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Scott is the romantic's romantic, and yet his novels display the struggle against romance that is common in early novel-writing (Don Quixote; Northanger Abbey). Edward Waverley, the "hero" of the first of Scott's novels, goes through various adventures with the Jacobite rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, proposes to the powerful and beautiful romance heroine Flora Mac-Ivor, is kidnapped and imprisoned and rescues a British captain, but then ends up marrying the sweet and quiet Rose Bradwardine and settling down to a quiet baronial life, where the only romance is in the library. There are similar things going on in various places in Ivanhoe: Ivanhoe does not end up with the dark, strong Jewess, but with the fair and rather less fiery Rowena (if I'm remembering her name rightly); during the great battle scene, he is laid up in a castle BEING rescued, while Rebecca talks to him about how silly chivalry is. All this suggests that Twain was off the mark in his repeated attacks on Scott's romantic inclinations, for Scott was also attacking his own romantic inclinations.
Large cultural conflicts are behing all this, what could be seen as a late phase of what might be described as the struggle between medieval and modern sensibility. But Scott is a wholly modern man in that struggle, letting his hero retire from adventure into the comforts of peaceful life. More fundamentally, the fact that Scott RECOGNIZES the medieval sensibility AS romantic means that he's already outside and beyond looking back.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, March 03, 2004 at 03:26 PM
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