Waverley; Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since

For the first time in literature, it was a poet who held the pen of the romancer in prose. Fielding, Richardson, De Foe, Miss Rurnev, were none of them made by the gods poetical. Scott himself, with his habitual generosity, would have hailed his own predecessor in Mrs. Radcliffe. “The praise may be claimed for Mrs. Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry… Mrs. Radcliffe has a title to be considered the first poetess of romantic fiction.” When “Guy Mannering” appeared, Wordsworth sneered at it as a work of the Radcliffe school. The slight difference produced by the introduction of humour could scarcely be visible to Wordsworth. But Scott would not have been hurt by his judgment. He had the literary courage to recognize merit even when obscured by extravagance, and to applaud that in which people of culture could find neither excellence nor charm. Like Thackeray, he had been thrilled by Vivaidi in the Inquisition, and he was not the man to hide his gratitude because his author was now out of fashion.

Thus we see that Scott, when he began “Waverley” in 1805, brought to his labour no hard-and-fast theory of the art of fiction, but a kindly readiness to be pleased, and to find good in everything. He brought his wide knowledge of contemporary Scottish life “from the peer to the ploughman;” he brought his well-digested wealth of antiquarian lore, and the poetic skill which had just been busied with the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and was still to be occupied, ere he finished his interrupted novel, with “Marmion,” “The Lady of the Lake,” “Rokeby,” and “The Lord of the Isles.” The comparative failure of the last-named no doubt strengthened his determination to try prose romance. He had never cared much for his own poems, he says, Byron had outdone him in popularity, and the Muse – “the Good Demon” who once deserted Herrick – came now less eagerly to his call. It is curiously difficult to disentangle the statements about the composition of “Waverley.” Our first authority, of course, is Scott’s own account, given in the General Preface to the Edition of 1829. Lockhart, however, remarks on the haste with which Sir Walter wrote the Introductions to the magnum opus; and the lapse of fifteen years, the effects of disease, and his habitual carelessness about his own works and mode of working may certainly to some extent have clouded his memory. “About the year 1805,” as he says, he “threw together about one third part of the first volume of ‘Waverley.’” It was advertised to be published, he goes on, by Ballantvne, with the second title, “‘T is Fifty Years since.” This, obviously, would have made 1755 the date of the events, just as the title “‘T is Sixty Years since” in 1814 brought the date of the events to 1754. By inspecting the water-mark of the paper Lockhart discovered that 1805 was the period in which the first few chapters were composed; the rest of the paper was marked 1814. Scott next observes that the unfavourable opinion of a critical friend on the first seven chapters induced him to lay the manuscript aside. Who was this friend? Lockhart thinks it was Erskine. It is certain, from a letter of Ballantyne’s at Abbotsford, – a letter printed by Lockhart, September 15, 1810, – that Ballantyne in 1810 saw at least the earlier portions of “Waverley,” and it is clear enough that he had seen none of it before. If any friend did read it in 1805, it cannot have been Ballantyne, and may have been Erskine. But none of the paper bears a water-mark, between 1805 and 1813, so Scott must merely have taken it up, in 1810, as it had been for five years. Now Scott says that the success of “The Lady of the Lake,” with its Highland pictures, induced him “to attempt something of the same sort in prose.” This, as Lockhart notes, cannot refer to 1805, as the “Lady of the Lake” did not appear till 1810. But the good fortune of the “Lady” may very well have induced him in 1810 to reconsider his Highland prose romance. In 1808, as appears from an undated letter to Surtees of Mainsforth (Abbotsford Manuscripts), he was contemplating a poem on “that wandering knight so fair,” Charles Edward, and on the adventures of his flight, on Lochiel, Flora Macdonald, the Kennedys, and the rest. Earlier still, on June 9, 1806, Scott wrote to Lady Abercorn that he had “a great work in contemplation, a Highland romance of love, magic, and war.” “The Lady of the Lake” took the place of that poem in his “century of inventions,” and, stimulated by the popularity of his Highland romance in verse, he disinterred the last seven chapters of “Waverley” from their five years of repose. Very probably, as he himself hints, the exercise of fitting a conclusion to Strutt’s “Queenloo Hall” may have helped to bring his fancy back to his own half-forgotten story of “Waverley.” In 1811 Scott went to Abbotsford, and there, as he tells us, he lost sight of his “Waverley” fragment. Often looked for, it was never found, till the accident of a search for fishing-tackle led him to discover it in the drawer of an old bureau in a lumber-garret. This cabinet afterwards came into the possession of Mr. William Laidlaw, Scott’s friend and amanuensis, and it is still, the Editor understands, in the hands of Miss Laidlaw. The fishing-tackle, Miss Laidlaw tells the Editor (mainly red hackles, tied on hair, not gut), still occupies the drawer, except a few flies which were given, as relics, to the late Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart. In 1813, then, volume i. of “Waverley” was finished. Then Scott undertook some articles for Constable, and laid the novel aside. The printing, at last, must have been very speedy. Dining in Edinburgh, in June, 1814, Lockhart saw “the hand of Walter Scott” busy at its task. “Page after page is finished, and thrown on the heap of manuscripts, and still it goes on unwearied.” The book was published on July 7, the press hardly keeping up with the activity of the author. Scott had written “two volumes in three summer weeks” and the printers had not shown less activity, while binders and stitchers must have worked extra tides.

