lazy journalism

I realize because I've done it that a lot of journalism is lazy, that's to say just researched at the desk by googling things. And this behaviour with its sometimes interesting but never verifiable findings is typical of the modern writer's lifestyle.

I think that's why every so often I write about nature. Even though much of what I say is still second-order information sourced from books or the internet, still the fact is that I did see the plants with my own eyes, and here's the photo to prove it.

Something was real. And it was that real contact that I wanted to report; but even then it isn't easy. To describe the real moment. So quite often I fall back on related material that I've read somewhere else. And I just hope that what I'm writing manages to convey some little breath of that true moment about which, so often,  I feel so tongue-tied.


*

What is a forest?  For me the idea contains reassuring elements of darkness and infinitude, that is, uncountableness.

Levin, of course, reproves his brother-in-law's vagueness. No, a forest isn't really infinite. A merchant always counts the trees before he buys.


*

I supposed I had no brothers. And indeed I don't. But when I listened to my first vocal overdub I was surprised by the effect it had on me. It sounded like I had brothers. We were singing a country song and we sounded like crooning cowboys.

*

Sir Walter Scott: Tales of a Grandfather, Marmion, etc.

[Original frontispiece of Tales of a Grandfather, Second Series as published by Cadell in 1829 (actually Nov 1828). From the Walter Scott Image Collection, Edinburgh University Library.]

A LONGER NOTE ON Tales of a Grandfather (1827-31) and The History of Scotland (1829)

Tales of a Grandfather is a history of Scotland up to 1745 - at least this is the bit that people usually talk about, and it equates to the first three series; there was a fourth series (1831) on French history, and an abandoned MS of a 5th series, continuing the French history. The abandonment may have been related to Master Littlejohn's death at ten years old.  He was the grandchild addressed in these volumes, though Scott didn't except in the early pages make much concession to infantile capacities. He does however dwell on memorable tales (even if legendary) and he steers clear of analysis. Until quite recently this was a widely-read book in Scotland; it makes a bizarre appearance in the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s Tomorrow Belongs to Me (1975) – Harvey (born in 1935) made a virtue of being older than other rock stars and of having access to forgotten things. The History of Scotland  (for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia) covers a briefer period, ending in 1603. This is harder to come by, but it makes better reading than the first series of TOAG, which covers the same ground. Both however are good books, if this kind of historical material interests you; in other words, wars, power-struggles, heroic and villainous deeds; not much about social or cultural matters.

On the assumption that even scholars are likely to leave these volumes unread, I’ll mention some passages that deserve attention. (TOAG is, however, currently in print as four paperback volumes with new titles.)

TOAG Chapter XXXIV (the first of the second series), is titled “Progress of Civilisation in Society”. It’s on such a theme that one gains from the clarity enforced on a writer who addresses a child. This is what most of Scott’s contemporaries thought, if they thought at all, but rarely had occasion to say: for example, about the origin and function of property, money, trade, social class and education. It’s interesting that Scott mentions peoples who did not know about boiling water (natives of New South Wales) or even making a fire (presumably the Tasmanians, at that time still in existence).

Scott’s remarks on class are as follows:

The numerous transactions occasioned by the introduction of money, together with other circumstances, soon destroy the equality of ranks which prevails in an early stage of society. Some men hoard up quantities of gold and silver, become rich, and hire the assistance of others to do their work; some waste or spend their earnings, become poor, and sink into the capacity of servants. Some men are wise and skilful, and, distinguishing themselves by their exploits in battle and their councils in peace, rise to the management of public affairs. Others, and much greater numbers, have no more valour than to follow where they are led, and no more talent than to act as they are commanded. These last sink, as a matter of course, into obscurity, while the others become generals and statesmen. The attainment of learning tends also to increase the difference of ranks. Those who receive a good education by the care of their parents, or possess so much strength of mind and readiness of talent as to educate themselves, become separated from the more ignorant of the community, and form a distinct class and condition of their own; holding no more communication with the others than is absolutely necessary.

It’s fairly clear where Master Hugh Littlejohn (actually a Lockhart grandchild) is to locate himself. The passage provides an interesting commentary on e.g. The Antiquary, both for what it tells us about Oldbuck’s views (and Scott’s own views with his patriarchal hat on) and for how Scott himself as a great artist is constantly seeing beyond them.

Certain weaknesses that are likely to occur to anyone today: one gets richer quicker by exploitation or entrepreneurism than by hoarding; to succeed by learning (as an alternative “stream” to wealth) sounds like a fairy-tale; surely learning and more particularly the worldly fruits of learning are something that are normally bought. Scott’s remarks on valour appear to confuse a schoolboy melée with an ordered state; an illuminating insight into the psychology of an officer-class, but if his words found their way into the ranks they’d amount to a revolutionary challenge.

Scott’s essential right-heartedness can be gauged from his chapter (TOAG, LVIII) on “The Massacre of Glencoe”. Though one learns so much more detail from e.g. John Prebble’s book, Scott’s words make it clear that he understood the main features of the episode with great clarity, and was humanly horrified by its two essential features: a genocidal order by government against a portion of its own subjects, combined with an utter betrayal of the Highlanders’ binding law of hospitality.  It’s true that he had other reasons (the Darien episode) for a profound dislike of King William.

The last page of Tales of a Grandfather is about the Highland clearances. It presents, as you might expect in such a book, a somewhat “official-sounding” view; but see also the note, quoting his words of 1816. (Scott also wrote about the clearances in the Introduction to the first edition of A Legend of Montrose.) No reader of Scott's novels could suppose that he felt no sympathy with people whose age-old way of life was being destroyed; and in fact his awareness of what had been going on (which must have been pretty acute, though much evil was suppressed) no doubt accounts in part for the urgency of his general concern for accommodations with the past. I am far from claiming Scott as a campaigner for the highland crofters; in fact his statement here, that “it is.. a change that has taken place, and has had its crisis”, was thoroughly disingenuous, for the clearances were to drag on for many more years in remoter parts of the highlands and islands. One can read Scott as providing, so to speak, an accommodation for the tender consciences of his bourgeois readers (one pays the victims by feeling, in Johnson’s phrase). But then, many readers get exactly the same comfortable pay-off by reading rousing campaigners. Scott on this theme can be read in different ways, and he has supplied his share of militant inspiration, though mainly in other countries than Scotland.    

A LONGER NOTE ON SCOTT’S POETICAL WORKS

Like April morning clouds, that pass,

With varying shadow, o’er the grass,

And imitate, on field and furrow,

Life’s chequer’d scene of joy and sorrow ;

Like streamlet of the mountain north,

Now in a torrent racing forth,

Now winding slow its silver train,

And almost slumbering on the plain ;

Like breezes of the autumn day,

Whose voice inconstant dies away,

And ever swells again as fast,

When the ear deems its murmur past ;

Thus various, my romantic theme

Flits, winds, or sinks, a morning dream.

Yet pleased, our eye pursues the trace

of Light and Shade’s inconstant race ;

Pleased, views the rivulet afar,

Weaving its maze irregular ;

And pleased, we listen as the breeze

Heaves its wild sigh through Autumn trees ;

Then, wild as cloud, or stream, or gale,

Flow on, flow unconfined, my Tale!

                                                            (from Marmion, Introduction to Canto Third)

Were you to suppose that Scott’s poetry is a kind of pleasant byway of little relevance to our world and its own poetry, you might want to reconsider after reading this, from Walt Whitman’s 1888 Introduction to Leaves of Grass (“A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”):

... Not till after all this, did I attempt any serious acquaintance with poetic literature. Along in my sixteenth year I had become possessor of a stout, well-cramm’d one thousand page octavo volume (I have it yet,) containing Walter Scott’s poetry entire – an inexhaustible mine and treasury of poetic forage (especially the endless forests and jungles of notes) – has been so to me for fifty years, and remains so to this day.

He adds in a note:

Sir Walter Scott’s Complete Poems; especially including Border Minstrelsy; then Sir Tristrem; Lay of the Last Minstrel; Ballads from the German; Marmion; Lady of the Lake; Vision of Don Roderick; Lord of the Isles; Rokeby; Bridal of Triermain; Field of Waterloo; Harold the Dauntless; all the Dramas; various Introductions, endless interesting Notes, and Essays on Poetry, Romance, etc. Lockhart’s 1833 (or ’34) edition with Scott’s latest and copious revisions and annotations. (All the poems were thoroughly read by me, but the ballads of the Border Minstrelsy over and over again.)

There soon followed Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, Sophocles, Ossian... but the impact of Scott’s hefty book plummeting into the clear swimming-hole of the young Whitman’s imagination in 1837 must have been tremendous and fundamental. Scott was not only the gatekeeper to the European past, he was also the one really modern poet that Whitman liked to read deeply in. To limit Scott’s influence to where it is obvious, e.g. to the superficial mannerisms of Whitman’s juvenilia, would be profoundly unimaginative, as well as ignoring the plain statement of those fifty years of delighted reading. The very image of the one great book that Whitman intended to leave behind is surely owed to that reverently bibliographized volume; its rampant energies, its indifference to fine criticism, its generous scope, its national audience stretching from shepherds to statesmen, its democratic (not aesthetic) conception of a bard as a man speaking to men, its untroubled assumption that poetry means singing the activity of human beings and the activity of nature.       

Whitman took from Scott his particular conception of a national poet as someone who set his marginal nation on the map of civilized awareness, and whose own copious energy instantiated his nation’s potency.

Marmion (1808)

Scott’s terrifically harmless narrative poems procured instant affection. Marmion typifies these poems, which although so readable are in other respects far from simple. The external structure of Marmion with its six cantos, each with an elaborate introduction (like those of Gavin Douglas to each book of his Scots Aeneid), hardly begins to suggest the complexity. Consider how Canto Second makes its anachronistic sea-progress of nuns up the Northumberland coast, faintly Chaucerian with laughter and daylight until it cuts to the horrific niches where Constance, a fair heroine in the wrong place, prophesies the end of the Roman rite, wearing Marmion’s blue badge and recalling his heroic appearance (along with a numbered meiny that likewise recalls a Chaucerian census) entering Norham at the beginning of Canto First, the whole tied up by a capricious breeze at the start and a tolling bell at the finish. It was in his poems that Scott learned the art of casual exposition that would make his best novels simultaneously expansive and direct. 

The basic unit is the verse paragraph, which on a fundamental basis of striding tetrameter couplets admits a variety of cross-rhyme, ballad-measure, triple-time story-within-story, etc. The paragraphs are elastic enough in length to accommodate all these without threat to the poem’s momentum. They imply a certain tick of the clock, so when (in Canto Third), Fitz-Eustace sings the languishing song Where shall the lover rest, a little roman capital XI appears half-way through it, splitting the song across two of these larger units.

The Wordsworths thought that Scott’s way of writing verse was heavily indebted to Christabel. It was a poem that Scott admired, and they were in a better position to see it than we are; to our eyes the resemblances are not striking, the differences profound. Coleridge couldn’t complete his visions, but Scott revels in endings and beginnings, only neglecting the middle, where vacuities are covered up in order to produce a finished product. The chief means that Scott resorts to is dragging in antiquarian lore, at which the guilty Marmion may or may not turn pale, but no reader skips this out of longing to hear more of Marmion’s story. Thus Canto Fourth is hugely freighted with irrelevances called up by Crichton castle, or by a garrulous Lord Lindesay, but readers with a sense of occasion allow this to lead up to the delighted and expected vision of the Scottish army laid out in splendour before the Empress of the North.

The southern entrance I passed through,

And halted, and my bugle blew.

Methought an answer met my ear, —

Yet was the blast so low and drear,

So hollow, and so faintly blown,

It might be echo of my own.   (IV, XIX)

We think of Scott as one of the first authors to have a historic sense of the differentness of the past, but in Marmion it’s the opposite that impresses. Scott’s knowledge of the past was immense but he depicts his hero and everything that happens in the poem as if it was being acted by people of his own time in costume.

For, by St. George, were that host mine,

Not power infernal nor divine,

Should once to peace my heart incline,

Till I had dimm’d their armour’s shine

    In glorious battle-fray!       (IV, XXIX)

For us a pitched battle like Flodden is something totally unreal, a thing of the past. Scott was writing Marmion while mainland Europe was a battleground, and we mistake the hero’s reaction if we think his modernity precludes a genuine sense of being a potential participant.  

While the “historical novel” has become accepted as a de facto genre, the “historical poem” has never become a recognized term. Poems, whatever material they may work over, are always statements about modernity, and Marmion is no exception.

AND THE OTHER WRITINGS...

Sir Walter Scott on novelists and fiction, ed. Ioan Williams, 1968. But I would rather die than read through these 500-odd pages; obviously, this compilation was intended solely for ease of scholarly reference. Scott's review of his own Old Mortality (published anonymously) is an uncomfortable performance; and getting chunks of the Prefaces without the accompanying novels leaves me feeling horribly cheated. Still, I suppose I'll withhold it from the charity shop for a while. It could just possibly be that one evening I'll like to immerse in one of Scott's long reviews of, say, Richard Cumberland or The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.  (Well, I did read them, and they didn't please me at all, and it has indeed gone... Even if I had a wing, instead of two book-cases, I would not want such deadwood volumes in it.)

Scott's novels: A brief guide

Sir Walter Scott, Woodstock (1826)

[Frontispiece of 1871 edition, image from Russell Library, McMaster University

The action of Woodstock is extraordinarily concentrated on its titular location; we are mainly inside the Lodge, almost as often in the grounds, sometimes in the town, but the only time we get any further afield during the main narrative is when Wildrake meets with Cromwell at Windsor (Chs VIII-IX). This scene (which Lockhart ridiculously called better than Macbeth) is certainly a fine one and it sets up a touch of menacing expectation; at some point we know we will see more of Cromwell.

