Ae Spark O' Nature's Fire

I SHALL never forget the astonishment I felt when I first encountered a man who took poetry seriously. He was a Scotchman, burly, bluff, bewhiskered, straddling in his gait like a seaman, kicking out his toes and playing wide with his elbows, and speaking Scots burry as a thistle. He was not a sailor, although he drew his living from the sea. He sold fish. I saw him more than once plying his trade in Fulton Market in the midst of finny droves of cod, mackerel, and red snappers, but it was in his home that I discovered that his soul was not entirely piscatorial.

He passed our house every morning and evening for over twenty years, and the clump of his heels on the pavement had made ’Here comes Mr. Macgregor ’ a formula of the supper table. On Saturday evenings he always carried under his ‘oxter ’ a flat package a foot long and half as wide; and then my father would say, with a laugh, ‘There goes Macgregor with his finnan haddie.’ Every Saturday for twenty years, I gathered from the family gossip, he had carried home his foot or so of Scotch smoked haddock for his Sunday breakfast; and my vagrom wits used to exercise themselves in calculating, as students of arithmetic will, how many miles of haddock he had consumed. The only glimmer of enthusiasm I had ever caught in him had to do with this victual, for he paused one summer twilight long enough to lean over the front fence and tell my father, who was pulling weeds, how to prepare finnan haddie according to the Scottish tradition.

Up to that time he had not discovered me, but one evening in June I chanced to be sitting on the steps with a book on my knees when he passed. It was a book of poetry; I have forgotten what— perhaps The Ancient Mariner. At any rate, he drew up at the gate and looked me over. Knowing him as a man whose soul was smoked and dry-salted and whose appearance was to the last degree pragmatic, I was ashamed to be caught reading anything so effeminate, and tried to hide the page. But his eyes were sharp. Without a word he took the book, glanced at it, and handed it back.

‘And do you like the poetry, laddie?’ said he.

‘Yes, sir,’ I returned, somewhat timidly.

‘Ah, then you should read Bobbie Burns. He’s the boy for the poetry. There’s none like him.’

And so we fell to much talk. Before darkness had fallen he had invited me to call upon him next evening, and I had agreed.

The next evening found me at halfpast seven seated in his long front parlor in one of the most uncomfortable chairs I have ever seen. At his suggestion I had stationed myself against the street wall between the two windows, while he stood at the other end of the room beside the square piano, on one corner of which, conveniently arranged, he had stacked a pile of books bristling with slips of paper to mark the places at which he purposed to read. His manner was serious, even solemn.

He carefully cleared this throat and began to read ‘ The Mitherless Bairn ' of William Thom, the Inverary weaver. It was the first time I had ever heard Scots read by a Scotchman, and, what with strange words, and familiar words strangely pronounced, I was much puzzled to catch the sentiment; but he was greatly affected and rolled out the concluding couplet, —

with a frowning significance that was very impressive. I summoned all my faculties, therefore, to bear upon the next poem, in mortal fear that he might ask me a question. I think, however, that he was as bashful as I. He made no comments whatever, but read two or three poems more, — some of Robert Tannahill’s, ‘Jessie the Flower of Dunblane’ and ‘The Midges Dance aboon the Burn,’ I think; at least, they have had a familiar ring ever since.

I was still floundering, but he cared never at all. He was a Paisley man, and the old songs flooded his mind with recollections of all the ‘ West Kintra side ’ — the braes of Gleniffer, Cruickston Castle’s lonely walls, Calder Glen, the bonnie wood of Craigielee; he had known the Barrs and Langs and Semples and the rest of those who had kept the town’s literary traditions green; and, warmed thoroughly by his theme, he delivered a lecture full of anecdote, family histories, and local legend, with interpolated readings, almost as delightful to me as to him. I have forgotten it all, and he is dead, and my memory is only the echo of an echo.

A reference to the Burns Society of Paisley offered a natural transition to Burns himself. Like all Scotchmen, Mr. Macgregor could see no moral obliquity in his hero, yet felt called upon to defend him from charges which, Heaven knows, I had no intention of preferring. I gathered, also, that no mere English-speaking person could appreciate Burns, try as he might; even learning the dialect would not suffice; it was necessary to have taken it in, as it were, with one’s mother’s milk, to feel all its softness and tartness and rough tenderness and bagpipe music.

I noticed, however, that my congenital deficiency as a mere English-speaking person did not deter him from reading vast numbers of poems of which I understood but one word in three. That he was illogical was nothing to him. I had become only a pretext. To a lonely man, a cat, a dog, a chrisom child, is better than no audience at all.

It was nearing ten o’clock when an astonishing phenomenon became visible. We had been laughing together over his anecdotes of famous Scotchmen. There was, I remember, the one about Scott’s whimsical maligning of his grandmother, — ‘Aiblins me gran’mither was an awfu’ leear,’ — and the one about Campbell’s intoxicated guest falling downstairs and, to the irate poet’s, ‘Who the deevil’s making yon fearful racket?’ replying, ‘It’s I, sir, rolling rapidly.’ There were many others, I do not know how many; these I remember. But suddenly he fell silent with an eye on the clock. ‘It’s time a’ weans was in bed,’ said he, ‘but first I’ll read you just one wee bit poem more.’ And he began to recite in a loud voice, —

drawing himself up to his full stature and glaring proudly down upon me as if I had been Bruce’s whole army, terrible with tartan, plaid, and claymore.

he inquired with unspeakable scorn, and, with swelling breast and flashing eye, —

And, while I felt obscurely that I was entirely neutral in the matter, I was thrilled by his ardor.

