With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life
and light and love.  The portrait of the good Bishop is one
of the most agreeable things in modern literature.  The whole
scene at Montfermeil is full of the charm that Hugo knows so
well how to throw about children.  Who can forget the passage
where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands in
admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster
behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'etre le Pere eternel?"
The pathos of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the
chimney in expectation of the Santa Claus that was not, takes
us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in Shakespeare that
touches the heart more nearly.  The loves of Cosette and
Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our
affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental
reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence.  Take
it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can
be compared with it.  There is as much calm and serenity as
Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that
disfigured NOTRE DAME are no longer present.  There is
certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the
story itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on
us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find
that every character fits again and again into the plot, and
is, like the child's cube, serviceable on six faces; things
are not so well arranged in life as all that comes to.  Some
of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do nothing
but interrupt and irritate.  But when all is said, the book
remains of masterly conception and of masterly development,
full of pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.

Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with
in the first two members of the series, it remained for LES
TRAVAILLEURS DE LA MER to show man hand to hand with the
elements, the last form of external force that is brought
against him.  And here once more the artistic effect and the
moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed, one.
Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a
type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion
of forces into the illimitable," and the visionary
development of "wasted labour" in the sea, and the winds, and
the clouds.  No character was ever thrown into such strange
relief as Gilliat.  The great circle of sea-birds that come
wanderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes
at once the note of his pre-eminence and isolation.  He fills
the whole reef with his indefatigable toil; this solitary
spot in the ocean rings with the clamour of his anvil; we see
him as he comes and goes, thrown out sharply against the
clear background of the sea.  And yet his isolation is not to
be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for
example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to
set side by side than LES TRAVAILLEURS and this other of the
old days before art had learnt to occupy itself with what
lies outside of human will.  Crusoe was one sole centre of
interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead and utterly
unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with
Gilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of
forces," that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are
the witnesses of the terrible warfare that he wages with "the
silent inclemency of phenomena going their own way, and the
great general law, implacable and passive:" "a conspiracy of
the indifferency of things" is against him.  There is not one
interest on the reef, but two.  Just as we recognise Gilliat
for the hero, we recognise, as implied by this indifferency
of things, this direction of forces to some purpose outside
our purposes, yet another character who may almost take rank
as the villain of the novel, and the two face up to one
another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm,
they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor; -
a victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus.  I
need say nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of
that famous scene; it will be enough to remind the reader
that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself
assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its way, is
the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here,
indeed, is the true position of man in the universe.

But in LES TRAVAILLEURS, with all its strength, with all its
eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main
situations, we cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a
thread of something that will not bear calm scrutiny.  There
is much that is disquieting about the storm, admirably as it
begins.  I am very doubtful whether it would be possible to
keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any
amount of breakwater and broken rock.  I do not understand
the way in which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to
take it as a loose way of speaking, and pass on.  And lastly,
how does it happen that the sea was quite calm next day?  Is
this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting after all?
And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigies of strength
(although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in the
Vicomte de Bragelonne than is quite desirable), what is to be
said to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate
terms that unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us
that the sloop disappeared over the horizon, and the head
under the water, at one and the same moment?  Monsieur Hugo
may say what he will, but we know better; we know very well
that they did not; a thing like that raises up a despairing
spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the
lie fiercely, as they read.  Lastly, we have here already
some beginning of that curious series of English blunders,
that makes us wonder if there are neither proof-sheets nor
judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us
sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what may be our
own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign
tongues.  It is here that we shall find the famous "first of
the fourth," and many English words that may be
comprehensible perhaps in Paris.  It is here that we learn
that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as "lord" in
England.  Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's
equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.

In L'HOMME QUI RIT, it was Hugo's object to 'denounce' (as he
would say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was
exhibited in England; and this purpose, somewhat more
unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two last, must answer
for much that is unpleasant in the book.  The repulsiveness
of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the
reader at the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as
seriously as it deserves.  And yet when we judge it
deliberately, it will be seen that, here again, the story is
admirably adapted to the moral.  The constructive ingenuity
exhibited throughout is almost morbid.  Nothing could be more
happily imagined, as a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine,
the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little
way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the
hereditary legislators of a great country.  It is with a very
bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is
left to float for years at the will of wind and tide.  What,
again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn
arraignment of the pleasures and privileges of its splendid
occupants?  The horrible laughter, stamped for ever "by order
of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of
democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to the scene;
in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer:
"If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so?"
This ghastly laughter gives occasion, moreover, for the one
strain of tenderness running through the web of this
unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl Dea, for the
monster.  It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one
of those compensations, one of those afterthoughts of a
relenting destiny, that reconcile us from time to time to the
evil that is in the world; the atmosphere of the book is
purified by the presence of this pathetic love; it seems to
be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full moon
over the night of some foul and feverish city.

