Sir Walter Scott

by Andrew Lang

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”

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.

WATERLOO

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,