Scott and American violence

 

The Lost Cause, 1868 painting by Henry Mosler

[Image source: Wikimedia . The painting is in the Johnson collection, Spartanburg SC. ]

[These notes previously appeared at the end of my post on Sir Walter Scott's 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein, but they're not specifically about that novel and I've decided they're better in a separate post. The hinge paragraph appears in both.]

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. . . At around the same date Anne of Geierstein may have had another and more dire influence. The Ku Klux Klan (formed 1865) may have based some of the details of their operation  on descriptions of the secret court of the Holy Vehme, ultimately from Goethe but most likely taken from this very novel. (For example the black cloaks and hoods; the white cloaks came later.) This at any rate was the theory put forward by James Taft Hadfield (PMLA, Vol 37 No 4 (Dec 1922), pp. 735-739):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/457170

Forty years later Thomas Dixon Jr, in The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), invented the detail of the Klan's burning crosses, apparently basing it on the Gaelic crann-tara, which he probably knew from Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. Subsequently, the reviving Klan adopted Dixon's idea. 

Scott's novels were certainly popular reading in the southern states. That was the context of Mark Twain's "wreck of the Walter Scott" in Huckleberry Finn and his subsequent onslaught in Life on the Mississippi (1883). He thought Scott had done "measureless harm", amounting, almost, to causing the US Civil War. But the passage deserves to be read in full. (I include a bit of outlying context here, but not all of it: the chapter starts by musing on Mardi Gras.) 

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien regime and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.

   Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

   Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. 

   One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too—innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. 

   But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it—clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany—as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two—and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. 

   A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.

(Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, end of Chapter 46)

Twain was more concerned, I suppose, with modern American culture than with a dead author who was rapidly going out of fashion. He said nothing about Scott's own many critiques of chivalry and romance, but I suppose these critiques are always nuanced; the underlying respect for rank in Scott's books is undeniable. Twain's allegation of Scott's deep influence on the culture of southern aristocracy seems to lack foundation. Scott was popular in both the northern and southern states, but he wasn't taken very seriously as an author. 

Henry James' early comments on Scott give a flavour. "[He is] the ideal fireside chronicler. And thoroughly to enjoy him, we must again become as credulous as children at twilight" (review of Nassau W. Senior's Essays on Fiction, 1864). Later James would take Scott with increasing seriousness. In his 1907 Preface to The American, he wrote of "the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola...": that's quite a striking grouping of names.

But Mark Twain always took Scott seriously. There was something about Scott -- and also about the Civil War -- that never ceased to bother him. 

(I'm taking that information from Susan Manning's "Did Mark Twain bring down the temple on Scott's shoulders?" an illuminating essay in Special relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936 (Manchester University Press, 2012):

https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/downloadpdf/9781526137654/9781526137654.00006.pdf  )

Here he is, ill in bed in 1903:

To Brander Matthews, in New York:

NEW YORK CITY, May 4, '03. DEAR BRANDER, -- I haven't been out of my bed for four weeks, but -- well, I have been reading, a good deal, and it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, and jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help and elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Colombian lectures out of the results and do your students a good turn.

1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English -- English which is neither slovenly or involved?

2. Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of a quality above that?

3. Are there passages which burn with real fire -- not punk, fox-fire, make believe?

4. Has he heroes and heroines who are not cads and cadesses?

5. Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him?

6. Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, and knows why?

7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous?

8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to lay the book down?

9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and in earnest?

10. Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't want to?

11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one when he saw it?

13. Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day -- an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics -- but land! can a body do it today?

Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation -- elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live to get to it you don't believe in it when it happens.

I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering -- I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of them rank high now? And do they? -- honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I believe it.  . . .

RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 . DEAR BRANDER, -- I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering -- that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being -- Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage properties -- finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.

It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.

I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward? Yrs ever MARK.

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I wonder if Twain originated what seems to have become a long-lasting meme: reading Scott caused American violence. In Stephen Crane's Wild West story "Moonlight on the Snow" (1900), the gambler Larpent shoots a man who calls him a cheat, then:

He sat down to read, his hand falling familiarly upon an old copy of Scott's Fair Maid of Perth. 

Maybe Hadfield's Ku Klux Klan theory is also influenced by that meme. 

And perhaps the influence is still floating around. Reading on Wikipedia about a protracted wave of killings in Kentucky and West Virginia (roughly from the 1840s through 1870s), I saw the suggestion that Scottish and Irish settlers had imported a tendency to violence within honour culture and that the killings were considered feuds because of the influence of Scott and Shakespeare. 

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I don't know what I think of all this, but I do see another connection. Scott's idea of reconciling past conflicts involved securing his nation's unity by safely admitting and celebrating, in highly romanticized form, the values of the losing side: e.g. in Waverley the Jacobite cause and the Highland clans that supported it. The losing side are given a cultural cachet in order to compensate for being superseded in the real world. 

You can probably see where I'm going with this, because that's exactly what happened with the romanticizing of the South after the Civil War, sometimes referred to as "The Lost Cause of the Confederacy". This romanticizing was an attempt by the losers to alleviate the trauma of losing, but it was countenanced and even encouraged by the victors, because it did reconcile white southerners to forgetting about secession and feeling part of a united nation, proudly contributing their distinctive culture and sense of romantic nostalgia. The long-term influence of that romanticizing is obvious in the movies, e.g. Gone With the Wind, and can't be excluded from e.g. the subsequent flourishing of southern literature (Faulkner et al) or the birth of rock'n'roll (largely in the Deep South). As a myth its influence continued to resonate through (white) music in subsequent decades, an irresistibly potent iconography, whether we think of The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", or Randy Newman's "Rednecks" (the Lost Cause cleverly affirmed in a song you can badge anti-racist), or the whole sub-genre of Southern Rock, or R.E.M's Fables of the Reconstruction, or Nick Cave's immersion in mythical southern Gothic, or... well, so much more. The problem is, national reconciliation is only one side of that story. In e.g. Thomas Dixon Jr and D.W. Griffith, the myth of the Lost Cause, apart from its distortedly romantic idea of the antebellum South (complete with beneficent plantations of happy slaves) was explicitly linked to racist beliefs and fears and to a philosophy of white supremacism. It opened a path to segregation, the disenfranchisement of black votes across the whole of the Deep South, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, spates of lynchings . . . And even aside from that, the Lost Cause, if it was a reconciliatory myth that bonded whites, did so by explicitly understating/excluding the perspective of African Americans. In a resonant 2009 article for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about why, for him, a song like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" could only ever be prejudged as "the blues of Pharoah". Unlike (what he then proceeds to quote), the chaplain Garland H. White's inspiring records of black soldiers entering Richmond, Va. in 1865, the freeing of thousands from the slave pens, the joyful re-uniting of families . . .  

This is almost too big a subject to come back from it to Scott without a sense of bathos. But anyway, it demonstrates that a Scott-like romanticizing of the past can inflame as well as reconcile, and it can also exclude. 

Scott's novels: A brief guide