Is wisdom’s root.
Thus much I thought I might venture on our poet’s life; I shall now proceed to offer some remarks upon his genius.
Burns was a true child of nature; thence his growing power, and thence the promise of his lasting fame. But though the child of nature, he was not the offspring of mere rude or uncultivated nature. The Scottish peasantry were a class of men among whom such a mind as that of Burns could perhaps receive its most fitting development. Without the refinement which tends to repress spontaneous expression, they had sufficient of moral and intellectual education to give that expression variety and strength. Their country, their history, and their religion, were all such as to train a serious and reflective imagination. Therefore it is that no peasantry have furnished so much to national literature as the Scottish, and especially to national poetry. Within a period by no means extensive in their annals, they have given to the world such writers as Ferguson, simple and full of music; Allan Ramsay, in his “Gentle Shepherd,” the very genius of pastoral poetry; Tannahill, a lowly spirit of melody and pathos, a sweet voice of truth and tenderness; Hogg, the glorious wizard of the mountains, coming down from his shepherd’s wilderness, his memory peopled with all olden legends, and his fancy teeming with all fairy dreams. Burns, then, though mightiest, is but one of an honorable family; though greatest and grandest among them, they are his kindred; of some he is the heir, of others, he is the progenitor.
Burns is a poet true, as I have said, to nature, and therefore true to art. Burns is not mechanically artificial, but he is patiently artistical. He had none of that indolent vanity which shrinks from careful preparation, which trusts all to sudden excitement, and undigested emotions. He looked, as every man of genius does, to the ideal; he knew it was not to be comprehended in a passing glance, or reached in a rapid bound, or embodied in a single effort; and he knew that in the endeavor to unfold it, no execution could be too thoughtful, and no labor too great. It is not the consciousness of power, but the conceit of vanity, which relies presumptuously upon momentary impulse, which mistakes the contortions of a delirious imbecility for the movements of celestial agitation. The very creation of God, which required but the will and word of Omnipotence for instant and perfect existence, has been gradually constructed—the earth on which we stand, so fair to look upon, so robed with beauty, so radiant with life and light, has been evolved from chaos through innumerable formations and even the thunder so astounding in its crash, and the lightning so sudden in its stroke, have long been generating in the womb of heaven. The man of genius, the man of creative power, is at once inspired and industrious; at once a man of passion and a man of patience; at once a constructor and analyser, a man of enthusiasm, but also a man of wisdom. Genius is not intoxication, and it is even more than rapture; it is capacity subject to the law of truth and beauty; the intense action of the soul, exalted, harmonious, and illuminated. The dash of noble thoughts may come suddenly on the brain; the torrent of enkindled feeling may rush upon the heart, but the spirit of order and of art must move over the face of this brilliant chaos, ere it is shaped into that perfection which the world does not willingly let die. All mighty souls know this; the rustic Burns knew it, not less than the godlike Milton.
The genius of Burns is now, by that instinctive appreciation which forms the supreme tribunal, placed in the highest order. Whence is this? All he has written may be contained in a moderately sized volume. If quantity of production therefore were needed to exalt a writer, which it is not, Burns should remain in the region of mediocrity. Neither has he composed as critics would seem to require, a work of elaborate and faultless excellence; for he has not even attempted a tragedy or an epic poem. But critics cannot decide this point, and that common heart which decides for all has decided for Burns. The depth and extent of his humanity has gained him his distinction, and it is that humanity which gains distinction for any who outlive their age. It is this spirit of love and sympathy which evinces the kindred that all men recognize; it is this spirit that reaches the truth of nature below all changes, custom and convention; below all colors which climates paint upon the skin; it is this which outlives all facts and fashions, and abides forever in the immortal heart. Whoever has this spirit must live; whoever has it not must die; whoever has this spirit must live, defiled though he may be with many evils; whoever has it not must die, no matter how excellent he may be besides; no matter what his brilliancy, his sagacity, his talent, the generations will outlast them all; will give them to as deep oblivion as they do the tongues of Babel. The world cherishes Boccacio, notwithstanding the offences of his tales; so it likewise preserves Chaucer; Rabelais and old Montaigne continue in literature despite of their impurities; and to think of Shakspeare dying would be to conceive the extinction of letters or our race. All these men are deathless brothers, and Burns is amongst them. His poetry is thoroughly human; a poetry which reproduces as we read it all the feelings of our wayward nature; which shows how man was made to be merry, and how he was made to mourn; which enters the soul on its sunny or its gloomy side, expands the heart with laughter or chastens it with melancholy.
In knowledge of man, Burns strikes us with wonder unspeakable, when we consider the narrow circle in which he lived, and the early age at which he died. A single song is like a compressed drama; and within the circle of these songs we have impulses from every stage of life, from the perturbations of youth to the chill of age. To every shade of sentiment and affection; to every change and turn of inward experience, to every oddity and comicality of feeling, he has given a voice of musical and energetic utterance.
