Richard Maxwell Ivanhoe

Inundations of Time: A Definition of Scott's Originality

Maxwell, Richard, 1948-

ELH, Volume 68, Number 2, Summer 2001, pp. 419-468 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/elh.2001.0016

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419Richard MaxwellELH 68 (2001) 419–468 © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

INUNDATIONS OF TIME: A DEFINITION OF SCOTT’SORIGINALITY

BY RICHARD MAXWELL

Between 1830 and 1930, the Waverley novels were omnipresent. It istrue, of course, that the tone of their reception changed several timesduring this period. First, they were the latest thing, a brilliant, univer-sally hailed spotlight on the past, then a solid appurtenance of civiliza-tion (occasionally, for that matter, traveling with voyagers to distantlands as a comforting reminder of home), then—as demonstrated by amass of modernist fiction, itself now largely forgotten—a slightlycontemptible item of juvenile instruction or interior decoration.1 But forall this time, a century more or less, they remained omnipresent, andthen—just as contempt began to be replaced by neglect or simpleoblivion—they were reconceived by Georg Lukács, whose study of TheHistorical Novel (1937) attempted to show that Scott had indeed donesomething really valuable. He had invented “The Classical HistoricalNovel,” setting a standard against which Tolstoy, for instance, could bejudged.

Lukács’ learned study eventually exerted international influence. TheEnglish language translation of The Historical Novel was published in1962; it made its way onto graduate school reading lists in England andAmerica, and also achieved recognition outside the academic world. Inthe meantime, however, the range of eighteenth-century and romanticnovels to which Lukács made direct reference began to seem con-stricted. Particularly during the last decade, a number of intrepidexplorers in the library discovered that the Waverley novels were not sosingular as they had appeared to the great Marxist, or to severalgenerations of nineteenth-century reviewers. A major genre—the na-tional tale—was rediscovered as a source of inspiration, Gothic andsentimental novels identified as precedents, William Godwin’s “OfHistory and Romance” (1797) printed for the first time and revalued.2 Ishall have little to say directly about these developments, except thatthey are highly illuminating and make advisable a reassessment ofLukács. The current essay assumes that Scott is indeed much more of aborrower than he seemed to Lukács, and that powerful alternatives to

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420 A Definition of Scott’s Originality

his version of historical fiction are established by such novelists asGodwin, John Galt, and Charles Maturin (not to mention the practitio-ners of the national tale). Within this frame of reference, I suggest thatLukács grasped a crucial point about Scott’s originality, although his caseis incomplete and not quite stated.

Far from wrong, however. Scott’s version of historical fiction is theoutgrowth not precisely of an interest in ages gone by but of the give-and-take between two different kinds of presentness. These models ofthe present might be exemplified by Queen-Hoo Hall (Joseph Strutt’santiquarian historical novel) and Maria Edgeworth’s national tales; inthe preface to the 1829 Magnum Opus edition of his novels, Scott citesthese works as formative. However, it will be useful to focus on aretrospective, consciously philosophical pair of statements, and thusemphasize the importance of reception history; Scott lives, sometimes,most fully in his readers. The statements in question were made byFriederich Nietzsche (articulating the antiquarian viewpoint) and Lukács(representing the salutary effect of living in an international andinstantaneous present). Each argument is less full than it could be; each,for that reason, suggests the stakes in imagining a Scott who practices asort of nostalgic sociology or who chronicles a drama of mutual andtransnational recognition.

I. NOSTALGIC TAXONOMIES

Nietzsche’s bemused contempt for Scott mingles with an admirationboth perverse and ineradicable. “Winckelmann’s and Goethe’s Greeks,Victor Hugo’s orientals, Wagner’s Edda characters, Walter Scott’s En-glishmen of the thirteenth century—some day the whole comedy will beexposed! it was all history false beyond measure, but—modern, true.”3

Nietzsche is observing that attempts to evoke the past often reek of theperiod of their creation—even if they are only perceived to do sobelatedly. As an evocation of the thirteenth century Ivanhoe is worth-less, but it remains an object of considerable historical value, evokingthe years that followed the Napoleonic Wars in its reconstruction of lateNorman England. Scott, then, is a historian, but only in the sense thathe lives under the sway of passing fashions and expresses their mean-ings. To put this another way, he is a historian because he is subject tohistory and capable of externalizing his subjection.

So claims the sardonic Nietzsche, the philosopher deprived of alldreaminess. On the other hand, there is another Nietzsche, who valuesthe truth of Scott’s modernized past more complexly. This is a philoso-pher who has gotten worn out (perhaps with his own cynicism, among

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other things), and who can write (to the classical scholar Erwin Rohde, in1875): “When I am resting my eyes, my sister reads to me, almost alwaysWalter Scott, whom I would call, as Schopenhauer does, an ‘immortal’; somuch do I like his artistic tranquillity, his andante, that I would like torecommend him to you; yet what strikes a chord for me does not alwaysaffect you; because you think more sharply and quickly than I do.”4 Makinghis confession of a partiality for Scott, Nietzsche is apologetic, almostashamed. To appreciate Scott one must not think sharply; quite thecontrary, one must lie back and rest one’s eyes, one must depend on one’ssister to read aloud, descending with her loving assistance into a restor-ative though unintellectual “tranquillity.” Scott is the classic entertain-ment of the convalescent, the slowly recovering patient separated fromthe grind of the outside world but struggling to recover contact with it.5

This aestheticized restfulness, a trance-like if learned look back-wards, emerges at a late date from the tradition of Western antiquarian-ism. Arnaldo Momigliano observes that “the separation of politicalhistory from antiquarian studies . . . happened in fact when Thucydidescreated political history. . . . In consequence history became a narrationof political and military events, preference being given to the events ofwhich the writer had been a witness.” Antiquarianism—or archeology,as it was first called—was what was left over after Thucydides’ redefini-tion of history. The antiquary concentrates on studying social systems,covering “the whole subject section by section” rather than explainingthings in a causal and sequential manner. Antiquaries have neveravoided chronology, according to Momigliano, but neither has it orga-nized their work. To identify antiquarianism with (usually comic) effortsto date particular objects is to miss the point. The antiquary’s fundamen-tal interest is in the interdependence among parts of a given whole; aDurkheimian sociologist, indeed a structuralist avant la lettre, he worksby means of inclusive systems of classification rather than throughnarrative.6 Such taxonomies are generally synchronic, assembling ele-ments whose dates of origin may be distant from one another but whichcoexist to form a single totality. “His world was static, his ideal was thecollection.”7 Think of a period room in a museum, where the feel of aspecific era is evoked by assembling furniture from several differentdecades, or even centuries (nobody except for a few stubborn puristsowns furniture all made in the same moment); or indeed of the crucialSaussurean example, linguistic systems built out of words with miscella-neous points of origin but mutually defining in a specific cross-section oftime. (“A linguistic state,” writes Saussure, is “a projection of [historicalreality] at one given moment.”)8 The fundamental antiquarian time


frame may be one’s own era, but this is not the anomaly it appears. Theantiquary reconstructs the past so that large-scale social structures canbecome visible—ideally, in the communal social behavior of his ownmoment. Thus chivalry is, in Scott, at once a quaint, long-discardedsystem requiring learned investigation and the basis of modern man-ners, through which it filters in many different ways. Chivalry is bothlong gone and pervasive in our daily lives.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries labor under nonostalgic burden. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, “nostalgia”has begun its linguistic life in the English language as a coinage (fromGreek “nostos” [return]) denoting a pathological condition, “a form ofmelancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s home or country.”R. Hamilton can write in the Edinburgh Medical Communications of1786 of the “History of a remarkable Case of Nostalgia”; for SydneySmith, in 1818, the word still performs a diagnostic function.9 “Nostal-gia” has its idiomatic equivalent in “homesickness” (specifically associ-ated with the longing for home among mountain peoples, such as theScottish Highlanders). Without replacing “homesickness,” however,“nostalgia” also becomes a word in common use, denoting chronologicalas well as geographical separation. These semantic changes signal a newconnection with antiquarianism. The investigations of the antiquary areincreasingly designed to situate us in a community, a home, which weare at once distant from (how far away its chronological origins are!) andvery near to (the marks of tradition, once we know where to look, are allaround us). This effort—by its nature, nationalistic—tends in some of itslater manifestations to take on a mystic glow, to be associated with theevocation of a happy world which can be not only recovered butpossessed and inhabited.10 By the early nineteenth century, nostalgicantiquarianism is an established category—almost a genre in itself. It isliterature’s preeminent effort to blur the conflicts of history, to makewithin them a yearned-for retreat.

Though Nietzsche is not the first to underline Scott’s antiquariannostalgias, he describes these whispered reorderings with greater ana-lytical flair than any predecessor. A striking gloss upon the nostalgicScott (though it never mentions him) is a passage from “On the Usesand Disadvantages of History for Life” (1874), where Nietzsche distin-guishes among three uses of history: the monumental (imitating greatmen of the past), the critical (destroying reverence for the past to freeoneself from it), and—a middle term—the antiquarian. It is thephilosopher’s characterization of this latter category, indeed of theantiquary’s very “soul,” over which I shall pause:

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By tending with care that which has existed from of old, he wants topreserve for those who shall come into existence after him the condi-tions under which he himself came into existence—and thus he serveslife. . . . The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; hereads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations, its holidays,like an illuminated diary of his youth. . . . he looks beyond his ownindividual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of hishouse, his race, his city. Sometimes he even greets the soul of his nationacross the long dark centuries of confusion as his own soul; an ability tofeel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almostextinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter howintricate its palimpsest, yes, polypseste may be—these are his talentsand virtues.11

Nietzsche holds fire, refusing to dwell excessively upon the antiquary’soft-cited vulnerabilities. These are, indeed, admitted: his mania forcollecting any old junk, his obsession with trivia, his barely suppresseddesire to live within a constructed past of such intolerable quaintnessand confusion that history might be no more than a knick-knack shelf.All the same, despite the antiquary’s traditional association with age, it istowards a scrubbed and idealized adolescence, his own and his country’s,that his sensibility turns. When “the history of one’s city is identifiedwith the history of oneself” [Die Geschichte seiner Stadt wird ihm zurGeschichte seiner selbst]—the two things overlain as in a palimpsest, orbetter yet, a “polypseste,” a city like a layered coral reef combining theliving and the dead—the result is a nostalgia both personal andcommunal. The obsession with studying relics of the past may seem toplace the antiquary as a brilliant but detached figure in a scholarlytradition; nonetheless, it is “his preserving and revering soul” [diebewahrende und verehrende Seele] which dominates his personality,allowing him to love the historical past as part of himself, to love it asthough it were his own biography. By a kind of optical illusion,antiquarian nostalgia foreshortens history, personalizes it so that we canclaim it for ourselves—so that we can inhabit the home which we(presumably) desire, or at least be near to it in an act of memory whichspans but a few years. Events beyond the reach of any possible lifetimeseem to have happened within our own experience and thus to belong tothe enchanted realm of nostalgia. The antiquary looks back on them asexcerpts from “an illuminated diary of his own youth” [ein ausgemaltesTagebuch seiner Jugend].12 This last phrase is crucial: “ausgemaltes”suggests a medieval psalter, four or five hundred years old, whereas“Tagebuch seiner Jugend” brings us back to a period just before our ownand still imaginably connected with living persons. Many times and


cultural moments are united by the spirit of place into a medium inwhich the overall unity of the past supports and widens individualsentiments.

One could imagine a scenario in which the antiquary’s passions wouldblot out his own identity in favor of “his house, his race, his city.” ForNietzsche, however, the antiquary’s follies remain both endearing andheroic. The dream of antiquarian recovery, where we wander in the pastas in an illuminated diary—or perhaps in a house like Scott’s Abbotsford,domestic and museum-like both—may not reveal the past as it actuallywas, no more than Ivanhoe replicates the thirteenth century. All thesame, this seemingly distant era (really, perhaps, no more than yesterdaydisguised) creates a mood of reverence associated with social, cultural,and ultimately national oneness. Whether as a fiery deistic radical (likeJoseph Ritson) or a staunch Tory (Scott’s fully nostalgic version), theantiquary roots time in a defined place, on whose mingled associationshe is typically prepared to live.

II. SIMULTANEITY: THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT

Karl Marx was fascinated by the lore of the Forty-Five, particularlyby its place in a larger dialectical clash between revolution and counter-revolution; moreover, he wrote journalistic dispatches on the Forty-Five’s aftermath, the expulsion of the Highlanders and their replace-ment by grazing sheep—a process still under way in the 1840s and 50s.Given his sharp, if schematic, knowledge of things Scottish, and hisinterest in laws of progress (largely inherited from the Scottish Enlight-enment), Marx’s obsession with Scott looks less idyllic than it otherwisemight. Though he read the Waverley novels to his children by thefireside, the gatherings there were not always cozy. He returned to Scott“again and again,” writes his daughter Eleanor, dwelling, it would seem,on certain painful parts of Highland lore. “The little girl [Eleanor] heardto her horror that she herself belonged partly to the detested clan ofCampbell,” the clan that cooperated most fully with imperial authority,and thus hastened the destruction of Gaelic culture in Scotland.13 Scott’ssupport of development, which he thought necessary and inevitable,even if initially devastating for those in its way, makes him a naturalobject of interest for Marx. The economist may have been a revolution-ary, the novelist a Tory, but the two of them agree on the desirability ofprogress, even of changes which could temporarily tear the world apart.In this sense, they are both on the side of the Campbells. Marx’s Scottthus chronicles a relentless and painful process of historical change,arousing rather than soothing.

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This case is broadly suggested in Marx; Lukács spells it out. ThoughThe Historical Novel dismisses antiquarian approaches to Scott’s fiction,it also criticizes crude efforts to allegorize the Waverley novels and toread them for covert references to the writer’s own time. Lukácsconceives the presentness of historical fiction much more complexly:

The French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall ofNapoleon . . . for the first time made history a mass experience, andmoreover on a European scale. . . . Now if experiences such as these arelinked with the knowledge that similar upheavals are taking place allover the world, this must enormously strengthen the feeling first thatthere is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process ofchanges and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of everyindividual.14

These sentences, from the opening pages of The Historical Novel, are asrich with implications as Nietzsche’s character sketch of the antiquary.Scott’s interest is not so much in any specific event as in the atmosphereof eventfulness, and thus of separation from tradition and from the past,created by many great happenings occurring on the heels of oneanother. The increasing velocity of change brings history into view,whether by forcing people to participate directly in it or by exposingthem to mass propaganda.15 This new visibility has an equally significanteffect: the multitudinous participants in the great European upheavalare able to imagine that other people or even other nations areexperiencing equally drastic changes. This is not to say that cultures arehomogenized; part of the point is that different groups, as they come toinhabit a common ground, are compelled to recognize differencesamong them. On these terms, a condensation in time creates a kind ofconceptual intimacy among the scattered denizens of a transformedworld, who now share points of reference as well as conditions ofsurvival. Even in everyday life, human beings across a wide area arefreshly aware of each other’s simultaneous existence. To echo Lukács’phrase, their awareness becomes the precondition for the classicalhistorical novel.

