Poking fun at the pipes—English caricature—Mixed metaphor—Churchism and pipes—Fifteenth century satire—A biographical sneer—Thackeray—Bitter English writers—Testimony of a Jew—Home sarcasm—The bards—Joanna Baillie—A Frenchman’s opinion—William Black—Ignorance breaking its shins—Imported sportsmen—The duty of Highlanders.

There is a curious tendency, except in truly Highland circles, to poke fun at the pipes. This tendency is very noticeable in the domain of English comic journalism, the more or less comic papers hailing from the metropolis finding in Scottish people and Scottish customs an inexhaustible field of humour. They never tire of joking about the strictness of our religious beliefs, our supposed slowness at perceiving a joke, our relations with visitors from the south, our alleged parsimony, our national dress, and our national music; and they never fail to depict us as on every occasion wearing the kilt, carrying the pipes, and hiding away a bottle of whisky. Sydney Smith once declared that one might as well try to get music out of an iron foundry as out of the pipes, and Leigh Hunt’s idea of martyrdom was to be tied to a post within a hundred yards of a stout-lunged piper. Some cynics have said that the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of the bagpipe, and it has even been contended that the important part played by the instrument in many glorious victories achieved by our armies was simply due to the fact that the enemy had only two courses open—either to flee or to remain and lose all desire for existence. However, as all these things amuse our southern neighbours and do not injure us, we do not complain.

Our national music has always lent itself to the caricature of the alleged humourist south of the Border. Thus a writer of perhaps two centuries ago:—

“North-west of a line from Greenock by Perth to Inverness is the land of the Gael—of the semi-barbarous instrument the bagpipe, of wild pibroch tunes, or rude melodies, very little known and still less admired, and of a species of song which has rarely been considered worth the trouble of translation.”

English writers who attend northern gatherings feel themselves in duty bound to be partly amused and partly terrified at the din of the pipes, and they often express the greatest wonder that our civilised ears can find pleasure in it. In the same way they used to look on our religion with contempt, and ridicule it on every opportunity. “Suffer Presbytery and bagpipes to flourish beyond Berwick” exclaims one in his wrath. The two seemed to be equally despicable. Butler, in putting this contempt into rhyme, works himself into a fine frenzy of mixed metaphor;—

How men can speak by light, how this light can be a lanthorn, how men can hear light, or how a bagpipe drone can shine upon a house, he does not stop to explain, but proceeds:—

Needham, another Englishman, writing in 1648, after calling a typical Presbyterian such names as “a sainted Salamander that lives in the flames of zeal,” “an apocryphal piece of university mummery,” “a holy picklock,” “a gunpowder politician,” “a divine squib-crack,” “a pious pulpit-cuffer,” and “a deadly spit-fire,” winds up with—

And yet another seems to think the Separatists, a Scottish religious sect of the 17th century, would have been better at the bagpipe than at singing. They had, he thought, “need of somewhat as a bagpipe, or something never used by Antichrist, to tune them; singing in their own conventicles like hogs against raine.”

A satirical writer of 1659, when he wished to be specially cynical, proposed that two illustrious persons should be married, and that “the banquetting house should be prepared forthwith, with a pair of bagpipes and a North Country jig to entertain the nobles that shall attend the nuptials.” There was apparently nothing to be said after that.

In a political satire of the same year, Sir Archibald Johnstone, a prominent person of that time, is thus addressed:—“Pure Sir Archibald Johnstone, wea is me for thee, for thou hadst thought to be a muckle laddy, but now the peeper of Kilbarchan will laugh thee to scorne.” He could get no lower than to be laughed at by the piper.

A sneering biographer of Archbishop Sharpe, speaking of the prelate’s grandfather’s pipes, says:—“If the pipe and bags be yet in the prelate’s possession, it is like he may have use for them, to gift them to some landwart church, to save the expense of a pair of organs, which may be well enough for our rude people, who can sing to the one as well as to the other; and if instrumental music be juris divini, as the prelates assert, it cannot be thought that any people should be so phanatick as to admit the organs in divine service and refuse the pipes.”

The Earl of Northampton, a contemporary of Shakespeare, concludes a treatise against alleged prophecy with the remark that “oracles are most like baggepypes and showmen, that sound no longer than they are puffed up with winde and played upon with cunning.”

