The Death-Wake | Page 2

judge
must have recognised new notes of romance. Their accents are fresh
and strange, their imaginations dwell in untrodden regions. Untouched
by the French romantic poets, they yet unconsciously reply to their
notes, as if some influence in the mental air were at work on both sides
of the Channel, on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this
indefinite influence was also making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in
Scotland. The Death-Wake is the work of a lad who certainly had read
Keats, Coleridge and Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great
poets. He has, in a few passages, and at his best, an accent original,
distinct, strangely musical, and really replete with promise. He has a
fresh unborrowed melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable
sign of a true poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed
heroic verse of Endymion, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William
Morris. He is a new master of the old instrument.
His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to
possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is "most incident"
to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad
monkish lover of the dead nun Agathé has hit on precisely the sort of
fantasy which was about to inspire Théophile Gautier's _Comédie de la
Mort_, or the later author of Gaspard de la Nuit, or Edgar Poe. There is
here no "criticism of life;" it is a criticism of strange death; and, so far,
may recall Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book, unpublished, of course, in
1830. Naturally this kind of poetry is "useless," as Mr. Ruskin says

about Coleridge, but, in its bizarre way, it may be beautiful.
The author, by a curious analogy with Théophile Gautier, was, in these
days, a humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies and
rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Théophile mocked at Les
Jeunes France. The psychological position is, therefore, one of the
rarest. Mr. Stoddart was, first of all and before all, a hardy and
enthusiastic angler. Between 1830 and 1840 he wrote a few beautiful
angling songs, and then all the poetry of his character merged itself in
an ardent love of Nature: of hill, loch and stream--above all, of Tweed,
the fairest of waters, which he lived to see a sink of pollution. After
1831 we have no more romanticism from Mr. Stoddart. The wind,
blowing where it listeth, struck on him as on an Æolian harp, and "an
uncertain warbling made," in the true Romantic manner. He did write a
piece with the alluring name of Ajalon of the Winds, but not one line of
it survives. The rest is not silence, indeed, for, in addition to his lays of
trout and salmon, of Tweed and Teviot, Mr. Stoddart wrote a good deal
of prose, and a good deal of perfectly common and uninspired verse.
The Muse, which was undeniably with him for an hour, abandoned him,
or he deserted her, being content to whip the waters of Tweed, and
Meggat, and Yarrow. Perhaps unfavourable and unappreciative
criticism, acting on a healthy and contented nature, drove him back into
the common paths of men. Whatever the cause, the Death-Wake alone
(save for a few angling songs) remains to give assurance of a poet "who
died young." It is needless to rewrite the biography, excellently done, in
Angling Songs, by Miss Stoddart, the poet's daughter (Blackwoods,
Edinburgh, 1889). Mr. Stoddart was born on St. Valentine's Day 1810,
in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, nearly on the site of the Kirk of Field,
where Darnley was murdered. He came of an old Border family. Miss
Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged Miss Helen who burned family
papers because she thought she was bewitched by the seals and
decorated initials. Similar follies are reported of a living old lady, on
whose hearth, after a night of destruction, was once found the
impression of a seal of Mary of Modena. I could give only too good a
guess at the provenance of those papers, but nobody can interfere.
Beyond 1500 the family memories rely on tradition. The ancestors
owned lands in the Forest of Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed

hard by Ashestiel. On the Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they
hid the prophets of the Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One
Williamhope is said to have been out at Drumclog, or, perhaps,
Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous strength, was called the Beetle
of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray of Philiphaugh. His son, in the
Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian side, which was not_ in favour with
the author of _The Death-Wake. He