SOURCE: Raleigh, John Henry. “Waverley as History; or, 'Tis One Hundred and Fifty-Six Years Since.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 4, no. 1 (fall 1970): 14-29.

[In the following essay, Raleigh depicts Waverley as a realistic novel written in the satirical mode of the eighteenth century but also concerned with the progress of history and featuring a proto-modern hero.]

It was as history that Waverley and the Waverleys made their great impact, and it is history that they are really about. And like history itself the appeal was and is multifarious and many-layered. What appealed to the nineteenth century was Scott's concrete reconstruction of the past, the “what” of history. This was not only a question of the feelings of patriotic Scotchmen and nostalgic Englishmen but of the most serious and profound European minds brooding on the rapidly disappearing past and the rapidly expanding future and the enigmas of man's history. Not only French historians, like Thierry, but sociologists of the future, like Tocqueville. Thus Tocqueville in England:

This picture of Gothic feudalism in decay appears to have struck a rare romantic chord in Tocqueville, or at least awakened some ambition of youth. He traveled northward to see the castle of Warwick and rode one night amid the ruins of Kenilworth. In a vibrant letter he shared the experience with his English-born bride-to-be, Mary (Marie) Motley.

He evoked for her the moon-bathed castle, which he peopled with characters from Sir Walter Scott. “Was I not in the realm of the dead? There I sat on a stone and fell into a kind of trance, while it seemed that my soul was drawn toward the past with indescribable force.”

(Seymour Drescher, Tocqueville and England [Cambridge, Mass. 1964], p. 38. The letter was written from Warwick on Aug. 26, 1833.)

Then there was Scott's magnificent evocation of the death-pangs of a distinctive but doomed culture, a phenomenon that Scotland was not alone, in the European community, in experiencing. Indeed Waverley was the first great artistic bodying forth of the condition of all-encompassing cultural transition that the whole world, both the most advanced sectors and the most primitive, is undergoing today. And thus for the twentieth century it is probably the “how” of the Waverley world that is most interesting and instructive, the Waverleys as “models” of historical processes, of the ways of men and events and how they mutually shape and form one another under the slow and continuous pressure of the passage of time, and, especially, in the context of high historical crisis. Thus the most interesting of Scott criticism, from first to last, has been that which has attempted to seek out and identify the primary “model,” that is, the human types and the particular historical configuration that recur so often as to constitute the basic scaffolding or skeleton for all the novels.¹

But, strangely enough, what has not been examined with any great care or specificity are Scott's historical attitudes toward his subjects and towards the processes of history. These subjects turn out to be quite complex, even if the discussion is kept to one document, Waverley, as will be the case in the essay that follows. What I propose is to discuss Waverley as a historical novel and to progress from Scott's conscious attitudes and intentions to his unconscious, and perhaps more revealing, assumptions about men and history. Thus the discussion moves from Scott's explicit utterances to the inferences that can be drawn from such implicit considerations as the structure of the book, the grouping of characters, the way the novel looks to someone one hundred and fifty-plus years after its publication and who can see how historical tendencies, of which Scott himself could not have been consciously aware, were incipient in the novel.

I

Considered as a conscious and explicit document, Waverley strikes one as something that could have been written in the eighteenth century.² It is in great part satiric and even when not satiric it minimizes the importance of its own subject matter. Like Voltaire deflating Europeans by putting them in the context of world civilization, Scott constantly reminds the reader that the story he is telling in Waverley is about miniscule matters. And whatever contemporaries may have thought, Waverley has a peculiarly, almost aggressively, unexalted tone.

Part of this results from Scott's allegiance to and connection with his great eighteenth century predecessors, Sterne, Fielding, Pope and Swift, whose satiric and ironic outlook encompassed not only the human species but also the very literary form that they were using as a vehicle for their satire. Thus in Waverley, the voice of Swift is heard when a supposed Jacobite who has managed to avoid any difficulty with the Hanoverian government is described as having a “very quiet and peaceful conscience, that never did him any harm” (ch. 11); that of Fielding and Pope when in the Highlands a hunting party awaiting the approach of a herd of deer is described in Miltonic terms—“Others apart sate on a hill retired” (ch. 24); that of Sterne when Scott, quite rightly, dismisses or deprecates his own plot or when he begins a chapter with the rhetorical question, “Shall this be a long or a short chapter?” and answers his own question with the indubitable assertion that in this matter the “gentle reader” has no vote. There are also touches of a belated eighteenth century voice, that of Jane Austen, especially in the opening section where hereditary life at Waverley Honour is being described. Sir Everard had not always wanted to remain a bachelor and once upon a time had paid court to the youngest of six daughters of a neighboring family. Upon the rejection, the Earl pronounced “grave eulogiums” on the “prudence and good sense, and admirable dispositions, of his first, second, third, fourth, and fifth daughters” (ch. 2). More potently, the voice of Dr. Johnson is heard as well through the anonymous narrator, who in this novel is not given a definitive character or persona, and through the character of Colonel Talbot, the voice of Reason in the novel. Thus the narrator at one point announces that flattery was in fashion sixty years since and will be in fashion six hundred years hence, “if this admirable compound of folly and knavery, called the world, shall be then in existence” (ch. 13). Colonel Talbot's speech has the authentic Johnsonian ring both in the form and in the content. Thus on the convicted MacIvor, he pronounces justly-earned doom:

“That he [MacIvor] was brave, generous, and possessed many good qualities, only rendered him the more dangerous; that he was enlightened and accomplished, made his crime the less excusable; that he was an enthusiast in a wrong cause, only made him the more fit to be its martyr.”

