Walter Scott, ‘The Fair Maid of Perth’ (1828)
[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) and The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827), The Highland Widow (1827). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]
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The novel we call The Fair Maid of Perth is actually called Saint Valentine’s Day: The Fair Maid of Perth. Indeed, it’s actually-actually called Chronicles of the Canongate, Second Series: Saint Valentine’s Day: The Fair Maid of Perth. See:
I’ll come back to this question of titles. The ‘Chronicles’ part is the continuing framing device by which Scott uses his retired gentleman mouthpiece Chrystal Croftangry to assemble various stories and bits and bobs: the first series was shorter pieces, and the second series is this Saint Valentine’s Day novel. Scott had wanted to keep issuing ‘Chronicles’ volumes as assemblages of shorter pieces but his publisher advised him a new three-volume novel would be a more lucrative publishing proposition. And he needed the money! So he took a short story he had drafted about a character called Harry Wynd and expanded it —starting this in December 1827 and pushing through into the new year, despite weakening health. The first volume of Fair Maid wasn’t finished until early February 1828, but the second was done by 2nd March and, picking up speed as the finishing line came within sight, Scott wrote the final volume by the end of that same month. It was published in May.
There’s an interesting article by Maia McAleavey [‘Behind the Victorian Novel: Scott’s Chronicles’, Victorian Studies 61:2 (2019), 232–239] which argues that, though little considered nowadays, the Chronicles of the Canongate was importantly influential on what she calls ‘a definitive form of Victorian fiction, the chronicle.’ Chronicles, McAleavey argues, exhibit three key features: ‘first, they are more likely to have settings (the Highlands, Barsetshire, Carlingford) than plots; second, chronicles are potentially endless; and third, they are non-protagonistic, telling the story of a group rather than an individual.’ She instances Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant, but we could follow-through on the analysis to take in Pratchett’s Discworld, modern soap opera, perhaps franchise cinema properties like Star Wars and the MCU.
I can certainly see McAleavey’s argument with the First Series of Scott’s Chronicles. But Saint Valentine’s Day: The Fair Maid of Perth is a regular Scott triple-decker, a historical novel set in the late 1300s which balances a trio of core (fictional) characters against the backdrop of ‘real’ historical events and figures.
In this latter regard Scott is pretty cavalier: folding together into one package the last years of the reign of the virtuous but weakling old King Robert III of Scotland, the murder of the heir apparent David Stewart, Duke of Rothsay by his rival (and uncle) the Duke of Albany and the ‘Battle of the Clans’, also known as ‘The Battle of the North Inch’, which took place in 1396. Now: Rothsay was actually murdered in 1402, and Robert III died in 1406 after which Albany ruled Scotland as Regent. Scott bundles these events together and relocates them to a six-week period at the end of the 1390s. We shan’t kvetch about that.
This actual-historical stuff, though, is not at the heart of The Fair Maid of Perth. Rather we’re given a fourway love story: fair maid and her three male admirers. The novel is slow to start, although once it gets going the plot moves quickly and indeed often rather frantically.
My point is that, in this novel, there is a story, and there is a story behind the story, and one of these two is more interesting than the other. The story concerns the titular Catherine, the exceptionally beautiful daughter of a Perthshire glove-maker. Catherine’s father is, we would now say, middle-class: a prosperous commoner working a respectable trade. In the world of 1390s Scotland there is a gulf between such folk and the nobles — indeed, the conflict between the Perth bourgeoisie and the Scottish aristocracy is a main theme of the novel.
Anyway, Saint Valentine’s day is approaching, and various men have the hots for Catherine Glover — as why wouldn’t they? She’s gorgeous. One man with a plausible hope of winning her is honest blacksmith and armourer Henry Gow (Gow being Gaelic for smith): a strapping young fellow, not afraid to wade into a fight, handsome and muscly and utterly in love with Catherine. She, however, does not seem to reciprocate his feelings. That is to say, she likes and respects him, and even grants him the honour of a kiss on Valentine’s Day morning — which makes him her ‘valentine’ — but she refuses her father’s prompt that she should marry Henry.
