Chapter 2

To write with authority about another man we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass
a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
Principal Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect--that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the
critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not
an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of "Holy
Willie's Prayer," Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved
most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was
ever written." To the "Jolly Beggars," so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say
painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the "Cottar's
Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The
"Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_--a burly figure in literature, as, from
our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the
other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary
clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt
and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protege_, and solacing
himself with the explanation that the poet was "the most inconsistent of
men." If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we
can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
neither "Holy Willie," nor the "Beggars," nor the "Ordination," nothing
is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galere?" And every merit we find in the book,
which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so
greatly thrown away.

It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of
Burns that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life
that demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man's nature, for all
its richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle
made an inimitable bust of the poet's head of gold; may I not be
forgiven if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were
of clay?

YOUTH

Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes,
after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill,
backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On
his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation; he
would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
own influence. For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
supplement this last--the trait is laughably Scottish--by a dialogue of
his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was
exactly represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield
herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or
to sit by her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family
tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
theology--everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up
a popular Scottish type. If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it
is only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old
Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader's comprehension by a popular but
unworthy instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and
wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours
who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father,
brothers, and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a
book in the other. We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that
of Gilbert need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable
letter for a young man of such slender opportunities. One anecdote marks
the taste of the family. Murdoch brought "Titus Andronicus," and, with
such dominie elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before
this rustic audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora
insults Lavinia, with one voice and "in an agony of distress" they
refused to hear it to an end. In such a father, and with such a home,
Robert had already the making of an excellent education; and what
Murdoch added, although it may not have been much in amount, was in
character the very essence of a literary training. Schools and colleges,
for one great man whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong
spirit can do well upon more scanty fare.

Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete
character--a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure,
greedy of notice; in his own phrase "panting after distinction," and in
his brother's "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were
richer or of more consequence than himself"; with all this, he was
emphatically of the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure
in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his
plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner
round his shoulders." Ten years later, when a married man, the father of
a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out
fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great
Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake.
This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter
students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter;
and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows
a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention
and remark. His father wrote the family name _Burnes_; Robert early
adopted the orthography _Burness_ from his cousin in the Mearns; and in
his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to _Burns_. It is plain that
the last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in
addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to
spelling number two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the
manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to
follow custom. Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in
conversation. To no other man's have we the same conclusive testimony
from different sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a
commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk.
Robertson the historian "scarcely ever met any man whose conversation
displayed greater vigour"; the Duchess of Gordon declared that he
"carried her off her feet"; and, when he came late to an inn, the
servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days
at least, he was determined to shine by any means. He made himself
feared in the village for his tongue. He would crush weaker men to their
faces, or even perhaps--for the statement of Sillar is not absolute--say
cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back. At the church
door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses.
These details stamp the man. He had no genteel timidities in the conduct
of his life. He loved to force his personality upon the world. He would
please himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined
his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing _Jehan_ for
_Jean_, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois
in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade.

A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in
love. _Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut._ His affections were often enough
touched, but perhaps never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of
discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the
happy isle. A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and
even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady. Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a
singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of
an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy
life without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after
every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong
temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost
the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred. The
circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the
result. For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was over and
the beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter
tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour
or two in courtship. Rule 10 of the Bachelors' Club at Tarbolton
provides that "every man proper for a member of this Society must be a
professed lover of _one or more_ of the female sex." The rich, as Burns
himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their "cannie hour at e'en." It was upon love
and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the
essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of
Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by
love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the
chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for a man
of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his
voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs
by the way. He was "constantly the victim of some fair enslaver"--at
least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often
underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background. Many--or may
we not say most?--of these affairs were entirely artificial. One, he
tells us, he began out of "a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,"
for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter. But, however they
began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and
he stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively
without a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of "battering
himself into a warm affection,"--a debilitating and futile exercise.
Once he had worked himself into the vein, "the agitations of his mind
and body" were an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as
this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature.
He sank more and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of
what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of
his seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier
vent when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first
bastard. We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up
an acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would
bear down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute
assurance--the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet another manner
did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame. If he were great
as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a
passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old
a hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even
string a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch
the hesitating fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only his
"curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity" that recommended him for a
second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the
assistance and advice of "Rab the Ranter"; and one who was in no way
formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the
fame of his associate.

