THE HARVARD CLASSICS SHELF
OF FICTION, Vol. 4
Guy Mannering,
or
The Astrologer
by Sir Walter Scott
Selected by Charles W. Eliot
With notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson.
PUBLISHED: New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1917.
First published: Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Co., anonymously in 1815
Ellangowan Castle
Biographical Note
Criticisms and Interpretations
I. By Thomas Carlyle
II. By Richard Holt Hutton
III. Carlyle on the Waverley Novels
IV. Richard Holt Hutton on Scott’s Women
V. Walter Bagehot on the Waverley Novels
Ruskin on Scott’s Women
Chapter List of Characters
Introduction to Guy Mannering (1829)
Additional Note
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Chapter XLVIII
Chapter XLIX
Chapter L
Chapter LI
Chapter LII
Chapter LIII
Chapter LIV
Chapter LV
Chapter LVI
Chapter LVII
Chapter LVIII
Notes
Glossary
A-B
C-D
E-F
G-H
I-J-K-L
M-N-O
P-Q-R
S
T-U-V-W-Y
SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771–1832) belonged by descent to a large family which had for generations lived in the border counties of the south of Scotland, and many of whose members had been heroes of such exploits as their descendant was to make familiar to all the world. His father, Walter Scott, the first of the stock to become a city dweller, was by profession a writer to the signet; his mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of a professor of medicine in Edinburgh University. The future novelist was born in Edinburgh on August 15, 1771, and attended the high school and university of his native town. His delicacy as a child led to his spending much of his youth in the country, where he early developed a love for the ballads and tales of the district, and began that vast collection of historical and legendary lore on which he drew to such admirable purpose through thirty years of authorship.
After serving some time as an apprentice to his father, he studied for the bar and became an advocate in 1792. He built up a fair practice and later obtained some remunerative legal offices, but by the time he was thirty he was feeling a strong attraction to literature. He had already done some translating from the German, and in 1802–3 published the fruits of years of collecting as “The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” in which he incorporated some ballads of his own composition. His first long poem, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” 1805, was also, to a large extent, the outcome of these interests; and its surprising success encouraged him to further attempts in the same vein, the most successful being “Marmion” in 1808, and “The Lady of the Lake” in 1810. His later narrative poems showing a falling off in popularity, he began a new experiment in 1814 with the prose romance of “Waverley,” which was issued anonymously. In the next five years he produced nine Scottish novels which enjoyed an immense and immediate popularity, and when in “Ivanhoe” he made his first excursion into English history, the vogue was still further extended.
Meantime, Scott had bought land on Tweedside, had built the mansion of Abbotsford, and had set out to found a landed family. To meet the expenses which were incurred by this ambition be became a partner in a printing and publishing business—a venture which ended disastrously. The failure of a London banking house in 1826 brought down the firms of Constable and of Ballantyne, and ruined Scott.
This catastrophe brought out the heroic side of his nature. So far life had gone smoothly with him; he had made a great reputation in two branches of literature—for the authorship of the Waverley Novels, though not acknowledged till 1827, was widely suspected; he had been made a baronet; and his house had become a place of pilgrimage for hero-worshipers of all nations. He could have become a bankrupt and gone on living comfortably on the income of his offices and the earnings of his pen. This he refused to do. He made an arrangement with his creditors and set himself to pay his debts. Within two years he had got together nearly £40,000, and was able to make a first payment of thirty cents on the dollar. Turning out histories, biographies, criticisms, and fiction like a factory, he went on until the terrific strain broke him down, and he died on September 21, 1832.
Scott’s character is faithfully reflected in his writings. Though possessed of a vivid historical imagination and full of romantic enthusiasm, he had a strong basis of commonsense and a solid respect for the good things of this life. His most powerful ethical motive was a chivalrous sense of honor, but his nature was not a deeply spiritual one. He was no prophet, and he made no claim for his fiction beyond its power to give wholesome entertainment and to stimulate a patriotic interest in history. In his personal relations he was kindly and generous, capable of strong partisanship but above personal enmities. No literary man of his time had friends in so many different circles; and, though an aristocrat in theory, he had intimacies with men of all ranks. His power of loving and being loved extended to the lower animals; dogs, no bad judges of character, were devoted to him, and “even a pig,” says a biographer, “took a sentimental attachment to him.” The annals of literary men show no more wholesome, likable man.