“Waverley” was published without the Author’s name. Scott’s reasons for being anonymous have been stated by himself. “It was his humour,” – that is the best of the reasons and the secret gave him a great deal of amusement. The Ballantynes, of course, knew it from the first; so did Mr. Morritt, Lady Louisa Stuart, and Lord and Lady Montague, and others were gradually admitted. In an undated letter, probably of November, 1816, Scott says to the Marchioness of Abercorn, a most intimate friend: “I cannot even conjecture whom you mean by Mr. Mackenzie as author of ‘The Antiquary.’ I should think my excellent old friend Mr. Harry Mackenzie [author of the ‘Man of Feeling,’ etc.] was too much advanced in years and plugged in business to amuse himself by writing novels; and besides, the style in no degree resembles his.” (Lady Abercorn meant ‘Young Harry Mackenzie,” not the patriarch.) “I am told one of the English reviews gives these works by name and upon alleged authority to George Forbes, Sir William’s brother; so they take them off my hands, I don’t care who they turn to, for I am really tired of an imputation which I am under the necessity of confuting at every corner. Tom will soon be home from Canada, as the death of my elder brother has left him a little money. He may answer for himself, but I hardly suspect him, unless much changed, to be Possessed of the perseverance necessary to write nine volumes.” Scott elsewhere rather encouraged the notion that his brother Thomas was the author, and tried to make him exert himself and enter the field as a rival. Gossip also assigned the “Scotch novels” to Jeffrey, to Mrs. Thomas Scott, aided by her husband and Sir Walter, to a Dr. Greenfield, a clergyman, and to many others. Sir Walter humorously suggested George Cranstoun as the real offender. After the secret was publicly confessed, Lady Louisa Stuart reminded Scott of all the amusement it had given them. “Old Mortality” had been pronounced “too good” for Scott, and free from his “wearisome descriptions of scenery.” Clever people had detected several separate hands in “Old Mortality,” as in the Iliad. All this was diverting. Moreover, Scott was in some degree protected from the bores who pester a successful author. He could deny the facts very stoutly, though always, as he insists, With the reservation implied in alleging that, if he had been the author, he would still have declined to confess. In the notes to later novels we shall see some of his “great denials.”

The reception of “Waverley” was enthusiastic. Large editions were sold in Edinburgh, and when Scott returned from his cruise in the northern islands he found society ringing with his unacknowledged triumph. Byron, especially, proclaimed his pleasure in “Waverley.” It may be curious to recall some of the published reviews of the moment. Probably no author ever lived so indifferent to published criticism as Scott. Miss Edgeworth, in one of her letters, reminds him how they had both agreed that writers who cared for the dignity and serenity of their characters should abstain from “that authors’ bane-stuff.” “As to the herd of critics,” Scott wrote to Miss Seward, after publishing “The Lay,” “many of those gentlemen appear to me to be a set of tinkers, who, unable to make pots and pans, set up for menders of them.” It is probable, therefore, that he was quite unconcerned about the few remarks which Mr. Gifford, in the “Quarterly Review” (vol. xl., 1814), interspersed among a multitude of extracts, in a notice of “Waverley” manufactured with scissors and paste. The “Quarterly” recognized “a Scotch Castle Rackrent,” but in “a much higher strain.” The tale was admitted to possess all the accuracy of history, and all the vivacity of romance. Scott’s second novel, “Guy Mannering,” was attacked with some viciousness in the periodical of which he was practically the founder, and already the critic was anxious to repeat what Scott, talking of Pope’s censors, calls “the cuckoo cry of written out’!” The notice of “Waverley” in the “Edinburgh Review” by Mr. Jeffrey was not so slight and so unworthy of the topic. The novel was declared, and not unjustly, to be “very hastily, and in many places very unskilfully, written.” The Scotch was decried as “unintelligible” dialect by the very reviewer who had accused “Marmion” of not being Scotch enough. But the “Edinburgh” applauded “the extraordinary fidelity and felicity” with which all the inferior agents in the story are represented. “Fastidious readers” might find Callum Beg and Mrs. Nosebag and the Cumberland peasants “coarse and disgusting,” said the reviewer, who must have had in his imagination readers extremely superfine. He objected to the earlier chapters as uninteresting, and – with justice – to the passages where the author speaks in “the smart and flippant style of modern makers of paragraphs.” “These form a strange and humiliating contrast with the force and freedom of his manner when engaged in those dramatic and picturesque representations to which his genius so decidedly inclines.” He spoke severely of the places where Scott explains the circumstances of Waverley’s adventures before he reaches Edinburgh; and Scott himself, in his essay on Mrs. Radcliffe, regrets that explanatory chapters had ever been invented. The reviewer broadly hints his belief that Scott is the author; and on the whole, except for a cautious lack of enthusiasm, the notice is fair and kindly. The “Monthly Review” differed not much from the Blue and Yellow (the “Edinburgh Review”).

“It is not one of the least merits of this very uncommon production that all the subordinate characters are touched with the same discriminating force which so strongly marks their principals; and that in this manner almost every variety of station and interest, such as existed at the period under review, is successively brought before the mind of the reader in colours vivid as the original.

“A few oversights, we think, we have detected in the conduct of the story which ought not to remain unnoticed. For example, the age of Stanley and Lady Emily does not seem well to accord with the circumstances of their union, as related in the commencement of the work; and we are not quite satisfied that Edward should have been so easily reconciled to the barbarous and stubborn prejudices which precluded even the office of intercession for his gallant friend and companion-in-arms.

“The pieces of poetry which are not very profusely scattered through these volumes can scarcely fail to be ascribed to Mr. Scott, whatever may be judged of the body of the work. In point of comparative merit, we should class them neither with the highest nor with the meanest effusions of his lyric minstrelsy.”

Lord Byron’s “Grandmother’s Review, the British,” was also friendly and sagacious, in its elderly way.

“We request permission, therefore, to introduce ‘Waverley,’ a publication which has already excited considerable interest in the sister kingdom, to the literary world on this side the Tweed.

“A very short time has elapsed since this publication made its appearance in Edinburgh, and though it came into the world in the modest garb of anonymous obscurity, the Northern literati are unanimous, we understand, in ascribing part of it, at, least, to the pen of W. Scott.

“We are unwilling to consider this publication in the light of a common novel whose fate it is to be devoured with rapidity for a day, and afterwards forgotten forever, but as a vehicle of curious and accurate information upon a subject which must at all times demand our attention, – the history and manners of a very large and renowned portion of the inhabitants of these islands. We would recommend this tale as faithfully embodying the lives, the manners, and the opinions of this departed race, and as affording those features of ancient days which no man probably, besides its author, has had the means to collect, the desire to preserve, or the power to portray.

“Although there are characters sufficient to awaken the attention and to diversify the scenes, yet they are not in sufficient number to perplex the memory or to confuse the incidents. Their spirit is well kept up till the very last, and they relieve one another with so much art that the reader will not find himself wearied even with the pedantic jargon of the old Baron of Bradwardine.

“Of Waverley himself we shall say but little, as his character is far too common to need a comment; we can only say that his wanderings are not gratuitous, nor is he wavering and indecisive only because the author chooses to make him so. Every feature in his character is formed by education, and it is to this first source that we are constantly referred for a just and sufficient cause of all the wandering passions as they arise in his mind.

