Burns and Scotch Song Before Him

LYRICAL poetry is poetry in its intensest and purest essence. Other forms of poetry may be greater, more intellectual.— may combine elements more numerous and diverse, and demand more varied powers for their production; but no other kind contains within the same compass so much of the true poetic ore, of that simple and vivid essence which to all true poetry is the breath of life.

For what is it that is the primal source, the earliest impulse, out of which all true poetry in the past has sprung, out of which alone it ever can spring? Is it not the descent upon the soul, or the flashing up front its inmost depths, of some thought, sentiment, emotion, which possesses it, fills it, kindles it, as we say inspires it? It may he some new truth, which the poet has been the first to discern. It may be some world-old truth, borne in on his soul so vividly that he seems to have been the first man who has ever seen it. New to him, as if no other eye had ever seen it, the light of it makes all it touches new. In remote times, before poetry had molded for itself settled forms, it could only be some impulse torrent strong, some fountain of thought bursting from the deepest and freshest seats of the soul, that could cleave for itself channels of utterance. In later times, when a poetic language had been framed, poetic forms stereotyped, and poetry had become an art, or even a literary trade, a far feebler impulse might borrow these forms and express itself poetically. But originally it was not so. In primitive times, as Ewald says, it was only the marvelous, overmastering power, the irresistible impulse of some quite new and creative thought, which, descending upon a man, could become within him the spirit and impelling force of poetry.

To our modern ears all this sounds unreal, — a thing you read of in æsthetic books, but never meet with in actual life. Our civilization, with its stereotyped ways and smooth conventionalities, has done so much to repress strong feeling, above all English reserve so peremptorily forbids all exhibition of it, even when most genuine, that if any are visited by it they must learn to keep it to themselves, and be content to know “ the lonely rapture of lonely minds.” And yet even in this century of ours such things have been possible.

A modern poet, whose own experience and productions have fully exemplified his words, has told us, “ A man cannot say, I will write poetry;” the greatest poet cannot say it, for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some irresistible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness. This power arises from within, like the color of a flower which dims and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. This, if in a measure true of all poetry, is especially descriptive of lyrical poetry.

The thought, sentiment, situation, which shall lay hold of the soul with the intense force I have spoken of, and rise to the highest elevation, must be single, solitary. Other thoughts may attach themselves to the ruling one, and contribute to body it forth, but these are merely accessory and subordinate. One ruling paramount thought or emotion there must be, if the mind is to rise to its highest elevation, to be kindled and concentrated into its warmest glow. And what we call a lyric poem is the adequate and consummate expression of some supreme moment, some one such rapturous mood. Single we said the inspiring mood must be, — whole, unmingled, all-absorbing. When a mood of mind, a thought, a sentiment, or an emotion, or a situation or an incident possessing these characters, has filled, overmastered, the singer’s soul, then the vehicle most fitted to express it is the form of words which we call lyrical or musical.

When and how the adequate utterance of the inward visitation comes is an interesting question, which, however, need not detain us now. There may have been instances in which the poet, in the first flush of emotion, projected it into language perfect and complete. This, however, I should believe, is but rare, and only when the faculty of poetic utterance has been trained to the finest. Far more often, I should believe, a few burning words, a line here and there, have sprung to life in the first moment of excitement, and then have remained in the mind as the keynotes, till afterwards the propitious hour arrives which shall round off the whole thought into perfect language. Other instances there are in which the profound impressions have come and gone, and found no words at the time, hut lain long dumb within, till, retouched in some happy moment by memory and imagination, they have taken to themselves wings, and bodied themselves forever in language adequate to their original brightness. This it is of which Wordsworth speaks when he calls poetry “ emotion remembered in tranquillity.” It is seen exemplified in his own best lyrics, many of which were no doubt born in this way; preëminently is it seen in that master ode of his on Intimations of Immortality. And if those moments of remembered fervor, seen through the atmosphere of memory, lose something of their original intensity, they win instead a pensive and Spiritual light, which forms I know not how much of their charm.

But however and whenever the one inspiring impulse finds words to embody it, one thing is certain, — that embodiment must be in language which has in it rhythm and melody. The expression must be musical, and for this reason. There is a strange kinship between inward fervor of emotion and outward melody of voice. When one overmastering impulse entirely fills the soul, there is a heaving of emotion within which is in its nature rhythmical, — is indeed music, though unuttered music. And when this passes outward into expression, it of necessity seeks to embody itself in some form of words which shall be musical, the outward melody of language answering to the already rhythmical and musical volume of feeling that is billowing within. We see this in the fact that whenever any one is more than usually moved the excitement, passing outward, changes the tones of his voice, and makes them musical. Lyrical poetry is but the concentrating into regular form and carrying to a higher power this natural propensity.

