Waverley; Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since
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[This tirade of gibberish is literally taken or selected from a mock discourse pronounced by a professed jester, which occurs in an ancient manuscript in the Advocates’ Library, the same from which the late ingenious Mr. Weber published the curious comic romance of the “Limiting of the Hare.” It was introduced in compliance with Mr. Strutt’s plan of rendering his tale an illustration of ancient manners. A similar burlesque sermon is pronounced by the Fool in Sir David Lindesay’s satire of the “Three Estates.” The nonsense and vulgar burlesque of that composition illustrate the ground of Sir Andrew, Aguecheek’s eulogy on the exploits of the jester in “Twelfth Night,” who, reserving his sharper jests for Sir Toby, had doubtless enough of the jargon of his calling to captivate the imbecility of his brother knight, who is made to exclaim: “In sooth, thou wast in very gracious fooling last night when thou spokest of Pigrogremitus, and of the vapours passing the equinoctials of Quenbus; ‘t was very good, i’ faith!” It is entertaining to find commentators seeking to discover some meaning in the professional jargon of such a passage as this.]
With much goodly gibberish to the same effect, which display of Gregory’s ready wit not only threw the whole company into convulsions of laughter, but made such an impression on Rose, the Potter’s daughter, that it was thought it would be the jester’s own fault if Jack was long without his Jill. Much pithy matter concerning the bringing the bride to bed, the loosing the bridegroom’s points, the scramble which ensued for them, and the casting of the stocking, is also omitted, from its obscurity.
The following song, which has been since borrowed by the worshipful author of the famous “History of Fryar Bacon,” has been with difficulty deciphered. It seems to have been sung on occasion of carrying home the bride.
BRIDAL SONG
To the tune of “I have been a Fiddler,” etc.
And did you not hear of a mirth befell The morrow after a wedding-day, And carrying a bride at home to dwell? And away to Tewin, away, away! The quintain was set, and the garlands were made, — ‘T is pity old customs should ever decay; And woe be to him that was horsed on a jade, For he carried no credit away, away. We met a consort of fiddle-de-dees; We set them a cockhorse, and made them play The winning of Bullen, and Upsey-fires, And away to Tewin, away, away! There was ne’er a lad in all the parish That would go to the plough that day; But on his fore-horse his wench he carries, And away to Tewin, away, away! The butler was quick, and the ale he did tap, The maidens did make the chamber full gay; The servants did give me a fuddling cup, And I did carry ‘t away, away. The smith of the town his liquor so took That he was persuaded that the ground looked blue; And I dare boldly be sworn on a book Such smiths as he there ‘s but a few. A posset was made, and the women did sip, And simpering said they could eat no more; Full many a maiden was laid on the lip, — I’ll say no more, but give o’er (give o’er).But what our fair readers will chiefly regret is the loss of three declarations of love: the first by St. Clore to Matilda, which, with the lady’s answer, occupies fifteen closely written pages of manuscript. That of Fitzosborne to Emma is not much shorter; but the amours of Fitzallen and Eleanor, being of a less romantic cast, are closed in three pages only. The three noble couples were married in Queen-Hoo Hall upon the same day, being the twentieth Sunday after Easter. There is a prolix account of the marriage-feast, of which we can pick out the names of a few dishes, such as peterel, crane, sturgeon, swan, etc., with a profusion of wild-fowl and venison. We also see that a suitable song was produced by Peretto on the occasion, and that the bishop, who blessed the bridal beds which received the happy couples, was no niggard of his holy water, bestowing half a gallon upon each of the couches. We regret we cannot give these curiosities to the reader in detail, but we hope to expose the manuscript to abler antiquaries, so soon as it shall be framed and glazed by the ingenious artist who rendered that service to Mr. Ireland’s Shakspeare manuscripts. And so (being unable to lay aside the style to which our pen is habituated), gentle reader, we bid thee heartily farewell.
No. III.
ANECDOTE OF SCHOOL DAYS, UPON WHICH MR. THOMAS SCOTT PROPOSED TO FOUND A TALE OF FICTION
It is well known in the South that there is little or no boxing at the Scottish schools. About forty or fifty years ago, however, a far more dangerous mode of fighting, in parties or factions, was permitted in the streets of Edinburgh, to the great disgrace of the police, and danger of the parties concerned. These parties were generally formed from the quarters of the town in which the combatants resided, those of a particular square or district fighting against those of an adjoining one. Hence it happened that the children of the higher classes were often pitted against those of the lower, each taking their side according to the residence of their friends. So far as I recollect, however, it was unmingled either with feelings of democracy or aristocracy, or, indeed, with malice or ill-will of any kind towards the opposite party. In fact, it was only a rough mode of play. Such contests were, however, maintained with great vigour with stones and sticks and fisticuffs, when one party dared to charge, and the other stood their ground. Of course mischief sometimes happened; boys are said to have been killed at these “bickers,” as they were called, and serious accidents certainly took place, as many contemporaries can bear witness.
The Author’s father residing in George Square, in the southern side of Edinburgh, the boys belonging to that family, with others in the square, were arranged into a sort of company, to which a lady of distinction presented a handsome set of colours. Now this company, or regiment, as a matter of course, was engaged in weekly warfare with the boys inhabiting the Crosscauseway, Bristo Street, the Potter Row, – in short, the neighbouring suburbs. These last were chiefly of the lower rank, but hardy loons, who threw stones to a hair’s-breadth, and were very rugged antagonists at close quarters. The skirmish sometimes lasted for a whole evening, until one party or the other was victorious, when, if ours were successful, we drove the enemy to their quarters, and were usually chased back by the reinforcement of bigger lads who came to their assistance. If, on the contrary, we were pursued, as was often the case, into the precincts of our square, we were in our turn supported by our elder brothers, domestic servants, and similar auxiliaries.
It followed, from our frequent opposition to each other, that though not knowing the names of our enemies, we were yet well acquainted with their appearance, and had nicknames for the most remarkable of them. One very active and spirited boy might be considered as the principal leader in the cohort of the suburbs. He was, I suppose, thirteen or fourteen years old, finely made, tall, blue-eyed, with long fair hair, the very picture of a youthful Goth. This lad was always first in the charge, and last in the retreat, – the Achilles, at once, and Ajax of the Crosscauseway. He was too formidable to us not to have a cognomen, and, like that of a knight of old, it was taken from the most remarkable part of his dress, being a pair of old green livery breeches, which was the principal part of his clothing; for, like Pentapolin, according to Don Quixote’s account, Green-Breeks, as we called him, always entered the battle with bare arms, legs, and feet.
It fell that once upon a time, when the combat was at the thickest, this plebeian champion headed a sudden charge so rapid and furious that all fled before him. He was several paces before his comrades, and had actually laid his hands on the patrician standard, when one of our party, whom some misjudging friend had intrusted with a couteau de chasse, or hanger, inspired with a zeal for the honour of the corps worthy of Major Sturgeon himself, struck poor Green-Breeks over the head with strength sufficient to cut him down. When this was seen, the casualty was so far beyond what had ever taken place before that both parties fled different ways, leaving poor Green-Breeks, with his bright hair plentifully dabbled in blood, to the care of the watchman, who (honest man) took care not to know who had done the mischief. The bloody hanger was flung into one of the Meadow ditches, and solemn secrecy was sworn on all hands; but the remorse and terror of the actor were beyond all bounds, and his apprehensions of the most dreadful character. The wounded hero was for a few days in the Infirmary, the case being only a trifling one. But though inquiry was strongly pressed on him, no argument could make him indicate the person from whom he had received the wound, though he must have been perfectly well known to him. When he recovered, and was dismissed, the author and his brothers opened a communication with him, through the medium of a popular gingerbread baker, of whom both parties were customers, in order to tender a subsidy in name of smart-money. The sum would excite ridicule were I to name it; but sure I am that the pockets of the noted Green-Breeks never held as much money of his own. He declined the remittance, saying that he would not sell his blood, but at the same time reprobated the idea of being an informer, which, he said, was “clam,” i.e., base or mean. With much urgency, he accepted a pound of snuff for the use of some old woman – aunt, grandmother, or the like – with whom he lived. We did not become friends, for the bickers were more agreeable to both parties than any more pacific amusement; but we conducted them ever after under mutual assurances of the highest consideration for each other.
