SOME BURNS FICTIONS. S the Nasmyth portrait is responsible for the popular conception of Burns's physical appearance, his mental constitution is similarly based on the pen-and-ink sketches of his early biographers. There is this wide difference, however, between the two which must be specially noted, that whereas Nasmyth's work was the result of personal sittings, the pen-and-ink sketches referred to were drawn, almost without exception, from the recollections and descriptions of others. Both conceptions are very impatient of being disturbed, especially the latter, for reasons which are obvious. Whenever a Burns student, by original research or sifting of the evidence, ventures to dissent from the received opinions, he is immediately assailed-not always by the detractors of Burns, but oftentimes by professed admirers who weakly deprecate the stirring of controversial waters. I confess I never could understand admirers of this sort, and the more I study the biographies of Burns the less sympathy I have with them. Their attitude is explainable only on the grounds that they accept all that has been said to his discredit as true, no matter who has said it nor whence they drew their information. It never occurs to them, apparently, to put the reliability of the informers and their information to proof in the light of the mass of contradictory and qualifying facts which have been placed upon the record since the earlier biographies were written. Heron wrote in 1797, Currie in 1800, Josiah Walker in 1811, Peterkin in 1815, Gilbert Burns in 1820, Lockhart in 1828, and Robert Chambers in 1851. One has only to scan the fragmentary but invaluable spade-work of Scott Douglas, and Dr Wallace's new edition of Chambers to become aware of the vast amount of new evidence which has been collected in the half-century that has intervened between the early and later biographies. Is a man, therefore, either a fanatic or special pleader who undertakes the task of thoroughly sifting the evidence in the light of these later facts, and subjecting it to every legitimate test, in order that the truth be made clear ? It is this type of Burnsian, and he alone, who is now able to write anything about Burns that is worth reading. The conventional path has been beaten so hard that we need not wonder that a man of Henley's qualities and abilities refused to follow it. That he diverged to the left when he forsook it, was inevitable in a man obsessed with the belief that the worship of Burns is either a heathenish idolatry or an organised hypocrisy, and the worshippers a concourse of besotted pagans whose periodic pæans of praise are but the eructations of capacious stomachs distended with an overdose of haggis and whisky. And so he falls to hammering the "idol's feet of clay." Henley does not add to the list of fictions, though he suggests one or two more by the "ambiguous giving out" method of manufacturing data. The tropical growth of these fictions when left in undisturbed possession of the field, and the sinister influence they exert in the formation of opinion, cannot be better illustrated than by the following communication, received in July of this year, from a valued correspondent in Australia-a licentiate of the Church-in which he says:— as The Queensland War Cry referred to Burns in a recent sketch Scotland's Prodigal Son," and I have never found any exception taken to the title. When I came out in the Runic (September, 1906), & wealthy Victorian, & Scot by birth, was rather annoyed because I would not grant that the Pcet had seventy illegitimate children. I wish you would ccme this way, or send out a Scottish Commission. We can't expect the Australian to master our Doric, but he might be taught the truth akcut our Poet. I came across the following reference to Burns last Sunday, and thought I would forward it to you as a sample of Harmsworth's Popular Science. I do not know whether or not that work has much circulation in Australia, but, in any case, there is too much of this sort of "science' spoken and written abcut Burns. EXTRACT FROM Harmsworth's Popular Science, PART 24: "The writer was recently at Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, where, together with a company of tourists from many parts of the world, he was shown the large tumbler used by Robert Burns, for just a wee drop before breakfast,' as our guide happily explained. The joke was well rewarded with what Solomon once compared to the crackling of thorns under a pot,' but one of the company remembered how that tumbler killed the Poet, ended in disgrace a rare young life, and robbed mankind of an unimaginable legacy of song." The fictions here are of colossal dimensions, and the murderous jokes on a correspondingly gigantic scale. In most cases there is no evil intent or set purpose in retailing rubbish of this sort; it is simply ignorance on the part of the narrator, who knows nothing about Burns beyond general impressions, whence derived he knows not, but which he has allowed to take possession of his mind without let or hindrance. A year or two ago, an eminent medical