Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy. Lang Andrew
just as he received it.” Yet Scott’s copy, mainly from a lost Cockburn MS., contains a humorous passage on Buccleuch which Child half suspects to be by Sir Walter himself. 8 It is impossible for me to know whether Child’s hesitating conjecture is right or wrong. Certainly we shall see, when Scott had but one MS. copy, as of Auld Maitland, his editing left little or nothing to be desired.
But now Scott is assailed, both where he deserves, and where, in my opinion, he does not deserve censure.
Scott did no more than his confessed following of Percy’s method implies, to his original text of the Ballad of Otterburne. This I shall prove from his original text, published by Child from the Abbotsford MSS., and by a letter from the collector of the ballad, the Ettrick Shepherd.
The facts, in this instance, apparently are utterly unknown to Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Fitzwilliam Elliot, in his Further Essays on Border Ballads (1910), pp. 1–45.
Again, I am absolutely certain, and can demonstrate, that Scott did not (as Colonel Elliot believes) detect Hogg in forging Auld Maitland, join with him in this fraud, and palm the ballad off on the public. Nothing of the kind occurred. Scott did not lie in this matter, both to the world and to his intimate friends, in private letters.
Once more, without better evidence than we possess, I do not believe that, in Jamie Telfer, Scott transferred the glory from the Elliots to the Scotts, and the shame from Buccleuch to Elliot of Stobs. The discussion leads us into very curious matter. But here, with our present materials, neither absolute proof nor disproof is possible.
Finally, as to Kinmont Willie, I merely give such reasons as I can find for thinking that Scott had “mangled” fragments of an old ballad before him, and did not merely paraphrase the narrative of Walter Scott of Satchells, in his doggerel True History of the Name of Scott (1688).
The positions of Colonel Elliot are in each case the reverse of mine. In the instance of Auld Maitland (where Scott’s conduct would be unpardonable if Colonel Elliot’s view were correct), I have absolute proof that he is entirely mistaken. For Otterburne I am equally fortunate; that is, I can show that Scott’s part went no further than “the making of a standard text” on his avowed principles. For Jamie Telfer, having no original manuscript, I admit decorative interpolations, and for the rest, argue on internal evidence, no other being accessible. For Kinmont Willie, I confess that the poem, as it stands, is Scott’s, but give reasons for thinking that he had ballad fragments in his mind, if not on paper.
It will be understood that Colonel Elliot does not, I conceive, say that his charges are proved, but he thinks that the evidence points to these conclusions. He “hopes that I will give reasons for my disbelief” in his theories; and “hopes, though he cannot expect that they will completely dispose of” his views about Jamie Telfer. 9
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 Elliot’s 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 Walter’s, 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 Elliot’s “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 critic’s researches; had it done so, he would have taken the information into account, but he does not. Of the existence of Scott’s “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 Scott’s 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
Child, part ix., 187.
Child, vol. i. p. xxx.