SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS.
Scott's genius flowered late. _Cadyow Castle_, the first of his poems,
I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and
fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one
years of age. It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of
his first great romance in verse, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, a
poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four. The
first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is
the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was
confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on
Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which
Scott was cornet. The poem was originally intended to be included in
the _Border Minstrelsy_, as one of the studies in the antique style,
but soon outgrew the limits of such a study both in length and in the
freedom of its manner. Both the poorest and the best parts of _The
Lay_ were in a special manner due to Lady Dalkeith (afterwards Duchess
of Buccleugh), who suggested it, and in whose honour the poem was
written. It was she who requested Scott to write a poem on the legend
of the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, and this Scott attempted,--and, so
far as the goblin himself was concerned, conspicuously failed. He
himself clearly saw that the story of this unmanageable imp was both
confused and uninteresting, and that in fact he had to extricate
himself from the original groundwork of the tale, as from a regular
literary scrape, in the best way he could. In a letter to Miss Seward,
Scott says,--"At length the story appeared so uncouth that I was fain
to put it into the mouth of my old minstrel, lest the nature of it
should be misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new
school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old. In
the process of the romance, the page, intended to be a principal
person in the work, contrived (from the baseness of his natural
propensities, I suppose) to slink down stairs into the kitchen, and
now he must e'en abide there."[12] And I venture to say that no reader
of the poem ever has distinctly understood what the goblin page did or
did not do, what it was that was "lost" throughout the poem and
"found" at the conclusion, what was the object of his personating the
young heir of the house of Scott, and whether or not that object was
answered;--what use, if any, the magic book of Michael Scott was to
the Lady of Branksome, or whether it was only harm to her; and I doubt
moreover whether any one ever cared an iota what answer, or whether
any answer, might be given to any of these questions. All this, as
Scott himself clearly perceived, was left confused, and not simply
vague. The goblin imp had been more certainly an imp of mischief to
him than even to his boyish ancestor. But if Lady Dalkeith suggested
the poorest part of the poem, she certainly inspired its best part.
Scott says, as we have seen, that he brought in the aged harper to
save himself from the imputation of "setting-up a new school of
poetry" instead of humbly imitating an old school. But I think that
the chivalrous wish to do honour to Lady Dalkeith, both as a personal
friend and as the wife of his "chief,"--as he always called the head
of the house of Scott,--had more to do with the introduction of the
aged harper, than the wish to guard himself against the imputation of
attempting a new poetic style. He clearly intended the Duchess of _The
Lay_ to represent the Countess for whom he wrote it, and the aged
harper, with his reverence and gratitude and self-distrust, was only
the disguise in which he felt that he could best pour out his loyalty,
and the romantic devotion with which both Lord and Lady Dalkeith, but
especially the latter, had inspired him. It was certainly this
beautiful framework which assured the immediate success and permanent
charm of the poem; and the immediate success was for that day
something marvellous. The magnificent quarto edition of 750 copies was
soon exhausted, and an octavo edition of 1500 copies was sold out
within the year. In the following year two editions, containing
together 4250 copies, were disposed of, and before twenty-five years
had elapsed, that is, before 1830, 44,000 copies of the poem had been
bought by the public in this country, taking account of the legitimate
trade alone. Scott gained in all by _The Lay_ 769_l._, an
unprecedented sum in those times for an author to obtain from any
poem. Little more than half a century before, Johnson received but
fifteen guineas for his stately poem on _The Vanity of Human Wishes_,
and but ten guineas for his _London_. I do not say that Scott's poem
had not much more in it of true poetic fire, though Scott himself, I
believe, preferred these poems of Johnson's to anything that he
himself ever wrote. But the disproportion in the reward was certainly
enormous, and yet what Scott gained by his _Lay_ was of course much
less than he gained by any of his subsequent poems of equal, or
anything like equal, length. Thus for _Marmion_ he received 1000
guineas long before the poem was published, and for _one half_ of the
copyright of _The Lord of the Isles_ Constable paid Scott 1500
guineas. If we ask ourselves to what this vast popularity of Scott's
poems, and especially of the earlier of them (for, as often happens,
he was better remunerated for his later and much inferior poems than
for his earlier and more brilliant productions) is due, I think the
answer must be for the most part, the high romantic glow and
extraordinary romantic simplicity of the poetical elements they
contained. Take the old harper of _The Lay_, a figure which arrested
the attention of Pitt during even that last most anxious year of his
anxious life, the year of Ulm and Austerlitz. The lines in which Scott
describes the old man's embarrassment when first urged to play,
produced on Pitt, according to his own account, "an effect which I
might have expected in painting, but could never have fancied capable
of being given in poetry."[13]
Every one knows the lines to which Pitt refers:--
"The humble boon was soon obtain'd;
The aged minstrel audience gain'd.
But, when he reach'd the room of state,
Where she with all her ladies sate,
Perchance he wish'd his boon denied;
For, when to tune the harp he tried,
His trembling hand had lost the ease
Which marks security to please;
And scenes long past, of joy and pain,
Came wildering o'er his aged brain,--
He tried to tune his harp in vain!
The pitying Duchess praised its chime,
And gave him heart, and gave him time,
Till every string's according glee
Was blended into harmony.
And then, he said, he would full fain
He could recall an ancient strain
He never thought to sing again.
It was not framed for village churls,
But for high dames and mighty earls;
He'd play'd it to King Charles the Good,
When he kept Court at Holyrood;
And much he wish'd, yet fear'd, to try
The long-forgotten melody.
Amid the strings his fingers stray'd,
And an uncertain warbling made,
And oft he shook his hoary head.
But when he caught the measure wild
The old man raised his face, and smiled;
And lighten'd up his faded eye,
With all a poet's ecstasy!
In varying cadence, soft or strong,
He swept the sounding chords along;
The present scene, the future lot,
His toils, his wants, were all forgot;
Cold diffidence and age's frost
In the full tide of song were lost;
Each blank in faithless memory void
The poet's glowing thought supplied;
And, while his harp responsive rung,
'Twas thus the latest minstrel sung.
* * * * *
Here paused the harp; and with its swell
The master's fire and courage fell;
Dejectedly and low he bow'd,
And, gazing timid on the crowd,
He seem'd to seek in every eye
If they approved his minstrelsy;
And, diffident of present praise,
Somewhat he spoke of former days,
And how old age, and wandering long,
Had done his hand and harp some wrong."
These lines hardly illustrate, I think, the particular form of Mr.
Pitt's criticism, for a quick succession of fine shades of feeling of
this kind could never have been delineated in a painting, or indeed in
a series of paintings, at all, while they _are_ so given in the poem.
But the praise itself, if not its exact form, is amply deserved. The
singular depth of the romantic glow in this passage, and its equally
singular simplicity,--a simplicity which makes it intelligible to
every one,--are conspicuous to every reader. It is not what is called
classical poetry, for there is no severe outline,--no sculptured
completeness and repose,--no satisfying wholeness of effect to the eye
of the mind,--no embodiment of a great action. The poet gives us a
breath, a ripple of alternating fear and hope in the heart of an old
man, and that is all. He catches an emotion that had its roots deep in
the past, and that is striving onward towards something in the
future;--he traces the wistfulness and self-distrust with which age
seeks to recover the feelings of youth,--the delight with which it
greets them when they come,--the hesitation and diffidence with which
it recalls them as they pass away, and questions the triumph it has
just won,--and he paints all this without subtlety, without
complexity, but with a swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed.
