Four faces among the portraits of modern men, great or small, strike
us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form
and proportion and harmony of features: Shakespeare, Raffaelle,
Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the
body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to
express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible
grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul,
Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be "in presence weak, in
speech contemptible," hampered by some thorn in the flesh--to
interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the
same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians,
the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies,
that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been
given, might learn, that soul is after all independent of matter, and
not its creature and its slave. But, in the generality of cases,
physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not,
alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet
even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be
solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and
weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when
we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to
the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect.
Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of
Robert Burns an honourable station among them. Of Shakespeare's we
do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of
all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns be
not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most lovable--the most
like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be. Raffaelle--
the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil
sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford--though
without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy,
formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. His is a
face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goethe, even in his earliest
portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own
will. There is a self-conscious power, and purpose, and self-
restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which
might win worship, and did; but not love, except as the child of
enthusiasm or of relationship. But Burns's face, to judge of it by
the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that
of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was mobbed by
the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets. The magic of
that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may
explain many a sad story. The features certainly are not perfectly
regular; there is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal
health in the outline or colour: but the marks of intellectual
beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too
triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling. The lips,
ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of
enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of
the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the
bones show thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh
out upon you with boundless good humour and sweetness, with simple,
eager, gentle surprise--a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth
upon the wonder of a new-born world--altogether
A station like the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.
Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence--a rich
flow of spirits and fulness of health and life--a deep sense of
wonder and beauty in the earth and man--an instinct of the dynamic
and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material
universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and
unscientific, all but superstitious--turn him loose in any country in
Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will
not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.
And what an age in which to be turned loose!--for loose he must go,
to solve the problem of existence for himself. The grand simple old
Scottish education which he got from his parents must prove narrow
and unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not because it
was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly
all things necessary for his "salvation"--in every sense, all laws
which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it
contained so much of them as yet only implicitly; because it was not
yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying
the new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's.
It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to
be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in
shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. But it had
not done so then. And when Burns found himself gradually growing
beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it
in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up
his education at the point where it had been left unfinished? He saw
around him in plenty animal good-nature and courage, barbaric honesty
and hospitality--more, perhaps, than he would see now; for the upward
progress into civilised excellences is sure to be balanced by some
loss of savage ones--but reckless, shallow, above all, drunken. It
was a hard-drinking, coarse, materialist age. The higher culture, of
Scotland especially, was all but exclusively French--not a good kind,
while Voltaire and Volney still remained unanswered, and "Les
Liaisons Dangereuses" were accepted by all young gentlemen, and a
great many young ladies who could read French, as the best account of
the relation of the sexes.
Besides, the philosophy of that day, like its criticism, was
altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its
ultimate and logical results. Criticism was outward, and of the form
merely. The world was not believed to be already, and in itself,
mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man
who could see and proclaim that supernatural element. Before it was
admired, it was to be raised above nature into the region of "the
picturesque," or whatnot; and the poet was the man who gave it this
factitious and superinduced beauty, by a certain "kompsologia" and
"meteoroepeia," called "poetic diction," now happily becoming
extinct, mainly, we believe, under the influence of Burns, although
he himself thought it his duty to bedizen his verses therewith, and
though it was destined to flourish for many a year more in the temple
of the father of lies, like a jar of paper flowers on a Popish altar.
No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should receive not
only no guidance, but no finer appreciation. True; he was admired,
petted, flattered; for that the man was wonderful no one could doubt.
But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very
flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great
failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many
as a writer of vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad-muse of
Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even
in the eighteenth century itself--witness "Auld Robin Gray." But who
suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years
afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of all the second-
hand French culture which seemed to her then the highest earthly
attainment? The Review of Burns in an early number of the "Edinburgh
Review," said to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as
clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and bewildered
feeling with which the world must have regarded such a phenomenon.
Alas! there was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the
phenomenon itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded; the
confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical
literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have been
the most deep-sighted. But no. The reviewer turns the strange thing
over and over, and inside out--and some fifteen years after it has
vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that
it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his
mind about in any clear or consistent way, and gets thoroughly cross
with it, and calls it hard names, because it will not fit into any
established pigeon-hole or drawer of the then existing
anthropological museum. Burns is "a literary prodigy," and yet it is
"a derogation" to him to consider him as one. And that we find, not
as we should have expected, because he possessed genius, which would
have made success a matter of course in any rank, but because he was
so well educated--"having acquired a competent knowledge of French,
together with the elements of Latin and Geometry," and before he had
composed a single stanza, was "far more intimately acquainted with
Pope, Shakespeare, and Thomson, than nine-tenths of the youths who
leave school for the university," etc. etc.--in short, because he was
so well educated, that his becoming Robert Burns, the immortal poet,
was a matter of course and necessity. And yet, a page or two on, the
great reason why it was more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to
become an original and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of "the
herd of scholars and academical literati," who are depressed and
discouraged by "perusing the most celebrated writers, and conversing
with the most intelligent judges," is found to be, that "the
literature and refinement of the age do not exist for a rustic and
illiterate individual; and consequently the present time is to him
what the rude times of old were to the vigorous writer who adorned
them." In short the great reason of Robert Burns's success was that
he did not possess that education the possession of which proves him
to be no prodigy, though the review begins by calling him one, and
coupling him with Stephen Duck and Thomas Dermody.
Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen years after
Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilemma'--
which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the points,
and form a complete circle of contradictions--what must have been the
bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's very lifetime? what
must, indeed, have been his own bewilderment at himself, however
manfully he may have kept it down? No wonder that he was unguided,
either by himself or by others. We do not blame them; him we must
deeply blame; yet not as we ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in
the least to those temptations under which Burns fell.
Biographies of Burns, and those good ones, according to the standard
of biographies in these days, are said to exist; we cannot say that
we have as yet cared to read them. There are several other
biographies, even more important, to be read first, when they are
written. Shakespeare has found as yet no biographer; has not even
left behind him materials for a biography, such at least as are
considered worth using. Indeed, we question whether such a biography
would be of any use whatever to the world; for the man who cannot, by
studying his dramas in some tolerably accurate chronological order,
and using as a running accompaniment and closet commentary those awe-
inspiring sonnets of his, attain to some clear notion of what sort of
life William Shakespeare must have led, would not see him much the
clearer for many folios of anecdote. For after all, the best
biography of every sincere man is sure to be his own works; here he
has set down, "transferred as in a figure," all that has happened to
him, inward or outward, or rather, all which has formed him, produced
a permanent effect upon his mind and heart; and knowing that, you
know all you need know, and are content, being glad to escape the
personality and gossip of names and places, and of dates even, except
in as far as they enable you to place one step of his mental growth
before or after another. Of the honest man this holds true always;
and almost always of the dishonest man, the man of cant, affectation,
hypocrisy; for even if he pretend in his novel or his poem to be what
he is not, he still shows you thereby what he thinks he ought to have
been, or at least what he thinks that the world thinks he ought to
have been, and confesses to you, in the most naive and confidential
way, like one who talks in his sleep, what learning he has or has not
had; what society he has or has not seen, and that in the very act of
trying to prove the contrary. Nay, the smaller the man or woman, and
the less worth deciphering his biography, the more surely will he
show you, if you have eyes to see and time to look, what sort of
people offended him twenty years ago; what meanness he would have
liked "to indulge in," if he had dared, when young, and for what
other meanness he relinquished it, as he grew up; of what periodical
he stood in awe when he took pen in hand, and so forth. Whether his
books treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is
there, the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to
read it. In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be
found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things
which happened to himself, and moreover of the most notable things
which went on in Scotland between 1759 and 1796.
This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider that we
find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the discoveries of
steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing
cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or even in Scottish
metaphysics. But after all, the history of a nation is the history
of the men, and not of the things thereof; and the history of those
men is the history of their hearts, and not of their purses, or even
of their heads; and the history of one man who has felt in himself
the heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated many
belonging to the next generation, is so far the collective history of
that generation, and of much--no man can say how much--of the next
generation; and such a man, bearing within his single soul two
generations of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have been; and
his poems, as such, a contemporaneous history of Scotland, the equal
to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or
several to come.
Such a man sent out into such an age, would naturally have a hard and
a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell under the
guidance of some master-mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly
deformed, as Burns did. His works are after all only the disjecta
membra poetae; full of hints of a great might-have-been. Hints of
the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and
thought. Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the
excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of
the Scottish Muse, in which
Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw
A lustre grand,
And seem'd to my astonished view
A well-known land.
The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a
translation from Dante's "Paradiso," so broad, terse, vivid, the
painter's touch. Hints, too, of a humour, which, like that of
Shakespeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the
sublime; as when
Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch
Just like a winking baudrons.
Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened in such
a perpetual word-battle as that amid which Shakespeare lived from the
age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare's own; which even now
asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases
scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the
memory of every reader. And as for his tenderness--the quality
without which all other poetic excellence is barren--it gushes forth
toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception,
namely, the hypocrite, ever alike "spiacente a Dio e ai nemici sui;"
and therefore intolerable to Robert Burns's honesty, whether he be
fighting for or against the cause of right. Again we say, there are
evidences of a versatile and manifold faculty in this man, which,
with a stronger will and a larger education, might have placed him as
an equal by the side of those great names which we mentioned together
with his at the commencement of this article.
But one thing Burns wanted; and of that one thing his age helped to
deprive him--the education which comes by reverence. Looking round
in such a time, with his keen power of insight, his keen sense of
humour, what was there to worship? Lord Jeffrey, or whosoever was
the author of the review in the "Edinburgh," says disparagingly, that
Burns had as much education as Shakespeare. So he very probably had,
if education mean book-learning. Nay, more, of the practical
education of the fireside, the sober, industrious, God-fearing
education, and "drawing out" of the manhood, by act and example,
Burns may have had more under his good father than Shakespeare under
his; though the family life of the small English burgher in
Elizabeth's time would have generally presented, as we suspect, the
very same aspect of staid manfulness and godliness which a Scotch
farmer's did fifty years ago. But let that be as it may, Burns was
not born into an Elizabethan age. He did not see around him Raleighs
and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes and Frobishers, Spensers and
Jonsons, Southamptons and Willoughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and
moulding the great whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong,
and wise--a woman who, whether right or wrong, bowed the proudest, if
not to love, yet still to obey.
That was the secret of Shakespeare's power. Heroic himself, he was
born into an age of heroes. You see it in his works. Not a play but
gives patent evidence that to him all forms of human magnanimity were
common and wayside flowers--among the humours of men which he and Ben
Jonson used to wander forth together to observe. And thus he could
give living action and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and
the Middle Age; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged
in everything but in the dress. Had he known Greek literature he
could have recalled to imperishable life such men as Cimon and
Aristides, such deeds as Marathon and Salamis. For had we not had
our own Salamis acted within a few years of his birth; and were not
the heroes of it still walking among men? It was surely this
continual presence of "men of worship," this atmosphere of admiration
and respect and trust, in which Shakespeare must have lived, which
tamed down the wild self-will of the deer-stealing fugitive from
Stratford, into the calm large-eyed philosopher, tolerant and loving,
and full of faith in a species made in the likeness of God. Not so
with Burns. One feels painfully in his poems the want of great
characters; and still more painfully that he has not drawn them,
simply because they were not there to draw. That he has a true eye
for what is noble, when he sees it, let his "Lament for Glencairn"
testify, and the stanzas in his "Vision," in which, with a high-bred
grace which many a courtly poet of his day might have envied, he
alludes to one and another Scottish worthy of his time. There is no
vein of saucy and envious "banausia" in the man; even in his most
graceless sneer, his fault--if fault it be--is, that he cannot and
will not pretend to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of
respect. He sees around him and above him, as well as below him, an
average of men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow,
ridiculous by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not
apply to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant
for their realities. After all, he does but say what every one round
him was feeling and thinking; but he said it; and hypocritical
respectability shrank shrieking from the mirror of her own inner
heart. But it was all the worse for him. In the sins of others he
saw an excuse for his own. Losing respect for and faith in his
brother-men, he lost, as a matter of course, respect for himself,
faith in himself. The hypocrisy which persecutes in the name of law,
whether political or moral, while in private it transgresses the very
law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned by his passionate and
sorely-tempted character into a too easy excuse for disbelieving in
the obligation of any law whatsoever. He ceases to worship, and
therefore to be himself worshipful--and we know the rest.
"He might have still worshipped God?" He might, and surely amid all
his sins, doubts, and confusions, the remembrance of the old faith
learned at his parent's knee, does haunt him still as a beautiful
regret--and sometimes, in his bitterest hours, shine out before his
poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, lighting him homewards
after all. Whether he reached that home or not, none on earth can
tell. But his writings show, if anything can, that the vestal-fire
of conscience still burned within, though choked again and again with
bitter ashes and foul smoke. Consider the time in which he lived,
when it was "as with the people, so with the priest," and the grand
old life-tree of the Scottish Kirk, now green and vigorous with fresh
leaves and flowers, was all crusted with foul scurf and moss, and
seemed to have ceased growing, and to be crumbling down into decay;
consider the terrible contradiction between faith and practice which
must have met the eyes of the man, before he could write with the
same pen--and one as honestly as the other--"The Cottar's Saturday
Night," and "Holy Willie's Prayer." But those times are past, and
the men who acted in them gone to another tribunal. Let the dead
bury their dead; and, in the meantime, instead of cursing the
misguided genius, let us consider whether we have not also something
for which to thank him; whether, as competent judges of him aver from
their own experience, those very seeming blasphemies of his have not
produced more good than evil; whether, though "a savour of death unto
death," to conceited and rebellious spirits, they may not have helped
to open the eyes of the wise to the extent to which the general
eighteenth-century rottenness had infected Scotland, and to make
intolerable a state of things which ought to have been intolerable,
even if Burns had never written.
We are not attacking the reviewer, far less the "Edinburgh Review,"
which some years after this not only made the amende honorable to
Burns, but showed a frank impartiality only too rare in the reviews
of these days, by publishing in its pages the noble article on Burns
which has since appeared separately in Mr. Carlyle's "Miscellanies."