Man, and man directly—man in the play of all his passions, is, with Burns, the great object of interest. The descriptive and the picturesque for their own sake have therefore no place in his writings. A picture with him is never more than the drapery of a passion. The chivalric past has none of his veneration; and the past, in any form, only kindles him when he associates it with the movements of humanity or the struggles of liberty. The conflicts of feudalism, the rivalry of dynasties, the gorgeous falsehoods of departed ages, had no enchantment to warm his fancy or to rule his pen. In this respect, the writings of Scott and those of Burns are as opposite as are their characters. The brilliancy of descriptive narrative glows over the poems of Scott—the strong life of passion throbs in those of Burns. Even in the record of a tour this contrast is observable. Scott has the eye of an antiquarian and a map-maker united. Burns glances along as if space were a tiresome obstruction to his fiery nature: Scott surveys every baronial castle, and notes all its chronicles. Burns raves with inspired fury on the field where the invader was struck down, where “tyrants fell in every blow.” Scott imagined that genius owed homage to rank; Burns gave the obligation another version, and conceived that rank should do reverence to genius. Peasant-born, he was too proud in his humanity to covet titles: almost morbidly jealous of individual independence, hereditary aristocracy was not to him poetically impressive; its outward glare provoked his scorn, and its deeper abuses sickened his imagination.
Two most human qualities in all poets are pre-eminent in Burns—I mean pathos and humor.
His pathos is profound but kindly. No writer is less gloomy than Burns, and yet none for the extent of his compositions has more pathos. No writer within the same compass has grander thoughts or deeper beauty; and, by some magic of the heart, grand thoughts and deep beauty are always allied to melancholy. The canopy of the blue heavens, when not a cloud swims in its brightness, makes our rapture sad: so it does when the stars stud it with ten thousand lights: the mountain’s majesty and the ocean’s vastness subdue our souls to thought, and in this world of ours thought has ever something of the hue of grief. It would seem as if a mysterious connection existed between great objects and pensive feelings, between lofty sentiments and deep regrets, a kind of struggle in our higher nature against the limits of its condition: a disappointment at the long interval that separates our aspirations from the ideal, tinges with sorrow all our sensations of the beautiful. Pathos such as this imbues all the graver poetry of Burns. Scarcely is there a wo which wrings the bosom between the cradle and the grave which has not an expression in the solemn music of his verse, from the gentlest whisper of feeling to the frenzies of every pain and the agonies of every passion. But though deep, his melancholy is not morbid. It is the melancholy of great capacities and of real suffering; of error reacting on itself a just infliction; or glorious desires yearning for their congenial objects. The muse of Burns was a rustic maiden; a maiden healthful and hardy. Fits of vapors she might occasionally have, but the heather of her native mountains soon restored the elasticity of her step, and the breeze of her pleasant valleys quickly recalled the bloom to her cheek and the lustre to her eye. At times she sought the solitudes; but she returned ere long to human homes, and sang her wild and simple songs to the friendly circle. She loved, it is true, to meditate under the green shadow of the forest, and to look up in raptured spirit to the lurid and darkened heavens; but she loved no less the blessed sunshine on the harvest hill, and the cottage smoke that floated in the evening sky. If occasionally she wept amidst the graves of her heroes, she came from the places of the dead, more boldly to proclaim liberty in the places of the living.
This pathos is neither maudlin nor misanthropic. It does not make the head giddy with paradox; nor whirl the heart upon a wild and chaotic tempest of doubt and selfishness; it does not dissect out the evils of human nature, and gloat over them with a diseased voluptuousness; it does not lead you to sit at the feast of despair, with the spectres and skeletons around you of unsocial horrors. It is no mawkish pretence of sentiment. Burns is true to what he feels; and, right or wrong, he speaks it as it is. He maintains this course in his good and his evil. It saved him from groveling and bombast; it saved him from intellectual cant, and from literary quackery. No language is so eloquent as honest language. Truth goes direct to its purpose, while affectation is crawling around its petty circumlocutions; and, as the straight line is the shortest, the most sincere words are the most resistless. As the poet had honesty in himself, he had faith in others. His appeal was weakened by no skepticism in the capacity of humble men to appreciate the noble and the beautiful. He spoke to them as beings whose hearts were of the same substance as his own; he spoke confident of the result, and he was not disappointed. The first auditors of his verses were the obscure dwellers among Scottish hills and hamlets, and to his words he received as true a response as poetic enthusiasm could have desired. The sons and daughters of toil proved to him, that he had not trusted them in vain. He gave them his faith, and they paid back the trust with a priceless love.