Walter Scott, “The Talisman” (1825)
[I mean, look: I can see that these posts are getting increasingly insufferable, lengthwise. This one is a thirty-minute read! I am certainly not asking you to indulge such prolixity; I’m sure you have better things to do with your time. But here we are, it seems: continuing my read-through of the Waverley novels. 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) and The Betrothed (1825). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]
This second of Scott’s two ‘Crusader Novels’ is so much better than the first it’s almost preposterous. Where The Betrothed is clogged, misshapen and haphazard, The Talisman is gripping, full of melodramatic panache and colour and rather wonderful. Its influence, mediating Scott’s reading in medieval crusader romance and Gibbon and Hume’s historical accounts into something more mythic and memorable, has been profound. To read it is to be struck by how many of the representational commonplaces of ‘the crusades’ in popular culture come from this place: the exoticism and local colour, the chivalric embellishments, the scheming Knights Templar, the bickering Christian kings, the sheer warrior strength and boldness of Richard and — perhaps above all — the portrait of Richard and Saladin as two equally admirable kings, different in temperament but alike in virtue, grandeur and nobility. The Christian kings are venal, bickering status-obsessed berks where Saladin is, effectively, co-hero of the novel. Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is set during the Second Crusade, where Scott’s novel is set during the Third, but otherwise the movie is a rehash of all the most memorable elements from the book: chivalry set against realpolitik, pigheaded and even brutish Christian knights, elegant Saracens adept at disguise, healing and courtesy, Saladin valorised.
That disguise element is important, and I’ll come back to it. But before I get too carried away, I should note a few sunspots. The novel is basically a three-act piece of storytelling: but the transition from the first to the second act is abrupt, and the transition from the second to the third muddy and too drawn-out. The second act in particular is superbly tense and involving, but, by contrast, the final works less brilliantly. And it could be argued — although I’m going to use this post to suggest otherwise — that there is something mendacious in the way Scott shrinks the whole militial-political phenomenon of the crusades to a series of one-on-ones, individuals fighting individuals. Indeed, since a major plot-point in the novel is that Richard can take Jerusalem and end the wars by marrying-off his kinswoman Lady Edith Plantagenet to Saladin, the adventures are framed as that old stalwart of the bourgeois novel, a marriage plot. I am going to argue that this is a feature, rather than a bug.
But first: a lengthy summary of what-happens-in-The-Talisman. Careful, now!
1. Story
Scott opens with an, I think, deliberate allusion to the opening line of Spenser’s Faerie Queene — ‘A gentle knight was pricking on the plain’, the knight in that case being of course Redcrosse — as the noble, handsome Scottish knight Sir Kenneth rides through the desolation of a Syrian wasteland:
The burning sun of Syria had not yet attained its highest point in the horizon, when a knight of the Red Cross, who had left his distant northern home and joined the host of the Crusaders in Palestine, was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts which lie in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, or, as it is called, the Lake Asphaltites, where the waves of the Jordan pour themselves into an inland sea, from which there is no discharge of waters. …
Crossing himself, as he viewed the dark mass of rolling waters, in colour as in duality unlike those of any other lake, the traveller shuddered as he remembered that beneath these sluggish waves lay the once proud cities of the plain, whose grave was dug by the thunder of the heavens, or the eruption of subterraneous fire, and whose remains were hid, even by that sea which holds no living fish in its bosom, bears no skiff on its surface, and, as if its own dreadful bed were the only fit receptacle for its sullen waters, sends not, like other lakes, a tribute to the ocean. … The land as well as the lake might be termed dead, as producing nothing having resemblance to vegetation, and even the very air was entirely devoid of its ordinary winged inhabitants, deterred probably by the odour of bitumen and sulphur which the burning sun exhaled from the waters of the lake in steaming clouds, frequently assuming the appearance of waterspouts. [Talisman, ch 1]
Then, in the first of many such passages, Scott describes exactly what Sir Kenneth’s massive body (cast by Nature in ‘a mould of uncommon strength’) is wearing:
Upon this scene of desolation the sun shone with almost intolerable splendour, and all living nature seemed to have hidden itself from the rays, excepting the solitary figure which moved through the flitting sand at a foot’s pace, and appeared the sole breathing thing on the wide surface of the plain. The dress of the rider and the accoutrements of his horse were peculiarly unfit for the traveller in such a country. A coat of linked mail, with long sleeves, plated gauntlets, and a steel breastplate, had not been esteemed a sufficient weight of armour; there were also his triangular shield suspended round his neck, and his barred helmet of steel, over which he had a hood and collar of mail, which was drawn around the warrior’s shoulders and throat, and filled up the vacancy between the hauberk and the headpiece. His lower limbs were sheathed, like his body, in flexible mail, securing the legs and thighs, while the feet rested in plated shoes, which corresponded with the gauntlets. A long, broad, straight-shaped, double-edged falchion, with a handle formed like a cross, corresponded with a stout poniard on the other side. … To this cumbrous equipment must be added a surcoat of embroidered cloth, much frayed and worn, which was thus far useful that it excluded the burning rays of the sun from the armour, which they would otherwise have rendered intolerable to the wearer. The surcoat bore, in several places, the arms of the owner, although much defaced. These seemed to be a couchant leopard, with the motto, “I sleep; wake me not.” An outline of the same device might be traced on his shield, though many a blow had almost effaced the painting. The flat top of his cumbrous cylindrical helmet was unadorned with any crest. In retaining their own unwieldy defensive armour, the Northern Crusaders seemed to set at defiance the nature of the climate and country to which they had come to war. [Talisman, ch 1]
There is a great deal of this in the novel: the dresses of women, but especially the habiliments of the men, are all minutely described. It is, in some sense, history as fancy dress, and howsoever effective this is in terms of evocative colour and vividness it is surely flattening, a caricature of actual events.
