SOURCE: "Chivalry and Romance: Scott's Medieval Novels," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 14, Spring, 1975, pp. 185-200.

[In the essay that follows, Chandler argues that the romantic aspects of Ivanhoe, like Scott's other medieval novels, should be judged not by the standards of realism but of allegory.]

One of the recurrent elements in the Waverley Novels is the distinction Scott makes between the Highlands and the Lowlands. To enter the Highlands, as one critic has put it, is to cross a border "between what is and what might be, between reality and romance, between selfish causes and lost causes, the calculating present and the impulsive past."¹ This analysis of the Scottish novels can also be applied to the medieval novels, except that in them there is no return at the end to ordinary life. While the medieval tales are far from the merely decorative pageantry that they have been popularly taken to be, most of the action does transpire on the far side of the border between the real and the unreal, in a world that sometimes verges on the mythic and allegorical. In the Scottish novels the protagonist eventually turns his back on the heroic archaism of the Highlands and returns to actuality with a deepened sense of himself. But in the world of Scott's medieval fiction, there is no such obvious recrossing, no such reintegration with life as it really is. For these books Wylie Sypher's assertion that "dreaming of the middle ages" can be "one of the shortest ways out of Manchester" may not be a complete summation, but it is at least an apposite epigram.²

It is this very quality of apparent wish-fulfillment, however tempered by an underlying realism, that made Scott's medieval panorama so popular for so long and that probably accounts for the low critical esteem in which the chivalric novels are currently held. Given a desire to restore Scott's laurels in an unheroic period, the tendency among recent critics has been to normalize his work and to emphasize the prudential, the rational, and the sociologically realistic elements in Scott's works at the expense of the romantic or affective. David Daiches expresses the prevailing view when he states that Scott's masterpieces all deal with Scottish manners and history. Reflecting a persistent discomfiture with the medieval fiction, he claims that Scott's best novels are anti-romantic since they show that "heroic action .. . is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful."³ Neither the admirable studies of Francis Hart nor of Edgar Johnson really dissent from this view. Hart, for example, declines to believe that the anti-utilitarian preface to Quentin Durward does justice to the complexity of Scott's views, while Johnson claims that the rational and pragmatic Saladin is the real hero of The Talisman.⁴ Such views find pointed expression in J. E. Duncan's article on "The Anti-Romantic in Ivanhoe," which salvages the novel for twentieth-century consumption by giving it an ironist interpretation and declaring that it is essentially anti-chivalric.⁵

As long as the novels are judged by purely realistic canons, they will certainly be found wanting. The medieval novels are not entirely lacking in the presentation of complex characters nor in a certain graininess of texture. The imprint of Scott's "realism" can be traced in the medieval novels, just as there are purely "romantic" portions to the Scottish ones. But the proportioning is different. Despite an occasional psychological portrait like that of Louis XI in Quentin Durward, the medieval novels do not contain the inner struggle and maturation of personality or the stenographic transcript of society that make Scott's presentation of a Jeanie Deans or Darsie Latimer and their worlds so compelling. Nor is there an overriding sense of historical or tragic fatality such as often informs the Scottish books. But what if instead of being judged against the grain of instinctive response, their wish-fulfilling qualities are used for them, not against them? What if they are considered not as novels, but romances—a term that in Scott's time implied narratives that were idealizing, symbolic, and affective, vaguely descended from the chivalric fables of the past and still retaining something of their passion and mystery? To do so may require an overemphasis on certain elements in the novels, but there is at least the justification that Scott himself shared in this sense of genre, believing that the "old wild fictions" awakened the fancy, elevated the disposition, and created a higher form of character than a mundane existence could afford.⁶ He thought that the novel was "the legitimate child of romance" and praised it for bringing its "knowledge of the human heart . . . to the service of honour and virtue."⁷ Judged by such aesthetic criteria, Scott's own medieval romances (for that is what they mostly are) reveal surprising strengths: a consistent ideal of human conduct and a startling inventiveness of technique.

To understand the medieval novels it is necessary to recall what the middle ages stood for in Scott's time. Despite some lingering hostility to the Dark Ages, the medieval revival was well under way by the time Scott was born and had diffused itself into a variety of artistic and antiquarian enthusiasms. As manifested in some of the popular histories of the late eighteenth century, the rehabilitation of the middle ages had resulted in a rather stylized view of the past, one that had little to do with the middle ages as they really were and a great deal to do with the emerging values of primitivism, freedom, and heroic individualism.

