Robert Burns: How To Know Him Part 6

Burns's chief enjoyment in these days was the work he was doing for Scottish song. While in Edinburgh he had made the acquaintance of an engraver, James Johnson, who had undertaken the publication of the _Scots Musical Museum_, a collection of songs and music. Burns agreed to help him by the collection and refurbishing of the words of old songs, and when these were impossible, by providing new words for the melodies. The work finally extended to six volumes; and before it was finished a more ambitious undertaking, managed by a Mr. George Thomson, was set on foot. Burns was invited to cooperate in this also, and entered into it with such enthusiasm that he was Thomson's main support. In both of these publications the poet worked purely with patriotic motives and for the love of song, and had no pecuniary interest in either. Once Thomson sent him a present of five pounds and endangered their relations thereby; later, when Burns was in his last illness, he asked and received from Thomson an advance of the same amount. Apart from these sums Burns never made or sought to make a penny from his writings after the publication of the first Edinburgh edition. Twice he declined journalistic work for a London paper.

Poetry was the great consolation of his life, and even in his severest financial straits he refused to consider the possibility of writing for money, regarding it as a kind of prost.i.tution.

By the autumn of 1795 signs began to appear that the poet's const.i.tution was breaking down. The death of his daughter Elizabeth and a severe attack of rheumatism plunged him into deep melancholy and checked for a time his song-writing; and though for a time he recovered, his disease returned early in the next year. It seems clear, too, that though the change from Ellisland to Dumfries relieved him of much of the severer physical exertion, other factors more than counterbalanced this relief. Burns had never been a slave to drink for its own sake; it had always been the accompaniment--in those days an almost inevitable accompaniment--of sociability. Some of his wealthier friends in the vicinity were in this respect rather excessive in their hospitality; in Dumfries the taverns were always at hand; and as Burns came to realize the comparative failure of his career as a man, he found whisky more and more a means of escape for depression. Even if we distrust the local gossip that made much of the dissipations of his later years, it appears from the evidence of his physician that alcohol had much to do with the rheumatic and digestive troubles that finally broke him down. In July, 1796, he was sent, as a last resort, to Brow-on-Solway to try sea-bathing and country life; but he returned little improved, and well-nigh convinced that his illness was mortal. His mental condition is shown by the fact that pressure from a solicitor for the payment of a tailor's debt of some seven pounds, incurred for his volunteer's uniform, threw him into a panic lest he should be imprisoned, and his last letters are pitiful requests for financial help, and two notes to his father-in-law urging him to send her mother to Jean, as she was about to give birth to another child. In such hara.s.sing conditions he sank into delirium, and died on July 21, 1796. The child, who died in infancy, was born on the day his father was buried.

With Burns's death a reaction in popular opinion set in. He was given a military funeral; and a subscription which finally amounted to one thousand two hundred pounds was raised for his family. The official biography, by Doctor Currie of Liverpool, doubled this sum, so that Jean was enabled to bring up the children respectably, and end her days in comfort. Scotland, having done little for Burns in his life, was stricken with remorse when he died, and has sought ever since to atone for her neglect by an idolatry of the poet and by a more than charitable view of the man.

CHAPTER II

INHERITANCE: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Three forms of speech were current in Scotland in the time of Burns, and, in different proportions, are current to-day: in the Highlands, north and west of a slanting line running from the Firth of Clyde to Aberdeenshire, Gaelic; in the Lowlands, south and east of the same line, Lowland Scots; over the whole country, among the more educated cla.s.ses, English. Gaelic is a Celtic language, belonging to an entirely different linguistic group from English, and having close affinities to Irish and Welsh. This tongue Burns did not know. Lowland Scots is a dialect of English, descended from the Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon. It has had a history of considerable interest. Down to the time of Chaucer, whose influence had much to do with making the Midland dialect the literary standard for the Southern kingdom, it is difficult to distinguish the written language of Edinburgh from that of York, both being developments of Northumbrian. But as English writers tended more and more to conform to the standard of London, Northern Middle English gradually ceased to be written; while in Scotland, separated and usually hostile as it was politically, the Northern speech continued to develop along its own lines, until in the beginning of the sixteenth century it attained a form more remote from standard English and harder for the modern reader than it had been a century before. The close connection between Scotland and France, continuing down to the time of Queen Mary, led to the introduction of many French words which never found a place in English; the proximity of the Highlands made Gaelic borrowings easy; and the Scandinavian settlements on both coasts contributed additional elements to the vocabulary. Further, in its comparative isolation, Scots developed or retained peculiarities in grammar and p.r.o.nunciation unknown or lost in the South. Thus by 1550, the form of English spoken in Scotland was in a fair way to become an independent language.

