A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century | Page 9

torn to pieces by evil
spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular
poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair
example:
"Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, And dropp'd the tear and
heaved the sigh: But vain the lover's wily art Beneath a sister's watchful
eye."
"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a
murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside--
"At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"--
but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real

names and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of
Melrose, the Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram
Moor (1545). The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the
ruined keep on the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe,
which left such an indelible impression on Scott's childish
imagination.[26] "The Eve" is in ballad style and verse:
"Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page, Loud dost thou lie to me!
For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, All under the Eildon
tree."
In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he
understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he
could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy;
but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect
flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern
balladists, like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce
more scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the
burden, the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the
imperfect rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers.
Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always
careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of
Volkspoesie.[27] He was by no means a rebel against
eighteenth-century usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of
a lady as an "elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus:
"The Pope he was saying the high, high mass All on St. Peter's day";
and then a little later fall into this kind of thing:
"There the rapt poet's step may rove, And yield the muse the day: There
Beauty, led by timid Love, May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29]
It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and
"La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative
quality and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet
upon the whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the
success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously

reproducing an extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back
into the social conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best
pieces of this class do not strike us as imitations but as original,
spontaneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few,
"Jock o' Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the
Regent Murray; "The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in
Lockhart's "Life"; "Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The
Antiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian,"
and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; besides the other scraps and
snatches of minstrelsy too numerous for mention, sown through the
novels and longer poems. For in spite of detraction, Walter Scott
remains one of the foremost British lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's
"Treasury" he is represented by a larger number of selections than
either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick; making an
easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked
contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott's contributions
to this anthology that they are not the utterance of the poet's personal
emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering songs, narrative
ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics touched always with the
light of history or legend.
The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a
natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands.
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the
local tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of
Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that
the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance
illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the
goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and
somewhat inconsequential thread of diablerie. Byron had his laugh at it
in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the
passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as
the groundwork of this production." The