St. Ronans Well | Page 2

of taste. He could drink corked wine without a suspicion that there
was anything wrong with it. This curious obtuseness of a physical sense,
in one whose eyesight was so keen, who, "aye was the first to find the
hare" in coursing, seems to correspond with his want of lightness in the
invention of badinage. He tells us that, for a long while at least, he had
been unacquainted with the kind of society, the idle, useless underbred
society, of watering-places. Are we to believe that the company at
Gilsland, for instance, where he met and wooed Miss Charpentier, was
like the company at St. Ronan's? Lockhart vouches for the
snobbishness, "the mean admiration of mean things," the devotion to
the slimmest appearances of rank. All this is credible enough, but, if
there existed a society as dull and base as that which we meet in the
pages of "Mr. Soapy Sponge," and Surtees's other novels, assuredly it
was no theme for the great and generous spirit of Sir Walter. The worst

kind of manners always prevail among people whom moderns call "the
second-rate smart," and these are drawn in "St. Ronan's Well." But we
may believe that, even there, manners are no longer quite so hideous as
in the little Tweedside watering-place. The extinction of duelling has
destroyed, or nearly destroyed, the swaggering style of truculence;
people could not behave as Mowbray and Sir Bingo behave to Tyrrel,
in the after-dinner scene. The Man of Peace, the great MacTurk, with
his harangues translated from the language of Ossian, is no longer
needed, and no longer possible. Supposing manners to be correctly
described in "St. Ronan's," the pessimist himself must admit that
manners have improved. But it is not without regret that we see a
genius born for chivalry labouring in this unworthy and alien matter.
The English critics delighted to accuse Scott of having committed
literary suicide. He had only stepped off the path to which he presently
returned. He was unfitted to write the domestic novel, and even in "St.
Ronan's" he introduces events of romantic improbability. These enable
him to depict scenes of the most passionate tragedy, as in the meeting
of Clara and Tyrrel. They who have loved so blindly and so kindly
should never have met, or never parted. It is like a tragic rendering of
the scene where Diana Vernon and Osbaldistone encounter each other
on the moonlit moor. The wild words of Clara, "Is it so, and was it even
yourself whom I saw even now?... And, all things considered, I do
carry on the farce of life wonderfully well,"--all this passage, with the
silence of the man, is on the highest level of poetic invention, and Clara
ranks with Ophelia. To her strain of madness we may ascribe, perhaps,
what Sydney Smith calls the vulgarity of her lighter moments. But here
the genius of Shakspeare is faultless, where Scott's is most faulty and
most mistaken.
Much confusion is caused in "St. Ronan's Well" by Scott's concession
to the delicacy of James Ballantyne. What has shaken Clara's brain?
Not her sham marriage, for that was innocent, and might be legally
annulled. Lockhart writes (vii. 208): "Sir Walter had shown a
remarkable degree of good-nature in the composition of this novel.
When the end came in view, James Ballantyne suddenly took vast
alarm about a particular feature in the heroine's history. In the original

conception, and in the book as actually written and printed, Miss
Mowbray's mock marriage had not halted at the profane ceremony of
the church; and the delicate printer shrank from the idea of obtruding
on the fastidious public the possibility of any personal contamination
having occurred to a high-born damsel of the nineteenth century." Scott
answered: "You would never have quarrelled with it had the thing
happened to a girl in gingham--the silk petticoat can make little
difference." "James reclaimed with double energy, and called
Constable to the rescue; and, after some pause, the author very
reluctantly consented to cancel and re-write about twenty-four pages,
which was enough to obliterate, to a certain extent, the dreaded
scandal--and, in a similar degree, as he always persisted, to perplex and
weaken the course of his narrative, and the dark effect of its
catastrophe."
From a communication printed in the "Athenæum" of Feb. 4, 1893,
extracts from the original proof-sheets, it seems that Lockhart forgot
the original plan of the novel. The mock marriage did halt at the church
door, but Clara's virtue had yielded to her real lover, Tyrrel, before the
ceremony. Hannah Irwin had deliberately made opportunities for the
lovers' meeting, and at last, as she says, in a cancelled passage, "the
devil and Hannah Irwin prevailed." There followed remorse, and a
determination not to meet again before the Church made them one,