There are two other suitors for the fair maid: handsome young Conachar, Catherine’s father’s glove-making apprentice, and the lecherous Duke of Rothsay, the king’s son and heir. As to the former, and though the opening portions of the novel give the impression that Catherine feels really rather fondly towards him, Conachar is but a lowly glover’s apprentice, and what’s more, a despised Highlander — so marriage between him and Catherine seems unlikely. As for the wicked Duke, he has no plans of actually marrying Catherine of course; he just wants a bit of slap and tickle with the beautiful girl, the lecherous young cad. Bad Duke! Naughty Duke! On your bed!
Virtuous Catherine, however, rebuffs Rothsay. Infuriated he gathers a crew of his aristocratic chums and storms her father’s house, intending to kidnap her and have his wicked way. But this crew is interrupted in the act of putting a ladder against the wall of the glover’s house so as to break in — interrupted by stout Henry Gow, who was coming this way hoping to be the first person Catherine sees as dawn breaks on St Valentine’s Day and so win her kiss. Henry doesn’t muck about: he wades into Rothsay’s group, cutting the hand from one geezer and then chasing them all away. Catherine is saved, and in gratitude grants Henry his kiss. But the good burghers of Perth are outraged at this lawless aristocratic assault, and petition the king. Old King Robert rebukes his son for this attempt on the girl’s virtue, and instructs him to dismiss his Master of the Horse, Sir John Ramorny, who ‘has encouraged all his follies’ and whom the king believes was behind this lecherous attempt.
Anyway, Henry is now ‘officially’ Catherine’s valentine. Accordingly he and Conachar fight, at the latter’s instigation, since the Highlander is terribly jealous. Simon Glover, the father, is outraged that his apprentice would assault his guest under his roof, and banishes him; and so Conachar leaves Perth and returns to the Highlands. It’s not the last we shall see of him.
We’re getting towards the halfway point in the novel, and things are about to speed up. Henry Gow’s defence of Catherine’s attempted abduction has consequences. It turns out that the hand Henry lopped off — a grisly relic which is hawked about the story, waved in front of the king and others — belonged to Rothsay’s Master of the Horse, Sir John Ramorny. Furious at being maimed, and encouraged by his apothecary, Dwining (a splendid piece of evil characterisation by Scott, this guy) Ramorny resolves upon revenge. He recruits an assassin called Bonthron to kill Henry Gow. This attack goes wrong however. It so happens that another honest burgher of Perth, a bonnet-maker called Oliver Proudfute, visits Henry Gow on the appointed night. Proudfute — a name I have to assume Tolkien nicked for one of his hobbit families — is a timorous sort, and borrows Henry Gow’s armoured coat and helmet to wear on his way home (it’s shrovetide and the town is full of drunken revellers, whom Proudfute fears might attack him). Seeing him in the street, and thinking him Henry, Bonthron cuts him down with an axe. When his body is discovered, the citizens of Perth make the same mistake, and go all Simpsons-rentamob.
The morning of Ash Wednesday arose pale and bleak. It was a severe day of frost, and the citizens had to sleep away the consequences of the preceding holiday’s debauchery. The sun had therefore risen for an hour above the horizon before there was any general appearance of life among the inhabitants of Perth, so that it was some time after daybreak when a citizen, going early to mass, saw the body of the luckless Oliver Proudfute lying on its face across the kennel in the manner in which he had fallen under the blow; as our readers will easily imagine, of Anthony Bonthron, the “boy of the belt” — that is the executioner of the pleasure — of John of Ramorny.
…
“This concerns the Fair City, my friends,” he said, “and if it is the stout Smith of the Wynd who lies here, the man lives not in Perth who will not risk land and life to avenge him … Oh, brave men of Perth! the flower of your manhood has been cut down, and that by a base and treacherous hand.”
A wild cry of fury arose from the people, who were fast assembling.
“We will take him on our shoulders,” said a strong butcher, “we will carry him to the King’s presence.”
