Waverley has a strong claim to be the most influential work in the modern history of the novel. With it Walter Scott founded ‘the classical form of the historical novel’1 and made the novel itself historical, ensuring its global ascendancy as a representation of national life. Waverley also established the phenomenon of the international best-seller. Published in July 1814, by the end of the year it had gone through three printings and four thousand copies. Two dozen more ‘Waverley Novels’ – as they came to be known – poured from the press in multiple editions and formats over the next couple of decades, outselling all other novels by ‘all the other novelists of the time put together’.2 That popularity, undiminished throughout the nineteenth century, brought Scott wealth, honours and critical prestige. The Victorians revered him as the paragon of authors, the last of the classics and the first of the moderns one who had reinvented the traditional forms of ballad, folktale, epic and romance for an industrial reading public. His success was not confined to the English-speaking world or even to literature. Translations of Waverley appeared in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish in Scott’s lifetime.3 Re-tellings and adaptations of his novels cascaded across the genres of print into the theatrical, pictorial, musical, touristic, architectural, ceremonial and other media and practices that made up the nineteenth-century public sphere.
Waverley itself, interestingly, proved not to be an especially popular source for paintings and dramatizations – certainly not on the scale of Scott’s later mega-hits Rob Roy and Ivanhoe.4 It shaped the collective imagination at a deeper level, where it shapes it today, even as Scott’s writings have sunk out of popular consciousness, so thoroughly have they been absorbed. Waverley provided a fable and an arrangement of topics that structure the stories we are still telling about the relations between past and present, tradition and progress, and the lives of nations and individuals. A naïve young man ventures into remote frontier territory, encounters outlaws and wild tribes, and gets caught up in a historic struggle between the civilization he represents and an older, ‘organic’ world of honour and loyalty. In Waverley the frontier is the Highlands of Scotland, the haunt of Gaelic-speaking clans. The historic struggle is the Jacobite rising of 1745, the last attempt of the exiled Stuart dynasty to regain the British throne. The 1745 rising makes a double-edged topic for the first historical novel. On the one hand it frames Scott’s story with an inevitable outcome. Our knowledge that the Jacobite cause is lost, and that its loss will speed the destruction of the clans, overcasts Waverley’s adventure with a fatal cloud. On the other hand, the character of the rising as not simply a power-grab but an attempt to reverse the current of history – to restore a past regime and preserve vanishing worlds of life – charges the tale with the utopian pathos of a crisis in which things might, at least imaginably, have turned out otherwise. The historical novel, committed to the pathway of the present, draws its energy from deviations along roads not taken, tracks not even charted.
Scott followed Shakespeare in making civil war the occasion of historical fiction, as his title-page epigraph proclaims: ‘Under which King, Bezonian? speak, or die!’ ‘History’ becomes visible in the clash of rival regimes, thus of alternative histories, and in the catastrophic breach of everyday life. Scott departed from Shakespeare in making the fate of cultures – ways of life and values – at stake in the collision, more than of dynasties or parties; and in giving the losing side the bias of human interest and feeling. Major European novelists in Scott’s wake, among them Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni and Lev Tolstoy, transformed his achievement in their own historical novels. Others – Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson – turned the form further in the direction of romantic adventure. Still others, from Honoré de Balzac to George Eliot, applied Scott’s insights and techniques to represent modern life as an historically evolving, complex social totality. Scott’s impact reverberated across the frontiers and satellites of imperial Europe, where – with Fenimore Cooper in New York, Bankim Chatterjee in Bengal, Ivan Vazov in Bulgaria – the historical novel became the main literary genre for reckoning the struggles of modernization and nation-making. After the heyday of the novel, Scott’s fiction would supply a template for the epic ambitions of the next global story-telling medium, from Birth of a Nation to Avatar.5
Scott’s popularity and critical standing declined throughout the twentieth century. Standing on its far shore, we may find it difficult to imagine what it was like to be immersed in that living flood. ‘People don’t read Scott any more’, one of Virginia Woolf’s characters sneers in To the Lighthouse (1927). The aesthetic revolutions of Modernism cast Sir Walter as the Victorians’ dreary forefather; the rise of new media, such as film, made his storytelling techniques seem too ponderous – too literary – for an electric-age mass public; while academic canons of moral and formal realism sidelined him from the ‘great tradition’ of the English novel. Even in Scotland, many more people today know Waverley as the name of a railway station than of a masterpiece of world literature. While a revival of scholarly interest in Scott has gathered momentum over the past two decades, buoyed by the new Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, it is probably safe to predict that his works will never regain their once universal currency. But to have forgotten to read Scott makes it possible to discover him afresh, unencumbered by nineteenth-century imperial pieties. Peter Garside’s Edinburgh Edition of Waverley, reprinted in this Penguin Classics volume, assists that discovery by bringing us the novel as Scott intended it (or as close to that state as it is possible to get): a rougher, quirkier, more audacious text than the polished and elaborated version of 1829, which became the official Waverley for modern readers.
