Kitobni o'qish: «Ringan Gilhaize, or, The Covenanters»

INTRODUCTION

A NEGLECTED MASTERPIECE

There have, of course, been many men of genius who have united with great laxity and waywardness in their lives a high and perfect respect for their art; but instances of the directly contrary practice are much rarer, and among these there is probably none more prominent than that of the author of Ringan Gilhaize. Gifted by nature with a faculty which was at once brilliant, powerful and genial, he led an industrious life, the upright and generally exemplary character of which has never for a moment been called in question. But, in the sphere of his art, it is as undeniable as unaccountable that he cared little or nothing to do his best. The haps or whims of the moment seem, indeed, to have governed his production with an influence as of stars malign or fortunate. Furthermore, we know that the profession of authorship – that most distinguished of all professions, as, speaking in sober sadness without arrogance, we cannot but be bold to call it – that profession from which he was himself so well equipt to derive honour – was held by him in low esteem. So that, speaking of the time of his residence in Upper Canada, he thinks no shame to observe that he did then consider himself qualified to do something more useful than "stringing blethers¹ into rhyme," or "writing 'clishmaclavers' in a closet." And again says he, "to tell the truth, I have sometimes felt a little shamefaced in thinking myself so much an author, in consequence of the estimation in which I view the profession of book-making in general. A mere literary man – an author by profession – stands low in my opinion." Such remarks as these from a man of commanding literary talent are the reverse of pleasant reading. But let us deal with the speaker, as we would ourselves be dealt by – mercifully, and regard these petulant utterances as a mere expression of bitterness or perversity in one much tried and sorely disappointed. Even so, the fact remains that the sum of Galt's immense and varied production exhibits inequalities of execution for which only carelessness or contempt in the worker for his task can adequately account. We shall presently have occasion to speak of him in his relation to the great contemporary writer to whose life and work his own work and life present so many interesting points of similarity and diversity; but we may here note that, in the glaringly disparate character of his output, the author of The Provost is in absolute contrast to the author of The Antiquary. For, if Scott's work viewed as a whole be rarely of the very finest literary quality, its evenness within its own limits is on the other hand very striking indeed. For, of his twenty-seven novels, there are perhaps but three which fall perceptibly below the general level of excellence; whilst probably any one of at least as many as six or eight might by a quorum of competent judges be selected as the best of all. And hence, where in the case of other authors we are called on to read this masterpiece or those specimens, and, having done so, are held to have acquitted ourselves, in the case of Scott we cannot feel that we have done our duty till we have read through the Waverley Novels. How entirely different is it with Galt – where we find The Omen occupying one shelf with The Radical, The Annals of the Parish catalogued with Lawrie Todd, and The Spaewife side by side with The Covenanters! And obviously it is in this inequality in its author's work – in the magnitude, that is, of the rubbish-heap in which he chose to secrete his jewels – that the explanation of the neglect, if not rather oblivion, into which the work last-named has fallen can alone be sought and found. For, once in the threescore years of his busy life, Galt did his best, consistently and on a large scale, with the pen; and that once was in the novel of Ringan Gilhaize, or the Covenanters. What is more – however lamentably he may appear in general to lack the faculty of self-criticism – he knew when he had done his best, and among all his books this one remained his favourite. But a man has to pay for artistic as he has for moral delinquencies, and it would seem that the penalty of many a careless tome has been exacted in the obscuration of one of the finest and truest of historical romances in our language.² A word or two as to the genesis and character of the book which we have ventured thus to describe may not be out of place as preface to our endeavour to obtain for it a second hearing.

