English law, framed by the House of Lords, compelled not only the consent of parents and guardians, but also the publication of banns, the presence of a priest of the Established Church, fixed and inconvenient hours, and other items of delay and expense. All that Scotland required, however, as in New York State, was a mutual declaration of marriage, to be exchanged in presence of witnesses.
The blacksmith of Gretna Green was no more important than other village characters, nor did his anvil and tongs have any ritual significance, because any witness was eligible to solemnize a ceremony which could be performed instantly. Gradually, however, as in so many other instances of original nonentities in Church and State, the blacksmith gradually assumed an authority which imposed upon the credulity of the English strangers, who usually came in a fluttering mood. In that way, the local disciple of St. Dunstan is said to have profited handsomely by the liberality usually dispensed on such felicitous occasions. The couple could then return at once to England, where their marriage was recognized as valid, because the nuptial union, if contracted according to the law of the place where the parties took the marital vow, was legal in the United Kingdom.
After the severity of the English law, under the hammering of the Free Church had been modified, Gretna Green was spoiled as a more or less romantic place of marriages, and held no charms for elopers. Scottish law, also, was so changed as to check this evasion of the English statutes. No irregular marriage of the kind, formerly and extensively in vogue, is now valid, unless one of the parties has lived in Scotland for twenty-one days before becoming either bride or groom. Gretna Green no longer points a joke or slur except in the preterite sense.
Sir Walter Scott, who sentinels for us the enchanted land we are entering, was in large measure the interpreter of Scotland, but he was more. In a sense, he was his native country’s epitome and incarnation. His literary career, however, illustrated, in miniature, almost all that Disraeli has written in his “Curiosities of Literature,” and especially in the chapter concerning “the calamities of authors.” Happily, however, Scott’s life was free from those quarrels to which men of letters are so prone, and of which American literary history is sufficiently full. Millions have been delighted with his poetry, which he continued to write until Byron, his rival, had occulted his fame. He is credited with having “invented the historical novel”—an award of honor with which, unless the claim is localized to Europe, those who are familiar with the literature of either China or Japan cannot possibly agree. Yet, in English, he was pioneer in making the facts of history seem more real through romance.
Scott was born in a happy time and in the right place—on the borderland, which for ages had been the domain of Mars. Here, in earlier days, the Roman and the Pict had striven for mastery. Later, Celtic Scot and invaders of Continental stock fought over and stained almost every acre with blood. Still later, the Lowlanders, of Teutonic origin, and the southern English battled with one another for centuries. On a soil strewn with mossy and ivied ruins, amid a landscape that had for him a thousand tongues, and in an air that was full of legend, song, and story, Scott grew up. Though not much of a routine student, he was a ravenous reader. Through his own neglect of mental discipline, in which under good teachers he might have perfected himself, he entered into active life, notably defective on the philosophic side of his mental equipment, and somewhat ill-balanced in his perspective of the past, while shallow in his views of contemporary life.
Despite Scott’s brilliant imagery, and the compelling charm of his pageants of history, there were never such Middle Ages as he pictured. For, while the lords and ladies, the heroes and the armed men, their exploits and adventures in castle, tourney, and field, are pictured in rapid movement and with fascinating color, yet of the real Middle Ages, which, for the mass of humanity, meant serfdom and slavery, with brutality and licentiousness above, weakness and ignorance below, with frequent visits of plague, pestilence, and famine, Scott has next to nothing to say. As for his anachronisms, their name is legion.
Nevertheless Scott had the supreme power of vitalizing character. He has enriched our experience, through imaginative contact with beings who are ever afterwards more intimately distinct and real for us than the people we daily meet. None could surpass and few equal Scott in clothing a historical fact or fossil with the pulsing blood and radiant bloom of life, compelling it to stand forth in resurrection of power. Scott thus surely possesses the final test of greatness, in his ability to impress our imagination, while haunting our minds with figures and events that seem to have life even more abundantly than mortal beings who are our neighbors.
Critics of to-day find fault with Scott, chiefly because he was deficient in certain of the higher and deeper qualities, for which they look in vain in his writings, while his poetry lacks those refinements of finish which we are accustomed to exact from our modern singers. However, those to whom the old problems of life and truth are yet unsettled, and who still discuss the questions over which men centuries ago fought and for which they were glad to spill their blood in defence and attack, accuse Scott of a partisanship which to them seems contemptible. Moreover, his many anachronisms and grave historical blunders, viewed in the light of a larger knowledge of men and nations, seem ridiculous.
Yet after all censure has been meted out and judgment given, it is probable that in frank abandon for boldness and breadth of effect, and in painting with words a succession of clear pictures, his poems are unexcelled in careless, rapid, easy narrative and in unfailing life, spirit, vigorous and fiery movement. Had Scott exercised over his prose writings a more jealous rigor of supervision, and had he eliminated the occasional infusions of obviously inferior matter, his entire body of writings would have been even more familiar and popular than they are to-day. It is safe to say that only a selection of the most notable of his works is really enjoyed in our age, though undoubtedly there will always be loyal lovers of the “Magician of the North,” who still loyally read through Scott’s entire repertoire. Indeed, we have known some who do this annually and delightedly. Taking his romances in chronological order, one may travel in the observation car of imagination through an enchanted land, having a background of history; while his poems surpass Baedeker, Black, or Murray as guide books to Melrose Abbey, through the Trossachs, to Ellen’s Isle, or along Teviot’s “silver tide.”