Burns had the virtues and defects of his class. He had vices that were not peculiar to the common people, but were shared in by the lordly and those high in office. Apart from his wonder-working power in the witchery of language, Burns, though called “the illegitimate child of Calvinism,” has wrought a moral influence for good in Scotland such as can be attributed to very few men who possess the reputation of higher sanctity. For besides Burns’s strong common sense, lively imagination, keen sympathy with what was beautiful in nature and noblest in man,—withal, in love with his native land and ever susceptible to fair women,—Burns purified and uplifted popular song. Out of the black mire of the obscene and indelicate, he called forth to bloom and glory deathless flowers of song.
Burns seemed to be the very incarnation of all that was necessary to be a true poet of the people. He illustrated the saying, ascribed to more than one man, that others might make the laws, but he would make the songs of the people—and he did. Many an old snatch of song, bit of sentiment, or scrap of poetry, which in form was vulgar and even indecent, he made clean. Purifying what was dear to the people, he set the substance in new shape and gave it wings of song. Some of the ancient ditties, now in happy oblivion, are too obscene to be sung to-day in their old form by refined society, but after their new baptism by Burns, they have become teachers of piety that excel in lasting power preachers or sermons. Such, for example, is “John Anderson, my Jo, John,” now so sweet and pathetic. In fact, Burns’s transformation of certain specimens of Scottish song is like that which we have seen when a handful of jewelry, of fashions outworn, was cast into the crucible made white hot and salted with nitre. The dross went off into vapor and fumes and the old forms and defects were lost in oblivion. What was of value remained. The pure gold was not lost, rather set free and regained. Poured forth into an ingot, that would become coin or jewels, it entered upon new life and unto a resurrection of fresh beauty.
Above all, Burns disliked to be tutored in matters of taste. He could not endure that one should run shouting before him whenever any fine objects appeared. On one occasion, a lady at the poet’s side said, “Burns, have you anything to say to this?” He answered, “Nothing, madam,” as he glanced at the leader of the party, “for an ass is braying over it.”
Since the ploughman-poet of Ayr was so generous in confessing inspiration and indebtedness to his greatest teacher, it is not meet that we should ignore this man and name in any real view of the forces making intellectual Scotland.
Robert Fergusson, though less known in countries abroad than in Scotland, was the spiritual father of Robert Burns and none acknowledged this more than Burns himself. When the man from Ayr visited Edinburgh, in 1787, he sought out the poet’s grave and erected the memorial stone which is still preserved in the larger and finer monument. Fergusson, born in 1751, was a graduate of St. Andrews. In Edinburgh, he contributed poems to Ruddiman’s “Weekly Magazine,” which gained him considerable local reputation. His society was eagerly sought and he was made a member of the Cape Club. Unfortunately, Fergusson fell a victim to his convivial habits, and was led into excesses which permanently injured his health. Alcohol probably helped to develop that brain disease usually called insanity. It was while in this condition that he met with Dr. John Brown, of Haddington, whose name is a household word in Scotland. The good man, a sound Presbyterian and Calvinist, was much more. He made “the love of the Lord” the real and ultimate test of a man’s orthodoxy. Brown’s “Self-Interpreting Bible” has been amazingly popular throughout heather land. The John Brown, whom some of us knew, who wrote “Rab and His Friends,” and “Pet Marjorie,” was the grandson of Fergusson’s friend.
After meeting with Dr. Brown, Fergusson became so very serious that he would read nothing but his Bible. A fall, by which his head was seriously injured, aggravated the symptoms of insanity, which had already shown themselves. After two months’ confinement in the only public asylum then known in Edinburgh, he died in 1774. His poems had been collected the year before his death.
Perhaps Fergusson’s fame rests as much upon his unhappy life and early death, and upon the fact that he was a true forerunner of Scotland’s greatest son of genius, as upon the essential merits of his verse. Burns read carefully Fergusson’s poems, admired them greatly, and called the author his “elder brother in the muses.” The higher critics declare that his influence on the poems of Robert Burns, such as “The Holy Fair,” “The Brigs of Ayr,” “On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street,” and “To a Mouse,” is undoubted. Even “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” when read alongside of “The Farmer’s Ingle,” of Fergusson, shows that Burns’s exquisite picture in verse of homely peasant life in Scotland is a firelight reflection of the older original, at which Burns warmed his genius.
With less of an immediate intellectual debt, Burns was certainly obligated to an older cultivator of Scottish poetry; who, in large measure, must be credited with the revival of public appreciation of the bards of Caledonia and who helped powerfully to create the climate in which Burns’s genius could blossom and bear fruit.
Among the effigies in Edinburgh, city of statues, is that of Allan Ramsay, the poet (1686–1758). When we first saw this work of art, it was comparatively new, having been erected in 1865, by which time national appreciation had ripened.
Ramsay must ever hold the gratitude of Scottish people, because he, more than any one else, made the wonderful world of Scottish music known in England and to the nations. He brought together, in “The Tea-Table Miscellany,” a collection of the choicest Scottish songs. He himself was a poetaster, rather than a great lyrist, and throughout his career proved himself a canny business man.