psychology and ethics; rather one should «memorialize» them both, let them roam loosely within the synthesis of Islam. One of the things Scott likes best about his medieval novels is that his -320- Protestant characters of that time can chide the medieval Catholic church for its accommodating preservation of pre-Christian elements in its «worship» of saints and stones and bones and fountains, while the narration itself preserves both Catholic heterogeneity and Protestant morality equally, and almost as equals, in the amber of its tolerant irony.
Although developmental narrative shapes the synthesis of Universal History (and vice versa) and the view of those like Saladin who are the narrative in character-disguise, the view of history most poignantly felt, even pursued, by characters experiencing rather than directing time is quite different, more 'Gothic.' Not evolutionary but revolutionary (and ceaselessly counterrevolutionary). Reversal, not synthesis, is the form of time: 'the world turned upside down,' as the outlaw
All the Waverley Novels pay homage to this primitive sense of History. The accommodation to 'real history' (that is, narrative synthesis), by which the hero shoulders the reward/burden of marriage, inheritance, continuation, life itself at the end of the narrative, almost always contains some element of that curious quality one sees most vividly in the finally successful lovers of Old Mortality, man and woman gamely continuing, but stunned in some vital organ by one too many magic reversals. All the Waverley Novels pay homage too to magic as the origin of religion and philosophy. Tidily packed away in whimsical tales or fatal prophecies, magic is traded, preserved, energized by the lower classes, and pondered and critiqued by the powers of the synthesis, the clerics and lords, the politicians, the narrators. The typical hero, himself a man of reason, will 'despise most of the ordinary prejudices about witchcraft, omens, and vaticination, to which his age and country still gave such implicit credit that to express a doubt of them was accounted a crime equal to the unbelief of Jews or Saracens.' But it was precisely the point of the Gothic Historic in the Waverley Novels to take readers to the age and country where the older and wilder form of 'vaticination,' visionary prophecy, contested with the Jew and the Saracen for the position at the origin of the Western Christian synthesis. Staging this contest on the prepared ground of Universal History, the Waverley Novels carry forward, almost by accident, an element of history as unruly as the witches and omens, and linked with them-the politics of class. -321-
The man quoted above striving to «despise» the primitive visionaries closer to him than Jew or Saracen is Edgar, Master of Ravenswood, the protagonist of The Bride of Lammermoor, the last novel the Scottish 'Author of Waverley' wrote before Walter Scott created the new cast of narrating characters who produced the English
Shakespeare's Malcolm, dispossessed heir, man of reason turned to war, shrewdly associates himself with the Christian magic of English Edward the Confessor, and approaches his usurped patrimony of Dunsinane «screened» not only by the leaves of Birnam Wood but also by the passionate anger of MacDuff, who kills Malcolm's enemy for him in the way many a minor character does for the hero of the Waverley Novels. Edgar of Ravenswood, last son of a Scottish Cavalier family dispossessed by a Whig lawyer married to an ambitious Douglas, seems at first to be placed as the Malcolm of this drama. And in fact, the political history around him is poised to carry this most modern of the antique and choleric Ravenswoods, this reflective, tolerant, and selfcritical mind, forward into the synthesis that preserves the best of the aristocratic races if they embody the changes called for by Universal Psychology. For the Scottish Tories are due for a period 'on top' in the politics of British union in the novel's time, and had not Edgar, like Macbeth, turned his face from the rational 'prospect of belief' urged by the novel's various Banquos toward the 'witchcraft, omens and vaticinations' of women in the wild, he would have gone with the tide to virtual restoration of his heritage. Once fixed in the «prospect» of magic, however, Edward's particular combination of virtues and flaws bring him to Macbeth's fate: the best he can do, after manifold struggles, is to plunge directly into the prophecy which organizes his death.
Two interesting modern differences characterize Scott's use of the standard women-in-the-wild stewardship of magic. Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare's human witch, the wife «unsexed» by spirits of the air, becomes in Scott's novel the mother and the daughter of Edgar's usurping enemy. Lady Ashton has not brought forth men children only: defending her usurped castle against Edgar, she needs her wrathful son Sholto, her fey teenage son Henry, and especially her romantic daugh-322- ter Lucy to divert Edgar from the restoration that Universal History has in mind for the Ravenswoods to the destruction that prophecy has in mind. The daughter's love and the mother's hate combine to attract Edgar toward the dueling ground where the drawn swords of both Whig opponents and Cavalier allies call to his own half-drawn one, a killing ground he has repeatedly tried to leave or transform.
Falling in love with the daughter of his enemy promises a transformation, but the wrathful mother in control of the daughter has lost sight of the rational goal of her fight-security for her family and a foot in both camps of the evolving synthesis. For Lady Ashton, history is simply a series of violent reversals, which she means to arrest while she is at the top. Manipulating Lucy into another marriage to block Ravenswood is a small price to pay. The maddened bride's attempted murder of her husband, even the bride's death in fits, is a small price, for it gives the «grieving» family the right at last to the trial by arms that Edgar refused in the early chapters.
When Edgar rides out to meet Sholto Ashton in the last pages of the novel he might, like Macbeth, be thinking of two magical prophecies that attached his death to an apparently impossible condition. One is a verse from Thomas Rhymer claiming that the 'last Lord' of Ravenswood will die when he 'stables his horse in the Kelpie's [quicksand's] flow' on the way to claim a dead bride. The other is a legendary tale chronicling the fatal love meeting between a sixteenth-century Ravenswood and a supernatural lady at a Gothic fountain on the ancient grounds. At the behest of his Christian counselors, the tale goes, he tested her humanity; she plunged back into the fountain, bloodying the waters, and his death followed. The story and the fountain became the bane of the family.
Scott creates two «witches» of the peasant classes to evoke and deploy this antihistorical prophecy within the sensitive minds of the declining aristocrat, Edgar Ravenswood, and the ascending one, Lucy Ashton. The politics of class are strong on this level of the plot. While the movement of Universal History seeks the alliance of blood and brain-the moderate aristocrat and the lawyer's daughter-in a revitalized and democratized ruling class, the plots of prophecy in Scott most often carry the contravening grievances of the poor, who take the short view, not the historical one, looking at close quarters for revenge and reversal.
The better-educated, blind Alice Gray's scorn is for the newer rulers: when called «witch» by an Ashton she swears she will go willingly to the -323- stake if 'the usurer, and the oppressor, and the grinder of the poor man's face, and the… subverter of ancient houses' burns at the same stake. The more chilling and fantastic Ailsie Gourlay, one of those who commit real crimes under pretense of magic, is in the pay of Lady Ashton, but scorns all the 'great ones': 'They wad gie us whinstanes for loaves, if it would serve their ain vanity, and yet they expect us to be gratefu', as they ca' it, as if they served us for true love and liking.' Alice wields the plots of prophecy to separate Edgar from Lucy out of genuine fear of the probable bloody renewal of the Ravenswood/ Ashton feud. Ailsie taunts Edgar and terrorizes Lucy with them partly for pay but mostly out of a diabolical love of mischief-making and a classic professional interest in death: with her fellow Shakespearean hags Maggie and Annie, Ailsie presides at the washing and winding of the neighborhood's corpses. Prophecy, and its aestheticized sister tragedy, are interested in glorious deaths; Universal History in sometimes inglorious survivals.
Scott's witches and wizards operate the plots of magic either to gain power over the great or out of self- delusion, often both. A fascinated rationalist, a commercial enchanter, Scott can never erect a supernatural structure without a probable rational origin: even the tale of the suicidal nymph of the Ravenswood fountain, the narrator speculates, sounds like the aristocrat's deliberately garbled version of a more sordid occurrence, the Ravenswood baron's murder of a lower-class mistress who crossed him. Ordinarily Scott makes the plots of magic, belief not assimilated to the synthesis of Univeral History, work with History, clearing the ground of figures unequipped to stay in the synthesis. Such is the case in Waverley, where the ancient superstition of the Bodach Glas, the death-bringer of his clan, seals Fergus MacIvor's resolve to die, leaving Edward Waverley free of his dark glamor. Such is the case in
Only in The Bride of Lammermoor do the plots of magic erase and humiliate the plan of History. No Ravenswood, no Ashton, survives to take the inheritance, marry, bear children, enter History. Edgar disappears in
