If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what
other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance? FOOTNOTE:

  [2] Prefatory letter to "Peveril of the Peak." II

SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS


To write with authority about another man we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass
a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
Principal Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect--that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the
critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not
an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of "Holy
Willie's Prayer," Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved
most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was
ever written." To the "Jolly Beggars," so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say
painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the "Cottar's
Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The
"Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_--a burly figure in literature, as, from
our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the
other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary
clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt
and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot _protégé_, and solacing
himself with the explanation that the poet was "the most inconsistent of
men." If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject,
and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we
can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen
a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes
neither "Holy Willie," nor the "Beggars," nor the "Ordination," nothing
is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère?" And every merit we find in the book,
which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns,
only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so
greatly thrown away. It is far from my intention to tell over again a story that has been so
often told; but there are certainly some points in the character of
Burns that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life
that demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man's nature, for all
its richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new
information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle
made an inimitable bust of the poet's head of gold; may I not be
forgiven if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were
of clay? YOUTH

Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes,
after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill,
backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On
his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation; he
would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
own influence. For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
supplement this last--the trait is laughably Scottish--by a dialogue of
his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was
exactly represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield
herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or
to sit by her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family
tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
theology--everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up
a popular Scottish type. If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it
is only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old
Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader's comprehension by a popular but
unworthy instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and
wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours
who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father,
brothers, and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a
book in the other.