Lukács’ theory of simultaneity has had a rich afterlife. BenedictAnderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (1983) suggests that the realist novel promotesnationalism by encouraging people to think of themselves as thesimultaneous members of a great commonwealth—a concept whichcould not be derived from face-to-face contact. Anderson acknowledgesthe influence of Walter Benjamin in formulating this thesis, but he


should surely have credited The Historical Novel also. Both Lukács andBenjamin are fundamentally different from Anderson in dwelling onhistory as a state of emergency; the simultaneity of crisis and interna-tional war is very far from Anderson’s simultaneity, which createseveryday reassertions of reality and subsumes actual effects, virtuallybefore the fact, to ideological effects.16 Lukács would not have beenaltogether sympathetic to Anderson’s rereading of simultaneity, for inthe Lukácsian understanding of Balzac (see below), history reappears ina chronologically abbreviated form but is not eliminated. For thepurposes of the present essay, therefore, I am using simultaneity with itsearlier rather than its later inflection: Lukács is my reference pointrather than Anderson.

Of all the accusations leveled against Lukács, perhaps the mostfrequent is that he ignores form. However, the circumstances in whichhistorical fiction becomes possible have an equivalent formal manifesta-tion underlined by the critic. In the classical historical novel, “Thehistorical ‘here and now’ . . . means that certain crises in the personaldestinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave withinthe determining context of an historical crisis.”17 In other words,“dramatic concentration and intensification of events” (in the novels,now, not in history as such) is being used to a particular end. We are toexperience, possibly to reenact, the process by which people becamewhat they were under conditions of widespread stress. The coincidence,the interweaving, the mutual recognition—cumulatively, the simultane-ity of their lives—creates a compelling presentness, a “here and now,”which the reader too is invited, for the novel’s duration, to join. Lukácsspeaks of the “poetic awakening” of Scott’s characters, meaning that thenovelist himself seems to create them out of the burgeoning events, thematerial environment, in which they found themselves and which he hasattempted to evoke for his audience.18 The great figures glimpsed briefly(Montrose or Mary Stuart) and the typical figures closely followed areboth shaped by an environment whose crowdedness is doubly signifi-cant: it reflects that mass historical experience which begins with theFrench Revolution, and it is also a manifestation of Scott’s novelistic art,one repeated frequently in novels describing many different historicalperiods. It is, as will be seen, as if a particular psychological condition ofthe author’s world could be replicated formally in books about a greatvariety of social periods; on these terms all of history can be opened upto view.

A further twist should be noted, even in this abbreviated account ofLukács’ subtle argument. As long as the pace of change remained slow,

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as long as the world seemed full of unbridgeable distances, the historicalnovel could hardly be a genre of special interest. Let time and spacearrive at a point of focus, as in the period 1789-1815, and the historicalnovel becomes more than a genre; it becomes a force which works agood deal like history itself. Not only does it depict characters deeplyinvolved with specific historical worlds, it also enlists its readers in thesame “uninterrupted process of changes.” Though Scott detests Napo-leon, he is a literary version of that hated and feared enemy. History andfiction act increasingly alike, both revealing the existence, not tomention the power, of sociopolitical upheaval as it overtakes all ofEurope and much of North America. Historical fiction becomes anagent in the process which originally made it possible.

History is an uninterrupted process of changes. This process hadcertainly been going on long before 1789: the Revolution and itsaftermath brought into view a phenomenon known already to learned ortitled elites, but the same phenomenon had been part of the humancondition for millennia. Thus Lukács raises an awkward question: oncethe shift in consciousness occurs, once the populations of Europe atlarge accept the existence of history (and agree, as an interesting sideeffect, to consume large quantities of historical fiction), once this chainof effects is set into motion, is there any going back? Can the masses, ineffect, be neutralized, reduced to the oblivious multitude which theyonce constituted? To some extent, the answer would have to beaffirmative. After 1815 and the Congress of Vienna, history as anuninterrupted process of change seemed to slow or stop. This apparentperiod of stasis (to be repeated after the flare-ups of 1848 and duringother crises) is not in itself a conceptual problem for Lukács’ Hegelianvision of historical development. If one believes that human culturechanges through a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and if oneadheres closely to the doctrine of “sublation” by which the conflicts ofhistory are always being raised to a higher level, then the stasis thatfollows 1815 or 1848 can be read as a necessary antithetical moment onthe way to a fresh historical truth and a new dispensation of social andpolitical justice. Mass movements which are suppressed or, worse yet,forget themselves will prove later to have had a better memory and agreater force than might have been supposed. However, in Lukács’treatment of the literary history which parallels this political one, adilemma arises. It is a distinct minority who persevere much beyond thefirst chapter of The Historical Novel, which describes the “classical”form of the genre invented by Scott and perfected in Manzoni, Pushkin,and Tolstoy. There is a reason for this perhaps unconscious reluctance,


manifested alike (in my experience) by the innocent student, thelearned Marxist, and the curious general reader. History may be movingon by the peculiar crab-like sidestep which Hegelian thought assures usis the true form of progress. All the same, the historical novel does not,apparently, move with it. Insofar as we assent to Lukács’ devastatingcritiques of the romantic historical novel in France (Vigny, Hugo,Dumas), the naturalistic historical novel (exemplified by indefatigablecollaborators Erckmann and Chatrian, or on a higher level by certainworks of Zola), the decadent, indeed sado-masochistic historical novelof Flaubert, or, last and perhaps least, the humanistic historical novel ofRomain Rolland or Heinrich Mann, we will be disinclined to supposethat the genre will ever have much to offer us again after, roughly, thetime of War and Peace. Lukács holds out hope that some hithertounimagined twist will revitalize the historical novel, but he remainsfixated on that classical form whose return, untransformed by historyand sublation, is impossible. In point of fact, the masses may rememberonce more their place in history—as they briefly did in 1848, and as theydid more cataclysmically in Russia in 1917—but historical fiction is notconcurrently resurrected.

Lukács’ most sustained work of literary criticism is the history of agenre which dies prematurely and then (during chapters two, three, andfour of The Historical Novel) remains dead; the genre’s decline isexhibited to us from every possible angle but never effectively denied.No genre has been more destructively chronicled by a critic who meansit well. The achievement seems perverse; all the same, there is aperfectly good reason why Lukács has lost heart. Toward the end of hisfirst chapter, he virtually repeats the striking account of time with whichhe began; the object of discussion, this second time around, is not Scottbut Honoré de Balzac:

The compression of historically portrayed events into a relatively briefperiod, full of big changes following one another in rapid succession,forces Balzac to characterize almost each year of the developmentindividually . . . whereas it was sufficient for Scott to present the generalcharacter of a longer epoch with historical faithfulness.19

This passage chronicles the rebirth of the historical novel—but inBalzac, according to Lukács, it is the present rather than the past whichis treated historically. Balzac’s present includes at most half a century,the fifty-year span immediately before the decades in which theComédie humaine was published. The point of this definition, whichstrains after a fine distinction indeed, would appear to be that spans of

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time close to the literal present—the moment when we live, feel, andwrite—would not have counted as the past for people of the earlynineteenth century, not, that is, until Balzac and the other great socialrealists came along. With the appearance of the Comédie humaine, “theage of the classical historical novel is . . . closed.”20 It is closed becausea mere fifty years (and by extrapolation, twenty, fifteen, or five) can nowbe redefined as a series of distinct epochs. The historical novel isminiaturized: historical fiction lives once more within the chronologicalrefinements of realism, its reach backwards shorter but for that reasonmore authoritative. Lukács nowhere shows any deep conviction that anovel about times long gone could compete in seriousness with one thattreated the recent past; in apotheosizing Balzac, he seems to jettisonancient history altogether as a feasible subject for fiction. The past towhich the novelist reaches out gets nearer. It is always located behindus, but—as in Zeno’s paradox—the gap continually narrows.

If Lukács’ theory begins with the evocation of a crisis widely shared,a cataclysm of linked experiences; if it allows even for a readingaudience defined in these terms (pressed, so to speak, into the service ofhistory); then it ends by implying that the same cataclysmic moment isthe subject of historical fiction, now, of course, reborn as realism. This isa fast, slippery, and fascinating set of moves. Perhaps it is the weaknessas well as the strength of Marxist criticism that when it evokes history, itso often means only a presentist kind of history—the history of now, orthe history of that thinly-disguised riposte to now, a millennial, utopianfuture. Though Lukács is well aware of this danger and does his best,here and elsewhere, to distance himself from it, he cannot entirely avoidthe trap which his own argument sets. Scott leads to Balzac; and Balzac’shistorically inflected obsession with the present, or a past often no olderthan yesterday, remains a model for future fiction.21 To the synchronicpresent of antiquarianism, Lukács opposes the simultaneous present ofcatastrophic dissolutions signalling the start of the modern world. Bythis standard the Waverley novels get a twentieth-century lease on life:no longer implausible reminders of an unrecoverable antiquity, theybecome the harbingers of that new life where much (even all) that issolid melts into air.

III. CRISIS AND NOSTALGIA COMBINED

Lukács is correct to propose that Scott’s fiction gains much of itsimpact from the author’s (and reader’s) experience with a sharplydefined present of international upheaval. Though the Marxist and theTory are obviously an ill-matched pair, they share a concern with the


results of development. On the other hand, the Author of Waverleyapproaches this focused period of emergency—the French Revolutionand its aftermath—through a discipline of memory more extensive thanLukács can acknowledge. Scott began his literary life as an antiquary(collector of folk ballads, student of local customs and border genealogy,author of learned poems about ages gone, poems in which the notesoutpace and occasionally outshine the text). During the Peninsular wars(1808-14), he adapts this role in order to come to terms with theNapoleonic challenge; both in his journalism and his novels, he rethinksthe simultaneous present by means of long-established antiquarianskills.

There are precedents and parallels for this enterprise. Two of themindicate some useful points of reference. First, the intrinsic logic ofmany antiquarian works turns them towards the realm of the simulta-neous. An outstanding instance is afforded by “Hardyknute” (1719), animitation of an ancient ballad chronicling a bloody invasion of Scotlandand probably the literary work most deeply ingrained in Scott’s memory.(“I was taught Hardiknute by heart,” he claimed, “before I could readthe ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt—the last I shallever forget”; he also recalled annoying a local clergyman, “who had notpatience to have a sober chat interrupted by my shouting forth thisditty.”)22 An eighteenth-century editor wrote of “Hardyknute” that its“[d]escriptions are so lively that they seem instantly to create a trueProspect of whatever they represent to us: Nay, such is the Force andRapidity of his [the supposedly ancient author’s] Genius that it hurriesus along to the different Scenes of Action, as fast as they are changed,and makes us the Hearers or Eye-witnesses of all that is said or done.”“Hardyknute”’s bardic narrative summons up history, presents it beforeour eyes, an accomplishment duplicated by many other eighteenth-century faux epics; in Ossian, above all, the song of the bard coexistswith the scenes it chronicles, a correlation which is stressed by changesof tense.23 This sort of shift, repeated again and again, goes a long way toprepare readers for the notion that the antiquary might become achronicler of political and social emergency in a present time defined bymass involvement and evoked as though it were occurring before oureyes.24

The second precedent represents an amalgam of gothic terror withEnlightenment rationality. The Pole Jan Potocki—antiquary, interna-tional diplomat, and romantic tale-writer—made himself into a widely-recognized expert on chronology.25 Potocki proposed to establish thetruth of ancient histories by juxtaposing them in an almost endless series

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of parallel charts. Since the historians of old did not read each other, heargued, the dates on which they agree must be accurate. Working fromsuch agreements, he could then establish a whole range of simultaneousoccurrences across the ancient world. Antiquarian texts are renewed—even recreated—by this process. We understand them within a presenttense established by Potocki’s relentless comparative timetables. Thisdevice is developed a step further in Potocki’s well-known fictionalproject. Most of The Manuscript Found at Saragossa was published in1814, the same year as Waverley; many years later, in 1827, Scotthimself discovered the book and was “much taken” with it.26 TheManuscript concerns a document purportedly discovered by a youngofficer in Napoleon’s army during the siege of Saragossa. Taken pris-oner, the officer whiles away his time by working on a translation of themanuscript. It proves to be a collection of tales, the first of which isnarrated by Alphonse van Worden, an ancestor of the captain, but manylater sections are stories told to van Worden or to people who have toldhim stories. The Manuscript presents many extraordinary occurrences(such as when van Worden makes loves to a pair of beautiful sisters who,the next morning, prove to be hanged men), but much of the time it isunclear whether these events are truly supernatural or part of somelarge-scale conspiracy. This ambiguity is soon compounded by another,more worrying yet: Potocki’s experiments with nested, recessive talesprove so dizzying that van Worden (and the reader with him) loses trackof where he stands in relation to the stories or of how the stories relateto one another. The book becomes a nightmare of labyrinthine narra-tive, made comprehensible only by an insight which proves, in the longrun, to be Potocki’s real subject. Many of the tales prove to intersectchronologically: they are occurring at the same time and can thus beused to illuminate each another, in a formally created effect of simulta-neity. As the virtuous and tender Rebecca notes, “‘You are right. . . .‘One would find in one column, for example, the story of the Marquesade Val Florida being unfaithful to her husband, in the other the effectsthis event had on him. That would no doubt clarify the story.’”27 Intelling us how to read his book, Potocki has returned to his belovedchronological columns, which now provide the structural basis for adazzling evocation of narrative and historical presentness.

Efforts to explore relations between the old and the new—or, moreprecisely, between those two versions of the present which I have calledsynchrony and simultaneity—are much in the air during the eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries. The antiquary who, like Lady Wardlaw,actually becomes a bard is well on the way to a metamorphosis which


Scott, in his own fashion, will reenact. The antiquary who, like Potocki,lets a historiographical investigation of chronology shape his tales is wellon the way to discovering a fresh set of equivalences between fiction andhistory, equivalences which Scott will also exploit. It is a measure ofScott’s centrality that the Waverley novels are reminiscent of these caseswhile outdoing them in range and sophistication. The Author ofWaverley mingles the rhetoric of synchronic antiquarianism with that ofcrisis-ridden simultaneity. On occasion this accomplishment seemspurely technical, an attempt to provide an entertaining—and self-justifying—sensation of vividness. Almost always, however, a furthermotive informs such practices. When he writes historical fiction, Scottlearns to relive the mass experience of history brought home to him sopowerfully during the Napoleonic wars. For him, that era was comingtriumphantly to its conclusion during the latter half of 1813, when themanuscript of Waverley was so providently rediscovered. There wouldbe subsequent crises, especially in the momentous year 1819, but nonewith the primacy of the Napoleonic struggle: the Reform Bill of 1832,debated while Scott lay dying, was only the aftershock of continentaltransformation, as England endeavored to adjust itself to the newEurope brought into being by the French Revolution. FollowingWaterloo, the world seemed to change on principles already settled:reflecting a widely held view, Harriet Martineau’s account of the post-Waterloo period would be called A History of the Thirty Years’ Peace. A.D. 1816-1846.28 However, the pressure of historical experience, thesense of high stakes, found at least one new home. By a tour de forceremarkable even at the distance of almost two centuries, Scott madesimultaneity occupy a recollected past remarkable for its institutionsand manners (that is, for its antiquarian features) rather than for massinvolvement in earthshaking events.

