I.
Textual History
In the early spring of 1798, William Erskine met M.G. Lewis,
author of the popular and notorious Gothic novel The Monk (1796), and
showed him two poems from his friend, Walter Scott, translations of Gottfried
August Bürger’s “Lenore” (entitled by Scott
“William and Helen”) and “Der Wilde Jäger” (“The Chase”).
Impressed by these ballads, Lewis invited Scott to contribute to his collection
of supernaturalist ballads, originally planned to be
entitled “Tales of Terror.” This arrangement led to a period of close
collaboration between Scott and Lewis that is detailed in eleven letters from
Lewis to Scott from June 1798 to May 1800 and, retrospectively, in
Scott’s “Essay
on Imitations of the Ancient Ballads” (1830). [For more on what Scott
regarded as his apprenticeship with Lewis, see Section III
of this Introduction.] In the fall of 1799, Scott, frustrated with delays in
the publication of Lewis’s collection, met with his old school friend James Ballantyne and devised a plan that would lead to the
limited publication of An Apology for Tales of Terror. J.G. Lockhart’s Life
of Scott tells the story of this meeting, which led to Scott’s long
professional relationship with Ballantyne, the
printer of most of Scott’s voluminous literary output:
Mr. Ballantyne had
not been successful in his attempts to establish himself in that branch of the
law, and was now the printer and editor of a weekly newspaper in his native
town. He called at Rosebank one morning, and requested
his old acquaintance to supply a few paragraphs on some legal question of the
day for his Kelso Mail. Scott complied; and carrying his article himself
to the printing-office, took with him also some of his recent pieces, designed
to appear in Lewis’s Collection. With these, especially, as his Memorandum
says, the “Morlachian fragment after Goethe,” [1] Ballantyne was charmed, and he expressed his regret that
Lewis's book was so long in appearing. Scott talked of Lewis with rapture; and,
after reciting some of his stanzas, 
said “I ought to apologise to you for having troubled you with anything of
my own when I had things like this for your ear.” “I felt at once,” says Ballantyne, “that his own verses were far above what Lewis
could ever do, and though, when I said this, he dissented, yet he seemed
pleased with the warmth of my approbation.” At parting, Scott threw out a
casual observation, that he wondered his old friend did not try to get some
little booksellers’ work, “to keep his types in play during the rest of the
week.” Ballantyne answered, that such an idea had not
before occurred to him—that he had no acquaintance with the Edinburgh
“trade;” but, if he had, his types were good, and he thought he could afford to
work more cheaply than town-printers. Scott, “with his good humoured
smile,” said, “You had better try what you can do. You have been praising my
little ballads; suppose you print off a dozen copies or so of as many as will
make a pamphlet, sufficient to let my Edinburgh acquaintances judge of your
skill for themselves.” Ballantyne assented; and I
believe exactly twelve copies [2] of
William and Ellen, The Fire-King, [3]
The Chase, and a few more of those pieces, were thrown off accordingly, with
the title (alluding to the long delay of Lewis's Collection) of “Apology for Tales of Terror—1799.” This first
specimen of a press, afterwards so celebrated, pleased Scott; and he said to Ballantyne “I have been for years collecting old Border
ballads, and I think I could, with little trouble, put together such a
selection from them as might make a neat little volume, [4] to
sell for four or five shillings. I will talk to some of the booksellers about
it when I get to Edinburgh,
and if the thing goes on, you shall be the printer.” Ballantyne
highly relished the proposal; and the result of this little experiment changed
wholly the course of his worldly fortunes, as well as of his friend’s. (1: 275-76 )
The title page
[5] for
this rare book reads as follows:
AN
APOLOGY
FOR
TALES OF TERROR.
— “A THING OF SHREDS AND
PATCHES.” HAMLET. [6]
KELSO:
PRINTED AT THE MAIL OFFICE.
1799.
