Dr. Leavis's critical tip in a footnote to the first chapter of The Great Tradition must have sent many readers to that tale of Scott's which, he said, "remains in esteem while the heroics of the historical novels can no longer command respect."¹ Yet "The Two Drovers" has not, in the years since 1948, come in for much critical attention—Davie, Welsh, Hart, and Mayhead, for example, scarcely mention it.² Even the text is not easily come by; for all its brevity, it is not reprinted in any of the fat college anthologies where it might well claim a place. Nevertheless, it is a tale that speaks to our time, particularly to the questions of how far our freedom is limited by cultural conditioning and how far we are right to judge by our own culturally-determined standards the acts of those of a markedly different background. I shall argue that the answers the tale gives to these questions are other than what its author takes them to be—are, in fact, surprisingly modern and relativist despite Scott's Tory conservatism. In effect this is to side with Lukacs on the issue of Scott's historicism rather than with Welsh, who writes that Scott "did not assume that men were fundamentally products of a particular age and economic condition"—a point perfectly true of Scott's conscious beliefs. But what Scott assumes and what Scott shows are different things, and by trusting the tale rather than the teller, we will come to agree with Lukacs that "Scott ranks among those great writers whose depth is manifest mainly in their work, a depth which they often do not understand themselves, because it has sprung from a truly realistic mastery of their material in conflict with their personal views and prejudices,"³ In "The Two Drovers" Scott's mastery and sympathetic insight manifest themselves in the way he makes his British audience inward with the foreign mentality of the Highland drover, in the way he gives general representativeness to what might be merely a pathetic anecdote of individuals, and above all in the way he builds up a sense of inevitability which makes the violent denouement a consequence of the national traits of the protagonists.

"The Two Drovers" begins with a leisurely analysis of the national character of the Highlanders and a description of the trade of cattle drover. It is written at a high level of generality, using generic names like "Donald" or "a John Highlandman" and referring without embarrassment to the Scot's "well-known reputation for parsimony." Robin Oig, the Highland drover, and Harry Wakefield, his English friend, are presented as schematic opposites. The difference in tone towards the two men shows the narrator's assumptions about his audience. Here he is speaking of Robin's ancestry:

Some people even say that Robin Oig derived his Christian name from one as renowned in the wilds of Loch Lomond as ever was his name-sake, Robin Hood, in the precincts of merry Sherwood. "Of such ancestry," as James Boswell says, "who would not be proud?" Robin Oig was proud accordingly; but his frequent visits to England and to the Lowlands had given him tact enough to know that pretensions which still gave him a little right to distinction in his own lonely glen might be both obnoxious and ridiculous if preferred elsewhere. The pride of birth, therefore, was like the miser's treasure, the secret subject of his contemplation, but never exhibited to strangers as a subject of boasting.

We smile at Robin's taking pride in such disreputable forebears: it is, if not obnoxious, at least mildly ridiculous. But then a curious effect occurs. As we read that Robin himself realized his pride would be seen as ridiculous, our sympathy is engaged on his behalf. He earns it by his perception and tact. Thus, having had our smile at his expense (from our own place "elsewhere") we can now—that aspect of the situation having been recognized—move in imagination to the "lonely glen" and begin to share his sense of pride, which we then allow to continue its felt presence in the "else-where" that we ourselves inhabit and that forces Robin to keep it secret. We have, in short, been imperceptibly moved from an external view of Robin to an internal one.

Dealing with Harry, on the other hand, the narrator's tone is less subtle, though what modulation there is is towards critical detachment. It starts out approving and indulgent; the reader's patriotic stock responses are appealed to, the Scots narrator comfortably joining with his mainly English audience in pan-British unity ("Wakefield was the model of Old England's merry yeomen"), yet willing to point out that Harry is not without his faults: "He was irascible, sometimes to the verge of being quarrelsome; and perhaps not the less inclined to bring his disputes to a pugilistic decision, because he found few antagonists able to stand up to him in the boxing-ring." Thus, with a touch of irony, the narrator unobstrusively both prepares his ground for the later quarrel between the friends and establishes their representative character.

