Chapter V: Part 5

William Thom was born in 1798 of parents steeped in poverty, in a tenement in one of the narrow closes of Aberdeen, and at the age of ten began his apprenticeship to life in a cotton factory. At the age of fifteen or sixteen he entered the "School Hill Factory,"--a building since swept away,--as a weaver hand, and remained there for seventeen years. The wages of the best operatives averaged through good and bad times from six to nine shillings weekly, and of the second-class from three to five shillings. The daily hours of labor were fourteen. What that meant, not in poverty, but in absolute want of food, warmth, and the means for the sustenance of life, the degradation of rags, the shutting out of all glimpses of heaven and earth, leaving the only alleviation to the hours of toil at the rattling machines, and the squalid suffering in the reeking tenements, in the cheap and fiery stimulants of the taprooms, can be only faintly imagined. An inheritance of bad habits had also descended to the weaving class. When the factories were first established in 1770, after the invention of the spinning jenny, the wages of skillful workmen were forty shillings a week, and the operatives usually remained drunk from Saturday night until Wednesday morning, wore frilled shirts and powdered hair, sported canes, and quoted Volney in their discussions on the rights of man in the taprooms. The overplus of labor gradually reduced the wages to the starvation point, while the habits of dissipation and recklessness remained as characteristic of the craft. Thom gives a most affecting picture of the lives and thoughts of these men, many of them, strong with native intellect and passion, condemned to a life of unending servitude and degradation, too ragged to dare to enter a church, even if they wished, and getting their only glimpse of nature in the garden of Gordon's Hospital, which was open on the Sunday holiday, while the whiskey shop gave them their only taste of joy and exhilaration; and yet who had a native feeling for poetry, repeating the verses of Burns and particularly of Tannahill, their brother weaver, as they tended their looms, and applauding the poets and singers in their own ranks, whose rude verses expressed their feelings or appealed to their sympathies in the gatherings in the taprooms. The moral influences of such a life, where three or four hundred men and women were herded together in common workrooms was also very bad, and many a young girl dated her ruin in life, bringing additional desolateness to the miserable home, from the promiscuous association, and being barred out into the streets with a heavy fine for failing to be at the factory door at its opening in the early morning. How virtue, morality, or any of the decency and self-respect of humanity could exist at all in such a life may be considered a marvel, and it is a proof of the inherent strength of the Scottish character and its inherited virtues that these factories were not greater plague spots than they actually were, and that honest lives and Tinman affections flourished at all. In a poem, entitled Whisperings to the Unwashed, in the fiercely declamatory style of the Corn Law Rhymer, Thom draws a grim picture of the awakening of the weavers at the call of the town drum, used for that purpose in the smaller burghs, at six o'clock in the bleak and dark Northern mornings.

Rubadub, rnbadub, row-dow-dow!

Hark how he waukens the Weavers now;

Who lie belaired in a dreamy steep--

A mental swither, 'tween death and sleep,

Wi' hungry wame and hopeless heart,

Their food no feeding, their sleep no rest;

Arouse ye, ye sunken, unravel your rags,

No coin in your coffers, no meal in your bags.

Yet cart, barge, and wagon, with load after load,

Creak, mockfully passing your breadless abode.

The stately stalk of Ceres bears,

But not for you the bursting ears.

In vain to you the lark's lov'd note,

For you no summer breezes float,

Grim winter through your hovel pours--

Dull, dim, and breathless vapour yours.

The nobler Spider weaves alone,

And feels the little web his own,

His home, his fortress, foul or fair,

No factory whipper swaggers there.

Should ruffian wasp or taunting fly

Touch his lov'd lair, 't is touch and die!

Supreme in rags, ye weave, in tears,

The shining robe your murderer wears,

Till worn at last to the very "waste,"

A hole to die in at the best;

And, dead, the session saints begrudge ye

The two-three deals in death to lodge ye,

And grudge the grave, wherein to drop ye.

And grudge the very muck to hap ye.

All this bitterness had reason and fact to excuse it, and it is a wonder that such feelings, fermenting in strong minds, did not lead to more serious consequences than taproom talk and the formation of Chartist clubs.

In such surroundings, what was the character and career of Thom himself? An active mind led him to the perusal of such books as came in his way, and a poetical temperament made him deeply sensitive to the suffering and degradation of his condition, while it gave him a stimulus toward the fleeting pleasures of dissipation and the glow of sociability and popularity among his fellows. He was without the determined energy to rise above his condition, which might have succeeded had an exceptional strength been allied with his mental gifts, in spite of the forlorn circumstances; and he appears to have been, if not content, at least to have submitted to be only the popular genius among the workmen of his factory, and the leader in the taproom gatherings with his social and musical gifts. He wrote songs in imitation of those which he heard, one of which, to his great delight, appeared in the poet's corner of an Aberdeen newspaper. The story which he tells is that on the morning after the poem had been dropped into the mail box, he and a companion waited around the door of the publication office, endeavoring in vain to induce some charitable purchaser to let them have a peep at the contents of the paper, only succeeding at last by crowding the holder of a copy into an entry way and examining the columns by force, being absolutely without the penny with which to buy one. But this success did not stimulate him with any hope of advantage by literature, and he regarded his gift of song writing, like his skill with the flute, as simply the means for his own enjoyment and the amusement of his associates, his ambition shut in within his own little world of squalor and destitution. In appearance he was below the middle stature, and with a club foot, so that physical deformity weighed upon him, as well as the miserable conditions of his life, and made him more sensitive as well as hopeless. For seventeen years he bent over the looms in the School Hill factory, and then removed to the small hamlet of Newtyle, near Dundee, where a cotton factory had been recently established. He now had a family of a wife and four children. In the commercial crash of 1836, after he had been there but a short time, the factory was suspended, only sufficient work being found for the operatives with families to allow them five shillings a week. Five shillings a week for six persons meant starvation and creeping death, "an empty armry and a cold hearthstone." Thom and his family waited week after week, "hoping that times would mend," and with no prospect before them, if they abandoned their miserable pittance, but roadside beggary. He gives the picture of the scene that drove them to the latter alternative.

