A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century | Page 8

he has Sir Walter with him; for this is
evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he
noted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he
would--witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'--'Song of the Cliffords,'
I think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself
speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse;
the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with
metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter--none of Scott's
heroes. Nature had educated him.
"In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had
been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that
is among the lonely hills."
Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between
the description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage
of "The Lady of the Lake":
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill. Where danced the moon on Monan's
rill," etc.[22]
Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23]
Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his
poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has

outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in
at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the
spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants
three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous
leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure
house and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry
in the summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the
cruelty and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass
will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain.
Part I. tells the story
without enthusiasm but without comment.
Part II. draws the lesson
"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest
thing that feels."
The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow
from "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott
the battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited
the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!"
And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is,
"What a scene were here . . .
"For princely pomp or churchman's pride! On this bold brow a lordly
tower; In that soft vale a lady's bower; On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey," etc.
The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his
imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.
The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which
the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular
ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His
point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his
Liddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive
years--was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border"
(Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads

historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the
way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities,
manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of
the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of
the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness
of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate
knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier
had commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy,
rarely substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred
corruptions," says Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the
primitive diction and imagery, and produced strains in which the
unbroken energy of half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions,
their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild
humour are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror."
In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott
calls his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The
Eve of St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of
Wonder." Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the
supernatural; but the first--Scott himself draws the distinction--is a
"legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad."
"Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland
chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of
the Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and