From his Essays on “the Songs of Scotland.”

THE LOVE songs of Scotland are as rich and various as the flowers of the field, and poured out from all quarters as spontaneously and as sweetly as the song of the mavis in May. Of course, in the midst of such abundance I could only form a bouquet of the choicest gems of song that had either laid strong hold of my fancy, or had struck deep roots in the popular affection; and when I had chalked out my scheme of classification, I was not a little surprised, and at the same time delighted, to find that only a small proportion of the whole belonged to the Corypheus of the Choir. This, of course, proves the extraordinary wealth of our lyrical vegetation. Burns, in fact, never would have been the man he was had he not derived an inspiration from the people, and breathed an atmosphere of popular song from the cradle; and to stand before his countrymen in the solitary sublimity of a Shelley or a Byron, would have been as hateful to his nature as it was foreign from his genius. I will therefore, in this bouquet of love lilts, give no preference to Burns, except where he comes in unsought for as the first among equals, the most prominent and the most popular specimen of the class which he is called on to illustrate; and the classes under which all love songs naturally arrange themselves are four: love songs of joy; love songs of sadness; love songs of wooing and courtship; and, lastly, love songs of marriage and connubial life.

  I begin then, now, with love songs of joy,—as indeed joy is the end of all existence; and love, as the rapturous recognition of an ideal, is, and must ever be, the potentiation of the higher human joy; and if there be any that would give a preference to woeful ballads and sentimental sighs in their singing of love songs, let them know that they are out of tune with the great harmonies of nature, and that, though it be the divine virtue of love songs, in certain cases, to sweeten sorrow, their primary purpose is to give wings to joy. As an example of the sweetness of soul and sereneness of delight that belong to the Scottish love song, we cannot do better than commence here with—

    In this beautiful lyric observe three things—the persons, the scenery, and the season of the year. It was long a fashion to identify lovers with shepherds or swains, till the affectation and the triteness of the notion made the Muse sick of it; but it nevertheless had reason in it, as the life of the shepherd is far more favorable both to thoughtful meditation and to tender contemplation than professions that put forth their energies amid the bustle of business, the whir of industrial wheels, or the parade of public life. The man who composed this song was a shepherd living in a land of shepherds, and in him it could be no affectation; but whether shepherd or not, the man who wishes to compose or quietly to enjoy a love song, or, what is better, a loving soul, will more naturally transport himself to the green slopes and the broomy knowes of a quiet land of shepherds than to the splendid roll of chariots in the Park at London, or the motley whirl of holiday keepers on Hampstead Heath. The scenery of the best love songs in all languages is decidedly rural. No doubt there may be love, and very wise love too, in a London lane, as “Sally in Our Alley,” and other songs abundantly testify; but they will want something to stamp on them the type of the highest classicality, and that something will be found not far from the Yarrow braes and Ettrick shaws, “when the kye comes hame.” Love in a green glade, or by a river side, or on a heather brae, is poetical, for there the living glory of the raptured soul within finds itself harmonized with the glory of the living mantle of the Godhead without; whereas love in a fashionable saloon, a gay drawing-room, or a glittering train of coaching gentility, is both less congruous on account of its artificial surroundings, and apt to degenerate into flirtation, which is a half-earnest imitation of the least earnest half of love. Observe also the season of the year, though indicated only by a single word in the song: “’Tis beneath the spreading birch,” the most graceful, the most fragrant, and the most Scottish of all trees; and the birch spreads its tresses not till May or June. It is, therefore, in May, “when the birds sing a welcome to May, sweet May,” and the “zephyrs as they pass make a pause to make love to the flowers,” that love songs should be aired and marriages made, if they are meant to be touched with the finest bloom of the poetry of nature.

