Giants in the North: Douglas, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Scott's Redgauntlet.

LEE, YOON SUN

IN THE SUMMER OF 1757, DAVID HUME EXULTED TO A FELLOW-SCOT, "IS IT not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our Chief Nobility ... that, in these Circumstances, we shou'd really be the People most distinguish'd for literature in Europe?"(1) Hume may well have had in mind the controversial success of his friend John Home's tragedy, Douglas, produced in Edinburgh in late 1756 and in London the following spring. Douglas was celebrated by its admirers as decisive proof that Edinburgh had come to rival London as a capital of "learning and genius.(2) But in his casual way, Hume puts his finger on the ambiguities that pervade that play's relationship to ideas of nationhood that would be explored in Scotland well into the following century by Walter Scott, among others. Specifically, Hume raises the question of how the nation as a cultural entity is related to the nation understood as a set of political institutions and activities. How did cultural production and self-conscious cultural identity compensate for the loss of political independence and the disintegration of the public sphere? And where did the idea of nationhood fit into the discourse of civic virtue that Scottish Enlightenment thinkers sought to revive? As Home's Douglas tried to mesh seamlessly the literary public sphere with the paradigm of civic virtue, the play's supporters argued that public spirit could be manifested by seeing, judging, and surrendering emotionally to this heroic "Scottish play."(3) But in the ensuing controversy, both the literary public sphere of Edinburgh and its purportedly nationalist discourse of civic virtue were demystified. Pursuing that critique, this essay argues that Douglas achieved its success by demonstrating how the idea of the Scottish nation could be efficaciously suspended in an imaginary and literally anachronistic void. From the vantage point of post-Waterloo Britain, Walter Scott spots this irony in the development of Scottish identity and suggests in his last Jacobite novel, Redgauntlet (1824), that the Scottish exercise of civic virtue turns on a highly equivocal nationalism that wishes both to disavow and to conjure up and conjure with the imagination of nationhood.

More than the author's friendship with David Hume made Douglas into a focal point for the tensions and energies of mid-eighteenth-century Scottish nationalism. John Home was part of that close-knit circle of clergymen that provided the intellectual and social force behind the Scottish Enlightenment.(4) But Home's tragedy, Douglas, had closer links to the issue of Scottish nationalism in the aftermath of the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745. When the play was rejected by David Garrick of Drury Lane as "totally unfit for the stage," Home's Edinburgh friends decided, in Walter Scott's words, "to try the experiment of a play written by a Scotsman, and produced, for the first time, on a provincial stage" and thus to make a striking bid for cultural autonomy.(5) In a rehearsal in late 1756, William Robertson and Adam Ferguson took the parts of Lord and Lady Randolph, David Hume played the villain, Hugh Blair the maid, and Home himself the hero, the young Douglas (Sher 77). Other forms of Scottish autonomy were also under dispute at this moment: the very day that Home's tragedy opened at Edinburgh's Canongate theater Pitt introduced his militia bill in Parliament after a long period of widespread debate, particularly in Scotland. Home's friends, most notably Adam Ferguson, had strongly supported the plan for a Scottish militia that would renovate a depleted public sphere.(6) Douglas, too, set in a temporally vague but distinctly national past, focuses its dramatic energy on the young hero's eagerness to win military glory. Pitt's bill would eventually become the Militia Act that pointedly excluded Scotland from the right to bear arms in self-defense; but Douglas would succeed beyond anyone's expectations, "[retaining]," even seventy years later, in Walter Scott's words, "the most indisputable possession of the stage."(7) It is at this complex intersection of political disappointment and cultural triumph that we need to situate the Scottish Enlightenment discourse of civic virtue that would be handed down to Scott, among others.

Alongside the stadial theory of the development of societies for which the Scottish Enlightenment is perhaps best known, there is in the work of Adam Ferguson and others a persistent discourse that stresses the themes of civic virtue or active participation in public affairs. The relationship of these two discourses to each other and to the essentially nostalgic strain of cultural nationalism recently studied by Katie Trumpener remains a fascinating problem.(8) Ferguson, for example, opposed the emphasis that scientific Whiggism and the nascent discourse of political economy placed on the operation of impersonal laws by stressing the themes of human agency and volition. Even the most finely calibrated laws and institutions, he argued, could not compensate for citizens' lack of active public spirit, for their withdrawal into the corrupting pleasures of consumerism.(9) But the relationship of this discourse of civic virtue to the feelings or the projects of Scottish nationalism is ambiguous. Unlike the antiquarians and other cultural nationalists, proponents of civic virtue like Ferguson were largely unconcerned with "questions of ownership, tradition, and occupation of the land."(10) Their orientation is nostalgic for a classical republican past rather than for a history recoverable from landscapes, material artifacts, or oral traditions. In his disregard for the specifically Scottish past, Ferguson seems to share in that subversion of national history that Colin Kidd has argued characterized the Scottish Enlightenment.(11)

