The immediate sense-perception of God through Beauty and the acceptance of Beauty as a factual proof of the union of the Soul with Nature, of the Real with the Ideal, and thus a proof of the supremacy of Good in the universe—this is the formula of Carman’s philosophical ‘reading’ of Nature and Existence. Always a poet of fine and assured artistry and of lyrical eloquence and spiritual power, Bliss Carman stands alone amongst Canadian poets as a verbal melodist, as a lyrist of love and the sea, and as a mystical interpreter of the moral and spiritual meaning of nature and existence. As an original verbal melodist and poetic impressionist and as an unexampled creator of songs of the sea, Bliss Carman has added significantly to English and to world poetry and to him, therefore, we may apply the distinction Great.

Quotations in this chapter, with the exception of a few lines, are from Later Poems, and from Ballads and Lyrics, by Bliss Carman, (McClelland & Stewart: Toronto).

Duncan Campbell Scott

In the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott there is more and finer expression of the pageantry of Nature in Canada and of the essential Canadian spirit than in the verse of any other Canadian poet. But, paradoxically, the genius and poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott are also more informed with an Old World culture and art than are the genius and verse of any other Canadian poet. Unless the reader and the critic of D. C. Scott’s poetry first realize that the mind and art of the poet are a product of Canada and of the Old World, a rare commingling of Canadian and European cultures, they will fail to understand how he is at once the least prolific and, to give him his outstanding distinction, the most exquisite artist of Canadian poets, not excepting Lampman and Bliss Carman. In his poem Frost Magic, Scott has written the formula of his own exquisite artistry:—

That line, however, rather distinguishes the characteristic excellence of his poetry on the technical side. It does not disengage the quality which makes him unique amongst Canadian poets. His differentia—the quality or power which distinguishes his poetic genius and craftsmanship from the mind and the art of all other Canadian poets—is Style. Duncan Campbell Scott is the one Canadian poet of whose verse it may be said that, after the manner of the English tradition, it possesses Style. Lampman’s and Carman’s, Pauline Johnson’s and Marjorie Pickthall’s, poetry each possess a style. But in their cases the style is imitable; it is a manner, original or ingenious no doubt, but not an essential and inevitable expression, of their poets’ minds or personalities. Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry has style, quite as individualistic as the others’, but it is an essential expression of his personality and character, and is therefore inimitable, or like the man himself, is in ‘the grand manner’—which is not at all a manner but just that subtle spiritual quality which distinguishes individuals in species. The genius and poetry or art of Duncan Campbell Scott, then, impose on us a special and somewhat recondite study in literary psychology.

The key to Duncan Campbell Scott’s genius and poetry is this singular, if not anomalous, spiritual fact that his Art always, corresponds with, and never contradicts, his Thought and Life. In this ‘tri-unity’ of complete ‘correspondence’ of Thought, Life, and Art, Scott’s analogue is Matthew Arnold. The English poet was, above all things, the austere intellectualist. So, too, Duncan Campbell Scott is the austere intellectualist. But, unlike Arnold, Scott’s ‘austerities and rejections’ are not those of the substance of poetry but of its temper and technic. While it is true that Scott is the remorseless idealist as man and active citizen, and while the light that chiefly plays on his poetry is the ‘dry light’ of the intellect or imaginative reason, it is equally true that in his heart there is the warm fire of love of humanity and Nature and all the humanizing arts, and that the dry intellectual light which most notably illumines his poetry is colored, at times delicately or subtly, at times brilliantly, at other times magically, with the substance and color of Nature in Canada and of modern music and painting. As in the man and citizen, as in his Thought and Life, there is a high plane of refined and serene vision, feeling, and deed, so in his poetic Art and Style the outstanding qualities are serene Dignity and exquisite Beauty. It is always a manly and refined art; and its sensuous Beauty is made spiritual by sincerity, delicacy or nobility of thought and by imaginative truth. Never in it is there sentimentality, or vulgarity, but always humane beauty and dignity which derive from delicacy of spiritual vision and sincerity, and from restraint in technical artistry. As an example of these excellences in Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry—of its dignity and beauty, refinement and restraint—we quote this surpassing compliment to woman’s spiritual loveliness and charm, Portrait of Mrs. Clarence Gagnon (from Scott’s Beauty and Life):—