There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and
particular than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned,
on the other hand, that the book is wordy, and even, now and
then, a little wearisome.  Ursus and his wolf are pleasant
enough companions; but the former is nearly as much an
abstract type as the latter.  There is a beginning, also, of
an abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite
pardonable in the drama where needs must, but is without
excuse in the romance.  Lastly, I suppose one must say a word
or two about the weak points of this not immaculate novel;
and if so, it will be best to distinguish at once.  The large
family of English blunders, to which we have alluded already
in speaking of LES TRAVAILLEURS, are of a sort that is really
indifferent in art.  If Shakespeare makes his ships cast
anchor by some seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Tim-
Jack to be a likely nickname for an English sailor, or if
either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that matter, be
guilty of "figments enough to confuse the march of a whole
history - anachronisms enough to overset all, chronology,"
(1) the life of their creations, the artistic truth and
accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised.  But
when we come upon a passage like the sinking of the "Ourque"
in this romance, we can do nothing but cover our face with
our hands: the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace
in the very reading.  For such artistic falsehoods, springing
from what I have called already an unprincipled avidity after
effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above all,
when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo.  We cannot
forgive in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate
sensation novelist.  Little as he seems to know of the sea
and nautical affairs, he must have known very well that
vessels do not go down as he makes the "Ourque" go down; he
must have known that such a liberty with fact was against the
laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of
sincerity in conception or workmanship.

(1) Prefatory letter to PEVERIL OF THE PEAK.

In each of these books, one after another, there has been
some departure from the traditional canons of romance; but
taking each separately, one would have feared to make too
much of these departures, or to found any theory upon what
was perhaps purely accidental.  The appearance of QUATRE
VINGT TREIZE has put us out of the region of such doubt.
Like a doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an
epidemic malady, we have come at last upon a case so well
marked that our uncertainty is at an end.  It is a novel
built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at that date laid
before revolutionary France, and which is presented by Hugo
to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the
question, clement or stern, according to the temper of his
spirit.  That enigma was this: "Can a good action be a bad
action?  Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep?"
This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain
undecided to the end.  And something in the same way,
although one character, or one set of characters, after
another comes to the front and occupies our attention for the
moment, we never identify our interest with any of these
temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn.
We soon come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a
general law; what we really care for is something that they
only imply and body forth to us.  We know how history
continues through century after century; how this king or
that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even
feel as if we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because
our interest is not in the men, but in the country that they
loved or hated, benefited or injured.  And so it is here:
Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more
than the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in
military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it is
the principle that put these men where they were, that filled
them for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power,
now that they are fallen, to inspire others with the same
courage.  The interest of the novel centres about
revolutionary France: just as the plot is an abstract
judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical
force.  And this has been done, not, as it would have been
before, by the cold and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but
with bold, straightforward realism, dealing only with the
objective materials of art, and dealing with them so
masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come
before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the
young men and maidens of customary romance.

The episode of the mother and children in QUATRE VINGT TREIZE
is equal to anything that Hugo has ever written.  There is
one chapter in the second volume, for instance, called "SEIN
GUERI, COEUR SAIGNANT," that is full of the very stuff of
true tragedy, and nothing could be more delightful than the
humours of the three children on the day before the assault.
The passage on La Vendee is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit.  The book is full,
as usual, of pregnant and splendid sayings.  But when thus
much is conceded by way of praise, we come to the other scale
of the balance, and find this, also, somewhat heavy.  There
is here a yet greater over-employment of conventional
dialogue than in L'HOMME QUI RIT; and much that should have
been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at
all, he has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or
other of his characters.  We should like to know what becomes
of the main body of the troop in the wood of La Saudraie
during the thirty pages or so in which the foreguard lays
aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman and
some children.  We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that
we can summon up to resist it.  Is it possible that Monsieur
Hugo thinks they ceased to steer the corvette while the gun
was loose?  Of the chapter in which Lantenac and Halmalho are
alone together in the boat, the less said the better; of
course, if there were nothing else, they would have been
swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's
harangue.  Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes
of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet
"statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the
tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately
pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears
with a taunting accusation of falsehood.  And then, when we
come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under
the idea that he is going to meet the republicans, it seems
as if there were a hitch in the stage mechanism.  I have
tried it over in every way, and I cannot conceive any
disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.

Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences,
are the five great novels.

Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak
with a certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who
can ever bend it to any practical need, few who can ever be
said to express themselves in it.  It has become abundantly
plain in the foregoing examination that Victor Hugo occupies
a high place among those few.  He has always a perfect
command over his stories; and we see that they are
constructed with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and
that every situation is informed with moral significance and
grandeur.  Of no other man can the same thing be said in the
same degree.  His romances are not to be confused with "the
novel with a purpose" as familiar to the English reader: this
is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the moral
clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or
thrown externally over it like a carpet over a railing.  Now
the moral significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the
romance; it is the organising principle.  If you could
somehow despoil LES MISERABLES OR LES TRAVAILLEURS of their
distinctive lesson, you would find that the story had lost
its interest and the book was dead.

Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to
make his art speak, he went on to teach it to say things
heretofore unaccustomed.  If you look back at the five books
of which we have now so hastily spoken, you will be
astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes of
story-telling have been laid aside and passed by.  Where are
now the two lovers who descended the main watershed of all
the Waverley novels, and all the novels that have tried to
follow in their wake?  Sometimes they are almost lost sight
of before the solemn isolation of a man against the sea and
sky, as in LES TRAVAILLEURS; sometimes, as in LES MISERABLES,
they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in the
epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in
QUATRE VINGT TREIZE.  There is no hero in NOTRE DAME: in LES
MISERABLES it is an old man: in L'HOMME QUI RIT it is a
monster: in QUATRE VINGT TREIZE it is the Revolution.  Those
elements that only began to show themselves timidly, as
adjuncts, in the novels of Walter Scott, have usurped ever
more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest
of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being
out of the field of fiction.  So we have elemental forces
occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak)
nearly as important a ROLE, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes
and overcomes them.  So we find the fortunes of a nation put
upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the
fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces
that oppose and corrupt a principle holding the attention
quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest attorneys
of the past.  Hence those individual interests that were
supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood out over
everything else and formed as it were the spine of the story,
figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one
force among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a
whole world of things equally vivid and important.  So that,
for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without
antecedent or relation here below, but a being involved in
the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a centre
of such action and reaction or an unit in a great multitude,
chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and
aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every
wind of doctrine.  This is a long way that we have travelled:
between such work and the work of Fielding is there not,
indeed, a great gulph in thought and sentiment?

Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of
life, and that portion one that it is more difficult for them
to realise unaided; and, besides helping them to feel more
intensely those restricted personal interests which are
patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness of those
more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods.  It helps to keep man in his
place in nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand
more intelligently the responsibilities of his place in
society.  And in all this generalisation of interest, we
never miss those small humanities that are at the opposite
pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the intellect
that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another
sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold
into Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the
fluttering of her dress in the spring wind, or put the blind
girl beside the deformity of the laughing man.  This, then,
is the last praise that we can award to these romances.  The
author has shown a power of just subordination hitherto
unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of
effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other,
his work is more nearly complete work, and his art, with all
its imperfections, deals more comprehensively with the
materials of life than that of any of his otherwise more sure
and masterly predecessors.

These five books would have made a very great fame for any
writer, and yet they are but one facade of the monument that
Victor Hugo has erected to his genius.  Everywhere we find
somewhat the same greatness, somewhat the same infirmities.
In his poems and plays there are the same unaccountable
protervities that have already astonished us in the romances.
There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions - an emphasis
that is somehow akin to weaknesses - strength that is a
little epileptic.  He stands so far above all his
contemporaries, and so incomparably excels them in richness,
breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel
as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily
than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him
profit by the privilege so freely.  We like to have, in our
great men, something that is above question; we like to place
an implicit faith in them, and see them always on the
platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily, cannot be
with Hugo.  As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we
shall have the wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we
shall have the justice also to recognise in him one of the
greatest artists of our generation, and, in many ways, one of
the greatest artists of time.  If we look back, yet once,
upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay
to the charge of no other man in the number of the famous;
but to what other man can we attribute such sweeping
innovations, such a new and significant presentment of the
life of man, such an amount, if we merely think of the
amount, of equally consummate performance?