authority in London,* when lecturing on " Alcohol and Adolescence" to an audience of young men, pointed the moral by bracketing Burns and Edgar Allan Poe as outstanding examples of youthful indulgence; and, more recently, one of our foremost Scottish novelists, who cannot be accused of any lack of admiration for our national Poet, represents him as a constant frequenter of Nanse Tinnock's alehouse during the Mossgiel period of his career. Both have been misled, and both grievously wrong the memory of Burns. He had reached the mature age of twenty-seven before he left Mossgiel for Edinburgh, and we have it on the authority of his brother Gilbert, that up to that date he had lived a most frugal and temperate life. The expenditure of each of the brothers while in Mossgiel never exceeded £7 per annum, so that, suppose the Poet had elected to go naked and spent his whole allowance on riotous living, his potations could neither have been frequent nor deep. Nanse Tinnock, when twitted with *Sir Thomas Clouston. 66 66 Burns's reference to her in the Earnest Cry and Prayer," petulantly replied : Confound the fallow! he never bocht a mutchkin in my house a' the days o' his life." Burns was not at any period of his career an abstainer (nobody was in those days), yet nothing is more certain than that in his youth and early manhood he was a sober and temperate man. This tradition of Burns's dissolute habits is most deadly and damaging-most deadly because it contains the grain. of truth which gives colour to the lie-most damaging because it remained uncontradicted so long that it was generally believed it admitted neither of contradiction, qualification, nor excuse. In spite of the voluntary exculpatory evidence of Alexander Findlater, John Syme, Mr Gray, and that contained in the early minutes of the Greenock and Dumfries Clubs, the vague charges of Heron and Currie still survive in their original vagueness. Currie's edition held the field for more than half a century; it is therefore not surprising that the tradition acquired such volume and intensity when we consider that Peterkin's vindication was belated, and never achieved a tithe of Currie's circulation. The general reader for long received Currie's biography as the gospel of Burns, and it is astonishing to find it still so received in quarters which ought to know better in the light now available. No charge of drunkenness has ever been whispered, even by his worst enemy, during the earlier part of his career. All charges of the kind are compressed into the last four years of his earthly sojourn, when he was between thirtyfour and thirty-eight years of age, and consequently long past the age when the alcohol habit is generally believed to be formed. I have bracketed Heron and Currie it will be observed, but there is a wide gulf between the men and the influence exerted by their writings. Heron was disreputable; a man of overweening vanity; an ostentatious fool whenever fortune smiled on him; and ultimately a helpless dipsomaniac, who ended a vicious career in poverty and misery as a literary hack in London. He had some personal acquaintance with Burns, and, it is said, never forgave him for the jocular lampoon of his failings which will be found in the Poet's rhyming "Epistle to Dr Blacklock." But his connection with Burns never approached intimacy, and he was not resident in Dumfries or its neighbourhood during the closing years of the Poet's life. What he writes about him is therefore neither more nor less than hearsay and gossip, collected as material for the magazine article he wrote shortly after Burns's death, which, strange to say, is now very seldom alluded to. 66 In Dr Currie, on the other hand, we have a most respectable man ; a medical practitioner of repute in Liverpool, of some local fame as a literary man, yet withal greatly overweighted with the task he undertook; and summed up as a Burns biographer by Charles Lamb in the terse and pregnant Latin aphorism, Ne sutor ultra crepidam." He personally knew positively nothing about Burns; he never saw him but once, and that for a few minutes on the streets of Dumfries; and his chief motive in editing the Liverpool edition was the honouring and saving oneto provide funds for the maintenance of Burns's widow and family. This charity hid the multitude of his editorial sins, and conferred upon his work a value which it did not intrinsically possess as the product of an unprejudiced, well-informed, and sympathetic mind. Whence did he derive his information? Ostensibly, as he himself says, from Gilbert Burns and John Syme, who went to Liverpool in the autumn of 1797 and remained some time with Currie, instructing and explaining, till he thought himself primed enough to begin his gigantic task. Neither Gilbert nor Syme had anything further to do with it. proofs were submitted to either of them; consequently, Currie alone is responsible for what appeared in print. When questioning began as to the general correctness of the Dumfries part of the narrative, Gilbert distinctly stated that he knew nothing about his brother's life in No |