Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume II Part 10

I read on with increasing interest. It was evident, from the tone of the introduction, that some new luminary had arisen in the literary horizon, and I felt somewhat like a schoolboy when, at his first play, he waits for the drawing up of the curtain. And the curtain at length rose. "The person," continues the essayist, "to whom I allude"--and he alludes to him as a genius of no ordinary cla.s.s--"is Robert Burns, an Ayrshire ploughman." The effect on my nerves seemed electrical; I clapped my hands, and sprung from my seat: "Was I not certain of it! Did I not foresee it!" I exclaimed. "My n.o.ble-minded friend, Robert Burns!" I ran hastily over the warm-hearted and generous critique, so unlike the cold, timid, equivocal notices with which the professional critic has greeted, on their first appearance, so many works destined to immortality. It was Mackenzie, the discriminating, the cla.s.sical, the elegant, who a.s.sured me that the productions of this "heaven-taught ploughman were fraught with the high-toned feeling and the power and energy of expression characteristic of the mind and voice of the poet"--with the solemn, the tender, the sublime; that they contained images of pastoral beauty which no other writer had ever surpa.s.sed, and strains of wild humour which only the higher masters of the lyre had ever equalled; and that the genius displayed in them seemed not less admirable in tracing the manners than in painting the pa.s.sions, or in drawing the scenery of nature. I flung down the essay, ascended to the deck in three huge strides, leaped ash.o.r.e, and reached my bookseller's as he was shutting up for the night.

"Can you furnish me with a copy of Burns' Poems," I said, "either for love or money?"

"I have but one copy left," replied the man, "and here it is."

I flung down a guinea. "The change," I said, "I shall get when I am less in a hurry."

'Twas late that evening ere I remembered that 'tis customary to spend at least part of the night in bed. I read on and on with a still increasing astonishment and delight, laughing and crying by turns. I was quite in a new world; all was fresh and unsoiled--the thoughts, the descriptions, the images--as if the volume I read was the first that had ever been written; and yet all was easy and natural, and appealed, with a truth and force irresistible, to the recollections I cherished most fondly.

Nature and Scotland met me at every turn. I had admired the polished compositions of Pope, and Gray, and Collins, though I could not sometimes help feeling that, with all the exquisite art they displayed, there was a little additional art wanting still. In most cases the scaffolding seemed incorporated with the structure which it had served to rear; and, though certainly no scaffolding could be raised on surer principles, I could have wished that the ingenuity which had been tasked to erect it, had been exerted a little further in taking it down. But the work before me was evidently the production of a greater artist; not a fragment of the scaffolding remained--not so much as a mark to show how it had been constructed. The whole seemed to have risen like an exhalation, and, in this respect, reminded me of the structures of Shakspeare alone. I read the inimitable "Twa Dogs." Here, I said, is the full and perfect realization of what Swift and Dryden were hardy enough to attempt, but lacked genius to accomplish. Here are dogs--_bona fide_ dogs--endowed indeed with more than human sense and observation, but true to character, as the most honest and attached of quadrupeds, in every line. And then those exquisite touches which the poor man, inured to a life of toil and poverty, can alone rightly understand! and those deeply-based remarks on character, which only the philosopher can justly appreciate! This is the true catholic poetry, which addresses itself not to any little circle, walled in from the rest of the species by some peculiarity of thought, prejudice, or condition, but to the whole human family. I read on:--"The Holy Fair," "Hallow E'en," "The Vision," the "Address to the Deil," engaged me by turns; and then the strange, uproarious, unequalled "Death and Dr. Hornbook." This, I said, is something new in the literature of the world. Shakspeare possessed above all men the power of instant and yet natural transition, from the lightly gay to the deeply pathetic--from the wild to the humorous; but the opposite states of feeling which he induces, however close the neighbourhood, are ever distinct and separate; the oil and the water, though contained in the same vessel, remain apart. Here, however, for the first time, they mix and incorporate, and yet each retains its whole nature and full effect. I need hardly remind the reader that the feat has been repeated, and even with more completeness, in the wonderful, "Tam o' Shanter." I read on. "The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night" filled my whole soul--my heart throbbed and my eyes moistened; and never before did I feel half so proud of my country, or know half so well on what score it was I did best in feeling proud. I had perused the entire volume from beginning to end, ere I remembered I had not taken supper, and that it was more than time to go to bed.

But it is no part of my plan to furnish a critique on the poems of my friend. I merely strive to recall the thoughts and feelings which my first perusal of them awakened, and thus only as a piece of mental history. Several months elapsed from this evening ere I could hold them out from me sufficiently at arms' length, as it were, to judge of their more striking characteristics. At times the amazing amount of thought, feeling, and imagery which they contained--their wonderful continuity of idea, without gap or interstice--seemed to me most to distinguish them.

At times they reminded me, compared with the writings of smoother poets, of a collection of medals which, unlike the thin polished coin of the kingdom, retained all the significant and pictorial roughness of the original die. But when, after the lapse of weeks, months, years, I found them rising up in my heart on every occasion, as naturally as if they had been the original language of all my feelings and emotions--when I felt that, instead of remaining outside my mind, as it were, like the writings of other poets, they had so amalgamated themselves with my pa.s.sions, my sentiments, my ideas, that they seemed to have become portions of my very self--I was led to a final conclusion regarding them. Their grand distinguishing characteristic is their unswerving and perfect truth. The poetry of Shakspeare is the mirror of life--that of Burns the expressive and richly modulated voice of human nature.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Burns was a poor man from his birth, and an exciseman from necessity; but--I _will say_ it!--the sterling of his honest worth, poverty could not debase; and his independent British spirit oppression might bend, but could not subdue."--_Letter to Mr. Graham_.

I have been listening for the last half hour to the wild music of an Eolian harp. How exquisitely the tones rise and fall!--now sad, now solemn--now near, now distant. The nerves thrill, the heart softens, the imagination awakes as we listen. What if that delightful instrument be animated by a living soul, and these finely-modulated tones be but the expression of its feelings! What if these dying, melancholy cadences, which so melt and sink into the heart, be--what we may so naturally interpret them--the melodious sinkings of a deep-seated and hopeless unhappiness! Nay, the fancy is too wild for even a dream. But are there none of those fine a.n.a.logies, which run through the whole of nature and the whole of art, to sublime it into truth? Yes, _there have_ been such living harps among us; beings, the tones of whose sentiments, the melody of whose emotions, the cadences of whose sorrows, remain to thrill, and delight, and humanize our souls. They seem born for others, not for themselves. Alas, for the hapless companion of my early youth! Alas, for him, the pride of his country, the friend of my maturer manhood!--But my narrative lags in its progress.

My vessel lay in the Clyde for several weeks during the summer of 1794, and I found time to indulge myself in a brief tour along the western coasts of the kingdom, from Glasgow to the Borders. I entered Dumfries in a calm, lovely evening, and pa.s.sed along one of the princ.i.p.al streets. The shadows of the houses on the western side were stretched half-way across the pavement, while, on the side opposite, the bright sunshine seemed sleeping on the jutting irregular fronts, and high antique gables. There seemed a world of well-dressed company this evening in town; and I learned, on inquiry, that all the aristocracy of the adjacent country, for twenty miles round, had come in to attend a county ball. They went fluttering along the sunny side of the street, gay as b.u.t.terflies--group succeeding group. On the opposite side, in the shade, a solitary individual was pa.s.sing slowly along the pavement. I knew him at a glance. It was the first poet, perhaps the greatest man, of his age and country. But why so solitary? It had been told me that he ranked among his friends and a.s.sociates many of the highest names in the kingdom, and yet to-night not one of the hundreds who fluttered past appeared inclined to recognise him. He seemed too--but perhaps fancy misled me--as if care-worn and dejected; pained, perhaps, that not one among so many of the _great_ should have humility enough to notice a poor exciseman. I stole up to him un.o.bserved, and tapped him on the shoulder; there was a decided fierceness in his manner as he turned abruptly round, but, as he recognised me, his expressive countenance lighted up in a moment, and I shall never forget the heartiness with which he grasped my hand.

