Robert Burns

YOUNG CHARACTERS IN HISTORY. BY PROFESSOR WILLARD DONE, PRESIDENT OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS' COLLEGE, SALT LAKE CITY.

V.

ROBERT BURNS. Unlike the characters previously treated in this series, Robert Burns was not raised up to meet a great national emergency. There was neither an American Revolution to be pushed forward with energy, nor a French Revolution to be checked and controlled, nor a country in the throes of disso- lution to be rescued and revived. The work of Burns was inaugurated and carried out, not so much under the influence of national as of personal environments. His thoughts and actions were not traceable to sudden needs arising in his na- tion, affecting its future, but rather to his own personal rela- tionships to the world at large. Therefore his work must be viewed from the personal standpoint, and he must be made personally responsible for it and its consequences. Wash- ington, Napoleon, and Joan of Arc were forced by national needs and emergencies, into unnatural surroundings and con- ditions, and each was forced to perform duties which, under normal conditions, would appear strange, if not objectionable. We must judge of Burns, on the other hand, as impelled normally and by personal environments and conditions, to his life's work, and, therefore, as morally responsible for it. This explanation is deemed necessary to introduce the line of treatment to be followed. At intervals there appear in our periodicals new estimates of Burns as a man, Burns as a poet, Burns as a philosopher, Burns as a social agitator,

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etc. These estimates are as varied as the standpoints from which they are written, and the opinions of their authors. Here it is the design merely to speak of him as a poet in his relationship to literature, and as a man in his relationship to society. Burns was of the Scotch yeomanry, a class generally sturdy, self-reliant, progressive. Born in a mud hut erected by his father's own hands, and accustomed in youth to the in- dependent life of a farmer, he might have retained his vigor and self-reliance through life if he had not given way to weak- ening excesses. Though no better circumstanced than the Scotch peasants of their time and neighborhood, there was no reason for the Burns family being dissatisfied with their worldly condition. Even when misfortune befell them, forti- tude might have been manifested had not the poet's father been gloomy and over-sensitive. But a series of disappoint- ments overwhelmed him and broke his spirit. This tendency towards hypochondria was inherited by Burns, and had already developed, with other traits, before his father's death. It

was ever afterward a distinguishing trait, and the source of some of his most touching poems. This habit of melancholy was deepened by later financial misfortunes, until he sank into a somber state, enlivened only by brilliant periods of wit, jollity, and revelry, like lightning flashes in a black storm

cloud. If I have judged his character correctly, this habit of

alternate gloom and jollity, combined with his tendency to do everything on impulse led to the excesses which marred his life. The weak and evil traits of his boyhood which developed to a full fruition in his later life, can be briefly catalogued. They were improvidence, intemperance, inconstancy in love, (leading to immorality) and irreligion. Poverty pursued Burns from the time he commenced his independent career, and in spite of all he could do, he fell a victim to it and was always under the ban of improvidence. A man may sink so far into the mire of poverty and be so overwhelmed by misfortune as to lose all power of self-help and provision for the future. He lives on, especially if he is of an emotional, impulsive nature, in a condition of blank despair, despised by the cold, calculating, worldly-wise, and feeling a humilated

contempt for them. This was Burns' condition for some years before his death, and, poor fellow, at his death as well; for he died in mortal fear that a "rascally haberdasher" would take his poor emaciated person to a debtor's jail. It is true that one's condition in age results very largely

from the habits formed and the traits cultivated in youth. It is easy to see what habit of youth through being encouraged into manhood, did most to render Burns wretchedly poor at death. It was his habit of doing everything on impulse. He recognized this weakness, and its impoverishing, disheart- ening effects, though he seemed never to be able to overcome it. In his poem, "To a Mountain Daisy," is this manifest reference to himself:

"Such is the fate of simple bard, On life's rough ocean luckless starred, Unskillful he to note the card of prudent lore, Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, And whelm him o'er."

