once ventured to express the sensibilities of the common delirium of man, and that he was rejected by the object of his affection. This insult, though it sprung from a very natural feeling on the part of the woman, sunk deep into his heart; and thus was he debarred from what would have been the only means of sweetening the bitter lot of solitary poverty and decrepitude,—dashed back with scorn from the general draught at which even his inferiors were liberally indulged. This circumstance forms another trait of resemblance between the Black Dwarf and David Ritchie; and, by a happy consonance never before discovered, confirms their identity.
“His habits were, in many respects, singular, and indicated a mind sufficiently congenial with its uncouth tabernacle. A jealous, misanthropical, and irritable temper was his most prominent characteristic. The sense of his deformity haunted him like a phantom; and the insults and scorn to which this exposed him had poisoned his heart with fierce and bitter feelings, which, from other traits in his character, do not appear to have been more largely infused into his original temperament than that of his fellow-men. He detested children, on account of their propensity to insult and persecute him. To strangers he was generally reserved, crabbed, and surly; and even towards persons who had been his greatest benefactors, and who possessed the greatest share of his good-will, he frequently betrayed much caprice and jealousy. A lady, who knew him from his infancy, says, that, although he showed as much attachment and respect for her father’s family as it was in his nature to show for any, yet they were always obliged to be very cautious in their deportment towards him. One day, having gone to visit him with another lady, he took them through his garden, and was showing them, with much pride and good-humour, all his rich and tastefully assorted borders, here picking up with his long staff some insidious weed, and there turning to digress into the history of some mysterious exotic, when they happened to stop near a plot of cabbages, which had been somewhat injured by the caterpillars. Davie, observing one of the ladies smile, instantly assumed a savage scowling aspect, rushed among the cabbages, and dashed them to pieces with his kent, exclaiming, ‘I hate the worms, for they mock me!’”
When he visited the neighbouring metropolis of the county, which happened very seldom towards the latter part of his life, he was generally followed by crowds of boys, who hooted and insulted him, with all that disregard of feeling and insolence of wickedness so often to be observed in children of the lower ranks in Scottish villages. On these occasions he was wont to give his persecutors the “length of his kent,” as he called it, when he could reach them; but they being generally too nimble for his crippled evolutions, he had often to vent his revenge in the more harmless form of curses. These were frequently of the most terrific and unusual kind. He is even said to have evinced something like genius in the invention of his imprecations, some of which far surpassed Gray’s celebrated
“Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!”
He would swear he would “cleave them to the harn-pans, if he had but his cran fingers on them;” that he “could pour seething lead down their throats;” that “hell would never be full till they were in it;” and frequently exclaimed that there was nothing he would “like so well as to see their souls girnin’ for a thousand eternities on the red-het brander o’ the de’il!”
Among the traits of his character, there is none reminds us so strongly of the Misanthrope of the tale as this propensity to execration. The same style of discourse, and almost the same terms of imprecation, are common to both. The Mighty Unknown has put expressions into the mouth of this character which, as specimens of the grand and sublime, are altogether unequalled in the whole circle of English poetry—not even excepting the magnificent thunders of Byron’s muse. Now, his prototype is well remembered, by those who have conversed with him, to have frequently used language which, sometimes sinking to delicacy and even elegance, and at others rising to a very tempest of execration and diabolical expression, might have been deemed almost miraculous from his mouth, could it not have been attributed partly to the impassioned inspiration that naturally flowed from his consciousness of deformity, from keen resentment of insult, and from the despairing, loveless sterility of his heart.
The history of his death-bed furnishes us with an anecdote of a beautiful and atoning character.
He had always through life expressed the utmost abhorrence of being buried among what he haughtily termed the “common brush” in the parish churchyard, and pointed out a particular spot, in the neighbourhood of his cottage, where he had been frequently known to lie dreaming or reading for long summer days, as a more agreeable place of interment. It is remarked by a former biographer, that he has displayed no small portion of taste in the selection of this spot. It is the summit of a small rising ground, called the Woodhill, situated nearly in the centre of the parish of Manor, covered with green fern, and embowered on the top by a circle of rowan-trees planted by the Dwarf’s own hand, for the double purpose of serving as a mausoleum or monument to his memory, and keeping away, by the charm of consecration supposed to be vested in their nature, the influence of witchcraft and other unhallowed powers from the grave.