We quitted the streets together for the neighbouring fields, and, after the natural interchange of mutual congratulations--"How is it," I inquired, "that you do not seem to have a single acquaintance among all the gay and great of the country?"

"I lie under quarantine," he replied; "tainted by the plague of liberalism. There is not one of the hundreds we pa.s.sed to-night whom I could not once reckon among my intimates."

The intelligence stunned and irritated me. "How infinitely absurd!" I said. "Do they dream of sinking you into a common man?"

"Even so," he rejoined. "Do they not all know I have been a gauger for the last five years!"

The fact had both grieved and incensed me long before. I knew, too, that Pye enjoyed his salary as poet laureate of the time, and Dibdin, the song writer, his pension of two hundred a-year, and I blushed for my country.

"Yes," he continued--the ill-a.s.sumed coolness of his manner giving way before his highly excited feelings--"they have a.s.signed me my place among the mean and the degraded, as their best patronage; and only yesterday, after an official threat of instant dismission, I was told it was my business to act, not to think. G.o.d help me! what have I done to provoke such bitter insult? I have ever discharged my miserable duty--discharged it, Mr. Lindsay, however repugnant to my feelings, as an honest man; and though there awaited me no promotion, I was silent. The wives or sisters of those whom they advanced over me had b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to some of the ---- family, and so their influence was necessarily greater than mine. But now they crush me into the very dust.

I take an interest in the struggles of the slave for his freedom; I express my opinions as if I myself were a free man; and they threaten to starve me and my children if I dare so much as speak or think."

I expressed my indignant sympathy in a few broken sentences; and he went on with kindling animation:--

"Yes, they would fain crush me into the very dust! They cannot forgive me, that, being born a man, I should walk erect according to my nature.

Mean-spirited and despicable themselves, they can tolerate only the mean-spirited and the despicable; and were I not so entirely in their power, Mr. Lindsay, I could regard them with the proper contempt. But the wretches can starve me and my children--and they _know_ it; nor does it mend the matter that I _know_ in turn, what pitiful, miserable, little creatures they are. What care I for the b.u.t.terflies of to-night?--they pa.s.sed me without the honour of their notice; and I, in turn, suffered them to pa.s.s without the honour of mine; and I am more than quits. Do I not know that they and I are going on to the fulfilment of our several destinies?--they to sleep, in the obscurity of their native insignificance, with the pismires and gra.s.shoppers of all the past, and I to be whatever the millions of my unborn countrymen shall yet decide. Pitiful little insects of an hour! what is their notice to me! But I bear a heart, Mr. Lindsay, that can feel the pain of treatment so unworthy; and I must confess it moves me. One cannot always live upon the future, divorced from the sympathies of the present. One cannot always solace one's self under the grinding despotism that would fetter one's very thoughts, with the conviction, however a.s.sured, that posterity will do justice both to the oppressor and the oppressed. I am sick at heart; and were it not for the poor little things that depend so entirely on my exertions, I could as cheerfully lay me down in the grave as I ever did in bed after the fatigues of a long day's labour. Heaven help me! I am miserably unfitted to struggle with even the natural evils of existence--how much more so when these are multiplied and exaggerated by the proud, capricious inhumanity of man!"

"There is a miserable lack of right principle and right feeling," I said, "among our upper cla.s.ses in the present day; but, alas for poor human nature! it has ever been so, and, I am afraid, ever will. And there is quite as much of it in savage as in civilized life. I have seen the exclusive aristocratic spirit, with its one-sided injustice, as rampant in a wild isle of the Pacific as I ever saw it among ourselves."

"'Tis slight comfort," said my friend, with a melancholy smile, "to be a.s.sured, when one's heart bleeds from the cruelty or injustice of our fellows, that man is naturally cruel and unjust, and not less so as a savage than when better taught. I knew you, Mr. Lindsay, when you were younger and less fortunate; but you have now reached that middle term of life when man naturally takes up the Tory and lays down the Whig; nor has there been aught in your improving circ.u.mstances to r.e.t.a.r.d the change; and so you rest in the conclusion that, if the weak among us suffer from the tyranny of the strong, 'tis because human nature is so const.i.tuted, and the case therefore cannot be helped."