It was in the year 1822 or 1823 that Galt, aged then about forty-three, and having already seen much of life in various countries and capacities, settled at Esk Grove, Musselburgh, to apply himself to writing historical fiction. He was for the moment elated – carried away, perhaps, for his temper was enthusiastic even to a fault – by the recent and deserved success of his novels of Scottish manners, Sir Andrew Wylie and The Entail; and the soaring idea appears to have entered his head of deliberately attempting to rival Scott in the very field which "the Wizard" had made peculiarly his own. From the point of view of prudence, though not from that of art or of sport, this enterprise was a mistake. For an author, serving as he does the public, shows no more than common sense if he endeavour to study, in the proper degree, the idiosyncrasies of that employer on whose favour his reputation, nay, perhaps the payment of his butcher's bill, depends. And it has long been observed that when the public has once made up its mind that one man is supreme in his own line, it has generally little attention to spare for those who seek to have it reconsider its decision. (This, by the way, was amply illustrated in the sequel of the very case now under discussion.) But the names of Galt and Prudence do not naturally go together: indeed, the two were never well or for any length of time acquainted. At Esk Grove, either in earnest, or, as seems more likely, in banter of the architectural incongruities of Abbotsford, Galt announced his intention of building a "veritable fortress," exactly in the fashion of the oldest times of rude warfare. En attendant, he worked hard with his pen, the first fruits of his industry appearing in the novel which is here reprinted after some six-and-seventy years.

What of the merits of this first attempt in a line that was new to him? In the first place, he had at least been guided in his choice of subject by an unerring historical instinct. For, surpassingly rich as is Scottish history in the elements both of picturesque and romantic incident and of wild and fascinating character, it is none the less a fact that there is but one period during which that history rises to the dignity of a really wide and permanent interest. And that period is of course the century, or century and a half, of the national struggle for religious liberty. It is not necessary to remind the reader that upon that struggle, and on those who maintained it, much has been written as well in the terms of undiscriminating eulogy as in those of uncomprehending condemnation. Nor is it more to the purpose to add that the truth lies neither entirely on one side nor the other. For – as in the earlier struggle for political independence, and, indeed, more or less in all other great national movements – the motives of most of those who took part were mixed, and varied with the individual. Thus it is undeniable that in the breast of many a reforming Scottish laird of the sixteenth century, mistrust of Rome was a subordinate feeling to the covetousness excited by the sight of extensive and well-cultivated Church lands; whilst, again, there are, on the other hand, probably few persons now in existence who would be prepared to justify the intolerance embodied even by the martyr Guthrie in his celebrated Remonstrance – to say nothing of that which made the mere hearing of the mass, under certain circumstances, a capital offence. These things are, however, more or less accidental, and supply no criterion by which the true character of the reforming movement may be tested; for during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, the very nature of tolerance, if understood by one here and there, was beyond the comprehension of the masses of the people. And yet we believe that, notwithstanding the intolerant and implacable spirit too often manifested by the Covenanters, no candid reader will read this book to the end without acknowledging (what is, indeed, the truth) that the soul of the Covenanting movement was a great and noble one. And that soul we here find personified in the younger Gilhaize – a type, if there be one in literature, of the Covenanter of the best kind.