We only wish to show, from the reviewer's own words, the element in
which Burns had to work, the judges before whom he had to plead, and
the change which, as we think, very much by the influence of his own
poems, has passed upon the minds of men. How few are there who would
pen now about him such a sentence as this: "He is" (that is, was,
having gone to his account fifteen years before) "perpetually making
a parade of his own inflammability and imprudence, and talking with
much self-complacency and exultation of the offence he has occasioned
to the sober and correct part of mankind"--a very small part of
mankind, one would have thought, in the British Isles at least, about
the end of the last century. But, it was the fashion then, as usual,
to substitute the praise of virtues for the practice of them; and
three-bottle and ten-tumbler men had a very good right, of course, to
admire sobriety and correctness, and to denounce any two-bottle and
six-tumbler man who was not ashamed to confess in print the
weaknesses which they confessed only by word of mouth. Just, and yet
not just. True, Burns does make a parade of his thoughtlessness, and
worse; but why? because he gloried in it? He must be a very skin-
deep critic who cannot see, even in the most insolent of those
blameworthy utterances, an inward shame and self-reproach, which if
any man had ever felt in himself, he would be in nowise inclined to
laugh at it in others. Why, it is the very shame which wrings those
poems out of him. They are the attempt of the strong man fettered to
laugh at his own consciousness of slavery--to deny the existence of
his chains--to pretend to himself that he likes them. To us, some of
those wildest "Rob the Ranter" bursts of blackguardism are most
deeply mournful, hardly needing that the sympathies which they stir
up should be heightened by the little scraps of prayer and bitter
repentance, which lie up and down among their uglier brethren, the
disjecta membra of a great "De Profundis," perhaps not all unheard.
These latter pieces are most significant. The very doggrel of them,
the total absence of any attempt at ornament in diction or polish in
metre, is proof complete of their deep heart-wrung sincerity. They
are like the wail of a lost child, rather than the remorse of a
Titan. The heart of the man was so young to the last; the boy-vein
in him, as perhaps in all great poets, beating on through manhood for
good and for evil. No! there was parade there, as of the lost woman,
who tries to hide her self-disgust by staring you out of countenance,
but of complacency and exultation none.
On one point, namely politics, Burns's higher sympathies seem to have
been awakened. It had been better for him, in a worldly point of
view, that they had not. In an intellectual, and even in a moral
point of view, far worse. A fellow-feeling with the French
Revolution, in the mind of a young man of that day, was a sign of
moral health, which we should have been sorry to miss in him. Unable
to foresee the outcome of the great struggle, having lost faith in
those everlasting truths, religious and political, which it was madly
setting at naught, what could it appear to him but an awakening from
the dead, a return to young and genial health, a purifying
thunderstorm. Such was his dream, the dream of thousands more, and
not so wrong a one after all. For that, since that fearful outburst
of the nether pit, all Europe has arisen and awakened into manifold
and beautiful new life, who can deny? We are not what we were, but
better, or rather, with boundless means of being better if we will.
We have entered a fresh era of time for good and evil; the fact is
patent in every sermon we hear, in every book we read, in every
invention, even the most paltry, which we see registered. Shall we
think hardly of the man who saw the dawn of our own day, and welcomed
it cheerfully and hopefully, even though he fancied the mist-spectres
to be elements of the true sunrise, and knew not--and who knows?--the
purposes of Him whose paths are in the great deep, and His ways past
finding out? At least, the greater part of his influence on the
times which have followed him, is to be ascribed to that very
"Radicalism" which in the eyes of the respectable around him, had
sealed his doom, and consigned him to ignoble oblivion. It has been,
with the working men who read him, a passport for the rest of his
writings; it has allured them to listen to him, when he spoke of high
and holy things, which but for him, they might have long ago tossed
away as worthless, in the recklessness of ignorance and discontent.
They could trust his "Cottar's Saturday Night;" they could believe
that he spoke from his heart, when in deep anguish he cries to the
God whom he had forgotten, while they would have turned with a
distrustful sneer from the sermon of the sleek and comfortable
minister, who in their eyes, however humbly born, had deserted his
class, and gone over to the camp of the enemy, and the flesh-pots of
Egypt.
After the time of Burns, as was to be expected, Scottish song
multiplies itself tenfold. The nation becomes awakened to the
treasures of its own old literature, and attempts, what after all,
alas! is but a revival; and like most revivals, not altogether a
successful one. Of the twelve hundred songs contained in Mr.
Whitelaw's excellent collection, whereof more than a hundred and
fifty are either wholly or partly Burns's, the small proportion
written before him are decidedly far superior in value to those
written after him; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to
explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been
proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been arising,
during the last half-century. True song requires for its atmosphere
a state rather of careless Arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and
doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and
pardonable regret for a dying past; and in that state the mind of the
masses, throughout North Britain, has been weltering confusedly for
the last few years. The new and more complex era into which we are
passing has not yet sufficiently opened itself to be sung about; men
hardly know what it is, much less what it will be; and while they are
hard at work creating it, they have no breath to spare in talking of
it. One thing they do see and feel, painfully enough at times,
namely, that the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away, before
the combined influence of manufactures and the large-farm system; to
be replaced, doubtless, hereafter, by something better, but in the
meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much that can
ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay and Burns.
Hence the later Scottish song-writers seldom really sing; their
proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their old models; they
will hardly go (the true test of a song) without music. The true
test, we say again, of a song. Who needs music, however fitting and
beautiful the accustomed air may happen to be, to "Roy's Wife of
Aldivalloch," or "The Bride cam' out o' the byre," or either of the
casts of "The Flowers of the Forest," or to "Auld Lang Syne" itself?
They bubble right up out of the heart, and by virtue of their inner
and unconscious melody, which all that is true to the heart has in
it, shape themselves into a song, and are not shaped by any notes
whatsoever. So with many, most indeed, of Burns's; and a few of
Allan Cunningham's; the "Wet sheet and a flowing sail," for instance.
But the great majority of these later songs seem, if the truth is to
be spoken, inspirations at second hand, of people writing about
things which they would like to feel, and which they ought to feel,
because others used to feel them in old times; but which they do not
feel as their forefathers felt--a sort of poetical Tractarianism, in
short. Their metre betrays them, as well as their words; in both
they are continually wandering, unconsciously to themselves, into the
elegiac--except when on one subject, whereon the muse of Scotia still
warbles at first hand, and from the depths of her heart--namely,
alas! the barley bree: and yet never, even on this beloved theme,
has she risen again to the height of Burns's bacchanalian songs.
But when sober, there is a sadness about the Scottish muse nowadays--
as perhaps there ought to be--and the utterances of hers which ring
the truest are laments. We question whether in all Mr. Whitelaw's
collection there is a single modern poem (placing Burns as the
transition point between the old and new) which rises so high, or
pierces so deep, with all its pastoral simplicity, as Smibert's
"Widow's Lament."
Afore the Lammas tide
Had dwin'd the birken tree,
In a' our water-side,
Nae wife was blest like me:
A kind gudeman, and twa
Sweet bairns were round me here;
But they're a' ta'en awa',
Sin' the fa' o' the year.
Sair trouble cam' our gate,
And made me, when it cam',
A bird without a mate,
A ewe without a lamb.
Our hay was yet to maw,
And our corn was yet to shear;
When they a' dwined awa',
In the fa' o' the year.
I daurna look a-field,
For aye I trow to see,
The form that was a bield
To my wee bairns and me.
But wind, and weet, and snaw,
They never mair can fear,
Sin' they a' got the ca',
In the fa' o' the year.
Aft on the hill at e'ens,
I see him 'mang the ferns,
The lover o' my teens,
The father o' my bairns:
For there his plaid I saw,
As gloamin' aye drew near--
But my a's now awa',
Sin' the fa' o' the year.
