Benedetto Croce

“ Certainly when a writer like Gosse steps forward and denies anybody's right to find defects in Scott, asserting that "England can challenge the world to produce in its literature a purer spirit, a more brilliant mind, a creator of more heroic works, a more marvellous painter of historical pictures," the impulse to indulge in a bit of mirth becomes almost irresistible. ”

“ This serenity we must attain if we would apply to Walter Scott even the methods of historical criticism. Approaching him from this point of view (and, as I must warn again, in a spirit of justice and serenity) we perceive that first of all we must take account of the social function he so admirably fulfilled.
Walter Scott, to speak quite plainly, was a literary manufacturer. His task it was to supply a market with wares which were in a demand as great as it was legitimate. Are not the needs of the human imagination—needs of stimulation or of amusement—real needs? ”

“ He says that if Europe will have nothing of Walter Scott, his own England may keep him for herself, exulting in her possession of him as the author of the most perfect style in the national literature, as a writer who never wrote a word that was morbid, impertinent, mean, or low, as the most perfect exemplification of the English gentleman. ”

“ We would have patience left to weigh Scott's objective values, and in some serenity of spirit piously and gratefully acknowledge the few flashes of real art which, in spite of everything, do shine in the mass of his whole production. ”

“ And unfailingly he kept his main people in the foreground, people noble and valorous, certain to hold the sympathy and interest of the reader.
In the fourth place the artistic criterion fails for Scott for the simple reason that art—or poetry, if you wish—was a secondary matter with him. The critic who looks for the artist in Scott inevitably ends with what we Italians call the "stroncatura"—the slashing, the flaying, which, however apposite it may be in the literary campaigns of our own day, becomes sheer bad manners, sheer ill-temper, when used on men of the past. ”

“ The characters stand before us as spectacles for our eyes, or at least for our imaginations. There is no real idea behind all that happens except the idea of supplying a series of attractive scenes. Strike, if you choose, a chord of deeper resonance—the celebrated love passage between the Templar and the Jewess Rebecca. ”

“ The character of the enamoured knight and the exchanges between the Templar and the Jewish girl are treated in a conventional and often absurd manner: we have the set for a drama of the soul, but the soul fails to materialize. The best touches, certainly, are a few impulses of generosity in the Templar's heart, and especially his death in combat—not under the enemy's joust, but from the violent tension of his conflicting passions. ”

“ Think of all the adventures, mysteries, duels, battles, intrigues, hairbreadth escapes, bandits, beautiful women, jolly friars, Black Knights, and what not, that constitute the thrill of Ivanhoe. But in the end we go away with empty hearts. ”

“ It is the figure of a Jewess who remains such out of loyalty to race, but with a successful outreaching to pure humanity.
Similar moments are not lacking in other novels of Scott, Old Mortality, for instance, in the conception of the crude and licentious Sergeant Bothwell, made ridiculous by his constant harping on his descent from the Stuarts, and on whose breast, when he had fallen in battle, Morton finds a wallet containing the Stuart family tree, two love letters written in a woman's hand twenty years before, a wisp of hair, and poems indited by this same Bothwell. ”

“ Less than nothing about the travail of spirit which we think of as the artist's characteristic domain. In Scott's biography the dramatic moment is always the failure of his publisher-partner, which left the novelist penniless and thousands of pounds in debt ”