Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set
out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend.
The town that winter was "agog with the ploughman poet."
Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair, "Duchess Gordon and all the
gay world," were of his acquaintance.  Such a revolution is
not to be found in literary history.  He was now, it must be
remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since
his early boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad
seed, and inclement seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses,
guiding the plough in the furrow wielding "the thresher's
weary flingin'-tree;" and his education, his diet, and his
pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman.  Now he
stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned.  We can
see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue
coat and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer
in his Sunday best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly
planted on its burly legs; his face full of sense and
shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought,
and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke.  "I
never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter
Scott, "though I have seen the most distinguished men of my
time."  With men, whether they were lords or omnipotent
critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from
bashfulness or affectation.  If he made a slip, he had the
social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation.  He
was not embarrassed in this society, because he read and
judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and,
as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an epigram.
"These gentlemen," said he, "remind me of some spinsters in
my country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither
fit for weft nor woof."  Ladies, on the other hand, surprised
him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; he
was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan; and
he, who had been so much at his ease with country lasses,
treated the town dames to an extreme of deference.  One lady,
who met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his
demeanour.  "His manner was not prepossessing - scarcely, she
thinks, manly or natural.  It seemed as if he affected a
rusticity or LANDERTNESS, so that when he said the music was
`bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child."
These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight
degree of intimacy the affectation would grow less.  And his
talk to women had always "a turn either to the pathetic or
humorous, which engaged the attention particularly."

The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once)
behaved well to Burns from first to last.  Were heaven-born
genius to revisit us in similar guise, I am not venturing too
far when I say that he need expect neither so warm a welcome
nor such solid help.  Although Burns was only a peasant, and
one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes.  They gave him a great deal of good
advice, helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready
money, and got him, as soon as he asked it, a place in the
Excise.  Burns, on his part, bore the elevation with perfect
dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when the time had
come, into a country privacy of life.  His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his
Edinburgh popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a
day.  He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein
of gratitude; but in practice he suffered no man to intrude
upon his self-respect.  On the other hand, he never turned
his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend,
although the acquaintance were a duke.  He would be a bold
man who should promise similar conduct in equally exacting
circumstances.  It was, in short, an admirable appearance on
the stage of life - socially successful, intimately self-
respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.

In the present study, this must only be taken by the way,
while we return to Burns's love affairs.  Even on the road to
Edinburgh he had seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation,
and had carried the "battering" so far that when next he
moved from town, it was to steal two days with this anonymous
fair one.  The exact importance to Burns of this affair may
be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its
occurrence.  "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "because she
loves me;" or, in the tongue of prose: "Finding an
opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it, and even
now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to profit by it
again."  A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.
Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him
regretting Jean in his correspondence.  "Because" - such is
his reason - "because he does not think he will ever meet so
delicious an armful again;" and then, after a brief excursion
into verse, he goes straight on to describe a new episode in
the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a Lothian farmer
for a heroine.  I must ask the reader to follow all these
references to his future wife; they are essential to the
comprehension of Burns's character and fate.  In June, we
find him back at Mauchline, a famous man.  There, the Armour
family greeted him with a "mean, servile compliance," which
increased his former disgust.  Jean was not less compliant; a
second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the
man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly
insulted little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took
advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest and most
cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent judge
of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return
- a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the whole
collection - a letter which seems to have been inspired by a
boastful, libertine bagman.  "I am afraid," it goes, "I have
almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my
former happiness - the eternal propensity I always had to
fall in love.  My heart no more glows with feverish rapture;
I have no paradisiacal evening interviews."  Even the process
of "battering" has failed him, you perceive.  Still he had
some one in his eye - a lady, if you please, with a fine
figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen the politest
quarters in Europe."  "I frequently visited her," he writes,
"and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between
the distant formal bow and the familiar grasp round the
waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of friendship
in rather ambiguous terms; and after her return to - , I
wrote her in the same terms.  Miss, construing my remarks
further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April
morning; and wrote me an answer which measured out very
completely what an immense way I had to travel before I could
reach the climate of her favours.  But I am an old hawk at
the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop,
down to my foot, like Corporal Trim's hat."  I avow a carnal
longing, after this transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk
about the ears.  There is little question that to this lady
he must have repeated his addresses, and that he was by her
(Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected.  One more detail to characterise the period.  Six
months after the date of this letter, Burns, back in
Edinburgh, is served with a writ IN MEDITATIONE FUGAE, on
behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of humble rank,
who declared an intention of adding to his family.

