challenges from or invitations to the turmoil of public life, while heredity effaces itself, sending forth no troubling images of a past or a patrimony to be matched, eluded, or redeemed.
It was Scott's own project as a novelist to wake this sleeper, History, to articulate those troubling psychodomestic images, and to integrate them with each other and with Richardson's manly prevaricator, producing in the long-running, multiple 'passive hero of the Waverley Novels' the most influential of his culture's essays in modernity, even with the competing accomplishment of Byron. For Byronic modernity explored its visions in registers of irony and fragmentation, its lyrics and dramas reaching after the consolidations and consolations of narrative without real faith in it. Scott's vision, hitting modernity's true notes of loss and limitation, of risky investment in self-creation and blue-chip respect for self-undermining, partakes of narrative faith. So does his culture, even when (especially when) contemplating its contaminated and bulky beginnings and its huddled, obscure conclusions. Complaining about the bulky beginnings and huddled conclusions of each Waverley Novel was a national pastime Scott initiated himself, but as a faithful recorder of his culture's understanding of history he could follow no other form.
Scott often fell short of wholeness and proportion as a plotmaster and as a philosopher of Western history, but he sought such coherence. His commitment was to that «Universal» and «continuous» History, time seen all of a piece, all of a pattern, whose first form he studied in his late novels of Christian chivalry, whose modern form, born out of the Scottish Enlightenment and consolidated in narrative in the Scottish/English Waverley Novels and articulated by Macaulay and Hegel, was liberalism.
This Universal History was dreamed and rationalized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a linear process, unstable and somewhat arbitrary at its beginning and end but governed by a dynamic middle made up of surges toward 'synthesis,' a process duplicated as form by nineteenth-century fiction itself. Readers of the Waverley Novels-historians and critics from 1814 to the present-have always recognized that the novels of Scott are a rich moment of exposure of this process and of the discourses of fiction and history which, allied with and contesting each other within the precincts of the republic of letters, aspired to articulate it. The project, the Universal Liberal History of Western Culture, imagined a human communal pattern moving psy-301- chologically from the irrational toward the rational, and politically from the sacred to the economic, while the horizon of expectations widened toward the accommodation of moderate change and desire was rechanneled from glory to security, diverted away from war toward the hundreds of new adventures of mind and spirit and body made possible-at least for the middle and upper classes-by security.
As Nietzsche saw, as science-fiction writers from Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon to Frank Herbert and Arthur Clarke have seen, Universal Liberal History might, so conceived, come to an end, either defeated by an unruly antithesis or immobilized, confounded by its own success. Indeed it was recently argued, in a controversial essay and book by conservative historian Francis Fukuyama, that the History that the Waverley Novels so indelibly and anxiously premised has come to an end. In a 1989 essay amplified in a 1991 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama returned to the question whether there is a universal and directional human history leading toward Liberal Democracy, broadly conceived, and argued that there is, looking not only at contemporary South America and Eastern Europe but at the macropolitics of the last four hundred years, and working from contemporary versions of the definition of 'human nature' found in classic philosophical literature.
For Fukuyama, History bears, is bearing out, Liberal Democracy's claim to exercise in wholeness the Platonically conceived threefold nature of man-his Reason, his Desire, and his 'Thymos,' the latter a complex element of the spirit, which requires that the self stand forth, alone and/or in company with a community or a community's significant values, as most valuable, that it stand forth in worth-full identity, be recognized. To know; to do; to be known to do. Recognition, the last of these virtues, is the cause of History, of History's brilliant constructions of 'values,' of its dark dramas of competing, captured, resisting values. And Liberal Democracy, constructing or tolerating so many forms of recognition, striving to equalize recognition for all, does, according to Hegel and now Fukuyama, formally answer all three of these elements of human nature.
Fukuyama, interestingly, sees two possible alternatives, or as yet unabsorbed possibilities, in this scheme of things, two grits in the wheel of the wagon of Universal History wending west to Liberal Democracy. These are the political and value systems of Islam and of feminism. Walter Scott, in his way, saw the same alternatives. The Saracen's head, — 302- debased on pub signs, swings over many a European town in the Waverley Novels: the madwoman laughs and groans at the crossroads. The narrative strives to integrate them into the synthesis, or leave them behind, but the consolidation is never complete, as I shall argue.
