Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 954
[Qualifications as a novelist]
For his poems had never been more than the skimming of a mighty cauldron. They had been tales told under the shackles of metre and rhyme, a form inadequate to the immense volume of his resources. “Whole buried towns support the dancer’s heel.” To do justice to the wealth of memories and knowledge which he had been storing up all his life, he needed an ampler method and a more generous convention. Few men have ever approached the task of fiction more superbly endowed than this lawyer-squire of forty-three. He was widely read in several literatures, and so deeply learned in many histories that he could look upon a past age almost with the eye of a contemporary. His life had brought him into touch with most aspects of men’s work; he knew something of law, something of business, something of politics, something of agriculture; he had mixed with many societies, from the brethren of the Covenant Close to the politicians of Whitehall, from the lairds of the Forest to the lords and ladies of St James’s. Every man he met he treated like a kinsman, and there was no cranny of human experience which did not attract his lively interest. Moreover he knew most of them from the inside, for by virtue of his ready sympathy and quick imagination he could penetrate their secrets. He valued his dignity so highly, he used to say, that he never stood upon it. He could understand the dark places of the human spirit, but especially he understood its normal sphere and the ordinary conduct of life. It could not be said of him, as it was said of Timon of Athens, that he never knew the middle of humanity but only the extremities. He had that kindly affection for the commonplace which belongs to a large enjoying temperament — the mood of Rupert Brooke when he wrote that he could “watch a dirty, middle-aged tradesman in a railway carriage for hours, and love every dirty, greasy, sulky wrinkle in his weak chin and every button on his spotted, unclean waistcoat.” The very characteristics which cramped him as a poet were shining assets for the novelist, since he did not dramatize himself and see the world in terms of his own moods, but looked out upon it shrewdly, calmly and steadfastly. He was no raw boy, compelled to spin imaginative stuff out of his inner consciousness, but mature in mind and character, one who had himself struggled and suffered, and rubbed against the sharp corners of life. Yet, in his devouring relish for the human pageant, he had still the ardour of a boy.
Above all he knew his native land, the prose and the poetry of it, as no Scotsman had ever known it before. He thrilled to its ancient heroics, and every nook was peopled for him with familiar ghosts. He understood the tragedy of its stark poverty, and the comedy of its new-won prosperity. It was all a book in which he had read deep; the cities with their provosts and bailies, the lawyers of the Parliament House and the High Street closes, the doctors in the colleges, the brisk merchants who were building a new Scotland, the porters and caddies and the riff-raff in the gutter; the burgh towns — was he not the presiding judge of one? — with their snuffy burgesses and poaching vagabonds; the countryside in all its ways — lairds and tacksmen, ale-wives and tinkers, ministers and dominies, the bandsters and shearers in harvest-time, the drovers on the green roads, the shepherds in the far shielings. He had the impulse and the material which go to the making of great epics; it remained to be seen whether he had the shaping power.
CHAPTER VI. — THE EARLY NOVELS (1814-1817)
I
When Scott returned to Edinburgh in January, 1814, after the Christmas vacation, he had completed most of the first volume of the new novel, and John Ballantyne copied the manuscript for the press. The Ballantynes printed it, and Constable undertook the publication on the basis of an equal division of profits between himself and the author. It was announced to appear in March, but its completion was delayed by papers that Scott undertook to write for the supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the copyright of which Constable had recently acquired. On the 4th of June he began the second volume, and the book was finished by the end of that month, while he was spending six hours in Court for five days of the week. Lockhart has given us a glimpse of the strenuous toil of those June twilights. He had been dining with some young advocates in a house in George Street, which commanded a back view of Scott’s house in North Castle Street.
When my companion’s worthy father and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned to a library which had one large window looking northward. After conversing here for an hour or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell. “No,” said he, “I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will.” I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand which, like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, distracted his hour of hilarity. “Since we sat down,” he said, “I have been watching it — it fascinates my eye — it never stops — page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied — and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night — I can’t stand the sight of it when I am not at my books.”—”Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk, probably,” exclaimed myself or some other giddy youth in our society. “No, boys,” said our host, “I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.”
[Reasons for anonymity]
Waverley; or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since appeared on July 7th in three shabby little volumes, the price one guinea. No author’s name stood on the title-page, and so began the tangled tale of Scott’s anonymity. His reasons for it were given explicitly in two letters written that month to Morritt. “I am something in the condition of Joseph Surface, who was embarrassed by getting himself too good a reputation; for many things may please people well enough anonymously, which, if they have me in the title-page, would just give me that sort of ill name which precedes hanging — and that would be in many respects inconvenient if I thought of again trying a grande opus.” And a fortnight later: “I shall not own Waverley; my chief reason is that it would prevent me of the pleasure of writing again.... In truth, I am not sure it would be considered quite decorous of me, as a Clerk of Session, to write novels. Judges being monks, Clerks are a sort of lay brethren, from whom some solemnity of walk and conduct may be expected. So, whatever I may do of this kind, I shall whistle it down the wind to pray a fortune.... I do not see how my silence can be considered as imposing on the public.... In point of emolument, everybody knows that I sacrifice much money by withholding my name; and what should I gain by it that any human being has a right to consider as an unfair advantage? In fact, only the freedom of writing trifles with less personal responsibility, and perhaps more frequently than I otherwise might do.”
