When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks dance to the piping of the devil in Alloway's auld haunted kirk, he was but assembling them in their fit and proper house of meeting. Here had they been called into being; here had they the still-born children of superstition been thrashed into life and trained in unholiness. One can imagine them oozing out from the walls that had echoed their names so often through centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue of his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no doubt from the very spot on which the pulpit once had stood. In the church had superstition exorcised this hellish legion out of the dead mass of ignorance into the swarming maggots that batten on corruption; and it was in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here their spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily shape, that they should assume the form and feature in which their mother Superstition had conceived them.
Upon the holy table too lay 'twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns.' For this hell the poet pictures is the creation of a creed that throngs it with the souls of innocent babes. 'Suffer little children to come unto me,' Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' 'But unbaptized children must come unto me,' the devil of superstition said; 'for of such is the kingdom of hell.'
What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its slow spondaic movement an eternity of tears. Could satire or sermon have shown more forcibly the revolting inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet were there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and charitable, who preached this as the law of a loving God. With one stroke of genius they were brought face to face with the logical sequence of their barbarous teaching, and that without a word of coarseness or a touch of caricature.
Only once again did Burns return to this attack on bigotry and superstition, and that was when he was induced to fight for Dr. Macgill in The Kirk's Alarm. But he had done his part in the series of satires of this year to expose the loathsomeness of hypocrisy and to purge holy places and the most solemn ceremonies of what was blasphemous and grossly profane. That in this Burns was fulfilling a part of his mission as a poet, we can hardly doubt; and that his work wrought for righteousness, the purer religious life that followed amply proves. The true poet is also a prophet; and Robert Burns was a prophet when he spoke forth boldly and fearlessly the truth that was in him, and dared to say that sensuality was foul even in an elder of the kirk, and that profanities were abhorred of God even though sanctioned and sanctified under the sacred name of religion.
CHAPTER IV
THE KILMARNOCK EDITION
The Holy Tulzie had been written probably in April 1785, and the greatest of the satires, The Holy Fair, is dated August of the same year. It may, however, have been only drafted, and partly written, when the recent celebration of the sacrament at Mauchline was fresh in the poet's mind. At the very latest, it must have been taken up, completed, and perfected, in the early months of 1786. That is a period of some ten months between the first and the last of this series of satires; and during that time he had composed Holy Willie's Prayer, The Address to the Deil, The Ordination, and The Address to the Unco Guid. But this represents a very small part of the poetry written by Burns during this busy period. From the spring of 1785 on to the autumn of 1786 was a time of great productiveness in his life, a productiveness unparalleled in the life of any other poet. If, according to Gilbert, the seven years of their stay at Lochlea were not marked by much literary improvement in his brother, we take it that the poet had been 'lying fallow' all those years; and what a rich harvest do we have now! Here, indeed, was a reward worth waiting for. To read over the names of the poems, songs, and epistles written within such a short space of time amazes us. And there is hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim to literary excellence. A month or two previous to the composition of his first satire he had written what Gilbert calls his first poem, The Epistle to Davie, 'a brother poet, lover, ploughman, and fiddler.' It is worthy of notice that, in the opening lines of this poem—
'While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us ower the ingle'—
we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself down to write. He plunges, as Horace advises, in medias res, and we have the atmosphere of the poem in the first phrase. This is Burns's usual way of beginning his poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs. The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken from The Cherry and the Slae, by Alexander Montgomery, which he must have read in Ramsay's Evergreen. The stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it from the first with masterly ease. But there is much more than mere jugglery of words in the poem. Indeed, such is this poet's seeming simplicity of speech that his masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading of the poem. Gilbert's opinion of this poem is worth recording, the more especially as he expressly tells us that the first idea of Robert's becoming an author was started on this occasion. 'I thought it,' he says, 'at least equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's epistles, and that the merit of these and much other Scottish poetry seemed to consist principally in the knack of the expression; but here there was a strain of interesting sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language of the poet.' It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus of the Scotticism, after having heard so much of Robert Burns writing naturally in the speech of his home and county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof of that graphic power in which Burns has never been excelled, and in it we have the earliest mention of his Bonnie Jean. In his next poem, Death and Dr. Hornbook, his command of language and artistic phrasing are more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire sparkle and flash from every line. The poem is written in that form of verse which Burns has made particularly his own. He had become acquainted with it, it is most likely, in the writings of Fergusson, Ramsay, and Gilbertfield, who had used it chiefly for comic subjects; but Burns showed that, in his hands at least, it could be made the vehicle of the most pensive and tender feeling. In an interesting note to the Centenary Burns, edited by Henley and Henderson, it is pointed out that 'the six-line stave in rime couée built on two rhymes,' was used by the Troubadours in their Chansons de Gestes, and that it dates at the very latest from the eleventh century. Burns's happiest use of it was in those epistles which about this time he began to dash off to some of his friends; and it is with these epistles that the uninterrupted stream of poetry of this season may be said properly to begin. Perhaps it was in the use of this stanza that Burns first discovered his command of rhymes and his felicity of phrasing. Certain it is, that after his first epistle to Lapraik, we have epistles, poems, songs, satires flowing from his pen, uninterrupted for a period, and apparently with marvellous ease. It has to be remembered, too, that he was now inspired by the dream of becoming an author—in print. When or where or how, had not been determined; but the idea was delightful all the same; the hope was inspiration itself. Some day his work would be published, and he would be read and talked about! He would have done something for poor auld Scotland's sake. The one thing now was to make the book, and to that he set himself deliberately. Poetry was at last to have its chance. Farming had been tried, with little success. The crops of 1784 had been a failure, and this year they were hardly more promising. In these discouraging circumstances the poet was naturally driven in upon himself. His eyes were turned ad intra, and he sought consolation in his Muse. He was conscious of some poetical ability, and he knew that his compositions were not destitute of merit. Poetry, too, was to him, and particularly so at this time, its own exceeding great reward. He rhymed 'for fun'; and probably he was finding in the exercise that excitement his passionate nature craved. Herein was his stimulant after the routine of farm-work—spiritless work that was little better than slavery, incessant and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in those days returning from the fields, 'forjesket, sair, with weary legs,' and becoming buoyant as soon as he has opened the drawer of that small deal table in the garret.
'Leeze me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist, my only pleasure;
At hame, afield, at wark or leisure,
The Muse, poor hizzie,
Though rough and raploch be her measure,
She's seldom lazy.'