"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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