feelings of another, while their characters are cast in such different
moulds? It is, indeed, wonderful--but the power is that of sympathy and
genius. The dramatic poet, whose heart breathes love to all living
things, and whose overflowing tenderness diffuses itself over the beauty
even of unliving nature, may yet paint with his creative hand the
steeled heart of him who sits on a throne of blood--the lust of crime in
a mind polluted with wickedness--the remorse of acts which could never
pass in thought through his imagination as his own. For, in the act of
imagination he can suppress in his mind its own peculiar feelings--its
good and gracious affections--call up from their hidden places those
elements of our being, of which the seeds were sown in him as in
all--give them unnatural magnitude and power--conceive the disorder of
passions, the perpetration of crimes, the tortures of remorse, or the
scorn of that human weakness, from which his own gentle bosom and
blameless life are pure and free. He can bring himself, in short, into
an imaginary and momentary sympathy with the wicked, just as his mind
falls of itself into a natural and true sympathy with those whose
character is accordant with his own; and watching the emotions and
workings of his mind in the spontaneous and in the forced sympathy, he
knows and understands for himself what passes in the minds of others.
What is done in the highest degree by the highest genius, is done by all
of ourselves in lesser degree, and unconsciously, at every moment in our
intercourse with one another. To this kind of sympathy, so essential to
our knowledge of the human mind, and without which there can be neither
poetry nor philosophy, are necessary a largeness of heart which
willingly yields itself to conceive the feelings and states of others
whose character is utterly unlike its own, and freedom from any
inordinate overpowering passion which quenches in the mind the feelings
of nature it has already known, and places it in habitual enmity to the
affections and happiness of its kind. To paint bad passions is not to
praise them; they alone can paint them well who hate, fear, or pity
them; and therefore Baillie has done so--nay start not--better than
Byron.
Well may our land be proud of such women. None such ever before adorned
her poetical annals. Glance over that most interesting volume,
"Specimens of British Poetesses," by that amiable, ingenious, and
erudite man, the Reverend Alexander Dyce, and what effulgence begins to
break towards the close of the eighteenth century! For ages on ages the
genius of English women had ever and anon been shining forth in song;
but faint though fair was the lustre, and struggling imprisoned in
clouds. Some of the sweet singers of those days bring tears to our eyes
by their simple pathos--for their poetry breathes of their own sorrows,
and shows that they were but too familiar with grief. But their strains
are mere melodies "sweetly played in tune." The deeper harmonies of
poetry seem to have been beyond their reach. The range of their power
was limited. Anne, Countess of Winchilsea--Catherine Phillips, known by
the name of Orinda--and Mrs Anne Killigrew, who, as Dryden says, was
made an angel, "in the last promotion to the skies"--showed, as they
sang on earth, that they were all worthy to sing in heaven. But what
were their hymns to those that are now warbled around us from many
sister spirits, pure in their lives as they, but brighter far in their
genius, and more fortunate in its nurture? Poetry from female lips was
then half a wonder, and half a reproach. But now 'tis no longer
rare--not even the highest--yes, the highest--for Innocence and Purity
are of the highest hierarchies; and the thoughts and feelings they
inspire, though breathed in words and tones, "gentle and low, an
excellent thing in woman," are yet lofty as the stars, and humble too as
the flowers beneath our feet.
We have not forgotten an order of poets, peculiar, we believe, to our
own enlightened land--a high order of poets sprung from the lower orders
of the people--and not only sprung from them, but bred as well as born
in "the huts where poor men lie," and glorifying their condition by the
light of song. Such glory belongs--we believe--exclusively to this
country and to this age. Mr Southey, who in his own high genius and fame
is never insensible to the virtues of his fellow-men, however humble and
obscure the sphere in which they may move, has sent forth a volume--and
a most interesting one--on the uneducated poets; nor shall we presume to
gainsay one of his benevolent words. But this we do say, that all the
verse-writers of whom he there treats, and all the verse-writers of the
same sort of whom he does not treat, that ever existed on the face of
the earth, shrink up into a lean and shrivelled bundle of dry leaves or
sticks, compared with these Five--Burns, Hogg, Cunningham, Bloomfield,
and Clare. It must be a strong soil--the soil of this Britain--which
sends up such products; and we must not complain of the clime beneath
which they grow to such height, and bear such fruitage. The spirit of
domestic life must be sound--the natural knowledge of good and evil
high--the religion true--the laws just--and the government, on the
whole, good, methinks, that have all conspired to educate these children
of genius, whose souls Nature had framed of the finer clay.
