I had high hopes for The Bride of Lammermoor, the sixth novel by Sir Walter Scott that I have read. But it let me down. Though there was some fine Scottish gothic atmosphere — seaside castles, witches, and violent storms — the story really came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty ending in pathos. I use the word pathos in a literary sense, as distinguished from tragedy. In pathos, unlike tragedy, there are no teachable moments in the calamity with which the story ends. There is only meaningless sadness. I was going to lower my estimation of Sir Walter Scott as a writer until I thought of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which also came down to little more than youthful folly and parental cruelty ending in pathos. It’s entirely possible that readers in the early 19th Century would have found some teachable moments, perhaps in the wrongness of older generations trying to control the emotional lives of young people.
The Bride of Lammermoor was published in 1819, so it’s just over 200 years old. A friend asked me if I thought that Scott’s novels, and the social issues he raises, are as relevant today as those of, say, Jane Austen. I would say definitely not. But even so, Scott does not deserve to be completely forgotten. I may, in years to come, return to Walter Scott, but for now I think my curiosity about his novels is satisfied. If anyone is considering reading Scott, of the novels I have read I would recommend The Heart of Mid-Lothian.
I have moved on to something completely different. I rarely read bestsellers, but I’ve just started Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It’s a new novel by R.F. Kuang. When I learned that the novel is about linguists and that it is set in London and Oxford, I bought it immediately.
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Hi David 🙂
I have three questions for you.
(1) Have you ever visited the Scott Monument in Edinburgh? (It’s stunning. Haven’t seen it myself in person or up close other than in lovely scenes in the film ‘Cloud Atlas’ but I’m guessing you have . . . )
(2) How would you size up the pathos and gothic elements in ‘Lammermoor’ with other novels’ treatment of the same human predicament that deal in it such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ or Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ or even Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons.’
I ask because I’ve been really caught up this last couple years more and more in the German movement — Sturm and Drang (and its colors in Nietzsche).
You’ve intrigued me now to want to read ‘Lammermoor,’ because I may just have a slightly different philosophical take than you — which is that I see irreconcilable pathos in literature and in life (btw, I should add: difficult for me to see as capable of being meaningless — i.e. what are the qualifiers for meaningless pathos in a tragedy? — isn’t the tragedy mechanism in and of itself rendering a meaning, in other words?) as its own wrestling lesson —— the absurdity predicament; a timeless state of being vast and long, as its own lesson, a messy one, but certainly no less relevant. When Nietzsche said, ‘You must have chaos inside you in order to give birth to a dancing star’ — I see that chaos in whole or in part, as pathos. What else could it be? This is partly why I’d classify myself in disposition more Epicurean-minded than Stoic. I can be very stoic if I want, if it’s required, but I find it also suffocating.
The best poetry I read or hold close to the heart is always turning on this point of irreconcilable disorder, discomfort or folly (and I don’t think youth holds the scepter on it as a condition here either, because it can simply increase over time, or middle age, to an unbearable intensity — as say, the novels of Hermann Hesse demonstrate. The passions or existential disillusionments of youth aren’t all that different in intensity or meaning (‘Demian’) to that of an older solitary man’s pathos (‘Steppenwolf’) . . . maybe just slightly deeper in mystery, but the absurd will always be the absurd in whatever fashion it reveals a face (or a door).
I was looking a little in depth at the background of Greek tragedy writers earlier this year, and the more you break down the plays individually, their teachable lessons (there’s always a heavy moral of the story in each one of course, even Euripides) can feel uneasy and insufferable. No upstart mortal, no matter how inquisitive, or gifted, or unlucky, or unjustly cursed they are before they start, is ever going to best the gods, and the gods are the only game in town (which is of course convenient in the sociological extreme and dogmatic in service of the times). It’s unfortunate that an Ancient Greek Camus as playwright didn’t make it down the ages to us till Shakespeare.
Since you mentioned ‘Romeo + Juliet’ I’d just like to add two cents to that as well (if you’ll permit me, ha) that it saddens me how often really magnetic parts of this play are overlooked by the lens focus on the imperiled teen love romance (as achingly sweet and moving and pretty-sounding in the ear as it may be) destroyed forever in the cyclone of parental grievance mayhem. Mercutio’s soliloquy and later sudden death and the gangland violence between the two tribal family factions are always sorely overlooked I feel. Mercutio’s speech on Mab’s dreams that can morph to nightmares sets up all the eeriness, fatalism, and forewarning that no one’s going to heed, while it’s also touched with an angst that some have likened to a possible understated homoerotic thwarting (of Mercutio for a delirious, clueless Romeo) that I’ve always found poignant (and provides a tragedy within a tragedy if you can look at it that way).
On the generational destructive gap as lesson, no one did it better than Turgenev in ‘Fathers and Sons’ than when son Arkady brings home nihilist, Bazarov to his unwitting, loving father. Nothing is ever the same, for the story, or for Russian literature after that (or for Russian politics for that matter). But I’ll just say to end on this subject of pathos unresolved for its own sake —— what I was most drawn to in Turgenev’s insanely good book is being unsure of where this tale is going — observing Bazarov, the most intrepid of nihilists, battle his own pathos to the death, and despite all his intellectualizing and raging efforts at reasoning a way out and practiced self-denial, he’s as susceptible and human as the next one! and succumbs to the fate he viewed worse than death — a wicked fall into unrequited, treacherous love that does not teach any lesson cleanly other than that nature and pathos is always going to be an irresistible, underestimated force of undoing. The whole book is like an exercise in the violent crashing of logos up against pathos, and eros up against reason. And that goes the same for whether it’s parental love and tradition pushing at the throat against the dangerous threats of modern nihilistic philosophy, or the stirrings of thwarted, unwanted desire forging into even less wanted utter heartache and madness crashing like tidal waves right over stoicism, subsuming any and all beloved pure and clean reason, holding on for dear life, clinging on by fingernails . . . so it’s all there. But I think it should be noted that in Turgenev, as in Emily Brontë, pathos wins. (I’ll spare you all my secretive opinions on why I think ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a better, truer book in this sense than ‘Jane Eyre’ but yes, partly it’s the wicked, stormy, Nietzschean, mauling, haunting pathos and unrestrained rule of nature that rings true; more so than a stoic appetite for sociologically pleasing subversions of will accomplished by illogical life-threatening sacrifices and obedience to lock in a ‘happy’ morally righteous ending. Just my contrarian opinion to the norm, but I’ll spare you from elaborating further . . . )
(3) Sorry it took me so long to arrive at question 3, lol (omg) but . . . After reading so much of Scott what would you say are his main (or best) takeaways? (My personal extent of reading him was about half of ‘Ivanhoe’ a very long time ago.) What highlights or elements do you think he wanted passed to us (I think you’ve spoken of the dialects and the language before) even if they’re not as fan-favored and as popularly transported through time to us as Austen?
(Note: You don’t have to answer everything if it’s too much, but TIA.)
Hi Malinda: I have indeed seen the Scott memorial in Edinburgh, though, strangely enough, I’ve never been inside it. I must do that on my next trip. Edinburgh, especially to us Americans because we don’t have old things, is magical. There is nothing quite like arriving at Waverley Station from London. One sees very little of Edinburgh when arriving by train, because the train is hidden in a kind of ravine. But upon stepping outside the station, there is the Scott memorial to one’s right, and, to the left, up on a crag, the castle looms over the city. Walk left onto Cockburn Street, toil up the hill, and you find yourself on the Royal Mile, which leads up through the old city to the castle.
I have not read Turgenev, and it has been thirty years since I readWerther . But your mentioning Werther, I think, is apt. Werther, I would say, was a case of obsessive love, whereas the love story (such as it is; I’m not sure that Scott knew how to write about romance) in Lammermoor is perfectly ordinary young love. As I recall, I didn’t think very highly of Werther, and I wrote that off to the time in which it was written (1774) and Goethe’s young age (24). The novel as we know it was just not well developed at the time, and one must keep that in mind when reading Scott as well as Goethe’s Werther. It makes one appreciate Jane Austen and the Brontës that much more, for their contributions to the development of the English novel, which I don’t think Scott can match, maybe because he cranked out too many of them too fast.
You make very good points about the Brontës, but for now I’ll just add that I loved Jane Eyre and have read it two or three times. It’s the first part of the book I love, in which Charlotte Brontë says perhaps more than she realized about what Christianity and its consequences do to children.
