Sir Walter Scott.
But these different schools of sedentary novelists, of novelists travelling by diligence or calash, of novelists of lakes and mountains, ruins and ghosts, of novelists of cities and drawing-rooms, have come to be lost in the new school of Walter Scott, even as poetry has precipitated itself in the steps of Lord Byron. The illustrious painter of Scotland started his career in literature during my exile in London with his translation of Goethe's Berlichingen.[288] He continued to make himself known by poetry, and ultimately the bent of his genius led him towards the novel. He seems to me to have created a false manner: the romancer set himself to write historical romances, and the historian romantic histories. If, in reading Walter Scott, I am sometimes obliged to skip interminable conversations, the fault is doubtless mine; but one of Walter Scott's great merits, in my eyes, is that he can be placed in the hands of everybody. It requires greater efforts of talent to interest while keeping within the limits of decency than to please when exceeding all bounds; it is less easy to rule the heart than to disturb it.
Burke kept the politics of England in the past. Walter Scott drove back the English to the Middle Ages; all that they wrote, manufactured, built, became Gothic: books, furniture, houses, churches, country-seats. But the barons of Magna Charta are to-day the fashionables of Bond Street, a frivolous race camping in the ancient manor-houses while awaiting the arrival of the new generations which are preparing to drive them out.
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At the same time that the novel was passing into the "romantic" stage, poetry was undergoing a similar transformation. Cowper[289] abandoned the French in order to revive the national school; Burns[290] commenced the same revolution in Scotland. After them came the restorers of the ballads. Several of those poets of 1792 to 1800 belonged to what was called the "Lake school," a name which survived, because the romantic poets lived on the shores of the Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes, which they sometimes sang.
Thomas Moore[291], Campbell[292], Rogers[293], Crabbe[294], Wordsworth[295], Southey[296], Hunt[297], Knowles[298], Lord Holland[299], Canning[300], Croker[301] are still living to do honour to English literature; but one must be of English birth to appreciate the full merit of an intimate class of composition which appeals specially to men born on the soil.
None is a competent judge, in living literature, of other than works written in his own tongue. It is in vain that you believe yourself thoroughly acquainted with a foreign idiom: you lack the nurse's milk, together with the first words which she teaches you at her breast and in your swaddling-clothes; certain accents belong to the mother country alone. The English and Germans have the strangest notions concerning our men of letters: they worship what we despise, and despise what we worship; they do not understand Racine nor La Fontaine, nor even Molière completely. It is ludicrous to know who are considered our great writers in London, Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Munich, Leipzig, Göttingen, Cologne, to know what is read there with avidity and what not at all.
When an author's merit lies especially in his diction, no foreigner will ever understand that merit. The more intimate, individual, rational a talent is, the more do its mysteries escape the mind which is not, so to speak, that talent's fellow-countryman. We admire the Greeks and Romans on trust; our admiration comes to us by tradition, and the Greeks and Romans are not there to laugh at our barbarian judgments. Which of us has an idea of the harmony of the prose of Demosthenes and Cicero, of the cadence of the verses of Alcæus and Horace, as they were caught by a Greek or Latin ear? Men maintain that real beauties are of all times, all countries: yes, beauties of feeling and of thought; not beauties of style. Style is not cosmopolitan like thought: it has a native land, a sky, a sun of its own.
Burns, Mason[302], Cowper died during my emigration, before 1800 and in 1800: they ended the century; I commenced it. Darwin[303] and Beattie[304] died two years after my return from exile.