Spectacles of Disaffection:Politics, Ethics, and Sentiment in Walter Scott's Old Mortality Andrew D. Krull This morning I saw a grand military spectacle, about 15000 Russians pass[ed] in review before all the Kings and dominations who are now resident at Paris. The Emperors . . . with their numerous and brilliant attendance of generals and staff-officers were in the center of what is called the Place of Louis Quinze almost on the very spot where Louis XVI was beheaded. A very long avenue which faced the station where they were placed was like a glowing furnace so fiercely were the sunbeams reflected from the arms of the host by which it was fill[e]d. . . . Your fancy my dear friend will anticipate better than I can express the thousand sentiments which arose in the mind from witnessing such a splendid scene in a spot connected with such various associations. —Walter Scott, Letter to the Duke of Buccleuch (August 1815)1 Walter Scott, the first eminent British writer to venture to the battle-site of Waterloo in the wake of victory over Napoleon, basked in the afterglow of national triumph. The "memorable field," still littered with "shot and shells, cartridges, old hats and shoes, and various relics of the fray" (some of which he collected as souvenirs), looked as if it would be "for ever consecrated to immortality" (L, 78). Soldiers from various nations around the continent, buoyed by their achievement, acted like high-spirited attendees at an international festival. Even the countryside, seared by the recent "storm of confusion," seemed as if it were poised for a new climate of "animated industry" (L, 96). To Scott, the victory and subsequent festivities were tantamount to the "grand finale" (L, 74) of a broad—and distinctly British—narrative of good triumphing over evil, of "politesse" over "self-conceit" (L, 84), of Burkean ideals of civil order returning to a continent that had been "out of nature" for twenty-five years: "There is no soundness left in [the French] at all . . . not even the usual honour of thieves among themselves. They are a moral phenomenon or rather a most immoral one" (L, 86).2 No less impressive than Scott's triumphalism about [End Page 695] the British defeat of Napoleon is his seeming gloss over the massive human loss; he registers only in passing the "thirty thousand dead bodies" that "cumber[e]d" the field (L, 91) and the bloodiness of the maimed soldiers with whom he converses, as he enjoys the "grand military spectacle[s]": "There is a perpetual whirl wind and tempest of gaiety going on among the strangers—that is, amongst us" (L, 87). Sentimental in this vein about the "splendid scene" (L, 95) of patriotism, yet strikingly detached from the grave tolls of warfare, Scott lodges his report in the mode and parlance of a spectator who is fully assured of his ethico-political convictions: Britain's moral rightness, he tells the Duke of Buccleuch, he felt with the certainty of "a thousand sentiments" lodged firmly within his breast.3 Scott's "gaiety" at Waterloo might lead one to anticipate similar reactions to "grand spectacles" by his fictional protagonists. Spectacles punctuate the Waverley Novels as they vault from one historical crisis to the next. Yet as a rule they denote atrocities, representing everything from desperate endgames of factionalism to vengeful pageants of victory, from ruthless acts of violence to public displays of torture. For Scott's heroes, who tend to cherish an ideal of moral community, such spectacles are ethical nadirs: war-making as opportunistic and ignominious enterprise. While Scott reads a moral triumph celebrated in the "spectacles" of Waterloo, his protagonists manage no such discernments. The spectacles of the Waverley Novels expose, rather, the failure of an ethical politics. In so doing, they alienate rather than inspire the moral spectator, desensitizing the man of feeling instead of heartening him. The tensions between national identification and human privation, seemingly elided by Scott at Waterloo, take possession of the narrative imagination of the Waverley Novels—and this by the very dynamics of fictional imagination. Fiction lets Scott displace the traumas of the modern day, mapping onto different historical frames ethical...