All around this romantic spot the waste features of a mountainous country bound the horizon, presenting a striking contrast to the fertile beauty of the intermediate valley, and withal capable of suggesting to the enthusiastic and imaginative mind of the Solitary, the idea of this scene being a more desirable grave, sacred as it was in the grandeur of Nature, than the merely Christian ground of a country churchyard. “What!” the proud unsocial soul of the misanthrope might perhaps think—
“What! to be decently interred
In a churchyard, and mingle my brave dust
With stinking rogues, that rot in winding-sheets,
Surfeit-slain fools, the common dung o’ th’ soil!”
Nevertheless, whatever might have been his sentiments regarding the dead among whom, during his days of health, he loathed to be placed, certain it is, that, when brought within view and feeling of the awful close of mortal existence, his heart was softened towards his fellow-men, his antipathies relaxed, and he died with a wish upon his lips to be buried among his fathers.
In 1820, the writer of the present narrative visited the deserted hut of “Bowed Davie,” actuated by a sort of pilgrim-respect for scenes hallowed by genius. The little mansion at present existing is not that built by the Dwarf’s own hands, but one of later date, erected by the charity of a neighbouring gentleman in the year 1802. A small tablet of freestone, bearing this date below the letters D. R. was still to be seen in the western gable. The eastern division of the cottage, separated from the other by a partition of stone and lime, and entering by a different door, was still inhabited by his sister. It is remarkable that even with that near relation he was never on terms of any affection; an almost complete estrangement having subsisted between these two lonely beings for many years. Agnes had been a servant in the earlier part of her life; but having of late years become subject to a degree of mental aberration, she had retired from every sort of employment to her brother’s habitation, where she subsisted on the charity of the poor’s funds.
On entering the cottage with my guide, we found her seated on a low settle before the fire, her hands reclined upon her lap, and her eyes gazing unmeaningly on a small turf fire, which died away in a perfect wilderness of chimney. Her whole figure and situation reminded me strongly of the inimitable description of the lone Highland woman in Hogg’s “Winter Evening Tales,” who sat singing by the light of a moss-lamp in expectation of the apparition of her son. The scene was nearly as wild and picturesque, the wretched inmate of the hut was as lonely and helpless, and there was an air of desolate imbecility about her that rendered her almost as interesting. It seemed surprising, indeed, how a person apparently so abandoned by her own energies and the care of her fellow-creatures, could at all exist in such a solitude. She neither moved nor looked up on our entrance; but a few minutes after we had seated ourselves, which we did with silence and awe, she lifted her eyes, and thereby gave us a fuller view of her countenance. She much resembled her brother in features, but was not deformed. Her face was dark with age and wretchedness, and her aspect, otherwise somewhat appalling, was rendered almost unearthly by two large black eyes, the lustre of which was not the less horrible by the imbecility of their gaze. I have been thus particular in describing her person and circumstances, because I do not judge it impossible that she may have suggested the original idea of Elspeth Cheyne, the superannuated dependant of Glenallan, in the “Antiquary.”
Through the medium of my guide, a sagacious country lad, I contrived to ask her a number of questions concerning her brother; but she was extremely shy in answering them, and expressed her jealousy of my intentions by saying, “she wondered why so many grand people had come from distant parts to inquire after her family—she was sure there was naething ill anent them.” Little did she, poor soul, understand the cause of this curiosity, or the honour conferred upon her family by the attention of the great hermit-author, in whose works the very mention of a name confers immortality.
She showed us her brother’s Bible. It was of Kincaid’s fine quarto edition, and had been bought in 1773 by the Dwarf himself. His name was written with his own hand on a blank leaf, and it was with something like transport that I drew a fac-simile of the autograph into my pocket-book, which I still preserve.
