Part 2

Scott’s was not wholly an ideal world, nor his life a romance. There was something very real and prosaic in it—something also of the tragic. Not a few of the virtues of his ideal heroes became prominent in his own life. After his fame had been established, and nothing of earthly ambition and popular applause remained unsatisfied, there came upon him those sweeping financial disasters in which his own fortunes and those of Constable his publisher went down in wreck and ruin that seemed irretrievable. But with a heroism unparalled in the history of literature, he girds himself anew to cancel by his pen a debt that was colossal in its magnitude. He was fifty-five years of age. He could accept no compromise, but goes to work writing untiringly until by sheer force and industry he succeeded in paying off seventy thousand of the one hundred and seventeen thousand pounds sterling which was the sum total of his debt, but he achieved that tremendous feat at the expense of an exhauseted brain and a paralyzed body. He perished in the attempt to redeem his honor and good name. But the name remains immortal and while Scottish hearts and Scottish brains throb and beat, and tears and smiles be evoked as a tribute to genius, the memory of Scott shall remain enshrined on the deathless galaxy of fame.

Another of the great names imperishably with old Caledonia is that of Robert Burns, the darling of the Scottish muse, the pride and glory of his native land, and the idol of the Scottish people. Poor unfortunate child of genius. It is hard to read his brief history without being choked with our sobs. Beginning life in the midst of the deepest poverty, we are told that the miserable clay hovel in which he first saw the light was partly wrecked by a January tempest on the very night of his birth—sad forecast of the brief, bitter, and stormy career which awaited him. At sixteen years of age he tells us his life was “the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley slave.” After his father’s death the little paternal estae had to be sold to satisfy creditors, and after three years “tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation” Robert and his brother Gilbert succeeded in saving a trifle from the clutches of the lawyears by stepping in as creditors for arrears of wages. When they got to work again the poet received the sum of seven pounds sterling (35 dollars) per annum. Troubles multiplied upon him owing chiefly to his own indiscretions until he says frankly “even in the hour of social mirth, my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.”

But in the midst of his daily durgery and incessant toil through summer heats and winter tempests, traveling through the snow, toiling at the plow, thrashing his grain with the “weary flingin tree,” attending market, he nevertheless found time to chant some of the sweetest lyrics ever penned. The outward conditions of his life were dark and lowering, but these could not quench those movements and ambitions of his inner man which flamed up like the lurid flashes of volcanic fires, and threw over the dark shadows of his destiny, a glory and a radiant heat which no adversity could quench. He works like a slave, it is true, but he must need pour in as occasion offered the pure and holy oil of lofty aspirations gathered from nature’s ample store, and a few well worn books, to feed the deathless flame of song which had begun to burn upon the altar of his heart. “He carried a book to study at spare moments in the field and he wore out thus two copies of MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling.” A suggestive hint, for with all his misfortunes, and his sins, perhaps, no more tender heart ever beat in human breast than that of Robert Burns. None more loyal to friendship or more sensitive to generous love and sympathy.

“There is sacrecely any earthly object” he says, “which gives me more pleasure than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high plantation on a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind houling among the trees, and raving over the plain. I listened to the birds and frequently turned out of my path, lest I should disturb their little song or frighten them to another station.”

Doubless his own misfortunes brought him into closer relations of sympathetic feeling even with the poorest and meanest things that were suddenly exposed to loss and pain, as for instance in the inadvertent passage of his ploughshare through a field mouse’s nest. Listen to his tender strain.

“We sleekit Cowerin timerous beastie, O what a pancis in thy breastie; Thou need nae start awa sae hasty, Wi bickerin brattle I wad de laith to rin and chase thee Wi murderin pattle.”

He moralizes at once, and does not think it beneath his dignity to put himself on the same plane for a time even with a mouse.

“I’m truly sorry man’s dominion Has broken nature’s social union An justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor earth born companion An fellow moral.”

He sees in the house of “leaves and stubble” so carefully collected against the winter storm, and analogy which he is slow to improve.

“But mousie thou art no thy lane In proving fore sight may be vain The best laid schemes o’ mince and men Gang aft agley An, lea us naught but grief and pain For promised joy.”

Perhaps the key note to Burns’ muse may be found in the homage which he paid to woman. “He was alwoys in love,” and he sang of love in strains as sweet as any mortal minstrel ever made, but he was only a mortal after all: and his illicit loves are the darkest blot on his name. But at first this passion burned with a pure and guileless fervor; and the sweetest lyric of his muse is the product of an early attachment for Mary Campbell whom “death untimely frost” snatched from his embrace. On the anniversary of her death, he had stayed out all night in the barn, tossing and tumbling till the dawn of day; and before the morning star was quenched in the rising sun, he went into the house and wrote:

“Thou lingering star, with less’ning ray, That lov’st to greet the early morn, Again, thou usher’st in the day, My Mary, from my soul was torn. O, Mary! dear departed shade! Where is thy place of blissful rest? Seest thou thy lover, lowly laid? Hear’st thou the groans, that rend his breast?

