Scott's Elementals: Vanishing Points between Space and Narrativein the Waverley Novels

Tom Bragg

Studies in the Novel, Volume 42, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall & Winter2010, pp. 205-226 (Article)

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SCOTT’S ELEMENTALS: VANISHING POINTS BETWEEN SPACE AND NARRATIVE IN THE WAVERLEY NOVELS

TOM BRAGG

For all their associations with Enlightenment rationality and the privileging of realism and order over Romantic chaos, Walter Scott’s Waverley novels regularly feature a certain irrational, chaotic character type—one whose bizarre behavior and “twilight rationality” seem at odds with the Author of Waverley’s calm, authoritative voice. Criticism has long found in some of these characters (such as Guy Mannering’s Meg Merrilies, The Heart of Midlothian’s Madge Wildfire, and The Antiquary’s Edie Ochiltree) a meaningful link between the genteel young man of middling loyalties at the center of Scott’s novels—the “wavering” hero described by Georg Lukács—and the peoples, customs and folk cultures they encounter in their journeys. Their surprising wildness is nevertheless authentic, critics argue; they are particularly vivid samplings of local color. As such these marginal characters serve to introduce the staid English observer to the seemingly strange, typically backwards Scots culture, history, and landscapes that Scott is either celebrating or appropriating, depending on whom one asks.1 Like the sturdy peasants, the Mucklebackits and Fairservices of Scott, these “elementals” (as Walter Allen called them in The English Novel) are steeped in genuine Scottishness (132-33). Unlike them, their excessive strangeness and borderline lunacy prompt edgy and unpredictable behavior, which in turn immerses the protagonist and reader in traditional Scottish folk culture and dialect, even if Scott himself has largely adapted the originals and invented most of the tradition. This linking of the Elementals with local agrarian culture and custom coincides with Lukács’ appreciation of Scott’s delineation of historical processes “from the bottom,” anticipates James Reed’s claims for “locality”

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and character, and in general confirms the situating of Scott’s novels within a realist- and sociopolitically-centered critical tradition (see Reed 50). In these ways and in others, then, the traditional take on the Elementals has been to enlist them in bolstering several of the truisms about Scott’s novels—from the assumption that Scott’s ethos is basically anti-“romantic” to the privileging of the Scottish over the “Chivalry” novels as constituting Scott’s best or most relevant work.2 Two facts about these characters that have gone largely unnoticed are instrumental, however, both in appreciating the narrative and modal complexity of Scott’s novels and in forming an understanding of them that comprehends both the Scottish novels and the less-studied Chivalry variety: that the Elementals in Scott appear on non-Scottish soil as well, and thus outside of the geographical and cultural context of Scottish locality, and that their links with the landscapes and ruins mark them as liminal sites between space, character, and narrative modes. The following analysis of the Elementals at work, on both Scottish and non-Scottish soil, has less in common with the discussions of nationalism and journalistic authenticity that have preoccupied the center of Scott criticism post-Lukács, and which has often unhelpfully restricted critical ideas about what the historical novel is or should be, how it functions, and what kind of history it should contain. Rather, my pointing out the increased significance of the Elemental characters and, in so doing, emphasizing the symbolic, rhetorical, and narrative significance of Scott’s spatial descriptions participates in the effort of some critics (such as Judith Wilt and Fiona Robertson) to understand Scott’s novels in their totality, as an “internally consistent system” (Robertson 132). This effort means, among other things, highlighting more romantic features of Scott’s work that criticism has typically under-emphasized or even regretted, and comprehending them as deliberate choices rather than as sops to public taste or symptoms of artistic laziness. It also means finding relevant continuity between the critically favored Scottish novels (such as Waverley [1814], The Heart of Midlothian [1816], and Rob Roy [1818]) and the often neglected non-Scottish or “Chivalry” novels (such as Ivanhoe [1820], Kenilworth [1821], and The Talisman [1825]). I have made it the subject of a larger work to emphasize one such continuity: that of shifting and mutable spaces in Scott; a few key concepts of this argument are crucial here. Scott’s spatial descriptions definitely “read time into space” (per Bakhtin), but recognizing this feature of the Waverley landscape has so far done little to comprehend the Chivalry novels: fictions set in spaces and landscapes apart from the land, peoples and cultural history Scott knew personally. My contention (which, to some degree, this essay assumes) is that Scott’s spatial description also reads “genre” into space, thus interrogating different types of writing, knowledge, and representation into the non-Scottish as well as the Scottish landscapes. Scott’s firsthand knowledge of the Scottish landscape is indubitable, but his readiness to manipulate all his spaces not

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only suggests a means of understanding the Waverley novels as a totality but also reveals palpable continuities between Scott and the Victorian historical novelists he immediately influenced: prolific but critically neglected novelists like W. H. Ainsworth, G. P. R. James, and Bulwer-Lytton, each of whom used complex, shifting, and rhetorical landscapes as part of their world-building techniques. The term “elemental”—which I borrow from Allen, who uses it much less inclusively (132-33)—is therefore more instructive than it first seems, since its natural and supernatural connotations lead us to examine these characters (as I do here) against the context of the shifting, symbolic, and often multi-generic spaces of the Waverley novels and their equally complex narrative structures. As literal “elementals” (i.e., characters in touch with the elements) these characters are linked with the earth, weather, and sky, the natural components of the rural landscape. As Elementals in the arcane sense of mythical beings, they transcend that “nature.” Scott’s Elementals partake of each of these senses, and more. However authentic and “local” his Elementals might seem in some contexts, however attached to the local landscape or the local cultural “spirit of the place,” they also seem not quite possible. Their knowledge of past and present is often mysteriously apt; in fact, they frequently have knowledge of the future as well. Their familiarity with space, both its natural and its acquired, cultural features, is mirrored by their familiarity with narratives, whether of history or of the novel’s own plots and subplots. As such unaccountably informed and capable beings, they draw from different categories of knowledge and, accordingly, their representation requires borrowing from different generic material.3 Exactly the same sort of combination occurs within the narrative structure of the Waverley novel, as mirrored in their typically palimpsestic spaces. If we understand Scott’s Elementals as representing a sort of regional cultural ethos only, “a genuine part of living natural experience” woven into the fiction like his Gothic borrowings (Allen 132-33), then they indeed live in the Scottish novels only; it is only the Scottish locality, space, and “living natural experience” that Scott understood firsthand. But if understood as sites, as living linkages or perhaps vanishing points between categories of information, representation, genres and types of knowledge, Scott’s Elementals abound in both the Scottish and the Chivalry Waverley novels as “fringe” characters whose acknowledged borderline status to social systems and to sanity carries over to space and to types of knowledge (especially nonrational knowledge). They are sites where the verifiable fact and the unequivocal fiction blur: where history meets legend, realism meets “romance,” and quite often, prose meets poetry and song. And they are also, not coincidentally, links between characters and spaces: the forests, glens, and ruins with which they are always associated. The Elementals are the means by which Scott gives voice and agency to the uncertain, layered, and shifting spaces of the historical novel. If Waverley

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space is the “splendid theatre” (2) of the sublime as Scott called the spaces of The Monastery (1820), the Elementals are its actors. Characters insane but frequently precognitive, blighted yet gifted, like blind Tiresias—they hold mysterious congress with knowledge yet also with the topos. Studying their appearances in Scott’s novels makes clearer not only the mimetic relationships between space and narrative in the historical novel, but also the genre’s habitual interrogation of different kinds of knowledge, experience, and representation.

