The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott - Expanded Edition [Expanded] 9781400863297

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
PREFACE
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE WAVERLEY NOVELS
I. ROMANCE
II. THE PASSIVE HERO
III. CHARACTER AND TOPOGRAPHY
IV. PROPERTY
V. THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN
VI. ANXIETY
VII. ROB ROY
VIII. HONOR
IX. OLD MORTALITY
CONTRAST OF STYLES IN THE WAVERLEY NOVELS
HISTORY AND REVOLUTION IN OLD MORTALITY
PATRIARCHY, CONTRACT, AND REPRESSION IN SCOTT’S NOVELS
INDEX

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THE HERO OF THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

LITERATURE IN HISTORY SERIES EDITORS

David Bromwich, James Chandler, and Lionel Gossman

T h e books in this series study hterary works in the context of the intellectual conditions, social movements, and patterns of action in which they took .shape. Other books in the series: Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism i n Nineteenlh-Cenliiry Fiction ( 1 9 9 2 ) David Quint, Epir and Empire (forthcoming)

THE HERO OF THE WAVERLEY NOVELS WITH NEW ESSAYS ON SCOTT

Alexander Welsh

PRINCETON VNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, /"\EW JERSEY

P U B L I S H E D B Y P R I N C E T O N UNIYT.RSTTY P R E S S , 41 W I L L I A M S T R E E T , P R I N C E T O N . NEW J E R S E Y 0 8 5 - 1 0 IN T ! IE U N I T E D K I N G D O M

PRINCETON UNIYERSI I T PRESS, (.1IICII ESTER, W E S T S U S S E X

C O P Y R I G H T © 1903, 1968 B Y A L E X A N D E R W E L S H , NEW MATERIAL FOR T H E PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS E D I T I O N © 1992 BY P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S ALL R I G H T S RI-SERVED

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CONTENTS

Bihliographical Note Preface

IX

XI

Chronological List of the vVaverley Novels I ROMANCE

1

1. Fiction a.s Prajrc/ion 1 2. Novel or Romance 6 3. Moral Truth 12 II THE PASSIVE HERO

21

4. Two Soliloquies 21 5. Possible Exceptions 26 6. Rationalr 31

III

40

CHARACTER AND TOPOGRAPHY

7. Dark Heroes 40 8. Blondr and Brunr/te 48 9. The Highland Line 56 IV PROPERTY

63

10. Nature and Convention 63 11. Property in 1814 68 12. The Romance of Property 77 V THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN

86

13. The Trial ofJeanir Deans 86 14. Society as an Abstraction 92 15. Jeanie Deans Visits thr Sick 96 VI ANXIETY

101

16. Authority 101 17. The Emotion of the Hao 18. PrudenCf' 112

107

XVII

Vlii

CONTENTS VII

ROBROY

118

19. Francis Osbaldistone 118 20. ThePlot 123 21. Tentative Fiction 127 VIII HONOR 134 22. Rank in Life 134 23. Self-Sacrifice 139 24. Immortality 148 IX OLD MORTALITY

155

25. Henry Morton 155 26. Life and Death 164 27. The Denouement 171 Contrast of Styles in the Waverley Novels History and Revolution in Old Mortality

178 191

Patriarchy, Contract, and Repression in Scott's Novels Index

243

213

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

I

N The Hero of the Waverley Novels and in the essays that follow, quo­ tations are from the Centenary Edition of the novels, 25 vols. (Edinburgh: Black, 1885-1887). The publishers printed the first chapters of Old Mortality, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, and The Bnde of Lammermoor as preliminary matter, however, and thus shifted the numbering of chapters by one throughout. To facilitate reference to other editions, I have silently restored the standard chapter numbers for these three novels.

PREFACE

I

T IS THIRTY YEARS since The Hero of the Waverley Xovels was writ­ ten. When the book first appeared, Scott's novels were rarely stud­ ied in universities on either side of the Atlantic, and his vast popu­ lar readership had been shrinking since the end of the nineteenth century—though Ivanhoe lingered in the school curriculum and some notable films had been based on that novel and others. Furthermore, novel criticism at the time was typically formalist, or hovered about the art of writing, and The Hero sought to demonstrate a close rela­ tion of Scott's achievement to the political and social assumptions of his time. Combined literary and historical study is far more common today, and at least in universities Scott is enjoying something of a re­ vival. Thirty years since, it is strange to think back on decades when critics imagined that great social fictions could be analyzed by them­ selves, divorced from history, and during which it was largely forgot­ ten that Scott was the most widely read and imitated novelist of the nineteenth century—very possibly of all time. I myself had not read Scott before I became a graduate student in English, when two things awoke my attention. First, I grew curious about those novels which few people read any more but which the Victorians, great and small, knew intimately. Second, in a course I took with Perry Miller on American romanticism, Miller started talking about the Waverley Novels and couldn't seem to stop. The influence of Scott is perhaps still better understood by students of American literature than by students of the English novel, but Miller's comparisons extended not only to Cooper and Hawthorne but to such Americana as the character Daisy in The Great Gatshy and the actor Gary Cooper in High Noon. Indeed the film, which had just been released and greeted as the epitome of the Western, could be shown to comply point by point with the conventions of Scott. Years later in Los Angeles I met the screenwriter, Carl Foreman, and told him of Miller's theories. It was news to Foreman, who told me what every film buff knew, that High Noon was about Foreman's own strug­ gle with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Still, that this purpose could find its expression in conventions reaching back more than a century was itself testimony to Scott's power. If Foreman drew upon the Waverley Novels without knowing it, he would not have been alone in this respect. The Hero of the Waverley Novels is a thematic study of the claims of landed society and a passive code of honor. It is not a book about

xii

PREFACE

Scott's purported realism, therefore, but about the shaping of reality by fiction—a shaping that nonetheless plays a part in our history. Strictly speaking, themes are such principles as are confirmed by the action of a narrative or dramatic work. It won't do merely to point to some discussion of a certain matter in a novel, as historians too often do when they use literature as evidence: the principles have to be ex­ plicated as rules governing behavior in such a way as to produce a desired outcome. The prescriptive doctrine of property, easily docu­ mented from the political theory of Scott's day, is still the best expla­ nation of his heroes' passive stance—their quite proper determi­ nation not to act for themselves. Mary Poovey, for example, in her excellent book on the same period, The Proper Lady (University of Chi­ cago Press, 1984), put forward similar arguments apparently without knowledge of Scott or of my book, which frequently refers to the "proper hero" and "proper heroine" of property. Rather than revise The Hero—and risk spoiling its symmetry or dulling its wit in the pro­ cess—I have added to it three essays designed to complement the ar­ gument of the original and present my recent thoughts. A few prefa­ tory words may help situate these essays for the reader. An account of European realism as the emergence of a single level of style was brilliantly set forth by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis (1946; Princeton University Press, 1953). Precisely because of his focus on classical decorum, the medieval mixture of high and low styles, and the modern adoption of a serious style for "low" matter, Auerbach could not cope directly with the great period of English realism. For the English novel, Scott's example—or his novelization of Shake­ speare's example—assured the continuation, throughout the nine­ teenth century, of a mixture of styles. A book about heroes necessar­ ily addressed the high style in the Waverley Novels, and only after editing Old Mortality for the Riverside series (Houghton-Mifflin, 1966), did I begin to appreciate Scott's use of a varietv of low stvles, in the use of Scottish dialect and the astonishing pastiche of Biblical quotations for the speech of the Covenanters. (It would be fair to saythat I had never actually read the dialect passages until I had looked up each word in the Oxford English Dielionary and decided whether and how to gloss it.) When shortly thereafter I was asked to introduce a bicentennial program on Scott at Lawrence Universitv—the only such celebration in the United States—my topic was "The Contrast of Styles in the Waverley Novels." The lecture was subsequently pub­ lished by the journal Novel in the form in which it appears here. Since then, of course, a number of studies of Scott's language have appeared, including Graham Tulloch's The Language of Walter Seott (Andre Deutsch, 1980).

PREFACE

xiii

Scott's realism began to be understood differently after the transla­ tion into English of Georg Lukacs s books, which were virtually un­ known in America before the 1960s. Thanks to Rene Wellek, who loaned me his copy of the Berlin edition, I was able to read the first part of Der Htstonsche Roman while preparing The Hero for the press. I scarcely realized the extent to which Scott was Ltikacs's hero until 1 studied the entire book in translation. In the essay on "History and Revolution in Old Mortality," which also draws on my edition of that novel, I have tried to recapture and rethink my own responses to Lukacs, who wrote about the Waverley Novels in the 1930s from the common view that they were part history, part fiction—historical nov­ els, in short. Lukacs also wrote of the novels as a Marxist; I wrote of them, I suppose, as a democrat determined to expose a myth about property that went well beyond the covers of a few books—"Scott's re­ ality," I claimed, was "a construction of society" (p. 93). In The Histori­ cal Novel, Lukacs addressed a form of representation, literary realism, which he regarded as a good thing, whereas I was expounding a thematics, trying to formulate what the novels said to their readers. These approaches are complementary, though at some high theoreti­ cal level you might take me for the Marxist critic and Lukacs for a popularizer of the bourgeois novel. For a fuller understanding of the use of history in Scott, one should turn to Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority (Cornell University Press, 1991), especially the sec­ ond part. The third essay here has also to do with Scott's contribution to his­ tory, but on the conceptual level. In it I return to the themes of The Hero, especially the second half, in order to amplify some discontent with society observed in the book. "The idea of society as a collective resistance to individual passions," I had written, "inspires a political fiction like the social contract, or a literary fiction like the passive hero" (p. 95). In Scott's time, the notion of a social contract was sup­ posedly antithetical to conservative thinking, which appealed to pre­ scription, or existing entitlements to property in land. But in a wider sense, all political theory had become contractual and, strangely, more deeply committed to repression than patriarchy itself. The les­ son of real property discouraged heroes, and all who identified with heroes, from even inwardly transgressing: "transactions of getting and spending advertise one's motives," whereas the passive possession of estates implies "no motive whatever" (p. 80). Explicit motives, as con­ trasted with possession, are a bad thing for this vision of society, which begins to demand self-inspection and an inward suspicion of guilt. Since writing Strong Representations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), I have been concerned with the attribution of motives

Xiv

PREFACE

by criminal prosecutors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If one consults Waverley's experience of the law and com­ pares the risks encountered by Tom Jones—both actions supposedly taking place in 1745—one may conclude that psychological guilt was on the increase in Scott's lifetime. I believe that, with respect to guilt of this order, also, a change was occurring that can be associated with the idea of contract, or a devotion to society that has no other basis than a self-regulating contract. The burden of responsibility assigned to individuals is one that cannot readily be eased. Psychological guilt, insofar as it is commonplace and chartable in the modern world—and nineteenth-century novels may be the best documentation we have—would seem to result from living with the contract rather than with patriarchy. Fathers may be propitiated, and even may forgive, but contracts can only be binding. Fielding's Tom Jones is the prime example of a patriarchal novel in English, but Scott's novels embrace a contractual ideal for society, frequently con­ trasted with feudal and patriarchal custom. This development does not mean that a parent can no longer make a child feel guilty, but it goes a long way toward explaining why unconscious guilt has become an object of concern. Modern society—at least the modern bourgeois family in the West—does not live in conscious fear of elders. Freud discovered that he harbored many hostile feelings toward his father, but the discovery did not diminish the propriety or economic sense of surpassing his father in whatever way he could. If one places psy­ choanalysis in historical perspective—and that means placing it along­ side novels, among other things—then its interest in the Oedipus complex seems like a projection of the accumulated guiltiness of a new independence, or a nostalgia for patriarchalism. Michel Foucault may have done more than any other single writer to historicize Freud. Foucault, of course, took repression for granted as a condition of modern life, and in a series of dazzling books he showed that repression has a history. Especially in Discipline and Pun­ ish (1975; Pantheon, 1978), he linked repression to pervasive tech­ niques of social control and the suppression of crime—to the police and the prison, in short, as those institutions represent a thickly ad­ umbrated system of power and obedience. In the 1980s, Foucault's ex­ pressive theories were readily exploited in such studies of the English novel as D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (University of California Press, 1988) and John Bender's Imagining the Penitentiary (University of Chicago Press, 1987). Miller is concerned with Victorian novels as they silently engage in policing, and Bender with eighteenth-century novels, including Fielding's, which in language and organization pos­ sibly anticipate the modern penitentiary; yet both might have hit

PREFACE

XV

upon more obvious material in Scott's novels, written in the era of transition to surveillance and imprisonment that Foucault highlights. Some of this imbalance of historical criticism has alreadv been righted by Bruce Beiderwell's Power and Punishment in Srott λ Novell (University of Georgia Press, 1991), a book that engages Foucault's work without being Foucauldian. My book on Scott spoke metaphorically of heroes "searching about for the police" (p. 106) and noted that "an uneasy fear of jails runs all through the Waverley Novels" (p. 116), but these observations were not Foucauldian either, since the relevant works bv Foucault had not yet been published. When it occurred to me that "Scott intro­ duced the kind of anxieties that only very well behaved persons can entertain for customs officials or traffic signs that they do not intend to disobey" (p. 117), I was thinking of my own family—especiallv of my father, and not of our differences or Oedipal rivalry, but of feel­ ings that we shared about civil authority, feelings already evidenced by the heroes of Scott. The present essay on "Patriarchy, Contract, and Repression" extends the emphasis on Scott's realism of my Reflec­ tions on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton University Press, 1981) and is another expression of my belief that historical studies matter insofar as they finally bear on present history, present society, present lives. This new edition of The Hero of the Waverley Novels follows the first edition, published by Yale University Press in 1963, as silently cor­ rected in the paperback edition by Atheneum in 1968. A good manyteachers and friends contributed in particular ways to the writing and first publication of the book. Most were thanked in the original pref­ ace, and I would like to name them again here: Max Bluestone, Cleanth Brooks, Ross Dabney, Gordon Haight, David Home, Howard Mumford Jones, Harry Levin, Harold C. Martin, Benjamin C. Nangle, Martin Price, and Katharine T. Welsh. It is less easy to comprehend my indebtedness, and express my gratitude, to the many persons who have influenced my thinking about Scott's novels since that time, but here's a try: Bruce Beiderwell, Barbara Bishop, David Bromwich, Frederick Burwick, Marilyn Butler, Patrice Caldwell, James Chandler, Steven Cohan, Thomas Dale, Ian Duncan, Ina Ferris, Robert Gordon, Russ Hart, Frederic Jameson, Karl Kroeber, George Levine, Jane Millgate, D. A. Miller, Max Novak, Morse Peckham, Judith Wilt, and Ruth Yeazell. Finally, I wish to thank Jeanette Gilkison for typing the new essays published here and Timothy Mennel for his copyediting.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

Waver! ey. 1814. Guy Mannering. 1815. The .1 ntiquary. 1816. Tales o f My Landlord: The Black Dwarfrnxd Old Mortality. 1816. Rob Roy. 1818. Tales o f My Landlord, Second Series: The Heart of Mid-Lothian. 1818 Tales o f My Landlord, Third Series: The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose. 1819. Ivanhoe. 1820. The Monastery. 1820. The Abbot. 1820. Kemlworth. 1821. The Pirate. 1822. The Fortu nes of Nigel. 1822. Peveril of the Peak. 1822. Qxientin Durward. 1823. St. Ronan's Well. 1824. Redgauntlet. 1824. Tales of the Crusaders: The Betrothed and The Talisman. 1825. Woodstock. 1826. Chronicles o f the Canongate: Two Drovers, The Highland Widow, and The Surgeon's Daughter. 1827. Chronicles o f the Canongate, Second Series: The Fair Maid of Perth. 1828. Anne of Geierstein. 1829. Tales o f My Landlord, Fourth Series: Gount Robert of Pans and Castle Dangerous. 1832.

ROMANCE From the minuteness with which I have traced Waverles "s pursuits, and the bias which these unavoidably communi­ cated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps antici­ pate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of Cervantes. But he will do my prudence injustice in the sup­ position. My intention is . . . [to describe] that more com­ mon aberration from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring.

—WcmerIey

T

1. Fiction as Projection

HE PRACTICE of fiction in the lifetime of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) generally differed from the main tradition of the English novel in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centu­ ries. Dickens and Thackeray, Fielding and Smollett viewed the world about them with critical eyes. Even when they were patently imagin­ ing things, they appeared to report what they saw. They successfully conveyed the impression of real life. Scott, too, filled his works with a sense of life. But he differs from these other great novelists in that he never criticizes his own society. During Scott's lifetime writers of fic­ tion were not always chiefly concerned with the imitation of realitv. The wild passions of villains and the horrific predicaments of hero­ ines could be imagined and expressed, perhaps, but not seen and re­ ported. The extravagant practice of fiction in this period (and the novel of manners could be as fantastic in its way as the novel of ter­ ror) tempered the earlier theory of the mimetic nature of fiction. The novelistic program for "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" meant surrendering some of the novel's pretensions to real­ ity. Prose fiction was once again referred to as romance. Neglecting the knowledge of the world, romancers aspired to "the knowledge of the heart." As moralists, instead of exposing to view actual human behav­ ior, they invented images of ideal behavior. As psychologists, they forewent the study of man's daily actions and discovered the dream­ like evidence of his bright hopes and darkest imaginings. The depar-

2

ROMANCE

tures in practice reflect a new theory that fiction is in its own right a peculiarly satisfying and natural human activity. Eighteenth-century assertions of the nature and purpose of fiction, whether or not they were entirely sincere, were highly moralistic. 1 In the romantic period fiction was still called upon to perform a moral duty, but morality was supposed to be conveyed in a fashion some­ what different from that of the age of reason. In the previous century morals had been interpreted in terms of practice. In fiction, precepts were illustrated by example. Inviting the reader to "see" good or bad behavior and its consequences, the moral reference of eighteenthcentury fiction depended upon the real world, or a world assumed to be real. The realities glossed over by hypocrisy and affectation would be exposed: the thrust of fiction could cut through illusion toward ob­ jective reality. The new age, on the other hand, tended to express mo­ rality in terms of ideal motive or attitude rather than precept tested bv act. The heart dictates to the man, and the man consults his heart faithfully. Morality was sought in an ideal world, not through watch­ ful observation of the real. Fiction therefore abounded in good exam­ ples and gazed upward. Illusion, rather than disillusionment, was sometimes tenderly respected. A soft "moral of the whole" replaced the sharp revelation of vice. Seeing was no longer sufficient. When fic­ tions "speak only to the eyes," urged iMadame de Stael, "they can only amuse: but they have a high influence over all moral ideas when they move the heart." 2 A theory of fiction appealing so frequently to "the heart" does not seem intellectually promising. The phrase implied, however, that fic­ tion was in some emotional, ideal, or moral sense an expressive or projective activity rather than a critical instrument sensitive to exter­ nal reality. In an essay on fiction prefaced to a collection of British Novelists in 1810, Anna Letitia Barbauld, the biographer of Richard­ son, entrusted her case for the dignity of the novel "above all" to "the power exercised over the reader's heart by filling it with successive emotions of love, pity, joy, anguish, transport, or indignation, to­ gether with the grave impressive moral resulting from the whole."' 1

For suiiiniai ics of eighteenth-centui y theories of fiction see Joseph Bunn Heidler,

The History, Jioin 17(10 to 1S00, of English C.iitiasm of Prosr Eittion, UmversitN o f Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 13 (1928); and Aitliur ). Tieje, "The Expressed Aim of t h e L o n g P r o s e K k l i o n Iroin 1579 t o 1740," Journal of English and Germamr Phi­ lology 2 (1912): 402-32. " A n n e L o u i s e G e r m a m e d e S t a e l , " E s s a i s t i r I e s f i c t i o n s , " (Euvrcs ( 1 7 \ o l s . P a r i s ,

1820), 2: 162. ' M r s . ( A n n a L e t i l i a ] B a r b a u l d , e d . , 'Phr Pirilish Novelists, with a n Essay, and Pre/ares, Hiogi(If)IuraI and Gntual (50 vols L o n d o n , 1810), 1: 3.

