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.
The gain in style is less perceptible. Scott was never a great stylist; he struck out at the very first a nervous, hurrying meter, and a strong though rather commonplace diction, upon which he never substantially improved. Abundant action, rapid transitions, stirring descriptions, common sentiments and ordinary language heightened by a dash of pomp and novelty, above all a pervading animation, spirit, intrepidity—these are the constant elements of Scott's success, present here in their accustomed measure. In the broader sense of style, however, where the word is understood to include all the processes leading to a given poetical effect, The Lady of the Lake has some advantage, even over Marmion. It contains nothing, to be sure, so fine or so typical of Scott's peculiar power, as the account of the Battle of Flodden in Marmion; the minstrel's recital of the battle of Beal' an Duine does not abide the comparison. The quieter parts of The Lady of the Lake, moreover, are sometimes disfigured by a sentimentality and 'prettiness' happily unfrequent with Scott. But the description of the approach of Roderick Dhu's war-boats, already mentioned, the superb landscape delineation in the fifth canto, and the beautiful twilight ending of canto third, can well stand as prime types of Scott's stylistic power.
