Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd

 

A talk delivered by James Robertson on 15th August 2005 at Makars’ Court, Edinburgh, to mark Scott’s birthday and the Hogg exhibition at the Writers’ Museum

 

I cannot, in the space of half an hour, offer much fresh insight or a major re-evaluation of the relationship between Scott and Hogg. What I can do however is rehearse some of the key events of their literary relationship, and draw out some conclusions from these.

 

The traditional view is that Scott was a good friend and patron of Hogg, but that he found him a wee bit embarrassing, indiscreet, pushy, gauche in polite company and hopelessly erratic both in his writing and in the way he conducted his life. Hogg, on the other hand, so runs the established line, adored Scott but disliked some of his social pretensions and many of his acquaintances. It’s also often said that Hogg was less grateful than he should have been for the help Scott gave him and that he maintained a kind of inverted superiority over Scott as a man of humble origins.

 

There is a great deal of truth in all this, but it is also the case that each of these two men played himself off against the other to his own advantage. It suited Scott, the great man of letters, sometimes to have a poor rustic clown tugging at his sleeve: he clearly enjoyed a good laugh at some of Hogg’s absurdities and social indiscretions, and in his letters he often makes puns on Hogg’s name (referring to him as coming “squeaking into the world”, the Boar of Ettrick Forest etc.) but he always remains loyal and warm towards Hogg, avoiding the snobbish mockery of Lockhart and the Blackwood’s circle, who made Hogg a laughing-stock, especially in their portrayal of him in the Noctes Ambrosianae. However, it also suited Hogg to play the part of the Shepherd, and to act up his court jester role in the literary and social circles that knowing Scott gave him access to. He knew he was a “character” and often deliberately accentuated his “characteristics”. Or, as one critic has put it, “Hogg played the Fool at the Court of patriotic Scottish opinion over which Scott presided and… like all the best fools he was often wiser than his master.” Both men were acutely aware that what they wrote about themselves would leave a lasting imprint upon the public’s perception of their characters; and Scott’s self-deprecation and Hogg’s self-aggrandisement were tools that they employed quite deliberately and self-consciously. “I like to write about myself,” Hogg begins his ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’: “in fact, there are few things which I like better; it is so delightful to call up old reminiscences. Often have I been laughed at for what an Edinburgh editor styles my good-natured egotism, which is sometimes anything but that; and I am aware that I shall be laughed at again. But I care not.…”

 

Despite all the manipulating and jockeying for position, a fundamental mutual fondness between the two men prevailed throughout their lives. But there is a third party of whom we must take cognisance, and that is John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and future biographer. Lockhart was Hogg’s erstwhile collaborator and friend in the Blackwood’s group, but he later became impatient with Hogg and not only painted up the ludicrous elements of the Ettrick Shepherd’s public persona but also set about undermining his literary career and reputation. This was partly because Lockhart, who saw himself as the guardian of Scott’s unassailable reputation, thoroughly disapproved of Hogg’s memoir of Sir Walter, published as The Domestic Manners and Private Life of Sir Walter Scott in 1834, two years after Scott’s death. Lockhart’s biography was published in 1837–8, and in the conclusion Lockhart says of Hogg, who had died in 1835, “it had been better for his fame had his end been of earlier date, for he did not follow his best benefactor until he had insulted his dust”.

 

Hogg and Scott first met in 1801, when Scott, recently appointed Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, was spending much time in Ettrick and Yarrow compiling the first volumes of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Scott’s great friend and companion on these Border “raids” was Willie Laidlaw, who introduced him to Hogg, then still working as a shepherd. Scott was thirty years old and Hogg eight months older (although Hogg would later maintain that he was slightly younger than Scott). Hogg’s elderly mother Margaret was a storehouse of old ballads, and Hogg himself a storehouse of what he called “traditionary tales”. The two men hit it off immediately. As Lockhart puts it (and one has to be aware that whenever Lockhart write of Hogg there are barbs attached even to his compliments):

 

Under the garb, aspect, and bearing of a rude peasant – and rude enough he was in most of these things – Scott found a brother poet, a true son of nature and genius, hardly conscious of his powers…As yet his naturally kind and simple character had not been exposed to any of the dangerous flatteries of the world; his heart was pure – his enthusiasm buoyant as that of a happy child… there was here a depth and a brightness that filled [Scott] with wonder, combined with a quaintness of humour, and a thousand little touches of absurdity, which afforded him more entertainment, as I have often heard him say, than the best comedy that ever set the pit in a roar.

