SOURCE: Valente, Joseph. “Upon the Braes: History and Hermeneutics in Waverley.” Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 2 (summer 1986): 251-76.

[In the following essay, Valente probes Scott's conception of history in Waverley, emphasizing the symbolic and thematic dialectic of romance and history illustrated by opposing characters and geographical locations in the novel.]

Scott's vision of history has become something of a critical chestnut: theses on it have passed through numerous restatements, and disputes have been thoroughly recycled. The same questions Lukacs and even Coleridge thought central are felt to be so today. As a result, the historiographical approaches to a text like Waverley,¹ a locus classicus of the discussion, remain relatively homogeneous. The subject has not, however, reached the point of saturation. Adjusting our perspective will, I believe, open a new and various exchange.

The historical project in Waverley has been approached previously from two directions, the first concerned with Scott's representation of his age and its political import,² the second with his historiography, specifically the relative importance of the uniformitarian model of the Enlightenment versus the incipient historicism of the romantic period.³ Both focus on history as an objective reality, whether local and empirical or metaphysical and ideal. But history is not a given in Waverley. Defined by opposition to the concept of romance, history is a problem, a problem with roots in epistemology and hermeneutics. Indeed, the topos of history and romance in Waverley serves precisely to thematize the fundamentally interpretive dimension of human experience.

Edward Waverley himself places the antitheses of history and romance at the center of the novel's structure. Having finally quit the crumbling Jacobite insurrection,

… 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.

(415)

This passage demarcates, along with the two segments of Edward's life, the two symbolic universes of Waverley.⁴ To one side, it sets the wild grace of Jacobite Scotland, with its antique social forms and visionary outlook, now passing convulsively into the realm of shadow and illusion. This is the fantastic world which holds Edward's youth in thrall. To the other side, it sets the cultured charm of Hanoverian England, with its burgeoning commercial order and pragmatic ethos, quietly ushering in the age of science. This, Edward's native element, is the realistic world in which he invests his future.

So radical is the dualism of Scott's thought, however, that these worlds divide against themselves, each harboring the values that characterize its other. To take an exemplary case, Edward's family, like England at large, is split along party lines; and it is the Waverley Tories, Sir Everard and Mrs. Rachel, who first introduce many of the romantic qualities predominantly associated with the Scottish Highlanders: the Jacobite loyalties, the strict code of personal, family and caste honor, the strong attachment to tradition and a dream-like past. For its part, Scotland is geographically partitioned into the Highland wilds, with its distinctively Celtic culture, and the more cultivated, Anglicized Lowlands; and it is by way of an alliance to a Lowland family that the “real history” of Edward's life is fulfilled. There is no end to this doubling in Waverley. Every pertinent aspect of the novel rests upon the braes between historical fact and romantic fancy. Scott thereby shows the two forms of experience to be dialectically implicated in one another, and so distinguishable not in terms of their respective lineaments alone, but by reference to the prospect from which these are viewed and interpreted.

Of the many narrative and symbolic oppositions Edward's change of course involves, the one drawn between his first love, Flora, and his eventual spouse, Rose, figures most importantly in Scott's elaboration of the crux at issue. By critical consensus, these women represent the muse of romance and history respectively, personifying the characteristics, sketched above, of either world-vision. Yet they display contradictions in role and character which, without subverting their contrasting symbolic values, progressively redefine them.

Thus, Flora comes to image the interdependence of romance and history and the epistemological problem this poses. Scott saturates her initial presentation with variants of the word “purity,” so that this concept, prototypical of the medieval romance heroine, serves to define her in a direct, authoritative manner. This context established, the gradually disclosed doubleness of her nature points to a state of division, of historical rupture, so fundamental that it stands for unity itself. I will outline Flora's role in the first section of the essay. Rose's duality by contrast is a function of Edward's changing perceptions of her; and this narrative development reflects Scott's perspectivist resolution to the problem. I will discuss this resolution in section three. In between, I will chart the novel's sophisticated hermeneutic, which elucidates the dialectic of history and romance and effects its sublimation. The essay will then close with a note on the social, economic and political origins of Scott's idea of history.

FLORA: DICHOTOMY AND DIALECTIC

Scott establishes Flora's allegorical role, in part, by identifying her with the highland landscape in several important respects: as its “Celtic muse,” its indigenous growth and its presiding deity. At the same time, Scott saturates the description of the landscape with the epithet, romantic. He thereby expands the significance of Flora's figuration of romance to include the national character, the primitivism of the region, and the communal art, hence ethos, of the people. Further, the qualities of the landscape deemed romantic correspond metaphorically with Flora's dominant spiritual traits, so that, on the one hand, the land and its genius exist as extensions of one another, and, on the other, the conceptual form of romance itself is both enlarged and more sharply defined.

Tracking the term romance through this landscape, one finds it associated with the wild and primitive, the natural and fearsome, the elevated and indeterminate, and, as applied to the guiding brook, with a certain raw, unharnessed power. The overall effect of the scenery is fairy-like, broaching a salient property of romance, illusion. All in all, the concept closely approximates the idea of the sublime, as it had been systematically opposed to the beautiful in the 18th century aesthetics. Flora, in fact, implicitly invokes this topos when she informs Edward that the wooer of the Celtic muse must “love the barren rocks more than the fertile valley” (177).

The metaphorical correlation of Flora and the landscape is evident. The uproar of the brook and elevation of the hills corresponds with the simultaneous purity and fury of her passions, particularly her fanatic devotion to the Stuarts. The desolate sublimity of the highlands is consonant with the “ideas and wishes” that she chiefly fostered, which, “respecting great and national events, are not to be brought round without both hazard and bloodshed, and therefore not to be thought of with levity” (171). Finally, the openness and untamed quality of the landscape corresponds with the sincerity and spontaneity of one who though once “the companion of a French princess … had not learned to substitute the gloss of politeness for the reality of feeling” (169). Flora is thus a representative romantic as well as the chief object of romance for Edward.

Flora's Parisian background, however, has left her neither as uncultured nor as artless as the romantic wilds she personifies might suggest. It is in fact upon her dual background, symbolic in itself, that Scott builds the internal division of her character.

There was no appearance of … parsimony in the dress of the lady herself, which was in texture elegant, and even rich, and arranged in a manner which partook partly of the Parisian fashion, and partly of the more simple dress of the Highlands, blended together with great taste.

