Robert Burns: How To Know Him

by William Allan Neilson

Let them cant about decorum

Who have characters to lose.

Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets!

Here's to all the wandering train!

Here's our ragged brats and callets! wenches

One and all cry out Amen!

The materials for rebuilding Burns's world are not confined to his explicitly descriptive poems. Much can be gathered from the songs and satires, and there are important contributions in his too scanty essays in narrative. Of these last by far the most valuable is [Tam o' Shanter]. The poem originated accidentally in the request of a certain Captain Grose for local legends to enrich a descriptive work which he was compiling. In Burns's correspondence will be found a prose account of the tradition on which the poem is founded, and he is supposed to have derived hints for the relations of Tam and his spouse from a couple he knew at Kirkoswald.

It was a happy inspiration that led him to turn the story into verse, for it revealed a capacity which otherwise we could hardly have guessed him to possess. The vigor and rapidity of the action, the vivid sketching of the background, the pregnant characterization, the drollery of the humor give this piece a high place among stories in verse, and lead us to conjecture that, had he followed this vein instead of devoting his later years to the service of Johnson and Thomson, he might have won a place beside the author of the Canterbury Tales. He lacked, to be sure, Chaucer's breadth of experience and richness of culture: being far less a man of the world he would never have attained the air of breeding that distinguishes the English poet: but with most of the essential qualities that charm us in Chaucer's stories he was well equipped. He had the observant eye, the power of selection, command of the telling phrase and happy epithet, the sense of the comic and the pathetic. Beyond Chaucer he had passion and the power of rendering it, so that he might have reached greater tragic depth, as he surpassed him in lyric intensity.

As it is, however, Chaucer stands alone as a story-teller, for [Tam o' Shanter] is with Burns an isolated achievement. There are three distinct elements in the work—narrative, descriptive, and reflective. The first can hardly be overpraised. We are made to feel the reluctance of the hero to abandon the genial inn fireside, with its warmth and uncritical companionship, for the bitter ride with a sulky sullen dame at the end of it; the rage of the thunderstorm, as with lowered head and fast-held bonnet the horseman plunges through it; the growing sense of terror as, past scene after scene of ancient horror, he approaches the ill-famed ruin. Then suddenly the mood changes. Emboldened by his potations, Tam faces the astounding infernal revelry with unabashed curiosity, which rises and rises till, in a pitch of enthusiastic admiration for Cutty-Sark, he loses all discretion and brings the “hellish legion” after him pell-mell. We reach the serio-comic catastrophe breathless but exhilarated.

The descriptive background of this galloping adventure is skilfully indicated. Each scene—the ale-house, the storm, the lighted church, the witches' dance—is sketched in a dozen lines, every stroke distinct and telling. Even the three lines indicating what waits the hero at home is an adequate picture. Though incidental, these vignettes add substantially to what the descriptive poems have told us of the environment, real and imaginative, in which the poet had been reared.