1. Religion should be a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich.2. There is a great and incomprehensible Being to whom I owe my existence.3. The Creator perfectly understands the being He has made.4. There is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue.5. There must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.6. From the sublimity, the excellence, and the purity of His doctrines and precepts, I believe Jesus Christ came from God.7. Whatever is done to mitigate the woes, or increase the happiness of humanity, is goodness.8. Whatever injures society or any member of it is iniquity.9. I believe in the immaterial and immortal nature of man.10. I believe in eternal life with God.
1. Religion should be a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich.
2. There is a great and incomprehensible Being to whom I owe my existence.
3. The Creator perfectly understands the being He has made.
4. There is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue.
5. There must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.
6. From the sublimity, the excellence, and the purity of His doctrines and precepts, I believe Jesus Christ came from God.
7. Whatever is done to mitigate the woes, or increase the happiness of humanity, is goodness.
8. Whatever injures society or any member of it is iniquity.
9. I believe in the immaterial and immortal nature of man.
10. I believe in eternal life with God.
Carlyle expressed regret that ‘Burns became involved in the religious quarrels of his district.’ This statement proves that Carlyle failed fully to comprehend the religious character of Burns. His chivalrous nature was partly responsible for his entering the battle waged by the ‘Auld Lichts’ against his dear friend the Rev. Dr M’Gill of Ayr and Gavin Hamilton ofMauchline; but his chief reason was his innate determination to free religion from the evils taught and practised in the name of religion in his time. He had the soul of a reformer, and the two leading elements in his soul were Religion and Liberty for the individual. It would have robbed the world of one of the greatest steps in human progress towards the Divine made in the eighteenth century, if Burns had failed to be true to the greatest things in his mind and heart.
Carlyle had clearly not studied the religious elements in either the poems or the letters of Burns, or he could not have written his comparison between Burns and Locke, Milton, and Cervantes, who did in poverty and unusual difficulties grand work. He asks: ‘What, then, had these men which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true religious principle of morals, and a single, not a double, aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of Heavenly Wisdom in one form or the other form ever hovered before them.
It passes understanding to comprehend how Carlyle could regard Burns as a ‘selfish’ man, or a man with ‘a double aim’—that is, two conflicting and opposing aims that he wasted his power in trying to harmonise.
Burns had three great aims: Purer Religion, a just Democracy, and closer Brotherhood; but these aims are in perfect harmony.
Carlyle ends the contrast between Burns and his model trio—Locke, Milton, and Cervantes—by saying of Burns: ‘He has no religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Lightformsof Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men.’
‘The heart not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or poeticalRestaurateur, but of a true poet and singer, worthy of the old religions heroic, had been given him, and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride.’
In a just comparison between Burns and the three named by Carlyle, Burns will need no apologists. Burns, directly in oppositionto the statement of Carlyle, was more vitally religious and less selfish than any of them. When twenty-one years of age he said, in one of his beautiful love-letters to Alison Begbie: ‘I grasp every creature in the arms of universal benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.’ This alone proves that Burns was one of the least selfish men who ever lived.
As an heroic teacher of vital religion Burns was infinitely greater than any other man of his time, and has been much more influential since his time in promoting Christ’s ideals than the men named by Carlyle. He was a fearless hero, and so meets the requirements specified by Carlyle, because, when he recognised the evils connected with religion in his time, when true religion was, to use Carlyle’s words, ‘becoming obsolete,’ he valiantly attacked them, hoping to enable his fellow-men to see the vision of true religion which his father had given him by his life and teaching.
There was absolutely no justification for calling Burns a mere verse-monger. To write such a wild nightmare dream about Scotland’s greatest and most self-less poet was unworthy of one of Scotland’s leading prose-writers.
It seems almost ludicrous to take notice of the assertion that Burns had not a high ideal of patriotism, as compared with the three ideal men of Carlyle—Burns, whose love for Scotland was a sacred feeling, a holy fire that never ceased to burn. This criticism needs no answer now.
No man ever comprehended Christ’s ideals regarding democracy more fully than did Burns. Christ based His teaching of the need of human liberty on His revelation of the value of the individual soul. Burns clearly understood Christ’s ideals regarding individual freedom, and faithfully followed Him.
The message of Coila in ‘The Vision’ to Burns was:
Preserve the dignity of manWith soul erect.
This was the central thought in the work of Burns regarding the freedom of all mankind: freedom from oppression by other men; freedom from the bondage imposed on the peasant and the labouring man by customs organised by so-called ‘higher classes’; freedom from the hardship and sorrow of poverty; freedom for each child to grow under proper conditions of nourishment, of physical development, and of educational training.
His whole nature was stirred to dignified indignation and resentment by class distinctions among men and women who were all created in the image of God, and who, in accordance with the teaching of Christ, should be brothers. He despised class distinctions which were made by man, whether the distinctions were made on the basis of rank or wealth. He was ashamed of the toadies who reverenced a lord merely because he chanced to be born a lord, and pitied those who accepted without protest inferiority to men of wealth. He was so true a democrat that he freely and respectfully recognised the worth of members of the aristocracy or of the wealthy class whose ability and high character made them worthy of respect; but he held in contempt those who assumed superiority simply because of rank or gold.
One of his most brilliant poems is ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ In it he gives comprehensive expression to his opinions, based on the fundamental principle,
The honest man, though e’er sae poor,Is King o’ men for a’ that.Is there for honesty poverty,That hangs his head an’ a’ that?The coward-slave, we pass him by;We dare be poor for a’ that.For a’ that, an’ a’ that,Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that;The rank is but the guinea stamp,The man’s the gowd for a’ that.goldYe see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,Wha struts, and stares, an’ a’ that;Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,He’s but a coof for a’ that:blockheadFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,His ribband, star, an’ a’ that;The man of independent mindHe looks and laughs at a’ that.A prince can mak a belted knight,A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;But an honest man’s aboon his might,aboveGude faith he maunna fa’ that.must not tryFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,Their dignities an’ a’ that,The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,Are higher ranks than a’ that.