F I C T I O N AS P R O J E C T I O N

3

Scott employed the same kind of language in his review of Emma. which we do not ordinarily regard as a novel of sentiment. Authors are most to be respected, he wrote, when, as in the case of Jane Austen, they proclaim a knowledge of the human heart, with the power and resolution to bring that knowledge to the service of honour and virtue." In the same review, with characteristic honest} - , Scott observed that, in fiction, even Peregrine Pickle and Tom Jones were "studiously vindicated from the charge of infidelity of the heart," and heroines were only more so.' On behalf of the heart, or in obedience to morality, fiction could even set out to counter reality instead of emulating it. By observing in the Quarterly Review that a novel should be "in some degree a lesson either of morals or conduct," John Wilson Croker uttered a common­ place. But he arrived at this conclusion from the reflection that the picture of life in Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, and Amelia was "too real.'" Clara Reeve's similar misgivings about Fielding were revealed by Euphrasia's remark in The Prog>~ess of Romance that "he certainly painted human nature as it is, rather than as it ought to be.*' Mrs. Barbauld was very much aware that fiction could distort reality, and that ideal good­ ness was easily supplied in a make-believe world—but that is as it should be: "It costs nothing, it is true, to an author to make his hero generous, and very often he is extravagantly so; still sentiments of this kind serve in some measure to counteract the spirit of the world, where selfish considerations have always more than their due weight.'" Just as reality was acknowledged to yield to morality, the pretense to factual certainty might be surrendered to mystery. When, in The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, Defoe undertook to convey a mystery, he skill­ fully rendered his account as matter-of-fact as possible. The premium in his time was on the detailed impression of fact. By the end of the century mystery had become a commodity in its own right. "Curi­ osity and a lurking love of mystery" explain, according to Scott, the vogue of Ann Raclcliffe: these are "more general ingredients in the human mind, and more widely diffused through the mass of human­ ity, than either genuine taste for the comic or true feeling of the pa­ thetic." Because certainty is never so fearsome as uncertainty, "sub­ lime emotion" originates in obscurity and suspense, "the dark and the doubtful." 8 1

Qtiarlerly Iieview 14 (1815): 189, 191.

' I b i d . , 7'(1812): 331. The Progress of Romance, 1785 (New York, Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 1: 141. 7 B a r b a u l d , The Britnh Novelists, 1: 49. * Miscellaneous Prose Works ( 6 vols. Edinburgh, 1827), 3. 436, 440.

4

ROMANCE

The notion of fiction as an expressive or projective activity of mind gained strength from a belief in its primitive origins. Fiction was now supposed to be a practice as natural and universal as language itself. Miss Reeve declared that "romances are of universal growth, and not confined to any particular period or country." 9 The origin of fiction was associated with primitive mythology. Mrs. Barbauld also asserted the prevalence of fictitious adventures in all ages and nations: "These have been grafted upon the actions of their heroes; they have been in­ terwoven with their mythology." 10 Sydney Owenson, author of The Wild Irish Girl, declared that works of fiction are to be found every­ where, "from the hut of the savage to the closet of the sage." As an ex­ ample of the mythic and ritualistic origins of her trade she cited the "system of good and evil spirits" of the savages of America. "Thus in the remotest ages, and in the most opposite extremities of the earth, the source of fictitious narrative has existed; a source which can only be exhausted when the heart ceases to feel, the memory to record, and the imagination to combine, to modify, and to adorn." 1 1 The most ambitious historical approach to fiction in this period was John Dunlop's History of Fiction, a three-volume work that ap­ peared in 1814, the year of Waverley. In the introduction to his history Dunlop wrote not a word of the imitation of nature or of the strictly moral usefulness of fiction but instead drew an elaborate analog}' be­ tween the origin of fiction and a savage planting a garden: The art of fictitious narrative appears to have its origin in the same prin­ ciples of selection by which the fine arts in general are created and per­ fected. Among the vast variety of trees and shrubs which are presented to his view, a savage finds, in his wanderings, some which peculiarly at­ tract his notice by their beauty and fragrance, and these he at length se­ lects and plants them round his dwelling. In like manner, among the mixed events of human life, he experiences some which are peculiarly grateful, and of which the narrative at once pleases himself, and excites in the mind of his hearers a kindred emotion. Of this kind are un­ looked-for occurrences, successful enterprise, or great and unexpected deliverance from signal danger and distress. . . . In the process of form­ ing the garden, the savage finds that it is not enough merely to collect a variety of agreeable trees or plants; he discovers that . . . it is also essen­ tial that he should grub up from around his dwelling the shrubs which '' R e e v e , The Progress o/ Romanic, 1 · x v - x v i B a i b a i i l d , The British Novelists, 1 : 1 . " " O n t h e O r i g i n a n d P r o g r e s s o f F i c t i t i o u s H i s t o r v , " New Monthly Magazine and Uni­ v e r s a l Register 1 4 , P t . I I ( 1 8 2 0 ) : 2 2 - 2 3 .

F I C T I O N AS P R O J E C T I O N

5

are useless o r noxious, and which weaken 01 impair the pure delight which h e derives fiom the others. . . . The collector ol agreeable facts finds, in like manner, that the sympathy which thev excite can be height­ e n e d by removing from their detail everv thing that is not interesting, or which tends to weaken the principal emotion, which it is his intention to raise. H e renders, in this way, the occurrences more unexpected, the en­ terprises more successful, the deliverance from danger and distress more wonderful.1 2

The savage thus derives the substance of his fiction from the external world but reworks it according to the lights of his inner mind. Dunlop stresses the motive of this process. Our savage takes pleasure in his fictions, but not the pleasure of imitation for its own sake. He gains his pleasure from improving reality, by exaggerating danger and distress and by flattering himself with his escape. The signifi­ cance of this activity obviously lies in the disparity of romancing and reality rather than in the correspondence. To complete his thought Dunlop translates from Francis Bacon the following argument: "As the active world," says Lord Bacon, "is inferior to the rational soul, so Fiction gives to mankind what history denies, and, in some measure, satisfies the mind with shadows when it cannot enjoy the substance: For, upon a narrow inspection, Fiction strongly shows that a greater variety of things, a more perfect order, a more beautiful variety, than can anv where be found in nature, is pleasing to the mind. And as real history gives us n o t the success of things according to the deserts of vice and vir­ tue, Fiction corrects it, and presents us with the fates and fortunes of per­ sons rewarded o r punished according to merit. And as real history dis­ gusts us with a familiar and constant similitude of things, Fiction relieves us by unexpected turns and changes, and thus not only delights, but in­ culcates morality and nobleness of soul. It raises the mind by accommo­ dating the images of things to o u r desires, and, not like history and rea­ son, subjecting the mind to things." 1 *

"Accommodating the images of things to our desires," fiction is satisfy­ ing in some sense. Fiction comes into being because human beings not only perceive an external world but project their emotions and ideals upon it. This idea of fiction amounts to a modern definition of romance, which, according to Northrop Frye, is "nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream." 1 4 12 The History of Fution (3 vols., London, 1814), 1: v-vii. "Ibid., 1: vii-viii. Cf. Bacon, The Advaiuement of Learning, Bk. II, ch. 4. " Anatomy oj Cntunm (Princeton, 1957), p. 186.

6

ROMANCE

2. Novel or Romance The novelist's view of man and of society is traditionally a critical view. But in the romantic period man and humanity were more often applauded than berated. Even when the depravity of man was dwelt upon, it was explored with fascination rather than with despair. This was not a critical era, and the fiction of this period, including the Waverley Novels, lies outside the main tradition of the novel. Edwin Muir, a sympathetic and perceptive critic of Scott, endorsed this view.,_ Scott's direct influence on subsequent fiction, according to Muir, was "trivial." Nor did Scott carry on the tradition of earlier fiction. "Field­ ing's and Sterne's criticism of life was intelligent and responsible. Scott substituted for this criticism a mere repetition of the moral cliches of his time. In his stories the public got the upper hand of the novelist, and it has kept its advantage, with few setbacks, ever since." 1 1 In Scott's lifetime the novel reverted to the romance, which ex­ presses, rather than criticizes, the desires of the mind. In Scott's hands romance projected publicly acceptable desires—"the moral cliches of his time." When Mark Twain indicted Scott—on a host of charges, including responsibility for the American Civil War—he appealed to a contrast with Cervantes: "A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown by the effects wrought by Uon Quixote and those wrought by Ivanhoe. The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry silliness out of existence; and the other re­ stored it." l b The popularity of Uon Qiiixote dicl not abate in the roman­ tic period—Scott's own writings are filled with tags and allusions from this favorite book. 1 ' At the same time, however, Amadis of Gaul had made a reappearance: in 1803 Robert Southev brought out an ad­ aptation in English, curtailing the original romance to four volumes. This and another version of the romance were the subject of Scott's first periodical essay in the Edinburgh Review. 18 Uon Quixote has been interpreted in many ways. In the romantic era the antiromantic character of Cervantes' novel was played down. Hazlitt declared of it that "the whole work breathes that air of ro­ mance,—that aspiration after imaginary good,—that longing after ' ' " W a l t e r Scott," in The English Novelists, e d . Derek Verschovle (New York, 1936), p. 117. Ltje on the Mississippi (New York, 1944), p p 271-73.

' ' C l . Aubrey Ilell 1 "Scott a n d Cervantes," in Sn XVnIlei Srotl Today, e d . H.J.C. Grierson (London, 1932), pp. 69-90. 1 8 Edinburgh Review 3 (1803): 109-36.

NOVEL OR ROMANCE

7

something more than we possess, that in all places, and in all condi­ tions of life,—'still prompts the eternal sigh, For which we wish to live, or dare to die.'" 1 4 Clara Reeve argued that Cervantes himself was not "cured" of romance, since he had not only written Galatea before Don Quixote, but wrote another serious romance, Persiles and Sigismunda, afterward. On another evening Euphrasia, who always speaks for the author of The Progress of Romance, rallies to the cause of the knight himself: "whenever this spirit, and this enthusiasm, become the object of contempt and ridicule, mankind will set up for them­ selves an idol of a very different kind." Romances inspire such spirit and enthusiasm—as they had inspired Don Quixote. "Let us suppose the character of Don Quixote realized, with all its virtues and absurdi­ ties. I would ask, whether such a man is not more respectable, and more amiable, than a human being, wholly immersed in low, grovel­ ing, effeminate, or mercenary pursuits . . One early nineteenthcentury courtesy book severely chastises Cervantes for ridiculing his own hero—no less than six pages are devoted to a defense of the virtue of Don Quixote. 2 1 In general, because romantic critics pur­ sued the origins of fiction to much earlier times, Cervantes appeared not so much the inventor of the novel as the specialist in "comic romance." Scott's good sense saved him from associating too warmly with the Knight of La Mancha. The numerous tags from Cervantes in his let­ ters and journal are generally borrowed from Sancho Panza. The same good sense, however, restricted Scott's understanding of Cervan­ tes' parody. He does not seem to have understood, to the degree that Fielding and Sterne understood, the play between fiction and reality in Don Quixote. He neither practiced himself nor quite recognized the method of posing fiction against fiction in order to pass, in Harry Levin's phrase, "from the imitation of art through parody to the imita­ tion of nature." 2 2 Instead, Scott's instinct was to rationalize Cervantes' parody. "In Spain," he wrote, "ere the ideas of chivalry were extinct amongst that nation of romantic Hidalgos, the turn of Don Quixote's frenzy seems not altogether extravagant, and the armour which he as­ sumed was still the ordinary garb of battle." 2 3 '"William Hazhtt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (21 vols. London and Toronto, 1931), 16: 9. -'"Reeve, TheProgress of Romance, 1: 59, 101-3. 21 [Kenelm Digby], The Broad Stone of Honour: or, Rules for the GnUlemen of England (2d ed. London, 1823), pp. 174-79. '""The Example of Cervantes," Conlexls of Crttiasm (Cambridge, Mass.. 1957), pp. 79-96. -' Mtseellaneous Piose Works, 3: 171.

8

ROMANCE

Despite his sense of humor, irony seems foreign to Scott's mind. The mild irony with which Goldsmith infused The Vicar of Wakefield Scott read in an even softer light, discovering merely "a fireside pic­ ture of such a perfect kind, as perhaps is nowhere else equalled." The same taste for Biedermeier, as Mario Praz would call it, obscured from Scott the quixotry of the Vicar, whose "pedantry and literary vanity" simply "show that he is made of mortal mould, and subject to human failings." 21 Without question Goldsmith's novel has this Biedermeier quality; but even the most sentimental eighteenth-century novel gen­ erally owed a distant debt to Cervantes. Even in The Man of Feeling emotion is not easily distinguishable from the mockery of emotion— and Henry Mackenzie clearly borrowed more than sentiment from Sterne. Scott defended the manliness of Mackenzie's hero. He was eager, of course, to honor the reputation of this elder lawyer and writer who lived on in Scotland until 1831. "Sketched by a pencil less nicely discriminating, Harlev, instead of a being whom we love, re­ spect, sympathize with, and admire, had become the mere Quixote of sentiment, an object of pity, perhaps, but of ridicule at the same time.""' Bv the time Waverley was published criticism of fiction had gradu­ ally developed a distinction between novels and romances. Novels were characterized by a greater degree of realism than romances. Romances were characterized by a greater degree of invention. Projec­ tion was implicit in romance; novels were studied from real life. And romance, of course, was the older form. In his preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765) Horace Walpole explained that his "Gothic Story" was "an attempt to blend the two kinds of ro­ mance: the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagina­ tion and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success."-" Though The Castle of Otranto does not really answer to this description, the theoretical in­ tention of combining the two forms was still important fiftv vears later. In the preface to The Progress of Romance (1785) Clara Reeve prom­ ised "to mark the distinguishing characters of the Romance and the Novel"—a task that subsequently falls to Euphrasia on the seventh eve­ ning, when the discussion has proceeded as far as the modern novel: T h e word Novel in all languages signifies s o m e t h i n g new. It was first used to distinguish these works from Romance, t h o u g h thev have lately b e e n Ibid., pp. 282-83. - ' Ibid., pp. 346-47 T h e Castle of O t u i n t o , in Shorter N o v e l E i f r h t e e n t h C e n t u r y , e d . Philip H e n d e r s o n ( L o n d o n , Everyman's Library, 1903), p. 102.

NOVEL OR ROMANCE

9

confounded together and are frequently mistaken for each other The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. —The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in loft) and elevated lan­ guage, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. —The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass ever ν day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the per­ fection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a man­ ner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a per­ suasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own. 2 '

Scott drew roughly the same distinction between the novel and the romance in his "Essay on Romance" for the 1822 Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The romance is "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents." The novel is "a fictitious narrative, differing from the Ro­ mance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society." 28 Neither word was used with any consistency in Scott's time. He generally referred to his own works as romances; but their collective title, of course, was "the Waverley Novels." The realism accredited to the novel by Scott and Miss Reeve did not imply that the novel should indulge in a critique of reality. The purpose of increased realism, according to Miss Reeve, was to absorb the reader in the "joys and distresses" of the actors—to make ro­ mance more compelling. Scott's definition of the novel begins not with the critical representation of modern life but with the "accommo­ dation" of romance to modern times and to a degree of probability. Elsewhere he refers to the novel as the "minor romance" and as "the legitimate child of romance." 29 These are distinctions of degree. Samuel Richardson, according to Scott, "threw aside the trappings of romance, with all its extravagance, and appealed to the genuine pas­ sions of the human heart." In his essay on Fielding he observed that "even Richardson's novels are but a step from the old romance, ap­ proaching, indeed, more nearly to the ordinary course of events, but still dealing in improbable incidents, and in characters swelled out be­ yond the ordinary limits of humanity." 30 The common assumption here is the gradual development of the novel out of romance—the

28

The Progress of Romance, 1: 110-11. Miscellaneous Prose Works, 6: 156-57. ibid., 3: 142; Quarterly Review 14 (1825):

30

Miscellaneous Prose Works,

3: 76, 117.

189.

10

ROMANCE

pi ogress of romance. In the general preface to the Waverley Novels (1829) Scott explained that he had hoped, in creating Waverley, "that a romance founded upon a Highland story, and more modern events, would liave a better chance of popularity than a tale of chivalry." 3 1 Thus the Wa\erlev Novels themselves entered the tradition of modi­ fied r o m a n c e , r o m a n c e t e m p e r e d bv realism. .Another wav of distinguishing between t h e romance a n d t h e novel was t o sa\ that t h e f o r m e r stressed incident a n d t h e latter, character. In paraphrasing Horace Walpole's expressed intention for The Castle of Olunild Scott wrote simply that ancient r o m a n c e was characterized bv "the marvelous t u r n of incident," a n d the m o d e r n novel, by the "accurate display of h u m a n character, a n d contrast of feelings a n d passions." , J In a p r i / e essay of 182() George Moberlv, future headmas­ ter of Wincliester a n d Bisliop of Salisbury, distinguished "fictions of incident" from "fictions of character" in such a way as to suggest that t h e two kinds of fiction were neither accidental n o r historical, but sci­ entific corollaries. Strong simple passions yield violent actions; subtle qualities of c haracter a r e displayed bv m o r e m i n u t e actions. Romance is t h e earlier f o r m because strong simple passions prevailed in earlier times. M o b e r h ' s essay closed with a promise that t h e u n i o n of t h e fic­ tions of incident a n d of character would "raise fiction to t h e height of which it is c a p a b l e . " " Walpole's idea of a "blend" of t h e two kinds of fiction h a d b e c o m e a prominent goal. In his general preface Scott professed to h a \ e emulated in Wnverley the achievement of Maria Edgeworth: she was congratulated by the Quarterly Review in 1812 for success­ fully mediating between the extremes of novel a n d romance. 1 4 U n d e r t h e guise of "novel of incident" a n d "novel of character" t h e distinction between t h e romance a n d t h e novel has long b e e n useful. Robert Louis Stevenson, who d e f e n d e d r o m a n c e in theory a n d in practice, a r g u e d that it was "not character, b u t incident" with which a r e a d e r becomes emotionally embroiled. ! > Edwin Muir distinguished between novels of action a n d novels of character—and t h e highest form of fiction, t h e dramatic novel, c o m b i n e d features of these two forms. T h e plot of the novel of action "is in accordance with o u r wishes, not with o u r knowledge. . . . It is a fantasy of desire r a t h e r than a picture of life."'" Both writers single o u t t h e affective quality of " Rcferenccs Io Scott's prefaces and introductions to the Waverlev Novels are cued Iioin the Centenary Edition (25 vols. F.dmbuigh, 1885-1887) ' ' Misiellaneous 1'iose Woihs, 3 ' 3 ( ) 4 . !!

"Is a Rude οι a Refined Age More FavoiiiahIe to the Production of Works of Fic­

tion?" Oxjuid hngl/sh I'nze Essays (5 vols. Oxford, 1830), 4: 131-54. " [ J o h n W i l s o n C r o k e r ] , Qttailetly Review 7 ( 1 8 1 2 ) ' 3 2 9 - 3 2 . ' ' "A Gossip o n R o m a n c e , " Longman's Magazine 1 (1882): 77. T h e S l r u i l u i e of Ihe Movel ( L o n d o n , 1 9 4 9 ) , p p 1 9 - 2 3 .

NOVEL OR ROMANCE

11

romance. The substance of romance corresponds to the internal world of its audience, not to the external world. Both Mnir and Ste­ venson pointed to the Waverley Novels as illustrations of romance, or the novel of action. In several contexts Scott contrasted the mischance and unmanageability of life with the studied pattern and enclosure of events in fic­ tion. He was twice brought to this reflection in apologv for what he re­ garded as the ungovernable course of his own plots. He censured The Monastery on the ground that the incidents of romance should ahvavs arise "out of the story itself."'' The incidents of real life are linear or haphazard. "It is seldom that the same circle of personalities who have surrounded an individual in his first outset in life, continue to have an interest in his career till his fate comes to a crisis." One kind of fiction, the picaresque, emulates this natural order of events: exam­ ples of such works are Gil Bias and Roderick Random. But though such an unconnected course of adventure is what most fre­ quently occurs in nature, yet the province of the romance-writer being artificial, there is more required of him than a mere compliance with the simplicity of realitv,—just as we demand from the scientific gar­ dener, that he shall arrange, in curious knots and artificial parterres, the flowers which "nature boon" distributes freely on hill and dale.

Tom Jones illustrates this more special art. Scott returned to the sub­ ject in the introduction to The Abbot and suggested that the arbitrary sequence of events in real life might excuse the "unintelligibility" of his narrative. Scott's contemporaries shared this perception of the difference be­ tween art and life. His garden figure recalls John Dunlop's interpreta­ tion of fiction as a species of plant freed and separated from less attractive or satisfying varieties of life. Mrs. Barbauld contrasted the unfinished, ever continuing "chance-medley" of life with the com­ pleted, enclosed, and deliberate unity of fiction, where events always achieve some appropriate denouement.* 8 Richard Whately remarked the same inherent conflict of imitation and harmony and declared that the two interests were reconciled by the art of Jane Austen. v > Whately was actually repeating an argument of Scott's review of Jane Austen in 1815: Although it may be urged that the vicissitudes of human life have occa­ sionally led an individual through as many scenes of singular fortune as are represented in the most extravagant of these fictions, still the causes 1 7 I n t r o d u c t i o n t o The Monastery 'w B a r b a u l d , T h e B r i t i s h N o v e l i s t s , 1 : 5 5 .

