BURNS, ROBERT, the national poet of Scotland, and in all literature one of the most singular geniuses, was born at Alloway, in the neighbourhood of Ayr, January 25, 1759. The history of most of his life is so well known, and what is not well known requires so much conjecture and research to elucidate it, while so much space were needed for the elucidation, that a meagre sketch must here suffice. About Burns, as about Shelley, our knowledge is almost too abundant. We might prefer that poets should live only in the light of their works, and that their personal existences were as obscure as those of Shakespeare and of Homer. But, in the case of Burns, this penumbra is impossible. Even if we had not his letters and the records left by people who met him, his poems would tell all the tale. In his poems his story lives unconcealed and imperishable; his loves and hates, his vices, his mirth, his shame, his mockery, his bitterness, his repentance; there is not a mood but has its verse. There is no possibility here of keeping the poetry and blinking the poet.
Burns's family was of the humbler and less prosperous yeomanry. His father built the 'clay bigging' where he was born. When the boy was seven, the father, an intelligent man with a great belief in education, moved to Mount Oliphant, four miles south-east of Ayr. When the boy was thirteen, there was another move to Lochlea. But the elder Burns did not prosper, and died when the poet was twenty-five. His education began at a school at Alloway Mill, and was continued by Mr John Murdoch, as a kind of private tutor. This education was thoroughly literary; the boy was exercised in turning verse into prose, selecting synonyms, and so forth. A metrical Life of William Wallace was a favourite book; and his letters to Clarinda, and many other correspondents, owe something to a selection of correspondence of Queen Anne's reign. There is to be noticed in Burns not merely a natural fire and gift of expression, but a steady conscientious culture of the gift. He had scarce any Latin, and no Greek, but it is not easy to see how his poetical style could have been improved by a knowledge of these languages. With French he was acquainted, and however much one may believe in the educational influence of Greek, it is perfectly plain that true literary genius can dispense with it. Unlike Hogg, Burns had always more or less consciously studied the technique of his art. He only fails when he imitates the artificial English manners of his age. Among the early influences which give the ply to his genius, ought, no doubt, to be reckoned the popular tales and ballads and songs of Betty Davidson, an old woman who lived with the poet's family. One of the first books that Sir Walter Scott ever possessed was a set of ballads, collected by himself when a boy, bound in three volumes, and often rescued with difficulty from the servants. Burns grew up with the same old lays in his ears, not read on fly-sheets, but recited. Popular Scotch poetry and traditions are thus the soil, as it were, in which the genius of our two Scottish poets grew. But Scott saw life in the magic of romance. Burns beheld it in the light of every day.
Even in boyhood the education and native genius of Burns soon made him friends among people born to a better place at the table of life than his own. He went to a dancing-school, and began to make a great deal of love for himself and for less confident swains. He read Allan Ramsay, and began to write a little. Acquaintance with sailors and smugglers very considerably widened his moral ideas. He became a kind of rural Don Juan, though he had too much heart for the rôle. It is useless to deny that the tone of Scotch rustic morality about the relations of the sexes is, and was, very like the morality of Sicilian swains in the time of Theocritus. If Burns had to appear among the penitents, there were seven other sinners with him. The institution of wooing a bonny lassie 'when the kye comes hame,' the Oaristys, as Theocritus and Homer call it, has never been peculiar to Sicily. Burns was a man of more attractions and stronger passions than his neighbours, and when that has been said, there is really no more to say. A worse man, or a man with a worse heart, would easily have escaped from the entanglement with Jean Armour. A luckier man might have married Highland Mary, and been happy with his one true love, but such luck is given to few.
