Part 9 (1/2)
Teach them true liberty-- Make them from tyrants free-- Let their homes happy be!
G.o.d save the Poor!
The arms of wicked men Do Thou with might restrain-- G.o.d save the Poor!
Raise Thou their lowliness-- Succour Thou their distress-- Thou whom the meanest bless!
G.o.d save the Poor!
Give them stanch honesty-- Let their pride manly be-- G.o.d save the Poor!
Help them to hold the right; Give them both truth and might, Lord of all LIFE and LIGHT!
G.o.d save the Poor!
And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting remark, that if the ”Poems ill.u.s.trative of the feelings of the intelligent and religious among the working-cla.s.ses of Scotland” be fair samples of that which they profess to be, Scotland may thank G.o.d, that in spite of temporary manufacturing rot-heaps, she is still whole at heart; and that the influence of her great peasant poet, though it may seem at first likely to be adverse to Christianity, has helped, as we have already hinted, to purify and not to taint; to destroy the fungus, but not to touch the heart, of the grand old Covenant-kirk life-tree.
Still sweeter, and, alas! still sadder, is the story of the two Bethunes. If Nicoll's life, as we have said, be a solitary melody, and short though triumphant strain of work-music, theirs is a harmony and true concert of fellow-joys, fellow-sorrows, fellow-drudgery, fellow-authors.h.i.+p, mutual throughout, lovely in their joint-life, and in their deaths not far divided. Alexander survives his brother John only long enough to write his ”Memoirs,” and then follows; and we have his story given us by Mr. M'Combie, in a simple una.s.suming little volume--not to be read without many thoughts, perhaps not rightly without tears. Mr. M'Combie has been wise enough not to attempt panegyric. He is all but prolix in details, filling up some half of his volume with letters of preternatural length from Alexander to his publishers and critics, and from the said publishers and critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business- like cast, but entirely successful in doing that which a book should do--namely, in showing the world that here was a man of like pa.s.sions with ourselves, who bore from boyhood to the grave hunger, cold, wet, rags, brutalising and health-destroying toil, and all the storms of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and conquered them every one.
Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exertion; he is twice blown up with his own blast in quarrying, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not thirteen, is set to stone-breaking on the roads during intense cold, and has to keep himself from being frostbitten and heart-broken by monkey gambols; takes to the weaving trade, and having helped his family by the most desperate economy to save ten pounds wherewith to buy looms, begins to work them, with his brother as an apprentice, and finds the whole outlay rendered useless the very same year by the failures of 1825- 26. So the two return to day-labour at fourteenpence a-day. John, in a struggle to do task-work honestly, over-exerts himself, and ruins his digestion for life. Next year he is set in November to clean out a watercourse knee-deep in water; then to take marl from a pit; and then to drain standing water off a swamp during an intense December frost; and finds himself laid down with a three months'
cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying the foundation of the consumption which destroyed him. But the two brothers will not give in. Poetry they will write; and they write it to the best of their powers, on sc.r.a.ps of paper, after the drudgery of the day, in a cabin pervious to every shower, teaching themselves the right spelling of the words from some ”Christian Remembrancer” or other--apparently not our meek and unbia.s.sed contemporary of that name; and all this without neglecting their work a day or even an hour, when the weather permitted--the ”only thing which tempted them to fret,” being--hear it, readers, and perpend!--”the being kept at home by rain and snow.”
Then an additional malady (apparently some calculous one) comes on John, and stops by him for the six remaining years of his life. Yet between 1826 and 1832, John had saved fourteen pounds out of his miserable earnings, to be expended to the last farthing on his brother's recovery from the second quarry accident. Surely the devil is trying hard to spoil these men. But no. They are made perfect by sufferings. In the house with one long narrow room, and a small vacant s.p.a.ce at the end of it, lighted by a single pane of gla.s.s, they write and write untiring, during the long summer evenings, poetry, ”Tales of the Scottish Peasant Life,” which at last bring them in somewhat; and a work on practical economy, which is bepraised and corrected by kind critics in Edinburgh, and at last published-- without a sale. Perhaps one cause of its failure might be found in those very corrections. There were too many violent political allusions in it, complains their good Mentor of Edinburgh; and persuades them, seemingly the most meek and teachable of heroes, to omit them; though Alexander, while submitting, pleads fairly enough for retaining them, in a pa.s.sage which we will give, as a specimen of the sort of English possible to be acquired by a Scotch day-labourer, self-educated, all but the rudiments of reading and writing, and a few lectures on popular poetry from ”a young student of Aberdeen,”
now the Rev. Mr. Adamson, who must look back on the friends.h.i.+p which he bore these two young men as one of the n.o.blest pages in his life.
Talk to the many of religion, and they will put on a long face, confess that it is a thing of the greatest importance to all--and go away and forget the whole. Talk to them of education; they will readily acknowledge that it's ”a braw thing to be weel learned,” and begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of Jeremiah because they cannot make it as long, on the ignorance of the age in which they live; but they neither stir hand nor foot in the matter. But speak to them of politics, and their excited countenances and kindling eye show in a moment how deeply they are interested. Politics are therefore an important feature, and an almost indispensable element in such a work as mine. Had it consisted solely of exhortations to industry and rules of economy, it would have been dismissed with an ”Ou ay, it's braw for him to crack that way: but if he were whaur we are, 'deed he wad just hae to do as we do.” But by mixing up the science with politics, and giving it an occasional political impetus, a different result may be reasonably expected. In these days no man can be considered a patriot or friend of the poor, who is not also a politician.
It is amusing, by-the-bye, to see how the world changes its codes of respectability, and how, what is anathema in one generation, becomes trite orthodoxy in the next. The political sins in the work were, that ”my brother had attacked the corn-laws with some severity; and I have attempted to level a battery against that sort of servile homage which the poor pay to the rich!”
There is no use pursuing the story much farther. They again save a little money, and need it; for the estate on which they have lived from childhood changing hands, they are, with their aged father, expelled from the dear old dog-kennel to find house-room where they can. Why not?--”it was not in the bond.” The house did not belong to them; nothing of it, at least, which could be specified in any known lease. True, there may have been a.s.sociations: but what a.s.sociations can men be expected to cultivate on fourteenpence a-day?
So they must forth, with their two aged parents, and build with their own hands a new house elsewhere, having saved some thirty pounds from the sale of their writings. The house, as we understand, stands to this day--hereafter to become a sort of artisan's caaba and pilgrim's station, only second to Burns's grave. That, at least, it will become, whenever the meaning of the words ”worth” and ”wors.h.i.+p” shall become rightly understood among us.
For what are these men, if they are not heroes and saints? Not of the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, human, evangelic sort, masculine and grand--like the figures in Raffaelle's Cartoons compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo. Not from superst.i.tion, not from selfish prudence, but from devotion to their aged parents, and the righteous dread of dependence, they die voluntary celibates, although their writings show that they, too, could have loved as n.o.bly as they did all other things. The extreme of endurance, self-restraint, of ”conquest of the flesh,” outward as well as inward, is the life-long lot of these men; and they go through it. They have their share of injustice, tyranny, disappointment; one by one each bright boy's dream of success and renown is scourged out of their minds, and sternly and lovingly their Father in heaven teaches them the lesson of all lessons. By what hours of misery and blank despair that faith was purchased, we can only guess; the simple strong men give us the result, but never dream of sitting down and a.n.a.lysing the process for the world's amus.e.m.e.nt or their own glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could have told us; whether the mere fact of a man's being able to dissect himself, in public or in private, is not proof-patent that he is no man, but only a sh.e.l.l of a man, with works inside, which can of course be exhibited and taken to pieces--a rather more difficult matter with flesh and blood. If we believe that G.o.d is educating, the when, the where, and the how are not only unimportant, but, considering who is the teacher, unfathomable to us, and it is enough to be able to believe with John Bethune that the Lord of all things is influencing us through all things; whether sacraments, or sabbaths, or sun-gleams, or showers--all things are ours, for all are His, and we are His, and He is ours--and for the rest, to say with the same John Bethune:
Oh G.o.d of glory! thou hast treasured up For me my little portion of distress; But with each draught--in every bitter cup Thy hand hath mixed, to make its soreness less, Some cordial drop, for which thy name I bless, And offer up my mite of thankfulness.