Labouring man on farm or in factory, this is your charter. Let this be your creed. Sing this great democratic hymn at your gatherings—ay, sing it in your homes with your children, and each time you sing it, itshould kindle some new light in your soul that will bring you new vision of the greatest fact in connection with human life and duty, that you are alive to be God’s partner, and that while you remain honest, and unselfishly consider the rights of others, as fully as you consider your own, you are entitled to stand with kings, because you are an honest man.
The discussion between Cæsar the aristocratic dog and Luath the cotter’s dog is a fair representation of class conditions in Scotland in the time of Burns. Cæsar describes the laird’s riches, his idleness, his rackèd rents, and the compulsory services required from the poor tenants; dilates on the wastefulness in connection with the meals even of the servants in the homes of the great; and expresses surprise that poor folks could exist under their trying conditions.
Luath admits that sometimes the strain on the cotter was very severe: digging ditches, building dykes with dirty stones, baring a quarry, ‘an’ sic like,’ as a means of sustaining a lot of ragged children with nothing but his hand labour. He acknowledges that, when ill or out of work, it sometimes seems hopeless; but, after all, though past his comprehension, the poor folks arewonderfully contented, and stately men and clever women are brought up in their homes.
Cæsar then expatiates on the contemptuous way the poor are ‘huffed, and cuffed, and disrespecket.’ He especially sympathises with the poor on account of the way tenants are treated by the laird’s agents on rent-day—compelled to submit to their insolence, while they swear and threaten to seize their property; and concludes that poor folks must be very wretched.
Luath replies that, after all, they are not so wretched as he thinks; that their dearest enjoyments are in their wives and thriving children; that they often forget their private cares and discuss the affairs of kirk and state; that Hallowe’en and Christmas celebrations give them grand opportunities for happiness that make them forget their hardships and sorrows, and that during these festivals the old folks are so cheery and the young ones are so frolicsome that he ‘for joy has barket wi’ them!’ Still, he admits that it is owre true what Cæsar says, and that many decent, honest folk ‘are riven out, baith root and branch, some rascal’s pridefu’ greed to quench.’
Cæsar then describes the reckless way inwhich the money received from the poor cotters was wasted at operas, plays, mortgaging, gambling, masquerading, or taking trips to Calais, Vienna, Versailles, Madrid, or Italy; and finally to Germany, to some resort where their dissipations may be overcome by drinking muddy German water.
Luath is surprised to learn that the money for which the cotters have toiled so hard should be spent so wastefully; and wishes the gentry would stay at home and take interest in the sports of their own country, as it would be so much better for all: laird, tenant, and cotter. He closes by saying that many of the lairds are not ill-hearted fellows, and asks Cæsar if there is not a great deal of true pleasure in the lives of the rich.
Cæsar replies:
Lord, man, were ye but whyles where I am,The gentles ye wad ne’er envy them.
Admitting that they need not starve or work hard through winter’s cold or summer’s heat, or suffer in old age from working all day in the wet, he says:
But human bodies are sic fools,For a’ their colleges and schools,That when nae real ills perplex them,They mak enow themsels to vex them;An’ aye the less they hae to sturt them,In like proportion less will hurt them.A country fellow at the pleugh,His acres till’d, he’s right eneugh;A country girl at her wheel,Her dizzens dune, she’s unco weel;But gentlemen, and ladies warst,Wi’ ev’n-down want o’ wark are curst.They loiter, lounging, lank and lazy;Tho’ deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy;Their days insipid, dull, an’ tasteless;Their nights unquiet, lang, and restless.An’ even their sports, their balls and races,Their galloping through public places,There’s sic parade, sic pomp an’ art,The joy can scarcely reach the heart.The ladies arm-in-arm in clusters,As great and gracious a’ as sisters;But hear their absent thoughts o’ ither,They’re a’ run deils and jads thegither.Whyles, ower the wee bit cup an’ plaitie,They sip the scandal-potion pretty;Or lee-lang nights, wi’ crabbet leuks,Pore ower the devil’s pictured beuks;cardsStake on a chance a farmer’s stackyard,An’ cheat like ony unhanged blackguard.There’s some exceptions, man an’ woman;But this is gentry’s life in common.
Burns was a philosopher, and he knew such conditions were wrong, and that they shouldnot be allowed to last. They are better, after more than a century, since Burns became the champion of the poor; but the great problem, ‘Why should ae man better fare, and a’ men brothers?’ is not properly answered yet. The wisest among the aristocracy know this, and admit it, and sincerely hope that the inevitable evolution to juster conditions and relationships may be brought about by constitutional means, and not by revolution.
Professor Dugald Stewart, of Edinburgh University, wrote: ‘I recollect once he told me, when I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and the worth which they contained.’
It was not the unhappiness of the peasantry that stirred the democratic heart of Burns. It was ‘man’s inhumanity’ to his fellow-men; the assumption of those belonging to the so-called upper classes that they had a divine right to hold higher positions than the common people, and that the poorer people should be contented in the ‘station to which God had called them,’ that led Burns to write so ably in favour of democracy. He recognisedno human right to establish stations to which people were called, and in which they should remain, in spite of their right to fill any positions for which they had proved their fitness. He could not be so irreverent or so unreasonable as to believe God could establish the conditions found all around him, so he claimed the right of every child to full opportunity for its best development, and to rise honourably to any position to which it could attain.
In a letter to Miss Margaret Chalmers, 1788, he wrote: ‘What signify the silly, idle gewgaws of wealth, or the idle trumpery of greatness? When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation of everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything unworthy—in the name of common-sense, are they not equals?’
