A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century | Page 3

never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along
certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he
published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series
of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour.
But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history,
legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a
finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early
determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its
object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript
ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies
were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers,
and his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table
Miscellany," upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened
eagerly. The ballad of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by
heart before he could read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I
shall ever forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the
poems of Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole
duans of the one and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could
have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I
considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their
outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was
to find myself in such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into
his hands, with results that have already been described.[3]
As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he
began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love
stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was
adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which
touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his
holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury

Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and
the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each
other "interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in
which the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The
education of Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of
Scott's first novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the
"large Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the
young book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the
writings of Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became
"well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have
exercised themselves on romantic fiction--of all themes the most
fascinating to a youthful imagination."
Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies.
"To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I
had always added the study of history, especially as connected with
military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of
fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found
amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and
pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way
thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered
between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me."
Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making
instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of
knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote
a theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that
Ariosto was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he
had forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have
fared as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish
chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its
rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies Irae,'[4]
and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn
and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our
examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has
been noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic
department of that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's

maturer work, to fix upon his juvenile drama "Goetz von
Berlichingen." Similarly he learned Italian just to read in the original
the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first
went to London in 1799, "his great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to
examine the antiquities of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to
make some researches among the MSS. of the British Museum." From
Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he brought away only "a grand but
indistinct