Walter Scott and Modernity 9780748631353

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Walter Scott and Modernity

Walter Scott and Modernity

Andrew Lincoln

Edinburgh University Press

To Annie and Sophie

© Andrew Lincoln, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon and Futura by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2606 9 (hardback) The right of Andrew Lincoln to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Frontispiece: Sir Walter Scott, 1st Bt by Sir William Allan. Image reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Contents

Preface

vii

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Towards the Modern Nation: The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and Waverley

30

The Condition of England: Ivanhoe and Kenilworth

67

Western Identities and the Orient: Guy Mannering and The Talisman

89

Commerce, Civilisation, War, and the Highlands: Rob Roy and A Legend of the Wars of Montrose

121

Liberal Dilemmas: Scott and Covenanting Tradition: The Tale of Old Mortality and The Heart of Mid-Lothian

151

Liberal Dilemmas: Liberty or Alienation? The Bride of Lammermoor and Redgauntlet

188

Postscript

218

Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Bibliography Index

1

222 244

Preface

He was a man of intensely conservative quality; he accepted, he accepted wilfully, the established social values about him; he had hardly a doubt in him of what was right and what was wrong, handsome or ungracious, just or mean. He saw events therefore as a play of individualities in a rigid frame of values never more to be questioned or permanently changed. H. G. Wells1

Wells’s view of Scott finds a counterpart in some of the most authoritative readings of later twentieth-century critics. It is echoed, for example, in the landmark study by Alexander Welsh (1963), who argues that the experience of revolution and war ‘inflated the moral currency’ in Britain, so that ‘the felt triumph of stability and status’ obscured the rapid changes taking place in contemporary society. In this reading, Scott’s fiction, like that of his contemporaries, ‘figured forth a vision of permanence and perpetuity’.2 Such accounts make Scott appear irrelevant to a modern age interested in change, instability, uncertainty, and diversity. In view of this it is perhaps not surprising that since Welsh’s study appeared, the impression of certainty and permanence has been modified by a succession of critics who have uncovered a more doubtful, duplicitous, and sceptical Scott. The move begins tentatively, as when Robert C. Gordon and D. D. Devlin find a vein of Tory ‘pessimism’ in Scott’s work, or when Peter Garside emphasises the ‘shifting perspectives and uncertain pictures’ through which Scott’s fictional vision of the past appears.3 It emerges decisively in the brilliant study by Judith Wilt, who draws attention to ‘the envelope of mockery around the whole enterprise of the Waverley novels’, and argues that Scott ‘half-consciously’ lays mines ‘under history, rationality, knowability, textuality, the novel, and himself’.4 In the wake of Wilt’s study many critics, including Ian Duncan, Bob Chase, Fiona Robertson, James Kerr, Paul Hamilton, and Yoon Sung Lee, have explored the presence and effects of scepticism in Scott’s writing.5 What

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was once seen by David Daiches as a controlled ‘ambiguity of feeling’ in Scott (nostalgia balanced by satisfaction) is now more likely to be read, as Jerome Christiansen reads it, as ‘equivocation’ – with the implication that Scott’s doubleness involves concealment, reservation, and even resistance.6 My own study can be aligned with, and is indebted to, the work of these more sceptical critics. It is based on the assumption that Wells, Welsh, and critics like them who find a vision of ‘permanence and perpetuity’ in Scott’s fiction are not mistaken: they are accepting an invitation that is fulsomely extended in his works. But those who find a sceptical undermining of such a vision are not mistaken either. Scott – the contemporary of Blake, Keats, and Byron – saw his role as to accommodate both kinds of reading. My view of Scott is close to that of Yoon Sung Lee, who argues that irony was a condition of romantic nationalism, and provided the grounds by which Maria Edgeworth, Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Scott himself could appeal at once to conservative opinion and the private discontents of disaffected subjects. Like her, I find the doubleness that pervades Scott’s writing a ‘political technique’ designed to accommodate opposed readings, although my sense of what motivates the opposition differs somewhat from hers, since I see the condition of modernity itself as Scott’s deepest concern.7 Scott worked with a fully historicised understanding of the artist’s role in contemporary society, which was the source of much that is distinctive in his writing. Like others of his time, he thought of the commercial society he lived in as a modern formation whose emergence was bound up with the demise of feudalism – and while he did not use the term ‘modernity’ in the way that writers in our own time do, he engages with the distinctive problems of the modern condition in terms that have counterparts in more recent discussions and debates. His fiction reflects upon the origins of modern society, origins seen as rooted in a process of division and repression, which works to separate polite subjects from the land and those who work on it, to separate enlightened rationality from bodily exertion and pleasure, and to separate historical enquiry from inherited belief. Ultimately, Scott saw, modernity separates the bourgeois conscience from historical truth, since that conscience is constituted in a language that obscures its own complicity in the violence of history. Scott’s fiction playfully offers a choice of fictions: the romance of disinterested virtue, or the history of civilised deceit. In this study I will try to clarify the rationale and historical purpose of this choice. The study does not attempt to represent the whole body of Scott’s creative work. Instead I have focused on the works that most interest me.

Preface

ix

The choice of novels will seem unsurprising to many readers of Scott, with the possible exception of The Talisman (a romance that seems to have gained a new topicality in the light of recent events) and Kenilworth. I include the first three poetic romances on the assumption that the tendency to neglect these deceptively complex narratives has diminished our understanding of Scott the novelist, and of the development of British romantic poetry. While I am concerned to understand Scott in relation to his own times, I do not want to present him as a writer who can only be approached as a historical curiosity. I share Avrom Fleishman’s view that the historical concerns of Scott’s fiction are developed in forms that can stand as an example to later times.8 The conflicts that run through his fictions – between modernisation and established interests, between individual liberty and public responsibility, between community and society, between the ideals and the material consequences of ‘civilisation’ – may be shaped by the cultural conditions and political crises of Scott’s age, but they still resonate in the twenty-first century. The continuing relevance of his work to our own age is part of my subject. In writing this study I have incurred many debts, not least to the many scholars who have attempted to rescue Scott from the disdain in which he is still commonly held. Like others working in the field, I owe an incalculable debt to the international Scott conferences inspired by David Hewitt and J. H. Alexander, and to the many members of the email network of Scott scholars, whose willingness to share information, ideas and critical views has been a constant source of illumination.9 I am grateful to Ian Duncan, Paul Hamilton and Orrin Wang, who read and commented on parts of this project, and to the following for answering enquiries, or giving advice, or simply for offering encouragement: J. H. Alexander, Markman Ellis, Ina Ferris, Nancy Moore Goslee, Ann Janowitz, Yoon Sung Lee, Javed Majeed, and Catherine Maxwell. My MA and research students at Queen Mary University of London have played a significant part in shaping this study, and I am also grateful for the anonymous feedback I have received from those who read drafts submitted for journal publication. My greatest debt is to Margarette Lincoln, who offered invaluable critical guidance and support at each stage of this project. Parts of this study incorporate material that first appeared in a different form in articles published in the Scottish Literary Journal and its successor, the Scottish Studies Review, in Philological Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, Romanticism, and Romantic Circles. I am grateful to the editors of these publications for their permission to include the material here.

x

Walter Scott and Modernity Notes

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Wells, ‘Digression about novels’, p. 494. Welsh, Hero of the Waverley Novels, p. 19. Gordon, Under Which King?, pp. 89, 108. Devlin argues that ‘a steady pessimism’ colours everything Scott wrote: ‘Scott’s favourite poem was “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and behind him there is always Dr Johnson’ (Devlin, Author of Waverley, pp. 11–12). Garside, ‘Waverley’s Pictures of the Past’, p. 661. Wilt, Secret Leaves, p. 17. Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel; Kerr, Fiction against History; Robertson, Legitimate Histories; Chase ‘Walter Scott: A New Historical Paradigm’; Hamilton, Metaromanticism; Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and Irony. Daiches, ‘Scott’s achievement as a novelist’, p. 36; Daiches, ‘Scott’s Redgauntlet’, p. 149; Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, pp. 170–1. Lee, Nationalism and Irony, p. 24. Fleishman, English Historical Novel, p. 37. The email address of the network is [email protected].

Chapter 1

Introduction

We can begin to see the relevance of Scott to our own age if we consider some of the consequences of the abrupt regime changes that have occurred across the globe in the last few decades. From Eastern Europe to Latin America, from Asia to the Middle East, as governments have fallen, nations have seen themselves, or been seen by others, as emerging from oppressive regimes into more liberal or more modern ones. Where sudden political change gets linked to ideas of modernisation, liberalisation, even civilisation, historical accountability comes to be seen as a key test of legitimacy. This helps to explain both the current popularity of truth commissions (at least twenty-one since 1974) and the spectacular growth of ‘social memory’ as a field of study – a field in which the ‘truth’ about the past tends to be seen as inseparable from the political interests and material needs of particular groups in the present.1 The rapid demise of so many authoritarian regimes has led to a rekindling of debate about the inevitability of progress towards liberal forms of government, accompanied by the resurrection of traditional ideas about the human cost of liberalisation (as in Francis Fukuyama’s account of the loss of thymos – self-esteem, or ‘spiritedness’).2 These responses to the experience of change give new form to preoccupations that began to emerge in the enlightenment and gained increased urgency in the wake of the French revolution. To generations of nineteenthcentury readers, these preoccupations found their most resonant fictional expression in the works of Walter Scott. Scott’s first readers had lived through an age of violent revolutions and great wars, in which huge armies had been mobilised, governments dramatically overthrown, populations displaced. The conflicts involving European powers spread far beyond Europe, and did not – as is sometimes supposed – end completely on the field of Waterloo. They continued in parts of Europe, in South America, in the Middle East, India, Burma, Africa.3 The violence also continued sporadically in mainland

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Britain, in local clashes between protesters and soldiers. Jerome Christensen argues that for Scott and others of his age the ‘aftermath’ of war ‘coincides with the foreclosure of a future that is anything more than that condition of normal change’ which is ‘the characteristic temporal modality of modern liberalism’.4 I would argue that for Scott and others the experience of revolution, war, and the tumultuous aftermath of Waterloo exposed the enlightenment concept of ‘normal change’ as a myth, and also spurred new attempts to maintain that myth. It was precisely because Scott’s fictions developed ways to represent and contain this shocked and wishful condition that they resonated so deeply with his early readers. Some of those readers would have taken part directly in the recent and ongoing conflicts. Some had relatives or friends who were involved in them. All were in some sense implicated in them, since the wealth and security of Britain depended on the defence and extension of its commercial interests by force. But insulation was generally taken to be a condition of novel readership: while Scott’s novels address a variety of implied readers, those readers are assumed to occupy a private cultural space removed from the larger world in which the dramatic events of history take place. The historical novel as Scott developed it exploited this conception of the reader’s position in various ways. Within its turbulent narrative, readers were imaginatively reconnected with the larger historical world from which they, and much domestic fiction, had been separated. The gap between the present and the past allowed the staging of a political and cultural critique that was discountable, as if relevant only to a bygone age. The exploration of the past could be experienced as bracing historical realism, which offered the shock of historical recognition without self-confrontation. Scott commanded a new audience, and provided a new map for nineteenthcentury fiction, because he was able to offer an imaginative space in which his contemporaries could encounter their own anxieties while appearing to escape from them.

France and Modernity For Scott’s generation the French revolution and its aftermath brought vividly into focus the issues at stake in the process of modernisation. France, long seen through British eyes as lacking the liberty guaranteed to Britons by the revolution of 1688, had suddenly announced its uncompromising modernity, offering to the world an image of a startling future: a unitary state in which power was fully centralised; in which the traditional powers of church and aristocracy, together with

Introduction

3

local customs and languages, were abolished by decree; in which new customs, new emblems of power were abruptly installed in the name of universal principles of justice and liberty, and in the name of the nation. Paris, the metropolitan centre, appeared to have the power to shape the nation’s collective experience of history by establishing commemorative festivals, by promoting official representations of the past, by creating a situation in which everything was ‘studiously and industriously altered [. . .] from the sacrament of the mass to the fashion of a shoe-tie’.5 The revolution was not only an astonishing demonstration of how a people could rise against government from below – it was also a manifestation of the disturbing power of a modern state to hold its citizens in place from above.6 In his Life of Napoleon Scott describes how a political apparatus ‘vested in a few hands’ and resting ‘on a very simple basis’ was able to produce a state of oppression so universal that ‘those who escaped the disorder contented themselves with their individual safety’. This ‘acquiescence in democratic tyranny’, appearing in a country which boasted of being ‘the most civilized in Europe’, seemed to demonstrate the death of patriotic virtue in an age given over to, in Burke’s phrase, ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators’.7 Such a view received support from the fact that internal resistance to the revolutionary administration had come most vigorously from the Vendée, an inaccessible and economically backward region where, as Scott put it, ‘the peasant was the noble’s affectionate partner and friend’.8 In Scott’s account, this close relationship between peasant and landowner had survived because it had not been disrupted by the spread of metropolitan manners. In his preface to Memoirs of the Marchioness De La Rochejaquelein Scott noted with approval that such Vendéan landowners ‘as went occasionally to Paris, had the good sense to lay aside the manners of the metropolis, and resume their provincial simplicity, so soon as they returned’.9 The modernising French state, which imposed itself across customary boundaries and regional communities, and then began to export its ‘liberty’ to other peoples, offered a graphic illustration of the dichotomy between the nation state’s claim to legal right, and the interests and traditions of established communities. This dichotomy was exacerbated by the internal resistance to the revolution, and then by the resistance of other peoples to Napoleonic conquest. In the resulting conflicts, the boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate were repeatedly destabilised and dramatically politicised. From the time of the Vendée resistance in the early 1790s, the British public became used to reading of the irregular military operations of European peoples who rose in defence of their own traditions, not only of peasants and their royalist

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leaders, but also of smugglers and other groups who traditionally worked or lived outside the law. In such circumstances the patriot and the smuggler could both be seen as defenders of customary practice against usurping state power. Indeed, the alliance between – or merging of – the local patriot and the outlaw would become a recurring feature of the military struggles of the age. And the contemporary conflicts unsettled distinctions between legitimate force and illegitimate violence more generally: the accounts of popular resistance to French power sometimes appeared in newspapers alongside accounts of comparable resistance to British power – in Ireland, India, the West Indies, and further afield – complicating perceptions of political difference between France and Britain. The rapid succession of regime changes across contemporary Europe repeatedly exposed the utilitarian nature of political obligation, as new states demanded that established loyalties and sacred oaths be replaced by new ones. The Vendéan clergy who refused to take an oath contradicting their religious vows, and their people who swore allegiance to their late king’s exiled brothers, epitomised a problem that would reappear in Switzerland, Spain, and elsewhere, and that would find its inverse counterpart with the restoration of European monarchies after the fall of Napoleon – the problem of those who persisted in regarding vows and loyalty as absolute when history had moved against them. In an age of revolution it became clear that loyalty to a lost cause could be at once a sign of virtue and of treason, that political obligation required the negation of political obligation, that reconciliation depended on a recognition that sacred oaths and covenants, legal agreements and established precedents could and must be rendered obsolete by political change and the passage of time.

Tory Scepticism An awareness of the ambiguous and shifting foundations of state legitimacy informs much of the outpouring of radical opinion in the revolution debate in Britain, and in the reviving agitation for constitutional reform in the early nineteenth century. Scott was fundamentally opposed to radical reform, but nevertheless his imaginative writing is haunted by his own recognition of the questionable basis of state legitimacy. This recognition has an important influence on his understanding of the nation as a cultural and political entity. His work has been discussed in relation to the ‘Bardic nationalism’ of eighteenth-century Welsh, Scottish, and Irish antiquarians who attempted to define and

Introduction

5

defend a distinctive national cultural heritage by promoting their respective bardic traditions.10 Scott was certainly influenced by this conception of national tradition, but his own sense of tradition differs from it significantly. In the work of nationalist antiquarians the bard emerges as a spokesman for an official culture patronised by court and priesthood, but Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border traces the origin of traditional ballads to feudal minstrels who resist official power: the minstrels praised their chieftains for the very exploits, against which the laws of the country denounced a capital doom – an outlawed freebooter was to them a more interesting person, than the king of Scotland exerting his power to punish their depredations.11

We need to appreciate this interest in resistance to centralising power if we are to recognise the paradoxical nature of Scott’s understanding of the nation. His early study of border ballads addresses the dichotomy exposed in the French revolution, between the legal claims of the nation state and the interests of established communities: where better to explore this than on a border, where those living on either side had more in common with each other than with their more distant compatriots, and where it required strict regulations to prevent cross-border intermarriages and allegiances? His awareness of the questionable basis of state authority has an important influence on his handling of moral issues and, more fundamentally, on his handling of historical change. His novels are sometimes read as illustrations of his Tory loyalism, but they repeatedly problematise loyalty. They are sometimes said to embody his positive satisfaction with the Hanoverian state, a state in which law is the guarantor of property, peace, and prosperity. But the novels repeatedly associate law with arbitrary power and violence – from the English law of treason by which Fergus McIvor is executed in Waverley, to the civil law that Peter Peebles uses so ruthlessly in the Hanoverian Edinburgh of Redgauntlet. As Bob Chase and others have recognised, it is Tory scepticism, rather than Tory loyalism, that shapes most fundamentally the social and historical vision of Scott’s fiction.12 Scott’s turn to history is motivated by his concern to encourage a pragmatic acceptance of the modern British state without engaging directly in the constitutional issues raised by radicals and reformers. A progressive vision of history was useful to him because it provided the basis for moderation. While political debate centred divisively on the respective merits and legitimacy of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and republican forms of government, the idea of progress as developed in the Scottish enlightenment focused attention less contentiously on the historical emergence of commercial society. As John Burrow explains,

6

Walter Scott and Modernity Commercial society, seen as the characteristic form of modernity, is not a type of polity – there is no one particular form of constitution which alone is compatible with a polite and refined society – but a tissue of manners and modes of social behaviour, sometimes referred to by the new term ‘civilization’.13

The political economy of the Scottish enlightenment had begun to locate the dynamic of social change not in the political ideas or will of reformers, but in what Adam Smith referred to as the ‘silent and insensible’ operations of commerce.14 By representing political and social conflict within the larger context of the progress of society, Scott could undermine arguments for radical change, and encourage acquiescence in the status quo. Scott’s progressive vision of history is always in the service of a conservative vision of moderation. The political rationale for Scott’s view of progress is developed most clearly in the works of David Hume. Hume’s apparent indifference to constitutional arrangements allows him to present liberty as the product of social and economic progress rather than of political establishments. He develops a distinction between personal or ‘civil’ liberty and political liberty that, as Duncan Forbes points out, has no place in theories that associate liberty exclusively with ‘free’ as opposed to absolute governments.15 He treats ‘controversies in politics’ as distinct from, and ‘entirely subordinate’ to, the ‘interests of peace and liberty’.16 In a comparable way, virtue is detached from public duty and associated with the effects of commercial development. Although commerce is driven by selfinterest, Hume argues, it fosters sociability, refinement, and ‘humanity’, and thus promotes a private virtue that can have a beneficial public influence without direct participation in politics.17 The conceptualisation of liberty and virtue in such terms allows him to encourage acquiescence in established government even at the expense of legal right and moral consistency. He argues that ‘Time and custom give authority to all forms of government’, including those ‘founded only on injustice and violence’. All rules of natural and civil justice ‘arise merely from human conventions, and from the interest, which we have in the preservation of peace and order’. He not only encourages his readers to ‘treat very lightly all disputes concerning the rights of princes’, but also asserts ‘that a strict adherence to any general rules, and the rigid loyalty to particular persons and families [. . .] are virtues that hold less of reason, than of bigotry and superstition’. He can make this assertion since he assumes that considerations of interest allow moral standards to be applied in different ways to private and public obligations, and to the actions of individuals and of governments. Thus loyalty and respect for rules remain necessary in the realm of social and economic relations; it is in the realm of politics that they become problematic. Similarly, the morality of princes does not

Introduction

7

have the same ‘force’ as that of private persons. The virtues needed to sustain social life depend more on the effective operation of government than the effective operation of government depends on such virtues.18 Hume’s views of the humanising influence of commerce and personal liberty proved highly influential in the eighteenth century. They were embraced even by those who were shocked by his bland analysis of the relationship between interest, on the one hand, and morality, justice, loyalty, on the other. Nevertheless, Christian, Stoic, and classical humanist traditions continued to warn of the moral dangers in commercial self-interest, the production of artificial desires, and the division of labour.19 The tensions between such traditions and the ethos of commerce appears in the work of many writers, including the Edinburgh literati, who struggled to reconcile commercial self-interest and personal liberty with ideals of public duty and patriotism.20 Such strains were intensified by the experience of the French revolution and the wars that followed, when the surge of plebeian demands for political liberty led conservative propagandists to emphasise the importance of personal liberty, while the war with France led them to appropriate the language of patriotism.21 There was also a growing tension between ideals of refinement that had worked to promote the feminised man of feeling in eighteenth-century culture, and the development of a new, tougher masculine ethic among the British elite, fostered in the public schools and universities through a classical curriculum celebrating physical heroism, through manly sports and fox-hunting, through the arts and the cult of military heroes.22 Scott, like many others of his time, is involved in a kind of negotiation with the moral problems associated with the progressive view of commercial society. He would have good reason to be sensitive to these problems, especially those associated with Hume. In the wake of Burke’s denunciation of the ‘infidel’ conspiracy of writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Bolingbroke, sensitivity to Hume’s scepticism increased.23 In 1795 the British Critic recommended that only bowdlerised versions of Hume’s works should be made available to youthful readers.24 Dugald Stewart, who taught Scott at Edinburgh University, warned of the ‘very dangerous’ implications of Hume’s tendency to resolve ‘the obligation of all the different virtues into a sense of their utility’, a tendency that could lead to an alarming individualism.25 Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review (1808) blamed Hume for the prevalence of the ‘Epicurean and ignoble strain of sentiment in this country’ which places private liberty above political commitment.26 The problem facing Scott was to accommodate the moderatism made possible by Humean ideas of progress while evading their more disturbing

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implications. Not surprisingly, Scott formally distances himself from scepticism and utilitarianism. He appeals to ‘the immutable rules of right or wrong’ just as he occasionally gestures towards a providential shaping of history. He explicitly condemns all moralities in which means are justified primarily by ends, and he is inclined to attribute moral casuistry to his villains.27 But nevertheless his moderate vision of history, like Hume’s, undermines absolute principles. The hero of Scott’s fiction, like the narrator, is usually cast in the image of a polite Christian gentleman, for whom adherence to principle and loyalty in the realm of personal relations is a sign of reasonable virtue. But in the realm of political relations these virtues become associated with fanaticism, superstition, or corrupt ambition. The constancy of the Jacobite, the Covenanter, and others is rendered dangerous and irrational by the successful establishment of prosperous new regimes. The sacred vow, the absolute moral standard, must be both upheld and violated; unwavering respect for principle and loyalty are at once endorsed and negated as ‘absurd political prejudice’ in Scott’s fiction. In a comparable way Scott formally values patriotism, and argues that it has ‘always been found to flourish in that state of society which is most favourable to the stern and manly virtues of self-denial, temperance, chastity, contempt of luxury, patient exertion, and elevated contemplation’.28 But the hero of his fictions is usually destined to be separated ultimately from the stern demands of patriotic duty and to be consigned to the enjoyment of personal liberty and material prosperity. It would be a mistake simply to assume that the compromises and elements of scepticism within Scott’s fiction were incompatible with religious belief. The evidence we have suggests that Scott was neither exceptionally pious nor a non-believer.29 Brought up as a Presbyterian, he joined an Episcopalian church more compatible with his social aspirations and conservative leanings, a church that offered itself as a refuge from the challenge of contemporary history – from ‘these disastrous times, in which dangerous novelties assail us in every hand, in which errors in politics, in science and religion, are propagated with assiduity, and produce endless doubts, animosities, jealousies and divisions’. Scott the man may well have attempted to hold fast to ‘fixed and approved principles’ and to faith in the ‘recompense of a future reward’.30 But Scott the writer was committed to an imaginative exploration of ‘disastrous times’, an exploration in which a Christian tradition that spoke of the vanity of human wishes had to be reconciled with a progressive vision of history. If his fictions occasionally gesture towards otherworldly rewards, they are committed to delineating the compromises, subterfuges, and illusions upon which this-worldly order is erected.

Introduction

9

Disembedding identity The hero of Scott’s fiction usually comes to illustrate the political quiescence and reasonable detachment that are seen as the appropriate response to disruptive social change. This response is presented as characteristic of a mature modern consciousness, and – as the historical perspective of the fiction reveals – it has been made possible by the historical disembedding of identity from the social, material, and cultural grounds that governed individuals in earlier ages. Scott’s representation of this process of disembedding is influenced by both his paternalism and his Scottish identity. I accept E. P. Thompson’s view that to use the term ‘paternalism’ in the context of eighteenth-century Britain is to evoke a ‘myth or ideology’, rather than an actual social practice based on ‘face-to-face relations’ between landowners and the poor. In Thompson’s account the myth was sustained in an age when the power of the governing classes was located primarily in a ‘cultural hegemony’, maintained through ‘postures and gestures’ that worked to give structures of authority the appearance of a natural order.31 The widening gap between myth and ‘actual social practice’ is a problem Scott has to address. Throughout eighteenth-century Britain the culture of paternalism was being weakened by economic, demographic, and political changes. Transformations in agricultural practices led to the abandonment of direct economic relations between landowners and those who worked on their land, while long-established methods of supporting the poor had been allowed to lapse. In Scotland the major cities were becoming increasingly aware of the problems posed by the poor displaced from the rural areas, although awareness did not necessarily result in a willingness to deal with the problems.32 To a twenty-first-century reader, Scott’s attitude to these developments must seem inconsistent. He was in favour of abolishing the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers and Apprentices, which regulated relations between employers and workers, and was critical of the poor law. He also accepted the ‘legislative interference’ of the Corn Laws (introduced to maintain prices) as ‘an imperious necessity’.33 Graham McMaster concludes that his position on such issues ‘makes it inconvenient to present him as a paternalist’.34 But in this period it was not unusual for those who embraced the myth of paternalism to hold such attitudes.35 Scott was generally distrustful of government regulation – rather more so than Coleridge and Southey, who favoured state intervention on behalf of the poor.36 His distrust may be consistent with the laissez-faire emphasis of the new political economy. But it is rooted less in a commitment to what Adam Smith would term a ‘system of natural

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liberty’ than in a desire to maintain local dependencies by finding private solutions to social problems.37 He shares a growing concern about the effects of modernisation upon the higher and middling ranks of society, who were apparently being led (as the High Tory Blackwood’s magazine complained) ‘to deride and despise a thousand of those means of communication that in the former days knit all orders of the people together’.38 The progressive aspects of Scott’s work are always in dialogue with a romantic paternalism. The movement of Vendéan landowners between metropolitan and provincial manners, which he describes in his preface to Memoirs of the Marchioness De La Rochejaquelein, is desirable to Scott because it might secure what he sees as a ‘natural’ interdependence between social orders in a modern world (we can see a parallel in Scott’s own movement between his urban life at Edinburgh and his life as laird of Abbotsford). He argued that ‘the chains by which the feudal system binds the plebeians to the nobles, are naturally superseded by the gentle and honourable ties of mutual affection for mutual kindness’.39 In his writing, this sentimental model of relations appears as a belated ideal in an age of increasing social division and agitation for reform. Scott’s historical investigations are partly driven by his interest in forms of cultural interaction between social orders in earlier ages, an interest he shares with English antiquarians such as Henry Bourne, John Brand, Joseph Strutt, Francis Grose, and Francis Douce.40 The concerns of these writers were rather different from those of the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh nationalist antiquarians who, in Katie Trumpener’s account, were inspired by the patriotic resistance of the ancient bards.41 The English antiquarians look back to localised popular customs once shared by high and low ranks, but which are now viewed with disdain by the enlightened and refined. Even when sharing that disdain, the antiquarians may betray an anxiety about the social consequences of change. Francis Grose, for example, in his glossary of waning oral traditions, worries that mobility, newspapers, and the influence of metropolitan culture are spreading political contention and scepticism among previously docile land-workers.42 And Joseph Strutt, in his pioneering study of popular sports and pastimes, notes that the progress of refinement produces a general decline of ‘manly and spirited’ bodily exercises, a result of the nobility’s withdrawal from practices that came to be seen as vulgar, and of the disappearance of the public spaces once devoted to such exercises, which confined them to ‘common drinking-houses’.43 Antiquarians were often viewed critically by historians, but in exposing the traces of social division and the ‘softening’ of masculine manners, their researches appeared to provide empirical confirmation of the more

Introduction

11

general arguments of enlightenment historians such as Adam Ferguson, who warned of the threat to public virtue inherent in the development of commercial societies. Within Scott’s fictions the emergence of the modern, metropolitan culture of politeness is grounded in a history of social division and exclusion. At various points his works allude to a process in which the nobility, the clergy, and the bourgeoisie withdrew from what was once a common culture. In The Lady of the Lake, for example, the culture of the highland clan, in which high and low are united by the art of the minstrel, is compared with that of Stirling, where the ‘mean burger sports’ are disdained by the nobles in the time of James V (canto V). In The Abbott, the popular revels once licensed and encouraged by the Roman Catholic church have become, in the era of the Reformation, an insolent threat that both Catholic and Protestant authorities seek to repress (ch. 14). The Fortunes of Nigel shows how the introduction of the ‘Ordinary’ in Jacobean London provides a social space for those with ‘good clothes and good assurance’, in contrast to the unrefined pleasures of the tavern.44 In Guy Mannering some ‘veterans of the law’ play High Jinks in a ‘paltry and half-ruinous’ tavern in Edinburgh Old Town in the early 1780s; they are lingering representatives of a tradition about to be displaced by new buildings and new manners (pp. 250, 252, ch. 36). As this novel indicates, the relationship between refinement and social division was revealed starkly in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, where alongside the sprawling Old Town, in which higher and lower orders traditionally lived in close proximity, the elegant New Town was built, equipped with the new Assembly Rooms and a Theatre Royal, an appropriate setting for the elite clubs and improvement societies in the vanguard of modern Scottish culture. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it appeared that, across Britain, ‘the present rage for refinement and innovation’ was killing off the last remnant of traditional popular customs and activities such as morris dancing, which antiquarians had begun to record for posterity.45 Scott’s interest in this aspect of cultural history anticipates that of modern historians. In some respects his view of this historical process resembles Habermas’s account of the emergence of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ centred on new spaces such as the coffee house.46 It anticipates the ‘bi-polar’ model of culture associated with Peter Burke, who claims that by 1800 the higher orders ‘had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes, from whom they were now separated, as never before, by profound differences in world view’.47 It also has something in common with the views of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, who describe how the making of polite identity required a ‘transformation of the sites of

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discourse’ (in the creation of refined spaces), a transformation that entailed a denial of ‘the unruly demands of the body for pleasure and release’ in the interests of ‘serious, productive and rational discourse’. Scott shows a comparable understanding of the ‘changes in the interrelationship of place, body and discourse’ required by the production of politeness.48 But he sees that moderate rationality is not only disembedded from archaic social and spatial relations, but also – as Hume had shown – detached from traditional ideas of duty and destiny. In the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, for example, the individual was bound up with the nation’s ethical and religious covenant with God, while in the civic-humanist tradition the identity of the citizen was defined in terms of landownership and public duty. But Scott’s heroes are rarely defined by such duties, even when they appear to be. Their status as moderates detaches them from the established claims of such commitments, and requires them to judge independently, by reason and circumstance. The traditional duty-laden relationships survive as roles that the hero may choose to assume, rather than as the historical grounds of identity. The emphasis on role-playing in Scott’s fiction, sometimes facilitated by the disguises and subterfuge of romance convention, works to foreground this understanding of identity. It allows a reconciliation of bourgeois ambition with established hierarchies – accommodating the preservation of traditional social boundaries as well as the free passage across them. Scott’s own career provides a striking illustration of the relevance of this view of social relations to a rapidly modernising Scotland, where he could be at once an entrepreneur, man of letters, Edinburgh advocate, sheriff depute of Roxborough (an office once part of a system of hereditary jurisdictions), and, as the proprietor of Abbotsford, one who assumed – having paid for it – the traditional role of landowner. Here we begin to encounter the unsettling consequences of Scott’s understanding of modern identity. For he not only makes the disjunction between adopted social role and inner being a central feature of many of his plots, but also creates the impression that the authenticity of the private self – its sense of purpose and its power of self-definition – has been eroded. When Waverley finds himself on the field of Prestonpans in the garb of old Gaul, or when Presbyterian Henry Morton finds himself reluctantly transformed into a rebel leader, or when Quentin Durward finds himself committed to the service of a corrupt French monarch – in such cases the hero appears curiously weightless, absent as a desiring subject or active will. Alexander Welsh relates the apparent passivity of Scott’s heroes to Edmund Burke’s view that civil society requires individuals to abdicate the right to be their own governors.49 But these cases have little to do with civil regulation.

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In setting his moderate characters apart from the spiritual imperatives and social duties that once determined individual identity, and by confronting them with ‘fanatical’ characters still defined and driven by such duties, Scott gives dramatic form to the condition of modernity in which, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, the individual has ‘suffered a deprivation’, not only because he or she lacks ‘any necessary social identity’ but also because ‘the kind of telos’ or ideal fulfilment in terms of which it once judged and acted is ‘no longer thought to be credible’. 50 The impression of hollowness reverberates notoriously in the heroes’ language. Their speech is often most disconcerting precisely when its symbolic function, as representative of moderate modernity, is most in evidence. At such moments Scott makes his characters speak a polite English prose of disabling formality: ‘your counsels only served to give unity and consistency to his conduct; to dignify, but not to precipitate, his resolution’ (Waverley, p. 469). Ostensibly, this language enacts in its antitheses and qualifications the search for middle ground between opposing ideologies and interests, the ground of a common ‘British’ identity that actually represents the interests of those with property.51 Judith Wilt finds in such language Scott’s recognition of the problematic nature of reason since the emergence of Protestantism.52 But, as we have seen, the problem that Scott evokes is wider than Protestantism: it is the history of a cultural refinement that requires a withdrawal from, or repression of, the vigorous bodily life and passionate beliefs now associated with the ‘vulgar’ or the ‘fanatic’. The process of repression was something of which Scott would have an acute awareness as a Scot. In relation to the process of refinement, as much recent scholarship has reminded us, Scottish experience was fraught with contradictions.53 There was no simple or absolute choice of self-identity, as between refined and vulgar. Lord Cockburn recounts that in the early 1790s (when Scott was a student at Edinburgh) Scots was still spoken habitually by ‘persons of rank, education and fashion, with eloquent preachers, dignified judges, and graceful women; from all whose lips it flowed, without the reality, or the idea, of vulgarity’. However, Cockburn acknowledges that Scots was ‘doomed to recede, to a certain extent, before the foreign wave’, and when the young Francis Jeffrey thought that his career would involve public speaking, he was ‘bent upon purifying himself of the national inconvenience’.54 Janet Sorensen argues that in moving between English and Scots, Scottish writers ‘illuminate the condition of all Britons’ for whom refined English is distinct from their colloquial usage.55 This is surely right, and it helps to explain how Scott could use Scottish history to illuminate the wider condition of modernity. But in the movement between English and

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Scots, the Scots’ sense of national identity was at issue in ways that distinguished them from English writers. The standardisation of language was part of a larger movement towards economic and political homogenisation that threatened the surviving autonomy of Scotland within the Union, and that could leave Scott feeling, as he himself once put it, like the subject of an ‘infant colony’.56 In this respect Scott had reasons to identify with the subordinate, the marginalised, the vulgar outsiders against whom polite British identity was defined. Paradoxically, the modern reader’s uneasy response to Scott’s ‘moderate’ dialogue resembles the response of eighteenth-century Scottish writers to what Sorensen terms the ‘placeless and dematerialised’ standard English they were themselves helping to establish, which could seem to them wordy, inhibited, dull, and even effeminate, in comparison with, say, the vibrant poetic Scots of Burns, or with a Gaelic recently redefined as an uncorrupted language of virtue.57 Scott’s fiction is symptomatic in its production of ‘British’ consciousness in terms that suggest loss of vitality rather than confident self-possession, a depletion often intensified by the vigorous language Scott attributes to those who stand beyond the norms of modern polite culture, in a condition ‘unfettered by system and affectation’.58 When Stallybrass and White consider responses to the process of refinement they focus primarily on culture within England, touching only briefly on relations between England and Ireland, and ignoring Scotland and Wales. But as we have seen, when the issue of refinement is considered in relation to the wider context of English hegemony it becomes more complicated. Refinement meant standardisation, and so it was always implicitly a threat to the cultural identity and separate interests of England’s partner nations. We can see how this threat influenced Scott’s views if we consider the monumental editions of Dryden and Swift that he had completed by 1814. Stallybrass and White describe both Dryden and Swift as ‘great champions of a classical discursive body’ who work to construct a refined English identity.59 In Scott’s assessment, however, there is a fundamental difference between Dryden, whose writing is bound by English concerns, and Swift, who becomes an Irish writer. Scott’s Dryden is a professional poet responding to and attempting to reform the taste of his age; he seeks to promote a heroic drama in which the language, actions, and character would be ‘raised above the vulgar’. But Swift, never a man of letters trying to please a select public, emerges as a great Irish patriot, who moves decisively beyond the exclusive and divisive concerns of Dryden and the fashionable English readership. He writes ‘in every varied form’ (including ballads and prose satires supplied to hawkers), rising above party

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interests and addressing both high and low in order to make a whole people aware of their rights and interests in the face of the ‘narrowsouled, and short-sighted mercantile interest’ of Britain.60 Where Dryden separates literature from the vulgar, Swift’s relative independence from the court and metropolis allows his writing to form the grounds for social and national unity. Swift’s greatness lies in his ability to unite a diverse and potentially fragmented audience by moving across cultural boundaries. As an ‘Irish’ writer he must continue to address polite English readers and include their concerns among others. He does not abandon the polite perspective, but he moves beyond it, allowing alternative perspectives to compete with it. He is, in a sense that Stallybrass and White would not acknowledge, both polite and popular. In this respect Scott anticipates the views of Swift offered in our own age by Carol Fabricant, who finds Swift’s work ‘fundamentally inimical to the ordering, idealizing Augustan mind as we have come to understand it in terms of someone like Pope’.61 For Scott the anarchic inclusiveness of Swift is realised most clearly in Gulliver’s Travels: perhaps no work ever exhibited such general attractions to all classes. It offered personal and political satire to the readers in high life, low and coarse incident to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age, and disappointed ambition.62

Swift’s influence on Anglo-Irish writers, including Scott’s contemporaries Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, has often been noted.63 Swift also offered an important precedent for Scott’s own attempts to move beyond, and unsettle, the framework of Anglo-British politeness in his writing; for the combination of historical, philosophical, political, sociological, and literary discourses with elements drawn from commercial and traditional popular culture; for the blending of realism with fantasy, literary game-playing, and subversive irony. The discontinuous and inconsistent qualities of Swift’s work that Michael McKeon and Bob Chase read as signs of ‘extreme skepticism’ are read by Scott as a means of uniting a diverse audience, a strategy consistent with Swift’s patriotism.64 Scott’s interest in the disjunction between adopted social role and inner being, in the tensions between British and Scottish identity, and in the social function of literary hybridity helps to set him apart from those contemporary writers who, in the wake of the French revolution, responded to political and cultural disruption by formulating organic models of consciousness and of English culture. While Wordsworth and Coleridge respond to the political and social turbulence of their age by developing an overtly spiritual understanding of the poet’s mission, and

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favour a poetic language that roots religious convictions directly in the poet’s personal experience, Scott adopts elaborate fictional frameworks that mask, qualify, and even divide the author’s identity, enacting a regression from his mature self in order to engage in the specious game of fiction. By combining progressive views of history with the romance of disinterested virtue, he allows absolute principles to be at once endorsed and rendered obsolete by the passage of time. And while Coleridge’s theory of imagination worked to validate an exclusively English tradition of poetry (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth), and to separate the language of imagination from ‘the consciousness of the uneducated man’,65 Scott extends the sociological and historical range of fiction to include Scottish tradition and to reconnect polite readers with what has been lost in the process of refinement.

Saving morality The conflict between the need for absolute principles to be upheld and the need for them to be negated was by no means unusual in the literature of the eighteenth century. John Barrell and Harriet Guest, for example, have considered the ‘knotting together of economic amoralism and theodicy’ in long poems of the eighteenth century, and conclude that contradiction was acceptable (even a positive advantage to the interests of the rich and the reasonably well off) so long as each topic exhibited a discursive unity, and the movement between topics was clearly signalled.66 But the effect of Scott’s fiction is quite unlike such clearly delineated juxtaposition, since those elements that sustain the impression of a moral universe interpenetrate with, and flow into, the amoral matter of history. There was nothing new in placing a disinterested humanitarian hero within a world built on calculating selfinterest. In the novel of sensibility, the gothic romance, or the Jacobin novel, individual moral action is commonly explored in relation to a social order seen as calculating and corrupt. But Scott’s historical perspective transforms the imagined relationship between the hero and the social order, since it not only brings radically different cultures and opposed ideologies into play, but also places the status quo directly under threat – of invasion, rebellion – or creates violent divisions in the face of which individuals must take sides, become winners or losers. When the hero is placed on the side of the winners, he is not only aligned with the forces of progress, but is seen more clearly as the beneficiary of the social order, of the settlements, compromises, and violations upon which it is founded.

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In a fictional world in which legitimacy is seen to follow power, prosperity, and expediency, distinctions between, say, the respectable merchant, on the one hand, and the smuggler, on the other, or between the government soldier and the rebel, begin to appear ultimately as distinctions between competing communities of interest, more or less powerful, or more or less modern, rather than as differences that can be assessed adequately in traditional moral terms. Scott’s historical perspective, that is, works to expose connections and equivalences that threaten to undermine the moral and political legitimacy that the narrator conventionally represents. Lurking at the heart of Scott’s fictions is the sober recognition that rational virtue, humanitarian sympathy, sociability, the positive values of civil order, can operate only within social structures based on political compromises, which may entail acquiescence in hypocrisy, injustice, and atrocity, and that the language by which a civilised world justifies its conduct to itself must necessarily occlude its own mendacity and barbarism. This is an awareness that Scott’s fiction accommodates within its apparently conventional gestures towards what H. G. Wells terms ‘established social values’, and within the conventional patterns of romance. Bob Chase has argued persuasively that ‘Scott refused to accept the conceptual distinctions between “story” and “history”, “history” and “philosophy of history”, “romance” and “novel”.’67 But while Scott was aware that ‘history’ was always a constructed and to that extent fictive narrative, he was also keenly aware of the significance of genre distinctions – of the cultural authority accorded to ‘history’ in his own age, for example, and of the different relations to ‘history’ evoked by the conventions of ‘romance’ (distinguished by ‘uncommon incidents’) and the ‘novel’ (which followed the ‘ordinary train of human events’).68 It is not the exotic matter of history that moves these novels generically towards the ‘uncommon’ realm of romance. It is rather the novels’ plotting which consistently violates the ‘ordinary train of human events’. This violation is the ground upon which the moral vision of the novel is precariously erected. The plot contrivances (the kidnappings, misplaced letters, fortuitous accidents, and elaborate intrigues set in motion against or on behalf of the heroes) are typically used to preserve the heroes’ moral integrity – to relieve them of responsibility at difficult times, to move them into and out of danger without requiring them to compromise themselves too much, to prevent them from accomplishing intended acts of violence of which we could not approve, to allow them to be disinterested winners rather than calculating ones. The plots strive to maintain the appearance of a world in which moral motives can be seen as significant

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determinants of action, and in which truth and virtue can be imagined as absolutes. Such contrivance is of course hardly new to British fiction. But now it is linked overtly to the larger plot of history, which is governed by the law of unintended consequences. The progressive understanding of history that informs Scott’s fiction allows the recognition of a gap between moral motives and the sociological consequences of actions, since it shows that calamities such as the ’45 rebellion – a conflict arising from ‘absurd political prejudice’ – might facilitate developments that prove beneficial to society as a whole (as the famous conclusion of Waverley makes clear). The hero of the novels usually exemplifies the disinterested humanitarian sympathy celebrated in much contemporary fiction, a sympathy that stands in opposition to selfinterested calculation, over which it tends to triumph. But the progressive understanding of history assumes that economic progress depends on the pursuit of self-interest, and it accommodates political expedience, the triumph of prudential calculation over principle. The novel plot generates uncertainties susceptible to complete if sometimes tortuous resolution, and creates the impression of a providential order. But this plot is informed by a historical understanding that generates irresolvable uncertainties – about the bases of knowledge and of social order – and which therefore tends towards scepticism. The historical novel, by embracing such contradictions, provided the grounds upon which a contemporary culture shaken by the violent disruptions of contemporary history, and torn between the demythologising heritage of the enlightenment, on the one hand, and attempts to reassert traditional moral and religious principles, on the other, could find an imaginary wholeness. The incorporation of ‘history’ into the novel involves the assimilation of heterogeneous materials that continually flow into each other but evoke alternative kinds of reading. Novelistic techniques offer powerful inducements to sympathetic identification with the heroes and their moral world-view. The sociological, political, and historical commentaries that support the historical perspective invite a more detached, analytical, and potentially sceptical reading. Such alternatives find a precedent in the historiographical theories of the later eighteenth century in which, as Mark Salber Phillips notes, the traditional view that history taught public lessons and required a ‘studious and diligent’ reading was being combined (in the works of Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, Joseph Priestley, and others) with newer views of reading ‘according to which readers were invited to cultivate sympathetic identification and even dreamy self forgetting’.69 Scott is also heir to an enlightenment tradition of protective ambivalence, in which sceptical

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questioning is licensed by conventional gestures of faith (as when Gibbon, in contemplating the pagan philosophers’ ‘inattention’ to the signs of Christ’s death, offers his readers an opportunity to have their faith in the historical veracity of the Gospels either confirmed or undermined).70 As Adam Potkay has shown, a comparable ambivalence can appear in the work of an apparently devout writer such as Samuel Johnson, who authorises ‘two opposed readings’ of Rasselas, leaving the relationship between belief and rational questioning open to the reader.71 Yoon Sun Lee finds a common strategy of irony among Irish and Scottish writers (Maria Edgeworth, Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, and Scott himself) which allows them to air the private discontents of disaffected subjects under cover of an appeal to conservative opinion.72 Ian Duncan, who describes the advertisement of ‘a problematic, unstable boundary between history and fiction’ as ‘the foundational trope’ of a specifically Scottish tradition of fiction, argues that Scott’s novels ‘appeal to those who see through the fiction (of national cohesion, of historical progress, of liberal participation) as well as those who do not’.73 This study presents a comparable view of Scott’s fiction, as founded on a simultaneous appeal to the sympathetic romance reader and to a detached, enlightened, resisting reader, alert to the possibilities of irony. In Scott’s fiction the conflict between the moral affirmation evoked by the disinterested hero and the uncertainties of historical understanding is largely unacknowledged by the narrator, and rarely impinges directly on the consciousness of the hero. At critical moments, as Harry E. Shaw notes, Scott has to shift his heroes ‘away from the personal and internal matters a substantially central protagonist is ideally suited to explore’.74 That is why attempts to read Scott’s novels as if they conform to the conventions of other kinds of nineteenth-century fiction do not ring true. In Francis Hart’s reading, for example, ‘the climax’ of a Scott novel ‘comes at the moment when the protagonist fully recognises the implications of his passivity and acts to assert his moral independence of the forces that have usurped his freedom of will’.75 But a full recognition of the hero’s place in history would undermine his claim to moral independence, which is why it has to be evaded. This is a central evasion of Scott’s fiction, which effectively weights the scale in favour of romance. As in Radcliffe’s gothic fiction, those characters in Scott who dismiss romance and moral idealism as ‘moonshine in the water’ are usually either coarse, cynically opportunistic, or villainous.76 The evidence of the contemporary reception of Scott’s novels suggests that most of Scott’s original readers read sympathetically, accepting the invitation to affirm the hero’s world-view, even admiring, as Harriet Martineau and John Henry

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Newman did, the ‘moral services’ he appeared to have rendered to society.77 But not all readers accepted that invitation: Coleridge, for example, notes that Scott is ‘most anxious to let his Readers know, that he himself is far too enlightened not to be assured of the folly & falsehood of all, that he yet relates as truth’, while Carlyle was led to suspect that Scott did not believe in anything except power.78 In Scott the sentimental emphasis on the motive rather than the consequences of action provides the means of articulating a moderate ethics. In Waverley we are invited to accept that, as Houghton claims, the hero ‘never did, or thought to do, anything dishonourable’ (p. 363). The invitation to the reader, to be moved by a sentimental reading in which Waverley’s ‘humanity’ calls for forgiveness, and thus diverted from an accountable reading in which his desertion and treasonous rebellion call for punishment, exposes the true meaning of Scott’s moderate ethics. The farmer who shelters Waverley in Cumberland, like Colonel Talbot who shelters him in London, may be guilty of misprision of treason. But the narrative offers an invitation to judge by motive, to approve the humanitarian sympathy that transcends party difference and makes the legal claims of the state, and hence the associated issues of legitimacy, seem alien, secondary, even inhuman. In the historical novel the self-interested constitutional indifference of Hume finds its counterpart in a disinterested humanitarian sympathy (which is in practice easily reconciled to the status quo). In the plot of the novel, disinterested virtue must triumph and prudential calculation can be exercised virtuously only on behalf of others. Waverley must depend on the plotting of Rose Bradwardine, who bribes the outlaw Donald Bean Lean to rescue him, and of Talbot, who barters with his commission for Waverley’s pardon. It is only through such elaborately contrived, other-directed plotting that ignorant good nature can be protected and rewarded in a politicised world – a world in which (as an accountable reading must show) such ignorance would be dangerous to itself and others. The collocation of virtuous action with the contrivance of ‘romance’ represents a challenge to the reader – especially given the ambivalent contemporary status of romance, as at once the ground of moral idealism and of deluding fantasy.79 Romance is what the reader must not wake from, if he or she is to avoid seeing the fundamental amorality of history. Indeed, romance aptly represents the condition of the civilised observer – insulated from the nightmare of history by elegant fictions. The hero who is said by Alexander Welsh to represent a ‘social ideal’ may be said by Georg Lukács to be ‘mediocre’ and by Scott himself to be a ‘sneaking piece of imbecility’.80 Scott’s historical romance is constructed to accommodate such a diversity of judgements.

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Inclusion It is because Scott does not want to press the legal claims of the state too closely that the issue of legitimacy must be displaced from the realm of legal right to the realm of cultural and historical representation, where it motivates the move towards a more socially inclusive fiction. Scott not only extends the social range of the novel by including many more characters from the lower ends of the social scale, but he also repeatedly places the polite heroes in situations of dependence on the lower orders, and shows that in the realm of local custom the polite gentleman may become the student rather than the model of culture. His antiquarian interests directed him primarily to a traditional culture in decline, one that had flourished in a pre-commercial age.81 But as a novelist he engages with a form that by its nature works to confound distinctions between traditional and modern cultural forms, as between high and popular culture – a generic feature he is keen to exploit. His novels often focus on historical figures that had already found their place in the commercial culture of chapbooks, black-letter ballads, popular theatre, prints, and romances – the smuggler, the pirate, knights of chivalry, the crusader, Robin Hood, Rob Roy, Richard I.82 Indeed, as William St Clair points out, the chapbooks provided ‘a model for the meeting of real and historical figures with imagined characters from low life’ which Scott exploited in his novels.83 Most important, in Scott’s work national history appears at the interface between the ‘universal’ narrative of progress and the experience of change within specific localities. In Britain the history of the modern nation was increasingly becoming a chronicle of the wars of empire, negotiations with European powers, debates in the Westminster Parliament. In such a chronicle the history of Scotland was a minor component, sometimes subsumed under the title of English history. Even a major crisis such as the ’45 rebellion could appear as a digression in the continuing story of British interests in Europe and overseas.84 Scott’s work, influenced by the national tales of Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Maturin, and others, consciously displaces the centralising perspective of such history. Whereas history writing was a specialist task of inferential reconstruction based on published documents and authenticated archival sources, Scott’s historical enquiries, as Hugh Trevor Roper points out, combined such sources with information drawn from ‘informal, private documents – from legends, traditions, customary rites, ephemeral literature, popular poetry, portraits’.85 Scott’s ambition here can be compared with the concern of recent historians to broaden the scope of history by turning to oral history, place-centred history, history that draws on family experiences, personal memories, on

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non-institutional, ‘unofficial’ sources of knowledge.86 By drawing on such resources, Scott democratises history, finding a place within it for what would now be termed ‘popular memory’. The contrast between the priorities of official history and popular memory has been usefully illustrated by Paul Connerton, who cites Carlo Levi’s experience in the 1930s in a remote village in southern Italy, where the villagers spoke with indifference of the Great War (although ‘not a single household had been spared’ by it). The only wars the villagers spoke of ‘with animation and mythic coherence’ were the ‘wars of the brigands’ against the government of the north, which had come to an end at least seventy years earlier.87 Popular memory has its own (often antiauthoritarian) priorities, and Scott’s antiquarian interests sensitised him to this fact.88 The starting point of some of his most resonant fictions is precisely those rebellious events that resonated in the popular memory of local Scottish communities ‘with animation and mythic coherence’ – tales of the Borderers, the Covenanters, the Jacobites, the Porteous riots. Such memories could still become a rallying point for popular discontent, as Scott had some reason to know.89 But within his fictions they are contained by the progressive perspective, which represents them as things of an outgrown past. Scott has often been criticised for this separation of the past from the present, as an evasion that neutralises the political lessons of times gone by and that places the reader beyond the flow of history.90 But it can also be seen as an enabling condition that allowed him to negotiate with painful events of the kind that other novelists were tempted to draw back from.91 The legitimising purpose of Scott’s inclusive history is comparable to that of modern truth and reconciliation commissions, which seek to create national narratives based on a collective memory, by representing those who would normally be excluded from the record. Priscilla Hayner notes that such commissions usually act as if the authority they represent is already divorced from the past, and that nations in which it is difficult to make this separation (such as Mozambique and Cambodia) have typically shown little interest in confronting their own pasts.92 The inclusive nature of Scott’s historical fiction attempts to reconnect the polite reader with what has been lost in the process of refinement, including the lost experience of the body. In Stallybrass and White’s account of polite culture, the refined bourgeois consciousness that emerges in the eighteenth century constructed the non-refined as an ‘other realm inhabited by a grotesque body which it repudiated as part of its own identity’ – a body characterised partly by the impure mixing of categories. Champions of refinement attacked as intolerable those who ‘had not yet dissociated “classical” from popular culture’ but who ‘actively lived both’.93 In Scott’s fiction, in contrast, the historical

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dissociation of cultures is assumed to be an accomplished fact, while the process is viewed in retrospect. Educated characters who remain in touch with popular tradition may therefore call for understanding or qualified admiration. Flora McIvor derives part of her romantic glamour from being placed on the borderline between polite culture and oral Gaelic culture. When the ‘grotesque body’ first begins to surface in Scott’s work, in Guy Mannering, it is not simply the sign of anxiety about the mixing of polite and popular culture, but the sign of a more radical anxiety about the influence of polite culture itself. The grotesque gypsy Meg Merrilies, for example, antithesis of feminine refinement and enlightened rationality, preserves the remnants of a common heritage of Scottish folk superstition and finds a counterpart in the polite hero Guy Mannering, who has a scholarly interest in astrological beliefs.94 The grotesqueness of the gypsy may register the polite subject’s anxiety about what has already been repudiated as part of polite identity, but it also enables the gypsy to assume a sublime dignity appropriate to her role in the restoration of the lost heir of Ellangowan. In the same novel the grotesque body of the Dominie or school master acquires a complementary significance. Beyond all possibility of refinement, it corresponds to his mental condition (he cannot, in spite of his parents’ ambition, be educated into a priest). The grotesqueness of this figure may suggest anxiety about the combination of high culture and low social origin, but the novel passes beyond raillery to assign the Dominie an apartment in the restored heir’s new house, as the subject of sympathetic patronage. Having failed to achieve independence through educational opportunity, he provides an image of lower-class dependence that is reassuring rather than threatening in an age of rapidly spreading literacy. These cases illustrate the negotiation Scott undertakes with the legacy of refinement, in which the polite perspective is reproduced while the repudiation it implies is mitigated: the recoil from the vulgar is transformed into a movement to re-establish relations on manageable terms. Elsewhere in the novels, rather than simply rejecting unrefined passions, Scott uses the historical perspective to allow a partial – and of course, heavily qualified – recovery of them. The historical romance, that is, offers to remedy (as reading experience) the loss it exposes as history. Ina Ferris reads this process compellingly through the responses of contemporary male critics, for whom it offered ‘a compelling alternative’ to female reading and feminine writing, a release from the ‘disciplinary virtues’ of a fiction aimed primarily at a refined female readership.95 Following the example of the gothic romance, Scott’s fiction typically thrusts the modern consciousness of the hero and reader into a world beyond the delibidinised space of rational discourse to which it is

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historically adapted. This was an aspect of Scott’s novels that Hazlitt, among the most astute of his contemporary critics and admirers, was keen to emphasise. He responded warmly to the novels’ evocation of violent passions that contrast with modern humanitarian sentiment: they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people – to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. [. . .] As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilisation, the flimsy veil of humanity, ‘Off, you lendings!’ The wild beast resumes its sway in us, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in its fancy the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses.96

Fiona Robertson notes how critics have traditionally ‘separated Scott from gothic in terms of their relative healthiness’.97 But for Hazlitt, apparently, the gothic violence of the novels was by no means incompatible with a healthy influence. However, it was not simply the possibility of visceral excitement in scenes of feuding, combat, mob violence, or torture that seemed rousing. The aesthetic principle that governs Scott’s fictions involves a deliberate unsettling of the boundaries that usually preserve the contemplative poise of the refined subject. In his autobiographical memoir Scott distinguishes between ‘the picturesque in action and in scenery’ to define this aspect of his aesthetic: ‘to me the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling castle’.98 Accordingly, in his fiction he repeatedly abandons the depoliticised picturesque convention of the framed and static scene that often diminishes the particularity of human figures. Instead, the picturesque in action strives to place the observer in the position of the participant, moving through a landscape peopled with historically particularised figures. In the age of the turnpike and the post-chaise, the novels seek to recreate the invigorating experience of contending with wild landscape on foot, of pleasurable exposure to the elements, and of confronting accidents that transform scenery into sources of mortal danger (Mordaunt Mertoun, his clothes thoroughly wet, making his way through brooks and morasses across the bleak Shetland landscape, maintaining a dogged conflict with wind and rain in The Pirate; Frank Osbaldistone, making his way back to Aberfoil by moonlight through a sharp frost-wind, his spirits suddenly elevated despite the danger and uncertainty of his situation, in Rob Roy; the scholarly Jonathan Oldbuck, ‘pressing forward with unwonted desperation to the very brink of the crag’ in the coastal rescue in The

Introduction

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Antiquary; Arthur Phillipson, ‘clinging to the decayed trunk of an old tree, from which, suspended between heaven and earth, he saw the fall of the rock which he had so nearly accompanied’ in Anne of Geierstein).99 The novels also offer glimpses of a habitual bodily intimacy excluded from their representations of polite society (as in the unimproved Liddesdale of Guy Mannering, chs. 24–6), and of vigorous communal effort or festive enjoyment of a kind that contrasts with the routines of the urban workplace or the factory (such as the collective holiday pageantry of Kenilworth, or the sport-as-work of the salmonhunting of Guy Mannering and Redgauntlet). By negotiating between refinement and what it represses, the fiction links the modern, detached, moderate rationality of the narrator and hero to a restored sensorial excitement, and connects the reader vicariously to a passional self momentarily free from habitual restraint (although in practice, still carefully insulated from any action that would seriously offend conventional proprieties). On the one hand, the novels appeared to recommend the detachment and moderation fostered by enlightened rationality (while detesting Scott’s Tory politics, Hazlitt thought the novels worked to counteract both ‘ultra-radicalism’ and conservative extremism). On the other hand, they seemed to compensate for the repression required by that rationality. Moderation and wildness, detachment and primitive passion: the radically opposed tendencies Hazlitt identifies help to account for his sense that Scott had thrown aside the ‘trammels of authorship’.100 In practice, the trammels of authorship could not simply be set aside, and Scott’s writing career shows a keen understanding of the author’s need to work within the conditions of the market. In a revolutionary age, Scott was in the vanguard of a revolution in the publishing industry, which transformed almost every aspect of book production – from relations between authors and publishers, to methods of printing and distribution – and which heralded an unprecedented expansion in the reading public. William St Clair notes that ‘For a time Scott and his partners achieved an ownership of the whole literary production and distribution process from author to reader’.101 But one does not ‘own’ the market, and can only have immediate influence within it working with its preferences. Scott had to develop a form that could deal with politically sensitive issues – rebellion, war, disruptive social change – in ways that could ‘conciliate all the suffrages’, could accommodate incommensurate views.102 Saree Makdisi is right to see Waverley as part of a romanticism that contributed to ‘the constitution of modernisation as a cultural field’, and that worked to validate the interests of capitalism and imperialism.103 But if that was the historical function of Scott’s work, to overlook

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the ways in which the fictions struggle to perform – and sometimes to resist – that function is to simplify them considerably. In our own age, when new states such as South Africa struggle to produce national narratives combining official history and unofficial memory, their imperfect attempts to come to terms with the horrors of an oppressive past may seem remote from the apparently comfortable world of Walter Scott and his best-selling fictions.104 Indeed, even to mention such things in the same breath might seem outrageous. But Scott’s recognition that reconciliation requires alternative understandings of truth produced a model of history that continues to find grim echoes in our own age. To see this is to begin to recover a sense of Scott’s relevance today.

Notes 1. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths. 2. Fukuyama, End of History, pp. 162–5. 3. In Europe the Poles continued their struggle against Russia, the Greeks rose against the Ottomans, the Belgians against Holland, while France, evicted from Spain in the Peninsular War, invaded once more in 1823. The struggle against Spanish rule in South America, begun in 1808, continued until 1825. Further afield, the Marathas, Ashantis, Nepalese, and Burmese were engaged in struggles against British power, while the American Indians fought against the encroachments of the United States. 4. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, p. 7. 5. Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, II, p. 19. 6. This was a concern that Scott shared with Edmund Burke. Burke, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, VIII, p. 305. 7. Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, II, pp. 193, 205; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 127. 8. Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, II, p. 124. 9. Scott, Memoirs of the Marchioness De La Rochejaquelein, p. 8. 10. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 4. 11. Jones, E., Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, p. 8; Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, I, p. cxi. 12. Chase, ‘Walter Scott’. 13. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, pp. 27–8. 14. Smith, A., Wealth of Nations, I, p. 437. 15. Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p. 154. 16. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Books Two and Three, p. 284. 17. Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 272, 271. 18. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Books Two and Three, pp. 288, 290, 284, 289. 19. See Dwyer, ‘Enlightened spectators and classical moralists’. 20. See Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 187–8.