Thackeray, in The Irish Sketch Book, says, “Anything more lugubrious than the drone of the pipe, or the jig danced to it, or the countenances of the dancers and musicians, I never saw. Round each set of dancers the people formed a ring, in which the figurantes and coryphees went through their operations.”

Thomas Kirke, the Englishman who wrote A Modern Account of Scotland, in 1679, said—“Musick they (the Highlanders) have, but not the harmony of the sphears, but loud terrene noises, like the bellowing of beasts; the loud bagpipe is their delight; stringed instruments are too soft to penetrate the organs of their ears, that are only pleased with sounds of substance.”

Dr. Mac Culloch, already quoted,^[13] who travelled Scotland in 1824, calls the bagpipe as vile a contrivance as can be imagined, and describes in graphic language all its alleged defects, and the sad result of listening to its music:—

“It is harsh, imperfect, and untunable. It is not wonderful if the responsive vibrations of the piper’s tympanum are not very accurate, nor the musical organ of his brain peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds after the daily induration which they must have undergone from such outrageous and unceasing inroads on their sensibility. The auricular wave is probably hardened as effectually as if it had been immersed in a tan pit. So much the better for them, but it is not easy to describe the subsidence of feeling the general deliquium, as physicians have it, which such worthless auditors as we are experience when an act of this music closes. It cannot be much unlike what the Mickmak or Dog-ribbed Indian feels, when his teeth have all been drawn.... As a vocal accompaniment this instrument is plainly inappropriate, unless it were to accompany a concert of tigers and cats. Nevertheless it is used for reels, and with bad enough success, if the ears are to be consulted. As a moving force, however, it answers its purpose very effectively. There are very few dancing airs that lie within its compass.... Six inches of Neil Gow’s horse hair would have beaten all the bagpipes that ever were blown.... The variations were considerably more abominable than the ground, musically speaking, but they are the best tests of the artist’s merit, as all that merit lies in difficult and rapid execution. Any man can blow the charge, but when it comes to action it is he who has the strongest fingers and the worst taste who will carry the day. Yet there are rules for all this cutting of notes as it is called. The term is not ill-chosen, as the ground is literally cut into tatters by a re-iteration of the most clumsy, commonplace and tasteless flourishes, offensive in themselves, but still more so by their excess, since every note is so encumbered that whatever air might have existed is totally swallowed up in the general confusion.”

Mac Culloch, however, admits in another place, the merits of the bagpipe as an outdoor instrument, and an instrument of war especially.

Carr, another Englishman, who wrote in 1809, had not a good word to say of the pipes:—

“Whilst refinement is rapidly spreading over Scotland, it is to be lamented that anyone should prevent the barbarous music of the country from yielding to instruments more agreeable to the ear. The bagpipe is among the few remaining barbarisms in Scotland.... It is a sorry instrument, capable of little more than making an intolerable noise. Every person of taste and feeling must regret the decline of the harp and be shocked at its having been succeeded by the bagpipe.... I shall never forget a playing competition in Edinburgh at which I was present. As soon as the prize judges were seated the folding doors opened. A Highland piper entered in full tartan array, and began to press from the bag of his pipes, which were decorated with long pieces of riband, sounds so loud and horrible that to my imagination they were comparable only to those of the eternally tormented. In this manner he strutted up and down with the most stately march, and occasionally enraptured his audience, who expressed the influence of his instrument by loud and continued plaudits. For my part, so wretched is the instrument to my ears that I could not discover any difference in regard to expression between ‘The Gathering of the Mac Donalds’ and ‘Abercrombie’s Lament,’ each sound being to me equally depressive, discordant, and horrible.... I believe that it might have been three hours that common politeness compelled me to endure the distraction of this trial of skill, and I left the room with nearly the same sensations with which I should have quitted a belfry on a royal birthday.... One of these barbarous musicians, attempting in a fit of enthusiasm to pipe over eighteen miles of ground, blew the breath out of his body. It would have been well if he had been the last of his race.”

