by John Buchan
An acute eighteenth-century critic thus summed up the effect of Pope and his school: “What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling.” But all through the century the fabling had gone on, in nursery rhymes and children’s tales, in broadsheets and chap-books and ballads, in the bombast of the popular presses. The public appetite for the stranger and more coloured aspects of life, the subjects which we call “romantic,” had never ceased, but it had been satisfied with indifferent fare, so that, when Scott began to write, romance had got an evil name, being associated with the feebly fantastic. The thoughtful fought shy of its crude manifestations, so that Dr Johnson, in spite of his taste for the old romancers, could nevertheless in his Dictionary mark the word “chivalrous” as obsolete. There was a sceptical spirit of counter-romance among the cultivated: we find it in Northanger Abbey, we have traces of it in Peacock’s Maid Marian. What was needed was a writer who could unite both strains, for in the mediæval world the two had been inseparable, the mystery and the fact, credulity and incredulity, the love of the marvellous and the descent into jovial common sense; who could make credible beauty and terror in their strangest forms by showing them as the natural outcome of the clash of human character; who could satisfy a secular popular craving with fare in which the most delicate palate could also delight.
[The Historical Romance]
In particular, the historical romance clamoured to be rescued from the dingy coulisses of the Minerva Press. It had a long ancestry and a continuing vogue, but, except in a piece of brilliant mimicry like Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, it too had only a nodding acquaintance with the serious art of letters. As Sir Walter Raleigh has written, “the historical novelists who preceded Scott chose a century as they might have chosen a partner for a dance, gaily and confidently, without qualification or equipment beyond a few outworn verbal archaisms.” Hitherto all the great novels had been studies of contemporary life; the historical tale was a lifeless thing, smothered in tinsel conventions, something beneath the dignity of literature. Yet the exclusion of the past gravely narrowed the area of fiction, and if the novel was to take all the world for its province it could not confine the world to the mutable present.
An historical novel is simply a novel which attempts to reconstruct the life, and recapture the atmosphere, of an age other than that of the writer. The age may be distant a couple of generations or a thousand years; the novel may find its drama in swift external incident, or in some conflict of the spirit; it may be picaresque or domestic, a story of manners, or of action, or of the heart; its technique may be any one of the twenty different ways in which tribal lays and other things are constructed. The point of difference is that in every case the writer has to construct for himself, imaginatively, not only the drama, but an atmosphere and modes of life and thought with which he cannot be personally familiar. So, it may be said, has the novelist of contemporary life, whenever he strays outside the narrow orbit of his experience. But there is a difference. The man who deals with contemporary life has the key nearer to his hand. He is concerned with things which are roughly within his world of experience; the details may be strange, but access to them is simple. The historical novelist has to think himself into an alien world before he can expound its humanity.
Such a type is capable of the highest flights. In the hands of a master it permits that isolation of essentials from accidentals, and that critical detachment which is of the essence of the novelist’s art, and which is hard to attain when he is clogged with a “turbid mixture of contemporaneousness.” But it is perhaps the most difficult, and requires the most scrupulous gift of selection; it is so apt to be overloaded with accurate but irrelevant bric-à-brac. Also it needs an austere conscience. It is easy to play tricks, and to startle with false colour and meretricious invention. The reader cannot check the result by his own experience; he is in the novelist’s hands, and a point of honour is involved; consciously to pervert the past is a more heinous sin than to pervert the present, for the crime is harder to detect. Above all it demands a strong independent imagination. It is fatally simple to project the mind of one’s own age back into the past and produce what is no more than a fancy-dress party. Past modes of thought are harder to realize than past ways of living. But the difficulties of the form have been an incentive to bold minds. Since Scott released the past for fiction, it is notable how many of the masterpieces have belonged to that school. War and Peace is an historical novel; Vanity Fair, likewise, for Thackeray wrote a generation or two after Waterloo: most of Victor Hugo’s and some of the best work of Flaubert and Anatole France.
[Scott’s material]
Scott in Waverley chose wisely to treat of history which was just outside his own recollection, but within that of many people with whom he had talked. He was a child of two when Dr Johnson visited Edinburgh, and since that year Scotland had moved into a new world. But fragments of the old world remained, and he had a pious desire to fix on canvas the fading colours before they vanished for ever. He put into his first novel a large part of the harvest of his youthful wanderings. The period — sixty years back — lived for him like a personal reminiscence, so vividly had he been impressed by what he had seen and heard and read. His prodigious memory enabled him to escape the toil of the ordinary chronicler; no need for him to hunt in books for the correct details, since they were all clear in his head. He wove into the tale traits of many real places and people. The house of Tully-Veolan was drawn from Grandtully in Perthshire and Traquair in Tweeddale. Davie Gellatley may have had his original in Daft Jock Gray, once a famous figure on the Border, and Fergus MacIvor may have been partly studied from his friend, Alexander Macdonell of Glengarry. The Baron of Bradwardine has hints of Stewart of Invernahyle, whom Scott visited in his youth; of Erskine’s neighbour, the old laird of Gask; and — in his love of the classics and uncompromising loyalty — of the last Lord Pitsligo. But all the portraits are composite, for Scott was no “barren rascal” to stick slavishly to one model.