A man so lacking in a knowledge of "prudent lore" is always unfortunate, and Burns knew it; but this knowledge did not lead him to amendment. It would be extending a

harrowing tale beyond its proper limits, to trace this youth- ful characteristic through manhood to death, but it is suffici-

ent to say that his death at the early age of thirty-seven, was largely due to the anxiety and care his habit of improvidence caused him. Speaking of his impulsiveness, it may be well to state that it infected his life in all its relationships. Truth or fidelity to any high moral principle was rendered impossible. Lacking in self-control, he was irresistibly influenced in his emotions by outward circumstances. In nothing was this more marked than in his love affairs. In his boyhood he was intensely romantic and passionate. His biographer declares that the tender passion was aroused within him by the mere sight of a woman, no matter how plain and unattractive she may have been. At seventeen "his inamoratas were the freckled beauties who milked cows and hoed potatoes, but his passionate imagination attired them with the most won- derful graces. He was Antony, and he found a Cleopatra

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— for — whom the world were well lost in every harvest field." If he had "loved at a distance," and had not inspired the same passion in his young lady acquaintances, who were captivated by his black, expressive eyes and witty tongue, his frequent and fitful spells of love would have done no harm. But to his passionate, impressible nature, this was impossible. His love degenerated, through very fickleness, into blind passion, which ruined both himself and its objects. Then when he had allowed it to gain a complete mastery over him, and, like the fly in the fable, had fed it until it became an irresistible monster, he confessed his helplessness and excused his sin: "I burn, I burn, as when thro' ripened corn, By driving winds the crackling flames are borne, Now maddening, wild, I curse that fatal night, Now bless the hour which charmed my guilty sight. * * # * . # # Each thought intoxicated homage yields. And riots wanton in forbidden fields." It is no cause for wonder that law, religion, conscience,

and reason were vanquished by his passion. It is not strange that while he was mourning over the untimely death of Mary Campbell, or falling into amorous intrigue with some "high- land lassie," or courting an Edinburgh lady separated from her husband, Jean Armour was approaching the birth of her third illegitimate child; or that after marriage, during an ab- sence of his wife, a girl fell a victim to his passion and gave birth to a child,which Burns welcomed in a half-pathetic, half-defiant poem. These things are not excusable, even in such a genius as Burns; and they were the direct, inevitable products of the impulsive, unrestrained passion of his youth. His intemperance arose from this same impulsiveness. On account of his brilliant wit and his free flow of animal spirits, when not in a despondent state, he was often sought after, when a youth, to form one of a roystering company, who might remain at the wine table until what Burns calls "the good-fellow hour of 6 a. m." Drunkenness followed as a matter of course. Youth's moderate indulgence develops into manhood's habitual drunkenness. Burns was no excep- tion to this rule. These excesses very materially hastened his death.

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Irreligion was not the least objectionable of his traits.

It is true, he assailed the false so-called orthodoxy of his

time, with its inconsistencies and absurdities, but he assailed, as well, its truths. And if such assults as he made are justi- fied, it is but a step to justification of attacks on true religion. He was an adept at using the weapons generally employed against religion, and he did not spare their use either in writing or in speaking. His "Holy Willie's Prayer" punct- ures some of the inflated claims of so-called Christianity more effectively than polemics could have done: "O Thou wha in the heavens dost dwell Wha, as it pleases best thysel', Sends one to heaven and ten to hell, All for thy glory, And not for any good or ill " They've done afore thee.

This single extract is a sermon against the doctrine of predestined salvation and condemnation. One of the elements of Burns's early life remained a memory until his death, and forms a striking example of the benefits springing from the wise course pursued by his father. Reference is made to the religious instruction imparted to him while a boy at home. True, it did not prevent his fall-

ing into the gross sins of his manhood, but it remained a hallowed memory through life, and no one knows how much more sinful his life might have been, but for this instruction. The lessons taught him at the "wee bit ingle" in childhood, did much, no doubt, to restrain him in his subsequent con- duct, and to keep him closer to the line of duty than would otherwise have been possible. In all his attacks upon the religion of outward form, he had no word to say against the worship of the heart, "the language of the soul." The pic ture so beautifully and touchingly portrayed in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" is said to be a literal reproduction of the familiar scene enacted each evening in his father's house; where the sire gathers his family about him, reads to them from the "great hall Bible," "And Let us worship God, he says with solemn air." Had Burns, instead of railing against the formal religions of his time, taken more to heart the

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teachings of this true, inward devotion, who knows how much fuller, nobler, more blameless, his life would have been? The virtues of Burns's early life should not be omitted. Chief among these was a noble ambition to excel. He stated that he always panted to become famous, to gain a name. This increased his intense desire for learning, a quality which he had inherited from his ancestors. His father was one of a number to unite in establishing a school near their farms, and here Robert's boyish desire for learning grew with what it fed on. As he advanced in knowledge he increased in friendship for all, whether of high or humble birth, who were attempting to establish the aristocracy of worth and intellect, and simultaneously his contempt for the aristocracy of birth and wealth deepened

"The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man's the gowd for a' that.''

