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Title: Songs, Patriotic And National
Author: Evelyn Baring [
More Titles by Baring]
_"The Spectator," September 13, 1913_
All historians are agreed that contemporary ballads and broadsheets constitute a priceless storehouse from which to draw a picture of the society existing at the period whose history they seek to relate. Some of those which have survived to become generally known to later ages show such poverty of imagination and such total absence of literary merit as to evoke the surprise of posterity at the ephemeral success which they unquestionably achieved. An instance in point is the celebrated poem "Lillibullero," or, as it is sometimes written, "Lilli Burlero." Here is the final stanza of the pitiful doggerel with which Wharton boasted that he had "sung a king out of three kingdoms":
There was an old prophecy found in a bog:
Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog;
And now this prophecy is come to pass,
For Talbot's the dog, and James is the ass.
Lillibullero, Bullen-a-la.
Doggerel as this was, it survived the special occasion for which it was written. When Queen Anne's reign was well advanced balladmongers were singing:
So God bless the Queen and the House of Hanover,
And never may Pope or Pretender come over.
Lillibullero, Bullen-a-la.
If the song is still remembered by other than historical students, it is probably more because Uncle Toby, when he was hard pressed in argument, "had accustomed himself, in such attacks, to whistle Lillibullero," than for any other reason.
But whether it be doggerel or dignified verse, popular poetry almost invariably possesses one great merit. When we read the outpourings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century poets to the innumerable Julias, Sacharissas, and Celias whom they celebrated in verse, we cannot but feel that we are often in contact with a display of spurious passion which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson tells us that Prior's Chloe "was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species." The case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It enables us to gauge the national aspirations of the day, and to estimate the character of the nation whose yearnings found expression in song. The following lines--written by Bishop Still, the reputed author of "Gammer Gurton's Needle"--very faithfully represent the feelings excited in England at the time of the Spanish Armada:
We will not change our Credo
For Pope, nor boke, nor bell;
And yf the Devil come himself
We'll hounde him back to hell.
The fiery Protestant spirit which is breathed forth in these lines found its counterpart in Germany. Luther, at a somewhat earlier period, wrote:
Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort,
Und steur des Papsts und Türken Mord.
Take again the case of French Revolutionary poetry. The noble, as also the ignoble, sides of that vast upheaval were alike represented in the current popular poetry of the day. Posterity has no difficulty in understanding why the whole French nation was thrilled by Rouget de Lisle's famous song, to whose lofty strains the young conscripts rushed to the frontier in order to hurl back the invaders of their country. On the other hand, the ferocity of the period found expression in such lines as:
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne,
which was composed by one Ladré, a street singer, or in the savage "Carmagnole," a name originally applied to a peasant costume worn in the Piedmontese town of Carmagnola, and afterwards adopted by the Maenads and Bacchanals, who sang and danced in frenzied joy over the judicial murder of poor "Monsieur et Madame Véto."
The light-hearted and characteristically Latin buoyancy of the French nation, which they have inherited from the days of that fifth-century Gaulish bishop (Salvianus) who said that the Roman world was laughing when it died ("moritur et ridet"), and which has stood them in good stead in many an arduous trial, is also fully represented in their national poetry. No other people, after such a crushing defeat as that incurred at Pavia, would have been convulsed with laughter over the innumerable stanzas which have immortalised their slain commander, M. de la Palisse:
Il mourut le vendredi,
Le dernier jour de son âge;
S'il fut mort le samedi,
Il eût vécu davantage.
The inchoate national aspirations, as also the grave and resolute patriotism of the Germans, found interpreters of genius in the persons of Arndt and Körner, the latter of whom laid down his life for the people whom he loved so well. During the Napoleonic period all their compositions, many of which will live so long as the German language lasts, strike the same note--the determination of Germans to be free:
Lasst klingen, was nur klingen kann,
Die Trommeln und die Flöten!
Wir wollen heute Mann für Mann
Mit Blut das Eisen röten.
Mit Henkerblut, Französenblut--
O süsser Tag der Rache!
Das klinget allen Deutschen gut,
Das ist die grosse Sache.
Some six decades later, when Arndt's famous question "Was ist das deutsche Vaterland?" was about to receive a practical answer, the German soldier marched to the frontier to the inspiriting strains of "Die Wacht am Rhein."
No more characteristic national poetry was ever written than that evoked by the civil war which raged in America some fifty years ago. Those who, like the present writer, were witnesses on the spot of some portion of that great struggle, are never likely to forget the different impressions left on their minds by the poetry respectively of the North and of the South. The pathetic song of the Southerners, "Maryland, my Maryland," which was composed by Mr. T.R. Randall, appeared, even whilst the contest was still undecided, to embody the plaintive wail of a doomed cause, and stood in strong contrast to the aggressive and almost rollicking vigour of "John Brown's Body" and "The Union for ever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah!"
