Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy | Page 7

Andrew Lang
not he knew the fact that
Laidlaw wrote in stanza 6 (half of it traditional), stanza 12 (also a
ballad formula), stanzas 17 and 18 (necessary to complete the sense;
the last two lines of 18 are purely and romantically modern).
We shall later quote Hogg's account of his own dealings with his raw
materials from recitation.

In January 1802 Scott published the two first volumes of The
Minstrelsy. Lockhart describes the enthusiasm of dukes, fine ladies,
and antiquarians. In the end of April 1803 the third volume appeared,
including ballads obtained through Hogg and Laidlaw in spring 1802.
Scott, by his store of historic anecdote in his introductions and notes,
by his way of vivifying the past, and by his method of editing, revived,
but did not create, the interest in the romance of ballad poetry.
It had always existed. We all know Sidney's words on "The Douglas
and the Percy"; Addison's on folk-poetry; Mr. Pepys' ballad collection;
the ballads in Tom Durfey's and other miscellanies; Allan Ramsay's
Evergreen; Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry; Herd's ballad
volumes of 1776; Evans' collections; Burns' remakings of old songs;
Ritson's publications, and so forth. But the genius of Burns, while it
transfigured many old songs, was not often exercised on old narrative
ballads, and when Scott produced The Minstrelsy, the taste for ballads
was confined to amateurs of early literature, and to country folk.
Sir Walter's method of editing, of presenting his traditional materials,
was literary, and, usually, not scientific. A modern collector would
publish things--legends, ballads, or folk-tales-- exactly as he found
them in old broadsides, or in MS. copies, or received them from oral
recitation. He would give the names and residences and circumstances
of the reciters or narrators (Herd, in 1776, gave no such information).
He would fill up no gaps with his own inventions, would add no
stanzas of his own, and the circulation of his work would arrive at some
two or three hundred copies given away!
As Lockhart says, "Scott's diligent zeal had put him in possession of a
variety of copies in various stages of preservation, and to the task of
selecting a standard text among such a diversity of materials he brought
a knowledge of old manners and phraseology, and a manly simplicity
of taste, such as had never before been united in the person of a poetical
antiquary."
Lockhart speaks of "The editor's conscientious fidelity . . . which
prevented the introduction of anything new, and his pure taste in the
balancing of discordant recitations." He had already written that "Scott
had, I firmly believe, interpolated hardly a line or even an epithet of his
own." {8a}
It is clear that Lockhart had not compared the texts in The Minstrelsy

with the mass of manuscript materials which are still at Abbotsford.
These, copied by the accurate Mr. Macmath, have been published in the
monumental collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, in ten
parts, by the late Professor Child of Harvard, the greatest of scholars in
ballad-lore. From his book we often know exactly what kinds of copies
of ballads Scott possessed, and what alterations he made in his copies.
The Ballad of Otterburne is especially instructive, as we shall see later.
But of the most famous of Border historical ballads, Kinmont Willie,
and its companion, Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead, Scott has left no
original manuscript texts. Now into each of these ballads Scott has
written (if internal evidence be worth anything) verses of his own;
stanzas unmistakably marked by his own spirit, energy, sense of
romance, and, occasionally, by a somewhat inflated rhetoric. On this
point doubt is not easy. When he met the names of his chief, Buccleuch,
and of his favourite ancestor, Wat of Warden, Scott did, in two cases,
for those heroes what, by his own confession, he did for anecdotes that
came in his way--he decked them out "with a cocked hat and a sword."
Sir Walter knew perfectly well that he was not "playing the game" in a
truly scientific spirit. He explains his ideas in his "Essay on Popular
Poetry" as late as 1830. He mentions Joseph Ritson's "extreme
attachment to the severity of truth," and his attacks on Bishop Percy's
purely literary treatment of the materials of his Reliques of Ancient
Poetry (1765).
As Scott says, "by Percy words were altered, phrases improved, and
whole verses were inserted or omitted at pleasure." Percy
"accommodated" the ballads "with such emendations as might
recommend them to the modern taste." Ritson cried "forgery," but
Percy, says Scott, had to win a hearing from his age, and confessed (in
general terms) to his additions and decorations.
Scott then speaks reprovingly of Pinkerton's wholesale fabrication of
ENTIRE BALLADS (1783), a crime acknowledged later by the culprit
(1786). Scott applauds
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