translating, and publishing The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border at thirty-one, and his aristocratic lineage into poetry at thirty-four with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which embellished an ancient tale of his own ancestors. These are selves Scott could himself recognize, legitimized by all that was open and precious in his history. The author of the Waverley Novels was a being he could not quite recognize himself, and so anonymous publication of Waverley: or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, in 1814, became the foundation of a new body of work generated by a new self, the Author of Waverley, a being recognized and lionized from the start as the Great Unknown.
Walter Scott told himself and his friends a number of disarming reasons for this turn to prose anonymity. He had written some chapters of the story in 1809 while working on the poem The Lady of the Lake, but mislaid them until they surfaced during a hunt for fishing tackle in 1813. His poetic drama Rokeby that same year had not had the huge momentum of his first three poems; both he and his publisher were looking for a novelty to replace the perhaps fading and too-muchknown Walter Scott. The Bridal of Triermain, an Arthurian questromance issued anonymously in the summer of 1813, had given him a taste for this particular jest.
The artist as fisher, as jester, as self-marketer-these are powerful components of an identity, but they don't fully explain Scott's commitment to this identity. No one in public life, and few in the reading public, doubted that the Great Unknown was Walter Scott. Yet for twelve years and thirty-two novels and tales this open secret gave Walter Scott unprecedented control over the drama of recognition by which the novelist and the historical novel itself were formed and (to exaggerate only slightly the influential analysis of Marxist critic Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel) simultaneously helped to construct the bourgeois culture of Victorian Britain.
No sooner did this drama of doubleness begin, however, than multiplicity joined anonymity as its hallmark. We can already discern the several voices in the single narrator who tells the stories of Waverley (1814) and
Out of the Author of Waverley, that open secret, that hidden publicist, he created complaining antiquarians, antagonistic secular and sacred historians, keen-eyed editors and literary philosophers of the Fieldingesque ironic and the Byronic Romantic schools to call attention to all the elements of his composition but one-genius, greatness, originality. In the most comprehensive study to date of this self-multiplication, Jane Millgate follows the ins and outs of 'the anonymity game,' as Scott's genuine humility and his respect for Augustan generic form diffuses his will to recognition, enabling him to conceal even from himself the originality of both his fiction and his view of history.
The anonymity game extended its second phase after the first three novels, and its third phase after three series of
This movement among the various locations of Universal History relies also on a Universal Psychology which, however clearly «developing» in the main, continually throws up unabsorbed elements of antique personality and psychological «sports» that continue to anchor modernity in its origins. As Scott claimed the reason for the anonymity and multiplicity of his writing self was humility and not fear or ambition, so he claimed the attraction he felt for chivalry, the historical origin of modernity, came from chivalry's idealization of loyalty and love and its sublimation of violence, and from the curious and elaborate rituals by which these idealizations and sublimations were both licensed and channeled. He saw himself inside a historical synthesis striving to bring an end to war, the absorption of Thymos by economics, as Fukuyama would say. And he came to feel and depict by Tory instinct rather than Marxist critique that qualm many in the West felt and still feel about the probability that war is not sublimated but rather enlarged by commerce, and that loyalty is not rechanneled but erased.
The large body of prefaces, postscripts, and narrative interventions exfoliated in the Waverley Novels (and I don't even count here the additional series of slightly obfuscatory tell-all prefaces written between 1829 and 1831 as part of the best-selling Magnum Opus edition), is part of a long-running fable of composition that began even before the novels, when Scott developed a prose-framing apparatus for his first poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The plot of this fable, like the plot of chivalry, is the expression and attempted diffusion of wrath-wrath in this case connected not only with the springs of personal and national history but also with the situation of fictional composition itself in these early decades of modernity.
The personal sources of Walter Scott's subtle wrath are of his gender and of his time: a wife not his first love, a family to support, a lawyerfather to love and subvert, a lost male heroism to «harness» (his favorite description of composition, as it was to be Dickens's) in work, a schizoid national-imperial identity to attack and defend. The sources of the wrath of the composer of fiction are what they always are: a kingdom of fantasy leased, not owned, invented in whorish negotiation with progenitors, competitors, and critics.
Scott's novels have one more aesthetic source, also of his gender and his time. The less than noble satirical squabbling of Richardson -307- and Fielding and the less than serious self-communing of Sterne have given way at the turn of the century to the feminized scene of the 'proper novel,' whose moral safety is grounded in a serene narrative persona distinguished by 'accuracy and observation.' At this time too the partisan polemics of antiquarian and apologetic historians has given way to the «stately» narratives of turn-of-the-century History. With serenity and safety and stateliness, dullness threatens. The woman novelist who leavens serenity with the language of narrative color and excess, or the male historian who returns to partisan violence, trespasses gender and genre boundaries hardening into shackles in the early nineteenth century. But in the new historical novel Walter Scott can lay hold of all these values, both these genders, both genres. In the new form, the «excess» of the past is an element licensed to the novelist as «variety» and to the historian as 'truth.' The crossdisciplinary consequence here is a new variety in what is allowed to constitute history, as well as a new truth standard-Universal History, Universal Psychology-to which fiction must be held by that third discipline, criticism, which was stabilized in the cauldron of the Waverley Novels.
Still central to the analysis of both history and psychology in Scott's novels is Alexander Welsh's recognition that the hero of the Waverley novels never kills anyone-though men die, and causes and institutions die. The hero carries a sword, and indeed draws it (often, as with Old Mortality's Henry Morton, successively on both sides of the same cause), but the plots of modernity check his swing at the crucial moment. The sword of his fathers hangs minatory or inviting on the castle wall, but the hero always has more than one father, and the pen of the lawyer, the purse of the merchant, the tempered tongue of the diplomat and the latitudinarian have intervened, and beckon too. The old codes of chivalry, for all their apparent allegiance to invisible realities, issued in solidly material consequences; the stakes of personal and communal honor were an eye for an eye, blood for blood, the Right made
