Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us
He knows each chord, its various tone;
Each spring its various bias.
Then at the balance let’s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What’s _done_ we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.”
Or in a better strain yet, a strain, his admirers will say,
unsurpassable—
“To make a happy fire-side clime
To weans and wife,
That’s the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.”
There is criticism of life for you, the admirers of Burns will say to
us; there is the application of ideas to life! There is, undoubtedly.
The doctrine of the last-quoted lines coincides almost exactly with what
was the aim and end, Xenophon tells us, of all the teaching of Socrates.
And the application is a powerful one; made by a man of vigorous
understanding, and (need I say?) a master of language.
But for the supreme poetical success more is required than the powerful
application of ideas to life; it must be an application under the
conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Those
laws fix as an essential condition, in the poet’s treatment of such
matters as are here in question, high seriousness;—the high seriousness
which comes from absolute sincerity. The accent of high seriousness,
born of absolute sincerity, is what gives to such verse as
“In la sua volontade è nostra pace ...”
to such criticism of life as Dante’s, its power. Is this accent felt in
the passages which I have been quoting from Burns? Surely not; surely,
if our sense is quick, we must perceive that we have not in those
passages a voice from the very inmost soul of the genuine Burns; he is
not speaking to us from these depths, he is more or less preaching. And
the compensation for admiring such passages less, from missing the
perfect poetic accent in them, will be that we shall admire more the
poetry where that accent is found.
No; Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the high seriousness of the
great classics, and the virtue of matter and manner which goes with that
high seriousness is wanting to his work. At moments he touched it in a
profound and passionate melancholy, as in those four immortal lines
taken by Byron as a motto for _The Bride of Abydos_, but which have in
them a depth of poetic quality such as resides in no verse of Byron’s
own—
“Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”
But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot make; the rest, in the
_Farewell to Nancy_, is verbiage.
We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving his
work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent
or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. His genuine criticism of
life, when the sheer poet in him speaks, is ironic; it is not—
“Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here firm I rest, they must be best
Because they are Thy will!”
It is far rather: _Whistle owre the lave o’t!_ Yet we may say of him as
of Chaucer, that of life and the world, as they come before him, his
view is large, free, shrewd, benignant,—truly poetic, therefore; and his
manner of rendering what he sees is to match. But we must note, at the
same time, his great difference from Chaucer. The freedom of Chaucer is
heightened, in Burns, by a fiery, reckless energy; the benignity of
Chaucer deepens, in Burns, into an overwhelming sense of the pathos of
things;—of the pathos of human nature, the pathos, also, of non-human
nature. Instead of the fluidity of Chaucer’s manner, the manner of Burns
has spring, bounding swiftness. Burns is by far the greater force,
though he has perhaps less charm. The world of Chaucer is fairer,
richer, more significant than that of Burns; but when the largeness and
freedom of Burns get full sweep, as in _Tam o’ Shanter_, or still more
in that puissant and splendid production, _The Jolly Beggars_, his world
may be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it. In the world of
_The Jolly Beggars_ there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is
bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth,
truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach’s Cellar, of
Goethe’s _Faust_, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only
matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes.
Here, where his largeness and freedom serve him so admirably, and also
in those poems and songs where to shrewdness he adds infinite archness
and wit, and to benignity infinite pathos, where his manner is flawless,
and a perfect poetic whole is the result,—in things like the address to
the mouse whose home he had ruined, in things like _Duncan Gray_, _Tam
Glen_, _Whistle and I’ll come to you my Lad_, _Auld Lang Syne_ (this
list might be made much longer),—here we have the genuine Burns, of whom
the real estimate must be high indeed. Not a classic, nor with the
excellent οπουδαιότης of the great classics, nor with a verse rising to
a criticism of life and a virtue like theirs; but a poet with thorough
truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving us a poetry
sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning towards the pathetic, and
may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most for his touches of piercing,
sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; for verse like—
“We twa hae paidl’t i’ the burn
From mornin’ sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne....”
where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps it is by the
perfection of soundness of his lighter and archer masterpieces that he
is poetically most wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a personal
estimate of Shelley, as so many of us have been, are, and will be,—of
that beautiful spirit building his many-colored haze of words and
images.
“Pinnacled dim in the intense inane”—
no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest
and soundest. Side by side with the
“On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire ...”
of _Prometheus Unbound_, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this
from _Tam Glen_—
‘My minnie does constantly deave me
And bids me beware o’ young men;
They flatter, she says, to deceive me;
But wha can think sae o’ Tam Glen?”
But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so
near to us—poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth—of which
the estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion.
For my purpose, it is enough to have taken the single case of Burns, the
first poet we come to of whose work the estimate formed is evidently apt
to be personal, and to have suggested how we may proceed, using the
poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone, to correct this
estimate, as we had previously corrected by the same means the historic
estimate where we met with it. A collection like the present, with its
succession of celebrated names and celebrated poems, offers a good
opportunity to us for resolutely endeavoring to make our estimates of
poetry real. I have sought to point out a method which will help us in
making them so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to put any one who
likes in a way of applying it for himself.
At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed to
lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get their
whole value,—the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to
enjoy the best, the truly classic, in poetry,—is an end, let me say it
once more at parting, of supreme importance. We are often told that an
era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of
readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do
not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and
that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if
good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be
abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never
will lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary appearances; it
never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not
indeed by the world’s deliberate and conscious choice, but by something
far deeper,—by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.