William Deresiewicz Read online

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  Marmion’s sense of belatedness is everywhere implicit in the time of year at which each canto’s introduction is set. Though Scott claims, in the fourth, that the composition of the poem has occupied more than a year, the five whose seasons are specified are all written in late autumn or early winter— the poet, looking about him, forever reflecting on scenes of desolation, and only the final introduction, set at Christmas, offering symbolic hope of “salvation” (VI.49). The same imagery continues in The Lord of the Isles—one of the later romances and the last to be published before Austen started work on Persuasion—which begins with an extended metaphor of the poet as still, even after autumn’s departure, “a lonely gleaner” “Through fields timewasted, on sad inquest bound, / Where happier bards of yore have richer harvest found” (I.3436). Like Anne after her loss of Wentworth, traditional Scotland’s spiritual date is a perpetual December. But Scott’s fullest embodiment of his sense of the state of Scottish cultural traditions and of his status relative to them is the authorial figure of the “last minstrel” himself, that founding image of Scott’s vast corpus. “[I]nfirm and old” (I.2), without peers or progeny, he haltingly attempts a “long forgotten melody” that finally emerges after great effort (I.83).33 As will be the case in Austen, memory is the vehicle of resurrection, and as selective as that faculty sometimes is in Persuasion, it is far more so when the survival of cultural rather than personal memories is at stake: “Each blank, in faithless memory void,” we are told at the work’s outset, “The poet’s glowing thought supplied” (I.9798). It is a striking acknowledgment on Scott’s part: he will recover of his nation’s legends and ballads as much as he can, but what he cannot recover, he will make up. Still, the poem communicates the sense of urgency that drives him to such expedients. When a poet dies, we are told: the stream, the wood, the gale, Is vocal with the plaintive wail Of those, who, else forgotten long, Liv’d in the poet’s faithful song, And, with the poet’s parting breath, Whose memory feels a second death. (V.ii.38) As in The Giaour, the dead die a second time with the death of those who remember them. If Scott does not get his material down on paper now, it will be lost forever.

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  The relevance to Persuasion of this question of cultural memory will become clear below. For now, it is worth noting that the same issues of national death and resurrection are present throughout the Turkish Tales as well as Childe Harold III, published the year before the first of the Tales, except that in Byron the nation in question is not the poet’s own, but his adopted one, Greece. The opening of The Giaour, as we saw, strikes this very note, with its description of the Greek shore as a corpse in the first moments after death: “‘Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!” (l. 91). The land of ancient heroes, having descended into servility and dependence, exists, as it were, in a state of living death, and the poet calls upon his Greek contemporaries to revive it by honoring the memory of their forebears and rising up against the foreign oppressor: These scenes, their story not unknown, Arise, and make again your own; Snatch from the ashes of your Sires The embers of their former fires[.] (ll. 104107) As in Scott, Byron’s introductions tend to lengthen themselves into digressions that reveal the larger issues occupying the poet’s mind—the stories that his stories are really about. Canto II of Childe Harold both begins and ends with extended lamentations over the ruins of ancient Greek glory. Canto II of The Bride of Abydos opens with a meditation on the Hellespont, the tale’s setting, and thence on Troy—an implicit exhortation to presentday Greeks to emulate their ancestors’ fabled defeat of an Asian power (just as the tale itself, like The Giaour and The Corsair, allegorically enacts a Greek assertion of freedom from the Turkish overlord). And Byron, like Scott, is also vexed by the problem of cultural memory, of keeping alive even the knowledge of ancient glory. Both The Giaour and Childe Harold elaborate a conceit the effect of which is that even if those who now inhabit the land of heroes have forgotten their sires along with their sires’ virtues, and even if the very memorials of those virtues are now gone, the land itself remembers.34 But at other moments—those when he laments the destruction of ancient monuments or bewails the fact that only visiting foreigners now recognize the places of glory—Byron implicitly acknowledges that the land cannot speak for itself, but only voice the words its beholders put in its mouth. Memory, again, embodied in story, depends on the rememberer; the dead are invariably threatened with a second death. But as we saw at the start of

