The Entail: or The Lairds of Grippy

The Entail or The Lairds of Grippy by John Galt

The Entail was published in 1822, and, disregarded as it has long been, its merit was not ignored then. Gifford, Mackenzie, Lord Jeffrey, and Sir Walter Scott helped to spread its fame. In January, 1823, ‘Christopher North’ reviewed it at great length in Blackwood, and declared it ‘out of all sight the best thing he [Galt] has done’—The Ayrshire Legatees and the Annals of the Parish, be it remembered, having already appeared. The Professor says that he had read ‘the work on its first publication through from beginning to end in one day’, and about a fortnight afterwards devoured ‘all the prime bits’ again.
The conclusion of the whole matter, in Professor Wilson’s opinion, was that Galt had now proved himself ‘inferior only to two living writers of fictitious narratives—to him whom we need not name, and to Miss Edgeworth’.
That Galt was inferior to Scott as a romanticist is what no one would deny. As a romanticist he should not be brought in comparison with Sir Walter at all; but as a painter of genre he is not surpassed even by him whom ‘Christopher North’ would not name. That Miss Edgeworth was a romanticist of high rank does not appear: Castle Rackrent and The Absentee are unequalled, but as presentations of original, quaint, and absolutely living Irish character: Galt was not inferior to her, or a rival of her, for his realm and hers were far apart: in his presentation of certain types of Scottish character he is equally original, equally quaint, and equally true and vivid. Scottish humour and Irish wit are singularly unlike; to compare them must be a barren labour; perhaps the same reader will never fully appreciate both; but to no critic who knows and loves Scots types of character will it be easy to confess that Galt had an inferior revelation to that of the inestimable Maria: the subject-matter was different, that was all. To try and pose them as rivals is the folly. In Galt is none of the rollicking pathos that is the miracle of Castle Rackrent: Scots pathos is as different from Irish as flamboyant Irish wit is different from Scottish pawkiness. But if the daft laird of Grippy be not pathetic then I know of no pathos outside the pathos that exposes itself naked to the public to obtain recognition. If the Leddy o’ Grippy be not inimitably comic, then can there be no comedy short of screaming farce.
The reader is asked to remember that any comparison of Galt with Scott, or of Galt with Maria Edgeworth, was not initiated by the present writer, but by ‘Christopher North’.
Sir Walter Scott himself gave the best proof possible of appreciation by reading The Entail three times: and Byron had read it three times within a year of its appearance. To the Earl of Blessington he said that ‘the portraiture of Leddy Grippy was perhaps the most complete and original that had been added to the female gallery since the days of Shakespeare’.
Were this an essay on The Entail it would not suffice to quote the criticism of great writers upon the work: the essayist would need to justify his own admiration of it by quotation from the book itself. And this he has done at full length in (as Cousin Feenix said) another place. But in an Introduction there can be no occasion to detain the reader from making acquaintance on his own account with the Leddy and Watty, Claud, and the Milrookits. He will not, with the book in his hand, need to be told which scenes are inimitable. There are many which he will never be content to read but once: though I venture to think that he will not arrive at Lord Jeffrey’s conclusion that the drowning of George Walkinshaw is the most powerful single sketch in the work. Powerful all the same it is; and, since Lord Byron’s dictum concerning the Leddy has given the hint, we may be the more readily forgiven for thinking that there is, in that grim passage, something Shakespearian about the little cabin-boy.