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Ian Dennis

Violent Victimhood and “Carnal Reason” in Scott’s The Tale of Old Mortality

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The “Old Mortality” in the title of Walter Scott’s 1816 novel was a real person, popularly known by that name.   Scott actually met him, but his depiction is assigned to a fictional narrator, Peter Pattieson–one in a characteristic sequence of mediators between the novelist and his dangerous nonfictional material.   A melancholy Scottish school-master who frequents his small town’s burial-ground, Pattieson registers the first of the many contrasts, the antagonistic symmetries, that structure the narrative.  It is something he hears.  

One summer evening, as ... I approached this deserted mansion of the dead, I was somewhat surprised to hear sounds distinct from those that usually soothe its solitude, the gentle chiding, namely, of the brook, and the sighing of the wind in the boughs of three gigantic ash trees, which mark the cemetery.  The clink of a hammer was now distinctly heard....  An old man was seated upon the monument of the slaughtered presbyterians, and busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the inscription, which, announcing, in scriptural language, the promised blessings of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematized the murderers with corresponding violence.  (28-29)

The hitherto silent graves in question contain victims of the Scotland ’s “killing time”–one, actually, of many times that could be so designated.  Extreme protestant opponents of the established episcopal church, they died in a late episode of the European wars of religion, which was also a stage in the British civil war and constitutional struggle that would end in 1690/91, with the accession of William and Mary to the throne and the defeat of the ousted Stewart James II at the battle of the Boyne in Ireland.  Perhaps foremost amongst the “blessings of futurity” Pattieson refers to is precisely this deepening of their names, the restoration and making permanent of the language of violence by which they lived, to which the curious man called Old Mortality has committed himself.

In the first edition of the novel he is anonymous, and is treated quite kindly, a picturesque exemplar of a kind of piety.  Humble, abstemious and seemingly gentle, he freely shares his plentiful lore about the heroes of the past, including the “tale” Pattieson’s manuscript passes on to us–the school-master himself, as another narrator tells us, already silent in his own grave.  He could easily be classed among those many rich portraits of people who–in Scott’s innovative fiction–lose none of their humanity in being clearly seen as the products of their historical and cultural context.   But one cannot write an historical novel of any real value–and certainly not in Scotland --without awakening the enmity of those whose desires are invested in one account or another of old conflicts.  For all that he created admirable characters on both sides, even made his protagonist, Henry Morton, a Presbyterian, and for all that his novel both bathed its hundred and fifty-year old events in an elegiac glow and generously acknowledged that theirs indeed was the winning side, Scott found himself attacked by the spiritual descendants of the rebels in the graves.  Whig counter-narratives proliferated and the cry of unfair treatment–of renewed victimhood itself--was sharp in the air.  This was no doubt why, when he re-issued the book in his “magnum opus” edition of 1830, Scott identified the real Old Mortality.  His name was Robert Paterson–the similar name lurking beneath the opaque original narrative but probably never intended to be revealed--and a careful reader of the book’s new introduction derives a somewhat different impression than was available in 1816.   Scott tells us now about his own encounter with him, where  “his appearance and equipment were exactly as described in the Novel.”   But other things are not.

... he would not speak frankly upon the subject of his occupation.  He was in a bad humour, and had, according to his phrase, no freedom for conversation with us. 

   His spirit had been sorely vexed by hearing, in a certain Abderdonian kirk, the psalmody directed by a pitch-pipe, or some similar instrument, which was to [him] the abomination of abominations...  (15-16)

With disingenuous antiquarian care, Scott provides the documents and information he has assembled about Old Mortality, and we learn, among other things, that he had abandoned his young family to wander Scotland with his chisel, and that his wife even sent some of her children off across the country in a futile attempt to persuade him to return.  The introduction ends with an anecdote about a cooper whose livelihood was ruined by a calumny casually uttered by Paterson in revenge for the interruptions his sacred work had suffered from the man’s grandchildren.  In short, what was softened and only implied in 1816, is considerably more visible in 1830: Old Mortality is a fanatic, harsh, obsessive, and careless of the welfare of others in the endless prosecution of his bitter cause.

