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Title: Robert Burns
       How To Know Him

Author: William Allan Neilson

Release Date: May 14, 2006 [EBook #18388]

Language: English

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ROBERT BURNS

HOW TO KNOW HIM

Copyright 1917
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.

TO
MY BROTHER

The Nasmyth Portrait of Robert Burns.

LIST OF POEMS

•  page
• Address to the Deil 282
• Address to the Unco Guid 176
• Ae Fond Kiss 56
• Afton Water 116
• Auld Farmer's New-Year Morning Salutation, The 278
• Auld Lang Syne 100
• Auld Rob Morris 121
• Bannocks o' Barley 165
• Bard's Epitaph, A 308
• Bessy and Her Spinnin'-Wheel 145
• Blue-Eyed Lassie, The 117
• Bonnie Lad that's Far Awa, The 139
• Bonnie Lesley 118
• Braw Braw Lads 140
• Ca' the Yowes 115
• Charlie He's My Darling 168
• Clarinda 58
• Come Boat Me o'er to Charlie 163
• Comin' through the Rye 154
• Contented wi' Little 126
• Cotter's Saturday Night, The 8
• Death and Doctor Hornbook 287
• Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, The 23
• De'il's Awa wi' th' Exciseman, The 154
• Deuk's Dang o'er My Daddie, The 155
• Duncan Davison 153
• Duncan Gray 152
• Elegy on Capt. Matthew Henderson 298
• Epistle to a Young Friend 200
• Epistle to Davie 193
• For the Sake o' Somebody 136
• Gloomy Night, The 40
• Go Fetch to Me a Pint o' Wine 88
• Green Grow the Rashes 123
• Had I the Wyte? 148
• Halloween 209
• Handsome Nell 20
• Highland Balou, The 151
• Highland Laddie, The 164
• Highland Mary 113
• Holy Fair, The 228
• Holy Willie's Prayer 173
• How Lang and Dreary 138
• I Hae a Wife 59
• I Hae Been at Crookieden 167
• I'm Owre Young to Marry Yet 143
• It Was a' for Our Rightfu' King 162
• John Anderson, My Jo 146
• Jolly Beggars, The 241
• Kenmure's On and Awa 165
• Lassie wi' the Lint-White Locks 119
• Last May a Braw Wooer 135
• Lea-Rig, The 120
• MacPherson's Farewell 150
• Man's a Man for a' that, A 158
• Mary Morison 28
• Montgomerie's Peggy 120
• My Father Was a Farmer 126
• My Heart's in the Highlands 140
• My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose 102
• My Love She's but a Lassie Yet 144
• My Nannie O 29
• My Nannie's Awa 57
• My Wife's a Winsome Wee Thing 108
• O for Ane an' Twenty, Tam! 129
• O Merry Hae I Been 148
• O This Is No My Ain Lassie 107
• O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast 123
• Of a' the Airts 106
• On a Scotch Bard, Gone to the West Indies 42
• On John Dove, Innkeeper 205
• Open the Door to Me, O! 137
• Poet's Welcome to His Love-Begotten Daughter, The 33
• Poor Mailie's Elegy 26
• Poortith Cauld 107
• Prayer in the Prospect of Death, A 32
• Rantin' Dog the Daddie o't, The 134
• Rigs o' Barley, The 30
• Scotch Drink 301
• Scots, Wha Hae 160
• Simmer's a Pleasant Time 131
• Tam Glen 133
• Tam o' Shanter 257
• Tam Samson's Elegy 294
• There Was a Lad 125
• There'll Never Be Peace till Jamie Comes Hame 166
• To a Haggis 306
• To a Louse 274
• To a Mountain Daisy 276
• To a Mouse 272
• To Daunton Me 142
• To Mary in Heaven 114
• To the Rev. John McMath 181
• Twa Dogs, The 219
• Wandering Willie 138
• Weary Pund o' Tow, The 147
• Wha Is that at My Bower Door? 156
• What Can a Young Lassie 142
• Whistle, and I'll Come to Ye, My Lad 132
• Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary? 40
• Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut 238
• Willie's Wife 156
• Ye Banks and Braes (two versions) 130
• Yestreen I Had a Pint o' Wine 104

CONTENTS

• chapter  page

1. Biography 1
   1. Alloway, Mount Oliphant, and Lochlea 3
   2. Mossgiel 31
   3. Edinburgh 44
   4. Ellisland 58
   5. Dumfries 62
2. Inheritance: Language and Literature 69
3. Burns and Scottish Song 90
4. Satires and Epistles 171
5. Descriptive and Narrative Poetry 206
6. Conclusion 310
7. Index 325

ROBERT BURNS

CHAPTER I

BIOGRAPHY

“I have not the most distant pretence to what the pye-coated guardians of Escutcheons call a Gentleman. When at Edinburgh last winter, I got acquainted at the Herald's office; and looking thro' the granary of honors, I there found almost every name in the kingdom; but for me,

My ancient but ignoble blood
Has crept thro' scoundrels since the flood.

Gules, purpure, argent, etc., quite disowned me. My forefathers rented land of the famous, noble Keiths of Marshal, and had the honor to share their fate. I do not use the word ‘honor’ with any reference to political principles: loyal and disloyal I take to be merely relative terms in that ancient and formidable court known in this country by the name of ‘club-law.’ Those who dare welcome Ruin and shake hands with Infamy, for what they believe sincerely to be the cause of their God or their King, are—as Mark Antony in Shakspear says of Brutus and Cassius—‘honorable men.’ I mention this circumstance because it threw my Father on the world at large; where, after many years' wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my pretensions to Wisdom. I have met with few who understood Men, their manners and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly Integrity, and headlong, ungovernable Irascibility, are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born, a very poor man's son.”

“You can now, Sir, form a pretty near guess of what sort of Wight he is, whom for some time you have honored with your correspondence. That Whim and Fancy, keen sensibility and riotous passions, may still make him zig-zag in his future path of life is very probable; but, come what will, I shall answer for him—the most determinate integrity and honor [shall ever characterise him]; and though his evil star should again blaze in his meridian with tenfold more direful influence, he may reluctantly tax friendship with pity, but no more.”

These two paragraphs form respectively the beginning and the end of a long autobiographical letter written by Robert Burns to Doctor John Moore, physician and novelist. At the time they were composed, the poet had just returned to his native county after the triumphant season in Edinburgh that formed the climax of his career. But no detailed knowledge of circumstances is necessary to rouse interest in a man who wrote like that. You may be offended by the self-consciousness and the swagger, or you may be charmed by the frankness and dash, but you can not remain indifferent. Burns had many moods besides those reflected in these sentences, but here we can see as vividly as in any of his poetry the fundamental characteristics of the man—sensitive, passionate, independent, and as proud as Lucifer—whose life and work are the subject of this volume.

1. Alloway, Mount Oliphant, and Lochlea

William Burnes, the father of the poet, came of a family of farmers and gardeners in the county of Kincardine, on the east coast of Scotland. At the age of twenty-seven, he left his native district for the south; and when Robert, his eldest child, was born on January 25, 1759, William was employed as gardener to the provost of Ayr. He had besides leased some seven acres of land, of which he planned to make a nursery and market-garden, in the neighboring parish of Alloway; and there near the Brig o' Doon built with his own hands the clay cottage now known to literary pilgrims as the birthplace of Burns. His wife, Agnes Brown, the daughter of an Ayrshire farmer, bore him, besides Robert, three sons and three daughters. In order to keep his sons at home instead of sending them out as farm-laborers, the elder Burnes rented in 1766 the farm of Mount Oliphant, and stocked it on borrowed money. The venture did not prosper, and on a change of landlords the family fell into the hands of a merciless agent, whose bullying the poet later avenged by the portrait of the factor in The Twa Dogs.

In 1777 Mount Oliphant was exchanged for the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles away, and here William Burnes labored for the rest of his life. The farm was poor, and with all he could do it was hard to keep his head above water. His health was failing, he was harassed with debts, and in 1784 in the midst of a lawsuit about his lease, he died.

In spite of his struggle for a bare subsistence, the elder Burnes had not neglected the education of his children. Before he was six, Robert was sent to a small school at Alloway Mill, and soon after his father joined with a few neighbors to engage a young man named John Murdoch to teach their children in a room in the village. This arrangement continued for two years and a half, when, Murdoch having been called elsewhere, the father undertook the task of education himself. The regular instruction was confined chiefly to the long winter evenings, but quite as important as this was the intercourse between father and sons as they went about their work.

“My father,” says the poet's brother Gilbert, “was for some time almost the only companion we had. He conversed familiarly on all subjects with us, as if we had been men; and was at great pains, as we accompanied him in the labours of the farm, to lead the conversation to such subjects as might tend to increase our knowledge, or confirm our virtuous habits. He borrowed Salmon's Geographical Grammar for us, and endeavoured to make us acquainted with the situation and history of the different countries in the world; while, from a book-society in Ayr, he procured for us Derham's Physics and Astro-Theology, and Ray's Wisdom of God in the Creation, to give us some idea of astronomy and natural history. Robert read all these books with an avidity and industry scarcely to be equalled. My father had been a subscriber to Stackhouse's History of the Bible ...; from this Robert collected a competent knowledge of ancient history; for no book was so voluminous as to slacken his industry, or so antiquated as to dampen his researches. A brother of my mother, who had lived with us some time, and had learned some arithmetic by our winter evening's candle, went into a book-seller's shop in Ayr to purchase the Ready Reckoner, or Tradesman's Sure Guide, and a book to teach him to write letters. Luckily, in place of the Complete Letter-Writer, he got by mistake a small collection of letters by the most eminent writers, with a few sensible directions for attaining an easy epistolary style. This book was to Robert of the greatest consequence. It inspired him with a strong desire to excel in letter-writing, while it furnished him with models by some of the first writers in our language.”

Interesting as are the details as to the antiquated manuals from which Burns gathered his general information, it is more important to note the more personal implications in this account. Respect for learning has long been wide-spread among the peasantry of Scotland, but it is evident that William Burnes was intellectually far above the average of his class. The schoolmaster Murdoch has left a portrait of him in which he not only extols his virtues as a man but emphasizes his zest for things of the mind, and states that “he spoke the English language with more propriety—both with respect to diction and pronunciation—than any man I ever knew, with no greater advantages.” Though tender and affectionate, he seems to have inspired both wife and children with a reverence amounting to awe, and he struck strangers as reserved and austere. He recognized in Robert traces of extraordinary gifts, but he did not hide from him the fact that his son's temperament gave him anxiety for his future. Mrs. Burnes was a devoted wife and mother, by no means her husband's intellectual equal, but vivacious and quick-tempered, with a memory stored with the song and legend of the country-side. Other details can be filled in from the poet's own picture of his father's household as given with little or no idealization in The Cotter's Saturday Night.

THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT

No less impressive than that of his father is the intellectual hunger of the future poet himself. We have had Gilbert's testimony to the eagerness with which he devoured such books as came within his reach, and the use he made of his later fragments of schooling points the same way. He had a quarter at the parish school of Dalrymple when he was thirteen; and in the following summer he attended the school at Ayr under his former Alloway instructor. Murdoch's own account of these three weeks gives an idea of Burns's quickness of apprehension; and the style of it is worth noting with reference to the characteristics of the poet's own prose.

“In 1773,” says Murdoch, “Robert Burns came to board and lodge with me, for the purpose of revising English grammar, etc., that he might be better qualified to instruct his brothers and sisters at home. He was now with me day and night, in school, at all meals, and in all my walks. At the end of one week, I told him as he was now pretty much master of the parts of speech, etc., I should like to teach him something of French pronunciation, that when he should meet with the name of a French town, ship, officer, or the like, in the newspapers, he might be able to pronounce it something like a French word. Robert was glad to hear this proposal, and immediately we attacked the French with great courage.

“Now there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, etc. When walking together, and even at meals, I was constantly telling him the names of different objects, as they presented themselves, in French; so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases. In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business; and about the end of the second week of our study of the French, we began to read a little of the Adventures of Telemachus in Fénelon's own words.

“But now the plains of Mount Oliphant began to whiten, and Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a man.”

The record of Burns's school-days is completed by the mention of a sojourn, probably in the summer of 1775, in his mother's parish of Kirkoswald. Hither he went to study mathematics and surveying under a teacher of local note, and, in spite of the convivial attractions of a smuggling village, seems to have made progress in his geometry till his head was turned by a girl who lived next door to the school.

So far the education gained by Burns from his schoolmasters and his father had been almost exclusively moral and intellectual. It was in less formal ways that his imagination was fed. From his mother he had heard from infancy the ballads, legends, and songs that were traditionary among the peasantry; and the influence of these was re-enforced by a certain Betty Davidson, an unfortunate relative of his mother's to whom the family gave shelter for a time.

“In my infant and boyish days, too,” he writes in the letter to Doctor Moore already quoted, “I owed much to an old maid of my mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.”

His private reading also contained much that must have stimulated his imagination and broadened his interests. It began with a Life of Hannibal, and Hamilton's modernized version of the History of Sir William Wallace, which last, he says, with the touch of flamboyancy that often recurs in his style, “poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.” By the time he was eighteen he had, in addition to books already mentioned, become acquainted with Shakespeare, Pope (including the translation of Homer), Thomson, Shenstone, Allan Ramsay, and a Select Collection of Songs, Scotch and English; with the Spectator, the Pantheon, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Sterne, and Henry Mackenzie. To these must be added some books on farming and gardening, a good deal of theology, and, of course, the Bible.

The pursuing of intellectual interests such as are implied in this list is the more significant when we remember that it was carried on in the scanty leisure of a life of labor so severe that it all but broke the poet's health, and probably left permanent marks on his physique. Yet he had energy left for still other avocations. It was when he was no more than fifteen that he first experienced the twin passions that came to dominate his life, love and song. The girl who was the occasion was his partner in the harvest field, Nelly Kilpatrick; the song he addressed to her is the following:

HANDSOME NELL

Since there may still be readers who suppose that Burns was a mere unsophisticated singer, without power of self-criticism, it may be as well to insert here a passage from a Commonplace Book written in 1783, ten years after the composition of the song.

Criticism on the Foregoing Song

“Lest my works should be thought below Criticism; or meet with a Critic who, perhaps, will not look on them with so candid and favorable an eye; I am determined to criticise them myself.

“The first distich of the first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street ballads; and on the other hand, the second distich is too much in the other extreme. The expression is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second I am well pleased with; and I think it conveys a fine idea of that amiable part of the Sex—the agreeables, or what in our Scotch dialect we call a sweet sonsy Lass. The third Stanza has a little of the flimsy turn in it; and the third line has rather too serious a cast. The fourth Stanza is a very indifferent one; the first line is, indeed, all in the strain of the second Stanza, but the rest is mostly an expletive. The thoughts in the fifth Stanza come fairly up to my favorite idea [of] a sweet sonsy Lass. The last line, however, halts a little. The same sentiments are kept up with equal spirit and tenderness in the sixth Stanza, but the second and fourth lines ending with short syllables hurts the whole. The seventh Stanza has several minute faults; but I remember I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, and my blood sallies at the remembrance.”

In spite of the early start in poetry given him by Nelly Kilpatrick, he did not produce more than a few pieces of permanent value during the next ten years. He did, however, go on developing and branching out in his social activities, in spite of the depressing grind of the farm. He attended a dancing school (much against his father's will), helped to establish a “Bachelors' Club” for debating, and found time for further love-affairs. That with Ellison Begbie, celebrated by him in The Lass of Cessnock Banks, he took very seriously, and he proposed marriage to the girl in some portentously solemn epistles which remain to us as the earliest examples of his prose. In order to put himself in a position to marry, he determined to learn the trade of flax-dressing; and though Ellison refused him, he went to the neighboring seaport of Irvine to carry out his purpose in the summer of 1781. The flax-dressing experiment ended disastrously with a fire which burned the workshop, and Burns returned penniless to the farm. The poems written about this time express profound melancholy, a mood natural enough in the circumstances, and aggravated by his poor nervous and physical condition.

But his spirit could not remain permanently depressed, and shortly after his return to Lochlea, a trifling accident to a ewe he had bought prompted him to the following delightful and characteristic production.

THE DEATH AND DYING WORDS OF POOR MAILIE, THE AUTHOR'S ONLY PET YOWE

POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY

How long he continued to mourn for Ellison Begbie, it is hard to say; but the three following songs, inspired, it would seem, by three different girls, testify at once to his power of recuperation and the rapid maturing of his talent. All seem to have been written between the date of his return from Irvine and the death of his father.

MARY MORISON

MY NANNIE O

THE RIGS O' BARLEY

2. Mossgiel

On the death of their father, Robert and Gilbert Burns moved with the family to the farm of Mossgiel in the next parish of Mauchline. By putting in a claim for arrears of wages, they succeeded in drawing enough from the wreck of their father's estate to supply a scanty stock for the new venture. The records of the first summer show the poet in anything but a happy frame of mind. His health was miserable; and the loosening of his moral principles, which he ascribes to the influence of a young sailor he had met at Irvine, bore fruit in the birth to him of an illegitimate daughter by a servant girl, Elizabeth Paton. The verses which carry allusion to this affair are illuminating for his character. One group is devout and repentant; the other marked sometimes by cynical bravado, sometimes by a note of exultation. Both may be regarded as genuine enough expressions of moods which alternated throughout his life, and which corresponded to conflicting sides of his nature. Here is a typical example of the former:

A PRAYER IN THE PROSPECT OF DEATH

In his Epistle to John Rankine, with a somewhat hard and heartless humor, he braves out the affair; in the following Welcome he treats it with a tender pride, as sincere as his remorse:

THE POET'S WELCOME TO HIS LOVE-BEGOTTEN DAUGHTER

At Mossgiel the Burns family was no more successful than in either of its previous farms. Bad seed and bad weather gave two poor harvests, and by the summer of 1786 the poet's financial condition was again approaching desperation. His situation was made still more embarrassing by the consequences of another of his amours. Shortly after moving to the parish of Mauchline he had fallen in love with Jean Armour, the daughter of a mason in the village. What was for Burns a prolonged courtship ensued, and in the spring of 1786 he learned that Jean's condition was such that he gave her a paper acknowledging her as his wife. To his surprise and mortification the girl's father, who is said to have had a personal dislike to him and who well may have thought a man with his reputation and prospects was no promising son-in-law, opposed the marriage, forced Jean to give up the paper, and sent her off to another town. Burns chose to regard Jean's submission to her father as inexcusable faithlessness, and proceeded to indulge in the ecstatic misery of the lover betrayed. There is no doubt that he suffered keenly from the affair: he writes to his friends that he could “have no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment” than what he had felt in his “own breast on her account. I have tried often to forget her: I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riot ... to drive her out of my head, but all in vain.” This is in a later letter than that in which he has “sunk into a lurid calm,” and “subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable widower.”

Yet other evidence shows that at this crisis also Burns's emotional experience was far from simple. It was probably during the summer of the same year that there occurred the passages with the mysterious Highland Mary, a girl whose identity, after voluminous controversy, remains vague, but who inspired some of his loftiest love poetry. Though Burns's feeling for her seems to have been a kind of interlude in reaction from the “cruelty” of Jean, he idealized it beyond his wont, and the subject of it has been exalted to the place among his heroines which is surely due to the long-suffering woman who became his wife.

In this same summer Burns formed the project of emigrating. He proposed to go to the West Indies, and return for Jean when he had made provision to support her. This offer was refused by James Armour, but Burns persevered with the plan, obtained a position in Jamaica, and in the autumn engaged passage in a ship sailing from Greenock. The song, Will Ye Go to the Indies; My Mary, seems to imply that Highland Mary was invited to accompany him, but substantial evidence of this, as of most things concerning his relations with Mary Campbell, is lacking. From Thee, Eliza, I Must Go, supposed to be addressed to Elizabeth Miller, also belongs to this summer, and is taken to refer to another of the “under-plots in his drama of love.”

Meantime, at the suggestion of his friend and patron, Gavin Hamilton, Burns had begun to arrange for a subscription edition of his poems. It seems to have been only after he went to Mossgiel that he had seriously conceived the idea of writing for publication, and the decision was followed by a year of the most extraordinary fertility in composition. To 1785-1786 are assigned such satires as Holy Willie and the Address to the Unco Guid; a group of the longer poems including The Cotter's Saturday Night, The Jolly Beggars, Halloween, The Holy Fair, The Twa Dogs and The Vision; some shorter but no less famous pieces, such as the poems To a Louse, To a Mouse, To the Deil, To a Mountain Daisy and Scotch Drink; and a number of the best of his Epistles. Many of these, especially the church satires, had obtained a considerable local fame through circulation in manuscript, so that, proposals having been issued for an edition to be printed by Wilson of Kilmarnock, it was not found difficult to obtain subscriptions for more than half the edition of six hundred and twelve copies. The prospect of some return from this enterprise induced James Armour to take legal measures to obtain support for Jean's expected child, and Burns, fearing imprisonment, was forced to go into hiding while his book was passing the press. The church, too, had taken cognizance of his offense, and both Jean and he had to stand up before the congregation on three occasions to receive rebuke and make profession of repentance. He was at the same time completing the preparations for his voyage. In such extraordinary circumstances appeared the famous Kilmarnock edition, the immediate success of which soon produced a complete alteration in the whole outlook of the poet.

In the first place, the consideration Burns gained from his volume induced Armour to relax his pursuit, and in September, when Jean became the mother of twins, the poet was in such a mood that the sentiment of paternity began to weigh against the proposed emigration. Some weeks later he learned through a friend that Doctor Blacklock, a poet and scholar of standing in literary circles in Edinburgh, had praised his volume highly, and urged a second and larger edition. The upshot was that he gave up his passage (his trunk had been packed and was part way to Greenock), and determined instead on a visit to Edinburgh. The only permanent result of the whole West Indian scheme was thus a sheaf of amorous and patriotic farewells, of which the following may be taken as examples:

WILL YE GO TO THE INDIES, MY MARY?

THE GLOOMY NIGHT

ON A SCOTCH BARD, GONE TO THE WEST INDIES

3. Edinburgh

On the twenty-seventh of November, 1786, mounted on a borrowed pony, Burns set out for Edinburgh. He seems to have arrived there without definite plans, for, after having found lodging with his old friend Richmond, he spent the first few days strolling about the city. At home Burns had been an enthusiastic freemason, and it was through a masonic friend, Mr. James Dalrymple of Orangefield, near Ayr, that he was introduced to Edinburgh society. A decade or two earlier, that society, under the leadership of men like Adam Smith and David Hume had reached a high degree of intellectual distinction. A decade or two later, under Sir Walter Scott and the Reviewers it was again to be in some measure, if for the last time, a rival to London as a literary center. But when Burns visited it there was a kind of interregnum, and, little though he or they guessed it, none of the celebrities he met possessed genius comparable to his own. In a very few weeks it was evident that he was to be the lion of the season. By December thirteenth he is writing to a friend at Ayr:

“I have found a worthy warm friend in Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield, who introduced me to Lord Glencairn, a man whose worth and brotherly kindness to me I shall remember when time shall be no more. By his interest it is passed in the Caledonian Hunt, and entered in their books, that they are to take each a copy of the second edition [of the poems], for which they are to pay one guinea. I have been introduced to a good many of the Noblesse, but my avowed patrons and patronesses are the Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn, with my Lord and Lady Betty—the Dean of Faculty [Honorable Henry Erskine]—Sir John Whitefoord. I have likewise warm friends among the literati; Professors [Dugald] Stewart, Blair, and Mr. Mackenzie—the Man of Feeling.”

Through Glencairn he met Creech the book-seller, with whom he arranged for his second edition, and through the patrons he mentions and the Edinburgh freemasons, among whom he was soon at home, a large subscription list was soon made up. In the Edinburgh Magazine for October, November, and December, James Sibbald had published favorable notices of the Kilmarnock edition, with numerous extracts, and when Henry Mackenzie gave it high praise in his Lounger for December ninth, and the London Monthly Review followed suit in the same month, it was felt that the poet's reputation was established.

Of Burns's bearing in the fashionable and cultivated society into which he so suddenly found himself plunged we have many contemporary accounts. They are practically unanimous in praise of the taste and tact with which he acquitted himself. While neither shy nor aggressive, he impressed every one with his brilliance in conversation, his shrewdness in observation, and criticism, and his poise and common sense in his personal relations. One of the best descriptions of him was given by Sir Walter Scott to Lockhart. Scott as a boy of sixteen met Burns at the house of Doctor Adam Ferguson, and thus reports:

“His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents.... I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school; that is, none of your modern agriculturists who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce guidman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments: the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a cast which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed an opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty.... I have only to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam partem, when I say I never saw a man in company with his superiors in station and information, more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I have heard the Duchess of Gordon remark this.”

