Part 10

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.