Even that he had difficulty in holding; because the French revolution came sweeping over Europe, and frightened the governing class of England into just such a frenzy of reaction as we in America witnessed in 1919. In his capacity as exciseman Burns captured a smuggling ship with four cannon; he purchased the cannon at auction, and sent them to the French Legislative Assembly as a mark of sympathy. Imagine, if you can, an American customs officer in 1919 shipping four machine-guns to the Soviet government of Russia, and you may realize how close the poet came to losing the salary upon which his wife and children had to exist.

We shall see other poets shrinking in horror from the execution of King Louis, and throwing in their lot with reaction. But here is one who stood by the down-trodden of the earth, and voiced their feelings to the end. Not merely is he the national poet of Scotland; he is, in spite of the handicap of dialect, the voice of the peasant and the land-slave throughout the English-speaking world. When he writes “the rank is but the guinea’s stamp,” he is the voice of the labor movement in England and of democracy in America. His work is beloved by humble people; you would be surprised to know how widely it is read—perhaps more widely than any other poetry among the poor.

The people know this voice, they know this heart, with all its loves and hates, its longings and griefs. There is no man who has come from the toiling masses, self-taught and self-made, who has expressed their feelings so completely. And note that he has, not merely beauty and passion, but keen insight and power of brain; he can think for his people, as well as feel with them. He is not a bit afraid to use his art to preach and to scold, to discuss moral problems, to storm at social injustice and to ridicule church dogma.

What though such a man did drink and squander himself; that also is a part of the worker’s tragedy. He paid for it the price which the workers pay, and life spared him no part of the suffering and shame, nor did he spare himself the remorse. He wrote his own epitaph, in which he spoke of himself as “the poor inhabitant below,” and recorded that “thoughtless folly laid him low and stained his name.” Because there is no spiritual value greater than honesty, the judgment of his people has raised him high and crowned his name with immortality.

CHAPTER L
THE BRAIN PROPRIETOR

“Why do you call this a work on art,” says Mrs. Ogi, “when you are dealing entirely with literature?”

“All the arts are one,” says her husband. “They are expressions of the human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We realize this when we see an artist like Michelangelo using blocks of marble and molecules of paint and printed words, and giving us with each medium the record of the same personality. There have been others who used the acted drama and the lyric, like Shakespeare; or words and music—”

“Let us see how your thesis works out with music,” says Mrs. Ogi.

Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his own peril. For example, Mozart; at the age of six he was a child prodigy, exhibited as a curiosity before all the crowned heads of Europe; but he grew up to a life of slow starvation, and a death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. The sum total of his earnings from seven hundred and sixty-nine compositions was not enough to keep his small family alive.

But now comes a mighty genius, who discovers how to make music an art of power, an expression of the deepest experiences of the human soul. Beethoven was born in 1770, his mother being a cook and his father a broken-down musician drinking himself to death. Beethoven became the child slave of this drunkard; he was driven by beatings to practice the piano at the age of four, and at the age of seven had a job in a theater orchestra. I wonder, when we go to the “movies” and listen to the banging and scraping, may there be among those servants of imbecility some lad who is destined to raise the art of music to a new height, and to die in misery for his pains?