St. Ronans Well | Page 2

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 "Athen?um" 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, and, on the head of this, the mock marriage shook Clara's reason. This was the original plan; it declares itself in the scene between Tyrrel and Clara (vol. i. chap, ix.): "Wherefore should not sorrow be the end