"Imagine a cold spring forenoon. It is eleven o'clock, but our little dwelling shows none of the signs of that time of day. The four children were still asleep. There is a bed cover hung before the window to keep all within as much like night as possible; and the mother sits beside the beds of her children to lull them back to sleep whenever any one shows an inclination to awake. For this there is a cause, for our weekly five shillings have not come as expected, and the only food in the house consists of a handful of oatmeal saved from the supper of last night. Our fuel is also exhausted.

"My wife and I were conversing in sunken whispers about making an attempt to cook the handful of meal, when the youngest child awoke beyond its mother's power to hush it again to sleep, and then fell a-whimpering, and finally broke out in a steady scream, rendering it impossible any longer to keep the rest in a state of unconsciousness. Face after face sprang up, each with one consent exclaiming, 'Oh, mither, mither, gie me a piece.'"

The family took to the road, leaving the key of the miserable tenement with the landlord, in the hope of being eventually able to return to a home like that. By the sale to a pawnbroker in Dundee of "some relics of better days,"--one can hardly imagine what relics or what days,--a small pack of cheap hawker's goods was procured for the wife, and four shillings' worth of books for the husband, to try to sell, but they can only have been the flimsiest disguise for the necessity of depending upon charity. The tramp began, the mother carrying the youngest child on her breast, and often bearing the next youngest also, who was unable to follow the weary road the whole distance. Sunset was followed by cold, sour east winds and rains. At nine o'clock they arrived at a comfortable farmhouse, where they were refused shelter, in the absence of the proprietor. All beseeching of the housekeeper was in vain, and the husband returned to the family, who had crept closer together, and were all asleep except the mother.

"Oh, Willie, Willie, what keepit ye. I'm dootfu'o' Jeanie; is na she waesome like? Let's in frae the cauld."

"We 've nae wae to gang, lass, whate'er come o' us. Yon folk winnae hae us."

After cowering under a wet mantle in despair for a time, another effort was made. The husband wrote a note by the fast fading light, asking for shelter, and endeavored to have it taken in at a gentleman's mansion near by. It was refused, but a farm laborer was touched by the spectacle of the forlorn family, crouching shelterless in the cold and rain, and took them to a neighboring farmhouse, where they were warmed and fed in the servants' quarters, and put to rest in beds of straw and bagging in an outhouse. Between three and four o'clock the father was wakened by the deadly scream of the mother, who had wakened to find her infant dead by her side, its little life having been worn out by the cold, hunger, and fatigue of the previous day. Amid the wailing of the children, and in the benumbing anguish of the blow, the most vivid remembrance of that moment to the father was the watching of the wheeling and fluttering of a colony of swallows, their fellow-lodgers, who had been awakened by the outcries.

From perfect grief there need not be

Wisdom or even memory;

One thing alone remains to me,

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Kind hands assisted in burying the child in the country graveyard, and the tramp was renewed. The poor goods and books would not sell, and no work was to be found, if, indeed, it was more than hopelessly looked for. The people, mostly the poor, "gave bits of bread for the poor bairnies," and shelter was found after nightfall in the outhouses of farms, experience having taught them that it was useless to apply for lodgings during daylight. They met and shared the fortunes of many "gangrel-bodies," some poor and respectable like themselves, and others professional mendicants and wandering ne'er-do-wells to whom beggary was the accustomed mode of livelihood, and many tragedies of life in its last extremity like their own passed under their eyes. One evening, in a gathering of people in the street of the village of Errol, he heard a man of grave countenance and respectable appearance singing, and with that note of despair in his voice which touched his heart with the sympathy like that which made Goldsmith rush from the lighted room to relieve the poor beggarwoman singing under the window. That night in their lodging there was a young woman rocking a corpse-like infant, whose wailing would not be stilled. Then the man who had been singing entered, and bent over the dying child:--

"I have wearied sadly for your coming, James," said the woman.

"It 's so dark out by the nicht," replied the man, "I only found out this door by our wean greetin'."

The child died during the night.

At length in the town of Methven, without even the necessary sixpence, preliminary to untieing the shoes in a tramp lodging house, an idea struck Thom that he might make use of his flute to avoid absolute mendicancy. Telling his wife to take the flute from their budget, and to accompany him, he went out into the streets. The story can be told only in his own words.

"We found ourselves in a beautiful green lane, fairly out of town, and opposite a genteel-looking house, at the windows of which sat several well-dressed people. I think that it might be our bewilderment that attracted their notice--perhaps not favorably.

