Sir Walter Scott

by Andrew Lang

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.

“BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR”

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

The last Lord of Ravenswood to Ravenswood doth ride,
To woo a dead maiden to be his bride,

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.

DUGALD DALGETTY

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.

“IVANHOE”

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.