About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in
the story of the poet's random affections.  He met at a tea
party one Mrs. Agnes M'Lehose, a married woman of about his
own age, who, with her two children, had been deserted by an
unworthy husband.  She had wit, could use her pen, and had
read WERTHER with attention.  Sociable, and even somewhat
frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a
considerable, but not authoritative, sense of the
proprieties.  Of what biographers refer to daintily as "her
somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging from the
silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the
reader will be fastidious if he does not approve.  Take her
for all in all, I believe she was the best woman Burns
encountered.  The pair took a fancy for each other on the
spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited him to tea; but the
poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a TETE-A-
TETE, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead.  An accident confined him to his room for nearly a
month, and this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander
correspondence.  It was begun in simple sport; they are
already at their fifth or sixth exchange, when Clarinda
writes: "It is really curious so much FUN passing between two
persons who saw each other only ONCE;" but it is hardly safe
for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write
almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes
in terms too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere
acquaintance.  The exercise partakes a little of the nature
of battering, and danger may be apprehended when next they
meet.  It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable
correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps, not
yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination
is baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in
bravura passages, into downright truculent nonsense.
Clarinda has one famous sentence in which she bids Sylvander
connect the thought of his mistress with the changing phases
of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by the swain,
but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
"Oh, Clarinda," writes Burns, "shall we not meet in a state -
some yet unknown state - of being, where the lavish hand of
Plenty shall minister to the highest wish of Benevolence, and
where the chill north wind of Prudence shall never blow over
the flowery field of Enjoyment?"  The design may be that of
an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a Bird of
Paradise.  It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write.  Religion, poetry,
love, and charming sensibility, are the current topics.  "I
am delighted, charming Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm
for religion," writes Burns; and the pair entertained a
fiction that this was their "favourite subject."  "This is
Sunday," writes the lady, "and not a word on our favourite
subject.  O fy 'divine Clarinda!' "  I suspect, although
quite unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on
his redemption, they but used the favourite subject as a
stalking-horse.  In the meantime, the sportive acquaintance
was ripening steadily into a genuine passion.  Visits took
place, and then became frequent.  Clarinda's friends were
hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself
had smart attacks of conscience, but her heart had gone from
her control; it was altogether his, and she "counted all
things but loss - heaven excepted - that she might win and
keep him."  Burns himself was transported while in her
neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat rapidly declined
during an absence.  I am tempted to imagine that, womanlike,
he took on the colour of his mistress's feeling; that he
could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected
passion; but that, like one who should leave the hearth upon
a winter's night, his temperature soon fell when he was out
of sight, and in a word, though he could share the symptoms,
that he had never shared the disease.  At the same time, amid
the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true
expressions, and the love verses that he wrote upon Clarinda
are among the most moving in the language.

We are approaching the solution.  In mid-winter, Jean, once
more in the family way, was turned out of doors by her
family; and Burns had her received and cared for in the house
of a friend.  For he remained to the last imperfect in his
character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister courage to
desert his victim.  About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into
the south-west on business.  Clarinda gave him two shirts for
his little son.  They were daily to meet in prayer at an
appointed hour.  Burns, too late for the post at Glasgow,
sent her a letter by parcel that she might not have to wait.
Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: "I think the streets look deserted-like since
Monday; and there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I
once enjoyed not a little.  Miss Wardrobe supped here on
Monday.  She once named you, which kept me from falling
asleep.  I drank your health in a glass of ale - as the
lasses do at Hallowe'en - 'in to mysel'.' "  Arrived at
Mauchline, Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and
prevailed on Mrs. Armour to promise her help and countenance
in the approaching confinement.  This was kind at least; but
hear his expressions: "I have taken her a room; I have taken
her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea. . . . I swore her privately and solemnly never
to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody
should persuade her she had such a claim - which she has not,
neither during my life nor after my death.  She did all this
like a good girl."  And then he took advantage of the
situation.  To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for
a certain woman.  I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure
her;" and he accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity
of soul, and mercenary fawning."  This was already in March;
by the thirteenth of that month he was back in Edinburgh.  On
the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes, your fears, your
cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them.  I will take
you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and
scare away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you."
Again, on the 21st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and
delight, a letter from a man who loves you, who has loved
you, and who will love you, to death, through death, and for
ever. . . . How rich am I to have such a treasure as you! . .
. 'The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall
know,' my love and your merit.  Adieu, Clarinda!  I am going
to remember you in my prayers."  By the 7th of April,
seventeen days later he had already decided to make Jean
Armour publicly his wife.

A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found.  And yet
his conduct is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be
grounded both in reason and in kindness.  He was now about to
embark on a solid worldly career; he had taken a farm; the
affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart, was
too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like
Burns, to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of
hope and self-respect.  This is to regard the question from
its lowest aspect; but there is no doubt that he entered on
this new period of his life with a sincere determination to
do right.  He had just helped his brother with a loan of a
hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor
girl whom he had ruined?  It was true he could not do as he
did without brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the
punishment of his bygone fault; he was, as he truly says,
"damned with a choice only of different species of error and
misconduct."  To be professional Don Juan, to accept the
provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may
thus lead a man through a series of detestable words and
actions, and land him at last in an undesired and most
unsuitable union for life.  If he had been strong enough to
refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had only
not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there
had been some possible road for him throughout this
troublesome world; but a man, alas! who is equally at the
call of his worse and better instincts, stands among changing
events without foundation or resource. (1)

(1) For the love affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott
Douglas's edition under the different dates.


DOWNWARD COURSE.


It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed
Burns; but it is at least certain that there was no hope for
him in the marriage he contracted.  He did right, but then he
had done wrong before; it was, as I said, one of those
relations in life which it seems equally wrong to break or to
perpetuate.  He neither loved nor respected his wife.  "God
knows," he writes, "my choice was as random as blind man's
buff."  He consoles himself by the thought that he has acted
kindly to her; that she "has the most sacred enthusiasm of
attachment to him;" that she has a good figure; that she has
a "wood-note wild," "her voice rising with ease to B
natural," no less.  The effect on the reader is one of
unmingled pity for both parties concerned.  This was not the
wife who (in his own words) could "enter into his favourite
studies or relish his favourite authors;" this was not even a
wife, after the affair of the marriage lines, in whom a
husband could joy to place his trust.  Let her manage a farm
with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long, she
would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object
of pity rather than of equal affection.  She could now be
faithful, she could now be forgiving, she could now be
generous even to a pathetic and touching degree; but coming
from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown herself
worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband's heart nor affect the
inherent destiny of their relation.  From the outset, it was
a marriage that had no root in nature; and we find him, ere
long, lyrically regretting Highland Mary, renewing
correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest language, on
doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park.

Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future.
He had been idle for some eighteen months, superintending his
new edition, hanging on to settle with the publisher,
travelling in the Highlands with Willie Nichol, or
philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt.  He
had lost his habits of industry, and formed the habit of
pleasure.  Apologetical biographers assure us of the
contrary; but from the first, he saw and recognised the
danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is "enervated to an
alarming degree" by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my
mind has been vitiated with idleness."  It never fairly
recovered.  To business he could bring the required diligence
and attention without difficulty; but he was thenceforward
incapable, except in rare instances, of that superior effort
of concentration which is required for serious literary work.
He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only
amused himself with letters.  The man who had written a
volume of masterpieces in six months, during the remainder of
his life rarely found courage for any more sustained effort
than a song.  And the nature of the songs is itself
characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often
as polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank,
and headlong, and colloquial; and this sort of verbal
elaboration in short flights is, for a man of literary turn,
simply the most agreeable of pastimes.  The change in manner
coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit.  In 1786 he had
written the ADDRESS TO A LOUSE, which may be taken as an
extreme instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787,
we come upon the rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are
extreme examples of the second.  The change was, therefore,
the direct and very natural consequence of his great change
in life; but it is not the less typical of his loss of moral
courage that he should have given up all larger ventures, nor
the less melancholy that a man who first attacked literature
with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.

Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the
salary of an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and
rely altogether on the latter resource.  He was an active
officer; and, though he sometimes tempered severity with
mercy, we have local testimony oddly representing the public
feeling of the period, that, while "in everything else he was
a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything seizable he
was no better than any other gauger."

There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years
which need delay us: and that was the sudden interest in
politics which arose from his sympathy with the great French
Revolution.  His only political feeling had been hitherto a
sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less respectable than
that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George Borrow has
nicknamed the "Charlie over the water" Scotchmen.  It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its
origin, built on ballads and the adventures of the Young
Chevalier; and in Burns it is the more excusable, because he
lay out of the way of active politics in his youth.  With the
great French Revolution, something living, practical, and
feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm of
human action.  The young ploughman who had desired so
earnestly to rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole
nation animated with the same desire.  Already in 1788 we
find the old Jacobitism hand in hand with the new popular
doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against the zeal
of a Whig clergyman, he writes: "I daresay the American
Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as
enlightened as the English Convention was in 1688; and that
their posterity will celebrate the centenary of their
deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do ours from
the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart."
As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even
violent; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling
to his hottest excess.  What he asked was a fair chance for
the individual in life; an open road to success and
distinction for all classes of men.  It was in the same
spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the
parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his
fervent snatches against tyranny and tyrants.  Witness, were
it alone, this verse:-


"Here's freedom to him that wad read,
Here's freedom to him that wad write;
There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
But them wham the truth wad indite."


Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom.
Many stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he
used in country coteries; how he proposed Washington's health
as an amendment to Pitt's, gave as a toast "the last verse of
the last chapter of Kings," and celebrated Dumouriez in a
doggrel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.  Now his
sympathies would inspire him with SCOTS, WHA HAE; now involve
him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent
apologies and explanations, hard to offer for a man of
Burns's stomach.  Nor was this the front of his offending.
On February 27, 1792, he took part in the capture of an armed
smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four carronades, and
despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.  Letter
and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials;
there was trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was
reminded firmly, however delicately, that, as a paid
official, it was his duty to obey and to be silent; and all
the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have
rushed to his head at the humiliation.  His letter to Mr.
Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid,
turbulent phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-
respect and vanity.  He had been muzzled, and muzzled, when
all was said, by his paltry salary as an exciseman; alas! had
he not a family to keep?  Already, he wrote, he looked
forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as
this: "Burns, notwithstanding the FANFARONNADE of
independence to be found in his works, and after having been
held forth to view and to public estimation as a man of some
genius, yet, quite destitute of resources within himself to
support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry
exciseman, and shrunk out the rest of his insignificant
existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of
mankind."  And then on he goes, in a style of rhodomontade,
but filled with living indignation, to declare his right to a
political opinion, and his willingness to shed his blood for
the political birthright of his sons.  Poor, perturbed
spirit! he was indeed exercised in vain; those who share and
those who differ from his sentiments about the Revolution,
alike understand and sympathise with him in this painful
strait; for poetry and human manhood are lasting like the
race, and politics, which are but a wrongful striving after
right, pass and change from year to year and age to age.  The
TWA DOGS has already outlasted the constitution of Sieyes and
the policy of the Whigs; and Burns is better known among
English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox.

Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps
led downward.  He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out
of him; he refused to make another volume, for he felt that
it would be a disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to
criticism, unless he was sure it reached him from a friend.
For his songs, he would take nothing; they were all that he
could do; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series of
Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling
of pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the
nobility of a viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to
accept money for these last and inadequate efforts of his
muse.  And this desperate abnegation rises at times near to
the height of madness; as when he pretended that he had not
written, but only found and published, his immortal AULD LANG
SYNE.  In the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an
artist; he was doing so little, he would fain do that little
well; and about two months before his death, he asked Thomson
to send back all his manuscripts for revisal, saying that he
would rather write five songs to his taste than twice that
number otherwise.  The battle of his life was lost; in
forlorn efforts to do well, in desperate submissions to evil,
the last years flew by.  His temper is dark and explosive,
launching epigrams, quarrelling with his friends, jealous of
young puppy officers.  He tries to be a good father; he
boasts himself a libertine.  Sick, sad, and jaded, he can
refuse no occasion of temporary pleasure, no opportunity to
shine; and he who had once refused the invitations of lords
and ladies is now whistled to the inn by any curious
stranger.  His death (July 21, 1796), in his thirty-seventh
year, was indeed a kindly dispensation.  It is the fashion to
say he died of drink; many a man has drunk more and yet lived
with reputation, and reached a good age.  That drink and
debauchery helped to destroy his constitution, and were the
means of his unconscious suicide, is doubtless true; but he
had failed in life, had lost his power of work, and was
already married to the poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before
he had shown his inclination to convivial nights, or at least
before that inclination had become dangerous either to his
health or his self-respect.  He had trifled with life, and
must pay the penalty.  He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had
grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happiness and
solid industry had passed him by.  He died of being Robert
Burns, and there is no levity in such a statement of the
case; for shall we not, one and all, deserve a similar
epitaph?


WORKS.


The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me
throughout this paper only to touch upon those points in the
life of Burns where correction or amplification seemed
desirable, leaves me little opportunity to speak of the works
which have made his name so famous.  Yet, even here, a few
observations seem necessary.

At the time when the poet made his appearance and great first
success, his work was remarkable in two ways.  For, first, in
an age when poetry had become abstract and conventional,
instead of continuing to deal with shepherds, thunderstorms,
and personifications, he dealt with the actual circumstances
of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might
be.  And, second, in a time when English versification was
particularly stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used
with ultra-academical timidity, he wrote verses that were
easy, racy, graphic, and forcible, and used language with
absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit to give a
clear impression.  If you take even those English authors
whom we know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will
see at once that he owed them nothing but a warning.  Take
Shenstone, for instance, and watch that elegant author as he
tries to grapple with the facts of life.  He has a
description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or
walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of
incompetence.  You see my memory fails me, and I positively
cannot recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking; as
though a writer should describe a skirmish, and the reader,
at the end, be still uncertain whether it were a charge of
cavalry or a slow and stubborn advance of foot.  There could
be no such ambiguity in Burns; his work is at the opposite
pole from such indefinite and stammering performances; and a
whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only
lead a man further and further from writing the ADDRESS TO A
LOUSE.  Yet Burns, like most great artists, proceeded from a
school and continued a tradition; only the school and
tradition were Scotch, and not English.  While the English
language was becoming daily more pedantic and inflexible, and
English letters more colourless and slack, there was another
dialect in the sister country, and a different school of
poetry tracing its descent, through King James I., from
Chaucer.  The dialect alone accounts for much; for it was
then written colloquially, which kept it fresh and supple;
and, although not shaped for heroic flights, it was a direct
and vivid medium for all that had to do with social life.
Hence, whenever Scotch poets left their laborious imitations
of bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect,
their style would kindle, and they would write of their
convivial and somewhat gross existences with pith and point.
In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad Fergusson, there was
mettle, humour, literary courage, and a power of saying what
they wished to say definitely and brightly, which in the
latter case should have justified great anticipations.  Had
Burns died at the same age as Fergusson, he would have left
us literally nothing worth remark.  To Ramsay and to
Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very uncommon degree,
not only following their tradition and using their measures,
but directly and avowedly imitating their pieces.  The same
tendency to borrow a hint, to work on some one else's
foundation, is notable in Burns from first to last, in the
period of song-writing as well as in that of the early poems;
and strikes one oddly in a man of such deep originality, who
left so strong a print on all he touched, and whose work is
so greatly distinguished by that character of "inevitability"
which Wordsworth denied to Goethe.

When we remember Burns's obligations to his predecessors, we
must never forget his immense advances on them.  They had
already "discovered" nature; but Burns discovered poetry - a
higher and more intense way of thinking of the things that go
to make up nature, a higher and more ideal key of words in
which to speak of them.  Ramsay and Fergusson excelled at
making a popular - or shall we say vulgar? - sort of society
verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in
taverns while a supper party waited for its laureate's word;
but on the appearance of Burns, this coarse and laughing
literature was touched to finer issues, and learned gravity
of thought and natural pathos.

What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct,
speaking style, and to walk on his own feet instead of on
academical stilts.  There was never a man of letters with
more absolute command of his means; and we may say of him,
without excess, that his style was his slave.  Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner
is tempted to explain it by some special richness or aptitude
in the dialect he wrote.  Hence that Homeric justice and
completeness of description which gives us the very
physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is.
Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces,
which keeps him from any slip into the weariful trade of
word-painting, and presents everything, as everything should
be presented by the art of words, in a clear, continuous
medium of thought.  Principal Shairp, for instance, gives us
a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original; and for
those who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has
the very quality they are accustomed to look for and admire
in Greek.  The contemporaries of Burns were surprised that he
should visit so many celebrated mountains and waterfalls, and
not seize the opportunity to make a poem.  Indeed, it is not
for those who have a true command of the art of words, but
for peddling, professional amateurs, that these pointed
occasions are most useful and inspiring.  As those who speak
French imperfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they may
have talked upon or heard others talk upon before, because
they know appropriate words for it in French, so the dabbler
in verse rejoices to behold a waterfall, because he has
learned the sentiment and knows appropriate words for it in
poetry.  But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with any
subject; and whether it was a stormy night, a shepherd's
collie, a sheep struggling in the snow, the conduct of
cowardly soldiers in the field, the gait and cogitations of a
drunken man, or only a village cockcrow in the morning, he
could find language to give it freshness, body, and relief.
He was always ready to borrow the hint of a design, as though
he had a difficulty in commencing - a difficulty, let us say,
in choosing a subject out of a world which seemed all equally
living and significant to him; but once he had the subject
chosen, he could cope with nature single-handed, and make
every stroke a triumph.  Again, his absolute mastery in his
art enabled him to express each and all of his different
humours, and to pass smoothly and congruously from one to
another.  Many men invent a dialect for only one side of
their nature - perhaps their pathos or their humour, or the
delicacy of their senses - and, for lack of a medium, leave
all the others unexpressed.  You meet such an one, and find
him in conversation full of thought, feeling, and experience,
which he has lacked the art to employ in his writings.  But
Burns was not thus hampered in the practice of the literary
art; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into his
work, and impregnate it from end to end.  If Doctor Johnson,
that stilted and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred
Boswell, what should we have known of him? and how should we
have delighted in his acquaintance as we do?  Those who spoke
with Burns tell us how much we have lost who did not.  But I
think they exaggerate their privilege: I think we have the
whole Burns in our possession set forth in his consummate
verses.

It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected
Wordsworth and the world.  There is, indeed, only one merit
worth considering in a man of letters - that he should write
well; and only one damning fault - that he should write ill.
We are little the better for the reflections of the sailor's
parrot in the story.  And so, if Burns helped to change the
course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct, and
masterly utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects.
That was imposed upon him, not chosen upon a principle.  He
wrote from his own experience, because it was his nature so
to do, and the tradition of the school from which he
proceeded was fortunately not oppose to homely subjects.  But
to these homely subjects he communicated the rich commentary
of his nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they
interest us not in themselves, but because they have been
passed through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man.
Such is the stamp of living literature; and there was never
any more alive than that of Burns.

What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out
in byways hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the
devil himself; sometimes speaking plainly between human
hearts; sometimes ringing out in exultation like a peal of
beals!  When we compare the FARMER'S SALUTATION TO HIS AULD
MARE MAGGIE, with the clever and inhumane production of half
a century earlier, THE AULD MAN'S MARE'S DEAD, we see in a
nutshell the spirit of the change introduced by Burns.  And
as to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the
collie, Luath, in the TWA DOGS, describes and enters into the
merry-making in the cottage?


"The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill,
Are handed round wi' richt guid will;
The canty auld folks crackin' crouse,
The young anes rantin' through the house -
My heart has been sae fain to see them
That I for joy hae barkit wi' them."


It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so
many women, and, through Jean Armour, to himself at last.
His humour comes from him in a stream so deep and easy that I
will venture to call him the best of humorous poets.  He
turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment or a
trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and
rises to the occasion.  I think it is Principal Shairp who
says, happily, that Burns would have been no Scotchman if he
had not loved to moralise; neither, may we add, would he have
been his father's son; but (what is worthy of note) his
moralisings are to a large extent the moral of his own
career.  He was among the least impersonal of artists.
Except in the JOLLY BEGGARS, he shows no gleam of dramatic
instinct.  Mr. Carlyle has complained that TAM O' SHANTER is,
from the absence of this quality, only a picturesque and
external piece of work; and I may add that in the TWA DOGS it
is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety that a
great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for its
existence and effect.  Indeed, Burns was so full of his
identity that it breaks forth on every page; and there is
scarce an appropriate remark either in praise or blame of his
own conduct, but he has put it himself into verse.  Alas! for
the tenor of these remarks!  They are, indeed, his own
pitiful apology for such a marred existence and talents so
misused and stunted; and they seem to prove for ever how
small a part is played by reason in the conduct of man's
affairs.  Here was one, at least, who with unfailing judgment
predicted his own fate; yet his knowledge could not avail
him, and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny.
Ten years before the end he had written his epitaph; and
neither subsequent events, nor the critical eyes of
posterity, have shown us a word in it to alter.  And, lastly,
has he not put in for himself the last unanswerable plea? -


"Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark - "

One?  Alas!  I fear every man and woman of us is "greatly
dark" to all their neighbours, from the day of birth until
death removes them, in their greatest virtues as well as in
their saddest faults; and we, who have been trying to read
the character of Burns, may take home the lesson and be
gentle in our thoughts.



CHAPTER III - WALT WHITMAN



OF late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal
bandied about in books and magazines.  It has become familiar
both in good and ill repute.  His works have been largely
bespattered with praise by his admirers, and cruelly mauled
and mangled by irreverent enemies.  Now, whether his poetry
is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit of a
difference of opinion without alienating those who differ.
We could not keep the peace with a man who should put forward
claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses in SAMSON
AGONISTES; but, I think, we may shake hands with one who sees
no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a literary point of
view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong
direction.  That may not be at all our own opinion.  We may
think that, when a work contains many unforgettable phrases,
it cannot be altogether devoid of literary merit.  We may
even see passages of a high poetry here and there among its
eccentric contents.  But when all is said, Walt Whitman is
neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works
is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not
disinherit a son upon the question, nor even think much the
worse of a critic, for I should always have an idea what he
meant.

What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says
it.  It is not possible to acquit any one of defective
intelligence, or else stiff prejudice, who is not interested
by Whitman's matter and the spirit it represents.  Not as a
poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more exact
expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent
position.  Whether he may greatly influence the future or
not, he is a notable symptom of the present.  As a sign of
the times, it would be hard to find his parallel.  I should
hazard a large wager, for instance, that he was not
unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet
where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on
two more incongruous contemporaries?  Mr. Spencer so decorous
- I had almost said, so dandy - in dissent; and Whitman, like
a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of
the world and baying at the moon.  And when was an echo more
curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his
Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of
the Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman?


I.


Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a
system.  He was a theoriser about society before he was a
poet.  He first perceived something wanting, and then sat
down squarely to supply the want.  The reader, running over
his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in
critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making
poems.  This is as far as it can be from the case of the
spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory
whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry
as Whitman.  The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and
preconceived.  A man born into a society comparatively new,
full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail,
if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies
around him.  He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet
settled down into some more or less unjust compromise as in
older nations, but still in the act of settlement.  And he
could not but wonder what it would turn out; whether the
compromise would be very just or very much the reverse, and
give great or little scope for healthy human energies.  From
idle wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems
to have been early struck with the inefficacy of literature
and its extreme unsuitability to the conditions.  What he
calls "Feudal Literature" could have little living action on
the tumult of American democracy; what he calls the
"Literature of Wo," meaning the whole tribe of Werther and
Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place.
Both propositions, if art had none but a direct moral
influence, would be true enough; and as this seems to be
Whitman's view, they were true enough for him.  He conceived
the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the life of
the present; which was to be, first, human, and next,
American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract;
to give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and,
in so doing, catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of
humanity which should be equally natural to all grades of
wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favourite
phrases, to "the average man."  To the formation of some such
literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many
contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes
superseding, the other: and the whole together not so much a
finished work as a body of suggestive hints.  He does not
profess to have built the castle, but he pretends he has
traced the lines of the foundation.  He has not made the
poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something towards
making the poets.

His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides
roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province
of the metaphysician.  The poet is to gather together for
men, and set in order, the materials of their existence.  He
is "The Answerer;" he is to find some way of speaking about
life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment, man's
enduring astonishment at his own position.  And besides
having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the
question.  He must shake people out of their indifference,
and force them to make some election in this world, instead
of sliding dully forward in a dream.  Life is a business we
are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly from day
to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our
moments by the inanities of custom.  We should despise a man
who gave as little activity and forethought to the conduct of
any other business.  But in this, which is the one thing of
all others, since it contains them all, we cannot see the
forest for the trees.  One brief impression obliterates
another.  There is something stupefying in the recurrence of
unimportant things.  And it is only on rare provocations that
we can rise to take an outlook beyond daily concerns, and
comprehend the narrow limits and great possibilities of our
existence.  It is the duty of the poet to induce such moments
of clear sight.  He is the declared enemy of all living by
reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,
of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in
which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years.
He has to electrify his readers into an instant unflagging
activity, founded on a wide and eager observation of the
world, and make them direct their ways by a superior
prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the
maxims of the copy-book.  That many of us lead such lives as
they would heartily disown after two hours' serious
reflection on the subject is, I am afraid, a true, and, I am
sure, a very galling thought.  The Enchanted Ground of dead-
alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of
considerate virtue.  But there they all slumber and take
their rest in the middle of God's beautiful and wonderful
universe; the drowsy heads have nodded together in the same
position since first their fathers fell asleep; and not even
the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a single
active thought.

The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows
to a sense of their own and other people's principles in
life.

And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an
indifferent means to such an end.  Language is but a poor
bull's-eye lantern where-with to show off the vast cathedral
of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words
is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the
absence of the many which remain unexpressed; like a bright
window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our
sight of its surroundings.  There are not words enough in all
Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of a man's
experience in an hour.  The speed of the eyesight and the
hearing, and the continual industry of the mind, produce, in
ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to
shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches.  If
verbal logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing
as a piece of Euclid.  But, as a matter of fact, we make a
travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put it
into words for the words are all coloured and forsworn, apply
inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses ideas of
praise and blame that have nothing to do with the question in
hand.  So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by
the realities of life and not by the partial terms that
represent them in man's speech; and at times of choice, we
must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute
convictions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which
cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are truly the
sum and fruit of our experience.  Words are for
communication, not for judgment.  This is what every
thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools and silly
schoolmasters push definitions over far into the domain of
conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these
scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and
unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a name
upon their acts or motives.  Hence, a new difficulty for
Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet; he must do more
than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade
them to look over the book and at life with their own eyes.