  The author of this song, we said, was a shepherd, and we need scarcely say that the shepherd was Hogg,—a name that will go down in literary tradition along with Burns and Scott, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn, as typical representatives of the best virtues of the Scottish character in an age when Scotland had not begun to be ashamed of her native Muse, and to lose herself amid the splendid gentilities of the big metropolis on the Thames. In outward condition and social circumstance, Hogg was more nearly allied to Burns than to Scott; if Burns was a plowman on the banks of Doon in Ayrshire, Hogg was first a cowherd, then a shepherd, and then a farmer, first in his own native parish of Ettrick, in the highland of Selkirkshire, and afterwards on Yarrow braes, not far from the sweet pastoral seclusion of St. Mary’s Loch. But in the tone of his mind, as well as the traditional influences of his birthplace, he belonged to Scott. In literature they were both story-tellers rather than song writers; and in politics they were both Conservatives, nourishing their souls in a sweet-blooded way on the heroic traditions and pleasant memories of their forefathers. The moving tales and strange legends from the fertile pen of the shepherd, for generations to come, will help innocently to entertain the fancy of many an honest cotter’s fireside in the long winter nights, while the strange unearthly weirdness of his “Fife Witch’s” nocturnal ride, and the spiritual sweetness of his “Bonny Kilmeny,” will secure their author a high place among the classical masters of imaginative narrative in British literature; but his appearance on the field of narrative poetry in the same age with the more rich and powerful genius of Scott was unfavorable to his asserting a permanent position as a poetical story-teller. It is as a song writer, therefore, that he is likely to remain best known to the general public; for though in this department he has no pretensions to the wealth or the power or the fire of Burns, he has prevailed to strike out a few strains of no common excellence that have touched a chord in the popular heart and found an echo in the public ear: and this, indeed, is the special boast of good popular songs, that they are carried about as jewels and as charms in the breast of every man that has a heart, while intellectual works of a more imposing magnitude, like palatial castles, are seen only by the few who purposely go to see them or accidentally pass by them. Small songs are the circulating medium of the people. The big bullion lies in the bank.

  We proceed to instance a few other classical examples of that sweet, pensive musing of the lover, quietly feeding upon beauty as the honeybee feeds on the flower,—a cheerfulness and a lusciousness of pure emotion, much more chaste, much more safe, and much more permanent than the passion which glows like a furnace, or the steam which threatens to explode. Take first one of Tannahill’s, perhaps not the best, but certainly at one time the most popular, of his love songs:—

    It is recorded by those who are versed in the detailed history of Scottish song, that there never was such a Jessie beneath the shade of Leighton’s grand old cathedral, and that Ben Lomond is not visible from that venerable haunt of Scottish Episcopacy called Dunblane,—a fact worthy of note, not because it in any wise detracts from the singable excellence of the song, but because it is in this respect an exception to the general character of Scottish songs, which always spring from a strong root in reality, never deal with imaginary persons,—an Amaryllis or an Amanda for the nonce,—and are in fact as true as a photograph to the person and place celebrated. Here is another ditty in a similar strain, composed by the poet under the immediate inspiration of the grassy slopes, wooded hills, dewy dells, and wimpling brooks of his own beautiful Renfrewshire; a poem which, for picturesqueness of pastoral scenery, is, I will venture to say, unsurpassed in the lyrical literature of any language, ancient or modern:—

    Poor Tannahill! Paisley truly has good reason to be proud of her hand-loom weaver, who knew to mingle the whir of his busy loom, not with the jarring notes of political fret or atheistic pseudo-philosophy, but with the sweet music of nature in the most melodious season of the year. Sad to think that the author of this song, one of the most lovable, kindly, and human-hearted of mortals, and who, in spite of the deficiencies of his early culture, had achieved a reputation second only to Burns among the song writers of his tuneful fatherland, should have bade farewell to the sweet light of the sun and the fair greenery of his native glens at the early age of thirty-six—drowning himself, poor fellow! in a pool not far from the place of his birth. “Frail race of mortals, these poets!” some will be quick to exclaim. “Burns and Byron died at thirty-seven, Shelley at thirty, Keats at twenty-six, and Kirke White even younger. Let no man envy the gift of song, and seek to batten on the delicious food that is seasoned with poison and sauced with death!” But this is a mistake. Many poets live long, and the biggest often the longest. Anacreon lived long, Sophocles lived long, Chaucer lived long, Goethe lived long, Wordsworth lived long, Southey lived long, Wilson lived within a year of the legitimate seventy, and Scott, had it not been for unfortunate and commercial mishaps which caused him to overstrain his powers, with another decade added to his years, had stuff in him to rival that rich union of mellow thought and melodious verse which all men admire in the octogenarian poet-thinker of Weimar. It is not poets, but a particular kind of poets, that die early; they had some unhappy ferment in their blood, that would have made them die early, as men, had they never written a verse. It was not poetry that killed Robert Burns; it was untempered passion: it was not poetry that drowned Tannahill; it was constitutional weakness.

