“Scott is invariably his own best critic,” says Mr. Andrew Lang.[348] Of this Scott was not himself in the least convinced, and when we recall how, to please his printer, James Ballantyne, he tacked on a last scene to Rokeby, resuscitated the dead Athelstane in Ivanhoe, and eliminated the main motive of St. Ronan’s Well, we wish he had been more uniformly inclined to trust his own critical judgment.

He never scheduled the qualities of his own genius.  A man who could sincerely say what he did about literary immortality would not be apt to develop any dogma in regard to his artistic achievement.  “Let me please my own generation,” he said, “and let those that come after us judge of their taste and my performances as they please; the anticipation of their neglect or censure will affect me very little."[349] His opinions about his own work are to be deduced largely from casual remarks scattered through his letters and journals.  His introductions to his novels, in the Opus Magnum, are valuable sources, however, and the “Epistle” preceding The Fortunes of Nigel is a mine of material, though, unlike the later introductions, it was written “according to the trick,” when he was still preserving his anonymity.  We have an article which he wrote for the Quarterly on two of his own books, the review of Tales of My Landlord.[350] His criticism of the work of other people is also very helpful in this connection, since from it we may learn what qualities he wished to find in poetry and in the novel, as well as in history, biography, and criticism, the fields in which he did much, though less famous work.

The student of his criticism is struck at once by the fact that the qualities which Scott particularly admired in literature were those for which he was himself preeminent.  Yet he cannot be accused, as Poe may be, of constructing a theory that those types of art were greatest which he found himself most skilful in exemplifying.  Scott’s nature was of that most efficient kind that enables a man to do such things as he likes to see done.  We cannot argue that he was incapable of attending to minute niceties and on this account chose to emphasize the large qualities of literature.  For notwithstanding that lack of delicacy which characterized his physical senses and which we might therefore conclude would affect his literary discernment, we have among his small poems some that show his power, occasionally at least, to satisfy the most fastidious critic of detail.  Evidently he could write in more than one style, and though the style he used most is undoubtedly that which was most natural to him, it was also that which he thought, on other grounds than the character of his own talents, best worth while.  Yet he had so little vanity in regard to his own work that he could hardly understand his success, though it depended on those very qualities which, in other authors, excited his utmost admiration.