EIGHT CENTURIES WITH WALTER SCOTT.
By WALLACE BRUCE.
Twenty-eight years have passed since the battle of Bosworth, where the bitter struggle between the Houses of York and Lancaster ceased with the defeat and death of Richard the Third. We now come to the three best-known poems of Sir Walter, viz.: “Marmion,” “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and the “Lady of the Lake,” all grouped together in their relation to history between the years 1513 and 1560.
It is beyond the scope and purpose of our plan to consider the beauties, defects or literary characteristics of these poems. We are constrained to consider them merely as links in the great historic chain. It may occur to the reader that they have less to do with actual history than the novels which we have considered; but, as the clear Scottish Lakes framed in rugged mountains, reflect every outline of rock, forest and shrub, so these poems framed and set in solid historic facts, reflect clearly the minutest features of the social feudal life in the reigns of James the Fourth and James the Fifth of Scotland. It is in fact the peculiar province of poetry, in all ages, to preserve the domestic habits and every-day happenings of the people. It would not be rash to assert that the real life of England and Scotland is better revealed in their ballads and poems than in their chronicles and histories.
“Marmion” opens about the commencement of August, and concludes with the battle of Flodden, the 9th of September, 1513. It will be remembered that Henry the Eighth, at this time, was on the English throne. He sailed to France in July with a gallant army, where he formed the siege of Terouenne. During his absence the Scottish King, James the Fourth, urged by the French Queen, gathered an army to invade the north of England. He was distinguished for his romantic chivalry, and when the beautiful Princess of France called him her knight, sent a ring from her own finger, and requested him “to ride three miles on English ground for her sake,” the gallant king thought that he could not in honor decline the request. His fantastical spirit led to his ruin. He met the English forces at Flodden under the Earl of Surrey, and the Scottish forces were defeated. It was one of the bravest and fiercest struggles recorded in Scottish or English history. The battle commenced about four o’clock in the afternoon and when night came it was still undecided. The Scottish center kept its ground, and the King fought hand to hand with a bravery and courage worthy of a better cause. The English lost five thousand, and the Scotch ten thousand of their bravest soldiers. During the night the Scottish army drew off in silent despair, when they knew that their King and bravest nobles lay dead upon the field. Or as Scott poetically expresses it:
“Their king, their lords, their mightiest low,
They melted from the field, as snow,
When streams are swollen and south winds blow,
Dissolves in silent dew.
Tweed’s echoes heard the ceaseless plash,
While many a broken band,
Disordered, through her currents dash,
To gain the Scottish land:
To town and tower, to down and dale,
To tell red Flodden’s dismal tale.
Tradition, legend, tune and song,
Shall many an age that wail prolong;
Still from the sire the son shall hear
Of the stern strife, and carnage drear,
Of Flodden’s fatal field,
Where shivered was fair Scotland’s spear,
And broken was her shield!”
In the description of this battle Scott is true to the minutest points of history, and throughout the entire poem we breathe the atmosphere of the feudal ages. His sketch of James the Fourth at Holyrood is a contribution to historical portraiture. His words seem like side-lights thrown upon the king’s character, until the chivalry and weakness of the man are presented in living embodiment.
“Old Holyrood rung merrily
That night with wassail, mirth and glee;
King James within her princely bower
Feasted the chiefs of Scotland’s power;
This feast outshone his banquets past;
It was his blithest—and his last.”
The night of revelry in Edinburgh, preceding the direful battle, may have suggested to Byron the grand poetic description of the “beauty and chivalry” convened in Belgium’s capital the night before the battle of Waterloo. The tradition to which Scott alludes of the ghastly midnight proclamation at the market cross of Edinburgh, summoning the king by name, and many of his nobles and principal leaders, to appear before the tribunal of Pluto within the space of forty days, found indeed sad realization. The description of “Edinburgh after Flodden,” a poem by Robert Aytoun, completes the picture, and, in lyrical power, is not an unworthy postscript to the vigorous canto which finds its culmination in the last words of the English knight:
“When Stanley was the cry—
A light on Marmion’s visage spread,
And fired his glazing eye;
With dying hand, above his head,
He shook the fragment of his blade,
And shouted ‘Victory!—
Charge Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!’
Were the last words of Marmion.”
