Complete Prose Works

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Poetry, largely consider'd, is an evolution, sending out improved
and-ever-expanded types--in one sense, the past, even the best of it,
necessarily giving place, and dying out. For our existing world,
the bases on which all the grand old poems were built have become
vacuums--and even those of many comparatively modern ones are broken
and half-gone. For us to-day, not their own intrinsic value, vast as
that is, backs and maintains those poems--but a mountain-high growth
of associations, the layers of successive ages. Everywhere--their own
lands included--(is there not something terrible in the tenacity with
which the one book out of millions holds its grip?)--the Homeric and
Virgilian works, the interminable ballad-romances of the middle ages,
the utterances of Dante, Spenser, and others, are upheld by their
cumulus-entrenchment in scholarship, and as precious, always welcome,
unspeakably valuable reminiscences.

Even the one who at present reigns unquestion'd--of Shakspere--for all
he stands for so much in modern literature, he stands entirely for
the mighty esthetic sceptres of the past, not for the spiritual
and democratic, the sceptres of the future. The inward and outward
characteristics of Shakspere are his vast and rich variety of persons
and themes, with his wondrous delineation of each and all,--not only
limitless funds of verbal and pictorial resource, but great excess,
superfoetation--mannerism, like a fine, aristocratic perfume, holding
a touch of musk (Euphues, his mark)--with boundless sumptuousness and
adornment, real velvet and gems, not shoddy nor paste--but a good
deal of bombast and fustian--(certainly some terrific mouthing in
Shakspere!)

Superb and inimitable as all is, it is mostly an objective and
physiological kind of power and beauty the soul finds in Shakspere--a
style supremely grand of the sort, but in my opinion stopping short of
the grandest sort, at any rate for fulfilling and satisfying modern
and scientific and democratic American purposes. Think, not of growths
as forests primeval, or Yellowstone geysers, or Colorado ravines, but
of costly marble palaces, and palace rooms, and the noblest fixings
and furniture, and noble owners and occupants to correspond--think of
carefully built gardens from the beautiful but sophisticated gardening
art at its best, with walks and bowers and artificial lakes, and
appropriate statue-groups and the finest cultivated roses and lilies
and japonicas in plenty--and you have the tally of Shakspere. The low
characters, mechanics, even the loyal henchmen--all in themselves
nothing--serve as capital foils to the aristocracy. The comedies
(exquisite as they certainly are) bringing in admirably portray'd
common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made
for the divertisement only of the elite of the castle, and from its
point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America
and Democracy.

But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from
the riches Shakspere has left us--to criticise his infinitely royal,
multiform quality--to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his
sun-like beams.

The best poetic utterance, after all, can merely hint, or remind,
often very indirectly, or at distant removes. Aught of real
perfection, or the solution of any deep problem, or any completed
statement of the moral, the true, the beautiful, eludes the greatest,
deftest poet--flies away like an always uncaught bird.

ROBERT BURNS AS POET AND PERSON

What the future will decide about Robert Burns and his works--what
place will be assign'd them on that great roster of geniuses and
genius which can only be finish'd by the slow but sure balancing of
the centuries with their ample average--I of course cannot tell. But
as we know him, from his recorded utterances, and after nearly one
century, and its diligence of collections, songs, letters, anecdotes,
presenting the figure of the canny Scotchman in a fullness and detail
wonderfully complete, and the lines mainly by his own hand, he forms
to-day, in some respects, the most interesting personality among
singers. Then there are many things in Burns's poems and character
that specially endear him to America. He was essentially a
Republican--would have been at home in the Western United States,
and probably become eminent there. He was an average sample of the
good-natured, warm-blooded, proud-spirited, amative, alimentive,
convivial, young and early-middle-aged man of the decent-born middle
classes everywhere and any how. Without the race of which he is a
distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and her powerful
Democracy could not exist to-day--could not project with unparallel'd
historic sway into the future.

Perhaps the peculiar coloring of the era of Burns needs always first
to be consider'd. It included the times of the '76-'83 Revolution
in America, of the French Revolution, and an unparallel'd chaos
development in Europe and elsewhere. In every department, shining
and strange names, like stars, some rising, some in meridian, some
declining--Voltaire, Franklin, Washington, Kant, Goethe, Fulton,
Napoleon, mark the era. And while so much, and of grandest moment, fit
for the trumpet of the world's fame, was being transacted--that little
tragi-comedy of R. B,'s life and death was going on in a country
by-place in Scotland!

