by Allan Massie
Well, when Tom Purdie came up before me in my capacity as Shirra, on a poaching charge, and I dismissed him and made him my gamekeeper, he subsequently becoming of all men the one in whom I reposed most love, trust, and confidence, I bought him a pair of boots when he entered my service. So perhaps I too may pass ‘through thick and thin, without scratch or scalle’.
Yet there are thorns and furzen enough in this world, and in my present predicament I feel not only barefoote, but naked as Lear, Kent, and the Fool to the storms of the world.
Lord, let me not be mad, sweet heaven, and Christe receive my saule; and let me see the broom yellow on the hillside above Abbotsford.
6
Border Memories and First Poetic Success, 1797–1808
I have ever felt myself a Borderer. The melancholy romance of the House of Douglas moved me from my earliest childhood. It rose in splendour with the Good Lord James, the companion of Bruce; it ended piteously with the eighth Earl, after many years of exile in England, returning full of longing to see his native land once more, having vowed that upon St Mary Magdalen’s day he would lay his offering on the altar at Lochmaben. But those Border lords who had profited from the downfall of his house united to oppose him, and he was seized by a son of Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, who had been one of his own vassals. ‘Carry me to the king,’ said Douglas, ‘for you may well profit from my misfortune; thy father was true to me while I was true to myself.’
This noble speech so moved the young man that instead he offered to escort the Douglas back to England. Weary of exile, and perhaps of life, the aged Earl refused, and, by the intercession of the young Kirkpatrick, who had been touched by the decay of greatness, he was permitted to end his days, in monastic seclusion, in the abbey of Lindores.
When it is considered that between the rise and fall of the Black Douglases, the family experienced the extremities of fortune, endured the grisly and brutal murder of the gallant youth who was the sixth Earl, taken by treachery and summarily beheaded with his younger brother in the courtyard of Edinburgh Castle, and also the murder of the eighth Earl by the king’s own hand at Stirling, is it any wonder that my youthful imagination was enflamed?
Edinburgh castle, towne and tower,
God grant ye sink for sin.
And that for the black denner
Yerl Douglas gat therein . . .
The lines ran in my head for days after the first hearing of them, and now, in old age, I cannot think on that sudden brutality, when the black bull’s head was laid on the festive board and the two youths, and their friend Malcolm Fleming of Cumbernauld, were dragged to the headman’s block, without tears pricking my eyes.
No one can deny the savagery of life on the Borders as the Middle Ages drew to a close and chivalry slipped behind a cloud. Consider for example the depredations of the English armies during the Rough Wooing conducted by the Earl of Hertford (later Duke of Somerset) in 1547, when the burning abbeys, keeps and farmhouses shed a lurid light from valley to valley. It was no wonder that, when they were able, the Scotch Borderers took an equally savage revenge. A French officer, by name Beaugé, serving in the army which the Regent, Marie de Guise, had called to her support, has left a description, which recalls the atrocities of the late war in the Peninsula. The castle of Ferniehurst, three mile out of Jedburgh, and the seat of the Kers, was for a time held by the English whose commander, Beaugé says, was guilty of such excesses of lust and cruelty as would have ‘made to tremble the most savage Moor in Africa . . .’ The castle was assaulted, and the commander surrendered himself to the Frenchman, imploring him to save him from the vengeance of the Borderers. One of them, however, recognizing in him the violator of his wife, swiftly advanced, and with a single sweep of his broadsword, carried the Englishman’s head four paces from his trunk. Immediately a hundred Scots rushed to dip their hands in the blood of the oppressor. Other prisoners were put to death, and when this task was completed, the Scots, poor as they were, purchased the unfortunate wretches who had had the prudence to surrender themselves to the French. ‘I myself,’ says Beaugé, with what I can only call military sang-froid, ‘sold them a prisoner for a small horse. They laid him on the ground, galloped over him with their lances at rest, and wounded him as they passed. When slain, they cut his body into gobbets, and bore the mangled pieces on the points of their spears. I cannot’, the polite Frenchman who had sold the poor wretch remarks, ‘greatly praise the Scottish for this practice. But the truth is, that the English had tyrannized over the Borders in the most cruel and barbarous fashion; and I think it was but fair to repay them, according to the proverb, in their own coin . . .’