Scott Country and the Critics Walter Scott’s scenic description was one of the earliest-noted and most celebrated features of the Waverley novels. Before the series fully caught on, reviewers sometimes praised the descriptive passages and little else, like the unsigned review of Guy Mannering (1815) which noted “its enchanting descriptions of natural scenery” while complaining that “its improbabilities are glaring” and its characters “rather insipid” (qtd. in Hayden 87-88). “Enchanting” is at once a common and a telling adjective for Scott’s scenery: on the one hand, it accurately describes the rapturous effect of Scott’s landscape descriptions on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century admirers, who recorded their tributes to his vision in a plethora of travelogues (for instance, James Hunnewell’s Lands of Scott [1895] and W. S. Crockett’s Scott Country [1911]). On the other hand, rhapsodizing over “enchanting” scenery seems to break immediately with the critical predilection for noting his journalistic and editorial talents above his more romantic inclinations, and recalls the vitriol of Mark Twain’s attack on Scott in Life on the Mississippi, when he could think of nothing more horrendous to hurl at the historical novelist than his fostering of “enchantments” and “shams” (267). The materialist critique of Scott and of the historical novel as a genre that follows Lukács’s seminal The Historical Novel has not had much to do with the Scott landscape as aesthetic device: rather, historical novel space has been most interesting to these critics (which include Lukács, David Daiches, David Brown, Ian Duncan, Colin Kidd and others) as realist artifact, a valuation that tends to take note of the authentic and the observed space, whether rural or built environment, and de-emphasize more flexible, “creative,” or marvelous spaces. Lukács himself barely mentions Scott’s spatial description in his study, although he implies that it makes up part of that picturesque description generally overestimated as “the essence of his [Scott’s] art” (41). It is regrettable that Lukács does not discuss described topography and environment more fully, since Scott’s novels have always been divided, classified, and assessed according to their locales—either Scotland or non-Scotland—and although Lukács does not invent this distinction he certainly upholds it. Further, Lukács clearly conceives of history and historical acumen in terms of spectators and landscapes in The Historical Novel, placing worthwhile practitioners of the form on “summits,” alleging that they are “in a position to see” real

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popular history, characterizing their achievement as portraying “the sunset” of heroic-revolutionary ideals (333, 344). Lukács figures historical dialectic or its absence topographically, as when he cites that history post-1848 “has no direction, no summits, and no depressions” (176). Clearly one of Lukács’s own persistent metaphors for history is landscape, making his reluctance to examine the Waverley landscape especially unfortunate. Later critics have mostly followed Lukács either in underemphasizing Waverley spaces or, more rarely, incorporating them into an understanding of Scott that diminishes his association with Romanticism and its favorite modes. For example, James Reed’s study of the realistic Scott landscape makes spatial description as rhetorical device its main focus, but only by consistently incorporating the Scottish scenery into current favoring of Scott as journalistic reporter of his homeland. Like Allen’s definition of the Elemental characters, Reed’s case for significant landscapes in Scott is confined to the Scottish novels, enlisting them into the celebration of authenticity and firsthand knowledge that criticism has come to value in Scott and in the historical novel generally. For Reed, Scott sees landscape “not as poet or philosopher but as countryman, predator, historian, [and] soldier” (9). In sharp contrast comes Saree Makdisi’s contention, contra Reed, that the Scottish landscapes in particular are untrustworthy, irrational, and “fluid” (88). But even so, Makdisi’s case—relatively unusual for its genuine engagement of the “poetics” of Scott’s spaces as Romantic device—is confined to a study of Waverley alone, and essentially confirms Reed’s interest in Scott as “predator” rather than poet or philosopher. Makdisi’s (somewhat irate) conclusion that Scott is appropriating Scotland for the Empire turns on the idea that England’s spaces, not Scotland’s, are described accurately and rationally circa 1745 in Waverley: England is “the firm ground of the knowable,” which Edward Waverley leaves behind to commence an unpredictable, because untruthful, “imaginary tour of the Highlands” (81, 84). Makdisi deserves great credit for engaging with spatial description in a major Scott novel as a “Romantic” feature, but his critique still implies that Scott’s use of it is in bad faith. By making Scotland’s spaces fluid and shifting, Scott is neglecting the novelist’s duty to report on the political relationships between England and Scotland, denying the representation of present Scotland, and “pretending” that the destruction of its national heritage was set in the past when in fact it was still going on (76). In other words, at the Scottish border Scott begins writing a romance, historical romance, historical novel, or at any rate some other genre than what is called for: a faithfully-described contemporary novel, describing the socio-political situation between the two nations. Makdisi looks to Scott expecting the fidelity of the social novelist, observing his own time, and finds him romancing, enchanting, and “pretending,” writing the fairy tale rather than the report.

