Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 22

ROBERT BURNS.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

We come now to the man who is the great representative of a cla.s.s which is the peculiar glory of Great Britain; that is, to Robert Burns. It is a brilliant feature of English literature, that the people, the ma.s.s, the mult.i.tude, call them what you will, have contributed to it their share, and that share a glorious one. We may look in vain into the literature of every other nation for the like fact. It is true that there may be found in all countries men who, born in the lowest walks of life, orphans, outcasts, slaves even, men laboring under not only all the weight of social prejudices, but under the curse of personal deformity, have, through some one fortunate circ.u.mstance, generally the favor of some one generous and superior person, risen out of their original position, and through the advantages of academical or artistic education, have taken their place among the learned and ill.u.s.trious of their race. We need not turn back to the Esops and Terences of antiquity for such characters; they are easy to select from the annals of middle age, and modern art and learning; but there is a cla.s.s, and this cla.s.s is found in Great Britain alone, which, belonging to the body of the people, has caught, as it were pa.s.singly, just the quantum of education which had come within the people's reach, and who, on this slender partic.i.p.ation of the general intellectual property, have raised for themselves a renown, great, glorious, and enduring as that of the most learned or most socially exalted of mankind. Those extraordinary individuals to whom I have alluded as to be found in the literature of all civilized nations--these men, who, admitted from the ranks of the people to the college or the studio, have distinguished themselves in almost every walk of science or letters--these have vindicated the general intellect of the human race from every possible charge of inequality in its endowments. They have shown triumphantly that "G.o.d is no respecter of persons." They have thus vindicated not only man's universal capacity for greatness, but the Creator's justice. They have demonstrated that "G.o.d has made of one blood all the nations of the earth," and still more, that he has endowed them all with one intellect.

Over the whole bosom of the globe its divine Architect has spread fertility; he has diffused beauty adapted to the diversity of climes, and made that beauty present itself in such a variety of forms, that the freshness of its first perception is kept alive by ever-occurring novelties of construction, hue, or odor. It is the same in the intellectual as in the physical world. In the universal spirit of man he has implanted the universal gifts of his divine goodness. Genius, sentiment, feeling, the vast capacity of knowledge and of creative art, are made the common heritage of mankind. But climate and circ.u.mstance a.s.sert a great and equal influence on the outer and the inner life of the earth. Some nations, under the influences of certain causes, have advanced beyond others; some individuals, under the like causes, have advanced beyond the generality of their cotemporaries. But these facts have not proved that those nations, or those individuals, were more highly endowed than the rest; they have rather proved that the soil of human nature is rich beyond all conception; the extent of that wealth, however, becoming only palpable through the operation of peculiar agencies. The causes which developed in Greece, in Rome, in India, in Egypt, such manifestations of grace, spirit, and power at certain periods, as never were developed even there at any other periods, before or since, present a subject of curious inquiry, but they leave the grand fact the same, and this fact is, that the soul of universal man is endowed with every gift and faculty which any possible circ.u.mstances can call upon him to exert for his benefit, and the adornment of his life.

He is furnished for every good word and work. He is a divine creature, that, when challenged, can prove amply his divinity, though under ordinary circ.u.mstances he may be content to walk through this existence in an ordinary guise. Every great social revolution, every great popular excitement of every age, has amply demonstrated this. There never was a national demand for intellect and energy, from the emanc.i.p.ation of the Israelites from the Egyptian yoke, or the destruction of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, down to the English or the French Revolution, which was not met, to the astonishment of the whole world, with such a supply of orators, poets, warriors, and statesmen, speakers and actors, inventors and constructors, in every shape of art, wisdom, and ability, as most completely to certify that the powers which slumber in the human bosom are far beyond those which are ever called into activity. The fertility of the soil of the earth is there in winter, but it lies unnoticed. The sun breaks out, and, like a giant alarmist thundering at the doors of the world, he awakens a thousand hidden powers. Life, universal as the earth itself, starts forth in its thousand shapes, and all is movement, beauty, sweetness, hurrying on through a charmed being into an exuberant fruit.

