Burns was superior in heart and brain to the theologians of his time.
He knew that the creed of Calvin was infinitely cruel and absurd, and he
attacked it with every weapon that his brain could forge.
He was not awed by the clergy, and he cared nothing for what was called
"authority." He insisted on thinking for himself. Sometimes he faltered,
and now and then, fearing that some friend might take offence, he would
say or write a word in favor of the Bible, and sometimes he praised the
Scriptures in words of scorn.
He laughed at the dogma of eternal pain--at hell as described by the
preacher:
"A vast, unbottom'd, boundless pit,
Fill'd fou o' lowin' brunstane,
Wha's ragin' flame an' scorchin' heat
Wad melt the hardest whun-stane!
The half asleep start up wi' fear,
An' think they hear it roarin',
When presently it does appear,
'Twas but some neebor snorin'.
Asleep that day."
The dear old doctrine that man is totally depraved, that morality is a
snare--a flowery path leading to perdition--excited the indignation of
Burns. He put the doctrine in verse:
"Morality, thou deadly bane,
Thy tens o' thousands thou hast slain!
Vain is his hope, whose stay and trust is
In moral mercy, truth and justice."
He understood the hypocrites of his day:
"Hypocrisy, in mercy spare it!
That holy robe, O dinna tear it!
Spare't for their sakes wha aften wear it,
The lads in black;
But your curst wit, when it comes near it,
Rives't aff their back."
"Then orthodoxy yet may prance,
And Learning in a woody dance,
And that fell cur ca'd Common Sense,
That bites sae sair,
Be banish'd owre the seas to France;
Let him bark there."
"They talk religion in their mouth;
They talk o' mercy, grace, an' truth,
For what? to gie their malice skouth On some puir wight,
An' hunt him down, o'er right an' ruth,
To ruin straight."
"Doctor Mac, Doctor Mac,
Ye should stretch on a rack,
To strike evil doers wi' terror;
To join faith and sense Upon any pretence,
Was heretic damnable error,
Doctor Mac,
Was heretic damnable error."
But the greatest, the sharpest, the deadliest, the keenest, the wittiest
thing ever said or written against Calvinism is Holy Willie's Prayer:--
"O Thou, wha in the Heavens dost dwell,
Wha, as it pleases best thysel',
Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell,
A' for thy glory,
And no for onie guid or ill
They've done afore thee!
"I bless and praise thy matchless might,
When thousands thou has left in night,
That I am here afore thy sight
For gifts an' grace,
A burnin' an' a shinin' light,
To a' this place.
"What was I, or my generation,
That I should get sic exaltation?
I, wha deserve sic just damnation,
For broken laws,
Five thousand years 'fore my creation,
Thro' Adam's cause?
"When frae my mither's womb I fell,
Thou might hae plunged me into hell,
To gnash my gums, to weep and wail,
In burnin' lake,
Where damnèd devils roar and yell,
Chained to a stake.
"Yet I am here a chosen sample,
To show Thy grace is great and ample;
I'm here a pillar in Thy temple,
Strong as a rock,
A guide, a buckler, an example
To a' Thy flock."
In this poem you will find the creed stated just as it is--with
fairness and accuracy--and at the same time stated so perfectly that its
absurdity fills the mind with inextinguishable laughter.
In this poem Burns nailed Calvinism to the cross, put it on the rack,
subjected it to every instrument of torture, flayed it alive, burned it
at the stake, and scattered its ashes to the winds.
In 1787 Burns wrote this curious letter to Miss Chalmers:
"I have taken tooth and nail to the Bible, and have got through the five
books of Moses and half way in Joshua.
"It is really a glorious book."
This must have been written in the spirit of Voltaire.
Think of Burns, with his loving, tender heart, half way in Joshua,
standing in blood to his knees, surrounded by the mangled bodies of old
men, women and babes, the swords of the victors dripping with innocent
blood, shouting--"This is really a glorious sight."
A letter written on the seventh of March, 1788, contains the clearest,
broadest and most philosophical statement of the religion of Burns to be
found in his works:
"An honest man has nothing to fear. If we lie down in the grave, the
whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods of the
valley--be it so; at least there is an end of pain and care, woes
and wants. If that part of us called Mind does survive the apparent
destruction of the man, away with old-wife prejudices and tales!
"Every age and every nation has a different set of stories; and, as the
many are always weak, of consequence they have often, perhaps always,
been deceived.