To make the perfect lyric two things must conspire: more than usual depth, intensity, and tenderness in the original emotion, and a corresponding mastery over language to give it fitting utterance. The light that Hashes up in the first creative moment must be so vivid and penetrating that it fills and illumines every syllable of the language, even as the light of the setting sun fills the cloud and transfigures it into its own brightness. When this depth and tenderness of susceptibility meet with perfect power of expression, we have the great lyric poems of the world. When such a creation has been accomplished, we have, as I have already said, the largest amount of the true poetic essence condensed within the smallest compass, and projected in the directest form and with the most thrilling power of which human language is capable.

Lyric poems are in a special way the creation of youth and the delight of age. Longer poems, the epic, the tragedy, demand more varied and maturer powers, and have generally been composed by men who have reached middle life. The intense glow, the tumultuous rush of feeling, which are the essence of the song belong preëminently to youth, and can seldom in their first freshness be perpetuated even in those who have carried the boy’s heart furthest into manhood.

The wear and tear of life and the continual sight of mortality pressing home cool down the most ardent glow and abate the strongest impulse. Hence it is that most of the greatest lyrists have done their pipings before forty; many have ceased to sing even earlier. The songs or lyric poems composed in mature life are mainly such as those which Wordsworth speaks of, — products of emotion remembered in tranquillity. These no doubt have a charm of their own, in which the fervor of early feeling is tempered and mellowed by the ripeness of age.

In the sequel I shall try to illustrate one of the many possible kinds of lyrics. There is an obvious division of lyrics suggested by a passage which I recently read in the literary studies of the late Mr. Walter Bagehot. That very able man, who was long known chiefly as an original writer on political economy, seems to have been even more at home in the deepest problems of metaphysics and the finest shades of poetic feeling than when discussing the doctrine of rent or the currency. Speaking of lyric poetry, he says, “ That species of art may be divided roughly into the human and the abstract. The sphere of the former is of course the actual life, passions, and actions of real men. In early ages there is no subject for art but natural life and primitive passion. At a later time, when from the deposit of the debris of a hundred philosophies a large number of half-personified abstractions are part of the familiar thoughts and language of all mankind, there are new objects to excite the feelings, — we might even say there are new feelings to be excited; the rough substance of original passion is sublimated and attenuated, till we hardly recognize its identity.” Out of this last state of feeling comes the abstract, or I may call it the intellectual lyric. I propose to dwell on the former of these two kinds.

There is a very general impression, especially in England, that Burns created Scottish song, and that all that is valuable in it is his work. Instead of saying that Burns created Scottish song, it would be more true to say that Scottish song created Burns, and that in him it culminated. He was born at a happy hour for a national songster, with a great background of song centuries old behind him, and breathing from his childhood a very atmosphere of melody. From the earliest times the Scotch have been a song-loving people, meaning by song both the tunes, or airs, and words. This is not the side which the Scotchman turns to the world, when he goes abroad into it to push his fortune. We all know the character that passes current as that of the typical Scot, — sandyhaired, hard-featured, clannish to his countrymen, shrewd, cautious, self-seeking, self-reliant, persevering, unsympathetic to strangers, difficult to drive a bargain with, impossible to circumvent. The last thing a stranger would credit him with would be the love of song. Yet when that hard, calculating trader has retired from the ’change or the market-place to his own fireside, perhaps the things he loves best, almost as much as his dividends, will be those simple national melodies he has known from his childhood. Till a very recent time the whole air of Scotland, among the country people, was redolent of song. You heard the milkmaid singing some old chant, as she milked the cows in field or byre; the housewife went about her work, or span at her wheel, with a lilt upon her lips. In the Highland glen you might hear some solitary reaper singing like her whom Wordsworth has immortalized; in the Lowland harvest field, now one, now another, of the reapers taking up an old-world melody, and ther the whole band breaking out into some well-known chorus. The plowman, too, in winter, as he turned over the lea furrows, beguiled the time by humming or whistling a tune; even the weaver, as he clashed his shuttle between the threads, mellowed the harsh sound with a song. In former days song was the great amusement of the peasantry, as they of a winter night met for a hamlet-gathering by each other’s firesides. This was the usage in Scotland for centuries, and I am not sure that the radica l newspaper which has superseded it is an improvement.