Burns's letters written at this time show an amused consciousness of his social prominence, but never for a moment did he lose sight of the fact that it was only the affair of a season, and that in a few months he would have to resume his humble station. Yet this intellectual detachment did not prevent his enjoying opportunities for social and intellectual intercourse such as he had never known and was never again to know. Careful as he was to avoid presuming on his new privileges, he clearly threw himself into the discussions in which he took part with all the zest of his temperament; and in the less formal convivial clubs to which he was welcomed he became at once the king of good fellows. To the noblemen and others who befriended him he expressed himself in language which may seem exaggerated; but the warmth of his disposition, and the letter writers of the eighteenth century on whom he had formed his style, sufficiently account for it without the suspicion of affectation or flattery. Whatever his vices, ingratitude to those who showed him kindness was not among them; and the sympathetic reader is more apt to feel pathos than to take offense in his tributes to his patrons. The real though not extraordinary kindness of the Earl of Glencairn, for example, was acknowledged again and again in prose and verse; and the Lament Burns wrote upon his death closes with these lines which rewarded the noble lord with an immortality he might otherwise have missed:

After a sojourn of a little more than five months, Burns left Edinburgh early in May for a tour in the south of Scotland. The poet was mounted on an old mare, Jenny Geddes, which he had bought in Edinburgh, and which he still owned when he settled at Ellisland. He was accompanied by his bosom friend, Robert Ainslie. The letters and journals written during the four weeks of this tour give evidence of his appreciation of scenery and his shrewd judgment of character. He was received with much consideration in the houses he visited, and was given the freedom of the burgh of Dumfries. On the ninth of June, 1787, he was back at Mauchline; and, calling at Armour's house to see his child, he was revolted by the “mean, servile complaisance” he met with—the result of his Edinburgh triumphs. His disgust at the family, however, did not prevent a renewal of his intimacy with Jean. After a few days at home, he seems to have made a short tour in the West Highlands. July was spent at Mossgiel, and early in August he returned to Edinburgh in order to settle his accounts with Creech, his publisher. On the twenty-fifth he set out for a longer tour in the North accompanied by his friend Nicol, an Edinburgh schoolmaster, the Willie who “brewed a peck o' maut.” They proceeded by Linlithgow, Falkirk, Stirling, Crieff, Dunkeld, Aberfeldie, Blair Athole, Strathspey, to Inverness. The most notable episode of the journey northwards was a visit at the castle of the Duke of Athole, which passed with great satisfaction to both Burns and his hosts, and of which his Humble Petition of Bruar Water is a poetical memorial. At Stonehaven and Montrose he extended his acquaintance among his father's relatives. He reached Edinburgh again on September sixteenth, having traveled nearly six hundred miles. In October he made still another excursion, through Clackmannanshire and into the south of Perthshire, visiting Ramsay of Ochtertyre, near Stirling, and Sir William Murray of Ochtertyre in Strathearn. In all these visits made by Burns to the houses of the aristocracy, it is interesting to note his capacity for pleasing and profitable intercourse with people of a class and tradition far removed from his own. Sensitive to an extreme and quick to resent a slight, he was at the same time finely responsive to kindness, and his conduct was governed by a tact and frank naturalness that are among the not least surprising of his powers. In spite of the fervor and floridness of some of his expressions of gratitude for favors from his noble friends, Burns was no snob; and it was characteristic of him to give up a visit to the Duchess of Gordon rather than separate from his companion Nicol, who, in a fit of jealous sulks, refused to accompany him to Castle Gordon.

The settlement with Creech proved to be a very tedious affair, and in the beginning of December the poet was about to leave the city in disgust when an accident occurred which gave opportunity for one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of his relations with women. Just before, he had met a Mrs. McLehose who lived in Edinburgh with her three children, while her husband, from whom she had separated on account of ill-treatment, had emigrated to Jamaica. A correspondence began immediately after the first meeting, with the following letter:

“Madam:

“I had set no small store by my tea-drinking tonight, and have not often been so disappointed. Saturday evening I shall embrace the opportunity with the greatest pleasure. I leave this town this day se'ennight, and probably I shall not return for a couple of twelvemonths; but I must ever regret that I so lately got an acquaintance I shall ever highly esteem, and in whose welfare I shall ever be warmly interested. Our worthy common friend, Miss Nimmo, in her usual pleasant way, rallied me a good deal on my new acquaintance, and, in the humour of her ideas, I wrote some lines, which I enclose to you, as I think they have a good deal of poetic merit; and Miss Nimmo tells me that you are not only a critic but a poetess. Fiction, you know, is the native region of poetry; and I hope you will pardon my vanity in sending you the bagatelle as a tolerable offhand jeu d'esprit. I have several poetic trifles, which I shall gladly leave with Miss Nimmo or you, if they were worth house-room; as there are scarcely two people on earth by whom it would mortify me more to be forgotten, though at the distance of nine score miles. I am, Madam, With the highest respect,

“Your very humble servant,
“Robert Burns.”

[December 6, 1787.]

The night before Burns was to take tea with his new acquaintance, he was overturned by a drunken coachman, and received an injury to his knee which confined him to his rooms for several weeks. Meantime the correspondence went on with ever-increasing warmth, from “Madam,” through “My dearest Madam,” “my dear kind friend,” “my lovely friend,” to “my dearest angel.” They early agreed to call each other Clarinda and Sylvander, and the Arcadian names are significant of the sentimental nature of the relation. By the time of their second meeting—about a month after the first,—they had exchanged intimate confidences, had discovered endless affinities, and had argued by the page on religion, Clarinda striving to win Sylvander over to her orthodox Calvinism. When he was again able to go out, his visits became for both of them “exquisite” and “rapturous” experiences, Clarinda struggling to keep on the safe side of discretion by means of “Reason” and “Religion,” Sylvander protesting his complete submission to her will. The appearance of passion in their letters goes on increasing, and Clarinda's fits of perturbation in the next morning's reflections grow more acute. She does not seem to have become the poet's mistress, and it is impossible to gather what either of them expected the outcome of their intercourse to be. With a few notable exceptions, the verses which were occasioned rather than inspired by the affair are affected and artificial; and in spite of the warmth of the expressions in his letters it is hard to believe that his passion went very deep. In any case, on his return to Mauchline to find Jean Armour cast out by her own people after having a second time borne him twins, he faced his responsibilities in a more manly and honorable fashion than ever before, and made Jean his wife. The explanation of his final resolution is given repeatedly in almost the same words in his letters: “I found a much loved female's positive happiness or absolute misery among my hands, and I could not trifle with such a sacred deposit.” It would appear that, however far the affair between him and Clarinda had passed beyond the sentimental friendship it began with, he did not regard it as placing in his hands any such “sacred deposit” as the fate of Jean, nor had one or two intrigues with obscure girls in Edinburgh shaken an affection which was much more deep-rooted than he often imagined. Clarinda was naturally deeply wounded by his marriage, and her reproaches of “villainy” led to a breach which was only gradually bridged. At one time, just before she set out for Jamaica to join her husband in an unsuccessful attempt at a reconciliation, Burns's letters again became frequent, the old fervor reappeared, and a couple of his best songs were produced. But at this time he had the—shall we say reassuring?—belief that he was not to see her again, and could indulge an emotion that had always been largely theatrical without risk to either of them. On her return he wrote her, it would seem, only once. For the character of Burns the incident is of much curious interest; for literature its importance lies in the two songs, Ae fond Kiss and My Nannie's Awa. The former was written shortly before her departure for the West Indies; the second in the summer of her absence. It is noteworthy that in them “Clarinda” has given place to “Nancy” and “Nannie.” Beside them is placed for contrast, one of the pure Clarinda effusions.

AE FOND KISS

MY NANNIE'S AWA

CLARINDA

4. Ellisland

In the spring of 1788 when Burns married Jean Armour, he took two other steps of the first importance for his future career. The Edinburgh period had come and gone, and all that his intercourse with his influential friends had brought him was the four or five hundred pounds of profit from his poems and an opportunity to enter the excise service. With part of the money he relieved his brother Gilbert from pressing obligations at Mossgiel by the loan of one hundred and eighty pounds, and with the rest leased the farm of Ellisland on the bank of the Nith, five or six miles above Dumfries. But before taking up the farm he devoted six weeks or so to tuition in the duties of an exciseman, so that he had this occupation to fall back on in case of another farming failure. During the summer he superintended the building of the farm-house, and in December Jean joined her husband. His satisfaction in his domestic situation is characteristically expressed in a song composed about this time.

I HAE A WIFE

Early in his residence at Ellisland he formed a close relation with a neighboring proprietor, Colonel Robert Riddel. For him he copied into two volumes a large part of what he considered the best of his unpublished verse and prose, thus forming the well-known Glenriddel Manuscript. Had not one already become convinced of the fact from internal evidence, it would be clear enough from this prose volume that Burns's letters were often as much works of art to him as his poems. This is of supreme importance in weighing the epistolary evidence for his character and conduct. Even when his words seem to be the direct outpourings of his feelings—of love, of friendship, of gratitude, of melancholy, of devotion, of scorn—a comparative examination will show that in prose as much as in verse we are dealing with the work of a conscious artist, enamored of telling expression, aware of his reader, and anything but the naif utterer of unsophisticated emotion. To recall this will save us from much perplexity in the interpretation of his words, and will clear up many an apparent contradiction in his evidence about himself.

Burns was never very sanguine about success on the Ellisland farm. By the end of the summer of 1789 he concluded that he could not depend on it, determined to turn it into a dairy farm to be conducted mainly by his wife and sisters, and took up the work in the excise for which he had prepared himself. He had charge of a large district of ten parishes, and had to ride some two hundred miles a week in all weathers. With the work he still did on the farm one can see that he was more than fully employed, and need not wonder that there was little time for poetry. Yet these years at Ellisland were on the whole happy years for himself and his family; he found time for pleasant intercourse with some of his neighbors, for a good deal of letter-writing, for some interest in politics, and for the establishing, with Colonel Riddel, of a small neighborhood library. As an excise officer he seems to have been conscientious and efficient, though at times, in the case of poor offenders, he tempered justice with mercy. Ultimately, despairing of making the farm pay and hoping for promotion in the government service, he gave up his lease, sold his stock, and in the autumn of 1791 moved to Dumfries, where he was given a district which did not involve keeping a horse, and which paid him about seventy pounds a year. Thus ended the last of Burns's disastrous attempts to make a living from the soil.

5. Dumfries

The house in which the Burnses with their three sons first lived in Dumfries was a three-roomed cottage in the Wee Vennel, now Banks Street. Though his income was small, it must be remembered that the cost of food was low. “Beef was 3d. to 5d. a lb.; mutton, 3d. to 4-1/2d.; chickens, 7d. to 8d. a pair; butter (the lb. of 24 oz.), 7d. to 9d.; salmon, 6d. to 9-1/2d. a lb.; cod, 1d. and even 1/2d. a lb.” Though hardly in easy circumstances then, Burns's situation was such that it was possible to avoid his greatest horror, debt.

Meantime, his interest in politics had greatly quickened. He had been from youth a sentimental Jacobite; but this had little effect upon his attitude toward the parties of the day. In Edinburgh he had worn the colors of the party of Fox, presumably out of compliment to his Whig friends, Glencairn and Erskine. During the Ellisland period, however, he had written strongly against the Regency Bill supported by Fox; and in the general election of 1790 he opposed the Duke of Queensberry and the local Whig candidate. But in his early months in Dumfries we find him showing sympathy with the doctrines of the French Revolution, a sympathy which was natural enough in a man of his inborn democratic tendencies. A curious outcome of these was an incident not yet fully cleared up. In February, 1792, Burns, along with some fellow officers, assisted by a body of dragoons, seized an armed smuggling brig which had run aground in the Solway, and on her being sold, he bought for three pounds four of the small guns she carried. These he is said to have presented “to the French Convention,” but they were seized by the British Government at Dover. As a matter of fact, the Convention was not constituted till September, and the Legislative Assembly which preceded it was not hostile to Britain. Thus, Burns's action, though eccentric and extravagant, was not treasonable in law or in spirit, and does not seem to have entailed on him any unfortunate consequences.

In the course of that year symptoms of the infection of part of the British public with revolutionary principles began to be evident, and the government was showing signs of alarm. The Whig opposition was clamoring for internal reform, and Burns sided more and more definitely with it, and was rash enough to subscribe for a Reform paper called The Gazetteer, an action which would have put him under suspicion from his superiors, had it become known. Some notice of his Liberal tendencies did reach his official superiors, and an inquiry was made into his political principles which caused him no small alarm. In a letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry, through whom he had obtained his position, he disclaimed all revolutionary beliefs and all political activity. No action was taken against him, nor was his failure to obtain promotion to an Examinership due to anything but the slow progress involved in promotion by seniority. Hereafter, he exercised considerable caution in the expression of his political sympathies, though he allowed himself to associate with men of revolutionary opinions. The feeling that he was not free to utter what he believed on public affairs was naturally chafing to a man of his independent nature.

