The Romantic Outlaw

Rob Roy is Walter Scott's 1817 novel about a young Englishman named Frank Osbaldistone who is disinherited by his father, sent to live with his uncle in Northumberland, falls in love with his cousin Diana Vernon, and finds himself caught up in the Jacobite rising of 1715 and the machinations of a Highland outlaw named Robert MacGregor, known as Rob Roy. Frank is a young man of no particular talent or ambition. He is not a hero. He is not a soldier. He is a poet, a dreamer, a young man who wants nothing more than a quiet life. But he is thrown into a world of danger and intrigue, and he must find the courage to survive. Rob Roy is the real star of the book, even though he appears less than a dozen times. He is a legend even before he walks onto the page a man of immense strength, fierce loyalty, and a code of honor that is as dangerous as it is noble. He is a cattle thief, a blackmailer, and a rebel. He is also a man who will risk everything for his people. 

 The novel is a historical romance, but it is also a meditation on the clash of cultures. The Lowlands are commercial, rational, and increasingly English in their sympathies. The Highlands are tribal, honor-bound, and doomed. Scott, who was a Scottish lawyer and a descendant of Border lairds, understood both worlds. He understood what was lost when the Highlands were pacified after Culloden, and he also understood that the old ways could not survive in the modern world. Rob Roy is a elegy for that lost world. It is a celebration of the outlaw, the rebel, the man who refuses to submit. It is also a warning about what happens when you choose the wrong side. 

 What makes the novel so memorable is its atmosphere. The Scottish Highlands are not just a setting. They are a force of nature dark, beautiful, dangerous, and indifferent to human suffering. The fog rolls in. The rains fall. The mountains loom. Frank is a stranger in a strange land, and he is constantly out of his depth. The scenes in the Highlands are the best in the book: the raid on the castle, the escape through the mountains, the confrontation with Rob Roy himself. Scott was a master of the set piece, and he knew how to build tension. He also knew how to write a villain, and in Rashleigh Osbaldistone, Frank's scheming cousin, he created one of his most memorable a man who is subtle, patient, and utterly without scruples. 

 You will close Rob Roy feeling like you have been on a journey through a Scotland that no longer exists. It is not a perfect novel. The plot is convoluted, the ending is rushed, and Frank is a passive hero who spends most of the book being pushed around by other people. But it is a novel that has captured the imagination of readers for over two hundred years, and it remains one of the most important works of Scottish literature ever written. Read it when you are ready to be swept up in a story of rebellion, romance, and the wild, beautiful, doomed world of the Scottish Highlands. And when you finish, you will understand why Rob Roy is still a hero to so many people. He is not a saint. He is not a villain. He is a legend. And this book is his monument.

SOURCE: Classic Bookworm

SEE ALSO:

The Sea Wolf

The Moonlight Rider

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear? 

The father it is, with his infant so dear; 

He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm, 

He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm. … 

 The father now gallops, with terror half wild, 

He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child; 

He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread, 

The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

THE PAINTING:

 Arnold Böcklin  - The Moonlit Landscape with Ruin (1849)

THE POEM: 

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe - Erlkönig (1782)

Life in Big City : The Signs of Degeneration

 

"The big city is the successful suicide attempt of man - the "invigorating" and inorganic diet of meat, alcohol, smoking, bars and the connoisseur world, with the contempt for everything natural, such as: the devaluation of women; swimming trunks, to the shame of those who wear them; the spiritual and moral levels of certain magazines and cinemas; the sterilization of souls by the machines; the rhythms of modern dances and fashion;  the whipping up of man by sensations; big advertisements, childlessness, the need for luxury in the big city, and, last but not least, the actual establishment of life insurance policies, or the consumption of artificial fertilizers, along with the erudition of life-dead "scientists", the idle time of administrators, in the proliferation of useless writing, their outflow of novels and "life problems", in the echoing of shallow flattery, the escapism of "intellectual greats" from the world, the flight into magic, mysticism, occult teachings, the attempts to revive already dead religious heritages - all this is morbid, and signs of degeneration.

Everywhere in these fields the counter-attack has been set in motion - not for the sake of a fight, oh no, that would be inorganic, but for the purpose of developing one's own forces and values.

It is amusing to see how decadence even celebrates triumphs today, for it too has awakened forces - thus it celebrates its zenith not only in Germany, but especially in America.

The Jew is the true core of decadence, as his way of life and his views on life are the prototype of the pathological: the devaluation of the economy to the capital market; the devaluation of culture and of women to sensual commodities; the devaluation of peoples, states and people to machines, and the devaluation of every ideal value as a justification for unrestrained instinct and lust.

This is the world we declared war on."

Taken from:

Rüdiger von Steinbach - The Victory of Life is the Meaning of the World

(Translated by National Socialist Lit Archive)