The Hero of the Waverley Novels

Abstract

that Alfred Noith Whitehead discovered in the romantic movement— the perception of a concrete, unified, thing-in-itself/' His dark heroes and heroines perhaps do react to nature in this wav. Scott's reality is a construction of society. He did not invent his kind of reality, any more than invented political conservatism. He argues, outside the Waverley Novels, that men of property must use their power. That powei is not mere physical power but legal power, in essence abstract and derived from an endless series of social promises and commit­ ments. This reality is indeed far removed from the concrete—espe­ cially removed from the passions of the individual human being. In that distance the proponents of reality saw its strength. To the same degree of abstraction William Blake and other protesters on behalf of the concrete—including, to an extent, our dark heroines—attributed the weakness of science and society. We are now in a position to understand the unique character of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. In this romance the gap between concrete fact and the reality imposed by law is explicit and critical. The childmurder statute of 1690 furnished Scott with a law that presumed to as­ cribe real existence to a concrete event—namely, the act of murder. (A statute from the criminal code thereby took the same logical form as a physical law of science.) According to the counsel for the crown in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, was the very purpose of the statute to substitute a certain chain of presumptive evidence in place of a proba­ tion (Ch. 23). The counsel for the defense, on the other hand, can reply that he was so far from acknowledging the alleged probability of the child's violent death, that could not even allow that there was evidence of its having ever lived. Clearly a legal construction of reality is pitted directly against a question of fact. The counsel for the crown summarizes the application of the statute as follows: It was not necessary . . . for him to bring positive proof that the panel [the accused] was accessory to the murder, nay, nor even to prove that the child was murdered at all. It was sufficient to support the indictment, that it [the child] could not be found. According to the stern, but neces­ sary severity of this statute, she who should conceal her pregnancy, who should omit to call that assistance which is most necessary on such occa­ sions, was held already to have meditated the death of her offspring, as an event most likely to be the consequence of her culpable and cruel concealment. And if, under such circumstances, she could not alternaScience and the Modem World (New York, 1925). ch 5.

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