THE SCOTT ORIGINALS.*
Ma. CROCKETT has written a very delightful book for lovers of Sir Walter. As he says truly, the Waverloy Novels were " The Scott Originate: An Account of Notables and Worthies, the Originals of Characters in the Waverley Novels. By W. S. Crockett. London : T. N. &alb,. [es. not.] " the outflow of that good fortune which linked Scott to the past by an unbroken succession of traditions and personages." He lived at a fortunate epoch, when echoes of historic strifes were still to be heard, and the new world had not yet obli- terated all traces of the old. Just as Burns out of obscure fragments of ribaldry and folk-song shaped his great verses, so Scott worked upon data which he found ready to his hand. Not that he was any crude photographer. Like all great artists lie transmuted his materials in the crucible of his genius. His portraits are composite, taking a trait here and a trait there, and producing a whole for which no specific original can be traced. But, knowing his methods, it is of the highest interest to glance into his laboratory and see what his materials were and how he'used them. Mr. Crockett takes the best-known characters in the novels and attempts to trace their genealogy. As a rule Scott himself or Lockhart has revealed their source, and the book is quite free from over-ingenious identifications. It is pleasantly and carefully written, and the few passages of criticism show a sound judgment of Scott's true qualities. Sir Walter had the Shakespearean gift of seeing life steadily and whole. He takes a great fragment of reality and presents it to us without bias or prejudice in all its fullness and intricacy. He called himself a Tory, but no professed democrat has ever seen so clearly the nobility of humble life and the transience of mortal distinctions. He had the rare gift of being able to realize with equal zest the romance and pageantry of history and the abiding problems of humanity. In Waverley the great figure of the Baron of Bradwardine shows traces of more than one original. Scott himself hints at Alexander Stewart of Invernahyle, that stalwart Jacobite whom he bad known in his childhood. Invernahyle saved a Whig officer's life at Prestonpans, very much in the fashion described in the novel. But many of the traits of the Baron are taken from that Bayard of Jacobitism, Lord Pitsligo, the only man to whom Dr. King of Oxford thought that the "character of perfect charitableness and perfect heroism" could be assigned. Pitsligo was an admirable scholar, and in his youth he had been under the spell of Madame Guyon and the Quietists. He took the field at the age of sixty-seven out of a pure sense of duty. After Culloden he was in hiding for years, going about among his old tenants in the guise of a beggar-man. No figure in eighteenth-century Scotland is more attractive than this gallant old scholar, who wiled away the time of his hiding with philosophical medita- tions. Davie Gellatley, the village idiot, in the same novel, seems to be drawn directly from Daft Jock Grey, once a famous figure on the Borders. The stories of Jock are innumerable. He was a noted church-goer, and one Sabbath morning the minister of Ettrick found him installed in the pulpit. Jock was bidden to descend, but replied, "Na, na ; come ye up, Mr. Paton. Come ye up. They are a stiff- necked and rebellious people, and it'll tak' us baith." In Guy Mannering the originals are easy to trace. Dandle Dinmont was the result of Scott's famous " raid into Liddes- dale " with Shortreed. Willie Elliot of Millburnholm sat for part of the portrait, and there are several other claimants ; but, indeed, Dandie is a true type, and the breed of large- hearted Border farmer is not extinct. Dominie Sampson seems to have been drawn from George Thomson, who acted for long as a tutor at Abbotsford. His extreme absentmindedness and eccentricity prevented him from finding a church. He used to say grace at Scott's dinner parties. Once at a hunt dinner he thanked Providence for having given man dominion over the beasts of the field, and expatiated on the subject at such length that Scott observed, " I think we've had everything except the view holla." The delightful figure of Pleydell seems to contain reminiscences of Adam Rolland, a stately old Scots lawyer, but the " high jinks " part is borrowed from Andrew Crosbie. Meg Meanies is undoubtedly based on Jean Gordon of Yetholm, a gipsy woman who after the '45 sang Jacobite songs to the Carlisle mob and died of the consequences. In The Antiquary Monkbarns is drawn from an old family friend, George Constable, and the immortal Edie Ochiltree had his prototype in the bedesman Andrew Gemmels, a true gentleman-beggar, who died at the age of a hundred and five. The Black Dwarf was, of course, a well-known figure on Tweedside, and Old Mortality, who gives the name to the novel, was Robert Paterson, a Dumfriesshire stonemason, whose work is still to be traced in many parts of Scotland. Mr. Crockett gives a most interesting descrip-
