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--th