Have the pipes a language?—A wild, fanciful notion—How it got a hold—How much of it is true?—The reed actually speaking—A powerful influence—The power of association—Neil Munro—Descriptive Highland airs—A Cholla mo run—Military stories—In South Africa—An enthusiastic war correspondent.

In this chapter we would walk warily, knowing that we are on dangerous ground. The question is, Has the bagpipe a language more than any other instrument? Can it speak to the heart of the Highlander more than any other instrument can speak to hearts that know it, and the music which it discourses, and the associations of that music? Through the great bulk of what has been written about the bagpipe there runs this idea of its power, this wild, fanciful notion that it has an actual language and that those who understand that language can converse by its means. Some have even attempted to analyse the music, and to discover the alleged secret, while others have held that canntaireachd, fully dealt with in the next chapter, was in reality a language and not merely a very rude system of musical notation. And this notion of the speaking power of the pipes got such a hold on the imaginative people of the Highlands that, although personally each of them did not understand how the thing was possible, many of them accepted it as truth and believed the stories illustrating the subject, which ultimately became part of their traditional literature. It seems like sacrilege to disturb the ideas which have been accepted as absolute truth for centuries, but there is no doubt whatever that of the speaking power of the pipes about seventy-five per cent. exists in the vivid imaginations of the retailers of Highland tradition. It was indeed in the chanter-reed of the pipes that, after a long search, and after great difficulties, Baron von Kempelen, a distinguished Continental mechanic and musician, discovered the nearest approach to the human voice. He believed it was possible to get an approximation of language by some mechanical contrivance, and he was able to convert the reed to the elements of a speaking machine, and through its aid and with many appliances he obtained letters, syllables, words, and even entire sentences. But all the same, the bagpipe cannot speak any more than it can fly. If it has ever in all its history conveyed, by means of an extemporised tune, information to people at a distance definite enough to enable them to alter all their battle tactics, we require better historical proof of the incident than is to be got of any of the stories to be given here.

While, as a simple matter of fact, it is true that the bagpipe cannot speak, it is equally true that its music exercises a strangely powerful influence over the Celtic mind. The race are, or at any rate were, of a peculiarly imaginative temperament. This, taken along with the fact that their music always had strong associations, explains a great deal. Many of the pibrochs were composed without premeditation, under the influence of exuberant joy or the wildest sorrow or despair. Consequently, when, under favourable circumstances, they were again played by master hands, they roused up the old memories, and did really, though not literally, speak to the listeners. The construction of the pipe also helps. It is the only instrument since the days of the old Highland harp which represents the Gaelic scale in music, and it is this that makes the pipe appeal so naturally and so intensely to the Gael. To him, especially if from home, it speaks of the past of his own race, and of the days of his youth. In this lies its special charm:—

Pipe music has many voices, and it expresses many of the emotions which are given vent to by language that can be printed. Neil Munro, as enthusiastic a Highlander as any man, does not believe in the “speaking” theory, but he believes in the descriptive character of the music. As witness—

“The tune with the river in it, the fast river and the courageous, that kens not stop nor tarry, that runs round rock and over fall with a good humour, yet no mood for anything but the way before it.”

The tune that, as Paruig Dall said, had “the tartan of the clan it.” And—

“Playing the tune of the ‘Fairy Harp,’ he can hear his forefolks, plaided in skins, towsy-headed and terrible, grunting at the oars, and snoring in the caves; he has his whittle and club in the ‘Desperate Battle’ (my own tune, my darling!), where the white-haired sea-rovers are on the shore, and a stain’s on the edge of the tide; or trying his art on Laments he can stand by the cairn of Kings, ken the colour of Fingal’s hair, and see the moon-glint on the hook of the Druids.”

Most of the old Highland airs were composed on particular occasions, or for the purpose of conveying particular feelings. One, for instance, is designed to express the succession of emotions in the mind of an Ardnamurchan crofter while tilling his soil in an unpropitious season and hesitating whether to emigrate or attempt to pay his landlord the triple rent a rival had offered. Another commemorates the arrival of Prince Charlie at a farmhouse in Skye, where one of his followers was sent forward to see if he was likely to find friends there. To a Highland ear the tune expresses the first hesitating, half-whispered questions of the messenger, then his confidence as he finds the goodwife favourable, and finally his composed feelings on finding that he was among friends. Another was composed on an occasion when the Mac Kenzies attempted to obtain possession of the lands of Mac Donell of Glengarry.^[4] The chief of the Mac Kenzies had his men and allies assembled at different points, one party being concealed in a church at Beauly, and, tradition says, this church was burned over the heads of a worshipping congregation by friends of the Mac Donells. But the pibroch contradicts this, for when the tune is properly played the listener in fancy hears the flames rustling and blazing through the timbers of the church, mingled with the angry remonstrances and half-smothered shouts of the warriors, but there is no representation of the more feeble plaints of women and children. Had these been among the victims, their cries would surely have formed the burden of the tune.^[5]

Many other instances of descriptive pipe music are to be found. The pibroch of Daorach Robbi contains the keenest satire ever levelled at the vice of drunkenness. The ludicrous imitation of the coarse and clumsy movements, the maudlin and staring pauses, the helpless imbecility of the drunkard as he is pilloried in the satire with the ever-recurring sneering notes, Seall a nis air (Look at him now) are enough to annihilate any person possessing the least sensibility, who, while hearing them, is conscious of having been in the position described, even for once in his life. Gillidh Callum is a striking contrast to Daorach Robbi. The total abstainer could hardly find a better text than the latter, while the man who advocates temperance only would be strongly supported by the former, which illustrates enlivening virtues of the fruit of the vine without its degrading effects. So with most pipe music. It describes something, and in this respect is second only to the recitative of the bards. It is, of course, necessary that performer and listeners should be Highland themselves. No one who is not versed in the poetry and music of the Highlands can impart to others, or appreciate for himself, the spirit of romance and pathos and love and sorrow and martial sentiment which is in the music, just as no actor can play well unless he enters into the spirit of the play. To the enthusiast for Highland music, the feelings aroused by other instruments are general and undefined, and common to Frenchman, Spaniard, German, or Highlander, but the bagpipe is sacred to Scotland. Gaelic itself has a sentiment that cannot be expressed, and so with its music. It appeals to us, but we cannot express it, and only those who know it understand it.

And now for one or two of these stories where the pipes are alleged to have spoken. The best known is that of A Cholla mo run, or “The Piper’s Warning.”^[6] The piper and friends were entrapped in Duntroon Castle, while Coll Citto, his master, and his followers were away at Islay, and the enemy laid an ambush to entrap the returning party. The piper one day saw Coll’s boats returning, and he knew that unless something was done they would sail right into the ambush. So he asked leave to go out on to the battlements and play a tune. This was granted, and the piper played extempore music, which to those in the boats meant:—

and more to the same purpose. Coll instantly took warning, turned his boats and fled. But the Campbells, in whose custody the piper was, also understood, and, some accounts say he had his fingers cut off, others that he was killed on the spot for his bravery in warning his friends. All agree that he spoke to Coll in the boats across an expanse of water by means of the pipes alone, and the tune has ever since been associated with the incident in which it originated.

Then there is the story of “Women of this Glen,”^[7] alleged to have been instrumental in warning some of the Mac Ians on the eve of Glencoe, and several others very similar.

Some stories come from wars of a less remote date. A Scottish regiment, we are told, on a sunbaked plain in India, was being mowed down by some mysterious disease. The doctors could not tell what it was, but the kilties were being swept off by it, one by one. At last it was discovered. Away on the outskirts of the camp, in the short still gloaming of the Eastern evening, a group of the men had gathered round the regimental piper. Their heads were buried in their hands, and big hot tears rolled through their fingers. And the weird, wae strains of “Lochaber no more,” played more melancholy than ever, filled the air. They were dying of homesickness, and the bagpipe spoke to them of home and all that was there. Another Scottish regiment had been at the Cape for a long time, and the officers found that the bagpipe so affected the men as to make them unfit for duty. The men were homesick, and their music intensified this feeling, and it had to be stopped for a time. The men of course knew the tunes, and what they meant, but there is nothing to show that the same tunes played on another instrument would not have had the same effect.

We had the old idea revived in all its beauty by one of the ablest of the war correspondents in the recent South African War. Mr. Julian Ralph, of the London Daily Mail, in a letter to his paper, spoke eloquently of the services rendered to the Highland Brigade by their pipers, and of the way in which the pipes spoke to the men and the men listened to the pipes. He was a stranger to the music, and at first he was not impressed by it. But gradually he came to like it, and to miss it when he was not within the range of the notes. Here is how he tells of the pipes speaking to the men:—

“Then off strode the fresh player with the streamers floating from his pipes, with his hips swaying, his head held high, and his toes but touching the earth. Once I heard a man say, ‘Gi’ me the pipes, Sandy; I can tell ye what naebody has said,’—at least, those were the strange words I thought that I distinguished.”

After General Wauchope was killed along with so many of his men at Magersfontein, the soldiers were for a time gloomy and dispirited.

“‘It’s the pipes that make them so,’ said an officer. ‘The pipes are keeping them a great deal resentful, and still more melancholy.’ ‘The pipes? What have the pipes to do with their feelings?’

“‘Eh, man? Don’t you know that the pipes can talk as good Scots as any man who hears them? Surely ’tis so—and ’tis what the pipes are saying, first in one player’s hands and then in another’s, that keeps the men from forgetting their part in the last battle.’

