Читать книгу The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 24

CHAPTER XX.

Walter Scott senior died of apoplexy in his seventieth year. He had survived several strokes, beneath which body and mind had gradually given way, and the task of nursing him had been a heavy strain upon his wife and invalid daughter during the previous winter. The manner of his death was that which was most usual at that time in the class to which he belonged. The fact that he survived to the completion of the seventh decade, particularly when consideration is given to the sedentary life he lived in contrast to that of his Border ancestors, gives some support to the abstemious reputation that he enjoyed. His widow, as is common in the family records of this period, survived him for nearly twenty healthy and happy years, modern prejudice would say in spite of the large family that she had borne in her youth. We must explain that as we please; but the habit of taking alcoholic refreshment in large and continual quantities appears to have been masculine rather than feminine, and paralytic deaths among the women were proportionately infrequent.

Mr. Scott left a sufficient capital sum to provide his widow with an income of about £300 a year, on which she lived in a quiet and comfortable independence, refusing resolutely to have it supplemented in the days of her son’s prosperity. Beyond this, Tom had the business, and though the residue which remained for division among the other children was less than had been expected, it doubtless eased the position of all at the time, though with a finality which closed any future expectations from the source on which they had been used to rely.

The home of a generation in George’s Square was closed and dismantled. Walter and Charlotte offered his mother and sister the hospitality of Lasswade, in which narrow quarters they remained together till the autumn came, and the cottage was abandoned for the winter months in the usual way, though somewhat later than usual, for it was here in October that Charlotte’s first baby—Charlotte Sophia—was born.

It was natural, during a summer in which Mrs. Scott and Anne were with them at Lasswade, and Charlotte was approaching motherhood, that Walter did not wander far from his own home. He reduced his annual Liddesdale raid with Sheriff Shortreed to the limit of a single week—the conditions of life in the desolate moorland country being too primitive for Charlotte to have been his companion on that occasion—and they improved acquaintance with many friends in the Eskdale district. There was a short visit to Robert Scott at Kelso, during which a printing order was given to James Ballantyne, of which more must be said. There was a visit also to Bothwell Castle, at the invitation of Lady Frances, the Duke of Buccleuch’s sister, who had just married Lord Douglas, and who did not allow her marriage to break the friendship which had been formed during the previous summer. There was even a proposal during this visit that the Scotts should give up the Lasswade cottage, and accept the free tenancy of a little house which had been built within the ruins of Craignethan Castle, which was the property of Lord Douglas. The offer, and the fact that it was not rejected, show how close and cordial was the friendship already established with the Buccleuch family. That it was afterwards abandoned was due to other developments to which we must come in due order. It was a year of many events, and in which the seeds of the future were freely sown.

It was a year of importance also in Scott’s literary history, for it saw an output of original ballads in which we may observe him gradually evolving the forms of creative art in which he was to show himself as a pioneer of literature, doing that which had never been done before, and which subsequent imitations have not approached to equal. They are of sufficient importance to deserve some detailed consideration, which it may be convenient to give before coming to the events of the autumn months.

These ballads, or some of them, were sent to Lewis, either for his opinion, or as possible contributions to the Tales of Wonder, which had still not materialised. They resulted in correspondence between the two poets, in which Lewis took the stand of a prosodic purist, and was severely critical of Scott’s looser or more experimental constructions. He was partly right and partly wrong; and so far as he was right, Scott showed himself receptive to his ideas, and may have consciously modified his methods of composition in consequence. The difference may be briefly summarised by saying that Lewis attached too much importance to metrical and rhythmical regularity, and Scott, his poetical appreciation nurtured on old ballads which were often crude and irregular in construction, was too complaisant to defects of form, which are not beauties in themselves, though their tatters may disclose a loveliness which better garments might hide.

The first of these ballads to reach a complete and final form appears to have been Glenfinlas; the most interesting and significant were The Eve of St. John and The Grey Brother: and the most technically satisfying was The Fire King.

Glenfinlas begins well;

“O hone a rie! O hone a rie!

The pride of Albin’s line is o’er.”

but there is little more to be said in its favour. It is far too long, and its horror is diffused and elaborated, where its presentation should be swift and simple. The fault is partly one of construction, and partly a defect of the subject itself, which has not sufficient length or variety of incident to supply material for a ballad. It is fit rather for use as a poetic reference, or allusion, of the length of a few lines, in the course of a longer poem.

Scott made the mistake here that he and Wordsworth made together at a later day. A man died on Helvellyn, and a dog was found long afterwards watching beside his skeleton. The subject was utterly unsuitable for a poem, because anything worth saying about it could be said in a single stanza. They both tried, and they both failed. They wrote the kinds of verse which were natural to either when he had nothing to say. Scott climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn, and Wordsworth asked anxiously, What is the creature doing here? Neither poem is worth reading, and, had they been the work of unknown authors, neither would have been remembered for a week. They are not so much examples of how not to do it, as what not to attempt to do.

