"THE LARGEST SOUL OF ALL THE BRITISH LANDS." Carlyle. 
 Born January 25, 1759. Died July 21, 1796.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 AND THE COMMON PEOPLE 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM STEWART 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'FIGHTERS FOR FREEDOM," "THE NATIVITY OF ADAM," ETC. 
 
 GLASGOW 
 
 REFORMERS' BOOKSTALL, LIMITED 
 1910
 
 " My Compeers^ the Common People? 
 
 BURNS. 
 
 "He came when poets had forgot 
 How rich and strange the human lot; 
 How warm the tints of Life; how hot 
 
 Are Love and Hate; 
 
 And what makes Truth divine ', and what 
 Makes Manhood great" 
 
 WILLIAM WATSON. 
 
 "lam one of the sons of little men" 
 
 BURNS.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FOREWORD ix 
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD i 
 A MAN'S A MAN . . . . .25 
 
 BROTHERHOOD 51 
 
 BURNS THE REBEL .... 73 
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN ... 89 
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN . . . 107 
 
 vii
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 T the request of the publishers, 
 and for my own pleasure, I 
 have written a book about 
 Robert Burns. 
 
 I am now told there must be a foreword 
 or preface. 
 
 This I believe is quite in accordance 
 with orthodox bookmaking practice. A 
 foreword is never a foreword. It is an 
 afterthought. It is the last thing written, 
 and would be described as a postscript 
 were it not that it is placed at the begin- 
 ning instead of at the end. A foreword
 
 x FOREWORD 
 
 is an indication that the author having 
 written his book has now begun to have 
 doubts as to whether he has not been 
 wasting his time. I have no such doubts. 
 I think this is a good and necessary book, 
 and does not stand in need of any post- 
 scriptive foreword. I have observed that 
 the foreword to a book is usually either 
 explanatory or apologetic. Sometimes 
 it is both. Mine will be neither. The 
 book will be its own explanation. And 
 as for apology, I have none to offer. I 
 shall most certainly continue to think 
 that it is a good book, though all the 
 readers and all the reviewers should 
 think otherwise. Why should I apolo- 
 gise for having produced a good book ? 
 This, then, is the Foreword :
 
 FOREWORD xi 
 
 I hope that what I have written will 
 prove to be stimulative of thought con- 
 cerning the relation of Burns's work 
 to the present time ; and even if the 
 stimulus arises through resentment or 
 antagonism to the ideas expressed, the 
 writer's purpose will still have been 
 achieved. If, on the contrary, my book 
 be not stimulative, then I shall agree it 
 had better not have been written. 
 
 WILLIAM STEWART.
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 
 
 ROBERT BURNS was born at Alloway, near Ayr, 
 January 25, 1759. 
 
 The first edition of his poems was published 
 at Kilmarnock in 1786. 
 
 The second edition was published at Edinburgh, 
 1787. 
 
 Editions innumerable have been published since 
 all over the English-speaking world. 
 
 He died at Dumfries, July 21, 1796, just ten 
 years from the publication of his first edition. 
 
 He was born in poverty, and he died in poverty. 
 But he enriched the world. 
 
 HERE has been much disputa- 
 tion about Robert Burns, con- 
 cerning his character, the nature 
 and quality of his genius, and his place in 
 the world of literature.
 
 4 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 This, however, remains undisputed and 
 indisputable : he is the first great poet of 
 the common people ; meaning thereby, not 
 merely that he is the first. great poet to 
 emerge from the common people, but the 
 first who has found in them his continual 
 theme and the source of his inspiration. 
 Therein rests the assurance of his per- 
 manent place among the world's immortal 
 singers ; for the future belongs to the 
 common people. But while his position 
 as the poet of the common people has 
 been taken for granted, its significance as 
 a means of estimating the value of his ser- 
 vice to humanity has been almost wholly 
 lost sight of by his numerous commenta- 
 tors, critics, and worshippers, who, in their 
 desire to place him comparatively with
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 5 
 
 other poets and men of letters, have failed 
 to give proportionate consideration to his 
 value as a force in the shaping of the 
 thought of humanity, and consequently in 
 the directing of human affairs. The trend 
 towards democracy during the last hundred 
 years owes more to Robert Burns than 
 has yet been conceded in any estimate 
 of his character and work. 
 
 This tendency to overlook and ignore 
 Burns's chief characteristic found its most 
 notable illustration in the late Mr. Henley's 
 famous, or at least notorious essay, and 
 also in the nature of the criticisms evoked 
 by that brilliant but lop-sided perform- 
 ance. Quite a flood of invective ensued, 
 mostly from perfervid Scottish patriots, 
 and directed chiefly against the essayist's
 
 6 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 slightly brutal references to the poet's 
 personal failings rather than to the main 
 argument whereby Henley, in the very 
 act of paying homage to the Scottish 
 poet's genius, sought to classify him as a 
 poetical back-number, a kind of glorious 
 antique, whose influence upon modern 
 thought was to all intents and purposes 
 a negligible quantity. 
 
 The incensed enthusiasts, in their zeal 
 for the character of their hero, flew off at 
 a tangent, leaving the main issue practi- 
 cally untouched, and proving that they, 
 equally with their adversary, had not even 
 begun to appreciate the true nature of 
 Burns's service to humanity, which con- 
 sists not only in that he was a great 
 Scottish poet, but in the fact that he was
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 7 
 
 a great poet with a new message. Henley 
 and his critics alike were concerned with 
 the medium of the message rather than 
 with the message itself. They failed to 
 look for that which Carlyle had desider- 
 ated concerning Burns seventy years pre- 
 viously a true standard " whereby to 
 estimate what he really was and did in 
 the eighteenth century for his country 
 and the world." 
 
 Henley's theory is that Burns was the 
 last (and of course the greatest) of the 
 old Scots school of poets ; a theory which 
 may be undeniably true, and yet leave the 
 essential truth unspoken. He contrives 
 to make his theory seem convincing, and 
 almost scientific, by setting it up against 
 another imaginary theory which is even
 
 8 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 more misleading. Here is the theory, as 
 elaborated in the preface to the centenary 
 edition. I quote it in full, as it helps me 
 in the way I want to go. 
 
 " Burns," says Henley, " for all his 
 exhibition of some modern tendencies, 
 was not the fqunder of a dynasty, but the 
 heir of a flourishing tradition, and the last 
 of an ancient line; he is demonstrably 
 the outcome of an environment, and not 
 in any but the narrowest sense the un- 
 natural birth of Poesy and Time, which 
 he is sometimes held to be. Being a 
 great artist, he derives from a numerous 
 ancestry ; and like all great artists, he is 
 partly an effect of local and peculiar con- 
 ditions, and partly the product of imme- 
 diate and remote forebears. Genius apart,
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 9 
 
 in fact, he is ultimus Scotorum, the last 
 expression of the old Scots world, and 
 therewith the culmination of a school 
 deep-rooted in the past, which by pro- 
 ducing such men as Dunbar and Scott, 
 and Alexander Montgomery ; as Ramsay 
 and Fergusson, and the nameless lyrists of 
 the song-books, made it possible for him 
 to be." 
 
 Thus is Burns safely deposited amongst 
 the ancients and securely barred out from 
 amongst the moderns, of whom he was 
 the forerunner ; from the company of the 
 poets of freedom Shelley and Byron and 
 Wordsworth and Longfellow and Whit- 
 man and Swinburne. " Burns was of us," 
 said Browning; but W. E. Henley thought 
 otherwise, and maintained his conclusions,
 
 io ROBERT BURNS 
 
 as we see, most learnedly and plausibly. 
 We can almost see Burns in the making, 
 and especially in the ending ; deriving 
 from his numerous ancestry and ending as 
 "ultimus Scotorum, the last expression of 
 the old Scots world." " He is demon- 
 strably the outcome of an environment." 
 Who will deny it of Burns, or of any 
 other? We are all the outcome of an 
 environment, not the great artists only 
 but the obscure dullards and nobodies, and 
 all this learned theorising does not take us 
 very far, either in accounting for Robert 
 Burns or in estimating his work, least of 
 all in measuring the effect of his work. 
 
 Henley, of course, does not apply his 
 pseudo-determinism literally and scientifi- 
 cally. To do that he would have had to
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD u 
 
 trace the genealogy of the peasant man 
 and woman from whom Burns sprang, 
 and that would have been no easy task 
 beyond a certain not very remote point, 
 quite impossible though along that line 
 of inquiry there might have been found 
 the sources of some at least of those 
 transmitted mental characteristics which 
 specially distinguished him, and in their 
 combination constitute what we call the 
 genius of Burns. That grandsire who 
 was out in the '45, and that other rela- 
 tive on the maternal side who died at 
 Aird's Moss fighting for religious liberty, 
 had probably a greater share in the 
 mental make - up of this imaginative, 
 patriotic, and liberty -loving peasant -poet 
 than all his literary predecessors.
 
