What the future will decide about Robert Burns and his works--what place
will be assign'd them on that great roster of geniuses and genius which
can only be finish'd by the slow but sure balancing of the centuries
with their ample average--I of course cannot tell. But as we know him,
from his recorded utterances, and after nearly one century, and its
diligence of collections, songs, letters, anecdotes, presenting the
figure of the canny Scotchman in a fullness and detail wonderfully
complete, and the lines mainly by his own hand, he forms to-day, in some
respects, the most interesting personality among singers. Then there are
many things in Burns's poems and character that specially endear him to
America. He was essentially a Republican--would have been at home in
the Western United States, and probably become eminent there. He was
an average sample of the good-natured, warm-blooded, proud-spirited,
amative, alimentive, convivial, young and early-middle-aged man of the
decent-born middle classes everywhere and any how. Without the race of
which he is a distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and
her powerful Democracy could not exist to-day--could not project with
unparallel'd historic sway into the future.
Perhaps the peculiar coloring of the era of Burns needs always first
to be consider'd. It included the times of the '76-'83 Revolution in
America, of the French Revolution, and an unparallel'd chaos development
in Europe and elsewhere. In every department, shining and strange names,
like stars, some rising, some in meridian, some declining--Voltaire,
Franklin, Washington, Kant, Goethe, Fulton, Napoleon, mark the era.
And while so much, and of grandest moment, fit for the trumpet of the
world's fame, was being transacted--that little tragi-comedy of R. B,'s
life and death was going on in a country by-place in Scotland!
Burns's correspondence, generally collected and publish'd since his
death, gives wonderful glints into both the amiable and weak (and worse
than weak) parts of his portraiture, habits, good and bad luck, ambition
and associations. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop, Mrs. McLehose, (Clarinda,)
Mr. Thompson, Dr. Moore, Robert Muir, Mr. Cunningham, Miss Margaret
Chalmers, Peter Hill, Richard Brown, Mrs. Riddel, Robert Ainslie, and
Robert Graham, afford valuable lights and shades to the outline, and
with numerous others, help to a touch here, and fill-in there, of
poet and poems. There are suspicions, it is true, of "the Genteel
Letter-Writer," with scraps and words from "the Manual of French
Quotations," and, in the love-letters, some hollow mouthings. Yet we
wouldn't on any account lack the letters. A full and true portrait is
always what is wanted; veracity at every hazard. Besides, do we not
all see by this time that the story of Burns, even for its own sake,
requires the record of the whole and several, with nothing left out?
Completely and every point minutely told out its fullest, explains and
justifies itself--(as perhaps almost any life does.) He is very close
to the earth. He pick'd up his best words and tunes directly from the
Scotch home-singers, but tells Thompson they would not please his, T.'s,
"learn'd lugs," adding, "I call them simple--you would pronounce them
silly." Yes, indeed; the idiom was undoubtedly his happiest hit. Yet
Dr. Moore, in 1789, writes to Burns, "If I were to offer an opinion, it
would be that in your future productions you should abandon the Scotch
stanza and dialect, and adopt the measure and language of modern English
poetry"!
As the 128th birth-anniversary of the poet draws on, (January, 1887,)
with its increasing club-suppers, vehement celebrations, letters,
speeches, and so on--(mostly, as William O'Connor says, from people who
would not have noticed R. B. at all during his actual life, nor kept
his company, or read his verses, on any account)--it may be opportune
to print some leisurely-jotted notes I find in my budget. I take my
observation of the Scottish bard by considering him as an individual
amid the crowded clusters, galaxies, of the old world--and fairly
inquiring and suggesting what out of these myriads he too may be to
the Western Republic. In the first place no poet on record so fully
bequeaths his own personal magnetism,[39] nor illustrates more pointedly
how one's verses, by time and reading, can so curiously fuse with the
versifier's own life and death, and give final light and shade to all.