Even a nation so little distinguished in literature as the Ottoman Turks is able, under the stress of genuine patriotism, to embody its hopes and aspirations in stirring verse. The following, which was written during the last Russo-Turkish war, suffers in translation. Its rhythm and heroic, albeit savage, vigour may perhaps even be appreciated by those who are not familiar with the language in which it is written:
Achalum sanjaklari!
Ghechelim Balkanlari!
Allah! Allah! deyerek,
Dushman kanin' ichelim!
Padishahmiz chok yasha!
Ghazi Osman chok yasha![109]
Let us now turn to Italy and Greece, the nations from which modern Europe inherits most of its ideas, and which have furnished the greater part of the models in which those ideas are expressed, whether in prose or in verse.
Although lines from Virgil, who may almost be said to have created Roman Imperialism, have been found scribbled on the walls of Pompeii, it is probable that in his day no popular poetry, in the sense in which we should understand the word, existed. But there is something extremely pathetic--more especially in the days when the Empire was hastening to its ruin--in the feeling, little short of adoration, which the Latin poets showed to the city of Rome, and in the overweening confidence which they evinced in the stability of Roman rule. This feeling runs through the whole of Latin literature from the days of Ovid and Virgil to the fifth-century Rutilius, who was the last of the classic poets. Virgil speaks of Rome as "the mistress of the world" (maxima rerum Roma). Claudian deified Rome, "O numen amicum et legum genetrix," and Rutilius wrote:
Exaudi, regina tui pulcherrima mundi,
Inter sidereos Roma recepta polos,
Exaudi, genetrix hominum, genetrixque deorum,
Non procul a caelo per tua templa sumus.
Modern Italians have made ample amends for any lack of purely popular poetry which may have prevailed in the days of their ancestors. It would, indeed, have been strange if the enthusiasm for liberty which arose in the ranks of a highly gifted and emotional nation such as the Italians had not found expression in song. When the proper time came, Giusti, Carducci, Mameli, Gordigiani, and scores of others voiced the patriotic sentiments of their countrymen. They all dwelt on the theme embodied in the stirring Garibaldian hymn:
Va fuori d'Italia!
Va fuori, o stranier!
It will suffice to quote, as an example of the rest, one stanza from an "Inno di Guerra" chosen at random from a collection of popular poetry published at Turin in 1863:
Coraggio ... All' armi, all' armi,
O fanti e cavalieri,
Snudiamo ardenti e fieri,
Snudiam l'invitto acciar!
Dall' Umbria mesto e oppresso
Ci chiama il pio fratello,
Rispondasi all' appello,
Corriamo a guerreggiar!
The cramping isolation of the city-states of ancient Greece arrested the growth of Hellenic nationalism, and therefore precluded the birth of any genuinely nationalist poetry. But it only required the occasion to arise in order to give birth to patriotic song. Such an occasion was furnished when, under the pressing danger of Asiatic invasion, some degree of Hellenic unity and cohesion was temporarily achieved. Then the tuneful Simonides recorded the raising of an altar to "Zeus, the free man's god, a fair token of freedom for Hellas."
In more modern times the long struggle for Greek independence produced a crop of poets who, if they could not emulate the dignity and linguistic elegance of their predecessors, were none the less able to express their national aspirations in rugged but withal very tuneful verse which went straight to the hearts of their countrymen. The Klephtic ballads played a very important part in rousing the Greek spirit during the Graeco-Turkish war at the beginning of the last century. The fine ode of the Zantiote Solomos has been adopted as the national anthem, whilst the poetry of another Ionian, Aristotle Valaorites, and of numerous others glows with genuine and perfervid patriotism. But perhaps the greatest nationalist poet that modern Greece has produced was Rhigas Pheraios, who, as proto-martyr in the Greek cause, was executed by the Turks in 1798, with the prophecy on his dying lips that he had "sown a rich seed, and that the hour was coming when his country would reap its glorious fruits." His Greek Marseillaise (Δεύτε παῖδες τῶν Ἑλλήνων) is known to Englishmen through Byron's translation, "Sons of the Greeks, arise, etc." But the glorious lilt and swing of his _Polemisterion_, though probably familiar to every child in Greece, is less known in this country. The lines,
καλλίτερα μιᾶς ὥρας ἐλευθέρη ζωή,
παρὰ σαράντα χρόνων σκλαβιὰ καὶ φυλακή,
recall to the mind Tennyson's
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
[Footnote 109:
Let us unfurl the standards!
Let us cross the Balkans!
Shouting "Allah! Allah!"
Let us drink the blood of the foe!
Long live our Padishah!
Long live Ghazi Osman!
]
[The end]
Evelyn Baring's essay: Songs, Patriotic And National
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