Duncan Campbell Scott
INFLUENCES ON HIS WORK—OLD WORLD CULTURE—AUSTERE INTELLECTUALISM—MUSIC AND PAINTING—ASSOCIATION WITH LAMPMAN—SCOTT, CARMAN, AND LAMPMAN COMPARED—INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH POETS—TECHNICAL EXCELLENCIES—REVELATION OF THE INDIAN HEART—MYSTICAL SYMBOLISM.
In the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott there is more and finer expression of the pageantry of Nature in Canada and of the essential Canadian spirit than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. But, paradoxically, the genius and poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott are also more informed with an Old World culture and art than are the genius and verse of any other Canadian poet. Unless the reader and the critic of D. C. Scott’s poetry first realize that the mind and art of the poet are a product of Canada and of the Old World, a rare commingling of Canadian and European cultures, they will fail to understand how he is at once the least prolific and, to give him his outstanding distinction, the most exquisite artist of Canadian poets, not excepting Lampman and Bliss Carman. In his poem Frost Magic, Scott has written the formula of his own exquisite artistry:—
Silvered in quiet rime and with rare art.
That line, however, rather distinguishes the characteristic excellence of his poetry on the technical side. It does not disengage the quality which makes him unique amongst Canadian poets. His differentia—the quality or power which distinguishes his poetic genius and craftsmanship from the mind and the art of all other Canadian poets—is Style. Duncan Campbell Scott is the one Canadian poet of whose verse it may be said that, after the manner of the English tradition, it possesses Style. Lampman’s and Carman’s, Pauline Johnson’s and Marjorie Pickthall’s, poetry each possess a style. But in their cases the style is imitable; it is a manner, original or ingenious no doubt, but not an essential and inevitable expression, of their poets’ minds or personalities. Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry has style, quite as individualistic as the others’, but it is an essential expression of his personality and character, and is therefore inimitable, or like the man himself, is in ‘the grand manner’—which is not at all a manner but just that subtle spiritual quality which distinguishes individuals in species. The genius and poetry or art of Duncan Campbell Scott, then, impose on us a special and somewhat recondite study in literary psychology.
The key to Duncan Campbell Scott’s genius and poetry is this singular, if not anomalous, spiritual fact that his Art always, corresponds with, and never contradicts, his Thought and Life. In this ‘tri-unity’ of complete ‘correspondence’ of Thought, Life, and Art, Scott’s analogue is Matthew Arnold. The English poet was, above all things, the austere intellectualist. So, too, Duncan Campbell Scott is the austere intellectualist. But, unlike Arnold, Scott’s ‘austerities and rejections’ are not those of the substance of poetry but of its temper and technic. While it is true that Scott is the remorseless idealist as man and active citizen, and while the light that chiefly plays on his poetry is the ‘dry light’ of the intellect or imaginative reason, it is equally true that in his heart there is the warm fire of love of humanity and Nature and all the humanizing arts, and that the dry intellectual light which most notably illumines his poetry is colored, at times delicately or subtly, at times brilliantly, at other times magically, with the substance and color of Nature in Canada and of modern music and painting. As in the man and citizen, as in his Thought and Life, there is a high plane of refined and serene vision, feeling, and deed, so in his poetic Art and Style the outstanding qualities are serene Dignity and exquisite Beauty. It is always a manly and refined art; and its sensuous Beauty is made spiritual by sincerity, delicacy or nobility of thought and by imaginative truth. Never in it is there sentimentality, or vulgarity, but always humane beauty and dignity which derive from delicacy of spiritual vision and sincerity, and from restraint in technical artistry. As an example of these excellences in Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry—of its dignity and beauty, refinement and restraint—we quote this surpassing compliment to woman’s spiritual loveliness and charm, Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Gagnon (from Scott’s Beauty and Life):—
Beauty is ambushed in the coils of her
Gold hair—honey from the silver comb
Drips and the clustered under-tone is warm
As beech leaves in November—the light slides there
Like minnows in a pool—slender and slow.
A glow is ever in her tangled eyes,
Surprise is settling in them, never to be caught;
Thought lies there lucent but unsolvable,
Her curved mouth is tremulous yet still,
Her will holds it in check; were it to sleep
One moment—that white guardian will of hers—
Words would brim over in a wild betrayal,
Fall sweet and tell the secret of her charm,
Harm would befall the world, Beauty would fly
Into the shy recesses of the wood—
Be seen no more of mortals, be a myth
Remembered by a few who might recall
A nerveless gesture, a frail color, a faint stress,
Some vestige of a vanished loveliness.
