"This morn is merry June, I trow,
The rose is budding fain;
But she shall bloom in winter snow,
Ere we two meet again.
He turned his charger as he spake,
Upon the river shore,
He gave his bridle-reins a shake,
Said, 'Adieu for evermore,
My love!
Adieu for evermore!'"
Turning from the legends in verse, let it not be forgotten that Scott was
a great lyrical poet. Mr. Palgrave is not too lenient a judge, and his
"Golden Treasury" is a touchstone, as well as a treasure, of poetic gold.
In this volume Wordsworth contributes more lyrics than any other poet:
Shelley and Shakespeare come next; then Sir Walter. For my part I would
gladly sacrifice a few of Wordsworth's for a few more of Scott's. But
this may be prejudice. Mr. Palgrave is not prejudiced, and we see how
high is his value for Sir Walter.
There are scores of songs in his works, touching and sad, or gay as a
hunter's waking, that tell of lovely things lost by tradition, and found
by him on the moors: all these--not prized by Sir Walter himself--are in
his gift, and in that of no other man. For example, his "Eve of St.
John" is simply a masterpiece, a ballad among ballads. Nothing but an
old song moves us like--
"Are these the links o' Forth, she said,
Are these the bends o' Dee!"
He might have done more of the best, had he very greatly cared. Alone
among poets, he had neither vanity nor jealousy; he thought little of his
own verse and his own fame: would that he had thought more! would that he
had been more careful of what was so precious! But he turned to prose;
bade poetry farewell.
"Yet, once again, farewell, thou Minstrel Harp,
Yet, once again, forgive my feeble sway.
_And little reck I of the censure sharp_
_May idly cavil at an idle lay_."
People still cavil idly, complaining that Scott did not finish, or did
not polish his pieces; that he was not Keats, or was not Wordsworth. He
was himself; he was the Last Minstrel, the latest, the greatest, the
noblest of natural poets concerned with natural things. He sang of free,
fierce, and warlike life, of streams yet rich in salmon, and moors not
yet occupied by brewers; of lonely places haunted in the long grey
twilights of the North; of crumbling towers where once dwelt the Lady of
Branksome or the Flower of Yarrow. Nature summed up in him many a past
age a world of ancient faiths; and before the great time of Britain
wholly died, to Britain, as to Greece, she gave her Homer. When he was
old, and tired, and near his death--so worn with trouble and labour that
he actually signed his own name wrong--he wrote his latest verse, for a
lady. It ends--
"My country, be thou glorious still!"
and so he died, within the sound of the whisper of Tweed, foreseeing the
years when his country would no more be glorious, thinking of his country
only, forgetting quite the private sorrow of his own later days.
People will tell you that Scott was not a great poet; that his bolt is
shot, his fame perishing. Little he cared for his fame! But for my part
I think and hope that Scott can never die, till men grow up into manhood
without ever having been boys--till they forget that
"One glorious hour of crowded life
Is worth an age without a name!"
Thus, the charges against Sir Walter's poetry are, on the whole, little
more than the old critical fallacy of blaming a thing for not being
something else. "It takes all sorts to make a world," in poetry as in
life. Sir Walter's sort is a very good sort, and in English literature
its place was empty, and waiting for him. Think of what he did. English
poetry had long been very tame and commonplace, written in couplets like
Pope's, very artificial and smart, or sensible and slow. He came with
poems of which the music seemed to gallop, like thundering hoofs and
ringing bridles of a rushing border troop. Here were goblin, ghost, and
fairy, fight and foray, fair ladies and true lovers, gallant knights and
hard blows, blazing beacons on every hill crest and on the bartisan of
every tower. Here was a world made alive again that had been dead for
three hundred years--a world of men and women.
They say that the archaeology is not good. Archaeology is a science; in
its application to poetry, Scott was its discoverer. Others can name the
plates of a coat of armour more learnedly than he, but he made men wear
them. They call his Gothic art false, his armour pasteboard; but he put
living men under his castled roofs, living men into his breastplates and
taslets. Science advances, old knowledge becomes ignorance; it is poetry
that does not die, and that will not die, while--
"The triple pride
Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde."