Annals of the Parish and the Ayrshire Legatees ... Illustrated by C. E. Brock. With an introduction by Alfred Ainger

Introduction

BY ALFRED AINGER SLonlion MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK i895 A U rights reserved

INTRODUCTION.

In the course of some remarks upon Sir Walter Scott and his copiousness as a writer, John Gait in his Autobiography makes the not very profound remark that ' unless we keep the quality of excellence constantly in view, we shall fall into a sad error by forming our estimates of authors on the quantity of their productions.' It is impossible but that Gait, as he penned these words in his declining years, should have looked back on his own remarkable literary industry and wondered how far the abundance of his own writings would affect the judgment of posterity upon his place in literature. For there can be no doubt that Gait's fluency in writing, and the apparent ease with which he could produce any kind of book to order, have had much to do with the neglect that has fallen upon him in later days.

He had written poetry, voyages and travels, bio graphies, and treatises on commercial subjects, besides editing and compiling, before ever he discovered the vein in him that was really worth working. John Gait was born in 1779 at Irvine in Ayrshire, the son of a sea-captain. He became in due course a clerk in the custom-house at Greenock, but his heart was already given to literary pursuits, and he early began writing verse and the regulation tragedy. In 1 803 he resigned his situation

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at Greenock and went to London, entering into partnership there with a fellow-countryman in some business, which failed after two years. Gait then became a member of Lincoln's Inn, and again turned his attention to literature as a profession. The bread-and-cheese question becoming urgent, he was once more driven to accept employment in promoting various commercial ventures on the continent of Europe. All these ventures ultimately failed, and after a varied life of residence abroad and travel, Gait returned to England in 1814, with the necessity of still looking to literature as a means of subsistence. Already his industry in that direction had been extraordinary. During his residence abroad and frequent movements from place to place he had found time to write accounts of his travels, with statistics of foreign trade.

But his interests were no less keen in such different subjects as the Drama and the Belles-Lettres generally. He wrote plays of his own, and poetry, and seems to have been little disheartened by the hostile criticism or neglect they encountered. He seemed doomed to taste every bitter experience of the book seller's hack before the chance came to him of showing that a genuine humorist and a singularly keen observer of character and manners had lain concealed and unsus pected amid the dreary waste of compilation and book making. It was not until he was over forty years of age that his opportunity came. In 1820 Blackwood accepted The Ayrshire Legatees for his Magazine. But though first published, it was not earliest written. It was the success of the Blackwood story that encouraged Gait to search for and complete an earlier venture, which he had abandoned in consequence of the unfavourable opinion of a publisher to whom he had submitted it. The incident, which in some

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respects resembles the ever -memorable story of Walter Scott and the Waverley manuscript, found among the fishing tackle, should be told in Gait's own words : — ' The Ayrshire Legatees was published before the Annals of the Parish, but the latter was the earlier written, and the history of it is curious. When very young I wished to write a book that would be for Scotland what The Vicar of Wakefield is for England, and early began to observe in what respects the minister of a parish differed from the general inhabitants of the country. The study, however, was not pursued with any particular intensity ; the opportunity indeed was wanting, for our town was large, and the clergyman in it too urbane to furnish a model. The beau-ideal of a rural pastor never presented itself to me, but I heard from others descriptions of the character of individuals by which I was furnished with many hints. ' One Sunday, happening to take a solitary walk in the neighbouring village of Inverkip, I observed that from the time I had been there before, some progress had been made in turning it inside out.

The alteration was undoubtedly a great improvement, but the place seemed to me neither so picturesque nor so primitive as the old town, and I could not refrain from lamenting the change, as one sighs over the grave of an old man. While looking at the various improvements around, my intention of writing a minister's sedate adventures returned upon me suddenly, and I felt something like that glow with which Rousseau conceived his essay on the arts and sciences. I resolved to make the schoolmaster of the village the recorder of a register. ' Business, with other cares and vicissitudes, suspended the design for many years, but it was constantly remembered, though not carried into effect till the year 1813, when I perceived that the plan of a schoolmaster's register would not suit, so I altered my design into the Annals of the Parish. 'When the work was nearly finished I wrote to my old acquaintance Constable, the bookseller, what I was about, but he gave me no encouragement to proceed : Scottish novels, he said, would not do, for at that time Waverley was not published, nor if it had been, was there any resemblance between my work and that celebrated production. In con- X

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sequence, however, of his letter the unfinished manuscript was thrown into a drawer and forgotten. ' Years after, I took it into my head one Sunday to set my papers in order, and among them the minister's chronicle was found ; I read it over, as an entire stranger would do, and it struck me as possessed of some merit. After dinner, I read passages to a friend who dined with me, and he was equally pleased. I then sent it to Blackwood, by whom it was published. ' Some of the individuals who have been the models of the characters were, on the publication, at once recognised, which tended to corroborate the favourable opinion I had myself formed of the work ; but although the story was suggested by the improvements of Inverkip, the scene is actually laid in the " whereabouts " of the village of Dreghorn, in Ayrshire.

In a still evening I sometimes think of its beautiful church, amidst a clump of trees, with, as Rogers says, " Its taper spire that points to heaven Nor is the locality to me uninteresting, as it happens to be the burial-place of my forbears.' In a later work of Gait's, supplementary to his Autobio graphy, he adds a few details to his account of the origin of this, his first and most memorable achievement in literature. He wished it to be, he says, a picture of society in the west of Scotland during the reign of George the Third, and he adds that he had no idea it would ever have been received as a novel. More than once elsewhere Gait expresses the same wonder, and is evidently a little hurt that a picture of society which was so far from being a ' novel ' should have been valued by the public above his longer and more complex romances, such as Sir Andrew Wylie.

But Gait was here misconceiving the true nature of his own genius. In his later, more elaborate stories he had no models on which to build himself but a school of fiction to which Walter Scott was doing more than any one else to give the coup de grace. What Charles Lamb called the ' innutritious

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phantoms ' of the Minerva Press were to be laid for ever by the ' happier genius ' of Waverley and its successors. Gait's genius was not of that sort which can construct a new body as well as a new soul for its creations. In painting on a large and crowded canvas he has to fall back upon effects that had done duty in a thousand compositions before. Outside the range of his own rare and genuine gifts he has to follow the outworn examples of inferior men. Hence Gait's longer fictions, rich as they are in strokes of his own peculiar humour, have already become old-fashioned. And moreover, when he attempts character -drawing beyond the scope of his own observation, — when he has to draw from books instead of from life, — his personages are often conventional and artificial. There is a certain nobleman who plays a leading part in Sir Andrew Wylie, one Lord Sandyfort, whose modes of expression never had any parallel save in the melodrama of Fitzball or Alfred Bunn.

This is how the Earl moralises, after an interview with the shrewd and honest Scottish clerk, whose speech is the kindly dialect of his native Ayrshire : — ' " I have hitherto lived among machines," said the Earl in soliloquy, moving from the spot, and throwing himself carelessly on a sofa ; " but this is a human being : it has brains, in which thought rises naturally as water-wells from the ground, the wholesome element of temperance ; it has a heart too, and in this little discourse has shown more of man than all the bearded bipeds I have ever met with. What am I to him that he should take such brotherly interest in my desolation ? And how should he know that it is caused by my wife ? My wife ! — -what wife ? I have no wife ; scarcely so much of one as Othello had when he had slain the gentle Desdemona."

And in saying these words his lordship rolled his head over towards the back of the sofa, and covering his face with his handkerchief, lay seemingly asleep.'

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Now we know that earls do not talk in this strain except in fiction, and it was to romances and plays (he was greatly addicted to the latter) that Gait had to resort in his more elaborate novels to supplement his own experience. And it is this element in them, and his adoption of melo dramatic incidents and machineries, that makes Gait, as I have said, so often 'artificial.' It is not the mere lapse of time that constitutes old fashion. The characters and manners of the Annals of the Parish are those of the reign of George the Third. But then they were drawn from the life, and the narrative form adopted by the writer required no assistance from plot or intrigue, and the result is that everything in the village history is as fresh, as real, as delightful as on the day of its appearance. Such is the reward, in prose as in verse, of ' humble truth.' f Gait, as we have seen, had indulged the hope that he might achieve in his Rev. Micah Balwhidder, the minister of Dalmailing, what Goldsmith had done for England in his Dr. Primrose.

And it may surprise many of the novel reading public of our day, to whom Gait is little more than a name, to learn for the first time how far from presump tuous Gait was in cherishing this ambition. As an auto biographical revelation of character the chief personage of this, Gait's masterpiece, has seldom been surpassed. And the degree of Gait's success must be measured by the fact that the task he essayed was to draw a commonplace character, and to create interest by virtue of that very commonplaceness. The elements in Micah Balwhidder's character are so 'kindly mixed' that none predominate. He has no eccentricities, no peculiarities to distinguish him from a thousand other men holding a like position. He is a study of the average man. He is not clever, and

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he is aware of the fact. He never forgets that his parishioners do not regard him as a burning and a shining light — that they even bitterly resented his having been originally set over them by the ' patron,' — but he is no whit dis couraged or mortified. His kindly feeling towards his people is never chilled or soured by the circumstance. He accepts his inferiority in this respect as itself a talent, and labours faithfully to neutralise the prejudice against him, and win kindly opinions as a prelude to the nobler harvest of souls. He is in the best of ways truly humble, for he is a good man ; but while concurring in the popular estimate of his gifts, he has that ' gude conceit ' of himself without which no man, I suppose, ever did much good work in the world. He is a master of the whole gamut of pulpit rhetoric, and falls into the familiar strain whenever he has to record the events of his parish and the earthly fortunes of his flock.

He is proud of his skill in improving national or local occasions, and his felicitous choice of texts. He takes evident pride in the steadfastness of purpose which made him, on one such, preach sixteen times from the words, ' Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's ' ; and in his closing years he rejoices to find that the preaching power in him shows no abatement, and that he can easily hold forth for half an hour longer than formerly. And we feel sure that Thomas Thorl was 'a great judge of good preaching' when he described the minister's sermon about Rachel weeping for her children as ' a monument of divinity whilk searched the heart of many a parent that day,' when the small-pox had been making havoc among the ' weans of the parish.' It is, indeed, this blending throughout of incon sistencies, vanity and humility, intellectual mediocrity and a shrewd but kindly eye to the main chance, of alternate

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simplicity and canniness, that makes the humour and charm of this engaging figure. His matrimonial experiences with the first, second, and third Mrs. Balwhidders are all in their way fascinating. Of the first, indeed, there is little to relate — a mariage de convenance with his own cousin, Miss Betty Lanshaw — a union arising ' more out of a com passionate habitual affection than the passion of love.' We hear little of her till her death, which first calls into play her husband's dormant belief in the poetic faculty within him. A recent Latin inscription on the laird's monument in the kirk at first suggests a rival effort in the same direction, but the idea is properly abandoned, 'as Mrs. Balwhidder, worthy woman as she was, did not under stand the Latin tongue ' ; and, moreover, Latin proving, as the bereaved husband found 'in the experimenting,' ' a crabbed language and very difficult to write properly.' The epitaph is accordingly composed in English, and is given in extenso, opening with the lines — ' A lovely Christian, spouse, and friend, Pleasant in life, and at her end.

A pale consumption dealt the blow That laid her here, with dust below.' The achievement ' was greatly thought of at the time,' and it was doubtless the fame it brought to its author that suggested to the widower in his solitude the thought of writing a book as a diversion from his melancholy. ' Some times I thought of an orthodox poem, like Paradise Lost, by John Milton, wherein I proposed to treat more at large of Original Sin and the great mystery of Redemption ; at others, I fancied that a connect treatise on the efficacy of Free Grace would be more taking ; but although I made divers beginnings in both subjects, some new thought ever b XV

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came into my head, and the whole summer passed away and nothing was done.' It is obvious that in this state of forlorn helplessness — to say nothing of the servant lasses who, 'having no eye of a mistress over them, wastered everything at such a rate ' — a new helpmate must, after a becoming interval, be sought. The second Mrs. Balwhidder was chosen, like Mrs. Primrose, for the qualities that ' wear ' ; and she indeed develops such extraordinary industry, and such a talent for money-making, that the husband is sorely divided in spirit between gratification at his improving fortunes, and an uneasy misgiving whether ' he had got the manse merely to be a factory of butter and cheese, and to breed up veal calves for the slaughter.' There is nothing, indeed, in the Annals more genuinely original and humorous than these domestic incidents, and the light these conjugal complications throw on the character of the narrator.

Sometimes this fine observation of human nature is exhibited in so casual a way that a careless reader may easily let it pass. There is a single parenthesis about the second Mrs. Balwhidder which all but reveals the whole personality of the woman in a flash. 'The roads were just a sheet of ice, like a frozen river ; insomuch, that the coal-carts could not work; and one of our cows (Mrs. Balwhidder said, after the accident, it was our best, but it was not so much thought of before) fell in coming from the glebe to the byre, and broke its two hinder legs, which obligated us to kill it, in order to put the beast out of pain.' But even here 'the soul of goodness in things evil ' is not overlooked. ' As this happened after we had salted our mart, it occasioned us to have a double crop of puddings, and such a show of hams in the kitchen as was a marvel to our visitors to see.'

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The Annals of the Parish is by general consent Gait's masterpiece, and the reasons are not far to seek. He possessed every gift and quality which go to make the success of a parochial record such as he here proposed. Early practice both in prose and metre had given him com mand of a style clear, harmonious, and flexible, combined with the Defoe-like simplicity that makes the narrative absolutely credible. His humour, and evident enjoyment of his humour, are without caricature, and he resisted every temptation to overdo his pathos. Although in his more elaborate fictions the necessity of constructing a plot often led Gait outside the true field of his powers, he was not without a fine artistic sense of the need of balance and contrast even in relating what purports to be an unordered sequence of events; and besides the unity given to the whole by the share of the narrator himself in these events, the story of the gentle and saintly Mrs. Malcolm and her family runs like a golden thread through the shifting humours and eccentricities of the parishioners, and gives strength and dignity, as well as a connected interest, to the whole.

To what extent, if any, Mrs. Gaskell was indebted to Gait the present writer is unaware, but the method and the art of the village annals of Cranford bear no small resemblance to those of Dalmailing. The incident of the Muscovy duck and the means adopted for its relief is a worthy pendant to the sad case of the cow in the flannel dressing-gown. The whole episode of Mr. Cayenne (a name that Thackeray might have envied) is masterly — from the first day when he could hardly wait for the bless ing to be asked before swearing at his blackamoor, to that last grim and daring picture of a death-bed — truly a stroke of genius. Had Gait always been up to this level he would have ranked with the greatest names in English fiction.

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Scarcely inferior are the incidents of Lady Macadam and her companion Kate Malcolm, and of Jenny Gaffaw and her half-witted daughter, though in the latter, perhaps, is to be traced something of the falsetto sentiment of Sterne and his follower Mackenzie. The obvious companion to the Annals of the Parish would be The Provost, this latter being also an autobio graphical presentment of humorous character — the method which was so precisely suited to Gait's genius, that The Provost justly ranks as next in value to the former work. But for the present volume choice has been made, and I think wisely, of another to bear it company, as exhibiting Gait's powers in a different line. The Ayrshire Legatees is the only one of its author's fictions that actually invites comparison — in form, at least — with the work of another novelist.