(ch. 67)

Talbot also clears all minds of cant about what the Highlanders are really like:

“Let them stay in their own barren mountains, and puff and swell, and hang their bonnets on the horns of the moon, if they have a mind; but what business have they to come where people wear breeches, and speak an intelligible language?”

(ch. 56)

The whole first section of the novel, dealing with England, is in the eighteenth century mode, a satiric anatomy of a complex, hierarchical, and varied society whose chief preoccupations are politics and religion, and whose modus vivendi is either resting on hereditary honors or getting ahead with any means at hand. Of the two Waverley brothers, the father and the uncle of the hero, the uncle is a decent but silly old Tory who talks of almost nothing but ancestry and its minutiae and of “the jargon of heraldry, its griffins, its moldwarps, its unycorns, and its dragons” (ch. 4). His younger brother, a political opportunist who has married for money and turned Whig for advancement, had early decided that “to succeed in the race of life, it was necessary he should carry as little weight as possible” (ch. 2). But he is not only despicable: he is a failure as well, even in the fraudulent world in which he operates.

English High Church religion is embodied in Mr. Pembroke, Waverley's good-natured, learned but old and indulgent tutor, who has two massive manuscripts, one entitled “Right Hereditary righted,” and the other, “A Dissent from Dissenters, or the Comprehension confuted; showing the Impossibility of any Composition between Church and Puritans, Presbyterians, or Sectaries of any Description; illustrated from the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, and the soundest Controversial Diaries.” Pembroke suffers from the last infirmity of the clerical mind, the desire to have these monsters published. There is a masterly little dramatic vignette describing his encounter with a London bookseller in Little Britain, a supposed Jacobite who speaks like Dickens's Alfred Jingle, in fast-moving, disjointed phrases, and who, with much secrecy, and signs and nods and smiles, mistakenly welcomes Pembroke as an emissary from the Pretender or from Rome, and then refuses to publish either manuscript. He has, he says, a family to think about, but he recommends to Pembroke another bookseller: “… he is a bachelor, and leaving off business, so a voyage in a western barge would not inconvenience him” (ch. 6).

It is not always remembered that this same very unromantic, realistic, satirical tone is sustained in many important ways throughout much of the whole novel. The opening chapter, which ticks off the various current sillinesses of fiction, the Gothic novel, the German novel, the “High-Life” novel, and so on, points a direction which in great part Waverley faithfully follows. In Chapter 5 Scott says “Mine [novel-vehicle] is a humble English post-chaise, drawn upon four wheels, and keeping his majesty's highway.” Such aberrations as the novel does deal with will not be great and glorious follies, like those Cervantes described, but “that more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their own reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring” (ch. 5). Even at avowedly romantic points in the novel, the ever-presence of a humdrum or even silly reality is always mentioned. Waverley's historical musings by the solitary tower, called Strength of Waverley, with its memories of the Wars of the Roses and the seventeenth century religious wars, are described as analogous to

… a child among his toys, culled and arranged, from the splendid but useless imagery and emblems with which his imagination was stored, visions as brilliant and as fading as those of an evening sky.

(ch. 4)

Even the first great romantic moment, so beloved by contemporary readers, when Waverley finds himself at night in the Highlands by a remote lake under the guidance of a wild native is undercut by the reminder that he is there because Baron Bradwarden's milch cows had been stolen by some thieving Highlanders—“The degrading incident be kept in the background!” (ch. 16)

The rebellion itself is a rather shabby affair, hopeless from the start, its leaders torn by petty bickerings and jealousies, the bulk of its Highland army, “half naked, stinted in growth and miserable in aspect; sparingly fed, ill-dressed, and worse armed” (ch. 44). The actual battles Colonel Talbot dismisses as minor skirmishes; as he says to Waverley:

“Fighting! pooh, what have you seen but a skirmish or two?—Ah! if you saw war on the grand scale—sixty or a hundred thousand men in the field on each side!”

(ch. 62)

And Waverley himself reflects that while he had imagined war would be all plumed troops, it has turned out to be night marches, vigils, and couches under a wintry sky. What one would have expected to be one of the climactic moments of the novel, the council of war at Derby on Dec. 5, 1745, when the rebellious invaders decided to give up their preposterous invasion of England, is never described but dismissed as something of which the reader is fully aware and needs hardly to be reminded. The battle of Culloden, which was historically of some importance, is only referred to in passing. “It is not my purpose,” says Scott, “to intrude upon the province of history” (ch. 57).