Wait: is it, though? Dressing up is play, and performance, and the strange, counterintuitive veracity of this theatrical mummery — dramatic as well as melodramatic — are, as I take it, the main points of The Talisman. Scott opposes men (and women) dressing up in elaborate costume not against some notional unaccommodated authenticity, but against a less performative, slyer and wickeder hypocrisy, where there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. The honest chivalric fancy-dress of Richard and Sir Kenneth, as against the Knights’ Templar hidden, exteriorly-invisible deceit. These, it seems, are our two options, and it is clear how they both align, morally.
Sir Kenneth is on his way, with documents from the Crusader council and the pope, to a notable Christian hermit, Theodoric of Engaddi. This ascetic individual, having renounced the worldly advantage of his noble birth, dwells now in a cave in the Syrian wilderness far from mortal distractions, but he retains enormous influence amongst the crusaders, on account of his high birth and prodigious piety. The plan, we later discover, concerns a proposal to end the war between Crusaders and Saracens by sharing Jerusalem, sealing the deal with the offer of Lady Edith’s hand in marriage to Saladin.
On this journey Sir Kenneth meets an Emir: Sheerkohf Seljook of Kurdistan, the self-proclaimed ‘Lion of the Mountain’. First the two men fight. Then they team-up and cross the wilderness together, Sheerkohf chatting happily about necromancy and devils and the like, thereby spooking Sir Kenneth, who believes literal demons haunt this territory. The Saracen boasts that his family-line descends from Genii.
“I well thought,” answered the Crusader, “that your blinded race had their descent from the foul fiend, without whose aid you would never have been able to maintain this blessed land of Palestine against so many valiant soldiers of God. I speak not thus of thee in particular, Saracen, but generally of thy people and religion. Strange is it to me, however, not that you should have the descent from the Evil One, but that you should boast of it.”
“From whom should the bravest boast of descending, saving from him that is bravest?” said the Saracen; “from whom should the proudest trace their line so well as from the Dark Spirit, which would rather fall headlong by force than bend the knee by his will? Eblis may be hated, stranger, but he must be feared; and such as Eblis are his descendants of Kurdistan.” [Talisman ch 3]
He goes on to narrate a mythological origin-story of the Kurdish people as descended from the Devil himself (Scott lifted this wholesale from the Bibliotheque orientale [1777‒79] of Barthélemy d’Herbelot): ‘Sir Kenneth heard his companion’s confession of diabolical descent without any disbelief, and without much wonder; yet not without a secret shudder at finding himself in this fearful place, in the company of one who avouched himself to belong to such a lineage.’
Eventually our two companions arrive at the cave of Theodoric. Scott has, in his leisurely and digressive manner (the subject of digressions in Scott deserves its own post) set the scene in a beautifully atmospheric manner: this strange, blasted landscape, materiality interpenetrated with the religious and the diabolic, people not whom they appear to be — because, as we learn at the end of the tale, Sheerkohf of Seljook is actually Sultan Saladin himself, in disguise. This is by no means the last disguise with which the novel will furnish us.
So far as the reader is concerned, Theodoric lives as a hermit, alone in a bare desert cave many miles from human civilisation. But after spending the night in this place, Scott expands the scene with a nicely disorienting focus-pull: this bare cell is actually the annex to a large underground chapel, and so far from being alone he is accompanied by a whole chapelful of folk, men and women. The transition is negotiated by the hermit waking Kenneth from his sleep, and leading him such that the night is ‘uncertain whether the dark form which glided on before to show him the path was not, in fact, the creation of a disturbed dream’. What follows is styled as much as a theatrical performance as it is a sacred ceremony; although, of course, those two things are hardly incompatible readings of religious ritual.
At the back of the cave is ‘a Gothic door, very rudely ornamented’; through this Kenneth passes:
The door opened spontaneously — at least Sir Kenneth beheld no one — and his senses were at once assailed by a stream of the purest light, and by a strong and almost oppressive sense of the richest perfumes. He stepped two or three paces back, and it was the space of a minute ere he recovered the dazzling and overpowering effects of the sudden change from darkness to light. [Talisman, 4]
Kenneth is in a ‘Gothic chapel hewn out of the sound and solid rock’. At one end is a shrine, shut-up with two folding doors:
As Kenneth gazed on the shrine the two folding-doors also flew open discovering a large piece of wood, on which were blazoned the words, Vera Crux; at the same time a choir of female voices sung Gloria Patri. The instant the strain had ceased, the shrine was closed, and the curtain again drawn.
The female voices come from, it seems, nowhere. Kenneth waits-out the rest of the night in that place, solus, but in the morning he finds himself watching a procession: ‘first, four beautiful boys, whose arms, necks, and legs were bare, showing the bronze complexion of the East’ and then ‘the females who composed the choir — six, who from their black scapularies, and black veils over their white garments, appeared to be professed nuns of the order of Mount Carmel; and as many whose veils, being white, argued them to be novices, or occasional inhabitants in the cloister, who were not as yet bound to it by vows.’ These walk up and down, and one of the latter females drops rose petals on the ground as she passes Kenneth. ‘The knight started as if a dart had suddenly struck his person.’ Significant!
It’s all beautifully surreal, although the remainder of the novel, in explaining the set-up, rather dilutes the sheer oddness of the transitions. So far from living as a hermit, it turns out Theodoric is attached to a large nunnery that possesses, as its star relic, an actual piece of the true cross. The novice who signalled to Kenneth with the rose petals is Lady Edith, young, beautiful and in love with the Scots knight. He in turn loves her, although, with the amour cortois logic of chivalric romance, as a distant ideal to which he has vowed his lance. The two cannot be together: Kenneth is too lowly and, as we have seen, Lady Edith, as King Richard’s kinswoman, is destined for greater things.
Just as the reader intuits the thwarted romance between these two people, Scott closes his scene abruptly with this bizarre move:
A creaking sound, as of a screw or pulleys, succeeded, and a light streaming upwards, as from an opening in the floor, showed that a trap-door had been raised or depressed. In less than a minute a long, skinny arm, partly naked, partly clothed in a sleeve of red samite, arose out of the aperture … The form and face of the being who thus presented himself were those of a frightful dwarf. This singular figure had in his left hand a kind of broom … The dwarf again whistled, and summoned from beneath a companion. This second figure ascended in the same manner as the first … a female form, much resembling the first in shape and proportions, which slowly emerged from the floor. Her dress was also of red samite, fantastically cut and flounced, as if she had been dressed for some exhibition of mimes or jugglers; and with the same minuteness which her predecessor had exhibited, she passed the lamp over her face and person, which seemed to rival the male’s in ugliness.
These two dwarfs are Necbatanus and Guenevra, and belong to Lady Calista of Montgaillard, who is a lady-in-waiting of Queen Berengaria, Richard’s wife. But we don’t discover this for several hundred pages.
I’ve spent quite a long time summarising the ‘first act’ of The Talisman, so as to draw out the tone of the piece: I don’t just mean the lavishly described historical colour and romance of it, but the co-current of sheer strangeness, the odd absurdist shifts of focus and scene. The transition to what I’m calling ‘Act 2’ is equally abrupt: suddenly we’re in Ascalon, at the main camp of the crusader army. Richard the Lionheart is floored by terrible illness and without his martial leadership the combined soldiery of France, Austria, Burgundy and elsewhere are languishing in the heat, unable or unwilling to push on to Jerusalem.
There are two main movements to this act, and both are grippingly written. First Sir Kenneth arrives, fresh from his meeting with Theodoric, bringing with him a Moorish physician, Adonbec el Hakim, who promises that he can cure Richard of his sickness. But what if this is a devious trick of the enemy? What if they let this Saracen into the royal tent and instead of curing the King he assassinates him?
Scott brilliantly sketches the febrile atmosphere of the camp, the friction of troops from so many different nations cheek by jowl, and the resentments of the (noble but ineffectual) Philip II of France and the (wicked and scheming) Leopold, Archduke of Austria in the company of Richard, so much kinglier, so much more the perfect warrior than they (before his illness struck him down, that is). Richard’s banner flies on an eminence in the camp, and none dare take it down, but Leopold resents that the Austrian banner isn’t up there instead of the English one. So, in the middle of the night, Leopold and his entourage creep up and plant the Austrian banner, with its eagle design, beside the three lions couchant of England. The real villain here is Conrade of Montserrat, who, like a toad at Eve’s ear, persuades the drunken Leopold to this act. Conrade is secretly plotting with Giles Amaury, the wily Grand-master of the Knights Templars, to destroy Richard, lest he become King of Jerusalem before them.
Anyway: Richard has been, by this point, cured by the ministrations of Adonbec el Hakim, and he storms up in fury. He tears the Austrian banner down in front of Leopold and his people, and for a moment it looks as though the camp will fall into civil war. Philip, arriving, persuades the haughty, belligerent royals to abide by the judgment of the crusader council rather than just going straight at one another, and Richard returns to his tent — but not before charging Sir Kenneth to remain and guard the English banner through the remainder of the night. Sir Kenneth and his trusty hound undertake this duty.
Sir Kenneth and his trusty hound undertake this duty and we come to the central episode of the novel. This is just magnificently handled by Scott: genuinely tense, dramatic and vivid. Sir Kenneth knows that to abandon his post, and disobey the order given him by Richard, would be death and dishonour; and Kenneth is an intensely honourable man. But as he guards, the dwarf Necbatanus creeps up. He is carrying Lady Edith’s ring, and insists that Kenneth leave his post and come to the lady now — she requires his service, and immediately: not tomorrow, not in a while, but now!
Sir Kenneth faces a dilemma. According to the laws of chivalry and amour cortois, he must obey this summons by his lady — it would be shaming and dreadful to deny. But by the laws of honour and war he must obey the command of King Richard, and stay to guard the banner! (By the way: ‘Necbatanus’ was originally the name of the mighty sorcerer who, according to the 4th-century romance Historia Alexandri Magni, was the true, biological father of Alexander the Great — appellated here ironically to this grotesque dwarf). Kenneth agonises over what to do, and finally decides to sneak away, return as quickly as he can and hope nobody notices his absence: ‘“I can return in an instant,” said the knight, shutting his eyes desperately to all further consequences, “I can hear from thence the bay of my dog if any one approaches the standard. I will throw myself at my lady’s feet, and pray her leave to return to conclude my watch. — Here, Roswal” (calling his hound, and throwing down his mantle by the side of the standard-spear), “watch thou here, and let no one approach.”’
Don’t do it, Ken!
He does it, though; going down to the Ladies’ tent. The dwarf installs him in a position behind the cloth where he can eavesdrop. Here Kenneth discovers to his horror that it wasn’t Lady Edith who summoned him: Berengaria, Richard’s queen, bored and in a mischievous mood, stole Edith’s ring and gave it to Necbatanus, telling him to summon Kenneth — acting, it seems, in idle frolic. By the time Kenneth has rushed back up the hill it is too late: his dog has been fatally wounded, and some malefactor has stolen the English banner. Oh no!
Ken does the honourable thing: he goes to Richard’s tent to report the theft, and to confess his own dereliction. Furious, Richard orders him to present his neck, and snatches up his gigantic axe, ready to chop off his head there and then — a fate to which Kenneth willingly, even gratefully, submits. But the young knight’s life is spared when the Moorish physician, Adonbec el Hakim, intervenes: having saved Richard’s life and restored his health, this doctor begs the life of Kenneth in return — Richard hands him over as Adonbec’s slave, and banishes him.
Who has stolen the banner? Conrade, obviously, in an attempt to sow dissension in the camp and unseat Richard’s preeminence amongst the crusaders. But what about the poor dog? Here we discover that Adonbec el Hakim is not only a miraculously gifted doctor, but a vet to boot: he heals Roswal the pooch, and promises Kenneth that he will not remain a slave.
And so the novel transitions into its messier third act. There’s some sense of anticlimax here, perhaps inevitably given how marvellous the opening is and how superbly tense and exciting the middle section. A series of things happen, disposed into something of a narrative jumble.
The first thing that happens is that Saladin sends a gift to the English camp: a Nubian slave, offering him in personal attendance upon King Richard. There’s a certain amount of 1820s-racism here: we’re told that this individual ‘was of superb stature and nobly formed, and his commanding features, although almost jet-black, showed nothing of negro descent’ [ch 20]: black but not African black, you see. That would be ridiculous! Richard gratefully accepts the gift. It is fortunate for him that he does, because shortly afterwards, into the camp glides ‘the puny form of a little old Turk, poorly dressed like a marabout or santon of the desert’ [ch 21]. This ragged figure dances a dervish dance for the amusement of the soldiery, drinks a proffered hornful of wine and falls asleep near Richard’s tent. But it is all a ruse! He is actually a Charegite, a member of a fanatical Islamic sect, hired by Conrade to eliminate Richard. He waits for his moment, and then leaps at the king with a dagger.