 

Hogg once wrote: “There are not above five people in the world who, I think, know Sir Walter better , or understand his character better than I do; and if I outlive him, which is likely, as I am five months and ten days younger, I shall draw a mental portrait of him, the likeness of which to the original shall not be disputed.” This was published in 1832, the last year of Scott’s life, and in fact, as we shall see, when Hogg did publish a fuller portrait of his old friend, it proved hugely controversial, most notably in the eyes of John Gibson Lockhart.

 

This is Hogg’s recollection of one of his earliest meetings with The Shirra in his mother’s cottage in Ettrickdale:

 

One fine day in the summer of 1801, as I was busily engaged working in the field at Ettrick House, Wat Shiel came over to me and said, that “I boud gang away down to the Ramseycleuch as fast as my feet could carry me, for there war some gentlemen there wha wantit to speak to me.”

“Wha can be at the Ramseycleuch that want me, Wat?”

“I couldna say, for it wasna me that they spak to i’ the byganging. But I’m thinking it’s the Shirra an’ some o’ his gang.”

I was rejoiced to hear this, for I had seen the first volumes of the “Minstrelsy of the Border,” and had copied a number of old ballads from my mother’s recital, and sent them to the editor preparatory for a third volume. I accordingly went towards home to put on my Sunday clothes, but before reaching it I met with The Shirra and Mr William Laidlaw coming to visit me. They alighted and remained in our cottage for a space better than an hour, and my mother chanted the ballad of Old Maitlan’ to them, with which Mr. Scott was highly delighted… I remember he asked her if she thought it had ever been printed; and her answer was, “Oo, na, na, sir, it was never printed i’ the world, for my brothers an’ me learned it frae auld Andrew Moor, an’ he learned it, an’ mony mae, frae auld Baby Mettlin, that was housekeeper to the first laird o’ Tushilaw.”

“Then that must be a very auld story, indeed, Margaret,” said he.

“Ay, it is that! It is an auld story! But mair nor that, except George Warton and James Steward, there was never ane o’ my sangs prentit till ye prentit them yoursell, an’ ye hae spoilt them a’thegither. They war made for singing, an’ for reading; and they’re nouther right spelled nor right setten down.”

“Heh-heh-heh! Take ye that, Mr. Scott,” said Laidlaw.

Mr. Scott answered with a hearty laugh, and the recital of a verse, but I have forgot what it was, and my mother gave him a rap on the knee with her open hand, and said, “It is true enough, for a’ that.”

 

And this is Lockhart’s account (not a first-hand one, for Lockhart did not meet Scott in person till 1818) of one of Hogg’s first entries into the Edinburgh social circles in which Scott moved:

 

The next time that Hogg’s business carried him to Edinburgh, he waited upon Scott, who invited him to dinner in Castle Street, in company with William Laidlaw, who happened also to be in town, and some other admirers of the rustic genius. When Hogg entered the drawing-room, Mrs Scott, being at the time in a delicate state of health, was reclining on a sofa. The Shepherd, after being presented, and making his best bow, forthwith took possession of another sofa placed opposite to hers, and stretched himself thereupon at all his length; for, as he said afterwards, “I thought I could never do wrong to copy the lady of the house.” As his dress at this period was precisely that in which any ordinary herdsman attends cattle to the market, and as his hands, moreover, bore most legible marks of a recent sheep-smearing, the lady of the house did not observe with perfect equanimity the novel usage to which her chintz was exposed. The Shepherd, however, remarked nothing of all this – dined heartily and drank freely, and, by jest, anecdote, and song, afforded plentiful merriment to the more civilised part of the company. As the liquor operated, his familiarity increased and strengthened; from “Mr Scott” he advanced to “Sherra” and thence to “Scott”, “Walter” and “Wattie” – until, at supper, he fairly convulsed the whole party by addressing Mrs Scott as “Charlotte”.

