SOURCE: Hamilton, Paul. “Waverley: Scott's Romantic Narrative and Revolutionary Historiography.” Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (winter 1994): 611-34.

[In the following essay, Hamilton assesses Scott's writing in Waverley as historicist, while illuminating Scott's ironic treatment of romanticism and his philosophical distance from revolutionary ideology in the work.]

More than most romantic novels, Scott's inaugural Waverley places itself within the contemporary scene of writing, reviewing its own possibilities quite openly—Gothic tale, Germanic romance, sentimental or fashionable upper-class yarn—and self-consciously pondering the problem of recovering a universal subject-matter in front of a modern audience sensitive to contemporary generic options. Like Friedrich Schlegel, Scott characterizes his audience as “this critical generation.” Like Wordsworth, he wishes to restore an understanding of “the human heart” through a historically colored reading of “the great book of nature, the same through a thousand editions” (5). Cervantes and Calderon, favorites of the romantic ironists, provide him with a background of larger, fashionable models of novelistic understanding. During his Jacobite experiences, Edward Waverley frequently feels that la vida es suena, a dream from which he awakes like Coleridge's Wedding Guest, “A sadder and a wiser man” (170, 296). But if its allusions to contemporary literary expectations suggest Schlegel's ironic reflexivity, does Waverley also share Schlegel's agenda for deploying this ironic understanding as the one best suited to representing an age whose most tendentious political event was the French Revolution? In his Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Scott describes the French Revolution as “peremptorily necessary and inevitable” insofar as it recovered rights and liberties alienated during the breakdown of feudalism.¹ Here, Lukács could have found ample justification for reading into Scott's novels “necessary anachronisms” for exhibiting “the prehistory of the present.”² Despite the Schlegelian ironies, though, Lukács wishes us to transpose from Schlegel to Goethe and Hegel. We must move into the orbit of a typifying model of historicism distanced from the immediate realities of the French Revolution, either as French experience or as English spectacle. To tie Scott's patriotism, for example, more closely to what might be his contemporary class interests is, Lukács famously claims, to pander to “vulgar sociologists”; it is to lose the wider perspective of The Historical Novel in which Scott is the novelist of revolutionary crises in general, and so to lose, also, the novelist of “human capacities” definitively displayed for Lukács in such upheavals (53).

Lukács appears, then, to return to Scott's concept of “the human heart” announced at the start of Waverley as the ideal text from which the novel will translate. In effect he recovers Coleridge's praise for Scott's depiction of “the two great moving principles of social humanity”; his romantic reader keys into a universal humanism which overcomes any dialectic of historical difference. Lost in this submission to Scott's romantic ideology is any sense of Scott's, or Lukács', relativism. The local tactics of Lukács' Hegelian period, with its dramatic appropriation of high art to its side of the argument, no doubt explain his comparatively uncritical identifications. Sacrificed, though, is a feeling for the way in which Scott's romantic reach for the universal might be specific to a historical moment of self-understanding, and, less obviously, the way in which such universalism masks his own local incoherencies in managing the representations of revolution. If we return to Schlegel as the intended ironic reader of Scott's dilemma we can certainly recuperate Scott's historicism. For the romantic ironist, crises in representation are the means by which what fails to be represented is alternatively evoked. Recently, though, the post-structuralist road out of this self-righting romantic ideology has aggressively questioned the nature of such alternative figuration: to find, instead of an allegory of revolution, an allegory of reading. In such crises we are made aware not of the difference between writing and something outside writing, but between one form of writing and another; the critical moment simply raises our consciousness of the versatility or generic vocabulary required of the reader. In other words, failure in representation turns out to be a kind of writing and nothing more. The ironists are neither failing more authentically than this, nor are they describing a new mimesis of the recalcitrant event: they are merely switching literary kinds or genres. This deconstructive formulation is an anachronism beyond even Scott's powers. In Waverley, however, it is through an incipient critique of romantic irony that the text's historicism produces its own moment.

James Hogg, mascot and butt of Scott and the young Blackwood's Tories, claims in his justifiably class-conscious Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott that Scott “had a settled impression in his mind that a revolution was impending over this country even worse than that we have experienced.” This “dread of revolution,” if Hogg was right, localizes Scott's Lukácsian interest in discovering an explanatory revolutionary pattern in history. Now this concern looks like his displacement of an analysis he feared to apply to the present. However, the nervousness may not arise from Scott's belief that the Revolutionary analysis did presently apply, but from some underlying sense that his compulsion to apply it figured all too accurately an hiatus in his historical understanding. For example, his Journal entries for October 1831 record his quite fantastic fears that the Fitz Clarences might be proclaimed heirs by a Royalist party opposed to reform, unfolding a plot which “would be Paris all over.” This conspiracy would be foiled only if the Duke of Wellington absconded to the Highlands with the young Princess Victoria and raised the loyal standard there. As a Tory argument against reform, this beats most, and defeats ironic redemption in any genre I know. In my reading, the novels do confirm Hogg's private view; they contradict Scott's airy public remarks on contemporary political agitation and reproduce an incoherence which could have provoked the anxious consignment of his Revolutionary analysis to the past.³

Waverley enjoys a kind of writing in which the narrative of revolution figures the intrusion of an otherness beyond recuperation: by that I mean a subject-matter which remains unassimilable to the aesthetic forms of organization supposed to make sense of it. What I have in mind works mostly in the following way. Waverley is ostensibly critical of romanticism, the romanticism of its young hero, Edward Waverley, and of the Jacobite cause constitutionally attractive to someone of this disposition. Yet romanticism turns out to be the very stuff of the Jacobite rebellion, the deep truth for which the narrative must find an image. The narrator disingenuously tells us that “it is not our purpose to intrude upon the province of history” (263), a sleight of hand unmasked when he also tells us, after Waverley's Jacobite adventure, “that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced” (283). The real history of the Jacobites presented here is one of misplaced romance: chivalric, visionary and imaginary—the “great game” (274) of Charles Edward Stewart and the feminine genius of Flora Mac-Ivor. Waverley hovers or “wavers” between alternatives, enjoying a well-endowed “indolence” (in the Baron Bradwardine's Latin gloss on Tory leisure [57]) as richly indeterminate as that of any romantic ironist. The Chief of the Mac-Ivors, Fergus, also describes his class as living a life of irony under legislation which allows the Highlander “a sword which he must not draw, a bard to sing of deeds which he dare not imitate,—and a large goat-skin purse without a louis-d'or to put into it” (103). The clans, simmering on the edge of rebellion, frequently demonstrate to Waverley and the reader their own self-government, a legislation unacknowledged by the Hanoverians, but about to be put into visionary practice in '45 under the romantic Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart. It is a romantic discourse which turns the Jacobite entitlement de jure, as Waverley's uncle Sir Everard saw it, into one de facto, thus pretending to create a political solution in typical romantic fashion by finding a necessity for it in the realm of ideas (25).

