‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’
It suited with the role of inspired ploughman which Burns assumed among the Edinburgh gentry to give the impression that the finished poem also was spontaneous, but he knew better. His poetry was often born under the open sky, with the physical rhythm of his farm-work supplying the muscular accompaniment he later sought in strolls on the banks of Nith, but it was matured and revised by concentrated study of the implications of his theme. As the piper has to walk his measure, so Burns’s body moved to the rhythm of the tune which was in his mind, and the rhythm brought the words which expressed his mood.
It was only Scots music that saved Burns in the end from complete subjection to the false elegance of his century. Though he was better read than most of his ‘patrons’ ever realized, he had the self-educated man’s diffidence in the face of established reputations. His ear, so quick to distinguish ‘the true tender or sublime’ from ‘affectation or fustian’ in a lyric, failed him in the reading of more pretentious works. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is shot full of verbal echoes of English poets; what is worse, it echoes their sentiments, in such a passage as Stanza X, to an extent which divorces the thought from all the realities of peasant life. He never acquired the degree of sophistication which would have enabled him to use the current English conventions freely and originally, yet he was too sophisticated to use old folk conventions when they were not reinforced by music. Thus he never—with the possible exception of ‘John Barleycorn’—wrote a serious ballad. His political verses, and above all such an uproarious parody as ‘The Ballad of Grizzel Grimme’, show that he had all the ballad conventions at his tongue’s end; he had collected numerous old ballad texts, of which Dr. Currie named more than a dozen to Sir Walter Scott, though without thinking it worth while to preserve them; yet he could employ the ballad only in satire or burlesque. Thanks to music, he was able in all seriousness to sing a song in the old folk style, but he could not tell a story.
Even his Scottish vocabulary was more literary and derivative than his contemporaries realized. It was not so much a direct transcript of Ayrshire speech as it was a generalized vernacular pieced together from Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and the anonymous folk lyrists and ballad writers. He was genuinely interested in the variations of dialect—on his Border tour, for instance, he jotted down definitions of local words which were new to him—but his poetic use of it was chiefly due to its pithiness, its humour, and, above all, its flexibility. This was what he had in mind when he admitted to Robert Anderson ‘the advantages he enjoyed ... from the copia verborum, the command of phraseology, which the knowledge and use of the English and Scottish dialects afforded him’. He habitually alternated between Scottish and English spellings of the same word, as the exigencies of rime and measure required, thereby achieving a more flexible expression than was possible in either dialect by itself. His vernacular writing, in short, was nearer to Lowell’s New England speech or Kipling’s Cockney than it was to Gawain Douglas’s or William Dunbar’s single-minded expression in his native tongue. Even Robert Fergusson’s dialect, with its strong infusion of Fifeshire elements, is closer than Burns’s to being a direct transcript from life.
In one sense the poems in the Kilmarnock volume which were written under Robert Fergusson’s influence are a divergence from Burns’s deepest impulses, even though his method of composing them was fundamentally the same as in his song-writing. Instead of a tune to which he could set his own words Fergusson supplied a pattern or a theme to be adapted to his own experience. The parallels between ‘The Plane-stanes and the Causey’ and ‘The Brigs of Ayr’, between ‘The Daft Days’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ or ‘The Holy Fair’, between ‘Caller Oysters’ and ‘Scotch Drink’ or ‘To a Haggis’ are too obvious and have been too often mentioned to need reiteration. Burns borrowed, but he did not copy; even borrowed phraseology he made his own. His imitations almost invariably surpassed their originals both in poetic fire and in the epigrammatic quality essential for quotability. Yet in these forms of verse he showed no inventiveness. His own phrase that Fergusson had roused him to emulating vigour is literally true. That Fergusson’s impetus failed to sweep Burns on to discover similar themes of his own reveals him as after all on foreign ground. Nevertheless, by demonstrating that poetry could still be written in the vernacular, Fergusson had done inestimable service. Beyond that his influence brought Burns to a dead end. The unhappy young lawyer’s clerk had no music in his soul.
Allan Ramsay rather than Fergusson showed the way to the sort of poetry without musical setting in which Burns found his genuine freedom and inspiration. The imitations of Fergusson end with the lines ‘To a Haggis’, written in December, 1786; Ramsay supplied the models for the vernacular epistles which Burns never wholly ceased to write until a few months before his death. And between the poetic epistle as Burns wrote it and the dramatic monologue in which he also excelled there is little basic difference. The writer of a poetic epistle is usually dramatizing himself. Like the professional humorist, he assumes a role which is a projection or exaggeration of one phase of his own temperament, but which is not really himself as the working-day world knows him. For Burns to pass from such self-dramatization as marks the epistles to Lapraik, Simpson, Rankine, and Smith to the pure drama of ‘The Auld Farmer’ or even ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ involved merely an extension of imaginative scope and not a different technique.
To put it another way, Burns could either talk or he could sing. When he was not writing to music he was at his best only when he was speaking, either for himself as personified bard or humorous spectator, or as he identified his own personality with another’s. Nothing in the poems composed in 1786 more clearly shows his maturing artistic powers than does the dramatic character of ‘The Auld Farmer’ and ‘Holy Willie’ when contrasted with the lyrics of ‘The Jolly Beggars’, composed the year before. In these last, magnificent as they are, the reader can seldom forget that it is Burns who is speaking through the mouths of the vagabonds. The lyrics are only half dramatic, and perhaps it was realization of this that made the poet in 1793 tell George Thomson that none of the songs pleased him except the last—in which Burns himself is speaking as the ‘Bard of no regard’. In ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Auld Farmer’, on the other hand, the poet has identified himself with the character whom he is portraying as completely as Browning ever did with Fra Lippo Lippi or the Duke of Ferrara.
Less than adequate notice has been taken of the fact that Burns had mastered the art of the dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue more than half a century before Browning gave the forms their names. His own statement that all his early lyrics had a personal basis has both led biographers on wild-goose chases after autobiographical elements in songs which possess none, and has been used to give false emphasis to many poems really based on personal experience. Such interpretations ignore the very foundation of creative art. That the impulse to write a lyric comes from personal emotion does not mean that the finished poem is literal history. Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne helped to make ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ what it is, but not even Mr. Middleton Murry has been fatuous enough to call Madeline a portrait of Fanny. Rose Aylmer was not necessarily as perfect as Landor’s elegy upon her; William Douglas may have had no real intention of laying him down and dying for Annie Laurie. Yet the whole Highland Mary legend, for instance, rests on precisely this sort of treatment of a handful of Burns’s songs, in obstinate disregard of the plain fact that the woman who inspires a love-lyric no more needs to be herself a lyric woman than the model for the Victory of Samothrace needed to be a woman with wings. Everyone has recognized Burns’s unsuccess in his effort to dramatize himself for Clarinda’s benefit as the pure man of sentiment; his true achievement could be better understood by recognition of his success in dramatizing his real self in many of his best ‘personal’ poems. From the ‘Mary Morison’ of his youth to the ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’ of his last illness, his best songs display not Burns himself but a dramatic projection of one aspect of his mind.
Commentators from Henry Mackenzie onward have regretted that Burns never carried out his plans for writing a drama. Yet his triumph in the dramatic monologue is the best reason for believing that the attempt would have failed. His numerous references to the drama and dramatic writing never so much as hint that Burns had grasped the elements of theatrical technique. For him a play was merely a vehicle for declamatory speeches and the expression of ‘sentiments’ which would make neat quotations; a cobbling together of purple patches and of scattered episodes supposed to depict ‘originality of character’. If it ever occurred to him that a good play is a unified structure in which a single impression is built up through a series of artfully contrived climaxes, he never put the idea on paper. But even had he understood the technique he had not the right psychological approach for dramatic writing, any more than Browning had. The true dramatist stands apart from his characters and develops them from without; the writer of dramatic monologues identifies himself for the moment with another individual and develops the character from within. The two temperaments are seldom united in one man, and Burns in turning away even from the pastoral drama which Mackenzie had urged him to undertake was once again instinctively following the bent of his own genius. In the light of what he accomplished in his chosen forms, Mackenzie’s suggestion was almost as inept as John Moore’s proposal that he try something like Virgil’s Eclogues.
Before he went to Edinburgh Burns had explored his own capacities, but had not yet realized more than half of them. Fergusson had shown him how to write satires and descriptions in the vernacular; Ramsay had revealed the possibilities of the poetic epistle. But his interest in the folk-songs of which the words and melodies haunted him, still seemed a rustic or even childish survival. So far as he knew, it was like taking nursery rimes seriously as poetry. Though he must have been aware that scholars of repute were beginning to collect old ballads, he had not yet discovered that they were turning also to the words and music of folk-songs. In this respect at least, his Edinburgh sojourn was of incalculable benefit. Apparently he never met David Herd, the greatest collector among his contemporaries, but he soon became acquainted with Herd’s published work and learned that even some university professors esteemed such things. Sending a couple of songs, ‘the composition of two Ayrshire Mechanics’, to the Rev. William Greenfield a few weeks after arriving in the city, he hailed that eloquent but incontinent clergyman as ‘Professor of the Belles lettres de la Nature’; in the following summer he told William Tytler that he had once a great many fragments of traditional literature, but as he had no idea that anybody cared for them, he had forgotten them. And his next remark showed that he already possessed the essential qualification of the collector: ‘I invariably hold it sacriledge to add anything of my own to help out with the shatter’d wrecks of these venerable old compositions; but they have many various readings.’ Yet not even then, not even though the singing of old melodies was one of the commonest amusements both in Edinburgh drawing rooms and at convivial meetings at taverns, did he realize immediately the task and the opportunity before him.