Yet the idea of the Scottish nation curiously subtends Ferguson's discourse, most notably in his highly successful Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). Ferguson defines virtue in that Essay as, in practice, "a contempt of animal pleasures ... [and] an equal contempt of danger or pain, that [could] come to stop [one's] pursuits of public good."(12) Civic virtue emerges as the Stoic negation of private pleasure--as a cancellation of determinate selfishness by a necessarily abstract idea of the whole.(13) But Ferguson equivocally praises "that habit of the soul by which we consider ourselves as but a part of some beloved community, and as but individual members of some society, whose general welfare is to us the supreme object of our zeal" (Civil Society 53). Instead of the mental idea of an "immense and infinite system," Ferguson gestures toward a determinate political and social arena.(14) Boundaries do matter, it seems, as do dimensions.

Ferguson's Essay develops the oxymoronic potential of a pseudo-indeterminate nationalism. Scotland can be neither mentioned nor forgotten.(15) In a section entitled "Of National Felicity," Ferguson argues that the optimal condition for nations is to be "independent, and ... of a small extent.... Where a number of states are contiguous, they should be near an equality ... in order that they may possess that independence in which the political life of a nation consists." Yet that observation is immediately, abruptly, belied: "When the kingdoms of Spain were united, when the great fiefs of France were annexed to the crown, it was no longer expedient for the nations of Great Britain to continue disjoined." Without further comment on the 1707 Union, Ferguson continues his reflections on the "small republics of Greece." Yet the discourse takes on a doubled, coded quality; and indignation at the fate of ancient republics sounds like an echo of hostility toward contemporary British imperialism: "[e]very little district was a nursery of excellent men, and what is now the wretched corner of a great empire, was the field on which mankind have reaped their principal honours" (60-61). Scotland had exchanged its political autonomy for economic and cultural development, but, unlike other contemporaries, Ferguson argues that the progress of both the fine and the "lucrative arts" is incompatible with the exercise of virtue. Progress, attained through the division of labor, results in a sinister dissolution of the public sphere: The members of a community may ... like the inhabitants of a conquered province, be made to lose the sense of every connection ... and have no common affairs to transact, but those of trade: Connections, indeed, or transactions, in which probity and friendship may still take place, but in which the national spirit ... cannot be exerted. (207-8)

Ferguson's thoughts will be echoed in the pro-militia pamphlet written by his friend Alexander Carlyle: "Are we then a province and a conquered Kingdom?"(16) The most prominent advocate of civic virtue before the Edinburgh literati, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, had called for a regional parliament as well as a militia for Scotland.(17) But Ferguson's idea of a public sphere is far more vague: at times simply the opposite of private withdrawal, at other times, it takes on determinate dimensions and an internal structure. Ferguson's Essay has the effect of replacing nationalist matter with a nationalist manner; it loosens virtue's connection to the public sphere and brings it closer to intention than to action.(18)

In the Prologue to Douglas written for delivery in Edinburgh (a separate one was written for the London performances), John Home flatters his Scots audience by comparing their nation to the city-state of Athens: "In days of classic fame ... Flourish'd the state of Athens, small her store, / Rugged her soil, and rocky was her shore, / Like Caledonia's ..."(19) But he then implicitly repudiates all metaphor, contrasting the usual fare of drama, "heroes not their own," with the subject offered by this play: "He comes, the hero of your native land!" Douglas thus offers itself as nationalist tragedy, and Home as nationalist tragedian: "back to the Muse he flies, / And bids your heroes in succession rise" (Prologue 33-34). The play's most avid supporters eagerly took up this view of the tragedy and its popular reception. Alexander Carlyle, in a Swiftian mock-condemnation of the play, wrote, The tragedy of Douglas is said by some ... to be an honour to our country ... if it were really true ... it ought to be kept as dead a secret as the flourishing state of any of our manufactures.... Have we not the greatest reason ... to fear that the English ministry will take it very much amiss, that any body here should have the presumption to think he can write the English language as well as they can do in London? ... What would David Garrick, Esq., say ... to hear, that a tragedy he rejected ... made the whole city of Edinburgh almost mad for a fortnight, and drew endless tears and lamentations from every spectator? (An Argument ... 16-19)