Our bonnie rigs theirsel',
Reca' my waes to mind,
Our puir dumb beasties tell
O' a' that I ha'e tyned;
For whae our wheat will saw,
And whae our sheep will shear,
Sin' my a' gaed awa',
In the fa' o' the year?
My heart is growing cauld,
And will be caulder still,
And sair sair in the fauld,
Will be the winter's chill;
For peats were yet to ca',
Our sheep they were to smear,
When my a' dwined awa',
In the fa' o' the year.
I ettle whiles to spin,
But wee wee patterin' feet,
Come rinnin' out and in,
And then I first maun greet:
I ken its fancy a'
And faster rows the tear,
That my a' dwined awa',
In the fa' o' the year.
Be kind, O heav'n abune!
To ane sae wae and lane,
An' tak' her hamewards sune,
In pity o' her mane:
Lang ere the March winds blaw,
May she, far far frae here,
Meet them a' that's awa',
Sin' the fa' o' the year.
It seems strange why the man who could write this, who shows, in the
minor key of metre, which he has so skilfully chosen, such an
instinct for the true music of words, could not have written much
more. And yet, perhaps, we have ourselves given the reason already.
There was not much more to sing about. The fashion of imitating old
Jacobite songs is past, the mine now being exhausted, to the great
comfort of sincerity and common sense. The peasantry, whose
courtship, rich in animal health, yet not over pure and refined,
Allan Ramsay sang a hundred years ago, are learning to think, and
act, and emigrate, as well as to make love. The age of Theocritus
and Bion has given place to--shall we say the age of the Caesars, or
the irruption of the barbarians?--and the love-singers of the North
are beginning to feel, that if that passion is to retain any longer
its rightful place in their popular poetry, it must be spoken of
henceforth in words as lofty and refined as those in which the most
educated and the most gifted speak of it. Hence, in the transition
between the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the
two elements, not always felicitous; attempts at ambitious
description, after Burns's worst manner; at subjective sentiment,
after the worst manner of the world in general; and yet, all the
while, a consciousness that there was something worth keeping in the
simple objective style of the old school, without which the new
thoughtfulness would be hollow, and barren, and windy; and so the two
are patched together, "new cloth into an old garment, making the rent
worse." Accordingly, these new songs are universally troubled with
the disease of epithets. Ryan's exquisite "Lass wi' the Bonny Blue
Een," is utterly spoiled by two offences of this kind.
She'll steal out to meet her loved Donald again,
and--
The world's false and vanishing scene;
as Allan Cunningham's still more exquisite "Lass of Preston Mill" is
by one subjective figure:
Six hills are woolly with my sheep,
Six vales are lowing with my kye.
Burns doubtless committed the same fault again and again; but in his
time it was the fashion; and the older models (for models they are
and will remain for ever) had not been studied and analysed as they
have been since. Burns, indeed, actually spoiled one or two of his
own songs by altering them from their first cast to suit the
sentimental taste of his time. The first version, for instance, of
the "Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon," is far superior to the second
and more popular one, because it dares to go without epithets.
Compare the second stanza of each:
Thou'lt break my heart, thou bonnie bird,
That sings upon the bough;
Thou minds me o' the happy days
When my fause love was true.
* * * *
Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons through the flowery thorn;
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed never to return.
What is said in the latter stanza which has not been said in the
former, and said more dramatically, more as the images would really
present themselves to the speaker's mind? It would be enough for him
that the bird was bonnie, and singing; and his very sorrow would lead
him to analyse and describe as little as possible a thing which so
painfully contrasted with his own feelings; whether the thorn was
flowery or not, would not have mattered to him, unless he had some
distinct association with the thorn-flowers, in which case he would
have brought out the image full and separate, and not merely thrown
it in as a make-weight to "thorn"--and this is the great reason why
epithets are, nine times out of ten, mistakes in song and ballad
poetry; he never would have thought of "departed" before he thought
of "joys." A very little consideration of the actual processes of
thought in such a case, will show the truth of our observation, and
the instinctive wisdom of the older song-writers, in putting the
epithet as often as possible after the noun, instead of before it,
even at the expense of grammar. They are bad things at all times in
song poetry, these epithets; and, accordingly, we find that the best
German writers, like Uhland and Heine, get rid of them as much as
possible, and succeed thereby, every word striking and ringing down
with full force, no cushion of an epithet intruding between the
reader's brain-anvil and the poet's hammer to break the blow. In
Uhland's "Three Burschen," if we recollect right, there are but two
epithets, and those of the simplest descriptive kind: "Thy fair
daughter" and a "black pall." Were there more, we question whether
the poet would have succeeded, as he has done, in making our flesh
creep as he leads us on from line to line and verse to verse. So
Tennyson, the greatest of our living poets, eschews as much as
possible, in his later writings, these same epithets, except in cases
where they are themselves objective and pictorial--in short, the very
things which he wants you to look at, as, for instance:
And into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove.
This is fair enough; but, indeed, after laying down our rule, we must
confess that it is very difficult to keep always true to it, in a
language which does not, like the Latin and German, allow us to put
our adjectives very much where we choose. Nevertheless, whether we
can avoid it or not, every time we place before the noun an epithet
which, like "departed joys," relates to our consciousness concerning
the object, and not merely to the object itself; or an epithet which,
like "flowery thorn," gives us, before we get to the object itself,
those accidents of the object which we only discern by a second look,
by analysis and reflection--(for the thorn, if in the flower, would
look to us, at the first glance, not "flowery," but "white," "snowy,"
or what you will which expresses colour, and not scientific fact)--
every time, we repeat, this is done, the poet descends from the
objective and dramatic domain of song, into the subjective and
reflective one of elegy.
But the field in which Burns's influence has been, as was to be
expected, most important and most widely felt, is in the poems of
working men. He first proved that it was possible to become a poet
and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either in station
or in sympathies; nay, that the healthiest and noblest elements of a
lowly-born poet's mind might be, perhaps must be, the very feelings
and thoughts which he brought up with him from below, not those which
he received from above, in the course of his artificial culture.
From the example of Burns, therefore, many a working man, who would
otherwise have "died and given no sign," has taken courage, and
spoken out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always
wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief
that he had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns
had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted,
by act as well as song, that "a man's a man for a' that." Almost
every volume of working men's poetry which we have read, seems to re-
echo poor Nicoll's spirited, though somewhat over-strained address to
the Scottish genius:
This is the natal day of him
Who, born in want and poverty,
Burst from his fetters and arose,
The freest of the free.
Arose to tell the watching earth
What lowly men could feel and do,
To show that mighty heaven-like souls
In cottage hamlets grew.
Burns! thou hast given us a name
To shield us from the taunts of scorn:
The plant that creeps amid the soil
A glorious flower has borne.
Before the proudest of the earth
We stand with an uplifted brow;
Like us, thou wast a toil-worn man,
And we are noble now!
The critic, looking calmly on, may indeed question whether this new
fashion of verse-writing among working men has been always conducive
to their own happiness. As for absolute success as poets, that was
not to be expected of one in a hundred, so that we must not be
disappointed if among the volumes of working men's poetry, of which
we give a list at the head of our article, only two should be found,
on perusal, to contain any writing of a very high order, although
these volumes form a very small portion of the verses which have been
written, during the last forty years, by men engaged in the rudest
and most monotonous toil. To every man so writing, the art,
doubtless, is an ennobling one. The habit of expressing thought in
verse not only indicates culture, but is a culture in itself of a
very high order. It teaches the writer to think tersely and
definitely; it evokes in him the humanising sense of grace and
melody, not merely by enticing him to study good models, but by the
very act of composition. It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts,
and aspirations, which might otherwise fret and canker within,
breeding, as they too often do in the utterly dumb English peasant,
self-devouring meditation, dogged melancholy, and fierce fanaticism.
