Sir Walter Scott | Page 5

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 fran?ois) 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:--
The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood, Each stepping where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell. No thought was there of dastard flight; Link'd in the serried phalanx tight, Groom fought like noble, squire like knight, As fearlessly and well; Till utter