Stop! - for thy tread is on an Empire's dust! - the best books of 1816

Isn’t that 1816 Constable landscape pretty.  It’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex, for some reason now in Washington, D. C.  1816 was the Year without a Summer, the year of a worldwide volcano-induced deep freeze, even with the Napoleonic Wars over, a terrible year in Europe.

It was a wonderful year for English poetry, with Shelley’s first great book, Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems, and Keats’s first published poems, including “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (a book would come in 1817).  Few knew it.  Everyone knew about best-seller George Gordon Byron’s great year, with three big hits: the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (the post’s title is from stanza XVII), “The Prisoner of Chillon,” and one of his dumb Orientalist narrative poems, The Siege of Corinth, my personal favorite of his dumb etc.

Alp, “the renegade,” has been refused the hand of the woman he loves, so he has thrown in his lot with the Turks.  Is he helping them besiege the recalcitrant Greeks in Corinth for love or revenge?  Regardless, the poem ends in not just a battle scene but a massive explosion, just like it would in the Hollywood action movie of which The Siege of Corinth is a genuine precursor.  The last seventy lines describing the explosion are superb, with the shock moving out to the armies, then to the animals, to the birds, as if the world is protesting the event:

Many a tall and goodly man,
Scorch’d and shrivell’d to a span,
When he fell to earth again
Like a cinder strew’d the plain:
Down the ashes shower like rain…  (Canto XXXIII)

Horrible, violent, shocking poetry.  I had meant to reread the more allusive and difficult Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage before writing this post, but picking up the Selected Poems I was sucked into The Siege of Corinth instead.

Walter Scott published three books in 1816.  To understand this silly story it is important to remember that he was a best-selling poet but published Waverley (1814) anonymously, then Guy Mannering (1815) as “By the Author of Waverley,” and now The Antiquary (1816) as by the same.  The latter is the favorite Scott novel of many eminent writers, so I am glad I have read it.  Waverley kicked off the craze for historical novels that continues to this day; The Antiquary is in many ways about historical novels.  If only it were better.

At this point, with three hit anonymous novels under his belt, Scott decided to play a prank.  He retired “the Author of Waverley” and began a new series, with a new publisher, the Tales of My Landlord, which resulted in one short novel, The Black Dwarf and one long one, Old Mortality, published simultaneously.  To extend the prank, Scott published vicious (anonymous) reviews of his own novels.  Nevertheless, both books were hits, and readers with any sense of style knew they are by the Waverley writer.

Old Mortality is Scott’s best novel, I think, along with The Heart of Midlothian (1818).  It is about religious fanaticism, a topic of continuing relevance.  The stakes are higher than in Waverley, the world more dangerous.

What else is going on in 1816?  Goethe’s Italian Journey, Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and “The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King,” Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe.  I have often mentioned how little French literature survived this period, but here is a major exception, a politician’s novel about a love affair with an older, stronger woman.  It is a dissection of the love affair and the narrator’s feelings about it:

We were living, so to speak, on a sort of memory of the heart, strong enough to make the thought of separation painful, but too weak for us to find satisfaction in being together.  I indulged in these emotions as a relaxation from my normal tension.  I would have liked to give Ellenore tokens of my love that would have made her happy, and indeed I sometimes went back to the language of love, but these emotions and this language resembled the pale and faded leaves which, like remains of funeral wreaths, grow listlessly on the branches of an uprooted tree.  (Ch. 6, tr. Leonard Tancock)

The entire book is written like that, with few scenes, description, or even dialogue, but rather alternating movement and analysis.  It is a kind of fiction I associate strongly with French literature.  The Albertine sections of In Search of Lost Time are in this mode.

The Empire is dust, and French literature is returning to life.

measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote - Twain versus Scott in Life on the Mississsippi

First they read Walter Scott.  It was like the shock of a new world revealed.  (Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Ch. 6, tr. Mark Polizzotti)

Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building [of Louisiana]; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances.  The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books.  (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883, Ch. 40)

Twain’s great screed against Walter Scott is in Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 46.  I have long wondered to what extent he meant it.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.  (Ch. 46)

In the next line he does call this a “wild proposition.”  His argument is that for some unspecified reason, Southern culture was especially susceptible to Scott’s “Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.”

Twain returns to the idea enough that I think he did mean it.  Tom Sawyer is Twain’s Scott-damaged representative, harmless enough in his own book but dangerous in the notorious last episode of Huckleberry Finn (1885).  That much-hated ending has almost convinced me that Twain was right, although he puts too much emphasis on the medieval Scott, when his Scottish novels are more important (and also better novels).

The Southern gentility, much of it descended from the people depicted in Scott’s novels, embraced the ethos of honor and glory they read about in the novels as their own, along with an ugly modernization of the clannishness.  Losing the war only added to the identification with Scott’s doomed loyalists and fanatics, sacrificing everything for the Young Pretender or radical Calvinism, depending on which novel seemed most appealing.  That Scott and his protagonists are generally on the other side is beside the point.

Much of the decline of Scott comes from the massive shifts in our idea of honor – true no matter who I mean by “our,” I think – and the replacement of glory with celebrity.  Twain, one of his time’s greatest celebrities, writes as an opponent of the old honor.

[Scott] did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.

So, that first line aside, I just about half believe Twain, maybe about as much as he believed himself.

Life on the Mississippi is, setting the Scott chapter aside, great fun from beginning to end – “The Mississippi is well worth reading about” (Ch. 1).  It is about one-third the memoir of Twain’s time as a cub pilot in the 1850s, and two-thirds a travel book with Twain revisiting the river.  I had thought the proportions were reversed.  At times I wished the proportions were reversed.  I mean, the glory days of the steamboats, what a time.  A visit to St. Paul – Twain is thorough – is not as interesting, even in Twain’s hands.  The proportion of nonsense and digression is satisfyingly similar to other Twain “non-fiction.”

He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books – The Best Books of 1815

We are looking at an 1815 drawing by Hokusai that I copied from p. 194 of Hokusai by Gian Carlo Calza (1999, English translation 2003).  Calza suggests that the scene depicts the Azumaya bookshop.  The owner is on the right, a delivery boy with a bundle of text on the left, and a customer in the middle, choosing a book.

What book do you think he will buy?  Will it be one of the best Japanese books of 1815?  What were the best Japanese books of 1815?

I have picked up from what I have read about Japanese literary history that the 19th century is not thought of as a good period, a helpful judgment in that it gives me a good excuse to stay ignorant.  I enjoy playing with Best Books posts at the end of each year, but they are mementoes of my ignorance.

How many books from 1815 have I read?  I believe three, or perhaps only two, but I did read those books in particular because a long line of readers have kept them alive.  If not the best, they are the survivors.

In December 1815, Walter Scott would have topped the Best Books lists with his second novel, Guy Mannering.  Well, not Scott, but rather “The Author of Waverley.”  I do not know how high The Author of Pride and Prejudice &c. &c. would have ranked with Emma, but she was becoming pretty well-known by this point.