“Ay — ay,” answered a blacksmith, “neither bolt nor bar shall keep us from the King, neither monk nor mass shall break our purpose. A better armourer never laid hammer on anvil!”
“Bethink you, burghers,” said another citizen, “our king is a good king and loves us like his children. It is the Douglas and the Duke of Albany that will not let good King Robert hear the distresses of his people.”
“Are we to be slain in our own streets for the King’s softness of heart?” said the butcher. “The Bruce did otherwise. If the King will not keep us, we will keep ourselves. Ring the bells backward, every bell of them that is made of metal. Cry, and spare not, St. Johnston’s hunt is up!”
“Ay,” cried another citizen, “and let us to the holds of Albany and the Douglas, and burn them to the ground. Let the fires tell far and near that Perth knew how to avenge her stout Henry Gow. He has fought a score of times for the Fair City’s right; let us show we can once to avenge his wrong. Hally ho! brave citizens, St. Johnston’s hunt is up!” [Fair Maid of Perth, ch 18]
Hally ho indeed! The mob eventually realise their mistake, but by that time they have already stormed the Dominican Convent where the king is staying. To defuse their fury the king orders ‘proof by bier-right’ — a right, it seems, ‘often granted in the days of our sovereign’s ancestors, approved of by bulls and decretals, and administered by the great Emperor Charlemagne in France, by King Arthur in Britain, and by Gregory the Great, and the mighty Achaius, in this our land of Scotland’. It goes like this: the dead body is laid out, and suspects walk past it. When the murderer strolls by, the corpse’s wounds will re-open and bleed again, indicating that individual’s guilt. It doesn’t sound awfully scientific to me, but there you go. Maybe we should bring it back. CSI: Bier Right would make great telly.
At any rate, Bonthron refuses to walk past the corpse, which you might think is indicative enough of his guilt. But that’s not how it goes. It turns out there is an alternative: ‘“what if any one of the suspected household refuse to submit to the ordeal of bier right?” “He may appeal to that of combat,” said the reverend city scribe, “with an opponent of equal rank.”’ So Henry Gow steps up and fights Bonthron, easily besting him. The assassin is carried away to be hanged, but here there’s another plot-twist — the apothecary Dwining interferes with the gallows, arranging things that Bonthron is merely dangled, secretly still able to breathe. Under cover of darkness he and Sir John’s page Eviot cut him down and carry him away.
Are you following all this? There’s quite a bit more plotting to come. Rothsay recruits the now one-handed Sir John to a scheme to murder the king, Rothsay’s father, so he can take the throne. Meanwhile, to settle an ongoing dispute between two Highland tribes, Clan Chattan and Clan Quhele (as we would nowadays say, ‘Clan Kay’) the King has decreed a combat between an equal number of their bravest men, to battle things out in the royal presence, winner takes all. Preparations are underway for this big rumble.
Wait: there’s another plot strand: Catherine has been taking spiritual advice from a Dominican friar called Father Clement. Now Clement is a Lollard — one of the precursors, we might say, of Protestantism. A royal decree outlawing such ‘heresy’ means that the Glovers fall under suspicion: Catherine can only save her father if she agrees to enter a nunnery. Rather than do so, father and daughter flee the city: Catherine to the Duchess of Rothsay’s castle at Falkland and her father to Clan Quhele in the Highlands. Why this latter? Ah, well, you see, it turns out that Simon Glover’s old apprentice, the banished Conachar, is actually Eachin M’Ian, Chief of the Clan Quhele. Plot twist!
There’s quite a lot of plotting wound-into the last portion of the novel, actually, but I’ll cut to the chase: Rothsay makes another attempt on Catherine’s virginity: sneaking into her room in Falkland castle disguised as the old Duchess.
The supposed nurse led the trembling maiden forward to the side of the couch, and signed to her to kneel. Catharine did so, and kissed with much devotion and simplicity the gloved hand which the counterfeit duchess extended to her.
“Be not afraid,” said the same musical voice; “in me you only see a melancholy example of the vanity of human greatness; happy those, my child, whose rank places them beneath the storms of state.”
