Scott-ish romp
On The Fair Maid of Perth
There will come a day when the Walter Scott novel I pluck off my shelves will turn out to be a stinker, or, worse again, when I discover there aren’t any left I haven’t read. Happily for me, my brush with The Fair Maid of Perth involved neither of these scenarios. Instead I got to enjoy a good old fourteenth-century Scottish/Scott-ish romp and last gasp of the pre-Victorian novel (1828).
As one approaches Perth from Aberdeen there is a castle on the right-hand side of the A90 occupied, I believe, by a Stagecoach bus magnate, but gifted in former times by Robert the Bruce to a French pirate called Charteris. Perthshire is a picturesque place, but a description of its landsape as ‘beauty in the lap of terror’ rings very true to what Scott does with the in-between nature of his setting. It is the seat of the monarchy (Scone) but also conveniently close to the highlands, whence the marauders of the Clans Quhele and Chattan descend on their raids.
The titular young maid is a famous beauty, and as such attracts a deal of unwelcome attention from various quarters. As the plot escalates, these complications build to a crisis that threatens the whole social order. Eliot once called Tennyson an ‘instinctive rebel’ against a society in which he was the most ‘perfect conformist’, and there is something of that in Scott too, given what a damning picture he draws of the failings and paralysis of the Scottish feudal order.
Robert III is a weak king. This prompts a decline of the aristocracy into scheming and corruption. His heir, the Duke of Rothsay, is an ineffectual hooray Henry. He is also a sex pest, blithely exploiting the feudal ius primae noctis. So egregious is his behaviour that the burghers of Perth demand something be done.
The church is not much help. There is a proto-Protestant reformer, whose taint of heresy rubs off dangerously on other characters. Orthodoxy is enforced by an uncaring and distant hierarchy. The Fair Maid is a faithful daughter of the church, for now, but John Knox’s arrival over the hills cannot be far off.
The Highlanders inhabit a kingdom of magical shadow. They are primitive yet noble, violent yet dignified, in their way. They cannot and will not be integrated into polite society. For complicated reasons, however, the heir to the Clan Quhele chieftainship is living in Perth as a glover’s apprentice. As a mystical highlander, he lacks the bourgeois individuation of the lowlanders. He acquires individuation but in an unfortunate form – he is a coward. This has serious consequences when it comes to a largescale stramash, the Battle of the North Inch.
Which leaves the figure of Henry Gow, the armourer, who represents the nascent bourgeoisie. He takes a moment, amid his triumph at the end of the book, to reject ennoblement and financial reward. He has defeated the Highlandmen and won the Fair Maid, but for his own sake and not for empty baubles and gold.
The unfortunate Duke of Rothsay is poisoned by his uncle, but luckily for Scotland that clears the way for his younger brother, who will become James I. The novel ends on a note of impeccable social reconciliation, as definitive a resolution as any perfect cadence in a Haydn symphony. Whatever dissonance and chaos history throws up, the crown finesses into a larger vision of order, whether in the 1400s or the post-Culloden eighteenth/nineteenth centuries.
Modern readers (including this reader) will find the closing interrupted cadence of another late novel, Redgauntlet, more sympathetic, with its vision of the utterly godforsaken Bonnie Prince Charlie in later life. Scott’s great power, for such a conformist, is the incredible care he lavishes on social formations destined to be swept away. Henry Gow by contrast, may end the novel as the last man standing, but is not possessed of much intrinsic interest. The Hanoverian worldview is thus, one might suggest, built on a hollow victory. But this too one senses Walter Scott knew, in some unacknowledged recess of his imagination. Hurrah for The Fair Maid of Perth
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