[Edward Waverley]
The theme of the novel is the contrast of two civilizations — the impact upon the mind of an average educated Englishman of the alien world of the Scots Lowlands and the lingering mediævalism of the Highlands. To get the contrast in the highest relief he selects a tense historical moment, and the tragedy of a lost cause. With the evolution of the narrative inside the main theme he has obviously taken pains, for the actual plot of Waverley, as Stevenson noted, is better wrought than that of any of the other novels. The hero under the influence of love and chivalry drifts unconsciously away from the loyalties of his race and the service to which he belongs, and finds himself launched upon an equivocal line of conduct which only just stops short of disaster. The lost cause must issue in tragedy, but for the others the end must be peace, and in order to compass this happy conclusion the fate of the Baron of Bradwardine and his estate is most skilfully managed — with complete fidelity, be it noted, to the intricate Scots law of entail. Nor, when the prefaces and introductions are omitted — excellent things in themselves but with no part in the artistry of the tale — does the narrative ever drag. The action begins properly with Chapter VII, and I cannot feel that it ever loses its grip; the pace at first is slow and leisurely, but soon we feel the rush of the true epic spirit.
In order to set the different modes of life in strong contrast it was necessary to present in detail the character of the hero, for, if one antithesis is Highland and Lowland, the other is normal good sense set against impracticable chivalry and poetry. “The hero,” Scott wrote to Morritt, “is a sneaking piece of imbecility; and if he had married Flora, she would have set him up upon the chimney-piece, as the Polish Dwarf’s wife used to do with him. I am a bad hand at depicting a hero properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of Borderers, buccaneers, Highland robbers and all others of a Robin Hood description.” One may take leave to differ. Edward Waver
ley is the most carefully studied of Scott’s younger heroes; he is indeed an elaborate portrait of one side of Scott himself. Too little attention has been paid to the curious merit of the first six chapters, which Erskine and James Ballantyne found prosy. In reality they are a careful, and often subtle, study of high-spirited and imaginative youth, in which the author drew straight from his own memories. Edward Waverley has Scott’s strong good sense combined with his poetic susceptibility; above all he has Scott’s habit of being abstracted into a secret world. “Had he been asked to choose between any punishment short of ignominy and the necessity of giving a cold and composed account of the ideal world in which he lived the better part of his days, I think he would not have hesitated to prefer the former infliction.” The sentence is self-revealing. So, too, with the solid element of prose in Edward. When Flora is for ever beyond his reach, he turns his affections contentedly to Rose. Scott himself had done the same.
The fullness with which the hero is realized and expounded provides the reader with a basis of judgment, a standpoint from which to view the whimsicalities and the heroics of the other characters. Such a norm is needed, for the portraits are mainly of the abnormal. The book is a comedy of manners, interwoven with a tragedy, and the manners are those of people who are mostly “characters” — survivals, grotesques, eccentrics, persons with some inherited or induced strain of extravagance. Such figures as Cosmo Comyn Bradwardine, Davie Gellatley, Duncan MacWheeble, Balmawhapple, the Gifted Gilfillan, Callum Beg, Donald Bean Lean, Jock Jinker, are real enough in the sense that they have the vigour of life, but they are comedy figures, who live a little apart from the main road of humanity. They all have certain traits developed in an excessive degree, and out of the clash of these with normal existence comes humour. No novel of Scott’s is more richly humorous, or even, in the narrow sense, wittier. Some have found the Baron’s pedantry and MacWheeble’s legalism dull, but the more they are studied the more subtly relevant their discourse must appear. The delicacies can perhaps be fully appreciated only by a reader with some knowledge of Scots law, for the humour is often professional. MacWheeble’s talk, as Davie Gellatley said, is like “a charge of horning,” and the manoeuvres by which Inch-grabbit is ousted from the lairdship of Tully-Veolan are highly technical.[10 But the great comedy scenes can be understood by all — the supper at Luckie Macleary’s tavern, the halt at Cairnvreckan, the escape of Waverley from Gilfillan (one of the best in literature) and a dozen other unforgettable glimpses. When the pedlar whistles his dog and with the butt-end of a musket lays out the westland Whig in the midst of his soliloquies on cattle and Covenants, the comic spirit comes happily to her own.