While he spoke, he put his arms around her neck and drew her towards him, as if to salute her in token of welcome. But the kiss was bestowed with an earnestness which so much overacted the part of the fair patroness, that Catharine, concluding the Duchess had lost her senses, screamed aloud.
“Peace, fool! it is I — David of Rothsay.”
Catharine looked around her; the nurse was gone, and the Duke tearing off his veil, she saw herself in the power of a daring young libertine. [Fair Maid of Perth, ch 31]
But Rothsay doesn’t go through with the rape. In part this is because he is ill and feverish (I wasn’t sure, reading Scott’s account, whether this is because he has been drugged by his enemies, or whether he is actually poorly) and in part because he is discouraged by her proud assertion of her virtue:
“My lord,” resumed Catharine, “keep these favours for those by whom they are prized; or rather reserve your time and your health for other and nobler pursuits — for the defence of your country and the happiness of your subjects. Alas, my lord, how willingly would an exulting people receive you for their chief! How gladly would they close around you, did you show desire to head them against the oppression of the mighty, the violence of the lawless, the seduction of the vicious, and the tyranny of the hypocrite!”
The Duke of Rothsay, whose virtuous feelings were as easily excited as they were evanescent, was affected by the enthusiasm with which she spoke. “Forgive me if I have alarmed you, maiden,” he said, “thou art too noble minded to be the toy of passing pleasure, for which my mistake destined thee.
Catherine is safe. ‘My health is fading even in early youth,’ Rothsay tells her, ‘and all that is left for me is to snatch such flowers as the short passage from life to the grave will now present. Look at my hectic cheek; feel, if you will, my intermitting pulse; and pity me and excuse me if I, whose rights as a prince and as a man have been trampled upon and usurped, feel occasional indifference towards the rights of others, and indulge a selfish desire to gratify the wish of the passing moment.’ She forgives him.
Now the increasingly wasting-away Rothsay is carried off and imprisoned by Albany. Rumour gets out that he is being starved and Catherine smuggles in some food to him, but he soon dies. All that remains in terms of Scott’s storytelling is the battle of the clans. And here we come to it: the novel’s major reveal: Conachar/Eachin M’Ian, Chief of the Clan Quhele, is a terrible yellow-bellied coward. He confesses as much to Simon Glover, when the latter takes refuge with him. He talks of his love for Catherine and declares his intention to marry her, though he is a great chief and she but a burgher’s daughter. But he also confesses a secret:
“Father, — for such you have been to me — I am about to tell you a secret. Reason and pride both advise me to be silent, but fate urges me, and must be obeyed. I am about to lodge in you the deepest and dearest secret that man ever confided to man. But beware — end this conference how it will — beware how you ever breathe a syllable of what I am now to trust to you; for know that, were you to do so in the most remote corner of Scotland, I have ears to hear it even there, and a hand and poniard to reach a traitor’s bosom. I am — but the word will not out!”
“Do not speak it then,” said the prudent glover: “a secret is no longer safe when it crosses the lips of him who owns it, and I desire not a confidence so dangerous as you menace me with.”
“Ay, but I must speak, and you must hear,” said the youth. [ch 29]
He asks whether old Simon has ever seen battle, and the glover recounts his youthful military adventures in defence of Perth. In reply Eachin spills his cowardly beans:
“I understand your tale,” said Eachin; “but I shall find it difficult to make you credit mine, knowing the race of which I am descended … Look, my father, the light which I bear grows short and pale, a few minutes will extinguish it; but before it expires, the hideous tale will be told. Father, I am — a COWARD! It is said at last, and the secret of my disgrace is in keeping of another!”
The young man sunk back in a species of syncope, produced by the agony of his mind as he made the fatal communication. The glover, moved as well by fear as by compassion, applied himself to recall him to life, and succeeded in doing so, but not in restoring him to composure. He hid his face with his hands, and his tears flowed plentifully and bitterly.