The death of Burns's father in 1784 left him to try to farm for himself. Farming without capital was, even then, like gambling without capital. One reverse meant ruin. Burns's husbandry went ill, he met Jean Armour, the entanglement began (he was then twenty-five), and out of his poverty, his passion, his despair, and his desperate mirth, came the extraordinary poetic harvest of 1785. To this year belong the Epistle to Davie, Death and Dr Hornbook (where the poet is very frank about his convivialities), The Twa Herds, The Jolly Beggars, Hallow E'en, The Cottar's Saturday Night, Holy Willie's Prayer, The Holy Fair, and The Address to a Mouse. If we had only the verses of this year, Burns would remain the greatest of known popular poets. His topics were topics at which, probably, dozens of other rural rhymers were hammering—the quarrels, lay and clerical, of the neighbourhood; banter of local notoriities; and sketches of rural manners. But then Burns touched them with the hand of an artist; he was a master already in this craft, and no poet, perhaps, of any language has ever attained such a wild perfection as he reaches in the reckless merriment of The Jolly Beggars:
Life is all a variorum,
We regard not how it goes;
Let them cant about decorum
Who have characters to lose.
That is the essence of Les Gueux; M. Richepin gives us a volume of the poetry of beggarhood, but a little is enough. The next year found Burns still busy; it was another annus mirabilis, though much of the verse is satirical, and necessarily less interesting. The Twa Dogs is a masterpiece of humour; The Lament and Despondency remind one of Regnier, who sinned in earnest and repentent in verse. In this year there was abundant trouble with Jean Armour; there was the betrothal to Highland Mary, and her death. Looking about him for money, that he might emigrate to Jamaica, Burns published the famous and much-sought-after Kilmarnock edition of his poems (600 copies, 1786). Their fame spread, Burns got a few pounds, and was just setting sail, when the praises and promises of admirers induced him to stay in Scotland. In winter he went to Edinburgh, met the wits and the great, was a lion, and tasted all the sweets of that estate, with much more than a necessary proportion of the bitter. He was as proud as he was poor, and no doubt fancied many slights and affronts that were in the mind of no one else. Here, too, Scott saw him, Scott being then a boy, and remembered the fire and beauty of his dark brown eyes. The poems were reprinted in 1787, and some money came in (about £500 ultimately). Burns erected a tomb over Fergusson, his ill-fated predecessor and master. On returning to the country, he was much made of, and, like Sir Lancelot in the romance, 'fell to his old love again,' Jean Armour. After a Highland tour with a blackguard dominie called Nicol, Burns went back to Edinburgh, and began the epistolary flirtations with Mrs M'Lehose (Clarinda). Neither the friendship with Nicol nor the affair with Clarinda was very creditable to Burns's taste. In the 'Letters to Clarinda,' as Mr R. L. Stevenson remarks, 'the design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a Bird of Paradise;' indeed, Burns elsewhere speaks of himself as 'an old hawk at the sport' of bringing his bird to his feet. Like Keats's love-letters, the letters to Clarinda should have been burned at once. But men will write, and women will print, while the world stands. By this date Mr Johnson had set about publishing his Scots Musical Museum, to which we owe all that is briefest and brightest of Burns. He contributed an astonishing number of the most beautiful, tender, passionate, and vivacious songs in any language, chiefly adapted to old Scotch airs, and moulded now and then on old Scotch words. An edition of Scotch songs, with the old words and the words of Burns, would be a valuable book, though not precisely a book for drawing-rooms. Many of the ancient ditties were of a singular license, though that does not make them less useful to the student of popular manners and of literary history. But very often, as in the deplorable case of Allan Ramsay's verses, the new songs have devoured and destroyed the old. Indeed, as Hogg's mother told Scott, printing popular songs generally kills their natural life, much more than the printing of substituted words.
In 1788 Burns was writing to Mrs M'Lehose of Jean Armour as 'the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the glory of the meridian sun.' Such are the loves of the poets: here is their gratitude—'in less than two months they were married,' Burns proving better than his word. 'I am the fool,' he wrote once, 'of my feelings and attachments.' He took a lease of Ellisland farm, on the Nith, near Dumfries, and next year received an appointment in the Excise. The following year again (1790) saw the birth of Tam o' Shanter, written in one day. By 1790 Ellisland, like all Burns's worldly enterprises, proved a failure. In November 1791 came his farewell to Clarinda (Mrs M'Lehose)—'Had we never loved so kindly;' and other nymphs had been loving rather blindly in the meantime. Burns left his farm, withdrew to Dumfries and to gauging, flirted with the French Revolution, drank, wrote songs, expressed opinions then thought Radical, and made himself unpopular with the local lairds. If he wrote lampoons on ladies at this date (1794), Horace, Martial, and Landon at different times behaved no better. In 1795 he became, one may be glad to note, a patriot again, and wrote songs against the French. He died—the deplorable causes of his death need not be lingered over—on July 21, 1796.
