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Chap. Copyright NcC-S.
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
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BY A. J. GEORGE, A.M.
WORDSWORTH'S PRELUDE. With Notes.
SELECTIONS FROM WORDSWORTH. With Notes.
WORDSWORTH'S PREFACES AND ESSAYS ON POETRY.
With Notes.
SELECT POEMS OF ROBERT BURNS. With Notes.
TENNYSON'S PRINCESS. With Notes.
COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL ESSAYS, (From Biographia Literaria )
With Notes,
BURKE'S SPEECHES ON THE AMERICAN WAR, AND LETTER
TO THE SHERIFFS OF BRISTOL. With Notes.
BURKE'S SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA. With
Notes.
SELECT SPEECHES OF DANIEL WEBSTER. With Notes.
THE BUNKER HILL ORATION, With Notes.
SYLLABUS OF ENGLISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE,
CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS. With Notes.
COLERIDGE'S ANCIENT MARINER. With Notes.
In Preparation.
Wordsworth's Excursion and White Doe of Rylstone.
Select Poems of Coleridge.
The History and Literature of Scotland :
I. The Highlands, II. Border,
THOMAS CARLYLE.
CARLYLE'S
ESSAY ON BURNS
EDITED, WITH E\TRODUCTION AND NOTES,
KY
ANDREW J. GEORGE, M.A.
Department of English, High School, Newton, Mass.
CARLYLE'S BIRTHPLACE, ECCLEFECHAN
r.\
BOSTON, U.S.A. r^ ^1, ^ -
D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
1897
<^'
Copyright, 1897,
Ey Andrew J. George.
C. J. PETERS & SON, TYPOGRAPHERS.
ROCKWELL & CHURCHILL, PRINTERS
TO
E. CHARLTON BLACK,
This Edition- of the Masterpiece of his
Distinguished Countryman
IS inscribed
In Memory of the pleasaxtest of
Literary Friendships.
The only knowledge that can really make us better is not
of things and their laws, but of persons and their thoughts ; and
I would rather have an hour's sympathy with one noble heart
than read the law of gravitation through and through. To
teach us what to love, and what to hate, whom to honor and
whom to despise, is the substance of all training.
James Martineau.
PREFACE.
' What is true at last will tell :
Few at first will place thee well ;
Some too low would have thee shine,
Some too high — no fault of thine —
Hold thine own, and work thy will !
Year will graze the heel of year,
But seldom comes the Poet here,
And the Critic's rarer still.'
Matthew Arnold has taught us the true function of
the critic, and has made it possible for us to value him at
his real worth — a worth only second to that of the crea-
tors of our literature. ' I am bound,' he says, ' by my own
definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavor to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in the
world' We become disinterested interpreters when we lay
aside the personal estimate and the historical estimate, and
seek the real estimate. 'The critical power,' he says, 'is
of lower rank than the creative. True ; but in assenting to
this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind.
It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that
a free creative activity, is the highest function of man ; it is
proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness.
But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of
exercising this free creative activity in other ways than in
producing great works of literature or art; if it were not
v
vi PREFACE.
so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the
true happiness of all men. They may have it in well-
doing, they may have it in learning, they may have it in
interpreting/
During the quarter of a century that followed the death
of Burns the great creative impulse which began in the last
half of the eighteenth century reached its height, and the
intellectual life of the new generation had not been voiced.
Byron, Shelley, and Keats, Scott, Wordsworth, and Cole-
ridge, had sung their mine dimittis.
The event of the death of Burns was followed by an
unusual activity on the part of a few whose function it was
to be the chroniclers of small beer in the region of biog-
raphy and criticism. An attempt was made to pluck out
the heart of the mystery of Robert Burns; and while we
may not question the motives of these writers, we have to
deplore their singular unfitness for such a delicate task,
Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, in his introduction to the Cor-
7-espondence of Carlyle and Emerson, says : ' The decade
from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dullness in
English thought and imagination. But toward the end of
this time a series of articles, mostly on German literature,
appearing in the Edinburgh and in the Foreign Quarterly
Review, an essay on Burns, another on Voltaire, still more
a paper entitled ' Characteristics,' displayed the hand of a
master, and a spirit in full sympathy with the hitherto
unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its time, and ca-
pable of giving them expression. Here was a writer whose
convictions were based upon principles, and whose words
stood for realities.'
That Carlyle's first great work in literary criticism should
be upon his brother Scot was natural and appropriate, in
view of the influences of heredity and environment which
PREFACE. vii
played so important a part in developing the genius both
of Burns and himself.
Carlyle was born and reared within a day's walk of Ayr
and the ' auld clay biggin ' in which Burns first saw the
light. His early days, like those of Burns, were spent in
a homely cottage built by the honest toil of the sturdy
father and consecrated by the sacrifice and prayers of the
devout mother. Like Burns, too, he was blessed by the
ministrations of parents distinguished for intelligence, cour-
age, thrift, industry, and deep religious conviction, —
True to the kindred points of heaven and home.
It is but natural, therefore, that the finest traits of these
fathers and mothers should appear intensitied in these chil-
dren of genius.
It is in these homes that we must seek for the origin of
that subtle affinity by which the younger was able to inter-
pret the mind and art of his distinguished countr3-man to
the men of his generation.
Mr. Barrie says : < A Scotch family are probably better
acquainted with each other, and more ignorant of the life
outside their circle, than any other family in the world.
And as knowledge is sympathy, the affection existing be-
tween them is almost painful in its intensity ; they have not
more to give than their neighbors, but it is bestowed upon
a few instead of being distributed among many ; they are
reputed niggardly, but for family affection at least they pay
in gold. In this, I believe, we shall find the true explana-
tion why Scotch literature, since long before the days of
Burns, has been so often inspired by the domestic hearth,
and has treated it with a passionate understanding.'
Let us glance at the occupants of these homes of rusticity.
viii PREFACE.
peace, and happy poverty, as they have been sketched for
us by the children.
Burns says : ' My father was of the north of Scotland, the
son of a farmer, and was thrown by early misfortunes on
the world at large ; where after many years of wanderings
and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity of ob-
servation and experience, to which I am indebted for most
of my little pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few
who understood men, their manners and their ways, equal
to him. We were very poor; but it was his dearest wish
and prayer to have it in his power to keep his children
under his own eye, till they could discern between good
and ill.
'He bade me act a manly part,
Though I had ne'er a farthing, O.'
The remainder of this description may be read in the Cot-
ter's Satiirday Night.''
Murdock, the teacher of Burns, describes the father and
mother as follows : ' She is a patient, virtuous, industrious
housewife, greatly devoted to her husband. The worthy
woman had the most thorough esteem for her husband of
any woman I ever knew. I can by no means wonder that
she highly esteemed him, for I myself have always consid-
ered William Burness as by far the best of the human race
I had the pleasure of being acquainted with. He was an
excellent husband, if I may judge from his assiduous atten-
tion to the ease and comfort of his worthy partner, and
from her affectionate behaviour toward him, as well as her
unwearied attention to the duties of a mother. He spoke
the English language with more propriety than any man I
ever knew with no greater advantages. This had a very
good effect on the boys, who began to talk and reason
PREFACE. ix
like men much sooner than their neighbors. In that two-
roomed cottage, that tabernacle of clay, there dwelt a larger
portion of content than in any palace in Europe.'
Carlyle says of his ancestors : ' They had to scramble,
scraffle, for their very clothes and food. They knit, they
thatched for hire, they hunted. My father tried all these
things almost from boyhood. His hunting years were not
useless to him. Misery was early training the rugged boy
into a stoic, that one day he might be the assurance of a
Scottish man. Ours was not a joyful life, yet a safe and
quiet one ; above most others, or any other I have wit-
nessed, a wholesome one. We were taciturn rather than
talkative, but if little was said, that little had generally a
meaning.
' More remarkable man than my father I have never met
in my journey through life ; sterling sincerity in thought,
word, and deed, most quiet, but capable of blazing into
whirlwinds when needful, and such a flash of just insight
and brief natural eloquence and emphasis, true to every
feature fit as I have never known in any other. Humour of
a most grim Scandinavian type he occasionally had ; wit
rarely or never — too serious for wit — my excellent mother
with perhaps the deeper piety in most senses had also the
most sport. No man of my day, or hardly any man, can
have had better parents. None of us will ever forget that
bold glowing style of his. Never shall we again hear such
speech as that was. The whole district knew of it. In
anger he had no need of oaths ; his words were like sharp
arrows that smote into the very heart.'
William Burness upon his deathbed showed some signs
that he was worried about the future of his children ; and
Robert, finding that he was the cause of this, burst into
tears. In February, 17S4, the poet writes: 'On the 13th
X PREFACE.
current I lost the best of fathers. I cannot remember the
tender endearments and parental lessons of the best of
friends and ablest of instructors without feeling what per-
haps the calmer dictates of reason would partly condemn.
' The pitying heart that felt for human woe ;
The dauntless heart that fear'd no human pride ;
The friend of man, to vice alone a foe :
For e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side.'
Carlyle writing to the family after his father's death
says : ' None of us but started in life with far greater ad-
vantages than our dear father had ; we will not weep for
him, but we will go and do as he has done. Could I write
my books as he built his houses, and walk my way so man-
fully through this shadow world, and leave it with so little
blame, it were more than all my hopes. Neither are you,
my beloved mother, to let your heart be heavy. Faithfully
you toiled by his side, bearing and forbearing as you both
could.'
While studying these Scots' homes it may not be amiss to
glance into that humble cottage in Thrums where sits that
devoted mother weaving her ' new clouty hearthrug,' while
her young son is WTiting in the garret those sketches out of
which one day is to be evolved Auld Licht Idylls. The
weaving is interrupted now and then by a descent from the
garret; for, says Mr, Barrie: 'When I had finished a chapter
I bounded down-stairs to read it to her ; and so short were
the chapters, so ready was the pen, that I was back with
a new manuscript before another clout had been added to
the rug.'
In the beautiful biography of that mother he speaks of
the mute blue eyes in which he had read all he knew and
PREFACE. xi
would ever care to write ; ' when you looked into my
mother's eyes you knew as if He had told you why God
sent her into the world — it was to open the eyes of all who
looked to beautiful thoughts, and that is the beginning and
end of literature. . . . The reason my books deal with the
past instead of with the life I myself have known is simply
this, that I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can
see a little girl, of whom my mother has told me, wander-
ing confidently through the pages. Such a grip has her
memory of her girlhood had upon me since I was a boy of
six. ... So much of what is great in Scotland has sprung
from the closeness of family ties.'
Soon after his marriage to Jane Welsh in 1825, Carlyle
settled at Comely Bank, Edinburgh, where he first met
Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review.
The meeting came about as follows : Barry Cornwall
sent Carlyle a letter of introduction to the editor, whom he
called ' a very fine fellow.' Armed with this letter, Carlyle
went at once to George Street, where Jeffrey lived, and was
shown into the study. ' Five pair of candles,' he tells us,
' were cheerfully burning, in the light of which sate my
famous little gentleman ; he laid aside his work, invited me
to sit, and began talking in a perfectly human manner.'
Jeffrey soon returned the call, and was greatly delighted
with Mrs. Carlyle. The friendship was happily begun ; and,
as a result, the next issue of the Review contained Carlyle's
paper on Jean Paul. For some time Carlyle was a frequent
contributor to its columns. When he removed to the wilds
of Craigenputtock (Craig, the crag of the small hawks), ' a
solitude almost Druidical,' ' Jeffrey's big carriage climbed
the rugged hill roads,' says Carlyle, ' and I remember noth-
ing so well as the consummate art with which my dear
played the domestic field-marshal and spread out our exigu-
ous resources without fuss or bustle.'
xii PREFACE.
It was at Craigenputtock, 'while the premises were still
littered with dirt, and in the wettest, warmest summer ever
known,' that the Essay on Burns was written. ' Lockhart
has written a kind of life of Burns,' writes Carlyle to his
brother in 1828, 'and men in general are making another
uproar about Burns.' In his diary is this note : ' Finished
a paper on Burns, September i6th, 1828, at this Devil's
Den, Craigenputtock.'
Jeffrey was surprised at the spirit and method of the
essay, and said that it must be cut down one-half. He
himself undertook to mitigate the intensity of its fervor,
the diffuseness of its diction, and the exaggeration of its
judgment. When Carlyle received the proof he found it
only a torso ; he became defiant at such tinkering, and
insisted that it be published as he wrote it, or not at all.
Jeffrey reluctantly descended from his throne ; and so we
have the work, ' saved as by fire,' substantially as it was
written.
On the 25th of September Carlyle wrote Goethe: 'The
only thing of any moment since I came hither [to Craigen-
puttock] is an Essay on Bu7'ns, for the next number of
the Edinburgh Revie%v, Perhaps you have never heard of
this Burns ; and yet he was a man of the most decisive
genius, but born in the rank of a Peasant. We English, es-
pecially we Scotch, love Burns more than any other Poet
we have had for centuries.' In April, 1830, Goethe wrote
the Introduction to Carlyle's Life of Schiller^ in which,
after quoting the above, he says : ' Yet Burns was better
known to us than our friend conjectured. Those of his
poems that we have made our own, convinced us of his ex-
traordinary talent.' In order that the German people may
know more of this Burns, he translates from line 20, p. 7,
' Born in an age,' to line 30 ; also from line 17, p. 9, ' But a
PREFACE. xiii
true Poet,' to line 12, p. 12. 'And as we wish the Germans
joy in their Schiller, so with the same feeling will we con-
gratulate the Scotch. We esteem this highly praised Robert
Burns amongst the first poetical spirits which the past cen-
tury has produced.'
Goethe desired that Germany should return the compli-
ment paid her by Carlyle in translating Schiller, and he
found a translator for Burns ; for he writes : ' A young man
of much talent, and successful as a translator, is busy with
Burns.'
The life and work of Carlyle fall into two periods. The
first period, extending until 1834, when he settles in London,
may be called a sort of Preparatio Evangelica. In it he
wrote his great works in interpretation of literature ; in it,
too, his life was quickened and enriched by the friendship
of two rare souls, — Goethe and Emerson. To understand
what these friendships were to Carlyle, one must read Cor-
7'espondence betiueen Goethe and Carlyle, covering a period
of six years, until the death of Goethe; and Correspondence
of Carlyle and Emerson, covering a period of forty years.
Of the former he writes : ' I think Goethe the only living
model of a great Vvriter. It is one of my finest day-dreams
to see him ere I die.'
Of Emerson's first visit to him he writes : ' He seemed to
be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had
ever looked on. He stayed till next day with us and talked
and heard talk to his heart's content, and left us all really
sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first journey since
Noah's Deluge undertaken to Craigenputtock for such a
purpose. I found him one of the most simple and frank of
men and became acquainted with him at once.'
The second period is that of Sfurni nnd Drang — storm
xiv PREFACE.
and stress — in which he wore himself out, body, mind, and
soul, in the herculean task of cleansing the life and thought
of his time from the sordid and the selfish. His was the
voice of one crying in the wilderness, and this was his cry :
' As the highest Gospel was a Biography, so is the life of
every good man an indubitable Gospel, and preaches to
the eye, and heart, and whole man, man is heaven-born —
not the thrall of circumstances but the victorious subduer
thereof.'
The mighty voice of Goethe had sounded a similar
note : —
Willst Du ins Unendliche Schreiten,
Geh nur im Endlichen nach alien Seiten.
Would you penetrate into the Infinite, then press on every
side into the Finite.
A like note came from the calm and gracious Emerson,
whom Matthew Arnold, in his noble tribute, calls 'the
friend and aider of him who would live in the Spirit.'
' Trust thyself ! Every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you.
Great men have always done so and confided themselves
childlike to the genius of their age ; betraying their percep-
tion that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working
through their hands, predominating in all their being.'
These were the voices of which Arnold speaks in his
essay on Emerson. He says : ' Forty years ago, when I
was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air
there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who
in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices !
They are a possession to him forever. . . . There was
the puissant voice of Carlyle ; so sorely strained, ov^er-used,
and misused since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and
PREFACE. XV
reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who
can forget the emotion of receiving in its first freshness
such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward
Irving, then just dead : " Scotland sent him forth a hercu-
lean man : our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all
her engines — and it took her twelve years ! " A greater
voice still — the greatest voice of the century — came to
us in those youthful days through Carlyle : the voice of
Goethe, And besides those voices, there came to us in that
old Oxford time a voice also from this side of the Atlantic,
— a clear and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate,
brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as
the strain of Carlyle or Goethe. ... So well he spoke,
that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were
names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that
which invests for me the names of Oxford and of Weimar,
and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed themselves in my
mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent words which
I have been just now quoting.'
These voices are potent still to heal and cleanse.
It may be worth while to emphasize here some principles
which should govern the handling of this Essay, and to
protest against the custom of vivisection which prevails in
our study of the masters in the art of literature. Remem-
bering that the great interpreter of literature is only a single
remove from the great creator of literature, we should read
his work as we do a great poem, — in its unity and com-
pleteness. Not until we get some conception of the whole
ought we to study the parts. Lowell says : ' Our prevailing
style of criticism, which regards parts rather than wholes,
which dwells on the beauty of passages, has done much to
confirm us in our evil way.'
If the results of our study of literature be not to quicken
xvi PREFACE.
our interest in the personality of the author and the subject
of his work, it will be of little advantage educationally as
a work of art, whatever information it may have provided.
As ' that only is true enlargement of the mind which is the
power of viewing many things at once as a whole, and of
referring them severally to their true place in the universal
system,' it follows that when the pupil becomes conscious
that he is in communion with a great soul, he will desire to
view in detail the various manifestations of personality as
that personality reveals itself in language, symbols, color,
and all the elements which an artist uses for creating an
organic whole. ' Everything that a man undertakes to pro-
duce,' says Goethe, 'whether by action, word, or in whatso-
ever way, ought to spring from a union of all his faculties.'
I would plead for a method quite the reverse of the sci-
entific. I would urge that great Hterature be used for its
power to stimulate and quicken, not a single faculty merely,
but all those powers which minister to complete selfhood.
' We must read, not for scholarship and specialized knowl-
edge,' says Professor Dowden, ' but for life ; we must read
in order to live. If our study does not directly or indi-
rectly enrich the life of man, it is but drawing of vanity
with cart-ropes, a weariness to the flesh, or at least a busy
idleness.'
Where poems of Burns are referred to by page, the allu-
sion is to The Select Poems of Robert Biirns, published by
D. C. Heath & Co.
A. J. G.
Brookline, M.K'&'S,.^ January, 1897.
INTRODUCTION.
' Taking Carlyle all in all there never was a man — I at
least never knew one — whose conduct in life would better
bear the fiercest light which can be thrown upon it. In the
grave matters of the law he walked for eighty years un-
blemished by a single moral spot. There are no " sins of
youth " to be apologized for. In no instance did he ever
deviate even for a moment from the strictest lines of integ-
rity. He had his own way to make in life, and when he
had chosen his. profession, he had to depend on popularity
for the bread which he was to eat. But although more
than once he was in sight of starvation he would never do
less than his very best. He never wrote an idle word, he
never wrote or spoke any single sentence which he did not
with his whole heart believe to be true.' j a. froude.
' You shall wear your crown at the Pan-Saxon Games
with no equal or approaching competitor in sight, well
earned by genius and exhaustive labor, and with nations
for your pupils and praisers. I count it my eminent happi-
ness to have been so nearly your contemporary, and your
friend — permitted to detect by its rare light the new star
almost before the Easterners had seen it, and to have found
no disappointment, but joyful confirmation rather, in com-
ing close to its orb.' emerson to carlyle (1872).
xvii
xviii INTRODUCTION.
' Carlyle's marvellous gift of language was really the very
skin of his body — part of his mind — which he could no
more put off than he could put off his Annandale accent.'
FREDERICK HARRISON.
' Carlyle was a great critic, and this at a time when our
literary criticism was a scandal. He taught us there was no
sort of finality, but only nonsense, in that kind of criticism
which was content with laying down some foreign master-
piece with the observation that it was not suited for the
English taste. He was, if not the first, almost the first
critic, who pursued in his criticism the historical method
and sought to make us understand what we were required
to judge.' AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.
' Wherever Carlyle is at home, and he seldom wanders
from it, his weapon is like none other, — it is the very sword
of Goliath. And this sword pierces to the joints and mar-
row as no other of the second division of our authors of the
nineteenth century proper pierces, with the exception of
that of Tennyson in verse. To speak on the best things in
an original way is the privilege of the elect in literature ;
and none of those who were born within, or closely upon,
the beginning of the century has had these gifts in English
as have the authors of The Lotus Eaters and Sartor Re-
sartus: GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
' The ground-feeling of Carlyle is that of some old Puri-
tan, preaching, like Baxter, as " a dying man to dying
men." He belonged emphatically to the imaginative as
distinguished from the speculative order of minds. He,
therefore, nmst be judged as a poet, and not as a dealer in
INTRODUCTION. xix
philosophic systems ; as a seer or a prophet, not as a theo-
rist, or a man of calculations.' LESLIE STEPHEN.
' Carlyle has surpassingly powerful qualities of expres-
sion, reminding one of the gifts of expression of the great
poets — of even Shakspeare himself. What Emerson so
admirably says of Carlyle's " devouring eyes, and pour-
traying hand," " those thirsty eyes, those portrait-eating,
portrait-painting eyes of thine, those fatal perceptions," is
thoroughly true.' MATTHEW ARNOLD.
' Carlyle was essentially a great artist, both in the way
in which he conceived things, and in the way in which he
expressed his conception of them. An artist, not of the
Raphael or Leonardo order, but of the Rembrandt, or even
of the Michael Angelo type — forceful, rugged, gnarled,
lurid. Titanic' j. c. SHAIRP.
' Carlyle had to the full the prophet's insight into the
power of parable and type, and the prophet's eye for the
forces which move society, and inspire multitudes with con-
tagious enthusiasm, whether for good or ill. He stands
out a paradoxical figure, solitary, proud, defiant, vivid. No
literary man in the nineteenth century is likely to stand out
more distinctly than Thomas Carlyle, both for faults and
genius, to the centuries which will follow.'
R. H. HUTTON.
' Carlyle's life of herculean labor was entirely given to
letters, and he undoubtedly brought to his tasks the great-
est single equipment of pure literary talent English prose
has ever received. Not a perfect writer certainly, nor
always an agreeable one ; but he exhibited at all times the
XX INTRODUCTION.
traits which the world has consented to call great. He be-
queathed to mankind an enormous intellectual force and
weight of character, embodied in enduring hterary forms.'
JOHN BURROUGHS.
' Carlyle has taken up a mission : he is a prophet, the
prophet of Sincerity. This sincerity or earnestness he
would have applied everywhere ; he makes it the law, the
healthy and holy law, of art, of morals, of politics. His
power is beyond dispute. Through all his oddities there
appears the gift of evoking the past, of making it Hve, of
making out of it a drama which cannot be seen without
emotion.' EDMUND scherer.
' After everything has been said that can be said in the
way of criticism, we are forced to recognize that no English
writer in this century has done more to elevate and purify
our ideals of life, and to make us conscious that the things
of the spirit are real, and that, in the last resort, there is on
other reality.' EDWARD CAIRD.
' His value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be over-
estimated. It is a power which belongs only to the highest
order of minds, for it is none but a divine fire that can so
kindle and irradiate. The debt due him from those who
listened to his teachings of his prime for revealing to them
what sublime reserves of power even the humblest may find
in manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid with
nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a purifier of the
sources whence our intellectual inspiration is drawn, his in-
fluence has been second only to that of Wordsworth, if even
to his. Indeed he has been in no fanciful sense the con-
tinuator of Wordsworth's moral teaching.'
J. r. LOWELL.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface v
Introduction xvii
Essay on Burns i
Chronological 80
Group of Carlyle's Friends 82
Notes 83
Carlyle's Summary of the Essay 135
References 138
"Carlyle's genius was kin to that of the poet, and made its discov-
eries by wide, ranging glances and penetrative intuitions. He would not
buttress his faith with formal argument : he would rather set forth his
vision of things ; and if defence were needed from a critical or sceptical
world, his defence would be made in the skirmishing way of humor."
Edward Dowden.
BURNS
[1828J
^ , In the modern arrangements of society, it is no un-
common thing that a man of genius must, like Butler,
' ask for bread and receive a stone ; ' for, in spite
of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by
no means the highest excellence that men are most 5
forward to recognize. (The inventor of a spinning-
jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day ; but ^.■
the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true
religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary .^ We do not
know^ whether it is not an aggravation of the injus- 10
tice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution.
Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, might yet have
been living ; but his short life was spent in toil and
penury; and he died, in the prime of his manhood,
miserable and neglected: and yet already a brave 15
mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one
splendid monument has been reared in other places
to his fame ; the street where he languished in poverty
is called by his name ; the highest personages in our
1 Edinburgh Review, No. 96. — T/ie Life of Robert Burns. By
J. G. LocKHART. LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828.
2 CARLYLE.
literature have been proud to appear as his commen-
tators and admirers ; and here is the sixth narrative
of his Life that has been given to the world ! .r j:
C^r, Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize forl)^ ^
5 diis new attempt on such a subject : but his readers, j'^^^'^'*
we believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will
censure only the performance of his task, not the
choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a
theme that cannot easily become either trite or ex-
lo hausted ; and will probably gain rather than lose in its
dimensions by the distance to which it is removed by
Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his'
valet ; and this is probably true ; but the fault is at.
least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For it
15 is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are won-
derful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to be-
lieve that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay
perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the
poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay
20 than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquain-
tance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of John a
Combe's, had snatched an hour or two from the pres-
ervation of his game, and written us a Life of Shak-
speare ! What dissertations should we not have had,
25 — not on Hcmilet and The Tempest^ but on the wool-
trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant
laws ; and how the Poacher became a Player ; and how
Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and
did not push him to extremities ! In like manner, we
30 believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions
of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commission-
ESSAY ON BURNS. 3
ers, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and
the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and
Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New
and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall
have become invisible in the darkness of the Past- or*-v^
visible only by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, /
i t will be difficult to measure him by any true standard,
or to estimate what he really was and did, in tlie eigh-
teenth century, for his country and the world. It will
be difficult, we say ; but still a fair problem for literary 10
historians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated
approximations.
'0,i4[is former Biographers have done something, no
doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr.
Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, 15
have both, we think, mistaken one essentially impor-
tant thing : Their own and the world's true relation to
their author, and the style in which it became such
men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie
loved the poet truly ; more perhaps than he avowed to 20
his readers, or even to himself ; yet he everywhere
introduces him with a certain patronizing, apolog etic
air ; as if the polite public mighFtBTnk it strange and
half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar
and gentleman, should do such honor to a rustic. In 25
all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was
not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret
that the first and kindest of all our poet's biographers
should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly
what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the 30
same kind : and both err alike in presenting us with
4 CARLYLE.
a detached catalogue of his several supposed attri-
butes, virtues and vices, instead of a delineation of the
resulting character as a living unity. This, however,
is not painting a portrait ; but gauging the length and
5 breadth of the several features, and jotting down their
dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay it is not so
much as that : for we are yet to learn by what arts or
instruments the mind could be so measured and gauged.
(v^-Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided
lo both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the
high and remarkable man the public voice has now
pronounced him to be : and in delineating him, he has
avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather
sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, say-
is ings ; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole
man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The
book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more
insight, we think, into the true character of Burns,
than any prior biography : though, being written on
20 the very popular and condensed scheme of an arti-
cle for Constable^ s Miscellany^ it has less depth than
we could have wished and expected from a writer
of such power ; and contains rather more, and more
multifarious quotations than belong of right to an ori-
25 ginal production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writ-
ing is generally so good, so clear, direct and nervous,
that we seldom wish to see it making place for another
man's. However, the spirit of the work is through-
out candid, tolerant and anxiously conciliating; com-
30 pliments and praises are liberally distributed, on all
hands, to great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birk-
ESSAY ON BURNS. 5
beck observes of the society in the backwoods of
America, ' the courtesies of polite life are never lost
sight of for a moment.' But there are better things
than these in the volume ; and we can safely testify,
not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a first 5
time, but may even be without difficulty read again.
^^JNevertheless, we are far from thinking that the
problem of Burns's Biography has yet been ade-
quately solved. We do not allude so much to defi-
ciency of facts or documents, — though of these we 10
are still every day receiving some fresh accession, —
as to the limited and imperfect application of them
to the great end of Biography. Our notions upon
this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; but^if
an individual is really of consequence enough to have 15
his life and character recorded for public remembrance, . 3')
we have always been of opinion that the public ought
to be made acquainted with all the inward springs and
relations of his character. ^ How did rtie world and
man's life, from his particular position, represent them- 20
selves to his mind? How did coexisting circumstances
modify him from without ; how did he modify these
from within .? With what endeavors and what effi-
cacy rule over them ; with what resistance and what
suffering sink under them ? fin one word, what and 25
how produced was the effect of society on him ; what
and how produced was hjs effect on society ?/ He who
should answer these questions, in regard to any indi-
vidual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of per-
fection in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can 30
deserve such a study ; and many lives will be written,
(2)
CARLYLE.
and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought
to be written, and read and forgotten, which are not
in this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake
not, is one of these few individuals ; and such a study,
5 at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained.
Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but
scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good-will,
and trust they may meet with acceptance from those
they are intended for.
10 ilvJBurns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and
was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual
fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily
subsiding into censure and neglect ; till his early and
most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm
15 for him, which, especially as there was now nothing
to be done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged^
itself even to our own time. It is true, the ' nine
days ' have long since elapsed ; and the very continu-
ance of this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar
20 wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where,
as years passed by, he has come to re^t more and more
exclusively on his own ijitnnsic metits, and may now
be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears
not only as a true British poet, but as one of _the most
25 considerable British men of the eighteenth century.
Let it not be objected that he did little. He did
much, if we consider where and how. If the work
performed was small, we must remember that he had
his very materials to discover ; for the metal he worked
30 in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his
ESSAY ON BURNS. 7
had guessed its existence ; and we may almost say,
that with his own hand he had to construct the tools
for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest
obscurity, without help, without instruction, without
model; or with models only of the meanest sort. | An
educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a
boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the
weapons and engines which man's skill has been able |
to devise from the earliest time ; and he works, ac-
cordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ageslio
|How different is his state who stands on the outside
of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be
stormed, or remain forever shut against him ll His
means are the commonest and rudest ; the mere work
done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind 15
his steam-engine may remove mountains ; but no dwarf
will hew them down with a pickaxe ; and. he must be a
Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms^
K'\jX is in this last shape that Burns presents himself.
Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, 20
and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where
his mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish
it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay,
of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst
evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge as 25
dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhymes of a Fer-
guson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty, he sinks
not under all these impediments : through the fogs
and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye
discerns the true relations of the world and human 30
life ; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains
8 CARLYLE.
himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the
expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he
struggles forward into the general view ; and with
haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of
5 his labor, a gift which Time has now pronounced im-
perishable. Add to all this that his darksome drudg-
ing childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era
of his whole life ; and that he died in his thirty-seventh
year : and then ask, (if it be strange that his poems
lofare imperfect, and of small extent, or that his genius
attained no mastery in its art ? f Alas! his Sun shonC;
as through a tropical tornado ; and the pale Shadow of
Death eclipsed it at noon ! Shrouded in such baleful
vapors, the genius of Burns was never seen in clear
15 azure splendor, enlightening the world : but some
beams from it did, by fits, pierce through ; and it
tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colors,
into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently
gazed on with wonder and tears !
gST^^We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposi-
'iJ tion rather than admiration that our readers require of
us here ; and yet to avoid some tendency to that side
is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him ;
and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it
25 is sometimes thought, should be a cold business : we
are not so sure of this ; but, at all events, our concern
wath Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and
genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as
a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects us.
30 He was often advised to write a tragedy : time and
means were not lent him for this ; but through life he
ESSAY ON BURNS. 9
enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We ques-
tion whether the world has since witnessed so utterly
sad a scene ; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl
with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, ' amid
the melancholy main,' presented to the reflecting mind
such a ' spectacle of pity and fear ' as did this in-
trinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul,
wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base
entanglements, which coiled closer and closer round
him, till only death opened him an outlet. Conquerors'"
are a class of men with whom, for most part, the world
could well dispense ;^ nor can the hard intellect, the
unsympathizing loftiness, and high but selfish enthu-
siasm of such persons inspire us in general with any
affection ; at best it may excite amazement ; and their
fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a cer-
tain sadness and awe, /But a true Poet^a man in
whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some '
tone of the 'Eternal Melodies,' (is the most precious
gift that can be bestowed on a generation r)\ve see in 20
him a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest
in ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to us ; ana we
mourn his death as that of a benefactor who loved and
taught us.
/■ , Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on 25
us in Robert Burns ; but with queenlike indifference
she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment ;
and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bau-
ble, before we recognized it. /.To the ill-starred Burns
was given the power of making man's life more ven- 30
erable, but that of wisely guiding his own life was not
lo CARLVLE.
given. Destiny, — for so in our ignorance we must
speak, — his faults, the faults of others, proved too
hard for him ; and that spirit, which might have soared
could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its
5 glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom ;
and died, we may almost say, without ever having
lived. /,And so kind and warm a soul ; so full of in-
born riches, of love to all living and lifeless things !
How his heart flows out in sympathy over universal
10 Nature, and in her bleakest provinces discerns a
beauty and a meaning ! The ' Daisy ' falls not un-
heeded under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of
that 'wee, cowering, timorous beastie,' cast forth, after
all its provident pains, to ' thole the sleety dribble
15 and cranreuch cauld.' The ' hoar visage ' of Winter
delights him; he dwells with a sad and oft-returning
fondness in these scenes of solemn desolation ; but the
voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to his ears ;
he loves to walk in the sounding woods, for ' it raises
20 his thoughts to Him that walketh o?i the wings of the
wind.^ A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck,
and the sound it yields will be music ! But observe
him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What
warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling ; what trustful,
25 boundless love; what generous exaggeration of the ob-
ject loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden,
are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a
queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The
rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any
30 Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the
smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely
ESSAY ON BURNS. ii
to him : Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love
also, and Courage ; the simple feelings, the worth, the
nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear
and venerable to his heart : and thus over the lowest
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his 5
own soul ; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine,
softened and brightened into a beauty which other
eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self-
consciousness which too often degenerates into pride ;
yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence ; 10
no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one.
The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, like a
King in exile: he is cast among the low, and feels him-
self equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, that
none may be disputed to him. The forward he can 15
repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions of
wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him ; there is
a fire in that dark eye, under which the 'insolence of
condescension ' cannot thrive. In his abasement, in
his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the ma- 20
jesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels
himself above common men, he wanders not apart from
them, but mixes warmly in their interests; nay, throv/s
himself into their arms, and, as it were, entreats them
to love him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest 25
despondency, this proud being still seeks relief from
friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy ;
and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart
that knows only the name of friendship. And yet he
was ' quick to learn ; ' a man of keen vision, before 30
whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His
kS)
CARLYLE.
understanding saw through the hoUowness even of ac-
complished deceivers ; but there was a generous cre-
dulity in his heart. And so did our Peasant show
himself among us ; ' a soul like an ^^olian harp, in
5 whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through
them, changed itself into articulate melody.' /And this
was he for whom the world found no fitter business
than quarrelling with smugglers and vintjiers, comput-
ing excise-dues upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels !
10 In such toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted ;
and a hundred years may pass on, before another such
is given us to waste.
I; All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left,
"^seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor,
15 mutilated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken
glimpses of a genius that could never show itself com-
plete ; that wanted all things for completeness, — cul-
ture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His
poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occa-
20 sional elusions ; poured forth with little premedita-
tion ; expressing, by such means as offered, the passion,
opinion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance
was it permitted him to grapple with any subject with
the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it
25 in the concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the
strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments would be
at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless there is
something in these poems, marred and defective as
they are, which forbids the most fastidious student of
30 poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality
ESSAY ON BURNS. 13
they must have : for, after fifty years of the wildest vi-
cissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read;
nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more
extensively; and this not only by literary virtuos_os, and
that class upon whom transitory causes operate most 5
strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard,
unlettered, and truly natural class, who read little, and
especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure
in it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popu-
larity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the pal- 10
ace to the hut, and over all regions where the English
tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After
every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare ex-
cellence in these works. What is that excellence ?
/pTo answer this question will not lead us far. The 15
excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest,
whether in poetry or prose ; but, at the same time, it
is plain and easily recognized, — his Sincerity^ his jji-
disp iitable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes
or joys ; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities -no wire- 20
drawn refinings, either in thought or feeling rthe pas-
sion that is traced before us has o:lowed in a livins;
heart ;Mhe opinion he utters has risen in his own un-
derstanding, and been a light to his own steps.'* He
does not write from hearsay, but from sight and expe- 25
rience ; it is the scenes that he has lived and labored
amidst, that he describes ; those scenes, rude and
humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions
in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves p>^nd
he speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward 30
call of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too
t>C'
14 CARLYLE.
full to be silent. He speaks it with such melody and
modulation as he can ; ' in homely rustic jingle ; ' but
it is his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret
for finding readers and retaining them : let him who
would move and convince others, be first moved and
convinced himself. Horace's rule. Si vis vie flcre^ is
applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. vfo
every poet, to every writer, we might say : Be true, if
^^ you would be believed.^ Let a man but speak forth
lo with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the
actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so
strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sym-
pathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in
extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or
15 below him ; but in either case, his words, if they are
earnest and sincere, will find some response within us ;
for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank or
inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of
man to man.
2o(J?:t'his may appear a very simple principle, and one
which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the
discovery is easy enough : but the practical appliance
is not easy ; is indeed the fundamental difficulty which
all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in
25 a hundred ever fairly surmounts. \K head too dull to
discriminate the true from the false ; a heart too dull
to love the one at all risks, and to hate the other in
spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer.
With either, or, as more commonly happens, with both
30 of these deficiencies combine a love of distinction, a
wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, and we
ESSAY ON BURNS. . ■ ■ ^5
have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its
elder brother, is of morals, j How often does the one
and the other front us, in poetry as in life ! Great
poets themselves are not always free of this vice ; nay,
it is precisely on a certain sort and degree of great- 5
ness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong ef-
fort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a
mere shadow of success ; he who has much to unfold, \ ry\
win_s^iedmes unfold it imperfectly Byron, for in- ,' ^~^
stance, was no common man : yet, if we examine his 10
poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from
faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is
not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine foun-
tain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulat-
ing indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or 15
even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would
ask, real men ; we mean, poetically consistent and con-
ceivable men ? Do not these characters, does not the
character of their author, which more or less shines
through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the 20
occasion ; no natural or possible mode of being, but
something intended to look much grander than nature ?
Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic hero-
ism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation,
with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other 25
sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player
in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours,
than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which
is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds there
is a taint of this sort, something which we should call 30
theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these other-
i6 CARLYLE.
wise so powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, espe-
cially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching
to a sincere work he ever wrote : the only work where
he showed himself, in any measure, as he was, and
5 seemed so intent on his subject as, for moments, to
forget himself. Yet Byron hated this vice : we be-
lieve, heartily detested it : nay, he had declared formal
/war against it in words, ySo difficult is it even for the
(^ strongest to make this primary attainment, which might
10 seem the simplest of all, — to read its oivn conscious-
ness without 7nistakes, without errors involuntary or
wilful ! } We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility
who comes before us from the first, and abides with ^A
us to the last, Avith su ch a total want of affectationyj!^^^v.cJi
15 He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In his
successes and his failures, in his greatness and his
littleness, he is ever clear, simjole, true, and glitters
with no lustre but his own, We reckon this to be
a great virtue ; to be, in fact, the root of most other
20 virtues, literary as well as moral. '
■^Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of Burns
lat we now allude ; to those writings which he had
time to meditate, and where no special reason existefl-
to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavor
to fulfil it. Certain of his Letter s, and other fractions
of prose composition, by no means deserve this praise.
Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of
style ; but on the contrary, something not only stiff,
but strained and twisted ; a certain high-flown in^flated
tone ; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill with
the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poorest
ESSAY ON BURNS. 17
verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether
unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself sometimes
premeditate the sheerest bombast ! But even with re-
gard to these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to state
that.-he had two excuses. The first was his compara- 5
tive deficiency in language. Burns, though for most
part he writes with singular force and even graceful-
ness, is not master of English prose, as he is of Scottish
verse ; not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the
depth and vehemence of his matter. These Letters 10
strike us as the effort of a man to express something
which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second
apd weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity
o^Burns^sociaj__xaiik. His correspondents are often
men whose relation to him he has never accurately 15
ascertained ; whom therefore he is either forearming
himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by
adopting the style he thinks will please them. At all
events, we should remember that these faults, even in
his Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. When- 20
ever he writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted
friends and on real interests, his style becomes simple,
vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His
fetters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent. „ J
iuj But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sin- 25
Merity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed i^*"'
but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing : this'"
displays itself in his choice of subjects ; or rather in
his indifference as to subjects, and the power he has of
making all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, ,lo^
like the ordinary man, is forever seeking in external
i8 CARLYLE.
\ / circumstances the help which can be found only in
I himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, he
discerns no form or comeliness : home is not poetical
I but prosaic ; it is in some past, distant, conventional
V 5 heroic world, that poetry resides ; were he there and
^ not here, were he thus and not so, it would be well
with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored
Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality not
on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon.
10 Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of
the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and copper-
colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other trucu-
lent figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates,
who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with
15 them! But yet, as a great moralist proposed preach-
ing to the men of this century, so would we fain preach
to the poets, ' a sermon on the duty of staying at
home.' Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic
climates can do little for them. That form of life has
20 attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler
than our own, than simply because it is different ; and
even this attraction must be of the most transient sort.
For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one ;
and have as quaint a costume as the rest ; not con-
25 trasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with
them, in respect of quaintness ? Does Homer interest
us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond his
native Greece, and two centuries before he was born ;
or because he wrote what passed in God's world, and
30 in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty
centuries ? Let our poets look to this : is their feeling
ESSAY ON BURNS.
^
really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of
other men, — they have nothing to fear, even from the
humblest subject ; is it not so, — they have nothing to
hoper-but an ejgliemeral favor, even from the highest.
/yThe poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek 5
*Wr a subject : the elements of his art are in him, and
around him on every hand ; for him the Ideal world is
not remote from the Actual, but under it and within
it : nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern
it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a 10
world around him, the poet is in his place ; for here
too is man's existence, with its infinite longings and
small acquirings ; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed en-
deavors ; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and
hopes that wander through Eternity ; and all the mys- 15
tery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made
of, in any age or cUmate, since man first began to live.
Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every death-
bed, though it were a peasant's, and a bed of heath ?
And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there 20
can be Comedy no longer ? Or are men suddenly
grown, wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his
sides, but be cheated of his Farce '? Man's life and
nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. But the
poet must have an eye to read these things, and a 25
heart to understand them ; or they come and pass
away before him in vain. He is a 7'a/es, a seer ; a gift
of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings
for him, which another cannot equally decipher; then
he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one. 30
imn this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely
20 CARLYLE.
a great poet, better manifests his capability, better
proves the truth of his genius, than if he had by his
own strength kept the whole Minerva Press going, to
the end of his literary course. He shows himself at
5 least a poet of Nature's own making ; and (Nature,
after all, is still the grand agent in making poets.) We
often hear of this and the other external condition
being requisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes
it is a certain sort of training ; he must have studied
lo certain things, studied for instance ' the elder drama-
tists.' and so learned a poetic language ; as if poetry
lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other times we
are told he must be bred in a certain rank, and must
be on a confidential footing with the higher classes ;
15 because, above all thins-s, he must see the world. As ,
to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him >
little difficulty, if he have but eyesight to see it with.
Without eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The
blind or the purblind man ' travels from Dan to Beer-
20 sheba, and finds it all barren.' But happily every poet
is born />/ the world ; and sees it, with or against his
will, every day and every hour he lives. The myste-
rious workmanship, of man's heart, the true light and
the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal them-
25 selves not only in capital cities and crowded saloon-s,
but in every hut and hamlet where men have their
abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues
and all human vices ; the passions at once of a Borgia
and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter
30 lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom,
that has practised honest self-examination ? Truly.
7jj
ESSAY ON BURNS. 21
this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbol-
ton. if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light
in Oockford's or the Tuileries itself.
^ 'S^at sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on
Vtxt poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he 5
should have beoi born two centuries ago ; inasmuch as
poetry, about that date, vanished from the earth, and
became no longer attainable by men ! Such cobweb
speculations have, now and then, overhung the field
of literature ; but they obstruct not the growth of 10
any plant there : the Shakspeare or the Burns, un-
consciously and merely as he walks onward, silently
brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossi-
bility till he appear ? Why do we call him new and
original, if ivc saw where his marble was lying, and 15
what fabric he could rear from it? It is not the ma-
terial but the workman that is wanting. It is not the
dark place that hinders, but the dim fxe. A Scottish
peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives,
till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it ; found 20
it a Jiiaii 's life, and therefore significant to men. A
thousand battle-fields remain unsung ; but the JVoiifidt'i/
Hare has not perished without its memorial ; a balm
of mercy yet breathes on us from its dumb agonies,
because a poet was there. Our Halhnvecii had passed 25
and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since the era
of the Druids ; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned
in it the materials of a Scottish Idyl : neither was the
Holy Fair any Council of Trent or ^o\\\2i\\ Jubilee ; but
nevertheless, Superstition and Hypocrisy and Fun hav- 30
ing been propitjous to him, in this man's hand it
22 CARLYLE.
became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic
life. Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it,
place him where and how you will, and true poetry
^:m\l not be wanting.
kH jindependently of the essential gift of poetic feel-
^^g, as we have now attempted to describe it, a cer-
tain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns
has written ; a virtue, as of green fields and moun-
tain breezes, dwells in his poetry ; it is redolent of natu- •
lo ral life and hardy natural men. There is a decisive
strength in him, and yet a sweet native gracefulness:
he is tender, he is vehement, yet without constraint
or too visible effort ; he melts the heart, or inflames
it, with a power which seems habitual and familiar to
Is him. We see that in this man there was the gentle-
ness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep
earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero.
Tears lie in him, and consuming fire ; as lightning
lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a
20 resonance in his bosom for every note of human feel-
ing ; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the
joyful, are welcome in their turns to his ' lightly-moved
and all-conceiving spirit.' And observe with what a
fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it what it
25 may! How he fixes, as it were, the full image of thei.p.'
matter in his eye; full and clear in every lineament;}
and catches the real type and essence of it, amid a
thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no
one of which misleads him ! Is it of reason ; some
30 truth to be discovered ? No sophjstry, no vain surface-
logic detains him ; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces
ESSAY ON BURNS. 23
through into the marrow of the question ; and speaks
his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten.
Is it of description ; some visual object to be repre-
sented .'' No poet of any age or nation is more graphic
than Burns : the characteristic features disclose them- 5
selves to him at a glance ; three lines from his hand
and we have a likeness. And, in that rough dialect,
in that rude, often awkward metre, so clear and defi-
nite a likeness ! It seems a draughtsman working with
a burnt stick; and yet the burin_ of a Retzsch is not 10
f)re expressive or exact.
Of this last excellence, the plainest and most com-
prehensive of all, being indeed the root and foundation
of ei't'ry sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could
produce innumerable instances from the writings of 15
Burns. Take these glimpses of a snow-storm from his
Winter Night (the italics are ours) : —
When biting Boreas, fell and douie,
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r,
And Phoebus ('•/Vj- a short-liv\i glozvr 20
Far south the lift,
Dim-dark'' ni)ig thro' the flaky shcnvr
Or ii.'hirli)ig d^'ift :
'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd,
Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd, 25
While burns 7c//' snaivy zvreeths iipchok^d
Wild -eddying swhirl^
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd
Down headlong hurl.
Are there not ' descriptive touches ' here ? The de- 30
scriber saw this thing; the essential feature and true
24 CARLYLE.
likeness of every circumstance in it ; saw, and not with
the eye only. ' Poor labour locked in sweet sleep ; '
the dead stillness of man, unconscious, vanquished,
yet not unprotected, while such strife of the material
5 elements rages, and seems to reign supreme in loneli-
ness : this is of the heart as well as of the eye ! — Look
also at his image of a thaw, and prophesied fall of the
Auld Brig : —
When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains
lo Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains;
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil,
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course,
Or haunted GarpaP draws his feeble source,
I- Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes,
/// moiiy a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes ;
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat.
Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate ;
And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey,
20 Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd tumbling sea;
Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise 1
And dash the gumlie jaups up to the ponring skies.
The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that
Deluge ! The welkin has, as it were, bent down
25 with its weight; the 'gumlie jaups' and the 'pouring
skies ' are mingled together ; it is a world of rain and
ruin. — In respect of mere clearness and minute fi-
delity, the Farmer's commendation of his Auld M<i/c\
in plough or in cart, may vie with Homer's Smithy
30 of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's Chariot. Nor
1 Fabulosus Hydaspes !
ESSAY ON BURNS. 25
have we forgotten stout £urn-fhe-7uind and his brawny
customers, inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is need-
less to multiply examples. One other trait of a much
finer sort we select from multitudes of such among
his Songs. It gives, in a single line, to the saddest
feeling the saddest environment and local habita-
tion : —
T/ie pale Moon is setting beyond the 7a/iite 7i<ave,
And Time is setting zvi'' me, O ;
Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell I
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O.
'>Q'
U^rhis clearness of sight we have called the founda-
tion of all talent ; for in fact, unless we see our object,
how shall we know how to place or prize it, in our
understanding, our imagination, our affections? Yet it 15
is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excellence ; but
capable of being united indifferently with the strong-
est, or with ordinary power. Homer surpasses all
men in this quality : but strangely enough, at no great
distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It be- 20
longs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind ; and
gives no sure indication of the higher endowments that
may exist along with it. In all the three cases we have
mentioned, it is combined with great g;arruUty ; their
descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact ; 25
Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as if
by accident ; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire.
Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clearness
than by the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of
the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he 30
26 CARLYLE.
thought, his emphasis of expression may give a humble
but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper say-
ings than his; words more memorable, now by their
burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor and la^
conic pith ? A single phrase depicts a whole subject,
a whole scene. We hear of ' a gentleman that derived
his patent of nobility direct from Almighty God.'
Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggled
forward ' red-icmt-shod : ' in this one word, a full vision
of horror and Ciiniage, perhaps too frightfully accurate
(r Art !
II n fact, one of the leading features in the mind of
►urns is this vigor of his strictly intellectual percep-
tions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments,
15 and in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart
says of him, with some surprise : ' All the faculties of
Burns's mind were, as far as 1 could judge, equally
vigorous ; and his pj^edilection for poetry was rather
the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned
20 temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that spe-
cies of composition. From his conversation I should
have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in what-
ever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abil-
ities.' But this, if we mistake not, is at all times the
25 very essence of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry,
except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole
consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and a cer-
tain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no sepa-
rate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the
30 rest, or disjoined from them ; but rather the result of
their general harmony and completion., / The feelings,
ESSAY ON BURNS. 27
the gifts that exist in the Poet are those that exist, with
more or less development, in every human soul : the
imagination, which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is
the same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that
picture into being. How does the Poet speak to men, 5
with power, but by being still more a man than they ?
Shakspeare, it has been well observed, in the planning
and completing of his tragedies, has shown an Un-
derstanding, were it nothing more, which might have
governed states, or indited a N'ovum Organi/m. What 10
Burns's force of understanding may have been, we
have less means of judging : it had to dwell among
the humblest objects ; never saw Philosophy ; never
rose, except by natural effort and for short intervals,
into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient 15
indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in
his works : we discern the brawny movements of a
gigantic though untutored strength ; and can under-
stand how, in conversation, his quick sure insight into
men and things may, as much as aught else about 20
him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and
ntr)^
ut, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns
s fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations
of things could not well have escaped his eye, for they 25
were intimately present to his heart. The logic of the
senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all-
sufficient ; nay, perhaps the highest Truth is that which
will the most certainly elude it. For this logic works
by words, and 'the highest,' it has been said, 'cannot 30
be expressed in words.' We are not without tokens
28 carlylp:.
of an openness for this higher truth also, of a keen
though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in
Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, ' wonders,'
in the passage above quoted, that Burns had formed
5 some distinct conception of the 'doctrine of associa-
tion.' We rather think that far subtler things than
the doctrine of association had from of old been famil-
iar to him. Here, for instance : —
' We know nothing,' thus writes he, ' or next to notliing, of
10 the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seem-
ing caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with
this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a diff.erent
cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favorite
flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-
15 bell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the
hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular de-
light. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a
summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray
plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of
20 soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my
dear friend, to what can this be owing ? Are we a piece of
machinery, which, like the /Eohan harp, passive, takes the im-
pression of the passing accident ; or do these workings argue
something within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself
25 partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities ; a
God that made all things, man's immaterial and immortal na-
ture, and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.'
Force and fineness of understanding are often spo-
en of as something different from general force and
30 fineness of nature, as something partly independent of
them. The necessities of language so require it; but
in truth these qualities are not distinct and indepen-
ESSAY ON BURNS. 29
dent ; except in special cases, and from special causes,
they ever go together. A man of strong understanding
is generally a man of strong character, neither is deli-
cacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy in
the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in ^
the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps pace
with keenness of feeling, that his light is not more
pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most
impassioned temper, with passions not strong only,
but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and 10
great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love
towards all nature, that inspires him, that opens his
eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent
in its praise. There is a true old saying, that ' love
furthers knowledge ; ' but, above all, it is the living 15
essence of that knowledge which makes poets ; the
first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of
Burns's fervid affection, his generous all-embracing
Love, we have spoken already, as of the grand distinc-
tion of his nature, seen equally in word and deed, in 20
his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to multiply
examples. Not man only, but all that environs man
in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his
sight : ' the hoary hawthorn,' the ' troop of gray plover,'
the ' solitary curlew,' all are dear to him ; all live in 25
this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as
in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for
instance, that amidst the gloom of personal misery,
brooding over the wintry desolation without him and
within him, he thinks of the 'ourie cattle' and ' silly 30
sheep,' and their sufferings in the pitiless storm !
30 CARLYLE.
I thought me on the ourie cattle,
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war.
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,
e Beneath a scaur.
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing.
That in the merry months o' spring
Delighted me to hear thee sing.
What comes o' thee ?
jQ Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing.
And close thy ee ?
The tenant of the mean hut, with its ' ragged roof and
chinky wall,' has a heart to pity even these ! This is
worth several homilies on Mercy ; for it is the voice
15 of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, ives in sympathy ;
his soul rushes forth into all realms of being ; noth-
ing that has existence can be indifferent to him. The
very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy : —
But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ;
20 O, wad ye tak a thought and men' !
Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, —
Still hae a stake ;
I'm wae to think upo' yon den,
Even for your sake !
25 ' He is the father of curses and lies,' said Dr. Slop,
'and is cursed and damned already.' 'I am sorry
for it,' quoth my uncle Toby! — a Poet without Love
^l^ere a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
qPy But has it not been said, in contradiction to this
30 principle, that ' indignation makes verses ? ' It has
been so said, and is true enough ; but the contradiction
ESSAY ON BURNS. 31
is apparent, not real, '\The Indignation which makes ^^ 1.
verses is, properly speaking, an inverted Love ;N;he love /'
of some right, some worth, some goodness, belonging
to ourselves or others, which has been injured, and
which this tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend 5
and avenge. No selfish fury of heart, existing there as
a primary feeling, and without its opposite, ever pro-
duced much Poetry ; otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger
were the most musical of all our choristers. John-
son said he loved a good hater; by which he must 10
have meant, not so much one that hated violently as
one that hated wisely, hated baseness from love of
nobleness. However, in spite of Johnson's paradox,
tolerable enough for once in speech, but which need
not have been so often adopted in print since then, we 15
rather believe that good men deal sparingly in hatred,
either wise or unwise ; nay, that a 'good ' hater is still
a d eside ratum in this world. The Devil, at least, who
passes for the chief and best of that class, is said to be
»wise an amiable character. 20
'^/ly-SJOf the verses which Indignation makes. Burns has
lIso given us specimens, and among the best that .were
ever given. Who will forget his Dweller i?i yo/i Dtni-
geon dark^ a piece that might have been chanted by
the Furies of y^schylus ? The secrets of the infernal 25
Pit are laid bare ; a boundless, baleful ' darkness visi-
ble ; ' and streaks of hellfire quivering madly in its
black haggard bosom !
Dweller in yon dungeon dark,
Hangman of Creation, mark ! 3°
Who in widow's weeds appears,
32 CARLYLE.
Laden with unhonored years,
Noosing with care a bursting purse,
A^ Baited with many a deadly curse !
\^^yWhy should we speak of Scots, w/ia hae wV Wallace
; bled, since all know of it, from the king to the mean-
est of his subjects ? This dithyrambic was composed
on horseback, in riding in the middle of tempests,
over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a
Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forbore
[o to speak, — judiciously enough, for a man composing
Briice^ s Adih'ess might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubt-
less this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed
it, through the soul of Burns ; but to the external ear it
should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So
15 long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman
or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode ;
^e best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen.
.nother wild, stormful Song, that dwells in our ear
rhd mind with a strange tenacity, is Macphersoji^ s Fare-
20 well. Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself
that co-operates. For was not this grim Celt, this
shaggy Northland Cacus, that ' lived a life of sturt
and strife, and died by treacherie," — was not he too
one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the
25 arena of his own remote misty glens, for want of a
clearer and wider one ? Nay, was there not a touch
of grace given him ? A fibre of love and softness, of
poetry itself, must have lived in his savage heart : for
he composed that air the night before his execution ;
30 on the wings of that poor melody his better soul would
soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy
ESSAY ON BURNS. 33
and despair which, Uke an avalanche, was hurling him
to the abyss ! Here also, as "aTThebes and in Pelops'
line, was material Fate matched against man's Free-
will ; matched in bitterest though obscure duel ; and
the ethereal soul sank not, even in its blindness, with-
out a cry which has survived it. But who, except
Burns, could have given words to such a soul ; words
that we never listen to without a strange, half-barbar-
ous, half-poetic fellow-feeling?
Sae rantingly, sae wantojily,
Sae dauntingly gaed he ;
He played a springs and danced it roiuid,
Belcnu the zoUmvs-tree.
'Under a lighter disguise,. the same principle of Love,
which we have recognized as the great characteristic 15
of Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests
itself in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, indeed, in
his sunny moods, a full, buoyant flood of mirth rolls
through the mind of Burns ; he rises to the high, and
stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all 20
Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irresis-
tible faculty of caricature ; for this is drollery rather
than Humor : but a much tenderer sportfulness dwells
in him, and comes forth here and there, in evanescent
and beautiful touches ; as in his Address to the Mouse, 25
or the Farmers Mare, or in his Elegy on poor Ala Hie,
which last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this
kind. In these pieces there are traits of a Humor as
fine as that of Sterne ; yet altogether different, origi-
nal, peculiar, — the Humor of Burns. 3°
34
CARLYLE.
/iJy Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many-
other kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more
might be said ; but now, with these poor outlines of a
sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of our sub-
5 ject. To speak of his individual Writings, adequately
and with any detail, would lead us far beyond our
limits. As already hinted, we can look on but few of
these pieces as, in strict critical language, deserving the
name of Poems: they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed
lo pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom essentially melo-
dious, aerial, poetical. T(Z7/i o^ Shaiiter itself, which
enjoys so high a favor, does not appear to us at all
decisively to come under this last category. It is not
so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the
15 heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead.
He has not gone back, much less carried us back,
into that dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tra-
dition was believed, and when it took its rise ; he does
not attempt, by any new-modelling of his supernatu-
20 ral ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of
human nature, which once responded to such things ;
and which lives in us too, and will forever live, though
silent now, or vibrating with far other notes, and to far
different issues. Our German readers will understand
25 us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the
Musaus of this tale. Externally it is all green and liv-
ing ; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy
on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere : the
strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imagi-
30 nations between the Ayr public-house and the gate of
Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay the idea of such
ESSAY OX BURNS. 35
a bridge is laughed at ; and thus the Tragedy of the
adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria,
or many-colored spectrum painted on ale-vapors, and
the Farce alone has any reality. We do not say that
Burns should have made much more of this tradition ; 5
we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not
much was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to
the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he
has actually accomplished ; but we find far more ' Shak-
spearean ' qualities, as these of Tarn o' Shanter have 10
been fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; nay
we incline to believe that this latter might have been
written, all but quite as well, by a man who, in place
^^^^^ genius, had only possessed talent.
/5,^^erhaps we may venture to say, that the most 15
strictly poetical of all his ' poems ' is one which does
not appear in Currie's Edition ; but has been often
printed before and since, under the humble title of
The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly is among the
lowest in Nature ; but it only the more shows our 20
Poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To
our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted ;
melted together, refined ; and poured forth in one flood
of true //^z/^V/ harmony. It is light, airy, soft of move-
ment ; yet sharp and precise in its details ; every face 25
is a portrait : that raucle mrlin, that luee Apollo, that
Son of Ma/'s, are Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene is at
once a dream, and the very Ragcastle of ' Poosie-Nan-
sie.' Farther, it seems in a considerable degree com-
plete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest 30
merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night is drawn
36 CARLYLE.
asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, flaming light,
these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous
revel ; for the strong pulse of Life vindicates its right
to gladness even here ; and when the curtain closes,
5 we prolong the action, without effort ; the next day as
the last, our Caird and our Balladinonger are singing
and soldiering ; their ' brats and callets ' are hawking,
begging, cheating ; and some other night, in new com-
binations, they will wring from Fate another hour of
10 wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal
sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in
Burns, a genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable
technical talent are manifested here. There is the
fidelity, humor, warm life and accurate painting and
15 grouping of some Teniers, for whom hostlers and ca-
rousing peasants are not without significance. It
would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best of
Burns's writings : we mean to say only, that it seems
to us the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical
20 composition, strictly so called. In the Beggars' Ope^'n,
in the Beggars' Bush^ as other critics have already re-
marked, there is nothing which, ^n real poetic vigor,
equals this Cajitata ; nothing, as we think, which comes
within many degrees of it.
1^1/ But by far the most finished, complete and truly in-
spired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found
among his Soigs. It is here that, although through a
small aperture, his light shines with least obstruction ;
in its highest beauty and pure sunny clearness. The
reason may be, that Song is a brief simple species of
ESSAY ON BURNS. 37
composition : and requires nothing so much for its
perfection as genuine_j»oetic feeling, genuinejmisicjaiV
heart. Yet the Song has its rules equally^^th the Tra-
gedy ; rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in
many cases are not so much as felt. We might write a 5
long essay on the Songs of Burns ; which we reckon by
far the best that Britain has yet produced : for indeed,
since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we know not that, by
any other hand, aught truly worth attention has been
accomplished in this department. True, we have 10
songs enough 'by persons of quality ; ' we have tawdry,
hollow, wine-bred madrigals ; many a rhymed speech
' in the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Por-
tugal Bishop,' rich in sonorous words, and, for moral,
dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental sensu- 15
ality; all which many persons cease not from endeav-
oring to sing ; though for most part, we fear, the music
is but from the throat outwards, or at best from some
region far enough short of the Soi/l ; not in which, but
in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in 20
some vaporous debatable-land on the outskirts of the
Nervous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed
€ches seem to have originated,
ith the Songs of Burns we must not name these
gs. Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt 25
sentiment that ever pervades /lis poetry, his Songs are
honest in another point of view : in form, as well as in
spirit. They do not iijfccf to be set to music, but they
actually and in themselves are music ; they have re-
ceived their life, and fashioned themselves together, 2,0
in the medium of Harmonv, as Venus rose from the
38 CARLYLE.
bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not de-
tailed, but suggested ; not said^ or spouted, in rhetori-
cal completeness and coherence ; but suiig^ in htful
gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in war-
5 blings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind.
We consider this to be the essence of a song ; and that
no songs since the little careless catches, and as it
were drops of song, which Shakspeare has here and
there sprinkled over his Plays, fulfil this condition in
10 nearly the same degree as most of Burns's do. Such
grace and truth of external movement, too, presup-
poses in general a corresponding force and truth of
sentiment and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns
are not more perfect in the former quality than in the
1 5 latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with what
vehemence and entireness ! There is a piercing wail
in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy ; he burns
with the sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or
slyest mirth ; and yet he is sweet and soft, ' sweet as
2o the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their part-
ing tear.' If we farther take into account the immense
variety of his subjects ; how, from the loud flowing
revel in Willie brew'd a Peck d Maut, to the still, rapt
enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven ; from the
25 glad kind greeting of Auld La/igsyne, or the comic
archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scofs
7vha hae wV Wallace bled, he has found a tone and
words for every mood of man's heart, — it will seem a
small praise if we rank him as the first of all our Song-
30 writers ; for we know not where to find one worthy of
being second to him.
D
^5. ESSAY OX BURNS. 39
^^^yTt is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns 's chief
influence as an author will ultimately be found to de-
pend : nor, if our Fletcher's apLllorism is true, shall we
account this a small influence. ' Let me make the
songs of a people,' said he, ' and you shall make its
laws.' Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled
himself with Legislators on this ground, it was Burns.
His Songs are already part of the mother-tongue, not
of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions
that in all ends of the earth speak a British language.
In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-
colored joy and woe of existence, the navie^ the voice of
that joy and that woe, is the name and voice which Burns
has given them. Strictly speakjiig^^xhaps no British
man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings 15
of so many men, as this solitary and altogether pri-
,^¥ate individual, with means apparently the humblest.
^H/In another point of view, moreover, we incline to «^.v^"
think that Burns's influence may have been consider- 15>^ '
able : we mean, as exerted specially on the Literature 20
of his country, at least on the Literature of Scotland.
Among the great changes which British, particularly
Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, 'J\jf^*^
one of the greatest will be found to consist in its re- '*^
markable increase, of nati onality./ Even the English 25
writers, most popular in Burns's time, were little dis-
tinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its best
sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in
good measure, taken place of the old insular home-
feelins: ; literature was, as it were, without anv local en
30
vironment ; was not nourished by the affections which
40 CARLVLE.
spring from a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers
seemed to write almost as if ;>/ vacuo ; the thing writ-
ten bears no mark of place ; it is not written so much
for Englishmen, as for men ; or rather, which is the
5 inevitable result of this, for certain Generalizations
which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an ex-
ception : not so Johnson ; the scene of his Rainbler is
little more English than that of his Rasselas.
/^OBut if such was, in some degree, the case with Eng-
iVIand, it was, in the highest degree, the case with
Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had, at that
period, a very singular aspect: unexampled, so far as
we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same
state of matters appears still to continue. For a long
15 period after Scotland became British, we had no litera-
ture : at the date when Addison and Steele were writ-
ing their Spectators, our good John Boston was writing,
with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of gram-
mar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. Then
20 came the schisms in our National Church, and the
fiercer schisms in our Body Politic : Theologic ink. and
Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed
to have blotted out the intellect of the country : how-
ever, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord
25 Kames made nearly the first attempt at writing Eng-
lish ; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a
whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all
Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our
'fervid genius.' there was nothing truly Scottish, noth-
30 ing indigenous : except, perhaps, the natural impetu-
osity of intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are
ESSAY ON BURNS. 41
sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our
nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full
of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any
English ; our culture was almost exclusively French.
It was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and 5
Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic
and philosopher ; it was the light of Montesquieu and
Mably that guided Robertson in his political specula-
tions ; Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam
Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow ; and 10
perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was
acted on by them : but neither had he aught to do
with Scotland ; Kdinburgh. equally with La Fleche,
was but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not
so much morally lived^ as metaphysically investigated. 15
Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers so clear
and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appear-
ance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human
affection whatever. The French wits of the period
were as unpatriotic : but their general deficiency in 20
moral principle, not to say their avowed sensuality and
unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render this
accountable enough. AVe hope there is a patriotism
founded on something oetter than prejudice; that our
country may be dear to us. without injury to our phi- 25
losophy: that in loving and justly prizing all other
lands, we may prize justly, and yet love before all
others, our own stern Motherland,) and the venerable
Structure of social and moral Life, which Mind has
through long ages been building up for us there. 30
Surely there is nourishment for the better part of
42 CARLYLE.
man's heart in all this: surely the roots, that have
fixed themselves in the very core of man's being, may
be so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into
roses, in the field of his life ! Our Scottish sages have
5 no such propensities : the field of their life shows
neither briers nor roses ; but only a flat, continuous
thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all questions, from
the ' Doctrine of Rent ' to the ' Natural History of
Religion,' are thrashed and sifted with the same me-
lochanical impartiality !
^ K" i^/Vith Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature,
it cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or
rapidly passing away : our chief literary men, whatever
other faults they may have, no longer live among us
15 like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda
Missionaries ; but like natural-born subjects of the soil,
partaking and sympathizing in all our attachments, hu-
mors and habits. Our literature no longer grows in
water but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of
20 the soil and climate. How much of this change may
be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be
difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns
was not to be looked for. (^But his example, in the
fearless adoption of domestic subjects,Jcould not but
25 operate from afar ; and certainly in no heart did the
love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than in
that of Burns : ' a tide of Scottish prejudice,' as he
modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, ' had
been poured along his veins ; and he felt that it would
30 boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest.' It
seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his coun-
ESSAY ON BURNS. . 43
li V, and yet would so gladly have done all. One small
province stood open for him, — that of Scottish Song ;
and how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he
labored there ! In his toilsome joiirneyings, this object
never quits him ; it is the little happy-valley of his 5
careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction,
he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the
muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the
oblivion that was covering it ! These were early feel-
ings, and they abode with him to the end : — 10
... A wish (I mind its power),
A wish, that to my latest hour ♦
Will strongly heave my breast, —
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake,
Some useful plan or book could make, 15
Or sing a sang at least.
The rough bur Thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,
I turn'd my weeding-clips aside.
And spared the svmbol dear. 20
\2/But to leave the mere literary character of Burns,
which has already detained us too long. Far more in-
teresting than any of his Written works, as it appears to
us, are his acted ones : the Life he willed and was fated
to lead among his fellow-men. These Poems are but 25
like little rhymed fragments scattered here and there
in the grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly exist-
ence ; and it is only when intercalated in this at their
proper places, that they attain their full measure of
significance. And this, too. alas, was but a fragment ! 30
44 CARLYLE.
The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some
columns, porticos, firm masses of building, stand com-
pleted ; the rest more or less clearly indicated ; with
many a far-stretching tendency, which only studious
. and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed
termination. For the work is broken off in the middle,
almost in the beginning ; and rises among us, beauti-
ful and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If chari-
table judgment was necessary in estimating his Poems,
o and justice required that the aim and the manifest
power to fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfil-
ment ; much more is this the case in regard to his
Life, the sum and result of all his endeavors, where
his difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but
5 in mass ; and so much has been left unaccomplished,
nay was mistaken, and altogether marred.
(Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of
Turns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and
manhood, but only youth : for, to the end, we discern
20 no decisive change in the complexion of his character ;
in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in
youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that,^^'
penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellec-
tual power, exhibited in his writings, he_jiever_attam§
25 to any clearness regarding himself ; t o the last, he
never ascertains his_j3eculiar aim, even with such dis-
tinctness as is common among ordinary men ; and
therefore never can pursue it with that singleness of
will, which insures success and_^me„.conte.ntm,ent to
^os uch men. To the last, he wavers between two pur-
poses : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet
ESSAY ON BURNS. 45
cannot consent to make this his chief and sole glory,
and to follow it as the one thing needful, through pov-
erty or riches, through good or evil report. Another
far meaner ambition still cleaves to him ; he must
dream and struggle about a certain * Rock of Jndepen- 5
dence : ' which, natural and even admirable as it might
be, was still but a warring with the world, on the com-
paratively insignificant ground of his being more com-
pletely or less completely supplied with money than
others ; of his standing at a higher or at a lower alti- 10
tude in general estimation than others. For the world
still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed colors :
he expects from it what it cannot give to any man ;
seeks for contentment, not within himself, in action
and wise effort, but from without, in the kindness of 15
circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary
ease. He would be happy, not actively and in him-
self, but passively and from some ideal cornucopia of
Enjoyments, not earned by his own labor, but showered
on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a 20
young man, he cannot gird himself up for any worthy
well-calculated goal, but swerves to and fro, between
passionate hope and remorseful disappointment : rush-
ing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, he sur-
mounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; travels, 25
nay advances far, but advancing only under uncertain
guidance, is ever and anon turned from his path ; and
to the last cannot reach the only true happiness of a
man, that of^clear decided Activity in the sphere for
which, by nature and circumstances, he has been fitted t,o
and appointed.) / XWMW.'/ -^ ,.-/ A.
yAM
46 CARLYLE.
H
e do not say these things in dispraise of Burns ;
nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favor.
This blessing is not given soonest to the best ; but
rather, it is often tiie greatest minds that are latest in
ic I obtaining it; for^^'here most is to be developed, most
\time may be required to develop it.7 A complex condi-
tion had been assigned him from without ; as complex
a condition from within : no ' pre-established harmony '
existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the em-
jo pyirean soul of Robert Burns ; it w^as not wonderful
that the adjustment between them should have been
long postponed, and his arm long cumbered, and his
sight confused, in so vast and discordant an economy
as he had been appointed steward over. Byron was,
at his death, but a year younger than Burns ; and
through life, as it might have appeared, far more
simply situated : yet in him too we can trace no such
adjustment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, and
only a little before his end, the beginning of what
med such.
ly much the most striking incident in Burns's Life
his journey to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more
important one is his residence at Irvine, so early as in
his twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor
25 and toilworn ; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all
its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parent-
age, deducting outward circumstances, he had every
reason to reckon himself fortunate. His father was a
man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the
30 best of our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possess-
ing some, and, what is far better and rarer, openminded
<
ESSAY ON BURNS. 47
for more: a man with a keen insight and devout heart;
reverent towards God, friendly therefore at once, and
fearless towards all that God has made : in one word,
though but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and
fully unfolded Ma7i. Such a father is seldom found 5
in any rank in society ; and was worth descending far
in society to seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor ;
had he been even a little richer, almost never so little,
the whole might have issued far otherwise. Mighty
events turn on a straw ; the crossing of a brook de- 10
cides the conquest of the world. Had this William
Burns's small seven acres of nursery-ground anywise
prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to school ;
had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to
some university ; come forth not as a rustic wonder, 15
but as a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and
changed the whole course of British Literature, — for
it lay in him to have done this ! But the nursery did
not prosper ; poverty sank his whole family below the
help of even our cheap school-system : Burns remained 20
a hard-worked ploughboy, and British literature took
its own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged
scene there is much to nourish him. If he drudges,
it is with his brother, and for his father and mother,
whom he loves, and would fain shield from want. 25
Wisdom is not banished from their poor hearth, nor
the balm of natural feeling : the solemn words ^ Let
us worship God,' are heard there from a 'priest-like
father;' if threatenings of unjust men throw mother
and children into tears, these are tears not of grief 30
only, but of holiest affection ; every heart in that hum-
48 CARLYLE.
ble group feels itself the closer knit to every other; in
their hard warfare they are there together, a ' little
band of brethren.' Neither are such tears, and the
deep beauty that dwells in them, their only portion.