The novel named for him thematizes the struggles of such extremism with the moderate, humane and domestic desires of those who merely try to survive history.   As the quietly punning title implies, however, it is first and last a book about old death.  It is death, not such life, that lives in the world the book evokes.  It is Old Mortality’s world, and his tale.

Its hero Henry Morton, as I said, is a Presbyterian, the son of a Whig soldier who died in an earlier round of fighting.  But Morton loves the daughter of a Royalist, a prominent member of the episcopal establishment.  Their prospective marriage, with all its implications for reconciliation and the renewal of national life in a more broadly defined family, is a frequent element of Scott’s historical fictions, and doubtless an important part of an immensely popular literary formula.   Morton first appears “wrapped in a dark-green cloak” (45) and is referred to as a “dark-green adventurer”.  He is the green man, the survivor who will carry the organic life of Scotland ’s gentility into the future.  He is also “slender”, however, pinched between bulkier figures, squeezed by terrible oppositions, his very substantiality precarious.

The action of the novel is structured in a way a Girardian would have no difficulty recognising as a series of interconnected and constantly proliferating triangles of rivalrous desire.   It begins with a ceremonial competition, a shooting contest, at a deliberately archaic medieval tournament organized by the then Stewart government in an attempt to impose itself on restless Western Scotland .   Morton out-shoots his Royalist double Lord Evandale, who is soon, of course, the suitor also for Morton’s beloved, Edith.  Even as they play at such rivalry, though, real blood begins to flow.  An old brother-in-arms of Morton’s father assassinates the hated Archbishop Sharpe, and genuine historical figures, assigned in Scott’s trademark technique to important but secondary roles in the plot, begin to animate his pages with their only too real energies.  Into their violent oppositions and imperious desires Morton is forcibly drawn.  He is suspected and almost executed by the Royalist Claverhouse, “the bluidy Clavers” of Whig myth, and compromised by the assassin Burley, who calls in obligations from the past, the dead hand of parental power reaching into Morton’s living present.  This is one of Scott’s most rapidly developing plots–admittedly he is not known for it–and the opening sections skilfully evoke the vertiginous momentum of a fall into mimetic frenzy as Morton promptly finds himself in battle on the side of what is explicitly called an insurgency.  Indeed, for his political value, he is made one of their commanders.

But Morton is not as passive as at first it seems, or as many of Scott’s protagonists are.  Despairing of Edith, he throws himself into the conflict.  But he conceives of it not as a battle of doubles, of religions or versions of the truth, but as a defensive struggle for fundamental principles already established in English and Scottish tradition.  Like many Scott heroes–and of course the novelist too, who was a barrister and a constable–Morton is a man of the law.  Critics  point out that much of his language, of human rights and constitutionality, is anachronistic, a product of an Enlightenment ideology which is some years in the future, but this misses the point.  Of course Morton is, or will seem anachronistic.  He is a moderate.  Perhaps that most uncommon kind–the desperate moderate, who remains true to his refusal of other, more dire characterizations of the human dilemma, even when all seems lost.  He is the man, as Edith is the woman, and as so many of Scott’s famously sympathetic common people of every class are the human fact, that history, as history, excludes.   He is thus a fiction, as they are, whereas Burley, Claverhouse, and the other fanatics and killers are historical fact, are real.  Morton lives in and for a human order which it is entirely naive to suggest Scott believed had ever been fully established, including in his own day.

Scott himself, however, was a product of the Enlightenment, of the great Scottish Enlightenment of the second half of the 18^th century, and as such he did believe in historical progress.  What Morton fights for, or endures vicissitudes for, is (vaguely enough) modernization.  In his context this means individual liberty, the rule of law, and a separation of church and state.  When William and Mary arrive to embody that goal–imperfectly enough, no doubt, but soon after the serious violence does end--Morton is able to return from the exile into which the defeat of his faction-weakened insurgency had forced him.  He is able to reclaim and marry Edith.

The comedic conclusion I have just summarized, however, is one of the most doubtful in Scott’s large oeuvre, and one of the most interesting, especially for our purposes at this conference.  Morton and his Edith are not just fictional, they are thin, insubstantial--even, in Morton’s case,  spectral, at least by the end of the narrative.  “I have seen a ghost!” someone cries when he returns to interrupt Edith’s impending marriage to Evandale (400), and the narrative itself refers to him as an “apparition”.  Even his spaniel does not recognise him.  The reversals of history have put Evandale very exactly in the position Morton himself formerly occupied, that of a moderate rebel, denied his desires for domesticity and the perpetuation of his name, forced by implacable violence and fortune to flee his home.  But Evandale actually does die.  As he does, because he does, mortally wounded in a skirmish which will bring Morton his literal patrimony, he makes himself the permanent sexual and affective mediator between Morton and his bride, the guarantor of their union, even the priest who marries them.   Here are the last words of the tale proper:

Unconscious even of the presence of Morton, she hung over the dying man; nor was she aware that fate, who was removing one faithful lover, had restored another as if from the grave, until Lord Evandale, taking their hands in his, pressed them both affectionately, united them together, raised his face, as if to pray for a blessing on them, and sunk back and expired the next moment.  (454)

Morton has returned “as if from the grave” indeed, and this seems to be part of the difficulty.  No one will re-chisel his name into the materiality of his native land.  Hints abound that his exile, external or internal as it may be, is somehow permanent.  Modern, enlightened, constitutionally protected man–shall we add tolerant man?--lives nowhere.

Not so the violent, or the victims–and the two groups here are often one and the same.  The novel features some of Scott’s most splendid and memorable characterizations, of the antagonists Claverhouse and Burley, and of the fierce and implacable Cameronian preachers who lead the ragged insurgent army.  Some of them–unhinged by injustice, as the novel freely concedes–are in the grip of a religious fury whose expression results in towering effusions of biblically-flavoured rhetoric, arias of victimhood and prophetic vengefulness, that are amongst Scott’s most remarkable writings.  They speak in his skilful literary rendering of dialect, in Scots language redolent of open-air preachings in the wild and inhospitable barrens of their homeland.  Or they speak, as Claverhouse does, in a strange and equally intransigent neo-medieval idiolect, the tongue of Froissart.   Colourful, rich, specific--possessed of strong identity--they are the prime examples of the “marginalised” cultures and peoples for which Scott’s fiction helped create a permanent taste, a taste we still share.  If they were historically marginal, that is, they achieve a sizeable share of the literary and cultural centre.  

In this Romantic aesthetic, of course, wild landscapes are intimately connected to marginal cultures, and Old Mortality also imbeds its human drama in the splendours of a symbolic or over-determined geography.   The lowland valleys are described as a “romantic region”, of charmed and picturesque cultivation, a land of chivalry.  The upper band of the same bifurcated  terrain, upon which the Whig army first appears,  is desolate, solitary, and equally impressive.  The insurgents, when they come into view–not marching, but already in place–stand as “firm and motionless, as the grey stones that lay scattered on the heath around them” (182).   These are the same stones Old Mortality’s chisel will renew.   The assassin Burley eventually dies in a little spasm of suicidal-homicidal violence, in which he drags one of King William’s Dutch dragoons down into the river Clyde where they perish together.  Signs of permanence–the endless identity of violent opposition--proliferate around this old death, as they do around the others: “As [Burley’s] grasp could not have been unclenched without cutting off his hands, both [men] were thrown into a hasty grave, still marked by a rude stone, and ruder epitaph” (which Scott, or Pattieson, provides in full at the bottom of the page; 453).  This integration with the land–its stones, its rivers--is figured for both opponents throughout the novel.  

