civilization has been subdued and the pestilence been cured; when man
shall no longer deny and revile the universal mother who gave him birth,
then Walt Whitman’s day will come. In the clear light of that
regenerated time, when the world looks back to the doubt and mist and
confusion of to-day, Walt Whitman will stand alone, the greatest,
truest, noblest prophet of the age, a man untainted by artificial life
and unmoved by the false standards of his time. In a sodden, commercial,
money-getting age, he enjoyed all the beauty of the earth without the
vulgar lust to own. In a world of privilege and caste, he felt and
taught the brotherhood of man and the kinship of all living things. In
an age of false modesty and perverted thought, he sang the sanctity of
the body with the divinity of the soul. Against the agnostic and the
Christian too, he defended every part and portion of the faultless work
of the creative power. Above the doleful, doubting voice of men, through
the dreariest day and darkest night, in the raging of the storm and the
madness of the waves, his strong, optimistic, reassuring note was ever
heard above the rest, proclaiming to the universe that all is well. He
saw that in a wise economy and a great broad way, that the false was
true, the evil good, the wrong was right, and that over all the
universe, pervading all its teeming life, a power omnipotent, beneficent
and wise, was working to uplift, conserve and purify the whole. The
poor, the weak, the suffering, the outcast, the felon, all knew him for
their comrade and their friend. His great, inclusive, universal heart
left no soul outside, but all alike he knew, the life of all he felt,
and one and all he loved. In his vocabulary were no words of bitterness
and hate, and in his philosophy no right to censure or to blame. In his
every deed and thought he seemed to say:
“So I be written in the book of love,
I have no care about that book above,
Erase my name, or write it as you please,
So I be written in the book of love.”
As the shadows lengthen and the daylight wanes—as the hair whitens and
the passions cool, more and more do we learn that love is the true
philosophy of life; more and more do we revise the sterner judgments of
our earlier years; more and more do we see that pity should take the
place of blame, forgiveness of punishment, charity of justice, and
hatred be replaced by love. When old familiar faces awake the memories
of bygone days, often and often again do we fear that our judgments were
cruel and unjust, but every deed of mercy and every act of charity and
every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls. We may
none of us be wise or great, fortune may elude us and fame may never
come; but however poor or weak or humble, we yet may inscribe our names
in the fairest, brightest book,—the book of love, and on its sacred
pages, earned by the glorious truths he taught, by his infinite, ever
present love of all, upon the foremost line will be inscribed Walt
Whitman’s name.
ROBERT · BURNS
[Illustration]
ROBERT BURNS.
It is difficult to account for a genius like Robert Burns. His life and
work seem to defy the laws of heredity and environment alike. The beasts
of the field were scarcely bound closer to the soil than were the
ancestors from which he sprang; and from his early infancy he was forced
to follow the stony path his father trod before. As a mere child, he
learned how hard it is to sustain life in the face of an unfriendly
nature and a cruel, bitter world. He was early bred to toil; not the
work that gives strength and health, but the hard, constant, manual
labor that degrades and embitters, deforms and twists and stunts the
body and the soul alike. Burns was denied even the brief years of
childhood—those few, short years upon which most of us look back from
our disappointments and cares as the one bright spot in a gray and level
plain.
It is not alone by the works he has left us that Robert Burns is to be
truly judged. Fortune endowed him with a wondrous brain and a still
rarer and greater gift—a tender, loving, universal heart; but as if she
grudged him these and sought to destroy or stunt their power, she cast
his lot in a social and religious environment as hard and forbidding as
the cold and sterile soil of his native land; and from these
surroundings alone he was obliged to draw the warmth and color and
sunshine that should have come from loving hearts, generous bounties,
and bright, blue southern skies. In measuring the power and character of
Robert Burns, we must remember the hard and cruel conditions of his
life, and judge of his great achievements in the light of these.