The story, such as it is, is again in the form of ' annals,' if indeed that term can be applied to the incidents of a few months. And not only the machinery adopted — a series of letters from members of a family on their travels — but the very distribution of the characters is borrowed with out disguise from Smollett's latest fiction, Humphrey Clinker. It is indeed a kind of Humphrey Clinker with the title character omitted. Gait, referring to the book in his Autobiography, is reticent on the point. The choice of characters runs curiously parallel with those of Smollett's novel, the Ayrshire minister and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Pringle, taking the place of Matthew and Tabitha Bramble, while the son and daughter of the Pringles are clearly modelled upon the Melfords, brother and sister, who supply the more serious interest in Humphrey Clinker.

Winifred Jenkins has indeed no exact counterpart among Gait's personages, though her famous eccentricities of spelling, as well as her Malapropisms, are partially reproduced in the

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epistolary style of Mrs. Pringle. Gait, while taking his general idea from Smollett, claims to have drawn his four correspondents from the life. He writes : — ' The Ayrshire Legatees appeared at different times in Blackwood's Magazine, and the characters, as those in the Annals of the Parish, are portraits. Mrs. Pringle is drawn from my mother, and was recognised by herself with some surprise and good-humour. Young Pringle, however, is not altogether a portrait ; he is represented as a Tory Scottish advocate of the ultra class, and as such imbued with anti pathies that have their origin in political opinions ; under a shadow of candour he has strong prejudices. It is necessary to say this here, because it has been supposed that his letters contain my own sentiments ; this, however, is not the case, for although always a moderate Tory, I have never been able to discern that there was aught in political persuasions different from my own to justify enmity.

My best friends have been Whigs, and the Tories I have always thought by far too intractable. I never could discover that the bias of dispositions should be ascribed to principles. The portrait of Andrew Pringle is a composition, and I am not aware that the attributes of any one particular character predominate.' The Ayrshire Legatees, like its prototype, has other interest for us than that of the humours of an unsophisti cated family on their travels. As Smollett provides the historian with valuable sketches of Bristol, Bath, and London in the middle of the last century, so Gait, by fixing the date of the Pringles' adventures in the years 1820-21, is able to record their impressions of the stormy season of George the Third's death, and the divorce proceedings of his successor against Queen Caroline.

Gait was himself living in London during this period, and obviously wrote his impressions as the events passed daily before his eyes. Indeed the incident of the Legacy, as he himself admits, was merely the occasion for bringing a family of country cousins to London to see the ' Lions.' And he

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doubtless chose the particular juncture as being crowded with events of public interest certain to be attractive to his readers in Scotland. It was the success of this work as it passed through the pages of Blackwood that, as we have seen, brought the halfwritten Annals of the Parish out of its pigeon-hole into the light of day, and made the reputation, though not the fortune of John Gait. The two stories led to a multitude of successors, but with the possible exception of The Provost, none of equal mark. He began to paint upon a larger canvas, and the larger canvas did not suit his genius. His more elaborate fictions, though never without strokes of his admirable humour, his perception of character, and remark able descriptive power, lose through their very elaboration the charm that rests still, and for all time, on the short and simple annals of Dalmailing.

Gait had among many fine qualities indefatigable industry. Like Walter Scott, he had to look to literature to compensate for ill-success in commercial ventures, and like Scott he paid the penalty of overtaxed powers and almost at the same age. He was only sixty when he died of gradual decay following on paralysis, in April 1839. Gait stands somewhat apart from the recognised gene alogy of the British novel. It is not easy to determine his immediate progenitors. He borrowed the form of one of his fictions from Smollett, but there are few other traces of indebtedness to that writer. Smollett, though by no means an immoral writer, had a curious leaning towards the coarser details of human life, and from this taint Gait is wholly free. To Scott he owed absolutely nothing, for his first story, in which lay the germ of every quality distinguishing its successors, was schemed and half composed some years before the appearance of Waverley. His true Burnsian XX

