Delphi Complete Works of Robert Burns (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) (106 page)

There is nothing morbid or narrow in Burns’s letters. They are frank and healthy. You can spend a day over them, and feel at the end of it as if you had been wandering at large through the freedom of nature. They seem to have been written in the open air. The first condition necessary to an appreciative understanding of them is to concern yourself with the sentiment. And, indeed, the strength and sincerity of the sentiment by-and-by draw you away to oblivion of the style, however much it may at first strike you as redundant and affected. They are not the letters of a literary man. They have nothing suggestive of the studious chamber and the midnight lamp. There is often a narrowness of idea in the merely literary man which limits his auditory to men of his peculiar pattern. To this narrowness Burns, with all his faults of style, was a stranger. His letters are the utterances of a man who refused to be imprisoned in any single department of human thought. He was no specialist, pinned to one standpoint, and making the width of the world commensurate with the narrowness of his own horizon. He moved about, he looked abroad; he had no pet subject, no restricted field of study; nature and human nature in their multitudinous phases and many retreats were his range, and he expressed his views as freely and vigorously as he took them.

The general tone of the letters is high. The subject is not seldom of supreme interest. Questions are discussed which are rarely discussed in ordinary correspondence. The writer rises above creeds and formularies and arbitrarily established rule. He speculates on a theology beyond the bounds of Calvinism, on a philosophy of the soul above the dialectics of the schoolmen, on a morality at variance with conventional law. He interrogates the intuitions of the mind and the intimations of nature in order that, if possible, he may learn something of the soul’s origin, destiny, and supremest duty. But let us hear himself: —

(a)
“I have ever looked on mankind in the lump to be nothing better    than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me.... I am drawn by conviction like a Man, not by a halter like an Ass.”

(b)
“
‘On Earth Discord! A gloomy Heaven above opening its jealous gates to the nineteen-thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! And below an inexorable Hell expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of mortals!’
O doctrine comfortable and healing to the weary wounded soul of man! Ye sons and daughters of affliction, to whom day brings no pleasure and night yields no rest, be comforted! ‘Tis one to but nineteen hundred housand that your situation will mend in this world, and ‘tis nineteen hundred thousand to one, by the dogmas of theology, that you will be damned eternally in the world to come.”

(c)
“A pillar that bears us up amid the wreck of misfortune and   misery is to be found in those feelings and sentiments which, however    the sceptic may deny or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those;
senses of the mind
, if I may be allowed the expression, which link us to the awful obscure realities of an all-powerful and equally beneficent God and a world-to-come beyond death and the grave.”

(d)
“Can it be possible that when I resign this frail, feverish being I shall still find myself in conscious existence?... Shall I yet be warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable Sages and holy Flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death, or are they all alike baseless visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must only be for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea then is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it as I ardently wish it!... Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! I trust thou art no impostor.... I trust that in Thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

(e)
“From the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfections in the administration of affairs, in both the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.”

(f)
“I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer’s noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover in an autumn morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, that, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod?”

(g)
“Gracious Heaven! why this disparity between our wishes and our powers? Why is the most generous wish to make others blest, impotent and ineffectual?... Out upon the world! say I, that its affairs are administered so ill.”

(h)
“At first glance, several of your propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a jew’s-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that, from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas — these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths.”
^a

(i)
“O, I could curse circumstances, and the coarse tie of human laws which keeps fast what common-sense would loose, and which bars that happiness it cannot give — happiness which otherwise love and honour would warrant!”

(j)
“If there is no man on earth to whom your heart and affections are justly due, it may savour of imprudence, but never of criminality, to bestow that heart and those affections where you please. The God of love meant and made those delicious attachments to be bestowed on somebody.”

The inequalities of fortune, the pleasures of friendship, the miseries of poverty, the glories of independence, the privileges of wealth allied to generosity, the sin of ingratitude, and similar topics, are continually recurring to prove the elevation at which his spirit usually soared and surveyed mankind. It has been charged against him
^b
that these subjects were not the food of his daily contemplation, but were lugged into his letters for the sake of effect, and that their clumsy introduction was frequently apologised for by the complaint that the writer had nothing else to write about. The frequent apologies here spoken of will be hard to find, and the critic’s only reason for advancing the charge, for which he would fain find support in the fancied apologies of Burns, is that many of the letters “relate neither to facts nor feelings peculiarly connected with the author or his correspondent.” This only means that a very large proportion of Burns’s letters are not like the letters of ordinary men, and therefore do not satisfy the critic’s idea or definition of a letter. They treat of themes that are not specially
à propos
of passing events, and therefore they are forced and affected. Few are likely to be imposed upon by such shallow reasoning. Another critic
^c
avers that “while Burns says nothing of difficulties at all, he yet leaves an admirable letter, out of nothing, in your hands!” We may pit the one critic against the other, and so leave them, while we peruse the letters, and form an opinion for ourselves.