In general it may be said that the airs of melodies are older than the words: almost all the tunes have had at least two sets of words, an earlier and a later; many of them have outlived more. There is much rather vague discussion as to the source from which the Scottish national tunes came. Some writers would refer them to James I., of whom we are told that he “ invented a new, melancholy, and plaintive style of music, different from all others.” Some would trace them to the old Celtic music, which has infiltrated itself unawares from the Highlands into the Scottish Lowlands, and it cannot be doubted that to this source we owe some of our finest melodies. Others would make the Lowland music a Scandinavian rather than a Celtic immigration. Others, with not a little probability, have found a chief origin of it in the plain-song, Gregorian chants, or other sacred tunes of the mediæval church, still clinging to the hearts and memories of the people after they had been banished from the churches. Whatever may have been their origin, these old airs or melodies, which have been sung by so many generations, are full of character, and have a marked individuality of their own. They are simple, yet strong, wild, yet sweet, answering wonderfully to the heart’s primary emotions, lending themselves alike to sadness or gayety, humor, drollery, or pathos, manly independence and resolve or heart-broken lamentation. What musical peculiarities distinguish them I cannot say, knowing nothing of music but only the delight it gives. If any one cares to know what the musical characteristics of Scotch music are, I would refer him to a publication called The Thistle, which is now being brought, out by Mr. Colin Brown, of Glasgow. In that miscellany of Scottish song there is a disquisition on the nature of the national music, which seems to me to make the whole matter more plain and intelligible than any other of the treatises I have met with. But whatever may have been the origin, whatever may be the characteristics, of the Scottish tunes or melodies, the thing to be remembered is that in general the musical airs are older than the words of the songs which we now have, and were in a great measure the inspirers of the words.

About the poetry of the oldest songs, since I cannot analyze or describe the music, let me say a word or two. It is songs I speak of now, not ballads. For though these two terms are often used indiscriminately, I should wish to keep them distinct. A ballad is a poem which narrates an event in a simple style, noticing the several incidents of it successively as they occurred; not indulging in sentiment or reflection, but conveying whatever sentiment is in it indirectly, in the way the facts are told, rather than by direct expression. A song, on the other hand, contains little or no narrative, tells no facts, or gives only allusively the thinnest possible frame-work of fact with a view to convey some one prevailing sentiment, — one sentiment, one emotion, simple, passionate, unalloyed with intellectualizing or analysis. It is of feeling all compact; the words are translucent with the light of the one allpervading emotion, the essence of the true song. Mr. Carlyle well describes the true song when he says, “ The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said or spouted in rhetorical completeness and coherence, but sung in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind.”

As to the history of these songs, it was only in the last century that men began to think them worth collecting, and only in this century that they have sought to trace their age and history. There are few, if any, entire songs of which we can be sure that they existed, in the form in which we now have them, before the Reformation. Snatches and fragments there are of much older date, some as early as the war of independence, when in the days of Robert Bruce the Scotch sang in triumph, —

James I., that wonderful artist, is said, besides his graver poems, to have composed songs in the vernacular which were snug by the people; but these have perished, or are now unknown. James V. celebrated his adventures among the peasantry in the somewhat free ballad or song, The Gaberlunzie Man.

With the dawn of the eighteenth century, there came in Scotland an awakening, some would say a revival, of literature of various kinds, and among these a taste for the national songs, which had hitherto been almost entirely left to the peasantry. The first symptom of this was the publication in 1706 of Watson’s collection of Scotch poems, which contained a number of old songs. But that which marked most decisively the turn of the tide in favor of the old popular songs was the publication by Allan Ramsay of his Tea Table Miscellany in 1724. Ramsay was himself a poet and a song writer, and, living in Edinburgh as a book-seller, undertook to supply the upper ranks with the songs which he had heard in his moorland birth-place. The Tea Table Miscellany was intended, as its name suggests, to furnish the more polished circles of Edinburgh, at their social meetings, with the best specimens of their national melodies. Through that collection the homely strains which had been born in cottages, and described the manners and feelings of peasants, found their way to the drawing-rooms of the rich and refined.