In his estimation the "guinea stamp" of genius was more genuine, and the gold more pure, than in the case of birth or wealth. Burns had great love and sympathy for the com- mon people. Their wrongs he considered his, but too frequently he thought his own wrongs theirs. This led to a resentment against the pride of aristocracy which was not al- ways just. This love for the commons was bred in Burns from childhood, and under the stimulating influence of the French Revolution and the wrongs he thought himself sub- jected to by the "privileged classes," it grew into one of the ruling passions of his life. To find the great and prominent virtues of Burns, how- ever, we must view him as a poet. His poetic power devel- oped in early childhood. Like Pope, he "lisped in num- bers." His subjects at that time, and at all times, were the common scenes and incidents around him. From his youth he was a close observer and enthusiastic admirer of nature, especially on its personal side. This, combined with the ex- cellent stock of tales and songs which he absorbed from the old men and women of his neighborhood, led him into the

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writing of excellent poetry at an early age. And, "his poems were as much the product of his own farm and its immediate neighborhood, as were the shoes he wore, or the oats and turnips he grew." From this fact arose his power to turn the most trivial incident into a song, either pathetic .or ludicrous. Seeing a louse on a fine lady's bonnet in church, led him to write a burlesque denunciation of the little intruder, winding up with the sublime wish "O wad some power thegiftiegie us To see ourselves as others see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

And foolish notion." Turning up a mouse's nest with his plough brought out a most affecting poem of condolence with the little animal, the poet's "fellow mortal," including the philosophical thought, "The best laid plans o' mice an' men, Gang aft a-gley."

Yet the mouse is blest, compared with the poet, in the fact that it has only the present to fear, while

"Och! I backward cast my e'e O'er prospects drear, A' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!"

The daisy, uprooted by the poet's plough, is a type, at once, of suffering worth, a ruined maid, the unskillful finan- cier, and the poet himself. A raging tooth gives rise to its appropriate poem, in which that particular pain is spoken of as "bearing the gree" of all the pangs known to mortals. No doubt the memory of a drunken brawl at a tavern led to the composition of his inimitable Tarn o' Shanter, the hero of which, drinking at a tavern bar until late at night, while his wife is at home

"Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm — finds himself assailed on the way home by a swarm of witches. His intense patriotism found expression in some stirring poems, directed to his countrymen, and rousing them to op-

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position to its enemies, real and imaginary. "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," "Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?" and "Caledonia" are only samples of the poems full of burn- ing Scotch patriotism, which have made his name, and that deservedly, a household word throughout his native country. Judged, therefore, from the standpoint of originality, imagination, patriotism, and lyric skill, Burns stands in the front rank of poets. His work was purely spontaneous and directly inspired. — "His fame greater than that of any other poet of his country —rests upon poems written hurriedly, as men write their letters, and on songs which came to him naturally, as its carol comes to the blackbird." As a man, Burns raised but little admiration during his life, because of his many failings and his evil repute. And it is a remarkable fact that the rapid degeneracy in his character was accompanied by a corresponding degeneracy in his poetry. But the memory of his virtues and the better poetry he has written, have been preserved to canonize his image in the hearts of his countrymen, whereby has been fulfilled his own prediction regarding himself. "Don't be afraid: I'll be more respected a hundred years after I am dead, than I am at present." If the claim of his admirers is true, that on

account of his prominence and ability his faults have been held to the gaze of the world, more than those of his contem- poraries, there is consolation for them in the thought that charity is becoming more and more apparent in estimates of his character, and harshness is rapidly disappearing. The evil he did is soon to be forgotten, except as a warning shadow (always growing dimmer) on the paje of his biography; the inspired and inspiring poems he has written will shed ever- brightening lustre on the history of Scotland and the mem- ory of her favorite son. "In Burns's songs, love finds an exquisite companionship; independence a backer and second; conviviality a roaring table; patriotism a deeper love of country, and a gayer scorn of death than even its own. And in so adding to, and puri- fying Scottish song, Burns has conferred the greatest benefit on his countrymen that it is in the power of a poet to confer."