This ‘strong and delicate art’ of Scott’s was itself the outcome of years of training in delicate perception or visioning of Nature and the human Spirit and in the practice of spiritual refinement and restraint in art or technical craftsmanship; and also of assiduous cultivation in the technical appreciation of modern music and painting. Born in 1862, Duncan Campbell Scott did not publish verse till he was some years past his majority, and did not publish his first book of poems till he was thirty-one years of age (The Magic House and Other Poems, 1893). For more than forty years he has been in the Civil Service of Canada, and for some years has been Deputy Superintendent General (a title and function equivalent to Deputy Minister) of the Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion. Archibald Lampman was a contemporary and a close friend of Scott. Lampman was a student of the poetry of Keats and much influenced by the verse of the English poet. In 1894 Scott married an accomplished lady, who was a violin virtuoso. He had published fugitive poems in magazines before 1893. (His poetry was later the subject of a very complimentary critical appreciation by William Archer in Poets of the Younger Generation). He had finished his academic studies at the public schools and at Stanstead College by his seventeenth year, and had then entered the Civil Service of Canada. So that the three influences on his mind and art are, first, that which began with his friendship with Lampman; secondly, his marriage with a cultured musician, and, thirdly, his long tenure of office in the Department of Indian Affairs of the Dominion of Canada. To his association with Lampman, rather than to his teachers at school and college, must be attributed his reading of the English poets and the cultivation of poetic technics. It is not until after his marriage and after his long association with certain Canadian painters that we find in his poetry any ‘color’ from music and painting. His connection with the Department of Indian Affairs resulted in those lyrics and legends which have for themes the Indian, the French-Canadian, and the Beauty of Nature. Lampman as co-student of the English poets, especially Keats or the idyllic impressionists, and as a co-worker in creative poetry, especially the poetry of Nature, was the most potent or subtle influence on Scott. This, however, was an influence ab extra. The most important inner influence on Scott was his own intellectual rigorism and austere respect for chaste or faultless craftsmanship. But for this rare virtue, which was innate in him, Scott would or might have been a more prolific poet, and might have been a close imitator of the English impressionists or Lampman himself as a nature-poet, or of Bliss Carman as a lyrist of Nature and of Love.

There is no denying that Lampman had considerable influence, negative and positive, on Scott, and that the negative influence was the more important. At any rate, by choice Scott decided to be a poet who, while caring as much for Nature as did Lampman and Carman, would care supremely for refined perfection of technical artistry in his verse. It is easy to observe the general differences between Lampman and Carman and Scott in attitudes, and in methods of poetic conception. Lampman is the more subjective, the more interested in his own emotions; Scott is the more objective, disclosing a delight in the object for its own sake or a philosophical interest in humanity and life. Lampman is the more passionate; Scott the more restrained or austere (without being ascetic). Lampman is the more sensuously luscious (though not always); Scott the more lucid and luminously colorful. Carman is the more naturalistically sensuous, and his pigmentation is limited to the pageant of Spring and Autumn; Scott is the more imaginatively sensuous, and paints every phase of the pageantry of Nature in the cycle of the seasons of the whole year. Carman is more a melodist, basing his melody on vowel-chime in words; Scott is more the musician, the technical virtuoso—or, in other words, Carman sings or lilts, like the lark; Scott performs, like the violin or flute virtuoso, though each in his way is as entrancingly lyrical. Carman is the more vernacular in diction, employing considerably the actual speech of everyday life; Scott is the more recondite, and therefore the more meaningful, in diction—‘a word virtuoso.’ But it is not true to say, as has been said, that Scott is a ‘poet’s poet.’ He is, when he aims to be, just as lyrical, musical, colorful, and simple in diction as Lampman or Carman, but he is also more delicate or chaste, more fanciful or imaginative, more lucid or luminous, and always more subtle in diction and exquisite craftsmanship. So that whenever Scott envisages or interprets Nature in Canada and the essential spirit of Canada, more than any other native-born poet he puts more of Canada in it and does it with a singular and surpassing beauty of diction, imagery, music, color, and general technical artistry.

