Gabriel Setoun

“ Coming from Edinburgh to the quiet home-life of Mossgiel was like coming out of the vitiated atmosphere of a ballroom into the pure and bracing air of early morning. Away from the fever of city life, he only gradually comes back to sanity and health. The artificialities and affectations of polite society are not to be thrown off in a day's time. Hardly had he arrived at Mauchline before he penned a letter to Clarinda, that simply staggers the reader with the shameless and heartless way in which it speaks of Jean Armour. ”

“ Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet, Burns took a lively interest in everything affecting the welfare of the parish and the well-being of its inhabitants. For this was no poet of the study, holding himself aloof from the affairs of the world, and fearing the contamination of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always acted his part in the world as a husband and father; as a citizen and a man. He made himself the poet of humanity, because he himself was so intensely human, and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. ”

“ Those who still denounce him as the chief of sinners, and without mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those whom Burns has pilloried to all posterity. There are dull, phlegmatic beings with blood no warmer than ditch-water, who are virtuous and sober citizens because they have never felt the force of temptation. What power could tempt them? The tree may be parched and blistered in the heat of noonday, but the parasitical fungus draining its sap remains cool—and poisonous. So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold and clammy; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. ”

“ But otherwise the story of Burns's life has been told with such minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence of his poetry would seem only to be called in to verify or correct the verdict of tradition and the garbled gossip of those wise after the fact of his fame. It is so easy after a man has compelled the attention of the world to fill up the empty years of his life when he was all unknown to fame, with illustrative anecdotes and almost forgotten incidents, revealed and coloured by the light of after events! ”

“ Still Burns might have been a great song-writer without becoming the name and power he is in the world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a quick emotional sense, which in some cases may be little more than a beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was essentially a strong man. His very vices are the vices of a robust and healthy humanity. Besides being possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with the love and joy of life. It is this sterling quality of manhood that has made Burns the poet and the power he is. ”

“ When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks dance to the piping of the devil in Alloway's auld haunted kirk, he was but assembling them in their fit and proper house of meeting. Here had they been called into being; here had they the still-born children of superstition been thrashed into life and trained in unholiness. One can imagine them oozing out from the walls that had echoed their names so often through centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue of his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no doubt from the very spot on which the pulpit once had stood. ”

“ It seems a terrible thing that, merely to gratify the morbid curiosity of the world, the very love-letters of a man of genius should be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the lives of our great men? 'Did I imagine,' Burns remarked to Mrs. Basil Montagu in Dumfries, 'that one half of the letters which I have written would be published when I die, I would this moment recall them and burn them without redemption.'
After all, what was gained by publishing this correspondence? It adds literally nothing to our knowledge of the poet. ”

“ And if a man be candid and sincere, he will be taken at his word when he makes the world his confessional, and calls himself a sinner. There is pleasure to small minds in discovering that the gods are only clay; that they who are guides and leaders are men of like passions with themselves, subject to the same temptations, and as liable to fall. This is the consolation of mediocrity in the presence of genius; and if from the housetops the poet proclaims his shortcomings, the world will hear him gladly and believe; his faults will be remembered, and his genius forgiven. ”

“ The Cotter's Saturday Night has usually, in Scotland, been the most lauded of his poems. Many writers give it as his best. It is a pious opinion, but is not sound criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only by the stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude he took towards his subject. He is never quite himself in it. We admire its many beauties; we see the life of the poor made noble and dignified; we see, in the end, the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and circumstance; but with all that we feel that there is something awanting. ”

“ Even in the present day we hear too much of the inspired ploughman bursting into song as one that could not help himself, and warbling of life and love in a kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that Burns was a great intellectual power, and would have been a force in any sphere of life or letters. All who met him and heard him talk have insisted on the greatness of the man, apart from his achievements in poetry. It was not his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his conversation ”

“ Wit and humour, play and sparkle of fancy, satire genial or scathing, a boundless love of nature and all created things, are harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind all is the personality of the writer, captivating the reader as much by his kindliness and sympathy as by his witchery of words. Others have attempted poetic epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to such fine issues; none has written with such natural grace or woven the warp and woof of word and sentiment so cunningly into the web of poetry as Robert Burns. ”

“ She is not unhappy: religion has been her balm for every woe. She had read his autobiography as Desdemona listened to the narration of Othello, but she was pained because of his hatred of Calvinism; he must study it seriously. She could well believe him when he said that no woman could love as ardently as himself. The only woman for him would be one qualified for the companion, the friend, and the mistress. The last might gain Sylvander, but the others alone could keep him. She admires him for his continued fondness for Jean, who perhaps does not possess his tenderest, faithfulest friendship. ”