I would say a large part of the fascination of Burns's homely, simple
dialect-melodies is due, for all current and future readers, to
the poet's personal "errors," the general bleakness of his lot, his
ingrain'd pensiveness, his brief dash into dazzling, tantalizing,
evanescent sunshine--finally culminating in those last years of
his life, his being taboo'd and in debt, sick and sore, yaw'd as by
contending gales, deeply dissatisfied with everything, most of all with
himself--high-spirited too--(no man ever really higher-spirited than
Robert Burns.) I think it a perfectly legitimate part too. At any rate
it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the songs
and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb'd. Through that
view-medium of misfortune--of a noble spirit in low environments, and of
a squalid and premature death--we view the undoubted facts, (giving, as
we read them now, a sad kind of pungency,) that Burns's were, before all
else, the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication. Perhaps
even it is this strange, impalpable _post-mortem_ comment and influence
referr'd to, that gives them their contrast, attraction, making the
zest of their author's after fame. If he had lived steady, fat, moral,
comfortable, well-to-do years, on his own grade, (let alone, what of
course was out of the question, the ease and velvet and rosewood and
copious royalties of Tennyson or Victor Hugo or Longfellow,) and died
well-ripen'd and respectable, where could have come in that burst
of passionate sobbing and remorse which well'd forth instantly
and generally in Scotland, and soon follow'd everywhere among
English-speaking races, on the announcement of his death? and which,
with no sign of stopping, only regulated and vein'd with fitting
appreciation, flows deeply, widely yet?
Dear Rob! manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak spots as well as
strong ones-essential type of so many thousands--perhaps the average, as
just said, of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not only
of the British Isles, but America, too, North and South, just the same.
I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof
he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes,
especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in their blood.
(How clear it is to me that the common soil has always been, and is now,
thickly strewn with just such gems.) He is well-called the _Ploughman_.
"Holding the plough," said his brother Gilbert, "was the favorite
situation with Robert for poetic compositions; and some of his best
verses were produced while he was at that exercise." "I must return
to my humble station, and woo my rustic muse in my wonted way, at the
plough-tail." 1787, to the Earl of Buchan. He has no high ideal of the
poet or the poet's office; indeed quite a low and contracted notion of
both:
"Fortune! if thou'll but gie me still
Hale breeks, a scone, and whiskey gill,
An' rowth o' rhyme to rave at will,
Tak' a' the rest."
See also his rhym'd letters to Robert Graham invoking patronage; "one
stronghold," Lord Glencairn, being dead, now these appeals to "Fintra,
my other stay," (with in one letter a copious shower of vituperation
generally.) In his collected poems there is no particular unity, nothing
that can be called a leading theory, no unmistakable spine or skeleton.
Perhaps, indeed, their very desultoriness is the charm of his songs: "I
take up one or another," he says in a letter to Thompson, "just as the
bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug."
Consonantly with the customs of the time--yet markedly inconsistent in
spirit with Burns's own case, (and not a little painful as it remains
on record, as depicting some features of the bard himself,) the relation
called _patronage_ existed between the nobility and gentry on one
side, and literary people on the other, and gives one of the strongest
side-lights to the general coloring of poems and poets. It crops out a
good deal in Burns's Letters, and even necessitated a certain flunkeyism
on occasions, through life. It probably, with its requirements, (while
it help'd in money and countenance) did as much as any one cause in
making that life a chafed and unhappy one, ended by a premature and
miserable death.
Yes, there is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable to the
concrete, human points of view. He poetizes work-a-day agricultural
labor and life, (whose spirit and sympathies, as well as practicalities,
are much the same everywhere,) and treats fresh, often coarse, natural
occurrences, loves, persons, not like many new and some old poets in a
genteel style of gilt and china, or at second or third removes, but in
their own born atmosphere, laughter, sweat, unction. Perhaps no one ever
sang "lads and lasses"--that universal race, mainly the same, too, all
ages, all lands--down on their own plane, as he has. He exhibits
no philosophy worth mentioning; his morality is hardly more than
parrot-talk--not bad or deficient, but cheap, shopworn, the platitudes
of old aunts and uncles to the youngsters (be good boys and keep your
noses clean.) Only when he gets at Poosie Nansie's, celebrating the
"barley bree," or among tramps, or democratic bouts and drinking
generally,
("Freedom and whiskey gang the gither.")
we have, in his own unmistakable color and warmth, those interiors
of rake-helly life and tavern fun--the cantabile of jolly beggars in
highest jinks--lights and groupings of rank glee and brawny amorousness,
outvying the best painted pictures of the Dutch school, or any school.