Thus, in outline, as regards the Canadian influences on Scott’s genius and poetry. It is necessary also to note the influence of Old World culture on his genius and art. For, like Bliss Carman’s, there is a challenging quality in Scott’s poetry which compels favorable comparison of it with the verse of English and United States poets of distinction. But while influences of certain English poets are remarked, this does not mean that Scott is derivative in inspiration or method of treatment, but that the influence was either on his ideals of what poetry is or on his meticulous practice of technical artistry in verse; or, in a phrase, their influences have been those of inspiring him to distinction in Style and Technic. In Scott’s noble monody in memory of his father, In the Country Churchyard, the formal structure and the elegiac elevation of thought fill the heart with a serene beauty which discloses the influence of Gray. There is a distinct Wordsworthian spirit and flavor to Above St. Irénée. A haunting beauty, which is of the quality of Tennyson, pervades Scott’s title poem of his first volume, The Magic House. Unmistakable is the influence of Rossetti on the form and tone-color of Scott’s sonnet sequence, In the House of Dreams, but there is enough of Scott’s own originality and ingenuity in inventing Western-world metaphors and in vowel-melody and alliteration to distinguish it as Scott’s or as Canadian or Western. The sonnet form is Rossettian, the mediaeval atmosphere and setting are Pre-Raphaelite, as are also the personages:—

The first line of the octave is, of course, Rossettian, but the fourth line (‘A blade of gladiolus, like a sword’) is not only Western but the phrase ‘like a sword’ is a common simile with Scott. In the sestet, quite Western is the picture in the second and third lines:—

The extraordinary ingenuity of the tone-unisons (not harmonies) in the third line (‘With oval spots of opal over all’) must have struck the fancy of the poet himself, because he repeats the very same vowel unisons, thus turning art into artifice, in Spring on Mattagami (from Via Borealis, 1906, reprinted in Lundy’s Lane and Other Poems, 1916):—

Quite Rossettian, at least in word-painting of fabrics and jewelry, is Scott’s picture of the drowned lady in his poem After a Night of Storm (from Beauty and Life, 1921). It is here quoted, not only to show the Rossettian influence, but also to furnish an example of how Scott works as lovingly and as painstakingly as a lapidary at his technic:—

Surely there is the art of a poet who has lingered long in the studios and ateliers, watching painters, lapidaries, and designers at work on pigments, precious stones, and delicate fabrics! Again, whose influence do we find or feel in certain parts of Spring on Mattagami and The Anatomy of Melancholy?—is it the influence of Keats or of Swinburne? It might be either in these lines from Spring on Mattagami:—

But there is no mistaking the Swinburnian manner of imaginative color and of alliterative and sensuous music in these lines from The Anatomy of Melancholy (from Beauty and Life):—

All the English poets mentioned were, however, not formative influences. At best what seems imitations of the manner of Gray, Tennyson, Rossetti, Keats, Swinburne are but recrudescences, quite unconscious and original, in Scott’s poetry. Scott is a nature-colorist, or impressionist, verbal musician and metrist, romanticist, and philosophical interpreter of Nature and Life on his own account. The real formative influences in Scott’s genius and art were the climate, atmosphere, seasons, and the color and drama of varied Nature and Humanity, of Canada; his compatriot poet of Nature, Lampman, and perhaps Carman, and these three English poets, Browning, Arnold and Meredith; and, finally, his appreciation and knowledge of the technic of music and painting.

