The object of the Federation will be to strengthen and consolidate the band of friendship existing among the members of Burns Clubs, by universal affiliation; its motto being – ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’
Before beginning this chapter, I must declare a conflict of interests. I once was a Burns Club myself. For a few years in Edinburgh from 1978, the John Cairney Burns Club, Number 947 in the official roll of federated clubs, existed from my office in Colinton Road, reluctantly supervised by my then manager, Colin Harvey Wright, who said he had enough to do without involving himself with Burns Clubs – and anyway, as he pointed out in his quiet way, ‘You’re never here.’ He was quite right. We were both away too much (on my solo tours as Burns) to attend any of the meetings. The club had been started informally by a group of Edinburgh friends at the behest of an old actor, and sometime colleague, Elliot Williams, (The Last of the Barn-Stormers) who thought it would be a good idea to mark the end of my playing career in the Burns one-man-show by starting a Cairney Burns Club. I didn’t know I was to play him in the theatre until 1981 and after that as an after-dinner solo until the time of writing this book.
However, the John Cairney Burns Club did not prove to have the same durability and with Elliot’s death in 1983, it fell into abeyance and died a natural death.As so often with Burns Clubs, or any kind of club for that matter, it is often the energy of one person who makes things happen and keeps them happening. Colin Rae-Brown, Duncan McNaught and Jock Thomson were all examples of this in the Burns world, solo dynamos that kept the engines turning. I am sure it is still the same in the 350 Burns Clubs extant in the world today. They will each boast a pivotal member round whom everything turns, and as long as he – or she – is there the club will survive and even flourish.
What is ironical, in view of their historical place, is the role that women play in the contemporary Burns movement. Not being eligible for membership of the then existing Burns clubs, they formed their own, starting with The Bingry Jolly Beggars in 1924, followed by the Glencraig Bonnie Jean and the Newton Jean Armour in 1925, and so on until the Hawick Conference of 1931 when six all-ladies clubs took part as affiliated members. The first thing the ladies proposed was a memorial to Jean Armour. This was rejected, ‘the present not being an opportune time for entering upon such an undertaking’. The grey heads of the Executive still held the purse-strings, but 1931 was, after all, at the very height, or depths, of the Depression.
But the women were not to be denied. Jean did eventually get her Memorial Homes in Mauchline, and the first woman President of the Federation was the translator of Hans Hecht, Jane Lymburn (Mrs Burgoyne). In 1937 the highest honour that could be given by the Federation, the Honorary Presidency, went to Dr Annie Dunlop of Kilmarnock. Considering that the very first such presidency had been awarded to Lord Rosebery and less than thirty had been given since then, it was a significant gesture. Since that time, women now comprise more than half the membership of mixed clubs. Indeed, since that time, a rare triple was achieved when Mrs Mary Thomson of the Mary Campbell Club in Cambuslang, her daughter, Mrs Molly Rennie, and her daughter, Mrs Moira Dunsmore, all became Presidents or Vice-Presidents of the Burns Federation in their respective generations. The ladies had made their point
However, in the beginning it was strictly ‘men only’. Such had been the impact of the world-wide centenary celebrations that it was natural that there would be a reaction, and a falling-off in Burns interest was felt for a time. In this pause for breath, as it were, opportunity was given for more considered, and less overt propagation of the poet and his work. The time was right for a scholarly and classical approach, which was perhaps why, speaking in Newcastle in 1859, Sir John Fyffe, resorted to a Latin tag to make a point in his Centenary address – ‘Homo sum et nihil humanum mihi alienum puto.’ And he went on:
That sentiment ran through the world. It exercised its influence wherever civilisation existed, and greatly advanced the progress of mankind; Burns, without knowing that motto, said as much in five words, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that.’ And this glorious principle, which is constantly breathing through his works and through his character, even in his least prosperous days, seems to have exalted into a brotherhood all those who are his admirers…
Few of whom, it must be said, would have been classically trained, yet in 1862 his works were being translated into Latin. Alexander Leighton was the first to attempt the conversion and ‘up in the morning’s no for me, up in the morning early’ came out as ‘Surgere mane, mordet me, surger lectulo mane’. MacPherson’s Farewell’s ‘And there’s no a man in all Scotland, but I’ll brave him at a word’ appeared as ‘Et vir nullus in Scotia quin verbo obstringam’. Further editions were issued in 1892 and 1899 so someone must have been reading them.
Nor did it stop there. By 1896, William Jacks had, as has been mentioned before, compiled a whole book, Burns in Other Tongues, which recorded the various foreign translations Burns had undergone until that date with the exception of Hebrew and Polish. Both these versions had to wait until 1956 for translation. In his Introduction, Jacks made no pretence to know all the languages included in his volume. As he said:
It would be hypocritical pedantry to leave it to be assumed that I knew all the various languages which appear here, sufficiently well to enable me to criticise those translations as I have done; indeed some of them I do not know at all. In such cases I had each translated literally into a language which I did understand, and the retranslation was sent to a native of the particular country for confirmation and comment, and in this way I was able to make my remarks.
That such translations can work, both for itself and for the original work, is shown by the style of Bartsch’s fluent re-working of My Heart’s in the Highlands:
Mein Herz ist im Hochland, mein Herz ist nicht hier
Mein Herz ist im Hochland und jagt in Revier;
Da jagd es den Hirsch und das fluchtige Reh
Mein Herz ist im Hochland, wo immer ich geh.
What one can see, linguistically speaking, is how close a second-cousin the German tongue is to Scots, nearer in many ways than English. In fact, some selected poems were turned into English by William Corbett and published by subscription in 1892. Interestingly, Holy Willie’s Prayer survives almost word for word as does An Epistle to Davie. More recently, in 1954, William Kean Seymour also turned Burns into English but somehow, to a Scot at any rate, Tam o Shanter doesn’t sound quite the same.
When pedlars pack and leave the street
And thirsty neighbours neighbours meet,
As market days are wearing late
And folk begin to quicken gait;
While we sit drinking pot on pot
With tipsy pleasure in our lot…
In 1909, a Swede, Gustav Froding, did a complete translation, and Samuil Marshak in Russia, who had been studying his Burns since around that time, produced Roberta Burnsa in 1954 which sold in Moscow as if it were a best-seller. Marshak was not the first to translate Burns into Russian. As early as 1800, his Address to the Shade of Thomson had appeared and in 1820, Ivan Kozlov had given versions of The Cotter’s Saturday Night and To A Mountain Daisy but undeniably, Marshak is the doyen as far as a Russian view of Burns is concerned. He was not only a good translator but was a good writer himself. That helped. So that the familiar opening lines of Tam o Shanter could still live poetically in Russian as:
When on the town lie shadows, and ends the market day…
Compare that with the feel of Seymour’s ‘English’ translation above. Marshak also ended the poem stylishly:
Just remember the night with rain and snow – and the old mare Meg!
There is no mere verbatim here of giving word for word. or line for line. A poet was rendering another poet. It takes one to know one.
The first language outside the mainstream of Burns translation must surely have been the 1892 adaptation into Bohemian but since that time he has been re-worked into every possible language, including the nearer-home Gaelic by Charles MacPhater of Glasgow in 1910 – Dain, is Luinneagan – Eader – Theangaichte Do’n – Ghaidhlig, Albannach. Given Burns’s stated aversion to the Highlands and Highlanders, Mr MacPhater’s work has a missionary significance. The same might be said of Hans Hecht’s famous Life, entitled simply Robert Burns, originally published in Heidelberg in 1919, and re-published in the Lynburn translation of 1936. This has since become a classic of Burns literature.
