De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 47
(1932)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–
Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd
[pagina 484]
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The poetry of sir Walter Scott:
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ments of ‘the greatest European’ are considered. With Goethe, writers have a ridiculous habit of ‘setting him aside as a poet’ and so getting on to the easier aspect of the ‘novel’ of his life. With Scott, on the other hand, if he is set aside as a poet - as he might even be - it is assuredly not to the ‘novel’ of his own life that we would turn - but to the Waverley novels. Henry James once referred to Scott as the greatest of all novelists - in one of his few fulsome moments. Few think that, of course. But as the greatest of historical novelists - and the essential creator of the historical novel - Scott's place is scarcely challenged. His genius, however, was naturally versatile, through his immense mental energy and his wide range of interests. Yet, we have to propound this paradox - that while, in a European sense, he would be just as important had he written nothing but the Waverley novels, his activities as poet, editor and translator, essayist and critic, seem to invest him with truer universality. Goethe, even as the author of ‘Faust’, is only a German author, but as the fore-runner of Darwin's evolutionary theory, in thinking in elemental principles, he becomes an Olympian figure; the first total man, as he has been supremely termed. Scott, on the other hand, with the example of Goldsmith, Milton, Dryden, Dr. Johnston, and Goethe himself, cannot even be called the first total author; yet he is perhaps the greatest of all in that sense. Here, however, we shall take stock only of the ‘supplement’ of his poetry, for in none of his lesser arts can Scott be divorced from his writing of the novel. ‘The critic of poetry,’ says Professor H.W. Garrod, must be a poet, but not a very good one.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Scott, it may be said, never posed as a critic of poetry, but in his editorial capacity he was one by implication. Perhaps his greatest service to poetry was not in his own right at all, but through his skiful editions of ‘The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.’Ga naar voetnoot2) He does not belong to the order of the great English poets, in spite of the bulk of his long narrative poems and the preservation in the best anthologies of a few lyrical gems. Of Wordsworth it has been | |
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remarked - with perhaps no very strict application - that he differed less than the other great ones of England from the ‘norm’ of his race; but it would, I think, be more correct to say that Scott showed less comparative difference from the average Scotsman. He possessed the strength of his northern countrymen in his vivid and characteristic transcripts of active life, in his concrete projections of strong romantic fancy, in his ennobling of national passions and ideals; he had also their weakness for flat, stale moralising and narrow, formalistic utterance, their failure to feel as well as think profoundly. Only in his assumption of aristocratic pretensions did he get away from the democratic spirit of the Scot.Ga naar voetnoot1) Feudalistic and conservative, he looked backwards for his ‘golden age’; the 1930 Revolution in Paris stung him to anger, and during the agitation for parliamentary reform he urged the workers of his adopted Border country to oppose their own emancipation. He had no message for his own time, no vision of the future; the Industrial Revolution might never have happened as far as his writings are concerned. Again, as Wordsworth said of him, he failed ‘to address himself to the immortal part of man’ and, as Mr. Carswell maintains, ‘his writings are as bare of ideas as his conversation was’. Also, let us grant that, unlike the great philosophic writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, he had no realization of the tragic ground-work of existence, and that his poetry - if we call it that and not verse - is almost entirely of a fairly commonplace, narrational order, achieving only broad general effects; we can never read in it the signs of mental and spiritual life, nor detect any curiosity about the ultimate bases of creation. Blake's apocalypse that religion and art are identical, Keats' unification of truth and beauty, were ideas left unpondered; Scott's poetry lacks even the virile greatness of Byron's and, indeed, when ‘the pilgrim of eternity’ awoke and found himself famous, ‘the wizard of the north’ accepted his supercession. For what, then, can we value Scott's poetry? Why do we | |
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still find some enjoyment in reading ‘The Lady of the Lake’, ‘Marmion’, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ - for I cannot think that ‘Rokeby’, ‘The Lord of the Isles’, ‘Harold the Dauntless’, have anything like the same appeal, since even in their own time they were comparative failures. In the first place, they are all about Scotland, and more so even than ‘the Scotch novels’ of the prose Scott, they are the essential work of the poet. In them he is nearest to his own country, to his own people, and to himself. Stefan Zweig in his study of Verhaeren remarks that no writer is great who has not put into his work something of his nation. It is supremely true to say of Scott that no one has ever put more of his own nation into his work. From it his mind took its vast cargo of historic, legendary, and literary lore. ‘Scott’, says Professor Macneile Dixon, ‘had something more than genius; he had character’ - and that was the rugged character of Scotland itself. Humour, too, he had in abundance - the humour that must exist in a fairly rigid ‘insular’ condition of society where departures from convention are easily noted. As Professor Grierson sings, ‘It was not given him to invoke again
The moving vision of great souls in pain,
But o'er his humbler characters and scenes,
An Edie Ochiltree or Jeannie Deans.’