I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough
moorland country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year,
looked upon with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best
talker, the best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the
laureate poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish. He
says he had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can
well believe it. Among the youth he walked _facile princeps_, an
apparent god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld
should swoop upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company
with seven others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the
stool of repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal
apotheosis in so conspicuous a shame? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more
idolised than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman
most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn? Or, to take a simile from
nearer home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even
corporal punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly
schoolmaster, against the influence and fame of the school's hero?

And now we come to the culminating point of Burns's early period. He
began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread
from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the
ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part
from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our
poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent
skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition
party,--a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit
enough to appreciate the value of the poet's help, and not sufficient
taste to moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their
surprise when "Holy Willie" was put into their hand; like the amorous
lads of Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds. His
satires began to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the
lawyers, "read him into fame"; he himself was soon welcome in many
houses of a better sort, where his admirable talk, and his manners,
which he had direct from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a
country dancing school, completed what his poems had begun. We have a
sight of him at his first visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman's shoes,
coasting around the carpet as though that were sacred ground. But he
soon grew used to carpets and their owners; and he was still the
superior of all whom he encountered, and ruled the roost in
conversation. Such was the impression made, that a young clergyman,
himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused when he saw
Robert enter the church in which he was to preach. It is not surprising
that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test of some
publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six winter
months the bulk of his more important poems. Here was a young man who,
from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of a
parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural
courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in
the world's bookshops.

A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch. This
strong young ploughman, who feared no competitor with the flail,
suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall
into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past
and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion,
but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before
God in what I can only call unmanly penitence. As he had aspirations
beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and
weaknesses to match. He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a
winter tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a
book with him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this
service two copies of the "Man of Feeling." With young people in the
field at work he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert
spoke sharply to them--"O man, ye are no' for young folk," he would say,
and give the defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts of the
men whom he met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his
knowledge of himself equalled his knowledge of others. There are no
truer things said of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters.
Country Don Juan as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which
values itself on what it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness
to a hair: he took himself boldly for what he was, and, except in
moments of hypochondria, declared himself content.

THE LOVE-STORIES

On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set
danced Jean Armour, the master-mason's daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
_caret quia vote sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful
comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner--or, as I
should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at
large--that "he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as
well as his dog." Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on
Mauchline green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog;
and the dog, "scouring in long excursion," scampered with four black
paws across the linen. This brought the two into conversation; when
Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any
of the lasses to like him as well as his dog?" It is one of the
misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour forbids him to
refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like
the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns accepted the
provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl--pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
"battering himself into a warm affection"; and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's serious
issues. Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to
expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest
thoughts; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never
have chosen. As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised
that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere--that
he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in
the pressure of the hour. "Against two things," he writes, "I am as
fixed as fate--staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first,
by heaven, I will not do!--the last, by hell, I will never do!" And then
he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
tell her I will meet her, so God hold me in my hour of need." They met
accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these
heights of independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of
marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually
false positions--relations of life which are wrong in themselves, and
which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a
case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be
glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover
that we can no longer be true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he
came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious
conscience; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How
are Thy servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with her
"lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his
wife. Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves
in their farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do
country lass; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous
attachment on his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed
by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to
cover it. Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the
acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any
violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for
destruction; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the
marriage was thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a
crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now
publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace
to his connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been
busy "battering himself" back again into his affection for the girl;
and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the
heart.

He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement. Jean's marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding
nature of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the
wandering affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of
a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy.

Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life. His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment
of the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he
was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his
wife; now he had "orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard
the _Nancy_, Captain Smith"; now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:--

"The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!"

But the great Master Dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to
bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success
of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put L20 at once into the
author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh
and push his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in
these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm
for Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over
his face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterwards, when
the story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then
learned the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing
we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and
left her with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."

Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter
was "agog with the ploughman poet." Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
"Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were of his acquaintance. Such
a revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must
be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the
furrow, wielding "the thresher's weary flingin'-tree"; and his
education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scots
countryman. Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.
We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat
and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday
best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his
face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of
thought, and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke. "I
never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, "though
I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether
they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified,
and free from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the
social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not
embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he
could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he
dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he,
"remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine
that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand,
surprised him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; he
was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan; and he, who had
been so much at his ease with country lasses, treated the town dames to
an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers
a speaking sketch of his demeanour. "His manners were not
prepossessing--scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if
he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he said the music
was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These
would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy
the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had always "a
turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention
particularly."

The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well
to Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a
peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice,
helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the
elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few
letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he
never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise
similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an
admirable appearance on the stage of life--socially successful,
intimately self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.

In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we
return to Burns's love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had
seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the
"battering" so far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal
two days with this anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of
this affair may be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its
occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "because she loves me";
or, in the tongue of prose: "Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate
to profit by it; and even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to
profit by it again." A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.
Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him regretting
Jean in his correspondence. "Because"--such is his reason--"because he
does not think he will ever meet so delicious an armful again"; and
then, after a brief excursion into verse, he goes straight on to
describe a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a
Lothian farmer for a heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these
references to his future wife; they are essential to the comprehension
of Burns's character and fate. In June we find him back at Mauchline, a
famous man. There, the Armour family greeted him with a "mean, servile
compliance," which increased his former disgust. Jean was not less
compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of
the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted
little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took advantage of her
weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, and with a
heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this by a letter written some
twenty days after his return--a letter to my mind among the most
degrading in the whole collection--a letter which seems to have been
inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I
have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former
happiness--the eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart
no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no paradisiacal evening
interviews." Even the process of "battering" has failed him, you
perceive. Still he had some one in his eye--a lady, if you please, with
a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen the politest
quarters in Europe." "I frequently visited her," he writes, "and after
passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal
bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless
way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her
return to ----, I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my
remarks farther than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I
had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. But I am
an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
foot, like Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal longing, after this
transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little
question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six months after
the date of this letter, Burns, back to Edinburgh, is served with a writ
_in meditatione fugae_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.

About the beginning of December (1787) a new period opens in the story
of the poet's random affections. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
M'Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could
use her pen, and had read "Werther" with attention. Sociable, and even
somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers
refer to daintily as "her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging
from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the
reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in
all, I believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a
fancy for each other on the spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited
him to tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
_tete-a-tete_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It was
begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth
exchange, when Clarinda writes: "It is really curious so much _fun_
passing between two persons who saw each other only _once_"; but it is
hardly safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write
almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms
too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The
exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of
this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps
not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous
sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
"Oh, Clarinda", writes Burns, "shall we not meet in a state--some yet
unknown state--of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister
to the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?" The
design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and
charming sensibility, are the current topics. "I am delighted, charming
Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion," writes Burns; and
the pair entertained a fiction that this was their "favourite subject."
"This is Sunday," writes the lady, "and not a word on our favourite
subject. O fy! 'divine Clarinda!'" I suspect, although quite
unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the
meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda's friends
were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself had
smart attacks of conscience; but her heart had gone from her control; it
was altogether his, and she "counted all things but loss--heaven
excepted--that she might win and keep him." Burns himself was
transported while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat
rapidly declined during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that,
womanlike, he took on the colour of his mistress's feeling; that he
could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected passion; but
that, like one who should leave the hearth upon a winter's night, his
temperature soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, though he
could share the symptoms, that he had never shared the disease. At the
same time, amid the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true
expressions, and the love-verses that he wrote upon Clarinda are among
the most moving in the language.

We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
received and cared for in the house of a friend. For he remained to the
last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
south-west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late
for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: "I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which
kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale--as
the lasses do at Hallowe'en--'in to mysel'.'" Arrived at Mauchline,
Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour
to promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement. This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: "I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea.... I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any
claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she
had such a claim--which she has not, neither during my life nor after my
death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of
the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a
certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he
accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the
21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever?... How rich am I to have such a treasure as
you!... 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my
love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my
prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already
decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.