That sacred hour—can I forget, Can I forget the hallow’d grove, Where, by the winding Ayr we met, To live one day of parting love! Eternity—will not efface Those records dear, of transports past; Thy image, at our last embrace! Ah! little thought I ’twas our last!

Ayr, gurgling, kissed his pebbled shore, O’erhung with wild woods’ thich’ning green; The fragant birch, and hawthorn here, Twin’d amorous round the raptur’d scene: The flowers sprang—wanton to be prest, The bird sang love—on every spray; Till, too soon, the glowing west, Proclaim’d the speed of winged day.

Still o’er these scenes my mem’ry wakes, And fondly broods, with miser care! Time but the impression deeper makes, As streams—their channels deeper wear. My Mary! dear departed shade! Where is thy place of blissful rest? Seest thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breats?”

No one has painted with such consummate skill, such tender grace, and with such depth of coloring “the short and simple annals of the poor” as Burns has done. He knew by bitter experience the struggles of poverty, the grinding toil needed to wring from an inhospitable climate, and unkindly soil the meagre products which barely supported life. His “Cottars’ Saturday Night” is a picture of peasant life in Scotland unequalled for purity and beauty by any production of genius, and is, we think, the crowning triumph of his poetic skill. It is a finished production, and his words flash upon our memory and imagination those scnes of humble but honest poverty, pious worth and modest joys, which relieve the monotonous burden of the Scottish laborer’s daily toil. The week’s work is done, and the poor toiler, gathering his few implements together, wends his way across the moor to his humble home. His gleeful little ones run to meet him. He is saluted by the kindly smile of a contented wife. A bright fire throws a genial glow over his poor but tidy home. The elder brains drop in with the scanty pittances earned by domestic services among their neighbors. Jenny, the pride of the family, in the first bloom of womanhood, introduces with bashful modesty, an honest lad worthy of her love and confidence. The mother is glad that her brain is “respected like the lave.”

“The father chats of horses, plows, and kye.” The humble, hospitable board is spread, and the evening meal is eaten with grateful thanks to God. Then “the big ha’ Bible” is brought out, and the old song that fired to enthusiasm the children of the Scottish covenant in their wanderings, is sung, and “the saint, the father, and the husband prays:

“That thus they all shall meet in future days, There, ever bask in uncreated rays, No more to sigh, or shed the tear, Together hymning their Creator’s praise, In such society, yet still more dear; While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere.”

As he tells the touching and familiar story, a glow of honest pride in his native land kindles in his breast, and he places the chaplet of honor upon the brow of pious poverty.

“From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs That make her loved at home, reveered abroad. Princes and Lords are but the breath of Kings, An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”

Genius had few liberal patrons at that time; and the compensations rendered to those who worshipped at the shrine of the Muses, consisted in great part in patronizing invitations to big dinners or in treats in the dram shops, where poets paid for their etertainment by appearing as prodigies, or by bartering the fine gold of their wit for draughts from the Circean Cup of popular applause and brutal intoxication.

The convivial usages of the country were almost universal; and Burns, with his genial nature and love of society, easily fell a prey to the seductions of Bacchus. It was considered an insult to hospitality to sit down to dinner in the house of a friend and get up from the table sober.

It was a time when hosts were not solicitous about the results of a revel or the comfort of guests, provided that there was a plentiful supply of hot water and sugar to replenish the punch bowl.

“But what will I do for beds for all these men?” said Margaret, the Laird of Logan’s house keeper. “Keep the kettle boiling Marg’et ma Wooman,” said the Laird, “and they will a find beds for themselves” to be fechtin’ fou’ or “greetin’ fow” was regarded as the normal condition of a well dined gentleman.

It was too often alas at such shrines and amid such scenes that poor Burns kindled the torch of his inspiration. He drew from life when in his masterpiece of “Tam O’Shanter” he pictured two drunken Cronies seeking respite from care in foaming tankards of ale inn:

“Auld Ayr, wham ne’re a toon surpasses For honest men and bonnie lassies.”

At Tam’s elbow sits Soute Johnie:

“His ancient droutly cronie: Tam lo’ed him like a verra brither; They had been fou for week thegether.”

None knew better than Burns how ephemeral are the joys of social drinking, and no one has ever produced such a chain of similitudes to describe their fleeting sweetness.

