Lord Rosebery to his Lady said, ‘My, hinnie, and my succour,
Shall we dae the thing,’ he said, ‘Or shall we have our supper?’
Wi’ bonie face, sae fu’ o’grace, replied the bonie leddie,
‘My noble Lord, may dae as he please, but supper isna ready!’
The Centenary was to become a virtual Rosebery celebration, but as top of the bill, he was not due till later. The supporting cast had still to perform in the lead-up to the main attraction. For instance, on the night before Burns Night, 1893, Mr Lewis McIver spoke to the South Edinburgh Burns Club. He did so as a patriotic Scot but with some reservations.
Mr Chairman, when I began I warned this goodly company of what they might expect; but, until I was fairly embarked, I had no notion how portentously dull I could be. And herein is a double crime; for gloom is most inopportune at a convivial gathering, and dullness – always inexcusable – is an outrage in connection with a prince of good fellows, the father of so much mirth in the past, in the present, and in the ages yet to come. That is the side of the
‘Sad, glad poet,
Whose soul was a white dove lost in the whirling snow’,
Which is meetest for tonight; and, after all, to invert the words of Marc Antony, I come to praise, not to bury Burns. On the occasion of a genuine ‘nicht wi’ Burns’ there is no need of an invocation to Euphrosyne. And one has but to pull out the mirthful stop in that magnificent instrument in order to flood this room with sunshine. That done, the scalpel of criticism is out of place. None of us want to dissect a nightingale.
The gladsomeness of Burns lives for ever in his songs; and even as they are his most enduring monument, so his mirth and joyousness, which they embalm, are our indestructible possession. He has been above all things a benefactor of humanity, and especially of his own countrymen as a songster, and a glad songster:
God sent His singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.
If with firm and confident finger he struck many noble and lofty chords in the national harp that no musician before or since has found, and which still vibrate, and will continue to vibrate while the heart of Scotland beats, he has also given echoing expression to the gayest and gladdest impulses of our nature. He discovered a rich mine of joyousness under the rough rock surface of our national character. He brought its gems to light from the depths. He cut and polished them, and he left them to us an imperishable inheritance, a perennial source of brightness and good fellowship; and we can best perpetuate our gratitude and his glorious name by keeping foremost that brightest aspect of his achievement, and by being glad to think of him as he would have chosen we should. What though
His regal vestments soil’d,
His crown of half its jewels spoil’d,
He is a king for all.
Edinburgh invited the Rev Wallace Williamson in 1895 and he spoke to the Burns Club on 26 January in the presence of Edinburgh’s Lord Provost. On his own admission, the Rev Williamson did not say anything new, but he said it modestly but cogently enough.
Mr Chairman, my Lord Provost, croupiers and gentlemen, – in rising to propose the toast of the evening, I must say at once you will not be wise if you expect anything new. For ninety-nine years the poet, whose memory we are met to honour, has been numbered with the dead. During that long period I know not how many speeches have been delivered on similar occasions, and I am appalled to think that I am about to add another to the number. My only defence in speaking, and your only satisfaction in listening, must be that, however often and however admirably the thing has been done before, another anniversary has come round.
The genius of Burns had shed a lustre over our native land. The unforced beauty of his song has found a place in every Scottish heart. We instinctively feel that our national life – that is to say, the life of the people – in all its many-sidedness, in every mood of joy and grief, in the strenuousness of its daily toil as well as the abandonment of hours snatched from care, has found expression through him as it never did before; and we know that from that fuller and freer development which he has helped to give it can never return. This is true as a general fact; but not merely so, for it comes home to the heart of every individual Scotsman. There is a certain subtle element which unites the personality and work of Burns in the imagination of his countrymen in a manner quite unique.
Between the poet and us language seems to melt into actual thought and feeling. He requires no interpreter. He speaks the language of the human heart, and the human heart infallibly responds. And behind the beauty of his work, behind the splendid gifts of his genius, there is also the pathos of a career which, with all its failings, claims for itself, and secures for itself, a sympathetic and abiding place in the memory of his countrymen. For this reason it seems to me the language of apology which has sometimes pervaded the utterances at such gatherings as this is entirely out of place. We need no apology for remembering the greatest genius our country has produced. I say the greatest genius. I do not say the greatest man.
The personal failings of Burns have been the theme of the moralist for a hundred years. For once we will let them alone. It is not his faults we are here to speak of. Another judge will deal with these and with ours. It is his genius.
There is hardly a side of human life which he does not touch, and in touching has not adorned. Is it the weird borderland on which the human should delights to hover? You have it in Tam o Shanter. Is it the wild abandonment of roving, rugged penury? You have it in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. Is it the scorn of hypocrisy? You have it in Holy Willie’s Prayer. Is it the pathos of separation and love? You have it in To Mary in Heaven and My Nannie’s Awa’. Is it the ‘comic humour’ of the country courtship? You have it in Duncan Gray. Is it the warm grasp of human friendship? You have it in Auld Lang Syne.
In closing, gentlemen, I shall merely say I regard Robert Burns as the brightest gift of genius God ever gave to our native land. We do well to cherish that noble heritage of poetry and song he has bequeathed to us. He has deepened and strengthened our love of country. He has purified the springs of our emotional life. He has sweetened the world of toil for careworn men, and knit closer the ties of human brotherhood…
A year later, to hansel in the Centennial Year, Mr Robert Fergie ‘memorised’ his piece before the South Edinburgh Burns Club.
The toast I have the honour to propose – The Memory of Burns – is one that, as year succeeds year and brings round the natal day of the bard, appears ever increasingly honoured in this country, and, indeed, all over the world. Men eminent in statecraft, in literature, and in arts, as well as lesser notables – honoured in the hamlet, the village, or the burgh, most worthy men not infrequently – are ever coming forward lauding the poet, descanting and enlarging upon his words and acts, and doing their best to keep his memory green. Keeping this in view, one is apt to think the subject would long ere this be pretty well exhausted; yet somehow, while each year or decade develops new ideas and aspirations, with new problems to solve, new difficulties to overcome, and new duties to face, the life and works of Burns, interpreted and read in the light of recent events, or of those assuming the ghost-like, shadowy forms of the future ere they take the realities of the present, will ever afford valuable guidance and awaken fresh interest when considering what is best to be done in emergencies or trials. At any rate, it is well, once in a way, to ponder over the treasures our fathers prized and test their worth, even at the risk of a little wearisome repetition.
But, I would here, with your kind permission, like to say a word or two upon his attitude towards religion, or the religious forms and opinions of his fellow-countrymen. No church, no organisation, and no man in this world is altogether good or perfect, and abuses will creep in even to the holy of holies, so that unless, like a tree which must be lopped or pruned to be maintained in perfect health and vigour, the pruning knife be applied to abuses and foul fungus sure in time to develop, the organisation or church is bound ere long to lose its strength or sap, and ultimately rot or
decay. Burns, to some extent at least, acted the part of the skilful gardener in respect to the Presbyterian Church. His Holy Fair virtually put an end to the great scandals which had sprung up side by side with the celebration of its most
sacred ordinance; and his Holy Willie’s Prayer dealt one of
the hardest blows ever struck against canting religious hypocrites, with the exception, perhaps, of some passages in the Bible record.
And yet one of Burns’s latest biographers, the late Principal Shairp, accords faint praise to the one, and expresses his regret that Holy Willie’s Prayer, The Ordination, and some other verses of a like nature were ever penned. Perhaps, for super-refined minds like Professor Shairp’s, this may be so; but for ordinary mortals who prefer plain, easily understood, though it may be unpalatable, truth to fine sophistries, the contrary view unquestionably prevails. The latter would, on no account, wish to see the poems blotted out; they do not regret they were ever written. For myself, I would sooner see the doctrine of election plainly stated as it is in the first stanza of Holy Willie’s Prayer than wade through the confused and bewildering questions and answers and proofs of the Westminster Catechism, to arrive at a similar conclusion.
To change the theme, I would have liked to have spoken at length on his plea for the dignity of labour and manhood and independent thought, and noted how his concentrated scorn and contempt oft break out upon these who can but will not assist their poorer brethren. We may almost fancy we see his brilliant eyes glowing with indignation as we read the lines:
See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.
If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave –
By Nature’s law design’d –
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn?
Why, indeed has often been asked, but remains, like the religious questions previously referred to, unanswered; and, perhaps will ever remain so.
Before concluding, however, let me refer to just one other of his poems – perhaps his greatest – because it shows so well how in life the happiest and most blissful moments may be shrouded, interwoven, or intermingled with gravest and saddest thought. These thoughts unbidden come; how they do come at such times will probably never be explained. Now, listen how artistically and naturally the lines I am going to quote depict this sensation, which all at times must have felt; how they dovetail into each other, though as opposite as may be, just like, as I have said, sad thoughts coursing over the mind of the gay dancer. Few poets, indeed, could have written such lines, and in the whole range of literature within the same compass I know of none so apt:
As bees flee hame wi’ lades o’treasure,
The minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure;
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed!