Generally, however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to
any feeling, however active in its bent. The cases in which he makes a
study of any mood of feeling, as he does of this harper's feeling, are
comparatively rare. Deloraine's night-ride to Melrose is a good deal
more in Scott's ordinary way, than this study of the old harper's
wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the
same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always
simple; and his subject always romantic. But though romantic, it is
simple almost to bareness,--one of the great causes both of his
popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of
his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and
richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron "bet" him; and no
doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he "bet" him, was in the
variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness
and bareness was of the essence of Scott's idealism and romance. It
was so in relation to scenery. He told Washington Irving that he loved
the very nakedness of the Border country. "It has something," he said,
"bold and stern and solitary about it. When I have been for some time
in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented
garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey
hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, _I think
I should die_."[14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his
native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It
is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest ideal point.
Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty subjects, as in parts of
_The Lady of the Lake_, and a good deal of _The Lord of the Isles_,
and still more in _The Bridal of Triermain_, his charm disappears. It
is in painting those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott
shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but experiences
them with far greater strength and purity than ordinary men, that he
triumphs as a poet. Mr. Lockhart tells us that some of Scott's senses
were decidedly "blunt," and one seems to recognize this in the
simplicity of his romantic effects. "It is a fact," he says,
"which some philosophers may think worth setting down, that Scott's
organization, as to more than one of the senses, was the reverse of
exquisite. He had very little of what musicians call an ear; his smell
was hardly more delicate. I have seen him stare about, quite
unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their
uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and
neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine
from sound. He could never tell Madeira from sherry,--nay, an Oriental
friend having sent him a butt of _sheeraz_, when he remembered the
circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir
John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler,
mistaking the label, had already served up half the bin as _sherry_.
Port he considered as physic ... in truth he liked no wines except
sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to the last he was no
connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a tumbler of whisky-toddy to the
most precious 'liquid-ruby' that ever flowed in the cup of a
prince."[15]
However, Scott's eye was very keen:--"_It was commonly him_," as his
little son once said, "_that saw the hare sitting_." And his
perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight. As
Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done
by the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness of
organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt
contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper
and more vital of Scott's romantic impressions; at least there is good
reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at
least diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated
life--do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere backwaters of
sensations, even if they do not directly tend towards artificial and
indirect forms of character. Scott's romance is like his native
scenery,--bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong
pure feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour in his
pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out. And
so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it
is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly
characters. But as for subtleties and fine shades of feeling in his
poems, or anything like the manifold harmonies of the richer arts,
they are not to be found, or, if such complicated shading is to be
found--and it is perhaps attempted in some faint measure in _The
Bridal of Triermain,_ the poem in which Scott tried to pass himself
off for Erskine,--it is only at the expense of the higher qualities of
his romantic poetry, that even in this small measure it is supplied.
Again, there is no rich music in his verse. It is its rapid onset, its
hurrying strength, which so fixes it in the mind.
It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of _The Lay_, that
_Marmion_, Scott's greatest poem, was published. But I may as well say what
seems necessary of that and his other poems, while I am on the subject of
his poetry. _Marmion_ has all the advantage over _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_ that a coherent story told with force and fulness, and concerned
with the same class of subjects as _The Lay_, must have over a confused and
ill-managed legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve as the
opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife. Scott's poems have
sometimes been depreciated as mere _novelettes_ in verse, and I think that
some of them may be more or less liable to this criticism. For instance,
_The Lady of the Lake_, with the exception of two or three brilliant
passages, has always seemed to me more of a versified _novelette_,--without
the higher and broader characteristics of Scott's prose novels--than of a
poem. I suppose what one expects from a poem as distinguished from a
romance--even though the poem incorporates a story--is that it should not
rest for its chief interest on the mere development of the story; but
rather that the narrative should be quite subordinate to that insight into
the deeper side of life and manners, in expressing which poetry has so
great an advantage over prose. Of _The Lay_ and _Marmion_ this is true;
less true of _The Lady of the Lake_, and still less of _Rokeby_, or _The
Lord of the Isles_, and this is why _The Lay_ and _Marmion_ seem so much
superior as poems to the others. They lean less on the interest of mere
incident, more on that of romantic feeling and the great social and
historic features of the day. _Marmion_ was composed in great part in the
saddle, and the stir of a charge of cavalry seems to be at the very core of
it. "For myself," said Scott, writing to a lady correspondent at a time
when he was in active service as a volunteer, "I must own that to one who
has, like myself, _la tête un peu exaltée_, the pomp and circumstance of
war gives, for a time, a very poignant and pleasing sensation."[16] And you
feel this all through _Marmion_ even more than in _The Lay_. Mr. Darwin
would probably say that Auld Wat of Harden had about as much responsibility
for _Marmion_ as Sir Walter himself. "You will expect," he wrote to the
same lady, who was personally unknown to him at that time, "to see a
person who had dedicated himself to literary pursuits, and you will find me
a rattle-skulled, half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a
regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old."[17] And
what Scott himself felt in relation to the martial elements of his poetry,
soldiers in the field felt with equal force. "In the course of the day when
_The Lady of the Lake_ first reached Sir Adam Fergusson, he was posted with
his company on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's artillery,
somewhere no doubt on the lines of Torres Vedras. The men were ordered to
lie prostrate on the ground; while they kept that attitude, the captain,
kneeling at the head, read aloud the description of the battle in Canto
VI., and the listening soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza when
the French shot struck the bank close above them."[18] It is not often that
martial poetry has been put to such a test; but we can well understand with
what rapture a Scotch force lying on the ground to shelter from the French
fire, would enter into such passages as the following:--
"Their light-arm'd archers far and near
Survey'd the tangled ground,
Their centre ranks, with pike and spear,
A twilight forest frown'd,
Their barbèd horsemen, in the rear,
The stern battalia crown'd.
No cymbal clash'd, no clarion rang,
Still were the pipe and drum;
Save heavy tread, and armour's clang,
The sullen march was dumb.
There breathed no wind their crests to shake,
Or wave their flags abroad;
Scarce the frail aspen seem'd to quake,
That shadow'd o'er their road.
Their vanward scouts no tidings bring,
Can rouse no lurking foe,
Nor spy a trace of living thing
Save when they stirr'd the roe;
The host moves like a deep-sea wave,
Where rise no rocks its power to brave,
High-swelling, dark, and slow.
The lake is pass'd, and now they gain
A narrow and a broken plain,
Before the Trosach's rugged jaws,
And here the horse and spearmen pause,
While, to explore the dangerous glen,
Dive through the pass the archer-men.
"At once there rose so wild a yell
Within that dark and narrow dell,
As all the fiends from heaven that fell
Had peal'd the banner-cry of Hell!
Forth from the pass, in tumult driven,
Like chaff before the wind of heaven,
The archery appear;
For life! for life! their plight they ply,
And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry,
And plaids and bonnets waving high,
And broadswords flashing to the sky,
Are maddening in the rear.
Onward they drive, in dreadful race,
Pursuers and pursued;
Before that tide of flight and chase,
How shall it keep its rooted place,
The spearmen's twilight wood?
Down, down, cried Mar, 'your lances down
Bear back both friend and foe!'
Like reeds before the tempest's frown,
That serried grove of lances brown
At once lay levell'd low;
And, closely shouldering side to side,
The bristling ranks the onset bide,--
'We'll quell the savage mountaineer,
As their Tinchel cows the game!
They came as fleet as forest deer,
We'll drive them back as tame.'"
But admirable in its stern and deep excitement as that is, the battle
of Flodden in _Marmion_ passes it in vigour, and constitutes perhaps
the most perfect description of war by one who was--almost--both poet
and warrior, which the English language contains.
And _Marmion_ registers the high-water mark of Scott's poetical power,
not only in relation to the painting of war, but in relation to the
painting of nature. Critics from the beginning onwards have complained
of the six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the story.