And if the effect of verse-writing had stopped there, all had been
well; but bad models have had their effect, as well as good ones, on
the half-tutored taste of the working men, and engendered in them but
too often a fondness for frothy magniloquence and ferocious raving,
neither morally nor aesthetically profitable to themselves or their
readers. There are excuses for the fault; the young of all ranks
naturally enough mistake noise for awfulness, and violence for
strength; and there is generally but too much, in the biographies of
these working poets, to explain, if not to excuse, a vein of
bitterness, which they certainly did not learn from their master,
Burns. The two poets who have done them most harm, in teaching the
evil trick of cursing and swearing, are Shelley and the Corn-Law
Rhymer; and one can well imagine how seducing two such models must
be, to men struggling to utter their own complaints. Of Shelley this
is not the place to speak. But of the Corn-Law Rhymer we may say
here, that howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for
the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's
own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman,
we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more
ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; "he
delights"--may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man--"in cursing;"
he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepense, the
loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes (and he can be most sweet)
by giving some sudden sickening revulsion to his reader's feelings;
and he does it generally with a power which makes it at once as
painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are struggling
with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his trick drags
him down into sheer fustian and bombast; but not always. There is a
terrible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, perhaps
unequalled in England, in his generation. His poems are like his
countenance, coarse and ungoverned, yet with an intensity of eye, a
rugged massiveness of feature, which would be grand but for the
seeming deficiency of love and of humour--love's twin and inseparable
brother. Therefore it is, that although single passages may be found
in his writings, of which Milton himself need not have been ashamed,
his efforts at dramatic poetry are utter failures, dark, monstrous,
unrelieved by any really human vein of feeling or character. As in
feature, so in mind, he has not even the delicate and graceful
organisation which made up in Milton for the want of tenderness, and
so enabled him to write, if not a drama, yet still the sweetest of
masques and idyls.
Rather belonging to the same school than to that of Burns, though
never degrading itself by Elliott's ferocity, is that extraordinary
poem, "The Purgatory of Suicides," by Thomas Cooper. As he is still
in the prime of life, and capable of doing more and better than he
yet has done, we will not comment on it as freely as we have on
Elliott, except to regret a similar want of softness and sweetness,
and also of a clearness and logical connection of thought, in which
Elliott seldom fails, except when cursing. The imagination is hardly
as vivid as Elliott's, though the fancy and invention, the polish of
the style, and the indications of profound thought on all subjects
within the poet's reach, are superior in every way to those of the
Corn-Law Rhymer; and when we consider that the man who wrote it had
to gather his huge store of classic and historic anecdote while
earning his living, first as a shoemaker, and then as a Wesleyan
country preacher, we can only praise and excuse, and hope that the
day may come when talents of so high an order will find some
healthier channel for their energies than that in which they now are
flowing.
Our readers may wonder at not seeing the Ettrick Shepherd's poems
among the list at the head of the article. It seems to us, however,
that we have done right in omitting them. Doubtless, he too was
awakened into song by the example of Burns; but he seems to us to owe
little to his great predecessor, beyond the general consciousness
that there was a virgin field of poetry in Scotch scenery, manners,
and legends--a debt which Walter Scott himself probably owed to the
Ayrshire peasant just as much as Hogg did. Indeed, we perhaps are
right in saying, that had Burns not lived, neither Wilson, Galt,
Allan Cunningham, or the crowd of lesser writers who have found
material for their fancy in Scotch peculiarities, would have written,
as they have. The three first names, Wilson's above all, must have
been in any case distinguished; yet it is surely no derogation to
some of the most exquisite rural sketches in "Christopher North's
Recreations," to claim them as the intellectual foster-children of
"The Cottar's Saturday Night." In this respect, certainly, the
Ettrick Shepherd has a place in Burns's school, and, in our own
opinion, one which has been very much overrated. But the deeper
elements of Burns's mind, those which have especially endeared him to
the working man, reappear very little, or not at all, in Hogg. He
left his class too much below him; became too much of the mere
aesthetic prodigy, and member of a literary clique; frittered away
his great talents in brilliant talk and insincere Jacobite songs,
and, in fine, worked no deliverance on the earth. It is sad to have
to say this: but we had it forced upon us painfully enough a few
days ago, when re-reading "Kilmeny." There may be beautiful passages
in it; but it is not coherent, not natural, not honest. It is
throughout an affectation of the Manichaean sentimental-sublime,
which God never yet put into the heart of any brawny, long-headed,
practical Borderer, and which he therefore probably put into his own
head, or, as we call it, affected, for the time being; a method of
poetry writing which comes forth out of nothing, and into nothing
must return.
This is unfortunate, perhaps, for the world; for we question whether
a man of talents in anywise to be compared with those of the Ettrick
Shepherd has followed in the footsteps of Burns. Poor Tannahill,
whose sad story is but too well known, perished early, at the age of
thirty-six, leaving behind him a good many pretty love-songs of no
great intrinsic value, if the specimens of them given in Mr.
Whitelaw's collection are to be accepted as the best. Like all
Burns's successors, including even Walter Scott and Hogg, we have but
to compare him with his original to see how altogether unrivalled on
his own ground the Ayrshire farmer was. In one feature only
Tannahill's poems, and those later than him, except where
pedantically archaist, like many of Motherwell's, are an improvement
on Burns: namely, in the more easy and complete interfusion of the
two dialects, the Norse Scotch and the Romanesque English, which
Allan Ramsay attempted in vain to unite; while Burns, though not
succeeding by any means perfectly, welded them together into
something of continuity and harmony--thus doing for the language of
his own country very much what Chaucer did for that of England--a
happy union, in the opinion of those who, as we do, look on the
vernacular Norse Scotch as no barbaric dialect, but as an independent
tongue, possessing a copiousness, melody, terseness, and
picturesqueness which makes it, both in prose and verse, a far better
vehicle than the popular English for many forms of thought.
Perhaps the young peasant who most expressly stands out as the pupil
and successor of Burns, is Robert Nicoll. He is a lesser poet,
doubtless, than his master, and a lesser man, if the size and number
of his capabilities be looked at; but he is a greater man, in that,
from the beginning to the end of his career, he seems to have kept
that very wholeness of heart and head which poor Burns lost.
Nicoll's story is, mutatis mutandis, that of the Bethunes, and many a
noble young Scotsman more. Parents holding a farm between Perth and
Dunkeld, they and theirs before them for generations inhabitants of
the neighbourhood, "decent, honest, God-fearing people." The farm is
lost by reverses, and manfully Robert Nicoll's father becomes a day-
labourer on the fields which he lately rented: and there begins, for
the boy, from his earliest recollections, a life of steady sturdy
drudgery. But they must have been grand old folk, these parents, and
in no wise addicted to wringing their hands over "the great might-
have-been." Like true Scots Bible lovers, they do believe in a God,
and in a will of God, underlying, absolute, loving, and believe that
the might-have-been ought not to have been, simply because it has not
been; and so they put their shoulders to the new collar patiently,
cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same. The mother
especially, as so many great men's mothers do, stands out large and
heroic, from the time when, the farm being gone, she, "the ardent
book-woman," finds her time too precious to be spent in reading, and
sets little Robert to read to her as she works--what a picture!--to
the last sad day, when, wanting money to come up to Leeds to see her
dying darling, she "shore for the siller," rather than borrow it.