Or like the snowfall in the river,
A moment white – then melts for ever!
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm.
The July of 1796 found Burns on his dying bed, haunted by the fear that he might be arrested and carried off to jail for debt; his Bonnie Jean lying ill and just about to be confined, but both well tended and nursed by a kindly neighbour, Jessy Lewars, in praise of whom his last song is written. And yet, undaunted amidst all this pain and misery, he can still bear up. He had previously written to an old Edinburgh friend these notable words, which must oft have recurred to him during this trying period: – ‘There are two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul, those senses of the mind – if I may be allowed the expression – which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities – an all powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field; the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.’
Thus amidst poverty and suffering he passed away, his greatness unrealised till his death, his fame obscured and hidden and besmirched by the little nobodies who surrounded him, till ultimately it burst through all trammels, and since then has ever been extending and increasing. We in Scotland, above all others, have reason to be proud of him. The fame, even the name, of Scotsmen had fallen lower – owing mainly to the crushing out of the Rebellion of ’45 – than at any other time, if we except that short period in her history of English domination immediately before the appearance of Wallace. He, like a second Wallace, aroused her from her depression and degradation. He inspired her sons with fresh courage. He gloried in his nationality. He showed what could be done, and has been done, even though, to use his own words, there was ‘a parcel of rogues in the nation.’ We honour ourselves by honouring his memory.
Gentlemen, I give you the toast, ‘The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns.’
The ‘Hat-Peg’ that Dickens had referred to in 1859 was even larger in 1896, for even more hats were thrown into the ring. Even the respectable topper of the Poet-Laureate, Mr Alfred Austin, who, as Cyril Pearl points out, was known more for his moustache than his poetry, found a place on the peg. He had not seen fit to compose an ode for the earlier occasion, merely confining himself to a brief comment:
It is perfectly idle to suppose that you (he was addressing the Scots) will give up loving this man (Burns) because, as no one can deny, he was as weak as water in the presence of your natural beverage and your natural beauties. He loved them overmuch and he loved them very much in the wrong sort
of way.
A remark that illustrates not only his Englishness, but his ignorance of Burns and reveals his own level as a putative poet. One can only be grateful that he never attempted an ode. In 1896, he relented sufficiently to come north to Irvine to speak at the unveiling of the Burns statue in the town. If he was not a poet, he was certainly no orator either, but he made appropriate Laureate noises and took his moustache home again as soon as he could and left the stage clear for the ‘star of Robbie Burns’ himself – Lord Rosebery.
Archibald Philip Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery was the great-great grandson of Henry Primrose who, in 1695 supported William and Mary against the rightful James VII of Scotland, and was rewarded with the Earldom of Rosebery, near Edinburgh. He was likely to be the Rosebery mentioned at the head of the chapter. The Rosebery we are concerned with here inherited in 1868, and although a conventional Eton and Oxford aristocrat, he regarded himself as completely Scottish and with a genuine concern for 19th-century Scotland which he saw as ‘mumbling the dry bones of political neglect’. He worked hard at the Home Office towards the creation of a Scottish Office, although it wasn’t to happen for another 40 years. Meantime, all his considerable energies (he was a widower and an insomniac) were given to his house, the Durdans, near Epsom, horse paintings by Stubbs and to his hobbies, which were various, but included Burns and Burns-related events.
This was to be later acknowledged in his being made the first Honorary President of the Burns Federation and having the Rosebery Burns Club named for him in Glasgow. Lord Rosebery might have been a great man had he applied himself wholly to any one thing but his whole was never quite as good as any of his many parts. What matters here is that he put his gifted tongue at the disposal of the early Burns movement and was tireless on its behalf. He unveiled statues, begged for money for monuments, attended dinners for every kind of good Burns cause, and generally spent his wit and wisdom in furthering the understanding of a man who could not have been more different to himself in every way. And when the Prime Minister of the day, Arthur Balfour (more related to Stevenson than to Burns) begged to be excused what he called – ‘the demonstration in honour of our National Poet’ – at Dumfries for health reasons, and because of Parliamentary demands in the House, who should take his place but Lord Rosebery
This is perfectly appropriate for a man who was to be Prime Minister of Great Britain himself in 1894–95. He also found time to own three Derby winners), become patron of the Scottish Football Association, (the Scotland team wore his racing colours, primrose and pink, in a 1900 international against England), and a published author of biographies on Napoleon and the two William Pitts. Most of all, he became a public orator and wit. His was a genuine admiration for Burns, and this showed in all his speeches. So much did he dominate the commemorations of the death of Burns in
1896 that they were thought of by Burnsians of the time as the Rosebery Celebrations.
This main event of this Centenary year took place on the actual anniversary of Burns’s death – 21 July 1896, and Dumfries made quite a day of it. Once again, the weather was not entirely propitious. It could more be described as precipitous. As soon as the very large procession got underway from Whitesands on its way to St Michael’s Kirkyard, the rain came down in torrents. The Freemasons, bellhangers, stockingmakers, fleshers and vanmen all got uniformly soaked along with their respective bands and the huge turn-out of Burns Club members from Britain, America and the Colonies. The gentry and those and such-as-those came, of course in their carriages between lines of wet King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the Earl of Rosebery travelling with Sir Robert and Lady Reid. Their arrival at the mausoleum was greeted with loud cheers and the noble earl dutifully laid his ‘magnificent wreath of choice exotics’ upon Burns’s grave.
That afternoon, after the public lunch, he gave the main oration in the Drill Hall, New Hall Terrace, and the place was fill to its 4,500 capacity. After apologies were read from the Prime Minister (he was to be made a Burgess of the town in the following year) Rosebery rose to prolonged cheering.
Ladies and gentlemen, I come here as a loyal burgess of Dumfries to do honour to the greatest burgess of Dumfries… but you impose on your youngest burgess an honour that might well break anybody’s back – that of attempting to do justice in any shape or fashion to the hero of today’s ceremony… We are surrounded by the choicest and the most sacred haunts of the Poet. You have in this town the house in which he died, the ‘Globe,’ where we could have wished that some phonograph had then existed which could have communicated to us some of his wise and witty wayward talk. You have the street commemorated in McCulloch’s tragic anecdote when Burns was shunned by his former friends, and you have the paths by the Nith which are associated with some of his greatest work. You have near you the room in which the whistle was contended for, and in which, if mere legend is to be trusted, the immortal Dr Gregory was summoned to administer his first powders to the survivors of the memorable feast…
You have near you the walk by the river, where, in his transport, he passed his wife and children without seeing them, ‘his brow flushed and his eyes shining’ with the lustre of Tam o Shanter. ‘I wish you had but seen him,’ said his wife ‘he was in such ecstasy that the tears were happing down his cheeks.’ That is why we are in Dumfries today… But it is not in Dumfries alone that he is commemorated today; for all Scotland will pay her tribute. And this, surely, is but right. Mankind owes him a general debt. But the debt of Scotland is special. For Burns exalted our race, he hallowed Scotland and the Scottish tongue. Before his time we had for a long period been scarcely recognised, we had been falling out of the recollection of the world. From the time of the union of the crowns, and still more from the time of the legislative union, Scotland had lapsed into obscurity. Except for an occasional riot or a Jacobite rising her existence was almost forgotten. She had, indeed, her Robertsons and her Humes writing history to general admiration, but no trace of Scottish authorship was discoverable in their works; indeed, every flavour of national idiom was carefully excluded. The Scottish dialect, as Burns called it, was in danger of perishing. Burns seemed at this juncture to start to his feet and reassert Scotland’s claim to national existence; his Scottish notes rang through the world, he preserved the Scottish language forever; for mankind will never allow to die that idiom in which his songs and poems are enshrined. That is a part of Scotland’s debt to Burns.
But this is much more than a Scottish demonstration; it is a collection of representatives from all quarters of the globe to own a common allegiance and a common faith. It is not only Scotsmen honouring the greatest of Scotsmen – we stretch far beyond a kingdom or a race – we are rather poetical Mohammedans gathered at a poetical Mecca, and yet we are assembled in our high enthusiasm under circumstances which are somewhat paradoxical. For with all the appearance of joy we celebrate, not a festival but a tragedy. It is not the sunrise but the sunset that we commemorate. It is not the birth of a new power into the world, but the subtle germ of a fame that is to survive and inspire the generations of men; but it is perhaps more fitting that we celebrate the end and not the beginning. For the coming of these figures is silent; it is their passing that we know. At this instant that I speak there may be born into the world the equal of a Newton or a Caesar, but half of us would be dead before he had revealed himself. Their death is different. It may be gloomy and disastrous; it may come at a moment of shame or neglect; but by that time the man has carved his name somewhere on the Temple of Fame…
This day a century ago, in poverty, delirium, and distress, there was passing the soul of Robert Burns. To him death comes in clouds and darkness, the end of a long agony of body and soul; he is harassed with debt, his bodily constitution is ruined, his spirit is broken, his wife is daily expecting her confinement. He has lost almost all that rendered his life happy, much of friendship, credit and esteem. Some score years before one of the most charming of English writers, as he lay dying, was asked if his mind was at ease, and with his last breath Oliver Goldsmith owned that it was not. So it was with Robert Burns. His delirium dwelt on the horrors of a jail; he uttered curses on the tradesman who was pursuing him for debt. ‘What business,’ said he to his physician in a moment of consciousness, ‘what business has a physician to waste his time upon me; I am a poor pigeon not worth plucking. Alas! I have not feathers enough to carry me to my grave’. For a year or more his health had been failing. He had a poet’s body as well as a poet’s mind; nervous, feverish, impressionable; and his constitution, which, if nursed and regulated, might have carried him to the limit of life, was unequal to the storm and stress of dissipation and a preying mind…
In his last April he wrote to his friend Thomson, ‘By Babel’s streams I’ve sate and wept almost ever since I saw you last. I have only known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness, and have counted time by the repercussions of pain. Rheumatism, cold, and fever have formed to me a terrible combination. I close my eyes in misery, and open them without hope.’ It was sought to revive him by sea bathing, and he went to stay at Brow. There he remained three weeks, but was under no delusion as to his state. ‘Well, madam,’ he said to Mrs Riddell on arriving, ‘have you any commands for the other world?’ He sat that evening with his old friend, and spoke manfully of his approaching death, of the fate of his children, and his farm, sometimes indulging in bitter-sweet pleasantry, but never losing the consciousness of his condition. In three weeks he wearied of the fruitless hunt for health, and he returned home to die. He was only just in time. When he re-entered his home on the 18th he could no longer stand. He was soon delirious… ‘On the fourth day,’ we are told, ‘when his attendant held a cordial to his lips, he swallowed it eagerly, rose almost wholly up, spread out his hands, sprang forward nigh the whole length of the bed, fell on his face, and expired.’
I suppose there are many who can read the account of these last months with composure. They are more fortunate than I am. There is nothing much more melancholy in all biography. The brilliant Poet, the delight of all society, from the highest to the lowest, sits brooding in silence over the drama of his spent life – the early innocent home, the plough and the savour of fresh turned earth, the silent communion with nature and his own heart, the brief hour of splendour, the dark hour of neglect, the mad struggle for forgetfulness, the bitterness of vanished homage, the gnawing doubt of fame, the distressful future of his wife and children – an endless witch-dance of thought without clue or remedy, all perplexing, all soon to end while he is yet young, as men reckon youth, though none know so well as he that his youth is gone, his race is run, his message is delivered. His death revived the flagging interest and pride that had been felt for him. As usual, men began to realise what they had lost when it was too late. When it was known that he was dying the townspeople had shown anxiety and distress. They recalled his splendour, and forgot his fall. One man was heard to ask, with a touch of quaint simplicity, ‘Who do you think will be our poet now?’ The district set itself to prepare a public funeral for the Poet who died almost penniless among them. A vast concourse followed him to his grave. The awkward squad, as he had foreseen and deprecated, fired volleys over his coffin. The streets were lined with soldiers, among them one who, within sixteen years, was to be Prime Minister.
And while the procession wended its gloomy way, as if no element of tragedy were to be wanting, his widow’s hour of travail arrived, and she gave birth to the hapless child that had caused the father so much misgiving. In this place, and on this day, it all seems present to us – the house of anguish, the thronged churchyard, the weeping neighbours. We feel ourselves part of the mourning crowd. We hear those dropping volleys and that muffled drum; we bow our heads as the coffin passes, and acknowledge with tears the inevitable doom. Pass, heavy hearse, with thy weary freight of shattered hopes and exhausted frame; pass, with thy simple pomp of fatherless bairns and sad moralising friends; pass, with the sting of death to the victory of the grave; pass, with the perishable, and leave us the eternal. It is rare to be fortunate in life; it is infinitely rarer to be fortunate in death. ‘Happy in the occasion of his death,’ as Tacitus said of Agricola, is not a common epitaph. It is comparatively easy to know how to live, but it is beyond all option and choice to compass the more difficult art of knowing when and how to die. We can generally, by looking back, choose a moment in a man’s life when he had been fortunate had he dropped down dead. And so the question arises naturally today, was Burns fortunate in his death – that death which we commemorate? There can, I fancy, be only one answer; it was well that he died when he did; it might even have been better for himself had he died a little earlier. The terrible letters that he wrote two years before to Mrs Riddell and Mr Cunningham betoken a spirit mortally wounded. In those last two years the cloud settles, never to be lifted. ‘My constitution and frame were ab origine blasted with a deep incurable taint of hypochondria which poisons my existence.’ He found, perhaps, some pleasure in the composition of his songs, some occasional relief in the society of boon companions; but the world was fading before him.
There is an awful expression in Scotland which one never hears without a pain ‘So and so is done,’ meaning that he is physically worn out. Burns was ‘done’. He was struggling on like a wounded deer to his death. He had often faced the end, and not unwillingly. ‘Can it be possible,’ he once wrote to Mrs Dunlop, ‘That when I resign this frail, feverish being I shall still find myself in conscious existence? When the last gasp of agony has announced that I am no more to those who know me and the few who loved me; when the cold, unconscious course is resigned to the earth to be the prey of reptiles, and become a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, enjoying or enjoyed?’ Surely that reads as if he foresaw this day, and would fain be with us, as indeed, he may be. Twelve years before he had faced death in a less morbid spirit:
Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene?
Have I so found it full of pleasing charms?
Some days of joy, with draughts of ill between,
Some gleams of sunshine, mid renewing storms.
He had perhaps never enjoyed life so much as is supposed, though he had turned it a brave, cheerful, unflinching face, and the last years had been years of misery. ‘God have mercy on me,’ he wrote years before the end, ‘a poor, damned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool! The sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonising sensibility, and bedlam passions.’ There was truth in this outburst. At any rate his most devoted friends – and to be admirer of Burns is to be his friend – may wish that he had not lived to write the letter to Mr Clark, piteously pleading that a harmless toast may not be visited hardly upon him; or that to Mrs Riddell, beginning ‘I write you from the regions of hell and the horrors of the damned,’ or to be harried by his official superiors as a political suspect, shunned by his fashionable friends for the same reason, wandering like a neglected ghost, in Dumfries, avoided and ignored. ‘That’s all over now, my young friend,’ he said, speaking of his reign in society, ‘and were’na my heart licht I wad dee.’
All this was in 1794. Had he died before then, it might have been happier for himself, and we should have lost some parts of his life which we would rather forget; but posterity could not have spared him; we could not have lost the exquisite songs which we owe to those years; but, above all, the supreme creed and comfort which he bequeathed to the world – ‘A man’s a man for a’that,’ would have remained undelivered. One may, perhaps, go further and say that poets or those whom the gods love should die young. This is a hard saying, but it will not greatly affect the bills of mortality. And it applies only to poets of the first rank, while even here it has its exceptions, and illustrious exceptions they are. But surely the best poetry is produced before middle age, before the morning and its illusions have faded before the heaviness of noon and the baleful chill of evening. Few men too, can bear the strain of a poet’s temperament through many years. At any rate, we may feel sure of this that Burns had produced his best, that he would never again have produced a Tam o Shanter, or a Cotter’s Saturday Night, or a Jolly Beggars; and that long before his death, though he could still write lines affluent with tenderness and grace, ‘the hand of pain and sorrow and care,’ to use his own words, ‘had lain heavy upon’ him.
And this leads to another point. Today is not merely the melancholy anniversary of death, but the rich and incomparable fulfilment of prophecy. For this is the moment to which Burns looked when he said to his wife ‘Don’t be afraid; I’ll be more respected a hundred years after I am dead than I am present!’ Today the hundred years are completed, and we can judge the prediction. On that point we must be all unanimous. Burns had honour in his lifetime, but his fame has rolled like a snowball since his death, and it rolls on. There is, indeed, no parallel to it in the world; it sets the calculations of compound interest at defiance. He is not merely the watchword of a nation that carries and implants Burns worship all over the globe as birds carry seeds, but he has become the champion and patron saint of Democrats. He bears the banner of the essential equality of man. His birthday is celebrated – 137 years after its occurrence – more universally than that of any human being. He reigns over a greater dominion than any empire that the world has ever seen. Nor does the ardour of his devotees decrease. Ayr and Ellisland, Mauchline and Dumfries, are the shrines of countless pilgrims. Burns statues are hardy annuals. The production of Burns manuscripts was a lucrative branch of industry, until it was checked by untimely intervention. The editions of Burns are as the sands of the sea. No canonised name in the calendar excites so blind and enthusiastic a worship.
Whatever Burns may have contemplated in his prediction, whatever dream he may have fondled in the wildest moments of elation must have fallen utterly short of the reality. And it is all spontaneous. There is no puff, no advertisement, no manipulation. Intellectual cosmetics of that kind are frail a fugitive; they rarely survive their subject; they would not have availed here. Nor was there any glamour attached to the Poet; rather the reverse. He has stood by himself; he has grown by himself. It is himself, and no other, that we honour. But what had Burns in his mind when he made this prediction? It might be whimsically urged that he was conscious that the world had not yet seen his masterpiece, for the Jolly Beggars was not published till some time after his death. But that would not be sufficient, for he had probably forgotten its existence. Nor do I think he spoke at hazard.
What were, perhaps, present to his mind were the fickleness of his contemporaries towards him, his conviction of the essential splendour of his work, consciousness that the incidents of his later years had unjustly obscured him, and that his true figure would be perceived as these fell away into forgetfulness or were measured at their true value. If so,
he was right in his judgement, for his true life began with his death: with the body passed all that was gross or impure – the clear spirit stood revealed, and soared at once to its accepted place amongst the fixed stars in the firmament of the rare immortals.
(Loud and prolonged cheering)
At the close of the meeting, Lord Rosebery was hurried to the railway station where a another kind of carriage awaited to take him to Glasgow where another audience awaited him in the St Andrew’s Hall. The indefatigable Earl seemed to pick up where he had left off – without repeating a single word or phrase or quote. A truly astonishing feat of oratory by any standard but, it seemed, all in a day’s work for him.
I cannot, perhaps, deny that the day has been a day of labour, but it has been a labour of love. It is, and it must be, a source of joy and pride to us to see our champion Scotsman receive the honour and admiration and affection of humanity; to see, as I have seen this morning, the long processions bringing homage and tribute to the conquering dead. But these have only been signs and symptoms of the worldwide passion of reverence and devotion. That generous and immortal soul pervades the universe today. In the humming city and in the crowd of man; in the backwood and in the swamp; where the sentinel paces the bleak frontier, and where the sailor smokes his evening pipe; and, above all, where the farmer and his men pursue their summer toil, whether under the Stars and Stripes or under the Union Jack the thought and sympathy of men are directed to Robert Burns.
I have sometimes asked myself, if a roll call of fame were read over at the beginning of every century, how many men of eminence would answer a second time to their names. But of our Poet there is no doubt or question. The ‘adsum’ of Burns rings out clear and unchallenged. There are few before him on the list, and we cannot now conceive a list without him. He towers high, and yet he lived in an age when the average was sublime. It sometimes seems to me as if the whole eighteenth century was a constant preparation for, a constant working up to, the great drama of the revolution which closed it. The scenery is all complete when the time arrives – the dark volcanic country; the hungry, desperate people; the firefly nobles; the concentrated splendour of the Court; in the midst, in her place as heroine, the dazzling Queen. And during long previous years brooding nature has been producing not merely the immediate actors, but figures worthy of the scene.
What a glittering procession it is! We can only mark some of the principal figures. Burke leads the way by seniority; then come Fox and Goethe, Nelson and Mozart, Schiller, Pitt, and Burns, Wellington and Napoleon. And among these Titans, Burns is a conspicuous figure; the figure which appeals most of all to the imagination and affection of mankind. Napoleon, perhaps, looms larger to the imagination, but on the affection he has no hold. It is in the combination of the two powers that Burns is supreme. What is his secret?…The secret, as it seems to me, lies in two words – inspiration and sympathy. But, if I wished to prove my contention, I should go on quoting from his poems all night, and his admirers would still declare that I had omitted the best passages. I know that profuse quotation is a familiar form of a Burns speech, but I am afraid to begin lest I should not end, and I am sure I should not satisfy. I must proceed, then, in a more summary way.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, there seem to me to be two great natural forces in British literature. I use the safe adjective of British. Your applause shows me that I was right to do so. I use it partly because hardly any of Burns’s poetry is strictly English, because he hated, and was, perhaps, the first to protest against the use of the word English as including Scottish- well, I say, there are in that literature two great forces of which the power seems sheer inspiration and nothing else – I mean Shakespeare and Burns. This is not the place or the time to speak of that miracle called Shakespeare, but one must say a word of the miracle called Burns. Try and reconstruct Burns as he was. A peasant, born in a cottage that no sanitary inspector in these days would tolerate for a moment – struggling, with desperate effort, against pauperism, almost in vain, snatching at scraps of learning in the intervals of it, as it were with his teeth – a heavy, silent lad, proud of his ploughing. All of a sudden, without preface or warning, he breaks out into exquisite song, like a nightingale form the brushwood, and continues singing as sweetly – with nightingale pauses – till he dies. A nightingale sings because he cannot help it – he can only sing exquisitely, because he knows no other. So it was with Burns. What is this but inspiration? One can no more measure or reason about it than measure or reason about Niagara. And remember, ladies and gentlemen, the poetry is only a fragment of Burns. Amazing as it may seem, all contemporary testimony is unanimous that the man was far more wonderful than his works…
‘No man’s conversation ever carried me so completely off my feet,’ said the Duches of Gordon – the friend of Pitt and of the London wits, the queen of Scottish society. Dugald Stewart says that ‘all the faculties of Burns’s mind were, so far as I could judge, equally vigorous, and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities.’ And of his prose compositions the same severe judge speaks thus – ‘Their great and varied excellences render some of them scarcely less objects of wonder than his poetical performance.’
The late Dr Robertson used to say that, ‘considering his education, the former seemed to him the more remarkable of the two.’ ‘I think Burns,’ said Principal Robertson to a friend, ‘was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met with. His poetry surprised me very much, his prose surprised me still more, and his conversation surprised me more than both his poetry and prose.’ We are told, too, that ‘he felt a strong call towards oratory, and all who heard him speak – and some of them were excellent judges – admitted his wonderful quickness of apprehension and readiness of eloquence.’ All this seems to me marvellous. It surely ratifies the claim of inspiration without the necessary of quoting a line of his poetry. I pass then to his sympathy.
If his talents were universal, his sympathy was not less so. His tenderness was not a mere selfish tenderness for his own family, for he loved all mankind except the cruel and the base. Nay, we may go further, and say that he placed all creation, especially the suffering and despised part of it, under his protection. The oppressor in every shape, even in the comparatively innocent embodiment of the factor and sportsman, he regarded with direct and personal hostility. But, above all, he saw the charm of the home; he recognised it as the basis of all society, he honoured it in its humblest form, for he knew, as few know, how unpretentiously, but how sincerely, the family in the cottage is welded by mutual love and esteem. ‘I recollect once,’ said Dugald Stewart, speaking of Burns, ‘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 of his mind which none could understand, who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which they contained.’ He dwells repeatedly on the primary sacredness of the home and the family, the responsibility of fatherhood and marriage. ‘Have I not,’ he once wrote to Lord Mar, ‘a more precious stake in my country’s welfare than the richest dukedom in it? I have a large family of children, and the prospect of many more.’ The lines in which he tells his faith are not less memorable than the stately stanzas in which Gray sings the ‘short and simple annals of the poor.’ I must quote them again, often quoted as they are
To mak’ a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That’s the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.
His verses, then, go straight to the heart of every home; they appeal to every father and mother. But that is only the beginning, perhaps the foundation of his sympathy. There is something for everybody in Burns. He has a heart even for vermin; he has pity even for the arch enemy of mankind. And his universality makes his poems a treasure house in which all may find what they want. Every wayfarer in the journey of life may pluck strength and courage from it as he passes. The sore, the weary, the wounded, will all find something to heal and soothe. For this great master is the universal Samaritan. Where the priest and the Levite may have passed by in vain, this eternal heart will still afford a resource. But his is not only for the sick in spirit. The friend, the lover, the patriot, will all find their choicest refreshment in Burns. His touch is everywhere, and it is everywhere the touch of genius. Nothing comes amiss to him. What was said of the debating power of his eminent contemporary, Dundas, may be said of his poetry ‘He went out in all weathers.’ And it may be added that all weathers suited him; that he always brought back something precious, something we cherish, something that cannot die. He is, then, I think, the universal friend in an unique sense.
But he was, poetically speaking, the special friend of Scotland, in a sense which recalls a profound remark of another eminent Scotsman, I mean Fletcher of Saltoun. In an account of a conversation between Lord Cromarty, Sir Edward Seymour, and Sir Christopher Musgrave, Fletcher writes, ‘I said I knew a very wise man, so much of Sir Christopher’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ This may be rudely paraphrased, that it is more important to make the songs of a nation than to frame its laws, and this again may be interpreted that in former days, at any rate in the days of Fletcher, even to the days of Burns, it is the familiar songs of a people that mould their thoughts, their manners, and their morals. If this be true, can we exaggerate the debt that we Scotsmen owe to Burns? He has bequeathed to his country the most exquisite casket of songs in the world primarily to his country, but others cannot be denied their share. I will give only one example, but that is a signal one. From distant Roumania the Queen of that country wrote to Dumfries that she has no copy of Burns with her, but that she knows his songs by heart. We must remember that there is more than this to be said. Many of Burns’s songs were already in existence in the lips and minds of people – rough and coarse and obscene. Our benefactor takes them, and with a touch of inspired alchemy transmutes them and leaves them pure gold. He loved the old catches and the old tunes, and into these gracious moulds he poured his exquisite gifts of thought and expression. But for him those ancient airs, often wedded to words which no decent man could recite, would have perished from that corruption if not from neglect. He rescued them for us by his songs, and, in doing so, he hallowed the life and sweetened the breath of Scotland.
