István Csicsery-Rónay, Jr. — The Classical Historical Novel and the Mythology of liberal Nationalism: Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, Tolstoy.

CHAPTER II: WAVERLEY, or ‘TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE

Before Scott

Before the appearance of Waverley in 1814, novelists had treated his­tory as merely one of several variants of magical romance, skewed, naively or satirically, to the authors’ attitudes vis a vis romance. In the Car­tesian world-view of novelists before Scott, characters and their environ­ments were kept altogether separate — they were included in the radical separation of the perceiving-thinking consciousness (Descartes’ res cogi­tans) from the dual infinities of space and time (res extensa), The dis­tinction lent itself inherently to the depiction of human subjects as aliens in a contingent world they could never fully comprehend. Character and fictional space-time (Bakhtine’s chronotopoi) constituted separate realities.

The separation of world and consciousness in the novel antedates Descartes’ formalization of the duality. In the two modes that Bakhtine identifies as the classical novel types, the Hellenistic adventure novel and the Roman adventure tale of everyday life, time and space were abstract magical fields of circumstance where chance and mystery functioned to test the fidelity and consistency of the protagonists (Bakhtine 259). The lovers of the Ae­thiopica, for example, far from developing or changing in the deluge of catastrophes they suffer, are “proved” by returning exactly as they set out: “true,” innocent lovers, unspoiled by evil fortune. The Roman tale of metamorphoses, with its religious-ethical basis, introduced a somewhat more dynamic image of the relations between the character and his fate. Like Lucius in The Golden Ass, characters in the moral tale bring vicissitudes on themselves through their own moral flaws, and their fate is bound up with the experi­ence they gain while subjected to the fortune of the mutable world. Space and time gain some concreteness in the Roman tale, compared with the Helle­nistic adventure tale. The protagonist wanders through a quasi-realistic so­cial space and is given glimpses into the contiguous private lives that to­gether make up an image of society. In the moral knowledge he gains from these glimpses he transcends his enchanted form, and attains full human consciousness, Time — which had been arbitrary and separated into self-suf­ficient cyclic episodes in the Hellenistic novel — gains some value and order through the character’s development.

Even so, this is a relative concreteness only. Time and space in both classical modes represent alienation, the radical separation of protagonists from the transcendent aesthetic and moral integrity of character, which is reaffirmed at each tale’s end as a timeless and universal value The relation of character to chronotopoi remained essentially unchanged in the ava­ tars of the classical modes: the Prufungsroman, the picaresque, the rationa­listic satirical tale, until the late Eighteenth Century. Abstract space, it is true, was increasingly rationalized into social space in the eyes of the picaro, who observed classes, households and professions side by side. Time, nevertheless, remained completely abstract. Grimmelshausen’s chrono­logy in Simplicissimus, for example, precisely matches the chronology of the Thirty Years’ War; not, however, to show that human history is intelli­gible, but to demonstrate the abstract, demonic irrationality of the actual world in total war.

With the development of possessive individualism, especially in Eighteenth Century England, novelists made the subject’s relation to space and time increasingly concrete. The novel’s passively perceiving subject was refined into realism’s order-making consciousness in a world whose infinity lay less in the endlessness of its horizons of time and space, than in the infinite density of its object-life. Capitalist development broke up tradi­tional communities, and led people to cities where they were free to float on the labor market against one another. Urbanization concentrated varie­ties of people from different regions with different pasts, and thus con­centrated an extensive social world into the city’s microcosmic space. More­over, Puritan Calvinism’s emphasis on the spiritual value of everyday life, which made of every daily decision a moral problem, encouraged elaborate and detailed analyses of the minutest motives. A further emphasis was Locke’s elaboration of Cartesian subjectivity, in which self-identity was conceived as a construct of memory, which was, in turn, the duration of particular perceptions of particular pasts.¹

Around 1750, the “extensive” magicality of earlier romances was chal­lenged by Richardson’s and Defoe’s more constricted magicality of the object-world, where virtue was confined to thrift (sexual or financial) and magic to status objects and tools of trade. With these realists, the image of English bourgeois and gentry society became more rationalized, tending toward satire and criticism and away from the fantastic abstract surprises of romance. The romancers’ abstractness of setting and idealization of virtue was threatened by the rationalization of everyday life.

Authors of romances attempted a variety of alternatives to familiar social space to create “estrangement” or “defamiliarizing” effects. One method was the exoticization of space: setting romances in indefinite realms that were putatively contemporary with, but utterly alien to, respectable bourgeois society. These included the primitivist philosophical romances set in India and America, and the great vogue of pseudo-oriental romances. (Tompkins 181). Another strategy was the use of the past as a sort of vertical space. Rather than creating fictional societies in space, many writers in the late Eighteenth Century created fictional worlds based on local legends and “histories.” Familiar, prosaic society was thus defamiliarized at its heart, by showing the alienness and magicality in its own past.

The fictional interest in the past began in England with Walpole’s attack on “the cold and well-disciplined merit of Addison” and the “sober and correct march of Pope” (Renwick 87). Against the generalizing, intellectual temper of Augustan writing, which pulled attention away from concrete objects to universals, Walpole used images of highly-charged concrete objects to represent the past. These objects once had had life when they had been used, and managed to maintain that life somehow, supernaturally, and to affect the present. They possessed magical powers to haunt by leaking through time. Thus, in Walpole, “antique curiosities resume with terrific effect their primal use and form,” serving the theme of the “invasion of human life by the dead” (Tompkins 226; 228). In a sense, Walpole and the early Gothic writers invented historical consciousness for use by romance. Because it was tied to certain pockets in prosaic reality that still showed the power of the aristocracy to resist bourgeois regulation, history was romantic. Its magic theater and greatest symbol was the Gothic castle, which Bakhtine identifies as the first historical chronotopos in the novel (Bakhtine 298).

The ruined castle, and soon after, the ruined abbey, had acquired definite atmospheric associations even before the Gothic, in nocturnal and landscape poetry, as the consummate elegiac objects, modern counterparts of the tombs of classical pastoral (Chandler 18). Their popularity was immense, and they were quickly appropriated by every writer who desired an audience, Thus, in the decades before Scott, these magic “navels” of the past were the settings of widely divergent forms of historical fiction, on a spectrum from the Gothic — in which either the literal ghosts of the past overwhelm the characters of the present (Walpole), or only threaten them with the return of the psychohistorical repressed (Radcliffe), to the rationalized romances from which supernatural events were excluded (Reeve), and inchoate attempts to tie romantic plots to empirical facts (Leland).

The historical past was only slightly less magical than the romantic distancing of space, Many writers felt no constraint against inventing their own histories; even those who scrupulously avoided falsifying the sequence of historical events, like Clara Reeve, added facts with abandon to bring the story closer to the tastes and concerns of the bourgeois audience (Tompkins 227). This magicality of the past, a function of its a1ienness, was conceived to a great extent as a reaction to the work of the Enlightenment historians, who were the contemporaries of the early historical novelists, They also radically separated the past from the present, viewing the former as a world of superstition and violence, They considered the past a jumble of often gruesome facts that had to be treated by the historian’s reason to separate mere contingent driftwood of opinion from the universal plan of supertemporal Reason, Voltaire urged historians to search for that transcendent principle which “manifests itself nevertheless in time; and how it enters the stream of time and reveals there in gradually increasing purity and perfection its basic and original form (qtd. in Cassirer 221). The corrupt and superstitious past was held at such a distance from the optimistic aspirations of the bourgeoisie that, as the historian G.N. Young writes, “the notion that there could be an existential encounter with the past, compelling men to make a decision concerning the present, or bringing them to a new self-understanding, was utterly foreign to the Age of Reason” (qtd. in John Lukacs 17 n.4).

