LOCKHART ON CRABBE AND BURNS.

W

HEN J. G. Lockhart, LL.B., son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott, came to write his Life of Burns, the performance of Dr Currie, "Burns's first and kindest biographer," as Carlyle not altogether untruthfully calls him, had been already before the world for two or three decades, and, to the lasting credit of the Wordsworth and Lamb group of literati, and to Mr Gray of the Dumfries Academy, and Mr Findlater Burns's superior officer in the Excise, had been condemned for its treatment of the life and character problem of the Scottish Poet. There was even a movement set on foot to rectify the alleged injustice (see Earnock MSS. in Annual Burns Chronicle for 1898), but it came to nothing, as Mr Roscoe and other friends of Currie-the latter being now dead— interfered in the interest of the doctor's honour: it did not, of course, matter about the reputation of poor Burns.

It is perhaps asking too much in consideration of all the complicated circumstances and interests involvednot the least of them being that Burns himself was constantly referring to his own errors in humorous or remorseful vein coloured as often as not with the hues of exaggeration, though, like the rest of us when in the confessional mood, not intending what he said to be taken too literally -but I cannot help thinking that if Currie had only had the courage, as presumably he could not be wanting in the intellectual insight, to let the private faults and failings of Burns alone in his treatment of the Poet's biography, he would have rendered a distinct service to mankind, and saved the world a deal of labour in adjusting matters with which, according to Wordsworth, it really had no concern ; a labour apparently not yet ended when we find the Rev. Principal of a Scottish University, in an article entitled "Burns and Present Distress," in the Glasgow Herald

(25th January, 1917), stooping to take the Poet's alleged alcoholic declensions of over a century ago as a text for the exploitation of his own prohibitionist propaganda of to-day. In the opinion of that great and wise poetical genius Wordsworth, whose own life and conduct, it is worthy of remark, was as distinguished for its purity as his poetry for its high and noble quality, a biographer has nothing to do with the private life of an author, and more especially of a poet, unless he has also been a public man and borne a certain part in the affairs of the world, when such knowledge might then be necessary to explain his public actions. "Nothing of this," he says, "applies to authors, considered merely as authors. Our business is with their books, to understand and to enjoy them. And of poets more especially it is true that, if their works be good, they contain within themselves all that is necessary to their being comprehended and relished." But I don't think it is unfair to Dr Currie to say that, in view of the different interests he thought it his duty to conserve, his extremist advocacy of the cause of temperance was to a greater extent responsible for his action than perhaps even he himself realised at the time. It made him feel it incumbent on him to touch this subject, however lightly and kindly, yet with candour, as he puts it himself, believing that if he did not do so, others would, and perhaps less tenderly; a subject, moreover, be it noted, of which he himself had no personal knowledge, and was consequently indebted for his information to the hearsay statements of outsiders, a very dangerous kind of evidence to handle under any circumstances, or at any time. The result has therefore been that almost all subsequent biographers have followed in Currie's footsteps; the very respectability, apparent frankness, and generosity of his achievement contributing to that end, That the mind of Lockhart was largely influenced by the work of Currie must be obvious to every unbiased reader of his Life of Burns, In spite of his evident intention to be just, and even moderately generous, as well as highly judicial, amounting to a con

fession, on careful examination of all the evidence, that the truth about Burns's drinking delinquencies probably lay midway between the statements of his accusers and defenders, it is nevertheless perfectly plain that he cannot divorce himself from the exceedingly reasonable and respectable hearsay testimony of the distinguished Liverpool physician.