Burns's correspondence, generally collected and publish'd since his
death, gives wonderful glints into both the amiable and weak (and
worse than weak) parts of his portraiture, habits, good and bad luck,
ambition and associations. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop, Mrs. McLehose,
(Clarinda,) Mr. Thompson, Dr. Moore, Robert Muir, Mr. Cunningham, Miss
Margaret Chalmers, Peter Hill, Richard Brown, Mrs. Riddel, Robert
Ainslie, and Robert Graham, afford valuable lights and shades to the
outline, and with numerous others, help to a touch here, and fill-in
there, of poet and poems. There are suspicions, it is true, of "the
Genteel Letter-Writer," with scraps and words from "the Manual of
French Quotations," and, in the love-letters, some hollow mouthings.
Yet we wouldn't on any account lack the letters. A full and true
portrait is always what is wanted; veracity at every hazard. Besides,
do we not all see by this time that the story of Burns, even for its
own sake, requires the record of the whole and several, with nothing
left out? Completely and every point minutely told out its fullest,
explains and justifies itself--(as perhaps almost any life does.) He
is very close to the earth. He pick'd up his best words and tunes
directly from the Scotch home-singers, but tells Thompson they would
not please his, T.'s, "learn'd lugs," adding, "I call them simple--you
would pronounce them silly." Yes, indeed; the idiom was undoubtedly
his happiest hit. Yet Dr. Moore, in 1789, writes to Burns, "If I were
to offer an opinion, it would be that in your future productions you
should abandon the Scotch stanza and dialect, and adopt the measure
and language of modern English poetry"!

As the 128th birth-anniversary of the poet draws on, (January, 1887,)
with its increasing club-suppers, vehement celebrations, letters,
speeches, and so on--(mostly, as William O'Connor says, from people
who would not have noticed R. B. at all during his actual life, nor
kept his company, or read his verses, on any account)--it may be
opportune to print some leisurely-jotted notes I find in my budget.
I take my observation of the Scottish bard by considering him as an
individual amid the crowded clusters, galaxies, of the old world--and
fairly inquiring and suggesting what out of these myriads he too may
be to the Western Republic. In the first place no poet on record so
fully bequeaths his own personal magnetism,[39] nor illustrates more
pointedly how one's verses, by time and reading, can so curiously fuse
with the versifier's own life and death, and give final light and
shade to all.

I would say a large part of the fascination of Burns's homely, simple
dialect-melodies is due, for all current and future readers, to the
poet's personal "errors," the general bleakness of his lot, his
ingrain'd pensiveness, his brief dash into dazzling, tantalizing,
evanescent sunshine--finally culminating in those last years of his
life, his being taboo'd and in debt, sick and sore, yaw'd as by
contending gales, deeply dissatisfied with everything, most of all
with himself--high-spirited too--(no man ever really higher-spirited
than Robert Burns.) I think it a perfectly legitimate part too. At any
rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the
songs and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb'd. Through
that view-medium of misfortune--of a noble spirit in low environments,
and of a squalid and premature death--we view the undoubted facts,
(giving, as we read them now, a sad kind of pungency,) that Burns's
were, before all else, the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing
intoxication. Perhaps even it is this strange, impalpable
_post-mortem_ comment and influence referr'd to, that gives them their
contrast, attraction, making the zest of their author's after fame. If
he had lived steady, fat, moral, comfortable, well-to-do years, on his
own grade, (let alone, what of course was out of the question, the
ease and velvet and rosewood and copious royalties of Tennyson or
Victor Hugo or Longfellow,) and died well-ripen'd and respectable,
where could have come in that burst of passionate sobbing and remorse
which well'd forth instantly and generally in Scotland, and soon
follow'd everywhere among English-speaking races, on the announcement
of his death? and which, with no sign of stopping, only regulated and
vein'd with fitting appreciation, flows deeply, widely yet?