It can hardly be said, either, that the Scotch, Highlanders or Lowlanders, are romanticized. Of the two Highland leaders described in detail, MacIvor, although quite courageous and noble in the face of death, is a political adventurer, and Donald Beam is a treacherous thief. The Highlanders are colorful, courteous, and, according to their lights, honorable, but treachery is also a salient Highland characteristic. Waverley himself is almost a victim of it when a follower of MacIvor attempts to assassinate him, imagining, as does his leader, that Waverley has been remiss in a point of conduct with the MacIvors. Once more the most vivid description of irresponsible Highland murderousness is given to Colonel Talbot:

“And they learn their trade so early. There is a kind of subaltern imp, for example, a sort of sucking devil, whom your friend Glena-Glenamuck there, has sometimes in his train. To look at him, he is about fifteen years; but he is a century old in mischief and villany. He was playing at quoits the other day in the court; a gentleman, a decent-looking person enough, came past, and as a quoit hit his shin, he lifted his cane: But my young bravo whips out his pistol, like Bean Clincher in the Trip to Jubilee, and had not a scream of Gardez l'eau, from an upper window, set all parties a scampering for fear of inevitable consequences, the poor gentleman would have lost his life by the hands of that little cockatrice.”

(ch. 56)

Highland superstition in the person of the ghost of Bodach Glas which appears to MacIvor as a premonition of his fall and which might be expected to add a touch of antique grandeur to his life and fate, is dismissed as the fiction of “an exhausted frame and depressed spirits” (ch. 59), for minds that do not think deeply or accurately have a “reserve of superstition” (ch. 24).

Lowland life is by definition less romantic, and is in fact dull, provincial, and stagnant. Thus the hamlet of Tully-Veolan, which constitutes Waverley's introduction to the amenities of this civilization: miserable houses with black stacks of turf on one side of the door and the family dunghill on the other; naked children sprawling in the streets; idle, useless, snarling curs snapping at horses' hoofs; an apathetic and incurious citizenry, strangers to soap—“The whole scene was depressing.” It was true that the marks of intelligence and gravity could be seen lurking in the physiognomies of these Arcadians, but:

It seemed, upon the whole, as if poverty, and indolence, its too frequent companion, were combining to depress the natural genius and acquired information of a hardy, intelligent, and reflecting peasantry.

(ch. 8)

The Baron of Bradwardine is a kind of lovable old bore—much like Sir Everard—whose interminable monologues are a compound of ancient and modern anecdotes; curious, if not valuable, information; prejudice and pedantry; plus liberal besprinklements of Latin and French phrases. As Scott had explained earlier in the novel, Scotch learning tended to be diffuse rather than accurate and its possessors to be readers rather than grammarians. The Baron is likewise a man of good sense, honorable feelings and stoical courage. But his neighbors, who attend a party for Waverley, which erupts, after much drinking, into a brawl, have hardly anything honorable to be said of them: the Laird of Balmawhapple, who tries to start a duel with Waverley, and the Laird of Killancureit, who has passed out on the floor by the time the argument begins. Later in the novel Flora MacIvor refers to the pedantry of the Baron, the “low habits” of Balmawhapple, and calls Killancureit a “bullish two-legged steer.” (She predicts a transformation, and Scott, writing in 1813, adds that the transformation has occurred, but without the revolution Flora is working for.)

The four Scotch characters who are meant in some senses to be likable and/or admirable are the Baron, MacIvor, Flora MacIvor, and the Baron's daughter, Rose. But even these do not escape the remorseless intellect and the Johnsonian finality of the inevitable Colonel Talbot who finally ticks off them too (ch. 52):

The Baron:

“… the most intolerable formal pedant he had ever had the misfortune to meet with …”

MacIvor:

“… a Frenchified Scotchman, possessing all the cunning and plausibility of the nation where he was educated, with the proud, vindictive and turbulent humour of that of his birth. If the devil,” he said, “had sought out an agent expressly for the purpose of embroiling this miserable country, I do not think he could find a better than such a fellow as this, whose temper seems equally active, supple, and mischievous, and who is followed, and implicitly obeyed, by a gang of such cut-throats as those whom you are pleased to admire so much.”

As for the two young women:

“He allowed that Flora Mac-Ivor was a fine woman, and Rose Bradwardine a pretty girl. But he alleged that the former destroyed the effect of her beauty by an affectation of the grand airs which she had probably seen practiced in the mock court of St. Germains. As for Rose Bradwardine, he said it was impossible for any mortal to admire such a little uninformed thing whose small portion of education was as ill-adapted to her sex or youth, as if she had appeared with one of her father's old campaign-coats upon her person for her sole garment.”

The sharpness of these judgments is mitigated by the explanation that Talbot is, like his model, Dr. Johnson, inveterately anti-Scotch. However, in this same chapter Waverley himself has already set off Talbot as a superior soldier to three Scotch militarists: the Baron whose art of war is marked by pedantry; Major Melville—who had interrogated Waverley earlier in the novel,—whose concern with minutiae makes him a martinet; and MacIvor whose martial strategies were inseparable from, and dominated by, his personal ambitions. Talbot, on the other hand, is the complete English soldier, devoted to King and Country, and devoid of pride of theory, over-preoccupation with detail, or personal ambition.

