Book: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4

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BURNS, ROBERT (1759-1796), Scottish poet, was born on the 25th of January
1759 in a cottage about 2 m. from Ayr. He was the eldest son of a small
farmer, William Burness, of Kincardineshire stock, who wrought hard,
practised integrity, wished to bring up his children in the fear of God,
but had to fight all his days against the winds and tides of adversity.
"The poet," said Thomas Carlyle, "was fortunate in his father--a man of
thoughtful intense character, as the best of our peasants are, valuing
knowledge, possessing some and open-minded for more, of keen insight and
devout heart, friendly and fearless: a fully unfolded man seldom found in
any rank in society, and worth descending far in society to seek. ... Had
he been ever so little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise. But
poverty sunk the whole family even below the reach of our cheap school
system, and Burns remained a hard-worked plough-boy."

Through a series of migrations from one unfortunate farm to another; from
Alloway (where he was taught to read) to Mt. Oliphant, and then (1777) to
Lochlea in Tarbolton (where he learnt the rudiments of geometry), the poet
remained in the same condition of straitened circumstances. At the age of
thirteen he thrashed the corn with his own hands, at fifteen he was the
principal labourer. The family kept no servant, and for several years
butchers' meat was a thing unknown in the house. "This kind of life," he
writes, "the cheerless gloom of a hermit and the unceasing toil of a
galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year." His naturally robust frame
was overtasked, and his nervous constitution received a fatal strain. His
shoulders were bowed, he became liable to headaches, palpitations and fits
of depressing melancholy. From these hard tasks and his fiery temperament,
craving in vain for sympathy in a frigid air, grew the strong temptations
on which Burns was largely wrecked,--the thirst for stimulants and the
revolt against restraint which soon made headway and passed all bars. In
the earlier portions of his career a buoyant humour bore him up; and amid
thick-coming shapes of ill he bated no jot of heart or hope. He was cheered
by vague stirrings of ambition, which he pathetically compares to the
"blind groping of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave." Sent to
school at Kirkoswald, he became, for his scant leisure, a great
reader--eating at meal-times with a spoon in one hand and a book in the
other,--and carrying a few small volumes in his pocket to study in spare
moments in the fields. "The collection of songs" he tells us, "was my _vade
mecum_. I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labour, song by
song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime or
fustian." He lingered over the ballads in his cold room by night; by day,
whilst whistling at the plough, he invented new forms and was inspired by
fresh ideas, "gathering round him the memories and the traditions of his
country till they became a mantle and a crown." It was among the furrows of
his father's fields that he was inspired with the perpetually quoted wish--

"That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some useful plan or book could make,
Or sing a sang at least."

An equally striking illustration of the same feeling is to be found in his
summer Sunday's ramble to the Leglen wood,--the fabled haunt of
Wallace,--which the poet confesses to have visited "with as much devout
enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did the shrine of Loretto." In another reference
to the same period he refers to the intense susceptibility to the homeliest
aspects of Nature which throughout characterized his genius. "Scarcely any
object gave me more--I do not know if I should call it pleasure--but
something which exalts and enraptures me--than to walk in the sheltered
side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day and hear the
stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. I listened
to the birds, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb
their little songs or frighten them to another station." Auroral visions
were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if not in joy, "behind his
plough upon the mountain sides."; but the swarm of his many-coloured
fancies was again made grey by the _atra cura_ of unsuccessful toils.

Burns had written his first verses of note, "Behind yon hills where
Stinchar (afterwards Lugar) flows," when in 1781 he went to Irvine to learn
the trade of a flax-dresser. "It was," he says, "an unlucky affair. As we
were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, the shop took fire and
burned to ashes; and I was left, like a true poet, without a sixpence." His
own heart, too, had unfortunately taken fire. He was poring over
mathematics till, in his own phraseology,--still affected in its prose by
the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay,--"the sun entered
Virgo, when a charming _fillette_, who lived next door, overset my
trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies." We
need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which
marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through
the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation.
He had found that he was "no enemy to social life," and his mates had
discovered that he was the best of boon companions in the lyric feasts,
where his eloquence shed a lustre over wild ways of life, and where he was
beginning to be distinguished as a champion of the New Lights and a
satirist of the Calvinism whose waters he found like those of Marah.

