A Persian Pearl, and Other Essays

by Clarence Darrow

It is difficult to account for a genius like Robert Burns. His life and work seem to defy the laws of heredity and environment alike. The beasts of the field were scarcely bound closer to the soil than were the ancestors from which he sprang; and from his early infancy he was forced to follow the stony path his father trod before. As a mere child, he learned how hard it is to sustain life in the face of an unfriendly nature and a cruel, bitter world. He was early bred to toil; not the work that gives strength and health, but the hard, constant, manual labor that degrades and embitters, deforms and twists and stunts the body and the soul alike. Burns was denied even the brief years of childhood—those few, short years upon which most of us look back from our disappointments and cares as the one bright spot in a gray and level plain.

It is not alone by the works he has left us that Robert Burns is to be truly judged. Fortune endowed him with a wondrous brain and a still rarer and greater gift—a tender, loving, universal heart; but as if she grudged him these and sought to destroy or stunt their power, she cast his lot in a social and religious environment as hard and forbidding as the cold and sterile soil of his native land; and from these surroundings alone he was obliged to draw the warmth and color and sunshine that should have come from loving hearts, generous bounties, and bright, blue southern skies. In measuring the power and character of Robert Burns, we must remember the hard and cruel conditions of his life, and judge of his great achievements in the light of these.

The ways of destiny have ever been beyond the ken of man; now and then, at rare, long intervals, she descends upon the earth, and in her arms she bears disguised a precious gift, which she lavished upon a blind, unwilling world. She passes by the gorgeous palaces and beautiful abodes of men, and drops the treasure in a manger or a hut; she comes again to take it back from a world that knew it not and cast it out; and again, she seeks it not among the strong and great, but in the hovel of the poor, the prison pen, or perhaps upon the scaffold or the block.

Measured by the standards of our day and generation, the life of Robert Burns was a failure and mistake. He went back to the great common Mother as naked of all the gilded trappings and baubles, which men call wealth, as when she first placed the struggling infant on its mother’s breast.

Robert Burns was not a “business man”; he was not one of Dumfries’ “first citizens”—in the measure of that day and this; he was one of its last if not its worst. He had no stock in a corporation and no interest in a syndicate or trust. He had neither a bank nor bank account. He never endowed a library, a museum, or a university. He was a singer of songs,—a dreamer of dreams. He was poor, improvident, intemperate, and according to the Scottish creed, immoral and irreligious. In spite of his great intellect he was doubted, neglected and despised. He died in destitution and despair; but the great light of his genius, which his neighbors could not see or comprehend, has grown brighter and clearer as the years have rolled away. A beautiful mausoleum now holds his once neglected ashes; monuments have been reared to his memory wherever worth is known and fame preserved; while millions of men and women, the greatest and the humblest of the world alike, have felt their own heartstrings moved and stirred in unison with the music of this immortal bard, whose song was the breath of Nature,—the sweetest, tenderest melody that ever came from that rarest instrument—the devoted poet’s soul.

The great masterpieces of his genius were not created in the pleasant study of a home of refinement, luxury, and ease, but were born in the fields, the farm yard, the stable; while the “monarch peasant” was bending above the humblest tasks that men pursue for bread. Only the most ordinary education was within the reach of this child of toil, and the world’s great storehouses of learning, literature, and art were sealed forever from his sight; and yet, with only the rude peasants, with whom his life was spent, the narrow setting of bleak fields and grey hills, which was the small stage on which he moved, and the sterile Scotch dialect with which to paint, he stirred the hearts of men with the sweetest, highest, purest melody that has ever moved the human soul.

Olive Schreiner tells of an artist whose pictures shone with the richest, brightest glow. His admirers gazed upon the canvas and wondered where he found the colors—so much rarer than any they had ever seen before. Other artists searched the earth, but could find no tints like his; he died with the secret in his breast. And when they undressed him to put his grave-clothes on, they found an old wound, hard and jagged above his heart; and still they wondered where he found the coloring for his work. Robert Burns, perhaps more than any other man who ever lived, taught the great truth that poets are not made but born; that the richest literature, the brightest gems of art, even the most pleasing earthly prospects are less than one spark of the divine fire, which alone can kindle the true light. Robert Burns like all great artists, taught the world that the beauty of the landscape, and the grandeur and pathos of life depend, not upon the external objects that nature has chanced to place before our view, but upon the soul of the artist, which alone can really see and interpret the manifold works of the great author, beside which all human effort is so poor and weak.

Millet looked at the French peasants standing in their wooden shoes, digging potatoes from the earth and pausing to bow reverently at the sounding of the Angelus, and saw in this simple life, so close to Nature’s heart, more beauty and pathos and poetry than all the glittering courts of Europe could produce. And Robert Burns, whose broad mind and sympathetic soul made him kin to all living things, had no need to see the splendor and gaiety of wealth and power, to visit foreign shores and unknown lands; but the flowers, the heather, the daisies, the bleak fields, the pelting rains, the singing birds, the lowing cattle, and above all, the simple country folk seen through his eyes, and felt by his soul, and held in his all-embracing heart, were covered with a beauty and a glory that all the artificial world could not create, and that his genius has endowed with immortal life. Robert Burns did not borrow his philosophy from the books, his humanity from the church, or his poetry from the schools. Luckily for us he escaped all these, and unfettered and untaught, went straight to the soul of Nature to learn from the great source, the harmony and beauty and unity that pervades the whole; and he painted these with colors drawn from his great human heart. His universal sympathy gave him an insight into life that students of science and philosophy can never reach. Contemplating Nature, and seeing her generous bounties lavished alike on all her children, he could not but contrast this with the selfishness and inhumanity of man, which crushes out the weak and helpless and builds up the great and strong. Burns was a natural leveler, and while men still believed in the “divine right of kings,” he preached that “man was the divine King of rights.” None knew better than he the injustice of the social life in which he lived, and in which we live to-day. Burns knew, as all men of intelligence understand, that worldly goods are not, and never have been given as a reward of either brains or merit.

It’s hardly in a body’s power