Another answer might be gleaned in the scores of titles published in the same two-year period, 1800–02, in which the words “ballad” and “tale” seem to be used interchangeably. Wishing to write “in the manner of” Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, for example, Mary Robinson published Lyrical Tales in 1800.

In 1801, Matthew Lewis’s collection of ballad imitations appeared as Tales of Wonder.

A year later, Anne Bannerman published Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, another collection of ballads. 1802 also saw the first two volumes of Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of “tales” of “elder times” (as Scott described them in the dedication) that recovered the rich ballad culture of the Scottish border country. William Earle’s Welsh Legends: A Collection of Popular Oral Tales (1802) features both verse and prose compositions, including prose tales on which, as Earle explains, the ballads “of this and other countries” were “founded” (vi).

In certain respects, the conflation of “ballad” and “tale” is confusing in that both were well-known forms at the turn of the century, the former as a verse form, the latter, increasingly, as a prose form. The ballad had undergone a revival in the latter half of the eighteenth century, thanks to the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and to what Katie Trumpener calls the “new” genre of the ballad collection (xi). And it was in these same years that the tale emerged as its own, distinct generic category, with a first major peak in popularity in the 1790s, followed by a second, even more dramatic rise in the 1820s, when “tale” surpassed both “novel” and “romance” to become the most popular label for prose fiction in the decade.

In other respects, however, the conflation of ballads and tales is not so difficult to account for. Both words had strong associations with what had come to be understood as “oral tradition” and both reflected a general sense of “nervousness” about the fate of songs and stories in a print-saturated age.

Indeed, the confusion already is evident in the series of publications that got the whole ballad revival started: I mean the proto-tales, or prose translations of Gaelic ballads, that James Macpherson called The Poems of Ossian (1760–65). “Pleasant are the words of the song,” says Cuchullin in book three of Fingal, “and lovely are the tales of other times” (73). Or, in “Oina-Morul. a Poem”: “I seize the tales as they pass, and pour them forth in song” (323). “Tale” and “ballad” refer generally to “story,” “tradition,” “antiquity.” But what was new and distinctive about these two as forms, especially compared with, say, the novel or the polite poetry of the eighteenth century, was precisely the attention they drew to the act of remediating traditional, oral stories in print. Both ballads and tales exhibit what Jussi Parikka calls “the media-archaeological spirit of thinking the new and the old in parallel lines” (2). As such, they bring to the fore the very question of medium itself.

Yet of the two answers offered here to Wordsworth’s question about affinities between metrical and prose composition, only one—the yoking together of lyric and ballad—has received scholarly attention. The other—the conflation of ballad and tale—has hardly been remarked upon at all, not even by those recent scholars whose work constitutes an important media turn in the field and highlights the significance of the ballad in particular for understanding the “medium” of Romantic poetry.

There are, I think, a couple of reasons for the silence. First, although the tale was a recognized form in the Romantic period, distinguished from the novel by booksellers, publishers, and readers, it has not been considered as such in our own time, which tends to see it merely as one subgenre in a larger “system” of novels.

Second, the media turn in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies has focused mostly on verse, finding in “the situation of British poetry, 1760–1830,” as Maureen McLane writes, “a window onto the transhistorical condition of poetic ‘mediality’” more generally—“mediality” being “the condition of existing in media, whether oral, manuscript, print, or digital” (Balladeering 6).

Without necessarily intending to do so, such accounts sometimes collapse prose into the larger category of print and ignore a genre such as the tale which, like the ballad, can also be described—in Paula McDowell’s words—as a “hybrid oral and textual practice” (“Mediating” 242).

In what follows, I examine the ways that the tale, too, exhibits a subtle self-consciousness about its own medial status and I ask whether the features and history of this form open up possibilities for talking about a medium of Romantic prose.

To do this, I turn to the work of James Hogg, a Romantic-period writer who not only recognized bonds of affinity between metrical and prose composition, but also understood ballads and tales to be versions—interchangeable, in a sense—of one other.

