LECTURE IV.

WALTER SCOTT.

CONTEMPORARY popularity is like bloom upon fruit, while yet attached to the tree. Though afterwards its substantial qualities may still be there; nay, though in some cases they may even be matured and developed; all that freshness and splendour, derived from the sap and spirit of life, cannot but imperceptibly fade away, to return no more. Just so everything that is transitory (and there is often much that is transitory in the reputation of celebrated authors) must be allowed to evaporate and disappear before their real station in literature can be finally determined. For this reason, among other reasons, it is desirable that great writers-great writings rather, for it comes after all to that—should be weighed and sifted at certain intervals, with a view to their more accurate revaluation. I say at certain intervals, because I am by no means clear that the revised estimate, sure to be made as soon as the fashion of an author's day has become a little obsolete, is the one which will be, or ought to be, accepted in the end by mankind.

The generation that immediately follows a great writer is tired of hearing him called Aristides the Just by predecessors, for whose literary judgment they often entertain, I am sorry to say, no great reverence.

They see, and see truly, that interests purely personalinterests that grow up out of the man's special character-out of the accidental circumstances of his career, his political con

nections, his brilliant social qualities; perhaps, even out of his dazzling faults-account for some, if not for much, of the glory that he has won.

They soon, therefore, come to think that this favourite of their fathers has been over-praised. They lose their tempers on the subject, and rush into the contrary extreme, under-rating him as much as he has been over-rated of old. It is not until these prepossessions and antagonisms die off; until everything that does not spring, as it were, out of the root of the matter, has been weeded away, that a satisfactory decision is attainable. Then, and not till then, is the verdict of time, never to be disturbed again, engrossed and registered for all generations.

All this is true of Scott; true, perhaps, to an extent more than common. Nevertheless, it affects me but little on the present occasion. If I came forward as a profound judge, or subtilising critic, to estimate his pretensions, you might fairly, from the point of view natural to youth, address me thus :'You are too old; your notions have been superseded; your mind is warped by prejudices, from which we, happily, have freed ourselves. For us, the genius you insist upon our admiring is like salt that has lost its savour; so that we toss his works aside on behalf of poets and novelists of our own.' Out of such difficulties I escape, when I frankly confess that I appear before you to-day as an advocate-an advocate and a partisan. By doing this, I think I act in harmony with the principles laid down by me on the delivery of my opening lecture. I said then, as I say now, that any man competent to decide, with unfaltering impartiality, under the guidance of that intellectual light called by Bacon 'dry light,' upon all the varieties and modifications of genius-to weigh them one against the other, and then to organise with exact skill proper tables of precedence-must be a second Aristotle. But Aristotles are not so easy to find. It is surely better to be less ambitious, to confess to yourself and to others that your judgment must be tinged by passion and

may well assert that of the mighty epoch during which he lived he was the leading spirit. But in order to settle that question, we must endeavour, as Samuel Johnson once advised Boswell emphatically, to clear our minds of cant. We may say, I apprehend, truly enough, that there have been poets possessed by their genius in much the same sense as men of old, according to the Jewish belief, were possessed by the Devil; and that genius, in such cases, is not a blessing but a curse. In estimating degrees of intellectual power, however, it is scarcely relevant to talk about moral excellence. Eustacius, in Scott's novel of 'The Abbot,' sensibly remarks about Mary's enemies, whom her partisans were disparaging before the battle-'They are evil men, no doubt; but the trade of war demands no saints: Kirkcaldy of Grange was long ago pronounced by the constable de Montmorency to be the first soldier in Europe.' As in war so in poetry. If Belial-fiend though he be-sings better and more powerfully than Israfil the angel, it is our business, as critics, to say so without hesitation.

