SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE
In Mrs. Riddell's sketch of Burns, which appeared shortly after his
death, she starts with the somewhat startling statement that poetry was
not actually his _forte_. She did not question the excellence of his
songs, or seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke of the
man as she had known him, and was one of the first to assert that Burns
was very much more than an uneducated peasant with a happy knack of
versification. Even in the present day we hear too much of the inspired
ploughman bursting into song as one that could not help himself, and
warbling of life and love in a kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that
Burns was a great intellectual power, and would have been a force in any
sphere of life or letters. All who met him and heard him talk have
insisted on the greatness of the man, apart from his achievements in
poetry. It was not his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season
in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his conversation; and it
needs more than the reputation of a minstrel to explain the hold he has
on the affection and intelligence of the world to-day.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to accept his intellectual
greatness as a mere tradition of those who knew him, and to regret that
he has not left us some long and ponderous work worthy of the power he
possessed. It is an absurd idea to imagine that every great poet ought
to write an epic or a play. Burns's powers were concentrative, and he
could put into a song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act
tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is the greater poet.
After all, the song is the more likely to live, and the more likely,
therefore, to keep the mission of the poet an enduring and living
influence in the lives of men.
Still Burns might have been a great song-writer without becoming the
name and power he is in the world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a
quick emotional sense, which in some cases may be little more than a
beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was essentially a strong
man. His very vices are the vices of a robust and healthy humanity.
Besides being possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was
at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with the love and joy of
life. It is this sterling quality of manhood that has made Burns the
poet and the power he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a
man, and saw things in their true colours and in their natural
relations. He regarded the world into which he had been born, and saw it
not as some other poet or an artist or a painter might have beheld
it,--for the purposes of art,--but in all its uncompromising realism;
and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered. His first and
greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his manifest sincerity. His men
and women are living human beings; his flowers are real flowers; his
dogs, real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are presented in
the simplest and fewest possible words. There is no suspicion of
trickery; no attempt to force words to carry a weight of meaning they
are incapable of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of
style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised reality rested his
poetical structure. Wordsworth speaks of him--
'Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.'
It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of the lives of his
fellow-men, not only to an outside world that knew them not, but to
themselves. And he has glorified those lives in the interpretation, not
by the introduction of false elements or the elimination of unlovely
features, but simply by his insistence, in spite of the sordidness of
poverty, on the naked dignity of man.
Everything he touched became interesting because it was interesting to
him, and he spoke forth what he felt. For Burns did not go outside of
his own life, either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry and
romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the man who has eyes to see
them; and Burns's stage was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his
poetry in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life round about
him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that he has been called the
satirist and singer of a parish. Had he lived nowadays, he would have
been relegated to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals
and indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics, and it
requires a specialist in manure to produce blue dandelions or sexless
ferns. In the narrow sense of the word he was not parochial. Whilst true
to class and country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A Scotsman
of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the hearts of a people; but he was
from first to last a man, and so has found entrance to the hearts of all
men. Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment; he might
address the men and women of Mauchline, but he spoke with the voice of
humanity, and his message was for mankind.
Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry, he revived for
them their nationality. For he was but the last of the great bards that
sang the Iliad of Scotland; and in him, when patriotism was all but
dead, and a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land and
their language, the voices of nameless ballad-makers and forgotten
singers blended again into one great voice that sang of the love of
country, till men remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name of
Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not parochial. It was no mere
prejudice which bound him hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish
song. He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots, and that men of
other countries and other tongues joyed and sorrowed, toiled and sweated
and struggled and hoped even as he did. He was attached to the people of
his own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst whom he had been
born and bred; but his sympathies went out to all men, prince or
peasant, beggar or king, if they were worthy of the name of men he
recognised them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him his
intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the souls of his fellows;
the thoughts of their hearts are visible to his piercing eye. He who had
mixed only with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond the
boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament as if he had known
princes and politicians from his boyhood. The goodwife of Wauchope House
would hardly credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts--
'And then sae slee ye crack your jokes
O' Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox;
Our great men a' sae weel descrive,
And how to gar the nation thrive,
Ane maist would swear ye dwalt amang them,
And as ye saw them sae ye sang them.'
But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in almost all he wrote.
