Delphi Complete Works of Robert Burns (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Robert Burns

  CHAPTER VIII. CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS.

  If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights and the shadows of Burns’s life, little comment need now be added. The reader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts here presented, a better impression of the man as he was, in his strength and in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been made to bring his various qualities together into a moral portrait. Those who wish to see a comment on his character, at once wise and tender, should turn to Mr. Carlyle’s famous essay on Burns.

  What estimate is to be formed of Burns — not as a poet, but as a man — is a question that will long be asked, and will be variously answered, according to the principles men hold, and the temperament they are of. Men of the world will regard him in one way, worshippers of genius in another; and there are many whom the judgments of neither of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one; it is the contradiction between the noble gifts he had and the actual life he lived, which make his career the painful tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely into the original outfit of the man, we seem in some sort to see how this came to be.

  Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, endowments of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as of the tenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right and wrong which he had brought from a pure home — place all these high gifts on the one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and turbulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrain and fatal to indulge — and between these two opposing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could overhear the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest manhood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymen there are many who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and his genial temperament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep defects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim honour for him, not only as Scotland’s greatest poet, but as one of the best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burns are no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge the counter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they cannot forget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it is ours to know; it is not ours to judge him who had them.

  While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scotland’s saints, others would give him rank as one of her religious teachers. This claim, if not so absurd as the other, is hardly more tenable. The religion described by Burns in The Cotter’s Saturday Night is, it should be remembered, his father’s faith, not his own. The fundamental truths of natural religion, faith in God and in immortality, amid sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, and has forcibly expressed. But there is nothing in his poems or in his letters which goes beyond sincere deism — nothing which is in any way distinctively Christian.

  Even were his teaching of religion much fuller than it is, one essential thing is still wanting. Before men can accept any one as a religious teacher, they not unreasonably expect that his practice should in some measure bear out his teaching. It was not as an authority on such matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In his Bard’s Epitaph, composed ten years before his death, he took a far truer and humbler measure of himself than any of his critics or panegyrists have done: —

  The poor inhabitant below

  Was quick to learn and wise to know,

  And keenly felt the friendly glow

  And softer flame;

  But thoughtless folly laid him low,

  And stained his name.

  Reader, attend! — whether thy soul

  Soars fancy’s flight beyond the pole,

  Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,

  In low pursuit;

  Know, prudent, cautious self-control

  Is wisdom’s root.

  “A confession,” says Wordsworth, “at once devout, poetical, and human — a history in the shape of a prophecy.”

  Leaving the details of his personal story, and —

  Each unquiet theme,

  Where gentlest judgments may misdeem,

  it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left to the world in his poetry. How often has one been tempted to wish that we had known as little of the actual career of Burns as we do of the life of Shakespeare, or even of Homer, and had been left to read his mind and character only by the light of his works! That poetry, though a fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what was best in the man; and though his stream of song contains some sediment we could wish away, yet as a whole, how vividly, clearly, sunnily it flows, how far the good preponderates over the evil.

  What that good is, must now be briefly said. To take his earliest productions first, his poems as distinct from his songs. Almost all the best of these are, with the one notable exception of Tam O’ Shanter, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actually composed before he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions, but, after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed himself to any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kilmarnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which is known as Burns’s peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country’s poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he felt himself indebted, and for them he always expresses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more show Burns’s inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best of those which he accepted as models. The old framework and metres which his country supplied, he took; asked no other, no better, and into those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such wine! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this new poetic wine of Burns’ poetry? At the basis of all his power lay absolute truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he saw, truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what Wordsworth recognized as Burns’s leading characteristic. He who acknowledged few masters, owned Burns as his master in this respect when he speaks of him —

  Whose light I hailed when first it shone,

  And showed my youth,

  How verse may build a princely throne

  On humble truth.

  Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his cottage, on society low and high and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human existence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and forced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and made them for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, reckless abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the mark, by the fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of the world’s inequalities, and some natural repining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as has been said, “some bitternesses of earthly spleen and passion with the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate deep into the great heart they had long tormented,” who that has not known his experience may venture too strongly to condemn him?

  This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision manifested itself in many ways. First. In the strength of it, he interpreted the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners of the Sc
ottish peasantry to whom he belonged, as they had never been interpreted before, and never can be again. Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edition. The Cotter’s Dog, and the Laird’s Dog, are, as has been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters’ lives, and their Lairds’. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humour and power. No doubt it is done from the peasant’s point of view. The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justice done to them; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just when the caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the edge of it is turned by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of

  Some gentle master, Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin,

  For Britain’s guid his saul indentin —

  Then Caesar, the rich man’s dog, replies, —

  Haith, lad, ye little ken about it:

  For Britain’s guid! — guid faith! I doubt it.

  Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him,

  An’ saying aye or no’s they bid him:

  At operas an’ plays parading,

  Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading!

  Or, may be, in a frolic daft,

  To Hague or Calais takes a waft,

  To make a tour an’ tak a whirl,

  To learn bon ton, an’ see the worl’.

  Then, at Vienna or Versailles,

  He rives his father’s auld entails;

  Or by Madrid he takes the rout,

  To thrum guitars and fecht wi’ nowt.

  * * * * *

  For Britain’s guid! for her destruction!

  Wi’ dissipation, feud an’ faction.

  Then exclaims Luath, the poor man’s dog, —

  Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate

  They waste sae many a braw estate!

  Are we sae foughten and harass’d

  For gear to gang that gate at last?

  And yet he allows, that for all that

  —— Thae frank, rantin’, ramblin’ billies,

  Fient haet o’ them’s ill-hearted fellows.

  “Mark the power of that one word, ‘nowt,’” said the late Thomas Aird. “If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all that way ‘to fecht wi’ nowt.’ It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly.”

  Or turn to the poem of Halloween. Here he has sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment — painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the remembrance of antique customs and superstitious observances, which even in Burns’s day were beginning to fade, and have now all but disappeared.

  Or again, take The auld Farmer’s New-year-morning Salutation to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a commonplace, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough setting her face to the furzy braes.

  Thou never braing’t, an’ fetch’t, and fliskit,

  But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit,

  An spread abreed thy weel-fill’d brisket,

  Wi’ pith an’ pow’r,

  Till spritty knowes wad rair’t and riskit,

  An’ slypet owre.

  To paraphrase this, “Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over.” The latter part of this paraphrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English words could have rendered these things as compactly and graphically?

  Of The Cotter’s Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns’s highest level. The metre was not native to him. It contains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are heavy. But as Lockhart has said, in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the better nature that was originally in him. It shows how Burns could reverence the old national piety, however little he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two great national poets has described Scottish character on the side of that grave, deep, though undemonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic element in it.

  No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sympathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to themselves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their own language made musical, and glorified by genius. He made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that otherwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of themselves on a large scale — of themselves, both in their virtues and in their vices.

  Secondly, Burns in his poetry was not only the interpreter of Scotland’s peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue that followed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all symbols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers.

  At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate, to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon, the power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local; the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he accomplished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that “the old kingdom” has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to-day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness, if she had been left without her two “sacred poets.”

  Thirdly. Burns’s sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class nor country; they had something more catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what “random shots o’ countra wit” did he hit off the public men of his time! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke! The elde
r, and the younger Pitt, “yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox,” as he irreverently calls him — if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.’s of the time, from —