This ‘strong and delicate art’ of Scott’s was itself the outcome of years of training in delicate perception or visioning of Nature and the human Spirit and in the practice of spiritual refinement and restraint in art or technical craftsmanship; and also of assiduous cultivation in the technical appreciation of modern music and painting. Born in 1862, Duncan Campbell Scott did not publish verse till he was some years past his majority, and did not publish his first book of poems till he was thirty-one years of age (The Magic House and Other Poems, 1893). For more than forty years he has been in the Civil Service of Canada, and for some years has been Deputy Superintendent General (a title and function equivalent to Deputy Minister) of the Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion. Archibald Lampman was a contemporary and a close friend of Scott. Lampman was a student of the poetry of Keats and much influenced by the verse of the English poet. In 1894 Scott married an accomplished lady, who was a violin virtuoso. He had published fugitive poems in magazines before 1893. (His poetry was later the subject of a very complimentary critical appreciation by William Archer in Poets of the Younger Generation). He had finished his academic studies at the public schools and at Stanstead College by his seventeenth year, and had then entered the Civil Service of Canada. So that the three influences on his mind and art are, first, that which began with his friendship with Lampman; secondly, his marriage with a cultured musician, and, thirdly, his long tenure of office in the Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion of Canada. To his association with Lampman, rather than to his teachers at school and college, must be attributed his reading of the English poets and the cultivation of poetic technics. It is not until after his marriage and after his long association with certain Canadian painters that we find in his poetry any ‘color’ from music and painting. His connection with the Department of Indian Affairs resulted in those lyrics and legends which have for themes the Indian, the French-Canadian, and the Beauty of Nature. Lampman as co-student of the English poets, especially Keats or the idyllic impressionists, and as a co-worker in creative poetry, especially the poetry of Nature, was the most potent or subtle influence on Scott. This, however, was an influence ab extra. The most important inner influence on Scott was his own intellectual rigorism and austere respect for chaste or faultless craftsmanship. But for this rare virtue, which was innate in him, Scott would or might have been a more prolific poet, and might have been a close imitator of the English impressionists or Lampman himself as a nature-poet, or of Bliss Carman as a lyrist of Nature and of Love.
There is no denying that Lampman had considerable influence, negative and positive, on Scott, and that the negative influence was the more important. At any rate, by choice Scott decided to be a poet who, while caring as much for Nature as did Lampman and Carman, would care supremely for refined perfection of technical artistry in his verse. It is easy to observe the general differences between Lampman and Carman and Scott in attitudes, and in methods of poetic conception. Lampman is the more subjective, the more interested in his own emotions; Scott is the more objective, disclosing a delight in the object for its own sake or a philosophical interest in humanity and life. Lampman is the more passionate; Scott the more restrained or austere (without being ascetic). Lampman is the more sensuously luscious (though not always); Scott the more lucid and luminously colorful. Carman is the more naturalistically sensuous, and his pigmentation is limited to the pageant of Spring and Autumn; Scott is the more imaginatively sensuous, and paints every phase of the pageantry of Nature in the cycle of the seasons of the whole year. Carman is more a melodist, basing his melody on vowel-chime in words; Scott is more the musician, the technical virtuoso—or, in other words, Carman sings or lilts, like the lark; Scott performs, like the violin or flute virtuoso, though each in his way is as entrancingly lyrical. Carman is the more vernacular in diction, employing considerably the actual speech of everyday life; Scott is the more recondite, and therefore the more meaningful, in diction—‘a word virtuoso.’ But it is not true to say, as has been said, that Scott is a ‘poet’s poet.’ He is, when he aims to be, just as lyrical, musical, colorful, and simple in diction as Lampman or Carman, but he is also more delicate or chaste, more fanciful or imaginative, more lucid or luminous, and always more subtle in diction and exquisite craftsmanship. So that whenever Scott envisages or interprets Nature in Canada and the essential spirit of Canada, more than any other native-born poet he puts more of Canada in it and does it with a singular and surpassing beauty of diction, imagery, music, color, and general technical artistry.
Thus, in outline, as regards the Canadian influences on Scott’s genius and poetry. It is necessary also to note the influence of Old World culture on his genius and art. For, like Bliss Carman’s, there is a challenging quality in Scott’s poetry which compels favorable comparison of it with the verse of English and United States poets of distinction. But while influences of certain English poets are remarked, this does not mean that Scott is derivative in inspiration or method of treatment, but that the influence was either on his ideals of what poetry is or on his meticulous practice of technical artistry in verse; or, in a phrase, their influences have been those of inspiring him to distinction in Style and Technic. In Scott’s noble monody in memory of his father, In the Country Churchyard, the formal structure and the elegiac elevation of thought fill the heart with a serene beauty which discloses the influence of Gray. There is a distinct Wordsworthian spirit and flavor to Above St. Irénée. A haunting beauty, which is of the quality of Tennyson, pervades Scott’s title poem of his first volume, The Magic House. Unmistakable is the influence of Rossetti on the form and tone-color of Scott’s sonnet sequence, In the House of Dreams, but there is enough of Scott’s own originality and ingenuity in inventing Western-world metaphors and in vowel-melody and alliteration to distinguish it as Scott’s or as Canadian or Western. The sonnet form is Rossettian, the mediaeval atmosphere and setting are Pre-Raphaelite, as are also the personages:—
The Lady Lillian knelt upon the sward,
Between the arbor and the almond leaves;
Beyond the barley gathered into sheaves;
A blade of gladiolus, like a sword,
Flamed fierce against the gold; and down toward
The limpid west, a pallid poplar wove
A spell of shadow; through the meadow drove
A deep unbroken brook without a ford.
