THE GENIUS OF BURNS.
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BY HENRY GILES.
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In a cottage on the banks of Doon, near the town of Ayr, in Scotland, in 1759, Robert Burns, one of the world’s sweetest poets, first saw the light of life. The peasant-child soon learned to know existence in toil and sorrow; torn at an early age from study to labor, grief went hand in hand with glory through his remaining years. We find him amidst the wild eccentricities of an irregular youth, without any settled aim, as he himself declares, but with some stirrings of ambition, that were only as the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops around the walls of his cave. With characteristic ardor, and with more zeal than wisdom, he mingled in the theological and political squabbles of the times, and by the destructive boldness of his satire, and the shafted power of his ridicule, he created many enemies whom it was easier to provoke than to propitiate. Nor must we hold him blameless. In the prodigality of wit, and the wildness of laughter; in the madness of merriment, and the pride of genius, he treated opinions and persons with an unsparing levity which a more thoughtful experience would have taught him to regard with reverence or forbearance. That his genius went too frequently in company with his passions, and that the glory of the one was sometimes wrecked in the delirium of the other, it is not allowed us to deny; but these follies had their penalties; and if it were possible, they were better now forgotten in the ashes of his early grave. Burns was a man that sinned, and one that suffered; but he was not a man that sinned callously, or that suffered meanly; and it is not for the living to write in marble errors which the departed repented in tears.
Incidents of romance and anguish checker the opening of his poetic fame with sadness as well as sunshine. His “Highland Mary,” the love of his youth, and the dream of his life is wrenched from his heart by death. Then comes the melancholy episode of his attachment to Jean Armor, with its heavy retribution of wretchedness. His name has begun to gather honor among his native hills; the small provincial edition of his poems is hailed with proud enthusiasm; but yet, with poverty and a bleeding spirit, he looks across the ocean to foreign exile. Suddenly his purpose is turned aside, and we behold him in Edinburgh among the exclusives and magnates of the land. There, as at the plough, we find him still the true and sturdy man. In the throng of Highland chieftains and border barons, in the full blaze of pride and beauty, he felt within him a humanity beyond the claim of titles; genius had given him a superscription more impressive than device of heraldry; the patent of nobility was written with fire in his heart, and the proud ones of earth became poor before the aristocrat of heaven. In that day of classic propriety, a poet from the plough, full of passionate earnestness, must have been in Edinburgh a startling phenomenon. But nature made herself heard in the very citadel of art; cavil was silent, and admiration offered willing homage. The wealthy marveled at the inspired peasant; and wherever the eloquent ploughman appeared, there were the nobles collected together. Dukes gave him their silken hands; duchesses received him with sweetest smiles; earls pledged him in the wine-cup; and for the moment, the haughty and the high-born recognized the presence of a greatness superior to their own. But Burns was not a man to hold popularity long in circles such as these. He was too stoutly individual for the apathy of elegant mediocrity, and he was too sternly independent for the sensibility of patronizing grandees: he saw nothing to venerate in a title when it was but the nickname of a fool; and he was undazzled by a star when it glittered on the breast of a ruffian or a dunce. But though Burns escaped the danger of aristocratic delusion, he did not escape the danger of aristocratic feasts. These were the times of night-long carousals, and pottle-deep potations. Burns had neither the firmness to resist such dissipation, nor the constitution to endure it; and he carried from it impaired health and impaired habits—an irritable discontent with his condition, and an instability of purpose fatal to a life of labor. Having placed a tomb over the neglected remains of poor Ferguson, the poet, he retired to the country, shared his success with his brother Gilbert, met his mother steeped in tears of honest joy, married his Jean, and gave peace to a wounded spirit.
From this era of light in his course; from this day, bright with fame and conscious virtue, we trace him along a path devious and clouded. We follow him through the toil of a profitless farm, to the struggles of a country gauger, and from these to a destitute death-bed. In all his follies and his sufferings, we behold him true to a manly nature, loyal to noble principles; and however seamed and deformed may have been the surface of his life, virtue remained unshaken in the centre of his soul. With a large family, and only seventy pounds a year, he had an open hand for the poor, and a hospitable roof for stranger and for friend; and although he died owing no man any thing, yet he has been stigmatized as a prodigal and a spendthrift. He gave the world his immortal songs without money and without price; and with the generosity of benignant genius, he sympathized with every effort of the humble men around him for a nobler life, he ministered to their intellectual wants, and he aided their intellectual struggles. Accordingly, we observe him at a time when he was harassed with cares and overcome with toil on a barren farm, establishing a book club in his neighborhood, forming its rules, and directing its operations. To estimate this in the true spirit, we must remember that it was sixty years ago, when as yet there had been no “Mechanics’ Institutions” in the land, and when Lyceums were not; when cheap editions of standard works had not arisen even on a printer’s dream, and “Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” were enfolded, as the poets say, in the mighty womb of futurity. Dr. Currie, of Liverpool, a genial and eloquent (though patronizing) biographer of Burns, in narrating this portion of his life, questions the utility of literary studies for the great masses of the people. Strange questioning this, in a life of Burns—the cottage-boy, whom the little knowledge of a rustic school awakened for eternity; raised from the clods of the valley to a place among the stars, a burning and imperishable light; and who, but for that little knowledge, might have been as nameless clay as any that nurtures the grass of a village church-yard.
The ideas of Currie have almost vanished with his times; still even yet we occasionally hear some small-souled cynic, some snail-shell philosopher, who thinks himself of those sages with whom wisdom is to perish, sneer scornfully at popular knowledge. Popular knowledge, it is true, is not the wisdom of Solomon; it has not the depth of Bacon, or the sublimity of Newton; still, so far as it goes, it is a good, and though the pedant may deride, the philanthropist will rejoice. And what, after all, is the ground of Mr. Pedant Wiseacre’s pride? Perhaps some learned investigation on the contraction of the Greek kai, or the tail of the Greek gamma. Seriously, the critic and the scholar, when true to their noble office, deserve our admiration and our gratitude; but those who grub merely for withered roots, which never produce either fruits or flowers; and, then, with insect vanity, give themselves airs of scorn, are themselves saved from contempt, only because all creatures have their uses. It is well for society that there should always be men of great and solid learning; and evil would be the day when slight acquirement should be a substitute for laborious thought; but it is also desirable that these accumulated treasures should be widely and bountifully distributed. It is good to have deep fountains in our munitions of rocks, but it is not good that these fountains should waste themselves in darkness; it is not good that they should merely feed the gorgeous river, and the mighty cataract, they should also steal along in the sunny streamlet, and give beauty to the secluded nook. Let there be rich men, and let them rejoice in their riches; let there be great men, and let them exult in their greatness; let there be men of strong intellect, but let them in their strength be merciful; it is not, however, the great, the noble, or the strong, that are ever of destructive nature; it was the lean kine of Egypt that became the devourers—and yet were as skinny as before; so there are poor, lean, hungry animals of the critic species—unproductive as they are voracious, that are naturally the most unsparing and the most ferocious.
When Burns went first to Edinburgh he was the rage, and homage to him became the cant of certain circles. But it is seldom that such homage survives a season. Poor Burns lived not long; but he lived long enough to understand in bitterness the hollowness of drawing-room applause. On a second visit to the Scottish metropolis, the enthusiasts of the first had disappeared. It is ridiculous enough now to us to think of any lord or lady of bedizened mediocrity supposing they could do honor by their notice to such a man as Robert Burns; but ridicule deepens to contempt, when we read of paltry provincials in Dumfries looking ascant at their mighty townsman, our indignation chokes our laughter at the record of treatment which small fashionables could offer to a great poet. Mr. Lockhart gives an anecdote from a gentleman who told him that he was seldom more grieved than when riding into Dumfries, one fine summer’s evening, to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night—not one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said, “Nay, nay, my young friend, that’s all over now,” and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzle Baillie’s pathetic ballad.
Burns, amidst poverty and sorrow, when needful comforts had almost failed him in his sickness, and his children nearly wanted bread, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, quitted a world that was not soon to look upon his like again. Burns, the gladdener of so many hearts, was at last outwrestled, and the mighty fell—Burns, who had so deeply felt the rapture of genius, and the misery of life.