And her son's life is like her own--a most pure, joyous, valiant
little epic. Robert does not even take to work as something beyond
himself, uninteresting and painful, which, however, must be done
courageously: he lives in it, enjoys it as his proper element, one
which is no more a burden and an exertion to him than the rush of the
strid is to the trout who plays and feels in it day and night,
unconscious of the amount of muscular strength which he puts forth in
merely keeping his place in the stream. Whether carrying
"Kenilworth" in his plaid to the woods, to read while herding, or
selling currants and whisky as the Perth storekeeper's apprentice, or
keeping his little circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure
heart with the thought of the twenty pounds which his mother has
borrowed wherewith to start him, or editing The Leeds Times, or lying
on his early deathbed, just as life seems to be opening clear and
broad before him, he
Bates not a jot of heart or hope,
but steers right onward, singing over his work, without bluster or
self-gratulation, for very joy at having work to do. There is a keen
practical insight about him, rarely combined, in these days, with his
single-minded determination to do good in his generation. His eye is
single, and his whole body full of light.
It would indeed (writes the grocer's boy, encouraging his despondent
and somewhat Werterean friend) be hangman's work to write articles
one day to be forgotten to-morrow, if that were all; but you forget
the comfort--the repayment. If one prejudice is overthrown, one
error rendered untenable; if but one step in advance be the
consequence of your articles and mine--the consequences of the labour
of all true men--are we not deeply repaid?
Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother:
That money of R.'s hangs like a millstone about my neck. If I had
paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man. But do not
mistake me, mother; I am not one of those men who faint and falter in
the great battle of life. God has given me too strong a heart for
that. I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to
struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure-hearted,
and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation--to
which earth is the gate . . . If men would but consider how little of
real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid--
poverty included--there would be more virtue and happiness, and less
world and Mammon-worship on earth than is. I think, mother, that to
me has been given talent; and if so, that talent was given to make it
useful to man.
And yet there is a quiet self-respect about him withal:
In my short course through life (says he in confidence to a friend at
one-and-twenty), I have never feared an enemy, or failed a friend;
and I live in the hope I never shall. For the rest, I have written
my heart in my poems; and rude and unfinished and hasty as they are,
it can be read there.
*****
From seven years of age to this very hour, I have been dependent only
on my own head and hands for everything--for very bread. Long years
ago--ay, even in childhood--adversity made me think, and feel, and
suffer; and would pride allow me, I could tell the world many a deep
tragedy enacted in the heart of a poor, forgotten, uncared-for boy .
. . But I thank God, that though I felt and suffered, the scathing
blast neither blunted my perceptions of natural and moral beauty,
nor, by withering the affections of my heart, made me a selfish man.
Often when I look back I wonder how I bore the burden--how I did not
end the evil day at once and for ever.
Such, is the man, in his normal state; and as was to be expected,
God's blessing rests on him. Whatever he sets his hand to succeeds.
Within a few weeks of his taking the editorship of The Leeds Times
its circulation begins to rise rapidly, as was to be expected with an
honest man to guide it. For Nicoll's political creed, though perhaps
neither very deep nor wide, lies clear and single before him, as
everything else which he does. He believes naturally enough in
ultra-Radicalism according to the fashions of the Reform Bill era.
That is the right thing; and for that he will work day and night,
body and soul, and if needs be, die. There, in the editor's den at
Leeds, he "begins to see the truth of what you told me about the
world's unworthiness; but stop a little. I am not sad as yet. . . .
If I am hindered from feeling the soul of poetry among woods and
fields, I yet trust I am struggling for something worth prizing--
something of which I am not ashamed, and need not be. If there be
aught on earth worth aspiring to, it is the lot of him who is enabled
to do something for his miserable and suffering fellow-men; and this
you and I will try to do at least."
His friend is put to work a ministerial paper, with orders "not to be
rash, but to elevate the population gradually;" and finding those
orders to imply a considerable leaning towards the By-ends, Lukewarm,
and Facing-both-ways school, kicks over the traces, wisely, in
Nicoll's eyes, and breaks loose.
Keep up your spirits (says honest Nicoll). You are higher at this
moment in my estimation, in your own, and that of every honest man,
than you ever were before. Tait's advice was just such as I should
have expected of him; honest as honesty itself. You must never again
accept a paper but where you can tell the whole truth without fear or
favour. . . . . Tell E. (the broken-loose editor's lady-love), from
me to estimate as she ought the nobility and determination of the man
who has dared to act as you have done. Prudent men will say that you
are hasty: but you have done right, whatever may be the
consequences.
This is the spirit of Robert Nicoll; the spirit which is the fruit of
early purity and self-restraint, of living "on bread-and-cheese and
water," that he may buy books; of walking out to the Inch of Perth at
four o'clock on summer mornings, to write and read in peace before he
returns to the currants and the whisky. The nervous simplicity of
the man come out, in the very nervous simplicity of the prose he
writes; and though there be nothing very new or elevated in it, or
indeed in his poems themselves, we call on our readers to admire a
phenomenon so rare, in the "upper classes" at least, in these days,
and taking a lesson from the peasant's son, rejoice with us that "a
man is born into the world."
For Nicoll, as few do, practises what he preaches. It seems to him,
once on a time, right and necessary that Sir William Molesworth
should be returned for Leeds; and Nicoll having so determined,
"throws himself, body and soul, into the contest, with such ardour,
that his wife afterwards said (and we can well believe it) that if
Sir William had failed, Robert would have died on the instant!"--why
not? Having once made up his mind that that was the just and right
thing, the thing which was absolutely good for Leeds, and the human
beings who lived in it, was it not a thing to die for, even if it had
been but the election of a new beadle? The advanced sentry is set to
guard some obscure worthless dike-end--obscure and worthless in
itself, but to him a centre of infinite duty. True, the fate of the
camp does not depend on its being taken; if the enemy round it, there
are plenty behind to blow them out again. But that is no reason
whatsoever why he, before any odds, should throw his musket over his
shoulder, and retreat gracefully to the lines. He was set there to
stand by that, whether dike-end or representation of Leeds; that is
the right thing for him; and for that right he will fight, and if he
be killed, die. So have all brave men felt, and so have all brave
deeds been done, since man walked the earth. It is because that
spirit, the spirit of faith, has died out among us, that so few brave
deeds are done now, except on battle-fields and in hovels, whereof
none but God and the angels know.
So the man prospers. Several years of honourable and self-
restraining love bring him a wife, beautiful, loving, worshipping his
talents; a help meet for him, such as God will send at times to those
whom he loves. Kind men meet and love and help him--"The Johnstones,
Mr. Tait, William and Mary Howitt;" Sir William Molesworth, hearing
of his last illness, sends him unsolicited fifty pounds, which, as we
understand it, Nicoll accepts without foolish bluster about
independence. Why not?--man should help man, and be helped by him.
Would he not have done as much for Sir William? Nothing to us proves
Nicoll's heart-wholeness more than the way in which he talks of his
benefactors, in a tone of simple gratitude and affection, without
fawning and without vapouring. The man has too much self-respect to
consider himself lowered by accepting a favour.
