and the mists of a dream; but lapt in | tion, was that the human n is d became a purifying atmosphere, amidst the more capable of abstraction. They visible progress of an improving socie- made, on a large scale, the same step ty and the general ennobling of lofty as the mathematicians when they pass and free men, amidst the proudest from arithmetic to algebra, and from hopes, in the wholesome clearness of ordinary calculation to the computation experimental sciences. The oratorical of the infinite. They perceived, tha' age which declined, as it declined in beyond the limited truths of the ora Athens and Rome, grouped all ideas torical age, there were deeper unfold. in beautiful commodious compartments, ings; they passed beyond Descartes whose subdivisionsstantaneously led and Locke, as the Alexandrians went the gaze towards the object which they beyond Plato and Aristotle: they un define, so that thenceforth the intellect derstood that a great operative archi could enter upon the loftiest concep- tect, or round and square atoms, were tions, and seize the aggregate which it not causes; that fluids, molecules, and had not yet embraced. Isolated na- monads were not forces; that a spirittions, French, English, Italians, Ger- ual soul or a physiological secretion mans, drew near and became known to would not account for thought. They each other through the upheaving of sought religious sentiment beyond the first French Revolution and the dogmas, poetic beauty beyond rules, wars of the Empire, as formerly races critical truths beyond myths. They divided from one another, Greeks, Syr- desired to grasp natural and moral ians, Egyptians, Gauls, by the con- powers as they are, and independently quests of Alexander and the domina- of the fictitious supports to which their tion of Rome; so that henceforth each predecessors had attached them. All civilization, expanded by the collision these supports, souls and atoms, all with neighboring civilizations, can pass these fictions, fluids, and monads, all beyond its national limits, and multi- these conventions, rules of the beautiply its ideas by the commixture of the ful and of religious symbols, all rigid ideas of others. History and criticism classifications of things natural, human spring up as under the Ptolemies; and and divine, faded away and vanished. from all sides, throughout the universe, Thenceforth they were nothing but in all directions, they were engaged in figures; they were only kept as an aid resuscitating and explaining literatures, to the memory, and as auxiliaries of the religions, manners, societies, philoso- mind; they served only provisionally, phies: so that thenceforth the intellect, and as starting-points. Through a comenfranchised by the spectacle of past mon movement along the whole line of civilizations, can escape from the prej- human thought, causes draw back into udices of its century, as it has escaped an abstract region, where philosophy from the prejudices of its country. A had not been to search them out for new race, hitherto torpid, gave the sig- eighteen centuries. Then appeared nal: Germany communicated to the the disease of the age, the restlessness whole of Europe the impetus to a rev- of Werther and Faust, very like that olution of ideas, as France to a revolu- which in a similar moment agitated tion of manners. These simple folk men eighteen centuries ago; I mean, who smoked and warmed themselves discontent with the present, the vague by a stove, and seemed only fit to pro- desire of a higher beauty and an ideal duce learned editions, became sudden-happiness, the painful aspiration for ly the promoters and leaders of human the infinite. Man suffered through thought. No race has such a comprehensive mind; none is so well adapted for lofty speculation. We see it in their language, so abstract, that away from the Rhine it seems an unintelligible jargon. And yet thanks to this language, they attained to superior ideas. For the specialty of this revolution, as of the Alexandrian revolu doubt, yet he doubted; he tried to seize again his beliefs, they melted in his hand; he would settle ard rest in the doctrines and the satisfactions which sufficed for his predecessors, and he does not find them sufficient. launches, like Faust, into anxious re searches through science and history, and judges them vain, dubious, good He for men like Wagner, learned pedants | Scottish peasant, Robert Burns: in and bibliomaniacs. It is the "beyond" "fact, the man and the circumstance he sighs for; he forebodes it through were suitable; scarcely ever was seen the formulas of science, the texts and together more of misery and talent. confessions of the churches, through He was born January 1759, amid the the amusements of the world, the in- hoar frost of a Scottish winter, in a toxication of love. A sublime truth cottage of clay built by his father, a exists behind coarse experience and poor farmer of Ayrshire; a sad conditransmitted catechisms; a grand hap- tion, a sad country, a sad lot. A part piness exists beyond the pleasures of of the gable fell in a few days after his society and family joys. Whether men | birth, and his mother was obliged to are skeptical, resigned, or mystics, they seek refuge with her child, in the midhave all caught a glimpse of or im- dle of a storm, in a neighbor's house. agined it, from Goethe to Beethoven, It is hard to be born in Scotland; it is from Schiller to Heine; they have so cold there, that in Glasgow on a fine risen towards it in order to stir up the day in July, whilst the sun was shinwhole swarm of their grand dreams; ing, I did not feel my overcoat too they will not be consoled for falling warm. The soil is wretched; there away from it; they have mused upon are many bare hills, where the harvest it, even during their deepest fall; they often fails. Burns' father, no longer have instinctively dwelt, like their pre- young, having little more than his arms decessors the Alexandrians and Chris- to depend upon, having taken his farm tians, in that splendid invisible world at too high