The romantic discourse of Scott's novels, then, is perhaps not imaginative simply because the pastness of its subject-matter obliges it to be so. Imagination may be more partisan than that. The novels' consciously imaginative reconstructions, even in the most painterly of the set-pieces, are never innocent, always uncanny. Retrospectively they turn out to have been part of a plot. The naive spectator of Fergus Mac-Ivor displaying his troops or of a Highland deer-hunt is always implicated and potentially incriminated by an ulterior purpose. Display turns out to have been military manoeuver, the hunt a clandestine mustering of the clan chiefs. Hospitality in a reiver's cave, described with a deceptive drop from the romantic picturesque of Salvator Rosa to a realistic register, later transpires to have been Edward's cunningly wrought undoing by Donald Bean Lean. With Gothic regularity, the ordinary and familiar prove to have contained another meaning. But, more than this, the imaginary character of reconstruction has had a part to play in the novel's historical recall, both interpreting the events so described and historicizing that interpretation. The narrator claims that:

I have embodied in imaginary scenes, and ascribed to fictitious characters, a part of the incidents which I then received from those who were actors in them. Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact.

(340)

But this attempt to lock romanticism in the archive, and to restrict its sense of history as play or drama to “Sixty Years Since,” produces its own uncanny when it resurfaces as Scott's description of revolution in his own time. Scott seems to follow Lord Kames and a host of Scottish Enlightenment theorists when he describes the literary as “that internal sorcery by which past or imaginary events are presented in action, as it were, to the eye of the muser” (17). But the Enlightenment deals in a universal, animal psychology contrasting with Scott's highly topical institutional sensitivity to the adequacy of any mode of representation to epochal change. Scott discovers, I would suggest his formulation here implies, that the literary impugns the object with which it intends to legitimate its imaginative authority. Critical breakdown in the intentional structure of the romantic image is already there to be elicited in Waverley.⁴

One of the more persuasive emphases of recent criticism of romanticism has been to improve our understanding of the extent to which its matrix concept, “romance,” was especially unstable in Scott's time, peculiarly fraught with a burden of self-criticism arising from its conspicuous literariness. In the Reviews, Scott's problematic conjunction of Romance and History was frequently discussed, but in terms of his tailoring of their respective proprieties to a new kind of writing: once more, that is, in terms of irony, of recuperation of referential failure within another genre, of the intentional structure of the romantic image. Hazlitt was unusual in anticipating the critical effort perhaps most helpful today. He too steps outside the economy of irony to recover political meanings effaced by irony's exculpation of historical failure:

Through some odd process of servile logic, it should seem, that in restoring the claims of the Stuarts by the courtesy of romance, the house of Brunswick are more firmly seated in point of fact, and the Bourbons, by collateral reasoning, become legitimate! In any other point of view, we cannot conceive how Sir Walter imagines ‘he has done something to revive the declining spirit of loyalty’ by these novels. His loyalty is founded on would-be treason: he props the actual throne by the shadow of rebellion.⁵

There are no allegories of reading, no saving generic innovations countenanced here. Hazlitt attributes a crudely Legitimist motive to Scott's contrariness. He does not, however, raise the question of whether or not the servility of Scott's logic could indicate a crisis in historiography rather than merely Scott's own tendentious evasion of historiographical responsibility. Yet we can, surely, share Hazlitt's sense of something gone irrecoverably wrong here without having to believe that a shift to Hazlitt's own contradictory stance—Napoleonic radicalism—would restore the authority of historical description.

How might Waverley's ostensible critique of romanticism generate a positive representation of history? In Waverley, the generous ironies of Wordsworthian idleness or Keatsian indolence register a local class inflection. The “dignified indolence” of Edward's Tory uncle, Sir Everard, goes with his “narrative old age,” an undemocratic preservation of the past in a medium “the very reverse of amber, which, itself a valuable substance, usually includes flies, straws and other trifles” (9, 15). Edward's romantic lucubrations clearly share a sublimating mechanism with Sir Everard's selective historical understanding. Both, although suspected as the etherialization of history by imagination, are sure signs of a landed leisure grown precious under the pressure of the times. “A lettered indolence,” Flora Mac-Ivor contemptuously calls Waverley's elegant background, temporarily forgetful of the leisured situation forced on her as a woman but necessary for her own cultivation of the culture of the Gael. Flora is impatient with a poetry which does not appear to be practically and politically imperative, simultaneously conjuring rebellion and nationhood. Of course what seems to her a poetry of velleity is precisely the reality of her Jacobite allegiance from the novel's perspective “Sixty Years Since.” Eventually she can only experience this realism as tragedy. Contemplating her brother's impending execution, she discovers that a fanciful truth has ceased to represent cultural self-fashioning; it has separated out once more into its originally incompatible categories: “I do not regret his [Fergus Mac-Ivor's] attempt because it was wrong … but because it was impossible it could end otherwise than thus” (323). Because, that is, it was an impossible attempt; because although “I ought” may imply “I can,” de jure can never be a deduction de facto, as the most sceptical Scottish Hanoverian Tory of them all, David Hume, had proved in a publication of 1739, largely ignored at the time.

In Waverley, then, literature seems inherently romantic, and is so in the reading-experience of any of the characters. Literature's visionary and imaginary allegiances are what make it expert in delineation of the '45 rebellion. This happens through a double movement which enhances literature's historical mimesis by restoring it, within the same realist account, to its own status of what can never be. Yet within this ironic delineation of romantic action, critical of Jacobite characters through its realistic application to them, lie the seeds of a further critique. To view irony as a successful alternative to representation, as a kind of “higher” realism, effaces another kind of contemporary history whose literariness records its failure not its enrichment; a history which inculcates in us the sceptical sense of being determined to view things in such a way that a deceptive fictional coherence occurs. Again, it is helpful to recall Hume's static epistemological scepticism, in contrast to the dynamic scepticism of Schlegelian irony. Consistent with Waverley's Burkean grasp of the history of revolution, is its relinquishing of Kant's supposed advance on Humean philosophy: it reverts from the logical necessity of believing in valid representation to Hume's strictly psychological explanation of why we do so.

Philosophically considered, Hume's external world is experienced only as psychological necessity; a compulsion from whose potential uncanny we have to be rescued by the ordinariness of convivial company and billiards. Furthermore, denied the power to represent, Hume's epistemology does not even figure an external world but is a figure of that alternative to representation. Its success is in giving an image of what it might be like to liken one thing to another from among an actually unconnected stream of impressions. We are thus placed at as uncanny a remove from our figurations as from our representations. In fact, for Hume, the world-building resemblances we are compelled psychologically to imagine between impressions are themselves internal impressions, and so, by a disabling reversal, add to the numbers from which they are meant to abstract.⁶