Nor does Scotch religion escape the general critique of crudeness, imbalance, incoherence, and eccentricity that have been remarked on in all the other spheres already touched upon above. The exception here is Mr. Morton, whom Waverley meets during his incarceration in the village of Cairnvrecken. Like George Eliot's Farebrother, Morton is completely nondoctrinaire, and the narrator declares that he has never been able to ascertain whether Morton was an evangelical or a moderate in the kirk. In some senses he is the Scotch equivalent to Talbot although his chief characteristic is not intelligence but rather simple goodness. However, played off against him are two religious extremists: the sour, puritanical, hypocritical, mercenary Ebenezer Cruickshanks and the energetic, grim, militant, fanatical, Cameronian, Gifted Gilfillan. Hypocrisy and fanaticism—the two historic vices of Northern European Protestantism—and the well deserved target of many an eighteenth century satirical rationalist. Thus the novel as a whole is certainly in the eighteenth century mode. One of its ideals is a moral expressed repeatedly in eighteenth century literature, that solitude and solitariness are what lead to imbalance and extravagance and that civilized society (i.e. English society), the collective force of other mature examples, alone make man a reasonable being: “Society and example … more than any other motives, master and sway the natural bent of our passions, …” (ch. 4).

Such romance, or romanticism, as there is exists largely in the imagination of the hero, but even here it is most clearly minimized or undercut. It should be said first that Scott is at his worst with a character like Waverley who is described internally, undergoes a supposed development and is inclined in some degree to abstraction or cerebration. In a letter Scott himself called his chief character a “botch.” He was, said his creator, a “sneaking piece of imbecility” and further remarked that if he had married Flora she would have set him up on the mantle-piece, as it was said the wife of the Polish dwarf did with her husband. To further confuse things Waverley has two identities: one a sterling young man of action who engages in battles; the other a Werther-like soul who shrinks from reality or, more accurately, does not know what reality is. And despite the fact that Waverley is supposed to have been educated out of his youthful illusions by experience, much of it harsh, into the nature of reality—by the end of Chapter 60 he says to himself that the romance of his life is ended—he will finally lapse back into his youthful, withdrawn romanticism, as Flora MacIvor predicts in her vision of what life will be like at Waverley-Honour, when Waverley, married to Rose, finally settles there for life: old books, grottoes, moon-lit nights, colonnades, oak trees, deer, and greensward (ch. 52).

In so far as the characterization of Waverley has any coherence, it is a picture of the bad effects—this was Scott's view of his own education—of a haphazard and hazy education on an indolent and romantic mind of which “fancy takes the helm, and the soul rather drifts passively along with the rapid and confused tide of reflections, than exerts itself to encounter, systematize, or examine them” (ch. 23). Thus as the Scotch represent one kind of imbalance, Waverley represents another; the former are colorful and the latter is weak: neither are viewed with anything except reason and common sense. In other words, the major impulse behind the novel is realistic and satirical rather than romantic: the Highlander's posturings and Waverley's musings are two kinds of moonshine. Through the dicta of Talbot or Flora MacIvor, almost everything gets deflated, even the highest virtue of this world, or of Scott's own imagination: courage, about which Flora says, anent men in danger, that it probably takes more courage to run away, and that all men like strife, in a kind of instinctual way like dogs and bulls, which makes its pursuit no great virtue (ch. 52).

What Scott seems to be saying in all this is that life is a rather prosaic affair; that dreams are only dreams; that it may once have been possible for men to see ghosts in the forest or signs in the sky or that the events of 1745 may once have appeared to be dashing and romantic; but that if you look closely and reasonably and clearly at things, like a philosophe, like a modern man of the Enlightenment, the ghosts disappear and the romance of history evaporates.

II

Considered as conscious philosophy of history, Waverley is in the best liberal, progressivist, optimistic style, identical in substance and spirit to Macaulay's “Third Chapter.” In fact the Postscript, “which should have been a Preface,” to Waverley is precisely a miniature “Third Chapter.” Like Macaulay, Scott takes a span of time, only fifty years rather than Macaulay's century and a half, and briefly describes the vast changes that have occurred in Scotland during that time, remarking that no other European nation has within the course of a half-century undergone so complete a change. The existing generations of Scotland are as different from their grandparents as existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth's time. As his authority for the political and economic effects of these changes Scott cites Lord Selkirk, and it is important to understand what this assent signified.

Thomas Douglas (1771-1820), Fifth Earl of Selkirk, was the author of Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland, with a View of the Causes and Probable Consequences of Emigration (1805). (Actually Selkirk cited a sixty-year period, 1745 to 1805, as the years of the great changes.) The Observations addresses itself to the problem of the de-population, largely by emigration to America, of the Highlands. The more vociferous Scots patriots objected to this, and in 1803, largely because of the efforts of the Highland Society, a bill restricting emigration was passed. Selkirk, who himself had led a group of Highlanders emigrating to Prince Edward's Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1803, was a proponent of emigration and pointed out that given the post-1745 economy of the Highlands there was no alternative. Sheep-farming and the aggregation of farms had made it impossible for the Highlands to support its people, and it would be cruel, remembering Malthus, to force them to stay there. Anyway, the Highlander hated regularity and sedentary labor, and he simply would not become a laborer in the Lowlands. In America he could get land, something unobtainable for him in Scotland. While his departure was a great loss to the army, whose backbone he was, the whole process was sound and progressive from an economic point of view:

… the produce of the country, instead of being consumed by a set of intrepid but indolent military retainers, is applied to the support of peacable and industrious manufacturers.

