Part 2

In 1784, soon after Burns's return home, his father died, leaving his affairs in utter ruin. Three months before his death Robert and Gilbert had taken the farm of Mossgiel, in the neighboring parish of Mauchline, and thither the whole family now removed. The years 1785 and 1786 are Burns's great period of poetical production; within them fall most of the pieces, exclusive of _Tam O'Shanter_ and of his songs, by which he is now best known. At this time the theological controversy between the two parties in the Scotch Kirk occupied the attention of every one. Burns was attracted by the personal character of the leaders of the _New Light_, or progressive, party; and aided them in their warfare upon the _Old Light_ divines by many stinging satires, notably _The Holy Fair_, _The Twa Herds_, and _Holy Willie's Prayer_. Readers to-day have come to have a new interest in the _Old Lights_, or _Auld Lichts_, as the Scotch term is, through J. M. Barrie's tales and sketches.

In 1785 Burns met and fell in love with Jean Armour, and the next year twin children were born to them. Burns, in order to save the girl from disgrace, had given her a written acknowledgment of marriage; but her father, who had a poor opinion of the poet's general character, had forced her to destroy this. Burns, finding himself without money or position in society, resolved to emigrate to Jamaica, and published a thin volume of his poems in order to raise money for the passage. The success of the book was great and immediate, and altered the whole course of Burns's life. Dugald Stewart, the philosopher, entertained him at his house; Henry MacKenzie, the novelist, gave him a flattering review; and, finally, an enthusiastic letter from Dr. Blacklock, one of the most celebrated Edinburgh critics, {xvi} made him decide to give up his plan of flight from his native country, and to try his fortune at the Scotch capital. The volume of poems was also the means of his acquaintance with the excellent Mrs. Dunlop, with whom he corresponded until the end of his life.

In November, 1786, Burns went to Edinburgh, and was the "lion" of the following winter. A new edition of his poems received three thousand subscribers, and brought him in about £500. Of this he lent £180 to his brother Gilbert, to help in the management of Mossgiel,--the loan was finally repaid some thirty years later to the poet's family. During the following year he made two trips through Scotland, partly to collect songs, and began to contribute to Johnson's _Scot's Musical Museum_ and Thomson's _Collection of Scottish Airs_. The poet applied for, and obtained, a commission in the Excise, the only worldly advantage, except the profits of his poems, that he derived from his triumphal Edinburgh season. Reserving his commission as a last resort, Burns rented a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries, where he settled, in the summer of 1788. He had renewed his intimacy with Jean Armour, and, when she became once more exposed to the anger of her father, made her all the reparation in his power, by marriage. The farm was not a success, and Burns tried to carry on the Excise business along with it. When this division of labor also proved unsatisfactory, he abandoned Ellisland, and, in November, 1792, moved to Dumfries.

At Dumfries Burns was advanced to all Excise division, with a salary of seventy pounds, and retained the position until his death. His hopes of further promotion were cut off by his ill-timed expressions of sympathy with the American Revolution, and with the republican party in France. He attended well to the duties of his office, but occasional drunkenness and other misconduct brought on him the ill favor of the "Dumfries aristocracy." The boon companions with whom he mingled, and the curious tourists attracted by {xvii} his fame, were in no small measure the cause of his poor success. On January 2, 1793, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop:--

"Occasionally hard drinking is the devil to me. Against this I have again and again bent my resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned: it is the private parties in the family way, among the hard-drinking gentlemen of this country, that do me the mischief."

The poet's excesses did not keep him from being an affectionate father, and attending carefully to his children's education. He died on July 21, 1796.

Burns's life since leaving Edinburgh had, on the whole, been one of decline. With the exception of his songs, which he never ceased to contribute to Thomson's _Collection of Scottish Airs_, and of _Tam O'Shanter_, written at Ellisland, he had produced no important poem since that time. But this sketch of Burns's life must not attempt an estimate of his character as poet or man. Its only object is to furnish for ready reference a few of the facts necessary for understanding Carlyle's work.

{xviii}

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Every author should be studied, as far as possible, from his own writings. Carlyle's voluminous correspondence furnishes rich materials for the history of his life and thought. The best editions of his letters are those edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton: _Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle_ (1814-1826), _Letters of Thomas Carlyle_ (1826-1836), _Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson_. These may be supplemented by Froude's edition of the _Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle_. Next to these first-hand documents, Froude's _Thomas Carlyle_, in spite of its inaccuracy and its prejudiced point of view, will remain the great storehouse of information for students of the subject. There are good short lives of Carlyle by John Nichol (_English Men of Letters_ Series) and Richard Garnett (_Great Writers_ Series). The former deals more fully in criticism on his literary work. There are excellent critical appreciations of Carlyle by James Russell Lowell, Augustine Birrell (in _Obiter Dicta_), and Matthew Arnold (in _Essay on Emerson_).

