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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael
Peverett |
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by Michael
Peverett
Some longer notes, on:
Tales of a Grandfather / History of Scotland
Those dusty,
dull-bound, heavy novels lie like pre-Cambrian bedrock on the lower shelves.
Such is the fate of the former best-seller, the man who popularised tartan
shortbread tins, the man who speckled the suburbs of Birmingham with houses
called Loch Lomond in streets called Waverley Crescent and Lammermoor Close,
where the daughters were once named Rowena, the sons Nigel.
Scott is the most under-rated writer in the canon of British literature, second only to Dickens among our great nineteenth-century novelists, readable, fertile, vivid, profound, a master. Like every great novelist, he has huge faults. His English prose style is clumsy and slipshod; he “sows from the sack, not from the hand” and the impact of his best work, essentially poetic, is hard to represent from quotations. His output is vast and many of his novels fail. He inaugurated, if he did not cause, the curious Victorian literary convention that sexual feelings don’t really exist; his scenery and weather are often perfunctory, his heroes and heroines are for the most part as stiff as bookmarks. He was also a Tory and a Unionist, which meets with little favour here. But his massive humanity, comedy and invention are triumphs: once discovered, he is never abandoned. So here goes: 25 novels in six pages, a lifetime of reading.
THE SCOTTISH PERIOD (1814-1820)
Although these are his earliest novels,
they are not beginner’s work. When he published
1.
Seminal, and deeply pondered over many years, this is the first historical novel worthy of the name in world literature. Perhaps his masterpiece, although subtler achievements were to follow. Here are all his great themes: the process of change in society, adolescence, humour, outcasts, ideals, compromises, progress and extinctions. Every adventure, every western movie, every sci-fi fantasy adventure you’ve ever read is indebted to this brilliantly innovative book; not to mention Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot... A great place to start.10 out of 10.
2. Guy Mannering (1815)
Scott with a head of steam up, this is frankly an improvisation. Despite its many wonderful scenes and characters, it’s carelessly executed and doesn’t run very deep. The Victorians loved it, but in our severer times: 7 out of 10.
3. The Antiquary (1816)
On the surface this is even more chaotic and heterogeneous than Guy Mannering; but this time it all works out. This is Scott’s supreme book about conversation, conviviality and human company: a little-known delight. 9 out of 10.
But his sister understood these looks of ire (rescued
from drowning, and no food in the house). “Ou dear! Monkbarns, what’s the use
of making a wark?”
“I make no
wark, as ye call it, woman.”
“But what’s the
use o’ looking sae glum and glunch about a pickle bains? – an ye will hae the
truth, ye maun ken the minister came in, worthy man – sair distressed he was,
nae doubt, about your precaurious situation, as he ca’d it, (for ye ken how
weel he’s gifted wi’ words,) and here he wad bide till he could hear wi’
certainty how the matter was likely to gang wi’ ye a’. He said fine things on
the duty of resignation to
(**** See longer discussion later)
4. The Black Dwarf and 5. Old Mortality (1816)
Old Mortality is his most exciting and perhaps greatest book, one of the best-imagined stories in English. A profound meditation on violence, fanaticism and repression; pick it up at Chapter 2 and watch how Scott’s insidiously slack-limbed narration sucks you in. 10 out of 10. The Black Dwarf, a short, unsatisfactory novel published with it, is generally neglected.
(**** See longer discussion later)
6. Rob Roy (1818)
A brief, fiery and penetrating book lies
hidden inside a baggier, more uneven one. In no book does Scott come closer to
a critique of the conventional ruling class that he approved, in no book is the
fact of the
( **** See longer discussion later)
7. The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818)
In the early years of this century, this
won an undeserved reputation as Scott’s only real masterpiece. For the first
200 pages, indeed, he is at his highest pitch (but hardly his uniquely highest
pitch): this
8. The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)
Rumoured to have been dictated in delirium and subsequently unremembered by its author (whose life was a catalogue of sicknesses), this is the most un-Scott-like of his masterpieces: a brilliant, bleak, secretive tragedy that operates with intense restraint. Beautifully structured, it shows (along with Old Mortality, Kenilworth etc) that Scott was the most naturally gifted designer of a novel in our tradition. (The French equivalent, in this respect, is Balzac’s Une ténébreuse affaire.) 9 out of 10.
9. A Legend of Montrose (1819)
This is Scott’s book about war, and the mercenary Rittmeister is one of the most morally troubling (and entertaining) characters he created. Elsewhere, though, it’s thinnish and looks hurried. 7 out of 10.
THE COSTUME DRAMAS (1820-1826)
It’s commonly supposed that the
unprecedented success of Ivanhoe, his first book set outside Scotland,
turned Scott’s head, and led him away from the true sources of his inspiration
(with the anomalous exception of Redgauntlet). The reality is more
complicated. Scott’s books always occupied the borderland with romance anyway,
and the best books of this period (e.g. The Abbot,
10. Ivanhoe (1820)
Anyone who wants to understand the
Victorian imagination needs to start with this.
11. The Monastery (1820)
This was considered a failure even at the
time of its first publication, so is now never read. The November weather, the
The river was not in flood, but it was above its
ordinary level – a heavy water, as it is called in that country, through which
the monk had no particular inclination to ride, if he could manage the matter
better.
“Peter, my
good friend,” cried the sacristan, raising his voice; “my very excellent friend
Peter, be so kind as to lower the drawbridge. Peter, I say, dost not hear? – it
is thy gossip, Father Philip, who calls thee.”
Peter heard him perfectly well, and saw him into the bargain; but, as he had considered the sacristan as peculiarly his enemy in his dispute with the convent, he went quietly to bed, after reconnoitring the monk through his loop-hole, observing to his wife that “riding the water in a moonlight night would do the sacristan no harm, and would teach him the value of a brig the neist time, on whilk a man might pass high and dry, winter and summer, flood and ebb.” (The Monastery, Ch 5)
12. The Abbot (1820)
Characteristically, Scott’s response to his first avowed failure was to write a sequel to it. Roland and Catherine are Scott’s most lively young couple, and the tension of the theme (Protestantism outlawing Catholism) make this a romance with an edge. 8 out of 10.
“You talk
riddles, my lord,” said Mary; “I will hope the explanation carries nothing
insulting with it.”
“You shall
judge, madam,” answered Lindesay. “With this good sword was Archibald Douglas,
Earl of Angus, girded on the memorable day when he acquired the name of
Bell-the-Cat, for dragging from the presence of your great-grandfather, the
third James of the race, a crew of minions, flatterers, and favourites, whom he
hanged over the bridge of Lauder, as a warning to such reptiles how they
approach a Scottish throne. With this same weapon, the same inflexible champion
of Scottish honour and nobility slew at one blow Spens of Kilspindie, a courtier
of your grandfather, James the Fourth, who had dared to speak lightly of him in
the royal presence. They fought near the brook of Fala; and Bell-the-Cat, with
this blade, sheared through the thigh of his opponent, and lopped the limb as
easily as a shepherd’s boy slices a twig from a sapling.” (The Abbot, Ch
21)
**See longer note below.
13.
Probably his most under-rated book, this
tragedy of ostentation and gorgeous surfaces is a not unworthy companion to The
Bride of Lammermoor, the extended description of the revels at
14. The Pirate (1822)
Scott had loved visiting the Shetlands, but he couldn’t raise a good novel out of it. The things that had moved him were untranslateable into any fiction even he could imagine. Dreary, tame and unconvincing. 3 out of 10.
15. The Fortunes of Nigel (1822)
Like all the other books he set in the
seventeenth century, Scott’s
16. Peveril of the Peak (1822)
Much derided, this long book is good for
about half its length before finally coming apart at the seams. The prelude is
excellent, and Peveril’s journey across
17. Quentin Durward (1823)
Often considered the best of the costume dramas, this architectural, expansive adventure is finely conceived but often feebly written, and the European setting too often recalls Balzac, a fatal comparison when Scott is short of his best. 5 out of 10. See longer note below
18. St Ronan’s Well (1824)
I haven’t read it! Rumoured (but not reliably) to be a masterpiece, described by others as a bitter satire, by others as a flop; the latter is perhaps least unlikely, but you never know. The only Scott novel set in his own time, though “The Antiquary” comes close. 6 out of 10, at a guess.
