Walter Scott, ‘Castle Dangerous’ (1831)

[Continuing my read-through of Walter Scott. Previously on this blog: Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), Quentin Durward (1823), St Ronan’s Well (1823), Redgauntlet (1824), The Betrothed (1825), The Talisman (1825), Woodstock (1826) and The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827), The Highland Widow (1827), The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) and Count Robert of Paris (1831). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

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Let’s, as Weezer once sang, get dangerous. In my post on Count Robert of Paris I talked in some detail about the health-problems that dogged Scott’s last years: a series of increasingly debilitating strokes that left him often paralysed and unable to speak — though he kept on writing. I also went through some of the complexities of Count Robert’s journey from manuscript to publication, a journey that involved Scott’s son-in-law John Lockhart revising and adding whole new sections to Scott’s barely legible and broken-backed screed: it may be that as much as a third of the novel was actually written by Lockhart.

Which brings us to Castle Dangerous, the last Waverley novel to be published in Scott’s lifetime — a later-penned story, The Siege of Malta, and a strange scrap of writing known as ‘Bizarro’, were left unfinished at Scott’s death and not published until 2008 (I will discuss them both in the blog at some point). Though ill and brain-weakened Scott pressed-on with the writing, because he needed the money, because writing was what he did, because the sheer momentum of a life of constant writing carried him on.

Thwarted in his plan to bring Count Robert to a shocking climax — a scene in which the novel’s two main female characters, one of them pregnant, fight in the Byzantine gladiatorial arena — Scott put the manuscript of that book aside. Instead he started a brand new novel, set at the time of the first Scottish war of independence, the time of Robert the Bruce.

As Scott was writing the country was in turmoil: there was widespread political agitation, leading up to the 1832 Reform Act, meetings, mobs, a fear of full-scale revolution. Scott, feeling it his duty to use his fame, and the fact that he had until recently been Jedburgh Sherriff, gave a public address to an election meeting in the town. It did not go well, Scott first rambling incoherently and then, as heckling from the crowd incensed him, angrily rebuking them: ‘I regard your gabble no more than the geese on the green.’ When election day came, three troops of dragoons had to be drafted to Jedburgh to keep the peace, and Scott himself (who attended the count to support his relative Henry Scott, standing on an anti-Reform platform) was spat at and pelted with stones. The crowd chanted ‘burke Sir Walter!’ — that is, strangle, murder Sir Walter — a taunt that recurred to Scott for the rest of his life, in nightmares and even in daytime hallucinations, as his mind deteriorated.

Things got worse. Another stroke left Scott with a dangerous oedema inside his cranium. Doctors inserted a threaded stent, or tap, called a ‘seton’ into the back of his head to drain fluid: — an operation undertaken without anaesthetic. Scott afterwards described it as ‘Indian torture.’

It is little short of astonishing that he pushed on with a new novel under these circumstances, but push on he did. He used his steward William Laidlaw as amanuensis, and even managed to orchestrate a brief research trip to visit Douglas Castle in Lanarkshire, the site of the novel’s various adventures. It seems Scott intended to write one of his standard three-volume novels. This, however, proved beyond him: he believed he had completed the first volume by the 3rd July — in fact, he had miscalculated, and had actually written less than half of one. He actually got to the end of the first volume by the beginning of August, but most of that month saw nothing added because Scott’s mind became, in Lockhart’s term, ‘confused’. He took up the novel again at the month’s end and worked into September despite chronic rheumatic pain, but the telling didn’t prosper. The tale was abbreviated, with not even the whole second volume completed, when Scott simply stopped: 9th September 1831. Part of the issue may have been that even Laidlaw, though accustomed to taking dictation from his master, was finding it harder even to comprehend what Scott was saying. Scott’s friend Adam Ferguson reported that ‘his voice is so thick and indistinct as to make it very difficult to gather his meaning’.

It was feared that Scott would not survive another Scottish winter, so a Mediterranean voyage was planned — perhaps sunshine and a sea voyage would restore his heath. On 28th September Scott and his party arrived in London by boat, the first stage of their voyage out. Lockhart and Cadell took up the manuscript after Scott had gone and, without any input from him, they revised and reworked it, Lockhart polishing and in places rewriting, or just writing, as he had done on Count Robert.

John Sutherland argues that Castle Dangerous bears the marks of the two, catastrophic strokes Scott had by that point suffered (more were to come):

The novel opens in the by now sadly familiar ‘clouded’ style. There are interminably long looping sentences — up to 170 words in places — which veer all over the place, and forget where they started. There are dialogues that go on too long and ramble away from the plot. The plot itself gets lost, and subplots (such as a quarrel between De Walton and De Valence) are introduced only to be dropped. The spectre knight is the most unconvincing of his kind in all of Scott. All readers will guess that it is Sir James Douglas in disguise. Castle Dangerous starts with one hero and heroine, and ends with another set. Principal characters are left off stage to long. [Sutherland, 347]

This is a little overharsh: if you’re really going to cavil at 170-word sentences, then there’s quite a lot of 19th-century fiction you’ll find objectionable. In fact the prose here seems to me not too bad, all things considered (it’s no late Henry James, let’s say), presumably because Lockhart took care to polish and tighten it before publication. But the rest of Sutherland’s critique is spot-on.

We can assume Lockhart did what he could, but he could not remedy the texture of the novel, the deliquescence of the blocks of prose, the sense of a story slipping away before the reader’s very eyes. Still, Castle Dangerous did well, initially: interest in a new and possibly final Scott novel was buoyed-up by the ongoing commercial success of the Magnum Opus edition. Published on 1st December 1831, its print-run of 5000 sold out quickly, despite its high (especially during an economic recession) price of two guineas.

It’s a difficult novel to get a grip on. I wonder if that isn’t because what was, in earlier Scotts, a productive dialectic (Highland versus Lowland, feudal past versus bourgeois future) coughs and jars, sputtering like an ill-maintained two-stroke engine that tries and fails to come to life. The old dialectic is embodied in the titular castle, the house of Douglas, which not only represents but literally embodies the England-Scotland conflict, passing from control by one nation to control by the other, destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. But all the novel does is pass the castle back from England to Scotland (as the novel opens, the English are holding it against the Scottish uprising of Robert Bruce; as the novel ends Sir James Douglas has reclaimed it): — there’s none of that tasty Lukacsian dialectic-of-history dynamic here.

The castle is garrisoned and commanded by its current governor, the fictional Sir John de Walton, assisted by his deputy, the historical Sir Aymer de Valence. As the novel opens we meet Bertram, an elderly minstrel, travelling towards Castle Dangerous, accompanied by his young son Augustine. Why does Bertram want to visit this military stronghold? It’s all down — harp and carp — to Thomas the Rhymer.

Bertram tells the story: at an earlier epoch, the castle being under assault, as men were being slaughtered and fire set to the infrastructure, one of the castle’s servants, Hugo Hugonet, rushed to the castle library to save the valuable manuscript: ‘the celebrated lay, called Sir Tristrem’ by the legendary poet. As flames lick up the walls and smoke fills the castle, Hugo pulls the book from a shelf and puts it on the table. But wait —

as he bent his eyes upon the book of the ancient Rhymer, he was astonished to observe it slowly removed from the desk on which it lay by an invisible hand. The old man looked with horror at the spontaneous motion of the book, for the safety of which he was interested. [Castle Dangerous ch 5]

In other news, “The Spontaneous Motion of the Book” is the name of my new band. The book is actually being moved by the ghost of Thomas Rhymer himself. I can only hope that, upon my demise, I’ll be granted to power to glide ghostly into people’s house and shove copies of my books about:

The room was already becoming dark, so as to render it difficult to distinguish any person in the chair, though it now appeared, on closer examination, that a kind of shadowy outline of a human form was seated in it … A tall thin form, attired in, or rather shaded with, a long flowing dusky robe, having a face and physiognomy so wild and overgrown with hair as to be hardly human, were the only marked outlines of the phantom …

“I am,” replied the vision, “that celebrated Thomas the Rhymer, by some called Thomas of Erceldoun, or Thomas the True Speaker. Like other sages, I am permitted at times to revisit the scenes of my former life: know, thou afflicted man, that what thou now seest in this woeful country, is not a general emblem of what shall therein befall hereafter, but in proportion as the Douglasses are now suffering the loss and destruction of their home for their loyalty to the rightful heir of the Scottish kingdom, so hath Heaven appointed for them a just reward; and as they have not spared to burn and destroy their own house and that of their fathers in the Bruce’s cause, so is it the doom of Heaven, that as often as the walls of Douglas Castle shall be burnt to the ground, they shall be again rebuilt still more stately and more magnificent than before.”

Thomas’s deal is this: the ‘fated hour’ of the book’s removal has not yet come. Until that time, it will be kept safe — despite the fact that the whole castle is burning down, ‘sparks flew from them as from the smith’s stithy, while the element caught to its fuel, and the conflagration broke its way through every aperture’ — until its time is come. What will happen when ‘its time is come’? Thomas isn’t specific; but something good for Scotland, we intuit.

Anyway, that’s what the minstrel Bertram is after. What about Augustine, his son? This fresh-faced youngster is not what he seems, of course — it’s a Scott novel, so various characters are gadding about in cosplay. In this case ‘Augustine’ is actually a young woman, Lady Augusta of Berkeley. By chapter 11 we discover the truth: having agreed to marry the noble English Sir John de Walton, young Augusta has laid down one condition: he must hold the castle of Douglas for a year and a day. If he does not, then their betrothal shall be null and void; if he does, then they shall marry. This 366-day period being underway, Augusta has disguised herself so as to infiltrate the castle in secret and … well, I’m not sure exactly (which is to say, I’m not sure the novel exactly spells it out): see how things are going. Maybe try and hurry things along, or perhaps stick a spoke in Sir John’s wheel. I dunno.

Bertram and Augustine’s plans are interrupted by the fact that Sir John’s deputy, Sir Aymer, doesn’t trust this minstrel and his quote-unquote ‘son’ and won’t let them in the castle. The latter is dispatched to a nearby convent where he (that is, she) befriends a nun with a ruined face called Ursula. The minstrel himself is detained in the guardhouse until Sir John returns, although when the castle’s governor does come back he is dissatisfied by the way Sir Aymer has conducted himself, setting up a quarrel between the two knights that looks fair to blossom into outright contention. It never does: this is one of the story-strands Scott lays down that he then forgets, or lacks the energy, to pick-up again.

Then — continuing the idea of the castle as haunted from the weird apparition of harp-carp Thomas the Rhymer — a spectral warrior, ‘The Knight of the Tomb’ makes his appearance: ‘a man sheathed in armour, but strangely accoutred, and in a manner so bizarre, as to indicate some of the wild fancies peculiar to the knights of that period.’

His armour was ingeniously painted, so as to represent a skeleton; the ribs being constituted by the corselet and its back-piece. The shield represented an owl with its wings spread, a device which was repeated upon the helmet, which appeared to be completely covered by an image of the same bird of ill omen. But that which was particularly calculated to excite surprise in the spectator, was the great height and thinness of the figure, which, as it arose from the ground, and placed itself in an erect posture, seemed rather to resemble an apparition in the act of extricating itself from the grave, than that of an ordinary man rising upon his feet.

… “It is a singular audacity,” [said] the Knight of the Tomb, “that would enter into conversation with him who is termed the Inexorable, the Unsparing, and the Pitiless.”

The novel never really pretends that this ‘ghastly figure’, whose every speech is delivered ‘in a voice more gloomy than before’, is a supernatural apparition. It is, as Sutherland says, only too obviously one of the disguises in which Scott’s heroes like to disport themselves: here, it’s Sir James Douglas, who would be lord of Castle Dangerous had not the English seized it from him.

Why is he gadding about in this Halloween get-up? (a skeleton painted onto his armour? Seriously??) Well, that’s a little tangled, and isn’t really explained — fundamentally he wants his family castle back, but it’s not clear how pretending to be a spectral knight will assist him in this endeavour. Then there’s the backstory of ‘Ursula’. The reason for her scarred face is revealed about halfway through, when she and cross-dressing Augusta are locked up (for plot-knotty reasons) in a prison cell together. Ursula confesses that she is actually Margaret de Hautlieu, once a beautiful and noble maiden in love with, and beloved by, handsome Sir Malcolm Fleming of Biggar (in the final chapter, Scott, his attention wandering, calls this figure ‘Sir Malcolm Fleming of Boghal’). Her father isn’t having any of that, and locks her in a convent to prevent the match:

He was furious both against my lover and myself; he placed me under the charge of a religious woman of this rule, and I was immured within the house of Saint Bride, where my father shamed not to announce he would cause me to take the veil by force, unless I agreed to wed a youth bred at the English court, his nephew.