tion of this curious solitary, and the strange mission to which he devoted his later years. So far in Mr. Crockett's identification we are on familiar ground, and many of them have been discussed in works like Chambers's Illustrations. But with the heroine of Bob Boy he opens up novel country. On the evidence of Captain Basil Hall he identifies Di Vernon with Miss Jane Anne Cranstoun, who afterwards became Countess Purgstall, and spent her later life in an Austrian Schloss. Lockhart does not accept the timely, but there is some evidence to recom- mend it. Miss Cranstoun was Scott's confidante in his futile love affair with Miss Belscbes, and to her in her foreign home ho wrote perhaps the most touching of all his letters. " The gay and wild romance of life is over with all of us. . . . Age, dark and unlovely, has laid his• crutch over the stoutest fellow's shoulders." New to many, also, will be the story of the origin of Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Scott owed her to Washington Irving. Rebecca Gratz was, the friend of Irving's fiancée, Miss Hoffman, who died young. She refused her lover on the ground of the incompatibility of their faiths, and devoted her life to works of charity. That Scott used her story in the novel we know on his own testi- mony. One of the first copies of Ivanhoe was sent to Irving with the words, "How do you like your Rebecca? Does the Rebecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern given ? " Mr. Crockett identifies Meg Dods in St. llonan's Well with Marion Ritchie, the landlady of the Cross Keys Inn at Peebles. This seems to be one of Scott's nearest approaches to an accurate portrait. Miss Ritchie's career was similar to Meg's, and she had as rough a tongue, as robust an under- standing, and as kind a heart. If a young man triad to linger over his cups she sent him home to 'his mother. She was a true hostess. The Presbytery of Tweeddale dined regularly at her inn, and she died during one of the dinners. Her last words were, " Are the ministers a' rieht P " Most of the other " originals " which Mr. Crockett traces are' well known and generally accepted. Jeanie Deans is, of course,. Helen Walker of Lincluden, to whom Scott erected a monument, in Irongray Churchyard. Lucy Ashton's tragedy in the Bride' of Lammermoor may or may not be modelled on the fate of Janet Dalrymple of Stair. Captain Dugald Dalgetty is, no doubt, taken in part from Colonel Robert Munro, and very largely from Sir James Turner, a luckless soldier of fortune, who was taken prisoner by the Covenanters in the Pentland rising. The Red Gauntlet family were the Grieraons of Lag in Dumfriesshire, those heroes of uncanny myth who in low- land Scotland used to fill the part of the monster in country pantomimes. In closing Mr. Crockett's delightful book one is struck by the fact that Scott borrowed widely and on all hands his raw material, but by the alchemy of his genius changed it beyond recognition. It is the true method of the artist whose work is based upon life. Shakespearean figures must have walked, most of them, the London streets, but none would have found his portrait in the plays. Scott did not even copy himself • slavishly. Mr. Crockett discusses this question and agrees with Hogg that Colonel Mannering is pretty much Sir Walter. Alike, and yet how different ! Any honourable and kindly and courageous man was like Scott, but Scott is too complex a being to be exhausted by any parallels. Colonel Mannering is a little bit of him, as are Pleydell and Menkbarns and Francis Osbaldistone and a score of others. He saw the world teeming with stories and full of presentable men and women. The tales provided their people, and the people inspired the tales, but historical lore and personal reminiscence and his friends' memories were all alike made to serve the creative purpose of Art.
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