by John Buchan
Yet at the back of his head he knew that his vogue had gone. He had caught a favouring breeze of popular favour, but the wind now blew from another quarter. In August, while the Ballantyne difficulty was at its worst, he had received a letter from the Lord Chamberlain, offering him the Poet Laureateship in succession to Pye. He was disinclined to accept it for a variety of reasons, the chief of which, perhaps, was that he did not wish to incur the charge, which Tom Moore had already made, of being a kind of poetic usher to the great world. The Duke of Buccleuch, when consulted, took the same view. The post was slightly ridiculous. “The poet laureate would stick to you and your productions like a piece of court-plaster. Your muse has hitherto been independent — don’t put her in harness. We know how lightly she trots along when left to her natural paces, but do not try driving.” The offer was declined, on the ground of his unsuitability for the work, and for the better reason that he already held two official posts. Through Croker and others he pushed the claims of Southey, to whom a small regular income would be a godsend, and Southey was duly appointed. Meantime, while the masons hammered on the new Abbotsford roof, Scott busied himself with The Lord of the Isles, but in his heart he had already bidden farewell to poesy as the staple of his life.
III
[Scott’s Poetry]
We shall err if we take Scott’s poetic self-depreciation too literally. As a poet he always stood in his own light, and that humorous, deprecating figure has ever since come between the light and the critics. In some degree it was a mannerism, springing from the modesty which was his prime characteristic; he disliked flattery and was shy even of praise, and he averted both by an aggressive humility. In so far as it was serious, it was based upon two deeply held convictions. The first was that poetry, indeed literature in any form, was not the highest of human callings. His true heroes belonged to a different sphere, the sphere of action. This was no snobbish contempt of letters as beneath the dignity of coat-armour; it was the man not the gentleman who spoke: it was a protest against the exaggerated repute of the spinner of words in contrast with those whose homelier virtues “spun the great wheel of earth about.” He was more interested in life than in art, in character than in intellect. He confessed that he never felt abashed or awed except in the presence of one man — the Duke of Wellington. “The immortality of poetry,” he wrote to Miss Seward in 1808, “is not so firm a point of my creed as the immortality of the soul.” The second was that his own verse simply did not attain what he regarded as the loftiest poetic excellence. Shakespeare was his supreme love, and at the end of his life he declared that he was not worthy to tie Shakespeare’s brogues. With Byron he considered himself on an equality, since they ran for the same stakes; but he held himself inferior to many contemporaries in what moved him most — the poetry of simple passion, and the poetry of reflection. Burns and himself, he thought, should not be “named in the same day.” He profoundly admired Wordsworth; he wrote in all sincerity to Southey—”I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry”: his own favourite pieces in all literature were Johnson’s “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes”; his love for the grave meditative vein even led him to the surprising judgment that in 1810 Joanna Baillie was “the highest genius of our country.”
These preferences must be kept in mind in judging Scott’s tales in verse. He was producing something in which he delighted, which he believed to be of use to his country, but which he did not himself regard as the highest kind of poetry. He would have agreed with Lord Dudley when he wrote: “I have all along harboured in my mind certain heretical doubts and misgivings as to Walter Scott’s style of writing, and am apt to suspect that, as my late lord of Rochester (speaking of no less a person than Cowley) did somewhat profanely remark, ‘it is not of God, and therefore cannot stand.’” He was a minstrel on the ancient pattern, and it was his business to capture popular favour and give the world what it wanted. If popular favour turned from him, he must stand back or try something new. To such a prosaic wooer the Muses do not give their secret hearts.
