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WALTER SCOTT AND JOHN HENRY NEWMAN Remarks by Patrick Killough to the 2007 Convention of the Venerable John Henry Newman Association Pittsburgh Holiday Inn Friday August 10 8:30 - 9:20 a. m. FOOTNOTE # 15 (15) Scott as prelude to re-Catholicized Britain For Scott's lifelong wrestling with the Gothic in literature see Fiona Robertson, 1994, passim. On Scott's religion Cast a glance at James HOGG. DOMESTIC MANNERS AND PRIVATE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1834/1987, p. 42f. Hogg, who described his friend the Baronet affectionately but realistically, wrote of Scott: He
was no great favourer of sects, and seldom or
never went to church. He was a complete and finished aristocrat, and the prosperity of the state was his great concern, which prosperity he deemed lost unless both example and precept flowed by regular gradation from the highest to the lowest. He dreaded religion as a machine by which the good government of the country might be deranged, if not uprooted. There was one evening when he and Marrit of Rokeby, some of the Fergusons, and I, were sitting over our wine, that he said, " There is nothing that I dread so much as a very religious woman ; she is not only a dangerous person, but a perfect shower-bath on all social conviviality. The enthusiasm of our Scottish ladies has now grown to such a height that I am almost certain it will lead to some dangerous revolution in the state. And then, to try to check it would only make the evil worse. If you ever choose a wife, Hogg, for goodness' sake, as you value your own happiness, don't choose a very religious one." See also A. N. Wilson, THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD, 1989, chapter five. This chapter focuses on the two novels of how the Reformation came to Scotland, THE MONASTERY and THE ABBOT. I am particularly struck by the following passage linking Abbotsford and the possibility that Scott might have become a Catholic convert: "I
thought of these things, emerging into the drizzle at Abbotsford from
the little oratory where Newman had said mass. My companion, a minister
of the suffering and Episcopal Church, murmured gloomily, 'I suppose, had he lived fifty years
later, Scott himself would have poped.' I could not
agree." (p.104)
"... there can be no doubt from THE
MONASTERY and its sequel that he
believed the Reformation to be divinely inspired." (p. 95)
Religion, in Scott's pages, is more often a source of division and pain than of solace and peace." (p. 96) Scott felt that a danger of Papism is that it makes men passive, quietist. (98f.) See also Michael E. SCHIEFELBEIN, 2001, '"Unguarded Gaiety": Catholicism in Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot', pp. 15 - 55. For the impact of IVANHOE and Scott's other "medieval" romances, see ibid., chapter eight. On Scott preparing Britain for Catholicism: Ian Ker, 990, p. 173, citing Newman, Prospects of the Anglican Church [British Critic, April 1839]. For the text and context on-line see http://www.newmanreader.org/works/essays/volume1/prospects.html p. 268. |