Walter Scott, ‘Anne of Geierstein’ (1829)
[Continuing my read-through of Walter Scott. Previously on this blog: Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1823), Quentin Durward (1823), St Ronan’s Well (1823), Redgauntlet (1824), The Betrothed (1825), The Talisman (1825), Woodstock (1826), The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827), The Highland Widow (1827) and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]
Like Woodstock (1826), Anne of Geierstein, or The Maiden of the Mist (1829) flirts with a Gothic supernatural before defusing its spectral ghostliness with common sense. Except that it doesn’t, exactly. What haunts the novel is not a maiden in the mist, not a ghost, or witch, but something else: the hydra-figure of democracy itself. Let me explain what I mean.
We’re into the last years of Scott’s life now, and his energies are flagging. After his bankruptcy, and his decision to write himself out of debt, he undertook positively stakhanovite efforts, writing writing and writing more: non-fiction works like the 9-volume Life of Napoleon and his two-volume History of Scotland were undertaken to repay his creditors; new Waverley novels were written to provide for his own living expenses. But Scott was weakening, exhausted, ill. He suffered a series of strokes, of increasing severity. He more-or-less got through the writing of Anne of Geierstein in a concerted push of work from September 1828 to April 1829, although the last third of the novel shows various signs of flagging. Then he laboured in an ill-focussed and more or less discombobulated way at his next novel, Count Robert of Paris: — in Jan 1831 he informed his publisher Robert Cadell he had finished vol 2 of this book and was starting vol 3, only to discover he had massively underwritten the second volume, had to backtrack, writing poorly-fitting extra stuff, moving sections around, responding despairingly to negative feedback from his friend (and printer) Ballantyne, and finally bundling the whole thing together and going off on a Mediterranean cruise for his health. In his absence Cadell and Scott’s son-in-law John Lockhart completely reworked Count Robert, restructuring it and rewriting large sections, without any input from Scott. After that novel there was only the abbreviated Castle Dangerous (1831), and the gibberish of The Siege of Malta and Bizarro, both begun in Scott’s last months alive, left unfinished at his death, and not published until 2008. All three of those titles are interesting, I think, though not in any sense good as conventional nineteenth-century novels. More like intriguing oulipo-style experiments in a special kind of anti-writing. I’ll come back to them on this blog shortly.
So, yes: there are symptoms in Anne of Geierstein of an author who is writing himself into the ground. Writing himself, really, into an early grave. The introduction to the 1833 ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of Anne of Geierstein starts with this rather splendid confession.
‘I couldn’t be bothered to do any actual research, so I just made it all up.’ Later in the same introduction he says, in effect: ‘I could have corrected the errors with which this novel is fillled, but I’m not feeling very well and am off on my holidays, so I won’t’ (what he actually says is: ‘there are probably several other points on which I ought to have embraced this opportunity of enlarging; but the necessity of preparing for an excursion to foreign countries, in quest of health and strength, that have been for some time sinking, makes me cut short my address upon the present occasion.’) Here’s Andrew Lang from the start of the 20th-century:
Anne of Geierstein was no favourite of the author’s, Scott complaining in his diary [19 June 1828] that he was become ‘a writing automaton,’ and that he suffered much pain from rheumatism and rheumatic headaches. He feared that this affected ‘the quality of the stuff’ … Scott believed in his duty and in his power of will, but imagination will not obey a moral dictate. We find Ballantyne ‘complaining of his manuscript’: the wearied hand no longer wrote legibly. He ‘wrought and endured,’ afflicted by a ‘hypochondriacal melancholy’: … In July we find him ‘beginning Simond’s Switzerland,’ in search of local colour, for he did not know Switzerland, nor even the Rhine.
When the story required a description alpine mountains, Scott bunged-in exaggerated versions of Scottish ones. As he finished the novel, Scott was not in a happy place: ‘I don’t know why or wherefore, but I hate Anne’ he wrote to a friend on April 27th 1829: ‘the story will end, and shall end, because it must end, and so here goes.’ Hey boy! Hey girl! Geierstein DJ … here we go.