Waverley's aestheticization of the Jacobite rebellion connects this philosophical defeatism with a Burkean history by defaillance. This history was epitomized for Scott's generation by Burke's valorization—feminized, victimized, Gothic—of the fleeing Marie Antoinette as the bearer of real historical significance, figured as compulsion, rather than active pursuit. The implication is that change or history can sometimes only be grasped in a kind of understanding which abandons claims to mastery, even the mastery residing in an ironic superiority to ironic failure. History, for once, is the story of the defeated, not the victors. Otherness, then, is not the outer edges of what we must know, but the alienation of what we do know without any ironic compensation. The Schlegelian tactic of conceding that our representations are incomplete and fanciful may itself be the fiction by which is masked Hume's and Burke's deeper truth—the utter incommensurability of contemporary events and their history. Radical condemnation of Burkean rhetoric repeated Paine's attack on its “chivalric nonsense.” But Burke's heroine remains a target for Hazlitt, perhaps because he realizes that Radicals had to press home their attack to counter the historicist irony otherwise available to Tories: the claim that the capitulation of Burkean history to rhetoric bypasses representational failure to figure successfully the adverse effect of the Revolution in alternative form. But Scott's novel suggests that Burke's pessimism went deeper than this, equating the imaginary mode his history was obliged to use with its own loss of authority. Arguably it is this tougher scepticism which is felt so sharply, for example, by Wordsworth at the end of the 1799 Prelude (repeated in Book 2 of the 1805 version), when he follows Coleridge's advice to make recuperation of the visionary mode the poem's aim.⁷

2

Writing in this vein is very different, I am arguing, from the optimism of an ironic discourse which, like Friedrich Schlegel's, was complicit with Revolutionary enthusiasm. However, the imbroglio of Revolutionary and romantic ideology can only be teased out strand by strand. Universal progressive poetry was not to be the method of those whose attempts at authoritative Revolutionary narrative were feminized as fanciful surrenders of mastery. Their figurings of determination by an otherness beyond textual recuperation returned the obliquest of ironies to the role of failed representation. A premise of this kind of historical discourse is that not only were genetic explanations or teleologies superficially similar to Scott's, like Hegel's, curtailed from the start; Schlegel's ostensibly more flexible irony was comparably deluded; or, delusion rather than provisionality was its prime significance. Schlegel's encouraging prospect of successive plenitudes made visible through a series of ironic disclaimers, a continually restructured consensus, gives way to Revolutionary divisions.⁸ Such modulations record changes in an ideology of progress. For Lukács, Scott was above all progressive. The contradictions of his allegiance to progress released him from selfish class-interest and gave his writing truly historical range, allowing it to be necessarily anachronistic in its prophecies of the present without ever becoming a narrowly partisan success story. More specifically, one might say that this is what characterizes Scott's historical narrative as Tory and distinguishes it from a Whig interpretation of history.

My point, contra Lukács, is that Scott's Tory freedom from Enlightenment logic and its romantic teleological successors is won at the cost of any philosophical control at all: his writing is disciplined simply as the description of that breakdown. His otherwise “servile logic” discredits rather than connives at its own romance. As Gary Handwerk has recently argued, Schlegel's irony is ultimately ethical, its exposure of the limitations of any single viewpoint the simultaneous establishment of a community of viewpoints, its paradoxes evocative of a wider intersubjective experience within a fundamentally Kantean economy (Handwerk 41-43). Tory historical narrative of the Revolution abandons this tendentiousness and, like our own contemporary revisionists, refuses to see the Revolution as the logical prosecution of a pre-existent bourgeois class interest.⁹ The interest and the class may have been there, but the revolution itself was a reactionary thing, sui generis, the spectacle of whose own momentum politicized the participants rather than vice versa. As William Doyle puts it baldly: “The principles of 1789 … cannot be identified with any one of the pre-revolutionary social groups.” He draws the only conclusion: “… the French Revolution had not been made by revolutionaries. It would be truer to say that the revolutionaries had been created by the Revolution” (Doyle, Origins 210, 213; see also Schama 62, 116). If this is true, or if a writer thinks so, narrative of a Lukácsian kind has had to give way to another: one which will forego the bold explanatory schemes it may appear to adopt for the rootless imaginings in which its failed authority lies.

Similarly, the changed emphasis of revisionist historians, attributing original Revolutionary agency to the ill-fated liberal nobility rather than the bourgeoisie, intensifies the picture of a rebellion so self-defeating as to render the notion of “agency” make-believe or imaginary. Revisionist stress on the reactionary and economically disastrous outcome of revolutionary initiatives does the same for historical causality. Simon Schama goes beyond Doyle to give more flamboyant shape to the thesis that the Revolution somehow abstracted itself from historical narrative to cast its own actors and tell its own story. The Revolution thus determined the political composition of its participants rather than vice-versa, rather in the way that public spectacle and art of the late 18th century could realize its audiences independently of inherited social decorum (Schama 124-25, 133, 181-82). Francois Furet had already written that the Revolution “marks the beginning of a theatre in which language freed from all constraints seeks and finds a public characterised by its volatility.” Indeed, the possibility that poetic spectacle might be a more appropriate genre for the historian of the French Revolution than sober chronology is a live issue for Carlyle and his reviewer, John Stuart Mill, as early as 1837.¹⁰

Unlike some other revisionists, and unlike Scott, Schama does not feel his authority as historian to be in conflict with his perception of the power of rhetoric and imagination to generate their own occasions. One can, as does Schama, imply method in the new formations by calling them “the cultural construction of a citizen”; but then his (post-modern?) point is that something “volatile” has taken over which allows “revolutionary utterance,” as he calls it, to escape from the determining “discourse” required by grand narratives of historiography, instead producing history by gossip and anecdote. Illuminating arbitrariness is thus the essence of Schama's truthful “chronicle” (xix-xv). Only if one was, like Scott, committed historiographically to some kind of progressive teleology, genetic or structuralist, would this concession appear embarrassing. Yet the alternative implied by Scott's writing is to take Revolutionary gossip as the norm, consequently to view history as something not in possession of its own explanations, and reflexively to describe this dilemma through the delusions of its actors and audiences to the contrary. As historians, Scott and Schama agree about a number of things, such as the Revolution's reaction against the modern, and the politicization of the financial crisis of the ancien régime rather than the crisis itself being of prime significance (Scott 1: 213-14, 105; Schama 47, 62). They differ where Scott (as I will elaborate in more detail) shows this crisis in historiography to be not redemptively historicist—so that the failure of historical grand narrative ironically becomes historically informative—but the Revolution's rebuff to historical understanding.

From this perspective, then, Lukács' patient recorder of gradual change and explicator of the long revolutionary march from feudalism to capitalism is ultimately disabled by a contemporary historical picture. The narrator of Waverley insists that the reader is “introduced to the character rather by narrative, than by the duller medium of direct description” (331). But my reading finds Scott's narrative art to be descriptive, its progressiveness frozen in scepticism, and its historicism in the character of its own times. After all, the passage in which this privileging of “narrative” over “description” occurs itself describes narrative, likening it to “the progress of a stone rolled down hill by an idle truant boy.” In his “Preliminary View of the French Revolution,” with which he begins his Life of Napoleon, Scott ascribes the same momentum to the Revolution, without the initiating figure of the romantic idler. The Parlements' refusal to levy the King's new taxes “was the first direct and immediate movement of that mighty Revolution, which afterwards rushed to its crisis like a rock falling down a mountain” (1: 105).¹¹ Nevertheless, the implied author of the “Preliminary View,” the British spectator of the French Revolution and plotter of its narrative, cannot but appear as an idler by comparison with the active participants; and Scott concedes that after Burke's Reflections “the progress of the French Revolution seemed in England like a play presented on the stage” (1: 280-81). Again, the historical narrative requires a saving “higher” realism, both to compensate for its own concessions to the volatile nature of its subject, and to answer Radical criticism, from Paine to Hazlitt, of the histrionics of its Burkean rhetoric. But once more, as we shall see, there is a way of reading Waverley which critiques the saving ironies of historicism.

