The coming of English justice

Blogging Rob Roy chapters 29 and 30
The usual complaint about books like Rob Roy is that they are plot-driven instead of character driven. But what is so bad about being driven by a plot as good as what we see unfurl in these two magnificent chapters. If anything, we have to wish there was more of this and less set up.

Again, let me compare with Jane Austen. Austen could never write this plot; she just didn't have the life experience to do so and even then she might not have been able to. But Austen would have gotten right into the plot. She'd have summarized everything that has happened up to now in maybe three chapters and then plunged us into what is the twenty-sixth chapter of Scott's book.

And the reason she'd do this is straightforward: this is where the good stuff is. This is good reading.

Some lore
We finally "learn" here that Robert Campbell is indeed Rob Roy. Or rather, Frank finally learns it courtesy of Andrew Fairservice and, as he does, we realize that Frank has never heard of Rob Roy before. That is a nice touch because the legend was as yet unknown during MacGregor's own life. Frank, had be been a real person, would have needed it explained to him.

MacGregor was forced into the role of being an outlaw by a debt he couldn't repay by his creditor the Duke of Montrose, James Graham, and not for his participation in the 1715 rebellion. He was only 18 at that time. We should note the parallel here, though. For Jarvie also holds debt against Rob Roy and yet he has been more forgiving. Again, Sir Walter is reminding us that there is often very little real honour among the nobility while there is often considerable honour in bourgeois capitalism.

And when we consider the current disdain that Scott is held in among modern academics, we should probably keep that in mind. Today's university professors are very much like  a corrupt aristocracy.

(Graham, by the way, would be an entirely forgotten figure today if it weren't for his association with Rob Roy just as the Archbishop of Salzburg would be entirely forgotten expect for his running across Mozart. This would come as a huge surprise to both men who regarded their respective victims as little more than troublesome servants. There is a poetic justice in this.)

Anyway, to get back to Rob Roy, I trust those who objected to my "spoiler" in suggesting that we were all supposed to figure out who he was quite early now understand why I said so.

Before leaving the subject, we should touch on the second independent woman in the person of Helen Campbell who seemingly leads the ambuscade (great word that) against the British troops who have taken Jarvie and Frank prisoner. Frank, as his creator does also, has a passion for wild women. I suspect most men do. I don't think many women do however and the percentage of women under the age of 19 or over the age of 25 who like wildness in women is very tiny indeed.

One interesting thing to note is that Helen shouts, "Ye have left me neither name nor fame ..." at the British troops. That is literally true. The English dealt with the rowdiness of clan MacGregor by suppressing the name. It would have been a crime to enter a contract and simply signing your name as "MacGregor".

This is a now forgotten aspect of the English revolution and an aspect of the rise of the modern world that people of Scott's time liked to soft pedal: that those who represented progress and freedom as they saw it felt quite comfortable simply suppressing the aspects of people's identity that they felt stood in the way of progress.

Contradictions
The illegality of the name is worth remembering because the person who says the name MacGregor out loud, thereby proving himself  a hypocrite, is Captain Thornton come to arrest him. Scott is exaggerating nothing in his creation of the murderous swine who is Thornton. His practices, including extracting evidence through death threats, was common practice by English authorities of the era.

And there is a little detail about Thornton and his allies that I would like to finish up on. When Thornton shows up at the tavern, Major Galbraith who is there to meet him commits what is unquestionably an act of treason. He openly supports the Stuart claim to the throne. And Captain Thornton lets that ride.

Again, Scott is quietly reminding the English of something they already know: that the management of their empire was considerably messier than the ideals that supposedly motivated it would suggest. Too often, men like Graham used the responsibilities of office to ruthlessly pursue their own interest and men like Thornton simply played divide and conquer with local chieftains rather than stand up for justice.

Nowadays, we know this a little too well and have gone to far the other way. We forget that the world is a much better place for the coming of the British empire and that life is usually much more fair, much more peaceful and much more comfortable in former British colonies than in the former colonies of any other European nation. It is also infinitely better in these places than it would have been had the English never come along. Sir Walter, as I say, is not unaware of this, and he shows us this by having Jarvie be a better advocate for British law and British capitalism than the man who was supposed to officially represent it.

He is a young man isn't he?

 Blogging Rob Roy chapters 24 and 25
Young Frank Osbaldistone is beginning, although not very quickly, to appreciate the gravity of the situation his father is and, beginning in chapter 23, he begins to get some notion of the situation that he himself is in.

As difficult a situation as that might be, however, his new appreciation is not enough to stop him from acting like an idiot.

That might seem like a crazy way to write a novel on Sir Walter's part but it was much done at the time. Fielding's Tom Jones remains an idiot for most of his work. Radcliffe's heroes seem to take forever to figure out things  that are long obvious to her readers.

In that regard, I might return to the issue of the secret identity of Robert Campbell, cattle dealer (or, more likely thief). I trust it is obvious from the prison scene that we are supposed to have figured out who he is by now and that Scott's intention is that we are to get some pleasure from seeing how long it takes young Frank to figure it out?

Of course, we have the singular advantage of knowing that it says "Rob Roy" on the cover and that the guy is going to show up sometime.

But back to the issue of character development. Sir Walter writes the way they teach people to write in creative writing classes. His hero has flaws that stand in the way of his goals and we see them played out. Some basic change in his character is required for him to succeed.

Again, the contrast with Austen is worth noting here. None of her heroines changes profoundly because none of them have to. They come already equipped with the virtues they need to succeed and at most only need to develop what is already there a little further.  Some make mistakes that they need to recognize and compensate for to succeed to be sure but they remain the same otherwise.

Scott writes in another tradition and we are to look to see Frank change.

The other thing that strikes me in these two chapters is that there are moments that are rather proto-Dickens. Andrew Fairservice, for example. And then there is this lovely paragraph giving us a wonderful sense of local colour:

Repeated knocking at Mrs. Flyter's gate awakened in due order, first, one or two stray dogs, who began to bark with all their might ; next, two or three night-capped heads, which were thrust out of the neighbouring windows to reprehend me for disturbing the solemnity of the Sunday night by that untimely noise. While I trembled lest the thunders of tneir wrath might dissolve in showers like that of Xantippe, Mrs. Flyter herself awoke, and began, in a tone of objurgation not unbecoming the philosophical spouse of Socrates, to scold one or two loiterers in her kitchen for not hastening to the door to prevent a repetition of my noisy summons.

Anyway, things are getting a bit better thanks to Bailie Jarvie, who, recognizing that Frank is too obsessed with romantic notions sends him off to the university where he runs into Rashleigh and promptly starts a duel. The judges give him the edge but he ends up injured and only an intervention from Rob Roy himself prevents anything more serious happening.

Frank realizes, or he is tole at least, that he is vulnerable here in Glasgow and that is where we end today's instalment.

Until next time.

Character should count but ....

Blogging Rob Roy chapters 21-23

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?

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.

What cannot be said

Blogging Rob Roy Chapter 13
This strikes me as the most important chapter in the entire book. It also tells us two really important things about Sir Walter Scott. I

The first is that it tells us just how quickly he wrote this stuff. It is only in this chapter that we begin to find out what the novel is really about. The big themes—the ones that Jane Austen would outline right at the beginning—are laid out here. And if someone were to set out to write a similar story, I think this is Chapter is where they would start.

The other thing that we learn is just how much Sir Walter was influenced by Ann Radcliffe. That is, the book is at heart a critique of Catholicism but it is a critique that means to dismiss first a lot of the shallow and superstitious attacks on Catholicism. Don't get swept up in the romance and magic of Catholicism, Radcliffe tells us, she wants to let us show us the psychological truths that underlie all the smells and spells.

We might think of it this way, unlike Jane Austen who writes about people and treats the historical and wider cultural issues as context, Sir Walter and Ann Radcliffe are writers very much concerned to tell us a story about the larger historical and cultural contexts. They both want us to leave the book thinking, "And that is why it is better that England and protestantism won and why they should continue to win." Jane Austen has no such ambitions.

So when Die Vernon corrects Frank in this chapter she wants to dissuade him of his romantic notions about her and her situation. Like an anthropologist, Sir Walter wants his heroine to describe not just a  gripping conflict but also to spell out what he takes to be the root problems with Catholicism. The story has to work as a tale and as if it were a chapter in a  history book wherein the historian has picked this particular tale as illustrative of something running through all history.

To focus on just the tale as a tale for a while—because if it doesn't work as a story it can't serve Sir Walter's larger purpose either—I think we should be very impressed and the convincing picture we get of Diana here. She doesn't reveal all (and I'll get back to just how much she might be concealing in a moment) but she reveals enough to make us believe in her and love her. She does the same to Frank and also does enough to shake him a little ways off the path he was headed.

I couldn't go through it all here but some of it is work touching on. My favourite bit comes fairly early in the chapter when Frank tries to get off by using drunkenness as an excuse and quoting Shakespeare to back him up.

People do this all the time. They quote "Shakespeare" as having said that "all the world's a stage' or that our fates are  but a tale told by babbling idiot forgetting that it was not Shakespeare but two less-than-admirable characters named Jacques and Macbeth who said these things. And here Diana reminds Frank that it was Iago who uttered the defense he claims as his own.