It’s a mournful sort of conclusion to what had started as a much more positive project: Scott had enjoyed writing Quentin Durward (1823) — his first European/medieval tale — so much that he thought about a sequel as soon as he finished it, ‘trying a continuation’ as he put it in letters. Solid, heroic Scot Quentin (who does not appear in Anne of Geierstein) finds himself caught in the middle of the Burgundian wars between Louis XI, King of France and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (who does appear in Anne, in its final third). It seems that Scott’s first narrative impulse was to wrap-up Charles’s bold career, which ended after he attempted to conquer Switzerland so as to add it to his spread of Burgundian territories, in yellow, here:
Charles was defeated at a trio of battles. First there was the Battle of Grandson (2 March 1476), where he lost his entire army, all his artillery and — as he fled for dear life — many personal possessions too, including his crown jewels and a bath of solid silver. I mean, who takes a solid silver bathtub away with him to war? Charles the Bling, evidently.
By June Charles had raised a new army of 30,000 men and again marched on Switzerland. At Morat (22 June 1476) he again lost the battle and his army (surviving troops were pressed back by the Swiss army until they were forced into the nearby lake, where they drowned or were shot as they attempted to swim to the far shore). After this Charles levied a new army and once again gave battle, this time at Nancy. You have to give him credit for persistence, I guess.
This final engagement happened in the dead of winter, January 1477. The weather was so cold that a significant number of Charles’ troops died of exposure before the fighting even began. The Swiss army (in alliance with René II, Duke of Lorraine, Nancy being a Lorraineian city) quickly flanked the Burgundian army, their movements hidden by the local topography and a blizzard that reduced visibility to a few metres. This manoeuvre was catastrophic for the Burgundians. As the Swiss swarmed through his lines, killing his men, Charles is reputed to have cried-out ‘I struggle against a spider who is everywhere at once!’ His mutilated body was not discovered until three days after the battle. Almost his entire force was killed, either on the battlefield, or in their disorderly retreat to the town of Metz — bodies littered the entire 18-mile-long Metz road, and survivors getting to Metz were so terrified of the pursuing Swiss that, rather than wait for the drawbridge to be lowered, they hurled themselves into the city’s icy moat to swim across, many to their death. Here is Delacroix’s 1831 canvas ‘La Bataille de Nancy’. The geezer in the bottom-left, on the collapsed horse, is Charles himself, about to receive his death blow from that alarming-looking lance. Charles the poled.
Charles the Bold’s demise meant that French King Louis took over most Burgundian territory and made it France. Which is where we are today, more or less.
It’s an exciting, tragic, intrinsically dramatic set of circumstances, all this. But Anne of Geierstein covers it only at second hand, offstage. Instead the novel’s focus is a couple of English traders, old John Philipson and his adult son Arthur, who spend two thirds of the novel carrying a small box from Italy, over the Alps, through Switzerland and into Burgundy, trekking through perils and dangers, encountering and evading enemies, sojourning into jail-cells, escaping, risking their lives. It is, you see, absolutely imperative that this small box reach its intended destination. What’s in the box, you ask? Ah — wouldn’t you like to know!
The two Philipsons are not whom they pretend to be, of course: it would hardly be a Scott novel if they were. Intimations of noble breeding keep showing from beneath their humble merchant’s attire. The novel starts with them trying to cross the Alps from Italy into Switzerland: one snowy peak they must pass, Mount Pilatus, is occupied by a malevolent spirit, supposedly the angry unquiet ghost of Pontius Pilate himself. The younger Englishman, Arthur, defies the mountain: ‘“How the accursed heathen scowls upon us!” [he] said … while the cloud darkened and seemed to settle on the brow of Mount Pilatus. “Vade retro! Be thou defied, sinner!”’ At his words a wind starts up. There are, as we might say, fell voices on the air (here, on this very blog, I suggested that Tolkien, reading this novel in his youth, adapted it for the episode in Lord of the Rings, the ‘Crossing of Caradhras’), a blinding fog, blizzard, a rockfall. It seems the Philipsons will died before the story even begins!
Of course they don’t. They are saved from disaster by the appearance of the titular Anne, who brings them safely into a prosperous Swiss village amongst the heights, where her uncle Arnold Biederman is the ‘Landamman’, or chief magistrate. Biederman explains that he himself is of noble blood, and entitled to rule as liege-lord over all these Swiss, but that he had surrendered his title to live an honest democratic life as a simple member of his community, working the land and joining his fellow citizens in defending the Canton against invasion. Biederman’s younger brother, incensed at this abdication, claimed the title himself: but he’s not around — ‘My brother had other possessions in Swabia and Westphalia,’ Beiderman the elder explains, ‘and seldom visits’. Anne is kid brother’s only child, and is being raised by her uncle because it’s too dangerous in Westphalia, what with all the Burgundian warring going on. But it means that, though she appears as a simple Swiss maiden, Anne is actually a duchess, or a countess, or some other position of rank. Not that she puts on airs: she herself much prefers the simple democratic Swiss life.
