CHAPTER IV. POEMS. THE Scottish poetry of Burns is the culmination of a literary movement which had begun some half a century before his birth, with writers like William Hamilton of Gilbertfield and Allan Ramsay. It is true that from at least the close of the fourteenth century Scotland had been in possession of a national poetic literature. The works of Barbour and Blind Harry, Henryson and Dunbar, Douglas and Lyndsay, with others of lesser note, form a native literature which, while it may not rise to the level of Chaucer, is far superior to the writings of any of his successors. This, however, is followed by a period of stagnation, setting in just when the English stream began to flow again in the Elizabethan writers; and when Scottish literature revives with the beginning of the eighteenth century it has entered on a new phase. The older poets had no influence outside of their own country; England probably knew few of them even by name; but just as Scotland had been politically united with the South, so Scottish literature becomes one with English, and gives it some of its most illustrious names. The work, however, of Thomson or Beattie, of Hume or Robertson, was English in form, and claimed correctness of style as well as originality of thought, and so these writers rank rather as English than as Scottish authors. It was left for Burns, and for him alone, to raise his own dialect to a level with the literary tongue, and to take his place in the front rank of English literature, not in virtue of his English, but of his purely Scottish work. It was a feat that no poet had achieved before him, and in which no one has succeeded since. The way for such an achievement was, naturally enough, paved by earlier workers in the same path, by the poems of Hamilton, of Ramsay, and of Fergusson, precursors and teachers whom Burns gratefully owned. These had found the Lowland tongue fallen from its high estate, the vehicle only of rude ballads and ruder songs, in which gleams of true poetry were obscured by a thick undergrowth of trivial and vulgar thoughts. They had tried to raise it to a higher place, to fit it for the expression of poetry and song, and for pioneers they had succeeded in no small degree. But models as they were to him, one will search their writings in vain for all that is characteristic of the poetry of Burns, for his fire, his satire, his tenderness, his humour. To them, and to many a nameless singer, he owed much of his literary form, much even of his matter, but making all allowances for this, there remains far more that is his own, and it is the highest part of his work. If it is unjust to Ramsay and to Fergusson to ignore their share in the making of Burns (an injustice that he was never guilty of), it is equally unfair to suggest that his reputation is in any way stolen from theirs. No borrowing of ideas will ever explain why Burns is an English classic, in a way that the others can never be. Here it is Homer that borrows from Virgil, the broad original mind from the narrower and more artificial. In the poems of Burns there are two groups to be distinguished, which faithfully answer to two stages in his literary training. In the first of these he is Scottish and natural, founding his work on that of earlier Scottish poets, and surpassing in his general level the highest reaches of their verse. In the second he has realized how much of his work was at variance with the prevailing tone of eighteenth-century English poetry, and tries to fit himself into what he conceives to be the true literary groove. But the vein is not his own, and he cannot work it with success; seldom does he bring pure ore out of it, except where older threads break out amid the new, in some isolated but brilliant instances. Burns was born to be the poet of Scotland, not to add new forms or new ideas to the school'of Pope and Thomson. It was for this that his whole early life fitted him; his very hardships lent their aid to that end. If they did not leave him with a "lean and hungry look," he had yet the other qualities of Cassius; he read much, he was a great observer, and his large and glowing eye looked right through the minds of men. Like Cassius, too, he was a patriot; Blind Harry had ensured that Scotland and Scottish independence should be to him a prejudice that was also an inspiration. Even his boyhood had felt the desire to realize this inspiration, a vague but burning wish "That I for poor auld Scotland's sake, The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, My envy e'er could raise ; He has said the same thing more than once in his letters, but for thoughts like these Burns's only natural expression is in verse. The earlier Scottish poets, even down to Ramsay and Fergusson, had been essentially East-Country men; Burns, on the other hand, though sprung from an Eastern stock, is above all the poet of the West. This, natural enough from the place of his birth, was also the outcome of a deliberate resolve to glorify his native county. At a time when his best work yet remained to be done, in the autumn of 1785, he thus recorded his resolve in his Common-place Book,-an echo of stanzas written three months before in the Epistle to William Simson "However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, haughs, etc., immortalized in such celebrated performances, whilst my dear native country, the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants; a country where civil and particularly religious Liberty have ever found their first support and their last asylum; a country, the birthplace of many famous Philosophers, Soldiers and Statesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in Scottish History, particularly a great many of the actions of the Glorious Wallace, the Saviour of his country; yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any eminence, to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes on Aire, and the healthy mountainous source, and winding sweep of Doon emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed, etc. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy, but alas! I am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and education. Obscure I am, and obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young soldier's heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine." The composition of the above sentence may not be beyond criticism; the ambition that inspires it is unmistakable. By the time these words were written the poetical work of Burns had fairly begun; in fact some of his best-known poems were produced several months before. He had composed songs from his fifteenth year, and the gloom of Irvine had produced some religious pieces; but it was not till his twenty-sixth year that he finally set his hand in earnest to the task. Then all the latent powers develop in sudden and vigorous growth; poem after poem is produced with a rapidity that is only less surprising than the variety of his themes. With each fresh success the poet becomes more and more conscious of his own strength, until the final assurance is borne in upon him that the fame he longs for is already within his reach. To follow him step by step along this path is therefore the best way to appreciate his work, the growth of which is so closely connected in each case with what has gone before, and with the various changes in his life and fortunes. It is as early as 1782, with The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, that the real vein of Burns's poetry commences, inspired, as we know, by his falling in with the works of Fergusson; but the metre of the piece, though much used by the earlier poets, is not one of his most favourite measures. The poem itself is marked by the interest in animals that appears in some of his other poems, brightened by the humour arising from the fact that Mailie's death was only imaginary, |