Is business and finance an heroic culture?

Blogging Rob Roy Chapters 17-18
(In some editions, book one will end with chapter 17 such that the next chapter will be Book 2, Chapter 1)

We open Chapter 17 with Frank slowly giving in to the desire to spy on Diana, despite his desire to honour his promise to her not to do so.. I won’t dwell on the point, as I made it before, but the question is does he in any way deserve a woman as fine and virtuous as Diana.

From Scott’s perspective, the most important moment is in chapter 17 when Die Vernon chides Frank for being so worried that at the potential loss of his father’s wealth. That may seem odd to us as the poor man is facing bankruptcy. However, in the shame-honour value system one of the marks of a noble man or woman is their ability to face serious financial loss without showing it.

I can’t remember who it was, but there is one famous character from the American revolution who distinguished himself by casually shrugging off the fact that the he—and everyone else— could see that the British were destroying his property rendering him a very poor man where he had been wealthy. Less admirably, there are many stories of men and women in the gambling casinos of Europe in the 19^th century casually smiling and buying their friends drinks even though they had just been ruined at the tables.

What the culture of honour and shame is that a man face ruin stoically.

So Frank cannot do what most of us would gave him do and say to Diana, but that money means the loss of our security and position in society. We’ll all be reduced to menial labourers.

That part is supposed to shrug off as a requirement of being a gentleman.

So what is his answer to her? It is to argue that it’s not the money but the honour.

"You do me injustice, Miss Vernon," I answered. "I grieve not for the loss of the money, but for the effect which I know it will produce on the spirits and health of my father, to whom mercantile credit is as honour; and who, if declared insolvent, would sink into the grave, oppressed by a sense of grief, remorse, and despair, like that of a soldier convicted of cowardice or a man of honour who had lost his rank and character in society. All this I might have prevented by a trifling sacrifice of the foolish pride and indolence which recoiled from sharing the labours of his honourable and useful profession. Good Heaven! how shall I redeem the consequences of my error?"

This is an interesting solution to the honour-shame versus guilt innocence issue. Scott is suggesting that finance does run on a kind of honour. Or at least that it can. Is this a useful solution? I’m not so sure but let’s let Sir Walter try and convince us over the rest of the book.

He still leaves it up to her to figure out that he should get himself to Glasgow. He doesn’t appear to want to try unless he is guaranteed success. She tells him that he has to do what he can.

On to Chapter 18, where we immediately, I think, run into trouble. We have it on the authority of Sir Walter himself that he could not do what Jane Austen could do. Here I think we begin to see evidence of why. Note the openingline of Chapter 18:

There is one advantage in an accumulation of evils, differing in cause and character, that the distraction which they afford by their contradictory operation prevents the patient from being overwhelmed under either.

Jane Austen would never write such a thing. Why not? Because it isn’t true. The world is full of people who faced with “an accumulation of evils” will crumple up in the corner and cry and be absolutely useless to themselves and anyone else. It is only the person with virtue—the person who has trained themselves their entire lives for a moment like this—who will be able to perform under such stress. The reason Sir Walter Scott couldn’t do what Jane Austen could do was not because she was the better writer, she was not, but because she understood human nature  and virtue better than he did,

We see more evidence of this on the very next page. Talking about how his father will be affected by the potential loss, Frank says,

I did not myself set a high estimation on wealth, and had the affectation of most young men of lively imagination, who suppose that they can better dispense with the possession of money, than resign their time and faculties to the labour necessary to acquire it. But in my father's case, I knew that bankruptcy would be considered as an utter and irretrievable disgrace, to which life would afford no comfort, and death the speediest and sole relief.

That is incredible. A young hothead like Frank might react this way but it is not credible that his father would and everything Scott has told of us of him so far testifies to this.

We might be inclined to cut Sir Walter some slack here.  These poor judgments, we might say, are not the work of Sir Walter Scott but Frank. And that seems initially plausible. Note that Frank’s irritating sense of moral superiority toward Diana has now shifted towards his father. He seems to think that he, Frank, is the strong one who can deal with this but his poor father will die of shame.

Is this credible? I hope so but I’m skeptical.

 The rest of the chapter is some interesting anthropological interaction with Andrew Fairservice. It's good stuff but hardly needs any commentary.