Those men, then, who have risen through the medium of a finished education to literary, artistic, or scientific eminence, have, I repeat, vindicated the universality of intellectual endowment; but there is still another cla.s.s, and that, as I have said, peculiar to these islands, who have shown that a finished or academical education even is not absolutely necessary to the display of the highest order of genius.

Circ.u.mstances again have been at work here. The circ.u.mstances of this country are different to those of any other. We have preserved our liberties more entire. The British people have disdained from age to age to suffer the curb and the bit that have been put upon the neck, and into the mouth, of the more pliant nations of the Continent. Whether these circ.u.mstances are to be looked for in the peculiar mixture of races, or in this particular mixture coexisting with peculiarities of climate and insular position, might afford scope to much argument; enough, these circ.u.mstances have existed, and their results do exist in a race, proud, active, free, and indomitable.

"Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pa.s.s by; Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band, By forms unfas.h.i.+oned, fresh from nature's hand, Fierce in their native hardiness of soul; True to imagined right, above control; While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan, And learns to venerate himself as man."

GOLDSMITH, _The Traveler_.

Thus it is that this free const.i.tution of the British Empire; this spirit of general independence; this habit of the peasant and the artisan of venerating themselves as men, has led to a universal awakening of mind in the people. In other countries few think; it is a few who are regularly educated, and arrogate the right to think, and write, and govern. If the poor man become an acknowledged genius, it is only through the pa.s.sage of the high school. The ma.s.s is an inert ma.s.s; it is a laboring, or, at best, a singing and dancing mult.i.tude. But in Great Britain there is not a man who does not feel that he is a member of the great thinking, acting, and governing whole. Without books often he has caught the spark of inspiration from his neighbor. In the field, the work-shop, the ale-house, the Chartist gathering, he has come to the discussion of his rights, and in that discussion all the powers of his spirit have felt the rousing influence of the sea of mind around, that has boiled and heaved from its lowest depths in billows of fire. Under the operation of this oral, and, as it were, forensic education, which has been going on for generations in the British Empire, the whole man, with all his powers, has become wide awake; and it required only the simple powers of writing and reading to enable the peasant or artisan to gather all the knowledge that he needed, and to stand forth a poet, an orator, a scientific inventor, a teacher himself of the nation.

To these circ.u.mstances we owe our Burnses, Hoggs, Bloomfields, Clares, Elliotts, Allan Cunninghams, Bamfords, Nicolls; Thoms; our Thomas Millers and Thomas Coopers. To these circ.u.mstances we owe, however, not merely poets, but philosophers, artists, and men of practical science.

Such were Drew, Opie, Smeaton, Brindley, Arkwright, Strutt, Crompton, Watt; such men are Joseph Barker, the great religious reformer of the people, and Carlton, the vigorous delineator of Irish actual life. For such men we look in vain abroad; and at home they const.i.tute themselves a constellation of genius, such as more than one country of Continental Europe can not muster from all the gathered lights of all its ages.

It is with pride, and more than pride, that I call the attention of my countrymen to this great and unique section of their country's glorious literature. I look to the future, and see in these men but the forerunners of a numerous race springing from the same soil. They are evidences of the awakened mind of the common people of England. They are pledges that out of that awakened mind there will, as general education advances, spring whole hosts of writers, thinkers, and actors, who shall not so merely represent the working cla.s.ses of our society, but shall point out the people as the grand future source of the enrichment of our literature. They are luminous proofs, and the forerunners of mult.i.tudinous proofs of the same kind, that genius is not entirely dependent upon art; but can, having once the simple machinery of reading and writing, seize on sufficient art to enable it to exhibit all the n.o.bler forms of intellectual life, and to speak from heart to heart the living language of those pa.s.sions and emotions, which are the elements of all human exertion after the good and the great, which console in distress, harden to necessary endurance, or fire to the generous rage of conquest over difficulties, and over the enemies of their just rights. These men are the starry lights that glitter on the verge of that dawn in which mankind shall emerge to its true position; the many being the enlightened spirits, and the few the weak exceptions, shrinking like shadows from the noon-day of human progress.

