Author Description

THE ballad of Auld Maitland holds in The Border Minstrelsy a place like that of the Doloneia, or Tenth Book, in the Iliad. Every professor of the Higher Criticism throws his stone at theDoloneia in passing, and every ballad-editor does as much to Auld Maitland. ProfessorChild excluded it from his monumental collection of "English and Scottish Popular Ballads,"fragments, and variants, for which Mr. Child and his friends and helpers ransacked everyattainable collection of ballads in manuscript, and ballads in print, as they listened to thelast murmurings of ballad tradition from the lips of old or young.Mr. Child, says his friend and pupil, Professor Kittredge, "possessed a kind of instinct" fordistinguishing what is genuine and traditional, or modern, or manipulated, or, if I may sayso, "faked" in a ballad."This instinct, trained by thirty years of study, had become wonderfully swift in itsoperations, and almost infallible. A forged or retouched piece could not escape him for amoment: he detected the slightest jar in the ballad ring." But all old traditional ballads are masses of "retouches," made through centuries, byreciters, copyists, editors, and so forth. Unluckily, Child never gave in detail his reasons forrejecting that treasure of Sir Walter's, Auld Maitland. Child excluded the poem sansphrase. If he did this, like Falstaff "on instinct," one can only say that antiquarian instinctsare never infallible. We must apply our reason to the problem, "What is Auld Maitland?"