THE GAUGER OF GENIUS
We have read about an English gentleman-novelist who wasted his health
and died at the age of forty-three; and we next have to hear the story
of a Scotch plowman-poet who treated himself in the same way and died at
the age of thirty-seven. Such men present a painful problem to their
friends, and also to their critics--since in art circles it is not
considered good form to set up moral standards. However, in this case
Robert Burns has solved the problem for us; he lacked nothing in
clearness of insight or plainness of speech concerning his own follies,
and spoke of his “self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.”
He was one of seven children of a peasant family, and was born on a
stormy January day, in a clay cottage of which the roof was blown off a
few days later. He followed the plow-tail all his early years, and wrote
that his life until sixteen was “the toil of a slave.” The few books
they could borrow the children would read at meal times, or snatching a
few words in the fields. Such peasant slaves are not supposed to acquire
culture, and if they do so, it is at the cost of health of mind and
body. Robert Burns was given to fits of melancholy, and to moods of wild
excess; he speaks of his “passions raging like demons.” He was a
headstrong, impatient youth, disgusted by the falsities and shams of
conventional religion. He had to find his own code in life, and the
fact that he found it too late to save himself is our loss.
This peasant, toiling on a rocky tenant farm, discovered in himself the
gift of exquisite melody. His feelings poured themselves out in verses
in the homely Scotch dialect, then considered a barbarous thing,
unworthy of literature. He would compose these verses all day long while
guiding the plow, and then, coming home at night, he would sit in a
garret room and write them out. Not until he was twenty-seven years old
did he succeed in having them published. They appeared at a time when
the family was ruined, and the poet himself being pursued by officers of
the law, at the instance of the father of a girl he loved. The twenty
pounds which he got from this first volume saved his life, so he
declared.
He leaped into fame all over Scotland, and spent a year in Edinburgh,
where he was fêted by the great. But he did not keep their favor,
because he persisted in intimacy with his humble friends, and also,
alas! with the taverns. He went back to the plow, more set than ever in
his bitterness against the world of privilege and rank. It was a time
when the great world was in the habit of pensioning its poets, but the
Tories controlled in Scotland, and “Bobbie” Burns was a Whig, and turned
into a Republican, the same thing as a Bolshevik today. The best that
lovers of his poetry could get him was a job as a gauger of liquor
barrels, at the princely salary of sixty pounds a years.
Even that he had difficulty in holding; because the French revolution
came sweeping over Europe, and frightened the governing class of England
into just such a frenzy of reaction as we in America witnessed in 1919.
In his capacity as exciseman Burns captured a smuggling ship with four
cannon; he purchased the cannon at auction, and sent them to the French
Legislative Assembly as a mark of sympathy. Imagine, if you can, an
American customs officer in 1919 shipping four machine-guns to the
Soviet government of Russia, and you may realize how close the poet came
to losing the salary upon which his wife and children had to exist.
We shall see other poets shrinking in horror from the execution of King
Louis, and throwing in their lot with reaction. But here is one who
stood by the down-trodden of the earth, and voiced their feelings to
the end. Not merely is he the national poet of Scotland; he is, in spite
of the handicap of dialect, the voice of the peasant and the land-slave
throughout the English-speaking world. When he writes “the rank is but
the guinea’s stamp,” he is the voice of the labor movement in England
and of democracy in America. His work is beloved by humble people; you
would be surprised to know how widely it is read--perhaps more widely
than any other poetry among the poor.
The people know this voice, they know this heart, with all its loves and
hates, its longings and griefs. There is no man who has come from the
toiling masses, self-taught and self-made, who has expressed their
feelings so completely. And note that he has, not merely beauty and
passion, but keen insight and power of brain; he can think for his
people, as well as feel with them. He is not a bit afraid to use his art
to preach and to scold, to discuss moral problems, to storm at social
injustice and to ridicule church dogma.
What though such a man did drink and squander himself; that also is a
part of the worker’s tragedy. He paid for it the price which the workers
pay, and life spared him no part of the suffering and shame, nor did he
spare himself the remorse. He wrote his own epitaph, in which he spoke
of himself as “the poor inhabitant below,” and recorded that
“thoughtless folly laid him low and stained his name.” Because there is
no spiritual value greater than honesty, the judgment of his people has
raised him high and crowned his name with immortality.