In July 1814 the Edition and Life of Swift appeared in nineteen volumes, six years after this laborious work was begun. The Life, which became popular, is perhaps, with that by Sir Henry Craik, the most generous and sympathetic attempt to make intelligible one of the greatest, most miserable, and most mysterious of mankind. Scott made more allowance than Thackeray for what Lockhart calls “the faults and foibles of nameless and inscrutable disease.”
CHAPTER IV
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.
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 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 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 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.