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Disagreement about the value and significance of Scott’s spatial description probably should not surprise anyone familiar with the contradictory criticism; “Scott is a novelist over whom we shall violently divide” (30) said E. M. Forster, who would be surprised at this particular way his words have been borne out. The Waverley novels “lend themselves to univocal readings because their complexity is unobtrusive” (Shaw 159). Consequently, lines get drawn in the sand by critics, and oppositions are set up—about landscape, certainly, but also about genre, accuracy, authenticity, seriousness, historical knowledge, moral knowledge, metaphysical knowledge—which may serve well to describe particular novels, but work less effectively within the broader context of Waverley novels. I allege that if we can be certain of anything about Waverley space, that mirror of Waverley narrative, it is its uncertainty, its shifty defying of any unilateral attempt to pin it down and characterize its function. After all, Scott uses the same bag of tricks to describe his favorite view of his own Edinburgh in The Heart of Midlothian as he does to paint the Inferno-esque Syrian landscape of The Talisman, where he never set foot. He confounds the “Scottish novels equal authentic landscapes” (primarily asserted by Reed [6]) equation by conflating famous houses and combining celebrated views, or by repeatedly assuring the reader (as in the Magnum Introduction of The Monastery) that he invented the whole place, however much it may look like Melrose. Perhaps the most accurate and useful paradigm for Waverley space is the palimpsest, where the scene conveys different layers of significance to the “viewer.” It is an old idea, as Wilt points out: “the most insisted on trait of [Scott’s] landscapes is that they are all palimpsests, ruin within ruin, structure upon structure, inscription under inscription” (158). Three important ideas related to this familiar trait have not been significantly explored, however: that the layered and blurred character of the palimpsest applies to Scott’s hodge-podge narrative structure extraordinarily well, suggesting the mirroring that takes place between narrative and space; that Scott’s characters, particularly his youthful male protagonists, are often measured and tested by their encounters with the novels’ uncertain spaces, such as Edward Waverley’s being challenged by his reading of the Highland landscape, Captain Thornton’s disastrous misreading of the landscape in Rob Roy that leads to his party’s ambush, and so on; and, that the Elementals, so close to nature and to unnatural knowledge simultaneously, are the ideal readers of this palimpsest, revealing uncanny familiarity with both the spaces around them and the events of narratives past, present, and future. I am exploring the first two ideas at length in a larger work, while this essay focuses particularly on the Elementals and their complex role. My analysis is intended to help correct the essentially lopsided critical assessment of Scott’s spatial descriptions not only by more inclusively situating these colorful landscape-related characters, but also and more importantly, to observe how the Elementals’ peculiar relationship to

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space and narrative indicates broader discussion foci available for Scott and historical novel studies.

(Mis)reading the Palimpsest: The Historians and Edie Ochiltree Given the conventional wisdom that finds most of Scott’s most significant innovations limited to the Scottish novels, I will begin with an Elemental from one such novel before looking at two similar variations in non-Scottish (or Chivalry) novels. The “Kaim of Kinprunes” scene in The Antiquary may be the most familiar figuring of space as palimpsest in the Waverley novels. It also features both a reader and a misreader of the text of space: the first an Elemental, Edie Ochiltree; the second, the novel’s titular antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck. In this episode at the novel’s opening, a misread landscape becomes the first indication that meaning and narratives will not be easy for the novel’s characters to reconstruct, as Oldbuck, the representative of scholarly, bookish reconstructions of the past, proudly displays his estate to the novel’s romantic hero, Lovel. Their tour concludes with a climb to a dearly-bought hillside which Lovel gamely admits “commands a fine view,” but which for Oldbuck possesses far more significant layers of meaning (33):

…it is not for the prospect I brought you hither; do you see nothing else remarkable?—nothing on the surface of the ground?” “Why, yes; I do see something like a ditch, indistinctly marked.” “Indistinctly!—pardon me, sir, but the indistinctness must be in your powers of vision. Nothing can be more plainly traced—a proper agger or vallum, with its corresponding ditch or fossa….you know a ditch from level ground, I presume, when you see them? Indistinct! why, the very common people, the very least boy that can herd a cow, calls it the Kaim of Kinprunes; and if that does not imply an ancient camp, I am ignorant what does.” (27-28)

For Oldbuck, what seem to be the extant historical elements in the scene—the remains of a Roman fort—can be distinctly detected by the discerning eye. Oldbuck’s learned discussion, composed of the same jargon and allusion as his talk on books and broadsheets, touches on the historical apparatus used to confirm the site of “the final conflict between Agricola and the Caledonians”; in effect, he has located this site by his reading of history, and has confirmed it visually since the land “correspond[s] with all the marks of that celebrated place of action” (28). He justifies his overpayment for the barren land by citing its importance to history, Scottish and (by extension) classical: “it was a national concern;….Whose patriotism would not grow warmer, as old Johnson says, on the plains of Marathon?”(29). In a famous contretemps, Oldbuck recounts his discovery of an ancient stone bearing the carved letters A. D. L. L., which he takes to mean “Agricola Dicavit Libens Lubens” (“Agricola willingly and happily dedicated [this]”[29]), just in time for Edie Ochiltree, who appears from nowhere, to mock all of his so-called discoveries. Scott is well aware of this familiar folk scenario as

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Lovel’s unspoken thoughts indicate,4 and chooses this moment to introduce Ochiltree, repository of folk wisdom and local history in the novel and also the character most conversant with the landscape. Edie explodes Oldbuck’s erudite lecture by asserting that what he fancies a Roman ruin is nothing more than the remnants of a fairly recent wedding barbecue. He mocks Oldbuck’s assertion that a certain eminence of the hill marks the praetorium of the ancient camp by interrupting, “Praetorian here, Praetorian there, I mind the bigging o’t” (remember when it was built) (30). Without being told of Oldbuck’s alleged artifact, Edie avers that the A. D. L. L. on the stone stand for “Aiken Drum’s Lang Ladle,” a playful reference to a Scots nursery rhyme (31). The Kinprunes episode reveals much about Scott’s perception that the “historical structure,” whether physical artifact or structure of knowledge, is sometimes indistinguishable from the natural or mundane, and that different knowledge-gathering systems must be employed to understand and verify supposed evidence (when that is even possible). The episode therefore simultaneously imagines the historian and the reader of historical novels, both trying to separate and distinguish data that are blending into each other. By placing different opinions about a hillside ruin into comic opposition, Scott examines differing modes of recovering history’s significance. Reed cites this scene as the first instance in the novel where Oldbuck “is the focus of a series of lessons by Scott on how not to look at a landscape” (91). Oldbuck’s inappropriate scrutiny arises from his being “a maverick antiquarian, [and] an indiscriminate collector of old things with which he clutters his old house,” a description that reminds us of Scott himself (90). But Scott makes abundantly clear in The Antiquary that the best “view” of space, and therefore of history, is an amalgamated view, one that allows differing epistemological tools including instinct and imagination. Readers could certainly find in this amalgam a metaphor for the Union, but that might be selling Scott’s technique short: this amalgamated view of narrative recovery is found in Waverley novels far afield from 1707 Britain, spatially and temporally. Edie is consistently successful at finding amalgamations of space and history. He understands both the spaces and the narratives of the novel, is adept at uncovering their layers. Edie’s mysterious facility with space combines with his at times unaccountable knowledge to make him perhaps the earliest Scott Elemental in my sense of the term. His mysterious ability to navigate the novel’s spaces quickly is especially worth noting as a trait that reappears in other Elementals, in and out of Scott. The ground which Edie so knowingly describes in the Kinprunes scene he seems to emerge from, stealing upon Lovel and Oldbuck “unseen and unheard” though they are atop the hill (30). He appears to save another misreader of space, Sir Arthur Wardour, from a sudden storm, striding prophet-like from the haze, shouting “Turn back!” (56). He appears again, emerging in Dante-esque contortions with the landscape, to try to prevent Lovel’s duel with Captain MacIntyre in Chapter 20, though