Anyhow, Anne is beautiful: ‘her long fair hair fell down in a profusion of curls on each side of a face, whose blue eyes, lovely features, and dignified simplicity of expression implied at once a character of gentleness and of the self-relying resolution of a mind too virtuous to suspect evil, and too noble to fear it.’ Young Arthur instantly falls in love with her, and, it seems, she with him — though Scott repeatedly tells us that nothing can come of their feelings. It excites the jealousy of a Switzer called Rudolph, who has a prior claim on young Anne, or feels he has. He challenges Arthur to a duel, which is interrupted by the Landamman Beiderman, outraged at Rudolf’s violation of hospitality.
The plot moves on: Philipson senior explains that he has to carry his tiny box and its (we presume) immensely valuable contents into Burgundy. Beiderman also need to go, to petition the Burgundian Duke, Charles the Bold, to leave the Swiss alone, and agree a peace treaty. So they travel together: a party of stout Switzers and the two Englishmen.
Things do not go easily. First of all the city of Basle (‘Bâle’, Scott calls it) refuse to let the party inside their walls, for fear of irking Charles the Bold, who hates the Swiss. They have to camp outside the city walls in an old ruin. Arthur, taking his turn on guard duty, sees beautiful Anne gliding out of the camp and then back in — but it can’t be her! She is safely with her uncle inside! What’s going on?
The Philipsons go their own way, saying farewell to the Swiss, but at the town of La Ferette, they are imprisoned by the Burgundian governor wicked Count Hagenbach, who steals John Philipson’s precious box. Now we discover what’s inside — a precious diamond necklace! Greedy for this treasure, Hagenbach plans to execute the Englishmen and keep it for his own. He is thwarted by a churchman, the ‘Black Priest of Saint Paul’s’, who is a hero of the populace and therefore dangerous to cross, and who refuses to sanction this crime.
Here Arthur sees a second magical manifestation of Anne of Geierstein: she somehow appears inside his prison cell and lets him out. It’s the nick of time: just as the party of Swiss enter La Ferette a popular uprising overthrows — and hangs — Hagenbach.
John Philipson and his son agree to double their chances of reaching the Burgundian court by splitting up. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, since it’s not just getting to Burgundy that counts, but the delivery of the diamond necklace. But off they go, John up the right bank of the Rhine and Arthur on the left. Anne of Geierstein appears to them both: to the son as the mistress of a fine castle near Arnheim; to the father, on the other side of the river, as a well-dressed noblewoman on horseback, out hawking, who warns John against the Black Priest. The warning is apropos: the Black Priest seizes John, carries him into a mysterious subterranean chamber, and subjects him to a trial to the death before the massed ranks of a secret society — he is, we discover, the head of the Vehmgericht, a pseudo-Masonic occult organisation that dispenses its own brand of star-chamber justice, to prince and peasant alike. John manages to escape, but the threat of the Vehmgericht remains.
We’re into the second half of the novel now, and it’s going pretty well: an agreeable central mystery, some nice diversions and adventures and above all a splendidly uncanny vibe of Gothic supernatural permeating the narrative. What is Anne, exactly? How is she able to glide through prison walls, haunt the night, appear in all these different places in different guises? We learn the backstory of Anne’s family tree: her grandfather, the Baron of Arnheim, was something of an alchemist, a seeker of forbidden lore, ‘a follower of the Persian Magi’. One night a stranger arrives: an actual wizard.
“I seek refuge and hospitality,” replied the stranger; “and I conjure thee to grant it me, by the shoulder of thy horse, and by the edge of thy sword, and so as they may never fail thee when thy need is at the utmost!”
“Thou art, then, a brother of the Sacred Fire,” said Baron Herman of Arnheim; “and I may not refuse thee the refuge which thou requirest of me, after the ritual of the Persian Magi. From whom, and for what length of time, dost thou crave my protection?”