Burns's chief enjoyment in these days was the work he was doing for Scottish song. While in Edinburgh he had made the acquaintance of an engraver, James Johnson, who had undertaken the publication of the Scots Musical Museum, a collection of songs and music. Burns agreed to help him by the collection and refurbishing of the words of old songs, and when these were impossible, by providing new words for the melodies. The work finally extended to six volumes; and before it was finished a more ambitious undertaking, managed by a Mr. George Thomson, was set on foot. Burns was invited to cooperate in this also, and entered into it with such enthusiasm that he was Thomson's main support. In both of these publications the poet worked purely with patriotic motives and for the love of song, and had no pecuniary interest in either. Once Thomson sent him a present of five pounds and endangered their relations thereby; later, when Burns was in his last illness, he asked and received from Thomson an advance of the same amount. Apart from these sums Burns never made or sought to make a penny from his writings after the publication of the first Edinburgh edition. Twice he declined journalistic work for a London paper. Poetry was the great consolation of his life, and even in his severest financial straits he refused to consider the possibility of writing for money, regarding it as a kind of prostitution.

By the autumn of 1795 signs began to appear that the poet's constitution was breaking down. The death of his daughter Elizabeth and a severe attack of rheumatism plunged him into deep melancholy and checked for a time his song-writing; and though for a time he recovered, his disease returned early in the next year. It seems clear, too, that though the change from Ellisland to Dumfries relieved him of much of the severer physical exertion, other factors more than counterbalanced this relief. Burns had never been a slave to drink for its own sake; it had always been the accompaniment—in those days an almost inevitable accompaniment—of sociability. Some of his wealthier friends in the vicinity were in this respect rather excessive in their hospitality; in Dumfries the taverns were always at hand; and as Burns came to realize the comparative failure of his career as a man, he found whisky more and more a means of escape for depression. Even if we distrust the local gossip that made much of the dissipations of his later years, it appears from the evidence of his physician that alcohol had much to do with the rheumatic and digestive troubles that finally broke him down. In July, 1796, he was sent, as a last resort, to Brow-on-Solway to try sea-bathing and country life; but he returned little improved, and well-nigh convinced that his illness was mortal. His mental condition is shown by the fact that pressure from a solicitor for the payment of a tailor's debt of some seven pounds, incurred for his volunteer's uniform, threw him into a panic lest he should be imprisoned, and his last letters are pitiful requests for financial help, and two notes to his father-in-law urging him to send her mother to Jean, as she was about to give birth to another child. In such harassing conditions he sank into delirium, and died on July 21, 1796. The child, who died in infancy, was born on the day his father was buried.

With Burns's death a reaction in popular opinion set in. He was given a military funeral; and a subscription which finally amounted to one thousand two hundred pounds was raised for his family. The official biography, by Doctor Currie of Liverpool, doubled this sum, so that Jean was enabled to bring up the children respectably, and end her days in comfort. Scotland, having done little for Burns in his life, was stricken with remorse when he died, and has sought ever since to atone for her neglect by an idolatry of the poet and by a more than charitable view of the man.

CHAPTER II

INHERITANCE: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Three forms of speech were current in Scotland in the time of Burns, and, in different proportions, are current to-day: in the Highlands, north and west of a slanting line running from the Firth of Clyde to Aberdeenshire, Gaelic; in the Lowlands, south and east of the same line, Lowland Scots; over the whole country, among the more educated classes, English. Gaelic is a Celtic language, belonging to an entirely different linguistic group from English, and having close affinities to Irish and Welsh. This tongue Burns did not know. Lowland Scots is a dialect of English, descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon. It has had a history of considerable interest. Down to the time of Chaucer, whose influence had much to do with making the Midland dialect the literary standard for the Southern kingdom, it is difficult to distinguish the written language of Edinburgh from that of York, both being developments of Northumbrian. But as English writers tended more and more to conform to the standard of London, Northern Middle English gradually ceased to be written; while in Scotland, separated and usually hostile as it was politically, the Northern speech continued to develop along its own lines, until in the beginning of the sixteenth century it attained a form more remote from standard English and harder for the modern reader than it had been a century before. The close connection between Scotland and France, continuing down to the time of Queen Mary, led to the introduction of many French words which never found a place in English; the proximity of the Highlands made Gaelic borrowings easy; and the Scandinavian settlements on both coasts contributed additional elements to the vocabulary. Further, in its comparative isolation, Scots developed or retained peculiarities in grammar and pronunciation unknown or lost in the South. Thus by 1550, the form of English spoken in Scotland was in a fair way to become an independent language.

This process, however, was rudely halted by the Reformation. The triumph of this movement in England and its comparative failure in France threw Scotland, when it became Protestant, into close relations with England, while the “auld Alliance” with France practically ended when Mary of Scots returned to her native country. Leaders like John Knox, during the early struggles of the Reformation, spent much time in England; and when they came home their speech showed the effect of their intercourse with their southern brethren of the reformed faith. The language of Knox, as recorded in his sermons and his History, is indeed far from Elizabethan English, but it is notably less “broad” than the Scots of Douglas and Lindesay. Scotland had no vernacular translation of the Bible; and this important fact, along with the English associations of many of the Protestant ministers, finally made the speech of the Scottish pulpit, and later of Scottish religion in general, if not English, at least as purely English as could be achieved.

The process thus begun was carried farther in the next generation when, in 1603, James VI of Scotland became King of England, and the Court removed to London. England at that time was, of course, much more advanced in culture than its poorer neighbor to the north, and the courtiers who accompanied James to London found themselves marked by their speech as provincial, and set themselves to get rid of their Scotticisms with an eagerness in proportion to their social aspirations. Scottish men of letters now came into more intimate relation with English literature, and finding that writing in English opened to them a much larger reading public, they naturally adopted the southern speech in their books. Thus men like Alexander, Earl of Stirling, and William Drummond of Hawthornden belong both in language and literary tradition to the English Elizabethans.

Religion, society, and literature having all thrown their influence against the native speech of Scotland, it followed that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the progressive disuse of that speech among the upper classes of the country, until by the time of Burns, Scots was habitually spoken only by the peasantry and the humbler people in the towns. The distinctions between social classes in the matter of dialect were, of course, not absolute. Occasional members even of the aristocracy prided themselves on their command of the vernacular; and among the country folk there were few who could not make a brave attempt at English when they spoke with the laird or the minister. With Burns himself, Lowland Scots was his customary speech at home, about the farm, in the tavern and the Freemasons' lodge; but, as we have seen, his letters, being written mainly to educated people, are almost all pure English, as was his conversation with these people when he met them.

The linguistic situation that has been sketched finds interesting illustration in the language of Burns's poems. The distinction which is usually made, that he wrote poetry in Scots and verse in English, has some basis, but is inaccurately expressed and needs qualification. The fundamental fact is that for him Scots was the natural language of the emotions, English of the intellect. The Scots poems are in general better, not chiefly because they are in Scots but because they are concerned with matters of natural feeling; the English poems are in general poetically poorer, not because they are in English but because they are so frequently the outcome of moods not dominated by spontaneous emotion, but intellectual, conscious, or theatrical. He wrote English sometimes as he wore his Sunday blacks, with dignity but not with ease; sometimes as he wore the buff and blue, with buckskins and top-boots, which he donned in Edinburgh—“like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird.” In both cases he was capable of vigorous, common-sense expression; in neither was he likely to exhibit the imagination, the tenderness, or the humor which characterized the plowman clad in home-spun.

The Cotter's Saturday Night is an interesting illustration of these distinctions. The opening stanza is a dedicatory address on English models to a lawyer friend and patron; it is pure English in language, stiff and imitatively “literary” in style. The stanzas which follow describing the homecoming of the cotter, the family circle, the supper, and the daughter's suitor, are in broad Scots, the language harmonizing perfectly with the theme, and they form poetically the sound core of the poem. In the description of family worship, Burns did what his father would do in conducting that worship, adopted English as more reverent and respectful, but inevitably as more restrained emotionally; and in the moralizing passage which follows, as in the apostrophes to Scotia and to the Almighty at the close, he naturally sticks to English, and in spite of a genuine enough exaltation of spirit achieves a result rather rhetorical than poetical.

Contrast again songs like Corn Rigs or Whistle and I'll Come To Thee, My Lad, with most of the songs to Clarinda. The former, in Scots, are genial, whole-hearted, full of the power of kindling imaginative sympathy, thoroughly contagious in their lusty emotion or sly humor. The latter, in English, are stiff, coldly contrived, consciously elegant or marked by the sentimental factitiousness of the affair that occasioned them. But their inferiority is due less to the difference in language than to the difference in the mood. When, especially at a distance, his relation to Clarinda really touched his imagination, we have the genuinely poetical My Nannie's Awa and Ae Fond Kiss. The latter poem can be, with few changes, turned into English without loss of quality; and its most famous lines have almost no dialect:

Finally, there are the English poems to Highland Mary. For some reason not yet fully understood, the affair with Mary Campbell was treated by him in a spirit of reverence little felt in his other love poetry, and this spirit was naturally expressed by him in English. But in the almost English

and in the pure English To Mary in Heaven, he is not at all hampered by the use of the Southern speech, Scots would not have heightened the poetry here, and for Burns Scots would have been less appropriate, less natural even, for the expression of an almost sacred theme.

The case, then, seems to stand thus. Burns commanded two languages, which he employed instinctively for different kinds of subject and mood. The subjects and moods which evoked vernacular utterance were those that with all writers are more apt to yield poetry, and in consequence most of his best poetry is in Scots. But when a theme naturally evoking English was imaginatively felt by him, the use of English did not prevent his writing poetically. And there were themes which he could handle equally well in either speech—as we see, for example, in the songs in The Jolly Beggars.

Yet the language had an importance in itself. Though its vocabulary is limited in matters of science, philosophy, religion, and the like, Lowland Scots is very rich in homely terms and in humorous and tender expressions. For love, or for celebrating the effects of whisky, English is immeasurably inferior. The free use of the diminutive termination in ie or y—a termination capable of expressing endearment, familiarity, ridicule, and contempt as well as mere smallness—not only has considerable effect in emotional shading, but contributes to the liquidness of the verse by lessening the number of consonantal endings that make English seem harsh and abrupt to many foreign ears. Moreover, the very indeterminateness of the dialect, the possibility of using varying degrees of “broadness,” increased the facility of rhyming, and added notably to the ease and spontaneity of composition. Thus in Scots Burns was not only more at home, but had a medium in some respects more plastic than English.

Language, however, was not the only element in his inheritance which helped to determine the nature and quality of Burns's production. He was extremely sensitive to suggestion from his predecessors, and frankly avowed his obligations to them, so that to estimate his originality it is necessary to know something of the men at whose flame he kindled.

As the Northern dialect of English was, before the Reformation, in a fair way to become an independent national speech, so literature north of the Tweed had promise of a development, not indeed independent, but distinct. Of the writers of the Middle Scots period, Henryson and Dunbar, Douglas and Lindesay, Burns, it is true, knew little; and the tradition that they founded underwent in the latter part of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries an experience in many respects parallel to that which has been described in the matter of language. The effect of the Reformation upon all forms of artistic creation will be discussed when we come to speak particularly of the history of Scottish song; for the moment it is sufficient to say that the absorption in theological controversy was unfavorable to the continuation of a poetical development. Under James VI, however, there were a few writers who maintained the tradition, notably Alexander Montgomery, Alexander Scott, and the Sempills. To the first of these is to be credited the invention of the stanza called, from the poems in which Montgomery used it, the stanza of The Banks of Helicon or of The Cherry and the Slae. It was imitated by some of Montgomery's contemporaries, revived by Allan Ramsay, and thus came to Burns down a line purely Scottish, as it never seems to have been used in any other tongue. He first employed it in the Epistle to Davie, and it was made by him the medium of some of his most characteristic ideas.

The Piper of Kilbarchan, by Sir Robert Sempill of Beltrees (1595?-1661?), set a model for the humorous elegy on the living which reached Burns through Ramsay and Fergusson, and was followed by him in those on Poor Mailie and Tam Samson. The stanza in which it is written is far older than Sempill, having been traced as far back as the troubadours in the twelfth century, and being found frequently in both English and French through the Middle Ages; but from the time of Sempill on, it was cultivated with peculiar intensity in Scotland, and is the medium of so many of Burns's best-known pieces that it is often called Burns's stanza.

