μακαρίζονμέν σε τέττιξ,
ὅτι δενδρέων ἐπ’ ἄκρων
ὀλίγην δρόσον πεπωκὼς,
βασιλεὺς ὅπως ἀείδεις.
But the songs, though interesting, were not beautiful, and, to tell the truth, were often more like a succession of street-cries than any other sound, human or divine! This was mainly owing to what was the chief peculiarity of the singing—the long stress, namely, laid by the voice on the last syllable or the last trochee, insomuch that success in a singer seemed to lie in the ability of keeping on at the concluding howl longer than his fellows.
One asks oneself with amazement how such dolorous chaunts could possibly have originated? Was it possibly the dire necessity of droning in concert with a bagpipe? The ‘dudelsack’—pitilessly expressive word!—is not unknown in Bosnia at this day, and was certainly as much the property of the primitive Sclave as of the primitive Englishman. Doubtless, too, early singing is pinched and crippled and distorted by the rudeness of early instruments. I did not see a bagpipe here, but traced its evil communications everywhere. It seemed to have corrupted all the other instruments. They had caught it. It had got into their throats like a fog, and given a twang to every chord. It was a positive nightmare of bagpipes. There was a bagpipe in the flute, and a bagpipe in the lute, and a bagpipe even in the whistle!
The singing, at any rate, reacts on the poetry; for the long expenditure of breath renders a pause a physical necessity for the recovery of wind at the end of every two lines, so that the lays were generally divided into couplets. Much that looks Procrustean, and many apparently capricious full-stops in classic metres might, one would think, be referred to similar causes. Nearly a minute would sometimes elapse after one couplet before the singer had recovered breath to continue.
But what carried one back into epic days at once was a larger gathering, forming a spacious ring lit up by a blazing fire, in the middle of which a Bosniac bard took his seat on a rough log, and tuning his ghuzla began to pour forth one of the grand sagas of his race. Could it have been an unpremeditated lay? Without a book or any aid to memory he rolled out the ballad for hour after hour, and when I turned to rest, not long before sunrise, he was still rhapsodising. I do not pretend to know what was the burthen of the ballad. Perchance it recorded the enchantments of the Vila in yonder forest-mountain; perchance it told how Czar Dūshan marched to seize the city of the Cæsars; or of the finding of Knez Lazar and the sad day of Kóssovo; or, mayhap it belonged to that later cycle of Serbian poetry which centres round the half-hero, half-renegade, Marko Kraljević.[176] For in this land, without books, without history, it is these heroic lays—Tabories they call them, from Tavor, their God of War—that keep alive from generation to generation the sacred traditions of the race. In the days of bondage these have been the one proud heirloom of the Serbian people from the Adriatic to the Danube. Their spirit has been continually refreshed from the perennial fount of epic song. Separated by creed and the barriers of nature, and the caprice of man, it is this national poetry that has kept them from forgetting that they are brothers, that has turned their mind’s eye back from the divisions of the present to the union of the past, and has fed their ambition with the memories of a time when one of their princes seemed about to catch up the falling diadem of Byzantium and place it on his brow. For the Bosnian Serb seems to forget the narrower traditions of his half alien kingdom in these more glorious legends, which override the cant of geographers and diplomatists, and make him see a brother in the Serb of the Black Mountain or Old Serbia, or the free Principality; and, indeed, he too has some claims to share these memories, for the city of the Serbian Cæsars, Prizren the Czarigrad, lies within the Bosnian limits.
Doleful, then, as these strains may seem to a civilised ears, it ill becomes the stranger to mock at them. Over those rude men they seemed to exercise a kind of charm. The hearers of the bard to whom I was listening seemed never to grow weary. Every now and then an ecstatic thrill would run through the whole circle, and find utterance in inarticulate murmurs of delight. So carried away are the emotions of the listeners, that it is by no means rare—though I did not witness this;—for them to be moved to tears. ‘I cannot describe,’ says an observer,[177] ‘the pathos with which these songs are sometimes sung. I have witnessed crowds surrounding a blind old singer, and every cheek was wet with tears; it was not the music, but the words, which affected them.’ For these songs speak to the heart. They are instinct with that natural simplicity which is the very soul of pathos. True, there is lacking something of the tremendous energy of our old Teutonic sagas. There is less sword-play; but there is more poetry. We should never expect to find an Anglo-Saxon gleeman of our epic days likening, as does one of these unlettered Bosnian bards, the cheeks of the loved one to the flush of dawn and her eyelids to the silken wings of swallows. This airiness of phantasy, the brilliance of the imagery, seem to witness the close communion of the race with the Oriental world around them; but there is a national sobriety ever bridling the imagination, just as we have seen the Oriental gorgeousness of a Serbian lady’s dress tempered with something of the homely Serbian house-mother. But what, perhaps, is more striking than all, is to find the rude simplicity of Homer combined with a dramatic force more characteristic of the age of Euripides.[178] Surely in such spring flowers—and wintry indeed has been the spring of this poor Bosnian stem!—is to be found the best proof that the stock is not all cankered, and the surest earnest of fruits to ripen yet. In a poetry that has received the reverent homage of Goethe it cannot be fanciful to see a token that the race is capable of attaining to the highest pinnacles of civilisation. It can hardly be unreasonable to seek here for a retort against those who speak of the South Sclavonic rayah as an utterly degraded being, and who cannot discern that
He still retains,