The first line of the octave is, of course, Rossettian, but the fourth line (‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword’) is not only Western but the phrase ‘like a sword’ is a common simile with Scott. In the sestet, quite Western is the picture in the second and third lines:—
On the soft grass a frosted serpent lay,
With oval spots of opal over all.
The extraordinary ingenuity of the tone-unisons (not harmonies) in the third line (‘With oval spots of opal over all’) must have struck the fancy of the poet himself, because he repeats the very same vowel unisons, thus turning art into artifice, in Spring on Mattagami (from Via Borealis, 1906, reprinted in Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems, 1916):—
While like spray from the iridescent fountain,
Opal fires weave over all the oval of the lake.
Quite Rossettian, at least in word-painting of fabrics and jewelry, is Scott’s picture of the drowned lady in his poem After a Night of Storm (from Beauty and Life, 1921). It is here quoted, not only to show the Rossettian influence, but also to furnish an example of how Scott works as lovingly and as painstakingly as a lapidary at his technic:—
After a night of storm,
They found her lovely form
They said she was a wondrous thing to see,
All dazzling in her bridal dress,
A miracle of foam and ivory.
Her satin gown was smoothened by the wave,
Her rippled ribbons, all her wandering laces
Set in their places.
Her hands were loosely clasped without a gem,
But clad with mitts of silken net.
Diamonds in the buckles of her shoon
All fairly set,
And one great brooch the color of the moon
Held her lace shawl.
A snood had slipped back from her hair,
Her face was piteous, so fair, so fair,
And gleaming small
Upon her breast there seemed to float
A wedding ring,
Threaded upon a crimson and green string
Around her throat.
Surely there is the art of a poet who has lingered long in the studios and ateliers, watching painters, lapidaries, and designers at work on pigments, precious stones, and delicate fabrics! Again, whose influence do we find or feel in certain parts of Spring on Mattagami and The Anatomy of Melancholy?—is it the influence of Keats or of Swinburne? It might be either in these lines from Spring on Mattagami:—
She would let me steal,—not consenting or denying—
One strong arm beneath her dusky hair,
She would let me bare, not resisting or complying,
One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair;
Then with the quick sob of passion’s shy endeavor
She would gather close and shudder and swoon away . . .
But there is no mistaking the Swinburnian manner of imaginative color and of alliterative and sensuous music in these lines from The Anatomy of Melancholy (from Beauty and Life):—
Lifted the dragon-guarded lid—and lo!
Faint and uncertain,
Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow
Haunted the room,
The spangled dew, the shell-tints and the moonlight
Lived in the fume. . . .
All the English poets mentioned were, however, not formative influences. At best what seems imitations of the manner of Gray, Tennyson, Rossetti, Keats, Swinburne are but recrudescences, quite unconscious and original, in Scott’s poetry. Scott is a nature-colorist, or impressionist, verbal musician and metrist, romanticist, and philosophical interpreter of Nature and Life on his own account. The real formative influences in Scott’s genius and art were the climate, atmosphere, seasons, and the color and drama of varied Nature and Humanity, of Canada; his compatriot poet of Nature, Lampman, and perhaps Carman, and these three English poets, Browning, Arnold and Meredith; and, finally, his appreciation and knowledge of the technic of music and painting.
Considering his qualities as a verbal musician and metrist, we may note that while Scott employs all the technical artifices of other Canadian and English poets, such as vowel-melody and harmony, alliteration and consonantal changes, beautiful measures and rhythms, he differs from his compatriot poets by informing, as did Browning, the substance of his poetry with an intimate use of the technical language of music, allusions to musical literature, and the aesthetic values of music. The texts of his poems show that he is acquainted technically with the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Grieg, such romantic moderns as Raff and MacDowell and such ultra-moderns as Debussy and Ravel. To anyone who has heard Beethoven’s Fifth (C-minor) Symphony, how arresting and emotionally impressive is the allusion to the principal motive of that great work, in these lines from Scott’s The Fragment of a Letter!—
Then quick upon the dark, like knocks of fate,
There fell three axe-strokes, and then clear, elate
Came back the echoes true to tune and time,
Three axe-strokes—rhythmed and matched in rhyme.
