THE WAVERLEY NOVELS
It must probably have been in 1813 that Scott, hunting for some fishing tackle in an old bureau, found both the flies (they were red palmers tied on several strands of grey horse hairs), and also the manuscript of the first chapters of Waverley, begun in 1805 and reconsidered in 1810. The novel was advertised in The Scots Magazine of February, as to appear in March. But, very characteristically, Scott now dropped the novel, and gave the spring months to composing the essays on “Chivalry” and “Romance” for Constable’s new purchase, The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then, in June 1814, Lockhart, at a dinner party of young men in George Street, saw through a window of North Castle Street the writing hand “that never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MSS.; and still it goes on unwearied, and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.... I well know what hand that is—’tis Walter Scott’s,” said Lockhart’s host.
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Thus, in three summer weeks, Scott wrote the two last volumes of Waverley, the anonymous romance that began a literary revolution. Novels, of course, were written always, since the days of Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney. But Miss Burney had long been silent: Mrs. Radcliffe had ceased to terrify and amaze, and Miss Edgeworth, in Lockhart’s opinion, “had never realized a tithe of £700 by the best of her Irish tales,” which Scott regarded as one source of his inspiration. Novels were in 1814 abandoned, said Morritt, to the Lydia Languishes and their maids; they were disdained by the then relatively serious members of the reading public who “formed libraries.” Waverley came with its successors and with the swarm of imitations, and libraries were formed no more. The public, indeed, still bought the poetry of Byron with enthusiasm, but Shelley and Keats they rejected. I doubt if there was a first edition of Christabel, and the reign of novels and nothing but novels began. There were interruptions to this despotism when Tennyson was in his golden prime, and when Macaulay and Froude wrote history, but to-day the Novel is supreme, and—the novels are not Waverley novels.
YACHTING TOUR
It was Scott, the greatest of readers, who inaugurated the reign of novel-reading, and very much chagrined he would be could he see the actual
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 results: the absolute horror with which mankind shun every other study. It could never have occurred to Scott, that, within less than a hundred years, male and female novelists, often as ignorant of books as of life, would monopolize the general attention, and would give themselves out as authorities on politics, philosophy, ethics, society, theology, religion, and Homeric criticism. Scott’s own tales never usurped the office of the pulpit, the platform, or the Press; and, if he did teach some readers all the history that they knew, he constantly warned them that, in his romances, he was an historian with a very large poetical licence.
No sooner had Scott read the proof-sheets of Waverley than he sailed from Leith (July 28, 1814) with a festal crew of friends, including Erskine, on board the Lighthouse yacht. The Surveyor, Viceroy of the jolly Commissioners of Lighthouses, was the ancestor of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, “a most gentlemanlike and modest man and well-known for his scientific skill,” writes Scott in his Diary. That he kept a very copious diary on a pleasure voyage is an example of his indomitable habit of writing, unfatigued by the production of two volumes of a novel in three weeks. He visited the ruined abbey of Arbroath, once held by Cardinal Beaton, “for the third time, the first being—eheu!” On the first visit he had
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 been in the company of his unforgotten love: to be absent from her, and divided from her by the river of death, was not to be out of mind of her. He studied the strange ways of the Shetland and Orkney islanders—we see the results in The Pirate; he examined the extraordinary towers of the fourth to ninth centuries A.D. called Brochs; he took notes of a superstitious practice which strongly resembles an usage of the natives of Central Australia: he heard of the great sea serpent’s recent visit to the coast, and he was presented with a collection of neolithic axe heads. He met a witch of great age who sold, as Æolus in the Odyssey gave, favourable breezes to seamen. He visited many island scenes of the distresses of Prince Charles, in 1746, and at Dunvegan saw the Fairy Flag of M’Leod, and heard M’Crimmon’s Lament played by a descendant of the M’Crimmon who was the only man slain in the rout of the M’Leods at Moy. He beheld Loch Coruisk—admirably described in The Lord of the Isles—and the ruins of Ardtornish Castle, in which occurs the opening scene of that poem. On September 4, he was saddened by news of the death of one of his dearest friends, the Duchess of Buccleuch, and, on September 8, left the yacht for Glasgow.
“WAVERLEY”
In Edinburgh, on his way to Abbotsford, Scott found Constable about to publish the third edition
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 of Waverley—three thousand copies, at a guinea, had already been disposed of, or were in the way of disappearing. This was at that time an unexampled success for a new and anonymous novel, unbacked by the favouring breezes of the modern puff preliminary. The book, uncut and in three grey-clad volumes, is now esteemed at a very high rate by bibliomaniacs. In most cases, purchasers had the novels “murderously half-bound in calf,” and much cut down; and, of Waverley in particular, copies of the first edition are seldom found in the original state. Constable had refused to give £1,000 for the whole copyright, and rather ruefully divided the large profits with the author.