Before his death, Burley and Claverhouse, the two extremist enemies, have actually formed an alliance, an historical fact of which Scott makes good thematic use.  They combine, of course, to resist the new Williamite order, and Claverhouse, over whom Scott casts an ambiguous aura of anticipatory mortality and fame, shortly after dies at the battle of Killiekrankie, the still-celebrated (but quite temporary) victory over the foreign imposition of modern religious pluralism-- tolerance--and constitutionally limited government.  In death, in Romantic tale (and in the ever-expanding audience for that tale), inscribed in stone and in the pages of the historical novel, the violent antagonists attain a substantiality which Scott’s ghost-like protagonists are clearly denied.  

But for all that, Morton really is a hero.   His heroism resides precisely in his ability to resist, in the name of his own vague gods, the rush of sacred violence around him, to reject, that is,  Romantic desire.  Here he is on the land and culture that Scott made (and made Scott) famous:  

I am weary of seeing nothing but violence and fury all around me–now assuming the mask of lawful authority, now taking that of religious zeal–I am sick of my country–of my dependent situation–of my repressed feelings–of these woods–of that river–of that house–of all but Edith–and she can never be mine.  (78)  

And here is how he responds to the operatic rhetoric of victimhood and struggle:  

“I will own frankly, Mr. Balfour ... much of this sort of language, which, I observe, is so powerful with others, is entirely lost upon me.  It is proper you should be aware of this before we commune further together.”  (The young clergyman then groaned deeply.)  “I distress you, sir,” said Morton; “but perhaps it is because you will not hear me out.  I revere the Scriptures as deeply as you or any Christian can do.  I look into them with humble hope of extracting a rule of conduct and a law of salvation.    But I expect to find this in an examination of their general tenor, and of the spirit they uniformly breathe, and not by wresting particular passages from their context, or by the application of Scriptural phrases to circumstances and events with which they have often very slender relation.”  (229-30)  

(It is worth quoting at length, perhaps, for its potential utility, through many ages, as a precise and forceful response to fundamentalism.)   Balfour and the other extremists are, of course, unimpressed, and scornfully depict Morton’s as “the worldly language of ...carnal reason”.  The Scott protagonists are often accused of this, actually, of speaking a homogenous and implicitly oppressive “standard English”, or of being at best mere foils to the colourful and linguistically vital secondary characters.  But in defence of linguistic responsibility-- when in defence of human rights–Morton can rise to an almost Churchillian brevity.  Here he is trying to rally his quarrelling comrades at Bothwell Bridge , the deciding battle of the insurgency:  

“Silence your senseless clamours, yonder is the enemy!  On maintaining the bridge against him depend our lives, as well as our hope to reclaim our laws and liberties.–There shall at least one Scottishman die in their defence.–Let any who loves his country follow me!”  (332)  

Churchill’s rhetoric was more effective, though.  The “laws and liberties” have to be saved, ten years later, by the Dutch.  

If all this sounds like making victims of the moderates, perhaps the novel does, briefly.  The same structure of desires that makes Morton heroic in adversity, though, can hardly be denied to  the genuine losers of history–and they are the ones everyone remembers.   Morton wins, after all,  gets the girl (a bit bland though she is), and inherits the real estate, if not the spiritual soil, the national soil soaked in blood and history.  We are not invited to cry for him, and don’t tend to.  Presumably they live happily–although Scott and Pattieson pointedly resist telling us about it.  The dying Evandale, and all the other dead, are to get the last word.  

