By WALLACE BRUCE.
It has been truly said that Walter Scott’s novels have done more to warm the hearts of the English people toward their northern brethren than any other influence during the last century. The two races, unlike in national traditions and social characteristics, differing as to climatic influence and formation of country, with a blood-stained record since the days of Keneth Mac Alpine, were not naturally allied, or well prepared for immediate and lasting friendship. To borrow the language of surgery: It was not a national break to be easily “knitted,” but a sort of compound fracture.
For thirty generations English and Scot had literally “glowered” across the border. Constrained in the narrow island of Britain, they had struggled like Roman gladiators in a wave-washed Coliseum, from which there was no escape. In the world’s history there is no other record of two races, with so many divergent points, and so much ancestral hatred, solidifying into one harmonious nation; and it is to the glory of Scott to have contributed to so grand a consummation. “All war,” Bulwer says, “is a misunderstanding.” It seemed to be the mission of our novelist to introduce England and Scotland to each other, and to make future misunderstanding impossible. Some of the volumes and characters, which we are to consider in this and in the following paper, emphasize and illustrate this conclusion.
“The Pirate,” next in historic sequence, has little to do with the history of reigns and dynasties. With the exception of a single paragraph, which refers incidentally to the commotion between Highlanders and Lowlanders, between Williamites and Jacobites, one would not dream that there was such a thing as a government in the world. The reader, in spite of the warlike title, finds himself in a northern Arcadia. In the hospitable home of Magnus Troil we have a picture of a Norwegian Udaller—one of the last survivors, who kept alive the customs of Scandinavia in the Orkney and Zetland Islands. What Cedric, the Saxon, was to his people, as a prototype of antique manners in the reign of Richard, the Lion Hearted, Magnus Troil is to the few surviving Norwegians at the close of the last century in the stormy islands of the north. We sit at his board, and hear Sagas rehearsed by fishermen, who preserved among themselves the ancient Norse tongue. We listen to the dark romance of other days when the black raven banner ruled the seas. We are taken back in fancy to moonlit bays, where mermaids mingle their voices with the moaning waves. The monstrous leviathans of the deep again seem real, and the sea-snake, with towering head, girdles with its green folds the misty islands of Shetland. We find captains negotiating for favorable voyages with weird hags and insane witches—antique insurance brokers, who were willing to take payment without giving indemnity. We find in Norna—the wild prophetess—who half believed her own divinations, a legitimate descendant of the Voluspæ, or divining women, who, from Hebraic and Delphic times, have wielded power through centuries of superstition. We find Christian inhabitants of well governed and hospitable villages, who regard the spoils of the sea, and castaway wrecks, as kindly dispensations of Providence. We are introduced to a primitive people still clinging to the belief that a supernatural race, allied to the fairies, sometimes propitious to mortals, but more frequently capricious and malevolent, worked below the earth as artificers of iron and precious metals. We see lovers still pledging their troth and taking the Promise of Oden at the Standing Stones of Stennis, and note the patriotism and proud spirit of Minna Troil, as she responds to her lover’s description of other lands of palm and cocoa,
Fair realms of continual summer,
And fields ever fragrant with flowers.
“No,” she answers, “my own rude country has charms for me, even desolate as you think it, and depressed as it surely is, which no other land on earth can offer to me. I endeavor in vain to represent to myself those visions of trees and of groves, which my eye never saw; but my imagination can conceive no sight in nature more sublime than these waves, when agitated by a storm, or more beautiful, than when they come, as they now do, rolling in calm tranquility to the shore. Not the fairest scene in a foreign land—not the brightest sunbeam that ever shone upon the richest landscape, would win my thoughts for a moment from that lofty rock, misty hill and wide rolling ocean. Haitland is the land of my deceased ancestors, and of my living father, and in Haitland will I live and die.”
The Bride of Lammermoor reveals the iniquitous administration of law in Scotland during the closing years of King William’s reign. The Scottish vicegerents, raised to power by the strength of faction, had friends to reward and enemies to humble. The old adage was literally verified: “Show me the man, and I will show you the law.” It is said that officers in high stations affected little scruple concerning bribery. “Pieces of plate, and bags of money, were sent in presents to the King’s counsel, to influence their conduct, and poured forth,” says a contemporary writer, “like billets of wood upon the floors, without even the decency of concealment.” The story opens with a burial and its attendant ceremony; and this key-note of sadness gives the tone or concert pitch to the sorrowful drama. The ready wit and crafty subterfuges of the old butler, Caleb Balderstone, somewhat relieve and lighten up the somberness of the tragedy. But it is not our purpose to trace the plot, or to point the moral of the swift and awful punishment which follows pride and injustice.
As in “The Pirate,” we find but one paragraph relating to concurrent history, so in the “Bride of Lammermoor” we have but one historic glimpse of passing events, when the Tory party obtained, in the Scottish, as in the English councils of Queen Anne, a short lived ascendancy. There were at this time three parties in Scotland: the Unionists, who were destined providentially to triumph; the Jacobites, who desired the national independence of the kingdom; the third party, who were waiting to see the course of events. The reign of William, just completed, was not favorably regarded by the Scottish nation. His memory was justly honored in England, and revered by the Protestants of Ireland as a deliverer from civil and religious servitude. In Scotland he had likewise rendered great service to the right of worshiping God according to the dictates of one’s own conscience, but in civil matters he had infringed upon the prerogatives of the people—an infringement not speedily to be forgotten. Scott, in his “Tales of a Grandfather,” calls attention to this long cherished national resentment in the following paragraph: “On the fifth of November, 1788, when a full century had elapsed after the Revolution, some friends to constitutional liberty proposed that the return of the day should be solemnized by an agreement to erect a monument to the memory of King William, and the services which he had rendered to the British kingdoms. At this period an anonymous letter appeared in one of the Edinburgh newspapers, ironically applauding the undertaking, and proposing as two subjects of the entablature, for the base of the projected column, the massacre of Glencoe, and the distresses of the Scottish colonies at Darien. The proposal was abandoned as soon as the insinuation was made public.”