Thou hast chastised my frame with dire disease, Long, obdurate, and painful; and thy hand Hath wrung cold sweat-drops from my brow; for these I thank thee too. Though pangs at thy command Have compa.s.sed me about, still, with the blow, Patience sustained my soul amid its woe.
Of the actual literary merit of these men's writings there is less to be said. However extraordinary, considering the circ.u.mstances under which they were written, may be the polish and melody of John's verse, or the genuine spiritual health, deep death-and-devil-defying earnestness, and shrewd practical wisdom, which s.h.i.+nes through all that either brother writes, they do not possess any of that fertile originality, which alone would have enabled them, as it did Burns, to compete with the literary savants, who, though for the most part of inferior genius, have the help of information and appliances, from which they were shut out. Judging them, as the true critic, like the true moralist, is bound to do, ”according to what they had, not according to what they had not,” they are men who, with average advantages, might have been famous in their day. G.o.d thought it better for them to ”hide them in his tabernacle from the strife of tongues;” and--seldom believed truism--He knows best. Alexander shall not, according to his early dreams, ”earn nine hundred pounds by writing a book, like Burns,” even though his ideal method of spending be to buy all the boys in the parish ”new shoes with iron tackets and heels,” and send them home with s.h.i.+llings for their mothers, and feed their fathers on wheat bread and milk, with tea and bannocks for Sabbath-days, and build a house for the poor old toil- stiffened man whom he once saw draining the hill field, ”with a yard full of gooseberries, and an apple-tree!”--not that, nor even, as the world judges, better than that, shall he be allowed to do. The poor, for whom he writes his ”Practical Economy,” shall not even care to read it; and he shall go down to the grave a failure and a lost thing in the eyes of men: but not in the eyes of grand G.o.d-fearing old Alison Christie, his mother, as he brings her, sc.r.a.p by sc.r.a.p, the proofs of their dead idol's poems, which she has prayed to be spared just to see once in print, and, when the last half-sheet is read, loses her sight for ever--not in her eyes, nor in those of G.o.d who saw him, in the cold winter mornings, wearing John's clothes, to warm them for the dying man before he got up.
His grief at his brother's death is inconsolable. He feels for the first time in his life, what a lot is his--for he feels for the first time that--
Parent and friend and brother gone, I stand upon the earth alone.
Four years he lingers; friends begin to arise from one quarter and another, but he, not altogether wisely or well, refuses all pecuniary help. At last Mr. Hugh Miller recommends him to be editor of a projected ”Non-Intrusion” paper in Dumfries, with a salary, to him boundless, of 100l. a-year. Too late! The iron has entered too deeply into his soul; in a few weeks more he is lying in his brother's grave--”Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths not divided.”
”William Thom of Inverury” is a poet altogether of the same school.
His ”Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver” are superior to those of either Nicoll or the Bethunes, the little love-songs in the volume reminding us of Burns's best manner, and the two languages in which he writes being better amalgamated, as it seems to us, than in any Scotch songwriter. Moreover, there is a terseness, strength, and grace about some of these little songs, which would put to shame many a volume of vague and windy verse, which the press sees yearly sent forth by men, who, instead of working at the loom, have been pampered from their childhood with all the means and appliances of good taste and cla.s.sic cultivation. We have room only for one specimen of his verse, not the most highly finished, but of a beauty which can speak for itself.
DREAMINGS OF THE BEREAVED.
The morning breaks bonny o'er mountain and stream, An' troubles the hallowed breath of my dream.