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21. Dickinson, ‘Popular conservatism’, pp. 105–7; Hole, Pulpits, pp. 149–50; Bennett, British War Poetry, p. 39; Karsten, Patriot Heroes, pp. 115–16. 22. Cannon, Aristocratic Century, pp. 34–49; Colley, Britons, pp. 164–93; Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, pp. 130–3; Turner, All Heaven in A Rage, pp. 65–95. 23. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, pp. 137, 140, 160. 24. Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, p. 48. 25. Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, II, 503–5. 26. Edinburgh Review, XXIV (1808), p. 276. 27. He condemns all religious fanaticism in which ‘The end is held to sanctify the means’: Scott, ‘Essay on chivalry’, p. 528. He also condemns ‘the transcendental philosophy which authorizes the acting of instant and admitted wrong, with the view of obtaining some distant, hypothetical, and contingent good’. He formally commends ‘the rule of Christian faith and true philosophy, which commands that each be weighed on its own circumstances, and decided upon the immutable rules of right or wring, without admitting any subterfuge founded on the hope of remote contingencies and future consequences.’ Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, II, p. 75. 28. Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, I, p. 52. 29. See, for example, French, ‘Religion of Sir Walter Scott’. 30. Walker, Conditions and Duties of a Tolerated Church, pp. 64–5. Walker’s sermon was delivered at the consecration of the Englishman David Sandford as bishop of Edinburgh. See Rowan Strong, Episcopalianism, pp. 153–4. 31. Thompson, Customs in Common, pp. 23, 24, 46, 43. 32. See Dwyer, ‘The Caledonian Mercury’, pp. 147–69. 33. Scott, Edinburgh Annual Register for 1814, pp. 57, 74; Edinburgh Annual Register for 1815, p. 67. 34. McMaster, Scott and Society, p. 82. 35. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 182–92, and Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England, pp. 18–21. 36. Lawes, Paternalism and Politics, pp. 29ff. 37. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, p. 208. Roberts notes ‘a decided preference’ among paternalists ‘for local over central government, and within the concept of local government a decided preference for private over public authorities’ (Paternalism in Early Victorian England, p. 40). 38. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, VII (1820), pp. 90–102. 39. Scott, Memoirs of the Marchioness De La Rochejaquelein, p. 6. 40. John Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777) is an annotated edition of Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares (1725). See Mullan and Reid, Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture. 41. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 7. 42. Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary, pp. vii–viii, iii. 43. Strutt, Glig-Gamena Angel Deod, or, The Sports and Pastime of the People of England, p. xlvi. 44. Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel, p. 168. 45. Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare, II, p. 482. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, p. 89. 46. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 9–10, 27–35.

28 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Walter Scott and Modernity Burke, P., Popular Culture, p. 270. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, pp. 83, 97. Welsh, Hero of the Waverley Novels, p. 57. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 32. Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830, p. 83. Wilt, Secret Leaves, p. 84. For example, Crawford, Devolving English Literature; Davis, Acts of Union; Sorensen, Grammar of Empire; Potkay, Fate of Eloquence; Potkay, Passion for Happiness; Davis et al., Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffery, I, pp. 272, 48, 46. Sorensen, Grammar of Empire, p. 6. See Scott’s letter to Croker, 19 March 1826, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, IX, pp. 471–2. Sorensen, Grammar of Empire, pp. 106, 157. Scott, Rob Roy, p. 410. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, p. 105. Scott, ‘Life of John Dryden’, p. 24; ‘Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D.D.’, p. 169. Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape, p. 17. Scott, ‘Memoirs of Jonathan Swift, D.D.’, p. 163. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 48. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, pp. 338–56; Chase, ‘Walter Scott’, p. 110. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 54. Barrell and Guest, ‘On the uses of contradiction’, p. 126. Chase, ‘Walter Scott’, p. 101. Scott, ‘Essay on Romance’, p. 554. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, p. 106. See Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, conclusion of ch. 15. Potkay, Passion for Happiness, pp. 201–7. Lee, Nationalism and Irony, p. 24. Duncan, I., ‘Authenticity Effects’, pp. 101, 107. Shaw, H. E., Forms of Historical Fiction, p. 212. Hart, Scott’s Novels, p. 9. The coarse Balafré deflates his nephew’s ideals of chivalric honour as ‘moonshine’ in Quentin Durward, p. 65. See Hayden, Walter Scott, pp. 340–2, 378–9. Coleridge, Marginalia IV, p. 605; Hayden, Walter Scott, p. 347. Duff, Romance and Revolution, p. 12. Welsh, Hero of the Waverley Novels; Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 35–6; Letters of Sir Watter Scott, IV, 478–9. Shiach, Discourse on Popular Culture, p. 115. Rogers, P., Literature and Popular Culture, p. ix. St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 347. Readers of Thomas Mante’s eight-volume Naval and Military History of the Wars of England, including the Wars of Scotland and Ireland, for example, would find Scottish and Irish events discussed as subordinate parts of

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85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

29

English history, and would find the ’45 rebellion summarised as a twentyfour page digression within a crowded record of the War of the Austrian Succession. Roper, ‘Walter Scott and history’, p. 229; Manning, ‘Antiquarianism’, disciplinarity’, p. 68. See Le Goff, History and Memory. Connerton, How Societies Remember, pp. 20–1. The antiquarian Joseph Ritson, for example, noted that ‘The insurrections of 1715 and 1745 seem to have inspired all the pipers in Scotland, having given rise to almost as many tunes as would fill a volume’, Scottish Songs in Two Volumes, I, p. cvii. Murray Pittock points out that radical mobs in Scotland sang Jacobite songs in the 1790s; Charles Kemble’s translation of a French play, Edouard en Ecosse, Charles Edward in Scotland, could not be performed in 1808; in 1817 protesting blanketeers followed the Jacobites’ route to Derby: Pittock, Jacobitism, p. 131. Angus Calder notes that the Covenant was evoked by textile workers and freemasons of industrial villages near Scott to demonstrate their approval of Napoleon when he escaped from Elba. Scott, Old Mortality, ed. Calder, p. 10. See Nairn, The Break-up of Britain, pp. 150, 116. In the preface to O’Donnel: A National Tale (1814), Lady Morgan explains that she initially considered a narrative based on the adventures of O’Donnel, the red chief of Tirconnel in the reign of Elizabeth, but decided that the material was unfit for ‘the purposes of conciliation’, and so chose a modern subject instead: pp. x, xi. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, pp. 175–6. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, pp. 103, 86. Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 14. Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority, p. 91. Hazlitt, ‘On the pleasures of hating’, p. 129. Robertson, F., Legitimate Histories, p. 25. Scott, ‘Memoir of his early years, written by himself’, p. 47. Simon Bainbridge provides a useful discussion of this distinction in British Poetry, p. 126. Scott, The Pirate, pp. 28–9; Rob Roy, p. 383; Antiquary, p. 61; Anne of Geierstein, p. 21. Hazlitt, ‘Spirit of the age’, pp. 64–5, 61. St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 170. Hazlitt, ‘Why the heroes of romance are insipid’, p. 252. Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, pp. 6–9. In Lars Buur’s view, the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can be located at the ‘interface between official history and unofficial history’, since its enquiries take account of ‘unofficial historical memory’, the oral testimony preserved in particular localities, in ‘stories, songs, myths, rumours and hypotheses about the relation between the past and the present’: ‘Monumental Historical Memory’, p. 76.

Chapter 2

Towards the Modern Nation The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, and Waverley

It has become commonplace to think of nations as political constructions that emerge in the condition of modernity, rather than as ancient or primordial communities based on common ancestry. Anthony Smith concludes that much discussion of nationalism and nation-building since the mid-twentieth century has been informed by ‘the paradigm of classical modernism’, in which nations are conceived as ‘social constructs and cultural creations of modernity, designed for an age of revolutions and mass mobilization, and central to the attempts to control these processes of rapid political change’.1 The nation conceived in these terms is not an organic community like those described by the founders of nineteenth-century nationalism (such as Fichte, Mazzini, and Michelet). Instead, it is a community created – with varying degrees of conscious design – through modern forms of communication and by centrally organised institutions. The most influential example of such thinking is probably Benedict Anderson’s account of nations as ‘imagined communities’, an account that foregrounds the development of ‘print-capitalism’, which helped to stabilise print-languages and provided new forms for ‘re-presenting’ the nation, such as the novel and the newspaper.2 But many other writers have explored the role of imagination and memory in nation-building, investigating the production of commemorative rituals, traditions, monuments, museums, and other cultural forms as means of fostering collective identity. This way of thinking about nation-building gained prominence during a period in which the global political map was being rapidly redrawn, as many new independent nations appeared (notably in Africa and Asia) as a result of decolonisation. It may help us to see what is at stake in Scott’s fictions, since he was writing in an age when the experience of revolution and war had led to a dramatic recasting of the political geography of Europe and its territories overseas. The sudden transformation of the French state in the revolution heralded a new era

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in the cultural role of the modern state, providing a dramatic example of the nation as a ‘cultural creation of modernity’. In Britain, Edmund Burke reacted to the spectacle of revolution by expounding an organic conception of the British state, as bound together by natural loyalties and pieties, in which the modern political system was held to be congruent with ‘old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution’, to be at once continually changing and maintained in ‘a condition of unchangeable constancy’.3 While Scott shares some of Burke’s conservative values, his sense of history has little room for Burke’s metaphysical claims. His work repeatedly emphasises that the progress to modernity entails conflict, disruption, discontinuity, violent dispossession. And while he sometimes writes of ‘natural’ relations between landowners and the poor, he is acutely aware that people will not ‘look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility’ simply because, as Burke claims, it is ‘natural to be so affected’.4 Believing with Hume that political obligation is founded on ‘interest, and human conventions’, Scott sees that affections can be shaped by cultural experiences, and that in the modern state political aims must be promoted by cultural means or, in Hume’s terms, by ‘artifice’.5 This view gives a special role to the artist as agent of national reconciliation, who must work to establish in the realm of imagination and memory the continuity that history denies, and to transform a past of conflict and displaced traditions into a usable heritage in the modern state. In this chapter I will consider how this understanding of the writer’s role takes shape in Scott’s first three poetic romances and in his first novel, Waverley.

The Birth of the Nation: The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake As Anthony Smith notes, the emphasis on invention or imagining in recent accounts of nation-building can suggest that the experience of community in modern nations is in some sense inauthentic: ‘imagined’ can imply ‘illusory’ as well as ‘created’. Indeed, the idea that nations are creations of modernity, bound up with the consolidation of centralised institutions and the spread of literacy, may engender a sense of dislocation between the literate culture of the modern nation, and the established traditions, including oral traditions, that previously generated collective loyalties. The antiquarian patriotism of Scott’s early writing – its preservation and imaginative recreation of diverse aspects of Scottish cultural tradition – stands in symbolic opposition to the disruptive,

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modernising, centralising nationalism of the French revolutionaries and Napoleon, and yet in the role of patriotic poet Scott finds that he can imagine the modern British nation as a community only by turning to the past, and to the language of romance. Imaginative opposition to modernity becomes, paradoxically, the ground upon which the unity of the modern nation is to be built, while imagination emerges as both creative and illusory. Feudalism and liberty Scott’s understanding of the origin of the nation was influenced by a tradition of political thought that focused on the demise of feudalism and the development of strong central government in European kingdoms. In British political theory the ending of feudal tenures, whether it was attributed to royal policy, or to cultural innovations, or to both, was generally seen to have given power first to the monarch, and then to parliament. James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) described it as a liberating process which transformed vassals into freeholders apt for public service, and which effectively undermined both noble and monarchical power.6 Following Harrington the writers of the Scottish enlightenment generally saw the transition as liberalising, even if they looked back with admiration and a sense of loss on the martial vigour displayed in the feudal era. But more negative views were also available to Scott. For example, in 1697 Andrew Fletcher, writing in the light of a radical Scottish tradition distrustful of theories of absolute political obligation and of royal government, saw a fatal loss of liberty in the transfer of power to the monarch: whereas the feudal system had ‘put the Sword into the hand of the Subject’, the ‘Alteration of Government’ which put an end to feudal tenures allowed princes to take possession of the sword by establishing mercenary standing armies.7 And Scott also had the example of Goethe’s historical drama Götz von Berlichingen, which he translated (and published in 1799), and which presented the loss of feudal independence in tragic terms. Goethe was influenced by the social theory of Justus Möser, who attacked the despotic power of the absolute princes ruling the larger German states, and sought to preserve the character of traditional communities by fostering a ‘local patriotism’.8 Set around the time of the reformation, Goethe’s play represents a Germany fractured into many states and minor baronies, each retaining the right to wage war and (as Scott explains) ‘independent of all control but the remote supremacy of the emperor’.9 The play’s hero, Götz, the owner of a small castle, behaves like an outlaw but is governed by a traditional code of honour; he fights a losing battle to preserve his independence,

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as the right of private war is abolished and power passes inevitably to despotic, centralised states – states defended by ‘mere hirelings’ (p. 101), in which torture, hypocrisy, and corruption are endemic. Goethe’s play vividly illustrates the point that Scott would later make in his ‘Essay on Chivalry’, that there were few traces of ‘patriotism, considered as a distinct predilection to the interests of one kingdom [. . .] in the institutions of knighthood’.10 For Scott, as for Anderson, patriotism becomes more widespread after the demise of feudal relations, with the rise of strong central government, and with the progress towards the modern commercial society. As Lord Kames has it, patriotism ‘rises high among a people intimately connected by regular government, by husbandry, by commerce, and by a common interest’.11 Among the cultural innovations that enlightenment historians associated with the transition from the feudal to the modern age were the restoration of classical learning, and the invention of printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass (which ushered in the age of exploration and discovery).12 With the exception of gunpowder, these changes were generally seen in positive terms, as helping to improve the manners of society, and to foster virtue and liberty. But their effects could also be seen, with the rise of commerce and luxury, as morally damaging: the power and virtue of the nobles, for example, were thought to have declined as they acquired expensive habits or, as Harrington puts it, ‘became courtiers’.13 And although these innovations had been introduced some three hundred years before Scott began to write, their consequences were apparently still unfolding in the contemporary turmoil of a revolutionary age. Edmund Burke suggested this when he famously associated the French revolution with the end of the ‘age of chivalry’. The era of exploration, commerce, and empire had intensified competition between nations, increased public interest in cultural and national differences, and given power to the ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators’ who, in Burke’s influential reading, had helped to produce the chaos of the French revolution.14 The rapid expansion of print culture stimulated and responded to widening literacy, and gave women and lower-class readers increasing influence in the literary market. Scott had reason to connect the rise of print capitalism, as Anderson does, with the fostering and consolidating of national consciousness (given, for example, the nationalist discourses and patriotic propaganda of the revolutionary period); but the burgeoning of print culture had also widened alarmingly the range of political voices contending in the public sphere. The restoration of classical learning, while it provided models of military heroism and patriotic virtue, was also identified by some British commentators as a cause of revolutionary ‘infidelity’.15 Gunpowder was being used in unprecedented quantities in the

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wars waged on land and sea in defence of or against the new forms of national government. Scott’s career as a writer was to be implicated in these developments: he became an entrepreneur in the field of publishing, commanding a huge readership, producing works that tap into the contemporary interest in cultural and national difference, that draw on oral and romance forms conventionally associated with female and lower-class audiences, that follow the military traditions of the classical epic and in doing so reflect the contemporary state of war-torn Europe. The condition of modernity that allowed Scott to flourish as a writer also fuelled his fears of social disintegration. The nation, the focus of internal contention and external aggression, was a problematic part of that condition. When Scott turned to the late feudal era in his early poetic romances, it was not simply to escape the problems of the modern nation, but to represent their origin and to suggest his own relation to them. The Border Minstrel Scott’s edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) has clear precedents in the literary and anthropological interests of eighteenthcentury antiquarian scholarship. In Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as Katie Trumpener notes, nationalist antiquaries ‘edited, explicated and promoted their respective bardic traditions; emphasizing the cultural rootedness of bardic poetry and its status as historical testimony’.16 In Scotland a revival of cultural nationalism generated new interest in medieval Scots poetry, led by Allan Ramsay as editor and populariser of the Scottish ‘makars’. James Macpherson’s Ossian established in the public mind the image of the ancient Scottish warrior-bard, celebrator of a lost era of disinterested military virtue, in a form well adapted to refined modern tastes. The scholarly dissertations that accompanied Macpherson’s prose poems, which described the culture of the supposed Ossianic era, were indicative of the developing relationship between literary and anthropological scholarship in Scotland.17 This patriotic tradition of scholarly and creative endeavour had helped to create a market for Scott’s Minstrelsy. But while Scott’s work is presented as a contribution to national history – its domain is the Scottish border – the border minstrels themselves conspicuously lack a sense of national unity and purpose. As Leith Davis observes, Macpherson’s Ossian represented the people of the British Isles as homogeneous, while in the Minstrelsy ‘The Border way of life exists as an indication of heterogeneity in Britain, a heterogeneity to which the ballads bear witness.’18 Unlike the bards celebrated by nationalist antiquaries as dignified

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spokesmen for a whole society (and unlike the ‘kings minstrels’ described in Percy’s famous introduction to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), Scott’s border minstrels, composing in the sixteenth century and earlier, are fundamentally opposed to monarchy and law. As we saw in Chapter 1, Scott emphasises that ‘the minstrels praised their chieftains for the very exploits, against which the laws of their country denounced a capital doom’, and they ‘always’ represent the Scottish king as ‘a ruthless and sanguinary tyrant’.19 It has been argued that the codes of kin loyalty and communal custom that bind Scott’s feudal borderers are ‘always translatable into loyalty to the state’; but if we pass too lightly over the fundamental opposition between the local and the central that Scott identifies here, we shall overlook its significance in his thinking.20 Historical border ballads such as ‘Johnie Armstrong’ and ‘The Sang of the Outlaw Murray’ dramatise attempts to impose power from the centre upon a condition of local independence. Thus the minstrelsy that Scott describes does not represent a condition of liberty that exists before the threat of oppression from a central power, but coincides with, and is sometimes a response to, that threat – a threat located within as well as beyond the Scottish border. When Scott formally identifies the modern poet with the border minstrel, the oppositional character of the minstrel is transformed but not lost. In the introductory epistles of Marmion the borderer’s resistance to law is transmuted into aesthetic terms. The modern minstrel expresses scorn for ‘pedantic laws’ of versification (his own verse is characterised as ‘wild’, ‘untrimmed’, ‘unrestrain’d’, etc.).21 He ostensibly resists the hegemony of a polite metropolitan culture, but instead of associating this move with an alternative tradition of Scots poetry that runs back through Burns, Fergusson, Ramsay and others, he aligns himself with an English poetic tradition that runs through Spenser and Milton, and ends with Dryden (Introduction to canto I). This implies that Spenser’s Arthurian and Milton’s biblical epics, in their use of legendary materials available to all classes, transcend distinctions between high and popular culture, while Dryden initiates a narrowing of English poetry to class-specific (courtly) interests. Scott’s manoeuvre here notionally positions his own work as ‘British’, and is an example of the concern among Scottish poets to establish a Britishness that, as Robert Crawford puts it, ‘makes full room for Scotland’.22 But the implicit claim to Britishness here is made through a gesture of resistance, and the resistance is possible for Scott because in the Marmion epistles the minstrel persona is always conceived as a step backwards, a knowing regression from the writer’s mature identity. It registers a split between the urbane, classically educated, professional gentleman who appears at the edges of these

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epistles, and the ‘Gothic’ poet who declines ‘The classic poet’s wellconn’d task’ and gives himself up to idleness, childish pursuits, to the ‘gossip history’ of oral tradition, to solitary musings on time’s ravages in a rural landscape.23 Scott adapts the reclusive voice common to much late eighteenth-century poetry, but presents it within an ironising frame. The poet is self-consciously belated in relation to the themes of his poetry. Paradoxically, the minstrel’s alienation suggests the temporary recovery of a lost purity which the adult must see ultimately as fantasy. A sophisticated self-awareness, then, licenses the apparent naivety of the minstrel persona and the anachronistic romance forms associated with it. The pose distinguishes Scott from the visionary romanticism of Wordsworth, which asserts a heroic triumph over its own doubts; it anticipates the more sceptical and ironical romanticism of Byron and Keats, for whom the poet’s imaginings may always be unmasked as deceiving fantasies. Indeed, our understanding of the development of British romanticism has been seriously impoverished by the disappearance of Scott’s early romances from the canon, for Scott’s poetic ambivalence provides an important model for the ‘second generation’ of male romantic poets. On the face of it, the ambivalent minstrel is an unlikely pose for a staunch Hanoverian patriot. Lockhart, responding to Francis Jeffrey’s complaint at ‘the manifest neglect of Scottish feelings’ in Marmion, hailed ‘the boldness and energy of British patriotism which breathes in so many passages’, and claimed that ‘Scott had sternly and indignantly rebuked and denounced the then too prevalent spirit of antinational despondence’.24 But this is to protest too much. In the narrative, some of the most patriotic sentiments are put into the mouth of the villainous Marmion. And far from offering a rebuke to the ‘spirit of antinational despondence’, the wintry musings of the Marmion epistles in many respects reproduce that spirit – the spirit of an age rendered anxious by the threat of invasion, by Napoleon’s dominance of continental Europe, and by political weakness at home. The melancholy poet approaches the contemporary world only to retreat from it, hedging his patriotic gestures with elaborate disclaimers. A tribute to Brunswick – a lamented ‘chief’ – appears in a sequence in which the poet declines to take on a public theme, refuses to sing about – or even name – heroes of the contemporary conflict (such as Sir Sidney Smith and Sir Ralph Abercrombie). The most sustained reflection on national events, the lament in the Introduction to canto I for the ‘mighty chiefs’ Nelson, Pitt, and Fox, with its appeal for reconciliation between Whig and Tory, and its vision of ‘One unpolluted church’, is revealed to have been a gothic romance, a ‘deception’, which quickly dissolves. The poet finds the

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nation blighted by corruption: the premature death of Pitt is a divine punishment for ‘Britain’s sins’; Pitt’s absence leaves the land exposed to ‘fraud or danger’, perhaps even a ‘tottering throne’ (pp. 6–14). But the minstrel’s response is to turn away once more to gothic romance, to another vision of enchantment rooted in a distant past. In this way the poem enacts its own evasion of the expected patriotic duty, even while gesturing towards that duty, in order to suggest that reawakening the genius of chivalry through romance might be a worthier fulfilment of the poet’s role. Scott himself, then, insists on the deceptive nature of romance imaginings, and emphasises their distance from the contemporary world even as he suggests their relevance to that world. The language of fealty contrasts strikingly with the language used by some other poets to imagine and celebrate the nation as a unified community. In Liberty: A Poem (1735–6) the Scottish poet James Thomson represented the British nation as powerful and independent (‘Queen of the Isles, Mistress of the Main’, I: 34) and as unified by its activities and institutions (Merchants, Trade, Commerce, the Palace of the Laws, Empire, ‘different Ranks’ in their ‘Responsive Place’, IV: 1180, 1183–4, etc.).25 In Scott’s age the poet laureate James Pye, among others, was still using this language in patriotic celebrations of Britain’s military effort.26 But Scott’s gothic minstrel conspicuously avoids such public language. Thomson represented the triumph of liberty as an escape from gothic barbarism, and from ‘The Grievous Yoke of Vassalage, the Yoke / Of private life’ (IV: 1046–7). Scott represents liberty in opposite terms – as removed from public life, and as a vassalage to distant ‘mighty chiefs’. Scott excludes a representation of the nation as a complex legal, commercial, and class system, in order to imagine it in the image of the border clan. This exclusion is for Scott the price of imagined unity. As Marlon Ross has argued, the persona of the border minstrel encourages a ‘trend towards ideological harmonization’.27 Just as the minstrel of The Lay sings for an exclusive aristocratic audience and for the peasant’s ear, so the minstrel of the Marmion epistles addresses his polite Tory friends, but is in contact with the oral culture of humble rural labourers. He represents the widening literacy of the age in the picture of a shepherd who is seen (reassuringly) slumbering over his ‘tatter’d book’.28 The poet may therefore be imagined giving back in his writing what he has taken from the legendary lore of such figures. Paradoxically, the minstrel’s alienation is essential to the aim of unity, since it can ambiguously represent or absorb other kinds of alienation, other kinds of reflection upon ‘Britain’s sins’. If its muted pro-war passages suggest a conservative, chauvinistic patriotism, the gestures of resistance might suggest a more

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traditional, oppositional patriotism, suspicious of the power of the state. It can also represent, in spite of the gestures towards British unity, the alienation of the Scots from the centres of British power. And in its identification with the peasant it might even motion towards the alienation of the disenfranchised. Perhaps the most difficult feat of harmonisation occurs in the area of gender. For in one sense, as critics have pointed out, Scott seeks to ‘masculinise’ romance, a genre associated with the female reader.29 Historically, the border minstrel represents a belligerent feudal world which apparently has little room for the conventional feminine ideal, or even for that aspect of the age of chivalry that was supposed to recommend it to a modern audience: respect or veneration for the female. The Lay of the Last Minstrel introduces the love interest as the minstrel’s concession to his female auditors, discounting the supposed interests of a modern female readership while catering for them. Here and in Marmion, female literacy has negative connotations – it enables women to intervene covertly and with dangerous results in the masculine world of chivalry. While these literate females are viewed critically or are seen as unfeminine, the conventionally virtuous females have little scope for action and their feelings are hardly represented. But in the Marmion epistles, the modern minstrel finds the living remnants of liberty in the feminine realm of sensibility and domestic relations, as when Mertoun House, a little kingdom ruled by the ‘fair dame’, becomes the modest refuge of the ‘good old time’ (Introduction to Canto VI). Thus the alienated minstrel of the modern age finds in the realm of the feminine a shadow of what has been lost in the realm of the masculine. In this way he accommodates the domestic virtues which in his own age female poets, novelists, and dramatists set in opposition to patriarchal codes of heroism. As Scott knew, this modern view of femininity and domesticity was the result of a historical process in which the status of women had been gradually transformed. Enlightenment stadial history had traced the emergence of modern family values in relation to the general progress towards commercial society (in John Millar’s version, for example, the accumulation of wealth required the regulation of sexual alliances, giving a special value to female chastity, while commerce, placing more emphasis on the comforts of life, gave woman an enhanced role within the bosom of her family).30 If this history gave woman a central role in the civilising process, in Scott’s age women writers were increasingly representing the woman in the home as the conscience of the nation, and as a source of national regeneration. The Lady of the Lake, as we shall see, clarifies the role of femininity in the transition towards centralised government and the birth of the modern nation.

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The Romance of Feudal Independence The Marmion epistles make explicit the mixture of sophistication and assumed naivety that characterises Scott’s first three poetic romances. Scott’s poetic narratives imitate an oral history of remembered local events and legends, but remain in contact with a history of social, political, and cultural transformation which implies a centralised perspective, one grounded within the cultural hegemony of the modern state. The second position is notionally privileged, but structurally marginalised. In The Lay and Marmion the minstrel describes a feudal world on the brink of fundamental change as if he has little or no awareness of that change – ‘I say the tale as ’twas said to me’ (Lay, II: xxii) – although occasional hints and reflections in each narrative remind us that the minstrel actually belongs to a later age. In The Lady of the Lake the narrative perspective is more complicated, since the minstrel describes the imposition of centralised government on the feudal world, and incorporates the conflicting perspectives of both systems of power in his narrative. The minstrel pose, as at once imaginatively inside and historically outside the world of romance, inevitably produces an unstable mixture of perspectives. In the first of Scott’s romances, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), feudal independence is characteristically defined in opposition to modern sensitivities, law and centralised power, as in this description of Deloraine, the representative border hero: A stark moss-trooping Scott was he, As e’er couched Border lance by knee. Through Solway sands, through Tarras moss, Blindfold, he knew the paths to cross; By wily turns, by desperate bounds, Had baffled Percy’s best blood-hounds; In Eske, or Liddel, fords were none, But he would ride them one by one; Alike to him was time, or tide, December’s snow, or July’s pride; Alike to him was tide, or time, Moonless midnight, or matin prime. Steady of heart, and stout of hand, As ever drove prey from Cumberland; Five times outlawed had he been, By England’s King, and Scotland’s Queen. (I: xxi)

The ‘rudeness’ of the language here baffles the expectations of the sophisticated reader. It is as if the poetic refinements of generations of later poets have not yet been introduced. The verse excludes the generalising terms of modern judgement; the formulaic phrasing and metrical simplicity demand no contemplative pause, but are designed to

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transport the reader back towards Deloraine’s condition. In his world, to drive prey and be outlawed by two monarchs does not signify a lack of probity or fealty: within his own sphere of interest Deloraine is exemplary, ‘good at need’, ready for dangerous service, completely trustworthy. He is hardly identifiable as Scottish (we later learn that he has many kin in Cumberland). He is a Scott rather than a Scot – his primary allegiance is to the Ladye of Branksome. Local loyalties, local knowledge, and known enemies take precedence over more general interests (he is illiterate), just as physical toughness takes precedence over consciousness. Scott shows a larger, national unity created ad hoc through such local ‘concrete’ loyalties and enmities. The mustering of Scottish clans in response to the threat of English invasion is a rallying of ‘kin, and clan and friends’ (III: xxvii). It follows established precedents (the beacons and gathering words are already in place), but it is not initiated or governed centrally. Critics have often related this aspect of the poem to Scott’s own involvement in the contemporary volunteer movement, which raised local amateur regiments in response to fears of invasion.31 Specifically it can be related to that movement’s construction of a national unity out of local loyalties.32 In the world of this poem, then, conflict defines larger allegiances and clarifies identity, as shown by the Northumbrian exile who is suddenly moved to inform the English of the movements of the Scots, or by Deloraine, who becomes unexpectedly eloquent on the foe he has just slain (in losing Musgrave, with whom he has long been in ‘deadly feud’, Deloraine loses a means of self-definition). Within the chivalric vision of the Minstrel, the mercenaries who serve with the English forces, and who have ‘sold their blood for foreign pay’ (IV: xv), are disdained anomalies. Since they are acknowledging neither country nor lord, they stand outside the defining economy of the feud and can offer no honour to their enemies. (Some are German, like those currently employed by George III against Napoleon.) Within the wider historical perspective of the poem they are signs of that ‘Alteration of Government’ by which, according to Fletcher, liberty was lost and despotism established. When the minstrel Fitzraver curses Henry VIII as a ‘jealous, ruthless tyrant’, the English chiefs applaud, since they ‘still held the ancient faith’ (VI: xx–xi). With the English, intimations of an encroaching modernity, already glimpsed in the passing references to fire arms, begin to intensify. The poem’s final allusions to the courtly poetry of Surrey may, as Celeste Langan argues, be part of an ‘allegorical history of the transformation of poetry by the book’.33 They are signs of an impending cultural transformation that will soon sweep away the chivalric world, institute strong centralised government, and reduce Melrose Abbey to ruins.

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The famous lines on ‘my own, my native land!’ (VI: i) do not emerge from the feudal world of the narrative, but are supplied by the isolated and alienated Last Minstrel, who belongs to a later age, one in which Scotland was riven not by territorial feuds and baronial jealousies, but by major ideological differences – by different religious affiliations and different understandings of nation. This kind of patriotism – in which loyalty is attached to a generalised ‘land’, and identity is defined in relation to a nation rather than by feudal service and codes of honour – is thus associated with dispossession, dislocation, the demise of fealty. The narrative itself works to resurrect for a modern age the resilience, resourcefulness, and martial spirit of an age that fought in defence of kin, clan, and friends rather than to realise an idea of the nation. Marmion engages more directly with the relationship between the feudal and the modern age. If The Lay presents a unity generated spontaneously in response to the threat of English invasion, the narrative of Marmion proceeds on quite different lines. For here the subject is a Scottish invasion of England, initiated by the Scottish monarch. As the historical invasion ended in catastrophic defeat, Scott’s account must show the Scottish campaign as ill-advised and poorly led. Marmion’s celebrated description of the Scottish army as a ‘various band’ identifies an array of different ranks, peoples, and motives – knights and squires, burghers who fear depredation by the wilder clansmen, reluctant yeomen, borderers who regard war as a sport and fight for plunder, diverse Celtic clans whose ‘savage’ stare characterises their social condition rather than their specific animosity to the English, Islesmen whose weapons attest to their Scandinavian origins (V: ii–v). Scotland is seen as a kingdom of remarkably heterogeneous peoples and interests assembled by royal command, an array whose diversity suggests neither a dominant national identity nor a unified attitude to war with England. Douglas may emerge as a patriotic hero, but he is against the war. The vision of the Scottish military campaign here is more complex than that in The Lay, because it exposes the disastrous consequences of corrupt centralised power. What is at issue within the naive vision of the minstrel is a tale of personal courage and villainy, but what is at issue in the wider historical perspective is the impending threat to liberty and martial virtue posed by a corrupting modernity. The naive vision is consistently privileged, as in the description of the hero Marmion: Well was he armed from head to heel, In mail, and plate, of Milan steel; But his strong helm, of mighty cost, Was all with burnish’d gold emboss’d;

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Walter Scott and Modernity Amid the plumage of the crest, A falcon hovered on her nest, With wings outspread, and forward breast; E’en such a falcon, on his shield, Soared sable in an azure field: The golden legend bore aright, who checks at me, to death is dight. Blue was his charger’s broidered rein; Blue ribbons decked his arching mane; The knightly housing’s ample fold Was velvet blue, and trapp’d with gold. (I: vi)

The minstrel’s enraptured description invites an admiring response, but seen in a larger historical perspective Marmion’s dazzlingly opulent imported armour, like his squires with courtly graces, and his extravagant largesse, is a sign of that luxury that was thought to have turned nobles into courtiers and led them into debt. Marmion is linked with the other innovations that accompanied the demise of feudalism. He is associated with the new age of exploration (‘Such buxom chief shall lead his host / From India’s fires to Zembla’s frost’, III: iv). His followers are armed with muskets that will soon transform the arts of warfare. Trained ‘in lore of Greece and Rome’ (VI: xiii) he is rumoured to doubt Christian teaching (III: xxx). The narrative makes clear that he has not lost his military virtue, but he has begun to lose his sense of honour. The signs of impending change are everywhere in the narrative. The invention of printing and the spread of literacy are already beginning to transform the oral culture of this world: the minstrel Fitz Eustace has been poring over huge romantic tomes; the Abbess exclaims that Marmion should read the record of his house; Sir David Lindesay will soon write a reforming satire on the church. The view of the Scottish court emphasises its luxury and corruption, and implies that the seeds of the Scottish defeat are sown there, where nobles have become courtiers. The presence of the church helps to set the feudal codes of honour that govern the hot-blooded conflicts of clans and barons against the cold-blooded operation of law. The institutional power of the church, passed over lightly in The Lay’s treatment of Melrose Abbey, is now revealed in references to Lindisfarne’s internal hierarchy, its power over transgressive barons, its appetite for bequests of property. The Vault of Penitence episode, which culminates in the execution of the condemned nun, Constance, represents law as institutional violence. The incident reveals a typical doubleness in the narrative strategy. It represents a barbarous and superstitious past that is soon to be reformed, but it is also connected with the modernity that will displace the feudal world. For in the context of Constance’s trial the ‘guilty packet’ emerges (II: xxviii),

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which introduces the forgery plot and a legalistic concern with written evidence that anticipates a ‘commercial’ age in which property exchanges will be governed by legal document rather than by combat.34 In this respect the guilty packet heralds the changes that will undermine the feudal independence of the nobles and bring them more firmly under the central authority of the state. Thus the packet links the ecclesiastical trial with Marmion’s state trial before King Henry (which leads Marmion to break honour’s laws, V: xxviii). The bizarre vision of ‘DunEdin’s Cross’, from where the ‘voice of Scotland’s law was sent’, suggests a sinister (satanic) relationship between church, monarchy, and law (V: xxv). Typically, the visionary mode of the episode allows its subversive implications to be discounted as a manifestation of the unenlightened past. But this dark view of usurping centralised authority is the antithesis of the nation as an array of diverse cultures and interests. The contrast between feudal allegiance and state authority approached indirectly in The Lay and Marmion becomes a central issue in The Lady of the Lake. At the beginning of this tale King James V (FitzJames) has already imposed his authority on the borderers. It is now the highlanders who embody the condition of feudal independence. The narrative moves from the clan culture of the highlands to the town of Stirling with its castle dungeons, guardroom, and state chamber, evoking a historical progress towards centralised government and national consciousness. The poem examines directly a system of government that has already begun to destroy the world represented by the border minstrel himself. The narrative therefore generates a conflict of perspectives, as its narrator is imaginatively both attached to, and detached from, the values of the feudal world (at once celebrating the highlanders’ gathering against the king, for example, and associating it with barbaric Druidism). This means, among other things, that the sense of alienation placed at the margins of the earlier poems now governs the narrative itself, in which displacement is seen to be a general condition of existence. The emotional force of the poem seems powerfully in favour of the natural liberty represented in the first canto – a liberty evoked through the huntsman’s estranged vision of an uncultivated landscape. The prevailing sense of displacement helps to explain the markedly different representation of femininity in this narrative. As we have said, the masculine world of the earlier poems finds little room for the conventional ideal of femininity. But in the Marmion epistles, the alienated modern minstrel finds the living remnants of liberty in the realm of the feminine: in sensibility; domestic relations; the home ruled over by the ‘fair dame’. Within the condition of modernity, that is, the feminine

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realm offers a necessary compensation for a sense of loss and displacement. Accordingly, femininity now assumes a central place in The Lady, where it becomes a means of humanising civil order and the idea of nation. The exiled Ellen represents femininity as a mythical power which can exert its influence over masculine passion, a ‘maiden confidence’ which chastens Fitz-James, softens the lustful Brent, and subdues Lewis of Tullibardine. This idealised femininity allows the heroine to express a humane response to violence, and to act without acting, to influence the masculine world innocently. Structurally, it provides a way of mediating between the opposing claims of nation and clan. A new concern with female vulnerability allows the narrative to link political issues to a moral allegory handled by symbolic doubling. The poem is haunted in its episodes and songs by images of female lives disrupted by the influence of masculine conflict – driven into exile, torn from their bridegrooms – instances that echo and contrast with each other, and with the situation of the displaced heroine, Ellen. Roderick and Fitz-James are doubled as would-be protector/suitors of Ellen, Roderick embodying the lawless passion that Fitz-James must subdue before he can become a worthy prince. Roderick’s victim Blanche of Devan – a grotesque double for Ellen – thus warns Fitz-James of moral as well as physical dangers. Marilyn Orr notes that the patterns of doubling that appear in Scott’s work may prompt a struggle to choose between alternatives, because the similarity between opposites creates the possibility of reversal. Orr sees this in terms of a generic struggle between romance and gothic: the romance world is challenged to define itself by resisting its gothic adversary.35 I would argue that the historical perspective Scott introduces has the potential to subvert the moral polarity characteristic of the romance plot, because it threatens to expose the integrity of the hero as a matter of romance. That is, it threatens to lay bare the moral equivalence between the hero and his apparent opposite, which sympathetic identification with the hero may dissuade us from seeing. The double brings into focus an option: to read as romance readers, or to undertake a more detached and critical reading. Thus the doubling of Roderick and Fitz-James ostensibly establishes a clear opposition, developed through the romance plot: Fitz-James’s victory over Roderick represents the triumph of law over feudal codes of revenge. But the historical perspective articulated within the narrative threatens this pattern: Roderick’s feudal justification of his ‘crimes’ opens up an irresolvable history of Gaelic dispossession, which reflects directly on the highland clearances of Scott’s own day, and eventually forces Fitz-James to shift from the precarious grounds of law onto those

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of feudal revenge – his chivalric vow to avenge Blanche (V: viii). If the king is allowed to appear as a courtly protector of the female here, the minstrel Allen-Bane’s account of the battle of Beal’ an Duine shows that, but for the timely truce, the Saxon soldiers fighting on James’s behalf would have taken ‘revenge’ on the women and others notionally under Roderick’s protection on the island of Loch Katrine (VI: xxi). The moral differences between Roderick and Fitz-James thus begin to dissolve. I will have more to say about this kind of doubling in Chapter 4. Against this ambivalent picture of the conflict between feudal chief and monarch is set a stylised and deeply ironical representation of state power in Stirling. Here, for the first time in his poetic romances, Scott represents a ‘dark city’ with ‘smoky air’, and a community in which nobles are no longer in the ascendant. The king’s authority is maintained by a standing army of foreign mercenaries, represented by Brent, an English outlaw ‘ever to strife and jangling bent’ (VI: vii). The portrait of James’s regime, with its political prisoners and grim instruments of torture, is consistent with the traditional Scottish association of mercenaries with domestic despotism. The gothic grimness allows us to see this order as representing an unenlightened past, but at the same time it is generalised into a reflection on civilisation as a state of bondage and alienation (Malcolm’s ‘Lay of the Imprisoned Huntsman’ uses hunting as a symbol of freedom to contrast with the steeple’s drowsy chime, the joyless towers of the city, VI: xxiv). In the representation of Stirling attention has shifted from conflict between clan and king to unstable relations between social ranks, a threat of disorder implicitly related to a social condition in which natural energies are repressed. In contrast to the minstrel’s art, which complements a highly active life style and requires a close and listening audience, the burghers’ sports are seen as a carnivalesque release centred on public spectacle. These ‘mean burgher’s joys’ recreate the life beyond the town in ‘quaint’ forms (V: xx–xxi). The woodland outlaw here is celebrated in the festival figures of Robin Hood and his band. Skills and physical prowess – archery, wrestling, feats of strength – are displayed not in feudal combat but in competitive sports rewarded with prizes. In place of the wild and dangerous hunt with which the poem began, the king lets loose a captive deer to be hunted by dogs. The role of the ‘Commons’ King’ in these spectacles is emphasised, since they are a means by which he must maintain his popularity among a people no longer bound by feudal loyalties, a crowd that can be won and lost by mere gestures. The precariousness of this civil order is emphasised, in order to legitimise the means that will stabilise it. Here Scott begins to engage with an issue that will reappear in some of his novels: the

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question of how royalty can maintain its authority in a world in which the bonds of feudal obligation have begun to dissolve. In Bothwell, the outlawed Douglas, the discourses of feudal honour, state authority, and domesticity converge. When he buffets the king’s groom before the king himself, he echoes the disruptive conduct of Roderick in Holyrood. But here the commons rise ‘against the law’ on his behalf; he has won their admiration in the sports, and they respond more warmly to his heroic independence than they do to the king’s patronage (V: xxv–xxvii). It is at this point, when the narrative appears to suggest that it is more natural to follow an outlawed clan chief than a king, that Douglas begins to produce the language of nation, law, public weal, patriotism, and domestic affections in order to pacify the commons (V: xxviii). The minstrel’s vision invites us to see Douglas’s patriotism as compatible with his sense of feudal honour, and to conclude that the law requires a strong aristocracy to uphold it against the commons. But the historical perspective shows the ideology of nationhood emerging in the town as the means of binding the commons under law once the traditional patterns of feudal order have begun to disintegrate. The appeal to national feeling is underpinned by the appeal to domestic feeling, as Douglas (whose urge for vengeance has just left a groom ‘senseless in his gore’, V: xxv) imagines the violation of the ‘public weal’ in terms of the private grief of shattered families. The appeal to nation and the appeal to family are presented as complementary: domestic affections must take the place of clan loyalty in the world of the burgher – the ‘public weal’ is hard to visualise in other terms among the dungeons and mercenaries of Stirling. Here, as in the Marmion epistles, Scott seems to be reflecting with some irony upon the condition of his own art. For while Scott formally aligns his own poetic art with that of the minstrel, an art which celebrates and gives shape to the history of a community of peasants and aristocrats governed by feudal codes, it resembles the popular pageantry of the burgher sports – in its re-creation for a bourgeois audience of a lost, more active world as ‘quaint’ spectacle, its co-option of figures from oral legend, its tamed violence, its festive brio, its function as entertainment for a fickle and potentially anarchic public whose favour must be carefully courted. The narrative shows that the outlawed chief must resign his independence in the interests of law and national unity – but what is lost in this realm of action can be given back in the realm of romance. And so Scott offers royalty in disguise – Fitz-James the hunter or, later, in Ivanhoe, King Richard the Black Knight – who can act with the captivating independence of the outlaw and the clan chief. When Scott arranged for George IV to parade through Edinburgh dressed as a

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highlander, he made a comparable substitution, aligning the Hanoverian monarchy of modern Britain not only with the deposed Stuart dynasty, but also with the lost hereditary jurisdiction of the highland chief – a move that symbolically moved the outlawed margin to the centre, but which, from another point of view, symbolically detached monarchy from the centre and placed it on the margin, in the condition of feudal independence. Like Scott’s other feudal romances, it was at once a creative imagining and an audacious fabrication. Anderson claims that communities are to be distinguished ‘not by their falseness/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’.36 This may leave out of account other modes of assessing the structures and institutions that constitute the life of a community, but its recognition of the importance of the style of imagining seems close to the thinking of Walter Scott. These early poetic romances already manifest the doubleness that will later shape Scott’s work as a novelist. The assumed naivety of the minstrel invites a surrender to romance, a sympathetic identification by which readers can escape into a lovingly recreated past. The early reviews suggests that most readers were happy to accept that invitation. But the minstrel’s own self-consciousness, his reservations and uncertainties, and his historical awareness open a quite different perspective on his narratives. They suggest that to live in a modern nation – whether Scotland or Britain – is to live in a condition of alienation and irony. It is to feel distant from the centres of power, and yet to feel threatened by their intrusive influence. It is to experience the city as a condition of repression, and art as means of release. It is to feel divided between a public world whose unifying structures seem difficult to grasp, and a private world whose compensating simplicities and fantasies must be experienced as regressions. In this way Scott identifies the condition of the modern subject, the product of the historical process upon which these early poetic romances reflect. The vision of history that emerges in his historical novels is shaped fundamentally by his awareness of this condition, as we shall see.

Social Memory and Waverley The end of the twentieth century was seen by many as a time of ‘memory crisis’, a crisis generated by rapid political and socio-economic transformations, by the development of new information technologies, and by a materialistic ethos that threatened to keep consumers spellbound in a continuous present.37 The crisis was held to entail anxiety about the loss of traditional forms of memory, a sense of the need to re-establish

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contact with the past, and uncertainty about the adequacy of the available memorials and museum culture. Among the most tangible evidence of this crisis was the surge of interest in ‘cultural memory’ – in what Jan Assmann defines as ‘the institutionalised heritage of a society’ – as writers turned to consider the consequences of ‘cultural amnesia’ and ‘memory distortion’, or to compare current modes of remembering with those of earlier societies.38 The renewed interest in the relationship between history and memory has its counterpart in Scott’s work, as scholars have begun to notice.39 He was writing in a period that has also been seen as an era of memory crisis, when long-established assumptions about the relationship between past and present were violently unsettled.40 In Britain the spectacle of French iconoclasm provoked a revaluation of tradition across a broad range of cultural activities, strengthening public interest in the preservation of antiquities as national heritage.41 The rising in Ireland, and the consequent debate about the Act of Union, gave a new significance to the works of Irish antiquarians, which began to reach a wider audience indirectly through the Irish national tales of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Charles Maturin. The struggles for national independence across continental Europe, and the fears of invasion at home, also helped to generate new perceptions of the past, in part because they gave rise to a search for precedents. In the search for precedents there was, of course, a multitude of historical and legendary sources to choose from: examples of patriotic virtue, of heroic resistance to foreign oppression, or of inspiring military leadership could be found in classical and other epics, the Bible, heroic drama, historical narratives, history paintings, and operatic works, as well as in popular songs, ballads, and other entertainments. Examples were easily transferred between contexts: British readers could respond to the feats of a Peruvian chief or a Spartan general, just as French revolutionaries could adopt patriotic songs from Sedaine’s play about Richard the Lionheart.42 Paradoxically, this transferability helped to give currency to those examples of Scottish and Welsh resistance to English power that eighteenth-century antiquarians had worked to revive, a process that needs to be taken into account when assessing their cultural significance. Katie Trumpener finds a ‘displacement of political anger into cultural anger’ in these scholarly accounts of bardic resistance to English hegemony.43 But as Erik Simpson notes, it was not uncommon for writers celebrating the British Union to adopt and adapt stories of historical resistance to England.44 I would add that the wider significance of these works’ patriotic gestures was determined not by the antiquarians who presented them, but by the place they assumed in modern memory.

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Burns’s patriotic song ‘Scots Wha Hae with Wallace Bled’ might be taken as a paradigmatic example of the transferability of patriotic sentiments. The song evokes a specific history of Scottish resistance to English oppression. But its model of patriotism could easily be applied to other contexts. It has sometimes been read as a radical poem (it was composed at the time of the trial of Thomas Muir, a leader of the radical ‘Friends of the People’ in Scotland).45 But it first appeared anonymously, as an imitation of the style of the Scottish bards, in the Morning Chronicle (8 May 1794), immediately above an outline of the day’s royal engagements, in an issue that made no mention of Muir, but featured conspicuous reports of two Scottish meetings in support of the war effort against France (one at Forfar to raise troops of light cavalry for the internal defence of the country, one at Aberdeen in support of raising the Aberdeenshire regiment). Muir’s trial had been mentioned in the Chronicle two days earlier, while on 5 May the Chronicle had printed the proclamation of Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish patriot, which urged the Poles: ‘fly to the standard of your country!’ The ongoing trial of Warren Hastings was featured prominently in these editions. For the Morning Chronicle reader Burns’s patriotic examples could accrue alternative contexts and resonances, and seem relevant to both loyalist and radical perspectives. Those readers who related Burns’s patriotic poem to the military struggle of Britain against France would have to make an analogy between the modern aggression of France and the historical aggression of England. This was an analogy that surfaced repeatedly in the period. A more bizarre example appears in James Boaden’s play The Cambro-Britons, which first appeared in the summer of 1798, in the wake of the French invasion of Switzerland, when reports of the events in Ireland were at their height, and invasion fears rife in Britain. In this play the patriotic resistance of the ancient Welsh to Anglo-Norman Edward I offers analogies to the plight of the contemporary Swiss (the play begins with a goatherd cottage in the mountains), and to the present-day Britons in their resistance to the French. In the next decade the Spanish and Portuguese resistance to Napoleon gave rise to comparable analogies with British history. William Wordsworth, for example, in his pro-war pamphlet The Convention of Cintra (1809), begins with an account of a unified Britain, but then compares the contemporary struggles of the Spanish with the ancient struggles of the Welsh and Scottish against England. His account of the enduring ‘mutual repulsiveness’ of the Spanish and French leads him to recognise the national passions that can flare in the hearts of Welsh and Scots after ‘hundreds of years’. He is eventually forced to concede that the blessings of the Union have ‘not

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been purchased without the relinquishment of something most salutary to the moral nature of Man’.46 Spain, like Switzerland before it, has become a mirror in which earlier tragedies suffered by Scotland and Wales are in danger of being re-enacted. Scott makes a comparable suggestion in Don Roderick, his patriotic poem about the Iberian campaign, and even suggests a kind of ethnic solidarity between the Irish, Scots, and the Spanish peasantry, for which their supposed ‘Celtic’ origin would provide a notional basis.47 There is evidence that Scott was planning to publish a version of Waverley in 1810, when public interest in Spain was at its height: a story of a rising of highland ‘Celts’ in defence of a deposed dynasty would have had a particular topicality at that time.48 If the contemporary struggles in Europe and Ireland evoked memories of what had been lost in earlier ages on the road to modern Britain, to entertain such memories did not necessarily imply any political resistance to the status quo and, as we have seen, could easily be reconciled with loyalism. The capacity of modern culture to absorb and neutralise rebellious feeling becomes a significant issue in Scott’s work. It is this which allows Scott to appropriate and transform radical themes and, as Hazlitt noted, to prop ‘the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion’.49 Part of the sensational effect of Waverley arose from Scott’s decision to focus not on ancient struggles (as Jane Porter did in her historical novel about William Wallace, The Scottish Chiefs, 1810), but on a relatively recent past, so making the comparison with current events more tangible. As a response to the contemporary turmoils of Europe, the implicit message of Waverley is relatively simple: Britain, more advanced in the cultivation of liberty than the rest of Europe, has already (more than ‘sixty years since’) passed through this violent phase of history. The European conflicts between absolutist anciens régimes and peoples no longer bound by feudal loyalties are foreshadowed in the ’45 rebellion, which in Scott’s representation features a ‘Frenchified highland chief’ on one side, and a ‘levy en masse’ of truculent Presbyterian lowlanders on the other. A narrative coded in such terms – and that associated the Jacobite rebellion with the defiant patriotism of the Gaelic bard – could evoke the struggle between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces within France and ancient and modern struggles for national independence. The opposition of interests exposed in the British conflict has, we are assured, finally been brought to a triumphant resolution not by political revolution or war, but by ‘the gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce’, which have produced a revolution in manners. It is this claim – that fundamental conflicts of interest and principle can be resolved by a process of

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modernisation – which endows the memorialising of the past with its special significance in the novel. For as Scott acknowledges, modernising entails the erosion of cultural difference and distinctive identities, the displacement of one kind of culture by another. It therefore entails much forgetting, as well as much reshaping of memory. It alienates the present from the past (producing a ‘class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time’).50 But if the past is turned into another country, Scott is keenly aware that it must also be recreated as a homeland, and that this requires a negotiation with the conditions of modern memory. Modern memory, history, identity Scott’s first historical novel is a highly self-conscious performance. As Paul Hamilton notes, Waverley, more than most romantic novels, ‘places itself within the contemporary scene of writing, reviewing its own possibilities quite openly’.51 The narrator reflects upon the generic status, the pace and the plausibility of his narrative, invokes a variety of readers, and draws attention at various points to his own strategic manoeuvres. He situates himself and his readers in a modern print culture in which the mechanic at his sixpenny club can receive ‘yesterday’s news from the capital’, through ‘twenty contradictory channels’ (p. 39). And he keeps in mind the diversity of modern culture through references to all kinds of specialised forms of knowledge with which the reader is supposed to be familiar. The references include: the talk of painters, the sagacity of a modern newspaper editor, modern educational practice, tailors’ patterns, English antiquarianism, Indian religious practices, the customs of hackney coachmen, private members’ parliamentary bills, picturesque aesthetics, the opinion of Negroes, the conceptions of a pagan, the military camps of the Scythians, what a Frenchman might have said, physiognomy, Castruccio Castracani, gentlemen’s homes, the London theatre (Mrs Henry Siddons), John Erskine and William Robertson, North American Indians, Italian dexterity, the customs of Esquimoux Indians, a mechanic’s workshop, Caranza or Vincent Saviola, Colonel Munro his expedition, books on Scottish law and Sir George Mackenyie, along with a host of other allusions to English, classical, oriental, and continental literature, British and European history, and the fine arts. This apparently indefinite series represents the fragmentary omnivorousness of modern consciousness, and constitutes the outer circle of the novel’s map of memory. But if the narrative celebrates the multiplicity of modern culture, in other respects it works to counteract the universalising force of that culture by rooting

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its account of the past in locations conceived as geographically, historically, and culturally specific.52 The tension between the representation of the past as distinct historical origin and as remembered point of reference – between history and memory – runs through the narrative in a number of ways. The reader must depend on the recollections of the characters for a great deal of information about the past: through anecdotal histories, personal memories, events associated with landmarks, the novel creates a sense of the past as part of the lived experience of daily life. But at times the narrator adopts a historical perspective that is conspicuously set apart from personal memory. A key example appears when the history of the McIvor clan is introduced in chapter 19. Here the narrator assumes a detached, analytical mode in the manner of enlightened historians: Had Fergus Mac-Ivor lived sixty years sooner than he did, he would, in all probability, have wanted the polished manner and knowledge of the world which he now possessed; and had he lived sixty years later, his ambition and love of rule would have lacked the fuel which his situation now afforded. He was indeed, within his little circle, as perfect a politician as Castruccio Castracani himself. He applied himself with great earnestness to appease all the feuds and dissensions which frequently arose among other clans in his neighbourhood, so that he became a frequent umpire in their quarrels. His own patriarchal power he strengthened at every expense which his fortune would permit, and indeed stretched his means to the uttermost to maintain the rude and plentiful hospitality, which was the most valued attribute of a chieftain. For the same reason, he crowded his estate with a tenantry, hardy indeed, and fit for the purposes of war, but greatly outnumbering what the soil was calculated to maintain. These consisted chiefly of his own clan, not one of whom he suffered to quit his lands if he could possibly prevent it. But he maintained besides, adventurers from the mother sept, who deserted a less warlike, though more wealthy chief, to do homage to Fergus Mac-Ivor. Other individuals, too, who had not even that apology, were nevertheless received into his allegiance, which indeed was refused to none who were, like Poins, proper men of their hands, and willing to assume the name of MacIvor. (pp. 91–2)

Here the ‘little circle’ of clan life is viewed from an external position that transcends local interests. No one within that circle could experience his or her own historical situation with such analytical hindsight. This demythologising analysis modifies or ruthlessly explodes conventional assumptions about highland loyalty, simplicity, and ‘straightforwardness’, which Scott’s narrative will carefully re-inscribe elsewhere.53 This unsentimental discourse is explicitly in the service of a progressive view of history, one that regards self-interest as a mainspring of human action, and that emphasises the specificity, and hence the pastness, of the

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past (circumstances that would not have prevailed either ‘sixty years sooner’ or ‘sixty years later’). There is little appeal for imaginative identification with this way of life or regret at its loss: it is easy to conclude from this history that the end of the traditional clan system is necessary in the interests of stable government and social improvement. The irretrievable pastness of the past apparently dissolves any moral claims it might otherwise have upon the present. This kind of ‘enlightened’, moderate history is implicitly contrasted with the heroic, oral history attributed to McIvor’s bard, a mode of memory adapted to the immediate interests of those within the little circle, one that seems destined to die with the triumph of Hanoverian culture. But within the larger scheme of the novel the narrator’s historical discourse finds a more threatening contrast in the theological conception of history attributed to the Covenanter. The historical discourse of the Covenanting tradition, inherited from the seventeenth century, represents the Scottish nation as bound by a Covenant to fulfil God’s law or suffer His wrath, rather than as subject to social transformation through the operations of commerce. This discourse is grounded partly in formal acts of the state and is underpinned by, among other things, a body of historic official documents (the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 committed both England and Scotland to establishing Presbyterianism as their national form of worship). It is precisely its once-official status that licenses the political claims of those who will not accept the change of the times. Far from separating the past from the present, the Covenanter’s understanding of history insists on their continuity, on the immediate currency of past conditions and agreements. History becomes the foundation rather than the exploder of mythic memory. This historical discourse poses a special challenge to Scott, since it has traditionally offered what his own historical fictions strive to produce – a version of national history that will live in the memory. In some of this later novels Scott will attempt to capture and transform this tradition. In Waverley its problematic nature is registered briefly but revealingly through the figure of the Cameronian, Gifted Gilfillan. The entrance of this figure induces an epistemological crisis: the narrator temporarily loses the detachment upon which his historical perspective usually depends. He makes no attempt to give the history of the Cameronians himself (this is given by the enlightened Presbyterian clergyman, Mr Morton, who speaks mildly of the ‘prejudices’ of the sect, p. 169). Instead, he enacts excited bafflement in the face of an enigma. For the Covenanter Gilfillan displays self-importance and a truculent disdain for the claims of rank, but apparently has little regard to material

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self-interest, and therefore resists the kind of historicising explanation that ties the self-interested Fergus McIvor to a particular moment (neither ‘sixty years sooner’ nor ‘sixty years later’). Indeed, the religious enthusiast Gilfillan apparently eludes any kind of interpretative certainty (‘one might have feared, admired, laughed at him’). The narrator, momentarily seduced by ‘imagination’, pictures Gilfillan in alternative iconic forms – martyr, soldier, banished wanderer, inquisitor – and links his antique weapons with landmarks of Covenanting history (the rout of Pentland and the battle of Bothwell Brigg). He also associates Gilfillan’s drummer with the British Convention, as if the radical agitation of the 1790s can be aligned with the same tradition of fanatical resistance to established authority (pp. 171–2).54 These narrative gestures offer an ironical illustration of the process of memory, which combines disparate events and images into a complex, resonant mythic tradition. Gilfillan’s obsessive recourse to Covenanting history illustrates the non-porous nature of this kind of tradition, which contains its own interpretative contexts (scriptural, liturgical, and legal), and refuses alternative sources and perspectives. This refusal is a source of its durability, a durability that defies the progress of enlightenment. The Covenanter is thus used to emphasise the dangerous repeatability of the past, just as McIvor is used to emphasise its unrepeatable pastness. From history to heritage The difference between the demythologising perspective of the enlightened historian and the consolidated, iconic memory of the enclosed national tradition is a difference the historical novel must negotiate. The enlightener’s analytical discourse ostensibly stands in opposition to the mythologising work of memory, ready to unmask its idealising and simplifying processes, to diminish its icons by placing them within the compromising complexities of material interests. But Scott’s understanding of history is shaped not only by the demythologising aims of enlightenment, but also by enlightenment psychology, and in particular by associationist theories of mind and art which, as Cairns Craig points out, combine ‘a profound sense of contingency, of the random and accidental’ with an understanding that ‘associations generated from identical sources may produce a common set of memories’ and so support a collective memory.55 From a psychological perspective, the idea that history can free the present of its falsifying memories is an illusion: memory remains ever ready to forget the complex lessons of history, to abstract the icon from its defining context, to construct atemporal analogies and dwell upon anachronistic tableaux (even the historical account of the

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McIvor clan is supported by atemporal appeals to memory, by allusions comparing highland chiefs to Aeneas, Castraccio Castracani, and Poins, pp. 91, 92). As Scott recognises, in the post-enlightenment world, imaginative control of the past does not depend on the triumph of analytical history over mythic memory, but on recognising and reconciling their conflicting processes. Tradition must be preserved and made to live in the imagination; but at the same time, it must be accessed through the relativising multiplicity of modern memory, and experienced as dead or dying. It must be divorced from the realm of action, and resurrected in a separate world of culture, as the object of private appreciation, of taste rather than of political and religious idealism. This idea of a privatised, depoliticised space for culture, adumbrated in the Marmion epistles (in the description of the feminine kingdom of Mertoun House), is central to Scott’s understanding of cultural memory, as we shall see. It entails an understanding of aesthetic taste like that of David Hume, who associates taste with empathy and makes it an enemy of prejudice, while also insisting that it involves feelings which ‘draw the mind off from the hurry of business and interest’ and dispose us towards tranquillity, agreeable melancholy, love, and friendship.56 This separation of readerly feelings from the realm of social action effectively licenses the modern reader to appreciate and enter into feelings that have no place in, and might actually conflict with, the duties of modern life, and explains how the enlightened observer might appreciate the diversity of modern print culture, including the productions of less civilised minds. As an antiquarian, Scott was alert to the historical significance of aesthetic approaches to supposedly ‘primitive’, ‘vulgar’, or ‘rude’ materials. As Rosemary Sweet points out, eighteenth-century antiquarians increasingly invoked the pleasures of taste in order to recommend antiquities to a wider audience. The convergence between antiquarianism and literature – as in the revival of interest in ballads, minstrelsy, and bardic literature – reinforced this tendency, helping to make antiquarian scholarship more amenable to female readers and writers.57 Indeed, women came to play a significant role in the mediation of knowledge of the past, as editors, biographers, and translators.58 This historical development has a key place in Waverley. In Waverley, Scott’s insistent disconnection of the realm of culture from politics and economic improvement subsumes the narrative’s ostensible concern with the hero’s romantic disposition. It also transforms some of the characteristic concerns Scott takes over from the national tale. Scott dilutes the kind of progressive economics found in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish tales, and historicises the kind of romantic mythologising found in Sydney Owenson’s construction of Irish

