The Fortunes of Nigel (May 1822) was the last novel written by Scott before his labours produced an ominous change in his health. It is, no doubt, as Lockhart says, in the first rank of his romances. The story is vécu: Scott had lived as long among the dramas, pamphlets, histories, and documents of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean times, as in any part of our history, and his Scottish types of character he knew by heart. All that Jacobean comedy, mainly the play of Ben Jonson, could tell him, he had fresh in his memory, or could “bring out with a wet finger.” Hence the brilliance and vivacity of the street scenes, the rufflers in Alsatia, the scenes at Court, and at the ordinary. He caught the moment when the heavy-hilted broad sword of the Scottish sire was becoming the long rapier of the Scottish son. In gentle King Jamie he had a model of which the grotesque absurdity needed pruning rather than exaggeration, and of all Scott’s many portraits of Kings, the slobbering trotting figure of James is the most truthful and the most comic. These moralists who denounce dissimulation and incontinence, Baby Charles and Steenie, are delicately touched: Ritchie Moniplies is a worthy pendant to Andrew Fairservice: the prentices are as excellent as the bullies and the old miser with his stern daughter in Alsatia: the whole life of Jacobean London is placed before us as vividly as the life of Georgian Edinburgh in The Heart of Midlothian. The “hero,” too, the unheroic hero, is, for once, a living and even realistic character. The ancestral Puritanism of Nigel degenerates into the cautious gambling of “The Sparrow Hawk,” who plays with prentices for small sums, and takes care to leave off a winner. Nobody can deny that this is a natural metamorphosis, though the effect is to make us rather detest Nigel. He is supposed to throw off his mean vice, but he cannot be styled amiable. George Heriot is a better kind of man, and Ritchie is as superior to his master, morally, as Strap to Roderick Random. The young women of the tale, the pretty daughter of the goldsmith, and the mysterious lady, do not distinguish themselves among Scott’s young women. But the book is certainly in the foremost rank.
VISIT OF GEORGE IV
The visit of George IV to Edinburgh, with the death of Erskine, slain by a calumny at which most men would have laughed, put a strain upon Scott, in July and August 1822, from which he never recovered. The toil of organizing the reception of the first crowned King of England who had visited Scotland since 1650 fell upon Sir Walter. Scott was, in great part, the cause of the Royal visit, and his whole strength was given to organizing success. There was “a grand terryfication” (dramatization in the manner of Terry the actor) “of the Holyrood chapters in Waverley.” The Highlanders were much to the front, “all plaided and plumed in their tartan array,” and the fat white legs of George IV appeared under the once forbidden philabeg. His Majesty, a man of vivid imagination, conceived himself to be a true Stuart, come to his own again; and Scott, himself in the Campbell tartan and trews, appears to have accepted him in that romantic character. He himself was the Baron Bradwardine of the hour, and we know how the Baron sat down on a glass which had touched the lips of His Most Sacred Majesty, and cut himself rather badly. In the sultry weather he “had to arrange everything, from the ordering of a procession to the cut of a button,” and he had also to amuse the perplexed old poet Crabbe, who seized on this frantic moment for a visit to a nation which he did not understand.
In one light the visit of George was very well. It reconciled the furious feuds which had raged around The Beacon, and it was a proof that Scotland, at last, was content with the Hanoverian in the disguise of the Stuart dynasty. The Highland chiefs were anxious about their precedence, which is said to have depended on the station occupied by each clan at Bannockburn, a point probably to be decided on the extremely diverse traditions of the clan bards or sennachies. Scott, aided by General Stewart of Garth, the historian of the Highland regiments, was the Montrose who brought harmony among the clans, no easy task where Glengarry and Clanranald were at odds about the chiefship of the Macdonalds, and Cluny and Mackintosh were not of one mind as to the headship of Clan Chattan. Be it remarked that, when in tartans, Scott wore the trews, not the philabeg. Glengarry, whether in the philabeg or not, rode in the procession, followed by “Tail,” pedestrians. The King, and Sir William Curtis, a stout dignitary of London town, both wore the Royal Stuart tartans, invented, it was said, for Prince Charles. No Stuart king, of course, had ever worn the Highland costume, except in expeditions beyond the Highland line. These amusing pageantries were “making every brain dizzy but his own,” when the death of Erskine, the mild, quiet, timid man who had been his dearest friend, fell upon Scott.
