'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 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 touches 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, boundless 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 _spoudaiotes_ 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-coloured 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 endeavouring 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 monetary 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.
[1] Published in 1880 as the General Introduction to 'The English
Poets' edited by T. H. Ward.
[2] 'Then began he to call many things to remembrance,--all the lands
which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, and the men of his
lineage, and Charlemagne his liege lord who nourished him.'--'Chanson
de Roland,' iii. 939-942.
[3] 'So said she; they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing,
There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaemon.'
--'Iliad,' iii. 243, 244 (translated by Dr. Hawtrey).
[4] 'Ah, unhappy pair, why gave we you to King Peleus, to a mortal? but
ye are without old age, and immortal. Was it that with men born to
misery ye might have sorrow?'--'Iliad,' xvii. 443-445.
[5] 'Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days wast, as we hear,
happy.--'Iliad,' xxiv. 543.
[6] 'I wailed not, so of stone grew I within;--_they_
wailed.'--'Inferno, xxxiii. 39, 40.
[7] 'Of such sort hath God, thanked be His mercy, made me, that your
misery toucheth me not, neither doth the flame of this fire strike
me.--'Inferno,' ii. 91-93.
[8] 'In His will is our peace.'--'Paradiso,' iii. 85.
[9] The French _soudé_; soldered, fixed fast.
[10] The name _Heaulmière_ is said to be derived from a head-dress
(helm) worn as a mark by courtesans. In Villon's ballad, a poor old
creature of this class laments her days of youth and beauty. The last
stanza of the ballad runs thus--
'Ainsi le bon temps regretons
Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes,
Assises has, à croppetons,
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes;
A petit feu de chenevottes
Tost allumées, tost estainctes.
Et jadis fusmes si mignottes!
Ainsi en prend à maintz et maintes.'
'Thus amongst ourselves we regret the good time, poor silly old things
low-seated on our heels, all in a heap like so many balls; by a little
fire of hemp-stalks, soon lighted, soon spent. And once we were such
darlings! So fares it with many and many a one.'