(167)

Flora's artfulness extends to her dealings with Edward, belying her vaunted “reality of feeling.” Conscious and glad of her power over Edward and aware that “the romance of the scene” (177) has its own persuasive impact on him, Flora displays a clear-eyed realism more appropriate to the historical than the romantic temper. Furthermore, given her revolutionary zeal, her cognizance of Edward's emotions almost necessarily passes into political calculation. Surely she knew what a catch a Waverley was for the rising. Her later attempt to dissuade him from joining the cause for her sake rather confirms her political savvy than absolves her of manipulation. There, she brilliantly mixes contempt for his “lukewarm adherence” (215) with disinterested counsel; she dismisses him from the highlands as unworthy but also for his own good. In the same breath however, she expresses confidence that an enlightened Edward will aid the rising from England, where, as an advance party, he would be of maximum benefit anyway. Here, she strives to enhance the romantic aura of the scene as a way of arousing in him a generalized sympathy for her people.

Scott calls attention to Flora's manipulation of Edward and the inconsistency of character it demonstrates under the pretense of rationalizing her behavior:

the appearance of Flora with the harp, as described, has been justly censured as too theatrical for the lady-like simplicity of her character. But something may be allowed for her French background in which rapt and striking effect always make considerable object.

(Note O, 502)

Instead of affirming Flora's simplicity, the passage subtly impugns it, hinting that her unspoiled air is an effect of histrionic proficiency. Her naturalness derives from elaborate artifice, her simplicity from a social code.

Whereas the romantic side of Flora's personality emerges through her metaphoric consonance with the landscape, the contradictory element can be discerned in what she does to it:

Mossy banks of turf were broken and interrupted by huge fragments of rock, and decorated with trees and shrubs, some of which had been planted under the direction of Flora, but so cautiously, that they added to the grace, without diminishing the romantic wildness of the scene.

(176)

Flora cultivates, tames, Nature, yet with such skill that she contrives to accentuate the sense of wildness. Her art outstrips itself; it excels mere form and attains to the form of formlessness, emphasizing the “broken and interrupted” lineaments of the earth.

Nevertheless, gardening per se figures the historical spirit in Waverley and is out of keeping therefore with Flora's allegorical role.⁵ In addition to being Rose's definitive pursuit, gardening is a notoriously English enterprise. Even as Edward acknowledges that “the romance of his life was over and its real history had commenced” (415), he is guiding his steps toward the world of “English farmhouses, enclosures and hedgerows” (406) against which the arch-Scot Fergus defines himself. Flora astutely prophesies a life of landscaping for Edward, but with a scorn that belies the self-referentiality of her prediction.

I will tell you where he will be at home, my dear, and in his place,—in the quiet circle of domestic happiness … and he will draw plans and landscapes … and dig grottoes …

(370)

In global terms, cultivation equals civilization. It involves the imposition of an ordering principle upon the inchoate life-quality of the wilderness and, as such, is the condition of historical being and thought. In local terms, it represents a pursuit of the beautiful at the expense of the sublime, the refined at the expense of the rugged, contentment rather than “high and perilous enterprise” and domestic emotion rather than grand passion, all of which aligns it, in the novel's symbolic schema, with practical, realistic ameliorism and over against the desperate and deluded idealism Flora putatively incarnates.

Gratifying the desire for form in a traditionally historical vein, Flora's antiquarianism jars even more obviously with her dominant symbolic role. Antiquarianism amounts to the cultivation of culture: the antiquarian collects raw material, organizing and framing it, much as the gardener works the stuff of nature. Flora's second-hand minstrelsy is of this order. Not the bard of the clan but its bardolater, she compiles, translates, and interprets the work for outsiders like Edward; and while doing so, she evinces the compulsive orderliness of the connoisseur. Not coincidentally, her self-reflexive vision of Edward's future, cited above, includes antiquarianism.

The allegorical polarities of Flora's character and conduct fall into a pattern of dialectical interdependence. Like the other antitheses of the novel, they are neither sustained nor resolved; they are absorbed into a symbiotic relationship, which finds its appropriate image in the friendly antithesis of Flora and Rose:

Her most intimate friend had been Rose Bradwardine, to whom she was much attached; and when seen together, they would have afforded an artist two admirable subjects for the gay and the melancholy muse.

(170)

To use a different metaphor, the polarities are analogous to the hemispheres of a working brain, one pole may dominate at a given point—Flora can serve a unilateral symbolic function—but only with the co-operation of the other, the action of which is never entirely invisible.

This contradictory symbiosis reflects the double nature of oppositional structures such as history and romance in Waverley. In the context of the narrative, they are recognizably empirical, cultural and psychological realities whose functioning entails their interplay and synthesis. Just as fundamentally, however, they are mutually defining concepts whose substance depends on their distinction and articulation.

The different types of cultivation that Flora practices foreground these different aspects of the history-romance interaction. The fusion of the two as social realities surfaces in Flora's political cultivation of Edward. Flora subconsciously employs the emotional impact of romantic notions as a rhetorical tool to achieve a specific end, with presumably weighty historical consequences. Her persuasive tact presages that employed by Charles Stuart, the sole historical figure in the novel and arguably the most romantic—

Unaccustomed to the address and manners of a polished court, in which Charles was eminently skillful (sic), his words and his kindness penetrated to the heart of our hero, and easily outweighed all prudential motives. To be thus personally solicited for acceptance by a Prince whose form and manner … answered his ideas of a hero of Romance …

(294-95)

So radically does Charles bring romantic ideas to bear on the historical process that they temporarily conceal and even supersede it. Charles Stuart the historical figure disappears behind Charles Stuart the romantic knight in order to override the “prudential motives” of possible converts by playing, prudentially, upon their romantic impulses.⁶

Flora's interweaving of romance and history is less complete, but even more convoluted. For if her immediate ends are historical, her ultimate response partakes of the sublime and illusory splendor of romance. To sustain her ideals, Flora must resort to expedient policy (including the somewhat disingenuous invocation of romance). Romantic sentiments here both constitute and determine historical particulars. But they themselves are a product of historical forces as well—no less shaped than shaping. Thus one finds the origin of Flora's grand passion is a decidedly domestic emotion, a filial attachment to her natural and adoptive guardians not unlike Rose's affection for the Baron; and this grand passion in turn augments her equally homey affection for Fergus. The thread can be followed endlessly through the shuttle.

On the other side, Flora's ‘natural’ cultivation serves to locate the history-romance dialectic in their differential semantic relation. Only such an interchange of nature and culture could properly frame this development; for it is the erosion of a pre-cultural groundwork that necessitates a differential structure of meaning. Flora, nature-deity and indigenous growth, is a product of hyper-cultural, exotic Paris, her simplicity an effect of manners, the highland wilds she personifies the wilder for her art. By way of these inversions, Scott points to the non-existence of pre-cultural, pre-ideological data. Without this stable and autonomous conception of reality—the nature of Newton and Pope—objective fact, intrinsic meaning and correspondence theories of truth are all untenable. Things signify, are true and false, only within human configurations and only by relation to other components within these systems.⁷ Hence culture itself must be defined, or define itself if you will, by the projection of a first term, nature, from which it claims to succeed and upon which it claims to build. Nature, as Flora's landscaping attests, is a complex achievement of culture, a view unwittingly intimated by Fergus: “A simple and unsublimated taste now, like my own, would prefer a jet'd'eau at Versailles to this cascade” (181). The nature/culture dichotomy in Waverley is irreducible; it is perfectly epitomized in Flora's oxymoronic quality, “lady-like simplicity.” But more than that, the perception that nature is a secondary origin, a dependent first term, brings forth the contradictory symbiosis of history and romance discussed above. This will become clearer as we turn to the hermeneutical paradigm to which the very same perception gives rise.