But the novel’s strength is already there and it is fugal in nature.  Woodstock persistently and often literally goes over the same ground. The most speedily revolving cogs are e.g. Wildrake the disguised cavalier gving vent to his royalist feelings or having a drink, motifs that recur incessantly. At a more stately pace, consider the number of substantial scenes that occur while approaching the Lodge:

Approach 1: Trusty Tomkins, then Joceline (Chs 2-3)

Approach 2: Everard and Wildrake (Ch 5)

Approach 3: Everard, Wildrake, Mayor, Holdenough (Ch 10)

Approach 4: Everard, Wildrake, then Tomkins, Harrison (Ch 14)

Approach 5: Everard, Charles, Sir Henry Lee (Ch 25)

Approach 6: Charles, Alice, Rochecliffe (Ch 28)

Approach 7: Cromwell, Pearson and soldiers, Everard, Holdenough, then Rochecliffe, Joceline (Ch 33)

Somewhere at the back of the reader’s mind is the persistent feeling of “I’ve been here before”. Thus when we attend the planned duel of Charles and Everard in Chapter 28, we feel the weight of accumulated combat: this very pair have already crossed swords at the end of Ch 24, Wildrake has mimed a combat with Harrison, Henry Lee has fenced with Tomkins. These clashings have always come to nothing, but the sensation grows that someone, sometime, is going to get themselves killed out here. And that is in fact what’s about to happen, when Joceline’s quarterstaff smacks into Tomkins’ temple.

This is just when we’re not expecting it. Scott has set up a pattern by which the natural climax of a section is followed by a trip to Rosamund’s spring for water. But just as the earlier visit encountered a sinister predator (Alice and the disguised Charles in Ch 18) so this one (Phoebe and Tomkins) blows up into a nasty squall and proves uncontainable. In the end it is not the gentlemanly sword that does the damage, nor does it ever in Woodstock, with the minor exception of Everard’s scratched throat.

I  am writing this for people who have already read Woodstock. Thus highlighted, the incessant patterning is bound to seem mannered, but in the actual reading we are only distantly haunted by it as it underlies a seemingly natural flow of conversation and incident. Such formal aspects do however play a more significant role in Scott’s fiction as his career proceeds.    

Woodstock is a novel about uneasy peace. The civil war is over, but only recently over, and thus motifs of constraint and haunting and suppressed violence predominate. There is comedy in the superbly extended – and fugal - scene with the Mayor and Holdenough in Chapter 10 – (Approach 3 above, when the wordy account of one approach takes place during the course of another, but outruns it so the speakers have to turn about for a while). The comedy concerns accounts of – largely imaginary – hauntings, and it’s a theme that returns in an apparently endless flood of talk  through Chapters 15-17; but in the last of these, we become aware of an un-comic chill. Holdenough’s story of the apparent loss of Albany suddenly opens up the full horror of the war that has just passed – it is not ghosts and devils who terrify us, but human beings. It’s clear that Scott understood how such memories are traumatic and are only spoken of in distress.

Woodstock could have been a darker novel. Cromwell more or less lets go of the reins in Ch 37, and you feel that Scott draws back from the brink, as Balzac in Une ténébreuse affaire did not. At the same time a punitive ending might have blanked out the discursive subtleties that had been broached. Besides these two (so different) scenes with Holdenough, it would be good to mention the dinner scene where Charles, passing himself off as an embarrassingly loutish Scot, is himself embarrassed by a drunk and oblivious Wildrake (Ch 20), or Albert and Alice’s various gymnastic efforts to direct royal behaviour, or the beautifully delineated arc of Henry Lee’s adrenalin after his authority has been called on to halt the fight in Ch 25.

All of these scenes are at some level about controlling feelings. With civil war so recent, the fear is that people can’t change the feelings that recently meant war and therefore war will resume; this is the darker aspect of those fugal repetitions. (When Wildrake thinks to control his own drinking, the comic result is the “modest sip” at the end of Ch IX.)

*

“Thou hast a wonderful memory, friend,” said the Colonel coldly, “to remember these rhymes in a single recitation. There seems something of practice in all this.”

Thus Everard most unjustly accuses Tomkins in Ch 14. We have difficulty shaking off the positive judgement of the dog Bevis, and Tomkins’ early awareness of Phoebe is so subtle that it is likely to go unremembered. As we read through the book we keep pondering what kind of literary stereotype Tomkins will eventually reveal himself to be – saviour or villain?  We are sure he’s in disguise. But in the end Tomkins doesn’t resolve into that kind of simple stereotype; unmasked, he remains masked. The effect is curiously impressive: Tomkins always eludes us, his wisdom and resource continue to echo positively though he dies casually, a mere brute. 

*

When Woodstock was published what most impressed its admirers was the even-handedness with which it portrayed both sides; Cromwell and Charles, specifically. That is less evident now, Scott’s own royalist sentiments seeming much more prominent than any real sympathy for the other side, Charles’ irritating faults being made completely pardonable by his eventual good behaviour, while most of Cromwell’s strong points, his leadership, sacrifice and religious dedication are repeatedly sniped at. What we miss is the extent to which, in 1826, these issues of the distant English civil war still aroused vehement party feeling; for a royalist to express anything other than pure hostility towards Cromwell was considered striking. 

*

One element of the fugue’s uneasy recapitulations is that they can sometimes wear down the novel’s certainties. When the hauntings begin in Ch 12 we are told:

Colonel Everard was incapable of a moment’s fear, even if anything frightful had been seen....

It is manifestly true that compared to the panic-stricken – Desborough and Bletson, for example – Everard stays pretty cool. However, this what you might call “official” view of the hero’s courage is in subsequent pages progressively undermined.

Markham Everard was by no means superstitious, but he had the usual credulity of the times... he could not help thinking he was in the very situation... Under such unpleasant impressions...

The fear of death, which Everard had often braved in the field of battle, became more intense... Large drops of perspiration stood upon his forehead; his heart throbbed, as if it would burst from its confinement in the bosom; he experienced the agony which fear imposes on the brave man, acute in proportion to that which pain inflicts when it subdues the robust and healthy.

Even when Everard regains his self-possession he remains distracted, embarrassed, affronted, disgraced. His adrenalin is still at the flood and it’s this, more than a reasoned judgement, that has him riding off so precipitately to the ranger’s hut.

It is pleasant to discover that the supposedly nerveless hero is in fact so highly impressionable, such a mass of passions. We aren’t therefore surprised when later the unwelcome Cromwell, eyeing him closely, says: “Is there not moisture on thy brow, Mark Everard?” What perhaps is a little more surprising is that Everard in this same scene says nothing to contradict Wildrake’s madly courageous claim to Cromwell “that he [Everard] knew not a word of the rascally conditions you talk of”. Within a few hours of Wildrake’s return to Woodstock Everard had really known all about those conditions (Ch 14), but he doesn’t at this moment think it necessary to set the matter straight. Difficult times, of course.  

*

The Introduction and Preface to Woodstock are dull antiquarian things and for ordinary purposes they should be ignored. The story sidles into view with Chapter 1 (this is not always the case with Scott’s novels), though an otiose modern narrator still lingers on through the first paragraph, like a candle guttering as the windows lighten.  

Scott's novels: A brief guide

Sir Walter Scott, Quentin Durward (1823)

When I wrote my mini-critiques of Scott’s novels, I was rude about this one and I still think I’m right. The praise accorded it in the book by Angus and Jenni Calder seems inexplicable to me, unless they were dazzled by its reception in Europe. For all that, it’s a book that can be read, just. The awful judgment of a critic - was it Taine? - that Scott is “tame” is not easily shrugged off, yet  the critic perhaps didn’t fully appreciate Scott’s anti-heroic instincts.

