However, Scott was otherwise inspired! The appearance of Ivanhoe, in December 1819, marked the flood-tide of his popularity. The English rejoiced at being freed from “the dialect,” which was and remains to them a stumbling block, though they find no difficulty in the lingo of the modern “Kailyard.” Lockhart says that, after Ivanhoe, the sale of Scott’s novels fell off, though Constable managed to conceal the circumstance from the author, an ill-judged proceeding.
“THE MONASTERY”
As Lockhart says, the next three or four years were the most expensive in Scott’s life, through his ignorance of the truth, whereas they should have been years of retrenchment. It became proportionately difficult for Sir Walter to “pull up” in his expenditure, and the mine was laid that exploded seven years later. Ivanhoe remains one of the best known of Scott’s novels, probably because it is precisely suited to the taste of boyhood, when the eyes of studious boys can be diverted from the mysteriously bewitching romances of the late Mr. Henty. We have all sighed with Rebecca, we have all been of Thackeray’s opinion about the “very English” respectable Rowena, we have all hated Front de Boeuf; “amo Locksley,” says Thackeray, and so say all of us; we have delighted in Friar Tuck, laughed with Wamba, and over the much-criticised scene, due to Scott’s good nature, of the resurrection of a trencherman so resolute as Athelstane. No mere knock on the head could get rid of so thick-skulled a thane as the lord of Coningsburgh.
While Scott’s health was recovered, while Abbotsford was full of guests, and the Abbotsford Hunt was, as the farmer said, the thing worth living for in the year, The Monastery was being written, and proved a not undeserved failure, relatively speaking. The only disaster of Scott, in his treatment of visionary things, is the White Lady of Avenel, and of all his bores, the Euphuist, Sir Percy Shafton is the least humorous, and was regarded as the most tedious. The business of the bodkin, and the tailor ancestry of the really gallant though rather distraught knight, did not amuse, and the historical setting is not handled in a manner worthy of the opportunity, the sudden fall of the ancient Church.
“THE ABBOT”
Never, surely, was such a bouleversement as the religious revolution taken so quietly as in Scotland. The only change, said the keeper of a hostel at St. Andrews, was that where the Dean had sat and called for claret, the Moderator sat and shouted for more toddy! This is a story of Scott’s, probably apocryphal, for toddy did not come in with Presbyterianism, and Darnley is the only whisky drinker whom I have remarked in the documents of the period. The truth is that, in many districts of the South, Catholicism was dead before it fell. The love of “a new day,” as they called it, and relief from priestly dues, with the fun of havoc and pillage, were universally attractive, and only a remnant, in outlying parishes, mourned for the Mass that had become a capital offence. Very few sentimental regrets accompanied the flight of the ancient faith, and the Abbot of Unreason jigged joyously through the roofless cathedrals. Thus perhaps the dramatic opportunity of Scott was less excellent than it seems at a first glance. Only Knox’s “rascal multitude” began to discover, after they had helped to wreck the monasteries, that life was as hardly ground down by lay as by clerical landlords, that gaiety was gone, that holidays were curtailed, that the penances of the new Kirk were harsher than those of the old, and that Sunday, from a feast, had become a day of gloom. Under James VI a preacher observed that he feared the rabble more than he did the Catholic earls, but rabble and earls were alike brought under the yoke. All this had not been foreseen, and thus the Reformation was taken lightly, not with the terrible struggles of contemporary France.
Far from being depressed, and abandoning his theme, Scott deliberately reverted to it, continuing some of the characters of The Monastery in The Abbot. To Lockhart, now his son-in-law, he sent a copy, with the inscription,
Up he rose in a funk, lapped a toothful of brandy,
And to it again ... any odds upon Sandy?
The Introduction to Nigel contains, with the rest of Scott’s Ars Poetica, a half apology for “The White Lady of Avenel.” She disappears from The Abbot, which, by virtue of the picture of Queen Mary and her Loch Leven adventures, and of Catherine Seyton, with all the lively scenes in old Marian Edinburgh, helped to restore the author’s shaken popularity.
John Ballantyne had ventured a “Novelists’ Library,” heavy books in double columns, and Scott contributed charming introductory essays, but in the summer of 1821 he lost this favourite henchman, and remarked that the sun would never shine so brightly again for himself. John clearly was no man of business, his possessions were a minus quantity, though he believed himself to have some property, and bequeathed a visionary £2,000 to Scott.