For life! for life! their flight they ply, And here is Homer in English prose: 'And as the gusts speed on, when shrill winds blow, on a day when dust lies thickest on the roads, even so their battle clashed together, and all were fain of heart to slay each other in the press with the keen bronze.' Need I say more than these extracts say for themselves? What commonness and what distinction, what puerility of effort and what repose in energy! Then there is Scott's feeling for nature. The feeling was deep and genuine, and in a conversation with Washington Irving Scott expressed it more poignantly than he has ever done in his verse. 'When,' he said, 'I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest grey hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die!' There is a great deal of landscape painting in Scott's verse, and it has many good prose qualities: it is very definite, it is written 'with the eye on the object,' it is always sincere, in a certain sense; it is always felt sincerely. But it is not felt deeply, and it becomes either trite or generalised in its rendering into words. Take the description of Loch Katrine in the third canto of the 'Lady of the Lake,' the final passage which Ruskin quotes for special praise in that chapter of 'Modern Painters' which is devoted to a eulogy of Scott as the master of 'the modern landscape? in verse. It gives a pretty and, no doubt, accurate picture, but with what vagueness, triteness, or conventionality of epithet! We get one line in which there is no more than a statement, which may have its place in poetry: 'The grey mist left the mountain side.' In the next line we get a purely conventional rendering of what has evidently been both seen clearly and felt sympathetically: "The torrent showed its glistening pride.' How false and insincere that becomes in the mere putting into words! And what a cliché is the simile for the first faint shadows on the lake at dawn: 'In bright uncertainty they lie, Even in better landscape work, like the opening of the first introduction to 'Marmion,' how entirely without magic is the observation, how superficial a notation of just what every one would notice in the scenery before him! To Ruskin, I know, all this is a part of what he calls Scott's unselfishness and humility, 'in consequence of which Scott's enjoyment of Nature is incomparably greater than that of any other poet I know.' Enjoyment, perhaps; but we are concerned, in poetry, with what a poet has made out of his enjoyment. Scott puts down in words exactly what the average person feels. Now it is the poet's business to interpret, illuminate, or at the least to evoke in a more exquisite form, all that the ordinary person is capable of feeling vaguely, by way of enjoyment. Until the poet has transformed enjoyment into ecstasy there can be no poetry. Scott's genuine love of nature, so profound in feeling, as his words to Washington Irving testify, was never able to translate itself into poetry; it seemed to become tongue-tied in metre. And, also, there was in Scott a love of locality, which was perhaps more deeply rooted in him than his love of nature, just as his love of castles and armour and the bricabrac of mediævalism which filled his brain and his house was more deeply rooted than his love of the Middle Ages. 'If,' said Coleridge to Payne Collier, 'I were called upon to form an opinion of Mr. Scott's poetry, the first thing I would do would be to take away all his names of old castles, which rhyme very prettily, and read very picturesquely; next, I would exclude the mention of all nunneries, abbeys, and priories, and I should then see what would be the residuum - how much poetry would remain.' In all these things there was personal sincerity; Scott was following his feeling, his bias; but it has to be determined how far, and in how many instances, when he said nature he meant locality, and when he said chivalry or romance, he meant that 'procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances made a very conspicuous show,' on the way to Abbotsford. Ruskin's special praise of Scott, in his attitude toward nature, is that Scott did not indulge in 'the pathetic fallacy' of reading one's own feelings into the aspect of natural things. This, in the main, is true, in spite of those little morals which Scott attaches to what he sees. But it is hardly more than a negative merit, at the best; and it is accompanied by no intimacy of insight, no revealing passion; aspects are described truthfully, and with sympathy, and that is all. Throughout the whole of his long poems, and throughout almost the whole of his work in verse, Scott remains an improviser in rhyme, not a poet. But in a few of the songs contained in the novels, songs written after he had practically given up writing verse, flickering touches of something very like poetry are from time to time seen. In one song of four stanzas, 'Proud Maisie,' published in 1818 in the 'Heart of Midlothian,' Scott seems to me to have become a poet. In this poem, which is like nothing else he ever wrote, some divine accident has brought all the diffused poetical feeling of his nature to a successful birth. Landor, who seems to have overlooked this perfect lyric, thought there was one line of genuine poetry in Scott's verse, which he quotes from an early poem on Helvellyn. But I cannot feel that this line is more than a pathetic form of rhetoric. In 'Proud Maisie' we get, for once, poetry. For the rest, all Scott's verse is written for boys, and boys, generation after generation, will love it with the same freshness of response. It has adventure, manliness, bright landscape, fighting, the obvious emotions; it is like a gallop across the moors in a blithe wind; it has plenty of story, and is almost as easily read as if it were prose. The taste for it may well be outgrown with the first realisation of why Shakespeare is looked upon as the supreme poet. Byron usually follows Scott in the boy's head, and drives out Scott, as that infinitely greater, though imperfect, force may well do. Shelley often completes the disillusion. But it is well, perhaps, that there should be a poet for boys, and for those grown-up people who are most like boys; for those, that is, to whom poetry appeals by something in it which is not the poetry. JAMES MONTGOMERY (1771-1854) 1 THROUGHOUT Montgomery's too copious work, which varies from being almost or quite good to being scarcely existent, there is a thin but natural stream of poetical feeling, not enough to make him a considerable poet, but setting him apart from such versifiers as his namesake, Robert Montgomery, and other pious companions, such as Kirke White. It was part of Montgomery's pride to realise that he had not merely aimed at being a poet, and it is to the credit of his sincerity that he should have realised the fact as well as the intention. All through his life he was a fighter, not only in his poems, on behalf of freedom and justice. His poem on 'The West Indies,' though indignation, as he admitted, 'gave to the versification the character of loud public speaking,' is as fervid as Whittier; and the later 'Climbing Boy's Soliloquies,' had they been much shorter, would have had real merit of a 1 (1) The Ocean, 1805. (2) The Wanderer of Switzerland, 1806. (3) The West Indies, 1809. (4) The World before the Flood, 1812. (5) Greenland, 1819. (6) The Pelican Island, 1826. (7) Hymns, 1853. (8) Selected Works, 1841. natural human kind. It was Montgomery who edited 'The Chimney-Sweepers' Annual,' to which Lamb sent Blake's poem as well as his own. It is with truth that he says of these and other poems: 'It appealed to universal principles, to imperishable affections, to primary elements of our common nature.' He says further: 'My small plot of ground is no more than Naboth's vineyard to Ahab's Kingdom; but it is my own, it is no copyhold; I borrowed it, I leased it, from none. The secret of my moderate success, I consider to have been the right direction of my abilities to right objects.' Now here there is perhaps a certain confusion in the mind between what concerns a right object and a successful poem. And is this small plot of ground so entirely unmortgaged as we are assured? Various influences are to be seen: the influences of Cowper, of Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads,' of whatever was best in Southey. The simple humour of such a poem as the 'Soliloquy of a Water-Wagtail' suggests Southey; the fine qualities of "The Common Lot' are akin, by the prose side, to Wordsworth, of whom it has the grave speech, without the unaccountable poetry. There are other such poems which may well still have their appeal to the audience from whom he looked for remembrance, 'the young, the fair, and the devout'; poems which are as full of pleasant thought and fancy as the dialogues of 'Birds,' and at times with something of the prim meditation of Matthew Arnold. Thought, of a carefully religious kind, there always is, and it is genuine, touched with a sense of beauty and meaning in visible things, to which he is sometimes able to give adequate expression in a lyric, but which is lost or diluted in the long poems on which he probably supposed that his fame would rest: 'The World before the Flood,' 'Greenland,' 'The Pelican Island.' Much of the moralising has come to weary us, and the smooth cadences seem to have been picked out on the keyboard of an early pianoforte. There is something in the whole form, easy and natural as it generally is, that has a little the air of a thing |