Hogg’s 1830 tale, “The Mysterious Bride,” opens with references to two writers who had a profound impact on his career. The first is Scott, a friend and competitor whose wildly successful “school of chivalry” was always threatening to edge out of the literary market Hogg’s own, more eccentric, “mountain and fairy school” (Hogg Anecdotes 9). Concerned about what he saw as a recent turn away from belief in ghosts and spirits, and about Scott’s comments on the subject in his Keepsake tale of 1829, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror,” Hogg exclaims, “Even Sir Walter Scott is turned renegade, and, with his stories made up of half-and-half . . . is trying to throw cold water on the most certain, though the most impalpable, phenomena of human nature” (“Mysterious Bride” 155).

Hogg may have felt miffed by Scott’s turn, in 1827, to the tale, a genre he saw as belonging to his own school and which he spent much of the 1820s proving his mastery of.

That Scott would then use the form to question the tale’s great topos of the supernatural only added fuel to the fire.

“Oh let me in this ae night,” sings a lover standing outside a woman’s window: he’s cold and wet and complains that “love has bound [him], hand and foot.” But the woman is not persuaded: “Gae back the gate ye came again / I winna let you in, jo—,” she responds (Kinsley 485). These lines are from Burns, the bard Hogg mentions in his tale. However, the lines that Hogg actually provides are from another, earlier version, much like the one published in The Scots Musical Museum and based on David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (1776). In this version, too, a man pleads to be admitted to his lover’s house:

I am the Laird o’ windy-wa’s,

I came nae here without a cause,

An’ I hae gotten forty fa’s

In coming o’er the knowe, joe!

The night it is baith cauld and weet;5

The morn it will be snaw and sleet;

My shoon are frozen to my feet;

O, rise an’ let me in, joe!

Let me in this ae night, &c. &c. (“Mysterious Bride” 155)

The lines quoted are similar to the Herd version, though here, in Hogg’s tale, the two stanzas are presented in reversed order. Indeed, both versions by Burns (in the Musical Museum and in Kinsley) follow Herd for the first eight lines. But the three versions are quite different in their endings. The later Burns version is the most chaste of the three: it was, after all, commissioned by Thomson, and the Burns whom Thomson wanted for his collection was the pious, sentimental Burns of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” not the bawdy Burns of such songs as would be printed a few years later in The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799).

Answering her lover with an unambiguous “no,” the woman in Burns’s song opines,

The sweetest flower that deck’d the mead,

Now trodden like the vilest weed—

Let simple maid the lesson read

The wierd may be her ain, jo.

“Wierd” here means “fate.” The version quoted in Hogg’s tale, based on Herd’s text, ends quite differently.

Although Hogg does not provide the actual lines, he hints at them when he writes, “[t]his song the Laird was singing, while, at the same time, he was smudging and laughing at the catastrophe, when, ere ever aware, he beheld, a short way before him, an uncommonly elegant and beautiful girl walking in the same direction with him” (155–56). The word “catastrophe” can mean “a conclusion generally unhappy,” as Samuel Johnson defined it; “a sudden disaster, as in the OED; or a “convulsion affecting the earth’s surface,” which was a new usage in Hogg’s time derived from the emerging science of geology (also listed in the OED). Hogg’s use of the word might be said to capitalize on all three meanings. Here are the concluding verses of Herd’s version:

She let him in sae cannily,

She let him in sae privily,

She let him in sae cannily,

To do the thing you ken, jo.

Bur ere a’ was done, and a’ was said,5

Out fell the bottom of the bed;

The lassie lost her maidenhead,

And her mither heard the din, jo. (Herd 167–69)

That Hogg’s laird is able to laugh at this catastrophe is somewhat ironic—it’s “wierd,” we might say—as it foreshadows his own unhappy conclusion: later in the tale, the laird’s “blackened corpse” is discovered at the very spot where the elegant and beautiful girl first appeared to him, on the day the two of them were to be married. “This woful catastrophe,” Hogg writes, repeating the word he used earlier to describe the end of the ballad, “struck the neighborhood with great consternation, so that nothing else was talked of” (166). The elegant and beautiful girl is, of course, the mysterious bride of the title—the ghost of one Jane Ogilvy, who, long ago, let a man in one night, so to speak. After losing her “maidenhead” she is jilted by the man, Allan Sandison, the grandfather of the laird singing the tune, who forsakes her to wed “the great heiress of Birkendelly.” Ogilvy’s ghost takes its revenge on Sandison’s heir, and we come to understand that a similar catastrophe befell the previous generation of Sandisons, as well.

Given the stress in Hogg’s tale on the ballad and its multiple versions, the word “made” as it is used here could be understood to refer to an assembled story—that is, to the raking, comparing and collecting that aims to produce a true or original text, something both “correct” and “romantic,” like a ballad in an eighteenth-century collection. The explicit comparison that Hogg makes, however, is to his “narratives,” a comparison which suggests that a “made” story is something more like a mere fiction or perhaps a story that is too seamless to be true. Something like a novel, that is. This might very well be a dig at Scott or, more generally, at what Matthew Wickman, in his contribution to this issue, describes as “the modern concept of the literary as a species of imaginative writing set against a normative sphere of everyday life.”

But if Hogg means to draw a distinction between the tale and the novel, the word “made” would seem to go against my own reading of the former’s major difference from the latter: its self-consciousness about its own medial status. Wouldn’t something that appears to be “made” be something more likely to call attention to its made-ness, or its medium—as in “made of what” or “made how”? This is a point that McLane and Celeste Langan make in their lucid account of “The Medium of Romantic Poetry” (2008). Commenting on a 1799 review of Lyrical Ballads, in which Charles Burney describes Wordsworth and Coleridge’s project as an “ingenious forgery,” Langan and McLane explain that it is precisely the “forged” aspect of the collection that makes visible poetry’s status as medium. “[T]he ‘retrogradation,’ to use Burney’s term, is intentional” (253), they write; Wordsworth and Coleridge,‘are exploring the ‘medium of poetry’ in another sense [not, as in Burney, as transition from one period to another]: neither its origin nor its end but rather its middle—and by extension, perhaps, its essence. For it may be that the question of a medium and the question of an essence are always bound together: the very possibility of multiple ‘mediations’ produces in turn the question, ‘mediations of what [thing]?’ (254)’ Hogg understands the ballad’s essence similarly: its multiple mediations not only open a space for the prose tale, but also allow his own telling to become a new—although not a final—version. But then how is the tale not also forged—or “made”? Wouldn’t a made story be more in keeping with a forged poetry?

The difference comes down to the medium that fictional prose is so often conflated with—print—and to the genre that has come to stand in for literature more generally in an age of print: the novel.

Unlike the ballad or the tale, the novel is a born-print genre: as Walter Benjamin explains, what “distinguishes” it from the latter is “its essential dependence on the book” (87). Such a dependence on the newly naturalized medium of print suggests that the “made” in Hogg’s description has a different character than the “forged” in Langan and McLane’s example. “Made” stories in print are those in which there appears to be no medium whatsoever, no work of forging, making, or mediation. As Catherine Gallagher has shown, novels offer readers the kind of consistency and depth of character which, though the product of fiction, appear consistent with—indeed, coterminous with—real life. “The novel gives us explicit fiction,” she writes, “and simultaneously seems to occlude it” (349). Such occlusion constitutes a kind of immediacy, a new product of “an age in which the medium of the book,” as Friedrich Kittler argues, “is first universal” (117), an age that Kittler dates to 1800. Poetry, too, exhibited the effects of the change. Langan, for instance, describes blank verse as “the redefinition of English poetry by the medium of print,” explaining that a poem like “Tintern Abbey” “appears to reject artifice” and thus to render its medium of communication “invisible” (“Understanding” 53–54). When poetry becomes prose or prose-like, in other words, medium becomes invisible because prose itself has become synonymous with print. A forged poetry, to go back to the example above, brings medium back to the fore by keeping the poetry part active: it resists the conflation of poetry and print, in practice if not in theory, by highlighting the poetic process of forging, or making, as distinct from something already made.

The novel, likewise, can be described as the redefinition of storytelling by the medium of print. Plausibly correct and withal so romantic, it, too, appears to reject its own artifice and to obscure the fact of medium. But what then can we say about prose in the period? Is its case a hopeless one, always to be collapsed into the larger category of print, a category that, having become natural and universal, had it made, so to speak? Perhaps the ballad-tale conflation highlighted at the start of this essay is somewhat akin to the poetry-prose conflation Langan analyzes, though here it resists the additional conflation of prose and print by highlighting the former’s continued affinities with poetry, that medium that refused to give way in the face of massive medium change? To say such is not to collapse prose into the larger category of medium. Instead, it is to make medium itself part what Yoon Sun Lee, in her introduction to this issue, describes as “the situated quality of prose,” and especially of prose written in a modern, print-saturated, world.

The opposite of a made story, then, would be a tale—or ballad—“founded on fact,” with fact referring not to that epistemological unit that Mary Poovey calls “the modern fact,” a unit that came to be represented by numbers (Poovey 5), but rather to a “truth” attested to by “authentic testimony” (as one OED entry defines it), and in particular to the telling and retelling of stories over time.

It is interesting to note that the word “tale” can mean both “number” and “story.” Hogg’s friend, Lord Byron, highlights the overlapping registers when he puns on the word in Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816): “and if thy tale be true,” he exclaims, alluding to the number of bodies that perished on the field of Waterloo and to the story those numbers tell of that decisive battle (l. 308). Hogg, too, brings to the fore the seemingly contradictory registers of number and story—or tally and tale—in his repeated claim that his tales are founded on incidents told again and again or, as in “The Mysterious Bride,” that they are a “relation of facts.” On the one hand, such stories traffic in a realm of experience that is thoroughly grounded in belief, including belief in ghosts, miracles, spirits and all that is inconsistent with real life as represented in novels.

On the other hand, the truth of such experience is both attested to and made, as in poiesis, or poetic making, precisely out of multiple retellings. “Perhaps a tale you’ll make it,” says Wordsworth’s speaker in “Simon Lee” (l. 80), making the reader both frustrated and, as McLane shrewdly observes, “like the poet, a ‘maker,’” (Balladeering 227). Tales are part of a process—and a community—in which facts are made in and by the act of transmission.

Hogg’s knowledge of the rich history of ballad transmission is hardly surprising: one of his first successes came with “Donald Macdonald” (1801), a patriotic song that gained a popular following in Scotland; and Hogg and his mother, Margaret Laidlaw Hogg, were what McLane describes as “informants” for Scott’s Minstrelsy (Balladeering 4). With Scott’s encouragement Hogg published a collection of “ballads and songs founded on facts and legendary tales,” The Mountain Bard, in 1807.

But while he would continue to write poetry and songs throughout his career, it was with the prose tale that Hogg found his best point of entry into a crowded literary market and his most distinctive literary voice. Many of his tales, like “The Mysterious Bride,” engage, build upon, or indirectly comment on the ballad tradition that Hogg was so familiar with.

Others quite literally emerge from the margins and surrounding materials of ballads—conjured, like the mysterious bride herself, by song. In The Mountain Bard, for instance, Hogg includes a ballad imitation, “The Pedlar,” that he published three years earlier in the Scots Magazine. The ballad tells the story of a murdered pedlar and of the discovery, following a bizarre incident in which a recovered heel bone starts “streamin wi’ blood,” of the murderer (Mountain, l. 147). As Hogg’s editor, Suzanne Gilbert, suggests, the “motif” of a part of a victim’s body bearing witness to his fate is common in traditional ballads; it can be seen in “The Cruel Sister,” collected in Scott, and the better known version, “The Twa Sisters,” collected in Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98).