In conclusion he addresses “Lines to the Caledonian Harp,” and in passing gives a final kick to the bagpipe—

We have also the testimony of a Jew, who was compelled, by the heavy hand of misfortune, to wander in the Highlands, and in 1828 formed his impressions into a book which he called The Jew Exile. He praises the people for their hospitality, but alas! for their music. When leaving the village of Strathglass he says he was, in compliment, preceded by a young piper in real Highland style:—

“My young Highlander played me on the road five miles, and I would gladly have sunk the portable screech-owl appendage. A man had better have a poll-parrot chained to his ear or be doomed to listen to a concert of files and saw teeth in a saw manufactory, than be obliged to listen to such music. If, ‘Sir Harry,’ has any musical instrument, it will be the great Highland bagpipe. What a hideous yell it makes! ... that grunting, howling, yelling, screaming, screaking pig of a bag or portable screech-owl. It seems to hook its tedrum threthrum crotchets and quavers upon your nerves, and tears them to tatters, like the ‘devil machine’ in a cotton manufactory. I would speak with the same deference of the music of a country, as I would of its superstitions; but what can a man do when his very soul is twisted out of its socket.... To think that this squealing pig in a poke should be the great lever of a people’s passions. It would not let a man die quietly, but would almost wake the dead.”

Even in the Highlands there seems to have been a tendency to joke at the expense of the pipes. A well-known proverb is said to have originated in this wise. The fox being hungry, found a bagpipe, and proceeded to eat the bag. There was still a remnant of breath in it, and when the fox bit it the drone gave a squeal. The fox was surprised, but not frightened, for he only said—“There’s meat and music here,” and went on with his meal. His remark has gone down to posterity as a proverb.

The bards, whom the pipes supplanted when they supplanted the harp, did not welcome the instrument, and satirised it in many of their poems. Duncan Ban Mac Intyre, the bard of Glenorchy, in the poem Aoir Uisdein Phiobair, abused it with sledge-hammer power; but his abuse was coarse, and contained little genuine humour. John Mac Codrum, the Hebridean bard, did better in Di-Moladh Piob Dhomh’uill Bhain, one of the most laughable things he wrote. The history of Donald Bain’s bagpipe he traced in an imaginative way through all its vicissitudes, from the days of Tubal Cain, through the disaster of the Deluge, and its damaging treatment by incompetent pipers. He compared the strains to some of the most discordant sounds in nature, spoke of it as a trump whose horrid music might rouse every Judas that ever lived, and used a multiplicity of illustrations to show its want of melody.

This spirit of cynicism was not confined altogether to the Gaelic bards. In The Family Legend, written by the distinguished poetess Joanna Baillie, there is introduced a short argument between the Duke of Argyll’s piper and “Dugald,” another of the characters. The piper has been playing in a small ante-room leading to the Duke’s apartment, when Dugald enters:—

And so on for a few more stanzas, till Argyll himself appears and puts an end to the discussion. But, after all, it is mostly non-Scotsmen who sneer at the pipes. They often understand as little of Scottish sentiment or Scottish music as did the Frenchman, who, after hearing “Tam o’ Shanter” recited, said it was “a story of how the devil came out of an old church and stole the tail from the horse of a farmer called Tam because he had played the pipes in the churchyard. I have heard,” he added, “play your pipes Scottish, and I would like well that some person would steal away all the pipes in Scotland.” Even our own William Black, the most inoffensive and delightful of latter-day writers, cannot resist the temptation to joke at the expense of the bagpipes. “Sermons,” he says, “are like Scottish bagpipes. They sound very well when one doesn’t hear them.” William Black, however, rarely if ever sneers, and this is very mild indeed, compared with what some other writers have thrown at the instrument.

The subject of Scottish national music is one against which ignorance is always breaking its shins. In a recent English novel, for instance, a Highlander is represented as sitting by the roadside singing a Jacobite song and accompanying himself on the bagpipe, while one of the most reputable of London afternoon papers gravely remarked when referring to the letting of Inveraray Castle, after the death of the eighth Duke of Argyll—“Ichabod is the watchword for the Highlands and Islands, and the pibroch may skirl the lament with better cause than if half the clan had fallen before the claymores of an alien tartan.” These are extreme cases, no doubt, but they are only two out of many. It is, of course, vain to expect Scottish feelings from non-Scottish people, and the over-running of our land by imported sportsmen does not improve matters a bit—

Although these people may cease their scoffing and make themselves as Highland as anyone can be whom nature has not made Highland, their affection for the music and their professions of goodwill are not likely to help to preserve it. It is for real Highlanders to keep alive their own music and show scorners that it is not going to die the death, but live while there are Highlands and a Highland people. If, on the other hand, they are playing the lament for a perishing race and a dying language, it is not much wonder if neighbours chime in with an emphatic Amen. Better far is the spirit of Alexander Fisher, a Glasgow poet, who wrote for Whistlebinkie:—