But the Nubian slave is ready! He deflects the dagger with his own arm, giving Richard time to pick up a chair and beat the assassin to death with it. Since this last detail may strike you as improbably Tarantino for a novel by Walter Scott, I will repeat it: ‘Richard caught up the stool on which he had been sitting, and dashed almost to pieces the skull of the assassin, who uttered twice, once in a loud, and once in a broken tone, the words Allah Ackbar! — God is victorious — and expired at the King’s feet.’
We are moving towards the denouement. In case you haven’t guessed it yet, the Nubian slave is actually Sir Kenneth in blackface. It strains, I would say, our suspension of disbelief that neither Richard, Edith or anybody else sees past this flimsy disguise, but perhaps we can take it as a Clark-Kent’s-spectacles kind of a deal. A bigger matter is that not only was Sheerkohf from the opening chapters Sultan Saladin in disguise, so was Adonbec el Hakim the physician — and it was Saladin who persuaded Kenneth to return to Richard’s tent in disguise. This guy seems to absolutely love dressing-up and disguises! Major, major fan of the disguising, is our Saladin.
During a procession of the crusading forces, Kenneth’s dog (healed, you’ll remember, by Saladin-in-disguise) recognises in Conrade the villain who stole the banner. The hound leaps at Conrade, and everyone instantly understands that this means Conrade was guilty of stealing the banner and trying to kill the dog, which is sagacious of them when the option ‘this northern European dog has been driven mad by the Palestinian heat’ is also a possibility. Conrade doesn’t help himself by blurting out, unprompted, ‘I never touched the banner!’ The scene is illustrated in the 1831 edition’s frontispiece, at the head of this post. Dramatic!
To establish formal guilt, it is decided that a trial-by-combat will be held in a location in ‘the Diamond of the Desert’, observed by both the Crusader and the Saracen armies. Richard offers to fight Conrade, but is dissuaded on account of his seniority and importance to crusade. But that’s alright — Sir Kenneth, having scrubbed off his boot-blacking, steps up.
The single combat is a little underwhelming: of course Sir Kenneth defeats the wicked Conrade, whom, wounded, is carried off to Saladin’s tents to be nursed. Then there are two plot-twists. In one, we discover that ‘Sir Kenneth’ is not Sir Kenneth — ‘Ken’ is just another of the book’s many disguises. He is in fact Prince David of Scotland, 8th Earl of Huntingdon, who had, he says, ‘made my vow to preserve my rank unknown till the Crusade should be accomplished’. The upside here is that he’s not some lowly Scots knight, but the heir to the Scottish throne, and so he can marry Lady Edith after all. Hearts and flowers all round!
One final twist: Sultan welcomes the chief crusaders to a banquet. Giles Amaury, Grand Master of the Templars, raises a glass of wine to his lips, and Necbatanus rushes in and cries accipe hoc — which means, take that! like the name of the 90s pop band! What follows is brutal: ‘the sabre of Saladin left its sheath as lightning leaves the cloud. It was waved in the air, and the head of the Grand Master rolled to the extremity of the tent, while the trunk remained for a second standing, with the goblet still clenched in its grasp, then fell, the liquor mingling with the blood that spurted from the veins.’
Consternation! But it immediately transpires that Amaury had previously stabbed Conrade to death, to cover-up their infamous plotting. As Amaury advanced upon him, Conrade had gasped ‘accipe hoc?’ — am I to take this? — and Amaury confirmed that the stabbing was very much going ahead by repeating ‘accipe hoc!’, all the while being secretly observed by the dwarf. So Saladin was quite right to execute him. The banquet continues. Take that — and party!
This is how the novel ends:
“Noble King of England,” Saladin said, “we now part, never to meet again. That your league is dissolved, no more to be reunited, and that your native forces are far too few to enable you to prosecute your enterprise, is as well known to me as to yourself. I may not yield you up that Jerusalem which you so much desire to hold — it is to us, as to you, a Holy City. But whatever other terms Richard demands of Saladin shall be as willingly yielded as yonder fountain yields its waters. Ay and the same should be as frankly afforded by Saladin if Richard stood in the desert with but two archers in his train!”
The next day saw Richard’s return to his own camp, and in a short space afterwards the young Earl of Huntingdon was espoused by Edith Plantagenet. The Soldan sent, as a nuptial present on this occasion, the celebrated Talisman. But though many cures were wrought by means of it in Europe, none equalled in success and celebrity those which the Soldan achieved. It is still in existence, having been bequeathed by the Earl of Huntingdon to a brave knight of Scotland, Sir Simon of the Lee, in whose ancient and highly honoured family it is still preserved; and although charmed stones have been dismissed from the modern Pharmacopoeia, its virtues are still applied to for stopping blood, and in cases of canine madness.
Our Story closes here, as the terms on which Richard relinquished his conquests are to be found in every history of the period. [ch 28]
Wonderfully deflating final paragraph, there. The ‘talisman’ itself we learn (but only in the preface Scott wrote for the 1831 Magnus Opus edition of the novel) is ‘a coin, some say of the Lower Empire’ with magical powers: ‘the water in which it was dipped operated as a styptic, as a febrifuge, and possessed other properties as a medical talisman’.
.
2. A reading
The one thing that leaps out from this novel is just how much disguising there is in it. Saladin disguises himself as not one but two separate individuals — placing himself in grave danger by doing so. Prince David disguises himself as ‘Sir Kenneth of the Couching Leopard’, and Sir Kenneth then disguises himself as a Nubian slave — putting one in mind of the way Shakespeare’s company hired boys to play girls who had to dress up as boys and then fall in love with other boys like girls. It’s not exactly fully recursive, but the first iterations of a chain of deferral that destabilises the idea of grounded, single identity. Or perhaps not. Here’s something I said in an earlier post, about Scott, Jane Austen and irony.
I have a high regard for irony, aesthetically speaking (though it’s somewhat out of fashion at the moment); and, more, I consider it a crucial artistic feature of modernity. It acquires a significant momentum in Romantic and post-Romantic culture (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and all that). Indeed, I’ve half a mind to write a book about a particular two-horned manifestation of it in the Romantic novel. On the one hand: Jane Austen. On the other: Walter Scott. I suppose we don’t often think of Scott as a particularly ironic writer — he does foursquare, prosy historical adventure stories, in which a ‘wavering’ character (hence: ‘the Waverley novels’) is positioned at some Big Historical Pivot Time: the Crusades; the English Civil War; the Jacobite Rebellion. There is peril, and questing, and journeying; there are battles and duels, and oodles of local colour and vividness. And Scott’s success and influence parleyed this mix into later literary offshoots. There’s a reason that description — character caught up in big events, questing/fighting/adventure, lots of local colour — describes a hefty proportion of all the Space Opera and Adventure SF written.
Of course, only a fool would deny that Scott, despite his many excellences, lacks the sophistication and maturity of Austen at her best. To read Scott’s books after reading Austen is to be struck by a kind of coarseness and staginess. Austen writes stories not about improbable adventures but about the probable dilemmas of everyday life, stories all readers can test against their own experience. But that’s not the crucial thing. It’s not that Austen writes about falling in love and marrying with sensitivity and charm — of course, that’s exactly what she does do; but there’s more to it than that. It’s that she is one of the first creative artists in the world to understand characterisation in ironic terms. Emma Woodhouse simultaneously is handsome, clever and rich and a short-sighted, rather spoilt young woman. The glory of Emma as a novel is the way Austen expertly, beautifully traces her growth in self-knowledge and maturity, correlating it to her awareness of whom it is she really loves. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’ is a very clever sentence; because it both is and isn’t true — isn’t because not all men see marriage as central to life the way Austen’s women do, and is because love is much more important and resonant and human than questing/fighting/adventuring — and in the world of Austen’s novel this truth acquires a universality that derives by definition from the parameters of her art. It’s what her novels are about.
Scott has no characters like this. His heroes are heroic all the way through; his villains similarly villainous. They stalk about their stage-sets acting entirely in character from start of story to happy ending. The Waverley novels construe a WYSIWYG universe of reassuring moral absolutes. And yet, and yet: there is something in Scott that responded to the change in the times. He lacked the technical skill to portray the ironies of individual subjectivity the way Austen could, in part because his approach to character was wholly externalised. But in some of his novels he found a way of articulating something that approaches Austenian doubleness of character.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean. In The Talisman (1825) noble characters are constantly gadding about in disguise. Prince David of Scotland goes disguised as a slave. When King Richard falls sick he is attended, and healed, by an Arab physician called El Hakim. At the end of the novel we discover that this physician was actually Sultan Saladin himself, Richard’s enemy, all along. All this disguise gubbins is Scott’s way of intimating that a character like Saladin might be both the enemy of Christendom and an honourable, gallant individual at the same time. It’s a device that externalises what happens more naturally, and more persuasively, as interiorised characterisation in Austen’s novels. But it can be a very effective textual strategy for all that; and there are versions of this device, or variants upon it, throughout the Waverley novels. Edward Waverley’s own bivalve political affiliation for example; or the complex games of prophesy and history, false-names and true identities, in Guy Mannering; the manifest and latent paired narratives of Heart of Midlothian.