It was at the close of the fourth stanza that tears began to gather and fall, dropping from his eyes as if without his knowledge. A more astonishing sight than this was beyond my imagining. Here was a man who took poetry seriously, who loved it and grew excited over it, as another might over baseball or religion or dinner; a great big bearded man crying, actually crying, over a little song hardly thirty lines long. Evidently the verses had some meaning that I could not fathom, something that caused the working of his rough features with the tears on them and the flashing of his eyes and the suffusion of his forehead and cheeks, as he thundered, —

No other friend of mine ever recited poetry in that way, or, for that matter, ever recited poetry at all.

‘Those lines aye make a fool of me,’ said he simply. ‘Now, run away home, laddie. It grows late.’

I had no words at my command but mumbled thanks for his hospitality. I did run away home, and I lay awake for an hour tingling with excitement. The next morning I began a search of the family library for the poems Mr. Macgregor had read, and found those which I have mentioned. But I never exchanged ten words with Macgregor again. He never repeated his invitation. When he spoke to me it was of generalities. He had opened his heart once, but thereafter I was to know only his outside, — ‘as if a rose should shut and be a bud again,’ and a very thorny bud at that.

The secret of the matter was that Mr. Macgregor thought that he had been sentimental, and was ashamed. Children know well enough, and who should know better than I, that gruffness often hides a melting heart; yet he thought by a hard exterior to show me that his performance of the other evening had been only an aberration.

I think that I partly guessed his difficulty and sympathized with him. I had not thought him sentimental — he could never have held me spellbound for three hours if I had; but boys are afraid of showing emotion themselves and are suspicious of it in others. It was all very well to shed tears over poems once, but it was impossible to picture a man of Mr. Macgregor’s physiognomy and physique doing it often. Nothing could be more natural than that he should look askance at me as at one who had caught him in a moment of weakness. I took the separation very philosophically, and contented myself with nodding at him and keeping out of my face any reminder that we had once been intimate.

But I have often thought of the incident since and wondered whether he remembered it long. I have a fancy that it meant even more to him than to me, serving as a kind of catharsis to a full heart. Children are cruel through ignorance, and a better understanding of him might have taken me again and again to his parlor to be read to for our mutual good; yet it was my very youth and ignorance, I suppose, that made him first pitch upon me as an audience and that later made him forget the constraints of manhood.

I do not know that Mr. Macgregor had ever essayed the writing of verse himself, but it seems likely. I have just been looking over Burns’s Remarks on Scottish Song and have made a list which would seem to indicate that, while no fish-merchant is enrolled in the archives of poetic fame, there is no reason why one should not be. There are songs ascribed to Mr. Alexander Ross, schoolmaster at Lochlee; Mr. McVicar, purser of the Solebay, manof-war; Richard Hewit, Dr. Blacklock’s amanuensis; Dudgeon, a respectable farmer’s son in Berwickshire; David Maigh, keeper of the blood lough-hounds of the Laird of Riddel; Mr. Skirving, a very worthy farmer of East Garleton; Dr. Austin, a physician at Edinburgh; the Rev. John Skinner, a non-juror clergyman at Linshart; Jean Glover, a ranting thieving hussy who knew the inside of half the houses of correction in Scotland: all these, and poor drudging, tippling ‘Balloon’ Tytler, who compiled the larger part of the original Encyclopædia Britannica, not to mention those fine ladies of the old school, Grisel Baillie and Ann Lindsay — all these, remembered by a song or so; as if the entire population, from the ‘Balloon’ Tytlers to the Rev. John Skinners, from the Jean Glovers to the Ann Lindsays, had tried their hands at a stray ballad or two. It would not be a wild wager to stake a Scotch pound that Mr. Macgregor had, stored away in his solid old walnut desk, a sheaf of lyrics in which town rhymed with aboon and eye with dree; and Scotia or Caledonia was proudly invoked with all her glens and braes and banks and burns; and the memory of some Patty or Nannie or Mary or Jeanie received a modest celebration.

To the public outside of Scotland, Scotch lyrical poetry is simply the poetry of Burns — a view which Mr. Macgregor, with all his love of Burns,would have scouted indignantly; for he knew that every hamlet in Scotland, one might almost say every street in Edinburgh and Glasgow, has its poet. There are many reasons why this is so. The Scottish people are educated; they speak the tenderest of languages; they offer their poets a sympathetic audience; they know the mellowing influence of John Barleycorn, and are great in convivial gatherings; they are Celts and so are sentimental at heart. A lyric poet must be glad or sad with all his might — or bad or mad, for that matter — anything but lukewarm or phlegmatic; and the Celt, be he Welsh, Irish, or Scotch, however harsh his exterior, is fundamentally volcanic.

