MINSTRELSY***


Transcribed from the 1910 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org





                             SIR WALTER SCOTT
                                 AND THE
                            BORDER MINSTRELSY


                                    BY
                               ANDREW LANG

                                * * * * *

                         LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
                        39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
                      NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
                                   1910




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 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 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 Archæological Society, 1905.




CONTENTS

                                                    PAGE
SCOTT AND THE BALLADS                                  1
AULD MAITLAND                                         18
THE BALLAD OF OTTERBURNE                              53
SCOTT’S TRADITIONAL COPY AND HOW HE EDITED IT         67
THE MYSTERY OF THE BALLAD OF JAMIE TELFER             87
KINMONT WILLIE                                       126
CONCLUSIONS                                          148




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