Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 969
[St Ronan’s Well]
Had St Ronan’s Well been the solitary book of a writer otherwise unknown how should we have regarded it? It is necessary to ask this question, for its whole temper and purpose are different from Scott’s previous work. To Lady Louisa Stuart it seemed that he was trying to be as unlike himself as possible. His own criticism was that the story was contorted and unnatural, but we can agree with that verdict only so far as Clara’s tragedy is concerned. The main feature of the book is its deliberate rejection of the romantic. He turned of purpose to a petty by-road as a change from his old glittering highway, turned a little nervously, for Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen had preceded him. It was a world of which he professed no special knowledge. “His habit of mind,” he wrote, “had not led him much, of late years at least, into its general and bustling scenes, nor had he mingled often in the society which enables the observer to ‘shoot folly as it flies.’ The consequence, perhaps, was that the characters wanted that force and precision which can only be given by a writer who is familiarly acquainted with his subject.” But this modesty is out of place. The romancer has become a realist, and the fribbles and bucks of the Well are drawn with a cruel fidelity. The key is kept low, and no glamour is allowed to veil the ugliness. Mowbray, for example, is painted without one touch of the romantic colour which Scott commonly permits himself in the case of the long-descended. Into this comedy of somewhat sordid manners enters tragedy, real tragedy, which is all the grimmer because it is played out against a background of “lions and lionesses with their several jackals, blue surtouts and bluer stockings, fiddlers and dancers, painters and amateurs.” There is no longer any craving for wedding-cake and marriage bells, and goodness goes tragically unrewarded. We have left the world where the fates are the mechanical allies of virtue. Had we been compelled to judge the writer on this book alone, would we not have said that he was revealed as one with a notable gift of observation and satire, one who had no illusions about the frailty of mankind, a convinced anti-romantic? And we might have added that this writer, apart from one blemish, showed a gift of ruthless tragic presentation not paralleled among his contemporaries.
The keynote of the book is the irony of life, not its promise and splendour. Its obvious fault is that Scott weaves too intricate a web. Lord Etherington’s intrigues, for example, and the dependence of his inheritance on marriage with a Mowbray are invented rather than imagined. Throughout there is too much minor theatrical business, like Etherington’s theft of the letter from the post-office, and the sudden appearance of Hannah Irwin. It was as if Scott, having raided the country of the circulating-library novelists, felt bound to borrow some of their devices. These, however, are minor blemishes; the overmastering blunder is that which he made on James Ballantyne’s demand, the explanation of Clara’s warped and feverish mind. A mere trick like a mock-marriage could not have wrought such havoc, and it needed, too, a deeper wrong to justify Tyrrell’s feelings towards his half-brother. As it stands, the reader is perplexed by the spectacle of unmotived passions.
Admitting such defects, the action is developed in a series of incidents adroitly conceived and most spiritedly recounted. The opening is admirable, where the homely decencies of the Cleikum Inn are made the foil to the absurdities of the Well. Scott never wrote dialogue which revealed more accurately the characters engaged, or was more germane to the development of the tale. Instances are Touchwood’s encounter with the unwilling Jekyll, and Lady Penelope’s visit to the cottage where Hannah Irwin is lying.
“Have ye had no pennyworth for your charity?” she said in spiteful scorn. “Ye buy the very life o’ us wi’ your shillings and sixpences, your groats and your boddles — ye hae gar’d the puir wretch speak till she swarfs, and now ye stand as if ye never saw a woman in a dwam before. Let me till her wi’ the dram — mony words mickle drought, ye ken. —— Stand out o’ my gate, my leddy, if sae be ye are a leddy; there is little use of the like of you when there is death in the pot.”
The great tragic scenes at the close — Mowbray’s interview with his sister, Touchwood’s visit to Shaws Castle, the flight and death of Clara — are done with a grim economy. Irony reaches its height when the gardener produces the weapon which came near to doing murder.
“Master — St Ronans — Master — I have fund — I have fund — —”
“Have you found my sister?” exclaimed the brother with breathless anxiety.
The old man did not answer till he came up and then, with his usual slowness of delivery, he replied to his master’s repeated inquiries. “Na, I haena found Miss Clara, but I hae found something ye wad be wae to lose — your braw hunting knife.”