The main results of “the right royal row,” as Scott called it, were that, by his suggestion, the attainders of 1715 and 1745 were redressed, and that Scott, pursued to Abbotsford by crowds of guests, appears to have suffered from a slight seizure of an apoplectic kind. “I have not been very well,” he wrote to Terry in November, “a whoreson thickness of blood, and a depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends ... have annoyed me much, and Peveril will, I fear, smell of the apoplexy.” This, says Lockhart, is the first allusion to Sir Walter’s fatal malady, the malady which had caused the death of his father. Lockhart suspected that he had sustained and concealed slight attacks of this nature. The machine was showing signs of overwork, which appear in the straggling Peveril of the Peak with its missed opportunities. Yet Quentin Durward was in progress in company with Peveril, and there is no smell of the apoplexy in that stirring tale, which made Scott’s fortune in France. The pictures of Louis XI, of his strange funereal servitors, of the delightful Le Balafré, a pendant of Dugald Dalgetty, with the bustling events of the story, have won popularity, though the romance, at first, was received with little enthusiasm. Perhaps this coldness, or a relapse into commonsense, made Constable announce that he would enter into no more bargains for books not only unchristened but unborn. The novels were appearing in uniform collected editions: the market was glutted. Scott thought of a set of dialogues on “superstitious” beliefs, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and witchcraft, as an alternative to romance. But the public was, by this time, solely devoted to fiction. Quentin Durward, too, began to sell in the old way, and Scott postponed his dealings with things
On the margin grey
’Twixt the soul’s life and day.
Scott had written no novel of contemporary society since The Antiquary, and Laidlaw, on the Eildon hill above Melrose, suggested a romance of the little town, in the actual year, 1823. The hint resulted in St. Ronan’s Well (December 1823); the scene is not Melrose, but the Spa of Innerleithen on the upper Tweed. The plot of St. Ronan’s Well was paralyzed by the prudery of James Ballantyne. A mischance on the part of the heroine was suppressed, to please James, consequently there is no reason in life for Clara’s ruined brain, or for anything else that is essential to the progress and conclusion of the narrative. There is a similar error, caused by a remonstrance from Jeffrey, in Dombey and Son, where the conduct of Edith towards Mr. Carker is inexplicable, as it is perfectly clear, from a passage which Dickens vainly tried to explain away, that Edith had been Mr. Carker’s mistress. The third or fourth rate society of the Spa may be true to nature, but is neither convincing nor amusing, and Meg Dods cannot cover the multitude of sins of confusion in St. Ronan’s Well. Miss Edgeworth wrote that the author of the last thirty pages of the book should be “carbonadoed,” and, practically, James Ballantyne would have been the sufferer, for he was the only begetter of the “incredible and unaccountable conclusion.”
“REDGAUNTLET”
Meanwhile a very different romance, the last of Scott’s before ruin fell on him, was in progress, Redgauntlet. In Redgauntlet we may surely say that Scott has found himself again, at his best, or very nearly at his best. The form of narrative, partly told in letters, as by Richardson, is no longer popular, and we are not sorry when the author deserts it. The plot of the story is rather baffling, and, as the tale goes on, we almost forget our curiosity as to why Darsie Latimer should not go near the English border. The reason, when we do learn it, is far fetched, Darsie was not worth all that mechanism of intrigue. But the pictures of old Edinburgh life about 1763, of Scott’s own father as the elder Fairford, with his good heart, and his “pernickety” ascetic lawyer’s ways, is delightful. Peter Peebles, the litigant maddened by law and drink, is pathetic no less than humorous; if the legal business appears dull, it is, none the less, or perhaps the more, Balzacian, supposing Balzac to have had the humour of Dumas. The Quakers are borrowed from what Scott saw, in boyhood, of a Quaker household at Kelso. Excellent is Geddes’s nonresisting courage, and his shamefaced pride in his armorial bearings, the ged, or pike, the freebooter of fresh water. The scene of salmon spearing on the Solway flats is a description of a sport dear to Scott as pursued in a boat on Tweed. Things like huge snow-shoes were used in my boyhood, the spearman stood erect above the water, one foot in each wooden shoe, he could spear a fish between them, and the exercise demanded much gift of balance, and a cool head, while the torches flared above the swift black running waters. Green-Mantle again recalls the Manteau Vert of Scott’s youth. He borrowed the horse-shoe frown of old Redgauntlet from the face of the wicked witch, the sister of the Wizard, Major Weir, in the legend given by Sinclair, in “Satan’s Invisible World Disclosed,” and he also borrowed thence the name of the jackanapes in “Wandering Willie’s Tale.” The scenes in the mysterious Redgauntlet’s cottage are as good romance as those in the Provost’s house at Dumfries, with the story of “Pate in Peril” are good comedy. The brokenhearted Nanty Ewart is full of an original pathos not common in Scott; his story of his own life of miserable adventure, with the foreknowledge of his doom, is a masterpiece, and as a masterpiece “the fallen and faded Ascanius” of the tale, Prince Charles, the battered stately wanderer, with the despotic mistress, was universally accepted.
“REDGAUNTLET”