Robert Burns, Principal Shairp [warren buffett book recommendations txt] 📗

Madrid he takes the rout,
To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt.

* * * * *

For Britain's guid! for her destruction!
Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction.

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog, -

Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate
They waste sae many a braw estate!
Are we sae foughten and harass'd
For gear to gang that gate at last?

And yet he allows, that for all that

- - Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies,
Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows.

"Mark the power of that one word, 'nowt,'" said the late Thomas Aird. "If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all that way 'to fecht wi' nowt.' It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly."

Or turn to the poem of Halloween . Here he has sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment - painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and (p. 195) lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the remembrance of antique customs and superstitious observances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, and have now all but disappeared.

Or again, take The auld Farmer's New-year-morning Salutation to his auld Mare . In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a commonplace, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough setting her face to the furzy braes.

Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit,
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit,
An spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket,
Wi' pith an' pow'r,
Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit,
An' slypet owre.

To paraphrase this, "Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over." The latter part of this paraphrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English words could have rendered these things as compactly and graphically?

Of The Cotter's Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns's highest level. The metre was not native to him. It contains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are heavy. But as Lockhart has said, in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the (p. 196) better nature that was originally in him. It shows how Burns could reverence the old national piety, however little he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two great national poets has described Scottish character on the side of that grave, deep, though undemonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic element in it.

No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sympathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to themselves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their own language made musical, and glorified by genius. He made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that otherwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of themselves on a large scale - of themselves, both in their virtues and in their vices.

Secondly, Burns in his poetry was not only the interpreter of Scotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue that followed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all symbols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The (p. 197) thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers.

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate, to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon, the power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local; the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he accomplished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that "the old kingdom" has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to-day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness, if she had been left without her two "sacred poets."

Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class nor country; they had something more catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the (p. 198) characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what "random shots o' countra wit" did he hit off the public men of his time! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke! The elder, and the younger Pitt, "yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox," as he irreverently calls him - if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.'s of the time, from -

That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas

to -

That glib-gabbit Highland baron
The Laird o' Graham,

and -

Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie,

- he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks, there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of his fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would not have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then his moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limitations - his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his own cause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral insight, piercing to the quick! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs in all lands - "mottoes of the heart"!

Such are - (p. 199)

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursel as ithers see us:
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion;

Or the much-quoted -

Facts are chiels that winna ding
And downa be disputed;

Or -

The heart ay's the part ay
That makes us right or wrang.

Who on the text, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone," ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his Address to the unco Guid ? and