Coward, capital letters, exclamation mark! When it comes to the Battle of the North Inch, all of Eachin’s men are slain and he himself flees. To appropriate a minstrel ballad from another source:
Brave Sir Eachin ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Eachin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Swiftly taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the brave, Sir Eachin!
And so on. This is how the novel ends:
Henry and Catharine were married within four months after the battle of the North Inch, and never did the corporations of the glovers and hammermen trip their sword dance so featly as at the wedding of the boldest burgess and brightest maiden in Perth … and several of the most respected houses in Scotland, but especially in Perthshire, and many individuals distinguished both in arts and arms, record with pride their descent from the Gow Chrom and the Fair Maid of Perth.
As for cowardly Conachar: he jumps into a waterfall. We’re told he either drowned, became a hermit, or else was spirited away by the fairies. Nobody is sure which it is.
That’s the story. It was very popular in its day, a bestseller, often illustrated, put on stage, and this surface story serves as the libretto to Bizet’s opera La jolie fille de Perth (1867). Not one of Bizet’s greatest opera that, but still.
The point is, as I mentioned above, there is a story behind the story and that seems to me much more interesting. What story is that, I hear you ask? Well, I’ll tell you:
The son of a Scottish clan’s chief — this is Conachar/Eachin— is born under unusual and romantic circumstances. The clan Quhele has recently suffered a disastrous defeat in war which compelled Conachar’s wife to flee to safety. The chieftain’s wife gives birth in the woods and ‘as the misery of the mother’s condition rendered her little able to suckle the infant’ she nurses her son on the milk of a white doe, caught for her by a local forester. After a while, mother and child are able return to their castle and resume their previous life. However, ‘a strong and prevailing prejudice, such as is often entertained by these wild people, prevented their chief from enjoying the full happiness arising from having thus regained his only son in safety.’ Why? ‘An ancient prophecy was current among them, that the power of the tribe should fall by means of a boy born under a bush of holly and suckled by a white doe’ [ch. 26]
This is why Conachar’s father sent the lad to the city, to be apprenticed to a glovemaker. Conachar returns home an adult to find his father dying. He is able to take his position as head of the clan, since enough time has passed for the original prophesy to have been forgotten. But a new prophesy has taken its place: a young chieftain will be the only survivor of a future battle between two clans.
The Fair Maid of Perth shows both prophecies turning out true. Scholars, looking for some source for this story-frame in Scottish folklore, have come up blank, so perhaps Scott invented it; although, clearly, he didn’t invent it from whole cloth — it has resonant similarities to tales out of Greek myth: Oedipus, Perseus, Priam-Paris, and so son.
This, it seems to me, is a much more powerful story than the surface narrative the novel adumbrates, all that to-ing and fro-ing between the burghers of Perth and the Scottish nobility. It achieves something mythic and profound, and it does so not despite but because the crucial element in making the second prophesy come true — Conachar’s non-negotiable and absolute cowardice — is so baffling. He really does not come across as a coward in the earlier portions of the novel: on the contrary, early in the story Conachar seems always bristling for a fight, especially when he detects any real or imagined slight towards Catherine, his love-object: ‘the glover’s youthful attendant,’ we’re told in chapter 2, ‘bristled up with a look of defiance, and the air of one who sought to distinguish his zeal in his mistress’s service by its ardour’. When Henry Gow comes on the scene Conachar goes out of his way to antagonise him: ordered to serve ale, he accidentally-on-purpose spills a quantity of beer over Henry Gow. The smith pushes the Highlander aside: “Had this been in another place, young gallows bird, I had stowed the lugs out of thy head, as I have done to some of thy clan before thee” whereupon:
Conachar recovered his feet with the activity of a tiger, and exclaimed: “Never shall you live to make that boast again!” drew a short, sharp knife from his bosom, and, springing on Henry Smith, attempted to plunge it into his body over the collarbone, which must have been a mortal wound. But the object of this violence was so ready to defend himself by striking up the assailant’s hand, that the blow only glanced on the bone, and scarce drew blood. To wrench the dagger from the boy’s hand, and to secure him with a grasp like that of his own iron vice, was, for the powerful smith, the work of a single moment. Conachar felt himself at once in the absolute power of the formidable antagonist whom he had provoked; he became deadly pale, as he had been the moment before glowing red. [ch 3]
This is impetuous, and speaks to his passion for Catherine and his hatred of his rival, but it hardly says cowardice. On the contrary! This is the brawl that leads to him being banished from the glover’s house and returning to his clan, and so to his late-novel exchange with Old Simon Glover in which he confesses that he is a capitalised COWARD.