We need songs here in America, but our poets seem better able to write everything else. I have a friend who thinks that they are too refined or too good. ‘How,’ says he, ‘can we expect our poets to be passionate if they have n’t any passions? How can they sing love lyrics if they are too refined to admit that they have ever been in love? How can they lament with plausibility if they have never done anything to lament over? The Heines, the Villons, the Burnses of the world have been great lovers and great sinners; it is they who can touch the popular heart.’

There seems to be some sense in his theory. The poets of the day impress me as little likely to ‘ touch the popular heart.’ They seem to fall into two classes — those who are trying to be recondite and those who are trying to be ‘ virile.’ The former would probably be shocked at the thought of appealing to the profane vulgar; yet, although it may be no derogation of a true poet to say that he does not catch the popular ear, it may be a very fine thing to be able to say that he does. The few may relish caviar, to use a metaphor in the vein of Mr. Macgregor, but there is still a place in the world for caller herring. The virile style, on the other hand, may be as much a confession of weakness as the delicacy against which it is a protest. There is a sentimentalism in avoiding sentimentalism. The virility of our poetry and fiction does not ring true, because there is something in it of the boy’s trying to be manly by smoking and swearing. It is the fashion of the day to dismiss prettiness and pathos and sentiment as Early Victorian, the intimation being that ‘we have changed all that’ — a perilous generalization. Some one has acutely observed that already Ibsen is beginning to impress us as romantic, and that fifty years hence Mr. Shaw may be accounted sentimental.

The truth is that we are all sentimental at heart, whatever our culture. Even though we appreciate Brahms, shall we not find some pleasure in the repertoire of the hand-organ, and though we admire Botticelli, shall we utterly condemn Darby and Joan ? There are moods in which Jean Ingelow and Mrs. Hemans are not mawkish. The thousands still weep over the death of Little Nell, though the critics sneer.

The more I think about it, the less I am sure what is sentimental and what is not. I condemn The May Queen critically, yet find that many sensible people enjoy crying over it very much. Temperamentally I do not like to groan and weep over my reading; I am more likely to laugh over The May Queen than to cry; yet I find that there is hardly a pathetic poem that I admire that some critic or some friend does not consider soft. It is obvious that for some cold temperaments Lamb’s essays may seem excessive. It is certainly true that for any of us a poem may seem sugary before breakfast that after dinner may seem only sweet.

The lymphatic critic might comment on the last observation, ‘Then read only before breakfast’; but few of us would be content to have our emotional dissipation so curtailed. Mr. Macgregor could never have wept at nine o’clock in the morning in a class of twenty-five seniors still reminiscent of breakfast. His heightened pitch and color were things of the evening hours and the solitary place and the receptive— or at least quiescent— listener.

There and then he could expand, forget the exigencies of social decency. This expansion and his subsequent diffidence seem to me to epitomize the condition of mankind; we, too, like so much once in a while to expand, to flap our wings, to lyricize, and we are so much ashamed of ourselves afterwards.

‘Back home’ we used to gather around the piano of an evening, a Godfearing, respectable family, and hold orgies of sentimental melody, seeing Nellie home, and imploring the winds of heaven to bring back our Bonnie to us. To a chance dyspeptic sitting on the hydrant outside, it must have been sickening.

The people, in the innocence of their hearts, wallow in sentimentalism unabashed. They have always done so. There is not much to choose in this regard between la comédie larmoyante (which is now studied in post-graduate courses) and the moving-picture of today. Probably the topical songs of the present are not more painful to us than were the ditties of a hundred years ago to people of refinement; the difference being that the latter, having about them the aroma of age, strike us now as quaint. This is a part of the alchemy of time, — that the affectations and sentimentalities of a bygone age become charming, — and points to the truth that what is and what is not sentimental is somewhat a matter of relativity.

The point of these reflections is that it is not less emotion that we want, but a finer expression. The old idea that sentimentality differs from sentiment in degree, in excess, seems to me only half true. Emotion or passion differs from sentiment in degree, but sentimentality differs also in its objects and in its expression. Humanitarians might impress us as sentimental over an earthworm or a fish, because the object is unworthy; Dickens impresses us as sentimental over Paul Dombey because his expression is cheap. Our popular songs are sentimental because, while they are sincere enough, they are unbridled, crude, inartistic in form and diction. One of our sorest needs in America is songs that are passionate and direct and simple and sincere, and that express universal emotions in terms that are national and native.

Meanwhile, having no local songs, we fall back upon those of Scotland and of our own South, and for the sake of the sentiment are willing to sing of Kentucky homes and Suwanee Rivers and lands of cotton, all of which must remain to most of us Yarrows unvisited. Unable, if called upon, to define the burns and braes of which we sing, and exceedingly hazy as to the geography of sweet Afton and bonny Doon, we still apostrophize and lament them with surprising conviction. The sentiment is all; yet it is a pity that it cannot have a local habitation. ‘Alas for us, our songs are cold!’ It is here that Mr. Macgregor had the better of us, as have all the Germans who sing the songs of Heine and all the Frenchmen who sing the songs of Béranger.