19. Redgauntlet (1824)
For many, his greatest book. Beneath its
casual surface is a profoundly poetic meditation on romance itself, intuitive,
mature and brilliantly imagined. Its innovative structure incorporates, along
with much else, that supreme short story, “Wandering Willie’s Tale”. The
closing chapters in
20. The Betrothed and 21. The Talisman (1825)
The first of the “Tales of the Crusaders”
is indisputably minor, a book that can be read (like The Pirate) only
for the pleasure of hearing its author’s voice. The second is over-rated, and
creaks with stage-management under the sun of
RUIN AND DECLINE (1826-1832)
In 1826, the fragile financial system of the printing and publishing trade collapsed. Scott, who was a secret partner in his own printing house, was brought down with it. Rather than plead bankruptcy, he offered to pay his creditors off with the proceeds of future writing. It was a decision that saved his honour and his home, at the cost of literally writing himself to death. (Apart from the novels, these last years produced such daunting monuments as his gigantic Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, now never seen or read: also, his private Journal, a grievous and brilliant book.)
22.
This intricately rotating microcosm in the unsettled backwash of the English civil war was half-completed when financial ruin, bereavement and illness dropped on its author in quick succession. But in the finished novel it doesn’t show; Scott was a stoic at noon and midnight; the full but sombre palette is there from the start. 6 out of 10. See longer note below
23. The
Fair Maid of
The best novel of his last period, this warm and wintry adventure, full of incident and humour, shows that Scott had lost none of his inner wisdom and imagination, if only circumstances would allow him to deploy them. 7 out of 10.
24. Anne of Geierstein (1829)
Haven’t read it. The drudgery of writing it
drove Scott to distraction, but this tale of medieval
25. Count Robert of Paris and 26. Castle Dangerous (1832)
Haven’t read them. Embarrassments, these,
the former set in eleventh-century
27. The
Siege of
Desperately ill, Scott went on a
recuperative trip to the
(The Walter Scott Digital Archive,
produced by Edinburgh University Library, will give you graphics of Lambert
& Butler “Waverley” Straight Cut Cigarettes, engravings of Catherine
Seyton, links to all sorts of interesting material that you won’t know about –
for example, the aging Mark Twain’s extraordinary letters about the Waverley
novels – and a more comprehensive guide to all Scott’s works. Also, a link to
Carlyle’s review-essay on Lockhart’s biography: I must admit, I don’t find it
an easy matter to read Carlyle on any subject. But it’s well worth persisting,
if only for the salutary effect of a view that resolutely declines to idealize
its subject. Carlyle is unenthusiastic; he argues that what we call “greatness”
in Scott is something less than what he thinks greatness in the absolute sense
(Goethe is his touchstone). It must be admitted that nearly all writing about
Scott is characterized – I will not say vitiated – by a vein of reverent
idealization, from which my own notes are by no means exempt. Carlyle was also
prescient in anticipating that Scott’s phenomenal popularity would be temporary.
As it happens his own work is now in even deeper eclipse, and that of his hero
Goethe too, at any rate in the English-speaking world.)
A LONGER NOTE ON THE ANTIQUARY (1816)
Scott wrote in the “Advertisement”: “The
present work completes a series of fictitious narratives, intended to
illustrate the manners of
“Minute description of manners”, considered as a novelist’s modus operandi, sounds insufficiently propulsive. Some foundering is inevitable, and this duly occurs in those middle chapters that are preoccupied for far too long with the uninteresting matter of Dousterswivel. And later the aged Elspeth, when she suddenly turns into an eloquent narrator who uses expressions like “I need not tell you” and “I was unhappily permitted to add”, has an inconsistent voice. But these are rather small criticisms.
The Antiquary conspicuously lacks a central thread. One looks for it in the genteel hero and heroine, but their story is spot-lit only at moments. Lovel has just the one reported conversation with Isabella Wardour, who herself never quite manages to take stage-centre, except perhaps as the author of the tale of Martin Waldeck. Lovel disappears altogether at the end of Ch XXI, to make only the briefest of reappearances in the final chapter. “Artificial and combined narrative” does, inevitably, have a place in the book; for example Lovel, staying in the Green Room at Monkbarns, doesn’t know that the lines of Chaucer embroidered on a border of the tapestry were chosen by his mother. But it is un-combined narrative that matters in The Antiquary. Scott had the example of Tristram Shandy to hand, but he was no great theorist and perhaps the novel emerged intuitively.
When Steenie Mucklebackit is unexpectedly drowned, you would swear that it comes as a surprise to the author himself, so utterly does he resist any hint of a foredoom. This is one of the episodes, like the post-office scene and the storm at Halket Head, that arise with great integrity from Scott’s imagination. Though they appear unplanned, their relevance is never in question, for Scott’s themes involve every aspect of the society he describes.
The book begins with a chance meeting and with good conversation, and every reader soon perceives that conversation is one of its central values. The chief, though not the only, purveyors of this life-enhancing tonic are Jonathan Oldbuck and Edie Ochiltree – one is a gentleman with a hobby-horse; the other a beggar who likes his way of life. Neither, however, is abused as a drone, and though the various plots do not seem to concern them directly they are conceived as agents for good. (For this is a portrait of a good society; one that passes muster, though comically, when its members misguidedly arm against the French.)
The image of the dilletante, of someone not quite engaged with the engine of his world, is there from the start. In the splendid opening paragraphs, Lovel (and later Oldbuck) are waiting for a coach. Scott, writing with that casual grasp of detail that came so easily to him, throws out a volume of information about the Hawes Fly, but Lovel, in the slightly absurd posture of a traveller, knows nothing of all this. Oldbuck, who complains vehemently of the coach’s lateness, is not taken seriously by Mrs Macleuchar, nor by himself. Rejecting the return of his fare, he asks: “Will it requite the damage I may sustain by leaving my business undone?” But this plea of business is not very convincing; he is a consumer, and more leisured than he pretends. It won’t be long before he himself is delaying the coach’s progress, “observing that one of the horses had cast a forefoot shoe” – as it luckily happens, within a hundred yards of the site of a Pictish camp. Scott allows no satire of Oldbuck. He can, we soon learn, subsist without a career; he is “in correspondence with most of the virtuosi of his time” – what a pleasant life it sounds!
The world of Oldbuck’s conversation, which occupies so much of the text, is very carefully fenced off from the world around him; but it would be a hard judge of personality who did not acknowledge the imaginative and philosophical enlargement that his talk supplies; Snuffy Davie, Aldobrand Oldenbuck, John o’ the Girnell, and all the rest. Yet he is not an unworldly man, and the faint suggestion of Don Quixote is defused in Ch III. In so subtle a book, there are plenty of hints that, in fact, his engagement with his household is far greater than he wishes to claim in his talk, which expresses an idea of himself as a detached scholar. As Griselda tells Lovel, “nobody thinks any thing of what Monkbarns says”. Oldbuck resorts to behaviour that expresses his detachment; when Oldbuck is eating or drinking in his sister’s company, he always reads a book to “evince his contempt for the society of womankind” (Ch VI). But “womankind” also stands for a large slice of the practical activity of his household. “Let womankind alone for coddling each other,” he announces in Ch IX. Oldbuck has his genuine incapacities; he cannot bargain for fish – on the other hand he takes a larger view of Maggie’s “dram” than his sister is able to do. His main structural function is to relegate Scott’s astonishingly detailed vision of Monkbarns and Fairport to small corners of the book.