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national origins. He carefully weakens and generalises the material grounds of political discontent. Whereas Owenson, in The Wild Irish Girl, focuses on the situation of an Irish family who lost their estate at the time of Cromwell, Waverley focuses on Jacobites who are still in possession of their own estates, and begins with the case of an English Jacobite family. The role of memory in the Jacobites’ relationship with their own estates assumes a central importance. The novel introduces the interest in family history in relation to social and political isolation within England’s elite classes.59 At WaverleyHonour, the remembered heroism of past generations does not inspire public action in the present; Sir Everard Waverley will take no part in the imminent Jacobite rebellion. Instead, memory supports a fully privatised condition: since the death of Queen Anne, Sir Everard had resigned his seat in Parliament and ‘had gradually withdrawn himself from society’ (p. 15). He and Aunt Rachel, living celibate lives, dwell on a family history in which honourable defeat and loss of the betrothed feature prominently. But while these characters are treated with gentle irony, and family tradition is associated with psychological enclosure, the basis of the narrator’s judgement at this point is unclear. The Waverley-Honour way of relating to the past – through place and property – is a form of historical stewardship that serves to ‘perpetuate a great deal of what is rare and valuable in ancient manners, and to record many curious and minute facts which could have been preserved and conveyed through no other medium’ (p. 16). If Sir Everard’s withdrawal is at once an abnegation of public responsibility and a refusal of sociability, the moral tradition of disinterested resignation sustained by his mode of remembering is one that the novel is inclined to revalue as it unfolds. With hindsight, it appears that the uncertainty in this English section prepares for the novel’s transition to Scotland. For what might be criticised in England – the country gentleman’s failure to take his seat in Parliament – could not have quite the same significance in Scotland, which had lost its own Parliament. Indeed, Sir Everard’s Scottish counterpart, the Jacobite landowner Bradwardine, and the English hero Edward Waverley will eventually forfeit through rebellion all possibility of assuming a public role. The plot demands reconciliation through sociability; the privatised memory that is a symptom of malaise in Waverley-Honour must therefore provide a basis of reconciliation at Tully-Veolan. This outcome is prefigured in the early descriptions of Bradwardine. Like Sir Everard, the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine has lived in retirement since ‘his demelée with the law of high treason in 1715’, and his sense

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of self is partly sustained by reflecting upon the memory of his heroic ancestors (whose portraits adorn his walls). But unlike Sir Everard, he still maintains an active sense of social responsibility that will lead him to join the new rebellion. His authority is now ‘exercised only within the bounds of his half-cultivated estate’ (p. 41), but he retains hereditary jurisdiction over his tenants, and guards their interests in the wider community. This is illustrated by the account of his concern to see fair play between Davie Gellatly’s mother (born on his estate) and a superstitious Presbyterian clergy who indict her as a witch. In 1745 such cases would have been at best a very distant memory.60 But the witchcraft trial serves to illustrate the relationship between Bradwardine’s sense of social responsibility and his attitude to tradition. As responsible landowner he actively opposes the public influence of superstition, and must therefore dissociate himself from the ‘figments’ of superstition which ‘deform’ the early history of his own ancestors – even though he is inspired by the tales of their chivalry, which he tells ‘with great enthusiasm’ (pp. 61, 59). His apparently enlightened view is actually a sign that Bradwardine has not yet dissociated tradition from public responsibility. The appropriate dissociation is immediately illustrated through his daughter, Rose, who shares neither his public responsibilities nor his ‘strange defiance of the marvellous’. For her, local superstition as represented by ‘some village poet’ has become a form of domestic entertainment. The narrator represents the ‘fragment’ of the song she performs, ‘St Swithin’s Chair’, as a written copy probably ‘corrected’ by Waverley, ‘to suit the taste of those who may not relish pure antiquity’ (pp. 60, 61). As dying tradition has entered the realm of taste, its irrational world-view can become a matter of private appreciation rather than public concern; the capacity for ‘enchantment’, rejected as erroneous belief, can be accepted as aesthetic effect. In this privatised realm it can therefore assume the function of heritage. The pattern is repeated in a more elaborate form in the sequence of chapters 20–22, in which a ‘profusion of Celtic verses’, first chanted to feasting clansmen by the family bhairdh, is then supposedly reproduced by Flora in an English translation, performed to ‘a lofty and uncommon Highland air’, and with a harp, in a setting described in terms which combine the picturesque and sublime features of romantic landscape. The bard’s song (as far as we can tell from its ‘translated’ version) is a call to arms which seeks revenge for past defeats. His impassioned performance inspires fierce, warlike emotions, even a kind of ‘ecstacy’ among its Gaelic audience. But when the song is reproduced by Flora in an English translation, its function is quite different. In this second, feminised performance the song is carefully staged as a tableau. In its new

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context, abstracted from the particular social conditions that gave rise to it, the ‘summons of heroes’ is attributed to a Celtic muse that is neither communal nor warlike, but essentially quiescent and contemplative (‘secret [. . .] solitary [. . .] in the murmur of the mountain stream’ pp. 98, 106–7). It has often been noted that this episode reads the future back into the past, making the sentimental Celtic tradition an attribute of, and perhaps the creation of, romantic Jacobitism. The sequence illustrates, as Macpherson’s Ossian does, how the translation of Gaelic culture for appreciation by a polite, metropolitan audience works to confirm the occlusion of that culture. The highlanders are themselves irrelevant to this performance: paradoxically, the loss of their way of life is enacted by Flora, their most eloquent defender in the novel. We might read the episode as an example of the process by which a supposedly debased popular art is belatedly ‘restored’ to its appropriate, aristocratic form.61 But given the repeated emphasis on the ‘wildness’ of the scene, it seems specifically to anticipate the harp playing of the heroines of contemporary novels such as Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl, Mme De Staël’s Corrine (1807), or Charles Maturin’s The Milesian Chief (1811). As such it might imply criticism of Owenson’s kind of sentimental patriotism, as a dangerous romantic folly. But Scott’s novel does not really move in that direction. Flora’s poetic performances might easily have been represented as the catalyst that transforms the romance-reading Waverley into a committed Jacobite rebel. But Waverley conspicuously fails to be seduced in this way – Flora’s rendition of the bard’s song is quite ineffectual as a call to arms. Instead the episode inspires in him an introspective response: finding ‘no courage’ to utter his thought, he ‘almost longed for solitude, that he might decypher and examine at leisure the complication of emotions that now agitated his bosom’ (p. 107). The song has entered the realm of taste, where desire is aestheticised, where an appeal to action becomes an object of contemplation and leisurely analysis, or of comparison with French and Italian models. After hearing the song Waverley still reflects coolly on the reasonableness of the Hanoverian succession (ch. 28). When Fergus sends him Flora’s poem on Wogan, to win him to the political cause, once again Waverley fails to commit himself to the Jacobites, although he reads the verses ‘as an Epicure protracts’ (p. 148). In the plot the poem merely provides misleading ‘evidence’ of Waverley’s Jacobitism to Major Melville. Waverley is seduced into rebellion (by Charles Edward) only once the web of circumstances has already closed around him. The translation of the Gaelic war song into an object of taste lies at the symbolic heart of Waverley. While Flora criticises Waverley for his

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lack of public virtue, he will come to criticise her for the provincialism of her taste, a defect we can understand in terms of her unsociable condition in Glennaquoich, where ‘her resources in French, English and Italian literature, were likely to be few and interrupted’ and where Highland traditions ‘fill up the vacant time’ (p. 101). In this relationship the contrast between public and social virtue is quietly negotiated. It is not that Gaelic literature is unworthy of polite attention; merely that Flora’s partiality for it is unbalanced, and bound up directly with her political idealism. Flora will learn to see that her political ideals are ‘impossible’ (p. 323). But Scott’s novel will also show that the political impossibility of her highland interests qualifies them for transformation into national heritage within the polite cultural sphere. The sequence as a whole, in replacing military ardour with melancholy contemplation, presages both the defeat of Fergus’s political interests, and the consequent triumph of Flora’s cultural interests. The forces of social change are in this way partly transferred from the world of political intrigue and war, over which men formally preside, to the realm of sociability, art, and domesticity, in which women can take a leading role. In the same way the process of social transformation is effectively distanced from the world of commerce – so that the economic basis of social improvement is simultaneously acknowledged and disowned. In fact, Waverley does all it can to disconnect politeness, sociability, and taste from the commercial developments that are supposed to promote them. In Waverley the virtue made available by sociability is most clearly associated with the landowner, but less with the landowner’s capacity for independent political activity than with his independence from the narrowing specialisation promoted by commerce and professional discipline. Waverley’s snobbery and amateurism, far from disqualifying him from the role of landowning hero, signal his suitability. We learn that the people of Dundee ‘chiefly engaged in mercantile pursuits, were not such as Waverley chose to associate with’ (p. 31). He is allowed to distinguish himself as a Jacobite volunteer, but not as a professional Hanoverian soldier, while his friend Talbot, having established himself as in every point the ‘true English soldier’, resigns his commission as soon as he comes into property. Although Jacobitism is formally associated with economic backwardness, the novel’s representatives of commercial activity and the professions tend to be endowed with disparaging names: Clippurse, Hookem, Mrs Nosebag.62 The only character to show an interest in agricultural improvement is, paradoxically, a Jacobite named Killancureit. Lowland Presbyterian commerce is represented ironically. It is associated with grasping self-interest (Cruikshanks), with the decline of martial virtue

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conventionally linked to the division of labour (the blacksmith labouring to repair the chaotic heap of rusty weapons), and with a democratic individualism seen as a propensity for dispute and civil disorder. Scott’s handling of this issue registers his sense that, in his own age, the threat to social order would not come from the highlands (currently being depleted by the highland clearances) but from within the Presbyterian lowlands (scene of the British Convention). It is the predominantly loyal lowlanders at Cairnvreckan, not the army of rebel highlanders, who are seen in terms of the revolutionary ‘levy en masse’ (p. 153). The novel draws a line between the lower-class Presbyterians and the gentlemanly figures such as Morton and Melville who herald the transformation of Scottish manners by politeness. Indeed, the treatment of the highlanders is consistently subordinated to the purpose of maintaining this distinction. The highlanders must be seen as ‘civil’ in relation to the lower-class lowlanders, but as ‘rude’ in relation to the standards of polite British culture. They must be seen as embodiments of a military virtue lost among the lower ranks in a commercial society, but as ultimately doomed to fail when matched against the discipline and resources of the professional English soldier. The coming revolution in sociability is heralded most interestingly by Rose Bradwardine, who blossoms paradoxically in the secluded environment of the unimproved Jacobite estate, and whose implicit acceptance of domestic happiness divorced from strenuous ideas of public virtue is one of the characteristics by which she is contrasted with Flora. Rose’s appearance of domestic quietude provides a cover for her private, behind-the-scenes plotting with the outlaw Donald Bean Lean to secure Waverley’s safety. While this collocation of domestic female and outlaw is an aspect of the novel’s ‘romance’, it also reflects upon the historical condition of the domestic realm, as at once an idealised arena of feminine virtue supposedly divorced from the corruptions of the larger world, and a realm in practice sometimes quietly complicit with a criminal underworld (usually through the consumption of smuggled or untaxed goods). The future ironically envisaged for Waverley by Flora, and apparently endorsed by Rose, entails fashionable improvement of house and park, but not economic improvement (p. 250). The eventual reconstruction of Bradwardine’s ruined estate with English money attempts to restore the house to its original condition: there is a new greenhouse, and lighter ‘picturesque’ stables, but the main drift of this episode is recreation and conservation, not improvement (p. 334). The postscript reads less like a misplaced preface than an alternative conclusion, which acknowledges the economic transformation that is soon to take place, and so supplies

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grounds for assuming that life at Tully-Veolan will change fundamentally, in ways the narrator does not want to specify. The restoration of Tully-Veolan brings into focus several of the novel’s concerns. Scott adapts the lesson of eighteenth-century antiquarianism, in which privately owned buildings could be recognised as representing the cultural memory of local communities and as forming part of the nation’s history. In its restored form the estate no longer represents feudal authority, but the paternalistic values that were supposedly fostered by that authority, and that can be harmonised with politeness and sociability. The baron’s resumption of ownership is staged as the triumph of sociability over his previously unreformed manners. The presence of Lady Emily in this episode is symbolically important, since she reinforces the polite feminine presence previously represented exclusively by Rose; the baron no longer withdraws into a homosocial environment of disaffected provincials. In a sociable context, the portrait of Fergus and Waverley on their way to eventual defeat will inspire no further rebellion. The past has now entered the privatised realm of taste, in which it will inspire readerly feelings detached from the world of political commitment. In this respect the movement of the novel confirms Thomas Docherty’s claim that ‘the aesthetic’ becomes for Scots ‘a consolation’ for the loss of political autonomy.63 In Waverley, then, the historical separation of a privatised realm of culture from politics is formally enacted; its ideological significance is implicitly recognised. Within the realm of taste one could feel a connection with a vanished, unenlightened past through songs, objects, artworks, commemorative re-enactments. Moreover, the readerly feelings and subjective identifications engendered in that privatised realm, insulated from the public world, could safely exist in imaginative opposition to the established order of the present. To dismiss such feelings as mere nostalgia is, Scott suggests, to underestimate their social significance. It is through such private commemorations and acts of appreciation, rather than through acts of civic responsibility, that the modern individual was to be connected to national history, and experience membership of the imagined community of the nation. In the moments in which the novel shows the past being recreated – in Rose’s song, Flora’s rendition of bardic verses, in the reconstruction of the house, in the portrait of Fergus and Waverley, in the ritual commemoration of the Bear – the novel illustrates the relationship between change and continuity in cultural memory. It provides an equivalent to Edmund Burke’s vision of ‘conservation and correction’ in the gradual modernisation of political institutions.64 Indeed, it suggests an understanding comparable to that of modern historians such as Barry

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Schwartz and Seymour Lipset, who, in their studies of American cultural memory, describe an evolutionary process in which new social and symbolic structures are superimposed upon old ones.65 Scott shows that if superstition is rejected, aesthetic enchantment is erected on its foundations; if feudal authority is renounced, an ideal of paternalism is derived from it; if inflexible political commitment is rejected as fanaticism, the self-sacrifice and bravery it requires are embraced as moral ideas.66 In this way memory allows a sense of identification with a past that is simultaneously felt to have been outgrown. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, arguing against the common view that Scott helped to trap Scotland in a falsified version of its own past, suggests that in Waverley (as in Guy Mannering) Scott begins to establish ‘narration as a space within which Scotland stands always in production’.67 In my reading of Waverley, in which Scotland’s past emerges as both history and cultural memory, the latter is certainly always open to revision, as the evidence of the past is shaped to the needs of the present. I would add that this view of memory is embedded in a larger view of historical change, which exposes some of the displacements and suppressions that occur in the production of a usable past. The novel, that is, reveals the gap between the historical violence of the witchcraft trial and the poetic representation of local superstition, between the political and economic conditions of highland life and the poetical image preserved in the translated version of the bard’s song, between the ‘virtue’ and ‘sentiment’ represented in the portrait of Fergus and Waverley, and the self-interest, wavering, and betrayal entailed in the two men’s rebellion. It also hints at the gap between the happy ending it offers to the readers, and the ‘affair of Culloden’ (p. 338) which it strategically veils. The novel would certainly have been a quite different work, and Scott a quite different writer, if the horrific consequences of Culloden had been openly confronted. But the awareness of the gap between the reconciling work of memory and the demythologising work of history qualifies the official conclusions of the novel. The notion that culture can be safely separated from politics is, as the narrative reveals, an idea that serves a political purpose. The supposition that the challenging aspects of the past can be neutralised as they are preserved depends on a view of the past as unrepeatable, a view which is challenged by the narrator’s own response to the Covenanter. The memories of loss, outrage, and discontent kept alive in the realm of taste cast shadows upon the modern order in which the narrator positions himself, and help to define its repressive nature. The inability to speak directly about the experience of violence and dispossession is addressed in the narrative, although in a typically

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stylised way. The narrator’s awareness of this issue is focused through an unlikely figure of displacement and dispossession, Davie Gellatly. The ostensible function of Gellatly is to represent the obsolete Scottish tradition of the kept fool, and more generally a tradition of paternal responsibility towards the poor, weak, and economically useless, which stands in contrast not only to the cruel and uncaring Presbyterian community supposed to exist beyond the bounds of the Tully-Veolan estate, but also to the modern trend to institutionalise such cases. But Davie – virtually the first Scots voice to be heard in the novel – is a more complex figure than this function demands. He will not talk about the traumatic past that has left him in his displaced and dependent condition: he has a ‘prodigious memory’, but will not remember. His songs (which are ‘unlike those of this country’) are at once symptomatic and strategic, signs of a stricken mind and vehicles of ‘remonstrance, explanation, or satire’, a form of communication that withholds communication (pp. 54, 55,). Davie, divorced through circumstance and cunning from the world of economic usefulness and active political allegiance, and representing himself by means of re-contextualised cultural shards, gives an uncanny form to the novel’s preoccupation with memory and cultural preservation. After the desolation of Tully-Veolan, he appears with his tattered finery ‘oddly supplied by the remnant of tapestried hangings, window curtains, and shreds of pictures’ (p. 298). With these fragments shored against his ruin, he becomes an alternative emblem of restoration: his attempt to reconstruct a lost identity with displaced cultural relicts is firmly associated with desolating loss and madness. Gellatly exemplifies a feature of Scott’s work that we will encounter in some of Scott’s later works – the inclusion of figures whose eccentricity or grotesqueness is a means of managing the response to dispossession or displacement, figures through whom the deficiency of the triumphant narrative of the modern nation can be registered and contained, through whom the potential for anger can be displaced into pathos or comedy. They illustrate the narrative desire for reconciliation with a brutal past, the desire to remember and forget, out of which all national narratives must be constructed.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Smith, A. D., Nationalism and Modernism, pp. 21–2. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 24–5. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 150, 84. Ibid., pp. 137–8.

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5. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Books Two and Three, II, pp. 268, 260. 6. Harrington, Political Works, pp. 196–9. 7. Fletcher, Discourse Concerning Militia’s, pp. 6, 5. 8. See Pascal, German Sturm und Drang, pp. 42–5; Knudsen, Justus Möser, pp. 25–30. 9. Scott, Goetz of Berlichingen, p. v. 10. Scott, ‘Essay on chivalry’, Miscellaneous Prose Works I, p. 527. 11. Home, Henry, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, II, p. 318. 12. Hume, History of England, III, p. 81; Fletcher, Discourse Concerning Militia’s, pp. 7–10. 13. Harrington, Political Works, p. 198. 14. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 127. 15. For example, Watson, R., Apology for the Bible. 16. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 4. 17. See Crawford, Devolving English Literature. 18. Davis, Acts of Union, pp. 84, 155. 19. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, I, p. cxi. 20. Oliver, Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter, p. 51. 21. Scott, Introduction to cantos V and III, Marmion, p. 236. 22. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, p. 53. 23. Scott, Introduction to canto III, Marmion, p. 129. 24. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, II, p. 208. 25. Thomson, J., Liberty, The Castle of Indolence and Other Poems, pp. 43, 125. 26. See Pye, Alfred, p. 90, ll. 241–62. 27. Ross, ‘Scott’s chivalric pose’, p. 285. 28. Scott, Introduction to canto IV, Marmion, p. 173. 29. See Gamer, ‘Marketing a masculine romance’, pp. 523–49; Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority. For a detailed discussion of gender in Scott’s poetry, see the pioneering study by Nancy Moore Goslee, Scott the Rhymer. 30. Millar, Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, pp. 59–61. 31. See Richard Cronin’s discussion in The Politics of Romantic Poetry, pp. 92–109. 32. See Colley, Britons, pp. 294, 304. 33. Langan, ‘Understanding media in 1805’, p. 63. 34. Scott later described forgery as ‘the crime of a commercial, rather than a proud and warlike age’: ‘Introduction to Marmion’, Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott, p. 11. 35. Orr, ‘Repetition, reversal, and the gothic’. 36. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 60. 37. Terdiman, Present Past; Nora, Realms of Memory, I, Conflicts and Divisions, pp. 2, 9; Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory. For a summary of these issues see Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering, pp. 43–4. 38. Assmann, ‘Collective memory and cultural identity’, p. 130; Sturken, Tangled Memories, pp. 3–5; Bertman, Cultural Amnesia; Schacter, ‘Memory Distortion:’, pp. 1–43.

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39. See Rigney, ‘Portable monuments’, Rigney, Imperfect Histories; Jones,C., Literary Memory. 40. See Terdiman, Present Past, pp. 3–4. 41. Sweet, Antiquaries, p. 34. 42. E.g. Alexander Dow’s Egyptian Sethona (1774); William Dimond’s Gustavus Vasa (1811); Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799). For the French response to Richard I, see Kennedy, Cultural History of the French Revolution, p. 252. 43. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, pp. 10–11. 44. Simpson, ‘Minstrelsey goes to market’, pp. 707–8. 45. Burns explained in a letter that the struggles in the poem were brought to mind by ‘some other struggles, not quite so ancient’: Complete Letters of Robert Burns, p. 639. 46. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, Prose Works, I, pp. 318–28. 47. The Celtic past of Spain had recently been noted by Robert Semple, who reported detailed similarities between the dress and manners of the Iberians and the Scottish highlanders: Observations of a Journey. 48. Garside, ‘Popular fiction and the national tale’, pp. 30–53. 49. Hazlitt, ‘Spirit of the age’, pp. 11, 65. 50. Scott, Waverley, p. 340. 51. Hamilton, Metaromanticism, p. 115. 52. Macqueen, Rise of the Historical Novel, p. 7. 53. John Brewer aligns Scott’s work with a large body of conservative literature which depicted the Highlands as a place of ‘feudal fealty rather than commercial contract [. . .] sacrifice rather than stratagem, straightforwardness rather than subtlety’: Pleasures of Imagination, p. 658. 54. The British Convention of 1793 was a meeting in Edinburgh of British and Scottish societies for political reform (named after the 1792 French Convention). 55. Craig, ‘Coleridge, Hume, and the chains of the romantic imagination’, p. 33. 56. Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 239, 7. 57. Sweet, Antiquaries, pp. 73–7. 58. D. R. Woolf, ‘A feminine past?’, pp. 650–1. 59. Scott’s portraits of Jacobite landowners owe something to Charlotte Smith’s novels. See Cross, ‘An earlier Waverley’, pp. 87–8; Smith, L. Z., ‘Dialectic, Rhetoric and Anthropology in Scott’s Waverley’, pp. 43–52. 60. In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Scott cites the last legal case involving witchcraft in Scotland, in 1722, and notes sporadic survivals in remote regions (p. 272). 61. The playing of the harp by the women of aristocratic households in the highlands had been discussed by John Gunn, whose Essay on the Caledonian Harp Scott cites (Waverley, p. 115). Elizabeth Isabella Spence, in Sketches of the Present Manners, Customs and Scenery of Scotland, emphasised that ‘The harp was, in fact, the national music of the highlands’ (II, p. 200). 62. Tully-Veolan and its environs are characterised by ‘the stagnation of industry’ and a natural genius depressed by ‘poverty and indolence’, just as the highland estate of Glennaquoich is seen to lack fencing in its fields and to produce a ‘scanty crop of barley’ (pp. 33, 94).

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63. Docherty, Criticism and Modernity, pp. 127–39. 64. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 72. 65. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, p. 301; Lipset, First New Nation. 66. Frank Palmeri notes: ‘In Scott’s view, as in Bradwardine’s, civilizations are founded upon prior cultures which can never be utterly destroyed or discarded’ (‘The capacity of narrative’, p. 47). 67. McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands, p. 17.

Chapter 3

The Condition of England Ivanhoe and Kenilworth

We have now encountered in Scott’s work two different ways of establishing a sense of community in a modernising world: while Waverley delineates the creation of a depoliticised heritage mediated through private commemorations and acts of aesthetic appreciation, The Lady of the Lake touches on the question of how royalty can maintain its attractions in a world destabilised by the demise of feudal obligation, and shows the importance of public spectacle in cultivating popularity. This second issue assumed a particular importance when Scott first turned to English history in his fiction. Scott’s evident fascination with pageantry, uniforms, archaic sporting events, and public displays is not simply antiquarian nostalgia, but represents a heightened sensitivity to the political and communal function of spectacle. In eighteenth-century Britain the authority of the ruling classes was represented and enacted at many levels, from great orchestrated displays (such as military processions and reviews, birthday celebrations, court receptions) to official rituals (such as assizes and public executions), local acts of patronage (such as the distribution of prizes at sporting events), and the reflections upon such events in newspapers, sermons, prints and paintings, and in the works of poets and novelists such as Scott himself. In the revolutionary period the style of this ‘theatre of the great’ had been subject to radical challenges.1 The dismantling of aristocratic government in America and then in France had helped to refocus attention on the political significance of iconography and outward display. In attempting to establish a new framework of power, the French revolutionaries had turned to the realm of public spectacle, organising pageants and festivals designed to distinguish the revolutionary age from the hierarchies of the ancien régime in their use of space and symbolism, and in their inclusiveness.2 These events realised Rousseau’s ideal of the open-air festival, in which individuals would be momentarily released from their normal places in the

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economic order, and in which distinctions between performers and spectators would be dissolved.3 As Gillian Russell and others have shown, in the wake of the revolution, the theatrical style of aristocratic government in Britain had been vigorously challenged by radicals, including Mary Wollstonecraft, who attacked the system of ‘gothic grandeur’ as a fraud on the public which helped to marginalise and subordinate women, and Thomas Paine, who in the Rights of Man denounced the workings of the present administration as something conducted ‘behind a curtain’, and called for representative government to be staged upon the ‘open theatre of the world’.4 When the reform movement revived in the post-war period there were renewed attacks on ‘State Theatricals’, and warnings that the preservation of the crown depended upon ‘the confidence of the people’ and not upon ‘horse guards with glittering helmets’.5 In this period the growing independence and class consciousness of the lower orders appeared in the proliferation of working men’s clubs, the efficient organisation of trade union activity, and the growing agitation in urban areas (which led to the suspension of habeas corpus from February 1817 to January 1818, and to the stationing of thousands of troops in industrial towns).6 E. P. Thompson notes that in the organisation of union activity ‘Secrecy was giving way year by year to massive and disciplined open demonstrations’.7 A new form of public spectacle was appearing, the spectacle of working-class protest, with its own rituals, banners, and insignia, representing a dramatic declaration of independence from the traditional patterns of subordination and deference.8 It was during a period of accelerating unrest that Scott first turned to English history in his novels. Much of Ivanhoe was composed in the months leading up to the Peterloo crisis, while Kenilworth was composed in the summer and autumn of 1820, following the period of alarm between Peterloo (August 1819) and the execution of the Cato Street conspirators in March 1820. In his letters Scott suggests that the British post-war crisis was worse in England than in Scotland because Scottish landowners (including him) still preserved paternal links with the poor, links that provided opportunities for shared cultural experiences, while in England dependence on the ‘accursed poor-rates’ was helping to promote discontents and ‘reforming mania’ among the English lower classes.9 In his reactionary political work The Visionary, completed just before he began work on Ivanhoe, Scott suggests the impossibility of reestablishing cordial paternal relations with the poor once these have been broken.10 The need to imagine England as an inclusive national community, united across and within social orders by shared goals and values, may have seemed particularly acute at this time. Scott responded

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to this need by attempting to reconcile traditional, aristocratic styles of public display with newer, egalitarian styles of imagining national community.

Ivanhoe The medieval setting of Ivanhoe was a pretext for an increased preoccupation with surfaces, pageantry, and formal display. Early reviewers noted the difference. The Eclectic Review, for example, compared the novel to ‘a pageant or a masquerade’, and suggested that only the costumes bore any ‘affinity with reality’.11 The analogy with the masquerade seems particularly appropriate to the novel’s festive blending of history and legend, since masquerades frequently included both historical figures and popular characters from English folk tradition. Like the masquerade, the novel plays with disguise, leaving individual identities tantalisingly obscure. This has always disappointed critics looking for psychological ‘realism’, but it is hardly the result of artistic negligence. Not only does the novel look back to an era that pre-dates the emergence of the bourgeois subject, it also consistently problematises issues of identity that may be naturalised by the conventions of more realistic kinds of fiction. In a move that has become familiar in the age of postmodern fiction, it replaces the drama of inner development with a drama of surfaces, displacing the unified subject to engage with the politics of style and spectacle. Denaturalising identity This move can be understood in relation to the political aims of the novel, as a transposition of the contemporary concern with political equality and national community as far as possible to the realm of spectacle. This transposition allows Scott to negotiate with and defuse potentially divisive issues. Scott had little sympathy with radical demands for reform, but his political instinct usually led him to avoid inflaming protest through direct opposition. Scott had reason to be critical of the conservative example set by Edmund Burke’s famous defence of the British constitution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke, attempting to defend the anciens régimes of Europe from the kind of revolution that had engulfed France, represented Britain itself as a kind of ancien régime – a view not shared by most observers in Britain.12 Moreover, suppressing his own Irish background, Burke constructed an English tradition that worked implicitly to exclude or

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submerge other cultural identities and traditions within Britain. Burke identified the British nation emphatically with ‘the people of England’ (a phrase he used a dozen times). By insisting that the English ‘frame of polity’ was ‘the image of a relation in blood’ he appeared not only to naturalise the constitution but also to endow the nation itself with a kind of biological identity, an identity now threatened by alien influences. On the one hand he was drawn into an uneasy acknowledgement of ‘the dangers and all the inconveniences’ of the Hanoverian line being ‘foreign’. On the other hand he emphasised the foreignness of radicalism, contemptuously equating radical claims with ‘gypsey predictions’, and playing on the association of the radical Richard Price with ‘Old Jewry’.13 When he identified the money-jobbing Jew as a presence that threatened the integrity of the modern nation, he was making the kind of judgement that had been made against Scots. There are anti-Semitic elements in Scott’s writing, and Ivanhoe itself adopts a Shakespearean strategy of assigning stereotypically negative characteristics to the Jewish father of an idealised daughter; but Scott was well aware of the popular association between Jews and Scots (the supposed ‘resemblance’ is mentioned in The Fortunes of Nigel).14 Both had become the focus of English suspicion or hostility, and were sometimes feared as grasping, intriguing infiltrators, and envied for their successful contributions to British commerce and statehood. In Reflections Burke referred scornfully to Scottish paper currency, and spoke indifferently of the fact that Cornwall elected as many MPs as Scotland. But it was not only minorities that seemed alien to Burke’s sense of English tradition. He claimed that, if revolutionary trends prevailed, ‘learning’, ‘along with its natural protectors’, would be ‘cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’.15 His contemptuous phrase ‘the swinish multitude’ was seized upon by radicals, and adopted as a badge of honour (as in Spence’s journal Pigs Meat). By characterising the landed classes as chivalrous guardians of high culture, rather than of the (apparently despised) lower orders, Burke had placed a gulf between rich and poor, and put a weapon in the hands of his opponents. The religious dimension of his argument had other consequences. While his defence of ‘old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution’ was unlikely to conciliate progressive thinkers, his insistence that Christianity was under threat from deistical ‘infidelity’ and religious extremists helped to stimulate a movement for Christian reform, led by evangelicals and Methodists, that gave cause for concern to both liberals and conservatives. In their drive for moral reform, the evangelicals were highly critical of the aristocracy (they were seen by the conservative Anti-Jacobin as dangerous radicals, even as successors to the

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Jacobins).16 The movement was often hostile to the imaginative arts, including works by Scott himself, and was eager to suppress lower-class leisure activities.17 Its quest for religious homogeneity fostered an attitude of superiority to other faiths, both in settlements overseas and at home (the evangelicals campaigned to convert British Jews).18 As Gerald Newman notes, it promoted a radical process in the guise of a conservative one, in defence of what Hannah More termed ‘the strong and discriminating features of the English heart and mind’.19 Scott may well have admired some of the movement’s aims, but his enlightenment education probably made him suspicious of its reforming zeal, selfrighteousness, and tendency to intolerance. Burke’s Reflections proved to be profoundly divisive, helping to polarise political opinion by providing a focus for both conservative thinking and radical counter-arguments. In the post-war years, as the demand for reform resurfaced with renewed vigour in Britain, Burke remained as influential and as controversial as ever – still hailed by conservatives, derided by radicals, still helping to define the lines of division.20 For someone such as Scott, who sought (according to Hazlitt) to ‘conciliate all the suffrages’, Burke provided an example of how not to proceed.21 Ivanhoe is, among other things, an answer to Burke. To see it in these terms helps to explain why Scott the Tory should take up the radical theme of the Norman Yoke (the view that the Normans had imposed on the Saxons a set of alien institutions – aristocratic, clerical, and legal – to consolidate their own supremacy).22 This theme allows English tradition to be prised apart into the opposed components of Norman and Saxon, each of which is shown to be in itself a hybrid tradition. The Saxons are notionally Christian, but retain traces of their pagan heritage and have already been influenced by Norman arts. The Normans have absorbed aspects of the oriental culture encountered in the crusades. The Saxons are associated with Burke’s symbol of English constitutional integrity, the oak tree. But they are also – as the many disdainful Norman references to them as ‘porkers’ remind us – in the position of Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ in relation to an aristocracy that claims to fashion itself by the codes of chivalry. Aristocracy and ecclesiastical power, for Burke the guarantors of learning and chivalry, are here united in the Templars, and become the very ground of both the infidel conspiracy and fanatical reform that Burke saw as threats to English liberty. Jewish finance, Jewish paper security, becomes the means of funding not only the corrupt rule of Prince John, but also the most sympathetic exemplar of chivalry, Ivanhoe himself. In this way, elements that Burke sees as contemporary threats to English tradition are seen to have contributed to that tradition. The urge to restore and protect a

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tradition threatened by alien influences appears most powerfully in the sinister figure of the Grand Master, whose ‘fanaticism’ in some respects resembles the reforming drive of contemporary evangelicals who speak out, as he does, against infidel agitation, unprincipled licentiousness, aristocratic display, luxury, and doctrinal laxity, and who also strive for the conversion of the Jews. His demand for consistency and unity among his followers produces an environment of perfect opacity, a surface conformity that conceals the corruption it condemns, and an inability to read either hypocrisy or innocence. Ivanhoe represents an understanding of identity that is fundamentally unlike Burke’s understanding. Burke places his reader securely in relation to deep-rooted traditions, to institutions unfolding organically through time, to an accumulated inheritance of experience authenticated by long duration, which is always potentially relevant and usable. Scott deals with a condition produced by disruptive change, a condition typical of an age of modernisation and empire: of migration, colonial displacement, and exile. The pattern of Waverley is reversed: whereas Edward Waverley has his Hanoverian identity confirmed at the end of the novel, Ivanhoe will retain his newly adopted Norman identity. The novel reflects on a condition that is sometimes seen as typical of modernity, in which one’s identity may become ‘out of date, or superfluous, or no longer socially validated’.23 This situation is comically foreshadowed in the Dedicatory Epistle to Ivanhoe where Scott plays with the assumption that the identity of the ‘Scottish magician’ is no longer valid when he turns to English history, which supposedly requires an English historian.24 In this translation from Scot to Englishman, he establishes a plural identity which is neither one thing nor the other. In the rest of the novel Scott creates a world in which individuals may similarly be caught between alternative identities, and fully present in none. Ivanhoe does not simply describe a rebellion against an established order. Rather, it describes a world divided between two orders, neither of which has complete dominance. The Saxons have lost political control of the kingdom, but the Normans have not yet established full hegemony. The fictional status of signs of authority and status within each community is thus emphasised, in that their legitimacy is always at issue. For the Saxon, cultural identity – which might otherwise be seen as a natural inheritance – becomes caught up in a crisis of choice. In this situation Ivanhoe, born a Saxon, reconstructs himself as a Norman. But there is no seamless merging of identities here – the difference between Norman Ivanhoe and a Saxon in disguise is one of commitment. The novel takes us into a colonial situation in which mimicry is a strategy of complicity and of resistance. In such a situation, the relationship between signs and

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power is pushed into the foreground (as the famous discussion about culinary terms in the first chapter illustrates), and language begins to appear as an arbitrary medium that constructs the self for the world. In terms of characterisation the focus shifts from subjectivity as some natural property of a core self, towards the interface between a shadowy will and the social codes and roles that represent or restrict that will. Thus although the diminished role of individual subjectivity can be seen as appropriate to the novel’s medieval setting, the displacement of the subject is managed more ruthlessly than such a historical perspective seems to require. The male heroes of the book – Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, King Richard – are oddly elusive figures. The hero, encased in the signs of his Norman knighthood, is revealed as Ivanhoe only after a wound has disabled him from acting as a knight; the huntsman Locksley identities himself as Robin Hood at the moment he ceases to be an outlaw; the Black Knight reveals himself as King Richard of England shortly before his departure from the narrative. Elsewhere, individuality is expressed partly through violations of the sartorial code – through luxurious excess (Prior Aymer, the Templar) or disguise – which take the place of inner life. But the disguising of the self is not simply a matter of costume. Rowena’s ‘haughtiness and habit of domination’ is said to be ‘a fictitious character, induced over that which was natural to her’ (p. 224). It is Rowena’s fictitious character that is operative throughout the novel, and that is unveiled to Rebecca’s appraising view at the end – her ‘natural’ self remains inaccessible. The novel conspicuously avoids representing the silent reflections of solitaries, while the deepest feelings tend to be expressed individually through song (those of Rebecca and Ulrica), or collectively through ritual (Athelstane’s funeral).25 This displacement of subjectivity means that, while the novel ostensibly illustrates the process of compromise as conquered Saxons learn to accept the ruling Normans, this compromise is never really brought into focus as a dilemma of conscience. Ivanhoe’s compromise has already taken place before the beginning of the novel, and he refers to it only briefly, in terms of his personal relations with his father and Richard. On the rare occasions on which he speaks at length it is in defence of chivalry rather than of his Saxon heritage. Articulate resistance to Norman rule is focused most consistently through Cedric, whose own moment of compromise is suddenly forced by the insensible Athelstane’s abrupt acquiescence. The process of compromise, minimised as an issue of individual conscience, is dramatised instead in group relations, in which the visible signs of authority are always at issue.

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Burke had famously lamented the demystification of kingship in France.26 But in Britain demystification appeared to have worked to the advantage of monarchy. Vincent Carretta has traced the process by which George III was transformed from target to positive exemplar during the latter part of his reign as satirists domesticated his image. Indeed, the king’s popularity had forced radicals ‘to accommodate their rhetoric to the Loyalist defense of monarchy’.27 Paradoxically, it seemed that the domestication of the monarch could help to preserve the pageantry of state. We can see a parallel here with Scott’s strategy in Ivanhoe. On the one hand the ‘state theatricals’ of military and ecclesiastical and legal display are assigned in the novel to the least sympathetic representatives of gothic grandeur, the usurping Prince John and the fanatical Grand Master of the Templars, while King Richard is associated with a more egalitarian style of leadership, and with the resistance of despotism rather than the pomp of power. On the other hand the novel celebrates and makes use of the seductive glamour of aristocratic display even while exposing its political function. At a relatively early point, the novel draws attention to the function of spectacle in establishing political power. At the beginning of chapter 7 the narrator supplies a historical account of the period – outlining the ‘various burdens imposed’ upon the people of England by ‘subaltern oppression’, civil commotion, disease, the wretched conditions of the lower classes (pp. 65–6). This account serves to define the novel’s strategic transformation and displacement of the historical record of such wretchedness. The dazzlingly spectacular tournament at Ashby is staged ‘amid these accumulated distresses’ as a distraction from them (p. 66). The aristocratic passage at arms, allied with the more popular sporting activities ‘for the more immediate amusement of the populace’, is commissioned by Prince John as an attempt to ‘lay the foundation of a popularity’ (p. 78). This aim is shared by the narrator, who diverts attention from accumulated distresses within the novel, and by extension, from those that trouble his own age, by offering spectacular entertainment drawn from both courtly and popular sources. Thus the testimony of scholarly histories such as David Hume’s, which dwell soberly on Richard’s irresponsibility and cruelty, will be pushed into the background by the legacy of popular tradition, in which Richard is celebrated as a folk hero and a symbol of patriotic pride.28 The forest of Sherwood, which in recent history had become home to General Ludd, the shadowy mythical leader of the Luddite movement, and to large camps of troops drafted in to stifle unrest, will be reclaimed for the iconic outlaw, Robin

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Hood, whose reconciliation with King Richard is licensed by ballad tradition.29 But the turn to the pageantry of romance and legend is also a means of engaging with, as well as evading, contemporary politics. There were modern equivalents of the passage at arms, such as the military review, which typically included music, parades, manoeuvres, and mock combats, and were, Gillian Russell notes, ‘presided over by the King in much the same way as he commanded Covent Garden or Drury Lane’.30 Such displays reflected the tradition of limited European war, which was often represented as a form of aristocratic theatre at which the people were mere spectators. But the new experience of war ushered in by the revolution – the levée en masse, the popular rising against imperial rule, the volunteer movement mobilised in national defence – introduced more inclusive models of military action. A comparable contrast between military styles appears in the novel’s movement from the Norman tournament to the formation of a Saxon fighting force in the woods. Here, those who had previously been spectators, or supplementary to the main performance, now make up a new kind of army, whose force is directed against the usurping power of a corrupt aristocracy. This army corresponds to those irregular, counter-revolutionary armies of Scott’s own age – such as those in the Vendée and Spain, where outlaws, peasants, landowners, and priests combined in new, ad hoc alliances. Among the Saxon army the symbols of difference are minimised. The outlaws are chiefly peasants and yeomen (Locksley does not have the noble title Earl of Huntingdon which Ritson attributes to him). The yeoman leaders are distinguished only by a feather in the cap, their dress, arms, and equipment being in all other respects the same. The siege is led jointly by Locksley and Richard (the latter disguised as the Black Knight), and Scott creates the impression of egalitarian leadership, in which request and invitations replace commands, yeoman Locksley can take precedence over noble Cedric, and Wamba can announce that he will not follow Athelstane (p. 268). After the siege Locksley reigns as democratic sovereign until Richard reveals himself as king. We are led to hereditary monarchy through meritocracy, so that the claims of hereditary kingship can be reconciled with elected sovereignty. The process of reconciliation, minimised as an issue of conscience, is handled through these outward negotiations of leadership, which allows radical sympathies to be indulged and then linked to a conservative agenda. The emergence of a new sense of national community is represented in a condition in which normal social roles and differences in status are temporarily suspended. Richard fulfils the demands of the radicals in Scott’s own age that the monarch should leave his seclusion and mingle with his people. But

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although the king is never seen ‘assuming his royal state, and presiding over a splendid circle of peers and nobles’ (p. 365), that option is not finally renounced. The theatre of Norman chivalry is not only a means by which usurping power attempts to establish hegemony, but also the arena in which the hero displays his heroism. On the one hand it represents a style of government that is resisted; on the other hand it is the ground on which the Saxon hero is reconciled with the Norman regime. If Richard’s armour allows him to step down from the pomp of Norman kingship into the democratic realm of the greenwood rebels, Ivanhoe’s armour allows him to step up into the Norman hierarchy. The true counterpart of the Ashby tournament is the Templestowe trial over which the Grand Master presides, to which local peasants are admitted as spectators. Here Lucas stands in place of Richard as returning authority, bent on reclaiming order. One of his functions is to represent opposition to aristocratic display in a chillingly unsympathetic form, so that Richard can restore aristocratic order as a reasonable bulwark against fanaticism and licentious infidelity. The denaturing of identity, the substitution of surface for depth, allows Scott to challenge and endorse Norman supremacy, without having to confront in the consciousness of his central characters what is at stake in the process of reconciliation. The values of martial heroism shared by Saxons and Normans alike, and apparently sanctioned by their Christian institutions, allow conquest to be narrated as a contest of masculine strength and courage, in which the Saxon men can regain their honour by overcoming the Norman stronghold of Torquilstone, or by becoming a Norman knight – as Ivanhoe does. Scott thus represents the consolidation of the nation as a masculine project, cemented by shared masculine values. The treatment of women in the narrative opens up alternative perspectives on this masculine project. In Scott’s novel the female is always either a spectator or victim of masculine power game, and her honour, once lost, cannot be restored. She reveals the underside of the narrative of conquest – the violence of the strong against the weak. This side is brought into focus in the siege of Torquilstone, where the plight of female victims Ulrica and Rebecca suddenly becomes central. Ian Duncan explains: The Gothic plot of the female body as object of totalitarian power expels any notion of reciprocity or consent, and with that the potent ideological category of feminine subjectivity, from the imperial allegory of the heroine as vessel of a union of races.31

This succinctly illuminates the generic debt to the gothic. I would add that it is precisely because Ulrica’s story does not quite expel notions of

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‘reciprocity or consent’ that it resonates so widely with the rest of the narrative. For unlike Rebecca, who would die rather than live with dishonour, the ravished Ulrica continues to live as the paramour of the man she hates, enacting the process of complicity with the conqueror that the Saxon men never fully confront. She represents the rage and guilt of the impotent victims of conquest, which cannot be discharged through the heroism of combat. Without prospect of reconciliation with either Saxon kin or Norman oppressors, she reverts to a pagan heritage that exults in uncontrolled violence. Her actions unsettle conventional categories of judgement, for while her descent into monstrosity can be read as reinforcing conventional fears of illicit female sexuality, her protest against the civilisation of which she is a victim seems justified. A comparable ambivalence is generated by Scott’s treatment of the Jewess Rebecca. In contrast to Ulrica, Rebecca conscientiously rejects the ideology of violence endorsed by the Saxon and Norman Christians. As Anne Mellor and others have shown, women writers of the period, adopting the role of ‘Mother of the Nation’, frequently claimed a moral authority based on Christian self-sacrifice, compassion for others, and peaceful coexistence, in opposition to the military values at work in an age of empire and endorsed by the masculine traditions of heroic poetry. Deirdre Lynch notes that women writers – including Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hamilton, Hannah Cowley, and Joanna Baillie – were also more sympathetic to ‘multiethnicity and racial intermingling’ than male writers (and male reviewers) tended to be.32 The conclusion of Scott’s novel makes a paradoxical gesture towards such sympathetic views by assigning pacifist sentiments to an admirable Jewess, one who embodies the moral purity, chastity, and virtue characteristic of the modern feminine ideal. The presence of Rebecca complicates the pattern of reconciliation suggested by the union of Ivanhoe and Rowena. For while this union complicates the expected symbolic reconciliation between Norman and Saxon by joining two Saxons (and so avoiding racial intermingling), readers are led to feel the alternative possibility of a union between Ivanhoe and Rebecca as preferable.33 Rebecca’s final renunciation of England as ‘a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions’ is directly applicable to the time in which Scott was writing (p. 399). It exposes the gap between the official agenda of the romance plot – the triumphant foundation of a unified nation anticipating future glories – and the actualities that complicate or are excluded by that version of history. Pierre Bourdieu argues that: there is no more potent tool for rupture than the reconstruction of genesis: by bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early

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beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibilities, it retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise.34

By bringing back into view the early beginnings of the English nation, Ivanhoe retrieves the possibility of a more tolerant, and perhaps less militaristic, national history, a possibility lost in the past, but still perhaps open in the future. Kenilworth The understanding in Ivanhoe and in The Lady of the Lake that communal bonds may be created most effectively when normal social roles are suspended finds a counterpart in recent studies of the role of official ceremonies, public spaces, sports, popular festivals, media events, and heritage sites. Such studies appear to undermine Hegel’s claim that in the modern world individuals would be encouraged to identify themselves as citizens by the formative influence of work, the administration of justice, the provision of education, the protection of the police or of corporations.35 Instead, collective identification often seems to be found in the release from routine – an understanding that has been used to justify the preservation within modern democracies of structures and institutions surviving from more hierarchical and exclusive eras, including stately homes (as visitable heritage sites) and, of course, monarchy.36 Royal occasions have been studied as a prime source of spectacular ‘media events’, which interrupt the ordinary flow of life, monopolise (and so unify) television audiences, and both undermine the aura of royalty (by emphasising its common humanity) and find means to recreate and maintain that aura.37 The fact that an institution representing hierarchy, exclusivity, and privilege can he used to generate (to the evident frustration of republican critics) a sense of community projected as egalitarian and inclusive might be seen as confirmation of Eric Hobsbawm’s claim that modern societies are sustained by the creation of arenas for ‘factitious community’.38 These observations may appear to take us some way from the usual concerns of the nineteenth-century novel – as the realm of private subjectivity, sexual relations, manners, social interactions within established communities, and conflicts centred on particular issues of social or political justice. But they echo some of Scott’s own special interests, and may help us to approach the theatrical preoccupations of Kenilworth, which critics have only recently begun to take seriously.39 The plot of Kenilworth appears to have been constructed to keep more consistently before the reader the gap between the triumphant

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narrative of the unified nation and the actualities of a society founded on inequality. A contemporary reviewer complained about the incongruous contrast between splendour and corruption – but the incongruity seems central to the effect of the novel.40 Here pageantry is a central device, as the narrative comes to focus on the acting out of both national community and national history. Unlike Ivanhoe, this novel focuses on a world in which characteristic features of modernity are emerging very distinctly – a capitalist market economy that promotes competition, individualism, social mobility, overseas trade, and exploration, as well as religious divisions deriving from the reformation. In this world aristocratic ambition may still have an important influence over affairs of state, but the feudal allegiances that once controlled the lower orders are dissolving before the economic pressures and opportunities generated by modernisation. It is a world in which the potential for instability seems high, and yet which achieves a remarkable sense of common purpose. For Scott’s contemporaries the reign of Elizabeth had been established as an age of national unity that had triumphantly delivered the kingdom from the religious turmoil and dissensions inherited from the age of Henry VIII.41 The monarch herself was seen as a key to this unity, a monarch whose authority was not dependent on taxes or a standing army, but was founded, according to David Hume, ‘merely on the opinion of the people’. That opinion had been reinforced, if not generated, by professional institutions – by lawyers, who represented the prerogative of the crown as ‘something real and durable; like those eternal essences of the schools’, and by divines, who called in aid the sanction of religion.42 In Kenilworth Scott represents an ideal of popular monarchy designed for his own age, an age in which public opinion was less likely to be unified by the appeals of lawyers and churchmen to the authority and sanctity of kings. Since the Elizabethan period pre-dates the emergence of the fully developed ‘free press’ that was held to shape public opinion in Scott’s own day, the novel contrives an alternate arena in which the nation can be imagined as a unified community. The Theatre of Heritage In Scott’s day Kenilworth Castle had long been a ruin, and was already a tourist attraction promoted through poems celebrating its past glories, an attraction for which visitors had a choice of guidebooks. Its state of ruin was itself a sign of national unity, an assurance that the conflicts once witnessed there were now consigned to a distant past.43 Scott needed to resurrect the edifice as a site on which conflict and unity could

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be represented at the same time. He shows it as the scene of a particular, localised history, and as a conservative emblem of the nation: its edifice exhibits ‘every species of castellated architecture, from the Conquest to the Reign of Elizabeth’ (p. 263), making it a symbol of that process of gradual adaptation Burke saw as characteristic of the British constitution. Since the destruction of castles such as Kenilworth during or immediately after the civil wars of the seventeenth century, the movement of the English ruling classes to the relative privacy of country houses surrounded by parks and high walls, their use of agents and stewards to manage their estates, and their withdrawal from the patronage of popular cultural activities and sports had weakened their traditional links with the lower orders.44 The festivities described in Kenilworth, a communal performance that ostensibly combines all classes, evoke an ideal condition before the historical separation of polite from popular culture. But the festivities are located in a rapidly modernising world. There are passing allusions to the wars against Ireland, the rebellion in the north, the wars in Scotland, which presage the consolidation of centralised power in modern Britain. And the references to overseas voyages and settlements indicate the dawning of the age of empire. The Earl of Leicester is representative of an emergent trend among the landowning class to forge close links with the spreading networks of commerce and business, in contrast to the traditional nobleman – such as Sussex – with his large force of armed retainers and his impressive record of military service. The new structures of dependence are unstable, because leases, monopolies, and grants may be bestowed as rewards for private services, as favours, or as bribes, as well as earned by public service, or transmitted through hereditary or customary right. Individuals can rise quickly by ambition and talent or – as Anthony Forster does – simply by unscrupulous service to the right patron. Leicester’s dependence on a range of specialist advisers and devious functionaries leaves him vulnerable to their machinations, but also enables his own rise to influence. Traditional ideas of hereditary status and obligations still have currency, but customary hospitality of the kind practised by Sir Hugh Robsart is declining, as wealth is diverted into edifices that represent individual desires and ambitions (a development that Ben Jonson complained of in his poem ‘To Penshurst’). The rise of the arts and sciences, and the development of manners to facilitate negotiations and transitions between social orders, has worked to create a new role for outward show as an indicator of worth. The appearance of personal grace and accomplishment can assume more importance than traditional signs of status, as the rapid rise of Raleigh shows.45

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The emphasis on appearance allows a significant gap to emerge between the public and private individual. This, of course, is a familiar theme in Scott, but here it assumes an unusual form. The separation of Leicester’s public image from his private life is manifest in his commitment to two quite different kinds of project. At Cumnor Hall, Leicester has transformed the interior of the dissolved monastic house into ‘the semblance of a royal palace’ for the benefit of Amy Robsart, leaving the dilapidated exterior unchanged. This scheme is the epitome of a privatised elegance divorced from any public or communal function. The other project is the improvement of Kenilworth. Here hospitality is turned into a public display designed to consolidate Leicester’s influence, a display that effectively displaces his private life. The separation of Leicester’s public image from his private life is mirrored in the roles played by the two women in his life. The fate of Amy Robsart, whose drive for private happiness leaves her unable to claim her public status, is the opposite of Elizabeth’s, whose public role as mother of the nation displaces entirely her private desires. As the representative role of these two female characters implies, the moral themes of the novel are in conflict with the theme of national unity. The moral perspective is traditional, familiar from the drama of the Elizabethan period, which sets the magnificent but deceptive appearances of the courtly world against traditional virtue. The reader’s privileged, backstage view of the pageantry consistently discloses the corruption and arbitrary violence concealed by, and even promoted by, elegant spectacle. The ambition of Leicester is furthered but ultimately defeated by his engagement with spectacle and show. As a speaker he is at his most influential when he turns the discourse on shows, while his display at Kenilworth is hugely successful in establishing him in the queen’s favour. The influence of spectacle on royal judgement is neatly illustrated in the sequence that begins when the queen confronts the distraught Amy Robsart in the Pleasance at Kenilworth (III, ch. 9). At the centre of the festivities, the queen’s enquiries about Amy resemble a trial. When subject to questioning, the unscrupulous Varney is able to produce the appearance of truth, since he and Leicester have influence over the witnesses, while the virtuous Tressilian and Amy are bound by oaths of secrecy. The queen has no difficulty in seeing that Varney is a knave – but cannot easily distinguish between a theatrical performance and Amy’s cry from the heart, between injured virtue and madness. But if display and artifice are associated with moral and political corruption, they also provide the grounds on which national unity can be imagined. When Leicester considers outright rebellion he learns that in this age such an action is doomed, because the queen has public opinion

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on her side – an opinion supported, as we see, by the self-same show through which he aims to influence her. The festivity, a local event designed to consolidate Leicester’s own power, is also represented as a national event in which the feelings of the country at large are at issue. It is ‘the conversation through all England’ (p. 209), and ‘the whole country’ is said to be ‘afloat, and steaming towards Kenilworth’ (p. 250). The ‘immense tide of population’ (p. 252) approaching the festivities includes mechanic, city mistress, clowns, substantial burghers and gentlemen of worship, Joan of the diary, the children of knights and squires, as well as musicians, dancers, jesters. The musical celebrations sound ‘as if the whole country around’ was ‘the scene of solemnising some high national festival’ (p. 309). The occasion is imagined, that is, in a style that anticipates the media event of today, which now allow British monarchs to be crowned ‘in the sight of the people’ and that gives virtual reality to the idea that the nation as a whole is present at a single location.46 Kenilworth becomes the embodiment of an exclusive, privatised, hierarchical order that has to be defended by force, and the site of an inclusive national festival answering to the popular imagination. This dual role, articulated through a host of details, is exemplified in the description of the porter who guards the castle entrance. Like the armed guards, his function is to police the event, ensuring that only invited guests, or those with the right connections, are admitted (III, ch. 1; [ch. 26]). But he also belongs to the pageant, and his theatrical dress aligns him with precedents in both high and popular culture (in describing him the narrator alludes to Colbrand, Ascapart, the son of Anak, popular romance, fairy tale, legends of knight errantry, Titan, and Hercules: III, ch. 5; [ch. 30]). In this respect, he suggests cultural inclusiveness. His force is represented as at once real and disarmingly fictitious. As a muscular sentinel who cannot remember his lines, he revises the image of the people as Hercules (promoted during the French revolution), and parodies aristocratic might. The conjunction of aristocratic and folk art underpins the legitimising function of the festival. So the elegant masque representing ‘the various nations by which England has at different times been occupied’ (p. 349) is eventually followed by an anti-masque or burlesque of a battle between Saxons and Danes, acted out by the men of Coventry (a traditional Hock tide sport recently put down by ‘zealous clergymen’, and now resurrected with the queen’s permission, p. 363). Scott emphasises social inclusion at the expense of other aspects of the pageantry that might appeal to national feeling. His source John Nichols emphasised the military element of the pageant’s allegory, in which the water deities represented ‘the most artful panegyric on the

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naval glory of this reign, and the most grateful representation of the Queen of the Ocean, as Elizabeth was then called’.47 But this aspect of the display, apparently so apt in the aftermath of the naval victories of the Napoleonic era, is hardly visible (and the larger symbolism of the narrative presents the ocean as an element that cannot be finally conquered). The tediousness and incongruities of the historical festivities described by Nichols drew withering criticism from the Unitarian Lucy Aiken.48 In Kenilworth these same deficiencies are strategically exploited. Wantonly mingling history with myth, the pageants do not ask for a suspension of disbelief; the conditions of their performance make such suspension not only irrelevant but impossible. The porter forgets his lines; Wayland does not appear in his appointed role; the queen herself finds the speeches tedious, and ironically congratulates the drunken Lambourne for the finest oration she has heard that day; the nobles have other things on their minds. Participation is privileged over dramatic effect; performance allows a form of communal action, an imagined community, in which normal social relations are momentarily transcended in the interests of a shared purpose. This symbolic function of the pageant eventually subsumes other aspects of the novel, which departs from the established pattern of Scott’s fiction. The reconciliation that might have concluded a novel based on civil strife has already taken place (between the loyalist Robsart and Tressilian’s grandfather, who joined Simnel’s rebellion against Henry VII). The marriage that might have sealed this reconciliation – between Tressilian and Amy – is neither necessary nor desired by Amy (p. 80). The novel therefore displaces its nominal hero, the ‘saintly sighing’ Tressilian, even more spectacularly than Ivanhoe displaced its hero. The straight-laced scholar adopts disguise to spy on Amy, but is otherwise outside of the world of performance. When he enters the pageant at Kenilworth dressed in black it is, ironically, to speak as himself (p. 353). The role of the romantic hero passes provisionally to Wayland, who combines inventiveness with physical courage and youth. But he too leaves the castle prematurely, and if there is a hero who answers to the symbolic needs of this narrative it is the schoolmaster pedant Erasmus Holiday, the choreographer of the revels. He provides an image of the artist remote from the prophetic and hieratic idiom of the romantic poet, an image like that projected by Scott himself – self-deprecating, given to wordiness and buffoonery, whose creativity supplies communal entertainment as a release from the world of work. The distance of this imagined community from the routines of work is a central concern of the novel. In the fluid and energetic new economy,

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the alliance of monarch and people is forged less in economic links, such as the grant to Woodstock, or the tardy payments of the Board of Green Cloth, than in the sphere of organised leisure, where the privately owned stately home can be transformed into the ground of an inclusive national heritage. The novel avoids the realm of lawyers and trading monopolies that helps to secure the expanding wealth of the new economy, and when it does focus on those who work beyond the immediate sphere of the courtier – the mercer, the schoolmaster, the blacksmith – these figures contribute to the recurring theme of release, the desire to break loose from the bonds of working routine into a world more appealing to the awakened secular imagination. In this way Scott develops his understanding that as the traditional, genealogical basis of community breaks down under the pressure of social mobility, modern social relations founded in competition, self-interest, and the rampant individualism of a commercial economy provide no basis in themselves for re-imagining community. Raphael Samuel, contemplating the extraordinary popularity of ‘heritage’ in our own age, suggests that ‘Instead of heredity it offers a sense of place’.49 Scott’s novel places a comparable emphasis on the sense of place. The narrative privileges space over time, the sense of place over chronology. The journey across England takes in two sites consecrated by communal memory: the Valley of the White Horse (traditionally associated with the defeat of the Danes), and Wayland’s Smithy. Scott’s aetiology of Wayland’s Smithy is manifestly an outrageous invention, but so is the legend it transforms. The point of the story of origin lies not in its accuracy but in its currency, for in communal memory legend will serve as well as history. While the castle of Kenilworth is evoked in the aristocratic splendour of a particular historical moment, it is also put on the same plane as these other monuments, pushed into the imaginative space of an immemorial England. Throughout the narrative Scott creates the impression of historical realism while violating that impression with outrageous anachronisms. There are precedents for this in the Elizabethan drama he evokes, and in this respect Scott tells his story of Elizabethan England as ‘that age would have told the tale’ (p. 168). He introduces Elizabethan authors not according to historical chronology, but as they might appear in popular memory, or on a souvenir – according to an imaginative time in which Raleigh is forever laying down his cloak. Scott’s novel represents a landmark in the development of British attitudes to heritage. Peter Mandler argues that before the early nineteenthcentury country houses could be valued as symbols of power, and as representing standards of comfort and taste, ‘but not as part of national

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heritage’, since the understanding of heritage as belonging to the people by virtue of its historical importance had not emerged before then.50 But Rosemary Sweet has traced the emergence of an understanding of heritage in the efforts of eighteenth-century antiquaries to encourage the preservation or restoration of ‘national antiquities’, and notes that the massive destructions of antiquities in revolutionary France generated interest in the preservation of domestic history and antiquities in Britain. ‘The illustration of monuments [in books and magazines] allowed the public to possess these antiquities vicariously. It was but a small imaginative leap to regard the buildings themselves as a communal, national heritage.’51 The imaginative leap that Scott makes in Kenilworth is to see the private stately home as a site to which the general public might have controlled access, where ordinary individuals might imagine themselves as part of the larger pageant of national history, where high culture might be entered as a form of popular entertainment. The subsequent history of heritage management in Britain has made a reality of this idea of communal access and participation. It has also worked to promote a wider transformation of antiquity into leisure facility. Of the locations referred to in Kenilworth, part of the garden of Says (or Sayes) Court in Deptford survives as a municipal park, Wayland’s Smithy and the Uffington White Horse are now managed and maintained by the English National Trust, while the ruins of Kenilworth Castle are maintained by the government-funded body English Heritage. The castle, at the centre of the local tourist industry, offers a range of summer weekend entertainments, including historical ‘re-enactments’ of its violent past. Its re-creation of aristocratic tradition for a mass audience is typical of an important sector of the English heritage industry. A contemporary review saw a direct connection between the pageant of Kenilworth and the ceremonial entry to Edinburgh that Scott was preparing for George IV.52 As an image of national community it anticipates the pageantry of our own era, such as the staging of the golden jubilee of the British Queen Elizabeth II in June 2002. The celebrations in London featured (among the more familiar trappings of a royal event) a pop concert, and a three-hour-long parade which included a Hell’s Angel, members of the Notting Hill Carnival, steel bands, a gospel choir, performers from a children’s theatre, and cricketers. The Guardian newspaper noted in its leader column that the event had been more successful in every respect than the organisers had expected, given their fears that Britain might have become indifferent or even hostile to the monarch: But it was a much more inclusive set of events than in the past, marked by great entertainment and visual splendour, both traditional and cutting edge.

