Sir Walter Scott | Page 3

of his story may be drawn.
Scott's superiority to his American rival comes out, says Balzac, chiefly in his secondary personages and in his talent for comedy. The American makes careful mechanical provision for laughter: Balzac takes this all to pieces, and leaves Scott unchallenged and inexhaustible.
Scott's reputation has suffered a little through suspicion of his politics, and, strangely enough, of his religion. He has been made responsible for movements in Churches about which opinions naturally differ, but of which it is certain Scott never dreamed. Those who suspect and blame his work because it is reactionary, illiberal, and offensive to modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such persons as believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each successive stage as soon as it is left behind. The spokesman of this party is Mark Twain, who wrote a burlesque of the Holy Grail, and who in his Life on the Mississippi makes Scott responsible for the vanities and superstitions of the Southern States of America:--
'The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque "chivalry" doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives.'
It is useless to moralise on this, and the purport and significance of it may be left for private meditation to enucleate and enjoy. But it cannot be fully appreciated, unless one remembers that the author of this and other charges against chivalry is also the historian of the feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, equal in tragedy to the themes of the chansons de geste: of Raoul de Cambrai or Garin le Loherain. Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed to the ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in Ivanhoe or The Talisman. I am told further--though this is perhaps unimportant--that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the taste of the South, that even at Chicago there are imitations of Gothic towers and halls.
Hazlitt, an unbeliever in most of Scott's political principles, is also the most fervent and expressive admirer of the novels, quite beyond the danger of modern progress, his judgment not corrupted at all by the incense of the cotton-factory or the charm of the locomotive. Hazlitt's praise of Scott is an immortal proof of Hazlitt's sincerity in criticism. Scott's friends were not Hazlitt's, and Scott and Hazlitt differed both in personal and public affairs as much as any men of their time. But Hazlitt has too much sense not to be taken with the Scotch novels, and too much honesty not to say so, and too much spirit not to put all his strength into praising, when once he begins. Hazlitt's critical theory of Scott's novels is curiously like his opinion about Scott's old friend, the poet Crabbe: whose name I cannot leave without a salute to the laborious and eloquent work of M. Huchon, his scholarly French interpreter.
Hazlitt on Crabbe and Scott is a very interesting witness on account of the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last hundred years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been canvassed almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not always to know when they are wandering from the point or wearying their audience with verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the controversy there has emerged at least one plain probability--that there is no such thing as simple transference of external reality into artistic form. This is what Hazlitt seems to ignore very strangely in his judgment of Crabbe and Scott, and this is, I think, an interesting point in the history of criticism, especially when it is remembered that Hazlitt was a critic of painting, and himself a painter. He speaks almost as if realities passed direct into the verse of Crabbe; as if Scott's imagination in the novels were merely recollection and transcription of experience. Speaking of the difference between the genius of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, he says:
'It is the difference between originality and the want of it, between writing and transcribing. Almost all the finest scenes and touches, the great master-strokes in Shakespeare, are such as must have belonged to the class of invention, where the secret lay between him and his own heart, and the power exerted is in adding to the given materials and working something out of them: in the author of Waverley, not all, but the principal and characteristic beauties are such as may and do belong to the class of compilation--that is, consist in bringing the materials together and leaving them to produce their own effect....
'No one admires or delights in the Scotch Novels more than I do, but