Ivanhoe [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Scott was a great historian, with the temperament and genius of a poet. It was really little more than an accident that he ever wrote novels at all. As every reader of Lockhart' knows, his novelistic career began by completing a tedious, pseudo-medieval romance called Queenhoo Hall, which had been left unfinished at the death of Joseph Strutt (1749-1802), the great antiquary and student of Anglo-Saxon manners and costume. This chore was only undertaken at the request of Strutt's pubhsher, John Murray, in 1807-8. Scott had already distinguished himself, by then thirty-six years old, as an antiquary, a collector of old ballads (The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was published in 1802-3) and as the poet of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (i 805) and Marmion (i 808). But another seven years were to pass before the publication of Waver ley in 1814. Waverley, of course, is a great novel; not just a piece of great historical writing. But it was of the essence of Scott's originality that he combined the two excellences. As an empirical realist in the tradition of Hume, he found that the most convincing way of recreating the past was in the medium sanctioned and explored by Smollett and Fielding. It is true that in his Lives of the Novelists, Scott displays a lively appreciation of non-realistic fictional traditions: Walpole's Castle of Otranto, or the Gothic fantasies of Mrs Radchffe. But what makes Scott a great novehst by today's austere standards of criticism is his unflinching historical realism. The Novel can convey what people are actually like: their