On the Old Road Volume Ii Part 31

"I thought to mysel', 'Ye are owre mony for me to mell with; but let me catch ye in Barford's Park, or at the fit of the vennel, I could gar some of ye sing another sang.' Sae, ae auld hirpling deevil of a potter behoved just to step in my way and offer me a pig, as he said, just to pit my Scotch ointment in, and _I gave him a push, as but natural_, and the tottering deevil couped owre amang his ain pigs, and damaged a score of them. And then the reird[105] raise"--

while in the close of the events (ii. 365), he wins his wife by a piece of hand-to-hand fighting, of the value of which his cool and stern estimate, in answer to the gay Templar, is one of the great sentences marking Scott's undercurrent of two feelings about war, in spite of his love of its heroism.

"Bravo, Richie," cried Lowestoffe, "why, man, there lies Sin struck down like an ox, and Iniquity's throat cut like a calf."

"I know not why you should upbraid me with my upbringing, Master Lowestoffe," answered Richie, with great composure; "but I can tell you, the shambles is not a bad place for training one to this work."

118. These then being the radical conditions of native character in the two men, wholly irrespective of their religious persuasion, we have to note what form their Presbyterian faith takes in each, and what effect it has on their consciences.

In Richie, it has little to do; his conscience being, in the deep of it, frank and clear. His religion commands him nothing which he is not at once ready to do, or has not habitually done; and it forbids him nothing which he is unwilling to forego. He pleads no pardon from it for known faults; he seeks no evasions in the letter of it for violations of its spirit. We are scarcely therefore aware of its vital power in him, unless at moments of very grave feeling and its necessary expression.

"Wherefore, as the letter will not avail you with him to whom it is directed, you may believe that Heaven hath sent it to _me_, who have a special regard for the writer--have besides, as much mercy and honesty within me as man can weel mak' his bread with, and am willing to aid any distressed creature, that is my friend's friend."

So, again, in the deep feeling which rebukes his master's careless ruin of the poor apprentice--

"I say, then, as I am a true man, when I saw that puir creature come through the ha' at that ordinary, whilk is accurst (Heaven forgive me for swearing) of G.o.d and man, with his teeth set, and his hands clenched, and his bonnet drawn over his brows...." He stopped a moment, and looked fixedly in his master's face.

--and again in saving the poor lad himself when he takes the street to his last destruction "with burning heart and bloodshot eye":

"Why do you stop my way?" he said fiercely.

"Because it is a bad one, Master Jenkin," said Richie.

"Nay, never start about it, man; you see you are known.

Alack-a-day! that an honest man's son should live to start at hearing himself called by his own name."

"I pray you in good fashion to let me go," said Jenkin. "I am in the humor to be dangerous to myself, or to anyone."

"I will abide the risk," said the Scot, "if you will but come with me. You are the very lad in the world whom I most wish to meet."[106]

"And you," answered Vincent, "or any of your beggarly countrymen, are the last sight I should ever wish to see. You Scots are ever fair and false."

"As to our poverty, friend," replied Richie, "that is as Heaven pleases; but touching our falsity, I'll prove to you that a Scotsman bears as leal and true a heart to his friend as ever beat in an English doublet."

119. In these, and other such pa.s.sages, it will be felt that I have done Richie some injustice in cla.s.sing him among the religionists who have little sympathy! For all real distress, his compa.s.sion is instant; but his doctrinal religion becomes immediately to him a cause of failure in charity.

"Yon divine has another air from powerful Master Rollock, and Mess David Black of North Leith, and sic like. Alack-a-day, wha can ken, if it please your lordship, whether sic prayers as the Southrons read out of their auld blethering black mess-book there, may not be as powerful to invite fiends, as a right red-het prayer warm from the heart may be powerful to drive them away; even as the evil spirit was driven by the smell of the fish's liver from the bridal chamber of Sara, the daughter of Raguel!"

The scene in which this speech occurs is one of Scott's most finished pieces, showing with supreme art how far the weakness of Richie's superst.i.tious formality is increased by his being at the time partially drunk!

It is on the other hand to be noted to his credit, for an earnest and searching Bible-reader, that he quotes the Apocrypha. Not so gifted Gilfillan,--

"But if your honor wad consider the case of Tobit--!"

"Tobit!" exclaimed Gilfillan with great heat; "Tobit and his dog baith are altogether heathenish and apocryphal, and none but a prelatist or a papist would draw them into question. I doubt I hae been mista'en in you, friend."