This process, however, was rudely halted by the Reformation. The triumph of this movement in England and its comparative failure in France threw Scotland, when it became Protestant, into close relations with England, while the "auld Alliance" with France practically ended when Mary of Scots returned to her native country. Leaders like John Knox, during the early struggles of the Reformation, spent much time in England; and when they came home their speech showed the effect of their intercourse with their southern brethren of the reformed faith.

The language of Knox, as recorded in his sermons and his _History_, is indeed far from Elizabethan English, but it is notably less "broad"

than the Scots of Douglas and Lindesay. Scotland had no vernacular translation of the Bible; and this important fact, along with the English a.s.sociations of many of the Protestant ministers, finally made the speech of the Scottish pulpit, and later of Scottish religion in general, if not English, at least as purely English as could be achieved.

The process thus begun was carried farther in the next generation when, in 1603, James VI of Scotland became King of England, and the Court removed to London. England at that time was, of course, much more advanced in culture than its poorer neighbor to the north, and the courtiers who accompanied James to London found themselves marked by their speech as provincial, and set themselves to get rid of their Scotticisms with an eagerness in proportion to their social aspirations. Scottish men of letters now came into more intimate relation with English literature, and finding that writing in English opened to them a much larger reading public, they naturally adopted the southern speech in their books. Thus men like Alexander, Earl of Stirling, and William Drummond of Hawthornden belong both in language and literary tradition to the English Elizabethans.

Religion, society, and literature having all thrown their influence against the native speech of Scotland, it followed that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the progressive disuse of that speech among the upper cla.s.ses of the country, until by the time of Burns, Scots was habitually spoken only by the peasantry and the humbler people in the towns. The distinctions between social cla.s.ses in the matter of dialect were, of course, not absolute. Occasional members even of the aristocracy prided themselves on their command of the vernacular; and among the country folk there were few who could not make a brave attempt at English when they spoke with the laird or the minister. With Burns himself, Lowland Scots was his customary speech at home, about the farm, in the tavern and the Freemasons'

lodge; but, as we have seen, his letters, being written mainly to educated people, are almost all pure English, as was his conversation with these people when he met them.

The linguistic situation that has been sketched finds interesting ill.u.s.tration in the language of Burns's poems. The distinction which is usually made, that he wrote poetry in Scots and verse in English, has some basis, but is inaccurately expressed and needs qualification.

The fundamental fact is that for him Scots was the natural language of the emotions, English of the intellect. The Scots poems are in general better, not chiefly because they are in Scots but because they are concerned with matters of natural feeling; the English poems are in general poetically poorer, not because they are in English but because they are so frequently the outcome of moods not dominated by spontaneous emotion, but intellectual, conscious, or theatrical. He wrote English sometimes as he wore his Sunday blacks, with dignity but not with ease; sometimes as he wore the buff and blue, with buckskins and top-boots, which he donned in Edinburgh--"like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird." In both cases he was capable of vigorous, common-sense expression; in neither was he likely to exhibit the imagination, the tenderness, or the humor which characterized the plowman clad in home-spun.

_The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_ is an interesting ill.u.s.tration of these distinctions. The opening stanza is a dedicatory address on English models to a lawyer friend and patron; it is pure English in language, stiff and imitatively "literary" in style. The stanzas which follow describing the homecoming of the cotter, the family circle, the supper, and the daughter's suitor, are in broad Scots, the language harmonizing perfectly with the theme, and they form poetically the sound core of the poem. In the description of family worship, Burns did what his father would do in conducting that worship, adopted English as more reverent and respectful, but inevitably as more restrained emotionally; and in the moralizing pa.s.sage which follows, as in the apostrophes to Scotia and to the Almighty at the close, he naturally sticks to English, and in spite of a genuine enough exaltation of spirit achieves a result rather rhetorical than poetical.

Contrast again songs like _Corn Rigs_ or _Whistle and I'll Come To Thee, My Lad_, with most of the songs to Clarinda. The former, in Scots, are genial, whole-hearted, full of the power of kindling imaginative sympathy, thoroughly contagious in their l.u.s.ty emotion or sly humor. The latter, in English, are stiff, coldly contrived, consciously elegant or marked by the sentimental fact.i.tiousness of the affair that occasioned them. But their inferiority is due less to the difference in language than to the difference in the mood. When, especially at a distance, his relation to Clarinda really touched his imagination, we have the genuinely poetical _My Nannie's Awa_ and _Ae Fond Kiss_. The latter poem can be, with few changes, turned into English without loss of quality; and its most famous lines have almost no dialect:

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met--or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Finally, there are the English poems to Highland Mary. For some reason not yet fully understood, the affair with Mary Campbell was treated by him in a spirit of reverence little felt in his other love poetry, and this spirit was naturally expressed by him in English. But in the almost English

"Ye banks and braes and streams around The Castle of Montgomery,"

and in the pure English _To Mary in Heaven_, he is not at all hampered by the use of the Southern speech, Scots would not have heightened the poetry here, and for Burns Scots would have been less appropriate, less natural even, for the expression of an almost sacred theme.

The case, then, seems to stand thus. Burns commanded two languages, which he employed instinctively for different kinds of subject and mood. The subjects and moods which evoked vernacular utterance were those that with all writers are more apt to yield poetry, and in consequence most of his best poetry is in Scots. But when a theme naturally evoking English was imaginatively felt by him, the use of English did not prevent his writing poetically. And there were themes which he could handle equally well in either speech--as we see, for example, in the songs in _The Jolly Beggars_.

Yet the language had an importance in itself. Though its vocabulary is limited in matters of science, philosophy, religion, and the like, Lowland Scots is very rich in homely terms and in humorous and tender expressions. For love, or for celebrating the effects of whisky, English is immeasurably inferior. The free use of the diminutive termination in _ie_ or _y_--a termination capable of expressing endearment, familiarity, ridicule, and contempt as well as mere smallness--not only has considerable effect in emotional shading, but contributes to the liquidness of the verse by lessening the number of consonantal endings that make English seem harsh and abrupt to many foreign ears. Moreover, the very indeterminateness of the dialect, the possibility of using varying degrees of "broadness," increased the facility of rhyming, and added notably to the ease and spontaneity of composition. Thus in Scots Burns was not only more at home, but had a medium in some respects more plastic than English.

Language, however, was not the only element in his inheritance which helped to determine the nature and quality of Burns's production. He was extremely sensitive to suggestion from his predecessors, and frankly avowed his obligations to them, so that to estimate his originality it is necessary to know something of the men at whose flame he kindled.

As the Northern dialect of English was, before the Reformation, in a fair way to become an independent national speech, so literature north of the Tweed had promise of a development, not indeed independent, but distinct. Of the writers of the Middle Scots period, Henryson and Dunbar, Douglas and Lindesay, Burns, it is true, knew little; and the tradition that they founded underwent in the latter part of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries an experience in many respects parallel to that which has been described in the matter of language. The effect of the Reformation upon all forms of artistic creation will be discussed when we come to speak particularly of the history of Scottish song; for the moment it is sufficient to say that the absorption in theological controversy was unfavorable to the continuation of a poetical development. Under James VI, however, there were a few writers who maintained the tradition, notably Alexander Montgomery, Alexander Scott, and the Sempills. To the first of these is to be credited the invention of the stanza called, from the poems in which Montgomery used it, the stanza of _The Banks of Helicon_ or of _The Cherry and the Slae_. It was imitated by some of Montgomery's contemporaries, revived by Allan Ramsay, and thus came to Burns down a line purely Scottish, as it never seems to have been used in any other tongue. He first employed it in the _Epistle to Davie_, and it was made by him the medium of some of his most characteristic ideas.

It's no in t.i.tles nor in rank: It's no in wealth like Lon'on Bank, To purchase peace and rest.