A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns,
to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and
self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but
there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a
sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a
loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
girl whom he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without
brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault;
he was, as he truly says, "damned with a choice only of different
species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept
the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead
a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource.[3]

DOWNWARD COURSE

It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. "God
knows," he writes, "my choice was as random as blind man's buff." He
consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that
she "has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him"; that she has
a good figure; that she has a "wood-note wild," "her voice rising with
ease to B natural," no less. The effect on the reader is one of
unmingled pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in
his own words) could "enter into his favourite studies or relish his
favourite authors"; this was not even a wife, after the affair of the
marriage lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her
manage a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long,
she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity
rather than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now
be forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband's heart nor affect the inherent
destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had
no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park.

Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been
idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging
on to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his
habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical
biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first he saw and
recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is "enervated to
an alarming degree," by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my mind
has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly recovered. To business
he could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty;
but he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong,
and colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is,
for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
had written the "Address to a Louse," which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.

Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
latter resource. He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony, oddly
representing the public feeling of the period, that, while "in
everything else he was a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything
seizable he was no better than any other gauger."

There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which
need delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose
from his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political
feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
Borrow has nicknamed the "Charlie over the water" Scotsmen. It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living,
practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
of human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to
rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the
same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand
with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against
the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American
Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the
English Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate
the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we
do ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of
Stuart." As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even
violent; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his
hottest excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in
life; an open road to success and distinction for all classes of men. It
was in the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in
the parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent
snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this
verse:

"Here's freedom to him that wad read,
Here's freedom to him that wad write;
There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
But them wham the truth wad indite."

Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom. Many
stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country
coteries; how he proposed Washington's health as an amendment to Pitt's,
gave as a toast "the last verse of the last chapter of Kings," and
celebrated Dumouriez in a doggerel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.
Now his sympathies would inspire him with "Scots wha hae"; now involve
him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies
and explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns's stomach. Nor was
this the front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took part in
the capture of an armed smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four
carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.
Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials; there
was trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was reminded firmly,
however delicately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey
and to be silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man
must have rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr.
Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent
phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had
been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an
exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he
looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this:
"Burns, notwithstanding the _fanfaronnade_ of independence to be found
in his works, and after having been held forth to public view and to
public estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of
resources within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled
into a paltry exciseman, and slunk out the rest of his insignificant
existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind."
And then on he goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living
indignation, to declare his right to a political opinion, and his
willingness to shed his blood for the political birthright of his sons.
Poor, perturbed spirit! he was indeed exercised in vain; those who
share and those who differ from his sentiments about the Revolution,
alike understand and sympathise with him in this painful strait; for
poetry and human manhood are lasting like the race, and politics, which
are but a wrongful striving after right, pass and change from year to
year and age to age. "The Twa Dogs" has already outlasted the
constitution of Sieyes and the policy of the Whigs; and Burns is better
known among English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox.

Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led
downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out of him: he
refused to make another volume, for he felt it would be a
disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was
sure it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he would take nothing;
they were all that he could do; the proposed Scots play, the proposed
series of Scots tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of
pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a
viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these
last and inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate abnegation
rises at times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that
he had not written, but only found and published, his immortal "Auld
Lang Syne." In the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist;
he was doing so little, he would fain do that little well; and about two
months before his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his
manuscripts for revisal, saying that he would rather write five songs to
his taste than twice that number otherwise. The battle of his life was
lost; in forlorn efforts to do well, in desperate submissions to evil,
the last years flew by. His temper is dark and explosive, launching
epigrams, quarrelling with his friends, jealous of young puppy officers.
He tries to be a good father; he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad,
and jaded, he can refuse no occasion of temporary pleasure, no
opportunity to shine; and he who had once refused the invitations of
lords and ladies is now whistled to the inn by any curious stranger. His
death (July 21, 1796), in his thirty-seventh year, was indeed a kindly
dispensation. It is the fashion to say he died of drink; many a man has
drunk more and yet lived with reputation, and reached a good age. That
drink and debauchery helped to destroy his constitution, and were the
means of his unconscious suicide, is doubtless true; but he had failed
in life, had lost his power of work, and was already married to the
poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he had shown his inclination to
convivial nights, or at least before that inclination had become
dangerous either to his health or his self-respect. He had trifled with
life, and must pay the penalty. He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had
grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happiness and solid
industry had passed him by. He died of being Robert Burns, and there is
no levity in such a statement of the case; for shall we not, one and
all, deserve a similar epitaph?