To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: ‘There are few circumstances, relating to the unequal distribution of good things of this life, that give me more vexation (I mean in what I see around me) than the importance the opulent bestow on their trifling family affairs, compared with the very same things on the contracted scale of the cottage. Last afternoonI had the honour to spend an hour or two at a good woman’s fireside, where the planks that composed the floor were decorated with a splendid carpet, and the gay table sparkled with silver and china. ’Tis now about term-day [a regular time twice a year was fixed for hiring servants], and there has been a revolution among those creatures [servants], who, though in appearance partakers, and equally noble partakers, of the same nature as Madame, are from time to time—their nerves, sinews, their health, strength, wisdom, experience, genius, time, nay, a good part of their very thoughts—sold for months and years, not only to the necessities but the caprices of the important few. We talked of the insignificant creatures; nay, notwithstanding their general stupidity and rascality, did some of the poor devils the honour to commend them. But light be the turf upon his breast who taught “Reverence thyself!” We looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives, and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little, dirty anthill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the wantonness of his pride.’
Such experiences added fuel to the divine purpose in his mind to free a large portion ofhis fellow-countrymen from the bonds that had been bound on their bodies and souls by long years of class presumption and heartless tyranny, which, till Burns attacked them, had grown more unjust and contemptuous as generation succeeded generation.
Burns’s reverence for real manhood, a basic principle of true democratic spirit, is shown in the closing verse of his ‘Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson’:
Go to your sculptured tombs, ye Great,In a’ the tinsel trash o’ state!But by thy honest turf I’ll wait,Thou man of worth!And weep the ae best fellow’s fateE’er lay in earth.
To John Francis Erskine he wrote, 1793: ‘Burns was a poor man from birth and an exciseman from necessity; but—I will say it—the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase, and his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.... Can I look tamely on and see any machination to wrest from them the birthright of my boys—the little, independent Britons, in whose veins runs my own blood?... Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddlewith the concerns of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The uninformed Mob may swell a Nation’s bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament; but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and reflect, yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a court—these are a nation’s strength.’
He wrote the letter, from which this is an extract, because some super-loyalists were trying to undermine his reputation on account of his independence of spirit and his democratic principles, with a view to having him removed from the paltry position he held as an Excise officer.
He was proudly, sensitively independent. He inherited his temperamental characteristics from his mother. He was happier defending others than working for himself. Writing to the Earl of Eglintoun, he said: ‘Mercenary servility, I trust, I shall ever have as much honest pride as to detest.’
Writing to Mr Francis Grose, F.S.A., in 1790, about Professor Dugald Stewart, he said: ‘Mr Stewart’s principal characteristic is your favourite feature—that sterlingindependence of mind which, though every man’s right, so few men have the courage to claim, and fewer still the magnanimity to support.’
In 1795, the year before his death, he wrote three poems favourable to the election of Mr Heron, the Whig candidate. In the first poem he said:
The independent commonerShall be the man for a’ that.
Mrs Riddell, writing of Burns after his death, said: ‘His features were stamped with the hardy character of independence.’
He was a democrat whose democracy was based on the rock of independence and a character that ‘preserved the dignity of man with soul erect.’
Burns saw both sides of the ideal of freedom. He hated tyrants, and he despised those who tamely submitted to tyranny. The inscription on the Altar to Independence, erected by Mr Heron at Kerroughtree, written by Burns, reads:
Thou of an independent mind,With soul resolv’d, with soul resign’d;Prepar’d Power’s proudest frown to brave,Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;Virtue alone who dost revere,Thy own reproach alone dost fear—Approach this shrine, and worship here.
The man of whom Burns approved was ‘one who wilt notbenorhavea slave.’
In ‘Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanac’ he says:
Deal Freedom’s sacred treasures free as air,Till Slave and Despot be but things that were.
In the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory’ he wrote:
Be Anarchy cursed, and be Tyranny damned;condemnedAnd who would to Liberty e’er be disloyalMay his son be a hangman—and he his first trial.
Burns was a philosopher whose mind had been trained to look at both sides of a question, and estimate truly their relationships to each other. Even in one of his beautiful poems to his wife, written after he was married, ‘I Hae a Wife o’ My Ain,’ he wrote:
I am naebody’s lord,I’ll be slave to naebody.
While Burns was an intense lover of freedom, he had no sympathy with those who would overturn constituted authority. He wished to achieve the freedom of the people, but to achieve it by constitutional means. He was a national volunteer in Dumfries,and he composed a fine patriotic song for the corps to sing. He revealed his balanced mind in the following lines in that song:
The wretch that would a tyrant own,And the wretch, his true-born brother,Who would set the mob aboon the throne,aboveMay they be damned together.
Burns had as little respect for a king who was a tyrant, as he had for a tyrant in any other situation in life; but he clearly saw the wicked folly of allowing mob-rule to be substituted for constitutional authority.
In the Prologue written to be spoken by an actor on his benefit night, Burns wrote:
No hundred-headed Riot here we meetWith decency and law beneath his feet;Nor Insolence assumes fair Freedom’s name.
Here, again, he records the dominant ideal of his mind through life; but at the same time he utters a warning against ignorant and wild theorists, who, in their madness, would overthrow civilisation.
He overflows again on his favourite theme in the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory,’ when he was proposing toasts:
The next in succession I’ll give you’s the King!Whoe’er would betray him, on high may he swing!And here’s the grand fabric, the free Constitution,As built on the base of our great Revolution.
The love of liberty grew stronger in his heart and in his mind as he grew older. In his songs, and in his letters, he frequently moralised on independence of character and the value of liberty. In a letter to theMorning Chroniclehe said, 1795: ‘I am a Briton, and must be interested in the cause of liberty.’
To Patrick Miller he sent a copy of his poems in 1793, accompanied by a letter expressing gratitude for his kindness and appreciation of him ‘as a patriot who in a venal, sliding age stands forth the champion of the liberties of my country.’