The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The attraction of the larger English public and the disuse of the vernacular among the upper classes already discussed, drew to the South or to the Southern speech whatever literary talent appeared in the North, and it seemed for a time that, except for the obscure stream of folk poetry, Scottish vernacular literature was at an end. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, interest began to revive. In 1706-9-11 James Watson published the three volumes of his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, and in the third decade began to appear Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (1724-40). These collections rescued from oblivion a large quantity of vernacular verse, some of it drawn from manuscripts of pre-Reformation poetry, some of it contemporary, some of it anonymous and of uncertain date, having come down orally or in chap-books and broadsides. The welcome given to these volumes was an early instance of that renewed interest in older and more primitive literature that was manifested still more strikingly when Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Its influence on the production of vernacular literature was evident at once in the original work of Ramsay himself; and the movement which culminated in Burns, though having its roots far back in the work of Henryson and Dunbar, was in effect a Scottish renascence, in which the chief agents before Burns were Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Ramsay himself, Robert Fergusson, and song-writers like Mrs. Cockburn and Lady Anne Lindsay.

Of this fact Burns was perfectly aware, and he was not only candid but generous in his acknowledgment of his debt to his immediate predecessors.

He knew Ramsay's collection and had a perhaps exaggerated admiration for The Gentle Shepherd. This poem, published in 1728, not only holds a unique position in the history of the pastoral drama, but is important in the present connection as being to Burns the most signal evidence of the possibility of a dignified literature in the modern vernacular. Hamilton and Ramsay had exchanged rhyming epistles in the six-line stanza, and in these Burns found the model for his own epistles. Hamilton's Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck—a favorite grey-hound—had been imitated by Ramsay in Lucky Spence's Last Advice and the Last Speech of a Wretched Miser, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about 1782 he had all but given up rhyming: “but meeting with Fergusson's Scotch Poems, I strung anew my wildly-sounding, rustic lyre with emulating vigour.” In the preface to the Kilmarnock edition he is still more explicit as to his attitude.

“To the poems of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Fergusson, he, with equal unaffected sincerity, declares, that, even in the highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scotch Poets he has often had in his eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for servile imitation.”

To be more specific, Burns found the model for his Cotter's Saturday Night in Fergusson's Farmer's Ingle, for The Holy Fair in his Leith Races, for Scotch Drink in his Caller Water, for The Twa Dogs and The Brigs of Ayr in his Planestanes and Causey, and Kirkyard Eclogues. In later years Burns grew somewhat more critical of Ramsay, especially as a reviser of old songs; but for Fergusson he retained to the end a sympathetic admiration. When he went to Edinburgh, one of his first places of pilgrimage was the grave of him whom he apostrophized thus,

And he later obtained from the managers of the Canongate Kirk permission to erect a stone over the tomb.

The fact, then, that Burns owed much to the tradition of vernacular poetry in Scotland and especially to his immediate predecessors is no new discovery, however recent critics may have plumed themselves upon it. Burns knew it well, and was ever ready to acknowledge it. What is more important than the mere fact of his inheritance is the use he made of it. In taking from his elders the fruits of their experience in poetical conception and metrical arrangement, he but did what artists have always done; in outdistancing these elders and in almost every case surpassing their achievement on the lines they had laid down, he did what only the greater artists succeed in doing. It is not in mere inventiveness and novelty but in first-hand energy of conception, in mastering for himself the old thought and the old form and uttering them with his personal stamp, in making them carry over to the reader with a new force or vividness or beauty, that the poet's originality consists. In these respects Burns's originality is no whit lessened by an explicit recognition of his indebtedness to the stock from which he grew.

His relation to the purely English literature which he read is different and produced very different results. Shakespeare he reverenced, and that he knew him well is shown by the frequency of Shakespearean turns of phrase in his letters, as well as by direct quotation. But of influence upon his poetry there is little trace. He had a profound admiration for the indomitable will of Milton's Satan, and he makes it clear that this admiration affected his conduct. The most frequent praise of English writers in his letters is, however, given to the eighteenth-century authors—to Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Gray, Young, Blair, Beattie, and Goldsmith in verse, to Sterne, Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie in prose. Echoes of these poets are common in his work, and the most frigid of his English verses show their influence most clearly. To the sentimental tendency in the thought of the eighteenth century he was highly responsive, and the expression of it in The Man of Feeling appealed to him especially. In a mood which recurred painfully often he was apt to pride himself on his “sensibility”: the letters to Clarinda are full of it. The less fortunate effects of it are seen both in his conduct and in his poems in a fondness for nursing his emotions and extracting pleasure from his supposed miseries; the more fortunate aspects are reflected in the tender humanity of poems like those To a Mouse, On Seeing a Wounded Hare, and To a Daisy—perhaps even in the Address to the Deil. He had naturally a warm heart and strong impulses; it is only when an element of consciousness or mawkishness appears that his “sensibility” is to be ascribed to the fashionable philosophy of the day and the influence of his English models.

For better or worse, then, Burns belongs to the literary history of Britain as a legitimate descendant of easily traced ancestors. Like other great writers he made original contributions from his individual temperament and from his particular environment and experience. But these do not obliterate the marks of his descent, nor are they so numerous or powerful as to give support to the old myth of the “rustic phenomenon,” the isolated poetical miracle appearing in defiance of the ordinary laws of literary dependence and tradition.

If this is true of his models it is no less true of his methods. Though simplicity and spontaneity are among the most obvious of the qualities of his work, it is not to be supposed that such effects were obtained by a birdlike improvisation. “All my poetry,” he said, “is the effect of easy composition but laborious correction,” and the careful critic will perceive ample evidence in support of the statement. We shall see in the next chapter with what pains he fitted words to melody in his songs; an examination of the variant readings which make the establishment of his text peculiarly difficult shows abundant traces of deliberation and the labor of the file. In the following song, the first four lines of which are old, it is interesting to note that, though he preserves admirably the tone of the fragment which gave him the impulse and the idea, the twelve lines which he added are in the effects produced by manipulation of the consonants and vowels and in the use of internal rhyme a triumph of conscious artistic skill. The interest in technique which this implies is exhibited farther in many passages of his letters, especially those to George Thomson.

GO FETCH TO ME A PINT O' WINE

CHAPTER III

BURNS AND SCOTTISH SONG

With song-writing Burns began his poetical career, with song-writing he closed it; and, brilliant as was his achievement in other fields, it is as a song-writer that he ranks highest among his peers, it is through his songs that he has rooted himself most deeply in the hearts of his countrymen.

The most notable and significant fact in connection with his making of songs is their relation to the melodies to which they are sung. In the vast majority of cases these are old Scottish tunes, which were known to Burns before he wrote his songs, and were singing in his ear during the process of composition. The poet was no technical musician. Murdoch, his first teacher, says that Robert and Gilbert Burns “were left far behind by all the rest of the school” when he tried to teach them a little church music, “Robert's ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another.” Either Murdoch exaggerated, or the poet's ear developed later (Murdoch is speaking of him between the ages of six and nine); for he learned to fiddle a little, once at least attempted to compose an air, could read music fairly easily, and could write down a melody from memory. His correspondence with Johnson and Thomson shows that he knew a vast number of old tunes and was very sensitive to their individual quality and suggestion.[1] Such a sentence as the following from one of his Commonplace Books shows how important his responsiveness to music was for his poetical composition.

“These old Scottish airs are so nobly sentimental that when one would compose to them, to south the tune, as our Scottish phrase is, over and over, is the readiest way to catch the inspiration and raise the Bard into that glorious enthusiasm so strongly characteristic of our old Scotch Poetry.”

Again, once when Thomson had sent him a tune to be fitted with words, he replied:

“Laddie lie near me must lie by me for some time. I do not know the air; and until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing (such as it is), I never can compose for it. My way is: I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then choose my theme; begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for subjects in nature around me that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. When I feel my muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and then commit my effusion to paper; swinging at intervals on the hindlegs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures as my pen goes on. Seriously, this at home is almost invariably my way.” [September, 1793.]

His wife, who had a good voice and a wide knowledge of folk-song, seems often to have been of assistance, and a further interesting detail is given by Sir James Stuart-Menteath from the evidence of a Mrs. Christina Flint.

“When Burns dwelt at Ellisland, he was accustomed, after composing any of his beautiful songs, to pay Kirsty a visit, that he might hear them sung by her. He often stopped her in the course of the singing when he found any word harsh and grating to his ear, and substituted one more melodious and pleasing. From Kirsty's extensive acquaintance with the old Scottish airs, she was frequently able to suggest to the poet music more suitable to the song she was singing than that to which he had set it.”

Kirsty and Jean were not his only aids in the criticism of the musical quality of his songs. From the time of the Edinburgh visit, at least, he was in the habit of seizing the opportunity afforded by the possession of a harpsichord or a good voice by the daughters of his friends, and in several cases he rewarded his accompanist by making her the heroine of the song. Without drawing on the evidence of parallel phenomena in other ages and literatures, we can be sure enough that this persistent consciousness of the airs to which his songs were to be sung, and this critical observation of their fitness, had much to do with the extraordinary melodiousness of so many of them.

We have seen that Burns received an important impulse to productiveness through his cooperation in the compiling of two national song collections. James Johnson, the editor of the first of these, was an all but illiterate engraver, ill-equipped for such an undertaking; and as the work grew in scale until it reached six volumes, Burns became virtually the editor—even writing the prefaces to several of the volumes. George Thomson, the editor of the other, A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, was a government clerk, an amateur in music, of indifferent taste and with a preference for English to the vernacular. In his collection the airs were harmonized by Pleyel, Kozeluch, Haydn, and Beethoven; and he had the impudence to meddle with the contributions both of Burns and of the eminent composers who arranged the melodies. Nothing is more striking than the patience and modesty of Burns in tolerating the criticism and alterations of Thomson. The main purpose in both The Scots Musical Museum and the Select Collection was the preservation of the national melodies, but when the editors came to seek words to go with them they found themselves confronted with a difficult problem. To understand its nature, it will be necessary to extend our historical survey.

In addition to the effects of the Reformation in Scotland already indicated, there was another even more serious for arts and letters. The reaction against Catholicism in Scotland was peculiarly violent, and the form of Protestantism which replaced it was extremely puritanical. In the matter of intellectual education, it is true, Knox's ideas and institutions were enlightened, and have borne important fruit in making prevail in his country an uncommonly high level of general education and a reverence for learning. But on the artistic side the reformed ministers were the enemies not only of everything that suggested the ornateness of the old religion, but of beauty in every form. Under their influence, an influence extraordinarily pervasive and despotic, art and song were suppressed, and Scotland was left a very mirthless country, absorbed in theological and political discussion, and having little outlet for the instinct of sport except heresy-hunting.

Such at least seemed to be the case on the surface. But human nature is not to be totally changed even by such a force as the Reformation. Especially among the peasantry occasions recurred—weddings, funerals, harvest-homes, New-Year's Eves, and the like—when, the minister being at a safe distance and whisky having relaxed the awe of the kirk session, the “wee sinfu' fiddle” was produced, and song and the dance broke forth. It was under such clandestine conditions that the traditional songs of Scotland had been handed down for some generations before Burns's day, and the conditions had gravely affected their character. The melodies could not be stained, but the words had degenerated until they had lost most of whatever imaginative quality they had possessed, and had acquired instead only grossness.

Such words, it was clear, Johnson could not use in his Museum, and the discovery of Burns was to him the most extraordinary good fortune. For Burns not only knew, as we have seen, the old songs—words and airs—by the score, but was able to purify, complete, or replace the words according to the degree of their corruption. Various poets have caught up scraps of folk-song and woven them into their verse; but nowhere else has a poet of the people appeared with such a rare combination of original genius and sympathetic feeling for the tone and accent of the popular muse, as enabled Burns to recreate Scottish song. If patriotic Scots wish to justify the achievement of Burns on moral grounds, it is here that their argument lies: for whatever of coarseness and license there may have been in his life and writings, it is surely more than counter-balanced by the restoration to his people of the possibility of national music and clean mirth.

One can not classify the songs of Burns into two clearly separated groups, original and remodeled, for no hard lines can be drawn. Since he practically always began with the tune, he frequently used the title or the first line of the old song. He might do this, yet completely change the idea; or he might retain the idea but use none of the old words. In other cases the first stanza or the chorus is retained; in still others the new song is sprinkled with here a phrase and there an epithet recalling the derelict that gave rise to it. Some are made up of stanzas from several different predecessors, others are almost centos of stock phrases.

The contribution thus made to Johnson's collection, of songs rescued or remade or wholly original, amounted to some one hundred eighty-four; to Thomson's about sixty-four. Some examples will make clear the nature of his services.

Auld Lang Syne, perhaps the most wide-spread of all songs among the English-speaking peoples, is in its oldest extant form attributed on uncertain grounds to Francis Sempill of Beltrees or Sir Robert Aytoun.[2] That still older forms had existed appears from its title in the broadside in which it is preserved:

“An excellent and proper new ballad, entitled Old Long Syne. Newly corrected and amended, with a large and new edition [sic] of several excellent love lines.”

It opens thus:

And so on, for eighty lines.

