Allan Ramsay Part 7

Be this as it may, Allan was grievously vexed by the comparison, and one day, when showing it, in the pride of his heart, to the witty Lord Elibank, who duly admired its unrivalled prospect, he added, 'And yet, my lord, thae toon wits say it's like naething else than a guse-pie.'

'Deed, Allan, noo I see ye intilt, I'm thinkin' the wits are no' sae far wrang.' History does not record Allan's rejoinder.

Scarcely had he entered his new mansion, however, expecting to enjoy there many years of domestic happiness and peace, than the great sorrow of his life fell upon him. In March 1743, his faithful and loving partner, who had stood by him amid all the storm and stress of his busy career, was taken from him, after thirty years of unbroken affection and devotion. She was interred in the Greyfriars Churchyard, as the cemetery records show, on the 28th of March 1743. So intense was her husband's grief that he, who for many another had written elegies instinct with deep sympathy and regret, could not trust himself to write of her, 'lest I should break doon a'thegither into my second bairnhood.' Alas! poor Allan!

But his daughters, realising to the full the part that now devolved on them, stepped into the gap left in his domestic circle. n.o.bly they fulfilled their duty, and amongst the most affecting tributes Ramsay paid, is that to the filial affection of 'his girls,' over whom, after their mother had gone from them, he watched with a wealth of paternal love and an anxious solicitude, as unsparing as it was unremitting.

And thus did the life of Allan Ramsay roll quietly onward through placid reaches of domestic and social happiness, during the closing fourteen years of existence. Though he did not formally retire from business until 1755, he left it almost entirely in the hands of capable subordinates. He had worked hard in his day, and now, as he said--

----'I the best and fairest please, A little man that lo'es my ease, And never thole these pa.s.sions lang That rudely mint to do me wrang.'

Accordingly, he lived quietly in the 'goose-pie,' 'faulding his limbs in ease,' and absolutely refusing to concern himself with anything political, social, or ecclesiastical calculated to bring worry and trouble upon him.

During the Rebellion of 1745, tradition states that Prince Charles Edward, after the capture of the city by the Highland army, sent a message to Ramsay, asking him to repair to Holyrood, that some mark of his new sovereign's favour might be bestowed on him. Singular, indeed, it was, that the poet should have selected the day in question to repair to his friend James Clerk's mansion at Penicuik, and that he should there have been seized with so severe an indisposition as to prevent him returning to Edinburgh for nearly five weeks. Though a Tory and a Jacobite, honest Allan knew upon which side his bread was b.u.t.tered. Such honours as would have been conferred would have been inconvenient.

Moreover, the Rebellion had not yet attained dimensions sufficient to trans.m.u.te it from a rebellion into a revolution. Pawkiness and caution were prominent traits in his character, and they were never used to more salient advantage than in the instance in question.

To the end of life, Ramsay remained the same kindly, genial, honourable man, whose appearance in any of the social circles he frequented, was the signal for 'quips and cranks and wreathed smiles' to go round, and for the feast of reason and the flow of soul to commence. His squat, podgy figure waddling down the High Street on his way to his shop in the Luckenbooths, his head covered with the quaint three-cornered hat of the period, beneath which peeped his tie-wig, was one of the familiar sights of Edinburgh, to be pointed out to strangers with a pride and an affection that never diminished. In his little villa on the Castlehill he entertained his friends in true Horatian style, and with a hospitality every whit as warm, though it was every whit as simple as that which the great Roman promised Maecenas, he made them free of what was in his power to give.

Foibles he had,--and who is without them? faults, too,--for what character lacks them? yet his very foibles and his faults leaned to virtue's side. Vain he certainly was, deny the fact who can? his egotism, also, may have jarred on some whose individuality was as strong as his own, but whose liberality in making allowances for human weaknesses was less. Nay, he may even in some respects have been 'near'

with regard to certain little things, though this was the result of his humble upbringing, where, in the household economy of the Crichtons, a pound was a fortune. But once break through the crust of his old-fashioned formalism with the thrust of some pressing appeal for aid, and instantly we touch the core of a ready and warm sympathy--a sympathy as catholic in the radius of its beneficence as it was munificent in the measure of its benefactions. To the poor, to the suffering, to the widow and the orphan, to the fatherless and the friendless, Allan Ramsay was ever the readiest to help where help was really needed; and if his vanity liked the fact to be made public property, wherein lay the harm?

Do our published subscription-lists to-day not testify to the existence of the same foible in nine-tenths of us? To the improvident, however, to the lazy, to the genteel beggar, and to the thousand and one forms mendicity--supported by mendacity--takes to extort money, Allan was as adamant. 'Gang your wa's,' he would say to such; 'gar your elbuck earn what your mooth eats, and ye'll be a better man.'

