This contest of the poets was an old
custom with them. And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had
never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it
down from father to son. We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry
whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power
which literature gives them to live outside it. Through our sacred
Scriptures, through the ancient storytellers, through the tradition which
in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of
time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our
lives in the Orient. But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the
crofter in his Highland cabin, the operative in his squalid
tenement-house, in the hopelessness of poverty, in the grime of a life
made twice as hard as that of the Arab by an inimical climate, does not
owe more to literature than the man of culture, whose material
surroundings are heaven in the imagination of the poor. Think what his
wretched life would be, in its naked deformity, without the popular
ballads, without the romances of Scott, which have invested his land for
him, as for us, with enduring charm; and especially without the songs of
Burns, which keep alive in him the feeling that he is a man, which impart
to his blunted sensibility the delicious throb of spring-songs that
enable him to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky-songs that make
him tender of the wee bit daisy at his feet--songs that hearten him when
his heart is fit to break with misery.
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