The Waverley Novels still await a full-scale treatment of their Orientalist impulse and of the ways in which this enables (and disables) Scott's vision of race in Universal History; though many have touched on the loss-gain equation in the novels' treatment of various British races, the powerful contemporary theorizing of race in culture and its fictions has not quite reached Scott criticism. But the equally powerful contemporary theorizing of gender has. Gone are the days when a critic might complacently note, as Andrew Hook did in the 1972 introduction to the Penguin edition of Waverley, that Scott rescued the novel from 'the danger of becoming the preserve of the woman writer and the woman reader,' offering 'a new masculinity,' which allowed the novel to become 'the most appropriate form for writers' richest and deepest imaginative explorations of human experience.' In one of the best of the recent books on Scott, Ina Ferris has linked the anxieties and diffusions of gender within the Waverley Novels to the drama of competing discourses-history, fiction, and criticism-at the turn of the century. Literary criticism, hungering for the adult authority of historiography, which was culturally gendered masculine, faced a new, huge, middleclass reading public already gendered female, already reading 'the novel,' also culturally gendered feminine. The transformation critics sought made use of a category crucial to evolving Western culture, the 'feminine,' or «proper» novels of Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth. This new kind of novel, replacing the amoral and sensual Gothic, and distinguished by such linear qualities as moral fineness, 'accuracy,' and 'observation,' cleared a space for a still newer kind of novel, whose fine and «feminine» observation and accuracy could also accommodate those 'richest and deepest' qualities that had been languishing since Shakespeare, or since Fielding, waiting for a masculine vessel, the necessary receptacle for lost 'height and depth.'
Shakespeare the writer-actor had, of course, taken his work to his public in the flesh; the narrator of Tom Jones abominated the 'little reptile of a critic' whose discourse had by the eighteenth century aspired to mediate the relationship of artist and public and to 'give laws' to govern that new province of writing, the novel. But Walter Scott was a critic before he was a novelist, and a lawyer before that, and a collector -303- of historical artifacts and songs before anything. This was the perfect biography for one aspiring to the masculine space cleared by a new kind of criticism that was gaining authority from the policing, so to speak, of the novel as it moved from «female» romance through 'proper feminine' moral acuteness to that «masculine» height and depth which included 'history.'
Yet even as he acquiesced in this transformation, this usurpation of the feminine novel by the masculine (historical) novel, Scott was ambushed by-and accepted the ambiguity of-gender. In culture, even in history, as in biology, masculinity often seems in its very strenuousness the less stable, the more artificial construct. For one thing, critical reception of the Waverley Novels during the sixty years after their publication provoked a gender migration similar to that which took place for the American classics. First these novels cleared a space for men to write novels; then they became novels for novelists' characters to read and then for readers' children to read, culturally set aside from the topos of (now masculine) writing, enmeshed in the (still feminine) topos of reading. Second, historiography itself, thus challenged, aspired to organize a narrative of 'the highest and deepest,' moving from the polemic and controversialist passions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the ironic stance of the rationalist and the amateur worship of separated scraps and fragments of the antiquarian, to the sweeping and ultimately mythic narratives of the Universal Historian.
Contemporary psychohistorians of History like Michel Foucault and Hayden White have linked this mythic historiography, this dream of continuity, the flow of all that disappears in fragments into a recomposed unity, with that fascination with androgyny, with the 'oceanic,' ultimately with the Good Mother, that underlay the nineteenth century's more conscious strivings after masculinity and the disciplines of the Father.
A key element in the construction of the long narrative that makes up the Waverley Novels and accelerated these changes in the genre was anonymity, a sly, spry baiting and baffling of the public that was its own publicity, a spectacle of Thymos which Plato could hardly have dreamed of, and which even yet enchants and irritates. The Walter Scott we recognize was born in 1771 into Georgian Scotland and died in the Reform Bill England of 1832. He followed his father into the Law at age fifteen, his multiplex culture into translation at twenty-two, — 304- his ambition into the Edinburgh Review and the Sheriffdom of Selkirk at twenty-eight, his antiquarianism into collecting,
