Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

JANE AUSTEN

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair.—He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.

—from a letter to Anna Austen (September 28, 1814)

 

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

The champion novelist of the day has again exhibited himself on a new arena,—in Ivanhoe, or the Jew of York,—equipped in the trappings of the feudal times, and in the chivalric character of an accomplished young Saxon of the woods. Though not perfectly historical in giving such a pompous picture of chivalric society at so early a period, (as it rather resembles Francis I, than Richard), yet, as it serves to represent characters of untamed life, judiciously mingled with those of ‘high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,’ the union of two different periods of society may be admissible in a romance. With this, and the single exception of the want of a real story, we do not recollect perusing any work of Walter Scott’s that has afforded us more pleasure than the present. The exquisite description, and dramatic power of character, are sufficient to redeem greater faults than are perceptible in the novels of this original author.

—February 1820

 

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

[I hold Scott] for a man of very extraordinary powers; and when I say that I have read the far greater part of his novels twice, and several three times over, with undiminished pleasure and interest; and that, in my reprobation of The Bride of Lammermoor (with the exception, however, of the almost Shakspearian old witch-wives at the funeral) and of the Ivanhoe, I mean to imply the grounds of my admiration of the others, and the permanent nature of the interest which they excite. In a word, I am far from thinking that Old Mortality or Guy Mannering would have been less admired in the age of Sterne, Fielding, and Richardson, than they are in the present times; but only that Sterne, &c., would not have had the same immediate popularity in the present day as in their own less stimulated and, therefore, less languid reading world....

Scott’s great merit, and, at the same time, his felicity, and the true solution of the long-sustained interest novel after novel excited, lie in the nature of the subject; not merely, or even chiefly, because the struggle between the Stuarts and the Presbyterians and sectaries, is still in lively memory, and the passions of the adherency to the former, if not the adherency itself, extant in our own fathers’ or grandfathers’ times; nor yet (though this is of great weight) because the language, manners, &c., introduced are sufficiently different from our own for poignancy, and yet sufficiently near and similar for sympathy; nor yet because, for the same reason, the author, speaking, reflecting, and descanting in his own person, remains still (to adopt a painter’s phrase) in sufficient keeping with his subject matter, while his characters can both talk and feel interesting to us as men, without recourse to antiquarian interest, and nevertheless without moral anachronism (in all which points the Ivanhoe is so woefully the contrary, for what Englishman cares for Saxon or Norman, both brutal invaders, more than for Chinese and Cochin-Chinese?)—yet great as all these causes are, the essential wisdom and happiness of the subject consists in this,—that the contest between the loyalists and their opponents can never be obsolete, for it is the contest between the two great moving principles of social humanity; religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and the admiration for permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth, as the offspring of reason—in short, the mighty instincts of progression and free agency, on the other.

 

—from a letter to Thomas Allsop (April 8, 1820)

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Sir Walter Scott had not all those aids of which his successors and imitators may take advantage. The historical romance was as much a distinct species of prose narrative fiction as the historical play was of dramatic poetry. He, however, had sufficient tact to detect at once the way in which it should be conducted, and continued to work upon the same principle, notwithstanding the warnings and oppositions of critics not submissive to the authority of contemporary genius, nor finding their canon of rules in the nature of the productions themselves, but reasoning from analogy, if not deciding on the grounds of hereditary prejudices.

—from an unsigned review printed in Fraser’s Magazine (February 1832)

 

WALTER BAGEHOT

Many exceptions have been taken to the detail of mediaeval life as it is described to us in Ivanhoe, but one merit will always remain to it, and will be enough to secure to it immense popularity. It describes the middle ages as we should have wished them to have been. We do not mean that the delineation satisfies those accomplished admirers of the old church system who fancy that they have found among the prelates and barons of the fourteenth century a close approximation to the theocracy which they would recommend for our adoption. On the contrary, the theological merits of the middle ages are not prominent in Scott’s delineation. ‘Dogma’ was not his way: a cheerful man of the world is not anxious for a precise definition of peculiar doctrines. The charm of Ivanhoe is addressed to a simpler sort of imagination,—to that kind of boyish fancy which idolises mediaeval society as the ‘fighting time.’ Every boy has heard of tournaments, and has a firm persuasion that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A martial society, where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large lances, in peace for pleasure, and in war for business, seems the very ideal of perfection to a bold and simply fanciful boy. Ivanhoe spreads before him the full landscape of such a realm, with Richard Coeur-de-Lion, a black horse, and the passage of arms at Ashby. Of course he admires it, and thinks there was never such a writer, and will never more be such a world. And a mature critic will share his admiration, at least to the extent of admitting that nowhere else have the elements of a martial romance been so gorgeously accumulated without becoming oppressive; their fanciful charm been so powerfully delineated, and yet so constantly relieved by touches of vigorous sagacity.

—from an unsigned review in the National Review (April 1858)

 

HENRY JAMES

It is almost ungrateful to criticize [Scott] . He, least of all, would have invited or sanctioned any curious investigation of his works. They were written without pretence: all that has been claimed for them has been claimed by others than their author. They are emphatically works of entertainment. As such let us cherish and preserve them. Say what we will, we should be very sorry to lose, and equally sorry to mend them. There are few of us but can become sentimental over the uncounted hours they have cost us. There are moments of high-strung sympathy with the spirit which is abroad when we might find them rather dull—in parts; but they are capital books to have read. Who would forego the companionship of all those shadowy figures which stand side by side in their morocco niches in yonder mahogany cathedral? What youth would willingly close his eyes upon that dazzling array of female forms,—so serried that he can hardly see where to choose,—Rebecca of York, Edith Plantagenet, Mary of Scotland, sweet Lucy Ashton? What maiden would consent to drop the dear acquaintance of Halbert Glendinning, of Wilfred of Ivanhoe, of Roland Græme and Henry Morton? Scott was a born story-teller: we can give him no higher praise. Surveying his works, his character, his method, as a whole, we can liken him to nothing better than to a strong and kindly elder brother, who gathers his juvenile public about him at eventide, and pours out a stream of wondrous improvisation. Who cannot remember an experience like this? On no occasion are the delights of fiction so intense. Fiction? These are the triumphs of fact. In the richness of his invention and memory, in the infinitude of his knowledge, in his improvidence for the future, in the skill with which he answers, or rather parries, sudden questions, in his low-voiced pathos and his resounding merriment, he is identical with the ideal fireside chronicler. And thoroughly to enjoy him, we must again become as credulous as children at twilight.

—from an unsigned review in the North American Review (October 1864)

 

MARK TWAIN

 

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by Don Quixote and those wrought by Ivanhoe. The first swept the world’s admiration for the mediæval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.

—from Life on the Mississippi (1883)

QUESTIONS

1. Professor Wood reminds us of parallels between the circumstances of the time in which Ivanhoe was written and those of the time in which it was set. He also reminds us why, later, American southerners found it attractive. But the novel has had, and continues to have, many readers who know nothing about such matters. What is its appeal?

2. Is the artificial dialogue in Ivanhoe a problem? Think how hard it would be to recover the colloquial English of Ivanhoe’s time. If you wanted to write a sequel, how would you solve the problem, on the one hand, of avoiding anachronisms and, on the other, of writing dialogue that is true to the way people spoke at that time? How would you know what was accurate and what was a product of your imagination?

3. How would you describe the function of the material about Robin Hood within the novel as a whole? Do he and his band serve as an implied commentary on the lifestyles of the other characters? Does he represent another, alternative way of living?