"'A quarter of an hour longer,' said I, 4 and it will be darker. Let us walk out a bit.'

"The sun had been down a good while and the gloamin' was lovely. In spite of everything I felt a momentary reprieve. I dipped my dry flute in a little brook and began to play. It rang sweetly amongst the trees. I moved on and on, still playing, and still facing the town. The Flowers of the Forest brought me before the house, lately mentioned. My music raised one window after another, and in less than ten minutes put me in possession of three shillings ninepence of good British money. I sent the mother home with this treasure, and directed her to send the little girl to me. It was by this time nearly dark. Every one says, 'Things just need a beginning.' I have had a beginning and a very good one, too. I had also a turn for strathspeys, and there appeared to be a run on them. By this time I was nearing the middle of the town. When I finally made my way, and retired to my lodging, it was with five shillings and some pence in addition to what was given us. My little girl got a beautiful shawl and some articles of wearing apparel."

He followed up his playing by writing an ode to his flute, which he got printed on slips, and sent in to the houses before which he appeared, with satisfactory results in donations, in one instance receiving the magnificent reward of half a guinea. But, as he says, it was but "beggar's wark," and he was glad to return to his weaving when times got a little better.

After a year at the loom in Aberdeen, he had an opportunity to work as a journeyman for a weaver, who took in custom work, in the little town of Inverury in the district bordering on Mar. Here, after nine months' residence, his wife, his "faithful Jeanie," died in child-bed, leaving him with three children, the daughter a herd lassie at a lonely farm at some distance. In January, 1841, being then more than forty years of age, and never before having attempted to find a market for his verse, the notion occurred to him, in despair at the dullness of work, to send a poem, entitled The Blind Boy's Pranks, to the Aberdeen Journal. It was prefaced by a note, signed "A Serf," and declaring that the writer was compelled to weave fourteen hours out of the four and twenty. After some time, and while he was engaged in packing the few clothes of himself and children in order to seek shelter at the Aberdeen House of Refuge, he received a letter, with encouraging words, from the editor, and inclosing half a guinea. The poem was widely copied into the Scottish newspapers, and attracted very favorable attention. Among its admirers was a Mr. Gordon of Knockespock, an Aberdeenshire laird, who made inquiries about the author and interested himself in his welfare. It is difficult to understand the sudden and extraordinary popularity of this poem, which is by no means of commanding merit, but the story of

Thom's life became known and he was treated as a literary phenomenon. He was taken on a holiday trip to London by Mr. Gordon, and introduced to the leaders of the Scottish colony there, who made much of him, and on his return he was given a public dinner in Aberdeen. Demands for his verses came upon him from various periodicals, and he was enabled to establish a custom weaving shop in Inverury for himself. The next three years, while he was thus engaged, were the happiest and the only comfortable ones of his life. He refused other offers of employment, and asked no patronage except the purchase of his home-made clothes. He was the head of a little circle of local bards, who looked up to him, and sought his critical approval and patronage for their verses. His fame was increasing and reached a national knowledge in the publication of the volume of his poems, in 1844, by a leading London firm. In an evil hour he was persuaded to give up his business of weaving and establish himself in London as an agent for the sale of weaver's cloth. He was without business knowledge or business habits, lived recklessly and extravagantly, keeping an open house for Chartist agitators and wandering Scottish poets. His inspiration failed him; he wrote little or nothing, and lost his head completely in the whirl of excitement and social dissipation. After three years of this, what he called his "Hospital" was closed by a sheriff's sale of his furniture, and he returned to Scotland by the aid of a subscription from his friends and a grant from the Literary Fund. He settled at Hawkhill, near Dundee, but his health was broken, and his habits of industry destroyed, and he lived recklessly and wretchedly, until death relieved him soon after, in February, 1848. With one fitful gleam of prosperity William Thom's life of half a century had been passed in such want and abject misery as falls to the lot of few mortals, and amid a squalor and degradation of surroundings to which the country poverty of Burns and Hogg, in healthy air and in touch with the sweetness and majesty of nature, was rich and fortunate. One is as surprised and almost shocked to find the flowers of genuine poetry blooming in such a life, as to see a pot of violets growing amid the whirling dust and rattling noise of a weaving factory or in the window of a dingy whiskey shop. That his life was not worse than it was under the influences which affected it, is no less wonderful. "To us," he says, "virtues were known only by their shadows," and that sentence tells all the hopeless misery of an existence in which squalor and unremitting toil were relieved only by the fitful gleams of stupefying indulgence, and in which an ever-pressing want meant the deprivation not only of the comforts, but of the necessities of life. That such a page of human history should be possible and common in the record of a civilized society is more appalling than the devastation of war, or the crimes of natural malignity, and we must wonder how any spark of virtue or genius survived it.

