Probably the best points made by Dr. McCrie are his proof that biblical names were not common among the Covenanteers and that Episcopal eloquence and Episcopal superstition were often as tardy and as dark as the eloquence and superstition of the Presbyterians. He carries the war into the opposite camp, with considerable success. His best answer to “Old Mortality” would have been a novel, as good and on the whole as fair, written from the Covenanting side. Hogg attempted this reply, not to Scott’s pleasure according to the Shepherd, in “The Brownie of Bodsbeck.” The Shepherd says that when Scott remarked that the “Brownie” gave an untrue description of the age, he replied, “It’s a devilish deal truer than yours!” Scott, in his defence, says that to please the friends of the Covenanters, “their portraits must be drawn without shadow, and the objects of their political antipathy be blackened, hooved, and horned ere they will acknowledge the likeness of either.” He gives examples of clemency, and even considerateness, in Dundee; for example, he did not bring with him a prisoner, “who laboured under a disease rendering it painful to him to be on horseback.” He examines the story of John Brown, and disproves the blacker circumstances. Yet he appears to hold that Dundee should have resigned his commission rather than carry out the orders of Government? Burley’s character for ruthlessness is defended by the evidence of the “Scottish Worthies.” As Dr. McCrie objects to his “buffoonery,” it is odd that he palliates the “strong propensity” of Knox “to indulge his vein of humour,” when describing, with ghoul-like mirth, the festive circumstances of the murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton. The odious part of his satire, Scott says, is confined to “the fierce and unreasonable set of extra-Presbyterians,” Wodrow’s High Flyers. “We have no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution.” To sum up the controversy, we may say that Scott was unfair, if at all, in tone rather than in statement. He grants to the Covenanters dauntless resolution and fortitude; he admits their wrongs; we cannot see, on the evidence of their literature, that he exaggerates their grotesqueness, their superstition, their impossible attitude as of Israelites under a Theocracy, which only existed as an ideal, or their ruthlessness on certain occasions. The books of Wodrow, Kirkton, and Patrick Walker, the sermons, the ghost stories, the dying speeches, the direct testimony of their own historians, prove all that Scott says, a hundred times over. The facts are correct, the testimony to the presence of another, an angelic temper, remains immortal in the figure of Bessie McLure. But an unfairness of tone may be detected in the choice of such names as Kettledrummle and Poundtext: probably the “jog-trot” friends of the Indulgence have more right to complain than the “high-flying” friends of the Covenant. Scott had Cavalier sympathies, as Macaulay had Covenanting sympathies. That Scott is more unjust to the Covenanters than Macaulay to Claverhouse historians will scarcely maintain. Neither history or fiction would be very delightful if they were warless. This must serve as an apology more needed by Macaulay—than by Sir Walter. His reply to Dr. McCrie is marked by excellent temper, humour, and good humor. The “Quarterly Review” ends with the well known reference to his brother Tom’s suspected authorship: “We intended here to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain transatlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a different author to those volumes than the party suspected by our Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused for seizing upon the nearest suspected person, or the principle happily expressed by Claverhouse in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver who used to hold forth at conventicles: ‘I sent for the webster, they brought in his brother for him: though he, maybe, cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give him the trouble to go to jail with the rest.’”
Nobody who read this could doubt that Scott was, at least, “art and part” in the review. His efforts to disguise himself as an Englishman, aided by a Scotch antiquary, are divertingly futile. He seized the chance of defending his earlier works from some criticisms on Scotch manners suggested by the ignorance of Gifford. Nor was it difficult to see that the author of the review was also the author of the novel. In later years Lady Louisa Stuart reminded Scott that “Old Mortality,” like the Iliad, had been ascribed by clever critics to several hands working together. On December 5, 1816, she wrote to him, “I found something you wot of upon my table; and as I dare not take it with me to a friend’s house, for fear of arousing curiosity”—she read it at once. She could not sleep afterwards, so much had she been excited. “Manse and Cuddie forced me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does when alone.” Many of the Scotch words “were absolutely Hebrew” to her. She not unjustly objected to Claverhouse’s use of the word “sentimental” as an anachronism. Sentiment, like nerves, had not been invented in Claverhouse’s day.
The pecuniary success of “Old Mortality” was less, perhaps, than might have been expected. The first edition was only of two thousand copies. Two editions of this number were sold in six weeks, and a third was printed. Constable’s gallant enterprise of ten thousand, in “Rob Roy,” throws these figures into the shade.
“Old Mortality” is the first of Scott’s works in which he invades history beyond the range of what may be called living oral tradition. In “Waverley,” and even in “Rob Roy,” he had the memories of Invernahyle, of Miss Nairne, of many persons of the last generation for his guides. In “Old Mortality” his fancy had to wander among the relics of another age, among the inscribed tombs of the Covenanters, which are common in the West Country, as in the churchyards of Balmaclellan and Dalry. There the dust of these enduring and courageous men, like that of Bessie Bell and Marion Gray in the ballad, “beiks forenenst the sun,” which shines on them from beyond the hills of their wanderings, while the brown waters of the Ken murmur at their feet.
