That the verse occurs in a stall-ballad is only of weight if the ballad were printed before the song appeared, and so far this has not been made out. Of the other songs, that on the Battle of Sherramuir is merely the result of cutting down an older ballad by the Rev. John Barclay, and others of the series may be more or less based on lost originals. In one of the poet's letters a great enthusiasm is expressed for the older scenes of Scottish history, a desire to "sit and muse on those once hard-contended fields, where Caledonia, rejoicing, saw her bloody lion borne through broken ranks to victory and fame; and, catching the inspiration, to pour the deathless names in song." The ambition was not realized in the way one might have expected; with one notable exception the battlefields of which he sings are those of civil strife -Sherramuir, Killiecrankie, and Culloden. That exception is Bannockburn, a scene which he viewed with feelings of excited patriotism, and the story of which interested him more than almost anything else in history. When in 1793 thoughts of Liberty and Independence were surging in his mind, the theme returned to him in connection with an old tune said to have been the Scottish march upon that occasion,† and so arose * Letter to the Earl of Buchan (Feb. 3, 1787); the words echo some lines in the Address to Edinburgh, and the same idea recurs in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop (March 25, 1787). + Some sympathy for the French Revolution had also a share in the production; "the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming mania." John Syme asserted that Burns composed the song while in his company in a storm in the wilds of Kenmure, apparently on Aug. 1, 1793. Burns, writing to Thomson on Sept. 1, says that he composed it in his "yesternight's evening walk." the lines of what has been accepted as the Scottish National Anthem, "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled." There is a vigour and sternness in the lines, which, together with their striking tune, has carried them right into the heart of Scottish patriotism. The poet's feeling with regard to this tune (overruled for a time, to the wreck of the song, by Thomson's intermeddling), has universally commended itself; and the native spirit of the whole has made his countrymen overlook the fact that the form, as in so many of his songs, is only Scottish on the surface.* For the history of his country Burns did little more in song. The promise made to Mrs. Dunlop to commemorate Wallace remained unfulfilled, just as the drama on Bruce was never written. Other scenes of Scottish story he did not touch, except in his ballad of Caledonia a summary of native triumphs over foreign foes, ending in a marvellous mathematical figure. The Dumfries Volunteers is patriotic enough, but it is for Britain, not for Scotland; to it belong four well-known lines "The kettle o' the kirk an' state, At a time when the Government dreaded nothing more than disaffection among the people, the effect of the song was for the good of national feeling, while it may * "Scots wha," and "Scots wham," are unnatural constructions in Scottish, which would use that for the relative, and even has instead of hae. The third, fifth, and sixth verses are pure English (except die, pronounced dee). The last verse is suggested by a couplet in Hamilton's version of Blind Harry's Wallace "A false usurper sinks in every foe, K have restored the confidence of some who had come to look on Burns with dark suspicions as to his politics. While the poet, however, declared his admiration for the British constitution in no uncertain phrases, he had a vehement hatred of "that horrid mass of corruption called politics and state-craft," and especially of those "mighty villains who divide kingdom against kingdom, desolate provinces, and lay nations waste, out of the wantonness of ambition." This is the thought which underlies the sweet pathos of Logan Braes, The Soldier's Return, and On the seas and far away. The last is certainly inferior to the other two, and Thomson's objections to it are not unjust; but the closing verse, "Peace, thy olive wand extend, And bid wild War his ravage end, contains another conception of that brotherhood of man, which is the crowning maxim of A man's a man for a' that. It may well be doubted whether any song by Burns has made him more famous among men of other nations, than this spirited declaration of a dignity in man that is independent of worldly rank and title— "The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for a' that." It is not the fault of Burns that he has sometimes been misunderstood, as if he had implied that all men were equal in gifts and rights; sense and worth' are his criterion of the true member of his universal brotherhood. "Let me make the songs of a people," runs the oftquoted saw attributed to Fletcher of Saltoun, "and I care not who makes their laws." While Burns was inveighing against the statesmen of his day, he was doing a work that should last as long as theirs, and hold as high a place in the history of his people. Scotland has had no lack of song-writers since Burns, as it had many before him, sweet singers who may even at times rise to his level, but no one has done so much for the glory of Scottish song as he did. He has made of it a treasury into which later hands may heap fresh wealth, but can never enrich it with finer ore. The task was greater than one may readily comprehend. "Those who think that composing a Scottish song is a trifling business, let them try it!" is his own challenge to his critics. The true song is indeed one of the rarest and most difficult forms of poetry; but the simplicity, depth, and directness of suggestion, which are its real essence, were qualities which, from the first, were strong in the verse of Burns. The springs both of laughter and of tears were ever welling up in his strongly emotional being; and where the feeling was a true one, the expression was full of a natural strength and sweetness that was music in itself, and flowed together with the melody of older days to form the perfect song. That all, that even the majority of his songs, are perfect no one will assert, but to regret with Scott "that so much of his time and talents was frittered away" in these years of devotion to Scottish song, is surely to misunderstand both the genius of Burns and the greatness of his work. The drama on Bruce, for which Scott sighs, could hardly have revealed the poet in a brighter halo than these lyric flashes of his varied genius, or given him a greater hold upon the hearts of men. His poems raised him from the obscurity of his native parish, and gave him a place in the literature of Britain. His songs have entitled him to rank among the poets of the world. CHAPTER VII. LETTERS. IN editions of the "complete works" of Burns, the poetry is rivalled in quantity by the prose. This prose, however, consists almost entirely of letters, of which between five and six hundred have now appeared in print ;* others are no doubt still extant in private collections. These letters are especially interesting for the light they throw upon the facts of his life, mainly from about the time he began to attract public notice in 1786, and are, as Motherwell says, "peculiarly valuable as forming the best of all narratives of the outgoings and incomings—nay, even the shortcomings, waywardnesses, and wanderings of that most original, extraordinary, and master-spirit." At the same time they often serve as commentaries on his poetical work, for many of the thoughts which inspire his verse are echoed in fuller, though not more striking, words in one or other of the letters. The whole series of his correspondence with George Thomson is also an indispensable guide to the dates and motives of his later song-writing. * Five hundred and thirty-four is the number of those given in Vols. IV., V., VI. of the edition by W. Scott Douglas (1878-79), which is the standard text of the letters. |