well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could not well
have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart.
The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not
all-sufficient; nay perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the
most certainly elude it. For {30} this logic works by words, and
"the highest," it has been said, "cannot be expressed in words." We
are not without tokens of an openness for this higher truth also, of
a keen though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns.
Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, "wonders," in the passage above
quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the
"doctrine of association." We rather think that far subtler things
than the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to
him. Here for instance:--
"We know nothing," thus writes he, "or next to nothing, of the
structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming
caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this
thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast,
makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favorite flowers in
spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the
foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary
hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never
hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the
wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning,
without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion
or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are
we a piece of machinery, which, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes
the impression of the passing accident; or do these workings argue
something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to
such proofs of those awful and important realities: a God that made
all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, {31} and a world of
weal or woe beyond death and the grave."[43]
Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as something
different from general force and fineness of nature, as something
partly independent of them. The necessities of language so require
it; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and independent:
except in special cases, and from special causes, they ever go
together. A man of strong understanding is generally a man of strong
character; neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from
delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in
the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of
feeling; that his _light_ is not more pervading than his _warmth_.
He is a man of the most impassioned temper; with passions not strong
only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great
poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love towards all
Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and
makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is a true old
saying, that "Love furthers knowledge:" but above all, it is the
living essence of that knowledge which makes poets; the first
principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid
affection, his generous all-embracing Love, we have spoken already,
as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and
deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to multiply
examples. Not man only, but all that environs man in the material
and moral universe, is lovely in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," the
"troop of gray plover," the "solitary {32} curlew," all are dear to
him; all live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as
in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that,
amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry
desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the "ourie
cattle" and "silly sheep," and their sufferings in the pitiless storm!
I thought me on the ourie cattle,
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war,
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,[44]
Beneath a scaur.
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing,
That in the merry months o' spring
Delighted me to hear thee sing,
What comes o' thee?
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing?
And close thy ee?[45]
The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof and chinky
wall,"[46] has a heart to pity even these! This is worth several
homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns,
indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of
being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him. The
very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy:--
But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben;
O, wad ye tak a thought and men'!
Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken,--
Still hae a stake;
I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
Even for your sake![47]
"He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop; {33} "and is
cursed and damned already."--"I am sorry for it," quoth my uncle
Toby![48]--a Poet without Love were a physical and metaphysical
impossibility.
But[49] has it not been said, in contradiction to this principle,
that "Indignation makes verses"?[50] It has been so said, and is
true enough: but the contradiction is apparent, not real. The
Indignation which makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted
Love; the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to
ourselves or others, which has been injured, and which this
tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend and avenge. No selfish
fury of heart, existing there as a primary feeling, and without its
opposite, ever produced much Poetry: otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger
were the most musical of all our choristers. Johnson said, he loved
a good hater; by which he must have meant, not so much one that hated
violently, as one that hated wisely; hated baseness from love of
nobleness. However, in spite of Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough
for once in speech, but which need not have been so often adopted in
print since then, we rather believe that good men deal sparingly in
hatred, either wise or unwise: nay that a "good" hater is still a
desideratum in this world. The Devil, at least, who passes for the
chief {34} and best of that class, is said to be nowise an amiable
character.[51]
Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also given us
specimens: and among the best that were ever given. Who will forget
his "Dweller in yon Dungeon dark;" a piece that might have been
chanted by the Furies of Æschylus? The secrets of the infernal Pit
are laid bare; a boundless baleful "darkness visible;"[52] and
streaks of hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom!
Dweller in yon Dungeon dark,
Hangman of Creation, mark!
Who in widow's weeds appears,
Laden with unhonoured years,
Noosing with care a bursting purse,
Baited with many a deadly curse![53]
Why should we speak of "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled;" since all
know of it, from the king to the meanest of his subjects? This
dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of
tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme,
who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak,--judiciously
enough, for a man composing "Bruce's Address" might be unsafe to
trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he
formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear, it
should be sung with the throat {35} of the whirlwind.[54] So long as
there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in
fierce thrills under this war-ode; the best, we believe, that was
ever written by any pen.
Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear and mind with a
strange tenacity, is "Macpherson's Farewell." Perhaps there is
something in the tradition itself that cooperates. For was not this
grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus,[55] that "lived a life of
sturt and strife, and died by treacherie,"--was not he too one of the
Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote
misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, was there not
a touch of grace given him? A fibre of love and softness, of poetry
itself, must have lived in his savage heart: for he composed that air
the night before his execution; on the wings of that poor melody his
better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain and all the ignominy
and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss!