 12 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 It is not, however, the poet's lineal 
 ancestry that is called to witness, but his 
 literary ancestry ; certain Scottish poets 
 from whom Burns learned some of his 
 poetic craftsmanship, but whose work, it 
 should be noted, was available to others 
 than Burns, and to some of them in a 
 much greater degree than it could ever 
 have been to this working ploughman. 
 
 Henley's contribution to Scottish literary 
 history is valuable, doubtless, but it does 
 not account for Robert Burns. It helps 
 to explain why, Robert Burns being 
 there, he of necessity worked through 
 certain stereotyped methods of expres- 
 sion, but it does not account for the 
 nature of the expression, for the thing 
 expressed. And it does not explain
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 13 
 
 why this numerous literary ancestry 
 should have culminated in this particu- 
 lar Scottish peasant, and not in another; 
 in Robert, for example, and not in 
 Gilbert. No theory that I have heard 
 of can explain that. Henley himself 
 seems to recognise this, and leaves a 
 way out which sets his whole theory on 
 one side. 
 
 " Genius apart, he is ultimus Scot- 
 orum" But genius apart there would 
 have been no Burns the poet. There 
 would only have been Burns the plough- 
 man, who would have had no use for 
 the literary ancestry ; and we should not 
 to-day be discussing the why and the 
 wherefore of him. On the whole, when 
 we come to look at the matter closely,
 
 i 4 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Henley simply rehabilitates the theory 
 he set out to destroy, the theory that 
 Burns is the unnatural birth of Poesy 
 and Time, which is a sorry end to a 
 painstaking argument, and is of course 
 absurd. 
 
 Certainly, the conclusion that Burns is 
 merely the last of an ancient line is alto- 
 gether untenable in view of the fact that 
 to-day, after one hundred years, his ap- 
 peal is still to that element in humanity 
 which looks forward rather than back- 
 ward. Walter Scott, who came later, 
 is more antiquarian, not to say anti- 
 quated, both in spirit and outlook than 
 Robert Burns. It is not true even to 
 say that he was the last of the Scottish 
 vernacular school of poetry. The greatest
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 15 
 
 certainly, but not the last. There has 
 probably been more vernacular verse 
 written since his time than before it, 
 some of it of a kind that would rank 
 very high had it not to bear comparison 
 with the supreme glory of Burns him- 
 self, who stands towards it as the great 
 exemplar. I call to mind "Kilmeny" 
 and some of the songs of Lady Nairne 
 as examples that will compare not un- 
 favourably with the best of the Scots 
 vernacular poetry anterior to Burns. 
 
 When we are told that Burns was 
 the last expression of the old Scots 
 world, we naturally ask, " Which old 
 Scots world ? " For there have been 
 more than one, and there were more 
 than one comprised in the period of
 
 16 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 time covered by the poetic pedigree 
 cited by Henley. Dunbar, the greatest 
 of our Scottish poets prior to Burns, 
 and the only one comparable to him in 
 point of genius, was a begging Francis- 
 can friar, and later a court dependant ; 
 Henryson, who preceded him, was a 
 schoolmaster who taught his scholars 
 within the precincts of a still flourishing 
 abbey and beneath the shadow of a 
 royal palace wherein the Scottish king 
 still held his court. Their world was 
 a Catholic world semi-scholarly, semi- 
 barbarous, mediaeval and feudalistic. 
 Burns could not be said to be the last 
 expression of that old Scots world. The 
 Reformation had made an end of it. 
 Scott and Montgomery belonged to
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 17 
 
 the turbulent time immediately following 
 the Reformation, when it was still a 
 question of doubt whether the new or 
 the old forms of religion would mould 
 the thoughts and dominate the life of 
 the Scottish people a time in which 
 art of any kind found small opportunity 
 for expression. With that old Scots 
 world Burns had nothing in common. 
 From these elder "makkars," so far as 
 he was conversant with them which 
 was not very far he borrowed some of 
 his rhythms and measures, but nothing of 
 his poetic outlook. He was born into a 
 Protestant, Calvinistic world, as different 
 from theirs as the twentieth century 
 is from the eighteenth. Ramsay and 
 
 Fergusson were also of that later world ; 
 
 B
 
 i8 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 but of their verse the most that can be said 
 is that it was symptomatic of the reaction 
 against the too strait-laced puritanism 
 superimposed by Calvinistic theology upon 
 the social life of the Scottish people. 
 
 From them Burns took nothing but 
 the stimulus of their example. He was 
 too close to reality to be misled by 
 the romantic gentle shepherds of Allan 
 Ramsay ; while the more original Fer- 
 gusson, dying before he had rightly begun 
 to live, had no great legacy to pass 
 on to his great successor. Burns paid 
 homage to both, especially to Fergusson, 
 recognising in his fate some affinity with 
 his own. But he looked upon that old 
 Scots world quite differently from them : 
 from the standpoint of the peasant, and
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 19 
 
 with the eye of genius. Where they 
 saw only the surface and fringes of 
 society he saw it comprehensively, and 
 discovered what neither poet nor his- 
 torian had yet discovered the import- 
 ance of the common people. 
 
 To the suggestion that what Henley 
 meant was that Burns is the last ex- 
 pression of Scottish life and character 
 before it became absorbed and merged 
 in the life and character of the English 
 people, there is the plain answer that 
 the absorption has not yet taken place, 
 after a hundred years' opportunity for 
 assimilation. Scottish life and character 
 has changed in consonance with modern 
 industrial environment, but it has not 
 become English life and character.
 
 20 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Nationality has a habit of persisting. 
 It derives some of its most vital charac- 
 teristics from the natural features of the 
 country in which it has been nourished ; 
 and although it is true that modern 
 industrial methods have a uniforming 
 tendency, temporarily destructive of indi- 
 viduality both in persons and nations, 
 modern industrialism has not yet laid 
 low the Scottish hills, nor softened the 
 Scottish climate, nor taken the bloom 
 off the heather. What it has done has 
 been to take the people from the hills 
 and from the land and place them in con- 
 ditions where the assertion of character, 
 national or personal, is more difficult 
 than it was formerly. That, however, 
 as all students of history know, is a
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 21 
 
 passing phase. The Scottish people will 
 get back to the Scottish land, and it 
 will probably be found that not the least 
 of the triumphs of the reorganised society 
 of the future will consist in the resto- 
 ration of communal individuality under 
 permanently favourable conditions ; thus 
 providing fresh outlets for Art and Litera- 
 ture, and freeing them from that com- 
 mercialist dominance in the midst of 
 which they strive, even now with some 
 measure of success, for natural expression. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten that once be- 
 fore Scottish literature was Anglicised 
 almost out of existence, yet reasserted 
 itself, the chief instrument in the revival 
 being this same Robert Burns. 
 
 Given the right conditions, which are
 
 22 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 sure to come, it will do so again ; and 
 just as even now, in the midst of the 
 alleged Anglo-Saxon ascendancy, there 
 exists a distinctive Scottish School of Art, 
 so also once again will there be a dis- 
 tinctive Scottish School of Literature, and 
 the whole world will, as in the past, be 
 the gainer thereby. And the renaissance, 
 when it does arrive, will find itself debtor 
 to Robert Burns. It will take its tune 
 from the Ayrshire peasant. For the 
 future literary revival in Scotland and 
 elsewhere must be, in the very nature 
 of things, democratic. It must reflect the 
 thoughts, passions, manners, and aspira- 
 tions of the common people. Burns was 
 the first amongst the poets to discover 
 the common people, not merely objec-
 
 THE OLD SCOTS WORLD 23 
 
 lively nor yet subjectively, as abstract 
 material for the literary artist, but as the 
 very source and fountain of inspiration. 
 It might be better to say that Burns 
 revealed the common people in his own 
 personality and in his poetry, which in 
 its every mood and phase is the expres- 
 sion of his personality. By virtue of 
 that expression Burns holds his place, 
 not only amongst the reminiscent singers 
 of a world that is dead and buried, but 
 amongst the great poets of the world 
 to come.
 
 A MAN'S A MAN
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 
 
 T is not necessary to claim 
 Burns as the founder of a 
 dynasty. The realm of poesy 
 indeed is, and has ever been, republi- 
 can rather than dynastic ; its gates wide 
 open always, and its borders never so 
 circumscribed by old tradition as to bar 
 the way against newcomers with new 
 ideals, or with new modes of expressing 
 the old ideals. 
 