It occurs to me too that Scott’s interest in royalty is associated with a determination to view the behaviour of a human being when untrammelled by institutions. In the Duke of Burgundy and King Louis he has his chance. These were exceptional lives in their own time, but ours have more in common with them than with the merchants and soldiers. We don’t have all the wealth, but we do have nineteen parts of the freedom. We too can become our own personalities.

C.L Bennet’s (of Dalhousie University) comatose 1967 introduction to Quentin Durward betrays how unrewardingly Scott has been read for at least a century, and what an increasingly ungrateful task popular publishers found it to present Scott classics. This copy, “specially selected for the Airmont Library from the immortal literature of the world”, appears as usual never to have been read.

There are after all considerable obstacles in the path of one who may have been attracted (or whose gift-buying relative was attracted) by the front cover, with its muscular hero (in an astonishing costume of Ivanhoe-meets-Rob Roy) posing heroically while a pitched battle engages furiously a few yards away. After Bennet there is Scott’s 1831 Preface which, with some seriousness and some dullness, and a full page of quotation in French, moralizes over King Louis XI, dispiritingly adding: “It will be easily comprehended, that the little love intrigue of Quentin is only employed as the means of bringing out the story” (as poor a piece of salesmanship as Henry James’ remarks on the mechanism of The Ambassadors). This is one of the later Prefaces that ought now to be relegated to an appendix, because it destroys the effect that Scott first aimed for. He was not one of those rare artists (like Brahms) who could add new material so seamlessly that we are convinced the whole work was built around it.

This is followed by another Preface (originally, the beginning of the book), which very slowly introduces a few of the book’s themes, chiefly that of Europe. It is not one of Scott’s best ideas anyway – he invents a persona for the “author of Waverley”, at first jocular, mannered and cynical, then fading uncertainly into his own voice (as if, by explicitly pretending not to be Sir Walter Scott, he had only managed to confuse himself). But “Chapter I”, which follows it, must once have been more inspiriting, though now it has lost most of its quiet momentum because its material instead of moving us sharply forward has been too much foreshadowed by the 1831 Preface. Finally in Chapter 2 we reach narrative, of a rather wooden sort. The archaic presentation of manly beauty in the point-by-point description of Quentin should appear to us as a sudden flash of colour, like when the credits have finished rolling. Unfortunately, the absurd contrivance of the king being the first human being that Quentin encounters at Plessis-les-Tours, and the more absurd staginess of the king concealing his identity, forestall any possibility of a touch of nature. This is indeed relevant to Scott’s aims, for he wants to make this court an unnatural, dangerous place, but he seems not to recognize the technical problems he has set for himself, and in fact writes very badly. Louis’ personality, already outlined to us, is now jerkily put into motion. First the deviousness, then the love of low escapades, then the punitiveness, then the superstitiousness, then the paranoia – it’s painting-by-numbers narrative. Quentin’s Scottishness (“they will get little by me but good Scottish knocks”) is presented nearly as baldly. Add to that a dash of “by my halidome” and “God wot”, and some characteristic clumsiness (“The young stranger, comprehending in one glance the result of the observation which it has taken us some time to express...”), and you will gather that the approach to this novel is strewn with obstacles requiring some tenacity and some charity. Even the scenery is rubble: “The trees in this secluded spot were chiefly beeches and elms of huge magnitude, which rose like great hills of leaves into the air. Amidst these magnificent sons of the earth, there peeped out ..” etc. (Balzac, in "Master Cornelius" (1831), pointed out that Scott's topography of Plessis is completely wrong: it is not on an eminence surrounded by woods but in the bottom of a vale, surrounded by canal and moat.)

And things do not quickly improve; it’s more than 100 pages before we start to settle and to walk about in the reading without constantly putting our elbows through the scenery. And the author himself is careless; is it Cunningham, or Guthrie, who is twitted with a gipsy lover? Is the princess Joan’s hair light brown, or so flaxen as to have almost a bluish tinge? To be precise, the point where our settling is palpable is the beginning of Chapter 10, when there is a quiet three-handed scene between Quentin, Le Balafré, and Oliver Dain; comedy, intelligence and excitement begin to interact, and for the first time the author is a step ahead of us. 

What I’ve written here is what every non-aficionado reports about Scott’s books. It’s a shame that Quentin Durward doesn’t really work, because Scott did have serious themes that he wanted to explore, in particular what he perceived as a crucial cultural development in which the plainsong of chivalry was manipulated into the counterpoint of policy. But I don’t think Scott was equipped to understand what “policy” was; the novel’s presentation of Louis the politician consists largely of such immemorial (or medieval) narrative tropes as trusting in dreams, meddling in arranged marriages, and variations on “the biter bit”. Scott even resorts helplessly to making Louis use his own favoured tag, “Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards”. He saw “policy” (as a romancer, and as a firm believer in good Scottish knocks) only from the outside; as a sinister black hole in whose deceptive neighbourhood romance and therefore life itself were mysteriously dissipated. So the book is constantly falling back into fringe situations and company (Scots or Bohemians or merely young) that avoid the issue of "policy"; instead of illuminating Louis and his world, they judge it. Quentin comes before us not as a naive innocent, or rather not only as a naive innocent, but as the novel’s representative of the values that Scott himself really upheld; Quentin is not a brilliant representative, but the main problem is that since he is already a moral touchstone he cannot learn anything. He cannot, as Scott could not, perceive “policy” from the point of view of someone who lives it from the inside; as a new form of perception, a new psychological acumen, a new means of getting by. This might seem an odd thing to claim, since we are talking about developments that were centuries old in Scott’s own time; the problem may be that his themes required a European, not a British, imagination.

But what Scott could do, and intermittently does well, is write a romance that has its own way irresponsibly with some of the materials of Commynes’ history. The book begins to breathe freely when Quentin and the ladies set off on their journey to Liège, and it gets even better at Peronne. The romance has now gathered its own momentum. Scott works with a surprisingly small cast of characters, considering his tapestry. If a guard is needed, the Balafré is always ready to hand; a low villain will always be Hayraddin. It stretches credulity, but Scott can produce good effects from putting characters who are all well-known to us into the same room; the best example is the night in the tower when Galeotti so nearly meets his doom. As Petit-André and his friends prepare a lynching, Scott can be taciturn about the Balafré’s thoughts, yet we are vividly concerned with them. The introduction of Galeotti into this tense situation, and its unexpected outcome, are transformations that matter to us.

I have heard it said that Hayraddin Maugrabin is the first gipsy to appear in a European novel. I'm not sure where. But still, let's think a bit more about it. Well obviously there's Meg Merrilies in Scott's 1815 novel Guy Mannering, so that's enough to disprove it. Also that year, Jane Austen's Emma had a clamorous group of gipsies, but I suppose they're not really individualized as characters. 

In fact gipsies featured regularly in older literature. Cervantes' La Gitanilla (1613) is a famous example, though its gipsy heroine Preciosa is eventually discovered to be a lost heir (so not a gipsy by birth). Gipsies frequently appeared in plays and masques; in fact European culture was fascinated by them. Of course the portrayals were stereotypes. The interest was not in real gipsies but in the fertile possibilities of a colourful contrast to the dominant culture. 

