The Lord of the Isles was the last poem by Scott, in that the title page indicated he was the author. But it was not Scott’s last long narrative poem. In 1817 a new work, Harold the Dauntless was published, described as being ‘by the Author of The Bridal of Triermain’. That poem had been published anonymously in 1813, having first appeared in 1811 (again anonymously) in the Ballantynes’ magazine, The Edinburgh Annual Register under the title The Inferno of Altisidora. Taxed by both friends and public critics to prove he could write in a vein other than his chosen form, Scott had turned to the Spenserian stanza for The Vision of Don Roderick. At the same time he produced works in the style of George Crabbe and Thomas Moore. Bizarrely, he decided he would also write an imitation of himself.
Scott did not deny authorship of The Inferno, but certainly spoke of the work as if it were by someone else. To as close a friend as the playwright Joanna Baillie, Scott said that ‘the imitation of Crabbe had struck him as good; that of Moore as bad; and that of himself as beginning well, but falling off grievously to the close’. Only Scott’s closest friends were allowed in on the secret: William Erskine and J B S Morritt. Scott hoped that Erskine would be taken as the author, and he contributed some scraps of Greek – a language Scott had little sympathy with and little knowledge of – to ‘throw out the knowing ones’. He also suggested ‘getting up a quizzical review’. To Morritt, Scott was more candid: the whole affair was ‘laying a trap for Jeffrey’. Jeffrey, being then on a transatlantic voyage following the death of his wife – and in order to meet his second wife – did not obligingly step into their snare.
The preface to the works again disavowed Scott’s authorship: ‘nothing burlesque, or disrespectful to the authors, was intended, but that they were offered to the public as serious, though certainly very imperfect imitations of that style of composition, but which each of the writers is supposed to be distinguished’. In the case of his version of himself, this was light rhythms and Pindaric stanzas, oodles of chivalric terminology and copious amounts of place-names; with the major difference being a subject drawn from Arthurian legend. A brief extract shows how well Scott could imitate himself:
The faithful page he mounts his steed,
And soon he cross’d green Irthing’s mead,
Dash’d o’er Kirkoswald’s verdant plain,
And Eden barr’d his course in vain.
He pass’d red Penrith’s Table Round,
For feats of chivalry renown’d,
Left Mayburgh’s mound and stones of power,
By Druids raised in magic hour,
And traced the Eamont’s winding way,
Till Ulfo’s lake beneath him lay.
In a piece of outrageous nose-tweaking, Scott even has his pseudo-self proclaiming that his lyre – not harp – boasts nothing ‘of Border spell’ or ‘feudal slogan’; that his heroes draw no claymores, and worst of all, it has never won ‘best meed to minstrel true, / One favouring smile from fair BUCCLEUCH!’.
Jeffrey may have been indisposed, but Scott’s friend George Ellis completely fell for the ruse in the rival Quarterly Review. ‘It is written,’ he argued, ‘in the style of Mr Walter Scott; and if in magnis voluisse sat est [in great endeavours will suffices], the author, whatever may be the merits of his work, has earned the meed at which he aspires. To attempt a serious imitation of the most popular living poet; and this imitation, not a short fragment, in which all his peculiarities might with comparatively little difficulty be concentrated, but a long and complete work; with plot, character, and machinery entirely new; and with no manner of resemblance therefore to a parody on any production of the original author;– this must be acknowledged as an attempt of no timid daring.’ Poor Ellis may have been misled simply because he did not think Scott would engage in such a scheme of subterfuge without telling him.
But the hoax did not end with Ellis’s review of The Bridal of Triermain, and its conclusion goes to show that you can push a joke too far. Scott’s last attempt at a narrative poem, Harold the Dauntless, pretended to be a second work by the anonymous epigone. It is a bizarre tale, indebted to Icelandic skaldic poetry and myths of Viking berserkers, in which the pagan Harold’s quest takes him to the underworld, and eventually to Christian baptism. The reviews were not good. Blackwood’s Magazine called it an ‘elegant, sprightly and delightful little poem’ but ‘generally inferior to the works of Mr Scott, in vigour and interest’. The Monthly Review excoriated the ‘faults engendered by a servile imitation of Mr Scott’s bad grammar and discordant versification’. Most damning of all, the Literary Gazette said it had nothing but a ‘caricature resemblance’ to Scott. Once the critics decide that your new work is actually a weak impersonation of your old work, it’s time to call it a day.