Chapter XVIII: The Monastery

Scott had some strange ways of seeking relaxation from the strain of his work. On Christmas Day, 1814, he wrote Constable that he was 'setting out for Abbotsford to refresh the machine.' During the year he had written his first great novel, 'Waverley'; one of his longer poems, 'The Lord of the Isles'; nearly the whole of his 'Life of Swift'; two essays for an encyclopædia; a two-volume family memoir for a friend; and kept up a voluminous personal correspondence,--an amount of industry which is best described by Dominie Sampson's word, _prodigious_. Surely the 'machine' needed 'refreshment,' and it consisted in producing, in six weeks' time, another great novel, 'Guy Mannering'! In the same way, while dictating 'Ivanhoe,' in spite of severe bodily pain which prevented the use of his pen, he sought refreshment by starting another novel, 'The Monastery.' 'It was a relief,' he said, 'to interlay the scenery most familiar to me with the strange world for which I had to draw so much on imagination.'

'The Monastery' was the first of Scott's novels in which the scenery is confined to the immediate vicinity of his own home. It is all within walking distance of Abbotsford and much of it had been familiar to the author from childhood. Melrose, or Kennaquhair, is only about two miles away. This little village is as ancient as the abbey from which it takes its name, and {256} that splendid ruin dates from 1136, when the pious Scottish king, known as St. David, founded the monastery and granted extensive lands to the Cistercian Order of Monks for its maintenance. The village has followed the fortunes of the abbey--prospering when the monks prospered, and suffering the blight of war whenever the English kings descended upon it. Its present prosperity, so far as it has any, is the gift of Sir Walter Scott. Hawthorne, who rambled through the country in 1856, noted in his journal that 'Scotland--cold, cloudy, barren little bit of earth that it is--owes all the interest that the world feels in it to him.' I cannot endorse this view of Scotland, for it left quite the opposite impression upon my mind, but the last part of the remark is certainly true of Melrose. It bears about the same relation to Scotland that Stratford does to England. Thousands go there every year to see the work of art, glorious even in ruins, which represents the highest development of the Gothic architecture and to marvel at the rich carvings in stone which, after the lapse of nearly six hundred years, still remain as a monument to the patience, skill, and devotion of the monks of St. Mary's. But they go because the great Wizard of the North has thrown the glamour of his genius over the whole of the Border country, of which Melrose is the natural centre. And when they arrive, they find the abbey interpreted in the words of 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' which the custodians of the ruin, for fourscore years, have never tired of quoting.

In the novel, no attempt is made to describe the beauty of the ruin. The poem had already done that to perfection. But the monks spring into life again, the {257} venerable ruin is transformed into a church, the monastic buildings resume their former shape, and the palace of their ruler is refurnished in all its original magnificence. A fire of glowing logs gives warmth to the apartments. An oaken stand, with a roasted capon and 'a goodly stoup of Bourdeaux of excellent flavour,' suggests the truth of the old rhyme:--

The monks of Melrose made fat kail
On Fridays when they fasted,
Nor wanted they gude beef and ale
So lang's their neighbours' lasted.

In a richly carved chair before the fire sits a portly abbot, with round face, rosy cheeks, and good-natured, laughing eyes, the product of a long life of good feeding and indolent ease. By his side stands the sub-prior, a cadaverous, sharp-faced little man, with piercing grey eyes bespeaking a high order of intellect, his emaciated features testifying to rigid fastings and relentless self-abasement. The abuse of the monastic privileges, common enough at the time, is thus contrasted with the conscientious observance of all the rules of the order. In and out of the cloisters, the refectory, and the palace, monks in black gowns and white scapularies are continually passing. The old ruin has been restored by the genius of the novelist to the life and activity of the sixteenth century.