But he must go after all. The editor's den at Leeds is not the place
for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes; and work rises before him,
huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under the ever-
increasing load. He will not believe it at first. In sweet
childlike playful letters, he tells his mother that it is nothing.
It has done him good--"opened the grave before his eyes, and taught
him to think of death." "He trusts that he has not borne this, and
suffered, and thought in vain." This too, he hopes, is to be a fresh
lesson-page of experience for his work. Alas! a few months more of
bitter suffering, and of generous kindness and love from all around
him--and it is over with him at the age of twenty-three. Shall we
regret him?--shall we not rather believe that God knew best; and
considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere of the second-class press,
and the strange confused ways into which old ultra-Radicalism,
finding itself too narrow for the new problems of the day, has
stumbled and floundered during the last fifteen years, believe that
he might have been a worse man had he been a longer-lived one, and
thank heaven that "the righteous is taken away from the evil to
come?"
As it is, he ends as he began. The first poem in his book is "The
Ha' Bible;" and the last, written a few days before his death, is
still the death-song of a man--without fear, without repining,
without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet
with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and homewards. And so
ends his little epic, as we called it. May Scotland see many such
another!
The actual poetic value of his verses is not first-rate by any means.
He is far inferior to Burns in range of subject, as he is in humour
and pathos. Indeed, there is very little of these latter qualities
in him anywhere--rather playfulness, flashes of childlike fun, as in
"The Provost," and "Bonnie Bessie Lee." But he has attained a
mastery over English, a simplicity and quiet which Burns never did;
and also, we need not say, a moral purity. His "Poems illustrative
of the Scotch peasantry" are charming throughout--alive and bright
with touches of real humanity, and sympathy with characters
apparently antipodal to his own.
His more earnest poems are somewhat tainted with that cardinal fault
of his school, of which he steered so clear in prose--fine words; yet
he never, like the Corn-Law Rhymer, falls a cursing. He is evidently
not a good hater even of "priests and kings, and aristocrats, and
superstition;" or perhaps he worked all that froth safely over and
off in debating-club speeches and leading articles, and left us, in
these poems, the genuine metheglin of his inner heart, sweet, clear,
and strong; for there is no form of lovable or right thing which this
man has come across, which he does not seem to have appreciated.
Besides pure love and the beauties of nature--those on which every
man of poetic power, and a great many of none, as a matter of course,
have a word to say--he can feel for and with the drunken beggar, and
the warriors of the ruined manor-house, and the monks of the abbey,
and the old mailed Normans with their "priest with cross and counted
beads in the little Saxon chapel"--things which a Radical editor
might have been excused for passing by with a sneer.
His verses to his wife are a delicious little glimpse of Eden; and
his "People's Anthem" rises into somewhat of true grandeur by virtue
of simplicity:
Lord, from Thy blessed throne,
Sorrow look down upon!
God save the Poor!
Teach them true liberty--
Make them from tyrants free--
Let their homes happy be!
God save the Poor!
The arms of wicked men
Do Thou with might restrain--
God save the Poor!
Raise Thou their lowliness--
Succour Thou their distress--
Thou whom the meanest bless!
God save the Poor!
Give them stanch honesty--
Let their pride manly be--
God save the Poor!
Help them to hold the right;
Give them both truth and might,
Lord of all LIFE and LIGHT!
God save the Poor!
And so we leave Robert Nicoll, with the parting remark, that if the
"Poems illustrative of the feelings of the intelligent and religious
among the working-classes of Scotland" be fair samples of that which
they profess to be, Scotland may thank God, that in spite of
temporary manufacturing rot-heaps, she is still whole at heart; and
that the influence of her great peasant poet, though it may seem at
first likely to be adverse to Christianity, has helped, as we have
already hinted, to purify and not to taint; to destroy the fungus,
but not to touch the heart, of the grand old Covenant-kirk life-tree.
Still sweeter, and, alas! still sadder, is the story of the two
Bethunes. If Nicoll's life, as we have said, be a solitary melody,
and short though triumphant strain of work-music, theirs is a harmony
and true concert of fellow-joys, fellow-sorrows, fellow-drudgery,
fellow-authorship, mutual throughout, lovely in their joint-life, and
in their deaths not far divided. Alexander survives his brother John
only long enough to write his "Memoirs," and then follows; and we
have his story given us by Mr. M'Combie, in a simple unassuming
little volume--not to be read without many thoughts, perhaps not
rightly without tears. Mr. M'Combie has been wise enough not to
attempt panegyric. He is all but prolix in details, filling up some
half of his volume with letters of preternatural length from
Alexander to his publishers and critics, and from the said publishers
and critics to Alexander, altogether of an unromantic and business-
like cast, but entirely successful in doing that which a book should
do--namely, in showing the world that here was a man of like passions
with ourselves, who bore from boyhood to the grave hunger, cold, wet,
rags, brutalising and health-destroying toil, and all the storms of
the world, the flesh, and the devil, and conquered them every one.
Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so deep,
that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh
and health under the exertion; he is twice blown up with his own
blast in quarrying, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and
scarred, with the loss of an eye. John, when not thirteen, is set to
stone-breaking on the roads during intense cold, and has to keep
himself from being frostbitten and heart-broken by monkey gambols;
takes to the weaving trade, and having helped his family by the most
desperate economy to save ten pounds wherewith to buy looms, begins
to work them, with his brother as an apprentice, and finds the whole
outlay rendered useless the very same year by the failures of 1825-
26. So the two return to day-labour at fourteenpence a-day. John,
in a struggle to do task-work honestly, over-exerts himself, and
ruins his digestion for life. Next year he is set in November to
clean out a watercourse knee-deep in water; then to take marl from a
pit; and then to drain standing water off a swamp during an intense
December frost; and finds himself laid down with a three months'
cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying the foundation of the
consumption which destroyed him. But the two brothers will not give
in. Poetry they will write; and they write it to the best of their
powers, on scraps of paper, after the drudgery of the day, in a cabin
pervious to every shower, teaching themselves the right spelling of
the words from some "Christian Remembrancer" or other--apparently not
our meek and unbiassed contemporary of that name; and all this
without neglecting their work a day or even an hour, when the weather
permitted--the "only thing which tempted them to fret," being--hear
it, readers, and perpend!--"the being kept at home by rain and snow."
Then an additional malady (apparently some calculous one) comes on
John, and stops by him for the six remaining years of his life. Yet
between 1826 and 1832, John had saved fourteen pounds out of his
miserable earnings, to be expended to the last farthing on his
brother's recovery from the second quarry accident. Surely the devil
is trying hard to spoil these men. But no. They are made perfect by
sufferings. In the house with one long narrow room, and a small
vacant space at the end of it, lighted by a single pane of glass,
they write and write untiring, during the long summer evenings,
poetry, "Tales of the Scottish Peasant Life," which at last bring
them in somewhat; and a work on practical economy, which is bepraised
and corrected by kind critics in Edinburgh, and at last published--
without a sale. Perhaps one cause of its failure might be found in
those very corrections. There were too many violent political
allusions in it, complains their good Mentor of Edinburgh; and
persuades them, seemingly the most meek and teachable of heroes, to
omit them; though Alexander, while submitting, pleads fairly enough
for retaining them, in a passage which we will give, as a specimen of
the sort of English possible to be acquired by a Scotch day-labourer,
self-educated, all but the rudiments of reading and writing, and a
few lectures on popular poetry from "a young student of Aberdeen,"
now the Rev. Mr. Adamson, who must look back on the friendship which
he bore these two young men as one of the noblest pages in his life.