UPON THE BRAES

The theme of irreducible non-simplicity is especially germane to the historicism/uniformitarianism debate in Scott commentary. A thoroughly historicist concept, it is first thematized in the chapters (beginning with Chapter 8) written immediately after the hiatus in Waverley's composition. Its development thus supports the view that during this period Scott abandoned the uniformitarian vision of nature expressed in the introductory extrapolation on the eternal passions.⁸

These chapters take place “upon the braes,” the border zone between lowlands and highlands, but also a part of the former, itself the border between modern, “historical” England and the traditional, “romantic” portion of Scotland. The braes epitomizes the import and operation of the novel's critical border-motif. The border is both single and double, the dichotomy and the difference. It symbolizes and is the fundamental condition of the relational world of the novel. It brings into view two entities (highland and lowland) and through this demarcating function comes into existence itself. This process goes on at every level; the so-called entities partake equally of border-status. The lowlands, subsuming the braes, serve to discriminate the Scottish highlands from the north of England and are, in the process, delimited. They, like the braes, are an integral entity precisely because they are a border.⁹ In Waverley, there are only borders. The braes is its microcosm and its frame: the place where Edward's adventures begin and end, the gateway, both geographically and narratively, to the “land of romance” and back to the “real history” of hearth and home.

Scott paints the braes as a region of whorled contraries, interlarding his description of Tully-Veolan itself with the term grotesque. Generically speaking, the grotesque is the nexus of the dichotomy and the border. It defines that which has irresoluble contradiction as its constituting principle, that which defies classification, resting in the interval between categories of intelligibility.¹⁰ It subsists in ironic relation to the term permeating the depiction of Flora, purity, especially since it twice attaches to the Baron's gardens.

The genius and chief grotesque of Tully-Veolan is Davie. He occupies so many categorial borders and absorbs so many dichotomies, it is difficult to provide an exhaustive list. A peasant, his life is one of aristocratic ease, his dress of aristocratic finery. In a psychological vein

neither idiocy nor insanity gave that wild, unsettled irregular expression … but something that resembled a compound of both, where the simplicity of the fool was mixed with the extravagance of a crazed imagination.

(82)

Through an allusion to “Shakespeare's roynish clowns” (83), a blend of wisdom and folly is also ascribed to Davie. Most importantly, Davie is thrice said to comprise a mixture of folly and knavery (84, 104, 116); and in between Scott assesses the world in identical terms, as an “admirable compound of knavery and folly” (107). Davie thereby becomes a microcosm of the earthly condition, the grotesque nature of which is correlated with moral failing. Immediately after the first such characterization, Davie is compared explicitly to a grotesque and then dubbed an innocent, an epithet Scott underlines via a second, somewhat forced reference (85-86). The ironic juxtaposition of innocent with grotesque—suggesting endless complexity—and with knavery, the attendant evil, points to the irreducibility of the border-structure.

Scott's major border-structures, such as Davie, are not special cases but exaggerated manifestations of those principles that constitute all entities in the Waverley world. Davie stands as a miniature model, his variegated wardrobe the symbol of Scott's characterization. Scott treats characters as he does concepts, values and qualities; to this extent, he works within the allegorical or humorous tradition. But because he finds layered dichotomies everywhere, his characters transcend this tradition, without, on the other hand, acquiring the psychological density notable in modern literature. The multiple contradictions of a Fergus MacIvor—self-serving politician and generous chief, petty blackmailer and massive threat to kings, throwback to the heroic past and modern utilitarian, endow him with a shallow complexity. Waverley himself, though more minutely worked out, remains a character of this mode, perhaps representing the farthest point it can attain.

Through its thematic dichotomies, the ur-border (the braes) exposes the corresponding doubleness of the items it defines and their equally relational character. To give an example—Scott pairs the Scots with romance and the English with practicality upon Edward's arrival at Tully-Veolan:

Three or four village girls, returning from the well or brook with pitchers and pails upon their heads, formed more pleasing objects … Nor could a lover of the picturesque have challenged either the elegance of their costume, or the symmetry of their shape; although, … a mere Englishman, in search of the comfortable, a word peculiar to his native tongue, might have wished the clothes less scanty, the feet and legs somewhat protected from the weather, the head and complexion shrouded from the sun, or perhaps … the whole person and dress considerably improved, by a plentiful application of spring water, with a quantum sufficit of soap.

(75)

The last phrase however sets the table for turning. The pointless Latin usage anticipates the Baron's verbal style, and the “mere Englishman's” exclusive concern with concrete facts soon finds its match in the Scottish laird: “the baron only encumbered his memory with hard dry outlines—the cold hard dry facts which history delineates” (109). The mind of Edward, conversely, teems with “wild and romantic ideas” (109), largely cultivated under the tutelage of the romantic Sir Everard and Mrs. Rachel. To argue that, being Tories, these two cannot be classified “mere Englishmen” is to postulate yet another border-condition.

To reverse matters, the Baron's romantic attachment to feudal tradition is not disparaged by the practical English, not even by Colonel Talbot, who despises him, but by Fergus, head of the highlanders, the collective personification of romance. He designates the Baron, “the most absurd original that exists north of the Tweed,” largely because his “principal motive for taking up arms” is a romantic one: “the expected pleasure of performing [a ceremony]” (346-47).

The braes form a social and economic border as well. As feudal estate, Tully-Veolan balances the collectivist ethos associated with the tribalism of the clans against the individualism that has become predominant to the south. A topographic equipoise is set up between the common field, “where the joint labor of the villagers cultivated alternate ridges and patches of rye oats, barley and peas” and the private enclosures, the walls of which are surmounted by the Bradwardine family symbol (76). But here too, the braes reveals the border principle at work in the entities it defines. On the one hand, the region falls victim to the predations of Donald Bean Lean, who, proving faithless to the Jacobite cause and his highland brethren, violates the very tribal code that sanctions his thievery. Donald is a self-serving turncoat in the Richard Waverley mold; and his conduct displays the individualistic spirit of capitalism already embedded in the clan system. Inversely, the decrepitude of the lowland feudal structure, its borderline status as feudalism, suggests that Sir Edward's expedient of purchasing what he still believes to be “the natural dependence of the people upon their landlords” with a “copious repast” will better sustain outworn class relations than Bradwardine's title or dormant pillory. The reactionary quasi-feudalism of the south counter-balances the incipient quasi-Whiggery of the north.

