THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 7

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 7

magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and modesty," is

easier to believe than that he escaped the contamination of their

sensual manners and prodigality. The people of Kyle regarded this

conduct with suspicion: they were not to be expected to know that when

Burns ranted and housed with smugglers, conversed with tinkers huddled

in a kiln, or listened to the riotous mirth of a batch of "randie

gangrel bodies" as they "toomed their powks and pawned their duds,"

for liquor in Poosie Nansie's, he was taking sketches for the future

entertainment and instruction of the world; they could not foresee

that from all this moral strength and poetic beauty would arise.

 

While meditating something better than a ballad to his mistress's

eyebrow, he did not neglect to lay out the little skill he had in

cultivating the grounds of Mossgiel. The prosperity in which he found

himself in the first and second seasons, induced him to hope that good

fortune had not yet forsaken him: a genial summer and a good market

seldom come together to the farmer, but at first they came to Burns;

and to show that he was worthy of them, he bought books on

agriculture, calculated rotation of crops, attended sales, held the

plough with diligence, used the scythe, the reap-hook, and the flail,

with skill, and the malicious even began to say that there was

something more in him than wild sallies of wit and foolish rhymes. But

the farm lay high, the bottom was wet, and in a third season,

indifferent seed and a wet harvest robbed him at once of half his

crop: he seems to have regarded this as an intimation from above, that

nothing which he undertook would prosper: and consoled himself with

joyous friends and with the society of the muse. The judgment cannot

be praised which selected a farm with a wet cold bottom, and sowed it

with unsound seed; but that man who despairs because a wet season robs

him of the fruits of the field, is unfit for the warfare of life,

where fortitude is as much required as by a general on a field of

battle, when the tide of success threatens to flow against him. The

poet seems to have believed, very early in life, that he was none of

the elect of Mammon; that he was too much of a genius ever to acquire

wealth by steady labour, or by, as he loved to call it, gin-horse

prudence, or grubbing industry.

 

And yet there were hours and days in which Burns, even when the rain

fell on his unhoused sheaves, did not wholly despair of himself: he

laboured, nay sometimes he slaved on his farm; and at intervals of

toil, sought to embellish his mind with such knowledge as might be

useful, should chance, the goddess who ruled his lot, drop him upon

some of the higher places of the land. He had, while he lived at

Tarbolton, united with some half-dozen young men, all sons of farmers

in that neighbourhood, in forming a club, of which the object was to

charm away a few evening hours in the week with agreeable chit-chat,

and the discussion of topics of economy or love. Of this little

society the poet was president, and the first question they were

called on to settle was this, "Suppose a young man bred a farmer, but

without any fortune, has it in his power to marry either of two women;

the one a girl of large fortune, but neither handsome in person, nor

agreeable in conversation, but who can manage the household affairs of

a farm well enough; the other of them, a girl every way agreeable in

person, conversation, and behaviour, but without any fortune, which of

them shall he choose?" This question was started by the poet, and once

every week the club were called to the consideration of matters

connected with rural life and industry: their expenses were limited to

threepence a week; and till the departure of Burns to the distant

Mossgiel, the club continued to live and thrive; on his removal it

lost the spirit which gave it birth, and was heard of no more; but its

aims and its usefulness were revived in Mauchline, where the poet was

induced to establish a society which only differed from the other in

spending the moderate fines arising from non-attendance, on books,

instead of liquor. Here, too, Burns was the president, and the members

were chiefly the sons of husbandmen, whom he found, he said, more

natural in their manners, and more agreeable than the self-sufficient

mechanics of villages and towns, who were ready to dispute on all

topics, and inclined to be convinced on none. This club had the

pleasure of subscribing for the first edition of the works of its

great associate. It has been questioned by his first biographer,

whether the refinement of mind, which follows the reading of books of

eloquence and delicacy,--the mental improvement resulting from such

calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was

not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A

well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by

elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all

that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps

of granite, bringing neither warmth nor life.