Gilfillan and Fairservice are exactly alike, and both are distinguished from Moniplies in their scornfully exclusive dogmatism, which is indeed the distinctive plague-spot of the lower evangelical sect everywhere, and the worst blight of the narrow natures, capable of its zealous profession. In Blattergowl, on the contrary, as his name implies, the _doctrinal_ teaching has become mere Blather, Blatter, or patter--a string of commonplaces spoken habitually in performance of his clerical function, but with no personal or sectarian interest in them on his part.

"He said fine things on the duty o' resignation to the will of G.o.d--that did he"; but his own mind is fixed under ordinary circ.u.mstances only on the income and privilege of his position. Scott however indicates this without severity as one of the weaknesses of an established church, to the general principle of which, as to all other established and monarchic law, he is wholly submissive, and usually affectionate (see the description of Colonel Mannering's Edinburgh Sunday), so that Blattergowl, _out of the pulpit_, does not fail in his serious pastoral duty, but gives real comfort by his presence and exhortation in the cottage of the Mucklebackits.

On the other hand, to all kinds of Independents and Nonconformists (unless of Roderick Dhu type) Scott is adverse with all his powers; and accordingly, Andrew and Gilfillan are much more sternly and scornfully drawn than Blattergowl.

120. In all the three, however, the reader must not for an instant suspect what is commonly called "hypocrisy." Their religion is no a.s.sumed mask or advanced pretense. It is in all a confirmed and intimate faith, mischievous by its error, in proportion to its sincerity (compare "Ariadne Florentina," paragraph 87), and although by his cowardice, petty larceny,[107] and low cunning, Fairservice is absolutely separated into a different cla.s.s of men from Moniplies--in his fixed religious principle and primary conception of moral conduct, he is exactly like him. Thus when, in an agony of terror, he speaks for once to his master with entire sincerity, one might for a moment think it was a lecture by Moniplies to Nigel.

"O, Maister Frank, a' your uncle's follies and your cousin's fliskies, were nothing to this! Drink clean cap-out, like Sir Hildebrand; begin the blessed morning with brandy-taps like Squire Percy; rin wud among the la.s.ses like Squire John; gamble like Richard; win souls to the Pope and the deevil, like Rashleigh; rive, rant, _break the Sabbath_, and do the Pope's bidding, like them a' put thegither--but merciful Providence! tak' care o' your young bluid, and gang na near Rob Roy."

I said, one might for a moment think it was a Moniplies' lecture to Nigel. But not for two moments, if we indeed can think at all. We could not find a pa.s.sage more concentrated in expression of Andrew's total character; nor more characteristic of Scott in the calculated precision and deliberate appliance of every word.

121. Observe first, Richie's rebuke, quoted above, fastens Nigel's mind instantly on the _n.o.bleness_ of his father. But Andrew's to Frank fastens as instantly on the _follies_ of his uncle and cousins.

Secondly, the sum of Andrew's lesson is--"do anything that is rascally, if only you save your skin." But Richie's is summed in "the grace of G.o.d is better than gold pieces."

Thirdly, Richie takes little note of creeds, except when he is drunk, but looks to conduct always; while Andrew clinches his catalogue of wrong with "doing the Pope's bidding" and Sabbath-breaking; these definitions of the unpardonable being the worst absurdity of all Scotch wickedness to this hour--everything being forgiven to people who go to church on Sunday, and curse the Pope. Scott never loses sight of this marvelous plague-spot of Presbyterian religion, and the last words of Andrew Fairservice are:--

"The villain Laurie! to betray an auld friend that sang aff the same psalm-book wi' him _every Sabbath_ for twenty years,"

and the tragedy of these last words of his, and of his expulsion from his former happy home--"a jargonelle pear-tree at one end of the cottage, a rivulet and flower plot of a rood in extent in front, a kitchen garden behind, and a paddock for a cow" (viii. 6, of the 1830 edition) can only be understood by the reading of the chapter he quotes on that last Sabbath evening he pa.s.ses in it--the 5th of Nehemiah.

122. For--and I must again and again point out this to the modern reader, who, living in a world of affectation, suspects "hypocrisy" in every creature he sees--the very plague of this lower evangelical piety is that it is _not_ hypocrisy; that Andrew and Laurie _do_ both expect to get the grace of G.o.d by singing psalms on Sunday, whatever rascality they practice during the week. In the modern popular drama of "School,"[108] the only religious figure is a dirty and malicious usher who appears first reading Hervey's "Meditations," and throws away the book as soon as he is out of sight of the company. But when Andrew is found by Frank "perched up like a statue by a range of beehives in an att.i.tude of devout contemplation, with one eye watching the motions of the little irritable citizens, and the other fixed on a book of devotion," you will please observe, suspicious reader, that the devout gardener has no expectation whatever of Frank's approach, nor has he any design upon him, nor is he reading or att.i.tudinizing for effect of any kind on any person. He is following his own ordinary customs, and his book of devotion has been already so well used that "much attrition had deprived it of its corners, and worn it into an oval shape"; its attractiveness to Andrew being twofold--the first, that it contains doctrine to his mind; the second, that such sound doctrine is set forth under figures properly belonging to his craft. "I was e'en taking a spell o' worthy Mess John Quackleben's 'Flower of a Sweet Savour sown on the Middenstead of this World'" (note in pa.s.sing Scott's easy, instant, exquisite invention of the name of author and t.i.tle of book); and it is a question of very curious interest how far these sweet "spells" in Quackleben, and the like religious exercises of a nature compatible with worldly business (compare Luckie Macleary, "with eyes employed on Boston's 'Crook in the Lot,' while her ideas were engaged in summing up the reckoning"--Waverley, i. 112)--do indeed modify in Scotland the national character for the better or the worse; or, not materially altering, do at least solemnize and confirm it in what good it may be capable of. My own Scottish nurse described in "Fors Clavigera" for April, 1873, would, I doubt not, have been as faithful and affectionate without her little library of Puritan theology; nor were her minor faults, so far as I could see, abated by its exhortations; but I cannot but believe that her uncomplaining endurance of most painful disease, and steadiness of temper under not unfrequent misapprehension by those whom she best loved and served, were in great degree aided by so much of Christian faith and hope as she had succeeded in obtaining, with little talk about it.

123. I knew however in my earlier days a right old Covenanter in my Scottish aunt's house, of whom, with Mause Hedrigg and David Deans, I may be able perhaps to speak further in my next paper.[109] But I can only now write carefully of what bears on my immediate work: and must ask the reader's indulgence for the hasty throwing together of materials intended, before my illness last spring, to have been far more thoroughly handled. The friends who are fearful for my reputation as an "ecrivain" will perhaps kindly recollect that a sentence of "Modern Painters" was often written four or five times over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour--perhaps a forenoon--before it was pa.s.sed for the printer. I rarely now fix my mind on a sentence, or a thought, for five minutes in the quiet of morning, but a telegram comes announcing that somebody or other will do themselves the pleasure of calling at eleven o'clock, and that there's two shillings to pay.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 98: October 1881.]

[Footnote 99: "Jean Francois Millet." Twenty Etching's and Woodcuts reproduced in Facsimile, and Biographical Notice by William Ernest Henley. London, 1881.]

[Footnote 100: I am sorry to find that my former allusion to the boating expedition in this novel has been misconstrued by a young auth.o.r.ess of promise into disparagement of her own work; not supposing it possible that I could only have been forced to look at George Eliot's by a friend's imperfect account of it.]

[Footnote 101: I am ashamed to exemplify the miserable work of "review"

by mangling and mumbling this n.o.ble closing chapter of the "Monastery,"

but I cannot show the web of work without unweaving it.]

[Footnote 102: With ludicrously fatal retouch in the later edition "was deprived of" his sword.]

[Footnote 103: Again I am obliged, by review necessity, to omit half the points of the scene.]

[Footnote 104: I must deeply and earnestly express my thanks to my friend Mr. Hale White for his vindication of Goethe's real opinion of Byron from the mangled representation of it by Mr. Matthew Arnold (_Contemporary Review_, August, 1881).]

[Footnote 105: "Reirde, rerde, Anglo-Saxon reord, lingua, sermo, clamor, shouting" (Douglas glossary). No Scottish sentence in the Scott novels should be pa.s.sed without examining every word in it, his dialect, as already noticed, being always pure and cla.s.sic in the highest degree, and his meaning always the fuller, the further it is traced.]

[Footnote 106: The reader must observe that in quoting Scott for ill.u.s.tration of particular points I am obliged sometimes to alter the succession and omit much of the context of the pieces I want, for Scott never lets you see his hand, nor get at his points without remembering and comparing far-away pieces carefully. To collect the evidence of any one phase of character, is like pulling up the detached roots of a creeper.]

[Footnote 107: Note the "wee business of my ain," i. 213.]

[Footnote 108: Its "hero" is a tall youth with handsome calves to his legs, who shoots a bull with a fowling-piece, eats a large lunch, thinks it witty to call Oth.e.l.lo a "n.i.g.g.e.r," and, having nothing to live on, and being capable of doing nothing for his living, establishes himself in lunches and cigars forever, by marrying a girl with a fortune. The heroine is an amiable governess, who, for the general encouragement of virtue in governesses, is rewarded by marrying a lord.]