The interest in the life of a man who has written poetry does not make its value. It may add an element of curiosity to biographical history, but it is upon its own inherent quality that it must depend for consideration and remembrance. Extraordinary circumstances in the life and character of the writer may lend an additional interest to his poetry, and cause it to be studied more attentively from a psychological point of view, but it must first be genuine poetry, and the questions of the personality and circumstances of its author are subordinate ones. Other thieves and blackguards like Francis Villon have doubtless written verses in the intervals of their debauches, and other ploughmen like Burns and other weavers like Thom have unquestionably done so under equally difficult and depressing conditions, but that fact has not kept their poetry alive or their names in remembrance. There were contemporaries of Thom, fishermen, turf-cutters, handicraftsmen, and publicans, whose names are preserved in local history and who even published forgotten volumes, who wrote verses under circumstances no less extraordinary than his own, but the world has taken no note of them, and is not called upon to do so. The question in regard to William Thom, as to all other poets, is as to what contribution, small or great, he made to the stock of genuine poetry in form, expression, and essence, fitting it to stand alone and to speak with a living voice to the emotions of the world, aside from any pathos or interest connected with its production. Poetry of this kind in the work of William Thom is very small in quantity. He published but a single volume, in which the verse comprises scarcely more than a hundred pages, and much the greater portion of this is artificial in conception and imperfect in form and expression. Like many uneducated authors, he endeavored to imitate the writers of polite literature, who seemed to him models of taste and fancy, although he had the native good judgment and national feeling to confine himself to the Scottish dialect, and the greater proportion of his verses have this weakness of imitation, or were called forth by special occasions and for a local audience. The poems entitled The Blind Boy's Pranks, which first attracted attention, are fanciful descriptions of the doings of Cupid, who is not more at home on the cold streams and heathery hills of the north of Scotland than on the head of an Italian image seller in the smoke and grime of London, and has no acquaintance with the sturdy Scotch lassies with whom he is supposed to play tricks. The native fairies with which Hogg peopled the raths and mounds of Ettrick do not appear in Thom's verses..When he wrote of what must have appealed most strongly to his heart and knowledge, the wrongs and sufferings of his fellow operatives, he was, as has been said, greatly influenced by the perfervid and declamatory style of Ebenezer Elliot, and weakened the force of his descriptions by exaggeration and savage invective. His songs were for the most part in the vein of the current Scottish lyric poetry, and, although not without grace and felicity of expression, rarely above the limits of conventionality and imitation. The song by which he is most widely known, and which appears in all the collections of Scottish poetry, The Mitherless Bairn, owes its vogue to its simple pathos, appealing to the popular emotions rather than to its quality as poetry. There are forcible and felicitous lines scattered through Thom's poetry, in which the language and melody combine to render the thought or sentiment with original power, and touches of description which show the sensitive eye illumined by the feeling heart, as this of the winter-beaten birds:--

Like beildless birdies, when they ca'

Frae wet, wee wing the batted snaw,-

and the pervading genuineness of a deep feeling, even if imperfectly expressed. There was the gloaming of a "waesome light" about his spirit, which shone through his uncertain gifts of utterance, although its power would not have been enough to have preserved his poetry in remembrance, except for two lyrics which reach the very highest level of Scottish song in their completeness and finish of construction, as well as in their simplicity and power. It may be believed from the crudity and imperfection of Thom's other verses that this supreme felicity was accidental, the perfect rapture of some occasional song of a thrush breaking out by its own inspiration after many careless warblings, rather than the deliberate effort of trained skill, and perhaps with little appreciation of their success. Every poet has his moments of supreme success when he reaches beyond his ordinary powers, and execution attains to the level of inspiration, but in most it is seen to be the culmination of trained skill reached by long labor and painstaking effort. There is little, however, in Thom's verse to lead to the expectation of such a flowering of perfect form and expression, and the impression is strong that they are accidental felicities. But, however produced, they give him an indisputable title to a place beside the highest of the Scottish song writers, and will live by their innate grace and power and feeling, when the rest of his work is forgotten, and the record of his strange and unfortunate life swallowed up in oblivion. This is the first one of them, grown from the banks of the Ythan, a little stream near Inverury, where Thom wandered some evening after the day's benumbing labor at the loom:--

YTHANSIDE.

I had ae nicht, and only ane,

On flo'ry Ythanside;

An' kith or kindred I hae nane

That dwall by Ythanside;

Yet midnicht dream and morning vow,

At hame they winna bide,

But pu' and pu' my willing heart

Awa' to Ythanside.

What gars its restless wand'ring wish

Seek aye to Ythanside,

An' hover round yon fairy bush

That spreads o'er Ythanside?

I think I see its pawkie boughs,

Where lovers weel might hide;

An', oh, what heart could safely sit

Yon nicht on Ythanside.

Could I return and own the scaith

I thole frae Ythanside,

Would her mild eye bend lythe on me

Ance mair on Ythanside?

Or would she crush my lowly love

Beneath a brow o' pride?

I daurna claim and maurna blame

Her heart on Ythanside.

I 'll rue yon high and heathy seat

That hangs o'er Ythanside;

I 'll rue the mill where bumies meet;

I 'll rue ye, Ythanside.

And you, ye moon, wi' luckless licht,

Pour'd a' your gowden tide

O'er sic a brow! sic e'en yon nicht!

Oh, weary Ythanside.

This is the other one in a somewhat different vein, but with equal magic in its melody and tender sweetness of expression:--

WHISPER LOW.

Slowly, slowly the cauld moon creeps

Wi' a licht unloesome to see;

It dwalls on the window whaur my love sleeps,

An 'she winna wauken to me.

Wearie, wearie, the hours, and slow,

Wauken, my lovie, and whisper low.

