Contemplating this sad end of Burns and how he sank unaided by any
real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous minds have
sometimes figured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much
might have been done for him--that by counsel, true affection, and
friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to himself and the
world. We question whether there is not more tenderness of heart than
soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to us
whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual could have
lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one,
he did not need: in his understanding he knew right from wrong as well
perhaps as any man ever did; but the persuasion, which would have
availed him, lies not so much in the head as in the heart, where no
argument or expostulation could have assisted much to implant it. As
to money, again, we do not really believe that this was his essential
want, or well see how any private man could, even presupposing Burns's
consent, have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with much
prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, that two men
in any rank of society could hardly be found virtuous enough to give
money, and to take it as a necessary gift, without injury to the moral
entireness of one or both. But so stands the fact: friendship, in the
old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists, except in the cases
of kindred or other legal affinity; it is in reality no longer
expected or recognized as a virtue among men. A close observer of
manners has pronounced "patronage," that is pecuniary or other
economic furtherance, to be "twice cursed," cursing him that gives and
him that takes! And thus in regard to outward matters also, it has
become the rule, as in regard to inward it always was and must be the
rule, that no one shall look for effectual help to another, but that
each shall rest contented with what help he can afford himself. Such,
we say, is the principle of modern honor--naturally enough growing out
of that sentiment of pride which we inculcate and encourage as the
basis of our whole social morality. Many a poet has been poorer than
Burns, but no one was ever prouder: we may question whether, without
great precautions, even a pension from royalty would not have galled
and encumbered more than actually assisted him.
Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of
Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having
ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We have already stated
our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would
have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall
readily admit, however, that much was to be done for Burns; that many
a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his bosom; many an
entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and
light and heat shed on him from high places would have made his humble
atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart then breathing might
have lived and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant
further, and for Burns, it is granting much, that with all his pride
he would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who
had cordially befriended him: patronage, unless once cursed, needed
not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor promotion he
desired in his calling might have been granted: it was his own scheme,
therefore, likelier than any other to be of service. All this it might
have been a luxury--nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have done.
No part of all this, however, did any of them do or apparently
attempt, or wish to do: so much is granted against them.
But what then is the amount of their blame? Simply that they were men
of the world, and walked by the principles of such men; that they
treated Burns as other nobles and other commoners had done other
poets; as the English did Shakespeare; as King Charles and his
cavaliers did Butler; as King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes.
Do men gather grapes of thorns? or shall we cut down our thorns for
yielding only a _fence_ and haws? How indeed, could the "nobility and
gentry of his native land" hold out any help to this "Scottish bard,
proud of his name and country"? Were the nobility and gentry so much
as able rightly to help themselves? Had they not their game to
preserve, their borough interests to strengthen; dinner, therefore, of
various kinds, to eat and give? Were their means more than adequate to
all this business, or less than adequate? Less than adequate in
general: few of them in reality were richer than Burns; many of them
were poorer: for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with
thumbscrews, from the hard hand, and, in their need of guineas, to
forget their duty of mercy, which Burns was never reduced to do. Let
us pity and forgive them. The game they preserved and shot, the
dinners they ate and gave, the borough interests they strengthened,
the _little_ Babylon they severally builded by the glory of their
might, are all melted, or melting back into the primeval chaos, as
man's merely selfish endeavors are fated to do: and here was an action
extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we may say, through all
time--in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal
as the Spirit of Goodness itself: this action was offered them to do,
and light was not given them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them.
But, better than pity, let us go and _do otherwise_. Human suffering
did not end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn mandate,
"Love one another, bear one another's burdens," given to the rich
only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to
assuage by our aid or pity: but celestial natures, groaning under the
fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and that wretchedness
which Fate has rendered _voiceless_ and _tuneless_, is not the least
wretched, but the most.