Allan has had the misfortune to be rated by what he did not do in the way of charity, rather than by what he did. Because he esteemed charity to begin at home, and that he should provide for his own before partic.i.p.ating in any schemes for providing for others, he has been rated as selfish and miserly. The opposite is the case. Prudent, careful, and economical,--into no speculation would he go from which he did not see the probability, at least, of an adequate return. Hence, during the South Sea madness, he kept his head when many a better man went mad with the speculative mania. He was pious, without his piety being black-edged with that gloomy bigotry which characterised much of the Presbyterianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Scotland. As he put the matter himself in his _Epistle to James Arbuckle_:

'Neist, Anti-Toland, Blunt, and Whiston, Know positively I'm a Christian, Believing truths and thinking free, Wishing thrawn parties would agree.'

He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled from aught savouring of licence or excess. To coa.r.s.eness, it is true, he may at times have stooped in his work; but we must remember the spirit of the times was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not 'an implement for disintegrating planetary particles.' To no degree greater than did Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot, or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered to have smirched his pages with references either ribald or indelicate.

The spirit of the age was in fault when coa.r.s.eness was rated as wit; and to be true to life, the painters of the manners around them had to represent these as they were, not as they would have liked them to be.

On the 9th May 1755 Ramsay, when writing to his friend, James Clerk of Penicuik, a rhyming epistle, had said--

'Now seventy years are o'er my head, And thirty mae may lay me dead.'

Alas! the 'Shadow feared of man' was already sitting waiting for him at no great distance farther on in his life's journey. For some years he had suffered acutely from scurvy in the gums, which in the end attacked his jawbone and affected his speech. To the close, however, he retained his cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits. When the last great summons at length came to him, he met it with a manly fort.i.tude and Christian resignation.

Amongst his last words, according to his daughter Janet, who survived until 1807, were these: 'I'm no' feared of death; the Bricht and Morning Star has risen and is shining mair and mair unto the perfect day.' And so he pa.s.sed 'into the unseen' on the 7th January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age. He was interred two days after in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where his gravestone is still visible, bearing the inscription: 'In this cemetery was interred the mortal part of an immortal poet, Allan Ramsay, author of _The Gentle Shepherd_ and other admirable poems in the Scottish dialect. He was born in 1686 and died in 1758.

'No sculptured marble here, no pompous lay, No storied urn, no animated bust; This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust.[2]

Though here you're buried, worthy Allan, We'll ne'er forget you, canty callan; For while your soul lives in the sky, Your "Gentle Shepherd" ne'er shall die.'

Sir John Clerk, one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, who admired his genius and was one of his most intimate friends, erected at his family seat at Penicuik an obelisk to his memory; while Mr.

Alexander Fraser-Tytler, at Woodhouselee, near the Glencorse _locale_ of _The Gentle Shepherd_, has erected a rustic temple which bears the inscription--

'ALLANO RAMSAY ET GENIO LOCI.

'Here midst those streams that taught thy Doric Muse Her sweetest song,--the hills, the woods, and stream, Where beauteous Peggy strayed, list'ning the while Her Gentle Shepherd's tender tale of love.

Scenes which thy pencil, true to Nature, gave To live for ever. Sacred be this shrine; And unprofaned, by ruder hands, the stone That owes its honours to thy deathless name.'

Ramsay was survived by his son Allan, the painter, and by his two daughters, Christian and Janet, who amongst them inherited the poet's fortune. The house on the Castlehill fell to his son, and remained in the possession of the family, as Mr. Logie Robertson records, until 1845, when it changed hands at the death of General John Ramsay, the poet's grandson, and the last of his line. For many years it stood, an object of interest to all admirers of the bard, until 1892, when, just as the building was beginning to show signs of age, the site was bought for the erection of the new students' boarding-house, 'University Hall,'

which so imposingly crowns the ridge of the Castlehill. With a reverence for the memory of the poet as rare as it is commendable, the promoters of the scheme resolved to preserve as much as possible of the house, and the greater part of it has been incorporated in the new building.

Of Ramsay we have only two portraits remaining that are of any real value,--that painted by his son Allan, and that by Smibert, the poet's lifelong friend. The latter represents him in youth, the former in age--both being considered, at the time of execution, striking likenesses. But perhaps the best idea of the appearance of the poet may be gathered from Sir John Steele's fine statue of him (designed from his son's portrait) which now stands at the corner of West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, immediately below the site of his house. There, with his familiar 'nightcap' on his head, he stands, watching the busy crowds pa.s.sing to and fro in front of him, wearing the while an expression on his face as though he were saying with his Patie--

'He that hath just enough can soundly sleep, The o'ercome only fashes fouk to keep; Content's the greatest bliss we can procure Frae 'boon the lift: without it, kings are poor.'

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The first stanza is in reality by Burns, and is identical with that he placed on the tombstone he erected over the remains of Fergusson, the poet, in the Canongate Churchyard.