For, whatever may have been the temper of his associates in the aggregate, the hero of the book holds the scales between the rival parties with admirable evenness – and this notwithstanding the strong bias of his temper and upbringing. Indeed, until the time when he has become, not metaphorically, but literally maddened by the wrongs and outrages to which he has been subjected, the book, in so far as it constitutes an expression of his personal sentiments, is a perfect homily on fairness. And how much such fairness has to do with the winning and retaining of sympathy, perhaps only a modern reader is qualified to say. Gifted with the saving graces of humour and of fellow-feeling, the supposed annalist of our chronicle is no less prepared to make allowance for the faults of the other side than to acknowledge the shortcomings of his own. In fact he is the pattern of a spirit at once upright, humble, and self-respecting, whose ruling passion is an earnest piety, and who asks no more of those set over him than freedom to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. And for this little boon, so harshly and unjustly withheld, we see him called upon to sacrifice home, kindred and estate, to know his wife and daughters given over to death and worse than death, and finally to surrender his liberty and his last remaining child. Unless pity and terror in a master's hand have lost their power, surely this spectacle is a moving one! Nor must we forget that, even in the culminating scene of the tragedy – where Ringan makes his bold and inspired oration at the meeting of the Cameronian leaders with Renwick in a dell near Lasswade – the hero, for all his wrongs, remains unembittered, and retains unimpaired the gentleness and the manliness which are his characteristics. That there were such men as this among the Covenanters, or that they constituted the salt which gave its savour to the movement, we are forbidden to doubt. But, saving in the pages which follow, we know not where to seek for the ideal presentment of one such. This is what we mean by saying, as we have said above, that Galt has in this romance laid bare the soul of the Covenanting movement. And this, we may add, is what Scott in Old Mortality most signally failed to do. For in that novel – in place of Galt's subtle and penetrating analysis of the motives which animated the Covenanters nobly to dare and nobly to endure – we find the author content himself with using the characteristics and the disturbances of the time for the mere purpose of providing incident and adventure, and a strong local colour for his puppets – in a word, for the most ordinary and conventional purposes of the romantic novelist. Nor is this the only instance of such psychological obtuseness in his work. That, in spite of this initial and damning defect, he does succeed in producing a fine novel, is but one more proof of the amazing fecundity of his genius. None the less does the fact remain that it is a novel, so to speak, without a soul – that, so far from being of the essence of the Covenant, the Burleys, Mucklewraths, Mauses and Macbrairs are but so many of its accidents, and that thus the main issues of the historical drama are not involved in the romance. In other words, it is as though the tragedy of Hamlet had been performed with great skill and éclat, only without the appearance of the Prince of Denmark upon the stage. And thus, if the historical novel is to play a part of any dignity in our literature, we may safely predict that it is upon the stock here supplied by Galt, rather than upon that supplied by Scott in Old Mortality, that it will have to be grafted.

Having now assigned to our author the credit due to him for his choice and general treatment of a fine subject, it remains to touch briefly upon the technical skill which he has brought to bear upon the handling of its details. By resorting, then, to an ingenious and yet perfectly natural and legitimate device, he has contrived to extend his "household memorial" (for it is thus that he describes the story) so as to make it embrace the entire period of the religious struggle – from its inception under the regency of Marie of Lorraine to its close, or practical close, under the rule of the enlightened and tolerant William of Orange, – a period in all of full one hundred and thirty years. For the narrative, opening with the martyrdom of Walter Mill at St Andrews in 1558, is continued to the death of Claverhouse at Killiecrankie in 1689. And by this means the varying phases of the struggle are traced almost step by step, through the preachings of John Knox and the early image-breaking outrages, to the comparative lull of the reign of James the First of England, and thence again from the renewed exasperating of opposition by the shifty and infatuated Martyr King to the climax of the "Killing Time" under the younger of his sons. Few incidents of really primary or representative importance are omitted, and the skill shown by the Author in stringing the pearls of history upon the thread of his narrative is not the least of the merits he displays. But, as should be in a novel, the historical never overweights the human or fictitious interest, but is always properly subordinated to it.

We have spoken elsewhere³ of Galt the novelist as being "in advance of his time" – a facile phrase which it is expedient to use with due reserve and after due consideration. But the fact that the author with whose work we are instinctively impelled to compare the novel of Ringan Gilhaize is the great chief of the French "Naturalistic" School would appear, at least so far, to support that characterisation. It is, of course, undeniable that, at the outset, there confront us several striking points of contrast or divergence between the two authors. For example, of that triste amour du laid, which, with its concomitants, was for so long, and perhaps is even yet, regarded by the general public as Zola's one prominent characteristic – of this, Galt has absolutely nothing, his preoccupation being uniformly with beauty in one form or another, whether of matter or of spirit. With him, a gloom which, did we not fear to be less than just to Galt we might denominate Byronic, fills perhaps the place of Zola's pessimism. Next, of that misbegotten passion for the painter's brush which has vitiated so much of modern French writing, and of which Zola in inferior works has even more than his due share, the novel of Ringan Gilhaize shows equally no trace. On the contrary, its brief descriptive passages, of which it is noticeable how many are nocturnal or crepuscular, or paint effects of mist or rain-cloud – these might serve as models, at once in their breadth of execution, their aptness and their pregnancy, or quality of moral suggestiveness, of what descriptions in literature should be. How different from those laboured outlines, laboriously filled in, of such a piece of writing as La Curée!

