FROM THE SEAT OF THE SCORNER.
“Then bagpipes of the loudest drones,
With snuffling broken-winded tones,
Whose blasts of air, in pocket shut
Sound filthier than from the gut.
And make a viler noise than swine,
In windy weather when they whine.”
—_Hudibras._
Poking fun at the pipes—English caricature—Mixed metaphor—Churchism
and pipes—Fifteenth century satire—A biographical sneer—Thackeray—
Bitter English writers—Testimony of a Jew—Home sarcasm—The bards—
Joanna Baillie—A Frenchman’s opinion—William Black—Ignorance
breaking its shins—Imported sportsmen—The duty of Highlanders.
There is a curious tendency, except in truly Highland circles, to poke
fun at the pipes. This tendency is very noticeable in the domain of
English comic journalism, the more or less comic papers hailing from the
metropolis finding in Scottish people and Scottish customs an
inexhaustible field of humour. They never tire of joking about the
strictness of our religious beliefs, our supposed slowness at perceiving
a joke, our relations with visitors from the south, our alleged
parsimony, our national dress, and our national music; and they never
fail to depict us as on every occasion wearing the kilt, carrying the
pipes, and hiding away a bottle of whisky. Sydney Smith once declared
that one might as well try to get music out of an iron foundry as out of
the pipes, and Leigh Hunt’s idea of martyrdom was to be tied to a post
within a hundred yards of a stout-lunged piper. Some cynics have said
that the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of the bagpipe, and it has
even been contended that the important part played by the instrument in
many glorious victories achieved by our armies was simply due to the
fact that the enemy had only two courses open—either to flee or to
remain and lose all desire for existence. However, as all these things
amuse our southern neighbours and do not injure us, we do not complain.
[Illustration:
“THE SPIRIT OF THE PIPES”[12]
]
Footnote 12:
Above the door of Dunderave, a ruined castle near Inveraray, there
used to be a figure playing upon its nose. This suggested to J. F.
Campbell, of Islay, the above design of “The Spirit of the Pipes.”
Our national music has always lent itself to the caricature of the
alleged humourist south of the Border. Thus a writer of perhaps two
centuries ago:—
“North-west of a line from Greenock by Perth to Inverness is the land
of the Gael—of the semi-barbarous instrument the bagpipe, of wild
pibroch tunes, or rude melodies, very little known and still less
admired, and of a species of song which has rarely been considered
worth the trouble of translation.”
English writers who attend northern gatherings feel themselves in duty
bound to be partly amused and partly terrified at the din of the pipes,
and they often express the greatest wonder that our civilised ears can
find pleasure in it. In the same way they used to look on our religion
with contempt, and ridicule it on every opportunity. “Suffer Presbytery
and bagpipes to flourish beyond Berwick” exclaims one in his wrath. The
two seemed to be equally despicable. Butler, in putting this contempt
into rhyme, works himself into a fine frenzy of mixed metaphor;—
“Whate’er men speak by this new light,
Still they are sure to be i’ the right;
’Tis a dark lanthorn of the spirit,
Which none can see but those who hear it.
· · · · ·
This light inspires and shines upon
The house of saint like bagpipe drone.”
How men can speak by light, how this light can be a lanthorn, how men
can hear light, or how a bagpipe drone can shine upon a house, he does
not stop to explain, but proceeds:—
“See Phœbus or some friendly muse
Unto small poets songs infuse,
Which they at second hand rehearse,
Through reed or bagpipe, verse for verse.”
Needham, another Englishman, writing in 1648, after calling a typical
Presbyterian such names as “a sainted Salamander that lives in the
flames of zeal,” “an apocryphal piece of university mummery,” “a holy
picklock,” “a gunpowder politician,” “a divine squib-crack,” “a pious
pulpit-cuffer,” and “a deadly spit-fire,” winds up with—
“The Scotch bagpipes, the pulpit drums,
And priests sound high and big,
Once more a Cause and Covenant comes
To show ’s a Scottish jig.”
And yet another seems to think the Separatists, a Scottish religious
sect of the 17th century, would have been better at the bagpipe than at
singing. They had, he thought, “need of somewhat as a bagpipe, or
something never used by Antichrist, to tune them; singing in their own
conventicles like hogs against raine.”
A satirical writer of 1659, when he wished to be specially cynical,
proposed that two illustrious persons should be married, and that “the
banquetting house should be prepared forthwith, with a pair of bagpipes
and a North Country jig to entertain the nobles that shall attend the
nuptials.” There was apparently nothing to be said after that.
In a political satire of the same year, Sir Archibald Johnstone, a
prominent person of that time, is thus addressed:—“Pure Sir Archibald
Johnstone, wea is me for thee, for thou hadst thought to be a muckle
laddy, but now the peeper of Kilbarchan will laugh thee to scorne.” He
could get no lower than to be laughed at by the piper.
