by John Buchan
By such efforts, feeble as they are, I may contribute something to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally. And, trivial as may appear such an offering to the Manes of a kingdom, once proud and independent, I hang it upon her altar with a mixture of feelings which I shall not attempt to describe.
In his wanderings about the Border Scott had for years been collecting ballads, before it occurred to him that James Ballantyne at Kelso, with his neat fount of type, might make a little volume out of them. His office as Sheriff brought him close to the heart of the most storied part of the countryside, and his collection grew apace. Much depended upon local assistants and he was fortunate in finding several of the best. The ballads were not in books, and rarely even in broadsheets; they lingered in corners of memory among the country folk, with odd corruptions and misunderstandings, and could only be elicited by tact and patience.
[John Leyden]
The first of his colleagues was John Leyden, one of those prodigies of learning and zeal in learning which have often appeared among the Scottish peasantry. A shepherd’s son from the Roxburghshire hills, he had no regular schooling, but, “hydroptic with a sacred thirst,” he fought his way to Edinburgh University, and at the age of nineteen, says Lockhart, confounded the professors by his portentous attainments in most departments of knowledge. Big-boned, garrulous, violent, with great bodily strength and unflagging ardour, poetic, sentimental and proud as Lucifer, he was a curious blend of the polymath and the Border reiver. “His first appearance,” Scott wrote, “was somewhat appalling to persons of low animal spirits.” He was proficient in many tongues, but declined to learn genteel English, on the ground, as he said, that it would spoil his Scots. Richard Heber found him in Archibald Constable’s little bookshop in the High Street, and introduced him to Scott, to whom he became an invaluable lieutenant. Leyden was a scholar, which Scott was not, and his austere conscience about texts had a salutary influence upon his colleague. Moreover he saw the project on ampler lines and would have none of Ballantyne’s one-volume idea. “Dash it, does Mr Scott mean another thin thing like Goetz of Berlichingen? I have more than that in my head myself; we shall turn out three or four such volumes at least.” He found instructive parallels in other literatures, he delved among the broadsheets, and he tramped the Border on the quest for versions.
[James Hogg]
In 1803 Leyden went out as an assistant-surgeon to India, “a distant and a deadly shore” from which he was not to return. But in the meantime Scott had discovered other helpers. Penetrating into Yarrow from the inn at Clovenfords, he had found lodging at the farm of Blackhouse on the Douglas burn. The farmer was a young man called William Laidlaw, who entered eagerly into Scott’s quest, and called in to help him a certain James Hogg, once a shepherd of his father’s, but now herding at Ettrick House. This Hogg came of interesting stock, for there had been witches on the paternal side, and his maternal grandfather, Will o’ Phawhope, was the last man on the Border who had spoken with the fairies. It was a promising source for balladry, and the ballads were duly forthcoming — some verses of “The Outlaw Murray,” and the whole of the sixty-five stanzas of “Auld Maitland,” taken down from his mother’s recitation. In the summer of 1802 Laidlaw guided Scott by the Loch o’ the Lowes over the hills to Ettrick, and the latter had his first meeting with Hogg. “Jamie the Poeter” was sent for to join the visitors at Ramsaycleuch, and Scott beheld a young man of his own age, burly, brawny, blue-eyed and red-headed, who was in no way abashed by the presence of the Sheriff. They had an evening of conviviality and anecdotage, and the next day Scott and Laidlaw visited Hogg’s mother. She proved to be a formidable old woman, who criticized with vigour and point the first volume of the Minstrelsy which had just appeared. “There was never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursel’, and ye have spoilt them awthegither. They were made for singin’ and no’ for readin’, but ye have broken the charm now, an’ they’ll never be sung mair.” But she was clear as to the provenance of her songs, notably “Auld Maitland,” about which Scott and Leyden had been suspicious. “My brother and me learned it and many mae frae auld Andrew Moor, and he learned it frae auld Baby Mettlin, who was housekeeper to the first laird o’ Tushielaw. She was said to have been anither than a gude ane....”