Allan Ramsay rewrote it for his Tea-Table Miscellany (1724), and a specimen stanza will show that it was still going down-hill:

The remaining four stanzas are worse. Burns may have had further hints to work on which are now lost; but the best, part of the song, stanzas three and four, are certainly his, and it is unlikely that he inherited more than some form of the first verse and the chorus.

AULD LANG SYNE

A more remarkable case of patchwork is A Red, Red Rose. Antiquarian research has discovered in chap-books and similar sources four songs, from each of which a stanza, in some such form as follows, seems to have proved suggestive to Burns:

The genealogy of the lyric is still more complicated than these sources imply, but the specimens given are enough to show the nature of the ore from which Burns extracted the pure gold of his well-known song:

MY LOVE IS LIKE A RED RED ROSE

Of the songs already quoted, the germ of Ae Fond Kiss lies in the first line of Robert Dodsley's Parting Kiss,

I Hae a Wife o' My Ain, borrows with slight modification the first two lines; a model for My Nannie O has been found in an anonymous eighteenth-century fragment as well as in a song of Ramsay's, but neither contributes more than the phrase which names the tune as well as the words; The Rigs o' Barley was suggested by a verse of an old song:

Handsome Nell, Mary Morison, Will Ye Go to the Indies, The Gloomy Night, and My Nannie's Awa are entirely original; and a comparison of their poetical quality with those having their model or starting point in an older song will show that, however brilliantly Burns acquitted himself in his task of refurbishing traditional material, he was in no way dependent upon such material for inspiration.

From what has been said of the occasions of these verses, however, it is clear that inspiration from the outside was not lacking. The traditional association of wine, woman, and song certainly held for Burns, nearly all his lyrics being the outcome of his devotion to at least two of these, some of them, like the following, to all three.

YESTREEN I HAD A PINT O' WINE

Nothing could be more hopeless than to attempt to classify Burns's songs according to the amours that occasioned them, and to seek to find a constant relation between the reality and intensity of the passion and the vitality of the poetry. At times some relation does seem apparent, as we may discern beneath the vigor of the song just quoted a trace of a conscious attempt to brave his conscience in connection with the one proved infidelity to Jean after his marriage. Again, in such songs as Of a' the Airts, Poortith Cauld, and others addressed to Jean herself, we have an expression of his less than rapturous but entirely genuine affection for his wife.

OF A' THE AIRTS

O THIS IS NO MY AIN LASSIE

POORTITH CAULD

MY WIFE'S A WINSOME WEE THING

Similarly, most of the lyrics addressed to Clarinda in Edinburgh are marked by the sentimentalism and affectation of an affair that engaged only one side, and that among the least pleasing, of the many-sided temperament of the poet.

But, in general, with Burns as with other poets, it was not the catching of a first-hand emotion at white heat that resulted in the best poetry, but the stimulating of his imagination by the vision of a person or a situation that may have had but the hint of a prototype in the actual. We have already noted that the best of the Clarinda poems were written in absence, and that they drop the Arcadian names which typified the make-believe element in that complex affair. So a number of his most charming songs are addressed to girls of whom he had had but a glimpse. But that glimpse sufficed to kindle him, and for the poetry it was all advantage that it was no more.

His relations with women were extremely varied in nature. At one extreme there were friendships like that with Mrs. Dunlop, the letters to whom show that their common interests were mainly moral and intellectual, and were mingled with no emotion more fiery than gratitude. At the other extreme stand relations like that with Anne Park, the heroine of Yestreen I had a Pint o' Wine, which were purely passionate and transitory. Between these come a long procession affording excellent material for the ingenuity of those skilled in the casuistry of the sexes: the boyish flame for Handsome Nell; the slightly more mature feeling for Ellison Begbie; the various phases of his passion for Jean Armour; the perhaps partly factitious reverence for Highland Mary; the respectful adoration for Margaret Chalmers to whom he is supposed to have proposed marriage in Edinburgh; the deliberate posing in his compliments to Chloris (Jean Lorimer); the grateful gallantry to Jessie Lewars, who ministered to him on his deathbed.

In the later days in Dumfries, when his vitality was running low and he was laboring to supply Thomson with verses even when the spontaneous impulse to compose was rare, we find him theorizing on the necessity of enthroning a goddess for the nonce. Speaking of Craigieburn-wood and Jean Lorimer, he writes to his prosaic editor:

“The lady on whom it was made is one of the finest women in Scotland; and in fact (entre nous) is in a manner to me what Sterne's Eliza was to him—a Mistress, or Friend, or what you will, in the guileless simplicity of Platonic love. (Now, don't put any of your squinting constructions on this, or have any clishmaclaver about it among our acquaintances.) I assure you that to my lovely Friend you are indebted for many of your best songs of mine. Do you think that the sober gin-horse routine of existence could inspire a man with life, and love, and joy—could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos equal to the genius of your Book? No, no!!! Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song; to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs, do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation? Tout au contraire! I have a glorious recipe; the very one that for his own use was invented by the Divinity of Healing and Poesy when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile the divinity of Helicon!”

Burns is here, of course, on his rhetorical high horse, and the songs to Chloris hardly bear him out; but there is much in the passage to enlighten us as to his composing processes. In his younger days his hot blood welcomed every occasion of emotional experience; toward the end, he sought such occasions for the sake of the patriotic task that lightened with its idealism the gathering gloom of his breakdown. But throughout, and this is the important point to note in relating his poetry to his life, his one mode of complimentary address to a woman was in terms of gallantry.

The following group of love songs illustrate the various phases of his temperament which we have been discussing. The first two are to Mary Campbell, and exhibit Burns in his most reverential attitude toward women:

HIGHLAND MARY

TO MARY IN HEAVEN

The group that follow are addressed either to unknown divinities or to girls who inspired only a passing devotion. In the case of Bonnie Lesley, there was no question of a love-affair: the song is merely a compliment to a young lady he met and admired. Auld Rob Morris is probably purely dramatic.

CA' THE YOWES
(Second Version)

AFTON WATER

THE BLUE-EYED LASSIE

BONNIE LESLEY

LASSIE WI' THE LINT-WHITE LOCKS

MONTGOMERIE'S PEGGY

THE LEA-RIG

AULD ROB MORRIS

O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, besides being one of the most exquisite of his songs, has a pathetic interest from the circumstances under which it was composed. During the last few months of his life, a young girl called Jessie Lewars, sister of one of his colleagues in the excise, came much to his house and was of great service to Mrs. Burns and him in his last illness. One day he offered to write new verses to any tune she might play him. She sat down and played over several times the melody of an old song, beginning,

The following lines were the characteristic result:

O, WERT THOU IN THE CAULD BLAST

This group may well close with his great hymn of general allegiance to the sex.

GREEN GROW THE RASHES

Equally personal, but not connected with love, are a few autobiographical poems of which the following are typical. The third of these, though prosaic enough, is interesting as perhaps Burns's most elaborate summing up of the philosophy of his own career.

THERE WAS A LAD

CONTENTED WI' LITTLE

MY FATHER WAS A FARMER

The stress laid upon that part of Burns's production which has relation, near or remote, to his personal experiences with women is, in the current estimate, somewhat disproportionate. A surprisingly large number of his most effective songs are purely dramatic, are placed in the mouth of a man who is clearly not the poet, or, more frequently, in the mouth of a woman. There is little evidence that Burns would have been capable of sustained dramatic composition; on the other hand, he was far from being limited to purely personal lyric utterance. His versatility in giving expression to the amorous moods of the other sex is almost as great as in direct confession. A group of these dramatic lyrics will demonstrate this.

O FOR ANE AN' TWENTY, TAM!

YE BANKS AND BRAES
(Second Version)

(Third Version)

SIMMER'S A PLEASANT TIME

WHISTLE, AND I'LL COME TO YE, MY LAD

TAM GLEN

THE RANTIN' DOG THE DADDIE O'T

LAST MAY A BRAW WOOER

FOR THE SAKE O' SOMEBODY

OPEN THE DOOR TO ME, O!

WANDERING WILLIE

HOW LANG AND DREARY

THE BONNIE LAD THAT'S FAR AWA

BRAW BRAW LADS

MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS

The foregoing are all placed in the mouths of girls, and it is difficult to deny that they ring as true as the songs that are known to have sprung from the poet's direct experience. Scarcely less notable than their sincerity is their variety. Pathos of desertion, gay defiance of opposition, yearning in absence, confession of coquetry, joyous confession of affection returned—these are only a few of the phases of woman's love rendered here with a felicity that leaves nothing to be desired. What woman has so interpreted the feelings of her sex?

The next two express a girl's repugnance at the thought of marriage with an old man; and the two following form a pair treating the same theme, one from the girl's point of view, the other from the lover's. The later verses of My Love She's but a Lassie Yet, however, though full of vivacity, have so little to do with the first or with one another that the song seems to be a collection of scraps held together by a common melody.

WHAT CAN A YOUNG LASSIE

TO DAUNTON ME

I'M OWRE YOUNG TO MARRY YET

MY LOVE SHE'S BUT A LASSIE YET

Bessy and Her Spinnin'-Wheel stands by itself as the rendering of the mood of contented solitude, and is further remarkable for its charming verses of natural description. John Anderson My Jo is the classical expression of love in age, inimitable in its simplicity and tenderness. The two following poems supply a humorous contrast.

BESSY AND HER SPINNIN'-WHEEL

JOHN ANDERSON, MY JO

THE WEARY PUND O' TOW

O MERRY HAE I BEEN

Had I the Wyte is, we may hope, also purely imaginative drama; it is certainly vividly imagined and carried through with a delightful mixture of sympathy and humorous detachment.

HAD I THE WYTE?

Macpherson's Farewell, made famous by Carlyle's appreciation, is a glorified version of the “Dying Words” of a condemned bandit, such as were familiar in broadsides after every notorious execution. Part of the refrain is old. One may imagine The Highland Balou the lullaby of Macpherson's child.

MACPHERSON'S FAREWELL

THE HIGHLAND BALOU

Distinct from either of the foregoing groups are several songs in narrative form, told as a rule from the point of view of an onlooker, but hardly inferior to the others in vitality. In them the personal or dramatic emotion is replaced by a keen sense of the humor of the situation.

DUNCAN GRAY

DUNCAN DAVISON

THE DE'IL'S AWA WI' TH' EXCISEMAN

COMIN' THROUGH THE RYE

THE DEUK'S DANG O'ER MY DADDIE

WHA IS THAT AT MY BOWER DOOR?

WILLIE'S WIFE

The songs written by Burns in connection with politics are often lively and pointed, but they have little imagination, and the passing of the issues they dealt with has deprived them of general interest. Two classes of exceptions may be noted. He was, as we have seen, sympathetically interested in the French Revolution, and the fundamental doctrine of Liberty, Fraternity, Equality was cast by him into a poem which, he himself said, is “not really poetry,” but is admirably vigorous rhetoric in verse, and has become the classic utterance of the democratic faith.

A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT

Another, equally famous, sprang from his patriotic enthusiasm for the heroes of the Scottish war of independence, but was written with more than a slight consciousness of what seemed to him the similarity of the spirit then abroad in France.

SCOTS, WHA HAE

ROBERT BRUCE'S ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY, BEFORE THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN

The other class of exceptions is the group of songs on Jacobite themes. The rebellion led by Prince Charles Edward in 1745 had produced a considerable quantity of campaign verse, almost all without poetic value; but after the turmoil had died down and the Stuart cause was regarded as finally lost, there appeared in Scotland a peculiar sentimental tenderness for the picturesque and unfortunate family that had sunk from the splendors of a throne that had been theirs for centuries into the sordid misery of royal pauperism. Burns, whose ancestors had been “out” in the '45, shared this sentiment, as Walter Scott later shared it, both realizing that it had nothing to do with practical politics. Out of this feeling there grew a considerable body of poetry, a poetry full of idealism, touched with melancholy, and atoning for its lack of reality by a richness of imaginative emotion. Burns led the way in this unique movement, and was worthily followed by such writers as Lady Nairne, James Hogg, and Sir Walter himself. He followed his usual custom of availing himself of fragments of the older lyrics, but as usual he polished the pebbles into jewels and set them in gold. Here are a few specimens of this poetry of a lost cause.