“The Lay of the Last Minstrel” is related in time to the middle of the sixteenth century; and the scene is laid in the border country of England and Scotland. It is sometimes claimed that poetry is not so much the outgrowth of monastic and studious seclusion as of stirring circumstances which inflame the imagination. Whether this is true or not, the principle finds proof in the border country of Scotland—a land of turmoil, poetry and song. On the English side of the border were strong and stately castles; on the Scottish side they were constructed for the most part on a limited scale. A few fortresses, like those of Jedburgh and Roxburgh, rivaled the Southron defences; but, after the usurpation of Edward the First, the Scots no longer attempted to defend their borders by strong places; they relied upon their own courage, and acted upon the familiar words of Douglas, that “they preferred to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak.” In fact many of the strongest fortresses were torn down, and utterly demolished, that the enemy might not obtain a footing in the country. The south of Scotland was reduced to a waste desert. Even as late as the invasion of Cromwell the borders were left in this desolate condition. The Hall of Cessford, or of Branksome, was on the largest scale of the border fortresses in Scotland, but could not be compared with the baronial castles of the northern families of England.
The poem opens with a description of the customs of Branksome Hall, how nine and twenty knights, with as many attendant squires with belted sword and spur on heel,
“Quitted not their harness bright,
Neither by day nor yet by night;
They lay down to rest,
With corselet laced,
Pillowed on buckler cold and hard;
They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred.”
That verse is worth a volume of history in emphasizing the irregular life of the time and place where every man’s charter was his sword. In the description of William of Deloraine and the holy monk digging up the grave of the wizard, Michael, Scott reveals the superstition of the times:
“Slow moved the Monk to the broad flag-stone,
Which the bloody cross was traced upon;
He pointed to a secret nook;
An iron bar the warrior took;
And the Monk made a sign with his withered hand,
The grave’s huge portal to expand.”
The adventure with the strange knight on his return, the gathering of the clans by the beacon light, the English forces drawn up before the castle, and the decision of the battle by the conflict of single champions, are all true to the spirit of the times. Everything is so weird and wild that even the dwarf, the book and magic charms do not seem entirely out of place in the story. We must remember that it is a land of tradition—a land aglow with the deeds of the Douglas and the Percy; and those interested in the Border History will be well repaid by reading carefully the notes accompanying the poem. It was a labor of love to the author, for it relates intimately to the valley of the Tweed. Here and there throughout the poem his enthusiasm breaks out for “the land of brown heath and shaggy wood—land of the mountain and the flood.” It would seem like sacrilege not to quote the familiar lines:
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!”
It is no wonder that Scott struck the chords of the national heart in this production, for it embodies so much of that unwritten history which had an oracle at every fireside.
As “Marmion” furnished us with a picture of James the Fourth, so the “Lady of the Lake” gives us a portrait of his son James the Fifth. He is said to have been handsome in person, and devoted to military exercises. He inherited his father’s love for justice, “was well educated, and like his ancestor, James the First, was a poet and musician.” His first care on taking the government was to restore the border country, of which we have just spoken, to something like order. He seized the principal chieftains and imprisoned them. He executed Adam Scott, known as king of the border, and John Armstrong, a free-booting chief, to whom the whole border country paid tribute. He thoroughly subdued these warlike chiefs, and it passed into a proverb, that “he made the rush bush keep the cow;” or, in other words, that cattle might remain safely in the fields without a guard.
He proceeded in the same manner against the Highland chiefs, and reduced the mountain country to a degree of quiet unknown for generations. Some of his acts are pronounced cruel by historians, but, in those bitter times, he was compelled to consider the welfare of the whole nation, and was compelled to be cruel in order to be kind.
James the Fifth also resembled his father in wandering, now and then, about Scotland in the dress of a private person. Many pleasing incidents are related of these royal visits in disguise, and the king in this way readily discovered the actual sentiments and feeling of the common people. Scott presents him in the “Lady of the Lake” in this character, after a long chase through the Highlands, which leaves him alone in the deep wilds of the Trosachs. His adventure in the disguise of Snowdoun’s knight, or James-Fitz-James, is doubly interesting as it presents a trait of the monarch’s character. The world likes true stories. It never outgrows the question of the child: Did it really happen? This is one of the marked features of these poems and romances. When we rise from the reading of Scott’s works we have in our minds something more than a mere story. We have not only the human qualities of love and friendship, but also the characteristics and features of the times, or the presentation of some well-known personage. The sketch of James-Fitz-James, from the time when he meets Helen Douglas near the margin of the Lake to the eventful day, when Snowdoun’s knight is revealed to her at Stirling Castle as Scotland’s King, is the faithful delineation of a real personage. He is not lifted into a realm of mere fancy, but everything is real and substantial about him. He is conducted to the island home which shelters the outlawed Douglas; around the walls hang trophies of the war and chase; spears, broadswords and battle-axes garnish with rude tapestry the sylvan hall; he sleeps upon the mountain heather, in the room
“Where oft a hundred guests had lain,
And dreamed their mountain sports again.”
