EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.
Scott's first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Bürger's
_Lenore_, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in
Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but certainly not a specimen of
the higher order of imaginative genius. However, it stirred Scott's
youthful blood, and made him "wish to heaven he could get a skull and
two cross-bones!" a modest desire, to be expressed with so much
fervour, and one almost immediately gratified. Probably no one ever
gave a more spirited version of Bürger's ballad than Scott has given;
but the use to which Miss Cranstoun, a friend and confidante of his
love for Miss Stuart Belches, strove to turn it, by getting it
printed, blazoned, and richly bound, and presenting it to the young
lady as a proof of her admirer's abilities, was perhaps hardly very
sagacious. It is quite possible, at least, that Miss Stuart Belches
may have regarded this vehement admirer of spectral wedding journeys
and skeleton bridals, as unlikely to prepare for her that comfortable,
trim, and decorous future which young ladies usually desire. At any
rate, the bold stroke failed. The young lady admired the verses, but,
as we have seen, declined the translator. Perhaps she regarded banking
as safer, if less brilliant work than the most effective description
of skeleton riders. Indeed, Scott at this time--to those who did not
know what was in him, which no one, not even excepting himself,
did--had no very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth.
It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was thus
connected with his interest in the preternatural, for no man ever
lived whose genius was sounder and healthier, and less disposed to
dwell on the half-and-half lights of a dim and eerie world; yet
ghostly subjects always interested him deeply, and he often touched
them in his stories, more, I think, from the strong artistic contrast
they afforded to his favourite conceptions of life, than from any
other motive. There never was, I fancy, an organization less
susceptible of this order of fears and superstitions than his own.
When a friend jokingly urged him, within a few months of his death,
not to leave Rome on a Friday, as it was a day of bad omen for a
journey, he replied, laughing, "Superstition is very picturesque, and
I make it, at times, stand me in great stead, but I never allow it to
interfere with interest or convenience." Basil Hall reports Scott's
having told him on the last evening of the year 1824, when they were
talking over this subject, that "having once arrived at a country inn,
he was told there was no bed for him. 'No place to lie down at all?'
said he. 'No,' said the people of the house; 'none, except a room in
which there is a corpse lying.' 'Well,' said he, 'did the person die
of any contagious disorder?' 'Oh, no; not at all,' said they. 'Well,
then,' continued he, 'let me have the other bed. So,' said Sir Walter,
'I laid me down, and never had a better night's sleep in my life.'" He
was, indeed, a man of iron nerve, whose truest artistic enjoyment was
in noting the forms of character seen in full daylight by the light of
the most ordinary experience. Perhaps for that reason he can on
occasion relate a preternatural incident, such as the appearance of
old Alice at the fountain, at the very moment of her death, to the
Master of Ravenswood, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, with great effect.
It was probably the vivacity with which he realized the violence which
such incidents do to the terrestrial common sense of our ordinary
nature, and at the same time the sedulous accuracy of detail with
which he narrated them, rather than any, even the smallest, special
susceptibility of his own brain to thrills of the preternatural kind,
which gave him rather a unique pleasure in dealing with such
preternatural elements. Sometimes, however, his ghosts are a little
too muscular to produce their due effect as ghosts. In translating
Bürger's ballad his great success lay in the vividness of the
spectre's horsemanship. For instance,--
"Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee,"
is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every one will
remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady of Avenel, in _The
Monastery_, and how vigorously she takes fords,--as vigorously as the
sheriff himself, who was very fond of fords. On the whole, Scott was
too sunny and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and
cross-bones with which he ornamented his "den" in his father's house,
did not succeed in tempting him into the world of twilight and cobwebs
wherein he made his first literary excursion. His _William and Helen_,
the name he gave to his translation of Bürger's _Lenore_, made in
1795, was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than for
the weirdness of its effects.
If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such ballads as
Bürger's which first led Scott to test his own powers, his genius soon
turned to more appropriate and natural subjects. Ever since his
earliest college days he had been collecting, in those excursions of
his into Liddesdale and elsewhere, materials for a book on _The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_; and the publication of this work,
in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was his first great
literary success. The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold
within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to
the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and spirit
of his own new ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at
once a very high literary name. And the name was well deserved. The
_Border Minstrelsy_ was more commensurate _in range_ with the genius
of Scott, than even the romantic poems by which it was soon followed,
and which were received with such universal and almost unparalleled
delight. For Scott's _Border Minstrelsy_ gives more than a glimpse of
all his many great powers--his historical industry and knowledge, his
masculine humour, his delight in restoring the vision of the "old,
simple, violent world" of rugged activity and excitement, as well as
that power to kindle men's hearts, as by a trumpet-call, which was the
chief secret of the charm of his own greatest poems. It is much easier
to discern the great novelist of subsequent years in the _Border
Minstrelsy_ than even in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Marmion_,
and _The Lady of the Lake_ taken together. From those romantic poems
you would never guess that Scott entered more eagerly and heartily
into the common incidents and common cares of every-day human life
than into the most romantic fortunes; from them you would never know
how completely he had mastered the leading features of quite
different periods of our history; from them you would never infer that
you had before you one of the best plodders, as well as one of the
most enthusiastic dreamers, in British literature. But all this might
have been gathered from the various introductions and notes to the
_Border Minstrelsy_, which are full of skilful illustrations, of
comments teeming with humour, and of historic weight. The general
introduction gives us a general survey of the graphic pictures of
Border quarrels, their simple violence and simple cunning. It enters,
for instance, with grave humour into the strong distinction taken in
the debatable land between a "freebooter" and a "thief," and the
difficulty which the inland counties had in grasping it, and paints
for us, with great vivacity, the various Border superstitions. Another
commentary on a very amusing ballad, commemorating the manner in which
a blind harper stole a horse and got paid for a mare he had not lost,
gives an account of the curious tenure of land, called that of the
"king's rentallers," or "kindly tenants;" and a third describes, in
language as vivid as the historical romance of _Kenilworth_, written
years after, the manner in which Queen Elizabeth received the news of
a check to her policy, and vented her spleen on the King of Scotland.