So came together two men who were destined to many years of acquaintanceship and — intermittently — of friendship. Hogg on one side was the essential peasant, with all a peasant’s hard shrewdness and suspicion, but without the good-breeding which is common in that class on the Border. He was as uncouth a figure as Leyden, but lacked Leyden’s innate gentility. He took more for granted than most men, and as a rule managed to carry it off. Unlike Burns he was almost wholly uneducated, and his self-tuition never gave him any real mental discipline. He was clever enough to see that he must adopt character parts and play with a heavy “make up,” and the result was the Shepherd of the Noctes Ambrosianæ and the “Boar of the Forest.” He was without delicate perceptions or the finer kind of pride; yet he was a warm-hearted, engaging being, with a magnificent zest for life. By presuming much he attained to a good deal. As has been well said, “the stony social wall against which Burns so often and so bloodily battered his proud head simply did not exist for his brother of Ettrick; and what the one preached defiantly in song and speech the other innocently practised.” Of his talent there is no question. If, in Scott’s words a “vile sixpenny planet” presided at his birth, so also did the dancing star under which Beatrice was born. He was, as he himself claimed, the poet of Fairyland, a remote diaphanous fairyland where few can dispute his title; he had gifts of popular song and produced the best in that line since Burns; he had the true ballad sense, and could recapture the spirit of the Middle Ages with its shivering jollity and scoffing credulity. For the purpose of the Minstrelsy no man could have been better fitted.
[1802-3]
The first two volumes, printed by James Ballantyne at Kelso, and bearing the London imprint of Cadell and Davies, were published in 1802. The second edition and the third volume, which appeared a year later, were issued by Longman, Hurst and Co. It met with an immediate success, and was reprinted several times during the following decade. The introduction and notes, which a contemporary reviewer declared to hold material for a hundred romances, reveal how deeply Scott had read himself into the literature and life of the Border. The preliminary essay, though much of it would now be regarded as unhistorical, gives a brilliant panorama of Border history and a sympathetic study of the origins of the ballad. This editorial work was an admirable training for the poet, and still more for the prose writer.
[The Minstrelsy]
The Minstrelsy is a milestone both in Scott’s life and in the story of Scottish letters. Motherwell, who looked upon it with a critical eye, estimated that it gave to the world not less than forty-three pieces never before accessible — among them that marvel of the half-world of dreams, “The Wife of Usher’s Well” and some of the best riding ballads like “Johnny Armstrong’s Goodnight” and “Jamie Telfer.” Without Scott these things might have survived, but only in shapeless fragments. Moreover, he has given us versions of many others, prepared by one who was himself a poet, and these versions remain to-day the standard text. Scott was modest about the performance. “I have contrived,” he wrote to a friend, “to turn a very slender portion of literary talent to account by a poetical record of the antiquities of the Border.” That was his purpose rather than a scholarly edition of different texts, and he therefore not unnaturally included in the volumes modern imitations, based on authentic legends, by himself and Leyden.
His handling of his material has been often criticized. With Leyden’s eye on him, he was more careful with his texts than Bishop Percy had been, and his work passed the scrutiny of the austere Ritson. But he had neither the scholar’s conscience nor the scholar’s apparatus of a modern editor like Prof
essor Child of Harvard. The question of ballad origins is one of the most intricate of literary problems, and it is easy to be over-dogmatic. The wandering violers of genius, who, as I believe, sometime in the sixteenth century made the greatest of the ballads, left no manuscripts, and the folk memory plays odd tricks, now adapting lines to secure a local point, now boldly amending that of which the first meaning has been lost. Scott was reasonably conscientious, but his primary aim was to achieve a standard text — a literary not a scientific purpose; and he avowedly made up a text out of a variety of copies. Such has been the method of popular editors since literature began. But it seems clear that he never attempted to palm off a piece of his own manufacture as an old ballad, and that, with rare exceptions, he confined his emendations to making sense out of nonsense. Now and then, as in “Jamie Telfer” where he had no text to work from, he interpolated a good deal, very much to the ballad’s advantage, and in “Kinmont Willie,” where he had only a few half-forgotten lines, he produced what is substantially a work of his own. For the rest he was a skilful, and, up to his lights, a faithful editor of authentic ancient material.