The main dramatic scene of the tale occurs at an alehouse where, after a series of plausible misunderstandings about rights to overnight grazing land, Harry and Robin come to blows. This scene has several touches which increase our sense of the national representativeness of the two drovers. After Harry had knocked Robin down, "the brave-spirited Englishman, with the placability of his country" invites Robin to shake hands and make up the quarrel. Harry even defends Robin against an onlooker's taunts, pointing out that he "could not use his daddies like an Englishman, as it did not come natural to him." The landlady warns Harry that Robin will not easily get over his grievance: "you do not know the dour temper of the Scots," she says. The quarrel, thus, is more than a mere clash of two individuals. It is essentially a clash of two ways of life, two cultures. This is clear at the most poignant moment of the dispute. Robin has declined to fight "like a jackanapes, with hands and nails." '"How would you fight, then?' said his antagonist; 'though I am thinking it would be hard to bring you to the scratch anyhow.' 'I would fight with proadswords, and sink point on the first blood drawn, like a gentlemans.' A loud shout of laughter followed the proposal, which indeed had rather escaped from poor Robin's swelling heart than been the dictate of his sober judgment." What looks like foolish pretension to the country people is seen differently by us; we remember "poor Robin's" secret pride of birth and can feel with compassion how bitterly the mockery of the bystanders wounds him in his most sensitive spot. To himself, and in terms of his own culture, he is a gentleman, and Scott has managed to make us keep this awareness in mind. "In the midst of this torrent of general ridicule, the Highlander instinctively gripped beneath the folds of his plaid. 'But it's better not,' he said in his own language. 'A hundred curses on the swine-eaters, who know neither decency nor civility!'" We know, of course, that he is reaching for his dirk. (He fails to find it because in obedience to an aunt's foreboding at the outset of his journey, he has given it into the keeping of a compatriot.) We know that the "instinct" could alternatively be called a result of cultural conditioning. Explicitly reminded of his place of origin by the way he is referred to, we hear his private self-reflection which itself is couched in terms that stress cultural distinctions: "swine-eaters" who lack civility—who are, by Robin's standards, uncivilized. So we can give him full credit for his restraint at this moment, and a few minutes later when he has been physically assaulted and humiliated, we know that given his identity as a member of a particular historical society he has no choice but to take revenge on Harry.

And so, in the brief scenes that follow, we fully understand the rendering of Robin's state of mind. He is now, even to himself, almost impersonal—a Highlander doomed to shed English blood, not simply Robin Oig who has quarreled with his friend. Scott reverts with powerful effect, in speaking of his hurt pride, to the image of the miser's treasure he had used near the opening.

The treasured ideas of self-importance and self-opinion—of ideal birth and quality, had become more precious to him, like the hoard to the miser, because he could only enjoy them in secret. But that hoard was pillaged; the idols which he had secretly worshipped had been desecrated and profaned. Insulted, abused, and beaten, he was no longer worthy, in his own opinion, of the name he bore, or the lineage which he belonged to; nothing was left to him—nothing but revenge; and, as the reflection added a galling spur to every step, he determined it should be as sudden and signal as the offence.

Unless he takes revenge according to his code, he will have lost his integrity, his very definition of himself. It would be worse than dying; it would be a kind of utter annihilation. The act of revenge is for Robin thus wholly necessary. Even though it will lead to his death, it has nevertheless the aspect of a victory, an assertion of meaningfulness in the face of threatened dissolution. But neither the threat nor the manner in which Robin must defeat it are free choices of the characters. They are brought into being, as we have seen with growing fear, by the clash of large and impersonal social conditions; they are experienced, in a word, as fate. With Robin thus transformed into a figure of tragic destiny, the tone becomes noticeably elegiac. Robin walks in search of Morrison and his dirk: "And now the distant lowing of Morrison's cattle is heard; and now they are seen creeping like moles in size and slowness of motion on the broad face of the moor; and now he meets them, passes them, and stops their conductor." The historic present tense, the passive constructions, and the incantatory rhythms here heighten the mood. It is as if Robin himself knows he is no longer a free agent, living in the world of immediate experience. Even Morrison wonders if he is a "wraith," and asks him if he is going home. "May pe I will never go north again," replies Robin. He has to pretent that he is enlisting in the Black Watch in order to persuade Morrison to return him his weapon, but he says, recalling "The readiness is all," "I go with goodwill the gate that I am going."

