good body to body. The new codes of modernity, for all their apparent ensnarement by the merely carnal, issue from invisible exchanges of credit and debt, the stakes of personal and communal honor counted in increments of physical restraint and delayed emo-308- tional gratification. The times are with the temporizer: the sword is too blunt for its object.
Readers have rightly made much of the first Waverley hero's first act depicted in the opening retrospect: the five-year-old Edward Waverley reaches passionately for his uncle's carriage and coat of arms, emblem of the 'idea of personal property.' Equally important, though, is the opening moment of the novel's present time: disentangling itself finally, six chapters in, from its retrospect, the narrative opens the library door along with the uncle, where the teenage Edward is practicing swordplay with the ancestral weapon from the wall.
Our young hero is «acting» a romantic battle here, readying himself for the sport of military captaincy that will succeed the sports of shooting, fishing, and reading, which he has in turn picked up and abandoned during a desultory and neglected youth whose main reality has been dreaming about his own and his culture's past. But, interestingly, it is not so much the active deeds of a more vibrant ancestry that mesmerize Edward as he haunts the long avenues and ruined monuments of Waverley Honour. Singled out from the ancestral store, rather, are two keen memories of loss and self-abnegation. One is the moment when Sir Willibert of Waverley, returning at last from the Crusades to see his betrothed give her heart to the man who had protected her at home, 'flung down his half-drawn sword, and turned away forever from the house of his ancestor': the other is the moment when the youngest son of the seventeenth-century Waverley, sent out from the Hall by his Royalist mother during the civil war to draw off Commonwealth pursuit of the king, was brought home successful, and dying. Presumably, the older son carried on the line.
Edward Waverley is the son of a younger brother who, because he assumed the older one would marry and carry on the line, the title, the property, turned aside from the house and politics of his Royalist ancestors to build a new domain in the shifting sands of Whig politics. The title and property are held by the infertile older brother. The tale that ensues, Waverley: or 'Tis Sixty Years Since, seems at one level the story of a man seeking the dream of the active sword and the fertile bride that are the conditions of holding title, holding ground, entering the synthesis of Universal History. Edward goes north on a Whig captaincy obtained by his politic father and diverts himself from his duties to vacation with his uncle's Scottish Royalist friend Bradwardine; he explores political and erotic outlawry with Bradwardine's Highland -309- rival and ally Fergus MacIvor and his sister and fellow Royalist Flora, and finally joins the army of the Young Pretender in the most serious of the Jacobite uprisings of 1745.
Yet even the dream of chivalry in Scott is only the half-drawn sword, its nightmare is the death of the (younger) son at the behest of (mother) country, its still deeper nightmare the death of the father at the hands of the son. These deaths are all accomplished by Edward-by proxy. Scott's language and his plots deal us moment after moment of innuendo and rumor whereby Edward (half) draws his sword, (half) kills with it, (half) dies by it. A Scottish outlaw steals Edward's identifying seal and creates with it a phantom Waverley who induces his troop to mutiny, and the loving Rose Bradwardine hears a rumor that that traitor Waverley was captured and executed. The real Edward does join the rebel army, but hates the life (and death) of the sword. And most necessary of all to Scott's plots, when the time-serving Sir Richard Waverley dies near the end of the revolt, a newspaper falsely prints that his son's reputed activities in the rebel army resulted in death for both the elder Waverleys, and 'Good God! Am I a parricide?' cries Edward.
No, he is not. That particular dream, often elaborated in the Gothic novel that was fiction's first grasp at history, brushes by as a rumor and is put to flight by reason. But there is more to these dramas of proxy crime and guilt than the Universal Historian's patterned movement out of war toward law, out of monarchy through pretenders and parties to universal representation. Underneath, as Alexander Welsh argues, is a shifting in Universal Psychology around the bargain of man with death itself.