“From those,” replied the stranger, “who shall arrive in quest of me before the morning cock shall crow, and for the full space of a year and a day from this period.”
“I may not refuse thee,” said the Baron, “consistently with my oath and my honour. For a year and a day I will be thy pledge, and thou shalt share with me roof and chamber, wine and food. But thou too must obey the law of Zoroaster, which, as it says, Let the Stronger protect the weaker brother, says also, Let the Wiser instruct the brother who hath less knowledge. I am the stronger, and thou shalt be safe under my protection; but thou art the wiser, and must instruct me in the more secret mysteries.” [Anne of Geierstein, ch 11]
For the stipulated 366 days the Baron learns various occult arts and skills from this Zoroastrian master — Dannischemend is his rather improbable name — and when his time is up, the wizard passes on the business of instructing the Baron to his beautiful young daughter Hermione (‘“Be not discouraged, my son,” said the sage; “I will bequeath the task of perfecting you in your studies to my daughter, who will come hither on purpose”.’ ). One thing leads to another, and the Baron and Hermione marry and have a daughter, Sybilla — this is Anne of Geierstein’s mother, you see. But things don’t end well for the couple. Hermione is able to pass as a Christian (indeed when ‘the Bishop of Bamberg himself made a visit to Arnheim’ to check up on her ‘he conversed with Hermione, and found her deeply impressed with the truths of religion, and so perfectly acquainted with its doctrines, that he compared her to a doctor of theology in the dress of an Eastern dancing-girl’). But that doesn’t mean she actually is a Christian. For one thing there are her occult abilities — ‘She appeared amongst her companions, and vanished from them, with a degree of rapidity which was inconceivable; and hedges, treillage, or such like obstructions, were surmounted by her in a manner which the most vigilant eye could not detect; for, after being observed on the side of the barrier at one instant, in another she was beheld close beside the spectator.’ For another, there is a certain magnificent opal Hermione wears always in her hair, and which gleams with an inner light. One day, attending the christening of her daughter Sybilla, a bit of Holy Water splashes onto the opal.
The opal, on which one of these drops had lighted, shot out a brilliant spark like a falling star, and became the instant afterwards lightless and colourless as a common pebble, while the beautiful Baroness sank on the floor of the chapel with a deep sigh of pain.
Oh no! Hermione dies soon after . Her daughter grows up to marry Baron Biedermann and give birth to Anne of Geierstein. The implication is that our Anne has inherited her grandmother’s supernatural abilities.
It’s all pretty exciting, an engaging Gothic concoction. Will handsome upright young Arthur truly marry this witch? What is the purpose of delivering the diamonds to Burgundy?
But when the two Englishmen (reunited after their separate adventures on either side of the Rhine) get to Strasburg and the Burgundian court, the novel falls to pieces — it absolutely collapses into rubbishness. There’s still a third, or so, of the book to go, but everything from this point on is a slog.
We finally discover the real identities of the Philipsons: it’s John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford and his son. John was a real person, a prominent Lancastrian who lost his title when the Yorkists won the Wars of the Roses at the Battle of Tewkesbury, 1471, and who was later restored to it (he was military commander of Henry VII’s army at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and ‘became one of the great men’ of the new King’s regime). Historically, he didn’t have a son, and indeed died without issue, a fact Scott gets around by disposing of Arthur in marriage to Anne of Geierstein at the end of his novel thereby leaving him in Switzerland (although the very last sentence implies that Arthur de Vere and his wife do return to the English court). Because, yes of course Arthur and Anne marry. It’s a Scott romance. Once Arthur is revealed to be not a humble peddlar but actually a scion of one of the noblest families in England, the young baroness is free to follow her heart.
But for most of the final third of the novel all that is forgotten, as is the tragic career of Charles the Bold, the ostensible reason for the novel. Why has the Earl of Oxford disguised himself and carried this valuable necklace all the way from Italy? In order to give it to Margaret of Anjou, that’s why — she the former wife of Henry VI and Queen of England, now (after the defeat of her Lancastrian faction) a bitter and broken-down old woman, living a mendicant’s life in exile in Strasbourg. Out of nowhere a whole new storyline lumbers into view: Margaret will use the fantastic wealth represented by the necklace to fund Charles of Burgundy’s military campaign, gifting him Provence (old King René, who rules that territory, is Margaret’s father) in return for Burgundian support in restoring the Lancastrians to power in England.
