In any serious attempt to criticise Waverley as a whole, it is not easy to say whether we should try to put ourselves at the point of view of its first readers, or whether we should look at it from the vantage-ground of today. In the dead world of clannish loyalty was fresh in many memories. Scott’s own mother had often spoken with a person who had seen Cromwell enter Edinburgh after Dunbar. He himself knew heroes of the Forty-five, and his friend Lady Louisa Stuart had been well acquainted with Miss Walkinshaw, sister of the mistress of Charles Edward. To his generation those things were personal memories, which to us seem as distant as the reign of Men-ka-ra. They could not but be “carried off their feet” by such pictures of a past still so near them. Nor had they other great novelists to weaken the force of Scott’s impressions. They had not to compare him with the melancholy mirth of Thackeray, and the charm, the magic, of his style. Balzac was of the future; of the future was the Scott of France—the boyish, the witty, the rapid, the brilliant, the inexhaustible Dumas. Scott’s generation had no scruples about “realism,” listened to no sermons on the glory of the commonplace; like Dr. Johnson, they admired a book which “was amusing as a fairytale.” But we are overwhelmed with a wealth of comparisons, and deafened by a multitude of homilies on fiction, and distracted, like the people in the Eyrbyggja Saga, by the strange rising and setting, and the wild orbits of new “weirdmoons” of romance. Before we can make up our minds on Scott, we have to remember, or forget, the scornful patronage of one critic, the over-subtlety and exaggerations of another, the more than papal infallibility of a third. Perhaps the best critic would be an intelligent schoolboy, with a generous heart and an unspoiled imagination. As his remarks are not accessible, as we must try to judge Waverley like readers inured to much fiction and much criticism, we must confess, no doubt, that the commencement has the faults which the first reviewers detected, and which Scott acknowledged. He is decidedly slow in getting to business, as they say; he began with more of conscious ethical purpose than he went on, and his banter is poor. But when once we enter the village of Tully-Veolan, the Magician finds his wand. Each picture of place or person tells—the old butler, the daft Davie Gellatley, the solemn and chivalrous Baron, the pretty natural girl, the various lairds, the factor Macwheeble—all at once become living people, and friends whom we can never lose. The creative fire of Shakespeare lives again. The Highlanders—Evan Dhu, Donald Bean Lean, his charming daughter, Callum Beg, and all the rest—are as natural as the Lowlanders. In Fergus and Flora we feel, indeed, at first, that the author has left his experience behind, and is giving us creatures of fancy. But they too become human and natural—Fergus in his moods of anger, ambition, and final courageous resignation; Flora, in her grief. As for Waverley, his creator was no doubt too hard on him. Among the brave we hear that he was one of the bravest, though Scott always wrote his battlepieces in a manner to suggest no discomfort, and does not give us particular details of Waverley’s prowess. He has spirit enough, this “sneaking piece of imbecility,” as he shows in his quarrel with Fergus, on the march to Derby. Waverley, that creature of romance, considered as a lover, is really not romantic enough. He loved Rose because she loved him—which is confessed to be unheroic behaviour. Scott, in Waverley, certainly does not linger over love-scenes. With Mr. Ruskin, we may say: “Let it not be thought for an instant that the slight and sometimes scornful glance with which Scott passes over scenes, which a novelist of our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a philosopher, and painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any absence in his heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal happiness.” But his mind entertained other themes of interest, “loyalty, patriotism, piety.” On the other hand, it is necessary to differ from Mr. Ruskin when he says that Scott “never knew l’amor che move ’l sol e l’altre stelle.” He whose heart was “broken for two years,” and retained the crack till his dying day, he who, when old and tired, and near his death, was yet moved by the memory of the name which thirty years before