There's nae ae sang in heaven's licht,

Nor on the green earth doun,

Like soun's which kind love kens at nicht,

When whispers hap the soun';

Hearin', fearin', sichin' so--

Whisper, my bonnie love, whisper low!

They lack nae licht wha weel can speak

In love's ain wordless wile;

Her ee-bree creepin' on my cheek

Betrays her pawkie smile.

Happy, happy, silent so--

Breathin' bonnie love, whisper low!

Was yon a waft o' her wee white han'

Wi' a warnin' "wheest" to me?

Or was it a gleam o' that fause moon fa'in

On my poor misguided ee?

Wearie, wearie, wearie O--

Wauken, my lovie, an' whisper low! The poor hand-loom weaver, struggling with the day's darg from the cold dawn to the cheerless night, and with but fitful gleams of light and hap-piness in the squalid misery of existence, and half unconsciously it may be, has interpreted the sad-ness and sweetness of love's despair and love's long-ing, with a melody and a rapture of utterance which touch the immortal sympathies of the heart through the magic of poetry, and will live in the emanations of his spirit to the eyes that for generations to come shall light upon these modest violets of song. Much greater and more fortunate men have failed to join the "choir invisible," and the poetry of loftier and stronger minds has perished, while these songs will remain in the immortal life of simple thought and deep feeling.

FOLK-SONGS OF LOWER BRITTANY.

|The publication in 1859 of Count Hersart de Villemarqué's Barzaz Breiz, or collection of ancient Breton ballads and folk-songs, excited almost as much interest in the literary world as Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry a century earlier, if not reaching to the point of that evoked by Macpherson's Ossian. The interest was historical and ethnological as well as literary. Here were historical ballads, full of fire and passion and pathos, dealing not alone with such comparatively recent and recognized historic figures as Bernard du Guesclin and Jean de Montfort, but dating back to the sixth century and earlier, having for definite characters Merlin and King Arthur, and containing distinct traces of Druidic and bardic influence, which had been preserved, not in manuscript, as were the remains of Celtic poetry in Wales and Ireland, but by oral tradition and as a part of the still living folk-poetry of the people. It was no wonder that great interest was excited by the apparent evidence that a people living in the midst of European civilization had preserved an unbroken tradition of popular poetry for thirteen centuries, with strong traces of heathen influence extending back much farther, in almost absolute purity of language and definite historic characterization, and it was regarded from an ethnologic point of view as of hardly less importance than the discoveries of the remains of the Lake dwellers and other tokens of the existence of prehistoric man. Apparent credibility was given to the authenticity of the collection by the fact that the Breton people had preserved their language in its native condition and form, and by their customs, dress, and manner of life were marked off from the rest of the French people by a distinct line, which showed the strength, originality, and persistence of the race. It was known that they retained the original characteristics of the Celtic race, its fervency of religious faith, its melancholy, its sensitiveness to the mysterious influences of nature, its passion and its loyalty, and that many of its customs and habits of life were distinct survivals of mediævalism, and utterly anomalous to the spirit of modern civilization. It was therefore not thought impossible, if extraordinary, that the ancient ballads should have been preserved in their original purity, and the compositions of the ancient bards and minstrels still remain to be collected from the lips of the wandering mendicant singers, who gathered audiences about them at Fairs and Pardons, or lightened the gloom of the winter evenings in the farm kitchens with song and legend. The character of the ballads in Villemarque's collection was singularly well adapted to produce this belief. They were simple in construction, impregnated with the characteristics of the people, their faith, their loyalty, their purity and gravity of thought, their subjection to the influence of the supernatural, and their devoted patriotism, and, aside from their genuine strength and elevation as poetry, were a faithful reflection of the thoughts and habits of their people, and of the authentic facts of their history. There were no signs of such incongruous piecing of the thoughts of a later civilization and the style of a later literature upon an ancient substance, as were visible in Bishop Percy's emendations and completions of the English and Scottish ballads, but they were complete and homogeneous in the very spirit and language of ancient poetry. As a consequence, they were not only accepted as genuine and authentic, but there was an immense interest created in the study and revival of the Breton language and literature, and an appreciation of the characteristics and influence of the Celtic race in France, which has continued and deepened to the present time. An academy was founded, with M. de Villemarqué for its president, and assemblies of bards and scholars were held like the Welsh Eistedfodds, and there was a temporary Breton rage like that for the Highland Scotch under the influence of the Waverley novels, although no ruler of France went so far as to appear in the Breton hat and waistcoat, as George the Fourth did in the Highland kilt during his visit to Edinburgh. Several translations of the ballads of the Barzaz Breiz appeared in German, and Mr. Tom Taylor rendered them into English, in a version singularly compounded of archaic phraseology and stage rhetoric. But the later investigation of careful and conscientious collectors of Breton folkpoetry, like M. F. M. Luzel and others, has destroyed the faith in the authenticity of M. Yillemarqué's ballads almost as completely as in that of Macpherson's Ossian. They are not to be found in existence among the present singers or the survivors of the generation from whom M. Villemarqué professed to have gathered them, except in a very mutilated form, and with most of their flowers of poetry ruthlessly swept away. Experiments have been tried at gatherings of the most famous depositories of folk-poetry and the most accomplished singers, by repeating the ballads of the Barzaz Breiz to them, but they have in all cases either professed total ignorance, or insisted upon such amendments as deprived them of all but the faintest resemblance; while the only occasions in which they have been heard sung by the peasantry have been traced to the scattered leaves of the book itself. A hot literary controversy has been waged over the authenticity of M. Villemarqué's ballads, but the best opinion has settled into the belief that they are fabrications and reconstructions from fragments not more authentic and genuine than those which were the basis of Macpherson's Ossian or Chatterton's poems of Rowley, although M. Villemarqué was as thoroughly possessed with the spirit of Breton poetry, and as saturated with the knowledge of Breton history, as Sir Walter Scott was with Scottish poetry and Scottish history, and in one sense they were as genuine as the ballads of The Baron of Smalholme and Thomas the Rhymer. But the idea that the contemporary poems relating to Merlin and King Arthur, and even those of the exploits of Du Guesclin and The Combat of the Thirty, had been preserved in faithful and uncorrupted condition by oral tradition, and were still a portion of the folk-songs of the Breton peasantry, to say nothing of the survival of Druidic poetry and tradition in a distinct form, attractive as it is to the historic imagination, must be given up, like the belief in the survival of the epic of Fingal.

