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;