One of these novels is currently among the most popular in the world, while the other has retreated to graduate school, although Scott Bailey read it last spring and made it sound pretty good, if “very plotty.”  I’ve read seven Scott novels, but not Guy Mannering; what do I know.

The big celebrity bestseller of the year was Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, a collection of song settings of original lyrics published in an expensive edition.  Byron was so popular that he could immediately sell ten thousand copies of even this book.  Current selections of Byron, even fat Penguins and Oxfords, come close to ignoring Hebrew Melodies, but it is the home of “She Walks in Beauty.”

It’s the next year, 1816, when miracles start to happen in English poetry.

I know of two great books in German literature from 1815: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (or just its first half – I never got this straight), and Part II of the first version of Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (Part I is from 1812).

The Hoffmann novel is great fun and a standard classic for German-language readers.  No idea why it has never done much in English.  Too weird?

The Grimm brothers’ book is of the highest importance.  Which book has generated the most additional books, Emma or Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales?  This second volume has “Hans My Hedgehog,” “The Goose Girl,” “The Golden Key” with its unending ending.  I have read the complete Fairy Tales, but not in this early form.  That would be worth doing someday.

So, within the bounds of my ignorance, then: after two hundred years of erosion, three great books left.

The title is borrowed from Emma.

Jenny Jop, Corporal Bullock, and the periphrastic and ambagitory Waverley

This is close to my favorite bit of Waverley:

Tired of the attendance of Callum Beg, who, he thought, had some disposition to act as a spy on his motions, Waverley hired as a servant a simple Edinburgh swain, who had mounted the white cockade in a fit of spleen and jealousy, because Jenny Jop had danced a whole night with Corporal Bullock of the Fusileers.  (Ch. 51)

The sneaky Callum Beg was a famous character for a while.  “[M]ounted by white cockade” means “joined the rebellion.”  So much of Scott has to be explained now.  None of this is what I like, but rather that none of the last three characters in that sentence, the swain who becomes Waverley’s servant, Captain Bullock, or the high-spirited, fickle Jenny Jop are of any importance.  The servant is at least mentioned a couple of times, leading Waverley’s horse and so on, but never with the life he is given when he is introduced here.  A little touch of Nikolai Gogol; an entire little scene popping into existence, then popping like a bubble.

Most impressive is how little pedantry there is in the sentence, or in the other examples of Scott at his best.  Pedantry is, unfortunately, a central technique for Scott.  One of the secondary characters, the Baron Bradwardine, a good one in most ways, is marred by his comic flaw, his tedious multilingual pedantry, his explanations of genealogy and heraldry interspersed with Latin and French, translated in the endnotes if for some reason you want to bother.  Or I should say he is marred by Scott’s insistence on taking the joke so far, always giving two paragraphs or pages of dull, mangled gibberish when one might still be funny.

Scott is not quite in on his own joke.  Flora Mac-Ivor, super-patriot, super-woman, not remotely a comic character, is as much of an antiquarian as the Baron, specializing in “the music and poetical traditions of the Highlanders” (Ch. 21).  Her brother, a paragon of obsolete and misguided but real heroism, is almost as bad.  See their conversation in Chapter 23:

“A truce, dear Fergus! spare us those most tedious and insipid persons of all Arcadia.  Do not, for Heaven's sake, bring down Coridon and Lindor upon us.”

“Nay, if you cannot relish la houlette et le chalumeau, have with you in heroic strains.”

And the author himself is worst of all.  This is meant to be self-mocking: 

But without further tyranny over my readers, or display of the extent of my own reading, I shall content myself with borrowing a single incident from the memorable hunting at Lude, commemorated in the ingenious Mr. Gunn's essay on the Caledonian Harp, and so proceed in my story with all the brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus, will permit me.  (Ch. 24)

Scott’s third novel, written two years later, puts the argument in the title.  The Antiquary (1816) is a self-critique, a justification of Scott’s method, a defense of the minutiae that compose culture.  Scott saw his novels as a way to preserve what was lost, or destroyed.  Few of his successors – few that we still read – had much interest in this idea.  Few writers of historical novels are themselves antiquarians.  Maybe this is one more obstacle in the way of reading Scott well, or at all.  I think he gets it out of his system, though.  I’ll reread Old Mortality for its bicentennial next year and see what I think.  It’s a novel about religious fanaticism, a subject of continuing rather than antiquarian interest.

As if her clothes had been flung on with a pitchfork - specific Scott

Walter Scott is not usually thought of as a first-rate prose writer, and he is not, but he was moving in the right direction.  He in fact had, from my perspective, crossed a threshold in the physicality of the novel.  Many of the greatest 18th century novels have plenty of stuff – see Crusoe salvage a shipwreck, or worry with Clarissa Harlowe about where she can hide the supply of paper that will allow her to crank out a thousand pages of letters – but Scott had a stronger sense of the artistic uses of the thickly imagined world.

Perhaps the blending with history focused his imagination, or perhaps he was adapting aspects of Romantic and proto-Romantic poetry into prose.  Jane Austen was working on the same problem, so I assume mostly the latter.

It is not easy to find much of this in 18th century fiction:

By this time the Baron… had indued a pair of jack-boots of large dimensions, and now invited our hero to follow him as he stalked clattering down the ample stair-case, tapping each huge balustrade as he passed with the butt of his massive horse-whip, and humming, with the air of a chasseur of Louis Quatorze…  (Ch. 12)

Well, obsolete verbs like “indued” are easy to find.  I mean the specific actions that help – or demand that – the reader visualize the character’s descent of the staircase.  A film version of Waverley will have to interpret the exact sound of the boots on the stairs (“stalked clattering”), but the whip and the tapping can go straight into the screenplay.  The Baron is a figure from an earlier time even in the context of the history of the novel and in many ways a figure of ridicule, but here Scott shows him at his confident best in every detail.

Metaphor creates a different kind of precision:

… a strong, large-boned, hard-featured woman, about forty, dressed as if her clothes had been flung on with a pitchfork, her cheeks flushed with a scarlet red where they were not smutted with soot and lamp-black… (Ch. 30)

The passage continues with more detail in description and action, perhaps even too much.  Nothing as good as that pitchfork.

My favorite in all of Waverley – a drummer has fallen in with a troop of Cameronians, religious fanatics, on the march:

[H]e protested he could beat any known march or point of war known in the British army, and had accordingly commenced with “Dumbarton's Drums,” when he was silenced by Gifted Gilfillan, the commander of the party, who refused to permit his followers to move to this profane, and even, as he said, persecutive tune, and commanded the drummer to beat the 119th Psalm.  As this was beyond the capacity of the drubber of sheepskin, he was fain to have recourse to the inoffensive row-de-dow as a harmless substitute for the sacred music which his instrument or skill were unable to achieve.  (Ch. 34)

Again, I have some doubts here – “drubber of sheepskin” is awful fussy – but otherwise this is all a fine joke.  The (omitted) next couple of lines are pedantic, but I want to save Scott-the-pedant for tomorrow.

With Waverley, English letters have not quite achieved the fog of Bleak House or Becky Sharp throwing Johnson’s Dictionary out the window or that idiot in Wuthering Heights mistaking a pile of dead rabbits for kittens or whatever your favorite concrete piece of fiction might be, but it is on its way; it is now well on its way.

