Scottish Poetry

By EDWIN MUIR

" Or the poems assembled here," says Mr. Mackie in his excellent introduction, " none is conceived on a grand scale. The Scot does not write odes and epics ; he writes songs and ballads ; he can achieve perfection only when he works within narrow limits.".

The reason for this formal limitation of Scottish poetry has never, as far as I know, been considered with any thorough- ness. Some have blamed the Reformation and others the defeat of Flodden for the poverty of Scottish poetry after its first brilliant promise under James IV anti his predecessors. The decline is obvious enough ; but what is interesting is that it is a decline not only in quantity but in quality too. Mr. Mackie is not quite exact in saying that none of the poems he has collected is conceived on a grand scale, or that no Scottish poet can achieve perfection except within narrow limits. Henryson's " Testament of Cresseid " is unmistakably conceived on a grand scale, and it is as nearly perfect as it could be. Such poems of Dunbar's as " The Golden Targe " and the magnificent hymn beginning " Done is a battle on the dragon black " are written in a style which would be perfectly equal to the ode of any of the larger forms of poetry. It is only if we confine ourselves to post-Flodden or post-Reformation Scottish poetry that the generalization is valid ; but there it is completely so. A decisive change happened to Scottish poetry some time in the sixteenth century. The poetry of the Makars, and of Henryson and Dunbar in particular, was the poetry of a whole civilization that which came afterwards was, even at its best, folk poetry. Dunbar was a poet in the full stream of the poetic tradition of his time ; acquainted with the best work done in France and England in his age and the age preceding it ; and employing the contemporary idiom freely and inventively. Burns, in poetic endowment actually superior to Dunbar, was a peasant poet ; his tradition was merely the tradition of Scottish folk poetry. Dunbar wrote when Scotland was a nation with a centre at which all the diverse energies of the country converged ; Burns wrote when Scotland had no longer a centre, and he drew his inspiration frorn the class which is most static of all, the least affected by the centre : the peasantry. Representing a civilization, Dunbar employed a style which could have been developed in favouring conditions Into a vehicle for all the various forms of poetry, including the most complex and ambitious. Speaking for the peasantry, Burns was confined to the few forms which he used with such astonishing skill. A country without a centre becomes a Collection of small towns, farms and cottakes, with a castle (symbolically suggesting an older tradition) dotted here and there. Scottish poetry after Dunbar may be divided into castle poetry and small town and country poetry. To the first belong, roughly, the ballads, Scotland's greatest poetic Possession, and to the latter Scottish folk-song and Burns. Both are equally folk-poetry, the poetry not of a nation or a civilization, but of a countryside.

This great change in Scottish poetry is to be seen not only in a lowering of style, but also in a blunting of sensibility. Mr. Mackie complains that " when he writes of love the Scottish poet does not, like Donne, attempt to sound all the depths and shoals of passion ; his love poems are the simple expression of desire, or frustration, or disillusionment." That is true, yet even there we can see how greatly Scottish Poetry declined between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. Alexander Scott, who wrote in the second half of the sixteenth century, is a minor poet, yet sometimes he reads like a fore-runner of Donne, and we feel he would have

A Book of Scottish Verse. Edited with an introduction by R. L. Mackie. (Oxford University Press. 2s.) -

understood Donne far better than Burns could have under- stood him. His work had a union of passion and thought which Scottish poetry has never recovered since. One has only to set one of his verses against any verse by Burns to see what Scotland lost in the interval :

" Love is ane fervent fire, Kindled without desire : Short pleasure, king displeasure ; Repentance is the hire ; Ane poor treasure without measure ;

Love is ane fervent fire."

The perfection of the form in Scott's poetry goes, one feels, with the fusion of passion and-thought that animated it ;- the shape of the poem is exquisite because it is both spontan- eous and deliberate. Burns sometimes and the ballads often sound that note of absolute passion which makes Clerk

Saunders " a great poem. But hardly ever do we find passion combined with intense reflection on passion in any Scottish poet after Alexander Scott, and never with the same perfection.

This capacity, then, was lost to Scottish poetry some time in the sixteenth century ; but it also lost the ability to write in a noble style. There is nothing after Flodden to compare with IIenryson's description of the meeting between Troilus. and Cresseid

" Than upon him she cast up baith her een, And with ane blenk it came into his thought That he sometime her face before had seen."

Or with Dunbar's poem beginning :

" Done is a battle on the dragon black, Our tampion Christ confounded has his force ; The yottis of hell are broken with a crack, The sign triumphal raisit is of the cross."

Nothing, at any rate, except certain happy lines in the ballads. About the time when the Reformation was beginning to take secure hold of the country Scottish literature as a literature in the full sense ended, whether as a belated effect of Flodden, or of the Reformation itself, or of Scotland's definite cessation as a separate nation has yet to be deter- mined. After that it was in essentials a folk literature.

An anthologist is bound to rouse dissatisfaction. The poems which we expect to find in his collection we accept

without comment, giving him no credit for their- presence ; and we blame him for what lie omits, or includes without

apparent justification. Mr. Mackie's anthology is on the whole an admirable one. There is one really glaring omission : that of " Clerk Saunders," which is one of the greatest of the ballads, as well as one of the finest poems in the language. Again it is impossible to imagine any true anthology of Scottish poetry which contains nothing Rabelaisian in it.

" A Brash of Wooing" and " The Jolly Beggars " are just as necessary for an understanding of Scottish poetry as " The Banks of Doon." Here an anthologist must put first either his subject, or decorum. Mr. Mackie has chosen to do the latter, and there are no doubt arguments for it ; but it implies a lack of fundamental seriousness about literary matters. His sins of inclusion are more serious, and the

last fifty pages of the book contain some very poor stuff. Andrew Lang and R. F. Murray were at best facile versifiers, and do not deserve a place in such -a volume. The selection of eighteenth-century verse is also far too ample. Mr.

Mackie has omitted that absurd piece of doggerel, " The Land of the Leal," for which we should feel thankful ; but he has retained the two versions of " The Flowers of the Forest," that of Mrs. Cockburn and that of Jane Elliot, the One more deplorable than the other. But these are, on the whole, minor blemishes in a book that has been soundly planned and shows an exact knowledge of its subject.