Considering his qualities as a verbal musician and metrist, we may note that while Scott employs all the technical artifices of other Canadian and English poets, such as vowel-melody and harmony, alliteration and consonantal changes, beautiful measures and rhythms, he differs from his compatriot poets by informing, as did Browning, the substance of his poetry with an intimate use of the technical language of music, allusions to musical literature, and the aesthetic values of music. The texts of his poems show that he is acquainted technically with the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Grieg, such romantic moderns as Raff and MacDowell and such ultra-moderns as Debussy and Ravel. To anyone who has heard Beethoven’s Fifth (C-minor) Symphony, how arresting and emotionally impressive is the allusion to the principal motive of that great work, in these lines from Scott’s The Fragment of a Letter!—

Again: it is not poetical pedantry on Scott’s part when, in his elegiac monody On the Death of Claude Debussy, he rhapsodizes the forms, content, properties, color, and musical structure—‘the mood pictures’—of Debussy’s opera Pellèas et Mélisande, his orchestral prelude L’Après-midi d’un Faune, and his orchestral sketches La Mer. No musical journalist or critic, writing in prose, has done this so summarily and with such vividness and veracity as Scott has accomplished it in twenty-five lines of trimeter and tetrameter unrhymed iambics and trochaics. It is for the sake of illumination and the substance of true poetry that Scott thus finely incorporates his knowledge of music into the text of his poetry. And, as Browning made compelling use of the technical language and meanings of musical structure, notably in his Abt Vogler, so, in the Debussy monody, Scott twice finely affects the spirit and illuminates the substance of his poem with such recondite musical technology as:—

The felicity of the phrase ‘the pedal-point of the deep-bas(s)ed ocean’ is apparent to anyone who is musically trained and who immediately hears the sustained stationary bass of the sea reverberating while mingling with its thunder are chords and progressions of wave plashings and wind harmonies, all combining to make the sublime Symphony of the Sea. Still more remarkable and illuminating is Scott’s use of the phrase ‘an enharmonic change . . . . Death and Debussy.’ In music an enharmonic change is but a change in notation of intervals and chords, the sound of them remaining the same. And so how felicitous Scott’s use of ‘an enharmonic change of vision!’—Death, Debussy (who died in the last year of the late war), France, and her war heroes. These terms are all synonymous of ‘one form,’ the spirit of France; there is only an enharmonic change in notation or name.

All this is, on Scott’s part, a brilliant and—as far as Canadian poetry is concerned—a unique achievement in incorporating musical ideas and essences and technics to color, illuminate, and enhance poetic meanings. But Scott surpasses himself in this matter, creating something really unique in poetic literature, in his Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme. It is the most ingeniously conceived poem, if not in English poetry, at least in continental American poetry; and it is a signal illustration of that Old World culture which was remarked as part of the challenging quality in Scott’s poetry. The poem is ‘programmatic’ in scheme, comprising ten sections which are ‘free variations’ on a Nature theme (the yellow of the primrose), inspired by two lines from Henry Vaughan (17th century):—

The ten sections or ‘variations’ or ‘movements’ of the poem are such niceties in imitation of the forms of music that they should be properly indicated with form or tempi nomenclature, inasmuch as the poet has not done this at the head of each section or ‘variation.’ Variation I is a Prelude (in the old style), the diction of which is Chaucerian or early 15th century English. Variation II is a triple-time Vivace movement (old form of the Scherzo)—a fetching bit of lively ballad-song. Variation III is a Largo movement, noble and impressive. A short Nocturne follows in Variation IV, which is succeeded by a movement that may be styled Dramatico, a short poignant ‘play within a play,’ dealing with the tragedy of romantic love. Variation VI is an Intermezzo, a contrasting change on ‘Youth is a blossom yellow at the edge.’ Variation VII is a Funeral March for fairies, and is fairy-like in imagery and music. By itself it is as pretty and winning a poem for children as any in our language:—

