Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy - Andrew Lang 3 стр.

I give my reasons, though I entertain but slight hope of convincing my courteous opponent. That is always a task rather desperate. But the task leads me, in defence of a great memory, into a countryside, and into old times on the Border, which are so alluring that, like Socrates, I must follow where the logos guides me. To one conclusion it guides me, which startles myself, but I must follow the logos, even against the verdict of Professor Child, notre maître à tous. In some instances, I repeat, positive proof of the correctness of my views is impossible; all that I can do is to show that Colonel Elliots contrary opinions also fall far short of demonstration, or are demonstrably erroneous.

AULD MAITLAND

The ballad of Auld Maitland holds in The Border Minstrelsy a place like that of the Doloneia, or Tenth Book, in the Iliad. Every professor of the Higher Criticism throws his stone at the Doloneia in passing, and every ballad-editor does as much to Auld Maitland. Professor Child excluded it from his monumental collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, fragments, and variants, for which Mr. Child and his friends and helpers ransacked every attainable collection of ballads in manuscript, and ballads in print, as they listened to the last murmurings of ballad tradition from the lips of old or young.

Mr. Child, says his friend and pupil, Professor Kittredge, possessed a kind of instinct for distinguishing what is genuine and traditional, or modern, or manipulated, or, if I may say so, faked in a ballad.

This instinct, trained by thirty years of study, had become wonderfully swift in its operations, and almost infallible. A forged or retouched piece could not escape him for a moment: he detected the slightest jar in the ballad ring. 10

But all old traditional ballads are masses of retouches, made through centuries, by reciters, copyists, editors, and so forth. Unluckily, Child never gave in detail his reasons for rejecting that treasure of Sir Walters, Auld Maitland. Child excluded the poem sans phrase. If he did this, like Falstaff on instinct, one can only say that antiquarian instincts are never infallible. We must apply our reason to the problem, What is Auld Maitland?

Colonel Elliot has taken this course. By far the most blighting of the many charges made by Colonel Elliot against Sir Walter Scott are concerned with the ballad of Auld Maitland. 11 After stating that, in his opinion, several stanzas of the ballad are by Sir Walter himself, Colonel Elliot sums up his own ideas thus:

My view is that Hogg, in the first instance, tried to palm off the ballad on Scott, and failed; and then Scott palmed it off on the public, and succeeded.. let us, as gentlemen and honest judges, admit that the responsibility of the deception rests rather on the laird (Scott) than on the herd (Hogg.) 12

If Colonel Elliots views were correct (and it is absolutely erroneous), the guilt of the laird would be great. Scott conspires with a shepherd, a stranger, to palm off a forgery on the public. Scott issues the forgery, and, what is worse, in a private letter to a learned friend, he utters what I must borrow words for: he utters cold and calculated falsehoods about the manner in which, and the person from whom, he obtained what he calls my first copy of the song. If Hogg and Scott forged the poem, then when Scott told his tale of its acquisition by himself from Laidlaw, Scott lied.

Colonel Elliot is ignorant of the facts in the case. He gropes his way under the misleading light of a false date, and of fragments torn from the context of a letter which, in its complete form, has never till now been published. Where positive and published information exists, it has not always come within the range of the critics researches; had it done so, he would have taken the information into account, but he does not. Of the existence of Scotts first copy of the ballad in manuscript our critic seems never to have heard; certainly he has not studied the MS. Had he done so he would not assign (on grounds like those of Homeric critics) this verse to Hogg and that to Scott. He would know that Scott did not interpolate a single stanza; that spelling, punctuation, and some slight verbal corrections, with an admirable emendation, were the sum of his industry: that he did not even excise two stanzas of, at earliest, eighteenth century work.

I must now clear up misconceptions which have imposed themselves on all critics of the ballad, on myself, for example, no less than on Colonel Elliot: and must tell the whole story of how the existence of the ballad first became known to Scotts collector and friend, William Laidlaw, how he procured the copy which he presented to Sir Walter, and how Sir Walter obtained, from recitation, his second copy, that which he printed in The Minstrelsy in 1803.

