There are more senses than one (or for the matter of that two) in the famous proverb, “The better is the enemy of the good.” And in one of them, though not the commonest, it is eminently true of the criticism of Sir Walter Scott. No one, of course, would give to Scott any such relative rank as a critic as that which is his due either as poet or as novelist; but the extent to which his fame as poet and novelist has obscured his reputation as critic is altogether disproportionate and unfair. It is even doubtful whether some tolerably educated persons ever think of him as a critic at all. For his so-called “Prose Works” (except Tales of a Grandfather) are very little read, and as usual the criticism is the least read part of them. Yet it is a very large part—extending, what with the Lives of Swift and Dryden, the shorter “Biographies,” the Chivalry, Romance, and Drama, and the collection or selection of Periodical Criticism, to ten pretty solid volumes, while even this excludes a great amount of critical matter in the notes and Introductions to the Poems, the Novels, the Dryden and Swift themselves, and other by-works of Sir Walter’s gigantic industry.
Mere bulk, however, it may be said, is nothing—indeed it is too often, in work of which posterity is so shy as it is of criticism, a positive misfortune and drawback. What makes the small account taken of Scott as a critic surprising and regrettable is the goodness as well as the bulk of his critical production. Perhaps it may be urged with some justice, in defence of this popular neglect, that his want of attention to style is particularly unfortunate here. He is notoriously a rather “incorrect” writer; and he does not, as many so-called incorrect writers have known how to do, supply the want of academic propriety by irregular brilliances of any kind.
Injustice of this.
Another charge sometimes brought against him—that he is too good-natured and too indiscriminate in praise—will less hold water;[[524]] and indeed is much too closely connected with the popular notion of the critic as a sort of “nigger”-overseer, whose business is to walk about and distribute lashes—a notion which cannot be too often reprobated. As a private critic Scott was sometimes too easy-going, but by no means always or often in his professional utterances. And he had what are certainly two of the greatest requirements of the critic, reading and sanity. Sometimes some amiable prepossession (such as the narrower patriotism in his relative estimate of Fielding and Smollett) leads him a little astray; but this is very seldom—far seldomer than is the rule with critics of anything like his range. Here, as elsewhere, he does not much affect the larger and deeper and higher generalisations; but here, as elsewhere, his power of reaching these has been considerably underrated. And the distaste itself saves him—and his readers—from the hasty and floundering failures of those who aim more ambitiously at width, depth, and height. In the methodic grasp and orderly exposition of large and complicated subjects (as in the Romance[[525]] and Drama examples) he leaves nothing to desire. Sometimes, in his regular reviews, he condescends too much to the practice of making the review a mere abstract of the book; but I have known readers who complain bitterly of any other mode of proceeding.
Moreover, in two most important divisions of the critic’s art Scott has very few superiors. These are the appreciation of particular passages, books, and authors, and the writing of those critical biographies which Dryden first essayed in English, and of which Johnson is the acknowledged master. The Prefaces to the Ballantyne Novels[[526]] are the best among Scott’s good things in this kind on the small scale, as the Dryden and the Swift are on the great: for evidences of the former excellence the reader has only to open any one of the half-score volumes referred to above. And those golden qualities of heart which accompanied his genius are illustrated, as well as that genius itself, in his frequent critical writing on other novelists. The criticism of creators on their fellows is not always pleasant reading, except for those who delight to study the weaknesses of the verdammte Race. Scott criticises great and small among the folk of whom he is the king, from the commonest romancer up to Jane Austen, with equal generosity, acuteness, and technical mastery. Nor ought we, in this necessarily inadequate sketch, to omit putting in his cap the feather so often to be refused to critics—the feather of catholicity. Macaulay could not praise the delightful lady, whom both he and Scott did their utmost to celebrate, without throwing out a fling at Sintram, as if there were no room for good things of different kinds in the great region of Romance. In Scott’s works you may find,[[527]] literally side by side, and characterised by equal critical sense, the eulogy of Persuasion and the eulogy of Frankenstein.[[528]]
Campbell: his Lectures on Poetry.
Campbell’s critical work is chiefly concentrated in two places, one of them accessible with some difficulty, the other only too accessible after a fashion. The first is the Lectures on Poetry, which, after delivering them at the Royal Institution during the great vogue of such things in 1820, he refashioned later for the New Monthly Magazine when he was its editor, so that they are only to be had by one of the least agreeable[agreeable] of all processes, the rummaging for a purpose in an old periodical.