“But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, its bloom is shed; Or like the Borealis race That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow’s lovely form Evanishing amid the storm. Or like the snow-flakes in the river, A moment white, then melts forever.”

We know of nothing in literature that, in the same space, contains so much of the homely, the horrible, and the grotesque, as will be found in this poem. There is a sharp Rembrandt-like minuteness in the details of this Scotch Walpurgis night that produces terror on the reader mingled with an irrisistible inclination to shriek with laughter. We watch the hard drunken sot

“Weel mounted on his gray mare, Meg, A better never lifted leg.”

Skelping along through the mud and pouring rain, the lightnings flashing from “pole to pole.”

“Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet, Whiles croomin o’er some auld Scotch sonnet While peepm round with prudent care Lest bogles catch him unaware.”

Every turn in the road has its tragic associations. Here a packman was smothered in the snow. Here hunters found a murdered child. Here an old thorn tree near a well where a woman hanged herself, etc. Till the adventurers are crowned on his approaching the old Kirk at Alloway which seems blazing to heaven.

We have stood in it, and really it looks a very innocent ruin, nothing but four stone walls, roofles, with a niche at one end where he old pulpit once stood. But in that neche Burns put “Aul Nick” as a piper to whose music a rabble rout of sheol are dancing “fast and furious.” Tammie urges on his mare until he comes into the sheolish light which gilds the ghastly scene, where the bones of murderers, the garter that strangled a babe, the knife that lacerated the throat of a father.

“And more of horrible and awful Which even to name would be unlawful.”

He cannot restrain a feeling of tender pity for one of the horrible crew who had been that very night enrolled among them. He thinks of the time when she was a little innocent child.

“O little kenned thy reveren’d granny The sack she Coft for her wee Nannie Wi’twa pund Scots ’twas a’ her riches, Should ever grace dance o’ witches.”

The climax is reached when Tam, carried away by his wonder at the marvelous agility displayed by the leader of the infernal gang who was arrayed in a very abbreviated under garment, cries out:

“Weel dune cutty sark And in an instant a’was dark,”

This precipitates the catastrophe.

“As bess bizz out wi, angry fik When murderons assail their bike As open pussey’s mortal foes When, pop, she starts before their nose, As eager runs the market crowd When “catch the thief” resounds aloud, So Maggie runs the witche’s fetlow, With many an eldritch scretch and hollow.”

The devotee of Bacchees hastens to procure the protection of the river Doon as witches dare not cross a running stream, and is indebted to his good horse for his safety although that is secured at the expense of her tail which she leaves in the clutches of the “Carlin.”

Perhaps the songs of Burns have exercised a more universal influence than his poems. They seize the heart and hold it as by a spell of enchantment. Who knows not the grand nation melody “Scots wha hae” and the familiar lyrics “Auld Lang Syne,” “John Anderson, My Joe,” “Comin’ through the Rye,” etc. In most of his songs there is a strain of sadness as indeed there is in most of the finest Scottish lyrics other than those written by Burns.

The brightest gems of the Muse show the sparkle of tears or utter the sad sigh which one hears in the moan of the waves, or the wail of the midnight wind through a pine forest. But the songs of Burns have a charm that enlist the sympathy of the whole world. He voices the universal experience. He is the high priest of nature. His words give tone and character to the passion, the sorrows, the pains and the joys of common people. He uses no artifice to engage the interest of others. His genius was a well-spring fresh and pure from the fountains of the heart, in its first unstrained gushings: too soon, alas, to migle with the defiling tributaries which a bitter experience of human life brought to blend with the clearer stream. With his great heart burning with a sense of wrong done him by those who ought to have sheltered and befriended him, mixed also with the bitter reflection that his own indiscretions and sins had entailed suffering and shame upon himself and upon those who were dearer to him than his own life, he sinks into the dark tide of death as the age of 38 years; not, we trust, without a hope that the infinite Father of mercy had heard the piteous appeal which he recorded in these words.

“O thou great governor of all below If I may dare a litted eye to thee, For all unfit I feel my powers to be To rule their torrent in the hollowed line O aid me with thy help, Omnipotence Divine.”

He wrote his own epitaph, and it is an honest and sincere confession, but if he had lived under more favorable auspices, and had his environment been such as to assure that the flame of his genius would have been nourished from the altars of a purer and fitter companionship, he would probably have penned a far different stanza than this which fitly closes a dark and stormy career, not unrelieved by many bright flashes of hope and gladness.

“The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know And dearly felt the amorous glow And social flame But thoughtless follies laid him low And stained him name.”

