Bloodless Revolution and the Form of the Novel

Jarrells, Anthony

Perhaps no important revolution was ever bloodless.

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

Introduction

A recent special issue of Novel: a Forum on Fiction (Spring 2001) takes up the question of the Romantic novel. What was it? What is it now? Why was it so violent? I want to follow up such questions by attending to the work of two writers who feature prominently in the issue: Walter Scott and William Godwin. Specifically, I want to look at how each writer represents the relationship between individuals and historical violence and how this representation helped to define the novel in the Romantic period.

In his answer to the question "What Is a Romantic Novel?" Robert Miles argues that it is a novel that highlights the ideological fissures of a nation defining itself on the brink of revolution-"philosophical romance," he calls it (191). Thus Godwin, as a writer of philosophical romances, is a-perhaps the-Romantic novelist. But being classified as a Romantic novelist has not always served Godwin's reputation as a fiction writer; as Miles explains, the Romantic novel has been a "source of embarrassment" for its critics almost from the time it emerged (180). This is because the Romantic novels of Godwin and others have not appeared to fit traditional rise-of-the-novel scenarios that culminate with Jane Austen uniting the omniscient narration of Fielding with the subjective ethos of Richardson. This is also because of the "anti-philosophical romances" penned by Godwin's contemporary, Walter Scott, who "...subordinates the methods of the philosophical romance to the purposes of a nationalist ideology" (194). The ideological fissures that remain open in Godwin are closed in Scott. And this, as the story goes, has been to the benefit of the novel and the nation.

Yet these openings in Godwin's fiction reveal what much of the literature of the Romantic period had to confront: what in this essay I will refer to as the problem of political violence.1 To write novels in a nation poised on the brink of revolution is almost necessarily to engage the problem of violence. Following the outbreak of revolution in France and especially the escalation of violence in late 1792 and 1793, there was a real fear of revolutionary violence in England. This fear manifested itself in the "gagging" acts of 1795, the suspension of habeas corpus twice between 1794-1801, and the treason trials of 1794. It can be seen in the increasingly anti-Jacobin press that continued the Pitt program of censorship by other means as well as in the so-called "church-and-king" mobs such as the one that destroyed Joseph Priestley's house and library in 1791. Such fear is evident, too, in the literature of the period. In The Prelude, Book Seventh, Wordsworth is shaken from his passive musings on a London beggar by the thought of mass violence:

... What say you then

To times when half the City shall break out

Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear,

To executions, to a Street on fire,

Mobs, riots, or rejoicings? (1805 ll. 645-49)

Wordsworth's solution to the problem is to see the parts "...but with a feeling of the whole" (1805 l. 713)-that is, to retreat in language and image to an abstracted sense of "the people," one in which he can posit "[c]omposure and ennobling harmony" (1805 l. 741).2

These arresting images of violence also occupy the novels of the period. As in the Wordsworth example, the formal problem of how to represent violence is often tied up with the national problem of how to avoid it.3 In tellingly different ways, the novels of Godwin and Scott exhibit real concern over the problem of violence that plagued Britain in the Romantic period. Each writer employs what Ian Duncan has described as a typically Gothic strategy and displaces the threat of violence to the historical past (24). The period that each writer displaces that threat to, however, is different. Godwin looks to the revolutionary upheavals of the 1640s. Scott repeatedly turns to the "bloodless" Revolution of 1688 and its aftermath. This difference in turn conditions the kind of resolution each writer achieves regarding the problem of political violence.

To keep Miles's terms, in Godwin, the problem of political violence remains "open." Scott comes much closer to achieving closure. Scott's works are more successful as novels and as nation-builders because they continue and in some ways recast a certain eighteenth-century reading of the "bloodless" Revolution of 1688, one that staves off the threat of civil war while maintaining the illusion of progressive popular change. Godwin's writing, which is more explicitly engaged with the problem of violence, rehearses a different reading of 1688. For Godwin, the path of progress leads directly through the problem of political violence-not, as in the case of Scott, away from it. This rendering shifts the focus away from the 1680s and back to the 1640s. Godwin questions the progress of the nation in terms of the violent marks left on real individuals. Scott on the other hand shows how individuals transcend the violence of history precisely through coming together as a nation, as a people. His "anti-philosophical romances" address political violence as a historical and a literary problem. In addition, they are rooted in a particular historical solution, for it was precisely the violence of the 1640s that 1688 was meant to close off.4

A Picture Marred by Violence

I say that Godwin's writing was more explicitly engaged with the problem of violence for two reasons. First, while his philosophy promoted the "dissolution" of government, Godwin argued from the start that this should be a gradual and non-violent process. "The great cause of humanity," he writes in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), "...has but two enemies; those friends of antiquity, and those of innovation, who, impatient of suspense, are inclined violently to interrupt the calm, incessant, the rapid and auspicious progress which thought and reflection appear to be making in the world" (261). The "friends of antiquity" would be an obvious target for the left following Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. But as the progenitor of the "new" philosophy, Godwin was considered by many to be the most infamous of the "friends of innovation." So how is it that they too figure in his attack? Like Burke, and for some of the same reasons, Godwin had his problems with the friends of innovation. To Godwin, these "friends" were associated with collective rather than individual action. And collective action was associated with violence. In the chapter of the Enquiry entitled "Of Political Associations," for example, Godwin compares organizations like the London Corresponding Society to the government-in terms of ignorance and propensity to violence.5

In the two major revisions that Godwin made to the Enquiry-in 1796 and 1798-he took great pains to emphasize that his was a gradualist, non-violent model for change. He did this because of the second reason his writing was more explicitly engaged with the problem of violence: nobody believed him. While Whiggish radicals like the young Wordsworth hailed the political import of the Enquiry, reviewers saw it as a piece of French systematizing-and often as a potentially violent act in itself.6 T. J. Mathias refers to the "cold-blooded" indifference of Godwin's new philosophy and says, "I looked indeed for a superstructure raised on the revolutionary ground of equality, watered with blood from the guillotine; and such I found it" (32). The attacks continued even after Godwin "uniformly declared" himself "the enemy to revolutions."7 Then he was simply forgotten.8 "No one thinks it worth his while even to traduce and vilify him," reports Hazlitt in 1825 (17).