Talk to the many of religion, and they will put on a long face,
confess that it is a thing of the greatest importance to all--and go
away and forget the whole. Talk to them of education; they will
readily acknowledge that it's "a braw thing to be weel learned," and
begin a lamentation, which is only shorter than the lamentations of
Jeremiah because they cannot make it as long, on the ignorance of the
age in which they live; but they neither stir hand nor foot in the
matter. But speak to them of politics, and their excited
countenances and kindling eye show in a moment how deeply they are
interested. Politics are therefore an important feature, and an
almost indispensable element in such a work as mine. Had it
consisted solely of exhortations to industry and rules of economy, it
would have been dismissed with an "Ou ay, it's braw for him to crack
that way: but if he were whaur we are, 'deed he wad just hae to do
as we do." But by mixing up the science with politics, and giving it
an occasional political impetus, a different result may be reasonably
expected. In these days no man can be considered a patriot or friend
of the poor, who is not also a politician.
It is amusing, by-the-bye, to see how the world changes its codes of
respectability, and how, what is anathema in one generation, becomes
trite orthodoxy in the next. The political sins in the work were,
that "my brother had attacked the corn-laws with some severity; and I
have attempted to level a battery against that sort of servile homage
which the poor pay to the rich!"
There is no use pursuing the story much farther. They again save a
little money, and need it; for the estate on which they have lived
from childhood changing hands, they are, with their aged father,
expelled from the dear old dog-kennel to find house-room where they
can. Why not?--"it was not in the bond." The house did not belong
to them; nothing of it, at least, which could be specified in any
known lease. True, there may have been associations: but what
associations can men be expected to cultivate on fourteenpence a-day?
So they must forth, with their two aged parents, and build with their
own hands a new house elsewhere, having saved some thirty pounds from
the sale of their writings. The house, as we understand, stands to
this day--hereafter to become a sort of artisan's caaba and pilgrim's
station, only second to Burns's grave. That, at least, it will
become, whenever the meaning of the words "worth" and "worship" shall
become rightly understood among us.
For what are these men, if they are not heroes and saints? Not of
the Popish sort, abject and effeminate, but of the true, human,
evangelic sort, masculine and grand--like the figures in Raffaelle's
Cartoons compared with those of Fra Bartolomeo. Not from
superstition, not from selfish prudence, but from devotion to their
aged parents, and the righteous dread of dependence, they die
voluntary celibates, although their writings show that they, too,
could have loved as nobly as they did all other things. The extreme
of endurance, self-restraint, of "conquest of the flesh," outward as
well as inward, is the life-long lot of these men; and they go
through it. They have their share of injustice, tyranny,
disappointment; one by one each bright boy's dream of success and
renown is scourged out of their minds, and sternly and lovingly their
Father in heaven teaches them the lesson of all lessons. By what
hours of misery and blank despair that faith was purchased, we can
only guess; the simple strong men give us the result, but never dream
of sitting down and analysing the process for the world's amusement
or their own glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could
have told us; whether the mere fact of a man's being able to dissect
himself, in public or in private, is not proof-patent that he is no
man, but only a shell of a man, with works inside, which can of
course be exhibited and taken to pieces--a rather more difficult
matter with flesh and blood. If we believe that God is educating,
the when, the where, and the how are not only unimportant, but,
considering who is the teacher, unfathomable to us, and it is enough
to be able to believe with John Bethune that the Lord of all things
is influencing us through all things; whether sacraments, or
sabbaths, or sun-gleams, or showers--all things are ours, for all are
His, and we are His, and He is ours--and for the rest, to say with
the same John Bethune:
Oh God of glory! thou hast treasured up
For me my little portion of distress;
But with each draught--in every bitter cup
Thy hand hath mixed, to make its soreness less,
Some cordial drop, for which thy name I bless,
And offer up my mite of thankfulness.
Thou hast chastised my frame with dire disease,
Long, obdurate, and painful; and thy hand
Hath wrung cold sweat-drops from my brow; for these
I thank thee too. Though pangs at thy command
Have compassed me about, still, with the blow,
Patience sustained my soul amid its woe.
Of the actual literary merit of these men's writings there is less to
be said. However extraordinary, considering the circumstances under
which they were written, may be the polish and melody of John's
verse, or the genuine spiritual health, deep death-and-devil-defying
earnestness, and shrewd practical wisdom, which shines through all
that either brother writes, they do not possess any of that fertile
originality, which alone would have enabled them, as it did Burns, to
compete with the literary savants, who, though for the most part of
inferior genius, have the help of information and appliances, from
which they were shut out. Judging them, as the true critic, like the
true moralist, is bound to do, "according to what they had, not
according to what they had not," they are men who, with average
advantages, might have been famous in their day. God thought it
better for them to "hide them in his tabernacle from the strife of
tongues;" and--seldom believed truism--He knows best. Alexander
shall not, according to his early dreams, "earn nine hundred pounds
by writing a book, like Burns," even though his ideal method of
spending be to buy all the boys in the parish "new shoes with iron
tackets and heels," and send them home with shillings for their
mothers, and feed their fathers on wheat bread and milk, with tea and
bannocks for Sabbath-days, and build a house for the poor old toil-
stiffened man whom he once saw draining the hill field, "with a yard
full of gooseberries, and an apple-tree!"--not that, nor even, as the
world judges, better than that, shall he be allowed to do. The poor,
for whom he writes his "Practical Economy," shall not even care to
read it; and he shall go down to the grave a failure and a lost thing
in the eyes of men: but not in the eyes of grand God-fearing old
Alison Christie, his mother, as he brings her, scrap by scrap, the
proofs of their dead idol's poems, which she has prayed to be spared
just to see once in print, and, when the last half-sheet is read,
loses her sight for ever--not in her eyes, nor in those of God who
saw him, in the cold winter mornings, wearing John's clothes, to warm
them for the dying man before he got up.
His grief at his brother's death is inconsolable. He feels for the
first time in his life, what a lot is his--for he feels for the first
time that--
Parent and friend and brother gone,
I stand upon the earth alone.
Four years he lingers; friends begin to arise from one quarter and
another, but he, not altogether wisely or well, refuses all pecuniary
help. At last Mr. Hugh Miller recommends him to be editor of a
projected "Non-Intrusion" paper in Dumfries, with a salary, to him
boundless, of 100l. a-year. Too late! The iron has entered too
deeply into his soul; in a few weeks more he is lying in his
brother's grave--"Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their
deaths not divided."
"William Thom of Inverury" is a poet altogether of the same school.
His "Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver" are superior to
those of either Nicoll or the Bethunes, the little love-songs in the
volume reminding us of Burns's best manner, and the two languages in
which he writes being better amalgamated, as it seems to us, than in
any Scotch songwriter. Moreover, there is a terseness, strength, and
grace about some of these little songs, which would put to shame many
a volume of vague and windy verse, which the press sees yearly sent
forth by men, who, instead of working at the loom, have been pampered
from their childhood with all the means and appliances of good taste
and classic cultivation. We have room only for one specimen of his
verse, not the most highly finished, but of a beauty which can speak
for itself.