IT WAS A' FOR OUR RIGHTFU' KING

COME BOAT ME O'ER TO CHARLIE

THE HIGHLAND LADDIE

BANNOCKS O' BARLEY

KENMURE'S ON AND AWA

THERE'LL NEVER BE PEACE TILL JAMIE COMES HAME

I HAE BEEN AT CROOKIEDEN

CHARLIE HE'S MY DARLING

Such in nature and origin are the songs of Burns. Of some three hundred written or rewritten by him, a large number are negligible in estimating his poetical capacity. One cause lay in his unfortunate ambition to write in the style of his eighteenth-century predecessors in English, with the accompanying mythological allusions, personifications, and scraps of artificial diction. Another was his pathetic eagerness to supply Thomson with material in his undertaking to preserve the old melodies—an eagerness which often led him to send in verses of which he himself felt that their only defense was that they were better than none. Thus his collected works are burdened with a considerable mass of very indifferent stuff. But when this has all been removed, we have left a body of song such as probably no writer in any language has bequeathed to his country. It is marked, first of all, by its peculiar harmony of expression with the utterance of the common people. Direct and simple, its diction was still capable of carrying intense feeling, a humor incomparable in its archness and sly mirth, and a power of idealizing ordinary experience without effort or affectation. The union of these words with the traditional melodies, on which we have so strongly insisted, gave them a superb singing quality, which has had as much to do with their popularity as their thought or their feeling. This union, however, has its drawbacks when we come to consider the songs as literature; for to present them as here in bare print without the living tune is to perpetuate a divorce which their author never contemplated. No editor of Burns can fail to feel a pang when he thinks that these words may be heard by ears that carry no echo of the airs to which they were born. Here lies the fundamental reason for what seems to outsiders the exaggerated estimate of Burns in the judgment of his countrymen. What they extol is not mere literature, but song, the combination of poetry and music; and it is only when Burns is judged as an artist in this double sense that he is judged fairly.

CHAPTER IV

SATIRES AND EPISTLES

Fame first came to Burns through his satires. Before he had been recognized by the Edinburgh litterateurs, before he had written more than a handful of songs, he was known and feared on his own countryside as a formidable critic of ecclesiastical tyranny. It was this reputation that made possible the success of the subscription to the Kilmarnock volume, and so saved Burns to Scotland.

Two characteristics of the Kirk of Scotland had tended to prepare the people to welcome an attack on its authority: the severity with which the clergy administered discipline, and the extremes to which they had pushed their Calvinism.

In spite of the existence of dissenting bodies, the great mass of the population belonged to the established church, and both their spiritual privileges and their social standing were at the mercy of the Kirk session and the presiding minister. It is difficult for a Protestant community to-day to realize the extent to which the conduct of the individual and the family were controlled by the ecclesiastical authorities. Offenses which now would at most be the subject of private remonstrance were treated as public crimes and expiated in church before the whole parish. Gavin Hamilton, Burns's friend and landlord at Mossgiel, a liberal gentleman of means and standing, was prosecuted in the church courts for lax attendance at divine service, for traveling on Sabbath, for neglecting family worship, and for having had one of his servants dig new potatoes on the Lord's day. Burns's irregular relations with Jean Armour led to successive appearances by both him and Jean before the congregation, to receive open rebuke and to profess repentance. Further expiation was demanded in the form of a contribution for the poor.

Against the discipline which he himself had to suffer Burns seems to have made no protest, and probably thought it just enough; but what he considered the persecution of his friend roused his indignation. This was all the fiercer as he regarded some of the members of the session as hypocrites, whose own private morals would not stand examination. Chief among these was a certain William Fisher, immortalized in a satire the application of which was meant to extend to the whole class which he represented.

HOLY WILLIE'S PRAYER

Still more highly generalized is his Address to the Unco Guid, a plea for charity in judgment, kept from sentimentalism by its gleam of humor. It has perhaps the widest appeal of any of his poems of this class. One may note that as Burns passes from the satirical and humorous tone to the directly didactic, the dialect disappears, and the last two stanzas are practically pure English.

ADDRESS TO THE UNCO GUID, OR THE RIGIDLY RIGHTEOUS

As regards the questions of doctrine there were in the church two main parties, known as the Auld Lichts and the New Lichts. The former were high Calvinists, emphasizing the doctrines of election, predestination, original sin, and eternal punishment. The latter comprised many of the younger clergy who had been touched by the rationalistic tendencies of the century, and who were blamed for various heresies—notably Arminianism and Socinianism. Whatever their precise beliefs, they laid less stress than their opponents on dogma and more on benevolent conduct, and Burns had strong sympathy with their liberalism. He first appeared in their support in an Epistle to John Goldie, a Kilmarnock wine-merchant who had published Essays on Various Important Subjects, Moral and Divine. Though he does not explicitly accept the author's Arminianism, he makes it clear that he relished his attacks on orthodoxy. A quarrel between two prominent Auld Licht ministers gave him his next opportunity, and the circulation in manuscript of The Twa Herds: or, The Holy Tulyie made him a personage in the district. With an irony more vigorous than delicate he affects to lament that

and he ends with the hope that if patronage could be abolished and the lairds forced to give

More light is thrown on Burns's positive attitude in religious matters by his Epistle to McMath, a young New Licht minister in Tarbolton. From the evidences of the letters, we are justified in accepting at its face value the profession of reverence for true religion made by Burns in this epistle; his hatred of the sham needs no corroboration.

TO THE REV. JOHN M'MATH

Enclosing a Copy of Holy Willie's Prayer, which he had requested, September 17, 1785

A further fling at orthodoxy appeared in The Ordination, a piece written to comfort the Kilmarnock liberals when an Auld Licht minister was selected for the second charge there. The tone is again one of ironical congratulation, and Burns describes the rejoicings of the elect with infinite zest. Two stanzas on the church music will illustrate his method.

In the same ironical fashion he digresses in his Dedication to Gavin Hamilton to satirize the “high-fliers'” contempt for “cold morality” and for their faith in the power of orthodox belief to cover lapses in conduct.

The period within which these satires were written was short—1785 and 1786; but some three years later, on the prosecution of a liberal minister, Doctor McGill of Ayr, for the publication of A Practical Essay on the Death of Jesus Christ, which was charged with teaching Unitarianism, Burns took up the theme again. The Kirk's Alarm is a rattling “ballad,” full of energy and scurrilous wit, but, like many of its kind, it has lost much of its interest through the great amount of personal detail. A few stanzas will show that, even after his absence from local politics during his Edinburgh sojourn, he had lost none of his gusto in belaboring the Ayrshire Calvinists.

It was inevitable from the nature and purpose of these satirical poems that, however keen an interest they might raise in their time and place, a large part of that interest should evaporate in the course of time. Yet it would be a mistake to regard their importance as limited to raising a laugh against a few obscure bigots. The evils that Burns attacked, however his verses may be tinged with personal animus and occasional injustice, were real evils that existed far beyond the county of Ayr; and in the movement for enlightenment and liberation from these evils and their like that was then sweeping over Scotland, the wit and invective of the poet played no small part. The development that followed did, indeed, take a direction that he was far from foreseeing. The moderate party, which he supported, gradually gained the upper hand in the Kirk, and, upholding as it did the system of patronage, became more and more associated with the aristocracy who bestowed the livings. The result was that the moderate clergy degenerated under prosperity and lost their spiritual zeal; while their opponents, chastened by adversity, became the champions of the autonomy of the church, and, in the “ten years' conflict” that broke out little more than a generation after the death of Burns, showed themselves of the stuff of the martyrs. It would be impossible to trace the extent of the influence of the poet on the purging of orthodoxy or on the limitation of ecclesiastical despotism, since his work was in accord with the drift of the times; but it is fair to infer that, especially among the common people who were less likely to be reached by more philosophical discussion, his share was far from inconsiderable.

The poetical value of the satires is another matter. It may be questioned whether satire is ever essentially poetry, as poetry has been understood for the last hundred years. The dominant mood of satire is too antagonistic to imagination. But if we restrict our attention to the characteristic qualities of verse satire—vividness in depicting its object, blazing indignation or bitter scorn in its attitude, and wit in its expression, we shall be forced to grant that Burns achieved here notable success. Of the rarer power of satire to rise above the local, temporal, and personal to the exhibiting of universal elements in human life, there are comparatively few instances in Burns. The Address to the Unco Guid is perhaps the finest example; and here, as usually in his work, the approach to the general leads him to drop the scourge for the sermon.

In his tendency to preach, Burns was as much the inheritor of a national tradition as in any of his other characteristics. A strain of moralizing is well marked in the Scottish poets even before the Reformation, and, since the time of Burns, the preaching Scot has been notably exemplified not only in a professed prophet like Carlyle, but in so artistic a temperament as Stevenson. Nor did consciousness of his failures in practise embarrass Burns in the indulgence of the luxury of precept. Side by side with frank confessions of weakness we find earnest if not stern exhortations to do, not as he did, but as he taught. And as Scots have an appetite for hearing as well as for making sermons, his didactic pieces are among those most quoted and relished by his countrymen. The morally elevated but poetically inferior closing stanzas of The Cotter's Saturday Night are an instance in point; others are the morals appended to To a Mouse and To a Daisy, and to a number of his rhyming epistles.

These epistles are among the most significant of his writings for the reader in search of personal revelations. The Epistle to James Smith contains the much-quoted stanza on the poet's motives:

Another gives his view of his equipment:

Then he passes from literary considerations to his general philosophy of life:

Here, as often, he contrasts his own reckless impulsive temper with that of prudent calculation:

Nothing is more characteristic of the poet than this attitude toward prudence—this mixture of Intellectual respect with emotional contempt. He admits freely that restraint and calculation pay, but impulse makes life so much more interesting!

The Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet, deserves to be quoted in full. It contains the final phrasing of the central point of Burns's ethics, the Scottish rustic's version of that philosophy of benevolence with which Shaftesbury sought to warm the chill of eighteenth-century thought:

The mood of this poem is Burns's middle mood, lying between the black melancholy of his poems of despair and remorse and the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable “tenebrific scene.” His humor returns with his Scots in the last verse.

EPISTLE TO DAVIE, A BROTHER POET

The didactic tendency reaches its height in the Epistle to a Young Friend. Here there is no personal confession, but a conscious and professed sermon, unrelated, as the last line shows, to the practise of the preacher. It is, of course, only poetry in the eighteenth-century sense—

and as such it should be judged. The critics who have reacted most violently against the attempted canonization of Burns have been inclined to sneer at this admirable homily, and to insinuate insincerity. But human nature affords every-day examples of just such perfectly sincere inconsistency as we find between the sixth stanza and Burns's own conduct; while not inconsistency but a very genuine rhetoric inspires the characteristic quatrain which closes the seventh.

EPISTLE TO A YOUNG FRIEND

The general level of the rhyming letters of Burns is astonishingly high. They bear, as such compositions should, the impression of free spontaneity, and indeed often read like sheer improvisations. Yet they are sprinkled with admirable stanzas of natural description, shrewd criticism, delightful humor, and are pervaded by a delicate tactfulness possible only to a man with a genius for friendship. They are usually written in the favorite six-line stanza, the meter that flowed most easily from his pen, and in language are the richest vernacular. His ambition to be “literary” seldom brings in its jarring notes here, and indeed at times he seems to avenge himself on this besetting sin by a very individual jocoseness toward the mythological figures that intrude into his more serious efforts. His Muse is the special victim. Instead of the conventional draped figure she becomes a “tapetless, ramfeezl'd hizzie,” “saft at best an' something lazy;” she is a “thowless jad;” or she is dethroned altogether:

Again the tone is one of affectionate familiarity:

Once more, half scolding, half flattering:

The epigrams, epitaphs, elegies, and other occasional verses thrown off by Burns and diligently collected by his editors need little discussion. They not infrequently exhibit the less generous sides of his character, and but seldom demand rereading on account of their neatness or felicity or energy. One may be given as an example:

ON JOHN DOVE, INNKEEPER

CHAPTER V

DESCRIPTIVE AND NARRATIVE POETRY

The “world of Scotch drink, Scotch manners, and Scotch religion” was not, Matthew Arnold insisted, a beautiful world, and it was, he held, a disadvantage to Burns that he had not a beautiful world to deal with. This famous dictum is a standing challenge to any critic who regards Burns as a creator of beauty. It is true that when Burns took this world at its apparent worst, when Scotch drink meant bestial drunkenness, when Scotch manners meant shameless indecency, when Scotch religion meant blasphemous defiance, he created The Jolly Beggars, which the same critic found a “splendid and puissant production.” We must conclude, then, that sufficient genius can sublimate even a hideously sordid world into a superb work of art, which is presumably beautiful.

But the verdict passed on the Scottish world of Burns is not to be taken without scrutiny. A review of those poems of Burns that are primarily descriptive will recall to us the chief features of that world.