In addition to the revisions to the Enquiry, Godwin experimented with other genres as a means for communicating his political principles. Some of these principles themselves changed in the process. In the Preface to St Leon, Godwin expostulates upon his turn from a politics based on public discussion to one based on private affections:

...for more than four years, I have been anxious for opportunity and leisure to modify some of the earlier chapters of [The Enquiry Concerning Political Justice] in conformity to the sentiments inculcated in this. Not that I see cause to make any change respecting the principle of justice, or any thing else fundamental to the system there delivered; but that I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active sense of justice in the mind of him that cherishes them. (xxxiii-xxxiv)

In his nonfictional writing, Godwin casts this transition from public to private in terms of a move away from French Revolutionary principles-principles which had by this time taken on the "[savour] of barbarism" (Enquirer 78). The preface to St Leon makes explicit the fictional connection to the failure of Godwin's gradualist system and his move toward a more individualist, less public-oriented kind of writing.

But if Godwin could not ultimately rid his philosophy of its violent connotations, neither could he write it out of his fiction. There is a striking passage in Caleb Williams (1794) that attests to this. Just prior to sending off an account of his story, Caleb stops to ponder the contents of Falkland's trunk. It was his curiosity over the contents and the potential clue they might provide about Falkland's role in Tyrrel's murder that got him into trouble with Falkland in the first place. But Caleb has changed his mind about what is contained in the trunk:

The contents of that fatal trunk, from which all my misfortunes originated, I have never been able to ascertain. I once though it contained some murderous instrument or relic connected with the fate of the unhappy Tyrrel. I am now persuaded that the secret it encloses is a faithful narrative of that and its concomitant transactions, written by Mr Falkland and reserved in case of the worst.... (326)

What was thought to contain a "murderous implement" turns out to contain a written narrative. This move from a dagger to a text is telling, for it is precisely the move to writing and discussion that Godwin endorses in his Enquiry.9 What is significant, however, is that this move leads Caleb to the same act as Falkland-namely, murder. In the revised ending to the novel, it is Caleb's "faithful narrative" that succeeds in killing Falkland. "I have been his murderer" (336), Caleb concludes.

Godwin's Mandeville (1816) is even more direct in highlighting the failure of the individual to rise above the violence of history. Mandeville tells the story of a man born into violence and confusion amid the rebellion of Irish Catholic landowners in 1641. It follows him through the English civil wars, where he makes a decision that brands him a traitor and a coward (he is suspected of betraying the Royalist cause) and that alienates him from society. In his isolation, Mandeville gives way to extremism and to the very violence that he was born into. "I shrank from no violence," he explains, "I was willing to engage in the widest scene of blood and devastation..." (321). In a duel with his lifelong nemesis, Clifford, Mandeville receives a Cain-like mark that makes explicit his failure to rise above his historical circumstances:

I had received a deep and perilous gash, the broad brand of which I shall not fail to carry with me to my grave.... My wound is of that sort, which in the French civil wars got the name of une balafre. I have pleased myself, in the fury and bitterness of my soul, with tracing the whole force of that word. It is cicatrix luculenta, a glazed, or shining scar, like the effect of a streak of varnish upon a picture. (325)

Clifford's sword gives to Mandeville a perpetual grimace; it makes him less a misanthropic Gulliver, which he has been throughout the novel, and more a yahoo of sorts-a beast. As in Caleb Williams, the "knowledge of past violence" becomes for Mandeville "a source of criminal guilt" (Clemit 100). It tarnishes the picture painted by the conniving lawyer Holloway, by Mandeville, by Godwin himself.

A comparison with Scott's fiction is telling. Scott's narratives, too, are peopled by men that have ended up on the wrong side and that have witnessed scenes of intense violence. Yet, unlike Caleb and Mandeville, these men transcend their violent circumstances. In Godwin's fiction, these circumstances haunt the text and inhibit closure. In Scott, they are sublimated in an overarching narrative of progress. Edward Waverley, for example, is a character who vacillates between competing positions. His uncle, Everard, to whom Edward is heir presumptive, is an old Jacobite, suspected in 1715 of shipping arms to the rebels and imprisoned in 1745 because of Edward's defection to the cause. His father, Richard, who could not survive so easily on such principles, is "an avowed whig, and friend of the Hanover succession" (Waverley 6). Waverley's education is forged in the loose space between these two positions, a process that leads not so much to a balanced view as to a lack of discipline and a penchant for flights of fancy.

