And little reck I of the censure sharp May idly cavil at an idle lay."People still cavil idly, complaining that Scott did not finish, or did not polish his pieces; that he was not Keats, or was not Wordsworth. He was himself; he was the Last Minstrel, the latest, the greatest, the noblest of natural poets concerned with natural things. He sang of free, fierce, and warlike life, of streams yet rich in salmon, and moors not yet occupied by brewers; of lonely places haunted in the long grey twilights of the North; of crumbling towers where once dwelt the Lady of Branksome or the Flower of Yarrow. Nature summed up in him many a past age a world of ancient faiths; and before the great time of Britain wholly died, to Britain, as to Greece, she gave her Homer. When he was old, and tired, and near his death--so worn with trouble and labour that he actually signed his own name wrong--he wrote his latest verse, for a lady. It ends -"My country, be thou glorious still!"
and so he died, within the sound of the whisper of Tweed, foreseeing the years when his country would no more be glorious, thinking of his country only, forgetting quite the private sorrow of his own later days.
People will tell you that Scott was not a great poet; that his bolt is shot, his fame perishing. Little he cared for his fame! But for my part I think and hope that Scott can never die, till men grow up into manhood without ever having been boys--till they forget that "One glorious hour of crowded life Is worth an age without a name!"Thus, the charges against Sir Walter's poetry are, on the whole, little more than the old critical fallacy of blaming a thing for not being something else. "It takes all sorts to make a world," in poetry as in life. Sir Walter's sort is a very good sort, and in English literature its place was empty, and waiting for him. Think of what he did. English poetry had long been very tame and commonplace, written in couplets like Pope's, very artificial and smart, or sensible and slow. He came with poems of which the music seemed to gallop, like thundering hoofs and ringing bridles of a rushing border troop. Here were goblin, ghost, and fairy, fight and foray, fair ladies and true lovers, gallant knights and hard blows, blazing beacons on every hill crest and on the bartisan of every tower. Here was a world made alive again that had been dead for three hundred years--a world of men and women.
They say that the archaeology is not good. Archaeology is a science; in its application to poetry, Scott was its discoverer.
Others can name the plates of a coat of armour more learnedly than he, but he made men wear them. They call his Gothic art false, his armour pasteboard; but he put living men under his castled roofs, living men into his breastplates and taslets. Science advances, old knowledge becomes ignorance; it is poetry that does not die, and that will not die, while -"The triple pride Of Eildon looks over Strathclyde."JOHN BUNYAN Dr. Johnson once took Bishop Percy's little daughter on his knee, and asked her what she thought of the "Pilgrim's Progress." The child answered that she had not read it. "No?" replied the Doctor;"then I would not give one farthing for you," and he set her down and took no further notice of her.
This story, if true, proves that the Doctor was rather intolerant.
We must not excommunicate people because they have not our taste in books. The majority of people do not care for books at all.
There is a descendant of John Bunyan's alive now, or there was lately, who never read the "Pilgrim's Progress." Books are not in his line. Nay, Bunyan himself, who wrote sixty works, was no great reader. An Oxford scholar who visited him in his study found no books at all, except some of Bunyan's own and Foxe's "Book of Martyrs."Yet, little as the world in general cares for reading, it has read Bunyan more than most. One hundred thousand copies of the "Pilgrim"are believed to have been sold in his own day, and the story has been done into the most savage languages, as well as into those of the civilised world.
Dr. Johnson, who did not like Dissenters, praises the "invention, imagination, and conduct of the story," and knew no other book he wished longer except "Robinson Crusoe" and "Don Quixote." Well, Dr.
Johnson would not have given a farthing for ME, as I am quite contented with the present length of these masterpieces. What books do YOU wish longer? I wish Homer had written a continuation of the Odyssey, and told us what Odysseus did among the far-off men who never tasted salt nor heard of the sea. A land epic after the sea epic, how good it would have been--from Homer! But it would have taxed the imagination of Dante to continue the adventures of Christian and his wife after they had once crossed the river and reached the city.
John Bunyan has been more fortunate than most authors in one of his biographies.
His life has been written by the Rev. Dr. Brown, who is now minister of his old congregation at Bedford; and an excellent life it is.
Dr. Brown is neither Roundhead nor Cavalier; for though he is, of course, on Bunyan's side, he does not throw stones at the beautiful Church of England.
Probably most of us are on Bunyan's side now. It might be a good thing that we should all dwell together in religious unity, but history shows that people cannot be bribed into brotherhood. They tried to bully Bunyan; they arrested and imprisoned him--unfairly even in law, according to Dr. Brown, not unfairly, Mr. Froude thinks--and he would not be bullied.