(ch. 77)

The emigration, which was really lamented only by the Highland gentry, was thus both inevitable and desirable. In other words it was Progress, as Macaulay would have understood the term.

In 1830 in a letter to Maria Edgeworth, in which he advised her to look at Selkirk, Scott said about the emigration:

It is vain to abuse the gentlemen [who converted to sheep-walks] this which is the inevitable consequence of a great change of things.

(Letters, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson [New York, 1932-38], XI, 380)

In other words Scott acquiesced in the extinction of his beloved Highland culture and way of life, and Waverley is one of its memorials and obituaries.

The extinction of the Highlands was but an extreme manifestation of a more sweeping transition that was transforming all of Scotland and involved the eradication of the Scottish past, including the language dialect, the amalgamation of Scotch and English, and the modernization and enrichment of Scotland. The signal characteristic of this change, in addition to its rapidity, was its silent unobtrusiveness. Except for the Highlands, it was not cataclysmic or even obvious; in fact it was almost imperceptible. As he puts it at the end of Waverley:

… 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 have drifted.

(ch. 72)

He does add that there have been losses: “folks of the old leaven,” who were living embodiments of loyalty, faith, hospitality, and honor. History then is omnipotent, in wiping out what is irrelevant, although perhaps lovable, and ‘slowly’ drifting the mass of mankind down the river of progress.

The next question is: what does this do to human character? The relationship between history and human character is spelled out in the opening chapter: that human nature is always the same; but that it is affected by the historical period in which it finds itself; and that the modern age is more civilized than former ones in which men could give in to their bent for fury and violence. Modern man is thus repressed: “Our malignant feelings … must seek gratification through more indirect channels and undermine the obstacles which they cannot openly bear down, …” (ch. 1). In other words, modern man cannot kill other men, except in war.

Cutting across these long-term historical drifts of collective progress and individual repression are two rear-guard counter-tendencies. First there is simple atavism or hereditary instincts which are attenuated by but nevertheless resist the flow of history, and which are ascribed both to families (the Waverleys) and to cultural and/or ethnic groups (the Highlanders). Second, there is biological sport or chance by which the right historical moment and the right character for that moment happen to coincide, producing a unique anomaly, as with the character of MacIvor. The MacIvors go back three centuries, and Fergus is the eleventh in descent from John of the Tower, the founder of the clan. Fergus' father, involved in the insurrection of 1715, had fled to France where he married a lady of rank and by her had two children, Fergus and Flora. Fergus' innate character, combined with his situation, produced a unique ego of “a mixed and peculiar tone, that could only have been acquired sixty years since” (ch. 19). Thus he could only have been what he was by virtue of the particular moment in which he was born: sixty years before he would have lacked polish and the knowledge of the world that he possesses; sixty years later his ambition and love of power would have found no proper outlet.³ When he dies, a historical possibility dies with him. As the present and the future represent the generalizing and standardizing of men and culture, the past is full of non-repeatable uniquenesses. And despite Scott's statement that human nature is a constant, particular configurations of human character can and do actually disappear, that is, a realizable human potential is wiped out. As Flora says of the Baron: “It is a character, Captain Waverley, which is fast disappearing” (ch. 23).

III

Thus there is, along with the conscious philosophy of history in Waverley, a less conscious one as well which is both more complicated and more interesting. In the first place, there is a disjunction between the fictional plot, Waverley's story, and the historical narrative to which that plot is joined. The fictional plot is involved, hasty, disjointed, full of mysteries, and uncertain in its temporal pace: sometimes leisurely; at other moments fast-moving. Scott himself said he had let the first volume (which concludes with Chapter 23, with Waverley listening to Flora sing) flag and that he tried to introduce more hustle and bustle in volumes two and three. (To J. B. Morritt, 28 July, 1814, Letters, III, 477.) The close of the plot proper is hurried, summary and apologetic. In Chapter 70, it is compared to a stone rolling down a hill:

… The earlier events are studiously dwelt upon, that you, kind reader, may be introduced to the character rather by narrative, than by the duller medium of direct description; but when the story draws to its close, we hurry over the circumstances, however important, which your imagination must have forestalled, and leave you suppose those things which it would be abusing your patience to relate at length.

In this story there is much guilt on Waverley's part, not only cultural, as he changes from the English army to the Scotch, but personal as well: to Colonel Gardiner, to Colonel Talbot, to his uncle, and so on. Much of the plot is a tissue of piled-up guilts, as he imagines himself the betrayer of all those closest to him or the cause of disaster to them. But all the guilts turn out to be either imaginary or about something that can be and is remedied. Thus when Colonel Talbot grants him the King's pardon at the end, he has already disburdened himself of all his other guilts.