Again: it is not poetical pedantry on Scott’s part when, in his elegiac monody On the Death of Claude Debussy, he rhapsodizes the forms, content, properties, color, and musical structure—‘the mood pictures’—of Debussy’s opera Pellèas et Mélisande, his orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune, and his orchestral sketches La Mer. No musical journalist or critic, writing in prose, has done this so summarily and with such vividness and veracity as Scott has accomplished it in twenty-five lines of trimeter and tetrameter unrhymed iambics and trochaics. It is for the sake of illumination and the substance of true poetry that Scott thus finely incorporates his knowledge of music into the text of his poetry. And, as Browning made compelling use of the technical language and meanings of musical structure, notably in his Abt Vogler, so, in the Debussy monody, Scott twice finely affects the spirit and illuminates the substance of his poem with such recondite musical technology as:—
And under all, the pedal-point
Of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean,
Hidden under the mists,
Chanting, infinitely remote,
At the foot of enchanted cliffs.
Then with a turn of illumination,
An enharmonic change of vision,
Death and Debussy
Become France and her heroes,
As if all her sacred heroes
Were in that one form,
Clasped in the bosom of France,
Enfolded with her ideals and aspirations.
The felicity of the phrase ‘the pedal-point of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean’ is apparent to anyone who is musically trained and who immediately hears the sustained stationary bass of the sea reverberating while mingling with its thunder are chords and progressions of wave plashings and wind harmonies, all combining to make the sublime Symphony of the Sea. Still more remarkable and illuminating is Scott’s use of the phrase ‘an enharmonic change . . . . Death and Debussy.’ In music an enharmonic change is but a change in notation of intervals and chords, the sound of them remaining the same. And so how felicitous Scott’s use of ‘an enharmonic change of vision!’—Death, Debussy (who died in the last year of the late war), France, and her war heroes. These terms are all synonymous of ‘one form,’ the spirit of France; there is only an enharmonic change in notation or name.
All this is, on Scott’s part, a brilliant and—as far as Canadian poetry is concerned—a unique achievement in incorporating musical ideas and essences and technics to color, illuminate, and enhance poetic meanings. But Scott surpasses himself in this matter, creating something really unique in poetic literature, in his Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme. It is the most ingeniously conceived poem, if not in English poetry, at least in continental American poetry; and it is a signal illustration of that Old World culture which was remarked as part of the challenging quality in Scott’s poetry. The poem is ‘programmatic’ in scheme, comprising ten sections which are ‘free variations’ on a Nature theme (the yellow of the primrose), inspired by two lines from Henry Vaughan (17th century):—
It was high spring, and all the way
Primrosed, and hung with shade.
The ten sections or ‘variations’ or ‘movements’ of the poem are such niceties in imitation of the forms of music that they should be properly indicated with form or tempi nomenclature, inasmuch as the poet has not done this at the head of each section or ‘variation.’ Variation I is a Prelude (in the old style), the diction of which is Chaucerian or early 15th century English. Variation II is a triple-time Vivace movement (old form of the Scherzo)—a fetching bit of lively ballad-song. Variation III is a Largo movement, noble and impressive. A short Nocturne follows in Variation IV, which is succeeded by a movement that may be styled Dramatico, a short poignant ‘play within a play,’ dealing with the tragedy of romantic love. Variation VI is an Intermezzo, a contrasting change on ‘Youth is a blossom yellow at the edge.’ Variation VII is a Funeral March for fairies, and is fairy-like in imagery and music. By itself it is as pretty and winning a poem for children as any in our language:—
For dead fairies go nowhere,
Leaving nothing in the air.
Their clear bodies are all through
Made of shadow, mixed with dew.
When they change their fairy state,
They, like dew, evaporate.
But we fairies that remain,
The dead fairy’s funeral feign,
Place within a shepherd’s purse
Primrose pollen; for a hearse
Lady-birds we harness up
To an empty acorn cup.
This we bury, deep in moss:—
Then we mourn our grievous loss,
Mourn with music, piercing thin,
Cricket with his mandolin,
Many a hautboy, many a flute,
Played by them you fancy mute . . . .
Variation VIII is a very human Burlesca—a ‘genre picture’ of the comedy of life in Old London, with the ‘motive’ of a socially outcast old woman looking at pots of primroses, labelled ‘Only a quarter,’ and fingering a coin, trying to decide whether to buy primroses or spend it on beer for herself and ‘dear old Jerry.’ The pathos of its realism is relieved by the piquancy of the spiritual portrait of the outcast old woman, in whose soul there is still a fine redeeming loyalty to a real heart-love. Variation IX is a Folk Song in the manner of Burns. It is followed by a Finale, which returns to the Vaughan theme, and closes with its couplet. The Finale is ennobled with tender reflections or philosophical interpretations of the drama of earth and existence, in which Scott beautifully maintains and expresses Serene Faith in the permanence of Beauty and Love. From this magnificent and genuinely unique poem, we quote Variation IX, as an example of Scott’s gifts as a song-writer. If it is in the manner of Burns or an imitation of one of his best-known songs, it is as informed also with the spirit of Herrick, but it is melodious, by vowel-music, alliteration, and rhythm, in a way which was not in the power of Herrick or Burns:—
My Love is like the primrose light
That springs up with the morn,
My Love is like the early night
Before the stars are born.