The task played a major part in the direction of his genius. Constant familiarity with the noble bareness of the ballads did much to purify his taste, and to weaken — unfortunately it did not wholly destroy — the dominance of the bad models of his youth. It was an education in directness, in economy of speech at moments of high drama, in the simplicities of great passion. Wordsworth writes the story of Helen of Kirkconnell, and achieves this masterpiece of the falsetto: —
Proud Gordon, maddened by the thoughts
That through his brain were travelling,
Rushed forth, and at the heart of Bruce
He launched a deadly javelin!
Fair Ellen saw it as it came,
And, starting up to meet the same,
Did with her body cover
The youth, her chosen lover.
The ballad in the Minstrelsy runs:
I wish I were where Helen lies!
Night and day on me she cries;
And I am weary of the skies,
For her sake that died for me.
The penultimate line is Scott’s own; not much trace here of Bürger or Matt Lewis. Take again, this verse from “Sir Patrick Spens” —
They hadna sail’d a league, a league,
A league but barely three,
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,
And gurly grew the sea.
The last couplet is almost certainly Scott’s. And there is no doubt at all about his authorship of these stanzas from “Kinmont Willie.”
He has ta’en the table wi’ his hand,
He garr’d the red wine spring on hie —
“Now Christ’s curse on my head,” he said,
“But avenged on Lord Scrope I’ll be!
“O is my basnet a widow’s curch?
Or my lance a wand of the willow tree?
Or my arm a lady’s lily hand
That an English lord should lightly me?”
The versifier has become a poet.
II
The lord-lieutenant of Selkirkshire was a finicking old gentleman who had once been a lord of the Bedchamber, and was very particular about the fashion of his neck-cloths. To his orderly soul it seemed wrong that the Sheriff should have no dwelling in the Forest, where he was bound by statute to reside for part of the year, but should live in the environs of Edinburgh and behave more like a cavalry officer than a Crown official. He conveyed his views to Scott, and, after protest, Scott submitted. In the spring of 1804 he was looking for a house on the Border. Harden was suggested, but Borthwick water was a bad centre for county business, and he finally decided to take a lease of Ashestiel, the property of a cousin on his mother’s side, who was then in India. It was a busy and eventful year for Scott. He had to pack off his scapegrace brother Daniel to the West Indies, and, as a trustee, wind up his uncle Robert Scott’s estate. Rosebank near Kelso was left to him, which he sold profitably, and with his share of the residue he found himself richer by some £6000. In the late summer he left Lasswade (the Gandercleugh of the novels) and moved to Ashestiel — a fortunate young man, said the world, with an income of well over £1000, a son of three years and daughters of five and one, perfect bodily health, a comfortable little niche at the Bar, and a rising literary reputation.
The house, half-farm, half-manor, and very ancient in parts, stood on a steep bank which a strip of meadow-land separated from Tweed. There was a little farm attached, with fields of old pasture; the garden was a beautiful old-world place with green terraces and tall holly hedges. It was reasonably convenient for Edinburgh and the county town; but it was also a sanctuary, for Tweed beneath it was unbridged and the only road was by a difficult ford, while it fulfilled the traditional desideratum of a Scots dwelling, being seven miles from kirk and market. The place was in the most haunted part of the Border. There the Tweed valley is as yet a mountain glen, for the river has some miles to go before it breaks from the hills at Yair into the champaign of the lower strath. Behind it to the south lies a dark field of heathery mountains, still clad at that period on the lower slopes with the wildwood of the old Ettrick Forest. An easy pass leads to Yarrow, with Ettrick beyond it and Esk and Ewes, while to the north lie Gala water and the vale of Leader. Minchmoor, across which Montrose fled after Philiphaugh, hangs like a cloud in the west; the road upstream passes the tower of Elibank, the home of Scott’s ancestress Muckle Mou’d Meg, and leads by the little Peeblesshire burghs to the pastoral loveliness of Manor and Holms, the haunts of Merlin Sylvestris, and the wild moorland where Tweed has its springs. There were pleasant or curious neighbours at hand — the Pringles at Yair, the Laidlaws (“Laird Nippy”) at the Peel, the Plummers at Sunderland Hall with its excellent library, and, across the Yarrow bounds, the Buccleuchs at Bowhill, Willie Laidlaw at Blackhouse, and Scott’s new friend Mungo Park at the cottage of Foulshiels. Legend and ballad were linked to every field and burn, and the landscape most exquisitely conformed to its human associations, for that corner of Tweedside seems to me especially in tune with Border romance. It is at once wild and habitable, the savagery of nature is tempered by a quality of gracious pastoral, and Tweed, with its pools and runs and gleaming shallows, has not lost its mountain magic.