 

Hogg (or his mother) supplied much of the contents of the third volume of the Minstrelsy (Hogg exaggeratedly claims about one-third of the whole – but significantly Hogg was the only person outwith Scott’s own family and the Duke of Buccleuch honoured with a presentation copy of the volume when it appeared) but Hogg was not always best pleased with how Scott treated the raw material. “I was much dissatisfied with the imitations of the ancient ballads contained in it, and immediately set about imitating the ancient ballads myself – selected a number of traditionary stories, and put them in metre by chanting them to certain old tunes.” This was the starting-point for Hogg’s collection The Mountain Bard.

 

Scott helped get this collection of ballads and songs published in 1807, and in fact suggested many subjects for Hogg to work up, made corrections and recommendations on grammar, style and matters of propriety and even corrected the proofs when Hogg couldn’t get up to Edinburgh. Hogg was extremely grateful, as is shown in the letters of the time. The book was a modest success, and Hogg used the proceeds to set himself up as a farmer in Dumfriesshire, emulating his hero Burns, whom he hoped to equal and perhaps surpass in poetic achievement. But the farm failed, as Burns’s had, and Hogg arrived back in Edinburgh in 1810, debt-ridden, forty, and anxious to make a living as a writer. Inspired by the huge success of Scott’s poetical romances, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake (1810), and of Byron’s Childe Harold (1812), Hogg decided that he could do as well at the same game. The trouble was, he didn’t have a book-length narrative poem on the stocks. What he did have was a collection of ballads which he now wove into a narrative set in 1561, the date of Mary, Queen of Scots’ return to her native land from France. The result was The Queen’s Wake, in which a bardic contest takes place before the queen, who will present the winning bard with a magnificent harp. Hogg, Douglas Mack tells us, “took to this narrative pattern like a duck to water”. He found himself able to create and inhabit a variety of voices, and to load these voices with all kinds of social, political and historical significance. Published in 1813, The Queen’s Wake successfully re-launched Hogg’s literary career.

 

We still find Hogg deferring to Scott’s opinions in many things. Here for example is how Hogg describes how he came to revise the ending of his ballad ‘The Witch o’ Fife’ for the third edition of The Queen’s Wake published in 1814. In Hogg’s original version the witch’s husband, having learnt the secret word that enables her to fly, follows her and her witch-cronies to Carlisle to drink the bishop’s wine. He overdoes it, is caught in the morning by the English and burnt at the stake. Scott didn’t like this ending:

 

He said to me one day after dinner “It was but very lately Mr Hogg that I was drawn by our friend Kirkpatrick Sharpe to note the merits of your ballad The Witch of Fife. There never was such a thing written for genuine and ludicrous humour but why in the name of wonder did you suffer the gude auld man to be burnt skin and bone by the English at Carlisle? I never saw a piece of such bad taste in my life What had the poor old carle done to deserve such a fate? Only taken a drappy o’ drink too much at another man’s expense which you and I have done often. It is a finale which I cannot bear and you must bring off the old man by some means or other no matter how extravagant or ridiculous in such a ballad as yon but by all means bring off the fine old fellow for the present termination of the ballad is one which I cannot brook.” I went home and certainly brought off the old man with flying colours which is by far the best part of the ballad.

 

Hogg rewrote the ending so that the “gude auld man” escapes just as the fire is kindling at his feet. Both versions, each with its own merits, are published in the new edition of The Queen’s Wake edited by Douglas Mack.

