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Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy

A >> Andrew Lang >> Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy



SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE BORDER MINSTRELSY




Contents:

Preface
Scott and the Ballads
Auld Maitland
The Ballad of Otterburne
Scott's Traditional Copy and how he edited it
The Mystery of the Ballad of Jamie Telfer
Kinmont Willie
Conclusions



PREFACE



Persons not much interested in, or cognisant of, "antiquarian old
womanries," as Sir Walter called them, may ask "what all the pother
is about," in this little tractate. On my side it is "about" the
veracity of Sir Walter Scott. He has been suspected of helping to
compose, and of issuing as a genuine antique, a ballad, Auld
Maitland. He also wrote about the ballad, as a thing obtained from
recitation, to two friends and fellow-antiquaries. If to Scott's
knowledge it was a modern imitation, Sir Walter deliberately lied.

He did not: he did obtain the whole ballad from Hogg, who got it
from recitation--as I believe, and try to prove, and as Scott
certainly believed. The facts in the case exist in published works,
and in manuscript letters of Ritson to Scott, and Hogg to Scott, and
in the original MS. of the song, with a note by Hogg to Laidlaw. If
we are interested in the truth about the matter, we ought at least to
read the very accessible material before bringing charges against the
Sheriff and the Shepherd of Ettrick.

Whether Auld Maitland be a good or a bad ballad is not part of the
question. It was a favourite of mine in childhood, and I agree with
Scott in thinking that it has strong dramatic situations. If it is a
bad ballad, such as many people could compose, then it is not by Sir
Walter.

The Ballad of Otterburne is said to have been constructed from Herd's
version, tempered by Percy's version, with additions from a modern
imagination. We have merely to read Professor Child's edition of
Otterburne, with Hogg's letter covering his MS. copy of Otterburne
from recitation, to see that this is a wholly erroneous view of the
matter. We have all the materials for forming a judgment accessible
to us in print, and have no excuse for preferring our own
conjectures.

"No one now believes," it may be said, "in the aged persons who lived
at the head of Ettrick," and recited Otterburne to Hogg. Colonel
Elliot disbelieves, but he shows no signs of having read Hogg's
curious letter, in two parts, about these "old parties"; a letter
written on the day when Hogg, he says, twice "pumped their memories."

I print this letter, and, if any one chooses to think that it is a
crafty fabrication, I can only say that its craft would have beguiled
myself as it beguiled Scott.

It is a common, cheap, and ignorant scepticism that disbelieves in
the existence, in Scott's day, or in ours, of persons who know and
can recite variants of our traditional ballads. The strange song of
The Bitter Withy, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered from
recitation but lately, in several English counties. The ignoble lay
of Johnny Johnston has also been recovered: it is widely diffused.
I myself obtained a genuine version of Where Goudie rins, through the
kindness of Lady Mary Glyn; and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote
procured the low English version of Young Beichan, or Lord Bateman,
from an old woman in a rural workhouse. In Shropshire my friend Miss
Burne, the president of the Folk-Lore Society, received from Mr.
Hubert Smith, in 1883, a very remarkable variant, undoubtedly
antique, of The Wife of Usher's Well. {0a} In 1896 Miss Backus
found, in the hills of Polk County, North Carolina, another variant,
intermediate between the Shropshire and the ordinary version. {0b}

There are many other examples of this persistence of ballads in the
popular memory, even in our day, and only persons ignorant of the
facts can suppose that, a century ago, there were no reciters at the
head of Ettrick, and elsewhere in Scotland. Not even now has the
halfpenny newspaper wholly destroyed the memories of traditional
poetry and of traditional tales even in the English-speaking parts of
our islands, while in the Highlands a rich harvest awaits the
reapers.

I could not have produced the facts, about Auld Maitland especially,
and in some other cases, without the kind and ungrudging aid, freely
given to a stranger, of Mr. William Macmath, whose knowledge of
ballad-lore, and especially of the ballad manuscripts at Abbotsford,
is unrivalled. As to Auld Maitland, Mr. T. F. Henderson, in his
edition of the Minstrelsy (Blackwood, 1892), also made due use of
Hogg's MS., and his edition is most valuable to every student of
Scott's method of editing, being based on the Abbotsford MSS. Mr.
Henderson suspects, more than I do, the veracity of the Shepherd.

I am under obligations to Colonel Elliot's book, as it has drawn my
attention anew to Auld Maitland, a topic which I had studied
"somewhat lazily," like Quintus Smyrnaeus. I supposed that there was
an inconsistency in two of Scott's accounts as to how he obtained the
ballad. As Colonel Elliot points out, there was no inconsistency.
Scott had two copies. One was Hogg's MS.: the other was derived
from the recitation of Hogg's mother.