The earliest date referred to in the story is 1547, the year of the battle of Pinkie, when the Scottish forces met with a disaster exceeded only by Flodden Field. In this battle Simon Glendinning, a soldier fighting for the 'Halidome' of St. Mary's, met his death. His son Halbert was then nine or ten years old. The story comes {258} to a close when he is nineteen, which would be 1557. The hostility of Henry VIII had caused great anxiety to the abbots of Melrose long before this time and the persecution reached a climax in 1545. Sir Ralph Ewers and Sir Brian Latoun systematically ravaged the Scottish Border, burning hundreds of towns, castles, and churches, slaughtering and imprisoning the people by the thousands and driving off their cattle and horses. In the course of their raids, they reached Melrose with a force of five thousand men and vented their spite on the beautiful old abbey. The Scots took prompt vengeance. They quickly raised an army, and under the leadership of Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, met the English and defeated them with heavy losses. Both Ewers and Latoun were among the slain, and the monks of Melrose buried them in the abbey with great satisfaction. 'The Monastery' does not refer to this event, but its graphic picture of the unsettled state of the country and the consequent anxiety of the monks constitutes its chief value.

North of the abbey and across the Tweed is a green hillside, at the base of which is a weir or dam. This is the place where the sacristan of St. Mary's was pitched out of his saddle into the stream by the 'White Lady of Avenel,' who dipped him in the water two or three times to make sure that 'every part of him had its share of wetting.'

The old bridge, which the sacristan was prevented from crossing by the perversity of old Peter, the bridge-tender, was about a mile and a half up the stream. Such a bridge once existed, though now there are no traces visible. Scott used to see the foundations {259} occasionally when drifting down the river at night in pursuit of one of his favourite pastimes, spearing salmon by torchlight. There were three towers in the water. A keeper lived in the middle one and controlled the traffic by raising or lowering the draws at his pleasure. Those who refused to pay his price, or whom he did not wish to accommodate, might ford the stream, but at some stages of the water this was a perilous operation.

The river Allan flows into the Tweed near the site of this bridge. It is a little mountain brook that flows, in serpentine course, through the valley of Glendearg. A mile or so up the rivulet there is a picturesque and shady glen called Fairy Dean. After a flood, little pieces of curious stones, in fantastic shapes, are often found, the play of the waters having transformed the fragments of rock into fairy cups and saucers, guns, boats, cradles, or whatever a childish imagination might suggest. This was the abode of the fairies where the little elfin folk held their nightly carnivals, and who knows but Queen Titania herself might have held her moonlight revels upon this very spot? At any rate, the neighbouring people, for centuries, by common consent, recognized the feudal rights of the fairy race to this little dell, and left them undisturbed. It must have been the abode of the White Lady, and no doubt stood in the author's mind for the secluded glen which he calls, in Celtic, _Corrie nan Shian_, meaning 'Hollow of the Fairies,' where Halbert Glendinning found the huge rock, the wild holly tree, and the spring beneath its branches. Here, doubtless, for no more appropriate spot can be found, Halbert summoned the mystic maiden with the words:--

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Thrice to the holly brake--
Thrice to the well:--
I bid thee awake,
White Maid of Avenel!

Noon gleams in the Lake--
Noon glows on the Fell--
Wake thee, O wake,
White Maid of Avenel!

At the head of the glen there are three ruined peel-houses or Border towers, known as Hillslap, Colmslie, and Langshaw. The first of these may fairly stand for the original of Glendearg, the home of the Glendinnings. This old tower has a sculptured date on the lintel of the entrance which seems to indicate that it was built in 1585--a little too late for the story, to be sure, but trifles like that never worried Sir Walter. He wanted to place the Widow Glendinning and her two children in a tower suited to the ancient family connexions of her husband who might have been able to defend his secluded retreat against all comers for many years, had not the necessities of the time required his service in the wars for the defence of his country. Hillslap offered an excellent type of such a Border fortalice, and its situation at the head of the glen, well protected by the surrounding mountains and isolated by its remoteness from the ordinary lines of travel, made it suitable for the purposes of the tale.

Referring to the castle of Julian Avenel, Scott, in a footnote, remarks that it is vain to search near Melrose for any such castle, but adds that in Yetholm Loch, a small sheet of water southeast of Kelso, there is a small castle on an island, connected with the mainland by a {261} causeway, but it is much smaller than Avenel. Of course we must take the author's word for this, and yet, whether he did it with conscious purpose or not, he succeeded in putting into his description some features which irresistibly suggest a castle only seven miles from Melrose, the tower of Smailholm, associated with the dearest memories of his childhood.