But my business in this brief note is not so much to criticise at any length Currie's, or even Lockhart's, biographical performance-the evidence for forming a judgment being accessible in the archives of the Poet's bibliography to every Burns student who cares to take the trouble to look into the matter for himself-but to bring to the notice of the reader certain, I should fancy, not too well-known observations on Crabbe and Burns; and in particular, to a wantonly indiscreet expression of Lockhart's, which has a relevant bearing on the preceding introductory remarks. It is a long way from Ayrshire to Suffolk, more particularly at the end of the eighteenth century, but, in the same year that Burns was learning flax-dressing with his cousin Peacock in Irvine, Crabbe, after an unsuccessful attempt at medical practice in his native village of Aldborough, and departure to London as a literary adventurer with a bundle of MSS. and three pounds of money in his pocket, a box of clothes, and a case of surgical instruments, was just saved from starvation by the kindness of the great statesman, Edmund Burke, who also assisted him in the publication of "The Library," and afterwards of “The Village,” which at once established his fame as a new and original poet. They were therefore not only contemporaries, but, along with Cowper, who was about the same period busy at Olney writing "The Task," all unknown to each other; and, with Wordsworth and Coleridge, may be said to have been pioneers in the revolt against the artificial school of poetry and the return to nature. At what time Crabbe became acquainted with the works of Burns there is, so far as I am aware, no record; but his son informs us in his father's biography, that "he was as enthusiastic an admirer

of the Ayrshire Bard as the warmest of his own countrymen," although the Poet himself, in all his voluminous works, makes only one solitary allusion to him. It is in his "Patron," the tale of a nobleman who takes under his patronage a young poetical genius of humble birth, whose satirical talents he foresees might be invaluable on the wavering minds of voting men" in political elections; and so resolves not only that "such worth to the world must be no longer blind," but prophesies that, under his protecting and fostering wing,

"His glory will descend from sire to son,

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The Burns of English race, the happier Chatterton."

It is of the same poem that Sir Walter Scott, who was a life-long admirer of the genius of Crabbe, writes to the author, evidently genuinely distressed by the realistic depiction of

"Nature's sternest painter, yet the best,"

as Byron aptly styled him, of the strained and unhappy relations existing between patron and poet: "Did any one of my sons show poetical talent, of which, to my great satisfaction, there are no appearances, the first thing I should do would be to inculcate upon him the duty of cultivating some honourable profession, and qualifying himself to play a more respectable part in society than the mere poet. And as the best corollary of my doctrine, I would make him get your tale of The Patron' by heart from beginning to end."

Lockhart, in a footnote, chapter IX., of his Life of Burns, further suggests that Crabbe "obviously" had the Scottish Poet in his view when he penned his tale of "Edward Shore," an observation with which I cannot agree, and question the justice or the wisdom of dealing in this kind of surmise where character and honour are concerned. It may be my dullness, but I have gone carefully over the poem again and fail to see what he says was " obviously' in the mind of Crabbe. There are no proofs whatever, ́so far as I can discover, that Burns was his model when

he drew the picture of "Edward Shore," with all the harrowing details of that person's sins and sorrows, imprisonment, madness, and final imbecility, as he wandered about the streets while "the heedless children" call after him "Silly Shore." It might, with even more justification be said, that Edward Shore sat to Lockhart when he painted the portrait of Burns in his last Dumfries years of broken health and hopes and happiness. But in any case, if Crabbe must needs have a model, why, it may be asked, choose Burns, when the life of any one of the many errant sons of genius in letters and in art, of which the domain of biography is so full and so uniform in their tragic and melancholy resemblances, would have served his purpose equally well? This sort of literary treatment of a great and serious theme the deeply perplexing problem of life and conduct-casts not only a doubt on the sanity of the whole fabric of the writer's own criticism, but makes him guilty of doing the very thing he so solemnly blames others for doing slandering, however unintentionally, the Poet's character and memory on insufficient evidence, or no evidence at all but that of gossip and hearsay, his own, let us hope, thoughtlessly-flung-out surmise being in the same category. It is of a piece with Henley's hearsay statement that Burns was burnt to a cinder before he died; contributes nothing essential to the better understanding of the subject in hand, but is provocative rather of confusion, and of mischief among the undiscerning.

In pleasant contrast to that against which the foregoing strictures are directed, I might cite here in conclusion a still further Crabbe-Burns contribution by Lockhart, in a letter of reminiscences, December 26th, 1833, to the Poet's son when he was writing his father's "Life." The reverend author, now famous in the world of letters, an honoured clergyman, and considerably advanced in years, paid his long-promised visit to Sir Walter Scott at the very time that King George the Fourth, in his northern progress, was being fêted in the Scottish capital. consequence," says Lockhart, "of Sir Walter's being con

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