Such men seem to us more clearly and certainly men of genius, than many
who, under different circumstances, may have effected higher
achievements. For though they enjoyed in their condition ineffable
blessings to dilate their spirits, and touch them with all tenderest
thoughts, it is not easy to imagine, on the other hand, the deadening or
degrading influences to which by that condition they were inevitably
exposed, and which keep down the heaven-aspiring flame of genius, or
extinguish it wholly, or hold it smouldering under all sorts of rubbish.
Only look at the attempts in verse of the common run of clodhoppers. Buy
a few ballads from the wall or stall--and you groan to think that you
have been born--such is the mess of mire and filth which often, without
the slightest intention of offence, those rural, city, or suburban bards
of the lower orders prepare for boys, virgins, and matrons, who all
devour it greedily, without suspicion. Strange it is that even in that
mural minstrelsy, occasionally occurs a phrase or line, and even stanza,
sweet and simple, and to nature true; but consider it in the light of
poetry read, recited, and sung by the people, and you might well be
appalled by the revelation therein made of the tastes, feelings, and
thoughts of the lower orders. And yet in the midst of all the popularity
of such productions, the best of Burns's poems, his "Cottar's Saturday
Night," and most delicate of his songs, are still more popular, and read
by the same classes with a still greater eagerness of delight. Into this
mystery we shall not now inquire; but we mention it now merely to show
how divine a thing true genius is, which, burning within the bosoms of a
few favourite sons of nature, guards them from all such pollution, lifts
them up above it all, purifies their whole being, and without consuming
their family affections or friendships, or making them unhappy with
their lot, and disgusted with all about them, reveals to them all that
is fair and bright and beautiful in feeling and in imagination, makes
them very poets indeed, and should fortune favour, and chance and
accident, gains for them wide over the world the glory of a poet's name.
From all such evil influences incident to their condition--and we are
now speaking but of the evil--the Five emerged; and first and
foremost--Burns. Our dearly beloved Thomas Carlyle is reported to have
said at a dinner given to Allan Cunningham in Dumfries, that Burns was
not only one of the greatest of poets, but likewise of philosophers. We
hope not. What he did may be told in one short sentence. His genius
purified and ennobled in his imagination and in his heart the character
and condition of the Scottish peasantry--and reflected them, ideally
true to nature, in the living waters of Song. That is what he did; but
to do that, did not require the highest powers of the poet and the
philosopher. Nay, had he marvellously possessed them, he never would
have written a single line of the poetry of the late Robert Burns. Thank
Heaven for not having made him such a man--but merely the Ayrshire
Ploughman. He was called into existence for a certain work, for the
fulness of time was come--but he was neither a Shakespeare, nor a Scott,
nor a Goethe; and therefore he rejoiced in writing the "Saturday Night,"
and "The Twa Dogs," and "The Holy Fair," and "O' a' the Airts the Win'
can blaw," and eke "The Vision." But forbid it, all ye Gracious Powers!
that we should quarrel with Thomas Carlyle--and that, too, for calling
Robert Burns one of the greatest of poets and philosophers.
Like a strong man rejoicing to run a race, we behold Burns in his golden
prime; and glory gleams from the Peasant's head, far and wide over
Scotland. See the shadow tottering to the tomb! frenzied with fears of a
prison--for some five-pound debt--existing, perhaps, but in his diseased
imagination--for, alas! sorely diseased it was, and he too, at last,
seemed somewhat insane. He escapes that disgrace in the grave. Buried
with his bones be all remembrances of his miseries! But the spirit of
song, which was his true spirit, unpolluted and unfallen, lives, and
breathes, and has its being, in the peasant-life of Scotland; his songs,
which are as household and sheepfold words, consecrated by the charm
that is in all the heart's purest affections, love and pity, and the joy
of grief, shall never decay, till among the people have decayed the
virtues which they celebrate, and by which they were inspired; and
should some dismal change in the skies ever overshadow the sunshine of
our national character, and savage storms end in sullen stillness, which
is moral death, in the poetry of Burns the natives of happier lands will
see how noble was once the degenerated race that may then be looking
down disconsolately on the dim grass of Scotland with the unuplifted
eyes of cowards and slaves.