IV. SYNCHRONY AS SIMULTANEITY IN THE EDINBURGH ANNUALREGISTER

Scott’s first great experiment with chronicling history in the makingoccurred when he became involved in publishing and writing TheEdinburgh Annual Register. Here he tested in print a participant’s pointof view on historical process. Not that he had actual military experiencesto write about: he recorded the upheavals of the Napoleonic era fromthe distance, and relative safety, of Edinburgh or the countryside. But itis just this kind of involvement which Lukács had in mind when hedescribed the mood of Europe during the early nineteenth century asthe basic inspiration for historical fiction. We all participate in these

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events because we are all conscious of them: those not pressed into massmilitary service have been reached by a vast propaganda machineworking full time to insist on the importance of the struggle and thestake of those who remain at home. Scott’s work for the Register—where he was, in effect, part of the propaganda machine—trained himto understand how it was that an antiquary could both master the realmof the simultaneous and use it for his own purposes, a lesson he couldthen apply in his production of the Waverley novels.

Modelled loosely on the annual register founded by Robert Dodsley(1758) and edited by Edmund Burke, The Edinburgh Annual Registerdebuted in 1810. A prospectus—written, presumably, by Scott orArchibald Constable—emphasizes the need to set down in print thedisaster which, by Tory lights, was then befalling Europe. In a crucialpassage, the editors compare the difficulties of compiling “the annals ofa year” with those of chronicling the history of “a hundred centuries.”29

The historian—especially if he is treating the remote past—lackssufficient data, but he has plenty of time to think about the evidence hedoes possess and is unlikely, moreover, to be caught up in rages ofpartisan feeling. The annalist, of necessity a partisan, is faced with toomuch information from too many places, and, furthermore, writes on adeadline which discourages selectivity or thoughtfulness. Nonetheless,the annalist is less a species of journalist than a philosophic investigator,producing a “connected and systematized narrative.”30 Though thisnarrative is less considered than that of Gibbon’s and Hume’s greathistories, it makes the same sort of truth claim, possesses the same sortof ambition, and could possibly achieve the same sort of success. Thegap between annalist and historian demonstrates less the incompatibil-ity of these two personages than their underlying similarity.

The comparison between annalist of the moment and historian of theremote past, the insistence that each faces structurally similar difficul-ties, is communicated not only in the Prospectus to the Register but alsoin its format.31 Shortly before he proposed the Register to Constable,Scott had considered seriously another, related project, “an antiquarianrepository” to be called Rhadamanthus or the British Librarian.32 Noone but he thought that such a serial would have popular appeal, yetRhadamanthus lives on in the back pages, or second volumes, of theEdinburgh Annual Register. Scott wrote the most memorable of thelong obituaries featured during this period, a memoir of the philologist-explorer John Leyden. He also encouraged or invited many of thefrequent translations and reprintings of documents from medieval andRenaissance times. It was Scott, finally, who articulated the contrast and


comparison between burrowing in the half-legendary past and chron-icling the all-too-urgent present. The Register for 1809 reprints hispoem The Vision of Don Roderick a few months after it had beenpublished in quarto; Roderick begins with an invocation of the musewhich defines what the poet characterizes as a drastic chronologicalturnabout. He asks for “a strain, whose sounds of mounting fire / Mayrise distinguish’d o’er the din of war”; he requests, in other words, a kindof poem which can compete with the noisy eloquence of the eventswhich it seeks to chronicle (“The thundering cry of hosts with conquestcrown’d, / The female shriek, the ruin’d peasant’s moan”). Up until now,the poet notes, he has transcribed or imitated folk verse of his ownlocality, musty compositions “[t]hat now scarce win a listening ear butthine, / Of feuds obscure, and Border ravaging.” A Highland spirit (froma “misty cairn”) tells Scott to go south, where he will discover higherpassions and higher themes than those to be found in mere Borderminstrelsy. Scott obliges. Drawing on time-honored epic convention, herecords the descent to a perilous and prophetic underworld by DonRoderick, last of the Gothic kings of Spain. In a sort of subterraneancinema, Roderick witnesses his own death and then, beyond it, severalcrucial cultural phases in the history of his native land—leading up tothe Peninsular Wars, whose successful termination Scott ends byprophesying.33

Like so much else in the Register, this turn from deep past toimmediate present suggests both the conflict and (Scott supposed) thedeeper similarity between writing retrospective history and giving anaccount on-demand of one’s own moment. Not that the poem hasworked out the logic of this relationship satisfactorily: Roderick effectsonly a murky compromise between the antiquarian’s interest in proto-sociological accounts of periods and the patriot-journalist’s pressing callto arms. Its “object . . . is less to commemorate or detail particularincidents, than to exhibit a general and impressive picture of the severalperiods brought upon the stage,” as a note immediately preceding thepoem announces; the same note describes the poem as “hastily”executed, “written for a temporary purpose, and on passing events,” andsubject, furthermore, to “negligence and incoherence.” (Profits were togo to the “relief of the Portugueze sufferers” of the Peninsular Wars.)34

A yen for the definition of social states has not been fully reconciledwith the desire to address the crisis of the moment. For all this,Roderick exemplifies Scott’s attempt to define the shape of his careerduring the final years of the Napoleonic conflict.

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His effort was widely noticed, nowhere more explicitly than in thepages of the Register itself. On the one hand, its 1810 volumes (issuedduring 1812) are unusually, expansively self-conscious in providingjustifications for studying the past. “The discovery of an unknown bard”(the seventeenth-century lyricist Patrick Carey) is accompanied by anelaborate rationale for mystiques of age, and for allowing oneself to befascinated with survivals of time precisely because they are survivals.35

Similarly, Leyden’s sonnets investigate that mixture of historical andpersonal memory which Nietzsche was to analyze as the quintessentialform of antiquarianism. On the other hand, this Register concludes witha different sort of piece. The work in question is John Wilson’s poem,“The Magic Mirror,” a homage to Roderick “Addressed to Walter ScottEsq” in which Wilson plays Roderick and Scott plays the Sorcerer-Bardwho displays in his magic mirror first a romantic and misty world ofromance which either never existed or is long gone, then the crises ofthe present moment:

“Thou lov’st,” said he [Scott], “on warlike pomp to gaze;’Tis a true Scottish pride—look here again,

And dream no more of deeds of other days.”—Glad I obeyed,—and lo! the shores of Spain

Rose beautifully terrible, like heaven,When all it’s lowering clouds in wrathful hosts are driven.36

The nostalgic antiquary must “dream no more of deeds of other days,”instead making himself over into a man of the moment, a warrior in thestruggle against Napoleon. (This sort of shift is replicated elsewhere inWilson’s extensive poetic opus.)37 He must use his dreams of the distant,the chivalric, past as a training ground for registering the glories andhorrors of an embroiling present crisis.

And so Scott tried to do—with equivocal success. On 27 July 1815, abit more than five weeks after the battle of Waterloo, he rushed off tothe Continent. He was a tourist rather than a full-fledged participant,though not everyone he met made this distinction: when the Russianczar asked the lame novelist in what affair he had been wounded, heavoided an awkward scene only by jocular evasions. The slightlyfictionalized dispatches he wrote as he traveled across Belgium andFrance communicate vividly the experience of arriving on the scene of agreat conflict shortly after the fact. Published as Paul’s Letters to HisKinsfolk, they suggest both the possibilities and the limits of Scott’squest for history in the making. Like it or not, Paul becomes the retailerof “last year’s news.” Everything that happened before Waterloo is now


old hat, so that the reporter on the spot finds himself rehearsing eventswhich occurred only a year ago but have already faded away frompopular memory. Farmers ploughing the fields (fields often stinkingwith corpses) have already destroyed many “transitory memorials,”while local peasants are offering the rest for sale. One pays almost asmuch for a Napoleonic cuirassier as one might for some fragment ofancient Roman armor. In the same paradoxical vein, where the new (orthe recent) becomes a version of the old, Paul is particularly fascinatedby a gift from a military acquaintance, a manuscript “trampled in theblood of the [presumably deceased] writer” and containing Frenchsongs of a medieval cast. The meditative Paul imagines how differently“these relics of minstrelsy” might have struck him had he taken them tobe “trophies of the fields of Cressy and Agincourt.” In that case theywould have evoked visions of chivalry, whereas, as things stand, theymust have been the “stock in trade of the master of a regimental band.”38

The Register soon fell into financial and (corresponding) conceptualdifficulties. Scott’s sense of a great crisis’s widespread effect—its effecthere and now, despite the geographic isolation of Britain, despite thecultural or geographical distance between Edinburgh and London—informs his creation of this publication and, even more, the formidablerange of his written work for it. But the historian’s struggle with the pastdoes not disappear, no more than in Paul’s Letters. Even if we dream nomore of deeds of other days, this hardly means that our memoryproblems have been solved. Post-Paul, Scott undertook to write theRegister’s account of the year 1814, which must already have seemedquite distant in some respects. As of May 1816, according to Lockhart,he “had not yet collected the materials requisite for his historical sketchof a year distinguished for the importance and complexity of itsevents.”39 His involvement remained intense for a few years afterward,declining only after the volume chronicling the events of 1816, thoughthe publication (losing money lavishly) hung on until 1828. Havingsuggested that the historian and the journalist were analogous or evenequivalent figures, Scott inadvertently discovered the truth of thisargument. The chronicler of his own moment had become a historian ofthe past, thrown back into his original antiquarian role. But with thisdifference: he was now reconstructing an era he had lived through,rather than one he had merely heard or read about. The experiencerendered him thoughtful. As he wrote much later, on adapting materialsfrom the Register into his nine-volume Life of Napoleon:

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When the rush of the inundation was before our eyes, and in our ears,we were scarce able to remember the state of things before its ragecommenced, and when, subsequently, the deluge has subsided withinthe natural limits of the stream, it is still more difficult to recollect withprecision the terrors it inspired when at its height. That which is presentpossesses such power over our senses and our imagination, that itrequires no common effort to recall those sensations which expired withpreceding events. Yet, to do this is the peculiar province of history,which will be written and read in vain, unless it can connect with itsdetails an accurate idea of the impression which these produced onmen’s minds while they were yet in their transit.40

Scott proposes that as soon as a world crisis, the “inundation” of time,has receded, it is almost impossible to recapture the emotions itproduced: “impressions” on “men’s minds” dissipate, as does, in effect,the mass experience of history. History is both an engulfing vortex and—once it has passed—a phenomenon supremely difficult to evoke. Bygeneral consensus, neither the Register nor the Life of Napoleonsucceeds in this task. The Waverley novels, however, are a differentmatter. It is there—in the realm of fiction—that Scott discovers fullyhow to make the deluge rise again.

V. PAST AS PRESENT IN SCOTT’S TRILOGY

Neither Scott nor his printer James Ballantyne originally understoodWaverley to be about the past at all. The opening chapter of the novelplays a sly game with readerly expectations. Scott mentions a number ofqualifiers that he could have appended to his title—“a Tale of otherDays,” “a Romance from the German,” a “Sentimental Tale,” “A Tale ofthe Times.”41 The first of these suggests a historical setting—that is tosay, a setting in the past. The last suggests a contemporary subject, one(as Scott goes on to suggest) associated with scandal in high society.Robert Colby and Peter Garside have put forth various novels as themodel for Scott’s parodied “Tales of the Times”; the most likely referent,nominated by neither of them, is Jane West’s A Tale of the Times (1799),whose early pages are themselves a fascinating study in chronologicalgames (especially in the poetics of the flashback).42 However, Scott’simplication—that his story belongs neither to past nor present—is moremind-scrambling than anything in West. Having toyed with, and re-jected, the four subtitles I have mentioned, he continues to dwell on thispeculiar paradox, that Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since will betemporally located between narratives of the present and historicalnarratives, tales of the times and tales of other times, without exactly


falling into either group. How can this be—and why, moreover, shouldthe experiment be attempted? According to Scott, “A tale of manners, tobe interesting, must either refer to antiquity so great as to have becomevenerable, or it must bear a vivid reflection of those scenes which arepassing daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty” (W,1:8). Since his project falls awkwardly in between, he will treat “thosepassions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alikeagitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet ofthe fifteenth century . . . or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoast ofthe present day” (W, 1:9-10). Scott appears to mark out a realm of hisown: he writes “neither a romance of chivalry,” like most of the historicalfiction which precedes his, “nor a novel of modern manners” (W, 1:7). 43

He then intimates—with wonderfully stubborn perversity—that thisrealm is so uninteresting, so indefinable, that he must emphasize eternalpassions rather than transient manners. He puts himself, therefore, inan interesting bind. The keynote of the book is that oft-repeated phrase,“sixty years since,” yet the author’s seeming uncertainty about just howpast a past moment has to be before it becomes a potential object ofantiquarian or historical fascination compels an emphasis on whatever inhuman nature remains unchanging.

It is little wonder that James Ballantyne was confused. In 1810, afterreading the early chapters of Waverley, Ballantyne wrote to Scott:“Considering that ‘sixty years since’ only leads us back to the year 1750,a period when our fathers were alive and merry, it seems to me that theair of antiquity diffused over the character is rather too great toharmonize with the time. The period is modern . . . and in fact scarcelyanything appears to have altered, more important than the cut of acoat.”44 Ballantyne apparently wanted a story of long ago; after Waverleywas finally published, he thought he had carried his point, confiding inMaria Edgeworth that “another novel, descriptive of more ancientmanners still, may be expected ere long from the Author of Waverley.”45

Nonetheless, far from treating ancient manners, Guy Mannering con-siders those closer by several decades to the novelist’s own moment, apoint carefully marked by references to the American Revolution, aswell as to events in India. And in The Antiquary (the third Waverleynovel), there is yet another account by Scott of his chronologicalintentions. “The present Work completes a series of fictitious narrativesintended to illustrate the manners of Scotland at three different periods.WAVERLEY embraced the age of our fathers, GUY MANNERING that of ourown youth, and the THE ANTIQUARY refers to the last ten years of theeighteenth century.”46 Scott suggests that he has been laboring not

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towards the past but the present. Having begun with a novel almost butnot quite about the past, he has then written novels successively closerto the present until we arrive at a period about two decades before thetime of writing.

Some found his ex post facto account unconvincing; according toJohn Wilson Croker, “We hardly think that so skilful an observer ofmanners could have imagined that in sixty years such changes could takeplace in national language, manners, habits, and character, as to warrant,a priori, the design of three distinct pictures. . . . he has endeavoured todescribe three different periods of which the manners were very muchthe same.”47 Bearing Croker’s criticism in mind, we might characterizethese early novels as experiments intended to gauge the pastness of thepast. According to the memorable formulation of Augustine, “Are anhundred years, when present, a long time? See first, whether anhundred years can be present.”48 In Scott, at least, they cannot. Scottsituates pastness closer and closer to his own moment of writing,attempting in the process to determine just how capacious or narrow aterritory the present is. During his writing of the first three Waverleynovels, the present contracts from sixty years to forty to twenty. In onesense this is an antiquarian achievement, because an eye for perioddetail can make sixty years (or in certain cases six months) seem like along time ago. However, in that case, antiquarianism is being used to asomewhat unusual end. In his role as antiquary, Scott proves to be abetter Lukácsian than Lukács—a novelist of a period of historical crisislocated in an increasingly narrow timespan.

This introductory survey of the first three Waverley novels suggests apattern familiar from The Edinburgh Annual Register: by a process ofwhat looks like trial and error, the writer discovers a need to integratethe antiquary’s skills with those of the journalist. A detailed consider-ation of these novels will reveal, as well, a further element in the blend.The give and take between simultaneity and synchrony is redefined bythe power of fictional narrative, and by several related kinds of historicalbluff, embodied in such figures as Charles Edward, the Young Pre-tender, or James Macpherson and his semi-fictional bard Ossian. WhatCharles Edward shares with Macpherson/Ossian is a claim to haveresurrected the past under the conditions of modernity or near-modernity: a long-dispossessed royal family makes a comeback, as along-forgotten bard is rediscovered (and, for the first time, published).It is this sort of situation which suggests to Scott the structure ofhistorical memory. Having defined periods quite near to his own as thepast, he proposes to resurrect that newly defined past. To make it live,


however—to think of the synchronic as simultaneous—is also to wonderhow completely a reconstructed piece of history could be true. (Wereprevious epochs really so full of action? Was action really so full ofmeaning, so rife with consequences? Did every conqueror have theimpact of Napoleon?) In Scott it is the illusion of authenticity throughwhich these questions are resolved. His self-described “Big Bow wowstrain,” his emphasis on chronologically compressed and geographicallyexpanded sequences of events, is not so much an end in itself as a way ofpresenting a world of historical antecedents which would otherwiseremain emotionally (and perhaps cognitively) inaccessible.49 The delugerises. The simultaneous crisis of events is called before us. It is theantiquary—the student of manners!—who summons it and evaluates itsclaims.

In Waverley, to take first things first, the eponymous hero grows upon his uncle Everard’s estate, his sensibility shaped by desultory readingin the literature of romance and by stories of dynastic tragedy handeddown orally through the family. Scott might say of his hero whatNietzsche says of the antiquary, “Sometimes he even greets the soul ofhis nation across the long dark centuries of confusion as his own soul.”His dreamy blending of past and present is challenged when, throughhis father’s Hanoverian machinations, Waverley is offered a militarycommission. In due course, he accepts it and somewhat unexpectedlytravels to Scotland. Here, as he begins his military career, he thinks thathe is throwing off adolescent dreaminess (“In wild and broken eddieswhirl’d, / Flitted that fond ideal world,” he writes [W, 1:68]), but this isnot so. During his confused participation in a Stuart-inspired insurrec-tion, Waverley relives the nostalgic antiquarianism of his youth, relivesit, however, in an oddly presentist mode.

One way to see how the nostalgic antiquarianism of his youth differsfrom that of his Jacobite adventure is to compare Scott’s treatment ofWaverley-Honour, Everard’s property, with Tully-Veolan, home of hisgood friend the Baron of Bradwardine. Waverley-Honour is rooted inthe past; its glamour is derived from such attractions as “a moss-growngothic monument which retained the name of Queen’s Standing” (W,1:51) because Queen Elizabeth supposedly hunted there. Here Waverleyis raised in an atmosphere which makes the distant past seem near andthus perpetuates, in modern life, those chivalric virtues it advocates(loyalty to the monarch, deference to ladies).50 At the same time, thenovel leaves open the question of just how completely such virtues canbe sustained in modern life. Waverley’s aunt Rachel recounts obses-sively the sacrifice of Lady Alice Waverley, who allowed her youngest

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son to die a violent and bloody death in order to help the future CharlesII escape from Cromwell’s clutches. As Scott assures us, she does notmean to tell her nephew to go and do likewise. Nostalgic antiquarianismhas its limits. Some virtues of the past must be celebrated without beingimitated, a compromise which allows a combination of continuity andopenness to change.

Tully-Veolan offers the tourist an equally romantic but also sharperexperience. When he first describes it, Scott maps out a range ofchronological confusions. Features which seem picturesquely outdated(like old loopholes for muskets) turn out to be fully functional; featureswhich are functional (such as a pigeon-house resembling Arthur’s Oven,a notorious object of antiquarian inquiry) project an air of mysteriousantiquity. Past and present in Scotland are inextricably bound up withone another. English gradualism—for example, the dying of chivalryinto modern manners—is beside the point. Old things do not metamor-phose into new ones so much as they mingle with them, forming apuzzling combination to the eyes of such outsiders as Waverley. Whereancient habits are so closely intertwined with everyday life, moderniza-tion could easily be wrenching, a sudden disaster rather than a slowdissolution. So it proves. By the time our hero next sees the house,Scotland and England have been thrown into turmoil by the YoungPretender’s invasion (in which the Baron, along with Waverley, hasparticipated). Returning to Tully-Veolan, Waverley finds it half-de-stroyed by English soldiers on the rampage:

The accessaries of ancient distinction, to which the Baron, in the prideof his heart, had attached so much importance and veneration, weretreated with peculiar contumely. . . . The stone bason [the Baron’sfamed bear-fountain] seemed to be destined for a drinking-trough forcattle, from the manner in which it was arranged upon the ground. (W,3:224)

The ruin is ruined—not from the slow depredations or the drollrevisions of time, but because of a single contemporary catastrophe.

Waverley goes no further than many romantic novels in presentingthe fall of an ancient family, and the parallel fall of the house theyinhabit. However, the book also attempts a less common twist: havingdescribed the ruin of Tully-Veolan, Scott charts its speedy refurbish-ment. A penultimate chapter describes the process by which the Baronis lured back to his ancestral home, which he thought he had lostforever, and offered it on the occasion of Waverley’s marriage to hisdaughter Rose. All the ruined elements (“marks of spoilation” [W,


3:345]) have either been repaired or eliminated. Scott emphasizes theingenuity by which “tokens of . . . violence” (W, 3:347), “marks ofdevastation,” are “obliterated” (W, 3:345). “The pigeon-house wasreplenished; the fountain played with its usual activity” (W, 3:347). In anoddly satisfying paradox, the scars of recent history are wiped away,while those of ancient history are still visible (a pair of totemic bearsremain, as they have been within human memory, “mutilated”; comparethe earlier image of “two large weather-beaten mutilated masses ofupright stone” [W, 1:105]). This “reformation,” which amazes both theBaron and his guests, is extraordinary on two counts: first, for theswiftness with which the ancient house is destroyed and then raised upagain (history, after happening slowly over centuries, is now occurringvery quickly indeed and would appear to be somewhat impulsive in itsturnabouts); and second, for Scott’s suggestion that an apparent reversalof time’s course can also be a step forward (there is an implied analogywith the Reformation in Scotland, another attempt to go backward andforward at the same time, to regain an original purity by throwing off theshackles of a relatively recent tyranny). In a way, nothing has happened:things look as they did at the beginning of the book; no one who did notalready know the truth could guess what had occurred here. In anotherway, everything has changed. Those bears, most particularly, no longerembody a living connection to ancient loyalties, a connection whichmight eventuate in a deed; rather, they belong to a dreamily symbolicversion of the past with which every reader of this novel will already beconversant from its introductory English chapters. Old scars are good—they have healed over gradually and are now, despite their ugliness, partof the body—whereas new wounds are either too painful to acknowl-edge or too shallow, too insignificant, to be worth acknowledging. Ineither case, English money—from Colonel Talbot, Waverley’s protec-tor—makes possible their dismissal. It turns Tully-Veolan into the samekind of nostalgic kingdom that Waverley-Honour was for our hero in hisyouth.

The rebuilding of Tully-Veolan leaves Waverley and his contempo-raries at what would soon be conceived, by the economist Antoine-Augustin Cournot in 1838, as the end of history (since that time, ofcourse, there have been several other “ends” of history).51 The age ofepic heroism is over and done with; the rule of a limited state over theinstitutions of private property and the market can begin. In the futurelie development and modernization—but along lines firmly and defini-tively set down by previous events. Waverley himself is perhaps thequintessential figure of this new, evidently permanent dispensation,

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tartly anticipated by Flora MacIvor shortly before the invasion ofCharles Edward fails (W, 3:71-72). One might then ask what it all meant,this evidently purposeless furor and shouting leaving so much destruc-tion in its wake. Such an inquiry would be central for any understandingof the Waverley novels as a whole. Many long-term students of thisnovelist seem eventually to arrive at a stage of utter frustration in whichthey believe that there is something fundamentally empty about Scott’spresentation of historical experience and its calm, restored aftermath.(In 1936 Edwin Muir wrote: “this Nothing in which Scott wrote was notmerely a spatial one; it was a temporal Nothing as well, dotted with afew disconnected figures arranged at abrupt intervals.”)52 It is hard toknow how to define Scott’s emptiness or, indeed, how to pin it down,except through the isolation of troublesome points; when John Sutherlandcomplains that we don’t know whether Waverley actually killed anybodyat the battle of Prestopans, he is worrying a detail with a largersignificance. Has anything at all happened to our hero? Could it be thathe, of all people, was actually once on a battlefield, and that while therehe engaged in life-or-death acts of war?53 In a notorious crux, after allthe battles are over, Waverley commissions a painting of himself andFergus MacIvor in Highland dress, a gesture which certainly suggestsan aestheticizing, a fine but deceptive varnishing, of the adventuresdescribed earlier. But from another perspective, these adventures weremeaningless all along, part of a phantasmic life from which Waverleyonly thought that he had awoken when he first received his militarycommission. So such incidents as the refurbishing of Tully-Veolan mighteasily seem to suggest; so the Waverley novels have, for many readers,implied.

The implication is valid but needs to be rethought. The problem ofWalter Scott’s emptiness can be better understood as the problem of theeighteenth century in Scotland. (For my purposes, the eighteenthcentury can be defined as the period between the Glorious and theFrench Revolutions.) Scott—no less than his political mirror-image inthe next generation, Thomas Macaulay—believes that it was the seven-teenth century in which the political fate of both England and Scotlandwere finally worked out. When Flora MacIvor wants to inspire Waverleyto military heroism, she sends him a poem about Captain Wogan, adeath-defying royalist whose Scottish mishaps get several pages inClarendon’s history of the Civil War. There is this gap between FloraMacIvor poetizing the woeful if uplifting tale of Captain Wogan andAunt Rachel recounting that of Lady Alice Waverley: the latter under-stands that her story is in the past and so cannot be directly imitated,


whereas the former misses this point altogether, at least until it is toolate and she has sent her brother (and Waverley, almost) to his doom.She should, she rightly admits, have known better; she must now livewith the knowledge of her fatal responsibility. In point of fact, the YoungPretender never had a chance; whether playing at the medieval game ofCrusade or the fine old Stuart diversion of king-on-the-run, he could benothing more than the palest shadow of his ancestors. The nameWaverley is itself part of this pattern, having been lifted from JaneWest’s The Loyalists, a novel treating the English Civil War.54 Thedreaminess, or the hollowness, however, is not just the hero’s or for thatmatter the author’s; it belongs to a historical moment remarkable for itsgratuitousness, extraordinary for a campaign perfectly meaninglessdespite the enormous destruction that followed in its wake. “It did notseem so at the time,” one who lived through the Forty-Five mightobject. But Scott does not assume this position or perspective; despitean occasional stab at surprise or mystification (as in his love of noveltitles which reveal little or nothing), he speaks in retrospect, as of eventsthat have already happened and whose futility seems no less obvious tohim than they do to Flora MacIvor after Charles Edward’s fall and flightto the continent.

None of this is to say that the story of the Forty-Five is trivial—farfrom it. Waverley’s last chapter—a postscript which, according to itsauthor, can easily function as a preface since everybody reads the end ofa novel first—provides a further view of the novelist’s play withtemporality, his quizzing of a historical moment without suspense yetfull of meaning: “There is no European nation which, within the courseof half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change asthis kingdom of Scotland” (W, 3:365). As a result of the insurrection of1745, the “patriarchical power” of Highland chiefs, represented inWaverley by Fergus MacIvor, was forever destroyed; the “Lowlandnobility,” represented by the Baron of Bradwardine, lost their ancestralprivileges (“heritable jurisdictions”); most generally, the Jacobites, withtheir absolute loyalty to the absolutist house of Stuart, suffered “totaleradication” (W, 3:365). Wealth and commerce replaced the old feudalorder; the consequence is that contemporary Scots are as different fromtheir grandfathers “as the existing English are from those of QueenElizabeth’s time” (W, 3:365-366). The suggestion is that Scotland existedin a backwards or at least static condition for about a century and a halfafter England began to be modernized and then, after that distractingnonevent the Forty-Five, underwent the changes which took more thanthree times as long in the kingdom to the south. Scott asserts that his

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ultimate subject in Waverley is this breathtaking acceleration of socialdevelopment. Mid-eighteenth century Scotland seems, on these terms,both very near and very far, as remote as the Renaissance would be to anEnglish reader of Waverley despite the existence of living witnesses toit. The period is revealed as an uncertain, even unreal interlude; thelaws of future development were already set but few people, as yet,understood what those laws implied.

