The glaring bale-fires blaze no more,
No longer steel-clad warriors ride
Along thy wild and willowed shore.”
There we have a picture painted in words. Scott has gone poaching into the domain of pictorial art, and with astonishing results. It is a picture. Literature is certainly capable of dealing with forms and colors as with abstractions of the mind, but it cannot handle them so well, perhaps, as painting. We have here not abstractions, but entities of form and color. There is something for the painter to grasp with pencil and brush. Perhaps he can paint the “silver tide” and the “willowed shore” more effectively than Scott can describe them; and if he should paint them with that feeling which would give us the wildness of the shore, the weirdness of the bale-fires, the crush and rush of steel-clad warriors along the banks, paralleling the push-forward of the stream itself, we should have what I am disposed to call pictorial poetry.
But, if you please, it is not to be inferred that this pictorial poetry is to be gotten out of literary poetry only. Painting is no mere servant of literature, whose duty it is to illustrate rather than create. There is no reason why the painter, looking at the river Teviot, should not see poetry in it as well as the writer. Delacroix not only could but did see it. Turner saw the same kind of romantic sentiment as Scott in all the rivers he ever pictured. Daubigny saw it less romantically, but with more of the real charm of nature, along the banks of the Marne; and Claude Monet has certainly shown us many times the poetry of light, color, and rushing, dancing water on the Seine. Monet is just as susceptible to poetic impressions as Leconte de Lisle, only his poetry comes to him in forms and colors rather than in the measured cadences of language. It is painter’s poetry, not writer’s poetry.
It is true enough that painting has often taken its themes from the play, the novel, and the poem, and not without success. All the older painters of England spent their time illustrating Shakespeare and Milton. But it was not at all necessary, nor did it result in the best kind of art. And as for literature taking its theme from painting, one can pick illustrations of it in quantity from any anthology. For instance, what is more probable than that Scott was looking at a painting when writing this:
“No earthly flame blazed e’er so bright
It shone like heaven’s own blessed light,
And, issuing from the tomb,
Showed the monk’s cowl and visage pale,