These are solid and intelligible grounds. The novel was not the form of literature in the best repute, and a Clerk of Court, who had hopes of the Bench, and whose name had so far only been associated with the responsible rôles of poet, critic and antiquary, might well seek an incognito when he appeared in the character of popular entertainer. Moreover, the warning of Constable’s former partner, Hunter, against cheapening his name had sunk deep into Scott’s mind. He had already a large mass of published work to his credit, and his circumstances made it necessary that he should steadily add to it; it would be fatal if he stood before the world as a bookseller’s hack. With his shrewd eye for economic facts, he realized that a market might be glutted by an author’s name, though the demand for that author’s work might be unsated. We see this motive in some doggerel lines to John Ballantyne: —
No, John, I will not own the book —
I won’t, you picaroon.
When next I try St Grubby’s brook,
The “A. of Wa—” shall bait the hook —
And flat-fish bite as soon
As if before them they had got
The worn out wriggler Walter Scott.
He did not want the name of a worn-out wriggler. It was not that he feared a new venture, and desired to test the flood before he committed himself to it; Scott was never afraid of experiment, and had always refused to bind himself to one line; but he was wisely anxious not to mortgage his future. Nor did he doubt the merits of his new work; he was as certain of them as against dubious friends, as Bunyan in a similar case had been about the Pilgrim’s Progress.
There was another motive, a love of the game of mystification for its own sake. It amused him enormously to see sapient critics hallooing on a false scent, and he was quite ready to encourage their vagaries. At first the secret was confined to Erskine, Morritt and the Ballantynes, but as the novels increased some twenty people shared the knowledge of the authorship. Scott stood resolutely to his denial, and thereby involved himself in a good deal of tortuous prevarication, and some downright falsehoods, justified only on the legal plea that he was not bound to incriminate himself. Presently the world came to regard it as Scott’s amiable fad, and it may fairly be said that no student of contemporary literature was for one moment misled. The mass of corroborative evidence was too great, and his best critic, J. L. Adolphus, quotes appositely from Twelfth Night —
An apple cleft in two is not more twin
Than these two creatures.
[Holiday in the North]
While Edinburgh was beginning to hum with gossip about the new novel, Scott disappeared from its streets on what was perhaps the happiest holiday of his life. He was in high spirits; his new venture promised to be a success, he was relieved for the present of financial cares, and his beloved Abbotsford was growing under his hand; he was setting out on a voyage of exploration to parts of his native land which had hitherto been only names to him; he had congenial company, including Erskine, and he had the holiday feeling which follows a long spell of strenuous work. He sailed on July 29th from Leith in the Lighthouse yacht, under the guidance of Mr Stevenson, the Surveyor of the Lights, who was Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather. There is no better proof of Scott’s inveterate passion for the pen than that, after long weeks of scribing, he should have kept in five little paper books a full journal of his trip. As a “tour to the Highlands” it is a curious contrast to the books of Johnson and Boswell — the stately introspective record of the Londoner who carried his vehement idiosyncrasies intact through a barbarous and unfamiliar land, the not less introspective gossip of the Londoner’s henchman; for it is the work of a keen observer who was more interested in things than in his reactions to them, and who brought to his observation a great store of sympathy and knowledge. And yet no journal could be more self-revealing. In Lockhart’s words, “we have before us, according to the scene and occasion, the poet, the antiquary, the magistrate, the planter and the agriculturist; but everywhere the warm yet sagacious philanthropist — everywhere the courtesy, based on the unselfishness, of the thoroughbred gentleman.”
At first he was in familiar scenes. He visited the ruined abbey of Arbroath, which awoke memories of Williamina Stuart, in whose company he had first seen it. He had his one and only bout of sea-sickness, though the rest of the company suffered much. In the Orkneys and Shetlands he studied the antiquities and the habits of the people, and had the felicity to meet a genuine witch, who, like Æolus, sold favourable winds to sailors; he explored the wild coast around Cape Wrath; in the outer Hebrides he followed the track of Prince Charlie’s wanderings; in Skye he saw Macleod’s fairy flag, heard Macrimmon’s Lament played by a Macrimmon, and was solemnized by the majesty of Loch Coruisk; he made a difficult landing on the reef which was afterwards to carry the lighthouse of Skerryvore, and, amid the tombs of Iona, reflected that the last Scottish king said to have been buried there owed all his fame to Shakespeare. “A few weeks’ labour of an obscure player has done more for the memory of Macbeth than all the gifts, wealth and monuments of this cemetery of princes have been able to secure to the rest of its inhabitants.”