Here also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line,[56] was material Fate
matched against man's Free-will; matched in bitterest though obscure
duel; and the ethereal soul sank not, even in its blindness, without
a cry which has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given
words to such a soul; words that we never {36} listen to without a
strange half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling?
Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,
Sae dauntingly gaed he;
He play'd a spring, and danced it round,
Below the gallows-tree.
Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, which we have
recognized as the great characteristic of Burns, and of all true
poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Humor.
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth
rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to
the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not of
his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature; for this is
Drollery rather than Humor: but a much tenderer sportfulness dwells
in him; and comes forth here and there, in evanescent and beautiful
touches; as in his "Address to the Mouse," or the "Farmer's Mare," or
in his "Elegy on poor Mailie," which last may be reckoned his
happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces there are traits of a
Humor as fine as that of Sterne;[57] yet altogether different,
original, peculiar,--the Humor of Burns.
Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred
qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might be said; but now, with
these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of
our subject. To speak of his individual Writings, adequately and
with any detail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already
hinted, we can look on {37} but few of these pieces as, in strict
critical language, deserving the name of Poems: they are rhymed
eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom essentially
melodious, aerial, poetical. "Tam o' Shanter" itself, which enjoys
so high a favor, does not appear to us at all decisively to come
under this last category. It is not so much a poem, as a piece of
sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard
and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that
dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and
when it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new-modelling of
his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of
human nature, which once responded to such things; and which lives in
us too, and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrating with
far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German readers
will understand us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the
Musäus of this tale.[58] Externally it is all green and living; yet
look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece
does not properly cohere: the strange chasm which yawns in our
incredulous imaginations between the Ayr publichouse and the gate of
Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay the idea of such a bridge is
laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere
drunken phantasmagoria, or many-colored spectrum painted on
ale-vapors, and the Farce {38} alone has any reality. We do not say
that Burns should have made much more of this tradition; we rather
think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made
of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power
displayed in what he has actually accomplished; but we find far more
"Shakespearean" qualities, as these of "Tam o' Shanter" have been
fondly named, in many of his other pieces; nay we incline to believe
that this latter might have been written, all but quite as well, by a
man who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent.
Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly poetical of all
his "poems" is one which does not appear in Currie's Edition; but has
been often printed before and since, under the humble title of "The
Jolly Beggars." The subject truly is among the lowest in Nature; but
it only the more shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the domain
of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted; melted
together, refined; and poured forth in one flood of true _liquid_
harmony. It is light, airy, soft of movement; yet sharp and precise
in its details; every face is a portrait: that _raucle carlin_,[59]
that _wee Apollo_, that _Son of Mars_, are Scottish, yet ideal; the
scene is at once a dream, and the very Ragcastle of
"Poosie-Nansie."[60] Farther, it seems in a considerable degree
complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in
a poem. The blanket of the Night is drawn asunder for a moment; in
full, ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in
their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of {39} Life vindicates
its right to gladness even here; and when the curtain closes, we
prolong the action, without effort; the next day as the last, our
_Caird_ and our _Balladmonger_ are singing and soldiering; their
"brats and callets" are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other
night, in new combinations, they will wring from Fate another hour of
wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with man
which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no
inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. There is the
fidelity, humor, warm life and accurate painting and grouping of some
Teniers,[61] for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without
significance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best
of Burns's writings: we mean to say only, that it seems to us the
most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition,
strictly so called. In "The Beggar's Opera,"[62] in the "Beggar's
Bush,"[63] as other critics[64] have already remarked, there is
nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this _Cantata_; nothing,
as we think, which comes within many degrees of it.
But by far the most finished, complete and truly inspired pieces of
Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his "Songs." It is
here that, although through a small aperture, his light shines with
least obstruction; in its highest beauty and pure sunny clearness.
The reason may be, that Song is a brief simple species of
composition; and requires nothing {40} so much for its perfection as
genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the Song has its
rules equally with the Tragedy; rules which in most cases are poorly
fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt. We might write a
long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon by far the best
that Britain has yet produced: for indeed, since the era of Queen
Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth
attention has been accomplished in this department. True, we have
songs enough "by persons of quality;" we have tawdry, hollow,
wine-bred madrigals; many a rhymed speech "in the flowing and watery
vein of Osorius the Portugal Bishop,"[65] rich in sonorous words,
and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental
sensuality; all which many persons cease not from endeavoring to
sing; though for most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat
outwards, or at best from some region far enough short of the _Soul_;
not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in
some vaporous debatable-land on the outskirts of the Nervous System,
most of such madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated.