As for Scott, I never finished Ivanhoe, because I kept thinking that I was rereading Le Morte d’Arthur, and I had very little remaining curiosity about chivalry and all that. I don’t recall ever hearing Scott mentioned during an English class, and I sort of see why. Why make students work so hard for such specialized rewards? I would see Scott as must-read, though, to the point of immersion, at the graduate level, partly for the history of the English novel, partly for the exposure to good Scots the better to appreciate the question whether Scots is a dialect or a language closely related to English, and partly for historical background on the relationship between Englishness and Scottishness, a point of conflict that still is very much with us today. We Americans, far more than most of us realize, are culturally still British colonials, and we do well to understand why the English in particular look down on us as turnips. In traveling, I have found, the English aren’t very interested in talking with us unless they perceive that we’re up to a certain speed, which is why I felt like an idiot on my first trip to England, Scotland, and Wales in 1984. I get along a bit better now. (If Chenda reads this, she probably will be amused.) I’d love to live in Scotland part-time.
David: First off, ‘sturm und drang’ — ugh, at this juncture I feel like autocorrect has more become a hindrance to overcome every other minute than an assist.
Your description of old Edinburgh is lovely and I sincerely hope you do get to go inside the monument. If someone should, it’s you.
I can see ‘Werther’ as a novel that if read at a time of life that felt removed from that kind of theme, or one’s outlook was set on other climes or styles of storytelling, it would probably feel as worth taking seriously as the play ‘Julius Caesar’ is to a class of freshman 14 year olds. But I’m gonna defend ‘Werther’ here because I just read it this year and while it’s still fresh in my mind, I want to say I found much of it impressively written considering Goethe’s age when he pulled it off. There’s of course a ‘Romeo + Juliet’ quality because of the premise, but also, there’s some extraordinary philosophical depth lurking in there; for instance, Goethe plays with the concept of suicide not being cowardice, looking instead at its causes and effects apart from the fault of the individuals that it overtakes, which grabbed me and pleasantly surprised me and felt super modern — way ahead of his time.
Werther:
‘The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.’
Things like that spoke to me, things about temperament and nature and forces working on the mind. In essence, all the budding brilliance and terror of Sturm und Drang. Werther shows an acuity of observation when he says things like:
‘Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?‘
‘I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.’
I mean, there’s a garden full of good quotes from the book, the prose is excellent, if not endearing or startling. But you’re right, as a denser, more sophisticated novel form with a suspenseful plot like the Brontës or Austen spoil us with, ‘Werther’s’ in a different category — not least because it’s been laid out in the style of nothing but a pack of confessional letters to a close friend. (‘The Color Purple’ comes to mind.)
I’d like to read ‘Lammermoor’ now from what you’ve said if just to see how ineffectually Scott does romance or pathos, ha. Is there any of the Dionysian at all in Scott (Scott that’s not ‘Ivanhoe’)? I do appreciate your candid insights and expertise (which saves everyone’s time from reading novels we can skip without regret).
On Miss Jane Eyre . . . I couldn’t agree more with how you also love young rebel Jane. This has always been at the crux of my distress with the novel — I adore how in your face ‘wicked’ Jane is when she’s under the sadistic glare of the criminal adults who mercilessly, hypocritically, ritually punish and exploit her. So why in heavens name would Jane the Rebel who dared so much, who grew up bucking Christianity’s sadism, suddenly cave into its tyrannies over women’s ‘virtue’ — when cold, stark reality’s push comes to shove — and throw not just her true love away but practically her own life, because the thought of leaving the continent with Rochester to ‘live in sin’ or to stay put and to say to hell with convention but yes to love is so abhorrent a notion to her sensibilities, she would rather literally die. I just can’t deal with how much of a whimpering mouse Jane morphs into as soon as messy fate is revealed, and she capitulates all her original contrarian fire by obeying society’s prudish laws (because Charlotte is Jane more or less and shares her mind), and this is held up by many readers as some kind of feminist act because she’s choosing herself over a man. No, really no — she’s not righting any wrongs, she’s letting society’s rules crush her, crush her spirit, and her love into nothing. I don’t fall in line with that commonly held narrative that Jane’s an early feminist heroine . . . but probably just me I guess, lol.
I’ll end here with: turnips! Lol, so funny.
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