Ch. 4: Scott's Traditional Copy and how he Edited It - Page 2

Otterburn to besiege the castle there; and he is taken by surprise (as in the ballads) when a mounted man brings news of Percy's approach. No tryst is made by Percy and Douglas at Otterburn in Froissart; Douglas merely tarried there by the courtesy of Scotland.

In Hogg's version we have a reason why Douglas should tarry at Otterburn; in the English ballad we have none very definite. No captured pennon of Percy's is mentioned, no encounter of the heroes "at the barriers" of Newcastle. Percy, from the castle wall, merely threatens Douglas vaguely; Douglas says, "Where will you meet me?" and Percy appoints Otterburn as we said. He makes the absurd remark that, by way of supplies (for 40,000 men), Douglas will find abundance of pheasants and red deer. {69a}

We see that the English balladist is an unwarlike literary hack. The author of the Ettrick version knew better the nature of war, as we shall see, and his Douglas objects to Otterburn as a place destitute of supplies; nothing is there but wild beasts and birds. If the original poem is the sensible poem, the Scott version is the original which the English hath perverted.

In Hogg, Douglas jousts with Percy at Newcastle, and gives him a fall. Then come two verses (viii.-ix.). The second is especially modern and mawkish--

But O how pale his lady look'd, Frae off the castle wa', When down before the Scottish spear She saw brave Percy fa'! How pale and wan his lady look'd, Frae off the castle hieght, When she beheld her Percy yield To doughty Douglas' might.

Colonel Elliot asks, "Can any one believe that these stanzas are really ancient and have come down orally through many generations?" {70a}

Certainly not! But Colonel Elliot does not allow for the fact, insisted on by Professor Child, that traditional ballads, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, were often printed on broad- sheets as edited by the cheapest broadside-vendors' hacks; that the hacks interpolated and messed their originals; and that, after the broadside was worn out, lost, or burned, oral memory kept it alive in tradition. For examples of this process we have only to look at William's Ghost in Herd's copy of 1776. This is a traditional ballad; it is included in Scott's Clerk Saunders, but, as Hogg told him, is a quite distinct song. In Herd's copy it ends thus--

"Oh, stay, my only true love, stay," The constant Marg'ret cry'd; Wan grew her cheeks, she closed her eyes, Stretched her soft limbs, and dy'd.

Let THIS get into tradition, and be taken down from recitation, and the ballad will be denounced as modern. But it is essentially ancient.

These two modern stanzas, in Hogg's copy, are rather too bad for Hogg's making; and I do not know whether they are his (he practically says they are not, we shall see), or whether they are remembered by reciters from a stall-copy of the period of Lady