 

Despite Scott’s repeated support in procuring subscriptions for his forthcoming books, loans or gifts of money (even when Scott himself was in deep financial distress), offering to take him on as grieve at Ashestiel (which Hogg, probably luckily for both of them and for their friendship, declined), a word in the ear of the Duke of Buccleuch and so on, Hogg did at times appear less than grateful to his patron. One of the passages in his memoir of Scott that annoyed Lockhart goes as follows:

 

On the whole I have never been anything advantaged by Sir Walter’s friendship save by the honour and undeviating steadiness of it which I certainly set a high value on. He never would review a work of mine, never bring me forward by the least remark in any periodical whatsoever. He was too much of an aristocrat for that. He once promised to review a work of mine I think Queen Hynde but he never did it although he had expressed his warmest approbation of it before several friends. I asked him a good while afterwards why he had not kept his word…

“Why the truth is Hogg” said he “that I began the thing and took a number of notes marking extracts but I found that to give a proper view of your poetical progress and character I was under the necessity of beginning with the ballads and following through The Queen’s Wake and all the rest and upon the whole I felt that we were so much of the same school that if I had said of you as I wished to say I would have been thought by the world to be applauding myself.”

I cannot aver that these were Sir Walter’s very words but they were precisely to that purport. But I like other disappointed men not being half quite satisfied with the answer said “Dear Sir Walter ye can never suppose that I belang to your school o’ chivalry? Ye are the king o’ that school but I’m the king o’ the mountain an’ fairy school which is a far higher ane nor yours.”

 

Hogg was highly critical of what he saw as Scott’s infatuation with rank, and again the fact that his Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott opens with remarks about this failing (as Hogg saw it) in his friend and patron infuriated Lockhart:

 

The only blemish or perhaps I should say foible that I could ever say I discerned in my illustrious friend’s character was a too high devotion for titled rank. This in him was mixed with an enthusiasm which I cannot describe amounting in some cases almost to adoration if not servility. This was to me the strangest disposition imaginable! For me who never could learn to discern any distinction in ranks save what was constituted by talents or moral worth.

 

We can detect in this one of the reasons why Scott is less in favour these days than he might be, and why Hogg’s star has risen. Hogg, like Burns, suits the democratic instincts of the modern age, and also fits with popular notions of Scottish egalitarianism, the idea of being “aw Jock Tamson’s bairns”. The thing is, though, that Scott also thought we were “aw Jock Tamson’s bairns” – he revelled in mixing with every walk of life, and his love of Hogg, Tom Purdie and others was not the mere “slumming” of a successful and wealthy writer. But Scott certainly believed that folk had their place in a settled order. So, too, of course, did Hogg – both were Tories opposed to Whig political reforms – but Hogg was as immensely proud of his humble origins as Scott was of his ancestral heritage.

 

They fell out on various occasions, on at least one of which the estrangement lasted several months. Usually Hogg’s temper, and perhaps the feeling that he was being patronised (in the worst sense of that word, for Hogg always actively sought Scott’s help in advancing his career), was at the root of their arguments. As Robin MacLachlan put it in an essay on their friendship published in 1983, “it is as if, conscious of the danger of being dominated by Scott, Hogg had every so often to assert his independence by quarrelling with him, even at the possible cost of their friendship.”

 

One famous occasion when they argued followed the publication of Hogg’s novel The Brownie of Bodsbeck in 1818. This novel, set in the era of the Covenanters, is often seen as Hogg’s riposte to Scott’s Old Mortality, published two years earlier, in which Hogg counters Scott’s favourable impression of the Royalists and Graham of Claverhouse in particular. In fact all the evidence suggests that Hogg began The Brownie as early as 1813 and that he had a finished draft of it before Old Mortality came out: only the dilatoriness of his publisher William Blackwood caused Hogg’s novel to come out after Scott’s. Hogg felt very strongly about this, writing in his Memoir:

 

I suffered unjustly in the eyes of the world with regard to that tale, which was looked on as an imitation of the tale of “Old Mortality”, and a counterpart to that; whereas it was written long ere the tale of “Old Mortality” was heard of, and I well remember my chagrin on finding the ground, which I thought clear, preoccupied before I could appear publicly on it, and that by such a redoubted champion. It was wholly owing to Mr Blackwood that this tale was not published a year sooner, which would have freed me form the stigma of being an imitator, and brought in the author of the “Tales of my Landlord” as an imitator of me.

 

This is Hogg’s recollection of what happened between him and Scott when The Brownie was published (and you must remember that at this time Scott was publishing his fiction anonymously, and both in public and private denied that he was the Author of Waverley and the other novels).

 

It was the day after the publication of The Brownie of Bodsbeck. I called on him after his return from the Parliament house to speak to him about something very particular as I pretended but in fact to hear his sentiments of my new work. His eye-brows were hanging very low a bad presentiment!

“Well Mr Hogg I have read through your new work” said he “And I must tell you plainly and downright as I always do that I like it very ill – very ill indeed.”

“What for Mr Scott?”

“Because it is a false and unfair picture of the times altogether.”

“I dinna ken. It is the picture that I hae been bred up in the belief o’ sin ever I was born an’ mair than that there is not one incident not one in the whole tale which I cannot prove to be literally true from history. I was obliged sometimes to change the situations to make one part coalesce with the other but in no one instance have I recorded in The Brownie that which is not true an’ that’s mair than you can say of your tale o’ Auld Mortality.”

“You are overshooting the mark now Mr Hogg I wish it were my tale.”

“Na I shouldna hae said that but I forgot myself. Ye may hinder a man to speak but ye canna hinder him to think an I can sometimes yerk at the thinking. I wadna wonder at ye being angry at it if ye thought it written as a counterpoise to Auld Mortality but ye ken weel it was written lang afore the other was heard of.”

“Yes I know that a part of it was written the year before but I suspect it has been greatly exaggerated since.”

“The devil a line sir has been either added or diminished that I remember of. Mr Blackwood was the only man that read it beside yourself an’ I appeal to him.”

“Well well I have nothing to say to that. I have only to tell you that with the exception of old Nanny the crop-eared Covenanter who is by far the best character you ever drew I dislike the tale exceedingly and assure you it is a prejudiced and untrue picture.”

“It’s a devilish deal truer than your’s though. An’ that I’ll prove to the hale world” and with that I rose and was going away in a huff.

“No no stop” said he “You are not to leave me in bad humour. You did not use to be offended at my telling you my mind freely.”

“It’s the height o’ nonsense to be sure” said I quite pacified by so great a man’s condescension “But ane’s beuks are like his bairns he disna like to hear them spoken ill o’ especially without ony good reason.”

 

Despite their ups and downs, Hogg was always conscious of Scott’s generosity (in kind and spirit) towards him, while always striving to retain his sense of independence. This is what he said in his Familiar Anecdotes of Sir W. Scott:

 

Sir Walter sought me out in the wilderness and attached himself to me before I had ever seen him and although I took cross fits with him his interest in me never subsided for one day or one moment… I am sorry to think that any of his relations should entertain an idea that Sir Walter undervalued me for of all men I ever met with…there never was a gentleman paid more deference to me than Sir Walter.

 

Hogg, it is surely correct to say, needed Scott more than Scott needed Hogg. But Hogg also writes best when he escapes from consciously trying to imitate Scott, or from Scott’s attempts to rein him in for reasons of propriety and taste. It is notable that The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, his masterpiece, bears absolutely no trace of Scott in it.

 

There is a somewhat tenuous connection here with Hans Christian Andersen, the bicentenary of whose birth this year is, and who is the subject of various exhibitions and events in Edinburgh from now, culminating in a major exhibition on his life at the city Arts Centre opening in January 2006. Danish literature, like so many European literatures, was greatly influenced by Scott, and so too was Andersen. He came to Scotland in 1847 to see the land of the author he so much admired. He stayed in Edinburgh, travelled to the Trossachs and Loch Lomond, and dined in the most fashionable houses in the New Town. (There’s a wonderful story about him going to dinner at the house of James Young Simpson, the discoverer of the efficacy of chloroform as an anaesthetic, and being rather appalled at the after-dinner drug-taking that went on: “Dined at Dr Simpson’s,” he recorded in his diary, “where Miss Crowe and one other poetess drank ether; I had the feeling of being with two mad creatures – they smiled with open dead eyes; there is something ghastly about it; I find it admirable for operations, but not for tempting God.”) Anyway, Andersen had fallen under Scott’s spell at the age of 17, in 1822, when he first read The Heart of Midlothian. In the 1830s he wrote the libretti for two Scott-based operas, Bredal’s Bruden fra Lammermoor and Weyse Festen paa Kenilworth. Scott’s influence is very evident in at least two of Andersen’s novels, which I confess I haven’t read: in one of these, De to Baronesser  (1848), published the year after Andersen’s visit to Scotland, we meet a Scotsman who used to know Scott, and the young heroine sets out on foot from one of the Frisian islands to Copenhagen to save the life of a young man under arrest for murder. Does this sound familiar? Well, Andersen, like Hogg, clearly took his cue from Scott at times, and as with Hogg the result was not always positive. Some Danish intellectuals and poets disliked what they saw as the absence of an idea or philosophy in Scott’s works. The philosopher Kierkegaard criticised Hans Christian Andersen in 1838 for trying to “conceal an inward emptiness under many-coloured pictures”, a technique learned from “W. Scott and similar novelists”. Kierkegaard therefore thought Scott’s influence a bad one. [I am indebted to an essay by Jorgen Erik Nielsen for all this information.]

 

To return to Hogg, Scott and Lockhart, what was it in Hogg’s recollections of Scott that so angered Lockhart? Hogg seems to have transgressed on three counts: first, the whole tone of his various memoirs and anecdotes is too familiar. Second, in the original manuscript of the Anecdotes which Lockhart saw Hogg recounts, in completely innocuous fashion, how Scott told “thousands of lees” regarding the anonymity of his novels. Although Hogg also said that, apart from these “lees”, Scott was “the most upright man he ever knew”, Lockhart wrote in a letter to Hogg that this “impeaches the personal veracity of Sir W. Scott”. Third, again in the original manuscript, Hogg sullies the name of Lady Scott, by repeating a story he claimed Scott had told him that Lady Scott was a daughter (an illegitimate one) of the Earl of Tyrconnel, and by referring to her taking opium for medicinal purposes. These passages were all dropped in the published editions of Hogg’s memories but Lockhart was still far from happy at what he thought was the trivial tone of Hogg’s work. The original manuscript was lost for many years but rediscovered in the 1980s by Douglas Mack in New Zealand (Hogg’s daughter Harriet emigrated there in 1879) and all these matters are being addressed in the excellent and definitive edition of Hogg’s works now being produced by Edinburgh University Press for the Stirling/South Carolina Research edition.

 

Whatever Lockhart thought of Hogg, Hogg did think very highly of Scott, and this I think is a fact worth holding onto. It reminds us, apart from anything else, how massive Scott’s reputation was in the 19th century – second in literary terms only to Shakespeare – and that in turn reminds us that, as in the 19th century Scott was in favour and Hogg was not, so in our times their situations have been reversed, and that their reputations will undoubtedly enjoy or endure similar reversals in the future. It is good, therefore, to remember what Hogg thought of Scott. Near the end of his Anecdotes he writes:

 

But to put an end to these trivial anecdotes for trivial they are were they not about so extraordinary a man. The greatest man in the world while he lived and must long be remembered as such now that he is gone. What are kings and emperors compared with Sir Walter Scott? Dust and sand! The most part of their names regarded with detestation. But here is a name that next to that of William Shakespere’s will descend with rapt admiration to all the ages of futurity. And is it not a proud boats for an old shepherd that he could call this man FRIEND and could associate with him every day and every hour that he chose?