CHAPTER X

RAMSAY AS A PASTORAL POET AND AN ELEGIST

In attempting a critical estimate of the value of Ramsay's works, for the purpose of a.n.a.lysis it will be most convenient to consider the great body of his writings under certain cla.s.sified headings--(1) Ramsay as a Pastoral Poet and an Elegist; (2) Ramsay as a Satirist and a Song-writer; (3) Ramsay's Miscellaneous Works.

In the chapter on _The Gentle Shepherd_, we noted the distinctive const.i.tuents of pastoral poetry, as currently defined, and also wherein Ramsay's principles, as exemplified in practice, differ from those of other writers of pastoral. To furnish examples ill.u.s.trative of our contention is now all that remains to be done. Early in his poetical career, as soon, in fact, as he had completed his first tentative efforts, Ramsay seems to have become conscious, with that rare gift of prevision always distinguishing him, that his strength lay in a picturesque yet truthful delineation of rural life. His earliest pieces, although termed elegies, exhibit, rather, many of the characteristics of pastorals, in the broad humour and in the graphic and vivid colouring wherewith he depicts the scenes at Maggy Johnston's tavern at Morningside, or the incidents in the life of Luckie Wood or of Patie Birnie. But, as he has termed them _elegies_, under that heading let them be considered, though a humorous or mock elegy is somewhat of a contradiction in terms.

Roughly cla.s.sified, Ramsay's pastorals may be stated as follows:--the dialogues between _Richy_ (Sir Rich. Steele) _and Sandy_ (Alex. Pope), on the death of Mr. Addison; between _Robert, Richy, and Sandy_, on the death of Matthew Prior; _Keitha_, on the death of the Countess of Wigton; an _Ode with a Pastoral Recitative_, on the marriage of James Earl of Wemyss to Miss Janet Charteris; _A Masque_, performed at the celebration of the nuptials of James Duke of Hamilton and Lady Ann Cochrane; _A Pastoral Epithalamium_, on the marriage of George Lord Ramsay and Lady Jean Maule; _Betty and Kate_, a pastoral farewell to Mr.

Aikman; and finally, _The Gentle Shepherd_.

Of Ramsay's less important pastorals, the distinguishing characteristics are their simplicity, their tenderness, and their freedom from aught didactic. In conforming to the conventional idea of pastoral,--the idea, that is, of the shepherd state being a condition of perfect peace and Arcadian felicity and propriety,--in place of copying direct from nature, they one and all differ from _The Gentle Shepherd_. The picture of burly Sir Richard Steele and of crooked little Alexander Pope, clad in shepherd's weeds, and masquerading with dogs and pipes and what not, savours somewhat of the ludicrous. Then, in _Richy and Sandy_, he makes Pope bewail the death of Addison, with whom he had been on anything but friendly terms for years previous; while the following picture of the deceased grave-visaged Secretary of State, in such a position as described in the following lines, tends to induce us profane Philistines of these latter days, to smile, if not to sneer--

'A better lad ne'er leaned out o'er a kent, Nor hounded collie o'er the mossy bent: Blythe at the bughts how oft hae we three been, Heartsome on hills, and gay upon the green.'

This, however, was the fashion in vogue, and to it our poet had to conform. In _Richy and Sandy_, in _Robert, Richy, and Sandy_, and in his earlier pastorals generally, we seem to see the poet struggling to rid himself of the conventional prejudices against painting rural nature in the real, and in favour of 'a golden-age rusticity' purely imaginary.

Not by this is it implied that I claim for our poet the credit of first insisting on reverting to nature for the study of scenes and character.

The same conviction, according to Lowell, was entertained by Spenser, and his _Shepherds' Calendar_ was a manifestation, however imperfect and unsatisfactory, of his desire to hark back to nature for inspiration. In _Keitha_ the same incongruity, as noted above, is visible. The poem in question, with that on the _Marriage of the Earl of Wemyss_, can neither be ranked as conventional pastoral nor as pure pastoral, according to Ramsay's later style. We note the 'Colins' and 'Ringans,' the 'shepherd's reeds' and 'shepherd's weeds,' and the picture of

----'the singing shepherd on the green Armyas hight, wha used wi' tunefu' lay To please the ear when he began to play,'

--an imitation of Milton's immortal lines in _Comus_, which are too well known to need quotation. All of a piece this with the 'golden-age pastoral.' In the same poems, however, occur intimations that the incongruity was perceived by the author, but that, as yet, he did not see any means of remedying the uniform monotony of the conventional form. The leaven was at work in Ramsay's mind, but so far it only succeeded in influencing but the smallest moiety of the lump.

