The extreme rarity of _The Death-Wake_ is a reason for its
republication, which may or may not be approved of by collectors. Of
the original edition the Author says that more than seventy copies
were sold in the first week of publication, but thereafter the
publisher failed in business. Mr. Stoddart recovered the sheets of his
poem, and his cook gradually, and perhaps not injudiciously, expended
them for domestic purposes.
Apart from its rarity, _The Death-Wake_ has an interest of its own for
curious amateurs of poetry. The year of its composition (1830) was the
great year of _Romanticisme_ in France, the year of _Hernani_, and of
Gautier's _gilet rouge_. In France it was a literary age given to
mediæval extravagance, to the dagger and the bowl, the cloak and
sword, the mad monk and the were-wolf; the age of Pétrus Borel and
MacKeat, as well as of Dumas and Hugo. Now the official poetry of our
country was untouched by and ignorant of the virtues and excesses of
1830. Wordsworth's bolt was practically shot; Sir Walter was ending
his glorious career; Shelley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the
_annus mirabilis_ of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of
the English-speaking race were producing their volumes, destined at
first to temporary neglect. The year 1830 was the year of Mr.
Tennyson's _Poems, chiefly Lyrical_, his first book, not counting
_Poems by Two Brothers_. It was also the year of Mr. Browning's
_Pauline_ (rarer even than _The Death-Wake_); and it was the year
which followed the second, and perhaps the most characteristic,
poetical venture of Edgar Allan Poe. In Mr. Tennyson's early lyrics,
and in Mr. Poe's, any capable judge must have recognised new notes of
romance. Their accents are fresh and strange, their imaginations dwell
in untrodden regions. Untouched by the French romantic poets, they yet
unconsciously reply to their notes, as if some influence in the mental
air were at work on both sides of the Channel, on both sides of the
Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this indefinite influence was also
making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in Scotland. _The Death-Wake_
is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and
Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few
passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely
musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed
melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true
poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of
_Endymion_, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William Morris. He
is a new master of the old instrument.
His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to
possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is "most incident"
to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad
monkish lover of the dead nun Agathé has hit on precisely the sort of
fantasy which was about to inspire Théophile Gautier's _Comédie de la
Mort_, or the later author of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, or Edgar Poe.
There is here no "criticism of life;" it is a criticism of strange
death; and, so far, may recall Beddoes's _Death's Jest-Book_,
unpublished, of course, in 1830. Naturally this kind of poetry is
"useless," as Mr. Ruskin says about Coleridge, but, in its _bizarre_
way, it may be beautiful.
The author, by a curious analogy with Théophile Gautier, was, in these
days, a humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies
and rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Théophile mocked at
_Les Jeunes France_. The psychological position is, therefore, one of
the rarest. Mr. Stoddart was, first of all and before all, a hardy and
enthusiastic angler. Between 1830 and 1840 he wrote a few beautiful
angling songs, and then all the poetry of his character merged itself
in an ardent love of Nature: of hill, loch and stream--above all, of
Tweed, the fairest of waters, which he lived to see a sink of
pollution. After 1831 we have no more romanticism from Mr. Stoddart.
The wind, blowing where it listeth, struck on him as on an Æolian
harp, and "an uncertain warbling made," in the true Romantic manner.
He did write a piece with the alluring name of _Ajalon of the Winds_,
but not one line of it survives. The rest is not silence, indeed, for,
in addition to his lays of trout and salmon, of Tweed and Teviot, Mr.
Stoddart wrote a good deal of prose, and a good deal of perfectly
common and uninspired verse. The Muse, which was undeniably with him
for an hour, abandoned him, or he deserted her, being content to whip
the waters of Tweed, and Meggat, and Yarrow. Perhaps unfavourable and
unappreciative criticism, acting on a healthy and contented nature,
drove him back into the common paths of men. Whatever the cause, the
_Death-Wake_ alone (save for a few angling songs) remains to give
assurance of a poet "who died young." It is needless to rewrite the
biography, excellently done, in _Angling Songs_, by Miss Stoddart, the
poet's daughter (Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1889). Mr. Stoddart was born
on St. Valentine's Day 1810, in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, nearly on
the site of the Kirk of Field, where Darnley was murdered. He came of
an old Border family. Miss Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged
Miss Helen who burned family papers because she thought she was
bewitched by the seals and decorated initials. Similar follies are
reported of a living old lady, on whose hearth, after a night of
destruction, was once found the impression of a seal of Mary of
Modena. I could give only too good a guess at the _provenance_ of
_those_ papers, but nobody can interfere. Beyond 1500 the family
memories rely on tradition. The ancestors owned lands in the Forest of
Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed hard by Ashestiel. On the
Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they hid the prophets of the
Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One Williamhope is said to have been
out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous
strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray
of Philiphaugh. His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian
side, which was _not_ in favour with the author of _The Death-Wake_.
He married a daughter of Veitch of The Glen, now the property of Sir
Charles Tennant. In the next generation but one, the Stoddarts sold
their lands and took to commerce, while the poet's father won great
distinction in the Navy. The great-great-grandfather of the poet
married a Miss Muir of Anniston, the family called cousins (on which
side of the blanket I know not) with Robert II. of Scotland, and, by
another line, were as near as in the sixth degree of James III.
As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost,
fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a
pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed _The
Death-Wake_ in _Blackwood_. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De
Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests
of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch
of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects
traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in
_technique_ than Byron usually wrote.
The summer of 1830 Mr. Stoddart passed in Hogg's company on Yarrow,
and early in 1831 he published _The Death-Wake_. There is no trace of
James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original.
Wilson places it "between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of
Barry Cornwall." It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of
romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune, but never to
be touched again.
It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life
of angling and of literary leisure. He only blossomed once. His poem
was plagiarised and inserted in _Graham's Magazine_, by a person named
Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (vol. xx.). Mr. Ingram, the biographer of
Edgar Poe, observes that Poe praised the piece while he was exposing
Tasistro's "barefaced robbery."
The copy of _The Death-Wake_ from which this edition is printed was
once the property of Mr. Aytoun, author of _Lays of the Scottish
Cavaliers_, and, I presume, of _Ta Phairshon_. Mr. Aytoun has written
a prefatory sonnet which will be found in its proper place, a set of
rhymes on the flyleaf at the end, and various cheerful but unfeeling
notes. After some hesitation I do not print these frivolities.
The copy was most generously presented to me by Professor Knight of
St. Andrews, and I have only seen one other example, which I in turn
contributed to fill the vacant place in the shelves of Mr. Knight. His
example, however, is far the more curious of the twain, by virtue of
Aytoun's annotations.
I had been wanting to see _The Death-Wake_ ever since, as a boy, I
read the unkind review of it in an ancient volume of _Blackwood's
Magazine_. In its "pure purple mantle" of glazed cloth, with paper
label, it is an unaffectedly neat and well-printed little volume.
It would be unbecoming and impertinent to point out to any one who has
an ear for verse, the charm of such lines as--
"A murmur far and far, of those that stirred
Within the great encampment of the sea."