John Scott of Amwell (review)

54Bulletin of Friends Historical Association be grateful for the good things they get—like Mr. Tolles' Logan—yet they will wish that the first modern biography of James Logan had been twice as long. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin,Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. Philadelphia and New Haven. John Scott of Amwell. By Lawrence D. Stewart. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956. xi, 236 pages. $3.50. Aside from the scholarly interest and importance of this book, Friends will read it as a delicately and significantly documented and reasoned study of the contest between the quietistic and the social ideals of eighteenth-century Quakerism in the heart of a minor poet who was deeply committed to the tradition of his faith and at the same time deeply moved by the new current in sensibility which was to culminate in the poetry of Wordsworth. The story of the spiritual struggle is not overdramatized , but this new record of Scott's spiritual pilgrimage does escape the limitations of the early life by John Hoole, which Mr. Stewart not unfairly calls "pedantic, dull, wearisome, and uninformative." There were really two struggles in Scott's life—both of them inward, for his outward experience was not dramatic. His education centered around the home of his well-to-do father in Amwell in Hertfordshire; it stopped far short of the university though it was continued by the cultivation of literary interests with a few friends, the sister of one of whom Scott married in 1767, when he was in his thirty-eighth year; and its inevitable result was to develop "the conventional youth" and "the timid poet" who are the subjects of Mr. Stewart's two opening chapters. The attachments of these early years committed the boy to be the father of the man who was John Scott of Amwell, and to be the author of Amwell: A Descriptive Poem, which he was not willing to regard as ready for publication until 1776. "It took him the larger part of his life to outgrow his teachers," says Mr. Stewart (p. 16); his "completely imitative genius" found perhaps its best nurture, though a confining one, in the "hothouse air of pseudo-intellectualism" in the circle of friends frequenting the home of the wealthy maltster in Amwell. For lovers of poetry, the inward struggle in Scott's life that is of greatest interest was his wavering attraction to the conventional themes and forms of the eighteenth century which stimulated him to write his early pastorals and to the romantic charm of verse like that published in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1754 as "occasioned by the Description of the AEOLIAN HARP." Mr. Stewart traces the telltale notes of that harp through much of his later work, but at the same time we are shown that those notes were not merely sentimental. As years passed, Scott developed a critical theory of his own, and—while Mr. Stewart apologizes for it as having been based upon "a rather inexact notion of what is poetry" (p. 173)—we are given good evidence that Scott's innate poetic gift and careful, sensitive cultivation of his talent perhaps enabled him to "pass on Book Reviews55 to Wordsworth ... the basic notion that a precise observation can produce a precise image" (p. 15). So we are finally left with the thought that Scott combined the feeling of a religious devotee of nature like Izaak Walton in the seventeenth century with the sensuously more perceptive (if not spiritually more delicate) response to nature that we have in Wordsworth 's poems. For Friends whose interest is less in poetry than it is in the growth of the humanitarian concerns of the Society in the last two centuries, the most important struggle in Scott's inward life was between his singlehearted , youthful devotion to his Quaker faith and the growing interest in public affairs which resulted in his outgrowing of the romantic aestheticism so extravagantly expressed in his construction of the famous grotto in his garden at Amwell, and in his writing in his later years of influential studies like his article on "the Present State of the Parochial and Vagrant Poor" in the London...