I have also used the words patriot and lover. These draw me to different lines of thought. The word ‘patriot’ leads me to the political side of Burns. There is no doubt that he was suspected of being a politician and he is even said to have sometimes wished to enter Parliament. That was perhaps an excusable aberration, and my old friend Professor Mason has, I think, surmised that had he lived he might have been a great Liberal pressman. My frail thought shall not dally with such surmise, but it conducts us naturally to the subject of Burns’s politics. From his sympathy for his own class, from his indignation against nobles like the Duke of Queensberry, and from the toast that cost him so dear, it might be considered easy to infer his political opinions. But Burns should not be claimed for any party. A poet, be it remembered, is never a politician, and a politician is never a poet that is to say, that a politician is never so fortunate as to be a poet, and a poet is so fortunate as never to be a politician.
I do not say that the line of demarcation is never passed a politician may have risen for a moment, or a poet may have descended – but, where there is any confusion between the two callings, it is generally because the poet thinks he discerns, or the politician thinks he needs, something higher than politics. Burns’s politics were entirely governed by the imagination. He was at once a Jacobite and a Jacobin. He had the sad sympathy which most of us have felt for the hapless house of Stuart, without the least wish to be governed by it. He has much the same sort of abstract sympathy with the French Revolution, when it was setting all Europe to rights; but he was prepared to lay down his life to prevent its putting this island to rights. And then came his official superiors of the Excise, who, notwithstanding Mr Pitt’s admiration of his poetry, snuffed out his politics without remorse. The name of Pitt leads me to add that Burns had some sort of relation with three Prime Ministers. Colonel Jenkinson, of the Cinque Ports Fencible Cavalry afterwards Minister for fifteen years under the title of Lord Liverpool was on duty at Burns’s funeral, though, we are told the good man disapproved of the Poet, and declined to make his acquaintance. Pitt, again, passed on Burns one of his rare and competent literary judgements, so eulogistic, indeed, that one wonders that a powerful Minister could have allowed one whom he admired so much to exist on an exciseman’s pay when well, and an exciseman’s half pay when dying. And from Addington, another Prime Minister, Burns elicited a sonnet, which, in the Academy of Lagado, would surely have been held a signal triumph of the art of extracting sunshine from cucumbers. So much for politics in the party sense. ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ is not politics – it is the assertion of the rights of humanity in a sense far wider than politics. It erects all mankind, it is the charter of its self-respect. It binds, it heals, it revives, it invigorates; it sets the bruised and broken on their legs, it refreshes that stricken soul, it is the salve and tonic of character; it cannot be narrowed into politics. Burns’s politics are indeed nothing but the occasional overflow of his human sympathy into past history and current events.
And now, having discussed the two trains of thought suggested by the words ‘friend’ and ‘patriot’, I come to the more dangerous word ‘lover’. There is an eternal controversy which, it appears, no didactic oil will ever assuage, as to Burns’s private life and morality. Some maintain that these have nothing to do with his poems; some maintain that his life must be read into his works, and here again some think that his life damns his poems, while others aver that his poems cannot be fully appreciated without his life. Another school thinks that his vices have been exaggerated, while their opponents scarcely think such exaggeration possible. It is impossible to avoid taking a side. I walk on the ashes, knowing the fire beneath, and unable to avoid them, for the topic is inevitable. I must confess myself, then, one of those who think that the life of Burns doubles the interest of his poems, and I doubt whether the failings of his life have been much exaggerated, for contemporary testimony on that point is strong, though a high and excellent authority, Mr Wallace, has recently taken the other side with much power and point.
But the life of Burns, which I love to read with his poems, does not consist in his vices; they lie outside it. It is a life of work, and truth, and tenderness. And though, like all lives, it has its light and shade, remember that we know it all, the worst as well as the best. His was a soul bathed in crystal; he hurried to avow everything. There was no reticence in him. The only obscure passage in his life is the love passage with Highland Mary, and as to that he was silent, not from shame, but because it was a sealed and sacred episode. ‘What a flattering idea,’ he once wrote, ‘is a world to come! There shall I with speechless agony of rapture again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary! Whose bosom was fraught with truth, honour, constancy, and love.’ He had, as the French say, the defects of his qualities. His imagination was a supreme and celestial gift. But his imagination often led him wrong, and never more than with women. The chivalry that made Don Quixote see the heroic in all the common events of life made Burns (as his brother tells us) see a goddess in every girl that he approached. Hence many love affairs, and some guilty ones; but even these must be judged with reference to time and circumstance. This much it is certain, had he been devoid of genius they would not have attracted attention. It is Burns’s pedestal that affords a target. And why, one may ask, is not the same measure meted out to Burns as to others? The illegitimate children of great captains and statesmen and princes are treated as historical and ornamental incidents. They strut the scene of Shakespeare, and ruff it with the best. It is for the illegitimate children of Burns, though he and his wife cherished them as if born in wedlock, that the vials of wrath are reserved. Take two brilliant figures, both descended from Stuarts, who were alive during Burns’s life. We occupy ourselves endlessly and severely with the offences of Burns. We heave an elegant sigh over the kindred lapses of Charles James Fox and Charles Edward Stuart. Again, it is quite clear that, though exceptionally sober in his earlier years, he drank too much in later life. But this, it must be remembered, was but an occasional condescendence to the vice and habit of the age. The gentry who pressed him to their houses, and who were all convivial, have much to answer for. His admirers who thronged to see him, and who could only conveniently sit with him in a tavern, are also responsible for this habit, so perilously attractive to men of genius. From the decorous Addison, and the brilliant Bolingbroke onward, the 18th century records hard drinking as the common incident of intellectual eminence.
To a man who had shone supreme in the most glowing society, and who was now an excisemen in a country town, with a home that cannot have been very exhilarating, and with a nervous system highly strung, the temptation of the warm tavern, and the admiring circle there, may well have been almost irresistible. Some attempt to say that his intemperance was exaggerated. I neither affirm nor deny. it was not as a sot he drank; that no one insinuated; if he succumbed it was to good fellowship. Remember, I do not seek to palliate or excuse, and, indeed, none will be turned to dissipation by Burns’s example; he paid too dearly for it. But I will say this, that it all seems infinitely little, infinitely remote. Why do we strain, at this distance, to discern this dim spot on the Poet’s mantle? Shakespeare and Ben Johnson took their cool tankard at the Mermaid; we cannot afford, in the strictest view of literary responsibility, to quarrel with them for that. When we consider Pitt and Goethe we do not concentrate our vision on Pitt’s bottles of port or Goethe’s bottles of Moselle. Then, why, we ask, is there such a chasm between the Mermaid and the Globe, and why are the vintages of Wimbledon and Weimar so much more innocent than the simple punch bowl of Inveraray marble and its contents?
I should like to go a step further, and affirm that we have something to be grateful for even in the weakness of men like Burns. Mankind is helped in its progress almost as much by the study of imperfections as by the contemplation of perfection. Had we nothing before us in our futile and halting lives but saints and the ideal, we might well fail altogether.
We grope blindly along the catacombs of the world, we climb the dark ladder of life, we feel our way to futurity, but we can scarcely see an inch around or before us. We stumble and falter and fall, our hands and knees are bruised sore, and we look up for light and guidance. Could we see nothing but distant unapproachable impeccability, we might well sink prostrate in the hopelessness of emulation and the weariness of despair. Is it not then, when all seems blank and lifeless, when strength and courage flag, when perfection seems as remote as a star, is it not then that imperfection helps us?
When we see that the greatest and choicest images of God have had their weaknesses like ours, their temptations, their hour of darkness, their bloody sweat, are we not encouraged by their lapses and catastrophes to find energy for one more effort, one more struggle? Where they failed we feel it a less dishonour to fail; their errors and sorrows make, as it were, an easier ascent from finite imperfection to infinite perfection. Man after all is not ripened by virtue alone. Were it so this world were a paradise of angels. No! like the growth of the earth, his is the fruit of all the seasons; the accident of a thousand accidents, a living mystery, moving through the seen to the unseen. He is sown in dishonour; he is matured under all the varieties of heat and cold; in mist and wrath, in snow and vapours, in the melancholy of autumn, in the torpor of winter, as well as in the rapture and fragrance of summer, or the balmy effluence of the spring – its breath, its sunshine, its dew. And at the end he is reaped – the product, not of one climate, but of all; not of good alone, but of evil; not of joy alone, but of sorrow – perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps stricken and withered and sour. How, then, shall we judge anyone? How, at any rate, shall we judge a giant – great in gifts and great in temptation; great in strength, and great in weakness? Let us glory in his strength, and be comforted in his weakness. And, when we thank heaven for the inestimable gift of Burns, we do not need to remember wherein he was imperfect; we cannot bring ourselves to regret that he was made of the same clay as ourselves.
