BURNS AND HIS RACE.

These two articles were contributed by the Right Hon. J. M. Robertson, P.C., to The Monthly Criterion for January and February, 1928, and are reprinted in the Burns Chronicle by kind permission of Mr. Robertson and of the Editor of that periodical. (Published by Messrs. Faber and Gwyer, Ltd., 24 Russell Square, London, W.C.2.)

To both gentlemen the Executive Committee of the Burns Federation here records its thanks for the privilege of bringing to the notice of readers of its official publication this notable piece of criticism of Burns and of certain of his critics.

I.

An able though arrogant critic has summed up that of the thirteen prominent British poets of the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth, only two have had their reputations altogether unaffected by the violent changes of literary fashion in the subsequent period. Those two, he declares, are Coleridge and Burns. "Each of these two," he continues, "has written a good deal which the world will willingly let die; but Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his comparatively small way, have done a certain amount of work so thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it into question or ever will." And this, written over thirty years ago, is probably as broadly true to-day as it was then-broadly true, that is, though it might be questioned whether the fame of Keats has ever retrograded since he was really recognised, a generation after his death.

The first thought set up by the generalisation is of the remarkable difference between the two bracketed poets. They are cherished for practically opposite reasons. Coleridge is the poet of the beauty of strangeness, of gramarye; and his artistic triumph is in the

felicity of the technique by which he has rendered it. The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and Christabel form a category by themselves in English poetry, inimitable, consummate, undecaying in their charm. The rest of his poetic work, in mass, has little of that distinction, and save for a few pieces is little prized. Burns, we might say, is at the other pole of æsthetic practice.

Not that he is outside the realm of beauty even in his humoristic narrative or his pictures of rustic life. For his countrymen these had their own beauty; a beauty of rhyme and rhythm and phrase, lending poetic charm to daily life: the beauty to which they were and are receptive. For the eighteenth century it was a satisfying beauty, both in England and Scotland; and not merely a demotic thing. Lamb was adoring Burns while Coleridge was beaming on Bowles; and Wordsworth and Byron are memorably at one on Byron's verdict that Burns is" in the first class of his art." Hallowe'en is a true rustic idyll, with one quite beautiful stanza; and for most people The Cotter's Saturday Night had a grave as well as a rustic beauty. It is the central paradox of life that men attain happiness only in seeking special ends, not conceived as happiness; and so, in plastic and poetic art, beauty is the fruit of a dominant craving, not for abstract beauty of form or colour or speech as such, but for truth of perception or conception. The dominion of an ideal of verbal beauty, sought for its own sake, is the motive of most of the poetry that fails, because the seeker cannot create the body which the desired beauty should clothe.

Burns strode straight towards the goal of poetic truth, seeing beauty in that if anywhere. But this was not a high poetic beauty in that literary sense of the word which takes account of all the verbal and rhythmic resources of English poetry: the beauty that, at their best, belongs to Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell: the rich beauty that in eighteenth century

poetry, as in prose, was to be lost, and was to be recovered in large only by the generation who came after Burns, and of which Blake in England was the sudden forerunner, as was Burns in Scotland in respect of the songs and stanzas in which he created a beauty not to be transcended in its kind. He is in the main the poet of direct, vivid, veridical speech, not of esoteric loveliness of image and cadence and alembicated language.

Coleridge is one of the first of the new magicians. His great poetry is moonlit; the mass of Burns that is read by his countrymen is hearty daylight work: even his raid into the witch-world is humorous, racy, vernacular, admirable for its gusto, its freshness, its stark strength, but seeking no witchery of word music; creating not beauty of phrase or cadence or reverie but the charm of vividness of impression and description and keenness of entertainment. Burns is the poet of the actual even in diablerie; and his use of the unearthly is in the key of mirth. "Tam o' Shanter is a companion piece to "The Jolly Beggars."

