Qass. Book. tion. The Cotter's Dog and the Laird's Dog are, as has been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters' lives, and their Lairds'. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humour and power. No doubt it is done from the peasant's point of view. The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justice done to them ; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just when the caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the edge of it is turned by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of " Some gentle master, Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin, For Britain's guid his saul indentin — " Then Caesar, the rich man's dog, replies — " Haith, lad, ye little ken about it : For Britain's guid ! — guid faith ! I doubt it. Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him, An' saying aye or no 's they bid him : 192 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. At operas an' plays parading, Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading : Or, may be, in a frolic daft, To Hague or Calais takes a waft. To make a tour an' tak a whirl. To learn hon ton^ an' see the worl'. " Then, at Vienna or Versailles, He rives his father's auld entails ; Or by Madrid he takes the rout. To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt. ***** For Britain's guid ! for her destruction ! Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction." Then exclaims Luatb, the poor man's dog — " Hech, man ! dear sirs ! is that the gate They waste sae mony a braw estate ! Are we sae foughten and harass'd For gear to gang that gate at last ?" And yet he allows, that for all that ' " Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows." " Mark the power of that one word, ' nowt,' " said the late Thomas Aird. " If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all that way ' to fecht wi' nowt.' It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly." I Or turn to the poem of Halloween. Here he has sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment — painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and lasses, sires and VIII.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 193 dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the re- membrance of antique customs and superstitious observ- ances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, and have now all but disappeared. Or again, take The auld Farmer's New-y ear-morning Salutation to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a common- place, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough set- ting her face to the furzy braes. " Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, Wi' pith an' pow'r, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit. Ah' slypet owre." To paraphrase this, " Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over." The latter part of this para- phrase is taken from Chambers. AVhat pure English words could have rendered these things as compactly and graphically ? Of The Cotter^s Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns's highest level. The metre was not native to him. It con- tains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are 9* 194 EGBERT BURNS. [chap. heavy. But as Lockliart has said, in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the better nature that was originally in him. It shows how Burns could reverence the old national piety, however lit- tle he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two great national poets has described Scot- tish character on the side of that grave, deep, though un- demonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic ele- ment in it. No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sym- pathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to them- selves, 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. He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that oth- erwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of them- selves on a large scale — of themselves, both in their virtues and in their vices. Secondly. Burns in his poetry was not only the inter- preter of Scotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue that followed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her Parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all sym- bols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprung up in Edin- VIII.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 195 burgh wlio, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotclimen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotti- cism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his sub- ject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers. At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate ; to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon the power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patri- otism was not merely local ; the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he ac- complished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that " the old kingdom " has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to- day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Bums, who first turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufact- uring ugliness, if she had been left without her two " sa- cred poets." Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class nor country ; they had something more 196 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the characters of states- men and politicians, yet with what "random shots o' countra wit " did he hit off the public men of his time ! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke ! The elder and the younger Pitt, " yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox," as he irreverently calls him — if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.'s of the time, from — "That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas" to— That glib-gabbit Highland baron The Laird o' Graham," and — Erskine a spunkie Norlan bilUe," — he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of his fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would not have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then his moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limi- tations — his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his own cause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral in- sight, piercing to the quick ! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs in all lands — " mottoes of the heart !" VIII.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 197 Such are — " wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursel as ithers see us : It wad f rae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion ;" Or tlie mucli-quoted — " Facts are chiels that winna ding And downa be disputed ;" Or— " The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right or wrang." Who on the text, "lie that is without sin among you, let him first east a stone," ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his Address to the unco Guid? and in his epistle of advice to a young friend, what wisdom ! what in- cisive aphorisms ! In passages like these scattered through- out his writings, and in some single poems, he has passed beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken home to the universal human heart. And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of human brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began towards the end of last century, and which found utterance through Cowper first of the English poets, there has been no voice in literature, then or since, which has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then his humanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to his lower fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, the worn-out mare, the field-mouse, the wounded hare, have long been household words. In this tenderness to- wards animals we see another point of likeness between him and Cowper. Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has the same clear eye, the same open heart that he has for man. His love of nature is intense, but very simple and 198 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. direct, no subtilizings, nor refinings about it, nor any of that nature -worship which soon after his time came in. Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into the outward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sym- pathy. Everywhere in his poetry, nature comes in, not so much as a being independent of man, but as the back- ground of his pictures of life and human character. How true his perceptions of her features are, how pure and transparent the feeling she awakens in him ! Take only two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes the burn in his Halloween — " Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, As thro' the glen it wimpl't ; Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays, Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't ; Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle ; Whyles cookit underneath the braes, Below the spreading hazel, Unseen that night." Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described ? The next verse can hardly be omitted — " Amang the brachens on the brae, Between her an' the moon, The deil, or else an outler quey. Gat up an' gae a croon : Poor Leezie's heart maist lap the hool ; Near lav'rock height she jumpit ; But naiss'd a fit, an' in the pool Out-owre the lugs she plumpit, Wi' a plunge that night." "Maist lap the hool," what condensation in that Scotch phrase ! The hool is the pod of a pea — poor Lizzie's heart almost leapt out of its encasing sheath. VIII.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 199 Or look at this other picture : " Upon a simmer Sunday morn, When Nature's face is fair, I walked forth to view the com, And snuff the caller air. The risin' sun owre Galston muirs Wi' glorious light was glintin ; The hares were hirplin down the furrs. The lav'rocks they were chantin Fu' sweet that day." I have noted only some of the excellences of Burns's poetry, which far outnumber its blemishes. Of these last it is unnecessary to speak ; they are too obvious, and what- ever is gross, readers can of themselves pass by. Burns's most considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, were almost all written before he went to Edin- burgh. There is, however, one memorable exception. Tarn d' Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to EUisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a tran- script of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. But in Tarn o' Shanter he had let loose his powers upon the materials of past experiences, and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pure imag- inative creation. In no other instance, except perhaps in The Jolly Beggars, had he done this ; and in that cantata, if the genius is equal, the materials are so coarse, and the sentiment so gross, as to make it, for all its dramatic pow- er, decidedly offensive. It is strange what very opposite judgments have been formed of the intrinsic merit of Tarn o' Shanter. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have been written " all but quite as well by a man, who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent ; that it is not so much a 200 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart of the story still lies hard and dead." On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott has recorded this verdict : " In the inimita- ble tale of Tarn o' Shanter, Burns has left us sufficient evi- dence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with the awful and even the horrible. No poet, with the exception of Shakespeare, ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid tran- sitions. His humorous description of death in the poem on Dr. Hornbrook, borders on the terrific ; and the witches' dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at once ludicrous and hor- rible." Sir AValter, I believe, is right, and the world has sided with him in his judgment about Tarn o' Shanter. Nowhere in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there to be found so much of the power of which Scott speaks — that of combining in rapid transition almost contradic- tory emotions — if we except perhaps one of Scott's own highest creations, the tale of Wandering Willie, in Bed- ff auntie t. On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but a few sentences must here suffice. It is in his songs that his soul comes out fullest, freest, brightest ; it is as a song- writer that his fame has spread widest, and will longest last. Mr. Carlyle, not in his essay, which does full justice to Burns's songs, but in some more recent work, has said something like this, " Our Scottish son of thunder had, for want of a better, to pour his lightning through the narrow cranny of Scottish song — the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son of thunder." The narrowest, it may be, but the most effective, if a man desires to come close to his fellow-men, soul to soul. Of all forms of lit- erature the genuine song is the most penetrating, and the most to be remembered ; and in this kind Burns is the su- Tin.] CUARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 201 preme master. To make liim tliis, two things combined. First, there was the great background of national melody and antique verse, coming down to him from remote ages, and sounding through his heart from childhood. He was cradled in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never could have sung so well. No one knew better than he did, or would have owned more feelingly, how much he owed to the old forgotten song-writers of his country, dead for ages before he lived, and lying in their unknown graves all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied ea- gerly the old tunes, and the old words where there were such, that had come down to him from the past, treasured every scrap of antique air and verse, conned and crooned them over till he had them by heart. This was the one form of literature that he had entirely mastered. And from the first he had laid it down as a rule, that the one way to catch the inspiration, and rise to the true fervour of song, was, as he phrased it, " to soioth the tune over and over," till the words came spontaneously. The words of his own songs were inspired by pre-existing tunes, not composed first, and set to music afterwards. But all this love and study of the ancient songs and outward melody would have gone for nothing, but for the second element, that is the inward melody born in the poet's deepest heart, which received into itself the whole body of national song ; and then when it had passed through his soul, sent it forth ennobled and glorified by his own genius. That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar inten- sity of his nature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibil- ity, the headlong passion, all thrilling through an intellect strong and keen beyond that of other men. How myste- rious to reflect that the same qualities on their emotional side made him the great songster of the world, and on 202 KOBEKT BURNS. [chap. their practical side drove him to ruin ! The first word which Burns composed was a song in praise of his partner on the harvest-rig ; the last utterance he breathed in verse was also a song — a faint remembrance of some former affection. Between these two he composed from two to three hundred. It might be wished, perhaps, that he had written fewer, especially fewer love songs ; never composed under pressure, and only when his heart was so full he could not help singing. This is the condition on which alone the highest order of songs is born. Probably from thirty to forty songs of Burns could be named which come up to this highest standard. No other Scottish song-writ- er could show above four or five of the same quality. Of his songs one main characteristic is that their subjects, the substance they lay hold of, belongs to what is most per- manent in humanity, those primary affections, those per- manent relations of life which cannot change while man's nature is what it is. In this they are wholly unlike those songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. As the phases of social life change, these are forgotten. But no time can superannuate the subjects which Burns has sung; they are rooted in the primary strata, which are steadfast. Then, as the subjects are primary, so the feel- ing with which Burns regards them is primary too — that is, he gives us the first spontaneous gush — the first throb of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, manly heart. The feeling is not turned over in tlie reflective faculty, and there artistically shaped — not subtilized and refined away till it has lost its power and freshness ; but given at first hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is at his best, you seem to hear the whole song warbling through his spirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and vm.