Robert Burns: How To Know Him

and he ends with the hope that if patronage could be abolished and the lairds forced to give

More light is thrown on Burns's positive attitude in religious matters by his Epistle to McMath, a young New Licht minister in Tarbolton. From the evidences of the letters, we are justified in accepting at its face value the profession of reverence for true religion made by Burns in this epistle; his hatred of the sham needs no corroboration.

TO THE REV. JOHN M'MATH

Enclosing a Copy of Holy Willie's Prayer, which he had requested, September 17, 1785

A further fling at orthodoxy appeared in The Ordination, a piece written to comfort the Kilmarnock liberals when an Auld Licht minister was selected for the second charge there. The tone is again one of ironical congratulation, and Burns describes the rejoicings of the elect with infinite zest. Two stanzas on the church music will illustrate his method.

The period within which these satires were written was short—1785 and 1786; but some three years later, on the prosecution of a liberal minister, Doctor McGill of Ayr, for the publication of A Practical Essay on the Death of Jesus Christ, which was charged with teaching Unitarianism, Burns took up the theme again. The Kirk's Alarm is a rattling “ballad,” full of energy and scurrilous wit, but, like many of its kind, it has lost much of its interest through the great amount of personal detail. A few stanzas will show that, even after his absence from local politics during his Edinburgh sojourn, he had lost none of his gusto in belaboring the Ayrshire Calvinists.

It was inevitable from the nature and purpose of these satirical poems that, however keen an interest they might raise in their time and place, a large part of that interest should evaporate in the course of time. Yet it would be a mistake to regard their importance as limited to raising a laugh against a few obscure bigots. The evils that Burns attacked, however his verses may be tinged with personal animus and occasional injustice, were real evils that existed far beyond the county of Ayr; and in the movement for enlightenment and liberation from these evils and their like that was then sweeping over Scotland, the wit and invective of the poet played no small part. The development that followed did, indeed, take a direction that he was far from foreseeing. The moderate party, which he supported, gradually gained the upper hand in the Kirk, and, upholding as it did the system of patronage, became more and more associated with the aristocracy who bestowed the livings. The result was that the moderate clergy degenerated under prosperity and lost their spiritual zeal; while their opponents, chastened by adversity, became the champions of the autonomy of the church, and, in the “ten years' conflict” that broke out little more than a generation after the death of Burns, showed themselves of the stuff of the martyrs. It would be impossible to trace the extent of the influence of the poet on the purging of orthodoxy or on the limitation of ecclesiastical despotism, since his work was in accord with the drift of the times; but it is fair to infer that, especially among the common people who were less likely to be reached by more philosophical discussion, his share was far from inconsiderable.

The poetical value of the satires is another matter. It may be questioned whether satire is ever essentially poetry, as poetry has been understood for the last hundred years. The dominant mood of satire is too antagonistic to imagination. But if we restrict our attention to the characteristic qualities of verse satire—vividness in depicting its object, blazing indignation or bitter scorn in its attitude, and wit in its expression, we shall be forced to grant that Burns achieved here notable success. Of the rarer power of satire to rise above the local, temporal, and personal to the exhibiting of universal elements in human life, there are comparatively few instances in Burns. The Address to the Unco Guid is perhaps the finest example; and here, as usually in his work, the approach to the general leads him to drop the scourge for the sermon.

In his tendency to preach, Burns was as much the inheritor of a national tradition as in any of his other characteristics. A strain of moralizing is well marked in the Scottish poets even before the Reformation, and, since the time of Burns, the preaching Scot has been notably exemplified not only in a professed prophet like Carlyle, but in so artistic a temperament as Stevenson. Nor did consciousness of his failures in practise embarrass Burns in the indulgence of the luxury of precept. Side by side with frank confessions of weakness we find earnest if not stern exhortations to do, not as he did, but as he taught. And as Scots have an appetite for hearing as well as for making sermons, his didactic pieces are among those most quoted and relished by his countrymen. The morally elevated but poetically inferior closing stanzas of The Cotter's Saturday Night are an instance in point; others are the morals appended to To a Mouse and To a Daisy, and to a number of his rhyming epistles.