What’s going on here? The novel makes some gestures towards explanation: Conachar, we are told, naturally fairly timid, has been brought up in the more gentle and refined urban environment, away from the hardy valour and martial culture of the Highlands. Specifically he has fallen under the influence of Father Clement, the local Lollard monk who is also Catherine’s spiritual guide, and who preaches purification of both the Church and individual Christians from sin via a return to the aboriginal Christian moral values and primitive simplicity of the early church — values such as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and the necessity of forgiving one’s enemies and repudiating vengeance. Conachar for his part is quite ready to give up the title of chieftain: he tries to persuade Simon Glover to permit him to marry his daughter by promising that he will ever after dedicate himself to a peaceful bourgeois life:
“Catherine will love me the better that I have preferred the paths of peace to those of bloodshed, and Father Clement shall teach us to pity and forgive the world, which will load us with reproaches that wound not. I shall be the happiest of men; Catharine will enjoy all that unbounded affection can confer upon her, and will be freed from apprehension of the sights and sounds of horror which your ill assorted match would have prepared for her; and you, father Glover, shall occupy your chimney corner, the happiest and most honoured man that ever — ” [ch 29]
“Hold, Eachin — I prithee, hold,” returns the father. “Catherine can never be yours.” After Conachar has gone off in despair, the glover speaks aloud: ‘to propose himself for a husband to my daughter, as if a bride were to find courage for herself and the bridegroom! No — no, Catharine must wed a man to whom she may say, “‘Husband, spare your enemy” — not one in whose behalf she must cry, “Generous enemy, spare my husband!”’
The cowardice of Conachar, like Jim’s leap in Lord Jim, is by a long way the most fascinating aspect of this novel. It is at once strangely underdetermined and unlikely, and absolutely human, that ubiquitous desire to avoid death we all share, Scott and all his readers, aristocrat and bourgeois, historical personage and modern day man or woman. It is simultaneously the most secret of secrets, whispered in shamefaced confession by Conachar to Simon Glover at the novel’s end, and also a fact absolutely hidden in plain sight, prophesied, enacted before the whole world. More, the brute fact of the cowardice is, in a wonderfully paradoxical touch, a killing thing: merely mentioning it leads to Conachar experiencing a life-threatening fit: ‘the young man sunk back in a species of syncope, produced by the agony of his mind as he made the fatal communication. The glover, moved as well by fear as by compassion, applied himself to recall him to life, and succeeded in doing so, but not in restoring him to composure. He hid his face with his hands, and his tears flowed plentifully and bitterly.’ The very point of cowardice is to preserve life from death, yet Conachar’s cowardice causes him physical collapse, social ruination, the loss of everything that ‘life’ means — Catherine’s hand in marriage, for instance — and, at the novel’s end, to a paradoxical cowardly-brave plunge from a castle parapet into a raging waterfall: hardly a timid individual’s preferred mode of committing suicide.
“There is but one way!” he exclaimed, springing upon the parapet … and shrieking out, “Bas air Eachin!” plunged down the precipice into the raging cataract beneath.
It is needless to say, that aught save thistledown must have been dashed to pieces in such a fall. But the river was swelled, and the remains of the unhappy youth were never seen. [ch 36]
This leads to the twinned legend already mentioned: either he swam clear and dedicated his life to god, or he was ‘snatched from death by the daione shie, or fairy folk, and that he continues to wander through wood and wild, armed like an ancient Highlander, but carrying his sword in his left hand.’ As to this latter, we are informed that ‘the phantom appears always in deep grief. Sometimes he seems about to attack the traveller, but, when resisted with courage, always flies.’ This spectral figure haunts the novel in a way that makes the foursquare Henry Gow and the beautiful Fair Maid herself seem insubstantial.
