the nobility or gentry it is for that they share the common virtues with the honest poor. The democratic inspiration of Burns is not his discontent. Indeed he never was discontented in the sense that he was a malcontent. He did not hate the superior classes. He hated their vices and their assumptions. He did not see wherein they were superior. He did not see that they worked. They looked like parasites to him. For money he did not care himself, but only for love and light and friendship and honesty and song-evermore song. And such songs as he produced in the midst of worry, poverty, illness, many duties, no one ever produced before. He reeled them off for Johnson and for Thomson without asking a penny. It was a labor of love, it was done for Scotland. He was not original, some say. Granted; he took his own where he found it, but nothing he borrowed he did not improve, nothing he touched he did not adorn. Burns was a nature poet, without any "return" from the worship of false gods. He was before Wordsworth. Burns was the first voice in the world, almost, since Villon, who gave poetic speech to the thoughts of the common man, even of the outcast. Burns' "nature" was a natural nature, not the pasteboard pinchback nature of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Burns was no sheer sentimentalist. His nature work is never overdone. "The pathetic fallacy" had no hold upon him. Satirist that he was, like Voltaire, he had a vast common sense. His epistle to a young friend, and the one to Davie, are examples of this, and in the same category comes many another poem and song. Burns' judgments, upon himself and others, are always fair, when satire is not his aim, and his didactic verse is more detailed in its observation, more widely diffused in its applicability, and more deeply psychological than Polonius' advice to Laertes-for old Polonius is a bore, and Burns' preachments have always the salt of humor. A sensible man and a democrat? "For a' that," is the answer. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp." A loving man- a singer of the love of comrades in which he antedated our own Whitman. But ye whom social pleasure charms Come to my bowl, come to my arms For thus the royal mandate ran 'Tis he fulfills great nature's plan, At Dumfries came the end, July 21st, 1796. He died pestered by collectors, begging a few pounds for which he promised the worth in songs. He died worn out by living. He had sung Scotland back to something like nationhood. He had sung the glories of honest manhood, as opposed to hereditary distinction. He had proclaimed the divinity of the common man. and had given the world its most effective armory against bigotry, cant, hyprocisy and class separatism. He gave shibboleths to patriotic democracy in all lands. He left us love songs that ease the world's heartache, little simplicities and particularities and personalities of utterance that are universal in their scope and feeling. "John Anderson, My Jo," "Afton Water," "My Love is Like a Red Red Rose," "My Dearie." He has sung friendship even as he has sung love, matchlessly, to Glencairn, to Simpson, to Lapraik, to James Smith: For me, I swear by sun and moon, Just gaun to see you, And every other pair that's done, Burns never attacked religion, nor worth of any kind. Indeed he had a passion for honesty. He believed in honesty in poetry. That is why, I believe, he has never written anything in literary English that compares with the things he has done in the Scotch dialect. Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire, That's a' the learning I desire, Then tho' I drudge thro' dub and mire, At plough or cart, My muse, though hamely in attire, May touch the heart. His philosophy: It is faith in good works. If happiness have not her seat And center in the breast, We may be wise or rich or great, We never can be blest. And charity for all, even for the Devil! What a stroke of sublime pantheism is his declaration that the light that leads astray is light from heaven. The poetry of Burns has become the thought-stuff of the world, wherever men care for the primal virtues, wherever they strive for liberty. His countrymen have carried his gospel abroad, wide as the waters be; and around the world, the doctrine of individual worth has made and is making headway; human rights rather than rank rights, or money rights are coming into wider and wider supremacy, and, insomuch as Robert Burns had such tremendous share in this it demonstrates the truth of Shelley's saying that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." ON N THE Burns Night of 1911, the Club recorded tribute to the memory of a late member, Joseph A. Graham, who had been one of the zealous, steadfast promoters of the Burns Cottage at the World's Fair: "He was of that nature to which the gospel of Burns appealed strongly. He viewed men with the tolerance bred of a newspaper life. He loved dogs. We, of the Burns Club, rceall fondly the charming personality of our late associate and we voice our tribute to his memory, borrowing the lines: "Heav'n rest his saul, whare'er he be! Is the wish o' many mae than me; Ae social, honest man want we AF FTER the dinner of 1911, Professor J. L. Lowes, of the chair of English at Washington University, took the Burns Club to an unusual viewpoint of the poet's genius. He led his hearers back to the English poets of the eighteenth century. He described and illustrated the repressed, pent-up, tamed spirit of that period until its very smoldering presence seemed to fill the chamber. And then with sudden transition, he caused to burst forth, without bounds, the soulful flame of Burns. The honor guest of the Club upon this Burns Night was David Franklin Houston, chancellor of Washington University, later Secretary of Agriculture in the Cabinet of President Woodrow Wilson. |