e
seeks to recover the feelings of youth,--the delight with which it
greets them when they come,--the hesitation and diffidence with which
it recalls them as they pass away, and questions the triumph it has
just won,--and he paints all this without subtlety, without
complexity, but with a swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed.
Generally, however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to
any feeling, however active in its bent. The cases in which he makes a
study of any mood of feeling, as he does of this harper's feeling, are
comparatively rare. Deloraine's night-ride to Melrose is a good deal
more in Scott's ordinary way, than this study of the old harper's
wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the
same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always
simple; and his subject always romantic. But though romantic, it is
simple almost to bareness,--one of the great causes both of his
popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of
his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and
richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron "bet" him; and no
doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he "bet" him, was in the
variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness
and bareness was of the essence of Scott's idealism and romance. It
was so in relation to scenery. He told Washington Irving that he loved
the very nakedness of the Border country. "It has something," he said,
"bold and stern and solitary about it. When 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 honest grey
hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, _I think
I should die_."[14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his
native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It
is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest ideal point.
Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty subjects, as in parts of
_The Lady of the Lake_, and a good deal of _The Lord of the Isles_,
and still more in _The Bridal of Triermain_, his charm disappears. It
is in painting those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott
shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but experiences
them with far greater strength and purity than ordinary men, that he
triumphs as a poet. Mr. Lockhart tells us that some of Scott's senses
were dec