"When social life and glee sat down
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmogrify'd, they've grown
Debauchery and drinking,"--
there would have been a far different story to have told of the life of
Robert Burns.
What ripe fruits of his genius we might have had, had he not burned out
the torch of that brilliant intellect at the early age of thirty-eight.
What poems he might have written--he who did immortal work with all his
drawbacks--had he kept his brain clear and his life sweet even for the
short span of life allotted him! How high might he have soared in the
years which he might have hoped from life, had he but moved at a slower
pace, in those reckless years, the record of which is so painful to the
great world of admiring and pitying friends, who cherish his memory so
tenderly. Yet there is in his case everything to mitigate a severe
judgment upon his youthful follies; and the great world has always
judged him leniently, knowing the story of his early life, and the
temptations which at that day must have surrounded a youth of his
temperament among the peasants of Scotland. Of the strength of those
temptations we probably can form but a slight idea.
"What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted."
And surely, there must have been much that was worthy of honor and
esteem, even of reverence, in the heart of the man, to have brought the
whole world to his feet, in spite of the faults and follies to which we
allude in passing, but upon which we have no disposition to dwell. As a
friendly hand long ago wrote, after visiting his poor, mean home and his
unhonored burial place:--
"We listened readily enough to this paltry gossip, but found that
it robbed the poet's memory of some of the reverence that was its
due. Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much the same effect
as the home-scene of his life, which we had been visiting just
previously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings,
and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from
these, one does not so much wonder that the people of that day
should have failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal
in a disreputable, drunken, shabbily-clothed, and shabbily-housed
man, consorting with associates of damaged character, and as his
only ostensible occupation gauging the whiskey which he too often
tasted. Siding with Burns, as we needs must, in his plea against
the world, let us try to do the world a little justice too. It is
far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape
in the spotlessness of marble, than when the actual man comes
staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his
daily life. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition
dawned as brightly as it did while he was still living. There must
have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some
strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to
have caused him to seem like a demigod so soon."
To do even faintest justice to the memory of the poet, we must go to
Ayr, and look upon the humble cottage which was his birthplace. It
consisted of but two small rooms paved with flag-stones, and with but
one window of four small panes, while the thatched roof formed the only
ceiling. The whole place is inconceivably small for the dwelling of a
family, for there is not even an attic-room, or any other spot where
children could have been hidden away. In such a hut as this it is hard
to conceive of a family being reared in purity and delicacy, even though
the parents should have done their best by their children, and been,
like the father of Burns, prudent and well-disposed.
This housing of the poor is of immense moral significance in all cases;
and it is growing to be a recognized fact that no help which can be
rendered them is of much avail, when they are left in these little, one
or two room dwellings.
There were seven children in the Burns household, and during the
childhood of Robert the family were very poor; and he and his brother
were expected to do the work of men, at the age of thirteen. He had some
schooling before that age, and must have improved his time, for he could
read and spell well, and had some knowledge of English grammar.
Near by the cottage flows the beautiful Bonny Doon, through deep wooded
banks, and across it is an ancient ivy-covered bridge with a high arch,
making a very picturesque object in the landscape, which is one of great
loveliness. Kirk Alloway is not far away,--the smallest church that ever
filled so large a place in the imagination of the world. The
one-mullioned window in the eastern gable might have been seen by Tam
O'Shanter blazing with devilish light as he approached it along the road
from Ayr, and there is a small square one on the side next the road;
there is also an odd kind of belfry, almost the smallest ever made, with
a little bell in it,--and this is all. But no grand and storied
cathedral pile in all Europe is better known, and to no shrine of famous
minster do more pilgrims journey than to this wee kirk immortalized by
the pen of Burns.