Romantically inclined and with a new post in the Hanoverian army, Edward heads off to Scotland. There, his romantic bent meets the greater forces of history, and there Edward receives his true education. Where at first he projects himself onto the barren landscape of the Scottish Highlands, he is later forced to confront the reality behind his romantic fixations. From Flora Mac-Ivor to Rose Bradwardine, from Vich Ian Vohr to Colonel Talbot, and from the romantic cause of the Pretender to the more realistic and common-sensical one of the House of Hanover: in all of these, we see what Waverley himself comes to understand near the end of the novel-namely, "that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced" (283). History, for Waverley, occasions a romance; it provides him with a field on which to act a great part, like the heroes of old sung in the poems so loved by Flora. But while occasioning a romance, it concludes much more reasonably: "a sadder and a wiser man" quips the narrator about Waverley, using Coleridge's description of the wedding guest upon hearing the Mariner's tale.

As things turn out reasonably well for Waverley, the description of his being sadder and wiser should be regarded as borrowed finery. In his acceptance of the Revolution and Settlement of 1688-89 and all it means for Scotland, Waverly may be accorded the status of "wiser." But he is hardly sadder. Waverley seems downright upbeat compared to the dour disposition he holds at the novel's start-or compared to Flora Mac-Ivor. Unlike Godwin's protagonists or Coleridge's Mariner, and unlike Fergus Mac-Ivor, Waverley does not finally have to choose one thing or another. In fact, it is his initial choice to side unequivocally with the Jacobites that leads him into trouble. Rather, Waverley finds a way to exist between extremes. His resulting stance can be compared to Tully-Veolan, the Bradwardine estate that Waverley purchases at the end of the novel. Tully-Veolan sits on the border between the Highlands and lowland Scotland, between primitivism and modernity, and between Romanticism and Enlightenment. Waverley finds a place between those poles that had initially led him to the flimsiness of fancy. His romantic disposition has been taken up and transformed into something more complex, as well as more solid-for example, property.

Like Scott himself, a Scottish Tory, Waverley finds a way to negotiate a place between two seemingly opposite positions. This may sound like good old-fashioned English common sense. But it is more than this. Waverley's negotiation resembles the Revolutionary Settlement of 1689, which subordinated the monarchy to the parliament, and the Act of Union of 1707, which made Scotland part of the United Kingdom, while allowing it to retain some of its national institutions. Pardoned by the English government, Waverley is free to enjoy his love of things Scottish: songs, arms, relics, dress. He is even given financial responsibility for the Mac-Ivor clan upon Fergus's execution by the British government. Yet, he does this while upholding the English Constitution. Whereas at first the Highland culture spurs a romantic disposition, by the end, the result is a politically enlightened one. The question is, how? What happens that allows Waverley to be enlightened while his fellow Jacobites are being executed-or while Godwin's characters are struggling unsuccessfully to rise above the violence into which history has cast them?

One answer to the question is that, in Scott's novels, a separation is maintained between the political and the cultural.10 Waverley learns to separate these two in a way that Caleb Williams never does. Of course, Scott's political motives were in many ways different from Godwin's. In a letter to Benjamin Robert Hayden, for example, Scott includes, along with his contribution of 10 l. to Godwin's relief fund, the following remark: "I should not wish my name to be made public as a subscriber (supposing publicity to be given to the matter at all), because I dissent from Mr. Godwin's theory of politics and morality as sincerely as I admire his genius, and it would be indelicate to attempt to draw such a distinction in the mode of subscribing" (October 1822). What is interesting in addition to Scott's contribution is that he believes it possible-though indelicate-to make a distinction between Godwin's genius and his politics.

There are several instances in Waverley where Scott's genius for avoiding messy political situations is evident. Consider the following passage: "Waverly riding post, as was the usual fashion of the period, without any adventure, save one or two queries, which the talisman of his passport sufficiently answered, reached the borders of Scotland. Here he heard tidings of the decisive battle of Culloden. It was no more than he had long expected..." (293). Waverley always remains just outside the fray, an observer rather than a fighter. Instead of killing anyone on the field of battle, Waverley acts to save the English Colonel Talbot. Just as he is not called upon to help decide important matters of strategy and battle, so he is not called upon in the end to pay for how such matters have played out. But Scott's readers knew what happened at Culloden. As the story becomes more about Waverley's individual character and less about the historical setting the Jacobite uprising is rendered less central to the plot. Edward passes through the rebellion, and so do we. There is no need to attend to the gruesome details of what happened next.

In fact, while the Duke of Cumberland-a.k.a. "the butcher"-is decimating the Highlands lest such an uprising ever happen again, Waverly is showing off his newly mounted arms and a portrait of himself with friend Fergus in full Highland regalia:

It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background.... Raeburn himself, (whose Highland Chiefs do all but walk out of the canvas) could not have done more justice to the subject; and the ardent, fiery, and impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. Beside this painting hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole piece was generally admired. (338)

Compare this description with the one from Mandeville. Mandeville's face wears the scar of the Catholic uprising of 1641 (Clifford, the one who leaves the scar, is a converted Catholic). This mark is described as "a streak of varnish upon a picture." The violence of history mars the portrait; it is a defect, even though the mark is also an outward sign of Mandeville's inner turmoil-his own propensity to violence. But with Waverley it is otherwise. The picture of him posing in Highland dress with a ferocious chieftain and complemented by the very arms he used against his government is offered as a work of "genius"; it is "spirited" and "generally admired." At the novel's start, Waverley admires the curious picture of the northern people-specifically, Evan Dhu-and is led off upon a journey that culminates in his taking up arms against the government. By the novel's end, Waverley himself is in the picture where Evan Dhu should be standing. But it is only a picture, a "romantic" work. Evan and Fergus die offstage. Culloden happens while Edward settles down to the domestic life that Scott's historical romance has taught him, and presumably us, to desire.