We can read Waverley, then, not as one of a set of ‘Waverley Novels’ (gathering dust in second-hand bookshops) but as a brilliant, mercurial experiment, the product – like Lyrical Ballads or Frankenstein – of an era rich in literary experiments: hesitantly begun in 1808 and then laid aside, resumed in 1810–11, and rushed to completion in the heady aftermath of the allied victory over Napoleon. Already famous as one of Europe’s leading poets – the first volume of Waverley was drafted while Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) were breaking sales records – Scott decided to try out the ascendant, still barely respectable genre of the novel. He himself promoted the legend that he turned to prose fiction after Byron overtook him with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812, although the evidence indicates that Scott’s poems continued to outsell Byron’s. It is likely that Scott sensed he had reached the limits of what he could achieve in verse, and took up prose as a more flexible and capacious medium for combining fiction with history, especially recent history. His experiment was spurred by dissatisfaction with the antiquarian heaviness of Joseph Strutt’s unfinished medieval romance Queenhoo-Hall (1808), for which he had supplied the closing chapters. The opening of Waverley shows Scott paying keen attention to the field he is entering (pretending that he is entering it in 1805), as he takes care to distinguish his work – ‘neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners’ – from the brands of Gothic, sentimental and fashionable-life fiction that crowded the early nineteenth-century market.6 These negative definitions clear space for his own attempt: ‘It is from the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions … that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public’. In what will become a characteristic gesture, Scott cloaks the innovative force of his experiment in the pretence that it is something well-established – and that the author is only another reader. Scott also hides his famous name. Like most novels of the period, Waverley was published anonymously. As his second literary career took off, soaring to altitudes scarcely anyone could have imagined, he held fast to that anonymity. Not ‘Sir Walter Scott’ but ‘the Author of Waverley’ blazed across the firmament of late Romanticism.
To get a feel for the scene in which the Author of Waverley made his debut we could do worse than turn to Jane Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion, the early chapters of which are set in the late summer and autumn of 1814. In a series of literary discussions, Anne Elliot and Captain Benwick compare the merits of Mr Scott and Lord Byron, the pre-eminent poets of the day. They make no mention of the new novel that was at that moment sweeping up thousands of readers, one of whom was Jane Austen herself. Like many of those readers, Austen saw through the mask of anonymity. ‘Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones,’ she complained, several weeks before the mid-November conversation between Anne and Captain Benwick is supposed to take place: ‘I do not like him, & do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it – but fear I must.’7 It is as though she recognized, already, something compulsive or addictive in the new kind of enjoyment offered by Scott’s fiction.
Early in Persuasion, Austen’s narrator reflects on the history of the heroine, Anne Elliot:
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.
With all these circumstances, recollections and feelings, she could not hear that Captain Wentworth’s sister was likely to live at Kellynch, without a revival of former pain; and many a stroll and many a sigh were necessary to dispel the agitation of the idea.8
The narrator remarks Anne’s turn to ‘romance’ as the poignant consequence of a thwarted development: ‘the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning’. The passage carries a delicate yet unmistakable echo of an analogous episode late in Waverley, in which Scott’s narrator considers his hero’s progress (also involving ‘many a … walk’ and ‘sigh’). But this reflection brings a disavowal of romance:
[I]t was in many a winter walk by the shores of Ulswater, that he acquired a more complete mastery of a spirit tamed by adversity, than his former experience had given him; and that he felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced. (301)
Edward Waverley’s initiation into his life’s ‘real history’ obeys (or so it seems) the conventional sentence of a banishment of romance by experience. Inverting that sentence at the beginning of her tale, Austen admits a subtle affinity with Scott’s art, rather than a rebuttal of it. Waverley and Persuasion both close with a modified triumph of romance, in which the hero and heroine are compensated – more than compensated – for the disappointments they have endured. Both novels teach their readers to ‘learn romance’ through a renunciation of it, modelled by the characters’ arrival at the happy ending through the winter walk of loss. Austen’s echo of Scott also acknowledges the status of Persuasion as her own essay in the national historical novel: one in which she recalibrates Scott’s past setting, ‘sixty years since’, to a more recent and far greater national crisis – not the least momentous product of which is Waverley itself.9
Waverley sprang into the world without literary forebears, according to Georg Lukács in his classic study of the historical novel. New historical conditions, the vistas of mass experience and national consciousness opened by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, made the new form of representation possible. Earlier attempts at historical fiction, lacking those conditions, were not authentically ‘historical’.10 In recent years scholars have brought to light prior works and traditions eclipsed by Scott’s worldwide triumph, notably a long genealogy of French historical fiction, reaching back into the seventeenth century, which developed a fatal tension between love-intrigues of fictional protagonists and the public realm of dynastic and military events.11 Scott’s own ground-clearing declarations swept some of his local forerunners from cultural memory. Characters called ‘Waverley’ had appeared in novels by Charlotte Smith (Desmond, 1792) and Jane West (The Loyalists, 1812), despite Scott’s claim to have given his hero ‘an uncontaminated name’; Smith’s dithering Waverley reads like a parody of Scott’s, avant la lettre – an effect Scott surely intended. And while Scott acknowledges Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth as a model for his depictions of regional life and manners, he neglects to mention Edgeworth’s more controversial compatriot, Sydney Owenson, whose ‘national tale’ The Wild Irish Girl (1806) pioneered the plot of a young Englishman’s journey to the Celtic hinterland, his love affair with a harp-playing heiress, and a final marriage which recapitulates (and reforms) the political union between their nations. (Scott’s Anglo-Scottish version divides the ‘national’ heroine into two figures, douce Rose Bradwardine and fiery Flora Mac-Ivor.)12 Most of Scott’s local forerunners were women, who dominated the early nineteenth-century British fiction market. The influential periodicals that sought to regulate that market dismissed the novel, accordingly, as a feminine genre, mere ‘romance’, unworthy of serious attention. By combining fiction with history, the most prestigious of the late-Enlightenment human sciences, Scott raised the novel to something like classical dignity – and in doing so (as such promotions tend to) he reclaimed novel-reading, as well as novel-writing, as a properly masculine business.13
Knowledge of his antecedents brings a keener appreciation of Scott’s artistic achievement rather than otherwise. The historical novel means something more than the insertion of a fictional protagonist’s adventures into a narrative of historical events. Waverley and its successors imagine the ‘inundation’ of ordinary life by the great tides of social and economic change upon which historical events are borne: the breakup of clan and feudal societies, the decay of traditional moral ecologies, the large-scale, complex transformations that we sum up with such words as ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘modernization’.14 Scott’s novels render the whole of human life – institutions, customs, manners, morals, beliefs, feelings – as historically saturated, dynamic and interwoven. Especially in the great series of novels of the making of modern Scotland that Waverley inaugurated, Scott disclosed the past as ‘the prehistory of the present’, in Lukács’ phrase, ‘giving poetic life to those historical, social and human forces which, in the course of a long evolution, have made our present-day life what it is and as we experience it’.15 The past is historical because the present is. And history determines more than the outcome of the novel’s plot. It comes to bear, with an unprecedented force and precision, on the details of setting and character. Scott distinguishes the variety and complexity of motives impelling his Jacobite loyalists, and analyzes (in a notable set piece) the ‘mixed and peculiar tone’ of the ‘acuteness, fire, and ambition’ infusing the Highland chief Fergus Mac-Ivor, ‘which could only have been acquired Sixty Years since’ (98). Had he lived sixty years earlier, observes the narrator, Fergus ‘would, in all probability, have wanted the polished manner and knowledge of the world which he now possessed’; sixty years later, ‘his ambition and love of rule would have lacked the fuel which his situation now afforded’ (98).
The catchphrase ‘sixty years since’ locates the prehistory of the present at the shifting border between living memory and the written record. Scott drew on reminiscences by witnesses of the 1745 rising he had met in his youth, as well as on manuscript and printed chronicles, memoirs, travelogues and newspaper reports, not just for the record of party intrigues and military campaigns but for the ethnographic and antiquarian details of ordinary life. Trained in the tenets of the Scottish Enlightenment, Scott brought a method to this matter. While a student he had attended the lectures of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University; one of his lifelong friends was the son of Stewart’s teacher, Adam Ferguson, whose History of Civil Society (1767) developed the sociological and anthropological mode of ‘philosophical history’ pioneered in the jurisprudence lectures of Adam Smith and taken up by other influential Scottish thinkers, notably William Robertson (Principal of the University of Edinburgh until 1793). Philosophical history held that human societies develop through a succession of increasingly complex economic formations, from hunting through herding and agriculture to commerce. ‘Commercial society’ is the order of modernity, exemplified by the metropolitan centres of late eighteenth-century Great Britain. The logic of development is universal. It applies not only to past and present stages of a particular nation but to different nations existing at the same time in different parts of the world, sorting them along a chronological axis. The indigenous societies of America or the South Pacific – or the Scottish Highlands – represent primitive, ancestral stages of civilization, superseded in modern life.16
Scott invokes this imperial logic of inexorable if uneven development in the last chapter of Waverley, called ‘A Postscript, which should have been a Preface’:
There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of 1745 … commenced this innovation. The gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time … But the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and, like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now-distant point from which we set out. (363)
Looking back across his story, the narrator views the Highland clans and Jacobite nobility as archaic tribal and feudal remnants, surviving in the hinterlands of a modernizing nation until shaken into oblivion by the convulsion of civil war. This temporal scheme underwrites the map of Edward Waverley’s adventures. The first volume of the novel tracks our hero’s extended journey north, from the quiet backwater of his uncle’s estate to the more emphatically old-fashioned Scottish manor of Tully-Veolan and thence deep into the Perthshire Highlands. The sequence of settings articulates a receding sequence of anthropological and historical stages, increasingly remote from modern life. More than a matter of miles, roads and mountain-passes, the difference between London and Tully-Veolan or Glennaquoich becomes a matter of time: the sixty years it will take, in a violent acceleration of two hundred years of English history, for the Scots to become British. The exotic scenes visited by Waverley have sunk into the past – into memory and the imagination – by the end of the story. Tully-Veolan still stands, as a museum-like restoration or facsimile; but the clans are long gone.