The central political figure in Waverley possesses the same border-structure. Charles is a divisive addition to Great Britain. The civil conflict he effects is the political analogue to the novel's overriding structure of contradiction; and Scott connects Edward's part in it with the Fall, reinforcing the link between moral transgression and ontological division.¹¹ But Scott deliberately and repeatedly emphasizes that the Stuarts are the royal house de jure, i.e. the rightful dynasty in law and, given monarchical pretense, the eyes of God. Charles is not an addition at all, nor can he be, in principle, a divisive factor; or, paradoxically, he is a primary addition, a divisive first term. In keeping with the overall thematic structure, there is no isolated fall from political unity, no point at which intractable antimonies supervene or are incurred. The entry of the heir de jure from a land symbolic of admixture¹² encapsulates and nationalizes the theme of irreducible non-simplicity. The border in Waverley is the first term.

The border, however, is inherently unstable. The non-existence of pre-cultural data entails that truth and significance be relative and contingent. To over-simplify, the concepts of history and romance subsist in a figure-ground relationship; but which is the applied figure and which the implied ground at any point varies with a wide range of social and historical circumstances bearing upon the novel's entire network of oppositions.

The unrecognized innovation in Waverley, the step that makes Scott fully contemporary, is the wedding of a proto-structuralist hermeneutic to a proto-historical one. Moreover, as the foregoing denotes, he shows these two models, often thought antithetical, to evolve logically from the same insight and so imply one another. Given the absence of a fixed nature, the economy or structured interplay of conceptual differences at once defines historical reality as its ground and arises from it as its function. Whereas Marx and Hegel anchored their famous dialectics in trans-historical realities, Scott ties his version to a structuralist projection that is no less its consequence than its basis. The paradigm as a whole is itself irreducibly synthetic. As a result, it resists discursive formulation.

Instead, Scott provides a vast and lucid metaphor of its operation, the bifurcated stream:

In a spot, about a quarter of a mile from the castle, two brooks, which formed the little river had their junction. The larger of the two came down the long bare valley … the other stream … seemed to issue from a very narrow and dark opening … These streams were different also in character. The larger was placid, and even sullen in its course, wheeling in deep eddies, or sleeping in dark blue pools; but the motions of the lesser brook [which leads to the “land of romance” described above] were rapid and furious … all foam and uproar.

(174-75)

The two streams can be identified with an array of oppositions pertinent to this discussion: Rose/Flora, Hanover/Stuart, civilized/wild, prudence/passion, and, clearly, history/romance.¹³ But the very wealth of possible associations here suggests that the image can be interpreted on a more comprehensive level as a hermeneutical model, particularly if one takes into account the river, largely ignored in critical commentary, that is formed by the junction of the two streams.

The spatial configuration of the stream suggests the structuralist element of Scott's thought; it images the differential unit that issues in positive meaning (the river). The streams' motion reflects the historical element, the confluence of their waters symbolizing the dialectic fusion of history and romance as social and psychic realities. Taken in both respects, the figure signifies the reciprocal production of these two elements. The current (phenomenal flux) inscribes, replenishes and redefines the stream beds (categories of sense) which not only direct but actually constitute it as such. The result is the appearance of a “reality,” the river, which largely submerges the complexities of its formative process. Structure and flux, stream-bed and current are thus neither wholly one nor two but both at once, irreducibly synthetic. This quality sustains the structure as a whole. Because the streams are disparately formed, they cannot but redefine themselves on a differential basis. Most importantly, the streams will continue to differ in the depth of their activity. At the end of Waverley, Scott fixes history and romance in an analogous relation.

Taken holistically, the image also reveals a dilemma confronting Scott: how can one calibrate the ideas of history and romance within a structure of meaning that creates, and is created by, historical circumstance? For a radical historicism, this problem is insoluble. Scott's two-fold paradigm does, however, enable a sublimation of it. Crossing its synchronic and diachronic aspects, Scott distills something akin to Nietzschean perspectivism. There are in Waverley not just differences, but differences between these differences based on one's vantage-point. Although this has the air of a further complication, it actually constitutes something of a solution. Whereas the differential structure of meaning explains the breakdown of categories, differential perspective can explain, provisionally, how distinctions appear, how one category sufficiently dominates to become the figure to the other's ground.

The dialectic of history and romance implicit in Flora's antiquarianism illustrates this principle. Flora's historical side, bred by her contact with modern culture, works to preserve artifacts largely for their romantic appeal. Yet this appeal rests in a rude sublimity and collectivist ethos that are recognizable as such only to someone with modern tastes and historical impulses. The less acculturated clansmen do not find minstrelsy romantic; only someone outside the immediate cultural matrix would; someone, for example, who knows the “characters of Arcadia” well enough to find them “insipid” (181). The quality of romance appears only at some culturally determined distance.

Similarly, Edward finds Flora romantic due to the type and degree of her cultural distance from him. That is to say, the romantic qualities she displays—sublimity, primitiveness, etc.—are no less the effects of her unfamiliarity than its occasion. Scott elucidates the relevance of distance to romance in his description of Edward's access of passion for Flora upon his return to the lowlands:

Distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as in real perspective. Objects are softened, and rounded, and rendered doubly graceful; the harsher and more ordinary points of character are mellowed down, and those by which it is remembered are the more striking outlines that mark sublimity, grace, or beauty. There are mists, too, in the mental, as well as the natural horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing in distant objects, and there are happy lights, to stream in full glory upon those points that can profit by brilliant illumination.

(225, emphasis added)

The effects of distance described here recall numerous romantic instances in Waverley. In making clear the indistinguishability of inherent property from perspectival distortion, the passage puts oppositions like reality/illusion, history/romance on a new footing.

Garside and Iser have discussed perspective in Waverley primarily as an interpersonal phenomenon. They remark the subjectivism implicit in Scott's view of reactions to, and accounts of historical events.¹⁴ Clearly, an examination of history and romance based on differential perspective finds such instances of subjective variance important, particularly when they are connected with cultural determinations, as in our own contrast of Flora's response to minstrelsy with that of the clan at large. But the difficulty of distinguishing the two categories cannot be reduced to a “one man's romance is another's history” formula, which ignores the radically diachronic property of their relation.