The scholarly record of the Apology has been vexed by its frequent
confusion with two other texts that have their own share of bibliographical
difficulties [7]:
Lewis’s two-volume collection, finally published in December of 1800 under the
title of Tales of Wonder, and Tales of Terror (May, 1801), of
anonymous authorship, although frequently and mistakenly attributed to Lewis. [8] The Apology
contains the following poems that would appear later in Tales of Wonder:
Scott’s translation of Bürger’s “Der
Wilde Jäger” entitled “The Chase” (appearing in Tales
of Wonder as “The Wild Huntsman”); Lewis’s “The Erl-King’s
Daughter” (first appearing in the Monthly Mirror 2 [October 1796]:
371-373), “The Water-King,” and “Alonzo the Brave” (Scott could have
gotten the latter two poems from Lewis himself or from one of the early
editions of The Monk); [9] and Robert
Southey’s “Lord William” (first appearing anonymously in The Morning
Post 16 March 1798; also published in Southey’s Poems [1799]).
Ballads appearing in the Apology not included in Lewis’s collection
include Southey’s “Poor Mary, the Maid of the Inn”
(first appearing in his Poems, 1797); Scott’s “William and Helen” (Lewis
will print instead William Taylor’s famed translation of Bürger’s
“Lenore”); and John Aikin’s “Arthur and Matilda” (from his Poems,
1791).
The text of the Apology used in this edition comes with permission from
the Houghton Library of Harvard (EC8.Sco86.799ta).
Notes:
1. “The Lamentation of the Faithful Wife of Asan
Aga, From the Morlachian Language.” This poem was not
included in either the Apology or Tales of Wonder. Indeed,
despite Lockhart’s reference to Scott bringing with him “his recent pieces,
designed to appear in Lewis’s collection,” only one poem included in the Apology,
“The Chase,” appears in Tales of Wonder (entitled as “The Wild
Huntsman”). The nine poems included, almost certainly suggested by Scott,
comprise a representative sampling of the German-influenced “tale of terror”
and its main practitioners at the end of the century. The one name less
known by us today, John Aikin, would have come to Scott’s attention as the
editor of The Monthly Magazine, which published William Taylor’s widely
regarded translation of Bürger’s “Lenore” in 1796.
2. Just five copies of
the text survive today. The four owned by Scott’s library at Abbotsford, the Harvard College
Library, the Morgan Library, and the Huntington Library all carry the
title An Apology for Tales of Terror. A fifth copy, entitled
simply Tales
of Terror, resides at Yale. In his 1894 article for The Edinburgh
Bibliographical Society, “The First Book Printed by James Ballantyne,” George P. Johnston discusses the only two
known copies at the time:
The fifth copy at Yale entitled Tales of Terror
has caused its fair share of scholarly perplexity. Often confused
with Bulmer’s and Bell’s Tales of Terror (London, 1801)—a text of
anonymous authorship that responds to Lewis’s Tales of Wonder—the Yale
copy, once in the private possession of Professor Edward Dowden, is actually
the only one of the five that declares on its title-page “Printed by James Ballantyne.” Aside from its title page, its contents are
identical to the Apology. (Johnston discusses this text in
his “Note to a Paper Entitled ‘The First Book Printed by James Ballantyne.’”) See Ruff’s Yale dissertation for evidence
that the Apology “was not offered for sale” (70-71); among other things,
there exist no advertisements of the volume in the papers, not even in the Scots
Magazine, with its lists of Scottish publications.
A single copy of what George P. Johnston
refers to as the “foreman printer’s copy” (“Note” 90) of the Apology
contains just six poems, ending with “William and Helen” (omitting Lewis’s
“Alonzo the Brave,” Aikin’s “Arthur and Matilda” and
Lewis’s “The Erl-King’s Daughter”); the last ballad
ends on page 57 and page 58 is left blank. This copy was first noted by
W.B. Cook in a Notes and Queries article entitled “The First Work of the
Ballantyne Press” (1874). It now resides at the
Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
Yale has a “negative photostat” of this “foreman
printer’s copy.”