My Love is like the shine and shade
That ripple on the wood,
(The shadow is her dark green plaid,
The light her silver snood).
They never meet with eager lips,
And mingle in their mirth,
They only touch their finger-tips,
And circle round the earth.
My Love’s so pure, so winsome-sweet,
So dancing with delight,
That I shall love her till they meet,
And all the world is night.
In that song-lyric we find Scott’s characteristic dignity and beauty. But fine and beautiful as it all is, the music of it is not the natural melodiousness of Herrick or Burns, of the lark or linnet, but the music of the adroit technical musician who is a ready master of all the resources of modern versification and metrics.
As regards these technical resources of verbal melody and music—vowel—‘tone-color’ and harmonies, alliteration, assonance, rhythm of line and stanza and other metrical structure, and even what is called in music as such ’suspension’—Scott challenges the art of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, and the Laureate, Sir Robert Bridges. In one instance, Scott has made the most happy and ingenious use of what musicians call ‘chord suspension’—that is, the retaining in any chord some notes (or tones) of the preceding chord. Scott achieves it finely in this cadence:—
With the thrushes fluting deep, deep,
Deep on the pine-wood hill.
This effect of ‘suspension’ in verbal music is not new in poetry, but it is infrequent in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon people. A melodious example is the opening stanza from Collins’ Ode to Evening:—
If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,
Thy springs, and dying gales.
With Collins the ‘suspension’ is an artifice rather than an inspiration. With Scott, it is, in the example instanced, an inspiration. No other modern poet, certainly no other Canadian or American poet, has Scott’s gift of verbally phrasing, with the utmost concreteness, imitative realism, and charm the ‘notes’ of bird songs and their meaning. In the cadence quoted, the effect of the ‘suspension’—‘deep, deep, deep’—is a happy realistic imitation of the tone-color of the thrush’s flute-like notes, and the triple reiteration affects the imagination with that charm which we distinguish as ‘haunting.’ Carman has not this gift of concreting bird-songs. Carman uses only the general epithet. One bird simply ‘whistles;’ another ‘flutes.’ Carman would have written the lines quoted from Scott not only without ‘suspension’ but also without any concrete, realistic imitation of the thrush’s notes and suspensions, thus:—
With the thrush’s fluting
On the pine-wood hill.
Scott not only makes a masterly and felicitous use of concrete tone-color epithets in phrasing the songs of birds, but he also knows how important and eloquent in music as such, as well as in the songs of birds, are pauses or silences, and uses this appreciation of silences exquisitely. Scott’s artistry in both these respects is finely shown in these lines:—
Hidden above there, half asleep, a thrush
Spoke a few silver words upon the hush—
Then paused self-charmed to silence.
Scott, in truth, on the side of exquisite realistic concretion of the notes and cadences of bird-songs, has the ear of a naturalist—and a better ear than Thoreau or Burroughs. Scott is the ‘bird-musician’ par excellence. Witness the naturalist’s exquisite ear for concrete realism in these lines:—
She would hear the partridge drumming in the distance,
Rolling out his mimic thunder in the sultry noons;
Hear beyond the silver reach in ringing wild persistence
Reel remote the ululating laughter of the loons.
Carman would have stopped with the general word ‘drumming’ in the phrase ‘hear the partridge drumming’—not so Scott; he must realistically concrete the reverberance of the drumming in the phrase ‘rolling out his mimic thunder.’ And what realistic concretion is in the phrases ‘in ringing wild persistence,’ and ‘ululating laughter!’ Carman half hears. Scott hears with the ear of the naturalist and the musician.
Again, only the ear of the naturalist and the musician in Scott could have so exquisitely, veraciously, concreted the ‘note’ of the white-throat sparrow and the lovely cadences of the vireo as in these lines:—
While the white-throat never-resting,
Even in the deepest night rings his crystal bell.
And:—
A vireo turns his slow
Cadence, as if he gloated
Over the last phrase he floated;
Each one he moulds and mellows
Matching it with his fellows:
So have you noted
How the oboe croons,
The canary-throated,
In the gloom of the violoncellos
And bassoons.
Scott knows the ‘voices’ of instruments as intimately as those of birds and other feathered wild creatures. How finely he combines a concrete use of his two-fold musical knowledge in this respect in the following ingenious and original bit of verbal instrumentation:—
And in the two-fold dark I hear the owl
Puff at his velvet horn.