For most of the pro-medieval historians the story of the middle ages began in the forests of Germany, or Scandinavia, or perhaps Britain, Wales, or Ireland—any place where Germanic or Celtic tribes could be discerned. They were a "great and divine People," according to their advocates, who lived simply and frugally, were hospitable to strangers, and were uncorrupted by the desire for riches. Intelligent, imaginative, proud, they were "strangers to duplicity and malignity of spirit" and passionately devoted to liberty.⁸

It was to these "forests of Germany" that the historians traced the origins of chivalry. Although earlier writers had ridiculed the "enthusiasm" of knight-errantry, such historians as Robert Henry, Gilbert Stuart, or even Sharon Turner, tended to idealize the chivalric code. Its leading characteristics were said to be "valour, humanity, courtesy, justice, honour . . . religion . . . [and] a scrupulous adherence to truth."⁹ While admitting the brutality of the middle ages, most of these historians thought that the period was redeemed by the chivalric insistence on the sanctity of women and the inviolable rights of the innocent and the weak.

These historians, however, clearly differentiated between the early middle ages and the late. In the early period, the binding principle of feudal society was seen as affection rather than compulsion. The connection between superior and vassal was believed to be "warm and generous," and the feudal chiefs were powerful not so much by their military forces as by the attachment and loyalty of their retainers. But the later middle ages changed all this. "Property," as one historian wrote, was "unfolded in all its relations."¹⁰ Money was substituted for loyalty, and the profit-motive separated forever the interests of the lord and his subject. By the end of the middle ages, mercenary armies had taken the place of vassals, and the "liberty and happiness" of the earlier period was replaced by the "rapacity and savageness" of a corrupted era.¹¹

In their tripartite division of medieval society into its Germanic, chivalric, and decadent phases, these pre-Romantic historians managed to maintain their belief in progress by seeing the decline of feudalism as paving the way for a new and better form of government. Many of them also believed that historical change revealed the hand of Providence. Scott's friend, Sharon Turner, though dubious about some aspects of the middle ages, was very certain about Providence. He often postulated divine interference as part of history, and he was praised on his death for showing in all his historical works that "minute providential agency and actual superintendence of all affairs by the Almighty."¹²

In his "Essay on Chivalry" Scott echoes many of these ideas. Although no man of his age had read more or knew more of the actual records of the past than Sir Walter Scott, he could not wholly avoid reading that past as others did. If one accepts Duncan Forbes' view in his now classical article on Scott's rationalism that he was strongly influenced by eighteenth-century thought,¹³ one must also include as part of his background such non-rationalist historians as Sharon Turner, to whom he acknowledges indebtedness in the preface to Ivanhoe, and Robert Henry, from whom Scott plagiarizes in "The Essay on Chivalry."¹⁴ Thus, for Scott, as for these pre-Romantic historians, the seeds of chivalry existed in the German forests. It was chivalry, he believed, Christianity excepted, that was the chief cause of difference between the ancients and the moderns. Its strength lay in its combination of military valor, not with a purely intellectual code, but with the strongest passions of the human mind, its feelings of reverence and love. Sharply critical of chivalry in practice, he could nonetheless praise the ideal. He claimed that it operated on the "beautiful" theory that the soldier who drew his "sword in defence of his country and its liberties, or of the oppressed innocence of damsels, widows, and orphans, or in support of religious rights . . . [was inspired in his deeds by] a deep sense of devotion, exalting him above the advantage and even fame which he himself might derive from victory and giving dignity to defeat itself, as a lesson of divine chastisement and humiliation."¹⁵

Like the historians, Scott also believed in the theory of rise and fall. He believed that all human institutions are bound to decay and that chivalry so deteriorated in its later stages that it finally seemed to foster the very vices it was pledged to avoid. "The devotion of the knights," he wrote, "degenerated into superstition,—their love into licentiousness,—their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil,—their generosity into hare-brained madness" (p. 13). Nevertheless, despite its final failure, chivalry is given a basically favorable judgment. "Its institutions," Scott claimed, "virtuous as they were in principle, and honourable and generous in their ends, must have done much good, and prevented much evil." With poetic nostalgia, he concludes his essay by calling chivalry "a beautiful and fantastic piece of frost-work which has dissolved in the beams of the sun" (p. 98).