At the head of this great cla.s.s stands, first in stature as in era, Robert Burns. True, before him there had been a Stephen Duck and a Robert Dodsley--glow-worms preceding the morning star; wonders, because the day of genuine minds had not yet come; respectable men, but not geniuses of that t.i.tanic stamp which, by its very appearance, puts an end to every question as to its rank or nature in the utter astonishment at its gigantic presence. There have been many small geniuses paraded before the public as curiosities, because they were uneducated; but when Burns came forth from the crowd of his fellow-men, it was as the poet of the people; issuing like Moses from the cloud of G.o.d's presence, with a face so radiant with divine light, that the greatest prophets of the schools were dazzled at the apparition. He needed no apologies of want of academic discipline; he was a man with all the gifts and powers of a man, fresh and instinctive in their strength as if direct from the Creator's hand. Burns was the representative of the common man in representative perfection. He was a combination of all the powers and the failings, the strength and the weakness of human nature. He had the great intellect of such a specimen man, awakened to its full consciousness, but not polished to the loss of any of its prominences.

He was manly, blunt, daring, independent; full of pa.s.sion and the thirst of pleasure; yet still, tender as a woman, sensitive as a child, and capable of sinking to the humblest penitent at the suggestions of his conscience, or rising to the dignity of a prophet or the sanct.i.ty of an apostle, as the oppressions of man or the sublimity of G.o.d aroused or exalted his spirit. He had the thrilling nerves and the changing moods of the poet; quick, versatile, melancholy, or humorous, he reflected all the changes of the social sky. His sensations were too acute to obey the sole dictates of mere reason--they carried him to every extreme. He was now bursting with merriment in the midst of his convivial comrades, singing like the lark or the nightingale in the joy of his heart; now thundering against the outrages of the strong and arbitrary, or weeping in convulsive grief over his follies or his wounded affections. But if his sensations were too acute to obey reason at all times, his moral-nature was too n.o.ble not to obey the clear voice of a conscience, which he often outraged, but never strove systematically to destroy.

There have not wanted numbers who have wondered that David should be called "a man after G.o.d's own heart." But to me there is nothing wonderful in such an appellation. G.o.d knows that we are weak and imperfect, that in proportion to the strength of our pa.s.sions are we liable to go wrong, and he does not expect miracles from us. What he expects is, that errors committed in the hurricane of pa.s.sion shall be abhorred and repented of, as soon as they are fully displayed to our consciences. To endeavor to do right, yet, if overtaken with error, to abhor our crime, and to repent in the dust and ashes of prostrate remorse, marks a heart frail, yet n.o.ble; and such is human nature at best. The evidence of a corrupt spirit, of a truly criminal nature, is that leaven of malignity, which goes doggedly wrong, subst.i.tuting the base purposes of its selfishness for the broad commands of G.o.d, and finding a satanic pleasure in working evil against its fellow-men. Such was not Robert Burns. He was no faultless monster, nor yet a monster with all his faults. His vivid sensibilities--those sensibilities which gave him the capacity of poetry, those qualities which were the necessary requisites for his vocation--often led him astray, often stained the purity of his mind; but they never succeeded in debasing his moral nature. That was too generous, too n.o.ble, too true to the G.o.dlike gift of a great human heart, which was to feel for all mankind, and to become the inspirer of the general ma.s.s with truer and higher ideas of themselves, and of their rank in creation. Woefully fell David of old--the poet taken from the sheepfold and the solitude of the wilderness to sit on the throne of a great people--and bitterly in the sight of that people did he lie in the dust and deplore his errors.