Smailholm is one of the most perfect examples of the old feudal keeps to be found in Scotland. A very small pool lies on one side of the tower, but it is suggestive of the loch which once surrounded the entire castle, making it a retreat of great security. 'The surprise of the spectator was chiefly excited by finding a piece of water situated in that high and mountainous region, and the landscape around had features which might rather be termed wild, than either romantic or sublime.' It was a surprise to me to find even a small pool of water in such a locality, and I cannot help thinking that at least some recollections of the peculiar situation of Smailholm may have been in the author's mind when he wrote this description.

Scott has himself mentioned a prototype of the vulgar, brutal, and licentious Julian Avenel in the person of the Laird of Black Ormiston, a friend and confidant of Bothwell and one of the agents in the murder of Darnley.

The concluding scene of the novel represents a sorrowful procession of monks, in long black gowns and cowls, marching solemnly to the market-place of the town, where they formed a circle around 'an ancient cross of curious workmanship, the gift of some former monarch of Scotland.' This old Mercat Cross still stands {262} in the centre of the market-place of Melrose. It is about twenty feet high and is surmounted by the figure of the unicorn and the arms of Scotland. It requires a vivid imagination to identify the unicorn, however, the ravages of time giving it more the aspect of a walrus, rampant.

'The Monastery,' following so soon after Scott's greatest success, suffers severely by comparison with 'Ivanhoe,' and, perhaps for this reason, was considered something of a failure. The cause, generally assigned by the critics, was twofold, or rather, may be attributed to two characters, which did not appeal to the public as Scott had expected. One of these was the 'White Lady of Avenel' and the other, Sir Piercie Shafton.

Scott had always manifested a fondness for ghosts, goblins, witches, and the supernatural. The goblin-page made a nuisance of himself in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' and came near spoiling the poem; Marmion had to fight a phantom knight, and so did Bertram Risingham, but in both cases a rational explanation dispelled the mystery; the Baron of Triermain visited a phantom castle in the Valley of St. John; Bruce landed on the shores of Carrick, guided by a weird supernatural light; Fergus MacIvor was dismayed by the Bodach Glas, a cheerful sort of family ghost which always appeared when disaster was impending; the guest of the Antiquary was compelled to sleep in a haunted chamber; a mysterious fountain had a fatal influence upon the life of the Bride of Lammermoor; and so throughout the pages of Scott's poems and novels we find these strange incidents and phantom appearances. The real orthodox ghost only peeps in at you occasionally and quickly vanishes. {263} Although you may be frightened a little, you delight, nevertheless, in the mystery. But there is something too substantial about a female ghost who climbs up behind a man on horseback, guides him into a stream of deep water, and ducks him three times, meanwhile reciting long stanzas of poetry. And when the same ghost appears again and again, as though the whole plot depended upon her personal exertions, the constant exposure to the limelight causes the illusion to melt away. This, I fancy, is the reason the Maid of Avenel failed to appeal to Scott's readers.

Sir Piercie Shafton, the Euphuist, seems in like manner to have been overdone. A suggestion of the foppery and absurdities of the coxcombs of Queen Elizabeth's court might have been interesting, but Sir Piercie remains on the stage too long and becomes a bore. The pedantic Baron of Bradwardine in 'Waverley' is a bore, but we like him. The garrulous Dalgetty is tiresome, but we could not do without him. Sir Piercie, on the contrary, has no redeeming traits.

Aside from the failure of these two characters to please the public, the novel lacks the interest that attaches to all its predecessors. There is no Dandie Dinmont, nor Meg Merrilies, nor Dominie Sampson; no Jonathan Oldbuck nor Edie Ochiltree; no historical personage of interest like Rob Roy or King Richard; no Jeanie Deans; no Flora MacIvor; no Die Vernon; no Rebecca.

On the other hand, it has some fine pictures of the sturdy Scotch character, it gives a glimpse of monastic life in the sixteenth century, and has an historical value in its presentation of the conflict of cross-currents of {264} thought and feeling, as they affected the people who lived amid the furious contentions of the Reformation. Father Eustace is a fine type of the able, intelligent, and devoted Catholic priest, and Henry Warden of the brave, unflinching, determined apostle of the reformed doctrines.

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