The protagonists are drawn on general lines but with a sure hand. Tyrrell, Clara and Etherington are real within their limits, and Mowbray is a faithful portrait of the loutish squireen. Touchwood, too, lives, with his fussy wisdom and kindly vanity. The frequenters of the Well are mainly conventional comedy figures — Lady Penelope, Winterblossom, Sir Bingo Binks, Chatterly, MacTurk. Exceptions are the sullen beauty, Lady Binks, who is one of the rare successes among Scott’s gentlewomen, the excellent Mrs Blower, and — with something of farce added — Dr Quackleben. But it is with the Scots characters that Scott has the surest touch — the lawyers Meiklewham and Bindloose, the minister Josiah Cargill, and such lesser people as Trotting Nelly. Above all, in Meg Dods he has drawn one of the best hostesses in literature. Of her fierce vitality there is no question; from the moment when we first hear her voice uplifted against the sins of her maids she is victoriously alive, a being so foursquare that the others seem wisp-like by contrast. She testifies against the foolish Vanity Fair of the Well, but she has her own honest vanities, which are ennobled by her warm heart and her complete mastery of life. “My gude name! — if onybody touched my gude name, I would neither fash counsel nor commissary — I wad be doun amang them like a jer-falcon among wild-geese.” Meg talks perhaps the best Scots in the novels, with that rhythmical lilt which is the chief beauty of the vernacular speech. Take this of the Well —
Down cam the hail tribe of wild geese, and settled by the Well, to dine there out on the bare grund, like a wheen tinklers, and they had sangs and tunes and healths, nae doubt, in praise of the fountain, as they ca’d the Well, and of Lady Penelope Penfeather; and, lastly, they behoved a’ to take a solemn bumper of the Spring, which, as I’m tauld, made unco havoc amang them or they wan hame.... And sae the jig was begun after her leddyship’s pipe, and mony a mad measure has been danced sin’ syne; for down cam masons and murgeon makers, and preachers and player folk, and Episcopalians and Methodists, and fools and fiddlers, and Papists and pie-bakers, and doctors and dragsters, forby the shopfolk that sell trash and trumpery at three prices — and so up got the bonny new Well, and down fell the honest auld town of Saint Ronan’s, where blithe decent folk had been heartsome eneugh for mony a day before ony o’ them were born, or ony sic vapouring fancies kittled in their cracked brains.
Or this of the “ancient brethren of the angle”: —
They were up in the morning — had their parritch wi’ maybe a thimbleful of brandy, and then awa up into the hills, eat their bit cauld meat on the heather, and came hame at e’en wi’ the creel full of caller trouts, and had them to their dinner, and their quiet cogue of ale, and their drap punch, and were set singing their catches and glees, as they ca’d them, till ten o’clock, and then to bed, wi’ God bless ye — and what for no?
Redgauntlet stands to Scott’s greatest novels much as Antony and Cleopatra stands to Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. It is not quite one of them, but it contains things as marvellous as the best. In it he returned to his store of actual memories, and, according to Lockhart, it embodies more of his personal experience than all the other novels put together. He drew Saunders Fairford from his father, Darsie Latimer from Will Clerk, and Alan partly from himself: and he called upon his boyish recollections for the slow ebbing of the Jacobite wave whose high-water mark he had described in Waverley. In the portraits of the Quaker family he paid pious tribute to the Quaker strain in his own ancestry. His landscape is very much that of Guy Mannering, the ribbon of Solway which separated Scotland from England, Solway with its perilous racing tides, its wild shore-folk, and the smuggler craft that stole in in the darkness. In the book we have the sense of being always on a borderland — not only between two different races, but between comfort and savagery and between an old era and a new. A common criticism is that the use of letters impedes the narrative, and no doubt there is now and then a felt hiatus, when the reader’s mind has to switch back awkwardly to a different sphere. This constitutes the main artistic defect; the story is too much of a mosaic, a series of fragments of which the pattern is not immediately recognized. But the pattern is there, and the slow leisurely narrative of the early letters is a skilful preparation for the tumultuous speed of the later chapters. Throughout there is a sense, not of impending catastrophe as in The Bride of Lammermoor, but of the iron compulsion of fate. Redgauntlet himself lays down the book’s philosophy. “The privilege of free action belongs to no mortal — we are tied down by the fetters of duty — our mortal path is limited by the regulations of honour — our most indifferent actions are but meshes of the web of destiny by which we are all surrounded.”