Waverley clarifies them by evoking a metaphor of travel. In an earlychapter, the narrator writes: “Mine is a humble English post-chaise,drawn upon four wheels, and keeping his majesty’s highway . . .inseparable from heavy roads, steep hills, sloughs, and other terrestrialretardations” (W, 1:72). His postscript recalls this figure—“Our journeyis now finished . . . like the driver who has received his full hire, I stilllinger near you” (W, 3:364)—but only to replace it with another:

The political and economical effects of these changes [since the Forty-Five] have been traced by Lord Selkirk with great precision andaccuracy . . . the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has,nevertheless, been gradual; and, like those who float down the stream ofa deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have madeuntil we fix our eye on the now-distant point from which we havedrifted. (W, 3:366) 55

Unlike that bumpy post-chaise—mundane, realistic storytelling—theriver of historical time allows a journey so smooth that we don’t evenknow how far we’ve gone until our destination is just around the bend.Scott’s reference to an old friend, the fifth earl of Selkirk, seemsproblematic in this context, since Selkirk’s attempt to settle Canada withdisplaced Highlanders (beginning in 1802 and continuing for manyyears thereafter) was internationally controversial. The sufferings ofSelkirk’s colony—considerable at the time when Waverley was writtenand soon after (1816) to issue in open warfare with the NorthwestCompany—hardly suggest that historical change is smooth and imper-sonal, a painless process that simply occurs without the intervention ofhuman agency. But this is less than fair to the passage. The “we” ofScott’s river journey does not, one might surmise, include Bradwardine,the exiled or slaughtered Highlanders of the Forty-Five, or, for thatmatter, an administrator-adventurer like Selkirk. It comprises, rather, anaudience of readers who for one reason or another have been insulatedfrom the violence of political and economic discontinuity, readers whomight crave the bumpiness or the stops and starts of Waverley becausein their normal lives they glide through time without such obstructions.


These readers are at the end of history and know it. By narrating events,even factitious events whose influence alone could never have changedScotland, the novel provides its intended audience with a landmark, that“now-distant point from which we have drifted”; fixing our eyes onWaverley’s picture of “sixty years since,” “we” come to a consciousnessof historical change. In sum, if the sheltered, protected readers forwhom Scott writes are to have any felt relation with the past, especiallywith that oddly illusionary territory the eighteenth century, it must betreated in a manner which combines nostalgia with urgency.

A further demonstration of how and why such a game might beplayed is afforded by Guy Mannering, during the nineteenth centuryone of Scott’s most popular novels. The title character of Mannering isan amateur astrologer, casually commissioned to calculate “a scheme ofnativity” for the newborn heir to the Scottish estate of Ellangowan.56 Ondoing so, he discovers that the nativity, which includes an enigmaticprediction of doom, intersects with one he had previously cast for hissweetheart Sophia. This coincidence between two apparently indepen-dent timelines appears to confirm astrology’s awe-inspiring truth. Thearchaic art might create a present shockingly simultaneous—shouldMannering persevere with it. Taken aback, he gives up fortune-telling—best to leave magic in the past, where it belongs—but five years later,long after his departure, a crucial element of his prophecy is fulfilled:following the local laird’s expulsion of gypsies, his young son is kid-napped or murdered. The novel then contrives to bring the abductedyouth, Harry Bertram, back to his ancestral lands and to reinstate him inhis familial claims. Among Guy Mannering’s many stagings and restagingsof Bertram’s return, perhaps the most evocative occurs in the openingchapter of volume three, where this heir unapparent arrives at Ellangowanby sea.

According to Scott, the period of the 1770s in which the novel is setis a peculiar one in the history of his country. On the one hand, Scotlandnow takes a strong part in the British imperial venture (both Manneringand Bertram have been away conquering India); on the other hand, thecollapse of the American part of the empire has slowed Scottishcommerce almost to a standstill. (The commercial characters of GuyMannering look forward to the end of the American wars and to whatthey hope will be a resumption of trade.) The little world of Ellangowanis part of an interconnected global history—its inhabitants understandthat faraway military and political developments affect them—butremains, nonetheless, strongly local, typically turned in on its ownaffairs. (Guy Mannering’s visit to Edinburgh, halfway through the novel,

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demonstrates just how isolated Ellangowan is.) It is this divided commu-nity, poised between simultaneity and synchrony, to which HarryBertram returns, not yet knowing of his own, still suppressed, connec-tion with it.

Set ashore by a fisherman, Bertram takes a tour of the castle wherehis family originally lived, the half-ruined “Auld Place” (M, 1:13; compare3:28). He marvels both at the signs of its age and at marks of “recenthabitation” (M, 3:23). He pays particular attention to a coat of armscarved in stone (his, though he does not know it): this image includes “asalvage man proper, to use the language of heraldry, wreathed andcinctured, and holding in his hand an oak tree eradicated, that is, tornup by the roots” (M, 3:24). Scott italicizes the technical heraldic termsbut bothers to gloss only one, the evocative “eradicated.” The oak is afamily tree and a national one, in both contexts suggestive of great age;the savage men who tear it up match the gypsies and smugglersresponsible for young Bertram’s kidnapping and thus for the eradicationof generational continuity. A glance back at Waverley suggests a furthergenealogical implication. Flora MacIvor’s poem about Captain Wogan iscalled “To an Oak Tree”: “Emblem of England’s ancient faith” (W,2:109), Flora commences, but by her choice of subject she recognizesthat an oak tree contemporaneous with Wogan played an up-to-date rolein the Civil Wars, having famously sheltered the Stuart heir after thebattle of Worcester. Charles II’s flight (and his use of that “so muchcelebrated Oake”) was a story told repeatedly during the late seven-teenth century.57 Scott’s Bertram is Charles’s successor, not just becausehis ancestors favored the Stuart cause but because he is a dispossessedheir attempting to reclaim his position. However, Bertram’s memory aswell as his claim has been eradicated. “Remember,” said Charles I onthe scaffold. This is the sort of advice Bertram needs.

Having confronted his hero with the overdetermined image of anuprooted oak, Scott concocts variations on the theme of memoryrecovery. Bertram wanders through the ruin, speculating on its formerowners and feeling an uncanny sense of déjà vu. He then stops by a realoak tree which happens to be planted on the spot where his father diedand happens as well to be the Justice-Tree “used for executions by thebarons of Ellangowan” (M, 3:27). Glossin, a conspirator in Bertram’skidnapping and the conniving usurper of the “New Place” (M, 1:22) justbelow them, is, by a “remarkable” (M, 3:27) coincidence, touring thecastle ruins with his architect. “He had resolved to use the stones of theruinous castle in his new edifice. Accordingly, he came up the bank” (M,3:27). The confrontation that follows is Scott’s most fully imagined effort


to present a recovery of memory on a model at once nostalgic,antiquarian, and Jacobite. Repeatedly, the writer plays off historical andpersonal remembering as though (as in Nietzsche) they were so close asto be inseparable. Bertram does not go to the New Place when he firstarrives at his long-forgotten home; he gravitates towards the Old,suggesting that the recovery of personal memory has a necessarycondition. He must first unearth the history of his family, partlyobscured in the move from castle to house, two generations before; onlythen will he be permitted to remember his place within the family. Themoment he steps on the grounds of the castle, the novelist begins callinghim by the name he possessed before his kidnapping. Almost everythingelse in the subsequent action is an attempt (presumably unconscious) tolive up to this name or, at least, to say what it means. Initially, he protestsagainst taking down the castle, where his family had lived for centuriesbefore 1715. His grandfather began this demolition to recuperate thefamily fortunes—whereas Glossin, an eradicator in the depths of hissoul, wishes not just to claim a supply of free stone but also to destroy asign of the past. (Only if such clues are eliminated will he be able tosubstitute his own, invented genealogical tradition.) An exchange aboutmottoes (to be echoed in The Antiquary) suggests why the castle mightbe worth preserving.58 Bertram’s impulsive suggestion that the motto ofthe Old Place be transferred to the New—chivalric idealism preservedfor a materialistic era—sounds like a Scott project par excellence:avenues of exchange between Old and New places allow for themodified continuities, the fuzzy synchronicities, which the Author ofWaverley is eager to promote. By the same logic, family tradition isassociated with a folkloric line of memory. Bertram quotes a balladabout an elopement, thus evoking his hoped-for marriage with thedaughter of his former colonel, Guy Mannering (and the continuation ofa family to which he does not yet realize he belongs). The lyrics aresupplied by a nearby washerwoman—a validation from the lower ordersenacted much more elaborately in the machinations of this book’s mostfamous character, the gypsy prophetess Meg Merrilies, who claims (andreceives) most of the credit for restoring Bertram to his home. Thedominance of music, especially as a means of linking ideas, is also acrucial mark of nostalgic recoveries, as debated between Rousseau andSenancour or as evoked by Samuel Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory.Finally, Glossin (turning on Bertram) has him imprisoned not in theNew but the Old Place. He hopes to prevent his prisoner’s reconstitu-tion of identity from developing further than it already has. However,since personal recollections are founded on collective and historic

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memory, this effort is foredoomed. Unable to find an instructor properlyversed in matters antiquarian, the interloper becomes his own anti-quary. He investigates, then advocates, a way of life which turns out tobe his own.

Bertram’s reinstatement is still in progress during the book’s lastchapter, when suddenly the discussion shifts back to architecture,concluding the nostalgic recovery of identity on the same ground whereit began. Guy Mannering is calculating “some proportions relating to alarge and splendid house, which was to be built on the scite [sic] of theNew Place of Ellangowan, in a style corresponding to the magnificenceof the ruins in its vicinity” (M, 3:352). “‘But what is all this?’ [observesthe lawyer Pleydell,] taking up the plans; ‘—tower in the centre to be animitation of the Eagle Tower at Caernarvon’” (M, 3:355). The projectedhouse, Scott implies, will match the Old Place in style as well as in“magnificence”: Caernarvon is the site of the greatest among the castlesof Edward II erected on the Welsh border shortly after the Englishvictory over Llywellyn, the last of the native Welsh princes. A soldier ofempire, Mannering will replicate a famous English assertion of impe-rium. However shallow this pretence, the price of the tower will makeits own statement about the renewal of Ellangowan, perhaps a moreauthoritative one than all the intricate legal maneuvers executed byPleydell on Bertram’s behalf.

The lawyer has his doubts, nonetheless. Caernarvon’s huge cost is ascandal among historians; similarly, “the house will take the estate ofEllangowan on its back, and fly away with it!” (M, 3:355-56). Manneringpromises “a few bags of Sicca rupees” (M, 3:356) to stave off bankruptcy.His comment clarifies a crucial distinction. The old New Place was thematerial embodiment of its predecessor, using the same stone todifferent ends. The new New Place will be a formal reembodiment,faithful in style but designed to stand alongside its predecessor ratherthan replace it, and constructed, in any event, under different economicconditions: empires are once more international, as they were in theancient world; capital circulates globally; one finds one’s place, like GuyMannering or Harry Bertram, by leaving it, making one’s fortune orone’s career and only then returning. On these terms, Sicca rupees canfinish the process begun by Meg Merrilies, herself a descendant ofIndian Hindus. Local pride will revive itself on the strong foundation ofglobal economic and military enterprise. Synchronic Gothic revival willbe financed by the recent depredations of the British army—simultane-ity par excellence. The question of authenticity is altogether transformed


in this aesthetic and historical Saturnalia, which both recalls therecognition scene at the Old Place and revises the reader’s view of it.

A further twist seals the argument. Pleydell ventures the speculationthat Mannering will repair a tower in the actual, the genuine, Old Placein order to pursue his astrological speculations but is rebuked as followsin the novel’s concluding words—

“And, being next door to the old castle, you may repair Donagild’stower for the nocturnal contemplation of the celestial bodies? Bravo,Colonel!” “No, no, my dear counsellor! Here ends THE ASTROLOGER.”

(M, 3:358)

No more can be said. Or rather, no more should be said. In the middleof that final sentence, Mannering turns into the Author of Waverley andshuts off the narrative, a gesture that courts both cuteness and haste (aneed, perhaps, to get on to the next novel), but also takes time to rejectwhat might have seemed the point of Mannering’s endeavors: appar-ently, it would be an error of the first order to revive a past state ofaffairs, whether by practicing magic or by revamping an actual medievalruin. On the other hand, if this dictum appears to contradict the wholeproject, to suggest that it is a hobby rather than a thoughtful enterprise,then we have not followed Scott’s line of reasoning far enough. Buildingan imitation castle is different from lurking in a real one and calculatinghoroscopes. The reconstruction allows its inhabitant to keep at adistance or even avoid that awkward and largely unplaceable period therecent past. Glossin wanted to wipe out the medieval history of theBertrams and of Ellangowan, a project prevented by Harry Bertram’sreturn. For Mannering, it is 1715 and the partial fall of the house ofEllangowan which must be circumvented; only then can the homecom-ing of Bertram, and the restitution of his aristocratic claims, so exhaus-tively reenacted, be complete. In one way, the multiplication of build-ings past, present, and future must seem clumsy; what Waverley haddone with one house, Tully-Veolan, Guy Mannering accomplishes withthree (including the projected dream-mansion). In another way thelater novel gains a superior analytical clarity from this careful breakingdown of possibilities. The problem is how to live in time. The solution isto define a present connected with the past but possessing its own vivid,focused identity. It is hard to conceptualize that a social order sixty oreven thirty years since has disappeared almost as thoroughly as the latemiddle ages. Let it be dismissed in a gesture like Mannering’s, ofreplacing one house with another: then we are home in time as well as

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space. We have imagined an inhabitable present, while drawing on theclaims of a partly constructed and perhaps partly genuine tradition.

The final novel of Scott’s trilogy takes up more extensively yet thedifficulty of gauging authenticity and fathoming time in the process. Itdoes so largely through a character study. In the brilliant openingchapters of The Antiquary, two travelers await a coach. The older,Jonathan Oldbuck (the antiquary himself), maintains that every minutecounts: he must reach the ferry before the tide changes. When thecoach arrives, there are many expostulations from Oldbuck on theimportance of promptness. Then, halfway through the journey, hebegins to change his mind, insisting that one of the horses must visit ablacksmith. The novelist comments: “I like so little to analyze thecomplication of the causes which influence actions, that I will notventure to ascertain whether our antiquary’s humanity to the poor horsewas not in some degree aided by his desire of shewing his companion aPict’s camp or Round-about” (A, 1:19). Straight on with the coach:round and round with the Picts. Oldbuck’s ability to combine moment-to-moment peremptoriness and circumlocutionary lectures on history—lectures potentially endless since they treat by choice irresolvablesubjects—delimits both his character and the often puzzling pace of thisstop-and-start tale. Scott presents an antiquary who lives—mentally andphysically—in a petrified sea of historical or pseudo-historical relics (a“mare magnum of miscellaneous trumpery”)—yet understands full wellthat “time and tide wait for no man,” even when he chooses to ignorethe tides (A, 1:53, 21).

How can a reader connect the two sides of such a personality or,indeed, of such a narrative? One of the best known passages of the novelexposes the Antiquary as absurdly prone to amour-propre in hisresearches: supposing that a field near his home is the site of “the finalconflict between Agricola and the Caledonians,” he buys the bit of landin order to display it proudly and generally exult in its possession (asthough he could own history for himself, as though it could literally behis) (A, 1:72). The beggar Edie Ochiltree destroys this much-loveddelusion by maintaining that he was present at the making of thesupposed Roman fortification: “Praetorian here, Praetorian there, Imind the bigging o’t” (A, 1:77). Scott refers back to the fatal field at anumber of points in his narrative; moreover, he extends the joke byhaving Oldbuck suggest to Lovel that he write an epic titled TheCaledoniad, or, Invasion Repelled, only to be reminded by the proposedauthor that the Caledonians did not repel Agricola but in fact were


conquered by him (a point, indeed, upon which Tacitus dwells withsupreme Roman smugness).

