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-
buttoned 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 coarse 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-debasement--a struggling to forget, where it was hopeless to
obtain." But to us, almost the most interesting passage 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 noble "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 fagged 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 passed 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 passage left.
Making all allowance for natural and pardonable high-colouring, we
recommend this most weighty and significant passage 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
principally to the working classes. 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 classes 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 authoress, 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 God 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 butterfly, 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 God 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 passion 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 noble 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 classic ground, and made all the
cultivated and the comfortable of the earth desert, for the exquisite
creations of his fancy, Faust, and Tasso, and Iphigenie.