5 Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living :
there is a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to
trample on misfortune ; nay to bind it under his feet to
make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor of
character has been given him ; and so the thick-coming
10 shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony,
and in their closest pressure he bates no jot of heart
or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail not. as he
grows up ; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities around
him ; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-
15 colored splendor and gloom : and the auroral light of
first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song
is on his path ; and so he walks
in glory and in joy,
Behind his plough, upon the mountain side.
2(/»/ X\'e ourselves know^ from the best evidence, that up
to this date Burns was happy ; nay that he was the
gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to
be found in the world ; more so even than he ever
afterwards appeared. But now. at this early age, he
25 quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder,
more oxciting society ; and becomes initiated in those
dissipations, those vices, which a certain class of phi-
losophers have asserted to be a natural preparative for
entering on active life ; a kind of mud-bath, in which
30 the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and. we
ESSAY ON BURNS. 49
suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of Man-
hood can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much
with this class of philosophers ; we hope they are mis-
taken : for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all
stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, 5
that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced
and fated not only to meet but to yield to them, and
even serve for a term in their leprous armada. We
hope it is not so. ^Clear we are, at all events^ it can-X
not be the training one receives in this Devil's-service, il IQ
but only our determining to desert from it, that fits us /
for true manly Action. J We become men. not after we ^
have been dissipated, and disappointed in the chase of
false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, in any
way, what impassable barriers hem us in through this 15
life ; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our in-
finite soul from the g//fs of this extremely finite world ;
that a man must be sufficient for himself ; and that for
suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striving
and doing. Q\ianhood begins when we have in anyV^
way made truce with Necessity ;) begins even when we^
have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only
do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we
have reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; and thus, in
reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity 25
we are free. Surely, such lessons as this last, which,
in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every
mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a
devout mother, in the looks and actions of a devout
father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in 30
collision with the sharp a^mant of Fate, attracting us
so CARLYLE.
to shipwreck us, when the heart is grown hard, and
may be broken before it will become contrite. Had
Burns continued to learn this, as he was already learn-
ing it, in his father's cottage, he would have learned it
5 fully, which he never did ; and been saved many a
lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year of re-
morseful sorrow.
^Jt seems to us another circumstance of fatal import
Tfi Burns's history, that at this time too he became
lo involved in the religious quarrels of his district ; that
he was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of
the New-Light Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable
warfare. At the tables of these free-minded clergy he
learned much more than was needful for him. Such
15 liberal ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind
scruples about Religion itself ; and a whole world of
Doubts, which it required quite another set of conjurers
than these men to exorcise. We do not say that such
an intellect as his could have escaped similar doubts at
20 some period of his history; or even that he could, at
a later period, have come through them altogether vic-
torious and unharmed : but it seems peculiarly unfor-
tunate that this time, above all others, should have
been fixed for the encounter. For now, with principles
25 assailed by evil example from without, by 'passions
raging like demons ' from within, he had little need of
sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of
the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already
defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind
30 is at variance with itself ; the old divinity no longer
presides there ; but wild Desires and wild Repentance
ESSAY ON BURNS. 51
alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has com-
mitted himself before the world ; his character for
sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted
worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes
of men ; and his only refuge consists in trying to dis- 5
believe his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The
blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken
only by red lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric
of his life is blasted asunder ; for now not only his
character, but his personal liberty, is to be lost ; men 10
and Fortune are leagued for his hurt ; ' hungry Ruin
has him in the wind.' He sees no escape but the
saddest of all : exile from his loved country, to a coun-
try in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to him.
While the 'gloomy night is gathering fast,' in mental 15
storm and solitude, as well as in physical, he sings his
wild farewell to Scotland : —
Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes !
My peace with these, my love with those :
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 20
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr !
ight breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still
a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is in-
vited to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with anticipating
heart ; is welcomed as in a triumph, and with univer- 25
sal blandishment and acclamation ; whatever is wisest,
whatever is greatest or loveliest there, gathers round
him, to gaze on his face, to show him honor, sympathy,
affection. Burns's appearance among the sages and
nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded as one of the 30
52 CARLYLE.
most singular phenomena in modern Literature ; al-
most like the appearance of some Napoleon among the
crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is no-
wise as 'a mockery king,' set there by favor, tran-
5 sieirtly and for a purpose, that he will let himself be
treated : still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden
elevation turns his too weak head : but he stands there
on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his
equal rank from Nature herself; putting forth no claim
10 which there is not strength /// him. as well as about
him, to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible ob-
servations on this point: —
' It needs no effort of imagination,' says he, ' to conceive what
the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either
15 clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this
big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing
eyes, who-, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail
at a single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing
and conversation a most thorough conviction, that in .thte society
20 of the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly where he
was entitled to be ; hardly deigiied to flatter them by exhibiting
even an occasional symptom qi being flattered by their notice ;
by turns calmly measured himself against the most cultivated
understandings of his time in discussion ; overpowered the don-
25 mots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merri-
ment, imjDregnated with all the burning life of genius ; astounded
bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social
reserve, by compelling them to tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly,
— beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all this with-
30 out indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among those
professional ministers of excitement, who are content to be paid
in money and smiles for doing what the spectators and auditors
would be ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they
ESSAY ON liURXS. 53
had the power of doing it ; and last, and probably worst of all,
who was known to be in the habit of enlivening societies which
they would have scorned to approach, still more frequently than
their own, with eloquence no less magnificent ; with wit, in all
likelihood still more daring ; often enough, as the superioi's whom
he fronted without alarm might have guessed from the beginning,
and had ere long no occasion to guess, with wit pointed at them-
selves.'
fvh
, ,^'l^e farther we remove from this scene, the more
singular will it seem to us : details of the exterior as- 10
pect of it are already full of interest. Most readers rec-
ollect Mr. Walker's personal interviews with Burns as
among the best passages of his Narrative : a time will
come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's,
slight though it is, will also be precious: 15
' As for Burns,' writes Sir Walter, ' I may truly say, Virgilinni
7<idi taiitiim. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came
first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much
interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know
him ; but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, 20
and still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets
tliat he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that
time a clerk of my father's. He knew Burns, and promised to
ask him to his lodgings to dinner ; but had no opportunity to
keep his word ; otherwise I might have seen more of this distin- 25
guished man. As it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable
Professor Ferguson's, where there were several gentlemen of
literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Mr.
Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, looked and
listened. The only thing I remember which was remarkable in 30
Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of
Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog
sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, with a
child in her arms. These lines were written beneath :
54 CARLYLE.
"Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain,
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ;
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew,
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,
5 Gave the sad presage of his future years,
The child of misery baptized in tears."
' Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the
ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears.
He asked whose the lines were ; and it chanced that nobody but
10 myself remembered that they occur in a half -forgotten poem of
Langhorne's called by the unpromising title of " The Justice of
Peace." I whispered my information to a friend present ; he
mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word,
which, though of mere civility, I then received and still recollect
15 with very great pleasure.
' His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not
clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which re-
ceived part of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his
extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nas-
20 myth's picture: but to me it conveys the idea that they are
diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance
was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits, I should
have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very
sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, i.e. none of
25 your modern agriculturists who keep laborers for their drudgery,
but the douce g7idemaji who held his own plough. There was a
strong expression of sense and shrew^dness in all his lineaments ;
the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and tem-
perament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed ( I say
30 literally glowed ) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never
saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the
most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed
perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among
the men who were the most learned of their time and country,
35 he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least
intrusive forwardness ; and when he differed in opinion, he did
ESSAY ON BURNS. 55
not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with mod-
esty. I do not remember any part of his conversation distinctly
enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever see him again, except in
the street, where he did not recognize me, as I could not expect
he should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh : but (consider- 5
ing what literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts
made for his reUef were extremely trifling.
' I remember, on this occasion I mention, 1 thought Burns's
acquaintance with English poetry was rather hmited ; and also
that, having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of 10
Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility as his models:
there was doubtless national predilection in his estimate.
' This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add,
that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a
farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak 15
/;/ ma lam paj'tetn, when I say, I never saw a man in company
with his superiors in station or information more perfectly free
from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was
told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was ex-
tremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic 20
or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I have
heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark this. — I do not know
anything I can add to these recollections of forty years since.'
i^v 'fhe conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of
^avor ; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which 25
he not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly
been regarded as the best proof that could be given
of his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little natu-
ral vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some
glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear of being 30
thought affected, we could have pardoned in almost
any man ; but no such indication is to be traced here.
In his unexampled situation the young peasant is not
56 CARLYLE.
a moment perplexed ; so many strange lights do not
confuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless,
we cannot but perceive that this winter did him great
and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge of
5 men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford
him ; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal ar-
rangements in their social destiny it also left with him.
He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the
powerful are born to play their parts ; nay had himself
10 stood in the midst of it ; and he felt more bitterly than
ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part
or lot in that splendid game. From this time a jealous
indignant fear of social degradation takes possession
of him ; and pery.er.ts, so far as aught could pervert,
15 his private contentment, and his feelings towards his
richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that he had tal-
ent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes,
could he but have rightly willed this : it was clear also
that he willed something far different, and therefore
20 could not make one. Unhappy it was that he had
not power to choose the one, and reject the other ; but
must halt forever between two opinions, two objects;
making hampered advancement towards either. But
so is it with many men : 'we long for the merchandise.
25 yet would fain keep the price ; ' and so stand chaffering
with Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night come,
5Lnd our fair is over !
ii^fcJThe Edinburgh Learned of that period were in gen-
eral more noted for clearness of head than for warmth
30 of heart : with the exception of the good old Blacklock.
whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among
ESSAY ON BURNS. 57
them seems to have looked at Burns with any true
sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly
curious thing. By the great also he is treated in the
customary fashion ; entertained at their tables and dis-
missed : certain modica of pudding and praise are, 5
from time to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination
of his presence ; which exchange once effected, the
bargain is finished, and each party goes his several
way. At the end of this strange season. Burns gloom-
ily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on the 10
chaotic future. In money he is somewhat richer ; in
fame and the show of happiness, intinitely richer ; but
in the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay poorer ;
for his heart is now maddened still more with the fe-
ver of worldly Ambition ; and through long years the 15
disease will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and
weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims.
What Burns was next to do or to avoid ; how a man
so circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his
true advantage, might at this point of time have been 20
a question for the wisest. It was a question too,
which apparently he was left altogether to answer for
himself : of his learned or rich patrons it had not
struck any individual to turn a thought on this so triv-
ial matter. Without claiming for Burns the praise of 25
perfect sagacffy, we must say, that his Excise and
Farm scheme does not seem to us a very unreasonable
one : that we should be at a loss, even now, to suggest
one decidedly better. Certain of his admirers have
felt scandalized at his ever resolving to gauge ; and 30
would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit of
S8 CARLYLE.
Patronage stirred the waters, that so, with one friendly
plunge, all his sorrows might be healed. Unwise
counsellors ! They know not the manner of this
spirit ; and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a
5 man might have happiness, were it not that in the in-
terim he must die of hunger ! It reflects credit on the
manliness and sound sense of Burns, that he felt so
early on what ground he w^as standing ; and preferred
self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and in-
lo action, though with hope of far more splendid possi-
bilities. But even these possibilities were not rejected
in his scheme : he might expect, if it chanced that he
had any friend, to rise, in no long period, into some-
thing even like opulence and leisure ; while again, if it
15 chanced that he had no friend, he could still live in se-
curity ; and for the rest, he ' did not intend to borrow
honor from any profession.' We reckon that his plan
was honest and well-calculated : all turned on the exe-
cution of it. Doubtless it failed ; yet not, we believe.
20 from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was
no failure of external means, but of internal, that over-
took Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but
of the soul ; to his last day, he owed no man anything.
Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise
25 actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from
a man whose income had lately been seven pounds a-
year, was worthy of him, and not more than worthy.
Generous also, and worthy of him, was the treatment
of the woman whose life's welfare now depended on
30 his pleasure. A friendly observer might have hoped
serene days for him : his mind is on the true road to
ESSAY ON BURNS. 59
peace with itself : what clearness he still wants will be
given as he proceeds ; for the best teacher of duties,
that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of those we see
and have at hand. Had the ' patrons of genius,' who
could give him nothing, but taken nothing from him, at
least nothing more ! The wounds of his heart would
have healed, vulgar ambition would have died away.
Toil and Frugality would have been welcome, since
Virtue dwelt with them ; and Poetry would have shone
through them as of old : and in her clear ethereal light,
which was his own by birthright, he might have looked
down on his earthly destiny, and all its obstructions,
not with patience only, but with love.
But the patrons of genius would not have it so.
Picturesque tourists/ all manner of fashionable dan-
glers after literature, and, far worse, all manner of con-
vivial Maecenases, hovered round him in his retreat ;
and his good as well as his weak qualities secured them
influence over him. He was flattered by their notice ;
1 There is one little sketch by certain ' English gentlemen ' of this
class, which, though adopted in Carrie's Narrative, and since then re-
peated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition to
regard as imaginary : ' On a rock that projected into the stream, they
saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap
made of fox-skin on his head, a loose greatcoat fixed round him by a belt,
from which depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns.'
Now, we rather think, it was 7iot Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox-
skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what
are we to make of this ' enormous Highland broad-sword ' depending
from him ? More especially, as there is no word of parish constables on
the outlook to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his
own midriff or that of the public ! Burns, of all men, had the least
need, and the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own
eyes, or those of others, by such poor mummeries.
60 CARLYLE.
and his warm social nature made it impossible for him
to shake them off, and hold on his way apart from
them. These men, as we believe, were proximately
the means of his ruin. Not that they meant him any
5 ill ; they only meant themselves a little good ; if he
suffered harm, let ///;;/ look to it ! But they wasted his
precious time and his precious talent ; they disturbed
Ins composure, broke down his returning habits of
temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their
lo pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, which
soon followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge
against Fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness
in their neighborhood ; and Burns had no retreat but
to 'the Rock of Independence,' which is but an air-
15 castle after all, that looks well at a distance, but will
screen no one from real wind and wet. Flushed with
irregular excitement, exasperated alternately by con-
tempt of others, and contempt of himself. Burns was
no longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing
20 it forever. There was a hoUowness at the heart of his
life, for his conscience did not now approve what he
was doing.
Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless
remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true load-
25 star, a life of Poetry, with Povert)', nay with Famine if
it must be so, was too often altogether hidden from his
eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where without some
such loadstar there was no right steering. Meteors of
French Politics rise before him, but these were not his
30 stars. An accident this, which hastened, but did not
originate, his worst distresses. In the mad contentions
ESSAY ON BURNS. 6i
of that time, he comes in colHsion with certain official
Superiors ; is wounded by them ; cruelly lacerated, we
should say, could a dead mechanical implement, in
any case, be called cruel : and shrinks, in indignant
pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodi- 5
ness than ever. His life has now lost its unity : it
is a life of fragments ; led with little aim, beyond the
melancholy one of securing its own continuance, — in
fits of wild false joy when such offered, and of black
despondency when they passed away. /:His character 10
before the world begins to suffer : calumny Is busy with
him ; for a miserable man makes more enemies than
friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a thou-
sand misfortunes ; but deep criminality is what he
stands accused of, and they that are not without sin 15
cast the first stone at him ! For is he not a well-wisher
to the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore
in that one act guilty of all } These accusations, po-
litical and moral, it has since appeared, were false
enough : but the world hesitated little to credit them. 20
Nay his convivial Maecenases themselves were not the
last to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his
later j^ears, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly with-
drawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted per-
son, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That 25
painful class, stationed, in all provincial cities, behind
the outmost breastwork of Gentility, there to stand
siege and do battle against the intrusions of Grocer-
dom and Grazierdom, had actually seen dishonor in
the society of Burns, and branded him with their veto ; 30
had, as we vulgarly say, cut him ! We find one pas-
62 CARLYLE.
sage in this Work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not
out of our thoughts :
' A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already
more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that
; he was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dumfries
one fine summer evening about this time to attend a county ball,
he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal
street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with succes-
sive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the
10 festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared willing to rec-
ognize him. The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who
on his proposing to cross the street said : " Nay, nay, my young
friend, that's all over now ; " and quoted, after a pause, some
verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad :
15
" His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow,
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing.
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.
O, were we young as we ance hae been,
20 We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green.
And linking it ower the lily-white lea !
And 2vercna my heart light, I wad die."
It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain sub-
jects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these
25 verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner ;
and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very
agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived.'
Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps ' where
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart ' ^
30 and that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentle-
1 Ubi scEva indignatio cor itlteritis lacerare iieqnit. Swift's Epitaph.
ESSAY ON BURNS. 63
men already lie at his side, where the breastwork of
gentility is quite thrown down, — wlio would not sigh
over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide
heart from heart, and make man unmerciful to his
brother ! 5
It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns
would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy
of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the
soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of
Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. And yet lo
what harmony was in him, w^hat music even in his dis-
cords ! How the wild tones had a charm for the sim-
plest and the wisest ; and all men felt and knew that
here also was one of the Gifted ! ' If he entered an
inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the 15
news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the
garret ; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord
and all his guests were assembled ! ' Some brief pure
moments of poetic life were yet appointed him, in the
composition of his Songs. We can understand how he 20
grasped at this employment ; and how too, he spurned
all other reward for it but what the labor itself brought
him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and
marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though
sharply conscious of its errors and abasement : and 25
here, in his destitution and degradation, was one act of
seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left even for
him to perform. He felt too, that with all the 'thought-
less follies ' that had ' laid him low,' the world was un-
just and cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to an- 30
other and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a
64 CARLYLE.
patriot, would he strive for the glory of his country : so
he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served
zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this
last luxury of his existence ; let him not have appealed
5 to us in vain ! The money was not necessary to him ;
he struggled through without it : long since, these
guineas would have been gone, and now the high-
mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in all
hearts forever.
lo We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; for
matters had now taken such a shape with him as could
not long continue. If improvement was not to be
looked for, Nature could only for a limited time main-
tain this dark and maddening warfare against the
15 world and itself. We are not medically informed
whether any continuance of years was, at this period,
probable for Burns ; whether his death is to be looked
on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as
the natural consequence of the long series of events
20 that had preceded. The latter seems to be the like-
lier opinion ; and yet it is by no means a certain one.
At all events, as we have said, some change could not
be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems
to us, were open for Burns : clear poetical activity ;
25 madness ; or death. The first, with longer life, was
still possible, though not probable ; for physical causes
were beginning to be concerned in it : and yet Burns
had an iron resolution ; could he but have seen and
felt, that not only his highest glory, but his first duty,
30 and the true medicine for all his woes, lay here. The
second was still less probable; for his mind was ever
ESSAY Ox\ BURNS. 65
among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third
gate was open for him : and he passed, not softly yet
speedily, into that still country, where the hail-storms
and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden
wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 5
Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he
sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise
sympathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to
themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might
have been done for him ; that by counsel, true affection 10
and friendly ministrations, he might have been saved
to himself and the world. We question whether there
is not more tenderness of heart than soundness of
judgment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to us
whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual 15
could have lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel,
which seldom profits any one, he did not need; in his
understanding, he knew the right from the wrong, as
well perhaps as any man ever did : but the persuasion,
which would have availed him, lies not so much in the 20
head as in the heart, where no argument or expostula-
tion could have assisted much to implant it. As to
money again, we do not believe that this was his essen-
tial want ; or well see how any private man could, even
presupposing Burns's consent, have bestowed on him 25
an independent fortune, with much prospect of deci-
sive advantage. K^\. is a mortifying truth, that two men
in any rank of society, could hardly be found virtuous
enough to give money, and to take it as a necessary
gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or 30/
66 CARLYLE.
both. But so stands the fact: Friendship, in the old
heroic sense of that term, no longer exists ; except in
the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is in real-
ity no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue among
5 men. A close observer of manners has pronounced
' Patronage,' that is, pecuniary or other economic fur-
therance, to be ' twice cursed ; ' cursing him that gives,
and him that takes ! And thus, in regard to outward
matters also, it has become the rule, as in regard to
lo inward it always was and must be the rule, that no one
shall look for effectual help to another ; but that each
shall rest contented with what help he can afford him-
self. Such, we say, is the principle of modern Honor ;
naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of
15 Pride, which we mculcate and encourage as the basis
of our whole social morality. Many a poet has been
poorer than Burns ; but no one was ever prouder : we
may question whether, without great precautions, even
a pension from Royalty would not have galled and
20 encumbered, more than actually assisted him.
Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with an-
other class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher
ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their self-
ish neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts
25 whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered,
would have been accepted, or could have proved very
effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that much
was to be done for Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow
might have been warded from his bosom ; many an en-
30 tanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the
powerful ; and light and heat, shed on him from high
ESSAY OX BURNS. 67
places, would have made his humble atmosphere more
genial ; and the softest heart then breathing might
have lived and died with some f«wer pangs. Nay, we
shall grant farther, and for Burns it is granting much,
that, with all his pride, he would have thanked, even 5
with exaggerated gratitude, any one who had cordially
befriended him : patronage, unless once cursed, needed
not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor
promotion he desired in his calling might have been
granted : it was his own scheme, therefore likelier than 10
any other to be of service. All this it might have been
a luxury, nay it was a duty, for our nobility to have
done. No part of all this, however, did any of them
do ; or apparently attempt, or wish to do : so much is
granted against them. But what then is the amount 15
of their blame .'' Simply that they were men of the
world, and walked by the principles of such men ; that
they treated Burns, as other nobles and other common-
ers had done other poets ; as the English did Shak-
speare ; as King Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, 20
as King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do
men gather grapes of thorns ; or shall we cut down
our thorns for yielding only a fence and haws 1 How,
indeed, could the ' nobility and gentry of his native
land ' hold out any help to this Scottish Bard, proud 25
of his name and country ' ? Were the nobility and
gentry so much as able rightly to help themselves .''
Had they not their game to preserve ; their borough
interests to strengthen ; dinners, therefore, of various
kinds to eat and give ? Were their means more than 30
adequate to all this business, or less than adequate ?
68 CARLYLE.
Less than adequate, in general : few of them in reality
were richer than Burns ; many of them were poorer ;
for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with
thumbscrews, from the hard hand ; and, in their need
5 of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy ; which Burns
was never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive
/them. The game they preserved and shot, the dinners
/ they ate and gave, the borough interests they strength-
en ( ened, the little Babylons they severally builded by the
V° glory of their might, are all melted or melting back into
\ t"he primeval Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavors
\are fated to do : and here was an action, extending, in
virtue of its worldly influence, we may say, through all
time ; in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time,
15 being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness itself; this
action was offered them to do, and light was not given
them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But
better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human
suffering did not end with the life of Burns ; neither
20 was the solemn mandate, ' Love one another, bear one
another's burdens,' given to the rich only, but to all
men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to as-
suage by our aid or our pity ; but celestial natures,
groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall
25 still find ; and that wretchedness which Fate has ren-
dered %'oiceless and tuneless is not the least wretched,
but the most.
Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's fail-
ure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to
30 us, treated him with more rather than with less kind-
ness than it usually shows to such men. It has ever,
ESSAY ON BURNS 69
we fear, shown but small favor to its Teachers : hun-
ger and nakedness, perils and revilings, the prison, the
cross, the poison-chalice have, in most times and coun"
tries, been the market-price it has offered for Wisdom,
the welcome with which it has greeted those who have 5
come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socra-
tes, and the Christian Apostles, belong to old days ;
but the world's Martyrology M^as not completed with '
these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly
dungeons; Tasso pines in the cell of a mad-house; 10
Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So
neglected, so ' persecuted they the Prophets,' not in
Judea only, but in all places where men have been.
/We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or
f should be, a prophet and teacher to his age; that he 15
'^ I has no right to expect great kindness from it, but
Vrather is bound to do it great kindness ;) that Burns,
m particular, experienced fully the usual proportion of
the world's goodness ; and that the blame of his fail-
ure, a^'we have said, lies not chiefly with the world. 20
,;WJS*^ere, then, does it lie ? We are forced to answer :
/With himself ; it is his inward, not his outward mis-
fortunes that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed,
is it otherwise : seldom is a life morally wrecked but
the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, 25
some want less of good fortune than of good guidance.
Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it
the strength needful for its action and duration ; least
of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and dar-
ling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is 30
in the power of any external circumstances utterly to
70 CARLYLE.
ruin the mind of a man ; nay if proper wisdom be given
him, even so much as to affect its essential health and
beauty. The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfor-
tunes is Death ; nothing more can lie in the cup of hu-
5 man woe : yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed
over Death, and led it captive ; converting its physical
victory into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal
and immortal consecration for all that their past life
had achieved. What has been done, may be done
10 again : nay, it is but the degree and not the kind of
such heroism that differs in different seasons ; for with-
out some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous dar-
ing, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in all its
forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever
15 attained to be good.
We have already stated the error of Burns ; and
mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was Jjie
want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his
ailTis ; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union
20 the common spirit of the world with the spirit of
poetry, which is of a far different and altogether ir-
reconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly, and
Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he was
can be anything, by halves. The heart, not of a mere
25 hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or poetical Restau-
rateur^ but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy of the
old religious heroic times, had been given him : and
he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of
scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true Noble-
30 ness was little understood, and its place supplied by a
hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful prin-
ESSAY ON BURNS. ji
ciple of Pride. The influences of that age, his open,
kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly
untoward situation, made it more than usually diffi-
cult for him to cast aside, or rightly subordinate ; the
better spirit that was within him ever sternly de- 5
manded its rights, its supremacy : he spent his life in
endeavoring to reconcile these two ; and lost it, as he
must lose it, without reconciling them.
Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue
poor, for he would not endeavor to be otherwise : 10
this it had been well could he have once for all ad-
mitted, and considered as finally settled. He was
poor, truly ; but hundreds even of his owm class and
order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered
nothing deadly from it: nay, his own Father had a far 15
sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was ; and
he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring,
and to all moral intents prevailing, against it. True,
Burns had little means, had even little time for poetr3^
his only real pursuit and vocation ; but so much the 20
more precious w^as what little he had. In all these
external respects his case was hard ; but very far from
the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery and much
worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and wise
men to strive wdth, and their glory to conquer. Locke 25
was banished as a traitor : and wrote his Essay on the
Human Unde^'statiding sheltering himself in a Dutch
garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease w^hen he com-
posed Paradise Lost? Not only low, but fallen from a
height ; not only poor, but impoverished ; in darkness 30
and with dangers compassed round, he sang his im-
72 CARLYLE.
mortal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did
not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier and
in prison ? Nay, was not the Araucana, which Spain
acknowledges as its Epic, written without even the aid
5 of paper ; on scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and
voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare ?
And what, then, had these men, which Burns
wanted ? Two things ; both which, it seems to us, are
indispensable for such men. They had a true, religious
lo principle of morals ; and a single, not a double aim
in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-
worshippers ; but seekers and worshippers of some-
thing far better than Self. Not personal enjoyment was
their object ; but a high, heroic idea of Religion, of
15 Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other
form, ever hovered before them ; in which cause they
neither shrank from suffering, nor called on the earth
to witness it as something wonderful ; but patiently en-
dured, counting it blessedness enough so to spend and
20 be spent. Thus the ' golden-calf of Self-love,' how-
ever curiously carved, was not their Deity ; but the
Invisible Goodness, which alone is man's reasonable
service. This feeling was as a celestial fountain,
whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all
25 the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence.
In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other
things were subordinated and made subservient ; and
therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend
rocks ; but its edge must be sharp and single : if it be
30 double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend
nothing.
ESSAY Ox\ BURNS. 73
i-f . Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ;
in which heroism and devotedness were still practised,
or at least not yet disbelieved in : but much of it like-
wise they owed to themselves. With Burns, again, it
was different. His morality, in most of its practical 5
points, is that of a mere worldly man ; enjoyment, in a
hner or coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and
strives for. A noble instinct sometimes raises him
above this ; but an instinct only, and acting only for
moments. He has no Religion ; in the shallow age, 10
where his days were cast. Religion was not discrimi-
nated from the New and Old Light forms of Religion ;
and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds
of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a trembling
adoration, but there is no temple in his understanding. 15
He lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt.
His religion, at best, is an anxious wish ; like that of
Rabelais, ' a great Perhaps.'
He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he
but have loved it purely, and with his whole undi- 20
vided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns
could have followed it, is but another form of Wisdom,
of Religion ; is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this
also was denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant
gleam, which will not be extinguished within him, yet 25
rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often
a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for
Burns to be rich, to be. or to seem, ' independent ; '
but it was necessary for him to be at one with his own
heart ; to place what was highest in his nature high- 30
est also in his life ; " to seek within himself for that
74 CARLYLE.
consistency and sequence, which external events would
forever refuse him.' He was born a poet ; poetry was
the celestial element of his being, and should have
been the soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into that
5 serene ether, whither he had wings given him to mount,
he would have needed no other elevation : poverty,
neglect and all evil, save the desecration of himself
and his Art, were a small matter to him ; the pride and
the passions of the world lay far beneath his feet ; and
lo he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince
and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with
clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympa-
thy, with pity. Nay, we question whether for his cul-
ture as a Poet poverty and much suffering for a season
15 were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in
looking back over their lives, have testified to that ef-
fect. ' I would not for much,' says Jean Paul, 'that I
had been born richer.' And yet Paul's birth w^as poor
enough ; for, in another place, he adds : ' The prison-
20 er's allowance is bread and water; and I had often only
the latter.' But the gold that is refined in the hottest
furnace comes out the purest ; or, as he has himself
expressed it, ' the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer
it has been trained in a darkened cage.'
25 A man like Burns might have divided his hours be-
tween poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which all
true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a
beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones :
but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's
30 banquets was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt.
How could he be at ease at such banquets ? What
ESSAY ON BURNS. 75
had he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse
roar of altogether earthly voices ; brightening the thick
smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven ?
Was it his aim to enjoy life ? To-morrow he must go
drudge as an Exciseman ! We wonder not that Burns 5
became moody, indignant, and at times an offender
against certain rules of society ; but rather that he did
not grow utterly frantic, and run amiick against them
all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or
others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable dili- 10
gence for an hour ? What he did, under such perverse
guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with
astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his
character. -^
Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; 15
but not in others ; only in himself ; least of all in
simple increase of wealth and worldly 'respectability.'
We hope we have now heard enough about the efiicacy
of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay
have we not seen another instance of it in these very 20
days ? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably
less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank
not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer :
the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career,
are his by inheritance ; the richest harvest of fame he 25
soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand.
And what does all this avail him ? Is he happy, is he
good, is he true .'' Alas, he has a poet's soul, and
strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal ; and soon
feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top 30
to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud
76 CARLYLE.
man; might, like nim, have 'purchased a pocket-copy
of Milton to study the character of Satan ; ' for Satan
also is Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his po-
etry, and the model apparently of his conduct. As
in Burns's case too, the celestial element will not
mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and man of
the world he must not be ; vulgar Ambition will not
live kindly with poetic Adoration ; he cannot serve God
and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy ; nay
he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely
arranged : the fire that is in him is not a strong, still,
central fire, warming into beauty the products of a
world ; but it is the mad fire of a volcano ; and now
— we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which ere
5 long will fill itself with snow !
Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to
their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer
Truth ; they had a message to deliver, which left them
no rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain.
20 this divine behest lay smouldering within them, for
they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mys-
terious anticipation, and they had to die without ar-
ticulately uttering it. They are in the camp of the
Unconverted ; yet not as high messengers of rigorous
25 though benignant Truth, but as soft flattering singers,
and in pleasant fellowship will they live there ; they
are first adulated, then persecuted ; they accomplish
little for others ; they find no peace for themselves,
but only death and the peace of the grave. We con-
30 fess it is not without a certain mournful awe that we
view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet
ESSAY ON BURNS. -j-j
ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It
seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece
of history, — twice told us in our own time ! Surely to
men of like genius, if there be any such, it carries with
it a lesson of deep, impressive significance. Surely it 5
would become such a man, furnished for the highest
of all enterprises, — that of being the Poet of his Age,
— to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in
what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton
are true i)i all times, and were never truer than in this: 10
/" He who would write heroic poems must make his
* ywhole life a heroic poem." If he cannot first so make
his life, then let him hasten from this arena ; for nei-
ther its lofty glories nor its fearful perils are fit for him.
Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; let him 15
worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the time
will not fail to reward him, — if, indeed, he can endure
to live in that capacity ! Byron and Burns could not
live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts con-
sumed them, and better it-was for them that they could 20
not. For it is not in the favor of the great or of the
small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable
citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's
strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him,
or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union 25
of wealth with favor and furtherance for literature,
like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest ama-
ranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A true
poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flat-
tery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of 30
occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit ; he can-
^.^-
^ C^^^^.^.:• ^l^^t^CTW
78 CARLYLE.
not be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan.
At the peril of both parties, let no such union be at-
tempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the
harness of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of fire, and
5 his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all
lands ; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale
for earthly appetites from door to door?
But we must stop short in these considerations,
which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had
10 something to say on the public moral character of
Burns ; but this also we must forbear. We are far
from regarding him as guilty before the world, as
■ guiltier than the average ; nay, from doubting that he
is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tri-
15 bunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscita
of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has
seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of
pity and wonder. Butjthe_wprld_isJia^U^
its judgments_^f_^u^hjnen^; unjust on many grounds,
20 of which this one may be stated as the substance : ]X,
decides. JjJce. a court of law, by dead statutes ; and not
positivejy but negatively^less orLJVJiat is, dpnejghl
thari_on-: what is or is not done wr ong._ Not the few
inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which
25 are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the
whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This
orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the
solar system ; or it may be a city hippodrome, nay, the
circle of a gin-horse, its diameter a score of feet or
30 paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured :
and it is assumed that the diameter of the gin-horse
ESSAY ON BURNS. 79
and that of the planet will yield the same ratio when
compared with them ! Here lies the root of many a
blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rous-
seaus, which one never listens to with approval.
Granted the ship comes into harbor with shrouds 5
and tackle damaged ; the pilot is blameworthy ; he
has not been all-wdse and all-powerful ; but, to know
how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has
been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the
Isle of Dogs. 10
With our readers in general, with men of right feel-
ing anywhere, Vv^e are not required to plead for Burns.
/In pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our
hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of
marble ; neither will his works, even as they are, pass 15
away from the memory of men. While the Shak-
speares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through
the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers
and assiduous pearl fishers on their waves, this little
Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye ; for this also 20
is of Nature's own and most cunning workmanship,
bursts from the depths of the earth with a full gushing
current, into the light of day ; and often will the trav-
eller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse
among its rocks and pines ! 25
CHRONOLOGICAL.
1795. Born at Ecclefechan, Annandale, Dumfriesshire.
1800. At the Village School.
1806-1809. At the Grammar School, Annan.
1809. Enters Edinburgh University.
1814, 1815. Teacher of Mathematics at Annan.
1 8 16-18 1 8. Master at Kirkcaldy ; Friendship with Edward Irving.
1818-1820. At Edinburgh; Divinity and Law; Writes First
Articles for Brewster's Eiicyclopirdia ; Begins the Study
of German Literature.
1821. His "New Birth;" Visits Haddington with Irving; Meets
Miss Jane Welsh.
1822. Tutor to the Bullers; W^rites Life of Schiller for the Lou-
don HLog-aziiw.
1824. Translates IVil/iel/n ^Leisfcl■ : First Visit to London with
the Bullers; Meets Coleridge at Highgate ; Visits Paris;
Cori'espondence with Goethe begun.
1825. At Home, Hoddam Hill.
1S26. Marries Jane Welsh, and settles at Comely Bank, Edin-
burgh ; Meets Jeffrey ; Writes Jean Paul for the Edin-
luirgh Review.
1827-1831. Removes to the Welshes' Manor, Craigenputtock ;
Essay on Burns in the Edinburgh Revie-cv : Contributes
Magazine Articles now published under Miscellanies ;
Writes Sartor Resartus.
1 81 1. Removes to London; His Father's Death.
Sartor Resartus published in Fraser\^ Magazine ; Win-
ter in Edinburgh.
80
CHRONOLOGICAL. 8i
1834. Settles at Cheyne Row (Chelsea), London.
1837. Lectures in London on German Literature; The French
Revolution.
1839. Chartism.
1 84 1. Lectures in London on Heroes; Heroes and flero Wor-
ship published.
1843. Past and Present.
1845. Cronnvell.
1850. Latter -Day Pamphlets.
1 85 1. Life of Sterling.
1 858-1 865. History of Frede^-ick the Secojid.
1866. Elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University; Address
on the Choice of Books; Death of Mrs. Carlyle.
1874. Order of Merit from the German Emperor.
1875. The Early Kings of N^orway.
1 881. Death; Reminiscences, J. A. Froude, Ed.
1882. Thomas Carlyle. J. A. Froude.
1883. Letters and Memorials of fane Welsh Carlyle. J. A.
Froude.
1883. Correspondence of Carlyle a)id Emerson. C.E.Norton, Ed.
1886. Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle. C. E. Norton, Ed.
1887. Correspondence betzoeen Goethe and Carlyle. C. E. Norton,
Ed.
GROUP OF CARLYLE'S FRIENDS.
Francis Jeffrey.
Professor David Masson.
Edward Irving.
John Sterling.
Leigh Hunt.
Walter Savage Landor.
John Stuart Mill.
Thomas Erskine of Linla-
then.
Alfred Tennyson.
John Ruskin.
J. A. f'ROUDE.
R. W. Emerson.
Goethe.
John Forster.
Arthur Hugh Clough.
Edward Fitzgerald. ,
Charles Dickens.
John Tyndall.
Henry Taylor.
Thomas Arnold.
Bishop Thirlwall.
Robert Browning.
C. E. Norton.
82
u
NOTES.
The student should be familiar with the life of Carlyle and
that of Burns, as given in the English Men of Letters, the Great
Writers, and the Famous Scots Series. He should also read the
poems of Burns in some edition which gives them in chrono-
logical order and with notes : Scott Douglas's Edinburgh edition,
or that of D. C. Heath & Co., Boston. Carlyle's Hero as Poet
and Hero as Man of Letters, Stevenson's Famous Reviews, or
L. E. Gates's Essays of Jeffrey will furnish interesting side-lights.
1. 1-3. It is no uncommon thing, etc. Since the time of
Burns, notable instances of tardy recognition are seen in the
case of Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Carlyle himself.
" Each in his day," says Mr. Edward Dowden, " has stood in the
stocks, and every fool has been free to throw a cabbage-stump
or a rotten egg at the convicted culprit." Cf. E. Dowden,
Tratiscripts and Studies, " The Interpretation of Literature."
In 1835 Carlyle wTOte to his brother: " Vour letters, my dear
Jack, are always a great comfort to me. My friends here admit
cheerfully that I am a very heroic man that must understand the
art, unknown to them, of living upon nothing. As to the heroism
(bless the mark !), I think often of the old rhyme:
" There was a piper had a cow,
And he had naught to give her ;
He took his pipes and played a spring.
And bade the cow consider.
The cow considered wi' hersel'
That piping ne'er would fill her ;
' Gie me a peck o' oaten strae.
And sell your wind for siller.'"
8;
84 ESSAY ON BURNS.
" Genius is a great disturber," says Coventry Patmore. " It is
always a new thing, and demands of old things that they should
make a place for it, which cannot be done without more or less
inconvenient rearrangements; and as it seems to threaten even
worse trouble than it is finally found to give, it is generally hated
and resisted on its first appearance."
" Poets perish in penury, and prophets are turned into mar-
tyrs; but God takes care that his innocent ones shall not go
unavenged, for after they die they are canonized." — George
Da\vs().\.
Cf. Tennyson, The Dead Prophet.
Like Butler (^). It was but natural that this satire upon the
Puritans should be popular with King Charles, yet Butler was
allowed to die in poverty. Butler's Hiidibras was one of the
books that interested Carlyle in his youth. Cf. Masson, Edin-
burgh Sketches and Memories., " Carlyle's Edinburgh Life."
13-19. but his short life, etc. Burns alludes to the toil and
hardship of his early life as " the cheerless gloom of a hermit,
with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave." Yet if we read the
poems of the same period, we find them expressions of the joy
of loving. Cf. Handsome A\dl, p. i, My A'annie O, p. 5, and
Mary Mori son, p. 7.
If his last years were spent in penury, they, too, were lighted
up with the ministratioiis of love. Cf. Althd' Thou Mann Never
Be Mine, p. 227, and O, Wert Thon in the Caiild Blast, p. 228,
tributes to the lass, Jessy Lewars, who attended him in his last
illness.
The street where he died is now called Burns Street, and the
town has many memorials of the poet. In the churchyard of St.
Michael's stands the mausoleum, over the vault in which rest
the bones of Burns, Jean Armour, and some of their children.
" 'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you ; they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you
Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep.
And all at once they leave you, and you know them."
NOTES. 85
Witness the multiplication of biographies, memorials, and edi-
tions of the poet's works since 1828; especially in this centenary
year, 1896, when artists, poets, press, and pulpit vie with each
other in doing him honor.
In October, 1830, Carlyle wrote Goethe: " Burns was of Schil-
ler's age ; in the second year of that fair Weimar Union he per-
ished miserably, deserted and disgraced, in that same Dumfries
where they have erected mausoleums over him, now that it is all
unavailing, and would buy a scrap of his handwriting as if it were
Bank-paper."
In his Reminiscences, Carlyle says : " Burns had an infinitely
wider education, my father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one
was a man of musical utterance ; the other wholly a man of
action."
2. 2. sixth narrative. See the Bibliography, in Blackie's
Life of Burns ( Great Writers), for the five works here alluded
to ; works which
" Needs must scan him from head to feet
Were it but for a wart or a mole."
8-1 J. The character of Burns, etc. •• Great men, great events,
great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them ; and
the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some
sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this standard. Burns
must be great indeed, for during the years that have passed since
his death, men's interest in the man himself and their estimate
of his genius have been steadily increasing." — J. C. Shairp.
20-29. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir
Thomas Lucy's, etc. Tradition connects Shakespeare with Sir
Thomas Lucy through a deer-stealing frolic in Charlecote Park.
When Sir Thomas threatened arrest for the poaching. Shake
speare nailed the following lampoon to the park gate :
" He thinks himself greate.
Vet an asse in his state
We alluwe by his eares but with asses to mate."
86 ESSAY ON BURNS.
It is held by some that Sir Thomas was the prototype of
Justice Shallow in Merry Wives of Windsor.
If one wishes to see what a hold this tradition of deer-stealing
has, even at Charlecote, one should take a ramble from Stratford
through the meadows to the park, where he will find a pair of
' tumble down barsj made in imitation of those which the poet
broke down when making his exit with the deer on his back.
Cf. Washington Irving, Sketch Book, " Stratford-on-Avon."
William Winter, Shakespeare'' s England.
Landor, Imaginary Conversations., " Examination of Shake-
speai-e."
John-a-Combe (^/). The history of John-a-Combe is inter-
esting as related to Stratford and to Shakespeare.
Sir Hugh Clopton, Knight, Lord Mayor of London in the
reign of Henry VII., built the beautiful bridge over the Avon, —
now known as Clopton Bridge, — and he gave the church of Holy
Trinity. The clergy resided in a stately college-building not far
from the church. After the Reformation it reverted to the Crown,
and was sold, in 1575, to John-a-Combe, a rich usurer, and col-
lector of the rents of the Earl of Warwick in the manor of Strat-
ford. Here he lived until his death in 1614. He must have been
a man of parts to have attracted the poet as he did; for when
Shakespeare returned to Stratford, tradition says they were to-
gether every evening, either at their own homes, or at the old
tavern, where they played shovel-board, and indulged their wits.
On these occasions Shakespeare used to compose epitaphs on
his friends, and we have the following on John-a-Combe •
" Ten in a hundred lies here engrav'd ;
'Tis hundred to ten his soul is not sav'd :
If any man ask, ' Who lies in this tomb .' '
* Oh ! ho ! ' quoth the Devil, ' 'tis my John-a-Combe.' "
This epitaph did not displease John, for when he died he left
Shakespeare five pounds as a token of affection.
29. In like manner, etc. Read Burns, by Shairp, Blackie, or
Setoun, for history of these characters ; also Holy Willie 's Prayer,
NOTES. 87
p. 28; Address to the Unco Guid, p. 32 ; llie Dell's awii' 701"' the
Excise Man, p. 194 ; and the notes to each.
3. 13. His former Biographers, etc. fe'f. BibHography, in
Btints (Great Writers). Jeffrey's review of Crowell's Reliques of
Robert Burns, in 1808, will give an excellent idea of the kind of
criticism then prevailing. After alluding to " the harshness and
acrimony of Burns's invective, his want of polish in his gallantry,
his contempt for prudence, his cant of careless feeling, and his
vulgarity," Jeffrey very condescendingly remarks : " With the
allowances and exceptions we have now stated, we think Burns
entitled to the rank of a great and original genius."
" There are two canons of criticism to which I have fixed my
allegiance : that it is always better to show mankind the things
which are to be imitated, rather than the things which are to be
avoided; and since the moral quality is present in everything,
whether as morality or immorality, penetrating all subjects and
everything that can be imagined, no work of art should have any
avowed and fixed moral. Those principles are imitated in the
writings of Dr. Watson. He has himself told you that it is im-
possible to analyze a spiritual fact. We all know that his race
are noble in their influence, that they have exerted a noble influ-
ence upon society. We do not know the secret of his charm, t
cannot tell it to you. I ^\■ish I could. I think perhaps it is that
same inaccessible magic which I find in Kitig Lear, which I find
in the death speech of Brutus :
' Night hangs upon mine eyes : my bones would rest.
That have but labour'd to attain this hour.'
' This day I breathed first : time is come round, and where
I did begin there shall I end.'
I find it in Robert Burns." — William Winter.
(Address at the dinner given to Ian Maclaren, New York,
Dec. 4, 1896.)
4. 21. Constable's Miscellany. Mr. Archibald Constable
was a famous Edinburgh publisher who gave to the world Scott's
early works.
88 ESSAY ON BURNS.
25-27. Mr. Lockhart's own writing, etc. Cf. Mr. Andrew
Lang's magnum opus, Biography of Lockhaj-t.
In 1838 Lockhart wrote to Haydon, as to his early perform-
ances in Blackivood : " In the first place, I was a raw boy who
had never had the least connection either with politics or con-
troversies of any kind, when, arriving at Edinburgh in 181 7, I
found my friend John Wilson (ten years my senior) busied in
helping Blackwood out of a scrape he had got into with some
editors of his magazine ; and on Wilson's asking me to try my
hand at some squibberies in his aid, I sat down to do so with
as little malice as if the assigned subject had been the Court of
Pekin."
31. Mr. Morris Birkbeck. Author of Notes on a Journey in
America (181 8).
5. 13-30. Our notions, etc. When Carlyle wrote these lines
he little thought that at no distant day the world would be inter-
ested to know in regard to him the very things which he here
affirms it should know in regard to Burns.
In 1843 h^ began to have fears that the indiscreet biographer
was in search of him, for he writes : " The w-orld has no business
with my life; the world will never know my life, if it should
write and read a hundred biographies of me." Again in 1848 :
" Darwin said to Jane the other day, ' Who will write Carlyle's
life ? ' The word reported to me set me thinking how impossible
it was, and would ever remain, for any creature to write my life.
... I would say to my biographer, if any fool undertook such a
task, ' Forbear, poor fool ! Let no life of me be wTitten ; let me
and my bewildered wrestlings lie buried here, and be forgotten
swiftly of all the world.' "
Later, when he found that this wish of his could not be hon-
ored, he reluctantly requested Mr. James Anthony Froude to use
all the materials possible to make a true likeness of him. It is
to Froude's four volumes that we must go for the revelation of
those influences which made Carlyle what he was, — the greatest
man of letters of the century.
NOTES. 89
Carlyle here insists upon that philosophical criticism of which
Coleridge gave such a splendid illustration in his Biograpkia
Literaria when he reviewed Wordsworth's Prefaces. Until this
time English criticism had been devoid of love and reverence ; it
was now to illustrate Wordsworth's principle :
" Vou must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love."
Cf. Arnold's " Sainte-Beuve," Encyclopedia Brifannica, 9th
edition.
6. 10. Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy. Cf.
Burns's poem, There Was a Lad., p. 98. Burns here represents
the wiseacres gathered about his cradle in the " auld clay biggin,"
reading his destiny :
" Our monarch's hindmost year but ane
Was five and twenty days begun,
'Twas then a blast o' Janwar win'
Blew hansel in on Robin."
Again, in My F'ather Was a Parmer, he says :
" No help, nor hope, nor view had I, nor person to befriend me, O ;
So I must toil, and sweat and broil, and labor to sustain me, O;
To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred me
early, O ;
For one, he said, to labor bred, was a match for fortune,
fairly, O."
26, 27. He did much, etc. The earliest note in Burns's
poetry was the personal ; his first poems were poems of love.
Then the note became national by his making the Lowland
Scotch a " Doric dialect of fame." " The only example in his-
tory," says Emerson, " of a language made classic by the genius
of a single man." The final note was the universal. Through
him Scotland's hills and vales, her woods and streams, her men
and women, became the property of the race.
90 ESSAY ON BURNS.
'• We love him, praise him just for this ;
In every form and feature,
Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss,
He saw his fellow-creature."
7, 4, 5. without instruction, without model. This state-
ment is likely to mislead one. With the Spectator, Pope, Shake-
speare, Ramsay, Ferguson, Thomson, Macpherson's Ossian, which
Burns calls " glorious models," and that book of books, — the
Bible, which was in every Scot's home, — we can hardly say he
was " without model." Then, too, his home was charged with
the rapture and rehgion of popular song. These songs, which
came to him from his mother as she rocked his cradle, from old
Jenny Wilson who beguiled his youth, touched every fibre of his
nature, and kindled his lyric genius.
Professor Minto says : " Burns's poetry drew its inspiration
from literature, and it became in its turn a faithful source of
inspiration to two great poets of the next generation, — Words-
worth and Byron."
Jeffrey says : " Burns was not himself uneducated nor illiter-
ate ; and was placed in a situation more favorable, perhaps, to the
development of great poetical talents, than any other which could
have been assigned him."