WORKS

The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me throughout this
paper only to touch upon those points in the life of Burns where
correction or amplification seemed desirable, leaves me little
opportunity to speak of the works which have made his name so famous.
Yet, even here, a few observations seem necessary.

At the time when the poet made his appearance and great first success,
his work was remarkable in two ways. For, first, in an age when poetry
had become abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to deal with
shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifications, he dealt with the actual
circumstances of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might
be. And, second, in a time when English versification was particularly
stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-academical
timidity, he wrote verses that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible,
and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit
to give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom
we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once
that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, for instance,
and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of
life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in
sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of
incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot
recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as though a writer
should describe a skirmish, and the reader, at the end, be still
uncertain whether it were a charge of cavalry or a slow and stubborn
advance of foot. There could be no such ambiguity in Burns; his work is
at the opposite pole from such indefinite and stammering performances;
and a whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only lead a
man further and further from writing the "Address to a Louse." Yet
Burns, like most great artists, proceeded from a school and continued a
tradition; only the school and tradition were Scottish, and not English.
While the English language was becoming daily more pedantic and
inflexible, and English letters more colourless and slack, there was
another dialect in the sister country, and a different school of poetry,
tracing its descent, through King James I., from Chaucer. The dialect
alone accounts for much; for it was then written colloquially, which
kept it fresh and supple; and, although not shaped for heroic flights,
it was a direct and vivid medium for all that had to do with social
life. Hence, whenever Scottish poets left their laborious imitations of
bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect, their style
would kindle, and they would write of their convivial and somewhat gross
existences with pith and point. In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad
Fergusson, there was mettle, humour, literary courage, and a power of
saying what they wished to say definitely and brightly, which in the
latter case should have justified great anticipations. Had Burns died at
the same age as Fergusson, he would have left us literally nothing worth
remark. To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very
uncommon degree, not only following their tradition and using their
measures, but directly and avowedly imitating their pieces. The same
tendency to borrow a hint, to work on some one else's foundation, is
notable in Burns from first to last, in the period of song-writing as
well as in that of the early poems; and strikes one oddly in a man of
such deep originality, who left so strong a print on all he touched, and
whose work is so greatly distinguished by that character of
"inevitability" which Wordsworth denied to Goethe.

When we remember Burns's obligations to his predecessors, we must never
forget his immense advances on them. They had already "discovered"
nature; but Burns discovered poetry--a higher and more intense way of
thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a higher and more
ideal key of words in which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson
excelled at making a popular--or shall we say vulgar?--sort of society
verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a
supper-party waited for its laureate's word; but on the appearance of
Burns, this coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues,
and learned gravity of thought and natural pathos.

