Abductions, Insurrection, and Destiny's scythed car

Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf: Reading Notes, Part II

Elshie's misanthropy challenged when a brigand informs him that he intends to raid Hobbie Eliot's homestead. Elshie considers whether to try to warn Hobbie but concludes that his war against humanity cannot allow such mercy: "I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there is an appeal, foresooth, to my feelings; as if I, toward whom none hold sympathy, ought to have sympathy with any one. Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity. Shall I be the idiot to throw this decrepit form, this mis-shapen lump of mortality, under her wheels?"

The brigand spurs his reluctant horse to the deed and Elshie reflects "that villain, that cool-blooded, hardened, unrelenting ruffian -- that wretch whose every thought is infected with crimes -- has thews and sinews, limbs, strength, and activity enough to compel a nobler animal than himself to carry him to the place where he is to perpetrate his wickedness."

Any chance that Elshie will intervene for Hobbie is dashed when the yeoman's hunting hound instinctively slaughters one of the gentle goats the hermit had been given by Earnscliff -- a beast whom the hunchback Elshie had noted treated him with a kindness and gratitude few humans had extended.

Hobbie defends his hound's act as part of his nature. Elshie too sees the attack as "natural": "yes! It is indeed in the usual beaten path of Nature. The strong gripe and throttle the weak; the rich depress and despoil the needy; the happy (those who are idiots enough to think themselves happy) insult the misery and diminish the consolation of the wretched."

Elshie curses Hobbie, which sends a bolt of fear through the superstitious yeoman.

When the brigand returns to Elshie's hut to report he and his gang have destroyed Hobbie's farmstead and kidnapped his fiance, the hermit intervenes with a bribe (one of several recent indications that he is of the gentry) to save the maiden from being sent in bondage to the colonies.

Hobbie's vengefulness somewhat held in check, first by his grandmother's insistence that he say the words "God's will be done" to indicate his acceptance of whatever ill-fate confronts him, then by the oath sworn by Earnscliff -- "Hand and faith! Troth and glove!" -- against attacking the brigand once he surrenders. Hobbie returns glowering from his martial adventures to find that his fiance has been returned through peaceful means -- his grandmother's prayers realized (but really Elshie's bribe of the brigand).

The expedition to free Hobbie's betrothed instead freed Isabella Vere, whose abduction had been planned by her calculating father Laird Ellieslaw, a reformed rake with animus against Earnscliff. Ellieslaw's intent to foment antagonism and thus inflame revolt along the Border in favor of the Catholic cause and the exiled Stewarts.

A more moderate Jacobite speaks of the reformed rake Ellieslaw's rashness: "I am not of so indifferent a mould as my cousin Ellieslaw, who speaks treason as if it were a child's nursery rhymes and loses and recovers that sweet girl, his daughter, with a good deal less emotion on both occasions, than would have effected me had I lost and recovered a greyhound puppy. My temper is not quite so inflexible, nor my hate against government so inveterate, as to blind me to the full danger of the attempt."

A gathering of Jacobites at Ellieslaw castle also includes "many subordinate malcontents, whom difficulty of circumstances, love of change, resentment against England, or any of the numerous causes which inflamed men's passions at the time, rendered apt to join in perilous enterprise."

The insurgent party is anxious rather than ardent, finding themselves in circumstances "where it is alike difficult to advance or recede. The precipice looked deeped and more dangerous as they approached the brink, and each waited with an inward emotion of awe, expecting which of his confederates would set the example by plunging himself down."

The bold Mareschal tries to raise the spirits of the insurgents: "If we have gone forward like fools, do not let us go back like cowards. We have done enough to draw upon us both the suspicion and vengeance of the government; do not let us give up before we have done something to deserve it."

Mareschal succeeds in emboldening the conspirtors, who Scott has respond with a hilarious series of self-interested toasts. Mareschal "seemed to take a mischievious delight in precipitating the movements of the enthusiasm which he had excited, like a rougish boy, who, having lifted the sliuce of the mill-dam, enjoys the clatter of the wheels which he has put into motion, without thinking of the mischief he may have occasioned."

Mareschal's rousing of the crowd revealed as all the more reckless when it is revealed that he had private knowledge that the revolt is already falling apart. He explains to his agast fellow conspirators: "I am tired of a party that does nothing but form bold resolutions over night, and sleep them away with their wine before morning."

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"Why should not the whole human herd butt, gore, and gorge upon each other?": Walter Scott's "The Black Dwarf" Begins

Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf: Reading Notes, Part I

The titular character of Scott's "The Black Dwarf" a misanthropic individual who erects a stone hut on Mucklerstane Moor, a rock strewn area long rumored to be the preserve of witches and their master The Devil.

The dwarf is first espied by two acquaintances coming back from hunting, a somewhat superstitious yeoman, Hobbie Elliot, and Earnscliff, a young Laird of liberal tendencies. The book is set as separatist political tensions are rising along the Scots Border.

Earnscliff's family has long been engaged in a feud with a rival family, the Ellieslaws. Hobie taunts his companion's "newfangled notions of peace and quietness" even as his dead father's "blood is beneath the nails" of the rival Laird of Ellieslaw.

Encountering the dwarf in the wild, before he has begun construction of his hut, Ellieslaw offers to take him to shelter out of a sense of "common humanity." To which the dwarf replies: "Common humanity. Where got ye that catchword -- that noose for woodcocks -- that common disguise for mantraps -- the bait which the wretched idiot who swallows, will soon find covers a hook with barbs ten times sharper than those you lay for the animals which you murder for your luxury?"

The dwarf threatens Hobbie and Earnscliff with violence and they retreat.

At Hobbie's home, his grandmother good-humoredly chides him for coming home without meat from his expedition into what have become highly over-hunted woods. "'In my young days,' said the old lady, 'a man wad hae been ashamed to come back frae the hills without a buck hanging on each side o' his horse'" To which Hobbie replies: "'I wish they had left some for us then Grannie. They've cleared the country of them, they auld friends of yours, I'm thinking.'"

Earnscliff insists on engaging the dwarf, who is building his hut of massive stones, laboring "day after day, with an assiduity so incredible as to appear almost supernatural" and at the same time transporting dirt and mold for a garden."

The truculent dwarf gains a reputation for divination and household magic and cures. He announces his name as Elshender the Recluse and becomes popularly known as Canny Elshie. He shuns money and lives as a vegetarian from his garden but accepts a pair of milk-goats from Earnscliff. As a local seer and homeopath, Elsie has also become party to many secrets of the local populace.

People asking advice or seeking medicines from the dwarf "usually left some offering on a stone, at a distance from his dwelling; if it was money, or any article that it did not suit him to accept, he either threw it away, or suffered it to remain where it was without making use of it."

Earnscliff, on his way back from fishing, stops by the hut and observes the hard work the dwarf has undertaken. The dwarf replies: "labor is the mildest evil of a lot so miserable as that of mankind; better to labor like me than sport like you."

The misanthropic dwarf continues to the creel-carrying fisher of trout: "And yet ... it is better to execute idle and wanton cruelty on mute fishes than on your fellow-creatures. Yet why should I say so? Why should not the whole human herd butt, gore, and gorge upon each other, till all are extirpated but one huge and over-fed behemoth and he, when he has throttled and gored the bones of all his fellows -- he, when his prey failed him, to be roaring whole days for lack of food, and finally to die, inch by inch, of famine -- it were a consummation worthy of that race."

The dwarf continues to explain -- bitterly, but not entirely convincingly -- to Earnscliff that the medical cures he provides are for the purpose of preserving the destructive humans who will eventually immolate each other -- "prolonging the lives of those who can serve the purpose of destruction as effectively" as poision.

Earnscliff argues that the dwarf's curing of the good-natured Hobbie puts the lie to his malign intent. Elshie counters: "He is at present tame, quiet and domesticated, for lack of opportunity to exercise his inborn propensities; but let the trumpet of war sound -- let the young blood-hound snuff blood, he will be as ferocious as the wildest of his Border ancestors that even fired a helpless peasant's abode. . . . The trumpet will blow, the young blood hound will lap blood, and I will laugh and say, 'For this I have preserved thee!"

Generously, Elshie suggests that, due to Earncliff's peaceable nature, he would compassionately offer him a cup of poision to spare him the brutal human holocaust to come.

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