In his love-song, ‘Their Groves o’ Sweet Myrtle,’ he compares the boasted glories of tropical lands with the beauty of his beloved Scotland, and boasts in pride of the charms of the
Lone glen o’ green breckan,fernsWi’ the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom,
and of the sweetness of
Yon humble broom bowers,Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk, lowly, unseen.
He cannot close the song, however, without claiming that beautiful as are the ‘sweet-scented woodlands’ of these foreign countries, they are, after all, ‘the haunt of the tyrant and slave,’ and that
The slave’s spicy forests, and gold-bubbling fountains,The brave Caledonian views wi’ disdain;He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains.
Burns celebrated the success of the French Revolution in a poem entitled ‘The Tree of Liberty.’ His heart bled for the peasantry of France, whom the aristocrats had treated so contemptuously, and with such lack of consideration, and cruelty. He rejoiced in the overthrow of their oppressors, and the establishment of a republican form of government. In this poem he gives credit to Lafayette, the great Frenchman who had gone to assist the people of the United States in their brave struggle to get free. He asks blessings on the head of the noble man, Lafayette, in the verse:
My blessings aye attend the chielWha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man,And staw a branch, spite o’ the deil,stoleFrae yont the western waves, man.Fair Virtue watered it wi’ care,And now she sees wi’ pride, man,How weel it buds and blossoms there,Its branches spreading wide, man.······A wicked crew syne, on a time,Did tak a solemn aith, man,oathIt ne’er should flourish to its prime,I wat they pledged their faith, man.Awa they gaed, wi’ mock parade,Like beagles hunting game, man,But soon grew weary o’ the trade,And wished they’d stayed at hame, man.Fair Freedom, standing by the tree,Her sons did loudly ca’, man;She sang a song o’ liberty,MarseillaiseWhich pleased them ane and a’, man.By her inspired, the new-born raceSoon drew the avenging steel, man;The hirelings ran—her friends gied chaseAnd banged the despot weel, man.······Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow,The warld would live at peace, man;The sword would help to mak’ a plough;The din o’ war wad cease, man.
The greatest poem Burns wrote to rejoice at the victorious progress of humanity towards freedom was his ‘Ode to Liberty,’ written to express his supreme gratification at the success of the people of the United States in their struggle for independence from England.He wrote it, as he wrote most of his poems during his life in Dumfries, in the moonlight in Lincluden Abbey ruins, on the Nith River, just outside of Dumfries. He introduces the ode in a poem named ‘A Vision.’
He tells that, at midnight, while in the ruins, he saw in the roofless tower of the abbey, a vision:
By heedless chance I turned my eyes,And, by the moonbeam, shook to seeA stern and stalwart ghaist arise,ghostAttired as minstrels wont to be.Had I a statue been o’ stane,His daring look had daunted me;And on his bonnet graved was plain,The sacred posy, ‘Libertie.’And frae his harp sic strains did flowMight rouse the slumbering dead to hear;But oh! it was a tale of woe,As ever met a Briton’s ear!
The ghost tells the story of the tyranny England exercised over the people of the United States, and of the breaking of the tyrant’s chains. Burns had no more respect for despotism by an English king than he had for the despotism of a tyrant in any other land. He knew the people of the American colonies were right. England’s greateststatesman, Pitt, had said so, when the colonists, driven to desperation, rebelled; so the ghost’s revelation should be to a liberty-loving Briton’s ear ‘a tale of woe.’
The ode begins:
No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,No lyre Æolian I awake;’Tis liberty’s bold note I swell;Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!See gathering thousands, while I sing,A broken chain exultant bring,And dash it in the tyrant’s face,And dare him to his very beard,And tell him he no more is feared—No more the despot of Columbia’s race!A tyrant’s proudest insults braved,They shout—a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.······But come, ye sons of Liberty,Columbia’s offspring, brave and free.In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,Ye know and dare maintain ‘the Royalty of Man.’
So the poem proceeds, till he appeals to King Alfred, and finally to Caledonia:
Alfred! on thy starry throne,Surrounded by the tuneful choir,The bards that erst have struck the patriotic lyre,And rous’d the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,No more thy England own!Dare injured nations form the great design,To make detested tyrants bleed?Thy England execrates the glorious deed!Beneath her hostile banners waving,Every pang of honour braving,England, in thunder calls, ‘The tyrant’s cause is mine!’That hour accurst how did the fiends rejoice,And hell, through all her confines, raise the exulting voice!That hour which saw the generous English nameLinkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!Thee, Caledonia! thy wild heaths among,Fam’d for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,To thee I turn with swimming eyes;Where is that soul of Freedom fled?Immingled with the mighty dead,Beneath that hallow’d turf where Wallace lies!Hear it not, Wallace! in thy bed of death.Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,Nor give the coward secret breath.Is this the ancient Caledonian form,Firm as the rock, resistless as the storm?
He loved to stir the liberty-loving spirit of his beloved Caledonia, so to her sons he makes the final appeal in his great ode. He wrote in a similar strain in the Prologue written for his friend Woods, the actor:
O Thou dread Power! whose empire-giving handHas oft been stretched to shield the honoured land!Strong may she glow with all her ancient fire!May every son be worthy of his sire!Firm may she rise with generous disdainAt Tyranny’s, or direr Pleasure’s, chain;Still self-dependent in her native shore,Bold may she brave grim Danger’s loudest roar,Till fate the curtain drop on worlds to be no more.
He reached the highest degree of patriotic fervour, and his clearest call, not only to Scotsmen, but to all true men, to be ready to do their duty for justice and liberty, in ‘Bruce’s Address at Bannockburn.’
In a letter to the Earl of Buchan, 1794, enclosing a copy of this poem, he wrote: ‘Independent of my enthusiasm as a Scotsman, I have rarely met with anything in history which interests my feelings as a man equal with the story of Bannockburn. On the one hand a cruel, but able, usurper, leading on the finest army in Europe, to extinguish the last spark of freedom among a greatly daring and greatly injured people; on the other hand, the desperate relics of a gallant nation, devoting themselves to rescue their bleeding country or perish with her. Liberty! thou art a prize truly and indeed invaluable, for never canst thou be too dearly bought.’
Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,Welcome to your gory bed,Or to Victorie!Now’s the day and now’s the hour;See the front o’ battle lour!See approach proud Edward’s power—Chains and slaverie!Wha will be a traitor knave?Wha can fill a coward’s grave?Wha sae base as be a slave?Let him turn and flee!Wha for Scotland’s King and Law,Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,Free-Man stand, or Free-Man fa’?Let him follow me!By Oppression’s woes and pains!By your Sons in servile chains!We will drain our dearest veins,But theyshallbe free!Lay the proud Usurpers low!Tyrants fall in every foe!Liberty’s in every blow!Let us Do—or Die.
‘So may God ever defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did that day.
‘Robert Burns.’
Because he was so outspoken in regard todemocracy, some men assumed he was not a loyal man. The truth is, that he always loved his country, but he ardently desired to improve the conditions of the great body of his countrymen. Complaints were made about his disloyalty to the Excise commissioners under whom he worked. These complaints were investigated, and Burns was found to be a loyal man.
When the call came from the Government for volunteers, Burns joined the Dumfries Volunteers. In his great song composed for these volunteers he strongly expresses his loyalty, both to his country and to his king, in the following quotations:
We’ll ne’er permit a foreign foeOn British ground to rally.Be Britain still to Britain true,Amang oursels united;For never but by British handsMaun British wrangs be righted.mustWho will not sing ‘God save the King,’Shall hang as high’s the steeple!But while we sing ‘God save the King,’We’ll ne’er forget the people.
To Robert Graham of Fintry, 1792, he wrote: ‘To the British Constitution onrevolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached.’
Again, a month later, he wrote to Mr Graham: ‘I never uttered any invectives against the King. His private worth it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate; but in his public capacity I always revered, and always will, with the soundest loyalty, revere the Monarch of Great Britain as (to speak in Masonic) the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution. As to reform principles, I look upon the British Constitution, as settled at the Revolution, to be the most glorious Constitution on earth, or that perhaps the wit of man can frame.
········
‘I never dictated to, corresponded with, or had the least connection with, any political association whatever—except that when the magistrates and principal inhabitants of Dumfries met to declare their attachment to the Constitution, and their abhorrence of riot.’
He had strong desires to effect many reforms in public life, but he was an intelligent believer in the British Constitution, and had no faith in any method of achieving reforms in the Empire except by constitutionalmeasures. He was a radical reformer with a grand mental balance-wheel; and such reformers make the best type of citizens, ardent reformers with cool heads and unselfish hearts.
Carlyle strangely misunderstood the spirit of democracy in Burns, although he justly wrote, long after the poet’s death: ‘He appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century.’
What were the achievements, in addition to his poetic power, that made Burns ‘one of the most considerable men of the eighteenth century?’ Mainly the work he did to develop in the souls of men a consciousness of fundamental principles of democracy, and higher ideals of vital religion; yet Carlyle does not approve of his efforts to reform either social or religious conditions. As the centuries pass, the work of Burns for Religion, Democracy, and Brotherhood will be recognised as his greatest work for humanity.
Carlyle’s belief was that Burns wrote about the wrongs of the oppressed because he could not become rich. In that belief he was clearly in error. The love of freedom, justice, and independence was a basic passion in thecharacter of Burns. The anxiety of Burns regarding money was not for himself, but for his family in case he should die. Several times he referred to this in letters to his most intimate friends.
In the third letter Burns wrote Alison Begbie, the first woman he asked to marry him, he said: ‘I grasp every creature in the arms of Universal Benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.’
This statement of one of the fundamental principles which guided him during his whole life is a profound interpretation of the teachings of Christ in regard to the attitude that each individual should have, must have, in order that brotherhood may be established on the earth. He taught universal benevolence and vital sympathywith—notfor—humanity; not merely when sorrows and afflictions bring dark clouds to hearts, but in times of happiness and rejoicing; affectionate sympathy, unostentatious sympathy, co-operative sympathy that stimulates helpfulness and hopefulness; sympathy that produces activity ofthe divine in the human heart and mind, and leads to brotherhood.
The amazing fact is, not that Burns wrote such fundamental Christian philosophy in a love-letter, but that a youth of twenty-one could think it and express it so perfectly.
To Clarinda he wrote, 1787: ‘Lord! why was I born to see misery which I cannot relieve?’
Again, in 1788, he wrote to her: ‘Give me to feel “another’s woe,” and continue with me that dear-loved friend that feels with mine.’
To Mrs Walter Riddell he wrote, 1793: ‘Of all the qualities we assign to the Author and Director of Nature, by far the most enviable is to be able “to wipe away all tears from all eyes.” O what insignificant, sordid wretches are they, however chance may have loaded them with wealth, who go to their graves, to their magnificent mausoleums, with hardly the consciousness of having made one poor, honest heart happy.’
In ‘A Winter Night,’ the great poem of universal sympathy, he says:
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.
He closes the poem with four great lines:
But deep this truth impressed my mind—Thro’ all His works abroad,The heart benevolent and kindThe most resembles God.
In the same poem he paints the characters who lack loving sympathy, and whose lives and attitudes towards their fellow-men separate men, and break the ties that should unite all men, and thus prevent the development of the spirit of brotherhood. After describing the fierceness of the storm and expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the cattle, the sheep, the birds, and even with destructive animals such as prey on hen-roosts or defenceless lambs, his mind was filled with a plaintive strain, as he thought of the bitterness of man to his brother man, and he proceeds:
Blow, blow, ye winds, with heavier gust!And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost!Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!Not all your rage, as now united, showsMore hard unkindness, unrelenting,Vengeful malice unrepenting,Than heaven-illumined man on brother man bestows.