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Scott does not reveal how he knows about it. In a Wordsworthian moment, he is found “[sitting] upon the roots of the old thorn” that had been the rendezvous point, “as vigourous in his decay as the moss-grown but contorted boughs which served him for a canopy” (160). His name even means “old tree.”5 As a character who seems himself to blend into the palimpsest of space, Edie is best suited to move around it, explain it, and at times manipulate it. His interaction with another layered location in the novel makes this relationship with space clearer, as well as depicting the failure of typical knowledge-gathering methods to read the space-history palimpsest. The Kaim of Kinprunes episode presents only a ditch and an obscurely marked stone; in chapter 17 of The Antiquary, however, a large touring party visits the ruins of a local priory, providing Scott with an occasion for depicting misreadings of a more fully realized ruin scene. Like Avrom Fleishman’s view of the historical novelist as tapestry restorer weaving “whole scenes or figures to fill the empty spaces” (6), both the touring party and the narrator take turns piecing histories together from the extant stone structures of “St. Ruth’s Abbey”: histories that conflict and, perhaps just as importantly, cannot be reconciled by the narrator because the site itself is largely unreal. The narrator effectively describes and learnedly reconstructs the ruin, providing the physical features with historical synopses so necessary to the notion of a learned “tour” (Liu 10-11). But the synopses supplied by the narrator are mischievous and misleading, and the entire scene eventually gives way to the separate synopses of the tour party members, each supplying his or her own self-serving and biased interpretative framework for the scene’s implied narrative. Oldbuck’s prefatory remark, appealing to Isabella Wardour as “an admirer of nature,” implies that the historic ruin structure is but a part of the natural scene (130)—for a moment foregrounding the Wordworthian boundary of nature as the scene’s most real and important element, effectively denying the history (Liu 11-12, 39). Indeed, the historical elements work in concert with the natural elements to produce highly aesthetic effects, yet the effects are also artistic, even artificial. The scene reveals just how intentional is the spatial palimpsest in Scott—that is, how elements historical, aesthetic, dramatic and otherwise blend into each other in deliberately stylized ways. For instance, when the party follows Oldbuck “through a breach in a low, ancient, and ruinous wall” they suddenly come upon “a scene equally unexpected and interesting”—the priory, in all its glory (130). So the first sign of a historic element in the landscape is a broken wall: a failed or compromised boundary, but one that has taken on the new aesthetic function of making the view more dramatic and picturesque. The scene continues:

They stood pretty high upon the side of the glen, which had suddenly opened into a sort of amphitheatre to give room for a pure and profound lake of a few acres extent, and a space of level ground around it. The banks then arose everywhere steeply, and in some places were varied by rocks—in

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others covered with the copse, which run up, feathering their sides lightly and irregularly, and breaking the uniformity of the green pasture-ground—Beneath, the lake discharged itself into the huddling and tumultuous brook, which had been their companion since they had entered the glen. At the point at which it issued from “its parent lake,” stood the ruins which they had come to visit. (130)

The transformation of natural features into “a sort of amphitheatre” is one of Scott’s most common nature-to-architecture shifts,6 again signaling the mixture of elements at work in the scene. As the crumbled wall works to frame the natural scene and surprise the viewer, so the forest has carved itself out into a fitting hollow space for the presentation of the ruins. What the viewer sees, on a grand scale and apparently naturally created, is essentially an ornamental garden scene: the surrounding forest acting as a niche in which to display the bas-relief sculpture of the priory. The steep risings and irregular “feathering” effects of the bank suggest a rough pedestal for the ruins, the rushing and pooling water a fountain. This is landscape transformed and transforming, landscape put to figurative and imaginative uses, and less a historical scene than a historically-themed garden folly. No antiquary, nor even an entire party of antiquaries, are equipped to interpret this scene adequately, since the scene itself is so patently artificial. That does not stop the antiquaries from trying, nor has it stopped numerous readers from overemphasizing the “originals” of many ruins in Scott.7 Immediately following the narrator’s own speculative description of St. Ruth’s, Scott focuses humorously on clashing speculative opinions about the priory, its historical role, and its current significance. The overgrown remains signify something different to each member of the dispute: a seat of learning in the Dark Ages for the Whiggish Oldbuck, “pomp and ceremonial” for the Tory Sir Arthur Wardour, inconceivable clerical duties for the Reverend Blattergowl, alchemy and buried treasure for the occultist and charlatan Dousterswivel, and a place where women have been excluded for Isabella (132). For John MacQueen, the wigs belonging to Oldbuck, Wardour and Blattergowl are Scott’s nod to earlier allegorical representations of the Three Estates; their owners’ dispute about the priory, thus about history itself, demonstrates the unyielding single-mindedness of each class’s perspective of knowledge:

Sir Arthur Wardour represents Temporality—he is a baronet. The minister, the Rev. Mr Blattergowl, is Spirituality, and the Antiquary himself…is Merchants and Burgesses….The first interest of each wig—some aspect of the past—is pursued with a self-centred concentration which, for the speaker at least, excludes everything else. (45-46)

MacQueen’s reading confirms the idea of clashing epistemologies at work in Scott’s ruin scenes, clashes that the narrator, confident and seemingly well-

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informed, cannot ultimately resolve. Scott’s focus in such scenes is more on the questions than the answers of history, on the nature of the weaves suggested by the tapestry rather than on the tattered remains of the tapestry itself:

What really concerns Scott and his character-historians is the destruction, the disappearances, the racial and personal losses which make up the fabric of history, the wiped-out voids which the persistence of ruins, or even the sudden discovery of hidden fragments, only emphasizes. (Wilt 166)

