we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was
in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show
itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: culture,
leisure, true effort, nay even length of life. His poems are, with
scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions; poured forth with
little premeditation; expressing, by such means as offered, the
passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance was it
permitted him to grapple with {14} any subject with the full
collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated
fire of his genius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect
fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless,
there is something in these poems, marred and defective as they are,
which forbids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by.
Some sort of enduring quality they must have: for after fifty years
of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to
be read; nay are read more and more eagerly, more and more
extensively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class
upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all
classes, down to the most hard, unlettered and truly natural class,
who read little, and especially no poetry, except because they find
pleasure in it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity,
which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and
over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth
inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to imply some
rare excellence in these works. What is that excellence?
To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence of
Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose; but,
at the same time, it is plain and easily recognized: his _Sincerity_,
his indisputable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no
hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire-drawn refinings, either in
thought or feeling: the passion that is traced before us has glowed
in a living heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own
understanding, and been a light to his own steps. He does not write
from hearsay, but from sight and experience; it is the scenes that he
has lived and labored {15} amidst, that he describes: those scenes,
rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his
soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he speaks forth what
is in him, not from any outward call of vanity or interest, but
because his heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such
melody and modulation as he can; "in homely rustic jingle;" but it is
his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for finding readers
and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be
first moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, _Si vis me
flere_,[20] is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To
every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be
believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the
thought, the emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and
other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of
sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of
view, we may stand above the speaker, or below him; but in either
case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some
response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward
rank or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to
man.[21]
This may appear a very simple principle, and one {16} which Burns had
little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is easy enough: but
the practical appliance is not easy; is indeed the fundamental
difficulty which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely
one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to
discriminate the true from the false; a heart too dull to love the
one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all temptations,
are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or as more commonly
happens, with both of these deficiencies combine a love of
distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, and we
have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother,
is of morals. How often does the one and the other front us, in
poetry, as in life! Great poets themselves are not always free of
this vice; nay it is precisely on a certain sort and degree of
greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after
excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of
success; he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it
imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man: yet if we
examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from
faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is not true.
He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with
vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon
ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we
would ask, real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable
men? Do not these characters, does not the character of their
author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a
thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being,
but something intended to look much grander than nature? {17}
Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman
contempt and moody desperation, with so much scowling, and
teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling
of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours,
than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last
threescore and ten years. To our minds there is a taint of this
sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in
every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps "Don Juan,"
especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a
_sincere_ work, he ever wrote; the only work where he showed himself,
in any measure, as he was; and seemed so intent on his subject as,
for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this vice; we
believe, heartily detested it: nay he had declared formal war against
it in words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this
primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: _to read
its own consciousness without mistakes_, without errors involuntary
or wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility who comes
before us from the first, and abides with us to the last, with such a
total want of affectation. He is an honest man, and an honest
writer. In his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his
littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no
lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue; to be, in
fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral.
Here, however, let us say, it is to the poetry of Burns that we now
allude; to those writings which he had time to meditate, and where no
special reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his
{18} endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and other
fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this praise.
Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of style; but on
the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and twisted; a
certain high-flown inflated tone; the stilting emphasis of which
contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his
poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether
unaffected. Does not Shakespeare himself sometimes premeditate the
sheerest bombast! But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it
is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first was his
comparative deficiency in language. Burns, though for most part he
writes with singular force and even gracefulness, is not master of
English prose, as he is of Scotch verse; not master of it, we mean,
in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These
Letters strike us as the effort of a man to express something which
he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and weightier
excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns's social rank. His
correspondents are often men whose relation to him he has never
accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is either forearming
himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the
style he thinks will please them.[22] At all events, we should
remember that these faults, even in his Letters, are not the rule,
but the exception. Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish {19}
to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his style becomes
simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters
to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent.
