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