In Scott's text, violence does not serve to mar the picture but rather to heighten its charm. This is because the violence of Fergus, of Jacobitism, is kept at a distance-"sixty years since." The act of writing itself helps to effect this distance between the violent and the domestic, the political and the cultural. Again, consider the following passage:

The impression of horror with which Waverley left Carlisle, softened by degrees into melancholy, a gradation which was accelerated by the painful, yet soothing, task of writing to Rose; and, while he could not suppress his own feelings of the calamity, by endeavouring to place it in a light which might grieve her, without shocking her imagination. The picture which he drew for her benefit he gradually familiarized to his own mind, and his next letters were more cheerful, and referred to the prospects of peace and happiness which lay before them. (328)

A sadder and a wiser man indeed! The process that is invoked here is the same as that of the picture adorning Waverley's wall. A painful and violent experience is mollified and familiarized by the act of representation. Is this not what Scott is doing for his readers and for himself? In the Preface to Caleb Williams, Godwin explains that "the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society" and that his novel is to be a "vehicle" to teach this "valuable lesson" (3).11 Scott's Waverley, in comparison, might be understood as a vehicle to do the opposite. That is, in Waverley, Scott's narrative works to assimilate such spirit and character so that the insinuations of government will not seem so intrusive.

That the state eliminated the Jacobite threat via the very same violence initiated by the Jacobites is not a point Scott would have us observe. There are good reasons for this. The violence of the uprising can be represented because the actual Jacobite threat to the state has been quashed. But the Hanoverian state must be presented as a progressive and civil alternative to Jacobite violence-especially because the stability of this state itself relies upon the threat of violence. Cumberland's victory was exceedingly violent, but the victory insured that there would be no future Jacobite threat. In brushing history "against the grain," like Walter Benjamin's historical materialist, we can see not only that Scott left Culloden out of Waverley's story, but that this absence becomes the very condition for the production of the portrait and the romance itself.12 The absence of this violence from the text does not signify that it never happened. Rather, it signifies that violence against the state is no longer a present threat-and, in addition, that the state can deal with such uprisings when it has cause.13 The victory at Culloden is thus absolutely crucial for establishing the distance necessary for making the Jacobite threat safe for cultural consumption.

Indeed, in the nonfictional world of early nineteenth-century Britain, Scott showed himself to be a proponent of the necessity for state violence. Following the Peterloo massacre of 1819, for example, in which at least six demonstrators were killed and hundreds injured by British troops upon St. Peter's Field in Manchester, Scott wrote "anxious, angry, and even threatening" letters to the Edinburgh Weekly Journal. "These letters," says James Chandler, "supported the decision of the Manchester magistrates who ordered the dispersal of the August demonstration and urged the British government to hold the line against the activities of the Reformers" (342-43). John Sutherland remarks that "excessive and bloodthirsty reaction to any sign of popular uprising was to be a regular feature of Scott's politics" (50). Perhaps there is a delicate distinction between how violence is to be represented and how it is to be really used to uphold the state. As with his contribution to Godwin's relief fund, though, Scott seems perfectly willing to assume this distinction without highlighting it in his narrative.

Enlightenments

It is strange to think that in Mandeville, Godwin tried to imitate Scott.14 But as William St. Clair notes, the "historical romance" was "a genre in which Godwin regarded himself as an earlier master" (395). In fact, Godwin was for a short time suspected of having written Waverley.15 As I have tried to suggest, however, while both Godwin and Scott mix the historical and the fictional in ways that have come to define the historical novel, the formal resolutions that emerge in Waverley and Mandeville could not be more different. The theoretical underpinnings to these differences can be glimpsed in two essays: Godwin's "Of History and Romance," written in 1797, and Scott's Essay on Romance, written for the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1824. Scott claims that "the progress of Romance ... keeps pace with that of society" (134). His comment implicitly privileges society by making it that which romance has to keep up with. But while romance is given the posterior position in the equation, this does not mean that its role is passive, that it merely reflects society. The role of romance is to assimilate the "progress" of society by naturalizing history via a certain kind of historicism. Romance for Scott helps not so much in understanding history as in accepting it. Scott's romances serve what we might call the Burkean end of making the nation lovely: they do not challenge the national institutions but rather accouter them in the generic clothing of romance.

In "Of History and Romance/' though, the relation between history and romance is represented in another way. Godwin stresses an approach to history that aims to "understand the machine of society, and to direct it to its best purposes" (362). The relation here seems initially to privilege society as the machine that needs to be understood. But the essay makes clear that for Godwin romance occupies the loftier position in the hierarchy. Romance is cast as a kind of political institution, one that will eventually direct society. This is not far from the rationalist motivations expressed and repeatedly revised in Godwin's Enquiry. But Godwin gives this motivation an alternative means in romance, one more in keeping with the individualist foundations that seemed to be obscured in his systematic philosophy precisely by the violence associated with political institutions.

Implicit in Godwin's privileging of romance over history is a kind of historicism that is directly opposed to Scott's. Scott's historicism accepts the present state of society as a given. Its premise is "things as they are." Godwin's historicism aims to redirect these things. There are two remarks in particular that underscore this difference. The first is Godwin's descant against the "abstractions" of historians who chart the "progress and varieties of civilization" rather than "the varying character of individuals" ("Of History and Romance" 360). As Jon Klancher explains, Godwin is writing against those precursors of Scott, the "philosophical historians" of the Scottish Enlightenment. Philosophical historians regard history "in a mass," says Godwin, and thus lose its true import: the effects produced by history on individuals. The second remark is closely related to the first:

The period of the Stuarts is the only portion of our history interesting to the heart of man. Yet its noblest virtues are obscured by the vile jargon of fanaticism and hypocrisy. From the moment that the grand contest excited under the Stuarts was quieted by the Revolution, our history assumes its most insipid and insufferable form. (367)

Both post-1688 history and the "philosophical" historicism used to justify it are regarded as "insipid" and "insufferable."

