William Allan Neilson

“ 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. ”

“ The spirit of that conviviality which was one of Burns's ruling passions, and which in his class helped to color the grayness of daily hardship, was rendered by him in verse again and again: never more triumphantly than in the greatest of his bacchanalian songs, Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut. Indeed it would be hard to find anywhere in our literature a more revealing utterance of those effects of alcohol that are not discussed in scientific literature—the joyous exhilaration, the conviction of (comparative) sobriety, the temporary intensification of the feeling of good fellowship. ”

“ A number of his most popular pieces are the expression of this warm-hearted sympathy, a sympathy not confined to suffering but extending to enjoyment of life and sunshine, and at times leading him to the half-humorous, half-tender ascription to horses and sheep of a quasi-human intelligence. Were we to indulge further our conjectures as to what Burns might have done under more favorable circumstances, it would be easy to argue that he could have ranked with Henryson and La Fontaine as a writer of fables. ”

“ It is true that when Burns took this world at its apparent worst, when Scotch drink meant bestial drunkenness, when Scotch manners meant shameless indecency, when Scotch religion meant blasphemous defiance, he created The Jolly Beggars, which the same critic found a “splendid and puissant production.” We must conclude, then, that sufficient genius can sublimate even a hideously sordid world into a superb work of art, which is presumably beautiful.
But the verdict passed on the Scottish world of Burns is not to be taken without scrutiny. ”

“ Such is the sordid material out of which Burns wrought his greatest imaginative triumph. To take the reader into such a haunt and have him pass the evening in such company, not with disgust and nausea but with relish and joy, is an achievement that stands beside the creation of the scenes in the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. It is accomplished by virtue of the intensity of the poet's imaginative sympathy with human nature even in its most degraded forms, and by his power of finding utterance for the moods of the characters he conceives. ”

“ The ironic apostrophes—to Tam for neglecting his wife's warnings; to shrewish wives, consoling them for their husband's deafness to advice; to John Barleycorn, on the transient courage he inspires; to Tam again, when tragedy seems imminent—are all in perfect tone, and do much to add the element of drollery that mixes so delightfully with the weirdness of the scene. And like the other elements in the poem they are commendably short, for Burns nearly always fulfills Bagehot's requirement that poetry should be “memorable and emphatic, intense, and soon over.” ”

“ But human nature is not to be totally changed even by such a force as the Reformation. Especially among the peasantry occasions recurred—weddings, funerals, harvest-homes, New-Year's Eves, and the like—when, the minister being at a safe distance and whisky having relaxed the awe of the kirk session, the “wee sinfu' fiddle” was produced, and song and the dance broke forth. It was under such clandestine conditions that the traditional songs of Scotland had been handed down for some generations before Burns's day, and the conditions had gravely affected their character. ”

“ 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 ”

“ These characteristics the poet inherited. With all his failures in worldly affairs, he contrived to pay his debts; however obliged to friends and patrons for occasional aid, he never abated his self-respect or became the hanger-on of any man; and he showed throughout his life an eager, receptive, and ever-expanding mind. The seed sown by his father with so much pains and care in his early training fell on fruitful soil, and in the range of his information, as well as in his critical and reasoning powers, Burns became the equal of educated men. ”

“ His love of his kind manifested itself especially in his delight in company, a delight naturally heightened by the enjoyment of the sense of leadership which his superior wit and brilliance gave him in almost any society. The customs of the time associated to an unfortunate degree hard drinking with social intercourse. But more than the whisky he enjoyed the loosening of self-consciousness and the warmth of conviviality that it brought. ”

“ AFTON WATER
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.
Thou stock-dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen,
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear,
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair.
How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,
Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills;
There daily I wander as noon rises high,
My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye. ”

“ The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The attraction of the larger English public and the disuse of the vernacular among the upper classes already discussed, drew to the South or to the Southern speech whatever literary talent appeared in the North, and it seemed for a time that, except for the obscure stream of folk poetry, Scottish vernacular literature was at an end. ”

“ In The Twa Dogs we have an entirely different method. Burns here gives expression to his social philosophy in a contrast between rich and poor, and adds a quaint humor to his criticism by placing it in the mouths of the laird's Newfoundland and the cotter's collie. The dogs themselves are delightfully and vividly characterized, and their comments have a detachment that frees the satire from acerbity without rendering it tame. The account of the life of the idle rich may be that of a somewhat remote observer ”

“ Here's him that's far awa, Willie!
Here's him that's far awa;
And here's the flower that I lo'e best—
The rose that's like the snaw! THERE'LL NEVER BE PEACE TILL JAMIE COMES HAME
By yon castle wa', at the close of the day,
I heard a man sing, tho' his head it was grey:
And as he was singing, the tears down came—
‘There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.
‘The church is in ruins, the state is in jars,
Delusions, oppressions, and murderous wars;
We dare na weel say't, but we ken wha's to blame—
There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame. ”