A sneering biographer of Archbishop Sharpe, speaking of the prelate’s
grandfather’s pipes, says:—“If the pipe and bags be yet in the prelate’s
possession, it is like he may have use for them, to gift them to some
landwart church, to save the expense of a pair of organs, which may be
well enough for our rude people, who can sing to the one as well as to
the other; and if instrumental music be _juris divini_, as the prelates
assert, it cannot be thought that any people should be so phanatick as
to admit the organs in divine service and refuse the pipes.”
The Earl of Northampton, a contemporary of Shakespeare, concludes a
treatise against alleged prophecy with the remark that “oracles are most
like baggepypes and showmen, that sound no longer than they are puffed
up with winde and played upon with cunning.”
Thackeray, in _The Irish Sketch Book_, says, “Anything more lugubrious
than the drone of the pipe, or the jig danced to it, or the countenances
of the dancers and musicians, I never saw. Round each set of dancers the
people formed a ring, in which the figurantes and coryphees went through
their operations.”
Thomas Kirke, the Englishman who wrote _A Modern Account of Scotland_,
in 1679, said—“Musick they (the Highlanders) have, but not the harmony
of the sphears, but loud terrene noises, like the bellowing of beasts;
the loud bagpipe is their delight; stringed instruments are too soft to
penetrate the organs of their ears, that are only pleased with sounds of
substance.”
Dr. Mac Culloch, already quoted,[13] who travelled Scotland in 1824,
calls the bagpipe as vile a contrivance as can be imagined, and
describes in graphic language all its alleged defects, and the sad
result of listening to its music:—
Footnote 13:
See Page 80.
“It is harsh, imperfect, and untunable. It is not wonderful if the
responsive vibrations of the piper’s tympanum are not very accurate,
nor the musical organ of his brain peculiarly sensitive to sweet
sounds after the daily induration which they must have undergone from
such outrageous and unceasing inroads on their sensibility. The
auricular wave is probably hardened as effectually as if it had been
immersed in a tan pit. So much the better for them, but it is not easy
to describe the subsidence of feeling the general deliquium, as
physicians have it, which such worthless auditors as we are experience
when an act of this music closes. It cannot be much unlike what the
Mickmak or Dog-ribbed Indian feels, when his teeth have all been
drawn.... As a vocal accompaniment this instrument is plainly
inappropriate, unless it were to accompany a concert of tigers and
cats. Nevertheless it is used for reels, and with bad enough success,
if the ears are to be consulted. As a moving force, however, it
answers its purpose very effectively. There are very few dancing airs
that lie within its compass.... Six inches of Neil Gow’s horse hair
would have beaten all the bagpipes that ever were blown.... The
variations were considerably more abominable than the ground,
musically speaking, but they are the best tests of the artist’s merit,
as all that merit lies in difficult and rapid execution. Any man can
blow the charge, but when it comes to action it is he who has the
strongest fingers and the worst taste who will carry the day. Yet
there are rules for all this cutting of notes as it is called. The
term is not ill-chosen, as the ground is literally cut into tatters by
a re-iteration of the most clumsy, commonplace and tasteless
flourishes, offensive in themselves, but still more so by their
excess, since every note is so encumbered that whatever air might have
existed is totally swallowed up in the general confusion.”
Mac Culloch, however, admits in another place, the merits of the bagpipe
as an outdoor instrument, and an instrument of war especially.
Carr, another Englishman, who wrote in 1809, had not a good word to say
of the pipes:—
“Whilst refinement is rapidly spreading over Scotland, it is to be
lamented that anyone should prevent the barbarous music of the country
from yielding to instruments more agreeable to the ear. The bagpipe is
among the few remaining barbarisms in Scotland.... It is a sorry
instrument, capable of little more than making an intolerable noise.
Every person of taste and feeling must regret the decline of the harp
and be shocked at its having been succeeded by the bagpipe.... I shall
never forget a playing competition in Edinburgh at which I was
present. As soon as the prize judges were seated the folding doors
opened. A Highland piper entered in full tartan array, and began to
press from the bag of his pipes, which were decorated with long pieces
of riband, sounds so loud and horrible that to my imagination they
were comparable only to those of the eternally tormented. In this
manner he strutted up and down with the most stately march, and
occasionally enraptured his audience, who expressed the influence of
his instrument by loud and continued plaudits. For my part, so
wretched is the instrument to my ears that I could not discover any
difference in regard to expression between ‘The Gathering of the Mac
Donalds’ and ‘Abercrombie’s Lament,’ each sound being to me equally
depressive, discordant, and horrible.... I believe that it might have
been three hours that common politeness compelled me to endure the
distraction of this trial of skill, and I left the room with nearly
the same sensations with which I should have quitted a belfry on a
royal birthday.... One of these barbarous musicians, attempting in a
fit of enthusiasm to pipe over eighteen miles of ground, blew the
breath out of his body. It would have been well if he had been the
last of his race.”