His country has been much scorned for her treatment of Burns. How was she to treat him? He deserved, what Socrates said he merited, 'to be kept at the public expense in the town-hall.' But he would not have accepted the offer had Scotland possessed a Prytaneum, and had Scotland made the offer. He did not try to live (as others in his position, and not without a share of his genius, have lived) by literature. He came too early. Such a poet now might actually exist on the proceeds of his poetry. What can the world do for such geniuses as Burns and Byron? They do not 'plough a straight furrow,' as the Greek proverb ran; their passions are part of their glory, their sorrow, and their shame. Their reward is immortality.
Burns is so much the greatest of Scotch poets that no other comes into the reckoning. Scott is a genius more universal, more genial, and a character infinitely more amiable and delightful. But for the mere essence of poetry and spirit of song, there is not the equal of Burns, not only in Scotch verse, but in the literature of the world. Sappho and Catullus are his peers; perhaps, indeed, no other lyric poet can be named with Sappho. The Tenth Muse does not compete with mortals, as the Nine sang against Thamyris the Thracian. She has a legendary magic, and dwells alone. But Catullus, with much of the fire, affection, and humour of Burns, has nothing like his range. Burns is not only a lyric poet of unsurpassed energy, and of an art usually unerring, but he is a satirist, and a descriptive poet second to few. He takes our hearts by storm; he rushes in with the fifes and pipes playing gloriously; he wins us at once by a natural intrepid gallantry of art. It is for this gay courage, or again for his brief natural sadness, that he is so esteemed, and for an art neither fairy-like, like Keats's; nor magical, like Virgil's; nor full of winning grace, like that of Horace; but simple, unaffected, completely appropriate, and classically clear. For loyal despair what can equal
Now a' is done that men can do,
And a' is done in vain; for loyal gallantry,
Oh, Kenmure's on and awa, Willie! for fresh beauty of nature,
When o'er the hill the eastern star; for proud content,
I hae a wife o' my ain! for jollity (the rhyme Scott parodied in his last year),
Blythe, blythe, and merry was she; for pathos,
John Anderson, my jo, John! and so on. Who can number all these watchwords of the Scotch people, to which a ready response is made by how many myriads of hearts all the world round! If he carried the famed theory of Aucassin rather far when he wrote
The kirk and state may gae to hell,
And I'll gae to my Anna, his example was not so attractive as to tempt many readers after him. It is not the faults of Burns, on the whole, nor his shamefaced glorying in them that remain in the memory and the imagination. We cannot believe that he has really encouraged the faults of his countrymen, as some say. There is no encouragement in that shamefaced glorying of 'The Daddy o't,' nor in his pitiful repentances. It is the good element in him, the tender heart, and proud courage and sound humour that survive, that inspire his verse, and communicate themselves to his hearers. On the rest the righteousness of Oblivion scatters his poppy, and leaves us only the memory of a great poet.
Bibliography.—Poems (Kilmarnock, 1786; Edinburgh, 1787; London, 1787; Edinburgh and London, 1793).—Editions, with Life, by Currie (4 vols. London, 1800); Allan Cunningham (8 vols. London, 1834); Chambers (with the poems and letters interspersed throughout the life, 4 vols. Edin. 1851; new ed. by W. Wallace, 1896); W. Scott Douglas (7 vols., with Life, &c., by Prof. Nichol, Edin. 1877–82; reissued 1896); Henley and Henderson (4 vols. 1896–97); and the present writer (1 vol. 1896). There were many minor editions in the centenary year from Burns's death, 1896, when enthusiastic commemorations were carried out, monuments erected, and a Burns exhibition held at Glasgow. See also the Life by Lockhart; by Shairp, in 'Men of Letters;' by Alexander Smith, in the 'Globe' series; the Essays by Carlyle, and by R. L. Stevenson (Men and Books); and the French Life and Works by Angellier (Paris, 1893).