Part 9 (2/2)
The gowd light of morning is sweet to the e'e, But ghost-gathering midnight, thou'rt dearer to me.
The dull common world then sinks from my sight, And fairer creations arise to the night; When drowsy oppression has sleep-sealed my e'e, Then bright are the visions awakened to me!
Oh, come, spirit-mother! discourse of the hours My young bosom beat all its beating to yours, When heart-woven wishes in soft counsel fell On ears--how unheedful, proved sorrow might tell!
That deathless affection nae sorrow could break; When all else forsook me, ye would na forsake; Then come, oh my mother! come often to me, An' soon an' for ever I'll come unto thee!
An' then, shrouded loveliness! soul-winning Jean, How cold was thy hand on my bosom yestreen!
'Twas kind--for the love that your e'e kindled there Will burn, ay an' burn, till that breast beat nae mair-- Our bairnies sleep round me, oh bless ye their sleep!
Your ain dark-eyed Willie will wauken and weep!
But blythe through his weepin', he'll tell me how you, His heaven-hamed mammie, was dauting his brow.
Though dark be our dwellin', our happin' tho' bare, And night closes round us in cauldness and care, Affection will warm us--and bright are the beams That halo our hame in yon dear land o' dreams: Then weel may I welcome the night's deathly reign, Wi' souls of the dearest I mingle me then; The gowd light of morning is lightless to me, But, oh for the night with its ghost revelrie!
But even more interesting than the poems themselves, is the autobiographical account prefixed, with its vivid sketches of factory life in Aberdeen, of the old regime of 1770; when ”four days did the weaver's work--Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, were of course jubilee. Lawn frills gorged (?) freely from under the wrists of his fine blue gilt- b.u.t.toned coat. He dusted his head with white flour on Sunday, smirked and wore a cane; walked in clean slippers on Monday; Tuesday heard him talk war bravado, quote Volney, and get drunk: weaving commenced gradually on Wednesday. Then were little children pirn- fillers, and such were taught to steal warily past the gate-keeper, concealing the bottle. These wee smugglers had a drop for their services, over and above their chances of profiting by the elegant and edifying discussions uttered in their hearing. Infidelity was then getting fas.h.i.+onable.” But by the time Thom enters on his seventeen years' weaving, in 1814, the Nemesis has come. ”Wages are six s.h.i.+llings a-week where they had been forty; but the weaver of forty s.h.i.+llings, with money instead of wit, had bequeathed his vices to the weaver of six s.h.i.+llings, with wit instead of money.” The introduction of machinery works evil rather than good, on account of the reckless way in which it is used, and the reckless material which it uses. ”Vacancies in the factory, daily made, were daily filled by male and female workers; often queer enough people, and from all parts--none too coa.r.s.e for using. The pickpocket, trained to the loom six months in Bridewell, came forth a journeyman weaver; and his precious experiences were infused into the common moral puddle, and in due time did their work.” No wonder that ”the distinctive character of all sunk away. Man became less manly--woman unlovely and rude.” No wonder that the factory, like too many more, though a thriving concern to its owners, becomes ”a prime nursery of vice and sorrow.” ”Virtue perished utterly within its walls, and was dreamed of no more; or, if remembered at all, only in a deep and woful sense of self-debas.e.m.e.nt--a struggling to forget, where it was hopeless to obtain.” But to us, almost the most interesting pa.s.sage in his book, and certainly the one which bears most directly on the general purpose of this article, is one in which he speaks of the effects of song on himself and his fellow factory-workers.
Moore was doing all he could for love-sick boys and girls, yet they had never enough! Nearer and dearer to hearts like ours was the Ettrick Shepherd, then in his full tide of song and story; but nearer and dearer still than he, or any living songster, was our ill-fated fellow-craftsman Tannahill. Poor weaver chiel! what we owe to you!-- your ”Braes of Balquidder,” and ”Yon Burnside,” and ”Gloomy Winter,”
and the ”Minstrel's” wailing ditty, and the n.o.ble ”Gleneiffer.” Oh!
how they did ring above the rattle of a thousand shuttles! Let me again proclaim the debt which we owe to these song spirits, as they walked in melody from loom to loom, ministering to the low-hearted; and when the breast was filled with everything but hope and happiness, let only break out the healthy and vigorous chorus, ”A man's a man for a' that,” and the f.a.gged weaver brightens up . . .
Who dare measure the restraining influences of these very songs? To us they were all instead of sermons. Had one of us been bold enough to enter a church, he must have been ejected for the sake of decency.
His forlorn and curiously patched habiliments would have contested the point of attraction with the ordinary eloquence of that period.
Church bells rang not for us. Poets were indeed our priests: but for those, the last relic of moral existence would have pa.s.sed away.
Song was the dewdrop which gathered during the long dark night of despondency, and was sure to glitter in the very first blink of the sun. You might have seen ”Auld Robin Gray” wet the eyes that could be tearless amid cold and hunger, and weariness and pain. Surely, surely, then there was to that heart one pa.s.sage left.
Making all allowance for natural and pardonable high-colouring, we recommend this most weighty and significant pa.s.sage to the attention of all readers, and draw an argumentum a fortiori, from the high estimation in which Thom holds those very songs of Tannahill's, of which we just now spoke somewhat depreciatingly, for the extreme importance which we attach to popular poetry, as an agent of incalculable power in moulding the minds of nations.
The popular poetry of Germany has held that great nation together, united and heart-whole for centuries, in spite of every disadvantage of internal division, and the bad influence of foreign taste; and the greatest of their poets have not thought it beneath them to add their contributions, and their very best, to the common treasure, meant not only for the luxurious and learned, but for the workman and the child at school. In Great Britain, on the contrary, the people have been left to form their own tastes, and choose their own modes of utterance, with great results, both for good and evil; and there has sprung up before the new impulse which Burns gave to popular poetry, a considerable literature--considerable not only from, its truth and real artistic merit, but far more so from its being addressed princ.i.p.ally to the working cla.s.ses. Even more important is this people's literature question, in our eyes, than the more palpable factors of the education question, about which we now hear such ado.
It does seem to us, that to take every possible precaution about the spiritual truth which children are taught in school, and then leave to chance the more impressive and abiding teaching which popular literature, songs especially, give them out of doors, is as great a niaiserie as that of the Tractarians who insisted on getting into the pulpit in their surplices, as a sign that the clergy only had the right of preaching to the people, while they forgot that, by means of a free press (of the licence of which they, too, were not slack to avail themselves), every penny-a-liner was preaching to the people daily, and would do so, maugre their surplices, to the end of time.
The man who makes the people's songs is a true popular preacher.
Whatsoever, true or false, he sends forth, will not be carried home, as a sermon often is, merely in heads, to be forgotten before the week is out: it will ring in the ears, and cling round the imagination, and follow the pupil to the workshop, and the tavern, and the fireside; even to the deathbed, such power is in the magic of rhyme. The emigrant, deep in Australian forests, may take down Chalmers's sermons on Sabbath evenings from the scanty shelf: but the songs of Burns have been haunting his lips, and cheering his heart, and moulding him, unconsciously to himself, in clearing and in pasture all the weary week. True, if he be what a Scotchman should be, more than one old Hebrew psalm has brought its message to him during these week-days; but there are feelings of his nature on which those psalms, not from defect, but from their very purpose, do not touch: how is he to express them, but in the songs which echo them?
These will keep alive, and intensify in him, and in the children who learn them from his lips, all which is like themselves. Is it, we ask again, to be left to chance what sort of songs these shall be?
