[ In the following essay, Duncan argues, against earlier critics, that Ivanhoe is "neither juvenile nor romantic" but is a serious examination of the transition between a period of heroic adventure and one of stable development.]

Is Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe essentially a romantic book of adventure—preferably for boys? A number of usually perceptive critics have treated it as such. Walter Bagehot declared that the novel expressed a great "romantic illusion" and that it was addressed "to that kind of boyish fancy which idolizes medieval society as the 'fighting time.'" Eighty years later Sir Herbert Grierson asserted that Ivanhoe was "mainly a good story of adventure for boys." Una Pope-Hennessy agreed that the novel was "first and last a boy's book" and explained that for Scott medieval England was "all a wonderful pageant-land" and that the novel's romance was "a revolt against the tyranny of facts." G. H. Maynadier wrote that the novel was not deservedly so famous on its historical side or its human side, but that "on its romantic side, one can hardly praise it too highly." Dorothy Margaret Stuart suggested that Ivanhoe was "little—if at all—more convincing than The Castle of Otranto."¹ While the novel's juvenile and romantic qualities probably have been responsible for much of its appeal to successive generations of readers and, more recently, to moviegoers, the basic point of view in Ivanhoe is neither juvenile nor romantic, but thoughtful, mature, and in a sense antiromantic. The novel presents a vivid, colorful picture of the "fighting time," but it does not glorify the fighters.

In his studies of the Scottish novels, David Daiches explained that Scott's real interest as a novelist was "in the ways in which the past impinged on the present and in the effects of that impact on human character." Explaining Scott's "deep concern with the relations between tradition and progress," Daiches declared that the Scottish novels "attempt to show that heroic action, as the typical romantic writer would like to think of it, is, in the last analysis, neither heroic nor useful."² Very similar interests and attitudes are reflected in Ivanhoe (1820). It was Scott's first published medieval novel, and in it he treated the same kind of themes examined in Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and other Scottish novels. In those he wrote about the conflict between an old heroic ideal and modern industrial society. He showed the struggle between the Scottish nationalists and the more socially advanced English and then their ultimate coöperation in forging a new society. In Ivanhoe he treated the chaos arising from the struggle between Saxons and Normans and the beginning of a new, more ordered society. But he realized that there was much of the heroic and romantic in both cultures that would unfortunately have to be sacrified before the two peoples could fuse and form the English nation.

The action, though confusingly narrated, presents in clear outlines the conflict between the Saxons and Normans, the turmoil and distress brought to the country by the struggle, the losses suffered by both groups, and then the first steps toward a unified England. Ivanhoe, the son of the Saxon patroit Cedric but a devoted follower of the Norman Richard the Lion-Hearted, is severely wounded in a tournament in which he defeats the Norman followers of King John. He is taken away and cared for by the Jewish Rebecca and her father Isaac, who later travel with the party of Cedric to gain protection against outlaws. The Normans of King John's faction attack Cedric and his entourage, capture everyone except the swineherd Gurth and the fool Wamba, and take the prisoners to the castle of the Norman Front-de-Boeuf. Richard, the Saxon servants, and Robin Hood and his band storm the castle and rescue everyone except Rebecca, who is taken away by the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert. When the Templars condemn Rebecca as a witch, she demands a champion. Brian had expected to be her champion, but he is appointed to defend the Templars' charge against Rebecca. If he is victorious, she will be burned; if he does not fight, he is disgraced. Ivanhoe, however, though scarcely recovered, appears as her champion and defeats Brian, who is really the victim of the conflict within him.

The end of civil strife and the beginning of a new national era are seen most clearly in the destruction of Front-de-Boeuf's castle. It is successfully stormed by Richard (who now insists he is Richard of England, no longer Richard of Anjou), Robin Hood, the Saxon slave Gurth and many common men of England. It was also set on fire by the mad Saxon captive Ulrica, apparently representative of the most ancient and barbarous element in the Saxon culture, who perishes with Front-de-Boeuf. In her song atop the burning castle she returns to "the wild strains which animated her forefathers during the time of Paganism and unrestrained ferocity" and lamented the passing of the race of Hengist and Horsa. The conclusion of her song seems significant for the future:

For vengeance hath but an hour;
Strong hate itself shall expire!
I also must perish!

This transition and the coming national unity are also dramatized in the victories of the Saxon-Norman Ivanhoe, the Saxon Athelstane's renunciation of his rights to the English throne, and the marriage of Ivanhoe, Richard's favorite, and Rowena, the last descendant of King Alfred.

In the introduction to Ivanhoe Scott explained that the Saxons were distinguished by "their plain, homely, blunt manners, and the free spirit infused by their ancient institutions and laws; the victors, by the high spirit of military fame, personal adventure, and whatever could distinguish them as the Flower of Chivalry." But the novel makes clear that these ideals are sometimes travestied and that an inflexible devotion to them has lost much of its usefulness. The two peoples cannot achieve unity so long as the Saxons dream of re-establishing their old kingdom and the Normans seek personal glory in irresponsible adventure. Both are short-sighted and hardened because of their enslavement to these outworn ideals and the consequent disunity and disorder in England. Cedric is a dreamer with a fanatic devotion to the lost Saxon cause that has led him to oppose the claims of nature in disowning his son Ivanhoe because the young knight has followed Richard. Athelstane, the hereditary leader of the Saxons, is known as the Unready. Although brave, he has no enthusiasm for anything except eating.

Many of the representatives of the Norman chivalric tradition are as interested in personal booty as they are in personal glory. Like Robertson in The Heart of Midlothian and some of the Highland chiefs, they are often little better than common outlaws. Scott interrupted his "idle tale" to lament that "those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity." Front-de-Boeuf has killed his father, has kept the Saxon Ulrica as his captive mistress, and is prepared to torture Isaac to obtain money. De Bracy is somewhat more chivalrous, but has kidnaped Rowena. Brian gaily violates his oath as a Templar, but is destroyed by an inner conflict when he discovers that the values of his order are opposed not only to love but to humane action.

Ivanhoe and Richard are the pivotal characters who indicate the possibility of a better future. Ivanhoe, though a Saxon, has given up the claims of his race in fighting for England and Christendom in the Crusades. Richard is a Norman who, however, honors Saxons from Cedric to Robin Hood. Richard, like some of the diehard Highland leaders of the Scottish novels, is a paradoxical figure, and Scott's treatment of him is ambivalent. Scott realized both the beauty and the grave inadequacy of the heroic ideal. Richard, "gay, good-humoured, and fond of manhood in every rank of life," can unite Saxons and Normans, barons and yeomen. When Cedric addresses him as Richard of Anjou, the monarch exclaims: "No, noble Cedric—Richard of England! whose deepest interest, whose deepest wish, is to see her sons united with each other." He effects a reconciliation between Cedric and Ivanhoe to help quell the dissension among his "faithful people." Yet Richard is too committed to the old outworn heroic ideal to lead the people into the promised land of a new England. "In the lion-hearted king," Scott wrote, "the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in a great measure realised and revived; and the personal glory which he acquired by his own deeds of arms, was far more dear to his excited imagination, than that which a course of policy and wisdom would have spread around his government." Scott apparently felt that Richard's dreams for England were not realized because he was "rash and romantic."³

There is more promise of unity and progress in the characters representative of the common people. Robin Hood joins the siege of Front-de-Boeuf's stronghold as "a true-born native of England." "Downright English am I," Friar Tuck exclaims to Richard. Wamba and Gurth are ready and able to play important roles in the rescue. In fact, Wamba enters the castle disguised as a monk and changes places with Cedric, who escapes. Although he is prepared to risk his life for his friend and master, he is not willing to do so for the heir of the Saxon kings, Athelstane.

The Hebraic culture, as represented by Isaac and Rebecca, is a kind of touchstone by which both Normans and Saxons may be judged. The Jews are conventionally charged with avarice, partly for the sake of comedy, but they are also the best representatives in the novel of the Christian virtues of love and sacrifice. Isaac and Rebecca are good Samaritans who care for Ivanhoe when his father Cedric is too proud to do so. Isaac rises to true heroism in his determination to endure any physical torture or financial sacrifice to save his daughter. This courageous devotion is in contrast with Cedric's treatment of Ivanhoe. Rebecca, with no hope that her affection for Ivanhoe can be reciprocated, risks her life to nurse him and even to give him a rapid-fire account of the siege. In her self-sacrifice and unobtrusive heroism she is comparable to Jeanie Deans of The Heart of Midlothian. In the meeting of Ivanhoe with Rebecca there is an encounter of the highest ideals of the chivalric tradition with those of the Hebraic-Christian tradition. Ivanhoe champions a chivalry, which he ironically associates with Christianity, which rates life far beneath the pitch of honor. Rebecca carries Scott's criticism of the chivalric ideal. She maintains that "domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness" are higher virtues than the love of honor and glory that brings tears and bloodshed. It is also Rebecca who later recalls the English to their own ideals. She seeks a champion from "merry England, hospitable, generous, free."