But I cannot see that the remark has weight. No poem is written for
those who read it as they do a novel--merely to follow the interest of
the story; or if any poem be written for such readers, it deserves to
die. On such a principle--which treats a poem as a mere novel and
nothing else,--you might object to Homer that he interrupts the battle
so often to dwell on the origin of the heroes who are waging it; or to
Byron that he deserts Childe Harold to meditate on the rapture of
solitude. To my mind the ease and frankness of these confessions of
the author's recollections give a picture of his life and character
while writing _Marmion_, which adds greatly to its attraction as a
poem. You have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of the
mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are brought back frankly,
at fit intervals, from the one to the other, in the mode best adapted
to help you to appreciate the relation of the poet to the poem. At
least if Milton's various interruptions of a much more ambitious
theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for
the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes--and I never heard
of any one who thought them so--I cannot see any reason why Scott's
periodic recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic
mistakes either. If Scott's reverie was less lofty than Milton's, so
also was his story. It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation
between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other. What
can be more truly a part of _Marmion_, as a poem, though not as a
story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott
expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of
the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches
himself for attempting so great a subject and returns to what he calls
his "rude legend," the very essence of which was, however, a
passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence? What can be
more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet
had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St. Mary's
Lake, in the introduction to the second canto? Or than the striking
autobiographical study of his own infancy which I have before
extracted from the introduction to the third? It seems to me that
_Marmion_ without these introductions would be like the hills which
border Yarrow, without the stream and lake in which they are
reflected.
Never at all events in any later poem was Scott's touch as a mere
painter so terse and strong. What a picture of a Scotch winter is
given in these few lines:--
"The sheep before the pinching heaven
To shelter'd dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines,
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The wither'd sward and wintry sky,
And from beneath their summer hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill."
Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is),
in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,--(he is too short, too
sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is
always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to
look out upon the great story of human nature), he is certainly
nearest to it in such a passage as this:--
"The Isles-men carried at their backs
The ancient Danish battle-axe.
They raised a wild and wondering cry
As with his guide rode Marmion by.
Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when
The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen,
And, with their cries discordant mix'd,
Grumbled and yell'd the pipes betwixt."
In hardly any of Scott's poetry do we find much of what is called the
_curiosa felicitas_ of expression,--the magic use of _words_, as
distinguished from the mere general effect of vigour, purity, and
concentration of purpose. But in _Marmion_ occasionally we do find
such a use. Take this description, for instance, of the Scotch tents
near Edinburgh:--
"A thousand did I say? I ween
Thousands on thousands there were seen,
That chequer'd all the heath between
The streamlet and the town;
In crossing ranks extending far,
Forming a camp irregular;
Oft giving way where still there stood
Some relics of the old oak wood,
That darkly huge did intervene,
_And tamed the glaring white with green_;
In these extended lines there lay
A martial kingdom's vast array."
The line I have italicized seems to me to have more of the poet's
special magic of expression than is at all usual with Scott. The
conception of the peaceful green oak wood _taming_ the glaring white
of the tented field, is as fine in idea as it is in relation to the
effect of the mere colour on the eye. Judge Scott's poetry by whatever
test you will--whether it be a test of that which is peculiar to it,
its glow of national feeling, its martial ardour, its swift and rugged
simplicity, or whether it be a test of that which is common to it with
most other poetry, its attraction for all romantic excitements, its
special feeling for the pomp and circumstance of war, its love of
light and colour--and tested either way, _Marmion_ will remain his
finest poem. The battle of Flodden Field touches his highest point in
its expression of stern patriotic feeling, in its passionate love of
daring, and in the force and swiftness of its movement, no less than
in the brilliancy of its romantic interests, the charm of its
picturesque detail, and the glow of its scenic colouring. No poet ever
equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the
expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of
his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its
highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is
apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient
happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises
of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it
seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous
men, often makes it hammer fatiguingly against the brain of those who
need the relief of a wider horizon and a richer world.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 217.]
[Footnote 13: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 226.]
[Footnote 14: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 248.]
[Footnote 15: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 338.]
[Footnote 16: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 137.]
[Footnote 17: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 259.]
[Footnote 18: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 327.]