It does not do to expect too much from folkpoetry in the way of the perpetuation of history.

Like the remains of prehistoric people buried in geologic strata, it has been subject to the inevitable destruction of natural forces and to the attrition of time, and only remains like the fragments of implements and the piles of kitchen middens, from which careful study can extract the evidences of former existence and habits. It is only when ancient poetry has been committed to writing, like the poems of Homer and the Scandinavian sagas, that it can be preserved in anything like a complete state; and while there is a singular tenacity in popular poetry, it cannot endure for centuries by oral tradition alone, however secluded the people or however strong their national and poetic spirit. Sir Walter Scott was only just in time to save the Border ballads of the previous two centuries, and the usual duration of popular ballads in anything but an indistinct and fragmentary condition is even less. But, although the authenticity of the ballads of the Barzaz Breiz is discredited, it cannot be said that there is no genuine and valuable Breton folk-song. On the contrary, it exists in very great quantity and of a high quality, not only as poetry, but as illustrating the character and history of the people. The Breton race is not only a profoundly poetical one, by its pensive, mystic, and deeply religious character, but by its secluded condition apart from the currents of modern education, and its occupations in the gloomy, wind-swept, and rain-beaten fields and on the mysterious and terrifying seas, is particularly subject to the influences which make folk-song a part of its life and the natural expression of its thoughts and emotions. Nor is its folk-poetry entirely without value in the strictly historical sense, although anything like absolute accuracy or the definite remains of contemporary historic verse are not to be expected. As in the extant folk-lore of other nations, the roots run far back, and evidences of the traditions and customs of former ages survive in a fragmentary and altered state, in which may be traced the tokens of the existence of the race in the earliest dawn of history and even before any known records. Thus, if there are no authentic poems of the time of Merlin and King Arthur in the Breton folk-songs of the present day, their names and traditions survive; and, if the school culture of the Druids does not survive in the poems of numeral questions on the characters and events of the Bible, as imagined or invented by M. Villemarqué, no less fragments of their customs and worship remain in the habits and traditions of the people in and outside of their religious ritual, and are perpetuated in their folk-songs, if with as little definite knowledge as of the rites once performed at the feet of the dolmens or in the temple of Karnac. The fairies, and the dwarfs, and the spirits of the sea and air still survive, and are dreaded or invoked in the same spirit, if with less fervency than the saints and powers of the Church. Thus M. Paul Sebillot, in his Contes des Marins, gathered in Upper Brittany, tells that the sailors shake their fists at and threaten with their knives an unfavorable wind, and there are numerous actual customs as well as traditions among the Breton people which are evident survivals from heathen ages, while the rites of the Church itself have many traces of the adoption of forms of nature worship. This element of the supernatural, like the traditions of actual history, is fading away in Brittany as in all other countries, but enough remains to throw a strong light on the ancient customs, as well as the fundamental character of the race, and to inform its folk-poetry with this element to a degree which that of few modern nations possesses.

The interest of modern folk-poetry is, however, mainly in quality as poetry, its expression with eloquence and feeling of the emotions of the human heart, and the representation which it gives of the quality of the mind, the temperament, the degree of intelligence, and the habits and customs of the people who produced it. In this view the two latest volumes of the collection of Breton folksongs by F. M. Luzel, Sonniou Breiz-Izel (Paris.

