1 the Minstrel Mode
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Notes 1The Minstrel Mode 1. Maureen McLane has noted that ‘Wordsworthlauded thealmost mystical connection between the first bards and their audiences’ (‘Ballads’ 423) in his 1802 ‘Appendix on Poetic Diction’. In that appendix, part of Wordsworth’s project is to assert that this ‘almost mystical connection’ was producedby ‘language which, though unusual, was still the language of men’( LB 318).By insisting on the ancient and modern poets’ shared attachment to common language, Wordsworth here downplays the importance of the shift from oral to print culture by emphasizing the primacy of diction. If the reader accepts Wordsworth’s arguments, the fantasy of minstrelsy becomes unnecessary, as modern poets can recapture the connection between bard and audience throughdiction, thus rendering obsolete the need to imagine minstrels with live audiences. This explains why Wordsworth’s deep interest in a bardic tradition, which Richard Gravilhas documented thoroughlyin Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, does not lead Wordsworth to employ the conventions of minstrel writing. 2. In using and extending the metaphor of ‘two-faced’ writing, I have in mind Jerome McGann’s comments stemming from this same passage in Mill. McGann writes that ‘Romantic truth is inner vision, and Romantic knowl- edge is the unfolding of the truths of that inner vision’ (Byron and Romanticism 115). McGann goes on to point out that ‘[h]ypocrisy is the antithesis of sincerity’ and continues, One can be sincere and yet speak incompletely, or even falsely, but it appears a patent contradiction to think or imagine that one could be sincere and at the same time speak deliberate falsehoods or develop subtle equivocations. To do so is to declare that one is ‘two-faced,’ and hence lacking the fundamental quality of the sincere person: integrity. (Byron and Romanticism 115) McGann argues that Byron wrote in genres such as satire that ‘have an exchange going on between the writer and the reader’ and there- fore resist Romantic poetry’s paradigmatic valorization of the ‘overheard’ (Byron and Romanticism 136) – or even, I would add by way of Keats, the unheard. 3. Historically, minstrels could legally travel onlywhen authorizedby attach- ment to a master or by holding their own land: ‘the Vagabond Act of 1604, continuing earlier statutes, includes players of interludes, fencers, bearwards, minstrels, begging scholars and sailors, psalmists, fortune-tellers, and others. If the vagrant could not show he had land of his own or a master whom he was serving, he was tied to a post and publicly whipped’ (Greenblatt Will 88). 158 Notes 159 4. In The Bridal of Triermain, Scott offers an amusing reversal of Boyer’s revision, where Scott’s narrator rejects ‘harp’ as too modern for his present taste: My Harp – or let me rather choose The good old classic form–my Muse, (For Harp’s an ever-scutchedphrase, Worn out by bards of modern days,) My Muse, then – (Stanza V of the Introduction to Canto III, PW 288) 5. Any discussion of Romantic-era harps must call to mind the Aeolian harps that pervade Romantic poetry andliterary theory. Whereas the Aeolian harp responds to nature, whether or not an observinghuman mind is present to hear it, the minstrel’s harp responds only to plucking, and writers frequently figure the minstrel as participating in a dialogue with the ‘responsive’ or ‘knowing’ harp that understands the emotional needs of a given situation. 6. This is not to say that Beattie and Gray had exactly the same sense of the poet’s audience. As Linda Zionkowski has noted, Gray‘constantly statedhis intent to write above the heads of the vulgar’ (341), which was hardly Beattie’s goal. Nonetheless, the eponymous ‘Bard’ of Gray’s ode embodies a concern with poetry’s public function and its interaction with historical process similar to Beattie’s early conception of his minstrel’s role. 7. This Advertisement, with some revisions, was called a Preface in later editions. Unless otherwise noted, I cite The Minstrel by book and stanza based on the 1771 and 1774 first editions of the first and second books, respectively. 8. Beattie’sindecision about whether to portray an English or Danish invasion isachoice between two then-prominent models (as well as many older ones): Percy’s Reliques, with its stories of border skirmishes between Scots and the English as well as the tales of English–Danish conflict quoted above, and John Home’s Douglas (1757), which features a Danish invasion that calls its hero to action. 9. Scott had reviewed William Forbes’s memoir of Beattie, so he presumably knew of Beattie’s plan from the letter quoted above. 10. This is not to mention the similarities between Wordsworth and Beattie in their approach to diction. King has noted those similarities in his book (for example, in footnote 4 on 211 and following of Origins) and in many articles. Beattie addresses The Minstrel to a specifically English audience and trumpets the plainness of his diction: ‘antique expressions I have avoided’, he writes; ‘I hope [no ‘‘old words’’] will be found that are now obsolete, or in any degree not intelligible to a reader of English poetry’ (vi). In one of the relatively sparse notes to the poem, Beattie calls attention to the difference between the diction of Percy’s poems and his own. Beattie introduces Edwin’s region with a rare gesture to ballad diction – ‘But he, I ween, was of the north countrie’ (I.xiii) – and the first note of the poem explains ‘of the north countrie’ to be an overused convention of the old ballads, explicitly referring the reader to Percy(7). 11. When one measures with the blunt instrument of publication frequency, at least, Percy’s Reliques appears to have gained its prominence over The Hermit of Warkworth in the later nineteenth century, when the former was reprinted far more often than the latter. Before 1830, however, we have records of 160 Notes more printingsof The Hermit than of the Reliques –my count based on RLIN, the ESTC, and other catalogs puts the numbers at approximately fifteen and twelve, respectively. The Hermit enjoyed more printings between 1791 and 1807, whereas the Reliques became by far the more frequently printed work in the later nineteenth century. Wordsworth’s praise of the Reliques and scathing critique of The Hermit in his 1815 ‘Essay,Supplementary to the Pref- ace’(361–2) may have contributed to the growing emphasis on the Reliques in nineteenth-century publication and reception. 12. For example, any reader of Scott’s poetry will recognize the blend ofpresent- daygeography and antiquarian interest in Percy’sAdvertisement, present at least bythe 1772 third edition: Warkworth Castle in Northumberland stands very boldly on the neck of land near the sea-shore, almost surroundedbythe river COQUET,(calledby our old Latin Historians,COQUEDA) which runs with aclear rapid stream, but when swoln with rains becomes violent anddangerous. About a mile from the Castle, in a deep romantic valley, are the remains of aHERMITAGE; of which the Chapel is still intire. This is hollowed with great elegance in a cliff near the river; as are also two adjoining apartments, which probably served for an Antechapel and Vestry, or were appropriated to some other sacred uses; for the former of these, which runs parallel with theChapel,isthoughttohave had an altar in it, at which Mass was occa- sionally celebrated, as well as in the Chapel itself ... But what principally distinguishes theChapel, is a small Tomb or Mon- ument, on the south-side of the altar: on the top of which, lies a Female Figure ... (vi) 13. See Leith Davis for an analysis of Scott’s effort to balance the value of histori- cal authenticity with a suggestion of ‘the importance that even an inauthentic work can have on the literary canon’(146). 14. Joseph Cooper Walker, for instance, writes of ‘Bards of an inferior rank, or rather minstrels, strolling in large companies amongst the nobility and gen- try’ (204). On the other hand, Walker himself describes Irish bards in part via examples from writing about English and Scottish Border minstrels. Most strikingly, in a passage about the education of the old bards, Walker suddenly and uncritically weaves Beattie’s Minstrel into his own narrative: Sometimes the young Bard, in order to relieve his mind from the severity of academic duties, ‘essay’s the artless tale,’ as he wandered through his groves, obeying the dictates of his feelings, and panting from the rude scenes aroundhim. – Whate’er of beautiful or new, Sublime or dreadful, in earth, sea, or sky, By chance or search was offer’d to his view, He scann’d with curious and romantic eye. (11) The quotation of Beattie leaps out from the surrounding citations of Irish historians and classical sources. Notes 161 15. The paradox of acted sensibility thus became a source of dramatic dou- ble entendre and of conservative anxiety. John Home’s Douglas attracted the fire of Presbyterian critics in 1757, for instance, partly because they objected to the seemingly sincere portrayal of religious piety. The better the performance of Douglas’s mother, in a literary sense, the more problem- atic it was for physiognomic readings of sincere emotion. Drama had long reveled in suchparadoxes, but Home’s critics wanted nothing to do with them. Catherine Burroughs has argued,ontheother hand,that women writers theorized an approach to theater practice that allows, indeed encourages, an appreciation of the theatricality of [closet theater as well as London playhouse performances]. This seeming unwillingness to discriminate against performance spaces bespeaks a flexibility and imagination that may in part be tied to women’s experience of performing femininity on social‘stages’ ..