“Once, as the days passed, when I saw this officer again at leisure, I went to him for an explanation of his surprising disclosure. I had been trying to learn the language of the pipes in the meantime, but I acquired no more understanding than a dog has of English when he distinguishes between a kindly human tone and a cross one. I could tell when a tune was martial and when another was mournful. When a gay one rang out—if any had—I would not have mistaken it for a dirge. To some this may seem a very little learning, but I had begun by thinking all the tunes alike.

“‘Yesterday,’ said my friend the officer, ‘we’d a little match between men who had some skill at embroidering the airs of the old ballads with trills of those grace-notes that they call warblers, but this contest was broken up by a rugged son of the hills who, after asking for the pipes, flung from them a few strong, clear notes which gained the attention of all who are born to a knowledge of the music that speaks. I am not one of those, but I called my soldier-servant up and asked him what was being played.’ ‘Well, sir,’ said he, ‘that’s Mac Callum—a great museecian he is. And hark, sir; he has the right of it and boldly he is telling every one his thoughts. He says that every man kens that the gran’ general who’s dead was as cunning and skilfu’ in war as ony man above him, and ’tis late in the day—now that he’s laid away and dumb—to put blame on him as if he were an ignoramus and a butcher, like some others. And now, oh! brawly ye’re tellin’ it, Mac Callum—he says there may be scheming and plotting in high places but no skullduggery o’ ony sort, however it is gilded, will ever deceive ane single true chiel o’ the Highlands.’”

“‘And then,’ said my gossip, ‘the pipes passed to the hand of another man,’ and my servant—seeing me about to move away—touched my arm and bade me wait, as this new player was another adept with the pipes. ‘He’s grand at it,’ said he; ‘well done, Stewart.’ He’s saying, sir, that the reason none will heed those who blame our grand leader that’s gone is that there’s men of rank among us—and of proud blood—that’ll stand up to any man at home and swear that when our fallen chief came back with his orders for the battle he complained of them sorely, but he said, ‘No better could he get,’ and when he lay down in his blanket his head was full of the trouble that was coming on him—he not being able to learn what he needed to know against the morrow.

“There was more of this recital of what the pipes had spoken to the regiment, but it would only be irritating a sore to repeat it. The pipers spoke even more plainly as the bold outpourings of one incited bolder from another. At last there were suggestions, by pipes grown mutinous, of sentiments which, happily, have seldom been spread within the British Army. But what I have told suffices to illustrate my sole point, which is that the gift of eloquent speech in chords and trills is born with the master-pipers.

“I never saw my officer-friend again for more than a nod or a word in passing. But on one day the pipes next door rang jubilantly, and man after man applied himself to them with ginger in his touch. Each blew triumphant, thrilling, heart-stirring chords, and every piper swaggered at his work with such a will as to send his aproned kilt to and fro with what seemed a double swing to each beat of the time.

“I said to myself, ‘They have learned that Hector Mac Donald is coming to be their new brigadier, and the pipes are assuring them that every Highlander may be himself again, certain of victory and new glory under a leader second only to the one they have lost.’ I still believe my conjecture was right.

“And I know from living next door, as it were, that the cloud of gloom that had hung over the brigade was dispelled almost with the suddenness of its horrid appearance.

“After that the kilties began to make in this war a continuation of their glorious record in so many lesser wars in the time that was.”

All of which is very fine writing, but one cannot get rid of the idea that Mr. Ralph was the victim of an elaborate joke. The speaking theory was new to him and he accepted it in all its amplitude. There is no report of what his officer-friend said when he read Mr. Ralph’s article—if he ever did read it.

The simple truth about the “language” of the pipes seems to be that a Highland listener gets from the pipes what, in a more or less degree, anyone gets from the music he loves—a stimulant for his emotion and imagination, nothing more. He is an emotional being, and his imagination, aided and abetted by the sorrows and the joys of many generations—which affect his disposition though he knows it not—and by the many associations of particular tunes or styles of playing, runs riot when he hears the pipes, and to him they speak as no other instrument ever can speak. A primitive instrument working on the feelings of a primitive people has a much more direct and intense psychological effect than on a sophisticated people who have scores of different cunning instruments and myriads of airs, a fact which should always be remembered when the “language” of the pipes is discussed. After all it depends much more on the listener than on the instrument. In our appreciation of any music, and in the effect it has on us, there is involved all that we ourselves have been, seen, heard, thought, and—sometimes—forgot. A plaintive love air brings up the old days, the sunny weather, the sweethearts of our youth, all the store of associations that are buried in us, and—who knows?—all the loves and hates, the joys and sorrows of our dead fathers, modified or intensified by our own personal character. Therefore to us that plaintive air is the sweetest of music. To the Highlander the bagpipe conveys the fine rapture a high-class audience gets, or at least professes to get, from Sarasate’s violin and Paderewski’s piano. To him it has a direct message, but to the rest of the world it is what a violin is to him, probably less. But as for an impromptu tune conveying intelligence like spoken language—ah well, we must draw the line somewhere.