a rent, burdened with sevin which, in ideal peace, slumber the en children, lived parsimoniously, or creative essences and powers; and the rather fasting, in solitude, to avoid vehement aspiration of their heart has temptations to expense. "For several drawn from their sphere the element-years butchers' meat was _a_thing_unary spirits, "film of flame, who flit and wave in eddying motion! birth and the grave, an infinite ocean, a web ever growing, a life ever glowing, ply at Time's whizzing loom, and weave the vesture of God." t Thus rises the modern man, impelled by two sentiments, one democratic, the other philosophic. From the shallows of his poverty and ignorance he exerts himself to rise, .ifting the weight of established society and admitted dogmas, disposed either to reform or to destroy them, and at once generous and rebellious. These two currents from France and Germany at this moment swept into England. The dykes there were so strong, they could hardly force their way, entering more slowly than elsewhere, but entering nevertheless. They made for themselves a new channel between the ancient barriers, and widened without bursting them, by a peaceful and slow transformation which continues till this day. II. The new spirit broke out first in a known in the house." Robert went barefoot and bareheaded; at "the age of thirteen he assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen he was the principal laborer on the farm." The family did all the labor; they kept no servant, male or female. They had not much to eat, but they worked hard. "This kind of fe- the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galiey slave-brought me to my sixteenth year," Burns says. His shoulders were bent, melancholy seized him: "almost every evening he was constantly afflicted with a dull headache, which at a future period of his life was exchanged for a palpitation of the heart, and a threatening of fainting and suffocation in his bed in the night-time." The anguish of mind which we felt," says his brother, was very great." The father grew old; his gray head, careworn brow, temples" wearing thin and bare," his tall bent figure, bore witness to the grief and toil which had spent him. The factor wrote him insolent and threatening letters which "set all the family in tears." There was a respite when the father changed his farm, but a lawsuit sprang up be tween him and the proprietor: "After three years tossing and whirling in the in him: "I had felt ‹rly some stir vortex of litigation, my father was just rings of ambition, but they were the saved from the horrors of a gaol by blind groping of Homer's Cyclor consumption, which after two years' round the walls of his cave.... The promises kindly stepped in." In order only two openings by which I could to snatch something from the claws of enter the temple of fortune were the the lawyers, the two sons were obliged gate of niggardly economy, or the path to step in as creditors for arrears of of little chicaning bargain-making. wages. With this little sum they took The first is so contracted an aperture, 1 another farm. Robert had seven never could squeeze myself into it; pounds a year for his labor; for several the last I always hated-there was con years his whole expenses did not ex- tamination in the very entrance." ceed this wretched pittance; he had Low occupations depress the soul even resolved to succeed by dint of absti- more than the body; man perishes in nence and toil: “I read farming books, them-is obliged to perish; of necesI calculated crops, I attended markets; sity there remains of him nothing but a but the first year, from unfortu- machine: for in the kind of action in nately buying bad seed, the second which all is monotonous, in which from a late harvest, we lost half our throughout the very long day the arms crops." Troubles came apace; pover-lift the same flail and drive the same ty always engenders them. The master-mason, Armour, whose daughter was Burns' sweetheart, was said to contemplate prosecuting him, to obtain a guarantee for the support of his expected progeny, though he refused to accept him as a son-in-law. Jean Armour abandoned him; he could not give his name to her child. He was obliged to hide; he had been publicly admonished by the church. He said: "Even in the hour of social mirth, my gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner." He resolved to leave the country; he agreed with Dr. Charles Douglas for thirty pounds a year to be bookkeeper or overseer on his estate in Jamaica; for want of money to pay the passage, he was about to "indent himself," that is, become bound as apprentice, when the success of a volume of poetry he had published put a score of guineas into his hands, and for a time brought him brighter days. Such was his life up to the age of twentyseven, and that which succeeded was little better. Let us fancy in this condition a man of genius, a true poet, capable of the most delicate emotions and the loftiest aspirations, wishing to rise, to rise to the summit, of which he deemed himself capable and worthy.* Ambition had early made itself heard Most of these details are taken from the Life and Works of Burns, by R. Chambers 1851, 4 vols. plough, if thought does not take this uniform movement, the work is ill done. The poet must take care not to be turned aside by his poetry; to do as Burns did, "think only of his work whilst he was at it." He must think of it always, in the evening unyoking his cattle, on Sunday putting on his new coat, counting on his fingers the eggs and poultry, thinking of the kinds of dung, finding a means of using only one pair of shoes, and of selling his hay at a penny a truss more. He will not succeed if he has not the patient dulness of a laborer, and the crafty vigilance of a petty shopkeeper. How could poor Burns succeed? He was out of place from his birth, and tried his utmost to raise himself above his condition. † At the farm at Lochlea, during meal-times, the only moments of relaxation, parents, brothers, and sisters, ate with a spoon in one