'Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.'
It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of the lives of his fellow-men, not only to an outside world that knew them not, but to themselves. And he has glorified those lives in the interpretation, not by the introduction of false elements or the elimination of unlovely features, but simply by his insistence, in spite of the sordidness of poverty, on the naked dignity of man.
Everything he touched became interesting because it was interesting to him, and he spoke forth what he felt. For Burns did not go outside of his own life, either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry and romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the man who has eyes to see them; and Burns's stage was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his poetry in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life round about him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that he has been called the satirist and singer of a parish. Had he lived nowadays, he would have been relegated to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals and indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics, and it requires a specialist in manure to produce blue dandelions or sexless ferns. In the narrow sense of the word he was not parochial. Whilst true to class and country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A Scotsman of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the hearts of a people; but he was from first to last a man, and so has found entrance to the hearts of all men. Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment; he might address the men and women of Mauchline, but he spoke with the voice of humanity, and his message was for mankind.
Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry, he revived for them their nationality. For he was but the last of the great bards that sang the Iliad of Scotland; and in him, when patriotism was all but dead, and a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land and their language, the voices of nameless ballad-makers and forgotten singers blended again into one great voice that sang of the love of country, till men remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name of Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not parochial. It was no mere prejudice which bound him hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish song. He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots, and that men of other countries and other tongues joyed and sorrowed, toiled and sweated and struggled and hoped even as he did. He was attached to the people of his own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst whom he had been born and bred; but his sympathies went out to all men, prince or peasant, beggar or king, if they were worthy of the name of men he recognised them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him his intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the souls of his fellows; the thoughts of their hearts are visible to his piercing eye. He who had mixed only with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond the boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament as if he had known princes and politicians from his boyhood. The goodwife of Wauchope House would hardly credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts—
'And then sae slee ye crack your jokes
O' Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox;
Our great men a' sae weel descrive,
And how to gar the nation thrive,
Ane maist would swear ye dwalt amang them,
And as ye saw them sae ye sang them.'
But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in almost all he wrote. Every character he has drawn stands out a living and breathing personality. This is greatly due to the fact that he studied those he met, as men, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank, of costly apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and station after all are mere accidents, and count for nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed, Burns was too often inclined from his hard experience of life to go further than this, and to count them disqualifying circumstances. This aggressive independence was, however, always as far removed from insolence as it was from servility. He saw clearly that the 'pith o' sense and pride o' worth' are beyond all the dignities a king can bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions would cease, and the glory of manhood be the highest earthly dignity.
'Then let us pray that come it may—
As come it will for a' that—
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree and a' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
It's comin' yet, for a' that,
That man to man, the warld o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that!'
Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because of it, Burns had also a childlike love of nature and all created things. He sings of the mountain daisy turned up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening at home while the storm made the doors and windows rattle, he bethought him on the cattle and sheep and birds outside—
'I thought me on the ourie cattle
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' wintry war,
And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle
Beneath a scaur.'
Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental strain; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail, at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is telling and effective, yet always in harmony with the feeling of the poem, and always subordinate to it. His descriptions of scenery are never dragged in. They are incidental and complementary; human life and human feeling are the first consideration; to this his scenery is but the setting and background. He is never carried away by the force or beauty of his drawing as a smaller artist might have been. The picture is given with simple conciseness, and he leaves it; nor does he ever attempt to elaborate a detail into a separate poem. The description of the burn in Hallowe'en is most beautiful in itself, yet it is but a detail in a great picture—