The fusion of fiction with the new scientific history calls for a new kind of hero. Waverley, an English gentleman and an army officer, is a representative of the regime that will shortly destroy the worlds he enters as a guest. However – and this is one of Scott’s great coups – he does not know that. Indeed, far from wishing harm upon the ecology of ‘old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour’ (363), Waverley abandons his allegiance and takes sides with it. He does so (again) largely unwittingly. By the time he makes a choice and kneels in homage to a rival prince, midway through the tale, it is no choice at all; or rather, the act of choice has been emptied by the sequence of causes leading up to it. Until now Waverley has been swept along by a combination of circumstance, accident and other people’s intrigues. He remains a blank figure, the ‘white shield’ of Scott’s opening metaphor (3), onto whom others project their wishes and intentions. At the end of the novel he floats free of his entanglement in the rebellion almost as lightly as he has drifted into it. In a far-reaching irony, the ‘wavering and unsettled habit of mind’ for which the narrator has mocked the protagonist (34) ends up saving him. Since his will and knowledge have never quite meshed into a morally authentic commitment to the Jacobite cause, Waverley can be released from the charge of treason that sends his friends to the scaffold.17
The cognitive dissociation of the hero from the history through which he moves is one of Scott’s powerful innovations. That dissociation rests not on a lack of feeling or imagination but on an excess of it. Waverley’s objective status as a cipher in his own story stems from the undisciplined luxuriance of his inner life. If Waverley’s descendants are the vague, ineffectual, superfluous protagonists of the nineteenth-century novel, disengaged from a historical role, his forebears include eighteenth-century types of extreme sensibility, the ‘man of feeling’ and the ‘female Quixote’, filtered through the beleaguered heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romances, whose refined imagination supports her amid wild mountain perils. More like a Gothic heroine than a hero, Waverley finds himself accused of deeds he has no knowledge of having committed, made a prisoner and carried off bodily, in a series of extreme realizations of the passivity that has always characterized his relation to events: beginning with the all-but-motiveless drift of his journey into the north. He falls into a tremendous national crisis through no epic ambition of military prowess but ‘a curiosity to know something more of Scotland’ (34). The hero of the historical novel, then, has a third notable characteristic. He changes sides; he is unconscious of the history he takes part in; and he is a tourist.
To be a tourist is to go on leave from one’s own time and place; to take a vacation from historical reality. The industrial development of tourism, beginning in the late eighteenth century, promoted a new kind of aesthetic attention to scenery detached from history: ‘picturesque’ natural landscapes, adorned with ruins of an extinct civilization or figures from a timeless, far-off past. The village girls in Tully-Veolan remind Waverley, ‘a lover of the picturesque’, of ‘Italian forms of landscape’ (35). He listens to Rose Bradwardine’s account of her father’s feud with the Mac-Ivors:
Waverley could not help starting at a story which bore so much resemblance to one of his own day-dreams. Here was a girl … who had witnessed with her own eyes such a scene as he had used to conjure up in his imagination, as only occurring in ancient times. He felt at once the impulse of curiosity, and that slight sense of danger which only serves to heighten its interest. (77)
He follows the impulse:
He had now time to give himself up to the full romance of his situation. Here he sate on the banks of an unknown lake, under the guidance of a wild native, whose language was unknown to him, on a visit to the den of some renowned outlaw, a second Robin Hood, perhaps, or Adam o’ Gordon … The only circumstance which assorted ill with the rest was the cause of his journey – the Baron’s milk cows! this degrading incident he kept in the back-ground. (84)
Waverley embraces the ‘romance of his situation’ by suppressing the situation’s historical content, screening it with aesthetic associations.18
The ‘renowned outlaw’, Donald Bean Lean, turns out to be a pale, slight, unprepossessing person, clad in an old French uniform instead of his Highland dress – far from the ‘stern, gigantic, ferocious figure, such as Salvator would have chosen to be the central object of a group of banditti’ that Waverley is expecting (86). The substitution of costume sums up the historical meaning of the adventure, if only Waverley could read it: no titanic upsurge of autochthonous forces but an inadequately backed intrigue in the great game between Britain and France that will only just have reached geopolitical resolution in 1814. As Waverley goes on to encounter more sophisticated agents, the ironical dissonance between his aesthetic framing of the scene and its historical content fades to an overtone – still audible, however, to the alert reader. Waverley falls into raptures at Flora Mac-Ivor’s recital of Gaelic song, ignorant that it is a Jacobite call to arms. He sees only a stag-hunt, not the mobilization of rebel militias.