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In the past, it had been their show. This time, we were all invited. (5 June 2002, p. 19)

The communal fantasy of total inclusion effortlessly overlooks the social divisions, cultural exclusions, and economic inequalities of the daily life of the nation. Scott’s novel, by indulging and critiquing such fantasy, while placing it in a broad historical perspective, illuminates its function in the competitive, secular, and individualistic condition of modernity. Notes 1. The phrase ‘theatre of the great’ is E. P. Thompson’s, from Customs in Common, p. 46. 2. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution. 3. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theatre, pp. 344–5. 4. Russell, Theatres of War, p. 260; Paine, Rights of Man, p. 171. 5. The Black Dwarf, Wednesday, 9 May 1817, no. 15, p. 229. The paper advised the prince regent to ‘Mix with the people, who alone can uphold the throne. Declare that “all are equal in your sight” ’: Wednesday, 10 September 1817, no. 33, pp. 518–19. 6. White, Waterloo to Peterloo, pp. 73, 106–8. 7. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 591. 8. The account of the Peterloo massacre in The Times, 19 August 1819, emphasised the order and discipline of the groups of protesting workers, male and female, and the banners, with their insignia, inscriptions, and liberty caps. Walmsley, Peterloo, p. 151. See also Reid, Peterloo Massacre, pp. 57–63. 9. Scott, Letters of Sir Walter Scott V, p. 114 (March 1818); p. 173 (July 818); pp. 286–7 (January 1819); p. 451 (August 1819); p. 486 (September 1819); pp. 509–10 (October 1819). 10. Scott, Visionary, II, p. 32. 11. Hayden, Walter Scott, p. 190. The Edinburgh Review also compared it with a pageant XXXIII (1820), pp. 7, 8. 12. Goodrich, Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s, p. 42. 13. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 84, 76, 68, 67. 14. Scott, Fortunes of Nigel, p. 348. 15. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 286, 235, 130. 16. The Anti-Jacobin, II (1799), p. iv. 17. Scott’s works had been condemned in the Christian Observer. Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 101–24. 18. .Margoliouth, The History of the Jews in Great Britain, II, p. 147. See also Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 1–80; Marshall, Problems of Empire, pp. 70–7. 19. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, pp. 235, 243. 20. See Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, XXXIII, 28 March 1818, p. 362.

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21. Hazlitt, ‘Why the heroes of romance are insipid’, p. 252. 22. See Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 149. 23. Kellner, ‘Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities’, p. 142. 24. Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Tulloch, p. 7. All subsequent references are to this edition, except where specified. 25. The palmer ‘sleeping’ at the sunken cross is represented as seen by others (p. 31); the Disinherited Knight is left ‘to his own perplexed ruminations; which upon more accounts than it is now possible to communicate to the reader, were of a nature peculiarly agitating and painful’ (p. 96); Ivanhoe, when thinking in his tent about the generosity of Rebecca and the robbers, falls asleep (p. 108). 26. ‘On this scheme of things, a king is but a man’: Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 128. 27. Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron, p. 346. 28. As in Sedaine’s troubadour opera Richard Coeur de Lion (1784). 29. The relevant ballad was printed under the title ‘The King’s Disguise, and Friendship with Robin Hood’ in Ritson, ed., Robin Hood, II, p. 162. 30. Russell, Theatres of War, pp. 17, 26. 31. Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Duncan, p. xxi. 32. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, pp. 72, 146; Lynch, ‘Nationalizing Women and Domesticating Fiction’, pp. 45–9. Lynch notes contemporary reviewers’ fears ‘for the patrilineal transmission of property and nationality’, p. 48. 33. One reviewer claimed that Rebecca was ‘almost the only lovely being in the story’: Edinburgh Review XXXII (1820), p. 53. 34. Bourdieu, ‘Rethinking the state’, p. 57. 35. Hegel, ed. Wood, pp. 220–74. 36. See Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual’, p. 156 (Cannadine quotes Sir Charles Petrie, The Modern British Monarchy, London, 1957, p. 27); Dicks, Culture on Display. 37. Dayan and Katz, ‘Electronic ceremonies’; Dayan and Katz, Media Events; Phillips, ‘Media discourse and the Danish monarchy’, pp. 221–45; Wober, Media and Monarchy. 38. Nairn, Enchanted Glass, pp. xxv, 53. 39. See, for example, the pioneering discussions by Arata, ‘Scott’s Pageants’, and Craig, ‘Scott’s staging of the nation’. 40. The reviewer thought this contrast made ‘a splendid pageant of English history read like a Newgate calendar’: Edinburgh Review, XXXVII (1822), p. 207. 41. Nichols, Progress and Public Processions; Aiken, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth; Carey, Memoirs of the life of Robert Carey; Bridges, Speeches Delivered to Queen Elizabeth; Naunton, Memoirs; Hamper, Masques. 42. Hume, History of England, V, pp. 127–8. 43. Janowitz, England’s Ruins, p. 4. 44. See Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, pp. 7–8. 45. See Lackey, ‘Kenilworth, Scott and historical honesty’, p. 40, and J. H. Alexander, ‘Introduction’ to Scott, Kenilworth, p. xiii.

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46. Cannadine, ‘Context’ pp. 149, 158. Cannadine quotes (p. 158) from George VI’s coronation broadcast: ‘I felt this morning that the whole Empire was in very truth gathered within the walls of Westminster Abbey’. 47. John Nichols, Progress and Public Processions, p. xvi. 48. Aiken, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, II, pp. 43–4, 499. 49. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, p. 246. 50. Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, p. 7. 51. Sweet, Antiquaries, p. 298. 52. Edinburgh Review, XXXVII (1822), p. 207.

Chapter 4

Western Identities and the Orient Guy Mannering and The Talisman

In recent decades the categories once used with little hesitation to denote identities and differences have begun to lose their stability. C. A. Bayley notes that as recently as the 1970s the term ‘British’ was taken to refer to ‘an old national identity’, while the term ‘indigenous peoples’ referred to ‘a set of fixed racial groups within the empire’. Now historians have begun to treat ‘Britishness’ as a ‘recent, fragile and contested ideology of power’, while recognising that the term ‘indigenous peoples’ was ‘fractured and contested from the beginning’.1 With the rise of postcolonial studies a new awareness of the inadequacy of dichotomous notions of difference has undermined the distinction between centres and peripheries, as observers increasingly insist on the interrelations and reciprocal influences at work in the dynamics of empire. These developments occurred, like the new understanding of nation-building, in the context of rapid changes in the economic and political order across the globe: the decolonisation that began in the wake of the Second World War, and the consequent production of new national histories that challenged imperial narratives of shared political and cultural history; the rise of civil rights and feminist protest movements; increasing migration and mobility; the deregulation and globalisation of markets; and the common experience of, in San Juan’s word, ‘the spectacle of heterogeneous languages and practices coexisting with the homogenizing scenarios of everyday life’.2 This questioning of cultural categories has helped to sensitise critics to the presence of comparable concerns in the eighteenth century, when the rapid expansion of trade and empire stimulated movement across cultural boundaries and encouraged many kinds of interaction between peoples of different origins. Indeed, A. G. Hopkins claims that the awareness of cultural difference in the eighteenth century – an age of ‘protoglobalization’ – is ‘rather closer to that of the present than to that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when nation states attempted to

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assert exclusive claims on the loyalties of their subjects’.3 The progress of empire in Scott’s age repeatedly brought Europeans into contact with peoples who were not yet living in modern nation-states, but in, as Philip Morgan says, ‘autonomous village communities composed largely of autonomous kin groups’.4 The idea of progress allowed such groups to be seen as representative of the condition of primitive diversity from which the modern nation had emerged. Scott’s own interest in historical border communities, in highland clans, in peoples living relatively selfcontained lives remote from the centres of state power does not simply represent nostalgia for lost worlds, but is clearly shaped by the contemporary experience of empire.5 Scott’s work not only suggests, as Katie Trumpener says, that nation-building and empire-building are analogous – it suggests that nations and empires are manifestations of the same process of political and cultural consolidation.6 But the process of consolidation could never be complete, since the experience of diversity could not simply be consigned to a supposedly primitive past. If, as Linda Colley has argued, Great Britain was ‘an invention forged above all by war’, it was an invention that subsumed a huge range of differences – religious, ethnic, and national.7 The English themselves were of course a heterogeneous people, as Defoe had notoriously reminded them at the beginning of the century.8 If English was the dominant language, within the British Isles it also coexisted with Welsh, Scots, Gaelic, Manx, and the languages of immigrant groups, including the French, Italian, and Dutch communities in London. And of course Britain included many other groups whose relationship to ‘Britishness’ was open to question, including Gypsies, Jews, peoples of African descent, and increasing numbers of Asians living in port cities.9 Forging a national identity was a continuous process that involved debates over origins, manners, language, and the arts, while giving new impetus to the process of refinement.10 Scott’s work can be seen as a contribution to this process, helping to reshape the British past, and finding ways to represent the cultural diversity threatened by the consolidation of the modern nation. It is informed by a keen awareness of the fragility and arbitrariness of the cultural categories and distinctions by which any observer’s world-view is constructed. The representation of ‘otherness’ in Scott is always notionally governed by a polite Anglo-British perspective, which assumes the cultural superiority of the civilised observer – white, Christian, and usually masculine. But in his work the civilised observer’s confrontation with cultural or racial difference is often a point at which polite presuppositions are challenged and unsettled. Repeatedly Scott’s fictions move towards a drama of non-recognition: they construct parallels and

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likenesses that have to be denied; they emphasise the need to maintain difference where sameness is exposed. The denial is made by both hero and narrator, who represent the same order of civilisation (in Rob Roy the hero is the narrator); but the disavowal generates ambivalence. The acts of non-recognition are not adequately described as symptoms of what Nigel Leask terms ‘anxieties about the Other’.11 They suggest an ironical awareness of what is at stake – psychologically, economically, politically – in the need to assert difference. They are points at which readers are offered an implicit choice: to affirm their own superior identities as civilised observers, or to see that affirmation as a form of selfdeceit. In this chapter I explore two novels in which the supposed superiority of the western observer is represented – and tested – in relation to oriental ‘others’. Edward Said famously argued that western representations of eastern culture helped ‘to define Europe’ by constructing the Orient as its great complementary opposite.12 But if such representations contributed to a programme of imperial domination, they did not always preclude the recognition of similarities and cultural influences. Scott was writing at a time when British attitudes to oriental cultures were undergoing major reassessment. During the eighteenth century, an important strand of scholarly enquiry had explored the European debt to oriental culture. The comparative philologist Sir William Jones, for example, noted the similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, and like many other eighteenth-century scholars regarded the Bible as ‘Oriental’ in its figurative language.13 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, this scholarly interest in oriental culture was giving way to the assumption of British superiority, in the light of administrative reforms, evangelical pressure to establish missions in India, and utilitarian and free-trade arguments in favour of modernising Indian institutions.14 As an AngloBriton Scott, probably shared this sense of superiority, and he saw the British operations in India as an important opportunity for Scots, including his own family.15 But his work is also informed by the earlier respect for oriental culture, and by his awareness of the English sense of superiority to their northern neighbours.16 Scott’s complex attitude generates a deeply ambivalent representation of cultural difference.

Guy Mannering In Guy Mannering, the follow-up to Waverley, Scott turned from the history of political rebellion to a story that allowed him to reflect in more detail on the material and cultural changes entailed in the process

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of modernisation. The narrative spans a period from around 1765 to near the end of the American war – a decisive era in imperial history, when Britain was in the process of losing the American colonies while consolidating its power in Canada, India, and other overseas territories. It ranges between scenes of rural life in the south-west of Scotland, the life of Edinburgh as the focal point of a new Scottish culture of politeness, and the experience of empire in India. The time scheme of the novel is broken by a gap of almost seventeen years during which the English hero, Guy Mannering, and a younger Scottish hero (Bertram, alias Brown) both go to India and see military service. Their Indian experiences are referred to only in momentary recollections and passing comments, but resonate through much of the rest of the narrative. The novel was mostly written between November 1814 and February 1815, in a period when the abdication of Napoleon, the restoration of the European monarchs, and the return of seized colonies appeared for a while to open the prospects of a new period of peace in Europe (qualified most obviously by a continuing war with America and unrest in Ireland). In this period of readjustment, India’s established role in the mending of British fortunes assumed a new significance, as the territory was seen to offer the best chance of averting the mass unemployment threatened by the end of war, by absorbing ‘surplus labour’.17 In the novel, the economic significance of empire is clearly recognised, although formally subordinated to a concern with the cultural and psychological consequence of modernisation. Guy Mannering can be seen as an attempt to explore and manage a crisis of identity engendered by the experience of empire, by splitting the narrative between two heroes, a senior English one and a junior Scottish one, who can represent different aspects of a divided Anglo-British identity. The English Hero and his others The English hero’s name offers the reader a puzzle, since Guy recalls two famous antecedents: Guy of Warwick, the hero of chivalry, who returns triumphant from the east after his battle with the Saracens, and Guy Fawkes, the anti-hero commemorated in effigy, the stuffed suit of clothes who appears, as Mannering does, at the beginning of November. Does Mannering exemplify the superior manners of the British gentleman, or is he man erring? The novel as a whole sustains this uncertainty, without clearly resolving it. Scott’s novel opens with an account of how the young Mannering, lately up from Oxford, crosses the ‘frontier’ from England into Scotland as a tourist. He soon loses his way, and as night falls he loses both his gentlemanly appearance and the respect it

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commands – receiving suspicious instead of deferential answers from those he meets. This temporary loss of identity, which transforms the respected into the suspected, prefigures some of the hero’s subsequent experiences north of the border. Here, the local laird has sunk beyond the usual limits of politeness into lower-class company; as his guest, the Englishman soon finds himself in the company of a Gypsy and a smuggler. As we shall see, these two characters both emerge as unlikely doubles for Mannering. And as in the doubling of Roderick and FitzJames in The Lady of the Lake (see Chapter 2), the doubling here threatens to dissolve the moral oppositions formally established by the narrator. In Guy Mannering the marginal figures of the smuggler and the Gypsy both confound normal categories of identity. The Gypsy Meg Merrilies eludes simple definition: all of her ‘equipment’ seems masculine ‘except her petticoats’; her mental state may be one of ‘real or affected insanity’.18 This bizarre figure – vulgar, illiterate, superstitious – presents a striking contrast with the young English gentleman. She represents a residual oral culture just as conspicuously as he represents an enlightened, literate one. And yet in her presence Mannering is led to display his own knowledge of astrology, and his reasonable discourse soon resolves into ‘a jargon more mysterious than her own’ (p. 17). In a later scene when Meg appears in a costume that seems both Scottish and eastern, and measures out the thread of life for the Laird’s unborn child like a sibyl, the fascinated Mannering views her through an aperture. The aperture delineates the cultural distance between the polite observer and what he sees as an ethnographic curiosity. Nevertheless, his complicity with the ritual is emphasised. He makes a vain attempt to master the exact words of the Gypsy’s song, and in doing so he enters into a kind of duet with her, since she accomplishes her task while he, her ‘free imitator’, is arranging his translated stanzas in his head (p. 24). In fact, the predictive labours of Mannering and Meg produce the same conclusion. The astrology theme, which Scott refers to in the Introduction of 1829 as an unnecessary encumbrance, is not needed to explain the events of the plot; its function is to establish an unexpected area of identification between gentleman and Gypsy. A note added to later editions of Guy Mannering explains that the Gypsy superstitions were ‘once generally entertained among the Scottish common people, and are now found among those who are most rude in their habits, and most devoid of instruction’ (note v). The gypsy, then, makes visible the remnants of a common heritage of folk superstition, just as Mannering’s more literate interest in astrology is a remnant from beliefs once held alike by ‘Christians and Heathens, Jews and Gentiles’

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(p. 16). The acknowledgement that such beliefs were once universal points to a fundamental aspect of human nature that must be constrained by the process of improvement. The narrative includes a long quotation from Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein in order to emphasise this. Here Love is said to dwell among ‘talismans, and Spirits’; although such things ‘live no longer in the faith of reason’, the heart still needs ‘a language’, the ‘old instinct’ still brings back ‘the old names’ (pp. 18–19). What is at issue, it seems, is the repressive effect of enlightenment, which creates a split between reason and instinct. Mannering’s fascination with astrology and Gypsy lore reveals an aspect of his character that must seem romantic and extravagant to the reasonable gentleman, and that he must repress or regulate accordingly. When he becomes a soldier in India, a region described by his daughter as ‘the land of talisman and spell’ (p. 92), he will carefully conceal his own artistic sensibility while constantly engaged in military duty. In this respect the Gypsy whose feminine nature is concealed by masculine equipment foreshadows an affective displacement in Mannering himself. It is while Mannering is watching Meg that he first encounters the smuggler, Dirk Hattaraick, who is used to introduce some of the other troubling issues that have to be negotiated in the presentation of Mannering as gentlemanly hero. Since Mannering follows a military career in India, he must be distanced from the potentially incriminating aspects of the politics of empire. As Peter Garside notes, Mannering appears to approach the end of his military career ‘in the early 1780s, a period marked by numerous engagements between Haider Ali and British forces under Sir Eyre Coote’.19 This was a period of political and military crisis, which had been subject to intense public scrutiny on account of the trial of Warren Hastings and heated controversy over the conduct of British policy in India. Edmund Burke had accused the East India Company of cruelty and corruption, of undermining established Indian rulers, and of selling Indian territories in pursuit of profit.20 There were reports of military ‘oppression and peculation’, and of official connivance in army recruitment through ‘kidnapping’.21 Haidar Ali was represented not only as a cruel tyrant, but also as a patriot calling for united Indian resistance against foreign oppression.22 To preserve the integrity of the hero, Scott must suppress the image of empire as an aggressive adventure driven by commercial gain with scant respect to the legitimacy of established regimes. Empire must be seen as a gentlemanly, civilising project, its military operations represented as essentially defensive, a matter of policing bandits. Those who read the romance at face value may accept this fiction of empire, and find Mannering divorced from any suggestion of wrongdoing.23

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But in the presentation of Mannering, Scott will, typically, identify the relations that have to be suppressed. Thus Mannering presents his military career in India as an escape from a career in commerce (and in divinity), and is said to ‘despise’ commerce. But we also learn that the best part of his property was made in commerce, seemingly in ‘the thriving concern of Mannering and Moregold’ in which he declined to work (pp. 69, 97). As Tara Ghosal Wallace points out, in India Mannering apparently serves with the king’s army, not the East India company’s, which might allow us to see him as ‘bringing justice to India’ rather than as defending the company’s commercial interests.24 But in practice the distinction between the king’s army and the company’s was far from absolute: Sir Eyre Coote became commander-in-chief of both at once, and before Pitt’s India Act of 1784, British policy in India was largely determined by the East India Company’s officials. When Scott returned to the subject of British activities in India, in his late tale The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827), his narrator acknowledges that even the king’s army resorted to ‘kidnapping, or crimping’ to secure recruits, and that ‘much villainy’, including ‘robbery and even murder’, arose in the process.25 While in Guy Mannering the hero is formally distanced from such abuses, the central crisis of his time in India is, as he admits, directly related to the problems of obtaining recruits for the army. Mannering’s good manners and reserve may help to distance him from the exploitation associated with the stereotype of the nabob, but here, too, Scott’s treatment is ambivalent since, as Wallace points out, other characters in the novel see him as a nabob ‘with an Indian fortune’.26 When Mannering at the end of the novel announces Bertram’s intention to return to India, he leaves no doubt about, and apparently endorses, Bertram’s motives – to bring back ‘Sicca rupees’ (p. 354). When the narrator asks whether Pleydell might not ‘wonder that from India, believed to be the seat of European violence and military oppression, had arrived an officer of distinction, open to compassionate and liberal feelings?’, the question is left open. The coexistence of compassionate feeling with oppression was a common theme in the contemporary critique of sensibility and in anti-slavery literature.27 When Mannering is confronted with the smuggler, he meets a figure through whom the troubling historical relationships that must be suppressed in the hero’s account of empire – between violence, commerce, corruption, and state power – can be encountered in an overtly criminal form. Smuggling exposes a problematic conflict of interests between states and their subjects, and gives national boundaries the appearance of arbitrary constraints. Hattaraick undermines such boundaries in his own person: he is described by the Laird as ‘half Manks, half Dutchman,

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half devil!’ (p. 26). The description helps to set his activities in context, since the Manx and the Dutch were both notorious for smuggling in the eighteenth century. The sovereignty of the Isle of Man had been bought by the British crown in 1765 in order to clamp down on illicit trade.28 The collapse of the Dutch East India Company at the end of the century was partly attributed to the smuggling activities of its employees.29 In Scotland, too, smuggling was rife, in part because many Scots held that the Act of Union had fixed tax levels north of the border, and that subsequent increases were illegitimate.30 Scott makes this clear in Heart of Mid-Lothian, set in the 1730s, where the Scots, both the vulgar and their betters, are said to regard the excise duties as ‘an unjust aggression upon their ancient liberties’.31 In Guy Mannering we learn that smuggling ‘was general, or rather universal, all along the south-western coast of Scotland’ (p. 45). The Scots found their own grievances echoed more vigorously by the Americans. It was North’s Tea Act of 1773, designed to make British teas (supplied by the East India Company) cheaper than smuggled tea in America, which sparked the Boston Tea Party and helped to fuel the American war.32 For Adam Smith, who argued against the regulation of commerce for political purposes, smuggling involved a fundamental conflict between national laws and natural justice.33 There is little or no discussion of the issue in Guy Mannering, but in a novel set against the background of the American war and British activities in East India, the figure of the smuggler is capable of producing unsettling resonances. The entry of Dirk Hattaraick generates a notable anxiety in the narrative, a desire to establish boundaries. The narrator is concerned to dissociate ‘our seamen’ from this ‘surly’ ‘hard-favoured’ sailor; Mannering recoils in disgust from him, briefly rejecting his ‘proffered civilities’ (pp. 24, 25). But the text smuggles a perplexing message across these boundaries. Mannering cannot simply dissociate himself from what he finds objectionable in the smuggler. In the act of rejecting civilities he himself becomes uncivil, betraying an aggressive aspect of his own character that will become more evident, and more costly, later in the narrative. He may take an officially disapproving view of the smuggling trade, but at breakfast the Laird serves him ‘excellent’ tea bought from Hattaraick. ‘Captain’ Hattaraick’s trade in tea, of course, hints at his connections with the east, which is where in the future ‘Colonel’ Mannering will pursue his military career. If Hattaraick places loyalty to his shipowners above the laws of the nations in which he trades (p. 352), Mannering will have to place the commercial interests of Britain and the East India Company above the legitimacy of Indian states. Both men will use violence to pursue their ends. In this respect

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Hattaraick – whose name gives off a distorted echo of Mannering – foreshadows an aspect of Mannering’s own character that will not easily find expression in what he describes as the ‘well-stuffed chairs of divinity and commerce’ (p. 69), but can operate beyond them in armed adventures overseas. Seen in this light, it seems fitting that Hattaraick should first address Mannering as ‘brother’ (p. 25). In this reading, then, Mannering’s encounter with the hybrid characters Hattaraick and Meg Merrilies reveals aspects of the English gentleman’s own character, and threatens to dissolve the firm distinction between the respectable and the non-respectable upon which his polite identity depends. The ruthless masculine power in the service of commercial interests, and the archaic, instinctual, customary, feminine power rendered more strange and fascinating through its marginalisation, mark out his own fate, and offer an oblique commentary on the character of the imperial hero. For although Mannering is repelled by Hattaraick and fascinated by Meg, it is the violent adventurer who delineates the future he will embrace, while Meg delineates that which must be repressed. Empire and identity The opening chapters, then, help to establish connections between the English gentleman and his ‘others’, and between Scotland and the east, connections that link the immediate events of the plot to causes beyond the individual villainy of Hattaraick or Glossin, and to effects beyond the shores of Scotland. As other critics have noted, the Laird’s expulsion of the Gypsies from his estate, which arises ultimately from a change of government in London, evokes not only contemporary highland clearances, but also the effects of British rule in India, the Maroon wars, and the colonising of Canada.34 In this way the novel suggests that comparable material interests are at work in all cases. But the presentation of the expulsion is far from simple. The episode is prefaced by a general commentary in which the Gypsies are described in consistently ambivalent terms. They are ‘a mingled race’ with characteristics inherited both from their eastern ancestors and ‘the men of the North’ (p. 35). They are a long-established part of the Scottish scene but they are also ‘Parias’ (p. 37). They are both feared and accepted; to the Laird they are both ‘knaves’ and ‘exceeding good friends’ (p. 37). If the account of their expulsion implicitly condemns the disruptive effects of colonial settlement, it also offers an implicit defence of settlers, since the narrator makes clear that the Gypsies are themselves invaders who have established their own territories and their own laws within an alien country.

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What is at issue is not only the effect of imperial aggression upon customary liberties, but also the uncanny proximity of the alien. The east is not only the name of remote territories over ‘there’ settled by ‘us’. It has already established itself ‘here’, as part of ‘our’ world. The Gypsies have even become custodians of Scottish folk tradition, blurring the distinction between native and settler. The episode focuses not only on a humanitarian sympathy for the displaced, but also on the difficulties of maintaining absolute cultural distinctions in a world where peoples of different origin come together. This issue is central to the experience of India in the novel. When the Scottish hero, Brown, the lost heir of Ellangowan, writes to a Swiss friend about their shared experiences as ‘soldiers of fortune’ in India, he defines their position in these terms: And you and I, Delaserre, [are] foreigners both – for what am I the better that I was originally a Scotchman, since, could I prove my descent, the English would hardly acknowledge me a countryman? [. . .] The English are a wise people – while they praise themselves and affect to undervalue all other nations, they leave us, luckily, trap-doors and back-doors open, by which we strangers, less favoured by nature, may arrive at a share of their advantages. (p. 112)

This passage implies on the one hand that British power is essentially English power, and at the same time that its dependence on foreigners must complicate any notion of its Englishness. The phrase ‘trap-doors and back-doors’ captures the ambiguity of the English position – ostensibly secure in its exclusive identity, but in practice forced to let others find a way into its cultural space. The activities of the British in India, like other imperial ventures, had opened such doors for many Scots. An unusually high proportion of Scots worked in India. Many worked for the company and its army (which was much less aristocratic than the British army), while Scots also played a conspicuous role in the king’s army (the 73rd Highland Regiment featured prominently in the Second Mysore War).35 The numbers can be explained partly by the Scottish influence over Indian patronage, which dates back to the 1720s, and continued through the era of Henry Dundas.36 The well-known Gillray cartoon of Dundas controlling both the City of London and a commercial empire in India depicts him as straddling different cultures – he wears the Scottish kilt and the oriental turban. He is both Scottish laird and oriental despot, roles which give him an alarming degree of influence over the British state.37 If imperial operations led the English to open doors to others, the success of the Scots in exploiting their opportunities led inevitably to English fear or resentment.38 English insecurity in the face of Scottish

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competition has been invoked to explain the contemporary obsession in polemical writing and prints with the sexual potency of Scots (including the claim that Lord Bute was the lover of George III’s mother).39 AntiScottish feeling in England in the later eighteenth century found expression not only in satires but in physical violence, including duels, since, as Paul Langford notes, some Englishmen seemed to regard ‘picking quarrels with Scotsmen as a patriotic duty’.40 British operations in India opened doors in other respects as well. The company’s policy of encouraging inter marriage between British and Indians in order to build up the army had created a sizeable category of ‘Eurasians’.41 Military operations depended on sepoy regiments, just as administrative operations depended on native officials. As we have noted, Scott was writing at a time when the earlier openness to Indians and Indian culture was giving way to more hostile and exclusive attitudes. Charles Grant, for example, in an influential survey of Indian society portrayed the Hindus as ‘governed by malevolent and licentious passions’, the result of a ‘general corruption of manners’; William Wilberforce promoted comparable assumptions.42 The new pressure to Christianise and modernise India was accompanied by a new insistence on keeping up the British character, and an increasing social estrangement from native Indians, a change which has been explained in part by the rising number of British women in the settlements.43 When seen against this background, the novel’s references to India offer more than a tale of private life: they help to focus wider issues of power, prejudice, and identity. The crisis of Mannering’s experience in India is a temporary loss of control in which his own sense of identity is threatened. As he explains in a confessional letter, his troubles begin with the arrival of a stranger, and are associated with the urge to maintain racial difference: ‘In a moment of particular pressure (you know how hard we were sometimes run to obtain white faces to countenance our line of battle), a young man, named Brown, joined our regiment as a volunteer’ (p. 70). In the context of this insistence on whiteness, Brown’s name introduces a note of ironic confusion, which is echoed in subsequent events. Once inside the regiment, Brown, a man without family and friends, is admitted to Mannering’s household as the ‘habitual attendant on my wife and daughter’, and soon Mannering becomes jealous, not in relation to his daughter, but in relation to his wife (p. 70). In this way Brown becomes, as Katie Trumpener notes, a focus for Mannering’s ‘fears of social and racial miscegenation’ (p. 187). But beyond the sexual jealousy that Mannering openly admits, his comparison of himself to Othello suggests another anxiety: the recognition of what Bhabha terms ‘the otherness of the Self’; the discovery of his

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own dark reflection in the shadow of colonised man.44 Like Othello, Mannering finds the order he seeks to defend breaking down from within, as he succumbs to irrational passion and violence. His shooting of Brown in a duel beyond the walls of his fortress, on ‘the frontiers’, allows native banditti to ‘pour in’ and capture Brown. This simultaneously fulfils his own desire to remove Brown, and allows him to assert the distinction between legitimate British forces and native ‘plunderers’ (p. 71). Insiders and outsiders The Indian crisis introduces a conflict between Mannering and Brown, senior Englishman and junior Scot, that the rest of the novel will stylise into a series of contrasts. Brown’s undefined social position allows him an ambivalent status in the plot. In relation to Mannering he is a man of no family, a dispossessed Scot, a resentful outsider who thinks of avenging himself on ‘this haughty insulting man’ (p. 113). But in relation to other outsiders he is a polite Anglo-British observer, destined to gain his rightful place in the governing class – destined, in fact, to take possession of the estate that the Englishman dreams of acquiring. In this way the narrative plays out the ambivalent position of the Scot as both subject and master of imperial power. Mannering does not explore the implications of his Indian experience (he never dares to open Othello). Once he has returned to Britain, suggestions of ‘otherness’ attach themselves to him incidentally (in a landlord’s description of him as ‘dark’, and Julia’s suggested analogy between her own situation and that of Jessica, daughter of Shylock, pp. 112, 94); but he retains his place as a respectable British gentleman, and is consistently associated with the foundations of modern Anglo-British order – law, literacy (in particular the enlightened culture of modern Edinburgh), and military force. On the other hand, Brown is consistently associated with those outside this order: the Hindu, the Liddesdale farmer, the Gypsy, the smuggler, the prisoner. While Mannering demonstrates a gentlemanly benevolence in his patronage of the Dominie, Brown receives the simple hospitality and charity of the unimproved or the socially marginalised. While Mannering upholds and even enforces the law, Brown mixes with lawbreakers, and lands in prison. And while Mannering is associated with imperial power, Brown is subtly associated with native resistance to that power. This can be seen once Mannering is installed in a temporary Scottish home at Woodbourne, where echoes of his Indian past give him the appearance of a colonial settler (he keeps a chaplain, as he did in his residence in India, and he continues to think of himself as ‘commandant’, p. 101).

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Here he uses a tiger rifle to repel attacking smugglers, ‘savage’ men of oddly eastern appearance, ‘stripped to their shirts and trowsers, with silk handkerchiefs knotted about their heads’ (p. 164). In this way the excise issue is played out in terms of imperial power. Julia Mannering’s account of the incident is naturally coloured by her polite British sympathies, but the reader’s view is complicated by the fact that Brown is subsequently associated with the attacking smugglers (typically, a case of mistaken identity). As this last incident shows, the strategy of the novel is consistently to defuse the subversive potential of the pattern it creates. The contrast between Mannering and Brown never resolves into a renewed conflict between them. On the contrary, the narrative forestalls their meeting until the grounds of conflict have been neutralised. The implications of the pattern are further defused by the action involving Glossin, who shares Mannering’s interest in acquiring Brown’s estate, but who is manifestly self-serving, and eventually stoops to outright villainy. Most important, Brown’s identification with the outsider is an effect of plot contingencies rather than of individual likeness. Whereas Mannering’s experiences reveal unsettling similarities between the polite observer and his others, Brown’s experiences help to define the differences. But this strategy exposes directly and indirectly the limitations of the AngloBritish identity, even while supposedly demonstrating its superiority. Contrasting Identities Brown’s visit to the lowland community of Liddesdale, which occurs near the beginning of his journey home, demonstrates Scott’s awareness of what Robert Crawford calls ‘the need both to construct and reconstruct images of cultural identity that are other than Anglo-centric’.45 The episode is the most sustained example of an alternative identity in the novel, and it registers a powerful nostalgia for what is lost in the polite world. At Liddesdale the independent farmer, Dinmont, seems fully at home and, for the reader, fully defined by his way of life. His community is as yet almost untouched by improvement (‘No inclosures, no roads’, p. 127) or by metropolitan conventions, and seems both selfcontained and self-sufficient.46 Here local superstitions and traditions are represented not as cultural curiosities, but as part of daily routine: sheets are washed with the fairy-well water; a tree takes its name from local legend. Here both mother and nurse (Old Elspeth with her ‘tales and ballads’, p. 130) are seen to have important roles. A warm physicality is established through the presence of children and animals, the plentiful supply of wholesome food, and the emphasis on bodily contact

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(the wife tending her husband’s wounded head, the ‘pat’, ‘kiss’, ‘hug’, and ‘shove’ of informal domestic intimacy, p. 129). Here the body is seen as a site of pleasure, and its communicative function is easily recognised. While the narrative emphasises the importance of touch here, the narrator reaffirms in contrast the importance of sight to the polite observer, noticing a total absence of ‘all those little neatnesses which give the eye so much pleasure in looking at an English farm house’ (p. 132). The Liddesdale episode as a whole helps to define by contrast the limitations of polite identity as represented in the rest of the novel, where the organic relationship between culture and locality, the unproblematic relationship with the body, and the role of the mother have been displaced. Katie Trumpener has helpfully discussed the novel in the light of the contemporary banishment of the nurse – the bearer of oral tradition or ‘cultural memory’ – from the nursery.47 The terms of the discussion can be broadened, since the modern culture for which Scott’s narrator appears to speak is one in which mothers and their influence have also been relegated to the margins. Mannering’s account of his family makes no mention of a mother. His legacy – his name, a library full of books, and a large fortune – comes from men. When he goes to Edinburgh (a visit occasioned by the death of a childless woman), the polite, reasonable, literary culture to which he is introduced is represented exclusively by men. Modern Anglo-British identity is seen as essentially masculine. The displacement of the woman is reflected in the very operation of the plot, for the mothers of the younger generation, Mrs Bertram and Mrs Mannering, are swiftly written out of the story. The narrator’s complicity in this repression is exposed with particular clarity by the Indian crisis. Mannering sees his wife, Sophia, as the victim of male jealousy and ambition. But the narrator subsequently describes Sophia as ‘a misjudging mother, who [. . .] read romances until she became so enamoured of the complicated intrigues which they contain, as to assume the management of a little family novel of her own’ (p. 95). This reinterprets the crisis entirely, deflecting blame onto ‘feminine’ subjectivity in a move which implicitly validates the ‘masculine’ rationality and control that Mannering usually embodies, re-establishing the hierarchy that has been threatened. It is the law of the father that supposedly orders this world. Julia Mannering, the most important of the polite females represented in the book, is introduced through her letters, which are prefaced by an epigraph referring ominously to Heaven’s invention of letters ‘For ladies in limbo’ (p. 91). Julia – freed from the domestic practicalities that give shape to Mrs Dinmont’s life – is seen to have no place of her

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own, and little power of self-determination. Her upbringing in India, her separation from her lover, the death of her mother, her return to England have all been occasioned by the ambitions and fears of Mannering (who sought to escape the influence of his own guardians). Her abrupt removal from her seminary and her friend Matilda, and her billeting with strangers, arises from his concern with her ‘progress in the accomplishments which he wished her to acquire’ (p. 91). It seems especially appropriate that Mannering should grant her a confidential interview in Mervyn’s library. As Jane Millgate observes, all of her perceptions are coloured by art or literature.48 She is a romantic, whose sentiments are spun from the vacuum of her own limbo. Although her circumstances are unusual, she is seen to be representative of a modern rootless sensibility that relates to the world through metropolitan categories of taste which have no organic connection with any locality (a sensibility glimpsed in Mervyn’s description of the cake-house, the destination of walking gentleman of all descriptions in search of the picturesque, p. 90). Julia, as constructed for us through her writing, is a disembodied presence for much of the narrative. But the polite characters have few distinguishing physical features anyway, apart from those relating to profession and status. Politeness confers protection from close visual inspection – gentlefolk are defined by their dress, speech, and manners, not by their bodies. It is those beyond the norms of politeness whose bodies become objects of scrutiny. Sampson’s ‘long mis-shapen legs’ and ‘immense shoulderblades’; Hattaraick’s ‘prodigiously muscular’ frame; Meg’s unusual height and ambiguous gender, her dark elf-locks ‘like the snakes of the gorgon’, and wild rolling eyes – such observations render the body as an object of anxiety or ridicule, registering the alienation of a refined sensibility which takes pleasure in ‘little neatnesses’ (pp. 11, 24, 14). In this novel, then, polite identity is defined by norms and categories which, in the context of the novel’s own view of Liddesdale, seem deeply repressive. But the narrator tends to resist the primitivist implications of his own narrative, remaining – like Brown himself – firmly within the limitations that are exposed. The tension between description and judgement, between experience and the polite assessment of experience, is focused with particular intensity in the scenes in which Brown confronts Meg Merrilies. Brown’s relationship with her is at once closer and more distant than Mannering’s – more distant because he finds no basis for identification with her, even though she repeatedly offers him one. Ostensibly his confusion in her presence arises from his failure to remember his childhood nurse. But there is a more fundamental failure

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at issue here – a failure to interpret what lies beyond the polite categories by which he constructs his world. On leaving Liddesdale, Brown meets and observes the Gypsy in a way that parallels Mannering’s first encounter with her. Like Mannering, he watches through an aperture as she performs a folk ceremony. Whereas Mannering watched a ceremony for the birth of the Laird’s child, Brown observes a ceremony of death performed over a dying outlaw to ease his passing (ch. 27). The repetition links the heir of privilege and the debased criminal in a levelling humanitarian concern, a connection strengthened by the recollection of how, when Brown was ill as a child, Meg lay all night ‘below the window, chaunting a rhyme’ until the crisis was over (p. 40). But unlike Mannering, Brown can make no identification with her actions. The aperture defines an unbridgeable cultural frame. Although he first addresses her as ‘mother’ (p. 123), he cannot recognise the maternal role in her care for the dying criminal. When she reaches out to protect him, he feels only a ‘masculine grasp’. Even as he watches her carefully arrange the outlaw’s dead body, he cannot ‘read’ in her face traces of compassion or humanity (p. 146). In a characteristic manoeuvre, the non-communication at issue here is given a more explicit and comic treatment elsewhere, when Meg takes the role of mother-provider, offering the Dominie a meal of (poached) game, which he accepts while continuing to see her only as ‘harlot, thief, witch, and gypsy’ (p. 283). The Dominie seems both ridiculous and hypocritical, but his reaction in some respects epitomises the response of Brown, and of the narrator. When she shows Brown the ruined home in which she bore her children and used to nurse him on her knee, her ‘look of peculiar and softened interest’ draws no corresponding response from him. Instead her personal feeling is transformed by the narrator into an object of aesthetic appreciation, a ‘study worthy of our Siddons’ (p. 328). Brown himself will eat ‘a morsel or two’ of the Gypsy’s meal, but in the moment when, mortally wounded, she publicly identifies him as the heir of Ellangowan, and takes hold of his hand, there is no response from him at all (she is consigned instead to the care of professionals – a clergyman and surgeon, pp. 329, 336). Elizabeth Bronfen has shown how ‘the construction of Woman-asOther’ often necessitates the woman’s death, so that cultural norms can be reconfirmed or secured ‘over her dead body’. The sacrifice of a virtuous, innocent woman ‘serves as a social critique and transformation’, while the sacrifice of a dangerous woman re-establishes an order suspended because of her presence.49 Meg Merrilies’s death is necessary in order to allow the contradictions that have played through the text to be closed off. As we have seen, Brown’s story is based on contradictory

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feelings – both subversive and conservative – which can be related to Scott’s own position as Anglo-British Scott. As a dispossessed outsider, Brown may call into question the value of Mannering’s style, arms, and fortune, but as restored heir he has no such qualms. The figure of the Gypsy is the focus of a comparable contradiction. She has to be rejected, not because she is part of an anachronistic fantasy of feudal loyalty which respects established hierarchies, but because she also displays a disinterested compassion and a sense of justice which ignores them. Scott’s figure of the Gypsy is dangerous because she can do ‘what good women canna, and darena do’ (p. 286). Her actions call into question the terms in which virtue and innocence – or humanity and compassion – can be understood, the terms in which woman herself can be recognised, by the polite Anglo-British observer. Brown’s restoration has to take place over her dead body, since it confirms the repression of the feelings to which the Gypsy appeals. In the final chapter Brown, as Bertram, has safely assumed the master’s place in the polite world of law, entails, financial arrangements, plans for new buildings. When he announces that he will repay his father’s creditors, Mannering grasps him by the hand, and there is ‘a thorough understanding between them’ (pp. 352–3). Debts and gestures of this kind, it seems, are easily comprehended. We learn that Bertram, who has longed to dedicate himself to the arts of peace, may in fact be ‘obliged again to go to India’, taking Julia with him, since his house needs the ‘ballast’ of ‘Sicca rupees’ (pp. 352, 354). The possibility of armed adventure is not, after all, to be renounced, but is firmly dissociated from the operations of Hattaraick, who, like Meg, must die. Boundaries have once more been redrawn, and the narrator does not formally recognise the more challenging implications of his own narrative. But the final revelation that Mannering plans to retire to a nearby ‘Bungalow’ (p. 355) might suggest that Scotland is a colonised nation as well as an imperial power – a situation that the text itself cannot resolve.

Europe and its Others: The Talisman In Guy Mannering, as in some of Scott’s other novels, the British hero is viewed in relation to others that are placed beyond civil order – either as criminal, or archaic, or ‘primitive’. Thus he represents India primarily through obscurely seen ‘banditti’ and exotic superstition. In his crusading novel, The Talisman, Scott inverts this relationship, by representing medieval European civilisation in relation to an Islamic civilisation that is in some respects more sophisticated. Here the

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historical distance from the Scotland of his own day allows Scott to undertake an imaginative critique of the Christian psychology that helped to establish the modern European world-view. The lasting power of the crusade as a marker of historical relations between Christians and Muslims was illustrated in the wake of ‘9/11’, in the anger and alarm that greeted George W. Bush’s comparison of his war on terrorism to a ‘crusade’.50 The remarkable reassessment of Islamic culture currently being undertaken in the west, often driven by shifting political and social interests, has moved uncertainly between ideas of dichotomy and continuity. As the discussion of Middle Eastern conflict has moved away from ideas of nationalism towards the concept of an opposition between fundamentally different world-views (in Samuel P. Huntingdon’s notorious phrase, a ‘Clash of Civilizations’), academic discussion of eastern culture has been dominated by responses to Said’s Orientalism, in which, as we have noted, the east is the west’s ‘great complementary opposite’.51 On the understanding that both of these developments threaten to generate new and distorting forms of dichotomous difference, some writers have moved to emphasise the historical influence of Islamic culture on Christian cultures, and have attempted to map out the common ground between them.52 In the context of such conflicting trends, the crusade against Saladin has proved a useful point of reference by which to examine western preconceptions about Islam, and to represent the need for tolerance and mutual understanding between Christians and Muslims (as in the recent revival of interest in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, and in Ridley Scott’s movie Kingdom of Heaven, a work clearly influenced by Walter Scott’s Talisman).53 In Scott’s era, as we have seen, enlightened respect for oriental culture was being replaced by assertions of Christian superiority. The crusade was a focal point for both attitudes. The Scottish historian William Robertson had represented the influence of oriental culture on Christian Europe as the most beneficial effect of the crusades, as it tended to dispel the ‘barbarism and ignorance’ of Europe.54 Other enlighteners, including Voltaire and Lessing, had satirised the prejudice and superstition of the Christians at the time of the crusades, while representing Saladin as an exemplar of humanitarian tolerance.55 But in the post-revolutionary era, such views were less commonly expressed. In Britain the influence of the evangelicals, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society, and the religious magazines generated a new climate of opinion less hospitable to overt criticism of Christianity. The magazines were often sharply critical of imaginative literature (Scott himself had been condemned in the Christian Observer), and keen to monitor its

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moral tendency.56 For the increasingly active missionary movement, resolved to promote Christianity within the developing British Empire in the east, the crusades were an inspirational precedent; Peter the Hermit, the preacher credited with inspiring the first crusade, far from being the bigoted enthusiast attacked by enlighteners, was a model to be emulated.57 In Europe a mystically inspired Holy Alliance of autocratic Christian monarchs had been formed, monarchs determined to bolster their own power in defiance of increasing discontents at home, while at the same time deeply suspicious of each other’s motives, and seemingly paralysed by the problems associated with the Ottoman Empire. In response to the revival of the slave trade among some European nations, the British anti-slavery movement was reanimated, a movement whose aim of liberating slaves was linked to the goal of conversion. While comparative philologists and students of romance continued to emphasise the influence of the Orient on European culture, many writers, including the utilitarian James Mill and a growing number of romantic Hellenists, were inclined to repudiate such influence.58 By the time Scott came to write The Talisman, in 1825, the crusades, and especially the third crusade, had become fashionable subjects of romance. But in the post-revolutionary era, writers treating the subject were generally responsive to the new atmosphere of Christian reassertion. In poems, novels, and plays about the crusades, writers acknowledged Saladin’s admirable qualities, and even the historical limitations of the crusaders, but insisted on the pre-eminence of Christianity, and contrived to represent it in triumphant terms. At the same time the traditional association of the Orient with despotism, fanaticism, slavery, and sensuality was repeatedly reinforced. Scott’s novel can be seen in relation to a current vogue for crusading romances, which effectively begins in France with Sophie Cottin’s very popular novel Mathilde (1805, soon translated into English as Matilda and Malek Adhel the Saracen, 1809), and continues with Louisa Sidney Stanhope’s novel The Crusaders (1820), Barbara Hoole’s story for children Theodore (1821), and Eleanor Anne Porden’s epic poem Coeur de Lion (1822). The plots developed by these women writers all made free use of conventions drawn from renaissance epic, oriental tales, and the gothic novel, in order to allow movement across cultural boundaries through disguise and/or romantic attachment, while at the same time reasserting Christian superiority. The narratives often focus on Christians who have become enslaved by Muslims, and are expected to convert to Islam. But while Christian slaves adopt oriental clothes or Muslim identities, they usually retain their Christian faith in secret.59 Christian women who fall in love with worthy Saracen males find their conflict of allegiance

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resolved by the deathbed conversion of the Muslim.60 The worst fate that can befall a Christian, it seems, is to succumb to the faith of Islam, as the unfortunate Agnes does in Sophie Cottin’s Matilda and Malek Adhel the Saracen (she is seduced and converted by the beguiling Saracen Malek, who then treats her like a slave and thinks of resigning her to another husband). The crusading soldiers are sometimes shown to be corrupted by their ambitions and their bloody deeds, but the romances include spiritual guides such as the historical Archbishop of Tyre or the traditional Christian hermit, figures endowed with saintly piety, who are contrasted with their deluded and superstitious nonChristian counterparts. The internal evidence suggests that Scott was familiar with some of these romances, although I know of no external evidence that might confirm this. Like Stanhope, for example, he introduces Richard on his sickbed, and has the hero save him from an attacking Saracen. Like Cottin, he uses a pilgrimage to account for the presence of the female characters. Like Barbara Hoole (Mrs Hofland) in Theodore (1821) he ends with a reconciliation between Richard and the Earl of Huntingdon (except that in Hoole the Earl of Huntingdon is revealed as Robin Hood, whereas in Scott he is revealed mysteriously as the Prince of Scotland). Like all of these writers he uses the romance plot to secure the conventional affirmation of Christian identity (through the marriage of the Christian hero to the pious Christian heroine) – although other elements of Scott’s novel may undermine this conclusion. Scott uses the conventions of romance to license a more historical and analytical treatment of Christianity than his contemporaries provide, and to explore its role in the emergence of ideas of nation and empire. His treatment of the attempts of European monarchs to co-operate at the time of the crusades, to assert their Christian identity against an oriental threat, and of the jealousies that ultimately defeat these attempts, had an immediate relevance to contemporary Europe and its Holy Alliance. Christianity In one part of his romance, Scott responds to the enlightenment critique of the crusades in a way that fundamentally undermines the conventional assumption of Christian superiority. The novel’s opening scene, in which a red-cross knight toils cumbrously across a burning desert plain, offers an ironic counterpart to the opening of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, the great allegory of Christian and national virtue. If this opening alerts us to the possibility of allegorical reading, conventional expectations are defeated.61 The red-cross knight turns out to be a

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disguised Scot, the pious hermit is a deluded Archimago, and most scandalous of all, the satanic Paynim is a kind of saviour. The landscape of the Holy Land has been assimilated to the deceiving landscape of hell: it is a scene of ‘brimstone and salt’ in which the Dead Sea, the grave of the once proud Cities of the Plain, is sulphurous like the infernal lake of Paradise Lost. The sickness that afflicts the Europeans in this realm evokes the traditional grail quest, whose function is to redeem both land and king. But here the knight’s quest is part of a cunning plan formed by the despotic Conrade of Montserrat to defeat the crusade. The romance presents a world in which Christian Europe is seen to have lost contact with the sources of its own beliefs and values, a version of the myth of western civilisation as sickening in a waste land, a culture whose degeneration might find answers in the wisdom of the east, in doctrines that might be summarised in terms that readers of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land will recognise: give, sympathise, control. Scott’s critique of Christianity appears to be based on the searching sociological and psychological critique provided by Gibbon in his history of Rome. Gibbon argued that the crusades weakened the bands of medieval society in Europe, since they produced a condition in which ‘the duties of the feudal tenure no longer existed’. The status traditionally derived from inheritance and education, or from guardianship of the ‘plebeian multitude’, became less important than status derived from feats of war. The attempt to replace social duties grounded in established property relations with social bonds sustained by money, personal feeling, or force gave a special importance to the symbols of power (the chief’s ‘banner, his armorial coat, and his cry of war’), those symbols by which group identity and loyalty were displayed and maintained.62 Similarly, in The Talisman Scott focuses on military service that is based not on ‘the duties of the feudal tenure’, but on more arbitrary submissions and makeshift allegiances. We learn, for example, that King Richard I’s wealth allows him to take command of the soldiers of other leaders and treat them as his own.63 He forces the other European princes to pay their respects to his banner, although he claims no natural allegiance from them (p. 251). And of course he has among his followers the Prince of Scotland, the hero Sir Kenneth, who has completely submerged his own identity to follow Richard, while owing him no political allegiance. The novel’s repeated emphasis on such arbitrary gestures of allegiance foreshadows the eventual demise of the feudal system and the rise of the modern nation, in which an ideology of individual and collective service rooted in Christian doctrine will allow economic and military power to have an overriding function in the grouping of individuals under the symbols of collective identity.

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The Talisman’s concern with the disembedding of allegiance from its traditional bases is brought into focus by the unusually abstract settings of Scott’s narrative. Unlike other crusader narratives of the period, Scott conspicuously excludes the familiar oriental locations that keep readers in contact with the order of civilisation – the castles, temples, palaces, and so on in which social hierarchies find their spatial equivalent. And he also disconnects the crusaders from the military activities that usually have an important place in crusader tales (a thirty-day truce leaves them to languish in a camp apparently located in the desert between Jean d’Acre and Ascalon, where they are wasted by sickness). In this way the narrative generates a sense of the tenuous relationship between the tents, armour, costumes, and insignia of the Christians, the signs of their culture and purpose, and the vacuous landscape in which they camp. The English banner that symbolises Richard’s military ambition is displayed not on the walls of a liberated city, but on the burial mound of a forgotten champion, a sepulchre staking a futile and failed claim for temporal and personal recognition. The indeterminate setting gives surrealistic expression to Gibbon’s perception that in the crusades, the signs and symbols of European power lose their grounding in the economic and social needs of established communities. How has this bizarre situation come about? In Gibbon’s account, Christianity has an important role in creating the psychological conditions for this transformation. He describes medieval Christianity as divided between extremes of self-denial and aggressive appetite, between ascetic ritual and an urge for opulence and domination – a division that creates a kind of spiral (since as Christian manners ‘relaxed’ so the discipline increased). The crusades emerged from the psychic energy generated by this split. So the first crusade was inspired by Peter the Hermit, whose ‘fancy was inflamed’ by his own ascetic lifestyle. And it was fuelled by the harsh discipline of penance imposed for sexual and other sins, since the ‘plenary indulgence’ granted to crusaders acted as an incentive for them to join the crusade. The system of chivalry, in which crusading knights were schooled, fostered the same division between self-denial and aggressive desire, linking ascetic discipline with the patronage of ‘chaste and high born beauty’.64 So within this system, Christian repression, including the repression imposed by chivalric discipline, fuels and licenses the pursuit of new goals, goals that are not embedded in the duties of feudal tenure. And at the same time it fosters the habits of submission needed to maintain new allegiances and duties without their traditional grounding. Scott’s novel appears to be shaped fundamentally by this understanding of Christian psychology, which makes a direct connection

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between repression on the one hand, and the ambitions and allegiances of the crusaders on the other. But Scott makes explicit what is implicit in Gibbon, namely the connection between this psychological condition and the Christian’s ambivalent reaction to ethnic and racial difference. Repression The repressive Christian ideology that fuels the crusades is represented in various ways throughout Scott’s novel. But the link between Christian repression on the one hand, and aggression towards the Saracen on the other, is explored most subtly in the experience of the Christian hero. At the beginning of the novel Sir Kenneth reaches a truce with a Saracen he has met in the desert, and goes with him into what is identified as the biblical ‘wilderness of temptation’, where the two begin to compare their respective beliefs. Drawn out by his Muslim companion, Sir Kenneth readily defends the Christian ‘liberty’ to drink wine (p. 21), and the Christian warrior’s devotion to female beauty (p. 23). But he then begins to feel thoughts of earthly pleasure polluting his devotion when the Saracen sings Persian poems in praise of beauty and of wine. The Saracen, that is, begins to mirror those very desires that the Christian’s own conditioning encourages him to celebrate as good and to repress as temptations. At this point we arrive at a moment of nonrecognition typical of Scott’s fiction. The Christian hero’s mounting struggle with his own feelings of guilt is shown to give rise directly to feelings of outrage and hostility towards the Saracen, who must be seen as the moral opposite – a satanic tempter – rather than the moral likeness, of the Christian. In this way the novel reflects ironically on that anxiety found in much literature of this period (including the other crusade romances I mentioned), an anxiety that has interested modern critics – the fear of identification with the Orient, of losing one’s sense of difference by coming into contact with oriental culture. Unlike the other crusade romances, The Talisman carefully contextualises this anxiety. The novel makes it clear from the outset that during the crusades the differences between Europeans and Saracens have been diminishing as a result of cultural exchanges. So the Saracens have absorbed some of the chivalric ethos of the Europeans, while Europeans have adopted Saracen practices. We learn that the luxury and profligate indulgence of the Christian leaders has brought into their tents ‘a motley concourse’ of ‘musicians, courtezans, Jewish merchants, Copts, Turks, and all the varied refuse of the Eastern nations’ (p. 219). (Here, as elsewhere, Scott emphasises the difference between the ascetic ideals and the actual practice of the

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Christians.) The princes who despise the Orientals nevertheless adopt their customs, including the custom of keeping black slaves in their households. The penetration of the western camp by the east provides the mainspring of the plot, as a disguised Saladin repeatedly mingles with the Christians, working to cure his ailing enemy King Richard. Such exchanges provide a context that illuminates and ironises the Christians’ determination to assert their difference from, and superiority to, the oriental. Just as Sir Kenneth denies the correspondence of Persian poetry with his own desires, so he ignores the similarity of the oriental tale to the tale of chivalry (p. 232), and, while stimulated to Christian prayer by the fervent devotion of Muslim companions, he insists on regarding their worship as idolatry. In relation to the Saracen, then, the perception of sameness must be suppressed, while the sense of difference must be reasserted, since the Christian finds in the apparent excesses of oriental culture an unacceptably clear image of his own desires, desires which his Christian conditioning has rendered a source of anxiety and conflict. Much of the plot of The Talisman seems designed to explore in stylised, semi-allegorical terms the relationship between the hero’s ambivalent attitude to the Saracen and his own repressed sexuality – specifically his chivalric desire for an unapproachable, unattainable mistress. This exploration is made in two narrative sequences, in which the hero moves from seeing the Saracen as an honourable counterpart to seeing him as representative of an oriental excess that has to be resisted. In the first sequence (chs. 3 to 5) the hero is rescued from the Saracen temptation by a Christian hermit, who exemplifies in his own life the psychological drive that inspires the crusade, a devotion driven by repressed erotic passion, harsh penitence, and rigorous self-restraint. The goatskinned Theodorick, one of Scott’s most audacious creations, unites in one person two conventional figures: the pious hermit of the Christian crusade narratives and his symbolic opposite, the deceiving enchanter who inveigles the questing knight from the path of virtue. Theodorick will eventually identify himself as Alberick of Mortemar (p. 193), a military hero corrupted by chivalrous desire, who betrayed his (socially inferior) lady in the role of confessor, after she had been placed in a convent to protect her from him. Here, as in the complementary case of Kenneth and Edith, chivalry represents the female as the object of a devotion that may transcend differences in social status, while sexual relationships are actually strictly governed by such differences. Theodorick’s aspiration to reclaim the empty sepulchre in the Holy City is fuelled by his guilty devotion to the nun’s sepulchre beneath his own cell. His buried history thus dramatically enforces a link between frustrated sexuality, penitential guilt, and crusading zeal, exposing the divisions that underlie the

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Christian missions (the ‘two spirits’ as his self-diagnosis later reveals, one active, one abject, p. 195). Kenneth’s dream-like experiences here, framed by the hermit’s self-torturing penance, move ambivalently between paradisal vision and nightmare (the ‘sense of oppression’ on the chest that rouses Kenneth is a conventional sign of nightmare; it is caused by the hermit, pressing his right hand on Kenneth’s chest).65 The relic of the cross and the maiden’s ruby ring may induce sincere reverence in Kenneth, but they have no talismanic power in this romance, which creates an equivalence between the hermit’s devotion to an idol he must not see and Kenneth’s paralysed adoration of a woman he must not address. The two dwarfs who rise from the earth like evil spirits figure the underside of chivalric idealisation – human smallness dignified by self-flattering delusion; physical and cultural difference seen as deformity. In the second sequence (chs. 12–14, 22–3) the hero is rescued from the threat of Christian discipline by the Saracen, who leads him back into a realm of oriental luxury that once again must be resisted. When Kenneth dreams under the influence of the talisman (ch. 22), he becomes detached from his own identity ‘as he might have viewed the story of his misfortunes acted upon a stage’ (p. 240). But if this suggests an impending psychological transformation, the novel is unable to fulfil the expectation. On awakening Kenneth refuses the emir’s clothes prepared for him, disdaining to assume the image of the ‘infidel’ and, inverting the pattern of the famous oriental tale ‘The Sleeper Awakes’, choosing a Christian slave’s identity instead. The hero’s movement between these two poles – of Christian selfdenial and oriental luxury – provides an expressive, semi-allegorical representation of his own repressed desires, since in each case the rescue leads him into a staged encounter with his unattainable mistress, in which he appears as a motionless, abject, speechless worshipper. In each case the hero’s sexual desire is mediated by his masculine guide – the hermit embodying the Christian guilt and aggression that actually govern the hero, the Saracen embodying the more open acceptance of desire that would approach the mistress as a ‘forward lover’ (an acceptance that our hero feels bound to resist). Slavery In the hero’s relations with the Saracen the novel draws a consistent link between Christian repression and fear of oriental excess. In this way it provides a suggestive view of one aspect of Europe’s relations with its others – the need to maintain difference. But the novel also engages with the obverse of this need. For difference is needed in order to claim

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superiority, and superiority is needed in order to justify not only the expulsion of difference (as in the eviction of the heathen from the Holy Land), but also the assimilation of difference, the conversion of the other into the same. The novel engages with this need when it touches on the issue of slavery. As we have seen, slavery was among the practices for which the Orient was conventionally condemned – although the European princes in Scott’s novel have adopted the oriental practice of keeping slaves, just as the modern European economies were also directly or indirectly linked to the practice of slavery. This was another area in which the Orient provided a mirror in which Europe chose not to recognise itself. When the hero is taken under the protection of the Saracen, he is offered a fine Islamic disguise. But he disdains to wear it, and fears that his Christian faith is under threat. And so instead he is disguised as a Christianised Nubian slave, in which disguise he re-enters the service of King Richard as a gift from Saladin, and bears a message from Saladin to his own mistress. It is a plot contrivance that opens up a number of troubling issues, by establishing and unsettling hierarchies of difference. Passing references in Scott’s novel reproduce the estranged view of black peoples’ appearance common in much contemporary literature and in enlightenment theories of racial difference – as in Scott’s references to the ‘hideous’, ‘misshapen’, ‘frightful’ Negro eunuchs who guard the Eastern harem (p. 288). The disguised hero has to be distinguished clearly from such figures, since in the terms of the novel no such figure would be acceptable, whether as a gift for the English king, or as a messenger to a high-born Englishwoman, or as a disguise for the hero. Giving the hero a Nubian identity apparently helps to solve the problem. In Count Robert of Paris, the black slave Diogenes is referred to as a Nubian, and ‘Nubian physiognomy’ is spoken of disparagingly by the Varangian (or English) hero Hereward, in a passage that reveals his prejudice (ch. 7, p. 125). But in contemporary discussions of racial difference, Nubians were sharply distinguished from most other black nations, as appearing ‘neither ugly nor stupid, but ingenious, delicate, and possessed of some taste’.66 Kenneth is also a Christianised Nubian, which obviously increases the acceptability of his disguise: in contemporary abolition discourse it was taken for granted that the Christianising of slaves would help to elevate them (as the Edinburgh abolition society put it) from ‘the condition of brutes, in which they have been placed [. . .] to that of men’.67 Indeed, it was argued that the Christianisation of Africans more generally would be a good way of incorporating them into the sphere of British influence. In this context African identity had to be eliminated as much as possible, so that Africans could be recognised as men. If such assumptions worked to

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reinforce the image of the slave as brute, they also helped to establish the counter-image of the slave as non-threatening and receptive. As Celeste-Marie Bernier points out, abolitionists tended to use the slave’s body as ‘the sole marker of authenticity’, transforming it into an object of admiration (treating language and consciousness as secondary).68 In his semi-naked and abject condition, Sir Kenneth resembles the docile icon of the abolition movement, a slave on his knees, looking up imploringly – beneath the slogan ‘am i not a man and brother?’ (he is immediately acknowledged and admired as ‘A Man’ by King Richard). His disguise also puts him in the position of the ‘blackface’ African, familiar from the contemporary theatre, played by white actors. Felicity Nussbaum argues that such theatrical representations allow white men to inhabit black men’s bodies, to shape and mould the culture’s perceptions of them, while simultaneously implying through racial simulation that race is as ephemeral as paint. The core beneath the racial counterfeit, and perhaps even the core of black men themselves, is imagined as ‘white’.69

Sir Kenneth, his own body revealed and disguised as a mute, loyal, submissive Christian Nubian slave, is therefore a site at which a number of contemporary attitudes to racial difference converge. His ostensible function in the novel is to illustrate the importance of embracing otherness, and of voluntary self-abnegation, as part of a salutary learning and healing process. But he also provides an illustration of the European desire to incorporate difference by erasing it, taming it, or transforming it into similarity (in this case, the perception of likeness within difference is reassuring rather than disturbing). In the guise of the mute slave the hero is an iconic representation of the loss of cultural identity and voice that has always characterised his condition as crusader. For as crusader, he is a Scottish prince in the service of an English king, a figure who has submerged his own identity, as well as his own desires, to a chivalrous ideal that effectively enslaves him. When Kenneth kneels speechless before Edith, he repeats the situation we have already seen in the caves of Engaddi. Indeed, he takes the name of Zohauk, the Persian king in Saladin’s tale, who is associated with selfenclosure and repression. The repetitions of the narrative establish a connection between the condition of the Scottish prince, reduced to abjection by the paralysing self-restraint fostered by his Christian beliefs, and the slave reduced to abjection by constraints imposed by others. One might conclude that such abjection lies at the heart of European nation-building and empire-building – since Christianity promotes an ideal of individual and collective service that paradoxically transcends the interests of individuals and of established communities, while generating through repression the urge for power and conquest.