“The secondary personages are drawn with much spirit and fidelity, and with a very striking knowledge of the peculiarities of the Scotch temper and disposition. The incidents are all founded on fact, and the historical parts are related with much accuracy. The livelier scenes which are displayed are of the most amusing species, because they flow so naturally from the personages before us that the characters, not the author, appear to speak. A strong vein of very original humour marks the whole: in most instances it is indeed of a local and particular nature, but in many cases it assumes a more general appearance.

“Of the more serious portions we can speak with unqualified approbation; the very few pathetic scenes which occur are short, dignifed, and affecting. The love-scenes are sufficiently contracted to produce that very uncommon sensation in the mind, – a wish that they were longer.

“The religious opinions expressed in the course of the tale are few, but of those few we fully approve.

“The humorous and happy adaptation of legal terns shows no moderate acquaintance with the arcana of the law, and a perpetual allusion to the English and Latin classics no common share of scholarship and taste.”

The “Scots Magazine” illustrated the admirable unanimity of reviewers when they are unanimous. The “Anti-Jacobin” objected that no Chateau-Margaux sent in the wood from Bordeaux to Dundee in 1713 could have been drinkable in 1741. “Claret two-and-thirty years old! It almost gives us the gripes to think of it.” Indeed, Sir Walter, as Lochhart assures us, was so far from being a judge of claret that he could not tell when it was “corked.” One or two points equally important amused the reviewer, who, like most of his class, detected the hand of Scott. There was hardly a possibility, as Mr. Morritt told Sir Walter, “that the poems in ‘Waverley’ could fail to suggest their author. No man who ever heard you tell a story over a table but must recognize you at once.” To his praise of “Waverley” Mr. Morritt hardly added any adverse criticism, beyond doubting the merit of the early chapters, and denouncing the word “sombre” as one which had lately “kept bad company among the slipshod English of the sentimental school.” Scott, in defence, informed Mr. Morritt that he had “left the story to flag in the first volume on purpose… I wished (with what success Heaven knows) to avoid the ordinary error of novelists, whose first volume is usually their best.”

It must be admitted that if Scott wished to make “Waverley” “flag” in the beginning, he succeeded extremely well, – too well for many modern readers, accustomed to a leap into the midst of the story. These introductory chapters,” he observes in a note on the fifth of them, “have been a good deal censured as tedious and unnecessary; yet there are circumstances recorded in them which the Author has not been able to persuade himself to retract or cancel.” These “circumstances” are probably the studies of Waverley, his romantic readings, which are really autobiographic. Scott was, apparently, seriously of opinion that the “mental discipline” of a proper classical education would have been better for himself than his own delightfully desultory studies. Ballantyne could not see what Waverley’s reading had to do with his adventures and character. Scott persisted in being of another mind. He himself, writing to Morritt, calls his hero “a sneaking piece of imbecility;” but he probably started with loftier intentions of “psychological analysis” than he fulfilled. He knew, and often said, in private letters, as in published works, that he was no hand at a respectable hero. Borderers, buccaneers, robber, and humorsome people, like Dugald Dalgetty and Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Macwheeble, whom he said he preferred to any person in “Waverley,” were the characters he delighted in. We may readily believe that Shakspeare too preferred Jacques and the Fat Knight to Orlando or the favoured lover of Anne Page. Your hero is a difficult person to make human, – unless, indeed, he has the defects of Pendennis or Tom Jones. But it is likely enough that the Waverley whom Scott had in his mind in 1805 was hardly the Waverley of 1813. His early English chapters are much in the ordinary vein of novels as they were then written; in those chapters come the “asides” by the author which the “Edinburgh Review” condemned. But there remains the kindly, honourable Sir Everard, while the calm atmosphere of English meadows, and the plump charms of Miss Cecilia Stubbs, are intended as foils to the hills of the North, the shy refinement of Rose, and the heroic heart of Flora Mac-Ivor. Scott wished to show the remote extremes of civilization and mental habit co-existing in the same island of Scotland and England. Yet we regret such passages as “craving pardon for my heroics, which I am unable in certain cases to resist giving way to,” and so forth. Scott was no Thackeray, no Fielding, and failed (chiefly in “Waverley”) when he attempted the mood of banter, which one of his daughters, a lady “of Beatrice’s mind,” “never got from me,” he observes.

