Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature | Page 6

well as to feed his
literary tastes. On this side he had an ample equipment for critical work,
conditioned, of course, by the other qualities of his mind, which
determined how the equipment should be used.
That Scott was not a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to
his imaginative power,--the second of the qualities which we have
distinguished as dominating his literary temperament. "I can see as
many castles in the clouds as any man," he testified.[11] A recent writer
has said that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense
of the romantic, and adds that his was that true romance which "lies not

upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it."[12] The
situations and the very objects that he described have the power of
stirring the romantic spirit in his readers because he was alive to the
glamour surrounding anything which has for generations been
connected with human thoughts and emotions. The subjectivity which
was so prominent an element in the romanticism of Shelley, Keats, and
Byron, does not appear in Scott's work. Nor was his sense of the
mystery of things so subtle as that of Coleridge. But Scott, rather than
Coleridge, was the interpreter to his age of the romantic spirit, for the
ordinary person likes his wonders so tangible that he may know
definitely the point at which they impinge upon his consciousness. In
Scott's work the point of contact is made clear: the author brings his
atmosphere not from another world but from the past, and with all its
strangeness it has no unearthly quality. In general the romance of his
nature is rather taken for granted than insisted on, for there are the
poems and the novels to bear witness to that side of his temperament;
and the surprising thing is that such an author was a business man, a
large landowner, an industrious lawyer.[13]
Scott's imaginative sense, which clothed in fine fancies any incident or
scene presented, however nakedly, to his view, accounts in part for his
notorious tendency to overrate the work of other writers, especially
those who wrote stories in any form. This explanation was hinted at by
Sir Walter himself, and formulated by Lockhart; it seems a fairly
reasonable way of accounting for a trait that at first appears to indicate
only a foolish excess of good-nature. This rich and active imagination,
which Scott brought to bear on everything he read, perhaps explains
also his habit of paying little attention to carefully worked out details,
and of laying almost exclusive emphasis upon main outlines. When he
was writing his Life of Napoleon, he said in his Journal: "Better a
superficial book which brings well and strikingly together the known
and acknowledged facts, than a dull boring narrative, pausing to see
further into a mill-stone at every moment than the nature of the
mill-stone admits."[14] Probably his high gift of imagination made him
a little impatient with the remoter reaches of the analytic faculties. Any
sustained exercise of the pure reason was outside his province,
reasonable as he was in everyday affairs. He preferred to consider facts,

and to theorize only so far as was necessary to establish comfortable
relations between the facts,--never to the extent of trying to look into
the center of a mill-stone. It was not unusual for him to make very
acute observations in the spheres of ethics, economics, and psychology,
and to use them in explaining any situation which might seem to
require their assistance; but these remarks were brief and incidental,
and bore a very definite relation to the concrete ideas they were meant
to illustrate.
Scott was a business man as well as an antiquary and a poet. Mr.
Palgrave thought Lockhart went too far in creating the impression that
Scott could detach his mind from the world of imagination and apply
its full force to practical affairs.[15] Yet the oversight of lands and
accounts and of all ordinary matters was so congenial to him, and his
practical activities were on the whole conducted with so much spirit
and capability, that after emphasizing his preoccupation with the poetic
aspects of the life of his ancestors, we must turn immediately about and
lay stress upon his keen judgment in everyday affairs. To a school-boy
poet he once wrote: "I would ... caution you against an enthusiasm
which, while it argues an excellent disposition and a feeling heart,
requires to be watched and restrained, though not repressed. It is apt, if
too much indulged, to engender a fastidious contempt for the ordinary
business of the world, and gradually to render us unfit for the exercise
of the useful and domestic virtues which depend greatly upon our not
exalting our feelings above the temper of well-ordered