 Not the founder of a dynasty, but 
 the pioneer of a new poetic enterprise. 
 To speak of Burns as merely the heir
 
 28 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 to deep-rooted conventions is absurd. He 
 brushed the old conventions aside. He 
 made use of the old modes of expres- 
 sion, it is true, but he made use of them 
 to express a new conception. Just as 
 one might use an old earth-worn spade 
 to dig up bright gold and shining dia- 
 monds ; just as Columbus made use of an 
 old-world ship to seek out a new world. 
 
 And yet the new world discovered by 
 Burns was, as we have seen, a very old 
 world. It was the world of the common 
 people. " The merry, friendly country 
 folks"; the "poor, oppressed, honest 
 man " ; the " toil - worn cottar " ; the 
 " buirdly chiels and clever hizzies " ; in 
 fact, all those ordinary, everyday folk 
 upon whose " toils obscure an' a' that "
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 29 
 
 depends, and has always depended, the 
 entire fabric of society ; in Burns's own 
 phrase, " the simple hind, whose toil up- 
 holds the glittering show'' 
 
 They had been there from the begin- 
 ning, these peasants, the basic element in 
 Scottish national life. They were there 
 through all the centuries, the burden- 
 bearers, fechtin' men, and daily drudges, 
 what time Henryson and Dunbar, and 
 Scott and Montgomery, and David 
 Lyndsay and Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den were weaving their poetic fancies and 
 polishing their rhyming apostrophes. But 
 the common people remained almost as 
 invisible to these mediaeval poets and 
 poetasters as they were, and are still, to 
 the orthodox historian.
 
 30 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 It needed a peasant-poet to see the 
 peasant rightly. With Burns the people 
 are not subsidiary ; with him the people 
 are all in all. It is the others who 
 are subsidiary and parasitical : the belted 
 knights and the struttin' birkies of lords, 
 alike with the king their maker. For the 
 first time these are placed in their right 
 perspective, and the people step forward. 
 This is a part of the real abiding service 
 which Burns rendered to humanity ; a 
 service which will remain, even though 
 what is not likely with the passing of the 
 ages and the decay of the Scottish doric 
 every scrap of his writings should find 
 oblivion. He dignified, he elevated the 
 common people. He saw them as no one 
 else had ever seen them ; as they had
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 31 
 
 not even seen themselves, until he held 
 up the mirror in which they were able 
 for the first time to recognise their 
 own importance, and were made thereby 
 to become almost involuntarily socially 
 conscious ; what we to-day call class con- 
 scious. 
 
 I would not be misunderstood. Work- 
 ing-class life had been casually versified 
 before Burns's time. I do not forget 
 "Christ's Kirk on the Green," nor 
 "Habbie Simpson," nor "Maggie Lauder." 
 I do not forget the "nameless lyrists 
 of the song-books," nor the unknown 
 folk-singers whose rough-and-ready re- 
 flections of incidental phases of working- 
 class life it was part of Burns's work 
 to transfigure and purify ; and I would
 
 32 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 be no true Scot if I sought to de- 
 preciate the value of their services in 
 keeping alive the flickering flame of 
 Scottish song in the hearts of the people 
 in the days of their serfdom. But 
 that is the full extent of their services. 
 They are episodal, fragmentary. Not 
 one, nor all of them, present a compre- 
 hensive picture of working-class life, or 
 reveal the spirit of the common people. 
 And they do not uplift nor inspire. The 
 common people, so far as they speak for 
 themselves, or are spoken for, in song and 
 ballad, are still quite contentedly the lower 
 classes, the serfs and hinds and menials. 
 Burns completely changed the point of 
 view. With him there enters into the 
 literature of the people a note of self-
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 33 
 
 respect ; nay, more, a note of exaltation. 
 He was the first to say, " A man's a man 
 for a' that ! " He said it not in one song 
 only, but in many songs. In his satires 
 against Calvinism not less than in his 
 sarcasms against pride of place and privi- 
 lege ; in his lamentations for human suf- 
 fering not less than in his songs of the 
 joy of life. The thought itself, embody- 
 ing the principle of natural equality irre- 
 spective of rank or caste or material 
 possessions, was not an entirely new 
 thought. For a generation at least it 
 had been permeating the mind of Europe, 
 silently sapping and mining at the founda- 
 tions of feudalism. It found philosophic 
 expression in the writings of Rousseau, 
 
 and was the moving principle behind the 
 
 C
 
 34 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 French Revolution. Paine in his " Rights 
 of Man" familiarised it to the English- 
 speaking race, and it managed to get 
 itself embedded in the constitution of the 
 new American republic, where, cynics 
 say, it has remained stowed away safe 
 and harmless ever since ; an interment 
 due to the growth of new social distinc- 
 tions created by capitalistic developments 
 which neither Rousseau, nor Tom Paine, 
 nor Washington could foresee, develop- 
 ments which make the affirmation of the 
 principle as necessary to-day as it was a 
 hundred years ago. But till Burns came 
 the new idea had not found its poet. He 
 was the first to give it utterance in song, 
 that method of appeal which most con- 
 vincingly reaches the mind of the common
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 35 
 
 people. His was no last minstrel's lay 
 sighing over declining feudalistic glories. 
 It was a forerunner's song heralding the 
 coming of the common people, and has 
 been echoed and re-echoed by nearly 
 every great singer since his day. It has 
 been carried round the world by the 
 emigrating and colonising Scottish peas- 
 antry, and enters into the very fibres of the 
 new over-seas democracies. " A man's a 
 man ! " With the striking of this note the 
 common people began to take their right- 
 ful place in literature and in the world. 
 Their enfranchisement had begun, though 
 parliament had to wait a hundred years 
 for the tread of their footsteps. In one 
 day, in the mere lilt of a song, so to speak, 
 democracy leapt forward. Democracy in
 
 36 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Scotland asserted itself, not with a vote, 
 nor with a sword, but with a song ; and 
 whether in its final vindication democ- 
 racy shall use the vote or the sword, 
 behind the weapon and the blow will be 
 the song of Robert Burns. Ere the theory 
 of Socialism had begun to shape itself, the 
 claim of Socialism had found a voice. 
 For what is the claim of Socialism but 
 this that the conditions shall prevail 
 wherein manhood shall have free play, 
 wherein a man shall be a man ? This was 
 Burns's message to humanity. He was 
 the first great poet to deliver that mes- 
 sage ; and the fact that despite the limita- 
 tions of his medium of expression he was 
 able to command the world's attention, 
 stamps him for ever as one of the world's
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 37 
 
 men of power. His medium was the 
 vernacular, the hamely, auld Scots doric ; 
 a form of speech familiar only to a small 
 corner of the British dominions, a lan- 
 guage, as some say, uncouth and obscure, 
 well-nigh obsolete, and, when Burns 
 appeared, ready to be swept away by the 
 rising Anglo-Saxon flood. It was good 
 enough for Burns and his message. The 
 old Scots doric was to him as an ancient 
 harp might be to a minstrel of genius, who 
 from the thumb-worn strings awakens a 
 great new heart-stirring melody. Burns's 
 new melody on the old Scottish harp 
 reaches to the heart of humanity, and 
 places him among the poets who are more 
 than local and more than national, who 
 are universal and for all time. For while
 
 38 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 there is no poet who is so truly in the 
 literal sense of the term a national poet, 
 yet there is none who has done so "much 
 as he to break down national boundaries 
 and destroy racial antipathies. The com- 
 mon people are the common people in all 
 lands. A man's a man, or ought to be, 
 everywhere. 
 
 This poetic promulgation of the idea of 
 natural human rights was all the more 
 notable because of the time and the place 
 and the circumstances in which it found 
 utterance. All the conditions in Scot- 
 land, political, social, and ecclesiastical, 
 were such as to stifle the very idea of 
 independence. Politically, Scotland had 
 sunk into a mere appendage of England ; 
 and Burns's malediction
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 39 
 
 " Lord, send a rough-shod troop o' hell, 
 O'er a' wad Scotland buy and sell ! " 
 
 was already well earned. Her govern- 
 ment was simply a corrupt bureaucracy 
 manipulated in the interests of a few terri- 
 torial families. Her industrial system was 
 no more than a kind of bastard feudalism 
 with the overlordship responsibilities left 
 out. Her religious life had degenerated 
 from the democratic conception of Knox 
 into superstitious formalism. 
 
