Stanzas xxxv., xxxvi. and xliv. are related, we have seen, to passages in Jock o’ the Side and Archie o’ Cafield, but ballads, like Homer, employ the same formulæ to describe the same circumstances: a note of archaism, as in Gaelic poetic passages in Märchen.
I do not pretend always to know how far Scott kept and emended old stanzas mangled by reciters: there are places in which I am quite at a loss to tell whether he is “making” or copying.
I incline to hold that Satchells was occasionally reminiscent of a ballad for the reasons and traces given, and I think that Scott when his and Satchells’ versions coincide, did not borrow direct from Satchells, but that both men had a ballad source.
That ballad was later than the popular belief, held by Satchells, that Gilbert Elliot was at the time (1596) laird of Stobs, which he did not acquire till after the Union (1603), and that he (the only man not a Scot, says Satchells, wrongly) rode with Buccleuch. Elliot is not accused of doing so in Scrope’s dispatches, but he may have come as far as Staneshaw bank, where half the company were left behind, says Satchells, with the horses, which were also left, says the ballad. In that case Elliot would not be observed in or near the Castle. Yet it may have been known in Scotland that he was of the party.
He was, as Satchells says, a cousin, he was also a friend of Buccleuch’s, and he may conceivably have taken a part in this glorious adventure, though he could not, at the moment, be called laird of Stobs. Were I an Elliot, this opinion would be welcome to me! Really, Salkeld was in a good position to know whether Elliot rode with Buccleuch or not.
The whole question is not one on which I can speak dogmatically. A person who suspects Scott intensely may believe that there were no ballad fragments of Kinmont in his possession. The person who, like myself, thinks Satchells, with his “It fell about the Martinmas,” knew a ballad vaguely, believes that Satchells had some ballad sources bemuddled in his old memory.
A person who cannot conceive that Scott wrote
Except Sir Gilbert Elliot, called
The laird of Stobs, I mean the same,
will hold that Scott knew some ballad fragments, disjecta membra. But I quite agree with Colonel Elliot, that the ballad, as it stands (with the exception, to my mind, of some thirty stanzas, themselves emended), “belongs to the early nineteenth century, not to the early seventeenth.” The time for supposing the poem, as it stands, to be “saturated with the folk-spirit” all through is past; the poem is far too much contaminated by the genius of Scott itself; like Burns’ transfiguration of “the folk-spirit” at its best.
Near the beginning of this paper I said, in answer to a question of Colonel Elliot’s, that I myself was the person who had suspected Scott of composing the whole of Kinmont Willie, and I have given my reasons for not remaining constant to my suspicions. But in a work which Colonel Elliot quotes, the abridged edition of Child’s great book by Mrs. Child-Sargent and Professor Kittredge (1905), the learned professor writes, “Kinmont Willie is under vehement suspicion of being the work of Sir Walter Scott.” Mr. Kittredge’s entire passage on the matter is worth quoting. He first says—“The traditional ballad appears to be inimitable by any person of literary cultivation,” “the efforts of poets and poetasters” end in “invariable failure.”