Lang Andrew
Waverley; Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since
It must be admitted that if Scott wished to make “Waverley” “flag” in the beginning, he succeeded extremely well, – too well for many modern readers, accustomed to a leap into the midst of the story. These introductory chapters,” he observes in a note on the fifth of them, “have been a good deal censured as tedious and unnecessary; yet there are circumstances recorded in them which the Author has not been able to persuade himself to retract or cancel.” These “circumstances” are probably the studies of Waverley, his romantic readings, which are really autobiographic. Scott was, apparently, seriously of opinion that the “mental discipline” of a proper classical education would have been better for himself than his own delightfully desultory studies. Ballantyne could not see what Waverley’s reading had to do with his adventures and character. Scott persisted in being of another mind. He himself, writing to Morritt, calls his hero “a sneaking piece of imbecility;” but he probably started with loftier intentions of “psychological analysis” than he fulfilled. He knew, and often said, in private letters, as in published works, that he was no hand at a respectable hero. Borderers, buccaneers, robber, and humorsome people, like Dugald Dalgetty and Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Macwheeble, whom he said he preferred to any person in “Waverley,” were the characters he delighted in. We may readily believe that Shakspeare too preferred Jacques and the Fat Knight to Orlando or the favoured lover of Anne Page. Your hero is a difficult person to make human, – unless, indeed, he has the defects of Pendennis or Tom Jones. But it is likely enough that the Waverley whom Scott had in his mind in 1805 was hardly the Waverley of 1813. His early English chapters are much in the ordinary vein of novels as they were then written; in those chapters come the “asides” by the author which the “Edinburgh Review” condemned. But there remains the kindly, honourable Sir Everard, while the calm atmosphere of English meadows, and the plump charms of Miss Cecilia Stubbs, are intended as foils to the hills of the North, the shy refinement of Rose, and the heroic heart of Flora Mac-Ivor. Scott wished to show the remote extremes of civilization and mental habit co-existing in the same island of Scotland and England. Yet we regret such passages as “craving pardon for my heroics, which I am unable in certain cases to resist giving way to,” and so forth. Scott was no Thackeray, no Fielding, and failed (chiefly in “Waverley”) when he attempted the mood of banter, which one of his daughters, a lady “of Beatrice’s mind,” “never got from me,” he observes.
In any serious, attempt to criticise “Waverley” as a whole, it is not easy to say whether we should try to put ourselves at the point of view of its first readers, or whether we should look at it from the vantage-ground of to-day. In 1811 the dead world of clannish localty was fresh in many memories. Scott’s own usher had often spoken with a person who had seen Cromwell enter Edinburgh after Dunbar. He himself knew heroes of the Forty-five, and his friend Lady Louisa Stuart had been well acquainted with Miss Walkinshaw, sister of the mistress of Charles Edward. To his generation those things were personal memories, which to us seem as distant as the reign of Men-Ka-Ra. They could not but be “carried off their feet” by such pictures of a past still so near them. Nor had they other great novelists to weaken the force of Scott’s impressions. They had not to compare him with the melancholy mirth of Thackeray, and the charm, the magic of his style. Balzac was of the future; of the future was the Scott of France, – the boyish, the witty, the rapid, the brilliant, the inexhaustible Dumas. Scott’s generation had no scruples about “realism,” listened to no sermons on the glory of the commonplace; like Dr. Johnson, they admired a book which “was amusing as a fairy-tale.” But we are overwhelmed with a wealth of comparisons, and deafened by a multitude of homilies on fiction, and distracted, like the people in the Erybyggja Saga, by the strange rising and setting, and the wild orbits of new “weirdmoons” of romance. Before we can make up our minds on Scott, we have to remember, or forget, the scornful patronage of one critic, the over-subtlety and exaggerations of another, the more than papal infallibility of a third. Perhaps the best critic would be an intelligent school-boy, with a generous heart and an unspoiled imagination. As his remarks are not accessible, as we must try to judge “Waverley” like readers inured to much fiction and much criticism, we must confess, no doubt, that the commencement has the faults which the first reviewers detected, and it which Scott acknowledged. He is decidedly slow in getting to business, as they say; he began