…perhaps the honest man who had written a piece of rhyme or verse was remembered in a way that the chief in the government of his country at the time was not remembered. But in Burns there was something more than that. There was not only the admiration which attached to poets and prose writers, but there was a special love and special affection which was given to the very few. And to what kind of few? To those writers – poets and whatever they were – who had addressed not the head, not the intellect, of a nation, not even the imagination, not even the men who had produced delightful dreams and far away phantasies; these were not remembered and loved like the writers who had addressed the human heart…who had addressed the primal forces, the passions of human nature – love, hate, the family relations, and all those things which were not artificial, which did not belong to any one age or any one country, but which were universal and perennial. Those writers who had contrived somehow or other to grasp the human heart were those that were remembered with admiration and with love. Now Burns did that…
Burns, though he was a great poet, was a great poet in the finest place because he was a great man – because this swarthy Scotsman had a brain co-equal with the best brains in his generation. It was the fortunate accident that this man with such powers took to poetry. But when he was beginning a life of poetry it occurred to him that he might be at a disadvantage, and this he expressed in the address to himself. In the words of that poem they had the key to that great portal, to that great door through which the whole of British literature of the eighteenth swung us into the nineteenth century. Burns preceded and heralded Wordsworth, who acknowledged his inspiration. He showed Wordsworth the way to that great reform of which so much had been the consequence. In these things there was what they call a ‘but’ and a ‘ben’. Now this influence of Burns on the literature of Great Britain, this influence of Burns on European literature, was shown by the fact that Germans, men of all nations, admired Burns, and had sent on this day expressions of their admiration. Still foreigners, the English people even, only got to the ‘ben’ of Burns. So when he said that Burns lasted, that he was remembered still, because he addressed not the head so much, or the imagination so much, as the human heart; he had to add this more specifically, that the heart he addressed was the Scottish heart.
Now, the Scottish heart had its peculiarities, and some of these peculiarities were hereditary and came from far back. The oldest of the sentiments that composed the Scottish heart was 600 years old – that was the love of this little land of the mountain and the flood – it was 600 years old at all events this love of liberty and freedom; almost the oldest thing in Scottish literature was Barbour’s poem on liberty. But the Scottish heart was a variable thing. It had taken a great deal of various history and experience to make the Scottish heart what it had come to be. The Scottish heart, it might be said, divided itself into two views, two opposite views, the Mary Stuart and the Covenanting and Presbyterian views. He said that that very diversity had made the Scottish heart stronger today than it was even in the days of Burns. Burns grasped aright the Scottish heart because he had it in himself. He enlarged the Scottish heart. From his own looking round on Scottish society and Scottish manners he infused into the Scottish heart an addition of tenderness, of humour, of outspokenness, and especially a feeling of individual manhood and independence. Wherever the Scottish heart functioned at the present moment the Scottish heart functioned as the heart of Robert Burns.
The Reverend Donald McLeod rose to propose a vote of thanks and had the good sense, as his Lordship had a night train to catch, to be brief, but he made his points. For literary skill and beauty, the address was one of the finest he had ever listened to. Nay, more, he believed that if Lord Rosebery would only try it, he could give them two or three good Scottish songs. As Professor Masson had said, Burns had not spoken to them from the ‘but’ and not from the ‘ben’. No man could understand Burns who was not a Scotsman. They could not get at the pith of the words, except that they had been brought up to speak the Scottish tongue. No foreigner could do it. It might be good work for the Burns Clubs to do something, in order to preserve what, he was afraid, was passing away, not from the peasantry, but from what were called the better classes – the knowledge of the Scottish language. Scots was not a dialect; it was a language, and they could not allow that language to die. Dr McLeod concluded by hoping that Lord Rosebery would be ‘won away from the poor paltry way of politics in to those higher regions of literature, in which he had been born to shine.’ The audience heartily responded to this – and so did Lord Rosebery – in his best English voice.
Now my friends, Dr McLeod, has given me sound advice. He has advised me to give up politics for literature. Now, I want to ask him if he gives me that advice in the character of a politician or in the character of an editor?
His Lordship left the hall to loud cheering. Perhaps that night, as he lay awake listening to the click of the wheels on the line as he went south through the darkness, he would hear again the waves of Scottish applause that had greeted his extraordinary double peroration. And no doubt his ‘train of thought’ would remind him that he was Scottish too. In this respect, it is interesting to note that when Rosebery himself died in 1929 at his country house near Epsom it was not to the sound of a Burns air but to the strains of the Eton Boating Song.
Unlike Lord Rosebery, Sheriff Campbell Smith did not have train to catch when he addressed the Burns Club in the Kinnaird Hall on that same night – 21 July, and he gave his enthusiastic listeners the full benefit of his forensic fondness for the spoken word. The following is an edited version of his tightly-worded, tightly-printed but tightly-thought-out address:
I follow Coleridge in thinking that the individual memory is the imperishable record – the book of the recording angel out of which each man and woman will be judged for the deeds done in the body. The perfect record, the actual balance sheet of Burns’s life, as a life, has been closed and is unknowable, whatever profane, sulphurous bigots may think and say about it; and I daresay Burns will be far from sorry should he find himself excluded from their special department of Paradise. But during the time since his death, the human, imperfect record has been searched into by many curious inquirers some friendly, some hostile and the details of it are better known I believe, than that of any man’s life that has ever lived. The printed books in which they are recorded are enough to a fill a considerable library, and the speeches that in private and on platforms have been devoted to them, if recorded and printed, would fill ten times as many books. These details, so far as for edification, and it may be a good deal further, are known to all who are likely to occupy places in an audience like this. I therefore take the general knowledge of them for granted, that being the only course at present competent for me, and recommend to all men, especially young men, who do not have that general knowledge, to get it as soon as they can…
Let the aspiring, hopeful, determined young man who desires to acquire knowledge, take note that Robert Burns, by facilities for education far inferior to those that are forced upon all by the modern machinery of compulsory education, became the skilful literary artist, and one of the most widely, most accurately informed men of his day upon all vital subjects; and let those who are impulsive in temperament, and liable to be beset by temptation, take double and treble note of the way in which uncontrolled impulse, fiery unbridled passion, lays waste the highest powers, whirls the attention into the clouds or into the mire, paralyses for the time all intellectual efforts, wrecks the bodily health into premature ruin, and leaves the conscience no function, except to punish by remorse the vice and folly which it has been powerless to prevent.
To the best of my judgement, not a single dishonourable or dishonest deed has been proved against him. I think he was a true man through and through, and that the strong irrepressible instinct of veracity in him that made him the poet he was – one of the truest of the true – kept him far from everything that savoured of deceit in all the relations of life, even those that were passionate as well as the dull and prosaic. Unlike many poets, perhaps most, he honestly paid his debts. I don’t believe that he was a heartless seducer – indeed, I doubt if he was ever a seducer at all. No doubt he did not use Jean Armour well, but it is my belief that not one man in ten thousand would have forgiven what she – easy tempered, soft, squeezable mortal – at the instigation of her gruff, severe, elder father, did to him. He was his own worst enemy, and the conscious enemy of no other human being. No man knew his faults so well as himself, and no man was ever more free from all manner of wilful falsehood…
Burns was the greatest gift of Providence to our country in his own generation. In point of gigantic force of intellect I think he was the greatest Scotsman of all time. And how did his contemporaries receive and appreciate this unprecedented, this priceless gift? That is one of the most searching questions that can have been put to Scotland and its thoughtful sons and daughters for the last hundred years, and it starts up tonight with importunate pertinacity, looming its biggest through the misty memories, the multitudinous opinions, fluctuating between the carping superfine gentility of Jeffrey and the inspired reverence of nature worshipping, sympathetic Wordsworth, struggling and advancing to victory over prejudice, stupidity, and religious bigotry in the wide battlefield of the Anglo-Saxon world, under the sunlight, starlight, lamplight, midnights of a busy, restless, hundred years. I think I can say with a good conscience that the peasant brotherhood of Scotland, upon the whole, behaved loyally, tenderly, and justly to their gifted, impulsive peasant brother; that they rejoiced with their whole nature in his poetry as they had never before rejoiced in poetry – not even the inspired Psalms of David; that they sang his songs tunefully, or the reverse – with thorough appreciation of their strong sense and fiery sentiment; and that they gathered while they could – the cleverest of them – to hear him talk wherever and whenever they had an opportunity, as they never before or since crowded to hear any mere secular conversationalist, nor any one except a very few popular preachers.