A spirit kindred to that of Robert Burns and one whose fame shall never perish, or be dimmed while “Annie Laurie” is sung—and where is it not sung? It is that of Robert Tannahill, a poor Paisley weaver. We have stood on the bridge which spans the canal near the city, and looked with sorrowful interest into that pool in the corner, where, driven by the demons of poverty and unappreciated talent, the disracted author ended his brief life. He was a true poet. He wrote many songs that the world will not willingly let die. One of the stanzas is peculiarly fine in its delicacy and tenderness:

“Towering o’er the Newton woods Laverocks fan the snaw white clouds Siller saughs wi downy buds Adorn the banks sae biery. Sweet the snaw flowers early bell Decks Gleniffers dewy dell Blooming like thy bonny sell My ain my artless deary.”

We would mention another bright name also a native of this same town of Paisley. John Wilson—known better by his pen name of “Christopher North” the author of “Noctes Ambrosianae.” He rose from obscurity to great honor and to the chair of moral philosophy in the University of Ediuburgh. He was a giant in stature as well as in mind, and one of the knightliest of men. No one who ever met Wilson striding along the street, his long yellow hair flowing over his shoulders, his blue eyes gleaming with merriment, and glowing with an intelligence that comprehend every department of knowledge, could ever forget him.

He may be fairly ranked with Scott and Burns in the power he exercised in the later part of his life, in storming the heart of the Scottish people—becoming at last their idol and great literary representative. He was conemporary with Thomas Brown whom he succeeded in the chair of moral philosophy, and with Sir William Hamilton, who was a candidate with him for the chair, but who, up to that time, had not given to the public those proofs of that consumate ability by which he was afterwards distinguished, and which placed him in the foremost rank of the most eminent European scholars.

Wilson once a poet, lecturer, statesman, orator, and novelist. He was the intimate friend of Coleridge, Woodsworth, and Southey. His poems of the “Isle of Palms” and the “City of the Plague” are productions that gave him a worthy place among those bright lights of song shed so brilliant a luster over that age of great minds, and whose genuis has bequeathed to all future time, the priceless legacy if immortal harmonies and wealth of thought. He was with all a very muscular Christian; “for on more than one occasion, the singular spectacle was exhibited of a Scotch professor of moral science taking off his coat in a public market place to inflict personal chastisment on some ruffian whose obnoxious proceedings has done outrage to his nicer sense of the fitness of things.” He was, with Lockheart, one of the original contributors to Blackwood’s Magazine, and helped more than any other author to give that publication a popularity that continues to this day.

It is said of Aytoun, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Letters in Ediuburgh University, when he was courting Wilson’s daughter that he could not summon up courage to ask her father to give his consent to their marriage, although he knew how exalted a place he occupied in Wilson’s estimation.

Here stood the silver tongued Aytown, week after week, trying to screw up his courage to ask the question that filled his heart, but he could not do it. At length he said: “Jessie, will you go and ask your father for me as I cannot?” Jessie was soon beside her father and acquainted him with how matters stood. “Puir Aytown,” said Wilson, “I maun gie him his answer in writing.”

So saying he wrote a line without Jessie’s knowledge of its purport, and pinning it on the back of her dress, sent her off to Aytoun whom he well knew was just at that moment fully appreciating the significance of the verb “to wait.”

“What did he say, Jessie?” was the impatient interrogatory of the loving professor. Jessie turned her back for once upon her lover, and then he read the precious answer: “With the Author’s compliments.”

This same little town of Paisley is distinguished as the birth place of another Wilson who is worthy of mention here because he became famous as the great “American ornithologist”—Alexander Wilson, born 1766. He began his career also as a poet with a witty and felicitous production called: “Watty and Meg.” That brings out with marvelous fidelity some of the most humurous phases of Scottish life and character. He came to America in 1794, and after many and thrilling adventures, gave to the world his great book on “American Birds” in seven quarto volumes. George Ord and Charles Lucein Bonaparte completed the work by issuing, after Wilson’s death, four volumes more. It is a record of patient industry that helped to put this land forward in the records of fame, and publish to the world its marvelous resources.

We might give brief sketches of such. Dr. Thomas Guthrie, the father of the ragged schools of Scotland. One short story will illustrate how earnest was the Doctor in his efforts to save the children from the dismal and fearful depths of vice and crime and infamy.

One night at a public meeting, a reverend but very unsympathetic speaker described the ragged school children as rescals and vagabonds, the scum of the country. When Guthrie’s time for speaking came, he arose with pale face and quivering lips, seized a sheet of writing paper from the table, and holding it up, said: “This was once the scum of the country—once foul, wretched rags. In it, now white as the snows of heaven, behold an emblem of the work our ragged schools have achieved.”