and said, "because I am far more vain of having been able to fix some share of public attention upon the ancient poetry and manners of my country, than of any original efforts which I have been able to make in literature."[457] The following commendation, which he wrote for a book of portraits accompanied by essays, might be made to apply to his novels: "It is impossible for me to conceive a work which ought to be more interesting to the present age than that which exhibits before our eyes our 'fathers as they lived'"[458] He felt strongly the value and importance of past manners, faiths and ideals for the present, and from this point of view took satisfaction in the social and ethical teaching of his novels.
On the whole, Scott's opinions about his own work fitted well with his general literary principles, except that his modesty inclined him to discount his own performance while he overestimated that of others. With this qualification we may remember that he always spoke sensibly about his work, without affectation, and with abundant geniality. We are reminded of the comment on Molière quoted by Scott from a French writer,—"He had the good fortune to escape the most dangerous fault of an author writing upon his own compositions, and to exhibit wit, where some people would only have shown vanity and self-conceit."[459]
CHAPTER VI
SCOTT'S POSITION AS CRITIC
Comparison of Scott with Jeffrey and with the Romantic critics—His criticism largely appreciative—Romantic in special cases and Augustan in attitude—Comparison with Coleridge—Scott's respect for the verdict of the public—His opinion that elucidation is the function of criticism—Use of historical illustration—Hesitation about analysing poetry—Political criticism—Verdict of his contemporaries on his criticism—Influence as a critic—Literary prophecies—Character of his critical work as a whole—His attitude towards it—Lack of system—Broad fields he covered—His greatness a reason for the importance of his criticism.
Important as Scott's poetry was in the English Romantic revival, as a critic he can hardly be counted among the Romanticists. His attitude, nevertheless, differed radically from that of the school represented by Jeffrey and Gifford. We have already seen that he disliked their manner of reviewing, and that he was conscious of complete disagreement with Jeffrey in regard to poetic ideals. Of Jeffrey Mr. Gates has said: "[He] rarely appreciates a piece of literature.... He is always for or against his author; he is always making points."[460] That Scott was influenced in his early critical work by the tone of the Edinburgh Review is undeniable, but temperamentally he was inclined to give any writer a fair chance to stir his emotions; and he did not adopt the magisterial mood that dictated the famous remark, "This will never do." Scott's style lacked the adroitness and pungency which helped Jeffrey successfully to take the attitude of the censor, and which made his satire triumphant among his contemporaries. Scott declined, moreover, to cultivate skill in a method which he considered unfair. Compared with Jeffrey's his criticism wanted incisiveness, but it wears better.
The period was transitional, and Jeffrey did not go so far as Scott in breaking away from the dictation of his predecessors. But his attitude was on the whole more modern than the reader would infer from the following sentence in one of his earliest reviews: "Poetry has this much at least in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question."[461] He considered himself rather an interpreter of public opinion than a judge defining ancient legislation, but he used the opinion of himself and like-minded men as an unimpeachable test of what the greater public ought to believe in regard to literature. We may remember that the enthusiasm over the Elizabethan dramatists which seems a special property of Lamb and Hazlitt, and which Scott shared, was characteristic also of Jeffrey himself. It was Jeffrey's dogmatism and his repugnance to certain fundamental ideas which were to become dominant in the poetry of the nineteenth century that lead us to consider him one of the last representatives of the eighteenth century critical tradition. Scott praised the Augustan writers as warmly as Jeffrey did, but he was more hospitable to the newer literary impulse. "Perhaps the most damaging accusation that can be made against Jeffrey as a critic," says Mr. Gates, "is inability to read and interpret the age in which he lived."[462]
Scott's criticism was largely appreciative, but appreciative on a somewhat different plane from that of the contemporary critics whom we are accustomed to place in a more modern school: Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, and Coleridge. His judgments were less delicate and subtle than the judgments of these men were apt to be, and more "reasonable" in the eighteenth-century sense; they were marked, however, by a regard for the imagination that would have seemed most unreasonable to many men of the eighteenth century.
Scott had not a fixed theory of literature which could dominate his mind when he approached any work. He was open-minded, and in spite of his extreme fondness for the poetry of Dr. Johnson he was apt to be on the Romantic side in any specific critical utterance. We have seen also that he resembled the Romanticists in his power to disengage his verdicts on literature from ethical considerations. On the other hand he seems always to have deferred to the standard authorities of the classical criticism of his time when his own knowledge was not sufficient to guide him. In discussing Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse he wrote: "It must be remembered that the rules of criticism, now so well known as to be even trite and hackneyed, were then almost new to the literary world."[463]