Glenfinlas is a ballad of the same brand. Scott must have felt that he hammered on cold iron, though he may have blamed himself for the poor craftsmanship that resulted. There is one stanza that lives in the reader’s memory—which must have been a moonlight memory to himself of when he had wandered in the Highland night, and seen the solitary expanses of lake and mountain outstretched beneath a cloud-crossed moon.

“The moon, half-hid in silvery flakes,

Afar her dubious radiance shed,

Quivering on Katrine’s distant lakes,

And resting on Benledi’s head.”

The stanza is profoundly significant of Scott’s genius, and to consider it is to understand why his descriptions of scenery mean so much to some, and so little to others.

His great contemporaries, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron, are all conscious of the natural beauty around them, and all have the skill to draw it. But, in their different ways, they make it reflective of their own moods. Scott loved it simply and utterly for what it was. There is less ego in his cosmos. Where they question, or pose, or fret, he accepts and is satisfied. It may be difficult to consider this difference and remain in doubt as to which is the saner or nobler attitude.

There are people who are not content with a picture of lake or woodland unless the foreground is disturbed by the obstruction of a human figure. They will be likely to agree that Wordsworth is the greater poet. There are others who admire Wordsworth also, but who keep him apart in their minds, lest he should appear dwarfed by too close a comparison with a loftier stature.

The Gray Brother is deformed in another way. Its opening and closing stanzas are effective, and could not easily be bettered. Its abrupt close is excellent. It would have been a better ballad if two-thirds had been lopped away.

“Who knows not Melville’s beechy grove,

And Roslin’s rocky glen,

Dalkeith, which all the virtues love,

And classic Hawthornden?”

The answer to this question is obvious, and not worth giving. But—and that is the real criticism—it has nothing to do with the subject of the ballad. Scott was simply inserting the addresses of the good friends he visited during the summer months at Lasswade, the beautiful situations of which, and their romantic traditions, he admired and loved. His method is emerging, but his genius has not yet fully controlled it to successful ends.

The Fire King is a ballad of a different kind. It has no local background. It is pure imagination throughout. It has a dramatic theme, competently and completely handled. It is not Scott at his greatest, but of its kind it would not be easy to equal, and of itself it would not be easy to improve. It has a separate interest in the fact that Scott is seen for the first time handling a popular metre with the originality of a prosodic genius which was still only experimenting. The anaepest has a treacherous habit of inopportune levity. It gives the impression that it would dance on its mother’s grave. In Scott’s time, when poetic style was struggling to escape from the formalism of the previous century, the anaepest was used by almost every poet, major and minor, with disastrous consequences. There were few solemnities on which it did not obscenely or absurdly dance, in utter ignorance of its own grotesqueness. Scott controls it to his own mood in this ballad:

“The battle is over on Bethsaida’s plain.—

Oh, who is yon Paynim lies stretched mid the slain?

And who is yon Page lying cold at his knee?—

Oh, who but Count Albert and fair Rosalie!

The Lady was buried in Salem’s blest bound,

The Count he was left to the vulture and hound:

Her soul to high mercy Our Lady did bring;

His went on the blast to the dread Fire-King.”

It is the same metre that he was afterwards to use in a new way, a kind of heroic levity, in Lochinvar, in Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances, and in When the dawn on the mountains:

For the rights of fair England that broadsword he draws,

Her King is his leader, her Church is his cause;

His watchword is honour, his pay is renown—

God strike with the gallant that strikes for the Crown!

Scott’s innovations gave the anaepest a new place in English poetry: they blaze the trail for Swinburne’s intricate cadences: in Kipling’s ballads their defiant note was sounded again.

This is not an essay on prosody, and it would be too long a diversion to probe the subtle vowel uses and points of accentuation on which the successful use of the anaepest depends, if it is to avoid being a jog or a jerk—they depend primarily upon the facts, which are not always recognised by teachers of prosody, that English accents do not always fall upon the centres of the syllables which they stress, and that those syllables are not merely long and short, but of many differing lengths—but it is impossible to do justice to Scott as an artist in the music of words without recognising how numerous were his successful experiments, and how much he broadened the bases of English verse.

The Eve of Saint John stands apart from the other ballads which we know to have been written during this year, not only for itself, but because of the method of its production, which is worth some detailed examination. Its genesis was casual. The ruins of Smailholm Tower rose from the rock which overlooked the farm of Sandy-Knowe. They were one of the earliest memories of Scott’s infant years. They were dear to him for their romantic memories, and for the associations of his own family. He saw signs of dilapidations which he asked his Harden kinsman, Hugh Scott, who owned the property, to repair. The reply, not perhaps seriously meant, was that a ballad must be the price. Scott accepted the condition, and The Eve of St. John was the result. Lockhart says that he actually wrote it at Mertoun House, but this should not be taken too literally. It is not off-hand work. It is not only that it is of very skilful dramatic construction, nor that it has varieties of melody in the changing forms of its stanzas, such as do not appear in a too hasty composition: it is that the tale itself is a made thing. Scott did not know any legend of the tower suitable for such purpose. For the first time, we can watch him collecting from the stored resources of his own mind to make a new tale, and to supply the incidents and background which it requires.