To emphasize this property, Scott projects the issue of perspective primarily through the transformations of Edward, whose viewpoint governs the narrative. His constitutional vacillation represents a miniature parody of differential historicity, and the name Waverley itself connotes continuously bilateral motion. Perhaps that is why Scott entitled the novel Waverley, instead of simply Sixty Years Since. In any event, it is Waverley who moves through the novel, gauging phenomena at different distances as he grows and changes. The most important object of his attention in this regard is unquestionably Rose Bradwardine.

ROSE: DEPTH PERCEPTION

Rose's milieu, like Flora's, signals her symbolic function. Whereas Flora's element is wild, open, and sublime, a masterpiece of nature, Rose's is pretty, cramped and civilized, a flower of culture: a “small but pleasant apartment,” adorned with art work (110). Not only is horticulture in evidence, the gardens are significantly de-naturalized through enclosure, stressing the tie between cultivation and the will to order. The flowers “under [Rose's] special protection” are crowded into a “bartizan or projecting gallery.” Nearby can be seen “the formal garden, with its high bounding walls … contracted, as it seemed, to a mere parterre” (111). The scene has a claustrophobic hothouse effect, with Rose herself the main botanical attraction. The only opening is southward, toward England, the national symbol and repository of the domestic, commonsensical and refined values of which Rose's environment is so redolent.

Rose's element is a mirror of her soul. Her “natural good sense” (111), her feel for the social amenities, and her insistence on good manners (indicated by her displeasure with Edward's brusqueness following the Balmawhapple affair) are exactly what one might infer from her living space. But even as Scott establishes her allegorical role, he again reveals the contradictions within the single term, in this case raising the issue of perspective.

Ironically, Rose's lack of romantic appeal for Edward is imputed to qualities metaphorically correlative not to her milieu but to the highland country—not wildness certainly, but relative naturalness, openness, spontaneity, sincerity, and innocence:

Rose Bradwardine … had not precisely the sort of beauty or merit which captivates a romantic imagination in early youth. She was too frank, too confiding, too kind, amiable qualities … but destructive of the marvellous, with which a youth of imagination delights to address the empress of his affections. Was it possible to bow, to tremble, and to adore, before the timid, yet playful little girl, who now asked Edward to mend her pen, now to construe a stanza in Tasso? … All these incidents have their fascination on the mind at a certain period of life, but not when a youth is entering it. …

(121)

The passage as a whole makes it clear that romance is not only in the eye of the beholder but at some distance from it. The point is subsequently underscored:

I knew a very accomplished and sensible young man cured of a violent passion for a pretty woman, whose talents were not equal to her face and figure, by being permitted to bear her company for a whole afternoon. … And although Miss Bradwardine was a very difficult character, it seems probable that the very intimacy of their intercourse prevented his feeling for her other sentiments than those of a brother. …

(121)

Rose does not lack romantic qualities; rather she is not at the right cultural distance for Edward to see them. Her allegorical status hinges upon this fact. History, then, represents what is so common one hardly notices it. I shall return to this point shortly.

Far from depriving her of romantic potential, Rose's sheltered existence has left her ripe to play the romantic heroine. She is not only natural but indeterminate—“A character young and inexperienced”—sincere and spontaneous, simple and solitary, prepared to give and receive affection. Scott calls attention to these qualities, in preparation for the comic conclusion. Rose is not, as one critic has it, another Cecilia Stubbs,¹⁵ but an open-ended possibility, a litmus test of perspective. Thus, her name sounds domesticated by comparison with Flora but it also resonates of the medieval romance. Similarly, she is toasted as a romantic “deity,” “the Rose of Tully-Veolan,” but the circumstance being farcical, she seems no more glorified than ridiculed by the affair (85).

Just as Flora seems even more romantic to Edward upon his return to the lowlands and to Rose, Rose assumes romantic nuances once he is swept up in Flora's world. Thus the differential relation is maintained. Weary of grandiose movements and passion, and feeling the stress of frenzied activity, Edward comes to think Rose's domestic affections and amiable traits perfectly natural yet invaluable, while deeming Flora bizarre and artificial:

Rose Bradwardine? … I rejected her simple, natural and affectionate attachment instead of cherishing it to tenderness … and dedicated myself to one who will never love mortal man, unless Old Warwick the king maker should rise from the dead.

(376)

She [Flora] is taller, and her manner more formed; but many people think Miss Bradwardine's more natural.

(377)

Edward finally articulates his resolve to marry Rose in London, at a great distance, in every sense, from her and what she represents. Not coincidentally, he professes his love in the same speech in which he renounces “the plumed troops and the big wars [that] used to enchant [him] in poetry” (i.e. at a remove) (425-26).

Distance is most effective as a condition of romance when it poses the threat of irrevocability. All things romantic in Waverley partake of pastness or loss. Rose only begins to haunt Edward's imagination after she and the domestic tranquility she symbolizes seem forever lost to him. In a cultural analogue, Flora and her battle song evoke a virtually extinct way of life; and it is no accident that the romantic appeal of the highlanders (Fergus, Flora, Callum Beg) reaches its peak preparatory to their disappearance. The romantic effect of the dominant political figure, who is part of history in the making, derives from his associations with a dynastic past, which the reader at any rate knows is irredeemable. Even Davie borders on the romantic when the properly elegaic note is struck (cf. 106, 435-36).

Scott interweaves romance with retrospection through a well-defined pattern of sunset imagery. Edward's youthful “visions [are] brilliant and as fading as those of an evening sky” (55). As Flora plays the Scottish harp, taught her by “one of the last harpers of the Western highlands … The sun, now stooping to the west, gave a rich and varied tinge to all the objects which surrounded” (176, emphasis added). Romance is that which is gilded by desolation, actual or anticipated. Of Preston, Scott reports, “Although the Highlanders marched on very fast, the sun was already declining when they arrived …” (331). The uprising is romantic because it is effectively over at its inception.

The last of this imagistic thread to romance carries its interpretation with it:

The pleasure of being allied to a man of the Baron's high worth … was also an agreeable consideration. … His absurdities, which had appeared grotesquely ludicrous during his prosperity, seemed, in the sunset of his fortune, to be harmonized and assimilated with the noble features of his character, so as to add peculiarity without exciting ridicule.

(450, emphasis added)

This passage broaches the power of pastness to color, soften, and ennoble, clearly recalling the passage above on the effects of distance. Because the Baron is a throwback to an eradicated social system, even his peculiarities have value.

Obviously, the condition of real history's emergence from the ground of romance must be equally tied up with the issue of perspective. None of the intrinsic historical criteria, suggested at points in the text, will hold; for at a retrospective distance the very same qualities are constitutive of romance. The paradox is that in Waverley romance occupies the space traditionally allocated to history. Not only does history generally entail retrospective distance, but some of the very distortions Scott connects with distance are part and parcel of any historical account. More striking outlines will be remembered, certain objects concealed and others emphasized as a result of the principle of selection that marks all systematic accounts. The infusion of narrative form both indicates distance and increases it.