At first glance, it would seem that Scotland is a strange place to look for justifications for post-1688 history. As historians from the eighteenth-century to the present have pointed out, the events of 1688-89 were far from bloodless in places like Scotland and Ireland.16 Godwin himself makes this point in his Enquiry:

If we look at the revolution strictly so called, we are apt to congratulate ourselves that the advantages it procured, to whatever they amount, were purchased by a cheap and bloodless victory. But if we would make a solid estimate, we must recollect it as the procuring cause of two general wars, of nine years under king William, and twelve under queen Anne; and two intestine rebellions (events worthy of execration, if we call to mind the gallant spirit and generous fidelity of the Jacobites, and their miserable end) in 1715 and 1745. (271)

On the other hand, it is often those who are the latest to conform that are the most defensive. Compare Waverley's thoughts about the Settlement:

Since [1689], four monarchs had reigned in peace and glory over Britain, sustaining and exalting the character of the nation abroad, and its liberties at home. Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a government so long settled and established, and to plunge the kingdom into all the miseries of civil war, to replace upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been willfully forfeited? (140-41)

As with Godwin's and Scott's conceptions of romance, we see in these examples different stances on society. Godwin questions the legitimacy of the Settlement not on the grounds of its having displaced the rightful monarch but on the grounds of what followed from it: violence and war. Scott's Waverley accepts the Settlement on the grounds of what followed: peace and stability. "Reason" itself, says Waverley, would stop one from thinking any other way.

This "reason" in large part comes from the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers that preceded Scott-particularly David Hume and William Robertson. The so-called "moderate literati of Edinburgh"17 saw post-1688 Britain as a peaceful, commercial, and civilized society. Contrary to the Jacobites, who argued and fought for a Stuart restoration, the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers portrayed seventeenth-century Scotland as violent, wayward, and thankfully cut off from the civilized present by the Settlement of 1689 and Union of 1707. As T. M. Devine notes, Robertson "dismissed the Scottish past before the Revolution of 1688 as a dark story of anarchy, barbarism and religious fanaticism, and his scathing critique was repeated many times over in the volumes of other writers of less renown" (29). The Settlement and Union afforded Scotland the opportunity to assimilate the values of a post-revolutionary society and in turn to be assimilated into the economic and political advantages that followed from the Revolution in England.

Where seventeenth-century English writers debated the validity of William's claim to the throne and whether or not this compromised the integrity of the constitution, Scottish Enlightenment writers like Robertson and Hume stressed the positive advantages secured by the Revolution. In his short essay "On the Protestant Succession," Hume, sounding a little like Waverley, asks,

What wise man, to avoid this inconvenience [of a disputed title], would run directly upon a civil war and rebellion? Not to mention, that so long possession, secured by so many laws, must, ere this time, have begot a title in the house of Hanover, independent of their present possession: So that now we should not, even by a revolution, obtain the end of avoiding a disputed title. (220)

For Hume, the Hanoverian succession has become part of things as they are; it has become customary, second nature. The effect of the revolution for Hume and for Waverley seems to be that it staves off the need for revolution and leaves nothing but acceptance imminent. Twentieth-century historian G. M. Trevelyan argues that "[t]he true 'glory' of the Revolution lies not in the minimum of violence which was necessary for its success, but in the way of escape from violence which the Revolution Settlement found for future generations of Englishmen" (4). If future generations of "Englishmen" found in 1688 an "escape from violence," this was in large part through the historical and theoretical lens of the Scottish Enlightenment literati and, later, Burke and Scott. It is in this sense that Hume, Robertson, and their contemporaries helped to justify the Revolution and Settlement to Scotland, and equally importantly, to Britain as a whole.

Against these abstractions and justifications, Godwin pits the more individualistically grounded romance. Yet, in doing so, he does not make that typically Romantic gesture against Enlightenment itself-a move seen, for example, in Wordsworth's line "we murder to dissect" or Blake's negative alignment of angels and reason in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Godwin gestures against a certain kind of Enlightenment. He does this from his own, different Enlightenment tradition-a tradition more in keeping with the radical possibilities of reason that were often toned down or altogether ignored in the writings of the philosophical historians. To put it in an overly schematic way, Godwin follows an English, roughly Lockean version of Enlightenment from the Stuart to the Romantic period while de touring through French thinkers like Holbach. Scott, as I've suggested, follows the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers while detouring through Burke's Reflections. These "Enlightenments" comprise variant responses to the problem of political violence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In being generically recast in the Romantic period, these responses in turn helped to shape the novel.

Much of the recent work in the period has looked to situate Enlightenment in its British contexts. Roy Porter's Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, for example, claims that Enlightenment began in Britain. Porter claims this despite the fact that "there was no English revolt to match [the French Revolution]" (9). The fact that England's revolution was bloodless implicitly grounds his claim that Enlightenment in Britain differed in significant ways from Enlightenment in France. But it should be added that Enlightenment in Britain was not always and everywhere the same thing and that this too had much to do with the ways in which the "bloodless" Revolution was received in the eighteenth century. For Porter, it is John Locke who is "crucial to the repertoire of the British Enlightenment" (70). But this is to focus on only one of several British Enlightenments. Locke's epistemology and politics are "crucial" to the radical and mostly English dissenting tradition that Godwin comes from. Indeed, epistemology and politics are intimately connected in this tradition. But this is not the case with the philosophical historians, nor is it for Edmund Burke. Hume may have followed Locke's epistemology, just as Burke drew on Locke's theory of sensation. But Locke's political theory appealed more to those "political men of letters" that Burke wrote against.