With the Songs of Burns we must not name these things. Independently
of the clear, manly, heartfelt {41} sentiment that ever pervades
_his_ poetry, his Songs are honest in another point of view: in form,
as well as in spirit. They do not _affect_ to be set to music, but
they actually and in themselves are music; they have received their
life, and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as
Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not
detailed, but suggested; not _said_, or spouted, in rhetorical
completeness and coherence; but _sung_, in fitful gushes, in glowing
hints, in fantastic breaks, in _warblings_ not of the voice only, but
of the whole mind. We consider this to be the essence of a song; and
that no songs since the little careless catches, and as it were drops
of song, which Shakespeare has here and there sprinkled over his
Plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the same degree as most of
Burns's do. Such grace and truth of external movement, too,
presupposes in general a corresponding force and truth of sentiment
and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the
former quality than in the latter. With what tenderness he sings,
yet with what vehemence and entireness! There is a piercing wail in
his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy; he burns with the sternest
ire, or laughs with the loudest or sliest mirth; and yet he is sweet
and soft, "sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as
their parting tear." If we further take into account the immense
variety of his subjects; how, from the loud flowing revel in "Willie
brew'd a Peck o' Maut," to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness of
"Mary in Heaven;" from the glad kind greeting of "Auld Lang Syne," or
the comic archness of "Duncan Gray," to the fire-eyed fury of "Scots
wha hae wi' Wallace bled," he has found a tone and words for {42}
every mood of man's heart,--it will seem a small praise if we rank
him as the first of all our Song-writers; for we know not where to
find one worthy of being second to him.
It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influence as an
author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher's[66]
aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. "Let me
make the songs of a people," said he, "and you shall make its laws."
Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legislators
on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are already part of the
mother-tongue, not of Scotland only, but of Britain, and of the
millions that in all ends of the earth speak a British language. In
hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-colored joy and woe
of existence, the _name_, the _voice_ of that joy and that woe, is
the name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking,
perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and
feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether private
individual, with means apparently the humblest.
In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that Burns's
influence may have been considerable: we mean, as exerted specially
on the Literature of his country, at least on the Literature of
Scotland. Among the great changes which British, particularly
Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, one of the
greatest will be found to consist in its {43} remarkable increase of
nationality. Even the English writers most popular in Burns's time
were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its
best sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good
measure, taken place of the old insular home-feeling; literature was,
as it were, without any local environment; was not nourished by the
affections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and
Glovers[67] seemed to write almost as if _in vacuo_; the thing
written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for
Englishmen, as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of
this, for certain Generalizations which philosophy termed men.
Goldsmith is an exception: not so Johnson; the scene of his "Rambler"
is little more English than that of his "Rasselas."
But if such was, in some degree, the case with England, it was, in
the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In fact our Scottish
literature had, at that period, a very singular aspect; unexampled,
so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of
matters appears still to continue. For a long period after Scotland
became British, we had no literature; at the date when Addison and
Steele were writing their "Spectators," our good John Boston was
writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar
and philosophy, his "Fourfold State {44} of Man."[68] Then came the
schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body
Politic: Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both
cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country:
however, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made
nearly the first attempt at writing English; and ere long, Hume,
Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the
eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our
"fervid genius," there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing
indigenous; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect,
which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a
characteristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland,
so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English;
our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine
and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to
be a critic and philosopher; it was the light of Montesquieu and
Mably that guided Robertson in his political speculations; Quesnay's
lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith.[69] Hume was too rich a
man to borrow; and perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was
acted on by them; but neither had he aught to do with Scotland;
Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche,[70] {45} was but the lodging and
laboratory, in which he not so much morally _lived_, as
metaphysically _investigated_. Never, perhaps, was there a class of
writers so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all
appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human affection
whatever. The French wits of the period were as unpatriotic: but
their general deficiency in moral principle, not to say their avowed
sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render
this accountable enough. We hope there is a patriotism founded on
something better than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us,
without injury to our philosophy; that in loving and justly prizing
all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love before all others,
our own stern Motherland, and the venerable Structure of social and
moral Life, which Mind has through long ages been building up for us
there. Surely there is nourishment for the better part of man's
heart in all this: surely the roots, that have fixed themselves in
the very core of man's being, may be so cultivated as to grow up not
into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life! Our Scottish
sages have no such propensities: the field of their life shows
neither briers nor roses; but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor
for Logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine of Kent" to the
"Natural History of Religion," are thrashed and sifted with the same
mechanical impartiality![71]