The closing pages of Ivanhoe suggest that a step has been taken forward toward a less adventurous but more stable and fruitful society, but they also warn that a relapse is inevitable because of an adherence to outworn traditions. The marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena is symbolically a marriage between the Normans and the Saxons and "a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races." It is attended by both Saxons and Normans, "joined with the universal jubilee of the lower orders." Ivanhoe himself, a native Saxon but representative of the best in Norman chivalry, is a kind of symbol of a new, unified England. Although a brave and loyal knight, he is grave and is impatient with "the wild spirit of chivalry" which impels Richard to seek dangers needlessly.

While attention perhaps centers on the dramatic conflict between the Saxons and Normans, the tension between the past and the present, tradition and progress, is even more significant. Critics have found many anachronisms in Ivanhoe, but they have tended to neglect the one which Scott intended to present—the adherence to ideals that have outlived their usefulness. Both Cedric and Richard are victims of their own romantic dreams of ways of life that belong to the past. Cedric desires to re-establish the Saxon kingdom; Richard envisions a progressive and unified English nation, but is too committed to knight-errantry to leave "those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause." "His reign," wrote Scott, "was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor, which shoots along the face of Heaven, shedding around an unnecessary and portentous light, which is instantly swallowed up by universal darkness." Ivanhoe and England prosper under Richard, but their prosperity is cut short by Richard's premature death, a result of his continued chivalric irresponsibility. It is ominous that Rebecca, who seems to represent the ideals of the past that are really worth preserving, leaves England because the nation is not prepared to nurture these ideals. Before departing, she explains to Rowena that "the people of England are a fierce race, quarrelling ever with their neighbours or among themselves."

It is only the surface and the padding of Ivanhoe that provide the romantic boy's adventure story. Scott's main concern in this novel, as in his best Scottish novels, was with the difficult but necessary transition from a romantic, heroic era to a comparatively drabber period of unity, peace, and progress. Despite the many inaccuracies in Scott's treatment of historical figures and the medieval setting, he had a firm grasp of a fundamental problem during a critical period of English history. He recognized that the reconciliation of Saxons and Normans was a permanent contribution; but he also recognized that the impingement of the past on the present, as in Richard's irresponsible heroism, could have serious consequences. Ivanhoe, far from being mainly juvenile and romantic, is essentially antichauvinistic, antichivalric, and anti-romantic.

Notes

¹The Works of Walter Bagehot (Hartford, 1891) II, 221; Sir Herbert Grierson, Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (London, 1938), p. 182; Una Pope-Hennessy, Sir Walter Scott (Denver, 1949), p. 93: G. H. Maynadier, "Ivanhoe and Its Literary Consequences," Essays in Memory of Barrett Wendell (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), pp. 222-223, and Dorothy Margaret Stuart, "Sir Walter Scott, Some Centenary Reflections," English Association Pamphlets, No. 89 (1934), p. 4.

² David Daiches, "Introduction," The Heart of Midlothian, by Sir Walter Scott, p. v, and "Scott's Achievement as a Novelist" (Part One), Nineteenth-Century Fiction, VI (1951), 81. In the introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel, Scott explained that the "strong contrast produced by the opposition of ancient manners to those which are gradually subduing them affords the lights and shadows necessary to give effect to a fictitious narrative." Max Korn declared that Scott's intellectual and intuitive historical consciousness provided the foundation and point of view in his work and that in Ivanhoe he had presented successfully the dramatic tension of human and political oppositions. "Sir Walter Scott und die Geschichte," Anglia, LXI (1937), 417, 435.

³ In the introduction to The Monastery Scott referred to the personal gallantry and "extravagant chivalry" that led knights to endanger the lives of others as well as their own.