Gleefully flouting the cultural, political, and economic power of England, Carlyle finds in Home's play a nationalist and not merely national "genius."(20) Douglas provides the occasion for exercising civic virtue in the form of critical judgment; defying the authority of the Edinburgh Presbytery as well, which had condemned the play and its spectators on religious grounds, he exhorts his readers to be "so head-strong, as to judge for yourselves" rather than to "surrender yourselves implicitly" to the judgment of others (An Argument 23).

But the ensuing controversy saw repeated attempts to demystify this attempted melding of civic virtue, literary genius, and patriotism. The tragedy's opponents saw the success of Douglas as the triumph not of the nation but of a small group ambitious for cultural hegemony--a group that preached and practiced virtue in a sense that was merely theatrical, without any tendency to benefit materially the nation or the mass of its citizens. The anonymous author of Apology for the Writers against the Tragedy of Douglas complains that Some years ago, a few gentlemen in this town assumed the characters of being the only judges in all parts of literature; they were and still are styled the geniuses, and lately erected what they called a select society, which usurps a kind of aristocratical government over all men and matters of learning. The first and fundamental maxim of this dictatorial club is that a punctilious correctness of style is the summum bonum of all compositions ... (in Douglas: A Tragedy ... 4)

The success of Douglas, as this writer sees it, is less the triumph of a rejuvenated public sphere than the triumph of publicity handed down to a passive public by a cabal without legitimate title to cultural authority. The writer hints at a betrayal of national autonomy in the standards of taste adopted by "this dictatorial club"; their "punctilious correctness of style" is as alien and tyrannical an imposition as their stranglehold over the culture of Edinburgh. Linking the ersatz public sphere manufactured by the "geniuses" to faddish sensibility, another satirical pamphlet, John Maclaurin's The Philosopher's Opera, figures the Edinburgh audience as "Miss Weepwell, Miss Sob, Miss Pity, Miss Blubber," the devotees of "Mr Moral Sense" (in Douglas: A Tragedy 3) This public sphere is as vitiated as the civic virtue that the philosophers claim to embody. "Mrs Sarah Presbytery" remarks flatteringly to "Mr Genius" [David Hume], "since [my sons] got into your good company, they have put off the old man entirely: they have acquired a jaunty air, a military swagger, and a G_d-d_n-me look; they are metamorphosed so very much to the better, that I scarce know them to be my own children" (in Douglas: A Tragedy 5). Civic virtue is so much "swagger": an accoutrement of personal vanity that bears little if any relation to the cause of the nation. The Usefulness of the Edinburgh Theatre Seriously Considered, a parody of Adam Ferguson's defense of Douglas (The Morality of Stage Plays Seriously Considered), carries furthest this critique of Ferguson's discourse of civic virtue. In a mock-serious argument for the social and economic productiveness and civic usefulness of the theater, the pamphlet argues that the eloquence of lawyers, the manners of clergymen, and the learning of students all stand to benefit greatly from "the noble entertainments of the stage" (in Douglas: A Tragedy 3-4). The polemic ends on a high note with a convincing imitation of Fergusonian rhetoric, but there is a decisive giveaway in which folly unmasks itself: A nobler motive influences my heart, and directs my pen; the love of virtue and of my country. To increase her wealth, to quicken [her] industry ... to infuse a spirit for the mimic-art into her promising sons, were the sole motives of my writing. The inward satisfaction arising from a consciousness of meaning the public welfare, is all the reward I expect ... (in Douglas: A Tragedy 11-12; my emphasis)

The discourse of civic virtue not only promotes the "mimic-art" in others but consists primarily, it appears, in this theatrical swagger. This writer suggests that the literati of the Scottish Enlightenment are not fervent national patriots but provincial mimic-men. But the fault may lie ultimately in the nation's equivocal situation rather than in its citizens' deficiencies.