It's no in makin muckle, mair, [much, more]

It's no in books, it's no in lear, [learning]

To make us truly blest: If happiness hae not her seat An' centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest!

Nae treasures nor pleasures Could make us happy lang; The heart aye's the part aye That makes us right or wrang.

_The Piper of Kilbarchan_, by Sir Robert Sempill of Beltrees (1595?-1661?), set a model for the humorous elegy on the living which reached Burns through Ramsay and Fergusson, and was followed by him in those on Poor Mailie and Tam Samson. The stanza in which it is written is far older than Sempill, having been traced as far back as the troubadours in the twelfth century, and being found frequently in both English and French through the Middle Ages; but from the time of Sempill on, it was cultivated with peculiar intensity in Scotland, and is the medium of so many of Burns's best-known pieces that it is often called Burns's stanza.

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose; Our Bardie's fate is at a close, Past a' remead; The last, sad cape-stane o' his woe's-- Poor Mailie's dead!

The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The attraction of the larger English public and the disuse of the vernacular among the upper cla.s.ses already discussed, drew to the South or to the Southern speech whatever literary talent appeared in the North, and it seemed for a time that, except for the obscure stream of folk poetry, Scottish vernacular literature was at an end.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, interest began to revive. In 1706-9-11 James Watson published the three volumes of his _Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems_, and in the third decade began to appear Allan Ramsay's _Tea Table Miscellany_ (1724-40). These collections rescued from oblivion a large quant.i.ty of vernacular verse, some of it drawn from ma.n.u.scripts of pre-Reformation poetry, some of it contemporary, some of it anonymous and of uncertain date, having come down orally or in chap-books and broadsides. The welcome given to these volumes was an early instance of that renewed interest in older and more primitive literature that was manifested still more strikingly when Percy published his _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ in 1765. Its influence on the production of vernacular literature was evident at once in the original work of Ramsay himself; and the movement which culminated in Burns, though having its roots far back in the work of Henryson and Dunbar, was in effect a Scottish renascence, in which the chief agents before Burns were Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Ramsay himself, Robert Fergusson, and song-writers like Mrs. c.o.c.kburn and Lady Anne Lindsay.

Of this fact Burns was perfectly aware, and he was not only candid but generous in his acknowledgment of his debt to his immediate predecessors.

My senses wad be in a creel, [head would be turned]

Should I but dare a hope to speel, [climb]

Wi' Allan, or wi' Gilbertfield, The braes o' fame; [hills]

Or Fergusson, the writer-chiel, [lawyer-fellow]

A deathless name.

He knew Ramsay's collection and had a perhaps exaggerated admiration for _The Gentle Shepherd_. This poem, published in 1728, not only holds a unique position in the history of the pastoral drama, but is important in the present connection as being to Burns the most signal evidence of the possibility of a dignified literature in the modern vernacular. Hamilton and Ramsay had exchanged rhyming epistles in the six-line stanza, and in these Burns found the model for his own epistles. Hamilton's _Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck_--a favorite grey-hound--had been imitated by Ramsay in _Lucky Spence's Last Advice_ and the _Last Speech of a Wretched Miser_, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his _Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie_. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about 1782 he had all but given up rhyming: "but meeting with Fergusson's _Scotch Poems_, I strung anew my wildly-sounding, rustic lyre with emulating vigour." In the preface to the Kilmarnock edition he is still more explicit as to his att.i.tude.

"To the poems of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Fergusson, he, with equal unaffected sincerity, declares, that, even in the highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scotch Poets he has often had in his eye in the following pieces; but rather with a view to kindle at their flame, than for servile imitation."

To be more specific, Burns found the model for his _Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_ in Fergusson's _Farmer's Ingle_, for _The Holy Fair_ in his _Leith Races_, for _Scotch Drink_ in his _Caller Water_, for _The Twa Dogs_ and _The Brigs of Ayr_ in his _Planestanes and Causey_, and _Kirkyard Eclogues_. In later years Burns grew somewhat more critical of Ramsay, especially as a reviser of old songs; but for Fergusson he retained to the end a sympathetic admiration. When he went to Edinburgh, one of his first places of pilgrimage was the grave of him whom he apostrophized thus,

O thou, my elder brother in misfortune, By far my elder brother in the muse!

