As with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, villainy is not incompatible with lyricism in Ivanhoe. Bois-Guilbert might despise religion, but it is to him that Scott gives the most poetic theological reflection in the novel, when he speaks to Rebecca of the transfigurations of the body at death, “dispersed to the elements of which our strange forms are so mystically composed—not a relic left of that graceful frame, from which we could say this lived and moved!” (p. 399). Rebecca’s stoic faith has grandeur, but not such depths as Bois-Guilbert’s despair. The fact that he dies not from Ivanhoe’s lance but his own “contending passions” is a fantastic, even surreal moment in the text that has embarrassed and perplexed Scott’s readers, but in fact manifests beautifully the historical impossibility of the Templar Knight’s continuing presence in the book. It would do as well for him to have disappeared in a puff of smoke, and awakened on the streets of St. Petersburg in 1895, or Paris in 1968.

As an object of desire in the novel who chooses exile over those who might love her, Rebecca resembles no one in the novel more strikingly than King Richard, who is likewise the object of Ivanhoe’s (and England’s) frustrated love. Richard tantalizingly comes within the precincts of his kingdom, but remotely, in disguise. And when he reveals himself, it is only a temporary emergence from his preferred elusive career as a knight errant. Although the novel ends at a moment of promise for Richard’s reign, Scott has already informed us that he will fail as king, and die on some foolish military adventure in Belgium. Rebecca might belong to an ostracized community, and Richard be merely “brilliant, but useless” (p. 424), but in terms of the generative energies of the novel itself, they are equals. Their remoteness, their unavailability, governs it all. Only Richard’s neglect has allowed the political ambitions of his brother John, and the resistant romantic nationalism of the Saxon Cedric, to flourish. Only Richard’s failure in Palestine has brought Ivanhoe home at all. And it is Rebecca who produces the final showdown between Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert, the former ready to desert Rowena even at the very moment of their betrothal. In riding, half-dead, to Templestowe to rescue Rebecca, Ivanhoe shows us that the impediments to his union with Rowena have never been important. It is the impossible union with Rebecca that drives him, and with it the real action of the novel.

But Rebecca, like Richard, is a love object who will not be loved, an exile who will soon return to exile. Thus the central love objects of the novel are never properly integrated into the national community, leaving the prospects for the emergent Anglo-Norman civilization meager and almost uninteresting. Without Christian chivalry and its magnificent opposite, Jewish martyrdom, Scott’s England is left in a muddle, and it is no wonder that he does not extend the novel to describe its bleak return to what Rebecca calls “a land of war and blood, surrounded by hostile neighbours, and distracted by internal factions” (p. 462). This is the pessimistic counterpoint to the progressive theme of cultural mixture in the novel, and one that seems particularly relevant to the time of Scott’s writing, when Britain’s devastating war against Napoleon had only just concluded, and citizens protesting for political reform lay dead in the town squares of the north at the hands of their countrymen.

Unlike the magnanimous Rebecca, however, Rowena’s more dangerous rival never quits the scene. Ivanhoe’s true love object is chivalry itself, his knightly career, of which Richard is merely the earthly embodiment. Rebecca recognizes the unhealthy grip of chivalric ideology on Ivanhoe’s imagination and, in terms that seem uncannily to anticipate Mark Twain, does her best to disabuse him: “Is there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?” (p. 293). As Cervantes makes plain in his grand satire of chivalry, Don Quixote (1605), knight-errantry was always more a literary phenomenon than an historical one, and Rebecca perceives that Ivanhoe’s self-image is essentially poetic, not a thing of the world. In mockingly pointing this out, Rebecca casts an ironic light on the generic complexities of Scott’s own project, where history lays perpetual siege to the glitter of romance, in fact to literature itself. Scott’s novel might have spawned a global fad for jousting and knights-errant, but his historical critique of chivalry is sincere.

In his essay “Chivalry,” written just prior to Ivanhoe for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott shows that he has far fewer illusions about the romance of chivalry than generations of his readers. Because “every institution becomes deteriorated and degraded” by our animal passions, he argues, the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages stood little chance of fulfilling their lofty union of chastity and righteous militarism: “the devotion of the knights often degenerated into superstition,—their love into licentious-ness, —their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil, —their generosity and gallantry into harebrained madness and absurdity” (Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. 6, p. 166).