Let us begin with The Cotter's Saturday Night, Burns's tribute to his father's house. Let us discard the introductory stanza of dedication, as not organically a part of the poem. The scene is set in a gray November landscape. The tired laborer is shown returning to his cottage, no touch of idealization being added to the picture of physical weariness save what comes from the feeling for home and wife and children. Then follow the gathering of the older sons and daughter, the telling of the experiences of the week, and the advice of the father. The daughter's suitor arrives, and the girl's consciousness as well as the lover's shyness are delicately rendered. Two stanzas in English moralize the situation, and for our present purpose may be ignored. The supper of porridge and milk and a bit of cheese is followed by a reverent account of family prayers, the father leading, the family joining in the singing of the psalm. And as they part for the night, the poet is carried away into an elevated apostrophe to the country whose foundations rest upon such a peasantry, and closes with a patriotic prayer for its preservation.

The truth of the picture is indubitable. The poet could, of course, have chosen another phase of the same life. The cotter could have come home rheumatic and found the children squalling and the wife cross. The daughter might have been seduced, and the sons absent in the ale-house. But what he does describe is just as typical, and it is beautiful, though the manners and religion are Scottish.

Another social occasion is the subject of Halloween. The poem, with Burns's notes, is a mine of folk-lore, but we are concerned with it as literature. Here the tone is humorous instead of reverent, the characters are mixed, the selection is more widely representative. With complete frankness, the poet exhibits human nature under the influence of the mating instinct, directed by harmless, age-old superstitions. The superstitions are not attacked, but gently ridiculed. The fundamental veracity of the whole is seen when we realize that, in spite of the strong local color, it is psychologically true for similar festivities among the peasantry of all countries.

HALLOWEEN[4]

FOOT-NOTES TO HALLOWEEN

[The foot-notes to this poem are those supplied by Burns himself in the Kilmarnock edition.]

In The Twa Dogs we have an entirely different method. Burns here gives expression to his social philosophy in a contrast between rich and poor, and adds a quaint humor to his criticism by placing it in the mouths of the laird's Newfoundland and the cotter's collie. The dogs themselves are delightfully and vividly characterized, and their comments have a detachment that frees the satire from acerbity without rendering it tame. The account of the life of the idle rich may be that of a somewhat remote observer; it has still value as a record of how the peasant views the proprietor. But that of the hard-working farmer lacks no touch of actuality, and is part of the reverse side of the shield shown in The Cotter's Saturday Night. Yet the tone is not querulous, but echoes rather the quiet conviction that if toil is hard it has its own sweetness, and that honest fatigue is better than boredom.

THE TWA DOGS

The satirical tendency becomes more evident in The Holy Fair. The personifications whom the poet meets on the way to the religious orgy are Superstition, Hypocrisy, and Fun, and symbolize exactly the elements in his treatment—two-thirds satire and one-third humorous sympathy. The handling of the preachers is in the manner we have already observed in the other ecclesiastical satires, but there is less animus and more vividness. Nothing could be more admirable in its way than the realism of the picture of the congregation, whether at the sermons or at their refreshments; and, as in Halloween, the union of the particular and the universal appears in the essential applicability of the psychology to an American camp-meeting as well as to a Scottish sacrament—

—not to finish the stanza!

THE HOLY FAIR

It must be admitted that, as we pass from poem to poem, Scottish manners are becoming freer, Scottish drink is more potent, Scottish religion is no longer pure and undefiled. Yet the poet hardly seems to be at a disadvantage. He certainly is no less interesting; he impresses our imaginations and rouses our sympathetic understanding as keenly as ever; there is no abatement of our esthetic relish.

We have seen the Ayrshire peasant alone with his family, at social gatherings, and at church. We have to see him with his cronies and at the tavern. Scotch manners and Scotch religion we know now; it is the turn of Scotch drink. The spirit of that conviviality which was one of Burns's ruling passions, and which in his class helped to color the grayness of daily hardship, was rendered by him in verse again and again: never more triumphantly than in the greatest of his bacchanalian songs, Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut. Indeed it would be hard to find anywhere in our literature a more revealing utterance of those effects of alcohol that are not discussed in scientific literature—the joyous exhilaration, the conviction of (comparative) sobriety, the temporary intensification of the feeling of good fellowship. The challenge to the moon is unsurpassable in its unconscious humor. Yet Arnold thought the world of Scotch drink unbeautiful.

WILLIE BREW'D A PECK O' MAUT

With greater daring and on a broader canvas Burns has dealt with the same subject in The Jolly Beggars. For the literary treatment of the theme he had hints from Ramsay, in whose Merry Beggars and Happy Beggars groups of half a dozen male and female characters proclaim their views and join in a chorus in praise of drink. More direct suggestion for the setting of his “cantata” came from a night visit made by the poet and two of his friends to the low alehouse kept by Nancy Gibson (“Poosie Nansie”) in Mauchline. The poem was written in 1785, but Burns never published it and seems almost to have forgotten its existence.

It is impossible to exaggerate the unpromising nature of the theme. The place is a den of corruption, the characters are the dregs of society. A group of tramps and criminals have gathered at the end of their day's wanderings to drink the very rags from their backs and wallow in shameless incontinence. An old soldier and a quondam “daughter of the regiment,” a mountebank and his tinker sweetheart, a female pickpocket whose Highland bandit lover has been hanged, a fiddler at fairs who aspires to comfort her but is outdone by a tinker, a lame ballad-singer and his three wives, one of whom consoles the fiddler in the face of her husband—such is the choice company. The action is mere by-play, drunken love making; the main point is the songs. They are mostly frank autobiography, all pervaded with the gaiety that comes from the conviction that being at the bottom, they need not be anxious about falling. Wine, women, and song are their enthusiasms, and only the song is above the lowest possible level.

Such is the sordid material out of which Burns wrought his greatest imaginative triumph. To take the reader into such a haunt and have him pass the evening in such company, not with disgust and nausea but with relish and joy, is an achievement that stands beside the creation of the scenes in the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. It is accomplished by virtue of the intensity of the poet's imaginative sympathy with human nature even in its most degraded forms, and by his power of finding utterance for the moods of the characters he conceives. The dramatic power which we have noted in a certain group of the songs here reaches its height, and in making the reader respond to it he avails himself of all his literary faculties. Pungent phrasing, a sense of the squalid picturesque, a humorous appreciation of human weakness, and a superb command of rollicking rhythms—these elements of his equipment are particularly notable. But the whole thing is fused and unified by a wonderful vitality that makes the reading of it an actual experience. And, though several of the songs are in English, there is no moralizing, no alien note of any kind to jar the perfection of its harmony. Scottish literature had seen nothing like it since Dunbar made the Seven Deadly Sins dance in hell.

THE JOLLY BEGGARS

A Cantata

The materials for rebuilding Burns's world are not confined to his explicitly descriptive poems. Much can be gathered from the songs and satires, and there are important contributions in his too scanty essays in narrative. Of these last by far the most valuable is Tam o' Shanter. The poem originated accidentally in the request of a certain Captain Grose for local legends to enrich a descriptive work which he was compiling. In Burns's correspondence will be found a prose account of the tradition on which the poem is founded, and he is supposed to have derived hints for the relations of Tam and his spouse from a couple he knew at Kirkoswald.

It was a happy inspiration that led him to turn the story into verse, for it revealed a capacity which otherwise we could hardly have guessed him to possess. The vigor and rapidity of the action, the vivid sketching of the background, the pregnant characterization, the drollery of the humor give this piece a high place among stories in verse, and lead us to conjecture that, had he followed this vein instead of devoting his later years to the service of Johnson and Thomson, he might have won a place beside the author of the Canterbury Tales. He lacked, to be sure, Chaucer's breadth of experience and richness of culture: being far less a man of the world he would never have attained the air of breeding that distinguishes the English poet: but with most of the essential qualities that charm us in Chaucer's stories he was well equipped. He had the observant eye, the power of selection, command of the telling phrase and happy epithet, the sense of the comic and the pathetic. Beyond Chaucer he had passion and the power of rendering it, so that he might have reached greater tragic depth, as he surpassed him in lyric intensity.

As it is, however, Chaucer stands alone as a story-teller, for Tam o' Shanter is with Burns an isolated achievement. There are three distinct elements in the work—narrative, descriptive, and reflective. The first can hardly be overpraised. We are made to feel the reluctance of the hero to abandon the genial inn fireside, with its warmth and uncritical companionship, for the bitter ride with a sulky sullen dame at the end of it; the rage of the thunderstorm, as with lowered head and fast-held bonnet the horseman plunges through it; the growing sense of terror as, past scene after scene of ancient horror, he approaches the ill-famed ruin. Then suddenly the mood changes. Emboldened by his potations, Tam faces the astounding infernal revelry with unabashed curiosity, which rises and rises till, in a pitch of enthusiastic admiration for Cutty-Sark, he loses all discretion and brings the “hellish legion” after him pell-mell. We reach the serio-comic catastrophe breathless but exhilarated.

The descriptive background of this galloping adventure is skilfully indicated. Each scene—the ale-house, the storm, the lighted church, the witches' dance—is sketched in a dozen lines, every stroke distinct and telling. Even the three lines indicating what waits the hero at home is an adequate picture. Though incidental, these vignettes add substantially to what the descriptive poems have told us of the environment, real and imaginative, in which the poet had been reared.

The value of the reflective element is more mixed. The most quoted passage, that beginning

can only be regretted. With its literacy similes, its English, its artificial diction, it is a patch of cheap silk upon honest homespun. But the other pieces of interspersed comment are all admirable. The ironic apostrophes—to Tam for neglecting his wife's warnings; to shrewish wives, consoling them for their husband's deafness to advice; to John Barleycorn, on the transient courage he inspires; to Tam again, when tragedy seems imminent—are all in perfect tone, and do much to add the element of drollery that mixes so delightfully with the weirdness of the scene. And like the other elements in the poem they are commendably short, for Burns nearly always fulfills Bagehot's requirement that poetry should be “memorable and emphatic, intense, and soon over.”

TAM O' SHANTER

A Tale

Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke.

Garvin Douglas.

Description in Burns is not confined to man and society: he has much to say of nature, animate and inanimate.

Though within a few miles of the ocean, the scenery among which the poet grew up was inland scenery. He lived more than once by the sea for short periods, yet it appears but little in his verse, and then usually as the great severing element.

is the characteristic line. Scottish poetry had no tradition of the sea. To England the sea had been the great boundary and defense against the continental powers, and her naval achievements had long produced a patriotic sentiment with regard to it which is reflected in her literature. But Scotland's frontier had been the line of the Cheviots and the Tweed, and save for a brief space under James IV she had never been a sea-power. Thus the cruelty and danger of the sea are almost the only phases prominent in her poetry, and Burns here once more follows tradition.

Again, the scenery of Ayrshire was Lowland scenery, with pastoral hills and valleys. On his Highland tours Burns saw and admired mountains, but they too appear little in his verse. Though not an unimportant figure in the development of natural description in literature, he had not reached the modern deliberateness in the seeking out of nature's beauties for worship or imitation, so that the phases of natural beauty which we find in his poetry are merely those which had unconsciously become fixed in a memory naturally retentive of visual images.

Not only do his natural descriptions deal with the aspects familiar to him in his ordinary surroundings, but they are for the most part treated in relation to life. The thunderstorm in Tam o' Shanter is a characteristic example. It is detailed and vivid and is for the moment the center of interest; but it is introduced solely on Tam's account. Oftener the wilder moods of the weather are used as settings for lyric emotion. In Winter, a Dirge, the harmony of the poet's spirit with the tempest is the whole theme, and in My Nannie's Awa the same idea is treated with more mature art:

Many poems are introduced with a note of the season, even when it has no marked relation to the tone of the poem. The Cotter's Saturday Night opens with

The Jolly Beggars with

The Epistle to Davie with

though in this last case it is skilfully used to introduce the theme. These introductions are probably less imitations of the traditional opening landscape which had been a convention since the early Middle Ages, than the natural result of a plowman's daily consciousness of the weather.

For whether related organically to his subject or not, Burns's descriptions of external nature are to a high degree marked by actual experience and observation. Even remembering Thomson in the previous generation and Cowper and Crabbe in his own, we may safely say that English poetry had hardly seen such realism. Its quality will be conceived from a few passages. Take the well-known description of the flood from The Brigs of Ayr.

Any reader familiar with Gavin Douglas's description of a Scottish winter in his Prologue to the twelfth book of the Æneid will be struck by the resemblance to this passage both in subject and manner. It is doubtful whether Burns knew more of Douglas than the motto to Tam o' Shanter, but from the days of the turbulent bishop in the early sixteenth century down to Burns's own time Scottish poetry had never lost touch with nature, and had rendered it with peculiar faithfulness. It is interesting to note that while The Brigs of Ayr is Burns's most successful attempt at the heroic couplet, and though it contains verses that must have encouraged his ambition to be a Scottish Pope, yet it is sprinkled with touches of natural observation quite remote from the manner of that master. Compare, on the one hand, such couplets as these: