Anthony Jarrells
University of South Carolina
James Hogg and the Medium of Romantic Prose
In his 1800 Preface to
Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth asks,
“where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the
affinity between metrical and prose composition” (
Major
Works 602)? One answer, surely, is in the lyrical ballads
themselves: in poems such as “Simon Lee,” “We are Seven,” and “The Thorn,” that
is, which adopt “language really used by men” (597) and dispense with “what is
usually called poetic diction” (600). Readers might have to “struggle with
feelings of strangeness and aukwardness” (596) before any such bonds can be
affirmed, as Wordsworth admitted in his revised Preface of 1802. Still, the poet
remained decided in his opinion that “there neither is, nor can be, any
essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”
(602).
Another answer might be gleaned in the scores of titles published in the same
two-year period, 1800–02, in which the words “ballad” and “tale” seem to be used
interchangeably. Wishing to write “in the manner of” Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads, for example, Mary Robinson published
Lyrical Tales in 1800.
Robinson
writes this in a June 17th, 1800, letter to a
publisher (qtd. in Pascoe, Introduction, 54). In 1801, Matthew
Lewis’s collection of ballad imitations appeared as
Tales of
Wonder.
In 1808, Lewis would publish Romantic Tales, a four-volume work that includes
ballads and prose tales. A year later, Anne Bannerman published
Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, another
collection of ballads. 1802 also saw the first two volumes of Walter Scott’s
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of
“tales” of “elder times” (as Scott described them in the dedication) that
recovered the rich ballad culture of the Scottish border country. William
Earle’s
Welsh Legends: A Collection of Popular Oral
Tales (1802) features both verse and prose compositions, including
prose tales on which, as Earle explains, the ballads “of this and other
countries” were “founded” (vi).
In certain respects, the conflation of “ballad” and “tale” is confusing in that
both were well-known forms at the turn of the century, the former as a verse
form, the latter, increasingly, as a prose form. The ballad had undergone a
revival in the latter half of the eighteenth century, thanks to the publication
of Thomas Percy’s
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765) and to what Katie Trumpener calls the “new” genre of the ballad
collection (xi). And it was in these same years that the tale
emerged as its own, distinct generic category, with a first major peak in
popularity in the 1790s, followed by a second, even more dramatic rise in the
1820s, when “tale” surpassed both “novel” and “romance” to become the most
popular label for prose fiction in the decade.
The tale has
two major associations that attach to it in these years of emergence: the
first is the moral or didactic (as in the work of Jean-Francois Marmontel,
Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth), the second is the
regional and traditional (as in the work of Edgeworth (again), Walter Scott,
and James Hogg). The foregrounding of the moment of telling or teaching in
both might be said to link these two major associations. The present article
will focus on the tale’s strong regional and oral-traditional associations,
but for a general view that considers both major strands of the tale’s rise,
see Tim Killick, British Short Fiction in the Early
Nineteenth Century (2008), and Anthony Jarrells, “Short
Fictional Forms and the Rise of the Tale,” in The Oxford
History of the Novel in English, vol. 2: English and British Fiction
1750–1820, edited by Karen O’Brien and Peter Garside (Oxford UP,
2015), 478–94. On the word “tale” surpassing “romance” and “novel” in the
1820s, see Peter Garside, “The English Novel in the Romantic Era:
Consolidation and Dispersal,” in The English Novel,
1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the
British Isles, edited by Peter Garside, James Raven, Rainer
Schöwerling (Oxford University Press, 2000), 15–103: pp. 50–51. In
other respects, however, the conflation of ballads and tales is not so difficult
to account for. Both words had strong associations with what had come to be
understood as “oral tradition” and both reflected a general sense of
“nervousness” about the fate of songs and stories in a print-saturated age.