The truth ought always to be spoken; and therefore we say that in fancy
James Hogg--in spite of his name and his teeth--was not inferior to
Robert Burns--and why not? The Forest is a better schoolroom for Fancy
than ever Burns studied in; it overflowed with poetical traditions. But
comparisons are always odious; and the great glory of James is, that he
is as unlike Robert as ever one poet was unlike another.
Among hills that once were a forest, and still bear that name, and by
the side of a river not unknown in song, lying in his plaid on a brae
among the "woolly people," behold that true son of genius--The Ettrick
Shepherd. We are never so happy as when praising James; but pastoral
poets are the most incomprehensible of God's creatures; and here is one
of the best of them all, who confesses the "Chaldee" and denies the
"Noctes!"
"The Queen's Wake" is a garland of fair forest flowers, bound with a
band of rushes from the moor. It is not a poem--not it--nor was it
intended to be so; you might as well call a bright bouquet of flowers a
flower, which, by the by, we do in Scotland. Some of the ballads are
very beautiful; one or two even splendid; most of them spirited; and the
worst far better than the best that ever was written by any bard in
danger of being a blockhead. "Kilmeny" alone places our (ay, _our_)
Shepherd among the Undying Ones. London soon loses all memory of lions,
let them visit her in the shape of any animal they please. But the Heart
of the Forest never forgets. It knows no such word as absence. The Death
of a Poet there is but the beginning of a Life of Fame. His songs no
more perish than do flowers. There are no Annuals in the Forest. All are
perennial; or if they do indeed die, their fadings away are invisible in
the constant succession--the sweet unbroken series of everlasting bloom.
So will it be in his native haunts with the many songs of the Ettrick
Shepherd. The lochs may be drained--corn may grow where once the Yarrow
flowed--nor is such change much more unlikely than in the olden time
would have been thought the extirpation of all the vast oak-woods, where
the deer trembled to fall into the den of the wolf, and the wild boar
farrowed beneath the eagle's eyrie. All extinct now! But obsolete never
shall be the Shepherd's plaintive or pawky, his melancholy or merry,
lays. The ghost of "Mary Lee" will be seen in the moonlight coming down
the hills; the "Witch of Fife" on the clouds will still bestride her
besom; and the "Gude Grey Cat" will mew in imagination, were even the
last mouse on his last legs, and the feline species swept off by war,
pestilence, and famine, and heard to purr no more!
It is here where Burns was weakest, that the Shepherd is strongest--the
world of shadows. The airy beings that to the impassioned soul of Burns
seemed cold, bloodless, unattractive, rise up lovely in their own silent
domains, before the dreaming fancy of the tender-hearted Shepherd. The
still green beauty of the pastoral hills and vales where he passed all
his days, inspired him with ever-brooding visions of Fairy Land, till,
as he lay musing on the brae, the world of shadows seemed, in the clear
depths, a softened reflection of real life, like the hills and heavens
in the water of his native lake. When he speaks of Fairy Land, his
language becomes aerial as the very voice of the fairy people, serenest
images rise up with the music of the verse, and we almost believe in the
being of those unlocalised realms of peace, and of which he sings like a
native minstrel.
Yes, James--thou wert but a poor shepherd to the last--poor in this
world's goods--though Altrive Lake is a pretty little bit farmie--given
thee by the best of Dukes--with its few laigh sheep-braes--its somewhat
stony hayfield or two--its pasture where Crummie might unhungered
graze--nyuck for the potato's bloomy or ploomy shaws--and path-divided
from the porch the garden, among whose flowers "wee Jamie" played. But
nature had given thee, to console thy heart in all disappointments from
the "false smiling of fortune beguiling," a boon which thou didst hug to
thy heart with transport on the darkest day--the "gift o' genie," and
the power of immortal song.
