ROBERT BURNS AND HIS TEACHERS
One must not come to Scotland without seeing Ayr, the native village of
Burns, any more than go to Tokio and not get a glimpse of the Mikado.
It is said that more tourists hailing from America visit annually the
village in which Robert Burns first saw the light than are seen at
Stratford. This may mean that there are probably more prosperous and
cultured descendants of Scotsmen in America than there are of ancestral
English folk. In addition to the throng from trans-Atlantic lands must
be counted a goodly company of passionate pilgrims from all parts of
the British Empire. Theodore Cuyler tells us, in his “Recollections,”
how Carlyle, when a boy, visited the grave of the poet, his feelings
allowing him to say only, but over and over again, “Rabbie Burns,
Rabbie Burns.”
The cottage in which the poet was born is probably in a much more
substantial condition to-day than in Burns’s infancy. When the poet’s
father took hold of the structure, it was a “clay bigging,” which the
parent rebuilt with his own hands. On the night of Robert’s birth, a
storm came on and part of the cottage fell in, so that the mother with
the baby had to fly for shelter to the house of a neighbor until the
house was repaired.
We moved down to the road opposite the new florid Gothic church of
Alloway, where was a flight of steps, worn by the feet of thousands of
pilgrims, leading over the wall to “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.” In
Burns’s day the edifice was whole and in use. All that is now left of
the famous building are four bare walls, two of them gabled and one of
them surmounted by a bell-cote. Burns’s progenitor is buried “where the
rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”
We were guided around by a most unprepossessing old native, a
Dick Deadeye in appearance, who insisted that “preachers were
of no use, except to scold the deil.” He made himself rather
free in his conversation with and repartees made to the clerical
gentlemen of the party, who were inclined to chaff this apparently
self-appointed defender of His Satanic Majesty. The old Scotsman
seemed, with his malevolent eye (not whole, if I remember aright),
to be the very incarnation of the dogma of total depravity. By a
sort of counter-irritant, his wit served but to stiffen up whatever
“orthodoxy”--after studying the Bible, with and without the aid of the
creeds--some of us had left. In any event, the cicerone “got as gude as
he gie.”
We glanced at the big monument of nine Corinthian fluted columns
emblematic of the nine muses. With all due respect to the Greeks, but
much less to the Scots, who reared the token, some of us wondered
why such a true son of the soil as Burns could not have had for his
memorial in architecture something more original than a Greek temple,
for Scotland lacks neither brains nor taste.
Here is said to be the Bible given by Burns to his Highland Mary,
held in the hand of each at their last interview, while both promised
eternal loyalty to each other. This “blessed damozel,” made immortal in
the poem, was Mary Campbell, a dairy maid. Their last meeting was when,
“standing one on each side of a small brook, they laved their hands in
the stream, and holding a Bible between them, pronounced a vow of an
eternal constancy.” The scene of the parting of the lovers is still
pointed out. In returning from her visit of filial duty, Mary fell sick
and died at Greenock. At Ellislan in 1789, on the third anniversary
of the day on which Burns heard of her death, he wrote that loveliest
of all his ballads, the address to “Mary in Heaven.” Since 1898, one
may see her lofty statue reared in her native place, Dunoon, on Castle
Hill, now famous for its seaside villas and as a summer resort, with
Loch Eh, not far away. Thousands come, also, to see the proof that man
worships woman.
Nevertheless, after his Highland Mary, Burns had many spasms of
affection, for he seems to have worshipped womanhood. One of his loves
was a young girl, in whose honor he wrote a poem when she was about to
leave for America, whither she went and married, rearing a family of
sons who became famous in science. One of her descendants settled at
Ithaca, New York, to live by the side of our beautiful Lake Cayuga. It
is after him that Port Renwick on its shores is named.
In a grotto, at the end of the garden, are the figures of Tam o’
Shanter and Souter Johnnie. Except for the natural beauty of the
spot in the Doon Valley, the country seems very monotonous and
uninteresting, though the two bridges are worth attention. One, “the
auld bridge,” has a single slim arch, which Meg tried to gain when she
fled from the witches. Here flows the river Doon, to which the writings
of Burns have given such celebrity. It rises in a lake of the same
name, about eight miles in length, and the river has a seaward course
of eighteen miles, its banks, especially in summer time, being laden
with floral richness and beauty. Besides looking so small to one used
to the Hudson, Susquehanna, and Delaware, it seemed almost lost in
trees and shrubbery. Yet in some parts its rocky banks are imposing.
