The 'Blackwood' Group

This period of his adolescence strikes one as having been unusually prolonged. It came to a sudden and violent end. It appears that about this time a set of purse-proud upstarts, who stood much in need of schooling in more ways than one, had made their appearance in Glasgow. In relation to some matter of business, one of these had addressed an insolent letter to the firm with which Galt was connected. It was delivered into his hands. On discovering its contents his indignation was boundless, and he proceeded to action with all the impetuosity of a Hotspur. Missing the writer in Glasgow, he straightway tracked him to his quarters in Edinburgh, and having bolted the door of the room in which he sat, forced from him a written apology. So much was satisfactory; but the turmoil excited in the young man's brain did not subside immediately. He did not return to his employment, but, after spending some time in an indeterminate sort of fashion, set off for London 'to look about him.' In the Autobiography, written when he was old and an invalid, all this is detailed in a loose and cursory manner. There is no reference to emotion or the inner life, and the style is that of one who, having written many books, is grown very tired of writing. To the reader this is the reverse of stimulating; yet whatever may be stated and whatever kept back, we may feel sure that, in so emotional and imaginative a man, an intense inner life must have existed, and one in all probability not of the smoothest. At the time of leaving home, however, the writer acknowledges to having felt exceedingly depressed. Then follows a description of sensations experienced, whilst horses were being changed, on the road between Greenock and Glasgow. His father accompanied him on his journey.

'I walked back on the fields,' says the young man, 'alone, with no buoyant heart. The view towards Argyleshire, from the brow of the hill, is perhaps one of the most picturesque in the world. I have since seen some of the finest scenes, but none superior. At the time it seemed as if some pensive influence rested on the mountains, and silently allured me back; and this feeling was superstitiously augmented by my happening in the same moment to turn round and behold the eastern sky, which lay in the direction of my journey, sullenly overcast. On returning to the inn, the horses had been some time in harness, and my father was a little impatient at my absence, but conjecturing what was passing in my mind, said little; nor did we speak much to each other till the waiter of the inn opened the door for us to alight at Glasgow. In truth I was not blind to the perils which awaited me, but my obstinacy was too indulgently considered.' The above reads like a passage from The Omen. In it we see the true Galt, or at least one side of him – brooding, fantastic, the devotee of mysticism, discerning, at this momentous point in his career, the finger of fate where another would have seen but an ordinary process of nature!

As to the time he now spent in London, beyond an incidental admission that it was one of the least satisfactory periods of his career, Galt does not take us into his confidence. One guesses that had he consulted his own feelings only, he would have enjoyed the luxury of writing Confessions. But, after all, he was a Scotchman, though an unusual variety of the class, and Scotchmen do not indulge in luxuries of that kind. His Autobiography, when it came to be written, was in the main a piece of book-making; certainly it has nothing of the confessional character, and, indeed, what of self-revelation he at this time supplies must be sought in his letters to Park.

He had brought with him to the metropolis a goodly number of introductions, which procured him much civility but nothing more. Whilst waiting, however, to see what was to be done for him in the shape of practical assistance, he employed himself in preparing for the press a poem which had been inspired by his studies in antiquarianism, and written some time earlier. The title of this production was The Battle of Largs, and its theme the invasion of Scotland by Haco, King of Norway, in the year 1263, – a subject which had already prompted the Titanic suggestions of Lady Wardlaw's Hardyknute. The poem, as it survives in extracts, is turgid, crude, and immature, exhibiting the exact reverse of what is desirable in poetry – to wit, a great expenditure of means to produce a very small result. For 'tis in vain we are assured that desperate deeds are doing if we find it possible to remain completely unmoved. A strain of somewhat similar kind was afterwards taken up by Motherwell, and by Tom Stoddart in the unbridled fantasy of his only half-serious 'Necromaunt,' called The Death-Wake. To do Galt justice, he quickly realised that he had mounted the wrong Pegasus, and almost immediately suppressed his poem. He acted wisely, and here once for all it may be admitted that, in the specialised sense of the term, he was no poet. Fancy, imagination, dramatic power, and many another fine attribute of the poet he of course possessed in high degree, but, whether because lacking the 'accomplishment of verse,' or for some other reason, he failed to give expression to these gifts in poetry. Metre seems to have impeded rather than assisted him, and he is most poetic when writing in prose – a conclusion suggested by the poem now under consideration, and borne out by his Star of Destiny, his posthumous Demon of Destiny, and his poetic plays. From his own frank avowal that, when drawing up a list of his works for publication, an epic3 was overlooked, we judge that not much of the labour of the file was expended upon his verse.

He waited for some months in London, whiling away the time, as he pretends, by dabbling in astrology, alchemy, and other studies which served to feed his love of the occult, and then at last, in despair, decided to shift for himself. This led to his entering into partnership with a young Scotchman named McLachlan, in a business which, for reasons unknown, is mentioned only under the vague name of a 'commercial enterprise.' Whatever may have been its nature, for Galt this undertaking started badly, and after a period of better success, at the end of three years ended in bankruptcy. The precise steps by which this final consummation was reached are carefully detailed by Galt, yet to minds unversed in commercial procedure they remain very far from clear. In general terms, however, we gather that the failure was due to the dishonesty of a debtor, occurring in conjunction with a succession of financial misfortunes.

Having failed in commerce, Galt's next thought was of the Law. He entered himself of Lincoln's Inn, and whilst waiting to be formally called to the Bar, went abroad in the hope of improving his health, which was not good at the time. He tells us that by this time he had realised that, without friends, there is no such thing as 'getting on' in life possible. These he was conscious of lacking, and when he now turned his back on England it was, in his own words, half desiring that no event might occur to make him ever wish to return. He betook himself in the first instance to Gibraltar, where, in the well-known Garrison Library, he had his first glimpse of a young man whose feelings, had they been revealed, might have been found to tally strangely with his own. Lord Byron, at that time known only as the author of a mordant satire, was starting upon the tour which was so soon to make him famous, and as Galt had him and Hobhouse for fellow-travellers to Malta and Sicily, he got to know them fairly well. It is noticeable that his first impressions of the Pilgrim betray prejudice; and that long afterwards, when he was called on to be his biographer, he complains that Moore's portrait reveals only the sunny side of his lordship's character, and is 'too radiant and conciliatory.'

After visiting Malta and Sicily, Galt proceeded to Athens. His active mind, abhorring idleness, was soon at work again. It may be remembered that this was the period of Buonaparte's endeavour to enforce his nefarious Berlin and Milan Decrees, which had been designed with the object of annihilating British commerce. Our traveller now conceived the idea that they might be evaded by introducing British goods into the Continent through Turkey. And here it may be noted that his biographers have united in representing this scheme as the object of his going abroad, whereas he himself distinctly, though incidentally, states that he left England for the benefit of his health,4 and that his scheme first occurred to him when at Tripolizza.5 This fact, immaterial in itself, is of importance as affording evidence that his circumstances at the time were fairly easy; for his travels must have been costly, yet they do not appear to have brought him in any return until after his written account of them had been published, when he was recouped for the whole, or a part, of his outlay.

In pursuance of the newly-devised scheme, it was now his object to find a locality where a depôt of goods might be established. For this purpose, after visiting various out of the way places, he selected Mykoni, an island of the Archipelago, which possessed an excellent harbour, where he acquired a large building, suited for a storehouse, which had originally been erected by Orloff at a time when the Empress Catherine the Second had designs on these islands. Hence, in the summer of 1810, he returned to Malta, to make known and to develope his scheme, and whilst awaiting the result of communications with England, he filled up the time with further travels, visiting Constantinople and Widdin. Turkey was now in arms against Russia, and in the course of his present journey, which was performed in wintry weather, he saw something of the hardships as well as of the pomp of war. Without presuming to question that he kept business in view – as possibly also did George Borrow in his rambles in Spain – we note the fact that in his own account of his travels the details of his specific labours are kept well in the background, if not indeed out of sight. At the worst his journeys, which led him through some singularly wild and little known parts of the globe, by bringing him acquainted with many picturesque and unusual characters, must have been rich in suggestions of adventure and romance; and, indeed, there is evidence that some of his experience of primitive and martial life acquired at this time was afterwards turned to account in painting similar life at home for his historical novels. His expectations of patronage for his project were, however, disappointed, and he resolved to return without delay to England, in the hope of there finding support for it. In the meantime literature had not been entirely neglected. Keeping his eyes well about him, he had amassed the notes on which were subsequently based his Voyages, and Letters from the Levant; whilst a translation from Goldoni, executed in a single wet day at Missolonghi, and published in the 'New British Theatre' as The Word of Honour, together with the tragedy of Maddalen, composed whilst undergoing quarantine at Messina, belong also to this time.

Back in London, he had the mortification of finding his commercial scheme – as to the presumptive value of which one would wish to have specialist opinion – regarded coldly by the Foreign Office, whilst at the same time he seems to have satisfied himself of the inutility of proceeding further in his legal career. But, whatever may have been his defects, want of resourcefulness was certainly not among them. An outburst of literary industry followed, and the year 1812 saw the publication of his Voyages and Travels, his Life of Wolsey, and his Tragedies. But in justice to one who has sins enough of slipshod composition to answer for, it must be stated that most of the Life of Wolsey – one of the most carefully composed of his books – had been written at an earlier date.

Of his Voyages and Travels in the years 1809, 1810, and 1811, containing statistical, commercial, and miscellaneous observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Cerigo and Turkey, a competent critic remarks that, 'while containing some interesting matter, they are disfigured by grave faults of style and by rash judgments.' The public received them favourably, but a contemptuous notice in the Quarterly Review was warmly resented by the author.

It was whilst standing in the quadrangle of Christchurch College, when on a visit to Oxford, that Galt had conceived the idea of his Life of Wolsey. He had worked hard at the book before he went abroad, and he claimed that it embodied new views, and the results of much original research. Notwithstanding this, the Quarterly Review assailed him again, and this time so libellously as to lead him to think of a criminal prosecution. He, however, dropped the idea, with the result that when his Tragedies saw the light, the persecution – now as in the case of the Travels conducted by Croker in person – was renewed with additional pungency. In the general form of his Maddalen, Agamemnon, Lady Macbeth, Antonia, and Clytemnestra, the author followed Alfieri, whose works he had studied abroad and admired enthusiastically, though with reservations. The plays are of a tentative character, and certainly do not deserve Scott's condemnation as the 'worst ever seen.' Lady Macbeth, which the author thought the 'best or the worst' of the series, though not lacking in imaginative touches, is without progression or story, and besides provoking irresistible comparisons, fails by ending just where it began. And whilst on the subject of Galt's drama, we may mention The Witness, the most important of several plays contributed by him to the 'New British Theatre,' a publication undertaken by Colbourn at his instigation. Here the dramatist had a powerfully dramatic if also a somewhat inconsequent story to work upon – a subject, in fact, after his own heart. Unfortunately the execution of the piece is hasty, and by no means equal to its conception. It was performed for some nights in Edinburgh as The Appeal, when Scott wrote an Epilogue for it, said to be the only piece of humorous verse existing from his pen. Galt himself rehandled the subject in narrative form, under the title of The Unguarded Hour.

He now embarked on a journalistic enterprise, assuming for a time the editorship of the Political Review. But the work did not suit him. After about a month he began to tire of it, and it was soon abandoned. He also contributed lives of Hawke, Byron, and Rodney, to an edition of Campbell's Lives of the Admirals; whilst, in 1813, his Letters from the Levant made their appearance. These contain 'views of the state of society, manners, opinions, and commerce, in Greece and several of the principal islands of the Archipelago,' and had actually been written as letters at the places from which they are dated, being subsequently but little altered.

Perhaps we have already seen enough of the subject of this sketch to convince us that any lengthy perseverance in one course of conduct must not be expected of him, and, sure enough, the next thing we hear of him is that he is bound for Gibraltar, on another commercial enterprise. Before setting out, he had taken occasion to revisit the scenes of his early years, going in turn to every place which he remembered having frequented, even to the churchyard, amid whose tombstones, like his own Andrew Wylie, he had haunted as a boy. Taking stock of himself and his surroundings, he tells us that he was sensible of change everywhere, but nowhere more than in his own hopes. 'I saw that a blight had settled on them, and that my career must in future be circumscribed and sober.' When it is remembered that he was now touching upon what is called the prime of life, his tone of disillusion is pathetic.

He had gone to Gibraltar as the emissary of Kirkman Finlay – a Glasgow merchant, who afterwards bore a spirited part in the Greek War of Independence – with a view to ascertain the feasibility of smuggling British goods into Spain. But the victories of the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula were unfavourable to his mission, and much against his will he found himself compelled to return to England, having accomplished nothing, to seek surgical treatment for a painful malady from which he was now suffering. Whilst in London he was married, his wife being the daughter of a Dr Tilloch, editor of the Philosophical Magazine, to which Galt was an occasional contributor. His marriage was a very happy one, and on the principle, perhaps, that the happiest countries have no history, his married life is not referred to in the biographies. In 1814, at the time of the Restoration in France, we find him visiting Holland and that country, with a view to promote yet another 'abortive scheme.'

It had now become imperative that he should exert himself, and having, as one may say, nothing better to do on his return from the Continent, he resumed the labours of the pen. His first known work of fiction was the result. It was entitled The Majolo, founded upon a Sicilian superstition, and published anonymously in 1816. It was a favourite with its author, and has been described as a 'strange flighty production, enjoyed only by a few peculiar minds.' With it may be mentioned The Earthquake, a three-volume novel written in 1820, and founded on the Messina earthquake of 1783. The latter, though an extravagant and ill-constructed story, is said to describe Sicilian habits and sentiments with accuracy. The Majolo was followed in the same year by the earlier instalment of a Life of Benjamin West, compiled from materials supplied by the painter himself – a work which was completed four years later, after his death. Then the eternal commercial scheme cropped up again. This time it emanated from Glasgow, leading Galt to move with his family to Finnart, near Greenock, where he spent a period afterwards characterised as the most unsatisfactory in his whole life. As usual the scheme in which he was interested failed, and he returned to London, having accepted employment from the Union Canal Company, in order to assist the passing through Parliament of a bill promoted by that body. This being accomplished, he returned to the drudgery of the desk, and, first and last, turned out a portentous body of hack-work, the various items of which need not be catalogued. Fortunately for himself, if not always for his reader, he had the strength and insouciance under labour of what he physically was, a giant. Among the tasks performed at this time were the fascinating, if fabulous, Pictures from English, Scottish, and Irish History; The Wandering Jew, described as a 'conglomerate of history, biography, travel, and descriptive geography,' and a collection of 'All the Voyages round the World' – the last issued under the pen-name of Samuel Prior.

This record of futile commercial enterprise, varied by uninspiring literary work, constitutes dull reading; fortunately a happier period is now reached. In 1820, Mr Blackwood accepted The Ayrshire Legatees for his magazine, and this book proved to be Galt's first real literary success. Perhaps it is also the first deliberate attempt in our literature to delineate, for their own sake, contemporary Scottish manners and character. It will be seen that the mechanism of the story, though of the simplest, is well contrived for supplying to these the necessary relief. Dr Pringle, the minister of a secluded rural parish in Ayrshire, having to his surprise been appointed residuary legatee of a wealthy Indian cousin deceased, betakes himself to London to attend to his affairs in person. He is accompanied by his wife and family – the latter consisting of a son just called to the Scottish bar, and a daughter. The Scottish characters are thus detached against an English background, and the letters in which they describe their experiences in the metropolis to their several correspondents at home make up the staple of the book. The characters of this little group – of the simple, but truly pious and kind-hearted minister, with his sturdy presbyterianism and quaint traditional phraseology of the pulpit; of that notable managing woman his spouse, like whom there was not another within the jurisdiction of the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr; and of the really able and acute young advocate, with his Scottish magniloquence, and his pose as a man of the world even whilst betraying his inexperience – all these are well conceived and well drawn, their unconscious self-revelation being cleverly and naturally managed. The high-flown and romantic young lady, who so soon adapts herself to her new circumstances, though a pleasing enough portrait, is less distinctively Scottish than the rest. Fragments of narrative interpolated among the letters serve to introduce us to the audience before whom these are read out, and at the same time to present a second series of slighter, though not less racy, character-sketches. The hint of the book, with its unanswered correspondence, is obviously drawn from Humphrey Clinker, and, as in that masterpiece, real persons and events – such as the funeral of George the Third and the trial of Queen Caroline, Braham the singer and Sir Francis Burdett – supply much of the epistolary subject-matter. As in Smollett's novel, too, the same subjects are at times discussed in turn by the different writers – a plan which, though it serves the purpose of contrasting character, is not entirely free from objection.