It’s all too abrupt: not having been prepared for any of this, the reader finds it hard to invest, and when the narrative dallies for hundreds of pages in Provence, with reports on Charles’s campaign against the Swiss being repeated at second-hand by various messengers, it’s positively maddening. The downfall of Charles the Bold, who could simply march down to ready-and-ripe Provence and claim it, but who is too obsessed with punishing the Swiss to do so, is full of dramatic potential. Young Arthur and elderly Margaret hanging around Provence is not. Scott inserts a risible piece of plotting: the Black Priest arrives, bringing a letter from the elder Philipson/Oxford (still with Charles in Burgundy) that ends with the phrase: ‘The bearer may be trusted’ with a small space after the word ‘may’. Arthur and Margaret allow the Black Priest into their confidences. Then, belatedly, Arthur remembers that his father told him to hold any letter he received over the fire; when he does this the phrased changes to ‘The bearer may not be trusted.’ Oh no! He hurries back to Margaret — is it too late? Turns out, no: it’s not too late. Margaret’s father detains the Black Priest and plans go ahead as before. A pointless diversion in the story, and all the while Charles, offstage, loses his three battles and is killed.
Then the novel, jarringly, just stops. We learn at second hand that Charles is dead. The Earl of Oxford, who had been part of Charles’s army, manages to escape with his life. He suddenly mentions ‘Bretagne … where my wife has dwelt since the battle of Tewkesbury expelled us from England’ and the reader goes: wait, wife? Why hasn’t she been mentioned before? In the next paragraph Earl and wife go visiting his old friends in Switzerland, despite the fact that the Earl was one of the main military movers-and-shakers in the Duke of Burgundy’s several armies that attempted to annihilate the Swiss. Forgive and forget, I guess:
To close the tale, about three months after the battle of Nancy, the banished Earl of Oxford resumed his name of Philipson, bringing with his lady some remnants of their former wealth, which enabled them to procure a commodious residence near to Geierstein; and the Landamman’s interest in the state procured for them the right of denizenship. The high blood and the moderate fortunes of Anne of Geierstein and Arthur de Vere, joined to their mutual inclination, made their marriage in every respect rational … [Some years later] the star of Lancaster began again to culminate … The treasured necklace of Margaret was then put to its destined use, and the produce applied to levy those bands which shortly after fought the celebrated battle of Bosworth, in which the arms of Oxford contributed so much to the success of Henry VII. [ch 36]
Wait, though, what about all that juicy stuff about Anne of Geierstein being a witch, descended of Persian magi? What about her magical powers? What happened to the Gothic stuff?
The short answer is, as with Woodstock, Scott first teases us with Gothic uncanny magic and then dismisses it with materialist and rational explanation (what’s now called the ‘Scooby Doo strategy’). So we learn, in passing, that though she did have interests in book-learning and forgotten lore, Anne’s grandmother Hermione was otherwise just a regular girl. Her opal was not a magic gem, just a regular jewel. The Baroness Steinfeldt (‘famous in the neighbourhood for her insatiable curiosity and overweening pride’) jealous that Hermione wore the opal, which she claimed an ancestor of her family had won ‘in battle from the Soldan of Trebizond’, poisoned the young wife. Holy water was sprinkled on her, but not to burn her as it might a vampire, but on the contrary to try and revive her when she first swooned, as the only water nearby.
“The sprinkling of water was necessarily had recourse to, on my ancestress’s first swoon. As for the opal, I have heard that it did indeed grow pale, but only because it is said to be the nature of that noble gem, on the approach of poison.” [ch 26]
But this is hurried past, and my reading of the book leaves the magical, or otherwise, status of Anne ambiguous. The Scooby-Doo rationalisation feels half-hearted, where the earlier Gothic uncanny stuff is splendid and rather potent. The rumour is (disputed by some scholars) that before this novel opals were just another kind of precious stone, but after its success — and it was widely read throughout the nineteenth-century, no matter Andrew Lang’s low opinion — the opal acquired its present-day reputation as an unlucky kind of gem. Wikipedia quotes Allan Eckert’s The World of Opals (New York 1997) to the effect that, though considered a lucky stone in the Middle Ages (it was even said to grant invisibility if wrapped in a fresh bay leaf and held in the hand), all that changed with Scott:
Following the publication of Sir Walter Scott’s Anne of Geierstein in 1829, opal acquired a less auspicious reputation. In Scott’s novel, the Baroness of Arnheim wears an opal talisman with supernatural powers. When a drop of holy water falls on the talisman, the opal turns into a colorless stone and the Baroness dies soon thereafter. Due to the popularity of Scott’s novel people began to associate opals with bad luck and death. Within a year of the publishing of Scott’s novel in April 1829, the sale of opals in Europe dropped by 50%, and remained low for the next 20 years or so.