Oldbuck (and one hears Scott behind this) does not overflow with respect for the Mucklebackits. That coolness, a land-owner’s judgment of feckless peasantry, is partly what makes the fisher-folk scenes at times so powerful; one can idyllicise the poor or expose their abject misery – and be a sentimentalist either way. We feel that what humanity Scott attributes to Maggie Mucklebackit is, as it were, forced out of him. The scene in which Saunders (the father) is found by Oldbuck attempting to fix the boat an hour or two after his shattered son’s funeral is one of Scott’s greatest – and let anyone who reads this scene consider if the author is “tame”. Conversation cannot cancel bereavement, yet what Oldbuck can do – in honouring the funeral, and in funding a carpenter – is much.
Oldbuck’s “caustic” manner hides a vulnerably tender heart, as we find out when his nephew is dangerously wounded, or when his old love Eveline Neville is spoken of. But Oldbuck’s refusal to discuss the matter of “womankind” expresses a sincere lack of interest in the lower orders, too. Caxon is expected to supply social gossip to Oldbuck’s ears as he fusses around the wig, but Oldbuck will not countenance a single word about what most occupies Caxon’s thoughts, namely his daughter Jenny.
Scott sees further than Oldbuck. With surprising economy, he manages to tell, in dispersed and indirect glimpses, something of Jenny Caxon’s love for her lodger Lieutenant Taffril. Just as compressed is the story of Jenny Rintherout , the “dirty barefooted chambermaid” passingly seen in Chapter III – making herself scarce, of course, before the wrath of Oldbuck. She is part of his household, along with his spinster sister Griselda, his niece Maria M’Intyre, Caxon who often sleeps over, Davie Dibble the gardener, a ploughman and “an old superintendant, a sort of female butler”. (Oldbuck considers that, aside from “two idle hussies of womankind” he is a perfect Caenobite, i.e. a monk in an enclosed order. He would no more think of mentioning his servants than his cat.)
Griselda’s emotional life revolves around the minister Blattergowl and his sister Beckie at the manse. Jenny herself has only one scene (Ch XXVI) in which she shares the foreground – a vigorous conversation with Maggie Mucklebackit. Despite Jenny’s denials it’s clear she has an interest in Steenie, who gallantly sees her home, perhaps returning late; the next morning he is drowned. Servants, of course, are not permitted (and perhaps really do not feel) such exalted emotions as heartbreak. But while Oldbuck is enjoying his self-satisfied conversation with Caxon (Ch XXX), we remember that somewhere in the same household an intense grief is being lived through. Eventually we will hear of it, but with no fellow-feeling in the prose: “Jenny Rintherout, scarce recovered from the hysterics which she had taken on hearing of poor Steenie’s misfortune, chased about the turkeys and poultry, cackled and screamed louder than they did, and ended by killing one-half too many” (Ch XXXIV). Griselda hardly takes her seriously: “that silly fliskmahoy, Jenny Rintherout...” (Ch XXXV), and nor does Oldbuck – “Has Jenny come to her senses yet?” (Ch XXXVI). Both are kindly souls, but only Maggie Mucklebackit in the end treats Jenny as a human being – and even she, in the presence of Hector and Oldbuck, is somewhat apologetic: “I want to see what that hellicate quean Jenny Rintherout’s doing – folk said she wasna weel – She’ll be vexing hersell about Steenie, the silly tawpie, as if he wad ever hae lookit ower his shouther at the like o’ her!” (Ch XXXIX). But Steenie still runs in Jenny’s mind when we catch a last sight of her: “Hech, sirs! – he’ll be missed the morn wha wad hae served king and country weel!” (Ch XLV)
Jenny’s attachment and bereavement are allowed no more than these few widely separated sentences. Their economy barely ripples the fabric of good-natured, easy comedy, and why should they? The book is not about the chambermaid. But Scott knew what was going on around the house, all the same; it’s this awareness that gives The Antiquary its wonderful sense of realism, its sense of taking place in a fully imagined society. Here Scott has a breadth that Jane Austen cannot match.
There is, by the way, a third Jenny (a daughter of Maggie’s), first seen “paddling in a pool among the rocks” (Ch XI). Oldbuck’s cat is black, and he is concerned that the spaniel imported by Hector (whose name is Juno) may worry her. The word caenobitium pleases Oldbuck, who (without a hint of authorial manipulation) refers to it several times. The public houses in the neighbourhood are the Grames’-arms, the Four Horse-shoes, and (near the seat of Glenallan) Ailie Sims’. The labour involved in drawing this information out of the book is notable: Scott lists nothing and describes nothing; people mention the pubs, as if they were real places, when they have a reason to. The same may be said of Mussel-crag, Craigburnfoot, Glen-Withershins, Kittlebrig etc. It is not the luxuriance of the topography that astonishes but the way in which each element meets us with perfect naturalness as it comes into use, like an old penny.
A LONGER NOTE ON OLD MORTALITY (1816)
With Tales
of My Landlord, Scott took the opportunity to break free from the
already-palpable constraints of being "the author of
The recently-restored title, The Tale of Old Mortality, reminds us that the narrative purports to be based on stories told by the latter-day Covenanter "Old Mortality", as adapted by the author Peter Pattieson, who writes:
My readers will of
course understand, that, in embodying into one compressed narrative many of the
anecdotes which I had the advantage of deriving from Old Mortality, I have been
far from adopting either his style, his opinions, or even his facts, so far as
they appear to have been distorted by party prejudice...
In fact the narrative that follows certainly does not look as if it could have had any basis in such tales as Old Mortality might have spun, except very sporadically, as perhaps in the heroic account of MacBriar's torture and execution; Scott, once he starts to write the story, doesn't attempt to make it reflect the complicated provenance that he has imagined for it in the frame.
Nevertheless, he did intend to write as fairly as he could about a movement to which he was unsympathetic, and Old Mortality is one of Scott's most liberal books. Thus, introducing the later part of the tale (set in 1689, when the Stuarts and their persecutions had ceased), he says:
This party,
therefore, remained grumbling and dissatisfied, and made repeated declarations
against defections and causes of wrath, which, had they been prosecuted as in
the two former reigns, would have led to the same consequence of open
rebellion. But as the murmurers were allowed to hold their meetings
uninterrupted, and to testify as much as they pleased against Socinianism,
Erastianism, and all the compliances and defections of the time, their zeal,
unfann'd by persecution, died gradually away, their numbers became diminished,
and they sunk into the scattered remnant of serious, scrupulous, and harmless
enthusiasts, of whom Old Mortality, whose legends have afforded the ground-work
of my Tale, may be taken as no bad representative.
But sometimes liberalism - the relative liberalism of a solid Tory - can seem more infuriating than outright hostility. At least, though it is evidently much better to live in a liberal climate, it can create more fury in the reader. The fury is to do with perceiving the author's insidious manipulation, his desire to have it both ways and to entrap unwary readers into embracing with him what purports to be consensual centre-ground (i.e. absolutely not "distorted by party prejudice") when really it is continuously, though gently, slanted towards an emasculation of opposing views.
Possibly the highly vocal objections to Scott's well-intentioned but subtly weighted "fairness" (initially McCrie, and cf. the later ripostes in novelistic form by Galt and Hogg) actually hastened the hardening of Scott's attitudes. Three years later, in the wake of Peterloo, he wrote an angry article in the Visionary; there was nothing here about being soft on civil dissent; he rejected the lessons taught by his own earlier novel. The highly vocal objections were in a way a compliment. Old Mortality was instantly seen to be a deathless masterpiece, a book that would shape conceptions of Scottish history for ever; hence, itself a battleground where it was absolutely necessary to strike soon and forcefully.
McCrie and the others were, after all,
quite right; the coolness of Scott's attitude to the Covenanters is
unmistakable. If we compare his portrayal of them with, e.g. the Jacobites in
What I mean specifically by a "companion" with whom he is "in sympathy" is, let's be frank, a "person of quality". Social class, in Scott's imagination, runs far deeper than ideology. As both the gentlefolk and most of the Covenanters instinctively realize, Morton has taken a perverse stand on what is (from the point of view of his social class) the "wrong" side - he is really much more at ease with Evandale and Claverhouse, and his heart lies with the "Midianitish woman". Morton's awkward position is both what makes the book thrilling and what makes it open to objection; Scott is not willing to imagine an organized working-class.