And he later obtained from the managers of the Canongate Kirk permission to erect a stone over the tomb.

The fact, then, that Burns owed much to the tradition of vernacular poetry in Scotland and especially to his immediate predecessors is no new discovery, however recent critics may have plumed themselves upon it. Burns knew it well, and was ever ready to acknowledge it. What is more important than the mere fact of his inheritance is the use he made of it. In taking from his elders the fruits of their experience in poetical conception and metrical arrangement, he but did what artists have always done; in outdistancing these elders and in almost every case surpa.s.sing their achievement on the lines they had laid down, he did what only the greater artists succeed in doing. It is not in mere inventiveness and novelty but in first-hand energy of conception, in mastering for himself the old thought and the old form and uttering them with his personal stamp, in making them carry over to the reader with a new force or vividness or beauty, that the poet's originality consists. In these respects Burns's originality is no whit lessened by an explicit recognition of his indebtedness to the stock from which he grew.

His relation to the purely English literature which he read is different and produced very different results. Shakespeare he reverenced, and that he knew him well is shown by the frequency of Shakespearean turns of phrase in his letters, as well as by direct quotation. But of influence upon his poetry there is little trace. He had a profound admiration for the indomitable will of Milton's Satan, and he makes it clear that this admiration affected his conduct. The most frequent praise of English writers in his letters is, however, given to the eighteenth-century authors--to Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Gray, Young, Blair, Beattie, and Goldsmith in verse, to Sterne, Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie in prose. Echoes of these poets are common in his work, and the most frigid of his English verses show their influence most clearly. To the sentimental tendency in the thought of the eighteenth century he was highly responsive, and the expression of it in _The Man of Feeling_ appealed to him especially.

In a mood which recurred painfully often he was apt to pride himself on his "sensibility": the letters to Clarinda are full of it. The less fortunate effects of it are seen both in his conduct and in his poems in a fondness for nursing his emotions and extracting pleasure from his supposed miseries; the more fortunate aspects are reflected in the tender humanity of poems like those _To a Mouse_, _On Seeing a Wounded Hare_, and _To a Daisy_--perhaps even in the _Address to the Deil_. He had naturally a warm heart and strong impulses; it is only when an element of consciousness or mawkishness appears that his "sensibility"

is to be ascribed to the fashionable philosophy of the day and the influence of his English models.

For better or worse, then, Burns belongs to the literary history of Britain as a legitimate descendant of easily traced ancestors. Like other great writers he made original contributions from his individual temperament and from his particular environment and experience. But these do not obliterate the marks of his descent, nor are they so numerous or powerful as to give support to the old myth of the "rustic phenomenon," the isolated poetical miracle appearing in defiance of the ordinary laws of literary dependence and tradition.

If this is true of his models it is no less true of his methods.

Though simplicity and spontaneity are among the most obvious of the qualities of his work, it is not to be supposed that such effects were obtained by a birdlike improvisation. "All my poetry," he said, "is the effect of easy composition but laborious correction," and the careful critic will perceive ample evidence in support of the statement. We shall see in the next chapter with what pains he fitted words to melody in his songs; an examination of the variant readings which make the establishment of his text peculiarly difficult shows abundant traces of deliberation and the labor of the file. In the following song, the first four lines of which are old, it is interesting to note that, though he preserves admirably the tone of the fragment which gave him the impulse and the idea, the twelve lines which he added are in the effects produced by manipulation of the consonants and vowels and in the use of internal rhyme a triumph of conscious artistic skill. The interest in technique which this implies is exhibited farther in many pa.s.sages of his letters, especially those to George Thomson.

GO FETCH TO ME A PINT O' WINE

Go fetch to me a pint o' wine, An' fill it in a silver ta.s.sie; [goblet]

That I may drink, before I go, A service to my bonnie la.s.sie.

The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith, Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the ferry, [from]

The ship rides by the Berwick-law, And I maun leave my bonnie Mary. [must]

The trumpets sound, the banners fly, The glittering spears are ranked ready; The shouts o' war are heard afar, The battle closes thick and b.l.o.o.d.y; But it's no the roar o' sea or sh.o.r.e Wad mak me langer wish to tarry; Nor shout o' war that's heard afar, It's leaving thee, my bonnie Mary.