Agnes Ritchie died in December, 1821, ten years after the decease of her brother, and was buried in the same grave, in Manor churchyard, on which occasion the deformed bones of Bowed Davie were found, to the utter disproof of a vulgar report, that they had suffered resurrection at the hands of certain anatomists in the College of Glasgow.
I found the part of the house which had been inhabited by the Dwarf himself deserted as he had left it at his death. Its furniture had been all dispersed among the curious or the friendly; and a host of poultry were now suffered to roost on the rafters where only soot formerly dared to hang. His seat of divination before the door had been suffered to remain. It was covered very rurally with a ruinous door of a cart. There seemed no precise window in the hut, but it contained numerous holes and bores all round, some of which were built up with turf. I drew a pair of rusty nails from a joist near the door, and, wrapping them up in a piece of paper, brought them away.
We stole a look at the garden, by climbing up the high wall. Some care has been taken by the neighbouring peasants to preserve it in good order; but, alas! it is scarcely the ghost of what it was: “Cum Troja fuit,” there was not a weed to be seen over its whole surface, nor durst a single kail-worm intrude its unhallowed nose within the precincts; an hundred mountain-ashes, displaying their red, sour fruit to the temptation of the passing urchin, stood around like a guard, to preserve from the influence of witchcraft the richer treasures that lay within,—
“Fair as the gardens of Gul in their bloom”;
but now weeds and kail-worms were abundant, the rowan-trees had been all cut down, and Bowed Davie’s garden, that once might have rivalled Milton’s imagination of Paradise, now lay stale, flat, and unprofitable—like a buxom cheek deprived of its blushes, or Greece deserted by the liberty that once, according to Byron, inspired its beauty. A few skeps, however, still remained, which the neighbouring Hobbie Elliots had not taken away.
It was a curious trait in the character of David Ritchie, that he was very superstitious. Not only had he planted his house, his garden, and even his intended grave, all round with the mountain-ash, but it is also well authenticated that he never went abroad without a branch of this singular antidote, tied round with a red thread, in his pocket, to prevent the effects of the evil eye. When the sancta sanctorum of his domicile were so sacrilegiously ransacked after his death, there was found an elf-stone, or small round pebble, bored in the centre, hung by a cord of hair passed through the hole to the head of his bed!
After taking the foregoing view of the Wizard’s fairy bower, I was next conducted to his grave, which lies in the immediate vicinity. A slip of his favourite rowan-tree marked the spot. It had been planted several years after his death by some kindly hand, and, in the absence of a less perishable monument, seemed a wonderful act of delicacy and attention. It spoke a pathos to the feelings that the finest inscription could not have excited,—it was so consonant with the former desires of “the poor inhabitant below!”
In allusion to the foregoing circumstances, the following verses were composed, and inserted in a periodical publication:—
I sat upon the Wizard’s grave,—
’Twas on a smiling summer day,
When all around the desert spot
Bloomed in the young delights of May.
In undistinguished lowliness
I found the little mound of earth,
And bitter weeds o’ergrew the place,
As if his heart had given them birth,
And they from thence their nurture drew,—
In such luxuriancy they grew.
No friendship to his grave had lent
Such rudely-sculptured monument
As marked the peasant’s place of rest;
For he, the latest of his race,
Had left behind no friend to trace
Such frail memorial o’er his breast.
But o’er his head a sapling waved
The honours of its slender form,
And in its loneliness had braved
The autumn’s blast—the winter’s storm.
Some friendly hand the tribute gave,
To mark the undistinguished grave,
That, drooping o’er that sod, it might
Repay a world’s neglectful scorn,
And, catching sorrow from the night,
There weep a thousand tears at morn.
It was an emblem of himself—
A widowed, solitary thing,
To which no circling season might
An hour of greener gladness bring;
A churchyard desert was its doom,
Its parent soil a darkling tomb;
Such was the Solitary’s fate,
So joyless and so desolate;
For, blasted soon as it was given,
His was the life that knew no hope,
His was the soul that knew no heaven—
Then, stranger, by one pitying drop,
Forgive, forgive the Misanthrope!
CHAPTER VI.
Old Mortality.