The representative intelligence of the peasantry of Scotland, repressing all manner of jealousy, and doing their utmost to gag the howling of cant and bigotry, have stood faithfully by Burns, from the time they discovered his abilities – and they discovered them early – till now. The moderate or rationalistic clergy of Scotland stood by him in his lifetime, and they have done so since. Carlyle laments that he became their ‘fighting man,’ but what else could he have done had he not steered clear of religion altogether, a quite impossible thing for any true poet who is bound to deal with the great social forces, and especially with religion, which is the greatest of them all? The religion that cannot bear to be scrutinised by the highest talent of the age, that is, or ought to be, ruled by it, that cannot bear the purification of the acutest reason and the keenest satire, is too superfine for the realities of erring fallible human nature – is fit only to throw a putrid, phosphorescent glory over the mummeries, the hypocrisies, the phylacteries of those that do their worship by machinery, and that have no rooted convictions because they have never been perfected by suffering or proved by the tempests of doubt. To the best of my understanding and conviction, the educated, rational classes of Scotland, high and low, rich and poor, from the first appreciated and honoured Burns as no poet has ever been appreciated by the masses – I ought rather to say by the solid mass – of his countrymen. He was intelligible alike to peers, professors, and peasants; indeed, the peasantry had had, for understanding him, a better training than the peerage, because they had from childhood been learning his language and seeing the sights that were familiar to him.
Some of the tribe of professors who were also unfortunately pedants did attempt to criticise and patronise him. Their lucubrations, for the most part, have tended to show that a man may be installed in a University Chair and yet may be an ass. But Dugald Stewart, Dr Blacklock, Dr Gregory, even Dr Blair, whose sermons have afflicted so many young persons on Sunday evenings, and above all the rest, Professor Wilson showed that College learning does not destroy the power of appreciating natural genius when the critic is a man of strong intellect and clear insight, and not a mere parsing, philosophising, syllogising machine. However, I admit that the tendency of College criticism has been somewhat to forget that the thunderbolt of original thought which is to travel through abysses of time does not require to be geometrically accurate in its form, and perfectly polished all over the academic sandpaper. Its function is to fly far, to illuminate primeval darkness, to burn up the effete of bygone eras, to melt or crush out from rubbish the ore of truth that can pass as gold into the intellectual currency of coming generations.
My conviction, based upon more facts than I can enumerate, is that Burns never suffered from contact with any man of real intellect. He had something to teach the best, the cleverest of his contemporaries, and they had all something to teach him. His most dangerous and useless friends were his drinking friends pure and simple, for what valuable idea can emerge from the convolutions of a brain that is reeking with whisky? The writers of Ayr could drink, but they could also think; so could most of the clergy of that age and I am inclined to believe that their plentifully strong toddy was more dangerous than their stinted, watery theology especially to a man like Burns, who did not require a teacher in any field of temptation.
The ruling politicians of Burns’s time, especially Pitt, ‘the Premier youth,’ have been greatly blamed for their neglect of Burns. Pitt was a bit of a poet himself – at least, he had tried his hand at translating Homer, and succeeded better than most University young men. When appealed to on behalf of Burns, he said ‘literature will take care of itself’. I am not sure that many of his successors, unless, perhaps, Mr Disraeli, would have done more for Burns. Political magnates appear to be afraid of poets, and still more of satirists. Dean Swift and Sydney Smith ought to have been Bishops for certain, if unrivalled intellect could be discovered and appreciated by Prime Ministers. But the high political mind seems to be incapable of putting faith in any mental powers beyond high class, decorous, industrious commonplace, and to be bound by its limited practical nature to distrust genius as a force that is abnormal, beyond calculation and control, and therefore dangerous. I wish that Pitt could have found some more congenial and appropriate occupation for Burns than ‘gauging auld wives’ barrels’, and in the meantime I believe that he would have done it if he could, for Pitt, like his father, was a noble, unselfish kind of man. But, of course, like all Prime Ministers, he was fettered by the traditions of the holders of his office, none of which are likely to take into account either the uses of the claims of genius. Pitt’s latest, brightest, and liveliest biographer is to preside over a cognate monster meeting in Glasgow tonight and we will all feel inclined to believe all that he says in favour both of Burns and of Pitt, and anxious to learn what he, with his greater versatility and wider knowledge, would have done for Burns had he been in Pitt’s place. How to utilise the gift of the highest genius must always be a difficult problem to the possessor of it, and not less to the people for whose guidance and advancement it has been given; and woe be to the dunces and the infidels who scorn and despise it, whether they be in high places or in low; woe be to the kings of the earth and their advisers who help to send poets, before the full maturity of manhood, the dreary ways traversed by Chatterton and Burns; woe, more terrible still, to the country that breeds ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ and Cromwells that cannot reach even through seas of blood the sceptre which they alone are fittest to wield. Notwithstanding of little help from high places, and of some obstruction from foolish men, as also, though not without a compensating inspiration, from unwise women, Burns has been one of the greatest benefactors of the human race, and more especially of the Scottish race; and we have reasons innumerable and inexpressible to be thankful to Providence that his message of freedom, of emancipation from the bonds of Royal and aristocratic tyranny, of Pharisaic pretence, and of priestly, though Presbyterian superstition, was thought out and delivered in our hilly, heathery, barren, toil-devoted country, which no mere superficial tickling can cause to laugh with harvests; and we have further reason to be proud that the Scottish race, probably alone of all the mixed races on the earth, or that have ever been on it, was fit to listen to his message, to understand it, and, in fair measure, to welcome and applaud its utterance; for, be assured, no orator can stand far above the level of his audience, no prophet be much in advance of his age, no poet can charm and inspire with his own heaven born revelation of the beautiful and the true, any multitude or race that has not been prepared by its history, its experience, and its destiny, to understand and joyfully accept that heaven born revelation.
Egypt, Judea, Greece, Rome, Germany, England, have each contributed to the miraculous, or all but miraculous advances of civilisation. Scotland, too, though a small country, has not failed in her share of the predestined work of human progress, and honour and glory be to the names of John Knox and David Hume, for they both fought for truth and freedom, though with very dissimilar weapons. Like honour to the names of Robert Bruce and of Robert Burns, for the one dealt a mortal blow to foreign, and the other to domestic tyranny; also, honour and gratitude to their successors in the host of the true and the brave that have continued the fight, and have helped us forward towards that liberty of thought, and word, and deed, which is the long delayed but inalienable birthright of the human race.
Following such an oration the Dundee Burns Club were wise in following the Sheriff with a special entertainment, especially prepared for the occasion, described as a musical lecture in song entitled Robert Burns. This was devised and performed by Madame Annie Grey but the report of the evening makes no further comment. Enough said. On the motion of Mr Alexander Macdonald, however, a hearty vote of thanks was passed to all who had assisted in the evening’s proceedings. and the meeting terminated with the singing of Auld Lang Syne.
A bombardment such as that provided by those two Burns big guns, Rosebery and Smith, could not have been sustained throughout Scotland, nor Britain for that matter, but on that commemorative January evening (a Sunday on this occasion) they came out and let off their lesser cannon as best they could. All that summer a Burns Exhibition was held in the galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute, the same event for which Stevenson was supposed to write the catalogue introduction and more than 3,000 Burns-related objects were shown to an astounded public. The success of the event was due mainly to Mr. W. Craibe Angus with the help of the inevitable Earl of Rosebery. Lord and Lady Kelvin had a Burns reception at Dunoon Castle for those involved in the ceremony of unveiling the statue of Highland Mary. This had been organised by a frail and ailing Colin Rae-Brown, who was witnessing his last Burns event and was to die not long afterwards.
However, even Rae-Brown would have been taken aback by the way in which women have increasingly played their part in Burns proceedings. They had come down from the gallery and balcony and taken their rightful place on the platform beside their men-folk in Burns. In this commemorative year of 1896, and for the very first time, a woman spoke publicly on the poet. Well, it was a leap year. This brave woman was not a Scot, she was a Yorkshire lass, and she addressed a conversazione on Burns held at the Victoria Art Galleries, Dundee, a few days after their memorable Burns Banquet. It would only be fitting to leave such a charming and articulate woman with the last word on the year that has been. Mrs R. A. Watson said:
I beg you to believe that I am not here of my own conceit. Like the old woman in the story, when asked to give her opinion of the minister, I would not have had the presumption. You know all about Burns, and there is nothing more absurd than telling Scots people what they know already. But you have paid me a great compliment, and what you want from me, I believe, is just a few words of personal testimony. Some may say – will say, no doubt – but what testimony have you to give about Burns, except to condemn his errors and deplore his influence? That was said to Gilfillan years ago, and might be said with more force to a woman. And then, again, the English man of letters, hearing of Burns festivals and Burns enthusiasm and all the rest, puts up his eye glass and says, with a look of great astonishment, ‘Why do these good people make such a fuss about Burns? Scott was greater as an artist and more estimable as a man. He was one of the three mighties of the world. Why Burns and not Sir Walter?’ Well, the answer to that question is what makes the great man of the people… Among all the poets he is the most real, the most frank, the most free. He is the type of Scotland alike in its good and its ill, and has given his people a treasure of apt quotation suited to their character, expressing the national temper, the beauty of the land, the keen energy of the life that is lived here. Only the Scots folk could have had Burns; only Burns, the critical, homely, tender and scornful, serious and wayward Burns, could be the voice of the country…
Although that same voice had written of Dame Nature,
Her prentice han she tried on man,
And then she made the lassies-O.