What’s going on? It would be interesting exercise to write a cultural history of cowardice. I wonder if I have time? The point in doing so would be to do more than just touch on the obvious examples: Falstaff of course, and his glorious, comedic yet profound instinct for self-preservation. More recently, there has been a kind of valorisation of the coward: perhaps as a reaction to the way world war — 1914–18 and 1939–45 — drew not just professional soldiers but millions of ordinary people into crazy danger against their will. George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman, Terry Pratchett’s Rincewind, Captain Jack Sparrow: these are more than merely comic foils, they are a new kind of hero, whose heroism is predicated on precisely not rushing stupidly into danger. On a sense, shared with their audience, that life is precious, not to be thrown pointlessly away, and that there is a complex, ironic kind of vigour and worth in the cowardly urge to keep oneself alive.
We might say that this is a bourgeois value (these four characters are, perhaps, bourgeois individuals) and contrast it with the older feudal warrior code by which military success, Homeric kleos and personal bravery are absolutes, and cowardliness, as the repudiation of all three, the lowest failing. Yet Scott’s Conachar is not the novel’s bourgeois; he is the feudal Highland chief. He is indeed rebuked by Simon Glover, the Perthshire burgher, for his cowardice. And Falstaff, of course, is a knight of the realm, a courtier and friend of princes. To go back to Shakespeare for a moment; isn’t it interesting that Prince Hal, whose path leads him away from venal and demeaning self interest and dissipation and to a properly kingly honour, bearing and courage, rebukes Falstaff’s cowardice in terms of human indebtedness.
PRINCE HENRY
Why, thou ow’st heauen a death.Exit PRINCE HENRY
FALSTAFF
Tis not due yet: I would bee loath to pay him before his day. What neede I bee so forward with him, that call’s not on me? Well, ’tis no matter, Honor prickes me on. But how if Honour pricke me off when I come on? How then? Can Honour set too a legge? No: or an arme? No: Or take away the greefe of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in Surgerie, then? No. What is Honour? A word. What is that word Honour? Ayre: A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that dy’de a Wednesday. Doth he feele it? No. Doth hee heare it? No. Is it insensible then? yea, to the dead. But wil it not liue with the liuing? No. Why? Detraction wil not suffer it, therfore Ile none of it. Honour is a meere Scutcheon, and so ends my Catechisme.
There’s a fascinating shift being articulated here. Prince Hal means ‘debt’ in the older feudal sense of due, in the way that a vassal owes his (or her) lord service; but Falstaff reads debt in a more modern, banking-system sense — the sense in which I owe my mortgage provider a large sum of money but I’m certainly not about to pay it all off at once, thank you very much. Honour in this system is ‘a word’, in a play that is (of course) all words, all the time. But there’s an inversion here as well. As David Graeber points out in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), one’s word is more valuable than money, since one can exchange the former for the latter — by promising to pay you back, I can borrow money from you (this promise is literally written onto the banknotes in the UK)— but not the latter for the former. Falstaff’s word honour is at once worthless, ‘honour a meere scutcheon’, and of the highest worth: Shakespeare’s ‘What is that word Honour? Ayre: A trim reckoning’ plays on this, I think, since trim means both thin, meagre, slender and (from Middle English trimen, trymen and Old English trymman “to make firm; strengthen”) stronger. There’s a similar pun at work in scutcheon, now that I come to look at it: at once a mere decoration and the warrior’s shield and strength, bearing his coat of arms.
That brings us back to the ‘actual’ title of Scott’s novel. Henry Gow is a physically strong, imposing individual; but the real strength in the story is a gesture, a signifier, a kind of word: the kiss Catherine bestows upon him in Saint Valentine’s day, which signifies a bond, or debt, that links them through all the vicissitudes and dangers of the story as such.