In Robert's 25th year his father died, full of sorrows and apprehensions
for the gifted son who wrote for his tomb in Alloway kirkyard, the fine
epitaph ending with the characteristic line--

"For even his failings leaned to virtue's side."

For some time longer the poet, with his brother Gilbert, lingered at
Lochlea, reading agricultural books, miscalculating crops, attending
markets, and in a mood of reformation resolving, "in spite of the world,
the flesh and the devil, to be a wise man." Affairs, however, went no
better with the family; and in 1784 they migrated to Mossgiel, where he
lived and wrought, during four years, for a return scarce equal to the wage
of the commonest labourer in our day. Meanwhile he had become intimate with
his future wife, Jean Armour; but the father, a master mason,
discountenanced the match, and the girl being disposed to "sigh as a
lover," as a daughter to obey, Burns, in 1786, gave up his suit, resolved
to seek refuge in exile, and having accepted a situation as book-keeper to
a slave estate in Jamaica, had taken his passage in a ship for the West
Indies. His old associations seemed to be breaking up, men and fortune
scowled, and "hungry ruin had him in the wind," when he wrote the lines
ending--

[v.04 p.0857]

"Adieu, my native banks of Ayr,"

and addressed to the most famous of the loves, in which he was as prolific
as Catullus or Tibullus, the proposal--

"Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary."

He was withheld from his project and, happily or unhappily, the current of
his life was turned by the success of his first volume, which was published
at Kilmarnock in June 1786. It contained some of his most justly celebrated
poems, the results of his scanty leisure at Lochlea and Mossgiel; among
others "The Twa Dogs,"--a graphic idealization of Aesop,--"The Author's
Prayer," the "Address to the Deil," "The Vision" and "The Dream,"
"Halloween," "The Cottar's Saturday Night," the lines "To a Mouse" and "To
a Daisy," "Scotch Drink," "Man was made to Mourn," the "Epistle to Davie,"
and some of his most popular songs. This epitome of a genius so marvellous
and so varied took his audience by storm. "The country murmured of him from
sea to sea." "With his poems," says Robert Heron, "old and young, grave and
gay, learned and ignorant, were alike transported. I was at that time
resident in Galloway, and I can well remember how even plough-boys and
maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned the most
hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might
but procure the works of Burns." This first edition only brought the author
L20 direct return, but it introduced him to the _literati_ of Edinburgh,
whither he was invited, and where he was welcomed, feasted, admired and
patronized. He appeared as a portent among the scholars of the northern
capital and its university, and manifested, according to Mr Lockhart, "in
the whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the most
eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled to be, hardly
deigning to flatter them by exhibiting a symptom of being flattered."

Sir Walter Scott bears a similar testimony to the dignified simplicity and
almost exaggerated independence of the poet, during this _annus mirabilis_
of his success. "As for Burns, _Virgilium vidi tantum_, I was a lad of
fifteen when he came to Edinburgh, but had sense enough to be interested in
his poetry, and would have given the world to know him. I saw him one day
with several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the
celebrated Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and
listened.... I remember ... his shedding tears over a print representing a
soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on
the other his widow with a child in her arms. His person was robust, his
manners rustic, not clownish. ... His countenance was more massive than it
looks in any of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness
in his lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and
temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he
spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human
head. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the least
intrusive forwardness. I thought his acquaintance with English poetry was
rather limited; and having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and
of Fergusson he talked of them with too much humility as his models. He was
much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made for his relief were
extremely trifling." _Laudatur et alget._ Burns went from those meetings,
where he had been posing professors (no hard task), and turning the heads
of duchesses, to share a bed in the garret of a writer's apprentice,--they
paid together 3s. a week for the room. It was in the house of Mr Carfrae,
Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket, "first scale stair on the left hand in going
down, first door in the stair." During Burns's life it was reserved for
William Pitt to recognize his place as a great poet; the more cautious
critics of the North were satisfied to endorse him as a rustic prodigy, and
brought upon themselves a share of his satire. Some of the friendships
contracted during this period--as for Lord Glencairn and Mrs Dunlop--are
among the most pleasing and permanent in literature; for genuine kindness
was never wasted on one who, whatever his faults, has never been accused of
ingratitude. But in the bard's city life there was an unnatural element. He
stooped to beg for neither smiles nor favour, but the gnarled country oak
is cut up into cabinets in artificial prose and verse. In the letters to Mr
Graham, the prologue to Mr Wood, and the epistles to Clarinda, he is
dancing minuets with hob-nailed shoes. When, in 1787, the second edition of
the _Poems_ came out, the proceeds of their sale realized for the author
L400. On the strength of this sum he gave himself two long rambles, full of
poetic material--one through the border towns into England as far as
Newcastle, returning by Dumfries to Mauchline, and another a grand tour
through the East Highlands, as far as Inverness, returning by Edinburgh,
and so home to Ayrshire.