Even so, as the Victorians marched on to the close of the century, the male predominance resumed and their voices boomed from every top table as the Edwardian Age loomed. None more so than Dr William Wallace, who needed all his distinguished authority as the best 19th-century biographer of Burns with his 1896 re-working of Cromek’s four-volume Life and Works of 1808, in order to face the famous Ninety Burns Club in Edinburgh on Burns Night, 1897. He was something of a catch for them that year, but they didn’t expect the celebrated editor’s rather frosty attitude to Burns Clubs in general, if not to the Ninety in particular. However, Dr Wallace had the highest regard for Lord Rosebery. The shorthand-writers did him justice in a very full report:
Mr. Wallace, in proposing the toast of the Immortal Memory, said that six months ago their distinguished neighbour and fellow citizen, Lord Rosebery, put a very memorable Iliad into a nutshell, when, in the course of an address which was not only a masterpiece of Burns criticism, but a masterpiece of British eloquence, he spoke of ‘the miracle called Burns.’ It was that miracle which made the year 1896 an eventful one in the history of literature, for it evoked, not from Scotland merely, but from the whole Anglo-Saxon world, the second most remarkable demonstration of hero worship that this century, or indeed any century, had witnessed. It was that miracle which, in spite of a centenary year full of overflowing of love and admiration, made Scotsmen all over the world give up that night to the worship of their true patron saint, St Robert, with unabated enthusiasm, with unsated passion.
Burns before his death said to his wife that he would be better appreciated a hundred years after that event than he had been during his life, and expressed the pious but quite ineffectual hope that the awkward squad would not be allowed to fire over his grave. That century had passed away. It had done its best, and its worst. An awkward – a very awkward – squad of biographers, editors, critics, to which, he regretted to say, he belonged, had been firing over Burns’s grave ever since he was laid in it, the only satisfactory thing about the performance being that having, in their awkwardness, loaded with ball cartridge, they had been firing into each other, to the edification of the many and the amusement of all. Still, that century of Burns appreciation could not have been altogether useless. At all events, the very fact that it had passed away suggested three questions – What has the century done for Burns, for the man as well as the poet, so very thoroughly that no further work of the same kind requires to be done in the years that are to come? What remains to be accomplished in the century that has commenced? Above all, what is the fundamental reason why, looking into that century as far as we can, we should continue the work of ‘realising’ the miracle called Burns? In the first place, then, what were the most remarkable of the Burns achievements of the century? The most noticeable of these was the existence of that unique propaganda for keeping Burns’s memory green in the heart of the world, and for giving circulation to his ideas, known as the Burns Clubs.
The Burns Clubs comprised the big battalions of the sense and worth of Scotland and of Scottish communities all over the world. But members of Burns Clubs were often subjected to attacks from another quarter, and one entitled to respect. Critics and other men of letters almost every year censured such celebrations as that of that night, because ‘the orators of the 25th’ did not understand Burns. To a certain extent he agreed with the critics. No man thoroughly understood Burns – except Burns. Yet even in the matter of imperfect or approximate understanding he questioned whether men of letters were entitled to be assigned a position of superiority to that occupied by those men of business, those men of action, whether on a large or on a small scale, whether belonging to the classes or the masses, who did the bulk of the hard work of the world; who, because they loved Burns, formed themselves into Clubs, and who, forsooth, were guilty of the incredible presumption of luxuriantly indulging their well-placed love one night in the year of revelling in Burns’s unrivalled lyrics and his equally unrivalled good sense, in doing their humble best to cross in imagination form the seen to the unseen, and to give the cordial shake of brotherhood to that vanished hand! He had the highest respect for men of letters – when they stuck to their last and their letters. But he held with Burns himself:
Our friends the reviewers,
Those chippers and hewers,
Are judges of mortar and stone, sir;
But of meet or unmet,
In a fabrick complete,
I’ll boldly pronounce they are none, sir.
But the century that had passed since Burns’s death was to be credited with other achievements than that of establishing Burns Clubs. It had firmly established Burns in his true position both in the world of literature and in the heart of Scotland. Carlyle by his famous essay did a great deal for the reputation of Burns. But he pronounced the opinion that the national poet was, as he put it, ‘a little Valclusa fountain’ compared with such ‘mighty rivers of song’ as Shakespeare and Milton. Post-Carlylian criticism had gone a step further. It had not only recognised Burns as the Eclipse of British lyrists, the rest, including Herrick himself, being practically nowhere, but, as represented by Taine in France and Arnold in England, it had place the author of The Jolly Beggars on the same shelf with Shakespeare, Aristophanes, and Goethe. As for Scotland, was it at all necessary for him to say here that she had long ago accepted Burns as her foremost lyrist, satirist, and everyday moralist, as incomparably the greatest exponent of her full-bloodedness, of her moods of ecstasy, despair, all embracing brotherhood, and that love which cast out the fear of death and the fear of man? So far as Scotland was concerned, indeed, the danger was not that they might admire and love Burns too much, but that they, or at least their successors, might get confused about the historical position of his achievement, or even the facts of his life.
And now, what of the special work that lay to be done in this second century of Burns’ appreciation? For the last few years he had been thinking not a little about Burns. He started his thoughts and his inquiries with two impressions, and at the end of his journey these impressions were stronger than they were at the beginning. The one was that it was absolutely impossible to understand Burns or his hold upon Scotland and humanity, unless his character and genius were considered together as parts of one truly stupendous whole. The other was that the more carefully his character was examined the better it appeared.
Much was to be said for the suggestion thrown out by Mr Lang and other Scottish critics, that Burns Clubs should set about the preparation of adequate editions of those authors who preceded and prepared the way for Burns. If, further, they could devote some of their resources of time and money to the examination of Burns traditions, he was certain they would perform a valuable service to Scotland, because experience taught that the examination of Burns traditions meant the exposure of Burns falsehoods. But now he came to the main question – Why should Burns be recommended for the admiration of another country? He died a hundred years ago. Innumerable poets had succeeded him, and had attained a more or less enduring fame. Were none of these deserving to be put in his special place, as the supreme poet for men of action? To this the answer was obvious.
He was not prepared to discuss the question whether, viewed simply as a poet, Burns was the inferior or the superior of his brilliant half-brothers in revolt against conventionality – Byron and Shelley – much less of Wordsworth or Tennyson, who, although their lives were cast in pleasanter places than his, understood him thoroughly and loved him tenderly, yet not more tenderly than the simple great ones gone from the United States within living memory – Longfellow and Whittier and Whitman. All that he had to contend for was that Burns was different from his successors, that he touched more closely the realities of present day life than they had done, and that in virtue of his doing so his name evoked more general enthusiasm.
In his eternal youth, in his eternal hope, in his eternal sympathy which made the weak strong and the poor rich, in that courage which converted misery and despair into stepping stones to fame and power, Burns appealed to Scotland for all time as emphatically her strong man rejoicing to run a race, and to their own generation as the most lovable, the most daring, the most modern, nay, the most Shakespearean of all the poets that influenced present day conduct as well as present day literature. Therefore it was that, taking a liberty for the first and last time with the text of one of his poems, he asked them once again to
Fill their cups with generous juice,
As generous as your mind,
And drink with him the generous toast,
The Bard of Humankind!
An interesting afterthought to Lord Rosebery is provided by Dr Jim Connor, that indefatigable Canadian Burnsian, and Past President of the Burns Federation. When he and his wife, Elma, were in Peebles, Scotland, for the 1999 Burns Conference they visited a local antique dealer with a view to any Burns ‘stuff’ he might have available. Among the ‘stuff’ he was shown was a letter from a certain Alex Pollock, Joint Honorary Secretary of the Rosebery Burns Club in Glasgow addressed to a William Haddow, Secretary of the Hamilton Junior Burns Club, regarding a publication of Burns for the blind. Apparently, a book of Burns in Braille had already been published in seven volumes, but the year was 1914 and events had occurred in northern Europe that would lead a whole generation of young men, blinded by gas on the Somme, to find Burns by touch rather than sight because for nearly six years the supposedly civilised world closed its ears to poetry and had no eyes for anything beyond mere survival. The essential verities were regarded as dispensable in a jaundiced age and for a time Burns’s ideal of worldly brotherhood remained for many no more than poetical pie in the sky. By 1919, it was a difficult time to be a poet. Even a dead one.
Is there a man, whose judgement clear
Can others teach the course to steer,
Yet runs, himself, Life’s mad career,
Wild as the wave?
Here pause – and, through the starting tear,
Survey this grave.
(A Bard’s Epitaph)