So much, then, for the divergence of the two authors; and now as to their relationship. It is, perhaps, in their power of putting their sense of a multitude before the reader, of exhibiting the passions by which that multitude is animated, and of tracing the phases and fluctuations of that passion, that the Frenchman or Italian and the Scot come first and most strikingly together. Witness in this book the scene of the advance of the congregations to the trial of the Ministers, or that of the return of the Reformer, Knox, to Scotland. This of itself, however, is not much; nor should we have felt justified in drawing special attention to it, but for the fact that it seems to us to be an outward and visible sign of what is a vital, perhaps the vital characteristic of either writer – or, at least, that of Galt in this book, and of Zola in his masterwork. It is associated, then, as we read it, with a desire to rise in art above the limitation of the merely individual, and the springs of this desire we take to lie in that noble and abounding pity which is the dominant passion of either author, or of either book. In either case it is an "objective" or artistic pity, called into being by the spectacle of human suffering as specific as it is intolerable to contemplate. Only that with Galt it is felt for a particular historical group of men, with Zola for a particular section of his contemporaries. And from this characteristic there naturally results a gain of the quality of artistic grandeur in the books. For it is less the fortunes of the individual colliers than the Rights of Labour and their chances of recognition which form the true theme of Germinal; whilst in Ringan Gilhaize we are called to gaze upon nothing less than the grandiose spectacle of a nation in death-grips with a race of mansworn sovereigns. Hence, in either case, the individual characters, measured by the greatness of the issues at stake, sink into comparative insignificance. But this very insignificance serves to illustrate a fundamental truth. For, to quote the words of a great modern thinker, "This is the law which governs humanity: an immense prodigality in regard to the mere individual, a contemptuous heaping together of the unit of human life." He continues, "I can picture to myself the artificer letting great quantities of his material go to waste – undisturbed, indeed, although three parts of it fall useless to the ground. For it is the fate of the vast majority of the human race to serve as a mere floor-cloth on which Destiny may celebrate her revel, or, rather, to contribute towards the making up of one of those numerous persons who were known to the classical drama as the Chorus."⁴ Impressively to exhibit this truth in art is of itself to accomplish much; but in the infinite pathos of the individual lot there is a converse side to every great drama too, and to this neither of our writers is insensible. Hence it is that, against the shadowy curtain or background formed by the crowded and suffering masses of humanity, are relieved and detached such tragic silhouettes as those of Ringan and of La Maheude. In the nature of the long-drawn unrelenting ordeal to which each of these is subjected they are identical; for both of them are rich only in human affection, and of this both live to see themselves entirely denuded. Gilhaize, who is raised above the struggle for mere daily bread, is animated by a spiritual and intellectual passion which would have been altogether beyond the comprehension of the miner's wife of Montsou; but that he is on that account the nobler or more interesting figure of the two, we do not take upon us to say. Neither, of course, must we be understood to insist unduly on the few points of resemblance in two books which, after all, are in so many respects radically unlike.

There is a lighter side to Galt's book, too, and this is seen principally, ere the stress of the action has become intense, in the adventures of the astute Michael Gilhaize. At this point in his narrative it is probably with Stevenson that Galt suggests comparison, nor is it any disparagement to the delightful author of Kidnapped and Catriona to say that the best of his work is to the best of Galt's as a clever boy's to that of a clever man. For whilst Galt presents incident with all, or nearly all, the charm of Stevenson, he is master, besides, of an adult psychology to which the other, in his short life, never attained.

GEORGE DOUGLAS.

Springwood Park, August 1899.