Robert Burns: How To Know Him Part 45

Burns was not a drunkard. He seems to have taken little alone, and in the houses of some of his more fas.h.i.+onable friends he resented the pressure to drink more than he wanted. Nor did he allow dissipation to interfere with his work on the farm, or his duties in the excise. Yet, even when contemporary manners have received their share of responsibility, it must be allowed that on the poet's own confession he drank frequently to excess, and that this abuse had a serious share in the breakdown of his const.i.tution, weakened as it was by the excessive toil of his youth.

He was fond of women, and this pa.s.sion more than any other has been the center of the disputes that have raged round his life and character. Again, contemporary and cla.s.s customs have to be taken into account. In spite of the formal disapproval of public opinion and the censure of the church, the att.i.tude of his cla.s.s in the end of the eighteenth century toward such irregularities as brought Burns and Jean Armour to the stool of repentance was much less severe than it would be in this country to-day. Burns himself knew he was culpable, but the comparative laxity of the standards of the time made it easier for him to forgive himself, and prompted him to defiance when he believed himself criticized by puritan hypocrites. Thus in his utterances we have a curious inconsistency, his feeling ranging from black remorse and melancholy, through half-hearted excuse and justification, to swaggering bravado. And none of them makes pleasant reading.

But his relations with the other s.e.x were not all of the nature of sheer pa.s.sion. He was capable of serious friends.h.i.+p, warm respect, abject adoration, and a hundred other variations of feeling; and in several cases he maintained for years, by correspondence and occasional visits, an intercourse with ladies on which no shadow of a stain has ever been cast. Such were his relations with Margaret Chalmers and Mrs. Dunlop. These facts have no controversial bearing, but they are necessary to be considered if we are to have a complete view of Burns's relations to society.

In estimating him as a poet, nothing is lost in keeping in mind the historical relations which have been so strongly emphasized in recent years. He himself would have been the last to resent being placed in a national tradition, but, on the contrary, would have been proud to be regarded as the last and greatest of Scottish vernacular poets.

Patriotic feeling is frequent in his verse; we have seen how consciously he performed his work for Johnson and Thomson as a service to his country; and to the "Guidwife of Wauchope House" he professed, speaking of his youth,

E'en then, a wish (I mind its pow'r), A wish that from my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast, That I for poor auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least.

So in the line of the Scottish "makers" we place him, the inheritor of the speech of Henryson and Dunbar, of the meters and modes of Montgomery and the Sempills, Ramsay and Fergusson, the re-creator of the peris.h.i.+ng relics of the lost masters of popular song.

His relation to his English predecessors need not again be detailed, so little of value did they contribute to the vital part of his work.

But some account should be taken of his connection with the English literature of his own and the next generation.

The humanitarian movement was well under way before the appearance of Burns, and the particular manifestations of it in, for example, the poems of Cowper on animals, owed nothing to the influence of Burns.

But Cowper's hares never appealed to the popular heart with the force of Burns's sheep and mice and dogs, and the tender familiarity and wistful jocoseness of his poems to beasts have never been surpa.s.sed.

In writing these he was probably, consciously or unconsciously, affected by the tendency of the time, as he was also in the democratic brotherhood of _A Man's a Man for a' That_, but, in both cases, as we have seen, part of the impulse, that part that made his utterance reach his audience, was derived from his personal intercourse with his farm stock and from his inborn conviction of the dignity of the individual. His relations to these elements in the thought and feeling of his day were, then, reciprocal: they strengthened certain traits in his personality, and he pa.s.sed them on to posterity, strengthened in turn by his moving expression.