While both the verse and the prose of Burns are revelations, his letters reveal more than his poems the failings and frailties of the man. His poems, taken altogether, shew him at his best, as we wish to — and as we mainly do — remember him; a man to be loved, admired, even envied, and by no means pitied, for his soul, though often vexed with the irritations incidental to an obscure and toiling lot, has a strength and buoyancy which readily raise it to divine altitudes, where it might well be content to see and smile at the petty class distinctions and the paltry social tyranny from which those irritations chiefly spring. His letters, on the other hand, present him to us less frequently on those commanding altitudes. He is oftener careful and concerned about many things, groping occasionally in the world’s ways for the world’s gifts, and handicapped in the struggle for them by a contemptuous and half-hearted adoption of the world’s methods of winning them.

The same personality that stands forth in the poems is everywhere present in all essential features in the letters. We have in the latter the same view of life, present and future; the same fierce contentment with honest poverty; the same aggressive independency of manhood; the same patriotism, susceptibility to female loveliness, love of sociality, undaunted likes and dislikes. The humour is the same, though often too elaborately expressed.
^d
In one important respect, however, his letters fail to reflect that image of him which his poetry presents. It is remarkable that his descriptions of rural nature, and one might add of rustic life, so full and plentiful in his verse, are so few and slight in his letters. He seems to have reserved these descriptions for his verse.

The best, because the most genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M’Lehose, the severest thing that can with justice be said against her is that, if she maintained her virtue, she endangered her reputation. One remarkable position taken up by a recent writer
^e
on the subject of Burns’s amours is, that he never really loved any woman, and least of all Jean Armour. The letters would rather warrant the converse of his statement. They go to prove that while Burns’s affections were more than oriental in their strength and liberality, they were especially centred upon Jean. He felt “a miserable blank in his heart with want of her;” “a rooted attachment for her;” “had no reason on her part to rue his marriage with her;” and “never saw where he could have made it better.” If Burns was never really in love, it is more than probable that the whole world has been mistaking some other passion for it. It is this same writer who in one breath speaks of Burns philandering with Clarinda, and yet declaring his attachment to her in the best songs he ever wrote. Another error which the letters should correct is the belief expressed in some quarters that Burns was no longer capable of producing poetry after his fatal residence in Edinburgh. It was, as a matter of fact, subsequent to his residence in Edinburgh that he wrote the poems for which he is now, and for which he will be longest, famous — namely, his songs. The writer already referred to compares the composition of these songs to the carving of cherry-stones. They were, he says in effect, the amusement of a man who could do nothing better in literature! The world has agreed that they are the best things Burns has done; and rates him for their sake in the highest rank of its poets. The truth is that Burns came to Ellisland with numerous schemes of future poetical work, vigorous hopes of carrying some of them, and an inspiration and faculty of utterance unimpaired. It was in Dumfriesshire that he composed the most tenderly and melodiously seraphic of his lyrics— “To Mary in Heaven” and “Highland Mary;” the most powerful and popular of his narrative poems— “Tam O’ Shanter;” the first of all patriotic odes— “Bruce’s Address to his Army”; and the noblest manifesto of the rights and hopes of manhood— “A Man’s a Man for a’ that.”

With one word on his style as a prose-writer this short paper must close. The most diverse opinions have been uttered on the subject. The critics trip up each other with charming independency. To Jeffrey they seemed to be “all composed as exercises and for display.” Carlyle declared that they were written “for the most part with singular force and even gracefulness,” and that when Burns wrote “to trusted friends on real interests, his style became simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful.” Dr. Waddell prefers him to Cowper and Byron as a letter-writer. Scott, while allowing passages of great eloquence, found in the letters “strong marks of affectation, with a tincture of pedantry.” Taine thinks “Burns brought ridicule on himself by imitating the men of the academy and the court.” Lockhart thought, with Walker, that “he accommodated his style to the tastes” of his correspondents. And so on.

It is worth while to learn from Burns himself what he thought of his talent for prose-composition. And in the first place it is to be noted that he practised prose-composition before he took to poetry. At sixteen he was carrying on an extensive literary correspondence, which was virtually a competition in essay-writing. He kept copies of the letters he liked best, and was flattered to find that he was superior to his correspondents. He studied the essayists of Queen Anne’s time, and formed his style upon theirs, and that of their most distinguished followers. Steele, Addison, Swift, Sterne, and Mackenzie were his models. He liked their rounded sentences, and caught their conventional phrases. He found delight in imitating them. He volunteered his services with the pen on behalf of his fellow-swains. He became the “Complete Letter-Writer” of his parish, and was proud of his function and his faculty. He was aware of his “abilities at a billet-doux.” To the very last he had a high opinion of himself as a writer of letters. He speaks of one letter being in his “very best manner;” and of waiting for an hour of inspiration to write another that should be as good. He retained copies of about thirty of his longer letters, and had them bound for preservation.