And has Scotland to the Ettrick Shepherd been just--been generous--as
she was--or was not--to the Ayrshire peasant?--has she, in her conduct
to him, shown her contrition for her sin--whatever that may have
been--to Burns? It is hard to tell. Fashion tosses the feathered
head--and gentility turns away her painted cheek from the Mountain Bard;
but when, at the shrine of true poetry, did ever such votaries devoutly
worship? Cold, false, and hollow, ever has been their admiration of
genius--and different, indeed, from their evanescent ejaculations, has
ever been the enduring voice of fame. Scorn be to the scorners! But
Scott, and Wordsworth, and Southey, and Byron, and other great bards,
have all loved the Shepherd's lays--and Joanna the palm-crowned, and
Felicia the muse's darling, and Caroline the Christian poetess, and all
the other fair female spirits of song. And in his native land, all
hearts that love her streams, and her hills, and her cottages, and her
kirks, the bee-humming garden and the primrose-circled fold, the white
hawthorn and the green fairy-knowe, all delight in "Kilmeny" and "Mary
Lee," and in many another vision that visited the Shepherd in the
Forest.
And what can surpass many of the Shepherd's songs? The most undefinable
of all undefinable kinds of poetical inspiration are surely--Songs. They
seem to start up indeed from the dew-sprinkled soil of a poet's soul,
like flowers; the first stanza being root, the second leaf, the third
bud, and all the rest blossom, till the song is like a stalk laden with
its own beauty, and laying itself down in languid delight on the soft
bed of moss--song and flower alike having the same "dying fall!"
A fragment! And the more piteous because a fragment. Go in search of the
pathetic, and you will find it tear-steeped, sigh-breathed,
moan-muttered, and groaned in fragments. The poet seems often struck
dumb by woe--his heart feels that suffering is at its acme--and that he
should break off and away from a sight too sad to be longer looked
on--haply too humiliating to be disclosed. So, too, it sometimes is with
the beautiful. The soul in its delight seeks to escape from the emotion
that oppresses it--is speechless--and the song falls mute. Such is
frequently the character--and the origin of that character--of our auld
Scottish Sangs. In their mournfulness are they not almost like the wail
of some bird distracted on the bush from which its nest has been
harried, and then suddenly flying away for ever into the woods? In their
joyfulness, are they not almost like the hymn of some bird, that
love-stricken suddenly darts from the tree-top down to the caresses that
flutter through the spring? And such, too, are often the airs to which
those dear auld sangs are sung. From excess of feeling--fragmentary; or
of one divine part to which genius may be defied to conceive another,
because but one hour in all time could have given it birth.
You may call this pure nonsense--but 'tis so pure that you need not fear
to swallow it. All great song-writers, nevertheless, have been great
thieves. Those who had the blessed fate to flourish first--to be born
when "this auld cloak was new,"--the cloak we mean which nature
wears--scrupled not to creep upon her as she lay asleep beneath the
shadow of some single tree among
"The grace of forest woods decay'd,
And pastoral melancholy,"
and to steal the very pearls out of her hair--out of the silken snood
which enamoured Pan himself had not untied in the Golden Age. Or if she
ventured, as sometimes she did, to walk along the highways of the earth,
they robbed her in the face of day of her dew-wrought reticule--without
hurting, however, the hand from which they brushed that net of gossamer.
Then came the Silver Age of Song, the age in which we now live--and the
song-singers were thieves still--stealing and robbing from them who had
stolen and robbed of old; yet, how account you for this phenomenon--all
parties remain richer than ever--and Nature, especially, after all this
thieving and robbery, and piracy and plunder, many million times richer
than the day on which she received her dowry,
"The bridal of the earth and sky;"
and with "golden store" sufficient in its scatterings to enable all the
sons of genius she will ever bear, to "set up for themselves" in poetry,
accumulating capital upon capital, till each is a Croesus, rejoicing
to lend it out without any other interest than cent per cent, paid in
sighs, smiles, and tears, and without any other security than the
promise of a quiet eye,
"That broods and sleeps on its own heart!"
