Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy | Page 8

Ritson's accuracy, but regrets his preference of
the worst to the better readings, as if their inferiority was a security for
their being genuine. Scott preferred the best, the most poetical readings.
In 1830, Scott also wrote an essay on "Imitations of the Ancient
Ballads," and spoke very leniently of imitations passed off as authentic.
"There is no small degree of cant in the violent invectives with which

impostors of this nature have been assailed." As to Hardyknute, the
favourite poem of his infancy, "the first that I ever learned and the last
that I shall forget," he says, "the public is surely more enriched by the
contribution than injured by the deception." Besides, he says, the
deception almost never deceives.
His method in The Minstrelsy, he writes, was "to imitate the plan and
style of Bishop Percy, observing only more strict fidelity concerning
my originals." That is to say, he avowedly made up texts out of a
variety of copies, when he had more copies than one. This is frequently
acknowledged by Scott; what he does not acknowledge is his own
occasional interpolation of stanzas. A good example is The Gay
Gosshawk. He had a MS. of his own "of some antiquity," a MS. of Mrs.
Brown, a famous reciter and collector of the eighteenth century; and the
Abbotsford MSS. show isolated stanzas from Hogg, and a copy from
Will Laidlaw. Mr. T. F. Henderson's notes {10a} display the methods
of selection, combination, emendation, and possible interpolation.
By these methods Scott composed "a standard text," now the classical
text, of the ballads which he published. Ballad lovers, who are not
specialists, go to The Minstrelsy for their favourite fare, and for
historical elucidation and anecdote.
Scott often mentions his sources of all kinds, such as MSS. of Herd and
Mrs. Brown; "an old person"; "an old woman at Kirkhill, West
Lothian"; "an ostler at Carlisle"; Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany;
Surtees of Mainsforth (these ballads are by Surtees himself: Scott never
suspected him); Caw's Hawick Museum (1774); Ritson's copies, others
from Leyden; the Glenriddell MSS. (collected by the friend of Burns);
on several occasions copies from recitations procured by James Hogg
or Will Laidlaw, and possibly or probably each of these men emended
the copy he obtained; while Scott combined and emended all in his
published text.
Sometimes Scott gives no source at all, and in these cases research
finds variants in old broadsides, or elsewhere.
In thirteen cases he gives no source, or "from tradition," which is the
same thing; though "tradition in Ettrick Forest" may sometimes imply,
once certainly does, the intermediary Hogg, or Will Laidlaw.
We now understand Scott's methods as editor. They are not scientific;
they are literary. We also acknowledge (on internal evidence) his

interpolation of his own stanzas in Kinmont Willie and Jamie Telfer,
where he exalts his chief and ancestor. We cannot do otherwise (as
scholars) than regret and condemn Scott's interpolations, never
confessed. As lovers of poetry we acknowledge that, without Scott's
interpolation, we could have no more of Kinmont Willie than verses,
"much mangled by reciters," as Scott says, of a ballad perhaps no more
poetical than Jock o' the Side. Scott says that "some conjectural
emendations have been absolutely necessary to render it intelligible."
As it is now very intelligible, to say "conjectural emendations" is a way
of saying "interpolations."
But while thus confessing Scott's sins, I cannot believe that he, like
Pinkerton, palmed off on the world any ballad or ballads of his own
sole manufacture, or any ballad which he knew to be forged.
The truth is that Scott was easily deceived by a modern imitation, if he
liked the poetry. Surtees hoaxed him not only with Barthram's Dirge
and Anthony Featherstonhaugh, but with a long prose excerpt from a
non-existent manuscript about a phantom knight. Scott made the plot of
Marmion hinge on this myth, in the encounter of Marmion with
Wilfred as the phantasmal cavalier. He tells us that in The Flowers of
the Forest "the manner of the ancient minstrels is so happily imitated,
that it required the most positive evidence to convince the editor that
the song was of modern date." Really the author was Miss Jane Elliot
(1747-1805), daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto. Herd published a
made-up copy in 1776. The tune, Scott says, is old, and he has heard an
imperfect verse of the original ballad -
"I ride single on my saddle, For the flowers o' the forest are a' wede
awa'"
The CONSTANT use of double rhymes within the line -
"At e'en, in the gloaming, nae younkers are roaming,"
an artifice rare in genuine ballads, might alone have proved to Scott
that the poem of Miss Elliot is not popular and ancient.
I have cleared my conscience by confessing