Such was the hero whom Mr. Thomas Scott proposed to carry to Canada and involve in adventures with the natives and colonists of that country. Perhaps the youthful generosity of the lad will not seem so great in the eyes of others as to those whom it was the means of screening from severe rebuke and punishment. But it seemed, to those concerned, to argue a nobleness of sentiment far beyond the pitch of most minds; and however obscurely the lad, who showed such a frame of noble spirit, may have lived or died, I cannot help being of opinion, that if fortune had placed him in circumstances calling for gallantry or generosity, the man would have fulfilled the promises of the boy. Long afterwards, when the story was told to my father, he censured us severely for not telling the truth at the time, that he might have attempted to be of use to the young man in entering on life. But our alarms for the consequences of the drawn sword, and the wound inflicted with such a weapon, were far too predominant at the time for such a pitch of generosity.
Perhaps I ought not to have inserted this schoolboy tale; but besides the strong impression made by the incident at the time, the whole accompaniments of the story are matters to me of solemn and sad recollection. Of all the little band who were concerned in those juvenile sports or brawls, I can scarce recollect a single survivor. Some left the ranks of mimic war to die in the active service of their country. Many sought distant lands, to return no more. Others, dispersed in different paths of life, “my dim eyes now seek for in vain.” Of five brothers, all healthy and promising in a degree far beyond one whose infancy was visited by personal infirmity, and whose health after this period seemed long very precarious, I am, nevertheless, the only survivor. The best loved, and the best deserving to be loved, who had destined this incident to be the foundation of literary composition, died “before his day,” in a distant and foreign land; and trifles assume an importance not their own, when connected with those who have been loved and lost.
WAVERLEY;
OR,
‘T IS SIXTY YEARS SINCE
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION TO WAVERLEY
“What is the value of a reputation that probably will not last above one or two generations?” Sir Walter Scott once asked Ballantyne. Two generations, according to the usual reckoning, have passed; “‘T is Sixty Years since” the “wondrous Potentate” of Wordsworth’s sonnet died, yet the reputation on which he set so little store survives. A constant tide of new editions of his novels flows from the press; his plots give materials for operas and plays; he has been criticised, praised, condemned: but his romances endure amid the changes of taste, remaining the delight of mankind, while new schools and little masters of fiction come and go.
Scott himself believed that even great works usually suffer periods of temporary occultation. His own, no doubt, have not always been in their primitive vogue. Even at first, English readers complained of the difficulty caused by his Scotch, and now many make his I “dialect” an excuse for not reading books which their taste, debauched by third-rate fiction, is incapable of enjoying. But Scott has never disappeared in one of those irregular changes of public opinion remarked on by his friend Lady Louisa Stuart. In 1821 she informed him that she had tried the experiment of reading Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling” aloud: “Nobody cried, and at some of the touches I used to think so exquisite, they laughed.” – [Abbotsford Manuscripts.] – His correspondent requested Scott to write something on such variations of taste, which actually seem to be in the air and epidemic, for they affect, as she remarked, young people who have not heard the criticisms of their elders. – [See Scott’s reply, with the anecdote about Mrs. Aphra Behn’s novels, Lockhart, vi. 406 (edition of 1839).] – Thus Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Heloise,” once so fascinating to girls, and reputed so dangerous, had become tedious to the young, Lady Louisa says, even in 1821. But to the young, if they have any fancy and intelligence, Scott is not tedious even now; and probably his most devoted readers are boys, girls, and men of matured appreciation and considerable knowledge of literature. The unformed and the cultivated tastes are still at one about Scott. He holds us yet with his unpremeditated art, his natural qualities of friendliness, of humour, of sympathy. Even the carelessness with which his earliest and his kindest critics – Ellis, Erskine, and Lady Louisa Stuart – reproached him has not succeeded in killing his work and diminishing his renown.