The Gothic and regional novels were tentative steps toward some sort of existential encounter with the past, As it had been directed against the intellectual and generalizing thought of the Enlightentment, so also historical “feeling” began as an assertion of local, and hence conservative, tradition over the internationalistic utopianism of rationalism.

At the end of the eighteenth century, those writers best placed to ex- tend the local spirit of historical romance, the Scots and Irish novelists, expanded the Gothic’s and legend-novel’s narrow and fantastic focus of locality. They used for settings entire regions that for English audien­ces seemed exotic and primitive pockets isolated within the boundaries of secure, civilized, and modern England, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1801), the most accomplished of the regional novels, was not actually historical in intention; rather, it was a Rousseauian tale about the en­durance of nobly primitive manners among the Irish. Nonetheless, Edgeworth inspired most of the popular romancers, not the least because of their in­dignation at her apologia for the incorporation of the British kingdoms into the Union (e.g., Sydney Owenson in Ireland, and the Porter sisters, Anna Maria and Jane, in Scotland).

In all, the early historical romancers knew very little of history, even when they kept their facts straight. For them, history was to serve as a background, or field, for romance. Its objects were usually intro­duced in long antiquarian descriptions for atmospheric effect, with no or­ganic connection to the action; or, alternatively, objects of the past be­ came dramatic actors in their own right, subjugating human characters, as in Walpole and his epigones, Events were either idealized beyond human motivation, or were brought down to the level of contemporary decorum (Tompkins 238).

The Beginnings of Historical Realism: Scott’s Introduction of 1805

It was not Scott’s original intention to depict a new historical con­sciousness. He wished merely to deepen and enrich the shallow conventions of contemporary fiction in two ways. First, by introducing the “dramatic principle,” adapted from Shakespeare and Fielding, to narrative action, whereby actual historical conflicts were presented from the standpoint of fictional characters’ conflicting motives. And secondly, by introducing the motivation of milieu. His approach was still partly rationalistic and Augustan in conception, an attempt to replace the silly solecisms of his­torical romancers with edifying and true information on historical and geographical matters. This motivating also took on a thoroughly romantic charge: true facts proving more interesting than an impoverished fancy, the concrete particulars of historical milieu became for Scott the foun­dation of the imagination. Seen at first as a combination of ethnography, geography and political history, history with Scott became a new Gestalt in which objects and codes were viewed as reflectors of an ethical life lived in the conflict of societies.

Scott was unaware of the extent of his innovation when he began Waverley in 1805. The Introduction and first seven chapters, written in that year and included intact when Scott returned to the work and completed it in 1814, show how tentative his intentions were. The tone of the Introduc­tion is humorously grave. Scott affects irony toward the sentimental tales and fashionable novels that were enjoying the greatest favor of the rea­ding public, and also against his own work, as well. He is so tentative about his novel’s place among the genres that the introduction gives the reader mixed signals about what to expect.

The title of this work has not been chosen without the grave and solid deliberation, which matters of importance demand from the prudent. Even its first, or general denomination, was the result of no common research or selection, although, according to the example of my predecessors, I had only to seize upon the most sounding and euphonious surname that English history or topography affords, and se­ lect it at once as the title of my work, and the name of my hero. (§1)

He rejects the “chivalrous epithets” of romance and the “more senti­mental sounds” of fashionable names, finally resting with “WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil, ex­cepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix to it.”

Is the novel that is to follow comic or serious, satirical or patriotic? The name, Waverley, implies that the hero will be a prosaic Everyman, with no romantic or typological associations. It is also a distinctly unflattering name, not likely to inspire a public to identification or emulation.

On the matter of genre, Scott is even more careful, and even more tentative. “But my second and supplemental title was a matter of much more difficult election, since that, short as it is, may be held as pledging the author to some special mode of laying the scene, drawing the characters, and :managing his adventures.” There follows a list of the possible subtitles he rejected, and the kinds of expectations they might be assumed to have evoked. “Waverley, A Tale of Other Days” would have implied a Gothic after Ann Radcliffe, with an Udolpho-like castle, “of which the eastern wing has long been uninhabited, and the keys either lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts.” “Waverley, a Romance from the German” would have fostered expectations of the Sinister Monastery genre of the Gothic, replete with “a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns.” A “Sentimental Tale” would have presaged an idealized heroine with harp, performing improbable deeds, aided by a peasant girl speaking in dialect. A last possibility might have been “A Tale of the Times,” with “a dashing sketch of the fashio­nable world, a few anecdotes or private scandal thinly veiled, and if lusciously painted, so much the better.” Each of the popular genres has its particular mechanical conventions to satisfy the mechanical expectations of the public.

Scott’s language is indulgent toward his audience, but he clearly wishes to present them with a more serious mode that will make greater claims on their attention.

By fixing then the date of my story Sixty Years before the present 1st November 1805, I would have my readers understand that they will meet in the following pages neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners; that my hero will have neither iron on his shoulders,as of yore, nor on the heels of his boots, as is the pre­sent fashion on Bond Street; and that my damsels will neither be clothed ‘in purple and in pall’ like the Lady Alice of an old bal­ lad, nor reduced to the primitive nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout. From this choice of an era, the understanding critic may farther presage, that the object of my tale is more a description of men than of manners. A tale of manners, to be interesting, must either refer to an antiquity so great as to have become venerable, or it must bear a vivid reflection of those scenes which are passing daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty, Thus the coat-of-mail of our ancestors, and the triple-furred pelisse of modern beaux may, though for very different reasons, be equally fit for the array of a fictitious character; but who, meaning the costume of his hero to be impressive, would willingly attire him in the court dress of George the Second’s reign, with its no collar, large sleeves and low pocket holes?

The premise may be new, but it does not appear drastically so. The date of the action is precise: “sixty years before 1st November 1805.” It is neither a vague sometime in the past, nor the equally vague sometime in the present. Scott implies that his chosen period permits him an accuracy impossible in a setting too far in the past to be recognized, and a distance impossible in a setting too near to be viewed critically. Like the name of his hero, Scott chooses a time-setting he believes has no mechani­cal associations for his audience.

Because the setting is new, Scott reasons, he will be more concerned with the depths of character than the mediations of social relations; the novel is to be “more a description of men than manners.” It is far from clear what Scott means by this difference. He appears to say that the pro­saic strangeness of his novel’s world will naturally place the emphasis on transhistorical truths of character.

Considering the disadvantages inseperable from this part of my sub­ject, I must be understood to have resolved to avoid them as much as possible, by throwing the force of my narration upon the charac­ters and passions of my actors; — those passions common to all men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corselet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day. Upon these passions it is no doubt true that the state of manners and laws cast a necessary co­ louring; but the bearings, to use the language of heraldry, remain the same, though the tincture may not only be different, but opposed in strong contra-distinction. The wrath of our ancestors, for example, was coloured gules; it broke forth in acts of open and sanguinary violence against the objects of its fury, Our malignant feelings, which must seek gratification through more indirect channels, and undemine the obstacles which they cannot openly bear down, may rather be said to be tinctured sable, But the deep-ruling impulse is the same in both cases; and the proud peer who can now only ruin his neighbor according to law, by protracted suits, is the genuine descendant of the baron who wrapped the castle of his competitor in flames, and knocked him on the head as he endeavoured to escape from the conflagration, It is from the great book of Nature, the same through a thousand editions, whether of black-letter, or wire-wove and hot-pressed, that I have venturously essayed to read a chapter to the public, Some favourable opportunities of contrast have been afforded me by the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history, and may serve at once to vary and to illustrate the moral lesson, which I would willingly consider as the most important part of my plan…

Scott’s ideal objective then in the 1805 preface is a moral tale about universal, and thus transhistorical, human passions, seen through the “tincturing” medium of the particular conditions of a particular historical time and place. The particulars are merely to serve as illustrations of a general point. He implies that he has chosen his location and period for its “favourable opportunities of contrast” only, not be­ cause they together represent a period and place of significant change in the historical world.

