The Scottish Enlightenment and John Galt

在所谓的“英国文学史”中，把“苏格兰作家”沃尔特·斯科特（Walter Scott）作为19世纪早期的代表性小说家之一是一件很正常的事情。虽然他的历史小说清楚地反映了他对苏格兰与英格兰关系中不稳定地位的敏锐认识，但在斯科特那个时代，苏格兰还有其他作家，当然，他们也试图维护/建立苏格兰的国家认同，但方式与斯科特截然不同。其中之一是约翰·盖特，他描述了苏格兰乡村和地区的生活方式，但没有斯科特那样复杂。高尔特的态度可以大致概括为对宗教的更理解，而斯科特与苏格兰启蒙运动有一些非宗教的感觉，这似乎在某种程度上解释了他们在“英国文学史”上的不同立场：可以说高尔特不能被封为圣徒是因为他对当地人民有很深的兴趣，这些人或多或少地同情，例如，对国民盟约的同情，正如他在《林根·吉尔海兹》中所阐述的，苏格兰盟约被描述为苏格兰民族事业的代表。它与斯科特的《老死亡率》形成了鲜明的对比，在斯科特的《老死亡率》中，作者在政治公正的伪装下，实际上相当坦率地将《盟约》的追随者描绘成狂热分子。这一论点无疑符合“意识形态与批评”学派的最新潮流，但在本研究中，我有意试图以非常传统的批评传记方式追溯高尔特的活动，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.