This trifle is addressed to lovers of Scott, of the Border, and of
ballads, et non aultres.

It is curious to see how facts make havoc of the conjectures of the
Higher Criticism in the case of Auld Maitland. If Hogg was the
forger of that ballad, I asked, how did he know the traditions about
Maitland and his three sons, which we only know from poems of about
1576 in the manuscripts of Sir Richard Maitland? These poems in 1802
were, as far as I am aware, still unpublished.

Colonel Elliot urged that Leyden would know the poems, and must have
known Hogg. From Leyden, then, Hogg would get the information. In
the text I have urged that Leyden did not know Hogg. I am able now
to prove that Hogg and Leyden never met till after Laidlaw gave the
manuscript of Auld Maitland to Hogg.

The fact is given in the original manuscript of Laidlaw's
Recollections of Sir Walter Scott (among the Laing MSS. in the
library of the University of Edinburgh). Carruthers, in publishing
Laidlaw's reminiscences, omitted the following passage. After Scott
had read Auld Maitland aloud to Leyden and Laird Laidlaw, the three
rode together to dine at Whitehope.

"Near the Craigbents," says Laidlaw, "Mr. Scott and Leyden drew
together in a close and seemingly private conversation. I, of
course, fell back. After a minute or two, Leyden reined in his horse
(a black horse that Mr. Scott's servant used to ride) and let me come
up. 'This Hogg,' said he, 'writes verses, I understand.' I assured
him that he wrote very beautiful verses, and with great facility.
'But I trust,' he replied, 'that there is no fear of his passing off
any of his own upon Scott for old ballads.' I again assured him that
he would never think of such a thing; and neither would he at that
period of his life.

"'Let him beware of forgery,' cried Leyden with great force and
energy, and in, I suppose, what Mr. Scott used afterwards to call the
SAW TONES OF HIS VOICE."

This proves that Leyden had no personal knowledge of "this Hogg," and
did not supply the shepherd with the traditions about Auld Maitland.

Mr. W. J. Kennedy, of Hawick, pointed out to me this passage in
Laidlaw's Recollections, edited from the MS. by Mr. James Sinton, as
reprinted from the Transactions of the Hawick Archaeological Society,
1905.



SCOTT AND THE BALLADS



It was through his collecting and editing of The Border Minstrelsy
that Sir Walter Scott glided from law into literature. The history
of the conception and completion of his task, "a labour of love
truly, if ever such there was," says Lockhart, is well known, but the
tale must be briefly told if we are to understand the following
essays in defence of Scott's literary morality.

Late in 1799 Scott wrote to James Ballantyne, then a printer in
Kelso, "I have been for years collecting Border ballads," and he
thought that he could put together "such a selection as might make a
neat little volume, to sell for four or five shillings." In December
1799 Scott received the office of Sheriff of Selkirkshire, or, as he
preferred to say, of Ettrick Forest. In the Forest, as was natural,
he found much of his materials. The people at the head of Ettrick
were still, says Hogg, {1a} like many of the Highlanders even now, in
that they cheered the long winter nights with the telling of old
tales; and some aged people still remembered, no doubt in a defective
and corrupted state, many old ballads. Some of these, especially the
ballads of Border raids and rescues, may never even have been written
down by the original authors. The Borderers, says Lesley, Bishop of
Ross, writing in 1578, "take much pleasure in their old music and
chanted songs, which they themselves compose, whether about the deeds
of their ancestors, or about ingenious raiding tricks and
stratagems." {2a}

The historical ballads about the deeds of their ancestors would be
far more romantic than scientifically accurate. The verses, as they
passed from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, would
be in a constant state of flux and change. When a man forgot a
verse, he would make something to take its place. A more or less
appropriate stanza from another ballad would slip in; or the reciter
would tell in prose the matter of which he forgot the versified form.

Again, in the towns, street ballads on remarkable events, as early at
least as the age of Henry VIII., were written or printed. Knox
speaks of ballads on Queen Mary's four Maries. Of these ballads only
one is left, and it is a libel. The hanging of a French apothecary
of the Queen, and a French waiting-maid, for child murder, has been
transferred to one of the Maries, or rather to an apocryphal Mary
Hamilton, with Darnley for her lover. Of this ballad twenty-eight
variants--and extremely various they are--were collected by Professor
Child in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (ten parts, 1882-
1898). In one mangled form or another such ballads would drift at
last even to Ettrick Forest.

