TO write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man’s character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that we
respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass a
sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
Principal Shairp’s recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect—that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the critic
and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not an
incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of _Holy
Willie’s Prayer_, Principal Shairp remarks that “those who have loved
most what was best in Burns’s poetry must have regretted that it was ever
written.” To the _Jolly Beggars_, so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the “strange, not to say
painful,” circumstance that the same hand which wrote the _Cotter’s
Saturday Night_ should have stooped to write the _Jolly Beggars_. The
_Saturday Night_ may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the _Jolly Beggars_. To take a man’s work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic’s duty. The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_—a burly figure in literature, as, from our
present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the other
hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman, whom
we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but orderly and
orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt and
disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protégé_, and solacing
himself with the explanation that the poet was “the most inconsistent of
men.” If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we
can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
neither _Holy Willie_, nor the _Beggars_, nor the _Ordination_, nothing
is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Géronte: “Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère?” And every merit we find in the book,
which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so greatly
thrown away.
It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of Burns
that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life that
demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man’s nature, for all its
richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle
made an inimitable bust of the poet’s head of gold; may I not be forgiven
if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were of clay?