But let's reframe the assertion about Hayraddin as "the first male gipsy to appear in a European novel". That feels a bit more credible. 

Scott’s own presentation is of course ignorant and framed in the conventions of literary villainy (he has to resort to Epicureanism to fill up the vacuum in his comprehension), but nothing can prevent him unleashing a powerful literary idea. (Hayreddin is an Arabic honorific name; Scott doubtless had read about the Ottoman Corsair Hizir Hayreddin Barbarossa.) Hayraddin’s villainy is consistently modified by the author's unconcealed interest in him and indeed a frustrated desire to sympathise; in the end, this issues in the strange little matter of the pony, Klepper, that Hayraddin bequeaths to Quentin. But the gipsy intrinsically resists the sympathy that Scott would like to give him; he does not accept any of the cultural axioms from which that sympathy springs. The poems that Wordsworth wrote about gipsies register the same unease.      

The scene with the pony has another function; to keep Quentin away from Maugrabin’s execution. Scott wants to maintain a spotless image of his hero.  Later, it requires another piece of clever handling to ensure that it is the Balafré, and not Quentin himself, who decapitates the corpse of William de la Marck. Less adroitly, Isabelle has been required to faint in order not to witness the killing of the bishop. At such moments one sees the limitations to what Scott has been able to achieve. Quentin and Isabelle could have remained morally upright in a close confrontation with evil, but they could not have remained figures of romance with an “innocence” that extends to their imaginations as well as to their deeds.

Quentin Durward again

Scott's novels: A brief guide

Sir Walter Scott, The Abbot (1820)

[Catherine Seyton, engraving after Landseer, 1833. "As they put off, Roland thought he could discover the face of Catherine Seyton... peeping from a loophole to view his departure" (Ch 25). Image from The Walter Scott Image Collection at Edinburgh University Library.]


“By Heaven, Catherine, your tongue wears as many disguises as your person!” Roland Græme complains of the girl he loves. He’s mistaken, for the “audacity” that we admire in Scott’s most entrancing heroine is not deceptive at all, though admittedly she does try to take advantage of the Lady of Lochleven’s belief in a supposed poisoning. The circumstances are a bit unusual. Normally Catherine is, whatever Roland thinks, perfectly sincere and direct. Her games are the spiritedness of youth, and “in sad earnest” she hardly troubles to hide even her love for Roland, and certainly never her unalterable commitment to the Catholic faith. Scott’s most attractive women (Flora MacIvor, Rebecca) are for some reason often committed to a creed he disapproves.

The Abbot is indeed a book full of even more than the usual quota of people in disguise. In the village of Kinross, Roland encounters four in very short order: Henry Seyton as a country maiden, Magdalen Græme as Mother Nicneven, Father Ambrose as a “mean and servile” retainer, and Father Boniface as the gardener Blinkhoolie. All are of course adherents to the “ancient and only road” (Mary’s phrase) that the ruling Protestant party is trying to suppress.

Disguise has the potential of allowing someone to assume a character that expresses their inner selves more openly than their everyday identity does, and here this might be claimed (in their different ways) of both Magdalen-as-Nicneven and Boniface-as-Blinkhoolie.

Pursuing that line of thought as regards Henry is intriguing, but the truth is that whenever Roland tries to treat Henry femininely he walks into a wall. This seems maybe like a crude device for nourishing an artificial mystification in Roland’s mind; he keeps mistaking Henry-as-maiden for Catherine, his supposedly “identical” twin, and there seems no good reason why the real Catherine doesn’t enlighten him. (Roland is apparently unaware that Catherine has a twin at all, even though Henry Seyton is a prominent noble.) The upshot is an androgynous tangle that links the three in features of their personalities. But what is “audacity” in Catherine is impulsiveness and violence in the two young men.

[Boy-and-girl twins are never “identical” twins, of course. But Scott had ample literary precedent, e.g. Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. There is a suggestive train of connexions between Shakespeare’s play and The Abbot, e.g. Sebastian’s violence, the puritan restrainer, and this whole matter of being a page – or eunuch.]

Father Ambrose provides the most telling commentary on these disguises. Roland, though backsliding fast from his own Catholicism, is appalled to see his former spiritual guide in “the dress of a poor sworder”, and then critical of the unworthiness of these shifts. Ambrose rebuts him powerfully:

“The heretics have played their usual arts on you, my son... they would willingly deprive us of the power of acting wisely and secretly, though their possession of superior force forbids us contending with them on the terms of equality. They have reduced us to a state of exhausted weakness, and now would fain proscribe the means by which weakness, through all the range of nature, supplies the lack of strength, and defends itself against its potent enemies. As well might the hound say to the hare, use not these wily turns to escape me, but contend with me in pitched battle, as the armed and powerful heretic demand of the down-trodden and oppressed Catholic to lay aside the wisdom of the serpent, by which alone they may again hope to raise up the Jerusalem over which they weep, and which it is their duty to rebuild...”

It’s a justification that still resonates disturbingly. (The discussion has some similarities with the highlander Roderick Dhu's defence of raiding the lowlands in The Lady of the Lake.)

Roland treads a dangerous path, seemingly entrammelled by loyalties to both sides, and seemingly always fated to end up as a lady’s page. His own agenda is personal; he wants to be free to be himself, and his childish image for that is to be a soldier. He is deeply frustrated, and his violence and rudeness issue from this. What ultimately unites Roland and Catherine is a modern desire to be themselves; in Roland’s case that amounts to a frustration with his times; Catherine, more solidly grounded, is able to live as herself by committing to an  unwavering allegiance and accepting its misfortunes.

*

Roland wants, as he thinks freely, to do great deeds for women. Impelled by his love for Catherine and his loyalty to Mary, he understands his own position in terms of knight-errantry and the imagery of medieval romance. The Lady of Lochleven uses a different (Protestant) kind of imagery to talk about this. She speaks of her son’s/grandson’s attempt to liberate Mary from Lochleven as evidencing Mary’s malignly seductive powers, the “snare of the Moabitish woman”. Both types of thinking are based on myth. Scott is unwilling to resolve the conundrum so far as Mary is concerned, but in Roland and Catherine it’s clear that he portrays a relationship in which the girl’s goal-setting and the lad’s courage are the natural and instinctive moves of courtship.

*

Mary was in fact only 25 at the period of The Abbot, but the dramatic part of her reign, the marriages and murders, already lay in the past. As usual, Scott likes to set his book in the vaguely fine weather of summer, and this was more or less historically accurate – the earlier chapters occur around the time of Mary’s imprisonment (16th June 1567) and abdication (August 1567), while the later chapters surround her eventual escape the following year (it actually took place on 2nd May 1568). Mary when we see her is in a lull between the sensational events of the years after her return to Scotland and the nineteen years of captivity in England that eventually ended with her execution. She in no way dominates the book, but sits within it as a kind of potent presence.

