The flawed man who became Scotland's immortal icon

“ No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sympathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to themselves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their own language made musical, and glorified by genius. He made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. ”

“ It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns’s chief influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher’s aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. “Let me make the songs of a people,” said he, “and you shall make its laws.” Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legislators, on this ground, it was Burns. His songs are already part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions that in all the ends of the earth speak a British language. ”

“ The poor woman of the tenement, sewing, blinded by tears, lives a poem holier, it may be, than the fortunate can know. The pioneers—the home builders, the heroes of toil, are all poets, and their deeds are filled with the pathos and perfection of the highest art.
But to-night we are going to talk of a poet—one who poured out his soul in song. How does a country become great? By producing great poets. Why is it that Scotland, when the roll of nations is called, can stand up and proudly answer "here"? Because Robert Burns has lived. It is Robert Burns that put Scotland in the front rank. ”

“ The ploughman-poet of Scotland; in whom the labour of the limbs appeared to invigorate the intelligence, and the bleak air of poverty to cherish the blossoms of genius. Shakspeare rose from the bosom of the people to delineate kings and queens. Burns, born some steps lower, dwelt, even in his verse, to the last, amongst his own order. That is his dignity and his glory. The life of the Scottish peasant as it remains represented by his pencil, and in his person, seizes the imagination and the sympathies of the educated world. He has drawn the heart of the high towards the low. ”

“ I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been “more fool than knave.” A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet is a monster.
R. B.
C. TO THE REV. JOHN SKINNER.
[When Burns undertook to supply Johnson with songs for the Musical Museum, he laid all the bards of Scotland [371] under contribution, and Skinner among the number, of whose talents, as well as those of Ross, author of Helenore, he was a great admirer.]
Edinburgh, 14th February, 1788. ”

“ From earliest manhood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymen there are many who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and his genial temperament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep defects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim honour for him, not only as Scotland's greatest poet, but as one of the best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burns are no true friends to his memory. ”

“ Scotland, having done little for Burns in his life, was stricken with remorse when he died, and has sought ever since to atone for her neglect by an idolatry of the poet and by a more than charitable view of the man. ”

“ And so the sanctification of a sinner consists chiefly in making the Lord our utmost end in all that we do. Every man living seeks himself as his last end and chiefest good, and out of this captivity no human power can redeem us. ”

“ I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious artist to this day.
The truth is, the world does not require enough at the hands of genius. Under the special plea of greater sensibilities, and of consequent greater temptations, it excuses its gifted ones, and even sometimes makes "a law of their weakness". ”

“ Let us then refuse our assent to a doctrine of indulgences applied to genius on the ground of temperament or of literary and artistic inspiration. "Why," we are often asked, "why force your narrow judgment upon an angry or a laughing world?" What have you to do with the conduct of gifted men? Genius means exuberance. ”

“ The question naturally arises, How comes it to pass that Burns who, excepting by a fluke, was always more or less of a middling poet, has come to rank as the finest thing in letters that Scotland ever produced? The answer to that question is simple enough. In spite of The Cotter’s Saturday Night, and two or three other pieces which are the delight and mainstay of the Scotch kirk-goer, Burns was undoubtedly the poet of licence and alcoholism. Also he was a ploughman.
Should humble state our mirth provoke! ”

“ The whole nature of Burns’s genius was governed by his will to sing the common speech of Scotland into immortality. The beau monde, the gaming rooms and the prize-ring, the purlieus of scandal and the solitudes of romantic exile filled with the whispers of poetry and heroic history, the world of new loves and lost causes, of literary loyalties and animosities, among which Byron moved indifferently, in or out of temper, all spoke their own language in the motley of his verse. To know the poet and his environment is to see the same essential man in ”

“ Poverty kept Burns from the influence, for good or ill, of the classics; nothing could preserve anyone, who read at all, from the influence of the neo-classics. Outside the door the rich vernacular literature of Scotland was still vigorously alive, but no schoolmaster in Burns’s boyhood would have dreamed of letting it in.
This literature, indeed, was being steadily thrust further out of the cultivated world. Two years before the poet’s father was born, Lady Elizabeth [Pg 43] Wardlaw had written the ballad fragment of ‘Hardyknute’ with genuine folk skill ”

“ Inquiry into his ancestry is fruitless, because nothing in his ancestry explains Burns, any more than the dull line of squires into which he was born can explain Shelley, or a London livery-stable Keats. Burns’s family produced no genius before him; it produced none after him. It is enough to record that William Burnes, the poet’s father, came of peasant stock from the eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The poet [Pg 36] cherished the belief that some of his forebears had been out in the ’Fifteen in the train of George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, but documentary proof is lacking. ”