A ballad may be found in a form which the first author could scarcely
recognise, dozens of hands, in various generations, having been at
work on it. At any period, especially in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the cheap press might print a sheet of the
ballads, edited and interpolated by the very lowest of printer's
hacks; that copy would circulate, be lost, and become in turn a
traditional source, though full of modernisms. Or an educated person
might make a written copy, filling up gaps himself in late
seventeenth or in eighteenth century ballad style, and this might
pass into the memory of the children and servants of the house, and
so to the herds and to the farm lasses. I suspect that this process
may have occurred in the cases of Auld Maitland and of The Outlaw
Murray--"these two bores" Mr. Child is said to have styled them.

When Allan Ramsay, about 1720, took up and printed a ballad, he
altered it if he pleased. More faithful to his texts (wherever he
got them), was David Herd, in his collection of 1776, but his version
did not reach, as we shall see, old reciters in Ettrick. If Scott
found any traditional ballads in Ettrick, as his collectors certainly
did, they had passed through the processes described. They needed
re-editing of some sort if they were to be intelligible, and readable
with pleasure.

In 1800, apparently, while Scott made only brief flying visits from
the little inn of Clovenfords, on Tweed, to his sheriffdom, he found
a coadjutor. Richard Heber, the wealthy and luxurious antiquary and
collector, looked into Constable's first little bookselling shop, and
saw a strange, poor young student prowling among the books. This was
John Leyden, son of a shepherd in Roxburghshire, a lad living in
extreme poverty.

Leyden, in 1800, was making himself a savant. Heber spoke with him,
found that he was rich in ballad-lore, and carried him to Scott. He
was presently introduced into the best society in Edinburgh (which
would not happen in our time), and a casual note of Scott's proves
that he did not leave Leyden in poverty. Early in 1802, Leyden got
the promise of an East Indian appointment, read medicine furiously,
and sailed for the East in the beginning of 1803. It does not appear
that Leyden went ballad-hunting in Ettrick before he rode thither
with Scott in the spring of 1802. He was busy with books, with
editorial work, and in aiding Scott in Edinburgh. It was he who
insisted that a small volume at five shillings was far too narrow for
the materials collected.

Scott also corresponded with the aged Percy, Bishop of Dromore,
editor of the Reliques, and with Joseph Ritson, the precise
collector, Percy's bitter foe. Unfortunately the correspondence on
ballads with Ritson, who died in 1803, is but scanty; nor has most of
the correspondence with another student, George Ellis, been
published. Even in Mr. Douglas's edition of Scott's Familiar
Letters, the portion of an important letter of Hogg's which deals
with ballad-lore is omitted. I shall give the letter in full.

In 1800-01, "The Minstrelsy formed the editor's chief occupation,"
says Lockhart; but later, up to April 1801, the Forest and Liddesdale
had yielded little material. In fact, I do not know that Scott ever
procured much in Liddesdale, where he had no Hogg or Laidlaw always
on the spot, and in touch with the old people. It was in spring,
1802, that Scott first met his lifelong friend, William Laidlaw,
farmer in Blackhouse, on Douglasburn, in Yarrow. Laidlaw, as is
later proved completely, introduced Scott to Hogg, then a very
unsophisticated shepherd. "Laidlaw," says Lockhart, "took care that
Scott should see, without delay, James Hogg." {4a} These two men,
Hogg and Laidlaw, knowing the country people well, were Scott's chief
sources of recited balladry; and probably they sometimes improved, in
making their copies, the materials won from the failing memories of
the old. Thus Laidlaw, while tenant in Traquair Knowe, obtained from
recitation, The Daemon Lover. Scott does not tell us whether or not
he knew the fact that Laidlaw wrote in stanza 6 (half of it
traditional), stanza 12 (also a ballad formula), stanzas 17 and 18
(necessary to complete the sense; the last two lines of 18 are purely
and romantically modern).

We shall later quote Hogg's account of his own dealings with his raw
materials from recitation.

In January 1802 Scott published the two first volumes of The
Minstrelsy. Lockhart describes the enthusiasm of dukes, fine ladies,
and antiquarians. In the end of April 1803 the third volume
appeared, including ballads obtained through Hogg and Laidlaw in
spring 1802. Scott, by his store of historic anecdote in his
introductions and notes, by his way of vivifying the past, and by his
method of editing, revived, but did not create, the interest in the
romance of ballad poetry.