By America and her democracy such a poet, I cannot too often repeat,
must be kept in loving remembrance; but it is best that discriminations
be made. His admirers (as at those anniversary suppers, over the "hot
Scotch") will not accept for their favorite anything less than the
highest rank, alongside of Homer, Shakspere, etc. Such, in candor, are
not the true friends of the Ayrshire bard, who really needs a different
place quite by himself. The Iliad and the Odyssey express courage,
craft, full-grown heroism in situations of danger, the sense of command
and leadership, emulation, the last and fullest evolution of self-poise
as in kings, and god-like even while animal appetites. The Shaksperean
compositions, on vertebers and frame-work of the primary passions,
portray (essentially the same as Homer's,) the spirit and letter of the
feudal world, the Norman lord, ambitious and arrogant, taller and
nobler than common men--with much underplay and gusts of heat and cold,
volcanoes and stormy seas. Burns (and some will say to his credit)
attempts none of these themes. He poetizes the humor, riotous blood,
sulks, amorous torments, fondness for the tavern and for cheap objective
nature, with disgust at the grim and narrow ecclesiasticism of his
time and land, of a young farmer on a bleak and hired farm in Scotland,
through the years and under the circumstances of the British politics
of that time, and of his short personal career as author, from 1783 to
1796. He is intuitive and affectionate, and just emerged or emerging
from the shackles of the kirk, from poverty, ignorance, and from his
own rank appetites--(out of which latter, however, he never extricated
himself.) It is to be said that amid not a little smoke and gas in his
poems, there is in almost every piece a spark of fire, and now and then
the real afflatus. He has been applauded as democratic, and with some
warrant; while Shakspere, and with the greatest warrant, has been called
monarchical or aristocratic (which he certainly is.) But the splendid
personalizations of Shakspere, formulated on the largest, freest, most
heroic, most artistic mould, are to me far dearer as lessons, and more
precious even as models for Democracy, than the humdrum samples
Burns presents. The motives of some of his effusions are certainly
discreditable personally--one or two of them markedly so. He has,
moreover, little or no spirituality. This last is his mortal flaw and
defect, tried by highest standards. The ideal he never reach'd (and yet
I think he leads the way to it.) He gives melodies, and now and then the
simplest and sweetest ones; but harmonies, complications, oratorios in
words, never. (I do not speak this in any deprecatory sense. Blessed be
the memory of the warm-hearted Scotchman for what he has left us, just
as it is!) He likewise did not know himself, in more ways than one.
Though so really fret and independent, he prided himself in his songs on
being a reactionist and a Jacobite--on persistent sentimental adherency
to the cause of the Stuarts--the weakest, thinnest, most faithless,
brainless dynasty that ever held a throne.
Thus, while Burns is not at all great for New World study, in the
sense that Isaiah and Eschylus and the book of Job are unquestionably
great--is not to be mention'd with Shakspere--hardly even with current
Tennyson or our Emerson--he has a nestling niche of his own, all
fragrant, fond, and quaint and homely--a lodge built near but outside
the mighty temple of the gods of song and art--those universal strivers,
through their works of harmony and melody and power, to ever show or
intimate man's crowning, last, victorious fusion in himself of Real
and Ideal. Precious, too--fit and precious beyond all singers, high
or low--will Burns ever be to the native Scotch, especially to the
working-classes of North Britain; so intensely one of them, and so racy
of the soil, sights, and local customs. He often apostrophizes Scotland,
and is, or would be, enthusiastically patriotic. His country has lately
commemorated him in a statue.[40] His aim is declaredly to be 'a Rustic
Bard.' His poems were all written in youth or young manhood, (he was
little more than a young man when he died.) His collected works in
giving everything, are nearly one half first drafts. His brightest hit
is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor'd like wild
fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns which cannot
be made for any other poet. Curiously even the frequent crudeness,
haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) prove
upon the whole not out of keeping in any comprehensive collection of
his works, heroically printed, "following copy," every piece, every line
according to originals. Other poets might tremble for such boldness,
such rawness. In "this odd-kind chiel" such points hardly mar the
rest. Not only are they in consonance with the underlying spirit of the
pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields
and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not
often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly
hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not "put on," that secretly
pleases the soul more than the wrought and re-wrought polish of the most
perfect verse?) Mark the native spice and untranslatable twang in the
very names of his songs-"O for ane and twenty, Tam," "John Barleycorn,"
"Last May a braw Wooer," "Rattlin roarin Willie," "O wert thou in the
cauld, cauld blast," "Gude e'en to you, Kimmer," "Merry hae I been
teething a Heckle," "O lay thy loof in mine, lass," and others.
The longer and more elaborated poems of Burns are just such as would
please a natural but homely taste, and cute but average intellect, and
are inimitable in their way. The "Twa Dogs," (one of the best) with the
conversation between Cesar and Luath, the "Brigs of Ayr," "the Cotter's
Saturday Night," "Tam O'Shanter"--all will be long read and re-read and
admired, and ever deserve to be. With nothing profound in any of them,
what there is of moral and plot has an inimitably fresh and racy flavor.