An Icelandic translation appeared in 1922 but a huge step forward in Burns colonisation was made when C. M. Butler converted him into Esperanto for the British Esperanto Association in 1926. This is dealt with more fully in Chapter Five. A Japanese edition had appeared in 1934 and since then a Japanese academic, Ishebashi Magoichiro, has added to the sum of Burns knowledge throughout the world with his study of Burns in 1952. Toshio Namba was another well-known Japanese Burnsian a decade later. The Bard emerged into Hebrew in 1956 and in 1976, Pierluigi Simonini dealt with Burns in Italy. Today, at the very time of writing, Channon Singh, at present living and working in Coventry, is still at work in translating Burns into Punjabi for students at Guru Nanak University in the Punjab. All that needs to happen now is for Robert to be contracted into tchspk for use in cell phones.
Despite this universal cover, it would seem that the English as a whole prefer their Burns in anything but Scots. Even Robert Louis Stevenson turned to his lawyer’s Latin when he came to write his essay on Burns in 1879. ‘Teres atque rotundus – a burly figure in literature’, which, roughly translated, meant that he was seeing Burns in the round. Stevenson, like other Victorians, while paying lip service to the bust of gold (as seen by Carlyle) seemed to be obsessed by the feet of clay (as seen by Professor Shairp), forgetting that the heart of the man lies somewhere in between. Stevenson considered Burns as one of the Four Great Scotsmen he intended writing about as early as 1874, the others being John Knox, David Hume and Walter Scott. As it was, he only completed two, Knox and Burns, both in the following year, but the Burns article was turned down by the Encyclopaedia Britannica (although he was paid his five guineas for it) and it was 1879 before he saw a revision of it published as Some Aspects of Robert Burns.
It was hardly worth waiting for. Although Stevenson could never be dull in anything he wrote, and had a generous understanding of the more robust side of Burns, this was a pedestrian trek through the familiar thicket of bastard weans and buckets of wine and the sharp decline as a consequence. Like so many at the time, Stevenson couldn’t see the real wood of Burns because of the biographical trees in the way. He was to be asked again to give his thoughts on Burns in the preface for a Burns Exhibition Catalogue being arranged in Glasgow by the Burns collector, W. Crabie Angus, in 1891, and, although RLS was excited by the idea and looked forward to receiving the catalogue details, nothing more was heard of his involvement. It might have been interesting to see if his opinion had changed any. After all, he had said in the Burns piece:
If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject, and so paternally delighted with his virtues, you will also be an excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer.
And also:
There is, indeed, only one merit in considering a man of letters – that he should write well; and only one damning fault – that he should write ill.
Quite. And would that the ‘memorisers’ from that day to this would remember that.
In this same year of 1879, an event took place in Scotland, that would have considerable repercussions within Burns circles in the years to come, and even yet resounds at Burns Suppers when its stirring chorus often starts proceedings. I refer, of course to that other Scottish anthem – The Star o Robbie Burns. This song owes its genesis to a Burns gathering in Hawick where the president of the Burns Club at the time was a certain James Thomson, who was also a well-known local rhymer and song-writer. Born at Bowden in the Scottish Borders in 1827, he was the son of Henrietta Wilkie, now Mrs Robert Thomson, and an enthusiastic literary enthusiast. Her brother, Dr Wilkie of Innerleithen, was a familiar of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, and Sir Walter Scott, no less, so young James grew up in a writing environment and quite soon showed some skill in verse-making. However, as a Border callant, his first job was herding sheep on the Eildon Hills. At 16, he was apprenticed to a Selkirk cabinet maker and wood turner and as soon as he became a tradesman himself, he moved to Hawick where he spent the rest of his life. He had continued to write, songs mostly, and many of these are clearly inspired by his adopted Border town, so much so that he became known as the Hawick Poet. Two of his songs, Up Wi’ the Banner and The Border Queen, are still sung at the annual Border Common-Riding Festival.
At the Literate Dinner held in the Tower Hotel sometime late in 1878, he met the musical accompanist who was also the composer of the famous Scots song Scotland Yet and he turned out to be an Englishman. James Booth was born in Congleton in the North of England in 1850. As a boy he studied the organ and piano with a Mr George Barlow, a local, but sound, teacher. Young Booth got his first job travelling with an opera company and soon developed his skill as an accompanist. This led to concert work and a constant demand from travelling singers, especially throughout Scotland. It was this experience that turned him to compositions of the Scottish songs that were to become so popular in their day. They’re Far, Far Awa, My Own, My Native Land, On Comrades, On were others to which he set original music, but the one for which he was remembered is undoubtedly The Star o’ Robbie Burns.
The Burns Centenary of 1859 had proved a memorable occasion for Hawick, where some four hundred people attended a gathering in the Commercial Hotel (now a Roman Catholic hall). Among the speakers were well-known townsmen like James A. H. Murray of Denholm, a schoolmaster, later to be knighted for his work in the compilation of the New Oxford English Dictionary. Twenty years later, at that year’s Burns Supper. the local blacksmith, Thomas Strathairn, got up to sing a new song especially written for the Burns occasion by the Hawick rhymer and the Congleton travelling accompanist. It was an immediate success. The 29-year old composer supplied a splendid tune with a rousing chorus, both of which flattered Thomson’s stiff lyrics. They were, of course, of their time and no doubt fitted the taste of those first hearers but the words creak a little today. Few kings have lately arisen and all the courtiers have fallen. However, the tune is lively and the surging chorus is irresistible. It is a march triumphant and I defy any set of feet to resist it.
Let kings and courtiers rise an’ fa’
This world has many turns
But brightly beams abune them them a’
The star o’ Robbie Burns.
It has two verses only.
There is a star whose beaming ray
Is shed on ev’ry clime.
It shines by night, it shines by day,
And ne’er grows dim wi’ time.
It rose upon the banks o’ Ayr,
It shone on Doon’s clear stream.
A hundred years are gone an’ mair
Yet brighter grows the beam-
Tho’ he was but a ploughman lad
And wore the hodden grey,
Auld Scotland’s sweetest bard was bred
Beneath a roof o’ strae.
To sweep the strings o’ Scotia’s lyre,
It needs nae classic lore,
It’s mother-wit an’ native fire
That warms the bosom’s core.
The first verse is tolerable – just – but the second has an earnest, ‘ploughman’ tread and has nothing of the ‘mother wit and native fire’ it sings about, but just when it reaches ‘the bosom’s core’ in the last line the rousing chorus comes to the rescue. The tune is the main reason that the song has survived for nearly 120 years. It occurs to this writer, however, that a modern re-write of this lyric is urgently called for.
However, Thomson is to be congratulated on meeting the needs of his day. The song fully served its purpose in adding to the lustre that surrounded Burns then. Victorians wanted to think of him as the ‘Heaven-inspired genius’ sprung up from peasant soil as if a by a miracle and then laid low by cruel fortune and his own misdeeds. They did not want to think of him as a man with a mind and a radical point of view who belonged more to the 18th than the 19th century. But by 1800, he might be said to have been ‘Curried’. It has taken Burns almost the whole 200 years since to be seen, as Stevenson tried to see him, ‘in the round’.
James Thomson eventually became the respected Bard of Lodge St James 424 in Hawick, and for the occasion of the unveiling of the Burns Statue in Dumfries in by Prime Minister Balfour in 1882, he penned the following:
I see noblest of the earth
Bend low to him of humble birth.
I see a vast, enraptured throng
Pay homage to the chief of song
And place a garland round his brow
And kiss the hands that held the plough.
Encouraged by the success of The Star at Hawick, the 47-year old Thomson decided to release his Doric Lays and Lyrics in 1884. This was the first publication of The Star and it brought the song to the notice of that great Scots tenor of the time, J.M. Hamilton, who made it his own and gave it much of his celebrity. Thomson died at the end of 1888, a justified singer at last, but nothing is known of the end of James Booth. Possibly he just went on travelling. If he didn’t, his song did – right round the world and his sturdy tune goes marching on to its own kind of immortality in being published by Mozart Allen in Glasgow and sung by such as Robert Wilson and later, Kenneth McKellar. It is still being lustily sung at the Suppers. Well, the Chorus is.
I doubt if it were given, however, at the gathering met to unveil a statue if Burns in Central Park, New York on 2 October 1880. The speaker was a certain George William Curtis, an American and an inveterate name-dropper:
The year 1759 was a proud year for Great Britain. Lord Chatham had restored to his country the sceptre of the seas, and covered her name with glory of continuous victory… It was the year of Minden, where the French army was routed; of Quiberon, where the French fleet was destroyed; of the heights of Abraham in Canada, where Wolfe died happy, and the dream of French supremacy upon the American continent vanished forever. The triumphant thunder of British guns was heard all around the world. Robert Clive was founding British dominion in India; Boscawen and his fellow admirals were sweeping France form the ocean; and in America Colonel George Washington had planted the British flag on the field of Braddock’s defeat. ‘We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is,’ said Horace Walpole, ‘for fear of missing one!’
But not only in politics and war was the genius of Great Britain illustrious. James Watt was testing the force of steam; Hargreaves was inventing the spinning-jenny, which ten years later Arkwright would complete; and Wedgwood was making household ware beautiful, Fielding’s Tom Jones had been ten years in print, and Gray’s Elegy nine years; Dr Johnson had lately published his Dictionary; and Edmund Burke his essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. In the year 1759 Garrick was the first of actors, and Sir Joshua Reynolds of painters; Gibbon dated in this year the preface of his first work; Hume published the third and fourth volumes of his History of England; Robertson his History of Scotland; and Sterne came to London to find a publisher for Tristram Shandy; Oliver Goldsmith, ‘unfriended, solitary,’ was toiling for the booksellers in his garret over Fleet ditch, but four years later, with Burke and Reynolds and Garrick and Johnson, he would found the most famous of literary clubs, and sell the Vicar of Wakefield to save himself from jail. It was a year of events decisive of the course of history, and of men whose fame is an illustrious national possession. But among those events none is more memorable than the birth of a son in the poorest of Scotch homes; and of all that renowned and resplendent throng of statesmen, soldiers, and seamen, of philosophers, poets, and inventors, whose fame filled the world with acclamation, not one is more gratefully and fondly remembered than the Ayrshire ploughman, Robert Burns.
It cannot be said of Burns that he ‘burst his birth’s invidious bar.’ He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and he always felt his poverty to be a curse. He was fully conscious of himself, and of his intellectual superiority. He disdained and resented the condescension of the great, and he defiantly asserted his independence. Perhaps, as Carlyle suggests, he should have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry. We only know that he did not. Like an untamable eagle he dashed against the bars he could not break, and his life was a restless alternation of low and lofty moods, of pure and exalted feeling, of mad revel and of impotent regret.
Distracted by poetry and poverty and passion, and brought to public shame, he determined to leave the country, and in 1786, when he was twenty seven years old, Burns published his poems by subscription to get the money to pay his passage to America. Ah! Could that poor, desperate ploughman of Mossgiel have foreseen this day, could he have known that because of those poems, an abiding part of literature familiar to every people, sung and repeated in American homes from sea to sea, his genius would be honoured and his name blessed, and his statues raised with grateful pride to keep his memory in America green for ever, perhaps the amazing vision might have nerved him to make his life as noble as his genius…
Burns’s sudden fame stayed him, and brought him to Edinburgh and its brilliant literary society. Hume was gone, but Adam Smith remained; Robertson was there, and Dugald Stewart. There, also, were Blacklock and Hugh Blair and Alison; Fraser, Tytler, and Adam Ferguson and Henry Erskine. There, too, were the beautiful Duchess of Gordon, and the truly noble Lord Glencairn. They welcomed Burns as a prodigy, but he would not be patronised. Glad of his fame, but proudly and aggressively independent, he wanders through the stately city, taking off his hat before the house of Allan Ramsay, and reverently kissing Robert Fergusson’s grave, ‘his elder brother in misfortune,’ as Burns called him. He goes to the great houses, and although they did not know it, he was the greatest guest they had ever entertained, the greatest poet that then or ever walked the streets of Edinburgh. His famous hosts were all Scotsmen, but he was the only Scotchman among them who had written in the dialect of his country, and who had become famous without ceasing to be Scotch.
The dazzling Edinburgh days were a glaring social contrast to the rest of his life. The brilliant society flattered him, but his brilliancy outshone its own. He was wiser than the learned, wittier than the gayest, and more courteous than the courtliest. His genius flashed and blazed like a torch among the tapers, and the well-ordered company, enthralled by the surprising guest, winced and wondered. If the host was condescending, the guest was never obsequious. But Burns did not love a lord, and he chafed indignantly at the subtle but invincible lines of social distinction, feeling too surely that the realm of leisure and ease, a sphere in which he knew himself to be naturally master, must always float beyond, beyond – the alluring glimmer of a mirage…
Five years of letting his life ‘wear only way it would hang,’ and Burns’s life was ended in 1796, in his thirty seventh year. There was an outburst of universal sorrow. A great multitude crowded the little town at his burial. Memorials, monuments, biographies of every kind followed. Poets ever since have sung him as of no other poet. The theme is always fresh and always captivating, and within the year our own American poet, beloved and honoured in his beautiful and unwasted age, sings of Burns as he sees him in vision, as the world shall forever see him, an immortal youth cheerily singing at his toil in the bright spring morning. The young man who would gild his dissipation with the celestial glamour of Burns’s name snatches the glory of a star to light him to destruction… ‘Except for grace,’ said Bunyan, ‘I should have been yonder sinner.’
But we unveil today, and set here for perpetual contemplation, not the monument of the citizen at whom respectable Dumfries looked askance, but the statue of a great poet… Great poets before and after Burns have been honoured by their countries and by the world; but is there any great poet of any time or country who has so taken the heart of what our Abraham Lincoln, himself one of them, called the plain people that as was lately seen in Edinburgh, when he had been dead nearly a hundred years, workmen going home from work begged to look upon this statue for the love and honour they bore to Robert Burns? They love him for their land’s sake, and they are better Scotchmen because of him…
But the power thus to depict national life and character, and thus to kindle an imperishable patriotism, cannot be limited by any nationality or country. Burns died at the same age as Raphael; and Mozart, who was his contemporary died only four years before him. Raphael and Mozart are the two men of lyrical genius in kindred arts who impress us as most exquisitely refined by careful cultivation; and although Burns was of all great poets the most unschooled, he belongs in poetry with Raphael in paining, and Mozart in music. An indescribable richness and flower like quality, a melodious grace and completeness and delicacy belong to them all.
A proposer of the Immortal Memory from this era was much nearer home, indeed, he had stayed in Burns’s own home in Dumfries for a time although not much is known about him at all. He is on record as ‘an anonymous speaker ’(probably a clergyman, by his tone) who, in February 1881, opened his address by explaining his singular link with the Dumfries Burns.
Having passed the greater portion of my life in the house in which Burns lived and died and taking an intense delight in everything relating to him, I have become somewhat familiar with the records of his life. I thought it would not be uninteresting if I brought some of the more prominent features of his career and writing before your notice, and trust that unworthy though they may be, they may throw some little light in the life of this remarkable man.
To render the incidents of the humble story of Robert Burns generally intelligible, it seems to me advisable to prefix some observations on the character of the order to which he belonged, a class of men distinguished by many peculiarities. By this means we shall form a more correct idea of the advantages with which he started and of the obstacles which he surmounted. A slight acquaintance with the peasantry of Scotland will serve to convince an unprejudiced observer that they possess a degree of intelligence not generally found among the same class of men in the other countries of Europe. In the very humblest condition of Scottish peasants everyone can read, and most persons are more or less skilled in writing and arithmetic, and under the disguise of their uncouth appearance, and of their peculiar manner and dialect, a stranger will discover that they posses a curiosity and have obtained a degree of information corresponding to these acquirements. These advantages they owe to an Act of Parliament made in 1646 for an establishment of a school in every parish throughout the country, for the express purpose of educating the poor but which has been superseded some years ago by the ‘Compulsory Education Act’. I may mention here, that the reading was chiefly taught from the Bible, as other books were too expensive at that time…
Robert received the greatest portion of the education from his father, and by borrowing books he made rapid progress. When about 13 or 14, his father sent him and his brother Gilbert ‘week about’ to a Parish school at Dalrymple two or three miles from their home. The good man not being able to pay two fees, and while one was at school the other helped their father at the work on the farm. At this time Robert was a dexterous ploughman. When he was at the age of 16 the family removed from the vicinity of Ayr to Lochlea in the Parish of Tarbolton in Ayrshire. At this place Robert began to write poetry for the first time. He says in one of his letters ‘I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in love and then rhyme and song were in a manner the spontaneous language of my heart.’
It was here where he met a bewitching creature a year younger than himself and whom he described as a ‘bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass’ and upon whom he composed his first production:
Oh once I loved a bonnie lass
Ay and I love her still
And whilst that honour warms my breast
I’ll love my handsome Nell.
Robert and Gilbert were employed by their father as regular farm servants, he allowing them seven pounds of wages each per annum, from which sum, however, all the clothes they received was deducted…
[W]hen his father died he succeeded him in the farm of Lochlea but here again he failed… and after leaving Lochlea he resided at a farm his brother Gilbert had taken named Mossgiel, [at Mauchline] for four years, the most important part of his life…
In Mauchline there dwells six proper young belles
The pride of the place and its neighbourhood a’
Their carriage and dress a stranger would guess
In London or Paris they’d gotten it’ a’.
Miss Miller is fine, Miss Markland divine
Miss Smith she has wit and Miss Betty is braw
There’s beauty and fortune to get wi Miss Morton
But Armour’s the jewel for me o’ them a’.
But not being equal to the maintenance of a wife he was on the eve of departing for Jamaica where he hoped to find better fortunes. However a Mr Hamilton advised him not to go, but encouraged him to publish some of his poems, he therefore went to Edinburgh where he succeeded fairly well in disposing of his words and was introduced to society. [W]ith the money he had saved in Edinburgh he gave farming another trial, and took the farm of Ellisland in the country of Dumfries [and] married ‘the jewel’ Jean Armour in 1788.
At Ellisland he got on remarkably well for a few years but towards the close of 1791 he finally despaired of his farm owing to bad crops, and he moved to Dumfries where he became an Exciseman…
His conduct as an Excise officer met with uniform approbation and he cherished warm hopes of being promoted by devoting himself altogether to the service, but death intervened and cut him off on 21 July 1796 at the early age of 38. [sic] The chief persons of the town and neighbourhood flooded together to attend his remains to their last resting place with military honours, the chief mourner being Lord Hawkesbury once Duke of Liverpool. During the funeral solemnity Mrs Burns gave birth to a posthumous son who shortly afterwards followed his father to the grave in St Michael’s churchyard…
With all Robert Burns’s faults no Scotchman has done more to develop that kindliness of heart and that fraternity of feeling which ought to prevail amongst us, and which only requires to be purified by the Spirit of God to give us ‘peace on earth and goodwill among us’ and to make our homes below as much as possible like our homes above. It is not possible however to speak of Burns in relation to religion without offending two classes of people. On the one hand, those who, because of what was bad in Burns refuse to acknowledge what was good, on the other hand those who make the good that was in Burns a reason for condoning what was bad. It is not about poor Burns himself that I am now going to speak but I speak of Robert Burns as a living and active power as one who by the force of his genius has made his life, his songs and his poetry, a mightier and more permanent influence in the world, more potent both for good and for evil than that of ten millions of men who are living and working around us.
One noble service he has rendered to humanity and therefore to a live Christianity is the bringing out of the dignity and worth of man as man apart from name, rank or fortune. Christ taught the same truth, it was the man he looked to, not the rank, not the robe. By His word, by His conduct, Christ taught the worth and nobleness of man. Burns sang it:
What tho’ on homely fare we dine
Wear hodden gray an a’ that
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine
A mans’ a man for a’ that.
For a’ that and a’ that
Their tinsel shows and a’ that
The honest man tho e’er sae poor
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
For a that an a’ that,
Our toils obscure and a’ that
The rank is but the guinea stamp
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.
By the bringing out of this great truth Burns helped the labouring poor to a spirit of contentment and self respect. He taught them to look for, and find enjoyment in life, in home, in friendship whatever their rank or station might be. He helped them to feel the wonder and the loveliness of nature. The green fields, the sounding shore, the storm, the sky, the little flower, the mavis’ song, the music of the ‘burnie trilling doon the glen’. The ‘wee, modest, crimson-tipped daisy’ looking out from amongst the green grass, was for them as well as for the rich, was even nearer to them because there was less of worldly pomp to separate man from nature…
He let the whole world see that in all circumstances, high or low, man is the same being, that everything that nature has bestowed upon us is found amongst the poor as well as among the rich. Burns taught Scotchmen to love and adore their native country, the true patriotism of which any of you can gather by reading Scots wha hae. It is a call to the defence of liberties, which the world needs defended as well as we. Nowhere does this comes and more clearly than when in The Cottars Saturday Night (which I would advise you all to peruse), before the bard pours out his prayer to Heaven for Scotland’s defence and prosperity he pictures the Scottish life and Scottish character which he deems it worth defending:
Oh Scotia my dear my native soil
For whom my warmest wish to heaven is sent
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health and peace and sweet content
And oh, may heaven their simple lives present
From luxury’s contagion weak and vile
Then howe’er crowns and coronets be rent
A virtuous populace may rise the while
And stand a wall of fire around their much lov’d isle. Such patriotism is, I think, not a menace but a strength to the world’s liberty and progress. It is a patriotism rooted in virtue and purity and kindly love – a love of Scotland that helps instead of hindering the wider love of all. And who is there amongst Scotchmen, aye, Englishmen too, who has joined hands round the festive table at home, or with fellow countrymen in distant lands, and sung of Auld Lang Syne but has felt his heart not only glowing with fresh love to country but warming with a wider love for all mankind…
The fame of Burns is remarkable for its rapid development and constant extension. It has grown, is growing, and will continue to grow, it is more than local, more even than national, it is well nigh world wide, not only on the banks of the ditch but throughout the length and breath of the United Kingdom and in the backwoods of Canada, in the bush of Australia, east and west to the very antipodes wherever on Earth’s wide surface the sons and daughters of Scotland may go, the name of Burns is a pledge of unity a passport to brotherly communion.
Of course Burns had his sins. In some form or another we all have sinned. Even those whose lives have been more wisely governed than that of Burns. Abraham told a lie, David committed treachery, and Peter on one occasion cursed and swore, but as well might men seek to honour Abraham by telling lies and David by committing treachery and Peter by profane swearing as seen to honour Burns by indulging in the drink that was his curse and perpetuating the customs that seduced him into sin and brought him to an early grave.
But, gentlemen, I call upon you to withhold your judgement as to Burns’s inner life, and responsibility and sin and judge of the influence of his actual word and conduct, and while Burns is dead and gone with no longer the power even to attempt to recall or to check the influence for evil which he had set in motion, this cannot be said of those who are living in presence of that influence and under it. The responsibility is shifted now from Burns to his admirers. They can and they are bound to distinguish between what is great and beautiful and good in Burns that they may rejoice in it and help to let it have free course and be glorified. And what is bad in Burns that they may war against it for his sake, for their own sake and for the sake of humanity – Like other poets Burns reaps the benefit of the good he bestowed upon the world, when he is no more and when he cannot know or enjoy it. More money has been lavished in Scotland and America on statues to his memory than was ever given to his troubled life. But his works, and his life, and his death have endeared him to his countrymen. They are not merely proud of his fame which is worldwide, they keep his memory with affection…
Here the transcript is marked ‘Finis’, and presumably the toast was drunk – in tea, no doubt, as temperance was a Victorian obsession pursued by the good with as much intensity as alcohol was by the bad. Similarly, the totally erroneous picture of Burns eking out his last year in squalor and abject poverty was to this attitude assisted by several hysterical letters of his at the end caused more by his illness than by his actual situation. However, we must bear in mind that this was the age of Dickens and Little Nell, plumed horses and caparisoned hearses, professional mourners and an almost romantic view of death, especially of those who die young. If not quite thanatopsis, it was a fascination with death and every aspect of it.
It helped towards that Victorian sense of smug complacency, especially among the new emerging middle classes. They liked to be seen to be helping the poor and sympathising with the unfortunate. To them, Burns was both. They quite ignored the fact of his working stamina which upheld him almost to the last and preferred to think of him as the poor young man wasting away in neglect and disgrace. They felt comfortable with that picture of a romantic, poetic end. It suited the taste of the times and just as discreetly they forgot the Burns that was the social rebel, the political firebrand, the theatre-lover, the folk-philosopher, the man who looked out into a whole world wider than Dumfries High Street. This sentimental strain ran through all the songs and odes and most of the speeches in the 1859 celebrations and an element of the same attitude persisted to the end of the century. It has not been completely eradicated to this very day.
Yet there was no denying that the speech given in Dumfries by this patently good man, who had lived in domestic surroundings that Burns himself would have known, had a real love for the poet and his works, no matter his distaste for ‘the drink’, as he terms it. There would be better orators, more gifted speakers, finer minds and more original themes put forward in future Burns Suppers, but none would surpass the unknown proposer in heart, and, in the Burns sense, that is the vital and ultimate ingredient. As Burns said in his Epistle to Davie:
Nae treasures nor pleasures could make us happy lang,
The heart ay’s the part ay that maks us right or wrang.
Towards the end of the 19th-century, the Burns Movement was growing almost too fast and its organisation was becoming cumbersome and difficult to control. It was in danger of trying to go in different, and often contradictory, directions at once. Was it to develop as a populist movement on a social basis or become a literary society with an elitist bias? The ideal would be a combination of both. The time was right for a pause for thought if only to further define their common purpose, which was the propagation of Burns’s works and to rationalise their activities to this end. It was important at some point to get the clubs together and thrash it all out.
It was in this kind of climate that a couple of visiting Scots took a walk in London. Provost David Mackay was secretary of the Kilmarnock Burns Club and Captain David Sneddon was its past-president. In the summer of 1884 they were there to discuss the placing of a statue of Burns which was planned for the following spring. To understand their status at this time, it is necessary to realise that in the early years of the Burns Movement the Kilmarnock Burns Club (the future Club No 0, a token of its unique status) was the movement and these two men, Mackay and Sneddon, were virtually the Kilmarnock Burns Club.
Now they were searching London for a site for the new statue. While walking along the Embankment looking for a suitable spot, the two men were joined by Colin Rae-Brown, the man behind the 1859 Centenary Year and now founder-president of the London Burns Club. It is almost impossible to overestimate the contribution made to the Burns Movement by this man. As has been already mentioned, he was from Greenock, born there in 1821. After training as a journalist, he joined a publishing house in Glasgow where he also contributed both prose and poetry to its various publications. As he rose in the newspaper world, he adopted the views of such as Cobden, Bright and Cassell in advocating a popular press for the masses at an affordable price, so the idea of a people’s newspaper was born.
In 1855, he helped to promote the Daily Bulletin in Glasgow as a penny paper. He also established two weekly journals, the Scottish Banner and the Workman. The latter title gives some idea of his political sympathies so it was no surprise that he was drawn early to Burns. He was honorary secretary of the Greenock Burns Club and it is safe to say that he was behind almost every event that honoured Burns in Britain from his first such involvement with Professor James Wilson (‘Christopher North’) in the 1844 Festival at Ayr to his last in 1897 with Lord Rosebery for the unveiling of the statue to Highland Mary Campbell at Dunoon. Between these times, he was the mainspring of the hugely successful Burns Centenary Festival of 1859, which was, of course, his original idea.
He became a good friend of James Glencairn Burns, the poet’s youngest son, and despite his many professional and Burnsian activities, was recognised as a minor poet himself. He continued to publish, despite failing health, until his death in London at the age of 76. By 1862, he had moved to London to further his newspaper interests and in 1868 he founded, with artist George Cruickshank and Irish writer Samuel Lover, the first Burns Club in London. This club is still extant, proudly bearing the title No 1, which in itself is a further tribute to the zeal and energy of its founder. Already a proved winner with centenaries, this was the man who met with Messrs Mackay and Sneddon, in that afternoon walk along London’s Embankment. Rae-Brown now mentioned the forthcoming centenary of the Kilmarnock Edition in 1886 and the possibility of
a Burns ‘demonstration’ in that town at that time. He saw this as an ideal opportunity to sound out the attending clubs on the idea of federation.
The trio decided that a secluded spot near to Cleopatra’s Needle was the spot for the statue. At the same time, it was also agreed that Rae-Brown’s idea for a Federation was a good one and that there ought to be some kind of covering of all of the clubs in Scotland.
‘Why not England as well?’ asked Rae-Brown.
‘Why not the world?’ asked Captain Sneddon.
‘Why not?’ agreed Mackay.
And so the idea of a world Federation of Burns Clubs was set in motion by three Scotsman walking together along the sides of the Thames. All in all, it had been a good day’s work for Burns.
Both projects, the statue and the federation of clubs, were put in hand almost at once. John Gordon Crawford, a Glasgow merchant, agreed to pay for the sculptor, Sir John Steell, to create a likeness out of Peterhead granite based on the Nasmyth portrait. It was ready in time for Lord Rosebery (who else?) to unveil it officially ‘in the presence of a large gathering of ladies and gentlemen’ on 26 July 1884. No doubt the gathering included Messrs Rae-Brown, Mackay and Sneddon and further discussions would have taken place regarding federation. These talks culminated in a preliminary meeting at Kilmarnock in February 1885, and the matter was moved forward.
In the following month the trio were together in London again. On 7 March 1885, the ubiquitous Lord Rosebery unveiled a bust of Burns set three feet to the right of Shakespeare in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. The ploughboy and the butcher’s apprentice had both obviously come a long way. But then so had the two friends from Killie. A few months later, on 17 July 1885, at a meeting in the George Hotel, Kilmarnock, under the auspices of the Kilmarnock Burns Club, the Burns Federation was officially proposed.Inevitably, the leading name on the list of the seventeen present that night was Colin Rae-Brown and the last was David Mackay. Between them was the exciseman and part-time soldier, Captain David Sneddon, flanked by the printer, James McKie, who had taken over the business from John Wilson, who had printed Burns’s first book, and that splendid reciter of Tam o Shanter, John Law, who attended from Springburn, Glasgow.
Also featured on the list was the Provost of Kilmarnock, the coalmaster and future MP for Kilmarnock, Peter Sturrock, who was to be elected the Federation’s first president. Richard Armstrong was there too. He was a hatter and hosier in the town until his health broke down and he was to leave Scotland in 1900 to settle first in South Africa, then Australia and finally, in Wellington, New Zealand, where he died in 1936, the last surviving member of that body of Victorians which founded the Burns Federation. Its object was, as Rae-Brown had directed, formally adopted and stated:
to strengthen and consolidate the band of friendship existing among the members of Burns Clubs, by universal affiliation…
It should be noted that they also added ‘its motto being A man’s a man’ for a’ that.’ It was a principle that was to supply the underlying ethos in all the Federation’s doings and it is to their credit that the seventeen good men of Killie did not propose it in Sir John Fyffe’s university Latin.
At that famous meeting the entry fee for clubs was set at a guinea. Its headquarters were to be established at Kilmarnock as that was the place where the first edition had been printed, and action towards federation was to be begun at once. All Rae-Brown’s professionalism was brought to bear on the project. A circular was sent out at once to all the known Burns clubs following this meeting but the initial response was not encouraging. Many of the older clubs, in a typical Scottish way, resented Kilmarnock’s taking such a daring initiative and held aloof from the new federation. Especially when the idea had emanated from London, albeit via three Scots. Gradually, however, sense prevailed, and, one by one, they all affiliated – Greenock in 1886, Paisley in 1891 but Dumfries did not join until 1913 and Ayr not until 1920.
All these clubs took part in the First Edition Celebrations in Kilmarnock on Saturday 7 August 1886, when they all processed from Barbadoes Green to the Burns Monument in Kay Park, where Dr Stoddart delivered the oration to a large crowd prior to a music festival followed by a banquet at the Corn Exchange. It was the annual holiday in the district but the turnout, according to reports of the time, was ‘spectacular’. This event did much to confirm the Federation, with ten members (two outside Scotland) as an established fact in the Burns world.
Meantime, in the United States, they were putting up more statues. This time at Albany, New York, where the Rev Robert H Collyer‘s address was delivered on 30 August 1888:
I will begin by asking you to turn with me for a moment to the first year in this century, and to the old churchyard of St Michael’s at Dumfries in Scotland, where we find one grave covered all over the Scotch thistles, and to notice, as we easily may, how they have not been left to grow there by a worthless sexton, but have been planted there and tended as if they were so many slips from the Rose of Sharon. That was the grave of Robert Burns when the century came in. They had laid him to rest there not very long before, in what should have been his fair, full prime, to the music of the Dead March in Saul. And as the music went sobbing into his home it would meet the wail of a babe just entering the world its father had left.
Englishmen, and Scotsmen too, in those times were voting incredible sums in salaries and pensions to no end of people because they were the offspring of the bastards of Charles II, and for equally delectable reasons; and that royal blackguard, George IV, was drawing more than half a million dollars a year for being a great deal meaner and more stupid than his father, George III, of blessed memory. Well, they made Burns a gauger on a salary of about £50 a year, with £20 more if he had good luck among those who got on the shady side of the revenue, and for this he had often to travel 200 miles a week in all sorts of weather, and Scotch weather at that… And when they had laid Burns under the greensward they did not think it worth their while to mark the spot with a stone. Those thistles were the only token and sign to tell you where he lay. How natural it would be for a good many of those who had once held him in esteem to conclude it was best that he should be speedily forgotten in the grave.
So they would imagine, but the truth they missed was this: that there was still a Robert Burns they could not bury any more than they could bury all the sunshine or all the daisies or all the birds that sing in the blue arches of heaven. Ploughmen and shepherds, and men at the bench and loom, were reading the poems he had written, and hiding them away, as an old Scotchman told me once, from the ministers and elders of the Kirk, for fear of what would happen if it was known they had the book. Then Burns began to be heard of far and wide. He went where the Bible went, and so at last, at the end of that hundred years, we gathered in his name hundreds of thousands strong all round the world…
By this time, another seminal Burns figure had emerged. Duncan McNaught, a schoolmaster from Kilmaurs, was to become a very important figure indeed and a leading Burns authority over the next 40 years or so. With Sneddon and Mackay, he formed the formidable triumvirate which became known as ‘The Old Guard’. It was these three who held the fledgling federation together in its first tentative decades. ‘Doing all the work and all the paying’ as McNaught was to recall in 1925.
Thanks to Provost Sturrock’s connections, James Dick, a Glaswegian factory-owner, but Kilmarnock-born, gave the town the building which became the Dick Institute, and for many, many years the headquarters of the Burns Federation. On Friday 4 September 1891 the Executive Council of the Burns Federation met there and on the motion of the ex-newspaper man, Colin Rae-Brown, it was agreed that an annual Burns Chronicle and Directory would be published from Kilmarnock starting in 1892. Captain Sneddon proposed John Muir of Glasgow as acting editor. Mr Muir was editor for the inaugural issue only, after which the indefatigable Duncan McNaught took over for what was to be his life’s work. According to McNaught:
The No.1 Chronicle was a dead failure in every respect, and I was hustled (much against my will) into the Editorial chair with something like a debt of one hundred pounds to wipe off.
Presumably his attitude changed, for Dr McNaught was to remain editor until his death from a heart attack in 1925. Few men have served Burns better. Or the Burns Federation. His heart was in all that he did for the Federation and if his heart eventually gave out, what he had built up in the Chronicle through 34 volumes stood as his lasting memorial. It was decided that this compilation should be known as the First Series in his honour and a new editor was sought to bring in the Second Series. If anything, James Ewing was of even greater calibre than McNaught in that he was the better all-round intellectual, and under his aegis the Burns Chronicle became a considerable platform for literary discussion that did not confine itself to Burns alone. It branched out into every aspect of the Scottish language and its cultural expression. It is really quite astonishing that a publication devoted to one man’s life and work should now have been going for more than a hundred years without repeating itself. It would seem that Burns was sufficient to engage, engross, and entertain generation after generation of Scottish minds and inspire them to lift their pens and fill the more than a hundred pages of each issue with lively debate and original comment.
If it is rare in publishing it is also quite unique in scholarship. Whole theses were propounded between the updated covers and the Chronicle was carried forward on its own momentum at a rate it would maintain until the Second World War when it would celebrate its Golden Jubilee against a background of air raid sirens and the noise of German bombs. In a Burns sense, it is salutary to think that before that war was over it would be British bombs over Berlin that would kill Hans Hecht, the first German Burnsian.
In 1891, however, stentorian Victorian voices were still rolling around the supposedly civilised world making sonorous sound waves in praise of Burns (for the most part) and to the delight of their perfervid listeners (for the most part). First, was the Honourable Wallace Bruce – who, with such a name could be described as a belt and braces Scot – but his voice was more London Club than Burns Club. Notwithstanding, the gentlemen of Ayr gave him the best of order on 25 January 1891. He reminded them of the last time he had visited their town.
Just before I came here in 1870 I was in Paris. I left that city three or four days before the gates were closed. While I was there the Marseillaise hymn burst forth form the heart of that people. It had been closed by an edict, but it had been locked up in the French heart, and then when the emperor was captured at Sedan every one in France sang the Marseillaise. In the hotel in which I was, a man stepped up to the piano and played the heart-stirring song. From the further end of the room came a Scotsman, and he sat down by the piano, and, filled with the same flush of patriotism, he played Scots Wha Hae. There I saw those two grand songs put in contrast with each other, and I don’t think I was prejudiced in thinking that there was more stirring strains in Scots Wha Hae than even in the great rush of the Marseillaise hymn.
E’en then a wish – I mind its pow’r –
A wish that to my latest hour
Should strongly stir my breast
That I, for puir auld Scotland’s sake,
Some usefu’ plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.
And he did do it. He sang the song, and he made the book.
Robert Burns taught the world the great principle of reciprocity. He was the only man that ever built a greater bridge than Sir William Arrol, Robert Burns has swung his choral bridge of poetry across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian oceans, so that the world today is bound together by the cords of one man, the genius of your town of Ayr. Could he have had a vision as he lay upon his dying bed, that before one hundred years had gone by the city of New York should be the centre of three millions of people, and he could see that, although the world had grown, it had not outgrown his songs? Did not the vision pass before him, for he was conscious of the power that slumbered in him? And now, tonight, all over the world, we come together to give the memory of Burns, and I ask you to pledge it in solemn silence.
Which they did.
In the following year, Mr Andrew Lang, one of the best Scottish minds of the time, and a still undervalued writer, spoke to the Edinburgh Burns Club. Regrettably, space allows only an extract from his address. In it, he refers to himself as a Cockney, despite the fact that he was born at Selkirk in 1844.
I admit that Burns has written better things than
My Mary, dear departed shade!
Where is thy place of blissful rest?
See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?
Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?
This song is under the disadvantage of being written in English. As far as I remember, Burns made no other song under the influence of grief for the dead. It is possible that what Scott says about other poets applies to Burns. ‘The language of passion is almost always pure, as well as vehement; and it is no uncommon thing to hear a Scotsman, when overwhelmed by a countryman with a tone of better and fluent upbraiding, reply, by way of taunt to his adversary, You have gotten to your English.’ Burns, then, uses English here under the stress of this unwonted passion; as he also does in rare movements of religious exaltation. Now, it is certain that in English verse he is never at his best.
Nobody in his senses will maintain that all Burns’s poems, or all of anybody’s poems, are always on the same level of excellence. But, perhaps, we may say that Burns is at least as often equal to himself as any other great poet; he has not the ups and downs of Wordsworth or of Byron. In this country, at least, the depressing critics are scarce. We are more plagued by a frantic enthusiasm which makes every Scot who writes regard Burns as his own private property, his special fetish, whom nobody else can speak of rightly, whom nobody else can with propriety praise.
For my sins, I lately published a book – a selection from Burns’s poetry. No such selection can ever be satisfactory; in truth, as a counsel of perfection, we should advise people never to make selections at all. Indeed, I don’t think that I satisfied anybody but a genial critic in Bonnie Dundee, who, on this occasion only, overlooked my sins as a Cockney – a native of the city that hears the music of Bow Bells. Well, these are personal matters, and not of cosmic importance; but is it not a fact that whatever we say of Burns irritates one Scot or another, and makes him take up his confounded testimony against us? If you hint that Burns was ‘a liberal shepherd’ in parts of his private conduct, you are ‘unco guid.’ If you say nothing about it, you leave a great element in his life and poetry out of sight. If you gloss over these things as seeming ‘genial, venial faults,’ you make allowances for Burns which you would not make for anyone else, and which are not of the best example. Well, it is easiest and most pleasant to drop a hackneyed theme, which has been made the topic of poems and preachings; the world is weary of it.
Verily, we are not a people of one lonely poet, though in one nature combined many of the voices of the past, much of the music of the future, in the good, the generous, the tender, the kindly, the homely, the impassioned Burns, the brightest of our lyrists, the most human of our satirists, the most perfervid of the perfervid Scots.
Had Burns been living today, would the world that lay around him have been so fit to inspire him with song? The mirth, the sport, the tradition are a’ wede awa’. London would inevitably have sucked him into its dingy and disastrous Corrievreckan. He would have battered at the door of the theatre, he might have scribbled articles for the press and drunk in Fleet Street, and contributed verses to the magazines. His magnificent genius would have been frittered away in the struggle for life. He was not happy; no man with his passionate nature could be happy; few men of genius, indeed, have been happy, ‘even as mortals count happiness.’ They may not be more miserable than others, but we hear more of it. Whoever represents humanity, as Burns represents it, whoever is to utter its voice, as Burns utters it, must know its sufferings in his own heart, and endure them in his own life.
In the Scottish phrase, we are not here as ‘doon-heartit loons’ to ‘make a poor mouth’ over Burns, nor greatly to blame the world for its treatment of him. He has received what he would have valued more than wealth, or ease, or an inglorious life; he has added renown to the country he loved, and for himself has gained that immortal garland, which is not to be run for without dust and sweat.
Mr Lang retired to St Andrews to take up the golf and walk on the links after a distinguished life in letters at Oxford and London. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Colonel Robert G Ingersoll addressed the Chicago Caledonian Society on 23 January 1893. Colonel Ingersoll was an army man with a most un-military eloquence.
We are here tonight, to honour a poet, and it may be well enough to inquire in the first place what a poet is? What is poetry? Every one has some idea of a poet, and this idea is born of his experience, of his impressions, of his education, and depends largely on whether his soul has burst into blossom. There have been more nations than poets. Many people imagine that poetry is a kind of art, depending upon certain rules, and that is only necessary to find out the rules; and if that were all, possibly it would be impossible to find out the rule. These rules have never been found, and yet the great poet follows them unconsciously, and the great poet is as unconscious as Nature, and the product of the highest art seems always to be felt instead of thought. The finest definition perhaps that has been given is this – ‘As Nature unconsciously produces that which appears to be the result of conscience, so the greatest artist conscientiously produces that which appears to have been an unconscious result.’ Poetry, after all, must rest on the experience of men. It must sit by the fireside of the heart. It must have to do with this world, with the place in which we live, with the men and women we know, with our loves, with our hopes, with our fears, and with our joys.
I was taught that Milton was a wonderful poet, and above all others sublime. I have read Milton once. Few people ever read him twice. We have been taught also that Dante was a wonderful poet. He describes with infinite minuteness the pangs and agonies endured by the damned in the torture dungeons of God. But there was one good thing about Dante – and for that one good thing I have forgiven him many faults. He had the religious democracy in his heart, and the courage to see a Pope in hell. That is something to be thankful for. Poetry cannot be written by rule. It is not a trade. It is not a profession. Let the critics lay down the laws of poetry, and the true poet will violate them all. By the rule such as the critics make, you can construct skeletons, but you cannot clothe them with flesh; you cannot put sight in their eyes and passion in their hearts.
In the olden time in Scotland most of the so-called poetry was written by pedagogues and parsons – gentlemen who found out what little they knew about the living world by reading the dead languages, by studying epitaphs in the cemeteries of literature. They knew nothing of any living thing that they themselves thought poetic. The men then living were not worth writing about; the women then alive were not beautiful enough to attract their scholarly attention. They bestowed their praise on the dead, on dust, on skeletons, on phantoms – phantoms that, if they did not live here, were supposed to live somewhere else. In those days they made poetry about geography. The critics then always looked for mistakes, not beauties, not for perfection of expression and feeling, but for syntax, grammar. These gentlemen would object to the clouds, because they are not square. And at one time it was thought the scenery, the grand and beautiful in Nature, made the poet. Let me tell you tonight – it is the poet who makes the scenery; the scenery never made a poet, and never made an artist in the world. The poet makes the scenery. Holland has produced far more genius than the Alps. There is not much scenery in Holland.
Where Nature is prodigal, where the crags kiss the clouds, man is overawed, overpowered, and becomes small. In England and Scotland the hills are low; nothing in the scenery is calculated to arouse poetic life, and yet those countries have produced the greatest and the most magnificent of all poets of all time. The truth is, the poets make the scenery. The place where man has died for man is grander than any snow-crowned summit in the world; the place where man has loved and suffered.
A poem itself is something like scenery; and let me say right here, that there is greater scenery in this world than the physical. There are mental seas and continents, and ranges of mountains and constellations of the imagination greater than the eye has ever yet beheld. A poem is something like a mountain stream that ripples into light and then is lost in shadow, ripples along with a kind of wild joy under overhanging boughs, and then leaps and hurls its spray on high over some cascade; then running peacefully along over pebbly bottoms, balling of joy, murmuring delight, and then sweeping along to its old mother, the sea. A mountain stream is a poem in itself.
Thousands and millions of men live poems, but do not write them; but every great poem that was ever written has been lived by the man who wrote it. I say tonight that every good and self-denying man, every man who lives and labours for those he loves, for wife and child, is living a poem. The loving mother rocking the cradle, singing the slumber song, is living a poem; the man who bares his breast through shot and shell for the right has lived a poem; the poor woman in the tenement, sewing and looking with her poor blurred eyes upon her work, for the love of her child, is living a perfect poem; all the pioneers, and all the builders of home, and all the brave men of the world, and all the brave and loving women have been poets in action, whether they have ever written one word or not.
But tonight we are going to talk about a poet; one who poured out his soul in the music of song. How does a country become great? By producing great folks. Why is it that Scotland, when the roll of nations is called, can stand up and proudly cry ‘Here’? It is because Robert Burns has lived. It is Robert Burns that puts your well-loved Scotland in the front rank of nations. Robert Burns was a child of the people. I am glad of it. Robert Burns was a peasant, a ploughman, and yet a poet.
And why is it that millions and millions of men and women love this man? Why is it? He was a Scotchman, and all the tendrils of his heart struck deep in Scottish soil. He voiced the ideals of the best and greatest of his race, and of his blood. He was patriotic to the last fibre, and yet he is as dear to the citizens of the great Republic as to Scotia’s sons and daughters. And why? We, of course, admit that all great poetry has a national flavour. It tastes of the soil. No matter how great it is, how wide, how universal, the flavour of locality is never lost. We love Burns because he made common life beautiful, because he idealised sun-burned girls who worked in the field, because he put honest labour above titled idleness, because he made the cottage far more poetic than the palace, because he painted the simple joys and ecstasies and raptures of sincere love, and because he put native common sense above the culture of students. We love him because he was independent, sturdy, self-poised, social, generous; thrilled by a look, by a touch, full of pity, carrying the sorrows of others in his heart, those even of enemies; hating to see anybody suffer, lamenting.
Burns had another art – the art of stopping; the art of stopping at the right place. Nothing is more difficult than this. It is very hard to end a play. It is very hard to get the right kind of roof on a house. There is not one storyteller in a thousand that knows just the place where the rocket ought to explode. They go on talking after the stick has come down. Burns wrote short poems, and why? All poems are short. There cannot be a long poem any more than there can be a long joke. Burns knew when to stop. I believe the best example of an ending perfectly accomplished you will find in his Vision. There comes into his house, into that auld clay biggin’, his muse, the spirit of a beautiful woman, and tells him what he can do, and what he can’t do, as a poet. He conversed with her; he has a long talk with her, and now the thing is how to get her out of the house. You may think that is an easy thing. It is easy enough to get yourself into difficulty, but not to get out. But I was struck with the beautiful manner in which Burns got that angel out of the house. ‘And like a passing thought she fled, in light away.’ That is the way he got her out of the house.
A little while ago one of the greatest poets died, and I was reading one of his volumes, and at the same time during the same period reading a little from Robert Burns, and the difference between these two men struck me so forcibly that I concluded to say something about it tonight. Tennyson was a piece of rare china decorated by the highest art. Burns was made of honest human clay moulded by sympathy and love. Tennyson dwelt in his fancy for the most part with kings and queens, with lords and ladies, and with counts and nobles. Burns lingered by the firesides of the poor and humble, in the thatched cottage of the peasant. He loved men and women, and without regard to the outlook. Tennyson was touched by place and birth, and by the insignia given by birth and chance of fortune. As he grew old he grew narrower, and less in touch with the world around him. Tennyson was ingenious, Burns ingenuous. Tennyson had intellectual taste, Burns’s brain was the servant of his heart. One was exclusive, and the other pressed the world against his breast. Burns was touched by wrongs and injustice. Tennyson touched art on many sides, writing no doubt of lordly things, dealing with the vast poesies of his brain, and he satisfied the taste of cultured men. Tennyson is always self-possessed. He possesses in abundance poetic sympathy, but lacks the fire and the flame. Burns dwells on simple things, on things that touch the heart and arouse the highest sympathies of men. The religion of Burns was great enough to include everything. Tennyson’s imagination lived in a palace. The imagination of Burns dwelt lower down, among the people; his heart went out to them, and he recorded the poems of their simple life in imperishable verse. His songs were sweet harmonies drawn from the breast of Nature.
Both men were great poets. Tennyson appealed to the intellectual in his readers, Burns to the tenderest feelings of the soul. Men admire Tennyson: men love Robert Burns. How that man rose above all his fellows in death! Do you know, there is something wonderful in death. What a repose! What a piece of sculpture! The common man dead looks royal, a genius dead, sublime.
When a few years ago I visited all the places where Burns had been, from the little house with one room where he was born to the marble mausoleum where he now sleeps, I thought of this. Yes, I visited them all; all the places made immortal by his genius: the field where love first touched his heart; the field where he ploughed up the home of the mouse. I saw the cottage where Robert and Jean first lived as man and wife and walked on ‘the banks and braes of bonnie Doon,’ and all the other places rendered immortal by his genius, and when I stood by his grave I said: This man was a great man.
The name of Robert Burns can never die. He is enrolled among the immortals and will live forever. This man left a legacy of riches untold, not only to Scotland, but to the whole world. And when I was at his birthplace, I wrote these lines:
Though Scotland boasts a thousand names
Of patriot, king, and peer,
Was loved and cradled here.
Here lived the gentle peasant prince,
The loving cotter king,
Compared with whom the greatest prince
Is but a titled thing.
’Tis but a cot roofed in with straw,
A hovel made of clay;
One door shuts out the snow and storm,
One window greets the day;
And yet I stand within this room,
And hold all thrones in scorn;
For here beneath this lowly roof
Love’s sweetest bard was born.
Within this hallowed hut I feel
Like one who clasps a shrine,
When the glad lips at last have touched
The something deemed divine.
And here the world, through all the years,
As long as day returns,
The tribute of its love and tears
Will pay to Robert Burns.
Which seems a suitable place to pause.
Come, friend, we’ll pree the barley bree
To his braid fame that’s noo awa’.