 

In the account which the poet gives to Moore of his early poems, he

says little about his exquisite lyrics, and less about "The Death and

dying Words of Poor Mailie," or her "Elegy," the first of his poems

where the inspiration of the muse is visible; but he speaks with

exultation of the fame which those indecorous sallies, "Holy Willie's

Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie" brought from some of the clergy, and the

people of Ayrshire. The west of Scotland is ever in the van, when

mutters either political or religious are agitated. Calvinism was

shaken, at this time, with a controversy among its professors, of

which it is enough to say, that while one party rigidly adhered to the

word and letter of the Confession of Faith, and preached up the palmy

and wholesome days of the Covenant, the other sought to soften the

harsher rules and observances of the kirk, and to bring moderation and

charity into its discipline as well as its councils. Both believed

themselves right, both were loud and hot, and personal,--bitter with a

bitterness only known in religious controversy. The poet sided with

the professors of the New Light, as the more tolerant were called, and

handled the professors of the Old Light, as the other party were

named, with the most unsparing severity. For this he had sufficient

cause:--he had experienced the mercilessness of kirk-discipline, when

his frailties caused him to visit the stool of repentance; and

moreover his friend Gavin Hamilton, a writer in Mauchline, had been

sharply censured by the same authorities, for daring to gallop on

Sundays. Moodie, of Riccarton, and Russel, of Kilmarnock, were the

first who tasted of the poet's wrath. They, though professors of the

Old Light, had quarrelled, and, it is added, fought: "The Holy

Tulzie," which recorded, gave at the same time wings to the scandal;

while for "Holy Willie," an elder of Mauchline, and an austere and

hollow pretender to righteousness, he reserved the fiercest of all his

lampoons. In "Holy Willie's Prayer," he lays a burning hand on the

terrible doctrine of predestination: this is a satire, daring,

personal, and profane. Willie claims praise in the singular,

acknowledges folly in the plural, and makes heaven accountable for his

sins! in a similar strain of undevout satire, he congratulates Goudie,

of Kilmarnock, on his Essays on Revealed Religion. These poems,

particularly the two latter, are the sharpest lampoons in the

language.

 

While drudging in the cause of the New Light controversialists, Burns

was not unconsciously strengthening his hands for worthier toils: the

applause which selfish divines bestowed on his witty, but graceless

effusions, could not be enough for one who knew how fleeting the fame

was which came from the heat of party disputes; nor was he insensible

that songs of a beauty unknown for a century to national poesy, had

been unregarded in the hue and cry which arose on account of "Holy

Willie's Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie." He hesitated to drink longer

out of the agitated puddle of Calvinistic controversy, he resolved to

slake his thirst at the pure well-springs of patriot feeling and

domestic love; and accordingly, in the last and best of his

controversial compositions, he rose out of the lower regions of

lampoon into the upper air of true poetry. "The Holy Fair," though

stained in one or two verses with personalities, exhibits a scene

glowing with character and incident and life: the aim of the poem is

not so much to satirize one or two Old Light divines, as to expose and

rebuke those almost indecent festivities, which in too many of the

western parishes accompanied the administration of the sacrament. In

the earlier days of the church, when men were staid and sincere, it

was, no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, of the

old and the young, all calm and all devout, seated before the tent of

the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence,

or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter

days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious

come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can

edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet

has poured his satire; and since this desirable reprehension the Holy

Fairs, east as well as west, have become more decorous, if not more

devout.

 

His controversial sallies were accompanied, or followed, by a series

of poems which showed that national character and manners, as Lockhart

has truly and happily said, were once more in the hands of a national

poet. These compositions are both numerous and various: they record

the poet's own experience and emotions; they exhibit the highest moral

feeling, the purest patriotic sentiments, and a deep sympathy with the

fortunes, both here and hereafter of his fellow-men; they delineate

domestic manners, man's stern as well as social hours, and mingle the

serious with the joyous, the sarcastic with the solemn, the mournful

with the pathetic, the amiable with the gay, and all with an ease and

unaffected force and freedom known only to the genius of Shakspeare.