“ It is doubtful whether Burns knew more of Douglas than the motto to Tam o' Shanter, but from the days of the turbulent bishop in the early sixteenth century down to Burns's own time Scottish poetry had never lost touch with nature, and had rendered it with peculiar faithfulness. It is interesting to note that while The Brigs of Ayr is Burns's most successful attempt at the heroic couplet, and though it contains verses that must have encouraged his ambition to be a Scottish Pope, yet it is sprinkled with touches of natural observation quite remote from the manner of that master. ”

“ Burns was not a drunkard. He seems to have taken little alone, and in the houses of some of his more fashionable 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 constitution, weakened as it was by the excessive toil of his youth. ”

“ If patriotic Scots wish to justify the achievement of Burns on moral grounds, it is here that their argument lies: for whatever of coarseness and license there may have been in his life and writings, it is surely more than counter-balanced by the restoration to his people of the possibility of national music and clean mirth.
One can not classify the songs of Burns into two clearly separated groups, original and remodeled, for no hard lines can be drawn. Since he practically always began with the tune, he frequently used the title or the first line of the old song. ”

“ On his Highland tours Burns saw and admired mountains, but they too appear little in his verse. Though not an unimportant figure in the development of natural description in literature, he had not reached the modern deliberateness in the seeking out of nature's beauties for worship or imitation, so that the phases of natural beauty which we find in his poetry are merely those which had unconsciously become fixed in a memory naturally retentive of visual images. ”

“ When a peasant is chivalrous he is so by virtue of some individual quality, and in spite of rather than because of the spirit of his class. Burns was too acute and too observant not to gather much from the social ideals of the ladies and gentlemen with whom he came in contact, and what he gathered affected his conduct profoundly; but at times under stress of frustrated passion or mortified vanity he reverted to the ruder manners of the peasantry from which he sprang. ”

“ In Winter, a Dirge, the harmony of the poet's spirit with the tempest is the whole theme, and in My Nannie's Awa the same idea is treated with more mature art:
Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray,
And soothe me wi' tidings o' nature's decay;
The dark, dreary winter, and wild-driving snaw
Alane can delight me—now Nannie's awa.
Many poems are introduced with a note of the season, even when it has no marked relation to the tone of the poem. The Cotter's Saturday Night opens with
November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh; The Jolly Beggars with
When lyart leaves bestrew the yird ”

“ Respect for learning has long been wide-spread among the peasantry of Scotland, but it is evident that William Burnes was intellectually far above the average of his class. The schoolmaster Murdoch has left a portrait of him in which he not only extols his virtues as a man but emphasizes his zest for things of the mind, and states that “he spoke the English language with more propriety—both with respect to diction and pronunciation—than any man I ever knew, with no greater advantages.” ”

“ This union, however, has its drawbacks when we come to consider the songs as literature; for to present them as here in bare print without the living tune is to perpetuate a divorce which their author never contemplated. No editor of Burns can fail to feel a pang when he thinks that these words may be heard by ears that carry no echo of the airs to which they were born. Here lies the fundamental reason for what seems to outsiders the exaggerated estimate of Burns in the judgment of his countrymen. What they extol is not mere literature, but song, the combination of poetry and music ”

“ The dominant mood of satire is too antagonistic to imagination. But if we restrict our attention to the characteristic qualities of verse satire—vividness in depicting its object, blazing indignation or bitter scorn in its attitude, and wit in its expression, we shall be forced to grant that Burns achieved here notable success. Of the rarer power of satire to rise above the local, temporal, and personal to the exhibiting of universal elements in human life, there are comparatively few instances in Burns. The Address to the Unco Guid is perhaps the finest example ”

“ But on the artistic side the reformed ministers were the enemies not only of everything that suggested the ornateness of the old religion, but of beauty in every form. Under their influence, an influence extraordinarily pervasive and despotic, art and song were suppressed, and Scotland was left a very mirthless country, absorbed in theological and political discussion, and having little outlet for the instinct of sport except heresy-hunting. ”

“ Somewhat akin in nature is Death and Doctor Hornbook. The purpose is personal satire, Doctor Hornbook being a real person, John Wilson, a schoolmaster in Tarbolton, who had turned quack and apothecary. The figure of Death is an amazingly graphic creation, with its mixture of weirdness and familiar humor; while the attack on Hornbook is managed with consummate skill. Death is made to complain that the doctor is balking him of his legitimate prey, and the drift seems to be complimentary; when in the last few verses it appears that in compensation Hornbook kills far more than he cures. ”

“ The feeling that he was not free to utter what he believed on public affairs was naturally chafing to a man of his independent nature.
Burns's chief enjoyment in these days was the work he was doing for Scottish song. While in Edinburgh he had made the acquaintance of an engraver, James Johnson, who had undertaken the publication of the Scots Musical Museum, a collection of songs and music. Burns agreed to help him by the collection and refurbishing of the words of old songs, and when these were impossible, by providing new words for the melodies. ”

“ Apart from the respects in which Burns is the inheritor and perfecter of the vernacular traditions, and apart from his contact, active or passive, 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 attitude toward life and society such as we are impelled to perceive in the work of Goethe ”