At first only three people were in Scott’s confidence as to the authorship of Waverley: they were Ballantyne, Erskine and Morritt. Gradually, as the novels flowed on and on, about twenty persons were entrusted with the secret, which could be no real secret to any one of sense who had read the poems and the notes to the poems. As for Scott’s intimates, they recognized him in dozens of details and traces. But the public, not unnaturally, wished to believe that they had a new entertainer. Thomas Scott, Jeffrey (of all people!), Erskine, and a clergyman who lay under a very black cloud, were among the persons suspected of the authorship.
It was vain to say that only Scott knew so much
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 of Highlands and Lowlands as the author knew: that no other man had his acquaintance with the personal side of old history, that no other could have written the snatches of verse in the romances. People enjoy a mystery, and Scott enjoyed mystifying them, while his conscience permitted him a latitude in denial warranted by the maxims of Father Holt, S.J., in Esmond. As a loyal citizen might blamelessly say that King Charles was not in the oak tree—His Majesty being private there, and invisible to loyal eyes—so Scott, if pressed, averred that he had no hand in the novels, often adding that, even if he had, he would still deny his authorship.
Casuists may blame or exonerate him (Cardinal Newman discussed the situation): it is certain that no man is bound to incriminate himself.
Jeffrey detected Scott, of course, and reviewed him with the usual grotesque assumption of superiority. O le grand homme, rien ne lui peut plaire! The Quarterly dullard probably did not recognize Scott’s hand, and spoke of the Scots tongue as “a dark dialogue” (so in Lockhart!) “of Anglified Erse,” a deathless exhibition of stupid ignorance.
THE NOVELS
The general characteristics, the merits and defects of the Waverley novels may be reviewed, before we approach the history of each example in its turn. In an age when an acquaintance with Fitz
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Gerald’s Rubáiyàt of Omar Kháyyám, an exhaustive ignorance of all literature of the past, and an especial contempt for Scott, whom FitzGerald so intensely admired, are the equipment of many critics, we must be very cautious in praising the Waverley novels. They are not the work of a passionate, a squalid, or a totally uneducated genius. They are not the work of any Peeping Tom who studies woman in her dressing-room, and tries to spy or smell out the secrets of the eternally feminine. We have novels to-day—novels by males—full of clever spyings and dissections of womankind, which Scott would have thrown into the fire. “I think,” writes Mr. Hutton, “that the deficiency of his pictures of women ... should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry.... He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character.”
Scott’s novels, again, are not the work of a man who desires to enforce his social, or religious, or political ideals and ideas in his romances. Like almost all great novels, except Tom Jones, they do not possess carefully elaborated plots, any more than do most of the dramas of Shakespeare. They are far from being the work of a conscientious stylist, beating his brains for hours to find le mot propre, usually the least natural word for any mor
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tal to use in the circumstances. But once Scott did hunt for le mot propre, in Scots. He could not find it, and came out to the lawn at Abbotsford where some workmen were engaged. He turned a bucket upside down, and asked the men, “What did I do just now?” “Ye whummled the bowie,” said the men, and Scott had found the word he wanted—to “whummle.” Mr. Saintsbury has a little excursus on this word, “whummle,” or “whammle,” which Scott, he has heard, picked up from a woman in the street. But every Scot knows it, for to “whummle the bannock,” in the presence of a Menteith, was a proverbial insult, as Menteith, or one of his men, is said, by whummling the loaf, to have given the signal of betrayal, when English soldiers lay in wait before seizing Sir William Wallace.
THE NOVELS
Far from being a conscientious stylist, Scott not infrequently proves the truth of his own remark to Lockhart, that he never learned grammar. I have found five “whiches” in a sentence of his, and five “ques” in a sentence by Alexandre Dumas, his pupil and rival. Dumas had more of the humour of Scott than Scott had of the wit of Dumas. Many parts of his tales are prolix: his openings, as a rule, are dull. His heroes and heroines often speak in the stilted manner of Miss Burney’s Lord Orville, a manner (if we may trust memoirs and books like Boswell’s Johnson, and Walpole’s Let
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ters), in which no men and women of mould ever did talk, even in the eighteenth century. But Catherine Glover, in The Fair Maid of Perth, usually speaks from stilts. These pompous discourses in which the speaker often talks of himself in the third person, were in vogue, in novel writing, we do not know why, and they are a stone of stumbling to readers who do not blench when a modern hero mouths fustian in the tone of a demoniac at large. All these unfashionable traits are to be found up and down the Waverley novels, combined with descriptive passages that, to some, are a weariness. These are frank confessions from a zealot who has read most of the Waverley novels many times, from childhood up to age, and finds them better, finds fresh beauties in them, every time that he reads them. But there are more serious defects than old-fashionedness, and prolixities (which may be skipped), and laxity of style, and errors in grammar. There are faults in “artistry,” and nobody knew them better, or put his finger on them more ruthlessly, or apologized for them more ingenuously than Scott himself.