Awfully went Robert Burns astray--the poet taken from the plow to sit on the throne of the realm of poetry--and bitterly did he, too, bow down and weep in the ashes of repentance. G.o.d gave, in both instances, impressive proofs to the world, that glorious talents given to men leave them but men still; and that they who envy the gift should not forget that they too would be exposed to the imminent danger of the fall. There is a comfort and a warning, there is a great moral lesson for mankind in the lives of such men; there is a great lesson of humility and charity.

Who shall say that with a nature equally igneous and combustible, his delinquencies would not be far greater? Where is the man in ten millions that, with such errors on one side of the account, can place the same talents and virtues on the other? In the words of Burns himself,

"Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us; He knows each chord its--various tone, Each spring--its various bias; Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it; What's _done_ we partly may compute, But know not what's _resisted_."

The errors of Burns were visited upon him severely in his day; they stand recorded against him; no man can plead his example, for he condemned himself, and the consequences of his aberrations stand warningly side by side with the deeds themselves; but who is he that, with all the perfections of a monotonous propriety, shall confer the same benefits on his country and on his fellow-men? There was in the nature of Burns a manliness, a contempt of every thing selfish and mean, a contempt of all distinctions not based on nature, a hatred of tyranny, a withering scorn of hypocrisy, which, had he not possessed the brilliant genius that he did, would, among his cotemporaries, have diffused that tone of honest uprightness and justness of thinking which are the truest safeguards of a country's liberties and honor, and would have stamped him as a remarkable man. But all these qualities were but the accompaniments of a genius the most brilliant, the wonders and delights of which stand written, as it were, in lightning forever.

Besides the irresistible contagion of his merriment, the flashes of wit, the tenderness of his sentiment, the wild laughter of his satiric scorn of cant, and priestcraft, and self-righteousness, the ardor of his patriotism, the gayety of his social songs, there is a tone in his graver writing which breathes over the hearts of his countrymen, and of all the world, the highest and most dignifying feeling that ever hallowed the heart of man.

With Burns, to be a man is the grand distinction. All other distinctions are but the clothes which wrap the figure--the figure itself is the real thing. To be a man, in his eye, was to be the most glorious thing that we have any conception of on this side of heaven; to be an honest man was to be "the n.o.blest work of G.o.d!" That was the great sentiment which animated him, and made him come forth from between the stilts of his plow, from his barn or his byre, into the presence of wealth and t.i.tle, with a calm dignity and a proud bearing which astonished the artificial creatures of society. t.i.tles, carriages, gay garments, great houses, what are they but the things which _the man_ had gathered about him for his pride or his comfort? It was for _the man_ that they were created and gathered together. Without _the man_ they were nothing, had no value, could have no existence. Without that solid, and central, and sentient monarch, t.i.tles are but air, gay clothes but the furniture of a Jew's shop, great houses but empty, useless sh.e.l.ls, carriages no better than wheel-barrows. From _the man_ they derived all they were or counted for; and Burns felt that he and his poorest brother of the spade, and poorest sister of the spindle, were as entirely and essentially that as the king upon his throne. The king upon his throne!

He was set there and arrayed in all his pageantry, and armed with all his power, solely for _the man_ and by _the man_. In _the man_ and his inner life, the heart, the soul, and the sentiment--that wondrous mystery which, prisoned in flesh and chained by matter to one corner of the limitless universe, yet is endowed with power to range through eternity--to plunge down amid innumerable worlds and their swarming life--to soar up and wors.h.i.+p at the foot-stool of the Framer and Upholder of suns and systems, the Father of all being--in him the poet recognized the only monarch of this nether world. For _him_, not for lords, or millionnaires, or mitered priests, but for him was this august world created. For him were its lands and waters spread abroad; for him the seasons set forward in the harmony of their progress; for him were empires and cities framed, and all the comforts of life, and the precious flowers of love and intellect breathed into the common air, and shed into the common heart. That was the feeling of Robert Burns, which made him tread down all other distinctions as he did the thistles of his own fields. That was the doctrine which he was as surely created and sent forth to preach, as Jesus Christ was to promulgate that glorious Gospel whose especial mission he declared was to the poor. Robert Burns was the apostle of the dignity of man--man, in his own proper nature, standing calmly and invincibly above every artful distinction which sought to thrust him from his place in G.o.d's heritage, and set over him the selfish and the base. When contemplating such delusive distinctions, the winged words,

"A man's a man for a' that!"

burst like a lightning flash from the poet's bosom, and became the eternal watchword of self-respecting humanity.

"The king can make a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; The rank is but the guinea stamp, A man's a man for a' that!"

Brave words! glorious truth! The soul of poetry and the whole science of social philosophy compressed into a single stanza, to serve as the stay and comfort of millions of hearts in every moment when most needed.

The pre-eminent merit of Burns, independent of his beauties as a fine poet, is the vigorous inculcation of these sentiments of a just self-estimation into the people. To teach them to regard themselves as objects of worth from their own human nature and destiny, irrespective of the mere mode by which they live, is to confer on the million the n.o.blest benefaction. It is to give them at once a s.h.i.+eld against "the proud man's contumely" and the degradations of vice. It is to set their feet on the firm rock of an eternal truth, and to render them alike invulnerable to envy and despair. The man who breathes the soul of a rational dignity into the mult.i.tude is the greatest of possible patriots. He who respects virtue and purity in himself will respect those qualities in others; and a nation permeated with the philosophy of Burns would be the n.o.blest nation that the sun ever yet shone upon.

But it is not merely that Robert Burns teaches his fellow-peasants and citizens to fling out of their bosoms the fiends of envy and self-depreciation; taught by those errors for which he has been so severely blamed, he has become, without question, the most efficient, wise, and tender counselor that they ever had. He knows all their troubles and temptations, for he has experienced them; and he gives them the soundest advice under all circ.u.mstances. He weeps with them, he rejoices with them, he wors.h.i.+ps with them, in such a brotherly, and occasionally such a fatherly sympathy, that his poems have become to the poor of Scotland, as they have told me, a sort of second Bible. How beautifully are blended in these stanzas the indignant sense of those oppressions which never crushed more directly the laboring poor than they do at this day in wealthy England, and the consoling truth of a divine retribution:

"Many and sharp the numerous ills Inwoven with our frame: More pointed still we make ourselves Regret, remorse, and shame!

And man, whose heaven-erected face The smiles of love adorn, Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.

"See yonder poor o'erlabored wight, So abject, mean, and vile, Who begs a brother of the earth To give him leave to toil; And see his lordly fellow worm The poor pet.i.tion spurn, Unmindful, though a weeping wife And helpless offspring mourn.

"If I'm designed yon lordling's slave, By nature's law designed, Why was an independent wish E'er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to His cruelty and scorn?

Or why has man the will and power To make his fellow mourn?

"Yet let not this too much, my son.

Disturb thy youthful breast; This partial view of human kind Is surely not the last!

The poor, oppressed, honest man, Had never, sure, been born, Had there not been some recompense To comfort those that mourn!"

Robert Burns ran off the rail-road line of morality; but listen to the advice, warned by his own folly, which he gives to a Young Friend.

"The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love, Luxuriantly indulge it, But never tempt the illicit rove, Tho' naething should divulge it, I waive the quantum o' the sin, The hazard of concealing; But, och! it hardens a' within, And petrifies the feeling!

"To catch Dame Fortune's golden smile, a.s.siduous wait upon her; And gather gear by every wile That's justified by honor: Not for to hide it in a hedge, Nor for a train attendant, But for the glorious privilege Of being independent.

