(Elshender the Recluse.)
The particulars of David Ritchie’s life, which are in themselves sufficiently meagre, have been more than once already laid before the public. In Blackwood’s Monthly Magazine for June, and in the Edinburgh Magazine for October, 1817, accounts of the supposed original of the Black Dwarf are given, evidently from no mean authority, if we may judge from the style in which these narratives are written. A separate production, also, of a very interesting nature, embellished with a striking and singularly correct likeness of the dwarf, appeared in 1820, and comprised every anecdote of this singular being previously uncollected. It is therefore conceived totally unnecessary to detail at any length a subject which, independent of its want of elegance and interest, has been already so completely exhausted. To give a few sketches of the character and habits of David Ritchie, and contrast them with those of the more sublime Elshender, will, it is hoped, prove a more grateful entertainment.
David Ritchie was a pauper, who lived the greater part of a long life, and finally died so late as the year 1811, in a solitary cottage situated in the romantic glen of Manor in Peebles-shire. This vale, now rendered classic ground by the abode of the Black Dwarf, was otherwise formerly remarkable as having been the retirement of the illustrious and venerable Professor Ferguson.[20]
His person coincided singularly well with the description of the fictitious recluse. He had been deformed and horrible since his birth in no ordinary degree, which was probably the cause of the analogous peculiarities of his temper. His countenance, of the darkest of dark complexions, was half covered with a long grisly black beard, and bore, as the centre of its system of terrors, two eyes of piercing black, which were sometimes, in his excited moments, lighted up with wild and supernatural lustre. His head was of a singular shape, conical and oblong, and might now form no unworthy subject for the studies of the Phrenological Society. To speak in their language, he must have had few of the moral or intellectual faculties developed in any perfection; for his brow retreated immediately above the eyebrows, and threw nearly the whole of his head, which was large, behind the ear, where, it is said, the meaner organs of the brain are situated—giving immense scope to cruelty, obstinacy, self-esteem, etc. His nose was long and aquiline; his mouth wide and contemptuously curled upward; and his chin protruded from the visage in a long grisly peak. His body, short and muscular, was thicker than that of most ordinary men, and, with his arms, which were long and of great power, might have formed the parts of a giant, had not nature capriciously curtailed his form of other limbs conformable to these proportions. His arms had the same defect with those of the celebrated Betterton, and he could not lift them higher than his breast; yet such was their strength, that he has been known to tear up a tree by the roots, which had baffled the united efforts of two labourers, who had striven by digging to eradicate it. His legs were short, fin-like, and bent outwards, with feet totally inapplicable to the common purposes of walking. These he constantly endeavoured to conceal from sight by wrapping them up in immense masses of rags. This ungainly part of his figure is remarkable as the only one which differs materially from the description of “Cannie Elshie,” whose “body, thick and square, was mounted upon two large feet.”
He was the son of very poor parents, who, at an early period of his life, endeavoured to place him with a tradesman in the metropolis to learn the humble art of brushmaking; which purpose he however soon deserted in disgust, on account of the insupportable notice which his uncouth form attracted in the streets. His spirit, perhaps, also panted for the seclusion of his native hills, where he might have ease to indulge in that solitude so appropriate to the outcast ugliness of his person, and free from the insulting gaze of vulgar curiosity. Here, in the valley of his birth, he formed the romantic project of building a small hut for himself, in which, like the Recluse of the tale, he might live for ever retired from the race for whose converse he was unfitted, and give unrestrained scope to the moods of his misanthropy. He constructed this hermitage in precisely the same manner with the Black Dwarf of Mucklestane Moor. Huge rocks, which he had rolled down from the neighbouring hill, formed the foundation and walls, to which an alternate layer of turf, as is commonly used in cottages, gave almost the consistency and fully the comfort of mortar. He is said to have evinced amazing bodily strength in moving and placing these stones, such as the strongest men, with all the advantages of stature and muscular proportion, could hardly have equalled. This corporeal energy, which lay chiefly in his arms, will remind the reader of the exertions of the Black Dwarf, as witnessed by Hobbie Elliot and young Earnscliff, on the morning after his first appearance, when employed in arranging the foundations of his hermitage out of the Grey Geese of Mucklestane Moor.—See pp. 78, 79.
