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