Of his voluminous productions the Waverley Novels have by far the strongest assurance of permanent esteem. Though in his own lifetime “Ivanhoe” roused greatest enthusiasm in England, and “Quentin Durward” in France, the novels dealing with Scotland are to-day the main foundation of his reputation. As to the best among these there is no general agreement, but most readers place “Guy Mannering” near the head of the list, and many excellent judges place it first. It was written immediately after the success of “Waverley,” in the space of six weeks, and published in February, 1815. It was at Gilsland, near the “waste of Cumberland,” which he describes in it, that he met the French refugee’s daughter, Charlotte Mary Carpenter, who became his wife. James Hogg recognized in the hero of the novel a portrait of the author himself. The original of Dominie Sampson has been found in George Thomson, tutor of his children, for many years a member of his household, though this equation is by no means certain. Dandie Dinmont has been identified by some with Willie Eliot of Milburnholm, a border farmer whom he discovered in one of his annual “raids” in search of ballads, “though a Jamie Davidson, whom Scott did not know till after the novel was written, who kept mustard-and-pepper terriers, passed by the name afterward; and Lockhart thinks the portrait was filled up from Scott’s friend, William Laidlaw.” It was this William Laidlaw who acted as his amanuensis when, too ill to hold the pen, he dictated “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which, on its publication, the author read as a new work, having forgotten all but the story on which he had based it. In the introduction by the author will be found the story which he regarded as having suggested the plot, though other “sources” have been discovered, and also an account of the prototype of the great figure of Meg Merrilies.
Little light, however, is thrown on the secrets of Scott’s genius by the search for his “originals.” He did indeed draw on his wide acquaintance with people, as he drew on his vast memory for the legends he had heard and the history and romance he had read. Without huge accumulations of this sort it is clear that his works could never have been produced; but it is equally clear that there was needed also a power of conjuring up the life of the past as a living and moving pageant, a faculty of describing men and women as they lived, and a supreme gift for telling a story. Few writers have done as much to widen the imaginative sympathies of men to embrace ages and countries remote from their own, few have provided for young and old so great and varied possibilities of entertainment, none has left less to regret. For as Carlyle has insisted in an essay which does not fail in discrimination, Scott was above all a healthy man, and his work shares this virtue throughout.
The wholesome influence of Scott is not confined to his own novels. Their phenomenal success, as was inevitable, set a fashion, and every literature in Europe is the richer for it. He first showed the world the real possibilities of the historical romance, and the devotees of Freytag and Manzoni, of Dumas and Fenimore Cooper, are the debtors of Sir Walter Scott.
W. A. N.
SCOTT’S career of writing impromptu novels to buy farms with was not of a kind to terminate voluntarily, but to accelerate itself more and more; and one sees not to what wise goal it could in any case have led him. Bookseller Constable’s bankruptcy was not the ruin of Scott; his ruin was that ambition, and even false ambition, had laid hold of him; that his way of life was not wise. Whither could it lead? Where could it stop? New farms there remained ever to be bought, while new novels could pay for them. More and more success but gave more and more appetite, more and more audacity. The impromptu writing must have waxed ever thinner; declined faster and faster into the questionable category, into the condemnable, into the generally condemned. Already there existed in secret everywhere a considerable opposition party; witnesses of the Waverley miracles, but unable to believe in them, forced silently to protest against them. Such opposition party was in the sure case to grow; and even, with the impromptu process ever going on, ever waxing thinner to draw the world over to it. Silent protest must at length have come to words; harsh truths, backed by harsher facts of a world popularity overwrought and worn out, behoved to have been spoken; such as can be spoken without reluctance, when they can pain the brave man’s heart no more. Who knows? Perhaps it was better ordered to be all otherwise. Otherwise, at any rate it was. One day the Constable mountain, which seemed to stand strong like the other rock mountains, gave suddenly, as the icebergs do, a loud-sounding crack, suddenly with huge clangor shivered itself into ice-dust, and sank, carrying much along with it. In one day Scott’s high-heaped money-wages became fairy money and nonentity; in one day the rich man and lord of land saw himself penniless, landless, a bankrupt among creditors.
It was a hard trial. He met it proudly, bravely, like a brave, proud man of the world. Perhaps there had been a prouder way still: to have owned honestly that he was unsuccessful, then, all bankrupt, broken in the world’s goods and repute, and to have turned elsewhither for some refuge. Refuge did lie elsewhere; but it was not Scott’s course or fashion of mind to seek it there. To say, Hitherto I have been all in the wrong, and this my fame and pride, now broken, was an empty delusion and spell of accursed witchcraft! It was difficult for flesh and blood! He said, I will retrieve myself, and make my point good yet, or die for it. Silently like a proud, strong man he girt himself to the Hercules task of removing rubbish-mountains, since that was it; of paying large ransoms by what he could still write and sell. In his declining years, too; misfortune is double and trebly unfortunate that befalls us then. Scott fell to his Hercules task like a very man, and went on with it unweariedly; with a noble cheerfulness, while his life-strings were cracking, he grappled with it, years long, in death-grips, strength to strength; and it proved the stronger; and his life and heart did crack and break. The cordage of a most strong heart! Over these last writings of Scott, his Napoleons, Demonologies, Scotch Histories, and the rest, criticism, finding still much to wonder at, much to commend, will utter no word of blame; this one word only, Woe is me! The noble warhorse that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels! Scott’s descent was like that of a spent projectile; rapid, straight down; perhaps mercifully so. It is a tragedy, as all life is; one proof more that Fortune stands on a restless globe; that Ambition, literary, warlike, politic, pecuniary, never yet profited any man.