'''' Qiinrteity Review 2 4 ( 1 8 2 2 ) . 3 6 0

12

ROMANCE

and personages acting on these changes have varied with the progress of the adventurer's fortune, and do not present the combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist,) in which all the more interesting in­ dividuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe. Here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel." 1 The "improbability of the novel"—of any novel—reflects simply a difference in the quality of experience in fact and in fiction. No fic­ tion corresponds exactly to fact because fiction organizes events into an enclosed pattern. Fictions are significant variants from life. Obvi­ ously something causes a fiction to be so organized: the organizing principle is projective—an emotion or an ideal that distorts reality to its own satisfaction. The revival of romance, and the rough differentia­ tion between the romance and the novel, enabled writers in this pe­ riod to recognize these truths, which had gone virtually unrecognized during the eighteenth century.

3. Moral Truth Notwithstanding these advances in the theory of fiction, the novel was in low repute when Scott anonymously tested the market for prose fic­ tion in 1814. For those who valued the material progress of the age, truth and useful knowledge put fiction to scorn. The notion of a sig­ nificant kind of falsehood was somewhat too paradoxical for a people with a high moral reverence for truth. Fictions were dishonest, as it were. Not theory, certainly, but only the Waverley Novels themselves could bring about the compromise between truth and fiction that was evident by 1832, when the Edinburgh Review eulogized Scott for rais­ ing the novel to "a place among the highest productions of human intellect." 4 1 In the preface to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Henry Fielding confessed that he "should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose." 4 2 The Quarterly Review greeted Waverley in almost the same spirit in 1814. "We cannot but wish," wrote Croker, that the author of Waverley had written a history instead of a fiction—"had rather employed himl l l Ibid.,

14 (1815): 190-91.

" Erlmburgh Revinobb (1832): 64. vl Journal oj a Voyage to Lisbon, in Works, e d . William Ernest Henley (16 vols. L o n d o n , 1903), 16: 182.

MORAL TRUTH

13

self in recording historically the character and transactions of his coun­ trymen." 4 3 It must be said that Scott himself took a similar view. He worried less than some of his contemporaries about the possible ill ef­ fects of the novel. Novels were chiefly for entertainment. But in his essay on Fielding, Scott, too, observed that the habit of reading fic­ tion was "apt to generate an indisposition to real history, and useful literature." 4 l James Beattie, the author of The Minstrel {1771), had con­ cluded his essay on romance with almost the same words. 4 "' It was nec­ essary at this time to acknowledge the superior importance of truth and serious works of knowledge. The authors of imaginative literature in particular were anxious to assure the public that they did not be­ lieve in their own fictions. The first words of Beattie's essay "On Fable and Romance" were incongruous with the title: "The love of truth is natural to man; and adherence to it, his indispensable duty.""' The word vraisemblance, borrowed from French criticism, seemed to bridge the gap between fact and fiction. A compounded word suited perfectly an age so rashly devoted to both history and fable. "That 'Ie vrai n'est pas toujours vraisemblable,' we do not deny," wrote Croker in 1812, "but we are prepared to insist that, while the i Vrai is the highest recommendation of the historian of real life, the ' vraisemblable' is the only legitimate province of the novelist who aims at improving the understanding or touching the heart." 4 7 Madame de StaeI was probably responsible for the use of the word in British criti­ cism. In 1795 she had defined the modern novel as that fiction "where everything is at the same time invented and imitated, where nothing is true, but where everything is vraisemblable." 4ίί The word fiction ordinarily embraces the same paradox, but vraisemblance did not convey such an explicit suggestion of falsehood. Yet it was ar­ gued, on behalf of truth, that vraisemblance might be a dangerous thing. Richard Whately declared that "what are strictly called novels," because of their plausibility, are more likely to give a false picture of life than romances. 4 9 The devotion to truth was thought to be a peculiarly modern vir­ tue. Not only were Britons devoted to truth: they imagined that they were becoming more and more so. By the end of the eighteenth century the nation was confident that material progress and enlightQuarterly Rnnew 11 (1814): 377. Miscellaneous Prose Works, 3: 121-22. ι! · "On Fable and Romance," Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), p. 574.

41 14

Ibid., p. 505. Quarterly Review! (1812): 329. ,s "Essai sur Ies fictions," CEuirres, 2: 182. ''' Quarterly Review 24 (1822): 353-54. ,h

47

14

ROMANCE

enment were native British qualities. A social historian has recently characterized the period, on its own terms, as "the Age of Improve­ ment.'" 0 The politeness and understanding of the age became the im­ plied premise of most literary criticism. Expansive pride in the useful arts pretended to take satisfaction in "the decline of the imagina­ tion." When Macaulay made his debut in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, he gravely complimented Milton for writing a great poem in spite of his intelligence and education. As civilization progresses, knowledge eclipses the imagination: "We cannot unite the incompati­ ble advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction.Macaulay denies nei­ ther the utility nor the pleasures of deception: we simply can no longer be deceived. Bishop Hurd, a spirit friendly to romance, posed the conflict of civi­ lization and fiction as the closing note of his Letters on Chivalry and Romance in 1762: "What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling.'" 2 By the end of the century social refinements seemed to have brought about even nicer changes of fashion in works of fiction. The novel of manners was felt to be the special product of an actual improvement in manners. Striking a characteristic note of the Quar­ terly Review, Scott observed that "social life, in our civilized days, af­ fords few instances capable of being painted in the strong dark colours which excite surprize and terror.""' 1 Moberly attributed the succession of the fiction of character to the fiction of incident to "the gradually diminishing influence of the imagination." The develop­ ment of "law and its attendant institutions," in particular, had crip­ pled the life of romance. ' 4 Nassau Senior objected to The Bride of Lammermoor on related grounds: "Ghosts have no business to appear to mortgagers and mortgagees."" The practical solution to the dilemma of fiction was the historical romance. In the full range of history passion and incident were often free of civilized restraint. Scott dismissed pastoral romance as an ab­ surdity in any age; but chivalric romance had once corresponded with the real thing: "If Amadis de Gaule was a fiction, the chevalier Bavard '"Asa Bnggs, The Age of hnfiiovement (London, 1959). '' [Thomas Babmgton Macaulav). Edtnbutgh Rivtew 42 (1825). 309. Lrtlets nn Chnmhy mid Romance, in The Works of Riihnid Huid ( 8 vols. L o n d o n , 1811),4:350. ''' Quaiterly Review 14 (1815) 192. *' George Moberlv, "Is a Rude o r a Refined Age More Favourable to . . . Fiction?" Ox­ ford English P m e Essays, 4: 133, 141 Quarleily R n u e w i e (1822): 123.

MORAL TRUTH

15

was a real person.All oi" the passions and prejudices of an earlier age, and events that were then believed supernatural, might form the truthful subject matter of historical romance. Historv extended the limits of plausible subject matter. "Romantic narrative is of two kinds,—that which, being in itself possible, ma\ be matter of belief at any period; and that which, though held impossible bv more enlight­ ened ages, was yet consonant with the faith of earlier times."' 7 As a man of his times Scott was more literal-mindecl and conserva­ tive than one imagines him to be. Though he once commented at length on his lifelong propensity for daydreaming and "castle-build­ ing," he disavowed the effect of such dreaming on his "actual life.'"* Scott's rationalization of Don Quixote's armor illustrates his critical impulse to refer all incident that fails the test of common sense to some idiosyncrasy of time or of place. When something in fiction seemed to him unreal, he willingly cast about for an explanation. The one-sided relationship of Strap to Roderick Random, for example, could be rationalized by recollecting "in Scotland, at that period, the absolute devotion of a follower to his master. And "in England, where men think and act with little regard to ridicule or censure of their neighbours," Uncle Toby's battleworks were perhaps quite plau­ sible." 0 When his own romances were criticized, Scott was little inter­ ested in defending himself except against charges of inaccuracy in matters of Scottish history or character." 1 One of Scott's favorite sayings, usually offered as an excuse for poor plotting, he borrowed from Bayes in The Rehearsal. "What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?'"'- The con­ flicting prestige of useful knowledge and of romance in this period readily invited a loose division of form and content in the novel. In­ teresting history could be attached to a romantic tale. Some such divi­ sion of form and content is always implicit in the historical novel. Most critics of the Waverley Novels have followed Scott and do not ex­ amine what the plot signifies. But Scott's attitude toward his own achievement is sometimes too cavalier. He carefully forestalls the so-

''' M L S W I U I N E O W T P K I S P

Woiks, 6: 253.

" Ibid., 3: 376. W The Jmnnal of Sir Wallei Stoil, ed. J. G. Tail and W. M Parker (Edinburgh, 195«), entry for Dec. 27, 1825. v > MisreUaneous Prose Works, 3: 194. ''"Ibid., pp. 330-31. 1,1 Cf James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Cnlies (Minneapolis, 193()), P -7 "- Introduetor)' Epistle, TheForIunes oj Sifft cf. Qimrtnly Review 1 (1817): 431; nal, Oct. 16 and 17, 1826; Mi.stellaneous Prose Wotks, 4: 58.

16

ROMANCE

phisticated conclusion that the author might believe that dreams come true. The numerous editors and narrators, the laborious intro­ ductions stationed between the author and the reader, the very ano­ nymity of the Author of Waverley are in part related to this elaborate disavowal of imagination. Coleridge lost patience with it, and wrote the following comment in his copy of The Pirate. Sir Walter relates g h o s t stories, prophecies, presentiments, all praetersnpernaturally fulfilled; b u t is most a n x i o u s t o let his r e a d e r s know, t h a t h e himself is far t o o e n l i g h t e n e d n o t to b e assured o f t h e folly a n d false­ h o o d o f all h e yet relates as truth, a n d f o r t h e p u r p o s e of exciting t h e in­ terest a n d t h e e m o t i o n s a t t a c h e d to t h e belief of t h e i r t r u t h — a n d all this, n o t with t h e free life a n d most h a p p y j u d g m e n t of Ariosto, as a n e u ­ tral tint o r s h o o t i n g light, but soberly, t o save his own (Sir Walter's) char­ a c t e r as a n e n l i g h t e n e d man. 1 , 1

In the end the novel complied with the scorn for deception by pre­ suming to convey only moral truth, and a certain number of extrinsic materials—manners, history, and landscape—that might be as true as one pleased. Bulwer-Lytton once pronounced this general directive for writers of fiction: "There is no great poetic artist, whether in Epic, Drama, or Romance, who, in his best works, ever presents a literal truth rather than the idealized image of a truth."" 1 This rule an­ swered both the awareness that fiction is not fact and the conviction that it is a significant projection of an idea. Those who are committed to literal truth, furthermore, are possibly the most fit persons to com­ municate a just and restrained ideal of truth. The selection of an ide­ alized image of truth entails an even greater responsibilitv than the devotion to literal truth. Public idealizing requires a verv sane man— and such a man was Sir Walter Scott. The greatness of the Waverley Novels for Bulwer-Lytton was their "moral beauty."'" The idealized image of truth in the Waverley Novels was fundamen­ tally uncritical. Scott undertook his romance with no satirical or ironic intent. Nor did he strive to render an image of truth that would transform his society in any way. He shaped into romance cer­ tain public images of truth of his day. To admirers of the Waverlev Novels Carlyle's famous review of Lockhart's Life is still an object of bitter controversy. But Carlyle had this to say: '"Coleridge's Mntelliineous Cnlu ism, e d

Thonias Middlcton Ravsor (London, 1936),

ρ 332 u "On Certain Principles of Art in Works of Imagination," (3 vols. London, 1808), 3: 375. "''Cf. Pel/mm (Boston, 1891), Ch. 52.

Misiellaneous Prose Works

MORAL TRUTH

17

S o m e w h a t t o o little o f a fantast, this Vales of o u r s ! But s o it was: m tins nineteenth century, our highest literary man, who umiieasurabh be\ond all o t h e r s c o m m a n d e d t h e w o r l d ' s ear, h a d , a s it were, n o message what­ e v e r t o d e l i v e r t o t h e world; wished n o t t h e world t o e l e \ a t e itself, t o d o t h i s o r t h a t , e x c e p t simply pay h i m f o r t h e b o o k s h e k e p t writing. Verv r e m a r k a b l e ; fittest, p e r h a p s , f o r a n a g e fallen l a n g u i d , d e s t i t u t e of faith a n d t e r r i f i e d a t scepticism? O r , p e r h a p s , f o r a n o t h e i sort of a g e , a n a g e all i n p e a c e a b l e t r i u m p h a n t motion?"''

Though Scott was a "medievalist," he frequently criticized the chivalric age. He was fond of pointing out not only that medieval apart­ ments were cold but that medieval behavior was in some respects too warm: "The valour of the hero was often stained by acts of cruelty, or freaks of rash desperation; his courtesy and munificence became solemn foppery and wild profusion; his love to his lady often de­ manded and received a requital inconsistent with the honour of the object."' 1 ' This appraisal was profoundly directed not against the im­ morality of a rude age but against acts of "rash desperation" and senti­ ments of "wild profusion" in any age. The present age vaunted its faith in prudent action and restrained thoughts. Prudery in the nar­ rower sense, increased refinement and delicacy, the insistence that "the forms must be veiled and clothed with drapery," were small but significant improvements over the past: Scott speculated that such factors might be responsible for the high incidence of female novel­ ists in recent times. 68 As applied to morals in this period, the word "masculine" underwent an inversion of meaning so pronounced that Scott could wish that Gil Bias "might perhaps have been improved by some touches of a more masculine, stronger, and firmer line of morality." 69 Masculinity meant self-control under the most trying cir­ cumstances. The antithesis of rash desperation is prudence. Scott held that "the direct and obvious moral to be deduced from a fictitious narrative, is of much less consequence to the public, than the mode in which the story is treated in the course of its details." 70 Prudence governs the mode in which the Waverley Novels were designed. In practice it was a curious mode, because the hero's action was confined to an ideal ""Thomas Carlyle, "Sir Walter Scott," Critical and Xiisiellaneous Essays (5 vols. NewYork, 1901), 4: 54-55.

" 7 Misiellaneous Prose Work·,, 6: 204. For the discomfort of mcdie\al apartments see

IviiIihoe, Ch. 6

Ibid., 4: 62-63. "" Ibid., 3. 496. 7 0 Ibid., p. 41. 1,8

18

ROMANCE

that all but prohibited activity. Moberly observed this difficulty to be one of the problems of fiction in a refined age: While the indulgence of the passions was unrestricted by legislative en­ actments or the influence of public opinion, there was necessarily the greatest facility for the commission of every description of violence. Nor can anything be better adapted for fiction, than the splendid crimes which frequently raised the heroes of antiquity to the rank of demigods. This kind of ignorance offers likewise great room for the display of ex­ traordinary virtue. The virtues of modern ages are for the most part of a quiet and retiring character.' 1

Present-day achievements contrast favorably with the ignorance of rude ages; but the rule of law and of public opinion depends upon a single necessary virtue: loyalty to one's own orderly society. The hero of civilization and refinement is a passive hero of "quiet and retiring" character. The prudence celebrated by the Waverley Novels would not be "cal­ culating prudence." Scott cautioned against calculating prudence at the end of his review of Emma. The heritage of Pamela was such that impulse and generous feeling seemed in danger of being ruled out of fiction altogether.' 2 Scott's romances veered well away from this dan­ ger but thereby incurred a further risk. Expelling calculation from prudence destroyed its one attribute as an active virtue. A prudent hero who cannot be deliberately prudent can have no active role. He can do no deeds of violence; nor can he survive b\ cunning. He is wholly at the mercy of the forces that surround him, and thus acted upon rather than acting. The period of romantic literature in England coincided with an era of national conservatism and moral righteousness. The standard and estimate of progress was high among all who had voice to express it; and the rational virtues of good sense and self-restraint were exalted by reformers as well as by the ruling class. Something called "public opinion"—a political fiction—began to assume the sacrosanct posi­ tion that it enjoys in our own day. If novels such as those of the davs of Charles II and Louis XIV were to reappear, Miss Owenson ven­ tured to say, "they would be hunted down by the common consent of society.'"' Official prudery was second only to willing patriotism, and patriotism pressed directly on literary judgment as well as indirectly on practice. When Scott reviewed Gertrude of Wyoming for the new71

Moberly, 111 Oxford English Prize Essays 4. 142. QuatletIy Kevinv 14 (1815): 200-201.

7 2 CC.

' 1 Sydney Owcnson, New Monthly Magazine and Universal Rrgisler 14, Pl 11(1820): 28

MORAL TRUTH

19

born Quarterly in 1809, he hoped that henceforth Thomas Campbell would find a subject more creditable to his nation. "The historian must do his duty when such painful subjects occur; but the poet who may chuse his theme through the whole unbounded range of truth and fiction may well excuse himself from selecting a subject dis­ honourable to his native land." 7 1 The war with revolutionary France and with Napoleon had more to do with the nature of fiction in this period than is implied by the small part it plays in the novels of Jane Austen or of Scott. War in­ flated the moral currency as well as the price of corn. Anti-Jacobinism and national feeling overrode not only political opposition in Britain but searching criticism of most kinds. The felt triumph of stability and status obscured the rapid and far-reaching social and industrial changes that were taking place beneath the surface of the victory. Never was there a war more readily construed as a struggle for peace against violence and change. The victory symbolized the triumph of a universal and political reality-principle over ambition and passion on the Continent. According to the Morning Chronicle of February 2, 1815, "It is to the cultivation of the moral qualities that England is in­ debted for her power and influence. For the want of them France may be mischievous, but she will never be great."" Like every other public statement, the Waverley Novels were af­ fected by this spirit. In France the novel could hardly escape the im­ pact of the bewildering successions of national fortune. The reality that Stendhal encountered, writes Erich Auerbach, "was so consti­ tuted that, without permanent reference to the immense changes of the immediate past and without a premonitory searching after the im­ minent changes of the future, one could not represent it; all the human figures and all the human events in his work appear upon a ground politically and socially disturbed." 7 " But in England the novel figured forth a vision of permanence and perpetuity, consigning the kinetic energies of life to a series of romantic episodes. Past Stendhal's hero the action at Waterloo sweeps in total confu­ sion, a turmoil of impression and fragmented reality. As if he were a typical hero of Scott, Fabrice del Dongo is supported in this scene by a selfless and knowledgeable guide, the old cantiniere, and eventually finds himself in trouble simply for having been present at the battle. But Stendhal thrusts his hero into a world of flux that does not prom-

7 1 Quarleiiy Rnnew 1 (1809): 243. " Quoted by EIie Halevy, England m 1815, trans. E. I. Watkin and D. A. Barker (Lon­

don, 1949), p. 451. Mimem, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953), p. 463.