The story has not a single irrelevant episode, and the plot itself is carefully framed to show in high relief the perversity as well as the tragic nobility of Jacobitism, that last relic of the Middle Ages. Against a background of misty seas and hidden glens the narrative logically unfolds itself. When Darsie meets the unknown horseman at the salmon-spearing our expectation is kindled and our imagination enchained. Back in Edinburgh comedy is rampant in the lawsuit of Peter Peebles, while high drama is a-foot on Solway sands, and presently the comic and tragic chains are interlinked. Scott never wrote a better comedy scene than Alan’s début in the Parliament House, or his dinner in Dumfries with Provost Crosbie and Pate-in-Peril, or his visit on Saturday at e’en to the house of Mr Thomas Trumbull, or the interview of the Quaker with Peter Peebles; or a scene more tremulous with romance than when Wandering Willie sings to Darsie in his prison. In all the novels there is no episode more pathetic than that of Nanty Ewart, or more charged with significant drama than the last great scene on the beach. It is high tragedy, when Redgauntlet watches the fall of the Cause which has been entwined with his decaying house, but the drama does not end there. It ends, as all great drama must end, in peace: in an anti-climax more moving than any climax, when a stranger — a Hanoverian and a Campbell — speaks over the dead Jacobitism a noble and chivalrous farewell, the epitaph of common sense.
The character-drawing, though limited in range, is at as high a level of sustained excellence as in any of the novels except Old Mortality. The protagonists, Alan and Darsie, Redgauntlet and Green Mantle, bow now and then to false conventions, but they are well drawn in the main. The elder Fairford could not be bettered, with his tenderness and his fussiness, his legal acumen, and the dry humour exemplified in his tale of Luckie Simpson’s cow, which drank up a browst of ale, but, since it drank it standing, was legally emptying a stirrup-cup, and so escaped liability. The Quaker, Joshua Geddes, is a subtle study in a rare type of courage; Crosbie and Summertrees, the rascally Trumbull, Nanty Ewart, are strong, three-dimensioned figures, Cristal Nixon is an adequate villain, and Wandering Willie is a happy incomer from the ancient vagabond Scotland. As for Peter Peebles he is the best of Scott’s half-wits, a massive figure of realistic farce, not without hints of tragedy.
It’s very true that it is grandeur upon earth to hear ane’s name thundered out along the long-arched roof of the Outer House—’Poor Peter Peebles against Plainstanes, et per contra’; a’ the best lawyers in the house fleeing like eagles to the prey ... to see the reporters mending their pens to take down the debate — the Lords themselves pooin’ in their chairs, like folk sitting down to a gude dinner, and crying on the clerks for parts and pendicles of the process, who, puir bodies, can do little mair than cry on their closet-keepers to help them. To see a’ this ... and to ken that naething will be said or dune amang a’ thae grand folk for maybe the feck of three hours, saving what concerns you and your business —— Oh, man, nae wonder that ye judge this to be earthly glory! And yet, neighbour, as I was saying, there be unco drawbacks. I whiles think of my bit house, where dinner and supper and breakfast used to come without the crying for, just as if the fairies had brought it — and the gude bed at e’en — and the needfu’ penny in the pouch. And then to see a’ ane’s worldly substance capering in the air in a pair of weigh-bauks, now up, now down, as the breath of judge and counsel inclines it for pursuer or defender! Truth, man, there are times I rue having ever begun this plea work — though, maybe, when ye consider the renown and credit I have by it, ye will hardly believe what I am saying.