In conclusion he addresses “Lines to the Caledonian Harp,” and in
passing gives a final kick to the bagpipe—
“No Highland echo knows thee now;
A savage has usurped thy place,
Once filled by thee with every grace—
Th’ inflated pipe, with swinish drone,
Calls forth applauses once thine own.”
We have also the testimony of a Jew, who was compelled, by the heavy
hand of misfortune, to wander in the Highlands, and in 1828 formed his
impressions into a book which he called _The Jew Exile_. He praises the
people for their hospitality, but alas! for their music. When leaving
the village of Strathglass he says he was, in compliment, preceded by a
young piper in real Highland style:—
“My young Highlander played me on the road five miles, and I would
gladly have sunk the portable screech-owl appendage. A man had better
have a poll-parrot chained to his ear or be doomed to listen to a
concert of files and saw teeth in a saw manufactory, than be obliged
to listen to such music. If, ‘Sir Harry,’ has any musical instrument,
it will be the great Highland bagpipe. What a hideous yell it
makes! ... that grunting, howling, yelling, screaming, screaking pig
of a bag or portable screech-owl. It seems to hook its tedrum
threthrum crotchets and quavers upon your nerves, and tears them to
tatters, like the ‘devil machine’ in a cotton manufactory. I would
speak with the same deference of the music of a country, as I would of
its superstitions; but what can a man do when his very soul is twisted
out of its socket.... To think that this squealing pig in a poke
should be the great lever of a people’s passions. It would not let a
man die quietly, but would almost wake the dead.”
Even in the Highlands there seems to have been a tendency to joke at the
expense of the pipes. A well-known proverb is said to have originated in
this wise. The fox being hungry, found a bagpipe, and proceeded to eat
the bag. There was still a remnant of breath in it, and when the fox bit
it the drone gave a squeal. The fox was surprised, but not frightened,
for he only said—“There’s meat and music here,” and went on with his
meal. His remark has gone down to posterity as a proverb.
The bards, whom the pipes supplanted when they supplanted the harp, did
not welcome the instrument, and satirised it in many of their poems.
Duncan Ban Mac Intyre, the bard of Glenorchy, in the poem _Aoir Uisdein
Phiobair_, abused it with sledge-hammer power; but his abuse was coarse,
and contained little genuine humour. John Mac Codrum, the Hebridean
bard, did better in _Di-Moladh Piob Dhomh’uill Bhain_, one of the most
laughable things he wrote. The history of Donald Bain’s bagpipe he
traced in an imaginative way through all its vicissitudes, from the days
of Tubal Cain, through the disaster of the Deluge, and its damaging
treatment by incompetent pipers. He compared the strains to some of the
most discordant sounds in nature, spoke of it as a trump whose horrid
music might rouse every Judas that ever lived, and used a multiplicity
of illustrations to show its want of melody.
This spirit of cynicism was not confined altogether to the Gaelic bards.
In _The Family Legend_, written by the distinguished poetess Joanna
Baillie, there is introduced a short argument between the Duke of
Argyll’s piper and “Dugald,” another of the characters. The piper has
been playing in a small ante-room leading to the Duke’s apartment, when
Dugald enters:—
_Dugald._—Now pray thee, piper, cease! That stunning din,
Might do good service by the ears to set
Two angry clans; but for a morning’s rouse,
Here at an old man’s door, it does, good sooth,
Exceed all reasonable use. The Earl
Has passed a sleepless night; I pray thee now
Give o’er and spare thy pains.
_Piper._—And spare my pains, says’t thou—I’ll do mine office
As long as breath within my body is.
_Dugald._—Then mercy on us all! If wind thou mean’st,
There is within that sturdy trunk of thine,
Old as it is, a still exhaustless store.
A Lapland witch’s bag could scarcely match it.
Thou could’st, I doubt not, belly out the sails
Of a three-masted vessel with thy mouth;
But be thy mercy equal to thy might,
I pray thee now give o’er, in faith the Earl
Has passed a sleepless night.
_Piper._—Think’st thou I’m a Lowland day-hired minstrel,
To stop or play at bidding. Is Argyll
The lord and chieftain of our ancient clan,
More certainly than I to him as such,
The high hereditary piper am?
A sleepless night, forsooth! He’s slept full oft
On the hard heath, with fifty harnessed steeds
Champing their fodder round him—soundly too.
I’ll do mine office, loun, chafe as thou wilt.