Once, as Scott sees it, the outrage of mortality was assuaged by 'glory,' the immortality attached to the name of the warrior. Now a man comes to consciousness, to the 'real history of his life,' awash in ambiguous and even inglorious names: Edward Waverley bears no fewer than four aliases while the plot maneuvers him toward the Scottish manor of his bride-to-be, whose property, in a complicated legal, political, financial, and moral «redemption» at the end, replaces his entailed English property as 'home.' No glory here, just the modern bargain with death called bodily survival, domesticity, fertility, whose emblem is the half-drawn sword, the passive entry into the killing field where other men do history's killing and suffer its death. The Waverley Novels feature a succession of ingenious endings (many readers feel they are clumsy) in which an alter ego or accidental third party or coin-310- cidental fatality disrupts the final duel between the hero and his enemy, saving the protagonist's «credit» while it refashions his «honor» into historical survival. 'Honour is a homicide… but credit is a decent honest man,' says the legal authority (and merchant) in
Scott set at the head of Waverley, and thus in some sense as the touchstone for all the Waverley Novels, and perhaps of all the historical novels of the Western tradition, the moment from Henry IV: Part II when all authority, legal, national, even personal and moral, wavers, shifts uneasily, then passes to its diffused modern form. The realist and sensualist Falstaff, making merry with «Justices» named Shallow and Silence, sees his friend Pistol arrive, big with tidings, and Justice Shallow importantly steps forward to receive and interpret the news on the grounds that 'I am, sir, under the king, in some authority.' The swaggering soldier's challenge-'Under which king, Besonian? Speak, or die'-is on the title page of Waverley.
As Universal History, the phrase points to the drama of choices, and speeches, by which authority is composed, and recomposed, both under the king and as the king, and to the link in that composition between the world historical personage of 'the king' and the professional and middle classes who increasingly exercise authority in the West. It points to the change in that composition from the divine right of Richard II through the tainted alliances of the usurping Henry IV to the selfmythicized energies of Henry V and the modern construction of the bureaucratized Tudor state. As Universal Psychology the phrase points to the struggle of the male to enter a personal history situated somewhere between slavish imitation of the legitimate father and slavish rebellion with the illegitimate one, Falstaff; that is, to his struggle to formulate an identity in which the choice of independent personhood is somehow harmonized with the continued possession of the oedipal property that is his destiny.
The maneuvering of the self, and of events, until one's personal choice coincides with one's patriarchal destiny, exposes to the hero-and the reader-of the Waverley Novels the fictiveness both of authority and of identity. Like Shakespeare's Hal the male protagonists move quickly off the paths of their fathers into the domain of the outlaw. For whether the counterpaternal world is the elevated realm of suicidal honor or the earthy precinct of the jester-cynic (and like Shakespeare, Scott usually provides counterfathers at both poles), it still offers the -311- necessary standpoint from which a son can face and assess the inevitable thievery, outlawry, and moral compromise of his domestic and social heritage. As with Hal, Scott's protagonist always makes his way back to the paternal world, hyperconscious of the selves he has put on and put away, of the underlying arbitrariness by which he has designated one experience a «dream» and another an 'awakening.'
For Shakespearean comedy, of course, the counterpaternal world is most often 'the green world' outside history, the greenwood of merriment, sensuality. This holds essentially true too of the English history plays. Only in the classical history plays, a Troilus and Cressida, an Antony and Cleopatra, does the Shakespearean protagonist awake, like Edward Waverley and many a Waverley hero after him, to the nightmare of modern history-to find that he has drawn his sword in the camp of the enemy against the fatherland.
However, some element of Shakespearean pastoral still governs Scott's imagination of the «dream» from which one «awakens» to the real history of one's life, an element to which Scott's building of the medieval house and reforesting of the medieval acres of Abbotsford is testimony. Scott's conflation of the greenwood and the camp of the enemy most often carries a comic and progressive view of Universal History:
From Waverley on, choosing a king shapes both Universal Psychology and Universal History in Scott's novels. If the choice seems at first to be between a pure king-of-honor associated with the timeless values of the greenwood and a king-of-credits contaminated by timely commerce with shifting ideals, turning coats, and mobile markets, it soon grows less simple. The incident that catapults Edward Waverley across the Highland Line into the