[Illustration: THE TAM O’ SHANTER INN, AYR]
There is also a statue of Robert Burns, between whom and Americans
there will ever be an indissoluble bond of sympathy. For, apart from
his wonderful work in liberating Scottish poetry from the bonds of
classical moulds and traditions, he had that profound sympathy with
man as man, which enabled him to see into the real meaning of the
French Revolution and its effect on the whole world. Though not blind
to its horrors and mistakes, he saw far more clearly its ultimate
results and blessings to mankind than could the men then in power and
office in England. These, in 1790, were too much like their successors
of 1861, when the struggle between slavery and freedom set armies in
shock. Then the British leaders of public opinion, the proprietors of
the Lancashire cotton mills, “Punch,” the London “Times,” and even
the great poets uttered no voice of appreciation of Lincoln or of the
freedom-loving American masses, not only of the North, but in the
highlands of the South.
Burns not only taught in verse the principles of the American
Declaration of Independence, but in his famous lines made forecast of
the United States of the world, which our descendants are to see.
As a creator of poetry, as one who took the genius of Scotland by
the hand, as it were, and led her out of the old paths, Burns will
ever awaken undying gratitude among Scotsmen. He drew his inspiration
from living nature and not from dead antiquity, or from books, old or
new. To him, indeed, there was an antiquity that was living, and that
part of the past which was its true and deathless soul, he clothed
in new beauty. There is no nobler vindication of John Knox of the
Reformers, who, with all their shortcomings and human infirmities,
demanded reality and the uplift of the common man. They gave Scotland
public schools, and the result was a sturdy, independent, and educated
peasantry. It was from that class that Burns sprang. John Knox and the
Reformers made a Robert Burns possible.
Burns had the virtues and defects of his class. He had vices that were
not peculiar to the common people, but were shared in by the lordly
and those high in office. Apart from his wonder-working power in the
witchery of language, Burns, though called “the illegitimate child of
Calvinism,” has wrought a moral influence for good in Scotland such as
can be attributed to very few men who possess the reputation of higher
sanctity. For besides Burns’s strong common sense, lively imagination,
keen sympathy with what was beautiful in nature and noblest in
man,--withal, in love with his native land and ever susceptible to fair
women,--Burns purified and uplifted popular song. Out of the black
mire of the obscene and indelicate, he called forth to bloom and glory
deathless flowers of song.
Burns seemed to be the very incarnation of all that was necessary to
be a true poet of the people. He illustrated the saying, ascribed to
more than one man, that others might make the laws, but he would make
the songs of the people--and he did. Many an old snatch of song,
bit of sentiment, or scrap of poetry, which in form was vulgar and
even indecent, he made clean. Purifying what was dear to the people,
he set the substance in new shape and gave it wings of song. Some of
the ancient ditties, now in happy oblivion, are too obscene to be
sung to-day in their old form by refined society, but after their
new baptism by Burns, they have become teachers of piety that excel
in lasting power preachers or sermons. Such, for example, is “John
Anderson, my Jo, John,” now so sweet and pathetic. In fact, Burns’s
transformation of certain specimens of Scottish song is like that
which we have seen when a handful of jewelry, of fashions outworn, was
cast into the crucible made white hot and salted with nitre. The dross
went off into vapor and fumes and the old forms and defects were lost
in oblivion. What was of value remained. The pure gold was not lost,
rather set free and regained. Poured forth into an ingot, that would
become coin or jewels, it entered upon new life and unto a resurrection
of fresh beauty.
Above all, Burns disliked to be tutored in matters of taste. He could
not endure that one should run shouting before him whenever any fine
objects appeared. On one occasion, a lady at the poet’s side said,
“Burns, have you anything to say to this?” He answered, “Nothing,
madam,” as he glanced at the leader of the party, “for an ass is
braying over it.”
Since the ploughman-poet of Ayr was so generous in confessing
inspiration and indebtedness to his greatest teacher, it is not meet
that we should ignore this man and name in any real view of the forces
making intellectual Scotland.