Having set up his antiquary as a blockhead, however, Scott laborslong and hard to prove him otherwise. The reversal begins when heintroduces a second antiquary, Sir Arthur Wardour, who is more gullibleand less learned than Oldbuck. Unlike Sir Arthur, the latter knows themovement of the sea, which is to say, the rules of time and its periodicinundations. Thus the most suspenseful episode in the first volume ofThe Antiquary: Sir Arthur and his daughter are caught by an incomingtide and almost drowned; it is Oldbuck—calling frantically for analmanac—who realizes that they have gone wrong and initiates themovement to rescue them (A, 1:145). This episode epitomizes thedifference between the two antiquaries. Compared to Sir Arthur,Oldbuck is “scrupulous in receiving legends as current and authenticcoin” (A, 1:101); “shrewd and suspicious,” “no respecter of divinehereditary right,” he rejects the traditional “bead-roll of one hundredand four kings of Scotland,” and is, moreover, withering on the mosttouchy subject of all, ridiculing his Highland nephew’s firm faith in theauthenticity of the epic poems supposedly composed by Ossian (A,1:102). Despite his Roman lapse, Oldbuck knows a fraud when he seesone. More obstreperous than Nietzsche’s antiquary but equally public-minded, Oldbuck seems, of all Scott’s characters, the best-equipped tomarry synchronicity with simultaneity, learned wandering in a multifari-ous past with alert engagement in the emergencies of the present. Evenhis bookishness is associated not just with choking on the dust of oldtomes or with the venial lusts of the collector but with the spread ofworld-shaking ideas to scattered populations: his most revered ancestorwas a printer who published Luther. As Oldbuck himself insists, “If youwant an affair of consequence properly managed, put it into the handsof an antiquary; for, as they are eternally exercising their genius andresearch upon trifles, it is impossible they can be baffled in affairs ofimportance” (A, 3:136). “Trifles” are those tiny clues—absurdly tiny onseveral occasions described in The Antiquary—from which the ardentinvestigator attempts to reconstruct the medieval or ancient past.“Affairs of importance,” on the other hand, are those passages of localgossip by which matters of blood relation and succession can beestablished. Despite the speaker’s jocular tone, the suggestion that themost pedantic reaches of archaeology might be a good training groundfor dabbling in contemporary scandal appears to be serious. Much ofThe Antiquary’s second half is taken up with Oldbuck’s efforts tostraighten out the affairs of two prominent local families, both tasks

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needing his historical skills. Aided by a “habit of minute and trouble-some accuracy” (A, 1:109), he protects gullible Sir Arthur from a hoaxer,memorably named Dousterswivel, who claims to be able to locatetreasure buried by monks during the Reformation. (Dousterswivel isthis novelist’s outstanding study of someone who wants to profit fromfaking the past.) At the same time, he helps the guilt-ridden recluseLord Glenallan break through a web of delusions fostered by hisruthless mother who, for obscure reasons of her own, has led him tobelieve that he once married his sister. During the course of these latterefforts, the antiquarian theme of forgery is made almost ludicrouslyexplicit. Attending at the deathbed of a half-delirious crone who hashoarded crucial secrets, Oldbuck alternates between philological ardorand determined efforts to trick a confession from the old woman. As shecroaks out a ballad, he exclaims, “a genuine and undoubted fragment ofminstrelsy!—Percy would admire its simplicity—Ritson could not im-pugn its authenticity!” (A, 3:222).59 He next attempts to elicit from heran admission of the false genealogy by which Glenallan was made tobelieve that his sister was also his wife: the trifler clears up this dreadfulmisunderstanding with his usual efficiency and authority.

Scott jokes repeatedly about his antiquary’s advantageous position,caught between scholarly investigation of the past and benevolentinterference in the lives of his neighbors. All the more noticeable is theabsence at the center of the joke. When first giving a pocket sketch ofJonathan Oldbuck, Scott attributes his misogyny to a disappointment inlove. Later, Oldbuck’s somewhat ritualistic woman-hating also turns outto have an ancient cause, revealed during a visit to the ruins of amedieval monastery (awkwardly enough, the monastery is named for St.Ruth). “This,” as Oldbuck informs his party, “this was a paradise whereno Eve was admitted, and we may wonder the rather how the goodfathers came to lose it” (A, 2:43). As Oldbuck also observes, “There they[the monks] lived with nought to do but to spend their time ininvestigating points of remote antiquity, transcribing manuscripts, andcomposing new works for the information of posterity” (A, 2:42). Heidentifies his own bookish bachelorhood with that of the medievalbrothers: his house, as he later describes it to Glenallan, is a moderndouble of the ruins. What would it mean to live in a monastery,however? This question is raised by Miss Wardour, the only woman inthe group. She asks “why tradition has preserved to us such meagreaccounts of the inmates of these stately edifices?” (A, 2:43-44) Her“puzzling” question is best answered by her aspiring suitor:


Lovel thought the question was best resolved by considering what arethe events which leave the deepest impression on the minds of thecommon people—‘These,’ he contended, ‘were not such as resemblethe gradual progress of a fertilizing river, but the headlong andprecipitous fury of some portentous flood. The eras, by which the vulgarcompute time, have always reference to some period of fear andtribulation. . . . we cannot wonder . . . that the ferocious warrior isremembered, and the peaceful abbots are abandoned to forgetfulnessand oblivion.’ (A, 2:45)

As in Waverley, a sense of history emerges from general crises—“inundations,” to mention The Antiquary’s most prominent metaphor ofcatastrophic time. To seek a refuge from such floods is to be erased frompopular historical memory.

Similar separations are redefined in a pivotal conversation betweenOldbuck and Lord Glenallan. Each courted the same woman; it wasGlenallan who won her hand, Oldbuck who lost her, then redirected hislove to rusty old objects and musty old books. The familial intrigueswhich the antiquary resolves establish a genealogical continuity whichexcludes him. Pedantic misogyny, whether it take the form of monkhoodor antiquarianism, removes him from the flow of history but also giveshim a singular power over time. Scott’s work with received ideas aboutthe difference between the active and the contemplative life takes apersonal cast. Oldbuck longs for a life which he never possessed: both ofhis substitute children, Lovel and his nephew Hector, are militaryofficers engaged directly with the political eruptions of their ownmoment; it is Lovel, appropriately, who will have to write that greatcounter-historical epic The Caledoniad, to which Oldbuck will providethe learned notes. In the event, the notes alone get written; at the endof The Antiquary, Oldbuck still waits, impatiently but with a sort ofsweet, half-faltering hope, for the son of his old love to produce a heroicpoem about an invasion which should have been but never was repelled,a love which should have been but never was fulfilled. These droll ifmelancholy moments of deadlock recall materials used at the beginningof the novel, most particularly the jokes about Agricola and the fabledfield of battle, but they do so in a deeper register. It no longer seems ananomaly that the antiquary should be the perfervid exposer of historicalforgery and (at the same time) a determined self-deceiver about the pastof his own nation; his power to grasp history and his sense of afundamental emptiness in life each emerge from his position vis-à-visthe other characters. For Oldbuck, history is as hollow as love; theseghostly forms must be filled completely, the beneficiaries of a horror

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vacuii which operates on every level of the book and serves not only asthe sign of a firm control over historical materials but also of acompulsive need to rework them—making them better and brighter(and perhaps more real) than they are.

The antiquary argues that we all engage in such “juggling tricks” (A,1:297). The climax of the novel suggests that he is right. Edie Ochiltreebrings news that a French invasion is imminent; Oldbuck slyly turns theconversation to a benevolent hoax of Edie’s, a counter-plot toDousterswivel’s malign and greedy magic. “I see it all . . . as plain as thelegend on a medal of high preservation” (A, 3:319-20). Then theconversation turns again: “Well, and to your public news, Edie—So theyare still coming, are they?” (A, 3:325). Edie affirms that the French areindeed on their way—at which point the conversation shifts once more,treating this time the proposed destruction of Dousterswivel’s al-chemical “engines” (A, 3:328). Scott’s effort to intertwine antiquarianinvestigation with present-day affairs now takes a tricky form. Theantiquary recommends that the machinery be made a bonfire; Edieremonstrates with him on this point: should they not sell the scrap andthus recoup some of what the swindler has cost them? At the beginningof the next chapter, a sentry observes a light appear in the distance, thelight from the fire which Oldbuck has recommended, and takes it to bea signal of invasion. The destruction of one hoax thus brings aboutanother. The inundations of time are evidently about to rise, signaled bythat “wavering” light in “reddening billows of the sea.” Caught up in thefrenzy of simultaneous crises, local patriots assemble to repel the hatedJacobins. Oldbuck is therefore hoist with his own petard. Despite anearly (and typical) skepticism about military frenzies of the moment (A,1:128), he places himself decisively among those ready to repel theimagined invasion. Rejecting “a Roman faulchion of brass,” not tomention “an Andrea Ferrara without a handle” (A, 3:333), he buckles ona third sword, his father’s from the Forty-Five. The emptiness of theChevalier’s enterprise predicts the emptiness of the current panic.

Oldbuck begins the novel by swindling himself on the subject of thepast (that damnable field); he ends it by swindling himself on the subjectof the present moment, which seems to be an echo of Agricola’sinvasion. This is the Scott of The Edinburgh Annual Register, fascinatedby the intricate equivalences between the activities of the retrospectivehistorian and those of the contemporary journalist. The Register Scott isnot a skeptic, of course: he possesses perhaps an excessive faith in ourability to get things right—sooner or later. For this reason, however, hecan emphasize either parallel successes or parallel failures in trying to


comprehend the past and present. The essential point is that the twosystems of knowledge are mutually determining. If antiquarian habitsare useful in untangling contemporary intrigues, antiquarian habits areequally likely to create certain systematic vulnerabilities in Oldbuck’sspeculations. The mild-mannered investigator of ruins who dreams ofbecoming one of those muscular, aggressive heroes he studies (and whomight even be able to woo and win a woman) is a figure we can all laughat, but he is more than an object of fun. The roster of Edinburghintellectuals—the moderate literati—who committed themselves toOssian’s authenticity because they wanted a Scottish army is (so tospeak) legion.60 Oldbuck, a warier thinker, debunks Ossian but nonethe-less falls prey to the call of action, a state of mobilized aggression inwhich the community realizes itself. This sharpest, tiniest, most finelydefined moment of presentness—so The Antiquary suggests—can turnout to be as inauthentic as Dousterswivel’s forgeries of the past.Oldbuck repels an invasion which was never there. Is this a triumph(however ludicrous) or just another way of filling up an empty space, hisown history and Scotland’s in the eighteenth century? Scott is not aboutto commit himself on such a delicate point.

Now you see it, now you don’t: it is in the nature of any collaborationbetween historical and personal memory that it should evoke anillusionistic, phantasmagoric past which one is then tempted to treat asthough it were real. (Agricola arrives two thousand years late; heroicaction must be taken, even if it’s only a matter of wearing one’s father’ssword from the Forty-Five, an event which itself—on close examina-tion—recedes into a curious half-existence.) Of all the book’s variationson this theme, the most haunting—literally—is a kind of folie à deux, orperhaps à trois, enacted on the first night that Lovel stays at theantiquary’s house. The Green Room alone is available to receive him. Itis no doubt appropriate that Lovel, whom Oldbuck supposes to be anactor, should lodge in a chamber so named, but there are evidently goodreasons why this Green Room should be avoided: it is not so much alounge for actors offstage as it is a stage itself, a site of alarminglyperformative apparitions. Oldbuck’s sister (a Griselda of considerablepatience) tells the story amid interruptions from her sibling: there in theGreen Room a ghost appeared to “auld Rab Tull, the town-clerk” (A,1:199) when he came over to look for a misplaced legal paper wanted ina suit. Rab stayed overnight; Oldbuck’s distinguished Reformationancestor hove into view, crying out carta, carta.

Rab Tull keepit a Highland heart, and bang’d out o’ bed, and till some o’his readiest claes—and he did follow the thing up stairs and down stairs

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to the place we ca’ the high dow-cot, (a sort of little tower in the cornerof the auld house, where there was a rickle o’ useless boxes and trunks),and there the ghaist gae Rab a kick wi’ the tae foot, and a kick wi’ thetother, to that very auld east-country tabernacle of a cabinet that mybrother has standing beside his library table. (A, 1:204)

In the “tabernacle,” of course, is the deed Rab Tull sought. Scott hasretold the story of how he rediscovered the unfinished manuscript ofWaverley, a tale already recounted in an epilogue at the end of his firstnovel, and now reproduced within the narrative frame of his third.61 Towhat end? The ghost, Oldbuck observes, was summoned up by a chainof associations created when Rab smoked and drank excessively, andtold his favorite tales of fraud and forgery, “the mystery of raising spirits,discovering hidden treasure, and so forth”—tales to which Griselda, ofcourse, responded with suggestive yarns about the Green Room. Nowonder Rab dreamed so vividly about excavating the past. The GreenRoom, however, is not just the site of historical hide-and-seek but also ofthe same game played out intimately. Escorting his guest to his bed,Oldbuck expatiates upon the “melancholy feeling” with which heassociates this chamber—“not, of course, on account of the childishnonsense that Grizel was telling you, but owing to circumstances of anearly and unhappy attachment” (A, 1:211). Quoting a sad little poemfrom Lyrical Ballads (an anachronism which Scott rationalizes in a note[A, 1:212n]), Oldbuck expatiates upon the revenges of time, which healsall wounds by rendering its patients numb with age or exhaustion. Lovelfalls asleep meditating his romantic frustrations as well as Oldbuck’slecture and Griselda’s ghost story. He dreams that a tapestry hanging hascome to life and that he, like Rab, has been advised by the long-deceased Reformation printer—then wakes to the sound of “an oldScottish tune” (A, 1:225). An offstage voice sings “something between asong and hymn” (A, 1:266-27), a meditation, naturally enough, on thedestructive power of time.

One might complain that the novelist has mounted a whole array ofspecial effects merely to get his putative hero back on track (that is, inpursuit of the heroine); the point, of course, is that Lovel must not endup brideless, as did his host, and that in order to win his bride he mustbe infused with the long-term historical sense which seems to permeateevery corner of Oldbuck’s souvenir-laden quarters, as well as with apersonal resolve which (strangely enough) emerges from that spell-bound locale. Is Lovel dreamy and maundering, or is he ready to act onhis wavering resolve to court Miss Wardour? The creation of a presentmoment in which action becomes possible is contingent upon opening


up a layered, murky past. This is, in small, the movement of TheAntiquary; this is, in large, a frequent, on occasion determining, motiveof the first three Waverley novels, where simultaneous and synchronictime each prove capable of generating the other: a sort of spiralstaircase, up which the reader mounts, sensing a development in thedirection of progress yet always retracing the same, close, heavilylayered space—wandering amid the collections.