THE NOVELS
The Introductions to the Novels have frightened away many a painful would-be student who has been told that, if you read a book, you must read every line of it—from cover to cover. This is an old moral maxim invented and handed on by
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 the class of mortals who are not born readers, and regard literature with moral earnestness as a duty, though a painful duty. There must be no flinching! Scott, like Dr. Johnson, “tore the heart out of a book,” rapidly assimilating what he needed, and “skipping” what he did not need. He wrote his Introductions for the curious literary student, not for the novel reader and the general public. Doubtless he expected the general public to skip the Introductions, and did not reflect that they would trouble persons who adhere to the puritanic rule against what they call “desultory reading.” But whosoever has any interest in Scott’s own theory of the conduct of the historical novel, and in his confession of his own faults, cannot afford to overlook the original Introduction of 1822 to The Fortunes of Nigel. In these pages Captain Clutterbuck describes an interview with “The Eidolon, or representative vision of The Author of Waverley.” Scott, in fact, anticipates the modern “interview,” but he interviews himself, and does the business better than the suave modern reporter. After confessing that The Monastery, especially the White Lady of Avenel, is rather a failure, Scott is asked by Captain Clutterbuck whether his new book meets every single demand of the critics, whether it opens strikingly, proceeds naturally, and ends happily, for critics then applauded what they
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 now denounce—“a happy ending.” Scott replies that Hercules might produce a romance “which should glide, and gush, and never pause, and widen, and deepen, and all the rest on’t,” but that he cannot. “There never was a novel written on this plan while the world stood.” “Pardon me—Tom Jones,” says the Captain. There was also the Odyssey, on which Wolf, the great sceptic as to the unity of the Iliad, bestowed the praise of masterly composition which the Captain gives to Tom Jones. But several modern German critics and Father Browne of the Society of Jesus, assure us that the plot of the Odyssey is a very bad piece of composition, a dawdling bit of patchwork by many hands, in many ages, strung together by a relatively late Greek “botcher,” though why he took the trouble nobody can imagine. Thus do critical opinions differ, and a fair critic informs me that “Tom Jones is the stupidest book in the English language.” Yet, if the Odyssey triumphed over the Zoili of three thousand years, while Tom Jones was an undisputed masterpiece for a century and a half, we may doubt whether the verdict of time and of the world is to be upset for ever by the censures of a few moderns. To them, and to the contemners of Scott, we may say, as Cromwell said to the Commissioners of the General Assembly, “Brethren, in the bowels of Christ, believe that it
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 is possible you may be mistaken.” Scott remarks that, in Fielding’s masterpiece, the Novel, for excellence of composition, “challenged a comparison with the Epic.” Other “great masters,” like Smollett and Le Sage, “have been satisfied if they amuse the reader on the road.” It is enough for himself if his “scenes, unlaboured and loosely put together, have sufficient interest in them to amuse in one corner the pain of the body; in another to relieve anxiety of mind; in a third place to unwrinkle a brow bent with the furrows of daily toil; in another to fill the place of bad thoughts, or to suggest better; in yet another to induce an idler to study the history of his country; in all ... to furnish harmless amusement.”
Such is Scott’s reply, in anticipation, to the censure of Carlyle, that he has not a message, and a mission, and so forth. His mission was to add enormously to human happiness: his message was that of honour, courage, endurance, love, and kindness. The Captain, however, doubts not that the new book needs an apology, and that the story “is hastily huddled up,”—a favourite criticism of Scott’s friend, Lady Louisa Steuart. Scott might have replied that his romances are not so hastily “huddled up” at the close as many of Shakespeare’s plays.
THE NOVELS
But it is curious that Hogg represents Scott as
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 criticising his tales exactly as Captain Clutterbuck and Lady Louisa censured Scott’s own romances.
“Well, Mr. Hogg, I have read over your proofs with a great deal of pleasure, and, I confess, with some little portion of dread. In the first place, the meeting of the two princesses at Castle Weiry is excellent. I have not seen any modern thing more truly dramatic. The characters are strongly marked, old Peter Chisholme’s in particular. Ah! man, what you might have made of that with a little more refinement, care, and patience! But it is always the same with you, just hurrying on from one vagary to another, without consistency or proper arrangement.”
“Dear Mr. Scott, a man canna do the thing that he canna do.”
“Yes, but you can do it. Witness your poems, where the arrangements are all perfect and complete; but in your prose works, with the exception of a few short tales, you seem to write merely by random, without once considering what you are going to write about.”
“You are not often wrong, Mr. Scott, and you were never righter in your life than you are now, for when I write the first line of a tale or novel, I know not what the second is to be, and it is the same way in every sentence throughout. When my tale is traditionary, the work is easy, as I then
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 see my way before me, though the tradition be ever so short, but in all my prose works of imagination, knowing little of the world, I sail on without star or compass.”
In the conversation with the Captain, Scott presently shows that, as regards composition, the Sheriff and the S............