In the ‘Highland minstrelsy’ that closes the first volume, Flora and Waverley collaborate in setting up ‘the romance of the scene’, she with her spectacle and song and he with his expectations (114). Their romantic designs are at odds with one another as well as with historical reality. Flora intends her rhapsody to inspire Waverley to join the rebellion, not fall in love with her. He mistakes it for a purely artistic performance, the evocation of a lost world of ancient heroes, like ‘Fingal’ and the other ‘Poems of Ossian’ that James Macpherson will unleash on the world some fifteen years later. Contending romanticisms yield contending ironies. Although she speaks to the present crisis, Flora’s impulse is backward-looking, inauthentic, ‘Ossianic’ – deluded in its literal attempt to revive the past. Waverley’s dissociation from the present, in contrast, looks forward to a genuine ‘romantic movement’ – genuine because it finds its expression not in military action but in poetry:
Indeed the wild feeling of romantic delight, with which he heard the few first notes she drew from her instrument, amounted almost to a sense of pain. He would not for worlds have quitted his place by her side; yet he almost longed for solitude, that he might decypher and examine at leisure the complication of emotions which now agitated his bosom. (115)
The impulse to refine a complex aesthetic experience through ‘recollection in tranquillity’ reaches beyond Macpherson’s dubious translations of Gaelic epic to the more rigorously experimental art of Scott’s friend, William Wordsworth.
Waverley’s aesthetic eye and ear predict the world to come, just as they are products of modern life, detached from a historical struggle that belongs in the past. The political and juridical dismantling of the clan system that followed the defeat of the 1745 rising made the Highlands safe for tourism. ‘There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent laws,’ wrote Samuel Johnson (in words echoed at the end of Waverley) on the occasion of his 1773 tour: ‘We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life.’ 19 Waves of emigration, driven by economic collapse, cleared the ground for visitors’ appreciation of ‘wild’ scenery. Domestic tourism was boosted by the long wars with France, which closed the Continent to British travellers. The Lady of the Lake, Waverley and Rob Roy ensured that the Highlands would remain one of Europe’s, indeed the world’s, premier romantic destinations. Waverley’s untimely relation to history, then, expresses his synchronization with the future – with Scott’s day, if not our own – rather than with the past. All this has encouraged some critics and (especially) historians to arraign Scott’s novels for promoting an imperialist historiography in which regret for the vanished clans softens pride in British progress with a tone of aesthetic refinement, a luxurious aura of melancholy. Waverley is one of the highlights of an ‘invention of Scotland’ – tartan-clad, retro-Jacobite, drained of real history – that begins with Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ and runs through Scott to Balmoral and Brigadoon.20
This critique has made the novel’s last scene notorious. The happy survivors gather before a memento of Waverley’s adventure:
It was a large and animated painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress, the scene a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the back-ground. It was taken from a spirited sketch, drawn while they were in Edinburgh by a man of high genius, and had been painted on a full length scale by an eminent London artist. Raeburn himself, (whose Highland Chiefs do all but walk out of the canvas) could not have done more justice to the subject; and the ardent, fiery, and impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. Beside this painting were hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war. The whole piece was generally admired. (361)
The technical name for this is an ecphrasis, a literary description of a work of art. A well-established epic convention, associated with the arming of the hero to return to war, it calls for sophisticated attention – not least because Scott makes it commemorate his hero’s definitive exit from the field. (Waverley’s arms, hung up with the painting, have become aesthetic objects, part of ‘the whole piece’.) Rather than installing a phony vision of Scotland, Scott invites his reader to consider the dynamics of historical memory in which his novel traffics. The narrator tells us that the painting is an artificial, sentimental production, assembled, like the novel itself, in Edinburgh and London – far from the scene it represents. If we compare the painting’s version of Waverley’s adventures with the story we have been reading, we recall the absence of any such idyllic brotherhood from its pages. Mockery lightens Waverley’s kitting out with Highland dress (214–15), while intrigue and resentment spoil his friendship with Fergus (until the rising is defeated). The difference between the dreaming hero and the knowing narrator prompts critical reflection as part of our work of reading. Only a heroic self-forgetfulness on his own part, confusing the work with its protagonist, can have prompted Henry James to call Waverley ‘the first novel which was self-forgetful’.21
Almost nothing Waverley encounters is what at first he imagines it to be. The patriarchal community of the Mac-Ivors is an artificial rather than natural system, kept up by the French-born chief for reasons which blend devotion to the Stuarts with a more sordid ambition. Waverley’s first view of Tully-Veolan bears a satirical indictment of the estate’s poverty and squalor; by the end of the story the experience of civil war has disclosed it as the ground of a genuine ‘organic society’, as faithful tenants rally around their hunted lord. Shy Rose Bradwardine emerges as the novel’s wiliest character, stage-managing the plot when Waverley is most lost in it. The closer we look at the novel – not just the more attentively we read it, but the better we remember reading it – the more equivocal its certainties become. In the concluding ‘Postscript’, the narrator’s assumption of the sober style of the Enlightenment historian follows his facetious impersonation of a coach-driver hanging about at the end of the journey in hope of a tip: which of these is the true voice of the Author of Waverley? What kind of a story is this?