The part of the story telling of the actual killing continues the tone of elegiac distancing. It even begins in the pluperfect tense: "But long ere the morning dawned, the catastrophe of our tale had taken place." This reminds us of our position as readers of a tale, and encourages us to understand the action in terms of the structure of stage tragedy ("catastrophe"). Robin returns to the inn, where Harry is now singing and enjoying himself, and summons him to stand up. Pathetically, Harry is no longer deserving of his fate. '"I will stand up with all my heart, Robin, my boy, but it shall be to shake hands with you, and drink down all unkindness. It is not the fault of your heart, man, that you don't know how to clench your hands.'" Yet there is an involuntary smugness here: Harry is complacent about his pugilistic abilities, and it is easier to be indulgent when one has won a fight. His attempt to be forgiving sounds like an insult: "Tis not thy fault, man, that, not having the luck to be an Englishman, thou canst not fight more than a schoolgirl.' 'I can fight,' answered Robin Oig, sternly but calmly, 'and you shall know it. You, Harry Waakfelt, showed me today how the Saxon churls fight; I show you now how the Highland duinie-wassel fights.'" And he stabs him fatally. Thus at the culminating moment Robin's words again underline the representative character of the conflict. Later, having surrendered himself, when he is about to be led off to jail, he takes a last look at the face of his dead friend, "which had been so lately animated, that the smile of good-humoured confidence in his own strength, of conciliation at once and contempt towards his enemy, still curled his lip." This shows very exactly how Harry's indulgent geniality towards Robin sprang from self-flattering sources and could not have been received by the proud Highlander in any other way than it was. So the main action ends. We have been made to see the conflict as both inevitable and more than personal—representative of clashing ways of life. The mode might be called "cultural tragedy."

For tragedy it is, in felt effect. As we watch the successive failure of several momentary hopes for a reconciliation between the friends and see the alternatives to violence being closed off one by one, we cannot but feel a sense of impending disaster. The two men being what they are, once chance has precipitated the quarrel, the outcome is foredoomed. But how shall we make sense out of the tragic events we have seen? In what terms shall we account for the inevitability? What resting point are we to be brought to finally? To answer these questions is the main function of the last part of "The Two Drovers," which functions as an epilogue.

It consists of the judge's speech to the jury at Robin's trial, a speech fully endorsed explicitly and implicitly by the narrator. It is presented to us—the trial judge having no real existence as a fictional character and serving only as an appropriate mask—with full earnestness and authority, sounding like the voice of Reason and Law personified. In rehearsing the events leading up to the crime, the judge apportions blame impartially. He defends Robin, for example, from the prosecutor's accusation of cowardice. ". . . as I would wish to make my words impressive when I point his real crime, I must secure his opinion of my impartiality by rebutting everything that seems to me a false accusation. There can be no doubt that the prisoner is a man of resolution—too much resolution. I wish to Heaven that he had had a better education to regulate it." Ironically, he points out that had Robin drawn his dirk in the heat of anger at the assault on his person and then killed his friend, he would have been guilty at most of manslaughter. So the very precaution which his aunt had designed to prevent the bloodshed she foresaw not only did not succeed in doing so but indirectly made matters far worse; as in Oedipus Rex, the human effort to avert the fated calamity only makes it more complete. The judge, therefore, compelled to see Robin's crime as premeditated murder for revenge, condemns it severely in the name of law. The whole order of his civilization requires him to do so. "The first object of civilization is to place the general protection of the law, equally administered, in the room of that wild justice which every man cut and carved for himself, according to the length of his sword and the strength of his arm." Robin is guilty of a most serious crime and of a relapse from civilization into barbarism and primitivism. If the jury were to decline to condemn him, they might "unsheath, under various pretences, a thousand daggers betwixt Land's End and the Orkneys." Nothing less than the entire civil order is at stake.

But what are we to feel toward the culprit, the man who poses such a threat to civilization? Or more exactly, how—having shared his feelings and understood his motives up to this point—are we to reconcile this sympathy to which we have committed ourselves with the grave condemnation which we are now hearing? The narrator guides us by describing the reactions of the English spectators. ". . . whatever might be at first the prejudice of the audience against a crime so un-English as that of assassination from revenge, yet when the rooted national prejudices of the prisoner had been explained . . . the generosity of the English audience was inclined to regard his crime as the wayward aberration of a false idea of honour rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or perverted by habitual vice." If the trial audience can do this, we can do no less. We note that the sympathy does not lead the narrator to any doubt about the unconditional validity of his own culture's assumptions. The spectators' refusal of sympathy to Robin is a "prejudice" which is removed by their "generosity," but Robin's own "national prejudices" are equated simply with "a false idea of honour." Feeling is one thing, ideas another. The judge's speech maintains this balance of pity for the actors in the story with firmly confident analysis of the falsity of any code of conduct other than that of the English judge and jury, and—by extension—of Scott's British readers. ". . . the crime, for a crime it is, and a deep one, arose less out of the malevolence of the heart than the error of the understanding—less from any idea of committing wrong than from an unhappily perverted notion of that which is right." The diction is latinate, the tone grave, the rhythms strongly Johnsonian; the whole has an effect of profound seriousness and self-confidence. "Here we have two men, highly esteemed, it has been stated, in their rank of life, and attached, it seems, to each other as friends, one of whose lives has been already sacrificed to a punctilio, and the other is about to prove the vengeance of the offended laws; and yet both may claim our commiseration at least, as men acting in ignorance of each other's national prejudices, and unhappily misguided rather than voluntarily erring from the path of right conduct." There is none of the earlier patronizing note in the tone here; the dignity and stature of Robin and Harry are what get the emphasis, as befits tragic heroes. Essentially, a distinction is made between the subjective and the objective. Subjectively Robin is excused; he knew no better and cannot be accused of "malevolence." This we know from the story: having seen him subjectively at key moments throughout, we need no persuading of his honorableness. What is added now is an objective judgment by a disinterested arbiter, and objectively (we are asked to agree) Robin's crime is of the utmost gravity.

Yet this objective condemnation must remain a matter of assertion only. It is the assertion of a conventional moral and legal code and there is no evidence at all that Scott foresaw any objections to it; nevertheless, nothing in the directly presented action of the story leads to it logically. The logic of the story points in a different direction, towards a conclusion subversive of the confident belief in objective truth. This is a direction which it was not open to Scott to follow, given the intellectual history of his time. Yet there is a moment in the passage last quoted when he seems to tremble on the verge of embarking in this dangerous new direction. We read, "both may claim our commiseration at least"—but the promise of that syntactic pattern is never fulfilled; we are never told what both might claim at most. It would be superficial to dismiss this asymmetry as merely careless writing. It is the localization of the limit of Scott's ability to follow through intellectually the emotional logic of his own story. For the balancing "most" that both might claim would be our approval, our perception not of a true code and a "perverted" one but of two equally "true" sets of belief, both given to those who hold them by the culture in which they grow up, neither one a priori truer than the other. The covert meaning of Scott's tale, that is, points in the direction of modern relativism, specifically cultural relativism. The tragic effect derives most profoundly from the perception of two goods in conflict, two excellent men equally conditioned by their cultures, equally moral and high-minded, equally—in short—embodying the good, brought by chance events into a conflict which neither can avoid because of their very natures. The certitude we are offered at the end that one of these men was "perverted" by "false ideas" can only come from outside the story, from a system of beliefs held a priori. Moreover, it diminishes the tragic meaning of the action. It would lead us to see in Robin only a man who gives his life courageously for a false ideal; such a spectacle would evoke pity, but little fear. If the story worked in this way, it would ultimately serve the complacency of its readers. But it transcends complacency by leading the reader to sympathy for both sides and to a perception of how both men are conditioned by their upbringing and beliefs and code of conduct. In that last analysis the fear that the action of this tale arouses in us derives from its intimation that we are all, like Robin and Harry, governed more than we know by the conditions of our culture; we are all less free than we think.

Perhaps all this is to say no more than that Scott was a conservative of the early nineteenth century. Certainly it is not intended as an argument for the truth of relativism, nor even as grounds for an adverse judgment on the tale itself. Indeed, the inherent contradiction between the tale and its narrator's interpretation is grounds for increasing our admiration for a writer who could imaginatively so outreach the limits of his ideology. "Never trust the teller, trust the tale," Lawrence wrote. One measure of the achievement of "The Two Drovers" is that the tale gets so honestly and effectively told despite the impercipience of the narrator to its meaning.

If the main emphasis of the judge's summing-up in the epilogue has been on the falsity of Robin's ideas, it is Robin himself who gets the last word. The judge's speech is followed by one final paragraph which brings the story to an end with these lines. "He met his fate wtih great firmness, and acknowledged the justice of his sentence. But he repelled indignantly the observations of those who accused him of attacking an unarmed man. 'I give a life for the life I took,' he said, 'and what can I do more?'" This conclusion is a small-scale paradigm of the contradiction between the tale's covert and overt meanings. Robin "acknowledged the justice of his sentence." Does this mean he was converted to the judge's view of the criminality of his action? Or merely that he recognized the fairness with which his trial was conducted? Scott has it both ways. On the one hand we are comforted in our sense of rightness by seeing even the victim of our system of law assuring us that justice is being done. If this conversion were spelled out explicitly it would be utterly implausible and therefore not nearly so reassuring. But on the other hand, Robin's "firmness," his sense of "fate," and the calm steadfastness of his last quoted words—all of which follow naturally from his tragic sense of himself at the moment of the killing—give his death the tragic meaning that the preceding action demands and that we (emotionally) want it to have. He remains as sure of his own code as the judge and narrator are of theirs. He has affirmed his honor and willingly gives his life as witness to it. Is Scott being dishonest, then? I think not. First of all, if we see a meaning in the story which Scott himself did not, it is not as a result of our superior intelligence or sensitivity but of the development of ideas since his time, especially of that historical method which he himself did so much to stimulate. For it is the historical method, the study of beliefs and customs as products of a particular place and time, which undermined the belief in the absolute rightness of any one set of such beliefs and customs. To condemn him for unawareness would be not only anachronistic but ungrateful. Secondly, it is Scott's very honesty—honesty of imagination and feelings—which causes the ambiguity, for it is the unintended and unconscious result of the pressure of his emotional commitment to Robin's rightness as much as Harry's against his intellectual belief in Robin's wrongness. It is the tale triumphing over the teller; it is the "depth" not understood by himself but springing from that "truly realistic mastery of [his] material in conflict with [his] personal views and prejudices" of which Lukacs speaks.

If Scott had no terms to account adequately for the meaning of his story, neither, of course, a fortiori, did his character Robin, who can only oppose to the judge's eloquent certitudes his mute but stubborn persistence in his own. Our intuition of the tragic irreconcilability of the code for which Robin dies and the code explicitly affirmed by the epilogue accounts for the peculiar poignance of Robin's last words. Accused of attacking an unarmed man—that is, of not risking his life for his cause—he points out that on the contrary he not merely risked his life but knowingly sacrificed it. Yet he ends not with this assertion but with a question: "what can I do more?" Underlying his courageous steadfastness there is a plaintive bewilderment. Though freely assenting to his fate within the limits of what freedom he has, he is, as this last question implies, as much victim as actor, victim of the clash of large, impersonal, and individually-unwilled forces—cultures, in a word—which the story has vividly shown us at work. Author, reader, and character thus share a final unadmitted fear in the face of uncomprehended realities. This is what gives such strange resonance to the work's last words, which almost seem to come from the author as much as from the nominal speaker. Appropriately, they lift our eyes from Robin as an individual to the impersonal system to which the question seems ultimately to be addressed.

Notes

¹ F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), p. 5.

² Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963); Francis R. Hart, Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966); Robin Mayhead, Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). The tale itself was published in volume 2 of the first series of The Chronicles of the Canongate (Edinburgh, 1827), from which I draw my citations.

³ Welsh, p. 86; Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (Boston: Beacon, 1963), p. 31.