20

ROMANCE

ise to right itself. In the Waverley Nove^ violence and change are con­ fined to a world separate from that of the hero. The public event never threatens, as it does in Stendhal, to expand and diminish with­ out end, nor to overwhelm the account of itself by its enigmatic pro­ portions. Henri Beyle actually took part in the Napoleonic cam­ paigns; Scott was lame from childhood. The war was waged on the Continent, and the British force was an expeditionary force. The exact personal or public significance of Waterloo, or even whether he had really been there, was never quite clear to Fabricc. When the news of Waterloo reached Scott, he experienced "the ex­ treme desire to hear a British drum beat in the streets of Paris," and he hurried to the scene. He arrived at Waterloo in time to secure a few relics of battle too worthless to have been carried off by the scav­ engers who followed the army." The implications of the event for literature were mischievously pointed by Stendhal, who instructed Fabrice, after his escapade, not to be seen reading anything pub­ lished after 1720—"with the possible exception of the novels of Wal­ ter Scott.'" 8 In 1815, of course, Fabrice could hardly have known that Waverley and Guy Mnnnering were written by Walter Scott. " The Letters of Sn Walter Stolt, e d . H . J . C G r i e r s o n ( 1 2 \ o l s . L o n d o n , 1 9 3 2 - 1 9 3 7 ) , 4- 7 6 , 7 9 . ' " S t e n d h a l [ H e n r i B e y l e ] , La Ckartieuse de Pai me ( 2 \ o l s P a r i s , 1 9 3 3 ) , C h . 5

THE PASSIVE HERO One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man should be ]ud(re in his oum cause. Bv this each person has at once divested himself of the first

fundamental right of uncovenanted

man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He in­ clusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of self-defence, the first law of Nature. —Burke, Reflections on the Rexiolution in France

"Then, in the name of Heaven, Mr. Francis Osbaldistone, what can you do?" "Very little to the purpose, Miss Vernon." —Rob Roy

4 . Two Soliloquies

JΛ

SOLILOQUY from The Fortunes of Nigel supplies the best introduction to the hero of the Waverley Novels. This romance is JL set in the London of James I and is imbued with the spirit of the public stage of that era: in the antics of his apprentices and in the spirited behavior of his middle-class heroine Scott gives free play to his fondness for the drama. Before introducing the reflections of his hero, imprisoned in Whitefriars, he therefore digresses on the nature of soliloquy. Though the device is more essential to drama than to narrative, Scott argues, the soliloquy still offers "a more concise and spirited mode" of conveying the thoughts of the hero (Ch. 22). 1 Scott frequently resorts to this dramatic convention in his prose romance— one habit that undoubtedly estranges modern readers of the WaverIey Novels. The device, in fact, represents more than a technical con­ venience. Soliloquies are appropriate to the Scott hero because he is always more eloquent in resolution than in action. The players in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship agreed that Hamlet, of all plays, was in References to the Waverley Novels are cited by chapter from the Centenary Edi­ tion (25 vols. Edinburgh, 1885-87). See above, Bibliographical Note, p. ix. 1

22

THE PASSIVE HERO

this respect closest to a novel, the species of fiction in which the hero "must he suffering."" In a fit of angry discovery Nigel draws his sword, in the king's park, against the villainous Lord Dalgarno. He flees to Whitefriars for sanc­ tuary. Having arrived in the dreary house of old Trapbois, he is un­ able to find a servant to lay his fire or to help him dress. Mistress Niartha Trapbois informs him that she has no servant and advises Nigel to be more independent. "Unable as yet to reconcile himself to the thoughts of becoming his own fire-maker," the hero paces to and fro while composing the following "reflections and resolutions." Here is the soliloquy: S h e is r i g h t , a n d h a s t a u g h t m e a lesson I will profit bv. I h a v e b e e n , t h r o u g h my w h o l e life, o n e w h o l e a n t u p o n o t h e r s f o r t h a t a s s i s t a n c e w h i c h it is m o r e truly n o b l e t o d e r i v e f r o m m y o w n e x e r t i o n s . 1 a m ashamed of feeling the paltry inconvenience which long habit has led m e t o a n n e x t o t h e w a n t o f a s e r v a n t ' s assistance—I a m a s h a m e d o f t h a t ; b u t far, f a r m o r e , a m I a s h a m e d t o h a v e s u f f e r e d t h e s a m e h a b i t o f t h r o w i n g m y b u r d e n o n o t h e r s , t o r e n d e r m e , s i n c e I c a m e t o t h i s city, a m e r e victim o f t h o s e e v e n t s , w h i c h I h a v e n e v e r e v e n a t t e m p t e d t o influ­ e n c e — a t h i n g n e v e r a c t i n g b u t p e r p e t u a l l y a c t e d u p o n — p r o t e c t e d bv o n e f r i e n d , d e c e i v e d by a n o t h e r ; b u t i n t h e a d v a n t a g e w h i c h I h a \ e re­ c e i v e d f r o m t h e o n e , a n d t h e evil 1 h a v e s u s t a i n e d f r o n t t h e o t h e r , a s pas­ sive a n d h e l p l e s s a s a b o a t t h a t d r i f t s w i t h o u t o a r o r r u d d e r a t t h e m e r c v o f t h e w i n d s a n d waves. I b e c a m e a c o u r t i e r b e c a u s e H e n o t s o a d v i s e d i t — a g a m e s t e r b e c a u s e D a l g a r n o s o c o n t r i v e d i t — a n Alsatian b e c a u s e Lowestoffe s o willed it. W h a t e v e r of g o o d o r b a d h a s b e f a l l e n m e , h a t h a r i s e n o u t o f t h e a g e n c y o f o t h e r s , n o t f r o m mv o w n . Mv f a t h e r ' s s o n m u s t n o l o n g e r h o l d t h i s facile a n d p u e r i l e c o u r s e . Live o r d i e , s i n k o r swim, Nigel O l i f a u n t , f r o m t h i s m o m e n t , shall o w e h i s safety, success, a n d h o n o u r , t o h i s o w n e x e r t i o n s , o r shall fall with t h e c r e d i t o f h a v i n g a t least e x e r t e d h i s o w n f r e e agency. 1 will write it d o w n i n mv tablets, m h e r very w o r d s , — " T h e wise m a n is h i s o w n best assistant." [ C h . 2 2 ]

Nigel is actually one of the most complex of Scott heroes. His rigid moral resistance and puritanic fear of gambling are transformed, with psychological justice, into a niggling and cautious consent to plav—bv which he calculates always to win, and never risks even odds. Scott stands sufficiently outside his hero to make the sequence interesting. But when Nigel moves, in this soliloquy, from sell-chastisement of his immediate folly to a sweeping condemnation of his total situation, he - J o l i a n i i W o l f g a n g v o n G o e t h e , Willuhn Meistei'% Appwnlueship and Tnwrls, t r a n s . ThoniasCailyIe (London, 1899), Bk. V, ch 7.

TWO SOLILOQUIES

23

speaks genetically for all the heroes of the VVa\erIey Noxels. Suddenh Nigel indicts not so much his own character as the entire fiction within which he finds himself. As we shall see, Scott himself re­ proached the inactivity of his heroes. Nigel's recriminations—"a ucUm of events" "passive and helpless"—define the customary stance of the Scott hero; his circumstances and "the agency of others" are the stuff of the Scott romance. The soliloquy suggests certain details of Nigel's predicament. As the title of the romance implies, his fortunes are in the balance. In the appropriate language of ups and downs, therefore, he speaks of what has "befallen" and how it has "arisen"; and again, that he shall rise or "fall." More precisely, since "safety" and "honour" flank "suc­ cess," he shall either recover his just deserts or be cheated of them. He is not altogether hopeful and speaks twice in the language of drowning. He asserts his identity by addressing himself in the third person, but reinforces the obligation of his new resolutions by nam­ ing himself also "my father's son." He commits himself ultimately to an abstraction—"his own free agency." He fears he is not only a vic­ tim of events but in the hands of good and bad agents, who both pro­ tect and deceive him. The previous events of the story justify Nigel's assault on his own dependence. More embarrassed than hungry in his destitution, Nigel fears to petition the king in person for the payments owed to his de­ ceased father. George Heriot, the goldsmith whose kindness is en­ tirely unmotivated by personal gain, seeks out the hero in his hiding place in London; and it is clear that Heriot is better acquainted with Nigel's state of affairs than is the hero himself (Ch. 4). When the goldsmith has advanced him one hundred pounds, unasked, and ti­ died him up for presentation at court, the door to the presence cham­ ber is barred by the deputy chamberlain—one of those instinctive en­ emies who invariably discountenance the merits of heroes. The way is opened by the Earl ofHuntinglen, who recognizes Nigel by his resem­ blance to his father; and the Earl generously exchanges his annual royal boon for Nigel's favor with the king (Ch. 9). Just as Master Heriot knows more of Nigel's business than the hero himself, so Mar­ garet Ramsay has mysterious intelligence of the plots against him. She enumerates the motives of his enemies as "avarice" and "vindic­ tive ambition," but inspired by an "absolute and concentrated spirit of malice"—the last suggesting that the hero's enemies are as un­ selfishly motivated as his friends (Ch. 19). As soon as Nigel becomes aware of Dalgarno's duplicity, an "impatient passion" involves him in the abortive duel in St. James's Park; but he stands there in risk of having his hand chopped off by the Star Chamber until "a decent-

24

THE PASSIVE HERO

looking elderly man" urges him to run off. Luckily, he runs into a ca­ sual acquaintance, Lowestoffe, who knowledgeably arranges his admis­ sion to Wliitefriars (Ch. 16). There we have discovered him, "never acting but perpetually acted upon." The excellent resolutions represented by the soliloquy do not alter the tendency of these adventures in the least. By the end of the same chapter Nigel's decision to become an active hero takes a strange turn: he decides to surrender himself. He learns that Lowestoffe has been arrested for his timely assistance, and is thus confirmed in his purpose. However, "he had, even before hearing of a reason which so peremptorily demanded that he should surrender himself, adopted the resolution to do so, as the manliest and most proper course which his ill-fortune and imprudence had left in his own power" (Ch. 22). When forced to translate his vow of independence into a specific act, Nigel can think only of giving himself up. He is guided by what is "manliest and most proper"—considerations that dictate his passive role. On the face of it his decision makes it more likely that he will die than live, sink than swim. Ordinarily when a character exclaims that he shall "live or die, sink or swim," he expresses an overpowering determination to live. The hero of Scott expresses by these terms a stubborn allegiance to his society. The hero of the Waverley Novels is seldom a leader of men. He is always a potential leader, because of his rank as a gentleman. He rep­ resents, however, a social ideal, and acts or refrains from acting ac­ cording to the accepted morality of his public. Law and authoritv are the sine qua non of his being. Nigel is emotionally justified in draw­ ing his sword in the park, but by doing so he has broken the law. Be­ cause he represents the individual acceptance of law and authoritv, he can only surrender himself. The hero of the Waverlev Novels stands at the beginning of a tradition of which Sean O'Faolain cele­ brates the close in a book called The Vanishing Hero. Instead of a com­ mander, this hero is an ideal member of society. By Mr. O'Faolain's account, the hero vanishes when society no longer defines him: "the Hero is a purely social creation. He represents, that is to sav, a so­ cially approved norm, for representing which to the satisfaction of society he is decorated with a title."® On the other hand, Mario Praz' study of Victorian fiction, commencing with Scott, is entitled The Hero in Eclipsed We are always in danger of a confusion of terms: it goes without saying that Mr. Praz' title refers to another person altogether, the romantic hero who is pitted against society. Such romantic charac5

The Vanishing IIcto ( L O I U I O I I 1 1 9 5 6 ) , ρ 1 4 .

1

The IIeto in Iulipse in Υκίοηαη Fiction, t r a n s . A n g u s D a x i d s o n ( L o n d o n , 1 9 5 6 ) .

TWO SOLILOQUIES

25

ters figure large in the Waverlev Novels, but the proper hero of Scott implicitly accepts his society. His nearly complete passivity is a func­ tion of his morality—the public and accepted morality of rational self-restraint. Self-imposed respect for law and authority only partly explains the passive hero, however. His characteristic responses are more (or less) than moral. They have an interesting emotional content. This con­ tent may be demonstrated by an Alpine adventure in Anne of Geierstein (Ch. 2), an adventure that exaggerates the propensities of a typical hero by exposing him to very untypical surroundings. The verse tags to the first two chapters of Anne of Geierstein are from Manfred, but the hero is not affected by the manners of his chief liter­ ary rival. Arthur Philipson and his father—the Earl of Oxford in dis­ guise—have been led up a wrong and precarious path in the moun­ tains. A storm is brewing, and the path suddenly disappears into a rock slide. Arthur proposes to make his way across the slide in order to seek help from a habitation that can be seen in the distance. The hero undertakes this dangerous effort in a significant fashion. He rea­ sons his way past the abyss, by "estimating the extent of his danger by the measure of sound sense and reality." The reader overhears his thoughts: "This ledge of rock," he urged to himself, "is but narrow, yet it has breadth enough to support me; these cliffs and crevices in the surface are small and distant, but the one affords as secure a resting place for my feet, the other as available a grasp to my hands, as if I stood on a platform of a cubit broad, and rested my arm on a balustrade of marble. My safety, therefore, depends on myself. If I move with decision, step firmly, and hold fast, what signifies how near I am to the mouth of an abyss?" [Ch. 2] The moral expressed in this soliloquy is also general. As with most ac­ counts of mountain climbing, the exercise is supposed to be sym­ bolic. Unlike most climbers, Arthur does not pretend to enjoy the sport. When Arthur has almost reached safety on the far side of the slide, a huge rock teeters under the climber's weight and smashes into the valley below—leaving the hero clinging to a tree. He is overcome by an attack of vertigo. The peril of his situation, and his consequent trembling fits, are spun out at great length in the narrative. Scott casts in peculiar language Arthur's determination to hang on: "noth­ ing, save the consciousness that such an idea was the suggestion of partial insanity, prevented him from throwing himself from the tree, as if to join the wild dance to which his disturbed brain had given mo-

26

THE PASSIVE HERO

tion." At this point a Swiss maiden appears out of the mist. She walks so close to the precipice that Arthur sinks back into his tree with a groan. It is Anne of Geierstein, and she points out to the hero that solid ground lies but one bold step from his perch. Arthur is ashamed of himself, and prepares to take the leap, but is again over­ come by fear. In order "to restore his confidence," Anne herself hops lightly from rock to tree and back again. She stretches out her hand to Arthur: '"My arm,' she said, 'is but a slight balustrade; yet do but step forward with resolution, and you will find it as secure as the bat­ tlement of Berne.'" Arthur has set out by imagining "a balustrade of marble" for his support; here he is offered one of real substance. He is sufficiently embarrassed—"shame now overcame terror so much"— that he leaps to safety without further assistance. In the following chapter the native Swiss chide the hero about this incident several times, though the writer continues to characterize him, without irony, as "young and daring." Scott draws out this scene so as to leave no doubt of his hero's ter­ ror and its embarrassing associations. He stresses the hero's qualms much more than his prowess. The cause of "sound sense and reality" would seem better served if Arthur kept his head when the rock bounds into the abyss—or if he rescued Anne instead of the other way around. In Anne of Geierstein she comes to his rescue three times. Prudential morality might account for the fact that the hero can sel­ dom be a savior, but it does not account for the mixed pleasure of being saved. The episode in Anne oj Geierstein indicates that the pas­ sive hero only partially admits of a rational explanation. Romance, of course, is not a rational exercise. Nigel Olifaunt's decision to surren­ der cannot adequately be explained in moral terms; and Arthur Philipson's terror and embarrassment have reverberations throughout the Waverley Novels. Ultimately I shall argue that a relation obtains between the moral scruples of the Scott hero and his demonstrable anxieties.

5. Possible Exceptions We have a full account of the origin of the name Waverley. Scott ex­ plained that he skirted both chivalrous names like "Howard, Mordaunt, Mortimer, or Stanley," and sentimental names like "Belmour, Belville, Belfield, and Belgrave," in favor of a name without associa­ tions. "I have, therefore, like a maiden knight with his white shield, as­ sumed for my hero, w a v i - . r l e y , an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil, excepting what the reader shall

POSSIBLE EXCEPTIONS

27

hereaftei be pleased to affix to it" (Ch. 1). A similar account of the choice of Ivatihoe was given in the 1830 introduction to that romance. But who is not tempted to detect a subconscious premonition of Wavei ley s career in his very name? The word waver emerges in one very typical situation: The question indeed occurred, whither he was to direct his course when again at his own disposal. Two schemes seemed practicable, yet both at­ tended with danger and difficulty . . . to go back to Glennaquoich, and join Fergus Mac-Ivor . . . [or] to take shipping for England. His mind wa­ vered between these plans; and piobably, if he had effected his escape in the manner he proposed, he would have been finally determined by the comparative facility by which either might have been executed. But his fortune had settled that he was not to be left to his option. [Ch. 37]

The condition contrary to fact—"if he had effected his escape in the manner he proposed"—is an amusing commentary on the passive hero, who never engineers his own escape. Waverley actually has no escape plan, "the manner he proposed" having no antecedent in the text except as given above. Walter Bagehot found all Scott's heroes commonplace with the possible exception of Waverley, "whose very vacillation gives himsort of character." 3 While acknowledging the uniformity of the heroes, the Edinburgh Review in 1832 applied the same word in a different judgment: "A strong fraternal likeness to the vacillating Waverley does not raise them in our esteem." h The likeness holds throughout the long series of novels to which Waverley gave his name—unless one excepts, in the very last of the series, Castle Danger­ ous, an older hero, "Walton the Unwavering" (Ch. 13). The distinctive inactivity of the passive hero may be appreciated simply by contrasting him with the popular hero who succors the un­ fortunate, who makes his own fortune and wins the girl he loves, or who changes the course of history. That kind of heroism occurs to Scott himself, for example, as he sets forth the predicament of Adam Hartley in The Surgeon's Daughter. Though the hero would willingly de­ vote his entire life to Menie Gray, he can only lament his helplessness to save her: The consciousness of being in her vicinity added to the bitter pangs with which Hartley contemplated her situation, and reflected how little chance there appeared of his being able to rescue her from it by the

"The Waverley Novels," 2: 158.

''EdinburghRexnewbb

Literaty Studies (2

¢1832): 69.

vols. London, Ever)man's Library, n.d ),

28

THE PASSIVE HERO

mere force of reason and justice, which was all he could oppose to the selfish passions of a voluptuous tyrant. A lover of romance might have meditated some means of effecting her release by force or address; but Hartley, though a man of courage, had no spirit of adventure, and would have regarded as desperate anv attempt of the kind. [Ch. 14] The hero eschews the use of "address" as well as the use of force; he must depend wholly upon reason and justice. The opposite course of action he would characterize as romantic and desperate. Yet reason ancl justice are here inadequate. The rescue is finally accomplished from outside by the native wisdom and absolute power of Hyder Ali Khan Behauder and the help of a ceremonial elephant to crush the life out of the villain. The hero can best be defined by the words of Nigel Olifaunt—"a thing never acting but perpetually acted upon." But he is nevertheless the protagonist. He stands at the center of the struggle. He may not move, but his chances, his fortunes, are at stake. He is a victim, at the mercy of good and bad agents alike. He never aspires to property, nor actively courts the heroine. But he does not remain a victim, and he receives the heroine and the property in the end. The adventures of Nigel, outlined above, may be taken as typical. Instead of tediously tracing the inactivity of such heroes, however, it is easier to allow the exceptions to prove the rule. Even those protagonists of Scott whom one remembers as particularly bold and independent actors prove, on closer examination, to be cast in a passive role. Quentin Durward, for example, comes immediately to mind. The Qiuirterlγ Review consid­ ered him "not so passive as Waverley and Redgauntlet."' At the outset of Qiienth) Durward the hero, in a compassionate ges­ ture, cuts down a corpse hung up bv the king's provost, and he is forthwith attacked by friends of the deceased and bv the executioners in rapid succession. With typical inadvertence he thus stumbles into a situation in which "life, death, time, and eternity, were swimming be­ fore his eyes"; and he is resetted only by the fortunate proximity of some Scottish Ciuards (Ch. 6). Quentin escapes from the conse­ quences of this incident by reluctantly allowing himself to be pressed into service with the Guards. He has many qualms about service to Louis XI. "How did the youth know but he might be soon com­ manded on some offensive operation of the same kind?" (Ch. 11). Next he sets out on a mission—to escort the Countess Isabelle ancl Lady Hameline to Liege—without knowing the country or the route, and evidently without instructions. Far from delivering orders to the expedition he commands, Quentin is informed in a whisper bv one 7

Qiiarlerly Rnncw .'55 ( K S 2 7 ) : 5 4 5

POSSIBLE EXCEPTIONS

29

of his retinue "that their guide was to join them beyond Tours." An­ other man guides them out through the "pitfalls, snares, and similar contrivances" that surround the castle of Louis (Ch. 14). When Quentin suspects treachery, however, he acts with excep­ tional alertness, following Hayraddin to a secret rendezvous at night, and overhearing the plot against the Countess (Ch. 17). Such infor­ mation generally reaches the ears of the passive hero by accident, and then he will listen most unwillingly. The following chapter opens with Quentin carefully inspecting the shoes of the horses "with his own eyes"—an action symbolic of his unusual role. Subsequentlv he res­ cues Isabelle from the castle at Liege and restrains De La Marck, the Boar of the Ardennes, by holding a knife to the throat of his son (Chs. 22 and 23). So lively is Quentin by this point that the reader an­ ticipates with gusto the slaughter of De La Marck in the last chap­ ter—the stated reward for which deed is the hand of Isabelle of Croye. But just as Quentin is about to conquer the monster, Lady Hameline runs by in distress, and the hero has to nip out to save her from a French soldier. His uncle Ludovic Lesly, alias Le Balafre, finishes De La Marck, and refers his right to Isabelle to Quentin. "It is all that is left of a bit of work which my nephew shaped out, and nearly finished, and I put the last hand to" (Ch. 37). This awkward contrivance, which saves Quentin the responsibility of killing some­ one outright, owes entirely to the rules of passive heroism. Quentin has "nearly finished" the villain; but even the foulest villains are safe from death at the hero's hand. The prototype for Quentin Durward, in the Waverley Novels, is Cap­ tain Dalgetty of A Legend of Montrose. Significantly, this first soldier hero is not, strictly speaking, the protagonist of the romance. As dan­ ger increases Dalgetty becomes more and more outrageous. He over­ powers the Marquis of Argyll and actually escapes from the dungeon with a bundle of military secrets in his pocket. Menteith, the proper hero of the romance, survives his part in the Civil Wars, as heroes are wont to, by contriving to be a party to both sides through his mar­ riage. The survival of Dalgetty almost parodies this typical denoue­ ment. From two paragraphs at the end of the tale the reader hears that he is captured; that he refuses to change sides—an act that would violate his military enlistment; and that he is reprieved from death by friends, who point out that his enlistment will expire in two weeks. At the end of two weeks Dalgetty does change sides, and even­ tually he gains "his paternal estate of Drumthwacket" by marriage to the daughter of the Whig who has usurped it (Ch. 23). Scott returned to a soldier hero for Count Robert of Paris. In that ro­ mance Hereward the Saxon displays a degree of initiative similar to Quentin Durward's and at a critical moment even employs deceit to

30

THE PASSIVE HERO

protect the emperor (Ch. 19). Durward and Hereward act where the typical heroes of Scott would await events. Because these honest mer­ cenaries fight for pay, it is as if their heroic role were also contrac­ tual. Their enterprise seems acceptable so long as the service they per­ form is formally owed to someone else. They are akin to certain of the ordinary heroes' retainers, who are often more alert to the main chance than their masters. Edgar Ravenswood of The Bride oj Lammermoor presents a special problem. He is the only hero of the several "tragic" romances who actually shares the unhappy fate of the heroine. Yet the Master of Ravenswood, as he is ironically called, suffers his fate passively, albeit passionately. Though the story takes place on his family estate, he often seems a complete stranger to the grounds. His one direct ac­ tion, serving to introduce the principals of the romance, is to rescue Lucy Ashton and her father from a wild bull (Ch. 5). He leaves the possible recovery of his estate to the vague agency of the Marquis A and becomes the uneasy dependent of the Ashtons. At the climax of The Biide oj Lammermoor, as the marriage deeds are signed, Ravenswood rushes into the room, sword in hand, pistol cocked, and threatening everyone in sight (Ch. 33). There is no comparable scene in the Waverley Novels. Yet his "fierce and free ideas" are never really enacted except in this scene, and here he does not go so far as to strike anyone. Nassau Senior, who thought Ravenswood exceptionalh well drawn, found it "a blemish, that his faults are so remoteh con­ nected with his misfortunes. . . . His misfortunes spring from the en­ mity of Bucklaw and Lady Ashton; both arising from causes out of his own controul, and as likely to have arisen if he had been the meekest of mankind."* His temperament is different, but his posture is funda­ mentally the same as that of the other heroes. Ravenswood himself tentatively recognizes the incompatibility in temperament between his dark passionate nature and the pale Lucy. "He felt that his own temper required a partner of a more independent spirit, who could set sail with him on his course of life, resolved as himself to dare in­ differently the storm and the favouring bree/e" (Ch. 21). It is the temperament and want of deeds together that make Ravenswood dis­ tinctive, essentially unattractive, and therefore interesting. The Fan Maid of Perth, finally, can boast the most active and ener­ getic hero of the Waverley Novels: Heniy Wynd, the armorer. The atmosphere of this romance, like that of The Fortunes of Nigel, de­ rives from Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, though The Fair Maid of Perth takes place a century earlier in Scotland. Scott's title suggests " Quarterly Rnnew

2(> (1822) 121.