Locke's Second Treatise of Government eventually came to be read as a theoretical justification of 1688. But it was hardly read that way in the eighteenth century.18 Far from a justification of "bloodless" revolution, Richard Ashcraft explains that "the whole point of the Second Treatise is to demonstrate that it is lawful for the people ... to resist the king" (332). In the eighteenth century, these radical connotations in Locke's work were not so easily assimilated into his larger epistemology. According to Margaret Jacob, Locke left "an arsenal of ammunition for the radicals." She explains that "[h]is arguments were seldom, if ever, sighted by the post-revolutionary Whigs in justification of the events of 1688-9. Having secured their properties and prerogatives, their church and constitutional monarchy, they sought not to encourage political reforms and revolutions but largely to prevent them" (85). What was crucial for the post-revolutionary Whigs that comprised the Scottish Enlightenment was not Locke but rather their own institutional status. The theories and histories of the philosophical historians were produced not against institutions but from them-and in their defense." 1688 offered an institutional arrangement that held off the divisions that led to violence in the 1640s. This "escape from violence" became the very means of Enlightenment in a post-1688 Scotland where the alternative was a violent Jacobitism. Modernity was to come from accepting these institutions. Dissenters in England were denied such institutional power and thus, like some of their French contemporaries, naturally directed their critiques against the church, state, and universities.

A dissenter himself, Godwin argued for an end to these institutions and to the abstract historicism used to justify them. Against the abstractions of the philosophical historians, Godwin privileges what he calls "historical romance," which, as he claims,

...consists in a delineation of consistent human character, in a display of the manner in which such a character acts under successive circumstances, in showing how character increases and assimilates new substances to its own, and how it decays, together with the catastrophe into which by its own gravity it naturally declines. (372)

Godwin's characterization of "historical romance" differs from Scott's in that it does not assimilate catastrophe but rather traces the violent marks left on individuals following this assimilation. In addition, his use of the mid-seventeenth century as a historical setting-indeed, a historical problematic -reopens the wounds that 1688 was thought to have closed. In the Preface to his History of the Commonwealth (1824-28), for example, Godwin remarks that "it is the object of the present work ... to restore the just tone of historical relation on the subject, to attend to the neglected, to remember the forgotten, and to distribute an impartial award on all that was planned and achieved during this eventful period" (v-vi). This might be understood as the object of his fiction, as well. Mandeville was set largely around the civil wars of the seventeenth century. And as Maurice Hindle states in his Introduction to Caleb Williams, Godwin's Falkland takes his name from the seventeenth-century Viscount Falkland, who was "...drawn unwillingly into the Civil War on the side of the Cavaliers" and who "ended his days by deliberately riding into a hail of enemy bullets at the first battle of Newbury" (xlivnSl). The first half of the description sounds like it could be the beginning of any of Scott's novels; the second half, with Falkland deliberately riding into a hail of bullets, sounds like the ending to almost all of Godwin's.

As with the privileging of romance over abstract history, Godwin's turn to the seventeenth century is not a turn toward the pre-modern, pre-capitalist society championed by Romantic poets from Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot. Rather, Godwin seems to find in the seventeenth century an alternative modernity to the one championed in Scott. As Jon Klancher argues,

Godwin's far regions of "romance" were not those of Burke's immemorial English antiquity or aristocratic idealism but the Roman republic and the age of Cromwell. What Godwin calls "historical romance" has the political charge of a republican romance, which seeks imaginatively to reopen that possibility in English history-the moment of 1642-which the Scottish philosophical historians, and most notoriously Hume in the first volume of The History of England (1763), had been especially anxious to close. (159)

Klancher suggests that the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars take on the character of an unfinished project-one temporarily closed off by the institutional compromise of 1688.20

But while "sixty years since" was sufficient time to allow Scott to reopen the painful episode of the '45, the 150 or so years that separated Godwin's time from the uprisings of the mid-seventeenth century was not enough to allow for revisiting. This is in large part because of the proximity to the escalating violence in France and the fact that the execution of Louis the XVI in 1793 reminded many in England of the execution of Charles I. In addition, though, 1688 had become an accepted compromise-especially in light of 1789. The 164Os suggested a different story-especially in light of 1793. There was no reason to reopen that moment. No new author was needed to rewrite the ending. What for Godwin was an insipid resolution to the problems opened up in the earlier period was for many more an acceptable and bloodless end to a tumultuous and trying time. In a country facing the real threat of political violence, the 1640s left too many republican and dissenting currents open for it to be considered a viable model for political change. The link both writers make between the political and the fictional becomes important here. For the reasons that made the 1640s a bad model politically also made the period a bad model for philosophical romance. Like the Revolution and Settlement of 1688-89, Scott's historical romances close off those awkward and politically suspect openings that make "the ideological visible as ideology" (Miles 191).

