J. De Lancey Ferguson

“ Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of more than three hundred songs, Burns’s most truly patriotic work, lies almost untouched on the shelves. Radio and concert stage alike ignore them. And choice of the few that are known to the public at large runs true to the same form as with the longer poems. Probably a hundred people know ‘Sweet Afton’ for one who knows ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ or ‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’. ”

“ In 1786 it seemed evident that when the former things passed away it would be into the darkness in which men and nations prefer to bury the ruder and more discreditable features of their early days. That the memory of the discarded heritage should be embalmed as a precious possession, and that the old world should be forever surrounded by the romantic glory of a golden sunset was due more to Robert Burns than to any other person. He made the Scots conscious of the richness of their national tradition. ”

“ Burns was already proud; Brown taught his pride to flow in proper channels—whatever that may mean. But Brown also was the only man the poet ever met who was a bigger fool than himself where women were concerned. The various goddesses by whom Burns’s tinder heart was continually lighted up still roused a hobbledehoy calf-love, as adolescent as his hero-worship of the sailor. Brown taught him that direct action might usually be counted on to bring results, and here, as Burns later admitted, the friendship did him a mischief. ”

“ The real Burns was not the dropper of tears over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours for a [Pg 308] kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. ”

“ The man who so charmed the Earl’s young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787 swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.
Despite their intimacy, it would be false to claim that Syme shared all Burns’s interests. No one man could do that. ”

“ But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his emotions swayed him in its favour. ”

“ Starting from certain ‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority for salvation—for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human righteousness were filthy rags.
This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice, as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. ”

“ For readers who do not relish broad humour they may be distasteful, but beneath their coarseness is the record of a genuine friendship with an honest, hearty, and generous man. One suspects that had Cunningham, for instance, visited Burns at Ellisland or Dumfries, he would have felt the same disillusionment at sight of the poet’s narrow and primitive domestic life which the pettier Robert Ainslie recorded. Cleghorn made such a visit in 1795, when Burns’s health and spirits were already declining, and left behind him a warm glow of renewed and strengthened friendship. ”

“ His heart lesion intensified the nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.
A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from social intercourse. ”

“ It is not Scott’s kings and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont—in other words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry would be without the Cavaliers. ”

“ His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless engaged in supporting it. ”

“ Murdoch, in the schoolroom and in the long evenings in what he called the argillaceous fabric or mud domicile at Alloway, had at least impressed the lesson that books had meaning and that words should be used with precision. That Burns in later life never had any difficulty in saying precisely what he meant, he probably owed at root to Murdoch’s severe drill; that his style of saying it was frequently much too formal he likewise owed to the dominie and to the prose selections of Arthur Masson.
The earliest stages of book education are seldom important in shaping the maturity of the learner. ”

“ Human life has always been Scotland’s cheapest commodity. That a high degree of social and intellectual culture should flourish amid this filth is merely another proof of human capacity for ignoring what it is too indolent to correct.
Outside the cities, as well as in them, Scottish life was beginning to change. Primitive agriculture in the northern kingdom, like the sanitation of Edinburgh, seemed almost to be an effort to demonstrate just how badly a thing could be done. The poorest sorts of oats and barley, the scrubbiest of cattle, were raised by the worst methods. ”

“ Could Burns have had more of the society of a man like Grose, had even young Walter Scott of Edinburgh, who in the intervals of his legal studies was already steeping himself in the ballads and legends of the Border, thought it worth while occasionally to ride as far as Dumfries to visit the man whom he had once seen in an Edinburgh drawing-room, the world might have more poems like ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. ”

“ There was no money in being a Scottish patriot. As in England, all things political went by favour. The only difference was that in Scotland they went by favour of one man—the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Bute, or Henry Dundas, as the case might be. All power concentrated at last in the hands of the national boss. ”

“ By giving a fighting edge to romance, the Revolution raised it above mere fancifulness and sentimentality. His patriotism did the same thing for the influence of Burns. Without it he might today be only a minor Man of Feeling. Even as it is, he is neglected and misunderstood. The strength, the humour, the fighting edge are there, but few people care to find them.
He saved Scotland; himself he could not save. Five years after his death a group of admirers in Greenock organized a Burns Club, and Paisley and Kilmarnock quickly followed suit. ”

“ These tasks, with all their accompanying observations of plants and animals, of weather and seasons, were stronger influences on Burns than John Murdoch was. No poet has revealed a closer or more accurate knowledge of nature; no poet, it may be added, had less of romantic enthusiasm for pure scenery. Burns knew nature as the peasant and the savage knows it, as something on which his health and prosperity and his very life depend. ”

“ Men do not hate unless they fear; the measure of his success and power was the measure of the antagonism he had aroused. The youth whose weakness it had always been to lack an aim had found one now. His education was complete. Intimate observation and experience of a small community had acquainted him with human nature, and had at last roused him to realization of his own capacities and his true vocation. His estimate of himself and his work, he later told John Moore, was pretty nearly as high in 1785 as it was two years later, after all the adulation of Edinburgh. ”

“ She sank before long to the status of a hard-working, child-bearing domestic fixture, losing her good looks—at first sight of her in 1790 John Syme concluded that Burns’s lyrics in her praise were poetic licence—but keeping her equable temper and her devotion to her husband. Of all the women who had loved Burns more or less, and whom he, more or less, had loved, she alone had to live with him. ”

“ Through these men the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries—a nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. ”

“ The Stuarts embodied the ideal of Scotland as an independent nation; even though from the accession of James to the death of Anne they had governed Scotland from London they still commanded the loyalty of their old kingdom. But the Georges were, as Burns said, ‘an obscure, beef-witted, insolent race of foreigners whom a mere conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into prominence and power.’ His phrase summarizes in vigorous prose the spirit of the ribald satirical songs by which Scotland had avenged herself for the humiliations following the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. ”

“ God was the ‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.
In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century and a Scot of his century. ”

“ Touchiness aside, Burns’s position in Edinburgh recalls Benjamin Franklin’s at Versailles a decade before. In each place the fashionable world thought it had discovered a child of nature; in each place the newcomer had really a shrewder mind and a quicker penetration of character and motive than most of the élite who patronized him. The contrast between Burns’s attitude toward Glencairn and toward his fellow peer, the Earl of Buchan, shows how thoroughly the poet had learned to take men’s measure regardless of rank. ”

“ The tradition of the blue-gowns, or licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age as a sort of Edie Ochiltree. ”

“ An honest man has nothing to fear.—If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley—be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the apparent destruction of the man—away with old-wife prejudices and tales!... ”

“ It had a chimney, whereas in many a cottage and farmhouse, long after Burns’s youth—Keats saw plenty of them in Ayrshire in 1818—such of the smoke as did not enter the eyes and lungs of the tenants escaped through the door. But even with a chimney the average farmhouse or labourer’s cottage, with its walls of stone or rammed clay, its earthen floor and thatched roof, and with the fire seldom built up except for cooking, had a winter chill and dampness that bred tuberculosis in the young and rheumatism in the old. ”