Chapter 21

Such men seem to us more clearly and certainly men of genius, than many who, under different circumstances, may have effected higher achievements. For though they enjoyed in their condition ineffable blessings to dilate their spirits, and touch them with all tenderest thoughts, it is not easy to imagine, on the other hand, the deadening or degrading influences to which by that condition they were inevitably exposed, and which keep down the heaven-aspiring flame of genius, or extinguish it wholly, or hold it smouldering under all sorts of rubbish. Only look at the attempts in verse of the common run of clodhoppers. Buy a few ballads from the wall or stall--and you groan to think that you have been born--such is the mess of mire and filth which often, without the slightest intention of offence, those rural, city, or suburban bards of the lower orders prepare for boys, virgins, and matrons, who all devour it greedily, without suspicion. Strange it is that even in that mural minstrelsy, occasionally occurs a phrase or line, and even stanza, sweet and simple, and to nature true; but consider it in the light of poetry read, recited, and sung by the people, and you might well be appalled by the revelation therein made of the tastes, feelings, and thoughts of the lower orders. And yet in the midst of all the popularity of such productions, the best of Burns's poems, his "Cottar's Saturday Night," and most delicate of his songs, are still more popular, and read by the same classes with a still greater eagerness of delight. Into this mystery we shall not now inquire; but we mention it now merely to show how divine a thing true genius is, which, burning within the bosoms of a few favourite sons of nature, guards them from all such pollution, lifts them up above it all, purifies their whole being, and without consuming their family affections or friendships, or making them unhappy with their lot, and disgusted with all about them, reveals to them all that is fair and bright and beautiful in feeling and in imagination, makes them very poets indeed, and should fortune favour, and chance and accident, gains for them wide over the world the glory of a poet's name.

From all such evil influences incident to their condition--and we are now speaking but of the evil--the Five emerged; and first and foremost--Burns. Our dearly beloved Thomas Carlyle is reported to have said at a dinner given to Allan Cunningham in Dumfries, that Burns was not only one of the greatest of poets, but likewise of philosophers. We hope not. What he did may be told in one short sentence. His genius purified and ennobled in his imagination and in his heart the character and condition of the Scottish peasantry--and reflected them, ideally true to nature, in the living waters of Song. That is what he did; but to do that, did not require the highest powers of the poet and the philosopher. Nay, had he marvellously possessed them, he never would have written a single line of the poetry of the late Robert Burns. Thank Heaven for not having made him such a man--but merely the Ayrshire Ploughman. He was called into existence for a certain work, for the fulness of time was come--but he was neither a Shakespeare, nor a Scott, nor a Goethe; and therefore he rejoiced in writing the "Saturday Night," and "The Twa Dogs," and "The Holy Fair," and "O' a' the Airts the Win' can blaw," and eke "The Vision." But forbid it, all ye Gracious Powers! that we should quarrel with Thomas Carlyle--and that, too, for calling Robert Burns one of the greatest of poets and philosophers.

Like a strong man rejoicing to run a race, we behold Burns in his golden prime; and glory gleams from the Peasant's head, far and wide over Scotland. See the shadow tottering to the tomb! frenzied with fears of a prison--for some five-pound debt--existing, perhaps, but in his diseased imagination--for, alas! sorely diseased it was, and he too, at last, seemed somewhat insane. He escapes that disgrace in the grave. Buried with his bones be all remembrances of his miseries! But the spirit of song, which was his true spirit, unpolluted and unfallen, lives, and breathes, and has its being, in the peasant-life of Scotland; his songs, which are as household and sheepfold words, consecrated by the charm that is in all the heart's purest affections, love and pity, and the joy of grief, shall never decay, till among the people have decayed the virtues which they celebrate, and by which they were inspired; and should some dismal change in the skies ever overshadow the sunshine of our national character, and savage storms end in sullen stillness, which is moral death, in the poetry of Burns the natives of happier lands will see how noble was once the degenerated race that may then be looking down disconsolately on the dim grass of Scotland with the unuplifted eyes of cowards and slaves.

