Walter Scott - Lady of the Lake

"At dawn, the knight and the mountaineer proceed toward the Lowland frontier. A dispute arises concerning the character of Roderick Dhu, and the knight expresses his desire to meet in person and do vengeance upon the predatory chief. 'Have then thy wish!' answers his guide; and gives a loud whistle. A whole legion of armed men start up from their mountain ambush in the heath; while the chief turns proudly and says, 'I am Roderick Dhu!' Sir Roderick then by a signal dismisses his men to their concealment. Arrived at his frontier, the chief forces the knight to stand upon his defense. Roderick, after a hard combat is laid wounded on the ground; Fitz-James, sounding his bugle, brings four squires to his side; and, after giving the wounded chief into their charge, gallops rapidly on towards Stirling. As he ascends the hill to the castle, he descries approaching the same place the giant form of Douglas, who has come to deliver himself up to the King, in order to save Malcolm Graeme and Sir Roderick from the impending danger. Before entering the castle, Douglas is seized with the whim to engage in the holiday sports which are going forward outside; he wins prize after prize, and receives his reward from the hand of the prince, who, however does not condescend to recognize his former favorite. Roused at last by an insult from one of the royal grooms, Douglas proclaims himself, and is ordered into custody by the King. At this instant a messenger arrives with tidings of an approaching battle between the clan of Roderick and the King's lieutenant, the Earl of Mar; and is ordered back to prevent the conflict, by announcing that both Sir Roderick and Lord Douglas are in the hands of their sovereign.

"The last canto opens in the guard room of the royal castle at Stirling, at dawn. While the mercenaries are quarreling and singing at the close of a night of debauch, the sentinels introduce Ellen and the minstrel Allan-bane—who are come in search of Douglas. Ellen awes the ruffian soldiery by her grace and liberality, and is at length conducted to a more seemly waiting place, until she may obtain audience with the King. While Allan-bane, in the cell of Sir Roderick, sings to the dying chieftain of the glorious battle which has just been waged by his clansmen against the forces of the Earl of Mar, Ellen, in another part of the palace, hears the voice of Malcolm Graeme lamenting his captivity from an adjoining turret. Before she recovers from her agitation she is startled by the appearance of Fitz-James, who comes to inform her that the court is assembled, and the King at leisure to receive her suit. He conducts her to the hall of presence, round which Ellen casts a timid and eager glance for the monarch. But all the glittering figures are uncovered, and James Fitz-James alone wears his cap and plume. The Knight of Snowdoun is the King of Scotland! Struck with awe and terror, Ellen falls speechless at his feet, pointing to the ring which he has put upon her finger. The prince raises her with eager kindness, declares that her father is forgiven, and bids her ask for a boon for some other person. The name of Graeme trembles on her lips, but she cannot trust herself to utter it. The King, in playful vengeance, condemns Malcolm Graeme to fetters, takes a chain of gold from his own neck, and throwing it over that of the young chief, puts the clasp in the hand of Ellen."

From this outline, it will be evident that Scott had gained greatly in narrative power since the production of The Lay of the Last Minstrel . Not only are the elements of the "fable" (to use the word in its old-fashioned sense) harmonious and probable, but the various incidents grow out of each other in a natural and necessary way. The Lay was at best a skillful bit of carpentering whereof the several parts were nicely juxtaposed; The Lady of the Lake is an organism, and its several members partake of a common life. A few weaknesses may, it is true, be pointed out in it. The warning of Fitz-James by the mad woman's song makes too large a draft upon our romantic credulity. Her appearance is at once so accidental and so opportune that it resembles those supernatural interventions employed by ancient tragedy to cut the knot of a difficult situation, which have given rise to the phrase deus ex machina . The improbability of the episode is further increased by the fact that she puts her warning in the form of a song. Scott's love of romantic episode manifestly led him astray here. Further, the story as a whole shares with all stories which turn upon the revelation of a concealed identity, the disadvantage of being able to affect the reader powerfully but once, since on a second reading the element of suspense and surprise is lacking. In so far as The Lady of the Lake is a mere story, or as it has been called, a "versified novelette," this is not a weakness; but in so far as it is a poem, with the claim which poetry legitimately makes to be read and reread for its intrinsic beauty, it constitutes a real defect.

Not only does this poem, with the slight exceptions just mentioned, show a gain over the earlier poems in narrative power, but it also marks an advance in character delineation. The characters of the Lay are, with one or two exceptions, mere lay-figures; Lord Cranstoun and Margaret are the most conventional of lovers; William of Deloraine is little more than an animated suit of armor, and the Lady of Branksome, except at one point, when from her walls she defies the English invaders, is nearly or quite featureless. With the characters of The Lady of the Lake the case is very different. The three rivals for Ellen's hand are real men, with individualities which enhance and deepen the picturesqueness of each other by contrast. The easy grace and courtly chivalry, of the disguised King, the quick kindling of his fancy at sight of the mysterious maid of Loch Katrine, his quick generosity in relinquishing his suit when he finds that she loves another, make him one of the most life-like figures of romance. Roderick Dhu, nursing darkly his clannish hatreds, his hopeless love, and his bitter jealousy, with a delicate chivalry sending its bright thread through the tissue of his savage nature, is drawn with an equally convincing hand. Against his gloomy figure the boyish magnanimity of Malcolm Graeme, Ellen's brave faithfulness, made human by a surface play of coquetry, and the quiet nobility of the exiled Douglas, stand out in varied relief. Judged in connection with the more conventional character types of Marmion , and with the draped automatons of the Lay , the characters of The Lady of the Lake show the gradual growth in Scott of that dramatic imagination which was later to fill the vast scene of his prose romances with unforgettable figures.

But the most significant advance which this poem shows over earlier work is in the greater genuineness of the poetic effect. In the description, for example, of the approach of Roderick Dhu's boats to the island, there is a singular depth of race feeling. There is borne in upon us, as we read, the realization of a wild and peculiar civilization; we get a breath of poetry keen and strange, like the shrilling of the bag-pipes across the water. Again, in the speeding of the fiery cross there is a primitive depth of poetry which carries with it a sense of "old, unhappy, far-off things"; it appeals to latent memories in us, which have been handed down from an ancestral past. There is nothing in either The Lay of the Last Minstrel or Marmion to compare for natural dramatic force with the situation in The Lady of the Lake when Roderick Dhu whistles for his clansmen to appear, and the astonished Fitz-James sees the lonely mountain side suddenly bristle with tartans and spears; and the fight which follows at the ford is a real fight, in a sense not at all to be applied to the tournaments and other conventional encounters of the earlier poems. Even where Scott still clung to supernatural devices to help along his story, he handles them with much greater subtlety than he had done in his earlier efforts. The dropping of Douglas's sword from its scabbard when his disguised enemy enters the room, arouses the imagination without burdening it. It has the same imaginative advantage over such an episode as that in the Lay , where the ghost of the wizard comes to bear off the goblin page, as suggestion always has over explicit statement. This gain in subtlety of treatment will be made still more apparent by comparing with any supernatural episode of the Lay , the account in The Lady of the Lake of the unearthly parentage of Brian the Hermit.