A pleasant evangel was this, and peacefully was it to have been propagated!
Scott was writing a novel, not history. In The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3) Sir Walter gave this account of the persecutions. Had the system of coercion been continued until our day, Blair and Robertson would have preached in the wilderness, and only discovered their powers of eloquence and composition by rolling along a deeper torrent of gloomy fanaticism. . . . The genius of the persecuted became stubborn, obstinate, and ferocious. He did not, in his romance, draw a complete picture of the whole persecution, but he did show, by that insolence of Bothwell at Milnwood, which stirs the most sluggish blood, how the people were misused. This scene, to Dr. McCries mind, is a mere farce, because it is enlivened by Manses declamations. Scott displays the abominable horrors of the torture as forcibly as literature may dare to do. But Dr. McCrie is not satisfied, because Macbriar, the tortured man, had been taken in arms. Some innocent person should have been put in the Boot, to please Dr. McCrie. He never remarks that Macbriar conquers our sympathy by his fortitude. He complains of what the Covenanters themselves called the language of Canaan, which is put into their mouths, a strange, ridiculous, and incoherent jargon compounded of Scripture phrases, and cant terms peculiar to their own party opinions in ecclesiastical politics. But what other language did many of them speak? Oh, all ye that can pray, tell all the Lords people to try, by mourning and prayer, if ye can taigle him, taigle him especially in Scotland, for we fear, he will depart from it. This is the theology of a savage, in the style of a clown, but it is quoted by Walker as Mr. Alexander Pedens. Mr. John Menzies Testimony (1670) is all about hardened men, whom though they walk with you for the present with horns of a lamb, yet afterward ye may hear them speak with the mouth of a dragon, pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides. Manse Headrigg scarcely caricatures this eloquence, or Pedens many and long seventy-eight years left-hand defections, and forty-nine years right-hand extremes; while Professor Simson in Glasgow, and Mr. Glass in Tealing, both with Edoms children cry Raze, raze the very foundation! Dr. McCrie is reduced to supposing that some of the more absurd sermons were incorrectly reported. Very possibly they were, but the reports were in the style which the people liked. As if to remove all possible charge of partiality, Scott made the one faultless Christian of his tale a Covenanting widow, the admirable Bessie McLure. But she, says the doctor, repeatedly banns and minces oaths in her conversation. This outrageous conduct of Bessies consists in saying Gude protect us! and In Heavens name, who are ye? Next the Doctor congratulates Scott on his talent for buffoonery. Oh, le grand homme, rien ne lui peut plaire. Scott is later accused of not making his peasants sufficiently intelligent. Cuddie Headrigg and Jenny Dennison suffice as answers to this censure.
Probably the best points made by Dr. McCrie are his proof that biblical names were not common among the Covenanteers and that Episcopal eloquence and Episcopal superstition were often as tardy and as dark as the eloquence and superstition of the Presbyterians. He carries the war into the opposite camp, with considerable success. His best answer to Old Mortality would have been a novel, as good and on the whole as fair, written from the Covenanting side. Hogg attempted this reply, not to Scotts pleasure according to the Shepherd, in The Brownie of Bodsbeck. The Shepherd says that when Scott remarked that the Brownie gave an untrue description of the age, he replied, Its a devilish deal truer than yours! Scott, in his defence, says that to please the friends of the Covenanters, their portraits must be drawn without shadow, and the objects of their political antipathy be blackened, hooved, and horned ere they will acknowledge the likeness of either. He gives examples of clemency, and even considerateness, in Dundee; for example, he did not bring with him a prisoner, who laboured under a disease rendering it painful to him to be on horseback. He examines the story of John Brown, and disproves the blacker circumstances. Yet he appears to hold that Dundee should have resigned his commission rather than carry out the orders of Government? Burleys character for ruthlessness is defended by the evidence of the Scottish Worthies. As Dr. McCrie objects to his buffoonery, it is odd that he palliates the strong propensity of Knox to indulge his vein of humour, when describing, with ghoul-like mirth, the festive circumstances of the murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton. The odious part of his satire, Scott says, is confined to the fierce and unreasonable set of extra-Presbyterians, Wodrows High Flyers. We have no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution. To sum up the controversy, we may say that Scott was unfair, if at all, in tone rather than in statement. He grants to the Covenanters dauntless resolution and fortitude; he admits their wrongs; we cannot see, on the evidence of their literature, that he exaggerates their