Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Ivanhoe
.pdf
IVANHOE
historical foundation earlier than the fourteenth century. In his
fascinated description of clothing, heraldry, and domestic interiors, Scott felt little qualm in borrowing from sources spanning a
century or more, and this is to say nothing of his description of
startled characters as “electrified,” perhaps the most notorious
anachronism in English fiction. Indeed, for all its rich weave of
Saxon and Norman vocabulary, the language spoken by the characters is entirely bogus, a pseudo-medieval patois Scott patched
together from the Elizabethan canon of Shakespeare and the
King James Bible. The stagy feel of the novel is due in large part
to the characters’ tendency to declaim and sermonize as if before
a large audience.
Critics have long taken Scott to task for this form of novelistic
license, but from the very beginning of his text Scott assumes an
ironic relation to historical writing. When Ivanhoe first appeared
in 1819, Scott had not yet acknowledged authorship of any of
his novels. To the titillated press, he was the “Great Unknown”:
Scott’s attachment to his barely credible anonymity (almost everyone saw through it) is difficult to understand beyond his abiding passion, shared by so many of his characters, for feint and
disguise. An instance of this appears in the form of the “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe, in which Scott, writing under the name
“Laurence Templeton,” defends himself in advance against the
petty corrections of the “dry as dust” historians, and even provides a fictional source for his tale, an Anglo-Norman manuscript
belonging to Sir Arthur Wardour, himself a character in one of
Scott’s earlier novels. As far as literal historical truth in the novel
is concerned, we should take Scott’s prefatory follies to heart, and
take an expansive, “romantic” view.
But this is not to say we should not take the historical lessons
of Ivanhoe seriously. Scott’s most acute critic, Gyorgy Lukacs, extends the argument of Scott’s preface to challenge all those read-
21
WALTER SCOTT
ings of the novel that equate its historical pastiche with shallow
theatricality or, in the common phrase of contempt invented for
Scott, mere “tushery.” “Scott’s greatness,” declares Lukacs in his
seminal work The Historical Novel, “lies in his capacity to give
living human embodiment to historical-social types… [his] way of
presenting the totality of certain transitional stages of history” (p.
35). Scott’s choice of historical subject is never accidental, far less
ornamental. Heroes such as Ivanhoe or Edward Waverley might
think of themselves romantically, but they are not themselves
romanticized. Both are examples, says Lukacs, of Scott’s distinctly
modern “middling” heroes, whose imaginations far outstrip their
real achievements. After his flirtation with the Jacobite Rebellion
of 1745, Waverley retreats to his safe English estate and the bland
anonymity of an English gentleman. Ivanhoe likewise has his day
of glory at Ashby, only to recede thereafter into pale ineffectuality. His behavior during the battle for Torquilstone – where, from
his sickbed, he encourages Rebecca’s lurid commentary on the
fighting – is particularly pathetic, like a rabid sports fan shouting at the television. Then, when his spirit finally revives for the
showdown with Bois-Guilbert at Templestowe, Scott denies his
hero the crowning chivalric deed he so desperately desires. Ivanhoe does not so much as scratch his Templar foe: Bois-Guilbert
merely self-destructs.
For Lukacs, Ivanhoe’s chivalric failures should not be confused with a literary failure by the novelist. Scott’s cool description of King Richard as “brilliant, but useless” could apply equally
to Ivanhoe, and typifies the realism of his treatment of individual
characters. It is this ironic detachment that appears “modern” to
us when reading Ivanhoe. Scott reserves his romantic nostalgia
not for people but for periods, for “the ruination of past social
formations” (p. 55). In other words, Scott de-emphasizes his hero
in Ivanhoe in order to bring into clearer focus his true subject: the
22
IVANHOE
transformation of medieval Saxon society as expressed in popular
life, through its living participants. Scott’s famous detail-workthe clothes, the food, the scenery – is thus more than simply “color,” more than a mere screen of dubious authenticity: It is the raw
material of a fully realized historical scene through which his
thinking, feeling characters move, and though they rarely appear
to us as real in the modern, psychologically detailed sense (BoisGuilbert is the notable exception), they fulfill Scott’s purpose as
vivid social beings, as genuine spirits of the age.