Here, in a nutshell, is the dialectical problem at the heart of Waverley‘s revolutionary form. The concreteness of Scott’s style, his choice of concrete examples and comparisons — from fashion, printing, heraldry — takes away from the force of these ahistorical passions even in this, the most abstract and theoretical language in the novel. The nature of these agitating passions is much less vivid than the contingent historical steel corselet, brocaded coat, and white dimity waistcoat. The “deep-ruling impulses” are compared to heraldic bearings (which were for Scott the signs of the unchanging, mythic-epic social status of the aristocracy). And here, too, it is the tinctures that stand out, gules and sable (with their connotations of violent openness in the gules/scarlet of the past, and the despicable secrecy of the sable/black of the present), while the bearings are left blank to be filled in by an imagination fa­miliar with heraldry. Similarly, the words in “the book of Nature” are less concrete than the book’s particular manifestations, “black-letter or wire-wove and hot-pressed.” Even in stating his guiding aesthetic principles, Scott’s imagination draws synecdoches and comparisons from con­crete objects, drawing attention away from generalities toward vividly described specific objects. With Scott, an empirical concern for compa­ring particulars of experience in different cultures becomes a new motivating force in fiction.

History’s Motivation

Scott’s technique in the bulk of the novel relies on a balance of op-positions similar to the one between concrete descriptions and moral gene­ralities. He is prone to an almost ritualistic pictorial and conceptual contrast of narrative elements: characters, events, and locations, His protagonists are bunched in twos: the heroines, Flora Macivor and Rose Bradwardine; the lairds, Baron Bradwardine and Fergus MacIvor; the patriarchs, Fergus and Col. Gardiner; the father-figures, the Baron and Edward’s true father, Richard Waverley; Scotland and England; Highlands and Lowlands; the battles of Prestonpans and Culloden; the Baron’s cave and Carlisle prison; the new Troy and the new Rome; Stuart and Hanover; Pretender and worthy king; alien and “British.” Moreover, every character is complemen­tary of another, as well as a contrast: the quixotics, Fergus and Edward; the gentlemen, The Baron and Col, Talbot; the romantics, Fergus and Flora; the sensibles, Rose and the mature Edward. This rage for doubling extends to the composition of the action, in the contrast of structurally matched tableaux: the hunts, meals and courtships on both Fergus’ and the Baron’s estates, Edward’s journeys to and from the Highlands, the several rescues, escapes and ceremonial occasions.

Several commentators have stressed the Augustan balance and anti-historical irony in Waverley.² At times, the narrator comments on the action like a Johnsonian satirist. But it would be an error to attribute too much significance to these overtly satirical passages. Scott’s irony is gene­rally tempered by a deference toward variant value-systems. Those sections that are most satirical occur in structurally unimportant parts of the action (Sir Everard’s courtship, Edward’s apotheosis of Flora as he leaves the Highlands, his journey in the London coach with Mrs. Nosebag). The prevailing tone of Waverley’s narration, and the theme that integrates the Bildungsroman with the historical plot, is sympathy and openness to others (Raleigh 16; 20; Hart 10). Moral knowledge with Scott must include historical knowledge. Already in the 1805 introduction, and to a much greater degree in the text itself, Scott avoided satire, and its inverse, exoticism. Both approa­ches lead to an exaggeration of customs, while ignoring how they shape and define individual character. Neither satire nor exotic romance is historically “grounded,” and Scott’s contemporary, Hegel, identified idealized Epic and Satire as the two “emplotments” inadequate for representing his­ tory.

…the Epic is not an appropriate form for historiography … because it does not presuppose substantial change. And the same can be said of Satire, because, although it admits change, it perceives no sub­stantial base against which the changes perceived can be measured. For the Epic, all is change conceived against a basic apprehension of substantial changelessness; for Satire, all is changelessness con­ceived in the light of the perception of substantial mutability. (qtd. in White, Metahistory 93)

The concrete background of the Insurrection of 1745 binds the narra- tive of Waverley to its historical time and place. Scott develops the his- torical oppositions in the background of his tale dialectically, in a form similar to Hegel’s own formal dialectic. The structural oppositions, some of which we listed earlier, are fictional analogues of, and motivations for, the historical conflicts known to have taken place in “the ’45.” The reader participates in the dialectic by watching the effects of changes in Edward Waverley’s perception of himself in a world consisting of more than a single, planar vision of social harmony, The concrete particulars of space and time not only serve to make the tale entertaining, but to give it cognitive depth, a greater knowledge about human motives.

Scott derived his sense of characterization from drama. Yet, in Waverley, his main characters are defined much less by their dramatic choices than by the social and historical conditions in which they live. Ela­borate descriptions of Edward’s, Rose’s, Fergus’ and Baron Bradwardine’s family and social histories bear the brunt of their characterizations.

Other than Edward, few characters in the novel entertain moral conflicts. Almost every important choice made by one of the protagonists appears as a result of long socio-historical conditioning. Fergus’ choice to join the rebellion is a given, a result of his historically conditioned tendency to ambition and despotic clan leadership, learned from the Pretender at his Court of St, Germain. Edward’s rescue of Talbot is an almost reflexive result of Edward’s tendency toward class loyalty and English uprightness. Flora’s rejection of Edward’s suit, and Rose’s acceptance of it, are as inevitable as the historical relations between England, Lowland Scotland, and the Highlands in 1745. There is even less of a feeling that the minor characters, such as Balmawhapple, Cruikshank, Gilfillan and Macwheeble, have ever made crucial moral choices.

Critics from Coleridge to the present have complained of Scott’s readiness to externalize moral dilemmas they feel should be personal, i,e, dramatic, problems.³ But Scott’s emphasis, his conscious intention not­withstanding, is on the actions and values of whole social groups, classes, and nations, a perspective that is inevitably historical, and which ine­vitably circumscribes the possibilities of particular characters’ con­sciousness and actions. He considered this one of his flaws as a writer, if we can take seriously his anonymous review of his own work in the Quar­terly Review (1817). All his heroes, he writes, are “a very amiable and very insipid sort of young men.”

We think we can perceive that this error is also in some degree occasioned by the dramatic principle upon which the author frames his plots. His chief characters are never actors, but always acted upon by the spur of circumstance, and have their fates uniformly determined by the agency of subordinate persons. This arises from the author having usually represented them as foreigners to whom every­ thing in Scotland is strange, — a circumstance which serves as his apology for entering into many minute details which are reflectively, as it were, addressed to the reader through the medium of his hero. While he is going into explanations and details, he gives them interest by exhibiting the effect which they produce upon the principal person of his drama, and at the same time obtains a patient hearing for what might otherwise be passed over without attention. But if he gains this advantage, it is by sacrificing the character of his hero. (Hayden, ed. 115)

What applies for the hero applies all the more for the other actors. In Edward, the historical conditioning is more vivid, because he, in ef­fect, has no history before the story begins, and we can witness history’s influence on him as it occurs. The other protagonists have all been considerably “acted upon by the spur of circumstance” in their pasts, before coming onstage in the novel.

The 1805 introduction underplays the importance of historical accuracy by presenting it merely as a tool to embellish a moral theme. In the telling of the tale, however, Scott speaks of it as a cognitive value as well.

I beg pardon once and for all, of those readers who take up novels merely for amusement, for plaguing them so long with old-fashioned politics, and Whig and Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites. The truth is, I cannot promise that this story shall be intelligible, not to say probable, without it. My plan requires that I should explain the motives on which its action proceeded; and these motives necessarily arose from the feelings, prejudices, and parties of the times.

