The hour of Germany’s revenge,
| Sir Walter Scott, 1830. From the painting by Sir John Watson Gordon, R.A. | Sir Walter Scott From a painting by Sir David Wilkie, R.A. |
“MARMION”
and that then
When breathing fury for her sake,
Some new Arminius shall awake,
Her champion, ere he strike, shall come,
To whet his sword on Brunswick’s tomb.
In few years the hour and the champion came, Field-Marshal Von Blücher. A poet has seldom been a better prophet.
The plot of Marmion is in one way strangely akin to the plot of Ivanhoe. In both we have a hard-bitten, hard-hearted, and unscrupulous knight, Marmion and the Templar. In both we have a pilgrim guide, who is no pilgrim, but a knight in disguise, returned from exile, with a deep grudge against the Templar, or Marmion (Wilfred, Wilton). Both sets of partners are rivals in love, at least if Wilfred, as we believe, loved Rebecca. In both we have a tourney between the rivals, in which Marmion and the Templar are defeated by Wilton and Wilfred. But Marmion’s behaviour, both in regard to his lady page, and in the matter of the forgery, is much worse than that of the Templar at his worst, though, amidst his infamy, he is a knight as bold and haughty as the traitor Ganelon in the Chanson de Roland. The high revenge of the lady page, Constance, as she goes to her death by hunger, stirred even Jeffrey. “The scene of elfin chivalry” in which Marmion tilts with the phantom knight, was suggested by a Latin legend, forged and sent to Scott by Surtees of Mainsforth, who several times palmed off on the Sheriff ballads of his own making. Pitscottie, the candid old Fifeshire chronicler, supplied the omens which, as in the Odyssey, lead up to the catastrophe of Flodden Field. Marmion was made to travel to Edinburgh by a path that mortal man never took, Scott desiring to describe the castles on the way, and a favourite view of Edinburgh from Blackford Hill. This passage of landscape has been elaborately and justly praised by Mr. Ruskin. For poetical purposes Lady Heron is brought to Holyrood, though she was at her castle beneath Flodden Edge, and the artifice is justified by her song of Young Lochinvar. But it is the closing battle piece that makes the fortune of Marmion.