The novel opens amidst the ruins of one social formation,
Saxon feudalism, and observes the embattled progress of its Anglo-Norman successor. Neither Cedric, with his fixation on Athelstane and Saxon restoration, nor the rapacious French barons
and their scheming leader, Prince John, come off well. Front deBoeuf, the blackest Norman villain, is both a serial rapist and a
parricide, and the death-chant of his aged Saxon concubine, Urfried, is the most graphic indictment of Norman brutality in the
novel (as well as its most unreadable scene: Scott’s melodramatic
staging of the fall of Torquilstone has not aged well). With both
the established Saxon and Norman orders subject to stringent
critique, Scott reserves his considerable romantic sympathies for
a third, marginal group, who live literally in the shadow of the
greater Saxon-Norman struggle, in the arboreal gloom of Sherwood. Scott never fails to describe Sherwood – the quintessential
English redoubt, the fabled greenwood of Shakespeare – with
real poetry. It is a place, both symbolic and real, over which neither Saxon lord nor French knight can claim dominion: “The
travellers had now reached the verge of the wooded country, and
were about to plunge into its recesses, held dangerous at that
time from the number of outlaws whom oppression and poverty
had driven to despair, and who occupied the forests in such large
bands as could easily bid defiance to the feeble police of the pe-
23
WALTER SCOTT
riod” (p. 191). The chief outlaw is, of course, Robin Hood. Borrowed from folk legend, the merry men of Sherwood serve multiple trans-historical functions. Their stable self-government is
designed to express a primordial English form of natural justice,
while their undemonstrative decency and industry look forward
to the bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century. Robin’s Sherwood is a primeval world, a fantasy of yeoman England that is
the most romantic and least historical aspect of the novel. But in
its idealization of Robin of Locksley, Ivanhoe adheres to, and in
fact did much to sustain, the grand historical narrative of English
liberalism, which traces its roots from the Magna Carta of 1215,
to the creation of a uniquely British “mixed monarchy” in the
bloodless revolution of 1688, to the Reform Bill of 1832. Robin
Hood, so the story runs, is the reason England never needed a
French Revolution. The outlaws of the greenwood will prevail
over the course of the centuries, subtly subduing the hot blood
of French tyranny and breeding the soul of English liberty in its
stead. As such, the merry men’s disciplined performance during the attack on Torquilstone Castle speaks more to England’s
recent triumph over the French on the field of Waterloo than
to any realistic evocation of the rude Saxon-Norman struggles
of the Middle Ages. The band of outlaws comports itself like a
modern professional army. As Front-de-Boeuf tells his skeptical
fellow Norman, Maurice de Bracy, when he shows contempt for
the force advancing on Torquilstone, “Were they black Turks or
Moors, Sir Templar… but these are English yeomen, over whom
we shall have no advantage” (p. 243). Once Norman fanaticism
has exhausted itself, Scott implies, it is these steady outlaws who
will inherit England as its sensible and fair-minded middle class,
and provide its sons as soldiers for her defense.
Robin, like his chivalric counterparts, has a penchant for disguise: he is a “nameless man” who employs a quiverful of pseud-
24
IVANHOE
onyms – Locksley, Bend-the-Bow – when venturing into the
treacherous post-Conquest world of castles and tournaments.
Under the canopy of Sherwood, however, he assumes the open
and natural disposition of a benevolent king. His court is the
great oak tree, overhanging his “throne of turf” (p. 317). Many
versions of the legend represent Robin Hood as a dispossessed
Saxon lord, not unlike Ivanhoe. But Scott deliberately reduces
his rank to yeoman and idealizes the Sherwood gang as a community of equals over which Robin rules by consensus, not fiat. The
nineteenth-century Ivanhoe spin-offs, on page and stage, mostly
surrounded Rebecca. But she, along with Ivanhoe and even Richard the Lion-Heart, have virtually vanished from popular consciousness, leaving Robin Hood the most enduring character of
Scott’s ensemble. If, in the aftermath of the American Civil War,
Ivanhoe represented to dispossessed southern planters an ideal of themselves that would never be historically realized, then
Robin Hood, the depredations of Hollywood notwithstanding,
remains for us a figure of muscular egalitarian democracy (robs
from the rich; gives to the poor), which, combined with the environmentally friendly occupation of the greenwood by his merry
men, stands as a model of human community the citizen of the
twenty-first century can hope to find only on a movie screen, or
in the pages of Ivanhoe.
But why does Robin Hood render up his liberty so readily to
a Norman king, especially one who has done so little to deserve
his loyalty? The answer brings us back to Scott’s theme of necessary mixture, but with a more conservative political inflection. It
is a revealing irony that, as Scott was writing Ivanhoe, the political consensus surrounding English liberty that he evoked in the
glades of twelfth-century Sherwood was under as great a threat
as at any time in its history. The influx of returning soldiers to
Britain in the aftermath of Waterloo, combined with years of bad
25
WALTER SCOTT
harvests and crushing national debts, had brought the country
to the brink. The summer of 1819 saw violent clashes between
government militias and the growing urban working class concentrated in the north. Particularly notorious was the so-called
Peterloo Massacre in August, in which a dozen unarmed protesters were slaughtered at the hands of the national guard. Scott
interrupted his writing of the third volume to contribute a long
editorial in defense of the government, and it is his often rabid
conservatism in this period – as the self-appointed “laird” of his
grand estate at Abbotsford – that explains his rehabilitation of
King Richard in Ivanhoe, and why he places such emphasis on
the automatic obeisance of Robin Hood and his men to the King.
Robin’s homage to Richard drives a wedge between him and Cedric, as it does between Cedric and Ivanhoe, but Scott’s romantic
inflation of the Sherwood scenes leaves no doubt as to his sympathies and the overall purpose of the novel.