Perhaps that last sentence needs qualification: he is not willing to imagine a self-organized, quietly ordered, effective working class. He imagines them as requiring a leadership which is either unstably inspired and half-insane (Mucklewrath, etc), or else brutally fanatical and inspirational by virtue of terror (Burley), or else belonging to the ruling class (Morton).
There is a bifurcation in the book. At Tillietudlem we see the classes working together in what Scott conceives as the natural order. Consider the great passages in which the rulers Major Bellenden, Lord Evandale, Claverhouse etc debate Morton's case; they do so with subtlety and acumen, here is the ruling class (each one in his way an admirable character) ordering themselves, discussing the difficult matter of one who has fallen away.
"And considering the usage which he has received,
and the suspicion under which he lies," said Lord Evandale, "what
other course is open to him? For my own part, I should hardly know whether he
deserved most blame or pity."
"Blame, my Lord? - Pity?" echoed the Major,
astonished at hearing such sentiments, "he would deserve to be hanged,
that's all; and were he my own son,..."
Within this orderly social construct the workers too have an important social role; I am thinking especially of the admirable - that word again - Jenny Dennison. For after all the ruling-class characters have each one their frailties and unreasonable (but not irrational) eccentricities; once their basic right to power has been silently conceded, a wise, comic, critical, corrective commentary can flow cheekily from the servants. It all works perfectly, comfortably, and admirably.
But now swing over to the Covenanter's campfires, and all this order is (in Scott's vision) nightmarishly perturbed. Here leadership is grotesque and what the narrative highlights is its power to do evil, its irrationality, and its insecurity (the very things that Scott doesn't want us to notice about the rulers of ordered society). And here the followers are a rabble; instead of a delightfully "irrepressible" critical voice like Jenny's, the relationship of the ruled to the rulers is uncritical adulation that may quite suddenly transform into uncritical trampling.
The problem for the scrupulous reader is that when you immerse in Old Mortality Scott's word is law. The world of the book that we very properly want to experience to the full is after all a fictional world: we can say of the history to which he alludes, "Well, it probably wasn't quite like that": but in the fiction, that's exactly how it is; and for most of us now the fiction is much more significant than the history. The more fully we plummet into identifying with Morton's experience the more the book is likely to influence our political thinking in ways we may not want. Such are the limits of dilletantism. A cautious conclusion might be: of course you must read Scott, but don't read only Scott. The profound truth in this vision - mobs and demagogues and feeling frightened and overwhelmed by them, yes, it convinces us, this is just what it's like - well, profound truths can be tyrannous if left to roam unchecked among the feebleness of our common perceptions. Great books are dangerous.
Note
"To
Fairy-knowe? - no; alone I could not protect them. - I must instantly to
Thus the instant
decision taken by Mjr-Gnrl Melville, formerly known as Henry Morton. Of course,
we are meant to accept this; but surely Morton gets it wrong. A forewarned
Evandale, the formidable Morton and the ever-useful Cuddie could surely have
stood firm against any such forces as Olifant could muster (they turn out to be
only four men).
(2008)
A LONGER NOTE ON ROB ROY (1818)
I have finally re-read Rob Roy, and found myself pronouncing it a failure (albeit one written in the midst of Scott’s best period). If so, it’s an interesting kind of failure.
The author of
It‘s a travelling book, the locale shifting
as the book proceeds. In that respect it’s like
The topographical structure of Rob Roy is roughly as follows:
First (and longest) part (Chapters 1-18).
In
Second part (Chapters 19-26). Journey to
Third part (Chapters 27-36a). To the Highlands;
in the Highlands; leaving the
Fourth part (Chapters 36b-39). This is
presented more summarily; time speeds up;
Considered baldly, the problem can be
defined as the long delay before the
The delay is inordinate, but can be partly
justified by the narrative momentum of gradual discovery. In
The reason for Scott’s difficulty is that
his hero’s main concern is with the Rashleigh/Die Vernon plots (and plots,
rather than stories, is what they are).
But when the
It’s unfortunate that the Osbaldistone Hall material is so lifeless by comparison. Hildebrand’s sons are an unfortunate group, a set of five dummies always trooped out in succession as if to supply a spurious comic life; this is wearisome. There is also a lot of reliance on Gothic motifs in this section - mysterious secret entrances and so on. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the effect is of inert copying not personal creation. (Contrast Osbaldistone Hall with the amazing home of the hero in The Bride of Lammermoor - which might be described as Gothic but only with an awareness that this term quite fails to express the uniqueness of setting and incident, the extent to which Gothic motifs are absorbed into a personal imagining.) Scott’s interest in Rashleigh is of a flickering type. At first he seems disposed to explore Rashleigh’s villainy, but in the end he just relies on it to initiate movements in the plot.
Unsatisfactory as all this is, its main effect (apart from putting off readers) is merely to obscure Scott’s deeper thematic interests. They are there all the same, but they do not come naturally before the reader as they should do.
Frank Osbaldistone is the key figure in the book. He is not a “sneaking imbecile” of the kind Scott more often deployed as formal hero. In fact he has quite a definite character, not an especially amiable one. He is essentially a member of the ruling class and (despite, apparently, a fondness for poetizing which does not run very deep) he is suitable material; effective, confident, worldly. He knows how to deal with servants, and with gentlemen too. He will be a competent administrator, and can put personal feeling aside, as is desolatingly portrayed in the ease with which, in the end, he takes over the reins of that same Osbaldistone Hall in which he was once a minor and troubled guest.
Scott himself doubtless admires Frank, and endows him with plenty of generous feelings which, on the whole, don’t threaten him very deeply.
He is, in various ways, “challenged” by the more interesting characters in the book, those who fail in some way to fit his conventional world-view.
Die
Andrew Fairservice challenges Frank in a different way, by being an unruly, self-interested, whippable-yet-rarely-whipped servant. Sometimes useful and sometimes obstructive, his cowardice and eccentricity make him too easily placed. He is too companionless to matter and, though entertaining, remains a servant. The limitations of the author’s own attitude to servants, his essentially complacent idea of what it means to be a landowner and a gentleman, prevent Andrew in the end from being deeply troublesome.
The Bailie, too, falls short of making a fundamental challenge. His mercantile wisdom and deeper (because broader) morality ought to knock Frank out of his stride more than it does. But his self-importance, a certain ridiculousness, a certain tendency to parrot repetitively about his father and his lineage, all undercut his potential significance. Like Andrew, he is too apt in the end to be that easy thing, a colourful character.
Rob Roy, and his more scarcely seen wife, are a different matter. Here the cultural challenge (deeply felt by Scott) strikes deeper. Rob Roy is, in some sense, a greater man than Frank or any of his society; he is a romantic hero, fit for the title of a book. If that seems a rather paltry and literary way of analysing the realities of highland life, I do not think it seemed so to Scott. (He did not write for Rob Roys but for Frank Osbaldistones.)
Frank acknowledges - and we acknowledge -
that in Rob Roy he has met his superior. Perhaps one could say that in the
After that key moment, Frank’s highland sojourn becomes a long and brilliant valediction. The precise question that the book has raised at that moment cannot, perhaps, be reduced to words. Here is one attempt: can a man such as Frank Osbaldistone deserve the romantic experience? Perhaps once in his life, yes. That’s his reward for the sensitivities, rather tepid as they are, that motivate his poeticizing. But can he live the romantic existence that, we believe, is lived (with all its accompanying sufferings) by Rob Roy? Clearly, no. If we are prepared to accept - I think I am - Frank’s marrying Die Verrnon - and how adeptly and confidently he goes about this when the occasion offers - the woman he marries is nevertheless not the Die Vernon that comes before us as part of the question. She is not the deeper reality of that mysterious night. Perhaps they have children; we are not told; it is all just “joys and sorrows”, the sort that do not challenge a conventional existence.
