The Forms of Historical Fiction by Harry E. Shaw

Author:Harry E. Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Scott concludes this attack with the assertion that though modern freethinkers may imagine they have transcended history and traditional values, whatever true morality they possess in fact reflects the moral climate created by a Christian society.

Scott found it difficult indeed to conceive of human beings, good or bad, without reference to some set of social norms or beliefs. A telling example of his tendency to think in terms of social and cultural types is provided by a comment on Robert Burns. Burns, Scott tells us, was a difficult man to deal with in polite society, because he demanded respect from his social superiors and enforced that demand through biting, overpowering rhetoric, yet felt no obligation to answer the challenges to duels his behavior sometimes elicited. This was not due to cowardice on Burns’s part, Scott continues—and here, if anywhere, we might expect a reference to Burns’s inner spirit, to the poetic greatness which lifted him above social boundaries, his individuality, his spiritual uniqueness. Instead, we learn that “the dignity, the spirit, the indignation of Burns was that of a plebian, of a high-souled plebian indeed, of a citizen of Rome or Athens, but still of a plebian untinged with the slightest shade of that spirit of chivalry which, since the feudal times, has pervaded the higher ranks of European society” (MPW XVII, 252–53). With Scott, the appeal to historical and social setting as a means of explanation is inevitable, even automatic. He is aware of the potential dangers in codes and beliefs because he recognizes their necessity, not because he views them as deformations of an eternal human nature. This quality of insight forms the basis of his most important limitations as a novelist, but also of his greatness.

I have been arguing that Scott’s mode of depicting character is exceedingly useful to him as a historical novelist. But doesn’t his external characterization mean that, however strong his representation of historical milieux might be, he is cut off from a crucial aspect of history, “the mind of the past”? Some critics think that it does, particularly in light of the important place Edinburgh Enlightenment ideas concerning man, society, and history have in his works. Duncan Forbes, the first to document in a systematic way Scott’s debt to his eighteenth-century predecessors, believes that a major part of what he learned from them was that men and women throughout history are uniform: their differences from one age to the next are superficial overlays created by the successive stages through which all societies pass. This familiar Enlightenment conception of man, the argument continues, prevents his depiction of character from being truly historical. Because of his belief in the essential uniformity of man throughout history, the Waverley Novels “are not ‘historical’ at the deeper levels of thought and feeling.” Scott barely creates and certainly fails to sustain “the frisson historique,” since a truly historical representation of the inner life depends upon the assumption, which Scott manifestly does not share, that human beings in the past were, in the depths of their souls, entirely different from those in the present.

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