Variation VIII is a very human Burlesca—a ‘genre picture’ of the comedy of life in Old London, with the ‘motive’ of a socially outcast old woman looking at pots of primroses, labelled ‘Only a quarter,’ and fingering a coin, trying to decide whether to buy primroses or spend it on beer for herself and ‘dear old Jerry.’ The pathos of its realism is relieved by the piquancy of the spiritual portrait of the outcast old woman, in whose soul there is still a fine redeeming loyalty to a real heart-love. Variation IX is a Folk Song in the manner of Burns. It is followed by a Finale, which returns to the Vaughan theme, and closes with its couplet. The Finale is ennobled with tender reflections or philosophical interpretations of the drama of earth and existence, in which Scott beautifully maintains and expresses Serene Faith in the permanence of Beauty and Love. From this magnificent and genuinely unique poem, we quote Variation IX, as an example of Scott’s gifts as a song-writer. If it is in the manner of Burns or an imitation of one of his best-known songs, it is as informed also with the spirit of Herrick, but it is melodious, by vowel-music, alliteration, and rhythm, in a way which was not in the power of Herrick or Burns:—

In that song-lyric we find Scott’s characteristic dignity and beauty. But fine and beautiful as it all is, the music of it is not the natural melodiousness of Herrick or Burns, of the lark or linnet, but the music of the adroit technical musician who is a ready master of all the resources of modern versification and metrics.

As regards these technical resources of verbal melody and music—vowel—‘tone-color’ and harmonies, alliteration, assonance, rhythm of line and stanza and other metrical structure, and even what is called in music as such ’suspension’—Scott challenges the art of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, Arnold, and the Laureate, Sir Robert Bridges. In one instance, Scott has made the most happy and ingenious use of what musicians call ‘chord suspension’—that is, the retaining in any chord some notes (or tones) of the preceding chord. Scott achieves it finely in this cadence:—

This effect of ‘suspension’ in verbal music is not new in poetry, but it is infrequent in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon people. A melodious example is the opening stanza from Collins’ Ode to Evening:—

With Collins the ‘suspension’ is an artifice rather than an inspiration. With Scott, it is, in the example instanced, an inspiration. No other modern poet, certainly no other Canadian or American poet, has Scott’s gift of verbally phrasing, with the utmost concreteness, imitative realism, and charm the ‘notes’ of bird songs and their meaning. In the cadence quoted, the effect of the ‘suspension’—‘deep, deep, deep’—is a happy realistic imitation of the tone-color of the thrush’s flute-like notes, and the triple reiteration affects the imagination with that charm which we distinguish as ‘haunting.’ Carman has not this gift of concreting bird-songs. Carman uses only the general epithet. One bird simply ‘whistles;’ another ‘flutes.’ Carman would have written the lines quoted from Scott not only without ‘suspension’ but also without any concrete, realistic imitation of the thrush’s notes and suspensions, thus:—

Scott not only makes a masterly and felicitous use of concrete tone-color epithets in phrasing the songs of birds, but he also knows how important and eloquent in music as such, as well as in the songs of birds, are pauses or silences, and uses this appreciation of silences exquisitely. Scott’s artistry in both these respects is finely shown in these lines:—

Scott, in truth, on the side of exquisite realistic concretion of the notes and cadences of bird-songs, has the ear of a naturalist—and a better ear than Thoreau or Burroughs. Scott is the ‘bird-musician’ par excellence. Witness the naturalist’s exquisite ear for concrete realism in these lines:—

Carman would have stopped with the general word ‘drumming’ in the phrase ‘hear the partridge drumming’—not so Scott; he must realistically concrete the reverberance of the drumming in the phrase ‘rolling out his mimic thunder.’ And what realistic concretion is in the phrases ‘in ringing wild persistence,’ and ‘ululating laughter!’ Carman half hears. Scott hears with the ear of the naturalist and the musician.

