Ronan's Well


By

Sir Walter Scott, Bart.




ST. RONAN'S WELL


VOLUME I.

PAGE
Meg Dods (p. 13) _Frontispiece_
The Meeting in the Wood 137
Preparing for the Duel 198

* * * * *

VOLUME II.

Reappearance of Tyrrel 127
Clara entering Tyrrel's Room 307




EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

TO

ST. RONAN'S WELL.


"'St. Ronan's Well' is not so much my favourite as certain of its
predecessors," Lady Louisa Stuart wrote to Scott on March 26, 1824. "Yet
still I see the author's hand in it, _et c'est tout dire_. Meg Dods, the
meeting" (vol. i. chap. ix.), "and the last scene between Clara and her
brother, are marked with the true stamp, not to be matched or mistaken.
Is the Siege of Ptolemais really on the anvil?" she goes on, speaking of
the projected Crusading Tales, and obviously anxious to part company
with "St. Ronan's Well." All judgments have not agreed with Lady
Louisa's. There is a literary legend or fable according to which a
number of distinguished men, all admirers of Scott, wrote down
separately the name of their favourite Waverley novel, and all, when the
papers were compared, had written "St. Ronan's." Sydney Smith, writing
to Constable on Dec. 28, 1823, described the new story as "far the best
that has appeared for some time. Every now and then there is some
mistaken or overcharged humour--but much excellent delineation of
character, the story very well told, and the whole very interesting.
Lady Binks, the old landlady, and Touchwood are all very good. Mrs.
Blower particularly so. So are MacTurk and Lady Penelope. I wish he
would give his people better names; Sir Bingo Binks is quite
ridiculous.... The curtain should have dropped on finding Clara's
glove. Some of the serious scenes with Clara and her brother are very
fine: the knife scene masterly. In her light and gay moments Clara is
very vulgar; but Sir Walter always fails in well-bred men and women, and
yet who has seen more of both? and who, in the ordinary intercourse of
society, is better bred? Upon the whole, I call this a very successful
exhibition."

We have seldom found Sydney Smith giving higher praise, and nobody can
deny the justice of the censure with which it is qualified. Scott
himself explains, in his Introduction, how, in his quest of novelty, he
invaded modern life, and the domain of Miss Austen. Unhappily he proved
by example the truth of his own opinion that he could do "the big
bow-wow strain" very well, but that it was not his _celebrare domestica
facta_. Unlike George Sand, Sir Walter had humour abundantly, but, as
the French writer said of herself, he was wholly destitute of _esprit_.

We need not linger over definition of these qualities; but we must
recognise, in Scott, the absence of lightness of touch, of delicacy in
the small sword-play of conversation. In fencing, all should be done,
the masters tell us, with the fingers. Scott works not even with the
wrist, but with the whole arm. The two-handed sword, the old claymore,
are his weapons, not the rapier. This was plain enough in the
word-combats of Queen Mary and her lady gaoler in Loch Leven. Much more
conspicuous is the "swashing blow" in the repartee of "St. Ronan's." The
insults lavished on Lady Binks are violent and cruel; even Clara Mowbray
taunts her. Now Lady Binks is in the same parlous case as the
postmistress who dreed penance "for ante-nup," as Meg Dods says in an
interrupted harangue, and we know that, to the author's mind, Clara
Mowbray had no right to throw stones. All these jeers are offensive to
generous feeling, and in the mouth of Clara are intolerable. Lockhart
remarked in Scott a singular bluntness of the sense of smell and 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 "Athenaeum" 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 of sin and
folly?" The reviewer in the "Monthly Review" (1824) says "there is a
hint of some deeper cause of grief (see the confession to the brother),
but it is highly problematical." For all this the delicacy of James
Ballantyne is to blame--his delicacy, and Scott's concessions to a
respectable man and a bad critic.

The origin of "St. Ronan's Well" has been described by Lockhart in a
familiar passage. As Laidlaw, Scott, and Lockhart were riding along the
brow of the triple-peaked Eildon Hills, Scott mentioned "the row" that
was going on in Paris about "Quentin Durward." "I can't but think I
could make better play still with something German," he said. Laidlaw
grumbled at this: "You are always best, like Helen MacGregor, when your
foot is on your native heath; and I have often thought that if you were
to write a novel, and lay the scene _here_ in the very year you were
writing it, you would exceed yourself." "Hame's hame," quoth Scott,
smiling, "be it ever sae hamely," and Laidlaw bade him "stick to Melrose
in 1823." It was now that Scott spoke of the village tragedy, the
romance of every house, of every cottage, and told a tale of some
horrors in the hamlet that lies beyond Melrose, on the north side of
Tweed. Laidlaw and Lockhart believed that this conversation suggested
"St. Ronan's Well," the scene of which has been claimed as their own by
the people of Innerleithen. This little town is beautifully situated
where the hills of Tweed are steepest, and least resemble the _bosses
verdatres_ of Prosper Merimee. It is now a manufacturing town, like its
neighbours, and contributes its quota to the pollution of "the
glittering and resolute streams of Tweed." The pilgrim will scarce rival
Tyrrel's feat of catching a clean-run salmon in summer, but the scenes
are extremely pleasing, and indeed, from this point to Dryburgh, the
beautiful and fabled river is at its loveliest. It is possible that a
little inn farther up the water, "The Crook," on the border of the
moorland, and near Tala Linn, where the Covenanters held a famous
assembly, may have suggested the name of the "Cleikum." Lockhart
describes the prosperity which soon flowed into Innerleithen, and the
St. Ronan's Games, at which the Ettrick Shepherd presided gleefully.
They are still held, or were held very lately, but there will never come
again such another Shepherd, or such contests with the Flying Tailor of
Ettrick.

Apart from the tragedy of Clara, doubtless the better parts of "St.
Ronan's Well" are the Scotch characters. Even our generation remembers
many a Meg Dods, and he who writes has vividly in his recollection just
such tartness, such goodness of heart, such ungoverned eloquence and
vigour of rebuke as made Meg famous, successful on the stage, and
welcome to her countrymen. These people, Mrs. Blower and Meg, are
Shakspearean,