Here now in peace sweet rest we take,
Once murdered for religion’s sake,
says the epitaph on the flat table-stone, beneath the wind tormented trees of Iron Gray. Concerning these Manes Presbyteriani, “Guthrie’s and Giffan’s Passions” and the rest, Scott had a library of rare volumes full of prophecies, “remarkable Providences,” angelic ministrations, diabolical persecutions by The Accuser of the Brethren,—in fact, all that Covenanteers had written or that had been written about Covenanteers. “I’ll tickle ye off a Covenanter as readily as old Jack could do a young Prince; and a rare fellow he is, when brought forth in his true colours,” he says to Terry (November 12, 1816). He certainly was not an unprejudiced witness, some ten years earlier, when he wrote to Southey, “You can hardly conceive the perfidy, cruelty, and stupidity of these people, according to the accounts they have themselves preserved. But I admit I had many prejudices instilled into me, as my ancestor was a Killiecrankie man.” He used to tease Grahame of “The Sabbath,” “but never out of his good humour, by praising Dundee, and laughing at the Covenanters.” Even as a boy he had been familiar with that godly company in “the original edition of the lives of Cameron and others, by Patrick Walker.” The more curious parts of those biographies were excised by the care of later editors, but they may all be found now in the “Biographia Presbyteriana” (1827), published by True Jock, chief clerk to “Leein’ Johnnie,” Mr. John Ballantyne. To this work the inquirer may turn, if he is anxious to see whether Scott’s colouring is correct. The true blue of the Covenant is not dulled in the “Biographia Presbyteriana.”
With all these materials at his command, Scott was able almost to dwell in the age of the Covenant hence the extraordinary life and brilliance of this, his first essay in fiction dealing with a remote time and obsolete manners. His opening, though it may seem long and uninviting to modern readers, is interesting for the sympathetic sketch of the gentle consumptive dominie. If there was any class of men whom Sir Walter could not away with, it was the race of schoolmasters, “black cattle” whom he neither trusted nor respected. But he could make or invent exceptions, as in the uncomplaining and kindly usher of the verbose Cleishbotham. Once launched in his legend, with the shooting of the Popinjay, he never falters. The gallant, dauntless, overbearing Bothwell, the dour Burley, the handful of Preachers, representing every current of opinion in the Covenant, the awful figure of Habakkuk Mucklewrath, the charm of goodness in Bessie McLure, are all immortal, deathless as Shakspeare’s men and women. Indeed here, even more than elsewhere, we admire the life which Scott breathes into his minor characters, Halliday and Inglis, the troopers, the child who leads Morton to Burley’s retreat in the cave, that auld Laird Nippy, old Milnwood (a real “Laird Nippy” was a neighbour of Scott’s at Ashiestiel), Ailie Wilson, the kind, crabbed old housekeeper, generous in great things, though habitually niggardly in things small. Most of these are persons whom we might still meet in Scotland, as we might meet Cuddie Headrigg—the shrewd, the blithe, the faithful and humorous Cuddie. As to Miss Jenny Dennison, we can hardly forgive Scott for making that gayest of soubrettes hard and selfish in married life. He is too severe on the harmless and even beneficent race of coquettes, who brighten life so much, who so rapidly “draw up with the new pleugh lad,” and who do so very little harm when all is said. Jenny plays the part of a leal and brave lass in the siege of Tillietudlem, hunger and terror do not subdue her spirit; she is true, in spite of many temptations, to her Cuddie, and we decline to believe that she was untrue to his master and friend. Ikuse, no doubt, is a caricature, though Wodrow makes us acquainted with at least one Mause, Jean Biggart, who “all the winter over was exceedingly straitened in wrestling and prayer as to the Parliament, and said that still that place was brought before her, Our hedges are broken down!” (“Analecta,” ii. 173.) Surely even Dr. McCrie must have laughed out loud, like Lady Louisa Stuart, when Mause exclaims: “Neither will I peace for the bidding of no earthly potsherd, though it be painted as red as a brick from the tower o’ Babel, and ca’ itsel’ a corporal.” Manse, as we have said, is not more comic than heroic, a mother in that Sparta of the Covenant. The figure of Morton, as usual, is not very attractive. In his review, Scott explains the weakness of his heroes as usually strangers in the land (Waverley, Lovel, Mannering, Osbaldistone), who need to have everything explained to them, and who are less required to move than to be the pivots of the general movement. But Morton is no stranger in the land. His political position in the juste milieu is unexciting. A schoolboy wrote to Scott at this time, “Oh, Sir Walter, how could you take the lady from the gallant Cavalier, and give her to the crop-eared Covenanter?” Probably Scott sympathised with his young critic, who longed “to be a feudal chief, and to see his retainers happy around him.” But Edith Bellenden loved Morton, with that love which, as she said, and thought, “disturbs the repose of the dead.” Scott had no choice. Besides, Dr. McCrie might have disapproved of so fortunate an arrangement. The heroine herself does not live in the memory like Di Vernon; she does not even live like Jenny Dennison. We remember Corporal Raddlebanes better, the stoutest fighting man of Major Bellenden’s acquaintance; and the lady of Tillietudlem has admirers more numerous and more constant. The lovers of the tale chiefly engage our interest by the rare constancy of their affections.
The most disputed character is, of course, that of Claverhouse. There is no doubt that, if Claverhouse had been a man of the ordinary mould, he would never have reckoned so many enthusiastic friends in future ages. But Beauty, which makes Helen immortal, had put its seal on Bonny Dundee. With that face “which limners might have loved to paint, and ladies to look upon,” he still conquers hearts from his dark corner above the private staircase in Sir Walter’s deserted study. He was brave, he was loyal when all the world forsook his master; in that reckless age of revelry he looks on with the austere and noble contempt which he wears in Hell among the tippling shades of Cavaliers. He died in the arms of victory, but he lives among
The chiefs of ancient names
Who swore to fight and die beneath the banner of King James,
And he fell in Killiecrankie Pass, the glory of the Grahames.
Sentiment in romance, not in history, may be excused for pardoning the rest.