The depth and universality of his sympathy is shown in ‘To a Mouse,’ after he had destroyed its nest while ploughing:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominionHas broken Nature’s social union,An’ justifies that ill opinionWhich makes thee startleAt me, thy poor earth-born companion,An’ fellow-mortal!
In his ‘Epistle to Davie,’ a brother poet, he emphasises the value of true sympathy, that should bind all hearts, must yet bind all hearts in universal brotherhood, when he says:
All hail! ye tender feelings dear!The smile of love, the friendly tear,The sympathetic glow!Long since, this world’s thorny waysHad numbered out my weary days,Had it not been for you.
In his ‘Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,’ after describing the thrifty but selfishly prudent, ‘who feel by reason and who give by rule,’ and expressing regret that ‘the friendly e’er should want a friend,’ he writes:
But come ye, who the godlike pleasure know,Heaven’s attribute distinguished—to bestow!Whose arms of love would grasp the human race.
In the opinion of Burns, they are the ideal men and women who best understood, andmost perfectly practised, the teaching of Christ.
In one of his epistles to his friend Lapraik he says:
For thus the royal mandate ran,When first the human race began:The social, friendly, honest man,Whate’er he be—’Tishefulfils great Nature’s plan,And none but he.
The influence of any act on society, on the brotherhood of man as a whole, was the supreme test of Burns to distinguish between goodness and evil.
To Dr Moore, of London, he said: ‘Whatsoever is not detrimental to society, and is of positive enjoyment, is of God, the giver of all good things, and ought to be received and enjoyed by His creatures with thankful delight.’
To Clarinda he wrote: ‘Thou Almighty Author of peace, and goodness, and love! Do thou give me the social heart that kindly tastes of every man’s cup! Is it a draught of joy? Warm and open my heart to share it with cordial, unenvying rejoicing! Is it the bitter potion of sorrow? Melt my heart with sincerely sympathetic woe! Above all, do Thou give me the manly mind, thatresolutely exemplifies in life and manners those sentiments which I would wish to be thought to possess.’
In ‘On the Seas and Far Away’ he says:
Peace, thy olive wand extend,And bid wild war his ravage end;Man with brother man to meet,And as a brother kindly greet.
In the ‘Tree of Liberty’ he says, if we had plenty of the trees of Liberty growing throughout the whole world:
Like brothers in a common causeWe’d on each other smile, man;And equal rights and equal lawsWad gladden ev’ry isle, man.
To Clarinda, when he presented a pair of wine-glasses—a perfectly proper gift to a lady in the opinion of his time—he gave her at the same time a poem, in which he said:
And fill them high with generous juice,As generous as your mind;And pledge them to the generous toast,‘The whole of human kind!’
In his ‘Epistle to John Lapraik,’ after describing those whose lives do not help men towards brotherhood, he describes those who are true to the great ideal:
But ye whom social pleasure charms,Whose hearts the tide of kindness warms,Who hold your being on the terms,‘Each aid the others,’Come to my bowl, come to my arms,My friends, my brothers.
Burns gives each man the true test of the influence of his life for the promotion of true brotherhood in the short line, ‘Each aid the others.’ That line is the supreme test of duty, and is the highest interpretation of Christ’s commandment to His disciples, and through them to all men, ‘Love one another, as I have loved you.’ Vital love means vital helpfulness.
Dickens gives the same great message as Burns when, in describing Little Dorritt, he says: ‘She was something different from the rest, and she was that something for the rest.’ This is probably the shortest sentence ever written that conveys so clearly the two great revelations of Christ: Individuality and Brotherhood.
There are some who dislike the expression ‘Come to my bowl.’ They should test Burns by the accepted standards of his time, not by the standards of our time. The bowl was the symbol of true comradeship in castle and cot, in the manse and in the layman’s home, in the time of Burns.
No other writer has interpreted Christ’s revelations of Democracy and Brotherhood so clearly and so fully as Robert Burns. He sums up the whole matter of man’s relationship to man in ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That,’ in the last verse:
Then let us pray that come it may—As come it will for a’ that—That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.pre-eminenceFor a’ that, an’ a’ that,It’s coming yet, for a’ that,That man to man the world o’er,Shall brothers be for a’ that.
He revealed his supreme purpose in ‘A Revolutionary Lyric’:
In virtue trained, enlightened youthWill love each fellow-creature;And future years shall prove the truth—That man is good by nature.The golden age will then revive;Each man will love his brother;In harmony we all shall live,And share the earth together.
While the so-called religious teachers of the time of Burns were dividing men into creeds based on petty theological distinctions, Burnswas interpreting for humanity the highest teachings of Christ: Democracy based on recognition of the value of the individual soul, and Brotherhood as the natural fruit of true democracy.
Many people yet believe that Burns was a universal and inconstant lover. He really did not love many women. He loved deeply, but he had not a great many really serious experiences of love. He loved Nellie Kirkpatrick when he was fifteen, and Peggy Thomson when he was seventeen. He says his love of Nellie made him a poet. There is no other experience that will kindle the strongest element in a human soul during the adolescent period so fully, and so permanently, as genuine love. Love will not make all young people poets, but it will kindle with its most developing glow whatever is the strongest natural power in each individual soul. Parents should foster such love in young people during the adolescent period, instead of ridiculing it, as is too often done. God may not mean that the love is to be permanent, but there is no other agency that can be so productive at the time of adolescence as love that is reverenced byparents who, by due reverence, sympathy, and comradeship, help love to do its best work.