The situation is similar with regard to his connection with the so-called "return to nature" in English poetry. Historians have discerned a new era begun in descriptive poetry with Thomson's _Seasons_; and in Cowper again, to ignore many intermediates, there is abundance of faithful portraiture of landscape. But Burns was not given to set description of their kind, and what he has in common with them lies in the nature of his detail--the frank actuality of the images of wind and weather, burn and brae, which form the background of his human comedy and tragedy. He observed for himself, and he called things by their own names. In so doing he was once more following a national tradition, so that he was not "returning" to nature, since the tradition had never left it; but, on the other hand, it is reasonable to suppose that Wordsworth, arriving at a somewhat similar method by a totally different route, found corroboration for his theories of the simplification needed in the matter and diction of poetry in the success of the Scottish rustic who showed his youth

How Verse may build a princely throne On humble truth.

Wordsworth, of course, like the most distinguished of his romantic contemporaries, found much in nature that Burns never dreamed of; and even the faithfulness in detail which Burns shared with these poets reached a point of subtlety and sensuousness far beyond the reach of his simple and direct epithets. Nature was to be given in the next generation a vast and novel variety of spiritual significance. With all that Burns had nothing to do. He was realist, not romanticist, though his example operated beneficently and sanely on some of the romantic leaders.

Yet in Burns's treatment of nature there is imaginative beauty as well as humble truth. His language in description, though not mystical or highly idealized, is often rich in feeling, and his personality was potent enough to pervade his most objective writing. Thus he ranks among those who have put lovers of poetry under obligation for a fresh glimpse of the beauty and meaning of the world around them. This glimpse is so strongly suggestive of the poet that our delight in it will largely depend on our sympathy with his temperament; yet now and again he flashes out a phrase whose imaginative value is absolute, and which makes its appeal without respect to the author:

The wan moon is setting behind the white wave, And time is setting with me, oh!

Apart from the respects in which Burns is the inheritor and perfecter of the vernacular traditions, and apart from his contact, active or pa.s.sive, with the English poets of his time, there is much in his poetry which is thoroughly his own. It does not lie mainly in his thinking, robust and shrewd though that is. We perceive in his work no great individual att.i.tude toward life and society such as we are impelled to perceive in the work of Goethe; we find no message in it like the message of Browning. What he does is to bring before us characters, situations, moods, images, that belong to the permanent and elemental in our nature. These are presented with a sympathy so living, a tenderness so poignant, a humor so arch and so sly, that they become a part of our experience in the most delightful and exhilarating fas.h.i.+on. Part of the function of poetry is to prevent us from becoming sluggish In our contemplation of life by making us feel it fresh, vivid, pulsing; and this Burns notably accomplishes.

Coleridge's image of wetting the pebble to bring out its color and brilliance is peculiarly apt in the case of Burns; for it was the common if not the commonplace that he dealt with, and his workmans.h.i.+p made it sparkle like a jewel.

In the long run the value of an author depends on two factors, the nature of his insight and his power of expression. Burns's insight into his own nature was deep and on the whole just, and that nature was itself rich enough to teach him much. He found there the great struggle between impulse and will--fiery, surging impulse and a stubborn will. This experience, illuminated by a lively imagination, gave him a sympathetic understanding of extraordinary range, extending from the domestic troubles of the royal family and the perplexities of the prime minister to the precarious adventures of a louse. His insight into external nature blended the weather wisdom of the ploughman with the poet's sensitiveness to the harmony or discord of wind and sky with the moods of humanity.

For the expression of all this he had an instrument that did not reach, it is true, to the great tragic tones of Shakespeare nor to the delicate and filmy subtleties of Sh.e.l.ley. But he could utter pathos almost intolerably piercing, and overwhelming remorse; gaiety as fresh and inspiriting as the song of a lark; roistering mirth; keen irony; and a thousand phases of pa.s.sion. This he did in a verse of amazing variety--sometimes tender and caressing; sometimes rus.h.i.+ng like a torrent.

Finally, it must be insisted again, in that aspect in which he is most nearly supreme, the writing of songs, he is musician as well as poet.

Though he made no tunes, he saved hundreds; saved them not merely for the antiquary and the connoisseur but for the great ma.s.s of lovers of sweet and simple melody; saved them by marrying them to fit and immortal words. It is for this most of all that Scotland and the world love Burns.

THE END