The reader must be a naturalist and, as well, have been a bandsman or orchestral instrumentalist to feel the felicitous realism and descriptive exactitude of Scott’s art, or rather inspiration, in inventing that figure of the owl as a musician. The humor of it also is exquisite.
Scott surpasses all other Canadian poets in a genius for inventing single and double terminal rhymes, and he excels in this gift, without ever dropping to impossible or bizarre rhymes, except when the comedy of life in a subject naturally requires the use of a vulgarism as in this couplet from the Burlesca movement (VIII) of Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme:—
But I keeps my quarter,
Though—perhaps I’d orter.
As ready and expert as Carman with such other musical resources as vowel-melody and harmony, assonance, consonantal tone-color and alliteration, Scott is more lyrically melodious than even Carman. Melodiousness—dulcet melody of combined vowel and consonant and rhythm—is the supreme musical quality of Scott’s poetry. Not Tennyson nor Swinburne have surpassed the melodiousness of this stanza from Scott’s The Lover to His Lass:—
Crown her with stars, this angel of our planet,
Cover her with morning, this thing of pure delight,
Mantle her with midnight till a mortal cannot
See her for the garments of the light and the night.
Matching the melodiousness of Scott’s poetry is its inimitable ‘color-music,’ a combination of sensuous color and alliteration, which quite rivals Swinburne. Scott’s poetry indeed abounds in the most ingenious and sensuously musical alliterative lines in Canadian verse. Outstanding examples are these:—
One sweet breast so sweet and firm and fair.
• • • •
Dark with sordid passion, pale with wringing pain.
• • • •
Shall find amid the ferns the perfect flower.
• • • •
With stars like marigolds in a water-meadow.
• • • •
The still, translucent, turquoise-hearted tarns.
• • • •
Rubies, pale as dew-ponds stained with slaughter.
• • • •
See Aldebaran like a red rose clamber.
• • • •
The long, ripe rippling of the grain.
• • • •
Flush and form, honey and hue.
• • • •
Still pools of sunlight shimmering in the sea.
• • • •
Languorously floating by the lotus leaves.
• • • •
Frail rose-ghosts of rose-gardens all in blow.
Such magical melody and color are not artifice or even art with Scott. It is all an inspiration, clear spontaneity of genius. If it were artifice or art it would be confined to mere phrases or lines; but Scott as readily and as magically fills stanzas with the same magical melody and color as in The Voice and The Dusk:—
The slender moon and one pale star,
A rose-leaf and a silver bee
From some fool’s garden blown afar,
Go down the gold deep tranquilly.
There is a sylvan earthly music in the poetry of Carman, Pauline Johnson, and Marjorie Pickthall. But the music of Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry is the melody of a fairy fantasy, an unearthly lyrical melody suffused with color which is imaginative rather than earth-born. Yet its vowel and alliterative melody, rhythmical refinement, and translucent or sensuous color are never unreal but only serve to etherealize real experience, to transport us with exquisite sensation of ineffable, unimagined beauty. To figure him under the title of one of his own most melodious and romantically imaginative poems, Duncan Campbell Scott is The Piper of Arll—and, like Debussy, regales us with:—
The complaint of the wind
In the plane-trees,
The far away pulse of a horn,
Ripples of fairy color,
Rhythms of Spain,
The overtones of cymbals,
The sobs of tormented souls,
Cries of delight and their echoes . . . .
Fauns’ eyes in the vapor,
Flutes of Dionysus,
Haunting his ruined fane,
Veils of rain, quenching the tulip gardens,
Sea-light at the roots of islands . . . .
And under all, the pedal-point
Of the deep based ocean,
Hidden under mists,
Chanting, infinitely remote,
At the foot of enchanted cliffs.
It is a question difficult of settlement whether Duncan Campbell Scott is greater as a verbal colorist and nature-painter than as a melodist. But there can be no doubt that as a verbal colorist and nature-painter he has the eye both of the naturalist and the impressionist. And it is indubitable that as a colorist or impressionist he has put more of the pageantry of Nature in Canada into his poetry than has even Bliss Carman. All the Canadian seasons are in it, and every phase of the light, color, and sound of the Canadian year is in it—done by ready, flexible, graphic stroke or exquisite touch, in rich or luminous and translucent coloring, with romantic eye and fantasy, and with singular ingenuity and power. It must be confessed that there is a seeming display of musical theory and technics, of musical learning, which almost savors of pedantry, in those of Scott’s poems which contain musical thought and imagery. This would be sophistication, were Scott not sincere and did he not sincerely use it all to enhance the poetic effect of his verse on the tonal sensibilities and the imagination. But there is no sophistication, no mere display of knowledge of pigments and the technic of painting in his work as a verbal colorist. He is a word-painter, a nature-colorist, an impressionist,—by innate genius. As a matter of fact, too, almost all his verbal melody is associated with color. So that, by genius rather than by art, Duncan Campbell Scott may be regarded as the supreme verbal colorist amongst Canadian poets. He is this for three reasons—inclusiveness of the seasons and phases of Nature in Canada, magic of pigmentation, and novelty and imaginative power of coloring and description.