Conclusion: 1688 and the Reform of the Romantic Novel

If looking at the relationship between individuals and historical violence can tell us something about why Godwin has not always fared well as a Romantic novelist, it can also tell us something about why Scott has fared better. Scott's novels succeed in literature by doing what Burke did in politics: they uphold the Settlement of 1689 against the violent alternative of revolution. They do this not only in content but also in their very form-by subordinating the political voice of critique to the cultural project of shoring up the nation. Like his Enlightenment forbears, Scott institutionalizes a mode not of ridding the nation of its institutions, but of maintaining them, of making the institutions as well as the romance mode itself national and thus that much more unassailable.21

Nowhere is this link between the form and the content of bloodless revolution more recognizable than in Scott's Old Mortality. Like Waverley, Old Mortality tells the story of a man-Henry Morton-who is caught between extremes and who is forced to take up arms with a group of violent extremists against an unjust government. In Waverley, this government is a post-revolutionary Hanoverian one. In Old Mortality it is a pre-1689 Scottish government-an institution in many ways as violent as the Presbyterian Church that opposed it. As Fergus says to Waverley moments before his execution, referring to Scotland's legal autonomy following Union,

-This same law of high treason ... 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 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 leveling them with a nation of cannibals. (326)

The "glorious revolution" in Scottish law occurred shortly after, in 1747: too late for Fergus.

Henry Morton belongs on neither side of the conflict, as the narrator explains:

He had formed few congenial ties with those who were objects of persecution, and was disgusted alike by their narrow-minded and selfish party spirit, their gloomy fanaticism, their abhorrent condemnation of all elegant studies or innocent exercises, and the envenomed rancour of their political hatred. But his mind was still more revolted by the tyrannical and oppressive conduct of the government, the misrule, license, and brutality of the soldiery, the executions on the scaffold, the slaughters in the open field, the free quarters and exactions imposed by military law, which placed the lives and fortunes of a free people on a level with Asiatic slaves. (187)

In a society that affords no existence in the middle, Morton is forced to choose a side, something he does begrudgingly. His choice pits him against his friends and neighbors and against the family of his beloved, Edith Bellenden. In a letter to her uncle, Major Bellenden, read also by his political foe and fellow suitor to Miss Bellenden, Lord Evandale, Morton exclaims,

...but God, who knows my heart, be my witness, that I do not share the angry or violent passions of the oppressed and harassed sufferers with whom I am now acting. My most earnest and anxious desire is, to see this unnatural war brought to a speedy end, by the union of the good, wise, and moderate of all parties, and a peace restored, which, without injury to the king's constitutional rights, may substitute the authority of equal laws to that of military violence, and, permitting to all men to worship God according to their own consciences, may subdue fanatical enthusiasm by reason and mildness, instead of driving it to frenzy by persecution and intolerance. (297)

His words are to no avail. Major Bellenden responds more to his religious affiliation and to his class than to his sentiment. "Were Saint Paul on earth again, and a Presbyterian," he quips, "he would be a rebel in three months-it is in the very blood of them" (298). Such was the association that Robertson wished to dispel, the Presbyterian as "wolf-cub" (298). But Scott is not so concerned to reclaim Presbyterianism from its violent connotations. His project is bigger. Robertson implies that Presbyterianism has grown up, as it were-that it has proven itself to be a fit moral authority for a modern Scotland, despite its violent past. For Scott, though, it is Scotland itself that has done this.

The Presbyterians are defeated at Bothwell Bridge. Yet tolerance and peace do find a foothold in Scotland. Henry is not as fortunate as Waverley; he does not secure a pardon but is instead exiled to the continent. But he returns, auspiciously, with William of Orange himself (406)-the Revolution and its Scottish embodiment arriving to restore and to uphold the liberties of the English constitution. Morton's wish for a union of the "good, wise, and moderate" comes to pass as he returns home to find a different Scotland. The Glorious Revolution not only "transformed the structure of Scottish parliamentary politics" (Devine 4); it extended tolerance to the various protestant sects that had virtually defined conflict in the seventeenth century:

As the murmurers were allowed to hold their meetings uninterrupted, and to testify as much as they pleased against Sodnianism, Erastianism, and all the compliances and defections of the time, their zeal unfanned by persecution, died gradually away, their numbers became diminished, and they sunk into the scattered remnant of serious, scrupulous, and harmless enthusiasts, of whom Old Mortality, whose legends have afforded the groundwork of my tale, may be taken as no bad representative. (Old Mortality 401)

In this the English government plays the part of the peaceful mediator, just as Morton does earlier in the story. Indeed, by the novel's end, it is not just Henry who resides in the middle. This middle space is forged and finally occupied by none other than the state itself. To repeat a point made in relation to Waverley, this is not merely a manifestation of English common sense, the so-called middle ground between extremes. It is the very form of history as it comes to be understood in eighteenth-century Britain-a history told for as well as from the perspective of those institutions that emerged in the wake of the Revolution.

It is also the form of Scott's novel. The narrative structure of Old Mortality reproduces the middle ground forged by the Revolution and embodied in Henry Morton. The politics of the various competing sides are subordinated in the tale of Henry Morton, who would let toleration and freedom do the work that cudgels and bayonets had previously done. Likewise, the extremism of the tale is curbed by the narrator, who comes upon the tale in the form given by Old Mortality, a kind of keeper of Covenanting monuments. Because the narrator wishes to address "...the sedate and reflecting part of mankind" (51), he makes the editorial decision to "embody" the anecdotes of Old Mortality. The tale thus shifts from the body of "the only true whig," Old Mortality himself, to that of Henry Morton. It is clear from the narrator's comments that Morton's place in the middle is shared by him, too. Of Old Mortality, he says: "I have been far from adopting either his style, his opinions, or even his facts, so far as they appear to have been distorted by party prejudice" (68). Scott's narrative frame assimilates the tale of Old Mortality and in doing so mediates the violence of the story. It is as if the narrative too has been transformed by the Revolution.