 It was Burns who said, "Facts are 
 chiels that winna ding, and daurna be 
 disputed." Yet his whole work, his life, 
 he himself, what were they but protests 
 against existing facts against the domi- 
 nant facts of the society in which he 
 was placed. The fact of ecclesiastical
 
 40 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 authority controlling men's beliefs ; the 
 facts of kingly, or aristocratic, or pluto- 
 cratic authority controlling men's actions. 
 He disputed the facts all along the line, 
 and "dang" them to some tune, though 
 he himself ultimately went down in the 
 conflict. And there was one tremendous 
 fact involved in all these others, the right- 
 fulness of which he disputed all through 
 life, and with his latest breath : the fact 
 of poverty the poverty of the common 
 people. 
 
 He had no illusions concerning the 
 world in which he lived, this peasant. 
 He was no dreamy mystic, nor yet 
 romanticist. Idealist he was, as all poets 
 are, but he was also realist, as many 
 poets are not. Occasional glances he
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 41 
 
 cast backward into the romance of a 
 lost cause, as of the Stuarts ; but con- 
 cerning the actual world in which he 
 lived he had no misconceptions. He 
 was too near to reality 
 
 "... Nurst in the Peasant's lowly shed, 
 To hardy Independence bravely bred, 
 By early Poverty to hardship steeled, 
 And trained to arms in stern Misfortune's field." 
 
 The son of a " toil - worn cottar," he 
 himself toil-worn and not a little care- 
 scarred, even ere he had emerged from 
 childhood, he knew, and never ceased 
 to know, that his fate was the fate of 
 all his social compeers. He was born 
 in poverty, he lived in poverty, and he 
 died in poverty. That was, and is, the 
 fate of the common people. Burns's
 
 42 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 attitude towards that fate was never 
 acquiescence, but rebellion always. He 
 never accepted poverty for justice. He 
 accepted it for what it was and is in- 
 justice. " Why should a'e man better 
 fare, an' a' men brithers?" Even in his 
 most philosophical and kindliest mood 
 he enters his protest 
 
 " It's hardly in a body's pow'r 
 To keep at times frae being sour, 
 
 To see how things are shared. 
 How best o' chiels are whyles in want, 
 While coofs on coontless thousands rant 
 
 An kenna how to ware't." 
 
 The modern apologists for things as 
 they are, who from time to time seek 
 to ordain Burns in the popular mind as 
 a kind of high priest of the gospel of 
 content, are guilty of the worst kind
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 43 
 
 of perversion. The puritans who ser- 
 monise over his social failings never did 
 worse than that. They have some basis 
 for their sermons. The others have 
 none for their misdirected eulogiums. 
 Burns loved to " tak' aff his dram," and 
 he " dearly lo'ed the lasses," and some- 
 times he gave his muse a loose rein 
 down pleasure's more disreputable by- 
 ways practices all of them antipathetic 
 to the " unco guid " ; but he was no 
 apostle of social contentment. He was, 
 as every rebel must be, a discontented 
 man. And in this, as in most other 
 aspects of his character, he was typical. 
 His discontent was the expression of 
 the justifiable discontent of his class, 
 the common people. It is true that
 
 44 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 he reflected also the brave optimism of 
 labouring folk, who even out of the 
 hardest environment contrive for them- 
 selves a little happiness. The natural 
 gaiety of the man, his loving-kindness, 
 and his ever-present sense of humour 
 reveal themselves in his intensely sym- 
 pathetic descriptions of the simple pleas- 
 ures of peasant life ; but ever and anon 
 he flames out in wrath and rage against 
 the injustice of the peasant's fate, or 
 melts into tears of pity for the hard, 
 unlovely lot of the poor. That the 
 life of the eighteenth-century Scottish 
 peasant was not utterly joyless is true, 
 just as it is true to-day that the inhabi- 
 tant of the city slum can catch an occa- 
 sional glimpse of the sun. But neither
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 45 
 
 the peasant's transient joys nor the slum- 
 dweller's stolen sunshine justify content- 
 ment. They rather, because of their 
 evanescence and precariousness, intensify 
 the sense of wrong. Of the transitory 
 pleasures of the Scottish peasantry no 
 one has given so vivid impressions as 
 Burns. Their Halloween feasts and 
 Fasten - e'en rockins ; their kirns and 
 weddings and New Year social gather- 
 ings ; their domestic felicities 
 
 " The canty auld folks, crackin' croose, 
 The young anes rantin' through the hoose " ; 
 
 their John Barleycorn joys, and the joys 
 of love, lawful and illicit ; all the inter- 
 mittent relaxations with which the labour- 
 weary peasants sought to beguile the
 
 46 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 "kiaugh and care" of their daily lives 
 they are all to be found in the pages of 
 Burns, and remain a priceless possession, 
 illuminative at once of the social habits 
 of the people and of the unconquerable 
 vitality of the Scottish race. But these 
 are fitful joys, snatched from a dreary 
 environment of harassing care and toil 
 and trouble ; they are the bright spots 
 in a picture lit up by the genius and 
 humour of Burns, but a picture whose 
 shadows are deep and sombre, and whose 
 background is poverty. " The Cottar's 
 Saturday Night " presents a pleasant, 
 restful, almost idyllic grouping, but it is 
 a "toil-worn" man who sits at the head 
 of the table ; the " priest-like father "
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 47 
 
 trudged " weary o'er the moors " only 
 an hour ago, and his "spade, his mat- 
 tocks, and his hoes " are truer emblems 
 of his daily life than is the " big ha'- 
 Bible." They are happy enough peasant 
 folk who gather round the fire on that 
 " merry day the year begins." They 
 deserve to be, for all the rest of the 
 year it has been their lot to "drudge and 
 drive through wet and dry," " howkin' 
 in sheuchs " and " biggin' dykes wi' 
 dirty stanes," getting rheumatism in their 
 bones, and growing old before their 
 time. Too old at forty is hardly an 
 exclusively twentieth - century grievance. 
 Listen to Burns, and, while you ad- 
 mire his handling of the doric, realise
 
 48 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 the tragedy of the life of the common 
 people 
 
 " For, ance that five-and-forty's speel'd, 
 See crazy, weary, joyless eild, 
 
 Wi' wrinkled face, 
 Comes hostin', hirplin' owre the field 
 
 Wi' creepin' pace." 
 
 This is no mere poetic figure. It is 
 grim realism. Burns saw it exemplified 
 in his own father, who was prematurely 
 beaten into his grave by toil and care 
 and poverty. 
 
 The background of Burns's picture of 
 Scottish peasant life is poverty. In the 
 picture there is love, and laughter, and 
 dram-drinking, and high spirits in plenty, 
 but at the back of it all, beclouding it all, 
 there is poverty. And not only material 
 poverty, but spiritual, or shall we say
 
 A MAN'S A MAN 49 
 
 unspiritual, poverty? There are not 
 only the humiliated, " poor tenant bodies, 
 tholin' the factor's snash " ; not only the 
 
 " Poor o'er-laboured wight, so abject, mean, and 
 
 vile, 
 
 Begging a brother of the earth to give him 
 leave to toil;" 
 
 not only " age and want, that ill-matched 
 pair," symbolical of the utter hopeless- 
 ness of the labourer's lot ; but side by 
 side with these there are the " Ayr 
 Presbyters" and the "Holy Fairs," and 
 the "Holy Willies," with their "three- 
 mile prayers and half-mile graces," with 
 their narrow spiritual outlook, their in- 
 tolerance and bigotry, and all the spirit- 
 cramping, soul - destroying tyranny of 
 
 hide-bound creeds and ignorant super- 
 
 D
 
 50 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 stitions which held the common people in 
 mental fetters, and over a whole nation 
 seemed to give the lie to the assertion 
 that "a man's a man." It is the picture 
 of a people laird-ridden and priest-ridden, 
 held, in fact, in a double bond of poverty, 
 material and mental. And it was from 
 the midst of this environment that Burns 
 sent his message to the world, " A Man's 
 a Man for a' that!"
 
