W. P. Ker

“ Scott's chivalry and romance are not what Balzac is thinking about. Balzac is considering Scott's imagination in general, his faculty in narrative and dialogue, wherever his scene may be, from whatever period the facts 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. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hazlitt appears to allow too little to the mind of the Author of Waverley—as though the author had nothing to do but let the contents of his mind arrange themselves on his pages. What this exactly may mean is doubtful. We are not disposed to accept the theory of the passive mind as a sufficient philosophical explanation of the Scotch novels. But Hazlitt is certainly right to make much of the store of reading and reminiscence they imply, and it is not erroneous or fallacious to think of all Scott's writings in verse or prose as peculiarly the fruits of his life and experience. ”

“ Shakespeare's spirit, like fire, shines through him; Sir Walter's, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects.'
I may not at this time quote much more of Hazlitt's criticism, but the point of it would be misunderstood if it were construed as depreciation of Scott. What may be considered merely memory in contrast to Shakespeare's imagination is regarded by Hazlitt as a limitless source of visionary life when compared with the ideas of self-centred authors like Byron. This is what Hazlitt says in another essay of the same series:—
'Scott "does not 'spin his brains' but something much better." ”

“ The scenes that bring out Scott's genius most completely—so they have always seemed to me—are those of Francis Osbaldistone's stay in Glasgow. Seldom [23] has any novelist managed so easily so many different modes of interest. There is the place—in different lights—the streets, the river, the bridge, the Cathedral, the prison, seen through the suspense of the hero's mind, rendered in the talk of Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice; made alive, as the saying is, through successive anxieties and dangers ”

“ Scott's humorous characters are nowhere and never characters in a comedy—and Falstaff, the greatest comic character in Shakespeare, is not great in comedy.
Some of the rich idiomatic Scottish dialogue [24] in the novels might be possibly disparaged (like Ben Jonson) as 'mere humours and observation.' Novelists of lower rank than Scott—Galt in The Ayrshire Legatees and Annals of the Parish and The Entail—have nearly rivalled Scott in reporting conversation. But the Bailie at any rate has his part to play in the story of Rob Roy—and so has Andrew Fairservice. ”

“ The Waverley Novels may be reckoned among the works of fiction that have had their origin in chance, and have turned out something different from what the author intended. Reading the life of Scott, we seem to be following a pilgrimage where the traveller meets with different temptations and escapes various dangers, and takes up a number of duties, and is led to do a number of fine things which he had not thought of till the time came for attempting them. ”

“ He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (Revue Parisienne, 1840) , where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes and forests with the crowd of life commanded by the author of Waverley. Allowing Cooper one great success in the character of Leather-stocking and some merit in a few other personages, Balzac finds beyond these nothing like Scott's multitude of characters; their place is taken by the beauties of nature. ”

“ He is not a poet from the beginning like Wordsworth and Keats, [15] devoted to that one service; he turns novelist late in life when the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in verse are queerly suggested and full of hazard. It needs a foreign language—German—to encourage him to rhyme. The fascination of Bürger's Lenore is a reflection from English ballad poetry; the reflected image brought out what had been less remarkable in the original. The German devices of terror and wonder are a temptation to Scott ”

“ Do we at home in Scotland make too much of Scott's life and associations when we think of his poetry and his novels? Possibly few Scotsmen are impartial here. As Dr. Johnson said, they are not a fair people, and when they think of the Waverley Novels they perhaps do [27] not always see quite clearly. ”

“ The novels were 'the Scotch novels.' Although Thackeray, when he praises Scott, takes most of his examples from the less characteristic, what we may call the English group, on the other hand, Hazlitt dwells most willingly on the Scotch novels, though he did not like Scotsmen, and shared [4] some of the prejudice of Stendhal—'my friend Mr. Beyle,' as he calls him in one place—with regard to Scott himself. And Balzac has no invidious preferences: he recommends an English romance, Kenilworth, to his sister, and he also remembers David Deans, a person most intensely and peculiarly Scots. ”

“ One distinguishes easily enough, at home in Scotland, between the novels, or the passages in the novels, that are idiomatic, native, homegrown, intended for his own people, and the novels not so limited, the romances of English or foreign history—Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Quentin Durward. ”

“ Hazlitt is right; Scott's experience is shaped into the Waverley Novels, though one can distinguish later between those stories that belong properly to Scott's life and those that are invented in repetition of a pattern. [19]
Scott's own alleged reason for giving up the writing of tales in verse was that Byron beat him. But there must have been something besides this: it is plain that the pattern of rhyming romance was growing stale. The Lay needs no apology ”

“ The story is not a mere string of adventures—it is adventures with a bearing on the main issue, with complications that all tell in the end; chief among them, of course, the successive appearances of Mr. ”