English Lands Letters and Kings 7

English Lands Letters and Kings 7

 “Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time!

Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;

Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,

Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe!

Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,

Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career,

Hope for a season bade the world farewell,

And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”

 

Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried

him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful

Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon

the coffin of the poet.

 

But in addition to its glow of liberalism, this first poem of Campbell

was, measured by all the old canons of verse, thoroughly artistic. Its

pauses, its rhymes, its longs and shorts were of the best prize order;

even its errors in matters of fact have an academic tinge--as, for

instance,--

 

“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along!”

 

The truth is, Mr. Campbell was never strong in his natural history; he

does not scruple to put flamingoes and palm trees into the valley of

Wyoming. Another reason why the first poem of Campbell’s, written when he

was only twenty-one, came to such success, was the comparatively clear

field it had. The date of publication was at the end of the century. Byron

was in his boyhood; Scott had not published his _Lay of the Last Minstrel_

(1805); Southey had printed only his _Joan of Arc_ (1796), which few

people read; the same may be said of Landor’s _Gebir_, (1797); Cowper was

an old story; Rogers’s _Pleasures of Memory_ (1792), and Moore’s

translation of _Anacreon_ (1799-1800), were the more current things with

which people who loved fresh poetry could regale themselves. The _Lyrical

Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge had indeed been printed, perhaps a

year or two before, down in Bristol; but scarce any one read _these_; few

bought them;[20] and yet--in that copy of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was lying

_perdu_--almost unknown and uncared for--the “Rime of the Ancient

Mariner.”

 

_Gertrude of Wyoming_, a poem, written at Sydenham, near London, about

1807, and which, sixty years ago, every good American who was collecting

books thought it necessary to place upon his shelves, I rarely find there

now. It has not the rhetorical elaboration of Campbell’s first poem; never

won its success; there are bits of war in it, and of massacre, that are

gorgeously encrimsoned, and which are laced through and through with

sounds of fife and warwhoop; but the landscape is a disorderly

exaggeration (I have already hinted at its palm trees) and its love-tale

has only the ardors of a stage scene in it; we know where the tragedy is

coming in, and gather up our wraps so as to be ready when the curtain

falls.

 

He was a born actor--in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the

on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of

the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped

always and everywhere to consider his _pose_.

 

There is little of interest in Campbell’s personal history; he married a

cousin; lived, as I said, mostly in London, or its immediate

neighborhood. He had two sons--one dying young, and the other of weak

mind--lingering many years--a great grief and source of anxiety to his

father, who had the reputation of being exacting and stern in his family.

He edited for a long time the _New Monthly Magazine_, and wrote much for

it, but is represented to have been, in its conduct, careless,

hypercritical, and dilatory. He lectured, too, before the Royal Institute

on poetry; read oratorically and showily--his subject matter being

semi-philosophical, with a great air of learning and academically dry;

there was excellent system in his discourses, and careful thinking on

themes remote from most people’s thought. He wrote some historical works

which are not printed nowadays; his life of Mrs. Siddons is bad; his life

of Petrarch is but little better; some poems he published late in life are

quite unworthy of him and are never read. Nevertheless, this prim,

captious gentleman wrote many things which have the ring of truest poetry

and which will be dear to the heart of England as long as English ships

sail forth to battle.

 

 

_A Minstrel of the Border._

 

Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten--whether British

ships go to battle, or idle at the docks--is Walter Scott.[21] I scarce

know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well--thanks to the

biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its

minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know--as we know about a

neighbor’s child--of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh

sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the

strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and

free rein--amongst other game--the old wives’ tales and border ballads

which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into

large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish

love-chase--beginning in Grey Friar’s church-yard; she, however, who

sprung the race--presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he

goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these

experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad of

_William and Helen_, founded on the German Lenore:--

 

“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode!

Splash, splash! along the sea!

The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,

The flashing pebbles flee!”

 

And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as

marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their

spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his

succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The

elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the

law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For the

_Border Minstrelsy_ comes spinning its delightfully musical and tender

stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long

poem--the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_--which waked all Scotland and England

to the melody of the new master. He was thirty-four then; ripening later

than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published his _Pleasures of Hope_.

There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all

precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language--stepping

from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and

with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing

master’s; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of

care, and a swift pace that made the “pebbles fly.” Just as unlike, too,

was this racing freedom of Scott’s--which dragged the mists away from the

Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming

heather over the moors--from that other strain of verse, with its

introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth

was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the

rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a

little landscape picture--let us say from _Marmion_--and contrasting with

it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more before

_Marmion_ was published. First, then, from Scott--and nothing prettier

and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,--

 

“November’s sky is chill and drear,

November’s leaf is red and sear;

Late gazing down the steepy linn

That hems our little garden in.”

 

(I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott’s

home surroundings at Ashestiel.)

 

“Low in its dark and narrow glen

You scarce the rivulet might ken,

So thick the tangled greenwood grew,

So feeble trilled the streamlet through;

Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen

Through brush and briar, no longer green,

An angry brook it sweeps the glade,

Breaks over rock and wild cascade,

And foaming brown with double speed

Marries its waters to the Tweed.”

 

There it is--a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is

like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook.

 

Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern

Abbey:--

 

“Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire

The hermit sits alone.”

 

(Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen

dwellers there); and again:--

 

“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

 

I have learned

To look on Nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity!

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky, and in the mind of men

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains.”

 

This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in

the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth putting _his_ all

on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and

languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying

only--look--and be glad!

 

In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the

one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing.

I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced

nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be

apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this

page in that category:--As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and

large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and

clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the

pages of the _Minstrel_ and of _Marmion_--needed apology! Apology or no, I

think Scott’s poems will be read for a good many years to come. The guide

books and Highland travellers--and high-thoughted travellers--will keep

them alive--if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better

fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs than

_Marmion_, and the _Lady of the Lake_.