“ His vain hopes of preferment were already 'thrown behind and far away,' and he saw clearly that by the labour of his own hands he had to live, independent of the dispensations of patronage, and trusting no longer to the accidents of fortune. 'The thoughts of a home,' to quote Cunningham's words, 'of a settled purpose in life, gave him a silent gladness of heart such as he had never before known.'
Burns, though he had hoped and was disappointed, left the city not so much with bitterness as with contempt. ”

“ It is an absurd idea to imagine that every great poet ought to write an epic or a play. Burns's powers were concentrative, and he could put into a song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is the greater poet. After all, the song is the more likely to live, and the more likely, therefore, to keep the mission of the poet an enduring and living influence in the lives of men. ”

“ Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along with the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are gifts the world cannot give, and, if he haply find them in his own heart, which it cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the closing months of Burns's chequered career. ”

“ For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets himself go in a very revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of style—that fetich of barren minds—and style comes to him; for style is a coquette that flies the suppliant wooer to kiss the feet of him who worships a goddess ”

“ What matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first or second or third rate poet? His countrymen, and more than his countrymen, his brothers all the world over, who read in his writings the joys and sorrows, the temptations and trials, the sins and shortcomings of a great-hearted man, have accepted him as a prophet, and set him in the front rank of immortals. They admire many poets; they love Robert Burns. They have been told their love is unreasoning and unreasonable. It may be so. Love goes by instinct more than by reason ”

“ In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was pleasure, and the poet's first song, with the picture he gives of the partners in the harvest field, breaks forth from this life of cheerless gloom and unceasing moil like a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns's description of how the song came to be made is worthy of quotation, because it gives us a very clear and well-defined likeness of himself at the time, a lad in years, but already counting himself among men. 'You know our country custom of coupling a man and a woman together in the labours of harvest. ”

“ Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord and master, exacting submission as well as rent from his tenants; while Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck and bow to any man. 'The life of a farmer is,' he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, 'as a farmer paying a dear, unconscionable rent, a cursed life.... Devil take the life of reaping the fruits that others must eat!'
The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was again subject to his attacks of hypochondria. 'I feel that horrid hypochondria pervading every atom of both body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment of myself. ”

“ There is a complete contrast between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In{68} the one case all the epithets are material; here they are all moral. The praises are borrowed, not from the graces of the body, but from the features of the soul. The words which occur again and again are those of honour, of purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her again some day was never absent from his mind. Every time he thought of eternity, of a future life, of reunions in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was ever present. ”

“ It ought not to be forgotten that Burns had a better education than most lads of his time. Even in the present day many in better positions have not the advantages that Robert and Gilbert Burns had, the sons of such a father as William Burness, and under such an earnest and thoughtful teacher as Mr. Murdoch. It is important to notice this, because Burns is too often regarded merely as a lusus naturæ; a being gifted with song, and endowed by nature with understanding from his birth. We hear too much of the ploughman poet. His genius and natural abilities are unquestioned and unquestionable ”

“ Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of Jean Armour, he rends himself in a whirlwind of passion, and seeks sympathy and solace in the love of Mary Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is just how the story-teller would have made his jilted hero act; sent him with bleeding heart to seek consolation in a new love. For novelists make a study of the vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in the rebound.
Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that this Highland lassie was the object of by far the deepest passion he ever knew. They may be right. ”

“ Ignorance, superstition, bigotry, stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy—all strongly bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence; to such a shield humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the pop-gun of a schoolboy. Creation-disgracing scélérats such as they, God only can mend, and the devil only can punish.' The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells us, and was forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently adding, 'so much more venial is it in devout men's eyes to be guilty of heresy than of satire.'
Into political as well as theological matters Burns also entered with all his wonted enthusiasm. ”

“ This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It seemed as if there had been a conspiracy{67} of fate and circumstance to herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were endless complications and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with breathless interest, dumbly wondering what the end will be. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He has a song for every age; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is a subject for a book to itself. His songs are sung all over the world. The love he sings appeals to all, for it is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart speaks to heart in the songs of Robert Burns; there is a freemasonry in them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across the seas in the firmest bonds of brotherhood.
What place Burns occupies as a poet has been determined not so much by the voice of criticism, as by the enthusiastic way in which his fellow-mortals have taken him to their heart. ”

“ Although a century has passed since his death, we do not yet see the events of Burns's life in proper perspective. Things trifling in themselves, and of little bearing on his character, have been preserved, and are still recorded with painful elaboration; while the sidelights from friends, companions, and acquaintances, male and female, are many and bewildering. ”

“ Such jinglers are usually as happy in their juvenile effusions as in their later efforts. But Burns from the first tried to express what was in him, what he himself felt, and in so far had set his feet on the road to perfection. Being natural, he was bound to improve by practice, and if there was genius in him to become in time a great poet. That he was already conscious of his powers we know, and the longing for fame, 'that last infirmity of noble mind,' was strong in him and continually growing stronger. ”