These two adolescent loves did their work in developing Burns, but they were not loves of maturity. From seventeen till he was twenty-one he was not really in love. Then he met, and deeply and reverently loved, Alison Begbie. She was a servant girl of charm, sweetness, and dignity, in a home not far from Lochlea farm. He wrote three poems to her: ‘The Lass o’ Cessnock Banks,’ ‘Peggy Alison,’ and ‘Mary Morrison.’ He reversed her name for the second title, because it possessed neither the elements of metre nor of rhyme. He gave his third poem to her the title ‘Mary Morrison’ to make it conform to the same metre as ‘Peggy Alison.’ There was a Mary Morrison who was nine years of age when Burns wrote ‘Mary Morrison.’ She is buried in Mauchline Churchyard, and on her tombstone it is stated that she was ‘the Mary Morrison of Burns.’ His brother Gilbert knew better. He said the poem was written to the lady to whom ‘Peggy Alison’ was written. It is impossible to believe that Burns would write ‘Mary Morrison’ to a child only nine years old.
Burns wrote five love-letters to Alison Begbie.Beautiful and reverent letters they were, too. In the fourth, he asked her to become his wife. In Chapter III. it has been explained that he was too shy, even at twenty-two, to ask the woman whom he loved to marry him when he was with her. This does not indicate that he had a new love each week, as many yet believe. Miss Begbie refused to marry him, and his reply should win him the respect of every reasonable man or woman who reads it. It is the dignified and reverent outpouring of a loving heart, held in control by a well-balanced and considerate mind.
Although Burns had no lover from seventeen to twenty-one years of age, he wrote love-songs during those years, but even his mother could not tell the name of any young woman who kindled his muse during these four years. Neither could the other members of his family.
He wrote one poem, ‘My Nannie O,’ during this period. He first wrote for the first line:
Beyond the hills where Stinchar flows.
He did not like the word ‘Stinchar,’ so he changed it to ‘Lugar,’ a much more euphonious word. He had no lover named ‘Nannie.’Lugar and Stinchar were several miles apart. He was really writing about love, not the love of any one woman, during those four years; and he was writing about other great subjects more than about love, mainly religious and ethical ideals.
From the age of twenty-two he was for three years without a lover. At twenty-five he met Jean Armour, then eighteen. Jean spoke first to the respectfully shy man. At the annual dance on Fair night in Mauchline, Burns was one of the young men who were present. His dog, Luath, who loved him, and whom he loved in return, traced his master upstairs to the dance hall. Of course the dance was interrupted when Luath got on the floor and found his master. Burns kindly led the dog out, and as he was going he said, ‘I wish I could find a lassie to loe me as well as my dog.’ A short time afterwards Burns was going along a street in Mauchline, and was passing Jean Armour without speaking to her, because he had not been introduced to her. She was at the village pump getting water to sprinkle her clothes on the village green, and as he was passing her she asked, ‘Hae you found a lassie yet to loe you as well as your dog?’ Burns then stopped and conversed with her. She was a handsome,bright young woman. Their acquaintance soon developed a strong love between them, and resulted in a test of the real manhood of the character of Burns. When he realised that Jean was to become a mother, he did not hesitate as to his duty. He gave her a legal certificate of marriage, signed by himself and regularly witnessed, which was as valid as a marriage certificate of a clergyman or a magistrate in Scottish law.
Jean’s father compelled her to destroy, or let him destroy, the certificate. This, and her father’s threatened legal prosecution, nearly upset the mind of Burns. He undoubtedly loved Jean Armour. In a letter written at the time to David Brice, a friend in Glasgow, he wrote: ‘Never man loved, or rather adored, a woman more than I did her; and, to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all.... May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her, and bless her in all her future life.’
He had arranged to leave Scotland for Jamaica to escape from his mental torture, when two things came into his life: Mary Campbell, and the suggestion that he shouldpublish his poems. The first filled his heart, the second gave him the best tonic for his mind—deeply and joyously interesting occupation.
Mary Campbell, ‘Highland Mary,’ he had met when she was a nursemaid in the home of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Meeting her again, when she was a servant in Montgomery Castle, he became acquainted with her, and they soon loved each other. It is not remarkable that Burns should love Mary Campbell, because she was a winsome, quiet, refined young woman, and his heart was desolate at the loss of Jean Armour. He, at the time he made love to Mary, had no hope of reconciliation with Jean. The greater his love for Jean had been, and still was, the greater his need was for another love to fill his heart, and he found a pure and satisfying lover in Mary. Their love was deep and short, lasting only about two months. Two busy months they were, as Burns was preparing his poems for the Kilmarnock edition, till he and Mary agreed to be married. They parted for the last time on 14th May 1785. The day was Sunday. They spent the afternoon in the fine park of Montgomery Castle, through which the Fail River runs for a mile and a half. In the evening they went out of thegrounds about half a mile to Failford, a little village at the junction of the Fail with the Ayr. The Fail runs parallel to the Ayr, and in the opposite direction after leaving the castle grounds, until it reaches Failford. There it meets a solid rock formation, which compels it to turn squarely to the right and flow into the Ayr, about three hundred yards away. At a narrow place where the Fail had cut a passage through the soft rock on its way to the Ayr, Burns and Highland Mary parted. He stood on one side of the river and Mary on the other, and after they had exchanged Bibles, they made their vows of intention to marry, he holding one side of an open Bible and she the other side. Mary went home to prepare for her marriage, but a relative in Greenock fell ill with malignant fever, and Mary went to nurse him, and caught the fever herself and died.
The poems he wrote to her and about her made her a renowned character. When in 1919 a shipbuilding company at Greenock, after a four years’ struggle, finally purchased the church and churchyard in which Mary was buried, with the intention of removing the bodies to another place, the British Parliament passed an Act providing that her monument must stand forever over her grave,where it had always stood.[4]Though she held a humble position, the beautiful poems of her lover gave her an honoured place in the hearts of millions of people all over the world.
Burns did not go to Jamaica, although he had secured a berth on a ship to take him to that beautiful island. Calls came to him just in time to publish an edition of his poems in Edinburgh. He answered the calls, startled and delighted Edinburgh society, published his poems, and met Clarinda.
Mrs M’Lehose was a cultured and charming grass-widow. She had been courted and married by a wealthy young man in Glasgow when she was only seventeen years of age. Though a lady of the highest character, on the advice of relatives and friends she left her husband. He then went to Jamaica.
Burns and Mrs M’Lehose mutually admired each other when they met, and their friendship quickly developed into affection. Under the names of Sylvander and Clarinda they conducted a love correspondence which will probably always remain the finest love correspondence of the ages. Clarinda was a religious and cultured woman; Burns was a religiousand cultured man, so their letters of love are on a high plane. Clarinda wrote very good poems as well as good prose, and Burns wrote some of his best poems to Clarinda. His parting song to Clarinda is, in the opinion of many literary men, the greatest love-song of its kind ever written. Those who study the Clarinda correspondence will find not only love, but many interesting philosophical discussions regarding religion and human life.
Thus ends the record of his real loves, notwithstanding the outrageous misstatements that his loves extended, according to one writer, to nearly four hundred. He had just four deep and serious loves, not counting the two deep and transforming affections of his adolescent period for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson. He loved four women: Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose. At the age of twenty-one he loved Alison Begbie, and, when twenty-two, he asked her to marry him. She declined his proposal. He was too shy to propose to her when he was with her. Get this undoubted fact into your consciousness, and think about it fairly and reasonably, and it will help you to get a truer vision of the real Burns. Read the proposal and his subsequent letter on pages 51-55, and your mindshould form juster conceptions of Burns as a lover and as a man. You will find it harder to be misled by the foolish or the malicious misrepresentations that have too long passed as facts concerning him as a lover.
From twenty-two to twenty-five he had no lover; then he loved and married Jean Armour. No act of his prevented that marriage-contract remaining in force. When her father forced the destruction of the contract, and much against his will, and in defiance of the love of his heart, he found that he had lost his wife beyond any reasonable hope of reconciliation and reunion, and was therefore free to love another, he loved Mary Campbell, and honourably proposed marriage to her. She accepted his offer, but died soon after. He was untrue to no one when he took Clarinda into his heart. Of course he could not ask her to marry him, as she was already married.
The first three women he loved after he reached the age of twenty-one years were Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, and Mary Campbell. The first refused his offer; he married the second, and was forced into freedom by her father; the third accepted his offer of marriage, but died before they could be married. The fourth woman whom he lovedloved him, but could not marry him, a fact recognised by both of them. There is not a shadow of evidence of inconstancy or unfaithfulness on his part in the eight years during which he loved the four women—the only four he did love after he became a man.
It may be answered that Burns was not loyal to Jean Armour because he loved Mary Campbell and Clarinda after he was married to Jean. Burns absolutely believed that his marriage to Jean was annulled by the burning of the marriage certificate. He would not have pledged matrimony with Mary Campbell if he had known that Jean was still his wife. When Mary died, and he found Jean’s father was willing that he might again marry Jean, he did marry her in Gavin Hamilton’s home. In writing to Clarinda he forgot himself for a moment and spoke disrespectfully of Jean, but his prompt and honourable action in marrying her soon after showed him to be a true man.
It should ever be remembered that Burns was in no sense a fickle lover. To each of the three women whom he loved, his love was reverent and true. He had a reverent affection for Alison Begbie after she refused him; he loved Jean Armour after she allowed their marriage-certificate to be destroyed; andhe loved Mary Campbell, not only till she died, but to the end of his life. The fact that he sat out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm through the long moonlit night, with tears flowing down his cheeks, on the third anniversary of her death, and wrote ‘To Mary in Heaven,’ proves the depth and permanency of his love.
In ‘My Eppie Adair’ he says:
By love and by beauty, by law and by duty,I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair.
In these lines Burns truly defines his own type of love.
It is true that Miss Margaret Chalmers told the poet Campbell, after Burns died, that he had asked her to marry him. His letters to her are letters of deep friendship—reverent friendship—not love. It is true that the last poem he ever wrote was written to Margaret Chalmers, and that in it he said:
Full well thou knowest I love thee, dear.
But it must be remembered that Burns had been married to Jean and living happily with her for eight years, so the love of this line was not the love that is expected to lead to marriage, but an expression of reverent affection. The whole tenor of this last poemof his life indicates that he thought her feeling for him was cooling, and his deep affectionate friendship urged him to plead with her for a continuance of their long-existing and quite unusual relationship.
Many people will doubtless say, ‘What about Chloris?’ Chloris was his name for Jean Lorimer, the daughter of a friend of his who dwelt near him when he lived on Ellisland farm after his second marriage to Jean Armour. Chloris was a sweet singer and player, who frequently visited Mrs Burns, and who sang for Burns, sometimes, with Mrs Burns the grand old Scottish airs that had long been sung to words that were not pure, and to which he was writing new and pure words nearly every day. A number of these songs were addressed to Chloris, but in a book of his poems presented to Miss Lorimer he states clearly that the love he appeared to be expressing for her was an assumed, or, as he called it, a ‘fictitious,’ and not a real love.
When Burns had earned five hundred pounds by the sale of the Edinburgh edition of his poems, he decided ‘that he had the responsibility for the temporal and possibly the eternal welfare of a dearly loved fellow-creature;’ so again giving proof of his honest manhood and recognising his plain duty, hemarried Jean Armour a second time, in the home of his dear friend Gavin Hamilton. Of the first three women whom he loved one refused him, one died after their sacred engagement, and the third he married twice. The fourth and last woman that he loved could not marry.
Any one of the first three would have made him a good wife, but no one could have been more considerate or more faithful than the one he married.
Could any reasonable man believe that if Burns had really loved other women, as he loved Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose, the names of the other women would not have been known by the world? He never tried to hide his love. He wrote songs of love with other names attached to them, used for variety. In a letter to a friend he regretted the use of ‘Chloris’ in several of his Ellisland and Dumfries poems, and to her directly he said they were ‘fictitious’ or assumed expressions of love. Notwithstanding the foolish or malicious statements that Burns had many lovers, he had but four real loves. One would have been his limit if the first had accepted him and lived as long as he did.