I do not invite my fair readers, whose sex and impatience give them the greatest right to complain of these circumstances, into a flying chariot drawn by hippogriffs, or moved by enchantment. Mine is a humble English post-chaise, drawn upon four wheels, and keeping to his Majesty’s highways. (§ 5)

Historical accuracy is necessary for intelligibility and probability. It is the code that keeps the novel from becoming mere romance. As the story progresses from the ironic pastoral of Edward’s boyhood deeper into the world of historical actuality, the distinction between men and manners becomes trivial. It is not a distinction that significantly affects Ed­ward’s moral choices. He must recognize an altogether different distinc­tion: the difference between anachronistic social values and appropriate ones. Only through this recognition can he restore himself and his line, saving both from destruction in the civil war. Edward’s ethical integrity hinges on whether he can break the romantic fascination Highland society has for him, to see it from a distance, historically. Until he can view the Pretender and Fergus from outside their no longer valid codes, he ac­cepts their domination uncritically.

It is not only Edward’s task, but the reader’s, as well. The moral would be lost if, for instance, Fergus were to be seen as an idealized tragic hero independent of the historical situation that conditioned him.

Had Fergus MacIvor lived Sixty Years sooner than he did, he would, in all probability, have wanted the polished manner and knowledge of the world which he now possessed; and had he lived Sixty Years later, his ambition and love of rule would have lacked the fuel which his situation now afforded. (§ 19)

This sense of historical groundedness depends on the concreteness of the historical setting; this concreteness, in turn, consists of the “many minute details” of the strange world perceived by Edward in Scot­land. They include facts of the particular conditions of the social world: geography, economics, language, ideology — conditions that had been used by earlier novelists for rhetorical color, but generated the action for the first time in the Waverley Novels. Robert Louis Stevenson, comparing Scott with Fielding, was one of the first to note the magnitude of this innovation in storytelling.

As for nationality and public sentiment it is curious to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers into the hero’s way. It is most really important, however, to notice the change that has been introduced into the conception of character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent introduction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force in a question of perfectly abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown to him; he had not understood the configuration of the landscape or the fashion of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott’s instinct, the instinct of the man of an age profoundly dif­ferent, taught him otherwise; and, in his work, individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small portion of the canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves on each other’s shoulders. Fielding’s characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we be­ gin to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and quali­fy a man’s personality; that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitu­tion of things. (Hayden, ed. 476-77)

The Dialectic of Waverley

The difference between men and manners, the ideal human content of character and its variable incarnations in society, itself becomes anachronistic in Scott’s new conception of narrative action. In Waverley, he begins to depict an interdependence and mutual conditioning of character and environment. This dialectical construction of action is still inchoate in Scott, with the result that he entertains two opposing structures, or ideologies, of history in the Waverley Novels: a rhetorical-“mythic” structure of romantic comedy and the dynamic structure of quasi-empirical, con­crete, sociological observation. Clearly, the two structures did not ap­pear incompatible to Scott, but complementary,

The former provided a framing device for the story, via the ideo­logy of aristocratic homeostasis.⁴ It is based on the epic code of reciprocal hospitality among great families. In the novel, it is represented by the exchange of protection among Baron Bradwardine, Edward, and Col. Talbot, an exchange that ultimately leads to the return of the Baron’s property to him and the restoration of “Waverley Honour,” the estate Edward gains as his wife’s dowry, and which, at the same time, serves as the emblem of the political synthesis of the Scottish-English union.

The latter ideology, operating in the structure of perception of concrete particulars, provides the stuff of Edward’s experience. In it, he is a passive observer. While he perceives reality through the enchanting codes of the Jacobites, he accepts their false construction of re­ality. When he can no longer avoid seeing the insurrection through the eyes of his English countrymen, after his encounter during the taking of Edinburgh with Houghton, his dying tenant, and Col. Talbot, Edward begins to view his own romantic subjectivity clearly, as a “fact” of experience.

The phenomenology of romance is based on the dialectic of true and false perceptions of reality, and it is easy to see how Scott could have viewed the historical concrete merely as a realistic rationalizing of the traditional structure of romantic comedy. But Scott’s historical world is not only the territory of romance’s manipulative magicians and inexorable forces. It is also the world in which Baron Bradwardine’s and Fergus MacIvor’s lives unfold: in it they play out the historical-ideo­logical conflicts that determine their own fates and the fates of their societies. Fergus’ and Flora’s tragedies occur in the realm of the con­crete, for their nobility has meaning only in anachronistic codes of loyalty and honor, and the Highland conditions that fostered them. Be­cause they are anachronistic, they are codes that can be understood only through contrast with the codes and conditions of England, in the present.

Fergus’ tragedy is caused by the passing of the clan’s value-sys­tem, and the ascendancy of English bourgeois civility opposed to it. Thus Scott, far from relegating the mutable world of manners to the status of illusion in the play between illusion and reality, begins to treat it as a conflict between relative realities. He shared this con­ception with his elder contemporaries, Adam Ferguson and Herder. Each was concerned with the problem of understanding the varieties of cultures and value-systems from the perspective of a “civil society” that worked against cultural diversity. Scott’s solution was an ideal resolution on the moral level of real contradictions generating the conflict on the concrete level: the synthesis of Scots and English under English hegemony, disguised as the union of aristocratic houses.⁵

The Code of the Concrete

Edward’s progress — and that of romantic Jacobite England –­ through the loss of social identity and reinclusion into the new society requires him to sift true facts from illusions as he moves through the realm of experience. This is a process of distinguishing among codes. Edward is represented in several social and cultural situations that he “passes along” to his readers as codes, or dialects.

From the beginning, Edward’s consciousness is determined by the indolent life he lives as a child on the estate of his nostalgic Jaco­bite uncle, Sir Everard Waverley. His education consists of reading romances and sagas, and of listening to Sir Everard’s loyalist reminiscences about the Insurrection of 1715. Edward learns nothing of death or politics as a child. He accepts his social privilege without reflection. The language of these early chapters (roughly the extent of the 1805 manuscript) pokes discreet fun at both the provincial social code of the eighteenth century English gentry and at the polite dialect of Scott’s own readers.

Here Scott writes as someone fully integrated with Tory society. Fine hints and understatements mime and refine the conventions of the gentry’s discourse; ironies are internal to the society and the sentence. The provincial world of the first Waverley Honour is so familiar that every principle and object functions as a sign in a closed, tacit system of relations.

There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others, than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time. Miss Stubbs had indeed summoned up every assistance which art could afford to beauty; but alas! hoop, patches, frizzled locks, and a mantua of genuine French silk, were lost upon a young officer of dragoons, who wore, for the first time, his gold-laced hat, jack­ boots, and a broadsword. I know not whether, like the champion of an old ballad.

                        His heart was all on honor bent,

                            He could not stoop to love,

No lady in the land had power,

His frozen heart to move;

or whether the deep and flaming bars of embroidered gold, which now fenced his breast, defied the artillery of Cecilia’s eyes; but every arrow was launched in vain. (§ 5)

After travelling to Ayrshire with a commission in the dragoons, in the company of twenty enthusiastic tenant “retainers” from Sir Everard’s estate, Edward quickly grows bored with the conventionality of the region’s petty aristocracy and the discipline of military life. He sets off to vi­sit a certain Baron Bradwardine, whom Sir Everard had protected after Bradwardine had been captured in the Insurrection of 1715, on his estate bordering the Highlands.