As for poetry written for the working cla.s.ses by the upper, such attempts at it as we yet have seen, may be considered nil. The upper must learn to know more of the lower, and to make the lower know more of them--a frankness of which we honestly believe they will never have to repent. Moreover, they must read Burns a little more, and cavaliers and Jacobites a little less. As it is, their efforts have been as yet exactly in that direction which would most safely secure the blessings of undisturbed obscurity. Whether ”secular” or ”spiritual,” they have thought proper to adopt a certain Tommy-good- child tone, which, whether to Glasgow artisans or Dorsets.h.i.+re labourers, or indeed for any human being who is ”grinding among the iron facts of life,” is, to say the least, nauseous; and the only use of their poematicula has been to demonstrate practically the existence of a great and fearful gulf between those who have, and those who have not, in thought as well as in purse, which must be, in the former article at least, bridged over as soon as possible, if we are to remain one people much longer. The attempts at verse for children are somewhat more successful--a certain little ”Moral Songs”
especially, said to emanate from the Tractarian School, yet full of a health, spirit, and wild sweetness, which makes its auth.o.r.ess, in our eyes, ”wiser than her teachers.” But this is our way. We are too apt to be afraid of the men, and take to the children as our pis- aller, covering our despair of dealing with the majority, the adult population, in a pompous display of machinery for influencing that very small fraction, the children. ”Oh, but the destinies of the empire depend on the rising generation!” Who has told us so?--how do we know that they do not depend on the risen generation? Who are likely to do more work during our lifetime, for good and evil,--those who are now between fifteen and five-and-forty, or those who are between five and fifteen? Yet for those former, the many, and the working, and the powerful, all we seem to be inclined to do is to parody Scripture, and say: ”He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still.”
Not that we ask any one to sit down, and, out of mere benevolence, to write songs for the people. Wooden out of a wooden birthplace, would such go forth, to feed fires, not spirits. But if any man shall read these pages, to whom G.o.d has given a truly poetic temperament, a gallant heart, a melodious ear, a quick and sympathetic eye for all forms of human joy, and sorrow, and humour, and grandeur; an insight which can discern the outlines of the b.u.t.terfly, when clothed in the roughest and most rugged chrysalis-hide; if the teachers of his heart and purposes, and not merely of his taste and sentiments, have been the great songs of his own and of every land and age; if he can see in the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and, above all, in the parables of Him who spake as never man spake, the models and elemental laws of a people's poetry, alike according to the will of G.o.d and the heart of man; if he can welcome gallantly and hopefully the future, and yet know that it must be, unless it would be a monster and a machine, the loving and obedient child of the past; if he can speak of the subjects which alone will interest the many, on love, marriage, the sorrows of the poor, their hopes, political and social, their wrongs, as well as their sins and duties; and that with a fervour and pa.s.sion akin to the spirit of Burns and Elliott, yet with more calmness, more purity, more wisdom, and therefore with more hope, as one who stands upon a vantage-ground of education and culture, sympathising none the less with those who struggle behind him in the valley of the shadow of death, yet seeing from the mountain peaks the coming dawn, invisible as yet to them: then let that man think it no fall, but rather a n.o.ble rise, to leave awhile the barren glacier ranges of pure art, for the fertile gardens of practical and popular song, and write for the many, and with the many, in words such as they can understand; remembering that that which is simplest is always deepest; that the many contain in themselves the few; and that when he speaks to the wanderer and the drudge, he speaks to the elemental and primeval man, and in him speaks to all who have risen out of him. Let him try, undiscouraged by inevitable failures; and if at last he succeeds in giving vent to one song which will cheer hard-worn hearts at the loom and the forge, or wake one pauper's heart with the hope that his children are destined not to die as he died, or recall, amid Canadian forests or Australian sheep-walks, one thrill of love for the old country, her liberties, and her laws, and her religion, to the settler's heart-- let that man know that he has earned a higher place among the spirits of the wise and good, by doing, in spite of the unpleasantness of self-denial, the duty which lay nearest him, than if he had out- rivalled Goethe on his own cla.s.sic ground, and made all the cultivated and the comfortable of the earth desert, for the exquisite creations of his fancy, Faust, and Ta.s.so, and Iphigenie.
THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART {187}
Much attention has been excited this year by the alleged fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal power was to receive its death-blow--in temporal matters, at least--during the past year 1848. For ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in the public esteem, than we have in many other interpreters of prophecy. Their shallow and bigoted views of past history are enough to damp our faith in their discernment of the future. It does seem that people ought to understand what has been, before they predict what will be. History is ”the track of G.o.d's footsteps through time;” it is in His dealings with our forefathers that we may expect to find the laws by which He will deal with us. Not that Mr. Fleming's conjecture must be false; among a thousand guesses there ought surely to be one right one. And it is almost impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth or other. The interpreters of prophecy therefore, like all other interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes.
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