3 - The suspension of belief
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
Summary
There is nothing spiritual in him; all is economical, material, of the earth earthy.
Carlyle complained that Scott could not be a great man because he lacked intensity of moral feeling. The modern romancer was not, himself, a hero of romance, but a literary merchant-capitalist:
He had nothing of the martyr; into no ‘dark region to slay monsters for us’, did he venture down: his conquests were for his own behoof mainly, conquests over common market-labour, and reckonable in good metallic coin of the realm. The thing he had faith in, except power, power of what sort soever, and even of the rudest sort, would be difficult to point out. One sees not that he believed in anything; nay he did not even disbelieve; but quietly acquiesced, and made himself at home in a world of conventionalities.
(66)The author as Laodicean: one of his own neutral heroes. Carlyle's shrewd, unforgivingly reductive sense of Scott's historical materialism hits at the paradox of his appeal to both Tory and Marxist readers. If Scott for his part declared his readiness to die for a faith, it was in terms little likely to appeal to the prophet of Ecclefechan:
I would if called upon die a martyr for the Christian religion, so completely is (in my poor opinion) its divine origin proved by its beneficial effects on the state of society.
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- Modern Romance and Transformations of the NovelThe Gothic, Scott, Dickens, pp. 106 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992