These epistles are among the most significant of his writings for the reader in search of personal revelations. The Epistle to James Smith contains the much-quoted stanza on the poet's motives:

Here, as often, he contrasts his own reckless impulsive temper with that of prudent calculation:

The Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet, deserves to be quoted in full. It contains the final phrasing of the central point of Burns's ethics, the Scottish rustic's version of that philosophy of benevolence with which Shaftesbury sought to warm the chill of eighteenth-century thought:

The mood of this poem is Burns's middle mood, lying between the black melancholy of his poems of despair and remorse and the exhilaration of his more exalted bacchanalian and love songs—the mood, we may infer, of his normal working life. We may again observe the correspondence between the change of dialect and change of tone in stanzas nine and ten, the increase of artificiality coming with his literary English and culminating in the unspeakable “tenebrific scene.” His humor returns with his Scots in the last verse.

EPISTLE TO DAVIE, A BROTHER POET

The didactic tendency reaches its height in the Epistle to a Young Friend. Here there is no personal confession, but a conscious and professed sermon, unrelated, as the last line shows, to the practise of the preacher. It is, of course, only poetry in the eighteenth-century sense—

and as such it should be judged. The critics who have reacted most violently against the attempted canonization of Burns have been inclined to sneer at this admirable homily, and to insinuate insincerity. But human nature affords every-day examples of just such perfectly sincere inconsistency as we find between the sixth stanza and Burns's own conduct; while not inconsistency but a very genuine rhetoric inspires the characteristic quatrain which closes the seventh.

EPISTLE TO A YOUNG FRIEND

The epigrams, epitaphs, elegies, and other occasional verses thrown off by Burns and diligently collected by his editors need little discussion. They not infrequently exhibit the less generous sides of his character, and but seldom demand rereading on account of their neatness or felicity or energy. One may be given as an example:

ON JOHN DOVE, INNKEEPER

CHAPTER V

DESCRIPTIVE AND NARRATIVE POETRY

The “world of Scotch drink, Scotch manners, and Scotch religion” was not, Matthew Arnold insisted, a beautiful world, and it was, he held, a disadvantage to Burns that he had not a beautiful world to deal with. This famous dictum is a standing challenge to any critic who regards Burns as a creator of beauty. It is true that when Burns took this world at its apparent worst, when Scotch drink meant bestial drunkenness, when Scotch manners meant shameless indecency, when Scotch religion meant blasphemous defiance, he created The Jolly Beggars, which the same critic found a “splendid and puissant production.” We must conclude, then, that sufficient genius can sublimate even a hideously sordid world into a superb work of art, which is presumably beautiful.

But the verdict passed on the Scottish world of Burns is not to be taken without scrutiny. A review of those poems of Burns that are primarily descriptive will recall to us the chief features of that world.

Let us begin with The Cotter's Saturday Night, Burns's tribute to his father's house. Let us discard the introductory stanza of dedication, as not organically a part of the poem. The scene is set in a gray November landscape. The tired laborer is shown returning to his cottage, no touch of idealization being added to the picture of physical weariness save what comes from the feeling for home and wife and children. Then follow the gathering of the older sons and daughter, the telling of the experiences of the week, and the advice of the father. The daughter's suitor arrives, and the girl's consciousness as well as the lover's shyness are delicately rendered. Two stanzas in English moralize the situation, and for our present purpose may be ignored. The supper of porridge and milk and a bit of cheese is followed by a reverent account of family prayers, the father leading, the family joining in the singing of the psalm. And as they part for the night, the poet is carried away into an elevated apostrophe to the country whose foundations rest upon such a peasantry, and closes with a patriotic prayer for its preservation.

Another social occasion is the subject of Halloween. The poem, with Burns's notes, is a mine of folk-lore, but we are concerned with it as literature. Here the tone is humorous instead of reverent, the characters are mixed, the selection is more widely representative. With complete frankness, the poet exhibits human nature under the influence of the mating instinct, directed by harmless, age-old superstitions. The superstitions are not attacked, but gently ridiculed. The fundamental veracity of the whole is seen when we realize that, in spite of the strong local color, it is psychologically true for similar festivities among the peasantry of all countries.

HALLOWEEN[4]

FOOT-NOTES TO HALLOWEEN

[The foot-notes to this poem are those supplied by Burns himself in the Kilmarnock edition.]