It had always existed. We all know Sidney's words on "The Douglas
and the Percy"; Addison's on folk-poetry; Mr. Pepys' ballad
collection; the ballads in Tom Durfey's and other miscellanies; Allan
Ramsay's Evergreen; Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry; Herd's
ballad volumes of 1776; Evans' collections; Burns' remakings of old
songs; Ritson's publications, and so forth. But the genius of Burns,
while it transfigured many old songs, was not often exercised on old
narrative ballads, and when Scott produced The Minstrelsy, the taste
for ballads was confined to amateurs of early literature, and to
country folk.

Sir Walter's method of editing, of presenting his traditional
materials, was literary, and, usually, not scientific. A modern
collector would publish things--legends, ballads, or folk-tales--
exactly as he found them in old broadsides, or in MS. copies, or
received them from oral recitation. He would give the names and
residences and circumstances of the reciters or narrators (Herd, in
1776, gave no such information). He would fill up no gaps with his
own inventions, would add no stanzas of his own, and the circulation
of his work would arrive at some two or three hundred copies given
away!

As Lockhart says, "Scott's diligent zeal had put him in possession of
a variety of copies in various stages of preservation, and to the
task of selecting a standard text among such a diversity of materials
he brought a knowledge of old manners and phraseology, and a manly
simplicity of taste, such as had never before been united in the
person of a poetical antiquary."

Lockhart speaks of "The editor's conscientious fidelity . . . which
prevented the introduction of anything new, and his pure taste in the
balancing of discordant recitations." He had already written that
"Scott had, I firmly believe, interpolated hardly a line or even an
epithet of his own." {8a}

It is clear that Lockhart had not compared the texts in The
Minstrelsy with the mass of manuscript materials which are still at
Abbotsford. These, copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been
published in the monumental collection of English and Scottish
Popular Ballads, in ten parts, by the late Professor Child of
Harvard, the greatest of scholars in ballad-lore. From his book we
often know exactly what kinds of copies of ballads Scott possessed,
and what alterations he made in his copies. The Ballad of Otterburne
is especially instructive, as we shall see later. But of the most
famous of Border historical ballads, Kinmont Willie, and its
companion, Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead, Scott has left no
original manuscript texts. Now into each of these ballads Scott has
written (if internal evidence be worth anything) verses of his own;
stanzas unmistakably marked by his own spirit, energy, sense of
romance, and, occasionally, by a somewhat inflated rhetoric. On this
point doubt is not easy. When he met the names of his chief,
Buccleuch, and of his favourite ancestor, Wat of Warden, Scott did,
in two cases, for those heroes what, by his own confession, he did
for anecdotes that came in his way--he decked them out "with a cocked
hat and a sword."

Sir Walter knew perfectly well that he was not "playing the game" in
a truly scientific spirit. He explains his ideas in his "Essay on
Popular Poetry" as late as 1830. He mentions Joseph Ritson's
"extreme attachment to the severity of truth," and his attacks on
Bishop Percy's purely literary treatment of the materials of his
Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765).

As Scott says, "by Percy words were altered, phrases improved, and
whole verses were inserted or omitted at pleasure." Percy
"accommodated" the ballads "with such emendations as might recommend
them to the modern taste." Ritson cried "forgery," but Percy, says
Scott, had to win a hearing from his age, and confessed (in general
terms) to his additions and decorations.

Scott then speaks reprovingly of Pinkerton's wholesale fabrication of
ENTIRE BALLADS (1783), a crime acknowledged later by the culprit
(1786). Scott applauds Ritson's accuracy, but regrets his preference
of the worst to the better readings, as if their inferiority was a
security for their being genuine. Scott preferred the best, the most
poetical readings.

In 1830, Scott also wrote an essay on "Imitations of the Ancient
Ballads," and spoke very leniently of imitations passed off as
authentic. "There is no small degree of cant in the violent
invectives with which impostors of this nature have been assailed."
As to Hardyknute, the favourite poem of his infancy, "the first that
I ever learned and the last that I shall forget," he says, "the
public is surely more enriched by the contribution than injured by
the deception." Besides, he says, the deception almost never
deceives.

His method in The Minstrelsy, he writes, was "to imitate the plan and
style of Bishop Percy, observing only more strict fidelity concerning
my originals." That is to say, he avowedly made up texts out of a
variety of copies, when he had more copies than one. This is
frequently acknowledged by Scott; what he does not acknowledge is his
own occasional interpolation of stanzas. A good example is The Gay
Gosshawk. He had a MS. of his own "of some antiquity," a MS. of Mrs.
Brown, a famous reciter and collector of the eighteenth century; and
the Abbotsford MSS. show isolated stanzas from Hogg, and a copy from
Will Laidlaw. Mr. T. F. Henderson's notes {10a} display the methods
of selection, combination, emendation, and possible interpolation.

