Abstract
R ECENT CRITICISM has emphasized the complexity of Scott the novelist. Scott, the child of Romanticism, we now recognize, engaged in a continuing, creative struggle with Scott, the product of the Scottish Enlightenment. More than anyone else, Professor Daiches has made us see how Scott's enthusiastic re-creation of the heroic and chivalric past, the past of high romance and stirring passion, exists alongside his complete acceptance of a civilized present of rational moderation and restraint.' The recognition of the clash of values implicit in this ambivalent response to the appeal of past and present, and its effect upon the form, style, and subject-matter of the Waverley novels, has become the main preoccupation of Scott criticism. It is in line with this preoccupation that I wish to reexamine The Bride of Lammermoor.2 That Poe should have regarded The Bride of Lammermoor as his favorite Scott novelthat purest and most enthralling of fictions, he called it-well suggests why, in the prevailing critical climate, this particular Waverley novel deserves special attention. On the face of it, The Bride is one of the more egregiously romantic of Scott's productions. Its action and plot suggest nothing more readily than a ballad. It is a tale of high passion and thwarted love, of superstitious legend and witches' prophecies, a tale whose hero drowns in a quicksand and whose heroine is brought to madness and death; that Donizetti should have based an opera on it
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