The Ayrshire Legatees was followed in the next year by the yet more original Annals of the Parish. The history of the growth of this book is identical with that of Waverley– it had been begun years before, laid aside, and then resumed and completed – only that Galt has told us that his reason for discontinuing it was that he had been assured that a Scotch novel had no chance of success – an assurance which the case of Waverley has proved untrue. The Annals stands in somewhat the same relation to Scott's novel as does a Dutch to an Italian masterpiece, a tale of Crabbe's to an Elizabethan tragedy. It is given out as an account of the ministry of Micah Balwhidder, parish priest of Dalmailing (Dreghorn), written by himself. Mr Balwhidder had happened to be inducted on the very day on which King George the Third came to the throne; and, irrespective of its merit as a work of fiction, his narrative possesses real historical value as a record of the progress of a rural parish during the half-century succeeding that event. Indeed, with some omissions, the book might almost be printed as an appendix to the old Statistical Account of the parishes of Scotland, drawn up by the ministers. When rumours of great events – such as the American War of Independence or the French Revolution – reach the secluded hamlet, their sound is softened and their influence subdued. But the records of such local matters as floods and bad seasons, improvement of land, making of roads and planting of hedges, development of mineral resources, and so on, are also in their degree the stuff of which history is made, and as here set down they are worthy the attention of an Arthur Young. Then we are incidentally informed of the fluctuations of prices, of the rise of new industries, and the change of fashions – information which to the ordinary novel-reader would appear dry, but for the human and personal interest by which it is pervaded. For the history of the parishioners is interwoven with that of the parish, and over the whole is cast the charm of the kindly Doric and the simple and guileless personality of the minister. In theory an uncompromising stickler for orthodoxy of doctrine, and a terror to evil-doers in the abstract, Mr Balwhidder's instinct is wiser than his creed, and where the two are at variance the stronger insensibly gains the day. The tone of his fragmentary narrative is of itself proof sufficient of his fatherly interest in his villagers. And among those villagers, or at least within the narrow bounds of his parish, he can exhibit a sufficiently motley and picturesque variety in character and the experience of life. First of all we have Lord Eaglesham, the kind landlord, genial gentleman and free liver; Mr Cayenne, the irascible business-man, whose bark is worse than his bite, and Lady Macadam, the flighty and high-handed Great Lady of the old school. Then there is Mrs Malcolm, the pattern widow left with a large young family, her son Charles, the frank sailor, and her handsome daughter Kate; old Nanse Banks, the school-mistress, and her more advanced successor, Miss Sabrina Hookey; Colin Mavis, the youthful poet; the labourer who deserts his slatternly wife and family in order to enlist; the 'naturals,' Jenny Gaffaw and her fantastic ill-fated daughter; pious Mizy Mirkland, and many more. And if these figures be not drawn life-size and set direct in the reader's eye, it is for the sake of artistic keeping: the book is deliberately pitched in a lower key than the ordinary novel, and its persons are shown to us, as it were, afar off. But, none the less, every history is life-like, every character consistent within itself – living as with the life of those real people who flourished before our time, and of whom we have all of us heard in fireside stories as children. In this respect the author's aim is perfectly realised, and his work is a perfect work of art.