In 1788 Burns took a new farm at Ellisland on the Nith, settled there,
married, lost his little money, and wrote, among other pieces, "Auld Lang
Syne" and "Tam o' Shanter." In 1789 he obtained, through the good office of
Mr Graham of Fintry, an appointment as excise-officer of the district,
worth L50 per annum. In 1791 he removed to a similar post at Dumfries worth
L70. In the course of the following year he was asked to contribute to
George Thomson's _Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs with
Symphonies and Accompaniments for the Pianoforte and Violin: the poetry by
Robert Burns_. To this work he contributed about one hundred songs, the
best of which are now ringing in the ear of every Scotsman from New Zealand
to San Francisco. For these, original and adapted, he received a shawl for
his wife, a picture by David Allan representing the "Cottar's Saturday
Night," and L5! The poet wrote an indignant letter and never afterwards
composed for money. Unfortunately the "Rock of Independence" to which he
had proudly retired was but a castle of air, over which the meteors of
French political enthusiasm cast a lurid gleam. In the last years of his
life, exiled from polite society on account of his revolutionary opinions,
he became sourer in temper and plunged more deeply into the dissipations of
the lower ranks, among whom he found his only companionship and sole,
though shallow, sympathy.

Burns began to feel himself prematurely old. Walking with a friend who
proposed to him to join a county ball, he shook his head, saying "that's
all over now," and adding a verse of Lady Grizel Baillie's ballad--

"O were we young as we ance hae been,
We sud hae been galloping down on yon green,
And linking it ower the lily-white lea,
But were na my heart light I wad dee."

His hand shook; his pulse and appetite failed; his spirits sunk into a
uniform gloom. In April 1796 he wrote--"I fear it will be some time before
I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams I have sat and wept. I have only
known existence by the pressure of sickness and counted time by the
repercussions of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without
hope. I look on the vernal day and say with poor Fergusson--

"Say wherefore has an all-indulgent heaven
Life to the comfortless and wretched given."

On the 4th of July he was seen to be dying. On the 12th he wrote to his
cousin for the loan of L10 to save him from passing his last days in jail.
On the 21st he was no more. On the 25th, when his last son came into the
world, he was buried with local honours, the volunteers of the company to
which he belonged firing three volleys over his grave.

It has been said that "Lowland Scotland as a distinct nationality came in
with two warriors and went out with two bards. It came in with William
Wallace and Robert Bruce and went out with Robert Burns and Walter Scott.
The first two made the history, the last two told the story and sung the
song." But what in the minstrel's lay was mainly a requiem was in the
people's poet also a prophecy. The position of Burns in the progress of
British literature may be shortly defined; he was a link between two eras,
like Chaucer, the last of the old and the first of the new--the inheritor
of the traditions and the music of the past, in some respects the herald of
the future.

The volumes of our lyrist owe part of their popularity to the fact of their
being an epitome of melodies, moods and memories that had belonged for
centuries to the national life, the best [v.04 p.0858] inspirations of
which have passed into them. But in gathering from his ancestors Burns has
exalted their work by asserting a new dignity for their simplest themes. He
is the heir of Barbour, distilling the spirit of the old poet's epic into a
battle chant, and of Dunbar, reproducing the various humours of a
half-sceptical, half-religious philosophy of life. He is the pupil of
Ramsay, but he leaves his master, to make a social protest and to lead a
literary revolt. _The Gentle Shepherd_, still largely a court pastoral, in
which "a man's a man" if born a gentleman, may be contrasted with "The
Jolly Beggars"--the one is like a minuet of the ladies of Versailles on the
sward of the Swiss village near the Trianon, the other like the march of
the maenads with Theroigne de Mericourt. Ramsay adds to the rough tunes and
words of the ballads the refinement of the wits who in the "Easy" and
"Johnstone" clubs talked over their cups of Prior and Pope, Addison and
Gay. Burns inspires them with a fervour that thrills the most wooden of his
race. We may clench the contrast by a representative example. This is from
Ramsay's version of perhaps the best-known of Scottish songs,--

"Methinks around us on each bough
A thousand Cupids play;
Whilst through the groves I walk with you,
Each object makes me gay.
Since your return--the sun and moon
With brighter beams do shine,
Streams murmur soft notes while they run
As they did lang syne."

Compare the verses in Burns--

"We twa hae run about the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine:
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne."

Burns as a poet of the inanimate world doubtless derived hints from Thomson
of _The Seasons_, but in his power of tuning its manifestation to the moods
of the mind he is more properly ranked as a forerunner of Wordsworth. He
never follows the fashions of his century, except in his failures--in his
efforts at set panegyric or fine letter-writing. His highest work knows
nothing of "Damon" or "Musidora." He leaves the atmosphere of drawing-rooms
for the ingle or the ale-house or the mountain breeze.

The affectations of his style are insignificant and rare. His prevailing
characteristic is an absolute sincerity. A love for the lower forms of
social life was his besetting sin; Nature was his healing power. Burns
compares himself to an Aeolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His
genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds
nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an
enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a
mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal doomed
like himself to "thole the winter's sleety dribble," and draws his
oft-repeated moral. He walks abroad and, in a verse that glints with the
light of its own rising sun before the fierce sarcasm of "The Holy Fair,"
describes the melodies of a "simmer Sunday morn." He loiters by Afton Water
and "murmurs by the running brook a music sweeter than its own." He stands
by a roofless tower, where "the howlet mourns in her dewy bower," and "sets
the wild echoes flying," and adds to a perfect picture of the scene his
famous vision of "Libertie." In a single stanza he concentrates the
sentiment of many Night Thoughts--

"The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave,
And Time is setting wi' me, O."

For other examples of the same graphic power we may refer to the course of
his stream--

"Whiles ow'r a linn the burnie plays
As through the glen it wimpled," &c.,

or to "The Birks of Aberfeldy" or the "spate" in the dialogue of "The Brigs
of Ayr." The poet is as much at home in the presence of this flood as by
his "trottin' burn's meander." Familiar with all the seasons he represents
the phases of a northern winter with a frequency characteristic of his
clime and of his fortunes; her tempests became anthems in his verse, and
the sounding woods "raise his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of
the wind"; full of pity for the shelterless poor, the "ourie cattle," the
"silly sheep," and the "helpless birds," he yet reflects that the bitter
blast is not "so unkind as man's ingratitude." This constant tendency to
ascend above the fair or wild features of outward things, or to penetrate
beneath them, to make them symbols, to endow them with a voice to speak for
humanity, distinguishes Burns as a descriptive poet from the rest of his
countrymen. As a painter he is rivalled by Dunbar and James I., more rarely
by Thomson and Ramsay. The "lilt" of Tannahill's finest verse is even more
charming. But these writers rest in their art; their main care is for their
own genius. The same is true in a minor degree of some of his great English
successors. Keats has a palette of richer colours, but he seldom
condescends to "human nature's daily food." Shelley floats in a thin air to
stars and mountain tops, and vanishes from our gaze like his skylark.
Byron, in the midst of his revolutionary fervour, never forgets that he
himself belongs to the "caste of Vere de Vere." Wordsworth's placid
affection and magnanimity stretch beyond mankind, and, as in
"Hart-leap-well" and the "Cuckoo," extend to bird and beast; he moralizes
grandly on the vicissitudes of common life, but he does not enter into,
because by right of superior virtue he places himself above them. "From the
Lyrical Ballads," it has been said, "it does not appear that men eat or
drink, marry or are given in marriage." We revere the monitor who,
consciously good and great, gives us the dry light of truth, but we love
the bard, _nostrae deliciae_, who is all fire--fire from heaven and
Ayrshire earth mingling in the outburst of passion and of power, which is
his poetry and the inheritance of his race. He had certainly neither
culture nor philosophy enough to have written the "Ode on the Recollections
of Childhood," but to appreciate that ode requires an education. The
sympathies of Burns, as broad as Wordsworth's, are more intense; in turning
his pages we feel ourselves more decidedly in the presence of one who joys
with those who rejoice and mourns with those who mourn. He is never
shallow, ever plain, and the expression of his feeling is so terse that it
is always memorable. Of the people he speaks more directly for the people
than any of our more considerable poets. Chaucer has a perfect hold of the
homeliest phases of life, but he wants the lyric element, and the charm of
his language has largely faded from untutored ears. Shakespeare, indeed,
has at once a loftier vision and a wider grasp; for he sings of "Thebes and
Pelops line," of Agincourt and Philippi, as of Falstaff, and Snug the
joiner, and the "meanest flower that blows." But not even Shakespeare has
put more thought into poetry which the most prosaic must appreciate than
Burns has done. The latter moves in a narrower sphere and wants the
strictly dramatic faculty, but its place is partly supplied by the
vividness of his narrative. His realization of incident and character is
manifested in the sketches in which the manners and prevailing fancies of
his countrymen are immortalized in connexion with local scenery. Among
those almost every variety of disposition finds its favourite. The quiet
households of the kingdom have received a sort of apotheosis in the
"Cottar's Saturday Night." It has been objected that the subject does not
afford scope for the more daring forms of the author's genius; but had he
written no other poem, this heartful rendering of a good week's close in a
God-fearing home, sincerely devout, and yet relieved from all suspicion of
sermonizing by its humorous touches, would have secured a permanent place
in literature. It transcends Thomson and Beattie at their best, and will
smell sweet like the actions of the just for generations to come.

Lovers of rustic festivity may hold that the poet's greatest performance is
his narrative of "Halloween," which for easy vigour, fulness of rollicking
life, blended truth and fancy, is unsurpassed in its kind. Campbell,
Wilson, Hazlitt, Montgomery, Burns himself, and the majority of his
critics, have [v.04 p.0859] recorded their preference for "Tam o' Shanter,"
where the weird superstitious element that has played so great a part in
the imaginative work of this part of our island is brought more prominently
forward. Few passages of description are finer than that of the roaring
Doon and Alloway Kirk glimmering through the groaning trees; but the unique
excellence of the piece consists in its variety, and a perfectly original
combination of the terrible and the ludicrous. Like Goethe's _Walpurgis
Nacht_, brought into closer contact with real life, it stretches from the
drunken humours of Christopher Sly to a world of fantasies almost as
brilliant as those of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, half solemnized by the
severer atmosphere of a sterner clime. The contrast between the lines
"Kings may be blest," &c., and those which follow, beginning "But pleasures
are like poppies spread," is typical of the perpetual antithesis of the
author's thought and life, in which, at the back of every revelry, he sees
the shadow of a warning hand, and reads on the wall the writing, _Omnia
mutantur_. With equal or greater confidence other judges have pronounced
Burns's masterpiece to be "The Jolly Beggars." Certainly no other single
production so illustrates his power of exalting what is insignificant,
glorifying what is mean, and elevating the lowest details by the force of
his genius. "The form of the piece," says Carlyle, "is a mere cantata, the
theme the half-drunken snatches of a joyous band of vagabonds, while the
grey leaves are floating on the gusts of the wind in the autumn of the
year. But the whole is compacted, refined and poured forth in one flood of
liquid harmony. It is light, airy and soft of movement, yet sharp and
precise in its details; every face is a portrait, and the whole a group in
clear photography. The blanket of the night is drawn aside; in full ruddy
gleaming light these rough tatterdemalions are seen at their boisterous
revel wringing from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer." Over the
whole is flung a half-humorous, half-savage satire--aimed, like a two-edged
sword, at the laws and the law-breakers, in the acme of which the graceless
crew are raised above the level of ordinary gipsies, footpads and rogues,
and are made to sit "on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind,"
and to launch their Titan thunders of rebellion against the world.

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