I cannot promise them that this story shall be intelligible - Waverley's strange fate

What I do not want to do is write about why no one reads Walter Scott anymore, how Scott dropped from World’s Greatest Novelist to whatever he is now.  Previously Important Writer.  My first serious encounter with Scott, before I had read any of his books, was in Irving Howe’s 1992 essay “Falling Out of the Canon: The Strange Fate of Walter Scott,” and I have never been able to separate Scott’s novels from his Strange Fate, a problem that only grew stranger when I finally read the novels and discovered that many of them are indeed good – ingenious, complex, ethically meaningful, and well-written.  He has pacing problems when compared to the novels of today, but what fool measures literature by the novels of today?  The same fools who insist that history is boring.  For them, Scott must read like gibberish.

Young, unformed, “romantic” Edward Waverley is an English officer stationed in Scotland who goes on a little tour, encountering Scottish drinking customs and Highland bandits and similar exotic adventures.  The novel is a bit picaresque at the beginning, something of a fictionalized travel book.  A reader might wonder if Waverley will penetrate further into the Highlands, ending the novel in the Outer Hebrides or someplace like that.  A reader, I mean, who was not paying attention to the time of the novel or does not understand its significance, the reader who does not know that Waverley is stumbling into the 1745 Jacobite uprising and into the side that will get him hanged for treason.

What looks like a problem with the pacing can actually be a great source of narrative tension.  By the time Bonnie Prince Charlie lands in Scotland and gathers the Clans to his side for one last grab at the crown of England, Scott has set up a serious problem for Waverley.

It was at that instant, that, looking around him, he saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike that which he had worn from his infancy, and wished to awake from what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible, and unnatural. ‘Good God!’ he muttered, ‘am I then a traitor to my country, a renegade to my standard, and a foe, as that poor dying wretch expressed himself, to my native England!’  (Ch. 46)

The Romantic adventure has turned into something with high stakes.  Almost three hundred pages earlier, while wandering through stuff about Waverley’s ancestry, childhood, and education, Scott wonders if “the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of Cervantes” (Ch. 5).  In a sense, Waverley is such an imitation, but one in which the sheep suddenly become a real army and Don Quixote a real knight.

I must link to Rohan Maitzen’s post about teaching Waverley to (good) undergraduates, the problems she has encountered and some of the successes she has had overcoming their resistance to this book. She reminds me that even Scott did not envision readers who were reading quite right:

I beg pardon, once and for all, of those readers who take up novels merely for amusement, for plaguing them so long with old-fashioned politics, and Whig and Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites. The truth is, I cannot promise them that this story shall be intelligible, not to say probable, without it.  (Ch. 5)

Well, there are different kinds of amusement.  Scott has become an increasingly difficult pleasure.

Are we in the land of romance and fiction?

Yes we are!  We are in Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since (1814), the novel that launched a craze for historical fiction that persists today.  I had meant to read the novel for its bicentennial, but blah blah etcetera and here I am.

This year’s 200th birthday party is for Guy Mannering, which I have not read but is probably pretty good since it is about smugglers.

I have read seven Scott novels and rank Waverley third, for whatever that is worth, with Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as its betters.

Waverley is good, though.  The characters are not exactly real, but they are original; the weight of events feels significant; the meta-fiction is amusing.  Or deadly, as it seems to be for many (non-)readers.  Scott has written a heroic adventure novel that is not just in places pedantic but actually about pedantry, which is a good if patience-testing trick.  Two novels later, with The Antiquary, he would toss out the adventure in order to focus more on the pedantry.

Waverley is about 500 pages long, and it takes 200 pages for Scott to put in place some elements that begin to look like a conventional story, and then another 50 pages for that story to lurch into motion, after which it cooks along pretty well.  Kidnappings, battles, chases, lots of narrative tension for the young protagonist as the central question moves from Who will he marry? to How will he not be hanged by the neck for treason?  The land of romance and fiction begins to seem pretty substantial.

Re-reading the book reminded me that Scott is as curious about how fiction works as was Henry Fielding before him, or Thackeray and Trollope after.  The short first chapter is entirely about the title and genre of the book.  Is it a Gothic novel, for example, with

a castle… of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys, either lost, or consigned to the case of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts?  Would the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page?

But no, it is not a Gothic novel, nor one of three more genres covered in the same paragraph.  The first paragraph of the book, I want to emphasize.  Scott is doing his (non-)readers a service – if the owl sounds more appealing, bail out now.  What Scott has done, he claims, is to write “from the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed.”  All of his fuss about fictionality is in the service of Truth.

Readers of Jane Austen – Mansfield Park is an exact contemporary – may wonder why he thinks he needs all this, but that has been a perpetual question.

The title quotation is in Chapter 27, “Upon the Same Subject.”

The Best Books of the Year: 1814 - neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners

What were the Best Books of the Year in 1814?  What I have usually done in a post like this is scrounge together every book of any literary consequence at all from a given year, which is not as hard a task as it seems since two hundred years culls the herd of books so brutally (as does twenty years; as does two).  But 1814 was unusual because its best books were so influential.

Another change is that I did more anniversary reading than usual this year (usual: none), so I will just link back to some recent posts.  One of these influential, foundational works was E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, for example, which is back here.  Another German novella from the same year, Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso casts almost as long a shadow.  It’s about a guy who sells his shadow to the devil.  That’s why I said – ah, never mind.  It’s good, too, if narrower than Hoffmann’s fantasy.

Then there’s Mansfield Park, Jane Austen’s best book, which is more read now than anything else I will mention, but the influence of which is complicated by the fact that it is Jane Austen’s worst book.  At the time it was published, Austen was something like what we would now call a midlist writer, not a bestseller, but a seller, a writer with a lot of good readers, including Walter Scott and the dissolute Prince Regent who would later become King George IV.  If she had only lived a few more years, she would have been a guest of the king, and then she could have written a hilarious novel about that.  And she could have finished Sanditon.  And, and, and.

We do not have enough Austen novels, but we have more Walter Scott novels than anyone wants to read.  The first was Waverley, from this year, the novel that went viral, as the youngsters say, that did not literally invent the idea of the historical novel but in effect did so.  Waverley must have directly inspired hundreds of novels; further Scott novels must have led to thousands.  Within twenty years Balzac, Hugo, Gogol, Pushkin, Manzoni, and Dickens had written historical novels that were clearly Scott-like.  Dumas and Cooper made careers out of the form.  On and on, to the present, even if the amount of Scott in contemporary novels has become homeopathic.

And Scott really was doing something innovative, and he knew it.  That’s why he spends the first chapter, and plenty of later passages, describing what he is doing:

I would have my readers understand, that they will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners…  (Chapter First)

Just the kind of thing many readers find deadly.  Scott certainly never seems to be in any hurry.  But Waverley is nevertheless a fine novel, funny, perceptive, and in some places fairly exciting.  I am rereading it now, so I will likely poke at the book more in the new year.

The final case, making at least four, is Lord Byron, who published some works key in the other viral phenomenon of the time, Byronism.  I want to save these for tomorrow, though.

So that’s: the novel that created historical novels, Byronism, Hoffmann fantasies, and an Austen novel.  Plus Peter Schlemihl.  And the earliest known Keats poems, but we have to wait two more years for the good stuff.

One final example, the reverse of the above.  The consensus Book of the Year in England, appearing on all of the lists, if there had been lists, would easily have been The Excursion by William Wordsworth, a book of great Significance and greater Tediousness.  It is close to unread now, and the curious thing is that it was made obsolete by Wordsworth himself, by the publication of The Prelude in 1850, a poem which does everything of value that The Excursion does except better – with more beauty, more narrative interest, and much less artificiality.  It took some time, but The Prelude eventually murdered The Excursion.  I doubt this happens very often.

From this distance, the number of surviving books from 1814 is hardly the point.  A good year.  I put a page from John Constable’s 1814 sketchbook, owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, up top.

No, I never shall be inspired to write romances! says Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here we have Nathaniel Hawthorne describing his 1856 visit to Walter Scott’s house.  Scott, at this point, had been dead for 24 years, and was the Greatest Novelist Ever.

The servant told me that I might sit down in this chair, for that Sir Walter sat there while writing his romances, "and perhaps," quoth the man, smiling, "you may catch some inspiration."  What a bitter word this would have been if he had known me to be a romance-writer!  "No, I never shall be inspired to write romances!" I answered, as if such an idea had never occurred to me.  I sat down, however.*

Hawthorne, at this point, had written, among other books, three novels and three volumes of stories.  The previous novel, The Blithedale Romance, was three years behind him; his last novel, The Marble Faun, was four years and one long trip to Italy ahead of him.

Yesterday I distinguished, vaguely, between novels and romances, just as Hawthorne and the servant did here.  No definition completely differentiates the two forms, in part because the modern novel has colonized and swallowed up earlier forms, absorbing them into what we call the novel.  Scott himself called the novel “a fictitious narrative… accommodated to the ordinary train of human events,” which ain’t bad but has its problems.**  He is trying to distinguish the novel as he understands it from Gothic fantasies or German fairy stories, all texts that, if long enough, whatever that means, we blithely label novels.  Still – “ordinary”?  Perhaps one could usefully drag in the word “realism,” but I fear that watery concept would not dispel but concentrate the fog.

Well, as a Modernist reading after a century of explicit genre-pushing experimentation, I don’t actually care what a novel is, and I happily call all sorts of strange things novels.  I’m trying to get at what Scott and Hawthorne were trying to get at.  A clue was provided to me by bibliographing nicole’s recent pieces about The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), in which she reminds me that Scott, like Hawthorne, wrote hybrid novels, blends of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Lammermoor blends old legends, fairy curses, and prophecies of doom with meticulously researched costumes and customs.  Like The Blithedale Romance, Scott’s novel is a stagey book, with the author shuffling a handful of characters and settings, or, to borrow from film, sets.

Now, The Bride of Lammermoor is the most romance-like of the seven Scott novels I have read – Ivanhoe is close, I guess.  Lammermoor is that much closer to Lancelot wandering through the woods in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) or the nobles disguised as shepherds in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593, more or less) than to Don Quixote or Clarissa.  How much closer?  Uh, you know, that much.  None of this is clear-cut.

Here’s one way I think of the difference – no, a way I imagine the difference.  Every piece of fiction has some sort of complicated relationship with the actual world.  Some texts earnestly mimic the real world, some playfully mock it.  Romances create stronger boundaries between the book’s world and the real world.  A more typical Scott novel, Waverley (1814), say, by using actual historical events and personages, interweaves itself with the real world, while The Bride of Lammermoor is somehow more sealed off from it.  Hawthorne deceptively writes “about” Puritans or Brook Farm, but his novels and stories are hermetic fantasies.  Like I said, this is an imaginative view.  Or – what are some harsher words? – vague, unformed, fallacious, wrong.

* From the long May 10, 1856 entry, Passages from the English Note-books, 1870.

** I found the quotation, ellipses and all, in “Novel, rise of the”, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edition, ed. Margaret Drabble, 1985.

Stevenson takes on Scott, and wins - Scottish Stevenson

What have I read, four Scotch novels of Robert Louis Stevenson?  Some Scottish stories, too, none of which were among his best, except, perhaps, the ghost story ”Thrawn Janet.”  One of the novels, Weir of Hermiston, is unfinished.  I wonder if it would have been the last one.  His imagination was settling into the South Seas.  Inspiration struck in strange ways for Stevenson, so who knows.

He had proved his point, though, or at least a point I glimpse in these novels.  Stevenson had deliberately set himself up against Walter Scott, inventor of the Scottish novel, inventor of the historical novel, and, in terms of influence, the Most Important Novelist of All Time.  Stevenson was moving onto Scott’s turf, claiming it as his own.

Kidnapped and Catriona and The Master of Ballantrae are all set soon after the events of Waverley, Scott’s first novel.  The events are the most important of modern Scottish history, the Jacobite uprising of 1745, which resulted in one of the great romantic defeats, the suppression of the Highlands.  Kidnapped brilliantly plunges its young, innocent hero into the middle of the chaos, ongoing after six years.  Weir of Hermiston is linked more closely to Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian.  Stevenson is working with, pressing against, only the best Scott novels, at least.

Compared to Scott, Stevenson’s books are sleeker, faster, uncluttered, while still retaining a mild flavor of 18th century language.  Scott has trouble keeping to his story or getting to his point; Stevenson gets there all too quickly. Stevenson’s books are less ambitious in scope, although not in art, while Scott has a grander reach, which does not always serve him well, either.

In “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), Stevenson writes that, as a child, he “liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, 'towards the close of the year 17-,' several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls.”  That’s not quite how The Antiquary begins, but it does start with an inn, a real one (still in “A Gossip on Romance”):

The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.  There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine - in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.  Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the 'Antiquary.'  But you need not tell me - that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.

Hawes Inn was so famous that tourists came to see it, but Stevenson was not satisfied.  Yes, Scott told a story about it, but not the story, or not the right story.  It took a few years, but Stevenson found his own use for the inn in Kidnapped (1886).

I should be clear – I don’t think Stevenson was really competing with Scott in the sense that he was trying to defeat or replace Scott.  Instead, Stevenson was measuring himself against Scott, at the time still widely considered the greatest novelist in English.  Sometimes, like Henry James, I wish Stevenson had wanted to measure himself against, I don’t know, George Eliot, or Henry James.  But Scott, that was plenty ambitious.

I want to point out a post at Lizzy’s Literary Life which has a fine Kidnapped-related photo and other links.  Now it’s Stevenson who draws the tourists to Hawes Inn.

How should there be wine in my son's house? - Walter Scott, antiquary

Walter Scott was, early on, a relentlessly experimental novelist.  He had discovered a new kind of novel with new, unknown rules.  Many of the flaws in Scott’s novels are the result of his experimentation.  Scott’s response to serious weaknesses in characterization or storytelling was not so much to tinker with the novel at hand, but to write another novel.