Old Mortality the man is a monument to the past-to an age of violence and extremes. But Old Mortality the text is a living embodiment of Scott's present, an embodiment institutionalized in the novel form itself. As Homer Brown puts it, "for Scott, romance both chronicles and shapes the institution of modern culture-that is to say, romance is a story of institution that itself becomes institutional" (16). That Scott remains a key figure in the institutionalization of the novel is an argument that has been made many times of late. He made it more masculine, more historical, more literary. His novels, prefaces, introductions, editions, essays, etc. "...decisively transformed the novel" (Duncan 4). it is for this that Scott maintains a prominent place in the history of the novel. I have tried to suggest that this institutional change in literature depended upon a prior institutional change-that of the Revolution and Settlement of 1688-89-and that this model of institutional change itself became crucial following the escalation of violence in France and the real possibility for such violence in Britain. Both institutional changes-the revolution and the novel-open up the space of representation just enough to close off the violence of the recent past.

In short, Scott's fiction is able to recoup the collective without the violence that was often associated with it and to maintain what Kathleen Wilson has described as the "almost mythical stature [of 1688] as an example of popular and nonviolent political change" (362). Godwin, on the other hand, rejected 1688 as such an example. He also rejected the collective in every form: class, party, nation-even the public sphere of letters. But isolated individuals do not transcend historical violence. This may be the biggest hole in Godwin's theory. In a political irony that could not have escaped the humorless Godwin, Scott seems to have learned the lesson that Godwin's own characters never do. Such may explain William Hazlitt's love of the "Scotch novels" and hatred of the author or Georg Lukacs's claim that Scott's historical consciousness transcends his conservative politics.22 It may also explain the place of Scott in literary history, which, like Godwin's "abstract history," has a tendency to subordinate the debilitatingly political to the culturally progressive and to lose sight of those individual texts that fail to demonstrate the features of this progress.

1 Another contributor to the volume on the Romantic novel, Simon Edwards, addresses the historical novel's "universal concern with violence" (295).

2 In his 1815 Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, Wordsworth opposes this notion of the People, "philosophically characterized," to the Public, which he characterizes in terms of "clamor" and "transitory outcry" (413).

3 Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for example, cites the "the great national events which are daily taking place" as proof that poets are especially needed at present.

4 Hill 235-36; Trevelynn 4.

5 See the Enquiry, Book IV, section 3.

6 David Simpson argues that after 1793, "everyone with any tolerance for system or theory was branded a Jacobin..." (55). See also Simpson 63-84.

7 In his Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon (1800).

8 Percy Shelley, having just found out that Godwin was in fact still alive, doubts this non-revolutionary stance. A series of letters between the two concerning Shelley's scheme to push for Catholic emancipation in Ireland and for a repeal of the Act of Union (1801) has Shelley advocating "Godwinian" arguments in defense of his scheme and Godwin maintaining that the "pervading principle" of his book is that "...association is a most ill-chosen mode of endeavoring to promote the political happiness of mankind." In his March 4th, 1802 letter to Shelley, Godwin explains that "you might as well tell the adder not to sting ... as to tell organized societies of men ... to employ no violence."

9 The first edition of the Enquiry (1793) contains a section on "Literature," which is one of the three ways, says Godwin, by which humans will advance toward political justice. His description depicts a "public sphere of letters" model of literature and was removed in subsequent editions of the Enquiry.

10 See Davis 13.

11 Godwin's Preface was withheld from publication because, as he says, "[t]error was the order of the day; and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor" (Caleb Williams 4).

12 Here one thinks of Benjamin's oft-quoted claim that "there is no document of civilization which is not at the saine time a document of barbarism" (256).

13 In his Keywords entry, Raymond Williams explains that the word "'violence' ... seems to be specialized to 'unauthorized' uses: the violence of a terrorist but not, except by its opponents, of an army, where 'force' is preferred and most operations of war and preparation for war are described as 'defence'" (329).

14 According to Pamela Clemit, Godwin had read Scott's Guy Mannering and The Antiquary prior to writing Mandeville; he read Old Mortality while revising it. See Clemit 87-97.

15 James Chandler explains that "Waverley was initially thought by soine readers to have been written by William Godwin" (213). See also St. Clair 395.

16 See, for example, Trevelyan 3 and 108-27.

17 "The moderate literati of Edinburgh" is Richard Sher's term. See his Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment.

18 See Ashcraft Though published in 1690, Locke's Second Treatise was written during the much more volatile period of the Exclusion Crisis.

19 As Richard Sher explains, "the Moderate Regime in Scotland rested on a bifurcated institutional foundation. The kirk constituted one pillar of the Moderate system; the University of Edinburgh, and to a lesser extent the other Scottish universities, constituted the other" (147). Hume, who was denied an academic post because of his atheism, is a notable exception to this.

20 It may have taken awhile, but it seems that some literary critics are following up on Godwin's project. In the Introduction to their edited collection, Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker explain that "[t]he recognition of 1649 and 1789 as starting and ending points suggests not only a new history but a new terrain of aesthetics and politics, a terrain yet to be explored and mapped" (6).

21 Sher, for example, explains that Scott's work does not mark a "decline" of Scottish Enlightenment culture but rather a "reorientation" (308).

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