The best way to study Burns is to learn the outline of the external events of his life from any short sketch, and then to read his poems and letters in chronological order. Besides the life by Lockhart, there are good accounts of him by Principal Shairp (_English Men of Letters_ Series) and John Stuart Blackie (_Great Writers_ Series). Carlyle mentions by name Currie and Walker among the biographers of Burns previous to Lockhart. Dr. James Currie (1756-1805), a famous Scotch physician, published in 1800 an edition of Burns's works, with an account of his life, in aid of the poet's family. The _Life of Burns_, written by Josiah Walker, later Professor of Humanity in Glasgow University, to accompany an edition of Burns's works published in 1811, has no permanent value.

Unlike the other two men, Lockhart does not appeal to us as much by his personal character as by his writings. The _Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart_, by Andrew Lang, is the best book with regard to him.

{1}

ESSAY ON BURNS.[1]

In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like Butler,[2] "ask for bread and receive a stone;" for, in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, might yet have been living; but his short life was spent in toil and penury; and he died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and neglected: and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over his dust,[3] and more {2} than one splendid monument has been reared in other places to his fame; the street where he languished in poverty is called by his name;[4] the highest personages in our literature have been proud to appear as his commentators and admirers; and here is the _sixth_ narrative of his life that has been given to the world![5]

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, we believe, will readily acquit him; or, at worst, will censure only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either trite or exhausted; and will probably gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed by Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet; and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps painfully feel toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of John a Combe's,[6] had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life {3} of Shakespeare! What dissertations should we not have had,--not on "Hamlet" and "The Tempest," but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities! In like manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,[7] and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers,[8] and the New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from _his_ juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country and the world. It will be difficult, we say; but still a fair problem for literary historians; and repeated attempts will give us repeated approximations.

His former Biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important thing: Their own and the world's true relation to their author, and the style in which it {4} became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air: as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such honor to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the same kind: and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This, however, is not painting a portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as that: for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind _could_ be so measured and gauged.

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true character of Burns than any prior biography: though, being {5} written on the very popular and condensed scheme of an article for "Constable's Miscellany,"[9] it has less depth than we could have wished and expected from a writer of such power; and contains rather more, and more multifarious quotations than belong of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place for another man's. However, the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant and anxiously conciliating; compliments and praises are liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and small; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck[10] observes of the society in the backwoods of America, "the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for a moment." But there are better things than these in the volume; and we can safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may even be without difficulty read again.[11]

{6}

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents,--though of these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession,--as to the limited and imperfect application of them to the great end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; but if an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man's life, from his particular position, represent themselves to his mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without; how did he modify these from within? With what endeavors and what efficacy rule over them; with what resistance and what suffering sink under them? In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society on him; what and how produced was his effect on society? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; and many _lives_ will be written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, and read and forgotten, which are not in this sense _biographies_. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few individuals; and such a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble; but we offer them with good-will, and trust {7} they may meet with acceptance from those they are intended for.[12]

Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect; till his early and most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is true, the "nine days" have long since elapsed; and the very continuance of this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he did little. He did much, if we consider where and how. If the work performed was small, we must remember that he had his very materials to discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence; and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without instruction, without model; or with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and {8} magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain forever shut against him! His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms.

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay[13] for his standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impediments: through the fogs and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns the true relations of the world and human life; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he {9} struggles forward into the general view; and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift which Time has now pronounced imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life; and that he died in his thirty-seventh year: and then ask, If it be strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that his genius attained no mastery in its art? Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening the world: but some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colors, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears!

We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition rather than admiration that our readers require of us here; and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold business; we are not so sure of this;[14] but, at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects us. He was often advised to write a tragedy;[15] time and means were not lent him for {10} this; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We question whether the world has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, "amid the melancholy main," presented to the reflecting mind such a "spectacle of pity and fear" as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer round him till only death opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the world could well dispense; nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons inspire us in general with any affection; at best it may excite amazement; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the "Eternal Melodies," is the most precious gift that can be bestowed on a generation: we see in him a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his life is a rich lesson to us; and we mourn his death as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us.[16]