"Pardon me, Mr. Burns," I said, "I am not quite so finished a Tory as that amounts to."

"I am not one of those fanciful declaimers," he continued, "who set out on the a.s.sumption that man is free-born. I am too well a.s.sured of the contrary. Man is not free-born. The earlier period of his existence, whether as a puny child or the miserable denizen of an uninformed and barbarous state, is one of va.s.salage and subserviency. He is not born free, he is not born rational, he is not born virtuous; he is born to _become_ all these. And woe to the sophist who, with arguments drawn from the unconfirmed const.i.tution of his childhood, would strive to render his imperfect, because immature, state of pupilage a permanent one! We are yet far below the level of which our nature is capable, and possess in consequence but a small portion of the liberty which it is the destiny of our species to enjoy. And 'tis time our masters should be taught so. You will deem me a wild Jacobin, Mr. Lindsay; but persecution has the effect of making a man extreme in these matters. Do help me to curse the scoundrels!--my business to act, not to think!"

We were silent for several minutes.

"I have not yet thanked you, Mr. Burns," I at length said, "for the most exquisite pleasure I ever enjoyed. You have been my companion for the last eight years."

His countenance brightened.

"Ah, here I am boring you with my miseries and my ill-nature," he replied; "but you must come along with me and see the bairns and Jean; and some of the best songs I ever wrote. It will go hard if we hold not care at the staff's end for at least one evening. You have not yet seen my stone punch-bowl, nor my Tam o'Shanter, nor a hundred other fine things beside. And yet, vile wretch that I am, I am sometimes so unconscionable as to be unhappy with them all. But come along."

We spent this evening together with as much of happiness as it has ever been my lot to enjoy. Never was there a fonder father than Burns, a more attached husband, or a warmer friend. There was an exuberance of love in his large heart, that encircled in its flow, relatives, friends, a.s.sociates, his country, the world; and, in his kinder moods, the sympathetic influence which he exerted over the hearts of others seemed magical. I laughed and cried this evening by turns; I was conscious of a wider and warmer expansion of feeling than I had ever experienced before; my very imagination seemed invigorated by breathing, as it were, in the same atmosphere with his. We parted early next morning--and when I again visited Dumfries, I went and wept over his grave. Forty years have now pa.s.sed since his death, and in that time many poets have arisen to achieve a rapid and brilliant celebrity; but they seem the meteors of a lower sky; the flush pa.s.ses hastily from the expanse, and we see but one great light looking steadily upon us from above. It is Burns who is exclusively the poet of his country. Other writers inscribe their names on the plaster which covers for the time the outside structure of society; his is engraved, like that of the Egyptian architect, on the ever-during granite within. The fame of the others rises and falls with the uncertain undulations of the mode on which they have reared it; his remains fixed and permanent, as the human nature on which it is based. Or, to borrow the figures Johnson employs in ill.u.s.trating the unfluctuating celebrity of a scarcely greater poet--"The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, pa.s.ses, without injury, by the adamant of Shakspeare."

THE PROFESSOR'S TALES.

THE CONVIVIALISTS.