Every character he has drawn stands out a living and breathing
personality. This is greatly due to the fact that he studied those he
met, as _men_, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank, of costly
apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and station after all are mere
accidents, and count for nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed,
Burns was too often inclined from his hard experience of life to go
further than this, and to count them disqualifying circumstances. This
aggressive independence was, however, always as far removed from
insolence as it was from servility. He saw clearly that the 'pith o'
sense and pride o' worth' are beyond all the dignities a king can
bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions would cease,
and the glory of manhood be the highest earthly dignity.
'Then let us pray that come it may--
As come it will for a' that--
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree and a' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
It's comin' yet, for a' that,
That man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that!'
Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because of it, Burns had
also a childlike love of nature and all created things. He sings of the
mountain daisy turned up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse
rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening at home while
the storm made the doors and windows rattle, he bethought him on the
cattle and sheep and birds outside--
'I thought me on the ourie cattle
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war,
And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle
Beneath a scaur.'
Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish
sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere
in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail,
at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and
effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and
always subordinate to it. His descriptions of scenery are never dragged
in. They are incidental and complementary; human life and human feeling
are the first consideration; to this his scenery is but the setting and
background. He is never carried away by the force or beauty of his
drawing as a smaller artist might have been. The picture is given with
simple conciseness, and he leaves it; nor does he ever attempt to
elaborate a detail into a separate poem. The description of the burn in
_Hallowe'en_ is most beautiful in itself, yet it is but a detail in a
great picture--
'Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
As thro' the glen it wimpl't;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays;
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't;
Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays,
Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes,
Below the spreading hazel,
Unseen that night.'
That surely is the perfection of description; whilst the wimple of the
burn is echoed in the music of the verse!
Allied to the clearness of vision and truthfulness of presentment of
Burns, growing out of them it may be, is that graphic power in which he
stands unexcelled. He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the
least of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity, which is a
rare combination in letters; his phrasing is as beautiful and fine as it
is forcible, which is a distinction rarer still. Hundreds of examples of
his pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see them in the
poems. Many have become everyday expressions, and have passed into the
proverbs of the country.
Another of Burns's gifts was the saving grace of humour. This, of
course, is not altogether a quality distinct in itself, but rather a
particular mode in which love or tenderness or pity may manifest
itself. This humour is ever glinting forth from his writings. Some of
his poems--_The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare_, for example--are
simply bathed in it, and we see the subject glowing in its light, soft
and tremulous, as of an autumn sunset. In others, again, it flashes and
sparkles, more sportive than tender. But, however it manifest itself, we
recognise at once that it has a character of its own, which marks it off
from the humour of any other writer; it is a peculiar possession of
Burns.
Perhaps the poem in which all Burns's poetic qualities are seen at their
best is _The Jolly Beggars_. The subject may be low and the materials
coarse, but that only makes the finished poem a more glorious
achievement. For the poem is a unity. We see those vagabonds for a
moment's space holding high revel in Poosie Nansie's; but in that brief
glance we see them from their birth to their death. They are flung into
the world, and go zigzagging through it, chaffering and cheating,
swaggering and swearing; kicked and cuffed from parish to parish; their
only joy of existence an occasional night like this, a carnival of drink
and all sensuality; snapping their fingers in the face of the world, and
as they have lived so going down defiantly to death, a laugh on their
lips and a curse in their heart. Every character in it is individual and
distinct from his neighbour; the language from first to last simple,
sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew Arnold says: '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 Shakspeare and Aristophanes.'
_The Cotter's Saturday Night_ has usually, in Scotland, been the most
lauded of his poems. Many writers give it as his best. It is a pious
opinion, but is not sound criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only
by the stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude he
took towards his subject. He is never quite himself in it. We admire its
many beauties; we see the life of the poor made noble and dignified; we
see, in the end, the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and
circumstance; but with all that we feel that there is something
awanting. The priest-like father is drawn from life, and the picture is
beautiful; not less deftly drawn is the mother's portrait, though it be
not so frequently quoted:
'The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy
What makes the youth so bashfu' and so grave;
Weel pleased to think her bairn's respected like the lave.'
The last line gives one of the most natural and most subtle touches in
the whole poem. The closing verses are, I think, unhappy. The poet has
not known when to stop, keeps writing after he has finished, and so
becomes stilted and artificial.
It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems, that we find Burns
most regularly at his best. And excellence in song-writing is a rare
gift. The snatches scattered here and there throughout the plays of
Shakspeare are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can at all
stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy Burns has left behind
him. This was his undying legacy to the world. Song-writing was a labour
of love, almost his only comfort and consolation in the dark days of his
later years. He set himself to this as to a congenial task, and he knew
that he was writing himself into the hearts of unborn generations. His
songs live; they are immortal, because every one is a bit of his soul.
These are no feverish, hysterical jingles of clinking verse, dead save
for the animating breath of music. They sing themselves, because the
spirit of song is in them. Quite as marvellous as his excellence in this
department of poetry is his variety of subject. He has a song for every
age; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is a subject for a
book to itself. His songs are sung all over the world. The love he sings
appeals to all, for it is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart
speaks to heart in the songs of Robert Burns; there is a freemasonry in
them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across the seas in the firmest
bonds of brotherhood.
What place Burns occupies as a poet has been determined not so much by
the voice of criticism, as by the enthusiastic way in which his
fellow-mortals have taken him to their heart. The summing-up of a judge
counts for little when the jury has already made up its mind. What
matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first or second or third
rate poet? His countrymen, and more than his countrymen, his brothers
all the world over, who read in his writings the joys and sorrows, the
temptations and trials, the sins and shortcomings of a great-hearted
man, have accepted him as a prophet, and set him in the front rank of
immortals. They admire many poets; they love Robert Burns. They have
been told their love is unreasoning and unreasonable. It may be so. Love
goes by instinct more than by reason; and who shall say it is wrong? Yet
Burns is not loved because of his faults and failings, but in spite of
them. His sins are not hidden. He himself confessed them again and
again, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. If he did not always abjure
his weaknesses, he denounced them, and with no uncertain voice; nor do
we know how hardly he strove to do more.
What estimate is to be taken of Burns as a man will have many and
various answers. Those who still denounce him as the chief of sinners,
and without mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those whom Burns
has pilloried to all posterity. There are dull, phlegmatic beings with
blood no warmer than ditch-water, who are virtuous and sober citizens
because they have never felt the force of temptation. What power could
tempt them? The tree may be parched and blistered in the heat of
noonday, but the parasitical fungus draining its sap remains cool--and
poisonous. So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold and
clammy; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. How can such
anomalies understand a man of Burns's wild and passionate nature, or,
indeed, human nature at all? The broad fact remains, however much we may
deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins and shortcomings of
a large-hearted, healthy, human being. Had he loved less his fellow men
and women, he might have been accounted a better man. After all, too, it
must be remembered that his failings have been consistently exaggerated.
Coleridge, in his habit of drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns
was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns
was neither the one nor the other. In spite of the occasional excesses
of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the
sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less
clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been.
Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by
sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along with
the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude
and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are gifts
the world cannot give, and, if he haply find them in his own heart,
which it cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the closing
months of Burns's chequered career.
But it was not to be. His work was done. The message God had sent him
into the world to deliver he had delivered, imperfectly and with
faltering lips it may be, but a divine message all the same. And because
it is divine men still hear it gladly and believe.
Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his sins as a man and
his limitations as a poet, the want of continuity and purpose in his
work and life; but at the same time let his nobler qualities be weighed
against these, and the scale 'where the pure gold is, easily turns the
balance.' In the words of Angellier: 'Admiration grows in proportion as
we examine his qualities. When we think of his sincerity, of his
rectitude, of his kindness towards man and beast; of his scorn of all
that is base, his hatred of all knavery which in itself would be an
honour; of his disinterestedness, of the fine impulses of his heart, and
the high aspirations of his spirit; of the intensity and idealism
necessary to maintain his soul above its circumstances; when we reflect
that he has expressed all these generous sentiments to the extent of
their constituting his intellectual life; that they have fallen from him
as jewels ... as if his soul had been a furnace for the purification of
precious metals, we are tempted to regard him as belonging to the elect
spirits of humanity, to those gifted with exceptional goodness. When we
recall what he suffered, what he surmounted, and what he has effected;
against what privations his genius struggled into birth and lived; the
perseverance of his apprenticeship; his intellectual exploits; and,
after all, his glory, we are inclined to maintain that what he failed to
accomplish or undertake is as nothing in comparison with his
achievements.... There is nothing left but to confess that the clay of
which he was made was thick with diamonds, and that his life was one of
the most valiant and the most noble a poet ever has lived.'
With Burns's own words we may fitly conclude. They are words not merely
to be read and admired, but to be remembered in our hearts and practised
in our lives--
'Then gently scan your brother Man,
Still gentler sister Woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving _Why_ they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.
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_'