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sense of drollery prevented his being ' sicklied-o'er,' save here and there, with the sentimentalism then still in vogue, and only in such experiments as The Omen does he gratify the lingering taste for the supernatural, which in the pages of Mrs. Radcliffe had so fascinated the generation of Catherine Morland and her friends. Gait, though he wrote much about himself, is not decisive as to the literary influences under which he became a novelist. He tells us that The Vicar of Wakefield suggested the companion study of a Scottish minister, but the essential difference in national characteristics prevented Micah Balwhidder from being in any sense a plagiarism from Dr. Primrose. Both characters are marked by simplicity and self-complacency, but these qualities bear such different fruit in different soils.

In another passage, however, of his Autobiography Gait tells us that as a boy he had read, with a schoolmaster, the Spectator and Gil Bias, and to such good purpose that he had never had occasion in after life to refresh his recol lections of these works. Le Sage, Smollett, Addison, Goldsmith — it was in these that Dickens also was to find his inspiration and impulse, and on his more limited plot of ground Gait gathered from the seed thus sown a harvest, in its measure, not less remarkable. Gait remains, I fear, little more than a name even to the omnivorous novel-reader in England. Perhaps, had he, like Goldsmith, written but a single story, he would have been long ago a classic, and the incidents and characters of the Annals of the Parish familiar as household words. It is a noticeable circum stance that the present reprint coincides with a marked revival of interest in Scottish character and manners.

We owe this largely to such admirable pictures of these as Mr. Barrie's, whose masterpiece, A Window in Thrums, owes its success to the dominance of character over plot, — char-

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acter drawn with consummate humour and pathos. It is not too much to hope that Gait's earlier study of life in a Scottish parish, in its different way no less a masterpiece, may once more receive a welcome proportionate to its unquestionable truth and charm. CONTENTS ANNALS OF THE PARISH Introduction Page i

Chapter I

— Year 1760 The placing of Mr. Balwhidder — The resistance of the parishioners — Mrs. Malcolm, the widow — Mr. Balwhidder's marriage . 5

Chapter II

— Year 1761 The great increase of smuggling — Mr. Balwhidder disperses a tea-drinking party of gossips — He records the virtues of Nanse Banks, the schoolmistress — The servant of a military man, who had been prisoner in France, comes into the parish, and opens a dancing-school . . . . . .11

Chapter III

— Year 1762 Havoc produced by the small-pox — Charles Malcolm is sent off a cabin-boy on a voyage to Virginia — Mizy Spaewell dies on Hallowe'en — Tea begins to be admitted at the manse, but the minister continues to exert his authority against smuggling . 1 6

Chapter IV

— Year 1763 Charles Malcolm's return from sea — Kate Malcolm is taken to live with Lady Macadam — Death of the first Mrs. Balwhidder . ANNALS OF THE PARISH

Chapter V

— Year 1764 He gets a headstone for Mrs. Balwhidder, and writes an epitaph for it — He is afflicted with melancholy, and thinks of writing a book — Nichol Snipe the gamekeeper's device when reproved in church ...... Page 24

— Year 1773 The new schoolhouse — Lord Eglesham comes down to the castle — I refuse to go and dine there on Sunday, but go on Monday, and meet with an English dean . . . .63

Chapter XV

— Year 1774 The murder of Jean Glaikit — The young Laird Macadam comes down and marries Kate Malcolm — The ceremony performed by me, and I am commissioned to break the matter to Lady Macadam — Her behaviour . . . . . .67

Chapter XVI

— Year 1775 Captain Macadam provides a house and an annuity for old Mrs. Malcolm — Miss Betty Wudrife brings from Edinburgh a new-fashioned silk mantle, but refuses to give the pattern to old Lady Macadam — Her revenge . . . . .71 ANNALS OF THE PARISH