*

Scott is confusing about the relationship between the Lady of Lochleven and George Douglas, who betrays his own side by attempting to liberate Mary. George Douglas was in fact her youngest son but in The Abbot Scott is inconsistent about this and sometimes thinks of him as her grandson. [The mistake may have arisen from conflation of the Lady’s husband and son, both named William; Scott might have remembered that George Douglas was the son of Sir William Douglas, and also that the Lady was the mother of Sir William Douglas, and thus ended up with three generations instead of two.] In any case Scott decided to keep his composite Sir William Douglas offstage and away from Lochleven so as to create a society dominated by forceful but unattached women. Perhaps, also, he was doubling the grandmother/grandson relationship of Magdalen and Roland. He wanted his older women to be free agents and was wary of introducing the more explosive relationship of mother/son. In general Scott in his novels steers clear of nuclear families*; they are too complicated, and romance (like dreams) has a tendency to eliminate siblings, parents and children. It’s something of the same wariness that persuaded him to avoid the more obviously sensational material of Mary’s marriages and the murders of Rizzio and Darnley, which he portrays only indirectly and by allusion. Mary’s marriage to Bothwell preceded her imprisonment by only a month but in the novel Bothwell is rarely mentioned and he too seems to belong to a distant past.

*

The Abbot is not inappropriately titled, for though it surprises us by its centre of interest being co-located with the novel’s young lovers (very unusual in Scott’s novels), its priests are important. They are themselves victims (at least on the Catholic side), but we cannot forget that it is their harangues on both sides that fuel the wars of religion under which this society suffers. Ambrose and Henderson represent each side at its best, while each has his comic variant (respectively, Boniface and Warden) who adds distinctive complications to the picture. For Scott the matter of Catholicism against Protestantism was still a live issue, and he emphatically speaks out at times in favour of the reformed church. But his story directs most of our sympathy towards the Catholic side. We side with the underdog, and if Ambrose is potentially an apologist for terrorism, the Protestants are uncompromising extirpators.

The Abbot is a book whose triumphs are atomised, verbal and ideological. Roland’s consciousness has difficulty concentrating. He is thus quite untroubled in his pursuit of Mary’s freedom, but we cannot forget Henderson’s earlier words to him:

“...but first, my good Roland, look forth on the pleasant prospect of yonder cultivated plain. You see, where the smoke arises, yonder village standing half hidden by the trees, and you know it to be the dwelling-place of peace and industry. From space to space, each by the side of its own stream, you see the gray towers of barons, with cottages interspersed; and you know that they also, with their household, are now living in unity; the lance hung upon the wall, and the sword resting in its sheath... What would he deserve, who should bring fire and slaughter into so fair and happy a scene – who should bare the swords of the gentry and turn them against each other – who should give tower and cottage to the flames, and slake the embers with the blood of the indwellers?...”

Roland rejected this imputation at the time, but in the end he does exactly what Henderson fears. As Catherine and Mary anticipate their escape, they sing the praises of the “merry soldier”; not long afterwards we will see Mary lead her own soldiers into a bloody rout. The feelings that spring up in this imprisoned and inactive society are inevitably warped by the circumstances; the lady’s page has a share in them too.

But aside from his allegiance to Catherine, Roland has another reason for wanting Mary out of prison. Roland ignores Henderson’s warning because his real motive, as he confesses to his grandmother, is a deep desire for clarity, even at the expense of violence. So long as secrets are mewed up and sovereigns immured (Adam Woodcock’s hawking imagery is potent), Roland cannot be himself, cannot know his own mind, and cannot act with the free will that every side seems determined to deny him. Roland wants to be out of his century.   

*Compare e.g. Edith Bellenden (parents dead, lives with grandmother) and Henry Morton (parents dead, lives with uncle) in Old Mortality.

Scott's novels: A brief guide

Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1818)

(Above: Jacket of Rob Roy, illustrated edition in Coleccion Historias, Editorial Bruguera, Barcelona 1960 - currently for sale.)


I have finally re-read Rob Roy, and found myself pronouncing it a failure (albeit one written in the midst of Scott’s best period). If so, it’s an interesting kind of failure.

The author of Waverley was, as that book sufficiently shows, an innovator by nature. Rob Roy’s failure is the sort that only innovations are prone to.

It‘s a travelling book, the locale shifting as the book proceeds. In that respect it’s like Waverley or Guy Mannering. This is familiar from picaresque novels, but Scott’s novels are not picaresque novels; they seek a unity of purpose that is different. Or, one could speak of a “narrative logic” -- and therefore, potentially, a failure in that logic --  that is not courted by picaresque novels. Besides, in the picaresque novel the travelling is a device. The stage backcloth moves but the hero never gets to a new country. When Scott began to make Scotland seem Scottish, that was the end -- for the moment, anyway -- of the picaresque novel.

The topographical structure of Rob Roy is roughly as follows:

First (and longest) part (Chapters 1-18). In England,  the first 4 chapters in London and moving northward, the rest in Northumberland.

Second part (Chapters 19-26). Journey to Glasgow; episodes in Glasgow.

Third part (Chapters 27-36a). To the Highlands; in the Highlands; leaving the Highlands.

Fourth part (Chapters 36b-39). This is presented more summarily; time speeds up; Glasgow, London, Northumberland.

Considered baldly, the problem can be defined as the long delay before the Highlands are reached. It’s only in the third section that Scott writes, a bit fitfully but for longish stretches nevertheless, as a modern novelist. The book lives. 

The delay is inordinate, but can be partly justified by the narrative momentum of gradual discovery. In Waverley, this was much better handled. In Rob Roy, our interest is aroused in the early chapters on the Great North Road, but it slackens off when we get becalmed in Osbaldistone Hall. Not until the hero is summarily shaken up by a letter and tacks uncertainly for Glasgow does the book become vivid again.

The reason for Scott’s difficulty is that his hero’s main concern is with the Rashleigh/Die Vernon plots (and plots, rather than stories, is what they are).  But when the Highland scenes arrive, they are soon dominated by the vastly more interesting matter of Rob Roy, with whose dealings the hero has no vital connection. (By contrast, Edward Waverley’s involvement with Fergus MacIvor is perfectly achieved -- the “narrative logic” is beyond question.)

It’s unfortunate that the Osbaldistone Hall material is so lifeless by comparison.  Hildebrand’s sons are an unfortunate group, a set of five dummies always trooped out in succession as if to supply a spurious comic life; this is wearisome. There is also a lot of reliance on Gothic motifs in this section -- mysterious secret entrances and so on. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the effect is of inert copying not personal creation. (Contrast Osbaldistone Hall with the amazing home of the hero in The Bride of Lammermoor - which might be described as Gothic but only with an awareness that this term quite fails to express the uniqueness of setting and incident, the extent to which Gothic motifs are absorbed into a personal imagining.) Scott’s interest in Rashleigh is of a flickering type. At first he seems disposed to explore Rashleigh’s villainy, but in the end he just relies on it to initiate movements in the plot. 

Unsatisfactory as all this is, its main effect (apart from putting off readers) is merely to obscure Scott’s deeper thematic interests. They are there all the same, but they do not come naturally before the reader as they should do.

Frank Osbaldistone is the key figure in the book. He is not a “sneaking imbecile” of the kind Scott more often deployed as formal hero. In fact he has quite a definite character, not an especially amiable one. He is essentially a member of the ruling class and (despite, apparently, a fondness for poetizing which does not run very deep) he is suitable material; effective, confident, worldly. He knows how to deal with servants, and with gentlemen too. He will be a competent administrator, and can put personal feeling aside, as is desolatingly portrayed in the ease with which, in the end, he takes over the reins of that same Osbaldistone Hall in which he was once a minor and troubled guest.