The central idea—that of the return of the murdered lover—is from an old Irish tradition. The idea of the nun of Dryburgh who ‘ne’er looked upon the sun,’ had an actual and recent parallel there. The placing of the event in the middle of the sixteenth century gave a plausible reason for the Baron’s absence: an opportunity to use the call of war for the settlement of a private quarrel. The battle of Ancrum Moor, an historic event dimly indicated in the background, gives a suitable atmosphere, and verisimilitude to the supernatural tale. And the fact that it is left as a mere background shows that Scott was finding by practice the importance of form, even in the apparent looseness of the construction which this ballad wears, and which Mat Lewis, printing it afterwards in his Tales of Wonder, must have regarded as evidence that Scott was beyond his teaching, in spite of the courteous deference of the letters which acknowledged the advice he gave.

And the temptation to extend the references to Ancrum Moor must have been a strong one. Scott had been over the ground in the course of his Liddesdale ‘raids’. It was a battle in which his own clan—the Scotts of Buccleuch and Harden—played an honourable and decisive part. It held none of the bitterness of the memory of the time when Teviotdale and Liddesdale had been engaged in the civil strife which was to be recorded deathlessly in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.

When Home and Douglas in the van

Bore down Buccleuch’s retiring clan,

Till gallant Cessford’s heartblood dear

Reeked on dark Elliot’s Border spear.

For at Ancrum Moor, Teviotdale came to the support of Liddesdale, and they fought and conquered together....

Lord Evers had a dreaded name in the Border country. It was not his first raid into Scotland when he came at the head of a little army in which there were 3,000 foreign mercenaries, and 700 renegade Scottish borderers, including the broken Armstrong clan, supporting his own English followers, who were estimated at 1,500 men. He penetrated as far north as Melrose, which he sacked for the second time in two years, and retreated, heavy with spoil. Too weak to attack, too bitter to let him go, Earl Douglas hung on his rear.

Lord Evers did not want to fight. He had nothing to gain by that. He had done all that he came to do. His eyes were turned towards the Cheviot Hills, and the safety of Cumberland. But he halted on Ancrum Moor, as though hesitant: no one will ever know why. It was his business to get home. It does not follow that he was wrong. He may have thought it too great a risk to descend to the Teviot ford with Douglas around his rear. He offered battle upon the moor. He commanded a force which evidently did not want to fight, and he had a difficult choice.

While he halted, Douglas was joined by Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch. He rode in with his own Scotts and those of Harden. The force was not large, but the Scotts had a name that gave confidence. It also appeared that the Sir Walter of that time was a man of brains. He proposed a plan of action to Douglas, which is not very clear, as Lesley gives it, but it was common talk that it won the battle, for which Sir Walter had the praise at the last.

There was to be going on and off hills, and a pretended flight, and Lord Evers was to do most of the running about (particularly uphill) and at last, when he was quite blown, and had the sun in his eyes, he was to find that the battle wasn’t over, but just about to begin.

The event worked out according to plan, which such tactics very seldom do, and when they saw how things were likely to go, the 700 renegade Scots settled matters by changing sides once again. That was the end. The mercenaries bolted: the Scots turned their coats: the English died where they stood, Lord Evers and his son heading the list.

Even a quarter of a millennium later, it was a good tale for the Scotts to tell. Liddesdale and Teviotdale had joined forces and triumphed together, and it was Teviotdale that had the honour in the mouths of men. That was better than when Teviotdale had gone down in battle before the Liddesdale spears

“Till Mathouse burn to Melrose ran,

All purple with their blood.”

It was a good thought on Scott’s part to use this muster for Ancrum Moor as an excuse for the Baron to arm himself and ride off on an errand of private vengeance, but the temptation to allow the battle to invade the foreground of the tale must have been great, and it shows a growing skill of construction that he kept it in the exact place that it ought to occupy.

He used the old flexible ballad metre, with its optional internal rhymes, which can be so poor or perfect a thing according to the handling it receives, and he did this with an independence of Lewis’s theories of regularity which showed that, however courteous or even deferential he might be to the opinions of the older man, he had sufficient independence to develop his own work on his own lines.

The stanzas, considered separately, have individual beauties, and single lines that remain in the memory. The whole ballad has vigour and dramatic intensity, though it is less perfect, at almost every point of judgement, than some others—notably Alice Brand—that were to follow.

But it is in the selection of materials of fact and fiction from diverse sources out of the stores he had accumulated, and blending them into an artistic unity, that this ballad is not only an achievement in itself, but an indication of the method by which he would go on to much greater triumphs.