Despite the soft-hearted Bailie, Rob Roy is not a genial book, and its hero is not an especially congenial man. Frank and Rashleigh may fight a cardboardish duel in Glasgow, (and there’s a comic playfight at the Clachan, too) but in the background the violence is real: the death of Morris, the troopers cut to pieces, the unlovely deaths of the cousins, Rashleigh’s death-wound filling the bottom of the coach with blood. Scott “places” all of this in a colourful past, but his serious concern is with a manner of life that dominated the present; the capable, immensely effective, life of a modern ruling class. In its inadequacy before the aspects of life that Scott gathers under the umbrella of romance, he discovers a failure that had its own violent consequences. He will not quite accept what he sees, and puts it all down as an adventure.
[In an earlier note I accepted the view of contemporary critics, and of Scott himself, that the ending of Rob Roy is shamelessly “huddled”. This, along with various other conventional judgments, I no longer hold. For example, that the highlights of the book are the colourful characters (the Bailie, Andrew Fairservice), and that Helen MacGregor is a Gothic harridan who arouses incredulity. It’s nearly 25 years since the reading that accepted those judgments, perhaps no less valid than what I think now, but inevitably reflecting a different reader.]
[A puzzling but surely important feature of Scott’s novels is their “re-readability”. I have not seen this discussed, perhaps because it seems rather subjective and intangible. However, it’s probably what is meant when Scott is called a “poetic” novelist - which in certain obvious respects he isn’t. When I finished Rob Roy I would have been quite prepared to turn the book back and re-read the superb confrontation with Frank’s father in the opening chapters. The scene is in some way elevated to a perennial or mythic or “epic” stature, though its texture is in most ways unlike a Shakespearean confrontation, for example. Its pages do not seem to exist only as a phase through which the story is advanced. There might be a connection with what I have written somewhere else about the picaresque novel. Alternatively, it may be the directness with which Scott’s material engages with his theme, so that the scene continues to signify in the memory. But then again, the re-readability is not limited to certain big scenes. “Small” Scott (in prefaces, transitional episodes, and passim in weak novels) also has this quality, absent from many better books. It might be connected with the impression the author himself makes. The turns of his mind, even on trivial material, are unusually fascinating; unusual, at any rate, considering the absence of brilliant expression. One is apt to put it all down to his personality, to call him “great” or “good” or “noble” - but if this is true it is by no means a simple truth; a catalogue of Scott’s less enchanting actions and beliefs would be easy to compile. Perhaps there is an unusually guileless revelation of the author’s personality in Scott’s books; he doesn’t know how to perform. When we read him we seem to be beside the author, sharing his zest and his inventions, his tameness and conventionality, his good-heartedness and his clumsiness. We do not feel that he is addressing an audience.]
A LONGER NOTE ON THE ABBOT (1820)
“By Heaven, Catherine, your tongue wears as many disguises as your person!” Roland Græme complains of the girl he loves. He’s mistaken, for the “audacity” that we admire in Scott’s most entrancing heroine is not deceptive at all, though admittedly she does try to take advantage of the Lady of Lochleven’s belief in a supposed poisoning. The circumstances are a bit unusual. Normally Catherine is, whatever Roland thinks, perfectly sincere and direct. Her games are the spiritedness of youth, and “in sad earnest” she hardly troubles to hide even her love for Roland, and certainly never her unalterable commitment to the Catholic faith. Scott’s most attractive women (Flora MacIvor, Rebecca) are for some reason often committed to a creed he disapproves.
The Abbot is indeed a book full of even more than the usual quota of people in disguise. In the village of Kinross, Roland encounters four in very short order: Henry Seyton as a country maiden, Magdalen Græme as Mother Nicneven, Father Ambrose as a “mean and servile” retainer, and Father Boniface as the gardener Blinkhoolie. All are of course adherents to the “ancient and only road” (Mary’s phrase) that the ruling Protestant party is trying to suppress.
Disguise has the potential of allowing someone to assume a character that expresses their inner selves more openly than their everyday identity does, and here this might be claimed (in their different ways) of both Magdalen-as-Nicneven and Boniface-as-Blinkhoolie.
Pursuing that line of thought as regards Henry is intriguing, but the truth is that whenever Roland tries to treat Henry femininely he walks into a wall. This seems maybe like a crude device for nourishing an artificial mystification in Roland’s mind; he keeps mistaking Henry-as-maiden for Catherine, his supposedly “identical” twin, and there seems no good reason why the real Catherine doesn’t enlighten him. (Roland is apparently unaware that Catherine has a twin at all, even though Henry Seyton is a prominent noble.) The upshot is an androgynous tangle that links the three in features of their personalities. But what is “audacity” in Catherine is impulsiveness and violence in the two young men.
[Boy-and-girl twins are never “identical” twins, of course. But Scott had ample literary precedent, e.g. Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. There is a suggestive train of connexions between Shakespeare’s play and The Abbot, e.g. Sebastian’s violence, the puritan restrainer, and this whole matter of being a page – or eunuch.]
Father Ambrose provides the most telling commentary on these disguises. Roland, though backsliding fast from his own Catholicism, is appalled to see his former spiritual guide in “the dress of a poor sworder”, and then critical of the unworthiness of these shifts. Ambrose rebuts him powerfully:
“The heretics have played their usual arts on you, my
son... they would willingly deprive us of the power of acting wisely and
secretly, though their possession of superior force forbids us contending with
them on the terms of equality. They have reduced us to a state of exhausted
weakness, and now would fain proscribe the means by which weakness, through all
the range of nature, supplies the lack of strength, and defends itself against
its potent enemies. As well might the hound say to the hare, use not these wily
turns to escape me, but contend with me in pitched battle, as the armed and
powerful heretic demand of the down-trodden and oppressed Catholic to lay aside
the wisdom of the serpent, by which alone they may again hope to raise up the
Jerusalem over which they weep, and which it is their duty to rebuild...”
It’s a justification that still resonates disturbingly.
Roland treads a dangerous path, seemingly entrammelled by loyalties to both sides, and seemingly always fated to end up as a lady’s page. His own agenda is personal; he wants to be free to be himself, and his childish image for that is to be a soldier. He is deeply frustrated, and his violence and rudeness issue from this. What ultimately unites Roland and Catherine is a modern desire to be themselves; in Roland’s case that amounts to a frustration with his times; Catherine, more solidly grounded, is able to live as herself by committing to an unwavering allegiance and accepting its misfortunes.
*
Roland wants, as he thinks freely, to do great deeds for women. Impelled by his love for Catherine and his loyalty to Mary, he understands his own position in terms of knight-errantry and the imagery of medieval romance. The Lady of Lochleven uses a different (Protestant) kind of imagery to talk about this. She speaks of her son’s/grandson’s attempt to liberate Mary from Lochleven as evidencing Mary’s malignly seductive powers, the “snare of the Moabitish woman”. Both types of thinking are based on myth. Scott is unwilling to resolve the conundrum so far as Mary is concerned, but in Roland and Catherine it’s clear that he portrays a relationship in which the girl’s goal-setting and the lad’s courage are the natural and instinctive moves of courtship.
*
Mary was in fact only 25 at the period of The Abbot, but the dramatic part of her reign, the marriages and murders, already lay in the past. As usual, Scott likes to set his book in the vaguely fine weather of summer, and this was more or less historically accurate – the earlier chapters occur around the time of Mary’s imprisonment (16th June 1567) and abdication (August 1567), while the later chapters surround her eventual escape the following year (it actually took place on 2nd May 1568). Mary when we see her is in a lull between the sensational events of the years after her return to Scotland and the nineteen years of captivity in England that eventually ended with her execution. She in no way dominates the book, but sits within it as a kind of potent presence.
