[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.]
“ROB ROY”
“HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN”
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),
I like not
Such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath,
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.”
“BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR”