Literary and General Lectures and Essays Part 9

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-authorship, 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 friendship 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 "worship" 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 shines 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 shillings 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.

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 fashionable." But by the time Thom enters on his seventeen years' weaving, in 1814, the Nemesis has come. "Wages are six shillings a-week where they had been forty; but the weaver of forty shillings, with money instead of wit, had bequeathed his vices to the weaver of six shillings, 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 Dorsetshire 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.