And so the curtain falls; and the strong Walter Scott is with us no more. A possession from him does remain; widely scattered, yet attainable; not inconsiderable. It can be said of him, When he departed he took a Man’s life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it!—ploughed deep with labor and sorrow. We shall never forget it; we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our proud and sad farewell.—From “Sir Walter Scott,” in “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,” 1838.
THERE is something of irony in such a result of the Herculean labors of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott. When fifteen years after his death the estate was at length freed from debt, all his own children and the eldest of his grandchildren were dead. This only was wanting to give something of the grandeur of tragedy to the end of Scott’s great enterprise. He valued his works little compared with the house and lands which they were to be the means of gaining for his descendants; yet every end for which he struggled so gallantly is all but lost while his works have gained more of added luster from the losing battle which he fought so long than they could ever have gained from his success.
What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen had the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was. Generous, large hearted and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivaled popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the current of a stream—these are characteristics which, even when enhanced as they were in his case by the power to defy physical pain and to live in his imaginative world when his body was writhing in torture, fail to touch the heroic point. And there was nothing in Scott, while he remained prosperous, to relieve adequately the glare of triumphant prosperity. His religious and moral feeling, though strong and sound, was purely regulative, and not always even regulative, where his inward principle was not reflected in the opinions of the society in which he lived. The finer spiritual element in Scott was relatively deficient, and so the strength of the natural man was almost too equal, complete and glaring. Something that should “tame the glaring white” of that broad sunshine was needed; and in the years of reverse—when one gift after another was taken away, till at length what he called even his “magic wand” was broken, and the old man struggled on to the last without bitterness, without defiance, without murmuring, but not without such sudden flashes of subduing sweetness as melted away the anger of the teacher of his childhood—that something seemed to be supplied. Till calamity came, Scott appeared to be nearly a complete natural man, and no more. Then first was perceived in him something above nature, something which could endure though every end of life for which he fought so boldly should be defeated—something which could endure and more than endure, which could shoot a soft transparence of its own through his years of darkness and decay. That there was nothing very elevated in Scott’s personal or moral, or political or literary ends—that he never for a moment thought of himself as one who was bound to leave the earth better than he found it—that he never seems to have so much as contemplated a social or political reform for which he ought to contend—that he lived to some extent like a child blowing soap bubbles, the brightest and most gorgeous of which, the Abbotsford bubble, vanished before his eyes, is not a take-off from the charm of his career, but adds to it the very specialty of its fascination. For it was his entire unconsciousness of moral or spiritual efforts, the simple straightforward way in which he labored for ends of the most ordinary kind, which made it clear how much greater the man was than his ends, how great was the mind and character which prosperity failed to display, but which became visible at once so soon as the storm came down and the night fell. Few men who battle avowedly for the right—battle for it with the calm fortitude, the cheerful equanimity with which Scott battled to fulfill his engagements and to save his family from ruin. He stood high amongst those—
“Who ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,”
among those who have been able to display—
“One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
And it was because the man was so much greater than the ends for which he strove, that there is a sort of grandeur in the tragic fate which denied them to him, and yet exhibited to all the world the infinite superiority of the striver himself to the toy he was thus passionately craving.—From “Scott,” in “English Men of Letters.”
WITH respect to the literary character of these Waverley Novels, so extraordinary in their commercial character, there remains, after so much reviewing, good and bad, little that it were profitable at present to say. The great fact about them is, that they were faster written and better paid for than any other books in the world. It must be granted, moreover, that they have a worth far surpassing what is usual in such cases; nay, that if Literature had no task but that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men, here was the very perfection of Literature; that a man, here more emphatically than ever elsewhere, might fling himself back, exclaiming “Be mine to lie on this sofa, and read everlasting Novels of Walter Scott!” The composition, slight as it often is, usually hangs together in some measure, and is a composition. There is a free flow of narrative, of incident, and sentiment; and easy masterlike coherence throughout, as if it were the free dash of a master’s hand, “round as the O of Giotto.” It is the perfection of extemporaneous writing. Furthermore, surely he were a blind critic who did not recognise here a certain genial, sunshiny freshness and picturesqueness; paintings both of scenery and figures, very graceful, brilliant, occasionally full of grace and glowing brightness blended in the softest composure; in fact, a deep sincere love of the beautiful in Nature and Man, and the readiest faculty of expressing this by imagination and by word. No fresher paintings of Nature can be found than Scott’s; hardly anywhere a wider sympathy with man. From Davie Deans up to Richard Cœur de Lion; from Meg Merrilies to Di Vernon and Queen Elizabeth! It is the utterance of a man of open soul; of a brave, large, free-seeing man, who has a true brotherhood with all men. In joyous picturesqueness and fellow-feeling, freedom of eye and heart; or to say it in a word, in general healthiness of mind, these Novels prove Scott to have been amongst the foremost writers.