"A man conscious of having acted an honest part among his fellow
creatures, even granting that he may have been the sport at times of
passions and instincts, he goes to a great Unknown Being, who could have
had no other end in giving him existence but to make him happy; who gave
him those passions and instincts and well knows their force.
"These, my worthy friend, are my ideas.
"It becomes a man of sense to think for himself, particularly in a case
where all men are equally interested, and where, indeed, all men are
equally in the dark."
"Religious nonsense is the most nonsensical nonsense."
"Why has a religious turn of mind always a tendency to narrow and harden
the heart?"
"All my fears and cares are for this world."
We have grown tired of gods and goddesses in art. Milton's heavenly
militia excites our laughter. Light-houses have driven sirens from the
dangerous coasts. We have found that we do not depend on the imagination
for wonders--there are millions of miracles under our feet.
Nothing can be more marvelous than the common and everyday facts of
life. The phantoms have been cast aside. Men and women are enough for
men and women. In their lives is all the tragedy and all the comedy that
they can comprehend.
The painter no longer crowds his canvas with the winged and
impossible--he paints life as he sees it, people as he knows them, and
in whom he is interested. "The Angelus," the perfection of pathos, is
nothing but two peasants bending their heads in thankfulness as they
hear the solemn sound of the distant bell--two peasants, who have
nothing to be thankful for--nothing but weariness and want, nothing but
the crusts that they soften with their tears--nothing. And yet as you
look at that picture you feel that they have something besides to be
thankful for--that they have life, love, and hope--and so the distant
bell makes music in their simple hearts.
Let me give you the difference between culture and nature--between
educated talent and real genius.
A little while ago one of the great poets died. I was reading some of
his volumes and during the same period was reading a little from Robert
Burns. And the difference between these two poets struck me forcibly.
Tennyson was a piece of rare china decorated by the highest art.
Burns was made of honest, human clay, moulded by sympathy and love.
Tennyson dwelt in his fancy, for the most part, with kings and queens,
with lords and ladies, with knights and nobles.
Burns lingered by the fireside of the poor and humble, in the thatched
cottage of the peasant, with the imprisoned and despised. He loved men
and women in spite of their titles, and without regard to the outward.
Through robes and rags he saw and loved the man.
Tennyson was touched by place and power, the insignia given by chance or
birth. As he grew old he grew narrower, lost interest in the race, and
gave his heart to the class to which he had been lowered as a reward for
melodious flattery.
Burns broadened and ripened with the flight of his few years. His
sympathies widened and increased to the last.
Tennyson had the art born of intellectual taste, of the sense of mental
proportion, knowing the color of adjectives and the gradations of
emphasis. His pictures were born in his brain, exquisitely shaded by
details, carefully wrought by painful and conscious art.
Burns's brain was the servant of his heart. His melody was a rhythm
taught by love. He was touched by the miseries, the injustice, the agony
of his time. While Tennyson wrote of the past--of kings long dead, of
ladies who had been dust for many centuries, Burns melted with his love
the walls of caste--the cruel walls that divide the rich and the poor.
Tennyson celebrated the birth of royal babes, the death of the titled
useless; gave wings to degraded dust, wearing the laurels given by those
who lived upon the toil of men whom they despised. Burns poured poems
from his heart, filled with tears and sobs for the suffering poor; poems
that helped to break the chains of millions; poems that the enfranchised
love to repeat; poems that liberty loves to hear.
Tennyson was the poet of the past, of the twilight, of the sunset, of
decorous regret, of the vanished glories of barbarous times, of the
age of chivalry in which great nobles clad in steel smote to death with
battle axe and sword the unarmed peasants of the field.
Burns was the poet of the dawn, glad that the night was fading from
the east. He kept his face toward the sunrise, caring nothing for the
midnight of the past, but loved with all the depth and sincerity of his
nature the few great souls--the lustrous stars--that darkness cannot
quench.
Tennyson was surrounded with what gold can give, touched with the
selfishness of wealth. He was educated at Oxford, and had what are
called the advantages of his time, and in maturer years was somewhat
swayed by the spirit of caste, by the descendants of the ancient
Pharisees, and at last became a lord.
Burns had but little knowledge of the world. What he knew was taught
him by his sympathies. Being a genius, he absorbed the good and noble
of which he heard or dreamed, and thus he happily outgrew the smaller
things with which he came in contact, and journeyed toward the
great--the wider world, until he reached the end.