As a background to this riot of fun and eccentricity there are the normal people like Waverley and Major Melville, and the full and sagacious pictures of social and economic conditions. Eccentricity, Walter Bagehot has written, “becomes a topic of literary art only when its identity with the ordinary principles of human nature is exhibited in the midst of, or as it were by means of, the superficial unlikeness. Such a skill, however, requires an easy, careless familiarity with normal human life and common human conduct.... It is this consistent acquaintance with regular life which makes the irregular characters of Scott so happy a contrast to the uneasy distortion of less sagacious novelists.” As for the other normal element, the love-story, it is admittedly a half-hearted and tenuous thing, with no passion in it — an exchange of high sentiment with Flora and a comfortable down-sitting with Rose, though there is much that is graceful in the latter’s courtship. Scott had James Ballantyne’s “love of wedding cake,” and liked to shepherd his lovers to church. But such climaxes are usually outside the real tale; that tale, in Waverley, was concluded on its tragic side at Haribee, and on its comic side with the entranced MacWheeble, when he hears of Rose’s fortune, preparing to make a “sma’ minute to prevent parties frae resiling.”
[The clash of loyalties]
The tragedy is the clash of ancient loyalties in the persons of Flora and Fergus MacIvor with an unsympathetic world. Scott, as is his custom, shows a profound comprehension of the merits of the different points of view, however fiercely they may conflict in action, for there was much in him of the philosophic historian. The two MacIvors are drawn on the grand scale, with something of the high heels and brocade which were thought fitting for tragic actors; they live only intermittently, for now and then they seem to fade into disembodied qualities of heart and mind. But what never ceases to live is the Highland world, as seen in the irruption of its denizens upon the Lowland towns and battlefields. Scott exulted in such a contrast, and the pageant of Prince Charlie at Holyrood is made the more real by the attendant pictures of chiefs and caterans in the unfamiliar streets. If it be complained that the Highlanders are drawn from the outside, the answer is that such is the plan of the book. It is not the inner life of the Celt that Scott is concerned with, but his external habits and manners, as they appeared when fate brought him into the glare of national history.
And at the end they rise to that supreme reality which is concerned only with the fundamentals of human life — the reality of the doomed Hector and the blinded Samson and the dying Lear — the ultimate truth of tragedy. The closing scenes at Carlisle have not often been equalled for moving simplicity — the trial, when Evan Dhu Maccombich first pleads with, and then defies, the court, or the last farewell when Fergus passes under the castle archway. With the supernatural in its crude form, like the Bodach Glas, Scott is never happy, but in great moments such as these he can trouble the mind as with a whisper from another world. But characteristically he does not leave us on the heights, for he must always conclude with his feet in the valley; like Samuel Butler he preferred the Holy Family to be painted with clothes drying in the background; the last word is with Waverley’s servant, the pragmatic Lowlander, Alick Polwarth, who is chiefly interested in the disposition of the bodies. “They’re no there.... The heads are ower the Scotch yate, as they ca’ it. It’s a great pity of Evan Dhu, who was a very weel-meaning, good-natured man to be a Hielandman; and indeed so was the Laird of Glennaquoich too, for that matter, when he wasna in one of his tirrivies.” This anti-climax is cunning art, for it prepares the mind for the mellow comfort of the close and the homely pedantries of Macwheeble.
[The Highlanders]
In Waverley Scott’s capacity for prose begins to reveal itself. Hitherto his style had been a workmanlike thing on the whole, but without any shining qualities and with many blemishes. The blemishes are still there. He has now and then the vice of grandiloquence, as when he calls an eagle “the superb monarch of the feathered tribes”; of pedantic stiffness—”Having thus touched upon the leading principle of Flora’s character, I may dismiss the rest more slightly” — or when Fergus orates, “You do not know the severity of a Government harassed by just apprehensions and a consciousness of their own illegality and insecurity”; of a sensibility which seems almost to parody itself: —
“Incomparable Flora!” said Edward, taking her hand. “How much do I need such a monitor!”
“A better one by far,” said Flora, gently withdrawing her hand, “Mr Waverley will always find in his own bosom, when he will give its small still voice leisure to be heard.”
There is a good deal of loose and ungrammatical writing and much that is dead and savourless. But the staple is sound, the sounder because it does not obtrude itself. It is easy, urbane, perspicacious, and, in the words of Adolphus, “imparts knowledge in the frank, unassuming and courteous manner of a friend communicating with a friend.” Above all it is notably free from the restless self-consciousness of most contemporary Scottish writers, who were in terror of falling into northern solecisms. But its supreme merit is in the dialogues. We see in the talk of the Prince the beginning of that happy discovery of a conventional style of speech for great people at once simple and dignified, a new thing in fiction. The vernacular of the Lowland characters is perfectly rendered, but so is the broken speech of the Highla
nd rank-and-file. For here was another new thing in fiction; the poor man at a great moment was allowed to become a poet, to use in his simplicity a far subtler and more beautiful rhythm than could be found in the swelling periods of his betters. Take Evan Maccombich at Carlisle. First the plea: —
If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life, or the life of six of my degree, is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it’s like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word, and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielander, nor the honour of a gentleman.