Savage times, which we are well rid of, and yet, strangely attractive to the imagination of youth.
I was much taken, I recall, with the story of Johnnie Armstrong, the great bandit chief, who marched out to meet James V, with all the pomp of assumed equality, as one monarch come to debate with another. The king would have none of it, and Johnnie and his thirty-six men were hanged on growing trees at Carlanrig Chapel, ten miles above Hawick on the Langholm road. When I was a bairn, it was still the crack of the countryside that the trees on whilk they were hangit withered away. Well, Johnnie may have been no better than a Sicilian bandit of our own day, but in the language of the ballads, he was indeed equal to the king – as he claimed to be:
To seek het water beneath cauld ice,
Surely it is a great folie –
I hae asked grace of a graceless face,
But there is nane for my men and me.
That was speaking to a king, indeed, and like a king.
The ballads enflamed me. I conceived – how or just when I cannot recall – the ambition of making a collection of them, and I believed that this might prove a fit offering to lay on the altar of my country, once proud and independent, now in danger of losing its memory of itself, and so its consciousness, in the benevolent embrace of a large polity, which also, and properly, required of me my devotion. The ambition, I am sure, grew slowly. It was the fruit of numerous excursions through the Borderland, mostly in the company of my friend, Robert Shortreed, then Sheriff-substitute of Roxburghshire. At first, I confess, I had little thought of scholarship. We were land-loupers, intoxicated with the sense of freedom, the queerness and the fun. But in this way I came to know, what I could never have learned, had I stuck to my last in Edinburgh – as so many of my lawyer-friends did – all sorts of ranks and conditions of men. I learned to talk as easily with a travelling tinker as with a minister of the kirk – often more easily, to tell the truth, for I have aye had the uncomfortable notion that a homily might be in preparation and have felt uncomfortable among the professionally virtuous, from which charge I am happy to acquit many clergymen of my acquaintance.
When we first travelled through Liddesdale, there was no road that could bear a wheeled carriage. I mind once, coming to a farm, keepit by an Elliot, for they are mostly members of that wild clan there. We were as ever invited to bide the night, but the gudeman seemed in strangely low spirits, and what was more remarkable was that when the festive board was set, it was lacking in certain accustomed elements of festivity. In short, there was but milk to drink, and the only ale was Adam’s. The meal was partaken of for the most part in a gloomy silence, for the low spirits of our host depressed those of the company. When the board was cleared, he said, to a young scholar, perhaps a nephew resident during the university vacation and studying for the Ministry, ‘Weel, Eben, there’s nocht else for it, so we’ll juist hae to hae you read us a chapter of the Gude Buik.’ Nothing loth, young master Eben began to read, choosing with what seemed to me an absence of tact which boded ill for his success in his future profession, to regale us with an account of the wandering of the Children of Israel in the desert. When he arrived at the passage where Moses strikes the rock and the waters gush forth, our host gave an audible sigh that turned to a groan. His head sank, and the young man read on. All of a sudden the Gudeman Elliot raised his hand and said �
�Whisht!’ There followed a prolonged silence, till, unmistakably, came the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. ‘The Lord be praised,’ he cries, ‘it’s the keg at last. Now we can offer hospitality to the shirra here’ (meaning Bob Shortreed) ‘and the young advocate-loon’ (meaning myself) ‘of whilk we needna be affrontit.’ Then there was a great bustle. The keg of brandy brought from smugglers on the Solway was borne in, broached, quaichs filled and downed, and filled again, amid such hilarity as you might find when the gates of a prison have been opened and the unfortunate long-incarcerated wretches have been released, while the young aspirant preacher was left in the middle of a chapter, even of a verse, on the other side of Jordan.
It all went to the making of me. He travels furthest, I sometimes think, that doesna ken his destination and aiblins has no care for it. We are driven on by impulses beyond our understanding, which, when we look back as from a hilltop we have climbed, seem to have led us there as straight and smooth as if by a turnpike road.
