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

Abstract

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 Presence of our Chief Nobility ... that, in these Circumstances, we shou'd really be People most distinguish'd for literature in Europe?(1) Hume may well have had in mind controversial success of his friend John Home's tragedy, Douglas, produced in Edinburgh in late 1756 and in London following spring. Douglas was celebrated by its admirers as decisive proof that Edinburgh had come rival London as a capital of learning and genius.(2) But in his casual way, Hume puts his finger on ambiguities that pervade that play's relationship ideas of nationhood that would be explored in Scotland well into following century by Walter Scott, among others. Specifically, Hume raises question of how nation as a cultural entity is related nation understood as a set of political institutions and activities. How did cultural production and self-conscious cultural identity compensate for loss of political independence and disintegration of public sphere? And where did idea of nationhood fit into discourse of civic virtue that Enlightenment thinkers sought revive? As Home's Douglas tried mesh seamlessly literary public sphere with paradigm of civic virtue, play's supporters argued that public spirit could be manifested by seeing, judging, and surrendering emotionally this heroic Scottish play.(3) But in ensuing controversy, both 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 idea of nation could be efficaciously suspended in an imaginary and literally anachronistic void. From vantage point of post-Waterloo Britain, Walter Scott spots this irony in development of identity and suggests in his last Jacobite novel, Redgauntlet (1824), that exercise of civic virtue turns on a highly equivocal nationalism that wishes both disavow and conjure up and conjure with imagination of nationhood. More than author's friendship with David Hume made Douglas into a focal point for tensions and energies of mid-eighteenth-century nationalism. John Home was part of that close-knit circle of clergymen that provided intellectual and social force behind Enlightenment.(4) But Home's tragedy, Douglas, had closer links issue of nationalism in aftermath of failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745. When play was rejected by David Garrick of Drury Lane as totally unfit for stage, Home's Edinburgh friends decided, in Walter Scott's words, to try experiment of a play written by a Scotsman, and produced, for first time, on a provincial stage and thus make a striking bid for cultural autonomy.(5) In a rehearsal in late 1756, William Robertson and Adam Ferguson took parts of Lord and Lady Randolph, David Hume played villain, Hugh Blair maid, and Home himself hero, young Douglas (Sher 77). Other forms of autonomy were also under dispute at this moment: 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 plan for a 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 young hero's eagerness win military glory. Pitt's bill would eventually become Militia Act that pointedly excluded Scotland from right 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 stage. …