"The fear o' h.e.l.l's a hangman's whip To haud the wretch in order, But where ye feel your honor grip, Let that aye be your border: Its slightest touches, instant pause-- Debar a' side pretenses, And resolutely keep its laws, Uncaring consequences.

"The great Creator to revere Must sure become the creature, But still the preaching cant forbear, And e'en the rigid feature; Yet ne'er with wits profane to range, Be complaisance extended; An Atheist's laugh's a poor exchange For Deity offended!

"When ranting round in pleasure's ring, Religion may be blinded, Or if she gie a random sting, It may be little minded; But when on life we're tempest driven, A conscience but a canker-- A correspondence fixed wi' Heaven Is sure a n.o.ble anchor!"

These are golden words, worthy to be committed to memory by every young person; they are full of the deepest wisdom. But such wisdom, such golden lines, we might quote from almost every page of Burns. In his Epistle to Davie, how cordially does he enter into all the miseries of the poor, yet how eloquently does he also dwell on those blessings which G.o.d has given to all, and which no circ.u.mstances can take away!

"To lie in kilns and barns at e'en, When banes are crazed and bluid is thin, Is doubtless great distress!"

Yet there are other seasons when Nature, even to the most abject tramp, pours out royal pleasures.

"What though, like commoners of air, We wander out we know not where, But either house or hall?

Yet Nature's charms, the hills and woods, The sweeping vales, and foaming floods, Are free alike to all.

In days when daisies deck the ground, And blackbirds whistle clear, With honest joy our hearts will bound To see the coming year.

On braes when we please, then, We'll sit and sowth a tune; Syne rhyme till't, we'll time till't, And sing't when we hae done."

"It's no in t.i.tles nor in rank; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest: It's no in makin muckle mair; It's no in books; its no in lear; To make us truly blest; If happiness hae not her seat And center in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great.

But never can be blest.

Nae treasures, nor pleasures, Could make us happy lang; The heart ay's the part ay, That makes us right or wrang."

So speaks the humble plowman of Ayrs.h.i.+re, the still humbler exciseman of Dumfries, but the greatest poet of his country, and one of the n.o.blest and wisest men of any country or age, spite of all his practical errors.

We must now make our pilgrimage to the spots which were his homes on earth.

The old town of Ayr, so intimately connected with the memory of Burns, by his birth near it, by his poem of the Twa Brigs, by the scene of Tam O'Shanter, by the place of his monument and the festival in his honor, and by other particulars, is a quiet and pleasant old town of some twenty thousand population. It lies on a level, sandy coast, on land which, in fact, appears to have been won from the sea. Though lying close on the sea, it has no good harbor, and therefore little commerce, and no manufacture of any account. These circ.u.mstances leave much of the town as it was in Burns's time, though there are also evidences of modern extension and improvement, in new streets and public buildings, especially of a county jail lying between the town and the sh.o.r.e. The moment you step out of the station of the Glasgow railway, which terminates here, you come upon the mouth of the River Ayr, and behold the Twa Brigs. That which was the New Brig in Burns's days, is the one over which you pa.s.s into the town. This bridge, whose guardian sprite is made to swagger over the Auld Brig, if it has not fulfilled the prophecy of the Auld Brig, and been swept away by a flood, has been in danger of demolition, having grown too narrow for the increase of traffic. It has been saved, however, no doubt by the saving power of Burns's poetry, which has made it sacred, and it was undergoing the process of widening at the time I was there, in July, 1845. The Auld Brig is some hundred yards or so higher up the stream, and seems retained really for little more than its antiquity and poetic cla.s.sicality. It is now used only as a footpath, and, not being considered safe for carriages, has posts set up at the end to prevent every attempt with any carriage to pa.s.s it. One is irresistibly reminded, on going upon it, of the haughty query of the New Brig:

"Will your poor narrow footpath of a street, Where two wheel-barrows tremble when they meet, Your ruined, formless bulk o' stane an' lime, Compare wi' bonnie brigs o' modern time?"