Walter Scott, Literary History, and the "Expressive" Tenets of Waverley Criticism

In joyous picturesqueness and fellow-feeling, freedom of eye and heart, or to say it in word, in general healthiness of mind, these Novels prove to have been amongst foremost writers. Thomas Carlyle, Amoral Scott There was no other author in history of literature who played more important role in shaping nineteenth-century novel than Walter (1771-1832). From publication of Waverley, his first novel, in 1814 until long after his death, his historical novels exerted power over prose discourse extent of which rarely recognized today. This importance derives in large measure from Scott's active formulation of mode of historical understanding, an understanding that, in words of Ian Watt, accepted the aims of economic individualism and its new attitude to society and its law (95).[1] Within dimensions of cultural shift of modernism, however, Scott's literary reputation suffered tremendously. Many recent studies of have sought to redress this situation; works by such critics as Judith Wilt, Ina Ferris, and Ian Duncan have sought to reestablish him as one of most seminal writers of nineteenth century. But question remains: if indeed one of authors of literary history, why has this resurrection been needed? What critical tenets were employed, consciously or unconsciously, to seal his fate as second-rate writer for several generations? Since around year 1885 in particular Scott's novels have been viewed by critics and readers alike as little more than romantic and nostalgic boy's adventures, origins of that descended to underground of popular press (McMaster 1). As early as 1821, critic Nassau Senior in Quarterly Review cited most of these familiar criticisms in his survey of Scott's novels published up to that year: the often sloppy prose, confused plots, historical mistakes, involved and tedious beginnings, constant re-creation, in book after book, of same cast of characters (qtd. in Raleigh 10).[2] Yet such early criticisms were small voices amid chorus of adulation for Author of (Waswo 2), for it was overwhelmingly felt that Scott's deficiencies were more than adequately compensated for by the beauties (Hadyn 7). Never before or since in Western culture, notes John Henry Raleigh in his study of Scott's meaning to Victorian readers, has a writer been such power in his own day and so negligible to posterity (8). As can be demonstrated, this meteoric fall attributable to modernist mode of criticism informed by certain canonized assumptions about serious fiction within some great tradition of novel. The unfortunate result of this criticism was an assessment of as an unserious, romance writer who comes out of bad tradition (Leavis 6).[3] It was moralizing tendencies of early nineteenth-century considerations in particular that continue to subject Waverley Novels to considerable deformation in early and mid-twentieth-century literary histories. Indeed, expressive biases that were implied premise of these ninetenth-century readings are latent precisely in that twentieth-century criticism that refers to Scott's genius and his exemplary ability to give voice to human nature and feelings of his characters. As such, later assessments can be considered never to have moved beyond earlier simplifications. There line that can be drawn from critic Francis Jeffrey's 1814 assertion that the secret of [Scott's] success that he is person of genius (79), through Carlyle's mid-century diatribes against Waverley Novels' ethics, to Georg Lukacs's 1937 pronouncement that Scott's greatness can be located in his imaginative capacity to give life to socio-historical types (42). Such approaches are symptomatic of consistent tendency to read in terms of his ability to express single meaning or message, and it precisely this tendency that was responsible for whole climate of literary opinion that came to find negligible. …