The truth ought always to be spoken; and therefore we say that in fancy James Hogg--in spite of his name and his teeth--was not inferior to Robert Burns--and why not? The Forest is a better schoolroom for Fancy than ever Burns studied in; it overflowed with poetical traditions. But comparisons are always odious; and the great glory of James is, that he is as unlike Robert as ever one poet was unlike another.

Among hills that once were a forest, and still bear that name, and by the side of a river not unknown in song, lying in his plaid on a brae among the "woolly people," behold that true son of genius--The Ettrick Shepherd. We are never so happy as when praising James; but pastoral poets are the most incomprehensible of God's creatures; and here is one of the best of them all, who confesses the "Chaldee" and denies the "Noctes!"

"The Queen's Wake" is a garland of fair forest flowers, bound with a band of rushes from the moor. It is not a poem--not it--nor was it intended to be so; you might as well call a bright bouquet of flowers a flower, which, by the by, we do in Scotland. Some of the ballads are very beautiful; one or two even splendid; most of them spirited; and the worst far better than the best that ever was written by any bard in danger of being a blockhead. "Kilmeny" alone places our (ay, _our_) Shepherd among the Undying Ones. London soon loses all memory of lions, let them visit her in the shape of any animal they please. But the Heart of the Forest never forgets. It knows no such word as absence. The Death of a Poet there is but the beginning of a Life of Fame. His songs no more perish than do flowers. There are no Annuals in the Forest. All are perennial; or if they do indeed die, their fadings away are invisible in the constant succession--the sweet unbroken series of everlasting bloom. So will it be in his native haunts with the many songs of the Ettrick Shepherd. The lochs may be drained--corn may grow where once the Yarrow flowed--nor is such change much more unlikely than in the olden time would have been thought the extirpation of all the vast oak-woods, where the deer trembled to fall into the den of the wolf, and the wild boar farrowed beneath the eagle's eyrie. All extinct now! But obsolete never shall be the Shepherd's plaintive or pawky, his melancholy or merry, lays. The ghost of "Mary Lee" will be seen in the moonlight coming down the hills; the "Witch of Fife" on the clouds will still bestride her besom; and the "Gude Grey Cat" will mew in imagination, were even the last mouse on his last legs, and the feline species swept off by war, pestilence, and famine, and heard to purr no more!

It is here where Burns was weakest, that the Shepherd is strongest--the world of shadows. The airy beings that to the impassioned soul of Burns seemed cold, bloodless, unattractive, rise up lovely in their own silent domains, before the dreaming fancy of the tender-hearted Shepherd. The still green beauty of the pastoral hills and vales where he passed all his days, inspired him with ever-brooding visions of Fairy Land, till, as he lay musing on the brae, the world of shadows seemed, in the clear depths, a softened reflection of real life, like the hills and heavens in the water of his native lake. When he speaks of Fairy Land, his language becomes aerial as the very voice of the fairy people, serenest images rise up with the music of the verse, and we almost believe in the being of those unlocalised realms of peace, and of which he sings like a native minstrel.

Yes, James--thou wert but a poor shepherd to the last--poor in this world's goods--though Altrive Lake is a pretty little bit farmie--given thee by the best of Dukes--with its few laigh sheep-braes--its somewhat stony hayfield or two--its pasture where Crummie might unhungered graze--nyuck for the potato's bloomy or ploomy shaws--and path-divided from the porch the garden, among whose flowers "wee Jamie" played. But nature had given thee, to console thy heart in all disappointments from the "false smiling of fortune beguiling," a boon which thou didst hug to thy heart with transport on the darkest day--the "gift o' genie," and the power of immortal song.