If it came to question, Literature could well afford to send adrift many
a pretensive poem, and even book of poems, before it could spare these
compositions.
Never indeed was there truer utterance in a certain range of
idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or small,
but has "snap" and raciness. He puts in cantering rhyme (often
doggerel) much cutting irony and idiomatic ear-cuffing of the
kirk-deacons--drilygood-natured addresses to his cronies, (he certainly
would not stop us if he were here this moment, from classing that
"to the De'il" among them)--"to Mailie and her Lambs," "to auld Mare
Maggie," "to a Mouse,"
"Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie:"
"to a Mountain Daisy," "to a Haggis," "to a Louse," "to the Toothache,"
&c.--and occasionally to his brother bards and lady or gentleman
patrons, often with strokes of tenderest sensibility, idiopathic humor,
and genuine poetic imagination--still oftener with shrewd, original,
sheeny, steel-flashes of wit, home-spun sense, or lance-blade
puncturing. Then, strangely, the basis of Burns's character, with all
its fun and manliness, was hypochondria, the blues, palpable enough in
"Despondency," "Man was made to Mourn," "Address to Ruin," a "Bard's
Epitaph," &c. From such deep-down elements sprout up, in very contrast
and paradox, those riant utterances of which a superficial reading will
not detect the hidden foundation. Yet nothing is clearer to me than
the black and desperate background behind those pieces--as I shall now
specify them. I find his most characteristic, Nature's masterly touch
and luxuriant life-blood, color and heat, not in "Tam O'Shanter," "the
Cotter's Saturday Night," "Scots wha hae," "Highland Mary," "the Twa
Dogs," and the like, but in "the Jolly Beggars," "Rigs of Barley,"
"Scotch Drink," "the Epistle to John Rankine," "Holy Willie's Prayer,"
and in "Halloween," (to say nothing of a certain cluster, known still to
a small inner circle in Scotland, but, for good reasons, not published
anywhere.) In these compositions, especially the first, there is much
indelicacy (some editions flatly leave it out,) but the composer reigns
alone, with handling free and broad and true, and is an artist. You may
see and feel the man indirectly in his other verses, all of them,
with more or less life-likeness--but these I have named last call out
pronouncedly in his own voice,
"I, Rob, am here."
Finally, in any summing-up of Burns, though so much is to be said in the
way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, and doubtless severe literary
criticism--(in the present outpouring I have "kept myself in," rather
than allow'd any free flow)--after full retrospect of his works and
life, the aforesaid "odd-kind chiel" remains to my heart and brain as
almost the tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory) dearest
flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of by-gone poets.
Notes:
[39] Probably no man that ever lived--a friend has made the
statement--was so fondly loved, both by men and women, as Robert Burns.
The reason is not hard to find: he had a real heart of flesh and blood
beating in his bosom; you could almost hear it throb. "Some one said,
that if you had shaken hands with him his hand would have burnt yours.
The gods, indeed, made him poetical, but Nature had a hand in him first.
His heart was in the right place; he did not pile up cantos of poetic
diction; he pluck'd the mountain daisy under his feet; he wrote of
field-mouse hurrying from its ruin'd dwelling. He held the plough or the
pen with the same firm, manly grasp. And he was loved. The simple roll
of the women who gave him their affection and their sympathy would make
a long manuscript; and most of these were of such noble worth that, as
Robert Chambers says, 'their character may stand as a testimony in favor
of that of Burns.'" [As I understand, the foregoing is from an extremely
rare book publish'd by M'Kie, in Kilmarnock. I find the whole beautiful
paragraph in a capital paper on Burns, by Amelia Barr.]
[40] The Dumfries statue of Robert Burns was successfully unveil'd April
1881 by Lord Rosebery, the occasion having been made national in its
character. Before the ceremony, a large procession paraded the streets
of the town, all the trades and societies of that part of Scotland
being represented, at the head of which went dairymen and ploughmen,
the former driving their carts and being accompanied by their maids. The
statue is of Sicilian marble. It rests on a pedestal of gray stone five
feet high. The poet is represented as sitting easily on an old tree
root, holding in his left hand a cluster of daisies. His face is turn'd
toward the right shoulder, and the eyes gaze into the distance. Near by
lie a collie dog, a broad bonnet half covering a well-thumb'd song-book,
and a rustic flageolet. The costume is taken from the Nasmyth portrait,
which has been follow'd for the features of the face.