Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the Edinburgh Annual Register, yet the two Tales were ready in November, and appeared on the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. 'I assure you,' he writes, 'I have never read a volume of them till they were printed,' a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and means absolutely nothing. Nobody but a magician, and no ordinary magician, could read a volume (which in the usual parlance means a printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott offered to review himself in the Quarterly, which he did. I certainly do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke than anything else.
Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned, if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture of the Covenanters given in Old Mortality. No one who knows the documents is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott's humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron, and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical novel, it is a far greater one than Waverley. Drumclog, the siege of Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved from murder by his own party, surpass anything in the earlier book. But greater than any of these single things is one of the first and the greatest of Scott's splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie's Tale later are here put in detail and justified.
As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the earlier part of the Black Dwarf as happy as all but the best of Scott's work. But the character of the Dwarf himself was not one that he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete. Isabel's father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo's antithesis between scélérat and maroufle comes in here), and even Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete insouciance as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil.
Between the first and the second sets of Tales, the 'Author of Waverley,' true to his odd design of throwing the public off the scent, reappeared, and the result was Rob Roy. Perhaps because it was written under the first attacks of that 'cramp of the stomach' which, though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott did not at first much like Rob. But he was reconciled later; and hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular, even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice, to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped stitch, no false note. Nor in any book are there so many of Scott's own characters, and others not quite so much his own. Helen Macgregor, perhaps, does not 'thrill our blood and overpower our reason,' as she did Lady Louisa's, simply because we were born some hundred years later than that acute and accomplished granddaughter of Lady Mary; and Rashleigh pretty frequently, Rob himself now and then, may also savour to us a little of the boards and the sawdust. But, as a rule, Rob does not; and for nobody else, not even for the fortunate Frank, – who has nothing to do but to walk through his part creditably, and does it, – need any allowance be made. The Bailie is, with Shallow, his brother justice (upon whom he justly looks down, but to whom he is, I think, kind) in Arthur's bosom; Andrew Fairservice and the Dougal creature, Justice Inglewood and Sir Hildebrand, are there too. As for Die Vernon, she is the one of Scott's heroines with whom one has to fall in love, just as, according to a beautiful story, a thoughtless and reluctant world had to believe the Athanasian Creed. It is painful to say that persons on whom it is impossible to retort the charge, have sometimes insinuated a touch of vulgarity in Di. For these one can but pray; and, after all, they are usually of her sex, which in such judgments of itself counts not. All men, who are men and gentlemen, must delight in her. And here, as always, to all but the very last, even in the twilight of Anne of Geierstein, the succession of scenes hurries the reader along without breath or time to stop and criticise, with nothing to do, if he is a reasonable person, but to read and enjoy and admire.
Lockhart has taken the opportunity of this point of time (1817-1818), which may be said to mark the zenith of Scott's prosperity, if not of his fame, to halt and to give a sort of survey of his father-in-law's private life at Castle Street and at Abbotsford. It forms one of the pleasantest portions of his book, containing nothing more tragic than the advent of the famous American tragedy of The Cherokee Lovers, which its careful author sent, that Scott might approve and publish it, in duplicate, so that the unfortunate recipient had to pay five pounds twice over for the postage of the rubbish. Of course things were not entirely as they seemed. The cramps with which, as mentioned, Scott had been already seized, during the progress of Rob Roy, were, though probably not caused, yet all too much helped and hastened, by the ferocious manner in which he worked his brains. For it must be doubted whether social intercourse, or even bodily exercise in company with others, is really the best refreshment after very severe mental labour. Both distract and amuse; but they do not refresh, relax, relieve, like a bath of pure solitude.