What Scott states explicitly about the rise and fall of chivalry and the distinction between practice and theory in his essay is implicit in the novels. We can see this sense of historical development most clearly in Anne of Geierstein, in which the hero successively (rather than simultaneously, as in a novel like Ivanhoe) experiences the three different phases of medieval life; the primitivism of the heroic Swiss mountaineers, the chivalry of the vanquished Lancastrians, and the postchivalric decay of the Burgundians and Provencals. Taken schematically Scott's young observer—as distinguished from his more complex-minded creator—sees freedom and simplicity in the first society, courage and fidelity in the second, and selfishness and luxury in the third—a perfect eighteenth-century minihistory.

Set at the intersection of historical periods and value systems, as are all his novels, medieval stories such as Anne of Geierstein give Scott the opportunity to explore the worth of various moral systems. Although his judgment is balanced, his sympathies are clear. The central value in all Scott's medieval romances—and the one that must win out in the end—is what we would call altruism and what Scott really meant by the term chivalry. Related to the Shaftesburian conception of the "moral sense"—or virtue for virtue's sake—altruism is a hard term to define, perhaps because it exists more purely in fiction than in life. But it is this ideal of human conduct, this practice of virtue without the necessity of reward, this risk of self for the benefit of others, this dedication to a cause in the face of danger, that Scott's medieval novels, stripped of their tempering complexities, ultimately assert. Other of his books penetrate the deceptions of altruism—the fanaticisms, the narcissisms, the power-drives that can masquerade in its clothes. Dealing with a more recognizably modern society, the Scottish and English novels seem to endorse a more prudential and realistic code of behavior. But in writing of the far-off world of the middle ages, Scott can afford to be more didactic.

Basically at issue in these books, though projected into the medieval past, is the growing nineteenth-century conflict between utilitarian and anti-utilitarian modes of behavior—between what Dickens so pithily calls "looking out for number one" and a philosophy of life that assumes there is more to conduct than mere ciphering. How clearly Scott sees this conflict of values and where he stands in regard to it appear most vividly in Quentin Durward, which is organized, as are most of the medieval romances, on the contrast between calculation and chivalry.

In his introduction to this novel, Scott sets up a dichotomy between the spirit of chivalry that is dying out as the story begins and the new utilitarian morality that is superseding it. Chivalry, he asserts, is founded upon "generosity and self-denial, of which if the world were deprived, it would be difficult to conceive the existence of virtue among the human race." Its successor, the emerging modern code of self-interest, is based on just the opposite moral principle of personal self-indulgence. Its admittedly selfish aim, to use Scott's purposely Benthamite phrase, is to augment one's individual "sum of happiness."¹⁶

King Louis, whom Scott compares to Goethe's Mephistopheles, embodies in himself these post-chivalric values and demonstrates their essential strengths and weaknesses. He is the practical peace-keeper in an age of brawling wars. But he is also the destructive, manipulative overreacher, who is so "purely selfish, so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and desire of selfish enjoyment, that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour in its very source" by ridiculing all actions that do not lead certainly and directly to self-gratification (31, iv-vi). Although Scott with his inevitable fairness and dramatic vision makes Louis one of the most fully living characters in his medieval novels—a projection on to an unreal world of a familiar and brilliant pragmatism—Louis is an unpleasant historical necessity, whose motives are dubious and calculations unpleasant.

But, as Ruskin, who was a great admirer of Scott, wrote later, "All endeavour to deduce rules of action from balance of expediency is in vain. .. . No man . . . can know what will be the result to himself, or to others, from any given line of conduct."¹⁷ Operating by expediency and calculations, King Louis schemes, lies, and consults astrology in order to control the future. The element that distrubs his computations is the young soldier, Quentin Durward, whose combination of naivete, chivalric idealism, and native shrewdness, proves too complex for the King at every turn. A free man moved by spontaneous generosity (or at least by youthful ambition and ardor) rather than a machine pushed forward by pleasure and pain, Durward is both unpredictable and unbeatable. Hardly the perfect hero of romance—somewhat too unpolished and immature for that—he nonetheless holds fast throughout the novel to his exalted faith in his lady and his word. A wise fool poised against a foolish wise man, it is he who saves Louis, and thereby France, in the end.

Ivanhoe, perhaps the most purely "romantic" of the medieval novels, is likewise built round the contrast between the generosity of primitive and chivalric man and the selfishness of his successors. The opening scenes in the Saxon stronghold at Rotherwood show open-handed generosity and a rude compassion for mankind in the ascendant. Food is plenteous at Cedric's Saxon board and all are welcome to share his table (although some have less desirable seats). By contrast, the hospitality that King John offers his Saxon guests is cold and meaningless. Sitting in their stolen castle, eating food refined out of all recognition, these Norman representatives of the later middle ages devote their energies to belittling their guests, the dispossessed owners of the entire land, and to devising new ways to outwit them.

An almost mythic contrast between selfishness and generosity distinguishes the scenes at Torquilstone from the episodes in Sherwood Forest. Torquilstone, the massive, forbidding castle of Front-de-Boeuf, is a veritable allegory of the selfish passions. Down in the dungeons, Front-de-Boeuf himself torments the frightened Isaac. In the chambers, Maurice de Bracy and Brian de Bois-Guilbert threaten the innocence of Rowena and Rebecca. And, on the towers, the demented Ulrica sings her death-song of revenge. By comparison, despite their superficial lawlessness, the oak glades of Sherwood are positively idyllic. Isaac's gold is restored to him, Rebecca and Rowena are treated courteously, and the spoils of Torquilstone are shared with a liberal hand.

The basic differences between the two codes of behavior come to a focus in the contrasted treatment of Rebecca by Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert. Doubly weak and unprotected as a woman and as a Jewess, Rebecca is a touchstone for chivalry. Her dialogues with Bois-Guilbert unveil the cynical egotism beneath his Templar's cloak as he tries to barter her virtue for her life. To his late medieval opportunism, the Jewess counters with the chivalric code. Were he a true Christian, she says, he would not put a price on her deliverance, but would "protect the oppressed for the sake of charity, and not for a selfish advantage" (17, 285).

Despite its failings, the only force within the novel capable of counteracting the dual threat of Bois-Guilbert's passionate sensuality and "free-born reason" would seem to be the spirit of chivalry. Ivanhoe's defense of the chivalric code as that which "alone distinguishes the noble from the base . . . [and which] raises us victorious over pain, toil, and suffering" has been attacked as naive and unrealistic.¹⁸ Scott expresses these strictures himself in Rebecca's criticism of its more blood-thirsty aspects. But what Ivanhoe goes on to say about chivalry as "the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, [and] the curb of the power of the tyrant" (17, 109) is not wholly ironic. It is the incipient voice of the law itself, magisterially protecting the weak from the strong, and not very different, after all, from Allan Fairford's defense of the legal profession in Redgauntlet as defending "a righteous cause with hand and purse, and [taking] the part of the poor man against his oppressor, without fear of the consequences to himself' (35, 68). What Ivanhoe describes is military courage, the only redress available to a barbarous age. It is more arbitrary and unreliable than Fairford's civil courage and unquestionably subject to abuses. But for Scott its premise is the same: the subordination of private judgment to the welfare of society itself.

Altruism, then, or devotion in the face of risk, is the saving grace of chivalry, in theory if not in actual fact. Like the bulwark of the law in the modern world, Scott sees it as redeeming man from the consequences of his selfishness and his passions. Although he is never very far away from puncturing his own illusions—never far, for example, from criticism of King Richard's feckless knight errantry in a tottering kingdom—it is a muted counterpointing, a small, dry voice almost unheard among his grander melodies.

As Ivanhoe shows, however, the practice of chivalry, whatever its limitations, is only the property of the chosen few. For the mass of men, according to Scott, the redeeming virtue is loyalty, or affection given without hope of reward. It is related to the well-nigh savage faithfulness of the Highland clans that he described in his Scottish novels and, in moderated form, is the force of social coherence that he wished to revive in his own competitive age through such quasimedieval refurbishments as The Loyal Foresters. In regard to the middle ages, Scott largely shares the belief in medieval unity that marked the work of earlier historians, but goes far beyond them in perception. Although he is never unaware of its deficiencies and contradictions and knows perfectly well how Cedric really treated Gurth, he still sees the feudal world, as Coleridge later would, as a chain of loyalties, in which all ranks of men from king to commoner acknowledge mutual ties. At the top of the scale, a knight like Ivanhoe offers his devoir to the king; but at the bottom, and just as significantly, a serf like Wamba will offer up his life to save his master. The symbol of such communality for Scott is the feudal feast. Its enemy (and he can sometimes be an attractive one) is the isolato—the gypsy, the atheist, the mercenary—those who deny the social bond. Scott's paternalistic concept of loyalty thus taps the wellsprings of political order by tracing them back to parental authority and familial ties.

If a society is to be bound by loyalty, however, it must be one in which pledges are honored. Keeping one's word is part of the implicit covenant of trust that men make in giving up their individual right of self-defense to the social group. As a lawyer and man of affairs Scott was doubtlessly aware of the pragmatic value of honorable conduct. As the author of romances he mocked it a little and exalted it much. Fidelity to the truth is an important theme in all Scott's works, but it is an especially important virtue in the medieval novels where Scott echoes the pre-Romantic historians' emphasis on "scrupulous adherence to the truth" as part of the knightly code. "My word is the emblem of my faith" (46, 19), says one of Scott's heroes, and though the hero is none too bright, the author does not mean us to deride him. Touched on to some degree in all his works, the meaning of honor is treated most fully in The Betrothed, where Scott explores the rival claims of a pragmatic attitude toward keeping faith based on a prudent self-interest and a chivalric idealism that hews to the absolute.

In this novel the de Berengers epitomize idealism. Raymond de Berenger, lord of a castle on the Marches, goes consciously to his death to fulfill a foolish promise made to his Welsh enemy that he will fight outside the natural defenses of his castle. His daughter Eveline feels bound after his death to maintain an equally foolish pledge to marry a man she does not love. In contrast to the rashness of Eveline and her father, Scott sets up the good sense and solid, burgher integrity of Wilkin Flammock, a Flemish weaver. Flammock is everything de Berenger is not. Cautious and practical, he always advises against rash promises and unnecessary fulfillments. He tells Raymond de Berenger not to fight upon the open field and refuses to let Eveline take her beloved into her castle, lest people think she has taken him into her bed as well. "This is one of your freaks," he says, "of honour and generosity, but commend me to prudence and honesty" (37, 372-73).

But are prudence and honesty enough? Although Scott finds much to praise in Flammock's sound judgment and integrity, he cannot accept such bourgeois values unreservedly. Wilkin's pragmatic code is a good one and, as Scott well knew, the inevitable code of the emerging mercantile society that would function by contract and by bond. But it lacks the high unselfishness of chivalry. Scott makes very clear the differences in sensibility between the de Berengers and the Flammocks—between those who merely fulfill their obligations and those who go beyond them. But without idealizing either, he shows that despite temporary setbacks, as in Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, it is the chivalrous who win out in the end. Raymond de Berenger is willing to sacrifice his life for his honor, and he is killed. But, ironically, his willingness to keep faith even with those who would observe none with him, ultimately leads his forces to victory, since the Welsh are trapped and annihilated on the very ground they had chosen. "Heaven is just," says Eveline, when she hears that the enemy has been destroyed. And heaven seems just, too, when at the end of the story it awards her the lover of her choice.

The notion that the gods are just points out another characteristic of the novels of chivalry. Walter Bagehot wrote more than a century ago that "the world of [Scott's] fiction .. . is one subject to laws of retribution which, though not apparent on a superficial glance, are yet in steady and consistent operation, and will be sure to work their due effect if time is only given to them."¹⁹ In the Scottish novels, with their emphasis on realism and historicity, such retributive justice can only work out, if it does at all, in a very general way. But Scott's medieval world is sufficiently free from historical fact to allow him the luxury of providential solutions. If poetic justice is still not universally achieved, it is more frequent and more dramatic than in the Scottish books.