Scott is generally happy to acknowledge the made-up quality of histales; he is happy, further, to acknowledge the made-up quality ofhistory as it happened—a sequence of large-scale delusions typicallypressed to climaxes whose comedy or horror resides in their pointless-ness. (The Young Pretender throws down the gauntlet; an officer-nabobbuilds a medieval castle; the French do not invade Scotland.) Events areoften fraudulent, in the sense that they mime a conflict which has beenor will be settled elsewhere, and over the long term; at the same time,events, no matter how insignificant or inauthentic in themselves,illuminate the truth of durée, the cumulative reality of communitieschanging over spans of time. We do not have to fight the French on ourown Scottish beaches, but we learn, while lunging towards this curiouslynonexistent enemy, just how and why the nation holds together; a lessonfrom antiquarian or sociological thought is taught by means of a mock-simultaneous narrative. Once this mechanism of the classical historicalnovel is constructed, once set in motion, the writer can imagine anygiven moment as a formative and engulfing one, then render it as part ofan historical past.

VI. THE AFTERMATH: WAVERLEY AS A ROUTINE

Archibald Alison’s essay on “The Historical Romance” (1845) confi-dently proclaims the mastery of Scott, whose “great revolution inromance-writing” has released new powers within literature. Definingthese powers entangles him in a familiar paradox:

Gibbon was lamenting that the subjects of history were exhausted, andthat modern story would never present the moving incidents of ancientstory, on the verge of the French Revolution and the European war. . . .[With Scott, however,] A new vein of boundless extent and surpassingrichness was opened as it were under our feet. . . . One of the mostdelightful and instructive species of composition was created; whichunites the learning of the historian with the fancy of the poet; whichdiscards from human annals their years of tedium, and brings promi-nently forward their eras of interest.62

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Gibbon’s triumphs in historical writing seemed to exhaust the field, butthe world crisis of 1790-1815 proved otherwise. However, the result wasnot so much that novelists rushed to depict their own action-packedepoch (“events were in that era accumulated which would have filledthe whole annals of a powerful state, in any former age,” as Alisonelsewhere notes).63 Far from it: the shock of simultaneity produced arealization that history was an inexhaustible trove for ambitious writersof fiction. The catastrophes of the present, or the near-present, could bereplicated through artful selection from the repertoire of world history.Historical novelists thus “discard from human annals their years oftedium”; narrative time is used to compress historical time, creating theimpression that the past generally is much like the period of Alison’sfather or grandfather, those emergency-ridden decades in which Napo-leon rose and fell. Through aesthetic rearrangements and abridgments,the world crisis is therefore conceived as omnipresent, a characteristicof any period at all about which the novelist may happen to write.

To universalize simultaneity, as the Scott-derived historical novelusually does, is to make many times and places available to our gaze. Onthe one hand, each is unique, a sort of imaginary present envelopingreaders; on the other, each must be seen as part of a larger world ofmemory, synchronically presented as a collection or as a set of institu-tions, culminating in the moment of reader and writer. Alison under-lines the gains from this drastic expansion in possible subject-matter:“Seated in our arm-chairs, with the wintry winds howling around us,with our feet at a blazing fire, we are transported by the wand of thenovelist to the most remote ages and distant countries of the earth. . . .We roam at will, not only over space but time; and if the writer is worthyof his high vocation . . . the strongest impression of reality is con-veyed.”64 We huddle close to that blazing yet secure fire (compare to thepostscript to Waverley, with its evocation of the safe reader’s smoothcoach ride through history); we also inhabit a past presented withoverwhelming vividness: “the strongest impression of reality is con-veyed.” If this impression originates in the condensation of annalistictime to a point of simultaneous density, it soon unfolds into a compre-hensive sociological survey, including “the manners, habits, and customsof all nations”: as though the pageant of historical development had, likean onrush of Time Bandits, tumbled out of a cluttered closet.

The effect of these labors is cumulative. The classic bibliographicalguidebooks to historical fiction, all produced around the beginning ofthe twentieth century (that is to say, before the end of the First WorldWar), will generally list a large bulk of works in chronological groupings,


great novels and terrible ones consorting together. Despite a subsidiaryconviction (fully acknowledged by Alison) that historical novelists arebest on their own national turf, their ability to move from culture toculture, place to place, is pervasively assumed. Sir Ernest Baker is themaster of this bibliographical reconstitution of historical fiction. In hisview, we read historical fiction to learn about history.65 We learn abouthistory by pretending to be in it, even while acknowledging that ourimmersion is temporary, soon to be replaced by some other provisionaltime trip. As a second bibliographer of the same breed puts it: “The past[in historical fiction] is restored and made to live again.”66 Suchresurrections are, of course, fleeting. In the play between synchrony andsimultaneity, in the universal tourism which it enables, the historicalnovelist produces works of a circular, self-confirming authenticity whichmay nonetheless, from time to time, break outside itself.

In its turn this sort of approach redefines the general understandingof Scott. Writing as late as 1940, Sir Herbert Grierson said of the Authorof Waverley, “Few have equalled him in giving the impression of real lifeand character in such a wide range of period, of locality, of rank, ofidiosyncrasy, from the Crusades to his own day, from the Shetlands toByzantium and Palestine, from Kings and Captains to peasants, beggars,and rogues; from a Cromwell or a Louis XI to half-wits like DavidGellatly and Madge Wildfire.”67 A view of Scott which emphasizeschronological and geographical range emerges from many sources:partly from the major early editions of his novels (the Magnum Opus andthe Abbotsford particularly), in which the overall fictional accomplishmentof the author is given a new dignity, not to mention a new coherence;even more, I suspect, from praise like Alison’s and bibliographical worklike Baker’s. These (and no doubt other) points of reference add up to aline of interpretation on which Grierson’s words of praise can draw.(Few after Grierson, I should add, have taken precisely his line, thoughJudith Wilt has recently provided an intriguing update.)68

Whether we conceive Scott’s novels or all historical fiction as aninclusive practice, a routine that can be learned and repeated, the samegroup of questions remain crucial. We will want to define the ultimateeffect of those perennial Waverleyite maneuvers studied above andvividly summarized in “The Historical Romance.” Even among thewriters of Blackwood’s Magazine, Alison was remarkable for his hatred ofdemocracy: he opposed the North in the American Civil War and was a firmdefender of slavery as a benign social institution. From his high Toryviewpoint, the consumption of multiple tales of emergency and discon-tinuity encourages a paradoxical reverence for tradition. Historical

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fiction is an innovation as influential as gunpowder or steam-engines,but instead of speeding time onwards towards a new and unrecognizablefuture it apparently accumulates many lapsed times around us, produc-ing a limpid, ideally serene nostalgia. “It is not going too far to say, thatthe romances of Sir Walter Scott have gone far to neutralise the dangersof the Reform Bill,” a kind of observation that would be repeated byboth admirers and detractors of the Waverley novels throughout thenineteenth century.69

The Waverley effect, however, need not always be neutralizing in thissense. Alison’s remarks can be placed against a notation by GeorgeSturt, who kept for many years a journal which included both records ofdaily life in rural England and meditations on books. One entry (10October 1901) begins with an appreciation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim(recently published), then continues:

Only last week, I was similarly startled out of the cramped ordinary life.. . . It was while re-reading “Waverley.” And somebody—I think FergusMacIvor—suddenly spoke of the way in which it was customary onslave-ships to bring up the slaves on deck for five minutes’ exercise andair. This picture, flashed into one’s mind when one was deep in theScottish heather, interrupting consciousness of it, made that and one’sown existence and the slavery business all simultaneous. It was well-nighcrushing, that momentary perception of what millions of millions oflives other than ours have gone down into the past, and are going andwill still go down.70

Sturt has mistakenly remembered the details of the passage he de-scribes here, but his slip (while interesting in itself) is not the primarypoint.71 He wants to suggest the way that small, almost accidental effectsin fiction, rather than full-scale set pieces, can best call up “the notion ofmultitude and variety of men in this world.” A novel set in eighteenth-century England and Scotland refers momentarily to the African slavetrade. A surprised Sturt feels himself abruptly aligned with “the Scottishheather” and “the slavery business.” These different moments in timeand space are “all simultaneous.” In Alison’s case, the mobility ofhistorical fiction is an invitation to settle down before the fire. In Sturt’scase, Waverley produces a sense of multitudinous lives going down intothe past. Sturt is thinking not only of slaves and Highlanders but of thepeople in his own parish, for whom, as he often observes in his journal,the world has no more use.

Of course, it is not Sturt but Lukács who offers the best-knownaccount of Scott in these latter terms; the fundamental value of hisemphasis on the simultaneous is that it reopens the problem of how the


two presents of historical fiction might connect and of what effect theirconnection might have on the reader. My own sense is that these puzzleshave to be worked out all over again each time we read a fullyconsidered work of historical fiction. The subtlety or perhaps elusive-ness of Scott himself, that conservative proponent of development, isfeatured in several well-known discussions, as it is, I trust, in the readinggiven above.72 If the dance of synchrony and simultaneity remains vital,this is largely because it is distinctive yet adaptable. Like the mosteffective routines, it is a set of habitual moves, moves which, practicedand internalized, became the basis for explorations of historical time,often unpredictable in outcome though sharing the same set of axioms.73

The Waverley routine persists well past those charmed hundred years inwhich the name of Scott was a mantra for readers, inspiring anextraordinary range of writers—perhaps most compellingly those un-aware of their inspiration’s source.

Valparaiso University

NOTES

I thank James Chandler, Ian Duncan, Simon Joyce, Deirdre Lynch, Margaret Maxwell,Stuart Tave, and Katie Trumpener for their comments on this essay.

1 To take a quintessential Victorian case, here is the young Lord Carnarvon in thewilder reaches of Turkey, 1853: “During the journey he lamented at times the want ofbooks, yet his reading seems to have been fairly varied. He carried with him two largefolio volumes of Gibbon, and though for a devourer of books he may have been on shortcommons, there seems to have been some literature of all sorts, from Byron to Butler’sAnalogy and Coningsby to Arnold’s Sermons, not to mention Horace and his greatfavourite Walter Scott.” Sir Arthur Hardinge, The Life of Henry Howard MolyneuxHerbert, Fourth Earl of Carnarvon 1831-1890, ed. Elisabeth Countess of Carnarvon, 3vols. (London: H. Milford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), 1:63. Thirty-six years later, wefind Carnarvon writing to a friend, “I have been delighting myself with The Antiquaryand Rob Roy . . . [He lauds] the incomparable superiority that Sir W. Scott has over allthe George Eliots and other modern romanticists—writing as they did with theadvantage that half-century of novel making gave them” (3:307).

The twentieth-century memoirs which take up the matter of Scott, usually in a serio-comic vein, are endless. An early hint of much to come is given by Leslie Stephen’sessay, “Hours in a Library with Scott” (Cornhill Magazine 24 [September 1871]: 278-93), where Stephen apprehends that a younger generation has begun to find the Authorof Waverley dull; Stephen’s meditation on this “muttered discontent” (278) is thepreface to an effort at salvaging Scott’s reputation, largely by a drastic process ofwinnowing and selection. Stephen famously reappears as a defender of Scott against acoming generation in his daughter’s To The Lighthouse, where The Antiquary is aparticular object of admiration. Aside from Virginia Woolf, similar references pervadenot just Bloomsbury novels or Edwardian autobiographies but much of Scottish,English, and even American literature. As Jessie Mathersole dryly comments in 1927,

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“To the present generation his works have perhaps become out-of-date, without yethaving attained the interest of antiquity” (Agricola’s Road into Scotland [London: JohnLane, The Bodley Head, 1927], 253). For some other striking indicators, see RebeccaWest, The Judge (1922; reprint, New York: Dial Press, 1980): “There was a little studyat the back of the house which was lined from top to bottom with soberly bound andunrecent books, and dominated by a bust of Sir Walter Scott supported on a revolvingbookcase which contained the Waverley Novels, Burns’ Poems, and Chambers’ Dictio-nary, which had an air of having been put there argumentatively, as a manifesto of theScottish view that intellect is their local industry” (127); A. A. Milne, Autobiography(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939), where Milne writes, “I take down a novel at randomfrom my shelves” (290), then reveals the novel to be Scott’s The Abbot and quotes it toshow what a dead-end novel writing is; Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake: A Bookof Reminiscences (New York: Viking Press, 1941), where, after spotting an anachronismin a historical novel, the young Aldington “put the whole problem to my father, who wasmost unsympathetic. Without looking up from his own book he said if I didn’t like whatI was reading I’d better try Scott. That was no good, because I’d already tried Scott anddidn’t like him. Well, said my father impatiently, try Harrison Ainsworth” (40); GrahamGreene, The End of the Affair (1951; reprint, New York: Viking Press, 1982), where thenarrator doubts “whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scottwas only there because it had—probably—belonged to his father, like the bronze copyof the Discus Thrower”(9): Scott is as hackneyed and as omnipresent as copies of Greeksculpture; Elizabeth Taylor, “Miss A. and Miss M.,” in The Devastating Boys (New York:Penguin, Viking, and Virago, 1984) in which “I pitied myself and my boring book—imposed holiday reading, usually Sir Walter Scott, whom I loathed. I pecked at itdispiritedly and looked about the room for distraction” (158), the first of severalepisodes in torture-by-Scott. On the other hand, there are renegade voices, such as thatof the irrepressible Frank Harris: “I am annoyed whenever I hear Homer, who is not asgreat as our Walter Scott, placed among the first of men” (My Life and Loves, ed. JohnGallagher [1925; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1963], 252; see 28 for the interestingconnection between Sir Walter Scott and Harris’s vigorous erotic life).

2 In his 1937 foreword, Lukács admits to not having done the “spade work” that wouldbe necessary for a fully informed account of historical fiction. See Georg Lukács, TheHistorical Novel (1837), trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press,1963), 17. As recently as 1978, Andrew Sanders could write, “To all intents and purposesthe historical novel sprang to life, fully accoutered and mature, with the appearance ofWaverley in 1814” (The Victorian Historical Novel 1840-1880 [London: Macmillan,1978], ix). For recent efforts to fill this gap, see especially Peter Garside, “PopularFiction and National Tale: Hidden Origins of Scott’s Waverley,” Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature 46 (1991): 30-53; Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender,History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); Katie Trumpener,“National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age ofWaverley, 1806-1830,” ELH 60 (1993): 685-731, and Bardic Nationalism (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1996); and Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Republican Ro-mance: Genre, Politics, and Contingency in Cultural History,” Modern LanguageQuarterly 56 (1995): 145-65.