Still, part of the point of the novel is that people like Morton and Edith are vulnerable.   They are vulnerable because of the nature of their desires.  They are not stoics, not the eternal sufferers of history, and not saints.  Morton is drawn into conflict in the first place because of his desire to love and be loved, to be happy, above all to live.  Any expressed desire entangles one in social struggle, and if one’s society is in thrall to death, to a paroxysm of violent rivalry, escape is difficult.  Late in the novel Morton visits Burley in his hiding place in a mountain ravine, a place to be reached by walking a single log laid across a chasm.  In a final confrontation with the now nearly mad Cameronian, Morton refuses to rejoin the violence.  Burley kicks away the log, seemingly the only means of egress, demanding that he share heroic death.  But Morton leaps the chasm, a “leap for life” as many critics have recognised.  It seems possible to desire life–just life–and to refuse the bigger desires, the contagion of spectacular victimhood and its promises of violent transcendence.  But this is also, of course, a leap away from a Girardian romanesque conclusion, which sees in death the end of all desire.  Morton leaps back into his desires.  The gesture is spectacular but the destination isn’t.  They are moderate desires, but entirely, indeed explicitly mimetic.  

He leaps, and the fade begins.  To refuse strong desires, strong identity, means a number of things, I think.  It’s a refusal of the Romantic modelling of difference, of identity as victimhood, which in turn means a refusal of nationalism, especially nationalism as inflected by the Romantic version of heroic marginality in the face of all-consuming supra-national entities of one kind of another.  Better a forgotten life in a unified Great Britain–even one ruled by a Dutchman--or a unified Europe for that matter, or a globalized world, than to be one of Scotland ’s old mortalities.  But it also means a refusal of the narrative role of hero, a role that Scott sensed was becoming less and less available to anyone but victims.  This is why he filled the position of protagonist in his novels, despite the exception I’m discussing here, with relative non-entities–a necessity at least if the old comedic plot was retained.  But this plot, as we know, did not remain inevitable for novelists too much longer.  This sort of hero is vulnerable to the evolving operation of representation itself.  He is vulnerable to obsolescence.  The victimary heroes thrive, the anti-victimary hero withers away–whatever “the facts on the ground”.   His name is written in sand, theirs chiselled into stone.  Morton wants what too many other people want and he, or Scott anyway, seems to realize what kind of bargain he is thus making with desire, the hollowing-out it implies.  But he is also, surely, the material out of which a modern society is formed.  This is something of a critical truism in Scott studies–Alexander Welsh famously speaks of Scott’s Waverley heroes as “ideal members of society” (35)--but it is true enough.  

What role can fiction now play in making a safer, more tolerant world?  Can it advocate the heroism of weak identity, in somewhat the same vein as, say, Gianni Vattimo advocates “weak thought”?  Who would read such stuff?  Certainly no one whose self-image has anything to do with being a victim.  Given the connection between violence and such self-images, plausibly represented in Scott’s novel as so often elsewhere, one might speculate that the cause of peace would be advanced by fictions which reduce rather than enhance the prestige of victimhood.  But are there many such on offer?  Even this conference’s call for papers, on the literary side, seems implicitly to concede there aren’t.  The plain literary fact of which Scott quietly reminds us, is that when Morton leaps, he leaps out of the only vulnerability that is likely to interest us.  Only through the kind of flimsily paradoxical argument I have just mounted can he be re-imbued with any of the victimhood that attracts modern desire.  And not much of it, at that.  But perhaps such heroes, and maybe novels generally, are simply ignored, the way most cultural evocations of violence and victimhood are ignored in movies or popular music–ignored or mentally partitioned away from active influence–by most of the people who do most of the good in this world.  And perhaps this is because Morton and company won, that is to say, because heroism itself–the modelling or “external mediation” of socially valuable behaviour--is made obsolescent by a modernity in which weak identity and moderate desires–“carnal reason”--for all that they are deplored or even despised, do in fact predominate.  

Scott, Walter.  Old Mortality.  1816, 1830.  Ed. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson.  Oxford :

Oxford University Press, 1999.

Welsh, Alexander.  The Hero Of the Waverley Novels.  New York : Atheneum, 1968.