Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy
Sir Walter Scott and the Border MinstrelsyPREFACESCOTT AND THE BALLADSAULD MAITLANDOLD MAITLAND A VERY ANCIENT SONGWHAT IS AULD MAITLAND?THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNESCOTT’S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED ITTHE MYSTERY OF THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFERKINMONT WILLIECONCLUSIONSFOOTNOTESCopyright
Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy
Andrew Lang
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 copy 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.WhetherAuld Maitlandbe 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.TheBallad of Otterburneis 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
ofOtterburne, with Hogg’s
letter covering his MS. copy ofOtterburnefrom 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 recitedOtterburneto 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 ofThe Bitter
Withy, unknown to Professor Child, was recovered
from recitation but lately, in several English counties. The
ignoble lay ofJohnny Johnstonhas also been recovered: it is widely diffused. I
myself obtained a genuine version ofWhere Goudie
rins, through the kindness of Lady Mary Glyn;
and a friend of Lady Rosalind Northcote procured the low English
version ofYoung Beichan,
orLord 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, ofThe 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, aboutAuld Maitlandespecially, 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 toAuld Maitland, Mr. T. F. Henderson, in his edition of theMinstrelsy(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 toAuld
Maitland, a topic which I had studied “somewhat
lazily,” like Quintus Smyrnæus. 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 ofAuld
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 ofAuld
Maitlandto Hogg.The fact is given in the original manuscript of
Laidlaw’sRecollections 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
readAuld Maitlandaloud 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 thesaw 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’sRecollections,
edited from the MS. by Mr. James Sinton, as reprinted from
theTransactionsof the Hawick
Archæological Society, 1905.
SCOTT AND THE BALLADS
It was through his collecting and editing ofThe Border Minstrelsythat 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 hisEnglish 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 ofAuld Maitlandand ofThe 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 theReliques, 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’sFamiliar 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 Minstrelsyformed 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
Dæmon 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
ofThe 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’sEvergreen; Bishop Percy’sReliques 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 producedThe 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
inThe Minstrelsywith the mass
of manuscript materials which are still at Abbotsford. These,
copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been published in the
monumental collection ofEnglish 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. TheBallad of
Otterburneis 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 hisReliques 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 ofentire 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 toHardyknute, 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 inThe 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 isThe 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 toThe
Minstrelsyfor 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’sTea-Table Miscellany; Surtees of
Mainsforth (these ballads are by Surtees himself: Scott never
suspected him); Caw’sHawick 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 inKinmont WillieandJamie 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 ofKinmont
Williethan verses, “much mangled by reciters,”
as Scott says, of a ballad perhaps no more poetical thanJock 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.”