One way to investigate Scott's providentialism is to examine the differences between the younger and older practitioners of chivalric virtue. Several of the novels present two contrasted heroes—an enthusiastic young man, who has yet to win his spurs, and a more prudent older man, who serves as a father figure. In Quentin Durward, for instance, Crevecoeur, though he admires the young Scotsman, cannot accept what seem to him young Durward's insane aspirations in love and calls him a "madman" for his hopes. In Anne of Geierstein, young Arthur argues with his father to accept the warnings of an unknown maiden. A similar contrast between prudence and confidence obtains in Castle Dangerous, where Aymer de Valence urges his chief to trust an unknown guest.

Despite their lack of caution, in the world of the medieval novels, the young idealists seem to have an edge, as contrasted with the Scottish novels where youth must more frequently learn from age. Quentin Durward does win a fair lady, and wealth and rank besides. Sir John de Walton imprisons the stranger, as practicality demands, and thereby precipitates an awful chain of disasters. As for Arthur Philipson, he, too, proves right in his youthful trust in the maiden. In chiding his son for what he considers his chivalric romanticism, the father, like all these supposedly wise old men, has the worst of the argument. What he called Arthur's "vain imagination" has actually given a truer picture of the world than his own too-cautious reasoning (44, 367).

Indeed, the quality of faith can be added to such other characteristics of Scott's heroes as altruism, loyalty, and honor—faith in himself and what can loosely be called Providence. A pagan character like Saladin in The Talisman can believe that the universe is governed by powers that turn good into evil and can address a hymn to the forces of darkness. But the chivalric hero knows otherwise. He may never express it directly, but his actions and his fate embody Scott's belief expressed in the Journal that "there is a God, and a just God—a judgment and a future life—and all who own so much let them act according to the faith that is in them."²⁰ Moderated though they are by Scott's full cognizance of human ambiguity, the medieval novels leave little doubt that Providence, though it moves slowly, moves justly, and that by mysterious ways it punishes the wicked and rewards the good.

Although Scott occasionally resorts to a clumsy deux ex machina, as in the sudden death of Brian de Bois-Guilbert, most manifestations of retributive justice are skillfully dovetailed into the plot. In Anne of Geierstein, for example, the Duke of Burgundy thinks his own interests will best be served by rejecting the course of honor. But by pursuing his own advantage he actually brings about his own death. In Quentin Durward, too, there is constant irony in the way King Louis and his royal astronomer plot Durward's future and the way in which the young Scotsman fulfills the letter of the prophecies while totally reversing their intentions.

These and a myriad of other unexpected events suggest one major aspect of Scott's view of life, though one that may need to be corrected by looking at the Scottish novels. The universe, he seems to be saying, is more complicated than the mere reasoning mind can realize, and attempts to calculate the future end in disaster. Indeed, in his last novel, Scott declares that the real purpose of art is to elucidate the ways of Providence. An aged minstrel, who seems very much Scott's spokesman, says in Castle Dangerous: "God knows . . . that if I, or such as I, are forgetful of the finger of Providence in accomplishing its purposes in this lower world, we have heavier blame than that of other people, since we are perpetually called upon, in the exercise of our fanciful profession, to admire the turns of fate which bring good out of evil and which render those who think only of their own passions and purposes the executors of the will of Heaven" (5, 347).

What of the attitude of the hero in such a world? As an important episode in Anne of Geierstein suggests, the hero must literally make the leap of faith. Trapped on a rock by a sudden Alpine avalanche, Arthur Philipson finds himself "suspended between heaven and earth." As long as he estimates his danger "by the measure of sound sense and reality," Arthur cannot cross the gap (45, 33 ff.). But when Anne of Geierstein, a half-realistic, half-supernatural figure, stretches out her hand and gives him "heart of grace" he springs the gulf to safety. Much of Arthur's education involves just such an act of faith. Like all of Scott's heroes, he must overcome his naiveté and learn to live wisely and prudently. But he must also learn to accept the universe on a deeper level than that of mere rationality. The events of the novel, Scott says, served to develop both the young man's "understanding and passions" (45, 257)—and the second quality is as important as the first. Like all Scott's chivalric heroes, Arthur Philipson would seem to illustrate Cardinal Newman's dictum—and Newman, rightly or wrongly, thought Scott responsible for the Oxford Movement—that "action flows not from inferences, but from impressions—not from reasonings, but from Faith."²¹ The medieval novels, like all Scott's work, give ample evidence that he never condoned ungoverned passion or irresponsible action. But whatever his subliminal ironies and authorial distancings, they also show his recognition that unselfish generosity and heroic idealism can only be energized by feeling.