The Antiquary (1816) was Scott’s third novel.  Set in 1794, it is, unlike the first two books, not exactly a historical novel (Scott was 23 years old in 1794).  It is, instead, about history, about Scottish history.  It is a self-critique, sometimes even a self-parody.  The Antiquary of the title is obsessed with every detail of Scottish history.  His obsession turns him into a fool.  How is Walter Scott any different?

The best scene in the novel, the funeral of the young fisherman Steenie Meiklebackit, suggests an answer.  We are at the beginning of Volume III, two-thirds through the novel.  Chapter One begins with Oldbuck, the Antiquary, asking his valet if “it is expected I should attend the funeral?”  It is, within some narrow prescriptions:

Ye ken in this country ilka gentleman is wussed to be sae civil as to see the corpse aff his grounds – Ye needna gang higher than the loan-head – it’s no expected your honour suld leave the land – it’s just a Kelso convoy, a step and a half ower the door-stane. (III.1.237-8)

That “Kelso convoy” gets Oldbuck’s attention, something new for him to research.  The rest of this chapter is deliberately packed with antiquarian nonsense.  An old vase is broken by a dog, an Egyptian cameo is described in detail, and, most importantly, Oldbuck argues with his nephew, at length, about the authenticity of the poems of Ossian.  The last paragraph sneaks in a reference to the 17th century poet William Drummond.  Now, some of the Ossian stuff is quite funny, and, for Scott, even a bit smutty, but the reader wanting Scott to just get on with it may be pulling hair out by the fistful.

This chapter of trivialities is purposeful, though.  It highlights the moral seriousness of the fisherman’s wake, and it works.  Scott emphasizes the various traditional mourning customs, but in a way that makes them deeply meaningful.  This might be my favorite part of the novel – long, but that’s Scott (Elspeth is the dead man’s ancient grandmother):

When Oldbuck entered this house of mourning, he was received by a general and silent inclination of the head, and, according to the fashion of Scotland on such occasions, wine and spirits and bread were offered round to the guests. Elspeth, as these refreshments were presented, surprised and startled the whole company by motioning to the person who bore them to stop; then, taking a glass in her hand, she rose up, and, as the smile of dotage played upon her shrivelled features, she pronounced, with a hollow and tremulous voice, "Wishing a' your healths, sirs, and often may we hae such merry meetings!"

All shrunk from the ominous pledge, and set down the untasted liquor with a degree of shuddering horror, which will not surprise those who know how many superstitions are still common on such occasions among the Scottish vulgar. But as the old woman tasted the liquor, she suddenly exclaimed with a sort of shriek, "What's this?—this is wine—how should there be wine in my son's house?—Ay," she continued with a suppressed groan, "I mind the sorrowful cause now," and, dropping the glass from her hand, she stood a moment gazing fixedly on the bed in which the coffin of her grandson was deposited, and then sinking gradually into her seat, she covered her eyes and forehead with her withered and pallid hand. (III.2.249)

Although the grandmother’s grief is especially dramatic, the mother and father are given their own, personal, responses to the death of their son.  At the end of the chapter, the father is incapable of carrying the head of the coffin.  Oldbuck, “landlord and master to the deceased,” takes his place - as I mentioned yesterday, he is not a fool about truly important matters.  The old ways, in this scene, have real meaning.  Most of Oldbuck’s antiquarianism is nonsense, but in the fisherman’s cottage, we find something worth preserving.  What is Scott doing, if not preserving it?

I was happy to see Virginia Woolf – I’m back to her essay on The Antiquary – single out the same scene as especially fine.  But she also uses it to club Scott about the shoulders, too, because “it is true that his scene breaks into ruin without his caring.”  Another character arrives at the fisherman’s’ hut, “[f]alsity breaks in,” and the plot, long in abeyance, creaks forward again.  We’re told of a secret marriage, an infant smuggled away, a sinister French nursemaid, that sort of thing.  I didn’t care much before Steenie’s funeral; after, it’s hopeless.

Something for Scott to work on in the next novel.

Page numbers from the Edinburgh Edition of The Antiquary, 1995.

His literary merits are almost undiscoverable - the highly recommended The Antiquary

Two views of Walter Scott, of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816). Virginia Woolf, first, picking out her favorite Scott:

I can’t read the Bride [of Lammermoor], because I know it almost by heart: also the Antiquary (I think those two, as a whole, are my favorites). (Sep. 12, 1932, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5, p. 104)

By heart!  Her favorites!  A strong recommendation.  Woolf, throughout decades of letters, is effusive about Scott, sometimes casting herself as his only remaining reader (see Aug. 12, 1928).

Now, Ford Madox Ford, from his eccentric literary history, The March of Literature (1938):

The Antiquary is a more serious attempt at novel writing [than Ivanhoe or Rob Roy], but its longwindedness is unbelievable and its insistence on assuring the reader that Scotland is a historically important and gentlemanly kingdom, not to be born...

His literary merits are almost undiscoverable… [The Antiquary] takes exactly forty pages of the closely printed pages of the 1837 edition of the “Waverley Novels” before anything like an adventure is so much as adumbrated.  This is a damning defect.* (711)

But when Ford includes only two Scott novels in his “essential reading” list at the end of his history, they are Ivanhoe and The Antiquary!

Someone, here, is wrong (preview: both are wrong).  Since I have been paying attention, I have noticed as many references to The Antiquary by Victorian writers as to any Walter Scott novel.  For readers who took Scott as the center of great literature – George Eliot, for example, or Robert Louis Stevenson, The Antiquary was at the center of the center.  They can make off-handed references to The Antiquary because of course everyone has read it.

Now I’ve read it, too, as has Rohan Maitzen of Novel Readings.  I’ll just speak for myself in saying that Ford’s description of the novel is accurate, but if I replace “adventure” (a rescue from a fast-rising tide) with “story,” I then have to replace “forty pages” with “a third of the book.”  And even then, I wish Scott had taken more time to get to the plot as such, since it is terrible – “a fearsomely predictable long-lost-heir plot,” Rohan calls it.

No one seems to like the plot.  When Virginia Woolf wrote about the novel at length, in “The Antiquary” (1924, collected in The Moment and Other Essays, 1948), she was interested in characters and episodes only.  The Antiquary has one great character who elevates every scene he’s in, and it has one great scene that justifies the concept of the novel.  The character is Edie Ochiltree, the wise beggar.  Please read Rohan on him.  She gets right at the power of a character who could easily have been an unbearable stereotype (and in the process demolishes Ford’s criticism of The Antiquary’s gentlemanly Scottishness).  The fine scene I’ll save until tomorrow, when I’ll return to Woolf as well – she liked it, too.

I haven’t said anything about what happens in the novel, because it doesn’t matter, or give an idea of what the writing is like, because it’s like Walter Scott.  The story barely makes sense, the romantic couple are cardboard of the usual grade, and the scenes are held together by nothing stronger than clothespins.  Ford is utterly wrong - Scott's merits are, with a bit of effort, discoverable.  The enthusiastic Woolf is wrong, too.  I would have trouble recommending the novel to any ordinary reader, anyone who is not a student of 19th century English literature, which is, of course, a nice thing to be.

* Readers of Parade’s End may discover some amusing hypocrisy here.

It would be impossible to mention any author, the tone of whose works is so thoroughly healthy and pure as Sir Walter Scott’s

The writers collected in The Victorian Art of Fiction are concerned, mostly, with the Victorian art of fiction.  But hovering over or buried under every piece is the shelf of novels by the Author of Waverley.  Walter Scott is omnipresent, he or one of his characters referred to in passing, repeatedly, as if the reader were obviously familiar with Scott’s Collected Works.  Scott has the largest entry in the index, followed closely by Shakespeare, Dickens, and Thackeray (and then: C. Brontë, G. Eliot, E. Bulwer-Lytton, J. Austen).

I’ve gone on and on and on some more about Scott’s enormous place in literary history, far out of proportion to the quality of his novels.  When literature professor David Masson claimed, in 1859, that "[Scott’s] influence is more widely diffused through certain departments of European and American literature than that of any individual writer that has recently lived…" (161), he did not need to argue his case.  Everyone knew it.

Working my way through these essays I learned that Scott was actually more important than I had thought.  Scott singlehandedly transformed the debate over the moral worth of the novel.  Before Waverley (1814), the novel was a morally dubious and/or artistically null form, brushing aside certain exceptions. After Waverley - not immediately after, but soon - the weight of the argument, the momentum, turned. Now the exception that had to be denied was Walter Scott, who somehow was no longer the exception but the rule.

The anonymous author of “The Progress of Fiction as Art” (1853) writes “In the whole range of fiction it would be impossible to mention any author, the tone of whose works is so thoroughly healthy and pure as Sir Walter Scott’s” (68) and means it.  Not Dickens, for example, or Austen, or Samuel Richardson.  "Thouroughly healthy and pure" is not quite the recommendation it used to be.

Masson argues that Scott’s stature as a poet was crucial, that he was able to transfer his acknowledged worth as a poet onto prose fiction, something not available to Austen or Maria Edgeworth.  I have no idea if this is right, but it’s plausible.  The result, according to Masson: “Prose Fiction assumed, in consequence, a higher relative dignity; nay Prose itself could be conscious of having advanced its several stages nearer to the very citadel of Poesy” (162).

The high value of Scott recurs throughout The Art of Victorian Fiction.  Walter Bagehot (“The Novels of George Eliot”, 1860) can pay Eliot no higher compliment than incessantly comparing her to Scott.  Henry Mansel (1863), amusingly, indicts the readers of sensation novels for not reading Scott (209).  John Ruskin’s head-on attack on the very practice of novel reading carves out an enormous exception for Scott.  It’s all been downhill since Walter Scott, Ruskin writes in 1880, sixty-six years after the publication of Waverley.

Today’s readers of Waverley and other Scott novels will find this curious, but it has little to do with Scott’s novels themselves.  Today’s readers of Jane Austen, Scott’s exact contemporary, will say “Excuse me!  Over here!  Even better novels, also morally serious!”  Literary history is not fair.*

I want to note that, unlike his role in the spread of the historical novel, Scott’s influence on notions of the moral value of fiction does not appear to be an international phenomenon.  By the time Scott turned to fiction, Goethe, for example, had published three novels, one of them forty years in the past, and a wide range of German Romantic fiction writers were working in all sorts of fascinating directions.  German fiction needed no assistance from Walter Scott.

* Austen, in these essays, is universally loved.  Everyone goes gushy over Austen.  George Henry Lewes (1852): “as an artist, Miss Austen surpasses all the male artists that ever lived” (49).  That’s typical.

Our passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence - Robert Louis Stevenson on detail

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his 1883 essay "A Note on Realism," called the Naturalism of Zola and Maupassant and others "[t]his odd suicide of one branch of the realists."  Stevenson accuses the Naturalists of fetishizing detail.  He attributes the wash of details found in the realistic novels of his contemporaries not to the theories of the writers, or to a conceptual desire to accurately portray the world, but to their skill, their craft.  Now this is a curious and revealing argument.

After Scott we beheld the starveling story - once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as parable - begin to be pampered upon facts.  The introduction of these details developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that amaze us now on a railway journey. (67)

Stevenson asserts that Zola, "[a] man of unquestionable force," "spends himself on technical successes," and that his devotion to "the extremity of detail" is often little more than "literary tricking."

The innovation of the mass of literary detail does belong to Scott, something I tried to describe two years ago, although Jane Austen made the same discovery at almost exactly the same time, and now I want to look back at Goethe and Sterne and so on, but will restrain myself.  The important question here is, how does the novel select details out of the available mass.  See this Interpolations post for a discussion of the issue in the context of Flaubert's A Simple Soul (1877) - Flaubert gives the reader very little, but somehow just enough.  How does he do it?

The question of realism, let it be then clearly understood, regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical method, of a work of art.  Be as ideal or as abstract as you please, you will be none the less veracious, but if you be weak, you run the risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. (67-8)

Stevenson attributes the proliferation of detail - here's the point I'm trying to get at - to genuine advance in the craft of novel writing.  Writers picked up the new tool and mastered it, completely.  but now that they are expert with the nail gun, they want to solve every problem with it.  Everything needs to be pumped full of nails.  Every story must be told through rich, descriptive details.  Writers do just the thing they know how to do well - "any fact [is] welcome to admission if it be the ground of brilliant handiwork" (70).  The detail-obsessed writer comes to regard "the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity to art."

I'm now reading a Walter Scott novel, The Antiquary (1816), in which Scott sometimes seems to be burying the reader in detail.  I recently finished Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End (1924-8), which consists of almost nothing but detail, brilliantly arranged, but exhausting.  Zola, or at least Thérèse Raquin (1867), is plain muslin cloth compared to those books.

I said that Stevenson's argument was revealing.  Stevenson's critical writing is always, in the end, about himself.  In the passage above, he does not really mean "you" - he means "I," himself.  He's describing his own methods and goals.  He's worried about his own use of details, his own reluctance to chop away some especially successful but useless description.

Stevenson was, I now think, a brilliant critic and essayist.  He was narrow, very much so compared to Virginia Woolf or Henry James, because his critical subject was fundamentally himself, his own creativity.  A worthwhile subject!

Page references are to the highly useful collection R. L. Stevenson on Fiction, ed. Glenda Norquay, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.  It will be my "text" this week.

Accuracy

A couple of the historical mystery authors I just read - specifically, Victoria Thompson of gaslight New York and "Owen Parry" of Civil War Washington, D.C. - express, in afterwords, pride in the accuracy of the details in their books, despite the fact that Pride is a mortal sin. They want to be sure to tell us which few, tiny details in their novels diverge from historical fact. Coney Island's Elephant Hotel, for example, was abandoned by 1896, and burned down the same year, but Thompson thinks it's neato and keeps it in business in her book. Otherwise, though, everything is totally accurate, "t"s crossed, "i"s dotted. Uh huh.

Much of what I write this week will be a confession of prejudices, I fear, evidence, perhaps, that I have no business reading these books (although I enjoyed them all, more or less). Still, as to the accuracy of the historical mystery, of any novel: I don't care, I just don't care.

Great writers create worlds that are nearly complete in themselves, lacking nothing but the imagination of the sympathetic reader. They borrow from the actual world around them, but in the end it's most important that the fictional world is true, not that it intersects with the real world in arbitrary or trivial ways. Because, I gotta say, there's plenty about every one of these novels that is untrue, regardless of how particular dates and events mesh. And, at their best, the novels contain other truths that have little to do with their historical accuracy - let's save that for later in the week.

I liked the approach Steve Hockensmith took to his "cowboy detectives on a train" story. In his acknowledgments, he thanks seven railroad buffs and one gun expert. His research is not meticulous - he just asked someone what he needed to do to keep the sticklers happy. The topography of the train is actually incorporated into the plot, but even that doesn't really matter - different order of train cars, slightly different plot. The world he created is small, but has its own sense, and works fine.

Some authors research their subject as part of their creative method. I'm thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald, novels like The Blue Flower or The Gate of Angels, which seem effortless, but are backed by intense archival work, hours digging around in old newspapers and diaries. The key here is that Fitzgerald used what she learned to inhabit her imaginary world, to make the fiction real. Almost all of the information she acquired in the process is omitted from the book.

Among these mysterical histories, only Carlo Lucarelli, writing about World War II Italy, came close to achieving this effect, carefully failing to explain the importance of every political detail or branch of the secret police. Some of the details are even obscure, or confusing. Good. He trusts his reader, or perhaps just assumes that they're Italians who know what he's talking about.

Every other writer from time to time hits the narrative brakes for an information dump. Hockensmith and Parry came off best, I think because of their first person narrators - they have to stay in character. A few passages in the Victoria Thompson and Michael Pearce novels, though, are little more than encyclopedia entries, on the history of Coney Island, or the politics of Herzogovina, or some other bit of curious lore. Thompson actually writes, about her policeman character, "He'd done some research on Coney Island and learned..." (p. 61), and then we get a page of Thompson's notes. When I said Thompson was clumsy, I meant passages like this.

The same problem plagues historical novels of any stripe, not just mysteries. Walter Scott's novels often include detailed notes about the accuracy and sources of his various characters and events. I've read six Scott novels; in saying that I am definitely not including every word in every one of those notes. I remember the notes in Ivanhoe as being especially dull. Better historical novels - The Scarlet Letter, or Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed - excise everything that is merely factual.

But, but, but, given that a novel or novelist may not be capable of creating an original world, historical or otherwise, given that the author is not Nathaniel Hawthorne or Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps accuracy isn't such a bad goal. If a novel's mystery plot is typical for its genre (in every novel I'm considering, it is), the characters brightly colored cardboard, and the themes well-worn if we're lucky, we can at least enjoy some strange and wondrous details extracted from the library by our all too fatigable mystery writer.

Because Victoria Thompson was right - it is neato that there was a hotel on Coney Island shaped like a giant elephant. I had no idea. By all means, use that in a novel. I'm happy to know about it.

Dostoevsky is ecstatically happy - I know I'm telling my story very beautifully

Or at least the narrator of the story White Nights (1848) is, at least for a while. He's a young social misfit, a St. Petersburg flaneur who has trouble meeting people. He comes across a sad young woman, instantly falls in love with her, and becomes blissfully happy.

He tells his new lady friend all about his happiness in gushing multi-page paragraphs that are either the best thing in the story or competely unbearable. He compares himself to a tortoise, he tells her how he loses all his friends (through anxiety), he tells her how he wanders about the city. The oddest part is his description of his dreams about various Walter Scott heroines. Maybe we're not supposed to take this for what he actually says to the young lady.

This story is in the anti-romance genre "We Can Still Be Friends," so the ecstatic state does not last. It ends pretty much where one is afraid it will. Still, this mood, this ecstatic state, seems to me to be an unusual thing to find in Dostoevsky - romantic happiness, especially.

In 1849, soon after White Nights was published, Dostoevsky was accused of revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, where he remained, in prison and in the army, for a decade. When he returned, he had become a different writer, the warm and cuddly prankster we all adore. I find it hard not to read these early stories, whatever merits they might have on their own (considerable, especially regarding The Double), as repositories of clues about the later writer.

1. On vacation in Senegal, 2. Read Adam Bede

I'm either on my way to, in, or returning from Senegal, depending on when you are reading this. I will return July 2.

One book coming with me is Adam Bede. Prof. Novel Reading is hosting a George Eliot summer book club at The Valve. Here's the leisurely reading schedule, and here is the first discussion. I don't understand about 50% of what is written over there, but Prof. Maitzen should be a trustworthy guide.

My travel makes my participation unlikely, but I am happy to read along and catch up. An advantage of being an Amateur Reader is that one can read this 600 pager over the summer just as well as that one. Take the opportunity, and read Adam Bede.

One comment, having only read a few chapters. Since I had recently been thinking about the influence of Walter Scott, I was amused to see that Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, begins in 1799, exactly 60 years before its year of publication. The long title of Scott's first novel is Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since. So whatever Eliot's many reasons might be for choosing that date, there's also a little nod to Scott.

Then, in Chapter 3, there's a long paragraph of landscape description that has a suspicious resemblance not only to the description of a landscape painting, but specifically to the sorts of description I have been reading in Modern Painters:

"And directly below them the eye rested on a more advanced line of hanging woods, divided by bright patches of pasture or furrowed crops, and not yet deepened into the uniform leafy curtains of high summer, but still showing the warm tints of the young oak and the tender green of the ash and lime." And so on. This is Eliot, not Ruskin.

Eliot uses more metaphorical language than Ruskin, but compare to his chapters on "On Truth of Vegetation" or "On Truth of Earth." Eliot's probably not the only great writer of her generation who learned about nature description from John Ruskin.

Always interesting to root through a writer's toolbox.

A glance back at Scott - his influence, whatever that means

Charles Dickens had begun thinking about a novel centered on the Gordon riots years before he wrote it. Most writers at the time probably thought about writing historical novels. They were popular, and they were relatively prestigious. Novels were still inferior to poems, but historical novels were somehow classier than domestic novels. Because they required research, I guess.

For a while, almost everyone was influenced by Walter Scott in some way. The phenomenon extended throughout America and Europe, although there's an irony that in most countries Scott was read in hasty, sloppy French translations. Alexandre Dumas and James Fennimore Cooper were direct imitators, although they found their own voices over time. The first novel Balzac put his name on, Les Chouans, is pure Scott, and it's no coincidence that Balzac has young Lucien of Lost Illusions bring two manuscripts to Paris: a book of sonnets, and a historical novel, The Archer of Charles IX. And there was a mound of others - Ainsworth, Bulwer-Lytton - names from literary encyclopedias; Gogol, Pushkin - names still very much alive.