Robert Fergusson, though less known in countries abroad than
in Scotland, was the spiritual father of Robert Burns and none
acknowledged this more than Burns himself. When the man from Ayr
visited Edinburgh, in 1787, he sought out the poet’s grave and erected
the memorial stone which is still preserved in the larger and finer
monument. Fergusson, born in 1751, was a graduate of St. Andrews. In
Edinburgh, he contributed poems to Ruddiman’s “Weekly Magazine,” which
gained him considerable local reputation. His society was eagerly
sought and he was made a member of the Cape Club. Unfortunately,
Fergusson fell a victim to his convivial habits, and was led into
excesses which permanently injured his health. Alcohol probably helped
to develop that brain disease usually called insanity. It was while
in this condition that he met with Dr. John Brown, of Haddington,
whose name is a household word in Scotland. The good man, a sound
Presbyterian and Calvinist, was much more. He made “the love of
the Lord” the real and ultimate test of a man’s orthodoxy. Brown’s
“Self-Interpreting Bible” has been amazingly popular throughout heather
land. The John Brown, whom some of us knew, who wrote “Rab and His
Friends,” and “Pet Marjorie,” was the grandson of Fergusson’s friend.
After meeting with Dr. Brown, Fergusson became so very serious that
he would read nothing but his Bible. A fall, by which his head was
seriously injured, aggravated the symptoms of insanity, which had
already shown themselves. After two months’ confinement in the only
public asylum then known in Edinburgh, he died in 1774. His poems had
been collected the year before his death.
Perhaps Fergusson’s fame rests as much upon his unhappy life and early
death, and upon the fact that he was a true forerunner of Scotland’s
greatest son of genius, as upon the essential merits of his verse.
Burns read carefully Fergusson’s poems, admired them greatly, and
called the author his “elder brother in the muses.” The higher critics
declare that his influence on the poems of Robert Burns, such as “The
Holy Fair,” “The Brigs of Ayr,” “On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street,”
and “To a Mouse,” is undoubted. Even “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,”
when read alongside of “The Farmer’s Ingle,” of Fergusson, shows that
Burns’s exquisite picture in verse of homely peasant life in Scotland
is a firelight reflection of the older original, at which Burns warmed
his genius.
With less of an immediate intellectual debt, Burns was certainly
obligated to an older cultivator of Scottish poetry; who, in large
measure, must be credited with the revival of public appreciation of
the bards of Caledonia and who helped powerfully to create the climate
in which Burns’s genius could blossom and bear fruit.
Among the effigies in Edinburgh, city of statues, is that of Allan
Ramsay, the poet (1686–1758). When we first saw this work of art, it
was comparatively new, having been erected in 1865, by which time
national appreciation had ripened.
Ramsay must ever hold the gratitude of Scottish people, because he,
more than any one else, made the wonderful world of Scottish music
known in England and to the nations. He brought together, in “The
Tea-Table Miscellany,” a collection of the choicest Scottish songs. He
himself was a poetaster, rather than a great lyrist, and throughout his
career proved himself a canny business man.
In literary history Allan Ramsay achieved two great triumphs. He
contributed thus early to the naturalistic reaction of the eighteenth
century against the slavery to classicism. As an editor, he furnished
the connecting link between the “Makars,” as verse-writers were called
in the Scotland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the poets
Fergusson (1751–74) and Burns (1759–96). Ramsay did much to revive
interest in vernacular literature. He certainly stimulated an ignorant
public to fresh enjoyment.
This reaction in Scotland was followed by one in England, for which
the publication of Bishop Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry”
furnished a sure foundation. Scotland honored herself when she honored
her poet Ramsay. Happy is the nation that appreciates her sons who
bid her people look within to find enduring treasure. To Ramsay, the
prophet’s words apply: “And they that be of thee shall build the old
waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations
and thou shalt be called ... the restorer of paths to dwell in.”
The second Allan Ramsay (1713–84), an accomplished scholar and
gentleman, was the son of the poet. Being carefully educated
by his father and sent to Rome to study art, he became an able
portrait-painter. Through introduction to the Prince of Wales,
afterwards George III, he rose rapidly into favor. To him we are
indebted for the portrait of that King George, with whose physiognomy,
more than with that of almost any other sovereign of England, our
fathers became very familiar during the time of their eight years’
disagreement with His Majesty and his ministers.