It was in the course of my search for ballads that I first encountered James Hogg. Hogg is a remarkable man, though less remarkable than he thinks himself, a criticism that could doubtless be levelled with equal justice at the majority of men. Our lives have been strangely intertwined; we may even be the same age, though, since Hogg’s age, to my knowledge, has altered according to the company he is in, or according to the mood of the moment, I cannot be sure of this. He was born and raised, the child of a poor family, in the parish of Ettrick, and he commonly – in my view mistakenly – is referred to – and has even been known to describe himself – as being uneducated. It is true he has neither Latin nor Greek, and his knowledge of history is defective, which is not surprising, for I do not believe he attended the parish school beyond the age of nine. Yet, since he grew up with the music of the ballads and the words of the Bible continually about him, he has acquired a sounder bottom of education than many who have gone through the common mill of schooling. As to the History, he accepts for instance the extreme and prejudiced view of the Covenanting tradition, even of those fanatics called the Cameronians. Indeed I recall an exchange between us when he published his novel, The Brownie of Bodsbeck set in the reign of Charles II.
‘I like it ill, Hogg,’ I said, ‘very ill. It is a false and unfair picture of the times.’
‘Na, na, Shirra,’ said he, with some degree of impudence, ‘it is the picture I hae been brocht up tae believe in since ever I was weanit. And there’s naething in it that isna true, which, Shirra, is mair as you can say of your Auld Mortality.’
In fact, the novel is the old tissue of Covenanting fabrications and lies. As I remarked to the Duke of Buccleuch, ‘Hogg has slandered Claverhouse to please the Cameronians, who do not read novels, and therefore will not be pleased.’
Hogg has tried me sorely, financially and in other ways, but I am fond of him, and feel myself in some curious fashion responsible for his well-being.
Another thought strikes me. Hogg has no sense of history because he grew up in the narrow valley of the Ettrick, where past and present coalesce; my upbringing under the shadow of Smailholm Tower made it inevitable that I should see history as a great march or procession, from the day when the Roman legions first forced their way through the passes of the Cheviots to the present.
Of course, difference of rank and my own fuller (though imperfect) education must contribute also to our different attitudes, mine critical, Hogg’s credulous.
Hogg was, however, a great help to me in my work of collecting the Ballads, though it was necessary to take some care in scrutinizing his offerings, for he was not above attempting to pass off a production of his own as an authentic ancient ballad, and indeed I discovered him in this deception more than once. Certainly, in the same context, I must confess that a like charge has been levelled at me; and indeed I did not scruple to add verses where the sense seemed to require them, or emend others which appeared defective. I feel no shame in such a confession, though once when I was speaking of the pleasure of making verses, a kind friend – such friends are always to be found – remarked, ‘Mak them Scott? Indeed I rather think you steal the maist of them.’ I did not contravert that charge either. The truth is I can scarcely see a verse but I itch to make it my own. I think no worse of myself for that, and therefore, doubtless, should forgive poor Hogg for yielding to the same desire to scratch the itch. It was indeed ever in this manner that our Border minstrels worked. When they got themselves a verse, they added and emended and omitted and embellished, till each had made it his own, a thing different and yet aye the same, a thing personal and yet held in common. No, borrowing and emending verses that have been handed down to us sits easy on my conscience. I can forgive myself that, and a man should be almost as ready to forgive himself as to forgive others.
And some of the verses I added to traditional ballads seem to me as good as anything you may find in the original:
Oh I hae dreamed a dreary dream
Ayont the Isle of Syke
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I . . .
Old Mistress Hogg, James’s mother, was of even greater assistance than her son, for her head was richly stored with old verses, although in many cases it was but fragments of the whole ballad which she could recollect. Nevertheless I owe much to her, and was therefore not disturbed, but rather amused, by the reproof she delivered when the Minstrelsy appeared in print.
‘Shirra, Shirra,’ she said, shaking her head and puffing at her clay pipe, ‘ye hae spiled them awethegither. The sangs were made for singing and no for prenting – and furthermair, Shirra, they’re nouther richt spelled nor richt setten doon.’
‘Maybe so, Mistress Hogg,’ I replied, ‘but I owe many of them to you, and whatever the faults or deficiencies of my edition, it ensures that they will never be forgotten. It ensures their survival or preservation, and that is something which, with the progress of civilization, could not otherwise be guaranteed.’
She was not, I fear, convinced, but then, living in the upper reaches of Ettrick, she could remain in happy ignorance of the progress of civilization, and retain the conviction that she inhabited an unchanging world.
‘Ye hae broken the charm, Shirra,’ she said, but I owe to her many verses of ‘The Outlaw Murray’ and all sixty-odd verses of ‘Auld Maitland’: no inconsiderable debt.
I had many other coadjutors. There was Willie Laidlaw, from Blackhouses in Yarrow, who has long been my factor, amanuensis, and the Lord knows what else besides, at Abbotsford; a man of the rarest virtue, combining humility and unselfishness with an extraordinary competence in all the affairs of life.
Even more remarkable was John Leyden, a shepherd’s son from the village of Denholm in Teviotdale. It was Richard Heber who discovered him for me, browsing in Archibald Constable’s bookshop in the High Street of Edinburgh, Leyden, with that uncommon perseverance and acumen which were among his principal characteristics, then having fought his way to the university. A large, awkward, raw-boned fellow whose first appearance was somewhat appalling to persons of low animal spirits, Leyden was perhaps the purest and finest scholar it has been my privilege to know. Among his endearing traits was a refusal to learn to speak polite or genteel English, on the grounds that he feared it would spoil his Scots. His appetite for other languages, however, was inordinate, and it was a sore day for me when he departed as an assistant-surgeon to the distant and deadly shore of India, whence, alas, he was never to return. Leyden, like Hogg, was a true poet himself, though curiously he expressed himself more easily in verse in the pure English which he refused to speak than in the Scots to which he was devoted.
Finally, in this record of tribute to those who assisted me in the compilation and publication of the Minstrelsy, I must mention my boyhood and lifelong friend James Ballantyne, who undertook the printing of the volumes, a far greater and more arduous task than anything which he had previously attempted.
I was fortunate to have so many eager to assist m
e in a work which I conceived as a patriotic duty.
The Minstrelsy made me, for I had gotten myself a reputation. The year after its publication Mrs Scott and I removed from our cottage at Lasswade, and took up residence at the house of Ashiestiel overlooking the Tweed upstream from Yair. This was done partly at the insistence of the Lord-Lieutenant of Selkirkshire, who thought it wrong that the Sheriff should not have a residence in the Forest, as indeed I was bound to do by statute which decrees that a sheriff must bide for part of the year at least in his shrievalty. But I was happy to comply, though disappointed that I could only lease, and not buy, Ashiestiel. Nevertheless it was a house that pleased me, situated as it is in the most beautiful and Romantic stretch of the valley of the most beautiful and Romantic of rivers, my beloved Tweed.
Around the time that we took up our residence there, Harriet, Countess of Dalkeith, urged me to compose a long poem of my own, stipulating only that it should be set in the period when the ballads themselves were being made. The idea would have attracted me, even if it had come from some source other than that of the House of Buccleuch, to which I owed fealty, and to which I was already bound by ties of friendship.
I had been struck by the manner in which Coleridge had composed his ‘Christabel’, and first essayed something in that metre, but it proved insufficiently rapid for either my talent or purposes. Octosyllabics appeared to me to be the thing, for they allowed me a dancing lightness, they gave scope to whatever facility I might have in rhyming, and they also permitted a certain conversational ease.
The poem was intended to illustrate the customs and manners which formerly prevailed on the Borders of England and Scotland, and in this sense may be considered a natural successor to the ballads collected in the Minstrelsy. I adopted the plan of the ancient metrical romance as allowing a greater latitude than might be considered proper in a regular poem, and the device of putting the romance in the mouth of an aged Minstrel, to be considered the last of his race, who, as he is supposed to have survived the Revolution of 1688, may be thought to have caught something of the refinement of modern poetry without losing the simplicity or naivety of his original model. The tale itself is set more than a hundred years earlier, about the middle of the sixteenth century, when most of the personages portrayed actually lived.