The braw bagpipes is grand, my frien’s,
The braw bagpipes is fine;
We’ll teuk another pibroch yet,
For the days o’ auld lang syne.
CHAPTER X
HUMOUR OF SCOTTISH POETS
There have been few great poets—few poets of any appreciable quality, indeed—anywhere, who have not had a lively and appreciative sense of humour, if they have not actually been positive and productive humourists. It is a faculty of the human mind without which no man can be intellectually great—without which no view of life can be comprehensive and true; a faculty without which Shakespeare could no more have sounded the gamut of human feeling as he did than a man who is colour-blind could describe the glowing iridescence of the rainbow. In Burns and Scott, the most notable among Scottish poets—and mighty influences both in the republic of letters—the faculty of original humour was revealed to an extraordinary degree. In the case of Scott the playfulness of his fancy was made manifest essentially, no doubt, in the Waverley Novels, and in conversations with individuals; his poetry being mainly martial and moving, and severe rather than lightsome. In Burns, the greater poet, and the more impulsive genius, there was revealed the greater humourist and the readier wit, as well as the finer sentimentalist. Alone amid the sublimities of Nature, or touched by the muse in her diviner moods, he was reverent in spirit and glowed with adoration as fervid and sincere as ever animated the breast of the royal Hebrew bard himself; but prompted to join the social circle at the festive board, and fired by the spirit of fun, he would dazzle and delight a party for hours together by the brilliance and rapidity of his flashes of ready wit and humorous satire. The most ample and effective examples of Burns’s humour occur, of course, in his poems—notably in “Tam o’ Shanter,” and “The Jolly Beggars”; in his songs “Duncan Gray,” “Tam Glen,” and “Sic a Wife as Willie had”; and in some of the rhymed epistles. The impromptu epitaphs and epigrams, etc., which find a place in nearly every edition of his works, afford convincing evidence of the pungency of his electric wit, and the annihilating weight of his equally ready satire. But with all of these—particularly the poems and the songs—every adult person in Scotland is so familiar that to quote from one or other of them here would be something like superfluous labour. A few of the nimbler of the impromptu rhymes and epigrams, with descriptions of the circumstances under which they were provoked, may, however, be reproduced en passant. The process will freshen the reader’s memory, if it does not actually enlighten his mind.
Burns, like true steel, was ever ready to give fire at the touch of the flint, and being present in a company where an ill-educated parvenu was boring everyone by boasting of the many great people he had lately been visiting, the poet gave vent to his feelings in the following impromptu stanza, which we may be sure effectually silenced the babbling snob before him:—
“No more of your titled acquaintances boast,
And in what lordly circles you’ve been;