A Minstrel of the Border.
Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten—whether British ships go to battle, or idle at the docks—is Walter Scott.[21] I scarce know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well—thanks to the biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know—as we know about a neighbor’s child—of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and free rein—amongst other game—the old wives’ tales and border ballads which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish love-chase—beginning in Grey Friar’s church-yard; she, however, who sprung the race—presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad of William and Helen, founded on the German Lenore:—
“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode!
Splash, splash! along the sea!
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee!”
And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For the Border Minstrelsy comes spinning its delightfully musical and tender stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long poem—the Lay of the Last Minstrel—which waked all Scotland and England to the melody of the new master. He was thirty-four then; ripening later than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published his Pleasures of Hope. There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language—stepping from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing master’s; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of care, and a swift pace that made the “pebbles fly.” Just as unlike, too, was this racing freedom of Scott’s—which dragged the mists away from the Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming heather over the moors—from that other strain of verse, with its introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a little landscape picture—let us say from Marmion—and contrasting with it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more before Marmion was published. First, then, from Scott—and nothing prettier and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,—
“November’s sky is chill and drear,
November’s leaf is red and sear;
Late gazing down the steepy linn
That hems our little garden in.”
(I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott’s home surroundings at Ashestiel.)
“Low in its dark and narrow glen
You scarce the rivulet might ken,
So thick the tangled greenwood grew,
So feeble trilled the streamlet through;
Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen
Through brush and briar, no longer green,
An angry brook it sweeps the glade,
Breaks over rock and wild cascade,
And foaming brown with double speed
Marries its waters to the Tweed.”
There it is—a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook.
Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern Abbey:—
“Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The hermit sits alone.”
(Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen dwellers there); and again:—
“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity!
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of men
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains.”
This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth putting his all on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying only—look—and be glad!
In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing. I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this page in that category:—As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the pages of the Minstrel and of Marmion—needed apology! Apology or no, I think Scott’s poems will be read for a good many years to come. The guide books and Highland travellers—and high-thoughted travellers—will keep them alive—if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs than Marmion, and the Lady of the Lake.