Scott makes play throughout Waverley with the well-worn metaphor of the narrative as vehicle, most conspicuously at the end of the fifth chapter, where he likens his story – laden with the baggage of history, ‘old-fashioned politics’ and ‘the feelings, prejudices, and parties, of the times’ – to ‘a humble English post-chaise, drawn upon four wheels, and keeping his Majesty’s high-way’, as opposed to the marvellous flying machines of Arabian and Italian romance (26). Yet the narrative that follows gains imaginative energy the further it strays from ‘his Majesty’s high-way’ – the more it veers like a flying carpet or hippogriff. The author (no longer a mere narrator) opens the second volume by characterizing his ‘natural style of composition’ as ‘what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus’ (122) – joyously pompous, roundabout, off the beaten track. He has made a similarly exuberant boast several chapters earlier:
I … hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that if my quill displays no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. (97)
Where other novelists have felt bound to apologize to their readers, the Author of Waverley revels in the mixed, inconstant, ‘wavering’ character of his art. What is vagueness in his hero is in him virtuosity.
Waverley glitters with such authorial punctuations, not only of the action but of the historian’s decorum. Scott’s subdivision of the narrative into short chapters, bracketed with titles, epigraphs, rhetorical flourishes and gear-shifts, keeps nudging the reader awake from the dream of the hero’s life. (Waverley falls asleep at the end of no fewer than ten chapters.) These devices can jolt us in and out of the scene, as in the wonderfully tense build-up to the battle of Prestonpans: ‘The vapours rose like a curtain, and shewed the two armies in the act of closing,’ Scott writes, enthralling us in the counterpoint of opening and closing – only to pull back: ‘The rest is well known’ (240). Or they are exquisitely modulated, as in the vernacular Scots elegies that fold several chapters in the second half of the book: the outcry of the village children as Waverley is marched off to prison (‘Eh! see to the Southland gentleman, that’s gaun to be hanged for shooting lang Johnie Micklewrath the smith’, 185); the obsequies spoken over the Laird of Balmawhapple (242) and over Fergus and Evan Dhu (‘It’s a great pity of Evan Dhu, who was a very weel-meaning and good-natured man, to be a Hielandman; and indeed so was the Laird o’ Glennaquoich, for that matter, when he was na in ane o’ his tirrivies’, 351). Such cadences, shifting without loss of pathos from a ‘high’, heroic or tragic register to tones of irony and burlesque, do not merely relieve tension. Admitting the viewpoints and verdicts of ‘ordinary daily life’,22 they affirm the irreducibly mixed, complex, fluctuating quality of human experience – and justify the novel as the literary form best equipped to represent it.
Scott overlays classical and popular styles in the most moving of these elegies. On the eve of the march from Edinburgh – the beginning of the end of the Jacobite adventure – Charles Edward Stuart bids his followers good night:
When the Baron of Bradwardine afterwards mentioned this adieu of the Chevalier, he never failed to repeat, in a melancholy tone,
‘Audiit, et voti Phœbus succedere partem
Mente dedit; partem volucres dispersit in auras;
which,’ as he added, ‘is weel rendered into English metre by my friend Bangour;
Ae half the prayer wi’ Phœbus grace did find,
The t’other half he whistled down the wind.’ (224–25)
William Hamilton of Bangour translated part of the Aeneid, but not (so far as we know) these particular verses; and his translations maintain a stately Augustan English. The Baron’s version, warming Virgil’s sonorous Latin into familiar Scots, is almost certainly Scott’s own. The historical novelist makes his claim (covertly, as usual) to be an author of modern epic.
At the same time, Scott aligns his art with the Baron’s pedantry: an aesthetic commitment that today’s readers may want to resist, although to do so would mean missing much of the novel’s delight. We are introduced to the Baron, early on, through the English stranger’s eyes, and like Waverley we at first take his gusts of erudition to express nothing more than his ‘humour’, the grotesque tic (as in a novel by Smollett) of a secondary comic character. Gaining dignity and pathos as the story proceeds, Bradwardine takes over as its true hero. His adventures, hiding out on his estate, outshine Waverley’s, and he literally – grammatically – displaces Waverley from the role of protagonist in the final pages. The Baron guides our reading of the novel as what Peter Garside has called a ‘bibliomaniacal romance’. We learn to adjust our view of his pedantry, and recognize in it the expression of a distinctive Scots Humanist literary tradition – the cultural roots of a Jacobite movement that the novel elsewhere shows to be compromised if not corrupt.23 The translation of Virgil affiliates the Baron, and Scott, to the distinguished lineage of Scots versions of the Aeneid, going back to Gavin Douglas in 1513. ‘Fuimus Troes – and there’s the end of an auld sang’ (323): Bradwardine transmutes Lord Seafield’s sarcastic epitaph for an independent Scotland into Virgilian elegy, the only remaining genuine epic note.
The reader’s education accompanies the hero’s, and reading is its theme.24 The early chapters establish Waverley as a masculine version of the Female Quixote (the heroine of Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 novel) rather than a modern Don Quixote – reading purely, passively, for pleasure, not for action, in a narcissistic trance. His unchecked imagination turns every scenario he encounters, in life as well as in books, into ‘romance’. The novel’s curriculum of literary allusion endows romance with an increasingly specific literary-historical gravity as the story unfolds – and we are meant to take note. The term is persistently associated with the Italian Renaissance poets Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, whose tales narrate the distraction of epic ambition by enchantment, even as they themselves are decadent (if enchanting) romantic substitutes for classical epic. Their relation to the Jacobite rising becomes clear in the latter part of the novel, where Scott’s chapter title ‘The Confusion of King Agramant’s Camp’ (285) confirms the dour English patriot Talbot’s jibe at the Chevalier as an ‘Italian knight-errant’ (257). Unfit to claim the dignity of British epic, the Jacobite dream of national restoration wears the literary guise not just of Ossianic false translation but of Italian courtly romance: a shimmering, delusive fabric of marvellous adventure wrapped around the worn-out politics of Catholic absolutism.25
In Waverley, then, Scott synchronizes three kinds or levels of history to create the effect of a grand, complex, overdetermined historical process: the public history of national formation, in which the final defeat of an old regime heralds Scotland’s full assimilation into the modern British state; the sentimental history of a fictional protagonist, who grows up from dreamy adolescence into sober adulthood; and a literary history, in which the ancient narrative forms of epic and romance give way to the novel as the genre of modern life, exemplified by the historical novel we are reading. The three levels converge on the scene (discussed earlier) in which Waverley ‘felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced’. Some critics have mistaken the narrator’s phrase (carefully hedged and indirect) for Scott’s own gloss on his novel – as though the reader is meant to share the hero’s awakening from romance to real history. Such a progression characterizes neither the final outcome of Waverley’s adventures, however, nor the work that relates them. Waverley is set free – as improbably as in any Italian romance – from the historical consequences of involvement in rebellion and rewarded with a home and bride. Flora’s advice to him – ‘you seek, or ought to seek, in the object of your attachment, a heart whose principal delight should be in augmenting your domestic felicity, and returning your affection, even to the height of romance’ (143) – bears a prophetic force. The story delivers its hero to the romance of domestic felicity which is the proper end of modern novels, and the ideal condition of our reading.
Like Persuasion, Waverley narrates a redemption of romance, not a rejection of it. The redemption takes place through the fusion of romance and history in the new genre of modern life, the novel. To be sure, eighteenth-century English novels – citing Don Quixote as their model – had made the rejection of romance a founding ritual. Lacking a classical genealogy, tainted by association with the market, with unregulated fantasy, and with popular and female literacy, novels called themselves ‘histories’ in a bid for respectability and laid claim to a ‘realistic’, morally responsible account of human nature – vehemently disavowing that other, licentious, outmoded kind of fiction called ‘romance’. Waverley recapitulates but also outpaces this literary history. The disavowal of romance may be true to a setting in 1745, the chronological horizon of ‘the rise of the novel’ in the work of Henry Fielding (The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones) and Samuel Richardson (Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady; The History of Sir Charles Grandison). In 1814, however, at the close of the long historical arc of modernization, Scott reinvents the form through a synthesis of its opposing terms. ‘History’ becomes an internal, essential ingredient of the novel, not just a gentrifying title.26
At the same time as he completes the rise of the novel by making it historical, Scott affirms – no less consequentially – its alternative principle: romance, or fiction. The combination of history and fiction does not dissolve one category into the other but releases both into autonomous cultural life. Opening the Victorian era of the novel as well as of historiography, Waverley makes fiction the medium through which modern readers imaginatively inhabit their own history. It does so not just through the technical means by which a novel ‘brings the past to life’, but through the complex interplay of distance and attachment, identification and reflection, sympathy and irony, that constitutes the aesthetic of fiction, and through which novels ‘may be said to activate a fundamental practice of modern ideology – acquiescence without belief, crediting without credulousness’.27 We know that what we are reading is only a story, an invention – and yet we imaginatively assent to it; indeed, our knowledge that it is a fiction is the condition of our assent to it. Waverley – constantly ruffling the illusion of historical reality with reminders that it is a fiction – cultivates in the reader the quintessentially secular, liberal relation to historical being which is proper to the occupants of modern civil society, who have outlived archaic (‘superstitious’, ‘fanatical’) modes of adherence to a religious or political cause. Our flickeringly sceptical awareness of our condition, tempering enjoyment of the benefits of modernity with the melancholy remembrance of worlds extinguished in its making, differentiates us from the unwitting Waverley (until, perhaps, the novel’s closing chapters). Double consciousness, not false consciousness, is the novel’s gift to its reader, the characteristic mode of the imagination in modern life.