The Waverley family annals, another of the novel's frames, dramatize this point. The legends of Wilibert, Nigel and Lady Alice defy the categories of history and romance. They are adjudged factual and have prescriptive force to match, yet they are also fantastic romances that “perpetuate what is rare and valuable in ancient manners.” Garside chalks this ambiguity up to the “intangibility of the distant past.”¹⁶ But the latest addition to them, the tale of Edward's “gallant behavior in the military character” (478) admits no such explanation. Given the proximity of report to event, Talbot's generous misrepresentation of Edward's action and the Waverleys' more generous misrepresentation thereof denote that the principles of selection, suppression and distortion are ineluctable attributes of distance, whatever its quantity. Commenting on Edward's glorification, Garside argues, “Scott is not pleased to rest entirely with history, at least not in the limiting sense of objective fact.”¹⁷ But Scott's thesis is meta-historical. One cannot rest in or seize upon the objective fact or even a faithful historical representation in the Kantian sense. History and romance do not just converge in the distant twilight of legend. The first step toward traditional history is the first step toward romance.

To stand free of romance, yet remain an alternative to it, history must coincide with immediate reality. Scott makes this point but at the same time indicates that history can never be apprehended as such. A principle of epistemological delay operates in the novel to convey the double theme. Facts are always detected at a temporal remove. This motif is explicitly established early on; news of Richard Waverley's activities “came upon Sir Everard gradually, and drop by drop … distilled through the … procrastinating alembic of Dyer's Weekly Letter … a slow succession of intelligence” (39). A similar time-lag in the detection process leads to Edward's loss of commission and Houghton's death.

The chief example of this type of deferred discovery, the nursing incident, clearly demonstrates the relevance of this motif to the romance-history distinction. We have seen that Rose's role as historical muse is bound up with her invisibility, metaphorically speaking, her failure to make an impression. In keeping with this, Edward is unable to identify her the entire time she ministers to him and presides over his convalescence. He imagines that “a female … had appeared to flit around his couch” (275), but his subsequent efforts to satisfy his curiosity prove fruitless. During this time, Edward's “sole amusement was gazing … upon a large brook, which raged and foamed through a rocky channel” (277). The similarity of this brook to that highland waterway to the “land of romance” (see 262 above) is marked, and the significance of its correlation with Rose's concealment is clear.

It might be said that Edward cannot see the “real history” for the romance. He is, after all, looking for his nurse to be Flora (275-76). But on another level, the incident suggests that history itself is imperceptible; what one approaches is always already romance. This is subsequently confirmed. First, Edward does not discover his nurse's identity until much later, when he is already romantically predisposed to her. The recognition scene is immediately preceded by Edward's discovery that the same romantic waterway runs through Tully-Veolan, a symbolic index of Rose's transformation, past and present, in Edward's mind. Further, the actual report of Rose's exertions suggests that they will in time pass into the Waverley annals. Janet performs the requisite apotheosis—“… a leddy that hasna her equal in the world—Miss Rose Bradwardine” (444)—while Edward's rapt attention to her account clearly recalls his youthful receptions of the family legends—“Never did music sound sweeter … than the drowsy tautology, with which old Janet detailed every circumstance, thrilled upon the ears of Waverley …” (445). Finally, this intelligence induces the most cliched romantic sentiment of the novel: “To Rose Bradwardine, then, he owed the life which he now thought he could willingly have laid down to serve her” (450).

More interestingly, Scott manages to inflict a similar sense of epistemological delay upon the reader. He forestalls the immediate experience of represented historical events by stepping out of the progressive narrative frame just as such events are about to unfold and relating the end and consequence, which, he points out, the reader already knows. The battles at Preston and Carlisle feature this narrative tactic. Most striking in this regard, however, is the report of the Jacobite decision to return home. Scott exploits the fact that none of the typical motivations for such a move—shortages, threatened mutiny, compelling defeats—obtain and simply apprises the reader, without warning, that the decision having since been made, the retreat had commenced. The most intriguing event in this sequence, the debate among the chieftains at Darby, is recapitulated summarily and only after the outcome is reported and its implications cited.

Scott creates this feeling of after-the-fact discovery solely with respect to historical occurrences. He thereby conveys, in a visceral manner, a sense of history as a submarine force depositing consequences that can only be seized upon retrospectively. Thus, the dialectical model of the history-romance correlation, presupposed in the novel's antimonous rhetorical structure, is gradually, insidiously—“historically,” if you will—supplanted by a model of necessary projection. History, for Scott, resembles Derridean presence or the pre-cultural data discussed above. Like them, it is a construct of immediacy, an unimpeachable source. Like them, it can never be observed, but its projection is absolutely essential to the differential operation of meaning, an operation whose own necessity lies precisely in the unverifiability of such constructs. History is Scott's version of the unfathomable ground of being. As the wave is to water or energy to matter, history is to the manifestations of temporal process; it is not them, nor is it in them, but it does not exist without them. Rather, it is presumed to move through them; and it conforms, in this sense, to Hume's idea of causality, which surely influenced Scott.

In accordance with this paradigmatic shift, Scott refines the relational metaphor of the bifurcated stream. Although it emphasized the complex dialectic of history and romance, setting them in a continuously changing figure-ground relationship, that metaphor held the paradigm of surface manifestation and inferred depth in potentia; the romantic brook being all surface uproar, the historical stream “wheeling in deep eddies.” At the novel's end, Scott returns to the river imagery to give his historical model its final form:

But 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.

(492, emphasis added)

Change and development only become apparent at some considerable retrospective distance from their source, yet they occur steadily and even rapidly. Thus the surface manifestations of life are misinterpreted as being stable until they come into a perspective which leaves them inevitably subject to other distortions. Simply stated, we can only focus at a distance, at which point our focus is falsifying. History is to this superficial flux of images as an undercurrent, hidden and unrecognizable. It is imagined in order to explain the changes in perspective, the increases in distance, the manifestations of progress, the continual leavening of the whole romantic superstructure. History stands on the last braes, seeming at once fundamental, an immanent force, and unreal, a fictional construct.

POSTSCRIPT

The ramifications of Scott's final formula for the historical novel are telling. By denying the accessibility of the historical undercurrent, Scott makes the historical novel a prototype of the standard history.¹⁸ All histories are, after all, historical romances. A true history has less to do with fidelity to fact, which is impossible in the absolute and unverifiable in any case, than with the authority accorded it by members of a given community.