with more of conscious ethical purpose than he went on, and his banter is poor. But when once we enter the village of Tully-Veolan, the Magician finds his wand. Each picture of place or person tells, – the old butler, the daft Davie Gellatley, the solemn and chivalrous Baron, the pretty natural girl, the various lairds, the factor Macwheeble, – all at once become living people, and friends whom we can never lose. The creative fire of Shakspeare lives again. The Highlanders – Evan Dhu, Donald Bean Lean, his charming daughter, Callum Beg, and all the rest – are as natural as the Lowlanders. In Fergus and Flora we feel, indeed, at first, that the author has left his experience behind, and is giving us creatures of fancy. But they too become human and natural, – Fergus in his moods of anger, ambition, and final courageous resignation; Flora, in her grief. As for Waverley, his creator was no doubt too hard on him. Among the brave we hear that he was one of the bravest, though Scott always wrote his battlepieces in a manner to suggest no discomfort, and does not give us particular details of Waverley’s prowess. He has spirit enough, this “sneaking piece of imbecility,” as he shows in his quarrel with Fergus, on the march to Derby. Waverley, that creature of romance, considered as a lover, is really not romantic enough. He loved Rose because she loved him, – which is confessed to be unheroic behaviour. Scott, in “Waverley,” certainly does not linger over love-scenes. With Mr. Ruskin, we may say: “Let it not be thought for an instant that the slight and sometimes scornful glance with which Scott passes over scenes, which a novelist of our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a philosopher, and painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any absence in his heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal happiness.” But his mind entertained other themes of interest, “loyalty, patriotism, piety.” On the other hand, it is necessary to differ from Mr. Ruskin when he says that Scott “never knew ‘l’amor che move ‘l sol e l’ altre stelle.’” He whose heart was “broken for two years,” and retained the crack till his dying day, he who, when old and tired, and near his death, was yet moved by the memory of the name which thirty years before he had cut in Runic characters on the turf at the Castle-gate of St. Andrew, knew love too well to write of it much, or to speak of it at all. He had won his ideal as alone the ideal can be won; he never lost her: she was with him always, because she had been unattainable. “There are few,” he says, “who have not, at one period of life, broken ties of love and friendship, secret disappointments of the heart, to mourn over, – and we know no book which recalls the memory of them more severely than ‘Julia de Roubigne.’” He could not be very eager to recall them, he who had so bitterly endured them, and because he had known and always knew “l’amor che move ‘l sol e l’altre stelle,” a seal was on his lips, a silence broken only by a caress of Di Vernon’s.’
This apology we may make, if an apology be needed, for what modern readers may think the meagreness of the love-passages in Scott. He does not deal in embraces and effusions, his taste is too manly; he does not dwell much on Love, because, like the shepherd in Theocritus, he has found him an inhabitant of the rocks. Moreover, when Scott began novel-writing, he was as old as Thackeray when Thackeray said that while at work on a love-scene he blushed so that you would think he was going into an apoplexy. “Waverley” stands by its pictures of manners, of character, by its humour and its tenderness, by its manly “criticism of life,” by its touches of poetry, so various, so inspired, as in Davie Gellatley with his songs, and Charles Edward in the gallant hour of Holyrood, and Flora with her high, selfless hopes and broken heart, and the beloved Baron, bearing his lot “with a good-humoured though serious composure.” “To be sure, we may say with Virgilius Maro, ‘Fuimus Troes’ and there ‘s the end of an auld sang. But houses and families and men have a’ stood lang eneugh when they have stood till they fall with honour.”
“Waverley” ends like a fairy-tale, while real life ever ends like a Northern saga. But among the good things that make life bearable, such fairy-tales are not the least precious, and not the least enduring.
INTRODUCTION
The plan of this edition leads me to insert in this place some account of the incidents on which the Novel of Waverley is founded. They have been already given to the public by my late lamented friend, William Erskine, Esq. (afterwards Lord Kinneder), when reviewing the Tales of My Landlord for the Quarterly Review in 1817. The particulars were derived by the critic from the Author’s information. Afterwards they were published in the Preface to the Chronicles of the Canongate. They are now inserted in their proper place.