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31

Heywood; and Simon Glover, but for Iiis different trade, recalls Dekkei s Simon Lvre. There is a vigorous courtship m this romance, not meiely an affection that achieves its fulfillment when e\ents per­ mit. Contrary to practice in the Waverley Novels, the hero kisses the heroine. It is the bride who must be won, not merely the permission to marry her. Simon Glover, Catharine's father, approves the match. In the two other romances in which the hero enjovs such whole­ hearted support from the heroine's father (KcnihooiIh and The Sur­ geon s Daughter) the lady loves elsewhere. Unique among Scott heroes, Henry even possesses sexual experience: "a certain natural wildness of disposition had placed him under the influence of Venus, as well as that of Mars," before his love for Catharine "had withdrawn him en­ tirely from such licentious pleasures" (Ch. 12). In a climax of inde­ pendent action Henry slaughters on Palm Sunday no less than five Highlanders in an extremely bloody (thirtv against thirty) trial bv combat (Ch. 34). The extenuating circumstance for Henry's behavior is not far to seek. His social class is responsible: he is an artisan, whereas the proper hero is a gentleman. "A gentleman," according to Charles Π in Woodstock (Ch. 24), "is a term which comprehends all ranks en­ titled to armorial bearings—A duke, a lord, a prince, is no more than a gentleman." But an armorer is not entitled to armorial bearings. Henry's role, like that of the soldier heroes, approaches the role of some of the retainers to proper heroes: a similar license both to kiss and to kill is granted only to Cuddie Headrigg in Old Mortality and to Joceline Joliffe in Woodstock. Henry Wynd is far too violent for an ordi­ nary hero—though his spirited presence makes The Fair Maid of Perth one of the most enjoyable of Scott's inventions.

6. Rationale This characteristic hero did attract the notice of Scott's contemporar­ ies. In his Letters to Richard Heber (1821) John Levcester Adolphus set out to prove, by internal evidence alone, and without spying at Abbotsford to catch him at it, that the Author of WaverIey was the same as the Author of Marmion. Pursuing very closely the question of au­ thorship, Adolphus produced a highly critical account of his material. In Letter VII of his treatise he compiled the following summary of the hero of the Waverley Novels: O n e circumstance very c o m m o n in t h e novels a n d poems, a n d highly dis­ advantageous t o t h e principal personage, is, that d u r i n g a great pari of

32

THE PASSIVE HERO

the storv, he is made the blind or involuntary instrument of another's p u r p o s e s ; t h e a t t e n d a n t o n a n o t h e r ' s will; a n d t h e s p o r t o f e v e n t s o v e r which he exercises no control. Such, for example, is Waverley; a hero, who, from the beginning to end of his history, is scarcely ever left upon his own hands, but appears almost always in the situation of pupil, guest, patient, protege, or prisoner; engaged in a quarrel from which he is un­ consciously extricated; half duped and half seduced into rebellion; inef­ fectually repenting; snatched away by accident from his sinking party; by accident preserved from justice; and restored by the exertions of his friends to safety, fortune and happiness. . . . Henry Bertram might justly c l a i m t o b e t h e h e r o o f G u v M a n n e r i n g , if p e r i l s , l a b o u r s , a n d c o u r a ­ g e o u s a c h i e v e m e n t s c o u l d of t h e m s e l v e s c o n f e r su< h a d i g n i t y ; b u t it i s difficult to consider him in that light, because we see him the mere king of a c h e s s - b o a r d , a d v a n c e d , w i t h d r a w n , e x p o s e d , p r o t e c t e d , a t t h e p l e a s ­ u r e of t h o s e w h o p l a y t h e g a m e o v e r h i s h e a d . T h e c h a r a c t e r o f F r a n c i s O s b a l d i s t o n e [ i n R o b Roy] i s n o t t o o i n s i p i d l y i m m a c u l a t e t o e n g a g e s y m ­ p a t h y o r a w a k e n c u r i o s i t y ; b u t it w a n t s t h a t c o m m a n d i n g i n t e r e s t w h i c h s h o u l d s u r r o u n d t h e first p e r s o n a g e of a n o v e l ; a n d t h e r e a s o n is, t h a t i n almost eserv pan of the story we Iiiul him played upon as a dupe, dis­ posed of as a captive, tutored as a novice, and unwittingly exciting indig­ nation as a Marplot.'1

Aclolphus offers no explanation of this phenomenon. He is merely doing the job of description that is essential to his detective work. But he speaks of this kind of hero as "disadvantageous" and clearly disparages a hero who is merely "pupil, guest, patient, protege, o r prisoner." Though contemporaries of Scott disparaged the passive hero, thev also, in effect, ruled out any alternative. Nassau Senior recognized the limitations of "perfect heroism" and averred that Scott had moved beyond these limitations in Jeanie Deans of The Heart of MidI . o t h i a n . " ' But in the same review Senior invoked a moral theory of fiction that compels perfect heroism. He cannot accept Roland Graeme, in T h e A b b o t , as a proper hero: In real life, all would foigive, some would even admire, his conduct; but a w i i t e r o l f i c t i o n h a s 110 r i g h t t o d r e s s , w h a t i s l u n d a m e n t a l l v w r o n g , i n a c o v e r i n g t h a t c a n a t t r a c t s y m p a t h y 01 a d m i r a t i o n . H e i s n o t e x p o s e d t o t h e s a m e d i f f i c u l t i e s a s h i s I i e i o e s , a n d h a s 110 r i g h t t o m a k e t h e i r r e ­ ward depend on that part of their conduct which does not deserve un­ mixed approbation. Still less has he a iiglu to sanction a parley between to Hiiliiiitl IIebei (Boston, 1822), pp. Ι.'ΐ7-.'ί8. (λιιιιιleity Review 26 (1822) 120.

'' I J - I I M

RATIONALE

33

duty a n d passion, a n d to countenance the sophistr\ that attacks the un­ derstanding through the h e a r t . "

One can sympathize with the reviewer's dislike of Roland Graeme. Though Graeme shares the troubles and concerns of other heroes, he bears his lot pettishly and spitefully, with grossly conceited notions ot his just expectations. Though the substance is familiar, his com­ plaint is shrill: "Am I for ever . . . to be devoured with the desire of in­ dependence and free agency, and yet to be for ever led on by circum­ stances to follow the will of others?" (Ch. 9). Senior's dicta would rule Graeme out of the heroic class. Though the critic exempts real life from his ruling, he sternly applies it to fic­ tion. His standpoint forces an author to choose between an insipid and an unworthy hero. From a twentieth-century perspective Roland Graeme is more interesting. His youthful behavior would intrigue the clinical psychologist. He suffers from an aggressive compulsion to stab people (Chs. 4 and 14). In the first four chapters of The Abbot Scott traces this behavior to the excessive protection and affection of his adopted mother. The discussion of Roland culminates in Henrv Warden's sermon (Ch. 4), which stresses the boy's fondness for his dagger—the "treacherous and malignant instrument, which is there­ fore fit to be used, not by men or soldiers, but by those who, trained under female discipline, become themselves effeminate hermaphro­ dites, having female spite and female cowardice added to the infirmi­ ties and evil passions of their masculine nature." Roland's reaction to the sermon is as clinical as the diagnosis: "His brow grew red, his lip grew pale, he set his teeth, he clenched his hand, and then with me­ chanical readiness grasped the weapon of which the clergyman had given so hideous a character." When the subject rushes out of the room, the preacher concludes, "the sick man hath been offended at the wholesome bitter of the medicine—the wounded patient hath flinched from the friendly knife of the surgeon." In a highly interesting document Scott recorded his own opinion of his first prose heroes. In 1817 he opportunely reviewed the first series of Tales of My Landlord in the Quarterly. The anonymous re­ view of his own work was favorable, but Scott charged the heroes as follows: A n o t h e r leading fault in these novels is the total want of interest which t h e r e a d e r attaches to the character of the hero. Waverlev, Brown, o r Bertram in Guy Mannering, a n d Lovel in the Antiquary, are all brethren of a family; very amiable a n d very insipid sort of young men. . . . His " Ibid., p. 141.

34

THE PASSIVE HERO

c h i e f c h a r a c t e r s a r e n e v e r a c t o r s , b u t always a c t e d u p o n by t h e s p u r o f c i r c u m s t a n c e s , a n d h a v e t h e i r f a t e u n i f o r m l y d e t e r m i n e d by t h e a g e n c y of s u b o r d i n a t e p e r s o n s . . . . Every h e r o i n poetry, i n fictitious n a r r a t i v e , o u g h t t o c o m e f o r t h a n d d o o r say s o m e t h i n g o r o t h e r w h i c h n o o t h e r p e r s o n c o u l d have d o n e o r said; m a k e s o m e sacrifice, s u r m o u n t s o m e difficulty, a n d b e c o m e i n t e r e s t i n g t o u s o t h e r w i s e t h a n by his m e r e a p ­ p e a r a n c e o n t h e s c e n e , t h e passive tool o f t h e o t h e r characters. 1 2

"Never actors, hut always acted upon" are very nearly the words of Nigel Olilaunt's soliloquy. Elsewhere Scott criticized o n e of Clara Reeve's heroes in similar terms: "for if Fitzowen be considered the Old English Baron, we d o not see wherefore a character, passive in himself from beginning to end, and only acted upon by others, should be selected to give a name to the story.'" ' This opinion had not deterred Scott from writing Wavetley, nor had it affected the title in any way. Yet the author's opinion of Waverley as a hero seems to have been consistent from the beginning, since the well known letter to John Morrit in July, 1814, registered the same sentiment: T h e h e r o e is a s n e a k i n g p i e c e o f i m b e c i l i u a n d if h e h a d m a r r i e d F l o r a s h e w o u l d have set h i m u p o n t h e c h i m n e y - p i e c e a s C o u n t Boralaski's wife u s e d t o d o with h i m . I a m a b a d h a n d at d e p i c t i n g a h e r o e p r o p e r l v s o calld a n d have a n u n f o r t u n a t e p r o p e n s i t y f o r t h e d u b i o u s c h a r a c t e r s of B o r d e r e r s B u c c a n e e r s h i g h l a n d r o b b e r s a n d all o t h e r s of a R o b i n H o o d d e s c r i p t i o n . 1 d o n o t k n o w why it s h o u l d b e s o [as] 1 a m mvself like H a m l e t i n d i f f e r e n t h o n e s t b u t f s u p p o s e t h e b l o o d of t h e o l d cattledrivers of TeviotdaIe c o n t i n u e s t o stir in mv v e i n s . "

Scott's notion that he had a flair for a more romantic tvpe of hero is recorded also in earlier letters on the metrical romances. 1 , He cher­ ished the thought that some of his own ancestors led romantic and extralegal careers on the border. For our purposes, these several state­ ments imply at least that "a heroe properlv so calld" can be distin­ guished from the various romantic o r historical personalities in the Waverlev Novels who may be of heroic stature but are not the protag­ onists. Lovel is correctly designated by his author as the hero of The Antiquary, even though he is perhaps the least colorful character—he does not even possess a Christian name. We are confronted, then, with an author who professes to scorn his unheroic hero and yet repeats the same creation in romance after roIJ {htm I r r I x Rnnrw 1 0 (1817) t i l -:>L\ " Mniellanmiis I'msi' Woili\, ?>: :588-89

" Li'lli'is, 4: 4 7 8 - 7 9 . '"'Cf. ibid , 2: .'512; .'i 221

RATIONALE

35

mance. Scott offers an explanation—a somewhat halting and uncon­ vincing explanation—in his review of Tales of My Landlord. The passive hero supplies a medium for introducing historical and to­ pographical detail. He is a kind of representative of the reader at the scene of action. He is inactive because he shares the reader's unfamiliarity with the scene. Without such a hero the instructive or informa­ tive content of the fiction would seem chill. This much must be derived from two sentences of Scott: the passive role of the heroes arises from the author having usually represented lhem as foreigners to whom every thing in Scotland is strange,—a circumstance which serves as his apology for entering into many minute details which are reflec­ tively, as it were, addressed to the reader through the medium of the hero. While he is going into explanations and details which, addressed directly to the reader, might appear tiresome and unnecessary, he gives interest to them by exhibiting the effect which they produce upon the principal person of his drama."'

Secondly, and serving the same general end, a weak hero may be ex­ peditiously dragged about by an author who is bent on immediate and temporary effects. For, Scott continues, the author "hesitates not to sacrifice poor Waverley, and to represent him as a reed blown about at the pleasure of every breeze" simply in order to get from one place to another. In sum, the virtues of a passive hero are that he may be a stranger and that he is at the mercy of his author. The argu­ ment reflects the contemporary willingness to separate "content" from "plot," as well as Scott's habitual allusion to the carelessness of his efforts. Hazlitt attacked the same problem in an essay entitled "Why the He­ roes of Romances Are Insipid." He thus employs the same adjective that Scott applies to his heroes. In the latter half of the essay Hazlitt deals expressly with the Waverley Novels. He first observes that read­ ers take it for granted that the hero is interesting—a fact that Scott neglects. Heroes adopt the correct or approved stance in any given sit­ uation. Heroes are in the right, unless they have been duped. "If there was any doubt of their success, or they were obliged to employ the ordinary and vulgar means to establish their superiority over every one else, they would no longer be those 'faultless monsters' which it is understood they must be to fill their part in the drama. The heroes of old romance had the advantage of active feats to per­ form. The heroes of modern French romance had at least the "fences

17

Qiiarlerly Review 16 Complete Works , ed.

¢1817): 432 P. P. Howe (21 vols. London and Toronto, 1931), 17: 2-17.

36

THE PASSIVE HERO

of morality and scruples of conscience" to break through. The heroes of the Author of Waverley Hazlitt explains as follows: Instead of acting, they are acted upon, and keep in the back-ground and in a neutral posture, till they are absolutely forced to come forward, and it is then with a very amiable reservation of modest scruples. Does it not seem almost, or generally speaking, as if a character to be put in this re­ sponsible situation of a candidate for the highest favour of the public at large, or of the fair in particular, who is to conciliate all suffrages and concentrate all interests, must really have nothing in him to please or give offence, that he must be left a negative, feeble character without untractable or uncompromising points, and with a few slight recommenda­ tions and obvious good qualities which everyone may be supposed to im­ prove upon and fill up according to his or her inclination or fancy and the model of perfection previously existing in the mind? . . . In fact, the hero of the work is not so properlv the chief object in it, as a sort of blank left open to the imagination, or lav-figure on which the reader dis­ poses whatever draperv he pleases! 1 "

Among the possible factors affecting the hero's shv neutrality, Hazlitt stresses the operation of the fiction on the reader, the point at which the book takes hold of the reader and the reader enters into the story. For it seems true that the hero, of whatever description, is the character with whom the reader confuses, or "associates," his own person. Whether a "blank" character is most efficient for this purpose is open to question. Hazlitt argues that an imaginative cipher can ac­ commodate the greatest range of readers. Reading itself is a passive act—more so than aural attention to the same narrative, and presum­ ably much more so than attending "old romance" expressly intended for the ear. Possibly readers of the long prose narrative bv definition enjoy fancying themselves acted upon rather than acting. Scott's rationale also implies a special relation of the hero and the reader. But according to Scott's argument the reader would be more concerned with where the hero goes, when he lived, and what he saw, than with what he feels; and therefore the reader cannot be said to as­ sociate with the hero in the modern psychological sense. In the same year that Scott reviewed Iiis own romances, an unidentified reviewer of Maria Edgeworth's comedies held that the theory of association or "sympathy" with the hero was an adequate theory of fiction itself: he rejected the theories of Beattie and of Bacon in two sentences. 1 " The most convinced advocate of the association of reader and hero has Ibid., pp. 252-53. ''' Qiiarletly Hnnrw 1 7 ( 1 8 1 7 ) : 9 7 .

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been Robeit Louis Stevenson: "When the reader consciously plays at being hero, the scene is a good scene." In the fiction of character, the reader's pleasure is critical and distant. But in the fiction of inci­ dent, "we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in the fresh ex­ perience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a iV>throp, displayed a highly cultivated and energetic mind, full of impassioned schemes of liberty, and impa­ tience of masculine usurpation. She had a lively sense of all the oppres­ sions that are done under the sun; and the vivid pictures which her imagination presented to her of the numberless scenes of injustice and misery which are being acted at every moment in every part of the inhab­ ited world, gave an habitual seriousness to her physiognomy, that made it seem as if a smile had never once hovered on her lips." The energy, imagination, compassion, masculinity, melancholy, and particular physiognomy of chirk heroines are here registered. Apart from topical allusions, the joke of Nighlmare Abbey is that Scythrop loves both Marionetta and "Stella" and cannot make up his mind be­ tween them until too late. In the Waverley Novels the hero always knows his mind by the end. As the hero of civil society he chooses the blonde heroine of society. " Thomas Love Peacock, Works (10 vols. London, 1924-34), 3: 93-94.

