Literary and General Lectures and Essays

But he must go after all.  The editor’s den at Leeds is not the place for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes; and work rises before him, huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under the ever-increasing load.  He will not believe it at first.  In sweet childlike playful letters, he tells his mother that it is nothing.  It has done him good—“opened the grave before his eyes, and taught him to think of death.”  “He trusts that he has not borne this, and suffered, and thought in vain.”  This too, he hopes, is to be a fresh lesson-page of experience for his work.  Alas! a few months more of bitter suffering, and of generous kindness and love from all around him—and it is over with him at the age of twenty-three.  Shall we regret him?—shall we not rather believe that God knew best; and considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere of the second-class press, and the strange confused ways into which old ultra-Radicalism, finding itself too narrow for the new problems of the day, has stumbled and floundered during the last fifteen years, believe that he might have been a worse man had he been a longer-lived one, and thank heaven that “the righteous is taken away from the evil to come?”

As it is, he ends as he began.  The first poem in his book is “The Ha’ Bible;” and the last, written a few days before his death, is still the death-song of a man—without fear, without repining, without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and homewards.  And so ends his little epic, as we called it.  May Scotland see many such another!

The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate by any means.  He is far inferior to Burns in range of subject, as he is in humour and pathos.  Indeed, there is very little of these latter qualities in him anywhere—rather playfulness, flashes of childlike fun, as in “The Provost,” and “Bonnie Bessie Lee.”  But he has attained a mastery over English, a simplicity and quiet which Burns never did; and also, we need not say, a moral purity.  His “Poems illustrative of the Scotch peasantry” are charming throughout—alive and bright with touches of real humanity, and sympathy with characters apparently antipodal to his own.

His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with that cardinal fault of his school, of which he steered so clear in prose—fine words; yet he never, like the Corn-Law Rhymer, falls a cursing.  He is evidently not a good hater even of “priests and kings, and aristocrats, and superstition;” or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and off in debating-club speeches and leading articles, and left us, in these poems, the genuine metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear, and strong; for there is no form of lovable or right thing which this man has come across, which he does not seem to have appreciated.  Besides pure love and the beauties of nature—those on which every man of poetic power, and a great many of none, as a matter of course, have a word to say—he can feel for and with the drunken beggar, and the warriors of the ruined manor-house, and the monks of the abbey, and the old mailed Normans with their “priest with cross and counted beads in the little Saxon chapel”—things which a Radical editor might have been excused for passing by with a sneer.

His verses to his wife are a delicious little glimpse of Eden; and his “People’s Anthem” rises into somewhat of true grandeur by virtue of simplicity:

Lord, from Thy blessed throne,Sorrow look down upon!God save the Poor!Teach them true liberty—Make them from tyrants free—Let their homes happy be!God save the Poor!The arms of wicked menDo Thou with might restrain—God save the Poor!Raise Thou their lowliness—Succour Thou their distress—Thou whom the meanest bless!God save the Poor!Give them stanch honesty—Let their pride manly be—God save the Poor!Help them to hold the right;Give them both truth and might,Lord of all LIFE and LIGHT!God save the Poor!

And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting remark, that if the “Poems illustrative of the feelings of the intelligent and religious among the working-classes of Scotland” be fair samples of that which they profess to be, Scotland may thank God, 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 unassuming 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 passions 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 scraps 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 unbiassed 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 space at the end of it, lighted by a single pane of glass, 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 passage 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 noblest 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 associations: but what associations 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 superstition, 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 nobly 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 analysing the process for the world’s amusement 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 shell 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 God 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 God of glory! thou hast treasured upFor me my little portion of distress;But with each draught—in every bitter cupThy 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 handHath wrung cold sweat-drops from my brow; for theseI thank thee too.  Though pangs at thy commandHave compassed 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 circumstances 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.  God 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 God-fearing old Alison Christie, his mother, as he brings her, scrap by scrap, 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 God 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 classic 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 BEREAVEDThe 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 hoursMy young bosom beat all its beating to yours,When heart-woven wishes in soft counsel fellOn 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 thereWill 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 beamsThat 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 à 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?