Dear Rob! manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak spots as well as
strong ones-essential type of so many thousands--perhaps the average,
as just said, of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not
only of the British Isles, but America, too, North and South, just the
same. I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable
proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring
classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in
their blood. (How clear it is to me that the common soil has always
been, and is now, thickly strewn with just such gems.) He is
well-called the _Ploughman_. "Holding the plough," said his brother
Gilbert, "was the favorite situation with Robert for poetic
compositions; and some of his best verses were produced while he was
at that exercise." "I must return to my humble station, and woo my
rustic muse in my wonted way, at the plough-tail." 1787, to the Earl
of Buchan. He has no high ideal of the poet or the poet's office;
indeed quite a low and contracted notion of both:

"Fortune! if thou'll but gie me still
Hale breeks, a scone, and whiskey gill,
An' rowth o' rhyme to rave at will,
Tak' a' the rest."

See also his rhym'd letters to Robert Graham invoking patronage; "one
stronghold," Lord Glencairn, being dead, now these appeals to "Fintra,
my other stay," (with in one letter a copious shower of vituperation
generally.) In his collected poems there is no particular unity,
nothing that can be called a leading theory, no unmistakable spine or
skeleton. Perhaps, indeed, their very desultoriness is the charm
of his songs: "I take up one or another," he says in a letter to
Thompson, "just as the bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug."

Consonantly with the customs of the time--yet markedly inconsistent in
spirit with Burns's own case, (and not a little painful as it remains
on record, as depicting some features of the bard himself,) the
relation called _patronage_ existed between the nobility and gentry
on one side, and literary people on the other, and gives one of the
strongest side-lights to the general coloring of poems and poets. It
crops out a good deal in Burns's Letters, and even necessitated a
certain flunkeyism on occasions, through life. It probably, with its
requirements, (while it help'd in money and countenance) did as much
as any one cause in making that life a chafed and unhappy one, ended
by a premature and miserable death.

Yes, there is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable to the
concrete, human points of view. He poetizes work-a-day agricultural
labor and life, (whose spirit and sympathies, as well as
practicalities, are much the same everywhere,) and treats fresh, often
coarse, natural occurrences, loves, persons, not like many new and
some old poets in a genteel style of gilt and china, or at second or
third removes, but in their own born atmosphere, laughter, sweat,
unction. Perhaps no one ever sang "lads and lasses"--that universal
race, mainly the same, too, all ages, all lands--down on their own
plane, as he has. He exhibits no philosophy worth mentioning; his
morality is hardly more than parrot-talk--not bad or deficient, but
cheap, shopworn, the platitudes of old aunts and uncles to the
youngsters (be good boys and keep your noses clean.) Only when he
gets at Poosie Nansie's, celebrating the "barley bree," or among
tramps, or democratic bouts and drinking generally,

("Freedom and whiskey gang the gither.")

we have, in his own unmistakable color and warmth, those interiors
of rake-helly life and tavern fun--the cantabile of jolly beggars
in highest jinks--lights and groupings of rank glee and brawny
amorousness, outvying the best painted pictures of the Dutch school,
or any school.