In the _Masque_, written in celebration of the marriage of the Duke of Hamilton, the sentiments expressed are wholly different. Written subsequently to _The Gentle Shepherd_, Ramsay exhibited in it his increased technical deftness, and how much he had profitted by the experience gained in producing his great pastoral. The _Masque_, albeit professedly a dramatic pastoral, entirely abjures the lackadaisical shepherds and shepherdesses of conventional pastoral, and, as a poem of pure imagination, reverts to the ancient mythology for the _dramatis personae_.

All these pieces, however, though they exhibit a facility in composition, a fecundity of imagination, a skilful adaptation of theme to specific metrical form, a rare human sympathy, and a depth of pathos as natural in expression as it was genuine in its essence, are only, so to speak, the preludes to _The Gentle Shepherd_. In the latter, Ramsay's matured principles of pastoral composition are to be viewed where best their relative importance can be estimated, namely, when put into practice.

By competent critics, _The Gentle Shepherd_ is generally conceded to be the n.o.blest pastoral in the English language. Dr. Hugh Blair, in his lectures on _Rhetoric and Belles Lettres_, styled it 'a pastoral drama which will bear being brought into comparison with any composition of this kind in any language.... It is full of so much natural description and tender sentiment as would do honour to any poet. The characters are well drawn, the incidents affecting, the scenery and manners lively and just.' And one of Dr. Blair's successors in the Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh,--a man and a Scotsman who, in his day, has done more than any other to foster amongst our youth a love of all that is great and good and beautiful in our literature; a teacher, too, whose students, whom he has imbued with his own n.o.ble spirit, are scattered over the world, from China to Peru,--Emeritus-Professor David Ma.s.son, has observed in his charming _Edinburgh Sketches_: 'The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish literature, or in any other: nothing so good of any kind that could be voted even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict.'

To anyone who will carefully compare the _Idylls_ of Theocritus, the _Eclogues_ of Virgil, and the _Aminta_ of Ta.s.so, with Ramsay's great poem, the conviction will be driven home,--in the face, it may be, of many deeply-rooted prejudices,--that the same inspiration which, like a fiery rivulet, runs through the three former masterpieces, is present also in the latter--that inspiration being the perfect and unbroken h.o.m.ogeneity existing between the local atmosphere of the poem and the characteristics of the _dramatis personae_. This fact it is which renders the _Aminta_ so imperishable a memorial of Ta.s.so's genus; for it is Italian pastoral, redolent of the air, and smacking of the very soil of sunny Italy. The symmetrical perfection of _The Gentle Shepherd_, in like manner, is due to the fact that the feelings and desires and impulses of the characters in the pastoral are those distinctively native and proper to persons in their sphere of life. There is no dissidence visible between what may imperfectly be termed the _motif_ of the poem and the sentiments of even the most subordinate characters in it. Therein lies the true essence of literary symmetry--the symmetry not alone of mere form, though that also was present, but the symmetry resulting from the harmony of thought with its expression, of scene and its characters, of situation and its incidents. Such the symmetry exhibited by Homer's _Iliad_, by Dante's _Inferno_, by Milton's _Paradise Lost_, by Cervantes' _Don Quixote_, by Camoens' _Lusiad_, by Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, by Tennyson's _Idylls_.

Frankly, it must be admitted that only in his _Gentle Shepherd_ does Ramsay attain this outstanding excellence. His other pieces are meritorious,--highly so; but they could have been produced by many a writer of the age with equal, perhaps superior, felicity, and they shine only in the reflected light of _The Gentle Shepherd_; even as Scott's _Lord of the Isles_ and _Harold the Dauntless_ were saved from being 'd.a.m.ned as mediocrity' only by the excellence of the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ and _Marmion_.

The great charm of _The Gentle Shepherd_ lies in the skilfully-balanced ant.i.thesis of its contrasts, in the reflected interest each type casts on its opposite. As in Moliere's _Tartuffe_, it is the vivid contrast created between the hypocrisy of the t.i.tle-character and the easy good-nature of Orgon, that begets a reciprocal interest in the fortunes of both; as in Balzac's _Pere Goriot_, it is the pitiless selfishness of his three daughters on the one hand, and the doting self-denial of the poor old father on the other, that throws both sets of characters into relief so strong: so, in _The Gentle Shepherd_, it is the subtle force of the contrast between Patie's well-balanced manliness and justifiable pride, and Roger's _gauche_ bashfulness and depression in the face of Jenny's coldness; between Peggy's piquant lovableness and maidenly joy in the knowledge of Patie's love, and Jenny's affected dislike to the opposite s.e.x to conceal the real state of her feelings towards Roger in particular, that impart to the poem the vivid interest wherewith its scenes are perused. Minor contrasts are present too, in the faithfulness of Patie to Peggy, as compared with the faithlessness of Bauldy to Neps.

The whole drama, in fact, might be styled a beautiful panegyric on fidelity in love. Such pa.s.sages as the following are frequent--