It is a platitude, taking all his work into account, to say that Scott was a far greater poet than his poetry reveals. But his specific achievement was remarkable enough. He invented a new form, from which the novelty has long ago departed; and this very familiarity with him has bred in many quarters a friendly contempt. He is a writer, says a foreign critic, “whom all grown-up people have read, and no grown-up people read.” But if we come to him with fresh minds, we shall not underrate his quality. He essayed a new type of poetic narrative, a kind of miniature epic. He discovered a measure which was apt for both rapid movement and detailed description. In a very simple rhythm he introduced variations which prevent monotony and permit of vigorous emphasis, and yet in no way break the flow. He adapted the old ballad form so as to fit it for a long and often complex narrative. Scott’s octosyllables embrace, if carefully studied, surprising varieties of manner, and they are far more artful than they appear; he has told us that he often wrote his verses two or three times over. They can gallop and they can jig, they can move placidly in some piece of argument, and now and then they can sing themselves into a lyrical exaltation.
[Defects]
The dangers and defects of such a medium are obvious, and, now that the novelty has worn off, it is these defects which the critic chiefly sees. We have all fallen under his spell in childhood, but age is apt to react against what ravishes youth. Too often the lines run with an unpleasing facility, so that he resembles the early Roman satirist, of whom Horace said that he could write six hundred lines “stans pede in uno.” Too often the fluency is monotonous and dulls the ear. Too often he seems to gird his loins and leap unashamedly into a pit of Gothick extravagance. Too often he falls into a polite jargon, and calls tartan the “bosom’s chequered shroud,” and revels in falsetto Augustan epithets, and writes bathos in the Shenstone style: —
Then first alarmed, his sire and train
Tried every art, but tried in vain.
The soul, too soft its ills to bear,
Had left our mortal hemisphere,
And sought in better world the meed
To blameless life by Heaven decreed.
Sometimes he can be at his worst and best in consecutive lines —
Till gallant Cessford’s heart-blood dear
Reeked on dark Elliot’s Border spear.
The pieces are first of all to be judged as poetic narrations, which is their strict artistic type — that is to say, on the credibility and interest of the characters, the skill of the telling, and the emotion of the high dramatic moments. Judged in this sphere, they show a progressive advance. The Lay and Marmion are faulty in construction, though the latter rises to a fine tragic conclusion. The Lady of the Lake is pure airy romance, getting its effects as swiftly and surely as a fairy tale, and possessing a background which straightway captures the fancy. In it the dispatch of the fiery cross, the combat between Fitz James and Roderick Dhu, and the closing scene in Stirling Castle are models of story-telling, as lucid as any prose and yet with the exaltation of poetry. That piece, also, contains an example of argument in verse, where, without the waste of one word and without dropping from the poetic level, an economic situation is admirably expounded — Roderick’s account in Canto V of the origin of Highland reiving. Rokeby is an attempt on a bigger scale, with an excellent but too intricate plot, which checks the speed. It is, as I have said, the precursor of the prose novels. But it contains character-drawing of a subtler kind than the others, and in Bertram a Byronic figure far more convincing than any of Byron’s own. But I am inclined to think that it is in the poem which was published after his farewell to poetry, The Lord of the Isles, that Scott reveals his highest narrative powers. The verse is fresher and simpler, with more play and sinew in it, and the scene in Canto II when the Abbot, like another Balaam, tries to curse and is forced to bless, touches the austere magnificence of the Sagas. Bannockburn, too, seems to me Scott’s best battle
-piece, with the death of Argentine and the beautiful “falling close.”
[Narrative Skill]
This narrative skill, this power of presenting human action, especially heroic action, so as at once to convince and delight, is a poetic merit of a high order. In English poetry, save for Chaucer, and Burns in “Tam o’ Shanter,” Scott has in this respect no serious rival. He has other strictly poetic qualities. For one thing he invented a new kind of description, a light, glittering summary of relevant features which rarely impedes the flow of the tale. Take the picture of St Mary’s loch in the introduction to Canto II of Marmion, or that of Loch Katrine in Canto I of The Lady of the Lake. The secret of success lies in the effortless choice of significant and memorable details; he fails when, as in Rokeby, he peeps and botanizes. Again, no poet has ever produced so easily the impression of sustained movement, and, at moments, of headlong speed. A journey, a ride against time, a muster, all are set to swift music. Take the Lay —
Already on dark Ruberslaw
The Douglas holds his weapon-schaw:
The lances, waving in his train,
Clothe the dun heath like autumn grain;
And on the Liddle’s northern strand,
To bar retreat to Cumberland,
Lord Maxwell ranks his merrymen good
Beneath the eagle and the rood.