20. Born in an age the most prosaic. Alluding to the fact
that Gray ' never spoke out' Arnold says : " The eighteenth cen-
tury was an age of prose and reason ; spiritual east winds were
blowing, and Gray, with the qualities of mind and soul of a gen-
uine poet, was isolated." What caused this blighting of the
buds of promise .''
26, 27. rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay. Carlyle hardly
gives to these men the credit which is their due. When Burns
went to Edinburgh, in 1787, his first act was to pay homage to
the memory of these men. He visited Canongate churchyard,
and finding no memorial at the grave of Ferguson, whose Far-
mer's Ingle had suggested to him the Cotter's Sattirday Night,
he asked permission to erect a simple stone over the "revered
NOTES. 91
ashes." The request was granted, and upon the stone was in-
scribed these hnes :
" No sculptur'd marble here, nor pompous lay,
' No storied urn nor animated bust ; '
This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way
To pour her sorrows o'er her Poet's dust."
Cf. Inscription on the Tombstone, p. 145.
He also found the shop of Allan Ramsay, and reverently
entered. Cf. Epistle to Jo /in Lapraik, p. 38, xiv. :
" O for a spunk o' Allan's glee.
Or Ferguson's, the bauld an' .slee."
Cf. Poem on Pastoral Poetry, p. 228, v., vi. :
" In this braw age o' wit and lear.
Will nane the shepherd's whistle mair
Blaw sweetly in its native air
And rural gi-ace ;
And wi' the far-fam'd Grecian share
A rival place .?
Yes ! there is ane ; a Scottish callan —
There's ane ; come forrit, honest Allan !
Thou need na jouk behint the hallan,
A chiel sa clever ;
The teeth o' Time may gnaw Tantallon,
But thou's forever."
" Whoever puts Ferguson right with fame," says Robert Louis
Stevenson, " cannot do better than dedicate his labor to the
memory of Burns, who will be the best delighted of the dead."
8. 11-19. Alas! his sun shone, etc. Mr. Shadworth Hodg-
son, in his essay on English Verse, says : " Prose, when it rises
into poetry, becomes as nearly musical as language without
metre can be ; it becomes rhythmical." This passage is an ex-
cellent illustration of the rhythm to be found in many places in
92 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Carlyle's writings. " Those of us who are old enough," says
Shairp, " cannot but look back — so strange it seems — to the
time when Carlyle's light first dawned on the literary world, a
wonder and a bewilderment. We knew that he had a way of
looking at things which was altogether new, that his words pene-
trated and stirred us as no other words did." Again, comparing
Carlyle's style with that of Newman, Shairp says : " Carlyle's
style is like the full untutored swing of a giant's arm. Cardinal
Newman's is the assured self-possession, the quiet gracefulness,
of the finished athlete." Cf. J. C. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry.
"Prose Poets;" (Carlyle).
28, 29. it is not chiefly as a poet, etc. " Burns had a pas-
sionate faith in God and man. He sinned, but he believed. He
was not a good man, but he was a very real one. Like David,
though a sinner, he was a preacher, and not merely a Hterary
artist." — E. Charlton Black.
" He came when poets had forgot
How rich and strange the human lot ;
How warm the tints of life ; how hot
Are Love and Hate ;
And what makes Truth divine, and what
Makes manhood great."
William Watson.
9. 17-24. But a true Poet, etc. Cf. Emerson, The Poet
(Essays, Second Series).
*' Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young.
And always keep us so."
Cf. Wordsworth, A Poefs Epitaph ; Tennyson, The Poet, The
PoeVs Mind ; Burns. A Bard's Epitaph, p. 103.
10. 7-11. and so kind and warm a soul, etc. "No poet
ever more deeply felt the sorrows of created things than Burns."
— Stopford Brooke.
NOTES. 93
Cf. A IVinte?' Nig/it, p. 94, iii. :
" List'ning the doors an' winnocks rattle,
I thought me of the ourie cattle
Or silly sheep."
II. The " Daisy." Cf. To a Mountain Daisy, p. 1 13.
13. * wee, cowering, timorous beastie.' Cf. To a Mouse,
p. 68.
15. winter. Cf. IVinter— A Dirge, p. 8.
Burns, in a note to this poem, says : " Winter is my best
season for devotion; my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthu-
siasm to ' Him who walks on the wings of the wind.' "
22-26. But observe him, etc. Cf. Epistle to Davie, p. 1 5 ;
Epistle to John Lapraik, p. 38 ; To William Simpson, p. 43 ; To
Dr. Blacklock, p. 166; To Mr. Citnuingham, p. 225; Handsome
.Veil, p. I ; /]/)' Nannie (9, p. 5 ; Mary Moriso/i, p. 7, etc.
28-31. The rough scenes of Scottish life, etc. Cf. Hal-
loween, p. 59; T/ie Tioa Dogs, p. 105 ; To James Smith, p. 51, v. :
" Some rhyme, a neebor's name to lash ;
Some rhyme (vain thought !) for needfu' cash ;
Some rhyme to court the countra clash.
An' raise a din ;
For me, an aim I never fash ;
I rhyme for fun."
11. 13-25. he is cast among the low, etc.
" But who his human heart has laid
To Nature's bosom nearer .^
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid
To love a tribute dearer ? "
Whittier.
" To homely subjects Burns communicated the rich commen-
tai'y of his nature ; they were all steeped in Burns ; and they
interest us not in themselves, but because they have been passed
94 ESSAY ON BURNS.
through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man." — Robert
Louis Stevenson.
" Burns was one of the people, and he spoke for the people.
He broke the pathetic silence of the toiling multitudes with a
voice so sweet and strong and true that it rang into every heart
that longs for freedom, and into every home where freedom is
dear." — E. Charlton Black.
25-29. It is moving to see how, etc. Dr. Hale, in his ad-
dress at the Burns Centenary, Boston, July 21, 1896, after allud-
ing to the injury some of Burns's friendships were to him,
sounded a very helpful note when he said : " To all mankind
this is to be said, — that such men as Robert Burns, if they are
to help us, deserve that we should help them ; that we should
neither tempt nor flatter them."
Carlyle, in his letter to Goethe, October, 1830, wrote: "How
different was his [Schiller's] fate from that of our poor Burns,
blest with an equal talent, as high a spirit, but smitten with a
far heavier curse, and to whom no guiding Friend, warmly as his
heart could love, and still long for wisdom, was ever given !
One such as you might have saved him, and nothing else could ;
but only the vain, the idle, the dissipated, gathered round him."
30. * Quick to learn,' etc. Cf. A Bard^s Epitaph, p. 103 ;
Wordsworth, At the Grave of Bin-ns.
12, 6-9. And this was he, etc. Burns was appointed to
the Excise in 1788. Cf. To Dr. Blacklock, p. 166, iv. :
" But what d'ye think, my trusty fier,
I'm turn'd a gauger — Peace be here !
Parnassian queens, I fear, I fear,
Ye'll now disdain me 1 "
13-22. All that remains of Burns, etc. " In Burns's poems
is to be read clearly the lyric chronicle of all that went to make
up the most moving tale of Robert Burns, which is surely to be
read, if at all, only with sympathy and tears." — Ernest Rhys.
NOTES. 95
25-27. To try by the strict rules, etc. Burns's poems are a
most excellent illustration of William Morris's conception of
Art : The expression of one's delight in what he is doing ; a joy
to the maker and the user.
30. Some sort of enduring quality, etc. " In homely Scot's
vernacular we are told by an Ayrshire ploughman authentic ti-
dings of living instincts, of spontaneous belief, which not all the
philosophy in the brain of the intellectual can banish from the
breast of the human being." — Arthur Hugh Clough.
Cf. Lowell, Incident in a Raih'oad Car.
" He spoke of Burns — men rude and rough
Pressed round to hear the praise of one
Whose heart was made of manly, simple stuff
As homespun as their own."
Cf. Whittier, Burns.
13. 18, 19. his sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth.
" He was utterly incapable of anything like baseness ; no man
could be more jealous of honor ; no man had a greater pride in
being largely and loftily a man." — J. S. Blackie.
Cf. For a' That and a* That, p. 220.
" Sincerity, indeed," says Edwin Gosse, " is the first gift in
literature, and perhaps the most uncommon." It is sincerity
which is the characteristic quality of Burns as well as of Carlyle.
It never occurred to either of them to be other than himself. A
little flattery at the proper time would have saved both of these
men a deal of trouble ; but posterity would not now be praising
them as it is if they had succumbed to the tempter. They are
two indiscreet Scots w^ho " spoke out."
14. 6-9. Horace's rule, etc.
" If you would move me to tears
You must yourself have seen sorrow."
• This law is splendidly illustrated in the modern Scotch Idyl,
as seen in the works of Barrie, Crockett, and Maclaren, — A
96 ESSAY ON liURNS.
IVindozv in IVrrums^ The Stickit Minister, and Beside the Bonnie
Brier Bush.
15. 9-16. Byron, for instance, was no common man, etc.
Edmond Scherer, the French critic, says of Byron : " He has
treated hardly any subject but one, — himself: now the man in
Byron is of a nature even less sincere than the poet. He posed
all his life long."
Cf. Arnold, " Essays in Criticism," Byron ; also his estimate
of Burns in The Study of Poetry.
16. 12-20. We recollect no poet, etc. This is the secret of
Burns's influence with the people. That he is the idol of Scot-
land few who have had the privilege of knowing the Scotch
people will venture to gainsay.
In speS-king of Burns's honesty and frankness, Charles Kings-
ley says :
" It has been with the workingmen who read him a passport
for the rest of his writings ; it has allured them to listen to him
when he spoke of high and holy things, while they would have
turned with a distrustful sneer from the sermon of the sleek and
comfortable minister."
" Only those books are for the making of men into which a
man has gone in .the making. Mere professional skill and sleight
of hand, of themselves, are to be appraised as lightly in letters as
in war or government, or any kind of leadership. Strong native
qualities only avail in the long run ; and the more these domi-
nate over the artificial endowments, the more we are refreshed
and enlarged." — John Burroughs.
Burns, in alluding to his father's teaching, says :
" He bade me act a manly part.
Though I had ne'er a farthing, O,
For without an honest, manly heart
No man was worth regarding, O."
25-31. Certain of his Letters, etc. Although Burns is known
chiefly by his verse, his prose is interesting for many reasons ;
NOTES. 97
but chiefly for its content, — the light which it throws upon his
Ufe, and habits of poetic composition. What interests us in its
form is the fact that it reveals imitation rather than creation.
He deliberately set about being a good prose-writer, and failed
because of this very consciousness of effort. His verse is char-
acterized by spontaneity and gi'ace ; his prose too often by affec-
tation and dress. He says : " I had met with a collection of
letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and I pondered over
them most devoutly." In his Tarbolton days he piqued himself
on his ability to write a billet donx.
17. 23, 24. His Letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excel-
lent. Mrs. Dunlop became the friend of Burns through reading
The Cotter'' s Saturday N^ight. After it had been published, 1786,
the edition which contained it came into Mrs. Dunlop's hands
through a friend. This poem so affected her that she despatched
a messenger to Mossgiel, a distance of fifteen miles, with a letter
to Burns, asking him to send her a dozen copies, and also in-
viting him to her house as soon as it was convenient for him
to come. This friendship lasted, and richly blessed the poet,
throughout his life. Almost the last thing he did before his
death was to write to her. Mrs. Dunlop showed this poem to
her housekeeper, who wondered that her mistress cared to enter-
tain one so unknown as was Burns, and the old lady returned it,
saying, " Gentlemen and ladies may think muckle of this ; but
for me, it's naething but what I saw i' my faither's hoose every
day, an' I dinna see hoo he could hae tell't it ony ither way,"
" He threw over the poor," says Stopford Brooke, " the light
of God. Every one knows the scene in The Cotter'' s Saturday
Night ; every one has felt how solemn and patriarchal it is."
27-30. This displays itself in his choice of subjects.
Wordsworth says :
" He showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth."
At the Grave 0/ Bur us.
98 ESSAY ON BURNS.
" Song drooped and fell, and one 'neath northern skies,
With southern heart, who tilled his father's field.
Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise
And touch quick Nature's hem, and go forth healed.
On life's broad plain the ploughman's conquering share
Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew,
And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre
The peasant's team a ruthless fuiTow drew."
William Watson.
" Give lettered pomp to teeth of time,
So ' Bonnie Doon ' but tarry ;
Blot out the epic's stately rhyme.
But spare his Highland ' Mary.' "
Whittier.
18. 7, 8. Rose-colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics. Who
were the popular writers of this time ?
29, 30. what passed in God's world, etc. Cf. Barrie, Mar-
garet Ogilvy, and Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush.
19. 5-10. The poet, etc. The Poet is chiefly distinguished
from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel with-
out immediate external excitement. . . . Poets do not write for
Poets alone, but for men. — Wordsworth.
" The Poet does not feel differently from other men, he feels
more." — J. C. Shairp.
" For, Ah ! so much he has to do ;
Be painter and musician too !
The aspect of the moment show.
The feeling of the moment know !
The aspect, not I gi'ant, express
Clear as the painter's art can dress;
The feeling, not I grant, explore
So deep as the musician's lore —
But clear as words can make revealing.
And deep as words can follow feeling.
NOTES. 99
But, Ah ! then comes his sorest spell
Of toil — he must life's movement tell ! "
Arnold.
1 8-2 1. Is there not the fifth act, etc.
" Riding one day with William Laidlaw," says W. Robertson
Nicoll, " Sir Walter Scott talked of the sensation in Paris over
Quentin Durivard, and proposed to write a German novel. Laid-
law remonstrated, and urged him to draw from Melrose, the vil-
lage below them, and lay the scene in that very year. Scott's
air became graver and graver ; and he at length said : ' Ay, ay, if
one could look into the heart of that little cluster of cottages,
no fear that you would find materials enow for tragedy as well as
comedy. I undertake to say that there is some real romance at
this moment going on there, that, if it could have justice done
to it, would be well worth all the fiction that was ever spun out
of human brains.' "
We have the following incident of Burns's first visit to Edin-
burgh from Dugald Stewart : " He walked with me to the Braid
Hills early in the morning ; and he told me, when I was admiring
a distant prospect, that the sight of so many smoking cottages
gave a pleasure to his mind which none could understand who
had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which
they contained."
Cf. J. M. Barrie, A Window in Thrums^ chap, vi.. Dead this
Twenty Years ; Margaret Ogilvy, chap, i.. How my Mother got
her Soft Face ; Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,
Doctor's Last Journey.
*E2, 23. that Laughter must no longer shake his sides.
" Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest, and youthful jolhty.
Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles.
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek.
And love to live in dimple sleek ;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And I>aughter holding both his sides."
Milton, L 'Allegro.
100 ESSAY ON BURNS.
27. He is a vates, a seer. "Among the Romans a poet was
called vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet.
. . . The Greeks called him Troirjxjjs, which name hath, as the
most excellent, gone through other languages." — Sidney, De-
fence of Poesy.
"A Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one."
— Shelley, Defence of Poetry.
" The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray.
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey,
And the nightingale thought, ' I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay.
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.' "
Tennyson, The Poefs Song.
" Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await ?
He must be musical.
Tremulous, impressional.
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit touch
Of man's or maiden's eye :
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world's flowing fates in his own mould recast."
Emerson.
" Who but the Poet was it that first formed Gods for us ; that
exalted us to them, and brought them dowMi to us ?" — Goethe,
Wilheltn Meister.
31. Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet, etc.
Mr. Ernest Rhys, in objecting to the opinion of Arnold that
Burns was not a classic, says : " Not a classic ? Then the term
NOTES. loi
can avail us little, T imagine, in lyrical poetry. If passion, fancy,
Avit, imagination, irresistibly musical, set to the lyric note by a
born master of words, cannot procure that praise, then the lyric
art must exist for other ends, and the term be confined to the
schools."
Cf. Arnold, Essays in Criticisf/i, II. The Study of Poetry
(Burns).
20. 3. Minerva Press, The press prolific in multiplying sen-
sational story, until Scott took the field.
22-27. The mysterious workmanship, etc. Cf. Wordsworth,
Michael ; Tennyson, Dora.
21. I. may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, etc. Burns
says : " I felt as much pleasure in being in the secret of half the
loves of the parish of Tarbolton, as ever did statesman in know-
ing the intrigues of the courts of Europe."
When twenty-one years of age. Burns founded the famous
Tarbolton Bachelors' Club. The following is from the preamble
which Burns himself wrote : —
" Of birth or blood we do not boast,
Nor gentry does our club afford ;
But ploughmen and mechanics we
In nature's simple dress record."
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson says of this period in Burns's life :
" Gallantry was the essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as
well as in the court of Versailles ; and the days were distinguished
from each other by love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations."
" In all this," says Andrew Lang, " Burns is the true represen-
tative of every Scot who is a Scot, and of his nation."
Crockford's. A famous gambling-place in St. James Street,
London.
5-8. for it is hinted, etc. Macaulay asserts that " as civi-
lization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines." It has
been feared, also, that the advance of science would cause poetry
to be less appreciated, and consequently little would be produced.
102 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Of all the modern poets, Tennyson and Browning best illus-
trate what Wordsworth prophesied in 1803, — that poetry and
science would walk peacefully together. Wordsworth had de-
fined poetry as -' the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science ; " and he had said that the poet
would carry " sensation into the midst of the objects of Science
itself."
18-21. A Scottish peasant's life, etc, Cf. A. J. George,
Select Poems of Robert Burns. Preface.
The Scotch people are worshippers of Burns ; and a pilgrimage
to the Land of Burns will be made interesting and instructive by
the frequent memorials, and the zeal with which his countrymen
vie with each other in doing justice to their darling poet. Mon-
uments are erected at Ayr, Kilmarnock, Edinburgh, Dumfries,
Dundee, Glasgow, and Aberdeen.
" Since the time of Burns," says Stopford Brooke, " our poetry
has not only been the poetry of man and of nature, but also of
passion. And it sprang clean and clear out of the natural soil
of a w'ild heath, not out of a cultivated garden."
22, 23. Wounded Hare. Cf. On Seeing- a Wounded Hare
Limp by Me, p. 161.
Burns writes : " One morning lately, as I was out pretty early
in the fields sowing some grass-seeds, I heard the burst of a
shot from a neighboring plantation, and presently a poor little
wounded hare came crippling by me. You will guess my indig-
nation at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this
season, when all of them have young ones."
Burns cursed the man, and at the same time threatened to
throw him into the Nith.
Cunningham says that he once met the man, Thomson, who
was the unhappy subject of this poem. He alluded to Burns's
threat ; and " I asked," says Cunningham, " ' Could he hae done
it .^ ' — ' Could he hae done it ! ' exclaimed he with wonder ; ' deil
a doubt but that he could hae done it ; he was mair than a match
for most men,' "
NOTES. 103
25. Our Halloween. Cf. Halloween, p. 59.
One of the quaintest and most characteristic of the old Scot-
tish festivals is that of Halloween, the vigil of All Saints' Day,
Oct. 31.
Nothing could reveal so clearly as does this poem the nature
of the peasantry of the west of Scotland as it manifests itself on
the night so prophetic with charm and spell, so ominous with its
forebodings, so fateful in its witchery.
" Of a' the festivals we hear,
Frae Han'sel Munday till New Year,
There's few in Scotland held mair dear.
For mirth I w'een,
Or yet can boast o' better cheer.
Than Halloween."
27. but no Theocritus. Cf. Poem on Pastoral Poetry, p. 228.
" But thee, Theocritus, wha matches }
They're no herd's ballats, Marco's catches ;
Squire Pope but busks his skinklin patches
O' heathen tatters :
I pass by hunders, nameless wTetches,
That ape their betters.
In this braw age o' wit and lear,
Will nane the Shepherd's whistle mair
Blaw sweetly in its native air
And rural grace ;
And wi' the far-fam'd Grecian share
A rival place ? "
29. Holy Fair. This poem is one of the series in which
Burns satirizes the church of his day. It is not so interesting as
the Address to the Unco'' Guid, p. 32; or Holy Willie'' s Prayer,
p. 28. Burns was —
" Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love."
[04 ESSAY ON BURNS.
He had said, —
" My name is Fun, your crony dear,
The nearest friend ye hae ;
And this is Superstition here,
And that's Hypocrisy."
The introductory stanza to The Holy Fair is : —
" A robe of seeming truth mid trust
Hid crafty Observation ;
And secret hung., with poison' d crust,
The dirk of Defamation :
A mash that like the gorget shotv 'd,
Dye-varying on the pigeon ;
And for a mantle large and broad
He wrapt him in Religion.^''
Hypocrisy a-la-mode.
The first stanza of the poem is in Burns's best style
" Upon a simmer Sunday morn,
When Nature's face is fair,
I walked forth to view the corn.
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."
Alluding to the preaching, he says (xxii.) : —
" A vast, unbottom'd, boundless pit,
Fill'd fou' o' lowin brunstane,
Wha's ragin flame, an scorchin heat,
Wad melt the hardest whun-stane I
The half asleep start up wi' fear,
An' think they hear it roarin,
When presently it does appear,
'Twas but some neebor snorin
Asleep that day."
NOTES. 105
Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee. Cf. Century Cyclopedia
of Names.
22. 15-19. We see that in this man there was the gentle-
ness, etc.
" Then gently scan your brother Man,
Still gentler sister Woman ;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human :
One point must still be gi'eatly dark,
The moving Why they do it ;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it."
Address to the Unco'' Gicid.
23. 4-9. No poet of any age or nation is more graphic
than Burns. Cf. See the Smoking Bowl Before Us, p. 58. Mr.
Arnold says : " It has a breadth, truth, and power which make
the famous scene in Auerbach's cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem
artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by
Shakespeare and Aristophanes."
" So powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that
beggars' chorus," says Lang, " that methinks it unconsciously
echoed in ths brain of our greatest living poet when he con-
ceived the Pulsion of Sin. You shall judge for yourself.
' Drink to lofty hopes that cool, —
Visions of a perfect State ;
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath !
Drink to heavy Ignorance !
Hob-and-nob with brother Death ! ' "
ID, II. the burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive. Of
this German outline draughtsman, Ruskin says : " We cannot
but attribute to him a very real gift of making visibly terrible
io6 ESSAY ON BURNS.
such legends as that of the ballad of Leonora, and interpreting
with a wild aspect of veracity the passages of sorcery in Faust^^
— The Art of England.
Carlyle has made equally terrible many of the scenes of the
French Revolution.
17. Winter Night. Cf. A Winter Night, p. 94.
28. bock'd. Gushed.
24. 1-2. saw, and not with the eye only. Cf. Words-
worth : —
" An auxiliar light
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendor."
Prelude ii., 368-370.
" And add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the Poet's dream."
Peele Castle.
" From worlds not quickened by the sun
A portion of the gift is won."
An Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty.
Cf. Tennyson, Far-Far- Azvay : —
" A whisper from this dawn of life ; a breath
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death
Far-far-away."
2. Poor labour, etc. Cf . Horace, Odi Profamcm : —
" Sleep hovers with extended wing
Above the roof where Labor dwells."
8. Auld Brig. Cf. The Brigs of Ayr.
16. snaw-broo. Melted snow.
17. Speat. Torrent.
22. Gumlie jaups. Muddy jets.
23. a Poussin-picture. Cf. Ruskin, Modern Painters, V.
" The Deluge," by Poussin, 248. " Truth of Water," L Sect. V.
NOTES. 107
28. Farmer's commendation. Cf. The Auld Farmer's Mezv
Year's Salutation to his Anld Mare Maggie, p. 99.
" In this homely but most kindly humorous poem," says Pro-
fessor Shairp, " you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman
and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the ele-
ments of what may seem a commonplace, but was to Burns a
most vivid, experience, are made to live forever. For a piece of
good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare
\\\ the plough setting her face to the furzy braes."
29, 30. Smithy of the Cyclops. Cf. Odyssey, Bk. ix.. Yok-
ing of Priam's Chariot. Cf. Iliad, Bk. xxiv.
25. I. Burn-the-wind. di. Scotch Drink : —
" When Vulcan gies his bellows breath,
An' ploughmen gather wi' their graith,
O rare ! to see thee fizz and freath
I' the lugget caup !
Then Burnewin comes on like Death
At ev'ry chaup."
Graith, yiW^/ instniincnts : Fizz, hiss; Fre2Lth, /roth ; Lugget
caup, eared cup ; Burnewin, blacksmith ; Chaup, />lo7c>.
5. his Songs. The secret of Burns's work as a song-writer
lies in the fact that in his veins Norse and Celtic blood mingled
w^th Saxon. His father came from Kincardineshire, or the
Mearns, and his mother from Ayrshire.
The Celt powerfully affected English poetry. Mr. Arnold
says : —
" It is in our poetry that the Celtic part in us has left its traces
clearest. If I were asked where English poetry got these three
things, — its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn
for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of na-
ture in a wonderfully new and vivid way, — I should answer
with some doubt that it got much of its turn for style from a
Celtic source ; with less doubt that it got much of its melancholy
from a Celtic source ; with no doubt at all that from a Celtic
source it got nearly all its natural magic." — Celtic Literature.
io8 ESSAY ON BURNS.
18-20. Homer surpasses all men, etc. Cf. Arnold, On Trans-
lating Homer: "Homer is rapid in his movement. Homer is
plain in his words and style. Homer is simple in his ideas.
Homer is noble in his manner."
27. Defoe and Richardson. Cf. Eighteenth Century Litera-
ture, E. Gosse.
26. 6, 7. 'a gentleman that derived his patent,' etc. Cf.
Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson, p. 179.
9. *red-wat-shod.' Wat means wet, so the word is very sug-
gestive, — wading in blood.
The Border is rich in such symbols. Jane Welsh Carlyle,
writing to Thomas Carlyle's mother, says, " I, too, am coming,
dear mother, and expect a share of the welcome ! For though
I am no son, nor even much worth as a daughter, you have a
heart where there is ' coot and coom again.' "
26. Keats. Cf. Arnold, Essays on Criticisjn, II. Keats.
27. 5. How does the Poet speak to men. Milton says that
Poetry must be simple — based upon our common humanity ;
senstious — flashing truth by images ; impassioned — moving in
the sphere of the realities. The poet can appeal only to the
poet in us.
" He spake not without a parable." Hebrew, Greek, Indian,
and Egyptian rehgions all spake in parables ; and poets deal in
images and parables simply because there is no other vehicle for
what they have to say." — Coventry Patmore.
Cf. Tennyson, The Foetus mind, The Foetus Song.
ID. Novum Organum. Cf. Bacon.
19. his quick sure insight, etc. It was this which enabled
him to appear as much at ease among the Edinburgh gentry as
among the Ayrshire peasantry.
Among other Edinburgh men of letters who welcomed Burns's
poetry was Dugald Stewart, the celebrated Scotch metaphysi-
cian. He had a country home at Catrine on the Ayr, not far
from Mossgiel. On one occasion he invited Burns to dine with
NOTES. 109
him. It was then that he first met a real lord, — a young nol>le-
man, Lord Daer — who had been a pupil of Dugald Stewart and
was then his guest.
Dugald Stewart writes of the meeting: " Burns's manners were
simple, manly, and independent ; strongly expressive of conscious
genius and worth, but without anything that indicated forward-
ness, arrogance, or vanity. Nothing was more remarkable than
the fluency and precision and originality of his language when
he spoke in company.
Cf. Lines on meeting Lord Daer, p. 135.
28. 6-8. far subtler things than the doctrine of associa-
tion, etc. Cf. James Martineau, Faith and Self-Surrender, p. 12 :
" Knowledge bears a double fruit — a physical and a moral. It
enables us to do more, and disposes us to be better. But it is not
the same kind of knowledge that effects both of these results.
We increase our power by knowing objects that are beneath us ;
our goodness by knowing those that are above us."
9-27. ' We know,' etc. Cf. Letter, " To Mrs. Dunlop,"
1789, No. clxviii.
29. 25-27. all live in this earth along with him, etc. Pro-
fessor Veitch says, " We ought to be thankful to the poet for his
precious susceptibilities, for thus the world came to know that
there was a new link of communion between the pure soul of
man and the universe of God."
30. i-ii. a. A Winter 7tig/it,p. ()4. Our'ie, co7aering- : deep-
lairing, decp-zvading ; sprattle, scramble : stake, chance.
It is worthy of note that the idea of brotherhood vaX\\ animal
nature, which now is universal, began at the close of the last
century with the two contemporaries, Cowper and Burns, and
was carried to its finest illustration in Cowper's Task, Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth's Hart Leap Well.
17, 18. The very Devil, etc. Cf. Address to the Dcil, p. 23.
21. aiblins. Perhaps.
25-27. Dr. Slop; uncle Toby. Characters in Sterne's Tris-
tram Shaudv.
no ESSAY ON BURNS.
30. 'Indignation makes verses,' Facit indignatio versus. —
Juvenal.
Tennyson has combined this idea and that in 1. 13-14 in The
Poet: —
" The poet in a golden chme was born,
With golden stars above ;
Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love."
31. 9, 10. Johnson said he loved a good hater. Alluding
to a friend, Johnson said : " He was a man to my very heart's
content : ... he was a very good hater."
At this time in his life Carlyle had not thundered forth his
hatred of things hateful, although Sartor Resartiis must have
been brewing.
23, 24. Cf. Burns's poem. Ode Sacred to the Me^nory of Mrs.
Oswald. The origin of Burns's indignation here was the fact that
one night after he had ridden a long distance on horseback he
put up at an alehouse, and while enjoying the expectation of a
night of rest and comfort, " the funeral pageantry of the late Mrs.
Oswald " arrived. He was turned out in the wind and snow to
seek a new resting-place ; and having found one at New^ Cum-
nock, his indignation gave voice to this ode. It hardly seems
worthy of Carlyle's superlatives.
25. Furies of -Sischylus. Cf. the Trilogy of ^schylus,
of which the Eumenides is the third play.
26, 27. 'darkness visible.' Cf. Paradise Lost., Bk. I., 63.
32. 4. Scots wha hae, etc. Cf. Bannockbiirn, p. 208.
When Burns visited Galloway he was accompanied by a fellow-
exciseman Mr. Syme, who preserved a record of the journey.
Mr. Syme says that after visiting Mr. Gordon at Kenmure, they
passed over the moors to Gatehouse in a wild storm : " The
sky was sympathetic with the wretchedness of the soil. It be-
came lowering and dark, the winds sighed hollow, the Hghtning
gleamed, the thunders rolled. The poet enjoyed the awful scene.
He spoke not a word, but seemed rapt in meditation. In a little
NOTES. Ill
while the rain began to fall. It poured in floods upon us, and
what do you think Burns was about ? He was charging the
English army along with Bruce at Bannockburn." Two days
later, when they were returning from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries,
" he was engaged in the same manner, and produced me the ad-
dress of Bruce to his troops."
19, 20. Cf. M^P/ier son's Farewell, p. 157.
An incident in Tennyson's early life, when he was wont to
visit the Carlyles at Chelsea, is associated with this poem. " On
one occasion when the poet stayed late, his hosts dismissed him
by singing AP Phersoiis Farewell, a tune w^hich Carlyle called
' rough as hemp, but strong as a lion.' The rude tune and stir-
ring words moved Tennyson so much that his ' face grew darker,'
and his lips quivered." — Arthur Waugh.
22, 23. * lived a life,' etc. Cf. the original ballad in David
Herd's Collection, v. i. p. 99.
33. 2. at Thebes, and in Pelops' line. Cf. Milton, // Pen-
seroso, 99.
25, 26. Cf. Po a Mouse, p. 68; Phc Auld Farmer ''s New
Year 's Salutation to His Auld Mare Maggie, p. 99 ; Phe Death and
Dying Words of Poor Mailie, p. lO; Poor Mailie's Elegy, p. 12.
34. 1 1-24. Tarn O'Shanter, etc. Cf., Pam O'Shanter, p. 172.
Mrs. Burns tells us that the poem was the work of one day.
Burns had spent most of the day by the Nithside, and in the
afternoon she joined him with the children. He was " crooning
to himself," and she remained at a little distance, lest she disturb
him ; soon she was attracted by his wild gesticulations. She
found him reciting aloud, while the tears rolled down his cheeks,
these lines : —
" Now Tam, O Tam ! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens."
" I wish you had seen him," says she, " he was in such
ecstasy."
Compare Carlyle's estimate of this poem with that of Blackie,
112 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Shairp, Professor Wilson, and others. This poem has been
translated into nine languages.
25, 26. Tieck, Musaus. German novelists of whom Carlyle
wrote in his Go-man Literature. Goethe writing to Carlyle, July
20, 1827, says : " Notices of the lives of ' Musaeus, Hoffman, and
Richter,' prefixed to German Romance, are also in their kind to
De commended." Carlyle writes to Goethe, April 15, 1877: "If
you stand in any relation to Mr. Tieck it would give me pleasure
to assure him of my esteem."
35. 19. The Jolly Beggars. While Burns and his friend
Smith (Cf. To James Smithy were walking by Poosie-Nansie's
alehouse one evening, they heard a sound of " meikle fun and
jokin." On entering, they found a company of wandering
vagrants assembled, —
" Wi' quaffing and laughing,
They ranted and they sang ;
Wi' jumping and thumping.
The vera girdle rang."
The company was composed of a maimed soldier and his
female companion, a Highland beggar's consort, a wandering
ballad-singer, and other such characters. Burns was delighted
with the scenes in which each character acted well his part, and
in a few days afterwards he wrote The Jolly Beggars. Scott
called it superior to anything of its kind in English poetry for
" humorous description and nice discrimination of character."
Cf. See the Smoking Bowl before Us! p. 58, and Note.
26, 27. raucle carlin (rugged crone), wee Apollo, Son of
Mars. Characters in The Jolly Beggars.
The work of Burns splendidly illustrates the final dictum of
Plato in Ion, eelov Ka\ /arj TexviKoi' — inspiration, not art.
36. 6. Caird. A tinker.
" My bonnie lass, I work in brass,
A tinkler is my station."
The' Jolly Beggars.
NOTES. 113
15. Teniers. David Teniers the younger, a noted Flemish
landscape and portrait painter. Cf. Century Dictionary of N^aines.
20, 21. Beggar's Bush. A comedy by Fletcher and others,
produced at Court 1622. Beggar's Opera. Opera by J. Gay,
produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1728. It was a satire on the
effeminate style introduced from Italy. Cf. Century Dictionary
of Names.
37. 6-10. Songs of Burns, etc. Cf. Shairp, Aspects of
Poetry, Scottish Song and Burns.
Charles Kingsley, in speaking of the later Scottish song-
writers, says : " They seldom really sing ; their verses want the
unconscious lilt and flash of their old models ; they will hardly
go (the true test of song) without music — the true test, we say
again, of a song. Who needs music, however fitting and beauti-
ful, to the Flowers of the Forest.^ or to Auld Lang Syne .^"
" All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very cen-
tral essence of us. Song ; as if the rest were but wrappings and
hulls ! The primal throb of us ; of us and of all things. The
Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies : it was the feeling they had
of the inner structure of Nature ; that the Soul of all her voices
and utterances was perfect music. Poetry therefore we will call
Musical Thought. The Poet is he who thinks in that manner.
See deep enough and you will see musically." — Carlyle, The
Hero as Poet.
13. Ossorius. Once called the Cicero of Portugal.
29. and in themselves are music. The essential difference
between the songs of Burns and the songs of Tennyson — each
perfect after its kind — is that the one is an inspiration, the other
an art. If we compare the songs in the Princess with those of
Burns, we shall see the distinction of kind clearly marked. Ten-
nyson is the artist who consciously selects his subjects for definite
purposes, fashions and refashions the verse which depends largely
for its effectiveness upon what Mr. Stedman calls " the obvious
repetends and singing bars, the stanzaic effect, the use of open
vowel sounds and other matters instinctive with song-makers."
114 ESSAY ON BURNS.
38. 23-27. Cf. Willie hrcw\i a Peck d Maul, p. 163 ; To Mary
in Heaven, p. 164 ; Aiild Lant; Syne, p. i 59 ; Bannockburn, p. 208.
Mr. A. T. Quiller Couch wonders why Scotsmen lavish their
enthusiasm on Burns rather than on Scott. He says : " All over
the world — and all under it, too, when their time comes — Scots-
men are preparing after-dinner speeches about Burns. ... Is it
the hoineliness of Burns that appeals to them as a wandering
race ? Is it because in farthest exile a line of Burns takes their
hearts straight back to Scotland ? " I think every Scot would
answer this question wdth a very emphatic Ay, Sir ! and wonder
that any one — even an Englishman — should be in doubt upon
the subject.
39. 3. our Fletcher's. Andrew Fletcher. Why does Car-
lyle use the pronoun " our " }
8-17. His Songs, etc.
John Stuart Blackie, in advocating the use of Scotch songs in
the public meetings of Scotland, says : " If choice were to be
made between classical education and Scottish song, I would
say at once, burn Homer, burn Aristotle, fling Thucydides into
the sea ; but let us by all means on our Scottish hills and by our
Scottish streams have Highland Mary, Aiild Lang Syne, and
Scots Wha hae zvi^ V/allace Bled.''''
" Not Latimer, not Luther, struck more telling blows against
false theology than did the brave singer. The Confession of
Augsburg, The Declaration of Independence, the French Rights
of Man, are not more weighty documents in the history of free-
dom than the songs of Burns." — Emerson.
18-28. In another point of view, etc. It is of importance
that we recognize the fact that in Burns the two literary estates,
English and Scottish, were united. Until his time there was a
sharp distinction between Scottish and English literature ; but
after him the literature of the tw^o countries became one, both in
nature and in name. This was but natural, when we consider
that something of the original impulse which moved Burns's
genius was English.
NOTES. 115
When the riches of this noble Scottish house, and of tliat sis-
ter house of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, awaited
union in a royal heir, there came a peasant lad from the " auld
clay biggin' " in Ayrshire, who, with the simple and graceful
dignity of one of nature's noblemen, claimed his own, and there
was added a new hereditary peer to the House of Fame.
40. I. Our Grays and Glovers. Cf. E. Gosse, Eighteenth
Century Literature.
17. John Boston. This should be Thomas Boston.
24, 25. Lord Karnes. Author of Elements of Criticism.
26. Hume, Robertson, Smith. Cf. Century Cyclopedia of
Names for the work of the Philosopher, the Historian, the Politi
cal Economist.
41. 4. our culture, etc.
" Burns followed and furthered the work of Ramsay and Fer-
gusson in turning our literature from Continental themes and so-
called classical treatment of them to Scottish scenery and music,
and the modes of Scottish life." — Veitch.
" To what other man was it ever given so to transfigure the
country of his birth and love ? Every bud and flower, every hill
and dale and river, whisper and repeat his name." — George
William Curtis.
16-23. Never, perhaps, was there a class, etc.
"At this time," says Professor Shairp, " theie was a set of lit-
erary men in Edinburgh who as to national feeling were entirely
colorless, — Scotchmen 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,
w^ho, with the instinct of genius, chose for his subject that Scot-
tish 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 country-
men a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been
strangers."
ii6 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Lockhart says : —
" Burns revived Scottish nationality, which was falling asleep
on the graves. of the Stuarts."
42. 8, 9. * Doctrine of Rent.' Cf. Ricardo, On the Principles
of Political Economy and Taxation, 1S17. De Quincey in his
Logic of Political Economy, reviews Ricardo's " Doctrine."
'Natural History of Religion.' Probably an allusion to the
works of James Douglas of Cavers, which were so popular in
the early years of the century.
27, 28. 'a tide of Scottish Prejudice.' Cf. Letter Iviii. To
Dr. Moore.
In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop the poet writes : —
" The appellation of a Scottish bard is by far my highest
pride ; to continue to deserve it my most exalted ambition."
" The first two books I ever read in private, which gave me
more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were The
Life of Hannibal and The Llistory of William Wallace. Hanni-
bal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in rap-
tures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and
wish myself tall enough to be a soldier ; while the story of Wal-
lace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins which will boil
along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest."
43. 1 1-20. A wish (I mind its power). Cf. Epistle to Mrs.
Scott, Giiidwife of Wanchope LLonse, p. 142.
The contrast between Burns and Carlyle is very great. Burns
was always loving the good ; Cailyle, at least in later life, was
always hating the bad. The world loves Burns ; it fears Carlyle.
Mr. Henry Drummond says that in youth, after reading Carlyle,
he felt as though he had been whipped.
25-29. These Poems, etc.
" In his poems we apprehend is to be found a truer history
than any anecdote can supply of the things which happened to
himself, and, moreover, of the most notable things which went
on in Scotland between 1759 ^'^'^ ^79^" — Charles Kingsley.
NOTES. 117
44, 17-22. there is but one era, etc. The most natural
divisions into which Burns's work may be divided are 1 773-1 7S6
and 1 787-1 796. In the first period, which closed with the publi-
cation of the first edition of his poems, we have the early love-
songs, epistles, satires, and poems humorous and descriptive
relating to rural life and manners. These are for the most part
in the native Scottish dialect, and are simple, picturesque, and
impassioned. In the second period we have mostly songs based
upon the early minstrelsy. The occasion of many of these was
the publication of Johnson's Miiscinii, a collection of the best
Scottish songs, and later a similar publication by Thomson. To
these two works Burns was a frequent contributor.
24-30. he never attains, etc. Carlyle here deserves the fol-
lov^ing censure of Mr. Ernest Rhys, who says : " It has been the
common responsibility of his biographers to point out how differ-
ently he might have Uved, how much more wisely he might have
ordered his days. More wisely, perhaps, but not so well. There
is a diviner economy in these things than w'e have come to
allow."
45, 3-19. Another and far meaner ambition, etc. What
do you say to this in the light of Burns's biogiaphy ?
46, 9. clay soil of Mossgiel, " The house is very small,
consisting of only two rooms, a but and a ben, as they are called
in Scotland. Over these, reached by a trap stair, is a small
garret, in which Robert and his brother used to sleep. Thither,
when he returned from his day's work, the poet used to retire,
and seat himself at a small deal table, lighted by a narrow sky-
light in the roof, to transcribe the verses which he had composed
in the fields. His favorite time for composition was at the
plough." Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, after the publication of
the poems, used to say that when the boys had gone to the
fields she would climb to the little room, and search the table-
drawer for the verses.
If we wish to see what obstacles lay in the way of the young
farmer, we have only to visit this place. The buildings are not
ii8 ESSAY ON BURNS.
attractive in themselves, but the situation is somewhat pictu-
resque. Not far away is the field where he turned down the
daisy, and that other field where the " wee cow'rin tim'rous
beastie " was so unceremoniously turned out of house and
home. Cf. W. Jolly, Bu7'7is at Mossgiel.
" Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye unseen Powers."
Goethe, Wilhelm Mcister.
22. journey to Edinburgh. Burns set out for the metropolis
on the 27th of November, and his journey was a sort of triumphal
progress. The farmers in the vicinity of Covington, Lanark-
shire, had agreed to signal his arrival with a white flag hung
from a pitchfork on a corn-stack. As it was hoisted, they came
running from all directions to see the author of the new volume
of poems. They met him at a late dinner, when he increased
their admiration for him by his ready wit and gentle humor. He
reached Edinburgh on the 28th, and w'ent to live wdth an old
crony at Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket.
28-31. His father, etc. William Burness was a type of the
sober, industrious, conscientious Scotch peasant ; clear-headed
and warm-hearted, and inclined to be somewhat stern.
This tribute to him is merited by all that we know of his life
of love and devotion : —
" The pitying heart that felt for human woe ;
The dauntless heart that fear'd no human pride ;
The friend of man, to vice alone a foe ;
For e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side."
The ancestors of William Burness were men of character,
education, and position ; they were deeply religious and nobly
patriotic, — stanch Jacobites. They were tenant-farmers of
George Keith, the Earl Mareschal of Scotland. They were
NOTES. 119
natives of Kinkardineshire, or the Mearns ; and in 17 15 they
joined the Mar men in the Jacobite rising.
Of his father's style Carlyle writes : " None of us will ever
forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from the un-
tutored soul, full of metaphor, though he knew not what metaphor
was, with all manner of potent words which he appropriated and
applied with surprising accuracy. In anger he had no need of
oaths."
Once a neighbor met James Carlyle on a stormy morning and
said, " Here's a fearful day, James," which drew forth this
response, " Man, it's a' that ; it's roaring doon our glen like the
cannon o' Quebec."
There is no doubt that Carlyle inherited much of his early
style from his father. One critic, who attributes his later pecu-
liarities to his study of German, says : " He wrestled so long
with Jean Paul, to master his spirit, that, like Jacob of old, his
thigh has been put out, and he has halted in his English ever
since."
" Carlyle deliberately says that if he had been asked whether
his father or Robert Burns had the finest intellect, he could not
have answered. Carlyle's style, which has been so much won-
dered at, was learnt in the Annandale farmhouse ; and beyond
the intellect there was an inflexible integrity in word and deed,
which Carlyle honored above all human qualities. The aspect
in which he regarded human life, the unalterable conviction that
justice and truth are the only bases on which successful conduct,
either private or public, can be safely rested, he had derived from
his father, and it was the root of all that was great in himself."
— J. A. Froude, Reminiscences, " James Carlyle."
The close touch of realities which he gained in this home
accounts for much of the scorn of shams which appears, perhaps
too often, in his later work.
He writes to Miss Welsh, when he was acting as tutor to
Charles Buller at Kinnaird in Perthshire : " I see something of
fashionable people here, and truly to my plebeian conception
there is not a more futile class of i^ersons on the face of the
I20 ESSAY ON BURNS.
earth. There is something in the life of a sturdy peasant toiUng
from sun to sun for a plump wife and six eating children ; but as
for the Lady Jerseys and the Lord Petershams, peace be with
them."
Cf. Burns, To Dr. Blacklock, p. i66.
" I hae a wife and twa wee laddies,
They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies ;
Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is —
I need na vaunt.
But I'll sned besoms — thraw saugh woodies.
Before they want.
But to conclude my silly rhyme,
(I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time,)
To make a happy fire-side clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life."
Cf. " Uomsie," in Maclaren's Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush,
or A Window in Thrziws and Margaret Ogilvy, by Barrie.
" I know of no way," says Phillips Brooks, " in which poetry
can make our lives more true than by the power that it has to
help us to appreciate other men's endeavors after worthy things.
It is a noble and a beautiful thing to feel ourselves outgrowing
our contempts, to recognize each day that something which we
have been despising as mean and poor is high and pure and
rich in worth and beauty." — Poetry.
" To be able to write ! Throughout Mr. Ogilvy's life, save
when he was about one and twenty, this had seemed the great
thing; and he ever approached the thought reverently, as if it
were a maid of more than mortal purity. And it is so ; and be-
cause he knew this she let him see her face, which shall ever
be hidden from those who look not for the soul, and to help him
nearer to her came assistance in strange guise, the loss of loved
ones, dolour unutterable. . . . Once or twice in a long life she
NOTES. 121
touched his fingers, and a heavenly spark was lit, for he had
risen higher than himself, and that is literature." — J. M. Barrie,
Sentimental Tommy, chapter xxxvi.
Dr. Martineau says : " The soul grows godlike, not by its
downward gaze at inferior nature, but by its uplifted look at
thought and goodness greater than its own."
" Some envious power," says John Stuart Blackie, " assigned
to Scotsmen a rugged plot of earth on the chilly edge of the
world. But strong hearts, subtlety of thought, unbending wills,
untiring hands, and a spark of the fire divine which Prometheus
brought from heaven to kindle wise invention, — these are the
glorious fairies' gifts that the blessed ones, the givers of all good
things, have bestowed on Caledonia."
47. 27, 28. 'Let us worship God.' Cf. The Cotter's Satur-
day Night, p. 81.
Of the inception of this poem Gilbert Burns says : " Robert had
frequently remarked to me that he thought there was something
peculiarly venerable in the phrase, ' Let us worship God,' used by
a decent, sober head of a family, introducing family worship."
Such pictures as this from Carlyle's early work are common, but
they are almost entirely absent from his later work. This is lurid
with the light of love ; later his pictures are lurid with scorn.
48. iS,' 19. in glory and in joy. Cf. Wordsworth, Resolu-
tion and Independence.
49. 26-31. Surely such lessons, etc. Cf. J. M. Barrie,
Margaret Ogihy.
50. 2-7. Had Burns continued to learn, etc. Wordsworth
says : " It is probable that Burns would have proved a still
greater poet, if, by strength of reason, he could have controlled
the propensities which his sensibility engendered, but he would
have been a poet of a different class ; and certain it is, had that
desirable restraint been early established, many peculiar beauties
which enrich his verses could never have existed, and many
accessory influences, which contribute greatly to their effects,
would have been wanting."
122 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Our language does not afford a more temperate, gracious, and
wise bit of criticism on the genius and character of Burns.
" We know his worst sins," says Christopher North, " but we
cannot know his sorrows. The war between the spirit and the
flesh often raged in his nature, as in that of the best of beings
who are made, and no Christian without humblest self-abase-
ment will ever read A Bard^s Epitaph.''''
" The sins of the dead poet should not be discussed, but for-
gotten. But the good, the things that are well done, what is
beautiful and loving, should be brought into clearer and clearer
light. This is a practical matter ; that is, the matter which helps
and kindles mankind towards the things that are worthy of
worship — which is the proper definition of the practical." —
Stopford Brooke.
" Nothing less intense than the central fires of the heart can
open clefts in the rocky structure of society, and project the
precious metals of true sentiment through its mass." — James
Martineau.
12, 13. unprofitable warfare. Here Carlyle is very far from
correct.
Charles Kingsley says : " Consider what contradiction be-
tween faith and practice must have met the eyes of the man
before he could write with the same pen — and one as honestly
as the other — The Cotter'' s Saturday Night and Holy Willie'' s
Prayer. In these poems of his is to be found a truer history
than any anecdote can supply of the things which happened to
himself, and of the most notable things that went on in Scot-
land between 1759 ^^<^ 1796-"
This assertion of Carlyle's seems strange when set against the
fundamental activity of his own life, — warfare against the cant
and hypocrisy of Church and State. Cf. Chartism and Latter-
day Pamphlets.
16. scruples about Religion. It has often been insinuated,
if not openly asserted, that Burns was not a religious man ; but
the sympathetic reader of his poetry can find no ground for such
NOTES. 123
implication, for he sees that it is charged with the spirit of
our common reUgious nature. Professor Blackie rightly says :
" Burns was not only a Scotsman breathing the religious atmos-
phere of the west, and brought up with pious care in a religious
family, but he was personally a religious man to a degree which
the cursory reader of his works would never suspect." " No
poet since the psalmist of Israel," says Andrew Lang, " ever
gave the world more assurance of a man."
