"We are Five-and-Forty": Meter and National Identity in Sir Walter Scott.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

WALTER SCOTT INITIATED A VIGOROUS DEFENSE OF SCOTTISH NATIONAL identity after the British Parliament responded to the 1825 financial panic with an 1826 currency reform: throughout Great Britain, small banknotes would henceforth be replaced by specie.(1) Scottish opponents of the reform claimed that small banknotes were crucial to economic prosperity, and while Scott himself also spoke of these notes as "nearly indispensable to the carrying on of business of almost any kind in Scotland," his contribution to the debate involved not so much a discussion of currency theory as the creation of a persona, Malachi Malagrowther, the speaker in a series of letters to the editor of the Edinburgh Weekly Journal.(2) Occupying the position of antiquarian cultural nationalist (Scott's Journal describes him as "an uncompromising right forward Scot of the Old School"(3)), Scott's Malagrowther condemns the currency reform as much for its blatant "national insult" (735) as for its flawed monetary policy. But as his Journal entries show, the upsurge in national sentiment caused by the letters was something Scott greeted with considerable ambivalence: while he "rejoic[ed]" to see "a scene of insurrection or ... general expression of national feeling" (97), he also, as a supporter of the British Union, hoped to stop short of genuine rebellion. "It is difficult to steer betwixt the natural impulse of one's National feelings setting in one direction and the prudent regard to the interests of the empire and its internal peace and quiet recommending less vehement expression. I will endeavour to keep sight of both" (98-99).

To "steer betwixt" nation and empire while keeping sight of "both" is the challenge Scott must negotiate in his Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, and my concern here is less Scott's admittedly substantial role in defeating the currency reform than the larger question of how pursuing this end induces him to formulate the "both" of nation and empire in a new--and particularly literary--way. In the pages that follow I will demonstrate that Scott's Letters of Malachi Malagrowther and his contemporary fiction ground national identity in a national meter, and meter is national, according to Scott, insofar as it functions as a "summons" to Scottish national identity: it assembles the Scottish people as a people and thereby demonstrates Scotland's ongoing integrity as a nation. In reconstructing the logic of Scott's metrical summons my aim is to emphasize not its suitability as a general account of poetics but its functionality as a vehicle for Scott's very particular politics--his defense of Scottish national autonomy within Britain.

I. National Impress

As he argues against the currency reform, Scott's Malachi Malagrowther asserts that "Ministers see no reason why any law adopted on this subject [i.e. banknote restrictions] should not be imperative over all his Majesty's dominions, including Scotland, for uniformity's sake" (730). This pursuit of "uniformity" as an end in itself (728) betrays the ministers' larger ambition to "assimilate" (726) Scotland within Britain's one "general system" (730), a goal that threatens "to annul and dissolve all the distinctions and peculiarities" (748-49) that make Scotland Scotland. "For God's sake, sir," Malagrowther counters,

let us remain as Nature made us, Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen, with something like the impress of our several countries upon each! We would not become better subjects, or more valuable members of the common empire, if we all resembled each other like so many smooth shillings.... The degree of national diversity between different countries is but an instance of that general variety which Nature seems to have adopted as a principle through all her works, as anxious, apparently to avoid, as modern statesmen to enforce, any thing like an approach to absolute "uniformity." (749)

Here Malagrowther invokes currency less as medium than as metaphor: just as an "impress" gives silver bullion its identity as a shilling, so "Nature" gives imperial subjects a national impress, imparting to Britons their respective national "variety" as "Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen." The impress that marks Scotsmen as Scotsmen, Malagrowther suggests, is the long-standing practice of issuing small banknotes, so the plan to end that practice brings Scottish national identity that much closer to smooth imperial "uniformity." Such a change won't affect the value of British subjects (any more than the smoothness of a shilling affects its value as silver bullion), but it undermines the identity of Scotland, placing at risk "the well-being, nay, the very being, of our ancient kingdom" (737).

Protecting the national "variety" of Scotland, then, requires protecting its national impress, and to do so Malagrowther ultimately turns to a "verse from an old song" (739) that serves as a "motto" for the second letter:

When the pipes begin to play Tutti taittie to the drum, Out claymore, and down wi' gun, And to the rogues again.

(739n)(4)

Describing himself as "desirous, by every effort in my power, to awaken [my countrymen] to a sense of their national danger" (739), Malagrowther sees this song verse as one means to that end, for it is "the summons which my countrymen have been best accustomed to obey" (739). As a "summons" addressed to "my countrymen," the motto is intended to awaken the Scottish people to vigilant protection of their national impress. But even as it seems to protect the national impress of Scots, it seems also to endanger neighboring Englishmen, the "rogues" under attack. Aware of this potential reading of the motto, Malagrowther hopes to allay any concerns: "The motto of my epistle may sound a little warlike.... But it is not a hostile signal towards you [i.e. England] ... To my countrymen I speak in the language of many recollections, certain they are not likely to be excited beyond the bounds of temperate and constitutional remonstrance" (739). Despite these assurances, the song verse generated such alarm among English readers that a later edition relegated it to a footnote, "some cautious friends," the note explains, "thinking it liable to misinterpretation" (739n).

To interpret the song as "hostile" and "warlike" seems almost inevitable given the military circumstance it depicts. But such a literal reading of the song envisions victory for...

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