That, I’d say, speaks to the superior power of the earlier, Gothic-y sections of the novel. It’s not the first time Scott has, as the phrase goes, failed to stick the landing. But it’s hard to think of another Waverley novel that falls off a cliff as badly in its last third as this one does.
***
There is a very interesting novel in here, buried under the mess and blather, and discounting the wrongfooting final third — or not discounting it so much as putting it in a proper relation. It’s the Swiss stuff, I think.
I don’t know if there has been a book written, or a PhD undertaken, on the topic of ‘the representation of the Swiss in 19th-century British Literature’. It would be worth undertaking, if not. One strand of this would be the sense of the Swiss as a bastion of Protestantism — more than 60% of Swiss identify as Catholic, but a quarter are Prots, and a poem like Milton’s barnstorming ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’ sonnet fixes on those Protestant Swiss as ‘saints’, persecuted by the surrounding Catholic nations. In the 19th-century this blends with a figuring of Switzerland as, like Britain, a democratic nation, almost an island state — though enisled by mountains rather than sea — praiseworthily holding out against despotism and tyranny. The invasion of Switzerland by Napoleon (the last time that nation was successfully invaded) roused British Romantics to heroizing outrage, most famously in Wordsworth’s Milton-imitating sonnet, ‘Thoughts of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland’ (1802):
Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!
There came a Tyrant, and with holy glee
Thou fought’st against him; but hast vainly striven:
Thou from thy Alpine holds at length art driven,
Where not a torrent murmurs heard by thee.
Of one deep bliss thine ear hath been bereft:
Then cleave, O cleave to that which still is left;
For, high-souled Maid, what sorrow would it be
That Mountain floods should thunder as before,
And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore,
And neither awful Voice be heard by thee!
The two voices are British and Swiss, and Scott’s novel strikes me as a belated (fourteen years after Napoleon’s final defeat, two years after Scott’s biography of Napoleon) engagement with the same dynamic: the tyrant who attempts to subdue the heroic sort-of island democracy and is heroically rebuffed, a celebration not just of endurance and martial valour, but of an insular democratic endurance and martial valour. In Johann David Wyss perennially popular Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812; first translated into English, as ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’, in 1814) a Swiss family are shipwrecked upon an actual island in the south seas, which they render into a smoothly functioning familial utopia. To this combo of quasi-democratic (quasi because actually strongly patriarchal, as per the prominence of Landamman Biederman in Scott’s imagined society) and ur-Protestant (the novel, set in the 1470s, is solidly pre-Reformation) island-nation repelling the Continental tyrant logic, Scott adds a romantic-erotic element: — the mythically-named, wholly fictional Arthur de Vere falling in love with the humble, beautiful Swiss maid Anne — except that it’s actually humble, handsome English merchant Arthur Philipson falling for the noble Countess of Arnheim, except that it’s actually actually two members of the nobility finding one another and marrying. It’s hard for a Victorianist not to look forward to Matthew Arnold’s ‘Marguerite’ poems.
I love those poems — ‘To Marguerite Continued’ may be my single favourite Victorian short poem — but they represent, even in the 1850s, a kind of retrenchment, in effect saying: these Swiss women are gorgeous, for sure — but I, respectable English gentleman that I am, could never marry one of them. Scott’s Arthur does marry his Swiss squeeze, but there’s something iffy about Anne of Geierstein to the end (is she a witch? can you be sure she isn’t?) and Arthur’s very status — not an historical personage, the fictional character whose inheritance is always already written-out of history by the mere fact that John de Vere was succeeded by his nephew, also called John — occupies a disorienting status in this half-historical half-fictional narrative. He’s sort of a scion of this ancient, noble and quasi- (or crypto-) Shakespearean families, the de Veres, the Oxfordians, and yet he isn’t, because he doesn’t exist.