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Other elements of the novel allow us to conclude that the crusading mentality is soon to be displaced in Europe through the progress of society. The cumbersome rituals of accusation, challenge, council, and combat by which the Europeans settle their offences are the antecedents of the legal processes that will secure the rights of individuals in commercial societies. Among the unforeseen consequences of the crusades, according the historian William Robertson, were the political privileges granted to cities, which liberated them from feudal oppression.70 Gibbon singles out the Assise of Jerusalem as an example of such privileges, an innovative model of political liberty which secured justice for the citizens of Jerusalem.71 Adam Smith argued that such privileges secured the rise of commerce in Europe at the expense of the oppressive power of nobles. In The Talisman, Conrade of Montserrat – a candidate for the crown of a restored kingdom of Jerusalem – opts for orientalstyle despotism in his ‘poor marquisate’ in preference to a kingdom that would include the Assise of Jerusalem (pp. 114–15). In the companion novel published with The Talisman, The Betrothed, the escape from chivalry through legal and commercial progress is given much more prominence. Here, the destructive impact of the crusade – promoted in twelfth-century Wales to ameliorate the divisions among Christians – is directly contrasted with the beneficial effects of commerce, which generates a rationality governed not by vows and ideal goals, but by material ends and means. Secured by legal privilege, commerce is seen to promise a release from divisive ideology, leading to the ready acceptance of foreigners, and a practical, humanitarian, forward-looking mentality that should guarantee social unity and steady prosperity. Remarkably, in The Talisman, some of the desired ends of this understanding of progress – such as humanitarian sympathy and the refinement of aggressive masculinity – are embodied in Saladin, who combines these qualities with an efficient despotism illustrated in the swift beheading blow with which he dispatches Conrade. Indeed, the plot moves towards two quite different moments of symbolic reconciliation. The quasi-allegorical critique of chivalry culminates in Richard’s diplomatic reconciliation with Saladin, an event that stands in place of the Redcrosse Knight’s marriage with Una – Saladin taking the place of the bride, with his snow-white garb, and veiled and jewelled turban. As Margaret Bruzelius has compellingly argued, while the crusaders exemplify a masculinity associated with bestial aggression, loss of control, and rigidity, Saladin combined elements of both genders: ‘he wears not only the sword of the fighting man but also the jewels and veils of a woman’.72 Saladin maintains his hold on Jerusalem in the novel by combining ‘masculine’ courage with ‘feminine’ empathy – by taking on

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other, humbler identities, by getting close to his enemies, entering into dialogue about cultural differences, and by caring for them. The rapprochement between Richard and Saladin represents in symbolic form an ideal reconciliation that the novel itself is unable to realise in the realm of psychological development, because the ‘real’ culmination of the plot has to be the hero’s eventual reconciliation with the heroine, who represents conventional Christian piety and inflexibly Eurocentric views. This reconciliation ostensibly confirms the triumph of superior Christian values, and so reinforces the cultural preconceptions that are questioned elsewhere. If The Betrothed looks forward to the historical displacement of the crusading mentality by the rise of commerce, The Talisman, by focusing on the rivalry of European monarchs and Christian views of Islam, suggests the historical persistence of that mentality, and its structural role in the rise of European nations. In its combination of conservative and critical gestures, The Talisman might be compared with Thomas Moore’s highly popular poem of 1817, Lalla Rookh, which, as Javed Majeed argues, uses an orientalist mode to offer veiled denunciations of British imperialism in general, and in particular of the incorporation of a neighbouring nation, Ireland. As Majeed has shown, Moore’s work attracted a great deal of hostile criticism, but this criticism was directed to the extravagant orientalism of Moore’s poem, rather than its veiled critique.73 In a comparable way, Scott’s Talisman seems to have been read by contemporary readers as an oriental romance, without much unease about its allegorical elements. Felicia Hemans, for example, in her poem ‘An Hour of Romance’ celebrates the work simply as an oriental fantasy.74 For most of Scott’s readers the neutralising effect of the conventional romance plot probably outweighed the more critical implications of the work. But for readers attuned to the challenging perspectives of enlightenment writers, and familiar with the idealised version of Saladin constructed by those writers as a means of exposing Christian limitations, the novel allows for a view that undermines the more comforting patterns of romance. The game of non-recognition, often thematically central to the romance mode in which disguise and mistaken identity feature prominently, became a formal necessity in Scott’s approach to the reading public. The characters in his fictions who – like Saladin – ‘step down’, concealing their own personal identity and social status by adopting a lower-status disguise, are counterparts of the author, who sometimes fulfils his own role by adopting the guise of naive border minstrel or obtuse antiquarian, and who descends from the role of demythologising historian to inhabit the popular conventions of romance. Such gameplaying allowed conventional beliefs to be sustained as the price of

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popular acceptance, but at the same time reserved a space for the recognition of alternative, less comforting views.

Notes 1. Bayley, ‘The British and indigenous peoples’, p. 19. 2. Featherstone, ‘Global Culture’; Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, pp. 29–32; San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory, p. 5. 3. Hopkins, ‘The history of globalization’, p. 25. 4. Morgan, ‘Encounters between British and “indigenous people” ’, p. 46. 5. Tim Fulford has recently reminded us of the romantic association between the highlander and the American Indian that shaped and was promoted by Scott’s writings: ‘Romantic Indians and their Inventors’. 6. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, pp. xiii–xiv. 7. Colley, Britons, p. 5. 8. In his satirical poem The True-Born Englishman (1701). Defoe countered anti-Dutch prejudice by claiming that the ‘uncertain and uneven’ English were ‘Deriv’d from all the Nations under Heav’n’ (lines 173–4). 9. Morgan, P. D., ‘Encounters between British and “indigenous” peoples’, p. 44; Fisher, M. H., ‘Asians in Britain’. 10. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, p. 9. Leith Davis considers some key aspects of the literary dialogue over the nature of Britain in Acts of Union. 11. Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, p. 2. 12. Said, Orientalism, p. 1. 13. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, pp. 27–9. 14. See Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 1–80; Marshall, Problems of Empire, pp. 70–7. 15. See Green, Dreams of Adventure, pp. 112–18. 16. Rendall, ‘Scottish orientalism’, pp. 43–69. Rendall notes that Scott’s teacher at Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart, was sympathetic to Sir William Jones’s comparative philology. 17. Colquhoun, Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire, p. ix. 18. Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 14. All subsequent references are to this 1999 edition, except where specified. 19. Ibid., pp. 497–8. 20. Burke’s Speech on Fox’s India Bill, 1 December 1783, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, V, pp. 378–451. 21. For example, Moodie, Remarks on the Most Important Military Operations (1788). The writer defends General Mathews and his men against the charge of ‘cruelty and peculation’ p. 5, quoting Dodsley’s Annual Register (1785) on the ‘slaughter, cruelty, rapine and avarice’ of the Bidnure campaign, and The Monthly Review (1785) on the provocation given by the British army to Tippoo Sultan (p. 12). Colonel Stuart Douglas reported on official connivance in the kidnapping of recruits for the East India Company’s army in A Military Dissertation (1781). 22. Ali, Manifesto, pp. 27, 32.

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23. See Jane Millgate’s ‘Introduction’, to Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. Garside, p. xvii. 24. Wallace, ‘Elephant’s foot’, p. 315. 25. Scott, Chronicles of the Canongate, p. 219. 26. Wallace, ‘Elephant’s foot’, p. 108. Wallace sees the discrepancy between these accounts as undermining cultural stereotypes, while preserving Mannering’s honour. 27. For example, Gillray’s famous print ‘The New Morality’, or Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Olaudah Equiano gives a vivid portrait of the compassion and liberal feelings of the slave owner Mr King, under whose ownership he often ‘felt much hunger’: Interesting Narrative, p. 105. 28. Kinvig, Isle of Man, pp. 115–16. 29. Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, pp. 226–9. 30. See Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 23. 31. Scott, Heart of Mid-Lothian, ed. Inglis, p. 28. 32. Burke pointed out the similarities between the British government’s treatment of the American colonies and of the Isle of Man in his speech on American taxation. See The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, II, p. 424. 33. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, p. 429. 34. For the relationship with the highland clearances, see McMaster, Scott and Society, pp. 156–61, and Jordan, ‘Management of Scott’s novels’, pp. 14661. For the relationship with India see Garside, ‘Meg Merrilies and India’, pp. 154–71; Garside, ‘Picturesque figure and landscape’, 145–74; and Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism. 35. Lawson, East India Company, p. 132; Mackenzie, J. M., ‘Essay and reflection’; Ruddle, ‘Tiger and the thistle’, p. 15. 36. Mackenzie, ‘Essay and reflection’, p. 717. See also Fry, Dundas Despotism, pp. 111–29. 37. Gillray, ‘Dun-Shaw’. 38. See Richards, ‘Scotland and the uses of the Atlantic empire’, pp. 84–7, 101–6. 39. Colley, Britons, p. 121. 40. See Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 589. Langford cites as one of the most notorious cases of duelling at the time of the American war the case of ‘Tyger’ Roche who, embarked for India, quarrelled with a group of Scotsmen who had questioned the honour of his wife and of the daughter of (the anti-Scots) John Wilkes. 41. See Spear, Nabobs, pp. 62–4; Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, p. 116. 42. Grant, Observations, pp. 71, 74, Wilberforce, Substance, pp. 92–3. 43. Spear, Nabobs, pp. 140–1; Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class, pp. 4–5. 44. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 44. 45. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature, p. 15. 46. Dinmont’s journey to Edinburgh to seek legal redress in a neighbourly dispute is a sign of impending change. 47. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, pp. 213–23 48. Millgate, Walter Scot, p. 70. 49. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, p. 181. 50. Christian Science Monitor, 19 September 2001.

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51. Huntington, ‘Clash of civilizations?’; Said, Orientalism, p. 1. 52. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, p. 15. 53. For example, the recent productions of Nathan the Wise in translations by Richard Sewell (Pearl Theatre Company, off-Broadway) and Edward Kemp (Hampstead Theatre, London). 54. Robertson, W., History of the Reign of Emperor Charles V, I, p. 32. Robertson hoped the study of the universal development of civilisation would challenge belief in the ‘natural’ superiority of Europeans: An Historical Disquisition, pp. 335–6. 55. Voltaire, Micromegas, p. 91. There were two English translations of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1781 and 1791), which features a tolerant Saladin and prejudiced Christians. 56. Altick, English Common Reader, pp. 101–24. 57. Lefroy, Pamphlets on the Crusade. 58. Bernal, Black Athena, p. 291; Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, pp. 84–5; Rendall, ‘Scottish orientalism’; Watt, ‘Scott, enlightenment and orientalism’, pp. 94–112. 59. This device is used in Louisa Sidney Stanhope’s The Crusaders (1820) and Barbara Hoole’s Theodore (1821). 60. As in Sophie Cottin’s Matilda and Malek Adhel (1809), and Stanhope’s The Crusaders (following the precedent of Tasso’s Tancred and Clorinda). In Porden’s Coeur de Lion a marriage ends disastrously: the Muslim husband dies cursing his wife, who has secretly retained her Christianity. In Gaetano Rossi’s heroic opera The Crusaders in Egypt (1825), a Christian knight disguised as a Muslim secretly instructs his Muslim mistress in Christian doctrine. 61. See Duncan, I., ‘Scott’s romance of empire’. Duncan notes that the correspondences with Spenser’s allegory are ‘slippery’, p. 376. 62. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, III, p. 580. 63. Scott, The Talisman, p. 205. All subsequent references are to this edition. 64. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, III, pp. 558, 565–6, 578–9. 65. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defines ‘nightmare’ as ‘A morbid oppression in the night, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast’. 66. This view is recorded by the French natural philosopher Buffon: Eze, Race and Enlightenment, p. 72. The explorer John Lewis Burckhardt reported ‘the men of Nubia are generally well made, strong and muscular, with fine features’. He also found them kind and honest: Travels in Nubia, pp. 144, 147. 67. Anon., First Annual Report of the Edinburgh Society, p. 15. 68. Bernier, ‘ “Arms like polished iron” ’, p. 92. 69. Nussbaum, ‘Theatre of empire’, p. 77. 70. Robertson, History of the Reign of Emperor Charles V, I, p. 36. 71. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, III, pp. 610–11. 72. Bruzelius, ‘ “The King of England” ’, p. 30. 73. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, pp. 100–5. 74. Hemans, ‘An hour of romance’, pp. 253–5.

Chapter 5

Commerce, Civilisation, War, and the Highlands Rob Roy and A Legend of the Wars of Montrose

Guy Mannering, the military commander, represents one part of the machinery of empire, which secured by force the routes through which people, material goods, and ideas moved across established boundaries. The machinery was powered by the City of London, and by the new commercial and financial institutions that motivated and financed the development of trading interests overseas. As we have seen, in Waverley Scott tended to divorce cultural modernisation from the commercial interests and activities that promoted it. In Guy Mannering the hero’s attempt to maintain his distance from the commercial interests he serves is rendered problematic at various points in the narrative. In Rob Roy, however, the relationship between polite culture and commercial interests is considered more directly, and the problem of maintaining the hero’s distance from commerce is negotiated through a first-person narrative. Scott’s treatment of this subject can be approached by thinking about the more recent views of the political and cultural consequences of commerce. In our own age the accelerating process of globalisation, coupled with the rapid demise of a number of totalitarian regimes, has inspired optimistic visions of the liberating potential of capitalism. Francis Fukuyama, for example, proclaims the victory of capitalism as ‘the world’s only viable economic system’ and predicts that ‘liberal democracy’ may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological development’.1 George Herbert Bush’s vision of a ‘New World Order’ that could realise ‘the universal aspirations of mankind’ and establish global ‘peace and security, freedom and the rule of law’ is implicitly underpinned by a comparable faith in the liberating potential of capitalism.2 On the other hand, many critics have emphasised the dispossessions, inequalities, and cultural destruction associated with the rise of global capitalism, while some have addressed the question of how the optimists reconcile themselves to such negative consequences. Pierre Bourdieu finds an answer in

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the social condition of the ‘governing class’ in prosperous nations, a class which ‘being endowed with very high cultural capital (most obviously of academic origin, but also non-academic) [. . .] feels perfectly justified in existing as it currently does’.3 Others note the coexistence of two conflicting views of historical possibility: on the one hand, the idea that nations can work meaningfully for universal improvement; on the other, the view that globalisation operates beyond the control of sovereign states or politicians, and that its ‘tyrannies and inequities’ must therefore be accepted with resignation.4 While many observers claim that the processes and problems of globalisation are unprecedented, others such as John Gray argue that the present-day utopias of the global free-market ‘embody the same rationalist hubris and cultural imperialism that have marked the central traditions of enlightenment thinking throughout its history’.5 In Rob Roy Scott produces a history that is remote from the world of global communications and globalised markets, but which focuses on issues that are directly comparable with those fiercely debated in our own age: the gap between the high ideals used to justify commerce, and the destructive consequences of commercial development; the social and geographical distance between those who benefit and those who suffer from its effects; the coexistence of a belief in the creative role of the capitalist with an understanding that the consequences of capitalism are inevitable.

Rob Roy While the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 is the ostensible mainspring of the plot of Rob Roy, in practice the novel seems at least as concerned with the uneven economic and social development within the new Union, with the prospects for commercial expansion, and with the effects of British power on its periphery. In 1715 most of Britain’s trade was with continental Europe – the market with which Osbaldistone senior is associated (he mentions trade with France and Portugal).6 But trade was also rapidly expanding in what has since been termed the ‘imperial sector’ – the North American colonies, the plantations in the West Indies, the trading settlements in India – a development from which, as we have seen, the Scottish economy would draw considerable benefits.7 The novel’s movement northwards from London, the commercial centre of the Union, towards a violent climax in the Scottish highlands, which brings a company of British soldiers into armed conflict with dispossessed highlanders, has a symbolic resonance that goes far beyond its

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historical setting in the era of the 1715 rebellion. While in some respects it resembles a journey into the past, towards an encounter with a culture not yet transformed by modern refinements, in other ways it resembles a journey towards the future, in which British power will increasingly impinge upon such cultures. The treatment of a threatened highland community in Rob Roy has behind it not only a more recent history of highland dispossession, but also the contemporary history of popular resistance to imperial power overseas. In a discussion that considers Rob Roy in relation to enlightenment historicism and social science, Ian Duncan argues that the novel ‘floats adrift from the linear chronicle of modernization’ in order to reveal ‘the obscure, occult, bewildering shapes and forces of the present’.8 I would argue that the novel preserves the ‘linear chronicle’, but tends to undermine from within the moderniser’s perspective while ostensibly endorsing that perspective, calling into question the moral and cultural superiority assumed by its polite narrator. The novel engages with the ideology of empire by establishing links between the violence in the highlands, the operations of commerce, and the self-representation of the polite English narrator. It shows that the identity produced by its gentlemanly narrator is shaped by the values of a system of power. As Stephen Greenblatt has observed, ‘the power to impose a shape upon oneself is an aspect of the more general power to control identity – that of others at least as often as one’s own’.9 In Scott’s novel the narrator’s attempt to impose a shape on others in the writing of his narrative is exposed as a manifestation of the same system of power that imposes itself on them by force in the events he describes. Resistance to both kinds of imposition in the novel brings into view the contemporary anxieties of empire. The process of imposition and resistance at the level of narration can be defined as a conflict of discourses. The narrator’s judgements belong to an enlightenment discourse of civilisation, which links commerce with politeness and virtue, and which legitimises its subjection of what are thought of as pre-commercial cultures by representing them as at best in need of transformation and at worst as frighteningly barbaric. But his narrative also includes a romantic discourse of primitive liberty, which represents such a pre-commercial existence as ‘unfettered by system and affectation’ (p. 410), and shows commercial civilisation as a condition of oppression and self-deceit.10 The conflict between these discourses works to destabilise the authority of the narrator, whose inability to confront the implications of his story becomes part of its meaning. The novel looks back to an era in which mercantilist aims were being promoted and justified with little effective opposition. As the

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international conflicts of the eighteenth century amply demonstrated, the aims of mercantile policy – to assure national prosperity by securing the greatest proportion of global resources, and by monopolising international commerce and colonial markets – could be secured only with the aid of force.11 But in contemporary English poetry, plays, journalism, sermons and parliamentary oratory, the mercantilist vision of an expanding commercial empire was often represented within a discourse of civilisation as essentially peaceful. In The Spectator Addison lauded merchants as mainstays of the Commonwealth, who ‘knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find Work for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great’.12 In his Review Defoe portrayed ‘A TrueBred merchant’ in even grander terms, as a ‘Universal Scholar’ who ‘sits in his Counting-House, and Converses with all Nations, and keeps up the most exquisite and extensive part of human Society in a Universal Correspondence’.13 Such writings played an important part in the development of a mercantile ideology, in which commerce was represented as a non-violent activity by which Britain could gain an economic advantage over neighbouring states and expand its wealth through settlements overseas. Many writers saw a close affinity between British and Roman practice in the handling of colonies, and any deviation from the Roman model was, according to Peter Miller, ‘believed to threaten the survival of Britain’s empire’.14 But if, like Rome, Britain would have a civilising influence, unlike Rome it would exert its power through trade rather than military conquest.15 Such rhetoric was used at more than one level in the work of incorporating Scotland into the Union. It was used, for example, as political persuasion. When Defoe was enlisted in 1706 to promote the forthcoming Union, he explained in a series of essays how new trading opportunities would allow peaceful modernisation of Scotland and an extension of Scottish liberties.16 At the time of the 1715 uprising, Addison performed a comparable service in The Freeholder, envisaging ‘a Race of Free-holders spreading into the remotest Corners of the Island’, and arguing that, as a result of government policy, highlanders could be secure in their tenancies without having to follow their chiefs into rebellion.17 The rhetoric linking commerce, peace, virtue, and politeness was also used as part of a more general programme to transform Scottish culture. In Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, periodical journalism worked to forge a unified public, a process which has been described as a ‘colonising’ project, one which paralleled the British trader’s establishment of new markets overseas.18 It helped to establish for men and women the parameters of polite Anglo-British identity, an identity that required the suppression of Scottishness (since, like the

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female, the Scot as Scot existed in a subordinate relation to the British gentleman). Scots had particularly good reason to see this identity as part of a system of power, and to associate it with loss as well as gain. It seems clear that protests against the abuses associated with British commercial policy gathered momentum in the last decades of the eighteenth century.19 In the Wealth of Nations the Scottish economist Adam Smith had produced a devastating criticism of mercantilism, claiming that the system had encouraged economic activity to the benefit of the rich and powerful, while oppressing the poor; at home and in the colonies, those who benefited from trade seemed to display indifference to the welfare of those who fell under their influence or rule.20 Such criticisms found support in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, the scandalous reports concerning the effects of British presence in India, the gathering pace of industrialisation, the emergence of a newly articulate urban proletariat, and the disastrous effects of economic ‘improvement’ on the Scottish highlanders. But the discourse of civilisation worked to legitimise as well as to disclaim violence. In Britain every significant military campaign or expedition by British forces was represented in print, as were many campaigns of other nations. During the later part of the eighteenth century, explorations in the Pacific, military operations in India, clashes with American Indians, and comparable activities elsewhere ensured a growth in the representation of conflicts between professional soldiers and those who resisted their intrusions. The ‘enemies’ encountered in such operations were sometimes untrained and poorly armed, ambushing from hills or woodlands, relying on their own mobility and local knowledge to counteract the material disadvantages. The asymmetries of such ‘irregular’ conflict, and the horrific atrocities that often accompanied them, inevitably gave rise to expressions of regret by European observers. But the defeated were identified as ultimately the beneficiaries of conquest, through contact with a ‘superior’ culture, through liberation from despotism, or through the restoration of lost freedoms.21 The act of representation was itself part of the process by which conquest was legitimised, hegemony reaffirmed, and the identity of the defeated controlled. Accounts of military expeditions and campaigns which, like Scott’s novels, were geared to the diverse interests of a polite readership would sometimes include reflections on landscape, descriptions of commerce and manners, historical surveys, biographical studies of defeated leaders, and perhaps even a glossary – all manifestations of the civilising authority that might justify the military enterprise.22 By the time Scott came to write Rob Roy, the wars that followed the outbreak of the revolution in France had provided unprecedented

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reportage of irregular conflict of this kind, not only in distant overseas colonies, but also in Switzerland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and other European countries. Invasions and popular uprisings repeatedly brought uniformed soldiers into conflict with armed civilians, including sometimes women and children. Resistance to British power – in Ireland, in the West Indies, in Buenos Aires, and elsewhere – was generally regretted, even when government policy was being questioned. But such resistance to French power in Switzerland, Austria, and further afield was usually represented to British readers as heroic. Above all, when Napoleon’s manoeuvres in Spain and Portugal, designed to reinforce his blockade of British trade, led to popular risings against the French in 1808, the Spanish and Portuguese patriots became for a while the focus of intense enthusiasm and sympathy in Britain. In The Convention of Cintra (1809) Wordsworth explained the heroism of the Spanish patriots in terms of their pre-modern condition: their lack of manufactures, commerce, and big cities, their freedom from ‘the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau, and the flippancies of Voltaire’.23 They were represented, that is, within a discourse of primitive liberty, in which modern commercial civilisation was associated with the loss of freedom and virtue, and with linguistic corruption. From the beginning of 1811 there were impressive reports of the activities of the ‘guerrillas’ (a term which entered the English language at this time). The disparity between the seasoned, heavily armed French military and the patriot bands that harassed them in mountains, in defiles, and on rivers gave the guerrillas a particular glamour. The conflict was sometimes related to ancient precedents in which Rome featured not as a positive model of British civilising influence but as a negative model of French imperial aggression.24 The Times compared the defence of Lisbon by Portuguese guerrillas on the Sierra de Estrella to the heroic defence of Lusitania by the shepherd leader Viriatus against Roman invaders (14 January 1811). Wordsworth made a similar comparison in his poems of national independence, in which the guerrillas are celebrated, along with the Alpine herdsmen of the Tyrol, as patriot heroes.25 Scott, whose personal fascination with the Peninsular campaign was motivated in part by a romantic identification with the Iberian patriots, echoed the comparison in his poem The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), which drew unmistakable parallels between the Spaniards in their struggles against the French, and the Scots in their historical struggles against southern invaders.26 The Spaniards’ mode of operation was often closer to the outlaw’s than to the regular soldier’s. Indeed, the memoirs of the French commander de Rocca explained that the fierce patriots of the Sierra de Ronda – viewed once again as admirably pre-modern – were smugglers who had always

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been famous for their ‘address’ and for the dexterity with which they eluded excise officers. The reports of Iberian resistance figured a female heroism that contrasted sharply with the polite image of female virtue. De Rocca represented the women of the outlaw-patriots as of ‘gigantic’ size, with robust limbs and bold looks.27 The story of Augustina, the militant heroine of the siege of Zaragoza, was celebrated in Britain,28 most famously in the first canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (stanzas 54–8). No doubt the celebration of such resistance to a rival power allowed a polite British public to defuse some of the anxieties generated by British military operations. And in some respects the discourse of primitive liberty which helped to shape such reactions can be seen as complementing the discourse of civilisation which legitimised the expansion of empire. It promoted the same vision of history as a progress from rudeness to refinement, while revaluing it. And, paradoxically, it also represented the interests of the polite classes, even while questioning some aspects of polite culture. Thus while Wordsworth associates commerce, manufactures, and large cities with the loss of liberty and virtue, and with the reveries and flippancies of a language no longer anchored in the realities of daily life, he characteristically sidesteps the realities of modern urban agitation, validating instead a primitive form of resistance distanced from such problems. As we shall see, Scott’s novel shows a comparable pattern, focusing on a glamorous highland outlaw rather than on, say, an unemployed Glaswegian ‘mechanical’. Nevertheless, in challenging the moral basis of modern commercial culture, and in celebrating alternatives to polite norms of identity, the discourse of primitive liberty implicitly called into question the values of the system of power which governed the production of such identity. This questioning can be felt throughout much of Scott’s novel, not only in the ambivalent representation of highland resistance, but in the indirect exposure of the limitations of the narrator’s self-representation in other areas of the narrative. By the time we reach the end of Rob Roy we have been led to recognise, either directly or obliquely, some questionable characteristics of the mercantile system within which seemingly benign merchants such as Osbaldistone senior and Bailie Nicol Jarvie flourish. Ownership of a plantation in Jamaica implicates the Bailie indirectly in the slave trade, a fact perhaps hinted at in the reference to the ‘decent man’ Captain Coffinkey. Osbaldistone has bought up highland forests without any concern for, or knowledge of, those who live in the highlands. He trades with distant merchants without any clear knowledge of how they might use or abuse the power this connection gives them. The culture of credit

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has given unsympathetic or unscrupulous creditors the legal right to throw Owen in prison, and to evict Rob Roy’s family from their homes. It has also placed alarming power in the hands of the Jacobite Rashleigh. Through such details, the novel confirms a number of Adam Smith’s criticisms of mercantilism. And yet while the narrative provides a basis for retrospective criticism of the system that allows such developments, the narrator himself makes no such judgement. He continually judges the personal failings of his past self, his youthful rashness and filial disobedience, but his more general views – those that relate to the wider meaning of his story – remain unrevised.29 In the early chapters, for example, the rhetoric celebrating merchants and commerce in terms reminiscent of Defoe and Addison is distributed with apparent indifference between the younger and older Frank. To espouse such positive views of trade, while aiming, as young Frank does, to keep at a respectful distance from the world of business, would be in keeping with the civic morality that Scottish writers thought appropriate to a commercial society. But in this retrospective narrative such views have been tested against experiences that challenge them. Where we might expect a clearly defined difference between youth and age, we find continuity. It is the older Frank who asserts the innocence of commerce: ‘trade has all the fascination of gambling without its moral guilt’ (p. 67). The seeming inadequacy of Frank’s judgement here reproduces the split between the benevolent ideology of commerce and the actual consequences of commercial activities. His judgement belongs to the discourse of civilisation, which legitimises such activities in moral as well as in material terms. In this novel the legitimising function of the narrative is foregrounded by Scott’s avoidance of the omniscient narrator he had previously favoured, and the use instead of a first-person narrator. At the beginning of the novel the act of self-narration is associated with narcissism (through the ironical reference to the ‘great Sully’, p. 67) and seen to offer seductive opportunities that can be abused. The narrator here is not a public voice addressing an unknown reader, but a voice speaking in private to a trusted friend on whose personal interest, sympathy, and perhaps indulgence he can rely. Above all, Frank is the immediate beneficiary of some of the events he describes. The relationship between selfinterest and judgement is exposed with startling clarity in his hasty tying-up of the narrative. For while the haste may reflect Scott’s own impatience with the story, it seems revealingly appropriate to the narrator – since the older Frank passes lightly over events in which the legitimacy of his own claim to the Osbaldistone estate is at issue. By an inversion characteristic of Scott’s fiction, young Frank secures the estate from the claims of Rashleigh at the one moment in the novel

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when he has voluntarily crossed the line of the law and given shelter to rebels, while Rashleigh dies, accused of treason, at a moment when he is seen on the side of legality, having fought bravely against outlaws. When we might expect a dying confession to secure moral closure, Rashleigh’s last words instead attribute his downfall to Frank. As narrator, Frank hurries on, avoiding a direct response: I will dwell no longer on so painful a picture, nor say any more of the death of Rashleigh, than that it gave me access to my rights of inheritance without farther challenge, and that Jobson found himself compelled to allow, that the ridiculous charge of misprision of high-treason was got up on an affidavit which he made with the sole purpose of favouring Rashleigh’s views, and removing me from Osbaldistone-hall. (p. 451)

In fact the charge of misprision of treason seems far from ridiculous, and it is hard to see why Jobson – unless bullied – should be ‘compelled’ to admit so much. The haste and slurring here, the straining for approval, and the violence on narrative probability are fatally expressive. They constitute a microcosmic enactment of the larger slurrings and violence entailed in the production of legitimising histories, written by the victorious, who inscribe possession as justice, material advantage as moral fitness. What might be dismissed as mere artistic carelessness on Scott’s part is, as we shall see, perplexingly consistent with other features of the narrative. The confessional nature of Frank’s narrative – its apparently frank expressions of guilt – is essential to its aim of self-justification. The legitimising purpose of the narrative requires Frank’s rival, Rashleigh, to be identified as a villainous foil to Frank’s essential worth and good nature. But here the narrative begins to establish a pattern of doubling which – like comparable patterns elsewhere in Scott – threatens to undermine the opposition between hero and villain. Rashleigh consistently places a self-justifying interpretation on his own actions and motives, so that the ‘villainy’ attributed to him is substantiated primarily through evidence supplied by hostile witnesses. At the same time Frank displays several of the dubious characteristics he attributes to Rashleigh. As civilised narrator Frank embodies the polite virtues of tact, openness, moderation, and good sense. And yet his politeness is from the beginning associated with deceit. The mild comedy of his first words of dialogue – ‘I am happy, sir’, and ‘I am sorry, sir’ (p. 68) – signals his habit of polite duplicity, his strategic manipulation of the ‘civil phrase’ (p. 69). This trait, first set endearingly against his father’s plain-dealing economy of speech, soon assumes a more sinister, manipulative appearance as Frank intentionally alarms the traveller Morris with polite, and apparently innocent, questions.

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One effect of the slow-moving chapters describing Osbaldistone Hall is to emphasise the relationship between politeness and duplicity. Frank’s distrust of Rashleigh is explained partly in terms of Rashleigh’s manners, which are associated with a model of politeness that had been largely discredited in Britain by the beginning of the eighteenth century – the courtier.30 They are linked with Rashleigh’s education at St Omer’s in France, and described by Frank as ‘the manners of an accomplished jesuit’ (p. 157). But Frank’s manners are associated with his own ‘French education’, which is said to keep his ‘English feelings’ in check (p. 179). If Frank sees Rashleigh’s demeanour in terms of theatrical display (p. 176), Die sees a theatrical element in Frank’s own behaviour (p. 181). While Frank suspects Rashleigh’s insincerity, he criticises Die’s dangerous sincerity, her over-frankness, her lack of feminine reserve. He attempts, that is, to judge and regulate her by the polite ideals of feminine identity that she resists. Indeed, Die’s presence works to expose the tacit assumption that governs Frank’s understanding of politeness – that to speak frankly is to speak rashly. In other respects, too, the distinction Frank seeks to make between himself and Rashleigh comes under threat. Frank notes with apparent distaste Rashleigh’s ‘studied softness and humility of step and deportment’ – characteristics conventionally associated with ‘the softer graces of the sex’ (pp. 157, 113). But if Frank attributes feminine characteristics to the cultivated Rashleigh, Die sees Frank’s own behaviour as remarkably ‘unmanly’ (p. 212). Frank is outraged at the thought that Rashleigh sought to take advantage of Die sexually, but he also makes his own clumsy advances, which are indignantly rejected by Die. By the end of the story, as we have seen, other distinctions between them will have been blurred, as Frank consorts with rebels and apparently fails to report the murder of a government official. In spite of his best efforts, Frank fails to establish the clear contrast between hero and villain that his claim to moral and legal authority requires. A criticism that expects fiction to offer clear moral resolutions may either ignore such blurring of distinctions, and accept Frank’s judgements as unquestionably authoritative – as much sympathetic criticism of the novel has tended to do – or else simply read Frank’s failure as Scott’s. But the historical perspective of the novel works to relativise judgement even as it privileges the narrator’s interpretation. The figure of the highland outlaw is used to establish an alternative perspective on the historical condition from which the narrator speaks. Rob Roy’s first appearance is heralded by a range of English preconceptions about the Scots: the legends of Mabel Rickets, the complaints of Frank’s father, the political assumptions of other English travellers. He is seen not as a

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highlander, but as a generic ‘North Briton’ or ‘Scotch’ man of ‘no very dignified professional pursuit’ (pp. 93, 96). Indeed, we are given a polite Englishman’s view of the Scot as mimic man, one who strives to suppress ‘peculiarities of idiom or dialect’ and appear as a ‘gentleman’. But the mimicry here is not that described by Homi Bhabha, which conceals no presence behind its mask.31 For while ‘Campbell’ seems disadvantaged in precisely those terms by which the English gentleman assesses social status (occupation, education, speech, dress), he also appears superior to those terms in his airs and manners. The identity available to him within the burgeoning economy of the Union (in which cattletrading was for a while to flourish) is registered as inappropriate and demeaning. We later learn that his involvement in the culture of credit led to his financial ruin. As Campbell reappears in later scenes, so he begins to assume or reassume his distinctive highland identity, until in chapter 35, having escaped from Montrose, he is finally seen at home in his native setting, as one of the Children of the Mist. One of his most important functions in the novel is to enact this peeling away of the British identity that obscures and constrains his Highland self. Ian Duncan argues that in this novel ‘the primitive sheds the trappings of its “pastness” ’, as ‘savagery and commerce’ are shown to sustain each other in the present.32 But the plot contrives a reverse movement, in which the highlander sheds the trappings of modernity, enacting a romantic urge for disengagement. The recovered highland self, identified with a rude, precommercial existence, provides a glimpse of a state of being that will be fettered ‘by system and affectation’ (p. 410) in the progress towards civil order. In his demeaning lowland garb Rob Roy makes visible the fetters imposed by commercial society, and exposes the affectation that governs the polite gentleman. His first words (about the thievery of English gaugers and supervisors, and about the markets in the south, p. 93) strip commerce of the innocence with which Frank’s own rhetoric would endow it. At the ale house table, in a discussion of the respective rights of Stuarts and Hanoverians, Campbell reduces political legitimacy to a matter of possession and self-interest, of whether the present king can ‘haud the grip he has gotten’ (p. 97). While the novel may officially distinguish between the theory of property espoused by Frank’s father (p. 79), and the romantic vision of ‘the good old rule’ presented in the title-page epigraph, the highlander allows no such distinction. The moral difference between Osbaldistone senior, whose commercial speculations are successful, and Rob Roy, who was ruined by his own gambles with credit, lies not in the drive for gain, which they share, but in Rob’s readiness to acknowledge its amoral nature.

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If the presence of Rob Roy exposes polite self-deceptions, his partial alignment with a pre-commercial identity allows the novel’s concern with specific issues – such as credit, gaugers, and government policy in the highlands – to shade into a broader concern with civilisation as a state of confinement. By placing the highlander’s discontents within the discourse of civilisation they can be seen as the consequences of inevitable historical forces rather than of decisions for which individuals might take moral responsibility. At the same time this strategy helps to limit the scope of the novel’s vision when Frank embarks upon the delicate task of representing the commercial city of Glasgow. Here Frank’s narration is at its most strangely ambivalent. The city he sees is the preindustrial city that the guidebooks of Scott’s time recommended to tourists, the city of historic buildings, including the cathedral, college, old bridge, and tolbooth.33 Frank’s aesthetic evaluations of this city belong to the discourse of civilisation, but a primary effect of his narration is to represent the city as the symbolic opposite of the highlands – as the negation, that is, of primitive liberty. In the highlands, according to the Bailie, men ‘may gang whewing and whistling without minding Sunday or Saturday’ (p. 276). In Glasgow such carefree behaviour seems out of the question, since life appears dominated by formal institutions which sternly regulate desire. Frank’s response thus sometimes moves oddly between touristic appreciation and fascinated revulsion, the former licensing the latter. His description of the Presbyterian service in the cathedral, for example, is prefaced by a positive evaluation (the aesthetic effect of the service is superior to that of the French mass) but actually offers a series of negative impressions that culminate in a mysterious warning of danger and the epiphany of the ‘sinister’ Mr MacVittie (p. 247). Frank’s description of the sabbath ‘pleasure-walk’ by the Clyde follows a similar pattern.34 The threatening mood of restraint and repression established in these episodes anticipates the scene in the tolbooth prison (the cathedral doors are locked during the service). As Ian Duncan puts it, the murk of the cathedral evokes a ‘nightmarish intensification of the rule of law’ (p. xxii). The evocation of Presbyterian Glasgow as a city of darkness is relieved by the sympathetic portrait of the Bailie, who emerges as the novel’s prime Scottish advocate of trade and improvement. And yet the positive aspects of this portrait are precisely those which distinguish him from both the gentlemanly style of Frank and the severity of the Glaswegian temper already established, and which make palpable his kinship with the highland outlaw – an unrestrained Scots vulgarity worthy of a ‘Scotch pedlar’, a ‘total want of delicacy’ (pp. 262, 266). It is his sinister counterparts, the shadowy MacVittie and company, who are characterised as ‘civil’ (p. 263).

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In the Glasgow chapters resistance to oppressive civil order is represented primarily by Rob Roy himself, whose symbolic opposition appears to stand in place of historical resistance of a very different kind. For as the Bailie’s passing reference to ‘rabblings [. . .] risings [. . .] mobs’ (p. 312) reveals (once the city has been left behind), Glasgow had a history of violent agitation. Some of Scott’s contemporary readers may have known that the first Scottish riots against the Union had broken out in Glasgow, in scenes featuring the tolbooth, the cathedral, and the town bailies.35 A primary function of Andrew Fairservice (who has been seen as unnecessary to the plot) is to represent lowland resentment of the Union in a form that seems ridiculous, hypocritical, and safely removed from urban causes of discontent.36 Those readers who had little or no knowledge of Scotland’s distant past would have been familiar with the Glasgow tolbooth from newspaper reports of its place in the recent rioting of distressed weavers.37 Scott’s own anxiety about the state of the ‘abominable manufacturing districts’ of Scotland, which seemed to have caught a contagion from England, cannot have been far from his mind as he wrote these chapters.38 But such discontents, which seem immediately relevant to the novel’s commercial theme, are not examined directly. Instead, the highlander’s criticism of commercial society is expressed as contempt for ‘weavers and spinners, and sic-like mechanical persons’ (p. 272), rather than as sympathy for them. This is a characteristic strategy: serious protest against the oppression legitimised by commercial society is displaced from the still dangerous lowland city into other areas of the novel, and especially the highlands – from which (in the wake of the highland clearances) no credible agitation could now come. Apart from Rob Roy himself, the most significant voices of protest are female. When Frank first sees Osbaldistone Hall peeping through a ‘Druidical grove of huge oaks’ (p. 100), he looks as with the eye of an imperial Roman upon a strange primitive northern culture. Seen in relation to the unimproved manners of Sir Hildebrand and his less educated sons, Frank’s cultural superiority seems secure. But in relation to Die it always seems precarious. When Frank attempts gallantry, Die ironically compares his ‘pretty sayings’ with the toys navigators carry to newly discovered lands to propitiate the ‘savage inhabitants’ (p. 112). Die’s figurative alignment of herself with the savage registers her subordinate status, not as Catholic and Jacobite, but as woman, and it implicitly identifies Frank’s politeness as part of a colonising project. Her impatience with polite constraints on female behaviour, her mild contempt for the image of femininity promoted by The Spectator (p. 113), and her outright rejection of the conventional trappings of the modern polite

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female identify the cultural standards represented by Frank with domination, repression, and loss of identity. When she shows Frank the library which she regards as her own space, she explains: you neither see a shepherd or shepherdess wrought in worsted, and handsomely framed in black ebony, – or a stuffed parrot, – or a breeding-cage, full of canary-birds, – or a housewife-case, broidered with tarnished silver, – or a toilette-table, with a nest of japanned boxes, with as many angles as Christmas mincedpies, – or a broken-backed spinet, – or a lute with three strings [. . .] None of these treasures do I possess. (p. 155)

In this context the ‘treasures’ represent a standard of wealth and culture that presupposes no tradition. Specifically they represent approved accomplishments and attributes that daughters of an emergent middling class can rapidly acquire. Some of these – the ebony, parrot, canary, japanned boxes – are signs of that international trade that has already been discussed in heroic terms in the narrative, – here registered through a range of consumer goods of dubious utility. The passage reflects upon a commercial ideology that gives woman as consumer a central place, at the cost of conformity and standardisation. It registers distaste at the creation of an urban, cosmopolitan culture that draws promiscuously on other cultures, at the risk of entirely blurring historical distinctions of family, class, and nation. There seems at first to be no alternative maternal tradition with which Die could identify herself in order to distinguish herself from the domestic female: Die’s Scottish mother is absent. The irony of Die’s situation is that, in dissociating herself from this modern femininity, she aligns herself with a masculine, chivalric, aristocratic tradition, sustained by its own symbolic ‘goods and chattels’ (p. 155), that would also deny her individuality and force her to marry one of Sir Hildebrand’s sons. Unable to speak freely of her own desires, she becomes associated with allegorical discourses – with Spenser and Dante – which hint at veiled meanings and buried truths. But in the highlands that which cannot be spoken of directly elsewhere in the novel at last finds open expression of a sort, in a sequence that introduces Helen MacGregor. The novel creates oblique links between Die and Helen. They are both characterised as Amazons (pp. 102, 349). They are linked through imagery: Die is associated with the tamed and spitted falcon (p. 155); Helen is compared to a hawk about to pounce upon its prey (p. 366). And they are also linked indirectly through genealogy. We learn early on that Die is the daughter of a Scotchwoman; but only near the end do we discover that her mother was apparently ‘a relation of the house of Breadalbane’ (pp. 162, 430). The first Earl of Breadalbane joined the rebellion in 1715; his name was Sir John Campbell. Campbell is, of course, the name

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Rob Roy adopts when MacGregor is proscribed. In the pattern created by these links, Helen MacGregor – or Helen Campbell – stands in place of Die’s own mother; and it is appropriate that she should forward Die’s ring to Frank, and feature in his dream as counterpart to Sir Frederick Vernon. The Scottish side of Die’s ancestry is suppressed through her commitment to her English father’s line of descent. Helen MacGregor’s violent irruption into the text suggests the return of the repressed. The appearance of Helen is heralded and followed by scenes of a kind that were re-enacted many times in reports of contemporary military campaigns and uprisings – featuring local resentment at the presence of foreign troops, an ambush, an atrocity, a violent hunt for a human fugitive. The physical violence is matched by an intensification of the conflict between the discourse of primitive liberty and the discourse of civilisation. Just as Die’s masculine habits disrupt the polite categories by which Frank tries to judge her, so Helen confounds distinctions between masculine and feminine, heroism and barbarism, liberty and excess. Her appearance on a rock aligns her with the patriotic resistance of Gray’s Bard to English tyranny. Her eloquent denunciation of the British forces – in an English of near impeccable politeness – recalls the example of the Caledonian chief Calgacus who, in Tacitus’ Agricola, spoke eloquently of the oppression the Romans had brought upon his people in the name of civil policy (in his autobiographical memoir Scott recalls spouting this speech at a public examination).39 Just as the Iberian guerrillas were compared to ancient patriots resisting the power of Rome, so the epigraphs of chapters 30 and 31 implicitly compare Helen’s defiance of British power with the patriotic resistance of Boadicea and Brinno to imperial Rome.40 But the epigraph from Fletcher’s play Bonduca also belongs to the discourse of civilisation, as the narrative reaches beyond the sanitised image of Boadicea promoted by Cowper and others, to an older image of the queen in which female resistance, female power, and female violence are represented as aspects of barbarism. Lying behind Fletcher’s play, as Scott would have known, was Holinshed’s chronicle, in which Boadicea’s forces are said to have ‘hanged up naked’ noblewomen, cut off their breasts, and ‘sewed them to their mouths, that they might seem as if they sucked and fed on them’.41 Scott apparently has this barbaric precedent in mind, although Helen’s violence endangers men: she threatens to cut out their tongues and put them in each other’s throats, tear out their hearts and put them in each other’s breasts. Here, and in the merciless execution of Morris, a feminised officer of the British state, her violence threatens masculine integrity, while her ‘lopping’ of the Bailie’s ‘genealogical tree’ suggests castration. In this respect Frank’s representation of Helen MacGregor

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registers his horror of female excess, of savage female passion unconstrained by masculine authority. By the characteristic logic of Scott’s narrative, Morris, the agent of oppressive law, becomes the powerless victim, while Helen, the victim of oppression, becomes the powerful aggressor – and it is the horrific aspect of Helen’s actions that renders the text safe. Helen MacGregor assumes her defiant role in the absence of the nominal hero of the narrative, her husband, Rob Roy. The novel would have been a very different work if Rob Roy himself had performed this act of violence. At this climactic and most resonant point, the female is substituted for the male, making heroic resistance indivisible from culpable female excess, an excess which can be neutralised by the restoration of masculine hierarchy with the return of Rob Roy. When Rob returns, Helen is conspicuously, and with some irony, put back into the domestic sphere, where she resumes her ‘more feminine’ identity as wife, mother, hostess. Judith Wilt observes that all acts of power by women in the Waverley novels have a curious status somewhere between ‘Imposture’ and the ‘compelling reality of a part acted out with complete self-abandon’.42 In this novel the powerful woman’s resumption of a domestic identity is also felt as an imposture, while Rob himself becomes representative of that very principle of order he violates as outlaw. In this way the act of violent resistance is at once tacitly endorsed, condemned, and discounted. The domesticating of Helen foreshadows a similar destiny for Die, who could become a respectable Mrs Osbaldistone only by assuming the polite feminine identity she despises. Her death at least spares the novel from dwelling on this ultimate act of narrative violence. Such manoeuvres seem necessary to Scott, as the conditions that enable him not only to circumvent, but also to confront, issues that have an immediate relevance to his own age. As Scott’s first readers had good reason to know, the turbulent violence represented in the Highland scenes did not belong only to a past age that could be viewed nostalgically (as his later critics have often implied), but was being re-enacted in their own age with increasing cost on the expanding frontiers of empire. The narrative which shows the English hero as a gentlemanly beneficiary of such violence can be said to privilege the discourse of civilisation, but it also exposes the deception and self-interest entailed in the process. It exposes, that is, what is at issue in the self-representation of the polite English gentleman, and in his ideal of femininity. The narrator may represent desirable norms of civil speech and manners, but those norms are also seen in the context of a colonising project in which they threaten to constrain and demean those – specifically the female and the Scot – who

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are placed in a subordinate category of identity. His polite language may be offered as the appropriate medium of disinterested history, but its problematic nature is exposed both thematically and in the discursive conflicts that unsettle his judgements. The ambivalence that plays through the narrative arises from contradictions which the narrator repeatedly fails to recognise: it represents a deep uncertainty about the ideology of modern commerce and about the basis of British prosperity in an age of empire. The novel’s power over its first readers probably had little to do with what Lukács terms ‘historical authenticity’, its faithfulness to a period already past.43 It may have had much more to do with its representation of the conflicts and confusions of contemporary history in a form that both distances and personalises them, making them resonate with a powerful mythic intensity.

Civilised War: A Legend of the Wars of Montrose The legitimisation of violence in the name of civilisation, questioned obliquely in Rob Roy, is approached more directly in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, since here the central character is not only a soldier of fortune, but one – unlike Henry Morton or Guy Mannering – who lacks the refined manners by which civilisation is defined. In this novel, more that any others, Scott engages with the seductive assumption that modern warfare is – or could be – governed by ‘civilised’ norms of conduct, an assumption that influenced official representations of war in the romantic period, and which lies behind our own endeavours to regulate the conduct of war. The attempt to reconcile war with humanitarian principles in our own age, whatever successes it may claim, seems haunted by double standards and doublethink. The western governments that press for the international tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia may be tempted to dismiss out of hand the counter-accusations of those they accuse. They may also find it convenient when managing overseas conflicts to employ or liaise with mercenaries or ‘privatised’ defence organisations (as in Nicaragua, Columbia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia), or to make alliances with local warlords (as in Afghanistan and Iraq) – arrangements that leave issues of accountability conveniently blurred.44 If the horrors of war make the demand for justice irresistible, the ability to enforce moral judgements belongs most obviously to the powerful and victorious. These problems have their counterparts in Scott’s time. Byron famously confronted British readers with the hypocrisy surrounding the military

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triumphs of his age, and with the barbarism that was veiled and endorsed by official propaganda (most notably in the outspoken satire of Don Juan, with its devastating account of the siege of Ismail, cantos VII and VIII). Scott’s poetic celebrations of the Iberian campaign and the victory at Waterloo would seem to make him a suitable target of such satire. But as we have already seen, a more complex and critical view of war emerges in his historical fiction. A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, which appeared in 1819, both confronts and reproduces the double-thinking that runs through contemporary attitudes to war, in ways that might either undermine or confirm the preconceptions of the polite reader. Civilised war The modern idea of the ‘just war’ developed in an age of empire. It is sometimes traced back to Franciscus de Victoria’s opposition to Spanish developers of the New World who demanded a Christian ‘holy war’ against the Indians in the sixteenth century. In his attempt to insist that war be based on ‘universal’ principles of justice, Victoria ultimately justified the Spaniards. The relationship between regulation and legitimisation that emerged in his thinking would also appear in the work of other fathers of international law who, as Yoram Dinstein puts it, ‘spread the mantle of justice over a wide variety of controversial causes’.45 In eighteenth-century Scotland the concept of the just war, as derived from Grotius, Pufendorf, and other natural law theorists, had acquired a history and a sociological basis, and was associated with the manners and ethos of commercial (and implicitly Christian) societies.46 The Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson, for example, assumed that the modern nations of Europe had improved the laws of war, softened its rigours, ‘mingled politeness with the use of the sword’, and learned that it was more glorious to save and protect than to destroy a defeated enemy. To wage war only for justice and the preservation of national rights was ‘perhaps, the principal characteristic, on which, among modern nations, we bestow the epithets of civilized or of polished’.47 The civilised soldier was implicitly distinguished from the mercenary since, while both fought for money and under professional discipline, the civilised soldier’s allegiance was based not on his contract, but on his social values and identity.48 His actions were governed by ideas of public service and self-sacrifice, and were therefore also distinguished from the passions conventionally attributed to the ‘savage’ – love of revenge, plunder, and brutality.49 Thus although ‘civilised war’ was associated with the defence of national rights, it also worked to rationalise European aggression on the frontiers of empire.

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More generally, the idea of civilised war helped to render military power acceptable to a polite public increasingly sensitised to brutality by the development of the ‘liberal conscience’, and the emergence of pacifist movements and the cult of sensibility.50 The civilised soldier – polite in combat, merciful in victory, and committed to violence only as a regrettable necessity – could seem unthreatening and sympathetic. The influence of this ideal can be seen clearly in the visual arts of the later eighteenth century. As David Bindman observes, Roubiliac’s sculptures memorialised eminent soldiers not only as brave heroes but as ‘magnanimous and worthy of affection’.51 Benjamin West’s highly influential painting The Death of Wolfe showed the hero of Quebec dying as a victim – or martyr – rather than as an aggressor.52 In the wake of the French revolution, sermons, patriotic poems, official war reports, and history paintings all helped to promote the British military effort against France as a civilised war. In special thanksgiving sermons, victories were attributed directly or indirectly to the influence of Providence, while feelings of national pride were at once justified and discretely chastened.53 The violence of war, it was argued, should occasion sorrow and dignified reflection, even when the outcome prompted rejoicing. De Loutherbourg’s painting of the battle of Maida, engraved by Anthony Cardon in 1810, exemplifies the appropriate manner of representing a civilised victory. In the battle the French were put to flight and relentlessly pursued, sustaining heavy casualties (700 killed, 1,000 wounded). The painting shows the decisive bayonet charge in the middle distance (orderly rows of British soldiers with retreating French behind them), placing in the foreground a British infantryman who stands offering a drinking flask to a kneeling Polish prisoner and French dragoon, and a British army surgeon dressing a French prisoner’s wound.54 Care for the defeated frames, and justifies, the disciplined violence that fades to a blur in the distance. The differences between such idealised images and the routine actualities of the war were always visible for those who cared to see them. Reports from North America, for example, made it clear that Europeans could adopt the brutal methods they routinely attributed to the ‘savage’ Indians.55 The pressure for positive views of the British war effort did not stop the publication of anti-war poems, nor the newspaper reports, published eye-witness accounts, and private correspondence which provided abundant evidence of the brutalities of modern war – of the atrocities committed by British troops in Ireland, for example, or of the British plundering of their Portuguese and Spanish allies (activities that led Wellington to describe his Iberian army as ‘a rabble’).56 Moreover, if civilised warfare was supposedly quite distinct from the warfare of

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unrefined peoples, in practice the British war effort frequently relied – in Calabria, for example, and in Iberia – upon the anti-French insurrections of local peasants whose irregular activities were not governed by professional discipline. And if the loyalties of the civilised soldier were supposedly quite distinct from the motives of the mercenary, in practice Britain depended extensively – as in earlier wars throughout the eighteenth-century – on mercenaries. The difference between the official image of the war and its actualities is illustrated vividly in the case of Waterloo, where almost two-thirds of the ‘British’ troops serving under Wellington could be described as foreign mercenaries (the status of the Hanoverian troops, who were fighting for their own king, was in fact open to question).57 Poetic celebrations of Waterloo usually avoided mentioning such dependence directly, preferring to represent the conflict in terms of national tradition, national character, and the disinterested commitment to justice. In James Hogg’s ‘The Field of Waterloo’, for example, a dying Scottish hero (sentimental representative of a martial tradition extending back to Douglas and the Elliots) asserts the superiority of the Scottish and British war effort to that of his Prussian and Russian allies, on the grounds that the British fought for ‘The glorious cause of human right’ rather than in self-defence.58 Scott’s own poem The Field of Waterloo relates the victory to English national tradition (Agincourt, Cressy, Blenheim) and to British national character (the ‘British heart’ undaunted by the terrors of battle), and even conceives the battle as a re-enactment of St George’s triumph over tyranny in defence of innocence, before acknowledging in the final lines that valour and discipline may ‘by gold be hired’.59 This final allusion indicates that Scott was in fact well aware of the role of mercenaries in the battle. In his Life of Napoleon Buonaparte he acknowledges that the French army was composed of ‘soldiers of the same nation’, whereas ‘the English’ composed less than half of the British army, which included large numbers of Hanoverians, Belgians, and other foreign mercenaries.60 After the war, when many demobilised British officers enlisted as mercenaries in the Latin American struggle against Spain, the Foreign Enlistment Act (1819) was passed to prevent them. The opposition to this act was at its height when Scott’s novel was published, giving the work a special topicality.61 But the act was introduced only in order to preserve Britain’s neutrality, not to prevent Britain’s own use of mercenaries. The modern ‘civilised’ nation, it seems, must embrace the kind of warfare it officially disavows, in which it may find a reflection of its own unacknowledged barbarism. This mixture of disavowal and complicity is a major concern of Scott’s A Legend of the Wars of Montrose. Scott followed Defoe’s

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Memoirs of a Cavalier in describing the experiences of a seventeenthcentury adventurer who returns from serving in Europe with the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, in order to fight in the wars occasioned by the Great Rebellion. But unlike Defoe, Scott sends his hero directly to the Scottish highlands, where he encounters both the conflict between royalists and Covenanters (centred on the struggle between Montrose and Argyle) and tales of bitter highland feuding. This setting allows Scott to focus on the troubling relationships between ‘civilised’ war, the violence of the ‘savage’, and the profession of the mercenary. These different kinds of martial activity are formally related to the historical transition from the era of feudal militia to the commercial era of mercenaries and professional standing armies, a transition that preoccupied a number of writers in the Scottish enlightenment. As P. D. Garside notes, Scott’s mercenary Captain Dalgetty ‘is not just a seventeenth-century peculiarity’: he is also a symbolic representative who registers Scott’s unease concerning ‘modern warfare’.62 However, it is not Dalgetty but the royalist Earl of Menteith who occupies the position of the polite hero and the ‘civilised’ soldier. Menteith is a man of anachronistically refined feeling and enlightened views, whose actions are ostensibly governed by ‘loyalty and religion’, who speaks regretfully of the savage and disdains the mercenary, and whose good sense and good manners merit the reward of the heroine, Annot Lyle.63 Distinguished in the eyes of Annot by ‘his infinite superiority in gentleness of disposition, and grace of manners’ (p. 165), it is he who speaks of the ‘duty of humanity’ towards the wounded prisoner, Sir Duncan Campbell (p. 158), exemplifying the magnanimity of civilised warfare. His apparently conciliatory temper, in contrast to the feuding highlanders’ supposedly implacable lust for revenge, provides the basis for a personal reconciliation between royalist and Presbyterian. In such narrative elements we can trace the outlines of the more conventional novel that Scott might have written, in which Menteith, and the civilisation he represents, would be triumphantly vindicated. But the conventional outlines are disrupted by the presence of those figures who should confirm Menteith’s superiority – the ‘savage’ highlander and the ‘bloodhound’ mercenary – and the result is a more complex and contradictory novel. The Highland Savage When James Hogg produced his own novel on the wars of Montrose (Tales of the Wars of Montrose, 1835) he represented the period as a whole as one of anarchy in which all sides in the conflict were tainted with duplicity and arbitrary violence. In Hogg’s account the Scottish

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clans are consistently seen as insular, anarchic, given to vengeful feuding that undermines their own interests, and not above murderous attacks on defenceless women.64 But this conventional image of the highlander as a brutal ‘savage’ had already been called into question by many writers, including Scott himself. In The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Lord of the Isles, and Rob Roy Scott had drawn on a range of conflicting assumptions about highlanders, showing them not only as violent, lawless, and prone to superstition, but also as victims of aggressive economic development and as exemplifying natural civility. In the year before A Legend of the Wars of Montrose appeared, Scott’s acquaintance Robert Jamieson published a new edition of Captain Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London, in which he criticised as typically prejudiced Burt’s negative view of highlanders. In his preface Jamieson argued that representations of highlanders had always been shaped by the interests – and often by the enmity – of outside observers, who routinely wrote of the highlanders’ ‘spirit of revenge’ without acknowledging the material circumstances that governed their behaviour.65 Scott’s A Legend of the Wars of Montrose develops a similar view, inviting us to consider the interests that may influence both highland violence itself, and the representation of that violence by others. The history of the highland feud that unfolds in the narrative is introduced primarily through the recollections of the refined Menteith and the unrefined clansman Ranald MacEagh. It is Menteith, speaking from a position of ease and authority (specifically from the comfort of a fourposter bed) who introduces this history, and who attributes to MacEagh’s clan, the Children of the Mist, ‘all the irritability, and wild and vengeful passions, proper to men who have never known the restraint of civilized society’ (p. 39). This initial distinction between the civilised and the primitive appears to gain powerful support from his horrifying description of the Children’s ‘savage triumph’ with the severed head of ‘the unfortunate Warden of the Forest’ (p. 39). But Menteith immediately, and apparently unconsciously, goes on to undermine his distinction. First, he describes the bloody revenge wreaked on the highlanders by ‘Every baron in the county’ (a revenge which includes the displaying of no fewer than seventeen severed heads, p. 40). Then he suggests that the traumatised mother of his kinsmen, the MacAulays, ‘a gentlewoman of good family’ (p. 38), successfully encouraged her son Allan to take bloody vengeance on the Children (p. 41). Finally, with disarming blandness Menteith explains his own ‘share’ in a later retaliatory expedition against the Children, an expedition that made ‘clean work’ of ‘burning and slaying’, a ‘terrible species of war’ in which ‘even

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the females and helpless do not escape’. In this account Annot Lyle is rescued from Allan’s vengeance by Menteith’s own entreaty, and ‘it was long ere Allan could endure the presence of the child’ at Darlinvarach Castle (p. 43). In short, Menteith’s account glosses his own role in the violence with generalities, while emphasising both his own compassion and Allan’s vengeful nature. It is only later that we discover that Menteith and Allan are potential rivals for the hand of Annot Lyle (while Allan’s recollection of his childhood fondness for Annot includes no account of the dislike Menteith mentions). In a displacement typical of Scott’s narrative method, Menteith’s ‘refined’ version of events finds a counterpart, not in the recollections of Allan (who is never allowed to speak directly of the history of the feud), but in the histories told by Mentieth’s unlikely double, the Child of the Mist, Ranald MacEagh. Unlike Menteith, MacEagh speaks from a marginalised position (first from the darkness of Argyle’s dungeon, and later having been carried from the floor of an outhouse into the chamber reserved for the wounded enemy of the Royalists, Sir Duncan Campbell). But the differences between the narratives of the ‘savage’ MacEagh and the ‘civilized’ Menteith are less surprising than the similarities. For like Menteith, MacEagh speaks of his own people as living in peace until provoked (specifically by Sir Duncan Campbell, who beheaded MacEagh’s brother), and then as engaging in fierce revenge, until – like Menteith – MacEagh shows compassion on the child Annot (pp. 100–4). The major difference between these histories lies not in the violence, but in the explanation of its cause. In MacEagh’s narrative the feuding originates ultimately in a history of highland dispossession, as the Children are ‘pushed at by the MacAulays and other western tribes’ until their traditional hunting grounds are threatened (pp. 100, 172), a history that finds its counterpart in the highland clearances of Scott’s own age, alluded to in the novel’s Introduction. What Menteith represents as rooted in primitive passions is seen instead as rooted in a struggle for territory and cultural survival (as Menteith’s own reference to the Warden of the Forest actually implies). In these histories, then, the supposedly clear moral difference between the civilised and the savage dissolves, while Menteith’s attribution of savage passions to the feuding highlanders begins to appear as a rationalisation that justifies his own complicity in their dispossession. The Mercenary As we have seen, the mercenary played a very large part in the ‘British’ military activities in the eighteenth century and in the Napoleonic Wars.