But Scott could not buy Ashestiel, and he would not be content for long with a hired dwelling. He wanted a home of his own, which he could beautify at his pleasure and leave to his son. He began to cast about for a permanent habitation, and his eyes fell on the little estate of Broadmeadows, just across the hills at the point where Yarrow leaves its bare upper valley for the wooded gorge overhung by Newark’s “birchen bower.” The place would be presently in the market, and the proceeds of the sale of Rosebank might be used to purchase it. It is hard not to regret that this project failed. Broadmeadows stood on a narrow shelf above the stream, and no ambition could have made of it anything but a modest country house; moreover Scott would not have been able to spend money on buying land, for he would have been surrounded, not by bonnet lairds very ready to sell, but by the inviolable domain of Buccleuch. Perhaps it was not really the kind of thing of which he dreamed: his taste was always more for the broader champaign country which he had learned to love at Sandy Knowe and Kelso. At any rate, as we shall see, his uncle Robert’s legacy was used for a very different purpose.
In his new home Scott found a refuge where he could turn from the common interests of his bustling life to the serious cultivation of the Muses. Which of the Nine was to be his chosen deity was not yet clear. But from his work on the ballads one thing remained over with which he proposed to try his fortune. He moved into Ashestiel in the early autumn, and about the same time sent to the printers a poem of his own, which had proved to be too long for inclusion in the Minstrelsy. He and his family spent New Year’s Day, 1805, on Tweedside, journeying thither in a snowstorm, preceded by “a detachment of brandy and mince-pies” in ca
se they were beleaguered by the weather. In the following week the Lay of the Last Minstrel was given to the world.
[Publication of the Lay]
It had been long simmering in his brain. Some years before young Lady Dalkeith at Bowhill had asked him to write a ballad on the subject of a mysterious goblin, called Gilpin Homer, whose doings were a legend on the Border. At Lasswade in 1802 he began his attempt to carry out the command, and, having a year or two before heard Sir John Stoddart recite Coleridge’s unpublished “Christabel” and being haunted by its rhythm, he adopted in the opening stanzas the same manner. Erskine, to whom he read them, did not care for them, but they stuck in his memory and presently he changed his opinion and encouraged his friend to continue. That autumn Scott finished the first canto, while he was laid up in Musselburgh lodgings owing to a kick from a trooper’s horse. Next year he had several cantos to read to George Ellis under an oak in Windsor Forest, and in the autumn the Wordsworths heard four of the six during their visit to Lasswade “partly read and partly recited in an enthusiastic style of chant,” and were delighted by “the novelty of the manner, the clear picturesque descriptions, and the easy flowing energy of much of the verse.” Scott had soon abandoned the “Christabel” music, and adopted the rapid octosyllables which were to be the staple of his narrative verse.
His purpose was consciously that of the Minstrel. In the first place he had written the poem at the command of the wife of one who would one day be the head of his clan, and this duty was never forgotten; compliments and allusions to the family of Buccleuch star the poem, and the felicitous use of the old harper is a piece of pure feudal loyalty. It is dedicated to Lord Dalkeith, and the beautiful close is at once a tribute to a great lady, and the confession of a dream then filling his mind (he was considering the purchase of Broadmeadows) of a lettered life to be spent in the sacred places of chivalry.