CHAPTER XI THE VICTORIAN ERA: 1848-1880 THE generation succeeding the Disruption produced a large number of writers of various sorts in Scotland. Scarce one of these attained the highest degree of excellence. Many, indeed, entered upon their voyage with a fair tide and a favouring breeze, whose barque, if it ever reached the haven of fame, now lies, a crazy old hulk, cast up on the beach, displaced by newer and more attractive craft. Some there were who missed the very first rank by little more than a hair's breadth. But in literature, if not in other occupations, a miss is as good as a mile. There are probably few periods in the history of Scottish letters in which so many promising reputations have come to almost nothing. Few, therefore, are so rich in works which it might be well worth the while of the industrious magazine-writer to disinter. A critical and detailed survey, för example, of the careers of Alexander Smith, David Gray, and Robert Buchanan, could not fail to contain many instructive literary, as well as other, lessons. The most versatile, and not the least clever, of the men of letters who flourished during these years was William Edmondstoune Aytoun1 (1813-65), a member of the Scottish bar, 1 Memoir, by Martin, Edin., 1867. There is no collected edition of Aytoun's works. I cite from the 1872 ed. of the Lays, and the 1874 ed. of Bon Gaultier. For a detailed criticism of Aytoun's work, see New Review, January, 1896. who was appointed to the chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University of Edinburgh, in 1845, and to the Sheriffship of Orkney and Zetland in 1852. Aytoun was, heart and soul, a "Blackwood" man, and he contributed innumerable articles of all sorts to the columns of Maga, the greater part of which is necessarily beyond resuscitation. It may be said, however, that, while his political articles are unusually well-reasoned and weighty, it is his lightness of touch which gives his papers on miscellaneous topics their chief value. His good spirits were infectious; and he had the journalist's gift of being always seasonable and "on the spot." If anything could have made up to the editor for the loss of Wilson, it must have been the acquisition of Wilson's son-inlaw as a contributor. Alike in poetry and prose, Aytoun's most ambitious essays were comparative failures. Bothwell (1856) suffers from being cast in the form of a monologue, and the subject, though a tempting one, is of a character to subject the highest poetical capacity to a severe test. Norman Sinclair (1861) is a novel of the orthodox autobiographical stamp, a genuine three-decker. Some idea of its length may be conveyed by the statement that it began to appear in Blackwood's Magazine in the January of one year, and was not completed until the August of the next. No doubt, it contains a certain number of graphic and entertaining episodes; but the effect of the book as a whole is one of rambling incoherence. Perhaps Aytoun's powers were incapable of any long-sustained effort. At all events, it is certain that his turn for poetry is far more advantageously displayed in the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers (1848) than in Bothwell. Here, also, he found a congenial vehicle for exhibiting the strain of Tory sentiment peculiar to him. His father had been a Whig, but Aytoun as a young man imbibed principles which may fairly be described as a mixture of "Young England" theories with a belated Jacobitism. The Jacobite element in his views was undoubtedly sincere and even passionate. Yet it was, of necessity, little better than academic, and the artificiality attaching to it appears to me to vitiate most of the Lays. These poems are well found in point of technique, and have for long commended themselves to the schoolboy and the village reciter. They contain much that is telling, though little that is moving, and, while admirable as rhetoric, seldom rise to the level of true poetry. The best of the Lays is perhaps the least known and least remembered The Island of the Scots. Here is one stanza which is charged with more true feeling than can be met with in most of its fellows : "And did they twine the laurel-wreath And did they honour those who lived, What meed of thanks was given to them Why should they bring the laurel wreath, It was not Frenchmen's blood that flowed A stranger band of beggared men The exiled heart to cheer? What mattered it that men should vaunt And loud and fondly swear, That higher feat of chivalry Was never wrought elsewhere? They bore within their breasts the grief That fame can never heal The deep unutterable woe Which none save exiles feel. Their hearts were yearning for the land For Scotland's high and heathered hills, For mountain loch and glen For those who haply lay at rest Beneath the green and daisied turf It is a little diffuse, and not otiose and lines that are flat. that it is poetry after all. I free from epithets that are But I am disposed to think not, some of his very best that tour de force, Firmilian parodies, has perished with Expanded from extracts in Sir Theodore Martin surmises that Aytoun's keen sense of the ludicrous, disabled him from doing himself justice in serious verse. Whether this be so or metrical work will be found in (1854), which, like many other what it was designed to ridicule. a bogus review which had appeared in Maga and bamboozled many of the critics, Firmilian is an attack upon the "spasmodic" school of poetry as represented by Bailey, Dobell, and Alexander Smith (infra, p. 596). We cannot blame very severely the people who knew not if Firmilian was to be taken seriously or not; for, while with high-sounding passages there were mingled tracts of the most prosaic sentiment and language (a characteristic trait of the school of poetry assailed), there were snatches of what might quite excusably be mistaken for tolerable poetry. "What we write Must be the reflex of the thing we know ; This is sonorous, and it is not nonsense. Or, again : "We have gazed Together on the midnight map of heaven, Much worse stuff than this has often been loudly applauded. The lyrical passages, too, such, as— "Firmilian, Firmilian, What have you done with Lilian," &c. are often a good deal more melodious than what corresponds to them in the objects of the parody. Whether regarded as caricaturing the thought or the style of the "Spasmodics,” Firmilian must be pronounced to be one of the great successes in a genre in which mediocrity is far more common than high attainment. Aytoun's genius for drollery assumes a less ephemeral form in the short stories which he wrote for Blackwood. Among the many humorous Tales collected from that venerable periodical his are unquestionably the best; and, in truth, they approach as closely to perfection in their own kind as it is possible for human performances to do. How I became a Yeoman, The Emerald Studs, How I stood for the Dreepdaily Burghs, How we got possession of the Tuilieries, and The Glenmutchkin Railway, form as delectable an anthology of its sort as man could desire and the best of them are Dree daily and Glenmutchkin. They are all conceived in a vein of "touch-and-go" farce, they have no arrière pensée, and they are brought off with a lightness of hand comparable only to that of some great chef who manipulates an omelette. Yet you may learn more about one aspect of Scottish politics from Dreepdaily than from many solemn These will all be found in the well-known Tales from Blackwood, 15: series. |