And so on for a few more stanzas, till Argyll himself appears and puts
an end to the discussion. But, after all, it is mostly non-Scotsmen who
sneer at the pipes. They often understand as little of Scottish
sentiment or Scottish music as did the Frenchman, who, after hearing
“Tam o’ Shanter” recited, said it was “a story of how the devil came out
of an old church and stole the tail from the horse of a farmer called
Tam because he had played the pipes in the churchyard. I have heard,” he
added, “play your pipes Scottish, and I would like well that some person
would steal away all the pipes in Scotland.” Even our own William Black,
the most inoffensive and delightful of latter-day writers, cannot resist
the temptation to joke at the expense of the bagpipes. “Sermons,” he
says, “are like Scottish bagpipes. They sound very well when one doesn’t
hear them.” William Black, however, rarely if ever sneers, and this is
very mild indeed, compared with what some other writers have thrown at
the instrument.
The subject of Scottish national music is one against which ignorance is
always breaking its shins. In a recent English novel, for instance, a
Highlander is represented as sitting by the roadside singing a Jacobite
song and accompanying himself on the bagpipe, while one of the most
reputable of London afternoon papers gravely remarked when referring to
the letting of Inveraray Castle, after the death of the eighth Duke of
Argyll—“Ichabod is the watchword for the Highlands and Islands, and the
pibroch may skirl the lament with better cause than if half the clan had
fallen before the claymores of an alien tartan.” These are extreme
cases, no doubt, but they are only two out of many. It is, of course,
vain to expect Scottish feelings from non-Scottish people, and the over-
running of our land by imported sportsmen does not improve matters a
bit—
“Cockneys, Frenchmen, swells, and tourists,
Motley-garbed and garish crew;
Belted pouches, knickerbockers,
Silken hose and patent shoe.”
Although these people may cease their scoffing and make themselves as
Highland as anyone can be whom nature has not made Highland, their
affection for the music and their professions of goodwill are not likely
to help to preserve it. It is for real Highlanders to keep alive their
own music and show scorners that it is not going to die the death, but
live while there are Highlands and a Highland people. If, on the other
hand, they are playing the lament for a perishing race and a dying
language, it is not much wonder if neighbours chime in with an emphatic
Amen. Better far is the spirit of Alexander Fisher, a Glasgow poet, who
wrote for _Whistlebinkie_:—
“You’ll may spoke o’ ta fittle, you’ll may prag o’ ta flute,
An’ ta clafer o’ pynas, pass trums, clairnet an’ lute.
Put ta far pestest music you’ll may heard, or will fan,
Is ta kreat Hielan’ pagpipe, ta kran Hielan’ pagpipe, ta prite o’ ta
lan’.
O! tere is no one can knew all her feelin’, her thought,
Whan ta soon o’ ta pibroch will langsyne to her prought,
An’ her mint whirl rount apout wi’ ta pleasure once fan,
When she hears ta kreat pagpipes, ta kran, etc.
· · · · ·
Whan ta clans all pe kather’t, an’ all rety for fought,
To ta soon o’ ta fittle, woult tey march tid ye’ll thought?
No not a foot woult tey went, not a claymore pe drawn,
Till tey heard ta kreat pagpipe, to kran, etc.
Whan ta funeral is passin’ slow, slow, through ta klen,
Ta hearts all soft wi’ ouskie what prings tears from ta men!
’Tis ta Coronach’s loot wail soonin’ solemn an’ kran,
From to kreat Hielan’ pagpipe, ta kran Hielan’, etc.
Whan ta wattin tauks place, O! what shoy, frolic an’ fun,
An’ ta peoples all meetit, an’ ta proose has been run,
Tere’s no music for dancin’, has yet ever been fan,
Like ta kreat Hielan’ pagpipe, ta kran Hielan’, etc.
O, tat she hat worts to tolt all here lofe an’ telight
She has in ta pagpipes, twoult teuk long, long years to write,
Put she’ll shust teuk a trap pefore her task sh’ll pegan,
So here’s ta pagpipe, ta kran Hielan’ pagpipe, ta prite o’ ta lan’.”
[Illustration:
“WHILE BREATHING CHANTERS PROUDLY SWELL.”—_Scott._
_Mr. McSkirliguy_ (_beguiling the time with some cheerful pibrochs on
his national instrument_).
_Mr. Southdown_ (_travelling north with his Family by the Night
Mail_). “Dear, dear, dear! What a Shame they don’t Grease the Wheels
of these Carriages! I can’t get a Wink of Sleep! (_Mrs. S. groans in
sympathy._) I declare I’ll Complain to the Directors.”
BY CHARLES KEENE, Jan. 21, 1871.
(Reproduced from _Punch_, by special permission of the Proprietors.)
]