 BROTHERHOOD
 
 BROTHERHOOD 
 
 OBERT BURNS was in 
 rebellion against both kinds 
 of poverty. That is not to 
 say that he set himself deliberately to 
 wage war against the forces that create 
 poverty. Burns was not a man of de- 
 liberation, except towards the end of his 
 life. Had he been, it might have been 
 better for himself, though the worse for 
 the world's poetic heritage. He never 
 sought out the enemy in the gate. There 
 was no need. The enemy sought him 
 out. Poverty found him where the muse
 
 54 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 found him, at the plough. Perhaps it 
 might be truer to say that poverty placed 
 him there. Burns was in rebellion in- 
 stinctively, and the nature of his revolt 
 was determined by the circumstances of 
 his immediate environment. He was girt 
 round about by the visible effects of 
 poverty, material and mental. To effec- 
 tively fight the former was impossible. 
 To escape from it was equally impos- 
 sible. But mental poverty the repres- 
 sion of mind and spirit to fight that 
 was not only possible, it was unavoidable 
 to a man like Burns. Gifted with the 
 power of satirical expression to a degree 
 vouchsafed to no other man before or 
 since, he found himself, just when his 
 genius was ripening to activity, in his
 
 BROTHERHOOD 55 
 
 Ayrshire parish, right in the heart of 
 what ultimately, and very largely through 
 his intervention, developed into a nation- 
 wide conflict between authority and 
 rationalism in religion. There was only 
 one possible side for Robert Burns. He 
 was for liberty always. He took his side, 
 not deliberately, but because he could do 
 naught else. It was his nature to. It 
 must be remembered, what usually is for- 
 gotten, that he chose the unpopular side ; 
 the side which, superficially looked at, 
 was opposed to the rights of the people. 
 It was only through his influence that it 
 ultimately became popular. The common 
 people of Scotland were not burning with 
 zeal for religious liberty. They had no 
 desire to be set free from the thraldom
 
 56 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 of creeds. Their personal devil had 
 become to them a kind of necessity ; 
 and they saw nothing wrong with a 
 God who sent "ane to heaven and ten 
 to hell" for His own glory. It was 
 not the people who were demanding a 
 more liberal theology. It was, strange 
 though it may seem, certain liberal- 
 minded church patrons who were thrust- 
 ing new theologians upon narrow-minded 
 and unwilling presbyteries and congre- 
 gations. Burns was on the side of the 
 liberal-minded patrons and the new theo- 
 logians. That is to say, he appeared to 
 be against the people. The people had 
 to be set free, not from corrupt church 
 government, but first of all from the 
 slavery of their own minds.
 
 BROTHERHOOD 57 
 
 This was Burns's achievement, not de- 
 liberately undertaken, but in the assertion 
 of his own mental freedom. One thing 
 the common people of Scotland had never 
 lost amidst all their abasement. They 
 still retained their sense of humour. And 
 Burns's humour, bitter and kindly by 
 turns, directed against their ingrained 
 beliefs, caught them where they were 
 most vulnerable. It appealed, as all true 
 humour ever does, to their common sense. 
 A petty parochial squabble it seemed ; 
 an affair of presbyteries, and kirk- 
 sessions, and patrons, intermingled with 
 personal rancours and spites ; a parish 
 pump affair, one would have said, had not 
 Robert Burns been there. But Robert 
 Burns being there made all the differ-
 
 58 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 ence. His satires not even meant to 
 be printed against the Presbytery of 
 Ayr and all the little crowd of heresy- 
 hunters struck at the very heart of reli- 
 gious intolerance everywhere. Bigotry 
 was put upon its defence, and this was 
 the kind of attack to which bigotry is 
 unaccustomed. The appeal was, as I 
 have said, not to authority, or precedent, 
 or metaphysics, but to common sense. 
 " Curst common sense, that imp o' hell," 
 as the other side naturally regarded it, 
 and as Burns phrased it for them. 
 
 In half-a-dozen poems, written in the 
 leisure moments of a working farmer's 
 life, more was done for the intellectual 
 liberation of the Scottish people than 
 has been accomplished by the entire
 
 BROTHERHOOD 59 
 
 army of higher critics since that time. 
 The higher criticism, indeed, is largely 
 the outcome of Burns's attack, and in 
 some of its aspects is little more than a 
 soothing apologetic, intended to dull the 
 edge of the Ayrshire peasant's weapons. 
 The particular phase of the quarrel 
 which brought Burns into the fray has 
 long since disappeared. But the main 
 quarrel, between authority and reason, 
 between bigotry and common sense, is 
 raging still ; and the Scottish peasant- 
 poet is still in the front of the battle. 
 
 Thus it was fated that this son of 
 genius, whose own personal and ever- 
 present quarrel was with material poverty, 
 should deliver his first strong blows 
 against mental poverty, the poverty
 
 60 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 which enslaves the mind. That, as I 
 say, was a matter of circumstance. Had 
 he been born and bred in another part 
 of the west of Scotland, amongst the 
 weavers of Glasgow, for example, or had 
 he lived longer, who can doubt that his 
 genius would have been at the service 
 of the Reform movement, which was 
 then struggling into existence? And 
 who can doubt that in that case we 
 should have had from him more than 
 the one or two casual references to 
 Muir and Palmer, the Reform martyrs. 
 Almost certainly he would himself have 
 been amongst the martyrs. As it is, 
 his influence on that side of the pro- 
 gressive movement is greater than can 
 be measured. The struggle for political
 
 BROTHERHOOD 61 
 
 freedom was simply the materialistic 
 counterpart of the free-thought conflict ; 
 differing only in that its basis was 
 economic rather than spiritual, its pur- 
 pose social rather than religious. 
 
 In essence the two movements were, 
 and are, one and the same : seeking 
 always to establish liberty for body 
 and soul. Whoever was fighting in the 
 one was helping the other. 
 
 Burns was in both. He was against 
 oppression, whether the instrument was 
 the priest or the laird, the presbytery 
 or the Government ; whether the source 
 of authority was Kirk or State, Calvinism 
 or feudalism ; fighting in the only way 
 possible for him, not with the weapons 
 of the agitators or the politicians, but
 
 62 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 with the weapons of the poet ; and 
 doing this, not deliberately and with 
 calculation, but incidentally, instinc- 
 tively, and impulsively. The case for 
 the people as against caste, and wealth, 
 and privilege has never been stated 
 more powerfully than by Robert Burns. 
 In two poems, widely differentiated from 
 each other in style and artistry, he has 
 probed to its very core the disease of 
 modern society. " The Twa Dogs " and 
 " Man was made to Mourn " express the 
 whole of Burns's social philosophy. 
 They also embody the whole of the 
 present-day indictment, economic and 
 moral, against society. " Man was made 
 to Mourn " is at once a lamentation and 
 a protestation, a song of tears and, if
 
 BROTHERHOOD 63 
 
 we would read it aright, a call to arms. 
 They pervert the very spirit of the 
 poem who find in it a fatalistic accepta- 
 tion of universal doom, an embittered 
 version of the Hebrew preacher's "Vanity 
 of vanities!" Burns did not believe 
 that man is born to trouble "as the 
 sparks fly upward," that the purpose of 
 man's being is sorrow. He did not 
 believe that "man was made to mourn." 
 Was not he the optimistic singer of 
 universal brotherhood ? He believed that 
 man was made to rejoice, and that if he 
 was prevented from realising his natural 
 heritage of joy, it was because of con- 
 ditions which man himself had created 
 and would change. The dirge-like mono- 
 tone, reiterant of what sounds like a
 
 64 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 chant of despair, is not the acceptation 
 of the everlasting inevitability of human 
 suffering. It is a grave and solemn 
 statement, austere in its simplicity, of 
 social facts, as they exist, as they ought 
 not to exist, and as they need not exist. 
 The doctrine of necessitarianism, as im- 
 plying the permanence of injustice on 
 earth, was as revolting to Burns as the 
 doctrine of hell-fire hereafter. 
 
 He questioned the necessity for human 
 wrong as emphatically as he questioned 
 the necessity for Divine wrath. If in- 
 justice and wrong are inevitable, de- 
 signed from all eternity to all eternity, 
 why was the heaven-erected face of man 
 adorned with the smiles of love? Why 
 was an independent wish implanted in 
 the human mind ? Man's nature cries
 
 BROTHERHOOD 65 
 
 out against it, and Burns, in the very 
 act of describing the effects of social in- 
 justice, voices humanity's protest; the 
 same protest which is on the lips of the 
 workless man to-day, and puts power 
 into the Socialist movement the wide 
 world over. It is the same protest to 
 which he gives utterance in another 
 way in " The Twa Dogs." Brimful of 
 humour, and of inimitable characterisa- 
 tion both of dogs and men, this poem 
 is a veritable chapter of social history, 
 a revelation of the life of the common 
 people in the eighteenth century, and 
 also of the other people whose life was 
 that of the parasite ; types who, differ- 
 entiated only by changing fashion and 
 industrial variation, are to be found in 
 
 every society organised on the principle 
 
 E
 
 66 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 of production for profit. These two 
 poems, wide apart as they are in point 
 of style and colour the one sombre and 
 serious, the other humorous and serious 
 have this common characteristic, that 
 while laying bare human follies arising 
 out of social injustice they are free from 
 class bitterness. They do not inspire 
 to hatred. It is humanity that suffers, 
 and it is humanity that is to blame, if 
 blame there be. In "The Twa Dogs" 
 especially there is a great and kindly 
 human tolerance, 
 
 "For thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, 
 Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows." 
 