Here, too, as in the case of philosophical history, Scott’s achievement has intellectual roots in the Scottish Enlightenment, this time in the work of David Hume. Hume (writing in the age of Richardson and Fielding) reclaims fiction and the imagination from their traditional opposition to canons of religious truth or scientific reality. The argument of his major philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), dissolves the metaphysical foundations of reality and covers the resulting ‘abyss of scepticism’ with an instinctual, sentimental commitment to ‘common life’, everyday social intercourse: in which the philosopher cannot help being a participant, even as he intermittently recognizes common life to be an imaginary construction of reality stabilized by custom. The connections and continuities that knit together our world and our identities in it are an ongoing, largely unconscious work of fiction, sustained by repetition, habit and social consensus. As well as historical, psychological and literary histories, then, Waverley rehearses a philosophical history, a Humean dialectic of Enlightenment, in which romantic illusion gives way to bleak disenchantment (‘the romance of his life was over’) which gives way, in turn, to a reattachment – at once ironical and sentimental – to common life: the ‘domestic felicity’ that awaits the hero at the end of the adventure, but that his readers look upon with a more alienated eye, aware even as they are enjoying it that this is another fiction.28
We do not know what Waverley is thinking or feeling at the end of the story, and we do not need to. Scott’s unremarkable hero fades into the picture of his late adventure (framed at last) while we contemplate the scene through the Baron’s tear-blurred eyes. Pathos and irony, melancholy and delight, naïve excitement and connoisseurial relish: these make up the complex enjoyment with which Scott layered his first novel. No less potent than it was in the summer of 1814, that enjoyment lies in store for the adventurous reader today.
1 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (Lincoln, NE, 1983), p. 19.
2 See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 221, 418–20; Philip Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 177–82.
3 See Murray Pittock, ed., The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London, 2006).
4 On this, and the larger topic of nineteenth-century Scott adaptations, see Ann Rigney, Portable Monuments: The Afterlives of Walter Scott (Oxford: forthcoming).
5 See James Chandler, ‘The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood: Scott, Griffith and the Film Epic Today’, in Robert Lang, ed., The Birth of a Nation: D. W. Griffith, Director (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), pp. 225–49.
6 See Peter Garside, ‘Walter Scott and the “Common” Novel, 1808–1819’, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 3 (1999): http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/articles/cc03_n02.html; and Michael Gamer, ‘Waverley and the Object of (Literary) History’, Modern Language Quarterly 70:4 (2009), 495–525.
7 Jane Austen to Anna Austen, 28 September 1814, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, 1995), p. 277.
8 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. James Kinsley, with a new introduction by Deidre Lynch (Oxford, 2004), p. 30.
9 On Persuasion, Waverley and historical fiction see Lynch, ibid., pp. xv-xxi; Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Wilmington, DE, 2007), pp. 109–18.
10 Lukács, The Historical Novel, pp. 23–25.
11 Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 11–58.
12 See Peter Garside, ‘Popular Fiction and National Tale: Hidden Origins of Scott’s Waverley’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991), 30–53; Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 105–33; Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997), pp. 128–57.
13 See Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority, pp. 79–104.
14 For a recent discussion see Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, pp. 75–82.
15 Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 53.
16 On Scott and philosophical history see, e.g., Peter D. Garside, ‘Scott and the “Philosophical Historians” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 497–512; Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 49–77; James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), pp. 127–35.
17 The classic study of Scott’s passive hero is Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
18 On Waverley, tourism and the picturesque, see P. D. Garside, Waverley’s Pictures of the Past’, ELH 44 (1977), 659–82; Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 41–52; James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, 2005), pp. 68–100; and George Dekker, The Fictions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott and Mary Shelley (Stanford, 2005), pp. 129–41.
19 Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Oxford, 1985), p. 46.
20 See, e.g., H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 15–42; Murray G. H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London, 1991), pp. 84–90; Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 256–67; Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 70–99.
21 Henry James, Literary Criticism, Vol. 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York, 1984), p. 1202.
22 See David Daiches, ‘Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 6:2 (1951), 94–95.
23 See Peter Garside, ‘The Baron’s Books: Scott’s Waverley as a Bibliomaniacal Romance’, Romanticism 14:3 (2008), 245–58. See also Chris Ann Matteo, ‘Spolia from Troy: Classical Epic Allusion in Walter Scott’s Waverley’, Literary Imagination 9:3 (2007), 250–69.
24 The richest discussion of ‘romance as education’ in Waverley remains Jane Millgate’s, in Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist, pp. 35–57.
25 For a fuller discussion see Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 79–105.
26 See Everett Zimmerman, The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca, NY, 1996), pp. 220–22.
27 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), p. 169.
28 See Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 119–38.