And has Scotland to the Ettrick Shepherd been just--been generous--as she was--or was not--to the Ayrshire peasant?--has she, in her conduct to him, shown her contrition for her sin--whatever that may have been--to Burns? It is hard to tell. Fashion tosses the feathered head--and gentility turns away her painted cheek from the Mountain Bard; but when, at the shrine of true poetry, did ever such votaries devoutly worship? Cold, false, and hollow, ever has been their admiration of genius--and different, indeed, from their evanescent ejaculations, has ever been the enduring voice of fame. Scorn be to the scorners! But Scott, and Wordsworth, and Southey, and Byron, and other great bards, have all loved the Shepherd's lays--and Joanna the palm-crowned, and Felicia the muse's darling, and Caroline the Christian poetess, and all the other fair female spirits of song. And in his native land, all hearts that love her streams, and her hills, and her cottages, and her kirks, the bee-humming garden and the primrose-circled fold, the white hawthorn and the green fairy-knowe, all delight in "Kilmeny" and "Mary Lee," and in many another vision that visited the Shepherd in the Forest.

And what can surpass many of the Shepherd's songs? The most undefinable of all undefinable kinds of poetical inspiration are surely--Songs. They seem to start up indeed from the dew-sprinkled soil of a poet's soul, like flowers; the first stanza being root, the second leaf, the third bud, and all the rest blossom, till the song is like a stalk laden with its own beauty, and laying itself down in languid delight on the soft bed of moss--song and flower alike having the same "dying fall!"

A fragment! And the more piteous because a fragment. Go in search of the pathetic, and you will find it tear-steeped, sigh-breathed, moan-muttered, and groaned in fragments. The poet seems often struck dumb by woe--his heart feels that suffering is at its acme--and that he should break off and away from a sight too sad to be longer looked on--haply too humiliating to be disclosed. So, too, it sometimes is with the beautiful. The soul in its delight seeks to escape from the emotion that oppresses it--is speechless--and the song falls mute. Such is frequently the character--and the origin of that character--of our auld Scottish Sangs. In their mournfulness are they not almost like the wail of some bird distracted on the bush from which its nest has been harried, and then suddenly flying away for ever into the woods? In their joyfulness, are they not almost like the hymn of some bird, that love-stricken suddenly darts from the tree-top down to the caresses that flutter through the spring? And such, too, are often the airs to which those dear auld sangs are sung. From excess of feeling--fragmentary; or of one divine part to which genius may be defied to conceive another, because but one hour in all time could have given it birth.

You may call this pure nonsense--but 'tis so pure that you need not fear to swallow it. All great song-writers, nevertheless, have been great thieves. Those who had the blessed fate to flourish first--to be born when "this auld cloak was new,"--the cloak we mean which nature wears--scrupled not to creep upon her as she lay asleep beneath the shadow of some single tree among

"The grace of forest woods decay'd, And pastoral melancholy,"

and to steal the very pearls out of her hair--out of the silken snood which enamoured Pan himself had not untied in the Golden Age. Or if she ventured, as sometimes she did, to walk along the highways of the earth, they robbed her in the face of day of her dew-wrought reticule--without hurting, however, the hand from which they brushed that net of gossamer.

Then came the Silver Age of Song, the age in which we now live--and the song-singers were thieves still--stealing and robbing from them who had stolen and robbed of old; yet, how account you for this phenomenon--all parties remain richer than ever--and Nature, especially, after all this thieving and robbery, and piracy and plunder, many million times richer than the day on which she received her dowry,

"The bridal of the earth and sky;"

and with "golden store" sufficient in its scatterings to enable all the sons of genius she will ever bear, to "set up for themselves" in poetry, accumulating capital upon capital, till each is a Croesus, rejoicing to lend it out without any other interest than cent per cent, paid in sighs, smiles, and tears, and without any other security than the promise of a quiet eye,

"That broods and sleeps on its own heart!"

