Next to the proverbs of a race its songs are the best expression of its
spirit, and though Manx songs are few, some of them are full of Manx
character. Always their best part is the air. A man called Barrow
compiled the Manx tunes about the beginning of the century, but his book
is scarce. In my ignorance of musical science I can only tell you how
the little that is left of Manx music lives in the ear of a man who does
not know one note from another. Much of it is like a wail of the wind in
a lonely place near to the sea, sometimes like the soughing of the long
grass, sometimes like the rain whipping the panes of a window as
with rods. Nearly always long-drawn like a moan rarely various, never
martial, never inspiriting, often sad and plaintive, as of a people
kept under, but loving liberty, poor and low down, but with souls alive,
looking for something, and hoping on,--full of the brine, the salt foam,
the sad story of the sea. Nothing would give you a more vivid sense of
the Manx people than some of our old airs. They would seem to take you
into a little whitewashed cottage with sooty rafters and earthen floor,
where an old man who looks half like a sailor and half like a landsman
is dozing before a peat fire that is slumbering out. Have I in my
musical benightedness conveyed an idea of anything musical? If not, let
me, by the only vehicle natural to me, give you the rough-shod words of
one or two of our old ballads. There is a ballad, much in favour, called
_Ny kirree fo niaghey_, the Sheep under the Snow. Another, yet better
known, is called _Myle Charaine_. This has sometimes been called the
Manx National Air, but that is a fiction. The song has nothing to do
with the Manx as a nation. Perhaps it is merely a story of a miser
and his daughter's dowry. Or perhaps it tells of pillage, probably of
wrecking, basely done, and of how the people cut the guilty one off from
all intercourse with them.
O, Myle Charaine, where got you your gold?
Lone, lone, you have left me here,
O, not in the curragh, deep under the mould,
Lone, lone, and void of cheer.
This sounds poor enough, but it would be hard to say how deeply this
ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even
to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the
weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of
the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun
shines fair on Carlisle wa'."