If the poems of Scott abound in arresting and compelling phrases, lines, and stanzas of alliterative beauty, the number of brilliant and luminous color phrases, lines, and whole stanzas in his poems is astounding. The following will serve in illustration:—
Bright as a sun spot in a globe of dew.
• • • •
The leaves dry up as pale as honeycomb.
• • • •
Or peacock tints on pools of amber gloom.
• • • •
Like the curve of a fragile ivory hand.
• • • •
the light slides there
Like minnows in a pool—slender and slow.
• • • •
Blown on a gold black flute.
• • • •
A miracle of foam and ivory.
• • • •
In loops of silver light.
• • • •
The gold moted wood-pools pellucid as her eyen.
• • • •
Snow peaks arise enrobed in rosy shadows.
• • • •
Tawny like pure honey.
• • • •
Fragile as frost pansies.
• • • •
Rubies, pale as dew ponds stained with slaughter.
How luminous, translucent, yet graphic and vivid, are all those colorful lines. They are the ‘painting’ of a poet who has, above all things, the eye of the naturalist and also a fairy fantasy. If in those lines we find in Scott a genius for exquisite and translucent verbal coloring, corresponding to the art of Constable or Corot in imaginative vision or fantasy, we discover the romantic pigmentation of Rossetti (as a painter) and the rich luminous impressionism of Monet, in the lines following the final apostrophe to Beauty in Scott’s noble Ode for the Keats’ Centenary:—
For Beauty has taken refuge from our life
That grew too loud and wounding . . .
Beauty is gone, (Oh, where?)
To dwell within a precinct of pure air
Where moments turn to months of solitude;
To live on roots of fern and tips of fern,
On tender berries flushed with the earth’s blood.
Beauty shall stain her feet with moss
And dye her cheek with deep nut-juices
Laving her hands in the pure sluices
Where rainbows are dissolved.
Beauty shall view herself in pools of amber sheen
Dampened with peacock-tints from the green screen
That mingles liquid light with liquid shadow.
It is not necessary to illustrate the variety of Scott’s pigmentation. That is as remarkable as its luminous beauty. What is most compelling in his Nature-painting is the unique ingenuity, power, and romantic beauty of his color phrases, metaphors, and similes. The naturalistic and imaginative intensity of them is a poetic phenomenon by itself. Consider these phrases: ‘Sun, like a gold sword,’ ‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword,’ ‘A burning pool of scent and heat,’ ‘Within the windless deeps of memory,’ ‘Bent like a shield between the silver seas,’ ‘With gulfs of blue and summits of rosy snow.’ Consider also these lines:—
The west unrolled a feathery wind.
• • • •
The poignard lightning searched the air.
• • • •
Stars like wood daffodils grow golden in the night.
• • • •
and dawn
Tolls out from the dark belfries of the spruces;
and, finally, consider the compelling romantic fantasy of color and simile in this stanza from The Piper of Arll:—
There were three pines above the cone
That, when the sun flared and went down,
Grew like three warriors reaving home
The plunder of a burning town.
It was said that there is more of Canada in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. So far this appears to be true of Scott’s painting of Nature in Canada. Scott, it must be observed, is a Nature painter, never a Nature interpreter, as were Lampman and Carman. Yet there is in Scott’s poetry a decided interpretative or philosophical element. It is on the side of his philosophical poetry that Scott’s verse contains more of the Canadian spirit than does the verse of any other Canadian poet. As a philosophical poet Scott is, first, an interpreter of humanity and life in Canada—and his interpretations possess highly novel distinction and spiritual import. His philosophical poetry is contained in three volumes, Labor and the Angel (1898), New World Lyrics and Ballads (1905), and Via Borealis (1906).
In his New World Lyrics and Ballads, Scott aims to reveal the kind of mind or thought which the strange humanity of the Northwest in Canada—the Indian heart in the wild North of Canada—contains. In the volume Indian themes predominate, and the so called Ballads are more aptly named Legends, because Scott’s Ballads are art and the product of a reflective mind thinking into Indian mind the thoughts of a civilized man, whereas the genuine Ballad is a spontaneous story told in simple verse. Moreover, Scott’s genius is lyrical; but in these so called Ballads he attempts dramatic situation and emotion. It all lands him in recondite psychological symbolism, as, for instance, in The Mission of the Trees or in The Forsaken, which is later attempted in The Half-Breed Girl (from Via Borealis), a striking essay in Indian introspection. What we get from these poems is Scott’s perception and revealment of spiritual Beauty in loneliness—his half-mystical intuition that the spirit in civilized man, in the Indian soul, and in Nature everywhere is one and the same spirit, and that civilization has only resulted in veiling the face of God and in separating his creatures from one another and from the Creator.
