A Character Study of Byron and Burns
BY ELIZABETH BAILEY TRAYLOR
THESE names are live wires in the lands of the Scotch heather and the English rose, and equally so here by the red hearts of the watermelons and the snow showers of the cotton-fields of the Southern States. One often hears it said of those devoted brotherhoods—the Burns Clubs and the Scotch Societies—“Their Bible is Robbie Burns.” Frank Stanton has a large hearing when he sings:
We’ll slip away from our today Of wonder and of worry, To where, in meadows of the may, He whistled “Annie Laurie.” To meet him in some gabled inn, And pass the rare decanter, Or in some ingle nook begin A race with “Tam o’Shanter.”
To a large coterie of kindred spirits the name of Byron evokes a pageant of ideas pulsating with life’s strongest emotions. It is told of a pleasure club that they recently abandoned the books of the day and read the poet exhaustively and with great enthusiasm—no slight tribute to his genius in a time of unremitting demand for that which is palpitant with the breath of today’s life. A learned minister from his pulpit says: “‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ is a marvel of diction and technique, and no divine has approached the narrative in its exact correspondence to Holy Writ.”
A bare sketch of these two philosophers may suggest to book-lovers in general the particular period of the culture-epochs dominating each career, and discover some of the forces of heredity and environment which produced these characters, vibrant with full, fresh, free life, or reveal to readers equipped by psychical research for judgment how it was that these natures furnished the battleground for so fierce a conflict of good and evil forces.
According to Carlyle, the father of Burns was a “man of thoughtful, intense character, possessing some knowledge and open-minded for more, of keen insight and devout heart, friendly and fearless; a fully unfolded man seldom found in any rank of society.” Of his ancestry we know nothing. The father of Byron was an Englishman, from a line of illustrious ancestors reaching back to the days of William the Conqueror.
The mother of Burns, devout of heart and calm of mind, brightened the lives of her children with the ballads of her beloved Scotland. The mother of Byron would smother him with kisses one moment, and the next call him a lame brat.
Both poets spent their early youth in Scotland, where the record of their school days is still preserved in their respective parishes. Burns read with equal avidity Taylor’s devotional works, Locke, Pope, Milton, Thomson and Young. He never minded work, if knowledge was the reward. Byron was devoted to the reading of history and poetry, and was at the head of many college rows. When, in conformity to the custom of the school, the order was so inverted as to make the boy of highest rank change places with the lowest, the teacher would call out to Byron: “Now, George, let us see how quick you will be foot again.”
Each had a favorite family servant. Byron wrote often to his old nurse of his triumphs in London. Burns says many of his songs were inspired by an old servant, Jenny Wilson, as she repeated her endless collection of songs and stories of devils, ghosts, fairies, witches, warlocks, kelpies, elf-candles and enchanted dragons.