A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century | Page 5

for his summer
residence."
Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with
my land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the
land itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have
been to Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain,
while Scott was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said
in condemnation of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest
ambition was to become a laird and found a family; that he was more
gratified when the King made him a baronet than when the public
bought his books, that the expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities
which he extended to all comers wasted his time and finally brought
about his bankruptcy. Leslie Stephen and others have even made merry
over Scott's Gothic,[14] comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and
ceilings in imitation of carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of
Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was
only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of
Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it
was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal of the life which he proposed to
himself there was scarcely a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish.
The artist or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition
of owning land and having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is
a very human one and has its good side. In Scott the desire was more
social than personal. It was not that title and territory were feathers in
his cap, but that they bound him more closely to the dear soil of

Scotland and to the national, historic past.
The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of
place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid,
picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the
imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched
that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears
come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A
dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the
Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of
Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill;
"Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: As if to give his rapture vent, The
spur he to his charger lent, And raised his bridle-hand, And, making
demi-volte in air, Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare To
fight for such a land?'"
and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the
"Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.:
"O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of
brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That
knits me to thy rugged strand?"
In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15]
Scott said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at
least once a year, he thought he would die.
Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his
dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles.
Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the
difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries.
His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied
with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some
local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and
lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of

Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing
upon the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I
do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque
scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was at
home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more especially
when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers' piety[16]
or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was not in this
sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet to
Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular poetry:
"Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be attributed solely
to its locality. . . . In some verses of that eccentric but admirable poet
Coleridge[17] he talks of
"'An old rude tale that suited well The ruins wild and hoary.'
"I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with
this