In 1801 Scott, who was collecting ballads, gave a list of songs which he wanted to Mr. Andrew Mercer, of Selkirk. Mercer knew young Will Laidlaw, farmer in Blackhouse on Yarrow, where Hogg had been a shepherd for ten years. Laidlaw applied for two ballads, one of them The Outlaw Murray, to Hogg, then shepherding at Ettrick House, at the head of Ettrick, above Thirlestane. Hogg replied on 20th July 1801. He could get but a few verses of The Outlaw from his maternal uncle, Will Laidlaw of Phawhope. He said that, from traditions known to him, he could make good songs, but without Mr. Scotts permission this would be an imposition, neither could I undertake it without an order from him in his own handwriting.. 13 Laidlaw went on trying to collect songs for Scott. We now take his own account of Auld Maitland from a manuscript left by him. 14

I heard from one of the servant girls, who had all the turn and qualifications for a collector, of a ballad called Auld Maitland, that a grandfather (maternal) of Hogg could repeat, and she herself had several of the first stanzas, which I took a note of, and have still the copy. This greatly aroused my anxiety to procure the whole, for this was a ballad not even hinted at by Mercer in his list of desiderata received from Mr. Scott. I forthwith wrote to Hogg himself, requesting him to endeavour to procure the whole ballad. In a week or two I received his reply, containing Auld Maitland exactly as he had received it from the recitation of his uncle Will of Phawhope, corroborated by his mother, who both said they learned it from their father, a still older Will of Phawhope, and an old man called Andrew Muir, who had been servant to the famous Mr. Boston, minister of Ettrick. Concerning Laidlaws evidence, Colonel Elliot says not a word.

This copy of Auld Maitland, with the superscription outside

all in Hoggs hand, is now at Abbotsford. We next have, through Carruthers using Laidlaws manuscript, an account of the arrival of Scott and Leyden at Blackhouse, of Laidlaws presentation of Hoggs manuscript, which Scott read aloud, and of their surprise and delight. Scott was excited, so that his burr became very perceptible. 15

The time of year when Scott and Leyden visited Yarrow was not the autumn vacation of 1802, as Lockhart erroneously writes, 16 but the spring vacation of 1802. The spring vacation, Mr. Macmath informs me, ran from 11th March to 12th May in 1802. In May, apparently, Scott having obtained the Auld Maitland MS. in the vernal vacation of the Court of Session, gave his account of his discovery to his friend Ellis (Lockhart does not date the letter, but wrongly puts it after the return to Edinburgh in November 1802).

Scott wrote thus: We (John Leyden and himself) have just concluded an excursion of two or three weeks through my jurisdiction of Selkirkshire, where, in defiance of mountains, rivers, and bogs, damp and dry, we have penetrated the very recesses of Ettrick Forest.. I have.. returned loaded with the treasures of oral tradition. The principal result of our inquiries has been a complete and perfect copy of Maitland with his Auld Berd Graie, referred to by [Gawain] Douglas in his Palice of Honour (1503), along with John the Reef and other popular characters, and celebrated in the poems from the Maitland MS. (circ. 1575). You may guess the surprise of Leyden and myself when this was presented to us, copied down from the recitation of an old shepherd, by a country farmer.. Many of the old words are retained, which neither the reciter nor the copyer understood. Such are the military engines, sowies, springwalls (springalds), and many others.. 17

That Scott got the ballad in spring 1802 is easily proved. On 10th April 1802, Joseph Ritson, the crabbed, ill-tempered, but meticulously accurate scholar, who thought that ballad-forging should be made a capital offence, wrote thus to Scott:

I have the pleasure of enclosing my copy of a very ancient poem, which appears to me to be the original of The Wee Wee Man, and which I learn from Mr. Ellis you are desirous to see. In Scotts letter to Ellis, just quoted, he says: I have lately had from him (Ritson) a copie of Ye litel wee man, of which I think I can make some use. In return, I have sent him a sight of Auld Maitland, the original MS.. I wish him to see it in puris naturalibus. The precaution here taken was very natural, says Lockhart, considering Ritsons temper and hatred of literary forgeries. Scott, when he wrote to Ellis, had received Ritsons The Wee Wee Man lately: it was sent to him by Ritson on 10th April 1802. Scott had already, when he wrote to Ellis, got the original MS. of Auld Maitland (now in Abbotsford Library). By 10th June 1802 Ritson wrote saying, You may depend on my taking the utmost care of Old Maitland, and returning it in health and safety. I would not use the liberty of transcribing it into my manuscript copy of Mrs. Browns ballads, but if you will signify your permission, I shall be highly gratified. 18 Your ancient and curious ballad, he styles the piece.