Scott introduces the idea of competing histories and their ties to other forms of social authority in a sly, prejudicial way:

It did not, indeed, he [the Baron] said, become them, as had occurred in late instances, to propone their prosapia, a lineage which rested for the most part on the vain and fond rhymes of their Seannachies or Bhairds, as aequiponderate with the evidence of ancient charters and royal grants of antiquity. …

(130-31)

Two forms of historical document are juxtaposed: the legal charter, the ancestor of the history proper, and the poetic charter, the forefather of the historical romance. The baron weakens his advocacy of the former by the absurd pomposity of his speech, but his argument from antiquity actually favors the contemporary novelist rather than the historian. Scott works in and claims descent from the ancient tradition of the Scottish bards, while the system of laws from which the historian draws his authority is almost brand new. The defender of the ancient charters loses his estate by the end of the novel, and it must be repurchased in accordance with the revised economic and legal apparatus of land distribution. The romance can thus claim precedence to the historical, just as the historical undercurrent always constitutes a secondary projection from the manifestation it is felt to cause.

The copious notes Scott appends to the text should be perused in light of this hierarchy. Scott's pose as an editor of history is designedly threadbare; the notes are shot through with references to literary texts, which are, ironically, invoked to support claims of historical veracity. Moreover, and more importantly, history is pressed into editorial service for romance. It becomes that most secondary of things, a footnote.

One can say then, that Scott founds the new form of novel on the collapse rather than the combination of generic categories. He shows the hybrid to be, in a sense, no hybrid at all. Yet he does crush the taxonomic boxes at both ends; so that by a perverse turnabout, the trace of an opposition remains. The “deep and smooth” river that submerges history in romance also submerges the romance at hand in history. It images the apparent social progress since the events represented—specifically “the gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce,” and “The political and economic effects of these changes” (492)—and in so doing breaks the conventional literary frame, situating the novel, no less than the tale it tells, in real time. The novel is foregrounded as an historical artifact. But of course such artifacts are surface manifestations, hence already a part of romance in the larger sense.

In order to emphasize his point, Scott applies the law of deferred discovery to the novel as a whole. He embeds this river image and its interpretation in a chapter headed “Postscript That Should Have Been Preface.” Not only does the phrase define Scott's view of history, it suggests that he did not fully grasp what he was about until after he had finished. His epistemological conclusions would thus seem an accurate reflection of his experience, which, for its part, authenticates them. Thus, the mechanism of epistemological delay itself could be read as a surface manifestation of an underlying “historical” force, in this case Scott's own uncertainty, and perhaps anxiety, during the novel's composition. The contrary view is no less indicated, however; that Scott's conclusions, coming as they do at a retrospective distance, are inevitably distorted, indeed that the very law of epistemological delay and the whole historical paradigm to which it is attached must partake of romance insofar as they have come into view for Scott and his readers. In any event, this device of delay is both clever and appropriate. It further breaks down the conventional frame, inscribing the novel in the history of its composition and its consumption, while at the same time affirming that this history remains a projection.

Because of such frame-breaking devices, Scott's “personal voice,” and the kinship between Scott and Edward, Waverley has invited more than its share of biographical and historical commentary.¹⁹ Although my intention has been to work the other side of the street, as it were, I do feel that several aspects of Scott's circumstances have particular relevance to the historical paradigm I have discussed and the ideas that underlie it.

Most of the plausible analyses in this vein place particular emphasis on the polarities that marked Scott's sensibility: affection for tradition vs. satisfaction at commercial progress (Fleishman), appreciation of the compassionate life of the Scottish Enlightenment (Daiches), knee-jerk romanticism vs. an awareness of its dangers (Mayhead).²⁰ The political manifestations of these spiritual dichotomies were that he was a progressive Tory on the one hand and, on the other, an anti-Jacobite who affirmed that he would have “fought against the convictions of my better reason for [Charles] even to the bottom of the gallows.”²¹ These oppositions, which are constant with those of Waverley, are generally invoked to support one or another compromise theory of history. Daiches speaks of an ambivalent version of history, Fleishman of a paradoxical “evolution within the status quo,” Devlin of progress founded on the changeable and universal constitution of the human spirit; even Lukacs, who might be expected to search out dialectic, finds in Scott's work an historical middle road.²²

Without quarreling with the underlying basis of these constructs, I would argue, in effect, that Scott's historical vision was more imaginative and more ambitious than has generally been recognized. To account for it, it is necessary to abandon for a time Scott's express duality of temper and turn to the circumstantial contradictions that befell him.

Underlying Scott's historical paradigm is, as we have seen, the concept of the border, which was deeply ingrained in his experience. Southern Scotland was considered border territory and Scott thought himself a border-poet.²³ What is important about the border is that in being one thing it is at the same time something else distinct from and, indeed, opposed to it: in being a start, it is an end; as an exit, it is an entry: being part one entity it is part of another; and as the border of both it is a thing unto itself. Scott occupied a number of such border positions. In an aesthetic vein, he was a Scotch writer addressing a primarily English audience. The more he played to that foreign audience, the more prominent a fact his own nationality became. He was thought a distinctively Scottish writer in a way he would not have been had his work circulated exclusively or even principally in Scotland.

The borders multiply in the political arena. Waverley shows that Toryism and Jacobitism were historically opposed to Whiggery and Hanoverianism, as right wing to left. Yet Scott, in being a Tory was also a Hanoverian; the progressive faction, possessing authority, becomes that which is conserved. On the other side, Scottish Nationalism, a Jacobite sentiment, was being exploited by advocates of the French Revolution²⁴—the old and new order, the radical right and left came together. Nor, as Scott was surely aware, was this a wholly novel development in Scottish politics. Sharing fear and hatred of England, the Jacobite Party and the County Party, an extreme Whig, Presbyterian faction, struck an alliance during the Parliamentary debates preceding the union in order to block concessions to their southern neighbor. The situation was reportedly felt to be an embarrassment, doubtless because it was grotesque: Jacobite and Whig differentially defined each other in Scotland at that time, yet in this instance one was a good Jacobite by being a good Whig.²⁵

An even more radical case: the Highlanders did not in fact consider themselves Scots; they applied this term with contempt and loathing to the Lowlanders, whose progenitors, they felt, had dispossessed their own of the best parts of the land.²⁶ Yet by keeping their cultural distance, by ferociously holding on to the distinguishing traits of their society, they came, over time, to be seen as the real, pure and original Scotsmen. Scott, an antiquarian, was doubtless aware of this anomaly.