But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sincerity, it has
another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or perhaps a
means, of the fore-going: this displays itself in his choice of
subjects; or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the power
he has of making all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like
the ordinary man, is forever seeking in external circumstances the
help which can be found only in himself. In what is familiar and
near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: home is not poetical
but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conventional heroic world,
that poetry resides; were he there and not here, were he thus and not
so, it would be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of
rose-colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality not on
the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of
the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans,
and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent
figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all
hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! But yet, as a great
moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we
fain preach to the poets, "a sermon on the duty of staying at home."
Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little
for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because it
is better or nobler than our own, than simply because it is
different; and even this attraction must be of the most transient
{20} sort. For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one; and
have as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted with the rest,
therefore, but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness?
Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond
his native Greece, and two centuries before he was born; or because
he wrote what passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which
is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this: is
their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that
of other men,--they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest
subject; is it not so,--they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral
favor, even from the highest.[23]
The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a subject: the
elements of his art are in him, and around him on every hand; for him
the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but under it and
within it: nay he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it
there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him,
the poet is in his place; for here too is man's existence, with its
infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted,
ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and
hopes that wander through Eternity; and all the mystery of brightness
and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since
man first began {21} to live. Is there not the fifth act of a
Tragedy in every deathbed, though it were a peasant's, and a bed of
heath? And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be
Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must
no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce? Man's life
and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must
have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; or
they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a _vates_, a seer;
a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him,
which another cannot equally decipher? then he is no poet, and Delphi
itself will not make him one.
In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet,
better manifests his capability, better proves the truth of his
genius, than if he had by his own strength kept the whole Minerva
Press[24] going, to the end of his literary course. He shows himself
at least a poet of Nature's own making; and Nature, after all, is
still the grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and the
other external condition being requisite for the existence of a poet.
Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must have studied
certain things, studied, for instance, "the elder dramatists," and so
learned a poetic language; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the
heart. At other times we are told he must be bred in a certain rank,
and must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes;
because, above all things, he must see the world. As to seeing the
world, we {22} apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he
have but eyesight to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, the task
might be hard. The blind or the purblind man "travels from Dan to
Beersheba, and finds it all barren." But happily every poet is born
in the world; and sees it, with or against his will, every day and
every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man's heart, the
true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal
themselves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in
every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, do not the
elements of all human virtues and all human vices; the passions at
once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter
lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that has
practised honest self-examination? Truly, this same world may be
seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it
ever came to light in Crockford's,[25] or the Tuileries itself.
But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant
to poetry; for it is hinted that he should have _been born_ two
centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, about that date, vanished from the
earth, and became no longer attainable by men![26] Such cobweb
speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature;
but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there: the Shakespeare
or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he walks onward, silently
brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he
appear? Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his
marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is {23}
not the material but the workman that is wanting. It is not the dark
place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish peasant's life was
the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it,
and a poet of it; found it a man's life, and therefore significant to
men. A thousand battlefields remain unsung; but the "Wounded Hare"
has not perished without its memorial; a balm of mercy yet breathes
on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our
"Halloween" had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since
the era of the Druids; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it
the materials of a Scottish Idyl: neither was the "Holy Fair" any
Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition and
Hypocrisy and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man's hand
it became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic life.[27]
Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and
how you will, and true poetry will not be wanting.
Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we have now
attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth pervades
whatever Burns has written; a virtue, as of green fields and mountain
breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of natural life and
hardy natural men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a
sweet native gracefulness: he is tender, he is vehement, yet without
constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or inflames it,
with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see that
in this man there was {24} the gentleness, the trembling pity of a
woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a
hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in
the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for
every note of human feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the
ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his
"lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." And observe with what a
fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it what it may! How he
fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye; full and
clear in every lineament; and catches the real type and essence of
it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one
of which misleads him! Is it of reason; some truth to be discovered?
No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute,
unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of the question; and
speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it
of description some visual object to be represented? No poet of any
age or nation is more graphic than Burns: the characteristic features
disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand and
we have a likeness. And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often
awkward metre, so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a
draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a
Retzsch[28] is not more expressive or exact.