In any serious, attempt to criticise “Waverley” as a whole, it is not easy to say whether we should try to put ourselves at the point of view of its first readers, or whether we should look at it from the vantage-ground of to-day. In 1811 the dead world of clannish localty was fresh in many memories. Scott’s own usher had often spoken with a person who had seen Cromwell enter Edinburgh after Dunbar. He himself knew heroes of the Forty-five, and his friend Lady Louisa Stuart had been well acquainted with Miss Walkinshaw, sister of the mistress of Charles Edward. To his generation those things were personal memories, which to us seem as distant as the reign of Men-Ka-Ra. They could not but be “carried off their feet” by such pictures of a past still so near them. Nor had they other great novelists to weaken the force of Scott’s impressions. They had not to compare him with the melancholy mirth of Thackeray, and the charm, the magic of his style. Balzac was of the future; of the future was the Scott of France, – the boyish, the witty, the rapid, the brilliant, the inexhaustible Dumas. Scott’s generation had no scruples about “realism,” listened to no sermons on the glory of the commonplace; like Dr. Johnson, they admired a book which “was amusing as a fairy-tale.” But we are overwhelmed with a wealth of comparisons, and deafened by a multitude of homilies on fiction, and distracted, like the people in the Erybyggja Saga, by the strange rising and setting, and the wild orbits of new “weirdmoons” of romance. Before we can make up our minds on Scott, we have to remember, or forget, the scornful patronage of one critic, the over-subtlety and exaggerations of another, the more than papal infallibility of a third. Perhaps the best critic would be an intelligent school-boy, with a generous heart and an unspoiled imagination. As his remarks are not accessible, as we must try to judge “Waverley” like readers inured to much fiction and much criticism, we must confess, no doubt, that the commencement has the faults which the first reviewers detected, and it which Scott acknowledged. He is decidedly slow in getting to business, as they say; he began with more of conscious ethical purpose than he went on, and his banter is poor. But when once we enter the village of Tully-Veolan, the Magician finds his wand. Each picture of place or person tells, – the old butler, the daft Davie Gellatley, the solemn and chivalrous Baron, the pretty natural girl, the various lairds, the factor Macwheeble, – all at once become living people, and friends whom we can never lose. The creative fire of Shakspeare lives again. The Highlanders – Evan Dhu, Donald Bean Lean, his charming daughter, Callum Beg, and all the rest – are as natural as the Lowlanders. In Fergus and Flora we feel, indeed, at first, that the author has left his experience behind, and is giving us creatures of fancy. But they too become human and natural, – Fergus in his moods of anger, ambition, and final courageous resignation; Flora, in her grief. As for Waverley, his creator was no doubt too hard on him. Among the brave we hear that he was one of the bravest, though Scott always wrote his battlepieces in a manner to suggest no discomfort, and does not give us particular details of Waverley’s prowess. He has spirit enough, this “sneaking piece of imbecility,” as he shows in his quarrel with Fergus, on the march to Derby. Waverley, that creature of romance, considered as a lover, is really not romantic enough. He loved Rose because she loved him, – which is confessed to be unheroic behaviour. Scott, in “Waverley,” certainly does not linger over love-scenes. With Mr. Ruskin, we may say: “Let it not be thought for an instant that the slight and sometimes scornful glance with which Scott passes over scenes, which a novelist of our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a philosopher, and painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any absence in his heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal happiness.” But his mind entertained other themes of interest, “loyalty, patriotism, piety.” On the other hand, it is necessary to differ from Mr. Ruskin when he says that Scott “never knew ‘l’amor che move ‘l sol e l’ altre stelle.’” He whose heart was “broken for two years,” and retained the crack till his dying day, he who, when old and tired, and near his death, was yet moved by the memory of the name which thirty years before he had cut in Runic characters on the turf at the Castle-gate of St. Andrew, knew love too well to write of it much, or to speak of it at all. He had won his ideal as alone the ideal can be won; he never lost her: she was with him always, because she had been unattainable. “There are few,” he says, “who have not, at one period of life, broken ties of love and friendship, secret disappointments of the heart, to mourn over, – and we know no book which recalls the memory of them more severely than ‘Julia de Roubigne.’” He could not be very eager to recall them, he who had so bitterly endured them, and because he had known and always knew “l’amor che move ‘l sol e l’altre stelle,” a seal was on his lips, a silence broken only by a caress of Di Vernon’s.’