There are, moreover, several writers, not Belials, of whom I should like to say a word. Scott, the poet of the young, as it is now the fashion to call him, not without a covert sneer; I, on the contrary, look upon it as a high compliment. For whom is poetry meant, I should like to know, if not for the young? Are Jared and Methusaleh the typical judges and critics whom we should seek to please? There is also Campbell-that most anomalous of singers, who seems every now then to be swept off his legs by some mighty rushing wind of inspiration, and lifted up, nolens volens, into the high places of poetry; but who, when that wind drops, does not only become weak and as other men, but absolutely a great deal weaker. No gentleman of fair abilities and decent education could have written things that Campbell gave unhesitatingly to the world, without positive discredit. But I have not time to speak of Scott or Campbell to-day; for, after all, the rival with whom Words

worth had to reckon, was neither of them, but Byron standing alone.

Many of the young may wonder that I make no mention of Shelley or of Keats. The fact is, that neither of these two poets interfered with, or helped to overshadow, Wordsworth at all. The premature death of Keats, indeed, was perhaps the greatest blow of its kind, the severest blighting of her poetical bloom, that England ever sustained; but till after he had passed away the world at large knew nothing about him.

In order that I may prove to you how Shelley also was unknown and unregarded, I am tempted—and for this I hope you will pardon me to embark upon a digression.

Some three and forty years ago, I brought forward a motion in the Oxford Union that Shelley was a greater poet than Byron. The debate, after the ordinary fashion of non-political debates, would probably have been a languid one; but friends of mine at Cambridge (the motion, I may say, was an echo of Cambridge thought and feeling) took the matter up, and appeared suddenly on the scene of action. The first of these friends was Arthur Hallam, the Marcellus of our time. Of him I need not speak, I need not tell you how, as combining perfect sweetness of nature with most extraordinary intellectual gifts, he left upon the minds of all who knew him an impression never to be effaced. I need not do this, I say, for has not his monumentum ære perennius been raised in all men's sight by another and a nobler hand?

The second was also a very remarkable man-Mr. Sunderland. By common consent he was an orator unequalled in promise, and at that moment rapidly expanding into unequalled power: His fate, alas! was even more appalling than that of Arthur Hallam. Just as he was issuing forth into life, all the stormy hopes-all the struggling energies-all the tumultuous aspirations of his impassioned soul were suddenly arrested by the grasp of some mysterious brain disease. For forty years he

chorus, and put by the poet into the mouths of captive Christian women. After him there was silence in the Union for several minutes, and then Mr. Manning, of Balliol, perhaps at that particular time the actual leader of our debates, with great propriety rose. He felt that it would be a somewhat clownish and inhospitable proceeding, if these bold guests went away unchallenged—if their shields were not touched with the arms of courtesy, by some daring Oxford cavalier. He spoke well, exceedingly well, but the framework of his argument—the backbone of his oration-amounted just to this: Byron is a great poet, we have all of us read Byron ; but (and this is my justification for introducing the topic at all) if Shelley had been a great poet, we should have read him also; but we none of us have done so. Therefore Shelley is not a great poet-à fortiori he is not so great a poet as Byron. In hanc sententiam, an immense majority of the Union went pedibus: the debate was over, and we all of us, including Mr. Gladstone, adjourned, as I have said, to supper.

Returning from this digression to the point where I left off, I may say that the era, looked at as a poetical era, to which both Byron and Wordsworth belonged, was one of unusual-I may say of almost unparalleled, splendour. Byron, Scott, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Keats, Campbell, Moore, the ninth among them, whichever he may be, is still a considerable name. Nay, besides these, there are many others, such as Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, and Landor, who ought not to be, and are not likely to be, soon forgotten. The headship of this mighty clan of poets is, as far as I can judge, now assigned by professed English critics to Wordsworth. By the English public, by foreign critics, by the world at large from St. Petersburg to Cape Horn-if anybody reads poetry at Cape Horn-it is awarded, I am sure, to Byron. It is true that the volcanic genius of Byron, working on in its inexhaustible affluence, poured forth, intermingled with higher products, smoke, and sulphur, and