When the young hermit had finished his hut, and succeeded in furnishing it with a few coarse household utensils, framed chiefly by his own hands, he began to form a garden. In the cultivation and adornment of this spot, he displayed a degree of natural taste and ingenuity that might have fitted him for a higher fate than the seclusion of a hermitage. In a short time he had stocked it with such a profusion of fruit-trees, herbs, vegetables, and flowers, that it seemed a little forest of beauty—a shred of Eden, fit to redeem the wilderness around from its character of desolation—a gem on the swarth brow of the desert. Not only did it exhibit the finest specimens of flowers indigenous to this country, but he had also contrived to procure a number of exotics, whose Linnæan names he would roll forth to the friends whom he indulged with an admission within its precincts, with a pomposity of voice that never failed to enhance their admiration. It soon came to be much resorted to by visitors, being accounted, with the genius of the place, one of the most remarkable curiosities of the county. Dr. Ferguson used sometimes to visit the eccentric solitary, as an amusement in that retired spot; and Sir Walter Scott, who was a frequent guest at the house of that venerable gentleman, is said to have often held long communings with him; likewise several other individuals of literary celebrity.
There is something more peculiarly romantic and poetical in the circumstance of the Misanthrope’s attachment to his garden than can be found in any of the other habits and qualities attributed to him. The care of that beautiful spot was his chief occupation, and may be said to have been the only pleasure his life was ever permitted to experience. On it alone he could employ that faculty of affection with which every heart, even that of the cynic, is endowed. Shut out from the correspondence and sympathy of his own fellow-creatures by the insurmountable pale of his own ugliness, there existed, in the whole circle of nature, no other object that could receive his affections, or reply to the feelings he had to impart. In flowers alone, those lineal and undegenerate descendants of Paradise, the Solitary found an object of attachment that could do equal honour to his feelings and to his taste. His garden was a perfect seraglio of vegetable beauties, and there he could commune with a thousand objects of affection, that never shrunk from the touch which threatened horror and pollution to all the world beside.
By the peculiarities of his person, as well as by the other abject circumstances of his condition, it may be easily supposed that the Hermit of Manor was entirely excluded from that great solace of the miseries of man, the sympathy to be derived from the tenderness and affections of woman. He was irredeemably condemned, as it were, to a dreary bachelorhood of the heart, which knew that there was for it no hope, no possibility of enjoyment. Perhaps the constant sense of loathsomeness in the eyes of the fair part of creation might help to increase the natural wretchedness of his existence. The misanthropy of Elshender is pathetically represented in the tale as springing chiefly from sources of disappointment like this. It happens, also, that his humble prototype once ventured to express the sensibilities of the common delirium of man, and that he was rejected by the object of his affection. This insult, though it sprung from a very natural feeling on the part of the woman, sunk deep into his heart; and thus was he debarred from what would have been the only means of sweetening the bitter lot of solitary poverty and decrepitude,—dashed back with scorn from the general draught at which even his inferiors were liberally indulged. This circumstance forms another trait of resemblance between the Black Dwarf and David Ritchie; and, by a happy consonance never before discovered, confirms their identity.
“His habits were, in many respects, singular, and indicated a mind sufficiently congenial with its uncouth tabernacle. A jealous, misanthropical, and irritable temper was his most prominent characteristic. The sense of his deformity haunted him like a phantom; and the insults and scorn to which this exposed him had poisoned his heart with fierce and bitter feelings, which, from other traits in his character, do not appear to have been more largely infused into his original temperament than that of his fellow-men. He detested children, on account of their propensity to insult and persecute him. To strangers he was generally reserved, crabbed, and surly; and even towards persons who had been his greatest benefactors, and who possessed the greatest share of his good-will, he frequently betrayed much caprice and jealousy. A lady, who knew him from his infancy, says, that, although he showed as much attachment and respect for her father’s family as it was in his nature to show for any, yet they were always obliged to be very cautious in their deportment towards him. One day, having gone to visit him with another lady, he took them through his garden, and was showing them, with much pride and good-humour, all his rich and tastefully assorted borders, here picking up with his long staff some insidious weed, and there turning to digress into the history of some mysterious exotic, when they happened to stop near a plot of cabbages, which had been somewhat injured by the caterpillars. Davie, observing one of the ladies smile, instantly assumed a savage scowling aspect, rushed among the cabbages, and dashed them to pieces with his kent, exclaiming, ‘I hate the worms, for they mock me!’”
When he visited the neighbouring metropolis of the county, which happened very seldom towards the latter part of his life, he was generally followed by crowds of boys, who hooted and insulted him, with all that disregard of feeling and insolence of wickedness so often to be observed in children of the lower ranks in Scottish villages. On these occasions he was wont to give his persecutors the “length of his kent,” as he called it, when he could reach them; but they being generally too nimble for his crippled evolutions, he had often to vent his revenge in the more harmless form of curses. These were frequently of the most terrific and unusual kind. He is even said to have evinced something like genius in the invention of his imprecations, some of which far surpassed Gray’s celebrated