 Yet it is these same frank, rantin', ramblin' 
 billies whose social conduct gives force to 
 the impeachment that " Man's inhumanity 
 to man makes countless thousands mourn."
 
 BROTHERHOOD 67 
 
 It is as if Burns had anticipated the 
 modern Socialist maxim, " not the indi- 
 vidual but the system." Rich and poor 
 are alike demoralised by the foolish and 
 unjust social arrangements. The poor, the 
 common people, suffer most ; they suffer 
 all the time ; but the wrong is humanity's. 
 In brotherhood, and in brotherhood only, 
 lies the means of righting the wrong. 
 That was Burns's ideal. 
 
 It is not suggested that he had visualised 
 to his own mind the new social order 
 which would give reality to his ideal of 
 brotherhood. We are speaking, not of 
 a political economist, but of a poet, and 
 of a poet whose life, involving a never- 
 ceasing struggle merely to maintain a 
 footing upon mother earth, precluded all 
 opportunity even supposing he had pos-
 
 68 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 sessed the necessary temperament, and 
 the times had been ripe for that scientific 
 inquiry into social problems which even 
 the political economists had hardly begun. 
 But the fundamental facts which are the 
 basis of that inquiry were well known to 
 Burns. Too well known. We know 
 that in the later years of his life he had 
 read at least twice over Adam Smith's 
 " Wealth of Nations," borrowed from his 
 friend, Graham of Fintry. He did not, 
 however, require Adam Smith to explain 
 to him that riches and poverty are corre- 
 lated as cause and effect. That was 
 one of the lessons he had been learning 
 from his infancy in the hardest of schools. 
 Nor did he require Adam Smith to prove 
 to him that labour is the source of wealth. 
 He had himself stated this, both in his
 
 BROTHERHOOD 69 
 
 poems and in his letters. The following 
 passage from one of his letters to Mrs. 
 Dunlop is a definite and clear statement 
 of the relations between labour and capital, 
 and would fall quite naturally from the 
 lips of any twentieth-century Socialist : 
 "'Tis now about the term day, and 
 there has been a revolution among those 
 creatures who, though in appearance par- 
 takers, and equally noble partakers of 
 the same nature with Madame, are from 
 time to time their nerves, their sinews, 
 their health, strength, wisdom, experience, 
 genius, time, nay, a good part of their 
 very thoughts sold for months and 
 years, not only to the necessities, the 
 conveniences, but the caprices of the 
 important few;" and to Mr. Peter Hill 
 he wrote, " I do not think that avarice
 
 70 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 of the good things we have is born 
 with us ; but we are placed here amid 
 so much nakedness and hunger, and 
 poverty and want, that we are under a 
 damning necessity of studying selfish- 
 ness, in order that we may exist." 
 
 There is plenty of evidence to show 
 that he had a clear perception of the 
 economic cause of poverty, and also a 
 conception, if not of the actual remedial 
 processes, certainly of the principle upon 
 which those processes must be based. 
 Professor Dugald Stewart expressed sur- 
 prise that Burns had formed some con- 
 ception of the " doctrine of association," 
 a surprise which illustrates naively the 
 aloofness of the academic mind. The 
 doctrine of association, whether of ideas 
 or persons, is simply the philosophical
 
 BROTHERHOOD 71 
 
 formula for the poetic ideal which the 
 wide world over is linked with the name 
 of Robert Burns. In that ideal is em- 
 bodied the principle of all social progress. 
 For if brotherhood be the ideal, it is 
 also, though it seems a paradox, the 
 means towards the ideal. Only by 
 brotherhood can brotherhood be estab- 
 lished. It is impossible to conceive of 
 any other way. In the beginning it 
 may be a brotherhood of defence, as of 
 the family, or of the clan ; but in the 
 end it must be a brotherhood of love. 
 That is the poet's conception. The 
 " doctrine of association," says the philo- 
 sopher. " Organisation and co-operation," 
 says the Socialist. " Brotherhood," says 
 the poet. It is the business of the 
 Socialist to give effect to the poet's
 
 72 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 ideal ; and it is very doubtful if this 
 great principle could have got itself so 
 widely spread and so deeply rooted in 
 the hearts of men if this Robert Burns 
 had not been there in the eighteenth 
 century to give it utterance in such a 
 way as to appeal to the mind of the 
 common people. In the directness and 
 simplicity of the appeal lies its strength 
 and power. " It's comin' yet, for a' that ! " 
 Faith and confidence are more than half 
 the battle. The fact that these words 
 have been singing round the world for a 
 hundred years is worth more to the cause 
 of human progress than whole libraries 
 of philosophy. They are, in truth, the 
 sum of all true social philosophies.
 
 BURNS THE REBEL
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 
 
 HAT this man, to whose nature 
 liberty was as the very breath 
 of life, should, when the time 
 
 came, find himself in active sympathy 
 with the French Revolution and with 
 the American Revolution was inevitable ; 
 just as inevitable as that the present- 
 day British Socialist should find himself 
 in sympathy with the revolutionists of 
 Russia, with the educationists of Spain, 
 and with the movements for self-govern- 
 ment in Ireland and India. And it was 
 just as natural that the authorities of his
 
 76 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 time should seek to repress and suppress 
 Robert Burns as it is that the govern- 
 ments of to-day should misrepresent and 
 if possible suppress Socialist sympathy 
 with these latter movements. The 
 analogy should not be lost sight of 
 either by Socialists or by the critics of 
 Socialists. 
 
 The Reform associations and corre- 
 sponding societies stood relatively in 
 much the same position towards the 
 ruling powers as do the Socialist organi- 
 sations of to-day. And just as history 
 has justified the former, so will it 
 justify the latter. Burns's biographers 
 have, I think without exception, chosen 
 to adopt a tone of apology concerning 
 his attitude at this period of his life,
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 77 
 
 as if his outspokenness were some kind 
 of lapse from common sense, a foolish, 
 irresponsible indiscretion, excusable in a 
 man like Burns, but highly regrettable. 
 
 There is no ground for such a view. 
 Burns's attitude was entirely consistent 
 with his past life, with his own nature, 
 and with the spirit of his poetic work. 
 The same impulse which in the earlier 
 Mauchline days threw him on the side of 
 the religious reformers, in the Dumfries 
 period threw him on the side of the 
 revolutionists. Had he failed to choose 
 his side, and to choose the right side, 
 he would have been recreant to those 
 very principles of liberty of which his 
 genius has made him, in literature at 
 least, one of the chief protagonists.
 
 78 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 He could do naught else. It was the 
 common people who had risen, 'and he 
 was one of them. His sympathy with 
 the revolutionists was the proof that 
 whatever modification of outlook had 
 come to him in his brief passage through 
 the world of wealth and fashion, his 
 belief in freedom and his love for the 
 common people had remained steadfast, 
 uncorrupt and incorruptible. The Burns 
 who wrote the " Ode to Liberty," the 
 "Welcome to Despots," and the ''Ballad 
 on the American War," was the same 
 Burns who wrote the " Holy Fair " and 
 " The Ordination." 
 
 But there was a difference. Some of 
 the power had gone out of him. His 
 faith in freedom was undimmed, but he
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 79 
 
 himself had lost some of his freedom. 
 And he had lost it even through the 
 very means he had taken to secure it. 
 It was to secure his own personal inde- 
 pendence that he took service in the 
 Excise. To " mak' siccar " at least 
 against the extreme rigours of poverty 
 for his wife and family, and thereby hold 
 himself free in his hours of leisure to 
 follow the muse without fear or favour : 
 that was why Robert Burns became a 
 gauger. And this that was meant for 
 the rock of his independence became 
 as a rock of serfdom to which he was 
 chained. Every word spoken in sym- 
 pathy with Washington and the American 
 patriots, every word spoken in sympathy 
 with the common people in France was a
 
 8o ROBERT BURNS 
 
 word spoken against the British Govern- 
 ment, his employers, who held control 
 of his material destinies. Had he been 
 worldly wise and a time-server, as some 
 of his commentators seem to think he 
 ought to have been, he would have 
 remained silent. That was impossible 
 for Robert Burns. So he spoke out, 
 and there was probably more moral 
 courage in the speaking out than he 
 has ever received credit for. In the 
 early days when he struck out against 
 bigotry he was unknown, and his public 
 was only a small Ayrshire parish. Now 
 he was well known and famous, and his 
 audience was the whole nation. He 
 knew this quite well. And he knew 
 also that the nation, officially through its
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 81 
 
 Government and through its governing 
 classes, was opposed to the opinions 
 which he felt bound to express. 
 