The mutual protection afforded by Waverley and Talbot to each other, upon which the whole plot depends, is founded upon one of those anecdotes which soften the features even of civil war; and, as it is equally honourable to the memory of both parties, we have no hesitation to give their names at length. When the Highlanders, on the morning of the battle of Preston, 1745, made their memorable attack on Sir John Cope’s army, a battery of four field-pieces was stormed and carried by the Camerons and the Stewarts of Appine. The late Alexander Stewart of Invernahylewas one of the foremost in the charge, and observing an officer of the King’s forces, who, scorning to join the flight of all around, remained with his sword in his hand, as if determined to the very last to defend the post assigned to him, the Highland gentleman commanded him to surrender, and received for reply a thrust, which he caught in his target. The officer was now defenceless, and the battle-axe of a gigantic Highlander (the miller of Invernahyle’s mill) was uplifted to dash his brains out, when Mr. Stewart with difficulty prevailed on him to yield. He took charge of his enemy’s property, protected his person, and finally obtained him liberty on his parole. The officer proved to be Colonel Whitefoord, an Ayrshire gentleman of high character and influence, and warmly attached to the House of Hanover; yet such was the confidence existing between these two honourable men, though of different political principles, that, while the civil war was raging, and straggling officers from the Highland army were executed without mercy, Invernahyle hesitated not to pay his late captive a visit, as he returned to the Highlands to raise fresh recruits, on which occasion he spent a day or two in Ayrshire among Colonel Whitefoord’s Whig friends, as pleasantly and as good-humouredly as if all had been at peace around him.
After the battle of Culloden had ruined the hopes of Charles Edward and dispersed his proscribed adherents, it was Colonel Whitefoord’s turn to strain every nerve to obtain Mr. Stewart’s pardon. He went to the Lord Justice Clerk to the Lord Advocate, and to all the officers of state, and each application was answered by the production of a list in which Invernahyle (as the good old gentleman was wont to express it) appeared ‘marked with the sign of the beast!’ as a subject unfit for favour or pardon.
At length Colonel Whitefoord applied to the Duke of Cumberland in person. From him, also, he received a positive refusal. He then limited his request, for the present, to a protection for Stewart’s house, wife, children, and property. This was also refused by the Duke; on which Colonel Whitefoord, taking his commission from his bosom, laid it on the table before his Royal Highness with much emotion, and asked permission to retire from the service of a sovereign who did not know how to spare a vanquished enemy. The Duke was struck, and even affected. He bade the Colonel take up his commission, and granted the protection he required. It was issued just in time to save the house, corn, and cattle at Invernahyle from the troops, who were engaged in laying waste what it was the fashion to call ‘the country of the enemy.’ A small encampment of soldiers was formed on Invernahyle’s property, which they spared while plundering the country around, and searching in every direction for the leaders of the insurrection, and for Stewart in particular. He was much nearer them than they suspected; for, hidden in a cave (like the Baron of Bradwardine), he lay for many days so near the English sentinels that he could hear their muster-roll called. His food was brought to him by one of his daughters, a child of eight years old, whom Mrs. Stewart was under the necessity of entrusting with this commission; for her own motions, and those of all her elder inmates, were closely watched. With ingenuity beyond her years, the child used to stray about among the soldiers, who were rather kind to her, and thus seize the moment when she was unobserved and steal into the thicket, when she deposited whatever small store of provisions she had in charge at some marked spot, where her father might find it. Invernahyle supported life for several weeks by means of these precarious supplies; and, as he had been wounded in the battle of Culloden, the hardships which he endured were aggravated by great bodily pain. After the soldiers had removed their quarters he had another remarkable escape.
As he now ventured to his own house at night and left it in the morning, he was espied during the dawn by a party of the enemy, who fired at and pursued him. The fugitive being fortunate enough to escape their search, they returned to the house and charged the family with harbouring one of the proscribed traitors. An old woman had presence of mind enough to maintain that the man they had seen was the shepherd. ‘Why did he not stop when we called to him?’ said the soldier. ‘He is as deaf, poor man, as a peat-stack,’ answered the ready-witted domestic. ‘Let him be sent for directly.’ The real shepherd accordingly was brought from the hill, and, as there was time to tutor him by the way, he was as deaf when he made his appearance as was necessary to sustain his character. Invernahyle was afterwards pardoned under the Act of Indemnity.
The Author knew him well, and has often heard these circumstances from his own mouth. He was a noble specimen of the old Highlander, far descended, gallant, courteous, and brave, even to chivalry. He had been out, I believe, in 1715 and 1745, was an active partaker in all the stirring scenes which passed in the Highlands betwixt these memorable eras; and, I have heard, was remarkable, among other exploits, for having fought a duel with the broadsword with the celebrated Rob Roy MacGregor at the clachan of Balquidder.
Invernahyle chanced to be in Edinburgh when Paul Jones came into the Firth of Forth, and though then an old man, I saw him in arms, and heard him exult (to use his own words) in the prospect of drawing his claymore once more before he died.’ In fact, on that memorable occasion, when the capital of Scotland was menaced by three trifling sloops or brigs, scarce fit to have sacked a fishing village, he was the only man who seemed to propose a plan of resistance. He offered to the magistrates, if broadswords and dirks could be obtained, to find as many Highlanders among the lower classes as would cut off any boat’s crew who might be sent into a town full of narrow and winding passages, in which they were like to disperse in quest of plunder. I know not if his plan was attended to, I rather think it seemed too hazardous to the constituted authorities, who might not, even at that time, desire to see arms in Highland hands. A steady and powerful west wind settled the matter by sweeping Paul Jones and his vessels out of the Firth.
If there is something degrading in this recollection, it is not unpleasant to compare it with those of the last war, when Edinburgh, besides regular forces and militia, furnished a volunteer brigade of cavalry, infantry, and artillery to the amount of six thousand men and upwards, which was in readiness to meet and repel a force of a far more formidable description than was commanded by the adventurous American. Time and circumstances change the character of nations and the fate of cities; and it is some pride to a Scotchman to reflect that the independent and manly character of a country, willing to entrust its own protection to the arms of its children, after having been obscured for half a century, has, during the course of his own lifetime, recovered its lustre.
Other illustrations of Waverley will be found in the Notes at the foot of the pages to which they belong. Those which appeared too long to be so placed are given at the end of the chapters to which they severally relate. [Footnote: In this edition at the end of the several volumes.]
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
To this slight attempt at a sketch of ancient Scottish manners the public have been more favourable than the Author durst have hoped or expected. He has heard, with a mixture of satisfaction and humility, his work ascribed to more than one respectable name. Considerations, which seem weighty in his particular situation, prevent his releasing those gentlemen from suspicion by placing his own name in the title-page; so that, for the present at least, it must remain uncertain whether Waverley be the work of a poet or a critic, a lawyer or a clergyman, or whether the writer, to use Mrs. Malaprop’s phrase, be, ‘like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.’ The Author, as he is unconscious of anything in the work itself (except perhaps its frivolity) which prevents its finding an acknowledged father, leaves it to the candour of the public to choose among the many circumstances peculiar to different situations in life such as may induce him to suppress his name on the present occasion. He may be a writer new to publication, and unwilling to avow a character to which he is unaccustomed; or he may be a hackneyed author, who is ashamed of too frequent appearance, and employs this mystery, as the heroine of the old comedy used her mask, to attract the attention of those to whom her face had become too familiar. He may be a man of a grave profession, to whom the reputation of being a novel-writer might be prejudicial; or he may be a man of fashion, to whom writing of any kind might appear pedantic. He may be too young to assume the character of an author, or so old as to make it advisable to lay it aside.
The Author of Waverley has heard it objected to this novel, that, in the character of Callum Beg and in the account given by the Baron of Bradwardine of the petty trespasses of the Highlanders upon trifling articles of property, he has borne hard, and unjustly so, upon their national character. Nothing could be farther from his wish or intention. The character of Callum Beg is that of a spirit naturally turned to daring evil, and determined, by the circumstances of his situation, to a particular species of mischief. Those who have perused the curious Letters from the Highlands, published about 1726, will find instances of such atrocious characters which fell under the writer’s own observation, though it would be most unjust to consider such villains as representatives of the Highlanders of that period, any more than the murderers of Marr and Williamson can be supposed to represent the English of the present day. As for the plunder supposed to have been picked up by some of the insurgents in 1745, it must be remembered that, although the way of that unfortunate little army was neither marked by devastation nor bloodshed, but, on the contrary, was orderly and quiet in a most wonderful degree, yet no army marches through a country in a hostile manner without committing some depredations; and several, to the extent and of the nature jocularly imputed to them by the Baron, were really laid to the charge of the Highland insurgents; for which many traditions, and particularly one respecting the Knight of the Mirror, may be quoted as good evidence. [Footnote: A homely metrical narrative of the events of the period, which contains some striking particulars, and is still a great favourite with the lower classes, gives a very correct statement of the behaviour of the mountaineers respecting this same military license; and, as the verses are little known, and contain some good sense, we venture to insert them.]
