The Scottish Enlightenment and John Galt

在所谓的《英国文学史》中，将苏格兰作家沃尔特·斯科特列为19世纪初的代表性小说家之一，已经是一种标准的做法。虽然他的历史小说清楚地反映了人们对苏格兰与英格兰关系中岌岌可危的地位的敏锐认识，但当然，在斯科特时代的苏格兰也有其他作家，他们也试图保持/建立苏格兰的民族身份，但方式与斯科特截然不同。其中之一是约翰·盖特，他描述了苏格兰农村和地区的生活方式，没有斯科特的老练。高特的态度可以粗略地概括为对宗教的更多理解，而斯科特与苏格兰启蒙运动有着某种不同的非宗教情感，这似乎在某种程度上解释了他们在《英国文学史》中的不同立场：可以说，高特不能被推崇为圣徒，因为他对当地人有很深的兴趣，例如，他们或多或少对国家圣约抱有同情，这在他的《林根·吉莱泽》中得到了很好的说明，在他的书中，苏格兰的圣约人被描述为苏格兰国家事业的代表。这与斯科特的《旧死亡》形成了鲜明的对比，在《旧死亡》中，作者在政治公正的伪装下，实际上相当直率地将《圣约》的追随者描绘成狂热的人。这一论断无疑符合“意识形态与批评”学派的最新风尚，但在本研究中，我有意用非常传统的批评传记的方式来追溯高尔特的活动，以便为对这位被忽视的作家进行批判性的重新评价奠定基础。

In what is called 'the History of English Literature' it has been a standard business to place Walter Scott, a 'Scottish Writer', as one of the representative novelists in the early nineteenth century.While his historical novels clearly reflect a keen awareness of the precarious position of Scotland in its relation to England, there were other writers in Scotland at the time of Scott, of course, who also tried to preserve/establish the national identity of Scotland but did it in quite a different way from Scott's. One of them was John Gait, who described rural and regional Scottish ways of life without Scott's sophistication. Galt's attitude can be roughly summarised as more understanding towards religion, whereas Scott shares something of irreligious feeling with the Scottish Enlightenment, and this seems to account for, to some extent, the difference between their positions in the 'History of English Literature' : it is possible to say that Galt cannot be canonised because of his deep interests in local people, who are more or less sympathetic, for instance, towards the National Covenant, as is well illustrated in his Ringan Gilhaize, in which the Covenanters of Scotland are described as representatives of the Scottish national cause. It makes a striking contrast to Scott's Old Mortality, in which the author, under the disguise of political impartiality, in fact quite bluntly renders the followers of the Covenant as fanatics. This argument undoubtedly corresponds to the latest fashion of the 'Ideology and Criticism' school, but in this research, I intentionally tried to trace Galt's activities in very traditional way of critical biography in order to lay the ground work for a critical re-evaluation of this neglected writer.