3

One can work towards a fuller sense of Scott's Revolutionary “play” through the character of the main heroine of Waverley, Flora Mac-Ivor. Initially, Flora seems sidelined by the interest in the clan chief, her brother Fergus. In good Scottish Enlightenment fashion, Waverley concentrates primarily on the genealogy and anthropology of feudal patriarchy, but silently maps Tory historiography of the French Revolution on to its novelistic account of the Jacobite rebellion, with all the conundrums for the former genetic historical explanation which this latter displacement entails. For Flora constantly outdoes her brother on his own terms, romanticizing and unrealizing his authority in a movement which first seems to contribute to and then to displace Fergus' framing of the novel's historical interpretation.

Her love of her clan, an attachment which was almost hereditary in her bosom, was, like her loyalty, a more pure passion than that of her brother. He was too much a politician, regarded his patriarchal influence too much as the means of accomplishing his own aggrandisement, that we should term him the model of a Highland chieftain.

(101)

Throughout the novel, Flora increasingly “models” the Jacobite interest, a role for which she is paradoxically fitted by her female lack of hereditary entitlement. She cannot escape the character of “romantic imagination” (101), fascinating to Waverley, a character whose political representativeness is enhanced by the novel the more impossibly she identifies with Jacobite patriarchy.

Her refusal to marry Edward stems from an excessive romanticism. Fergus laughs at the theatricality (109) which Maria Edgeworth thought a fault in Scott's characterization of Flora: “she should be far above all stage effect or novelistic trick.”¹² But unrealistic presentation is the clue to her seriousness. Fergus dismisses her coyness with Edward as foolishness “in what regards the business of life” (132); but for Flora “the business” is political, not domestic, and her foolishness is his, distilled to its essence. She is “a triumphant spectator” of early Jacobite successes in a novel where, as already suggested, the spectator is always retrospectively implicated in the action. She finally tries explicitly to assume responsibility as a historical agent on the eve of Fergus' execution. She describes her idealism as gaining a practical application, but only to unrealize its own action: “there is a busy devil at my heart, that whispers—but it were madness to listen to it—that the strength of mind in which Flora prided herself has—murdered her brother” (322).

There is certainly a potential irony or higher realism here, in which Flora's paradox figures without representing the political inefficacy of the Jacobites. But justice has also to be done to Flora as the historical agent contemporarily figured as a disempowered woman whose action can only be experienced in the uncanny reversal of her idealism. To appreciate this timeliness more sharply, and with it the significant abdication implied by Scott's use of Flora as a kind of model of revolutions without a model, it is helpful to look further at the figure of the woman in some of the Revolutionary discourses of Scott's time, both pro- and anti-. The common feature is the denial of political efficacy to women in the face of apparently incontrovertible evidence.

The obvious example to pick is the march on Versailles of the 6th and 8th October 1789. Most accounts of the October days describe how a large body of Parisian working women marched to the Hotel de Ville and from there to the Palace of Versailles principally to demand that the King safeguard the supply of bread to Paris. Almost immediately, though, in both favorable and hostile accounts, the agency of the women is discredited. In the pejorative descriptions, a rhetoric in which Scott's “Preliminary View” participates, the women are either depicted as monsters—“half unsexed by the masculine nature of their employments, and entirely so by the ferocity of their manners” (Scott 1: 185)—through familiar abuse ascribing to them the supposedly male violence of furies, bacchantes, amazons and so on. Or else, they are prostitutes whose loose character not only makes them inherently untrustworthy, but lends credence to the idea that they were the easily bought instruments of others, not autonomous actors but suborned by the Duc d'Orleans. The most blatant detractions from the women's initiative come from accusations that many men disguised as women were the really effective agents provocateurs in their ranks. The murder of some of the National Guard at Versailles, before Lafayette came to the rescue, could then be safely ascribed by both conservative and radical writers either to men, or to women whose unnaturalness or hire by men effaced sexual difference.

The polemical cross-dressing of the character of Revolutionary women continues its politically ambiguous story up until about 1795. Feminism at that time, as now, crossed a number of social barriers, but not unproblematically. As Levy, Applethwaite and Johnson show in their collection and explication of the documentation of women in Revolutionary Paris from 1789-95, feminist interventions ranged from the Enlightened appeals of salon women for legal, educational and financial reforms to the spontaneous insurrections of the poissardes or market-women in response to immediate scarcities. The Société des Républicaines-Révolutionaires was a short-lived women's pressure-group at the lower end of this social register, but in 1793 it succeeded more than any other formation in aligning radical middle-class feminism with the interests of working women. Once more, the demise of this initiative comes in a discursive impasse in which feminist politics are rendered unthinkable. The Société was finally proscribed after a disturbance in which some of its members had tried to persuade the women of the Marché des Innocents to adopt the red pantaloons and bonnets of the Jacobins and Montagnards in their struggle against the Girondins. The report to the National Convention on this failed recruitment drive records that “a mob of nearly 4000 women gathered. All the women were in agreement that violence and threats would not make them dress in a costume [which] they respected but which they believed was intended for men.”¹³ The Convention duly banned the Société on the grounds that “a woman should not leave her family to meddle in affairs of government.” At the Paris Commune, Pierre Chaumette silenced a deputation of protesting républicaines by calling the bluff of their cross-dressing: “Since when is it permitted to give up one's sex?” (Women in Revolutionary Paris 220). Clearly, by showing her ability to perform as a political activist, a woman in those accounts loses out both ways—her sex impugns her activism or her activism her sex. Chaumette's play on these uncanny reversals reaches its climax in his casuistical disposal of the predictably embarrassing precedent of Jeanne d'Arc. She was only justified, it transpires, as a corrective to Royalist cross-dressing, as confirmation of a proleptic guillotine: “if the fate of France was once in the hands of a woman, that is because there was a king who did not have the head of a man” (Women in Revolutionary Paris 220). Within the regime of Revolutionary discourse, whether from counter-Revolutionary, Jacobin or eventually Thermidorean perspectives, female agency is ruled out of court and turned into costume theater through its alleged unnaturalness, vicariousness or inauthenticity. While this is a recurrent feature of patriarchy, it achieved such unusual intensity and visibility at this moment as to characterize for many the general problematic of Revolutionary action.

Scott, in his “Preliminary View,” described the egalitarianism of the French Revolution as “a gross and ridiculous contradiction of the necessary progress of society … a fruitless attempt to wage war with the laws of Nature.” Burke's response, according to Scott, had been one of colorful hyperbole which “ought to have been softened … On the other hand, no political prophet ever viewed futurity with a surer ken” (1: 213, 278-79). Burke's histrionics are excused as identifying the Revolution's lapsus naturae with its affront to historical logic. Within Scott's own writings, the Revolutionary aberration is corrected not only by the restoration of the Bourbons but by the resumption of a historian's confidence after a definite hiatus. Writing to Henry Francis Scott in January 1831, betraying his private tendency to identify Reform with Revolution, Scott is more forthcoming about that Revolutionary caesura in historical logic which Burke's imagination rushed to fill.