Divers events of importance happened to Scott, in the later course of the year 181823 (besides a much worse recurrence of his disorder), after the Heart of Midlothian (the second series of the Tales) had been published in June, and the Bride of Lammermoor (the third series) had been begun. The Duke of Buccleuch, his chief, his (as he would himself have cheerfully allowed) patron, his helper in time of need, and his most intimate friend, died. So did his brother-in-law, Charles Carpenter, this latter death adding considerably, though to an extent exaggerated at first and only reversionary, to the prospects of Scott's children. He gave up an idea, which he had for some time held, of obtaining a judgeship of the Scotch Exchequer; but he received his baronetcy in April 1820. Abbotsford went on gradually and expensively completing itself; the correspondence which tells us so much and is such delightful reading continued, as if the writer had nothing else to write and nothing else to do. But for us the chief matters of interest are the two novels mentioned, and that admirable supplement to the second of them, the Legend of Montrose.
There can be little doubt, I think, that in at least passages, and those very large ones, of the Heart of Midlothian, Scott went as high as he ever had done, or ever did thereafter. I have never agreed with Lady Louisa Stuart that 'Mr. Saddletree is not amusing,' nor that there is too much Scots law for English readers. It must be remembered that until Scott opened people's eyes, there were some very singular conventions and prejudices, even in celestial minds, about novels. Technical details were voted tedious and out of place – as, Heaven knows! M. Zola and others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made. Professional matters, the lower middle classes, etc., were thought 'low,' as Goldsmith's audience had had it, 'vulgar,' as Madame de Staël said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist's book is absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale, – it has been admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion, – and personally I have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same Lady Louisa's admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection – her father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbiedykes, Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such an extent and in such proportion again.
He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in The Bride of Lammermoor, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the Black Dwarf aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose. Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest respect, thought differently – thought it, indeed, 'the most pure and perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned.' Perhaps there is something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy per se was certainly not Scott's forte to the same extent as were comedy and history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the 'conditions,' in the old sense, of its last representative are not such as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even play the easy and perennially attractive part of desdichado so as to keep our compassion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a repulsive virago, and the father a time-serving and almost vulgar intriguer. Moreover – and all this is not in the least surprising, since he was in agonies during most of the composition, and nearly died before its close24– the author has, contrary to his wont, provided very few subsidiary characters to support or carry off the principals. Caleb Balderstone has been perhaps unduly objected to by the very persons who praise the whole book; but he is certainly somewhat of what the French call a charge. Bucklaw, though agreeable, is very slight; Craigengelt a mere 'super'; the Marquis shadowy. Even such fine things as the hags at the laying-out, and the visit of Lucy and her father to Wolf's Crag, and such amusing ones as Balderstone's fabliau-like expedients to raise the wind in the matter of food, hardly save the situation; and though the tragedy of the end is complete, it leaves me, I own, rather cold.25 One is sorry for Lucy, but it was really her own fault – a Scottish maiden is not usually unaware of the possibilities and advantages of 'kilting her coats of green satin' and flying from the lad she does not love to the lad she does. The total disappearance of Edgar is the best thing that could happen to him, and the only really satisfactory point is Bucklaw's very gentlemanlike sentence of arrest on all impertinent questioners.
But if the companion of the first set of Tales was a dead-weight rather than a make-weight, the make-weight of the third would have atoned for anything. Sometimes I think, allowing for scale and conditions, that Scott never did anything much better than A Legend of Montrose. First, it is pervaded by the magnificent figure of Dugald Dalgetty. Secondly, the story, though with something of the usual huddle at the end, is interesting throughout, with the minor figures capitally sketched in. Menteith, though merely outlined, is a good fellow, a gentleman, and not a stick; Allan escapes the merely melodramatic; 'Gillespie Grumach' is masterly in his brief appearances; and Montrose himself seems to me to be brought in with a skill which has too often escaped notice. For it would mar the story to deal with the tragedy of his end, and his earlier history is a little awkward to manage. Moreover, that faculty of hurrying on the successive tableaux which is so conspicuous in most of Scott's work, and so conspicuously absent in the Bride (where there are long passages with no action at all) is eminently present here. The meeting with Dalgetty; the night at Darnlinvarach, from the bravado of the candlesticks to Menteith's tale; the gathering and council of the clans; the journey of Dalgetty, with its central point in the Inverary dungeon; the escape; and the battle of Inverlochy, – these form an exemplary specimen of the kind of interest which Scott's best novels possess as nothing of the kind had before possessed it, and as few things out of Dumas have possessed it since. Nor can the most fervent admirer of Chicot and of Porthos – I know none more fervent than myself – say in cool blood that their creator could have created Dalgetty, who is at once an admirable human being, a wonderful national type of the more eccentric kind, and the embodiment of an astonishing amount of judiciously adjusted erudition.
