literature implied in conducting a more or less literary paper. Even, I wrote about Burns from time to time with that fatal facility and felicity of half knowledge, or no knowledge, which enables the journalist, by means of tags and cliches and generalities, successfully to counterfeit omniscience. But, at the word of the Burns Club, I have read my Burns and for my continuing sin of many years, my punishment, involving yours, is here and now. What shall I say of Burns to you gentlemen who know him by heart, who have enshrined him in your heart of heart, who have fondled that first edition in which his own hand and pen filled out for his friend Geddes the lacunae in the poems indicated by asterisks or dashes? I ask your pardon for trying to say anything; but the retribution of my long dereliction must be fulfilled. It was not, at first, with me as with Keats, on first reading Chapman's "Homer"-no new planet swam into my ken. I found myself rather in the attitude of our all too nearly forgotten humorist, Bill Nye, when he first witnessed the play of "Hamlet"; it was very good, but it was too full of quotations. As the reading progressed and the marking of the passages, it was borne in upon me how great a poet was Burns by the number of his lines that have been practically absorbed into the language of the people. There they were, enough to make a biggish bibelot-passage after passage, so familiar that even I knew them. And often these passages were whole poems. Then was impressed upon me that Burns is a world-poet, the poet not only of the man in the street, but of the poet, and I stood like stout Balboa and all his men, viewing the Pacific in a mute surprise, "silent upon a peak of Darien." But now I rejoice that I dined late at that feast, that I came to it with some experience of sin and folly not unlike the poet's own. The poet has told his life story in his song, and told it with a splendid simplicity, in the language of the Scots farmer and peasant. When he essays literary English, speaking generally, the magic, the glamour vanishes. What a life of copious content was that of Burns, from the hour when a "blast o' Januar' win' blew hansel in on Robin" to the last hour in which he passed away after an execration upon the agent, Mathew Penn, who was hounding him for a "damned haberdasher's" bill. Whatever he did with his life, he lived it every hour of it. He came into the world. the heir to a remote romantic tradition of sacrifice by his ancestors in the cause of the hapless, worthless, but fascinating Stuarts. His father was no peasant, but a farmer, strong-willed but not "hard," a man of some education, of a tendency decidedly generous and humane in religious matters, when we contrast it with the dour creed of the time and place. His mother was more emotional, more sympathetic and she possessed a wide knowledge of Scottish folk song, supplemented later by a still more encyclopaedic knowledge of that subject by an elderly neighbor, Jenny Davidson. Thus Burns came, splendidly dowered in head and heart, gifted with a grasp, a hunger for all of life. Good sense and sentiment, reason and passion, all his days, waged a mighty struggle in his heart. The push and the pull of these forces gave him the full swing of the pendulum -all the ecstacies of life, from rejoicing to regret. His spirit seized upon each detail of experience, warmed it, fashioned it into forms of perdurable beauty which still speak their message to all the children of men. Burns had the ink in his veins and as things moved his thought or his emotion he wrote them off. Life was the matter of his song. Yet when a tale comes in my head, As whyles they're like to be my dead, (O sad disease!) I kittle up my rustic reed: It gies me ease. Therefore, while I would not minimize the poet's woes, I would say that their very intensity made for their more perfect expression, in which, even as we, the poet himself found an exquisite delight of their communicableness. He suffered for his and our gain. His early days at the plough's tail, doing a man's work at fifteen, gave him touch with nature, a touch delicate or strong, as need was, sure, brief, direct, miraculously comprehensive when he imparts his thought to us. No great poet wastes so few words as Burns in giving us a thought or a picture and no poet's taste is truer at its multifarious best. The eye for nature never better justified itself than in such a poem as the elegy of "Matthew Henderson," the "Westlin Wind" or "Halloween," with their landscapes done in a few strokes, full of light and the sense of the goodliness of the world of sky and wood and wimpling water and the wee timorous beasties of the wild, the field and fold. As we read that long and painful iliad of the successive failures of the Burns farms, were not our hearts light we should die, for pity