Like Scott’s version in the Minstrelsy, Hogg’s “Pedlar” has what appears to be a standard ballad-collection apparatus, including a headnote and endnotes. But these spaces are used not to highlight excluded variants or to justify one version over another, but instead to proliferate multiple versions of the “fact” on which the ballad is “founded” (26). The endnotes, for instance, stretch on for many pages and offer multiple instances of the “superstitious awe” (Mountain Bard 31) recorded in the song. “This reminds me of a trifling anecdote, which I will here relate as an instance” (33), Hogg writes. A few paragraphs later: “some, yet alive, have heard John Corry, who was [Mr Boston’s] servant, tell the following story” (34). “A similar story to this of Mr Boston and the pedlar, is told of a contemporary of his, the Reverend Henry Davieson, of Gallashiels . . .” (35). And off he goes again, with one account suggesting another until a tale—indeed, a set of tales—has unfolded in the margins to extend the story and to show it to be alive still, present “amongst the wilds of the country to this day” (Mountain Bard 32).

In the 1821 edition of The Mountain Bard, Hogg added a number of new ballads, including “The Wife of Crowle,” a version of the famous “Wife of Usher’s Well,” from Scott’s Minstrelsy, which tells the story of three sons drowned at sea who return—as revenants—to feast with their bereaved mother before departing in the morning to go to their graves. Hogg’s version was originally published in his own, short-lived literary periodical, The Spy, in 1810, as “A Fragment.” And as Hogg notes in the headnote to The Mountain Bard version, it is also “given more at large in ‘The Winter Evening Tales’” (312), a collection of prose tales that Hogg published in 1820—his most successful work of fiction. This more-at-large version appears in the first story of the collection, “The Renowned Adventures of Basil Lee,” which was itself published in two fragments earlier in The Spy and tells of the wanderings of the anti-heroic Basil, from a Berwickshire farm to Canada to revolutionary-war America and back to Edinburgh. Along the way Basil encounters the tale of “an old woman who lived in a lone sheiling, at the head of an arm of the sea, called Loch Kios, to whom a ghost paid a visit every night” (Winter 53). The account recorded in “The Wife of Crowle” is here transplanted to the isle of Lewis and then extended in the form of a prose tale.

The movement back-and-forth between ballad and tale, and the interplay of both within individual ballads or tales, is a striking feature of Hogg’s work. But as noted at the start of this essay, his deployment of these two forms as versions of one another, interchangeable, in a sense, is a product of the ballad-tale conflation that marks the turn of the century more generally and that can be linked back to Ossian, the ballad revival, and a general sense of anxiety about the fate of old stories in new media. It is tempting to see in the examples given from Hogg a progress of sorts: from the ballad (“Donald Macdonald”), to the ballad and tale existing side by side (as in The Mountain Bard or The Spy), and finally on to the tale: “Basil Lee” or “The Mysterious Bride,” each one taking its starting point from a ballad. That is perhaps a little too neat, though the progression is in keeping with a larger cultural shift in these years, one that saw the tale first confused with the ballad and then, for a time, rivaling it and even displacing it as an object of collection (as in Earle’s Welsh Legends or the more famous example of the Children’s and Household Tales of the Grimm brothers, first published in 1812).

Still, this is to emphasize the competition between the forms, of which there was some, rather than the commonalities between them, of which there were many. As Wordsworth might have said—or better, as Albert B. Lord or Marshall McLuhan might have said—the more “philosophical” distinction is not that between poetry and prose, or ballad and tale, but rather between oral and written media.

Like the ballad, the tale kept a foot in both camps, holding on to the idea of a genuine middle position—in prose—between orality and literacy for at least as long as it took for the short story to reorient such fiction along the lines of the novel and to make a new age of prose synonymous with an age of print.