Tennyson was what is called religious. He believed in the divinity of
decorum, not falling on his face before the Eternal King, but bowing
gracefully, as all lords should, while uttering thanks for favors partly
undeserved, and thanks more fervid still for those to come.
Burns had the deepest and the tenderest feelings in his heart. The
winding stream, the flowering shrub, the shady vale--these were trysting
places where the real God met those he loved, and where his spirit
prompted thoughts and words of thankfulness and praise, took from their
hearts the dross of selfishness and hate, leaving the gold of love.
In the religion of Burns, form was nothing, creed was nothing, feeling
was everything. He had the religious climate of the soul, the April that
receives the seed, the June of blossom, and the month of harvest.
Burns was a real poet of nature. He put fields and woods in his lines.
There were principles like oaks, and there were thoughts, hints and
suggestions as shy as violets beneath the withered leaves. There were
the warmth of home, the social virtues born of equal state, that touched
the heart and softened grief; that make breaches in the cruel walls of
pride; that make the rich and poor clasp hands and feel like comrades,
warm and true.
The house in which his spirit lived was not large. It enclosed only
space enough for common needs, built near the barren land of want; but
through the open door the sunlight streamed, and from its windows all
the stars were seen, while in the garden grew the common flowers--the
flowers that all the ages through have been the messengers of honest
love; and in the fields were heard the rustling corn, and reapers songs,
telling of well-requited toil; and there were trees whose branches rose
and fell and swayed while birds filled all the air with music born of
joy. He read with tear-filled eyes the human page, and found within his
breast the history of hearts.
Tennyson's imagination lived in a palace ample, wondrous fair, with dome
and spire and galleries, where eyes of proud old pedigree grew dim with
gazing at the portraits of the worthless dead; and there were parks
and labyrinths of walks and ways and artificial lakes where sailed the
"double swans;" and there were flowers from far-off lands with strange
perfume, and men and women of the grander sort, telling of better days
and nobler deeds than men in these poor times of commerce, trade and
toil have hearts to do; and, yet, from this fair dwelling--too vast,
too finely wrought, to be a home--he uttered wondrous words, painting
pictures that will never fade, and told, with every aid of art, old
tales of love and war, sometimes beguiling men of tears, enchanting all
with melody of speech, and sometimes rousing blood and planting seeds
of high resolve and noble deeds; and sometimes thoughts were woven like
tapestries in patterns beautiful, involved and strange, where dreams and
fancies interlaced like tendrils of a vine, like harmonies that
wander and return to catch the music of the central theme, yet cold as
traceries in frost wrought on glass by winter's subtle art.
Tennyson was ingenious--Burns ingenuous. One was exclusive, and in his
exclusiveness a little disdain. The other pressed the world against his
heart.
Tennyson touched art on many sides, dealing with vast poetic themes, and
satisfied in many ways the intellectual tastes of cultured men.
Tennyson is always perfectly self-possessed. He has poetic sympathy, but
not the fire and flame. No one thinks of him as having been excited, as
being borne away by passion's storm. His pulse never rises. In artistic
calm, he turns, polishes, perfects, embroiders and beautifies. In him
there is nothing of the storm and chaos, nothing of the creative genius,
no sea wrought to fury, filling the heavens with its shattered cry.
Burns dwelt with simple things--with those that touch the heart; that
tell of joy; that spring from labor done; that lift the burdens of
despair from fainting souls; that soften hearts until the pearls of pity
fall from eyes unused to weep.
To illustrate his thought, he used the things he knew--the things
familiar to the world--not caring for the vanished things--the legends
told by artful tongues to artless ears--but clinging to the common
things of life and love and death, adorning them with countless gems;
and, over all, he placed the bow of hope.
With him the man was greater than the king, the woman than the queen.
The greatest were the noblest, and the noblest were those who loved
their fellow-men the best, the ones who filled their lives with generous
deeds. Men admire Tennyson. Men love Robert Burns.
He was a believer in God, and had confidence that this God was sitting
at the loom weaving with warp and woof of cause and effect, of fear
and fancy, pain and hope, of dream and shadows, of despair and death,
mingled with the light of love, the tapestries in which at last all
souls will see that all was perfect from the first. He believed or hoped
that the spirit of infinite goodness, soft as the autumn air, filled all
of heaven's dome with love.
Such a religion is easy to understand when it includes all races through
all times. It is consistent, if not with the highest thought, with the
deepest and the tenderest feelings of the heart.