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Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody, essay(s) by Andrew Lang |
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_ APPENDIX Note on Letter of Mr. Surtees to Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, p. 64. No literary forgeries were ever much better done than the sham ballads which Surtees of Mainsforth imposed on Sir Walter Scott. The poems were spirited and good of their kind; and though we wonder now that some of them could take in an expert, it is by no means assured that we are even to-day acquainted with the whole of Surtees' frauds. Why a man otherwise honourable, kindly, charitable, and learned, exercised his ingenuity so cruelly upon a trusting correspondent and a staunch friend, it is hardly possible to guess. The biographers of Surtees maintain that he wanted to try his skill on Scott, then only known to him by correspondence; and that, having succeeded, he was afraid to risk Scott's friendship by a confession. This is plausible; and if good may come out of evil, we may remember that two picturesque parts of "Marmion" are due to one confessed and another certain supercherie of Surtees. It cannot be said in his defence that he had no conception of the mischief of literary frauds; in more than one passage of his correspondence he mentions Ritson's detestation of these practices. "To literary imposition, as tending to obscure the path of inquiry, Ritson gave no quarter," says this arch literary impostor. A brief account of Surtees' labour in the field of sham ballad writing may be fresh to many people who merely know him as the real author of "Barthram's Dirge" and of "The Slaying of Anthony Featherstonhaugh." In an undated letter of 1806, Scott, writing from Ashestiel, thanks Surtees for his "obliging communications." Surtees manifestly began the correspondence, being attracted by the "Border Minstrelsy." Thus it appears that Surtees did NOT forge "Hobbie Noble" in the first edition of the "Minstrelsy"; for he makes some suggestions as to the "Earl of Whitfield," dreaded by the hero of that ballad, which Scott had already published. But he was already deceiving Scott, who writes to him about "Ralph Eure," or "Lord Eure," and about a "Goth, who melted Lord Eure's gold chain." This Lord Eure is doubtless the "Lord Eurie" of the ballad in the later editions of the "Border Minstrelsy," a ballad actually composed by Surtees. That wily person immediately sent Scott a ballad on "The Feud between the Ridleys and Featherstones," in which Scott believed to the day of his death. He introduced it in "Marmion."
Readers of "Marmion" will remember how
Not content with two "whoppers," as Mr. Jo Gargery might call them, Surtees goes on to invent a perfectly incredible heraldic bearing. He found it in a MS. note in the "Gwillim's Heraldry" of Mr. Gyll or Gill--the name is written both ways. "He beareth per pale or and arg., over all a spectre passant, SHROUDED SABLE"--"he" being Newton, of Beverley, in Yorkshire. Sir Walter actually swallowed this amazing fib, and alludes to it in "Rob Roy" (1818). But Mr. Raine, the editor of Surtees' Life, inherited or bought his copy of Gwillim, that of Mr. Gill or Gyll; "and I find in it no trace of such an entry." "Lord Derwentwater's Good-Night" is probably entirely by Surtees. "A friend of Mr. Taylor's" gave him a Tynedale ballad, "Hey, Willy Ridley, winna you stay?" which is also "aut Diabolus aut Robertus." As to "Barthram's Dirge," "from Ann Douglas, a withered crone who weeds my garden," copies with various tentative verses in Surtees' hand have been found. Oddly enough, Sir Walter had once discovered a small sepulchral cross, upset, in Liddesdale, near the "Nine Stane Rig;" and this probably made him more easily deceived. Surtees very cleverly put some lines, which COULD not have been original, in brackets, as his own attempt to fill up lacunae. Such are
Till the rowan tree of gramarye
Concerning another ballad in the "Minstrelsy"--"Auld Maitland"-- Professor Child has expressed a suspicion which most readers feel. What Scott told Ellis about it (Autumn, 1802) was, that he got it in the Forest, "copied down from the recitation of an old shepherd by a country farmer." Who was the farmer? Will Laidlaw had employed James Hogg, as shepherd. Hogg's mother chanted "Auld Maitland." Hogg first met Scott in the summer of 1801. The shepherd had already seen the first volume of the "Minstrelsy." Did he, thereupon, write "Auld Maitland," teach his mother it, and induce Laidlaw to take it down from her recitation? The old lady said she got it from Andrew Moir, who had it "frae auld Baby Mettlin, who was said to have been another nor a gude ane." But we have Hogg's own statement that "aiblins ma gran'-mither was an unco leear," and this quality may have been hereditary. On the other side, Hogg could hardly have held his tongue about the forgery, if forgery it was, when he wrote his "Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott" (1834). The whole investigation is a little depressing, and makes one very shy of unauthenticated ballads. [The end] _ |