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Swinburne's Edition of Popular Ballads
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Swinburne's devotion to the popular ballad is well-known, and his continued experiments with ballad imitation—from “May Janet” to “The Brothers”—attest to the longevity of this passion. But one of the earliest manifestations of his devotion—an unfinished edition of popular ballads—has received less careful attention than it deserves. Furthermore, what little has been written about this anthology has been tainted with errors—errors for which the ultimate responsibility lies on the head of Thomas James Wise. Wise owned the manuscript of Swinburne's ballad edition, described it in his catalogues, and allowed its contents to be printed. Since even the most innocent of the great forger's published statements about the books and manuscripts in his possession cannot be taken on trust, it will be prudent to reexamine what he has said—and what others have repeated—about Swinburne's edition of the ballads.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
1 T. J. Wise, A Swinburne Library (London, 1925), pp. 11–12. The same text appears in The Ashley Library A Catalogue, vi (London, 1925), 45–46, and is slightly revised from Wise's earlier description in A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ii (London, 1920), 383–384. The fullest discussion of Swinburne's ballad anthology is in Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne (Paris, 1928), ii, 144–151. There are brief treatments, all repeating information given by Wise, in William A. Maclnnes, introduction to Ballads of the English Border (London, 1925), pp. vii–xii; T. Earle Welby, A Study of Swinburne (London, 1926), pp. 51–52; Samuel C. Chew, Swinburne (Boston, 1929), pp. 39–40; Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 43–44, 135; Clyde K. Hyder, “Swinburne and the Popular Ballad,” PMLA, XLIX (1934), 295–296,
2 See Edmund Gosse, review in Sunday Times, 4 April 1926, p. 6; The Times Literary Supplement, 15 July 1926, p. 476; Hustvedt, pp. 43–44; Hyder, p. 295. Lafourcade (ii, 145) notices that the preface is much later than the ballad collection, but assumes that it is a preface and goes on to say that the selection is not English.
“What shall I teach thee, the foremost thing?”
Couldst teach me off my own Shadow to spring!
Thomas Carlyle, “Goethe's Works,” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, II (London, 1899), 432. All my quotations of Swinburne's text throughout this paper are taken from the MS and not from Maclnnes. I have consistently expanded Swinburne's ampersands.
4 Border Ballads, ed. Andrew Lang (London and New York, 1895); Sotheby sale catalogue for Swinburne's library, 19–21 June 1916, lot 265.
5 It was this edition that Swinburne had in his library (Sotheby catalogue, lot 462).
6 Maclnnes's introduction (p. xi) contains the hint that Swinburne's “preface” is a reply to (unidentified) remarks made by Andrew Lang. This is puzzling since it suggests that Maclnnes must have known that the “preface” was written later than the ballads.
7 “To Lord Byron,” Letters to Dead Authors (London, 1886), p. 211. Swinburne's essay “Wordsworth and Byron” appeared first in The Nineteenth Century, April-May 1884, and then in Miscellanies (London, 1886), p. 63.
8 “Of Modern English Poetry,” Letters on Literature (London and New York, 1889), p. 23.
9 Quarterly Review, No. 391 (July 1902), p. 20; reprinted in Charles Dickens, ed. T. Watts-Dunton (London, 1913). Watts-Dunton mollifyingly says that Swinburne was speaking “as an angry borderer” (p. xiv).
10 Punch, CXXIII (6 August 1902), 79; C. K. Hyder, Swinburne's Literary Career and Fame (Durham, N. C, 1933), pp. 123, 229.
11 A Swinburne Library, pp. 11–12. These remarks are repeated by Maclnnes, Lafourcade, Welby, and Chew (see n. 1).
12 The dates (with the name E. Towgood) form the countermarks on these sheets, the principal watermark being a seated Britannia.
13 Some copies (e.g., British Museum's) of vols. 5–8 are dated 1859.
14 I, [vii]. The first edition says only that “A copious Index is subjoined to Volume Eighth, in which references are given not only to the ballads in this collection, in all their forms and under various titles, but also to such others, not here included, as are most likely to be inquired for” (“Advertisement,” v, [iii]).
15 This last one remained a favorite of Swinburne's. Edwin Harrison, another of Jowett's prote'ge's, writes from Pitlochry in August 1871: “You should hear Swinburne chant to us a ballade, of which this is the burden:
The broom blows bonnie and says it is fair,
And we'll never come back to the broom any mair'.“
Thomas Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett, The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, 1918), p. 52.
16 His corrected note (Maclnnes, pp. 246–247) covers the same ground more economically, but three misprints in Maclnnes spoil the sense. Swinburne praises the ballad's “exquisite ease” (not “care”); and the last clause should read: “and [not ”a“] song or ballad it is of such admirable excellence that I was glad of any plea [not ”place“] to warrant its insertion.”
17 Publishers' Circular, xxv (1 February 1861), 68.
18 The Spectator, xxxiv (9 February 1861), 139–140 (unsigned).
19 The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven, 1959–62), i, 45–46; Hyder, op. cit. (above, n. 1), pp. 303–304.
20 Swinburne Letters, I, 47–48.
21 I include in this number the twenty-three ballads in Maclnnes's first section, plus “Lady Isabel” and “There Gowans are Gay” from section two. I do not include “Clerk Saunders,” for although this ballad is also part of Ashley 5070, it is clearly only a hasty copy from Kinloch's collection, and was used by Swinburne in his version of “Proud Lady Margaret.” Nor do I include “The Earl of Mar's Daughter,” an unfinished rifacimento of a ballad in Buchan's collection, which may have been intended for the anthology, but is not part of the MS. There are also a few isolated stanzas and lines from various ballads jotted down in the MS, that are not printed by Maclnnes, and that I have ignored. (In his account of the MS, Wise makes the number of ballads twenty-seven in his Bibliography and raises it to thirty in A Swin burne Library)
22 The stanza is from Motherwell's version. Swinburne quotes the last two lines in a letter (4 August 1870) apropos of Christina Rossetti's story, “Vanna's Twins.” Swinburne Letters, ii, 116 (where the lines are unidentified).
23 Numbers refer to Child's final edition, The English and Scottish Popidar Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston, 1882–98).
24 Swinburne Letters, I, 22.
25 Ibid., II, 103. Rossetti, however, let his lines stand: “Tell me now, my mother my dear, / What's the crying that I hear?”, etc.
26 Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (London, 1897), p. 74.
27 “The Progress of Art in Modern Times,” in Lafourcade, La Jeunesse, ii, 224.
28 “Bonny Bee-Ho'm,” in Robert Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs (Edinburgh, 1806), I, 185; “The Enchanted Ring,” in Peter Buchan, Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1828), i, 169. Both versions reprinted in Child, 1861 ed., iii, 53, 57.
29 The phrase in pointed brackets has been cancelled but nothing substituted. Maclnnes (p. 235) prints the note without this deleted phrase, so that the sense is confused.
30 “Lord Thomas Stuart,” in [James Maidment], A North Countrie Garland (Edinburgh, 1824), p. 1. Reprinted in Child, 1861 ed., iii, 357.
31 Swinburne first wrote “Clerk Thomas” throughout but changed it to “Lord” in all but its last three occurrences. This incomplete cancellation and the unfinished note may mean that this text was not intended as his final version. In my quotations I have substituted “Lord.”
32 Four other stanzas (not used) from this ballad are jotted down on another sheet in Swinburne's MS.
33 Maclnnes prints “was mair love” in this third stanza, but that reading has been clearly deleted by Swinburne.
34 Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad (Boston, 1907), pp. 90–91.
35 Cf. Child 17A:
In Scotland there was a babie born,
And his name it was called young Hind Horn.
He sent a letter to our king
That he was in love with his daughter Jean.
36 Lesbia Brandon, ed. Randolph Hughes (London, 1),952 p. 43.
37 Ibid., pp. 138, 143.