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 203 transfigured by it. No one else has so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most per- fect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in Ye Banks and Braes. In the best of them the outward form is as perfect as the inward music is all- pervading, and the two are in complete harmony. To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate and consummate expression to fundamental hu- man emotions, four songs may be mentioned, in each of which a different phase of love has been rendered for all time — " Of a' the airts the wind can blaw," " Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon," " Go fetch to me a pint o' wine ;" and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically — " John Anderson, my Jo, John." Then for comic humour of courtship, there is — " Duncan Gray cam here to woo." For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's trou- bles, yet keeps " aye a heart aboon them a'," we have — ", Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair." For friendship rooted in the past, there is — " Should auld acquaintance be forgot," even if we credit antiquity with some of the verses. For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of 204 ROBERT BURNS. [char finer feeling, there is Macpherson^ s Farewell. For patri- otic heroism — " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled ;" and for personal independence, and sturd}^, if self-assert- ing, manhood — " A man's a man for a' that." These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which Burns has given such consummate expression, as will stand for all time. In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is so greatly to the honour of Burns. He was em- phatically the purifier of Scottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also a few among his songs, which we could wish that he had never written. But we who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine how much he did to purify and elevate our national melo- dies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but to compare Burns's songs with the collection of Scottish songs published by David Herd, in 1769, a few years be- fore Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well what he spoke of, the late Thomas Aird, has said, " Those old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had long been set. How was the plague to be stayed ? All the preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness from the music. The only way was to put something better in its stead. This inestimable something better Burns gave us." So purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody human emotion in its most condensed and sweetest es- sence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they Till.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 205 clieer toil-worn men under every clime. AVhercver the English tongue is beard, beneath the suns of India, amid African deserts, on the western prairies of America, among the squatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood w^ould give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial feelings, it is to the songs of Burns they spontaneously turn, and find in them at once a perfect utterance, and a fresh tie of brotherhood. It is this which forms Burns's most enduring claim on the world's gratitude. THE END. 2^07^ ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. These short Books are addressed to the general public, with a view both to stirring and satisfying an interest in literature and its great topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense class is growing up, and must every year increase, whose education will have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature, and capable of in- telligent curiosity as to their performances. The series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity to an extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty. The following volumes are now ready : JOHNSON Lkslie Stephen. GIBBON J. C. MoRisoN. SCOTT R. H. HuTTON. SHELLEY. J. A. Symoncs. HUME Professor Huxley. GOLDSMITH William Black. DEFOE William Mlnto. *- BURNS Principal Shairp. SPENSER The Dean of St. Paul's. THACKERAY Antuont Tuollope. / BURKE John Morley. MILTON Mark Pattisoxn. SOUTHEY , Professor Dowden. CHAUCER Professor A. W. Warp. BUNYAN J.A. Feoude. COWPER GoLPWiN Smith. POPE Leslie Stephen. ' BYRON...... John Nicuol. LOCKE Thomas Fowleb. WORDSWORTH F.Myers. 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume. HAWTHORNE. By Hbney James, Jr 12mo, Cloth, $1 00. VOLUMES IN PREPARATION : SWIFT John Morley. GRAY John Morley. ADAM SMITH Leonard H. Courtney. ■" LANDOR Professor Sidney Colvin. - BENTLEY Professor Jebb. Others will he announced. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. t^" H.vuper & Brothers will send any of the above works Ig mail,postag0 prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price. cl'SI'B 7/6, BUMS'S LIFE AND WORKS. The Life and Works of Eobert Burns. Edited by Robert Cha^ieers. 4 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $6 00 ; Half Calf, $13 00. Mr. Chambers's edition is the completest presentation of the Scot- tish poet in existence. The various compositions are here strmig in strict chronological order upon the Memoir, that they may render up the whole light which they are qualified to throw upon the history of the life and mental progress of Burns, while a new significance is given to them by their being read in connection with the current of events and emotions which led to their production. The result of this plan is not merely a great amount of new biographical detail, but a new sense, efficacy, and feeling in the writings of the poet himself. All that remains of Burns, the writings he has left, seem to us no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete ; that wanted all things for completeness — culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. * * * There is something in his poems which forbids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. * * * The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose ; but, at the same time, it is plain, and easily recog- nized — his indisputable air of truth. — Thomas Carlyle. Burns is by far the greatest poet that ever sprung from the bosom of the people, and lived and died in an humble condition. He was born a poet, if ever man was, and to his native genius alone is ow- ing the perpetuity of his fame. * * * Whatever be the faults or the defects of the poetry of Burns — and no doubt it has many — it has, beyond all that was ever written, this greatest of all merits, intense, life-pervading, and life-breathing truth. — Professor Wilson ( Christo- pher North). Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. t^" Sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receix>t of the price. — '^^^^ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: March 2009 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111