But in history proper doom is dark and guilt is real, and inexpiable. History proper, unlike fiction, moves slowly, steadily, inexorably, and clearly to its foregone tragic conclusion. There are no mysteries to it: Bonnie Prince Charley's efforts, and the ambitions of the MacIvors, are doomed from the start. And whereas Waverley's guilt is imaginary or unfounded, Flora MacIvor's is genuine, deep, and unforgivable. As she says to Waverley, “…—that the strength of mind on which Flora prided herself has murdered her brother!” (ch. 68). And her brother's death is the peculiarly horrid one accorded to convicted traitors under the English laws of the day. Thus the end of the novel alternates back and forth between the light and the dark: the gradual disentanglement of Waverley from his mistakes and troubles and his marriage to the light-haired Rose, out into the sunlight of the future, but the MacIvors sink down into the darkness of guilt, despair, and a bloody death:

The place of Fergus's confinement was a gloomy and vaulted apartment in the central part of the Castle—a huge old tower, supposed to be of great antiquity, …

(ch. 69)

Then there is the black sledge, drawn by the white horse; the “horrid-looking” executioner; “the deep and dark Gothic archway” through which moves the procession of death and affords Waverley his last glimpse of MacIvor. A dark, old, blood-stained place of immurement, with men torturing other men: this is the real conclusion of a crucial historical event. Even the humor of history is grisly and smacks of the gallows. The Baron, for example, had been involved in the uprising of 1715, was captured, made his escape, but returned—and was recaptured—in order to get his copy of Livy which he had forgotten. The Baron was pardoned but his historical antecedent, a real man, had not been so fortunate. As Scott explained it in a footnote:

The attachment to this classic was, it is said, actually displayed in the manner mentioned in the text by an unfortunate Jacobite in that unhappy period. He escaped from the jail in which he was confined for a hasty trial and certain condemnation, and was retaken as he hovered around the place in which he had been imprisoned, for which he could give no better reason than the hope of recovering his favourite Titus Livius. I am sorry to add, that the simplicity of such a character was found to form no apology for his guilt as a rebel, and that he was condemned and executed.

(ch. 6)⁴

Moreover, if real history is dark, it is also concretely complex, tangled in innumerable details and quite the opposite in its tenor from that metaphor of the quiet, smooth-flowing river of progress, and the future, the modernity that abstracts man so rapidly into a vaguely roseate future. The past is Gothic, ornate, irrational, thick: it is, as has been said of Scott's world in general, full of “things.” For example, the golden goblet, known as the Blessed Bear of Bradwardine, introduced in Chapter 11, is an object of great intricacy and formidable history, which is explained at some length, and in the vocabulary of heraldry, by the Baron.

Above all, the past was slow-moving, in contrast to the frenetic present. Thus at Waverley-Honour in the 1740's, national news was slow in arriving and came through only one channel, unlike the present day of “those mail-coaches, by means of which every mechanic at his six-penny club may nightly learn from twenty contradictory channels the yesterday's news of the capital” (ch. 2). Again, letters, we are told (ch. 30), are shorter in these “degenerate days,” and most things are more expensive, as the price of horses, for example (ch. 28). People were more credulous, unlike “this critical generation” and things in general in ordinary life were duller: “the hum-drum details of a courtship Sixty-Years since” (ch. 67).

The past contrasted to the present was more exciting in some ways: wars, rebellions, and killings and fiercer, more passionate. The Baron is a kind of good-natured eccentric, but an ancestor whose portrait (ca. 1642) hangs in his hall “glared grimly out of a huge bush of hair, part of which descended from his head to his shoulders, and part from his chin and upper-lip to his breast-plate” (ch. 15). In other respects, especially in the normal routines of living, the past tended to be more prosaic, less exciting than the more expansive present. If it was simpler, it was in some spheres more solid morally. Thus in Chapter 3 Scott attacks the modern penchant for making learning “interesting”: “The history of England is now reduced to a game of cards, the problems of mathematics, to puzzles and riddles, …”

History then is a scale of existence, the well-known “stages-of-civilization” idea, of which Scott, as a pupil of Dugald Stewart, was a proponent, but passage from one stage to another, while it was Progress, was not necessarily all gain. For example, the decline or disappearance of the chivalric spirit in the nineteenth century was not lamented only by the conservatives and the Tories. No less a champion of reason and progress than John Stuart Mill felt this loss every bit as strongly:

The chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education; the popular novels of the day teach nothing but (what is already too soon learnt from actual life) lessons of worldliness, with at most those huckstering virtues which conduce to getting on in the world; and for the first time perhaps in history, the youth of both sexes are universally growing up unromantic.

… and greatly is the book to be valued, which in this age, and in a form suited to it, does its part towards keeping alive the chivalrous spirit.

From the heroic character of ancient literature, “not only the noblest minds in modern Europe derived much of what made them noble, but even the common spirits what made them understand and respond to nobleness.” (“A Prophecy,” Dissertations and Discussions [New York, 1874], I, 285.)