Home's Douglas in fact anticipates many of these criticisms, justifying some and disarming others. Set in a vaguely medieval Scotland, it is a play in which the nation is everything and nothing to the exercise of virtue. On the eve of a Danish invasion of the independent monarchy of Scotland, a young stranger who saves the life of the nobleman Lord Randolph is found to be the long-lost son of Lady Randolph from her never-disclosed first marriage to a Douglas. But just as the young Douglas, full of patriotic zeal and desire for glory, is about to publish his true identity, he is murdered by the jealous Glenalvon, Lord Randolph's villainous kinsman. The conventional romance plot is placed within a framework of nationalist consciousness meant to give it new urgency. This consciousness owes less than might be expected to the foreign-invasion theme; other than a few references to the landing of the "mighty host" of Danes, and to preparations for war, the idea of repelling invasion is not strongly developed. Rather, national consciousness is linked with the idea of identity, an idea that is most explicitly voiced in the Edinburgh Prologue to the play: "Oft has this audience soft compassion shown / To woes of heroes, heroes not their own. / This night our scenes no common tear demand, / He comes, the hero of your native land!" (Prologue 19-22). This last phrase is repeated throughout the play for the benefit, it seems, of an audience acutely aware of watching a tragedy with peculiar relevance to their non-English identity.

Both the plot and the patriotic consciousness of the play are focused, though, not only on young Douglas, but on Lady Randolph, who is above all a figure of unsuccessful mourning. In the play's opening soliloquy, addressed to her dead first husband, she "Weep[s] for her husband slain, her infant lost" as well as her "brother's timeless death ... Who perish'd with [her husband] ..." (1.13-15). As her odd epithet, "timeless death," suggests, Lady Randolph is suspended in a state that at once confers overwhelming significance to the past as past and fails to distinguish past from present. She continues, "Incapable of change, affection lies / Buried, my Douglas, in thy bloody grave" (1.20-21). Deprived of her past (her husband and child being both, as she thinks, dead) and obsessed with it, she figures effectively a Scotland deeply engaged in the project of re-evaluating its own past.(21) Emblematic of both history and its suppression, Lady Randolph suggests Scotland's situation in other ways, too; her present husband she refers to as one "whom fate has made [her] lord." Despite this remarriage, she continues privately to conceive of her identity as separate, calling herself"the last of all my race" (1.22, 87), and noting resentfully that "Randolph now possesses the domains ... that should to Douglas' son have given / A baron's title, and a baron's power" (1.239-42). While Home's friends like Ferguson unfailingly treat virtue and virility as synonyms, Home's tragedy seizes on a woman as the most plausible enthusiast for "some beloved community."(22) Her community is not so much the Scottish nation as her husband and son; but what transforms her sentiment from domestic into public feeling is the name that they bear: Douglas. But this name, and the functions it performs, point to one of the most potent ambiguities of the play.

"O Douglas, Douglas!" Lady Randolph implores in her opening speech: the name refers to either "her husband slain" or "her infant lost," and the equivocality of the referent becomes an important point for the tragedy's plot.(23) Lady Randolph herself hints that the name makes the two equivalent; at the climax of the discovery scene, she proclaims to her son, "Image of Douglas! ... All that I owe thy sire, I pay to thee (4. 181-82). Though this interview is private and the young man's identity remains unknown to others until the end of the play, the plot develops this idea of the equivalence between son and husband: Glenalvon convinces Lord Randolph that Douglas is his wife's lover and thus engages his kinsman's complicity in a scheme to kill the young man. The equivalence suspected in the plot merely develops a suggestion unmistakably made in the Prologue: that one Douglas, any Douglas, is the same as any other because what matters is the name alone. Douglas, a name through all the world renown'd, A name that rouses like the trumpet's sound! Oft have your fathers, prodigal of life, A Douglas follow'd through the bloody strife; Hosts have been known at that dread time to yield, And, Douglas dead, his name hath won the field.

(Prologue 23-28)

Independently of the life, death, or identity of the particular person whom it designates, the name of Douglas functions in these latter days, the Prologue claims, as a powerful national talisman of bygone virtue.