Paula McDowell argues that in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, following a new interest in the ballad and in the
controversy surrounding James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, “we see an epochal
shift in attitudes toward ‘oral tradition,’ and the crystallization of the
modern secularized version of this concept” (McDowell, “Mediating Media,”
240). See also Nicholas Hudson, “Constructing Oral Tradition: the Origins of
the Concept in Enlightenment Intellectual Culture.” The
Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850, edited by Adam
Fox and Daniel Woolf (Manchester UP, 2002), pp. 240–55. On “nervousness”
about the spread of print in the eighteenth century, see McDowell, “The Art
of Printing was Fatal,” p. 56. Indeed, the confusion already is
evident in the series of publications that got the whole ballad revival started:
I mean the proto-tales, or prose translations of Gaelic ballads, that James
Macpherson called
The Poems of Ossian (1760–65).
“Pleasant are the words of the song,” says Cuchullin in book three of
Fingal, “and lovely are the tales of other times” (73).
Or, in “Oina-Morul. a Poem”: “I seize the tales as they pass, and pour them
forth in song” (323). “Tale” and “ballad” refer generally to “story,”
“tradition,” “antiquity.” But what was new and distinctive about these two as
forms, especially compared with, say, the novel or the polite poetry of the
eighteenth century, was precisely the attention they drew to the act of
remediating traditional, oral stories in print. Both ballads and tales exhibit
what Jussi Parikka calls “the media-archaeological spirit of thinking the new
and the old in parallel lines” (2). As such, they bring to the fore the very
question of medium itself.
Yet of the two answers offered here to Wordsworth’s question about affinities
between metrical and prose composition, only one—the yoking together of lyric
and ballad—has received scholarly attention. The other—the conflation of ballad
and tale—has hardly been remarked upon at all, not even by those recent scholars
whose work constitutes an important media turn in the field and highlights the
significance of the ballad in particular for understanding the “medium” of
Romantic poetry.In terms of the latter, I’m thinking
especially of the work of Maureen N. McLane (Balladeering,
Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry). In terms
of a more general media turn in Romantic studies, see, in addition to
McLane, Celeste Langan (“Understanding Media in 1805”); Langan and McLane
(“The Medium of Romantic Poetry”); Paula McDowell, “Mediating Media Past and
Present”; Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British
Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge UP,
2008); and Clifford Siskin, “Mediated Enlightenment: the System of the
World,” in This is Enlightenment, eds. Siskin and
William Warner (U of Chicago P, 2010), pp. 164–72. There are, I
think, a couple of reasons for the silence. First, although the tale was a
recognized form in the Romantic period, distinguished from the novel by
booksellers, publishers, and readers, it has not been considered as such in our
own time, which tends to see it merely as one subgenre in a larger “system” of
novels. As in, for instance, Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: “Both synchronically and
diachronically . . . the novel is the system of its
genres” (30). Clifford Siskin has used the term “novelism” to
describe the “habitual subordination of writing to the novel”
(172–3). Second, the media turn in eighteenth-century and Romantic
studies has focused mostly on verse, finding in “the situation of British
poetry, 1760–1830,” as Maureen McLane writes, “a window onto the transhistorical
condition of poetic ‘mediality’” more generally—“mediality” being “the condition
of existing in media, whether oral, manuscript, print, or digital” (
Balladeering 6).
McLane takes her
definition here from Friedrich A. Kittler’s Discourse
Networks, 1800/1900, and specifically from David E. Wellbery’s
Forward to the book, in which the term “mediality” is introduced.
Without necessarily intending to do so, such accounts sometimes collapse prose
into the larger category of print and ignore a genre such as the tale which,
like the ballad, can also be described—in Paula McDowell’s words—as a “hybrid
oral and textual practice” (“Mediating” 242).
Celeste Langan
addresses the conflation of prose and print in her essay, “Understanding
Media in 1805,” pp. 53–54. In what follows, I examine the ways that
the tale, too, exhibits a subtle self-consciousness about its own medial status
and I ask whether the features and history of this form open up possibilities
for talking about a medium of Romantic prose.
As Langan and
McLane do for verse in “The Medium of Romantic Poetry.” To do this, I
turn to the work of James Hogg, a Romantic-period writer who not only recognized
bonds of affinity between metrical and prose composition, but also understood
ballads and tales to be versions—interchangeable, in a sense—of one other.
Hogg’s 1830 tale, “The Mysterious Bride,” opens with references to two writers
who had a profound impact on his career. The first is Scott, a friend and
competitor whose wildly successful “school of chivalry” was always threatening
to edge out of the literary market Hogg’s own, more eccentric, “mountain and
fairy school” (Hogg
Anecdotes 9). Concerned about what
he saw as a recent turn away from belief in ghosts and spirits, and about
Scott’s comments on the subject in his
Keepsake tale of
1829, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” Hogg exclaims, “Even Sir Walter Scott is
turned renegade, and, with his stories made up of
half-and-half . . . is trying to throw cold water on the most
certain, though the most impalpable, phenomena of human nature” (“Mysterious
Bride” 155).
“The Mysterious Bride” was published as a
continuation of Hogg’s “Shepherd’s Calendar” series, which started in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1819 and was later
published as a two-volume collection in 1829. I am aware of the pitfalls of
conflating narrator and author in Romantic works and understand, too, that
the shepherd-narrator that Hogg employs for his series is a creation based
on Hogg’s own experiences, on people he knew in Ettrick, and on the persona
of “the Shepherd” as it appeared in the pages of Blackwood’s. Nevertheless, for the sake of convenience and to
more clearly position Hogg the writer in relation to the references and
sources he engages in his tale, I will refer to him throughout this essay as
“Hogg” rather than as the more awkward “Hogg’s narrator” or “Hogg’s
speaker.” Hogg may have felt miffed by Scott’s turn, in 1827, to the
tale, a genre he saw as belonging to his own school and which he spent much of
the 1820s proving his mastery of.
As Ian Duncan notes, it was
during these years that “Hogg and [John] Galt gave the tale its most
striking formal development” (Scott’s Shadow
35). That Scott would then use the form to question the tale’s great
topos of the supernatural only added fuel to the fire.
The second reference follows immediately from the first and expands the argument
about the supernatural to include another form associated with tradition: the
ballad. As a means of challenging the recent rejection of ghosts and spirits,
Hogg exclaims: “Before [naysayers like Scott] had ventured to assert such
things, I wish they had been where I have often been; or, in particular, where
the Laird of Birkendelly was on St Lawrence’s eve, in the year 1777, and sundry
times subsequent to that” (155). The place in question is the road from
Birkendelly, in the “great muckle village of Balmawhapple”; the Laird to whom
Hogg’s narrator almost silently gives way is casually riding along and “chanting
a song” by “a certain, or rather uncertain, bard ycleped Robert Burns, who made
a number of good songs” (155). This song, Hogg writes, “was an amorous song of
great antiquity, which, like all the said bard’s best songs, was sung one
hundred and fifty years before he was born” (155). “O let me in this ae night,”
the song referred to, was first taken up by Burns in 1792 when he modified it
for inclusion in James Johnson’s
Scots Musical Museum
(1787–1803). He returned to it again several times between 1793 and 1795
following a request from George Thomson to contribute to his
A
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793–1818).
“Oh let me in this ae night,” sings a lover standing outside a woman’s window:
he’s cold and wet and complains that “love has bound [him], hand and foot.” But
the woman is not persuaded: “Gae back the gate ye came again / I winna let you
in, jo—,” she responds (Kinsley 485). These lines are from Burns, the bard Hogg
mentions in his tale. However, the lines that Hogg actually provides are from
another, earlier version, much like the one published in
The
Scots Musical Museum and based on David Herd’s
Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (1776). In this version, too, a
man pleads to be admitted to his lover’s house:
I am the Laird o’ windy-wa’s,
I came nae here without a cause,
An’ I hae gotten forty fa’s
In coming o’er the knowe, joe!
The night it is baith cauld and weet;
The morn it will be snaw and sleet;
My shoon are frozen to my feet;
O, rise an’ let me in, joe!
Let me in this ae night, &c. &c. (“Mysterious
Bride” 155)
The lines quoted are similar to the Herd version, though here,
in Hogg’s tale, the two stanzas are presented in reversed order. Indeed, both
versions by Burns (in the
Musical Museum and in
Kinsley) follow Herd for the first eight lines. But the three versions are quite
different in their endings. The later Burns version is the most chaste of the
three: it was, after all, commissioned by Thomson, and the Burns whom Thomson
wanted for his collection was the pious, sentimental Burns of “The Cotter’s
Saturday Night,” not the bawdy Burns of such songs as would be printed a few
years later in
The Merry Muses of Caledonia
(1799).
On Thomson’s request see Kinsley’s note
to the poem, #485, in volume three of The Poems and Songs
of Robert Burns. Answering her lover with an unambiguous
“no,” the woman in Burns’s song opines,
The sweetest flower that deck’d the mead,
Now trodden like the vilest weed—
Let simple maid the lesson read
The wierd may be her ain, jo.
“Wierd” here means “fate.” The version quoted in Hogg’s tale, based on Herd’s text, ends
quite differently.
In the version printed in The Scots Musical Museum she also lets him in. It concludes:
“the joys we’ve had this ae night / your chamber was within, jo” (Musical Museum #311). Although Hogg does not
provide the actual lines, he hints at them when he writes, “[t]his song the
Laird was singing, while, at the same time, he was smudging and laughing at the
catastrophe, when, ere ever aware, he beheld, a short way before him, an
uncommonly elegant and beautiful girl walking in the same direction with him”
(155–56). The word “catastrophe” can mean “a conclusion generally unhappy,” as
Samuel Johnson defined it; “a sudden disaster, as in the
OED; or a “convulsion affecting the earth’s surface,” which was a
new usage in Hogg’s time derived from the emerging science of geology (also
listed in the
OED). Hogg’s use of the word might be
said to capitalize on all three meanings. Here are the concluding verses of
Herd’s version:
She let him in sae cannily,
She let him in sae privily,
She let him in sae cannily,
To do the thing you ken, jo.
Bur ere a’ was done, and a’ was said,
Out fell the bottom of the bed;
The lassie lost her maidenhead,
And her mither heard the din, jo. (Herd 167–69)
That Hogg’s laird is able to laugh at this catastrophe is
somewhat ironic—it’s “wierd,” we might say—as it foreshadows his own unhappy
conclusion: later in the tale, the laird’s “blackened corpse” is discovered at
the very spot where the elegant and beautiful girl first appeared to him, on the
day the two of them were to be married. “This woful catastrophe,” Hogg
writes, repeating the word he used earlier to describe the end of the ballad,
“struck the neighborhood with great consternation, so that nothing else was
talked of” (166). The elegant and beautiful girl is, of course, the mysterious
bride of the title—the ghost of one Jane Ogilvy, who, long ago, let a man in one
night, so to speak. After losing her “maidenhead” she is jilted by the man,
Allan Sandison, the grandfather of the laird singing the tune, who forsakes her
to wed “the great heiress of Birkendelly.” Ogilvy’s ghost takes its revenge on
Sandison’s heir, and we come to understand that a similar catastrophe befell the
previous generation of Sandisons, as well.
Hogg, then, refers to one version of a ballad—by Burns—and cites another, a
version “that is more direct in defining the ‘catastrophe’ that results from
admitting the laird ‘this ae night,’” as Hogg’s recent editor, Thomas C.
Richardson, puts it (
Blackwood’s 433, n. 155d). It’s a
clever bit of play, showing not only that Hogg knew a good deal about different
versions of ballads but also drawing attention to the process of transmission
itself: from the song “sung one hundred and fifty years” before Burns’s birth to
the different versions collected by Herd, Johnson, and Thomson, and on to Hogg’s
own tale. Indeed, Hogg seems to suggest that his tale is yet another instance in
this process, part of a living tradition comprised of individual memory (what
the narrator characterizes as “facts that happened in my own remembrance” [155])
and oral lore as collected in songs and stories. Hogg does not try to smooth
over the differences brought about in the process or to “conflate sources so as
to produce a single representative text”—as, for example, David Atkinson
suggests that Scott did in his
Minstrelsy and Percy did
before him in his
Reliques (Atkinson 120). Rather than
seeing the ballad as a “closed, original, and seminal utterance,” Hogg
understands it “as a constant and multiple production” (Atkinson 23). The
ballad’s “appropriate organizing principle,” as Atkinson argues, “is precisely
one of proliferation” (23). The laird in Hogg’s version of the story might be
singing the tune that Burns’s verses are set to while chanting the words printed
in Herd’s edition or combining elements from all of the versions. The tale thus
highlights the ballad’s “inherent” instability even as it becomes yet another
version (Atkinson 182).
My aim here is not to reduce “The Mysterious Bride” to an allegory about the
pitfalls of ballad editing. But I do want to suggest that it reveals an acute
awareness of how the ballad exists somewhere between orality and print and of
how the tale, though written in prose, can be understood to be part of the
“multiple production” of the ballad, either following from it, as in Hogg, or
preceding it, as in the Earle example cited above. The mysterious bride from
whom the tale takes its title is, in a sense, conjured into being from the
singing of the Burns song: so sudden is her appearance on the road that the
laird assumes that she must have “risen out of the earth” (156). And in a
description that sounds like it could be of the antiquarian ballad collection
itself, Hogg writes that when the body of the young Sandison was discovered,
“[e]very ancient tradition and modern incident were raked together, compared,
and combined” (166). To little effect, it might be said. Hogg’s tale would seem
to offer another instance of what Ian Duncan, writing about Hogg’s
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(1824), calls “a grisly parody of the late Enlightenment project of antiquarian
and literary ‘revival’—the attempt by scholars and poets to recover the remains
of national traditions, buried in a primitive countryside” (xi). Instead of
raking, comparing, and combining with the hope of arriving at an answer—or
text—the mystery is solved by an old woman named Marion Haw, who simply tells
another tale. This tale, Hogg notes, has more than a little in common with his
own attempts in the genre. “She gave the parishioners a history of the
Mysterious Bride, so plausibly correct, but withal so romantic,” he writes,
“that everybody said of it, (as is often said of my narratives, with the same
narrow-minded prejudice and injustice,) that it was a
made story”
(166–67; emphasis in the original).
Given the stress in Hogg’s tale on the ballad and its multiple versions, the word
“made” as it is used here could be understood to refer to an
assembled story—that is, to the raking, comparing and
collecting that aims to produce a true or original text, something both
“correct” and “romantic,” like a ballad in an eighteenth-century collection. The
explicit comparison that Hogg makes, however, is to his “narratives,” a
comparison which suggests that a “made” story is something more like a
mere fiction or perhaps a story that is too seamless to be
true. Something like a novel, that is. This might very well be a dig at Scott
or, more generally, at what Matthew Wickman, in his contribution to this issue,
describes as “the modern concept of the literary as a species of imaginative
writing set against a normative sphere of everyday life.” See
Wickman’s essay in this issue, “Concerning the Spiritual in Hogg’s Art”:
link here. But if Hogg means to draw a distinction between the tale
and the novel, the word “made” would seem to go against my own reading of the
former’s major difference from the latter: its self-consciousness about its own
medial status. Wouldn’t something that appears to be “made” be something more
likely to call attention to its made-ness, or its medium—as in “made of what” or
“made how”? This is a point that McLane and Celeste Langan make in their lucid
account of “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” (2008). Commenting on a 1799 review
of
Lyrical Ballads, in which Charles Burney describes
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s project as an “ingenious forgery,” Langan and McLane
explain that it is precisely the “forged” aspect of the collection that makes
visible poetry’s status as medium. “[T]he ‘retrogradation,’ to use Burney’s
term, is intentional” (253), they write; Wordsworth and Coleridge,
are
exploring the ‘medium of poetry’ in another sense [not, as in Burney, as
transition from one period to another]: neither its origin nor its end but
rather its middle—and by extension, perhaps, its
essence. For it may be that the question of a medium and
the question of an essence are always bound together: the very possibility
of multiple ‘mediations’ produces in turn the question, ‘mediations of what
[thing]?’ (254)
Hogg understands the ballad’s essence similarly:
its multiple mediations not only open a space for the prose tale, but also allow
his own telling to become a new—although not a final—version. But then how is
the tale not also forged—or “made”? Wouldn’t a made story be more in keeping
with a forged poetry?
The difference comes down to the medium that fictional prose is so often
conflated with—print—and to the genre that has come to stand in for literature
more generally in an age of print: the novel. See note 6 on
Clifford Siskin’s term, “novelism.” Unlike the ballad or the tale,
the novel is a born-print genre: as Walter Benjamin explains, what
“distinguishes” it from the latter is “its essential dependence on the book”
(87). Such a dependence on the newly naturalized medium of print suggests that
the “made” in Hogg’s description has a different character than the “forged” in
Langan and McLane’s example. “Made” stories in print are those in which there
appears to be no medium whatsoever, no work of forging, making, or mediation. As
Catherine Gallagher has shown, novels offer readers the kind of consistency and
depth of character which, though the product of fiction, appear consistent
with—indeed, coterminous with—real life. “The novel gives us explicit fiction,”
she writes, “and simultaneously seems to occlude it” (349). Such occlusion
constitutes a kind of immediacy, a new product of “an age in which the medium of
the book,” as Friedrich Kittler argues, “is first universal” (117), an age that
Kittler dates to 1800. Poetry, too, exhibited the effects of the change. Langan,
for instance, describes blank verse as “the redefinition of English poetry by
the medium of print,” explaining that a poem like “Tintern Abbey” “appears to
reject artifice” and thus to render its medium of communication “invisible”
(“Understanding” 53–54). When poetry becomes prose or prose-like, in other
words, medium becomes invisible because prose itself has become synonymous with
print. A forged poetry, to go back to the example above, brings medium back to
the fore by keeping the poetry part active: it resists the conflation of poetry
and print, in practice if not in theory, by highlighting the poetic process of
forging, or making, as distinct from something already made.
The novel, likewise, can be described as the redefinition of storytelling by the
medium of print. Plausibly correct and withal so romantic, it, too, appears to
reject its own artifice and to obscure the fact of medium. But what then can we
say about prose in the period? Is its case a hopeless one, always to be
collapsed into the larger category of print, a category that, having become
natural and universal, had it made, so to speak? Perhaps the ballad-tale
conflation highlighted at the start of this essay is somewhat akin to the
poetry-prose conflation Langan analyzes, though here it resists the additional
conflation of prose and print by highlighting the former’s continued affinities
with poetry, that medium that refused to give way in the face of massive medium
change? To say such is not to collapse prose into the larger category of medium.
Instead, it is to make medium itself part what Yoon Sun Lee, in her introduction
to this issue, describes as “the situated quality of prose,” and especially of
prose written in a modern, print-saturated, world. See Yoon
Sun Lee’s Introduction to this special issue: link here.
The opposite of a made story, then, would be a tale—or ballad—“founded on fact,”
with fact referring not to that epistemological unit that Mary Poovey calls “the
modern fact,” a unit that came to be represented by numbers (Poovey 5), but
rather to a “truth” attested to by “authentic testimony” (as one
OED entry defines it), and in particular to the telling
and retelling of stories over time.
As a reviewer of Mary
Margaret Busk’s Tales of Fault and Feeling (1825)
put it, “[t]ales are in the first place facts, which, from being in some
degree out of the common course of things, attract attention, are
remembered, and handed down from father to son, with all that incorrectness
which must attend what relies on memory only . . .” The Literary Gazette (26 March 1825). Quoted in
Killick, British Short Fiction, p. 17. It
is interesting to note that the word “tale” can mean both “number” and “story.”
Hogg’s friend, Lord Byron, highlights the overlapping registers when he puns on
the word in Canto III of
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1816): “and if thy tale be true,” he exclaims, alluding to the number of bodies
that perished on the field of Waterloo and to the story those numbers tell of
that decisive battle (l. 308). Hogg, too, brings to the fore the seemingly
contradictory registers of number and story—or tally and tale—in his repeated
claim that his tales are founded on incidents told again and again or, as in
“The Mysterious Bride,” that they are a “relation of facts.” On the one hand,
such stories traffic in a realm of experience that is thoroughly grounded in
belief, including belief in ghosts, miracles, spirits and all that is
inconsistent with real life as represented in novels.
As
Wickman explains, “[f]or Hogg, the spiritual is a fact of existence.” Link
to Wickman’s essay. On the other hand, the truth of such experience
is both attested to and made, as in
poiesis, or poetic making,
precisely out of multiple retellings. “Perhaps a tale you’ll make it,” says
Wordsworth’s speaker in “Simon Lee” (l. 80), making the reader both frustrated
and, as McLane shrewdly observes, “like the poet, a ‘maker,’” (
Balladeering 227). Tales are part of a process—and a community—in
which facts are made in and by the act of transmission.
Hogg’s knowledge of the rich history of ballad transmission is hardly surprising:
one of his first successes came with “Donald Macdonald” (1801), a patriotic song
that gained a popular following in Scotland; and Hogg and his mother, Margaret
Laidlaw Hogg, were what McLane describes as “informants” for Scott’s
Minstrelsy (
Balladeering 4). With
Scott’s encouragement Hogg published a collection of “ballads and songs founded
on facts and legendary tales,”
The Mountain Bard, in
1807.
Title page, The Mountain
Bard, 1807. Hogg published an expanded version of The Mountain Bard in 1821. The title of the 1821
edition was changed, slightly, to read, “The Mountain Bard; Consisting of
Legendary Ballads and Tales.” But while he would continue to write
poetry and songs throughout his career, it was with the prose tale that Hogg
found his best point of entry into a crowded literary market and his most
distinctive literary voice. Many of his tales, like “The Mysterious Bride,”
engage, build upon, or indirectly comment on the ballad tradition that Hogg was
so familiar with.
As Douglas Gifford notes, “. . .
it cannot be stressed enough how much [Hogg’s] ballad background is the
basis of both content and form in the bulk and the best of his fiction”
(Development 10). Others quite literally
emerge from the margins and surrounding materials of ballads—conjured, like the
mysterious bride herself, by song. In
The Mountain
Bard, for instance, Hogg includes a ballad imitation, “The Pedlar,” that
he published three years earlier in the
Scots Magazine.
The ballad tells the story of a murdered pedlar and of the discovery, following
a bizarre incident in which a recovered heel bone starts “streamin wi’ blood,”
of the murderer (
Mountain, l. 147). As Hogg’s editor,
Suzanne Gilbert, suggests, the “motif” of a part of a victim’s body bearing
witness to his fate is common in traditional ballads; it can be seen in “The
Cruel Sister,” collected in Scott, and the better known version, “The Twa
Sisters,” collected in Francis James Child’s
The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98).
See Gilbert’s
note to “The Pedlar” (1807), pp. 405–06.
Like Scott’s version in the
Minstrelsy, Hogg’s “Pedlar”
has what appears to be a standard ballad-collection apparatus, including a
headnote and endnotes. But these spaces are used not to highlight excluded
variants or to justify one version over another, but instead to proliferate
multiple versions of the “fact” on which the ballad is “founded” (26). The
endnotes, for instance, stretch on for many pages and offer multiple instances
of the “superstitious awe” (
Mountain Bard 31) recorded
in the song. “This reminds me of a trifling anecdote, which I will here relate
as an instance” (33), Hogg writes. A few paragraphs later: “some, yet alive,
have heard John Corry, who was [Mr Boston’s] servant, tell the following story”
(34). “A similar story to this of Mr Boston and the pedlar, is told of a
contemporary of his, the Reverend Henry Davieson, of
Gallashiels . . .” (35). And off he goes again, with one account
suggesting another until a tale—indeed, a set of tales—has unfolded in the
margins to extend the story and to show it to be alive still, present “amongst
the wilds of the country to this day” (
Mountain Bard
32).
As Gilbert elsewhere argues, for Hogg “tradition” is
not “a fixed set of practices” located in the past, but rather something
that “continues into the present” (“Authority of Tradition” 101).
In the 1821 edition of
The Mountain Bard, Hogg added a
number of new ballads, including “The Wife of Crowle,” a version of the famous
“Wife of Usher’s Well,” from Scott’s
Minstrelsy, which
tells the story of three sons drowned at sea who return—as revenants—to feast
with their bereaved mother before departing in the morning to go to their
graves. Hogg’s version was originally published in his own, short-lived literary
periodical,
The Spy, in 1810, as “A Fragment.” And as
Hogg notes in the headnote to
The Mountain Bard
version, it is also “given more at large in ‘The Winter Evening Tales’” (312), a
collection of prose tales that Hogg published in 1820—his most successful work
of fiction. This more-at-large version appears in the first story of the
collection, “The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee,” which was itself published
in two fragments earlier in
The Spy and tells of the
wanderings of the anti-heroic Basil, from a Berwickshire farm to Canada to
revolutionary-war America and back to Edinburgh. Along the way Basil encounters
the tale of “an old woman who lived in a lone sheiling, at the head of an arm of
the sea, called Loch Kios, to whom a ghost paid a visit every night” (
Winter 53). The account recorded in “The Wife of Crowle”
is here transplanted to the isle of Lewis and then extended in the form of a
prose tale.
nother example of this movement from ballad to
tale, one perhaps better known to today’s readers of Hogg, is the prose tale
version of the ballad, “The Twa Corbies,” collected in Scott’s Minstrelsy, that is interpolated in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
(147–52). See also Duncan’s note in the text, p. 208, n. 149.
The movement back-and-forth between ballad and tale, and the interplay of both
within individual ballads or tales, is a striking feature of Hogg’s work. But as
noted at the start of this essay, his deployment of these two forms as versions
of one another, interchangeable, in a sense, is a product of the ballad-tale
conflation that marks the turn of the century more generally and that can be
linked back to Ossian, the ballad revival, and a general sense of anxiety about
the fate of old stories in new media. It is tempting to see in the examples
given from Hogg a progress of sorts: from the ballad (“Donald Macdonald”), to
the ballad and tale existing side by side (as in
The Mountain
Bard or
The Spy), and finally on to the
tale: “Basil Lee” or “The Mysterious Bride,” each one taking its starting point
from a ballad. That is perhaps a little too neat, though the progression is in
keeping with a larger cultural shift in these years, one that saw the tale first
confused with the ballad and then, for a time, rivaling it and even displacing
it as an object of collection (as in Earle’s
Welsh
Legends or the more famous example of the
Children’s and Household Tales of the Grimm brothers, first
published in 1812).
As Tim Killick notes, “[a]t some point
during the late 1810s, perhaps influenced by Scott’s shift from poetry to
the novel, the tale began to match the ballad as a subject worthy of study
by the antiquarian and the folk historian” (British Short
Fiction 122). Still, this is to emphasize the competition
between the forms, of which there was some, rather than the commonalities
between them, of which there were many. As Wordsworth might have said—or better,
as Albert B. Lord or Marshall McLuhan might have said—the more “philosophical”
distinction is not that between poetry and prose, or ballad and tale, but rather
between oral and written media.
Wordsworth, Preface, 602.
Wordsworth actually says that the contradistinction is between poetry and
science. Lord’s book, The Singer of Tales (2nd edition, Harvard UP, 2000), published in 1962,
examines the distinct manner in which oral epic singers compose and as such
contributes to discussions about Homer and his age that go back to the
eighteenth century. Marshall McLuhan described his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (U
of Toronto P, 1962) as “complementary” to The Singer of
Tales, for the ways it understands one moment of medium change
(oral to print) in terms of another, later one (from print to the “electric
age”). Like the ballad, the tale kept a foot in both camps, holding
on to the idea of a genuine middle position—in prose—between orality and
literacy for at least as long as it took for the short story to reorient such
fiction along the lines of the novel and to make a new age of prose synonymous
with an age of print.