Lavengro · Chapter
On Scotch Gentility Nonsense explained
The narrator launches a fierce critique of Sir Walter Scott's novels, accusing them of inventing a romanticized literature that glorifies the Stuart family and promotes Jacobite and Popish sentiments.
What happens
The narrator launches a fierce critique of Sir Walter Scott's novels, accusing them of inventing a romanticized literature that glorifies the Stuart family and promotes Jacobite and Popish sentiments. He condemns the Stuarts as a family of criminals, cowards, and tyrants, and argues that Scott's works have corrupted English society, leading the genteel classes to adopt Jacobitism and Roman Catholicism. The narrator traces the spread of these ideas to Oxford, where pedants have used Scott's novels to teach Popish and Jacobite nonsense to young students, corrupting their religious and political principles.
Themes in this chapter
Religion and Priestcraft
The chapter critiques the spread of Popery and Jacobitism through Scott's novels, accusing Oxford pedants of corrupting youth with Catholic and Jacobite nonsense.
Social Class and Gentility
The narrator argues that the genteel classes in England adopted Jacobitism and Popery because they perceived these as fashionable and genteel, driven by Scott's romanticized portrayals.
Key passages
“Of the literature just alluded to Scott was the inventor. It is founded on the fortunes and misfortunes of the Stuart family, of which Scott was the zealous defender and apologist, doing all that in his power lay to represent the members of it as noble, chivalrous, high-minded, unfortunate princes; though, perhaps, of all the royal families that ever existed upon earth, this family was the worst.”
Scott created a genre of literature that romanticizes the Stuart dynasty, portraying them as noble and tragic, but the narrator insists they were actually the worst royal family in history.
The narrator condemns Scott's glorification of the Stuarts, arguing it is a distortion of history.
“An idea got about that the religion of such genteel people as the Stuarts must be the climax of gentility, and that idea was quite sufficient. Only let a thing, whether temporal or spiritual, be considered genteel in England, and if it be not followed it is strange indeed; so Scott's writings not only made the greater part of the nation Jacobite, but Popish.”
The notion that the Stuarts' religion was the height of fashion led many English people to adopt Jacobitism and Catholicism, simply because Scott made it seem genteel.
The narrator criticizes the English tendency to follow whatever is considered fashionable, even in religion.
“But whence did the pedants get the Popish nonsense with which they have corrupted youth? Why, from the same quarter from which they got the Jacobite nonsense with which they have inoculated those lads who were not inoculated with it before—Scott's novels.”
The Oxford pedants derived both their Popish and Jacobite teachings from Scott's novels, which they used to corrupt young students.
The narrator traces the source of Oxford's religious and political corruption directly to Scott's fiction.