Robert Burns

by Gabriel Setoun

Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet, Burns took a lively interest in everything affecting the welfare of the parish and the well-being of its inhabitants. For this was no poet of the study, holding himself aloof from the affairs of the world, and fearing the contamination of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always acted his part in the world as a husband and father; as a citizen and a man. He made himself the poet of humanity, because he himself was so intensely human, and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. At this time he established a library in Dunscore, and himself undertook the whole management,—drawing out rules, purchasing books, acting for a time as secretary, treasurer, and committee all in one. Among the volumes he ordered were several of his old favourites, The Spectator, The Man of Feeling, and The Lounger; and we know that there was on the shelves even a folio Hebrew Concordance.

A favourite walk of the poet's while he stayed here was along Nithside, where he often wandered to take a 'gloamin' shot at the Muses.' Here, after a fall of rain, Cunningham records, the poet loved to walk, listening to the roar of the river, or watching it bursting impetuously from the groves of Friar's Carse. 'Thither he walked in his sterner moods, when the world and its ways touched his spirit; and the elder peasants of the vale still show the point at which he used to pause and look on the red and agitated stream.'

In spite of his multifarious duties, he was now more than ever determined to make his name as a poet. To Dr. Moore he wrote (4th January 1789): 'The character and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure, but now my pride.... Poesy I am determined to prosecute with all my vigour. Nature has given very few, if any, of the profession the talents of shining in every species of composition. I shall try (for until trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to shine in any one.'

It was inevitable that one whose district as an exciseman reached far and wide could not regularly attend to ploughing, sowing, and reaping, and the farm was very often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie appears to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied the principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it could not have been otherwise. Burns after having undertaken a duty would attend to it religiously, and we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctuality. Others have bemoaned that those frequent Excise excursions led the poet into temptation, that he was being continually assailed by the sin that so easily beset him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations to social excess were great; is it not all the more creditable to Burns that he did not sink under those temptations and become the besotted wreck conventional biography has attempted to make him? If those who raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became a confirmed toper, then they are assuredly wrong; if they be only drawing attention to the fact that drinking was too common in Scotland at that time, then they are attacking not the poet but the social customs of his day. It would be easy if we were to accept 'the general impression of the place,' and go by the tale of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his duties as a gauger, and sank into a state of maudlin intemperance. But ascertained fact and the testimony of unimpeachable authority are at variance with the voice of gossip. 'So much the worse for fact,' biography would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunningham's Personal Sketch of the Poet, the letters from Mr. Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to close our eyes to the excellence of the poetry of this period, in order to see Burns on the downgrade, and to preach grand moral lessons from the text of a wasted life.

But, after all, 'facts are chiels that winna ding,' and we must take them into account, however they may baulk us of grand opportunities of plashing in watery sentiment. Speaking of the poet's biographers, Mr. Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one another in heaping obloquy on his name; they have made his convivial habits, habitual drunkenness; his wit and humour, impiety; his social talents, neglect of duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he gives his testimony: 'My connection with Robert Burns commenced immediately after his admission into the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. In all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as an officer of the revenue was a branch of my especial province; and it may be supposed I would not be an inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man and a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the former capacity, so far from its being impossible for him to discharge the duties of his office with that regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not very obscurely even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary in his attention as an Excise officer, and was even jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.'

But a glance at the poems and songs of this period would be a sufficient vindication of the poet's good name. There are considerably over a hundred songs and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many of them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson's Museum, published in February 1790, contained no fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the Ellisland songs were such as, Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon, Auld Lang Syne, Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut, To Mary in Heaven, Of a' the Airts the Wind can blaw, My Love she's but a Lassie yet, Tam Glen, John Anderson my Jo, songs that have become the property of the world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that the imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not have known. Even the song Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut, the first of bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest achievements, is Tam o' Shanter. This poem was written in answer to a request of Captain Grose that the poet would provide a witch story to be printed along with a drawing of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. We have been treated by several biographers to a private view of the poet, with wild gesticulations, agonising in the composition of this poem; but where his wife did not venture to intrude, we surely need not seek to desecrate. 'I stept aside with the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean; not, we should imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism provided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its excellence sufficeth.

It is worthy of note that in Tam o' Shanter, as well as in To Mary in Heaven, the poet goes back to his earlier years in Ayrshire. They are posthumous products of the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock Edition. I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate of Tam o' Shanter. It is not the composition of a man of great talent, but of a man of transcendent poetical genius. The story itself is a conception of genius, and in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the characters and scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind, and abide with us a cherished literary possession. After reading the poem, the words are recalled without conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible embodiment of the mental impressions retained. Short as the poem is, there is in it character, humour, pathos, satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic, diablerie, almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in the writing of this poem likened to a composer at an organ improvising a piece of music in which, before he has done, he has used every stop and touched every note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the piece, which mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narration, have a distinctive beauty and are the most frequently quoted lines of the poem. In artistic word-painting and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and it is questionable if even the imagination of that master ever conceived anything more awful than the scene and circumstance of the infernal orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is! In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem, though Burns had never written another syllable, would have made him a high reputation. Certainly it was not the work of a man daily dazing his faculties with drink; no more was that exquisite lyric To Mary in Heaven. Another poem of this period deserving special mention is The Whistle, not merely because of its dramatic force and lyrical beauty, but because it gives a true picture of the drinking customs of the time. And again I dare assert that this is not the work of a mind enfeebled or debased by drink. It is a bit of simple, direct, sincere narration, humanly healthy in tone; the ideas are clear and consecutive, and the language fitting. It is not so that drunken genius expresses itself. The language of a poetical mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous; it is rarely narrative or simple; never direct nor forcible.

In the Kirk's Alarm, wherein he again reverted to his Mossgiel period, he displayed all his former force of satire, as well as his sympathy with those who advocated rational views in religion. Dr. Macgill had written a book which the Kirk declared to be heretical, and Burns, at the request of some friends, fought for the doctor in his usual way, though with little hope of doing him any good. 'Ajax's shield consisted, I think, of seven bull-hides and a plate of brass, which altogether set Hector's utmost force at defiance. Alas! I am not a Hector, and the worthy doctor's foes are as securely armed as Ajax was. Ignorance, superstition, bigotry, stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy—all strongly bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence; to such a shield humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the pop-gun of a schoolboy. Creation-disgracing scélérats such as they, God only can mend, and the devil only can punish.' The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells us, and was forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently adding, 'so much more venial is it in devout men's eyes to be guilty of heresy than of satire.'

Into political as well as theological matters Burns also entered with all his wonted enthusiasm. Of his election ballads, the best, perhaps, are The Five Carlins and the Epistle to Mr. Graham of Fintry. But these ballads are not to be taken as a serious addition to the poet's works; he did not wish them to be so taken. He was a man as well as a poet; was interested with his neighbours in political affairs, and in the day of battle fought with the weapons he could wield with effect. Nor are his ballads always to be taken as representing his political principles; these he expressed in song that did not owe its inspiration to the excitement of elections. Burns was not a party man; he had in politics, as in religion, some broad general principles, but he had 'the warmest veneration for individuals of both parties.' The most important verse in his Epistle to Graham of Fintry is the last:

'For your poor friend, the Bard, afar
He hears and only hears the war,
A cool spectator purely:
So, when the storm the forest rends,
The robin in the hedge descends,
And sober chirps securely.'