R ECEPCIÓN DE LA OBRA

Publicado en julio de 1811, The Vision of Don Roderick fue, a pesar de la negativa de Scott a dar su consentimiento para la publicación, muy bien recibido por los lectores, recaudando muy rápidamente una buena cantidad de guineas para la Guerra de Portugal. La reacción de la crítica fue diversa, dependiendo de las revistas, The Quarterly Review,

Edinburgh Review, Critical Review, Eclectic Review, etc. Veamos algunas

de las opiniones más reputadas:

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART: "In the beginning of 1811, a committee was

formed in London for the relief of the Portuguese, who had seen their lands wasted, their vines torn up, and their houses burnt in the course of Massena's last unfortunate campaign; and Scott, on reading an advertisement, immediately addressed Mr. Whitman, the chairman, begging that the committee would allow him to contribute to the fund the profits, to whatever they might amount, of a poem which he proposed to write upon a subject connected with the localities of the patriotic struggle... The production, notwithstanding the complexity of the Spenserian stanza, had been very rapidly executed; and it shows, accordingly, many traces of negligence. But the patriotic inspiration of it found an echo in the vast majority of British hearts; many of the Whig oracles themselves acknowledged that the difficulties of the metre had been on the whole successfully overcome; and even the hardest critics were compelled to express unqualified admiration of various detached pictures and passages, which, in truth, as no one now disputes, neither he nor any other poet ever excelled. The whole setting or framework — whatever

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relates in short to the last of the Goths himself — was, I think, even then unanimously pronounced admirable; and not party feeling could blind any man to the heroic splendor of such stanzas as those in which the three equally gallant elements of a British army are contrasted. I incline to believe that the choice of the measure had been in no small degree the result of those hints which Scott received on the subject of his favorite octosyllabics, more especially from Ellis and Canning; and, as we shall see presently, he about this time made more than one similar experiment, in all likelihood from the same motive" Life of Scott (1837-38; 1902) 2:216, 221.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: "If I may judge from the extracts in the

Monthly, Don Roderick is a falling off indeed. Scott certainly does not excel in the Spenser stanza. He has been so long accustomed to make the measure bend to him, that he can not bend to the measure, and a consequence results from it something similar to that in the Taming of the Shrew: 'Why, then, thou canst no break her to the lute? Why, no; for she hath broke the lute on me!'" 19 April 1811; Life of Mary Russell Mitford (1870) 1:109.

THOMAS CAMPBELL (a Archibald Alison): "Scott's Vision I have seen a

part of. It is bold, and dignified, and quite worthy of him.... As to the cause of the Spaniards and Portuguese, I do not blush to own that I can hardly pronounce a blessing on it. At this moment there are thousands — in the course of the year there are scores of thousands — of miserable Africans, groaning under the positive sanction of the Slave-trade by those two nations" 14 July 1811; William Beattie, Life

and Letters of Thomas Campbell (1849) 2:206.

FRANCIS HODGSON: "This hasty production of a Poet, otherwise not

celebrated for the patient revision of his labours, is dedicated to the Committee of Subscribers for the relief of the Portuguese sufferers... If we are again called to subjoin our general sentiments respecting the claims of Mr. Scott to the high station of popular favour in which he stands, we have little to remark that we have not often remarked before, on the leading features of his poetic character. Nature has done everything for him: Art has added much: he abounds in cultivated genius; and he wants nothing (we speak it 'in sorrow rather than in anger') but a more correct and more exalted taste: — a taste that would at once impel him to the choice of some noble subject, worthy of his highest mood of enthusiasm, and would chastise his style by purer methods of composition" Monthly Review NS 65 (July 1811) 293, 303.

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FRANCIS JEFFREY: "It has been received with less interest by the public

than any of the author's other performances; — and has been read, we should imagine, with some degree of disappointment, even by those who took it up with the most reasonable expectations. Yet it is written with very considerable spirit, — and with more care and effort, than most of the author's compositions; — with a degree of effort, indeed, which could scarcely have failed of success, if the author had not succeeded so splendidly on other occasions without any effort at all, or had chosen any other subject than that which fills the cry of our alehouse politicians, and supplies the gabble of all the quidnuncs in this country, —our pending campaigns in Spain and Portugal—, with the exploits of Lord Wellington and the spoliations of the French armies. The nominal subject of the poem, indeed, is the Vision of Don Roderick, in the eighth century; — but this is obviously a mere prelude to the grand piece of our recent battles — a sort of machinery devised to give dignity and effect to their introduction. In point of fact, the poem begins and ends with Lord Wellington; and being written for time benefit of the plundered Portuguese, and upon a Spanish story, the thing could not well have been otherwise. The pubic, at this moment, will listen to nothing about Spain, but the history of the present war; and the old Gothic King, and the Moors, are considered, we dare say, by Mr. Scott's most impatient readers, as very tedious interlopers in the proper business of the piece"

Edinburgh Review 18 (August 1811) 380.

