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.
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.