In "The Twa Dogs" he seeks to reconcile the labourer to his lot, and

intimates, by examples drawn from the hall as well as the cottage,

that happiness resides in the humblest abodes, and is even partial to

the clouted shoe. In "Scotch Drink" he excites man to love his

country, by precepts both heroic and social; and proves that while

wine and brandy are the tipple of slaves, whiskey and ale are the

drink of the free: sentiments of a similar kind distinguish his

"Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives in the House of

Commons," each of whom he exhorts by name to defend the remaining

liberties and immunities of his country. A higher tone distinguishes

the "Address to the Deil:" he records all the names, and some of them

are strange ones; and all the acts, and some of them are as whimsical

as they are terrible, of this far kenned and noted personage; to these

he adds some of the fiend's doings as they stand in scripture,

together with his own experiences; and concludes by a hope, as

unexpected as merciful and relenting, that Satan may not be exposed to

an eternity of torments. "The Dream" is a humorous sally, and may be

almost regarded as prophetic. The poet feigns himself present, in

slumber, at the Royal birth-day; and supposes that he addresses his

majesty, on his household matters as well as the affairs of the

nation. Some of the princes, it has been satirically hinted, behaved

afterwards in such a way as if they wished that the scripture of the

Burns should be fulfilled: in this strain, he has imitated the license

and equalled the wit of some of the elder Scottish Poets.

 

"The Vision" is wholly serious; it exhibits the poet in one of those

fits of despondency which the dull, who have no misgivings, never

know: he dwells with sarcastic bitterness on the opportunities which,

for the sake of song, he has neglected of becoming wealthy, and is

drawing a sad parallel between rags and riches, when the muse steps in

and cheer his despondency, by assuring him of undying fame.

"Halloween" is a strain of a more homely kind, recording the

superstitious beliefs, and no less superstitious doings of Old

Scotland, on that night, when witches and elves and evil spirits are

let loose among the children of men: it reaches far back into manners

and customs, and is a picture, curious and valuable. The tastes and

feelings of husbandmen inspired "The old Farmer's Address to his old

mare Maggie," which exhibits some pleasing recollections of his days

of courtship and hours of sociality. The calm, tranquil picture of

household happiness and devotion in "the Cotter's Saturday Night," has

induced Hogg, among others, to believe that it has less than usual of

the spirit of the poet, but it has all the spirit that was required;

the toil of the week has ceased, the labourer has returned to his

well-ordered home--his "cozie ingle and his clean hearth-stane,"--and

with his wife and children beside him, turns his thoughts to the

praise of that God to whom he owes all: this he performs with a

reverence and an awe, at once natural, national, and poetic. "The

Mouse" is a brief and happy and very moving poem: happy, for it

delineates, with wonderful truth and life, the agitation of the mouse

when the coulter broke into its abode; and moving, for the poet takes

the lesson of ruin to himself, and feels the present and dreads the

future. "The Mountain Daisy," once, more properly, called by Burns

"The Gowan," resembles "The Mouse" in incident and in moral, and is

equally happy, in language and conception. "The Lament" is a dark, and

all but tragic page, from the poet's own life. "Man was made to

Mourn'" takes the part of the humble and the homeless, against the

coldness and selfishness of the wealthy and the powerful, a favourite

topic of meditation with Burns. He refrained, for awhile, from making

"Death and Doctor Hernbook" public; a poem which deviates from the

offensiveness of personal satire, into a strain of humour, at once

airy and original.