Scott himself doubtless admires Frank, and endows him with plenty of generous feelings which, on the whole, don’t threaten him very deeply.

He is, in various ways, “challenged” by the more interesting characters in the book, those who fail in some way to fit his conventional world-view.

Die Vernon is one such, and he quite frankly misunderstands her and acts badly towards her. Unfortunately there is a lack of particularity in this writing (it clusters around the “Gothic” scenes). Scott falls short (as he does with Rashleigh) of exploring Diana’s individuality (it would have called for powers he doesn’t possess), and in the second half of the book she is a seldom-seen symbol. 

Andrew Fairservice challenges Frank in a different way, by being an unruly, self-interested, whippable-yet-rarely-whipped servant. Sometimes useful and sometimes obstructive, his cowardice and eccentricity make him too easily placed. He is too companionless to matter and, though entertaining, remains a servant. The limitations of the author’s own attitude to servants, his essentially complacent idea of what it means to be a landowner and a gentleman, prevent Andrew in the end from being deeply troublesome.

The Bailie, too, falls short of making a fundamental challenge. His mercantile wisdom and deeper (because broader) morality ought to knock Frank out of his stride more than it does. But his self-importance, a certain ridiculousness, a certain tendency to parrot repetitively about his father and his lineage, all undercut his potential significance. Like Andrew, he is too apt in the end to be that easy thing, a colourful character.

Rob Roy, and his more scarcely seen wife, are a different matter. Here the cultural challenge (deeply felt by Scott) strikes deeper. Rob Roy is, in some sense, a greater man than Frank or any of his society; he is a romantic hero, fit for the title of a book. If that seems a rather paltry and literary way of analysing the realities of highland life, I do not think it seemed so to Scott. (He did not write for Rob Roys but for Frank Osbaldistones.)

Frank acknowledges -- and we acknowledge -- that in Rob Roy he has met his superior. Perhaps one could say that in the Highlands he meets a superior place, a wider sphere of life. When (in that genuinely moving scene) he encounters Die Vernon in this unlikely place, he -- for the only time in the book -- can’t handle it. Unresponsive to her half-embrace, he sees her move off, breaks down and cries.

After that key moment, Frank’s highland sojourn becomes a long and brilliant valediction. The precise question that the book has raised at that moment cannot, perhaps, be reduced to words. Here is one attempt: can a man such as Frank Osbaldistone deserve the romantic experience? Perhaps once in his life, yes. That’s his reward for the sensitivities, rather tepid as they are, that motivate his poeticizing. But can he live the romantic existence that, we believe, is lived (with all its accompanying sufferings) by Rob Roy? Clearly, no. If we are prepared to accept -- I think I am -- Frank’s marrying Die Vernon -- and how adeptly and confidently he goes about this when the occasion offers -- the woman he marries is nevertheless not the Die Vernon that comes before us as part of the question. She is not the deeper reality of that mysterious night. Perhaps they have children; we are not told; it is all just “joys and sorrows”, the sort that do not challenge a conventional existence.

Despite the soft-hearted Bailie, Rob Roy is not a genial book, and its hero is not an especially congenial man. Frank and Rashleigh may fight a cardboardish duel in Glasgow, (and there’s a comic playfight at the Clachan, too) but in the background the violence is real: the death of Morris, the troopers cut to pieces, the unlovely deaths of the cousins, Rashleigh’s death-wound filling the bottom of the coach with blood. Scott “places” all of this in a colourful past, but his serious concern is with a manner of life that dominated the present; the capable, immensely effective, life of a modern ruling class. In its inadequacy before the aspects of life that Scott gathers under the umbrella of romance, he discovers a failure that had its own violent consequences. He will not quite accept what he sees, and puts it all down as an adventure. 

[In an earlier note I accepted the view of contemporary critics, and of Scott himself, that the ending of Rob Roy is shamelessly “huddled”. This, along with various other conventional judgments, I no longer hold. For example, that the highlights of the book are the colourful characters (the Bailie, Andrew Fairservice), and that Helen MacGregor is a Gothic harridan who arouses incredulity. It’s nearly 25 years since the reading that accepted those judgments, perhaps no less valid than what I think now, but inevitably reflecting a different reader.]

[A puzzling but surely important feature of Scott’s novels is their “re-readability”. I have not seen this discussed, perhaps because it seems rather subjective and intangible. However, it’s probably what is meant when Scott is called a “poetic” novelist - which in certain obvious respects he isn’t. When I finished Rob Roy I would have been quite prepared to turn the book back and re-read the superb confrontation with Frank’s father in the opening chapters. The scene is in some way elevated to a perennial or mythic or “epic” stature, though its texture is in most ways unlike a Shakespearean confrontation, for example. Its pages do not seem to exist only as a phase through which the story is advanced. There might be a connection with what I have written somewhere else about the picaresque novel. Alternatively, it may be the directness with which Scott’s material engages with his theme, so that the scene continues to signify in the memory. But then again, the re-readability is not limited to certain big scenes. “Small” Scott  (in prefaces, transitional episodes, and passim in weak novels) also has this quality, absent from many better books. It might be connected with the impression the author himself makes. The turns of his mind, even on trivial material, are unusually fascinating; unusual, at any rate, considering the absence of brilliant expression. One is apt to put it all down to his personality, to call him “great” or “good” or “noble” - but if this is true it is by no means a simple truth; a catalogue of Scott’s less enchanting actions and beliefs would be easy to compile. Perhaps there is an unusually guileless revelation of the author’s personality in Scott’s books; he doesn’t know how to perform. When we read him we seem to be beside the author, sharing his zest and his inventions, his tameness and conventionality, his good-heartedness and his clumsiness. We do not feel that he is addressing an audience.]  

A sentence in Rob Roy

Scott's novels: A brief guide

Sir Walter Scott, Old Mortality (1816)

[Image from www.forgottenbookmarks.com]


With Tales of My Landlord, Scott took the opportunity to break free from the already-palpable constraints of being "the author of Waverley" and travelled back a lot further than 60 years; Old Mortality takes place 127 years since. Nevertheless, of all his novels it was the one that stirred most political debate in Scotland. When Scott put the Covenanters stage-centre, he was writing about a historical group who had in recent times become a political symbol of resistance to government tyranny, e.g. for the textile workers who assembled at Loudon-hill in 1815 to celebrate Napoleon's escape from Elba.

The recently-restored title, The Tale of Old Mortality, reminds us that the narrative purports to be based on stories told by the latter-day Covenanter "Old Mortality", as adapted by the author Peter Pattieson,  who writes:

My readers will of course understand, that, in embodying into one compressed narrative many of the anecdotes which I had the advantage of deriving from Old Mortality, I have been far from adopting either his style, his opinions, or even his facts, so far as they appear to have been distorted by party prejudice...

In fact the narrative that follows certainly does not look as if it could have had any basis in such tales as Old Mortality might have spun, except very sporadically, as perhaps in the heroic account of MacBriar's torture and execution; Scott, once he starts to write the story, doesn't attempt to make it reflect the complicated provenance that he has imagined for it in the frame.