*
Scott is confusing about the relationship between the Lady of Lochleven and George Douglas, who betrays his own side by attempting to liberate Mary. George Douglas was in fact her youngest son but in The Abbot Scott is inconsistent about this and sometimes thinks of him as her grandson. [The mistake may have arisen from conflation of the Lady’s husband and son, both named William; Scott might have remembered that George Douglas was the son of Sir William Douglas, and also that the Lady was the mother of Sir William Douglas, and thus ended up with three generations instead of two.] In any case Scott decided to keep his composite Sir William Douglas offstage and away from Lochleven so as to create a society dominated by forceful but unattached women. Perhaps, also, he was doubling the grandmother/grandson relationship of Magdalen and Roland. He wanted his older women to be free agents and was wary of introducing the more explosive relationship of mother/son. In general Scott in his novels steers clear of nuclear families*; they are too complicated, and romance (like dreams) has a tendency to eliminate siblings, parents and children. It’s something of the same wariness that persuaded him to avoid the more obviously sensational material of Mary’s marriages and the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, which he portrays only indirectly and by allusion. Mary’s marriage to Bothwell preceded her imprisonment by only a month but in the novel Bothwell is rarely mentioned and he too seems to belong to a distant past.
*
The Abbot is not inappropriately titled, for though it surprises us by its centre of interest being co-located with the novel’s young lovers (very unusual in Scott’s novels), its priests are important. They are themselves victims (at least on the Catholic side), but we cannot forget that it is their harangues on both sides that fuel the wars of religion under which this society suffers. Ambrose and Henderson represent each side at its best, while each has his comic variant (respectively, Boniface and Warden) who adds distinctive complications to the picture. For Scott the matter of Catholicism against Protestantism was still a live issue, and he emphatically speaks out at times in favour of the reformed church. But his story directs most of our sympathy towards the Catholic side. We side with the underdog, and if Ambrose is potentially an apologist for terrorism, the Protestants are uncompromising extirpators.
The Abbot is
a book whose triumphs are atomised, verbal and ideological. Roland’s consciousness
has difficulty concentrating. He is thus quite untroubled in his pursuit of
Mary’s freedom, but we cannot forget
“...but first, my good Roland, look forth on the
pleasant prospect of yonder cultivated plain. You see, where the smoke arises,
yonder village standing half hidden by the trees, and you know it to be the
dwelling-place of peace and industry. From space to space, each by the side of
its own stream, you see the gray towers of barons, with cottages interspersed;
and you know that they also, with their household, are now living in unity; the
lance hung upon the wall, and the sword resting in its sheath... What would he
deserve, who should bring fire and slaughter into so fair and happy a scene –
who should bare the swords of the gentry and turn them against each other – who
should give tower and cottage to the flames, and slake the embers with the
blood of the indwellers?...”
Roland rejected this imputation at the
time, but in the end he does exactly what
But aside from his allegiance to Catherine,
Roland has another reason for wanting Mary out of prison. Roland ignores
*Compare e.g.
Edith Bellenden (parents dead, lives with grandmother) and Henry Morton
(parents dead, lives with uncle) in Old
Mortality.
A LONGER NOTE ON QUENTIN DURWARD (1823)
When I wrote my mini-critiques of Scott’s
novels, I was rude about this one and I still think I’m right. The praise
accorded it in the book by Angus and Jenni Calder seems inexplicable to me,
unless they were dazzled by its reception in
It occurs to me too that Scott’s interest in royalty is associated with a determination to view the behaviour of a human being when untrammelled by institutions. In the Duke of Burgundy and King Louis he has his chance. These were exceptional lives in their own time, but ours have more in common with them than with the merchants and soldiers. We don’t have all the wealth, but we do have nineteen parts of the freedom. We too can become our own personalities.
C.L Bennet’s (of Dalhousie University) comatose 1967 introduction to Quentin Durward betrays how unrewardingly Scott has been read for at least a century, and what an increasingly ungrateful task popular publishers found it to present Scott classics. This copy, “specially selected for the Airmont Library from the immortal literature of the world”, appears as usual never to have been read.
There are after all considerable obstacles in the path of one who may have been attracted (or whose gift-buying relative was attracted) by the front cover, with its muscular hero (in an astonishing costume of Ivanhoe-meets-Rob Roy) posing heroically while a pitched battle engages furiously a few yards away. After Bennet there is Scott’s 1831 Preface which, with some seriousness and some dullness, and a full page of quotation in French, moralizes over King Louis XI, dispiritingly adding: “It will be easily comprehended, that the little love intrigue of Quentin is only employed as the means of bringing out the story” (as poor a piece of salesmanship as Henry James’ remarks on the mechanism of The Ambassadors). This is one of the later Prefaces that ought now to be relegated to an appendix, because it destroys the effect that Scott first aimed for. He was not one of those rare artists (like Brahms) who could add new material so seamlessly that we are convinced the whole work was built around it.
This is followed by another Preface (originally,
the beginning of the book), which very slowly introduces a few of the book’s
themes, chiefly that of
What I’ve written here is what every non-aficionado reports about Scott’s books. It’s a shame that Quentin Durward doesn’t really work, because Scott did have serious themes that he wanted to explore, in particular what he perceived as a crucial cultural development in which the plainsong of chivalry was manipulated into the counterpoint of policy. But I don’t think Scott was equipped to understand what “policy” was; the novel’s presentation of Louis the politician consists largely of such immemorial (or medieval) narrative tropes as trusting in dreams, meddling in arranged marriages, and variations on “the biter bit”. Scott even resorts helplessly to making Louis use his own favoured tag, “Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards”. He saw “policy” (as a romancer, and as a firm believer in good Scottish knocks) only from the outside; as a sinister black hole in whose deceptive neighbourhood romance and therefore life itself were mysteriously dissipated. So the book is constantly falling back into fringe situations and company (Scots or Bohemians or merely young) that avoid the issue of "policy"; instead of illuminating Louis and his world, they judge it. Quentin comes before us not as a naive innocent, or rather not only as a naive innocent, but as the novel’s representative of the values that Scott himself really upheld; Quentin is not a brilliant representative, but the main problem is that since he is already a moral touchstone he cannot learn anything. He cannot, as Scott could not, perceive “policy” from the point of view of someone who lives it from the inside; as a new form of perception, a new psychological acumen, a new means of getting by. This might seem an odd thing to claim, since we are talking about developments that were centuries old in Scott’s own time; the problem may be that his themes required a European, not a British, imagination.
But what Scott could do, and intermittently does well, is write a romance that has its own way irresponsibly with some of the materials of Commynes’ history. The book begins to breathe freely when Quentin and the ladies set off on their journey to Liège, and it gets even better at Peronne. The romance has now gathered its own momentum. Scott works with a surprisingly small cast of characters, considering his tapestry. If a guard is needed, the Balafré is always ready to hand; a low villain will always be Hayraddin. It stretches credulity, but Scott can produce good effects from putting characters who are all well-known to us into the same room; the best example is the night in the tower when Galeotti so nearly meets his doom. As Petit-André and his friends prepare a lynching, Scott can be taciturn about the Balafré’s thoughts, yet we are vividly concerned with them. The introduction of Galeotti into this tense situation, and its unexpected outcome, are transformations that matter to us.
I have heard it said, with what authority I don’t know, that Hayraddin Maugrabin is the first gipsy to appear in a European novel. Scott’s presentation is of course ignorant and framed in the conventions of literary villainy (he has to resort to Epicureanism to fill up the vacuum in his comprehension), but nothing can prevent him unleashing a powerful literary idea. Hayraddin’s villainy is consistently modified by the author's unconcealed interest in him and indeed a frustrated desire to sympathise; in the end, this issues in the strange little matter of the pony, Klepper, that Hayraddin bequeaths to Quentin. But the gipsy intrinsically resists the sympathy that Scott would like to give him; he does not accept any of the cultural axioms from which that sympathy springs. The poems that Wordsworth wrote about gipsies register the same unease.
The scene with the pony has another function; to keep Quentin away from Maugrabin’s execution. Scott wants to maintain a spotless image of his hero. Later, it requires another piece of clever handling to ensure that it is the Balafré, and not Quentin himself, who decapitates the corpse of William de la Marck. Less adroitly, Isabelle has been required to faint in order not to witness the killing of the bishop. At such moments one sees the limitations to what Scott has been able to achieve. Quentin and Isabelle could have remained morally upright in a close confrontation with evil, but they could not have remained figures of romance with an “innocence” that extends to their imaginations as well as to their deeds.
A LONGER NOTE ON
The action of
But the novel’s strength is already there
and it is fugal in nature.
Approach 1: Trusty Tomkins, then Joceline (Chs 2-3)
Approach 2: Everard and Wildrake (Ch 5)
Approach 3: Everard, Wildrake, Mayor, Holdenough (Ch 10)
Approach 4: Everard, Wildrake, then
Tomkins,
Approach 5: Everard, Charles, Sir Henry Lee (Ch 25)
Approach 6: Charles,
Approach 7: Cromwell, Pearson and soldiers, Everard, Holdenough, then Rochecliffe, Joceline (Ch 33)
Somewhere at the back of the reader’s mind
is the persistent feeling of “I’ve been here before”. Thus when we attend the planned
duel of Charles and Everard in Chapter 28, we feel the weight of accumulated
combat: this very pair have already crossed swords at the end of Ch 24,
Wildrake has mimed a combat with
This is just when we’re not expecting it.
Scott has set up a pattern by which the natural climax of a section is followed
by a trip to Rosamund’s spring for water. But just as the earlier visit
encountered a sinister predator (Alice and the disguised Charles in Ch 18) so
this one (Phoebe and Tomkins) blows up into a nasty squall and proves
uncontainable. In the end it is not the gentlemanly sword that does the damage,
nor does it ever in
I am
writing this for people who have already read
All of these scenes are at some level about controlling feelings. With civil war so recent, the fear is that people can’t change the feelings that recently meant war and therefore war will resume; this is the darker aspect of those fugal repetitions. (When Wildrake thinks to control his own drinking, the comic result is the “modest sip” at the end of Ch IX.)
*
“Thou hast a wonderful memory, friend,” said the
Colonel coldly, “to remember these rhymes in a single recitation. There seems
something of practice in all this.”
Thus Everard most unjustly accuses Tomkins in Ch 14. We have difficulty shaking off the positive judgement of the dog Bevis, and Tomkins’ early awareness of Phoebe is so subtle that it is likely to go unremembered. As we read through the book we keep pondering what kind of literary stereotype Tomkins will eventually reveal himself to be – saviour or villain? We are sure he’s in disguise. But in the end Tomkins doesn’t resolve into that kind of simple stereotype; unmasked, he remains masked. The effect is curiously impressive: Tomkins always eludes us, his wisdom and resource continue to echo positively though he dies casually, a mere brute.
*
When
*
One element of the fugue’s uneasy recapitulations is that they can sometimes wear down the novel’s certainties. When the hauntings begin in Ch 12 we are told:
Colonel Everard was incapable of a moment’s fear, even
if anything frightful had been seen....
It is manifestly true that compared to the panic-stricken – Desborough and Bletson, for example – Everard stays pretty cool. However, this what you might call “official” view of the hero’s courage is in subsequent pages progressively undermined.
Markham Everard was by no means superstitious, but he
had the usual credulity of the times... he could not help thinking he was in
the very situation... Under such unpleasant impressions...
The fear of death, which Everard had often braved in
the field of battle, became more intense... Large drops of perspiration stood
upon his forehead; his heart throbbed, as if it would burst from its
confinement in the bosom; he experienced the agony which fear imposes on the
brave man, acute in proportion to that which pain inflicts when it subdues the
robust and healthy.
Even when Everard regains his self-possession he remains distracted, embarrassed, affronted, disgraced. His adrenalin is still at the flood and it’s this, more than a reasoned judgement, that has him riding off so precipitately to the ranger’s hut.
It is pleasant to discover that the supposedly nerveless hero is in fact so highly impressionable, such a mass of passions. We aren’t therefore surprised when later the unwelcome Cromwell, eyeing him closely, says: “Is there not moisture on thy brow, Mark Everard?” What perhaps is a little more surprising is that Everard in this same scene says nothing to contradict Wildrake’s madly courageous claim to Cromwell “that he [Everard] knew not a word of the rascally conditions you talk of”. Within a few hours of Wildrake’s return to Woodstock Everard had really known all about those conditions (Ch 14), but he doesn’t at this moment think it necessary to set the matter straight. Difficult times, of course.
*
The Introduction and Preface to Woodstock are dull antiquarian things and for ordinary purposes they should be ignored. The story sidles into view with Chapter 1 (this is not always the case with Scott’s novels), though an otiose modern narrator still lingers on through the first paragraph, like a candle guttering as the windows lighten.
(2006)
A LONGER NOTE ON Tales of a Grandfather (1827-29) and The History of Scotland (1829)
Tales of a Grandfather is a history of Scotland up to 1745. It was supposedly designed for a young child, but Scott soon gave up any thought of infantile capacities, though he does dwell on memorable tales (even if legendary) and he steers clear of analysis. Until quite recently this was a widely-read book in Scotland; it makes a bizarre appearance in the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s Tomorrow Belongs to Me (1975) – Harvey (born in 1935) made a virtue of being older than other rock stars and of having access to forgotten things. The History of Scotland (for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia) covers a briefer period, ending in 1603. This is harder to come by, but it makes better reading than the first series of TOAG, which covers the same ground. Both however are good books, if this kind of historical material interests you; in other words, wars, power-struggles, heroic and villainous deeds; not much about social or cultural matters.
On the assumption that even scholars are likely to leave these volumes unread, I’ll mention some passages that deserve attention. (TOAG is, however, currently in print as four paperback volumes with new titles.)
TOAG Chapter XXXIV (the first of the second series), is titled “Progress of Civilisation in Society”. It’s on such a theme that one gains from the clarity enforced on a writer who addresses a child. This is what most of Scott’s contemporaries thought, if they thought at all, but rarely had occasion to say: for example, about the origin and function of property, money, trade, social class and education. It’s interesting that Scott mentions peoples who did not know about boiling water (natives of New South Wales) or even making a fire (presumably the Tasmanians, at that time still in existence).
Scott’s remarks on class are as follows:
The numerous transactions occasioned by the
introduction of money, together with other circumstances, soon destroy the
equality of ranks which prevails in an early stage of society. Some men hoard
up quantities of gold and silver, become rich, and hire the assistance of
others to do their work; some waste or spend their earnings, become poor, and
sink into the capacity of servants. Some men are wise and skilful, and,
distinguishing themselves by their exploits in battle and their councils in
peace, rise to the management of public affairs. Others, and much greater
numbers, have no more valour than to follow where they are led, and no more talent
than to act as they are commanded. These last sink, as a matter of course, into
obscurity, while the others become generals and statesmen. The attainment of
learning tends also to increase the difference of ranks. Those who receive a
good education by the care of their parents, or possess so much strength of
mind and readiness of talent as to educate themselves, become separated from
the more ignorant of the community, and form a distinct class and condition of
their own; holding no more communication with the others than is absolutely
necessary.
It’s fairly clear where Master Hugh Littlejohn (actually a Lockhart grandchild) is to locate himself. The passage provides an interesting commentary on e.g. The Antiquary, both for what it tells us about Oldbuck’s views (and Scott’s own views with his patriarchal hat on) and for how Scott himself as a great artist is constantly seeing beyond them.
Certain weaknesses that are likely to occur to anyone today: one gets richer quicker by exploitation or entrepreneurism than by hoarding; to succeed by learning (as an alternative “stream” to wealth) sounds like a fairy-tale; surely learning and more particularly the worldly fruits of learning are something that are normally bought. Scott’s remarks on valour appear to confuse a schoolboy melée with an ordered state; an illuminating insight into the psychology of an officer-class, but if his words found their way into the ranks they’d amount to a revolutionary challenge.