But if Scott’s narrator cannot sort out the answers, Scott’s Elemental can at least hint at them. It is Edie Ochiltree who turns out to understand St. Ruth’s landscape best, as the site becomes the focal point of The Antiquary’s second volume. Edie knows of the hidden tunnel that shelters Lovel after the duel, leading from a tree-enshrouded hillside to within the priory’s walls; he also knows its original clandestine use in England’s obscure Catholic past—a nook from which the Abbot could spy on his monks. From this medieval hiding place, Edie foils the plots of the charlatan Dousterswivel by impersonating an offended spirit of the ruins. Edie knows that the occultist pretends to detect hidden treasure in the ruins; he acts as his guide, tricking the trickster by “salting the mine of history,” (75) as Wilt has it. This farcical episode, often written off as weak and superficial Gothic parody by critics, not only reveals Edie’s role as the trickster historian, but also emphasizes his preternatural knowledge of the past and of the landscape. Edie literally knows how the organic morphs into the architectural or historical, or how “the natural world is imbued with cultural values” (Janowitz 56). Against the suppositions of the touring party, and transcending the cautious, speculative historian turns of the narrator, Edie understands the grounds of St. Ruth’s spatially, historically and one might even say ideologically. And he moves over these grounds—at times described realistically, at other times taking on the qualities of a comedy set, with spaces for eavesdropping and off-stage voices—as adeptly as over the Gothic spaces of Glenallan House or the commonsensical surroundings of Fairport. As Scott’s first full-blown Elemental character, he alone bridges the dimensions of space, narrative, and genre. He alone understands the palimpsest on all levels. While his actions seem to resist and even mock the supernatural (as in his upsetting of Dousterswivel’s clairvoyance), his own unaccountable knowledge hints at a metaphysical narrative power (see Allen 133). Tapped into the land’s “obscure but certain realm of secret, meaningful signs,” Edie’s ability to decipher such signs allows him (like Wordsworth’s visionary poet) “to be possessed of the ground of all contingent truths” (McGann 69). My reference to Jerome McGann’s gloss on Wordsworth should hint at the broader discursive possibilities indicated by Scott’s Elementals. By their

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apparent though unexplained connections with knowledge, nature, and perhaps even “supernature,” the Elementals point out that Romantic reckonings with “marvelous” elements or “ideal” transcendence are endemic to Scott’s novels. They hint at questions that matter to the Waverley scheme of things yet that have unfortunately remained unexamined.

“The Grotesque Boy”: Dickie Sludge of Kenilworth As I have emphasized above, criticism has consistently yielded to the Scottish Waverley novels the position of “true historical novels,” of which the Chivalry novels are poor imitations. Allen’s remarks are typical—Scott is “cut off from nine tenths of his power” outside of Scotland (135)—but others have expressed the judgment more negatively: “The ‘historical romance’ industry which Scott inspired owed nothing to his finest work. There were, though, two Scotts, and the lesser Scott was easier to imitate” (Rance 38). The problems with this truism are threefold: it does not acknowledge the popularity and influence of the Chivalry novels during the nineteenth century, and therefore does not fully comprehend Scott’s much-vaunted influence; it skews critical perception about what historical fiction is by excluding as “lesser” product most of Scott’s novels, and those the most imitated, like Ivanhoe (1820); and it further skews understanding of certain common narrative and descriptive elements in the novels by restricting their context. The latter problem especially describes critical saws about Scott’s spaces and local characters, including the Elementals. I have drawn my next two examples from the Chivalry rather than the Scottish novels not only because they are neglected, but also because an Edie Ochiltree has at least as much in common with characters from the Chivalry novels (like Hayraddin Maugrabin, Ulla Troil, and the White Lady) as with Meg Merrilies and Madge Wildfire. Further, since Edie’s complicated role as folk historian, reader of time and genre, and traverser of space gibes with that of so many Chivalry novel characters, the broader significance of Elementals must be reconsidered to determine why historical novels of all types so often rely on these shadowy, half-real and unstable characters to get their work done. In Scott’s popular Elizabethan novel Kenilworth (1821), as much a progenitor of the Victorian historical novel as the better known Ivanhoe, the Elemental is less prominent than Edie Ochiltree, perhaps because one of the novel’s protagonists is the most adept “normal” reader of the palimpsest to be found in Scott: the blacksmith-merchant-alchemist Wayland Smith. Although not mysterious enough to be an Elemental, Wayland Smith nevertheless rivals the Elemental’s genius for overlapping categories: of society and class, of appearance and dress, and of country and city life. In a novel focused on self-fashioning and competing males, “perceptive in its understanding of the way in which the whole of Elizabethan society, not just individuals, fashions itself through performance” (Alexander xiv), Wayland emerges as the most

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successful, because the most adaptable, male. His ascent depends upon his successful reading of the spaces around him, which reveals Wayland’s grasp of various kinds of knowledge: not only geographical and directional, but also chemical, medical, linguistic, commercial and psychological. But Wayland cannot complete all the tasks required by the novel’s complicated plot without help—enter the Elemental, the bizarre “hobgoblin” boy, Dickie Sludge. Better known throughout the novel as Flibbertigibbet, Sludge first appears as protagonist Tressilian’s guide to Smith’s hidden forest forge and laboratory, and is described as “a queer, shambling, ill-made urchin” of “stunted growth” and “grotesque sneer” (92-93). Along the way he jokes and jabs repeatedly about leading Tressilian to the devil, since Sludge is Smith’s confederate in maintaining his usefully evil reputation as an invisible and occult smith. Unlike Wayland, who soon drops his Gothic-flavored disguise, Sludge’s goblin and devil associations remain with him throughout the novel, emphasizing both his otherworldliness and puckish sense of mischief. Sludge brings Tressilian to Smith’s stone circle (always an emblem in Scott for a complex and layered landscape space) and teasingly calls the space’s exterior features by interior names: the stone circle is “Wayland Smith’s forge-door,” the flat stone is “Wayland Smith’s counter,” and so on (96). When Tressilian tries to punish him for what he considers a practical joke or worse, Sludge displays both an Elemental’s facility with the forest space and a demon’s propensity to torment:

[He] presently took to his heels across the heath, with a velocity which baffled every attempt of Tressilian to overtake him,….[He]…preserved just such a rate as to encourage Tressilian to continue the chase, and then darted away from him with the swiftness of the wind, when his pursuer supposed he had nearly run him down…. This lasted until Tressilian, from very weariness, stood still, and was about to abandon the pursuit with a hearty curse on the ill-favoured urchin, who had engaged him in an exercise so ridiculous. But the boy, who had, as formerly, planted himself on the top of a hillock close in front, began to clap his long, thin hands, point with his skinny fingers, and twist his wild and ugly features into such an extravagant expression of laughter and derision, that Tressilian began half to doubt whether he had not in view an actual hobgoblin. (96-97)

Sludge further taunts if Tressilian tries to catch him on horse, “there is a marsh hard by would swallow all the horses of the Queen’s guard. I will into it, and see where you will go then” (97). Despite their partnership as faux conjurors in chapter 10, Wayland Smith and Flibbertigibbet differ qualitatively, as the subsequent action bears out. Elemental or no, there is always some mystification about the capable reader of space, and indeed Smith’s easy familiarity with disguise, language, forest,

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and city space baffles Tressilian and surprises the reader. But Flibbertigibbet’s proficiency baffles even Wayland Smith. When he and Amy Robsart join a group of players on the road to Kenilworth Castle, Dickie Sludge is already among them, dressed appropriately enough as a devil. When the couple is turned away at the castle gate by a mock giant—part of Kenilworth’s extended focus on performance and spectacle—Sludge gains them entrance by joining in the drama and prompting the gigantic porter with his forgotten lines. The scene points out both his unnatural knowledge and his easy trans-navigation of genres:

He dropped down from the horse, and skipping up to the porter, plucked him by the tail of the bearskin, so as to induce him to decline his huge head, and whispered something in his ear…. “It is even so,” he said, with a thundering sound of exultation—“it is even so, my little dandieprat. But who the devil could teach it thee?” (260-61)

Both his half-sinister impishness and his unaccountable understanding align Dickie Sludge with other Elementals, as does his link with the novel’s various spaces: he flits freely and easily throughout the unreal mummery of Kenilworth, warning Wayland that he is determined by mysterious means to be “at the bottom of all your secrets, were they as deep and dark as the Castle dungeon” (261). Through his intervention Wayland enters the castle, but through his interference Wayland loses an important letter, thus bringing on the climax of the novel. A character less important to the plot of the novel than Ochiltree to The Antiquary, yet Dickie Sludge proves the key to new agency several times for this novel’s two protagonists, and each time corresponds to a change in scene: from the village to the stone circle, to the underground laboratory, and so into Kenilworth Castle. If his weird or marvelous nature is less powerfully realized than a character like Meg Merrilies, his variety of Elemental was the more imitated throughout the genre: he might be considered the first in a long line of dwarf characters in historical novels whose physical “grotesquerie” is compensated by unnatural knowledge, often mischievously employed.8

Holy Ground: Theodorick of The Talisman Since Kenilworth is set in Elizabeth’s England, with superstition (often equated with Catholicism) allegedly in retreat, the problem of Sludge’s knowledge is dealt with more playfully than in the epic surroundings of Scott’s far-flung novel, The Talisman. Theodorick of Engaddi appears late in chapter 3, the goal of the journey protagonist Sir Kenneth undertakes through the Syrian desert. Prior to meeting him, Sir Kenneth and the Muslim Sheerkohf have traded a long series of jabs and counter-jabs about faith, knowledge, custom, and landscape, all while traveling through some of Scott’s most tortuously mutable scenery.

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Scott’s diction evokes both the Gothic and the Inferno as the knight and his uneasy guide pass from flat desert to rocky, shadowy, and deeply pocketed terrain. Although Kenneth remains indifferent to Sheerkohf’s stories of wild animals and robbers, the “dark caverns and chasms amongst the rocks, those grottoes so often alluded to in Scripture,” convince him “that he was now in the awful wilderness of the forty days’ fast, and the scene of the actual personal temptation, wherewith the Evil Principle was permitted to assail the Son of Man” (36-37). The scene change connects with frightening metaphysical narratives in Kenneth’s memory and imagination, altering both the character of the story in which he finds himself 9 and that of his companion: Sheerkohf’s incongruous and carefree singing of drinking songs now strikes him as dangerously irreverent in the unholy surroundings.

As it was, the Crusader felt as if he had by his side some gay licentious fiend, who endeavored to ensnare his immortal soul, and endanger his immortal salvation, by inspiring loose thoughts of earthly pleasure, and thus polluting his devotion, at a time when his faith as a Christian, and his vow as a pilgrim, called on him for a serious and penitential state of mind. (37)

The alteration of landscape thus signals an alteration of genre and mood, of ways of knowing and predicting what will happen. The knight who had been mocking Sheerkohf with alleged fables now tells him that “this place—these rocks—these caverns with their gloomy arches, leading as it were to the central abyss—are held an especial haunt of Satan and his angels” (38). The verbal duel between Kenneth and Sheerkohf boils to a climax when the latter chants the verses to “Ahriman,” a mythological tale supposedly describing his family’s occult origins, but that Kenneth takes to be a prayer to Satan. Sheerkohf’s poem touches upon the very questions of holy and unholy ground, of righteous and maleficent spirits, that the two have been debating in Bunyanesque fashion. For instance, the oasis that knight and Saracen have visited in chapter 2 is recalled by the “fountain in the desert field,” granted by a “Benigner Power” who contrasts with “Ahriman,” the evil spirit who controls the lashing wave and tornado (42.7-8). The speaker wonders if Ahriman has form or if he is intermingled into the very fabric and elements of earth:

Or art thou mix’d in Nature’s source,An ever-operating force, Converting good to ill; An evil principle innate,Contending with our better fate (42.31-35)

Sheerkohf claims to have descended from subterranean demigods who are themselves “elementals”—“created out of the pure elementary fire”—and

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though content to leave the finer questions of religion to the theologians, he grants the simple power of such beings:

we are not willing, like other Moslemah, to pass hasty doom on the lofty and powerful elementary spirits from whom we claim our origin. These Genii, according to our belief and hope, are not altogether reprobate, but are still in the way of probation, and may hereafter be punished or rewarded….Enough that with us the reverence for these spirits is not altogether effaced by what we have learned from the Koran…. (40-41)

“Not altogether effaced”—a palimpsest-like feature spoken of on “unholy ground,” in the context of a dialogue that has ranged from figure to figure, symbol to symbol, ascertaining which soldier, religion, culture, or nation possesses the truer knowledge. But Sheerkohf, though an admirable reader of space, is not the Elemental here, despite his claims. Rather, the seemingly “infernal spirit” that Sir Kenneth “hesitated not to believe that the blasphemous hymn of the Saracen had raised up” is his quest’s object, the Christian hermit, Theodorick of Engaddi (43). Theodorick’s appearance finds him utterly familiar with the territory around the two horsemen, and very capable of using it to his advantage. Tall like the demigods of Sheerkohf’s tale, “a figure of great height and very thin, which skipped over rocks and bushes with so much agility as, added to the wild and hirsute appearance of the individual, reminded [Kenneth] of the fauns and silvans,” this “apparition,” who “at first appeared to dog their path by concealing itself behind rocks and shrubs, using those advantages of the ground with great address, and surmounting its irregularities with surprising agility,” dramatically proclaims himself Theodorick of Engaddi, “walker of the desert,” “friend of the Cross, and flail of all infidels” (43, 46). He pounces on Sheerkohf’s throat in his animal skins, here in this treacherous waste of grottoes and caves that “were often the refuge of beasts of prey, or of men still more ferocious” (36). Sir Kenneth’s conviction that this wild and unkempt recluse cannot be Theodorick since he is a “madman” is answered by an assurance from the Muslim that sums up the mysterious power possessed by all of Scott’s Elementals:

“Not the worse saint [for being mad],” returned the Moslem, speaking according to the well-known Eastern belief, that madmen are under the influence of immediate inspiration. “Know, Christian, that when one eye is extinguished, the other becomes more keen;…so, when our reason in human things is disturbed or destroyed, our view heavenward becomes more acute and perfect.” (47)

This same unholy ground where “the Evil One hath more than ordinary power over sinful mortals” (38) is Theodorick’s domain: he leads the two riders deeper into the waste with uncanny proficiency, “well acquainted with all the winding

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dells and passes of the desert, and gifted with uncommon activity, which, perhaps, an unsettled state of mind kept in constant exercise” (47). “Athletic yet wasted,” like Edie the Old Tree, he leads them to his cave’s opening, standing at the entrance with a “sulphurous” (46) torch. Yet the interior is less like hell than a monastery, with a cool temperature, waxen torches, and “a niche for a rude statue of the Virgin” (48). But while the Muslim sleeps, Theodorick leads Kenneth further into the cave, and thus into mysteries of the landscape—as the space of the novel, which had recently turned from Dante-esque Hell to quiet monk’s cell, now transforms into a full-blown Gothic chapel:

whereas, in every other place which Sir Kenneth had seen, the labour employed upon the rock had been of the simplest and coarsest description, it had in this chapel employed the invention and the chisels of the most able architects. The groined roofs rose from six columns on each side, carved with the rarest skill; and the manner in which the crossings of the concave arches were bound together, as it were, with appropriate ornaments, were all in the finest tone of the architecture of the age. (56)

Enshrined in this hallowed space, complete with “gothic door,” ornate carvings and a choir of female voices—strange accompaniment for a hermit monk!—is a fragment of the true cross. This first featured landscape in The Talisman is one whose rapid alteration signals changes in genre and mood, shifts with which the poor reader of space, Sir Kenneth, is ill-equipped to keep up. Not merely has the scene moved from the harshest exterior space to a cool, decorous and even luxurious interior space, but space and narrative have moved within a chapter from the “scene of the temptation” to the Actual Presence, from Inferno to Paradiso. What is important to note here is that the Elemental has made this possible. He alone knows the secret of the desert and caves, and has the power of proclaiming the unholy ground holy (56). Though certainly no more “organic” growth of the Syrian setting—which, of course, Scott never visited—than Sir Kenneth, and in fact more mythic and archetypal than anything else, he has been summoned or conjured by an invocation to elemental forces, in a scene “pregnant” with theological and cultural symbolism, and he alone has the power to transform this arid, unholy scene, his own domain, into its metonymic inverse. Worth noting are the similarities between Theodorick of Engaddi and The Antiquary’s Edie Ochiltree: both are aged but robust figures, unnaturally strong and spry. Both are beggars with strong links to Catholicism: Edie’s social status as a “King’s Bedesman” links to a Catholic past no one in The Antiquary knows directly, an order of paupers partly maintained by Scottish kings “in conformity with the ordinances of the Catholic Church, and who were expected in return to pray for the royal welfare and that of the state” (Scott, qtd. in Hewitt 376). As such he, like Theodorick, participates in but also subverts the dynamic between Catholicism and superstition assumed during Scott’s time,

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summed up by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart as “Middle Ages = Catholic = ignorant and superstitious, as opposed to ‘modern times’ = non-Catholic/deist/agnostic = enlightened and scientific” (5). Both Theodorick and Edie lead the heroes of their novels to caves that connect with mysterious Gothic structures. Both characters unaccountably know the scenery and ideas and constructs invested in the scenery, though one draws from a Scottish landscape and period that Scott remembered, and the other from a stylized representation of an ancient Middle East that Scott never saw. Theodorick’s role in The Talisman is important but brief; his main function is to reunite Sir Kenneth with Lady Edith Plantagenet, the kinswomen of Richard I to whom Kenneth is devoted. Both Theodorick and Flibbertigibbet are thus in keeping with Allen’s “elemental” as a half-mad or at least provokingly eccentric, elusive, haunting character whose actions significantly affect the resolution of the story. Yet they are also characters whose interaction with space hints at the limitations of rational, conventional knowledge. Like Edie’s knowledge of a remote Catholic past; like Madge Wildfire’s “uncertain, and twilight sort of rationality” (Midlothian 308) which yet kens space and genre, roads and forests as well as ballad and folk tale; like Guy Mannering’s Meg Merrilies, whose curses and prophecies are as accurate as her uncanny knowledge of the secret places on the Ellangowan estate; like also, in differing degrees, Norna from The Pirate (1822), Lady Hermione from The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Fenella from Peveril of the Peak (1822), and the White Lady from The Monastery—all have ways of merging with the text of space in Scott’s novels, becoming vanishing points between space/time and human beings, the inevitable and the perishable, the universal and the mortal.

Futurespace: The Elemental as Prophet Because I am postulating the Elementals as fringe characters in touch with both the landscape and other kinds of knowledge, a word needs to be said regarding the precognitive powers Elemental characters often possess—especially since (contrary to what might be expected of a genre valued for authenticity) soothsayers and prophets who predict accurately found their way into the historical novel in abundance. The historical novel’s ethos demands a constant backward-looking and speculative groping into the murky past. The author, part historian and part “tapestry restorer,” must find an authoritative grasp of his subjects and timeline (or at least appear to have one) and be able to distinguish the sharper outlines and bolder colors in the mist. The looking back into obscurity and bringing forward into narrative cohesion and clarity make up the magical powers so often granted to the successful historical novelist: to Scott, the Wizard of the North, and to those who followed. The author’s through-a-glass-darkly exercise of scrutiny and speculation is thus mirrored by some Elemental characters whose knowledge extends mysteriously forward, who peer into the obscure future back at the novelist and reader.

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Often the soothsayers and prophets, insane or believed insane, are another means of demonstrating the links between past and present: when a soothsayer looks “forward,” the event predicted is only another fact looked “back” to by the author, revealing a historical link between author and setting. In one way, therefore, the Elemental as prophet emphasizes historical continuity, thus arguing for order and rationality.10 Yet in another way, their divinations hint at sublime powers unaccountable in the world of pure rationalization, yet just as real and just as powerful. What the source of their power is becomes the vexing question in Waverley epistemology. At the least, their knowledge confirms the importance of inexplicable instinct and “hunches”—precognition in its simplest form. At most, the Elementals’ ways of knowing acknowledge metaphysical ways, and those outside the commonsensical Christianity of the Anglican Church. It may be why ruined Catholic and Druid spaces in Scott mirror the Elementals so well: Scott’s crumbling remains of stone circles, monasteries, and cathedrals are links to an English past that was still palpable yet seem also in touch with other-worldly knowledge and power. So these spaces may actually be haunted, even when all other spaces may be relatively realistic. The sacramentality associated with Catholic spaces implies multiple natures overlapping, just like the Elementals themselves: the cities of man and God overlaying each other in Augustine, the natural world whose acts yet resonate on the spiritual plane. To identify Scott’s haunted abbeys as a Gothic motif is only to acknowledge the Gothic’s intuitive acknowledgement of this British past, and to confirm the Gothic novel itself as “a mode of history, a way of perceiving an obscure past and interpreting it” (Punter, qtd. in Mitchell 85). The nebulous energy around Scott’s Catholic ruins even complements Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of medieval church-dominated cities as a successful blending of his triad of spatial categories (40-41). Monkish spaces were apparently successful and harmonious spaces of social practice and yet were destroyed. As such they become idealized riddles, spaces of lost knowledge, coherency and perspective (as when Egremont regrets the loss of the “Monastics” in Disraeli’s Sybil). The British Catholic ruin is not only a residue of historical struggle but also a link to a coherent spatial/political whole. What critics have hitherto noted in the Elementals, I suggest, is not so much an innate channeling or representation of locality in this kind of character, as Scott’s signaling that the palimpsest of historical novel space is also “outside reason,” where reason equals verifiable or empirical knowledge. Grasping the past imaginatively cannot be achieved by purely rational means—nor should a genre so romantically invested as the historical novel (in its technique at least, if not its ethos) pretend to do so. As the form gathers together scraps from different genres and categories to build its fictional world (fragments of verse and song, dramatic dialogue, historical footnotes, editorial paratexts) so its spaces shift and transmute into their own palimpsest: at times a journalistic

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rendering of an extant scene, at times a stage backdrop, at still other times the brooding, painterly, and sublime “splendid theatre.” Neither the spaces nor the Elementals, therefore, can be understood in terms of ratio—grasped by logical steps—though there are hints that they are both intellectus—grasped by a higher, intuitive understanding. And if the successful reading of space implies a correct interpretation or acquisition of knowledge for most characters, the Elementals’ seemingly instinctive or preternatural links with space deliberately introduce an epistemological problem into the Waverley narrator’s scheme of “knowing.” As such they are a challenge to order, realism, and level-headedness, and thus to the compensatory coolness and confidence of the voice of the typical historical novel’s narrator: that self-assured attachment to rationality and realism that criticism has long taken at face value.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, SALKEHATCHIE

NOTES

1 I refer here to opposing critical viewpoints about the purpose of Scott’s Scottish landscape description, such as Reed’s assertion that the Scottish landscape is being authentically recorded and its locality celebrated, versus Makdisi’s claim that Scott is participating in the “appropriation” (84) of Scottish landscape for the Empire. 2 See Lukács 33-34, Allen 134, and Armstrong 7. The idea that the Scottish novels are Scott’s best and most relevant work is an old saw, dating back to the late nineteenth century at least: see Barzun (61) and Rance (38). 3 Allen’s diction further suggests that these characters signal a mixing of genres, a mingling of elements that should be presumably disparate (133). 4 “This, thought Lovel to himself, is a famous counterpart to the story of Keip on this syde” (39). The reference is to “what would now be called an urban folk-tale” (Hewitt 377), well known in Scott’s day, of antiquarians puzzling over a seemingly mysterious stone carving (as in KEI PONT HI SSYDE), and later ridiculed when the marker’s mundane significance is revealed. Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick, another over-enthusiastic antiquary, makes a similar mistake early in his travels (see Pickwick, 143-44). 5 Like Wordsworth’s “erect but aged thorn,” “a mass of knotted joints, / A wretched thing forlorn,” (“The Thorn” lines 6, 8-9) Edie presides over The Antiquary’s own birth mystery Most of the situations in “The Thorn” have thematic parallels in Scott’s novel, from its birth mystery scandal to the mysterious unreasoning force of its landscape—as its speaker directs, “I cannot tell; I wish I could; / For the true reason no one knows, / But if you’d gladly view the spot” (lines 89-91). See also Reed 9. In The Antiquary, however, Reed’s “informed observer” is the empirical Oldbuck, who has been shown up and gently mocked by the more mysterious Edie, the “Old Tree.” 6 See, for instance, the “sylvan amphitheatre” of Waverley (105) and of Ivanhoe (272) the “amphitheatre of level turf” of The Monastery (246); and the “amphitheatre filled with large trees” of Anne of Geierstein (334). 7 See Reed 93, but as Oldbuck has learned earlier, probable history may be formulated only if the site has been correctly identified. The relationship between the ascertainable historical facts (Saint Ruth resembles Arbroath Abbey, Montrose campaigned near Arbroath) and the fictional setting and situations of The Antiquary are paradigmatic of Scott’s understanding of the historical novel: history, imaginatively applied, supports a fictional framework. Speculations about the ruin, historical constructions put upon its fragments, must be ultimately abstract and hypothetical since Scott has faked the site.

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8 Scott’s first version of this character is really the “goblin page” of his poem, Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), “scarce an earthly man” but “an earthly spirit,” who demonstrates his unnatural quickness covering the same forest ground as Lord Cranstoun (3:31, 5:13). Flibbertigibbet also builds upon earlier Scott characters like The Black Dwarf’s Canny Elshie and the historical “Old Mortality.” His example can be clearly seen in later historical novel characters like Xit in W. H. Ainsworth’s The Tower of London and Tangel in G. P. R. James’ Forest Days. 9 The connection between landscape, hero, and narrative is deliberate and, I would argue, commonplace in Scott. Waverley space often operates as a background that can foreground questions about storytelling, style, motif, and types of knowledge. Scott’s male protagonist looks to his landscape to learn what kind of story he is in, what kind of drama he is enacting, and as Edward Waverley wonders, “what will be his own share” in the appropriate action. The landscape assists in determining the truth, style, category, or character of the narrative, or of the character’s place within it. Waverley does not so much argue that Scotland is not a “land of romance,” as critics have suggested, but that Waverley himself is not a character from romance: like Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, he is hopelessly out of step with the environment he is exploring. 10 For some Victorian examples, an unnamed witch predicts Vesuvius’s eruption in Lytton. In Ainsworth, soothsayer Gunnora Braose predicts Lady Jane Grey’s downfall, the climax of the novel. Lady Tiphaine predicts the British Empire’s wide expanse in Doyle.

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