Part 19 (1/2)

Doggerel as this was, it survived the special occasion for which it was written. When Queen Anne's reign was well advanced balladmongers were singing:

So G.o.d bless the Queen and the House of Hanover, And never may Pope or Pretender come over.

Lillibullero, Bullen-a-la.

If the song is still remembered by other than historical students, it is probably more because Uncle Toby, when he was hard pressed in argument, ”had accustomed himself, in such attacks, to whistle Lillibullero,” than for any other reason.

But whether it be doggerel or dignified verse, popular poetry almost invariably possesses one great merit. When we read the outpourings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century poets to the innumerable Julias, Sacharissas, and Celias whom they celebrated in verse, we cannot but feel that we are often in contact with a display of spurious pa.s.sion which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson tells us that Prior's Chloe ”was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species.” The case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It enables us to gauge the national aspirations of the day, and to estimate the character of the nation whose yearnings found expression in song. The following lines--written by Bishop Still, the reputed author of ”Gammer Gurton's Needle”--very faithfully represent the feelings excited in England at the time of the Spanish Armada:

We will not change our Credo For Pope, nor boke, nor bell; And yf the Devil come himself We'll hounde him back to h.e.l.l.

The fiery Protestant spirit which is breathed forth in these lines found its counterpart in Germany. Luther, at a somewhat earlier period, wrote:

Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort, Und steur des Papsts und Turken Mord.

Take again the case of French Revolutionary poetry. The n.o.ble, as also the ign.o.ble, sides of that vast upheaval were alike represented in the current popular poetry of the day. Posterity has no difficulty in understanding why the whole French nation was thrilled by Rouget de Lisle's famous song, to whose lofty strains the young conscripts rushed to the frontier in order to hurl back the invaders of their country. On the other hand, the ferocity of the period found expression in such lines as:

Ah! ca ira, ca ira, ca ira!

Les aristocrates a la lanterne,

which was composed by one Ladre, a street singer, or in the savage ”Carmagnole,” a name originally applied to a peasant costume worn in the Piedmontese town of Carmagnola, and afterwards adopted by the Maenads and Baccha.n.a.ls, who sang and danced in frenzied joy over the judicial murder of poor ”Monsieur et Madame Veto.”

The light-hearted and characteristically Latin buoyancy of the French nation, which they have inherited from the days of that fifth-century Gaulish bishop (Salvia.n.u.s) who said that the Roman world was laughing when it died (”moritur et ridet”), and which has stood them in good stead in many an arduous trial, is also fully represented in their national poetry. No other people, after such a crus.h.i.+ng defeat as that incurred at Pavia, would have been convulsed with laughter over the innumerable stanzas which have immortalised their slain commander, M. de la Palisse:

Il mourut le vendredi, Le dernier jour de son age; S'il fut mort le samedi, Il et vecu davantage.

The inchoate national aspirations, as also the grave and resolute patriotism of the Germans, found interpreters of genius in the persons of Arndt and Korner, the latter of whom laid down his life for the people whom he loved so well. During the Napoleonic period all their compositions, many of which will live so long as the German language lasts, strike the same note--the determination of Germans to be free:

La.s.st klingen, was nur klingen kann, Die Trommeln und die Floten!

Wir wollen heute Mann fur Mann Mit Blut das Eisen roten.

Mit Henkerblut, Franzosenblut-- O susser Tag der Rache!

Das klinget allen Deutschen gut, Das ist die grosse Sache.

Some six decades later, when Arndt's famous question ”Was ist das deutsche Vaterland?” was about to receive a practical answer, the German soldier marched to the frontier to the inspiriting strains of ”Die Wacht am Rhein.”

No more characteristic national poetry was ever written than that evoked by the civil war which raged in America some fifty years ago. Those who, like the present writer, were witnesses on the spot of some portion of that great struggle, are never likely to forget the different impressions left on their minds by the poetry respectively of the North and of the South. The pathetic song of the Southerners, ”Maryland, my Maryland,” which was composed by Mr. T.R. Randall, appeared, even whilst the contest was still undecided, to embody the plaintive wail of a doomed cause, and stood in strong contrast to the aggressive and almost rollicking vigour of ”John Brown's Body” and ”The Union for ever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah!”

Even a nation so little distinguished in literature as the Ottoman Turks is able, under the stress of genuine patriotism, to embody its hopes and aspirations in stirring verse. The following, which was written during the last Russo-Turkish war, suffers in translation. Its rhythm and heroic, albeit savage, vigour may perhaps even be appreciated by those who are not familiar with the language in which it is written:

Achalum sanjaklari!

Ghechelim Balkanlari!

Allah! Allah! deyerek, Dushman kanin' ichelim!

Padishahmiz chok yasha!

Ghazi Osman chok yasha![109]

Let us now turn to Italy and Greece, the nations from which modern Europe inherits most of its ideas, and which have furnished the greater part of the models in which those ideas are expressed, whether in prose or in verse.

Although lines from Virgil, who may almost be said to have created Roman Imperialism, have been found scribbled on the walls of Pompeii, it is probable that in his day no popular poetry, in the sense in which we should understand the word, existed. But there is something extremely pathetic--more especially in the days when the Empire was hastening to its ruin--in the feeling, little short of adoration, which the Latin poets showed to the city of Rome, and in the overweening confidence which they evinced in the stability of Roman rule. This feeling runs through the whole of Latin literature from the days of Ovid and Virgil to the fifth-century Rutilius, who was the last of the cla.s.sic poets.