By these methods Scott composed "a standard text," now the classical
text, of the ballads which he published. Ballad lovers, who are not
specialists, go to The Minstrelsy for their favourite fare, and for
historical elucidation and anecdote.

Scott often mentions his sources of all kinds, such as MSS. of Herd
and Mrs. Brown; "an old person"; "an old woman at Kirkhill, West
Lothian"; "an ostler at Carlisle"; Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table
Miscellany; Surtees of Mainsforth (these ballads are by Surtees
himself: Scott never suspected him); Caw's Hawick Museum (1774);
Ritson's copies, others from Leyden; the Glenriddell MSS. (collected
by the friend of Burns); on several occasions copies from recitations
procured by James Hogg or Will Laidlaw, and possibly or probably each
of these men emended the copy he obtained; while Scott combined and
emended all in his published text.

Sometimes Scott gives no source at all, and in these cases research
finds variants in old broadsides, or elsewhere.

In thirteen cases he gives no source, or "from tradition," which is
the same thing; though "tradition in Ettrick Forest" may sometimes
imply, once certainly does, the intermediary Hogg, or Will Laidlaw.

We now understand Scott's methods as editor. They are not
scientific; they are literary. We also acknowledge (on internal
evidence) his interpolation of his own stanzas in Kinmont Willie and
Jamie Telfer, where he exalts his chief and ancestor. We cannot do
otherwise (as scholars) than regret and condemn Scott's
interpolations, never confessed. As lovers of poetry we acknowledge
that, without Scott's interpolation, we could have no more of Kinmont
Willie than verses, "much mangled by reciters," as Scott says, of a
ballad perhaps no more poetical than Jock o' the Side. Scott says
that "some conjectural emendations have been absolutely necessary to
render it intelligible." As it is now very intelligible, to say
"conjectural emendations" is a way of saying "interpolations."

But while thus confessing Scott's sins, I cannot believe that he,
like Pinkerton, palmed off on the world any ballad or ballads of his
own sole manufacture, or any ballad which he knew to be forged.

The truth is that Scott was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if
he liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with Barthram's
Dirge and Anthony Featherstonhaugh, but with a long prose excerpt
from a non-existent manuscript about a phantom knight. Scott made
the plot of Marmion hinge on this myth, in the encounter of Marmion
with Wilfred as the phantasmal cavalier. He tells us that in The
Flowers of the Forest "the manner of the ancient minstrels is so
happily imitated, that it required the most positive evidence to
convince the editor that the song was of modern date." Really the
author was Miss Jane Elliot (1747-1805), daughter of Sir Gilbert
Elliot of Minto. Herd published a made-up copy in 1776. The tune,
Scott says, is old, and he has heard an imperfect verse of the
original ballad -


"I ride single on my saddle,
For the flowers o' the forest are a' wede awa'"


The CONSTANT use of double rhymes within the line -


"At e'en, in the gloaming, nae younkers are roaming,"


an artifice rare in genuine ballads, might alone have proved to Scott
that the poem of Miss Elliot is not popular and ancient.

I have cleared my conscience by confessing Scott's literary sins.
His interpolations, elsewhere mere stopgaps, are mainly to be found
in Kinmont Willie and Jamie Telfer. His duty was to say, in his
preface to each ballad, "The editor has interpolated stanza" so and
so; if he made up the last verses of Kinmont Willie from the
conclusion of a version of Archie o' Ca'field, he should have said
so; as he does acknowledge two stopgap interpolations by Hogg in Auld
Maitland. But as to the conclusion of Kinmont Willie, he did, we
shall see, make confession.

Professor Kittredge, who edited Child's last part (X.), says in his
excellent abridged edition of Child (1905), "It was no doubt the
feeling that the popular ballad is a fluid and unstable thing that
has prompted so many editors--among them Sir Walter Scott, whom it is
impossible to assail, however much the scholarly conscience may
disapprove--to deal freely with the versions that came into their
hands."

Twenty-five years after the appearance of The Border Minstrelsy, in
1827, appeared Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern.
Motherwell was in favour of scientific methods of editing. Given two
copies of a ballad, he says, "perhaps they may not have a single
stanza which is mutual property, except certain commonplaces which
seem an integral portion of the original mechanism of all our ancient
ballads . . . " By selecting the most beautiful and striking
passages from each copy, and making those cohere, an editor, he says,
may produce a more perfect and ornate version than any that exists in
tradition. Of the originals "the individuality entirely disappears."

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