Sir Walter Scott | Page 5

they
hang about his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery,
their horrors made all the more intolerable through the degraded verse
of Lewis--a bad example which Scott instinctively refused to follow,
though he most unaccountably praised Lewis's sense of rhythm. The
close of the eighteenth century cannot be fully understood, nor the
progress of poetry in the nineteenth, without some study of the plague
of ghosts and skeletons which has left its mark on The Ancient Mariner,
from which Goethe and Scott did not escape, which imposed on
Shelley in his youth, to which Byron yielded his tribute of The Vampire.
A tempting subject for expatiation, especially when one
remembers--and who that has once read it can forget?--the most
glorious passage in the Memoirs of Alexandre Dumas describing his
first conversation with the unknown gentleman who afterwards turned
out to be Charles Nodier, in the theatre of the Porte Saint-Martin where
the play was the Vampire: from which theatre Charles Nodier was
expelled for hissing the Vampire, himself being part-author of the
marvellous drama. I hope it is not impertinent in a stranger to express
his unbounded gratitude for that delightful and most humorous
dialogue, in which the history of the Elzevir Press (starting from Le

Pastissier françois) and the tragedy of the rotifer are so adroitly
interwoven with the theatrical scene of Fingal's Cave and its unusual
visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest laughter over the
expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right to say so, but I
throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember nothing in any
chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as this story of the
first encounter and the beginning of friendship between Charles Nodier
and Alexandre Dumas.
The Vampire of Staffa may seem rather far from the range of Scott's
imagination; but his contributions to Lewis's Tales of Wonder show the
risk that he ran, while the White Lady of Avenel in The Monastery
proves that even in his best years he was exposed to the hazards of
conventional magic.
Lockhart has given the history of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, how the
story developed and took shape. It is not so much an example of Scott's
mode of writing poetry as an explanation of his whole literary life. The
Lay of the Last Minstrel was his first original piece of any length and
his first great popular success. And, as Lockhart has sufficiently shown,
it was impossible for Scott to get to it except through the years of
exploration and editing, the collection of the Border ballads, the study
of the old metrical romance of Sir Tristrem. The story of the Goblin
Page was at first reckoned enough simply for one of the additions to the
Border Minstrelsy on the scale of a ballad. Scott had tried another sort
of imitation in the stanzas composed in old English and in the metre of
the original to supply the missing conclusion of Sir Tristrem. It was not
within his scope to write an original romance in the old language, but
Coleridge's Christabel was recited to him, and gave him a modern
rhythm fit for a long story. So the intended ballad became the Lay,
taking in, with the legend of Gilpin Horner for a foundation, all the
spirit of Scott's knowledge of his own country.
Here I must pause to express my admiration for Lockhart's criticism of
Scott, and particularly for his description of the way in which the Lay
came to be written. It is really wonderful, Lockhart's sensible,
unpretentious, thorough interpretation of the half-unconscious

processes by which Scott's reading and recollections were turned into
his poems and novels. Of course, it is all founded on Scott's own notes
and introductions.
What happened with the Lay is repeated a few years afterwards in
Waverley. The Lay, a rhyming romance; Waverley an historical novel;
what, it may be asked, is so very remarkable about their origins? Was it
not open to any one to write romances in verse or prose? Perhaps; but
the singularity of Scott's first romances in verse and prose is that they
do not begin as literary experiments, but as means of expressing their
author's knowledge, memory and treasured sentiment. Hazlitt is right;
Scott's experience is shaped into the Waverley Novels, though one can
distinguish later between those stories that belong properly to Scott's
life and those that are invented in repetition of a pattern.
Scott's own alleged reason for giving up the writing of tales in verse
was that Byron beat him. But there must have been something besides
this: it is plain that the pattern of rhyming romance was growing stale.
The Lay needs no apology; Marmion includes the great tragedy of
Scotland in the Battle of Flodden:--