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The mercenary also had an important place in Scottish history, since in earlier centuries many Scots had made a living in the service of foreign princes, and had considered such service honourable. In The Tale of Old Mortality (an earlier novel in the Tales of My Landlord series, in which A Legend of the Wars of Montrose appeared), Scott had allowed his seventeenth-century hero Morton, a man of honour and enlightened views, to serve as a soldier of fortune on the continent, while using the corrupt Sergeant Bothwell to provide a glimpse of the utterly unscrupulous activities of the solder of fortune abroad. The ambivalence suggested in that earlier novel is tightened in A Legend of the Wars of Montrose. In the second chapter Dalgetty rides into view from a distance, to be seen from Menteith’s polite perspective as an oddity. It is an entrance that might qualify him for a subordinate role in this narrative, but Dalgetty immediately proceeds to usurp the centre of interest, displacing Menteith’s normalising view. Surprised by Dalgetty’s detached attitude to the civil conflict, Menteith declares ‘when loyalty and religion are at stake, no gentleman or man of honour could be long in chusing his party’ (p. 15). But Dalgetty calls into question the place of ‘loyalty’, ‘religion’, and ‘honour’ in war. He dismisses the conflicting ideologies of the civil war disdainfully as ‘watchwords’, but accepts ‘Honour’ as his own watchword, and proceeds to show that such terms work to legitimise as well as to regulate violence. Part of Scott’s comic strategy is to place in the mouth of Dalgetty (who has ‘the manner of a half-bred man’, p. 80) the polite euphemisms and periphrases that should elegantly veil the brutalities of ‘civilised’ warfare. Delivered with the casualness of the hardened adventurer rather than the solemn regret of the polite gentleman, they expose rather than conceal the routine barbarities of war. Thus Dalgetty himself speaks with disdain of the mercenary who would postpone ‘honour to filthy lucre’ (p. 17), but speaks comfortably of making ‘some small profit’ from ‘the usage of wars’ on ‘the chance of storm or victory’ or ‘the fetching in of some town or victory’ (p. 18). In his mouth the religious justification of war – a commonplace of contemporary sermons – becomes overtly incongruous: ‘a soldier is a profession peculiarly favoured by Heaven, seeing that we may hope for salvation, although we daily commit actions of so great violence’ (p. 173). Dalgetty is a comic triumph, and part of that triumph derives from the fact that he is, after all, a man of his word. He not only emerges as brave and loyal, but as a touchstone against whom the words of Menteith can be judged. His adventures allow us to put beside Menteith’s history of the feud both MacEagh’s narrative and a direct account of the Children of the Mist (defending themselves and Dalgetty

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with bows and arrows against the advances of Argyle’s musketeers, and then nursing the wounded Dalgetty back to health, the highland females being ‘nurses as kind and attentive in reality, as they were wild and uncouth in outward appearance’, p. 121). Menteith’s attempt to dissociate himself discreetly from what he sees as the savagery of the highlander is matched by his overt attempt to dissociate himself from the self-interest of the mercenary Dalgetty (the thematic link between these two strands of the narrative is carefully signalled by the introduction of Allan MacAulay at the point when Menteith formally agrees to ‘dissemble’ towards Dalgetty, p. 28). The hardened Montrose has no qualms about employing Dalgetty, but Menteith’s avowed contempt for Dalgetty’s self-interest is that of the civilised soldier whose self-image is directly threatened by its crude reflection in the mercenary. To take Montrose’s advice, therefore, and accept the ‘assistance of those who act on baser motives than our own’ (p. 27), Menteith must hide his own distaste. It is in dissembling mode that he addresses the assembly of royalist chiefs, speaking in the manner appropriate to the civilised soldier – that is, harnessing to the cause of ‘the independence of an ancient and honourable nation’ both the mercenaries and the savage violence he would disavow, glossing the former as ‘officers of ability and experience in the foreign wars’, and speaking with approval of the panic that would spread among the enemy at the first sound of the highland clans’ pibroch (pp. 57–8). This ‘civilised’ embrace of the uncivil enacts the compromise that is repeated, and disavowed, in Scott’s own age and in ours, in the name of honourable nations. Scott’s novel leaves open to question whether such compromise is justifiable, focusing instead on the moral condition of the individual who makes it. When Menteith complains to Montrose for the second time of Dalgetty’s self-seeking (‘his very benevolence is selfish’), Montrose suddenly changes his tone to ask if Menteith has seen Annot Lyle (pp. 160–1). The connection is not fortuitous, as Menteith’s feelings for Annot reveal most clearly the self-interested side of his own nature. When Annot is discovered to be the heiress of his enemy Sir Duncan Campbell, Menteith, moved by ‘Passion, an ingenious, as well as an eloquent advocate’ begins to think of abandoning the king’s service (pp. 174–5). Once he is wounded by Allan he leaves for Sir Duncan’s castle and does not rejoin the war, having previously declared that he would never leave Montrose’s camp while the royal standard was displayed, or make a wound an excuse for absence in a crisis (p. 175). In this respect his understanding of loyalty and honour seems more self-interested, and less reliable, than that of Dalgetty, who is prepared to face death on the scaffold rather than dishonour his contract.

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When Allan MacAulay tells Menteith ‘Your life is a lie’ (p. 180), the accusation is discountable, coming as it does from an unstable and jealous rival. But there is a sense in which Menteith’s life is ‘a lie’, not only because he is forced to dissemble, but because he lives in the civilised illusion of moral superiority to those whose unrefined manners and appearance do not disguise their motives. Allan’s prediction that Menteith and Annot will be the destruction of each other is of course not fulfilled in the conventional sense, since once married Menteith ‘lived long, happy alike in public regard and in domestic affection’ (p. 182). But one might reflect that both hero and heroine are led to disguise their feelings for each other, and that their removal to the castle of Sir Duncan Campbell, the ‘fair and false’ knight who beheaded Ranald’s brother and shot Dalgetty’s horse when offered honourable quarter, might be seen from another point of view as a movement towards moral ruin. In a severely critical reading of the novel, Francis Hart was led to wonder ‘what meaningful coherence might have been articulated had Menteith become morally implicated in the conflict of Allan and MacEagh?’66 Hart’s question begs another question: why are readers tempted to accept Menteith’s account of the feud as a reasonable vindication of his own position, and MacEagh’s as a confirmation of his savagery, reproducing the very assumption that the narrative calls into question? To which one might add, why are readers tempted to accept Menteith’s moral distinction between himself and Dalgetty? Such questions point to a real difficulty, since in some respects Scott’s narrative reinforces the double standards it questions. So at one point the narrator tells us that: Montrose dearly loved his noble kinsman [Menteith], in whom there was conspicuous a flash of the generous, romantic, disinterested chivalry of the old heroic times, entirely different from the mercenary, calculating, and selfish character which the practice of entertaining mercenary troops had introduced into most parts of Europe. (pp. 157–8)

This may be poised ambiguously between narrator’s authoritative judgement and character’s subjective assessment, but it reasserts directly a distinction that the narrative indirectly questions. Moreover, having officially claimed authorship of the novel, Scott added an introduction in 1830 that seems designed specifically to control the interpretation of the text – by providing an authoritative history of the feud that reproduces the kind of judgement made by Menteith (on the highlanders’ ‘exultation of vengeance’, and adding for good measure an account of a ‘heathenish and barbarous oath’ which does not appear in the fictionalised narrative). Sir Walter Scott, Bart., it seems, must uphold the

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‘civilised’ position that the anonymous author of Tales of My Landlord was prepared to question. Ultimately, this is a novel that presents readers with a choice that is no choice. We can choose to recognise and condemn Menteith’s moral deficiencies, or we can choose to ignore them – but as civilised readers we cannot escape them, since Menteith’s complicity in what appals him is an image of our own condition. Scott offers no simple solutions or moral triumph here, despite superficial appearances. He exposes the moral cost of his conventionally happy ending. If we simply accept, as P. D. Garside does, that Menteith represents ‘Scott’s hopes for the modern world [. . .] the “pure” and “generous” side to chivalry’ (p. 170), we are basing those hopes on a disavowal, repeating a movement that has been replayed many times in the history of attempts to humanise the conduct of war, a movement that Scott’s narrative works paradoxically to identify, undermine – and accommodate.67

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

Fukuyama, End of History, pp. 90, xi. Bush, ‘State of the Union’ speech. Bourdieu, Firing Back, p. 33. Ward, Justice, Humanity and the New World Order, pp. 77–8; Rosow, ‘Globalisation as democratic theory’. Gray, False Dawn, p. 3. . Scott, Rob Roy, ed. Ian Duncan, p. 14. At the time of writing, this is the best properly edited text in print (it is based on the 1829 text, which includes minor revisions to the first edition of 1817). All subsequent references are to this edition. . See Colley, Britons, p. 68. Duncan, ‘Primitive inventions’, pp. 87, 101. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, p. 1. Kathryn Sutherland considers the contrast in Scott’s fiction between the language of pre-literate culture and the language of commercial civilisation in ‘Fictional economies’, p. 121. See Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 3. The Spectator, I, no. 69, Saturday, 19 May 1711, p. 296. Defoe, Review of the State of the English Nation, III, pp. 2–3. Miller, Defining the Common Good, p. 194. Joseph Addison argues in The Freeholder that through trade and navigation Britain could ‘reap the Advantages of Conquest, without Violence or Injustice’ and lay other Nations ‘under a kind of Contribution’ without any act of hostility. At the same time, the civilising power of trade would work to banish from Britain ‘all the remains of its antient Barbarity’ (pp. 229, 225). Defoe, Review, p. 650. See also Dickey, ‘Power, commerce, and natural law’, and Penovich, ‘From “revolution principles” to Union’, pp. 63–96, 228–42.

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17. Addison, Freeholder, pp. 39–42. 18. Klancher, Making of English Reading Audiences, p. 25; Phillipson, ‘Scottish enlightenment’, pp. 26–7. 19. Wilson, ‘The good, the bad, and the impotent’, p. 253. See also Miller, Defining the Common Good, pp. 214ff. 20. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, p. 411. 21. See Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s, pp. 206–35. 22. For example, Beatson, View of the Origin and Conduct of the War, or Edward Moor (lieutenant of the Bombay establishment), Narrative of the Operations of Captain Little’s Detachment. 23. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, Prose Works, I, p. 332. 24. In Agg’s Dawn of Liberty the rising is compared to the ancient Spanish rebellion against the Roman Sempronius, and the insurrection of Viriatus, pp. 60–64. 25. Wordsworth published some of his poems of national independence in Coleridge’s The Friend, on 26 October and 21 December 1809. 26. Scott followed Wordsworth in comparing the modern Iberians with the ancient Numantians who had resisted Rome in the second century BC (stanza XI). 27. De Rocca, Memoirs of the War, pp. 262–3. De Rocca cited the Spaniards’ distance from the disputes and controversies that had wracked much of Europe in the sixteenth century, and from the ‘philosophical’ spirit of the eighteenth century which had helped to spark the revolution in France, p. 7. 28. For example, Vaughan, Narrative of the Siege of Zaragoza, pp. 15–16. 29. David Hewitt discusses some aspects of Scott’s innovative use of the firstperson narrator in ‘Rob Roy and first person narratives’. In a brilliant reading, Jane Millgate argues that ‘autobiography is here transformed into a ritual for keeping full understanding at bay’, Walter Scott, p. 146. 30. Carré, ‘Introduction’, Crisis of Courtesy, p. 3. 31. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 88. 32. Duncan, ‘Primitive Inventions’, pp. 89, 95. 33. As in MacNayr, Guide from Glasgow; Chapman, Picture of Glasgow. Both guides make special mention of the sublime gloom of the Barony Laigh church beneath the cathedral. 34. The inhabitants seem ‘impressed with a reverential feeling’, and give an ‘intimation of a devotional character’ – but soon Frank is overcome with an oppressive sense of being exposed to observation (pp. 250–1). 35. See Defoe, History of the Union, pp. 179–207. 36. Donald Davie sees Fairservice as ‘one huge excrescence on the story’: ‘Rob Roy’, p. 128. 37. The Times carried several reports of Glasgow riots in August 1816, and February and March 1817. 38. Scott, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, IV, pp. 369–70, 456–7. 39. Scott, ‘Memoir of his early years, p. 31. 40. It is an open question as to whether these epigraphs are part of Frank’s narrative, or an editorial commentary upon it. 41. Holinshed’s Chronicles, I, p. 500; Mikalachki, Legacy of Boadicea, pp. 130–1.

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42. Wilt, Secret Leaves, p. 119. 43. Lukács, Historical Novel, p. 50. 44. See Dusˇan Coticˇ’s discussion of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in ‘Introduction’, to Clark and Sann, Prosecution of International Crimes, pp. 3–16; Rogers, A., Someone Else’s War, pp. 279–83; Arnold, Mercenaries, pp. xiii, 148, 159. 45. Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence, pp. 64. See also Johnson, J. T., Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, pp. 94–103. 46. Clare Jackson, ‘Revolution principles’, and Schröder, ‘Natural law and enlightenment’. 47. Ferguson, An Essay in the History of Civil Society, pp. 199–200. Lord Kames develops an even more enthusiastic view of the ‘courage, generosity, and disinterestedness’ inspired by civilised war in Home, Sketches of the History of Man, II, p. 295. 48. Mercenaries had been condemned, and their use ruled as incompatible with justice, by Hugo Grotius in De Jure Belli Ac Pacis, which Scott quotes in chapter 1. A contemporary translation of the quoted passage reads: ‘there is no Course of Life more abominable and to be detested, than that of mercenary Soldiers, who without considering the Justice of what they are undertaking, fight for Pay’. Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, p. 505. 49. It was widely assumed that ‘savages’, such as the North American Indians, maintained (as Adam Smith has it) ‘contempt of death and torture’, in contrast to the more refined and sensitive civilised nations. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 206, 204. 50. See Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience. 51. Bindman and Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument, p. 147. 52. Von Effra and Staley, Paintings of Benjamin West, pp. 54–68. 53. For example, Hatt, A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of St Paul. Revd Hatt advised his congregation that ‘Whatever secondary praise be due to those whose valour has contributed to our national welfare, we should never forget, that victory is at the disposal of a Superior Power’, p. 20. 54. See Cannon-Brookes, Painted Word, pp. 122–3. 55. Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country, describes how American settlers ‘butchered and scalped’ Indian villagers ‘in the manner of savages’, p. 29. Bouquet, Historical Account, outlines plans for special forces trained to wage war more effectively with Indians by emulating their irregular tactics, p. 9. 56. Bennett, British War Poetry, p. 13; McLaren, Minute Description; Clinton, Observations on the Movements; Rowlandson, Military Adventures; Parkinson, Peninsular War, p. 85; Wheeler, Letters, pp. 51–2, 105. 57. Hereward Senior observes, ‘Among the 69,894 troops under Wellington at Waterloo, there were 6,793 of the King’s German Legion, 10,995 Hanoverian Militia, 6,303 Brunswickers, 2,926 Nassauers, and 17,488 Dutch-Belgians’ (that is, over 63 per cent): ‘Mercenaries in the British service’, p. 510. 58. Hogg, ‘The Field of Waterloo’, Poetical Works of James Hogg, II, p. 304. 59. Scott, Field of Waterloo, pp. 23, 45.

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60. Scott, Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, II, p. 6. 61. Thomson, J. E., Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, p. 57. A Legend of the Wars of Montrose was published with The Bride of Lammermoor on 10 June 1819. The Times carried reports of the opposition to the act, including petitions, from May through to August. 62. Garside, ‘A Legend of Montrose and the History of War’, p. 162. 63. Scott, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, ed. Alexander, p. 15. All further references are to this edition. 64. The narrator of ‘The Adventures of Peter Aston’, for example, repeats the conventional view: ‘It is well known that on the event of any national commotion in Scotland it has always been the prevailing sin of the clans to wreak their vengeance on their neighbours’: Hogg, Tales of the Wars of Montrose, p. 108. 65. Burt, Letters from a Gentleman, I, pp. xlviii, xxxi; II, p. 79. 66. Hart, Scott’s Novels, p. 122. 67. Garside, ‘A Legend of Montrose and the History of War’, p. 170.

Chapter 6

Liberal Dilemmas: Scott and Covenanting Tradition The Tale of Old Mortality and The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Scott is sometimes said to show a ‘notorious illiberalism’.1 But the moderate world-view his fictions appear to endorse – with its commitment to security of property, to civil liberty (meaning security from government oppression), and to the separation of the private from the political realm – can be placed within what is now identified as the ‘liberal’ tradition associated with Locke, Hume, Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. In this and the following chapters I will consider how the historical perspective of Scott’s fiction allows the liberal conscience to be confronted with beliefs, identities, and kinds of allegiance it has already supposedly renounced, and I will argue that this confrontation enables an unprecedented fictional engagement with some of the enduring moral, social, and political problems bequeathed by the emergence of liberalism. In our own time, liberalism has been subject to vigorous attack on several fronts. Two kinds of criticism have special relevance here.

Individual versus Community First, liberalism is attacked for what is seen as its emphasis on the autonomy of the individual at the expense of communal values. For example, communitarian critics such as Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre denounce what they see as the fragmented and impersonal nature of modern liberal societies, whose ‘atomism’ and lack of shared values are said to render life morally meaningless and to provide no secure basis for patriotism. In contrast they delineate an ideal of close-knit, localised community bound together by a common heritage, shared values, and unifying stories – an ideal they associate with classical Greece, or the medieval period, or the early years of the American republic.2 These criticisms have some precedents in Scott’s

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own era. Scottish writers steeped in classical humanist tradition, in Stoic-Ciceronian moral philosophy, or in Calvinist theology sometimes struggled to reconcile their stern ideas of public duty with the selfinterested, privatising ethos of modern commerce. Adam Ferguson, for example, evoking the ideal public community spirit of ancient Sparta and republican Rome, warned of the corrupting effects of commercial prosperity, which could weaken the bonds of society, undermining patriotism and martial virtue: If that respite from public dangers and troubles which gives a leisure for the practice of commercial arts, be continued, or increased, into a disuse of national efforts; if the individual, not called to unite with his country, be left to pursue his private advantage; we may find him become effeminate, mercenary, and sensual. (p. 250)

In the light of such fears about the corrupting potential of modern commercial society, it is perhaps not surprising that eighteenth-century Britons developed an interest in tight-knit, localised, archaic communities, unified by their stories, and exemplifying martial virtue – an interest exemplified and fed by antiquarian reflections on the remnants of dead or dying oral tradition, and by Scott’s own Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders. It was not simply the rise of commerce that appeared to threaten the bonds of society, but fundamental changes in the understanding of life. MacIntyre argues that the attempts made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to base morality on secular reasoning tended to divide morality from social structure, and individuals from social roles. In his account enlightenment writers, including Scottish writers David Hume and Adam Smith, having eliminated any theological notion of ‘man-ashe-could-be-if-he-realised-his-telos’, and trying to consider issues of morality in terms of ‘psychological states or events’, worked with a drastically diminished notion of the self, a self whose social identity had become merely contingent.3 For MacIntyre this development is the source of the ‘distinctively modern standpoint’ which ‘envisages moral debate in terms of a confusion between incompatible and incommensurable moral premises’ (pp. 51, 39).4 We can find an example of the kind of development MacIntyre has in mind in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, where self-interest is counterbalanced and restrained by the development of feelings of sympathy, benevolence, or approbation, and by identification with the imagined response of an ‘impartial spectator’ – a view that associates self-restraint with the psychological state of the properly socialised individual, rather than directly with spiritual discipline or divinely ordained moral law.5 The individual here is apparently conceived as if autonomous, not defined by inherited duties

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to God or to the public good – although free to assume such duties. For MacIntyre, the sympathy that Smith invokes to explain the moral action of such an individual is a mere ‘philosophical fiction’ (p. 49). John Dwyer has rightly warned us against attributing to Scottish authors anything like a ‘paradigmatic leap’ from the traditional language of virtue to a language of the self and its emotions, and points out that many writers, including Adam Smith himself, attempted to combine ideas of spectatorial sympathy with sterner, more traditional moral ideas.6 As we shall see, Scott also attempts to reconcile these ideas, while the historical perspective of his fiction works to expose the tensions between them.

Legitimacy, oppression, and consent The second, related kind of criticism is directed at the claims liberalism makes for its principles. The progressive impulse of liberalism implies that, while power must be exercised in accordance with established rules and legal precedents, rules and precedents must be adapted judiciously to a changing environment. Legitimacy must be grounded in principles relevant to the present conditions and needs of society, since, as Locke puts it, ‘an Argument from what has been, to what of right should be, has no great force’.7 But defenders of liberalism are accused of taking the authority of the liberal state for granted, and therefore of privileging the interests of those with power.8 The rise of Marxist, feminist, post-colonial and postmodern criticism has worked to challenge the liberal claim to universal principles of liberty and justice, and to foreground the liberal state’s complicity with various forms of oppression, including the subordination of women, colonial exploitation, slavery, and the repression of homosexuality.9 When the American liberal John Rawls proposed to base a liberal political order not on a universal principle of justice, but on an ‘overlapping consensus’ constructed from ‘a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines’, this supposedly non-controversial proposal was attacked as working to protect established interests, as sustaining patriarchal oppression in the home by treating it as a private matter, and as privileging a particular moment in a consensus that must change over time.10 Indeed, the very idea that the liberal state rests upon the consent of its members has been described by Carole Pateman as a ‘political myth’, since even when there is universal adult suffrage the right to make political decisions is alienated to representatives, while ‘tacit consent’ tends to be inferred from the acceptance of benefits such as the inheritance of property, or simply from the fact that, as Locke has it, people can travel

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‘freely on the Highway’.11 Since the liberal defence of personal liberty can apparently coexist with injustice and oppression, the silence or inertia that is read as ‘tacit consent’ might also be read as moral indifference, disavowal, or helplessness. When interrogated, then, the liberal conception of political obligation may appear morally and politically vacuous, which in Pateman’s view is why political theorists such as Burton Zwiebach prefer to treat obligation to the state as ‘secondary and prudential’, and claim that ‘our primary obligation must be to those with whom we are engaged in a common undertaking’. Thus the ‘locus of meaningful moral – and political – life’ is not the larger community of the nation, but the realm of private associations.12 These fundamental issues of legitimacy, justice, and obligation tend to be debated most vigorously in times of rapid political and societal transformation. In Scott’s age – an age of revolution, abrupt regime change, and dramatic social disruption – the basis of state legitimacy, the validity of ideas of liberty and justice, the claim to universal principle, and the issue of consent were fiercely contested. Burke, faced with Richard Price’s assertion that Englishmen had a right to frame a government for themselves, treated the concept of prescription with a kind of sacred reverence. In reply Paine described British ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ as mystificatory concepts that promoted ‘aristocratic monopoly’, war, injustice, and oppression, and argued that every man should formally ‘concur’ in the political process.13 In the context of continuing radical challenges from writers such as William Cobbett and William Hone, who described the foundations of the existing political order as mere expediency and interest, Scott was inclined in his fiction to treat the claims of the state as secondary, and to emphasise instead the importance of private relationships and personal obligations. His fascination with the Covenanting tradition can be explained partly in terms of the challenge it represents to the enlightened, moderate world-view represented by his heroes, since the dedicated Covenanter seeks to defend values and ways of life placed under threat by the rise of modern society: the community unified by a shared vision of the good; the theological understanding of the self; and the absolute validity of legal precedent. And in claiming the right of resistance, the Covenanter exposes the problematic nature of consent in the modern state. Jerome Christensen argues that Scott’s fiction presents ‘a recognition based subject rather than a consent based citizen’.14 But I think Scott’s fiction generally implies that consent is a necessary fiction, associated with the acceptance of benefits – in spite of the bitterness and moral outrage such acceptance may entail. The sense of moral unease generated in Scott’s novels is an important part of their effect.

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In returning to the history of the Covenanters, Scott reveals his own struggle with the ‘incompatible and incommensurable moral premises’ bequeathed by the enlightenment. His work exemplifies what Judith Shklar identifies as ‘the liberalism of fear’ – a non-utopian, sceptical tradition rooted in a reaction to the cruelties of the religious wars of the seventeenth century; a political vision inspired not by a vision of a collective good, but by the summum malum of fanaticism, dogmatism, and the cruelty they unleash.15

Covenanting Tradition The Covenant first emerged during the violent transformations of Scottish society in the reformation. It was a solemn agreement binding individual Scots together as a Protestant nation, and binding them to God. It was renewed in 1638, and during the English civil war the Solemn League and Covenant was established (1643), committing both England and Scotland to establishing Presbyterianism as their national form of worship. When Charles II imposed episcopacy on the kirk in 1662, a period of Covenanter defiance and government repression followed. In response to James II’s attempts to crush the remnant of Covenanters, Richard Cameron and his followers declared war on the government in the ‘Sanquhar declaration’. The history of these events was vigorously contested. In the hands of Whig historians, it offered dramatic examples of legitimate resistance to the oppressive, persecuting authority of a corrupt church and state in pre-revolution Scotland, and of heroic martyrdom. For Tory historians it offered examples of the dangers and absurdities of enthusiasm. The Tories were apt to deny that any Presbyterians were persecuted on matters of conscience. They portrayed the resisting Covenanters as a ‘Handful of desperate Ruffians’ who ‘rendered themselves obnoxious to the Laws by repeated Murders, Robberies, and open Rebellions’.16 As Colin Kidd notes, Episcopalians exploited the Cameronians’ claim to be the remnant of the true kirk, suggesting that the Presbyterians of the established kirk ‘were hypocritical Cameronians manqués’.17 Were the Covenanters to be celebrated as martyrs or condemned as half-crazed rebels and traitors? The issue was not simply a matter of distant history. In modern Scotland the memory of the persecutions was being kept alive in histories of the kirk and in reprinted Covenanting texts such as A Short Memorial and A Cloud of Witnesses. Covenanting tradition was still venerated in the Scottish lowlands in the late eighteenth century, and in the early decades of the nineteenth. The two

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synods of the divided Secession church both sought to maintain the principles of the Covenanted Church of Scotland. In the 1790s their adherents may have numbered between 100,000 and 150,000 – perhaps 10 per cent of the Scottish population. They were spied on as potential Jacobins by the government and, according to John Brims, ‘sent at least three ministers as delegates to the Scottish radical reformers’ national conventions’.18 The British Convention of reformers in Edinburgh, seeking to build a broad consensus, made no official appeal to Covenanting tradition. Nevertheless, when the reform movement was suppressed analogies were inevitably drawn between the situation of the modern reformers and the earlier struggles of the Covenanters.19 As we have seen, Scott himself makes a connection between the British Convention and the Cameronians in his first novel, Waverley (ch. 34). And as Angus Calder points out, the Covenanters’ victory over the king’s forces at the battle of Drumclog could still become a focus for political demonstration. The victory was celebrated at the site in June 1815 by a group of ‘weavers, pirn-winders, tambourers’ at a time when ‘the people of France were in arms against their lawful sovereign’.20 Scott’s own attitude to the Covenanters shares some common ground with that of Tory historians who reacted with alarm at the democratic implications and rebellious events of the tradition. But Scott was aware that this response was too simple. Across a spectrum of Presbyterian belief, the Covenant was represented as a defensive institution. The ‘moderate’ Presbyterian William Robertson described the original Covenant as ‘a prudent and laudable device for the defence of the religion and liberties of the nation’.21 In the work of sympathetic historians such as Defoe, Wodrow, and Cook, the Covenanters often appear not as Knoxian reformers seeking revolutionary change, but as patriots seeking to resist innovations emanating from an alien authority.22 The Covenanter thus appears under a double sign – as rebel and as patriot – a doubleness that seems particularly interesting to Scott.

The Tale of Old Mortality: Patriotism and Personal Liberty The reception of The Tale of Old Mortality testifies to the complexity of its treatment of Covenanting history: since its first publication readers have disagreed vigorously about the balance or bias of its portraits of Covenanters and royalists.23 Scott is certainly challenging the proCovenanting historiography developed in the eighteenth century by Presbyterians such as Robert Wodrow, as Angus Calder points out.24 But it is sometimes assumed that this revision of Whig history produced

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a narrative that (in Douglas Mack’s words) ‘celebrates the “Glorious Revolution” and the Union as the precursors of a rational, stable British settlement that secured the rights of men of property by establishing freedom, under the law, from arbitrary power’.25 ‘Celebrates’ is surely too simple a term here. Scott’s novel would be much less demanding, and less powerful, if it simply endorsed or celebrated the historical outcome of the conflicts it describes. But at its centre is his most haunting portrait of the dilemmas of a moderate conscience in a time of crisis. In 1816, when Scott was at work on the novel, deep social divisions, partially suppressed during the war years, were dramatically reopening in Britain. The triumph and relief of Waterloo had rapidly given way to widespread disillusionment, protests against high taxes and the Corn Laws, demands for reform, violent riots, and harsh suppression. The Glorious Revolution had not in itself secured Britain from the dangers of social division and, as Scott knew, an appeal to the rule of law would hardly appease those who pushed for constitutional reform. Old Mortality shows how, in the turmoil that precedes the revolution of 1688, law gives an oppressive authority to the ‘satellites of power’ such as Bothwell and Claverhouse. Scott could have taken the novel beyond such arbitrary violence towards a celebratory ending comparable to that of Waverley – indeed, the idyllic description of domestic happiness at Fairy Knowe in chapter 37 might lead us to expect just such a conclusion. But here the aura of contentment is established in order to be dispersed by news of the landowners’ precarious situation. With ‘the pitting awa’ o’ the Stuart line’ (p. 294), the creditors have come to oust Major Bellenden from his ancestral home of Charnwood, and the unprincipled Basil Oliphant has been confirmed as possessor of Tillietudlem (pp. 328–9). Scott and other nineteenth-century landowners would undoubtedly want the possession of their wealth to be protected, as Mack says, by ‘due legal process’, but the plot of Old Mortality outrageously circumvents such process in contriving a restoration. For the hero, Henry Morton, fails to save the legal document that would secure possession of Tillietudlem, and he arrives with the civil magistrate too late to save Lord Evandale. In the paternalist vision of the novel it is not law, but the loyalty of the lower orders, cultivated by sympathetic understanding, that secures the rights of the landowner. Thus it is the unheroic Cuddie who effectively restores Tillietudlem to the Bellendens, by shooting the intestate Oliphant, without warrant or warning, ‘from behind the hedge’. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, law waits upon violence. This is the condition from which Morton has been trying to dissociate himself. Instead, he finds himself the beneficiary of it. Throughout Old Mortality fortunate ends

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are disconnected from the aims and intentions at work in the narrative. The hero gains the tower after failing to save it for the Bellendens, and wins the heroine after resigning her to his rival. The successful revolution of 1688 is disconnected from the doomed rebellion actually described. The expected happy ending is detached from the narrative and consigned to an ironic post script. An optimistic reading of historyas-romance has to be stretched across such gaps and reversals. The novel certainly extends an invitation to the optimistic reader. But at the same time its representation of the moderate hero provides grounds for a much less optimistic reading. Private self, public role While placed in a seventeenth-century context, the hero Henry Morton is recognisably modern, not only in his humanitarian sentiments, but in his sense of autonomy. This sense is established from the outset. The wappenschaw with which the narrative properly begins is an attempt to revive a feudal tradition of non-professional military service that has already lapsed. Here Lord Evandale’s participation is a direct expression of his social (royalist, aristocratic) and personal identity, while Henry Morton’s participation is not. Morton takes part officially in the name of his uncle and of the ‘royal family’, while his actions are claimed for ‘the good old cause’ by part of the crowd. But his own sense of identity is found to be independent of each of these claims, since he is alienated from them by social, cultural, and political considerations. When his uncle threatens to put him to the plough, he protests: ‘I have formed a scheme for myself’ (p. 49). Following his dead father’s example, he thinks of serving abroad as a soldier of fortune, to fight for his own interest and honour. Morton’s resolution foreshadows the mobility of the age of commerce, in which the identity of the individual will be distinguishable from the social roles he performs. Through much of the novel his sense of self is represented as fundamentally distinct from his public character. His role as Presbyterian hero is initially shaped by others (by the wappenschaw spectators, by Burley, by general rumours, by Kettledrummle), without his consent or even knowledge. He is offered a command in the insurgents’ army primarily on the strength of his unearned reputation (pp. 169–70). The royalist officers who hold him captive each subsequently begin to treat him as one of their own (Bothwell treats him as a potential soldierly comrade, Claverhouse as a ‘high-minded gentleman’ whom he can rescue from the violence of both sides, p. 246). Being taken prisoner and the offer of social assimilation

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are oddly aligned in these moments. There is always a father figure ready to co-opt Morton, on the assumption that he will conform to their social image of him, and each image represents a role that Morton might adopt. But Morton remains one of the loneliest of Scott’s heroes, and his connection with his own society is always at issue. The role that Morton chooses, but is initially diverted from – the soldier of fortune – is at once representative of an honourable Scottish tradition of military service overseas and, as another term for a ‘mercenary’, the focus of anxieties about dependence, corruption, and the demise of public virtue in a commercial age.26 This second aspect is soon brought into focus, since Morton’s first conflict after the wappenschaw is with Bothwell, whom he meets on the premises of Niel Blane, the town piper and publican who epitomises the substitution of private gain for public principle encouraged by commerce. Bothwell demonstrates how easily the soldier of fortune can be led to make the same substitution. The sergeant’s role he plays is determined not by his social origins, but by his condition of dependence – in which he has been corrupted by the habits of acting as agent of government.27 In the quasi-allegorical structure of the narrative he represents a possible future from which Morton must dissociate himself. It is therefore ironically appropriate that the patriotic fundamentalist Burley should step forward to confront the taunts of Bothwell in the very moment that Morton’s own ‘patience and prudence gave way completely’ (p. 31). For in Burley the role of demonic tempter is oddly combined with that of good angel who awakens a sleeping conscience. It is Burley who precipitates Morton’s solitary confrontation with his own alienation, and who, having slain the unbelieving Bothwell, confirms Morton in the role of patriot-rebel leader (pp. 140, 174). The contrast between Morton and Burley threatens to bring into focus that sense of moral disorder and diminished identity that MacIntyre sees as a typical of the modern condition. For Burley is a religious extremist, one who would now be called a fundamentalist. His challenge to Morton strikes at the very basis of the moderate’s worldview. In our own age, some of the most vigorous criticism of western liberalism has come from religious groups and movements loosely described by the contested term ‘fundamentalism’, who reject outright the secular rationality promoted by the enlightenment. Most scholars agree that fundamentalisms arise in response to disruptive social and political changes associated with modernisation. Indeed, fundamentalism has been said to exist in a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with modernity (fundamentalist groups often make use, for example, of modern means of communication to further their aims).28 It has been described as ‘a

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mirror for the Western Academy’, one that forces a critical examination of the beliefs and presuppositions at work in modern thought.29 In practice the response of the ‘Western Academy’ to fundamentalism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the commitment to pluralism and tolerance has produced a willingness to accommodate non-violent fundamentalism as a matter of individual belief.30 On the other hand, the commitment to unfettered critical enquiry leads to an outright denial of fundamentalist presuppositions. So Chetan Bhatt, for example, offers a penetrating critique of enlightenment assumptions in the light of the beliefs of Islamic and Hindu fundamentalist groups, but finally claims the right to critique the ‘superstitions’, ‘falsehoods’, ‘brutalities’, and ‘profanities’ of religion.31 If the ‘mirror’ of fundamentalism induces a questioning of the enlightenment legacy, it also provides a context in which that legacy can be reaffirmed. As we shall see, these responses find their counterpart in Scott, who uses fundamentalism as a mirror that allows him to challenge and reaffirm the moral bases of his own moderatism. Burley is no ordinary enthusiast, but a figure who disrupts the conventional distinction between other-wordly enthusiasm and ‘carnal’ rationality, since he can employ worldly stratagems for his own ends, and make the reluctant Morton acquiesce in his reasoning (p. 210).32 Burley’s sense of identity is directly bound up with the spiritual destiny of the nation. For him, duty demands a continuous effort in the glorious work of building up the spiritual kingdom on earth through the national Covenant, an effort that involves a ceaseless struggle against spiritual darkness, against evil affections and passions. Morton’s identity – though supposedly Christian – has no such theological telos. He will not directly acknowledge such passions and spiritual powers, which are excluded by the impersonal rationality of his language. His sense of duty does not require the realisation of positive public goals but compliance with established authority, which leaves him free to pursue private ends (‘I do my duty as a subject, and pursue my harmless recreation according to my own pleasure’, p. 34). When Burley points out that Morton’s understanding of duty allows him to acquiesce in both the government’s violation of a solemn agreement (the Covenant) and the subsequent oppression of those who insist on keeping that agreement, Morton characteristically retreats from ‘controversy’ (p. 44). This kind of retreat can be construed as ‘tacit consent’, and so as approval of the government. At this point Burley would apply to government the same standard of morality – the same sense of obligation – that Morton applies to private life, in which promise-keeping and consideration of others are matters of gentlemanly honour (as Claverhouse later makes

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clear). But Morton lives in a moral world like Hume’s, in which it is generally advisable to overlook the transgressions of government, since our interest is always engaged on the side of obedience to magistracy. Morton, of course, speaks of ‘duty’ rather than ‘interest’, but the confrontation with Burley nudges into view what is concealed by his words. This is an early indication of the difficulties posed for the reader by Morton’s language, which seems at once ‘authoritative’ and unsatisfactory. The problems at this point arise from a dilemma that Scott can expose but only resolve by sleight of hand. For he can neither fully endorse an idea of personal liberty that acquiesces in corrupt government, nor disown such an idea. Burley initiates the process by which Morton becomes a patriotic hero, but Morton cannot be allowed formally to renounce as inadequate his privatised conception of duty, since this is the conception that the novel will ultimately underwrite, rewarding as it does the soldier of fortune rather than the loyalist Evandale. Instead, the issue itself must be privatised. Later in the book, the current of Morton’s soul is said to be ‘frozen’ by ‘dependence’, ‘poverty’, and ‘limited education’ (p. 110). To what extent, we may wonder, are we to see his moral sensibilities as ‘frozen’ in this novel, and to what extent are they shared by the narrator? In practice, Morton’s repressed feelings modulate into virtue, since Morton is shown to be completely selfdenying in his private life. The personal ‘race of generosity’ with Evandale serves to outweigh and license Morton’s prudential hesitations. Morton abhors Burley’s willingness to sacrifice personal feeling for public duty (that is, to sacrifice friends and family members if they are guilty). But he is prepared to sacrifice his personal feeling for Edith, and hers for him, to his conception of private honour. Just as Burley reveals the limitations of Morton’s sense of public duty at the beginning of the novel, so he calls into question Morton’s willingness to sacrifice Edith to his rival at the end of the novel. Burley, that is, continues to expose the feelings that Morton has to repress in himself to maintain the appearance of moderate hero. The evil angel once again sounds oddly like a good angel. The Conditions of Moderate Rebellion The novel drastically simplifies its portrait of the times into a broad contrast between a ‘narrow-minded’ Presbyterian culture, and the more sociable royalists – some of whom take an interest in arts. We hear that ‘few persons of decent quality had joined the insurgents’ (p. 173). Presbyterian culture is therefore represented primarily by vulgar radicals given to theological harangue – and appears primarily as fanatical,

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contentious, often absurd. As the ‘Preliminary’ chapter makes clear, the Covenanting tradition has taken root most deeply among the ‘peasantry’ of the western districts of Scotland (Ayr, Galloway, Dumfries), among people who are said to urge their sons, even in the present day, ‘to resist to the death in the cause of civil and religious liberty’ (p. 7). The wild preacher Habakkuk Meiklewrath wears ‘the tattered fragments of a shepherd’s plaid’ (p. 180), epitomising Scott’s fears about the unrest that could be generated by vulgar orators speaking to an uneducated and discontented rural poor. Apart from Morton himself, the moderate Presbyterians are represented only by the miserly Milnwood and the simple, self-indulgent Poundtext, who becomes an ally, but is hardly developed into a companion of Morton. In those moments when we hear that the moderates are in the majority, the information comes as something of a surprise. We never see or hear these moderates, who really are a silent majority in the novel.33 This means that Morton is doomed to be socially isolated while he supports the Presbyterian cause, and can find an appropriate social life only among the royalists. Morton’s mind has ‘been freed’ from fanaticism and puritanical sourness (p. 109), and has moved beyond the ‘narrow-minded’ Presbyterian culture into which he was born, a culture opposed to ‘all elegant studies and innocent exercises’ (p. 110). His relationship with Edith figures the development of his own finer feelings, their cultivation and refinement within an appropriately domestic sphere. The older Bellendens are provincial and relatively uncultivated (Major Bellenden boasts of his limited reading, p. 96), but Edith has many ‘accomplishments’ and exchanges ‘books, drawings, letters’ with Morton. These exchanges portend the humanising influence of sociability and the arts, an influence that would become associated in the eighteenth century with the development of commerce. Morton represents a conciliatory ideal, one that unites the sober virtues of the Presbyterian conscience with the manners and sentiments of polite culture. His act of rebellion must therefore represent a middle ground between conflicting extremes. Given his gentlemanly aspirations, the interests he defends must implicitly include both property and social hierarchy. But on the other hand, his protest and rebellion must appear to transcend self-interest, to be universal and egalitarian, encompassing the interests of, for example, the uneducated ploughman Cuddie. Morton’s journey towards rebellion therefore has to be represented under carefully controlled conditions. As a reasonable moderate he cannot rebel against the government simply on principle, without ‘any rational prospect’ of success (p. 78). And, in fact, as long as his own freedom of action is not directly infringed he will not even protest, since

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it is not in his interests to do so. He does not speak out for his country’s rights until they are ‘insulted in his person’. He protests only when he mistakenly thinks he has lost Edith’s love, since, having lost all particular hopes, he can be seen as completely disinterested. He takes his stand on the issue of personal liberty (considered primarily as freedom from arbitrary arrest), a cause that seems universal; but at the same time the revolution in his character is clearly associated with the defence of property: Desperate himself, he determined to support the rights of his country, insulted in his person. His character was for the moment as effectually changed as the appearance of a villa, from being the abode of domestic quiet and happiness, is, by the sudden intrusion of an armed force, converted into a formidable post of defence. (p. 114)

The moderate’s impulse to resist is represented as alien, intrusive, nonutopian, while the simile of the besieged villa quietly anticipates the future direction of the plot. For this tale of the Presbyterian defence of personal freedom against royalist aggression will have at its centre the defence of a royalist property against Presbyterian aggression. The romance conventions dictate that Morton shall marry the heroine Edith, and the corollary of his ambition to marry her is his eventual possession of her inheritance, the tower and lands of Tillietudlem. He never formally acknowledges this as a prospect (although it occurs to Burley, p. 238). Indeed, the prospect has to be warded off by contortions of the plot, in order to free the socially inferior Morton from any suspicion of ulterior or mercenary motives, and to preserve the appearance of complete disinterestedness. But the future liberty Morton is fighting for is always implicitly embodied in the property of Tillietudlem. Here, as elsewhere, Morton’s moderation is based on disavowal of the self-interest that lies at the heart of the commercial ethos he portends. He characteristically defines his position in terms that evoke commitment to political and public goals, but which actually imply a more limited commitment to personal liberty and private interests. Morton will therefore claim rights that are both ‘natural’ and ‘chartered’, confounding the contemporary distinction between the natural rights claimed by Painite radicals and the chartered rights which, as Cuddie points out, belong only to gentlemen (pp. 124, 230).34 In both cases Morton uses the terms to imply personal liberty rather than political rights. In a comparable way, while he strives to place law and authority against the enthusiast’s appeal to individual feeling, he is actually led to place individual feeling against law and authority. When Burley appeals to the inward light, Morton invokes legal magistracy and national law (p. 43), but this appeal is qualified by his own distrust of the ‘tricking and time-serving judge’

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and ‘arbitrary lawyer’ (p. 89). When Burley appeals to the law of the Covenant, Morton objects that this has no authority (since it is no longer authorised by the state); but he finds that Claverhouse and Bothwell carry the authority of the state in their shoulder knot and broadsword. When joining the rebels’ military campaign he appeals to ‘the rules of civilized nations’ (p. 175), but we have already seen that such rules may sanction the arbitrary violence they are intended to disarm (the rebel leader Burley can claim to act according to established rules in killing Cornet Graham, who violates them in making his general offer of pardon, p. 136). In a world in which the laws of state and nations fail, Morton finds his firmest guide in ‘those feelings of natural humanity, which Heaven has assigned to us as the general law of our conduct’ (p. 43). The effective difference between these feelings and Burley’s inner light is not their supposed origin (divine in both cases), but their orientation towards or away from violence. Unlike Burley, Morton places compassion above revenge or punishment. Morton’s appeal to humanity helps to characterise him as a modern hero – since humanity was associated with the sociability and refinement promoted by commerce, the moderation of aggressive masculinity by feminine feeling. But the appeal to humanity as a general law was, as Scott knew, a gesture associated with radicalism, with the friends of humanity, who appealed against the injustice of inequality. While the apparently disinterested universality of Morton’s feelings is set in contrast to the party spirit of both sides, in practice his most conspicuous acts of humanity – such as giving shelter to Burley, or saving Evandale’s life – are motivated by gratitude in the form of personal obligation. Such acts do not link Morton with his ‘country’ or with humanity at large, but with a select circle of associates with whom he has some personal interest. Paternalism requires such private networks of obligation, with particular responsibilities to known individuals, rather than general laws of humanitarian feeling, which might underpin demagogic demands. In the tortuous narrative manoeuvres through which Morton’s conscience is unfolded we can discern Scott’s struggle to appease his own doubts about the implications of his own moderatism. The communitarian Charles Taylor argues that pure enlightened self-interest will never move enough people strongly enough to constitute a real threat to potential despots and putschists. Nor will there be, alas, enough people who are moved by universal principle, unalloyed with particular identifications, moral citizens of cosmopolis, Stoic or Kantian, to stop these miscreants in their tracks.

Taylor insists that patriotism entails ‘a love of the particular’, rather than of a generalised ‘common humanity’.35 Scott’s Henry Morton is

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designed to test just this kind of assumption – and in his history, paternalism is the ground upon which the love of the particular can assume the guise of general feelings of humanity. The course of Morton’s rebellion is from outspoken public virtue to a sentimental private virtue, an outcome anticipated in the very scenes in which he begins to question authority. In his confrontation with Bothwell (ch. 8), Mause’s unrestrained voice represents the triumph of party spirit over her natural feelings; in the matching scene of Morton’s confrontation with Claverhouse, Lady Margaret’s womanly feelings of humanity actually stop her voice and effectively triumph over ‘all the prejudices of rank and party’. The stopping of the voice portends the eventual triumph of sentimental private virtue.36 When he is captured and tried by the Covenanters, Morton experiences ‘a want of that eager and animating sense of right’ (p. 264) which earlier supported him when as a captive he confronted Claverhouse (in ch. 13). He recollects that earlier moment, none too accurately, as one in which he drew moral support from the sympathy and encouragement of the spectators, a support which he now lacks.37 He is being characterised as a sociable being, whose sense of right depends on the approbation of a spectator rather than on spiritual conviction. His capture and rescue by Claverhouse repeats the earlier association between imprisonment and social assimilation. Its true significance is revealed in the climactic scene of the torture of the rebellious Macbriar, where Morton’s gesture of protest is easily restrained, his voice easily stopped by the worldly prudence of Claverhouse – who echoes the warning Silas Milnwood once gave in the presence of Bothwell. In place of the moral idealism of the patriot hero, Morton feels the civilised helplessness of the private individual, whose humanity can now be registered in the silent anguish of outraged feelings. Thus he is becoming the kind of hero Scott really needs – one who will eventually be able to take his place as a quiescent, benevolent landowner, one who will carefully patronise his own dependants, and who seems likely to resign himself to (while attempting to dissociate himself personally from) the unfortunate, and morally deplorable, necessity of harsh action against those who agitate violently for change. He is returning, that is, to the condition in which silence can be construed as ‘tacit consent’. To see the political usefulness of humanitarian sympathy in this way is not to diminish its positive historical influence. As Scott’s readers knew, the progress of humanitarian reform since the seventeenth century had worked to erase torture from the statute books of many European states, and had encouraged ostensible commitment to ‘civilised’ practices in warfare. A progressive reading of history might find in such developments

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a demonstration of the humanising influence of commerce and the arts, and the extension of sympathy as a force for social cohesion and moderation. Nevertheless the period of revolution and war had supplied ample evidence of continuing brutality within the ‘civilised’ states of modern Europe, which could undermine optimistic equations between the progress of the arts and the promotion of humanity. In 1816, the year in which The Tale of Old Mortality was composed, Scott would certainly have good reason to encourage moderation. In France – a nation restored to monarchy for the second time in two years – a backlash of ‘UltraRoyalists’ or ‘jacobins blancs’ against Bonapartists and Protestants would have strengthened the connection Scott made between the restoration of the French king and that of Charles II (which led to the persecutions of the Scottish Covenanters).38 In Britain, too, there were violent riots and harsh suppression. In Scott’s novel the humanising power of the arts is conspicuously called into question by the presence of the more cultured royalists. All of the royalists in the novel, including the refined Edith and – at times – Evandale, are lacking in sympathy for and understanding of the sufferings of the poor. The novel’s only poet is the corrupt Bothwell, the author of a lyric that, far from expressing humanitarian feeling, combines sentiments of love with satanic pride, misanthropy, and savage violence. The lyric found a contemporary counterpart in the poetry of Byron, who had glamorised a comparable mixture of feelings. The aristocratic Claverhouse, devotee of the chivalric Froissart, voices the chivalrous sentiments that were conventionally held to have humanised modern civilisation.39 But paradoxically, in him the cultivation and manners of a model gentleman coexist with the cruelty and indifference to suffering routinely attributed to the savage, since his sympathies, ‘perverted by party spirit’, do not extend to the lower orders. The portrait of Claverhouse unexpectedly echoes radical criticisms of Edmund Burke, whose celebration of chivalric sentiment coexisted notoriously with expressions of disdain for the ‘swinish multitude’. An optimistic reading of the novel must see Bothwell and Claverhouse as manifestations of a past age that the subsequent development of commerce was destined to transform. The alternative reading must see them as foreshadowing the historical failure of that transformation. It is because the novel inscribes within itself the failure of refined manners and the polite arts to foster sympathetic guardianship of the poor that it cannot after all simply dissociate itself from the pieties, beliefs, and wounded feelings of the vulgar Covenanters. This is why the novel cannot end with the vision of rural contentment at Fairy Knowe, and with the satisfaction of the peasant Cuddie, who cares so little for

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the theology that sustains his own people. It has to seek symbolic reconciliation with the Covenanting tradition, finding its most impressive example of quiescent humanitarian feeling within that realm of ‘narrowminded’ Presbyterian conviction it has tended to recoil from, and in an impoverished landscape that is the antithesis of Fairy Knowe. It must lead Morton, that is, to the blind widow Elizabeth Maclure, whose compassion for Royalist Evandale (even though her two sons have been killed by royalists) is said to be based simply on her sense of womanly and Christian values, and in no way incompatible with her attachment to the Covenant. Symbolic reconciliation must be staged in this way because in this passive female, Covenanter fundamentalism is stripped of the militancy and political aspiration that make it a threat to civil order, and can be tolerated as a purely private belief, or as the liberal theorist John Rawls would say, ‘as part of the liberty of conscience’. Even here, of course, compassion is absorbed within a framework of patronage: we learn that, in sheltering Evandale, Maclure apparently knew she was sheltering an associate of the Bellendens, on whose estate she lived. But in this way Covenanting theology is finally harnessed to the cause of political moderation in a realm beyond the supposedly humanising effects of refined manners, the arts, or material improvement. Elizabeth Maclure thus helps to displace Burley who, having been demonised, first as a power-hungry hypocrite, and then as mad, can be exorcised from the novel. The crazed figure of Burley in the cave is designed to displace the traditional image of the hunted Covenanter, surviving heroically in the recesses of the Scottish landscape. It has often been noted that in his death he is identified with the wild Scottish landscape itself. This strange conclusion helps to modify the historical perspective of the novel. The image of the tower of Tillietudlem, poised symbolically between two prospects – one ‘monotonous, dreary, wild, inhospitable’, the other ‘richly cultivated and highly adorned’ (p. 97) – initially seemed to represent the historical fate of Scotland, poised between an uncultivated past and progressive future. But in retrospect it begins to look more like a representation of the condition of modern civilisation itself, centred upon the interests of the privatised and gentrified bourgeois family unit, divided between an ideal of material improvement and an austere ideal of unimproved nature, a nature into which its own fantasy of quiet virtue can be projected, and in which the convictions, passions, and violence it must disavow can be distanced and replayed in the thrill of natural sublimity, and in the ghostly memories of a violent past. Scott’s Covenanting novels are presented under the series title Tales of My Landlord, the landlord in question being not a laird but a publican.

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The stories emerge from the realm of commerce, a world where patriotic sentiment sells (the hero Wallace has given his name to licensed premises). In this materialistic world, Old Mortality, whose act of remembrance links the nation-in-history with the spiritual kingdom, is turned into a ‘last man’. In the frame of The Tale of Old Mortality he is caught up in a this-worldly history of obsolescence which looks no further than the material evidence (as Pattieson’s interest in the evidence of pocketbook and funeral expenses, added in the ‘Introduction to Old Mortality’, confirms). The novel’s ironical framing of the heroic narrative by the unheroic discourse of Jedediah Cleishbotham attempts to disarm criticism of the compromises entailed in its own treatment of history. In fact, The Tale of Old Mortality’s portrait of Covenanting tradition did not escape criticism, and provoked some fictional responses. James Hogg’s novel The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) included a much more sympathetic portrayal of the oppressed lower-class Covenanters (showing, for example, how they worked at night-time on the farms of those who had sheltered them by day). John Galt’s monumental Ringan Gilhaize (1823) attempted to portray the heroic spirit of the Covenanters’ rebellion without Scott’s ‘levity’.40 One of Old Mortality’s most penetrating critics was the Secessionist Thomas McCrie, who was outraged at what he considered the lenient treatment of Claverhouse, and the omission of so much of the Covenanters’ suffering. This last point is telling, since the novel avoids showing the aftermath of Bothwell Bridge, which Whig historians represent as the period of most intense persecution – of tortures, banishment, slavery, and summary execution. McCrie exclaims: Such of them as escaped execution were transported, or rather sold as slaves, to people desolate and barbarous colonies; the price of a whig was fixed at five pounds, and sometimes they were given away in presents by the judges.41

When Scott returned to the Covenanting tradition in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, he focused on a story which seems to exclude the possibility of dealing with such persecutions. In the post-Union Scotland of the 1730s, the Covenanters’ resistance to Stuart oppression has been replaced by the Edinburgh mob’s resistance to interference by Hanoverian London. But Scott evokes the Covenanting tradition as a means of negotiating the inherent problems of his conciliatory stance. And the novel’s generally sympathetic representation of a Cameronian family caught up in the deadly processes of law echoes the plight of earlier Cameronians. As we shall see, the history of intense persecution

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partially repressed in Old Mortality returns to haunt and disturb this narrative.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian: Covenant and Union Scott was officially committed to the principle of Union, and to the legal framework that supposedly protected Scotland from unwarranted interference from the Westminster Parliament. But in practice the Union of 1707 was an agreement whose terms, like those of the Solemn League and Covenant, were soon infringed. Union left Scotland vulnerable to interfering reforms from London, such as the attempts to reform the Scottish legal system in 1807, and to abolish the small Scottish banknote in 1826 (both of which Scott opposed, fearful that Scotland might be left ‘tabula rasa for doctrines of bold innovation’).42 And it accelerated the economic transformation that threatened to undermine the traditional social fabric of Scotland.43 Such developments alarmed and angered Scott, and could prompt him into angry verbal protest.44 In the Covenanters’ conscientious adherence to the original principles of the Covenant, then, Scott would have found an echo of his own desire to protect Scottish liberties by adhering to the original principles of the Union. This echo can be heard in his Letters of Malachi Malagrowther (1826), where he appeals to the terms of the Treaty of Union in order to question the legality of plans to abolish a Scottish banknote. It is a manoeuvre that exposes the inherent conflict between his desire for an absolute principle of legitimacy immune to temporal change, and his progressive vision of history. While he hopes ‘that an international league of such importance may still be found obligatory’ on both contracting parties, he also recognises the quixotic nature of the hope: Even if the old parchment [of the Treaty] should be voted obsolete, there would be some satisfaction in having it looked out and preserved – not in the Register-Office, or Advocates’ Library, where it might awaken painful recollections – but in the Museum of the Antiquaries, where, with the Solemn League and Covenant, the Letter of the Scottish Nobles to the Pope on the independence of their country, and other antiquated documents once held in reverence, it might silently contract dust, yet remain to bear witness that such things had been.45

The Scottish Nobles’ letter is usually known as the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) – an affirmation of Scotland’s independence and a refusal to submit to English rule. Scott aligns his own hopes directly with those earlier Scots, including the Covenanters, who sought to adhere to a solemn agreement. In doing so he anticipates an inevitable betrayal.

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No matter how binding these documents may once have seemed, their validity can now be seen as relevant only to circumstances that no longer exist. The passage of time transforms the absolute into the relative. History shows only too clearly that social order is founded, in Hume’s word, on ‘advantage’.46 For this very reason, as the passage makes clear, an element of suppression is necessary in the handling of such sensitive historical issues. The phrase ‘voted obsolete’ blandly legitimises a process that must outrage Scottish feelings. The historical evidence – of solemn agreements, declarations, oaths – must be preserved in a form that doesn’t disturb slumbering pain. As in Waverley, that is, memory must be divorced from the official business of life. To deal with the past in this way is to anaesthetise conscience, to abandon principle (even while officially espousing it), to collaborate with the very process of cultural assimilation against which one is protesting. In the steadfast refusal of the Covenanters to accept the necessity of betrayal, Scott could find an admirable model of resistance, but one at odds with his own conciliatory stance. The undeclared project of The Heart of MidLothian might be described as an attempt to bridge the gulf between conscientious resistance and tacit consent. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as in Scott’s other Scottish novels, the conciliatory approach to history extends beyond the handling of broken agreements to the record of violence and atrocities that looms so large in the history of Scotland. The narrator’s account of the Butlers’ family history begins at the time of what is termed the ‘storm and plunder’ of the city of Dundee by Monk’s army in 1651. Scott’s phrase gestures towards, but partially occludes, the horror of the event, in which, as Hume’s History informs us, Monk followed ‘the example and instructions’ of Cromwell and ‘put all the inhabitants to the sword’.47 The time-scheme of the novel is extended to include reference to ‘the breaking out and suppression of the rebellion in 1745’, but the reference itself suppresses the bloody consequences of the event. Among the characters of the novel, this way of dealing with the painful legacy of history is exemplified most clearly by the Duke of Argyle who can speak, for example, of the deaths of his grandfather and great grandfather in a conciliatory tone that discreetly veils the fact that both were executed by the government as rebels. When the duke’s daughter uses a ballad to tease him about the battle of Sheriffmuir, he replies, referring to the highlanders who destroyed the left wing of his army, ‘well do I wish them, “for a’ the ill they hae done me yet”, as the song goes’.48 The song supplies a form of words that forestalls any exploration of the ‘ill’, and excludes any note of personal bitterness. This response may remind us that Scott’s own first published accounts of painful episodes in Scottish history were in ballad form.

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In the novel the Cameronian Davie Deans represents an alternative approach to the past. As a Covenanter, Deans is committed to defending an idea of the nation against the threat of corruption. He fortifies his commitment by dwelling on the ‘gloomy history of the strivings and testimonies, escapes, captures, tortures, and executions of those martyrs of the covenant’ (p. 135), in order to keep the bitterness alive and draw strength from examples of resistance. In this he exemplifies the approach to the past we have seen in Thomas McCrie. Deans has the fundamentalist’s inflexible commitment to historical precedent and sacred bond, and therefore acts as a mirror in which worldly compromise is revealed. His steadfast refusal to accept that a solemn promise, sworn before God, could be ‘voted obsolete’ by historical circumstances exposes the perfidy upon which the social order is built. To him conciliation means betrayal. He resents ‘the quiet and indifferent manner in which King William’s government slurred over the errors of the times’ and rewarded former persecutors of the kirk. He is appalled that the government ‘eluded’ a proposal to revive the League and Covenant ‘as being inapplicable to the present times’ (p. 178). In his view, to co-operate with a state that has compromised in this way is to collaborate with an illegitimate power that should be resisted. Scott has formally to dissociate himself from such a position in the novel. Not only is Deans’s ostensibly principled attitude consistently associated with fanaticism, but it is also undermined by his egotism and self-deceit, and his own need to shift his ground in response to changing circumstances.49 He has to be implicated, if unconsciously, in the kind of evasion that he opposes. Nevertheless, he represents most clearly the novel’s awareness that injustice and broken faith are legitimised, and Scottish autonomy is quietly eroded, in such ‘slurrings’. The polite narrator of this novel must tacitly endorse such slurrings, and reproduce them in his own narrative, as a method of dealing with the affronts of history. As in The Tale of Old Mortality, Scott attempts to reconcile Covenanting tradition with the cause of moderation by focusing on the conscience of a female peasant, in whom tradition can be represented in a privatised and quiescent form, and carefully distinguished from Davie Deans’s militancy. How better to negotiate with fears expressed by Ferguson and others, that the ‘respite from public dangers and troubles’ in the modern world will make potential patriots ‘effeminate’, than by moving from a male soldier-hero to a young female who could be a model of virtue without engaging in violent resistance? We can begin to see, then, that if The Heart of Mid-Lothian gives Jeanie Deans’s courtroom testimony a central place, it does so in order to redeem and celebrate an absolute commitment to principle which

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must elsewhere be treated evasively or with irony. Jeanie’s refusal to violate a ‘solemn oath’ (p. 209) and bear false witness in order to save her sister’s life is sometimes attributed by critics to her unusual Cameronian upbringing; but the novel explicitly avoids making this exclusive link. Instead Jeanie’s decision is presented as a refusal ‘to transgress one of those divine commandments which Christians of all sects and denominations unite in holding most sacred’ (p. 182). For this reason it does not have to be qualified as an example of ‘fanaticism’. In itself, that is, the decision is placed beyond the historical conditions the novel is most interested in. Like the narrator’s view, it simply transcends them. It involves none of the ‘casuistry’ which James Chandler rightly sees as important elsewhere in the novel.50 Jeanie is not allowed to have any ‘chimerical scruples’ (p. 205) about her need to testify in court, however much its consequences may distress her (the narrative has to contrive other problems for her, such as her horrified misunderstanding of her father’s advice). Her testimony works to guarantee both her own and the narrator’s moral authority, and therefore helps to underwrite their judgements elsewhere in the novel. Jeanie’s unnecessary collaboration with this dubious legal process can be viewed sympathetically because it will eventually be redeemed by royal pardon. It must be viewed sympathetically because elsewhere the novel will seek to elicit sympathy for Jeanie’s silent refusal to collaborate with British law. In place of open resistance, the novel comes to endorse a form of resistance that resembles its own unobtrusive evasions. Official and Unofficial Resistance Scott’s use of a young Scotswoman from the peasant class as the heroine of his work can be seen as an important step in the democratising of the novel, but Scott is able to take this step because Jeanie has no possibility of assuming a public voice, except in the courtroom where she must say ‘Nothing’. Since polite English has a hegemonic status in the novel, Scottish identity can be asserted in public or official terms only by its own erasure. Scott makes this clear at the beginning of the narrative, in his most dramatic example of resistance to British influence, the Porteous riots. Scott’s treatment of the riots has inevitably been related to contemporary representations of the French revolution.51 It would certainly have been impossible to describe a mob storming a prison without evoking the fall of the Bastille. But in view of Scott’s own fears of contemporary urban agitation, which had been intensified by political unrest in Scotland in the year before he began work on the novel, his treatment of the Porteous riots is very surprising.52 For while the

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mob is credited with a roar like a tiger (a conventional portent of revolutionary violence), its protests are represented by polite English of astonishing formality (‘venture to defraud public justice [. . .] profligate satellite [. . .] trifling tumult’), which dignifies it (pp. 33–5).53 The general avoidance of Scots in describing the riot, like the rioters’ politeness when acting on their protest, is paradoxically one of the conditions that enables the event to be presented as a public expression of the collective Scottish ‘national spirit’ (p. 64) endorsed by all social ranks. The chorus of Scots voices that complains about London after the public protests of the mob is presented as offstage, and clearly divorced from the active resistance of the rioters. Elsewhere the hegemonic status of English works to complicate Scott’s representation of Scottish institutions. The story of Effie Deans requires him to show the harshness and corruption of the Scottish system of law and order. But his desire to vindicate Scots law (a system recently threatened by assimilating British reforms) demands that the same system be represented as humane, fair, and efficient. The conflict of interests is played out as a linguistic conflict. The harshness and corruption are portrayed mostly in Scots (through scenes involving Sharpitlaw and Ratcliffe), while the good qualities are represented mainly in English. The magistrate Middleburgh – like the other officials who preside over Effie’s trial – is usually made to speak an impeccably polite English, while a footnote added in the later editions asserts that the Scots patois of the Edinburgh magistrates was actually a source of confusion and mirth when they testified before the House of Lords. This is one reason why the novel needs Saddletree, the Scots-speaking wouldbe magistrate, whose unofficial status allows him to function, as Peter Fisher notes, as a ‘scapegoat’ who bears the brunt of the charge of formalism.54 Scottish identity, it seems, can be directly represented only in unofficial forms, unofficial voices. In this respect the status of Scots speakers corresponds to that of women, who have no official or public voice. This helps to explain why, after its violent opening, the novel comes to focus so insistently on female characters.55 Jeanie has a limited education and few social contacts, and her relation to Presbyterian tradition is a purely private one. The ‘gloomy history’ of the martyrs of the Covenant, in which Deans himself claims to have played a significant role, constitutes for Jeanie an entirely pacific moral tradition. Her Scots ‘eloquence’ can be allowed to prevail in her sister’s cause because it is voiced unofficially, in back stage scenes. Her resistance to authority involves no public opposition to injustice or broken faith, but often takes the form of evasion, saying nothing. Her sister, Effie, provides a similar example of

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passive resistance to authority. It is through these female figures, rather than through Davie Deans, that Scott evokes most disturbingly the earlier history of the persecuted Covenanters. Jeanie’s first major test before her appearance in court occurs on the desolate setting of Muschat’s Cairn, where Robertson/Staunton attempts to bind her conscience by making her ‘solemnly swear’ (p. 138). The scene, dramatised in terms of gothic terror, recreates a situation of central importance in Covenanting history – in which the oath is used as an instrument of persecution. Many conscientious Presbyterians regarded official oaths such as the Test, the Oath of Supremacy, and the Abjuration (to be taken without equivocation or mental reservation) as snares for the conscience. Covenanting history provided the most dramatic examples of the tyranny of the oath, since during the 1680s, after the Cameronians had issued the Sanquhar declaration, those who refused to swear an oath of abjuration faced severe punishment, even summary execution. In Robertson’s menacing insistence (‘I will have no reservation!’, p. 139) and his threat to kill Jeanie – and in her brave resistance and resourceful evasion – the tradition of Covenanting defiance of a corrupt and tyrannical authority is replayed in a form that neutralises its political significance. A less theatrical and more disturbing example of this echoing of the past appears in the trial process. Here Effie finds herself in an ambiguous situation where the distinction between ‘declaring’ and ‘refusing’ dissolves, where exercising the right to silence may be taken as proof of guilt, in which testimonies which are not ‘in themselves evidence’ usually work to condemn the accused ‘out of their own mouths’ (pp. 204–6). By giving Effie’s declaration ‘in judicial form’, the narrator aligns the scene with interrogation scenes in popular martyrologies such as A Cloud of Witnesses, in which martyrs to the Covenant refuse to name their associates or to subscribe their own testimonies (refusals which were, of course, taken as evidence of guilt).56 The ostensible issue – Effie’s sexual guilt – is overwhelmed by a quite different issue: Effie’s courageous refusal to ‘tell on other folk’ even though her life is in danger recreates an earlier history of Covenanting resistance to a menacing authority. The novel’s preoccupation with naming and withholding names has been helpfully discussed by Carol Anderson, who relates it to, among other things, Scott’s interest in oral tradition.57 I would add that naming is also a prominent concern in Covenanting historiography. Scott evokes that concern incidentally by linking his history of a Cameronian family with the ‘Porteous’ affair. In the period of persecution, the names of suspected Cameronians were inscribed in ‘Porteous rolls’, the names often being supplied (according to Whig historians) by mercenary informers.

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The historians offered a kind of restitution for the persecution by naming persecutors (to condemn them to lasting infamy), and by naming victims (to memorialise them as martyrs).58 This tradition of naming and shaming lies behind Jeanie’s considered act of resistance to state authority when, on her journey to London, Staunton reveals his leadership of the Porteous mob, and advises her to trade his life for Effie’s. Jeanie’s Cameronian identity makes her reject this proposal. Staunton’s crime, she thinks, may be ‘a crime against the public’, but it ‘was not against her’. In this context, ‘public’ refers to the British state, whereas later in the same sequence ‘public’ refers to the Scottish people, whose idea of ‘ancient national independence’ is affronted by the government’s reaction to the Porteous affair. Jeanie accepts the Scottish view that to lodge information about the riot would be ‘treason’ against Scottish independence. She ‘trembled’ at her name being ‘damned’ to ‘perpetual remembrance and execration among its peasantry’ (pp. 313–14). Her decision, unlike that in the courtroom, is seen as culturally and historically specific. Private judgement triumphs over the claims of legal authority (a death penalty threatens ‘those who should harbour the guilty’, p. 171). In the spirit of the Covenanting tradition, Scottish identity is constituted in terms distinct from, and opposed to, the existing institutions of the state. The heroine aligns herself directly with a community united by shared values. The narrator cannot officially condone this decision, and has to characterise it as an example of ‘fanaticism’ (p. 314). But it is nonetheless viewed sympathetically. Jeanie’s thought processes at this point are summarised in English. The avoidance of Scots at this sensitive moment works to control and authorise the non-British perspective. Jeanie’s sense of national solidarity and her capacity for resistances manifest themselves here as an ability to keep a secret. It can therefore shade into less contentious, more general forms of concealment – on the one hand, the canny closeness of the peasant, and on the other, the social tact of politeness. In this way, the gap between the vision of the Cameronian peasant and the polite vision of the narrator is quietly closed, or slurred. Repeatedly the narrative foregrounds Jeanie’s awareness that confrontation can be avoided by saying nothing. She advises Butler not to speak Latin or English terms to Deans (p. 247). When she crosses the border into England, she soon finds that it is ‘in her interest to speak as little and as seldom as possible’ (p. 249). She conceals her affairs from the Reverend Staunton, and from Mrs Glass, and from her husband, and she conceals her sister’s identity from her patron, the Duke of Argyle. When the queen asks her if she has any friends among the Porteous rioters, she is able to reconcile her denial with her

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conscience because she will not regard the man who has offered to give his life for her sister as a ‘friend’ (p. 340). What is from one point a view a scrupulous regard for the truth is from another point of view (as Judith Wilt points out) mental reservation.59 Resistance and non-collaboration shade into tactful evasion and a polite defence of the rights of privacy. Migration, banishment, abandonment The social form of this reconciliation between resistance and politeness, between the affective claims of an identifiable community and the legal claims of the state, is the establishment of a privatised space for Scottish culture. This was the solution Scott proposed to himself at Abbotsford, which was to be at once the home of an enlightened gentleman in touch with the improving spirit of his age, and a conservation area for Scottish culture, which would provide a home for, among others, a celebrated border piper and a Cameronian preacher, living under the benign paternal supervision of the laird. Scott repeatedly refers to Abbotsford in his letters as his ‘colony’, humorously inviting comparison with other, grander attempts to establish a space for Scottish culture in colonies overseas.60 Settlements such as those in contemporary Canada, in which Scottish emigrants hoped to establish kinship patterns comparable to those already breaking down in the homeland, could be seen as a longerterm answer to Scottish problems. They might absorb excess population, and insulate Scottish culture from the worst effects of British commerce and political interference, while remaining open to communication and trade with Britain.61 In Scott’s novel the Duke of Argyle, the ‘Prince of Scotland’ (p. 325), occupies a position comparable to the settlement proprietor – between the public domain of British power, and his own private estates in which he is regarded as the supreme authority. Jeanie, Butler, and Deans must therefore migrate from the shadow of Edinburgh, move westward, put clear water between themselves and their past, start a new life under the benign patronage of Argyle, in whose realms the ‘law of the land’ (p. 214) – about banishment, smuggling, hereditary jurisdiction – may be quietly disregarded. Here political discontent is absorbed and protest deflected, and the proximity of different cultural traditions living together under aristocratic authority encourages ‘measures of conciliation’ (p. 416), illustrating once more the importance of tactful withdrawal, of learning when to say nothing. Here Butler’s appointment as delegate to the General Assembly of the kirk heralds the ‘moderate’ Presbyterianism that will gain the ascendancy in the later part of the century, and thus suggests a beneficial

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influence working outward from Roseneath – but generally the emphasis is on the community’s insulation from the wider culture of Britain. Effie’s transformation, hardly necessary to the morality of the novel, is used to emphasise the artificiality of the Hanoverian world – a world of deceitful appearances, in which manners have completely usurped the role of morals. Effie returns as a kind of double of the expatriate Queen Caroline – both maintain their position through polite dissimulation, and have a commanding manner, an ‘embonpoint’ appearance, and a £50-note gift for Jeanie. The relationship between Scots Jeanie and Hanoverian Effie, which allows financial support without interference, has a larger resonance. Roseneath at the western end of the highland line could be both insulated from modern commercial Scotland and, with the introduction of improved methods of farming, well placed to benefit from its market: it lay across the Clyde from Greenock, Scotland’s fastest growing port, and about twenty miles downstream from the great commercial city of Glasgow. Jeanie’s return journey from London, which moves towards Glasgow, only to make its swerve away from the political agitation of the city more visible, encapsulates the movement of the novel itself – towards and away from modernity. This swerve away from the city clearly signals the narrator’s evasion of the problems introduced at the beginning of the novel – the substitution of a private solution for a public one. In other ways the novel signals that the Duke of Argyle’s highland Arcadia stands in place of histories which the novel will not address directly. The migration to Roseneath is occasioned initially by Effie’s banishment; the collocation of banishment and migration has precedents in Covenanting history. In the aftermath of Bothwell Bridge, many resisting Covenanters escaped execution only to be banished to plantations in America or the West Indies, where some were sold as slaves or simply given away to plantation owners. Some emigrated voluntarily to a small Scottish settlement in New Jersey, founded by the Quaker Robert Barclay.62 This is the history that Thomas McCrie expected Scott to keep faith with. The novel gestures towards this unspoken history by describing Knocktarlitie as a refuge for those dispossessed Scots who suffered under the Earl of Argyle at the time of the Monmouth rebellion (p. 398). Historically, Argyle’s followers, like other Covenanters, were subjected to torture, executed, or banished to transatlantic slavery.63 Just as Knocktarlitie stands in place of, and offers an imaginary restitution for, a history that cannot be spoken of directly in the novel, so the benign exile of Jeanie – which hinges upon the Argyle family’s historical connection with the Covenanting cause, and on the present duke’s willingness to honour long-standing family debts – stands in place of a confrontation with the irresolvable divisions

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and grievances that agitated Edinburgh at the beginning of the novel, and which must be abandoned in the novel’s search for a conclusion. But these issues are not completely abandoned. Instead, they are displaced onto the figure of the madwoman Madge Wildfire – another figure linked by her parentage to Covenanting tradition (her father was in a Cameronian regiment). Her ruin is initially associated with the problems of Edinburgh. She is identified by her ‘real’ name, Magdalen, as a prostitute – and her presence in the novel testifies to the existence of large numbers of prostitutes in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, where the brothels seem to have become a tourist attraction.64 At the time Scott was writing, prostitution and mental illness had become matters for enlightened reform: a Magdalene House had recently been established in Glasgow for the rehabilitation of prostitutes, while the Edinburgh Review had lent its support to a parliamentary investigation of conditions in madhouses and charity reforms by select committee, 1815–16.65 The reform movement was assisted by sentimental discourses of prostitution and insanity, in which the fallen woman and the madwoman were presented as pathetic victims. In the presentation of Madge Wildfire such types are evoked, and complicated by older ones – the outrageous, libertine whore, and the rowdy bedlamite.66 Typically, she resists simple categorisation: combining masculine and feminine features, her function is to be beyond assimilation, and beyond reform. From her first ‘appearance’ in the Porteous riots, she unsettles conventional relations between signifier and signified. Her presence represents and, through its colourful oddities, obscures, the existence of an urban underclass made up of the displaced and exploited who, without the benefits of patronage, are to be regulated by the harsh mechanisms of the Tolbooth, the house of correction, the workhouse, and Porteous’s City Guard. Initially associated with the rioters, by her subordinate status, as female, as fallen woman, and as mad, she illustrates, and to some extent ironises, the novel’s displacement of such active resistance into more passive, feminine forms, and onto the transgressive sexuality of the female. Critical studies often associate Madge with oral folk tradition, but this view does not quite account for the range of her language, since a number of her ‘vanities’ derive from literary sources. Here again she resists assimilation to a single category. The incongruity of her words consistently associates language with betrayal. In the Tolbooth she mocks Butler as a persecuted minister suffering for the ‘gude auld cause’ (p. 149) – an allusion that anticipates her later references to Bunyan; her song, adapted from the restoration author Tom D’Urfey, expresses defiant royalist sentiments. But in this age, Presbyterian Butler, like Deans, is a Hanoverian, while to support the house of Stuart is to be

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a dangerous Jacobite. The incongruity between the song and its application reflects not only on the insanity and obsolescence of the speaker, but also on the process of historical change itself, in which loyalties are inverted, perjury legitimised. She next sings the song from which she acquired her new name, a song which, we subsequently learn, was given to her by the Englishman Robertson/Staunton on the night he promised to marry her (p. 278). The song, that is, represents her betrayal, just as its glamorous, romantic image of light-hearted liberty belies the actual ruined condition of the displaced fallen woman. In the same scene, her reference to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster recalls the occasion in 1643 when a new directory of worship was agreed jointly for both Scotland and England – an agreement soon broken by the English. Her reference to the dimly remembered carritch (catechism), justification, and effectual calling testifies to a religious education designed to promote trust and obedience through open declaration. Her offer (in a later scene) to say her prayers to the mother who has abused her (p. 263) links that education directly with her ruin (it was assumed by the founders of the Glasgow Magdalene that religious education must be an essential element in the reclamation of prostitutes).67 This character’s unsettling of conventional terms and categories represents another kind of resistance, one which works against the authority of language itself. Madge offers, more suggestively than any other character in the novel, a perspective at odds with the polite narrator’s. Peter Murphy notes that in the central scenes of the novel, Madge leads us through winding ways to the heart of a dark forest, to the site of a dark secret, but nothing happens when we get there. [. . .] This novel and its heroine have an extraordinary capacity to walk past significant things without noticing them.68

Murphy’s reading is consistent with the narrator’s view, but bypasses the view suggested by Madge’s references to Bunyan, the enthusiast who was persecuted for his faith. For Madge leads us beyond her buried child to the House of the Interpreter, the site of another dark secret which is simultaneously exposed and buried in the narrative. The narrator must politely distance himself from the vision of the Pilgrim’s Progress, which he associates with ‘children and people of the lower rank’ (p. 279). But the Bunyanesque context provides a silent commentary on the episode. Bunyan’s Interpreter was identified by contemporary commentators as the Holy Spirit, his House as the scriptures themselves – an allegory which emphasised the individual’s engagement with the spiritual significance of the text.69 But Madge leads Jeanie to the Church of England which, from Bunyan’s point of view, is the abode of Mr Worldly

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Wiseman. While the narrator notes the ‘dignified appearance and deportment’ of the clergyman, and his ‘sensible’ discourse on ‘the practical doctrines of Christianity’ (p. 284), Madge’s absurd attentions to her beggarly finery parody the pretensions of polite congregations. She doesn’t enter the rectory of the Reverend Staunton (like Mercy she is left outside; she is turned away by the ‘awful authority’ of the beadle, p. 286). But she has guided Jeanie to what may be the novel’s most scandalous revelation: that the leader of the Porteous riots, the source of Madge’s ruin, and of Effie’s, lies within the ‘respectable’ and ‘imposing’ House of the Interpreter, which is possessed by a former soldier from an aristocratic family, returned from his plantations in the West Indies, where his son, now a professional smuggler, was brought up among slaves. Even as the novel shows what lies behind the imposing appearance – an aristocratic and military tradition that has begun to profit by the commercial exploitation of slaves, and that betrays and disowns its own dependants – the narrator erects barriers to contain and neutralise the revelation. The respectable Anglican clergyman must be insulated from the proceeds of the West Indian estate, and from full knowledge of his son’s deeds; his son must be a palpable villain, through whom the narrative can personalise and limit guilt and responsibility. Patriarchal power must be absolved, responsibility placed on the female: the son was spoilt by his mother (p. 315), perhaps corrupted by his nurse’s milk (p. 297). Madge’s expectation that the vicar would take her by the hand, feed her, and restore the good times is a mere symptom of the fallen woman’s derangement (p. 279). The narrative leads us towards a conclusion which threatens to dissolve the distinction between the morally respectable and the morally corrupt, but finds that conclusion literally unspeakable. Madge has to be disposed of before the Roseneath idyll can begin – her fire extinguished in the river Eden, before Jeanie can cross the water into the highland Arcadia. But this disposal gives dramatic form to the novel’s abandonment of the problems associated with Madge. As Scott knew, the corollary of agricultural improvement, of the experimental farm to which Jeanie travelled, was displacement – expulsions, clearances, the casting of the less fortunate ‘loose upon society’.70 Progress in the modern state serves the interests of those with power, while the poor who lack benevolent patronage will suffer. In protecting Jeanie, Archibald (the agent of Argyle and the namesake of his ancestors) must try to dislodge Madge with ‘violence’ when she tries to enter his carriage, leaving her to her fate among unimproved butchers and graziers. The dying Madge is carried to a ‘work-house, or hospital’, where

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ironically one of her songs casts ‘Lord Archibald’ as her betrayer (pp. 363–6). Jeanie, en route to an increasingly bourgeois existence, takes up the role previously assigned to Ratcliffe and Sharpitlaw, of trying to extract information from Madge (colouring her action as ‘a matter of humanity’, p. 364, and leaving the hospital as soon as she is sure she won’t get any information). The novel allows Madge no direct protest against this outrageous treatment, but characteristically produces song and silence instead: Madge will say nothing to Jeanie, turning to the wall and refusing to answer to her name. The figure of Madge, then, reveals in grotesque symbolic form what cannot be spoken of directly, and (like Davie Gellatly in Waverley) also exemplifies the impossibility of speaking out. Her confession to Jeanie reveals explicitly that much of what she says stands in place of ‘gude words’ that cannot be spoken: ‘whiles they are just at my tongue’s end, but then comes the Devil, and brushes my lips with his black wing [. . .] and dits up my gude words, and pits a wheen fule sangs and idle vanities in their place’ (p. 274). This confession licenses the stylisation of her insanity into a display which both invites and resists enquiry. It also reflects on the language of the novel more generally. The incongruity of Madge’s language is a grotesque comic counterpart to the linguistic evasion of the polite speaker, for whom a ballad may deflect the painful reality of war, and who must simultaneously pay lip-service to, and forget, the absolute. The conventional madness of the marginalised fallen woman is beginning to symbolise a view of the historical condition that the novel cannot directly acknowledge: an awareness that polite culture cannot openly account for itself, for its own betrayals and injustices; that cultural tradition, unable to answer or even directly confront the most painful truths of history, must exist as fragments shored up against ruin. The novel has to collude in Madge’s final abandonment, but Roseneath cannot keep the abandoned completely at bay. After the reference to the ’45 rebellion, a new set of dispossessed outsiders appear, headed by Donacha and the Whistler. If Roseneath resembles a colony, the Whistler recalls those displaced by colonial settlement. His hair is like the ‘glibbe’ of the Gaelic Irish (p. 443) who were dispossessed and kept beyond the pale by the English colonisation of Ireland, as Lady Morgan had reminded British readers in The Wild Irish Girl (1806).71 His selling as a slave to a Virginia planter in the winding up of the novel is the final gesture towards the unspoken history of the Covenanters’ persecution – towards their transportation to the American plantations, and their selling as slaves. It is a gesture that throws light retrospectively on the many references to tobacco – from Ratcliffe with his quid, to

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Mrs Glass at the sign of the Thistle in London (her family has traded with Virginia since the 1690s, p. 353), to Duncan smoking in church. The historic dependence of the Scottish economy on the tobacco trade, and so on the ‘horrible trade’ of slavery (p. 463), is in this way indirectly acknowledged, but also carefully played down (the sale is attributed to the outlaw Donacha). At the end of the novel it is Jeanie who, having cut the bonds of the ‘savage’, unbaptised Whistler, seeks to bind him with a promise. The scene brilliantly encapsulates the betraying power of language, as it combines in one act an enabling gesture and a gesture of assimilation – the strategy of a ‘civilising’ colonial power. For the Whistler, to promise means to give up his freedom, and perhaps his life. He triumphantly evades her with fire, a bid for liberty which looks back to the fires lit at the Tolbooth door, and forward to his rebellion against his slave-master. The Whistler’s progress to a life of savagery among American Indians is perhaps the ultimate way of saying nothing to a civilisation founded on betrayal. The echoes of the Covenanters’ persecutions that play through this narrative represent the haunting of the narrator’s modern British voice by its Scottish conscience. That conscience cannot be voiced directly, because Scotland seems locked into the process of history, just as Scottish culture seems locked into a dominant Anglo-British culture, and as Scott himself – in writing novels for a polite British audience – seems locked into a system that to some extent predetermines what can and cannot be said. But Scott’s linguistic evasions, omissions, and substitutions, and his representations of the refusal or inability to speak, bring into view forms of resistance and trauma that may be concealed within the silence and inertia from which tacit consent to the modern British state may be inferred. Scott’s turning away from the problems of the city in this novel might be cited as a fundamental evasion of the problems of modernity – and Scott can be compared unfavourably with the later novelists of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, who find powerful ways to confront and explore directly the scandal of urban poverty. But Scott was writing at a time when the rural population across Britain was expanding faster than rural employment, when many land-workers were suffering the harsh effects of rapid economic change, including displacement from the land. Scott had good reason to fear the potential consequences of these developments in Britain (as we have seen, he saw a connection between contemporary radical agitation and the ‘fanaticism’ of the Covenanters). And if he had reason to see the inadequacy of benevolent paternalism as a solution to such problems,

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he also had reason to hope that it might at least ameliorate them. Moreover, problems comparable to those afflicting rural Britain were being experienced in many other rural communities across the globe, as a result of colonial expansion and the development of commerce. Recent studies have traced a link between the disruption of rural communities and the appearance of fundamentalism among peasants and former peasants in our own time. Indeed, we might reconsider our own fascination with the modern city in relation to William H. McNeill’s observation (made in a study of fundamentalism) that ‘a majority of humankind on the face of the earth today is properly described as peasant or ex-peasant’.72 Rather than see Scott’s preoccupation with Covenanting tradition among the Scottish peasantry as a retreat into a historical curiosity, we might begin to see it as a prescient attempt to engage with a problem that is central to the condition of modernity.

Notes 1. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, p. 174. 2. MacIntyre, After Virtue; MacIntyre, Whose Justice?; Sandel, Liberalism; Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart. 3. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 32. 4. See also John Gray’s discussion in Enlightenment’s Wake, pp. 144–84, and Poole, Morality, pp. 1–25. 5. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 77. 6. Dwyer, ‘Enlightened spectators’, p. 101. 7. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (II, 103), p. 380. 8. Pateman, Problem of Political Obligation, p. 22. 9. For example, Said, Culture and Imperialism; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason; Ericson, Debate over Slavery; Kittay and Meyers, Women and Moral Theory; Weeks, Coming Out. 10. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xvi, 67, 147; Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness’. See Hampton, ‘Should political philosophy be done without metaphysics?’; Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family; Exdell, ‘Feminism, fundamentalism, and liberal legitimacy’, and Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, p. 76. 11. Pateman, Problem of Political Obligation, p. 82. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (II, 119), p. 392. 12. Pateman, Problem of Political Obligation p. 172; Zwiebach, Civility and Disobedience, pp. 75–6. 13. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 84. 14. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, p. 175. 15. Shklar, ‘Liberalism of Fear’, pp. 23–9. 16. Bruce, Scottish Behemoth, p. 26. 17. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past, p. 53. 18. Brims, ‘Covenanting Tradition’, pp. 51–2.

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19. John Brims (ibid., pp. 54–7) cites the example of Archibald Bruce, founder of the hard-line Constitutional Presbytery in 1806, who compared contemporary reformers with persecuted Covenanters in his HistoricoPolitico-Ecclesiastical Dissertation (1802) and elsewhere. 20. Scott, Old Mortality, ed. p. 10; Aiton, History of the Rencounter at Drumclog, pp. 98–9. 21. Robertson, W., History of Scotland, III: p. 85. 22. Defoe, Memoirs of the Church of Scotland; Wodrow, History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland; Cook, The History of the Church of Scotland. 23. Donald G. Priestman has shown how early criticism was coloured by political interests and by related attitudes towards religious toleration: ‘Old Battles Fought Anew’. Beth Dickson argues that the novel is an example of a ‘Tory version of Scottish history’: ‘Sir Walter Scott and the Limits of Toleration’, p. 60. 24. Scott, Old Mortality, ed. Calder, p. 16. 25. Scott, Tale of Old Mortality, ed. Mack, p. xxv. All subsequent references are to this edition, which is based on the Edinburgh Edition of 1993. 26. J. G. A. Pocock explains, ‘If all his [commercial man’s] political relationships were mediated, he must in the last analysis be governed by intermediaries, whether these took the form of mercenaries, courtiers, clergy or representatives; and every theory of corruption, without exception, is a theory of how intermediaries substitute their own good and profit for that of their supposed principals’: Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 121–2. 27. The narrator assures us that in Claverhouse’s regiment of Life-Guards, even non-commissioned officers and privates ‘were not considered as ordinary mercenaries’, since ‘Many young men of good families were to be found in the ranks’ (p. 55). But Bothwell’s behaviour is certainly consistent with an unscrupulous mercenary. 28. Marty and Appleby, ‘Introduction’, Fundamentalisms Observed, p. vii. See also Tétreault, ‘Contending Fundamentalisms’, p. 18; Kepel, Revenge of God, p. 2; Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution, pp. 51–2. 29. Marty and Appleby, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. 30. John Rawls explains: in liberal theory ‘It is left to citizens individually – as part of the liberty of conscience – to settle how they think the values of the political domain are related to other values in their comprehensive doctrine’. Political Liberalism, p. 140. 31. Bhatt, Liberation and Purity, p. 271. 32. What Morton sees as an attempt to ‘unite the duties of a good Christian with those of a peaceful subject’, Burley sees as an attempt to ‘serve both God and Mammon’, p. 46. 33. We learn in passing that most Presbyterians among the insurgents don’t approve of the archbishop’s murder, and that Morton assumes that he will have a voice as powerful as Burley’s from the numbers of the moderate party, pp. 172, 211. 34. Radicals claimed both natural and chartered rights, but in the 1790s Painite radicals claimed natural rights in opposition to the rights granted by legal charters which, according to Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man,

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35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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annulled the rights of the majority. When Cuddie objects that chartered rights only belong to gentlemen, Morton cites St Paul, claiming the right of the freeborn, a charter common to the ‘meanest Scotchman’, p. 124. The appeal is not to any legal charter, but to a residual understanding that rights should be defined in terms of authority. Later the Covenant will be identified as ‘the Magna Charta’ of the Presbyterian church, p. 287. The novel shies away from insistence on either natural and chartered rights. Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes’, p. 175. Peter D. Garside offers a brilliant discussion of the relationship between language, silence and ‘sympathy’ in the novel: ‘Old Mortality’s silent majority’, pp. 149–64. ‘Then he was conscious, that, amid the spectators, were many lamenting his condition, and some who applauded his conduct’ (p. 264). It is hard in reading the episode in question to find anyone who applauds his conduct (Major Bellenden thinks him mad). Scott had drawn a parallel between the restoration of Charles II and Louis XVIII in the Edinburgh Annual Register and Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk. From October 1815 until January 1816 the ‘Chambre Introuvable’ was occupied with four ‘laws of exception’ which were intended to crush opposition. There were reports of ‘Royalist troops arresting and executing persons without trial or authority’: Cobbin, Statement of the Persecutions, p. 88. Helen Maria Williams exclaimed: ‘They seem to think, like the Ultras in the time of our Charles the Second, that they can never find axes and ropes enough to punish the guilty’: Narrative of the Events, p. 374. Gilbert Stuart, for example, argued that ‘The spirit of humanity, which distinguishes modern times in the periods of war, as well as of peace; the gallantry which prevails in our conversations and private intercourse; in our theatres and in our public assemblies and amusements; the point of honour which corrects the violence of our passions, by improving or delicacy, and the sense of propriety and decorum; and which, by teaching us to consider the importance of others, makes us value our own; these circumstances arise out of chivalry, and discriminate the modern from the ancient world’: View of Society, p. 66. Galt, The Life and Literary Miscellanies, I, p. 251. McCrie, Vindication of the Covenanters, p. 43. Scott, Journal, p. 113, entry for Tuesday 4 March 1826. See, for example, Scott’s comments on ‘those abominable manufacturing districts’ of Scotland where traditional kinship patterns have broken down: ‘they are little better than English without English independence to make amends for this hard heartedness’. Scott to John Morritt, 27 May 1817. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, IV, p. 456. Phillipson, ‘Nationalism and ideology’, p. 186. Scott, Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, p. 43. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, p. 205. Hume, History of England, VI, p. 44. Scott, Heart of Mid-Lothian, ed. Hewitt and Lumsden, p. 358. All quotations from the novel refer to this edition. See D’Arcy, ‘Davie Deans and Bothwell Bridge’. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 311.

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51. See, for example, Lodge, ‘Crowds and power in the early Victorian novel’; Robertson, F. Legitimate Histories, pp. 208–9. 52. Scott feared that the period of political agitation of the early 1790s (the period of the British Convention in Edinburgh) was returning, and that strong counter measures were necessary. See his letters to Charles Erskine, 9 January 1817, and to the Duke of Buccleugh, 10 January 1817: Scott Letters of Sir Walter Scott, IV, pp. 363, 369. 53. Although Scott’s narrator refers to them as ‘the mob’, David Hewitt points out that the crowds at the execution of Wilson and Porteous were not in, legal terms, ‘mobs’, ‘because they were legally assembled to witness acts of justice’: ‘The Heart of Mid-Lothian and the people’, p. 303. 54. Fisher, P. F., ‘Providence, fate, and the historical imagination’, p. 109. 55. As Caroline McCracken-Flesher puts it, ‘Scott elides the male criminal under the sign of the suffering woman’. ‘A wo/man for a’ that?’, p. 232. 56. For example, the interrogation of James Nicol before the privy council, 18 August 1684, p. 351, and the interrogations of George Jackson by the Bishop of Glasgow: ‘Q. Who was your captain? A. A Young man. Q. How called they him? A. I am not bound to give an account to you’, etc.: Anon., Cloud of Witnesses, p. 366. Comparable scenes appear in martyrologies relating to the Monmouth rebellion. In Anon., The Protestant Martyrs, Monmouth is interrogated on the scaffold in a vain attempt to acknowledge the doctrine of non-resistance, pp. 7–9. In James Bent’s The Bloody Assizes, Henry Boddy undergoes a similar interrogation, p. 68. 57. Anderson, C., ‘Power of naming’, pp. 189–201. 58. John Howie, for example, produced a ‘black catalogue’ for this purpose in The Judgement and Justice of God Exemplified (Glasgow, 1782). 59. Wilt, Secret Leaves, p. 125. 60. See, for example, Scott’s letter to Lady Compton, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, V, p. 93, ‘since the days of Robinson Crusoe never was a colony so queerly peopled’. 61. Among the most notable Canadian settlements were those established by the Earl of Selkirk in Prince Edward Island (for highlanders, dating from 1803) and by Thomas Talbot on the shores of Lake Erie (Talbot Settlement, which included both lowlanders and highlanders). According to K. J. Duncan, ‘the glowing accounts of the [Talbot] settlement arriving in Scotland in the period 1818–21 persuaded many people from Argyllshire and Perthshire to emigrate thence’: ‘Patterns of settlement in the east’, p. 62. 62. The fullest account of the banishment and exile appears in Wodrow’s History of the Sufferings, II, pp. 339–484. For a modern account see Ritchie, Scotland in the Time of the Covenanters, p. 124. 63. George Cook claims that after the rebellion the government took action against all Presbyterians in its power ‘with the utmost remorseless severity’, History of the Church of Scotland, III, p. 411. Many suffered terrible privations while imprisoned in Dunottar Castle. Wodrow records that ‘Fifteen Prisoners taken with Argyle, of the meaner Sort’ were ‘banished to New-England, and given to William Arbickle on his Petition to the Council’. History of the Sufferings, II, p. 550. 64. A detailed tourist guide was published in 1775: Anon., Ranger’s Impartial List. The issue is discussed in Tait, Magdalenism.

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65. Mahood, Magdalenes, p. 59; Scull, Museums of Madness, pp. 68–70. 66. See Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, pp. 167–77; Showalter, Female Malady, pp. 8–14. 67. Stevenson MacGill, in A Sermon Delivered at Glasgow, explains that a female superintendent in the hostel will ‘Evening and Morning, read the Scriptures, worship God with them [the inmates], and shall give religious instruction’, p. 29. 68. Murphy, ‘Scott’s Disappointments’, pp. 190–1. 69. ‘Where is the House of the Interpreter [. . .] It is the HOLY SCRIPTURES’: Andronicus, Key to the Pilgrims Progress, p. 40. ‘The Interpreter represents the teaching of the Holy Spirit according to the Scripture’: Bungay, Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 441. 70. Scott, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, IV, p. 496. 71. Lady Morgan, Wild Irish Girl, p. 17. 72. McNeill, ‘Epilogue’, p. 563. McNeill notes the rise of fundamentalism among peasant populations who experience acute discontents as a result of the disruptive effects of modernisation and the disregard of traditional ties.

Chapter 7

Liberal Dilemmas: Liberty or Alienation? The Bride of Lammermoor and Redgauntlet

Scott officially endorses the humanitarian sentiments and civilised conduct of his moderate heroes, and evokes Christian principles that supposedly transcend historical conditioning. But his fictions often appear to confirm Hume’s view that all rules of natural and civil justice arise ‘merely from human conventions, and from the interest, which we have in the preservation of peace and order’. Like his awareness of the limits of historical truth, Scott’s implicit recognition that there may be no absolute or universal principles upon which to found social order might suggest a comparison with the views of ‘postmodern’ liberals such as Richard Rorty, who accepts the absence of such principles without regret, and who willingly gives up any attempt to arrive at an ‘accurate representation of the way Nature or Morality really is’.1 But to make this comparison is to expose the historical distance between Scott and Rorty. Scott’s scepticism may give rise to some irony, but it does not escape regret, and it is tempered by the understanding that certainty, or the appearance of certainty, is desirable. His romance of disinterested virtue may be offered with a playful awareness of its own fictiveness, in ways that have encouraged critical comparisons with the self-reflexive playfulness of postmodern fiction.2 But it is also usually sustained with enough consistency to allow the suspension of disbelief – that is, to provide the reassuring illusion of a knowable world and a traditional moral world-view. While Scott usually proceeds as if historical scepticism can be happily integrated with romance, the idea that the modern subject is fundamentally divided surfaces early in his career. As we have seen, in the Marmion epistles, the modern poet’s consciousness appears split between a fantasy of lost community (evoked by the naive minstrel persona, attached to memory of the clan) and the dissatisfactions of the civilised present. The division cannot simply be aligned with the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ that has haunted discussions of Scottish literature since the nineteenth

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century – that notion of a specifically Scottish condition of division rooted in the traumas of a national past.3 For Scottish history is the lens through which Scott brings into focus a wider condition rooted in the progress to modernity itself, the condition of the individual disembedded from traditional social relations, for whom identity and community have become problematic. The recognition of this condition reverberates through the historical novels, including English novels such as Kenilworth. Scott, torn between an enlightened view of the past as a realm of ignorance and brutality, and a romantic critique of the present as a condition of alienation and division, is neither proto-communitarian nor a whole hearted liberal. His awareness of this division anticipates that of Zygmunt Bauman, an exponent of ‘postmodern ethics’, who argues that both liberalism and communitarianism are ‘projections of dreams born of the real contradiction inherent in the plight of autonomous individuals’, of modern subjects for whom ‘Community without freedom is a project as horrifying as freedom without community’.4 But if Scott anticipates Bauman, he cannot be assimilated to the postmodern position. To Bauman, the recognition of irresolvable contradiction is liberating, enabling the autonomous self to vindicate its own moral responsibility. There can be no comparable moral break through in Scott’s fiction, since the contradiction cannot be directly confronted, and is usually partially obscured. For this reason, Scott rarely emphasises the psychological disruptions entailed in the historical disembedding of identity, or foregrounds the condition of alienation that the process of modernisation can produce. But there are some exceptions. In this chapter I will consider two novels which, in quite different ways, begin to expose more overtly the profoundly disruptive effects of the progress of modernity.

Between two moralities: The Bride of Lammermoor The Bride of Lammermoor exposes anxieties about the moral consequences of the rise of commerce, without offering the kind of symbolic resolution that usually provides closure in Scott’s fiction. We can approach his treatment of these anxieties by briefly reconsidering Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, gives voice to fears widely shared among Scottish writers, about the loss of martial virtue and public spirit threatened by the rise of commerce. Ferguson draws a familiar contrast between an active virtue associated with military and political fitness, and ideas of virtue associated with commerce and refinement, a contrast that plays

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through a wide range of eighteenth-century writings, as J. G. A. Pocock and other scholars have noted.5 And he identifies multiple sources of corruption that appear in the movement from ‘barbarity’ to ‘times of refinement’, including the division between the arts of war and of civil government, which gives pre-eminence to the statesman (p. 151). But Ferguson goes beyond such public developments to identify a fundamental and deeply problematic psychological transformation within the process of corruption: the emergence of a debilitating self-consciousness which generates anxiety by ‘incumbering the individual with new subjects of personal care’ (p. 206), and the alienating influence of ‘sensibility and delicacy’, which makes citizens critical of the ‘ardour’ and ‘fortitude’ of former ages (p. 256).6 If, as John Dwyer suggests, Scottish writers did not undergo a ‘paradigmatic leap’ from the traditional language of virtue to a language of the self and its emotions, Ferguson visualises such change as part of what Duncan Forbes has identified as ‘the first clear announcement of [. . .] the idea of alienation’.7 In The Bride of Lammermoor, as we shall see, Scott presents a comparable transformation in consciousness, as the unrefined, active, relatively unselfconscious condition of former times is displaced by a more refined, passive, critical, and psychologically unsettled sense of being. But while Ferguson stabilises the relativising contrast between these historically conditioned modes of virtue, by idealising the former condition (as exemplified in the supposed integrity of ancient Sparta) Scott effectively undermines both modes, projecting a world without secure moral foundations. In other Scott novels, political compromise and economic dependence are transposed into exchanges of mutual affection through symbolic marriage and benevolent patronage, while disinterested virtue wins out economically over self-interested calculation. But The Bride of Lammermoor frustrates the progress towards symbolic marriage, allows self-interest to destroy supposedly disinterested virtue, and relegates to the subplot the prospect of social reconciliation through patronage (where the prospect is treated with disdainful comedy). The novel contrives for the reader a process of disillusionment, in which the ideal of the aristocratic landowner as the exemplar of virtue is ruthlessly undermined, while sentimental views of feminine virtue, of rural poverty, of folk culture, and of the regenerative power of the affections are entertained, only to be displaced or brutally exploded. Politics and the private world At the centre of this novel is a tale of domestic tyranny – a young woman urged to marry against her will, and made prisoner in her own home.

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While Scott claims a historical source for his story, this part of the plot has precedents in many eighteenth-century novels, most notably Richardson’s Clarissa. The virtuous resignation or passive resistance of the heroine was a recurrent motif in contemporary fiction. It had been challenged by radical novelists in the 1790s, including Thomas Holcroft in Anna St Ives and Robert Bage in Man As He Is, who use the heroine’s plight to draw parallels between domestic and public oppression. Scott transforms the motif by embedding it within a wider history of social change – a history of the demise of feudal relations, a change arising partly from aristocratic negligence and partly from the aspirations of a rising professional class who are guided by self-interest rather than by codes of feudal honour. Sir William Ashton, a lawyer turned politician, has acquired the ancestral estate of the Ravenswoods by the skilful pursuit of legal advantage. Seen in this context, the attempt to control the marriage choice of the heroine, Ashton’s daughter, Lucy, brings into focus a problematic relationship between the private world of virtuous feeling and the public world of politics and law. The opposition between virtue and social corruption in the sentimental traditions of eighteenthcentury literature is often conceived in terms of disjunction: virtue is found where sympathetic feeling can be nurtured and appreciated, in areas outside of – disjoined from – the world of political and commercial interests or urban vice. The moral purity of the heroine, of the conscientious mother, or of the rustic depends on the notional separation of the domestic enclave and the realm of rural labour from the corrupting world of competitive self-interest and political intrigue.8 But Scott’s novel undermines this assumption by showing how the forces of historical change and political interest penetrate into every aspect of human experience. The fortunes of the last Ravenswood, the hero, Edgar, are not only bound up in the broad historical movement away from feudalism; they are also linked to a possible change of government, which may favour his claims against Ashton. The action is also refracted through the uncertain and divided medium of public opinion, as the narrator’s many reports of alternative views, rumours, and general opinions remind us (reporting phrases abound, such as ‘it is said’ and ‘it seemed evident’, and there are many references to the views of unspecified others, such as ‘The more numerous part of the assembly’ or ‘the more cool and judicious’.9 The novel illustrates at every turn the penetration of the political into the personal. To the lovers, Edgar and Lucy, it may appear that their intimacy arises out of chances and feelings that transcend historical and political considerations. But this perception is shown to be an illusion. Even when the narrative appears to follow the chance logic of romance, it may subsequently backtrack to subsume chance

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within self-interested political calculation. (The arrival of Ashton’s hunting party at Ravenswood’s tower is not, as it first appears, simply the chance result of a storm; we subsequently learn that the storm merely favours Ashton’s careful planning.) The novel demonstrates that the lovers’ relationship, even in its most private moments, is intricately involved in a maze of political intrigue, counterplotting, and opinion. The climax of the novel – which shows the destructive influence of the politically motivated will on the integrity of the innocent mind – is the culmination of a process examined through the narrative as a whole. Scott’s representation of this process undermines the privileging of feminine subjectivity found in some other novels of the period. In one respect it represents an answer to the gothic romances of Anne Radcliffe, as Ian Duncan suggests.10 In The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, the virtue of the heroine, Emily, is fostered in a protective domestic enclave set apart from the world of war and politics, and ruled over by a benevolent father, himself a man of feeling. It is tested in the quite separate world of Udolpho, a centre of political intrigue and masculine aggression and ambition. Scott follows Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Austen’s Northanger Abbey in collapsing this formal distinction between the domestic realm and the realm of patriarchal tyranny. But in The Bride of Lammermoor the distinction between parental benevolence and selfinterested manipulation also collapses. As in Radcliffe, the heroine’s virtue is fostered in domestic seclusion, and her home is set in symbolic opposition to a ruinous, dark, dungeon-like gothic edifice. But in Scott’s novel the heroine’s home is also a gothic castle, and is the site of political intrigue. Sir William Ashton is at once a protective, caring father, who will risk his own life to protect his daughter from a charging bull, and a self-interested, ambitious, scheming politician. The forbidding tower of Wolf’s Crag is the home of the hero, Edgar Ravenswood, who has the haughty manners and striking appearance of the gothic villain, but is essentially good-natured. Edgar is largely divorced from the dubious strategies that historically sustained aristocratic power – the depredation, the manipulation of custom and appearance, the downright deceit – which are displaced onto the comic figure of Caleb, the loyal butler. This allows Edgar to speak a personal language of honour, revenge, and love, and to court the wealthy heroine, Lucy, with the appearance of complete disinterestedness. He is a man seemingly without material or sexual desires, and with only a residual urge for vengeance deriving not from a selfish will but from an inherited code of honour widely shared in the novel. He can therefore be assimilated to an aristocratic ideal of virtue, associated with military training and a readiness for active service, in contrast to the refined virtue exemplified by the heroine.

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The virtue of a Radcliffe heroine is tested most obviously in the absence of her mother, by aggressive and amoral masculine power (as when Montoni tries to force Emily to ‘Sign the papers’ that will give him possession of her property). But in Scott’s novel it is the mother who will imprison the heroine, using both the authority of official culture (the Bible and the clergyman) and the folk learning of the peasant to pressure her daughter into an unwanted marriage. The innocent centre of the novel, Lucy’s sensibility, is carefully historicised. It is seen as the product of assumptions about feminine conduct that predominated before the French revolution, and it is also seen in the context of the Keeper’s puritan heritage (the family portraits emphasise the ascetic nature of Sir William’s Calvinistic ancestors). Lucy is introduced by a song that links her sensibility to a principled negation of desire, and to ‘vacancy’. Scott invests her innocence from the beginning with a spectral quality resembling that of Radcliffe heroines, whose refined sensibilities endow them, as Terry Castle notes, with a ‘haunted’ air.11 In this case, however, the spectral quality of Lucy’s innocence portends its eventual collapse, and its social and moral value remains open to question. From a public point of view, Lucy seems in herself quite inconsiderable. But the public view is always bound up with interests and assumptions that might be moderated by the influence of Lucy’s innocence. The Marquis’s advice to Edgar (‘you might do better’) is shaped by his political views, while the perception (shared by Blind Alice and other folk) that Edgar is interested in Lucy only in order to revenge himself upon Ashton is based on knowledge of Ravenswood family tradition. But Lucy’s effect is not to be measured in such terms; it works in the realm of individual subjectivity, beyond the shared reality of social convention. Edgar thinks of Lucy as an angel descending to help him battle with his bosom snake of vengeance. She appears ‘before his imagination’ as ‘a picture of the most seducing sweetness’. His emotional response to her is always in tension with his rational evaluation, since he is distrustful of imagination (he describes her feelings as ‘poetry’, asserting that ‘in poetry there is always fallacy, and sometimes fiction’, p. 164). This tension runs through much of the novel, since while the redemptive potential of feminine sensibility is suggested in the plot, that sensibility is also related to ignorance, lack of will, and susceptibility to delusion. As John Mullan notes, novelists such as Richardson and Mackenzie represented the amelioration of society by virtue, sympathy, or benevolence as a ‘remote, oppositional and even despairing’ prospect.12 Edgar Ravenswood and all of the Ashton males are shown to be to some extent responsive to Lucy’s benign influence. The novel appears to

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illustrate this influence in the early sequence in which Ashton, pausing from his sedentary labours, hears Lucy’s song. She leads him away from the world of law, and away from the luxuries of the house, into the large and well-wooded chase outside the castle, a domain that he knows little of, and in which she can be his guide. There she makes him feel the beauties of nature (she is said to know every part of the grounds by her frequent rambles, p. 31), and she encourages him to take an interest in one of the poor who lives on his estate, Alice Gray (according to the Keeper, she makes it a point of conscience to record the special history of every boor around the castle). She portends the romantic sensibility in its democratising Wordsworthian form, which might help an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie alienated from rural culture to develop a sympathetic appreciation of rustic life. To this reconciling function is added another, since in response to her influence Edgar’s commitment to the vengeful code of honour weakens, and he gives voice to unmistakably moderate views, looking forward to a time ‘when justice shall be open to Whig and Tory’, and when political factions will become obsolete: ‘as social life is better protected, its comforts will become too dear to be hazarded without some better reason than speculative politics’ (p. 74). In this respect Lucy represents that feminine influence that can promote peace and sociability by softening ‘the headlong passions of the ruder sex’ (p. 44). In these parts of the novel, we can trace the outlines of a movement that could conceivably have ended in a symbolic marriage of reconciliation, one that would represent the triumph of disinterested virtue over the forces of social division. But that movement is not fulfilled, and while various narrative devices invite us to attribute the tragic outcome to an impersonal fate or doom, other parts of the narrative locate the reasons for failure within the very understanding of virtue the narrative appears to endorse. For the novel shows that the moderation Edgar envisages depends not, as he might suppose, on disinterested virtue, but on self-interest of the kind embraced by Ashton and the inhabitants of Wolf’s Hope, who have already acquired a taste for ‘comforts’, and who trust in the law, rather than in aristocratic might, for their protection. Ashton, the pliable, time-serving trimmer, who identifies reason with self-interest, and works in the ‘spirit of temporizing policy’ (p. 127), is a major voice of conciliation in the novel. He may excite ‘the contempt of the more daring leaders of most factions in the state’, and the narrator may see his pursuit of ‘a middle measure’ as typical of ‘timid minds’ (p. 183). But however selfish and cowardly his motives, his gestures of conciliation towards Edgar effectively supplement, and seem inseparable from, the benign influence of Lucy. Edgar renounces his

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vows of vengeance under the influence of ‘the real charms of the daughter, joined to the supposed services of the father’ (p. 136). The sentimental romance of reconciliation is itself already wedded to, and qualified by, the politics of self-interest. As we read on, we become increasingly aware of how the novel revises its own idealising gestures, not only those that promise reconciliation between aristocracy and new wealth, but also those that concern relations between landowners and the poor. The figure of Blind Alice provides a sentimental view of the rural poor, as frugal, disinterested, self-sufficient, and dignified. She is seen primarily as the victim of personal misfortune (a widow who has buried six children), rather than of social misfortune (she has secured possession of her cottage and, if poor, can sustain herself economically). Identifying herself as a ‘monarch’, she offers her simple honesty as a model for the political world. Her oracular warnings to Edgar and Ashton evoke a fantasy of feudal community in which the poor can speak out in responsible judgement on their betters, in which ‘legendary lore’ is compatible with the authority of biblical tradition, and in which the peasant is righteously opposed to the masculine, quasi-pagan code of aristocratic honour. This idealised figure manifestly works to deflect, or rather suspend, harsher views of rural poverty in the narrative. As an Englishwoman, said to have married far below herself, she confounds class distinctions, and speaks a dignified English remote from the ‘vulgar’ idiom of the Scots peasant. In this respect, as in others, she represents an impoverished Scots peasantry by not representing them. Her presence in the narrative lends support to the myth of a regenerative female virtue associated with Lucy, but the return of Lady Ashton heralds the disintegration of this myth, the death of Alice Gray, and her replacement by a demonic double, Ailsie Gourlay. Unlike Alice, Ailsie represents those who have been dispossessed as a result of the Ravenswoods’ improvidence and who, lacking the protection that Alice has fortuitously secured, are ‘steeled by want and bitterness of spirit’. This figure helps to bring into focus what Kathryn Sutherland describes as a ‘profound sense of broken allegiance between the old aristocracy and the folk’.13 Ailsie speaks in Scots, and when the peasant voice appears its effect is like a veil being withdrawn. While Alice’s moral warnings dignified the Ravenswoods as implacable but honourable, Ailsie speaks of the late Ravenswood’s random (and apparently drunken) violence. Hers is a bitter, malevolent voice, seeking rather than disavowing revenge. Her complaints are generalised through those of the gravedigger Mortesheugh, who speaks disparagingly of the Ravenswoods’ part in the battle of Bothwell Brigg, and who has lost his farm to ‘John Smith’ – suggestive of the infiltration of disruptive English

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interests into the Scottish economy. The idea of virtue exemplified in the independent landowner, ready to take up arms in defence of the public good, is challenged here. As mediated through the voice of the dispossessed poor, the Ravenswoods are stripped completely of their dignity and honour. The displacement of Alice by Ailsie, of the voice of an ideal rustic honesty by the malevolent Scots voice of bitter experience, anticipates the climax of the book, when Lucy Ashton on her wedding night will lose her docile feminine virtue with her sanity, and speak in disdainful Scots to her persecuting family. The most sinister aspect of this novel is its re-creation of the wider historical opposition between aristocratic oppression and embittered peasantry, within the realm of bourgeois domestic relations. For here it shows the dynamic of social reconciliation as itself the source of destruction. When the gothic Ravenswood Castle is transferred from aristocratic ownership, it is refurbished and adapted for the use of its new gentrified owners, who replace the Ravenswood family portraits with their own. This adaptation of the new to the old suggests a conservative understanding of social change (it corresponds to William Blackstone’s approving description of the British constitution as ‘an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant’).14 Such a process is usually an essential precondition of social reconciliation in Scott’s novels, but here it is consistently ironised. The ethos of an aristocratic tradition trained in masculine pursuits of hunting and war, and dignified by an ideology of honour, is readily absorbed by the Ashton sons, Henry (an enthusiastic student of hunting) and Douglas (eager to defend family honour in a duel). But it also reappears within the heart of the domestic sphere, where it is dignified by appearing under the guise of an opposing feminine ideology, whose outward sign is the docility and gentleness of Lucy, ‘the most affectionate maternal tenderness’ (p. 229) of Lady Ashton (said to work upon her daughter like a military engineer and an angler, p. 238), and the ‘kindliness and interest’, the ‘attentive services and real skill’ of the vengeful peasant nurse (p. 240). Lucy’s feminine docility is, of course, the antithesis of the physical courage and haughty pride that shape aristocratic masculinity. But such docility had to be defended from the awakening of latent desires. The conventional warnings to young women of the dangers of reading ‘delusive’ romances assumed that such works would inflame the sensibility and foster unrealisable ambitions. Scott illustrates these dangers in the case of Lucy. From the beginning we learn that her outward conformity conceals a delight in legendary tales, in which she can imagine herself

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‘distributing the prizes at the tournament, or raining down influence from her eyes on the valiant combatants’ (p. 25). Lucy’s chivalric fantasies connect her with the world of aristocratic pride and violence associated with the Ravenswoods, and give furtive expression to that desire for power and recognition that is supposedly refined into enlightened virtue by the progress of society, and that will eventually be released through insanity as violent, vengeful anger on her wedding night. But long before this catastrophe, the desire for such power and recognition surfaces in the novel in the figure of the mother. In much writing of the later eighteenth-century writing the feminine ideal is divided between the submissive figure of the daughter as potential bride, and the elevated figure of the mother as guardian and educator of her children. The contrast emerges very clearly in Rousseau’s influential novels: for example, the ideal woman of Émile, Sophie, is conceived as the pleasing subordinate partner of the male hero, while Julie de Wolmar, the heroine of Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, emerges as an ideal mother who dominates her household.15 The conflict between an established ideal of femininity conceived in terms of amiable gentleness, and the urge to claim rationality and moral authority for women, was played out partly on the grounds of motherhood. In the radical writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, as in the conservative works of Hannah More, the educated woman finds her most obvious fulfilment as a mother, a figure who combines gentle sympathy with firm moral discipline, and so underpins the claim for influence within the home and in society at large. In a wide range of contemporary writing, arguments about the moral duties of the mother were couched in terms of social utility, justice, rationality, or Christian virtue; in the works of women writers anxious to improve women’s education, such arguments were also claims for social recognition and power. This is particularly evident in Hannah More, for whom maternal tenderness, underpinned by Christian faith, becomes the medium by which women can exercise and enforce patriarchal authority. In law mothers had no rights over their own children. But within the home, More insists, mothers have an ‘acknowledged power’ over them, and especially over their daughters (who were ‘almost exclusively committed’ to their care). In this context power means psychological mastery, since children must be subject to ‘unrelaxing’ discipline and restraint, and ‘led to distrust their own judgement’.16 For More, such moral discipline in the home was to be the basis of a general reformation of British culture, one that would, as Gerald Newman points out, effectively undermine the ascendancy of Britain’s upper classes.17 Scott’s treatment of the mother figure reflects upon the relationship between the bourgeois ideology of motherhood and the aristocratic

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traditions it contends with. The transfer of authority from Ravenswood to Ashton gives a new significance to the family, since virtue is no longer dependent on physical courage or military prowess, but can be cultivated within the domestic sphere. Lady Ashton clearly violates the ideal model of maternity by absenting herself from family duties to engage in political intrigues with the powerful favourite of Queen Anne, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. But it is when she returns to resume her domestic duties that she is most disturbing. Paradoxically, the inflexible Lady Ashton becomes, like her husband, an active agent of reconciliation. She combines pride in her Scottish ancestry with readiness to cooperate with English political influence, feminine skill in ‘the recesses of the human heart’ with a masculine grasp of political strategy, a zealous respect for the authority and teaching of the kirk with a readiness to patronise folk wisdom. The Marquis may exclaim that Lady Ashton should be taught the duties which correspond to her station, but this is the view Lady Ashton will adopt towards her own daughter, since she shares the Marquis’s view of Lucy’s relationship with Edgar, and of what is due to family interest. She does not overtly challenge patriarchal authority, but appears to uphold it vigorously, representing herself as compliant wife, seeking to prevent what is widely assumed to be an unwise and unacceptable match. Nevertheless, instead of representing a moral alternative to the aristocratic regime of the Ravenswoods, she continues its traditions. The pride and urge for mastery that once led the Ravenswoods to wreak implacable vengeance upon their enemies, to oppress their dependants, and to persecute the Covenanters find a new sphere of action within the home, as Lady Ashton seeks to inflict ‘a blow of deep and decisive vengeance’ against her ‘mortal enemy’, Edgar Ravenswood, and subjects her own daughter, Lucy, to ‘constant and unceasing persecution’ (pp. 235). Subject to such treatment, Lucy ‘felt herself the object of suspicion, of scorn, of dislike at least, if not of hatred, to her own family’ (p. 237). In this she is placed in a situation like that of those marginalised women popularly regarded as witches, who, like Ailsie Gourlay, feel themselves ‘odious to humanity’. Like them Lucy will move through alienation towards violence. Within the Ashton household, then, history is caught in a spiral. The novel’s most audacious move is to suggest a convergence between the apparently opposed destructive passions of Lady Ashton, the witch-like Ailsie Gourlay, and Lucy herself. Ailsie represents the antithesis of respectable maternal authority; she opens the novel out to the antiauthoritarian, subversive, amoral, cruel, and superstitious world of popular culture. As the novel’s account of her makes clear, the folk arts of healing and fortune-telling and oracular story telling that shade into

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the forbidden realm of witchcraft are not simply the symptoms of deluded ignorance – they are the means by which the marginalised can find a kind of power otherwise denied to them, often by exploiting the hopes and fears of others without power. This was clearly recognised in contemporary warnings against the wiles of ‘cunning women’ and fortune-tellers and interpreters of dreams, such as Hannah More’s tract on the fortune-teller Rachel Tawney, or the history of Mary Bateman, the ‘Yorkshire Witch’ hanged in 1807, which explains that young women were especially vulnerable to the deluding arts of this softly spoken thief and murderess, as she exploited their anxieties about marriage.18 It is not the opposition between the maternal authority of the respectable woman and the wiles of socially marginalised cunning woman that interests Scott, but the parallels between them. The situation of the socially marginalised women associated with witchcraft, like Ailsie Gourlay, whose power is exercised most easily over the powerless, and especially young women, mirrors that of the respectable mother, denied direct access to legal and political power, who can exert power most effectively through her influence over her child. The convergence between the respectable lady and the witch has some precedents in the popular fiction of Scott’s day, in which the figure of the witch was sometimes included as a disguise adopted by respectable, sometimes aristocratic, women in conflicts over marriage or inheritance. The disguise might be used in the service of unscrupulous female ambition (as in the popular tale The Witch of Rona) or to defeat corrupt masculine rule (as in the romance The Witch of Ravensworth or the pastiche of Scott Reft Roy), but in either case the witch’s control of illusion, healing arts, and story telling endowed the dissembling woman with a power of action denied by social convention.19 Lady Ashton’s intriguing with other women to defeat the ambitions of her masculine rivals makes visible a repressed desire for power that can emerge only in selfdestructive ways. The triumph of Presbyterian over Episcopalian, of law over aristocratic power, of feminine virtue over aggressive masculinity, is seen as a repetition of old corruption in a more hypocritical, duplicitous form. Such an overtly bleak view can be countenanced, because it can be personalised as a negative critique of feminine will, a reproduction of the conventional view of powerful women as amazons. In both its earlier and revised versions the novel allows us to conclude that the political instabilities and legal abuses it identifies belong to the past, and have since given way to a more just and stable era. The foundations of that stability are imagined most clearly in the presentation of the fishing community of Wolf’s Hope. These villagers have

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been ‘emancipated from the chains of feudal dependence’ (p. 101), having acquired ‘feu-rights’ to their possessions. But the view of their transition from custom to law is deeply ambivalent. When Caleb Balderstone reminds the villagers of their customary obligation to supply produce to the Ravenswoods (in return for the building of a pier) they refuse to admit the claim, allowing interest to overrule conscience (p. 102). Indeed, the villagers’ attitude to law is determined entirely by self-interest: they live partly by smuggling. Their situation might be used to illustrate the concerns of modern writers who argue that the liberal emphasis on protecting legal rights undermines moral thinking by separating rights from obligation, and by giving authority to lawyers who have little interest in the particular moral contexts in which disputes arise. The villagers’ attorney, Dingwall, is described in such hostile terms that Ian Ward assumes that the tenants have used the law ‘to dispossess themselves’.20 But the episode is used to make a different point. At Wolf’s Hope there is plenty, security, and communal solidarity – but there is no wider social sympathy. Social integration is to come not through patriotic feeling, but through emulation and patronage, since the villagers are still dependent on their betters for advancement, as Caleb’s comic exploitation of them shows. The possibility that selfinterest might after all be compatible with, and help to sustain, deferential relations between the ranks is treated with heavy irony. Whatever hope might be taken from this episode, the shaping of the central conflicts in the narrative lends support to Robert C. Gordon’s verdict that ‘The Bride of Lammermoor is a climax of reactionary despair’.21 For there is no satisfactory middle way between the aggressively masculine values of an aristocratic lifestyle based around ostentatious display, military service, and hunting, and the enlightened, sympathetic, humanitarian virtue associated with feminine sensibility. Once the former has been touched by an enlightened consciousness it begins to seem overblown, unrefined, irresponsible, and cruel. The educated Ravenswood has already begun to see this at the beginning of the novel, even before he meets Lucy: the funeral pageantry seems excessive, the feast seems vulgar. He is forced to stand back from the social order in which his identity is grounded, and view it as if from an outside position. The narrator can find a middle way between sanguine tradition and modern sensitivities only by sleight of hand (he appears finally noncommittal about ‘the art of hunting, or of butchery, whichever the reader chuses to call it’, p. 81, but displays Ravenswood’s hunting skill only in a protective act which saves Ashton and Lucy from the charging bull). The sensibility that alienates the modern observer from traditional practices must operate in a world of powerful material interests, in

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relation to which it seems fragile, ineffective, even illusory. Much of the emotional power of the narrative comes from Ravenswood’s cumulative discovery of this dilemma – on the one hand the obsolescence of his own social identity, in a world where the Ravenswood name has lost respect among a dispossessed people, and on the other his inability to hold on to or make real to himself the promise of transforming virtue personified in Lucy. In Ravenswood, Scott dramatises the birth of detachment as a condition that arises with the disembedding of identity from traditional social relations. This corresponds to Ferguson’s view of the process of alienation which, under the influenced of sensibility and delicacy, makes people critical of the ‘fortitude’ of former ages. Scott’s view also anticipates that of Alasdair MacIntyre, who insists that in ‘premodern’ or ‘heroic’ societies there is ‘only one set of social bonds’, which makes it impossible to stand back and view moral issues as if from an external point of view, because ‘there is no “outside” except that of a stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear.’22 This implies that any transformation of the social order by economic growth must generate not only moral confusion, but also profound psychological alienation, since it creates room for that very ‘outside’ perspective that threatens to annihilate an individual’s given identity. But while Ferguson and MacIntyre (his spiritual heir) implicitly endorse the lost condition of heroic society, Scott does not. In his novel, therefore, between an aristocratic virtue that seems exploded, and a bourgeois virtue that seems a frail subjective fantasy, lurks an abyss, the prospect of a world without moral foundations. Edgar Ravenswood, of course, does not confront this possibility directly, but it is fitting that he should finally disappear into the quicksand of Kelpie’s Flow, without actually engaging in the duel with Lucy’s brother, since that engagement offers no hope of restoring what has already been lost. In MacIntyre’s terms, throughout the novel Ravenswood has been ‘engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear’.

Modernity, community, identity: Redgauntlet The Tale of Old Mortality, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, and The Bride of Lammermoor are all set in periods before the modernisation of the Scottish economy was advanced (The Heart of Mid-Lothian begins in an Edinburgh as yet hardly touched by the developments that would transform it in later decades). But Redgauntlet draws on Scott’s own

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experience of modern Edinburgh, one in which a new civil order has appeared. In this novel, therefore, the costs and the benefits of modernisation can be explored more closely. Critical opinion divides particularly sharply over Redgauntlet, the strange tale of a Jacobite conspiracy that never was. David Daiches saw the work as typical of the ‘Scotch’ novels in that it moves towards ‘the reluctant victory of prudence over the seductive, but in the last analysis anachronistic claims of romantic action’.23 In this reading, ‘prudence’ has a positive value, like the ‘civil courage’ that the young lawyer Alan Fairford celebrates in the novel. This view has been echoed by a number of more recent critics.24 Emily Allen sees the novel as an optimistic work designed to restore Scott’s critical reputation after his representation of the modern world of St Ronan’s Well as hopelessly degenerate.25 But a much more negative judgement emerged among its earliest readers. The contemporary critic Thomas Noon Talfourd, for example, felt ‘compelled to quit the book with a hopeless depression of spirits, at the predominance of evil, and with a tame disposition to acquiesce in an order of things which seems absolutely irremediable’.26 This negative impression has also been echoed in recent criticism.27 A third kind of reading has appeared since the 1980s, one that finds in the novel a selfconscious reflection on story telling and the construction of history, and thinks of it as, in James Chandler’s words, ‘a metafictional commentary’ on Scott’s own fiction, ‘a kind of self-pastiche’.28 One can find ample evidence in Redgauntlet to support all of these views. The bifurcated narrative, with its abrupt transitions between different narrative modes, its movement between realism and romance, and its many embedded histories, ensures that the tension between the elements that invite a sentimental reading and those that encourage a more sceptical reading is particularly acute. Daiches appears to recognise this when he argues that Scott ‘uses the conventional plot patterns available to him to provide the external structure of the story, and these plot patterns are really quite unsuitable to the kind of exploration of the relationship between tradition and progress which Scott is carrying out’.29 I would add that the plot patterns involving the lost and rediscovered heir, the adventure of flight and pursuit, and the final marriage are a necessity to Scott, since their completion supports the impression of social integration and justified virtue that licences the novel’s more critical investigations. The novel reflects more closely than any of Scott’s others on the emergence of a world in which impersonal contractual relationships appear to be displacing those based on personalised guarantees and direct dependencies, in which a fragmentary, incoherent commercial nexus

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appears to be replacing the localised community which supposedly once fostered, in Anthony Giddens’s term, an ‘embedded affinity to place’.30 The movement between different narrative modes and interpretative frameworks seems appropriate to this view of society, since Redgauntlet presents a world conspicuously lacking in a shared conception of the good, a world that has lost contact with what communitarian Robert Bellah terms the ‘constitutive narrative’ (in this context, the Christian narrative of fall and redemption) that once embodied shared values. In our own time the ideal of the constitutive narrative is regarded with suspicion by those critics who, aware of the diversity of perspectives within modern society, argue that a unified perspective can be achieved only through some kind of violence. This suspicion generates the so called ‘postmodern impasse’ in the realm of education, where distrust of any attempt to dictate the values of citizenship may co exist with a belief that such values should still be taught, and with anxiety that they are not provided by educational systems dedicated to professional advancement.31 As we shall see, Scott leads his readers towards a comparable impasse, since his novel includes an uneasy awareness that any claim to truth is likely to be partial, bound by the prejudices of a particular kind of education, and that any unifying narrative must be imposed by a kind of violence. The novel is partly shaped by the sentimental conventions of eighteenth-century fiction, in which disinterested virtue is placed in opposition to a corrupt and unsympathetic world. As in the sentimental novels of Henry Mackenzie, for example, there are moments that register an acute sense of the world’s indifference or casual hostility to individual sensitivities, such as Darsie’s view of ‘the stranger in the crowded coffee house’, instantly forgotten when the bill is paid, or Nanty Ewart’s paranoiac experience at the Edinburgh Cross: ‘I observed everyone looked strange on me, and I thought some laughed.’32 The novel is unusual among Scott’s works for the intensity with which it evokes social disconnection, the absence of community in the modern world. The conscientious lawyer, the pious Quaker, the hardened smuggler, the zealous Jacobite rebel – all seem doomed to live or work among those they despise. The story of Nanty Ewart exposes the quotidian brutality that supports the commercial prosperity of Britain: the physically harsh and morally corrupting life of the navy; a colonial trade that depends on the horrors of slavery; the regulation of urban poverty and associated vice and crime through the workhouse or transportation. The novel presents a world that appears to have lost contact with Christian values, a world in which individuals appeal instead to the legal warrant, money, necessity, the nation, nature, civility, or to history itself in order

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to justify their actions. The founding myth of the father’s sacrifice of his son becomes in the memory of Redgauntlet a legend that justifies deceit and violence in the name of personal and national honour. In ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, heaven and hell have apparently become indistinguishable. The ‘comforter’ invoked by Nanty Ewart is not the Holy Spirit, but the alcoholic spirit of brandy (p. 330). The ‘Eden’ of the Quaker Joshua Geddes is founded on the plunder of his piratical ancestors, which has been ‘redeemed’ by money and a change of name (pp. 52, 55). He must leave it, he thinks, to ‘make terms with the Mammon of unrighteousness’; but as his sister realises, he has already made terms with ‘the Mammon of gain’ (pp. 213, 61). In opposition to such a world, the novel sets the disinterested affection of a select group of good-natured individuals, who form and sustain their own community of friendship. This group is an example of what Claude Fischer and his colleagues would term ‘personal communities’, which (contrary to the claims made by communitarians) Fischer sees as ‘more compatible and more supportive to the individual’ than those supplied by the accidents of inheritance and location, and which are facilitated in modern liberal societies by the lowering of social barriers.33 Darsie Latimer and Alan Fairford, like other Scott heroes, are moved to generous actions on behalf of others, actions motivated by personal affection rather than by the political zeal that moves Redgauntlet. The social value of their virtue is substantiated not by public action, but by their ability to inspire kindness and sympathy in those who are set apart from the mainstream of polite society, such as the Quaker Joshua Geddes, the wandering minstrel, Willie Steenson, and the smuggler Nanty Ewart. And yet these personal relationships acquire an unmistakable political resonance in the narrative. The brotherly relationship between Alan the Scot and Darsie the Englishman represents a political ideal: the alliance of urban professional with enlightened landowner in Hanoverian Britain, constituting a tolerant and benevolent ruling class under whose guidance the injustices and divisions within the social order might be progressively ameliorated. The neo-feudal alliance between Darsie and Wandering Willie suggests the social harmony that might be secured by a landowning class that cultivates paternalistic relations with the rural poor. It represents, that is, the desire to retrieve from the disruptions of recent history the basis of a rural community integrated by shared cultural traditions and by the influence of patronage. If Scott uses sentimental conventions to develop an optimistic reading of history, other aspects of the novel expose the limitations of this reading, and of the sentimental understanding of virtue. We have already noted that sentimental fiction characteristically projects an

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absolute opposition between virtue and a corrupt world. In the novels of Mackenzie, for example, as John Mullan notes, the alien world ‘is distanced from any association with the actual society in which he [Mackenzie] lived and advanced himself’.34 But the unsympathetic world revealed in Redgauntlet cannot easily be separated from the Edinburgh society in which Scott himself lived, despite its supposed historical distance. The description of the legal profession draws directly on his own personal experience, and, as we shall see, the lawyer’s world seems implicated in the social problems exposed elsewhere in the narrative. The sentimental opposition between disinterested virtue and corrupt world is threatened by an awareness of continuities; difference threatens to collapse into sameness. This collapse represents a critical recognition of the privatising dynamic of modernity. The plot allows Scott to place both commercial self-interest and the sentimental virtues of private life in opposition to the patriotic zeal of the Jacobite rebel, rooted in a passionate national pride. This opposition exposes the loss of public virtue in the condition of modernity, and the consequent reliance on the amoral mechanisms of commerce and a culture of civility to provide the basis of social cohesion. Law and Commerce The novel certainly attempts to identify the world of the Edinburgh lawyer as a humane and enlightened one quite distinct from the brutal and hypocritical Presbyterianism that blights Nanty Ewart’s youth. Redgauntlet is set in the 1760s, a period when work on Edinburgh New Town was beginning, and when the Moderates held sway in the General Assembly of the kirk. Here the lawyer Saunders Fairford, ‘Writer to his Majesty’s Signet’, is representative of an emergent Hanoverian Edinburgh, in which the professional expertise of the lawyer is contributing to wider commercial prosperity and cultural transformation (p. 12). In Scott’s portrait, Fairford is poised carefully between the frugal habits of a strict Presbyterian upbringing and the more liberal manners of a mid-century moderate. The older, theocratic Presbyterian preoccupation with law is being replaced by a newer, professional understanding of law more attuned to the practices and rewards of commerce. The legalistic habits of mind that might once have been expended on biblical texts are now applied to the technicalities of the legal brief, or exercised in a mildly pedantic legalistic wit and a penchant for ‘brocards of law’ (p. 3). The Presbyterian zeal that once fired the Covenanters is, in Saunders, domesticated and professionalised into

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ardent hopes for the future career of his son Alan. The Calvinistic preoccupation with Predestination has been bequeathed to Alan as a belief that a career in law is his personal ‘destiny’ (p. 3), a vocation formed in the social trajectory of his father and grandfather. The epistolary mode of the opening sections of the novel allows the portrait of Saunders to be mediated through the affectionate impressions of his son, Alan, and his ward, Darsie. When Darsie reflects ironically on Saunders’s military courage, Alan defends his father by celebrating his civil courage, ‘courage enough to defend a righteous cause with hand and purse, and to take the part of the poor man against his oppressor, without fear of the consequences to himself’ (p. 34). Sympathetic readers may accept this judgement at face value – but here we encounter the possibility of a more critical reading. For what we see of Saunders does not really illustrate this picture of disinterested moral courage.35 As Scott shows, in a commercial society, law is inseparable from the self-interest of its practitioners. In the interests of business the staunch Hanoverian Saunders must suspend and occlude his Hanoverian convictions and practise ‘civility’. His linguistic civility is directly related to his financial self-interest, to the fact that ‘he had clients and connections of business among families of opposite political tenets’. It is in his interest to adopt ‘conventional phrases’, such as the politically neutral term ‘the Chevalier’, devised as ‘an admissible mode of language betwixt the two parties’ (p. 126). He must even suffer the disrespectful manner of ‘Herries of Birrenswerk’ when he invites himself to dinner. To give hospitality to an attainted Jacobite is technically to risk being charged with misprision of treason. But such things are in the way of business – or so Fairford suggests to his son, Alan (p. 40). The peace required for prosperity depends on such occlusions and sufferances, which enable attainted men such as Redgauntlet to remain in the community by not being named, and allow lawyers to advance themselves. The Fairfords have recently moved from cramped accommodation in the ancient Luckenbooths to the newly built Brown Square in the New Town. Scott goes further, showing that even the formal process of law cannot be entirely separated from business interests. One of the functions of the Peebles case is to show that law is simultaneously an activity by which commercial transactions and partnerships are regulated, and a means of professional advancement. At stake in the handling of the case are not only the legal rights of plaintive and complainant, but also the performance of the lawyer, whose own prospects depend on a successful appearance. Thus what is from one perspective a disinterested ‘divine science’ is from another a market transaction in which the

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lawyer’s wares are on display. The lawyer must sell his labour – as we are reminded at various points in the narrative. The title of Alan’s legal thesis resonates widely through this novel – De periculo et commodo rei venditae (‘Concerning the risk and profit of things that are sold’, p. 75). In the personal evaluation of Saunders, the eccentric, vindictive Peter Peebles is a ‘degraded, worthless, drunken beast’ (p. 123). But in the courtroom, where Alan Fairford’s future prospects depend upon a good showing, Peebles must be represented as a ‘simple-hearted, honest, wellmeaning man’ (p. 133). The novel shows that the professionalisation of law in a commercial society makes it subject directly to self-interest, creating a system in which moral judgements may be inverted, and political affiliations, even obligations to the state, may be suspended by the most respectable practitioner. The wider significance of the Peebles partnership case lies in the routine devotion of the law to the rights of commercial enterprises. The protection of commerce by ‘equal laws’ had a central place in enlightenment understandings of the progress of society from feudal oppression to liberty. The symbiotic relationship between commerce and law had been vividly demonstrated by the rapid acceleration in the theory and practice of contract law since the 1770s, which increased the penetration of law and lawyers into the ordinary conduct of business throughout Britain. In Scott’s life time the law relating to partnership was for the first time collated and systematised, while partnership itself was located at the centre of the historical rise of commerce, as a form of relationship that offered a dynamic and ‘liberal’ contrast with feudal relations.36 At the same time it was recognised that the interests of commercial enterprises were different from the interests of the communities in which they operated. Adam Smith, for example, had warned that ‘the interests of the dealers [. . .] in any particular branch of trade and manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposed to, that of the public’.37 Peebles’s insane and self-destructive devotion to his legal rights, which consumes so much of the court’s time and resources, is made possible only because the legal system concedes so much to private interests. Such evidence provides the basis for an unsentimental critique of the law – but other aspects of the narrative work to disarm criticism. For here, as elsewhere in the novel, personal feelings are privileged over the other interests at stake, as sentimental narrative conventions work to guide our response. We are invited to sympathise with Fairford’s paternal feelings, which lead him to turn the Peebles case to good use, just as we are invited to sympathise with Alan’s fraternal feelings, which lead him abruptly to abandon the case. In this way commercial self-interest

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is effectively transformed into, or overridden by, a protective concern for the well-being of another. The disjunction between private and public interests that appears in the work of the lawyer appears more dramatically in the novel’s other commercial enterprises, and so does the paradoxical association between commercial self-interest and disinterested affection. The Quaker’s fishing station is a type of commercial innovation that can have a serious impact on the established economy of a local community; but the Quaker’s first allegiance is not to that community (his sister regards the local sailors and fishermen as false and deceitful), nor to his nation (whose laws and magistrates he despises), but to his commercial partners. The smuggler Nanty Ewart is ‘but tenth owner’ of his vessel, and must sail her by his owners’ directions; his duty to his partners overrules his anti-Jacobitical and anti-popish views (and of course commits him to evading government duties). Both the Quaker and the smuggler are engaged in trade which is technically illegal, and each demonstrates a parental concern for one of the young heroes. In this novel we are allowed to see more clearly than elsewhere in Scott that there is an equivalence between commercial self-interest and its apparent opposite, disinterested virtue, since both work to privilege private obligations over public ones. For Scott, as for Hume, the elevation of the private over the public supposedly works against political extremism and encourages acquiescence in established government, and so makes ultimately for peace and stability. But acquiescence in established government does not imply any particular enthusiasm for law, except as a necessary protection for private interest. It follows that while Scott takes the unusual step of adopting a lawyer as one of the heroes of his novel, it is only in the abandonment of law that the lawyer can fulfil the hero’s role. Alan’s departure from the Peebles case epitomises his movement in the rest of the novel. In the story of his pursuit of Darsie, the process of law is subverted and abandoned in favour of personal agreements based on honour, or obligations based on personal feeling. On picking up Darsie’s trail in Dumfries, Alan resumes the professional manner appropriate to a Hanoverian lawyer, speaking to the temporising Provost Crosbie about ‘aggression on the liberty of the subject’ (p. 209), threatening to denounce him to the government, urging him to speak out like a man. But when he discovers that appeals to the law are fruitless, he begins to engage in purely personal transactions (with the Jacobite Summertrees and the smuggler Turnpenny) in which discretion, rather than speaking out, is usually advisable. The pattern is repeated in England, in his even more compromising relations with ‘Father Buonaventure’. At Father Crakenthorpe’s

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inn he will raise his voice only when Redgauntlet attempts to use Peebles’s false warrant against him, a gesture that evokes Nanty Ewart’s sympathetic response, ‘D—n all warrants’ (p. 340). Finally, having formed a personal alliance with Lilias, he will rush to inform the Pretender that the forces of law are coming, in the hope that these forces can be evaded. The obligations contracted through personal relations are privileged above obligations to laws of state – the very tendency that Alan detected in Crosbie at the outset of his journey. In a comparable paradox, Scott’s potentially aristocratic hero, Darsie Latimer, can assume the role of hero only by evading public virtue and equipping himself for a quiet private life. As appropriate to his aristocrat destination, Darsie Latimer’s search for liberty and identity is initially associated with his partiality for romance. The constraints that he has to negotiate with are presented not in terms of social realism (of economic self-interest, professional vocation, or worldly reasonableness), but in terms of gothic romance (of violent family legend, inherited doom, and an extreme view of destiny). Redgauntlet may strive to bring Darsie into a masculine world of overtly political responsibility in which war, statesmanship, and patriotic duty are matters of immediate concern. But as many readers have noted, he actually places him in the situation of the gothic heroine: abducted, forcibly confined, threatened with the imputation of madness. In gothic fiction such violent oppression offers an imaginative counterpart to the social constraints routinely experienced in the domestic sphere by eighteenth-century female readers (who lacked the legal rights granted to males, as the plight of Darsie’s mother will remind us). It is in relation to overbearing masculine authority, rather than in relation to commercial civility, that Darsie learns to moderate his language, following a learning process already familiar to Lilias, who (like women subject to the exhortations of conduct literature) has ‘learned to weigh every word before she uttered it’, to temporise and be silent. The discovery of his aristocratic birthright, far from empowering Darsie to engage in acts of public virtue, apparently completes his preparation for a life based around the domestic affections. He will not intervene to dissuade the wavering Jacobite conspirators from pursuing their plot. Like a young lady allowed to overhear men discussing politics, he will generally say nothing. The disguise in female dress merely makes explicit the nature of his education. The privileging of the private over the public drastically qualifies the novel’s representation of paternalist patronage. The reconciliation of paternalism and modernising self-interest might be easy to represent in the symbolic resolutions of a romantic plot. But it was difficult to imagine in practical terms. Scott accepted the need for agricultural

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improvements, but as a paternalist he was anxious about their impact on traditional relations between landowners and those who worked on the land, and could see no simple remedy for the plight of those workers who lost their livelihoods as a result of modernisation. Whereas earlier novels such as Guy Mannering and Rob Roy had included powerful representations of rural protest against economic dispossession, in Redgauntlet Scott seems unwilling to repeat this. He was also well aware that, from the point of view of evangelical moralists and others, it was socially irresponsible to engage in and encourage what they saw as brutal agrarian sports and manners. The novel typically moves between opposed interests without reconciling them. In its representation of Darsie’s relationship with the lower orders the novel separates the patronage of popular culture from sympathetic engagement with the economic situation of the rural poor. The initial portrait of Darsie Latimer, sitting in an inn in Dumfries, writing under the influence of wine, impatient of social constraint, evokes the precedent of Robert Burns, whose life story, as recounted in the introduction to John Currie’s edition of his works, had ended in Dumfries.38 Darsie, like Burns, engages in wild rambles, and finds conviviality in low and bibulous company around Nithsdale. Wandering Willie and his tale are among the most Burnsian of Scott’s creations. In his wandering condition, Willie represents the disruption of the traditional paternal relationship between landowner and vassal that once formed the basis of community in rural Scotland, a community with shared cultural traditions. As in Burns’s writing, the celebration of drink, popular music, and dancing is a means of imaginative participation in what is now seen as lower-class culture. But here this participation is strictly limited. Darsie is no drunkard (the issue of alcoholism, prominent in Currie’s introduction, is reserved for other parts of Scott’s narrative), and ‘liberty’ for him has none of the radical implications it has for Burns. Darsie is interested in Willie’s storytelling and his music (an art initially fostered by patronage), and he will attend a lower-class bacchanal; but he will not take the fishermen’s part in an economic dispute. The Quaker’s method of fishing, like his restrained conduct, seems unnatural to Darsie, and clearly threatens the customary practices of the local community. But Geddes is gentlemanly, good mannered, and capable of disinterested friendship: unlike Redgauntlet, he doesn’t want anything from Darsie. This personal virtue overrides the wider social issues raised by his commercialism. Darsie will stand by him when the (illegal) fishing station is attacked by the disgruntled fishermen, whose actions will be seen as part of Redgauntlet’s conspiracy. Darsie will be warned away from low company by Lilias

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(p. 109). Willie can be absorbed into a romance of feudal loyalty since he is not only a ‘fierce brawling dissolute stroller’ but also a ‘quiet, decorous, [. . .] almost [. . .] respectable person’ capable of disinterested friendship (p. 103). This respectability allows for his final separation from his popular audience (for whom he may after all have ‘contempt’), and his installation ‘in Sir Arthur Redgauntlet’s ha’ neuk’ (pp. 323, 379). This neo-feudal romance of selective cultural patronage provides no clear answer to the social problems raised by the commercialisation of agriculture. Instead it suggests that the respectable and well-off in Hanoverian Britain will take little responsibility for the plight of the poor. But the novel does not simply pass over the relationship it identifies between the private virtue of this hero and his wealth, nor does it simply ignore the social division between rich and poor. Instead, these issues are characteristically displaced into other parts of the narrative. The story of Nanty Ewart, which in Daiches’s reading ‘has no business in this novel at all’ (p. 161), is used to illustrate both of these concerns. It shows what happens to someone who lacks the wealth that insulates Darsie from the hardships of poverty. Whereas Darsie can opt for ‘freedom’ from the constraints of study and professional responsibilities, the penniless Nanty, a natural scholar, is compelled to leave his studies, denied a professional career, and forced to mix with the dissolute lower classes in a way that contrasts strikingly with Darsie’s romantic escapade. We learn that Nanty’s illicit liaison with Jess Cantrips would have been a moral peccadillo for a gentleman, to be hushed up by a donation to the kirk treasurer. But to Nanty and the hapless Jess it is a public catastrophe. This story emphasises Nanty’s capacity for disinterested affection (in his motherly care of Alan) but demonstrates that this capacity counts for little without financial protection. It also shows that Nanty, having lost his place in respectable Edinburgh society, will eventually find another place within the black economy of Hanoverian Britain. The story complements that of the fishermen whose livelihood is threatened by the commercial fishing station. For they also supplement their income by smuggling, finding employment in an area of commerce that operates – like the fishing station itself – without legal sanction. The poor, that is, are forced to follow the logic of self-interest that works at other levels of society. Crakenthorpe’s In both the economy of commercial self-interest, then, and the economy of sentimental virtue, private considerations are privileged above wider

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social and political responsibilities. We can begin to see why, in the symbolic logic of the novel, the final destination of so many of the characters should be Crakenthorpe’s inn. For it is Father Crakenthorpe, rather than the Stuart prince disguised as ‘Father Buonaventure’, who symbolises the power destined to rule the commercial world of Hanoverian Britain. In the national tales of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth, designed to represent Ireland to a prejudiced British readership, the English hero’s initiation to Irish culture may entail a re-education, figured in the loss of normal consciousness, and a nursing back to health.39 Redgauntlet audaciously reverses this pattern: each of the two heroes enters England for the first time from Scotland in a state of convalescence. The experience of England is a revelation of the conditions that will operate both south and north of the border in modern Britain. As Peter Garside observes, Crakenthorpe’s confidence ‘reflects the newfound freedom of the tradesman in the “commercial” age’.40 The corpulent publican is an epitome of vigorous appetite, worldly independence, and business-like authority. He is both a provider and a jailer – tolerant, good-humoured, and utterly corrupt. His inn, where all kinds of public can meet on the basis of commercial exchange, represents an alternative to community experienced as an ‘embedded affinity to place’. It is penetrated and shaped by social influences that enter from elsewhere, and within it traditional distinctions of status and authority become part of the confusion of a ‘miscellaneous’ public. The other English location in the novel, the archaic and deeply private Fairladies (once a convent, and still a place where the ‘Vestals’, the Miss Arthurets, ‘feed the hungry, and clothe the naked’, pp. 266, 267), stands in striking contrast with the rowdy openness of Crakenthorpe’s. At the inn, where hospitality must be paid for, there is still room for casual charity (such is the plenty in this inn that the impecunious Peebles can dine well on the remains of a princely pasty). But the logic of exchange quickly triumphs over other principles: the sober Quaker will ply Peter with drink in exchange for information. Here the romance of feudal loyalty evoked in Darsie’s narrative proves oddly ineffectual: Willie does not, after all, rescue Darsie, and his warning signal proves manifestly redundant. Here Crakenthorpe takes no responsibility for the political schemes of his guests: as far as he is concerned, all have come ‘in the way of business’ (p. 324). General Campbell’s treatment of the rebels is in keeping with the prevailing ethos of the inn: the government seeks to keep itself ‘clear’ of open conflict, in the general interests of peace and prosperity. In the events at Crakenthorpe’s Scott develops a complex, ironical image of social relations governed by commerce. If the rise of

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commerce was held to have introduced good government – laws that protected the liberty and security of individuals – enlighteners also assumed that, as Dugald Stewart explained, ‘a great part of the political order which we are apt to ascribe to legislative sagacity, is the natural result of the selfish pursuits of individuals’.41 Indeed, Adam Smith argued against attempting to regulate commerce for political purposes, absolving the sovereign of any duty to direct ‘the industry of private people [. . .] towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society’, since in attempting to perform such a duty ‘he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions’. In the ‘system of natural liberty’, Smith explained, ‘Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way’. In view of this, it is not surprising that Smith hesitates to condemn smuggling, arguing that it reveals a fundamental conflict between national laws and natural justice, and that a smuggler may be someone who ‘would have been [. . .] an excellent citizen, had not the laws of the country made that a crime which nature never meant to be so’.42 In Scott the figure of the smuggler is used to illustrate the paradoxical relationship between commercial interest and national interest at the heart of the modern economy. Within the impersonality and amorality of this commercial environment, personal relations are confirmed and preserved by withdrawing from the general confusion, or screening it out – as Alan liaises with Lilias behind the screen of Darsie’s dress. The thread of references to sailing and wrecking that has run through the narrative culminates in the reunion of the parted friends, when Darsie, his sister, and Fairford draw together ‘as those who, when a vessel is about to founder in the storm, determine to take their chance of life and death together’ (p. 371). The concern for personal relationships displaces any patriotic concern to seize the helm of the sinking vessel. The resolution of the plot works to convince us that the rebellion is an anachronism destined to collapse virtually of its own accord. But the novel has not only shown that commerce overrides patriotic feeling and disrupts rural communities; it has also shown that commerce creates an environment in which conspiracies can flourish unless exposed by informers. While the virtuous rich withdraw to look after their own interests, the disgruntled poor find a ready champion eager to harness their discontent to his own political purposes. The hope that commerce would create the conditions in which peace and prosperity could flourish and political liberty be guaranteed was coming under increasing pressure in the age of Peterloo. The anxieties arising from this situation are clearly registered here.

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In Crakenthorpe’s inn the novel represents the absence of a necessary connection between place and social relations. The absence is implicit in the conception of the commercial economy as a market that extends indefinitely across local and national boundaries. This sense of space finds its counterpart in the sense of time in the novel. The novel’s passing references to Eden, Adam and Eve, the Prince of Darkness, Ithuriel, Mammon, Pandemonium, and ‘the comforter’ evoke a spiritual understanding of history that has apparently ceased to have relevance in the modern world. They evoke, that is, the ‘constitutive narrative’ of Christianity, and its poetic expression in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a narrative that supposedly embodies the shared values of society, binding together morality and destiny. In Paradise Lost the past is refracted through a series of separate time-bound narratives, each limited by the experience and language of its narrator – but the fragmentary nature of these histories is contained by a greater vision of history grounded in biblical tradition, unfolded by the poet with a prophetic authority. In Scott’s narrative the past is also represented through a series of embedded histories, but these are contained only in the ‘empty’ time of secular history. As Kathryn Sutherland puts it, ‘the pre-emptive narrative which will draw together all these diverse narratives in a moment of shared illumination and verification’ never comes.43 In the Hanoverian world of the novel, Christian teleology has effectively been displaced by the teleology of progress, within which the diversity of values promoted by the pursuit of self-interest, the division of labour, and the principle of tolerance should be informed by universal principles, discovered by reason. But Scott was writing in an age that looked back to a violent revolution apparently inspired by the enlightenment faith in universal reason, an age in which Burke had defended prejudice as a bulwark of liberty, and in which Christian views of human nature as innately sinful were being reasserted against enlightenment theories of perfectibility. In this context some of Scott’s male contemporaries – Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats – produce works that locate the source of their authority not primarily in the inherited traditions they evoke, but in the history (whether naturalistic or allegorical) of their own development, and in the self-authenticating power of imagination, as an alternative to enlightened reason. Scott’s novel can be seen as a counterpart to such writings. Its contrast between Alan and Darsie has an autobiographical dimension unusual in his fiction. It reflects upon the formative constraints and opportunities that prepared the writer for a dual life as lawyer and as artist, and on the conflict

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between worldly, demythologising rationality and idealising imagination, a conflict reproduced in the tension between the sentimental and realistic elements of the narrative itself. But where Scott’s poetic contemporaries assert, even if they qualify, the liberating power of imagination, Scott’s novel repeatedly suggests the impossibility of transcending the cultural horizons that shape individual judgement. The novel’s pervasive concern with education and prejudice is introduced in the initial exchange of letters between Alan and Darsie. The thematic treatment of the educational issue is far from conclusive, since it becomes caught up in the social and political dialectics of the narrative. The placid Quaker argues that education corrupts ‘the best and mildest natures, until fortitude and spirit become stubbornness and ferocity’ (p. 151). The aristocratic Jacobite Redgauntlet assumes that Hanoverian Darsie has been tamed by the ‘grovelling habits of a confined education’ (p. 317). Darsie later acknowledges the educational basis of his loyalty – he has been ‘bred in sentiments of attachment to the family on the throne’ (p. 199). Alan Fairford’s Presbyterian education, we learn, ‘had taught him a holy horror for Papists’ (p. 283). The heroine, Lilias, escapes the papal and Stuart doctrines for which she was destined since she was educated by a Jansenist. But she responds less to the reasonableness of the teaching than to her teacher’s ‘mysterious secrecy’ and to a ‘childish delight’ at opposing the severity of the abbess (p. 303). Such references may well make us wonder whether education can ever reach beyond prejudice, instead of creating it. At the end of the novel, General Campbell quotes the king, who assumes that the few who continue to disown his title do so ‘from the errors of education’ (p. 373). Since the argument is used by all sides in defence of their own positions, it is hard to see the space in which principle can operate beyond prejudice or self-interest in this novel. An epistemological problem is identified that relates directly to the progressive, Hanoverian understanding of history that the novel ostensibly endorses. The novel’s movement from an epistolary mode that accommodates and debates the subjective bases of judgement, to firstperson journals that insulate writer from addressee, and finally to a thirdperson narrative is the only answer Scott can provide to this problem. The third-person narrative overrides the educational issue by conferring a formal authority on the Hanoverian perspective. Here, as elsewhere, a formal device occludes an unresolved conflict. As a solution it reflects an understanding that the novelist’s role in a commercial society is not to give positive expression to the common values of a community, but to find ‘an admissible mode of speaking’. This conclusion offers a rhetorical solution to a problem that Scott can expose without confronting directly or fully exploring. Jerome

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Christensen sees Scott as ‘our herald of the postmodern consensus’.44 But if Scott anticipates a consensus without unifying principles, it does not follow that he fully endorses it. In some ways, Scott’s vision of modern society in Redgauntlet corresponds to MacIntyre’s: ‘nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints’. But Scott recognises that nostalgia for lost community is based on an idealised view of the past. On the other hand he also recognises that, while personal communities of like-minded friends may offer more support and fulfilment to the enlightened individual than traditional communities could, modern sociability may entail a weakening of the sense of public responsibility, and enlightened tolerance can shade into mere indifference. Scott has no answer to these problems, and offers the romance of disinterested virtue rather than a full confrontation with them. Judged in relation to later fiction this certainly looks like a limiting evasion – but it is an evasion that can be understood in relation to the historical moment of Scott’s enterprise, an enterprise that evolved not in a moral world of fixed values as imagined by H. G. Wells (‘never more to be questioned or permanently changed’), but in years of crisis born of revolution, war, post-war depression, and social unrest. Given his situation and his political fears, the wonder is not that he didn’t go further, but that he went as far as he did, and succeeded in reaching such a wide audience. Notes 1. Rorty, Truth, Politics and ‘post-modernism’, p. 41. Jerome Christensen finds Scott’s fiction ‘in accord with the recognition-based polity modelled by such posthistorical liberals as Richard Rorty and Francis Fukuyama’: Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, p. 174. 2. See Elam, Romancing the Postmodern, pp. 61–3, 106; McGann, ‘Walter Scott’s Romantic Postmodernity’. 3. See Duncan, I., ‘North Britain, Inc.’. 4. Bauman, ‘On communitarians and human freedom’, p. 89. 5. See, for example, Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 37–50. 6. Ferguson, An Essay in the History of Civil Society, pp. 151, 206, 257. 7. Forbes, Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Community, p. 7. 8. Williams, R., Country and the City, p. 65. 9. Scott, Bride of Lammermoor, ed. Alexander, pp. 17–21. All subsequent references are to this edition. 10. Duncan, I., Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, pp. 141–2. 11. Castle, Female Thermometer, p. 123. 12. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, p. 25. 13. Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, to Scott, Redgauntlet, p. xxviii.

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14. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, III, 17, pp. 267–8. 15. Jimack, ‘Paradox of Sophie and Julie’. 16. More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, I, pp. 59, 60, 154, 155. 17. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, p. 234. 18. More, Tales for the Common People; Anon., Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman, p. 18. 19. Brewer, G., Witch of Ravensworth; Anon., Witch of Rona; Anon., Reft Rob. 20. Ward, ‘Scott and the Waverley constitution’, p. 207. 21. Gordon, Under Which King?, p. 108. 22. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 126. 23. Daiches, ‘Scott’s Redgauntlet’, p. 148. 24. E.g. Beiderwell, Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels, p. 101. 25. Allen, ‘Re-Marking Territory’, p. 179; Elbers, ‘Contrast of fictional worlds’. 26. New Monthly Magazine, xi (1824), p. 94; Hayden, Walter Scott, p. 101. 27. McMaster, Scott and Society, p. 47; Wilt, Secret Leaves, p. 152; Cullinan, ‘History and language in Scott’s Redgauntlet’, p. 660. 28. Chandler, England in 1819, p. 223; Sutherland, ‘Introduction’ Scott, Redgauntlet, p. xv; Kerr, Fiction Against History, p. 122; Meitzen, ‘ “By no means an improbable fiction” ’. 29. Daiches, ‘Scott’s Redgauntlet’, p. 160. 30. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, p. 117. 31. Aronowitz and Giroux, Postmodern Education; Carr, Education, Knowledge and Truth; Bain, ‘Loss of innocence’, p. 14. 32. Scott, Redgauntlet, ed., Wood and Hewitt, pp. 16, 277. All subsequent references are to this edition. Compare these passages with Mackenzie: ‘In the faces of those he met, he saw no acknowledgement of connection, and felt himself like Cain after his brother’s murder, an unsheltered, unfriended outcast’ : Mackenzie, H., Man of Feeling, p. 10. 33. Fischer et. al., Networks and Places, pp. 196, 202. 34. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, p. 122. 35. In his patriotic defence of the Hanoverian regime he is very quickly forced into retreat – twice in the brief resistance to Charles Edward defending the western gate of Edinburgh September 1745, and again in the battle of Falkirk. 36. Watson, W., Treatise of the Law of Partnership, p. xxv; Montagu, Digest of the Law of Partnership (Montagu noted that between 1800 and 1822 some 90 volumes of legal reports and 19 volumes of statutes were published, p. vi); Gow, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Partnership. 37. Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, p. 278. 38. Burns, Works, ed. Currie, I, p. 196. 39. See Lady Morgan’s Wild Irish Girl; Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (1809). 40. Garside, ‘Redgauntlet and the topography of progress’, p. 168. 41. Stewart, Collected Works, II, p. 227. 42. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, p. 429. 43. Sutherland, ‘Introduction’ to Scott, Redgauntlet, p. xv. 44. Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, p. 175.

Chapter 8

Postscript

Although the antiquarian notes and editorial apparatus of Scott’s fictions make a claim for historical accuracy, Scott was quite open about the need to modernise the matter of history in presenting it to the reading public, and quite obviously ready to mix fact and fantasy. His turn to history was driven in part by a concern to encourage acquiescence in the political status quo and a moderate view of progress. His view of progress was informed not only by assumptions about its benefits, but also by anxieties about its costs – anxieties influenced by the enlightenment heritage itself, and by the turbulent events of contemporary history. The historical perspective of Scott’s fiction allowed an imaginative engagement with key material and cultural changes entailed in the process of modernisation: an examination of the role of Christianity in the development of the modern nation state and in the civilised identity of the European; a testing of the claim to cultural superiority entailed in the project of empire and in the notion of ‘civilised’ war; an examination of the grounds of collective identification within the modern nation; and an exploration of the moral bases of modern commercial society in relation to such spectres as fundamentalism and alienation. These issues are usually ‘contained’ in Scott’s fiction by the notional separation of the present from the past upon which the progressive historical perspective depends, and by what I have referred to as the romance of disinterested virtue. Romance and enlightenment scepticism exist in a complementary relationship in his works: the threat of disorder, haunting the very basis upon which the narrator’s civilised authority is supposed to rest – the legal, moral, and cultural foundations – is met by an appeal to transcendent good nature, humanitarian compassion, a willingness to identify sympathetically with the proffered, if fragile and imperfect, image of virtue. Scott conceived of his own relationship with the reading public (whether as named poet or anonymous

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novelist) as a playful stepping down or knowing regression into the delusive realm of romance; the wishfulness of his conclusions signalled their provisionality. But the ironical gestures of Scott’s fiction, the playful qualifications, the self-deflating authorial personae, could always be read simply as aspects of disarming good humour, rather than as signs of a critical reservation (Alexander Welsh, for example, claimed that irony was ‘foreign to Scott’s mind’).1 Scott’s representations of the triumph of virtue were apparently reassuring to an age reeling from the shock of revolution and war; those readers who accepted the triumph at face value – as most apparently did – could have a sense that they were facing the dark realities of history and transcending its challenges at the same time. His popularity persisted through the mid-nineteenth century, although with hindsight we can see that developments in the criticism of Scott during this period anticipate the subsequent decline in his readership. Ina Ferris has argued persuasively that the relocation of Scott within the field of nineteenthcentury criticism can be understood in relation to changes in the valuation of romance-reading: the early reviews ‘constructed the figure of the Author of Waverley as manly genius, but the male trope turns out to depend on its apparent opposite, the trope of female reading’; eventually ‘the imaginative transport and absorption that marked Waverley reading from the outset begin to resume their female signification’.2 In this account, the alliance with romance helped to expel Scott’s novels from the canon, as domesticity and the ‘proper’ novel gained generic dominance. But such an expulsion also implies a loss of interest in, or sensitivity to, the kind of historical and scholarly perspectives that, as Ferris notes, helped to distinguish Scott’s work from that of most contemporary women novelists. In other words, it was the discounting of the history, as well as the romance, that eventually condemned Scott. With the relative stabilisation of international relations within Europe after the Congress of Vienna, and with the partial displacement of enlightenment perspectives within nineteenth-century culture, the sense of what was at stake in Scott’s turn to history was gradually lost, because these developments tended to exorcise the spectres that haunted and motivated Scott’s romance. In Britain the continuing efforts of evangelicals and moral reformers helped to change the prevailing climate of intellectual opinion, working, as Gerald Newman notes, to characterise the critical traditions of the enlightenment as symptoms of a dangerous ‘French’ philosophy, and drawing prominent intellectuals, including Hazlitt and Carlyle, towards ‘the system of mystical and nationalist enthusiasm enunciated by Wordsworth’.3 In the age of Macaulay, British history assumed a new air of self-confidence, as the idea of Britain as a long-favoured

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nation, able to offer an example to the rest of world, seemed vindicated by its military and commercial dominance.4 Across Europe, after the revolutions of 1848, history became an increasingly professionalised, specialised, academic mode of enquiry.5 If for Scott the turn to history was a means of promoting moderation, and of understanding the condition of modernity, during the nineteenth century historians became increasingly preoccupied with accurate knowledge of the past in itself. As historians came to see themselves as engaged in a scientific activity, so they began consciously to distance themselves from the forum of public debate. And as the study of history was increasingly seen to be divorced from current affairs, it became easier to see Scott’s own historical fiction as at once irrelevant to present concerns and unhistorical in its lack of professionalism. Judged by the touchstone of factual reconstruction, Scott’s fictions could appear to offer no understanding of history at all. Hippolyte Taine, writing in 1863, could dismiss all of Scott’s ‘pictures from a foreign age’ as simply ‘false’.6 In the following year Henry James wrote of Scott’s ‘indifference to historic truth’, and – taking Scott’s own disavowals at face value – claimed that Waverley was written simply to amuse the reader: ‘It was the novel irresponsible’.7 Once Scott’s historical concerns had been thoroughly discounted, all that remained in his fiction was the romance of disinterested virtue. His complex encounters with the ideology of commerce, or with Jacobitism, or with Covenanting tradition, could be seen – improbably enough – as suitable only for the schoolroom. When James suggests that we need to be credulous if we are to enjoy Scott’s fiction again, he thinks of the credulousness of ‘children at twilight’, not the knowing credulousness of the enlightened writer, whose view of history is informed by Hume and Gibbon. In our age, writers as various as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márques, John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Maxine Hong Kingston, Italo Calvino, and Julian Barnes have playfully explored the relationship between history and fantasy, while critics have become used to discussing fiction that ‘contests from within its own assumptions’.8 In such an age, it is appropriate that Scott’s own contradictory historical romance should begin to look less like an irrelevant retreat into puerile nostalgia, and more like a precursor, a complex response to uncertain times.

Notes 1. 2.

Welsh, Hero of the Waverley Novels, p. 8. Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority, pp. 238–49.

Postscript 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

221

Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, p. 244. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 300. Grossman, ‘History as decipherment’, p. 28; Stern, ‘Introduction’ to The Varieties of History, p. 16. H. A. Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863), quoted in Hayden, Walter Scott, p. 417. Henry James, writing in the North American Review (1864), quoted in Hayden, Walter Scott, pp. 429–30. Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 7.

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Index

Abbotsford, 10, 12, 176 Addison, Joseph, 124 agriculture, 9, 59, 180, 182, 208, 209 Aiken, Lucy, 83 alcohol, 204, 210 Alexander, J. H., ix alienation, 43, 45, 47, 189–90, 201, 218 Allen, Emily, 202 America, 67, 92, 122, 139 Anderson, Benedict, 30, 47 Anti-Jacobin, 70 antiquarianism, 4, 10, 11, 21, 48, 55, 61, 152, 218 aristocracy, 2, 46, 67–9, 76, 80, 191, 195, 196, 198, 200 Assmann, Jan, 48 astrology, 93–4 Austen, Jane, 192 autonomy, 158, 189 Bage, Robert, 191 Baillie, Joanna, 77 ‘bardic nationalism’, 4–5, 10 Barnes, Julian, 220 Barrell, John, 16 Bauman, Zygmunt, 189 Bayley, C. A., 89 Bellah, Robert, 151, 203 Bernier, Celeste-Marie, 115 Bhabha, Homi, 131 Bhatt, Chetan, 160 Bindman, David, 139 Blackstone, Sir William, 196 Blackwood’s Magazine, 10

Blake, William, viii, 214 Boaden, James, 49 body, 12, 22–5, 102–3 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount, 7 borderers, 22, 34–5, 39–40, 90 Borges, Jorge Luis, 220 Bourdieu, Pierre, 77–8, 121–2 Bourne, Henry, 10 Brand, John, 10 Brims, John, 156 British Convention, 54, 60, 156 British Critic, 7 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 104 Bruzelius, Margaret, 116 Bunyan, John, 178, 179 Burke, Edmund, viii, 3, 7, 12, 19, 31, 33, 61, 80, 94, 154, 166, 214 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 69–72 Burke, Peter, 11 Burns, Robert, 14, 35, 49, 210 Burrow, John, 5 Bush, George Herbert, 121 Bush, George W., 106 Byatt, A. S., 220 Byron, Lord, viii, 36, 127, 137–8, 166 Calder, Angus, 156 Caledonian antisyzygy, 188–9 Calvino, Italo, 220 Canada, 176 Caretta, Vincent, 74 Carlyle, Thomas, viii, 19, 20 Castle, Terry, 193

Index Chandler, James, 172, 202 Chase, Bob, vii, 5, 15, 17 chivalry, 37, 45, 110, 116, 134, 196 Christian Observer, 106 Christianity, 7, 8, 106–17, 172, 203, 214, 218 Christiansen, Jerome, viii, 2, 154, 216 civilisation, viii, 1, 5, 123–5, 128, 132, 135, 137, 165, 167, 182 civilised war, 138–41, 145, 218 classical humanism, 7, 152 Cockburn, Lord, 13 Coleridge, S. T., 9, 15–16, 20, 94 Colley, Linda, 90 commerce, 6, 10, 59, 95, 121, 123, 128, 131, 133–4, 152, 158, 163, 168, 202, 207, 208, 212–13 communitarianism, 151, 164, 189, 203 community, viii, 3, 176, 189, 203, 204, 210, 213, 215 Connerton, Paul, 22 conscience, viii, 73, 157, 162, 167, 182 Cook, George, 156 Corn Laws, 9, 157 Cottin, Sophie, 107 Covenant, 12, 53, 155, 160, 167, 169, 171, 173 covenanter(s), 8, 22, 53–4, 62, 141, 154, 156, 166–7, 168, 170–1, 174, 177–8, 182, 198, 205 Cowley, Hannah, 77 Cowper, William, 135 Crawford, Robert, 35, 101 crusades, 71, 106–17 Culloden, 62 culture, 55, 61 Currie, John, 210 customs, 3, 93–4, 198–9, 200, 210 Daiches, David, viii, 202, 211 Davies, Leith, 34 Defoe, Daniel, 90, 124, 140–1, 156 Devlin, D. D., vii disembedding, 9, 12, 109–10, 189, 201 Docherty, Thomas, 61 domesticity, 38, 43–4, 46, 59, 60, 136, 196, 198, 209 doubleness, viii, 42, 47

245

doubles, 44–5, 93, 97, 129–30, 177, 195 Douce, Francis, 10 Dryden, John, 14, 15, 35 Duncan, Ian, vii, ix, 19, 76, 123, 131, 132, 192 Dwyer, John, 153, 190 Eclectic Review, 69 Edgeworth, Maria, viii, 15, 19, 21, 48, 55, 212 Edinburgh, 7, 10, 11, 92, 102, 178, 202, 205 Edinburgh Review, 7, 178 education, 214–15 Eliot, T. S., 109 Elizabeth II, 8 Ellis, Markman, xi emigration, 176 empire, 89–105, 121, 218 England, 67–86, 212 enlightenment, 1, 5, 6, 38, 52–4, 94, 122, 123, 152, 155, 160, 214, 216, 218 episcopalianism, 8 Europe, 1, 4, 105, 109, 115, 117, 220 evangelicals, 70–1, 210 Fabricant, Carol, 15 femininity, 38, 43–4, 60, 133–4, 136, 193, 196–7; see also mother, women Ferguson, Adam, 10, 18, 138, 152, 201 Essay on the History of Civil Society, 189–90 Fergusson, Robert, 35 Ferris, Ina, xi, 23, 219 feudalism, 10, 32, 42, 46, 109–10, 191, 207, 211 Fischer, Claude, 204 Fleishman, Arnold, ix Fletcher, Andrew, 32, 40 Fletcher, John, 135 Forbes, Duncan, 6, 190 Fowles, John, 220 Fox, Charles James, 36 France, 2, 3, 4, 166 French revolution, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 30, 33, 50, 67, 125–6, 154, 172, 214

246

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Fukuyama, Francis, 1, 121 fundamentalism, 159–60, 167, 171, 183, 218 Gaelic, 14, 57–9 Galt, John, 168 Garside, Peter, vii, 94, 141, 147, 212 George III, 40, 74 George IV, 47, 85 Gibbon, Edmund, 19, 109–11, 116, 220 Giddens, Anthony, 203 Gillray, James, 98 globalisation, 89, 121–2 Glorious Revolution (1688), 2, 157, 158 Goethe, Johan W., 32 Gordon, Robert C., vii, 200 Goslee, Nancy Moore, ix gothic fiction, 76, 192, 209 government, 7 Grant, Charles, 99 Gray, John, 122 Greenblatt, Stephen, 123 Grose, Francis, 10 Grotius, Hugo, 138 Guest, Harriet, 16 gypsies, gypsy, 90, 93, 97–8, 104–5 Habermas, Jurgen, 11 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 77 Hamilton, Paul, vii, ix, 51 Harrington, James, 32 Hart, Francis, 19, 146 Hayner, Priscilla, 22 Hazlitt, William, 24, 25, 50 Hegel, G. W. H., 78 Hemans, Felicia, 117 heritage, 57, 59, 84–5, 93 Hewitt, David, ix highlanders, highlands, 43–5, 52, 57–9, 62, 90, 122–8, 131–6, 141–3 history, 5, 17–21, 52–6, 61, 214, 215, 218–20 Hobsbawm, Eric, 78 Hogg, James, 140, 141–2, 168 Holcroft, Thomas, 191 Holinshed, Raphael, 135 Holy Alliance, 107, 108

Holy Land, 109 Hoole, Barbara, 107 Hopkins, A. G., 89 humanitarian sympathy, 6, 17, 18, 20, 116, 141, 158, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 200, 218 Hume, David, 6, 7, 8, 12, 20, 30, 55, 79, 152, 161, 170, 188, 220 Huntingdon, Samuel P., 106 identity, 9, 12, 14, 30, 78, 93, 101–5, 113, 115, 123, 124, 131, 137, 158, 160, 173, 174, 201 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 77 inclusion, 21–6, 82, 85–6 India, 1, 4, 91–2, 94–9, 122, 125 Ireland, 4, 14, 15, 34, 126, 139, 181 Islam, 105–8 Jacobite(s), 8, 22, 56, 58, 59, 122, 202, 205 James, Henry, 220 Jamieson, Robert, 142 Janowitz, Ann, ix Jeffrey, Francis, 7, 13, 36 jews, 70, 71, 90, 93 Johnson, Samuel, x n3, 19 Jones, Sir William, 91 justice, 3, 6, 153–4, 165, 172, 173, 181, 204, 206–7, 213 Kames, Lord, 18, 33 Keats, John, viii, 36, 214 Kerr, James, vii Kidd, Colin, 155 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 220 Langan, Celeste, 40 Langford, Paul, 99 Latin America, 1 law, 5, 172, 173, 174, 175, 191, 200, 202, 205, 206–9, 213 Leask, Nigel, 91 Lee, Yoon Sung, vii, viii, 19 legitimacy, 4, 17, 20, 45, 128, 129, 137, 153–4, 169, 171, 179 Lessing, G. E., 106 liberalisation, 1 liberalism, 2, 151–5, 188–9, 216

Index liberty, 3, 6, 8, 9, 161–3, 182, 209, 211, 213, 214 Lincoln, Margarette, ix Lipset, Seymour, 62 Locke, John, 151, 153–4 Lockhart, James Gibson, 36 London, 121, 169, 172 Loutherbourg, Philip James de, 139 loyalism, 5, 50 loyalty, 4, 6, 8, 40, 144–5, 161, 179, 211, 212, 215 Luddites, 74 Lukács, Georg, 20, 137 Lynch, Deirdre, 77 Macaulay, Thomas, 219 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline, 62 McCrie, Thomas, 168, 171 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 13, 151, 152–3, 159, 201, 216 Mack, Douglas, 157 Mackenzie, Henry, 203, 205 McKeon, Michael, 15 McMaster, Graham, 9 Macpherson, James, 34, 58 Majeed, Javed, ix, 117 Makdisi, Saree, 25 Mandler, Peter, 84 Manx, 95–6 Márques, Gabriel Garcia, 220 Martineau, Harriet, 19 Maturin, Charles, 21, 48, 58 Maxwell, Catherine, ix Mellor, Anne, 77 memory, 1, 22, 47–55, 61–2, 155 mercantilism, 124–5 mercenaries, 40, 137–8, 140, 143–6, 159 methodists, 70 Middle East, 1 Milgate, Jane, 103 Mill, James, 107 Millar, John, 38 Miller, Peter, 124 Milton, John, 35, 214 moderation, 5, 6, 7, 25, 50–1, 159–65, 171, 194 modernisation, viii, 1, 2, 10, 33,

247

79–80, 152, 159, 189, 201, 202, 218 modernity, 2 monarchy, 46–7, 74, 75, 78 Moore, Thomas, 117 morality, 6, 8, 16–20, 152–3, 188, 189–90 More, Hannah, 197, 199 Morgan, Lady see Owenson, Sydney Morgan, Philip, 90 Möser, Justus, 32 Mother, 101–2, 197–9 Mullan, John, 193, 205 Murphy, Peter, 179 naming, 174–5 Napoleon, 3, 4, 32, 36, 40, 92 nation, 3, 4, 30–63, 169, 173 Nelson, Lord, 36 Newman, Gerald, 71, 219 Newman, John Henry, 20 newspapers, 4, 10, 51 Nichols, John, 82–3 non-recognition, 90–1, 104, 111, 117 Normans, 71–7 Nubians, 114 oaths, 174 obligation, 4, 67, 69, 154, 161 Orient, 91, 106–7, 111–12, 114 Orr, Marilyn, 44 Ottoman empire, 107 outlaw(s), 4, 104, 126, 129, 130, 155, 206, Owenson, Sydney, 15, 21, 48, 55, 58, 77, 181, 212 paganism, 77 pageantry, 45, 46, 67, 79, 81 Paine, Thomas, 68, 154 Paris, 3 partnership, 206–7 Pateman, Carol, 153–4 paternalism, 9, 10, 61, 63, 157, 164–5, 176, 182, 204, 209–10 patriot, patriotism, 4, 7, 8, 32, 36, 37–8, 41, 48, 50, 151–2, 159, 161, 164, 171, 200, 205, 209, 213 Percy, Thomas, 35

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Peterloo, 68, 213 Phillips, Mark Salber, 18 picturesque, 24 Pitt, William, the younger, 36–7 Pocock, J. G. A., 190 politeness, 11, 15, 123, 124, 129–30, 132, 172, 175, 181, 206 Poor law, 9 Porden, Eleanor Anne, 107 Porteous riots, 22, 172–3 Porter, Jane, 50 Portugal, 126, 139 postmodern ethics, 189 postmodern fiction, 188 postmodern liberalism, 188, 216 Potkay, Adam, 19 Presbyterianism, 8, 12, 57, 59–60, 63, 155, 156, 165–6, 173, 176, 205 Price, Richard, 70, 154 Priestley, Joseph, 18 primitive liberty, 123, 135 progress, 1, 5, 6, 7, 18, 52, 90, 116, 180, 198, 214 prostitution, 178 providence, 8 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 138 Pye, James, 37 Quaker(s), 203, 208 Radcliffe, Ann, 19, 192 radicalism, 5, 49, 68, 70–1, 154, 157, 163, 164 Ramsay, Allan, 34, 35 Rawls, John, 153, 167 reconciliation, 4, 63, 117, 162, 170, 171, 176, 190, 194, 198 refinement, 10, 11, 13, 14, 22–6, 190 reform, 4, 10, 68, 157 Reformation, 11 regime change, 1, 4 repression, viii, 45, 47, 94, 111–12 Richard I, 21, 73, 74–5, 109, 116 Richardson, Samuel, 191 Robertson, Fiona, vii, 24 Robertson, William, 106, 116, 156 Robin Hood, 21, 45, 74–5 Roman, Rome, 124, 126, 135, 152

romance, 17–20, 23, 32, 36, 38, 47, 188, 202, 209, 216, 218–19 Roper, Hugh Trevor, 21 Rorty, Richard, 188 Ross, Marlon, 37 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 7, 197 Rushdie, Salman, 220 Russell, Gillian, 67, 75 Said, Edward, 91, 106 St Clair, William, 21, 25 Samuel, Raphael, 84 San Juan, E., 89 Saxons, 71–7 scepticism, vii, 5, 8, 18–20, 188, 218 Schwartz, Barry, 62 Scotland, 9, 14, 21, 34, 41, 56, 169 Scott, Ridley, 106 Scott, Walter The Abbot, 11 Anne of Geierstein, 25 The Antiquary, 25 The Betrothed, 116, 117 The Bride of Lammermoor, 189–201 Count Robert of Paris, 114 ‘Essay on Chivalry’, 33 The Field of Waterloo, 140 The Fortunes of Nigel, 11, 70 Goetz von Berlichingen, 32 Guy Mannering, 11, 22, 25, 62, 91–105, 210 The Heart of Mid-Lothian, 168–83, 201 Ivanhoe, 69–78 Kenilworth, ix, 25, 78–86, 189 The Lady of the Lake, 11, 38–9, 43–7, 67, 78, 93, 142 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 37–41 A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, 137–47 Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, 169 Life of Napoleon, 3, 140 The Lord of the Isles, 142 Marmion, 35–9, 41–3, 188 Memoir of his Early Years, 24 Memoirs of the Marchioness De La Rochejacqueline, 3, 10

Index Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 5, 34–5, 152 The Pirate, 24 Quentin Durward, 12 Redgauntlet, 5, 25, 201–16 Rob Roy, 24, 121–37, 142, 210 St Ronan’s Well, 202 The Surgeon’s Daughter, 95 The Tale of Old Mortality, 12, 144, 156–69, 201 The Talisman, ix, 105–18 The Visionary, 68 The Vision of Don Roderick, 126 Waverley, 12, 13, 20, 22, 25, 50–63, 67, 72, 142, 156, 170 sensibility, 193, 194, 196, 200 Shaw, Harry E., 19 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 214 Shklar, Judith, 155 Simpson, Erik, 48 slavery, slaves, 107, 112–15, 127, 180, 181–2, 203 Smith, Adam, 6, 9, 96, 116, 207, 213 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 152–3 Wealth of Nations, 125 Smith, Anthony, 30, 31 Smith, Charlotte, 77 smuggler(s), 4, 17, 93, 95–7, 126–7, 200, 208, 211, 213 Sorensen, Janet, 13, 14 South Africa, 26 Southey, Robert, 9 Spain, 4, 49–50, 75, 126, 139 spectacle, 45, 46, 67, 74–6, 81 Spence, Thomas, 70 Spenser, Edmund, 35, 108 Staël, Mme de, 58 Stallybrass, Peter, 11, 14, 15, 22 Stanhope, Louisa Sidney, 107 state, 2, 3, 5, 33, 43, 176, 209 Stewart, Dugald, 7, 213 stoicism, 7, 152 Strutt, Joseph, 10 subjectivity, 73, 190, 193, 201 Sutherland, Katherine, 195, 214 Sweet, Rosemary, 55, 85 Swift, Jonathan, 14, 15 Switzerland, 4, 49–50, 126

249

tacit consent, 153, 154, 160, 165, 170, 182 Tacitus, 135 Taine, Hippolyte, 220 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 202 taste, 55, 57–9, 61 Taylor, Charles, 151, 164 Thompson, E. P., 9, 68 Thomson, James, 37 thymos, 1 tobacco, 181–2 tradition, 31, 48, 55, 56, 57, 72, 80, 98, 101, 152, 158, 168, 173, 174–5, 178, 198–9, 210 treason, 4, 129, 206 Trumpener, Katie, 10, 34, 48, 90, 102 truth commission, 1 utilitarianism, 7, 8 Union, Act of (1707), 14, 122, 133, 157, 169 Union, Act of (1800), 48 Vendèe, 3, 4, 10, 75 Victoria, Franciscus de, 138 virtue, viii, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 20, 42, 59, 123, 124, 159, 161, 165, 171, 188, 189–90, 191, 192–3, 196, 197, 201, 202, 203, 204, 210, 218, 219, 220 Voltaire, 7, 106 volunteer movement, 40 Wales, 14, 34 Wallace, Tara Ghosal, 95 Wang, Orrin, ix war, 2, 75, 125–7, 135, 137–45; see also civilised war Waterloo, 1, 2, 140, 157 Wells, H. G., vii, viii, 17, 216 Welsh, Alexander, vii, viii, 12, 20, 219 West, Benjamin, 139 West Indies, 4, 122, 126, 180 White, Allon, 11, 14, 15, 22 Wilberforce, William, 99 Wilt, Judith, vii, 13, 136 witchcraft, 57, 198–9 Wodrow, Robert, 156 Wollstonecraft, 68, 192, 197

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Women, 76–7, 104–5, 134, 136, 173, 197, 209; see also femininity, mother

Wordsworth, William, 15–16, 36, 126, 127, 214, 219 The Convention of Cintra, 49–50