In 1884 "The Art of Fiction" was not what it was in 1819, or what it would become in the late twentieth-century aftermath of James's celebrated Modernist manifesto. For James the "art" of fiction is unam, sanctam, catholicam, as is clear in his dismissal of the distinction, authoritative since Scott, between "novel" and "romance." "I can think of no obligation," James writes, "to which the 'romancer' would not be held equally with the novelist." And why? Because the issue is a craft issue: "the standard of execution is equally high for each [and] it is of execution we are talking". Fair enough, one thinks.

James's argument for a realist fiction, a Flaubertian argument, focuses on the artist's craft—on his ability to create verisimilar worlds that appear to stand on their own—looking, like Browning's duchess, as if they were alive. So far as James is concerned, Scott's work must be at best charming, at worst crude, rarely rigorous. How could one possibly install an integral imaginative world with all those Jedediah Cleishbothams and Peter Pattiesons, Drs. Rochecliffe and Dryasdust, who come to tell us in no uncertain terms that "the Author of Waverley" is only making believe?

An equally authoritative proponent of the great realist tradition appeared a half-century after James to explain how Scott brought off this feat of art. A consciously anti-Jamesian and anti-Flaubertian critic, Lukács.

In developing his case for Scott Lukács makes two crucial moves. First, he insists that Scott has been mistakenly seen as a romantic writer. On the contrary, Scott's work is "a renunciation of Romanticism, a conquest of Romanticism," and a repudiation of the "lyrical-subjectivist absolute" that defines the essence of a Romantic art. The latter is epitomized in the heroes of the Gothic and Byronic tradition, and Scott's heroes, Lukács correctly observes, do not get measured in such terms. The second move involves a kind of deliberate amnesia: Lukács says nothing about the elaborate comic apparatus that Scott created to support and transmit his novels to the public. This material seems to have struck as inconsequential to Scott's great project : the epic portrayal of human beings struggling within an "Historical necessity . . . of the most severe, implacable kind"

Romanticism for Lukács is a phenomenon of localities and individuals and its model is Byronism: on one hand the self-involved tumult of Giaours and Corsairs spinning to issueless exhaustion; on the other an airy or airless vortex, whether comical as in Don Juan, or brooding as in Childe Harold, Keats's Hyperions, Wordsworth's Prelude. Scott's work is perceived as different—a representation of processes of historical change whose accuracy stems from Scott's own conservative class and historical position. The "necessary anachronism" that Lukács sees there underpins an Hegelian/Marxist argument about history as a system of dynamic and progressive transformations. The historical dialectic traced out in the work casts what Shelley would call "the shadow of futurity" across a revolutionary history stretching from 1830–1930. That coming time is for Lukács both modelled and forecast in Scott's work.

The entire lecture can be found at:

www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/snodgrass/scott99/mcgann.html