 Robert Burns was
born near Ayr, Scotland, 25th of January, 1759. He was the son of William Burnes, or
Burness, at the time of the poet's birth a nurseryman on the banks of the Doon in
Ayrshire. His father, though always extremely poor, attempted to give his children a fair
education, and Robert, who was the eldest, went to school for three years in a neighboring
village, and later, for shorter periods, to three other schools in the vicinity. But it
was to his father and to his own reading that he owed the more important part of his
education; and by the time that he had reached manhood he had a good knowledge of English,
a reading knowledge of French, and a fairly wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of
English literature from the time of Shakespeare to his own day. In 1766 William Burness
rented on borrowed money the farm of Mount Oliphant, and in taking his share in the effort
to make this undertaking succeed, the future poet seems to have seriously overstrained his
physique. In 1771 the family move to Lochlea, and Burns went to the neighboring town of
Irvine to learn flax-dressing. The only result of this experiment, however, was the
formation of an acquaintance with a dissipated sailor, whom he afterward blamed as the
prompter of his first licentious adventures.
His father died in 1784, and with his brother
Gilbert the poet rented the farm of Mossgiel; but this venture was as unsuccessful as the
others. He had meantime formed an irregular intimacy with Jean Armour, for which he was
censured by the Kirk-session. As a result of his farming misfortunes, and the attempts of
his father-in-law to overthrow his irregular marriage with Jean, he resolved to emigrate;
and in order to raise money for the passage he published (Kilmarnock, 1786) a volume of
the poems which he had been composing from time to time for some years. This volume was
unexpectedly successful, so that, instead of sailing for the West Indies, he went up to
Edinburgh, and during that winter he was the chief literary celebrity of the season. An
enlarged edition of his poems was published there in 1787, and the money derived from this
enabled him to aid his brother in Mossgiel, and to take and stock for himself the farm of
Ellisland in Dumfriesshire. His fame as poet had reconciled the Armours to the connection,
and having now regularly married Jean, he brought her to Ellisland, and once more tried
farming for three years. Continued ill-success, however, led him, in 1791, to abandon
Ellisland, and he moved to Dumfries, where he had obtained a position in the Excise. But
he was now thoroughly discouraged; his work was mere drudgery; his tendency to take his
relaxation in debauchery increased the weakness of a constitution early undermined; and he
died at Dumfries in his thirty-eighth year.
It is not necessary here to attempt to
disentangle or explain away the numerous amours in which he was engaged through the
greater part of his life. It is evident that Burns was a man of extremely passionate
nature and fond of conviviality; and the misfortunes of his lot combined with his natural
tendencies to drive him to frequent excesses of self-indulgence. He was often remorseful,
and he strove painfully, if intermittently, after better things. But the story of his life
must be admitted to be in its externals a painful and somewhat sordid chronicle. That it
contained, however, many moments of joy and exaltation is proved by the poems here
printed.
Burns' poetry falls into two main groups:
English and Scottish. His English poems are, for the most part, inferior specimens of
conventional eighteenth-century verse. But in Scottish poetry he achieved triumphs of a
quite extraordinary kind. Since the time of the Reformation and the union of the crowns of
England and Scotland, the Scots dialect had largely fallen into disuse as a medium for
dignified writing. Shortly before Burns' time, however, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson
had been the leading figures in a revival of the vernacular, and Burns received from them
a national tradition which he succeeded in carrying to its highest pitch, becoming
thereby, to an almost unique degree, the poet of his people.
He first showed complete mastery of verse in the
field of satire. In "The Twa Herds," "Holy Willie's Prayer,"
"Address to the Unco Guid," "The Holy Fair," and others, he manifested
sympathy with the protest of the so-called "New Light" party, which had sprung
up in opposition to the extreme Calvinism and intolerance of the dominant " Auld
Lichts." The fact that Burns had personally suffered from the discipline of the Kirk
probably added fire to his attacks, but the satires show more than personal animus. The
force of the invective, the keenness of the wit, and the fervor of the imagination which
they displayed, rendered them an important force in the theological liberation of
Scotland.
The Kilmarnock volume contained, besides satire,
a number of poems like "The Twa Dogs" and "The Cotter's Saturday
Night," which are vividly descriptive of the Scots peasant life with which he was
most familiar; and a group like "Puir Mailie" and "To a Mouse," which,
in the tenderness of their treatment of animals, revealed one of the most attractive sides
of Burns' personality. Many of his poems were never printed during his lifetime, the most
remarkable of these being "The Jolly Beggars," a piece in which, by the
intensity of his imaginative sympathy and the brilliance of his technique, he renders a
picture of the lowest dregs of society in such a way as to raise it into the realm of
great poetry.
But the real national importance of Burns is due
chiefly to his songs. The Puritan austerity of the centuries following the Reformation had
discouraged secular music, like other forms of art, in Scotland; and as a result Scottish
song had become hopelessly degraded in point both of decency and literary quality. From
youth Burns had been interested in collecting the fragments he had heard sung or found
printed, and he came to regard the rescuing of this almost lost national inheritance in
the light of a vocation. About his song-making, two points are especially noteworthy:
first, that the greater number of his lyrics sprang from actual emotional experiences;
second, that almost all were composed to old melodies. While in Edinburgh he undertook to
supply material for Johnson's "Musical Museum," and as few of the traditional
songs could appear in a respectable collection, Burns found it necessary to make them
over. Sometimes he kept a stanza or two; sometimes only a line or chorus; sometimes merely
the name of the air; the rest was his own.
His method, as he has told us himself, was to
become familiar with the traditional melody, to catch a suggestion from some fragment of
the old song, to fix upon an idea or situation for the new poem; then, humming or
whistling the tune as he went about his work, he wrought out the new verses, going into
the house to write them down when the inspiration began to flag. In this process is to be
found the explanation of much of the peculiar quality of the songs of Burns. Scarcely any
known author has succeeded so brilliantly in combining his work with folk material, or in
carrying on with such continuity of spirit the tradition of popular song. For George
Thomson's collection of Scottish airs he performed a function similar to that which he had
had in the "Museum"; and his poetical activity during the last eight or nine
years of his life was chiefly devoted to these two publications. In spite of the fact that
he was constantly in severe financial straits, he refused to accept any recompense for
this work, preferring to regard it as a patriotic service. And it was, indeed, a patriotic
service of no small magnitude. By birth and temperament he was singularly fitted for the
task, and this fitness is proved by the unique extent to which his productions were
accepted by his countrymen, and have passed into the life and feeling of his race. |