About 1792, when I was entering life, the admiration of the godlike system of the French Revolution was so rife, that only a few old-fashioned Jacobites and the like ventured to hint a preference for the land they lived in; or pretended to doubt that the new principles must be infused into our worn-out constitution. Burke appeared, and all the gibberish about the superior legislation of the French dissolved like an enchanted castle when the destined knight blows his horn before it. The talents, the almost prophetic powers of Burke are not needed on this occasion, for men can now argue from the past. We can point to the old British ensign floating from the British citadel; while the tricolor has been to gather up from the mire and blood—the shambles of a thousand defeats—a prosperous standard to rally under. Still, however, this is a moment of dulness and universal apathy, and I fear that unless an Orlando should blow the horn, it might fail to awaken the sleepers.¹⁴

Here, the initial evocation of the Jacobites as counter-Revolutionaries suggests, given Waverley, that you counter fantasy with fantasy, the unreal principles of radical projectors with a different kind of unreality. The untenable Jacobite claim therefore opposes the Revolution's rationalization of itself, but with a self-confessedly disreputable anachronism. This ambiguity shapes the characterization of Burke's prophecy as a kind of divinatory recourse before reasoning from the past can be rehabilitated. Burke, as “the destined knight,” is a character in the romance he is there to demystify. His effort, however successful its outcome, is compromised by the discourse in which it is obliged to identify its subject. That discourse is a dispensable makeshift before the power to argue inductively from the past is regained and the revolution can be understood as the prehistory of its own disaster, evincing the need for alternative, constitutional reform.

The last sentence, though, alluding to the impending Reform Bill, vindicates Hogg's “anecdotal view” of Sir Walter by having him suggest that another uncharted historical lacuna may be at hand. In his Journal, Scott described turning out to vote for Henry Scott in May of that year amid cries by the dissident Border weavers, “the bra lads of Jeddart,” of “Burke Sir Walter,” a slogan referring by an unintended but rich irony not to the great polemicist but to the fate of William Burke the murderer, Hare's collaborator, recently hanged in Edinburgh. The entry reads like a conflation of Edinburgh under the barbaric Highlanders and Revolutionary Paris agitating for uncountenanceable reforms.¹⁵

In a letter to Robert Southey of September 1824, Scott had asked his Tory friend:

By the way, did you ever observe how easy it would be for a good historian to run a par[a]lell betwixt the Great Rebellion and the French Revolution, just substituting the spirit of fanaticism for that of soi disant philosophy. But then how the character of the English would rise whether you considered the talents and views of great leaders on either side, or the comparative moderation and humanity with which they waged their warfare. I sometimes think an instructive comparative view might be made out, and it would afford a comfortable augury that the restoration in either case was followed by many amendments in the constitution.

(Letters viii: 376)

In Scotland, the “Great Rebellion” against Charles i lived on in resistance to the constitutional solution by the ultra-Presbyterian Covenanters. Scott's extended analysis of this, to his mind, unrealistic persistence is of course to be found in Old Mortality. In Waverley, though, there is a significant conjuncture in which a group of surviving Cameronian Covenanters serving the Whig cause is detailed to take Edward into custody to Stirling Castle. Mr. Morton, a moderate Presbyterian, recounts the history of Richard Cameron's sect to Edward while they await the Covenanting escort, recalling its “unnatural” support for the Catholic Jacobite opposition to the Union of the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707 (169). Again, resistance to constitutional change creates analogies between otherwise dissimilar groups who, because they refuse to move with the times, share the same anachronistic, imaginary space. In giving these figures literary houseroom, Scott's fictions again characterize themselves as alternatives to historical explanation, or as places staging the fanciful interregnum between accredited historical discourses.

Chronologically, therefore, the intervening theater is inherently unstable. Edward, perceiving the leader of these belated Cameronians with his captor, Major Melville, “was irresistibly impressed with the idea that he beheld a leader of the Roundheads of yore, in conference with one of Marlborough's captains” (172). Characters are plucked from different periods of history in order to historicize a particular period: the different narratives thus invoked are absorbed in a single descriptive function. As we have seen, this tactic ostensibly belongs to a “higher realism” within history, comparable to that within romantic philosophy when irony is held to compensate for failures in representation. Here, failure of chronology is translated into history by analogy: a failure generating an ironic discourse in which anachronism informs just because of rather than in spite of its breaks with history's self-defining sequence. For Scott, this theatrical licence reaches its apogee, perhaps, when he stage-manages the Highland pageantry for George iv's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. Historicism competes so successfully with history on this occasion that the Hanoverian King wins applause as the Jacobite Pretender's successor, and the Tory Edinburgh Observer can announce that “we are now all Jacobites, thorough-bred Jacobites, in acknowledging George iv.”¹⁶ In the novel, however, it is an analogy Waverley draws with the new contemporary Revolutionary period which scotches the traditional romantic alibi. This final analogy evolves, as the narrator concedes, from what “may be held a trifling anecdote.” As Gifted Gilfillan and his motley, even quaint Cameronian volunteers march into Cairnvreckan to take Edward into custody, the drummer symptomatically falls far short of martial authority in his beating because he has been asked to accompany the 119th Psalm rather than any march known to the British army. The narrative waxes heavily sarcastic at the Covenanters' expense and then, in a final swipe, notes that “the drummer in question was no less than town-drummer of Anderton. I remember his successor in office a member of that enlightened body, the British Convention. Be his memory, therefore, treated with due respect” (171). The sarcasm implies continuity between the narrative and the “respect” Scott himself would have liked to have shown to the Scottish “Friends of the People” who organized the meetings of the “British Convention” in Edinburgh in 1792 and 1793. But Scott's analogy here needs prefacing with more about the knowledge he assumed when presenting his Covenanters.

The Covenanters fuel Scott's historicism with their displaced loyalties, uncanny alliances and anachronistic potential. When Charles ii disingenuously subscribed the two Covenants to secure Scottish support, the Covenanters threw their weight behind the Stuart cause and fought Cromwell at Dunbar in 1650. It was the residue of this interest which joined with the Jacobites against the Act of Union fifty seven years later. Extremes met in the two groups' opposition to the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which offered religious hegemony to neither. After 1688, the idea of a Whig was detached once and for all from its originals, the radical Covenanters of the Whiggamore raid on Edinburgh of 1648. The ideology of a new moderate Legitimacy deserving of support from Whig and Tory alike was established.