Take a dozen passages in Marmion — Marmion’s reply to James beginning
But Nottingham has archers good
And Yorkshire men are stern of mood;
or Clare’s charge to De Wilton, or the quarrel with Angus at Tantallon, or the whole tale of Flodden. Take the superb opening of The Lady of the Lake, and the breathless excitement of the scene when the whistle of Roderick calls up the Highland ambush. One secret of the speed is the use of proper names — the thunderous, cumulative topography, which gives at one and the same time an impression of a spacious background, and of a hurrying to and fro within it. The place-names mark the course like the posts in a stadium.
This is one of the matters in which Scott is akin to Homer. Another is the sudden drop into a humorous simplicity which Jeffrey disliked, and thought “offensive to every reader of delicacy.” It is part of Scott’s gift, which we shall find everywhere in the novels, of linking his heroics with mother earth. Let me cite as examples William of Deloraine’s
Letter nor line know I never a one
Wer’t my neck-verse at Hairibee —
or Wat Tinlin’s:
They crossed the Liddle at curfew hour
And burned my little lonely tower;
The fiend receive their souls therefor!
It had not been burned this year or more —
or the comments of the Borderers on Marmion’s train: or old Angus’s
Thanks to Saint Bothan, son of mine,
Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line —
or the sports in the castle-hall of Stirling. Such homeliness is of the essence of true romance, but it was alien to the bloodless thing which before Scott had passed for romantic.
[The Lyrics]
The magic, inseparable from poetry, is not to be found in any curious verbal felicities, or in the occasional excursions into diablerie. In the long poems Scott is consistently unhappy in his use of the supernatural. It dwells rather in the total effect of the gleaming landscapes and the brightly coloured pageants, and, most of all, in his power of rounding off an episode or a description with a ringing note, which sets the blood running. He can do this in narration, and he can do it in argument and reflection. The best instance of the latter, perhaps, is outside the main poems, in the verses in his usual metre which Waverley wrote on receiving the news of his captain’s commission. A piece of respectable but uninspired description, an exercise on the grand piano, ends with a clarion note —
So on the idle dreams of youth
Breaks the loud trumpet-call of truth,
Bids each fair vision pass away,
Like landscape on the lake that lay,
As fair, as flitting, and as frail
As that which fled the autumn gale —
For ever dead to fancy’s eye
Be each gay form that glided by,
While dreams of love and lady’s charms
Give place to honour and to arms.
Another and a rarer magic reveals itself now and then in the long poems — in the interspersed lyrics; and it is in such pieces, especially in those scattered through the novels, that Scott attains his real poetic stature. He has been called with justice the greatest of our lyric poets between Burns and Shelley, greater than Coleridge or Wordsworth because more truly a singer. His inspiration here came from the vernacular songs and ballads, and was the chief boon which his work on the Minstrelsy gave him. It put tunes in his head far subtler than the conventional things which he officially admired; and these tunes remained, singing themselves to him at work and play, so that, when in the novels he needed a snatch of verse, they rushed upon him unbidden, and flowed from his pen as easily as dialogue. Hence his lyrical genius shows a steady growth so long as his powers endured. By their very nature the octosyllables of the narrative poems could not be muted to the silences of great poetry, those “ditties of no tone” which are piped only to the spirit; but in his greater lyrics Scott penetrated to the final mystery of the poet.