What, then, is the result of these Waverley Romances? Are they to amuse one generation only? One or more! As many generations as they can; but not all generations: ah, no, when our swallow-tail has become fantastic as trunk hose, they will cease to amuse! Meanwhile, as we can discern, their results have been several-fold. First of all, and certainly not least of all, have they not perhaps had this result; that a considerable portion of mankind has hereby been sated with mere amusement, and set on seeking something better? Amusement in the way of reading can go no farther, can do nothing better, by the power of man; and men ask, Is this what it can do? Scott, we reckon, carried several things to their ultimatum and crisis, so that change became inevitable: a great service, though an indirect one.
Secondly, however, we may say, these Historical Novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems; but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive of great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought of it. Her faint hearsays of “philosophy teaching by experience” will have to exchange themselves everywhere for direct inspection and embodiment: this, and this only, will be counted experience; and till once experience have got in, philosophy will reconcile herself to wait at the door. It is a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him;—correspondent indeed to the substantial nature of the man, to his solidity and veracity even of imagination, which, with all his lively discursiveness, was the characteristic of him….—From “Sir Walter Scott,” in “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,” 1838.
I THINK the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry. His conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too romantic. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them to look deeply into their weaknesses and intricacies of character. With women of an inferior class he had not this feeling. Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the dairywoman and woman of business in Jeanie Deans with the lover and the sister. But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her that he could not go deep into her heart. He could no more have analyzed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analyzed Rosamond Vincy, than he could have vivisected Camp or Maida.[1] To some extent, therefore, Scott’s pictures of women remain something in the style of the miniatures of the last age—bright and beautiful beings without any special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could not take them up into his imaginations as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble!—From “Scott,” in “English Men of Letters.”
[Note 1. His favorite dogs.]
AS in the imagination of Shakespeare, so in that of Scott, the principal form and object were the structure—that is a hard word—the undulation and diversified composition of human society; the picture of this stood in the center, and everything else was accessory and secondary to it. The old “rows of books” in which Scott so peculiarly delighted were made to contribute their element to this varied imagination of humanity. From old family histories, odd memoirs, old law trials, his fancy elicited new traits to add to the motley assemblage. His objection to democracy—an objection of which we can only appreciate the emphatic force when we remember that his youth was contemporary with the first French revolution and the controversy as to the uniform and stereotyped rights of man—was that it would sweep away this entire picture, level prince and peasant in a common égalité, substitute a scientific rigidity for the irregular and picturesque growth of centuries, replace an abounding and genial life by a symmetrical but lifeless mechanism. All the descriptions of society in his novels—whether of feudal society, of modern Scotch society or of English society—are largely colored by this feeling: it peeps out everywhere, and Liberal critics have endeavored to show that it was a narrow Toryism; but in reality it is a subtle compound of the natural instinct of the artist with the plain sagacity of the man of the world.
It would be tedious to show how clearly the same sagacity appears in his delineation of the various great events and movements in society which are described in the Scotch novels: there is scarcely one of them which does not bear it on its surface. Objections may, as we shall show, be urged to the delineation which Scott has given of the Puritan resistance and rebellions, yet scarcely any one will say there is not a worldly sense in it; on the contrary, the very objection is that it is too worldly and far too exclusively sensible.
The same thoroughly well-grounded sagacity and comprehensive appreciation of human life is shown in the treatment of what we may call anomalous characters. In general, monstrosity is no topic for art. Every one has known in real life characters which if, apart from much experience, he had found described in books, he would have thought unnatural and impossible; Scott, however, abounds in such characters. Meg Merrilies, Edie Ochiltree, Ratcliffe[1] are more or less of that description. That of Meg Merrilies especially is as distorted and eccentric as anything can be; her appearance is described as making Mannering “start,” and well it might.
[Note 1. In “Guy Mannering.” “Antiquary,” “Heart of Midlothian.”]
“She was full six feet high, wore a man’s great-coat over the rest of her dress, had in her hand a goodly sloe-thorn cudgel, and in all points of equipment except her petticoats seemed rather masculine than feminine. Her dark elf-locks shot out like the snakes of the gorgon between an old-fashioned bonnet called a bongrace, heightening the singular effect of her strong and weather-beaten features, which they partly shadowed, while her eye had a wild roll that indicated something like real or affected insanity.”[2]
[Note 2. “Guy Mannering,” chapter iii.]
Her career in the tale corresponds with the strangeness of her exterior. “Harlot, thief, witch, and gipsy,” as she describes herself,[3] the hero is preserved by her virtues; half-crazed as she is described to be, he owes his safety on more than one occasion to her skill in stratagem, and ability in managing those with whom she is connected and who are most likely to be familiar with her weakness and to detect her craft; yet on hardly any occasion is the natural reader conscious of this strangeness. Something is, of course, attributable to the skill of the artist; for no other power of mind could produce the effect, unless it were aided by the unconscious tact of detailed expression. But the fundamental explanation of this remarkable success is the distinctness with which Scott saw how such a character as Meg Merrilies arose and was produced out of the peculiar circumstances of gipsy life in the localities in which he has placed his scene. He has exhibited this to his readers not by lengthy or elaborate description, but by chosen incidents, short comments, and touches of which he scarcely foresaw the effect. This is the only way in which the fundamental objection to making eccentricity the subject of artistic treatment can be obviated. Monstrosity ceases to be such when we discern the laws of nature which evolve it; when a real science explains its phenomena, we find that it is in strict accordance with what we call the “natural type,” but that some rare adjunct or uncommon casualty has interfered and distorted a nature which is really the same into a phenomenon which is altogether different.
[Note 3. She does not: these words are Dominie Sampson’s (same chapter).—EDITOR.]
Just so with eccentricity in human character; it becomes a topic of literary art only when its identity with the ordinary principles of human nature is exhibited in the midst of and as it were by means of, the superficial unlikeness. Such a skill, however, requires an easy careless familiarity with usual human life and common human conduct. A writer must have a sympathy with health before he can show us how and where and to what extent that which is unhealthy deviates from it; and it is this consistent acquaintance with regular life which makes the irregular characters of Scott so happy a contrast to the uneasy distortions of less sagacious novelists.
A good deal of the same criticism may be applied to the delineation which Scott has given us of the poor. In truth, poverty is an anomaly to rich people: it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell. One-half of the world, according to the saying, do not know how the other half lives. Accordingly, nothing is so rare in fiction as a good delineation of the poor; though perpetually with us in reality, we rarely meet them in our reading. The requirements of the case present an unusual difficulty to artistic delineation: a good deal of the character of the poor is an unfit topic for continuous art, and yet we wish to have in our books a lifelike exhibition of the whole of that character. Mean manners and mean vices are unfit for prolonged delineation; the everyday pressure of narrow necessities is too petty a pain and too anxious a reality to be dwelt upon. We can bear the mere description of the “Parish Register”—
“But this poor farce has neither truth nor art,
To please the fancy or to touch the heart:…
Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene,
Presents no objects tender or profound,
But spreads its cold, unmeaning gloom around;”
but who could bear to have a long narrative of fortunes “dismal but yet mean,” with characters “dark but not awful,” and no objects “tender or profound?” Mr. Dickens has in various parts of his writings been led, by a sort of pre-Raphaelite cultus of reality, into an error of this species: his poor people have taken to their poverty very thoroughly; they are poor talkers and poor livers, and in all ways poor people to read about. A whole array of writers have fallen into an opposite mistake: wishing to preserve their delineations clear from the defects of meanness and vulgarity, they have attributed to the poor a fancied happiness and Arcadian simplicity. The conventional shepherd of ancient times was scarcely displeasing; that which is by everything except express avowal removed from the sphere of reality does not annoy us by its deviations from reality; but the fictitious poor of sentimental novelists are brought almost into contact with real life; half claim to be copies of what actually exists at our very doors, are introduced in close proximity to characters moving in a higher rank, over whom no such ideal charm is diffused, and who are painted with as much truth as the writer’s ability enables him to give. Accordingly, the contrast is evident and displeasing; the harsh outlines of poverty will not bear the artificial rose tint; they are seen through it, like high cheek-bones through the delicate colors of artificial youth. We turn away with some disgust from the false elegance and undeceiving art; we prefer the rough poor of nature to the petted poor of the refining describer. Scott has most felicitously avoided both these errors: his poor people are never coarse and never vulgar. Their lineaments have the rude traits which a life of conflict will inevitably leave on the minds and manners of those who are to lead it; their notions have the narrowness which is inseparable from a contracted experience; their knowledge is not more extended than their restricted means of attaining it would render possible. Almost alone among novelists, Scott has given a thorough, minute, lifelike description of poor persons which is at the same time genial and pleasing. The reason seems to be, that the firm sagacity of his genius comprehended the industrial aspect of poor people’s life thoroughly and comprehensively, his experience brought it before him easily and naturally, and his artist’s mind and genial disposition enabled him to dwell on those features which would be most pleasing to the world in general. In fact, his own mind, of itself and by its own nature, dwelt on those very peculiarities. He could not remove his firm and instructed genius into the domain of Arcadian unreality; but he was equally unable to dwell principally, peculiarly, or consecutively, on those petty, vulgar, mean details in which such a writer as Crabbe lives and breathes. Hazlitt said that Crabbe described a poor man’s cottage like a man who came to distrain for rent: he catalogued every trivial piece of furniture, defects and cracks and all.[4] Scott describes it as a cheerful but most sensible landlord would describe a cottage on his property: he has a pleasure in it. No detail, or few details, in the life of the inmates escape his experienced and interested eye; but he dwells on those which do not displease him. He sympathizes with their rough industry and plain joys and sorrows. He does not fatigue himself or excite their wondering smile by theoretical plans of impossible relief; he makes the best of the life which is given, and by a sanguine sympathy makes it still better. A hard life many characters in Scott seem to lead; but he appreciates and makes his reader appreciate the full value of natural feelings, plain thoughts, and applied sagacity.—From a review of “The Waverley Novels,” 1858.
[Note 4. “Lectures on the English Poets”—on Thomson and Cowper.]
I PUT aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value; and though the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is of no weight other than that of a boy’s ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and in the whole range of these there are but three men who reach the heroic type[1] —Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is a border farmer; another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage and faith, together with a strong but uncultivated or mistakenly applied intellectual power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly playthings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or accident) of that fortune survive, not vanquish, the trial they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined or consistent character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is no trace in his conception of young men. Whereas, in his imaginations of women—in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora MacIvor, Rose Brawardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon. Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power—we find in all a quite infallible sense of dignity and justice; a fearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice to even the appearance of duty, much more to its real claim, and finally a patient wisdom of deeply restrained affection, which does infinitely more than protect its objects from a momentary error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy lovers, until at the close of the tale we are just able, and no more, to take patience in hearing of their unmerited success.
[Note 1. I ought in order to make this assertion fully understood, to have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideals of other great characters of men in the Waverley novels,—the selfishness and narrowness of thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendenning, and the like; and I ought to have noticed that there are several quite perfect characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three—let us accept joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers—are English officers: Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering.]
So that in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is the woman, who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over or educates his mistress.—From “Sesame and Lilies.”
MRS. ALLAN, Colonel Mannering’s housekeeper.
ANDREW, gardener at Ellangowan.
GILES BAILLIE, a gipsy.
BARNES, valet to Colonel Mannering.
DEACON BEARCLIFF, a village worthy.
GODFREY BERTRAM, Laird of Ellangowan.
MRS. BERTRAM, his wife.
HENRY BERTRAM (also called Captain Brown), son of Godfrey.
LUCY BERTRAM, daughter of Godfrey.
MARGARET BERTRAM, a relative of Godfrey.
CAPTAIN BROWN (see Henry Bertram).
LIEUTENANT VANBEEST BROWN, smuggler.
COCKBURN, landlord of the George Inn.
COSSARD, a justice.
CAPTAIN DELASERRE, friend of Harry Bertram.
DANDIE DINMONT.
AILIE DINMONT, wife of Dandie.
JENNIE DINMONT, his daughter.
DONALD, an Edinburgh chairman.
DRIVER, Pleydell’s clerk.
DUDLEY, an artist, friend to Henry Bertram.
JAMIE DUFF, an idiot.
REV. DR. ERSKINE, a Scotch divine.
GABRIEL FAA, gipsy, nephew of Meg Merrilies.
JOHN FEATHERHEAD, opponent of Kittlecourt.
JANET GIBSON, dependent on Margaret Bertram.
GILBERT GLOSSIN, Godfrey Bertram’s agent.
GRIZZIE, servant at Gordon Arms.
DIRK HATTERAICK, a smuggler.
CHARLES HAZLEWOOD, lover of Lucy Bertram.
SIR ROBERT HAZLEWOOD, his father.
GODFREY BERTRAM HEWIT, natural son of Godfrey Bertram.
JOE HODGES, a landlord.
LUCKIE HOWATSON, a midwife.
JOCK O’ DAWTSON CLEUGH, neighbour to Dandie Dinmont.
JOCK JABOS, postilion at the Gordon Arms.
MRS. JABOS, his mother.
SLOUNGING JOCK, jailer’s assistant.
JOHNSTONE, a young fisherman.
PEGGIE JOHNSTONE, a laundress, his sister.
WILLIAM JOHNSTONE, their father.
FRANCIS KENNEDY, a revenue officer.
SIR THOMAS KITTLECOURT, member of parliament.
MRS. MAC-CANDLISH, landlady of the Gordon Arms.
MAC-CASQUIL, sometime of Drumquag.
MILES MACFIN, a cadie.
DAVID MAC-GUFFOG, a jailer.
MRS. MAC-GUFFOG, his wife.
MAC-MORLAN, Sheriff substitute.
MRS. MAC-MORLAN, his wife.
COLONEL GUY MANNERING, an English officer, retired.
JULIA MANNERING, his daughter.
MRS. MANNERING (Sophia Wellwood), his wife.
MATILDA MARCHMONT, Julia’s friend and correspondent.
MEG MERRILIES, a gipsy.
ARTHUR MERVYN, a friend to Colonel Mannering.
MRS. MERVYN, his wife.
MORTCLOKE, an undertaker.
TIBB MUMPS, landlady of Mumps Ha’.
PAULUS PLEYDELL, an Edinburgh lawyer.
WILLIAM PRITCHARD, commander of the sloop Shark.
PETER PROTOCOL, trustee of Margaret Bertram’s Estate.
MR. QUID, a kinsman of Margaret Bertram.
MRS. REBECCA, Margaret Bertram’s maid.
DOMINIE ABEL SAMPSON, tutor to Henry and Lucy Bertram.
SCROW, Glossin’s clerk.
SAM SILVERQUILL, an idle apprentice.
MR. SKREIGH, precentor of Kippletringan.
SOLES, a shoemaker.
DICK SPUR’EM, assistant to Mac-Guffog.
TOM, servant to Charles Hazlewood.
JOHN WILSON, groom to Godfrey Bertram.
’Tis said that words and signs have power
O’er sprites in planetary hour;
But scarce I praise their venturous part,
Who tamper with such dangerous art.
Lay of the Last Minstrel.
THE NOVEL or Romance of WAVERLEY made its way to the public slowly, of course, at first, but afterwards with such accumulating popularity as to encourage the author to a second attempt. He looked about for a name and a subject; and the manner in which the novels were composed cannot be better illustrated than by reciting the simple narrative on which Guy Mannering was originally founded; but to which, in the progress of the work, the production ceased to bear any, even the most distant resemblance. The tale was originally told me by an old servant of my father’s, an excellent old Highlander, without a fault, unless a preference to mountain-dew over less potent liquors be accounted one. He believed as firmly in the story as in any part of his creed.
A grave and elderly person, according to old John Mac-Kinlay’s account, while travelling in the wilder parts of Galloway, was benighted. With difficulty he found his way to a country-seat, where, with the hospitality of the time and country, he was readily admitted. The owner of the house, a gentleman of good fortune, was much struck by the reverend appearance of his guest, and apologized to him for a certain degree of confusion which must unavoidably attend his reception and could not escape his eye. The lady of the house was, he said, confined to her apartment, and on the point of making her husband a father for the first time, though they had been ten years married. At such an emergency, the Laird said, he feared his guest might meet with some apparent neglect.
‘Not so, sir,’ said the stranger; ‘my wants are few, and easily supplied, and I trust the present circumstances may even afford an opportunity of showing my gratitude for your hospitality. Let me only request that I may be informed of the exact minute of the birth; and I hope to be able to put you in possession of some particulars which may influence, in an important manner, the future prospects of the child now about to come into this busy and changeful world. I will not conceal from you that I am skilful in understanding and interpreting the movements of those planetary bodies which exert their influences on the destiny of mortals. It is a science which I do not practise, like others, who call themselves astrologers, for hire or reward; for I have a competent estate, and only use the knowledge I possess for the benefit of those in whom I feel an interest.’ The Laird bowed in respect and gratitude, and the stranger was accommodated with an apartment which commanded an ample view of the astral regions.
The guest spent a part of the night in ascertaining the position of the heavenly bodies, and calculating their probable influence; until at length the result of his observations induced him to send for the father, and conjure him, in the most solemn manner, to cause the assistants to retard the birth, if practicable, were it but for five minutes The answer declared this to be impossible; and almost in the instant that the message was returned, the father and his guest were made acquainted with the birth of a boy.
The Astrologer on the morrow met the party who gathered around the breakfast table with looks so grave and ominous, as to alarm the fears of the father, who had hitherto exulted in the prospects held out by the birth of an heir to his ancient property, failing which event it must have passed to a distant branch of the family. He hastened to draw the stranger into a private room.
‘I fear from your looks,’ said the father, ‘that you have bad tidings to tell me of my young stranger: perhaps God will resume the blessing he has bestowed ere he attains the age of manhood, or perhaps he is destined to be unworthy of the affection which we are naturally disposed to devote to our offspring?’
‘Neither the one nor the other,’ answered the stranger: ‘unless my judgement greatly err, the infant will survive the years of minority, and in temper and disposition will prove all that his parents can wish. But with much in his horoscope which promises many blessings, there is one evil influence strongly predominant, which threatens to subject him to an unhallowed and unhappy temptation about the time when he shall attain the age of twenty-one, which period, the constellations intimate, will be the crisis of his fate. In what shape, or with what peculiar urgency this temptation may beset him, my art cannot discover.’
‘Your knowledge, then, can afford us no defence,’ said the anxious father, ‘against the threatened evil?’
‘Pardon me,’ answered the stranger, ‘it can. The influence of the constellations is powerful; but He who made the heavens is more powerful than all, if His aid be invoked in sincerity and truth. You ought to dedicate this boy to the immediate service of his Maker, with as much sincerity as Samuel was devoted to the worship in the Temple by his parents. You must regard him as a being separated from the rest of the world. In childhood, in boyhood, you must surround him with the pious and virtuous, and protect him, to the utmost of your power, from the sight or hearing of any crime, in word or action. He must be educated in religious and moral principles of the strictest description. Let him not enter the world, lest he learn to partake of its follies, or perhaps of its vices. In short, preserve him as far as possible from all sin, save that of which too great a portion belongs to all the fallen race of Adam. With the approach of his twenty-first birthday comes the crisis of his fate. If he survive it, he will be happy and prosperous on earth, and a chosen vessel among those elected for heaven. But if it be otherwise’—The Astrologer stopped, and sighed deeply.
‘Sir,’ replied the parent, still more alarmed than before, ‘your words are so kind, your advice so serious, that I will pay the deepest attention to your behests. But can you not aid me further in this most important concern? Believe me, I will not be ungrateful.’
‘I require and deserve no gratitude for doing a good action,’ said the stranger, ‘in especial for contributing all that lies in my power to save from an abhorred fate the harmless infant to whom, under a singular conjunction of planets, last night gave life. There is my address; you may write to me from time to time concerning the progress of the boy in religious knowledge. If he be bred up as I advise, I think it will be best thát he come to my house at the time when the fatal and decisive period approaches, that is, before he has attained his twenty-first year complete. If you send him such as I desire, I humbly trust that God will protect His own, through whatever strong temptation his fate may subject him to.’ He then gave his host his address, which was a country-seat near a post-town in the south of England, and bid him an affectionate farewell.
The mysterious stranger departed, but his words remained impressed upon the mind of the anxious parent. He lost his lady while his boy was still in infancy. This calamity, I think, had been predicted by the Astrologer; and thus his confidence, which, like most people of the period, he had freely given to the science, was riveted and confirmed. The utmost care, therefore, was taken to carry into effect the severe and almost ascetic plan of education which the sage had enjoined. A tutor of the strictest principles was employed to superintend the youth’s education, he was surrounded by domestics of the most established character, and closely watched and looked after by the anxious father himself.
The years of infancy, childhood, and boyhood, passed as the father could have wished. A young Nazarene could not have been bred up with more rigour. All that was evil was withheld from his observations;—he only heard what was pure in precept—he only witnessed what was worthy in practice.
But when the boy began to be lost in youth, the attentive father saw cause for alarm. Shades of sadness, which gradually assumed a darker character, began to overcloud the young man’s temper. Tears, which seemed involuntary, broken sleep, moonlight wanderings, and a melancholy for which he could assign no reason, seemed to threaten at once his bodily health, and the stability of his mind. The Astrologer was consulted by letter, and returned for answer, that this fitful state of mind was but the commencement of his trial, and that the poor youth must undergo more and more desperate struggles with the evil that assailed him. There was no hope of remedy, save that he showed steadiness of mind in the study of the Scriptures. ‘He suffers,’ continued the letter of the sage, ‘from awakening of those harpies, the passions, which have slept with him as with others, till the period of life which he has now attained. Better, far better, that they torment him by ungrateful cravings, than that he should have to repent having satiated them by criminal indulgence.’
The dispositions of the young man were so excellent that he combated, by reason and religion, the fits of gloom which at times overcast his mind, and it was not till he attained the commencement of his twenty-first year, that they assumed a character which made his father tremble for the consequences. It seemed as if the gloomiest and most hideous of mental maladies was taking the form of religious despair. Still the youth was gentle, courteous, affectionate, and submissive to his father’s will, and resisted with all his power the dark suggestions which were breathed into his mind, as it seemed, by some emanation of the Evil Principle, exhorting him, like the wicked wife of Job, to curse God and die.
The time at length arrived when he was to perform what was then thought a long and somewhat perilous journey, to the mansion of the early friend who had calculated his nativity. His road lay through several places of interest, and he enjoyed the amusement of travelling, more than he himself thought would have been possible. Thus he did not reach the place of his destination till noon on the day preceding his birthday. It seemed as if he had been carried away with an unwonted tide of pleasurable sensation, so as to forget, in some degree, what his father had communicated concerning the purpose of his journey. He halted at length before a respectable but solitary old mansion, to which he was directed as the abode of his father’s friend.
’‘’‘’‘’‘’’‘’‘’