The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Biography. S. Fowler Wright
which he asked his Harden kinsman, Hugh Scott, who owned the property, to repair. The reply, not perhaps seriously meant, was that a ballad must be the price. Scott accepted the condition, and The Eve of St. John was the result. Lockhart says that he actually wrote it at Mertoun House, but this should not be taken too literally. It is not off-hand work. It is not only that it is of very skilful dramatic construction, nor that it has varieties of melody in the changing forms of its stanzas, such as do not appear in a too hasty composition: it is that the tale itself is a made thing. Scott did not know any legend of the tower suitable for such purpose. For the first time, we can watch him collecting from the stored resources of his own mind to make a new tale, and to supply the incidents and background which it requires.
The central idea—that of the return of the murdered lover—is from an old Irish tradition. The idea of the nun of Dryburgh who ‘ne’er looked upon the sun,’ had an actual and recent parallel there. The placing of the event in the middle of the sixteenth century gave a plausible reason for the Baron’s absence: an opportunity to use the call of war for the settlement of a private quarrel. The battle of Ancrum Moor, an historic event dimly indicated in the background, gives a suitable atmosphere, and verisimilitude to the supernatural tale. And the fact that it is left as a mere background shows that Scott was finding by practice the importance of form, even in the apparent looseness of the construction which this ballad wears, and which Mat Lewis, printing it afterwards in his Tales of Wonder, must have regarded as evidence that Scott was beyond his teaching, in spite of the courteous deference of the letters which acknowledged the advice he gave.
And the temptation to extend the references to Ancrum Moor must have been a strong one. Scott had been over the ground in the course of his Liddesdale ‘raids’. It was a battle in which his own clan—the Scotts of Buccleuch and Harden—played an honourable and decisive part. It held none of the bitterness of the memory of the time when Teviotdale and Liddesdale had been engaged in the civil strife which was to be recorded deathlessly in the Lay of the Last Minstrel.
When Home and Douglas in the van
Bore down Buccleuch’s retiring clan,
Till gallant Cessford’s heartblood dear
Reeked on dark Elliot’s Border spear.
For at Ancrum Moor, Teviotdale came to the support of Liddesdale, and they fought and conquered together....
Lord Evers had a dreaded name in the Border country. It was not his first raid into Scotland when he came at the head of a little army in which there were 3,000 foreign mercenaries, and 700 renegade Scottish borderers, including the broken Armstrong clan, supporting his own English followers, who were estimated at 1,500 men. He penetrated as far north as Melrose, which he sacked for the second time in two years, and retreated, heavy with spoil. Too weak to attack, too bitter to let him go, Earl Douglas hung on his rear.
Lord Evers did not want to fight. He had nothing to gain by that. He had done all that he came to do. His eyes were turned towards the Cheviot Hills, and the safety of Cumberland. But he halted on Ancrum Moor, as though hesitant: no one will ever know why. It was his business to get home. It does not follow that he was wrong. He may have thought it too great a risk to descend to the Teviot ford with Douglas around his rear. He offered battle upon the moor. He commanded a force which evidently did not want to fight, and he had a difficult choice.
While he halted, Douglas was joined by Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch. He rode in with his own Scotts and those of Harden. The force was not large, but the Scotts had a name that gave confidence. It also appeared that the Sir Walter of that time was a man of brains. He proposed a plan of action to Douglas, which is not very clear, as Lesley gives it, but it was common talk that it won the battle, for which Sir Walter had the praise at the last.
There was to be going on and off hills, and a pretended flight, and Lord Evers was to do most of the running about (particularly uphill) and at last, when he was quite blown, and had the sun in his eyes, he was to find that the battle wasn’t over, but just about to begin.
The event worked out according to plan, which such tactics very seldom do, and when they saw how things were likely to go, the 700 renegade Scots settled matters by changing sides once again. That was the end. The mercenaries bolted: the Scots turned their coats: the English died where they stood, Lord Evers and his son heading the list.
Even a quarter of a millennium later, it was a good tale for the Scotts to tell. Liddesdale and Teviotdale had joined forces and triumphed together, and it was Teviotdale that had the honour in the mouths of men. That was better than when Teviotdale had gone down in battle before the Liddesdale spears
“Till Mathouse burn to Melrose ran,
All purple with their blood.”
It was a good thought on Scott’s part to use this muster for Ancrum Moor as an excuse for the Baron to arm himself and ride off on an errand of private vengeance, but the temptation to allow the battle to invade the foreground of the tale must have been great, and it shows a growing skill of construction that he kept it in the exact place that it ought to occupy.
He used the old flexible ballad metre, with its optional internal rhymes, which can be so poor or perfect a thing according to the handling it receives, and he did this with an independence of Lewis’s theories of regularity which showed that, however courteous or even deferential he might be to the opinions of the older man, he had sufficient independence to develop his own work on his own lines.
The stanzas, considered separately, have individual beauties, and single lines that remain in the memory. The whole ballad has vigour and dramatic intensity, though it is less perfect, at almost every point of judgement, than some others—notably Alice Brand—that were to follow.
But it is in the selection of materials of fact and fiction from diverse sources out of the stores he had accumulated, and blending them into an artistic unity, that this ballad is not only an achievement in itself, but an indication of the method by which he would go on to much greater triumphs.
CHAPTER XXI.
The year 1799, which witnessed the death of Scott’s father (too soon to know the justification of those early wanderings which had vexed his mind), the publication of the Goetz translation, and the birth of his first child, was momentous in two other directions.
During that week in the early autumn which was spent with Captain Robert at Kelso, Mr. Walter Scott had a visitor. The Editor of the Kelso Mail, Mr. James Ballantyne, a young man of his own age, called to request an article from him on a legal subject of topical interest, with which he was particularly competent to deal. Scott agreed to write it, and to bring it in to the Mail office on completion. The importance of this incident may be exaggerated. The two men had known each other from boyhood, James having been a pupil of Mr. Lancelot Whale when Walter had attended his school during the summer that intervened between his High School and College courses. After that, James had come to Edinburgh, continuing his studies there, his father (a “decent shopkeeper” Lockhart calls him, which is praise by implication, though it holds a sneer) intending him for the legal profession. But this plan was abandoned, and James on his return to his native town, founded the Kelso Mail; laying down his own plant, and being proprietor, printer and editor of this local weekly.
Scott, as we know, was a frequent visitor at Kelso, first with his Aunt Janet, and then at Rosebank with Captain Robert, and the schoolboy acquaintance had been kept up.
In the light of after-knowledge, James Ballantyne’s call at Rosebank may seem to be of a decisive importance to many lives, but this may be an appearance only. Had he not called, Scott might have called upon him. Anyway, when he did so, he not only had the promised article in his pocket, he had some of his ballads also, to which the talk turned. Lockhart’s hearsay account of this interview derived from James Ballantyne, is the best we have. He says:
“Scott, carrying his article himself to the printing-office, took with him also some of his recent pieces, designed to appear in Lewis’s Collection. With these, especially, as his Memorandum says, the ‘Morlachian fragment after Goethe,’ Ballantyne was charmed, and he expressed his regret that Lewis’s book was so long in appearing. Scott talked of Lewis with