Many incidents of interest and some of importance occurred in Scott's private life between the date of 1818 and that of 1820, besides those mentioned already. One of these was the acquisition by Constable of the whole of his back-copyrights for the very large sum of twelve thousand pounds, a contract supplemented twice later in 1821 and 1823 by fresh purchases of rights as they accrued for nominal sums of eleven thousand pounds in addition. Unfortunately, this transaction, like almost all his later ones, was more fictitious than real. And though it was lucky that the publisher never discharged the full debt, so that when his bankruptcy occurred something was saved out of the wreck which would otherwise have been pure loss, the proceeding is characteristic of the mischievously unreal system of money transactions which brought Scott to ruin. Except for small things like review articles, etc., and for his official salaries, he hardly ever touched real money for the fifteen most prosperous years of his life, between 1810 and 1825. Promises to receive were interchanged with promises to pay in such a bewildering fashion that unless he had kept a chartered accountant of rather unusual skill and industry perpetually at work, it must have been utterly impossible for him to know at any given time what he had, what he owed, what was due to him, and what his actual income and expenditure were. The commonly accepted estimate is that during the most flourishing time, 1820-1825, he made about fifteen thousand a year, and on paper he probably did. Nor can he ever have spent, in the proper sense of the term, anything like that sum, for the Castle Street house cannot have cost, even with lavish hospitality, much to keep up, and the Abbotsford establishment, though liberal, was never ostentatious. But when large lump sums are constantly expended in purchases of land, building, furnishing, and the like; when every penny of income except official salaries goes through a complicated process of abatement in the way of discounts for six and twelve months' bills, fines for renewal, payments to banks for advances and the like – the 'clean' sums available at any given moment bear quite fantastic and untrustworthy relations to their nominal representatives. It may be strongly suspected, from the admitted decrease of a very valuable practice under Walter Scott père, and from its practical disappearance under Thomas, that the genius of the Scott family did not precisely lie in the management of money.
The marriage of Sophia Scott to Lockhart, and the purchase of a commission for her eldest brother Walter in the 18th Hussars, made gaps in Scott's family circle, and also, beyond all doubt, in his finances. The first was altogether happy for him. It did not, for at anyrate some years, absolutely sever him from the dearest of his children, a lady who, to judge from her portraits, must have been of singular charm, and who seems to have been the only one of the four with much of his mental characteristics; it provided him with an agreeable companion, a loyal friend, and an incomparable biographer. Of Sir Walter Scott the second and last, not much personal idea is obtainable. The few anecdotes handed down, and his father's letters to him (we have no replies), suggest a good sort of person, slightly 'chuckle-headed' and perfervid in the wrong places, with next to no intellectual gifts, and perhaps more his mother's son than his father's. He had some difficulties in his first regiment, which seems to have been a wild one, and not in the best form; he married an heiress of the unpoetical name of Jobson, to whom and of whom his father writes with a pretty old-fashioned affection and courtesy, which perhaps gave Thackeray some traits for Colonel Newcome. Of the younger brother Charles, an Oxford man, who went into the Foreign Office, even less is recorded than of Walter. Anne Scott, the third of the family, and the faithful attendant of her father in his last evil days, died in her sister's house shortly after Sir Walter, and Mrs. Lockhart herself followed before the Life was finished. Scott can hardly be said to have bequeathed good luck to any of these his descendants.