 Yet there can be no doubt that the 
 knowledge of the possible consequences 
 to his family, the thought of what the 
 loss of his one meagre source of income 
 would mean to them, limited and curbed 
 the force of his expression. And when 
 the official coercion was applied as it 
 was bound to be he made his submission, 
 and democracy's greatest voice was stifled 
 at the moment when democracy had most 
 need of it. That, to me, is the real 
 tragedy of Robert Burns. In his soul 
 he was humiliated, and he was a proud 
 man this peasant. 
 
 "Burns was a poor man by birth and 
 
 F
 
 82 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 an exciseman by necessity ; but I will 
 say it the sterling of his honest worth 
 no poverty could debase, and his inde- 
 pendent British mind oppression might 
 bend, but it could not subdue." Thus 
 he wrote to John Francis Erskine, under 
 stress of the occasion, and in anticipation 
 of posterity's verdict. 
 
 The situation could not be better de- 
 scribed. He was bent, but not broken. 
 And the bending of Robert Burns must 
 have meant for him a process of mental 
 conflict which one would rather not think 
 of. Nevertheless, he left no room for 
 doubt, either to his contemporaries or 
 to posterity, as to his attitude towards 
 those great events which were convulsing 
 Europe and laying the foundations of a
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 83 
 
 new nation in America. In these days 
 all kinds of pretenders seek to associate 
 themselves with the name of Robert 
 Burns ; but no defender of class privi- 
 lege, no opponent of liberty, no traitor 
 to democracy has a right to claim that 
 Robert Burns is on his side. 
 
 Not the least bitter element in the 
 situation was the fact that his country, 
 Scotland, the land he loved, was through 
 its governing classes suborned to the 
 cause of the oppressor. He was, in his 
 blood and marrow, a patriot. Love of 
 country was like a religion to him. It 
 was his daily theme. But his patriotism 
 was no narrow, selfish creed. Love 
 of country with him was simply love 
 of liberty expressed in the terms of
 
 84 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 nationalism. A country enslaved was a 
 country to be made free. And it was 
 this beloved country of his, his " auld 
 respectit mither," the land whose greatest 
 glory it was that it had stood among 
 nations for the principle of independence. 
 It was this dear land that, in the same 
 hour 
 
 "Which saw the generous English name 
 Link't with such damned deeds of everlasting shame," 
 
 was made to associate itself with the 
 infamy and dishonour. 
 
 " Thee, Caledonia ! Thy wild heaths among, 
 Famed for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song, 
 
 To thee I turn with swimming eyes ! 
 Where is that soul of Freedom fled ? 
 Immingled with the mighty dead 
 
 Beneath that hallowed turf where Wallace lies." 
 
 Strange it is, that amid all the thousand
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 85 
 
 annual orations to the memory of Burns 
 the patriot, Burns the poet of brother- 
 hood, Burns the nature-lover, there should 
 seem to be a common conspiracy to 
 becloud and hide the figure of Burns 
 the rebel. 
 
 We know, and Burns knew, that the 
 common people, both in England and 
 Scotland, were guiltless of the crimes 
 against liberty committed by their govern- 
 ments that they, in fact, were amongst 
 the sufferers from those same crimes ; 
 and that wherever possible, and by the 
 only methods available, they were making 
 their protest. They had on their own 
 account the same quarrel with their 
 governments as their compeers in Europe. 
 Liberty was being throttled, and nowhere
 
 86 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 more ruthlessly than in Burns's own 
 country, where packed juries and vin- 
 dictively brutal judges were overriding 
 even the not very tender existing laws, 
 to intimidate the Reform leaders and 
 terrorise the people. It was fated that 
 Burns should never get into close touch 
 with the Reform movement. By the 
 time it had emerged convulsively from 
 the embryonic stage his race was nearly 
 run. While the Reform leaders were 
 being transported to Botany Bay he was 
 at hand-grips once more with poverty 
 and with the unmistakable symptoms 
 of deadly disease ; precariously holding 
 house and home together, and still writing 
 immortal verse on fifty pounds a year, 
 and even that being threatened. He
 
 BURNS THE REBEL 87 
 
 had been even poorer than that in his 
 time, in the years when his father had 
 to fight the same heart-breaking battle. 
 
 " The piebald jacket let me patch once more," 
 he wrote to Graham of Fintry, 
 
 " On eighteenpence a week Pve lived before? 
 
 But that heroic alternative was not 
 possible now with a wife and family 
 dependent upon him. And knowing 
 what we know of Burns, of his nature, 
 and of his life's record, we come to the 
 conclusion that it was poverty, and that 
 alone, that in the last years of his life 
 lost Burns to the Reform movement.
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 
 
 JUMANITY has a heavy in- 
 dictment against this evil which 
 we call poverty. It is no 
 mere idle speculation to say that the 
 whole world was the loser through the 
 poverty of Robert Burns. We may set 
 aside the plea so often put forward, that 
 the hard conditions of the peasant's lot 
 were the natural nursing-ground for his 
 particular kind of genius. 
 
 That theory may suit men like Lord 
 Rosebery, who can look at poverty philo- 
 sophically, from afar off; or men like 
 91
 
 92 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who can look 
 backwards and downwards upon poverty. 
 It is not in accord with the laws of 
 growth and development. The fruits of 
 Burns's genius would have been greater 
 had the material conditions of his life 
 been better. Poverty never was good 
 for man nor woman. The poverty- 
 stricken man of genius is as an eagle 
 with leaden-weighted pinions. He may 
 soar high, but his flight is neither so 
 lofty nor so far as it would have been 
 without the fetters. Carlyle, himself 
 peasant's son and man of genius, and 
 to this day the one man who has looked 
 with true sympathetic insight into the 
 soul of this other peasant's son, speak- 
 ing on this very aspect of the question,
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 93 
 and with reference to Burns's father, 
 says : " Had this William Burns's small 
 seven acres of nursery - ground anywise 
 prospered, the boy Robert had been sent 
 to school, had struggled forward as so 
 many weaker men do, to some univer- 
 sity, come forth not as a rustic wonder, 
 but as a regular, well-trained, intellectual 
 worker, and changed the whole course of 
 British literature for it lay in him to 
 have done this." That is to say, had 
 Burns's father been secure against poverty, 
 his son Robert would have changed the 
 whole course of British literature. 
 
 In these pages I have been arguing 
 that even as it was he did that to 
 some extent. He changed the outlook, 
 and gave a new direction to the stream
 
 94 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 of poetic thought ; nay, more, he changed 
 the nature of the stream itself, giving 
 it that democratic and humanitarian im- 
 pulse 'and colour whose course and char- 
 acter can be traced through the whole of 
 nineteenth-century literature, " as streams 
 their channels deeper wear." But there 
 can be no question that had his poverty 
 been less, his powers would have been 
 greater. Doubtless Carlyle was right. A 
 university education would have been 
 of great value to Robert Burns. We 
 can judge of that by the heroic use 
 which he made of the intermitting edu- 
 cational opportunities that came his way. 
 But deprivation of university training 
 was not the worst turn that poverty did 
 for Burns. It beset him at every step
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 95 
 
 of his journey through life. And, especi- 
 ally at that supreme period of crisis 
 when his whole future career depended 
 upon what step he should take next, 
 poverty drove him into a corner, and 
 left him without an alternative between 
 ruin and the patronage of the rich. Had 
 not Burns been driven to desperate straits, 
 the second edition of his poems would 
 have been published, like his first, from 
 Kilmarnock, and. there would never have 
 been any dedication to the noblemen 
 and gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt 
 those " distinguished members of the 
 northern aristocracy," as Lockhart styles 
 them whose distinction would have died 
 with them but for their accidental asso- 
 ciation with the ploughman. We are
 
 96 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 here, of course, in the region of the 
 "might have been," but it is a reason- 
 able conjecture that if the Edinburgh 
 adventure could have been avoided, if 
 Burns could have gone on steadily de- 
 veloping his powers at home in Ayrshire, 
 maturing his genius in the same soil 
 and atmosphere in which it had been 
 nourished, his subsequent career, though 
 less cometary and wayward, would have 
 been quite as brilliant, and more satis- 
 factory. The Edinburgh period was the 
 least prolific, poetically, of his life, and 
 its experiences and associations the least 
 useful and stimulating. He himself was 
 conscious of this, and after the first six 
 months was sick of it, and looking for a 
 way out, and for some secure anchorage
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 97 
 from whence he could earn a competent 
 living without hindrance to the free exer- 
 
 O 
 
 cise of his poetic faculty. This was 
 the one thing, apparently, which neither 
 his literary patrons nor the northern 
 aristocracy could give him. They did 
 what they could in their well-meaning, 
 condescending, patrician way. Let us 
 give them all due credit and honour. 
 Their help was necessary to Robert Burns 
 at this juncture, and they gave it, some 
 of them generously ; but it was neces- 
 sary only because of the poverty of Robert 
 Burns. It is not the Edinburgh gentry 
 I am indicting, but poverty. As he 
 himself said later, when forced to take 
 refuge in the Excise, "The question is 
 
 not at what door of fortune's palace 
 
 G
 
 9 8 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 shall we enter in ; but what doors does 
 she open to us ? " This was the only 
 door that opened to him, and poverty 
 drove him through it. 
 