In short, the key historical imperative under which Scott
wrote Ivanhoe was national unity, and he imposes that unity
in the novel, where all factions are brought together under the
awesome figure of the king. By re-inventing Richard so regardless of the historical facts, Scott shows that his mind was as much
on the standing of his own king as the reputation of the LionHeart. Scott had always viewed himself as descended from the
lost tradition of minstrel courtiers, and it is not too much to say,
in the words of his most recent biographer, that the entire “plot
of Ivanhoe can be construed as an elegant compliment to the
[Prince] Regent” (Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, p. 228).
Scott’s novel of King Richard’s reign was published on the eve
of the first British coronation in sixty years. Mad King George
III, as mentally absent from his kingdom as Richard had been in
person, had finally died, and his son, heretofore Regent, belatedly assumed the throne. The new George was widely loathed
26
IVANHOE
for his vanity and extravagance, but Scott idolized him, and the
scene in the greenwood where the homely English yeomen bend
a knee to their fickle but glamorous monarch must have touched
the dandy Regent’s heart. Ivanhoe, where monarchs are flawed
but monarchy is the only salvation, became the new George IV’s
favorite novel, and Britain’s as well. The King’s reward was fitting for one who had risen in his defense at a time of crisis. He
awarded the famous novelist the first baronetcy of his reign. Thus
it was that Scott, who had done so much to rescue the knights of
yore from oblivion, himself became Sir Walter, a knight of the
modern world, wielding a patriotic pen in place of a lance.
Gillen D’Arcy Wood was born in Australia, and came to New
York on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1992. He took his Ph.D. from
Columbia University in 2000, and is now Assistant Professor of
English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is
the author of an historical novel, Hosack’s Folly (Other Press,
2005), and a cultural history of Romantic literature and art, The
Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860
(Pal-grave, 2001), as well as numerous articles on nineteenthcentury British literature and culture.
Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart,
And often took leave, – but seem’d loth to depart!
PRIOR.
27
CHAPTER I
Thus communed these; while to their lowly dome
The full-fed swine return’d with evening home,
Compell’d, reluctant, to the several sties,
With din obstreperous and ungrateful cries.
POPE’S Odyssey
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered
by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest,
covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which
lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The
remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble
seats of Wentworth, of Wharncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley;
here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the
Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times
those bands of gallant outlaws whose deeds have been rendered
so popular in English song.
Such being our chief scene, the date of our story refers to a
period towards the end of the reign of Richard I., when his return from his long captivity had become an event rather wished
than hoped for by his despairing subjects, who were in the meantime subjected to every species of subordinate oppression. The
nobles, whose power had become exorbitant during the reign
of Stephen, and whom the prudence of Henry the Second had
1
28
IVANHOE
scarce reduced into some degree of subjection to the crown, had
now resumed their ancient license in its utmost extent; despising
the feeble interference of the English Council of State, fortifying
their castles, increasing the number of their dependants, reducing all around them to a state of vassalage, and striving by every
means in their power to place themselves each at the head of
such forces as might enable him to make a figure in the national
convulsions which appeared to be impending.
The situation of the inferior gentry, or franklins, as they were
called, who, by the law and spirit of the English constitution,
were entitled to hold themselves independent of feudal tyranny, became now unusually precarious. If, as was most generally
the case, they placed themselves under the protection of any of
the petty kings in their vicinity, accepted of feudal offices in his
household, or bound themselves, by mutual treaties of alliance
and protection, to support him in his enterprises, they might indeed purchase temporary repose; but it must be with the sacrifice
of that independence which was so dear to every English bosom,
and at the certain hazard of being involved as a party in whatever
rash expedition the ambition of their protector might lead him to
undertake. On the other hand, such and so multiplied were the
means of vexation and oppression possessed by the great barons,
that they never wanted the pretext, and seldom the will, to harass and pursue, even to the very edge of destruction, any of their
less powerful neighbours who attempted to separate themselves
from their authority, and to trust for their protection, during the
dangers of the times, to their own inoffensive conduct and to the
laws of the land.
A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny
of the nobility and the sufferings of the inferior classes arose from
the consequences of the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood
29
WALTER SCOTT
of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still
felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the
consequences of defeat. The power had been completely placed
in the hands of the Norman nobility by the event of the battle
of Hastings, and it had been used, as our histories assure us, with
no moderate hand. The whole race of Saxon princes and nobles
had been extirpated or disinherited, with few or no exceptions;
nor were the numbers great who possessed land in the country
of their fathers, even as proprietors of the second or of yet inferior classes. The royal policy had long been to weaken, by every
means, legal or illegal, the strength of a part of the population
which was justly considered as nourishing the most inveterate
antipathy to their victor. All the monarchs of the Norman race
had shown the most marked predilection for their Norman subjects; the laws of the chase, and many others, equally unknown
to the milder and more free spirit of the Saxon constitution, had
been fixed upon the necks of the subjugated inhabitants, to add
weight, as it were, to the feudal chains with which they were
loaded. At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where
the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was
the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and
judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French
was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while
the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned
to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and
those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated,
occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this
necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English
30
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]