The ways of destiny have ever been beyond the ken of man; now and then,
at rare, long intervals, she descends upon the earth, and in her arms
she bears disguised a precious gift, which she lavished upon a blind,
unwilling world. She passes by the gorgeous palaces and beautiful abodes
of men, and drops the treasure in a manger or a hut; she comes again to
take it back from a world that knew it not and cast it out; and again,
she seeks it not among the strong and great, but in the hovel of the
poor, the prison pen, or perhaps upon the scaffold or the block.
Measured by the standards of our day and generation, the life of Robert
Burns was a failure and mistake. He went back to the great common Mother
as naked of all the gilded trappings and baubles, which men call wealth,
as when she first placed the struggling infant on its mother’s breast.
Robert Burns was not a “business man”; he was not one of Dumfries’
“first citizens”—in the measure of that day and this; he was one of its
last if not its worst. He had no stock in a corporation and no interest
in a syndicate or trust. He had neither a bank nor bank account. He
never endowed a library, a museum, or a university. He was a singer of
songs,—a dreamer of dreams. He was poor, improvident, intemperate, and
according to the Scottish creed, immoral and irreligious. In spite of
his great intellect he was doubted, neglected and despised. He died in
destitution and despair; but the great light of his genius, which his
neighbors could not see or comprehend, has grown brighter and clearer as
the years have rolled away. A beautiful mausoleum now holds his once
neglected ashes; monuments have been reared to his memory wherever worth
is known and fame preserved; while millions of men and women, the
greatest and the humblest of the world alike, have felt their own
heartstrings moved and stirred in unison with the music of this immortal
bard, whose song was the breath of Nature,—the sweetest, tenderest
melody that ever came from that rarest instrument—the devoted poet’s
soul.
The great masterpieces of his genius were not created in the pleasant
study of a home of refinement, luxury, and ease, but were born in the
fields, the farm yard, the stable; while the “monarch peasant” was
bending above the humblest tasks that men pursue for bread. Only the
most ordinary education was within the reach of this child of toil, and
the world’s great storehouses of learning, literature, and art were
sealed forever from his sight; and yet, with only the rude peasants,
with whom his life was spent, the narrow setting of bleak fields and
grey hills, which was the small stage on which he moved, and the sterile
Scotch dialect with which to paint, he stirred the hearts of men with
the sweetest, highest, purest melody that has ever moved the human soul.
Olive Schreiner tells of an artist whose pictures shone with the
richest, brightest glow. His admirers gazed upon the canvas and wondered
where he found the colors—so much rarer than any they had ever seen
before. Other artists searched the earth, but could find no tints like
his; he died with the secret in his breast. And when they undressed him
to put his grave-clothes on, they found an old wound, hard and jagged
above his heart; and still they wondered where he found the coloring for
his work. Robert Burns, perhaps more than any other man who ever lived,
taught the great truth that poets are not made but born; that the
richest literature, the brightest gems of art, even the most pleasing
earthly prospects are less than one spark of the divine fire, which
alone can kindle the true light. Robert Burns like all great artists,
taught the world that the beauty of the landscape, and the grandeur and
pathos of life depend, not upon the external objects that nature has
chanced to place before our view, but upon the soul of the artist, which
alone can really see and interpret the manifold works of the great
author, beside which all human effort is so poor and weak.
