Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bois-Guilbert merely self-destructs.
    For Lukács, Ivanhoe’s chivalric failures should not be confused with a literary failure by the novelist. Scott’s cool description of King Richard as “brilliant, but useless” could apply equally to Ivanhoe, and typifies the realism of his treatment of individual characters. It is this ironic detachment that appears “modern” to us when reading Ivanhoe. Scott reserves his romantic nostalgia not for people but for periods, for “the ruination of past social formations” (p. 55). In other words, Scott de-emphasizes his hero in Ivanhoe in order to bring into clearer focus his true subject: the transformation of medieval Saxon society as expressed in popular life, through its living participants. Scott’s famous detail-work-the clothes, the food, the scenery—is thus more than simply “color,” more than a mere screen of dubious authenticity: It is the raw material of a fully realized historical scene through which his thinking, feeling characters move, and though they rarely appear to us as real in the modern, psychologically detailed sense (Bois-Guilbert is the notable exception), they fulfill Scott’s purpose as vivid social beings, as genuine spirits of the age.
    The novel opens amidst the ruins of one social formation, Saxon feudalism, and observes the embattled progress of its Anglo-Norman successor. Neither Cedric, with his fixation on Athelstane and Saxon restoration, nor the rapacious French barons and their scheming leader, Prince John, come off well. Front de-Boeuf, the blackest Norman villain, is both a serial rapist and a parricide, and the death-chant of his aged Saxon concubine, Urfried, is the most graphic indictment of Norman brutality in the novel (as well as its most unreadable scene: Scott’s melodramatic staging of the fall of Torquilstone has not aged well). With both the established Saxon and Norman orders subject to stringent critique, Scott reserves his considerable romantic sympathies for a third, marginal group, who live literally in the shadow of the greater Saxon-Norman struggle, in the arboreal gloom of Sherwood. Scott never fails to describe Sherwood—the quintessential English redoubt, the fabled greenwood of Shakespeare—with real poetry. It is a place, both symbolic and real, over which neither Saxon lord nor French knight can claim dominion: “The travellers had now reached the verge of the wooded country, and were about to plunge into its recesses, held dangerous at that time from the number of outlaws whom oppression and poverty had driven to despair, and who occupied the forests in such large bands as could easily bid defiance to the feeble police of the period” (p. 191). The chief outlaw is, of course, Robin Hood. Borrowed from folk legend, the merry men of Sherwood serve multiple trans-historical functions. Their stable self-government is designed to express a primordial English form of natural justice, while their undemonstrative decency and industry look forward to the bourgeois ideals of the nineteenth century. Robin’s Sherwood is a primeval world, a fantasy of yeoman England that is the most romantic and least historical aspect of the novel. But in its idealization of Robin of Locksley, Ivanhoe adheres to, and in fact did much to sustain, the grand historical narrative of English liberalism, which traces its roots from the Magna Carta of 1215, to the creation of a uniquely British “mixed monarchy” in the bloodless revolution of 1688, to the Reform Bill of 1832. Robin Hood, so the story runs, is the reason England never needed a French Revolution. The outlaws of the greenwood will prevail over the course of the centuries, subtly subduing the hot blood of French tyranny and breeding the soul of English liberty in its stead. As such, the merry men’s disciplined performance during the attack on Torquilstone Castle speaks more to England’s recent triumph over the French on the field of Waterloo than to any realistic