The bulk of these three chapters is made up of a mysterious encounter leading to people sneaking into a prison to visit someone who is being unjustly held. This is a classic romantic scene and it became a classic romantic scene largely because of the genius of people like Ann Radcliffe and Sir Walter Scott. This is great stuff and the thing to do is to make your imagination do some work. Just read it and allow Sir Walter to please you with this stuff. It's what he does best and nothing I could say here could improve on the experience of reading it yourself.
What I want to focus on instead is something that Sir Walter doesn't do so well and that is his attempts to provide us some glimpse of the inner workings of Frank's mind as he tries to explain, years after the fact, why he chose as he did. That is why he chose not to trust Mr. McVittie who had been recommended to him. (Scott, by the way, reminds us that this is Frank recalling his motivations years later by inserting an anachronism into the account and then having a footnote where his "editor" points out this anachronism.)
John Buchan is a deservedly forgotten writer who was once very popular. Think of him as the Ken Follett of his day. I mention him here because he was a huge admirer of Sir Walter Scott. If we look at Buchan's writing we can see the kinds of weakness that Sir Walter shows here at the beginning of chapter 21 blown up large so it is clearly distinguishable. Like Scott, Buchan was not good at presenting convincing portrayals of the way characters motivations connected with their actions.
At the risk of over-simplfying, I think they both got something exactly backwards. Scott's characters (and Buchan's) tend to have very complex motivations coupled with very direct, straightforward behaviours. In my edition, Frank takes two whole pages to explain the reasons he has for wanting to believe the mysterious stranger who spoke to him in the church and to distrust Mr, MacVittie. Two whole pages.
But, and this is rather stunning if you think about it, when push comes to shove he makes his decision based entirely on his not liking what he sees in McVittie's face. Buchan does this even more. His characters tend to have very complex motivations and yet when the crucial moment arrives, the hero will look at some guy and decide he is trustworthy because he meets his gaze steadily and has a firm handshake.
This, of course, is a characteristic of a lot of modern fiction. We get pages and pages of the internal life of a character as they think about what they should do and then boom, they may as well flip a coin. But modern fiction wants to make the point that our motivations do not give us reason enough to act one way or another. Modern fiction stresses the meaninglessness of modern life (or at least what modern authors think is the meaninglessness of modern life. Scott thinks life is meaningful and it is therefore a huge failure that he cannot tie reasons and action together more convincingly.
Here a contrast with Jane Austen is helpful. Austen's characters have rather simple motivations. They tend to be jealous, angry, insecure or in love and that is all there is to say. It takes Emma most of the book that bears her name to figure out that she loves Mr. Knightly but her love is not a set of complex emotions. It is quite simply love and Austen doesn't spend any time trying to spell it out. The same thing happens at the end of Mansfield Park. When it is time for Fanny and Edmund to fall in love, Austen effectively says, look there aren't than many pages in the book left and you all know how this works anyway so I'm not going to waste my time spelling it all out.
There is a significant agreement between Austen and the moderns here. She does not—contrary to what is often claimed of her—believe that our inner lives explain our outward actions. Scott thinks they do and keeps trying to connect (as EM Forster will also attempt with even less success). But she also agrees with Scott in believing that life is meaningful. What she does think is that character counts. It is the character of the people in her novels that determines whether they will succeed or fail. That Emma realizes she is in love with Knightly is less important than her realizing she has been a fool.
It is on the other end of the scale where Austen introduces complexity. Her characters' motivations are simple what is complex is the way they act. Having a motivation is never enough to guarantee success in attaining it. Darcy is in love with Elizabeth from fairly early on but contradictions in his very complex character seem to get in the way. Character is not visible in their inner lives but in their outer actions. The famous moment of self-revelation is not the turning point but the moment where the person in the novel comes to understand what the plot has already demonstrated.
Emma has virtues (because possessing or not possessing virtues is what character is) that would ensure her success at life even if Knightly had not also loved her (although I find it very hard to see how any man could not love Emma). Those virtues are not sufficient at the beginning of the novel but she has grown by the end. (Mansfield Park is a whole other story that I won't get into here.)
But what of Frank? It's pretty obvious he is now in love with Diana but what of his character. Will it develop such as justify his having a happy of unhappy ending we know must be coming?
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