He is in the first place a master of the pure lyric, the song for music. It takes many forms, but has always two characteristics: it may be different in style from the surrounding narrative, but it is exactly appropriate to its mood; and it carries its own music with it — there is no need to set it formally to a tune. Its emotion is usually the emotion of external things, the hunt, the combat, the battle, the bridal, as much fitting subjects for lyric as the subtler passions. It may be a marching song, like “Blue Bonnets over the Border” in the Minstrelsy, or “Donald Caird,” or “Allen-a-dale” or “Bonnie Dundee”; or a lullaby like “Soldier, rest, thy warfare o’er”; or a lover’s farewell like “The heath this night must be my bed,” and “A weary lot is thine, fair maid”; or a fairy tale, like “Alice Brand,” and the strange snatch about the “stag of ten” in The Lady of the Lake; or the eternal love-plaint like “Brignall Banks.” Such pieces are different in kind from the rest of his poetry. His lyric talent here has no redundancies or false notes; he achieves his effect, often a subtle and delicate effect, with extreme precision.
But there is a second type of lyric or lyrical ballad, mostly to be found in the novels, which mounts still higher, which at its best, indeed, is beyond analysis, producing that sense of something inexplicable and overwhelming which is the token of genius. Its subjects are the mysteries of life, not its gallant bustle, and the supreme mystery of death. It deals with enchantments and the things which “tease us out of thought,” with the pale light of another world, with the crooked shadows from the outer darkness which steal over the brightness of youth and love. The ballad of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot in The Antiquary is such a piece — it is romance seen through dying eyes. The “Coronach” in The Lady of the Lake is another, a lament which has the poignant sorrow of a wandering wind. Sometimes the atmosphere of them is translunary, not of this earth. Sometimes they are sober reflections upon the transience of mortal things, and the minstrel becomes the prophet. They are Scott’s final credentials as a poet, even as a great poet, for they have the desiderium of great poetry. Such is the snatch in Guy Mannering, which has Shakespeare’s high oracular spell —
Twist ye, twine ye! even so,
Mingle shades of joy and woe.
Such is Lucy Ashton’s song in The Bride of Lammermoor —
Look not thou on beauty’s charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens.
Stop thine ear against the singer
From the red gold keep thy finger, —
Vacant heart, and hand and eye,
Easy live
and quiet die.
Such is that haunting fragment in The Pirate, beginning
And you shall deal the funeral dole;
Ay, deal it, mother mine,
To weary body and to heavy soul,
The white bread and the wine.
And, greater still, there is “Proud Maisie,” Madge Wildfire’s dying song. These things are sung mostly by the distraught; they appear in the narrative to enhance a mood; not like the solid carpentry of the larger poems, but like some sudden breath of inspiration from an inner shrine. They are Scott’s way of linking the prosaic earth with the things that were never on sea or land, the ultimate matter of poetry.
IV
Very early in his literary career Scott’s mind had turned to the writing of romances in prose. He began one on Thomas the Rhymer and another on the Civil War. In 1805, when he was settled at Ashestiel and busy on his Dryden, he projected a tale of the Highlands in the ‘Forty-five to be called “Waverley: ‘Tis Fifty Years Since.” Seven chapters were completed, and shown to Erskine, who pronounced them dull. The success of The Lady of the Lake turned his thoughts again to the Highlands and Prince Charlie, which Surtees had long been pressing on him as a fitting subject. A few more chapters were written and the whole was submitted to James Ballantyne, who shook his head at their prosiness, though he counselled perseverance. Scott was discouraged and put the thing aside. He had already in 1807 finished Joseph Strutt’s romance of Queen-Hoo Hall for Mr Murray, and neither the fragment nor its continuation had been successful. But the plan had always been at the back of his head, though it was overlaid by more urgent duties. The manuscript of the Jacobite novel had been mislaid in the “flitting” from Ashestiel, and did not lie in a corner of his desk to spur his memory. But in 1813, in the autumn when the salmon run well in Tweed, a guest at Abbotsford proposed to go fishing. Scott ascended to the garret to find his tackle, and in a corner of an old escritoire he came upon the lost chapters. It was a moment when he had escaped from his worst financial anxieties, but to live at Abbotsford as he desired to live he must earn money by his pen, and he had already the clear conviction that his meridian as a poet was past. He carried the manuscript downstairs to see what could be made of it, and thereby entered into his true kingdom.