Universal Magazine: "it may be observed, that since the days of

Spenser some of the greatest poets that ever Britain produced have exhausted all their stores of fancy and language on the composition of poems in this measure: and though the merits of these poems have been acknowledged, the poems have scarcely ever been perused. Of these candidates for literary honours we need only mention Thomson and Campbell. What labour have they bestowed on their poems in that measure! and how little have these poems added to their characters as men of genius in the eye of popular estimation? Unawed by the experience of others, Mr. Scott has boldly taken up the gauntlet, and entered as a candidate in that list where Beattie alone has proved successful, in hopes by his bold imagery to carry all before him, and add the palm of sublimity to that delicate artificial wreath with which his temples were previously entwined; and which was modeled from the simplicity and fire of the ancient romance, and blended with a rich tissue of modern manufacture. This attempt has, contrary to expectation, led to a failure similar to those of former adventurers in the same scheme; and to a failure for a much larger sum" NS 16 (August 1817) 126.

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ROBERT ANDERSON (a Thomas Percy): "At length the Vision of Don

Roderick is come out, which was expected to claim for its author a distinguished rank among the classical poets of our nation. Never was expectation raised so high, and never was disappointment more universal. It is written in the stanza of an acknowledged classical poet, which had been happily imitated in a few stanzas in his last poem, but he has completely failed in challenging a rival ship with the great father of allegorical poetry, in every respect. Even his admirable talent for description is seldom visible, except perhaps in his picture of the troops of which the allied armies is composed, English, Scottish, and Irish; the last rather incorrectly, as the Irish regiments are more in name than in reality. The subject of the poem is founded on an historical tradition respecting Don Rodrigo, the last of the Gothic kings of Spain. Mr. Scott has made no mention of a poem with the same title, printed in the ninth volume of El Parnaso Español, published at Madrid in 1772, which has been imitated with great elegance and spirit by Mr. Russell in his Poems, printed in 1788. The Vision terminates in the defeat of Rodrigo by the Saracens, invited by Count Julian to avenge himself of the violence offered to Caba, his daughter. Scott's plan is more extensive, and includes the late events in the Peninsula, so interesting to the generous sympathy of the British nation: yet, unfortunately, that is the least interesting part of the poem. The whole is heavy, flat, and unimpressive" 17 August 1811; in Nichols, Illustrations (1817-58) 7:218.

ROBERT SOUTHEY: "The execution is a triumphant answer to those

persons who have supposed you could not move with ease in a meter less loose than that of your great poems. To me it appears, on the whole, better written than those greater works, for this very reason — you have taken fewer licenses of language, and have united with the majesty of that fine stanza (the most perfect that ever was constructed) an ease which is a perfect contrast to the stiffness of Gertrude of Wyoming" 8 September 1811; in Life and

Correspondence (1849-50) 3:315.

GEORGE CANNING: "I am very glad that you have essayed a new meter

— new I mean for you to use. That which you have chosen is perhaps at once the most artificial and the most magnificent the language affords; and your success in it ought to encourage you to believe, that for you, at least, the majestic march of Dryden (to my ear the perfection of harmony) is not, as you seem to pronounce it, irrecoverable. Am I wrong in imagining that Spenser does not use the plusquam-Alexandrine — the verse which is as much longer than an Alexandrine, as an Alexandrine is longer than an ordinary heroic measure? I have no books where I am, to which to refer. You use this

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— and in the first stanza" 1811; in Lockhart, Life of Scott (1837-38; 1902) 2:222.

JOSEPH DENNIE: "The measure (that of Spencer) is happily selected for

the poet's purpose. There is in that measure a cumbrous gravity, well apportioned to the expression of grand and magnificent objects. The long protracted conclusion and the stately march of the verse allow leisure for the mind to peruse and meditate" Port Folio [Philadelphia] S3 6 (October 1811) 393-94.

WALTER SCOTT (en respuesta a la Edinburgh Review): "I agree with

them, however, as to the lumbering weight of the stanza, and I shrewdly suspect it would require a very great poet indeed to prevent the tedium arising from the recurrence of rhymes. Our language is unable to support the expenditure of so many for each stanza: even Spenser himself, with all the license of using obsolete words and uncommon spellings, sometimes fatigues the ear" 26 November 1811; in Lockhart: Life of Scott (1837-38; 1902) 2:226.

ALLAN CUNNINGHAM: "Don Roderick was sharply handled by the critics;

it did not suit with the aim of the poem, which was to arouse the spirit of resistance against an usurper in Spain and Portugal, to describe repulse and defeat: had the poet related the disastrous retreat of Sir John Moore, he would have destroyed the unity as well as the propriety of his poem. The chief fault of the work was the strange long step which the author took, from the days of King Roderick to those of Lord Wellington; the olden times mingled ungracefully with latter events; the story seemed like a creature with a broken back — the extremities were living, but there was no healthy or muscular connexion" The Athenaeum (6 October 1832) 646.

EDMUND GOSSE: "The Vision of Don Roderick is now little read, for the

Spenserian stanza in which it is written is less attractive in Scott's hands than his easy, accustomed octosyllabics, yet the conclusion of it, where he lays the medieval legend wholly aside, and concentrates his attention on the deeds of our Peninsular forces, is often vigorous" "Napoleonic Wars in English Poetry" in Inter Arma (1916) 126.

MARJORIE GARSON: "The most thoroughly Spenserian of the longer

poems, The Bridal of Triermain, an apocryphal Arthurian tale culminating in an allegorical quest, and The Vision of Don Roderick, an historical pageant (in Scott's favorite Spenserian stanzas) recalling Merlin's disclosures to Britomart (FQ III iii 26-50), are the slightest and least seminal" Spenser Encyclopedia (1990) 633.

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