The medieval novels enhance the world they depict. Despite certain tensional ironies and contradictions, they appeal not only to the reader's desire for heroic action but to his idealized conceptions of nobility and justice. Subordinating freedom to order as they do, they are conceptually not very different from the rest of his works, but they are far more schematic in their approach. Dealing with a period of time that had already been glamorized by the historians, they allow Scott more freedom to express that nostalgia for chivalric values than the more realistic underpinning of the Scottish novels will not allow him to indulge. Set in a period historically vague, they give freer range to his hopefulness. Once their genre is recognized as what might be termed a subset of the Waverley Novels, retaining some characteristics but strongly emphasizing others, certain of the difficulties surrounding the books begin to disappear. They have been accused, for example, of superficial characterization. As long as they are regarded purely as novels, instead of as romances, this is certainly true. Despite a few complex psychological portraits, Scott's medieval stories show little to compare with the subtle and dramatic development of character that he achieves in the best of the Waverley Novels and few of the confrontations and renunciations that give these novels strength. But romance does not ask for psychological realism; it stylizes, instead—heightening, coloring, and dramatizing the characters until they almost allegorically polarize such values as egotism and altruism, prudence and idealism, caution and commitment. This essay has already explored the meaning of such symbolic pairs as Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, Raymond de Berenger and Wilkin Flammock, and the young chivalric heroes and the old. Further investigation of the medieval romances would show many other thematic pairings and even triplings: Harry Smith and Conachar in The Fair Maid of Perth; Coeur-de-Lion, Sir Kenneth, and Saladin in The Talisman; and, in Count Robert of Paris, a veritable Great Chain of Being, from bestial tiger through cynical modern man.

The plot structure of these novels is also romantically stylized. As has been seen, Scott arranges his stories to make full use of dramatic irony, and arranges the incidents of his plot, though they may initially seem fortuitous, to support his conception of providence. Many of the medieval novels show a considerable tautness of structure. One such structural device is the use of a symbolic episode to sum up and forecast the action. An excellent example is the scene at the beginning of Quentin Durward, in which the young archer, who is described as entering the world with little conception of its perils, is tricked by King Louis into fording a treacherous river and survives the danger of crossing to threaten Louis' henchman with a drubbing. The two-page episode sums up the remainder of the book quite as clearly as the extended siege of Torquilstone epitomizes Ivanhoe or Arthur Philipson's entrapment by the avalanche foreshadows all that follows.

Although some of the last medieval romances fall apart in structure, most of the earlier ones are remarkably symmetrical in plot, with the symmetry underscoring the theme. Ivanhoe, for instance, begins with a feast scene at Cedric's estate, in which both friends and foes are divided amongst themselves, proceeds to the open hostility of the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, and then enters into the moral ambiguity of the forest. The scenes that follow at Torquilstone are both physically and morally central, with their confrontation between good and evil, thrice repeated blasts of the trumpets, and references to the Book of Job and apocalyptic destruction by fire. After that crisis the plot retraces itself backwards towards harmony. The new scenes in the forest show that the outlaws really live in unity, the second tournament at Templestowe reasserts the power of the good, and the concluding feast at Rotherwood shows the wicked routed and the good men reconciled. In broad outline, the progress of the novel from Rotherwood to the tournament, to the forest glade, to Torquilstone, and back to the forest glade, a tournament, and Rotherwood is not only symmetrical but triumphant. Similar symmetrical developments, with the action pivoting on a single crucial scene, can also be observed in Quentin Durward and The Talisman.

If the earlier medieval novels use symbolism and structure to reinforce Scott's historical conceptions, the last ones—Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous—also use it to support his providentialism. They do so by means of two repeated image clusters or motifs—the descent into the grave and restoration after loss.

In Anne of Geierstein, which Scott started in 1828, three years after financial ruin had shattered him, there are several episodes of symbolic descent into the grave. In one, young Arthur Philipson is immured in a dark and narrow dungeon from which he is only rescued by a quasi-seraphic Anne. In another, his father must undergo a symbolic burial. Nightmarishly clad in only his underclothes, the Earl is plunged into a subterranean chamber, where he encounters an inquisitorial tribunal, which claims an "acquaintance with all guilt, however secret" (45, 37), and accuses him of dreadful crimes. Like his son, he is eventually restored to life but only after a hideous foretaste of death and judgment.