Characterisation, of course, is not at its best in the poems, in which the personages - Marmion, William of Deloraine, Douglas, Roderick Dhu, James Fitz-James, Ellen of the Isle - are made rather to fit the idealizations of poetry than meet the sterner demands of life. The inter-play of the action is always made more important, and Scott displays superb ability in the ‘telling’ of his poems: especially in describing the wild energy of battle. Next to his narrational skill, we must note his power in describing scenery. Everyone knows his passages on Melrose Abbey and Loch Katrine. These pictorial accounts, written in the glow of patriotic fervour, are, indeed, what have kept Scott's name to the front more than anything else he has written. They may have much of the meretriciousness of an easy, | |
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popular appeal and but for the essential soundness of their inspiration might even fail to rise above the banal, as: - ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said
“This is my own, my native land!”’
and ‘O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand?’
But their very familiarity becomes a religious thing, they are exalted when statelier lines are forgotten. We come to-feel about them as D.H. Lawrence about the hymns he learned as a boy: ‘They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.’ One last word must concern Scott's lyrical verse, which is more finished than his ‘novels in verse’. It includes ‘Bonnie Dundee’, Jock o' Hazeldean, ‘Lochinvar’, ‘Pibroch of Donuil Dhu’; which must rank as among the freshest and most musical of modern English lyrics. And if the lines, ‘Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name,’
are really Scott's own, then he has written one of the most memorable little poems in the entire language. The part played by this poetry was, in Holland, by no means inconsiderable. Dr. Hendrik Vissink in his ‘Scott and his Influence on Dutch Literature’ has perhaps given us the best | |
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account of it, his work being painstaking and scholarly and his English style correct if not very pleasing. It is an informative book but by no means a critical one; and as we have now made a survey of Scott's poetry, it is perhaps right that some attempt should next be made to assess the value of its Dutch imitations. Dr. Vissink takes Jacob Geel as the earliest translator of Scott's poetry, two fragments being published as ‘Proeve eener navolging van de Lady of the Lake’; these are of the hunt in the first canto and the sending round of the Fiery Cross to summon the clans in canto three. In the preface Geel hints at making a complete translation of all six cantos, but this he never did. Only when Jacob van Lennep published his ‘Nederlandsche Legenden in Rijm’ did the Netherlands begin to feel interested in the poetic romance, though these early tales cannot be said to do more than capture the outward characteristics of Scott's own metrical tales, while often they amount to one vast piece of plagiarism. Of this charge Van Lennep quits failed to clear himself by maintaining that his thefts were of slight importance compared with the national spirit of his work. Mention need only be made of his translation of ‘Lochinvar’, and his taking over of Norna's ‘Song of the Reimkennar’ from ‘The Pirate’, and his rendering of Vidal's song in ‘The Betrothed’ as ‘Vrouwenlof’. Van Lennep also adopted the versification of Scott, but if Scott is often no more than readable, his earliest Dutch disciple too often sinks to the level of sheer bathos; nor can it be maintained - high poetry apart - that, if Scott's verse is usually redemeed by vigour and variety in rhyming, Van Lennep's always justifies itself in like manner. Thus, it is surprising to find Dr. Vissink regarding lines like these as satisfactory: - ‘At once the knight's arrival is
The noble Captain told,
And presently the answer comes:
“Let him be brought at once to me.”’
Of the poem in which they occur, ‘Eduard van Gelre’. he quite seriously remarks: ‘The whole of “Edward of Guelders” cannot | |
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but make us regret that Van Lennep did not begin his “Dutch Legends” with work like this.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Personally, I cannot find anything save the more superficial of the influences of Scott, which he professes to discover, in the poetry of Van Lennep, and would even opine that no true service was done Dutch literature thereby. Van Lennep may at least be said to resemble Scott in that it was the advent of a younger rival which made him forsake the rhymed tale for that in prose. This was, of course, Nicolaas Beets (himself perhaps not unworthy to be called in his youth ‘the Byron of Holland’) with ‘Kuser’. It is a poem still largely in the manner of Byron's ‘Lara’ and ‘The Corsair’ and only very remotely Scott-like; but it is, at any rate, free from sheer plagiarism, and in the natural descriptions we see the poet attempting the same service for the landscape of the Hague forest that Scott had achieved for the Trossachs. Apart from this poem and ‘Ada’, Dr. Vissink makes out no strong case for Beets' successfully following Scott, and devotes many of his remarks simply to recording ‘mentions’ of Scott in the pages of ‘Camera Obscura’ and to the poet's studies of the English writer. It is perhaps not without significance that Beets was born in the year of the publication of ‘Waverley’. Though still at school, therefore, on Scott's death, he wrote his ‘Proeve van Hulde aan Sir Walter Scott’, and carried his devotion further two years later by editing ‘Proeven uit de dichterlijke werken van Walter Scott’. Then, in 1864, his study, ‘Walter Scott’, was read at Haarlem, and in 1871, during the centenary celebrations for the birth of Scott, he attended Edinburgh as Holland's representative, an account of this visit being given in his ‘Het Eeuwfeest van Sir Walter Scott, 1871, te Edinburgh’, an essay which very fittingly was prefixed to Dr. M.P. Lindo's new edition of ‘Ivanhoe’ the following year. It would seem, thus, that we must note Dr. Beets for his professed admiration arther than for any great personal success under Scott's tutelage. Dr. Vissink also notes the influence exerted by Scott on W.J. Hofdijk; and I agree that in his ‘Jonker van Brederode’ | |
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he has most successfully assimilated his method and style. The earlier ‘Rosamunde’ and ‘Egmond 1004 en 1021’ are still much too jejune to merit serious criticism, and Dr. Vissink is fully justified in saying that ‘it will be seen at once how much the Dutch writer lacks the excellent preparation of the English poet.’Ga naar voetnoot1) This time the passage quoted can be regarded as worthy of one who would write in the way of Scott. Thus, the beauty of Elwyne is described as being ‘Not of the sun in burning glow
When rising in the sky;
Not of the swelling rose, as it
Bursts from its opening bud,
And sparkles in the morning dew,
Above each bloom and herb;
But of the silver moon, when all
In lovely splendour she,
In silence of the summer night,
Goes up above the lake;
But of the hawthorn delicate,
When warmth of eastern sun
A rosy glowing light doth shed
On snowy satin leaves.’
Even so, the lines are rather unequal and surely no one would seriously contend that Scott has not many better. Yet, Dr. Vissink on the strength of the passage in which they occur declares incautiously that Hofdijk was ‘a true romantic writer and surpassed Scott’.Ga naar voetnoot2) But after ‘De Jonker van Brederode’ the metrical tale fell into desuetude in Dutch, as in English, and Scott's régime was reserved for the novel. |
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