But to the young, if they have any
fancy and intelligence, Scott is not tedious even now; and probably his
most devoted readers are boys, girls, and men of matured appreciation and
considerable knowledge of literature. The unformed and the cultivated
tastes are still at one about Scott. He holds us yet with his
unpremeditated art, his natural qualities of friendliness, of humour, of
sympathy. Even the carelessness with which his earliest and his kindest
critics--Ellis, Erskine, and Lady Louisa Stuart--reproached him has not
succeeded in killing his work and diminishing his renown.
It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt,
that secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his
own defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): "A solecism in
point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent to me. I never
learned grammar. . . . I believe the bailiff in 'The Goodnatured Man' is
not far wrong when he says: 'One man has one way of expressing himself,
and another another; and that is all the difference between them.'" The
difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers,
and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered "stylists" among writers not
so very good, is essential.
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