Oh no! But Sir Malcolm essays a rescue: ‘he found means to communicate to me a particular night on which he proposed to attempt to storm the nunnery of Saint Bride, and carry me from hence to freedom and the greenwood’. His plan is for them to marry and live as part of the retinue of William Wallace. Rather stupidly, Margaret lets the abbess know all about this plan, which means that Sir Malcolm’s rescue attempt is anticipated. Things go badly wrong:

In the middle of the night appointed, the window of my cell, which was two stories from the ground, was opened without noise; and never were my eyes more gladdened than I saw Malcolm Fleming spring into the apartment. He rushed towards me; but at the same time my father with ten of his strongest men filled the room, and cried their war-cry of Baliol. Blows were instantly dealt on every side. A form like a giant, however, appeared in the midst of the tumult, and distinguished himself, even to my half-giddy eye, by the ease with which he bore down and dispersed those who fought against our freedom.

This giant? Only William Wallace himself! He picks up Margaret, hoiks her out the window and starts down. But Margaret’s father, furious at being thwarted, knocks the ladder away:

Even the strength of Wallace could not prevent the assailant, with all the energy of desperation, from throwing down the ladder, on which his daughter was perched like a dove in the grasp of an eagle. The champion saw our danger, and exerting his inimitable strength and agility, cleared himself and me from the ladder, and leaped free of the moat of the convent, into which we must otherwise have been precipitated. The Champion of Scotland was saved in the desperate attempt, but I fell among a heap of stones and rubbish.

She wakes, back in the abbey, with her face bashed to pieces and one eye missing. Malcolm, she learns, managed to get away. Her father dies soon afterwards (‘my father was slain in one of the endless battles which took place between the contending factions’ she says, in a rather heartless aside) and the abbess herself also dies ‘of a cold caught the evening of the fray’, which seems a bit feeble of her, frankly. Anyway: now that the abbess is dead Ursula is able to leave the convent, although her ghastly disfigurement means that she no longer hopes for a union with her handsome lover.

What does this have to do with the main storyline, the castle and the England/Scotland war? Well, honestly, that’s not entirely clear. Ursula/Margaret’s loyalties are with the Scots; Sir John de Walton is English but honourable. But all the actual civil war action, battles and such, happens off stage, off page. There’s a hunting scene, some to-ing and fro-ing, lots of rather inconsequential dialogue, and Thomas Rhymer’s prophecy is revealed as pertaining to a place called ‘the Bloody Sykes’ or the ‘Bottomless Myre’. The English army is coming to relieve Castle Dangerous from Scottish assault. Eventually, after a good deal amount of faffing about, English Sir John de Walton and Scottish Sir James Douglas fight a duel, a chivalric mano-a-mano, at the Bloody Sykes (though Scott doesn’t do his readers the courtesy of specifying that this is, indeed, where the combat happens) until Augusta intervenes and persuades them both to a truce:

“For Heaven’s sake,” she said — “for your own sakes, and for that of lady’s love, and the duties of chivalry, hold your hands only for an hour, and take chance, that where strength is so equal, means will be found of converting the truce into a solid peace. Think this is Palm Sunday, and will you defile with blood such a peculiar festival of Christianity! Intermit your feud!” [ch 17]

The two knights stop their rumble at this little speech, improbably enough. Then, under what strongly resembles an aegis of exhausted impatience, Scott suddenly wraps everything up: the English army, which has been impending for many chapters, is defeated off-stage and will not now arrive. This turnaround really does happen with startling suddenness: literally within a few paragraphs the novel goes from

‘“Courage, noble English,” said the voice of Greenleaf — “A messenger brings us notice that Pembroke is in full march hither from the borders of Ayrshire, and will be with us in half an hour. Fight on, gallant English!”

to

“Woe is me … The Earl of Pembroke resolved to march to your support, noble knight, with all the forces he had at his disposal. He did so, when unexpectedly he met, on Loudon Hill, a body of men of no very inferior force to his own, and having at their head that famous Bruce whom the Scottish rebels acknowledge as their king.”

Pembroke being defeated (‘the fate of war was against us!’) Sir John has no choice but to surrender the castle to Sir James Douglas, who in turn, rather oddly, hands him Augusta as a kind of consolation prize and lets him go.

“God forbid,” answered the noble James of Douglas, “that I should take such advantage of the bravest knight out of not a few who have found me work in battle! I transfer my claim upon the person of the redoubted Knight of Walton, to the high and noble Lady Augusta Berkely, who, I hope, will not scorn to accept from the Douglas a gift which the chance of war has thrown into his hands.”