It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt, that secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his own defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): “A solecism in point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent to me. I never learned grammar… I believe the bailiff in ‘The Goodnatured Man’ is not far wrong when he says: ‘One man has one way of expressing himself, and another another; and that is all the difference between them.’” The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered “stylists” among writers not so very good, is essential. About Shakspeare it was said that he “never blotted a line.” The observation is almost literally true about Sir Walter. The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an erasure, whether in the “Waverley” fragment of 1805 or the unpublished “Siege of Malta” of 1832.
[A history of Scott’s Manuscripts, with good fac-similes, will be found in the Catalogue of the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1872.]
The handwriting becomes closer and smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in “Waverley,” he advances to between fifty and sixty in “Ivanhoe.” The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine’s is occasionally set down on the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that “a sentence of ‘Modern Painters’ was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps an hour, – perhaps a forenoon, – before it was passed for the printer.” Each writer has his method; Scott was no stipples or niggler, but, as we shall see later, he often altered much in his proof-sheets.
[While speaking of correction, it may be noted that Scott, in his “Advertisement” prefixed to the issue of 1829, speaks of changes made in that collected edition. In “Waverley” these emendations are very rare, and are unimportant. A few callidae juncturae are added, a very few lines are deleted. The postscript of the first edition did not contain the anecdote about the hiding-place of the manuscript among the fishing tackle. The first line of Flora Macdonald’s battle-song (chapter xxii.) originally ran, “Mist darkens the mountain, night darkens the vale,” in place of “There is mist on the mountain and mist on the vale.” For the rest, as Scott says, “where the tree falls it must lie.”]
As long as he was understood, he was almost reckless of well-constructed sentences, of the one best word for his meaning, of rounded periods. This indifference is not to be praised, but it is only a proof of his greatness that his style, never distinguished, and often lax, has not impaired the vitality of his prose. The heart which beats in his works, the knowledge of human nature, the dramatic vigour of his character, the nobility of his whole being win the day against the looseness of his manner, the negligence of his composition, against the haste of fatigue which set him, as Lady Louisa Stuart often told him, on “huddling up a conclusion anyhow, and so kicking the book out of his way.” In this matter of denouements he certainly was no more careful than Shakspeare or Moliere.
The permanence of Sir Walter’s romances is proved, as we said, by their survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he took up his pen to begin “Waverley,” fiction had not absorbed, as it does to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign writers. Now we hear of “art” on every side, and every novelist must give the world his opinion about schools and methods. Scott, on the other hand, lived in the greatest poetical ago since that of Elizabeth. Poetry or the drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna Baillie hyperbolically declared, “The Scotch novels put poetry out of fashion.”
[Abbotsford Manuscripts. Hogg averred that nobody either read or wrote poetry after Sir Walter took to prose.]
Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers like the plaintive lady’s-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld “the fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a novel in her hand.” Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes he will “restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually slipped before it dwindled into a manufactory for the circulating library.” “Waverley,” he asserted, “would prevail over people otherwise averse to blue-backed volumes.” Thus it was an unconsidered art which Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed since Fielding gave us in “Tom Jones” his own and very different picture of life in the “‘forty-five,” – of life with all the romance of the “Race to Derby” cut down to a sentence or two. Since the age of the great English novelists, Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney, the art of fiction had been spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe, had been sentimental with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but moribund, save for the humorous Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott always insisted, it was mainly “the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth” which induced him to try his hand on a novel containing pictures of Scottish life and character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own novels than the blending of close and humorous observation of common life with pleasure in adventurous narratives about “what is not so, and was not so, and Heaven forbid that it ever should be so,” as the girl says in the nursery tale. Through his whole life he remained the dreamer of dreams and teller of wild legends, who had held the lads of the High School entranced round Luckie Brown’s fireside, and had fleeted the summer days in interchange of romances with a schoolboy friend, Mr. Irving, among the hills that girdle Edinburgh. He ever had a passion for “knights and ladies and dragons and giants,” and “God only knows,” he says, “how delighted I was to find myself in such society.” But with all this delight, his imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the humours and passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as the battles, the castles, and the giants. True, he was more fastidious in his choice of novels of real life than in his romantic reading. “The whole Jemmy and Jessamy tribe I abhorred,” he said; “and it required the art of Burney or the feeling of Mackenzie to fix my attention upon a domestic tale.” But when the domestic tale was good and true, no man appreciated it more than he. None has more vigorously applauded Miss Austen than Scott, and it was thus that as the “Author of ‘Waverley’” he addressed Miss Edgeworth, through James Ballantyne: “If I could but hit it, Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making there live as beings in your mind, I should not be afraid.” “Often,” Ballantyne goes on, “has the Author of ‘Waverley’ used such language to me; and I knew that I gratified him most when I could say, ‘Positively, this is equal to Miss Edgeworth.’”
Thus Scott’s own taste was catholic: and in this he was particularly unlike the modern novelists, who proclaim, from both sides of the Atlantic, that only in their own methods, and in sharing their own exclusive tastes, is literary salvation. The prince of Romance was no one-sided romanticiste; his ear was open to all fiction good in its kind. His generosity made him think Miss Edgeworth’s persons more alive than his own. To his own romances he preferred Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
[Scott reviewed “Frankenstein” in 1818. Mr. Shelley had sent it with a brief note, it, which he said that it was the work of a friend, and that he had only seen it through the press. Sir Walter passed the hook on to Mr. Murritt, who, in reply, gave Scott a brief and not very accurate history of Shelley. Sir Walter then wrote a most favourable review of “Frankenstein” in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” observing that it was attributed to Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a son-in-law of Mr. Godwin. Mrs. Shelley presently wrote thanking him for the review, and assuring him that it was her own work. Scott had apparently taken Sheller’s disclaimer as an innocent evasion; it was an age of literary superscheries. – Abbotsford Manuscripts.]
As a critic, of course, he was mistaken; but his was the generous error of the heart, and it is the heart in Walter Scott, even more than the brain, that lends its own vitality to his creations. Equipped as he was with a taste truly catholic, capable in old age of admiring “Pelham,” he had the power to do what he calls “the big bow-wow strain;” yet he was not, as in his modesty he supposed, denied “the exquisite torch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment.”
The letter of Rose Bradwardine to Waverley is alone enough to disprove Scott’s disparagement of himself, his belief that he had been denied exquisiteness of touch. Nothing human is more delicate, nothing should be more delicately handled, than the first love of a girl. What the “analytical” modern novelist would pass over and dissect and place beneath his microscope till a student of any manliness blushes with shame and annoyance, Scott suffers Rose Bradwardine to reveal with a sensitive shyness. But Scott, of course, had even less in common with the peeper and botanizer on maidens’ hearts than with the wildest romanticist. He considered that “a want of story is always fatal to a book the first reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second.” From him “Pride and Prejudice” got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the “Quarterly Review,” “we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and conduct of those great people would have been as dignified as their situations. We should have heard nothing of the hero in his new costume ‘majoring afore the muckle pier-glass,’ of his arrest by the hint of the Candlestick, of his examination by the well-powdered Major Melville, or of his fears of being informed against by Mrs. Nosebag.” In short, “while the leading persons and events are as remote from ordinary life as the inventions of Scudery, the picture of human nature is as faithful as could have been given by Fielding or Le Sage.” Though this criticism has not the advantage of being new, it is true; and when we have added that Scott’s novels are the novels of the poet who, next to Shakspeare, knew mankind most widely and well, we have the secret of his triumph.