FullReads

Such a man sent out into such an age, would naturally have a hard and a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell under the guidance of some master-mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly deformed, as Burns did. His works are after all only the disjecta membra poetae; full of hints of a great might-have-been. Hints of the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and thought. Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of the Scottish Muse, in which

Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw
A lustre grand,
And seem’d to my astonished view
A well-known land.

The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a translation from Dante’s “Paradiso,” so broad, terse, vivid, the painter’s touch. Hints, too, of a humour, which, like that of Shakespeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the sublime; as when

Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch
Just like a winking baudrons.

Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened in such a perpetual word-battle as that amid which Shakespeare lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Shakespeare’s own; which even now asserts its force by a hundred little never-to-be-forgotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader. And as for his tenderness–the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren–it gushes forth toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception, namely, the hypocrite, ever alike “spiacente a Dio e ai nemici sui;” and therefore intolerable to Robert Burns’s honesty, whether he be fighting for or against the cause of right. Again we say, there are evidences of a versatile and manifold faculty in this man, which, with a stronger will and a larger education, might have placed him as an equal by the side of those great names which we mentioned together with his at the commencement of this article.

But one thing Burns wanted; and of that one thing his age helped to deprive him–the education which comes by reverence. Looking round in such a time, with his keen power of insight, his keen sense of humour, what was there to worship? Lord Jeffrey, or whosoever was the author of the review in the “Edinburgh,” says disparagingly, that Burns had as much education as Shakespeare. So he very probably had, if education mean book-learning. Nay, more, of the practical education of the fireside, the sober, industrious, God-fearing education, and “drawing out” of the manhood, by act and example, Burns may have had more under his good father than Shakespeare under his; though the family life of the small English burgher in Elizabeth’s time would have generally presented, as we suspect, the very same aspect of staid manfulness and godliness which a Scotch farmer’s did fifty years ago. But let that be as it may, Burns was not born into an Elizabethan age. He did not see around him Raleighs and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes and Frobishers, Spensers and Jonsons, Southamptons and Willoughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and moulding the great whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong, and wise–a woman who, whether right or wrong, bowed the proudest, if not to love, yet still to obey.

That was the secret of Shakespeare’s power. Heroic himself, he was born into an age of heroes. You see it in his works. Not a play but gives patent evidence that to him all forms of human magnanimity were common and wayside flowers–among the humours of men which he and Ben Jonson used to wander forth together to observe. And thus he could give living action and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and the Middle Age; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged in everything but in the dress. Had he known Greek literature he could have recalled to imperishable life such men as Cimon and Aristides, such deeds as Marathon and Salamis. For had we not had our own Salamis acted within a few years of his birth; and were not the heroes of it still walking among men? It was surely this continual presence of “men of worship,” this atmosphere of admiration and respect and trust, in which Shakespeare must have lived, which tamed down the wild self-will of the deer-stealing fugitive from Stratford, into the calm large-eyed philosopher, tolerant and loving, and full of faith in a species made in the likeness of God. Not so with Burns. One feels painfully in his poems the want of great characters; and still more painfully that he has not drawn them, simply because they were not there to draw. That he has a true eye for what is noble, when he sees it, let his “Lament for Glencairn” testify, and the stanzas in his “Vision,” in which, with a high-bred grace which many a courtly poet of his day might have envied, he alludes to one and another Scottish worthy of his time. There is no vein of saucy and envious “banausia” in the man; even in his most graceless sneer, his fault–if fault it be–is, that he cannot and will not pretend to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of respect. He sees around him and above him, as well as below him, an average of men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow, ridiculous by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not apply to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant for their realities. After all, he does but say what every one round him was feeling and thinking; but he said it; and hypocritical respectability shrank shrieking from the mirror of her own inner heart. But it was all the worse for him. In the sins of others he saw an excuse for his own. Losing respect for and faith in his brother-men, he lost, as a matter of course, respect for himself, faith in himself. The hypocrisy which persecutes in the name of law, whether political or moral, while in private it transgresses the very law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned by his passionate and sorely-tempted character into a too easy excuse for disbelieving in the obligation of any law whatsoever. He ceases to worship, and therefore to be himself worshipful–and we know the rest.