Dictionary of Literary Biography on Frederick George Scott
Frederick George Scott, an Anglican priest and a lesser member of the Confederation group of poets, was celebrated by his contemporaries for his nature lyrics, his hymns of empire, and his celebration of the young Canadian soldier at the front during World War I. His regional Laurentian lyrics were important precursors of some modern Canadian poetry--especially the"Old Song" and"Laurentian Shield"of his son Francis Reginald Scott (born in 1899). The elder Scott's religious verse and fiction offer a more explicit rendering of the Victorian pessimism underlying the poetry of his more important contemporaries Charles G. D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman.
Scott was born in Montreal in April 1861. When only six he heard the bells of parliament ring out for confederation; he became a staunch Canadian, one whose poetic nationalism was rooted in the Laurentian landscape. The second strain in his poetry, the religious, also began in early childhood when he disobeyed his parents to attend a service at St. John the Evangelist Church in Montreal, where the ritual was so High Church as to be considered "Popish." But Scott (as reported by Sydenham Lindsay in 1959), "like many another small boy ... was curious to do what was forbidden, and so he went. But when he saw surpliced choir boys preceded by a processional cross ... he was terrified and ran out of the church." Despite his fears, or perhaps because of them, this scene was permanently imprinted upon his poetic imagination: the cross became his dominant symbol and Anglo Catholicism his faith.
He received his early education in Montreal and in 1881 graduated with a B.A. from Bishops College, Quebec. In 1882 he studied theology at King's College, London, returning to Canada and Bishops College in September 1883, where he obtained an M.A. in 1884. His first book, a collection of verses on nature, evolution, death, and ecumenicalism, was privately printed as Justin and Other Poems in 1885. These early poems are informed both by personal experience and Victorian pessimism. In"A Mood,"dated March 1882, he writes of his intense fear of death, speaking of a demon that had haunted him since childhood with "death and dreams of death." Like John Webster he saw the skull beneath the skin: "And, when I gaze in rapture on the face / Of whom I love, he casts a hideous light, / That lets me see, behind the sweet, warm flesh, / The lightless skull...." Several of Scott's early narrative poems, including"Justin," and his novel Elton Hazlewood: A Memoir by His Friend Harry Vane (1891) describe the typically Victorian recognition of "life and death as they are": Hazlewood links his own spiritual crisis with that described in John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873); and Justin asks "Why men should be, why pain and sin and death, / And where were hid the lineaments of God."
In December 1885 Scott returned to England and was ordained at Coggeshall in 1886; there he resolved his spiritual doubts. In the title poem of The Soul's Quest and Other Poems (1888)--the main poem being dated November 1886--the protagonist, "the old world's soul," is described as lost on life's highway where "The road is long, the hedgerows bare, / There's the chill of death in the silent air, / And a glimmer of darkness everywhere." She (the soul) finds no rest until she embraces the way of the cross and a life of active service, heartened by the solace of Anglo-Catholic ritual: "the altar lights are shining fair, / And Jesus' cross is standing there; / The darkness brightens everywhere."
This volume also includes"In Memoriam," a poem for the young Canadians killed in the North West Rebellion of 1885: "Wild the prairie grasses wave / O'er each hero's new-made grave; / ... But the future spreads before us / Glorious in that sunset land...." The last two lines were excerpted as an epigraph to W. D. Lighthall's Songs of the Great Dominion in 1899, the major anthology of nineteenth-century Canadian poetry. Scott had returned to Canada in February 1887 when he was appointed rector at Drummondville, Quebec, and his verse caught the epic note of heroism and the promise of Canada's future, two important strains in this post-Confederation era. On 27 April 1887 Scott married Amy Brook; they eventually had seven children.
In 1894 he published My Lattice and Other Poems, some of which, such as"Samson"and"Natura Victrix,"are a continuation of his earlier religious didacticism; however,"My Lattice,"a spontaneous description of the northern landscape, introduces a new and fresher strain that continued in the Wordsworthian title poem of The Unnamed Lake and Other Poems, published in 1897."The Unnamed Lake" depicts a Canadian wilderness where no man has been:
Along the shore a heron flew,
And from a speck on high,
That hovered in the deepening blue,
We heard the fish-hawk's cry.
Among the cloud-capt solitudes,
No sound the silence broke,
Save when, in whispers down the woods,
The guardian mountains spoke.
Scott's Canadianism, as was customary in this period, was closely allied with his imperialism; in 1899 he had preached to the Canadian troops leaving for the Boer War from his new parish of St. Matthews in Quebec City. In 1900 he published Poems Old and New and in 1906 A Hymn of Empire, and Other Poems, both including political poems. In 1914, two days after the declaration of the Great War, Scott volunteered for service. He was appointed chaplain in October 1914 and traveled to England. When it became apparent that he would not be dispatched to the front, he boarded a transport ship bound for France and calmly attached himself to the nearest Canadian group, the 15th Battalion of the First Division. Because of his extraordinary spirit and bravery under fire, Scott, a lieutenant colonel, returned to Canada in 1919 as a war hero decorated with the C.M.G. (Companion of St. Michael and St. George) and D.S.O. (Distinguished Service Order), the "beloved padre" who told his own story in The Great War as I Saw It (1922). The record of the war years is also expressed in Scott's In the Battle Silences: Poems Written at the Front (1916); the young soldier is seen as a Galahad in a chivalric crusade for king and country.
Scott's celebration of Canada and Canadians struck a resonant note with his contemporaries; his religious poems were appreciated, too, although as Thomas Adams noted in 1898, those "who talk of art for art's sake would perhaps decide that he is too fond of sermons in verse." In 1919 Melvin O. Hammond identified the dominant strains in Scott's poetry as a love for the Canadian northland and a pronounced imperialism. His"Hymn of Empire," Hammond shrewdly observed, was "fervent beyond the thoughts of native Britons." Scott's religious and imperialist poetry, topical in his lifetime, has seemed less relevant to later generations, and the only extended treatment of his nature poetry by a contemporary critic is Louis Dudek's analysis of the similarities between Scott's poetry and that of his son F. R. Scott.
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