Nevertheless, he did intend to write as fairly as he could about a movement to which he was unsympathetic, and Old Mortality is one of Scott's most liberal books. Thus, introducing the later part of the tale (set in 1689, when the Stuarts and their persecutions had ceased), he says:

This party, therefore, remained grumbling and dissatisfied, and made repeated declarations against defections and causes of wrath, which, had they been prosecuted as in the two former reigns, would have led to the same consequence of open rebellion. But as the murmurers were allowed to hold their meetings uninterrupted, and to testify as much as they pleased against Socinianism, Erastianism, and all the compliances and defections of the time, their zeal, unfann'd by persecution, died gradually away, their numbers became diminished, and they sunk into the scattered remnant of serious, scrupulous, and harmless enthusiasts, of whom Old Mortality, whose legends have afforded the ground-work of my Tale, may be taken as no bad representative.

But sometimes liberalism - the relative liberalism of a solid Tory - can seem more infuriating than outright hostility. At least, though it is evidently much better to live in a liberal climate, it can create more fury in the reader. The fury is to do with perceiving the author's insidious manipulation, his desire to have it both ways and to entrap unwary readers into embracing with him what purports to be consensual centre-ground (i.e. absolutely not "distorted by party prejudice") when really it is continuously, though gently, slanted towards an emasculation of opposing views.

Possibly the highly vocal objections to Scott's well-intentioned but subtly weighted "fairness" (initially McCrie, and cf. the later ripostes in novelistic form by Galt and Hogg) actually hastened the hardening of Scott's attitudes. Three years later, in the wake of Peterloo, he wrote an angry article in the Visionary; there was nothing here about being soft on civil dissent; he rejected the lessons taught by his own earlier novel. The highly vocal objections were in a way a compliment. Old Mortality was instantly seen to be a deathless masterpiece, a book that would shape conceptions of Scottish history for ever; hence, itself a battleground where it was absolutely necessary to strike soon and forcefully.

McCrie and the others were, after all, quite right; the coolness of Scott's attitude to the Covenanters is unmistakable. If we compare his portrayal of them with, e.g. the Jacobites in Waverley, we notice two things missing: first, there is no beautiful maiden on the Covenanters' side, to present their cause to us in ardent and seductive terms. Secondly, Morton does not have any companion on the Covenanter's side with whom he is in sympathy, hence we overhear no conversations in which we are invited to participate without prejudgement in the Covenanting cause. Morton indeed speaks powerfully (and with his author's consent) about government persecution and his duty to resist it. But Morton never says one enthusiastic word about the cause that is being persecuted.

What I mean specifically by a "companion" with whom he is "in sympathy" is, let's be frank, a "person of quality". Social class, in Scott's imagination, runs far deeper than ideology. As both the gentlefolk and most of the Covenanters instinctively realize, Morton has taken a perverse stand on what is (from the point of view of his social class) the "wrong" side - he is really much more at ease with Evandale and Claverhouse, and his heart lies with the "Midianitish woman". Morton's awkward position is both what makes the book thrilling and what makes it open to objection; Scott is not willing to imagine an organized working-class.

Perhaps that last sentence needs qualification: he is not willing to imagine a self-organized, quietly ordered, effective working class. He imagines them as requiring a leadership which is either unstably inspired and half-insane (Mucklewrath, etc), or else brutally fanatical and inspirational by virtue of terror (Burley), or else belonging to the ruling class (Morton).

There is a bifurcation in the book. At Tillietudlem we see the classes working together in what Scott conceives as the natural order. Consider the great passages in which the rulers Major Bellenden, Lord Evandale, Claverhouse etc debate Morton's case; they do so with subtlety and acumen, here is the ruling class (each one in his way an admirable character) ordering themselves, discussing the difficult matter of one who has fallen away.

"And considering the usage which he has received, and the suspicion under which he lies," said Lord Evandale, "what other course is open to him? For my own part, I should hardly know whether he deserved most blame or pity."

"Blame, my Lord? - Pity?" echoed the Major, astonished at hearing such sentiments, "he would deserve to be hanged, that's all; and were he my own son,..."

Within this orderly social construct the workers too have an important social role; I am thinking especially of the admirable - that word again - Jenny Dennison. For after all the ruling-class characters have each one their frailties and unreasonable (but not irrational) eccentricities; once their basic right to power has been silently conceded, a wise, comic, critical, corrective commentary can flow cheekily from the servants. It all works perfectly, comfortably, and admirably.  

But now swing over to the Covenanter's campfires, and all this order is (in Scott's vision) nightmarishly perturbed. Here leadership is grotesque and what the narrative highlights is its power to do evil, its irrationality, and its insecurity (the very things that Scott doesn't want us to notice about the rulers of ordered society). And here the followers are a rabble; instead of a delightfully "irrepressible" critical voice like Jenny's, the relationship of the ruled to the rulers is uncritical adulation that may quite suddenly transform into uncritical trampling.  

The problem for the scrupulous reader is that when you immerse in Old Mortality Scott's word is law. The world of the book that we very properly want to experience to the full is after all a fictional world: we can say of the history to which he alludes, "Well, it probably wasn't quite like that": but in the fiction, that's exactly how it is; and for most of us now the fiction is much more significant than the history. The more fully we plummet into identifying with Morton's experience the more the book is likely to influence our political thinking in ways we may not want. Such are the limits of dilletantism. A cautious conclusion might be: of course you must read Scott, but don't read only Scott. The profound truth in this vision - mobs and demagogues and feeling frightened and overwhelmed by them, yes, it convinces us, this is just what it's like - well, profound truths can be tyrannous if left to roam unchecked among the feebleness of our common perceptions. Great books are dangerous.

Note

"To Fairy-knowe? - no; alone I could not protect them. - I must instantly to Glasgow." (Ch 43)

Thus the instant decision taken by Mjr-Gnrl Melville, formerly known to us as Henry Morton. Of course, we are meant to accept this; but surely Morton gets it wrong. A forewarned Evandale, the formidable Morton and the ever-useful Cuddie could surely have stood firm against any such forces as Olifant could muster (they turn out to be only four men). 

*

The ‘Tales of my Landlord’ I have read with great pleasure, and perfectly understand now why my sister and aunt are so very positive in the very erroneous persuasion that they must have been written by me. If you knew me as well as they do, you would have fallen, perhaps, into the same mistake. Some day or other, I will explain to you why—when I have time; at present it does not much matter; but you must have thought this blunder of theirs very odd, and so did I, till I had read the book....

(Byron to Murray, 9 May 1817)

Yes -- unlikely as it seems, members of his family thought Byron was the author.

Obviously there was some renewed speculation about authorship, since the Tales of My Landlord seemed to come from a different stable than the previous Waverley novels, as Scott intended. It was published by Blackwell (Edinburgh) and Murray (London), the latter being Byron's publisher.

These readers were Byron's half-sister Augusta, daughter of Jack Byron from his first marriage, and Jack's sister Frances Leigh née Byron.

I suppose it's a trivial matter, but I'd love to know what led them so astray!

Old Mortality: The Whig's Vault

Scott's novels: A brief guide