CHAPTER II - SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS



To write with authority about another man, we must have
fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with our
subject.  We may praise or blame according as we find him
related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; but it is
only in virtue of some relationship that we can be his
judges, even to condemn.  Feelings which we share and
understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's
character; those to which we are strangers in our own
experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions,
inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise
our hands to heaven in wonder when we find them in
conjunction with talents that we respect or virtues that we
admire.  David, king of Israel, would pass a sounder judgment
on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume.  Now, Principal
Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read
it without respect and interest, has this one capital defect
- that there is imperfect sympathy between the author and the
subject, between the critic and the personality under
criticism.  Hence an inorganic, if not an incoherent,
presentation of both the poems and the man.  Of HOLY WILLIE'S
PRAYER, Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved
most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that
it was ever written."  To the JOLLY BEGGARS, so far as my
memory serves me, he refers but once; and then only to remark
on the "strange, not to say painful," circumstance that the
same hand which wrote the COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT should have
stooped to write the JOLLY BEGGARS.  The SATURDAY NIGHT may
or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is
trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears,
when it is set beside the JOLLY BEGGARS.  To take a man's
work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts,
is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty.
The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a
man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused.  The man
here presented to us is not that Burns, TERES ATQUE ROTUNDUS
- a burly figure in literature, as, from our present vantage
of time, we have begun to see him.  This, on the other hand,
is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman,
whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too
often hurt and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot
PROTEGE, and solacing himself with the explanation that the
poet was "the most inconsistent of men."  If you are so
sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject, and so
paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer.
Indeed, we can only be sorry and surprised that Principal
Shairp should have chosen a theme so uncongenial.  When we
find a man writing on Burns, who likes neither HOLY WILLIE,
nor the BEGGARS, nor the ORDINATION, nothing is adequate to
the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable allait-
il faire dans cette galere?"  And every merit we find in the
book, which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with
biographies of Burns, only leads us to regret more heartily
that good work should be so greatly thrown away.

It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that
has been so often told; but there are certainly some points
in the character of Burns that will bear to be brought out,
and some chapters in his life that demand a brief rehearsal.
The unity of the man's nature, for all its richness, has
fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers.
Mr. Carlyle made an inimitable bust of the poet's head of
gold; may I not be forgiven if my business should have more
to do with the feet, which were of clay?


YOUTH.


Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in
silence the influences of his home and his father.  That
father, William Burnes, after having been for many years a
gardener, took a farm, married, and, like an emigrant in a
new country, built himself a house with his own hands.
Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life.
Chill, backward, and austere with strangers, grave and
imperious in his family, he was yet a man of very unusual
parts and of an affectionate nature.  On his way through life
he had remarked much upon other men, with more result in
theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden.  His great delight was in solid
conversation; he would leave his work to talk with the
schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert, when he came home late at
night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept his father two
hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and vigorous
talk.  Nothing is more characteristic of the class in
general, and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he
took to get proper schooling for his boys, and, when that was
no longer possible, the sense and resolution with which he
set himself to supply the deficiency by his own influence.
For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke with
them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men;
at night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he
borrowed books for them on history, science, and theology;
and he felt it his duty to supplement this last - the trait
is laughably Scottish - by a dialogue of his own composition,
where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly
represented.  He would go to his daughter as she stayed
afield herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and
wild flowers, or to sit by her side when it thundered.
Distance to strangers, deep family tenderness, love of
knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of theology
- everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds
up a popular Scotch type.  If I mention the name of Andrew
Fairservice, it is only as I might couple for an instant
Dugald Dalgetty with old Marshal Loudon, to help out the
reader's comprehension by a popular but unworthy instance of
a class.  Such was the influence of this good and wise man
that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours
who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole
family, father, brothers, and sisters, helping themselves
with one hand, and holding a book in the other.  We are
surprised at the prose style of Robert; that of Gilbert need
surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable letter
for a young man of such slender opportunities.  One anecdote
marks the taste of the family.  Murdoch brought TITUS
ANDRONICUS, and, with such dominie elocution as we may
suppose, began to read it aloud before this rustic audience;
but when he had reached the passage where Tamora insults
Lavinia, with one voice and "in an agony of distress" they
refused to hear it to an end.  In such a father and with such
a home, Robert had already the making of an excellent
education; and what Murdoch added, although it may not have
been much in amount, was in character the very essence of a
literary training.  Schools and colleges, for one great man
whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong spirit
can do well upon more scanty fare.

Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his
complete character - a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad,
greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice; in his own phrase
"panting after distinction," and in his brother's "cherishing
a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more
consequence than himself:" with all this, he was emphatically
of the artist nature.  Already he made a conspicuous figure
in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish,
"and his plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in
a particular manner round his shoulders."  Ten years later,
when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an
officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in
masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great
Highland broadsword.  He liked dressing up, in fact, for its
own sake.  This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant
array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen
of the English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure
derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is,
to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and
remark.  His father wrote the family name BURNES; Robert
early adopted the orthography BURNESS from his cousin in the
Mearns; and in his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to
BURNS.  It is plain that the last transformation was not made
without some qualm; for in addressing his cousin he adheres,
in at least one more letter, to spelling number two.  And
this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his
appearance even down to the name, and little willing to
follow custom.  Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his
powers in conversation.  To no other man's have we the same
conclusive testimony from different sources and from every
rank of life.  It is almost a commonplace that the best of
his works was what he said in talk.  Robertson the historian
"scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed
greater vigour;" the Duchess of Gordon declared that he
"carried her off her feet;" and, when he came late to an inn,
the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk.  But, in
these early days at least, he was determined to shine by any
means.  He made himself feared in the village for his tongue.
He would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps -
for the statement of Sillar is not absolute - say cutting
things of his acquaintances behind their back.  At the church
door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views
amid hisses.  These details stamp the man.  He had no genteel
timidities in the conduct of his life.  He loved to force his
personality upon the world.  He would please himself, and
shine.  Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot
with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing JEHAN for
JEAN, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying
Bourgeois in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade.

A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to
be in love.  NE FAIT PAS CE TOUR QUI VEUT.  His affections
were often enough touched, but perhaps never engaged.  He was
all his life on a voyage of discovery, but it does not appear
conclusively that he ever touched the happy isle.  A man
brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and even from
childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady.  Burns was formed for love; he had passion,
tenderness, and a singular bent in the direction; he could
foresee, with the intuition of an artist, what love ought to
be; and he could not conceive a worthy life without it.  But
he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after every
shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a
strong temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and
his heart had lost the power of self-devotion before an
opportunity occurred.  The circumstances of his youth
doubtless counted for something in the result.  For the lads
of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was over and the
beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a
winter tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland
to spend an hour or two in courtship.  Rule 10 of the
Bachelors' Club at Tarbolton provides that "every man proper
for a member of this Society must be a professed lover of ONE
OR MORE of the female sex."  The rich, as Burns himself
points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their "cannie hour at e'en."  It
was upon love and flirtation that this rustic society was
built; 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, and expansions to the chosen
confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux.  Here was a field for
a man of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, where he
might pursue his voyage of discovery in quest of true love,
and enjoy temporary triumphs by the way.  He was "constantly
the victim of some fair enslaver " - at least, when it was
not the other way about; and there were often underplots and
secondary fair enslavers in the background.  Many - or may we
not say most? - of these affairs were entirely artificial.
One, he tells us, he began out of "a vanity of showing his
parts in courtship," for he piqued himself on his ability at
a love-letter.  But, however they began, these flames of his
were fanned into a passion ere the end; and he stands
unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively
without a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of
"battering himself into a warm affection," - a debilitating
and futile exercise.  Once he had worked himself into the
vein, "the agitations of his mind and body" were an
astonishment to all who knew him.  Such a course as this,
however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his
nature.  He sank more and more towards the professional Don
Juan.  With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids
the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions; and the
same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he
plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first
bastard.  We can well believe what we hear of his facility in
striking up an acquaintance with women: he would have
conquering manners; he would bear down upon his rustic game
with the grace that comes of absolute assurance - the
Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel.  In yet another manner did
these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame.  If he
were great as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant.  He
could enter into a passion; he could counsel wary moves,
being, in his own phrase, so old a hawk; nay, he could turn a
letter for some unlucky swain, or even string a few lines of
verse that should clinch the business and fetch the
hesitating fair one to the ground.  Nor, perhaps, was it only
his "curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity" that
recommended him for a second in such affairs; it must have
been a distinction to have the assistance and advice of RAB
THE RANTER; and one who was in no way formidable by himself
might grow dangerous and attractive through the fame of his
associate.

I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that
rough moorland country, poor among the poor with his seven
pounds a year, looked upon with doubt by respectable elders,
but for all that the best talker, the best letter-writer, the
most famous lover and confidant, the laureate poet, and the
only man who wore his hair tied in the parish.  He says he
had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can
well believe it.  Among the youth he walked FACILE PRINCEPS,
an apparent god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend
Mr. Auld should swoop upon him with the thunders of the
Church, and, in company with seven others, Rab the Ranter
must figure some fine Sunday on the stool of repentance,
would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis,
in so conspicuous a shame?  Was not Richelieu in disgrace
more idolised than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was
the highwayman most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn?  Or,
to take a simile from nearer home, and still more exactly to
the point, what could even corporal punishment avail,
administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly school-master,
against the influence and fame of the school's hero?

And now we come to the culminating point of Burns's early
period.  He began to be received into the unknown upper
world.  His fame soon spread from among his fellow-rebels on
the benches, and began to reach the ushers and monitors of
this great Ayrshire academy.  This arose in part from his lax
views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to
end of our poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a
hot and virulent skirmish; and Burns found himself identified
with the opposition party, - a clique of roaring lawyers and
half-heretical divines, with wit enough to appreciate the
value of the poet's help, and not sufficient taste to
moderate his grossness and personality.  We may judge of
their surprise when HOLY WILLIE was put into their hand; like
the amorous lads of Tarbolton, they recognised in him the
best of seconds.  His satires began to go the round in
manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, "read him into
fame;" he himself was soon welcome in many houses of a better
sort, where his admirable talk, and his manners, which he had
direct from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a
country dancing school, completed what his poems had begun.
We have a sight of him at his first visit to Adamhill, in his
ploughman's shoes, coasting around the carpet as though that
were sacred ground.  But he soon grew used to carpets and
their owners; and he was still the superior of all whom he
encountered, and ruled the roost in conversation.  Such was
the impression made, that a young clergyman, himself a man of
ability, trembled and became confused when he saw Robert
enter the church in which he was to preach.  It is not
surprising that the poet determined to publish: he had now
stood the test of some publicity, and under this hopeful
impulse he composed in six winter months the bulk of his more
important poems.  Here was a young man who, from a very
humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of a
parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of
rural courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and
printed poet in the world's bookshops.

A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the
sketch.  This strong young plough-man, who feared no
competitor with the flail, suffered like a fine lady from
sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall into the blackest
melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past and
terror for the future.  He was still not perhaps devoted to
religion, but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness
prostrated himself before God in what I can only call unmanly
penitence.  As he had aspirations beyond his place in the
world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses to match.
He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a winter
tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried
a book with him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore
out in this service two copies of the MAN OF FEELING.  With
young people in the field at work he was very long-suffering;
and when his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to them - "O man,
ye are no for young folk," he would say, and give the
defaulter a helping hand and a smile.  In the hearts of the
men whom he met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more
rare, his knowledge of himself equalled his knowledge of
others.  There are no truer things said of Burns than what is
to be found in his own letters.  Country Don Juan as he was,
he had none of that blind vanity which values itself on what
it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness to a hair:
he took himself boldly for what he was, and, except in
moments of hypochondria, declared himself content.


THE LOVE STORIES.


On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and
women of the place joined in a penny ball, according to their
custom.  In the same set danced Jean Armour, the master-
mason's daughter, and our dark-eyed Don Juan.  His dog (not
the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame, CARET
QUIA VATE SACRO), apparently sensible of some neglect,
followed his master to and fro, to the confusion of the
dancers.  Some mirthful comments followed; and Jean heard the
poet say to his partner - or, as I should imagine, laughingly
launch the remark to the company at large - that "he wished
he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his
dog."  Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on
Mauchline green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied
by his dog; and the dog, "scouring in long excursion,"
scampered with four black paws across the linen.  This
brought the two into conversation; when Jean, with a somewhat
hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any of the
lasses to like him as well as his dog?"

It is one of the misfortunes of the professional Don Juan
that his honour forbids him to refuse battle; he is in life
like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like the sworn physician
who must attend on all diseases.  Burns accepted the
provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl - pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and
plainly not averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once
more as if love might here be waiting him.  Had he but known
the truth! for this facile and empty-headed girl had nothing
more in view than a flirtation; and her heart, from the first
and on to the end of her story, was engaged by another man.
Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
"battering himself into a warm affection;" and the proofs of
his success are to be found in many verses of the period.
Nor did he succeed with himself only; Jean, with her heart
still elsewhere, succumbed to his fascination, and early in
the next year the natural consequence became manifest.  It
was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple.  They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's
serious issues.  Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the
best she had now to expect was marriage with a man who was a
stranger to her dearest thoughts; she might now be glad if
she could get what she would never have chosen.  As for
Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised that his
voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere -
that he was not, and never had been, really in love with
Jean.  Hear him in the pressure of the hour.  "Against two
things," he writes, "I am as fixed as fate - staying at home,
and owning her conjugally.  The first, by heaven, I will not
do! - the last, by hell, I will never do!"  And then he adds,
perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
tell her I will meet her, so God help me in my hour of need."
They met accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery,
came down from these heights of independence, and gave her a
written acknowledgment of marriage.  It is the punishment of
Don Juanism to create continually false positions - relations
in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it is
equally wrong to break or to perpetuate.  This was such a
case.  Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way;
let us be glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart.
When we discover that we can be no longer true, the next best
is to be kind.  I daresay he came away from that interview
not very content, but with a glorious conscience; and as he
went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How are Thy
servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with
her "lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her
father, and his wife.  Burns and his brother were then in a
fair way to ruin themselves in their farm; the poet was an
execrable match for any well-to-do country lass; and perhaps
old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his
daughter's part.  At least, he was not so much incensed by
her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been
designed to cover it.  Of this he would not hear a word.
Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only to appease her
parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to the
poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction; and all
parties imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was
thus dissolved.  To a proud man like Burns here was a
crushing blow.  The concession which had been wrung from his
pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth.  The Armour
family preferred disgrace to his connection.  Since the
promise, besides, he had doubtless been busy "battering
himself" back again into his affection for the girl; and the
blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at
the heart.

He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront
manuscript poetry was insufficient to console him.  He must
find a more powerful remedy in good flesh and blood, and
after this discomfiture, set forth again at once upon his
voyage of discovery in quest of love.  It is perhaps one of
the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope
or confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and
lean upon another.  The universe could not be yet exhausted;
there must be hope and love waiting for him somewhere; and
so, with his head down, this poor, insulted poet ran once
more upon his fate.  There was an innocent and gentle
Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family;
and he had soon battered himself and her into a warm
affection and a secret engagement.  Jean's marriage lines had
not been destroyed till March 13, 1786; yet all was settled
between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May 14, when they
met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr.  They each wet their hands
in a stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible
between them as they vowed eternal faith.  Then they
exchanged Bibles, on one of which Burns, for greater
security, had inscribed texts as to the binding nature of an
oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the
wandering affections, here were two people united for life.
Mary came of a superstitious family, so that she perhaps
insisted on these rites; but they must have been eminently to
the taste of Burns at this period; for nothing would seem
superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his tottering
constancy.

Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's
life.  His book was announced; the Armours sought to summon
him at law for the aliment of the child; he lay here and
there in hiding to correct the sheets; he was under an
engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his
wife; now, he had "orders within three weeks at latest to
repair aboard the NANCY, Captain Smith;" now his chest was
already on the road to Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn
weather on the moorland, he measures verses of farewell:-


"The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!"


But the great master dramatist had secretly another intention
for the piece; by the most violent and complicated solution,
in which death and birth and sudden fame all play a part as
interposing deities, the act-drop fell upon a scene of
transformation.  Jean was brought to bed of twins, and, by an
amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to bring up by
hand, while the girl remained with her mother.  The success
of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put 20 pounds at
once into the author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all
hands to go to Edinburgh and push his success in a second and
larger edition.  Third and last in these series of
interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for
Robert.  He went to the window to read it; a sudden change
came over his face, and he left the room without a word.
Years afterwards, when the story began to leak out, his
family understood that he had then learned the death of
Highland Mary.  Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself
made no reference to this passage of his life; it was an
adventure of which, for I think sufficient reasons, he
desired to bury the details.  Of one thing we may be glad: in
after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and left her
with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."