Sir Henry Taylor once said that Carlyle was a Calvinist who
had lost his creed.
51. 6-8. The blackest desperation, etc. This was due to
the trouble with the Armours ; as a consequence, he had decided
to go to Jamaica. Cf. Select Poems of Robert Burns, A. J. George,
p. 287-290 ; also Archibald Munro, V^he Story of Burns and High-
land Alary.
11,12. * hungry Ruin had me in the wind.* Cf. Letter Iviii,
To Dr. Moore.
15-21. while the 'gloomy night is gath'ring fast.' Cf.
Farewell to the Banks of Ayr, p. 1 30.
Of this poem Burns says : " My chest was on the road for
Greenock, and I had composed the last song I should ever
measure in Caledonia, —
' The gloomy night is gath'ring fast,'
when a letter from Dr. Blacklock opened new prospects to my
poetic ambition." This new prospect was a second edition of
his poems, and by it he was deterred from the voyage to Ja-
maica. Cf. To Dr. Blacklock, p. 166.
When Highland Mary went to her home to prepare for her
coming marriage with Burns, she carried with her two very pre-
cious books, — the two-volume Bible inscribed by the poet, and
a copy of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems.
Cf. Will Ye go to the Indies, My Mary, p. 131 ; Prayer for
Mary, p. 132; Highland Lassie O, p. 133; To Mary in Heaven,
p. 164; and Highland Mary, p. 195.
Mr. Munro, in his Story of Burns and Highland Mary, tells
124 ESSAY ON BURNS.
us that on one occasion the poet's sister, Mrs. Begg, who lived
near Alloway Bridge, was visited by two strangers, who seemed
very much interested in Burns's poetry. They inquired for the
various editions of his work, and the elder of the two asked per-
mission to read aloud a poem which interested him very much.
He then read, or intoned, To Mary in Heaven, at the conclusion
of which all were in tears. Mrs. Begg desired to know the
reader's name, when his companion informed her that he desired
to travel incognito. But when, on departing, they reached the
door, the reader took the aged lady's hand, and said : " Mrs.
Begg, I have reasons for withholding my nam^ on certain occa-
sions ; and I trust that, so far as you are concerned, my name
may remain a secret here for a few days at least. To the sister
of immortal Burns I have now the honor and pleasure of con-
fiding my name — Alfred Tennyson."
29, 30. Burns's appearance among the sages, etc. This in-
troduces us to what may be called the second period of his lit-
erary work. It was indeed a critical time for a young man who
had never been beyond the limits of Ayrshire ; but the native
strength and beauty of his simple and graceful manner was
everywhere apparent, and enabled him to stand firm in the
midst of the whirl of fashionable entertainment, and the con-
vivialities of tavern life.
Mrs. Alice Cockburn, the gifted author of I''ve Seejt the Smil-
ing of Fortune Beguiling, then very aged, wrote of Burns's ar-
rival : " The town is at present all agog with the Ploughman
Poet, who receives adulation with native dignity."
53, 12. Mr. Walker's personal interviews. Ci. Select Foetus
of Robert Burns (George), Note, p. 288.
55. 24-28. The Conduct of Burns. Mr. James T. Fields
compares Burns with our own Hawthorne in personal appear-
ance, and in the general impression made by his ease and grace
of manner. He says : " I remember to have heard, in the liter-
ary circles of Great Britain, that since Burns no author had ap-
peared there with a finer face than Hawthorne's. Old Mrs. Basil
NOTES. 125
Montague told me, many years ago, that she sat next to Burns
at dinner when he appeared in society in the first flush of his
fame, after the Edinburgh Edition of his poems had been pub-
lished. She said among other things that, although the com-
pany consisted of some of the best bred men in England, Burns
seemed to her the most perfect gentleman among them. She
noticed particularly his genuine gi-ace and deferential manner
toward women."
Dugald Stewart says : " The attentions he received from all
ranks and descriptions of persons would have turned any head
but his own."
56. 28-30. The Edinburgh learned, etc. Of the condition
of things in Edinburgh in Burns's time Mr. Alexander Smith
says : " The literary society of the time was exotic, like the
French lily or the English rose. For a generation and more the
Scottish philosophers, historians, and poets had brought their
epigram from France as they brought their claret, and their
humour from England as they brought their parliamentary intel-
ligence."
30. The good old Blacklock. Dr. Blacklock, the Edinburgh
Maecenas, was the first of the literary friends of the poet. It
was at his suggestion that the second edition of the poems was
issued. His love and esteem were always of the greatest assist-
ance to Burns. His simple and sweet Christian nature made
him kindly with his kind, and he viewed the frailties of his
fellow-mortals with tenderness and sympathy. He is known in
Scotland as the " discoverer of Robert Burns."
57. 26, 27. Excise and Farm scheme. He had enjoyed and
suffered in Edinburgh. The flattery and the feasting, the smiles
and the speeches, were rated at their true worth. " I have
formed many intimacies and friendships here," he says, " but I
am afraid they are all of too tender a construction to bear car-
riage a hundred and fifty miles." The truth of these words was
now to be tested. He began to think of home and of a settled
purpose in life, now that Edinburgh had done her best, — a best
126 ESSAY ON BURNS.
which could not satisfy this proud-spirited peasant. He must
have a life of love, even though it be in an humble cottage.
In the spring of 1788 Burns left Edinburgh, and in March
leased the farm at Ellisland, making " a poet's, not a farmer's,
choice."
Compare this with Carlyle's scheme at Craigenputtoch.
58. 24, 25. With two good and wise actions. After look-
ing to the wants of his mother, he married Jean Armour, although
the earlier marriage having been declared null and void he was
under no legal obligation to return to her ; but Burns was not
the base man he had been represented to be, and the action, so
greatly to his credit, brought peace of mind and gladness of
heart.
" My father put me frae his door,
My friends they hae disown'd me a' ;
But I hae ane will take my part —
The bonnie lad that's far awa'."
Cf . / love my Jean, p. 1 56.
" The marriage," says Professor Blackie, " was the most hon-
orable and wise act in the life of a great genius, always remark-
able for honor, not always for wisdom."
It is interesting to note here that when Carlyle was struggUng
into literary fame in Edinburgh in 1821, and had earned some-
thing by his pen, the first use of the money was to send his
father a pair of spectacles, and to his mother " a little sovereign
to keep the fiend out of her hussif." Cf. J. M. Barrie, Margaret
Ogilvy, last chapter.
60. 2-5. These men, etc. Dr. Edward Everett Hale, allud.
ing to this period, says : " Yes, at that moment every man in
Scotland, you may say, was tempting him. The good God only
knows how he struggled." — Address at the Burns Centenary,
Boston, 1896.
61. he comes in collision with certain official superiors.
On one occasion, when Exciseman, Burns captured a smuggling
craft in the Solway, and sent four carronades which he found in
NOTES. 127
her to the French Government, they were stopped at Dover, and
he was reprimanded for lack of patriotism. Cf. The DeiTs aiva
wi'' the Exciseman, p. 194.
63. 28, 29. ' thoughtless follies,' etc. Cf. The Bard's Epi-
taph, p. 103.
64. 10. the crisis of Burns's life. The year at ElUsland,
1 79 1, was the saddest in the hfe of our poet. It was now demon-
strated that in selecting this place he had made " a poet's, not a
farmer's, choice." His crops cUd not yield him any adequate re-
turn for the money he had expended. He had used the proceeds
remaining from the sale of the second edition of his poems. In
August he decided to sell the crops and give up the lease, and
in November the business was wound up.
" It is not without deep regret," says Shairp, " that even now
we think of Burns's departure from this beautiful spot. If there
was any position on earth in which he could have been happy
and fulfilled his genius, it would have been on such a farm."
He moved to a house in Mill Hole Brae (now Burns Street),
near the lower end of Bank Vennel in Dumfries. Here the
society was not conducive to regular habits, either of business
or art. He was throwni into company with an idle set, much
to the injury of his reputation among the steady-going peasantry.
" Like litanies of nations came.
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below.
The canticles of love and woe."
Emerson.
65. 1-5. So the milder third gate was open, etc. The
pathos of these last days at Dumfries is very intense. There
is no sadder picture in history than that of this sweet soul crushed
under the burden too heavy for it to sustain, and yielding its
divine fragrance to the world.
" 'Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you ; they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you,
128 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Who care not for their presence, muse or sleep,
And all at once they leave you, and you know them ;
We are so fooled, so cheated ! "
Of his death on the 21st of July, 1796, Alexander Smith
writes : —
" Mighty is the hallowing of death to all — to him more than
to most. Farmer no longer, exciseman no longer, subject no
longer to criticism, to misrepresentation, to the malevolence of
mean natures and evil tongues, he lay there, the great poet of
his country, dead too early for himself and for it. He had passed
from the judgment of Dumfries, and made his appeal to Time."
" Dead, who had served his time.
Was one of the people's kings.
Had labour'd in lifting them out of slime.
And showing them, souls have wings."
Tennyson.
" Death I account always as a great deliverance, a dark Door
into Peace, into everlasting Hope. Had not a God made this
world, and made Death too, it were an insupportable place." —
Carlyi.e to Erskine of Linlathen.
66. 21-24. Still less, etc. Alluding to the fact that so many
in Burns's time recognized him, and valued him at his true worth,
Hawthorne says : —
" It is far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has
taken shape in the spotlessness of marble, than when the actual
man comes staggering before you besmeared with the sordid
stains of his daily life. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his
recognition dawned so brightly while he was yet living. There
must have been something very grand in his immediate presence,
some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior,
to have caused him to seem like a demigod so soon."
" An artist, sir, should rest in art.
And waive a little of his claim ;
To have the deep poetic heart
Is more than all poetic fame."
Tennyson.
NOTES. 129
68. 6. Let us pity and forgive them. " We cease to be
savage and caustic when we are acquainted with the inner exist-
ence of a man ; for the relentlessness of satire is only possible
to those who neither sympathize nor comprehend." — Edmund
GOSSE.
73. 10-18. He has no religion, etc. Cf. A Prayer, p. 9. John
Stuart Blackie says of this poem : " The man who could feel and
write thus was not far from the best piety of the Psalms of David."
" It is the religious element in Burns that fuses and kindles
all the rest, that makes him the voice of the race at lis best when
he is at /lis best." — E. Charlton Black.
" With shattering ire and withering mirth
He smote each worthless claim to worth,
The barren fig-tree cumbering earth
• He w^ould not spare.
Through ancient lies of proudest birth
He drove his share."
William Watson.
Rev. Charles Rogers, the author of A CenUiry of Scottish Life,
says: " In 1856 I spent an afternoon with Mrs. Begg, the poet's
sister. She said that Robert took their father's place in conducting
household worship, and that he instructed her in the Shorter Cate-
chism. " He was a father to me," said Mrs. Begg, " and my knowl-
edge of the Scriptures in my youth I derived from his teaching."
" Burns was distinctly and definitely a religious man, else he
could never have written much that he did." — Edward Eve-
rett Hale.
Cf. R. H. HUTTON, Modern Guides to T/ioiight in Matters of
Faith, ' Carlyle,' for a view of Carlyle's religion.
Carlyle came naturally by his independence in religious mat-
ters. His father stood by the " auld Buke," and insisted that
he should be allowed to interpret it for himself. On one occa-
sion the clergyman gave a somewhat luminous description of the
terrors of the last judgment; and when he had ceased, James
Carlyle faced him before the congi'egation with these words : —
I30 ESSAY ON BURNS.
" Ay, ye may thump and stare till yer een start fra their sock-
ets, but you'll na gar me believe such Stuff as that."
76. 1 8. they had a message to deliver. Carlyle's analysis
of Byron's character is one of the very best to be found in criti-
cism ; but the treatment of that of Burns from this point to page
78, line 7, is not in his best temper. A Scot's judgment of an-
other Scot in matters of religion is not always just.
" We are near the century of Burns's death, and his fame
stands beyond question higher than ever ; and a fame, let us
remember, not of the coteries, but, so to speak, of the equator."
— Ernest Rhys.
" High Duchesses, and ostlers of inns, gather round the Scot-
tish rustic. Burns: — a strange feeling dv^^elling in each that they
never heard a man like this ; that, on the whole, this is the man !
. . . Do not we feel it so ? But now, Dilettantism, Scepticism,
Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast out of us, — as by
God's blessing they shall one day be ; were faith in the shows of
things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the things, so
that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the
other non-extant ; w^hat a new livelier feeling towards this Burns
were it ! " — Carlyle. The Hero as Poet.
78. 20-23. It decides like a court of law, etc. In this noble
passage Carlyle gives a history of what criticism had been, and
a prophecy of what it w-ould be. It was against this judicial
criticism that Wordsworth and Coleridge did battle ; the one in
The Prefaces, and the other in the Biographia Literaria. Pro-
fessor Dowden says that the function assumed by these minis-
ters of literature (the critics) resembles that of a magistrate on
the bench. Before this judge the offender was brought on the
charge of disturbing the peace, and if he addressed the court in an
unknown tongue he was at once sentenced.
" Jeffrey judged before he interpreted. His quick glance over
superficies led him to exaggerate the defects of great poets, while
their genius merely hummed in his ears." — E. P. Whipple.
Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, and Matthew Arnold have been distin-
NOTES. 131
guished for their insistence upon and application of the principles
for which Carlyle ever pleads. " The form of this world passes,"
said Goethe, " and I would fain occupy myself with that only
which constitutes abiding relations." " The first consideration
for us," says Sainte-Beuve, " is not whether we are amused and
pleased by a work of art or mind, but ought we to be amused,
are we right in being moved by it ? " " Criticism," says Arnold,
" is a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that
is known and thought in the world."
Cf. Wordsworth's Prefaces and Coleridge's Biograpliia Lite-
raria, A. J. George, Ed.
79. 9, 10. Ramsgate. A seaport, Kent, England.
Isle of Dogs. A peninsula on the Thames.
12. we are not required to plead for Burns. Emerson says: —
" Every man's, every boy's and girl's head carries snatches of
Burns's songs, and they say them by heart ; and what is strangest
of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth.
The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley,
and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them ; nay, the music-boxes of
Geneva are framed and toothed to play them, the hand-organs
of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of
bells ring them in spires. They are the property and solace of
mankind."
When Carlyle wrote this essay he little thought that as Burns
would become recognized as the greatest poet of his native land,
so he would be considered Scotland's greatest man of letters.
Burns never forsook the fireside of the cottager ; and it is there
he is loved, and there his immortality is secure. While Carlyle
did much to exalt the conception of simple, homely worth, he
never succeeded in gaining the love and devotion of the peas-
antry.
" Great ! for he spoke and the people heard,
And his eloquence caught like a flame
From zone to zone of the world, till his Word
Had won him a noble name.
132 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Noble ! he sung, and the sweet sound ran
Thro' palace and cottage door,
For he touched on the whole sad planet of man,
The kings and the rich and the poor."
Tennyson.
16-25, While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on, etc.
This concluding passage reminds us of that of Shairp, in his
Wordsworth, the Man and the Poet (Studies in Poetry and Phi-
losophy). " What earth's far-off, lonely mountains do for the
plains and the cities, that Wordsworth has done and will do for
literature, and through literature for society; sending down great
rivers of higher touch, fresh, purifying winds of feeling, to those
who least dream from what quarter they come."
Lord Roseberry, in his speech on the unveiling of the Burns
statue at Paisley, Sept. 26, 1896, said : —
" I think, indeed, that the greatest of the many debts that we
Scotchmen of the latter nineteenth century owe to Burns is that
he. keeps our enthusiasm alive. It is to him that we owe our
perennial supply, as distinguished from gusts and flashes of this
precious quality. He never fails us ; we rally regularly and con-
stantly to his summons and his shrine ; his lute awakens our
romance, and charms the sunless spirits of darkness ; his is the
influence that maintains an abiding glow in our dour character.
To Burns we owe it that we canny, long-headed Scots, do not
stagnate into prose."
" The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer ;
The grass of yesteryear
Is dead ; the birds depart, the groves decay ;
Empires dissolve and peoples disappear :
Song passes not away.
Captains and conquerors leave a httle dust.
And kings a dubious legend of their reign ;
The swords of Caesars, they are less than rust :
The poet doth remain."
W. Watson,
NOTES. 133
Of this essay, Froude says : " It is one of tlie very best of his
essays, and was composed with an evidently peculiar interest,
because the outward circumstances of Burns's life, his origin, his
early surroundings, his situation as a man of genius born in a
farm-house not many miles distant, among the same people and
the same associations as were so famiUar to himself, could not
fail to make him think fair of himself while he was writing about
his countryman."
" The essay on Burns," says Richard Garnett, " is the very
voice of Scotland, expressive of all her passionate love and tragic
sorrow for her darling son. It has paragraphs of massy gold,
capable of being beaten out into volumes, as indeed they have
been. Unlike some of Carlyle's essays, it is by no means open
to the charge of mysticism, but is distinguished by the soundest
good sense."
Carlyle's rule as to style is well illustrated in this essay,
though he often violated it in his "later work: "Learn, so far
as possible, to be intelligible and transparent, — no notice taken
of your style, but solely of what you express by it : this is your
clear rule."
" Carlyle in these first essays," says Lowell, " already shows
the influence of his master, Goethe, the most widely receptive of
critics. The remarkable feature of Carlyle's criticism is the
sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the matter of
his theme, never turned aside by a false scent, regardless of the
outward beauty of form, in his hunger after the intellectual nour-
ishment which it may hide. Everything that Carlyle wrote dur-
ing this first period thrills with the purest appreciation of whatever
is brave and beautiful in human nature."
In 1827 Goethe said to Eckermann ; "Carlyle is a moral force
of great significance. He has a great future before him, and in-
deed one can see no end to all that he will do and effect by his
influence."
" The Essay on Burns," says Mr. John Morley, " had the same
effect on us at Oxford as had Cardinal Newman's sermons. It
was not till twenty-five years after the essay was published that
134 ESSAY ON BURNS.
it began to exert the great formative opinion of which my gener-
ation was so interested a witness. Carlyle, though not a great
poet in form, yet had a poetic grandeur and a fervid sublimity of
imagination, which enabled him to do some of the things which
great poets do."
CARLYLE'S SUMMARY OF THE ESSAY.
Our grand maxim of supply and demand. Living misery and
posthumous glory. The character of Burns a theme that cannot
easily become exhausted. His biographers. Perfection in biog-
raphy, (p. 5.) Burns one of the most considerable British men
of the eighteenth century : an age the jhost prosaic Britain had
yet seen. His hard and most disadvantg,geous conditions. Not
merely as a Poet, but as a Man, that he chiefly interests and
affects us. His life a deeper tragedy than any brawling Napo-
leon's. His heart, erring and at length broken, full of inborn
riches, of love to all living and lifeless things. The peasant
poet bears himself among the low, with whom his lot is cast,
like a king in exile, (n.) His writings but a poor mutilated
fraction of what was in him, yet of a quality enduring as the
English tongue. He wrote, not from hearsay, but from sight
and actual experience. This, easy as it looks, the fundamental
difficulty which all poets have to strive wdth. Byron, heartily as
he detested insincerity, far enough from faultless. No poet of
Burns's susceptibility from first to last so totally free from affec-
tation. Some of his Letters, however, by no means deserve this
praise. His singular power of making all subjects, even the
most homely, interesting. Wherever there is a sky above him,
and a world around him, the poet is in his place. Every genius
an impossibiUty till he appears. (21.) Burns's rugged, earnest
truth, yet tenderness and sweet native grace. His clear, graphic,
' descriptive touches,' and piercing emphasis of thought. Pro-
fessor Stewart's testimony to Burns's intellectual vigor. A deep-
er insight than any ' doctrine of association.' In the Poetry of
136 ESSAY ON BURNS.
Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling.
Loving indignation and good hatred : Scots za/ia hue : Macpher-
son's Farewell: sunny, buoyant floods of humor, {^^y) Imper-
fections of Burns's poetry : Tain 0'' Shunter, not a true poem so
much as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the Jolly Beggars, the
most complete and perfect as a poetical composition. His Songs
the most truly inspired and most deeply felt of all his poems.
His influence on the hearts and literature of his country : lite-
rary patriotism. (42.) Burns's acted works even more interesting
than his written ones : and these too, alas, but a fragment : his
passionate youth never passed into clear and steadfast manhood.
The only true happiness of a man : often it is the greatest minds
that are latest in obtaining it : Burns and Byron. Burns's hard-
worked, yet happy boyhood : his estimable parents. Early dis-
sipations. In necessity and obedience a man should find his
highest freedom. (49-) Religious quarrels and scepticisms.
Faithlessness : exile and blackest desperation. Invited to Edin-
burgh : a Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of Literature.
Sir Walter Scott's reminiscence of an interview with Burns.
Burns's calm manly bearing amongst the Edinburgh aristocracy.
His bitter feeling of his own indigence. By the great he is
treated in the customary fashion ; and each party goes his sev-
eral way. (57) What Burns was next to do, or to avoid: his
Excise-and-Farm Scheme not an unreasonable one : no failure
of external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. Good
beginnings. Patrons of genius and picturesque tourists : their
moral rottenness, by which he became infected, gradually eat out
the heart of his life. Meteors of French politics rise before him,
but they are not /lis stars. Calumny is busy with him. The
little, great -folk of Dumfries : Burns's desolation. In his desti-
tution and degradation one act of self-devotedness still open to
him : not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for
the glory of his country. The crisis of his life: death. (65.)
Little effectual help could perhaps have been rendered to Burns ;
patronage twice cursed : many a poet has been poorer, none
prouder. And yet much might have been done to have made
CARLYLE'S SUMMARY OF THE ESSAY. 137
his humble atmosphere more genial. Little Babylons and Baby-
lonians : let us go and do otherwise. The market-price of Wis-
dom. Not in the power of any mere external circumstances to
ruin the mind of a man. The errors of Burns to be mourned
over, rather than blamed. The gieat want of his life was the
great want of his age, a true faith in religion and a singleness
and unselfishness of aim. (73.) Poetry, as Burns could and ought
to have followed it, is but another form of wisdom, of religion.
For his culture as a Poet, poverty and much suffering for a sea-
son were absolutely advantageous. To divide his hours between
poetry and rich men's banquets an ill-starred attempt. Byron,
rich in worldly means and honors, no whit happier than Burns
in his poverty and worldly degi'adation : they had a message
from on High to deliver, which could leave them no rest while
it remained unaccomplished. . Death and the rest of the grave :
a stern moral, twice told us in our own time. The world habitu-
ally unjust in its judgments of such men. With men of right
feeling anywhere, there will be no need to plead for Burns : in
pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts. (79.)
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REFERENCES.
Blackie, J. S.
Emerson, R. W.
Froude, J, A.
Froude, J. A., Ed.
Froude, J. A., Ed.
Garnett, R.
Hood, E. P.
Macpherson, H. C.
NiCHOL, J.
Norton, C. E., Ed.
Norton, C. E., Ed.
NoRTOxN, C. E., Ed.
Setoun, G.
Shairp, J. C.
BIOGRAPHICAL.
Burns. Grea^ Writej's Series.
Carlyle. English Traits.
Thomas Carlyle, 4 v.
Carlyle' s Rem iniscences.
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh
Carlyle.
Thomas Carlyle. Great Writers Series.
Thomas Carlyle.
Thomas Carlyle. Famous Scots Series.
Carlyle. English Men of Letters Series.
Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson.
Early Letters of Carlyle.
Correspondence betzoeen Goethe and Car-
lyle.
Burns. Famous Scots Series.
Burns. Eiiglish Men of Letters Series.
CRITICAL.
Arnold, M. Discourses in America. Emerson.
Bayne, p. Lessons from my Masters. Carlyle.
Birrell, a. Ol'iter Dicta., First Series. Carlyle.
Burroughs, J. Fresh Fields. In Carlyle's Country.
Burroughs, J. Fresh Fields. A Sunday in Cheyne Row.
Burroughs, J. Indoor Studies. Arnold's View of Carlyle
and Emerson.
138
REFERENCES.
139
Cairo, E.
Dawson, G.
DOWDEN, E.
George, A. J.
Harrison, F.
hutton, r. h.
hutton, r. h.
Lowell, J. R.
Masson, D.
MORLEY, J.
Saintsbury, G.
Saintsbury. G.
Scherer, E.
Seeley, J. R.
Shairp, J. C.
Stephen, L.
Literaticre and Philosophy. Genius of
Carlyle.
Biographical Lecttii-es. Carlyle.
Studies in Lite^'ature. The Transcenden-
tal Movement.
Select Poems of Robert Burns. (With
notes.)
Literary La)idmarks of Edinburgh.
Alodern Guides to Thought in Matters of
Faith.
Criticisms on Contemporayy Thought and
Thinkers.
Literary Essays, Vol. II. Carlyle.
Edinburgh Sketches and Afe?nories.
Miscellanies, Vol. II. Carlyle.
Victorian Literature.
Corrected Lmpressio)is. Carlyle.
Essays in English LJterature. Carlyle.
For Biography of Carlyle consult Gar-
nett, Carlyle. {Great Writers.)
Lectures and Essays. Milton and Carlyle.
Aspects of Poetry. Prose Poets.
Llours in a Library. Carlyle's Ethics.
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