The incoherence covered by this consensus, however, is quite considerable. It provides the necessarily unreliable grounds for historians of 17th- and 18th-century England proposing their own controversial revisionism, a once more self-impugning (Tory) history, weirdly recalling Scott's Burkean moment. For instance, Jonathan Clark argues plausibly that after 1688, far from enforcing Jacobite submission to a new ideology, the successful Whigs accommodate the Jacobite “dynastic idiom” to bolster their monarchical idea. This strategy simultaneously explains the post-1688 consensus, why it lasted, and the ease with which people could change sides. The Whig settlement becomes indistinguishable from its opposite, and thus merits Dr. Johnson's verdict that “Whiggism is a negation of all principle.”¹⁷ Clark, however, feels no embarrassment in making this difference without distinction the test of his historical discrimination. He describes how public and cryptic loyalty are expressed in the same words, and in the same homiletic asseverations of monarchic allegiance (Clark, English Society 159). But, unlike Scott, he gives no sign of recognizing the threat to a history whose factual basis, the language of established loyalty, has therefore become as uncanny as any post-Freudian view of the normal. This is the Hanoverian Toryism inherited by Scott which represents an inadmissible division by lying about it: that is, by failing to represent it, employing instead a language whose dream-like, fantastic working mechanisms have been modelled from Freud to Lyotard as alternatives to representational theories of meaning. Scott clearly has an interest in locating this uncanny entirely in the Jacobite idiom or its extreme Covenanting counterpart. Nevertheless, the inherited contradiction in the original reconciliation of Tory and Whig will out, and surely resurfaces in the nonsense of Scott's Jacobite Hanoverian pageantry of 1822.

In his early novels, though, it is the Covenanting opposition to the Revolution Settlement which Scott presents as a fantastical equivalent to the Jacobites. Either party could therefore figure for him the reactionary wrong-headedness of contemporary radicalism. “Education and property,” progressive assimilation rather than an alternative “politics” outmoded by definition, were Scott's proclaimed remedies for lower-class discontent (Journal 28, 245, 678). The Covenanting spirit condenses into the democratic radicalism of Scott's own day, again because of rather than in spite of the anachronism involved.¹⁸ Scott, commenting on 1790s radicals and on post-war agitators, possesses the antiquarianism if not the zeal of an Old Mortality retouching the past. The historicism that makes sense of his anachronism is more fully developed in Old Mortality, where the Biblical jargon and plebian crudity of the Covenanters seem intended to cast them already in a primitive light. But it is in Waverley that we are first invited to imagine the saving ideological connection between past and present. The imaginary quality of this reenactment not only contrasts Scott's Hanoverian latitude with the dogmatic anachronisms of the Covenanters' Biblical applications to their own actions (259); it also allows his writing to imply room for critical manoeuver beyond the historicist solution.

To fill out the modern end of Scott's sarcastic analogy between Covenanters and French-inspired radicals we must remember that in the early 1790s Scotland was used as a testing-ground for how far Government repression against the latter could go. It was, E. P. Thompson claims, the prospect of “an alliance between English and Scottish reformers and the United Irishmen that determined the Government to act.”¹⁹ The National Conventions of 1792-93 to which Scott alludes seemed to offer at least the first half of that possibility, an alliance between Scottish and English radicals. The ferocious Scottish judges, of whom Lord Braxfield (the dedicatee of Scott's thesis for the Faculty of Advocates) became the most famous, went into action, and deportations and executions quickly followed. The potential for a further alliance with the United Irishmen was experienced by Scott in all its implausibility at the playhouse. In the “Preliminary View,” the description of the way in which the French Revolution appeared like a play to English spectators continues with a description of the theater-goers themselves, which actually incorporates his own experience.

From this period the progress of the French Revolution seemed in England like a play presented upon the stage, where two contending factions divide the audience, and hiss or applaud as much from party spirit as from real critical judgement, while every instant increases the probability that they will try the question by actual force.

(i: 280-81)

This is what Scott himself did in 1794, conspiring with other hearty young Tory friends to beat up Irish medical students who had been disrupting performances with vociferously anti-loyalist sentiments. Scott and other ringleaders of the playhouse riot had to find bail and were bound over to keep the peace (Letters i: 30; Johnson i: 102). Scott later writes of the Radical War and the Boroughmuir Skirmish of 1820 much in the spirit of his 1790s escapades:

the whole Radical plot went to the devil when it came to gun and sword … the Edinburgh young men showed great spirit … Lockhart is one of the cavalry and a very good trooper. It is high to hear these young fellows talk of the raid of Airdre, the trot of Kilmarnock, and so on, like so many moss-troopers.

(Letters vi: 234-35, 209)

It is the same unpleasant mixture of high japes for the educated youth playing at militias and hangings for the lower-class radicals.

However, the 1794 brawl grows in seriousness when one discovers that later in the same year it is cited at the trial for high treason of Robert Watt, as “one link of the scheme” for which he is sent to the gallows. To find the life of irony, the theater, realistic in this instance is surely to connive at injustice. The brawl's significance should instead have been to reflect on the admissibility of the evidence on which he was condemned for conspiring to foment “a general rising in Edinburgh.” Watt was an unreliable witness, an ex-Government spy alleged to have joined the cause he was investigating. The most lurid, unconvincing but deadly testimony comes from his own confession. The charge that he and others plotted to establish a provisional Republican government in Edinburgh, armed with a few pikes, in concert with London Corresponding Society activists such as Hardy, Thelwall, Holcroft and others, seems risible.²⁰ Yet Scott, who stayed in town specifically to witness Watt's execution, ingenuously thought that, on the scaffold, “the pusillanimity of the unfortunate victim was astonishing, considering the boldness of his nefarious plans” (Letters i: 34-35). The theatricality common to Scott's violent overthrow of sedition in an Edinburgh playhouse and the revolting spectacle of an exemplary execution could only be thought of as the realistic exercise of justice in a state which was corrupt.

4

Like other leaders of the Scottish culture of his day, Scott was a trained lawyer, and one might expect there to be a detectable symmetry in the economies of his legal, aesthetic and historical discourses. Latitude in interpretation of the universal rule of law, such as exonerates exemplary or deterrant exceptions, is as likely to produce opportunism and tyranny as it is to lead to liberal discretion. The power of a judicial institution to survive its failure to implement its own principles does not necessarily redeem its practice, no more than irony necessarily saved epistemological breakdown, nor historicism failures in historical narrative. My insistence on recognizing collapses in the intentionalism of these discourses is finally focused by the pronouncements of two characters within different discourses, legal and novelistic—one a judge, the other a fictional victim of exemplary justice.

Lord Swinton, one of Braxfield's henchmen, remarked during the trial of Thomas Muir, leader of the Scottish Friends of the People, that since sedition included “every sort of crime … If punishment adequate to the crime … were to be sought for, it could not be found in our law, now that torture is happily abolished” (E. P. Thompson 136). Swinton's statement, regretfully one imagines, identifies the romantic failsafe in contemporary legal discourse. He acknowledges that there is no longer a motivated relationship of retribution or fit between punishment and crime. This, “happily,” is the reason for the law's leniency in only transporting Muir to an early death. Yet it is precisely the new measure of justice, taking over from the old representational theory, which licenses the law's use as a Government tool, increasing its scope to the point of oppression. This is the other, darker side of that Burkean view of the law learned by Scott from the lectures of Baron David Hume, in which constitutionalism takes precedence over moral principle, and the law's function as a register of social cohesion identifies its nature more surely than do principles of natural justice. At the end of that road, we find the excesses of Braxfield, discounting Jesus as a justly hanged reformer, and the taking of Joseph Gerrald's able defense as proof positive of his danger to the State and as justification for condemning him to deportation.²¹

Toward the end of Waverley, Fergus Mac-Ivor contemplates his fate under a law by which, according to Swinton's judgment, the punishment still fits the crime of high treason. Fergus is quite clear that his execution at Carlyle by hanging, drawing and quartering will last “a short half hour.” He also notes that such torture was not a penalty originally belonging to Scottish law but imposed by England after 1707. Fergus' speech at this moment provides us with a means of seeing through Swinton's sophistry to the way in which, under pressure of coping with the Revolution, the exercise of law, however much it clings to a notion of fitting retribution, collapses into instrumental theatricality of a piece with the aberration it is putting down.

“This same law of high treason”, he continued, with astonishing firmness and composure, “is one of the blessings, Edward, with which your free country has accommodated poor old Scotland—her own jurisprudence, as I have heard, was much milder. But I suppose that one day or other—when there are no longer any wild Highlanders to benefit by its tender mercies—they will blot it from their records, as levelling them with a nation of cannibals.”

(326)

The legal principle, then, is conveniently effaced, along with the people whom it was its actual purpose as social engineering to devour. Mac-Ivor, though, sees what an ass all this realpolitik makes of the law. He continues, “The mummery, too, of exposing the senseless head—they have not the wit to grace mine with a paper coronet; there would be some satire in that, Edward” (326). A law which refuses to acknowledge its own polemical, ideological design is like a “mummery” which stops short of “satire”; its departure from its own principles is unexonerated by rhetorical compensation in another genre.

5

Fergus' execution is not witnessed by Edward. The narrative sends Mac-Ivor out of sight under “a deep and dark Gothic arch-way” to his death and remains with Edward. Its silence or blindness here is perhaps its most open admission of the force of its failure to represent the process of revolution. The words with which Mac-Ivor reprieves Edward from the culminating spectacle of his rebellion epitomize literally the instabilities and reversals with which a spectator is undermined: “But what a dying man can suffer firmly, may kill a living friend to look upon” (326).

We have to be careful in deciphering what is rhetorically at stake here. The empowering of spectacle is at the expense of the objectivity of difference. The distance necessary for us to understand power rather than be subject to it is erased. Words which kill have failed to represent. Scott's finally reticent narrative fails to represent this failure of representation which, as theorized by a modern revisionist historian of the Revolution like Francois Furet, is the Revolution in its contemporary characterizations, for and against. Furet argues in explicitly Rousseauistic manner that in the pre-Thermidor period, especially during Robespierre's ascendancy, “language was substituted for power, for it was the sole guarantee that power would belong only to the people, that is, to nobody.” The “basic nature” of revolutionary consciousness was “an imaginary discourse on power” generated when “the field of power, having become vacant, was taken over by the ideology of pure democracy, that is by the idea that the people are power, or that power is the people” (Furet 48, 54). Rousseau's unrepresentable general will is imagined in a performative language recognized by devotees and detractors alike. The crisis of representation perceived by Burke to be consequent on the legitimate representatives' loss of power, precipitating his own history's loss of mastery, is related to the Revolution's own discourse about itself. Critique and defense are housed within the same problematic: the more authentic, the more imaginary. This is the confused performance in which Waverley finally refuses to participate.

In Furet's scenario, both supporters and antagonists appear locked into the same “revolutionary ideology” which, he argues, also characterizes the work of the first historians of the Revolution: “amazement at the strangeness of the phenomenon” (Furet 84). Imprisonment by this idea of a radical break with the past, one unintelligible unless as the imagined reincarnation of a temporally discontinuous period (Robespierre's republicanism, Scott's Jacobitism), was of course exactly Marx's target in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and elsewhere. He both characterized and attacked the persistent reproduction of the French Revolution as a unique break with the past which set the ground rules for all revolutions to come.²² Blindness to the historicism and ideological coloring of this interpretation reduces, Marx claims, its later proponents to parody. To see their farcical degeneration also as the apt characterization of their historical moment is to turn historicist recuperation into something indistinguishable from its failure. It is like the Hanoverian Jacobites all over again: Scott's pageantry of 1822 for George iv parodies his novel of 1814, in the way that Louis' coup in 1851 parodies, pace Marx, almost sixty years since.

Revolutionary ideology parallels romantic ideology in its power to coerce its interpreters into seeing its problematic entirely on its own terms. More precisely, both ideologies share an incorrigible intentionalism which unerringly finds its object. Scott's Waverley exposes this common structure and, in his inaugural novel, preserves ideological incoherencies from being utterly obscured by the saving realisms of irony and historicism. Later, his writing could succumb to those recuperations, as in the sentimentalized success of a Jeanie Deans; or in the unconsciously parodic working-up of Jacobite interest again in Redgauntlet's unhistorical figure of a portly revenant, Charles Edward Stuart, in his priest's frock, twenty years on. Redgauntlet was published only two years after Scott's “fat friend,” George iv, came so implausibly into his Jacobite inheritance in Edinburgh.²³ Darsie Latimer's cross-dressing in the same novel adds to the farcical mockery of the Revolutionary figure of female agency in Charles' disguise. In Waverley, though, the imaginary treatment of an historical subject still counts as an insuperable paradox: one in which otherness is evoked, not through successful irony, but through a sense of the novel's having been determined by it in such a way as to misdescribe it.

To summarize, then: Scott on the French Revolution is not Lukács' geneticist. The displaced narrative of Waverley shows him to be an historicist. But his historicism expresses the failure of geneticism, not its recuperation in another genre. His ironic use of the imaginary does not save but emphasizes his failure to represent this period in history, finally refusing even the ideological glossing of that failure, offered by both sides, as Revolutionary epistemological break. The quarrel between geneticism and historicism is still alive in the writings of our contemporary historians of the French Revolution, visible in the tripartite debates between revisionists, proponents of the old geneticist view of a bourgeois Revolution, and Marxist reformulations. Furthermore, in his use of the ironic imaginary Scott demonstrates an internal distance from romantic ideology as much as from Revolutionary ideology. In this he contributes to an anti-intentionalist strain in romantic writing which recent critical concentration, however salutary, on exposing the reach of romantic intentionalism has made it increasingly difficult to recognize.²⁴

Notes

1. Sir Walter Scott, The Life Of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor Of The French. With A Preliminary View Of The French Revolution. By The Author Of “Waverley”, &c. In Nine Volumes (Edinburgh: Ballantyne & Co., 1827) 1: 63. The edition of Waverley used throughout is edited by Claire Lamont (Oxford and NY: Oxford UP, 1986).

2. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London, 1962) 61-63.

3. James Hogg, Memoirs of the Author's Life (1807) and Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (1834), ed. D. S. Mack (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academy Press, 1972) 129, 132; The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972) 644.

4. See especially, Paul de Man, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” both reprinted in the second edition of Blindness and Insight, Introductions by Wlad Godzich (London: Methuen, 1983) 20-36, 187-229, and “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” originally published in French in 1960, revised English version reprinted in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984). There is a good, accessible exposition of de Man on intentionality in the first chapter of Tilottama Rajan's Dark Interpreter (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1980).