By America and her democracy such a poet, I cannot too often
repeat, must be kept in loving remembrance; but it is best that
discriminations be made. His admirers (as at those anniversary
suppers, over the "hot Scotch") will not accept for their favorite
anything less than the highest rank, alongside of Homer, Shakspere,
etc. Such, in candor, are not the true friends of the Ayrshire bard,
who really needs a different place quite by himself. The Iliad and the
Odyssey express courage, craft, full-grown heroism in situations of
danger, the sense of command and leadership, emulation, the last and
fullest evolution of self-poise as in kings, and god-like even while
animal appetites. The Shaksperean compositions, on vertebers and
frame-work of the primary passions, portray (essentially the same as
Homer's,) the spirit and letter of the feudal world, the Norman lord,
ambitious and arrogant, taller and nobler than common men--with much
underplay and gusts of heat and cold, volcanoes and stormy seas. Burns
(and some will say to his credit) attempts none of these themes. He
poetizes the humor, riotous blood, sulks, amorous torments, fondness
for the tavern and for cheap objective nature, with disgust at the
grim and narrow ecclesiasticism of his time and land, of a young
farmer on a bleak and hired farm in Scotland, through the years and
under the circumstances of the British politics of that time, and
of his short personal career as author, from 1783 to 1796. He is
intuitive and affectionate, and just emerged or emerging from the
shackles of the kirk, from poverty, ignorance, and from his own
rank appetites--(out of which latter, however, he never extricated
himself.) It is to be said that amid not a little smoke and gas in his
poems, there is in almost every piece a spark of fire, and now and
then the real afflatus. He has been applauded as democratic, and with
some warrant; while Shakspere, and with the greatest warrant, has been
called monarchical or aristocratic (which he certainly is.) But the
splendid personalizations of Shakspere, formulated on the largest,
freest, most heroic, most artistic mould, are to me far dearer as
lessons, and more precious even as models for Democracy, than the
humdrum samples Burns presents. The motives of some of his effusions
are certainly discreditable personally--one or two of them markedly
so. He has, moreover, little or no spirituality. This last is his
mortal flaw and defect, tried by highest standards. The ideal he never
reach'd (and yet I think he leads the way to it.) He gives melodies,
and now and then the simplest and sweetest ones; but harmonies,
complications, oratorios in words, never. (I do not speak this in any
deprecatory sense. Blessed be the memory of the warm-hearted Scotchman
for what he has left us, just as it is!) He likewise did not know
himself, in more ways than one. Though so really fret and independent,
he prided himself in his songs on being a reactionist and a
Jacobite--on persistent sentimental adherency to the cause of the
Stuarts--the weakest, thinnest, most faithless, brainless dynasty that
ever held a throne.

Thus, while Burns is not at all great for New World study, in the
sense that Isaiah and Eschylus and the book of Job are unquestionably
great--is not to be mention'd with Shakspere--hardly even with current
Tennyson or our Emerson--he has a nestling niche of his own, all
fragrant, fond, and quaint and homely--a lodge built near but outside
the mighty temple of the gods of song and art--those universal
strivers, through their works of harmony and melody and power, to ever
show or intimate man's crowning, last, victorious fusion in himself of
Real and Ideal. Precious, too--fit and precious beyond all singers,
high or low--will Burns ever be to the native Scotch, especially to
the working-classes of North Britain; so intensely one of them, and so
racy of the soil, sights, and local customs. He often apostrophizes
Scotland, and is, or would be, enthusiastically patriotic. His country
has lately commemorated him in a statue.[40] His aim is declaredly
to be 'a Rustic Bard.' His poems were all written in youth or young
manhood, (he was little more than a young man when he died.) His
collected works in giving everything, are nearly one half first drafts.
His brightest hit is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms
flavor'd like wild fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance
to Burns which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously even the
frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by
no means absent) prove upon the whole not out of keeping in any
comprehensive collection of his works, heroically printed, "following
copy," every piece, every line according to originals. Other poets might
tremble for such boldness, such rawness. In "this odd-kind chiel" such
points hardly mar the rest. Not only are they in consonance with the
underlying spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and
veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch
vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish,
careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not
"put on," that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and
re-wrought polish of the most perfect verse?) Mark the native spice and
untranslatable twang in the very names of his songs-"O for ane and
twenty, Tam," "John Barleycorn," "Last May a braw Wooer," "Rattlin
roarin Willie," "O wert thou in the cauld, cauld blast," "Gude e'en to
you, Kimmer," "Merry hae I been teething a Heckle," "O lay thy loof in
mine, lass," and others.

The longer and more elaborated poems of Burns are just such as would
please a natural but homely taste, and cute but average intellect, and
are inimitable in their way. The "Twa Dogs," (one of the best) with
the conversation between Cesar and Luath, the "Brigs of Ayr," "the
Cotter's Saturday Night," "Tam O'Shanter"--all will be long read and
re-read and admired, and ever deserve to be. With nothing profound in
any of them, what there is of moral and plot has an inimitably fresh
and racy flavor. If it came to question, Literature could well afford
to send adrift many a pretensive poem, and even book of poems, before
it could spare these compositions.