But in its best moments, the novel does something really quite interesting with this figuring-of-Swiss-ness. For much of the first half, Scott is patently in love with the Swiss ideal: muscular, hearty ordinary men and beautiful, virtuous ordinary women in the testing yet utopian environment of the high alpine pastures, working the land, enjoying themselves with sporting contests, a community of citizens rather than subjects — the Romantic Rousseau-ian dream, in other worlds. And yet, at the same time, Scott can’t give-up his lifelong Tory passion for rank, social hierarchy, noble blood and divine right. So it is that ordinary English merchants the ‘Philipsons’ are also of the noble house of Oxford, Landamman Biederman is actually a Baron (though he has voluntarily surrendered his titles) and a story about the heroic defence of democratic Switzerland suddenly shifts, in its last third, into a distracted, meandering story of the dynastic jockeyings of the nobility. That the Swiss victories over Charles the Bold get so comprehensively sidelined in the last portions of Anne of Geierstein might be the point.
Scott is caught between love for his idealised Swiss democratic levelling, in its Rousseauian pastoral utopia, and his love for the arboreal hierarchies of traditional aristocracy, blood and refinement, the courtly civility, deference and pomp. The novel’s first third, with its rose-tinted portrait of life in the Canton, suggests Scott’s heart is with the former, and ostensibly this is a novel that delineates the defeat of arrogant old-style feudal aristocracy by this new, democratic mode. But the way the novel handles this larger through-line speaks to a Scott-esque anxiety about it: for the novel simply looks away during Charles the Bold’s tripartite humiliation, instead focusing on kindly old King René of Provence, and the future — rather than the past — of the Lancastrian cause in England, in which ‘John Philipson’ will dispense with his common-ness as a mere disguise and become again what he truly is, Earl of Oxford and right-hand-man of the restored Henry VII of England. Scott wants to love democracy, and paints it in as vigorous and progressive colours as he can; but he also fears it. There is something uncanny about it, for Scott; some buried sense of dark magic — hence Anne of Geierstein’s spooky and unchristian magical powers.
There’s a fascinating chapter at the more-or-less halfway point of the novel. On the left bank of the Rhine, as Philipson senior/Oxford on the other side is being apprehended by the sub-Masonic Vehmgericht, young Arthur stops at an inn for rest and refreshment on his journey. But this inn is not like the welcoming hostelries of England. A traveller, and particularly a man of quality like Arthur, might expect ‘a separate room’, where he could ‘sleep without company in his bedroom, and where he could deposit his baggage in privacy and safety.’ But ‘all these luxuries’ were alien to the logic of this inn, which
regarded as effeminacy everything beyond such provisions as were absolutely necessary for the supply of the wants of travellers; and even these were coarse and indifferent, and, excepting in the article of wine, sparingly ministered.’ [ch. 13]
The grumpy innkeeper first ignores Arthur’s knocking, then rejects his request for a private room. Everyone who stays at his inn must muck-in together. Arthur asks for his horses to be attended to: ‘“No one is at leisure,” replied this most repulsive of waiters; “you must litter down your horses yourself, in the way that likes you best”.’ Arthur does so, ‘cursing the spirit of independence which left a traveller to his own resources and exertions.’
He was suffered to enter, rather than admitted, into the general or public stube, or room of entertainment, which, like the ark of the patriarch, received all ranks without distinction, whether clean or unclean.
The stube, or stove, of a German inn, derived its name from the great hypocaust, which is always strongly heated to secure the warmth of the apartment in which it is placed. There travellers of every age and description assembled — there their upper garments were indiscriminately hung up around the stove to dry or to air — and the guests themselves were seen employed in various acts of ablution or personal arrangement.
The more refined feelings of the Englishman were disgusted with this scene.
Arthur offers the landlord — a Thersites-type individual ‘short, stout, bandylegged, and consequential’ called Mengs — a substantial extra sum for a private room:
“Good host,” said Philipson, in the mildest tone he could assume, “I am fatigued, and far from well — May I request to have a separate apartment, a cup of wine, and a morsel of food, in my private chamber?”
“You may,” answered the landlord; but with a look strangely at variance with the apparent acquiescence which his words naturally implied.