What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style,
and to walk on his own feet instead of on academical stilts. There was
never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means; and we
may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted
to explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he
wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and completeness of description which
gives us the very physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature
is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces, which
keeps him from any slip into the weariful trade of word-painting, and
presents everything, as everything should be presented by the art of
words, in a clear, continuous medium of thought. Principal Shairp, for
instance, gives us a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original; and
for those who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has the very
quality they are accustomed to look for and admire in Greek. The
contemporaries of Burns were surprised that he should visit so many
celebrated mountains and waterfalls, and not seize the opportunity to
make a poem. Indeed, it is not for those who have a true command of the
art of words, but for peddling, professional amateurs, that these
pointed occasions are most useful and inspiring. As those who speak
French imperfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they may have talked
upon or heard others talk upon before, because they know appropriate
words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a
waterfall, because he has learned the sentiment and knows appropriate
words for it in poetry. But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with
any subject; and whether it was a stormy night, a shepherd's collie, a
sheep struggling in the snow, the conduct of cowardly soldiers in the
field, the gait and cogitations of a drunken man, or only a village
cock-crow in the morning, he could find language to give it freshness,
body, and relief. He was always ready to borrow the hint of a design, as
though he had a difficulty in commencing--a difficulty, let us say, in
choosing a subject out of a world which seemed all equally living and
significant to him; but once he had the subject chosen, he could cope
with nature single-handed, and make every stroke a triumph. Again, his
absolute mastery in his art enabled him to express each and all of his
different humours, and to pass smoothly and congruously from one to
another. Many men invent a dialect for only one side of their
nature--perhaps their pathos or their humour, or the delicacy of their
senses--and, for lack of a medium, leave all the others unexpressed.
You meet such an one, and find him in conversation full of thought,
feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art to employ in his
writings. But Burns was not thus hampered in the practice of the
literary art; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into his
work, and impregnate it from end to end. If Doctor Johnson, that stilted
and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred Boswell, what should we
have known of him? and how should we have delighted in his acquaintance
as we do? Those who spoke with Burns tell us how much we have lost who
did not. But I think they exaggerate their privilege: I think we have
the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his consummate verses.

It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected Wordsworth
and the world. There is, indeed, only one merit worth considering in a
man of letters--that he should write well; and only one damning
fault--that he should write ill. We are little the better for the
reflections of the sailor's parrot in the story. And so, if Burns helped
to change the course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct,
and masterly utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects. That
was imposed upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He wrote from his own
experience, because it was his nature so to do, and the tradition of the
school from which he proceeded was fortunately not opposed to homely
subjects. But to these homely subjects he communicated the rich
commentary of his nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they
interest us not in themselves, but because they have been passed through
the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man. Such is the stamp of living
literature; and there was never any more alive than that of Burns.

What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways
hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself;
sometimes speaking plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out
in exultation like a peal of bells! When we compare the "Farmer's
Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie," with the clever and inhumane
production of half a century earlier, "The Auld Man's Mare's dead," we
see in a nut-shell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns. And as
to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the collie, Luath, in
the "Twa Dogs," describes and enters into the merry-making in the
cottage?

"The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill
Are handed round wi' richt guid will;
The canty auld folks crackin' crouse,
The young anes rantin' through the house--
My heart has been sae fain to see them,
That I for joy hae barkit wi' them."

It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so many women,
and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last. His humour comes from him
in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of
humorous poets. He turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment
or a trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and rises to
the occasion. I think it is Principal Shairp who says, happily, that
Burns would have been no Scotsman if he had not loved to moralise;
neither, may we add, would he have been his father's son; but (what is
worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his
own career. He was among the least impersonal of artists. Except in the
"Jolly Beggars," he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has
complained that "Tam o' Shanter" is, from the absence of this quality,
only a picturesque and external piece of work; and I may add that in the
"Twa Dogs" it is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety
that a great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its
existence and effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of his identity that it
breaks forth on every page; and there is scarce an appropriate remark
either in praise or blame of his own conduct but he has put it himself
into verse. Alas for the tenor of these remarks! They are, indeed, his
own pitiful apology for such a marred existence and talents so misused
and stunted; and they seem to prove for ever how small a part is played
by reason in the conduct of man's affairs. Here was one, at least, who
with unfailing judgment predicted his own fate; yet his knowledge could
not avail him, and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny. Ten
years before the end he had written his epitaph; and neither subsequent
events, nor the critical eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it
to alter. And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last
unanswerable plea?--

"Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may gang a kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark--"

One? Alas! I fear every man and woman of us is "greatly dark" to all
their neighbours, from the day of birth until death removes them, in
their greatest virtues as well as in their saddest faults; and we, who
have been trying to read the character of Burns, may take home the
lesson and be gentle in our thoughts.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] For the love-affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott Douglas's
edition under the different dates.