In this collection honest Allan preserved a good deal of the genuine old ware of our songs, which but for him might have perished. Many old strains he recast after his own taste, substituting for the names of Jock and Jennie Damon and Phyllis, and for sun and moon Phæbus and Cynthia. A great deal was done at this time to spoil the genuine old poetry with importations of a false classicism from Virgil’s Eclogues, or perhaps from Pope’s imitations of these. Much was then irretrievably spoiled; but we may be glad that so much was allowed to escape the touch of the spoilers.

After Ramsay’s time the love of Scottish song spread through all ranks in Scotland, and many exquisite melodies, both tune and words, were added to the current stock by distinguished men of the time, and especially by ladies of what Lockhart used to call “ fine old Scotch families.” Conspicuous among the lady songstresses stands Lady Grisell Baillie. She was a girl during the troublous times of Charles II. and James II., and died a widow in 1746. By her heroic conduct in preserving the life of her father, the covenanting Earl of Marchmont, she had won the admiration of her countrymen before she was known as a poetess. To the heroic Christian character which she displayed while still a girl she added the accomplishment of song. One of her songs begins, —

and it has for a chorus, —

The song, excellent in itself, was made more famous by having been quoted by Burns on a well-known occasion in his later days. Lady Grisell was a native of the Borders, and a large proportion of our best songs, as of our ballads, came from the Border land.

Other Border ladies followed her in the path of song, especially Miss Jane Elliot, of Minto, and Miss Rutherford, of Fairniche, afterward? Mrs. Cockburn, who lived to be, in her old age, a friend of Scott’s boyhood. Each of these made herself famous by one immortal song. Miss Elliot, taking up one old line, —

and a refrain that remained from the lament sung for the warriors of Ettrick Forest who had died at Flodden, —

sang it anew in a strain which breathes the finest spirit of antiquity. Miss Rutherford, born herself on the border of Ettrick Forest, took up the same refrain, and adapted it to a more recent calamity which befell in her own time, when many lairds of the Forest were overwhelmed with ruin and swept away. The songs of these three ladies, while they are true to the old spirit and manner of our native minstrelsy, did something toward refining it, by showing of how pure and elevated a sentiment it might be made the vehicle.

These ladies’ songs were first made known to the world by appearing in a collection of Scottish songs, ancient and modern, published in 1769 by David Herd, a zealous antiquary and collector. After Ramsay’s Miscellany, this publication of Herd’s marks another epoch in the history of Scottish song. Herd preserved many precious relics of the past, which otherwise would have disappeared. He was indefatigable in searching out every scrap that was old and genuine, and his eye to the genuinely antique was far truer than Ramsay’s. This, however, may be said: he was so faithful and indiscriminate in his zeal for antiquity that, along with the pure ore, he retained much baser metal that might well have been left to perish. Not a few of the songs in his collection are coarse and indecent. As has often been said, if we wish to know what Burns did to purify Scottish song, we have only to compare those which he has left us with many which Herd incorporated in his collection and published not twenty years before Burns appeared.

Scottish song is true pastoral poetry, — the truest pastoral poetry I know. That is, it expresses the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners, incidents, of men and women who were shepherds, peasants, crofters, and small moorland farmers, in the very language and phrases which they used at their firesides. As I have said elsewhere, the productions, many of them, not of book-learned men, but of country people, with country life, cottage characters and incidents, for their subjects, they utter the feelings which poor men have known in the very words and phrases which poor men have used. No wonder the Scottish people love them; for never was the heart of any people more fully rendered in poetry than Scotland’s heart in these songs. Like the homely hodden-gray, formerly the cotter’s only wear, warped in woof, they are entirely homespun. The stuff out of which they are composed,

is the heart fibre of a stout and hardy peasantry.

Every way you take them, — in authorship, in sentiment, in tone, in language, — they are the creation and property of the people. And if educated men and high-born ladies, and even some of Scotland’s kings, have added to the store, it was only because they had lived familiarly among the peasantry, felt as they felt, and spoken their language that they were enabled to sing strains that their country’s heart would not disown. For the whole character of these melodies, various as they are, is so peculiar and so pronounced that the smallest foreign element introduced, one word out of keeping, grates on the ear and mars the music. Scottish song has both a spirit and a frame-work of its own, within which it rigorously keeps. Into that frame-work, these molds, it is wonderful how much strong and manly thought, how much deep and tender human-heartedness, can be poured. But so entirely unique is the inner spirit, as well as the outward setting, that no one, not even Burns, could stretch it beyond its compass without your being at once aware of a falsetto note. It was the glory of Burns that, taking the old form of Scottish song as his instrument, he was able to elicit from it so much. That Burns was the creator of Scottish song no one would have denied more vehemently than himself. When he appeared, in 1786, as the national poet of his country, the tide of popular taste was running strong in favor of Scottish song. He took up that tide of feeling, or rather he was taken up by it, and he carried it to its height. He was nurtured in a home that was full of song. His mother’s memory was stored with old tunes or songs of her country, and she sang them to her eldest boy from his cradle-time all through his boyhood. Amid the multifarious reading of his early years, the book he most prized was an old song book, which he carried with him wherever he went, poring over it, he says, as he drove his cart or walked to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully distinguishing the true, tender, or sublime from affectation and fustian. Thus he learned his song-craft and his critic-craft together. The earliest poem he composed was in his seventeenth summer, a simple love song in praise of a girl who was his companion as a reaper in the harvest field. The last strain he breathed was from his death-bed, in remembrance of some former affection.

Yet deep as were the love and power of song, the true lyric throb of heart within him, it was not as a lyrist or song writer that he became famous. The first Kilmarnock volume, which carried him at once to the height of poetic fame, contained only three songs, and these, though full of promise, perhaps not his best. A song which he addressed to his first love, while he was still young and innocent, before he had composed almost any of his other poems, has a tenderness and delicacy seldom reached in his other love songs, and was the first of his productions which revealed his lyric genius:

It was during the last eight years of his life that Burns threw his whole genius into song. Many have been the lamentations over this. Scott has expressed his regret that in his later and more evil days Burns was guided by no fixed purpose,—did not gird himself to some great dramatic work, such as he once contemplated. Mr. Carlyle has bewailed that “ our son of thunder should have been constrained to pour all the lightning of his genius through the narrow cranny of Scottish song, — the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son of thunder.” We may well regret that his later years were so desultory; we cannot but lament the evil habits to which latterly he yielded; we may allow that the supplying two collections with weekly cargoes of songs must have “ degenerated into a slavish labor, which no genius could support.” All this may well be granted, and yet we cannot but feel that Burns was predestined, alike by his own native instinct and by his outward circumstances, to be the great songster of his country, — I may add, of the world. Song was the form of literature which he had drunk in with his mother’s milk; it was the only subject which he knew better and had keener insight into than any one else. He had longed from boyhood to shed upon the unknown streams of his native Ayrshire some of the power which generations of minstrels had shed upon Yarrow and Tweed. He tells us in his own vernacular verse that from boyhood he had —

He had a compassionate sympathy for the old nameless song makers of his country, lying in their unknown graves, all Scotland over. When he had leisure for a few brief tours, he went to gaze on the places, the names of which were embalmed in their old melodies, to find their birth-places, or look upon the graves where they lie buried, as Wilson beautifully says, in kirkyards that have ceased to exist and returned to the wilderness. The molds which those old singers had bequeathed him, the channels they had dug, Burns gladly accepted, and into these he poured all the fervor of his large and melodious heart. He perceived how great capabilities lay in the old vernacular Lowland dialect, and in the pastoral form and style of the old Scotch songs, and availed himself of these, and expanded and enriched them, —this he did, but more than this: he entered with his whole soul into the old airs and melodies with which the earliest songs were associated, and these old melodies became his inspirers He tells us that he laid it down as a rule, from his first attempts at song writing, to sound some old tune over and over till he caught its inspiration. He never composed a lyric without first crooning a melody in his mind to kindle his emotion and regulate the rhythm of his words. Sometimes he got an old woman to hum the tune to him; sometimes the village musician to scrape it on his fiddle, or a piper to drone it on his bagpipe; oftener his own wife to sing it aloud to him, with her wood-note wild. And so his songs are not, like many modern ones, set to music; they are themselves music, conceived in an atmosphere of music, rising out of it, and with music instinct to their last syllable. But the essential melody that was in him might have effected little, if he had not possessed a large background of mind to draw upon; a broad and deep world of thought and feeling to turn to melody; a nature largely receptive of all beauty, of all influences from man and the outward world; most tender sensibility; vivid and many-sided sympathy with all that breathes; passionate, headlong impulse, — all these forces acting from behind and through an intellect the most powerful of his time, and driving it home with penetrating insight to the very core of men and things. Yet keen as was his intellect, no one knew so well as Burns that in song writing intellect must he wholly subordinate to feeling; that it must be soothed and gently charmed; that if for a moment it is allowed to preponderate over feeling, the song is killed. It is the equipoise and perfect intermingling of thought and emotion, the strong sense latent through the prevailing melody, that makes Burns’s songs what they are, the most perfect the world has seen. Happy as a singer Burns was in this, that his own strong nature, his birth, and all his circumstances conspired to fix his interest on the primary and permanent affections, the great fundamental relations of life, which men have always with them, — nor on the social conventions and ephemeral modes, which are here in our day, forgotten in the next generation. In this how much happier than Moore or Béranger, or other song writers of society living in a late civilization! Burns had his foot on the primary granite, which is not likely to move while anything on earth remains steadfast.

Consider, too, the perfect naturalness, the entire spontaneity, of his singing. It gushes from him as easily, as clearly, as sunnily, as the sky-lark’s song does. In this he surpasses all other song composers. In truth, when he is at his best, and his soul is really filled with his subject, it is not composing at all; the word is not applicable to him. He sings because he cannot help singing, — because his heart is full, and could not otherwise relieve itself of its burden.

Consider, again, that while it is the primary emotions, the fundamental and permanent relations and situations of human nature, with which he deals in his songs, how great is the variety of those moods and feelings, how large the range of them, to which he has given voice! One emotion with him, no doubt, is paramount, — that of love. And it must be owned that he does harp on this string to weariness, that he does drive the amatory muse to death. As our eye ranges over his songs, we could wish that, both for his own peace and for our satisfaction, he had touched this note more sparingly. As Sir Walter says, “ There is evidence enough that even the genius of Burns could not support him in the monotonous task of writing love verses on heaving bosoms and sparkling eyes, and twisting them into such rhythmical form as might suit Scotch reels, ports, and strathspeys.”

Yet, allowing all this, when he was really serious, how many phases of this emotion has he rendered into words which have long since become a part of the mother tongue! What husband ever breathed to his absent wife words more natural and beautiful than those in

Then, when did blighted and brokenhearted love mingle itself with the sights and sounds of nature more touchingly than in

Where is the wooing match that for pointed humor and drollery can compare with that of Duncan Gray, when “ Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig,” and Duncan “spak o’ lowpin o’er a linn!” These are lines that for happy humor none but Burns could have hit off. Many more of his love songs are equally felicitous, but there is a limitation. It has been remarked, and I think truly, of Burns’s love songs that their rapture is without reverence. The distant awe with which chivalry approaches the beauty it admires is unknown to him; it was Scott’s privilege above all poets to feel and express this. Perhaps Burns made some slight approach toward this more refined sentiment in his love song after the manner of the old minstrels: —

And again in that early song of his to Mary Morison, which has been already quoted.

But besides those effusions of young ardor in which he generally indulges, how well has he conceived and depicted the sober certainty of long-wedded love in calm and cheerful pathos in “ John Anderson, my jo, John! ”

But besides the one emotion which was paramount with Burns, how many other moods has he rendered! What can be simpler, easier (one might think), to compose than such a song as “ Should auld acquaintance be forgot ”? Yet who else has done it ? There is about this song almost a biblical character, such as we find in the words of Naomi, or of one of the old Hebrew patriarchs. For, as has been said, the whole inevitable essential conditions of human life, the whole of its plain, natural joys and sorrows, are described, often only assumed, in the Old Testament as they are described nowhere else. In songs like Auld Lang Syne Burns has approached nearer to this biblical character than any other poet I know. Again, if wild revelry or bacchaneal joy is to find a voice in song, where else has it found one to compare with that of “ Willie brewed a peek o’ maut? ” Certainly not in the “ Nunc est bibendum ” of Horace. The heroic chord, too, Burns has touched with a powerful hand in “ Scots, wha hae. ” The greatest living Scottish writer has said of it, “ As long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchmen, or of man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode, the best, I believe, that was ever written by any pen.” To this oracle I suppose every Scotchman must say Amen. And yet I have my own misgivings. I think that it is to the charm of music and old associations rather than to any surpassing excellence in the words that the song owes its power. Another mood is uttered and a strange, wild fascination dwells in the defiant Farewell of Macpherson, the Highland Reever, who

and to whose last words Burns has added this matchless chorus: —

Last, I shall but name “ A man’s a man for a that,” which, though not without a touch of democratic bitterness, embalms in words of power, not to be matched out of Shakespeare, the sense of the native dignity of man and of the essential equality of all men: —

That is a word for all time.

These are but a few samples of the many moods of mind which Burns has set to melody. He composed in all nearly three hundred songs, and of these from thirty to forty represent him at his best, at the highest flood mark of his singing power. They are perfect in sentiment, perfect in form. Amid the much that was sad and heart-depressing in his later years, the making of these songs was his comfort and delight. Besides the solace he had in the exercise of his powers, he found some satisfaction in the thought that he was doing something to atone for the waste of the great gift with which he had been entrusted. Of these three hundred songs some were founded on old words, which he took, retouched, or recast; sometimes an old verse or line served as the hint, whence he struck off an original song, far better than the lost one. For others he made new words from beginning to end, keeping to some old tune, and preserving the native pastoral style and vernacular dialect.

Every one of them contains some touch of tenderness or humor, some delicate grace or stroke of power, which could have come from no other but his master hand. And to his great credit be it ever remembered that in doing this he purified the ancient songs from much coarseness, and made them fit to be heard in decent society. The poems and even some of the songs of Burns are not free from grossness, which he himself regretted at the last. But in justice to his memory it should ever be borne in mind how many songs he purged of their coarser element, — how many tunes he found associated with most unworthy words, and left them married to verses, pure and beautiful, of his own composing. Those old Scottish melodies, said Thomas Aird, himself a poet, “ sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were all the more, from their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had been set.” How was the plague to be stayed ? All the preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness from the music.

The only way was to put something better in its stead. That inestimable something, not to be bought by all the mines of California, Burns gave us. And in doing so, he accomplished a social reform beyond the power of pulpit or Parliament to effect. That which we have seen to be the native quality of Scottish song Burns took up and carried to a higher effect. The qualities and characteristics which we find in the best old Scottish songs, and preëminently in the best songs of Burns, are: (1.) Absolute truthfulness: truthfulness to the great facts of life; truthfulness also to the singer’s own feelings,—what we call sincerity. (2.) Perfect naturalness. The feeling embodies itself in a form and language as natural to the poet as its song is to the bird. This is what Pitt noted when he said that no verse since Shakespeare’s “ has so much the appearance of coming sweetly from nature.” I should venture to hint that in this gift of perfect spontaneity Burns was even beyond Shakespeare. (3.) What is perhaps but another form of the same thing, you have in Burns’s songs what, in the language of logicians, I would call the “first intention ” of thought and feeling. You overhear in them the first throb of the heart, not reflected over, not subtilized or refined, but projected warm with the first glow of feeling. (4.) To express all this his native Scottish vernacular, which no one has ever used like Burns, contributed I know not how much. That dialect, broadening so many vowels and dropping so many consonants, lends itself especially to humor and tenderness, and brings out many shades of those feelings which in English would entirely evaporate. Nothing, I think, more shows the power of Burns than this. That dialect, which but for him would have perished ere now, he has made classical. — an imperishable portion of the English language. This is but one way of putting a broader and very striking fact: that while everything about Burns would seem to localize and limit his influence, the language he employed, the coloring, the manner, the whole environment, he has informed all these with such a strength and breadth of catholic humanity that of every emotion which he has sung his became the permanent and accepted voice wherever the English tongue is spoken.

Scottish song, I have said, culminated in Burns. I might have gone further, and said that he gave to the song a power and a dignity before undreamt of. The thing became a trumpet in his hand, whence he blew soul-animating strains. Is there any other form of poetry or of literature which so lays hold of the heart, — which penetrates so deep and is remembered so long? Although no singer equal to Burns has arisen in Scotland since his day, or will arise again, yet in the generation which followed him song in his country gained a new impetus from what he had done for it. Tannahill, the Ettrick Shepherd, Walter Scott, Lady Nairn, Hugh Ainslie, and many more contributed some new treasure to swell their country’s stores. Other nameless men there are who will yet be remembered in Scotland, each as the author of one unforgotten song. Lady Nairn, I am apt to fancy, is almost our best song composer since Burns. She has given us four or five, each in a different vein, which might be placed next to the best of Burns.

Whether the roll of Scottish song is not now closed is a thought which will often recur to the heart of those who love their country better for its songs’ sake. The melodies, the form, the language, the feeling, of those national lyrics belong to an early state of society. Can the old molds be stretched to admit modern feeling without breaking? Can the old root put forth fresh shoots amid our modern civilization? Are not school boards and educational apparatus doing their best to stamp out the grand old dialect, and to make the country people ashamed of it?

Can the leisure and the full-heartedness in which song is born any longer survive, amid the hurry of life, the roar of railways, the clash of machinery, the universal devotion to manufacture and money making?

I should be loth to answer No; but I must owm to a painful misgiving when I remember that during the present generation, that is, during the last thirty years, Scotland has produced no song that I know of that can be named along with our old favorites.

I said that Burns had given a voice to a wide range of emotion, — to many moods ; I did not say to all, — that would have been to exaggerate. There is the whole range of sentiment which belongs to the learned and philosophic, that which is born of subtile, perhaps over-refined intellect, which he has not touched. No Scottish song has touched it. Into that region it could not intrude without abrogating its nature and destroying its intrinsic charm. That charm is that it makes us breathe awhile the air of the mountains and the moors, not that of the schools. But there is another side on which Scottish song is limited, which it is not so easy to explain. It is this : there is little, almost no allusion to religion in it. It is almost as entirely destitute of the spiritual element as if it had been composed by pagans. Certainly, if we wished to express any real Christian feeling or aspiration, we should have to look elsewhere than to these songs. Had this been peculiarly confined to Burns’s songs, we might have accounted for it, since he, though not without a haunting sense of religion, lived a life that shut him out from its serener side ; he never had the heart set free, from which alone religious poetry can flow. But the same want is apparent in almost all Scottish songs of every age. The Scotch have passed hitherto for a religious people, and, I hope, not without reason. Yet there is hardly one of their popular songs which breathes any deep religious emotions, which expresses any of those thoughts that wander towards eternity. This is to be accounted for partly by the fact that the early Scottish songs were so mingled with coarseness and indecency that the teachers of religion and guardians of purity could not do otherwise than set their face against them. Song and all pertaining to it got to be looked upon as irreligious. Moreover, the old stern, strong religion of Scotland was somewhat repressive of natural feeling, and divided things sacred from things profane by an over-rigid partition; and songs and song singing were reckoned among things profane. Yet the native melodies were so beautiful, and the words, with all their frequent coarseness, contained so much that was healthful, so much that was true to human nature, that they could not be put down, but kept singing themselves on in the hearts and homes of the people, in spite of all denunciations. In the old time, it was often the same people who read their Bibles most whose memories were the greatest store-houses of these countless melodies. As a modern poetess has said,

Lady Nairn, who was a devoutly religious person, and yet loved her country’s songs, and felt how much there was in them which, if not directly religious, was yet “ not far from the kingdom of heaven,” was fain to remove the barrier; and she sang one strain, The Land o’ the Leal, which, even were there none other such, would remain to prove how little alien to Christianity is the genuine sentiment of Scottish song,—how easily it can rise from true human feeling into the pure air of spiritual religion. If any Scottish religious teacher of modern times ever possessed a high spiritual ideal, and could set forth the stern side of righteousness, it was Edward Irving; yet in his devoutest moods he could ever take with him the remembrance of the melodies and songs he had loved in childhood. With a passage from his sermon on Religious Meditation, I shall conclude : “I have seen Sabbath sights and joined in Sabbath worships which took the heart with their simplicity and thrilled it with sublime emotions. I have crossed the hills in the sober, contemplative autumn to reach the retired, lonely church betimes; and as we descended towards the simple edifice, whither every heart and every foot directed itself from the country around on the Sabbath morn, we beheld issuing from every glen its little train of worshipers coming up to the congregation of the Lord’s house, round which the bones of their fathers reposed. In so holy a place the people assembled under a roof where ye of the plentiful South would not have lodged the porter of your gate; but under that roof the people sat and sang their Maker’s praise, ‘ tuning their hearts, by far the noblest aim,’ and the pastor poured forth to God the simple wants of the people, and poured into their attentive ears the scope of Christian doctrine and duty. The men were shepherds, and came up in their shepherd’s guise, and the very brute, the shepherd’s servant and companion, rejoiced to come at his feet. It was a Sabbath, — a Sabbath of rest! But were the people stupid? Yes, in what an over-excited citizen would call stupid ; that is, they cared not for Parliaments, for plays, routs, or assemblies, but they cared for their wives and their children, their laws, their religion, and their God ; and they sang their own native songs in their own native vales, — songs which the men I speak of can alone imagine and compose. And from them we citizens have to be served with songs and melodies, too, for we can make none ourselves.”

J. C. Shairp.