grotesqueness, their superstition, their impossible attitude as of Israelites under a Theocracy, which only existed as an ideal, or their ruthlessness on certain occasions. The books of Wodrow, Kirkton, and Patrick Walker, the sermons, the ghost stories, the dying speeches, the direct testimony of their own historians, prove all that Scott says, a hundred times over. The facts are correct, the testimony to the presence of another, an angelic temper, remains immortal in the figure of Bessie McLure. But an unfairness of tone may be detected in the choice of such names as Kettledrummle and Poundtext: probably the jog-trot friends of the Indulgence have more right to complain than the high-flying friends of the Covenant. Scott had Cavalier sympathies, as Macaulay had Covenanting sympathies. That Scott is more unjust to the Covenanters than Macaulay to Claverhouse historians will scarcely maintain. Neither history or fiction would be very delightful if they were warless. This must serve as an apology more needed by Macaulaythan by Sir Walter. His reply to Dr. McCrie is marked by excellent temper, humour, and good humor. The Quarterly Review ends with the well known reference to his brother Toms suspected authorship: We intended here to conclude this long article, when a strong report reached us of certain transatlantic confessions, which, if genuine (though of this we know nothing), assign a different author to those volumes than the party suspected by our Scottish correspondents. Yet a critic may be excused for seizing upon the nearest suspected person, or the principle happily expressed by Claverhouse in a letter to the Earl of Linlithgow. He had been, it seems, in search of a gifted weaver who used to hold forth at conventicles: I sent for the webster, they brought in his brother for him: though he, maybe, cannot preach like his brother, I doubt not but he is as well principled as he, wherefore I thought it would be no great fault to give him the trouble to go to jail with the rest.
Nobody who read this could doubt that Scott was, at least, art and part in the review. His efforts to disguise himself as an Englishman, aided by a Scotch antiquary, are divertingly futile. He seized the chance of defending his earlier works from some criticisms on Scotch manners suggested by the ignorance of Gifford. Nor was it difficult to see that the author of the review was also the author of the novel. In later years Lady Louisa Stuart reminded Scott that Old Mortality, like the Iliad, had been ascribed by clever critics to several hands working together. On December 5, 1816, she wrote to him, I found something you wot of upon my table; and as I dare not take it with me to a friends house, for fear of arousing curiosityshe read it at once. She could not sleep afterwards, so much had she been excited. Manse and Cuddie forced me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does when alone. Many of the Scotch words were absolutely Hebrew to her. She not unjustly objected to Claverhouses use of the word sentimental as an anachronism. Sentiment, like nerves, had not been invented in Claverhouses day.
Nobody who read this could doubt that Scott was, at least, art and part in the review. His efforts to disguise himself as an Englishman, aided by a Scotch antiquary, are divertingly futile. He seized the chance of defending his earlier works from some criticisms on Scotch manners suggested by the ignorance of Gifford. Nor was it difficult to see that the author of the review was also the author of the novel. In later years Lady Louisa Stuart reminded Scott that Old Mortality, like the Iliad, had been ascribed by clever critics to several hands working together. On December 5, 1816, she wrote to him, I found something you wot of upon my table; and as I dare not take it with me to a friends house, for fear of arousing curiosityshe read it at once. She could not sleep afterwards, so much had she been excited. Manse and Cuddie forced me to laugh out aloud, which one seldom does when alone. Many of the Scotch words were absolutely Hebrew to her. She not unjustly objected to Claverhouses use of the word sentimental as an anachronism. Sentiment, like nerves, had not been invented in Claverhouses day.
The pecuniary success of Old Mortality was less, perhaps, than might have been expected. The first edition was only of two thousand copies. Two editions of this number were sold in six weeks, and a third was printed. Constables gallant enterprise of ten thousand, in Rob Roy, throws these figures into the shade.
Old Mortality is the first of Scotts works in which he invades history beyond the range of what may be called living oral tradition. In Waverley, and even in Rob Roy, he had the memories of Invernahyle, of Miss Nairne, of many persons of the last generation for his guides. In Old Mortality his fancy had to wander among the relics of another age, among the inscribed tombs of the Covenanters, which are common in the West Country, as in the churchyards of Balmaclellan and Dalry. There the dust of these enduring and courageous men, like that of Bessie Bell and Marion Gray in the ballad, beiks forenenst the sun, which shines on them from beyond the hills of their wanderings, while the brown waters of the Ken murmur at their feet.
Here now in peace sweet rest we take,
Once murdered for religions sake,
says the epitaph on the flat table-stone, beneath the wind tormented trees of Iron Gray. Concerning these Manes Presbyteriani, Guthries and Giffans Passions and the rest, Scott had a library of rare volumes full of prophecies, remarkable Providences, angelic ministrations, diabolical persecutions by The Accuser of the Brethren,in fact, all that Covenanteers had written or that had been written about Covenanteers. Ill tickle ye off a Covenanter as readily as old Jack could do a young Prince; and a rare fellow he is, when brought forth in his true colours, he says to Terry (November 12, 1816). He certainly was not an unprejudiced witness, some ten years earlier, when he wrote to Southey, You can hardly conceive the perfidy, cruelty, and stupidity of these people, according to the accounts they have themselves preserved. But I admit I had many prejudices instilled into me, as my ancestor was a Killiecrankie man. He used to tease Grahame of The Sabbath, but never out of his good humour, by praising Dundee, and laughing at the Covenanters. Even as a boy he had been familiar with that godly company in the original edition of the lives of Cameron and others, by Patrick Walker. The more curious parts of those biographies were excised by the care of later editors, but they may all be found now in the Biographia Presbyteriana (1827), published by True Jock, chief clerk to Leein Johnnie, Mr. John Ballantyne. To this work the inquirer may turn, if he is anxious to see whether Scotts colouring is correct. The true blue of the Covenant is not dulled in the Biographia Presbyteriana.
With all these materials at his command, Scott was able almost to dwell in the age of the Covenant hence the extraordinary life and brilliance of this, his first essay in fiction dealing with a remote time and obsolete manners. His opening, though it may seem long and uninviting to modern readers, is interesting for the sympathetic sketch of the gentle consumptive dominie. If there was any class of men whom Sir Walter could not away with, it was the race of schoolmasters, black cattle whom he neither trusted nor respected. But he could make or invent exceptions, as in the uncomplaining and kindly usher of the verbose Cleishbotham. Once launched in his legend, with the shooting of the Popinjay, he never falters. The gallant, dauntless, overbearing Bothwell, the dour Burley, the handful of Preachers, representing every current of opinion in the Covenant, the awful figure of Habakkuk Mucklewrath, the charm of goodness in Bessie McLure, are all immortal, deathless as Shakspeares men and women. Indeed here, even more than elsewhere, we admire the life which Scott breathes into his minor characters, Halliday and Inglis, the troopers, the child who leads Morton to Burleys retreat in the cave, that auld Laird Nippy, old Milnwood (a real Laird Nippy was a neighbour of Scotts at Ashiestiel), Ailie Wilson, the kind, crabbed old housekeeper, generous in great things, though habitually niggardly in things small. Most of these are persons whom we might still meet in Scotland, as we might meet Cuddie Headriggthe shrewd, the blithe, the faithful and humorous Cuddie. As to Miss Jenny Dennison, we can hardly forgive Scott for making that gayest of soubrettes hard and selfish in married life. He is too severe on the harmless and even beneficent race of coquettes, who brighten life so much, who so rapidly draw up with the new pleugh lad, and who do so very little harm when all is said. Jenny plays the part of a leal and brave lass in the siege of Tillietudlem, hunger and terror do not subdue her spirit; she is true, in spite of many temptations, to her Cuddie, and we decline to believe that she was untrue to his master and friend. Ikuse, no doubt, is a caricature, though Wodrow makes us acquainted with at least one Mause, Jean Biggart, who all the winter over was exceedingly straitened in wrestling and prayer as to the Parliament, and said that still that place was brought before her, Our hedges are broken down! (Analecta, ii. 173.) Surely even Dr. McCrie must have laughed out loud, like Lady Louisa Stuart, when Mause exclaims: Neither will I peace for the bidding of no earthly potsherd, though it be painted as red as a brick from the tower o Babel, and ca itsel a corporal. Manse, as we have said, is not more comic than heroic, a mother in that Sparta of the Covenant. The figure of Morton, as usual, is not very attractive. In his review, Scott explains the weakness of his heroes as usually strangers in the land (Waverley, Lovel, Mannering, Osbaldistone), who need to have everything explained to them, and who are less required to move than to be the pivots of the general movement. But Morton is no stranger in the land. His political position in the juste milieu is unexciting. A schoolboy wrote to Scott at this time, Oh, Sir Walter, how could you take the lady from the gallant Cavalier, and give her to the crop-eared Covenanter? Probably Scott sympathised with his young critic, who longed to be a feudal chief, and to see his retainers happy around him. But Edith Bellenden loved Morton, with that love which, as she said, and thought, disturbs the repose of the dead. Scott had no choice. Besides, Dr. McCrie might have disapproved of so fortunate an arrangement. The heroine herself does not live in the memory like Di Vernon; she does not even live like Jenny Dennison. We remember Corporal Raddlebanes better, the stoutest fighting man of Major Bellendens acquaintance; and the lady of Tillietudlem has admirers more numerous and more constant. The lovers of the tale chiefly engage our interest by the rare constancy of their affections.