Scott’s essential right-heartedness can be gauged from his chapter (TOAG, LVIII) on “The Massacre of Glencoe”. Though one learns so much more detail from e.g. John Prebble’s book, Scott’s words make it clear that he understood the main features of the episode with great clarity, and was humanly horrified by its two essential features: a genocidal order by government against a portion of its own subjects, combined with an utter betrayal of the Highlanders’ binding law of hospitality. It’s true that he had other reasons (the Darien episode) for a profound dislike of King William.
The last page of Tales of a Grandfather is about the Highland clearances. It presents, as you might expect in such a book, a somewhat “official-sounding” view; but see also the note, quoting his words of 1816. No reader of Scott's novels could suppose that he felt no sympathy with people whose age-old way of life was being destroyed; and in fact his awareness of what had been going on (which must have been pretty acute, though much evil was suppressed) no doubt accounts in part for the urgency of his general concern for accommodations with the past. I am far from claiming Scott as a campaigner for the highland crofters; in fact his statement here, that “it is.. a change that has taken place, and has had its crisis”, was thoroughly disingenuous, for the clearances were to drag on for many more years in remoter parts of the highlands and islands. One can read Scott as providing, so to speak, an accommodation for the tender consciences of his bourgeois readers (one pays the victims by feeling, in Johnson’s phrase). But then, many readers get exactly the same comfortable pay-off by reading rousing campaigners. Scott on this theme can be read in different ways, and he has supplied his share of militant inspiration, though mainly in other countries than Scotland.
A LONGER NOTE ON SCOTT’S POETICAL WORKS
Like April morning
clouds, that pass,
With varying shadow,
o’er the grass,
And imitate, on field
and furrow,
Life’s chequer’d scene
of joy and sorrow ;
Like streamlet of the
mountain north,
Now in a torrent racing
forth,
Now winding slow its
silver train,
And almost slumbering on
the plain ;
Like breezes of the
autumn day,
Whose voice inconstant
dies away,
And ever swells again as
fast,
When the ear deems its
murmur past ;
Thus various, my
romantic theme
Flits, winds, or sinks,
a morning dream.
Yet pleased, our eye
pursues the trace
of Light and Shade’s
inconstant race ;
Pleased, views the
rivulet afar,
Weaving its maze
irregular ;
And pleased, we listen
as the breeze
Heaves its wild sigh
through Autumn trees ;
Then, wild as cloud, or
stream, or gale,
Flow on, flow
unconfined, my Tale!
(from Marmion, Introduction to Canto
Third)
Were you to suppose that Scott’s poetry is a kind of pleasant byway of little relevance to our world and its own poetry, you might want to reconsider after reading this, from Walt Whitman’s 1888 Introduction to Leaves of Grass (“A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”):
... Not till after all this, did I attempt any serious
acquaintance with poetic literature. Along in my sixteenth year I had become
possessor of a stout, well-cramm’d one thousand page octavo volume (I have it
yet,) containing Walter Scott’s poetry entire – an inexhaustible mine and
treasury of poetic forage (especially the endless forests and jungles of notes)
– has been so to me for fifty years, and remains so to this day.
He adds in a note:
Sir Walter Scott’s Complete Poems; especially
including Border Minstrelsy; then Sir Tristrem; Lay of the
Last Minstrel; Ballads from the German; Marmion; Lady of
the Lake; Vision of Don Roderick; Lord of the Isles; Rokeby;
Bridal of Triermain; Field of Waterloo; Harold the Dauntless;
all the Dramas; various Introductions, endless interesting Notes, and Essays on
Poetry, Romance, etc. Lockhart’s 1833 (or ’34) edition with Scott’s latest and
copious revisions and annotations. (All the poems were thoroughly read by me,
but the ballads of the Border Minstrelsy over and over again.)
There soon followed Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, Sophocles, Ossian... but the impact of Scott’s hefty book plummeting into the clear swimming-hole of the young Whitman’s imagination in 1837 must have been tremendous and fundamental. Scott was not only the gatekeeper to the European past, he was also the one really modern poet that Whitman liked to read deeply in. To limit Scott’s influence to where it is obvious, e.g. to the superficial mannerisms of Whitman’s juvenilia, would be profoundly unimaginative, as well as ignoring the plain statement of those fifty years of delighted reading. The very image of the one great book that Whitman intended to leave behind is surely owed to that reverently bibliographized volume; its rampant energies, its indifference to fine criticism, its generous scope, its national audience stretching from shepherds to statesmen, its democratic (not aesthetic) conception of a bard as a man speaking to men, its untroubled assumption that poetry means singing the activity of human beings and the activity of nature.
Whitman took from Scott his particular conception of a national poet as someone who set his marginal nation on the map of civilized awareness, and whose own copious energy instantiated his nation’s potency.
Marmion (1808)
Scott’s terrifically harmless narrative poems procured instant affection. Marmion typifies these poems, which although so readable are in other respects far from simple. The external structure of Marmion with its six cantos, each with an elaborate introduction (like those of Gavin Douglas to each book of his Scots Aeneid), hardly begins to suggest the complexity. Consider how Canto Second makes its anachronistic sea-progress of nuns up the Northumberland coast, faintly Chaucerian with laughter and daylight until it cuts to the horrific niches where Constance, a fair heroine in the wrong place, prophesies the end of the Roman rite, wearing Marmion’s blue badge and recalling his heroic appearance (along with a numbered meiny that likewise recalls a Chaucerian census) entering Norham at the beginning of Canto First, the whole tied up by a capricious breeze at the start and a tolling bell at the finish. It was in his poems that Scott learned the art of casual exposition that would make his best novels simultaneously expansive and direct.
The basic unit is the verse paragraph, which on a fundamental basis of striding tetrameter couplets admits a variety of cross-rhyme, ballad-measure, triple-time story-within-story, etc. The paragraphs are elastic enough in length to accommodate all these without threat to the poem’s momentum. They imply a certain tick of the clock, so when (in Canto Third), Fitz-Eustace sings the languishing song Where shall the lover rest, a little roman capital XI appears half-way through it, splitting the song across two of these larger units.
The Wordsworths thought that Scott’s way of writing verse was heavily indebted to Christabel. It was a poem that Scott admired, and they were in a better position to see it than we are; to our eyes the resemblances are not striking, the differences profound. Coleridge couldn’t complete his visions, but Scott revels in endings and beginnings, only neglecting the middle, where vacuities are covered up in order to produce a finished product. The chief means that Scott resorts to is dragging in antiquarian lore, at which the guilty Marmion may or may not turn pale, but no reader skips this out of longing to hear more of Marmion’s story. Thus Canto Fourth is hugely freighted with irrelevances called up by Crichton castle, or by a garrulous Lord Lindesay, but readers with a sense of occasion allow this to lead up to the delighted and expected vision of the Scottish army laid out in splendour before the Empress of the North.
The southern entrance I passed through,
And halted, and my bugle blew.
Methought an answer met my ear, —
Yet was the blast so low and drear,
So hollow, and so faintly blown,
It might be echo of my own. (IV, XIX)
We think of Scott as one of the first authors to have a historic sense of the differentness of the past, but in Marmion it’s the opposite that impresses. Scott’s knowledge of the past was immense but he depicts his hero and everything that happens in the poem as if it was being acted by people of his own time in costume.
For, by St. George, were that host mine,
Not power infernal nor divine,
Should once to peace my heart incline,
Till I had dimm’d their armour’s shine
In glorious
battle-fray! (IV, XXIX)
For us a pitched battle like Flodden is something totally unreal, a thing of the past. Scott was writing Marmion while mainland Europe was a battleground, and we mistake the hero’s reaction if we think his modernity precludes a genuine sense of being a potential participant.
While the “historical novel” has become accepted as a de facto genre, the “historical poem” has never become a recognized term. Poems, whatever material they may work over, are always statements about modernity, and Marmion is no exception.
(2000-2009)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael
Peverett |
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