Emile Bouillon, 1890), are particularly interesting. His two previous volumes, Gwerzion Breiz-Izel, were devoted to the fantastic, supernatural, and tragic ballads which held a place by the side of the fabulous tales in the minds of the people, were derived from the remote past, and had little connection with the life of to-day. On the contrary, the Sonniou, for which songs is the somewhat imperfect equivalent in English, are the immediate interpretation of their thoughts and emotions, the transcripts of their present life, and its events, sung and told by living poets, or those who have lived within a time to make them a part of the present people. They include the songs which are sung by the cradles to drowsing infants, the hopes and sorrows of love, the joyous welcomes to weddings, the homely pains of married life, and the sorrows for the common lot of death, the chants of religious faith and worship, the charms against diseases, the accompaniments of labor and the peculiarities of trade and occupation, the homely reflections on the conduct of life, and the rustic humor and satire, and, in short, all the thoughts and events, which mark the daily life of the people. Of their absolute genuineness there can be no question. They have all the internal evidence in their construction and language, the simplicity and abruptness of thought, the imperfection of utterance combined with untaught eloquence and strength, the occasional vulgarity by the side of an equally great delicacy, the simple and powerful melody, and all the characteristics of popular poetry, which are as unmistakable as the perfumes of the flowers of the field. Their collection has been the work of forty-five years, in which M. Luzel has indefatigably traversed the provinces of Lower Brittany, visiting the solitary huts of the sabot makers and hemp-weavers, colloquing with wandering beggars, listening to the songs and stories at the kitchen firesides of lonely farms in winter, gathering the singers at the Fair around him in the tap-rooms, taking down the songs of nursing mothers, the sailors on shipboard and the soldiers in the barracks, the shepherds on the plains and the laborers in the fields, and, in short, gathering every form of verse which is the expression of the popular thoughts and emotions. They are naturally of less purely literary merit than the ballads of the Barzaz Breiz, which are carefully arranged, trimmed, and decorated for poetical effect. It is always a sign for suspicion when folk-poetry is too good. The picturesque garments of the Breton peasantry must show the signs of actual wear and even the stains of grease and dirt, if they are to have the genuine effect, and when they are of too fine material, too carefully arranged, and shining and spotless, the impression is that they are simply stage costumes drawn from the theatrical wardrobe. Even the beggar with his rags too artistically draped suggests the painter's model. So there must be the element of reality in their defects before the folk-songs can be accepted as really genuine, and it adds a power and even a literary effect to them, which in its peculiar flavor the most accomplished literary art cannot produce. We seem to hear the speech of living men, to feel the thoughts of simple hearts through the imperfect utterance, and to experience all the flavor of actual and homely life. The pieces in the Sonniou collected by M. Luzel have all this quality. They have the coarse material and the patches of garments actually worn, and their charm is due to their native picturesqueness and originality. There is no false sentiment, however deep the feeling, and the homely thoughts are expressed in homely phrases, with natural imagery drawn from the aspect of nature about them and their avocations in life. Their standard of conventionality in speech differs from that of polite society, and there are words and phrases which smack of a coarse and natural life, but they are, nevertheless, singularly pure in thought, and show the soundness and honesty of the Breton character, as well as its tenderness and warmth of affection. If not great refinement, there is great depth of feeling, and actual vulgarity of thought is as rare as immoral suggestion, even in the rude satires and humorous narratives.

The beginning of all folk-song is in the cooing melodies which the mothers chant by the inspiration of nature by the cradles of their drowsing infants, and in which the affections of their hearts take an articulate form as naturally as the songs of birds. The _berceuses_, or cradle songs, of the Breton peasantry have all the elements of deep feeling and childish simplicity of expression which characterize the voice of motherhood in every clime and every station in life, and unite the queen and the peasant in a common bond. The same lovely and touching images suggest themselves, and the same simple and soothing melody flows naturally from the lips. This Breton cradle song might find its parallel in thought and language in many nations:--

CRADLE SONG.

Toutouie la, la, my little child,

Toutouie la, la.

Your mother is here, my little child,

To rock you softly, little dear.

Your mother is here, my little lamb,

She will sing you a little song.

The other day she wept sorely;

Now she smiles, the little mother.

Toutouie la, la, my little bird,

In the sweet breast of thy rose tree.

To fly to heaven, my little angel,

Do not spread your little wing.

There is also the element of infantile humor, as in all nursery songs, to bring smiles to the rosy cheeks, with food for the simple imagination open-ing its eyes on the birds and beasts around it, and endowing them with human life. One can feel how a child would appreciate the little story of The Fox Gallant with a sense at once of reality and hu-mor:--

THE FOX GALLANT.

I had a pullet and I had but one,

A fox carried her off, and now I have none.

The fox has carried her off from the sill of my door,

And more than that, I think, he has done me disgrace.

But I perceive Jean le Ri and also Herod,

And I ask them, have you not seen my pullet.

And I pass my head out of the front room window.

I see my pullet, who on the village green is dancing,

And the fox by her side with a Flanders basket;

With pears and with apples he is treating my pullet.

Next to cradle songs, the creations of motherly affection, come the songs of youthful passion, when the instinct of love wakes in the hearts of the young man and the maid; and they sing, also, as naturally and simply as birds do in pairing time. There is often a touching inconsequence in these simple strains, a transcript of nature as it speaks to the heart, and finds almost inarticulate utterance in emotions of joy and sorrow, which is like the warbling of a bird, often ending its trill of gladness with a plaintive note. And the verses entitled The Song of the Nightingale, with its inconsequent but natural imageries at the close, which has an effect beyond the reach of art, has this penetrating and realistic effect:--

THE SONG OF THE NIGHTINGALE.

Sing, sing, nightingale, it is early you are singing.

Not earlier than you, young man. Hunting are you going?

Good luck to you, little comrade. I am not going a-hunt

ing.

I am on my way to Kerlosquet, where my love is dwelling.