Again, only the ear of the naturalist and the musician in Scott could have so exquisitely, veraciously, concreted the ‘note’ of the white-throat sparrow and the lovely cadences of the vireo as in these lines:—

And:—

Scott knows the ‘voices’ of instruments as intimately as those of birds and other feathered wild creatures. How finely he combines a concrete use of his two-fold musical knowledge in this respect in the following ingenious and original bit of verbal instrumentation:—

The reader must be a naturalist and, as well, have been a bandsman or orchestral instrumentalist to feel the felicitous realism and descriptive exactitude of Scott’s art, or rather inspiration, in inventing that figure of the owl as a musician. The humor of it also is exquisite.

Scott surpasses all other Canadian poets in a genius for inventing single and double terminal rhymes, and he excels in this gift, without ever dropping to impossible or bizarre rhymes, except when the comedy of life in a subject naturally requires the use of a vulgarism as in this couplet from the Burlesca movement (VIII) of Variations on a Seventeenth Century Theme:—

As ready and expert as Carman with such other musical resources as vowel-melody and harmony, assonance, consonantal tone-color and alliteration, Scott is more lyrically melodious than even Carman. Melodiousness—dulcet melody of combined vowel and consonant and rhythm—is the supreme musical quality of Scott’s poetry. Not Tennyson nor Swinburne have surpassed the melodiousness of this stanza from Scott’s The Lover to His Lass:—

Matching the melodiousness of Scott’s poetry is its inimitable ‘color-music,’ a combination of sensuous color and alliteration, which quite rivals Swinburne. Scott’s poetry indeed abounds in the most ingenious and sensuously musical alliterative lines in Canadian verse. Outstanding examples are these:—

Such magical melody and color are not artifice or even art with Scott. It is all an inspiration, clear spontaneity of genius. If it were artifice or art it would be confined to mere phrases or lines; but Scott as readily and as magically fills stanzas with the same magical melody and color as in The Voice and The Dusk:—

There is a sylvan earthly music in the poetry of Carman, Pauline Johnson, and Marjorie Pickthall. But the music of Duncan Campbell Scott’s poetry is the melody of a fairy fantasy, an unearthly lyrical melody suffused with color which is imaginative rather than earth-born. Yet its vowel and alliterative melody, rhythmical refinement, and translucent or sensuous color are never unreal but only serve to etherealize real experience, to transport us with exquisite sensation of ineffable, unimagined beauty. To figure him under the title of one of his own most melodious and romantically imaginative poems, Duncan Campbell Scott is The Piper of Arll—and, like Debussy, regales us with:—

It is a question difficult of settlement whether Duncan Campbell Scott is greater as a verbal colorist and nature-painter than as a melodist. But there can be no doubt that as a verbal colorist and nature-painter he has the eye both of the naturalist and the impressionist. And it is indubitable that as a colorist or impressionist he has put more of the pageantry of Nature in Canada into his poetry than has even Bliss Carman. All the Canadian seasons are in it, and every phase of the light, color, and sound of the Canadian year is in it—done by ready, flexible, graphic stroke or exquisite touch, in rich or luminous and translucent coloring, with romantic eye and fantasy, and with singular ingenuity and power. It must be confessed that there is a seeming display of musical theory and technics, of musical learning, which almost savors of pedantry, in those of Scott’s poems which contain musical thought and imagery. This would be sophistication, were Scott not sincere and did he not sincerely use it all to enhance the poetic effect of his verse on the tonal sensibilities and the imagination. But there is no sophistication, no mere display of knowledge of pigments and the technic of painting in his work as a verbal colorist. He is a word-painter, a nature-colorist, an impressionist,—by innate genius. As a matter of fact, too, almost all his verbal melody is associated with color. So that, by genius rather than by art, Duncan Campbell Scott may be regarded as the supreme verbal colorist amongst Canadian poets. He is this for three reasons—inclusiveness of the seasons and phases of Nature in Canada, magic of pigmentation, and novelty and imaginative power of coloring and description.

If the poems of Scott abound in arresting and compelling phrases, lines, and stanzas of alliterative beauty, the number of brilliant and luminous color phrases, lines, and whole stanzas in his poems is astounding. The following will serve in illustration:—