56

CHARACTER AND TOPOGRAPHY

9. The Highland Line T h e topographical stress of the Waverley Novels complements the contrast of two basic character types. T h e face of the land as well as the features of heroes and heroines physically represent the dualism of law and nature, reason and passion, sobriety and romance. Physiog­ nomy and topography together supply the primary symbols for the thematic structure of the Waverley Novels. T h e symbols are products of the theme: in the romance of Scott morality is more fundamental than geography. Yet in a real sense these works originate from the city of Edinburgh, and could not have been written by a citizen of any other land but Scotland. To the present day, from the window of a library o r from the confusion of city traffic in Edinburgh, o n e can be shocked by the sudden prospect of sublime nature crowding in upon civilization. And in former days, in The Chronules of the Canongale, Chrystal Croftangrv also looked out upon "the gigantic slope of Arthur['s] Seat, and the girdle of lofty rocks called Salisbury Crags; objects so rudely wild that the mind can hardly conceive them to exist in the vicinage of a populous metropolis" (Ch. 6). Another passage in the same work renders explicit the symbolism of this contrast: "I have, as it were, the two extremities of the moral world at my thresh­ old" (Ch. 5). T h e ambulatory motion of the Waverley Novels is typicallv from south to north, from England to Scotland, from lowlands to high­ lands, and back again. Running east and west from the Firth of Forth to the Clyde, the Highland line locates an ideal difference in ways of life rather than an actual political barrier. In the 1829 introduction to Rob Roy Scott attributed the interest of that historical figure to "this strong contrast betwixt the civilised and cultivated mode of life o n the o n e side of the Highland line, and the wild and lawless adven­ tures which were habitually undertaken and achieved In o n e who dwelt on the opposite side of that ideal boundarv." Wtwerley and Rob Roy exploit the contrast most deliberately. The structure of Redgauntlet is similar—though the action moves from Edinburgh to the south and west, suggesting that the Highland line exercises an ideal rather than literal influence on the Waverlex Novels. T h e passive hero in each of these romances is appropriately an Englishman. In A Legend of Monlrose and The Fair Maid of Perth Lowlanders journev into the lawless and primitive region. Scott inherits this kind of motion from the picaresque tradition. But the direction of the journey in his romance differs from that of the picaresque novel. T h e protagonist of the eighteenth-century

THE HIGHLAND LINE

57

novel in England travels toward the city, to London or to Bath, where civilization becomes, in effect, the victim of the hero's or heroine's in­ nocence. Instead of searching out and exposing actual human behav­ ior, romance projects ideal values. Scott's traveler sets out from Ed­ inburgh, or from England, to probe the lawless state that civilization has overcome. As in the old romance, which moved from court to country, the journey is undertaken with the ultimate expectation of af­ firming rather than criticizing existing values. The superiority of soci­ ety Scott takes for granted. Moreover, from a position of strength in organized and accepted morality, the journey of romance turns inward, exploring the instinc­ tual life of man. It is the same with a great part of the narratives of my friend Mr. Coo­ per. We sympathise with his Indian chiefs and backwoodsmen, and ac­ knowledge, in the characters which he presents to us, the same truth of human nature by which we should feel ourselves influenced if placed in the same condition. So much is this the case, that, though it is difficult, or almost impossible, to reclaim a savage, bred from his youth to war and the chase, to the restraints and the duties of civilised life, nothing is more easy or common than to find men who have been educated in all the habits and comforts of improved society, willing to exchange them for the wild labours of the hunter and the fisher. The very amusements most pursued and relished by men of all ranks, whose constitutions per­ mit active exercise, are hunting, fishing, and, in some instances, war, the natural and necessary business of the savage of Dryden, where his hero talks of being —'As free as nature first made man, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.' 1 2

Scott significantly chooses sport to illustrate this movement away from society toward nature. Hunting and fishing, and, hopefully, war, are characterized by their temporary interest. Similarly, the journey in the Waverley Novels proves to be designed as an excursion, by which the hero ventures to explore "the opposite side of that ideal bound­ ary," but returns safely to peaceful society. In the eighteenth century, especially in the years after 1745, the Highlands of Scotland were thoroughly "pacified" in the interests of legal and political security. Conditions in this period were in some ways analogous to the frontier of nineteenth-century America. The union of 1707 was commercially unfavorable to all parts of Scotland, 12

1 8 3 0 i n t r o d u c t i o n t o The Monastery,

58

C H A R A C T E R AND

TOPOGRAPHY

and Hanoverian rule made slower headway north o f the border irrespective o f Stuart sympathies. T h e public toleration o f smuggling, as evidence o f the resentment o f this settlement, is frequently remarked in the Waverley Novels. T h e local history o f the century preceding 1814 provided a concrete source for the contrast o f civilization and lawlessness, just as the closing o f the frontier in the nineteenth century continues to supply a theme for popular American literature today. History, therefore, furnished the same kind o f material as geography. According to Scott's general preface o f 1829, visits to the Highlands and conversations with the veterans of 1745 were central to the inspiration of the Waverley Novels. "It naturally occurred to me that the ancient traditions and high spirit of a people who, living in a civilised age and country, retained so strong a tincture o f manners belonging to an early period o f society, must afford a subject favourable for romance, if it should not prove a curious tale marred in the telling." We often credit Scott, however, with modern historical notions that he did not possess. Though he freely contrasted the " m a n n e r s " o f civilized and primitive ages, he did not assume that men were fundamentally products o f a particular age and e c o n o m i c condition. T h e test o f the latter concept o f history is the full sense of the present as a concrete and particular environment. Stendhal and Bal/ac were able to transform the "atmospheric Historism" o f romanticism into "atmospheric realism," but this process was not accomplished in English fiction until the eighteen-f'oi ties. 1 ' Scott was convinced of the primary uniformity o f human nature in all periods. He would agree with David Hume that "the same motives alwa\s produce the same actions," and that history discovers "the constant and uni\ersal principles o f human n a t u r e . " " In the general preface Scott c o n n e c t e d his venture into prose romance with his experience in completing a romance of the antiquar\ Joseph Strutt. He proposed to render "a similar work more light and obvious to general comprehension . . . [and] founded on . . . more "CI

A n e i b a i h , Mimesis,

t o r i c i s m , " journal " i.ssays

Moial,

Ir.ins Ti.isU, pp

«/ Aesllirlii s anil ,1 >1 C.uliasm I'ohlii al, anil Lilnaiy,

ed T

H H - 1 8 , also his "Yk o a n d 8 ( 1 0 t1.)) II

\esthetic His-

1 1(1-18

G i e e n and

I". II

( . r o s e (2 vols. L o n -

d o n , 1 8 7 5 ) , 2: t')8. Foi i h e o p i n i o n lhal Si oil a d l i e i e s lo iln- e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t m \ l a t i o n alisl view ol history i a t h e i than l o m a n l i c Insioi k ism see H u m a n F o i b e s , Hie Libeial ghian

Itlni o/ Ihslon

(Cainbi idge, F i n l a n d , 1 9 5 2 ) , pp

1,'lli-:!", .uid n 2 0 2 . pp

An-

190-91.

F o r b e s d i e s Ihe c o n c u r i e i H c ol C a i h l e , l a m e , B a g e h o t , R u s k m , A \V B e n n , B i u h a n , a n d L e g o n i s a n d Ca/ainian on ibis p o m l , against i h e dissent ol G the o p p o s i t e view see Leslie S t e p h e n , Horns

in a l.ibiaiy

M

I 6 2 - 0 5 ; a n d e s p e c i a l ! ) the Marxist l e a d i n g ol G e o i g L n k a t s , l)n Unions, lin, 1 9 5 5 ) , pp. 2 . V 0 0

FieveKan. For

(3 vols. L o n d o n ,

1892), 1

he Roman

(Ber-

THE HIGHLAND LINE

59

modern events." His reservations about Queenhoo Hall are more ex­ plicit in the dedicatory epistle to Ivavhoe: T h e l a t e i n g e n i o u s M r . S t r u t t , i n h i s r o m a n c e of Q u e e n - H o o - H a l l [ s i c ] , a c t e d u p o n a n o t h e r p r i n c i p l e ; a n d 111 d i s t i n g u i s h i n g Isetween w h a t w a s a n c i e n t a n d m o d e r n , f o r g o t , a s it a p p e a r s t o m e , t h a t e x t e n s i v e n e u t i a l g r o u n d , t h e l a r g e p r o p o r t i o n , t h a t is, of m a n n e r s a n d s e n t i m e n t s w h i c h aie common to us and to our ancestors, having been handed down unalt e i e d f r o m t h e m t o u s , o r w h i c h , a r i s i n g o u t of t h e p r i n c i p l e s of o u r c o m m o n n a t u r e , m u s t h a v e e x i s t e d a l i k e i n e i t h e r society. . . . T h e pas­ s i o n s . . . a r e g e n e r a l l y t h e s a m e i n all r a n k s a n d c o n d i t i o n s , all c o u n t r i e s and ages; and it follows, as a matter ofcour.se, that the opinions, habits of t h i n k i n g , a n d a c t i o n s , h o w e v e r i n f l u e n c e d b y t h e p e c u l i a r s t a t e o f soci­ ety, m u s t still, u p o n t h e w h o l e , b e a r a s t r o n g r e s e m b l a n c e t o e a c h o t h e r .

Scott hesitates, in this last sentence, as if he were aware of the im­ pending surge of historicism. In Waverley he contended that "the object of my tale is more a description of men than manners," and further lesolved to escape the "disadvantages" of recounting the man­ ners of the previous century "by throwing the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors;—those passions com­ mon to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fif­ teenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and dimity waistcoat of the present day" (Ch. 1). The dynamics of human nature are thus supposed to be the constant of history. Because history, and the peculiar situation of the Highlands, must reflect "passions common to men," history and geography in the Waverley Novels converge with a topography of the mind. The conflict of individual "romantic" energies against the civilizing restraints of soci­ ety conforms to the chief interior conflict of passion and reason. Λ re­ ciprocal arrangement obtains between the external and internal con­ flict, so that it is difficult to speak of one conflict without drawing a metaphor from the other. (Treating history in terms of the passions has since gone out of fashion, though the use of topographical meta­ phors for the mind has become, if anything, more common.) The contrast of light and dark heroes and heroines contributes to Scott's image of Scotland in the eighteenth century. Conversely, the contrast of Highlands and Lowlands, or of Scotland and England, elaborates a philosophy of mind and ethics. In The Highland Widow Captain Campbell, a Highland officer, doubts if his superior officer will sympa­ thize with the tragic crime of Hamish MacTavish: "General is half a Lowlander, half an Englishman. He has no idea of the high and enthusiastic character which, in these mountains, often brings ex-

60

CHARACTER AND TOPOGRAPHY

alted virtues in contact with great crimes, which, however, are less of­ fences of the heart than errors of the understanding" (Ch. 5). In the less civilized Highlands emotions prevail over the understanding; and each individual Highlander illustrates the rule. Even the Scottish romances are more usefully interpreted as gen1 eral studies of the conflict of nature and civilization than as particular imaginative tales of Scottish history. Rob Roy rejects Frank Osbaldistone's offer to help settle his account with society on the grounds that he cannot live without nature: "the heather that I have trode upon when living, must bloom ower me when I am dead—my heart would sink, and my arm would shrink and wither like fern in the frost, were I to lose sight of my native hills; nor has the world a scene that would console me for the loss of the rocks and cairns, wild as they are, that you see around us" (Ch. 35). As if in direct response to this feeling for nature, Rob Roy longs for the condition of man that philosophers regularly characterized as the state of nature: "it was a merry warld when every man held his ain gear wi' his ain grip, and when the country side wasna fashed wi' warrants and poindings and apprizings, and a' that cheatrv craft" (Ch. 25). Law of property is the J principal civilizing force. On behalf of his English novices, Bailie NicolJarvie paints a similar picture of the Highlands, substituting the present geographical equivalent for the world which Rob Rov rele­ gates to the historical past: "They are clean anither set frae the like o ' hu/:—there's nae bailiecourts amang them—nae magistrates that clmna bear the sword in vain, like the worthy deacon that's awa', and, 1 may sa't, like mvself and other present magistrates in this city—But it's just the laird's command, and the loon maun Ioup [the fellow must leap]; and the never another law hae they but the length o' their dirks—the broadsword's pursuer, or plaintiff, as von Englishers ca' it, and the target is defender; the stoutest head bears langest out;—and there's a Hieland plea for ve." Owen groaned deeply; and I allow that the description did not greatlv increase my desire to trust myself in a country as lawless as he described these Scottish mountains. [Ch. 26]

The basic contrast of nature and civilization, and of natives and citi­ zens, made the romance of Scott peculiarly meaningful to the Ameri­ can audience. But the American frontier had already contributed something to this romance before the Waverley Novels were imported to the United States. For Europeans one of the· symbols of man in a state of nature was the American Indian. This symbol formed part of Scott's own image of the Highlands: "It was not above sixty or seventy years . . . since the whole north of Scotland was under a state of gov-

THE HIGHLAND LINE

61

eminent nearly as simple and patriarchal as those of our good allies the Mohawks and Iroquois." 1 "' Rob Roy shares his symbolic stature with that of the Indian, and an Indian in close vicinitv to modern soci­ ety: "Thus a character like his, blending the wild virtues, the subtle policy, and unrestrained license of an American Indian, was flourish­ ing in Scotland during the Augustan age of Queen Anne and Cieorge I.""' The long factual and legendary account of Rob RON that follows in the 1829 introduction does not remind us stronglv of an American Indian, but that is his symbolic value. The highly generalized cast of the conflict of law and lawlessness in the Waverley Novels may be discerned in an excursion that sets out in the very opposite direction from the Highland line. In her journey from Edinburgh to London in The Heart of Mid-Lothian Jeanie Deans may be seen moving out of the sphere of civilized life and then into it again. She meets persons who seem to originate from another moral world: '"In what strange school,' thought Jeanie to herself, 'has this poor creature been bred up, where such remote precautions are taken against the pursuits of justice? What would my father or Reu­ ben Butler think if I were to tell them there are sic folk in the world?"' (Ch. 30). A little later she resolves to follow Madge Wild­ fire as long as her wandering steps seem likely to lead "into contact with law and legal protection" (Ch. 31). In the same romance Scott introduces Effie Deans, who transgresses the laws of society, as an "un­ taught child of nature, whose good and evil seemed to flow rather from impulse than from reflection" (Ch. 10). She belongs, if we pur­ sue the geographical symbolism of the Waverley Novels, in the High­ lands with Hamish MacTavish. Similarly, at the end of The Heart oj Mid-Lothian, Staunton expresses grave apprehension at the approach of an unusual storm. Butler, the passive hero, scorns the notion that "the laws of nature should correspond in their march with our ephemeral deeds or sufferings," but Staunton believes implicitly in the prophetic character of natural events (Ch. 51). He is, indeed, fated to die in a few moments by the hand of his natural son. "The eyes of the lad were keen and sparkling; his gesture free and noble, like that of all savages" (Ch. 50). And the boy flees in the logical di­ rection, westward to America, where he murders his inhuman master, and disappears among "the next tribe of wild Indians" (Ch. 52). The two worlds are distinguished therefore in the romance that is morally the most complex of the Waverley Novels. The two extremities of the moral world set the passive hero in mor'

Dedicatory epistle to Ivanhoe. 1829 introduction to Rob Roy.

62

CHARACTER AND TOPOGRAPHY

tion. His allegiance, however, is firmly to one side. He may tour the dark, wild Highlands but never negotiate between that world and the achieved order of his own world. For him the Highland line is an ideal but rigid moral barrier that he cannot violate, though he may have pleasurable glimpses of the other side. If he were actually to par­ ticipate in that other Iife, or attempt to negotiate a fresh settlement between its claims and the claims of "prudence and principle," then, in terms of this fable, he would have to depart forever into the west. The fable does not envision a compromise. Bailie Nicol Jarvie, him­ self a magistrate of Glasgow, does negotiate between the states of na­ ture and civilization. He pays blackmail to certain Highlanders, in­ cluding Rob Roy, for protection. But the consequent irony of his advice to Frank Osbaldistone mocks the moral predicament of he­ roes: "ye suldna keep ower muckle company wi' Hielandmen and thae wild cattle. Can a man touch pitch an no be defiled?—aye mind that" (Ch. 23).

PROPERTY T h e power of perpetuating o u r property in our families is o n e of the most valuable and interesting circumstances be­ l o n g i n g t o it, a n d t h a t which t e n d s t h e most to t h e perpetu_ a t i o n of society itself. It m a k e s o u r weakness subservient to o u r virtues; it grafts b e n e v o l e n c e even u p o n avarice. —Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in Fxnne

[ P r o p e r t y ] is, in t h e last resort, t h e palladium of all that o u g h t t o b e d e a r t o us, a n d must never b e a p p r o a c h e d but with awe ancl v e n e r a t i o n . —Godwiη, PoliticalJustKe

10. Nature and Convention

T

HE DENOUEMENT in the Waverley Novels obeys an eco­ nomic motive: the passive hero and blonde heroine ordinarily inherit a superabundance of real property. According to Wil­ liam Paley's Principles (1785), of which there were twentv-one editions by 1814, "the real foundation of o u r right [ t o property] is, THE LAW OF THE LAND ." 1 For Paley, private property is ultimately sanctioned by divine law; but neither divine law nor natural right is required to un­ derstand the practical foundation of property, which consists of the existing legal "regulations" agreed upon by men. Property rests di­ rectly on the rational order of society, and is secure only by virtue of an agreement among men to respect it—that is, to respect the exist­ ing titles to property, and ultimately to respect reality, or things as they are. In the Waverley Novels, by adhering steadfastly to the law of the land—so steadfastly that they may hardly act in any direction— the passive hero and blonde heroine demonstrate their respect for property and their fitness to possess and perpetuate the title to prop­ erty for future generations. In the second book of the Commentaries Blackstone warms to the subject of jura rerum, the rights of things, with the observation that 1

Principles of Moral and Pohtxal Philosophy, i n Works, e d . D . S . W a x l a n d ( 5 v o l s L o u ­

don, 1837), 1: Bk. Ill, Ft. I, ch. 4.

64

PROPERTY

" t h e r e is n o t h i n g w h i c h s o g e n e r a l l y s t r i k e s t h e i m a g i n a t i o n , a n d e n ­ gages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of this world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe." In a subsequent sentence (reflect­ i n g o n t h e g e n e r a l o b s c u r i t y o f p r o p e r t y law) h e u n c o n s c i o u s l y sketches both sides of the emotional stake in property: "Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look back to the means by w h i c h it w a s a c q u i r e d , a s if f e a r f u l o f s o m e d e f e c t i n o u r title." 2 T h e excitement of the idea of property derives from the expectation of m a t e r i a l b e n e f i t a n d f r o m t h e a n x i e t y o f loss, f r o m t h e s e c u r i t y of t a n ­ g i b l e t h i n g s a n d t h e u n c e r t a i n t y o f a b s t r a c t titles. P r o p e r t y is f a r f r o m b e i n g a d r y l e g a l r e l a t i o n . P a l e v a n d Blacks t o n e a r e t h e g r e a t r a t i o n a l i z i n g m i n d s of t h e i r a g e ; t h e y a c c e p t t h i n g s a s t h e y a r e w i t h s o m e t i m e s a s t o n i s h i n g c o m p l a c e n c y . Yet t h e excitement, the possible irrationality, of the idea of property reveals itself i n t h e i r p a g e s . P a l e y ' s t r e a t m e n t o f t h e s u b j e c t b e g i n s w i t h a famous but unresolved parable of pigeons: If \u should sec a flock of pigeons in a field of corn, and if

. \ou

should see ninetv-nine of them gatheiing all thev got into a heap; reserv­ ing nothing for themselves but the (half and refuse; keeping tins heap for one, and that the weakest, perhaps worst, pigeon of the flock; sitting round, and looking on, all the winter, whilst this one was devouring, throwing about, and wasting it; and if a pigeon more hardv o r liungrv than the rest, touched a gram of the hoard, all the others instanth f l y i n g u p o n i t , a n d t e a r i n g i t t o p i e c e s : if YOU s h o u l d s e e t h i s , \ o u w o u l d see nothing more than what is everv day piactised a n d established among men.!

T h e a n a l o g y w o u l d b e s u b v e r s i v e i n a n y a g e . As P a l e v w r i t e s i n t h e fol­ lowing paragraph, "there must be some very important advantages to a c c o u n t f o r a n i n s t i t u t i o n , w h i c h , i n t h e \ i e w o f it a b o \ e g i v e n , is s o p a r a d o x i c a l a n d u n n a t u r a l . " I I e lists, i n fac t, f o u r a d v a n t a g e s o f p r o p ­ e r t y a s a n i n s t i t u t i o n : it i n c r e a s e s p r o d u c t i o n I n s e c u r i n g t h e p r o d u c t ; "it p r e s e r v e s t h e p r o d u c e o f t h e e a r t h t o m a t u r i t \ " f o r t h e s a m e r e a ­ s o n ; it p r e v e n t s w a r a n d c o n l u s i o n ; a n d "it i m p r o v e s t h e c o n v e n i e n c e of l i v i n g " by s t i m u l a t i n g i n v e n t i o n a n d d i v i s i o n o f l a b o r . 1 B u t P a l e y c a n d i s c o v e r n o hilly s a t i s l a c t o i ν f o u n d a t i o n o f t h e right o f ' p r o p e r t y —

" Willi,mi Bi.κ ksioiic, Coiiiiiii'iiliun-s mi Ilir Iinus / !'.ngluiitl (IT>ih od I \ols., London, >807-:M, lioni hihhs \iiunil ami Motleni (1700) m the I'oinn (,/ /»//» Diylrii, ed [anu s Kinsley. l\ol\ ( O v l o i d ("laiendon. 1958), 4. 1476. " R o b r i l C. ( . o i d o n , "Si oil, Racine, and die Fuline of l l o n o i , " in Sailt and His hi/hii'iiii'. vd ]. II Alexandei and D.md I l e u m ( \ b e i d e e n \ssoc i.uion tor Scottish I.ileiai\ Studies, 1981), pp. 255-1)5, and "The Maiksman o! Rau-nsuood l'ouei and Le^ilimac \ in The ISnilt- o/ l.ammn mooi." .\'iinimilh-Cniliii \ I itnattm- 41 ( 1 9 8 6 ) . 4 9 - 7 1 . Lukacs, "Class (ionsc lousness," pp. 5 5 - 5 9 .

HISTORY & REVOLUTION: OLD MORTALITY

211

examine the fate of the higher ranks in society, including the destiny of the middle-of-the-road hero. Determined not to taint Scott with the charge of bourgeois humanism, Lukacs virtually ignores the plot of the novels, which not only rewards the strictest respect for prop­ erty but reflects a political theory of the permanence of the British Constitution, a kind of end of history. The plot of the Waverle\ Nov­ els is unfortunately every bit as metahistorical as Lukacs's own beliefs, but metahistorical in an opposed direction. Lukacs is hardly alone in neglecting novel plots, the study of which demands sorting out protagonists from other characters, a sense of where the reader's attention has been rhetorically directed, and above all consideration of the outcome of an action. Thus historians often admire some parliamentary maneuver in a Trollope novel—or feminists, the behavior of a special heroine—without concerning themselves with the resonant affirmation of a society of landed gentle­ men with which the Trollope novel typically concludes. Still, Luktics labors under a particular difficulty in this regard, because he insists so upon endings—upon closure—within his definition of nineteenthcentury realism. That insistence can be found almost anywhere in his writings, from his fixed admiration of Scott to what I take to be his misreading of Joyce's realism. Some praise accorded Tolstoy, for ex­ ample, he summarizes this way: "The profound realism of Tolstoy's world thus rests on his ability to present an intricate and differenti­ ated world and yet to make it quite clear, by poetical means, that un­ derlying all this diversity of manifestations there is a coherent, uni­ fied foundation to all human destinies."*' That "yet" is Lukacs's slight acknowledgment that realism's detailed representations do not of themselves confer any outcome upon events; the outcome must be im­ posed "by poetical means." The association of strong closure with real­ ism is all the more evident when Lukacs dismisses myriad forms of modernism, most of which he dislikes: Whereas in life 'whither?' is a consequence of 'whence?', in literature 'whither?' determines the content, selection, and proportion of'the vari­ ous elements. The finished work may resemble life in observing a casual sequence; hut it would he no more than an aibitiaiv chionicle if theie were not this reversal of direction. It is the perspective, the ad quern,

Ieimnnts

that determines the significance of each element in a work of

Liikacs, S t u d i e s i n E i n o p e a n R e a l i s m , p. 177. '"I.ukacs, C o n t e m p o r a r y R e a l i s m , p. 5 5 . F D I his belief that Jovce s iealism goes no­ where, see pp. 17-19. i7

212

HISTORY & REVOLUTION: OLD MORTALITY

Thus for this critic to neglect the regular denouement of virtually all Scott's novels runs counter to his inmost beliefs about literature, about realism. But in English literature the property plot, a reaffirma­ tion of bourgeois humanism, supplied conventional endings for nov­ els throughout the nineteenth century, or until the advent of modern­ ism. It is as if, for Lukacs, the shape of bourgeois fiction were always pleasing regardless of its politics. Twenty years ago, Fredric Jameson chided us for viewing "our cul­ ture, indeed, as a vast imaginary museum in which all forms and all intellectual positions are equally welcome side by side, providing they are accessible to contemplation alone." Thus, among other things Marxian, we failed to understand Lukacs's liiework, committed as it was to a particular and continuous vision of society. w Because of my own reading of the Waverley Novels, however, and this perceived con­ tradiction in Lukacs's thinking about them, I felt immediately that I would have to pick and choose among the positions taken in The His­ torical Novel. Lukacs assuredly resides in my imaginary museum, a for­ midable display alongside other authorities on Scott and the histori­ cal novel, but museums for the contemplation of theories are useful, even necessary institutions. w Jameson,

M a r x i s y n a n d F o r m , pp. 1()0-63

PATRIARCHY, CONTRACT, AND REPRESSION IN SCOTT'S NOVELS

T

HOUCiH SCOTT'S contribution to historical consciousness and to historiography undeniably rests upon specific achieve­ ments such as Old Mortality, his success as a creative mvthographer of the nineteenth century followed from the continuities, the similarities of action, in the twenty-seven novels he composed from 1814 until his death in 1832. Mainly, 1 have argued, Scott promul­ gated during the long century of his fame a double fable of past ac­ tions and present stability in the social scheme of things. But this double fable and the confidence underlying it were not untroubled. Dramatically, the promised outcome of the plot is challenged before­ hand, by intrusions of the low style and even heroic misgivings— Shakespearean techniques that Scott uses to dramatize modern forms of uncertainty. Judith Wilt, exaggerating a little, locates in Old Mortal­ ity "the single most poignant and typical gesture of all the protago­ nists in all the Waverley Novels." The instance she singles out is when "Morton comes home from his truant activism, his captaincv, at the revels, to knock on the door of home with 'a sort of hesitating tap, which carried an acknowledgment of transgression in its very sound, and seemed rather to solicit, than command attention."' 1 The narra­ tor's "acknowledgment of transgression" seems to say it all. A certain authorial irony plays about the expression even before the critic lays hold of it, but that degree of perspective is still consistent with Scott's helping to define modern behavior. Implicit in civilization itself, in the pacification of behavior and commitment to property celebrated in the Waverlev Novels, is a persis­ tent drama involving not only past historical actions but the immedi­ ate reactions of the protagonists. Both aspects of this diama make their contribution to civilization: the dynamic of the myth is the same as that of each novel, a bearing of actions upon outcome. The protag onists' actions—most likely their inactions or restraint—certify their worthiness to benefit from society. The inward drama often discovers heroes voluntarily submitting themselves to civil, or even military, au­ thorities in order to affirm their commitment to society. Tvpicallv— and here I differ slightly from Wilt—they do not seek to identify with i a father, or male head of the family, but with an authority to whom ' Judith Wilt, .SVw/ Leaves: The Sovets of WaIte, Sa,It (ChicaRo: Unnersitv „f Chuago

Press, 1985), p. 86.

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they have contractually agreed to give way. Their "acknowledgment of transgression" thus corresponds to a newer idea of authority in which they actually participate. On behalf of civilization, an inward affirma­ tion of loyalty is enacted repeatedly in the Waverley Novels. Scott dramatizes, in order to resolve, the very antagonisms that Nietzsche and Freud will decree are unresolvable. Just so, without Scott and other novelists there would be less understanding of the burdens of a social contract for Nietzsche and Freud to work on. Scott's first move as a novelist in 1814 was to pluck Edward WaverIey from the library at Waverley-Honour and cause him to take up a commission with a regiment stationed in Scotland, in the year 1745 (he was supposedly writing Waverley "sixty years since," as the subtitle has it). Being unused to discipline and curious about his relations in Perthshire, the young hero directly requests a leave of absence and rides off to visit the Baron Bradwardine at Tully-Veolan. Thence he gets a chance to trek to the highlands in pursuit of the Baron's rus­ tled cows, while he remains largely oblivious to the political rising on behalf of the most romantic of lost causes, the return of the Stuarts to the throne of England and Scotland. Sometime after he has become the guest of the chieftain and Stuart conspirator Fergus Mac-Ivor, he is apprised by a letter from Rose Bradwardine that so­ journing in the highlands has brought him under suspicion. How he liimself should have been involved in such suspicions, conscious that until yesterday he Iiad been free from harbouring a thought against the prosperity of the reigning family, seemed inexplicable. . . . Still he was aware that unless he meant at once to embrace the proposal of Fergus Mac-Ivor, it would deeply concern him to leave this suspicious neighbourhood without delay, and repair where his conduct might un­ dergo a satisfactory examination. (Cli. 28)

In this typical turn of the Scott hero's adventures, note two things: the threatened danger comes irom the more civili/ed Hanoverian settlement to which the hero already subscribes; and his immediate response is voluntarily to resubmit himself to that establishment for "examination." What this voluntary examination would consist of is a little unclear, for when the hero turns southward for the purpose— after an interlude with a blacksmith thai enac ts the politics of the dav in the low style—he is promptly arrested for high treason and under­ goes a formal examination preliminary to a criminal trial. It is Waverley's revulsion from this treatment that throws him temporarily into the Stuart rebellion after all. The reader may not exactly be surprised by Waverley's arrest, since it was precisely such danger that Rose Bradwardine warned of, and

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quite a few times heroes in novels by Fielding or Smollett had been aiiested before this. Waverley himself is surprised, indignant, exasper­ ated, and ashamed, though only a few days before he decided "to re­ pair where his conduct might undergo a satisfactory examination." Thus in his first novel Scott invented an action in which the hero am­ biguously invites and resists his own arrest—a posture so modern that it more nearly resembles a novel by Kafka than any bv Scott's predecessors. Waverley demands of' the local magistrate, a retired major, to hear the charges against him. Besides the military crimes of desertion and inciting mutiny, he Hnds himself accused of high trea­ son, or "the highest delinquency of which a subject can be guiltv." "And by what authority am 1 detained to reply to such heinous cal­ umnies?" "By one which you must not dispute, nor 1 disobev." He handed to Waverley a warrant from the Supreme Criminal Court of Scotland, in full form, for apprehending and securing the person of Edward Waverley, Esq. suspected of treasonable practices and other high crimes and misdemeanours.

Because Waverley and other of Scott's heroes are so consciously com­ mitted to authority and to correct legal procedure, the voices of in­ crimination in such a scene are partly internal. In the present in­ stance, the narrator explains the internal case this way: "Although Edward's mind acquitted him of the crimes with which he was charged, yet a hasty review of his own conduct convinced him that he might have great difficulty in establishing his innocence to the satis­ faction of others." In the course of his formal "Examination" (the chapter title), the hero inwardly conducts his own review of the case, and now the question inevitably arises, of the "satisfactory examina­ tion" he has promised himself earlier: Satisfactory to whom? There follows an elaborate Kafkaesque sequence over the personal papers he has about him, one of which he tries to conceal because he treas­ ures it as a love-gift from Flora Mac-Ivor but which Major Melville, the magistrate, sees in a political light; the paper consists of a poem, no less, not addressed to Waverley at all but to the memory of one Cap­ tain Wogan who deserted the Puritan for the Royalist side in 1648, and who bore the same forename as our hero."' After these embarrass­ ments, the prisoner—"for such our hero must now be called"—recov­ ers his presence of mind and defends himself as best he can against 2

The story of Edward Wogan was given by Clarendon: see The Histoiy of the Rihellioii

and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dnnn MacRav, 6 \ols (Oxford· Clarendon, 1888),

5: 313-15.

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the circumstantial evidence, but there comes a point when Melville speaks of an incident at Tully-Veolan (the Baron defended the hero's honor while he slept) that "cannot be charged against you in a court of justice" but ought nevertheless to be answered. It is as if all the hero's shortcomings, even incidents of which he was not conscious, are matters for examination. This was too much. Beset and pressed on every hand by accusations, in which gross falsehoods were blended with such circumstances of truth as could not fail to procure them credit—alone, unfriended, a n d in a strange land, Waverlev almost gave u p his life and honour for lost, a n d leaning his head upon his hand, resolutely refused to answer any further questions, since the fair a n d candid statement he had already made had only served to furnish arms against him.

Though Melville has assured him that this is not yet an actual trial ("your examination will be transmitted elsewhere"), the hero's sud­ den lapse into silence can hardly help him. Moreover, he refuses to tell anything of the Mac-Ivors, for that would be a poor return for their "unsuspecting hospitality" to himself (Ch. 31). This stance, fine as it is, indirectly affirms that, where the hero alone is concerned, there can be no concealment of his activities from a duly appointed authority of civil society such as this stern magistrate. The authorities may one day be satisfied, perhaps, but the hero never. The experi­ ence is like a bad dream, in which the threat to his being—his very "life and honour"—seems to extend from the society with which he identifies. The episode is representative, for suspense in Waverley fi­ nally turns not on the question of whether the hero will fight for the Pretender, as he half-heartedly does for a while, but whether he can get clear again from the due and lawftd penalties for engaging in such an adventure. The career of Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy—sixth of the novels but written just four years later—is a close variant to that of Edward Waverley. Scott's first hero is arrested but never actually brought to trial: the novel itself f unctions as his trial, in the course of which he is absolved from guilt by circumstances, perhaps, but never quite from the sensation that a trial might still be pending. Osbaldistone, on the other hand, is several times threatened with arrest, but typically the complaint is destroyed or the warrant never presented: the tenuousness of the action, in fact, makes it seem still more a study in psycho­ logical guilt than the former novel. For Waverley, the historical novel­ ist exploited the events of 1745 for their familiar detail and sequence; in Rob Roy, set thirty years earlier, after the Union of Scotland and En­ gland, Scott is vague about history and keeps hinting at Jacobite plots

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only to forget them again. An implausible scheme of commercial fraud substitutes for politics, and this plot rapidly gives way before the end to the restoration of the Osbaldistone estate to its riehtful o heir (Frank's lather, after all, was the elder son in his generation, so Frank ought to—and does—inherit the property). For a novel com­ posed in 1818, the treatment of capitalism is scarcely forward-looking: though Frank is made to realize that he might have saved his mer­ chant father some anguish by joining the business, this barely convinc­ ing recognition depends on archaic motives of loyalty and filial duty. Nevertheless, the familial and personal turn of Rob Roy—unusually for Scott, it is narrated in the first person—permits one to glimpse more inward aspects of the hero's commitment to civil society. Rob Roy is another novel in which mere proximity to crime is bound to get the hero in trouble with the authorities. Francis Osbaldistone is out hunting in Northumberland with his cousins and Die Vernon, when he learns that he has come under suspicion for rob­ bery and that his supposed victim is a government agent. "And so it is high treason, then, and not simple robbery, of which I am accused!" Miss Vernon's quip that high treason "has been in all ages accounted the crime of a gentleman" only succeeds in irritating the hero, whose politics and morals, he reminds her, are Hanoverian. She advises him to flee to Scotland, but as a hero of the Waverley line he insists on confronting immediately the justice of the peace before whom the charges were made (Ch. 7). Similarly, contending with Rashleigh Osbaldistone in the college yards at Glasgow, Frank insists, "you shall go with me before a magistrate," when it is Rashleigh all along who is conspiring to have him arrested and who boasts that warrants have al­ ready been drawn up for the purpose (Ch. 25). Obviously it is not vil­ lainy alone that threatens the hero. When crimes occur around him, he has a certain propensity to appear before the authorities, or even to turn up in the Glasgow prison after visiting hours: At finding myself so unexpectedly, fortuitously, and, as it were, by stealth, introduced within one of the legal fortresses of Scotland, I could not help recollecting my adventure in Northumberland, and fretting at the strange incidents which again, without any demerits of my own, threatened to place me in a dangerous and disagreeable collision with the laws of a country which I visited only in the capacity of a stranger. (Ch. 21)

The novel Rob Roy is unmistakably of two minds as to where the dan­ ger for the individual lies. The English hero and most of the Scots outwardly fear to set foot in the highlands, where lawlessness prevails. But for all the attention directed to that danger, the hero himself is

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scarcely threatened except by the law. At least four times, Osbaldistone is threatened with arrest, and each time he is saved by the in­ tervention of Rob Roy, whose independence of the law is notorious. In the last instance, the warrant names not only Frank but Die Ver­ non and her father Sir Frederick as traitors, yet the hero insists, "Commit no violence—give me leave to look at your warrant, and, if it is formal and legal, I shall not oppose it" (Ch. 39). Apparently, a young gentleman untrained in the law can recognize at a glance the authority of a warrant. Cousin Rashleigh is once again behind this move, and all three persons—hero, heroine, and her father, as if yoked in a courtship plot—are legally taken prisoner in the moments before Rob Rov enters and this time slays Rashleigh outright. To summarize: the hero is strictly law-abiding and fears only lawless­ ness; he is threatened by law nevertheless and continuously made anx­ ious on this account; and if it were not for the outlaw Rob Roy he would never be relieved from this plight. Readers of the novel suppos­ edly share the anxiety with the suspense, and if the}' should take this repeated action seriously, Francis Osbaldistone would seem to be in constant danger of being hanged. But R o b R o y is far too entertaining and too tentative to permit much fear of that. Rashleigh is too devil­ ish a villain, Frank's other cousins and his usurping uncle too boor­ ish, and Diana too much of a sportsman for the initial mystery to be very gripping. Thereafter, Scott's own interest in the story may have been distracted by the inspiration that made Andrew Fairservice the hero's self-appointed squire and especially by composing the dialect for two other characters, Rob Roy and Bailie Nicol Jarvie. 1 In the Cilasgow prison scene that ought psychologically to tell for the hero (Chs. 22 and 23), Frank hardly bothers to say a word, while Rob and the Bailie meet as old acquaintances. Frank faithfully narrates their conversation, putting in all the dialect spellings. As the narrator, he cannot really be in much danger of being incarcerated for long, let alone of being hanged: psychologically, in fact, the novel is something of a tease. But for all that, the hero's plight does count in the novel's political dimension. Much weaker than W ' t w e r l e w O l d M o r t a l i t y , and some others as an historical novel and certainly not very impressive as a psychological novel, R o b R o y is nevertheless important for the persis­ tent shape it gives to a myth of modern polity, and all the more so be­ cause of the unexpected threat of legal constraint or punishment. For about a hundred years the Waverlev Novels were very widelv read; they were exported and reprinted and translated into most

i O n B a i l i e N i c o l J a r v i c , s e e D a v i t l B r o w n , WaIlei Sratt anil the Hislontat Imairinatietii ( L o n d o n : R o u t l o d g c , 1 9 7 9 ) , p p . 9 8 - 1 0 8 , a n d W i l t , S e a t ' t Lraxffs t l p p . 5 4 — 5 6 .

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European languages almost immediately; and thus thev contributed to the Western world's store of wisdom. One notable piece of wisdom from Rob Roy, familiar to Victorian readers if not to us, is Bailie Nicol Jarvie's distinction between honor and credit: 1 maun hear naething about honour—we ken naething heie but about ci edit. Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about mak­ ing frays in the street; but Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at liame and makes the pat play." (Ch. 26) At this point the Bailie is reproving the young hero for being con­ cerned with honor and at the same time clearing space for his own occupation. His measure of honor as a willingness to kill or be killed is just, however, and his put-down of honor—its reduction to a brawl in the streets—is very quick. When Scott writes at his best, dialect— that is, the low style—is subversive of most pretensions. So the Bailie's boast about credit is exaggerated somewhat: he means it but means it as a joke, just to be safe. Credit always remains in doubt, if only in the sense that it ought to be open to examination, like a Waverley hero. Even personification sits a little less easily with credit than with honor; and on his own side of the comparison the Bailie's put-down is more of a come-down, reflecting a determination to stay out of trouble and tend to the profits. Historically speaking, this particular come-down amounts to something like a feminization of culture, for it is traditionally women who sit at home and make the pot boil ("the pat play") while the men are out fighting. The comparison of credit and honor is far from being an isolated witticism in this novel. That the Bailie's meaning is cultural is proved by a misunderstanding of the clerk Owen, who naively begins to inter­ rupt the conversation with a bookkeeper's definition of "credit." That the sense is also historical—credit taking the place of honor over time—is borne out by the subsequent discussion of the survival in the highlands of a less pacific form of government conducted by chiefs like Rob Roy. "Ah, but ye judge Rob hardly," said the Bailie, "ve judge him hardly pnir chield; and the truth is, that ye ken naething about our hill coun­ try, or Hielands, as we ca' them. They are clean anither set frae the like o' huz;—there's nae bailie-courts amang them—nae magistrates that dinna bear the sword in vain . . . like mysell and other present magis­ trates in this city—But it's just the laird's command, and the loon maun loop; and the never another law hae they but the length o' their dirks— the broadsword's pursuer, or plaintiff, as you Englishers ca' it, and the target is defender; the stoutest head bears the langest out;—and there's a Hieland plea for ye."

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Owen groaned deeply; and I allow thai the description did not greatly increase my desire to trust myself in a country so lawless as he described these Scottish mountains. (Ch. 26)

Obviously J a r v i e is e n j o y i n g himself. Like Odysseus telling o f h i s close e s c a p e from the land of t h e Cyclops, h e g o e s o u t o f his way t o r e m a r k t h e a b s e n c e of any m o d e r n system o f justice a m o n g t h e s e s t r a n g e people. Scott treats the talc lightly but also has a s e r i o u s his­ torical p u r p o s e . J a r v i e n e x t p r o d u c e s statistics o n t h e d e m o g r a p h y a n d e c o n o m y o f t h e h i g h l a n d s t h a t , if they a r e n o t actually c u l l e d from the Earl of Selkirk's Obsnvations on the Present State of the High­ lands of Scotland (1804), a r e c o m p i l e d just a s anachronistically i n t h e s a m e spirit. 1 A s t r o n g i n d i c a t i o n o f t h e success with w h i c h S c o t t t o u c h e d o n h i s c u l t u r e ' s m y t h of t h e yielding o f violence t o law c a n b e f o u n d by plac­ i n g NicoI J a r v i e ' s witty distinction b e t w e e n h o n o r a n d c r e d i t s i d e by s i d e with H e n r y M a i n e ' s f a m o u s d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n s t a t u s a n d c o n ­ tract, first p u b l i s h e d in his Ancient Law i n 1861 a n d i n f l u e n t i a l i n soci­ ology t o t h i s clay. T h e l a t t e r d i s t i n c t i o n arises f r o m M a i n e ' s p r i n c i p a l i d e a o f p r o g r e s s in society, f r o m t h e ties o f b i r t h a n d family t o t h o s e o f individual o b l i g a t i o n . " T h e m o v e m e n t o f t h e progressive societies h a s b e e n u n i f o r m in o n e respect," h e wrote. " T h r o u g h all its c o u r s e it h a s b e e n d i s t i n g u i s h e d by t h e g r a d u a l dissolution o f family d e p e n ­ d e n c y a n d t h e g r o w t h o f individual o b l i g a t i o n in its p l a c e . T h e I n d i ­ vidual is steadily s u b s t i t u t e d f o r t h e Family, a s t h e u n i t o f w h i c h civil laws t a k e a c c o u n t . " A c c o m p a n y i n g this r e p l a c e m e n t o f t h e family bv t h e individual is t h e i n c r e a s i n g clarity a n d sway of c o n t r a c t , "which re­ places by d e g r e e s t h o s e f o r m s o f reciprocity in r i g h t s a n d d u t i e s which have t h e i r o r i g i n in t h e Family." T h e n , in t h e final p a r a g r a p h of his c h a p t e r o n "Primitive Society a n d A n c i e n t Law," M a i n e o f f e r s t h e word "status" a s s u m m a r i z i n g r i g h t s a n d d u t i e s d e r i v e d f r o m t h e family a n d c o n c l u d e s a s follows: All t h e forms of Status taken notice of in t h e Law of Persons were de­ rived from, a n d to s o m e extent a r e still c o l o u r e d In, t h e powers a n d privileges anciently residing in t h e Family. If t h e n we emplov Status, ' T h a t these matteis aie In such case, the law and its demands would seem to require the repression necessary to be "integrated" as well as the nuisances suggested bv "infinitesimal." T h e shift in civil punishment delineated by Foucatdt occurred roughly in Scott's lifetime. It is not surprising, therefore, that a novel­ ist so attuned to history and to politics should register main of the ef­ fects theorized by the historian a century and a half later. Foucault writes of the new paradigm that "the guilty person is only o n e of the targets of punishment," and that "everyone must see punishment not only as natural, but in his own interest." ! / T h e innocent Francis Osbaldistone, as we have seen, discovers himself to be such a target. Nor does he fail to appreciate that the system of punishment is in his

!7

Ibid., pp. 222-2:5. Sec also p. 194. Ibitl., pp. l()!S-9.

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own interest. O n o n e occasion in Roh Roy, Frank at o n c e protests his i n n o c e n c e a n d a d d s that robbery is a crime "which would . . . d e s e i \ edly forleit my life t o t h e laws of my c o u n t r y " (Ch. 1 1). T h o u g h little if any a t t e n t i o n has b e e n paid t o such reflections by critics who a p p h f o u c a u l t ' s ideas t o t h e history of t h e novel, Bruce Beiderwell has iecently m a d e u p for this by r e a d i n g t h e Waverley Novels in close con­ j u n c t i o n with expressed theories of p u n i s h m e n t Irom the e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u i y t o t h e present day. , h From t h e Tower of L o n d o n to \illage s t r o n g r o o m s , t h e prisons described in t h e novels a r e old-fashioned af­ fairs, r e m o t e f r o m t h e m o d e r n penitentiary, but t h e same can b e said of nearly all t h e prisons in t h e novels of Dickens, written alter t h e b u i l d i n g o f t h e first penitentiaries. In The Heart of Mid-l.othian, more­ over, Scott a d d r e s s e d s o m e aspects of imprisonment that a n t e d a t e the prison s technological a n d theoretical transformation as a n instru­ m e n t of p u n i s h m e n t . A prison provided t h e title of t h e novel, a n d since t h e title refers b o t h t o t h e gaol in t h e High Street of Edinburgh a n d t o t h e o r g a n i c c e n t e r of a n u r b a n site known as Midlothian to this day, t h e ironies c o u l d n o t b e m o r e Foucauldian. T h e T o l b o o t h , a s it was called, a b u t t e d t h e cathedral, parliament, a n d law c o u r t s o f Scotland's major city. As a n old-style prison, it func­ tions paradoxically in The HearI of Mid-Lothian as t h e c e n t e r of ever\t h i n g t h a t is marginal: t h e relations between t h e law a n d outlaws, force a n d violence, o r d e r a n d disruption. T h o u g h s o m e o f t h e same issues a r e raised elsewhere by Scott—in t h e social banditry of Rob o r t h e wrongs o f H e l e n MacGregor, for example—it is as if in this novel h e c o u l d n o t lay t h e m aside. Not only is t h e great Porteous riot t r e a t e d in such a way that readers a r e led t o s h a r e t h e m o b ' s sense of justice, b u t t h e trial o f Effie Deans casts d o u b t o n t h e justice of a par­ ticular law a n d ultimately o n t h e C o u r t o f Sessions. T o p r e p a r e for t h e P o r t e o u s narrative, t h e novel begins with a smuggling case—al­ ways o f interest t o Scott. H e r e is how h e generalizes the matter: Contraband trade, though it strikes at the root of legitimate govern­ ment, bv encroaching o n its revenues,—though it injures the fair trader, a n d debauches the minds of those engaged in it,—is not usualh looked u p o n , either by the vulgar o r by their betters, in a very heinous point of view. O n the contrary, in those countries where it prevails, the cleverest, boldest, a n d most intelligent of the peasantry, are uniformly engaged in illicit transactions, a n d very often with the sanction of the farmers and inferior gentry. (Ch. 2) w Brutc Beiderwell, Cleorgia Press, 1991)

Power a n d P u n i s h m e n t i n Sous, 27, 128 Cave, Terrene e, 2 2 3 n

D a u e , D o n a l d . 124, 140 f D e I.acv, D a m i a n , 105, 151 t D e Lacv, Hugo, 1 5 0 - 5 1 + De la Marck, William, 2 9 De Stael, A n n e Louise G e r m a i n e , 2, 13, 4 9 f D e Valence, Sir Aymer, 128 -fDe Veie, Arthur. See Philipson, A r t h u r f D e a n s , David, 91, 1 8 3 - 8 4 , 2 4 0 , 241

C e r v a n t e s Saa\edra. Miguel de, 1, 6 - 8 , 15, 178, 2 0 6 - 7 C h a r l e s II, 41, 8 0 , 197 f C h a r l e s Edwaid Stuart, 41, 105, 153. 179 t C h a r l e s the Bold, 41 C h a n c e r , Geolfiev, 2 0 9 fC.ln istian, Edward, 4 8 t C h n s t i e , J o h n , 112 C h r o n i c l e s ot the C a n o n g a t e , 5 6 civil p u n i s h m e n t , 2 3 7 - 4 0 ci\il society, 39, 40, 55, 57, 6 0 - 6 2 , 79, 9 5 , 9 9 , 106, 1 12, 1 1 5 - 1 7 , 125, 1 3 7 - 3 9 , 144, 1 4 7 - 4 9 , 158, 1 6 0 - 6 2 , 1 7 6 - 7 7 , 2 1 3 - 1 4 , 216, 2 3 0 - 4 1 civilization. .Seccivil society Clark, G e o r g e , 198n f C l a v e r h o u s e , G r a h a m of, 129, 130, 1 5 8 59, 164, 168, 1 7 0 - 7 1 , 172, 198, 2 0 3 - 5 , 209 •("Cleveland, C l e m e n t , 41, 43, 45. 5 1 - 5 2 , 53, 9 2 C o b b a n , Allied, 69, 8 3 n , I 4 4 n C o h a n , Ste\en, 2 2 5 - 2 7 C o l e n d g e , Samuel Taylor, 10, 3 7 - 3 8 , 46, 144 Collyer, J . M., 142n Conrad, Joseph, 240 t C . o m a d c of M o n t s c r r a t , 151 c o n t r a c t , 2 1 9 See a/so soc lal c onti act contrast ol styles, 1 7 8 - 9 0 C o o p e i , J a m e s F e n i m o i e , 57 Count Robert o/ I'aus, 2 9 - 3 0 Covenanters, 165, 171, 185, 1 9 7 - 2 0 7 t C r o f t a n g r y , Chryslal, 5 6 C i o k e r , J o h n Wilson, 3, 1 2 - 1 3 cross-dressing, 125-2(5, 2 3 0 , 2 3 2 - 3 3 Daiches, David, 3 7 - 3 8 , 46, 47, 1(55 f D a l g a r n o , Loicl, 22, 2 3 fDalgetty, Dugald, 2 9

t D e a n s , Klfie, 41, 48, 49, 5 0 , 52, 6 1 , 79, 8 1 - 8 2 , 8 6 - 9 1 , 9 3 - 9 4 , 9 7 , 9 8 - 9 9 , 184, 186-87, 239 f D e a n s , J e a n i e , 32, 41, 49, 52, 6 1 , 82, 8 6 9 1 , 9 4 , 9 6 - 9 9 , 105, 109, 110, 1 1 6 - 1 7 , 183, 1 8 7 - 8 9 , 2 4 0 death: dark h e r o e s and h e r o i n e s , 52, 8 4 - 8 5 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 1 5 2 - 5 3 . relation to honor, 1 4 2 - 4 8 ; responsibility of the state. 1 4 8 - 4 9 ; h e r o ' s immunity, 1 4 9 50, procokecl b\ h e r o , 1(59-71. See aha immoitalitv; killing D e l o e , Daniel, 3, 175 Dekker, Thomas, 31 f D c i i n i s o n , Jenny, 157, 185, 2 0 5 , 2 0 8 +Dhu, Evan, 180 Dicey, A. V , 70 Dickens, Charles, 191, 2 2 7 , 2 3 9 Digbv, K e n e l m , 7, 138, 149 1"I>mmont, Dandle, 1 5 3 - 5 4 . 182, 183 Disiaeh, Ben|aimn, 2 4 0 f D o n n e i h u g e l , R u d o l p h , 150 Dosto\e\skv, K\odoi, 2 2 7 d i e a m s and r o m a n c e , 5, 9 7 , 1 0 1 - 3 , 2 1 6 dress, 102, 1 0 8 - 9 , 148, 1 7 5 - 7 6 . See also cross-dressing Drvden, J o h n , 2 0 9 - 1 0 dualism, 4 6 - 4 8 , 49, 56, 8 8 dueling, 1.31, 1 4 2 - 4 4 , 148 t ^ t i m b i e c h k e s , I.aird ol, 2 4 0 D u n l o p , J o h n , 4 - 5 , 11, 77 t D m u a r d , Q u e n l m . 2 8 - 2 9 , 136, 1 5 1 - 5 2 Edgeworth, Maria, 10, 3 6 luhnliiiigh Review, 6, 12, 14, 27 Eliade, M n c e a , 194n Eliot, G e o i g e , 5 2 - 5 3 , 191, 195, 2 4 0 ("Elizabeth 1, 109, 1 1 1 f E l s h i e the Dwarf, 41, 4 5 E m p s o n , William, 180, 190

INDEX 24 e p i s o d e , r o m a n t i c , 19, 8 4 - 8 5 , 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 1 2 4 See also e x c u r s i o n

Erskine, John, 71, 83, 92 t E v a n d a l e , L o r d , 157, 158, 164, 1 6 7 - 7 0 , 172-76, 206, 208, 209 Lvans, Mary Ann See Eliot, G e o r g e tEvvart, Xantv, 2 2 8 excursion, 5 6 - 5 7 , 6 1 - 6 2 , 8 4 - 8 5 , 90, 1 0 8 - 9 , 111, 124, 1 5 9 - 6 0 , 171 Fan Maid of Perth, The. 3 0 - 3 1 , 56, 109, 1 5 6

t F a i r l o r d , Alan, 4 3 , 2 2 7 - 2 8 , 2 3 0 tFairford, Saunders, 227, 230 f F a n service, Andrew, 120, 132, 185, 2 1 8 family r o m a n c e , 2 2 7 t F e n e l l a , 4 8 , 49, 5 2 , 5 4 , 8 2 fiction, primitive o i i g i n s , 4 - 5 ; vs. fact, 1 3 - 1 5 , 4 7 , 77, 127; vs. social progress, 1 3 - 1 4 , 1 7 - 1 9 , conveys m o r a l tiutli, 1 6 - 1 7 ; r e s p o n s e to F r e n c h wars, 1 9 2 0 . See a/so p r o j e c t i o n vs. m u t a t i o n ; rom a n c e ; S c o t t ; t h e o r y o f fiction Fielding, Henry, 3, 6, 9, 1 2 - 1 3 , 7 7 - 7 8 , 215 Filmer, R o b e r t , 2 2 1 , 2 3 4 Fiske, Ghristabel F., 171n F l e i s h m a n , Avrom, 193n Fletcher, J o h n , 2 1 0 Forbes, Duncan, 58n ForHines of Nigel, The, 2 1 - 2 4 , 3 0 , 49, 5 2 , 5 5 , 79, 108, 109, 112, 150 Foucault, Michel, 2 3 6 - 3 9 f r e e agency, 2 2 - 2 4 , 3 7 - 3 8 , 138, 144, 2 2 8 . See also liberty F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n , 1 9 - 2 0 , 7 3 - 7 4 , 115, 138, 177, 181, 193 F r e u d , S i g m u n d , 155, 2 1 4 , 2 2 3 - 2 7 , 2 3 0 36, 237 Frye,' N o r t h r o p , 5, 179, 189 f G a r d i n e r , C o l o n e l , 181 Gaskell, E l i z a b e t h , 2 4 0 fGeddes, Joshua, 228 t G e i e r s t e i n , A l b e r t of, 41 f G e i e r s t e i n , A n n e of, 2 5 - 2 6 , 41, 8 2 , 9 6 , 113, 1 5 0 g e n t l e m e n , 24, 31, 38, 1 3 4 - 3 9 . 1 4 2 - 4 4 , 149, 159. See n/jorank f G l o s s i n , G i l b e r t , 78, 8 1 , 129, 135 f G l o v e r , C a t h a r i n e , 31 f G l o v e r , S i m o n , 31

5

G o d u m , William. 63, 63. 72, 75-76, G o e t h e , J o h a n n Wolfgang von, 2 1 - 2 " .

49,193,210

'

'

Goldsmith, Oliver 8 t G o o s e G . b b i e , 184, 2 0 8 Goi d o n , Robert C , 2 0 9 2 2 3 2 2 8 G o r d o n , S Stewart', 102n Gossman, Lionel 193 t < i r a e m e , Roland, ,32-33, 1 1 4 , 1 5 1 fGray, Menie, 27, 10.5 K - i e e n Mantle, 2 3 2 , 2 3 0 (.rev, Charles Edvvaid, 138 G n e r s o n , H.J.G , 37, 4 6 G n n s t e i n , Alexander, 2 2 4 n Grotius, Hugo, 6 8 Guinness, Alec, 2 3 2 +Gurth, 182, 185 Gi/y Maiinemisait, Amy, 42, 80, 111 fRhsart, Sir Hugh, 8 0

INDEX

Rokl'bl', HI rOlnal1«(', L 26, 2H, 99-100, 104, 10';; v, \lO\e], f)-I:!; anClcnt ,md modcn) H10; 1'1' ,,/\11 pn»)CCliOn \ ,. imudllon romantic hero .)1'1' dal k heloe, Rom"edU, Je,lI1:/,\cqut'" 2:!2, 231 tRowen,\, ·l9, 50, 52, 53-54, :;5, 79. 114 Rmkll1, John, I :12-:n

tS,\ddletrc(', Bartoline, H6, IH:I, IH4, IH6H7 tSaddletree, \11"';., H6, 94, IHli-H7 St Ronan\ m'II,HO, 10:;, III, 134, 14142 tSaladin, 41, 4:1-44, 45, 92,139,146-47, 148, 151, 152-5:\ SchIller, Friednch, 223-25, 232 Schlatter, Richard, 65n, liHn Schochet, Gordon.J., 222n, :!36n Schopenhauer, Arthur, 104 Scott, \\'alter: criUCI,m of the no\'el, 3, 7-8,9, 11-12, 15, 17, 18,40,45, H4, 113; humor, H, 206-8; theorv of fictIOn, H-9, II, 14-16,33-35, I1H, relatIOn of life to work;, 20, 3-1-35, 37, 4G, 57-58, 67-GH, 72-73, 77; romantic 'ympath\es, 3H, 46-48; Idea of hi,tory, ,:;8-59; views on property, 67-68, 74, method of compositIOn, 102, 127-28; histOrical no\'elist, 191-212 Seccombe, Thomas, 126n Selkirk, Thoma, Dougla" Earl of, 73n, 220 Senior, Na'isau, 14,30,32-33 sexual"e1ation" 49-,')0, ,')2, 82, 9(), 126, 132, 141-42, 173-75. Sf'f' alH) lo\'e Shakespeare, Wilham, IHO-82, IH5, 190,205,206-7,209,210,213,22425. 229 Sharp, James, 198, 199,203 Sinclair, John, 73n Smith,Adam, 68, G9, !OI, 114, I~n Sl1Io]\ett, Tobias, 1, 3, 11, 15, 215 social banchtry, 225, 239 social class, 185-89 ,ocial contract, 38-39, 65-66, 95, 144, 221-22,230-36, 238 . .'itt' allo C\nl SOCIetv, nature: "'. t'ivllization

249 ,0IIlofjllle" 21-2Ii. 107. Iti:'>. Iti 7-iiI'. 174 ."0 111 er' . .I "".C . 112 SOllthe\. Rohert, h Spcn< e, Tholl1,\'>. 7:; St,\ir, lamc, 1),lh vmple:. I,t \ IV (l\lllt. 71 .... tatu .... , 2~O-~~

.\f'( O/\I)

honol, I t of ,t\les; tcnt,lIl\c fi(uon tSuffolk, Lad\', 11'9 Sill gl'O !I lOS

"

Dilllgh/Pl, Thl', 27-~~,

:',1,

tTalbol, Colo\1{'\, 100, 105, 140, ~~(i27 Tale, of :Yh LlI1dlord, rcvlcw of. 3:1-3.", 107, 1~4 '[{[/mllaN, Thl', 41. 43-45,1:19,14,')-47, H~, 151, 15~-S:\ TawncY', R. H , 74 tent,ltiv(' f1ct\o\1, 1~7-:":", 150-52, 164(ii, 169-70 Thackera\', Wilham l\i.lkepcac(', ")4, 15·1 Thiern, Augmtin, 191 tThornton, CaptCr, 22:,

250 Uhecla, F r a n c i s c o dc\ 1 7 8 - 7 9 , 1 9 0 Van G h e n t , Dorothy, 8 9 - 9 0 t V a r n e y , R i c h a r d , 111 f V e r n o n , D i a n a , 4 8 , 4 9 - 5 0 , 5 5 , 110, 113, 118, 123, 1 2 5 - 2 7 , 1 3 0 - 3 2 , 134, 145, 217, 224, 2 3 2 - 3 3 t V e r n o n , Sir F r e d e i i c k , 2 1 8 villains, 4 0 - 4 1 , 4 6 , 8 0 - 8 1 , 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 152, 172 Walker, H e l e n , 8 7 , 8 8 , 241 Walpoie, H o r a c e , 8, 10 f W a l t o n t h e Unwavering, 27 Wal/er, M i c h a e l , 2 3 7 n t W a m b a , 182, 185 f W a r d e n , Henry, 33 f W a r d o u r , Isabella, 103 Watt, Ian, 128

INDEX Waverley,

1, 10, 2 0 , 2 6 - 2 7 , 3 0 - 3 1 , 3 3 - 3 4 ,

41, 43, 4 6 - 4 7 , 49, 5 4 - 5 5 , 56, 59, 76, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 1 0 2 - 3 , 1 0 8 - 9 , 130, 140, 153, 1 7 8 - 8 0 , 185, 190, 2 1 4 - 1 6 , 2 1 8 , fWaverley, Edward, 2 8 , 3 2 , 3 3 , 3 4 , 48, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 1 0 2 - 3 , 1 0 5 , 1 0 8 - 9 , 153, 1 5 5 , 1 7 8 - 8 0 , 1 8 5 , 2 1 4 - 1 6 , 226-27, 235 Whately, R i c h a r d , 11, 13

226-27 46-47, 140, 222,

Whitehead, Alfred North, 9 2 - 9 3 f W i l d f i r e , M a d g e , 61, 9 8 , 1 1 0 - 1 1 William III, 161, 198 f W i l s o n , Aihe, 2 0 7 Wilt, J u d i t h , 2 0 1 - 2 , 2 1 3 - 1 4 , 2 1 8 n , 230n W o g a n , Edward, 2 1 5 W'oodstotk, 3 1 - 4 1 f W y n d , H e n r v , 3 0 - 3 1 , 1 0 9 - 1 0 , 136, 150, 1 5 6