Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

And all the warrior fled.”

And so the fragment really ends, making us aware of some dreadful catastrophe, though what it is we know not. Something ghastly has happened in the castle during Hardyknute’s absence, but it is left untold. Only, by a kind of necessity of the imagination, we connect it somehow with that wounded knight whom Hardyknute had met lying on the ground as he was hurrying to the war, and whom he had left making his moan. Was he a fiend, or what?

It is quite useless to call this a historical ballad. There was a reference, perhaps, in the author’s mind, to the battle of Largs in Ayrshire, fought by the Scots in 1263, in the reign of Alexander III., against the invading King Haco of Norway; and there is a Fairly Castle on a hill near Largs which may have yielded a suggestion and a name. But, in truth, any old Scottish reign, and any Norse invasion, will do for time and basis, and the ballad is essentially of the romantic kind, a story snatched from an ideal antique, and appealing to the pure poetic imagination. A battle is flung in; but what rivets our interest is the hero Hardyknute, a Scottish warrior with a Danish name, and that stately castle of his, somewhere on the top of a hill, in which he dwelt so splendidly with his lady, his four sons, and their sister Fairly fair, till he was called once more to war, and in which there was some ghastly desolation before his return. Such as it is, we shall all agree, I think, with Gray, Warton, Scott, and the rest of the best critics, in admiring the fragment. It has that something in it which we call genius.

It seems strange now that any critic could ever have taken the ballad for a really old one, to be dated from the sixteenth century or earlier. Apart from the trick of old spelling, and affectation of the antique in a word or two, the phraseology, the manner, the cadence, the style of the Scotch employed, are all of about the date of the first publication of the ballad, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The phrase “Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute,” and the phrase “And all the warrior fled,” are decisive; and, while there might be room for the supposition that some old legend suggested the subject to the author, the general cast of the whole forbids the idea that it is merely a version of some transmitted original.

Suspicions, indeed, of the modern authorship of Hardyknute had arisen in various quarters long before any one person in particular was publicly named as the author. That was first done by Percy in 1767, in the second edition of his Reliques, when he gave his reasons for thinking, from information transmitted to him from Scotland by Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, that the ballad was substantially the composition of a Scottish lady, who had died in 1727, eight years after it had first appeared in its less perfect form, and three years after it had appeared with the improvements and the additional stanzas. That lady was Elizabeth Halket, born in 1677, one of the daughters of Sir Charles Halket of Pitfirran in Fifeshire, baronet, but who had changed her name to Wardlaw in the year 1696, when she became the wife of Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitreavie, also a Fifeshire baronet. All subsequent evidence has confirmed the belief that this Lady Wardlaw was the real author of Hardyknute, though, to mystify people, it was first given out by her relatives as an ancient fragment. This was the statement more especially of the already-mentioned Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, who was one of her brothers-in-law.

Of Lady Wardlaw herself we hear nothing more distinct than that she was “a woman of elegant accomplishments, who wrote other poems, and practised drawing and cutting paper with her scissors, and who had much wit and humour, with great sweetness of temper.” So we must be content to imagine her,—a bright-minded and graceful lady, living in Fifeshire, or coming and going between Fifeshire and Edinburgh, nearly two centuries ago, and who, while attending to her family duties and the duties of her station, could cherish in secret a poetic vein peculiarly her own, and produce at least one fine ballad of an ideal Scottish antique. This in itself would be much. For that was the age of Queen Anne and of the first of the Georges, when poetry of an ideal or romantic kind was perhaps at its lowest ebb throughout the British Islands, and the poetry most in repute was that of the modern school of artificial wit and polish represented by Addison and Pope.

But this is not all. In the year 1859 the late Mr. Robert Chambers published a very ingenious and interesting essay entitled “The Romantic Scottish Ballads: their Epoch and Authorship.” The ballads to which he invited critical attention were the particular group which includes Sir Patrick Spens, Gil Morrice, Edward Edward, The Jew’s Daughter, Gilderoy, Young Waters, Edom o’ Gordon, Johnnie of Braidislee, Mary Hamilton, The Gay Goss Hawk, Fause Foodrage, The Lass of Lochryan, Young Huntin, The Douglas Tragedy, Clerk Saunders, Sweet William’s Ghost, and several others. With but one or two exceptions, these were first given to the world either in Percy’s Reliques in 1765, or in the subsequent collections of Herd (1769), Scott (1802), and Jamieson (1806); but, since they were published, they have been favourites with all lovers of true poetry,—the “grand ballad” of Sir Patrick Spens, as Coleridge called it, ranking perhaps highest, on the whole, in general opinion. There is a certain common character in all the ballads of the group, a character of genuine ideality, of unconnectedness or but hazy connectedness with particular time or place, of a tendency to the weirdly, and also of a high-bred elegance and lightsome tact of expression, distinguishing them from the properly historical Scottish Ballads, such as the Battle of Otterbourne, or the Border Ballads proper, such as Kinmont Willie, or the homely rustic ballads of local or family incident of which so many have been collected. Hence the distinctive name of “romantic,” usually applied to them.

Respecting these ballads the common theory was, and still is, that they are very old indeed,—that they are the transmitted oral versions of ballads that were in circulation among the Scottish people before the Reformation. This theory Mr. Chambers challenged, and by a great variety of arguments. Not only was it very suspicious, he said, that there were no ancient manuscripts of them, and that, save in one or two cases, they had never been heard of till the eighteenth century; but the internal evidence, of conception, sentiment, costume, and phraseology,—not in lines and passages merely, where change from an original might be supposed, but through and through, and back to the very core of any supposed original,—all pointed, he maintained, to a date of composition not farther back than the beginning of the century in which they first came into print. He maintained farther that they all reveal the hand of some person of superior breeding and refinement, with a cultivated literary expertness and sense of the exquisite, and that, just as the difference of age would be seen if one of them were placed side by side with an authentic piece of old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, so would this other difference of refined or cultured execution be at once seen if one of them were placed side by side with a genuine popular ballad of lowly origin, such as used to please in sheets on street-stalls and in pedlars’ chap-books. Farther still, in all or most of the ballads concerned, there are, he argued, traces of feminine perception and feeling. And so, still pressing the question, and noting the recurrence of phrases and ideas from ballad to ballad of the group, not to be found in other ballads, but looking like the acquired devices of one and the same writer’s fancy,—some of the most remarkable of which recurring ideas and phrases he chased up to the ballad of Hardyknute,—he arrived at the conclusion that there was a “great likelihood” that all or most of the ballads he was considering were either absolutely the inventions of Lady Wardlaw of Pitreavie, or such complete recasts by her of traditional fragments that she might be called the real author. He would not advance the conclusion as more than a “great likelihood,” and he allowed that it might be still controverted; but he cited in its favour the fact that so high an authority as Mr. David Laing had previously intimated his impression that Hardyknute and Sir Patrick Spens were by the same hand.

Were Mr. Chambers’s conclusion to be verified, it would be a sore wrench to the patriotic prejudices of many to have to abandon the long-cherished fancy of the immemorial, or at least remote, antiquity of so many fine Scottish favourites. But what a compensation! For then that Lady Wardlaw whom we can already station, for her Hardyknute alone, as undoubtedly one woman of genius in the poverty-stricken Scotland of the beginning of the eighteenth century, would shine out with greatly increased radiance as the author of a whole cycle of the finest ballad-pieces in our language, a figure of very high importance in Scottish literary history, a precursor or sister of Burns and of Scott. For my own part, I would willingly submit to the wrench for a compensation so splendid. I am bound to report, however, that Mr. Chambers’s speculation of 1859 was controverted strenuously at the time, has been pronounced a heresy, and does not seem to have been anywhere generally accepted. It was controverted especially, within a year from its appearance, in a pamphlet of reply by Mr. Norval Clyne of Aberdeen, entitled “The Scottish Romantic Ballads and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy”; and I observe that Professor Child of America, in his great Collection of English and Scottish Ballads, pays no respect to it, treats it as exploded by Mr. Clyne’s reply, and expressly dissociates Sir Patrick Spens and other ballads of the class from Hardyknute. It may be enough, in these circumstances, merely to intimate my opinion that the controversy is by no means closed. There were shrewder and deeper suggestions, I think, in Mr. Chambers’s paper of 1859 than Mr. Clyne was able to obviate; and, having observed that most of the lore on the subject used by Mr. Clyne in his reply, his adverse references and quotations included, was derived from Mr. Chambers’s own Introduction and Notes to his three-volume edition of Scottish Songs and Ballads in 1829, I cannot but presume that Mr. Chambers had all that lore sufficiently in his mind thirty years afterwards, and found nothing in it to impede or disconcert him then in his new speculation. Apart, however, from the special question of Lady Wardlaw’s concern in the matter, Mr. Chambers seems to me to have moved a very proper and necessary inquiry when he started his theory of the comparatively recent origin of all or most of the Scottish Romantic Ballads. In what conception, what kind of language, does the opposite theory couch itself? In the conception that, besides the series of those literary products of past Scottish generations, the work of learned or professional writers, from the time of Barbour onwards, that have come down to us in books, or in old manuscript collections like that of Bannatyne, there was always a distinct literature of more lowly origin, consisting of ballads and songs recited or sung in Scottish households in various districts, and orally transmitted from age to age with no names attached to them, and indeed requiring none, inasmuch as they were nobody’s property in particular, but had “sprung from the heart of the people.” Now, this phrase, “sprung from the heart of the people,” I submit, is, if not nonsensical, at least hazy and misleading. Nothing of fine literary quality ever came into existence, in any time or place, except as the product of some individual person of genius and of somewhat more than average culture. Instead of saying that such things “spring from the heart of the people,” one ought rather to say therefore that they “spring to the heart of the people.” They live after their authors are forgotten, are repeated with local modifications, and so become common property. It is, of course, not denied that this process must have been at work in Scotland through many centuries before the eighteenth. The proof exists in scraps of fine old Scottish song still preserved, the earliest perhaps the famous verse on the death of Alexander III., and in lists, such as that in The Complaint of Scotland, of the titles of clusters of old Scottish songs and tales that were popular throughout the country in the sixteenth century, but have perished since. The very contention of Mr. Chambers respecting Sir Patrick Spens and the other ballads in question was that the fact that there is no mention of them in those old lists is itself significant, and that they have a set of special characteristics which came into fashion only with themselves.

If Lady Wardlaw was the author of those ballads, or of some of them, we have lost much by her secretiveness. We have been put in a perplexity where perplexity there ought to have been none. The cause, on her part, was perhaps less a desire for mystification than an amiable shrinking from publicity, dislike of being talked of as a literary lady. This was a feeling which the ungenerous mankind of the last century,—husbands, brothers, uncles, and brothers-in-law,—thought it proper to foster in any feminine person of whose literary accomplishments they were privately proud. It affected the careers of not a few later Scottish women of genius in the same century, and even through part of our own. Passing over several such, and among them Lady Anne Barnard, the authoress of Auld Robin Gray, let me come to an instance so recent that it can be touched by the memories of many that are still living.