And yet those two utterly different poets, who approach each other only on the unæsthetic and unpoetic ground of their politics, are admittedly alike enduring in their steady hold on admiration; one catering for the lovers of sheer æsthetic beauty, the other, so to speak, for a nation. The fames of Shelley and Wordsworth ebb and flow, alternately discounted and partially restored these do but increase.

One says that Burns is the poet of a nation—this as against the clever critics who call him the poet of a parish. He is the only one in the list of thirteen who can be spoken of as a national poet. And that, doubtless, is an adventitious qualification in so far as it implies a vogue apart from strictly poetic merit. But the fact in itself is significant, and enters into the critical problem. It must sometimes occur even to patriotic Scots to realise that Burns is far from being typical of

the mass of his race, whether as they are known to each other or as they are more or less humorously regarded by their neighbours. Scotland is for Punch the land of Aberdeen, where Jews cannot prosper by reason of native supremacy in thrift and in what are reckoned Semitic arts. To the eye of the native, nineteenth century Scotland was a land of Kirks-Established, Free, United Presbyterian, and a dozen more select "bodies"; of eloquent and influential preachers, of kirk collections, of General Assemblies, of Sabbatarian austerities. And through all those zones, in all those decades, Burnsthe author of The Jolly Beggars and Holy Willie's Prayer and Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut, the singer of tumultuous and obstreperous life, the humorist, the satirist, the rollicking songster, the tinder-hearted amorist of so many lamentable entanglements, the bard of whisky and the tavern, remained the national poet, rarely rebuked even in the pulpit.

But to note that apparent incongruity is to remember that, after all, national poets so-called are in general anything but "typical" of their race. Who shall say that Dante, as personality and as artist, is typical of Italy, whether mediæval or modern? Machiavelli is visibly more so. And is either Goethe or Schiller, one reckoned the poet of the educated, the other the poet of the people, typical of the Germany we know? Neither was a devotee of race: neither cared for "Macht." Ethically and politically they were cosmopolitans. There is more of Germanism in Heine, the Jew.

But yet again, in what sense is Shakespeare typical of England? Impersonality, universality of outlook, intense perception at once of the actuality and the nothingness of life, reverie that outsoars and outdives Dante, supreme mastery of speech-these are not the attributes of the John Bull of Punch, or the John Bull of France, or Germany, or the United States. The national poet and dramatist is really no more "typical " of his people

than are Oliver Goldsmith and Dickens. Had we not better say, once for all, that even as men do not fall in love with duplicates of themselves, nations take to their hearts poets and writers who win them as much by difference as by community of cast; no less, nay, much more, by contrast of temperament and personality than by resemblance to themselves, singly or in mass?

The one great quality in common between such profoundly different spirits as Shakespeare and Burns is just humanness, wealth of relation to humanity, intensity of interest in its aspects, its greatnesses, its littlenesses, its follies a kind of community which sets at naught national environments and proclivities, class divisions, and mere patriotisms, and makes of one kin and kind Shakespeare and Dante and Burns and Béranger and Goethe and Schiller. The rest is a matter of language and specialty and grade of poetic art.

For Burns, be it remembered, has always had an English and a European and an American audience as well as a Scottish. Herein he makes an interesting contrast with William Barnes, the scholarly cleric and poet who chose to put the bulk of his effort into the dialect of Dorsetshire. Coventry Patmore, the legislatorial critic who picked out Coleridge and Burns for their security of tenure, has made a strenuous attempt to put Barnes in the front rank, albeit of the class which we may label that of "the great minor poets," in which he places Herbert, Suckling, Herrick, Burns, and Blake, though he admits that " it would be absurd to call Barnes a poet of the first magnitude or even the second." His praise of him as one of the last of the minor classics, however, appears to be definitely grounded on the "Poems in the Dorsetshire Dialect," not on the "Poems in ordinary English.'

Now, this claim for Barnes may suffice to raise and dispose of the verdicts alike of those who call Burns the poet of a parish and of those who call him the poet of a