a dinner invitation on account of "the death of an old friend." To Maida he erected a marble monument. One of his chief sports was salmon-spearing by torchlight-"burning the water," as it was called. These eight years, despite the seeming disproportion between the hours at his desk and his hours out-of-doors, were marked by tremendous accomplishment. He finished The Lay of the Last Minstrel, wrote Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, part of The Bridal of Triermain, and part of Rokeby. In addition he wrote a life of Dryden, edited many volumes of records and historical materials, and began an edition of Swift. During part of this time he also held the offices of sheriff and deputy clerk of the session. In May of 1812 he moved to Abbotsford, five miles down the Tweed from Ashestiel, near Melrose Abbey. With him he took twenty-five cartloads of "trash," beside dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, "bareheaded wenches and bare-breeched boys." There were old swords, bows, targets, and lances. He said, "The very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets." All animals loved him; his servants and the poor adored him. At Abbotsford he acquired a hundred acres of land, to which he constantly added, so that he possessed an estate of baronial proportions. To keep up this estate required an enormous income. For a time he succeeded, since in addition to his official salaries the returns from his literary work were very great. For The Lay of the Last Minstrel he received £600; for Marmion £1000. When he gave up his law practice he became a partner in the publishing house of the Ballantynes. In 1814 he turned from metrical romance to prose. Waverley, begun in 1805, was the result. The last two volumes of the work were written in three weeks. In the next fourteen years he produced twenty-three novels and some tales. All these were published anonymously, partly because he feared that his reputation as a poet might be injured if it were found that he was writing prose romance, and partly because he delighted in mystifying the public. He liked being a private man one day and a king the next. He lived many lives actually as well as in the creation of so many characters in his tales. The prose romances relate to many periods and show the most exhaustive study of the periods he described. Through his imaginative power, the brilliant light in which he saw past events, he re-created past times as truly as Shakespeare in his historical plays. Old Mortality goes back more than a century before his own time; Quentin Durward belongs to the fifteenth century and Kenilworth to the sixteenth, while Ivanhoe and The Talisman go back five centuries. Other romances belong nearer his own time. In all this vast expanse of history Scott moves like a man among familiar haunts. It is as though he could project himself at will out of the body of his mortal life and take up a temporary abode amid scenes and people of distant generations. Thus he appeals to old and young, and to men of every occupation. Puritans and Cavaliers live in his pages, as well as outlaws, border chiefs, lords and ladies of Elizabeth's court, gypsies, beggars, every rank and condition of men. For this reason, no one can read Scott without an enlargement of his sympathy, a quickening of his imagination, and a sense of the reality of history such as textbooks cannot give. In this he is like Shakespeare. Scott lived at Abbotsford from 1814 to 1825. He lived like a feudal baron, surrounded by retainers, possessing a vast estate, visited by throngs of men and women from every part of the world. He had an enormous correspondence. He befriended young writers who made pilgrimages to his estate. Washington Irving writes delightfully of his own visits to Abbotsford, and Scott was one of the first to recognize the worth of Irving's Knickerbocker, the first considerable work of prose imagination written in America. Financial trouble came upon Scott in 1826. He had himself lived for years beyond his income. beyond his income. His publishers were unfortunate in some of their ventures; at last they failed, the liabilities being more than £100,000. Scott was then fifty-five years old. His wife, whose health had been failing for some time, died four months after the crisis. Two days later Scott was at work on Woodstock, determined to pay off the whole gigantic indebtedness. No knight of chivalry ever devoted himself to so generous and lofty a task. Scott was not legally liable, and might have escaped without contributing a cent to the creditors. He was not made of that kind of stuff. He spoke of adversity as a "tonic and bracer." In two years he had paid off £40,000 of the debt. He gave up his dearly loved home and went to live in lodgings in Edinburgh. By 1830 he had paid £63,000. Soon after, he was stricken by paralysis and sailed for Malta in an effort to regain his health. On the 7th of July, 1832, he returned to Abbotsford, so wasted from sickness that he was almost helpless, but so overjoyed at his return that it was with difficulty that he was held in his carriage. It was like the return of Ulysses to Ithaca. Scott's dogs, like the faithful dog of Ulysses immortalized by Homer, welcomed him as eagerly as his friends and dependents. After a few days, he made a manful effort to do some more writing, but it was impossible. Before death came he was in a state of coma for days. On the 17th of September he had a moment of consciousness, when he spoke the famous words to Lockhart, his son-in-law, "Lockhart, I may have but a moment to speak to you. My dear, be a good man-be virtuous, be religiousbe a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here." So died, September 21, 1832, a bravehearted and knightly gentleman. The copyright on his works, assigned to the creditors, paid off the balance of the debt in fifteen years. He had liked, in the time of vigor and prosperity, to think of himself as the head of a great house, a survivor into the nineteenth century of the nobleman of heroic times. In this he failed. His poems and tales, valued by himself mainly as a means for providing his estate and later for paying the obligations that he voluntarily assumed, are immortal. Immortal, too, is his personality. In his vast appetite for life, for friendship; in his love for nature and dogs; in his love for old tales and for the simple, straightforward life they dealt with, he reminds one of Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike the great American, Scott had no sense of reform or mission. Through the influence of a great personality, each man was greater than the work he performed. Like Ulysses, they were men cast in