3. Lockhart is wrong on
this score: “The Fire-King” appears first in Lewis’s collection Tales of
Wonder.
4. Scott alludes to Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border, first edition 1802.
5. The Yale copy’s title page
for its Tales of Terror reads after the quotation from Hamlet:
KELSO:
PRINTED BY
JAMES BALLANTYNE
AT
THE KELSO MAIL PRINTING OFFICE.
__________________________________
1799.
6. From
Act 3.4.93, Hamlet’s calling Claudius a “king of
shreds and patches.”
7. Most notoriously by Henry Morley, who in the introduction
to his edition of Tales of Terror and Wonder (1887) writes mistakenly
that “Lewis published at Kelso, in 1799, his Tales of Terror, and
followed them up in the next year with his Tales of Wonder”(5-6).
8. For
more information on these two texts, see the forthcoming Broadview edition of Tales
of Wonder, edited by Douglass H. Thomson.
9. “The Erl-King’s Daughter” does not appear until the fourth
edition of The Monk, and it is clear from the versions of “The
Water-King” and “Alonzo the Brave” that Scott and Ballantyne
were working from versions of these poems as they appeared in earlier
editions of the novel. See the textual variants
for these poems.
II. The
Scottish-German Connection: “The Unexpected Discovery of an Old Friend in a
Foreign Land”
Scott’s interest in German language and literature stemmed from several key
factors that reflect the overall interest of British writers in the subject
during the 1790’s. In his important “Essay
on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad,” Scott records his
growing personal fascination with such authors as Schiller, Goethe, and
Bürger amid the larger
backdrop of the state of poetry “during the last ten years of the eighteenth
century,” which he claims at that time “was at a remarkably low ebb in
Britain” (23). He cites two early events that first sparked interest in
German writers:
Henry Mackenzie’s presentation of an “Essay on German Literature” to the
Royal Society on April 21, 1788 and his friend Alexander Fraser Tytler’s
translation of Schiller’s Die Räuber in
1792 (Mackenzie’s picture
appears at the right). These works alerted
Scott to the “existence of a race of poets who had the … lofty ambition
to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe, and investigate the realms
of
chaos and old night” (25) and were of special interest in Edinburgh, “where
the remarkable coincidence between the German language and that of the
Lowland
Scottish encouraged young men to approach this newly discovered spring
of literature” (27). Scott records his rather desultory German lessons
under a Dr.
Willich during the winters of 1792-94, while
another decisive event occurred in the summer of 1793, when Anna Lætitia
Aikin Barbauld (portrayed below) “electrified” an Edinburgh literary
society with her reading of a spirited translation of Bürger’s
“Lenore” written by William 
Taylor
of Norwich, her former student at the dissenting academy in Palgrave, Suffolk.
Although not at the reading, Scott heard of the commotion, found a copy
of Bürger’s ballads, and immediately came up with his own
translation of “Lenore” (entitled “William and Helen”) and, somewhat later,
“Der Wilde Jäger” (“The Chase”),
the two of which, printed in a “thin quarto,” proved to be his first
publication. [1] Supplied
with a copy of Bürger’s ballads and other German
works by his relative Hugh Scott’s wife Harriet, “a young gentlewoman of
high German blood” (Lockhart, Chapter 2) who aided his studies of the language,
Scott tells us he “began to translate on all sides” (“Essay” 43). Most
of these were translations of German dramas, including Goethe’s Goetz
von Berlichingen (later published with Lewis’s aid on March 14, 1799),
but Scott writes that “the ballad poetry, in which I had made a bold essay,
was
still my favorite” (43). From this “German-mad” period, we can also date
Scott’s translation of Goethe’s “Der Erl-König,”
the first poem in An Apology for Tales of Terror. [2]
Scott’s creative engagement with his German source material was a natural
outgrowth of his early fascination with old English and Scottish ballads,
especially of the kind that he read in his beloved Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and which he
heard and collected in his various excursions in the Border country. In a
note to his “Essay on the Imitations of Ancient Ballads,” Scott draws a
comparison between the old Scottish song of “Patrick Spence” found in Percy and