So much as to the breadth of the literary area which this first book
of Scott's covered. As regards the poetic power which his own new
ballads, in imitation of the old ones, evinced, I cannot say that
those of the first issue of the _Border Minstrelsy_ indicated anything
like the force which might have been expected from one who was so soon
to be the author of _Marmion_, though many of Scott's warmest
admirers, including Sir Francis Doyle, seem to place _Glenfinlas_
among his finest productions. But in the third volume of the _Border
Minstrelsy_, which did not appear till 1803, is contained a ballad on
the assassination of the Regent Murray, the story being told by his
assassin, which seems to me a specimen of his very highest poetical
powers. In _Cadyow Castle_ you have not only that rousing trumpet-note
which you hear in _Marmion,_ but the pomp and glitter of a grand
martial scene is painted with all Scott's peculiar terseness and
vigour. The opening is singularly happy in preparing the reader for
the description of a violent deed. The Earl of Arran, chief of the
clan of Hamiltons, is chasing among the old oaks of Cadyow
Castle,--oaks which belonged to the ancient Caledonian forest,--the
fierce, wild bulls, milk-white, with black muzzles, which were not
extirpated till shortly before Scott's own birth:--
"Through the huge oaks of Evandale,
Whose limbs a thousand years have worn,
What sullen roar comes down the gale,
And drowns the hunter's pealing horn?
"Mightiest of all the beasts of chase
That roam in woody Caledon,
Crashing the forest in his race,
The mountain bull comes thundering on.
"Fierce on the hunter's quiver'd band
He rolls his eyes of swarthy glow,
Spurns, with black hoof and horn, the sand,
And tosses high his mane of snow.
"Aim'd well, the chieftain's lance has flown;
Struggling in blood the savage lies;
His roar is sunk in hollow groan,--
Sound, merry huntsman! sound the pryse!"
It is while the hunters are resting after this feat, that
Bothwellhaugh dashes among them headlong, spurring his jaded steed
with poniard instead of spur:--
"From gory selle and reeling steed,
Sprang the fierce horseman with a bound,
And reeking from the recent deed,
He dash'd his carbine on the ground."
And then Bothwellhaugh tells his tale of blood, describing the
procession from which he had singled out his prey:--
"'Dark Morton, girt with many a spear,
Murder's foul minion, led the van;
And clash'd their broadswords in the rear
The wild Macfarlanes' plaided clan.
"'Glencairn and stout Parkhead were nigh,
Obsequious at their Regent's rein,
And haggard Lindsay's iron eye,
That saw fair Mary weep in vain.
"''Mid pennon'd spears, a steely grove,
Proud Murray's plumage floated high;
Scarce could his trampling charger move,
So close the minions crowded nigh.
"'From the raised vizor's shade, his eye,
Dark rolling, glanced the ranks along,
And his steel truncheon waved on high,
Seem'd marshalling the iron throng.
"'But yet his sadden'd brow confess'd
A passing shade of doubt and awe;
Some fiend was whispering in his breast,
"Beware of injured Bothwellhaugh!"
"'The death-shot parts,--the charger springs,--
Wild rises tumult's startling roar!
And Murray's plumy helmet rings--
Rings on the ground to rise no more.'"
This was the ballad which made so strong an impression on Thomas Campbell,
the poet. Referring to some of the lines I have quoted, Campbell
said,--"I have repeated them so often on the North Bridge that the whole
fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind
in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of
lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head
which strong, pithy poetry excites."[10] I suppose anecdotes of this kind
have been oftener told of Scott than of any other English poet. Indeed,
Sir Walter, who understood himself well, gives the explanation in one of
his diaries:--"I am sensible," he says, "that if there be anything good
about my poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition,
which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active
dispositions."[11] He might have included old people too. I have heard of
two old men--complete strangers--passing each other on a dark London
night, when one of them happened to be repeating to himself, just as
Campbell did to the hackney coachmen of the North Bridge of Edinburgh, the
last lines of the account of Flodden Field in _Marmion_, "Charge, Chester,
charge," when suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, "On, Stanley,
on," whereupon they finished the death of Marmion between them, took off
their hats to each other, and parted, laughing. Scott's is almost the only
poetry in the English language that not only runs thus in the head of
average men, but heats the head in which it runs by the mere force of its
hurried frankness of style, to use Scott's own terms, or by that of its
strong and pithy eloquence, as Campbell phrased it. And in _Cadyow Castle_
this style is at its culminating point.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 79.]
[Footnote 11: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 370.]