In the journey to the Baron’s estate, known as Tully-Veolan, the narrator’s tone becomes steadily less fine-tuned and oblique, and increa­singly informative and direct. The genial voice appropriate for describing a harmonious, familiar society is transformed by the sight of totally new and alien conditions. Edward’s free-indirect narration takes on the ethno­graphic style of the amateur sociologist-travellers of the early Eighteenth Century, such cas Capt, E.A. Burt and Martin Martin, who first in­troduced Highland culture to English audiences (Smout 332).⁶

The poverty of Tully-Veolan’s inhabitants shocks Edward out of his dreamy abstraction. He begins to record the details (familiar to Scott from personal experience during his youth in the Border region). He becomes aware of a particular culture at a particular time in its life. His mind goes into action, defining appearances, seeking out concrete causes.

The whole scene was depressing; for it argued, at first glance, at least a stagnation of industry, and perhaps of intellect. Even curiosity, the busiest passion of the idle, seemed of a listless cast in the village of Tully-Veolan: the curs … alone showed any part of its activity; with the villagers it was passive. They stood and gazed at the handsome young officer and his attendant, but with­ out any of those quick motions and eager looks, that indicate the earnestness with which those who live in monotonous ease at home look for amusement abroad. Yet the physiognomy of the people, when more closely examined, was far from exhibiting the indifference of stupidity; their features were rough, but remarkably intelligent; grave, but the very reverse of stupid; and from among the young women, an artist might have chosen more than one model, whose fea­tures and form resembled those of Minerva…. 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. (§ 8)

Baron Bradwardine’s estate is the spatial middle of the novel. When Edward arrives, everything is stuck in historical transition; every object, code, and character is caught midway between functions, half one thing, half another. The property lies on the border of the Lowland and Highlands, vulnerable to Englishman and Highlander alike. The manor house’s architecture is a frozen transition between the martial past and the bourgeois future.

It had been built at a time when castles were no longer necessary, and when the Scots architects had not yet acquired the art of desig­ning a domestic residence. The windows were numberless, but very small; the roof had some nondescript kind of projections, called bartisans, and displayed at each frequent angle a small turret, ra­ther resembling a pepper-box than a Gothic watch-tower. (§ 8)

The grounds are idyllic, the house rundown and fight-pocked; Saun- ders Saunderson is half butler, half gardener (a mixture of class-func­tions); Davie Gellatley half idiot, half wit; the “heterogeneous” Baron part scholar, part soldier, part pedant, part sage, part modest, part immoderately proud, His speech is a constant flow of macaronics, part English, part Latin, part Low Scotch Only Rose is, to all appearances, free of the grotesque characterization. But even she proves later to be only one half civilized maiden; on Edward’s return from the Highlands, she shows she is a canny guerilla leader as well.

Tully-Veolan is also the border zone between myth and history. Edward’s imperial achievement (and that of the rhetorical plot) will be to complete the transition of the Baron’s estate from the anachronistic epic past of Jacobite loyalism to modern reality, by marrying Rose, becoming the Baron’s heir, and establishing his own estate on the grounds. The assimilation is possible because the values and manners of the Low­land lairds overlap those of their English counterparts.

Edward soon becomes impatient with the real conditions and familiar values. When a raiding party of Highlanders offer his imagination stronger stuff, he leaps at the chance. He is drawn to “dreaming:” “It seemed like a dream to Edward that these deeds of violence should be so familiar to men’s minds, and currently talked of as falling within the common order of things and happening daily in the immediate vicinity, without his having crossed the sea, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered island of Great Britain” (§15).

The codes of Highland society are as coherent as those of provincial England. But in Fergus’ land, neither Edward nor the English bourgeois au­dience that attends him have any of the ethnographic or historical expe­rience that would let them “read” the society, i.e., to place it in its proper historical perspective, or to judge Fergus’ role in it. Faced with a wholly alien world, Edward employs the misleading dialects available to English readers for describing alien worlds: the hyperbolic sublime (§16), and pseudo-oriental fantasy (§17). His fascination with Flora, the archetypal dark, iconoclastic heroine, impels Edward to use the whole arsenal of Romanticism: allusion to Romantic topoi, such as Poussin landscapes (§ 21), Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s romances (Ibid,), the ver­tiginous sublime of mountain landscapes (“the romantic waterfall, which seemed to seek the very abyss, etc,” — Ibid.) , and the sentimental mys­tification of the feminine:

Edward had thought that he had never, even in his wildest dreams, imagined a figure of such exquisite and interesting loveliness. The wild beauty of the retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and awe with which he ap­proached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto, by whose nod the scenery around seemed to have been created, an Eden in the wilderness. (Ibid.)

Because these codes are exotic themselves, Scott maximizes the moral con­fusion Edward feels as Fergus’ guest. Even the language he uses to interpret his experience is alien and delusive.

Nonetheless, Edward occasionally observes conditions as they are, even in the Highlands. Often these are congruent with the Ossianic ro- manticism Scott’s readers knew, as in the clan feast of Chapter 20, and Chapter 22, “Highland Minstrelsy.” On one occasion, at least, Edward has a clear perception of unromantic facts ordered by the unfamiliar values of clan culture.

Around the house, which stood on an eminence in the midst of a nar­row Highland valley, there appeared none of that attention to convenience, far less to ornament and decoration, which usually surrounds a gentleman’s habitation. An inclosure or two, divided by dry­ stone walls, were the only part of the domain that was fenced; as to the rest, the narrow slips of level ground which lay by the side of the brook exhibited a scanty crop of barley, liable to constant depredations from the herds of wild ponies and black cattle that grazed upon the adjacent hills. These ever and anon made an incursion upon the arable ground, which was repelled by the loud, uncouth and dissonant shouts of a half-dozen Highland swains, all running as if they had been made, and every one hallooing a half-starved dog to the res­ cue of the forage…. The whole view was wild and desolate, rather than grand and solitary. Yet, such as it was, no genuine descendant of Ian nan Chastel would have changed the domain for Stow or Blenheim. (§19)

Because Edward cannot free himself of his infatuation with Fergus and Flora, he cannot understand what his eyes tell him: that the time of Fergus’ culture has passed, that its ideals of valor and fidelity cannot com­pensate for hunger and poverty. By the time he leaves the Highlands for England to clear his name from the charges of desertion (and perhaps to muster troops for the Pretender), Edward is utterly confounded. The roman­tic mind has suppressed the critical, comparing mind in him, and the world around him reflects his helplessness. Until the battle of Preston, Edward is at the mercy of forces out of his control. Because he has sacrificed his clarity of vision to romantic ideological illusions, he is oppressed on his return to the Lowlands by obscure impressions and suspicions. In­stead of sociological facts, he can perceive only mysteries. He is suspected of being a spy, and held as a deserter. (As it later turns out, the outlaw Highlander, Donald Bean Lean, has used a ring stolen from Edward to incite insurrection among his followers in the Ayrshire camp.) The code of hospitality is turned upside-down. His jailer, Maj. Melville, sympathetic to Edward’s predicament, treats him as a guest; his rescuers, Donald Bean Lean and Prince Charles Edward, treat him as a pri­soner. After sustaining an injury that prevents him from moving, Edward is nursed by Gaelic-speaking nurses he assumes are Fergus’ followers, to discover later they are Rose’s. Edward loses control over language as well. He meets one incomprehensible or taciturn character after another: Gilfillan, who speaks the biblical, sectarian dialect of the Covenanters, Jamie Jinker, with his “broad Scotch of the most vulgar description” (§39), the silent Balmawhapple, and the Gaelic nurses.

In the consummation of Edward’s bouleversement, the Pretender raises him from abjection to the position of highest honor, by personally re­questing Edward’s support in the rebellious campaign. Prince Charles Ed­ward’s speech is a brilliant act of sincerity speaking straight to Edward’s romantic ideas of patriotic loyalty (§ 40). Only later, out of Edward’s earshot, does the “Chevalier” reveal his hollowness; on the march to Carlisle he sighs to his French lieutenant, “que mon métier de Prince errant est ennuyant, parfois, Mais, courage! C’est le grand Jeu; après tout” (§59).