There is another character in the poem drawn true to life; that of the bold mountain chieftain Roderick Dhu, an outlawed, desperate man, representative of the Gaelic leaders driven back into their mountain fastnesses. In the harsh treatment which they received alike from kings and nobles, they found ready excuse for depredation. Scott puts this idea with great force in the lines of the Gaelic warrior:
“Saxon, from yonder mountain high,
I marked thee send delighted eye
Far to the south and east, where lay,
Extended in succession gay,
Deep-waving fields and pastures green,
With gentle slopes and groves between;—
These fertile plains, that softened vale,
Were once the birthright of the Gael;
The stranger came with iron hand,
And from our fathers reft the land.
Where dwell we now? See, rudely swell
Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell.
Ask we this savage hill we tread
For fattened steer or household bread;
Ask we for flocks these shingles dry,
And well the mountains might reply,
‘To you, as to your sires of yore,
Belong the target and claymore!
I give you shelter in my breast,
Your own good blades must win the rest.’
Pent in this fortress of the north,
Think’st thou we will not sally forth,
To spoil the spoiler as we may,
And from the robber rend the prey?
Ay, by my soul! While on yon plain
The Saxon rears one shock of grain;
While, of ten thousand herds, there strays
But one along yon river’s maze,
The Gael, of plain and river heir,
Shall, with strong hand, redeem his share.”
The poem also reveals the old Highland custom of gathering the clans by the cross of fire, and there is nothing more dramatic in descriptive verse than the journey of that flaming cross, as it passes from hand to hand, calling the mourner from the house of death, and stopping midway the joyous marriage procession:
“Fast as the fatal symbol flies,
In arms the huts and hamlets rise;
From winding glen, from upland brown,
They poured each hardy tenant down.
The fisherman forsook the strand,
The swarthy smith took dirk and brand;
With changed cheer, the mower blithe
Left in the half-cut swath the scythe;
The herds without a keeper strayed,
The plow was in mid-furrow stayed,
The falconer tossed his hawk away,
The hunter left his stag at bay;
So swept the tumult and affray
Along the margin of Achray.”
The personal bravery of the Gael and Saxon is well presented in the mountain march, and we venture a long quotation, which finds apology not only in its strength and beauty, but also in the fact that it reveals the character of the King and the Highland chief. The Saxon says:
“Twice have I sought Clan Alpine’s glen
In peace; but when I come again,
I come with banner, brand and bow,
As leader seeks his mortal foe.
For love-lorn swain, in lady’s bower,
Ne’er panted for the appointed hour,
As I, until before me stand
This rebel chieftain and his band!”
“Have then thy wish!” He whistled shrill,
And he was answered from the hill;
Wild as the scream of the curlew,
From crag to crag the signal flew.
Instant through copse and heath, arose
Bonnets and spears and bended bows;
On right, on left, above, below,
Sprung up at once the lurking foe;
From shingles gray their lances start,
The bracken bush sends forth the dart,
The rushes and the willow wand
Are bristling into axe and brand,
And every tuft of broom gives life
To plaided warrior armed for strife.
The whistle garrisoned the glen
At once with full five hundred men,
As if the yawning hill to heaven
A subterraneous host had given.
Watching their leader’s beck and will,
All silent there they stood and still.
Like the loose crags whose threatening mass
Lay tottering o’er the hollow pass,
As if an infant’s touch could urge
Their headlong passage down the verge,
With step and weapon forward flung,
Upon the mountain side they hung.
The mountaineer cast glance of pride
Along Benledi’s living side,
Then fixed his eye and sable brow
Full on Fitz-James; “How say’st thou now?
These are Clan Alpine’s warriors true;
And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu.”
The entire poem is so true to fact and scenery that it forms to-day a poetic guide-book to the country about Loch Katrine. The description of sunset upon the lake, the deep recesses, the lone mountain passes, the dashing cataracts, impart life, vigor and reality; and every line reveals the spirit and bravery of highland life.
We have been tempted to give an analysis of the plot of the poem, and to quote some of the noble passages which Scott speaks through the honest lips of Helen Douglas and her faithful Malcolm; but it would have taken us aside from the main purpose of our historic relation. The events of these poems, as related to the world’s history, are trifling and insignificant, when compared with the far-reaching policy of Louis the Eleventh, which formed the frame work of our last paper; and are in no way prophetic of the great events that follow in the reign of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, depicted in “The Monastery,” “The Abbott” and “Kenilworth;” but the rude life of these warlike days has passed into the world’s poetry, and the reader will trace, through the three poems which we have considered, the devoted faith of manhood and the abiding love of womanhood; ay more, perhaps discover a wholesome moral, which ought not to be unheeded in these days of broadening civilization.