3 Friedrich Nietzche, The Will to Power, 830 (November 1887-March 1888), trans.Walter Kaufmann, ed. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1967),438.


4 Nietzche to Erwin Rhode, 8 December 1875, in Selected Letters of FriedrichNietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 138.

5 The reading of Scott on the sickbed is not confined to Nietzsche. Ruskin evaluatesScott as a sickbed author (“Fiction Fair and Foul,” Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook andAlexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. [London: George Allen, 1903-12], 34:280 and through-out); even Karl Marx can write, during his sufferings due to a carbuncle, “This last attackwas atrocious. It did not merely put paid to any work, but to any reading, too, EXCEPT

Walter Scott.” Marx to Friedrich Engels, 2 March 1866, in Letters (1864-68), vol. 42 ofMarx and Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 234.

6 Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rise of Antiquarian Research,” in The Classical Founda-tions of Modern Historiography (California: Univ. of California Press, 1990), 54-79.

7 Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Studies in Historiography(New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 1-39.

8 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (LaSalle,Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 87. (It is immediately following this passage that Saussure usesthe metaphor of the cross-section to define the difference between synchrony anddiachrony.)

9 These and other citations are given in the OED, under the word “nostalgia.”10 On the relationship between antiquarianism, patriotism, and nation-building, see

Yoon Sun Lee, “A Divided Inheritance: Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the BritishNation,” ELH 64 (1997): 537-67.

11 I use the translation of R. J. Hollingdale in Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 73. I add, however, the phrase “yes,polypseste” [ja Polypseste], which Hollingdale has dropped.

12 Friedrich Nietzche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag de Gruyter), 265.

13 Eleanor Marx-Aveling, “Karl Marx: A Few Stray Notes,” appendix 11 in SaulPadover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 635, 638.

14 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 25.15 “If in place of the recruitment or pressing into professional service of small

contingents of the declassed, a mass army is to be created, then the content and purposeof the war must be made clear to the masses by means of propaganda” (Lukács, TheHistorical Novel, 23).

16 See especially Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” inIlluminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1969), 253-64.

17 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 41.18 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 42.19 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 84.20 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 85.21 For the full development of this claim, see Lukács’ collection of essays written in

Russia during the 1930s, Studies in European Realism (with an introduction by AlfredKazin [New York: The Universal Library, Grosset and Dunlap, 1964]).

22 John Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, Illustrated LibraryEdition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, n. d.), 1:110, 48.

23 See, for instance, “The War of Carols: A Poem,” in The Poems of Ossian &c,containing the Poetical Works of James Macpherson, esp. in Prose and Rhyme: WithNotes and Illustrations, ed. Malcolm Laing, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable,1805), 1:7-8.

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24 Aristotle’s account of epic goes against this aesthetic of vividness; according to thePoetics, epic can accomodate the marvellous because the ear demands less vividnessthan the eye. The eighteenth-century bardic epic is in this way a reaction uponAristotelian principles rather than an extension of them. See the discussion of this pointin Steven Shankman, Pope’s Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion (Princeton: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1983), 85-86.

25 He corresponded with Jefferson, whose copies of Potocki’s works can be examinedat the Library of Congress.

26 The Journal of Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford, 2 vols.(New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), 2:32.

27 Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian Maclean (London:Viking, 1995), 316. Potocki’s Rebecca is probably the nearest contemporary equivalentto Scott’s (in Ivanhoe, 1819). For Potocki’s theories of chronology, see the Principes deChronologie pour les Quatorze Siècles, qui ont Précédé la Premiere Olympiade Vulgaire,Seconde Partie (Krzemieniec, 1815), 1.

28 Harriet Martineau’s study was first published in 1849-50 in two volumes as Historyof England during the Thirty Years’ Peace 1816-1846; it was revised and republished inone volume under the title cited in my text during 1877-78 (London: George Bell andSons).

29 “Prospectus of the Work,” The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808 (Edinburgh:John Ballantyne, 1810), part 1, vi-vii.

30 The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808, viii.31 On the annalization—or annualization—of history as a feature of “romantic

historicism,” see James Chandler’s large-scale theorization, England in 1819: ThePolitics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1998), esp. chap. two, “An Art of the ‘State.’”

32 Kenneth Curry, Sir Walter Scott’s Edinburgh Annual Register (Knoxville: Univ. ofTennessee Press, 1977), 6.

33 The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1809 (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1811), part2, 607, 609, 608.

34 The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1809, part 2, 605, 606, 603.35 “Account of the Poems of Patrick Carey,” in The Edinburgh Annual Register for

1810 (Edinurgh: John Ballantyne, 1812), part 2, lxvii.36 The Edinburgh Register for 1810, part 2, cxiii.37 See Wilson’s “The Fallen Oak, A Vision. Scene, A Wood, near Keswick, Belonging

to Greenwich Hospital,” in which “an ancient oak” is felled to much poetic lamenta-tion—“Methought, the vanquish’d monarch as he died / Utter’d a groan.” At the end ofthe piece, however, there is an abrupt turnabout: the oak is addressed by “the mountain-goddess, Liberty,” who predicts that the fallen tree will become a mast on a ship inNelson’s fleet. See The Isle of Palms and Other Poems (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne,1812), 362-65.

38 Scott, Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, in Miscellaneous Prose Works, 6 vols.(Edinburgh: Cadell, 1827), 5:178, 184, 24, 190-91.

39 Lockhart, Life, 4:293-94.40 Life of Napoleon Buonaparte with a Preliminary View of the French Revolution, in

The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834), 8:1-2.41 Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Edinburgh:

Archibald Constable, 1814), 1:5-6. Hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and pagenumber and abbreviated W.


42 So far as I can determine, none of the novels mentioned by Colby or Garside havethe phrase “A Tale of the Times” in their titles or subtitles. This in itself is a powerfulargument for the priority of the Scott-West connection. Furthermore, West’s story is, asrequired by Scott’s description, a scandalous narrative of high life. She shows us, inthree gossipy, intricate volumes, the breakdown of a marriage between the lovelyGeraldine Powerscourt and the impetuous Lord Monteith—he corrupted by Londonentanglements (including “an illicit amour” [2:295]), she led astray by the sweetblandishments of the skeptical libertine Fitzosborne. West’s Burkean program is todemonstrate the debilitating effects of revolutionary thought on British culture (acontemporary theme indeed). This in itself would have attracted Scott’s attention. Hewould also have noticed that the party which West describes in the opening chapter ofher novel is compared elaborately to “the splendid fêtes of Kenilworth” (1:3) and thatLord Monteith himself (as described in an early flashback which almost takes over thenovel) is a Scotsman with Jacobite ancestors and connections in the Highlands, which hevisits and then flees in a panic of boredom before he marries Geraldine. West describesthe family histories of the bride and groom in an archly satiric manner which does notaltogether prepare us for Geraldine’s tragic death (with a weeping, repentant Monteith)at novel’s end. She is, by the way, savage towards “antiquarians” who deny the “historicalcredibility” of “the revealed will of God” (3:388); in good eighteenth-century fashion,her antiquaries are radicals rather than nostalgists, demystifiers rather than the avatarsof tradition and continuity described in section three of the present essay. On Jane Westsee also note 54 below. For Colby’s rich bibliographical survey, see Fiction With aPurpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels (Bloomington: Indiana Univ.Press, 1967), 33; Garside’s commentary (with fascinating material on a spate of scandalnovels in the years 1807-1810) is in “Popular Fiction and National Tale,” 37-38.

43 In the English language, the fashion is largely set by Thomas Leland’s Longsword(1762); see the modern edition edited and introduced by John C. Stephens, Jr. (NewYork: New York Univ. Press, 1957). See also the classic work of J. M. S. Tompkins, ThePopular Novel in England 1770-1800 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press 1961), esp.chapter 6, “The Stirring of Romance, and the Historical Novel.”

44 James Ballantyne to Scott, 15 September 1810, quoted in Lockhart, Life, 3:137.45 The letter to Edgeworth is dated 10 November 1814 (Scott, Letters, 3:518).

Grierson states that this letter is “obviously Scott’s composition—in the main” (517),leaving some ambiguity about who is saying what and why in the comment which I havequoted; on the whole, this particular remark seems to me Ballantyne’s rather thanScott’s. John Sutherland suggests that Scott and the Ballantynes were already negotiat-ing on one of the seventeenth-century novels, perhaps Old Mortality (The Life of WalterScott: A Critical Biography [Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: BlackwellPublishers, 1995], 180).

46 “Advertisement,” in The Antiquary, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1816),v. The novel is hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page number andabbreviated A.

47 John Wilson Croker, review of The Antiquary, The Quarterly Review 15 (April1816), in Scott: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 99.

48 St. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), bk. 11, sec. 15, p. 265.

49 The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Edinburgh: CanongateClassics, 1998), 132.

467Richard Maxwell

50 On the circumstances of Waverley’s upbringing, Scott writes: “Family tradition andgenealogical history . . . is the very reverse of amber, which, itself a valuable substance,usually includes flies, straws, and other trifles; whereas these studies, being themselvesvery insignificant and trifling, do nevertheless serve to perpetuate a great deal of what israre and valuable in ancient manners, and to record many curious and minute factswhich could have been preserved and conveyed through no other medium” (W, 1:45).

51 See Perry Anderson’s essay “The Ends of History,” in A Zone of Engagement(London: Verso, 1992), 279-375.

52 Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London:George Routledge and Sons, 1936), 12.

53 Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 174. For several prominent variations on thetheme of Scott’s emptiness, see Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels(New York: Atheneum, 1968) on the negativity of the Waverley hero; Judith Wilt, SecretLeaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), esp. herpages on Scott’s anxieties about Christianity and empty tombs; and Peter Murphy,“Scott’s Disappointments: Reading The Heart of Midlothian,” Modern Philology 92(1994): 179-98. (“He writes uncompelling novels—that is precisely their point” [197].)

54 On Jane West’s The Loyalists, see Trumpener, “National Character,” 194-95.55 See the fifth earl of Selkirk’s Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of

Scotland, with a View of the Causes and Probable Consequences of Emigration, 2nd ed.(Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1805).

56 Guy Mannering, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1815), 1:50. Hereaftercited parenthetically by volume and page number and abbreviated M.

57 On Charles II and his oak, a good introduction is “An Exact Narrative and Relation”(1660; in Charles II’s Escape from Worcester: A Collection of Narratives Assembled bySamuel Pepys, ed. William Matthews [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966], 91):“Col. Carelesse brought and led the King to that so much celebrated Oake, wherebefore he had himself been lodged: (This Tree is not hollow but of a sound firm Trunk,onely about the middle of the body of it there is a hole in it about the bignesse of a manshead, from whence it absurdly and abusively (in respect of its deserved perpetualgrowth to outlast Time it self) is called Hollow,” where the emptiness of the Stuart causeis at once foreshadowed and denied. In Scott’s Woodstock (1826), whose central eventis Charles’s escape from the debacle at Worcester, a tree called “The King’s Oak” playsa significant symbolic role.

58 The “half-defaced” motto on the Ellangowan coat of arms is “Our Right makes ourMight;” the motto Glossin intends to assume is “He who takes it makes it” (M, 1:32).

59 Bishop Percy was the author of Reliques of English Poetry (1765), the mostinfluential ballad collection of the eighteenth century; Joseph Ritson spent much of hisscholarly career impugning the accuracy of Percy’s supposed transcriptions from amysterious authenticating manuscript which he was ever reluctant to let out of his hands.

60 See Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: TheModerate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985).

61 A comparison with the real-life incident from which Scott claimed that thisanecdote was derived shows that it has been changed in several crucial respects, eachtending to suggest similarities with the author’s story of the discovery of Waverley.See—not in the first edition but in the Magnum Opus edition published towards theend of Scott’s life, and in most subsequent texts—the “note to Chapter IX,” on “thelegend of Mrs. Grizel Oldbuck.” Waverley, New Edition, 5:132-34.


62 Archibald Alison, “The Historical Romance,” Blackwood’s Magazine, September1845, 341-56.

63 See the introduction to Archibald Alison’s History of Europe from the Fall ofNapoleon in MDCCXV to the Accession of Louis Napoleon in MDCCLII, 4 vols. (NewYork: Harper and Brothers, 1852-60), 1:2.

64 Alison, “Historical Romance,” 344.65 See Jonathan Nield’s Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales (London: E.

Mathews and Marrat; New York; G. P. Putnam’s Sons) which went through at least fiveeditions (the first is from 1902, the fifth from 1928); Ernest Baker’s Guide to HistoricalFiction (Argosy-Antiquarian Ltd., 1968), first published 1914, but based on previousBaker bibliographies going back to 1903; and James R. Kaye’s Historical FictionChronological and Historically Related (Chicago: Snowdon Publishing, 1920). In his Artand Practice of Historical Fiction, Alfred Tresidder Sheppard, himself a highly eclectichistorical novelist, discusses with enthusiasm the use of such guides by readers in thegenre. The sort of thing he has in mind can be suggested by a quote from Baker: “Till1904 few people knew anything about that anxious outcome of medieval enthusiasm, theChildren’s Crusade; there are now five novels dealing with it at large in the followinglist” (x).

66 Kaye, xi.67 Herbert Grierson, Sir Walter Scott, Bart (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1940),

119.68 Judith Wilt, “Walter Scott,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel (New

York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), esp. 306-7.69 Alison, “Historical Romance,” 347.70 The Journals of George Sturt 1890-1927. A Selection, ed. E. D. Mackerness, 2 vols.

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 1:368.71 The passage he had in mind is probably a conversation between Waverley and

Colonel Talbot, where the speech of Scots is compared to the speech of “the Negroes inJamaica” (W, 3:112-13).

72 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New York: Atheneum, 1968),argues for Scott as a Burkean conservative; Avrom Fleishman, The English HistoricalNovel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,1971), identifies him with Enlightenment theories of progress. More recently, in theintroduction to his recent edition of Ivanhoe (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, OxfordWorld’s Classics, 1996), Ian Duncan offers a nuanced view of Scott’s ideologicalmachinations.

73 Compare Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso,1998): “How does a convention change. . . . And how on earth can the same conventionwork in such different places—Scotland and Italy, Denmark and Hungary?” (150).Moretti follows A. L. Kroeber in treating diffusion as “the great conservative factor incultural history” (190); this makes him generally pessimistic about the impact ofinfluential genres, an impact which he sees as unduly homogenizing: do we really wantWaverley novels not only about but from every country and every author under the sun?My answer would be somewhat more positive than Moretti’s; if one sees Scott’sinnovation on a high level of abstraction, that is, in terms of its synthesis betweensimultaneity and synchronicity, it might well be a desirable model in places culturallydistant from Scotland and England.

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Richard Maxwell Ivanhoe