Of[29] this last excellence, the plainest and most {25} comprehensive
of all, being indeed the root and foundation of _every_ sort of
talent, poetical or intellectual, we could produce innumerable
instances from the writings of Burns. Take these glimpses of a
snowstorm from his "Winter Night" (the italics are ours):--
When biting Boreas, fell and doure,
_Sharp shivers_ thro' the leafless bow'r,
And Phœbus _gies a short-liv'd glowr
Far south the lift,
Dim-darkening thro' the flaky shower
Or whirling drift:_
'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd,
Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd,
While burns _wi' snawy wreeths upchok'd
Wild-eddying swirl,_
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd[30]
Down headlong hurl.
Are there not "descriptive touches" there? The describer _saw_ this
thing; the essential feature and true likeness of every circumstance
in it; saw, and not with the eye only. "Poor labour locked in sweet
sleep;" the dead stillness of man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not
unprotected, while such strife of the material elements rages, and
seems to reign supreme in loneliness: this is of the heart as well as
of the eye!--Look also at his image of a thaw, and prophesied fall of
the "Auld Brig:"--
When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains;
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
Or stately Lugar's _mossy_ fountains _boil_,
Or where the Greenock winds his _moorland_ course,
Or haunted Garpal[31] draws his feeble source,
{26}
Arous'd by blust'ring winds and _spotting_ thowes,[32]
_In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes;[33]
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat,[34]
Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate;_
And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey,
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd _tumbling_ sea;
Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise!
And _dash the gumlie jaups[35] up to the pouring skies_.[36]
The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that Deluge! The
welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight; the "gumlie jaups"
and the "pouring skies" are mingled together; it is a world of rain
and ruin.--In respect of mere clearness and minute fidelity, the
_Farmer's_ commendation of his _Auld Mare_ in plough or in cart, may
vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's
Chariot.[37] Nor have we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind[38] and his
brawny customers, inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is needless to
multiply examples. One other trait of a much finer sort we select
from multitudes of such among his "Songs." It gives, in a single
line, to the saddest feeling the saddest environment and local
habitation:--
_The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave,
And time is setting wi' me, O;_
{27}
Farewell, false friends! false lover, farewell!
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O.[39]
This clearness of sight we have called the foundation of all talent;
for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we know how to place
or prize it, in our understanding, our imagination, our affections?
Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence; but capable
of being united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary
power. Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but strangely
enough, at no great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It
belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind; and gives no sure
indication of the higher endowments that may exist along with it. In
all the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great
garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact:
Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident;
but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not more
distinguished by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his
conceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he
thought, his emphasis of expression may give a humble but the
readiest proof. Whoever uttered sharper sayings than his; words more
memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor
and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole
scene. We hear of "a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility
direct {28} from Almighty God." Our Scottish forefathers in the
battlefield struggled forward "_red-wat-shod_:"[40] in this one word
a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate
for Art!
In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this
vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute force is
ever visible in his judgments, and in his feelings and volitions.
Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise:[41] "All the
faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally
vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of
his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius
exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his
conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in
whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities." But
this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly
poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats,
where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and a
certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty,
no organ which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them;
but rather the result of their general harmony and completion.[42]
The feelings, the gifts {29} that exist in the Poet are those that
exist, with more or less development, in every human soul: the
imagination, which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same
faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. How
does the Poet speak to men, with power, but by being still more a man
than they? Shakespeare, it has been well observed, in the planning
and completing of his tragedies, has shown an understanding, were it
nothing more, which might have governed states, or indited a "Novum
Organum." What Burns's force of understanding may have been, we have
less means of judging: it had to dwell among the humblest objects;
never saw Philosophy; never rose, except by natural effort and for
short intervals, into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless,
sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his
works: we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though untutored
strength; and can understand how, in conversation, his quick sure
insight into men and things may, as much as aught else about him,
have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country.