Edward’s recognition comes soon after. Once he is given space to read a secret packet of letters he had received from Rose during his rescue, he understands the connection of events that controlled his fate while he was in hiding; a connection, moreover, he had refused to even conceive in his romantic isolation. These connections are more romantic than di­rectly historical: Donald Bean Lean’s imposture, the stolen seal, the mu­tiny of Edward’s men, and the interception of their letters to him by the English commandant. Now Edward is in a position to gather precise infor­mation and to think for himself. The liberating mediations follow rapidly. The dying Houghton, one of Edward’s retainers wounded in a skirmish with the Pretender’s troops, adds the long-lacking moral charge to the growing mass of historical connections. “In about a quarter of an hour poor Hum­phrey breathed his last, praying his young master, when he returned home to Waverley Honour, to be kind to old Job Houghton and his dame, and con­juring him not to fight with these wild petticoat men against old England” (§45).

The deaths of his man and of his commander, Col. Gardiner, weigh heavily on Edward’s consciousness. Rescuing Col. Talbot places him back in balance, and by doing so, he is brought in touch with his first Englishman not influenced by Scottish conditions. Talbot’s language is bigoted, exaggeratedly anti-Scots, the opposing extreme to Highland romanticism (Hart 30). Between Talbot’s disdain for the Scots, and Fergus’ ambition to hold an English earldom, Edward begins to sift out the truth.

After Talbot’s parole and departure from Scotland, it is only a matter of time until Edward finds a point at which to abandon the Chevalier’s army gracefully. With the disruption of the forces near Penrith in Northern England, he is forced into hiding on a neighboring farm. He is also forced to delay his departure to London, where he intends to seek Talbot’s intercession in gaining a pardon from the king. During that de­lay, caused not by unintelligible forces, but the all-too clear conse­quences of political ambition and historical conflict, Edward completes his recognition, and begins his “real history.”

…and it was in many a winter walk by the Ulswater, that he acquired a more complete mastery of a spirit tamed by adversity, than his former experience had given him; and that he felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was now ended, and that its real history had now commenced. (§60)

After the reader has followed Edward through so many different worlds within worlds, learning with him several different social dialects and sympathy with different value-systems, we might expect to see the recovered reality of England, Edward’s proper value-system, in a new light, with the same detail as Tully-Veolan and Glennaquoich. But the narration is much less concrete in the hastily written description of Edward’s English homecoming at the end of the book. English conditions were, of course, familiar to Scott’s readers, while those of Scotland were much less so. That assumption of familiarity, however, made for a much less vivid impression than the elaborate detailing of new and strange phenomena.

He then, for the first time since leaving Edinburgh, began to experience that pleasure which almost all feel who return to a verdant, populous, and highly cultivated country, from scenes of wasted desolation, or of solitary and melancholy grandeur. But how were those feelings enhanced when he entered the domain so long possessed by his forefathers; recognized the old oaks of Waverley Chase; thought with what delight he should introduce Rose to all his favou­rite haunts; beheld at length the venerable hall arise above the woods which embowered it, and finally threw himself in the arms of the venerable relations to whom he owed so much duty and affection! (§70)

An unconscious double standard is at work in Waverley. The attributes of history: Tragedy, concrete detail, the unity of social and personal ac­tion, belong to the defeated Scottish society. English society is charac­terized by moral and rhetorical attributes. It is abstract, the ethnographer’s eye becomes the comedian’s, the satirist’s and the apologist’s, as soon as it is observing matters English.

Waverley as Apologia for the Union

In Waverley, Scott attempted to synthesize the tenets of Tory ideo- logy with the inexorable expansion of capitalism, the supremacy of the agrarian aristocracy and the historical progress toward Anglocentric eco­nomic and cultural assimilation. His choice of the 1745 Insurrection allowed him to create a world in which different cultural values might be viewed with sympathy without calling into question the sanctioned social codes of aristocratic landownership and the process of national integration, As John Henry Raleigh has pointed out, Scott conceived Waverley partly in response to the large-scale emigration of Highland Scots, up­rooted by sheep-farming and the aggregation of farms, to America. Econo­mic rationalization made it impossible for them to get land in Britain, so rather than doom them to sedentary labor which they hated, Scott sup­ported laws to permit their emigration. “In other words,” writes Raleigh, “Scott acquiesced to the extinction of his beloved Highland culture and way of life, and Waverley is one of its memorials and obituaries” (Raleigh 22). Land- ownership and the concentration of capital had to be made compatible values, even if they destroyed the community they overlay. “It is vain to abuse these gentlemen [who converted the sheep-walksJ”, Scott wrote to Maria Edgeworth in 1830, “this which is the inevitable consequence of a great change of things” (qtd. in Raleigh 22).

Scott did not consider that either the description of historical in­fluences or sympathy with Highland culture interfered with his underlying moral understanding of man’s unchanging nature. In the 1829 Introduction to the collected Waverley Novels, Scott attributed his choice of setting and theme less to the “favourable opportunities of contrast” he cited in the 1805 preface to Waverley, than to his wish to emulate the ideal of Maria Edgeworth’s regional novels.

Two circumstances, in particular, recalled my recollection of the mislaid manuscript. The first was the extended and well-merited fame of Maria Edgeworth, whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbors of Ireland, that she may truly be said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up.

Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact that pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland — something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister kingdom in a more favourable light that they have been hitherto placed, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their follies. ²⁶

Scott’s intended audience was thus English, and Anglophile Scots, not the nationally conscious Scots — an intention clearly implied in the 1817 Quarterly Review article’s remark about obtaining “a patient hearing” for descriptions of Scottish conditions (“General Preface “17). Edgeworth’s most successful novel, Castle Rackrent, was published a year before the administrative union of Ireland with England in 1801, and participated in the general renewal of Irish culture after the French Revolution. Scott believed Rackrent had succeeded in moderating the conflict between the nationalistic Irish and the assimilating English by showing sympathy for the former, while identifying with the ascendancy party of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, of which the Edgeworths were prominent members.

Although the Union of Scotland and England had been effected politically in 1707, it remained a source of economic and political grievance in Scott’s own lifetime, and indeed into the present age. Scott set out to acquire sympathy for the Scots from the English audience by showing Scots character at its best, and providing historical reasons for its fai­lings. Because of this, Hazlitt, for one, believed that the Waverley Novels were received more wholeheartedly in England than Scotland, where the political, economic, and religious conflicts of the past two centuries had not yet yielded to a cool and settled picture of the national character (Hazlitt in Hayden, ed. 283).

For many Scotsmen, Scott’s image of Scotland seemed to be directed exclusively to English and Anglophile, High Church readers. In his de- bate with the Edinburgh divine, Thomas McCrie, for instance, Scott was compelled to turn a large portion of his anonymous self-review in the Quarterly Review to a detailed defense of his depiction of the Covenanters in Old Mortality. McCrie’s instructions from his editor had been “not to spare the author, to praise his Scotch, but reprobate his principles with all his might….” (qtd. in Raitt 6).

McCrie criticized Scott — Old Mortality, in particular, but the cri- tique was intended to apply to all the Waverley Novels — precisely for creating stories of historical and political fact through the conscious­ ness of a protagonist capable of acting only from personal, “psychological” motives, and of distinguishing only such motives in other historical characters. Thus, the consequences of decisive historical events were li­mited to what was either nonpolitical, or disastrous, thereby evading the problem of nationalistic political morality and commitment. Scott defen­ded himself on literary grounds, claiming the Waverley Novels were romances, and consequently freer than history “or the novel” from the demands of probability or fact. Moreover, they had been written on the “dramatic principle,” according to which the reader is forced to “gather the meaning of the scenes from what the dramatis personae say to each other, not from any explanation addressed immediately to themselves.” The Scots readers, as McCrie’s critique illustrates, were often too concerned with the historical consequences of the events Scott wrote about to be able to suspend disbelief sufficiently to accept Scott’s “psychological” view of their own national character (Goodin 15-17).

