The place of Burns in poetry may be called unique. His genius was the incarnation, as it were, of his country people's through many centuries, generations, from the one musical stanza on the death of Alexander III (1285) to the simplest song that the milkmaids crooned at their work. In literary poetry, as we have seen, the part played by Scotland had been partly derivative. The greatest poets, those of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, were professed followers of Chaucer: Drummond of Hawthornden was a lyrist and sonneteer under Italian and Elizabethan influences. Of Barbour and Blind Harry, Burns had little but the burning patriotism: his real predecessors were the many named or nameless popular song-makers, and makers of lays of rural merriment; and the music of the Scottish tunes to which their words were wedded. Of the popular ballads, romantic or historical, he professed no high esteem: no "white plumes were dancing in his eye," chivalry was not his subject: his matter was rural life and Nature; and he had the true Scottish love of the rivers and burns of his country. In the furnace of his genius all the ancient poetic material, all the folk-song (but not "the fairy way of writing") was recast and refashioned in forms singularly varied, vivid, and real: while, to pursue the metaphor, the furnace was fanned by all the winds of his age—now of democracy; now of loyalty to "a man undone," and a dying dynasty; now of patriotic resistance to "haughty Gaul," and her threats of invasion.
In the fire of his nature and of his passions Burns resembled Byron, but his humour was kindlier, his ear more tuneful, and his gift of creating character was infinitely more varied. He had the eye of Molière or of Fielding for a hypocrite; and combined the delusion that the Covenanters were the friends of freedom, with a scornful contempt of the discipline and doctrines of the successors of the Covenanters. In affairs of the heart he exhibits the usual pastoral morality, that of the shepherds and goatherds of Theocritus, with little of the Sicilian grace and charm.
The life of Burns is so familiarly known that the briefest survey must suffice. Born on 25 January, 1759, in a clay bigging in the parish of Alloway, in Ayrshire, he was the son of a small labouring farmer of the class whence so many of the martyrs and stout fighting men of the Covenant sprang. His father, a "grave liver" and devout, like them, managed to obtain for Burns, and out of every book which came in his way Burns picked-up for himself, a fair literary education. He owed much, especially many opportunities of reading, to a young tutor, Mr. Murdoch. He never was such a bookish man as Hogg, neglected as Hogg's education was in youth, but he acquired a knowledge of French, and studied Molière. The hardships of a poor farmer, in a cold soil, under a heartless "factor," the severest struggles for existence were known to Burns, but he also had his fill of dancing and "daffing," and the consequent "Kirk discipline". On this aspect of his life and adventures what is best to say has been said by Keats, in a letter written from Burns's country.
Entanglements of love affairs, and despair of success in life, caused Burns to contemplate emigration to the West Indies, but first he published at Kilmarnock (July, 1786), a collection of his songs and verses which instantly made him famous. Invited to Edinburgh, he passed a winter there in learned, noble, and festive society, carrying the celebrated Duchess of Gordon "off her feet," as she said, but winning far more admirers and boon companions than serviceable friends.
The Earl of Glencairn, whom Burns immortalized in sincere and glowing verse, died young; the age of Harley and Bolingbroke, of pensions and places for poets, was long dead. Burns met Scott, then a boy of 15; Scott later said that he was unworthy to tie Burns's shoes, but had the men been of equal age, better work would have been found for Burns than the perilous and bitterly uncongenial task of the exciseman (1789).
Not successful as a farmer at Ellisland (his capital was no more than the scanty profits of his poems), Burns settled in the pretty little town of Dumfries. Here his wit and genius made him the guest of the town and country, of lairds and tourists, and tradesmen. A constitution naturally robust, though injured by early privation, broke down; he had not the energy to continue in the vein of "Tam o' Shanter"; but poured out his songs, original, or re-creations of old popular ditties, till his death on 21 July, 1796.
Burns was singular as a poet, in one point: he needed, as it were, to have a key-note struck for him, and he prolonged and glorified the note which had inspired him. Far from concealing the fact, he acknowledged, with perfect candour and generosity, his debt to Robert Fergusson. This poet, born in Edinburgh (1750), and educated at the University of St. Andrews, died, after an interval of madness, in 1774. He, like Burns, had been too welcome a guest of more seasoned convivialists for the sake of his wit. His verses in English are commonplace, but his lyrics, in Burns's favourite measure, on the rude pleasures of Edinburgh tavern life, his "Leith Races," "The Farmer's Ingle," "Ode to the Gowdspink," and other pieces, gave Burns the needed key-note for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," "The Holy Fair" (the sacramental meeting in the open air, a relic of Covenanting days), and, perhaps, for the poems on "The Mouse," and "The Mountain Daisy". Burns has so entirely eclipsed Fergusson that he is scarcely remembered, even in Scotland.
"Poor Mailie's Elegy" had a much older predecessor; and, generally, Burns's songs start from an old tune, to which, through the ages, new verses had been set in new generations. There was a Jacobite "Auld Lang Syne," there was a Jacobite "For a' that," there was a very improper "Green grows the Rashes, o'" and so on, endlessly. But Burns, in many cases, transfigured his original. That he shone more in Scots than in English is admitted—but the best verses in his "Jolly Beggars" are in English, and there is only one word spelled in the Scots fashion in
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.