no fighter—none of Scott's heroes. Nature had educated him.
"In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead.
"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of "The Lady of the Lake":
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill.
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22]
Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23] Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his poem—who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"—has outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson
"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."
The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!" And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What a scene were here …
"For princely pomp or churchman's pride!
On this bold brow a lordly tower;
In that soft vale a lady's bower;
On yonder meadow, far away,
The turrets of a cloister grey," etc.
The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age.
The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids"—begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years—was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions," says Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror."
In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott calls his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the supernatural; but the first—Scott himself draws the distinction—is a "legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad." "Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair example:
"Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart,
And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh:
But vain the lover's wily art
Beneath a sister's watchful eye."
"The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside—
"At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"—
but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real names and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.[26] "The Eve" is in ballad style and verse:
"Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page,
Loud dost thou lie to me!
For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould,
All under the Eildon tree."
In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists, like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce more scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden, the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers. Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of Volkspoesie.[27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an "elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus:
"The Pope he was saying the high, high mass
All on St. Peter's day";
and then a little later fall into this kind of thing:
"There the rapt poet's step may rove,
And yield the muse the day:
There Beauty, led by timid Love,
May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29]
It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray; "The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life"; "Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering