This visit to London was extended to Brussels and Paris, with the result in verse of the already mentioned and not particularly happy Field of Waterloo, in prose of the interesting Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, an account of the tour. Both were published (the poem almost immediately, Paul not till the new year) after Scott's return to Abbotsford at the end of September; and he set to work during the later autumn on his third novel, The Antiquary. The book appeared in May 1816, at about the time of the death of Major John Scott, the last but one of the poet's surviving brothers. It was not at first so popular as Guy Mannering, which, however, it very rapidly caught up even in that respect: nor is this bad start surprising. To good judges nowadays the book appeals as strongly at least as any other of its author's—in fact, Monkbarns and the Mucklebackits, the rescue of Sir Arthur and Isabel, the scenes in the ruins of St. Ruth's, and especially Edie Ochiltree, were never surpassed by him. But the story was a daring innovation, or return, among the novels of its own day. It boldly rejected most of the ordinary sources of romance interest. It had very little plot; its humorous characters, though touched with the rarest art, were not caricatured; and (for which it certainly cannot be praised) that greatest fault of Scott's,—perhaps his only great fault as a novelist,—the 'huddling up' of the end, appears in it for the first, though unluckily by no means for the last, time. But it would have been a very sad thing for the public taste if it had definitely refused The Antiquary. A book which contains within the compass of the opening chapters such masterpieces as the journey to the Hawes, the description of the Antiquary's study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful. Moreover, it had, as Scott's unwearied biographer has already noted, a new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes, invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; but what is certain is that he in them discovered, with extraordinary felicity, skill in three different kinds of novel—the historical, the romantic-adventurous, and that of ordinary or almost wholly ordinary life; and that even he never exactly added a fourth kind to his inventions, though he varied them wonderfully within themselves. The romance partly historical, the romance mainly or wholly fictitious, and the novel of manners; these were his three classes, and hardly any others.
It is not entirely explained what were the reasons which determined Scott to make his next venture, the Tales of my Landlord, under a fresh pseudonym, and also to publish it not with Constable, but with Murray and Blackwood. Lockhart's blame of John Ballantyne may not be unfair; but it is rather less supported by documentary evidence than most of his strictures on the Ballantynes. And the thing is perhaps to be sufficiently accounted for by Scott's double dislike, both as an independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments on the public—a fancy itself not wholly, though partially, comprehensible. As a matter of fact, Old Mortality and the Black Dwarf were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of 'old stock.' The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence of some critical remarks of his on the end of the Black Dwarf,—remarks certainly not inexcusable,—and of Scott's famous letter in reply, will doubtless receive further elucidation in the forthcoming chronicle of the House of 'Ebony'; but it is told with fair detail, in the second edition of Lockhart, from the actual archives.
Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the Edinburgh Annual Register, yet the two Tales were ready in November, and appeared on the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. 'I assure you,' he writes, 'I have never read a volume of them till they were printed,' a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and means absolutely nothing. Nobody but a magician, and no ordinary magician, could read a volume (which in the usual parlance means a printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott offered to review himself in the Quarterly, which he did. I certainly do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke than anything else.
Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned, if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture of the Covenanters given in Old Mortality. No one who knows the documents is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott's humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron, and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical novel, it is a far greater one than Waverley. Drumclog, the siege of Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved from murder by his own party, surpass anything in the earlier book. But greater than any of these single things is one of the first and the greatest of Scott's splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie's Tale later are here put in detail and justified.
As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the earlier part of the Black Dwarf as happy as all but the best of Scott's work. But the character of the Dwarf himself was not one that he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete. Isabel's father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo's antithesis between scélérat and maroufle comes in here), and even Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete insouciance as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil.
Between the first and the second sets of Tales, the 'Author of Waverley,' true to his odd design of throwing the public off the scent, reappeared, and the result was Rob Roy. Perhaps because it was written under the first attacks of that 'cramp of the stomach' which, though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott did not at first much like Rob. But he was reconciled later; and hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular, even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice, to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped stitch, no false note. Nor in any book are there so many of Scott's own characters, and others not quite so much his own. Helen Macgregor, perhaps, does not 'thrill our blood and overpower our reason,' as she did Lady Louisa's, simply because we were born some hundred years later than that acute and accomplished granddaughter of Lady Mary; and Rashleigh pretty frequently, Rob himself now and then, may also savour to us a little of the boards and the sawdust. But, as a rule, Rob does not; and for nobody else, not even for the fortunate Frank,—who has nothing to do but to walk through his part creditably, and does it,—need any allowance be made. The Bailie is, with Shallow, his brother justice (upon whom he justly looks down, but to whom he is, I think, kind) in Arthur's bosom; Andrew Fairservice and the Dougal creature, Justice Inglewood and Sir Hildebrand, are there too. As for Die Vernon, she is the one of Scott's heroines with whom one has to fall in love, just as, according to a beautiful story, a thoughtless and reluctant world had to believe the Athanasian Creed. It is painful to say that persons on whom it is impossible to retort the charge, have sometimes insinuated a touch of vulgarity in Di. For these one can but pray; and, after all, they are usually of her sex, which in such judgments of itself counts not. All men, who are men and gentlemen, must delight in her. And here, as always, to all but the very last, even in the twilight of Anne of Geierstein, the succession of scenes hurries the reader along without breath or time to stop and criticise, with nothing to do, if he is a reasonable person, but to read and enjoy and admire.