Amongst the most famous thieves in our time have been Rob, James, and
Allan. Burns never saw or heard a jewel or tune of a thought or a
feeling, but he immediately made it his own--that is, stole it. He was
too honest a man to refrain from such thefts. The thoughts and
feelings--to whom by divine right did they belong? To Nature. But Burns
beheld them "waif and stray," and in peril of being lost for ever. He
seized then on those "snatches of old songs," wavering away into the
same oblivion that lies on the graves of the nameless bards who first
gave them being; and now, spiritually interfused with his own lays, they
are secured against decay--and like them immortal. So hath the Shepherd
stolen many of the Flowers of the Forest--whose beauty had breathed
there ever since Flodden's fatal overthrow; but they had been long
fading and pining away in the solitary places, wherein so many of their
kindred had utterly disappeared, and beneath the restoring light of his
genius their bloom and their balm were for ever renewed. But the thief
of all thieves is the Nithsdale and Galloway thief--called by Sir
Walter, most characteristically, "Honest Allan!" Thief and forger as he
is--we often wonder why he is permitted to live. Many is the sweet
stanza he has stolen from Time--that silly old carle who kens not even
his own--many the lifelike line--and many the strange single word that
seems to possess the power of all the parts of speech. And, having
stolen them, to what use did he turn the treasures? Why, unable to give
back every man his own--for they were all dead, buried, and
forgotten--by a potent prayer he evoked from his Pool-Palace,
overshadowed by the Dalswinton woods, the Genius of the Nith, to
preserve the gathered flowers of song for ever unwithered, for that they
all had grown ages ago beneath and around the green shadows of Criffel,
and longed now to be embalmed in the purity of the purest river that
Scotland sees flowing in unsullied silver to the sea. But the Genius of
the Nith--frowning and smiling--as he looked upon his son alternately in
anger, love, and pride--refused the votive offering, and told him to be
gone; for that he--the Genius--was not a Cromek--and could distinguish
with half an eye what belonged to antiquity, from what had undergone, in
Allan's hands, change into "something rich and rare;" and above all,
from what had been blown to life that very year by the breath of Allan's
own genius, love-inspired by "his ain lassie," the "lass that he loe'd
best," springing from seeds itself had sown, and cherished by the dews
of the same gracious skies, that filled with motion and music the
transparency of the river-god's never-failing urn.
We love Allan's "Maid of Elvar." It beats with a fine, free, bold, and
healthful spirit. Along with the growth of the mutual love of Eustace
and Sybil, he paints peasant-life with a pen that reminds us of the
pencil of Wilkie. He is as familiar with it all as Burns; and Burns
would have perused with tears many of these pictures, even the most
cheerful--for the flood-gates of Robin's heart often suddenly flung
themselves open to a touch, while a rushing gush--wondering gazers knew
not why--bedimmed the lustre of his large black eyes. Allan gives us
descriptions of Washings and Watchings o' claes, as Homer has done
before him in the Odyssey, and that other Allan in the Gentle
Shepherd--of Kirks, and Christenings, and Halloweens, and other
Festivals. Nor has he feared to string his lyre--why should he?--to such
themes as the Cottar's Saturday Night--and the simple ritual of our
faith, sung and said
"In some small kirk upon the sunny brae,
That stands all by itself on some sweet Sabbath-day."
Ay, many are the merits of this "Rustic Tale." To appreciate them
properly, we must carry along with us, during the perusal of the poem, a
right understanding and feeling of that pleasant epithet--Rustic.
Rusticity and Urbanity are polar opposites--and there lie between many
million modes of Manners, which you know are Minor Morals. But not to
puzzle a subject in itself sufficiently simple, the same person may be
at once rustic and urbane, and that too, either in his character of man
or of poet, or in his twofold capacity of both; for observe that, though
you may be a man without being a poet, we defy you to be a poet without
being a man. A Rustic is a clodhopper; an Urbane is a paviour. But it is
obvious that the paviour in a field hops the clod; that the clodhopper
in a street paces the pave. At the same time, it is equally obvious that
the paviour, in hopping the clod, performs the feat with a sort of city
smoke, which breathes of bricks; that the clodhopper, in pacing the
pave, overcomes the difficulty with a kind of country air, that is
redolent of broom. Probably, too, Urbanus through a deep fallow is seen
ploughing his way in pumps; Rusticus along the shallow stones is heard
clattering on clogs. But to cease pursuing the subject through all its
variations, suffice it for the present (for we perceive that we must
resume the discussion another time), to say, that Allan Cunningham is a
living example and lively proof of the truth of our Philosophy--it being
universally allowed in the best circles of town and country, that he is
an URBANE RUSTIC.
Now, that is the man for our love and money, when the work to be done is
a Poem on Scottish Life.
We can say of Allan what Allan says of Eustace,--
"Far from the pasture moor
He comes; the fragrance of the dale and wood
Is scenting all his garments, green and good."