Amongst the most famous thieves in our time have been Rob, James, and Allan. Burns never saw or heard a jewel or tune of a thought or a feeling, but he immediately made it his own--that is, stole it. He was too honest a man to refrain from such thefts. The thoughts and feelings--to whom by divine right did they belong? To Nature. But Burns beheld them "waif and stray," and in peril of being lost for ever. He seized then on those "snatches of old songs," wavering away into the same oblivion that lies on the graves of the nameless bards who first gave them being; and now, spiritually interfused with his own lays, they are secured against decay--and like them immortal. So hath the Shepherd stolen many of the Flowers of the Forest--whose beauty had breathed there ever since Flodden's fatal overthrow; but they had been long fading and pining away in the solitary places, wherein so many of their kindred had utterly disappeared, and beneath the restoring light of his genius their bloom and their balm were for ever renewed. But the thief of all thieves is the Nithsdale and Galloway thief--called by Sir Walter, most characteristically, "Honest Allan!" Thief and forger as he is--we often wonder why he is permitted to live. Many is the sweet stanza he has stolen from Time--that silly old carle who kens not even his own--many the lifelike line--and many the strange single word that seems to possess the power of all the parts of speech. And, having stolen them, to what use did he turn the treasures? Why, unable to give back every man his own--for they were all dead, buried, and forgotten--by a potent prayer he evoked from his Pool-Palace, overshadowed by the Dalswinton woods, the Genius of the Nith, to preserve the gathered flowers of song for ever unwithered, for that they all had grown ages ago beneath and around the green shadows of Criffel, and longed now to be embalmed in the purity of the purest river that Scotland sees flowing in unsullied silver to the sea. But the Genius of the Nith--frowning and smiling--as he looked upon his son alternately in anger, love, and pride--refused the votive offering, and told him to be gone; for that he--the Genius--was not a Cromek--and could distinguish with half an eye what belonged to antiquity, from what had undergone, in Allan's hands, change into "something rich and rare;" and above all, from what had been blown to life that very year by the breath of Allan's own genius, love-inspired by "his ain lassie," the "lass that he loe'd best," springing from seeds itself had sown, and cherished by the dews of the same gracious skies, that filled with motion and music the transparency of the river-god's never-failing urn.

We love Allan's "Maid of Elvar." It beats with a fine, free, bold, and healthful spirit. Along with the growth of the mutual love of Eustace and Sybil, he paints peasant-life with a pen that reminds us of the pencil of Wilkie. He is as familiar with it all as Burns; and Burns would have perused with tears many of these pictures, even the most cheerful--for the flood-gates of Robin's heart often suddenly flung themselves open to a touch, while a rushing gush--wondering gazers knew not why--bedimmed the lustre of his large black eyes. Allan gives us descriptions of Washings and Watchings o' claes, as Homer has done before him in the Odyssey, and that other Allan in the Gentle Shepherd--of Kirks, and Christenings, and Halloweens, and other Festivals. Nor has he feared to string his lyre--why should he?--to such themes as the Cottar's Saturday Night--and the simple ritual of our faith, sung and said

"In some small kirk upon the sunny brae, That stands all by itself on some sweet Sabbath-day."

Ay, many are the merits of this "Rustic Tale." To appreciate them properly, we must carry along with us, during the perusal of the poem, a right understanding and feeling of that pleasant epithet--Rustic. Rusticity and Urbanity are polar opposites--and there lie between many million modes of Manners, which you know are Minor Morals. But not to puzzle a subject in itself sufficiently simple, the same person may be at once rustic and urbane, and that too, either in his character of man or of poet, or in his twofold capacity of both; for observe that, though you may be a man without being a poet, we defy you to be a poet without being a man. A Rustic is a clodhopper; an Urbane is a paviour. But it is obvious that the paviour in a field hops the clod; that the clodhopper in a street paces the pavé. At the same time, it is equally obvious that the paviour, in hopping the clod, performs the feat with a sort of city smoke, which breathes of bricks; that the clodhopper, in pacing the pavé, overcomes the difficulty with a kind of country air, that is redolent of broom. Probably, too, Urbanus through a deep fallow is seen ploughing his way in pumps; Rusticus along the shallow stones is heard clattering on clogs. But to cease pursuing the subject through all its variations, suffice it for the present (for we perceive that we must resume the discussion another time), to say, that Allan Cunningham is a living example and lively proof of the truth of our Philosophy--it being universally allowed in the best circles of town and country, that he is an URBANE RUSTIC.

Now, that is the man for our love and money, when the work to be done is a Poem on Scottish Life.

We can say of Allan what Allan says of Eustace,--

"Far from the pasture moor He comes; the fragrance of the dale and wood Is scenting all his garments, green and good."

The rural imagery is fresh and fair; not copied Cockney wise, from pictures in oil or water-colours--from mezzotintoes or line-engravings--but from the free open face of day, or the dim retiring face of eve, or the face, "black but comely," of night--by sunlight or moonlight, ever Nature. Sometimes he gives us--Studies. Small, sweet, sunny spots of still or dancing day-stream-gleam--grove-glow-- sky-glimpse--or cottage-roof, in the deep dell sending up its smoke to the high heavens. But usually Allan paints with a sweeping pencil. He lays down his landscapes, stretching wide and far, and fills them with woods and rivers, hills and mountains, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle; and of all sights in life and nature, none so dear to his eyes as the golden grain, ebbing like tide of sea before a close long line of glancing sickles; no sound so sweet as--rising up into the pure harvest-air, frost-touched though sunny--beneath the shade of hedgerow-tree, after their mid-day meal, the song of the jolly reapers. But are not his pictures sometimes too crowded? No. For there lies the power of the pen over the pencil. The pencil can do much, the pen everything; the Painter is imprisoned within a few feet of canvass, the Poet commands the horizon with an eye that circumnavigates the globe; even that glorious pageant, a painted Panorama, is circumscribed by bounds, over which imagination, feeling them all too narrow, is uneasy till she soars; but the Poet's Panorama is commensurate with the soul's desires, and may include the Universe.

This Poem reads as if it had been written during the "dewy hour of prime." Allan must be an early riser. But, if not so now, some forty years ago he was up every morning with the lark,

"Walking to labour by that cheerful song,"

away up the Nith, through the Dalswinton woods; or, for anything we know to the contrary, intersecting with stone-walls, that wanted not their scientific coping, the green pastures of Sanquhar. Now he is familiar with Chantrey's form-full statues; then, with the shapeless cairn on the moor, the rude headstone on the martyr's grave. And thus it is that the present has given him power over the past--that a certain grace and delicacy, inspired by the pursuits of his prime, blend with the creative dreams that are peopled with the lights and shadows of his youth--that the spirit of the old ballad breathes still in its strong simplicity through the composition of his "New Poem"--and that art is seen harmoniously blending there with nature.

We have said already that we delight in the story; for it belongs to an "order of _fables_ grey," which has been ever dear to Poets. Poets have ever loved to bring into the pleasant places and paths of lowly life, persons (we eschew all manner of _personages_ and _heroes_ and _heroines_, especially with the epithet "_our_" prefixed) whose native lot lay in a higher sphere: for they felt that by such contrast, natural though rare, a beautiful light was mutually reflected from each condition, and that sacred revelations were thereby made of human character, of which all that is pure and profound appertains equally to all estates of this our mortal being, provided only that happiness knows from whom it comes, and that misery and misfortune are alleviated by religion. Thus Electra appears before us at her Father's Tomb, the virgin-wife of the peasant Auturgus, who reverently abstains from the intact body of the daughter of the king. Look into Shakespeare. Rosalind was not so lovable at court as in the woods. Her beauty might have been more brilliant, and her conversation too, among lords and ladies; but more touching both, because true to tenderer nature, when we see and hear her in dialogue with the neat-herdess--ROSALIND and _Audrey_! And trickles not the tear down thy cheek, fair reader--burns not the heart within thee, when thou thinkest of Florizel and Perdita on the Farm in the Forest?