We must introduce our readers, with an apology for our abruptness, into a party of about half-a-dozen young gallants, who had evidently been making deep and frequent libations at the shrine of Bacchus. The loud bursts of hearty laughter which rang round the room like so many triple bobmajors, the leering eyes, the familiar diminutives with which the various parties addressed each other, and the frequent locking of hands together in a grasp the force of which was meant to express an ardour of social friendship which words were too weak to convey--all showed that the symposiasts had cleared the fences which prudence or selfishness set up in the sober intercourse of life, and were now, with loosened reins, spurring away over the free wild fields of fancy and fun. An immense quant.i.ty of walnut-sh.e.l.ls--which the mercurial compotators had been amusing themselves by throwing at each other--lay scattered about the table and on the floor; two or three shivered wine gla.s.ses had been shoved into the centre of the table, the fragments glittering upon a pile of glorious Woodvilles, all speckled over, like Jacob's sheep; each man had one of the weeds stuck rakishly in the corner of his mouth, and was knocking off the ashes upon his deviled biscuits; and, to the right of the president's chair, a long straggling regiment of empty bottles gave dumb but eloquent proof of the bibulous capabilities of the company. Each man was talking vehemently to his neighbour, and every one for himself; in order, as a wag among them said, to get through the work quickly, and jump at once to a conclusion. They were, as Sheridan has it, "arguing in platoons." There was one exception, however, to the boisterous mirth of the convivialists, in the person of Frank Elliot, in celebration of whose obtaining his medical degree the feast had been given. He was leaning back in his chair, gazing, with a slight curl of contempt on his lip, at the rude glee of his a.s.sociates. He had distinguished himself so highly among his fellow-students, that one of the professors had, in the ceremony of the morning, singled him out, before all his contemporaries, with the highest eulogiums, and had predicted, in the most flattering manner, his certain celebrity in his profession. Perhaps the natural vanity which these public honours had created, the bright prospect which lay before him, and his being less excited than his companions--caused him to turn, with disgust, from the silly ribaldry and weak witticisms which circled round his table. Amid the uproar his silence was for some time unheeded; but at length Harry Whitaker, his old college chum, now lieutenant in his Majesty's navy, and with a considerable portion of broad sailor's humour and slang, observed it, and slapping him roundly on the back, cried, "Hilloa, Frank! what are you dodging about?--quizzing the rig of your convoy, because they have too much light duck set to walk steadily through the water?"

"Frank! why, isn't he asleep all this time? I haven't heard his voice this half hour," exclaimed another.

"'Parce meum, quisquis tanges cava marmora somnum Rumpere; sive bibas, sive lavere, tace,'"

said Elliot beseechingly.

"Come, come," said Harry, "none of your heathenish lingo over the mahogany. Boys! I move that Frank be made to swallow a tumbler of port for using bad language, and to make him fit company for the rest of us honest fellows."

"_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_," squeaked a first year medical student, shoving the lighted end of his cigar, by mistake, into his mouth when he had delivered his sentence, and then springing up and sputtering out a mighty oath and a quant.i.ty of hot tobacco ashes.

"Ashes to ashes," cried Harry, filling up a tumbler to the brim; "we'll let you off this time, as you're a fire-eater; but rally round, lads, and see this land shark swallow his grog."

"Nay, but, my friends"----began Frank, seeing, with horror, that the party had gathered round him, and that Harry held the gla.s.s inexorably in his mouth.

"Get a gag rigged," shouted the young sailor; "we'll find a way into his grog shop."

"Upon my word, Whitaker," said Frank, with a ludicrous intonation of voice, between real anger and distress, "this is too hard on one who has filled fairly from the first--to punish him without an inquiry into the justice of the case."

"Jeddart justice--hang first, and judge after!" roared a student from the sylvan banks of the Jed.

"No freeman can, under any pretence," hiccupped a young advocate, who was unable to rise from his chair, "be condemned, except by the legal decision of his peers, or by the law of the land. So sayeth the Magna Charta--King John--(_hic_)--right of all free-born Englishmen--including thereby all inhabitants of Great Britain, incorporated at the Union--_hic_--and Ireland."

Whitaker set the tumbler down in despair, finding that his companions, like the generality of raw students, were so completely wedded to their pedantry, that the fine, if insisted on, would have to go all round.

"Let's have a song, Rhimeson," cried Frank, very glad to escape from his threatened b.u.mper, and still fearful that it might be insisted upon, "a song extempore, as becomes a poet in his cups, and in thine own vein; for what says Spenser?--

'For Bacchus' fruit is friend to Phoebus wise; And when, with wine, the brain begins to sweat, The numbers flow as fast as spring doth rise.'"

"By Jove, boys! you shall have it," cried Rhimeson, filling his gla.s.s with unsteady hand, and muttering, from the same prince of poets--