Rereading The Talisman, now for the second time, has made me wonder whether this account is adequate to the novel, actually. I stand by the claim that Scott tends to externalise, in often melodramatic devices of disguise and doubleness and so on, what happens in Austen’s internally and more sophisticatedly. But I wonder if Chesterton — in a magnificent passage that contrasts Dickens and Scott as ‘democrats’, quoted a little further down in the blogpost linked to above —is as right as I once thought him:
Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise. He was, with all his errors, profoundly possessed with the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.
Chesterton is saying: man may look like a humble traveller, or a physician, or even a slave, but actually this is just a kind of fancy-dress — or, I suppose, more strictly an unfancy-dress: the truth, behind the disguise, is that we are royal. I’m less convinced by this reading, I think, than I once was.
Everything in The Talisman is styled as a quasi-theatrical performance. There are no actual battles, there are only tournaments: religious observation is not the quiet, personal communion with the divine via prayer and devotion (not, we might say, the Protestant style): it is the bizarre, over-the-top playacting and special effects of the scene in the Engaddi chapel.
We could redescribe disguise as ‘dressing up’ and so include not only the plot-specific moments where characters pretend to be other people, but all the detailed, loving, descriptions of clothes and armour and accoutrements Scott includes in the book: consider the account (quoted at length, above) of Sir Kenneth at the novel’s beginning.
To say that the crusades are actually about ‘dressing up’ — rather than about, let’s say, capturing Jerusalem or converting Araby to Christianity — sounds more diminishing than actually it is. In fact I’d suggest that, on the contrary, it’s a statement that captures a kind of profound truth. It’s true not just that the third crusade failed to capture Jerusalem; it is very much a feature of this novel how uninterested its main characters are in such a consummation: Richard, we are assured, has the military prowess and wherewithal to take the city, and then Saladin himself essentially offers him the city for the price of a dynastic marriage. But both options are not so much dismissed as entirely ignored, because the characters of this novel have more important things to be getting on with, actually: jockeying for position amongst themselves for status and honour, and dressing up in splendid clothes — dressing up all the time.
In an interesting essay [‘Clothes and the Body of the Knight: The Making of Men in Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman’ The Wordsworth Circle, 27:1 (1996), 21- 24] Lisa Hopkins argues that this emphasis on lavishly describing clothing in the novel works to destabilise firm boundaries between male and female: ‘what Scott has so powerfully shown is that the world of chivalry, in which gender roles are so radically bifurcated, is actually held to gether by nothing more than convention and by the easily removable covering of dress. That knights might be turned into women is not a fear entirely without foundation, since the sense of male difference from women is so perilously maintained, and rests on such fragile foundations.’ I don’t disagree with this; I only think the novel goes further. In one sense the novel is saying: what is chivalry? It is putting on certain clothes and putting on certain acts, behaviours, attitudes — it is, in fact, fancy dress, and in this inheres its glory and appeal. But it’s not just chivalry. The Talisman is also asking: what is war? Fancy dress. What society? What religion? Fancy dress. Indeed, if the novel answers the question what is history? itself by saying ‘fancy dress’, this response goes beyond the facile assumption that Scott parades cardboard characters in period-appropriate dress and calls it history. It is, on the contrary, that Scott articulates a much more penetrating historiography, not denigrating historical writing into mere fancy dress, but elevating fancy dress into an ontological principle. The Talisman is a more colourful, much more readable Sartor Resartus, a decade avant la lettre.
Think of the vectors of our dressing: we can dress down, and stress comfort, private carelessness or unpretentiousness, or we can dress up, don glad rags, put on war paint (perhaps put on the face that we keep in a jar by the door) and enter the world, interact with others, engage with society. Homo sapiens is a social animal. Lear’s unaccommodated man is poor not just because his nakedness leaves him vulnerable to the cold and the rain, but because accommodation in its fullest sense is what we all need in the world — social accommodation, erotic accomodation, ontological accomodation.
Mentioning Lear touches on another point. Shakespeare’s great play is centrally ‘about’ this question: what is a king? — a question it approaches by asking a more particular question: how much can be subtracted from a king before he stops being kingly? Take away (to be precise Lear gives away) his followers, his courtiers and ministers and officers: is he still a king? What if we take away his crown and fine clothes, and leave him naked: what about now? Is he still a king? Alright: what if we take away his sanity, his mind, his fundamental humanity: how about now?
Well, you can ask him yourself! Art thou not the king? queries the blind man, and insane Lear, with flowers in his hair, replies: ay, every inch a king. But the play, I think, licenses us to disagree. At the end Lear is not king but father, not mad but restored to a sanity that only leaves him open to literally heart-breaking grief.
What about Scott’s Richard Coeur de Lion? He has the power to command: lords and courtiers and soldiers; and he has the pomp — the closely described magnificence of clothing. He also has, as his brother kings do not, extraordinary individual physical strength. But the novel begins with this strength taken-away by illness (an illness that, paradoxically, only his great enemy can cure) and the novel ends with the army he commands taken away. So where does that leave us? Lear’s lendings: his clothes, his personal bearing.
But this hints at a kind of mis-en-abyme, without getting tediously tangled in its infinite recursions. Who is this Nubian slave? He is Sir Kenneth in disguise. But who is Sir Kenneth? He is Prince David of Scotland in disguise! Ah, but who is this royal prince? He is a common man, like you or me, disguised in the finery and surrounds of royalty. And when we look at it like that, this novel is saying something quite radical. Why do these character indulge so heartily in dressing-up and disguising themselves? Consider the risk they put themselves in to do it — when the slender, elderly Sheerkohf, solus, battle Sir Kenneth in the novel’s first chapter he could have been killed! When Adonbec el Hakim rides, on his own, into the heart of the crusader camp he is gambling his very life on his ability to cure Richard. Truly the rewards of this behaviour must be prodigious indeed, to be worth such risk. But, says Scott, of course they are. The rewards are socialised humanness itself. Dressing up, as kids understand with an uncomplicated wisdom, is fun. And the fun is in assuming the role, and the role is: human being. The actual talisman after which The Talisman is named only ‘works’ if it is dipped in something else, such that the fluid into which it is dipped becomes the medicine. Humans, this novel suggests, are similar: coat them in clothing, dip them in society — with its joys and frictions, its jockeyings-for-power, it erotic and amicable and inimical relationships — and they become themselves. The disguise maketh the man.
Of course, in the 13th-century fine clothing was a marker of specifically high status, something undergirded by strict sumptuary laws. But, as Ulinka Rublack’s Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2011) shows. this changed radically with the Renaissance and the later rise of the bourgeoisie: clothing itself became a ‘powerful agent of change’, Rublack argues, with new and cheaper fabric choices and colours, a dissemination of fine clothes into other strata of society and changes in clothing styles. Specific clothing-related social questions that were live in Scott’s day — such as the legality and propriety of wearing the tartan — are part of a larger discursive logic to do with the way clothes simultaneously disguise us and reveal us, interpellate us into the world.
This, I think, is the context in which we should read another one of The Talisman’s famous, much imitated scenes. When Richard and Saladin finally meet, officially as it were, at the Diamond of the Desert, and the Sultan reveals that he was the physician who earlier cured the Lionheart, Scott of course gives us their clothes: Saladin in ‘snow-white turban, vest, and wide Eastern trousers, wearing a sash of scarlet silk’. his headgear inset with ‘that inestimable gem which was called by the poets the Sea of Light’ and ‘the diamond on which his signet was engraved, and which he wore in a ring, [which] was probably worth all the jewels of the English crown’; Richard ‘lightly armed, richly dressed, and gay as a bridegroom on the eve of his nuptials’. But it is not just their clothing that interests Scott:
In the splendid pavilion, where was everything that royal luxury could devise. De Vaux, who was in attendance, removed the chappe (capa), or long riding-cloak, which Richard wore, and he stood before Saladin in the close dress which showed to advantage the strength and symmetry of his person, while it bore a strong contrast to the flowing robes which disguised the thin frame of the Eastern monarch. It was Richard’s two-handed sword that chiefly attracted the attention of the Saracen — a broad, straight blade, the seemingly unwieldy length of which extended well-nigh from the shoulder to the heel of the wearer. [ch 27]
Saladin’s slender scimitar looks feeble beside this enormous broadsword. The two agree to a contest: Richard easily cuts through an iron bar, but his blade is incapable of slicing a soft cushion in two. Saladin ‘stepping at once forward, drew the scimitar across the cushion, applying the edge so dexterously, and with so little apparent effort, that the cushion seemed rather to fall asunder than to be divided by violence.’ He later does the same thing with a veil. The ostensible moral here, with its opposition of Richard’s brute, foresquare strength and Saladin’s subtle and often diplomatic sharpness, is reinforced by the larger way the novel frames clothing, and cloth. We could say Saladin is piercing enough to ‘cut through’ clothing — that is, disguise — or we could say that the edifice of chivalry, of Ricardian strength and power, is not strong enough to do so. But that is only another way of saying that the clothing is the world. ‘Such is the fashion of the world,’ as Saladin puts it; ‘the tattered robe makes not always the dervise.’