 

His epistles in verse may be reckoned amongst his happiest

productions: they are written in all moods of mind, and are, by turns,

lively and sad; careless and serious;--now giving advice, then taking

it; laughing at learning, and lamenting its want; scoffing at

propriety and wealth, yet admitting, that without the one he cannot be

wise, nor wanting the other, independent. The Epistle to David Sillar

is the first of these compositions: the poet has no news to tell, and

no serious question to ask: he has only to communicate his own

emotions of joy, or of sorrow, and these he relates and discusses with

singular elegance as well as ease, twining, at the same time, into the

fabric of his composition, agreeable allusions to the taste and

affections of his correspondent. He seems to have rated the intellect

of Sillar as the highest among his rustic friends: he pays him more

deference, and addresses him in a higher vein than he observes to

others. The Epistles to Lapraik, to Smith, and to Rankine, are in a

more familiar, or social mood, and lift the veil from the darkness of

the poet's condition, and exhibit a mind of first-rate power, groping,

and that surely, its way to distinction, in spite of humility of

birth, obscurity of condition, and the coldness of the wealthy or the

titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their fame to the rank

or the reputation of those to whom they are addressed; those of Burns

are written, one and all, to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar

was a country schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird, Smith a small

shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and a joke. Yet

these men were the chief friends, the only literary associates of the

poet, during those early years, in which, with some exceptions, his

finest works were written.

 

Burns, while he was writing the poems, the chief of which we have

named, was a labouring husbandman on the little farm of Mossgiel, a

pursuit which affords but few leisure hours for either reading or

pondering; but to him the stubble-field was musing-ground, and the

walk behind the plough, a twilight saunter on Parnassus. As, with a

careful hand and a steady eye, he guided his horses, and saw an evenly

furrow turned up by the share, his thoughts were on other themes; he

was straying in haunted glens, when spirits have power--looking in

fancy on the lasses "skelping barefoot," in silks and in scarlets, to

a field-preaching--walking in imagination with the rosy widow, who on

Halloween ventured to dip her left sleeve in the burn, where three

lairds' lands met--making the "bottle clunk," with joyous smugglers,

on a lucky run of gin or brandy--or if his thoughts at all approached

his acts--he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed by the furrow which

his own ploughshare had turned. That his thoughts were thus wandering

we have his own testimony, with that of his brother Gilbert; and were

both wanting, the certainty that he composed the greater part of his

immortal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the summer of

1786, would be evidence sufficient. The muse must have been strong

within him, when, in spite of the rains and sleets of the

"ever-dropping west"--when in defiance of the hot and sweaty brows

occasioned by reaping and thrashing--declining markets, and showery

harvests--the clamour of his laird for his rent, and the tradesman for

his account, he persevered in song, and sought solace in verse, when

all other solace was denied him.

 

The circumstances under which his principal poems were composed, have

been related: the "Lament of Mailie" found its origin in the

catastrophe of a pet ewe; the "Epistle to Sillar" was confided by the

poet to his brother while they were engaged in weeding the kale-yard;

the "Address to the Deil" was suggested by the many strange portraits

which belief or fear had drawn of Satan, and was repeated by the one

brother to the other, on the way with their carts to the kiln, for

lime; the "Cotter's Saturday Night" originated in the reverence with

which the worship of God was conducted in the family of the poet's

father, and in the solemn tone with which he desired his children to

compose themselves for praise and prayer; "the Mouse," and its moral

companion "the Daisy," were the offspring of the incidents which they

relate; and "Death and Doctor Hornbook" was conceived at a

freemason-meeting, where the hero of the piece had shown too much of

the pedant, and composed on his way home, after midnight, by the poet,

while his head was somewhat dizzy with drink. One of the most

remarkable of his compositions, the "Jolly Beggars," a drama, to which

nothing in the language of either the North or South can be compared,

and which was unknown till after the death of the author, was

suggested by a scene which he saw in a low ale-house, into which, on a

Saturday night, most of the sturdy beggars of the district had met to

sell their meal, pledge their superfluous rags, and drink their gains.

It may be added, that he loved to walk in solitary spots; that his

chief musing-ground was the banks of the Ayr; the season most

congenial to his fancy that of winter, when the winds were heard in

the leafless woods, and the voice of the swollen streams came from

vale and hill; and that he seldom composed a whole poem at once, but

satisfied with a few fervent verses, laid the subject aside, till the

muse summoned him to another exertion of fancy. In a little back

closet, still existing in the farm-house of Mossgiel, he committed

most of his poems to paper.