This vague mystical intuition of the mystery and yet identity of spirit in man and Nature is beautifully, perhaps too sensuously, envisaged in Scott’s Spring on Mattagami (from Via Borealis). This poem is seductively musical and highly impressionistic, but shows the influence of Meredith (Love in a Wilderness) in its interpretation of the conflict of Love and Law in the universe. What counts and solaces, however, is the Vision or Light of a higher Love and a deeper Law that lie behind the seemingly meaningless conflict of the visible love and law. After all, the poet, like the rest of mortals, can only ‘trust’ in the supremacy of Good in the universe:—
Vaster than the world or life or death my trust is
Based in the unseen and towering far above.
Hold me, O Law, that deeper lies than Justice,
Guide me, O Light, that stronger burns than Love.
This abstract mystical symbolism is Old World, not Canadian, not Scott’s own philosophy of the spirit for the Canadian spirit. His own is found in his poem Labor and the Angel. It is original and noble in conception; and, consistently with its serious didactic purpose and ideas, or symbolism, its diction is vernacular, its form and rhythm are suited to plain narrative; and the whole is devoid of Scott’s luxuriant color and sensuous melody. It is a dramatic poem in the sense that it is designed to affect the heart and the imagination with dramatic force and truth. As a criticism of life in the Arnoldian sense, we see in the poem the influence of Matthew Arnold. But its thought and style show more notably the influence of Browning and Meredith, especially in its syntactical ellipses, bald and abrupt lines.
In its way, Labor and the Angel is as finely and as impressively achieved as Tennyson’s Princess. It answers a question which is particularly pertinent to Canada where work—the gaining of material subsistence—necessarily is paramount, because inevitable and pressing. As with Browning, so with Scott, Woman is man’s life-star and inspiration. In the poem Labor and the Angel, the Man and the Girl are common humanity, but the Girl, who is also the Angel of Labor, is the man’s companion and helpmate:—
Down on the sodden field
A blind man is gathering his roots,
Guided and led by a girl;
Her golden hair blows in the wind,
Her garments, with flutter and furl,
Leap like a flag in the sun;
And whenever he stoops, she stoops,
And they heap up the dark colored beets
In the barrow, row upon row.
Labor, the kind which is mere toil and drudgery, is without meaning and unspiritual. But Woman was designed by God as the power which shall inspire men to spirituality in all things. As Man, every man would be ‘blind’ and purposeless and futile. But as Man, companioned and inspired by Woman and idealizing labor for the end of her companionship and love and the spiritual fruits of that love, every man, who is obedient to the ideal, transmutes the lowliest labor into spiritual purpose, meaning and result:—
She offers no tantalus cup
To the shrunken, the desperate lips,
But she calms them with lethe and love
And deadens the throb and the pain.
For Labor is always blind,
Unless as the light of the deed
The Angel is smiling behind.
‘Effort and effort,’ she cries,
‘Up with the lark and the dew,
Still with the dew and the stars,
This is the heart beat of life,
Feel it athrob in the earth.’
Man and Labor, Woman and Love as the star and inspiration of man in all his work—what nobler dignity could any poet give to Woman, and what other consolation of philosophy could he conceive and sing that would, as it does, for men more surely
Make mortal flesh seem light and temporal!
Labor and the Angel is unique amongst poems by Canadians, and its noble philosophy of the spirit challenges poems of similar quality by Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, and Emerson.
Duncan Campbell Scott—austere intellectualist, superb verbal musician, luminous Nature-painter, and impeccable technical virtuoso of verse amongst Canadian poets—it is by him that we are also given in The Height of Land the finest expression of the true spiritual mysticism, the immediate perception of God—an intuition in which Life appears
As simple as to the shepherd seems his flock:
A Something to be guided by ideals—
That in themselves are simple and serene
Of noble deed to foster noble thought,
And noble thought to image noble deed,
Till deed and thought shall interpenetrate,
Making life lovelier, till we come to doubt
Whether the perfect beauty that escapes
Is beauty of deed or thought or some high thing
Mingled of both, a greater boon than either:
Thus we have seen in the retreating tempest
The victor-sunlight merge with the ruined rain,
And from the rain and sunlight spring the rainbow.
Seek we in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott for the choice and ineluctable goods of the spirit,—music, color, high thought and serene philosophy—and we shall always be rewarded with Beauty ‘golden and inappellable.’
The quotations in this chapter are chiefly from Beauty and Life, by Duncan Campbell Scott, (McClelland & Stewart).