The Code of Hospitality

However much he is moved by his observations and impressions, Edward’s continuity in history, the principle through which he transcends the contingencies of partisan strife, derives from two a prioris: that he is an Englishman, and that he is an aristocrat. In Waverley, this conti­nuity is represented by the aristocratic code of reciprocal hospitality that bound families to extend protection to one another.

Edward meets with several different attitudes to guest-friendship before he can assert it in his own right. At Tully-Veolan, the Baron’s fervent hospitality proves embarrassing to Edward’s military honor, when he refuses to let Edward challenge an insult while under his protec­tion. At Glennaquoich, Fergus manipulates the signs of hospitality to se­duce Edward to his cause. Fergus, typically, receives hospitality from no one. He is at home only with his own,

The first time Edward encounters a clear abuse of the code is when Donald Bean Lean, the Highland raider, steals his seal while Edward is resting in his cave. It is this breach of aristocratic faith that brings the troubles down on Edward’s head. Donald represents the most untrust­worthy, anarchic aspect of Highland society. He is not a savage, totally unfamiliar with the code. But his experience with it has been perverse; the only example of reciprocal hospitality in Donald’s history is an invitation to the wedding of a local landowner whom Donald had abducted, then cured of smallpox while waiting for the ransom. Donald does overtly and on a small scale what Fergus and the Pretender do subtly on a grand scale, In effect, he breaks the code that keeps society together, bringing on chaos in which innocents are persecuted and killed.

At the battle of Preston, Edward ceases to be a guest. He asserts his national and class loyalties by rescuing Talbot from otherwise certain death, and taking him under his protection. It is quite a neat bit of coincidence, since Talbot’s presence at that spot had also been motivated by a debt of guest-friendship to Edward’s uncle, to whom he had promi­sed to search out Edward’s whereabouts. Talbot’s rescue and parole are the means by which Edward finally frees himself from the Jacobite cause, and ultimately restores his line. Talbot shelters him when he flees to London after Charles Edward’s defeat, gains him a passport, and even se­cures a pardon for him and the Baron. It is Talbot’s solidarity, forged through the code of reciprocal hospitality, that motivates the comic en­ding. It is he who buys Tully-Veolan back for its “rightful” proprietors, thus giving Edward the opportunity to establish his estate and line in a symbolic marriage of Scotland and England.

Extended to nations, the ideal epic code of aristocratic honor was Scott’s model of universal human law transcending ideological differences. In the ideology of the Augustan world-view, understanding between parties depended on their sociability and openness, and these could only be assured by such ethical codes of reciprocity. The doom of the clan of Ivor, as of all the Highlanders, stems from their self-regulated isolation from other societies. As Raleigh writes:

…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 mature examples alone makes man a reasonable being: “Society and example..,more than any other motive, master and sway the natural bent of our passions… ” (§ IV). (Raleigh 20; emphasis added)

Although ethnographic and historical detail constitute in our view the realism of Waverley, Scott considered the code of hospitality and mutual protection to be the basis of the novel’s verisimilitude. In the 1829 “Introduction to Waverley,” Scott alludes to the “incidents on which the novel of WAVERLEY was founded:… 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.”⁷ He recounts the meeting on the field of Preston of Alexander Stewart, a Jacobite officer, and a Col. Whitefoord, a Hanoverian from Ayrshire. The encounter follows in detail both the meeting of Waverley and Talbot, and the fate of Baron Bradwardine. Although extraordinary, the chivalrous exchange actually did take place. Thus, in Scott’s eyes, it gave the Talbot-Waverley episode greater historical legitimacy than mere statistical probability, which has no moral value, could have done.

Waverley‘s rhetorical plot hinges then on the continuity of epic values in the welter of history. Extraordinary historical occurrences might also be claimed to have resolved the contradiction between men and manners, history and comedy. For Scott, the code of mutual protection is a constant in both social life and individual feelings.

In basing so much of his novel on the aristocratic code, Scott ran into as complex ideological problems as he did with his use of quasi-empirical, concrete descriptions. We have mentioned the lack of concreteness in Scott’s description of English society. I wish now to examine a particular aspect of the problem relevant to the code of mutual protection: Scott’s depiction of the social organization of landed estates.

Guest friendship depends on landed wealth. It requires a place in which and the wherewithal with which to provide extended hospitality. A good half of Waverley takes place on estates or farms that provide or have provided hospitality to one or another of the protagonists: Waverley Honour, Tully-Veolan, Glennaquoich, Fasthwaite, There is no questioning the right of the landowners to their lands. Each is entitled to it by right of long lineage and royal deed. Fergus’ goes back three hundred years, the Baron’s to the reign of King David I. Much space is given to disquisitions on the status of estates under a Hanoverian king to whom the landlords —  Jacobites all — have not sworn allegiance. But we are clearly not to doubt their traditional right to their lands. The central problems revolving around their landownership are those of heritability: the continuing institutional legitimacy of aristocratic families. The old-fashioned Baron abides by the anachronistic and uneconomic code of of entail, even though it means the alienation of his lands, since he has no sons. Sir Everard is forced to figure out a way to continue both his line and his Jacobitic principles in Hanoverian England. Fergus, typical­ly, is not concerned with the continuation of his estate, only with its aggrandizement. Estates represent the family line, land represents the people. The Baron is known as Tully-Veolan to his intimates, and the Lowlanders call Fergus, “like other gentlemen, by the name of his estate, Glennaquoich” (§15) .

In the same vein, we are given no reason to question the unflagging loyalty of their tenants and dependents. Tenants in the novel affirm their faith in their lords from the most personal level of Davie  Gellatley’s love for the Baron, to the national level of the clan’s loyalty to its chief, and the ultimate, utopian level of the international loyalty of the United Kingdoms to their king. At Tully-Veolan and Glennaquoich Edward is quick to observe the relations of the dependence of the villagers or tenants. Even though the Baron’s land can no longer support the village, the Baron’s servants serve him with great affection. Glennaquoich is even poorer, but its organization and traditional etiquette lend it the nobility of a rude epic domain. The clansmen are so fiercely loyal to their chief, who is the center of their social structure, that when Edward asks Evan Dhu about the clan’s loyalties in the struggle between Stuart and Hanover, he replies: “Troth, and you must ask Vich Ian Vohr about that; for we are for his king, and care not much which o’ them it is” (§ 18).

Beyond his callow romanticism, Edward’s greatest flaw in the novel is his irresponsible neglect of his own land and tenants. Flora, who has a highly evolved sense of loyalty, exhorts him to leave the Highlands, where he is motivated to serve the Jacobite cause only because of his infatuation with her and her brother, and to return to England where, she tells him, he may serve the cause with conviction, in his proper place, on his own property.

Let me beg you to return to your own country; and having publicly freed yourself from every tie to the usurping government, I trust you will see cause, and find opportunity, to serve your injured so­vereign with effect, and stand forth, as your loyal ancestors, at the head of your natural followers, and adherents, a worthy representative of the house of Waverley. (§ 28)

Scott does not describe the lord-tenant relationship on Waverley Honour itself in detail. Some twenty “adherents,” to use Flora’s phrase, tenants and their sons, accompany Edward to Scotland. They show so much loyalty to him there that they are in danger of regressing to the Highlan­ders’ clan code in his absence. Edward’s first encounter with his social responsibility comes when he meets one of these “natural followers” mor­tally wounded by the Scots, among whom he, Edward, is fighting. In a guilt­ ridden soliloquy, he addresses the dead man:

I brought you from your paternal fields, and the protection of a generous and kind landlord, and when I had subjected you to all the rigour of military discipline, I shunned to bear my own share of the burden, and wandered from the duties I had undertaken, leaving alike those whom it was my business to protect, and my own reputation to suffer under the artifices of villainy. (§ 45)

The death of the tenant, Houghton, brings Edward to awareness of his responsibility. His first act of restitution, however is to rescue a peer, not a dependent.