5. William Hazlitt, “The Spirit of the Age” in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930-34) xi: 65. Amongst recent examinations of “romance” see Rajan and Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

6. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (1739), ed. L. C. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1888, 1968) 264-65.

7. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (New York and London: Norton, 1979) (1799) 2: 473-96; (1805) 2: 435-66. I take my view of Hazlitt here to complement David Bromwich's fine account of why “Hazlitt, alone of Burke's rivals, saw that an anti-rhetorical prejudice would be no help in defeating him,” Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1983) 292-96.

8. See Gary J. Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) 15.

9. Revisionism is usually described as starting with Alfred Cobban's inaugural lecture as Professor of French History at London University, “The Myth of the French Revolution” (1955), expanded as The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1964). Cobban's work is still abrasive enough to remain the presiding idea of very recent studies, like William Doyle's Oxford Book of The French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) and Simon Schama's Citizens (London: Viking, 1989). Henri Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and Claude Mazauric were the main targets for the brilliant French Revisionist, Francois Furet. Marxist reformulations rather than defenses of the idea of the “bourgeois” Revolution are propounded in G. Comminel's Rethinking the French Revolution, Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London: Verso, 1987). There are useful general summaries and introductions to this vast area of historiography going back, after all, to Tocqueville and Michelet, in the first chapter of Doyle's Origins of The French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) and in T. W. Blanning's The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois (London: Macmillan, 1987).

10. Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elbourg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981) 46; see Blanning 41-42. In his review of Carlyle's The French Revolution, John Stuart Mill attributes Carlyle's success to “showing” rather than “reasoning.” Mill worries, though, that Carlyle's spectacular epic power will replace entirely inductive reasoning from general principles (The London and Westminster Review [July, 1837] xxvii, 10: 27, 48). In his recent book on the subject of 19th-century spectacle, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983), Martin Meisel likens Carlyle to Scott and argues that “Carlyle's protagonist is the people as such,” therefore, we might add, Rousseau's unrepresentable general will, and so a moving force which Carlyle must strive to let us experience immediately. From Meisel's discussion it emerges that what Carlyle can represent is just this dilemma for representation: so a reality experienced in his undistanced way becomes one which we readers experience as if we were thrust into a play. Carlyle's realism, if we try to understand it through conventional oppositions of life and art, or spectacle and action, becomes self-defeating. “It is perhaps,” concludes Meisel, “only the reflective irony that keeps the style sane” (212-13).

11. Marilyn Butler has pointed out (Studies in Romanticism 28, 3 [Fall 1989]: 345-46, 350-52) that Burke's “plot” is to foreclose other possible narratives of the Revolution, and that our postmodern use of narrative to unseat philosophical seriousness therefore connives at this pessimism, denying us academic critics and historians a voice as powerful as Burke's. My paper tries to keep visible the Troy condemnation of the Revolution as an event undermining all kinds of historiography.

12. John O. Hayden, ed. Scott: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 78.

13. Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795, Selected Documents Translated with Notes and Commentary by Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applethwaite, Mary Durham Johnson (Urbana, Chicago, London: U of Illinois P, 1979) 185, 213.

14. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, assisted by Davidson Cook, W. M. Parker and Others (London: Constable and Co., 1935) xi: 455.

15. Journal 656; see also Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott—The Great Unknown (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970) ii: 117-18.

16. Quoted by John Prebble in The King's Jaunt: George iv in Scotland, August 1822 (London: Fontana, 1989) 206. Prebble's polemical account effectively juxtaposes actual contemporary radical disturbances and the Highland Clearances with the make-believe Jacobitism of George's visit. See also Basil C. Skinner, “Scott as Pageant-Master—The Royal Visit of 1822” in Scott Bicentenary Essays, ed. Alan Bell (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 231-32; for a more general and witty account of the fraudulent “tartanizing,” as J. G. Lockhart called it, of Scotland, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983) 15-43.

17. Jonathan Clark, English Society 1688-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 143; Revolution and Rebellion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 111-16; James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, rev. ed. D. Fleeman (Oxford, London, New York: Oxford UP, 1970) 305. Scott's most explicit description of the “public confusion” caused by the alliance of Covenanting and Jacobite interests around the time of the Union of the Parliaments is in chapter i of The Black Dwarf.

18. This might explain the otherwise puzzlingly religious orientation of the impression Scott gave to Hogg that “he was always keeping a sharp look out on the progress of enthusiasm in religion as a dangerous neighbour [to revolution]” (Familiar Anecdotes 129).

19. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working-Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 134.

20. Letters i: 35; Marianne Elliott's exhaustive study, Partners in Revolution, The United Irishmen and France (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1982), suggests that genuine complicity between the LCS and the UI's revolutionary republicans took place much later in 1797-98 as a result of the LCS's decline (173-76, 185-88).

21. See John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Constable, 1837-38, 1902) i: 60-61; E. P. Thompson 140.

22. Francois Furet, Marx et La Révolution Francaise (Paris: Flammarion, 1986) 98 ff. The use by modern French philosophers, most famously by Bachelard, Althusser, and Foucault, of the idea of epistemological “breaks” to explain philosophical and historical difference can be understood as incidentally attacking the uniqueness claimed by their inherited Revolutionary model of the “break” in a way that, say, Thomas Kuhn's theory of successive scientific paradigms could not. For Althusser on the “reactionary tradition” in French philosophy since the Revolution which he takes his own work (after Jean Hyppolite) to oppose, see Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx—Politics and History, trans. B. Brewster (London: Verso, 1982) 163 ff. J.-F. Lyotard once offered advice, intriguing in this context, to Richard Rorty on the necessity of understanding French thought under “the sign of the crime,” the execution of Louis xvi, which necessarily raises questions of legitimacy. Lyotard calls this French discourse “tragic,” a description which, I think, catches at his sense of trying to escape an original determination threatening to shape every intellectual departure precisely in proportion to its radicalism or break with the past. (“Discussion entre Jean-Francois Lyotard et Richard Rorty,” Critique [May, 1985]: 583-84).

23. I think Kathryn Sutherland implies this interpretation in her excellent Introduction to Redgauntlet (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1985) xvii. Hugh Redgauntlet and Charles's other Jacobite supporters fear that he is presumed upon by his mistress whom they happily demonize. They thus apparently displace, but in fact reemphasize, their leader's womanish inefficacy. Judith Wilt cleverly retraces this pattern of Jacobite recrimination to the unexpiated original sin with which began the myth of Scottish Kings' legitimacy—Robert Bruce's sacrilegious murder of his rival for the crown, the Red Comyn. The feminization of Jacobite rebellions and Pretenders, depriving them of legal entitlement or personage, also damns them with too true a lineage. “The crime being expiated in the feminizing of the last Scottish King is not the degrading of power by association with women but the outlaw grasping of power by the red hand of man” (Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Sir Walter Scott [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985] 129).

24. Compare Jon Klancher's adventurous argument in “Romantic Criticism and the Meanings of the French Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 28, 3 (Fall, 1989): 463-91. Klancher gains a perspective from which he can see romantic criticism's vested interest in having “‘English Romanticism’ … reproduce its own circuitous history of making ‘the meanings of the French Revolution’” (491).