Читать книгу The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 27

CHAPTER XXIII.

The winter of 1800-1 saw the belated appearance of Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, to which Scott had made substantial contribution. It fell flat, having been talked about too much in advance, and published a year too late. In fact, Lewis was a setting star. But it is unlikely that Scott was greatly concerned about a book that was not his. He was too fully and hopefully occupied with his own affairs. The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was now something more than a dream. It took shape. Two volumes were in an advanced state of preparation. Arrangements were made with Ballantyne to print it at Kelso. A London firm of publishers, Cadell and Davies, were to bring it out. It was first intended to include an old mutilated metrical romance, Sir Tristrem, attributed to Thomas of Erchildoune, and certainly of Border origin, but the accumulation of material had been too great. Something must go overboard. Sir Tristrem, if flung out, would make space for a dozen ballads. Scott decided to complete it in imitation of the old form, and print it later as a separate book.

In this and similar work, the result of which was to be seen later, the first year of the new century passed.

There is little record of summer wanderings for this year, which may be explained by the fact that in October Charlotte had a second child, a boy this time, to add another to the many generations of Walters that the Scott family showed.

It was in this year also that Scott’s sister died, after a twenty-five-year struggle to maintain courage and sanity of spirit in the body which fire had disfigured and injured, “living in an ideal world,” as he recorded, “which she had framed to herself by the force of imagination”.

The Scotts spent Christmas in Lanarkshire, on the invitation of the Duke of Hamilton. It gave an opportunity of inspecting the ruins of Cadyow Castle, and the remains of the old Caledonian forest, which are in the neighbourhood of Hamilton Palace. The Ballad of Cadyow Castle was a result of this visit. Lockhart implies that Scott was anxious to include it in the two volumes of Border Minstrelsy which were now in the press, but that Ballantyne vetoed it, on the ground that the volumes were already full enough. The possibility of this seems doubtful. The ballad could not have reached Kelso much before January 1st, 1802, and that date is improbably early. The two volumes were published in London during that month. They had to be printed, and Ballantyne’s machinery was limited, and its processes would seem slow today. He had done his work well, which does not suggest haste. After printing, binding must follow. Delivery to London would take about a week at that time. That Scott proposed an insertion of additional matter at such a stage, simply to include something that he had just written, is an improbable thing. The point is of no great importance, except as showing how careless in assertion Lockhart can be, and that is of some moment, in view of more seriously controversial matters which are before us. ‘Does it matter?’ he might have asked, as he did when he was convicted of a worse inaccuracy. But, if not, why say it at all?

That it would have been politic to include the ballad there can be no doubt. It had a right to be there, for its author was certainly a Border minstrel. But it was a Clydeside ballad, glorifying the House of Hamilton. It would have called on Glasgow and Paisley, and all the Hamilton interests, to support the book. There may possibly have been a promise to Lady Anne Hamilton that it should be included. But the third volume remained.

Apart from such arguments, the thing was good in itself. There were points—there were stanzas—in which it surpassed any of Scott’s published, if not any of his written work.

The Hamilton estate included a fragment—perhaps the only remaining fragment—of the old forest of Caledon. The enormous girth of its dying oaks showed that they had flourished when that forest extended unbroken from the Atlantic to the North Sea. Up to ten years ago (about 1790) the ancient wild white cattle had still roamed in its shade.

The ballad begins, as it ends, with a graceful compliment to the peaceful beauty of the present scene, and to her who had asked that it should be written:

“For chiefs intent on bloody deed,

And vengeance shouting o’er the slain,

Lo, Highborn Beauty rules the steed,

Or graceful guides the silken rein.”

And then it proceeds very skilfully to call up the past in such a way that the chase of one of the great white mountain bulls in the sixteenth century and the assassination of the Regent Murray at the same period are blended into a single tale.

The description of Murray’s entrance into Linlithgow, when,

“From the wild Border’s humbled side,

In haughty triumph marched he,”

is ballad poetry, but it is ballad poetry raised to a new plane of artistry:

Dark Morton, girt with many a spear,

Murder’s foul minion, led the van;

And clashed their broadswords in the rear,

The wild Macfarlanes’ plaided clan.

Glencairn and stout Parkhead were nigh,

Obsequious at their Regent’s rein,

And haggard Lindesay’s iron eye,

That saw fair Mary weep in vain.

’Mid pennoned spears, a steely grove,

Proud Murray’s plumage floated high;

Scarce could his trampling charger move,

So close the minions crowded nigh.”

These stanzas are not flawless. The repetition of ‘minion’ must have passed unnoticed; and the first line of the second requires careful accenting, if it is to be read well, but their melody is still of the highest order, with subtle uses of assonance and alliteration and accenting which it would require a chapter to analyse. And defects are as significant as excellences. They show Scott, not as a laborious artificer, but a careless master. It is the distinction which we recognise when we attempt to differentiate between talent and genius. And yet careless is a word which may imply more than the fact. It is Scott’s distinctive quality as a poet that he would always put what he had to say before how he said it. He would paint a scene as he saw it to be. Parkhead was one of the two who were closest to Murray when he was shot (the bullet that killed the Regent went on at a downward slant into Parkhead’s horse), and the stanza had to put up with the accenting of the man’s name as best it could.

Scott approached the temple of song by the ballad-path. All his life he wrote ballad-poetry, in which the subject matter was the first consideration. What has to be said must be said, and you must dress it, however roughly, in the best garments that its shape will wear. But he brought to their composition an understanding and control of the music of words which raised such poetry to the highest technical level. Miss Cranston judged well when she foretold a cross between Burns and Gray. Gray himself, most patient of craftmen, and most severe in self-criticism, never produced anything more flawless than were the lyrics which Scott would write for the ornamentation of his longer poems.

Cadyow Castle, though it was not immediately printed, obtained a prompt circulation in manuscript form. It came into the hands of Thomas Campbell (who, like everyone else, had met Scott in Edinburgh, two years earlier). Campbell, (it is his own witness) could not get it out of his head.

“Where, mightiest of the beasts of chase

That roam in woody Caledon,

Crashing the forest in his race,

The mountain bull came thundering on.”

He recited audibly in his morning walks, and with such gesticulations that the line of coachmen he passed regarded him as an entertaining lunatic.

Has the art of verbal music reached new heights in the subsequent century, or is it a cause for satisfaction that we are less alert to hear it?