hand a book in the other. Burns, at the school of Hugh Rodger, a teacher of mensu. ration, and later at a club of young men at Tarbolton, strove to exercise himself in general questions, and debated pro and con in order to see both sides of every idea. He carried a book in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields; he wore ot thus two copies of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. "The collection of songs was any vade mecum. I poured over them Chambers' Life of Burns, i. 14. † My great constituent elements are pride and passion. We find such recriminations against driving my cart, or walking to labor, | honest contempt for whatever bore the song by song, verse by verse, carefully appearance of meanness and servility' noting the true, tender, sublime or fus-made him "fall into the opposite error tian." He maintained a correspon- of hardness of manner." He had also dence with several of his companions the consciousness of his own merits. in the same rank of life in order to 66 Pauvre inconnu as I then was, I had form his style, kept a commonplace pretty nearly as high an opinion of mybook, entered in it ideas on man, re-self and of my works as I have at this ligion, the greatest subjects, criticizmoment, when the public has decided ing his first productions. Burns says, in their favor."* Who can wonder "Never did a heart pant more ardently that we find at every step in his poems than mine to be distinguished." He the bitter protests of an oppressed ani thus divined what he did not learn, rebellious plebeian? rose of himself to the level of the most highly cultivated; in a while, at Edin-all society, against State and Church. burgh, he was to read through and Burns has a harsh tone, often the very through respected doctors, Blair him- phrases of Rousseau, and wished to self; he was to see that Blair had at- be a "vigorous savage," quit civilized tainments, but no depth. At this time life, the dependence and humiliations he studied minutely and lovingly the which it imposes on the wretched. old Scotch ballads; and by night in his cold little room, by day whilst whistling at the plough, he invented forms and ideas. We must think of this in order | to measure his efforts, to understand his miseries and his revolt. We must think that the man in whom these great ideas are stirring, threshed the corn, cleaned his cows, went out to dig peats, waded in the muddy snow, and dreaded to come home and find the bailiffs prepared to carry him off to prison. We must think also, that with the ideas of a thinker he had the delicacies and reveries of a poet. Once, having cast his eyes on an engraving representing a dead soldier, and his wife beside him, his child and dog lying in the snow, suddenly, involuntarily, he burst into tears. He writes: "It is mortifying to see a fellow, whose abilities would scarcely have made an eight-penny taylor, and whose heart is not worth three farthings, meet with attention and notice that are withheld from the son of genius and pover ty." It is hard to "See yonder poor, o'eriabow'a g "While winds frae off Ben-Lomond blaw, I tent less, and want less To see their cursed pride. To see how things are shar'd; And ken na how to wair 't." § But "a man's a man for a' that," and the peasant is as good as the lord. There are men noble by nature, and they * Chambers' Life, i. 231. Burns had a right to think so: when he arrived at night in an inn, the very servants woke their fellow-labourers to come and hear him talk. † Chambers' Life and Works of Rober Burns, ii. 68. + Man was made to Mourn, a dirge. First Epistle to Davie, a brother post. alone are noble; the coat is the business of the tailor, titles a matter of the Herald's office. "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, the man's the gowd for a' that." He's greater than a Lord, man For this the watchman cracked his crown, Cut off his head and a', man.” * and which, in better style, resembles A strange gayety, savage and nervous, that of the Ca ira. Against men who reverse this natural equality Burns is pitiless; the least thing puts him out of temper. Read his "Address of Beelzebub, to the Burns is hardly more tender to the Right Honourable the Earl of Breadal church. At that time the strait paribane, Fresident of the Right Honoura- tanical garment began to give way. ble and Honourable the Highland So- Already the learned world of Edin ciety, which met on the 23d of May ed it to the fashions of society, decked burgh had Frenchified, widened, adapt last at the Shakspeare, Covent Garden, it with ornaments, not very brilliant, it to concert ways and means to frustrate is true, but select. In the lower strata the designs of five hundred Highland- of society dogma became less rigid, and ers, who, as the society were informed by Mr. Mackenzie of Applecross, were Arminius and Socinus. John Goldie, approached by degrees the looseness of so audacious, as to attempt an escape a merchant, had quite recently discussfrom their lawful lords and masters, ed the authority of Scripture.t John whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. M'Donald of Taylor had denied original sin. Burns' Glengarry to the wilds of Canada, in liberal and humane doctrines, had defather, pious as he was, inclined to search of that fantastic thing-liber-tracted from the province of faith to ty!" Rarely was an insult more prolonged and more biting, and the threat is not far behind. He warns Scotch members like a revolutionist, to withdraw "that curst restriction on aquavitae," "get auld Scotland back her kettle:" "An', Lord, if ance they pit her till't, An' rin her whittle to the hilt In vain he writes, that "In politics if thou wouldst mix Bear this in mind, be deaf and blind, Not alone did he see and hear, but he "Upo' this tree there grows sic fruit, *Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives. The Creed of Poverty; Chambers' Life, v. 86. add to that of reason. Burns, after his "Should Hornie, as in ancient days, Hear how he clears the points o' faith *The Tree of Liberty. † 1700 |