Though Scottish songs seldom refer to a Divine Being, yet they are very far from being without their noble sentiments and inspirations. On the contrary, they have frequently sustained the moral life of a man. "Who dare measure in doubt," says William Thom in his "Recollections," "the restraining influences of these very songs? To us, they were all instead of sermons.... Poets were indeed our priests. But for those, the last relict of our moral existence would have surely passed away!"
Yet there is a marked contrast between the very aims of Scottish and Greek song-writers. The Scottish wish merely to please, and consequently never concern themselves with any of the deeper subjects of this life or the life to come. There is seldom an allusion to death, or to any of the great realities that sternly meet the gaze of a contemplative man. There may be a few exceptions in the case of pious song-writers, like Lady Nairn; but even such poets are shy of making songs the vehicle of what is serious or profound. The Greeks, on the other hand, regarding their poets as inspired, expected from them the deepest wisdom, and in fact delighted in any verse which threw light on the great mysteries of life and death. Thus it happens that the remains of the Greek lyric poets, especially the later, such as Simonides and Bacchylides, are principally of a deeply moral cast. The Greeks do not seem to have had the extravagant rage which now prevails for merely figurative language. They sought for truth itself, and the man became a poet who clothed living truths in the most appropriate and expressive words.
There is a remarkable contrast between the Scotch and Greeks in their historical songs. The lyric muse sings at great epochs, because then the deepest emotions of the human heart are roused. But since, in Greece, the states were small, and every emotion thrilled through all the free citizens, there was more of determined and unanimous feeling than with us, and consequently a greater desire to see the heroic deeds of themselves or their fellows wedded to verse. And then, too, the poet did not live apart; he was one of the people, a soldier and a citizen as well as others, and animated by exactly the same feelings, though with greater rapture. This is the reason why the Greeks abounded in songs in honour of their brave. At the time of the resistance to the Persian invasion, there was no end to the encomiums and pæans. Almost every individual hero was celebrated, and these songs were made by the acknowledged masters of the lyre, such as Æschylus and Simonides. With us, great deeds have to wait their poets. Distance of time must first throw around them a poetic hue; and after the hero has sunk unnoticed into a nameless grave, the bard showers his praises on him, and his worth is universally recognised. Or if his merits are discerned before his death, song is not one of the appointed organs through which our people demand that he should be praised. If a heroic action gets its poet, the people will listen; but if it pass unsung, none will regret it. Besides, we do not discern the poetry of the present so strongly as the Greeks did. Everything with them seems to have been capable of finding its way into verse. Alcman delights in speaking of his porridge, and Alcæus of the various implements of war which adorned his hall. The real world in which the Greeks moved had the most powerful attraction for them. This is also, in a great measure, true of the unknown poets, who have contributed so much to Scottish minstrelsy in the days of the later Stuarts. There is no squeamishness about the introduction of realities, whatever they be; and the people took delight in a mere series of names skilfully strung together, or even in an enumeration of household articles or dishes.[3]
This pleasure in the contemplation of the actual things around us, is not nearly so great in modern cultivated minds. We are continually trying to get out of ourselves, to transport ourselves to other times, and to throw ourselves into bygone scenes and characters. Hence it is that almost all our best historical songs, written in these days, have their basis in the past; and the one which moves us most powerfully, "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," actually carries us back to the times of Robert the Bruce.
It is rather singular that most of the Scottish songs which refer to our history, are essentially aristocratic, and favourable to the divine right of kings. The Covenanters—our true freemen—disdained the use of the poet's pen. They uttered none of their aspirations for freedom in song, and thus the Royalists had the whole field of song-writing to themselves. Such was the state of matters until Burns rose from amidst the people, and sang in his own grand way of the inherent dignity of man as man, and of the rights of labour. It is one of the frequent contradictions which we see in human nature, that the very same people who sing "A Man's a Man for a' that," and "Scots wha hae," mourn over the unfortunate fate of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and lament his disasters, as if his succession to the throne of Scotland would have been a blessing. Notwithstanding, however, what Burns has done, Scotland is still deficient in songs embodying her ardent love of freedom. Liberty and her blessings are still unsung. It was not so in Greece, especially in Athens. The whole city echoed with hymns in its praise, and the people wiled away their leisure in making little chants on the men who they fancied had given the death-blow to tyranny. The scolia of Callistratus, beginning, "I'll wreathe my sword in myrtle bow," are well known.
Few of the patriotic songs of the Greeks are extant, and it is probable that they were not so numerous as ours. Institutions had a more powerful hold on them than localities. They were proud of themselves as Greeks, and of their traditions; but wherever they wandered, they carried Greece with them, for they were part of Greece themselves. Thus we may account for the absence of Greek songs expressive of longing for their native land, and of attachment to their native soil. We, on the other hand, have very many patriotic songs, full of that warm enthusiasm which every Scotsman justly feels for his country, and containing frequently a much higher estimate of ourselves and our position than other nations would reckon true or fair. In these songs, we are exceedingly confined in our sympathies. The nationality is stronger than the humanity. We have no such songs as the German, "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?"