Augusta, though ‘hastily wiping off the tears which had unwillingly flowed to her eyes’, goes along with this transfer. So: they all live happily every after, except for Ursula, which is to say Margaret, what with her ruined face and general hideous ugliness and everything.

Sir Malcolm Fleming is present, and a knight there rebukes him with abandoning his lady-love. Sir Malcom angrily repudiates this accusation, and fights his accuser with his broadsword. But he has abandoned her, and after the final chapter’s duel he buggers off. He later writes to Margaret, ‘an attempt to state his apology’ but she ‘returned his letter unopened.’ Then, as a kind of afterthought, Scott gives us this gobsmacking conclusion:

The lady, on that direful morning … had not resolved (indeed what lady ever did?) to renounce, without some struggle, the beauties which she had once possessed. A long process of time, employed under skilful hands, had succeeded in obliterating the scars which remained as the marks of her fall. These were now considerably effaced, and the lost organ of sight no longer appeared so great a blemish, concealed, as it was, by a black ribbon, and the arts of the tirewoman, who made it her business to shadow it over by a lock of hair.

When Sir Malcolm meets her again, by chance, he is won over, understanding that ‘fate had intimated its fiat that their fortunes were inseparable from each other’. And so they marry and join everybody else in living happily ever after. Astonishing stuff. A dab of magic scar-healing cream and an artful lock of hair and: bang! Beautiful again.

The defacement and subsequent romantic consummation of Scott’s heroine is, clearly, one of the things behind Dickens’s handling of Esther Summerson in Bleak House. But it also figures as the trope of the novel itself: effaced in large part, quite hard to follow in terms of plot, subject to tiresome longueurs of dialogue and jolting switches of direction of storytelling focus — and yet, if you squint your eyes, still kind-of beautiful. Late Scott manages some lovely effects of landscape and weather:

The morning was indeed a drizzly, dark, moist day; the mist had settled upon the hills, and unrolled itself upon brook, glade, and tarn, and the spring breeze was not powerful enough to raise the veil, though from the wild sounds which were heard occasionally on the ridges, and through the glens, it might be supposed to wail at a sense of its own inability. The route of the travellers was directed by the course which the river had ploughed for itself down the valley, the banks of which bore in general that dark grey livery which Sir Aymer de Valence had intimated to be the prevalent tint of the country. Some ineffectual struggles of the sun shot a ray here and there to salute the peaks of the hills; yet these were unable to surmount the dulness of a March morning, and, at so early an hour, produced a variety of shades, rather than a gleam of brightness upon the eastern horizon.

Magnificent desolation! And, as in Count Robert, Scott is good on the huge gothic spatialisation of the castle itself: its massy stonework situated in ‘an amphitheatre of mountains’, often battered by ‘sudden storms’, supported by a few ‘bleak and wild farms’. The main castellation is impressive and vast, and is full of wonderful Gothic chambers and annexes. Here, for instance, is the habitation of the sexton Lazarus Powheid, a character introduced, like something out of German expressionist cinema of the 1920s, in this fashion: ‘the shadow of the old man was projected upon the illuminated wall ere his person came in view.’ Powheid’s space is assembled, jigsaw fashion, out of flagstones and graveyard stealings:

He opened a lowly door, which was fitted, though irregularly, to serve as the entrance of a vaulted apartment, where it appeared that the old man held, apart from the living world, his wretched and solitary dwelling. The floor [was] composed of paving stones, here and there inscribed with letters and hieroglyphics, as if they had once upon a time served to distinguish sepulchres … a rude stool or two, and a table were nearly the only furniture, if we include the old man’s bed of straw, lying in a corner, and discomposed, as if he had been just raised from it. At the lower end of the apartment, the wall was almost entirely covered by a large escutcheon, such as is usually hung over the graves of men of very high rank. “Let us sit,” said the old man; “the posture will better enable my failing ears to apprehend your meaning, and the asthma will deal with me more mercifully in permitting me to make you understand mine.”

A peal of short asthmatic coughs attested the violence of the disorder which he had last named, and the young knight followed his host’s example, in sitting down on one of the rickety stools by the side of the fire.

All this, though only inchoately related to a throughline plot, is splendid, and there’s loads of it in this book: wonderfully atmospheric Gothic-y intricacy and vibe-ness. There’s something wonderful here, even if it isn’t properly integrated into the whole of the telling. Overall Castle Dangerous is novel mediocre.