Bonnie Scotland and what we owe her

by William Elliot Griffis

We were guided around by a most unprepossessing old native, a Dick Deadeye in appearance, who insisted that “preachers were of no use, except to scold the deil.” He made himself rather free in his conversation with and repartees made to the clerical gentlemen of the party, who were inclined to chaff this apparently self-appointed defender of His Satanic Majesty. The old Scotsman seemed, with his malevolent eye (not whole, if I remember aright), to be the very incarnation of the dogma of total depravity. By a sort of counter-irritant, his wit served but to stiffen up whatever “orthodoxy”—after studying the Bible, with and without the aid of the creeds—some of us had left. In any event, the cicerone “got as gude as he gie.”

We glanced at the big monument of nine Corinthian fluted columns emblematic of the nine muses. With all due respect to the Greeks, but much less to the Scots, who reared the token, some of us wondered why such a true son of the soil as Burns could not have had for his memorial in architecture something more original than a Greek temple, for Scotland lacks neither brains nor taste.

Here is said to be the Bible given by Burns to his Highland Mary, held in the hand of each at their last interview, while both promised eternal loyalty to each other. This “blessed damozel,” made immortal in the poem, was Mary Campbell, a dairy maid. Their last meeting was when, “standing one on each side of a small brook, they laved their hands in the stream, and holding a Bible between them, pronounced a vow of an eternal constancy.” The scene of the parting of the lovers is still pointed out. In returning from her visit of filial duty, Mary fell sick and died at Greenock. At Ellislan in 1789, on the third anniversary of the day on which Burns heard of her death, he wrote that loveliest of all his ballads, the address to “Mary in Heaven.” Since 1898, one may see her lofty statue reared in her native place, Dunoon, on Castle Hill, now famous for its seaside villas and as a summer resort, with Loch Eh, not far away. Thousands come, also, to see the proof that man worships woman.

Nevertheless, after his Highland Mary, Burns had many spasms of affection, for he seems to have worshipped womanhood. One of his loves was a young girl, in whose honor he wrote a poem when she was about to leave for America, whither she went and married, rearing a family of sons who became famous in science. One of her descendants settled at Ithaca, New York, to live by the side of our beautiful Lake Cayuga. It is after him that Port Renwick on its shores is named.

In a grotto, at the end of the garden, are the figures of Tam o’ Shanter and Souter Johnnie. Except for the natural beauty of the spot in the Doon Valley, the country seems very monotonous and uninteresting, though the two bridges are worth attention. One, “the auld bridge,” has a single slim arch, which Meg tried to gain when she fled from the witches. Here flows the river Doon, to which the writings of Burns have given such celebrity. It rises in a lake of the same name, about eight miles in length, and the river has a seaward course of eighteen miles, its banks, especially in summer time, being laden with floral richness and beauty. Besides looking so small to one used to the Hudson, Susquehanna, and Delaware, it seemed almost lost in trees and shrubbery. Yet in some parts its rocky banks are imposing.

THE TAM O’ SHANTER INN, AYR

There is also a statue of Robert Burns, between whom and Americans there will ever be an indissoluble bond of sympathy. For, apart from his wonderful work in liberating Scottish poetry from the bonds of classical moulds and traditions, he had that profound sympathy with man as man, which enabled him to see into the real meaning of the French Revolution and its effect on the whole world. Though not blind to its horrors and mistakes, he saw far more clearly its ultimate results and blessings to mankind than could the men then in power and office in England. These, in 1790, were too much like their successors of 1861, when the struggle between slavery and freedom set armies in shock. Then the British leaders of public opinion, the proprietors of the Lancashire cotton mills, “Punch,” the London “Times,” and even the great poets uttered no voice of appreciation of Lincoln or of the freedom-loving American masses, not only of the North, but in the highlands of the South.

Burns not only taught in verse the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, but in his famous lines made forecast of the United States of the world, which our descendants are to see.

As a creator of poetry, as one who took the genius of Scotland by the hand, as it were, and led her out of the old paths, Burns will ever awaken undying gratitude among Scotsmen. He drew his inspiration from living nature and not from dead antiquity, or from books, old or new. To him, indeed, there was an antiquity that was living, and that part of the past which was its true and deathless soul, he clothed in new beauty. There is no nobler vindication of John Knox of the Reformers, who, with all their shortcomings and human infirmities, demanded reality and the uplift of the common man. They gave Scotland public schools, and the result was a sturdy, independent, and educated peasantry. It was from that class that Burns sprang. John Knox and the Reformers made a Robert Burns possible.