In any case, the lesson is not just that she wishes to impart to Frank is that he not pick up the habits of the people who surround him. She wants him to see that Rashleigh has played him well.

And here we might begin to wonder at Frank. He is astounded at the frank and manly way that Diana demands that he tell her what Rashleigh has said of her but he doesn't seem to wonder why she is so confident in her assumption that Rashleigh did say something and that this something is the real reason for Frank's bad behaviour.

When he confesses what he has been told, Diana does two things. The first is to make him see that it is not the seemingly romantic fate pushed on her by the choice between marriage to one of the boys or the convent that has made her life so painful but rather the way Rashleigh has treated her. The second is to tell him that far from treating her case in the condescending way he described to Frank, that Rashleigh has set about seducing her and had used his position as her tutor to reach this end.

That should have us hearing echoes of all sorts of stories from Abelard and Heloise to Bartholo and Rosine in the Barber of Seville.

What really happened?
And it should have us asking a question, How successful was Rashleigh? At the time, people didn't say. Even songs wherein a wronged woman sang about her seducer were sung by men at that time because women couldn't even assume the role of a woman who'd been seduced for length of a song without it reflecting on them. Sir Walter is going to be extremely circumspect about how he puts things here.

My question is, has he left some of it between the lines for us to figure out for ourselves?

After leaving Die Vernon, Frank contemplates the situation. Here is how he puts it to Tresham:

In Dubourg's family (as he was of the reformed persuasion) I had heard many a tale of Romish priests who gratified, at the expense of friendship, hospitality, and the most sacred ties of social life, those passions, the blameless indulgence of which is denied by the rules of their order. But the deliberate system of undertaking the education of a deserted orphan of noble birth, and so intimately allied to his own family, with the perfidious purpose of ultimately seducing her, detailed as it was by the intended victim with all the glow of virtuous resentment, seemed more atrocious to me than the worst of the tales I had heard at Bourdeaux ...

By nineteenth century standards that is very heavy stuff indeed and would have had set the minds, and perhaps other parts, of the  men who read this a stirring. Note the language here. The "blameless indulgence" here means sex. He means married sex and the kind of sex he has in mind means men using their wives as a source of pleasure for themselves. He would have been shocked at the suggestion that any woman other than the basest whore might enjoy sex rather than merely being the source of sexual release for her husband, as even the most progressive men of the time also would have also felt. Even Flaubert—a man who devoted his life to flouting bourgeois values and a generation after Scott—was scandalized at George Sand's suggestion that women were entitled to enjoy sex and refused for a while to meet her as a consequence.

The other great turn of phrase in this bit I have quoted is this:

... with the perfidious purpose of ultimately seducing her ...

It's the "ultimately" I wonder about. The attempt would be enough to explain Diana's "resentment" as Frank puts it but it seems obvious to me that Diana feels far more than resentment. She has other secrets as she hints to Frank here but even when we learn what those secrets are, I don't think they explain the depth of her shame and hurt here. To put it in my characteristically blunt way, I think Rashleigh got her and I think Sir Walter expects us to sense that maybe something of that nature happened even if both he and and his readers (unlike me) are too polite so say so many words.

I love, by the way, the fact that Frank takes it that Dubourg being a Calvinist makes his tales about the purported evil of Catholicism absolutely trustworthy.

Finally, I think that explains another rather troubling thing—troubling to me anyway—about Frank. I'd put it this way, everything we have seen tells us that Diana is morally superior to Frank. Granted he is vain and stupid but he should not miss this and yet he seems to.

Even after being rightfully chastised by her Frank treats Diana as lacking in some fundamental female modesty even though he has no reason that we have seen to do so. Read this passage, for example,

Neither can I conceive with what view he should have engaged Diana in the gloomy maze of casuistry which schoolmen called philosophy, or in the equally abstruse though more certain sciences of mathematics and astronomy; unless it were to break down and confound in her mind the difference and distinction between the sexes, and to habituate her to trains of subtle reasoning, by which he might at his own time invest that which is wrong with the colour of that which is right. It was in the same spirit, though in the latter case the evil purpose was more obvious, that the lessons of Rashleigh had encouraged Miss Vernon in setting at nought and despising the forms and ceremonial limits which are drawn round females in modern society. 

What differences did Rashleigh discourage her from believing in and what were the real consequences of this?  We're back in Samuel Richardson land here and female virtue consist not in what women can do but in their ability to resist allowing men doing things to them.

This is a sexism that we might forgive in Sir Walter given the time he lived in but can we forgive it in Rob Roy? Jane Austen is just as evasive about actual sexual content but she does not make the mistakes that Sir Walter at least appears to make or has Frank make.

If my good friend Eliot Girl were to chime in, she might say the real question is, "Does Frank deserve Diana?" That is the test I think we should put Rob Roy to as read it the rest of the way through.

I think that is a much harder question than might first appear.

Let's cut Frank a little slack and allow that he knows that there is more to Diana's story than she is telling. Let's assume that he is such a perfect gentleman that not only does he see this as no barrier to his marrying her but that even if upon marriage he learns she is not a  virgin he will pretend not to have noticed and will love her faithfully until death do them part. Even if he does all that, it would not be enough for him to deserve her. He must do even more and I think the ultimate test of this novel will be in how well it shows him succeeding in really deserving her or it, if it doesn't do that, it show us his failing to get her.

Shame and honour again

Blogging Rob Roy: chapters 10 to 12 (Update: Corrected, this used to say 12-14)
Sometimes people argue that some social feature simply cannot be gotten rid of. Poverty is wrong, they will say, but humans are flawed such that it cannot be eliminated. We might say that this sort of argument is that X should be done but cannot be done.

I want to argue that the reason shame-honour values persist is because we keep choosing them. We can all think of spheres where they should not apply  but we also keep finding situations to use them.

It's analogous to alcohol and automobiles. The social cost for both these things is huge and if we only focused on the damage they do we'd all be prohibitionists. But the truth is that none of us would get rid of either. And we don't really want to get rid of shame either.

One of the great lessons of prohibition, by the way, was that it turned out that nobody thought the law should apply to them. They didn't want to stop drinking so much as they wanted to stop certain undesirable people from drinking while they continued to do so themselves.

In these chapters of Rob Roy we see a fascinating example of a man, Francis Osbaldistone, who wants to eliminate shame. He won't acknowledge it or consider it because all that matters to him is his innocence.

First, however, we get some more of Die Vernon's virtues and very attractive virtues they are. She can read and speak Latin, Greek and Gaelic. She can ride a horse as well as bridle and saddle him. She can jump the horse over a gate and she can fire a gun without blinking. She also has, this is pretty neat, two ancestors who appear in Shakespeare, on in a negative light and one positively. What she cannot do is anything a reasonable Jane Austen heroine might be expected to do and this is pointed out by another woman:

I can neither sew a tucker, nor work cross-stitch, nor make a pudding, nor—as the vicar's fat wife, with as much truth as elegance, good-will, and politeness, was pleased to say in my behalf—do any other useful thing in the varsal world.

You'd think that Frank would love this and you'd be right but he also wants to change Diana.  He thinks her lacking in feminine discretion.

He also displays  appalling ignorance and lack of tact when she starts talking about her family heritage and the honour she feels is due to that heritage.

He admires Rashleigh's public virtues and, we sense, either respects or fears these virtues, but also has criticism about Rashleigh's character and he delivers these rather smugly:

More learned than soundly wise—better acquainted with men's minds than with the moral principles that ought to regulate them, he had still powers of conversation which I have rarely seen equalled, never excelled.

And here he ought to have seen a warning because Rashleigh plays Frank like a fiddle. He quickly figures out that while Frank claims to care about innocence, he is very susceptible to suggestions concerning his honour. When Rashleigh suggests that he, Rashleigh, might marry Diana, not out of love but out of charity, Frank begins to lose it. His own sense of honour is so stirred up that he even begins to think less of Diana.

Addressing Tresham directly, Frank describes his flaw as pride, and pride it is, but it is specifically the suggest that Rashleigh might be his equal in matters of love with Diana (and he hasn't even admitted that love to himself yet) that gets Frank's goat. And boy does it get it. Mix in a little alcohol and he starts a fight and makes a fool of himself, thereby exhausting any honour he might have accumulated.

On Saturday we learn how Diana responds in Chapter 14.

Before leaving, I should note that Rashleigh also introduces a plot complication right out of a Gothic novel. Die Vernon must either marry one of Sir Hildebrand's sons or "take the veil". This is a favourite device of protestants slurring Catholicism at this point. Henry James is still doing in in The American almost a century later. It will be interesting to see what Sir Walter does with it.

Blogging Rob Roy begins here.

Next post will be here.

He'll have justice or ...

Blogging Rob Roy chapters 7 to 9

Note: later today I will publish two lists of virtues. One that is typical of shame-honour cultures adn one typical of guilt-innocence cultures.

In Chapter 7, Frank learns that he has been accused of a crime. He is the last to learn of it and what makes it all very disconcerting for him is that everyone behaves as if he is guilty. If he thought of it more deeply—and note that he isn't a very deep thinker—it would bother him even more that Die Vernon, who also acts as if he was guilty, does so even though she knows from the outset that he is not. She does so because she is fully committed to the shame-honour culture.

And we couldn't get a more clear-cut example of the difference between a shame-honour culture and guilt-innocent one. In a shame honour culture the accusation and the shame that comes with it is the problem to be fixed. Frank is advised to run for Scotland so that the thing can be quietly hushed up.

As a good protestant Englishman, he will have none of it. Or will he?

Here is a simple question: Does Frank get what he wants? That is does he get his day in court and the chance to prove his innocence? He does not.

It's easy to miss that in all the toing and froing.

Of course, we might wonder how much he really wants it. Frank is a fan of poetry after all and poetry is firmly in the world of shame and honour. And we might note that while he starts off determined to have his innocence proven, he is rather easily distracted from this.

Here in Chapter 7, we might think, as he does, that he has won Die Vernon to his cause and yet what she actually does is to begin, with the help of Rashleigh!, to plot and scheme in good shame-honour-culture fashion to get Frank's honour restored. (Note "deceive for the sake of the cause" in the list coming this afternoon.)

Most of Chapter 8 is an extended comedy scene in which we see justice held up to mockery.

First good justice/squire Inglewood. Don't miss the bit where Scott tells us how he became justice. That the local nobility, while disdaining the guilt-innocence idea of justice discovered that they needed someone to protect their rights as wealthy landowners against the poor who hunt not for pleasure but for food. So it was agreed that this one would pretend to abandon his Jacobite loyalties so he could be judge.

It's worth reminding ourselves, in that regard, that we are still in England and Scott is making sure that he readers remember that there were Jacobites on both sides of the border.

A point underlined by a great little joke. It turns out that our good friend Morris was much upset by Franks jokes and that has inclined him to think Frank a highwayman. But it gets better when he inquires into the character of the Osbaldistone family and is told that they have been "Papists and Jacobites since the days of William the Conqueror."

This joke is later picked on by Die Vernon who will remind Frank that her Catholic faith, which is held a crime, was the faith of everyone until the recent past.

Chapter 9 sees the re-entry of Mr. Campbell, whoever he is. But do note the rather abrupt switch at the start. If we go back to the scene where we first meet him, we will remember Mr. Campbell speaks the King's English perfectly. Not just his spoken accent but his behaviourial accent and political opinions are meant to make him blend in.

On the opening page of this Chapter, he speaks one sentence of the King's and thereafter can't seem to say four words without lapsing back into the auld Scots tongue. Mr. Campbell's identity does seem rather maleable don't you think? (He is, if you'll pardon the comparison, the Don Draper in this story.)

But he saves Frank from the shame of conviction. If Frank were a deeper thinker he might have noticed that neither Campbell nor anyone else does anything to establish his innocence and he leaves the hallowed halls of justice just as vulnerable to the charge as he was when he went in. I wonder if this will come back to haunt him?

(An aside: Scott is giving us all sorts of hints of the obliviousness of Francis Osbaldistone. He is an unreliable narrator and we have the choice of reading one of two books. The plain sense of his tale or the one between the lines. I daresay that most people who've read this book, even the few who still do today, have chosen the first.)

Later in the chapter, Frank will learn that a whole conspiracy has been mounted to get him off when he learns that a false letter was delivered to get Mr. Joseph Jobson, the one other person determined to see procedural justice maintained, out of the room.

This sets up a nice meeting between Die Vernon and said Mr. Jobson in which we learn that he is not such a comic figure after all but rather a man full of hate for Catholics. There is a deep criticism here of both the treatment of Catholics in the 18th century and of the English justice system. How effective can a guilt-innocence system be if the main participants keep bouncing back and forth between guilt-innocence and shame-honour values the way Jobson does?

Anyway, we wind up with Die Vernon making her three complaints. Frank apparently cannot figure out the thing that makes hers so attractive to him for he has no sympathy for her rebellion against the constraints of woman hood. He also has little sympathy for her Catholicism.

Her third request is that he respect her secrets for she is tied up in a web of secrets. Frank willingly consents to this but Die quickly realizes that he will not keep this promise but praises his intention nevertheless.

Should we be so kind. I do not think it a spoiler to say that Frank is obviously deeply in love with Die Vernon and he hopes to win her love for him. If Eliot Girl were here, she might well ask us if Frank even half way merits this love he hopes to gain. I don't think he does.

Well, he Frank and Sir Walter have 312 pages to either show us how Frank loses Die or to convince us that he someone does earn this love.

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