Lockhart has taken the opportunity of this point of time (1817-1818), which may be said to mark the zenith of Scott's prosperity, if not of his fame, to halt and to give a sort of survey of his father-in-law's private life at Castle Street and at Abbotsford. It forms one of the pleasantest portions of his book, containing nothing more tragic than the advent of the famous American tragedy of The Cherokee Lovers, which its careful author sent, that Scott might approve and publish it, in duplicate, so that the unfortunate recipient had to pay five pounds twice over for the postage of the rubbish. Of course things were not entirely as they seemed. The cramps with which, as mentioned, Scott had been already seized, during the progress of Rob Roy, were, though probably not caused, yet all too much helped and hastened, by the ferocious manner in which he worked his brains. For it must be doubted whether social intercourse, or even bodily exercise in company with others, is really the best refreshment after very severe mental labour. Both distract and amuse; but they do not refresh, relax, relieve, like a bath of pure solitude.
Divers events of importance happened to Scott, in the later course of the year 1818[23] (besides a much worse recurrence of his disorder), after the Heart of Midlothian (the second series of the Tales) had been published in June, and the Bride of Lammermoor (the third series) had been begun. The Duke of Buccleuch, his chief, his (as he would himself have cheerfully allowed) patron, his helper in time of need, and his most intimate friend, died. So did his brother-in-law, Charles Carpenter, this latter death adding considerably, though to an extent exaggerated at first and only reversionary, to the prospects of Scott's children. He gave up an idea, which he had for some time held, of obtaining a judgeship of the Scotch Exchequer; but he received his baronetcy in April 1820. Abbotsford went on gradually and expensively completing itself; the correspondence which tells us so much and is such delightful reading continued, as if the writer had nothing else to write and nothing else to do. But for us the chief matters of interest are the two novels mentioned, and that admirable supplement to the second of them, the Legend of Montrose.
There can be little doubt, I think, that in at least passages, and those very large ones, of the Heart of Midlothian, Scott went as high as he ever had done, or ever did thereafter. I have never agreed with Lady Louisa Stuart that 'Mr. Saddletree is not amusing,' nor that there is too much Scots law for English readers. It must be remembered that until Scott opened people's eyes, there were some very singular conventions and prejudices, even in celestial minds, about novels. Technical details were voted tedious and out of place—as, Heaven knows! M. Zola and others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made. Professional matters, the lower middle classes, etc., were thought 'low,' as Goldsmith's audience had had it, 'vulgar,' as Madame de Staël said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist's book is absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale,—it has been admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,—and personally I have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same Lady Louisa's admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection—her father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbiedykes, Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such an extent and in such proportion again.
He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in The Bride of Lammermoor, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the Black Dwarf aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose. Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest respect, thought differently—thought it, indeed, 'the most pure and perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned.' Perhaps there is something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy per se was certainly not Scott's forte to the same extent as were comedy and history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the 'conditions,' in the old sense, of its last representative are not such as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even play the easy and perennially attractive part of desdichado so as to keep our compassion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a repulsive virago, and the father a time-serving and almost vulgar intriguer. Moreover—and all this is not in the least surprising, since he was in agonies during most of the composition, and nearly died before its close[24]—the author has, contrary to his wont, provided very few subsidiary characters to support or carry off the principals. Caleb Balderstone has been perhaps unduly objected to by the very persons who praise the whole book; but he is certainly somewhat of what the French call a charge. Bucklaw, though agreeable, is very slight; Craigengelt a mere 'super'; the Marquis shadowy. Even such fine things as the hags at the laying-out, and the visit of Lucy and her father to Wolf's Crag, and such amusing ones as Balderstone's fabliau-like expedients to raise the wind in the matter of food, hardly save the situation; and though the tragedy of the end is complete, it leaves me, I own, rather cold.[25] One is sorry for Lucy, but it was really her own fault—a Scottish maiden is not usually unaware of the possibilities and advantages of 'kilting her coats of green satin' and flying from the lad she does not love to the lad she does. The total disappearance of Edgar is the best thing that could happen to him, and the only really satisfactory point is Bucklaw's very gentlemanlike sentence of arrest on all impertinent questioners.