The last of these borders involves Scott's place in the changing social and economic order. Scott was attuned to the capitalistic tenor of his day. He broke away from an established publisher to enter as an equal partner in a new publishing and printing firm. He then took the initially substantial profits from this venture and bought his estate in Abbotsford. He planted the grounds, renovated the house “after the model of an old hall” and there passed his antiquarian studies, occupying a feudal world of sense and spirit.²⁷ He proceeded through the capitalistic structure of the present and future to the agrarian tradition of the past. In being one with the former, he became one with the latter, a fact substantiated further by the baronetry of Abbotsford he received in 1820.²⁸

These border-cases, in aggregate, must have impressed Scott deeply. More than that, they exemplified theoretic means by which he could gratify his conflicting desires, by which he could eat his cake and have it too. The last example appears in fairly unsublimated form at the close of Waverley, where it takes the form of a wish-fulfillment. The baron's estate is lost to Inchgrabbit, betokening the passage of the historical baton to an order founded on Adam Smith's contradictory notion of private greed for public good. But Edward's participation in the free-market system restores the Baron to his estate. He is, if anything, more secure in it, being beyond monarchical whim and prerogative.

This conclusion can be fairly criticized as a fairy tale imposition on an historical novel, a dodge;²⁹ yet it is wholly consistent with Scott's historical paradigm, which is itself a rather sanguine accommodation of circumstance to desire. If, as outlined, history is always imperceptible and romance alone can be apprehended, if the immediate or the present is always unrealized and things can appear only at a retrospective distance where their irrevocability softens and embellishes them, then a commitment to the new order will necessarily both create and dignify the old. The development of a modern industrial Scotland will bring her past into glorious view, and only through dull, transparent domesticity can the heroic shine as such. The Hanover ascendency enshrines the Stuart cause; capitalism defines and aggrandizes feudalism. In brief, under this model, progress, and progress alone, can engender tradition, the value of which lies precisely in its being not-progress. Scott establishes a temporal border, where to be one thing, progressive or contemporary, was to be its opposite, reactionary or conservative. One can see this mechanism at work in the development of the paradigm: Scott's modern analytical skepticism leads him to posit a wholly romantic and retrospective world. One can see it too in Scott's career; a novel like Waverley, which ultimately expresses a pro-union position, played a large part in the making of Scottish identity.

On the other side, those activities, such as fiction and antiquarianism, that move one mentally, spiritually or emotionally into the romance of the past, that makes the old order seem immediate and somehow normative, place one at a distance from the present day and grant insight into it and appreciation of its worth. Scott gives up the possibility of objective truth and intrinsic meaning to maximize the value of life, valorizing the past from the present and the present from the past. Far from resting in ambivalence or acquiescing in compromise, Scott contrived a paradigm that allowed his opposed impulses to satisfy each other. He plays both sides against the middle; he exaggerates polarities to the point at which they collapse upon themselves: “Indeed, the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those with a foundation in fact” (493).

Notes

1. I have used the Penguin English Library edition, Andrew Hook ed., which is based on the Centenary edition of 1870-71. The Penguin text includes Scott's Notes, which have a direct bearing on my discussion here, as well as the additional material of the 1829 edition.

2. Scott's conservative tendencies are emphasized by Alexander Welsh in The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1963) 82-92. His progressivism is articulated in Marxist terms by Georg Lukács in his classic section on Scott in The Historical Novel (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1962) 30-62, and, with reference to speculative history, by Avrom Fleishman in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971) 37-101.

3. Lukacs of course opts for a version of historicism and Donald Davie—in The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge, 1961) 33 ff.—seems to as well. Welsh, Fleishman and D. D. Devlin (The Author of Waverley [London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971] 40-41) all see Scott balancing the two historical programs.

4. A. O. J. Cockshut, The Achievement of Walter Scott (N.Y.: NYU Press, 1969) 127. Cockshut points out that all of Scott's best books have something of a double focus.

5. Robin Mayhead, Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973) 25. Mayhead notes this cultivation as unromantic and deems it an extension of Flora's orderliness of mind, which is equally so.

6. Historical accounts indicate Charles actually performed in exactly this manner. Hume P. Brown, History of Scotland (N.Y.: Octagon, 1971) 288 and W. C. MacKenzie, The Highlands and Isles of Scotland (Edinburgh: AMS, 1971) 118-19.

7. To paraphrase Ferdinand de Saussure, without positive terms there are only differences. See Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw, 1959) 120.

8. Davie registers the view that Scott changed courses, The Heyday of Walter Scott 26. For the novelist's uniformitarian views see Waverley Introductory 35.

9. Scott hailed from what was termed border country, as I note in my conclusion, and so would be sensitive to the concept's possibilities.

10. Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) Ch. i.

11. Donald Bean Lean is said to have “played the part of the tempter” respecting the letters, in which he punned on Gardiner's name, calling him Adam.

12. For the operation of France as a principal of admixture, witness Flora's cultivated simplicity of dress and mien, Fergus' alienation from his traditional role and, a more purely emblematic example, the French text Edward reads, “Memoirs Scarcely More Faithful Than Romances … Romances So Well Written as to be Hardly Distinguished from Memoirs” 49.

13. The Hanover/Stuart opposition is remarked by Devlin in The Author of Waverley 64. For the prudence/passion antimony see David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge, 1979) 26.

14. Wolfgang Iser, “Fiction—The Filter of History” in The Implied Reader (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974) 81-101. P. D. Garside, “Waverley's Pictures of the Past,” ELH [Journal of English Literary History] 44 (1977): 664.

15. Devlin, The Author of Waverley 72.

16. P. D. Garside, “Waverley's Pictures of the Past,” ELH 44 (1977): 666.

17. P. D. Garside, “Waverley's Pictures of the Past,” ELH 44 (1977): 676.

18. Iser argues (The Implied Reader 96) that for Scott history “can be best captured by aesthetic means,” imagination giving access to a reality beyond fact.

19. For Scott's personal voice see David Daiches, “Waverley: The Presence of the Author” in Nineteenth Century Scottish Fiction, ed. Ian Campbell (Manchester: Carcanet, 1979) 15.

20. Fleishman, The English Historical Novel 38, Daiches, “Waverley: The Presence of the Author” in Nineteenth Century Scottish Fiction 16 and Mayhead, Walter Scott 29.

21. Scott's “Letter to Miss Clephane” quoted by Daiches 15 and Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1871) 786. On Scott's political conflicts see Lockhart 716. Lockhart reports that Scott stayed a Jacobite to the end, and worried over his disloyalty at heart to a monarch who had befriended him.

22. For Daiches' view see Francis Hart, Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historical Survival (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1966) 5; for Fleishman's see The English Historical Novel 45; for Devlin's, The Author of Waverley 40-42; for Lukacs' see The Historical Novel.

23. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1970) 1: 171, 213.

24. Henry Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution (N.Y.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1912) 65-67.

25. For an account of this situation see Hume P. Brown, History of Scotland 86-95.

26. W. C. MacKenzie, The Highlands and Isles of Scotland 118-19.

27. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott 306-36, 373 and 576.

28. Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott 460.

29. P. D. Garside, “Waverley's Pictures of the Past” ELH 44 (1977): 677.