Influence can be a slender thing, though. My two favorite historical novels of the early 19th century are Victor Hugo's Notre Dame of Paris (1831) and Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827). Both are big, lively, exciting books, dramatic and humorous. Both contain complete imaginative worlds. Scott, or the imitators of Scott, may have planted the idea of writing a historical novel, but any influence ends there. These writers didn't need Scott's help with anything.*

At some point, the popularity of the genre made Scott's influence too diffuse to be noticed. I doubt War and Peace (1869), or Salammbo (1862), or maybe even The Tale of Two Cities (1859) owe much to Scott.

But there may have been another way that Scott left his mark, more important than his affect on the popularity of a particular genre. To differentiate then from now - a primary goal of historical fiction, one would think - the novelist must detail the differences. Clothes, food, speech, coaches and houses have to be described in some detail. Customs, laws, society, those, too, but also the physical world. Attentive readers of Fielding or Richardson or Austen's earliest novels will understand how new this level of detail is. John Galt, for example, understood that he could write in similar detail about contemporary life in Scotland. I think he picked this up from Scott. Although, come to think of it, his masterpiece The Entail (1823) covers a García Márquez-like hundred years, which sounds a bit historical.

Anyway, maybe there are a few more traces of Scott in Flaubert and Tolstoy than one would guess.

*Manzoni's framing narrator may have an element of parody of Scott. Manzoni later wrote a book length essay on the genre (On the Historical Novel), which I have not read, and should.

Barnaby Rudge, Walter Scott, and the dull Dickens hero

Barnaby Rudge (1841) is Charles Dickens’ first historical novel. Walter Scott had published Waverley in 1814, not exactly inventing the historical novel, but sparking the craze for the genre. Dickens had apparently been thinking for years about a novel on the subject of the 1780 anti-Catholic “Gordon riots”.

This was not the first time that Dickens had been inspired by Scott, though. Unfortunately. A writer of enormous creativity and unrivalled skill at depicting original characters, Dickens had trouble with his young heroes and heroines. These characters are the greatest flaw in his early novels.

A typology of early Dickens protagonists: There’s the Mr. Pickwick clone, generous and jolly, perfect in The Pickwick Papers, but little more than plot mechanisms in later novels, copies of copies by The Old Curiosity Shop, when there are, for some reason, three of them (the old bachelor, a lawyer, and – another lawyer? – who knows). Barnaby Rudge at least does some interesting things with this type.

Then there’s the commonsense Cockney – Sam Weller in Pickwick. Sam could hardly be improved upon, but Kit in The Old Curiosity Shop is passable. If only Dickens had trusted himself to stick with this kind of hero.

The third type, the disaster, is the dashing young fellow and his dashing young love interest. Rose and the doctor in Oliver Twist are the nadir, refugees from a romance novel dragged in to fill a nonexistent gap. In a novel featuring Fagin and Mr. Bumble and the Artful Dodger, among others, our ten year-old hero Oliver is barely sufficiently interesting. These additional heroes are a waste of space.

Nicholas Nickleby (the character) is an improvement, just barely, Little Nell a regression, and Barnaby Rudge (the novel, not the character) a complete failure. Dickens for some reason decides he needs two of these truehearted pairs. One of the women, Dolly Varden, the coquette, at least has some personality. But the two men and the third woman* are nothing, purely generic. Dickens was obviously perfectly aware how boring they are, since he packs them away halfway through the book and spends the rest of his time with the interesting characters.

By generic, I mean the genre of the historical novel. Dickens just borrows these characters from Walter Scott. He didn’t know what to do, so he went to the most expert, most popular source. Why is this sort of noble and virtuous hero more interesting in Scott’s hands than in Dickens'? They somehow do not exist in Dickens’ world, richer than Scott’s in almost every other way. By Bleak House (1853), at least, and I presume by David Copperfield (1850), Dickens had worked out the problem. Esther Summerson, for example, is as virtuous as any Scott heroine, but also interesting, very much so.**

This is the core of what Barnaby Rudge does badly. I’ll spend at least some of this week on what it does well. As with The Old Curiosity Shop, this is Minor Dickens. As with that novel, minor is relative. There's a lot to like in Minor Dickens.

* Edward Chester, Emma Haredale, Joe Willet. In case anyone cares.

** Is it the switch to first person? We’ll soon see how or if Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son modify my thinking.

Scott and Redgauntlet - alcoholics and ghost stories

So there's slack and there's slack. Scott's Redgauntlet (1824) doesn't really get moving until, in my Oxford World's Classic edition, p. 262.* But once it does, it goes to some interesting places.

I'm exaggerating, and skipping to my favorite part, the two or three chapters one of the protagonists spends in the company of the smuggler Nanty Ewart, a great talker, a great drinker (an alcoholic, actually), and one of Scott's greatest characters. Here's a sample of the adventures of Ewart, related by himself:

"'Well, brother, something or other I did or said -- I can't tell what -- How the devil should I, when I was as drunk as David's sow, you know? But I was punished, my lad -- made to kiss the wench that never speaks but when she scolds, and that's the gunner's daughter, comrade. Yes, the minister's son of no matter where -- has the cat's scratch on his back! This roused me, and when we were ashore with the boat, I gave three inches of the dirk, after a stout tussle, to the fellow I blamed most, and took the bush for it. There were plenty of wild lads then along shore -- and, I don't care who knows -- I went on the account, look you -- sailed under the black flag and marrow-bones -- was a good friend to the sea, and an enemy to all that sailed on it.'" (Ch. 14, p. 277-8)

Here he is on his besetting vice:

"'Here is no lack of my best friend,' -- touching his case-bottle; -- 'but, to tell you a secret, he and I have got so used to each other, I begin to think he is like a professed joker, that makes your sides sore with laughing if you see him but now and then; but if you take up house with him, he can only make your head stupid. But I warrant the old fellow is doing the best he can for me, after all.'

'And what may that be?' said Fairford.

'He is KILLING me,' replied Nanty Ewart; 'and I am only sorry he is so long about it.'" (p. 278)

It's maybe only a chapter and a half where Nanty Ewart takes over, but it's one of Scott's finest pieces. Almost all of it could have been eliminated if all Scott wanted to do nothing but push the story forward.

Redgauntlet is probably a terrible "first Scott". The preceding Waverley, Old Mortality, The Black Dwarf, and Rob Roy all deal with Scottish rebellions against English rule, scattered over 150 years. Redgauntlet serves as a sort of sequel. It's 1765, twenty years after the Rebellion of 1745, and the Jacobins are going to raise the call to arms one more time. But it's too late. In all of the earlier rebellions, the Scots had at least a chance of success. In Redgauntlet, the cause is lost. This is really what much of the novel is about - the discovery by honorable men that the cause to which they have devoted their lives is lost forever. The emotional effect of this theme has to be stronger for a reader who has, like the title character, been here before.

Honor and loyalty - Scott returns to this theme repeatedly. Perhaps one reason we do not read Scott so much now is that our ideas about honor have changed too much since Scott's time.

* Aside from "Wandering Willie's Tale." Letter XI contains a first-rate ghost story, complete in itself, and worth reading for its own sake.