  It would be unfair, in recalling the image of the great Paisley songster, not to mention the distinguished musical composer to whose friendly aid he owed no small share of his abiding popularity. Robert Archibald Smith, though born in Reading, was of Scotch descent, and restored to his native country in the year 1800, when he was twenty years of age. A native of East Kilbride, his father had followed the profession of silk weaving at Paisley; and on his return from Reading, betook himself to the weaving of muslin in that town. The son, following the father’s lines, commenced likewise as a weaver of webs; but he was too often found scratching crotchets and quavers on the framework of the loom, when he ought to have been watching the interfacings or the snappings of the thread. The starvation of his intellectual strivings by the monotony of the loom operated disadvantageously on a constitution not naturally strong; and the depression of spirits into which he was falling acted as a wise warning for his father to let the poor bird out of the cage, and be free to flap his wings in the musical atmosphere for which he was born. He accordingly threw the loom aside, and commenced a distinguished musical career, first as leader of the choir in the Abbey Church, Paisley, and then in St. George’s Church, Edinburgh, where he enjoyed the stimulating and influential fellowship of Dr. Andrew Thomson, a theologian distinguished not less for his refined musical taste than for the warmth of his evangelical zeal and the slashing vigor of his polemics. While holding this situation, he sent forth a series of well-known and highly esteemed musical publications, both in the sacred and secular sphere of the noble art which he professed; and, though he had but finished half what might have been prophesied as his destined career, he achieved enough to cause his name to be remembered in the history of Scottish culture as the pioneer of a new era, and the first mover in a necessary reform. The church service of Scotland had suffered too long from the barbarism of a certain Puritanical severity that had no better reason for the neglect of music in religious worship than that it was cherished by the Romanists and the Episcopalians; and the name of R. A. Smith, the friend and fellow-songster of Tannahill, will live in the grateful memory of the Scottish people as the herald of the advent of a wiser age which reconciles devotion to her natural ally music, and removes from Presbytery the reproach of cultivating only the bald prose of the temple service, while the graces of the divinest of the arts are left in the exclusive possession of other churches, whose doctrine may be less sound, and their preaching less effective, but whose attitude is more dignified, and whose dress is more attractive.

  We shall content ourselves with three more specimens of this initiatory stage of present sweetness and prospective joy in love, and then pass to songs of wooing and courting, which, while they are more richly marked by dramatic situation and incident, are at the same time seldom free from difficulties and entanglements of various kinds, over which even the persistency that belongs to all strong instincts and noble passions cannot always triumph. The first is the popular Dumfriesshire song of:—

    The heroine of this song was, as Chambers informs us, a daughter of Sir Robert Laurie, first Baronet of Maxwelton; and the devoted admirer who sang her praises was a Mr. Douglas of Fingland. It may be interesting to compare the above verses, as now commonly sung, with the original verses as given by Chambers:—

    Our second is:—

    This song comes to us with a whiff of the mountain heather, particularly grateful and specially salubrious in an age when so much of the best music is condemned to be sung in the hot air of fashionable saloons, where the poetry of nature is utterly ignored and the laws of health systematically violated. The authoress was Jean Glover, a Kilmarnock girl, who had the misfortune to unite her fates in life to a pleasant fellow, a strolling player or mountebank, with whom she traveled over the country frequenting fairs and markets, supporting herself and entertaining the public with show and song in an irregular sort of way. Burns, who picked up the song from her in one of her strolling expeditions, has spoken of her in very disparaging terms (for which, see Chambers, page 49); but his severe judgment, in Miss Tytler’s delightful work, “The Songstresses of Scotland,” receives a kindly mitigation. She died at Letterkenny, in Ireland, when not much past the middle term of life. It requires very little knowledge of human nature to know that the power of striking out a good song is no guarantee for the steady march or the fruitful issue of a well-rounded life drama. Sensibility finds a vent in song; purpose shapes a career.