The voyage gave him the landscape he needed for the forthcoming Lord of the Isles, and the knowledge of island life which afterwards bore fruit in The Pirate. It gave him more — an insight into certain aspects of Highland and island economy, and the problems of a fast-moving world. No trait is more notable in Scott than his constant interest in economic and social questions, how human beings made a livelihood, how social change was to be combined with social persistence. In Orkney he observed the crofting system with a sagacious eye; large farms were, he decided, the only economic solution, but he could not face the dispossession of the small folk. “Were I an Orcadian laird I feel I should shuffle on with the old useless creatures against my better judgment.” In the Reay country he noted the growth of the big sheep farms, which were opening up a new source of profit for Highland landowners. But they meant the eviction of hundreds of families who had been there for generations and had provided stalwart soldiers for the British Army. Europe was not yet at peace; was the economic to be preferred to the human factor? “Wealth is no doubt strength in a country, while all is quiet and governed by law, but on any altercation or internal commotion it ceases to be strength, and is only a means of tempting the strong to plunder the possessors.”
He crossed to Ulster, and at Portrush had news which clouded the remainder of his journey — the death of Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, to whom he was attached by every bond of clan loyalty and personal affection. He left the yacht at Greenock and made his first steamer journey to Glasgow, where he wrote to the Duke. But the Duke had anticipated him, and had already written a letter to tell him how the kind and gracious lady had made her farewell to the world. In his sorrow the bereaved husband desired to draw his friends closer around him. “I shall love them more and more because I know that they loved her.” There are few things in the long literature of consolation to surpass the tenderness and fortitude of this interchange of letters.
Scott reached Edinburgh to find that Constable had sold three thousand copies of Waverley, and was eager to treat for a third edition. The novelist was fairly embarked on his career, and we may pause to consider the auspices under which he entered upon it.
II
[Origins of the Novel]
This is not the place to trace at length the progress of English fiction from its lowly beginnings to the high estate to which it was brought by the eighteenth-century masters. Scott entered upon a field already largely cultivated, though under divergent principles of husbandry. First for these principles. Defoe’s had been the method of minute, conscientious realism. His technique was that of the detached reporter, giving fictitious events the air of a plain statement of fact, the art, as Sir Walter Raleigh has put it, of “grave, imperturbable lying.” With Richardson we have the same elaborate pretence at factual accuracy; his device of a narrative in letters had the same purpose as Defoe’s minute particulars, to give the imaginative stuff the illusion of a chronicle of fact. With both the personality of the writer is withdrawn. In Fielding we find a radical change. He had the boldness to present fiction as fiction, and to propound a doctrine of the writer’s part which since his day has been generally accepted. Verisimilitude is to be attained by the inherent logic of the characters and their doings; the illusion he seeks is not that of history but of art. The author is no longer the impersonal chronicler; he is the spectator who assumes omniscience, and therefore he is entitled to comment and philosophize as he pleases. In the fantastic impressionism of Sterne the freedom of the author was further enlarged. He could now cut capers on his own account, and, in revealing his characters, reveal every cranny of himself.
Fielding’s achievement freed the hands of his successors. Simultaneously with the development of the methods of husbandry had come an enlargement of the arable land. Richardson had invented the novel of sensibility, which was the early form of the novel of personality — the record of events of which the chief interest lay in the reactions of the human soul. Smollett brought in the rough background of the streets and the taverns, and the coarse sea-salt of life; he was the first to exult in the grosser oddities of human nature. With Fielding, too, the domain of the novel was indefinitely extended; the new elasticity of his method made its sphere co-extensive with all aspects of society. When Scott began to write, the novel of manners was firmly established, embracing the drawing-rooms of Richardson and Miss Burney, the bar-parlours and streets and highroads of Smollett and Fielding, and the impish world of Sterne. Its aim, in Coleridge’s phrase, was no longer to copy but to imitate reality, and to interpret it.
But the great era of production seemed to have closed with the publication of Humphry Clinker in the year of Scott’s birth. Jane Austen was indeed carrying one branch of the novel of manners to its final perfection and had published three of her masterpieces before 1814, but they had not caught the public taste. That taste was avid for fiction, and it was being fed on coarse fare. The Minerva Press was sending out a stream of foolish romances, which wallowed in sentimentality or horror, partly translated from the French, partly imitations of Matt Lewis and Mrs Radcliffe. The consequence was that the novel had acquired an ill repute among serious readers. But the underworld in which it lived was populous; of a forgotten work in six volumes, Vicissitudes, two thousand copies at thirty-six shillings were sold on the day of publication. Such a vogue pointed to a demand for something which the ordinary novel of manners did not meet. Miss Edgeworth’s Irish tales had shown that there were untilled patches within the confines of the British islands from which good harvests could be reaped; the success of Miss Jane Porter’s unhistorical melodramas revealed a popular craving for the pageantry of past history; and the crudities of the Minerva Press proved that the fairy-tale, even in its most vulgar form, had not lost its ancient glamour. The time was ripe for a further extension of the domain of the novel, the artistic value of which in one sphere the eighteenth century had signally proved; inside the splendid mechanism which had been devised must be drawn the discredited romance.