In Count Robert of Paris, however, the judgment is no longer Kafkaesque but providential. Released from bondage and apparent blindness after three years of imprisonment, the victim here asserts the justice of his punishment, stating that the Emperor who imprisoned him was "but the agent through whom Heaven exercised a dearly-purchased right of punishing me for my manifold offenses and transgressions" (47, 138) and adding that his imprisonment and blindness have shown him a "liberty far more unconstrained than this poor earth can afford, and a vision far more clear than any Mount Pisgah on this wretched side of the grave can get us" (47, 149).

These themes of entombment, restoration, and providence appear again in Scott's last novel, Castle Dangerous, a sad, flawed, strange work, whose major theme appears to be that of loss with honor. Although it is bad scholarship to make such biographical conjectures, it is tempting to read this novel in the light of what we know about Scott's final years. It is not difficult to see the autobiographical elements. Sir John de Walton has pledged to keep an ancient Scottish Castle (Abbotsford, perhaps, or Scott's own honor) for a year and a day. He has done this in deference to a promise given to the Lady Augusta, who, like himself (and like Scott), is dedicated to the fast-dying virtues of chivalry. The castle contains a wondrous book of ancient poetry, into which Bertram the Minstrel, another of Scott's self-projections, is pledged to keep looking. The minstrel had thought once during the sack of the castle (Scott's bankruptcy) that it was time for him to take his book and go, but he has learned that the time is not yet, that he still has a role to play in reminding others about providence and heroism. More than any other of Scott's heroes, Sir John de Walton falters. He quarrels with his foster son, is churlish to Bertram the Minstrel, and almost betrays Augusta. But in spite of his shortsightedness and error, he does hold fast to his honor. At the end of the novel, which brings with it symbolic restorations of love, eyesight, and justice, Sir John can gracefully yield up the castle to its rightful owner, The Knight of the Tomb. Confused though this final narrative is, it shows a new growth of symbolic and psychological power and an attempt to wrest triumph out of defeat. It is an appropriate final work for an acute and subtle realist who had all his life asserted the virtues of chivalry and the attractions of romance.

Notes

¹ Coleman 0. Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott's Fiction (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p. 264.

² Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 103.

³ David Daiches, Literary Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956), p. 88.

⁴ Francis R. Hart, Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1966), pp. 225-226. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (New York: Macmillan, 1970) II, 937.

⁵ J. E. Duncan, "The Anti-Romantic in Ivanhoe," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 (1955), 293-300.

⁶Sir Walter Scott, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson (London: Constable and Co., 1932-37), VII, 302.

⁷Quarterly Review, 14 (1815), 189.

⁸ Robert Henry, The History of Great Britain, 4th ed. (London, 1805), II, 299.

⁹ William Russell, The History of Modern Europe, new ed. (London, 1822), I, 193-94.

¹⁰ Gilbert Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, 2nd ed. (London, 1782), p. 75.

¹¹Ibid., p. 80.

¹² Thomas Preston Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing: 1760-1830 (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1933), p. 229.

¹³ Duncan Forbes, "The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott," Cambridge Journal, 7 (October, 1953), passim.

¹⁴ A sentence from the "Essay" quoted below, for example, is almost identical with a statement of Henry's: "But still an institution so virtuous in its principles and so honourable in its ends must have done much good and prevented many evils" (The History of Great Britain, VI, 327).

¹⁵ Sir Walter Scott, Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1854), I, 20; all further references to the "Essay" are to this edition.

¹⁶ Sir Walter Scott, The Waverley Novels, 48 vols. (Edinburgh, 1929-33), 31, XXV. All further references to the novels are to this edition.

¹⁷ John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library edition (London and New York: George Allen and Longman, 1903-1912), XVII, 28.

¹⁸ Johnson, I, 738-39.

¹⁹ Walter Bagehot, National Review (April, 1858), p. 458.

²⁰ Sir Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. John Guthrie Tait (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1950), p. 39.

²¹ John Henry Cardinal Newman, Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, 2nd ed. (London, 1873), p. 304.