Perhaps there is no point in which the Greeks contrast with the Scotch and all moderns more strikingly than in their mode of describing nature. This contrast holds good only between the cultivated Greek and the cultivated modern; for the cultivated Greek and the uncultivated Scotsman are one in this respect. Perhaps we should state it most correctly, if we say that the Greek never pictures natural scenery with words—the modern often makes the attempt. There is no song like Burns's "Birks o' Aberfeldy," or even like the "Welcome to May"[4] of early Scottish poetry, in the Greek lyric poets. The Greek poet seizes one or two characteristic traits in which he himself finds pleasure; but his descriptions are not nicely shaded, minute, or calculated to bring the landscape before the mind's eye. No doubt, the Greek was led to this course by an instinct. For, first, his interest in inanimate nature was nothing as compared to his strong sympathies with man. He had not discovered that "God made the country, and man made the town." The gods, according to his notion, ruled the destinies of man, and every thought and device of man were inspirations from above. He saw infinitely more of deity in his fellow-men—in his and their pleasures, pursuits, and hopes—than in all the insentient things on the face of the earth; and consequently he clung to men. He delighted in representations of them; and in embodying his conceptions of the gods, he gave them the human form as the noblest and most beautiful of all forms. Nature was merely a background exquisitely beautiful, but not to be enjoyed without the presence of man. And, secondly, though the Greeks may not have enunciated the principle, that poetry is not the art suited for picturing nature, still they probably had an instinctive feeling of its truth. Poetry, as Lessing pointed out in his Laocoon, has the element of time in it, and is therefore inapplicable in the description of those things which, while composed of various parts, must be comprehended at one glance before the right impression is produced. Look how our modern poet goes to work! He has a fair scene before his fancy. He paints every part of it, with no reason why one part should be placed before another,—and as you read it, you have to piece each part together, as in a child's dissected map; and after you have constructed the whole out of the fragments, you have to imagine the effect. The Greek told you the effect at once,—he gave up the attempt to picture the scene in words. But when he had to deal with any part of nature that had life or motion in it—in fact, any element of time—then he was as minute as the most thorough Wordsworthian could wish. How admirably, for instance, does Homer describe the advance of a foam-crested wave, or the rush of a lion, the swoop of an eagle, or the trail of a serpent!
The Greeks were as much gladdened by the sight of flowers as moderns. Did they not use them continually on all festive occasions, public and private? But minuteness of detail was out of the question in poetry. The poet was not to play the painter or the naturalist. And it had not yet become the fashion to profess a mysterious inexpressible joy in the observation of natural scenery. Nor had men as yet retired from human society in disgust, or in search of freedom from sin, and betaken themselves to the love of pure inanimate objects instead of the love of sin-stained man. It had not yet become unlawful, as it did with the Arabs afterwards, to represent the human form in sculpture. Human nature was not looked on as so contemptible, that it would be appropriate to represent human bodies writhing under gargoyles, as in Gothic churches, or beneath pillars, as in Stirling Palace. The human form was then considered diviner than the forms of lions or flowers.
In bold personification of natural objects, the Greeks could not be easily surpassed. In reality, it was not personification with them,—it was simply the result of the ideas they had formed regarding causation. If a river flowed down, fringed with flowery banks, they imagined there must be some cause for this, and so they summoned up before their fancy a beautiful river-god crowned with a garland. Even in the more common process of making nature pour back on us the sentiments we unconsciously lend her, the Greeks were very far from deficient. The passage in which Alcman describes the hills, and all the tribes of living things as asleep,[5] and the celebrated fragment of Simonides on Danae, where she says, "Let the deep sleep, let immeasurable evil sleep," are only two out of very many instances that might be quoted.
Perhaps the most marked instance of the poetic instinct of the Greeks, is their avoiding descriptions of personal beauty. Though they were permeated by the idea, and thrillingly sensitive to it, it is easier to tell what a Scotch poet regards as elements of beauty than what a Greek did. A beautiful person with the Greek is a beautiful person; and that is all he says about the matter. This is not true of the Anacreontics, or of the Latin poets. Now, in Scotland, again, there is little feeling of beauty of any kind. A Scottish boy wantonly mars a beautiful object for mere fun. There is not a monument set up, not a fine building or ornament, but will soon have a chip struck off it, if a Scotch boy can get near it. And the Scotsman, as a general matter, sees beauty nowhere except in a "bonnie lassie." Even then, when he comes to define what he thinks beautiful features, he is at fault, and there are songs in praise of the narrow waist, and other enormities—