Still we do not think that the blame of Burns's failure lies chiefly
with the world. The world, it seems to us, treated him with more,
rather than with less kindness, than it usually shows to such men. It
has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its teachers: hunger and
nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the
poison-chalice, have in most times and countries, been the
market-place it has offered for wisdom, the welcome with which it has
greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and
Socrates and the Christian apostles belong to old days, but the
world's martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and
Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a
madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected,
so "persecuted they the prophets," not in Judea only, but in all
places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns's order
is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his age--that he has no
right therefore, to expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound
to do it great kindness--that Burns, in particular, experienced fully
the usual proportion of the world's goodness, and that the blame of
his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world.
Where then does it lie? We are forced to answer, With himself; it is
his inward, not his outward misfortunes, that bring him to the dust.
Seldom indeed is it otherwise--seldom is a life morally wrecked, but
the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want less
of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature
without implanting in it the strength needful for its action and
duration: least of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and
darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the
power of _any_ external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a
man--nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect its
essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all worldly
misfortunes is death--nothing more _can_ lie in the cup of human woe:
yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over death, and led it
captive, converting its physical victory into a moral victory for
themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that their
past life had achieved. What has been done may be done again--nay, it
is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism that differs in
different seasons; for without some portion of this spirit, not of
boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of self-denial, in all
its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be
good.
We have already stated the error of Burns, and mourned over it rather
than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his purposes, of
consistency in his aims, the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly
union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which
is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was
nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing--no man formed as he was
can be anything by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded,
popular verse monger, or poetical _Restaurateur_, but of a true poet
and singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been given
him: and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of
scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true nobleness was little
understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether
barren and unfruitful principle of pride. The influences of that age,
his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly
untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to
repel or resist: the better spirit that was within him ever sternly
demanded its rights, its supremacy: he spent his life in endeavoring
to reconcile these two, and lost it, as he must have lost it, without
reconciling them here.
Burns was born poor, and born also to continue poor, for he would not
endeavor to be otherwise: this it had been well could he have once for
all admitted and considered as finally settled. He was poor, truly;
but hundreds even of his own class and order of minds have been
poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it--nay, his own father
had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was; and he
did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all moral
intents prevailing against it. True, Burns had little means, had even
little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation; but so
much the more precious was what little he had. In all these external
respects his case was hard, but very far from the hardest. Poverty,
incessant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of
poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. Locke
was banished as a traitor, and wrote his "Essay on the Human
Understanding," sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich
or at his ease when he composed "Paradise Lost"? Not only low, but
fallen from a height; not only poor, but impoverished: in darkness and
with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit
audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish his work a maimed
soldier, and in prison? Nay, was not the "Araucana," which Spain
acknowledges as its epic, written without even the aid of paper; on
scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any
moment from that wild warfare?
And what then had these men which Burns wanted? Two things; both which
it seems to us are indispensable for such men: they had a true
religious principle of morals, and a single not a double aim in their
activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers, but seekers
and worshippers of something far better than self. Not personal
enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of religion, of
patriotism, of heavenly wisdom, in one or the other form, ever hovered
before them; in which cause they neither shrunk from suffering, nor
called on the earth to witness it as something wonderful, but
patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough so to spend and be
spent. Thus the "golden calf of self-love," however curiously carved,
was not their Deity, but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is man's
reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose
streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces of their
otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, to
which all other things were subordinated and made subservient, and
therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks, but its
edge must be sharp and single: if it be double the wedge is bruised.
Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness, but not in
others--only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth and
worldly "respectability." We hope we have now heard enough about the
efficacy of wealth for poetry and to make poets happy. Nay, have we
not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an
endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in
the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the
highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by
inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another
province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he
happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives
toward the infinite and the eternal; and soon feels that all this is
but mounting to the housetop to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is
only a proud man; might, like him, have "purchased a pocket-copy of
Milton to study the character of Satan"; for Satan also is Byron's
grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of
his conduct. As in Burns's case, too, the celestial element will not
mingle with the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he must
not be; vulgar ambition will not live kindly with poetic adoration; he
_cannot_ serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay,
he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the
fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into
beauty the products of a world, but it is the mad fire of a volcano;
and now--we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which, erelong,
will fill itself with snow!