Compared with the historically accurate views of Scots society, Scott’s vision of English social relations is uncritical. The yeomen of Westmoreland, where Edward goes into hiding, complain only of the inva­sion of foreigners from Scotland. The landed aristocracy of England ap­pears to embody a utopian society (vs. the corruption of the Whigs, re­presented by the opportunism of Edward’s father, Richard Waverley, and his nefarious associates), where the serenity of conditions renders harm­ less Sir Everard’s Jacobite nostalgia, a nostalgia so dangerous in Scotland.

The description of English society is a romantic fantasy, and omits the concrete elements that make the descriptions of Highland and Lowland Scots society credible. It is the “Diva Pecunia” of the English, their “tutelary deity,” in the Baron’s words, that restores Tully-Veolan to the line of Bradwardine; yet there is no hint of the source of that wealth, or the activities that produce it, in Scott’s description of English life. Of Talbot we know that he is “a kind of farmer” (§ 62); how his kind of farming brings in such wealth as Talbot enjoys is left a mystery. In effect, Scott succeeds in lifting Edward’s rhetorical-moral story out of the flow of historical contingency only by jumping the track into the world of an ideal society. Edward’s enlightening experiences must come from the historical world. But the ultimate purpose of his en­lightenment is to reaffirm the non-historical aristocratic code of social relations that actually disguises historical reality. In its function as the indirect restorer of Lowland Scotland to prosperity, the role of English bourgeois society in Waverley agrees with historical fact. We could wish that the Baron had dwelt a little longer on the Diva Pecunia that transforms social relations in the wink of an eye from a structure based on aristocratic privilege to one based on the market. But as a utopian society of which Lowland Scotland has become a part, Scott’s Tory fantasy of England is a creation of romantic comedy, without social dynamics, without history, without dialectical definition.

The double-standard that shows up so often in Waverley led different publics to different conclusions. As I hope to show in succeeding chapters, European audiences and writers responded to the ideology of the concrete implied in one of the aspects of Scott’s method: the concrete nations, events, objects, social relations between and among classes, that are implicit in Scott’s concern for historical particularity. In England, and for Scott’s conscious purpose of “completing the Union,” the moralis­tic, nostalgic, rationalistic and pseudo-aristocratic elements were favored.⁸  

In the end, Scott’s vision of historical movement at the expense of primitive societies was an affirmation of the actual trend of history: progress toward assimilation of isolated cultures within a single state that, for all the supra-nationalism of its appearance, bears the marks of English civil society. Scott thus becomes the apologist for the English brand of nationalism at the beginning of the liberal period. The “moral” of Waverley, affirming the code of aristocratic mutual protection among nations, is a fiction that creates the illusion of reciprocity among equals: Baron Bradwardine and Col. Talbot, Rose and Edward, Scotland and England. Obscured behind the rhetorical-moral structure is the code of the new “tutelary deity,” Diva Pecunia, whom Talbot brings from England to work providentially for the reinstitution of the old proprietors. English money, flowing from an ostensibly utopian Tory society, is the explicit means for the restoration of Scotland. In the vocabulary of the ethnolo­gist, such a restoration is termed assimilation. If the Bradwardines and Waverleys are to be seen as equals in the Tory world-view of the novel, Edward Waverley is unquestionably primus inter pares.

Conclusion

I have attempted to show in this essay the underlying contradictions in the first major realistic historical novel, Scott’s Waverley, between the sociologically empirical “ideology of the concrete” and the ideology of English aristocratic privilege embodied in the structure of rhetorical romantic comedy, The former is embodied in the novel by the elaborate and accurate concrete motivation of the characters’ actions in the personal and social histories; in the detailed description of geographical and so­cial environments that influence and moderate the characters’ actions and perceptions; in the observation of different cultural value-systems and “manners” from a dialectical perspective that examines familiar social structures through alien ones, the alien through the familiar, and seeks out historical causes for social phenomena. Waverley is the first Europe­an historical novel to give clear expression to the view that particulars of history and environment generate human actions.

This is so despite Scott’s formal intention. Waverley was intended by him to be a moral tragicomedy, with the emphasis on the comedy of a young man growing through experience to take his rightful place in society, and joining his line with the line of another nation. The ideology of rhetori­cal comedy, as opposed to that of concrete representation, perceives the world as an ideal, rhetorical structure of values, essentially unchanging, unaffected by accidental exceptions in reality. Thus Waverley is also a comic myth of Scott’s society. Edward’s marriage to Rose and the regene­ration of Waverley Honour on Bradwardine land consummates an ideal resolution of contradictions perceived in reality. The restoration of agrarian aristocratic values with the co-operation of financial values creates an ideal society growing out of civil conflict. This is the legitimating myth of English supremacy on the British Isles, where assimilation is presented as union, and restoration through capital as if it were through the code of reciprocal hospitality.

Notes to Chapter II

1. The points in this paragraph are drawn from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, 11-30.

2.  John Henry Raleigh, “Waverley as History; or ‘Tis One Hundred and Fifty:–Six Years Since” 22; Lionel Stephenson, A Panorama of the English Novel 198-204; see also Duncan Forbes, “The rationalism of Sir Walter Scott.”       

3. “The great felicity of Walter Scott is that his own intellect supplies the place of all intellect and all character in his heroes and heroines, and representing the intellect of his readers, supersedes all motive for its exertion, by never appearing alien, whether as above or below.” Coleridge in Hayden, ed. Scott: The Critical Heritage 184; recent critics with similar views: Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel, Form and Function 124; F.R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Nineteenth Century British Novel 70.

4. Romantic comedy is not, of course, an aristocratic mode, and the comic element of the Waverley Novels is the conception of a conservative bourgeois gentleman sympathetic to aristocratic ideology. Comedy is a priori anti-aristocratic, since the bouleversement of values at the heart of its conflict is inherently critical of entrenched values. See Albert Cook, The Dark Voyage and The Golden Mean. A Philosophy of Comedy 47-8.                                    

5.  I can only note here that this formulation of Scott’s ideology rests on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ working definition of myth in “The Structu­ral Study of Myth” as an ideal resolution of real contradictions (Structural Anthropology 229); it implies the thesis that Scott was writing an ideological mythology of the Union of Scotland and England and the creation of a unified British state dominated by English commerce. The argument is elaborated above, but here I wish only to point out my disagreement with Avrom Fleischmann’s assessment that “Scott’s vision of history is open-ended and free, neither a validation of the past nor an invocation of a necessary outcome on the horizon. Scott was not an ideologist but a dramatist of ideas, and his historical thinking is closer to being an aesthetic contemplation of change that it is to being a celebration of any society, past or present” (The English Historical Novel 50). Fleischman’s view stems from an unreflective separation of aesthe­tics from ideology.                               

6.  C.S. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 332. Scott may have taken his intention of introducing Scotland’s “natives to those of the sister kingdom in a more favourable light, etc,” di­rectly from Martin’s Descriptions of the Western Isles of Scotland (1701); in his dedication to the Queen’s husband, Martin expresses the plea “that the wide world would soon come to know his country better, and learn to treat its men with less scorn.”

7. “General Preface to the Waverley Novels” in the Cassell edition of Waverley (1908) 17.

8. Coleridge’s praise for Scott is in this vein. See “Coleridge on the Novels” in Hayden, ed. 180.