 

But while the poet rose, the farmer sank. It was not the cold clayey

bottom of his ground, nor the purchase of unsound seed-corn, not the

fluctuation in the markets alone, which injured him; neither was it

the taste for freemason socialities, nor a desire to join the mirth of

comrades, either of the sea or the shore: neither could it be wholly

imputed to his passionate following of the softer sex--indulgence in

the "illicit rove," or giving way to his eloquence at the feet of one

whom he loved and honoured; other farmers indulged in the one, or

suffered from the other, yet were prosperous. His want of success

arose from other causes; his heart was not with his task, save by fits

and starts: he felt he was designed for higher purposes than

ploughing, and harrowing, and sowing, and reaping: when the sun called

on him, after a shower, to come to the plough, or when the ripe corn

invited the sickle, or the ready market called for the measured grain,

the poet was under other spells, and was slow to avail himself of

those golden moments which come but once in the season. To this may be

added, a too superficial knowledge of the art of farming, and a want

of intimacy with the nature of the soil he was called to cultivate. He

could speak fluently of leas, and faughs, and fallows, of change of

seed and rotation of crops, but practical knowledge and application

were required, and in these Burns was deficient. The moderate gain

which those dark days of agriculture brought to the economical farmer,

was not obtained: the close, the all but niggardly care by which he

could win and keep his crown-piece,--gold was seldom in the farmer's

hand,--was either above or below the mind of the poet, and Mossgiel,

which, in the hands of an assiduous farmer, might have made a

reasonable return for labour, was unproductive, under one who had

little skill, less economy, and no taste for the task.

 

Other reasons for his failure have been assigned. It is to the credit

of the moral sentiments of the husbandmen of Scotland, that when one

of their class forgets what virtue requires, and dishonours, without

reparation, even the humblest of the maidens, he is not allowed to go

unpunished. No proceedings take place, perhaps one hard word is not

spoken; but he is regarded with loathing by the old and the devout; he

is looked on by all with cold and reproachful eyes--sorrow is foretold

as his lot, sure disaster as his fortune; and is these chance to

arrive, the only sympathy expressed is, "What better could he expect?"

Something of this sort befel Burns: he had already satisfied the kirk

in the matter of "Sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess," his daughter,

by one of his mother's maids; and now, to use his own words, he was

brought within point-blank of the heaviest metal of the kirk by a

similar folly. The fair transgressor, both for her fathers and her own

youth, had a large share of public sympathy. Jean Armour, for it is of

her I speak, was in her eighteenth year; with dark eyes, a handsome

foot, and a melodious tongue, she made her way to the poet's

heart--and, as their stations in life were equal, it seemed that they

had only to be satisfied themselves to render their union easy. But

her father, in addition to being a very devout man, was a zealot of

the Old Light; and Jean, dreading his resentment, was willing, while

she loved its unforgiven satirist, to love him in secret, in the hope

that the time would come when she might safely avow it: she admitted

the poet, therefore, to her company in lonesome places, and walks

beneath the moon, where they both forgot themselves, and were at last

obliged to own a private marriage as a protection from kirk censure.

The professors of the Old Light rejoiced, since it brought a scoffing

rhymer within reach of their hand; but her father felt a twofold

sorrow, because of the shame of a favourite daughter, and for having

committed the folly with one both loose in conduct and profane of

speech. He had cause to be angry, but his anger, through his zeal,

became tyrannous: in the exercise of what he called a father's power,

he compelled his child to renounce the poet as her husband and burn

the marriage-lines; for he regarded her marriage, without the kirk's

permission, with a man so utterly cast away, as a worse crime than her

folly. So blind is anger! She could renounce neither her husband nor

his offspring in a lawful way, and in spite of the destruction of the

marriage lines, and renouncing the name of wife, she was as much Mrs.

Burns as marriage could make her. No one concerned seemed to think so.

Burns, who loved her tenderly, went all but mad when she renounced

him: he gave up his share of Mossgiel to his brother, and roamed,

moody and idle, about the land, with no better aim in life than a

situation in one of our western sugar-isles, and a vague hope of distinction as a poet.