Herbert Tucker on Lay and Marmion

Herbert F. Tucker has written an enormous book on epic and long poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods, called Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (Oxford University Press 2008) (you can use Amazon's 'click to look inside' facility to read p.121f. on Lay or p.137f. on Marmion).

So what does he say? Well, with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Tucker dashes through some of the material I covered in the lecture:

The Lay skirted epic borders. This would have been instantly apparent to readers whose sharp memory of the Ossian controversy was kept fresh by editions of balladry, themselves controversial ... from revised versions of Percy's Reliques to Joseph Ritson's Ancient Songs (1790) and subsequent collections to Scott's own Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (180203), which would reach a third edition by 1806. George Ellis's thorough scholarship in Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances, published the same year as The Lay, set Scott's chosen genre on a continuum running from trouveur balladry through 'something like an epic fable' in the 'ruder hands' of the Normans, to the Italian refinement of 'a new and splendid species of epic poetry.' Among contemporary poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge had adapted these forms with epoch-making originality in Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the unpublished but circulating 'Christabel'. [121-22]

There's some interesting stuff on the other end of that link to Ellis's collection, up there; you might want to check it out. Tucker goes on to argue that the Lay's success lay in 'foregrounding narrative as performance':

Neither the central-casting Minstrel, not the Duchess who favours the entertainment is memorably drawn; and it is plan from the kindly intercalations of the Dickess and her ladies that even they do not value the story he offers them much more highly than the dispassionate modern reader can. Yet all this scarcely matters. The secret of the poem's success lay elsewhere: in the means of its transmission, in the ingenious modulation of new-old verse and in the presentation of the narrative frame as itself a text in motion, ie a narrative possessing independent value. ... For [contemporary epic poets] Cumberland, Blake, Southey and the rest the relation of past to present remained serenely unproblematic, Not so, however, for Scott or, to judge from the enthusiasm The Lay excited, for the reading public either. History was a problem, not just a resource. With unobtrusive genius Scott both acknowledged the problem abd proposed to solve it through the continuity-therapy that a sympathetic writer and reader might conspire to effect. [123-4]

This 'continuity-therapy', I think, has to do with the way Scott gives weight to both the present-day framing device and the historical tale, and does so in a way that engages and involves his readership. But Tucker thinks Marmion is an even greater achievement.

This poem of 1808 was an epic transaction that brilliantly infused into the entertaining sophistication of the Lay a tone and an ethos addressing the national trouble that contemporary epics of a more turgid sort had begun churning up. Instructed perhaps by [Southey's] Madoc, which he read more than once, Scott showed in Marmion how heroes' guilt and victims' history might conspire to support a narrative economy of loss and gain; and he suggested how a reader's speculative investment in such a narrative economy might redound to the national interest. He did so by correlating the breaking and keeping of faith, at several stuctural levels, with the maintenance of continuity between past and present on which personal identity and British history alike depended; and by infusing into the narrated flow of heroic psychology the epochal theme of historical change which The Lay of the Last Minstrel had been content merely to stage. [137]

Tucker's reading of Marmion is a dozen dense-pages long, and I can't do justice to it here. His main argument is that Scott uses medieval history as a way of writing about Modernity, paradoxical as that sounds: 'Modernity is a chronically recurrent condition, one that sustains itself by running back to an origin it discernibly yet incompletely differs from. harbouring the incompleteness of that difference as guilt -- accepted because shared, and carried forward because perennially unpaid -- is the work of national history as Scott momentously defined it for the nineteenth-century. And he taught the world how to do this work in the novel only after undertaking it first in epic poetry, the literary genre with which national history was most firmly associated in his lifetime.' [144] Tucker doesn't have much time for the other Scott long poems, though.

In The Lady of the Lake (1810) and Rokeby (1813) Scott untwined for separate consideration historical factors that the epic web of Marmion had woven together: in the former, the conflict between waning and emerging cultural formations, represented in figures who are nearly allegories of thsoe formations; in the latter, the narrative burden of guilt as it fastens on, and bends inward into personhood, figures enmeshed in the density of national events, the latter now further complicated by New World buccaneering. Scott's decline hereafter through perfunctory self-imitation in The Bridal of Triermain (1813) and The Lord of the Isles (1815), towards the outright parody of Harold the Dauntless: a Poem in Six Cantos (1817) confirms that by mid-decade he had designated Byron his heir in metrical romance and was saving himself for prose fiction. [146]

Harold is pretty weak, I agree; but this seems to me hard on both Triermain and Lord of the Isles, both pretty interesting poems in various ways, I think.