Thus Scott had Auld Maitland in May 1802; he sent the original MS. to Ritson; Ritson received it graciously; he had, on 10th April 1802, sent Scott another MS., The Wee Wee Man: and when Scott wrote to Ellis about his surprise at getting a complete and perfect copy of Maitland, he had but lately received The Wee Wee Man, sent by Ritson on 10th April 1802. He had made a spring, not an autumn, raid into the Forest.

We now know the external history of the ballad. Laidlaw, hearing his servant repeat some stanzas, asks Hogg for the full copy, which Hogg sends with a pedigree from which he never wavered. Auld Andrew Muir taught the song to Hoggs mother and uncle. Hogg took it from his uncles recitation, and sent it, directed outside,

and Laidlaw gave it to Scott, in March 12May 12, 1802. But Scott, publishing the ballad in The Minstrelsy (1803), says it is given as written down from the recitation of the mother of Mr. James Hogg, who sings, or rather chants, it with great animation (manifestly he had heard the recitation which he describes).

It seems that Scott, before he wrote to Ellis in May 1802, had misgivings about the ballad. Says Carruthers, he made another visit to Blackhouse for the purpose of getting Laidlaw as a guide to Ettrick, being curious to see the poetical shepherd.

Laidlaws MS., used by Carruthers, describes the wild ride by the marshes at the head of the Loch of the Lowes, through the bogs on the knees of the hills, down a footpath to Ramseycleuch in Ettrick. They sent to Ettrick House for Hogg; Scott was surprised and pleased with Jamess appearance. They had a delightful evening: the qualities of Hogg came out at every instant, and his unaffected simplicity and fearless frankness both surprised and pleased the Sheriff. 19 Next morning they visited Hogg and his mother at her cottage, and Hogg tells how the old lady recited Auld Maitland. Hogg gave the story in prose, with great vivacity and humour, in his Domestic Manners of Sir Walter Scott (1834).

In an earlier poetical address to Scott, congratulating him on his elevation to the baronetcy (1818), the Shepherd says

(Stanza xliii. as printed. In Hoggs MS. copy, given to Laidlaw there are two verbal differences, in lines 1 and 4.)

Then says Hogg

Hogg could not thus describe the scene in addressing Scott himself, in 1818, if his story were not true. It thus follows that his mother knew the sixty-five stanzas of the ballad by heart. Does any one believe that, as a woman of seventy-two, she learned the poem to back Hoggs hoax? That he wrote the poem, and caused her to learn it by rote, so as to corroborate his imposture?

This is absurd.

But now comes the source of Colonel Elliots theory of a conspiracy between Scott and Hogg, to forge a ballad and issue the forgery. Colonel Elliot knows scraps of a letter to Hogg of 30th June 1802. He has read parts, not bearing on the question, in Mr. Douglass Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (vol. i. pp. 1215), and another scrap, in which Hogg says that I am surprised to hear that Auld Maitland is suspected by some to be a modern forgery. This part of Hoggs letter of 30th June 1802 was published by Scott himself in the third volume of The Minstrelsy (April 1803).

Not having the context of the letter, Colonel Elliot seems to argue, Scott says he got his first copy in autumn 1802 (Lockharts mistake), yet here are Hogg and Scott corresponding about the ballad long before autumn, in June 1802. This is very suspicious. I give what appears to be Colonel Elliots line of reflection in my own words. He decides that, as early as June 1802, Hogg(in the Colonels view), in the first instance, tried to palm off the ballad on Scott, and failed; and that then Scott palmed it off on the public, and succeeded.