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  the chapter, that is the theme not only of The Giaour’s framing meditation, but also of the poem itself. Byron juxtaposes there the questions of personal and national bereavement—loss, melancholy, memory, revival—and he does so again in The Bride of Abydos, implicitly in The Corsair (given the allegorical dimension I noted above), and also in Childe Harold II, which ends with an extended lamentation on an unnamed “more than friend” (II.xcvi.6) that immediately follows (“Thou too art gone, thou loved and lovely one!” [II.xcv.1]) his elegy on Greek glory. And this juxtaposition is exactly what Austen accomplishes in Persuasion by synchronizing the personal story of Anne and Wentworth with the national story of war and peace—which is, of course, no less a story of death and life, bereavement and recovery. War and peace, that is to say, comprise another one of the novel’s down-and-up processes, but one that possesses a special status. Not only does it work itself out on a national scale, but we might suspect, given that it does, and given Austen’s obsession with Waterloo and the end of the war during the months she was composing the novel, that the national story is in fact the genesis of the personal one. This story of widows, in other words, was written as a way of addressing the fact that England itself had been widowed—widowed thousands of times over—and was now trying to understand, after twenty years of war, how to move forward, how to live again, in the aftermath of bereavement. But before we explore Austen’s great intertwining of these personal and national stories, we should note that her most important source for the idea of this juxtaposition—both in general and in the specific context of the Napoleonic War—is not Byron, but Scott. The first and most prominent of Marmion’s introductions, the one that heads the poem as a whole, mourns the deaths of Nelson, Pitt, and Fox, Britain’s chief military and political leaders during this time of crisis. The passage bemoans the same tragic circumstance we looked at with respect to Persuasion and Lady Elliot: that although Nature is reborn each spring, individuals once dead are dead forever. But Scott also makes a further leap. The deaths of individuals, or at least of great individuals, threaten national survival, as well: To mute and to material things New life revolving summer brings; … … … … … … . . But oh! my country’s wintry state What second spring shall renovate?

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  What powerful call shall bid arise The buried warlike and the wise[?] (I.5354, 5760) The life of a country and the lives of its countrymen are inextricably intertwined, and war imperils both. Marmion was written in the dark days of 1808, but we find the same logic, only now applied to the “up” phase of the cycle, in the romance Scott composed the year the war drew to its first close, The Lord of the Isles. The poem intertwines the story of Robert the Bruce’s liberation of Scotland with that of the thwarted love of Edith of Lorn, daughter of a nobleman who has sided with the English, and Ronald, “Lord of the Isles,” one of the vassals who has remained loyal to Bruce. Edith renews her vows to Robert—the poet speaks of her love as “reviv[ing]” (VI.ix.6)—at the same time Lorn repledges his allegiance to Bruce, and the poem ends with a service that functions at once as noble wedding and national thanksgiving. Personal and national intertwine, and the story, as Scott makes sure to tell us, possesses a more than antiquarian interest. The introduction to the final canto explicitly likens the breathless pace of Bruce’s campaign of reconquest to that of the closing period of the Napoleonic war. The analogy is strengthened by Scott’s headnote to the poem, which calls Bruce “the restorer of Scottish monar
chy.“35 “Restoration” was no innocuous word in 1814: Bruce restored the Scottish monarchy just as the allies restored the French. The identity of the personal and the national at this time of great crisis is again affirmed. The fate of the country is the fate of its countrymen. One can well imagine, and Austen clearly did imagine, the number of men (like Robert, like Wentworth) who were returning to wives, fiancées, or lovers in 1814—and the number who were not. Waverley was already in press when The Lord of the Isles was being written; Scott had by now hit upon the device, central to his development of the historical novel, of setting his narratives at moments of historical crisis, transitions from one social order to another.36 Bruce’s conquest was one, Napoleon’s defeat, implicitly, a second. That Austen saw the latter likewise, that she recognized the end of the war as a profoundly significant historical turning point, has been noted before, though it bears further discussion.37 But she also, with the example of Scott before her, saw it in larger terms, as analogous to other historical turning points, moments when old orders gave way to new or when, on the contrary, historical change was impeded or reversed.

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  That this is so is not obvious, for she encodes these analogies in a passage the likes of which she had never attempted before, one that seems to contain a great deal of surplus information. It is the Elliot family’s entry in the Baronetage—Persuasion’s shadow-text, the book in which the book itself is mirrored—a passage that stands at the novel’s very head: Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a stillborn son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791. (35) The key to unraveling the information encoded in this passage actually comes a few lines later, as the narrator paraphrases the rest of the entry, which tells of “the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family” and which includes the information that the Elliots were elevated to the “dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II.” The family as a whole, and Sir Walter in particular, is thus associated with the Stuart Restoration, the turning back of the historical clock in 1660—fittingly so, since Sir Walter is so unyielding a reactionary, so staunch an opponent of social change. But the historical associations only begin there. Sir Walter’s daughters are Elizabeth and Mary, themselves the latest, as we know, in the long line of “Marys and Elizabeths” the Elliot men have married. Elizabeth and Mary are the queens of the Tudor-Stuart monarchy, the one superseded in 1689 by the Glorious Revolution. For Austen, Britain’s one queen since then had, of course, been Anne. Sir Walter also marries the daughter of a James, one of the Stuart male names, and marries his own daughter to a Charles, the other. As Anne represents the new order among the female Elliots—remember that she urges “reformation” on her father—William Walter Elliot represents it among the males.38 And lest we miss this second association with the post-Revolutionary settlement, Austen tells us that during the period of his estrangement from Sir Walter—the period of his most complete apostasy from aristocratic values—William Walter drops his middle name, becoming simply “William.” Furthermore, that Sir Walter is the last of his breed, that he represents an order that is passing from the historical stage, is signified, as in the case of Scott’s last minstrel, by the death of his son. And this blow to his lineage is delivered on none other than Guy Fawkes Day, the day of the Gunpowder Plot that sought to overthrow the first of the Stuart

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  kings, and in the year that marked the start of the French Revolution, a more successful attempt to overthrow an old monarchical order. But old and new are relative terms; what was new becomes old. Sir Walter, born in 1760, is also associated with George III, the king who ascended the throne that year and who had become, by 1815, the very embodiment of senescence, superseded, while still alive, by his own son. 1660 and 1760, two signposts of old orders—Austen could not have failed to see, and did not fail to make use of, that historical rhyme, just as she also implicitly calls our attention to a complementary one: 1689 and 1789, the two revolutions. Lady Elliot, like her husband, embodies the old, dying in 1800—for people had not yet forgotten in Austen’s time that a new century begins in the year ‘01—and it is interesting that Austen seems to have changed her mind at some point as to whether Anne’s mother belongs to the party of the new or the old, for she later tells us that “[t]hirteen years had passed away since Lady Elliot’s death” when the novel begins in 1814 (37).39 Finally, to bring us back to Waterloo, Sir Walter’s association with everything old receives one more confirmation in the fact of his being born on March 1—the day, as we noted, that Napoleon landed in France. Old and new are relative terms, and the resurrection of Britain’s archenemy was a particularly horrible example of the return of an “old” that was thought to be dead and gone—a fact of enormous importance to the novel and one that I will return to shortly.40 Reformation, revolution; restoration, return. In this coded manner, right at the outset, Austen announces the scope of her ambitions for the novel. It is to be a story of the great historical transition England was living through, and even more, a meditation on historical transitions as such. But how to write such a story—to write, in other words, in the epic mode? Again, Byron and Scott had wrestled with the same questions in the Turkish Tales and the verse romances. Over and over we find them forswearing the lofty, heroic strain as, in Byron’s case, no longer feasible, and in Scott’s, above his powers. The Giaour, with its opening glance at the tomb of Themistocles—“When shall such Hero live again?” (6)—and its lament on the servility of presentday Greeks, is selfconsciously non-epic or even anti-epic. For while the poem features a variety of epic devices—epic similes, women-stealing, a Homeric battle—it remains resolutely a private tale only, a romance. Indeed, throughout his early narrative verse, Byron struggles continuously with the shadowing presence of the epic possibility. Troy, the epic subject par excellence, cuts athwart the romance plot, as we have seen, at the start of canto II of The Bride of Abydos, as if every time the poet paused for breath, the longing for epic, pressing always on his mind, came flooding back. The

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  root of Byron’s struggle, it seems, is precisely that he knew himself to be living in epic times yet no longer believed in the possibility of epic poetry. Childe Harold I, which has been called an “unepical modern epic,” deliberately swerves from the subject matter of the Peninsular War, traversing the same ground, surveying the scenes of battle, but returning quickly to its private tale.41 What we might call the poem’s anti-invocation tells the Muse that the poet will not be calling on her, precisely because she has been, since her glory days, “shamed full oft by later lyres.” In any case, he adds, he has no right to ask “the weary Nine / To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine” (I.i.3, 89). Of course, Don Juan will constitute Byron’s greatest exercise in anti-epic, one that begins by announcing that the so-called heroes of the Napoleonic age are, in fact, unworthy of epic treatment. Scott, however, does not at all think them unworthy of such treatment, he just does not think himself worthy to attempt it. Marmion’s opening elegy for Nelson, Pitt, and Fox ends with the poet confessing his inability adequately to treat such a theme. Better for him to “Essay to break a feeble lance / In the fair fields of old romance” (I.286287)—to stick, in other words, with the “lowly lay.” Again, in The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), a retelling of Spanish history in the guise of the prophetic dream of the country’s last pre-Moslem Christian king, he opens by pronouncing Wellington’s deeds a theme fit for Homer or Milton, but unfit for “we, weak minstrels of a laggard day” (I.iii.1). Near the poem’s end, when the narrative reaches the contemporary events of the Peninsular War, he waves away his governing conceit altogether, for “shall fond fable mix with heroes’ praise? / Hath fiction’s stage for truth’s long triumphs room?” (II.lxi.56). But by 1814—Waverley and The Lord of the Isles—he has
devised a way of bringing “truth’s long triumphs” onto “fiction’s stage”—that is, of writing in the epic mode. It is a solution we noted, in a different context, above, another key element in Scott’s creation of the historical novel: he focuses the national story through the lives of ordinary, “unheroic” individuals, who nevertheless, under the stress of great events, find themselves capable of heroic action.42 And this is precisely the model that Austen takes over from Scott, only with two differences.43 Undoubtedly out of a sense that to do so would cheapen them in just the way he worried about at the end of The Vision of Don Roderick, Scott never did apply his method to the great events of his own time. But Austen did; Persuasion is Austen’s history of the present. But it is also—for Austen appropriated this new novelistic form by fitting it to the one she had already perfected—history told from the opposite perspective. Middlemarch may be George Eliot’s