heroic mold. II THE POEM The Lady of the Lake is a story dealing with the life of King James V of Scotland, who lived in the sixteenth century. The events narrated in it may be imagined as having taken place in about 1529, and while the story is not historical, being chiefly the product of Scott's imagination, it is a good example of the poet's power to reconstruct the life of a past time so vividly as to give to it something of the truth of history. The historical background needed for a clearer reading of the poem is here given. As a boy, King James was under the guardianship of Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, who had married his mother. The young King for a long time wished to free himself, but the Douglases were a powerful clan, and virtually held James as their captive. In 1528, however, he escaped to Stirling Castle, where he was received by the governor, an enemy to the Douglas clan. In a short time so many chieftains joined the King that they were able to banish the Earl of Angus to England. The Douglas whom we meet in the poem is an imaginary uncle of the banished regent, who is hiding on a lonely island in Loch Katrine under the protection of Roderick Dhu. Both the Douglas of the poem, therefore, and Roderick, are fictitious characters. The same is true of Ellen, the Lady of the Lake, Malcolm Græme, and the minstrel, Allan-bane. But all these characters are drawn from an intimate knowledge of the history and customs of the time, and the action of the poem might well have taken place in 1529, when the King took steps toward putting an end to the outrages that had long characterized life on the Scottish Border. The name of the poem is itself a suggestion of the romantic character of the story. The old romances about Arthur and the knights of the Round Table had much to say about a fairy called the Lady of the Lake, who lived on a mysterious island which mortals could visit only rarely and where wonderful adventures awaited them. Ellen, you will observe, is called a fairy, though not with any suggestion of supernatural qualities. The minstrel, Allan-bane, is just such a person as one meets in the old romances. Such minstrels were not mere entertainers; they were wise men whose counsel was highly valued, and many of them were supposed to possess the gift of prophecy. Other illustrations of the romantic spirit that gives charm to the poem are easily found. The summoning of the warriors by means of the small wooden cross with its points scorched and dipped in blood, vividly suggests a primitive life, one in which simple passions of hate, loyalty, and the spirit of the clan figure in place of the conventional virtues of courtly society. Indeed, this story will no doubt seem even more primitive than the story of Ulysses among the Phæacians. Again, you will notice the relatively large space given to descriptions of nature. This is characteristic of the age in which Scott lived. Men began to find in the wilder aspects of nature a fascination that the eighteenth century utterly failed to realize. Wordsworth, Byron, and Scott owed much of their popularity to the fact that in their poems the beauty of river and forest, of the mountains and remote and almost inaccessible places, found expression. An excellent illustration of this is to be found in the fact that immediately following the publication of The Lady of the Lake in 1810, the journey to Loch Katrine and Ellen's Isle became a sort of pilgrimage for hundreds of travelers. You will observe that the poem is divided into six cantos, or divisions, corresponding somewhat to the acts of a drama. These cantos are much shorter than the "books," or divisions, of the epic poem. Each canto is subdivided into smaller units, of varying numbers of lines, which are not stanzas but serve the same purpose, that of breaking up the narrative into paragraph-like units. The verse rimes in couplets, and in the normal line there are four accents, or stresses. This verse-form lends itself to rapidity of movement; the eight syllables in the line, with the rime, give a sort of rhythmic beat like that of the ballad. Variety is gained through the introduction of songs and of little poems of introduction and conclusion, in the various cantos, written in a different meter. The Lady of the Lake is neither ballad nor epic but metrical romance. In this respect it revives a form of poetry popular all over civilized Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The most famous of these old romances were written about King Arthur and his knights, or about Charlemagne, the great king of France. They dealt with the age of chivalry, while Scott deals here with a later period. Scott's poem has many of the characteristics of the ballad, as you will see if you compare it with one of the romantic ballads previously read. But it tells a long and sustained story, and this the ballad cannot do. It is like the epic in its use of history and legend, and in its portrayal of the life of a past time through a poetic biography of national or racial heroes. But it is more simple than the epic; it lacks the stately dignity that you have found in the story of Ulysses. It also finds a large part of its interest in the lovestory, something that the epic does not stress. King James is a romantic and deeply interesting figure, but he is not the founder of a civilization, like one of the heroes of the epics written so many centuries ago. Though harsh and faint, and soon to die away, And all unworthy of thy nobler strain, Yet if one heart throb higher at its sway, The wizard note has not been touched 26 in vain. Then silent be no more! Enchantress, wake again! I 30 The stag at eve had drunk his fill, And faint, from farther distance borne, II 35 40 As Chief, who hears his warder call, III 50 Yelled on the view the opening pack; 29. Monan, a Scottish martyr of the fourth century. 31. Glenartney, glen or valley of the Artney. For all geographical references, see map, page 300. 33. Benvoirlich, ben is Scottish for "mountain." A hundred dogs bayed deep and strong; IV Less loud the sounds of silvan war And roused the cavern, where, 'tis told, For ere that steep ascent was won, V 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 The noble stag was pausing now VI way; 135 The hunter marked that mountain high, "Twere long to tell what steeds gave o'er, As swept the hunt through Cambusmore; 89. Mentelth, district along the River Teith. 93. Lochard, loch is Scottish for "lake." 108. Cambusmore, an estate on the border of the Braes of Doune. 140 145 106. Bochastle's heath, a plain between Loch Vennachar and the Teith River. 112. Brigg, Scottish for "bridge." 188. whinyard, sword. |