It was at the end of 1819, after Walter the younger left home, and before Sophia's marriage, that the next in order of the Waverley Novels (now again such by title, and not Tales of my Landlord) appeared. This was Ivanhoe, which was published in a rather costlier shape than its forerunners, and yet sold to the extent of twelve thousand copies in its three-volume form. Lockhart, perhaps with one of the few but graceful escapes of national predilection (it ought not to be called prejudice) to be noticed in him, pronounces this a greater work of art, but a less in genius than its purely Scottish predecessors. As there is nothing specially English in Ivanhoe, but only an attempt to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the positive part of Lockhart's judgment and demurs to the negative. Although the worst of Scott's cramps were past, he was still in anything but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated, not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms which have brought on Ivanhoe the wrath of Dryasdust. But Dryasdust is adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit, and the book is a great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the point of view of literary 'document.' The picturesque opening; the Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Passage of Arms; the more splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular stories of the 'King-and-the-Tanner' kind into the episodes of the Black Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of Bois-Guilbert, the pendant in prose to Marmion; the more admirable contrast of Rebecca and Rowena; and the final Judgment of God, which for once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a novel, – with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac, Front-de-Bœuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others – give such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as nobody but Scott has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal hero, it is to be observed, escapes the curse of most of Scott's young men (the young men to several of whom Thackeray would have liked to be mother-in-law), and if he is not worthy of Rebecca, he does not get her. As for Richard, no doubt, he is not the Richard of history, but what does that matter? He is a most admirable re-creation, softened and refined, of the Richard of a romance which, be it remembered, is itself in all probability as old as the thirteenth century.
After speaking frankly of the Bride of Lammermoor and of some others of Scott's works, it may perhaps be permissible to rate the successor to Ivanhoe rather higher than it was rated at the time, or than it has generally been rated since. The Monastery was at its appearance (March 1820) regarded as a failure; and quite recently a sincere admirer of Scott confided to a fellow in that worship the opinion that 'a good deal of it really is rot, you know.' I venture to differ. Undoubtedly it does not rank with the very best, or even next to them. In returning to Scottish ground, Scott may have strengthened himself on one side, but from the distance of the times and the obscure and comparatively uninteresting period which he selected (just after the strange and rapid panorama of the five Jameses and before the advent of Queen Mary), he lost as much as he gained. An intention, afterwards abandoned, to make yet a fresh start, and try a new double on the public by appearing neither as 'Author of Waverley' nor as Jedediah Cleishbotham, may have hampered him a little, though it gave a pleasant introduction. The supernatural part, though much better, as it seems to me, than is generally admitted, is no doubt not entirely satisfactory, being uncertainly handled, and subject to the warning of Nec deus intersit. There is some return of that superabundance of interval and inaction which has been noted in the Bride. And, above all, there appears here a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase upon Scott, – the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular says, 'tail off.' The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except Scott should we grumble, if we had the admirable descriptions of Glendearg, the scenes in the Abbey, the night-ride of poor Father Philip, the escape from the Castle of Avenel, the passage of the interview of Halbert with Murray and Morton? Even the episode of Sir Piercie Shafton, though it is most indisputably true that Scott has not by any means truly represented Euphuism, is good and amusing in itself; while there are those who boldly like the White Lady personally. She is more futile than a sprite beseems; but she is distinctly 'nice.'
At any rate, nobody could (or indeed did) deny that the author, six months later, made up for any shortcoming in The Abbot, where, except the end (eminently of the huddled order), everything is as it should be. The heroine is, except Die Vernon, Scott's masterpiece in that kind, while all the Queen Mary scenes are unsurpassed in him, and rarely equalled out of him. Nor was there any falling off in Kenilworth (Jan. 1821), where he again shifted his scene to England. He has not indeed interested us very much personally in Amy Robsart, but as a hapless heroine she is altogether the superior of Lucy Ashton. The book is, among his, the 'novel without a hero,' and, considering his defects in that direction, this was hardly a drawback. It cannot be indeed said to have any one minor character which is a success of the first class. But the whole is interesting throughout. The journeys of Tressilian to Devonshire and of Amy and Wayland to Kenilworth have the curious attraction which Scott, a great traveller, and a lover of it, knew how to give to journeys, and the pageantry and Court scenes, at Greenwich and elsewhere, command admiration. Indeed, Kenilworth equals any of the novels in sustained variety of interest, and, unlike too many of them, it comes to a real end.
It was in 1821 that a book now necessarily much forgotten and even rare (it is comparatively seldom that one sees it in catalogues), Adolphus's Letters on the Author of Waverley, at once showed the interest taken in the identity of the 'Great Unknown,' and fixed it as being that of the author of the Lay, with a great deal of ingenuity and with a most industrious abundance of arguments, bad and good. After such a proof of public interest, neither Scott nor Constable could be much blamed for working what has been opprobriously called the 'novel manufactory' at the highest pressure; and The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan's Well, and Redgauntlet were written and published in the closest succession. These books, almost all of wonderful individual excellence (Peveril, I think, is the only exception), and of still more wonderful variety, were succeeded, before the crash of 1825-26, by the Tales of the Crusaders, admirable in part, if not wholly. When we think that all these were, with some other work, accomplished in less than five years, it scarcely seems presumption in the author to have executed, or rashness in the bookseller to have suggested, a contract for four of them in a batch – a batch unnamed, unplanned, not even yet in embryo, but simply existing in potentia in the brain of Walter Scott himself.
In surveying together this batch, written when the first novelty of the novels was long over, and before there was any decadence, one obtains, as well perhaps as from any other division of his works, an idea of their author's miraculous power. Many novelists since have written as much or more in the same time. But their books for the most part, even when well above the average, popular, and deservedly popular too, leave next to no trace on the mind. You do not want to read them again; you remember, even with a strong memory, nothing special about their plots; above all, their characters take little or no hold on the mind in the sense of becoming part of its intellectual circle and range.
How different is it with these six or eight novels, 'written with as much care as the others, that is to say, with none at all,' as the author wickedly remarked! The Pirate (December 1821) leads off, its scenery rendered with the faithfulness of recent memory, and yet adjusted and toned by the seven years' interval since Scott yachted round Orkney and Shetland. Here are the admirable characters of Brenda (slight yet thoroughly pleasing), and her father, the not too melodramatic ones of Minna, Cleveland, and Norna, the triumph of Claud Halcro (to whom few do justice), and again, the excellent keeping of story and scenery to character and incident. The Fortunes of Nigel (May 1822) originated in a proposed series of 'Letters of the Seventeenth Century,' in which others were to take part, and perhaps marks a certain decline, though only in senses to be distinctly defined and limited. Nothing that Scott ever did is better than the portrait of King James, which, in the absence of one from the hand of His Majesty's actual subject for some dozen years, Mr. William Shakespeare of New Place, Stratford, is probably the most perfect thing of the kind that ever could have been or can be done. And the picture of Whitefriars, though it is borrowed to a great extent, and rather anticipated in point of time, from Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia, sixty or seventy years after date, is of the finest, whilst Sir Mungo Malagrowther26 all but deserves the same description. But this most cantankerous knight is not touched off with the completeness of Dalgetty, or even of Claud Halcro. Lord Glenvarloch adds, to the insipidity which is the bane of Scott's good heroes, some rather disagreeable traits which none of them had hitherto shown. Dalgarno in the same way falls short of his best bad heroes. Dame Suddlechop suggests, for the first time unfavourably, a Shakespearean ancestress, Mistress Quickly, and the story halts and fails to carry the reader rapidly over the stony path. Even Richie Moniplies, even Gentle Geordie, good as both are, fall short of their predecessors. Ten years earlier The Fortunes of Nigel would have been a miracle, and one might have said, 'If a man begins like this, what will he do later?' Now, thankless and often uncritical as is the chatter about 'writing out,' we can hardly compare Nigel with Guy Mannering, or Rob Roy, or even The Abbot, and not be conscious of something that (to use a favourite quotation of Scott's own), 'doth appropinque an end,' though an end as yet afar off. The 'bottom of the sack,' as the French say, is a long way from us; but it is within measurable distance.