Happily the three finest Epic-Ballads, or Ballad-Epics, in the language have outlived the discoverer, or rediscoverer, of the type, with no symptom about them of impending torpor or trance. To bear them company they maintain a body-guard of intimate preludes, and isolated bursts of music. Glenfinlas, The Eve of St. John, re-incarnations of Border Minstrelsy, re-inspired imitations of mystic German, and a spray of lyrics and dramatic fragments, are of the number. Scott, at his best, that is, when the subject has its source in his heart, soars upwards; his whole nature is led captive by the poetic spirit; all his powers are evidently its tributaries or ministers. The sagacity, humour, painstaking, wisdom, in which, while treading earth, he excelled, throw into clearer relief the ecstasy of the winged mood of inspiration. Like his poetic fellows he had the instinct which, when itself captivated, pounces instantly upon the precise details required, upon the one virgin plot of earth fit for the imagination to cultivate. No Lowlander or Borderer before him had discovered romance in a Highland cateran. Who does not, even to excess, recognize it now? Every great poet is a pioneer. Wordsworth was one; and such, though in older soil, was Scott. In the quality, and the energy to exercise it, he resembled his kind; the specific line he followed was peculiarly his own, as were the weapons he employed. He is an open-air poet, a poet of morning, not of night. In his most vehement dithyrambs he says outright what he means. Trickery he disdained. He never hunted after conceits. It is easy to understand how Ruskin, not being wholly free from them himself, should have loved to aerate his disciples' souls and his own with poetry like Scott's, where there are few or none. Some poetry is itself essence, a distillation of thought, of conclusions, from the writer's mind. There is a sort, and Scott's is of it, in which the reader has to distill for himself. The poet has collected, selected the materials; has himself been enraptured by the feeling, rather than expression, of their essence. It is the fault of his public if it cannot be so likewise. The inclination of the present age is towards having introspection and intellectual analysis done for it, and by its poets. To poetry it looks for problems, and for the solutions. Scott does not deal in enigmas. In him it would have been affectation; and he is never affected. As he never poses as a Sphinx, so he pretends neither to be a child of nature, like Burns, nor a nature worshipper, like Wordsworth. Yet his scenes are all, in their changeful diversity, constantly true and real. He does not attempt to hide his debt to libraries for very much in his narratives. He makes no parade of the equal truth that he has charmed the heart out of them; that in his verse it beats as it rarely beat before. No golden haze floats over the poems of Scott. They apply no form of spiritual or sensuous intoxication. Only, when the imagination is elsewhere cloyed with sweetness, or has wearied of tying knots in the brain, when it longs for dancing breezes and fire, like the Homeric, it turns with relief to the Last Minstrel's Lay, to Marmion, to The Lady of the Lake. They re-enter into their rightful inheritance of hearthside favour. When they are duly understood, it will be seen also that they can reclaim something of worth as high; that is, property in the author himself. Scott the man is a possession that any province of literature may be proud to appropriate as primarily its own. Nobody can be surprised that the title to such a prize has at times been disputed. Those splendid gifts, the manliness, the magnanimity, the incapability of envy, jealousy, meanness, unkindness, the freshness, the genius which extracted gold from everything, and transmuted lead into gold, the large presence in letters and in life, which ennobled both-were they the poet's or the story-teller's more legitimate attributes? Study the poems; and you will find the basis of all there. Never in writer was there less of egotism; yet never poet was more assured that poetry was his vocation. He continued in the full practice of the art as long as inspiration, with the rarest exceptions, denied by many to be exceptions, is wont to descend. For its sake he had sacrificed professional ambition; he had curbed the aspirations of romance, and bidden it take second place. There it waited a humble attendant, until poetry voluntarily abdicated, when it pressed forward to occupy and console. But the poetic spirit dwelt apart; it had not died. It is felt, feeding, guiding, lending warmth and grace to fiction, always prepared to step forth from its retirement at need; -like Achilles, behind the borrowed shield of Ajax, scaring with his battle-cry the wolves of Troy from the body of Patroclus. The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. G. Lockhart. 12 vols. Edinburgh: 1833-4. 1 The Lord of the Isles, Canto vi, st. 24. 2 Marmion, Canto vi, stanzas 25–26. 3 The Lady of the Lake, Canto v, st. 9. 4 Macgregor's Gathering. 5 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto ii, st. 1. • Ibid., Canto vi, Song 23. JAMES HOGG 1770-1835 A POET, a born poet, and nothing but a poet; a poet all over, who thought in poetry; with whom all he saw turned to poetry; who wrote much verse, read formerly, and still, if at all, with pleasure; who had the aspirations of a great poet, perhaps, the belief that he was one; who yet was never recognized as more than a minor poet; and never, with a single exception, wrote other than minor poetry. Not that his copious poetical repertory is without abundant testimony to a rich and ready fancy. He is at home in Fairyland. The Haunted Glen, in which the Elves are to meet to crown for King a mortal man refined into their nature by seven years of penance, is full of delicate imaginings. The monarch elect renames his attendant sprites, as in its model A Midsummer Night's Dream, where a grosser creature discharges the same function. So dainty here is the texture that, in fear of coming upon coarser threads, we have a sense of relief when the fabric is left incomplete with a dismissal of the little beings to their several duties. Still more musical, as voiced in Ettrick dialect, is the appeal to the fairies to watch over a newborn babe. Humour everywhere in Hogg bubbles up freely, though nowhere more delightfully than in the tragicomedy of The Gude Greye Katt. No feeling heart can help compassionating the sad plight of the great Byschope of Blain, who for toying with the beauteous witch he had been invited to unmask and ban, finds himself suddenly in Mistress Pussy's claws taking aghast his jante Up throu the milkye waye.1 There is store as well of humour's sister, real pathos; from the elegy on the nameless child, whose little feet across the lawn Scarce from the primrose pressed the dew; I thought the Spirit of the Dawn Before me to the greenwood flew ; to Poor Little Jessie's lament: 2 It's lang sin' I lost baith my father and mother, My Willie-but he 's lying cauld on the clay.3 Even the old house,' deserted by the thriving, aged farmer, has its tribute of pretty pity: Thy roof will fa', thy rafters start, How damp an' cauld thy breath will be! Ah, sae will soon ilk honest heart, That erst was blithe an' bauld in thee. My bourtree bush an' bowzy tree, And he can sing too, Burns-like, just for singing's sake, as of Peggie, and of the blissful hour, the fairest flower The braes of Ettrick ever saw,5 When the little wee bit heart Rises high in the breast, |