But the play does not let us forget how "Douglas" remains doubly conjectural here. Because of the vagueness of the historical setting, we cannot know which Douglas is being thus celebrated (there is also an older brother of Lady Randolph's husband still alive, we are told). More importantly, the virtue of the play's hero and nation's fictive representative has to remain a matter of speculation. The emotional impact of Douglas depends almost entirely on the idea of the protagonist's tragically foreshortened career of virtue. Douglas, while yet unaware of his identity, introduces himself as "A low-born man ... Who nought can boast but his desire to be / A soldier, and to gain a name in arms" (2.34-36); his mother later describes him as "The soldier now of hope" (2.95). And he remains to the end merely a figure of hope and desire, both personal and national. Though he proclaims his "soul's unalter'd wish ... [to] be renown'd" (5.86-87) and desires to prove his virtue and his identity before public witnesses, he receives his fatal wound in a private scuffle and dies obscurely: "Unknown I die; no tongue shall speak of me. / Some noble spirits ... May yet conjecture what I might have proved ..." (5.213-15). Suggesting that Douglas' virtue becomes more powerful for remaining uncontaminated by contact with history, the play stresses the wishful conjecture required to make of "Douglas" a signifier of Scotland's civic identity.

Reviewing Henry Mackenzie's edition of the Life and Works of John Home in 1827, Walter Scott treats the continuous popularity of Douglas as a key element in the larger myth of the Scottish Enlightenment: "in those days, there were giants in the North," he writes, referring not to names like Douglas and Bruce but to Hume, Robertson, Ferguson and Smith--the "phalanx" of enlightenment that surrounded John Home (837). The self-conscious archaism of Scott's manner here seems a shrewd strategy for distancing what remains too close, for, as Scott's son-in-law John Lockhart had written not long before, the Scottish Enlightenment, by means of its "legitimate progeny," the Edinburgh Review, still exercised cultural hegemony over the North, in an "intellectual subjection" that was "as melancholy and profound, as anything ever exemplified within the leaden circle of an eastern despot's domination."(24) Revising the prevailing picture of this cultural movement, Scott treats David Hume not as the singular "beau ideal of national understanding" but as one half of a dyad. The other half Scott finds in John Home, whose "disposition," unlike that of the "subtle and sceptical" Hume, was "excursive and romantic": "The one saw more, the other saw less, than was actually visible. Yet this very difference tended to bind the two friends ... in a more intimate union" ("John Home" 837). Emphasizing Hume's rationality and Home's patriotic fervor, Scott thus squarely locates both science and civic virtue at the center of the Enlightenment, but only in order to describe both of these key discourses in terms of their fantastic deviation from social or political actuality. Scott particularly ridicules Home's attempts to practice civic virtue during and after the Jacobite Rebellion. Home becomes a figure of bumbling patriotism, and the Poker Club, founded by Ferguson, Home and their friends "to stir up and encourage the public spirit of Scotland" and to promote a national militia, an exercise in amiable anachronism. Scott tells only one anecdote about this club, a late meeting at which the members "found themselves reassembled as old and broken men": "cold, torpid, inactive, loaded with infirmities, and occupied with the selfish care of husbanding the remainder of their health and strength" ("John Home" 839). In Scott's rendering, the virtuous literati of Edinburgh meet precisely the fate which Douglas had been spared: that of proving their own obsolescence.

Thus Scott makes room for his own subtle, skeptical, romantic treatment of nationalism in Redgauntlet (1824). Rather than disavowing the equivocal nature of the modern Scottish discourse of virtue, Redgauntlet boldly embraces it, treating this brand of nationalism as a conscious mythology dependent on the two key moves of conjecture and deferral. In this novel about a third Jacobite rebellion that fails to occur (in the late 1760s), the sentiment uttered by a character, "damn all warrants, false or true," applies not only to legal warrants but epistemological ones as well.(25) A scene where the protagonist Darsie Latimer is interrogated by a justice of the peace demonstrates the deliberate and radical undermining of certainty aimed at by the novel: asked his name and nationality, Latimer answers readily, but asked by the mysterious figure, Hugh Redgauntlet, to swear to these and other claims, Latimer finds himself strangely unable to do so. "`Will you presume to say, sir ... that you then [as a child in England] bore your present name?' I was startled ... and in vain rummaged my memory for the means of replying" (189). Asked to swear to another claim, Latimer is prevented by "a frightful vision" that he cannot classify as memory or fancy (193). This state of mental uncertainty is brilliantly created for the reader by means of the embedded tale told by the itinerant fiddler, Wandering Willie. In this story an ancestral Redgauntlet is sought out after death by a poor tenant in need of a receipt, proof that his rent has been paid: the scene, laid presumably in hell, of a sort of Scottish Royalist valhalla is superbly described, but it is never quite made clear whether it had occurred or been dreamt, whether the receipt produced at the end had been recovered or forged. Other supernatural events are also given a possible natural explanation, and so in this way the tale perfectly illustrates the principle of the genre that Tzvetan Todorov calls the fantastic: the reader's hesitation.(26) Conjecture is kept alive. The tale's moral, moreover, points towards the necessity of conjecture. "`What was fristed wasna forgiven'" (117) or what was deferred was not resolved, Willie insists, but his application of the moral is noticeably strained. The tale demonstrates the desire to conjure up links, continuities, and survivals both of virtue and its opposite--and the greater freedom to do so in the absence of evidence.

Surmise is the chief occupation of the novel's leading Jacobite figure, Hugh Redgauntlet. Single-handedly working towards another attempt to overthrow the Hanoverian dynasty, Redgauntlet sees "restoring [his] King" as equivalent to "freeing [his] country" (342). Redgauntlet alone equates the Jacobite project with Scottish nationalism and alone believes in the historical possibility of either. But his enthusiastic belief is remarkably ironized by a myth about how the Redgauntlet family is doomed to support the losing side of every contested cause. Redgauntlet's determinism admits no exceptions: "`in doing and suffering, we play but the part allotted by Destiny ... stand bound to act no more than is prescribed, to say no more than is set down for us; and yet we mouth about ... freedom of thought and action ...'" (213). The odd example of Redgauntlet's Jacobitism, at once sincere and ironic, does not question nationalism directly as a set of beliefs, but it does invite the reader to question the second-order beliefs on which such ideologies are founded. Belief is permitted as long as it is accompanied by the suspicion that it is grounded on the necessity not of truth but of fate.(27)

Notwithstanding the formidable legal apparatuses designed to assert otherwise, the indeterminate nature of the Scottish nation and its ultimate reliance on subjective fantasy and feeling are suggested by the novel's carefully chosen setting on the border between Scotland and England. The novel begins and ends on "the banks of the great [Solway] estuary [where] the waters had receded from the large and level space of sand, through which a stream, now feeble and fordable, found its way to the ocean" (32). Believing himself an English citizen yet mysteriously prohibited from crossing the border, Latimer haunts this area; yet the reassuring image of the stream finding its way home is a dangerously deceptive one. Neither land nor water, indeterminately wide and deep, subject to the vagaries of the tide, this uncanny zone seems to mirror the qualities and dimensions of Latimer's apprehensions, as he finds himself stranded in the middle when the water rushes in: I began a race as fast as I could, feeling, or thinking I felt, each pool of salt water ... grow deeper and deeper. At length the surface of the sand did seem considerably more intersected with pools and channels of water--either that the tide was really beginning to influence the bed of the estuary, or ... that I had ... involved myself in difficulties ... the sands at the same time turned softer, and my footsteps, so soon as I had passed, were instantly filled with water. (33-34)

The estuary seems to grow deeper or, in another episode, broader, exactly in proportion to the desperation of the desire to reach the other side, to arrive at one's nation.

The extended final scene of the novel occurs at an inn on these banks, where Redgauntlet attempts to draw out of the assembled reluctant crypto-Jacobites, the not-so-young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, and all the other characters in the novel the semblance of a political movement. It is immediately apparent that, as Darsie believes, "the conspiracy would dissolve of itself" (368); thus the complex denouement concentrates its energies not on debunking Redgauntlet's nationalist-Jacobite hopes but on finding a way to sustain and keep alive their conjectured fulfillment. Asked before the assembled conspirators for his opinion, Darsie only announces, "I suspend expressing my sentiments on the important subject under discussion" (370). Asked to redeem earlier, vague pledges with actions, a representative Jacobite insists on the presence of Charles Edward as "the only condition upon which I myself and others could ever have dreamt of taking up arms" (370). Confronted unexpectedly with the Pretender's presence, they perform a move of crucial importance: they seek to revise and to redefine the conditions for their engagement--conditions which the Pretender will have to refuse. This strategy is important because it allows them to evade their lack of desire to take up arms, to disavow their lack of virtue. It allows them to maintain indefinitely the dream that, given the right conditions, they would have prosecuted their Jacobite adventure. The translation of Scottish nationalism into the realm of conjecture even allows it a graceful entrance into the Hanoverian political world. When the Hanoverian representative arrives, he dismisses the Jacobites' project as merely "exaggerated accounts" and "calumnies" without "any real foundation": "there was perhaps no great harm meant or intended by your gathering together in this obscure corner, for a bear-bait or a cockfight, or whatever other amusement you may have intended" (394-95). The symbolic violence of this courteous dismissal is palpable as this Jacobite rebellion, like the young Douglas, dies "in apparency" ("Apology for the Writers ..." in Douglas: A Tragedy 12). The adherents of virtue are not prohibited, however, from believing that they have simply "postpon[ed] the payment of [their] duty" (372) yet again. And this belief would have been correct, for the questions and demands of Scottish nationalism were not forgiven, only deferred, as recent history demonstrates.

(1.) David Hume to Gilbert Elliot, 2 July 1757, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932) 1: 255.

(2.) [Alexander Carlyle], An Argument to prove that the Tragedy of Douglas ought to be Publickly Burnt by the Hands of the Hangman. This and other pamphlets from the controversy are collected in an edition simply titled Douglas: A Tragedy as it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Covent Garden (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton et al., 1757) 19.

(3.) The phrase is from a pamphlet published in defense of the play: Advice to the Writers in Defence of Douglas in the same collection.

(4.) See Richard B. Sher's valuable study, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), esp. 45-147. Home's closest friends, William Robertson, Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, and Adam Ferguson, formed an important cohort within the Select Society and within the Church of Scotland, initiating what Sher calls the "Moderate Revolution." Many of Home's friends owed their institutional prominence to Home's position as secretary to Lord Bute (Sher 114-15).

(5.) Carlyle, Autobiography of the Reverend Dr. Carlyle (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1860) 309; Walter Scott, "Life and Works of John Home," review of Life and Works of the Author of Douglas, ed. Henry Mackenzie, Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1847), 3 vols., 1: 833.

(6.) See Adam Ferguson, Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (Edinburgh, 1756); also Sher 62-63.

(7.) "Life and Works of John Home" 827.

(8.) On the persistent tension between polite Whiggism and civic virtue, see John Pocock's useful reminder in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), esp. 115 ff.

(9.) See Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 121.

(10.) Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 25.

(11.) Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 115.

(12.) Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 41.

(13.) Adam Smith, paraphrasing Epictetus, argues that self-command should follow from a proper regard for the "immense and infinite system, which must and ought to be disposed of, according to the conveniency of the whole" (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976; rpt. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984] 140). Both Smith and Ferguson are indebted to Francis Hutcheson; Ferguson closely renders classical Stoic authors in his Institutes of Moral Philosophy (1769), but diverges from them in important ways in the Essay.

(14.) Ferguson singles out for mention the "arts of deliberation, elocution, policy, and war" as virtuous when exercised "in the view of his fellow-creatures" (33), as in the type of legislative assembly defunct in Scotland since 1707.

(15.) Oz-Salzberger notes that Scotland inspires many of Ferguson's remarks (99); see also Sher on the militia debate as the context of the Essay.

(16.) Carlyle, The question relating to a Scots Militia (1760), cited in Sher 226.

(17.) See Pocock, Virtue 238, also the essays in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983).

(18.) I am indebted here to Colin Kidd's discussion of the Enlightenment's "micropolitics of personal liberty" (250).

(19.) "Prologue spoken at Edinburgh," Home's Douglas, ed. Hubert J. Tunney (Lawrence, Kansas: U of Kansas P, 1924) lines 1-5. All further references are to this edition.

(20.) The phrases are "genius and spirit," and "learning and genius," but the context is one of contrast between Scotland and England, as well as of Scotland's inclusion in a greater community of aesthetic achievement, "the annals of taste and literature" (Carlyle, 18, 19, 14).

(21.) See Kidd's argument.

(22.) The phrase is Ferguson's, cited above.

(23.) The play also stresses the theme of equivocal speech; the chief culprit is Lady Randolph, who at several crucial moments speaks with a double sense, apparently referring to one thing and meaning another. See for example her reference to "he for whom I mourn" (1.28); Lord Randolph believes it to be her brother only, being unaware of the existence of her first husband and her son.

(24.) John G. Lockhart, Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1819) 2: 142, 205.

(25.) Redgauntlet, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 362. All further references will be given parenthetically in the text.

(26.) Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction a la Litterature Fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970).

(27.) On the necessity of belief, see Bernard Williams, "Deciding to Believe," Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973).

YOON SUN LEE is an Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College. She has published on Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, and Maxine Hong Kingston, among other subjects. She is currently working on her second book, Asian American Literature and the Resistance to Politics.