Millet looked at the French peasants standing in their wooden shoes,
digging potatoes from the earth and pausing to bow reverently at the
sounding of the Angelus, and saw in this simple life, so close to
Nature’s heart, more beauty and pathos and poetry than all the
glittering courts of Europe could produce. And Robert Burns, whose broad
mind and sympathetic soul made him kin to all living things, had no need
to see the splendor and gaiety of wealth and power, to visit foreign
shores and unknown lands; but the flowers, the heather, the daisies, the
bleak fields, the pelting rains, the singing birds, the lowing cattle,
and above all, the simple country folk seen through his eyes, and felt
by his soul, and held in his all-embracing heart, were covered with a
beauty and a glory that all the artificial world could not create, and
that his genius has endowed with immortal life. Robert Burns did not
borrow his philosophy from the books, his humanity from the church, or
his poetry from the schools. Luckily for us he escaped all these, and
unfettered and untaught, went straight to the soul of Nature to learn
from the great source, the harmony and beauty and unity that pervades
the whole; and he painted these with colors drawn from his great human
heart. His universal sympathy gave him an insight into life that
students of science and philosophy can never reach. Contemplating
Nature, and seeing her generous bounties lavished alike on all her
children, he could not but contrast this with the selfishness and
inhumanity of man, which crushes out the weak and helpless and builds up
the great and strong. Burns was a natural leveler, and while men still
believed in the “divine right of kings,” he preached that “man was the
divine King of rights.” None knew better than he the injustice of the
social life in which he lived, and in which we live to-day. Burns knew,
as all men of intelligence understand, that worldly goods are not, and
never have been given as a reward of either brains or merit.
It’s hardly in a body’s power
To keep at times, frae being sour,
To see how things are shared;
How best o’chiels are whiles in want
While coofs on countless thousands rant
And ken na how to wair’t.
The immortal singer of songs, and all his descendants, received
infinitely less for all the works of his genius than an ordinary gambler
often gets for one sale of something that he never owned, or one
purchase of something that he never bought; and it is doubtful if all
the masterpieces of the world in art, in literature, and in science,
ever brought as much cash to those whose great, patient brains have
carefully and honestly wrought that the earth might be richer and better
and brighter, as has been often “made” by one inferior speculator upon a
single issue of watered stock.
Living in the midst of aristocracy and privilege and caste, Burns was a
democrat that believed in the equality of man. It required no books or
professors, or theories to teach him the injustice of the social
conditions under which the world has ever lived. Here, as elsewhere, he
looked to the heart—a teacher infinitely more honest and reliable than
the brain.
If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave,
By Nature’s law design’d;
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty, or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn?
Preachers and authors and teachers, judges and professors and lawyers,
have been employed for ages to teach the justice of slavery and the
folly and crime of equal rights; but through all quibbles and evasions,
this question of Burns, straight from the heart, as well as the head,
shows that all these excuses are but snares and cheats. The voice of the
French Revolution could not fail to move a soul like that of Robert
Burns. This great struggle for human liberty came upon the world with
almost the suddenness of an earthquake, and with much of its terrors,
too. Here the poor and the oppressed felt the first substantial hope for
freedom that had pierced the long, dark centuries since history told the
acts of men. To the oppressors and the powerful, who hated liberty then
as they ever have, before and since, it was a wild, dread threat of
destruction and ruin to their precious “rights.” When the struggle
commenced, Burns was enjoying the munificent salary of Fifty pounds a
year as a whisky gauger in the village of Dumfries. He had already spent
a winter in Edinburgh, and had been feted and dined by the aristocracy
and culture of Scotland’s capital without losing his head, although at
no small risk. An acquaintance and entertainer of the nobility and an
incumbent of a lucrative office, there was but one thing for Burns to
do; this was to condemn the Revolution and lend his trenchant pen to the
oppressor’s cause; but this course he flatly refused to take. He openly
espoused the side of the people, and wrote the “Tree of Liberty,” one of
his most stirring songs, in its defense.
Upon this tree there grows sic fruit,
Its virtues a’can tell man;
It raises man aboon the brute,
It mak’s him ken himsel’ man.
Gif ance the peasant taste a bit,
He’s greater than a lord man.
King Louis thought to cut it down
When it was unco sma’ man;
For this the watchman cracked his crown,
Cut aff his head an’ a’ man.
Even these words are not strong enough to express his love for natural
liberty and his distrust of those forms and institutions which over and
over again have crushed the priceless gem they pretend to protect.
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.
Even higher and broader was Burns’ view of equality and right. He stood
on a serene height, where he looked upon all the strife and contention
of individuals and states, and dreamed of a perfect harmony and
universal order, where men and Nations alike should be at peace, and the
world united in one grand common brotherhood, where the fondest wish of
each should be the highest good of all. These beautiful, prophetic lines
seem to speak of a day as distant now as when Burns wrote them down a
hundred years ago. But still, all men that love the human race will ever
hope, and work, and say with him:
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 coming yet, for a’ that,
That man to man, the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.
It is perhaps as a singer of songs that the literary fame of Burns will
longest be preserved. No other poet has ever breathed such music from
his soul. His melodies are as sweet and pure as the bubbling spring; and
as natural and spontaneous as ever came from the throat of the
nightingale or lark. These songs could not be made. The feeling and
passion that left his soul bore this music as naturally as the zephyr
that has fanned the strings of the Æolian harp. The meter of these songs
was not learned by scanning Latin verse, or studying the dry rules that
govern literary art, but it was born of the regular pulse beats, which
in the heart of Nature’s poets are as smooth and unstudied as the
rippling laughter of her purling brooks.
John Anderson, my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonnie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snow;
But blessing on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo.
John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill tegither,
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither;
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep tegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
Although a plough boy and surrounded by the grime and dirt that come
from contact with the soil, still even here Burns found material for
music and poetry that will live as long as human hearts endure; for,
though the sky may be warmer and bluer on the Mediterranean shore than
where it domes the Scottish hills and crags, still the same heaven bends
above them both, and the same infinite mysteries are hidden in their
unfathomed depths. The tragedy of death is alike, whether defying the
power of a Prince, or entering the home of the humblest peasant to bring
the first moments of relief and rest. The miracle of life, whether
wrought by Nature on the rich couch of the Queen or the unwatched pallet
of the peasant, is the same mystery, ever new, ever old, appealing ever
to the heart of man. The affections and passions,—those profound
feelings that Nature planted deep in the being of all sentient things,
and on whose strength all life depends,—these are the deepest and purest
as we leave the conventions and trappings of the artificial world, and
draw nearer to the heart of the great Universal power. With the sky
above, the fields around, and all Nature throbbing and teeming with
pulsing life, but one thing more was needed to make harmony and music,
and that was Robert Burns.
The old story of human love was sung by him a thousand times and in a
thousand varying moods, as never love was sung before. It mattered not
that his melodies breathed of rustic scenes, of country maids, and of
plain untutored hearts that beat as Nature made them feel, unfettered by
the restraints and cords of an artificial life. Transport his Mary to a
gorgeous palace, and deck her fair form with the richest treasures of
the earth and bring to her side the proudest noble that ever paid homage
to a princess, and no singer,—not even Burns himself,—could make a
melody like the matchless music that he sung to Highland Mary.
How sweetly bloom’d the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom;
As underneath their fragrant shade,
I clasp’d her to my bosom!
The golden hours, on angel wings,
Flew o’er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.
All the conventions and baubles and spangles which fashion and custom
use to adorn the fair could only have cheapened and made vulgar the
rustic maiden that moved Burns’ soul to song.
These sweet lines could never have been written of any but a simple
country lass, whose natural charms had moved a susceptible human heart:
I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,
I hear her charm the air;
There’s not a bonnie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green,
There’s not a bonnie bird that sings,
But minds me o’ my Jean.
Who was this Burns that sang these sweet songs and whose musical soul
was stirred by every breeze and moved to poetry by every lovely face and
form that came within his view? Biographers and critics and admirers
have praised the genius and begged excuses for the man. Without asking
charity for this illustrious singer, let us view him in the light of
justice, exactly as he was. It is not difficult to understand the
character of Robert Burns. His heart was generous and warm and kind; his
mind was open as the day, and his soul was sensitive to every breath
that stirred the air. These qualities have made the poet loved in every
land on earth, and brought more pilgrims to his grave than were ever
drawn to the tomb of any other poet or author that has ever lived and
died. And yet the short-sighted, carping, moralizing world, with solemn
voice and wisdom ill-assumed, has ever told how much better and holier
he could have been and should have been. Poor, silly, idle world, can
you never learn that the qualities that make us strong must also make us
weak; that the heart that melts at suffering and pain is made of clay so
sensitive and fine as to be moved and swayed by all the emotions of the
soul? Would you serve the weak, the suffering and the poor—would you
calm their fears and dry their eyes and feel with them the cruel woes of
life—you must wear your heart upon your sleeve, and then of course the
daws will peck it into bits. Would you keep it safely hidden from the
daws, you must hide it in a breast of stone or ice and keep it only for
yourself. Perhaps we may admire the man that walks with steady step
along a straight and narrow path, unmoved by all the world outside. He
never feels and never errs. But we cannot ask of either man the virtues
that belong to both, and when our choice is made we must take the
strength and weakness too.
We look at the mountain top, lifting its snow-crowned head high into the
everlasting blue, and are moved with wonder and with awe. Above is the
endless sky; below, the world with all its bickering and strife, the
clouds, the lightning and the storm, but the mountain, cold, impassive,
changeless, unmoved by all the world, looks ever upward to the eternal
heavens above. Again we gaze on the peaceful, fertile lowlands, rich
with their generous harvests yet unborn—beautiful with their winding
streams and grassy fields, ever ready to bestow bounteously on all that
ask, demanding little and lavishly returning all; and we love the quiet,
rustic, generous beauty of the scene. The mountain is majestic and
sublime, and the yielding, generous lowlands are beautiful and pleasing
too. We love them both, but we cannot have them both at once and both in
one.
Robert Burns, and all men like him that ever lived, were always giving
from their generous souls. In the cold judgment of the world, Burns
wasted many a gem upon the thoughtless, worthless crowd, who consumed a
life he should have spent for nobler things. But the flower that never
wastes its fragrance has no perfume to give out. If it is truly sweet,
its strength is borne away on every idle wind that blows. Robert Burns
with lavish bounty shed his life and fragrance on every soul he met. He
loved them all and loved them well: his sensitive, harmonious soul
vibrated to every touch, and moved in perfect harmony with every heart
that came within his reach. The lives of men like him are one long
harmony; but as they pass along the stage of life, they leave a trail of
disappointed hopes, and broken hearts, and vain regrets. But of all the
tragedies great and small that mark their path, the greatest far and
most pathetic is the sad and hopeless wreck that ever surely falls upon
the exhausted artist’s life.
The life of Burns was filled with wrecks—with promises made and broken,
with hopes aroused, and then dashed to earth again. It was filled with
these because one man cannot give himself personally to all the world.
The vices of Robert Burns perhaps like those of all the rest that ever
lived, were virtues carried to excess. Of course, the world could not
understand it then, and cannot understand it now, and perhaps it never
will, for slander and malice and envy, like death, always love a
shinning mark. The life of Burns and the life of each is the old Greek
fable told again. Achilles’ mother would make him invulnerable by
dipping him in the river Styx. She held him by the heel, which remained
unwashed and vulnerable, and finally brought him to his death. To
whatever dizzy height we climb, and however invulnerable we seek to be,
there still remains with all the untouched heel that binds us to the
earth. And after all, this weak and human spot, is the truest bond of
kinship that unites the world.
I look back at Robert Burns, at the poor human life that went out a
hundred years ago, and study its works to know the man. I care not what
his neighbors thought; I care not for the idle gossip of an idle hour. I
know that his immortal songs were not born of his wondrous brain alone,
but of the gentlest, trust, tenderest heart that ever felt another’s
pain. I know full well that the love songs of Robert Burns could have
come from no one else than Robert Burns. I know that even the Infinite
could not have changed the man and left the songs. Burns, like all true
poets, told us what he felt and saw, and it is not for me to ask excuses
for this or that; but rather reverently to bow my head in the presence
of this great memory, and thank the infinite source of life for blessing
us with Robert Burns exactly as he was.