But all losses and gains are subsumed under the great inner historical subject of Waverley which is a comparison and contrast between two scales of civilization, Scotch and English, and a description of the various degrees of human consciousness that can be found in each scale. Roughly speaking, England is advanced and organically whole, while Scotland is retarded and unbalanced. The ideal for which England stands and for which the author speaks, is a secular civilization that continuously advances but has the virtues of wholeness, balance, sanity, and a general adherence to the Reality-principle: no mysticism in religion and nothing but stoicism in morals. Its mind does not go whoring after multiple causes-and-effects or the multiplicity of consequences that follow in the train of human actions. As Colonel Talbot, its spokesman, says:

“It is a responsibility, Heaven knows sufficiently heavy for mortality that we must answer for the foreseen and direct result of our actions,—for their indirect and consequential operation, the great and good Being who alone can foresee the dependence of human events on each other, hath not pronounced his frail creatures liable.”

(ch. 55)

Nevertheless, not all members of a culture have the same degree of awareness or consciousness of what is happening to them and their culture, and this internal scale of consciousness is temporal too. For example, in Scotland the MacIvors and the Highlanders stand for the remote past, which is dead although they do not know it, and thus they represent the tragedy of historical transition. The Baron and the rest of the Lowlanders stand for the recent past, but now in process of transformation in which their anachronisms, about to disappear, are amusing and lovable. They thus represent the comedy of historical transition. The author or narrator who says after MacIvor has been condemned for treason:—

Let us devoutly hope that, in this respect at least, we shall never see the scenes or hold the sentiments that were general in Britain Sixty Years since.

(ch. 67)

—is the voice of the present and the future. The scale of awareness of cause-and-effect in human actions is analogous. The Highlanders believe in fate, ancestral curses, charismatic powers, signs in the sky, and so on; while the narrator believes simply that history makes man what he is and that the more advanced stage of civilization will always overcome the less advanced.

The scale of temporal awareness for the principal English characters is both wider and, as a whole, is more advanced on the universal historical scale than that of the Scots. In England an attachment to the past is merely a harmless and amusing eccentricity, an amateur hobby that signifies only that its practitioner has departed from the mainstream of history and harmlessly idles in a backwater. Thus Sir Everard. On the other hand, one who single-mindedly and materialistically pursues the main chance in the hurly-burly of the present is contemptible and, what is even worse, defeatable. Thus Sir Richard, Waverley's father.

The two most interesting and significant consciousnesses on the English scale are those of Waverley and Colonel Talbot. Despite the fact that he is preoccupied with the past, Waverley is one of the first crude, intuitive sketches of “modern man” with distinct affinities to the artist-hero who first came to the surface in the Romantic period and who was to loom so large in the literary imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First of all, Waverley's fixation on the past is not indicative of a direct connection to it: it is a device to dream with and has little attachment to literal reality. In a sense it is atemporal, unanchored, hazy. Scott makes this point very clear in the comparison between the Baron's factual sense of history, history as a series of concrete events stored in memory, and Waverley's vaguely romantic notions about historical high points (ch. 12). For Waverley's “history” is “as brilliant and fading as … an evening sky” (ch. 4). He is in short a transformer of reality by the artistry of imagination. His is the modern, free-floating consciousness, not really rooted in anything and completely unhindered in its imaginary travels up and down the scale of time.

“Modern” Waverley is in other ways as well. First, he is a victim, the pawn rather than the master of events. Second, he suffers from the three modern curses: doubts of identity; anxiety (much of it nameless); and guilt (much of it imaginary). These are all problems that arise out of his own consciousness, turned in on itself. For in the early part of the novel he also suffers from isolation, and his character has been formed in solitude. As such, he is one of the first representatives in literature of the distinguishing and distinctive property of the modern mind first pointed out by Hegel (who was Scott's almost exact contemporary) and termed by him “alienation.” This same phenomenon was described succinctly by John Stuart Mill in his St. Andrews Inaugural Lecture:

The modern mind is, what the ancient mind was not, brooding and self-conscious; and its meditative self-consciousness has discovered depths in the human soul which the Greeks and Romans did not dream of, and would not have understood.

Like modern man, too, Waverley is “international,” one of the first of the expatriates and genuinely-bemused by the clash of competing cultures in which he is involved. The happy ending of the conventional plot subdues all his problems, but not before Scott's “world-historical” consciousness had dimly perceived some of the basic problems of the modern consciousness.

No better summation of his character has been written than Lukács' description (in Die Seele und die Formen) of the every-day experience of ordinary modern consciousness:

Daily life is a confused and many-coloured anarchy, where nothing attains its perfect essence, and no clear dividing line separates the pure and the impure. Everything flows, everything is broken and destroyed, and nothing attains authenticity. For men love everything which is hazy and uncertain in life, and adore the soothing monotony of the Grand Perhaps. Everything clear and unambiguous makes them afraid, and their weakness and cowardice lead them to embrace every obstacle set up by the world and every gate to bar their path. For what lies behind each rock too steep for them to climb is the unsuspected and ever unattainable paradise of their dreams. Their life is made up of hopes and desires, and everything which prevents them from fulfilling their destiny is easily and cheaply transformed into an internal richness of the soul.

(Quoted by Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, trans. Philip Thody [London, 1964], p. 39.)

But there is also a mind above time, that of Colonel Talbot, or, more properly, a mind that refuses to recognize history and which maintains that what can be known, about men and events, can be known clearly and unambiguously, for human nature never changes. To this mind the past, the sky, dreams, the wilderness, romantic yearnings, the admitted intricacy of human events are best left to God, Who alone can comprehend them. The only thing worth talking about is what one can actually know.

In the first edition of Waverley there were three volumes. Roughly, the three divisions were: first, Waverley's education and introduction to the Highlands; second, Waverley's involvement with the MacIvors and the beginnings of the rebellion; and third, the denouement. Waverley runs throughout the entire narrative, but each section tends to have dominant and theme-bearing secondary characters: in Vol. I: Sir Everard; in Vol. II: Fergus, Flora, and the Pretender; in Vol. III: Colonel Talbot (who does not appear until Vol. III). Thus the first volume might be entitled: “Dream and History”; the second, “The Myth of the Highlands”; and the third, “The Reality of the Present.” Thus whatever happens to Waverley, the novel as a whole progresses from Dream through Myth to Reality, from History as private dream, to History as tragic myth, to History as the unambiguous present. And thus the great evoker of the past, the man who according to Carlyle taught us what history meant, turns out to be a classic apostle of progress.

Notes

1. To give some examples:

   a. J. A. Adolphus saw always at the center of things a passive hero, who usually gets his second choice of women but who escapes fate and gains happiness. Contrasted to him is the wild, strong, uncivilized “hero” who meets his death. Letters to Richard Heber, Esq. (London, 1821), Letter VII.

   b. Nassau Senior saw the period as always a great crisis or turning point in history and the standard cast of characters as: a virtuous passive hero who marries; a fierce active hero who dies violently; and a fool or bore. Essays in Fiction (London, 1864).

   c. Alexander Welsh sees, among other things: a light and dark hero and a light and dark heroine; a concern for property and paternity; and an evocation of guilt and anxiety. The Hero of Waverley Novels (New Haven, 1963).

   d. Coleman O. Parsons sees three basic ingredients in all the plots: civil strife; the problem of the hero's identity; and the problem of honor. The hero is a moderate who is caught in a conflict between mighty opposites; he gets debits and credits on both sides but is usually thrown on the side of the rebels by some act of severity on the part of authority. Sub-themes are sister-contrast (as in Heart of Midlothian) and the wages of sin. Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott's Fiction (Edinburgh and London, 1964), pp. 265ff.

   e. Thomas Crawford sees the novels as dramatizations of history that have superficial themes and inner themes. Thus conventionally Woodstock is a Romeo and Juliet story; an anti-Puritan document; and is Toryish in its outlook. The real or inner themes are: (1) contrasts of Cavalier and Puritan; (2) relationship between Hegel's “maintaining personalities” (ordinary citizens) and “world-historical personalities” (in this case Cromwell). Again Woodstock is a “model” of a revolution, and Ivanhoe is a “model” of how nations are formed out of tribes. Scott (Edinburgh and London, 1965), pp. 47-63.

   f. Francis R. Hart investigates many of the complexities of man and history in his Scott's Novels: The Plottings of Historic Survival (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1966).

   g. The great claim for the Waverleys as a model for some of the major courses of Western history has of course been made by Georg Lukács, particularly in “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel,” The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, (Boston, 1963), pp. 19-88.

2. It has, of course, often been remarked that Scott was really an eighteenth century man. The most sweeping claim for Scott as an unqualified eighteenth century rationalist of which I am aware is that of A. W. Benn in The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (London & New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1906).

   Duncan Forbes in The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 8-9; and 132; makes a similar claim that as an historian Scott is in the eighteenth-century rationalist tradition.

3. The character of MacIvor has often been criticized as unreal or mythical. History, however, shows that the peculiar combination of high civility and barbarism that MacIvor embodies was a phenomenon among the Highland chieftains of the time. They were civilized savages who could speak both Gaelic and English and were often conversant with French, Latin and Greek. They drank French claret, wore lace, and sent their sons abroad to be educated. John Prebble, Culloden (London, 1961), p. 38. At the same time it should be remarked that Prebble calls Sir Walter's picture of the Highlands “Gothic” (p. 330).

4. Grisly anecdotes of a similar kind always crop up in Scotch history, the most famous or often-repeated being the one about the Highland retainer who had been condemned to death by his chieftain. There are various versions of the story. One version has it that the man was put in the “pit” until the hanging. Somehow he procured a sword and vowed he would kill the first man who touched him. But his wife said, “Come up quietly and be hanged and do not anger the laird.” And the man submits to his fate. Wallace Notestein, The Scot in History (New Haven, 1946) p. 197f. Another version has it that the man is inside his cottage on the morning of his hanging and his wife is outside. As the laird approaches, she cries out “Come awa', Jaimie, Come awa' to your hangin' and dinna vex the laird.” James Fergusson, Lowland Lairds (London, 1959). This anecdote is, of course, supposed to illustrate the fanatical loyalty of retainers (although it seems to me that the power of wives is certainly part of the picture). Either way, it is gallows humor of a high and literal order. Its equivalent in Waverley is Evan Dhu's offer to give his own life and his fellows in exchange for MacIvor's to the English tribunal. The court, initially, laughs at what they regard as a preposterous proposition. But, of course, it is meant seriously.