“ The four years which he resided upon this farm were the most important of his life. It was here he felt that nature had designed him for a poet; and here, accordingly, his genius began to develop its energies in those strains which will [Pg 38] make his name familiar to all future times, the admiration of every civilized country, and the glory and boast of his own.
The vigor of Burns’s understanding, and the keenness of his wit, as displayed more particularly at masonic meetings and debating clubs, of which he formed one at Mauchline, began to spread his fame as a man of uncommon endowments. ”

“ I glory in being a Poet, and I want to be thought a wise man—I would fondly be generous, and I wish to be rich. After all, I am afraid I am a lost subject. “Some folk hae a hantle o’ fauts, an’ I’m but a ne’er-do-weel.” ”

“ It follows that the man of genius is, by his very constitution and vocation, to a considerable extent a solitary. He is apt to offend the world into which he was born by refusing to bow the knee to its conventional deities. ”

“ To hypocrites and tailored quacks in high places, his eyes are lightning; but they melt in dewy pity softer than a mother's to the downpressed, maltreated; in his heart, in his great thought, is a sanctuary for all the wretched. This world's improvement is forever sure.
'Man of Genius?' Thou hast small notion, meseems, O Mecaenas Twiddledee, of what a Man of Genius is! Read in thy New Testament and elsewhere,—if, with floods of mealymouthed inanity, with miserable froth-vortices of Cant now several centuries old, thy New Testament is not all bedimmed for thee. ”

“ Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations to social excess were great; is it not all the more creditable to Burns that he did not sink under those temptations and become the besotted wreck conventional biography has attempted to make him? If those who raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became a confirmed toper, then they are assuredly wrong; if they be only drawing attention to the fact that drinking was too common in Scotland at that time, then they are attacking not the poet but the social customs of his day. ”

“ This is a penalty of genius, and it is sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of the world out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity, and not the life-record of work achieved. It is easier to collect ana and to make them into the patchwork pattern of a life than to read the character of the man in his writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of colour than the homespun web of a peasant-poet.
Burns has suffered sorely at the hands of the anecdote-monger. One great feature of his poems is their perfect{9} sincerity. He pours out his soul in song ”

“ Robert Burns (1759-1796) was a Scottish poet, whose home was near Ayr, in Scotland. His life was short and filled with poverty and hardship, but he saw beauty in the common things of life and had a heart full of sympathy. He wrote this poem at a time when he was in great trouble. His farm was turning out badly, the soil was sour and wet, his crops were failures, and he saw nothing but ruin before him. Burns’s tenderness and sympathy are shown in the feeling expressed in this poem at crushing the flower. ”

“ Scotland, having stoned to death its own Burns, made a determined attempt to annihilate all the rising poetry of England. It commenced the review of Wordsworth's Excursion with the ludicrous words,—"This will never do!" and declared that there was not a line of poetry, or scarcely of common sense, in it, "from the hour that the driveler squatted himself down in the sun, to the end of his preaching." Let every youthful aspirant remember this history; and that if criticism could prevail over genius, we should not at this moment have one great established poet on our list of fame. ”

“ Genius is like the wind that bloweth where it listeth, and it often appears in strangely uncongenial quarters. The true nobility of a nation is shown by the men they choose, by the men they follow, by the men they admire, by the ideals of character and conduct they place before them. Tried by such tests, there is often much that is profoundly saddening in the history of countries that have been far from poor in the number of their great men. ”

“ It is not till we are forgiven through the great blood-sprinkling that the real work of holiness begins. But in these words sanctification comes before it, and the sprinkling of the blood is described as the result of the sanctifying act. The reason is, not that this verse is at variance with the rest of Scripture,—God forbid the thought,—but that the word sanctification does not here express our growth in personal holiness, but means God’s great act of separation unto Himself by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Justification does not cleanse this out of the heart. It only takes away the guilt and trespasses of the sinner, and brings him into the favor of God, who gave his Son a "trespass-offering" for the world. But Jesus gave himself a "sin-offering" for the church, and when the heart has yielded up to the death for the destruction of this depravity it can truly be said of such an one that we are dead to sin, for the blood of Jesus in this sin-offering will most certainly effect this cleansing. ”

“ It is a pregnant observation that we might well bear in mind when we concern ourselves with the nature and significance of genius. I know little about St. Peter's claim to genius. But at least he is here an admirable symbol. That is how genius is made, and, it is interesting to note, how the popular mind realises that genius is made; for the creators of the Gospels, who have clearly omitted or softened so much, have yet emphatically set forth the bald record of the abject moral failure in the moment of decisive trial of the inappropriately named Rock on which Christ built His Church. ”