Horace Walpole and the Objects of Literary History

Abstract

Horace Walpole and the Objects of Literary History Ruth Mack The "voluminous Historian" is like a "Stage-Coach, which performs constantly the same Course, empty as well as full," Henry Fielding writes in Tom Jones, where he proposes instead to "hasten on to Matters of Consequence."1 Fielding suggests that there are two kinds of historical travel: the slow-moving chronological sort (dedicated to regular description even "if whole Years should pass without producing any thing worthy his [our Reader's] Notice") and the fast-moving, novelistic sort, leaping from event to event.2 But a few years earlier John Dart offers a third possibility in his 1742 history of Westminster cathedral, Westmonasterium. In his preface Dart explains that [t]he Historian and Antiquary differ in this, the first travels on a direct Road, while the other is employ'd in marking out and measuring some Lands bordering upon it; or, to use another Comparison, the first builds a new Fabrick, (which, if he's skilful, he may do regularly, having the Materials provided him,) while the latter is gathering the broken and irregular Fragments of an old one; whilst he's intent about which, it is impossible to know exactly the Method and Manner of his Search.3 If Fielding's event-driven history rushes the coach toward the next inn, then Dart's antiquarian study leaves the road of narrative entirely, trading it for measured spaces and monuments, for the "broken and irregular Fragments" of the old countryside. Accounts of the philosophy of history in eighteenth-century Britain have almost exclusively set their sights on what Dart calls the "direct Road," maintaining that the century's contributions to historiography lie either in the great narrative histories of Edward Gibbon and David Hume or in the conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Fielding's famous comment has itself served to point critics toward a relationship between fiction and history in the period that focuses on the temporality of historical narrative offered in the two genres, encouraging the pairing of the long novels of Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Lawrence Sterne with the grand narrative histories of Gibbon and Hume.4 This has emerged as a standard way for literary historians to [End Page 367] think about the relation between the genres of history and fiction of eighteenth-century Britain not only because The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The History of England are literary—they are, famously, stylistic masterpieces—but also because of the part narrative is thought to play in historical consciousness. As Leo Braudy argues, both historians and novelists were concerned with the "continuity of history" and they both "sought to form time, to discover its plot, and to give a compelling and convincing narrative shape to the facts of human life, whether observed directly or through the records and 'memorials' of the past." In Braudy's account, historiography and the novel are important for taking the "'memorials' of the past," Dart's "irregular Fragments," and lending them "a compelling and convincing narrative shape."5 The antiquary—content with his fragments as they are—has no place in this formation of historical thought. Because of his interest in gathering, rather than reshaping, he has, notoriously, no flair for or inclination toward narrative. As Horace Walpole remarked, "I love antiquities, but I scarce ever knew an antiquary who knew how to write upon them."6 If we understand history as most importantly narrative history, then the antiquarian's pile of historical pieces looks incomplete. It is, however, precisely this unrecuperated state that redeems antiquarianism in the view of many later historians and archaeologists; indeed, recent defenses of antiquarianism have sought to justify it on precisely the grounds that its materials emerge unprocessed, distant from the workings of the historian's creating mind. And yet there is an important reason that, almost forty years after Arnaldo Momigliano's well-known defense of antiquarianism as serious historiography, the antiquary still needs defending.7 For despite his ability to make available the "raw material" of history, the antiquary has never lost his unfortunate association with the trivial.8 Thus, even the most loyal defenders of antiquarianism...