its German rendering from Johann Gottfried Herder’s highly influential Volkslieder
(1778-1779), [3]
noting close similarities not only in their “vocables
and rhymes” but in their “the turn of phrase” (43 n.1). Scott regarded
this close connection between Scottish and German balladry as “the unexpected
discovery of an old friend in a foreign land” (43 n1). His invoking the German
muse also carried a serious agenda, one shared by the Norwich circle of
ballad-writers Robert
Southey, William Taylor, and Frank Sayers [4]:
Scott felt that “the advancing taste in German language and literature . . . might
easily be employed as a formidable auxiliary to renewing the spirit of our own”
poetry (29), which, we will remember, he considered at a “low ebb” at the
time. James Watt in his study Contesting the Gothic defines a
charged political context for this turn to “ancient” and Gothic source
materials that reveal a close relationship between old British and German
poetry. This connection comprises what Watt calls a “Loyalist Gothic”
from which writers could assert a noble ancient line of British literature in
pointed opposition to enervating French influences. Scott in his “Essay” argues
that the German example could provide an “emancipation from the rules so servilely adhered to the French school”: once relieved from
such “shackles,” the “genius of Goethe, Schiller, and others . . . was
not long in soaring to the highest pitch of poetic sublimity (26).
One can thus understand poems included in An Apology for Tales of Terror
as a small but representative example of the broader movement at the end of the
eighteenth-century to reinvigorate British poetry through the example of the
ancient British and German ballad. Scott’s participation in this movement also
tracks another development that occurs at the turn of the century: the sharp
English critical reaction against Teutonic source materials. From a nation
still at war with France and embroiled in foreign conflict, this literary
import, once promising the revival of a more authentic native idiom, eventually
came to be regarded by some conservative critics as, in the words of Michael
Gamer, “culturally invasive, morally corrupting, and politically jacobin" (144-45) [5]. Scott, warned by
his concerned friends of too close of an association with Lewis and his
combustible Gothic productions, would soon renounce his “German-mad” phase [6].
Having made an “escape” from the “general depreciation of the Tales of
Wonder” (51), Scott goes on to compile a more respectably nationalist
collection of ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802).
Although
the mature Sir Walter Scott would often be critical of German and Gothic
literature, he reveals in his “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” just
how formative such influences had been in his decision to embark on a literary
career.
Notes:
1. The
Chase; and, William and Helen. Edinburgh:
Manners and Miller, 1796.
2. In
a letter to his aunt Christian Rutherford in 1797, Scott sent a copy of his “Erl-King” with the following note: “I send a goblin story,
with best compliments to the misses. … I assure you, there is no small
impudence in attempting a version of that ballad, as it has been translated by
Lewis” (Lockhart 1: 239).
3. The Volkslieder
also serves as the primary source for Lewis’s “Danish” and “German” ballads in Tales
of Wonder, and Herder’s "Erlkönigs Tochter" provided the inspiration for Goethe’s “Erlkönig.” Further evidence of the connection between the
German and old British ballad can be found in Herder’s preface to the Volkslieder,
in which he reveals that Thomas Percy's Reliques
of Ancient English Poetry (3 vols., London, 1765) proved the
inspiration for his undertaking. He includes in his collection over twenty
translations from Percy’s collection, besides a number from Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table
Miscellany (1727) and other volumes of English
and Scottish traditional ballads.
4. For the Norwich
circle’s interest in “incorporating ‘German
sublimity’ into English ballads,” see David Chandler’s “Southey’s ‘German Sublimity’ and Coleridge’s ‘Dutch Attempt.’”
5. For the turn against German-inspired literature,
see Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre,
Reception, and Canon Formation and Peter Mortensen’s British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia.
6. Scott
uses this phrase in a letter to Mrs. Hughes, 13 December, 1827. For Scott’s
turn against his early interests in German and Gothic Literature and his
creation of Sir Walter Scott, champion of the Scottish literary identity, see Gamer’s chapter on Scott in his Romanticism and the
Gothic.
III. Walter Scott and
M.G. Lewis
Scholars
and editors of Walter Scott’s literary works have often been puzzled by
the remarkably high estimate Scott held of Matthew Gregory
Lewis’s
poetic talent. In addition to asserting that Lewis was “the person
who first attempted to introduce something like the German taste into English
fictitious[,] dramatic, and poetical composition” (“Essay” 29), Scott felt
that
“few persons 
have exhibited more
mastery of rhyme, or greater command over the melody of verse” (49). While
conceding that Lewis’s The Monk “seemed to create an epoch in our
literature,” Scott’s main interest in the novel was its poetry, and he
went so far as to make the claim, probably a doubtful one, that “the public
were
chiefly captivated by the poetry with which Mr. Lewis had interspersed
his prose narrative” (33). [1]
When Scott agreed to contribute ballads to Lewis’s planned collection of supernaturalist verse, he met with exacting criticism from
what he called his ”Mentor”
(49). A lyrical technician—Scott referred to him as a “martinet” (48)—Lewis
insisted upon scrupulous “accuracy of rhymes and numbers” and, Scott wryly
noted, had some trouble disciplining his “northern recruits” (48). [2] Scott includes
in an appendix to his “Essay on
Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” correspondence from Lewis that reveals
the meticulous, detailed nature of his criticisms and suggested revisions.
Although
somewhat resistant to Lewis’s requested revisions, [3] Scott writes
that “I was much indebted to him, as forcing upon the notice of a young
and careless author hints which the said author’s vanity made him unwilling
to
attend to, but which were absolutely necessary to any hope of his ultimate
success (53-54).
While Scott may have benefited from what Lewis called a “severe
examination” of his early ballads (56), the Scottish poet would come to use
the example of his erstwhile mentor’s kind of poetry to define a distinctly
different agenda for his own. In giving reasons for the “general depreciation”
(51) of Tales of Wonder, Scott outlines several factors, including
Lewis’s inclusion of many previously published ballads and the shady dealings
of his publisher Joseph Bell. But Scott also
finds fault with Lewis’s treatment of supernatural themes in terms that
will have a
special resonance for the author of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
He objects, as many other critics did, to Lewis’s inclusion of parodies in
his collection of Gothic ballads. This decision to “throw some gaiety into
his
lighter pieces, after the manner of the French writers” in “attempts at
what is called pleasantry” Scott deemed a conspicuous failure (51). We remember
that
opposition to French influence and sophistication comprised one of the
motivating forces in the turn to German sources. With this arch, self-deprecating
consciousness pervading Tales of Wonder, Scott found that ballad
poetry which “had been at first received as simple and natural, was now
sneered at as
puerile and extravagant” (49-50).
Lewis’s distinctly English, very Gothic, and surely “extravagant” treatment of
four old Scottish ballads in Tales of Wonder must have caught Scott’s
attention. These include “Clerk Colvin,” “Willy’s Lady,” “Courteous King Jamie”
[4] and “Tam Lin.” In the
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Scott pointedly prints more
authentic Scottish versions of all four poems with the purpose of restoring
their “native simplicity” in opposition to the anglicizing “additions and
alterations” supplied by Lewis (see the head-notes to these poems in the Minstrelsy,
all of which cite Lewis’s earlier example). In an “Introduction” Scott supplies
to an 1806 reprinting of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, he draws
a strong distinction “betwixt the legendary poems and real imitation of the old
ballads” (cxxxvii). By legendary poems he means a
“kind of poetry … capable of uniting the vigorous numbers and wild fiction,
which occasionally charm us in the ancient ballad, with a greater equality of
versification, and elegance of sentiment, than we expect to find in the works
of a rude age” (cxxxvii). Almost certainly, he is
thinking of the example of Lewis’s poetry. [5] Scott tells us in his
1806 “Introduction” to The Minstrelsy that he designed his first two
original compositions for Tales of Wonder, “The Eve of St. John” and “Glenfinlas,” to furnish, respectively, an example of a
“real” imitation of an “old ballad,” as opposed to the more “modern” legendary
poem “(cxxxvii). This distinction would come to have
great importance for Scott as he goes on to the Minstrelsy and his
project of recovering and championing the Scottish literary heritage. What
seems at first to have been merely a descriptive rubric becomes a charged and
purposeful one, with Scott using the distinction to define his project of
rescuing the authentic and ancient character of the Scottish ballad from modern
and English appropriations of it. [6]
One can see that Scott’s relationship with Lewis, while early in his literary
life and brief, played a fairly significant and complex role in his developing
ideas about poetry. At first a devoted Lewisite, he assigns Lewis the lead role
in the German revival, includes three of his poems in the Apology, and
submits to his mentor’s “severe examination” of his own very first
poems. Warned by his literary friends of the turning tide against Lewis, he
makes his “escape” from the “general depreciation” of Tales of Wonder and,
as he embarks upon his career as literary champion of Scotland, would
come to look back upon his early days as a “German-mad” phase. But Scott
also used the particular character of Lewis’s poetry to define his own. As
opposed to what he regarded as the mannered, modern, and anglicizing language
of Lewis’s Gothic ballad, Scott will aim for a more authentic and native idiom
in his compilation of ancient ballads.
Notes:
1. Scott took the three poems by Lewis
published in the Apology from one of the first three editions of The
Monk. The texts of these poems in the Apology differ from those
Lewis slightly revised for the fourth edition of the novel.
2. Scott’s good friend
John Leyden also contributed to Tales of Wonder with his poem “The
Elfin-King.”
3. Although claiming
“inflexibility” about the revisions (49), Scott generally accepted most of
Lewis’s calls for change. The version of “The Wild Huntsman” that appears in Tales
of Wonder accepts every change called for by Lewis (mainly concerning
rhyme) and thus differs from the earlier version contained in the Apology
(wherein it is entitled “The Chase”). See the textual
variants listed at the end of the poem in Text of the Poems. In
a note to the poem “Frederic and Alice” in his Ballads and Lyrical Pieces (1806),
Scott comments: “It owes any little merit it may possess to my friend Mr.
Lewis, to whom it was sent in an extremely rude state; and who, after some
material improvements, published it in his Tales of Wonder” (143). In
collating the versions of the ballad “Eve of St. John” as published
independently in Kelso in 1800 and as it appeared in Tales of Wonder,
John William Ruff notes that, if anything, Scott took pains to “polish” the
poem and “make his meter smoother” for its inclusion in Lewis’s collection
(175). On the other hand, Scott ignores the lengthy list of suggested
revisions—what Lewis called a “severe examination”—for “William and
Helen” (see “Appendix” to the “Essay” 54-56).
4. Entitled “King Henrie” in the Minstrelsy.
5. Both Coleridge and Southey also regarded
Lewis as modernizing the ancient ballad. In his appraisal of the poetry in The
Monk, Coleridge wrote that “The simplicity and naturalness
is his own, and not imitated; for it is made to subsist in congruity with a
language perfectly modern, the language of his own times. … This, I think, a
rare merit” (Griggs 1. 379). Southey takes issue with Lewis on just this point:
“In all these modern ballads there is a modernism of thought and
language-turns, to me very perceptible and unpleasant. … He is not versed
enough in old English” (C. C. Southey 2. 211-212).
6. Or at least a
more “authentic and ancient character of the Scottish ballad”: as many
scholars have noted, Scott took “liberties” with his various source materials,
constructing a single ballad from various old copies, adding words and even
whole stanzas, and often improving phraseology. As
Hughes notes in his “Prefatory Note,” Scott’s “aim was less to obtain an
accurate text than to stimulate an interest in the subject” (xvii).
