In order rightly to appreciate the poetry of Scott it is necessary to
understand something of that remarkable "Romantic Movement" which took
place toward the end of the eighteenth century, and within a space of
twenty-five years completely changed the face of English literature.
Both the causes and the effects of this movement were much more than
merely literary; the "romantic revival" penetrated every crevice and
ramification of life in those parts of Europe which it affected; its
social, political, and religious results were all deeply significant.
But we must here confine ourselves to such aspects of the revival as
showed themselves in English poetry.
Eighteenth century poetry had been distinguished by its polish, its
formal correctness, or--to use a term in much favor with critics of that
day--its "elegance." The various and wayward metrical effects of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean poets had been discarded for a few
well-recognized verse forms, which themselves in turn had become still
further limited by the application to them of precise rules of
structure. Hand in hand with this restricting process in meter, had gone
a similar tendency in diction. The simple, concrete phrases of daily
speech had given way to stately periphrases; the rich and riotous
vocabulary of earlier poetry had been replaced by one more decorous,
measured, and high-sounding. A corresponding process of selection and
exclusion was applied to the subject matter of poetry. Passion, lyric
exaltation, delight in the concrete life of man and nature, passed out
of fashion; in their stead came social satire, criticism, generalized
observation. While the classical influence, as it is usually called, was
at its height, with such men as Dryden and Pope to exemplify it, it did
a great work; but toward the end of the eighth decade of the eighteenth
century it had visibly run to seed. The feeble Hayley, the silly Della
Crusca, the arid Erasmus Darwin, were its only exemplars. England was
ripe for a literary revolution, a return to nature and to passion; and
such a revolution was not slow in coming.
It announced itself first in George Crabbe, who turned to paint the life
of the poor with patient realism; in Burns, who poured out in his songs
the passion of love, the passion of sorrow, the passion of conviviality;
in Blake, who tried to reach across the horizon of visible fact to
mystical heavens of more enduring reality. Following close upon these
men came the four poets destined to accomplish the revolution which the
early comers had begun. They were born within four years of each other,
Wordsworth in 1770, Scott in 1771, Coleridge in 1772, Southey in 1774.
As we look at these four men now, and estimate their worth as poets, we
see that Southey drops almost out of the account, and that Wordsworth
and Coleridge stand, so far as the highest qualities of poetry go, far
above Scott, as, indeed, Blake and Burns do also. But the contemporary
judgment upon them was directly the reverse; and Scott's poetry
exercised an influence over his age immeasurably greater than that of
any of the other three. Let us attempt to discover what qualities this
poetry possessed which gave it its astonishing hold upon the age when it
was written. In so doing, we may discover indirectly some of the reasons
why it still retains a large portion of its popularity, and perhaps
arrive at some grounds of judgment by which we may test its right
thereto.
One reason why Scott's poetry was immediately welcomed, while that of
Wordsworth and of Coleridge lay neglected, is to be found in the fact
that in the matter of diction Scott was much less revolutionary than
they. By nature and education he was conservative; he put _The Lay of
the Last Minstrel_ into the mouth of a rude harper of the North in order
to shield himself from the charge of "attempting to set up a new school
in poetry," and he never throughout his life violated the conventions,
literary or social, if he could possibly avoid doing so. This bias
toward conservatism and conventionality shows itself particularly in
the language of his poems. He was compelled, of course, to use much
more concrete and vivid terms than the eighteenth century poets had
used, because he was dealing with much more concrete and vivid matter;
but his language, nevertheless, has a prevailing stateliness, and at
times an artificiality, which recommended it to readers tired of the
inanities of Hayley and Mason, but unwilling to accept the startling
simplicity and concreteness of diction exemplified by the Lake poets at
their best.
Another peculiarity of Scott's poetry which made powerfully for its
popularity, was its spirited meter. People were weary of the heroic
couplet, and turned eagerly to these hurried verses, that went on their
way with the sharp tramp of moss-troopers, and heated the blood like a
drum. The meters of Coleridge, subtle, delicate, and poignant, had been
passed by with indifference--had not been heard perhaps, for lack of
ears trained to hear; but Scott's metrical effects were such as a child
could appreciate, and a soldier could carry in his head.
Analogous to this treatment of meter, though belonging to a less formal
side of his art, was Scott's treatment of nature, the landscape setting
of his stories. Perhaps the most obvious feature of the romantic revival
was a reawakening of interest in out-door nature. It was as if for a
hundred years past people had been stricken blind as soon as they passed
from the city streets into the country. A trim garden, an artfully
placed country house, a well-kept preserve, they might see; but for the
great shaggy world of mountain and sea--it had been shut out of man's
elegant vision. Before Scott began to write there had been no lack of
prophets of the new nature-worship, but none of them of a sort to catch
the general ear. Wordsworth's pantheism was too mystical, too delicate
and intuitive, to recommend itself to any but chosen spirits; Crabbe's
descriptions were too minute, Coleridge's too intense, to please. Scott
was the first to paint nature with a broad, free touch, without raptures
or philosophizing, but with a healthy pleasure in its obvious beauties,
such as appeal to average men. His "scenery" seldom exists for its own
sake, but serves, as it should, for background and setting of his story.
As his readers followed the fortunes of William of Deloraine or Roderick
Dhu, they traversed by sunlight and by moonlight landscapes of wild
romantic charm, and felt their beauty quite naturally, as a part of the
excitement of that wild life. They felt it the more readily because of a
touch of artificial stateliness in the handling, a slight theatrical
heightening of effect--from an absolute point of view a defect, but
highly congenial to the taste of the time. It was the scenic side of
nature which Scott gave, and gave inimitably, while Burns was piercing
to the inner heart of her tenderness in his lines "To a Mountain Daisy"
and "To a Mouse," while Wordsworth was mystically communing with her
soul, in his "Tintern Abbey." It was the scenic side of nature for which
the perceptions of men were ripe; so they left profounder poets to their
musings, and followed after the poet who could give them a brilliant
story set in a brilliant scene.
Again, the emotional key to Scott's poetry was on a comprehensible
plane. The situations with which he deals, the passions, ambitions,
satisfactions, which he portrays, belong, in one form or another, to all
men, or at least are easily grasped by the imaginations of all men. It
has often been said that Scott is the most Homeric of English poets; so
far as the claim rests on considerations of style, it is hardly to be
granted, for nothing could be farther than the hurrying torrent of
Scott's verse from the "long and refluent music" of Homer. But in this
other respect, that he deals in the rudimentary stuff of human character
in a straightforward way, without a hint of modern complexities and
super-subtleties, he is really akin to the master poet of antiquity.
This, added to the crude wild life which he pictures, the vigorous sweep
of his action, the sincere glow of romance which bathes his story--all
so tonic in their effect upon minds long used to the stuffy decorum of
didactic poetry, completed the triumph of _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_, _Marmion_, and _The Lady of the Lake_, over their age.
As has been already suggested, Scott cannot be put in the first rank of
poets. No compromise can be made on this point, because upon it the
whole theory of poetry depends. Neither on the formal nor on the
essential sides of his art is he among the small company of the supreme.
And no one understood this better than himself. He touched the keynote
of his own power, though with too great modesty, when he said, "I am
sensible that if there is anything good about my poetry ... it is a
hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and
young people of bold and active dispositions." The poet Campbell, who
was so fascinated by Scott's ballad of "Cadyow Castle" that he used to
repeat it aloud on the North Bridge of Edinburgh until "the whole
fraternity of coachmen knew him by tongue as he passed," characterizes
the predominant charm of Scott's poetry as lying in a "strong, pithy
eloquence," which is perhaps only another name for "hurried frankness of
composition." If this is not the highest quality to which poetry can
attain, it is a very admirable one; and it will be a sad day for the
English-speaking race when there shall not be found persons of every age
and walk of life, to take the same delights in these stirring poems as
their author loved to think was taken by "soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active dispositions."