Robert Burns: How To Know Him Part 23

Morality, thou deadly bane, Thy tens o' thousands thou hast slain!

Vain is his hope, whose stay and trust is In moral mercy, truth and justice!

No--stretch a point to catch a plack; [small coin]

Abuse a brother to his back; Steal thro' the winnock frae a wh.o.r.e, [window from]

But point the rake that takes the door:

Be to the poor like ony whunstane, [any whinstone]

And haud their noses to the grunstane; [hold, grindstone]

Ply ev'ry art o' legal thieving; No matter--stick to sound believing.

Learn three-mile pray'rs, an' half-mile graces, Wi' weel-spread looves, an' lang, wry faces; [palms]

Grunt up a solemn, lengthen'd groan, And d.a.m.n a' parties but your own; I'll warrant them ye're nae deceiver, A steady, st.u.r.dy, staunch believer.

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 Ayrs.h.i.+re Calvinists.

Orthodox, Orthodox, wha believe in John Knox, Let me sound an alarm to your conscience: There's a heretic blast has been blawn i' the wast, That what is not sense must be nonsense.

Dr. Mac, Dr. Mac, you should stretch on a rack, To strike evil-doers wi' terror; To join faith and sense upon any pretence, Is heretic, d.a.m.nable error.

D'rymple mild, D'rymple mild, tho' your heart's like a child, And your life like the new driven snaw, Yet that winna save ye, auld Satan must have ye, For preaching that three's ane and twa.

Calvin's sons, Calvin's sons, seize your sp'ritual guns, Ammunition you never can need; Your hearts are the stuff will be powther enough, And your skulls are storehouses o' lead.

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 a.s.sociated 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 att.i.tude, 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 embarra.s.s 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 appet.i.te 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 Sat.u.r.day 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:

Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash; Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needful cash; Some rhyme to court the countra clash, [gossip]

An' raise a din; For me, an aim I never fash; [trouble about]

I rhyme for fun.

Another gives his view of his equipment:

The star that rules my luckless lot, Has fated me the russet coat, An' d.a.m.ned my fortune to the groat; But, in requit, Has blest me with a random-shot O' countra wit. [country]

Then he pa.s.ses from literary considerations to his general philosophy of life:

But why o' death begin a tale?

Just now we're living sound an' hale; Then top and maintop crowd the sail; Heave Care o'er-side!

And large, before Enjoyment's gale, Let's tak the tide.

When ance life's day draws near the gloamin, Then fareweel vacant, careless roamin; An' fareweel cheerfu' tankards foamin, An' social noise: An' fareweel dear, deluding Woman, The joy of joys!

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

With steady aim, some Fortune chase; Keen Hope does ev'ry sinew brace; Thro' fair, thro' foul, they urge the race, And seize the prey: Then cannie, in some cozie place, [quietly]

They close the day.

And others, like your humble servan', Poor wights! nae rules nor roads observin', To right or left eternal swervin', They zig-zag on; Till, curst with age, obscure an' starvin', They aften groan.

O ye douce folk that live by rule, Grave, tideless-blooded, calm an' cool, Compar'd wi' you--O fool! fool! fool!

How much unlike!

Your hearts are just a standing pool, Your lives a d.y.k.e! [stone wall]

Nothing is more characteristic of the poet than this att.i.tude 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 heart aye's the part aye That makes us right or wrang.

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 baccha.n.a.lian 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

While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw, And bar the doors wi' driving snaw, And hing us owre the ingle, [hang, fire]

I set me down to pa.s.s the time, And spin a verse or twa o' rhyme, In hamely westlin jingle. [west-country]

While frosty winds blaw in the drift, Ben to the chimla lug, [In, chimney-corner]

I grudge a wee the great-folk's gift, That live sae bien an' snug; [comfortable]

I tent less, and want less [value]

Their roomy fire-side; But hanker and canker To see their cursed pride.

It's hardly in a body's pow'r, To keep, at times, frae being sour, To see how things are shar'd; How best o' chiels are whyles in want [fellows, sometimes]

While coofs on countless thousands rant [dolts, roister]

And ken na how to wair't: [spend it]

But, Davie, lad, ne'er fash your head, [trouble]

Tho' we hae little gear, [wealth]

We're fit to win our daily bread, As lang's we're hale and fier: [l.u.s.ty]

'Mair spier na, nor fear na,' [More ask not]

Auld age ne'er mind a feg; [fig]

The last o't, the warst o't, Is only but to beg.

To lie in kilns and barns at e'en, When banes are craz'd, and bluid is thin, [bones]

Is, doubtless, great distress!

Yet then content could mak us blest; Ev'n then, sometimes, we'd s.n.a.t.c.h a taste Of truest happiness.

The honest heart that's free frae a'