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.
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