Never indeed was there truer utterance in a certain range of
idiosyncrasy than by this poet. Hardly a piece of his, large or
small, but has "snap" and raciness. He puts in cantering rhyme
(often doggerel) much cutting irony and idiomatic ear-cuffing of
the kirk-deacons--drilygood-natured addresses to his cronies, (he
certainly would not stop us if he were here this moment, from classing
that "to the De'il" among them)--"to Mailie and her Lambs," "to auld
Mare Maggie," "to a Mouse,"

"Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie:"

"to a Mountain Daisy," "to a Haggis," "to a Louse," "to the
Toothache," &c.--and occasionally to his brother bards and lady or
gentleman patrons, often with strokes of tenderest sensibility,
idiopathic humor, and genuine poetic imagination--still oftener with
shrewd, original, sheeny, steel-flashes of wit, home-spun sense,
or lance-blade puncturing. Then, strangely, the basis of Burns's
character, with all its fun and manliness, was hypochondria, the
blues, palpable enough in "Despondency," "Man was made to Mourn,"
"Address to Ruin," a "Bard's Epitaph," &c. From such deep-down
elements sprout up, in very contrast and paradox, those riant
utterances of which a superficial reading will not detect the hidden
foundation. Yet nothing is clearer to me than the black and desperate
background behind those pieces--as I shall now specify them. I find
his most characteristic, Nature's masterly touch and luxuriant
life-blood, color and heat, not in "Tam O'Shanter," "the Cotter's
Saturday Night," "Scots wha hae," "Highland Mary," "the Twa Dogs,"
and the like, but in "the Jolly Beggars," "Rigs of Barley," "Scotch
Drink," "the Epistle to John Rankine," "Holy Willie's Prayer," and in
"Halloween," (to say nothing of a certain cluster, known still to a
small inner circle in Scotland, but, for good reasons, not published
anywhere.) In these compositions, especially the first, there is much
indelicacy (some editions flatly leave it out,) but the composer
reigns alone, with handling free and broad and true, and is an artist.
You may see and feel the man indirectly in his other verses, all of
them, with more or less life-likeness--but these I have named last
call out pronouncedly in his own voice,

"I, Rob, am here."

Finally, in any summing-up of Burns, though so much is to be said in
the way of fault-finding, drawing black marks, and doubtless severe
literary criticism--(in the present outpouring I have "kept myself
in," rather than allow'd any free flow)--after full retrospect of his
works and life, the aforesaid "odd-kind chiel" remains to my heart and
brain as almost the tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory)
dearest flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of
by-gone poets.

Notes:

[39] Probably no man that ever lived--a friend has made the
statement--was so fondly loved, both by men and women, as Robert
Burns. The reason is not hard to find: he had a real heart of flesh
and blood beating in his bosom; you could almost hear it throb. "Some
one said, that if you had shaken hands with him his hand would have
burnt yours. The gods, indeed, made him poetical, but Nature had a
hand in him first. His heart was in the right place; he did not pile
up cantos of poetic diction; he pluck'd the mountain daisy under his
feet; he wrote of field-mouse hurrying from its ruin'd dwelling. He
held the plough or the pen with the same firm, manly grasp. And he was
loved. The simple roll of the women who gave him their affection and
their sympathy would make a long manuscript; and most of these were of
such noble worth that, as Robert Chambers says, 'their character may
stand as a testimony in favor of that of Burns.'" [As I understand,
the foregoing is from an extremely rare book publish'd by M'Kie, in
Kilmarnock. I find the whole beautiful paragraph in a capital paper on
Burns, by Amelia Barr.]

[40] The Dumfries statue of Robert Burns was successfully unveil'd
April 1881 by Lord Rosebery, the occasion having been made national
in its character. Before the ceremony, a large procession paraded the
streets of the town, all the trades and societies of that part of
Scotland being represented, at the head of which went dairymen and
ploughmen, the former driving their carts and being accompanied by
their maids. The statue is of Sicilian marble. It rests on a pedestal
of gray stone five feet high. The poet is represented as sitting
easily on an old tree root, holding in his left hand a cluster of
daisies. His face is turn'd toward the right shoulder, and the eyes
gaze into the distance. Near by lie a collie dog, a broad bonnet half
covering a well-thumb'd song-book, and a rustic flageolet. The costume
is taken from the Nasmyth portrait, which has been follow'd for the
features of the face.

A WORD ABOUT TENNYSON

Beautiful as the song was, the original "Locksley Hall" of half a
century ago was essentially morbid, heart-broken, finding fault with
everything, especially the fact of money's being made (as it ever must
be, and perhaps should be) the paramount matter in worldly affairs;

Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.