of it, did we not remember that out of it all he drew a philosophy and a poetry full of "the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love." He early knew his Bible history, his Pope, his Shakespeare, his Locke on the "Human Understanding," and he read Allan Ramsay's poems while he followed the plow, distinguishing the sincerity from the fustian, for Schoolmaster Murdoch had made him no mean critical vivisectionist. Song and sorrow were tenants of his heart in the economic tragedy of the farm at Mount Oliphant, but the rack-renting factor thereof wrought better than he knew, for out of his persecution and extortion sprang the poet's never-to-be suppressed sympathy for the House of Have-Not as against the House of Have, the first utterance of which we find in the "Twa Dogs," who are very dog of dog and yet searchers of the secrets of man's miseries high and low. After Mount Oliphant, Lochlea. Another poor farm; but if Lochlea was unprofitable it was picturesque and Burns could steep his soul in scenery. He was now sixteen, he had been to dancing school and he was in love—and never after out of it. Poor he was, yet kings might have envied him the stuff of poetry and youth that was working in him, as, certainly, he never envied kings. After Lochlea, where the poet's father died, leaving so little that Burns and his brother had to claim their wages to get something to start life upon anew, after Burns' flax-weaving factory had burned to a Bacchic accompaniment, came the farm at Mossgiel. But Burns had studied life, as youth will, at Irvine and Kirkoswald; he had met with smugglers and sailors and roysterers; he had found the good fellows who are so bad for good fellows; drink and the doxies fascinated him, for his was the temperament that finds generous pleasure resistless. He was yet to find that Pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, the bloom is shed; Or like the snow fa's in the river A moment white then melts forever. Much that was bad had Burns learned by this time, but one supreme good thing he learned; the goodness of so-called bad people; and the meanness or badness of self-styled good people came to him shortly after, to the dear delight of all the world and the more perfect confusion of Hypocrisy, for ever and ever, amen. It was at Kirkoswald he was refused by Mary Morison, who thought herself too good for him—and she but a serving girl. This was not an incident calculated to sweeten the poet's disposition, but long after, remembering, he forgave her and avenged himself nobly in a song in which her name is still sweet in the mouths of men. Mossgiel yielded two bad crops, but at Mossgiel Burns began to write, and the poetry crop was goldenly rich and the landlord could take no toll of that in unearned increment. In this time, sore beset with trial, harassed by apparent failure, the plowman gave us "Halloween," "To a Mouse," "The Cotter's Saturday Night," "The Address to the De'il," "The Jolly Beggars," "The Farmer's Salutation," "The Twa Dogs," "The Death of Dr. Hornbook," "The Mountain Daisy." What a sweep, what a reach, what a revel of perception, of wit, of tenderness, of humor, of kindness, of satire and grotesquerie! This alone would have set up an ordinary poet in immortality. And Burns knew. he was a poet by this time, and felt the spirit of consecration upon him; he made now his high resolve to do something for "puir auld Scotland"-"to sing a song at least." These poems passed from hand to hand, over the countryside, and never before was such verse so circulated since certain "sugar'd sonnets" of Shakespeare's among his friends. They were composed at the plow, and then, after the "countra wark," were written out, on a plain deal table, in an ill lighted garret -an humble workshop to which to-day the world repairs as to one of humanity's holy places. And all the better was this flash of singing for that through the meditations at the plow there flitted the face and form and echoes of the voice of Jean Armour. Was ever true poetry written without a woman as part, if not all, the inspiration? I believe not. The great work of the world, in all lines, is usually done for, and to, an audience of one-a woman, though not necessarily throughout each work the same woman. A curious story that of Jean Armour, and in it Burns does not always figure well; he wrote some things about her that are infamous, though not more infamous than things he wrote later about Mrs. Riddle, whom he had offended. But she stung him into song. She and her father's treatment of him contributed to the sentiment of the "Mouse" and the "Daisy" a finer strain of wistfulness and gave to the satires an added biting power. The affair between Jean and Rob became a scandal; it broke into the kirk; it helped Burns to espouse the liberal cause the more heartily in the war |