The final scene of the book must rank among Scott’s highest achievements, for it is the very soul of romance, and yet it has an epic dignity, for it is the end of a loyalty which had deeply moved men’s hearts. One other episode is universally admitted as a masterpiece, the interpolated story told by the blind violer. It is a piece which deserves careful study, for the proof-sheets show that Scott took exceptional pains with it, and it is a revelation of what he could do when he bent his mind critically upon his work. It is told in Scots, but the dialect is never exaggerated, and it is rather English with a faint Scots colouring and many pithy Scots phrases. The language is extraordinarily apt and every detail is exactly appropriate. “Glen, nor dargle, nor mountain, nor cave could hide the puir hill-folk when Redgauntlet was out with bugle and bloodhound after them, as if they had been sae mony deer.”—”Aye, as Sir Robert girned wi’ pain, the jackanapes girned too, like a sheep’s head between a pair of tangs — an ill-faur’d, fearsome couple they were.”—”Are ye come light-handed, ye son of a toom whistle?”—”A tune my gudesire learned from a warlock.”—”It’s ill-speaking between a fou man and a fasting.”—”There was a deep morning fog on grass and gravestone around him and his horse was feeding quietly beside the minister’s twa cows.” — And there is the famous description of the company around the tavern-board in Hell: —
There was the fierce Middleton and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; and Dalzell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle; and Earlshall with Cameron’s blude on his hand; and wild Bonshaw that tied blessed Mr Cargill’s limbs till the blude sprang; and Dumbarton Douglas, the twice-turned traitor baith to country and King. There was the Bluidy Advocate MacKenzie, who, for his worldly wit and wisdom, had been to the rest as a god. And there was Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark curled locks streaming down over his laced buff coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance; while the rest hallooed and sang, and laughed till the room rang. But their smiles were fearfully contorted from time to time, and their laughter passed into such wild sounds as made my gudesire’s very nails go blue, and chilled the marrow in his banes.
[Wandering Willie’s Tale]
“Wandering Willie’s Tale” is one of the greatest of the world’s short stories by whatever test it be tried. Its verbal style is without a flaw, its structure is perfect, and it produces that intense impression of reality imaginatively transmuted which is the triumph of literary art. One point is worth noting, for it shows Scott’s unfailing insight into human nature. The narrator, in telling of Steenie’s interview with the old Sir Robert, allows time for the latter to write a receipt before death took him. “He (Steenie) ventured back into the parlour ... He forgot baith siller and receipt, and down stairs he banged.” But when Steenie meets Sir Robert’s heir he tells a different story. “Nae sooner had I set down the siller, and just as his honour, Sir Robert that’s gane, drew it till him to count it, and write me a receipt, he was ta’en wi’ the pains that removed him.” Now the supernatural explanation depends on the receipt being got from a dead man in the wood of Pitmurkie and signed that very night, which is consistent with the second story, whereas the first leaves room for the receipt being merely lost. Scott knew so profoundly the average man and his incapacity for exact evidence — compare the gossip in the ale-house of Kippletringan in Guy Mannering — that he makes Wandering Willie in telling the tale give two different versions of the crucial incident — one which is compatible with a prosaic explanation, and a second in flat contradiction and full of excited detail, which transports the whole affair into the realm of the occult. It is an astonishing achievement — to write a tale of diablerie which is overwhelming in its effect, and at the same time incidentally and most artfully to provide its refutation.
V
[Walter’s marriage]
On the 3rd of February, 1825, the young Walter was married in Edinburgh. Scott settled Abbotsford upon him that Border acres might match the Jobson money-bags, and for £3500 purchased for him a captain’s commission in the Hussars. He was a most tender and indulgent father-in-law, as his letters to the bride show, and the marriage was all that he could desire. But it had been an expensive affair, and for the moment he felt, as he said, like his “namesake in the Crusades, Walter the Penniless.” He had begun a tale of these same Crusades which was not going well, for the great effort of Redgauntlet seems to have impoverished his imagination. All that arid spring, when, because of the drought, he found it difficult to let his grass parks, his mind was much exercised by ways and means. “I must look for some months,” he wrote, “to be put to every corner of my saddle.” His friend Terry asked his help in his proposed lease of a London theatre, and Scott guaranteed him to the extent of £1250. But he wrote him a sagacious letter, warning him against the danger of embarking on an enterprise without a backing of cash. He pointed out that, however much the venture might succeed, receipts would lag behind expenditure. “The best business is ruined when it becomes pinched for money and gets into the circle of discounting bills, and buying necessary articles at high prices and of inferior quality for the sake of long credit.... Besides the immense expense of renewals, that mode of raising money is always liable to some sudden check which throws you on your back at once.” He therefore urged him to get some monied man behind him with a substantial interest in the speculation.