The nightingale then asked him, being a curious gossip,

There are many houses at Kerlosquet, to which one are you

going?

The young man answered her in a tone of humor,

Good luck to you, little comrade, I am not at confession.

In a moment after he saw his mistress coming;

By her color and her looks he saw that she was ailing.

Anxiously he asked her, feeling for her sadness,

Are you sick at heart, or sick in your spirit?

And she answered, with a little smile so gracious,

I am not subject to sickness, no, by the mercy of Jesus.

--The spider does well to spin his web,

To spin and to spread it and to dry it on the meadow.

A breath of wind will come and bear it away.

The hearts of young men are like it.

The most numerous producers of love songs in the Breton folk-poetry are the _cloer_, or young theological students, to whose title the English word clerk, as it was understood in the time of Chaucer, is the nearest equivalent. These young men, mostly the sons of peasants or persons in humble circumstances, are destined for the priesthood, for which they have manifested a vocation by their special intellectual brightness or devotional temperament. They are naturally the pride and hope of their families, to whom the office of priest is a position of worldly advancement and religious reverence, and the ballads tell touching tales of sacrifices by poor parents to enable their son to pursue his studies. They are sent to the seminaries attached to the abbeys in the various cathedral towns, from which they return in the vacation to mingle with the life of the people. Although destined for the priesthood, the instinct of youthful passion breaks out, as they meet the young maidens of the neighborhood in the fields or at the village fêtes and gatherings, and there are struggles of love and longing, which sometimes end peacefully in the surrender of the affection to the demands of the priestly vow, sometimes in the tragedy of broken hearts and a double devotion to religious celibacy, and sometimes, under the influence of a stronger passion, in the renunciation of the priesthood and marriage with the object of affection. These young clerks are, naturally, objects of great attraction to the young maidens by the contrast of their superior manners and education to the duller and coarser young men of the peasant class, and this attraction results in many dramas of love, not to mention the deeper tragedies of blighted passions and ruined lives. From their superior intellectual activity and education the young clerks are the most fertile and eloquent of the folk-poets, and by far the greater number of the love songs in the Sonniou are their production, and relate to the condition in which their affections are bound and limited. Their songs are genuine folk-poetry in their simplicity and strength of expression, except in the few instances where sophomoric pedantry overloads them with mythologie terms and academic phrases, and they often express a deep feeling with simple and natural eloquence. In The Ditty of Love the young girl appeals to the clerk to abandon the priesthood, since there are enough priests in the country, and expect the blessing of God in marrying the one who loves him, and then resigns herself to the consolation they will have in hearing the bells of each other's convents and their voices raised in psalm:--

THE DITTY OF LOVE.

When from my books I turn to the sight of the world,

I am touched by a prick, which troubles my spirit.

I fancy I hear the sweet voice of my mistress

Speak with a tone that is melting with sadness.

Whenever my mistress raises her voice in song,

The fairies of the mountain reëcho the air.

The fishes in the sea dart about rejoicing,

And the sailors on the deck dance gaily as they hear it.

The rocks upon the mountain split themselves asunder

In hearing her voice and seeing her beauty.

When I cast a glance, which rests upon my mistress,

It seems to me I see the queen of all the maidens.

Her dainty hands are mingled with red and with white,

And her eyes are brilliant as the stars in the sky.

Her two cheeks are roses of a natural color,

And her lips are as sweet as the pure honeycomb.

-- Good morning, my fair maiden, on my knees I fall

To ask your benediction to become a Capuchin.

To ask your benediction to become a Recollet,

In St. Francis convent, in the village of Morlaix.

--Oh, enough of Recollets has St. Francis's convent,

And enough of priests has the village of Morlaix.

There are enough of priests everywhere in the country,

Marry the one you love, and God will also love you.

If you become a Recollet at St. Francis convent,

I will go to the Calvary and there become a nun.

There we will hear together the bells of our two convents,

And there we will be singing the praises of our Lord.

There we will be singing, with our lifted voices,

The _Gloria in Excelsis_ and the _Salve Regina._

The hero of the piece entitled I will be neither Priest nor Monk is made of more determined stuff, and demands that his books shall be thrown into the fire, and liberty given him to marry the object of his love, or else he will die:--

I WILL BE NEITHER PRIEST NOR MONK.

Between the prairie and the grassy hill,

There is a bridge, I know it to my will.

No one can pass at eve along its planks,

Because of scholars rude, who play their pranks.

When at prayers I should be at grand mass,

No pater nor ave from my lips does pass.

Across my shoulder I only fix my glance

On the young girl, who causes my mischance.

I see my sweet beneath the shadowed nave,

As the lily fair, and as the red gold brave.

A cambric cap upon her head sets well,

Which cost, at least, six ecus for an ell.

And underneath a fine coiffure of lace,

That like a lily's margin frames her face.

Her petticoat, so rounded and so gay,

Shines with a double silver cord's display.

A robe she wears as red as any coal,

And, oh, I love her in my inmost soul.

--Put money in your pocket, little fool,

And to Treguier take your way to school.

Go to Treguier, and there study well,

Become a priest and follow the church bell.

--Keep your money in your own purse for me,

For, by my faith, no priest nor monk I 'll be.

My books throw in the fire, and let them burn,

Or give them to my brother in his turn.

No priest or monk I ever shall be made,