“Let me have such accommodation, then, with your earliest convenience.”
“Soft!” replied the innkeeper. “I have said that you may request these things, but not that I would grant them. If you would insist on being served differently from others, it must be at another inn than mine.”
He is told ‘whoso comes to this house of entertainment must eat as others eat, drink as others drink, sit at table with the rest of my guests, and go to bed when the company have done drinking.’ Mengs locks the gates, allowing nobody in or out of the hostelry til the morning, and everyone gathers round the table. Arthur eats the revolting soup and drinks the thin, acidic wine the same as everybody else, and, try as he might to keep himself apart, he is compelled to join in the rowdy singing. When Arthur demurs from drinking any more of what Scott, in a lovely phrase, calls ‘this acid potation’, one of the other guests advises: ‘“Humble thyself, my son … bend the stubbornness of thy heart before the great lord of the spigot and butt. I speak for the sake of others as well as my own”.’ When Arthur tries to slink away from the uproar and find a quieter corner of the stube, Mengs grows wrathful:
“Who are you,” said John Mengs, “who presume to leave the table before the reckoning is called and settled? Sapperment der teufel! we are not men upon whom such an offence is to be put with impunity! You may exhibit your polite pranks in Rams-Alley if you will, or in Eastcheap, or in Smithfield; but it shall not be in John Mengs’s Golden Fleece!”
It’s a scene that plays no part in advancing the story, but it is very well done: grimly hilarious in its nightmarishness, a parodic portrait of the horrible vulgarity and compulsion implicit in the idea of ‘democracy’. It reminds me of the Nabokov story ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ (1941), in which sensitive, shy Vasiliy Ivanovich wins a holiday in a contest, in 1930s Germany. The other people on the holiday trip are all hearty Germans, vulgar, ordinary, Nazis. They enforce a boorish, collective jollity: everyone must partake in the same outings, the same games, the same sing-alongs. All Vasiliy wants to do is enjoy the beauties of nature, alone, but the rest of his party are uncomprehending, dismissive: ‘he was made to play cards. They pulled him about, questioned him, verified whether he could show the route of the trip on a map — in a word, all busied themselves with him, at first good-naturedly, then with malevolence, which grew with the approach of night. Both girls were called Greta; the red-headed widow somehow resembled the rooster-leader; Schramm, Schultz, and the other Schultz, the post-office clerk and his wife, all gradually melted together, merged together, forming one collective, wobbly, many-handed being, from which one could not escape.’
It’s Nabokov’s satirical commentary on Nazism as a culture, this story: focusing not on the more obvious horrors of the regime — the war and genocide — but rather on the quotidian enormity of the ideology, predicated upon a faux-democratic partaking, whether the individual (and of course, Nabokov — a truer Tory in spirit even than Scott — values the individual above all, and certainly above the vulgar herd) likes it or not. When Vasiliy declares he is leaving the group to strike out into nature alone, things take a turn:
‘Silence!’ the post-office clerk suddenly bellowed with extraordinary force. ‘Come to your senses, you drunken swine!’
‘Wait a moment, gentlemen,’ said the leader, and, having passed his tongue over his lips, he turned to Vasili Ivanovich.
‘You probably have been drinking,’ he said quietly. ‘Or have gone out of your mind. You are taking a pleasure trip with us. Tomorrow, according to the appointed itinerary, — look at your ticket, — we are all returning to Berlin. There can be no question of anyone — in this case you — refusing to continue this communal journey. We were singing today a certain song — try and remember what it said. That’s enough now! Come, children, we are going on.’
‘There will be beer at Ewald,’ said Schramm in a caressing voice. ‘Five hours by train. Walks. A hunting lodge. Coal mines. Lots of interesting things.’
‘I shall complain,’ wailed Vasili Ivanovich. ‘Give me back my bag. I have the right to remain where I want. Oh, but this is nothing less than an invitation to a beheading’ —
‘If necessary we shall carry you,’ said the leader grimly, ‘but that is not likely to be pleasant for you. I am responsible for each of you, and shall bring back each of you, alive or dead.’ [Nabokov, ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’]
From Scott to Nabokov: not the usual critical trajectory, I suppose, but there you go: that cross-over in the Tory imaginary where ‘democracy’ and fascism fold over into one another. And Nabokov also ended-up living in Switzerland. So there it is.