 But our indictment against poverty in 
 the case of Robert Burns goes much 
 deeper, and it is not quite the same as 
 Carlyle's. It is not that poverty with- 
 held from him a university education, 
 but that it withheld from him good health 
 and length of days. Poverty killed him, 
 as it has killed, and is killing daily, its 
 tens of thousands of men and women 
 of genius, and men and women of no 
 genius. 
 
 The span of a man's life is threescore 
 years and ten. Burns died at thirty- 
 seven. He died at that age, not because
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 99 
 
 he had lived fast, but because he had 
 lived hard. It was not fast living nor 
 deep drinking that killed Burns. It was 
 overwork. 
 
 Poverty took him in his tender years 
 and set him there in the Ayrshire fields 
 behind the plough. Ere his limbs were 
 grown, ere his bones were set, poverty 
 asked him to do more than * a grown 
 man's work. It exposed him to the 
 winter's cold, to the summer's heat, to the 
 heavy " trauchlin' " toil in the ploughing- 
 field, to the long day's darg in har- 
 vest time. Poverty sowed the seeds of 
 disease in his body ere he had well 
 begun to live. Poverty took him in his 
 boyhood's days, and cast over his youth- 
 ful shoulders a burden of care such as in
 
 ioo ROBERT BURNS 
 
 a well-ordered society no human being, 
 old or young, will be asked to carry. 
 When William Burns stood, as no man 
 should have to stand before another 
 man, "tholin' the factor's snash," Robert, 
 in spirit, stood with him, and the iron 
 entered into his soul. It was of these 
 things Burns died at thirty-seven. 
 
 Rheumatic fever, consumption ; what- 
 ever the medical diagnosis, Burns died 
 of poverty. I will be told that he was 
 not alone ; that many others have had 
 a similar fate. I know. That is part of 
 the case for Socialism. But at present 
 we are speaking of Robert Burns and 
 the loss to literature and to humanity 
 hrough his early death. He came of 
 good stock. He had behind him many
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 101 
 
 generations of the open-air life. He 
 ought to have lived long. We know 
 the kind and the quantity of his literary 
 output during the years in which he 
 lived, but even that does not give us 
 the measure of his possible output dur- 
 ing the years in which he ought to have 
 lived. He had only just passed from 
 the years of receptivity. All that fine 
 work of his was no more than his literary 
 apprenticeship, work produced for the 
 most part responsive to the casual events 
 of every passing day : the quarrels of 
 sectarians, the amours of lads and lasses, 
 the carousals of beggars, the singing of 
 birds, the murmuring of streams, the 
 whistling of the winds and the howling 
 of the storms, the shining day and the
 
 102 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 gloomy night. His work as we have 
 it is the recording of passing impres- 
 sions, impressions which his genius trans- 
 formed into works of art, most of them 
 imperishable. But, in the natural course 
 of life, the days of high purpose and 
 supreme achievement lay all before him, 
 the days that never dawned ; for poverty 
 had killed him, and in killing him robbed 
 the world of who shall say how much 
 great poetic thought and noble inspiration. 
 There is no need to blame his contem- 
 poraries, the individual lairds, and factors, 
 and government supervisors. They were, 
 as we most of us are, but twigs on the social 
 tree. Nor is there any need to indulge 
 in retrospective pity for the man Robert 
 Burns. We are not now considering
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 103 
 
 Burns's loss, but humanity's loss. He, 
 indeed, got more out of life than most 
 men get. He got the love of women 
 and the friendship of men, both of them 
 in abundance. He got these because his 
 nature would not be denied ; because on 
 the social and passional sides his nature 
 was at once winning and masterful, and, 
 in the very reaction from the too stern 
 discipline of material poverty, demanded 
 full measure of compensation, and got it 
 while life lasted. We are considering 
 now the economic environments which 
 conditioned his life and shortened it ; not 
 the influence of Bonnie Jean and High- 
 land Mary, or of Willie Nicol and the 
 barley-bree, but of the heavy toil, and the 
 high-rented land, and the hard bargain.
 
 104 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Quite a prosaic question this with 
 which we are faced in Burns's life and 
 death, but one which involves the future 
 of poetry and art the future, indeed, 
 of civilisation. The question is I am 
 stating it crudely, I know can social 
 systems be much longer regarded as 
 tolerable, which in their very nature 
 hinder genius in every department from 
 giving of its best ? We have to sit in 
 judgment upon ourselves collectively ; upon 
 society ; and we have got to consider 
 whether there is not now sufficient common 
 sense in the world, or in our corner of it, 
 to shape and mould a system of society 
 which will not stone its prophets, nor make 
 sport of its poets, nor starve its children, 
 nor degrade its common people.
 
 THE MIGHT HAVE BEEN 105 
 
 And this last is the most important, 
 comprehending as it does all the others. 
 For if it be true that the literature and 
 art of the future must be democratic 
 alike in its source and its tendencies, at 
 once revealing and inspiring the life of 
 the common people, then in proportion 
 as that life is healthy, vigorous, and free, 
 in the same proportion will literature and 
 art be virile, original, and noble.
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 
 
 T is with some fear and trem- 
 bling I venture now to write 
 concerning the poetic quality 
 of Burns's work, concerning his place and 
 value as inspired literary artist. It is 
 of his power as a social force I have 
 hitherto been writing, a power derived, 
 of course, from his poetic force, and 
 not separable therefrom, though it seems 
 to me to have been so separated or 
 altogether ignored by most of his com- 
 mentators, even by those whose appreci- 
 ation is most unrestrained. That, indeed, 
 
 109
 
 no ROBERT BURNS 
 
 is my only apology for the writing of 
 this book. 
 
 But of Burns the artist, of Burns the 
 poet, how shall one hazard an opinion who 
 is neither artist, nor poet, nor practised 
 literary critic ? I suppose it ought to 
 be sufficient for me that he has been 
 acclaimed as great poet and artist by 
 other great poets and artists, and by all 
 who are competent to judge of poetry 
 and art. But it is not sufficient for me. 
 I am not content merely to know that 
 Shelley and Byron, and Wordsworth and 
 Browning, and Carlyle and Tennyson 
 have all hailed him as a master. I want 
 to know why he has charms for me, why 
 he has charms for the common people. 
 For it has to be acknowledged that
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN in 
 
 while these other masters receive their 
 homage almost exclusively from amongst 
 that class ever growing in numbers, let 
 us hope who love literature for litera- 
 ture's sake, Burns has won to himself 
 the allegiance, not to say the affections, 
 of great numbers who, outside of his 
 sphere of influence, have little taste for 
 literature. He holds the others too, it 
 must be remembered, the cultured, book- 
 learned people. His grip on the common 
 folk is therefore not won by any debase- 
 ment of the standard of literary work- 
 manship, or by any sacrifice of artistic 
 ideals. I want to know the secret of his 
 power, and I want to know it, not from 
 the literary critics, but at first hand if I 
 can. Perhaps we shall get on the trail
 
 ii2 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 if we take Burns on that side where he 
 is said to be most open to literary dis- 
 paragement, where he is weakest rather 
 than where he is strongest. " He has, 
 moreover, little or no spirituality," says 
 Walt Whitman, in an estimate which, 
 though appreciative, is curiously patronis- 
 ing in tone, coming from such a source. 
 " He has, moreover, little or no spiritu- 
 ality. This last is his mortal flaw and 
 defect, tried by highest standards." I 
 suppose it is true ; yet I call to mind 
 Byron's retort upon his publisher : " You 
 have so many 'divine* poems is it noth- 
 ing to have written a human one?" We 
 have so many poets of " spirituality " 
 is it nothing to have a poet of humanity ? 
 Therein, probably, lies some part of his
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 113 
 
 affinity with the common people ; for, if 
 the truth must be told, the common 
 people also have "little or no spiritu- 
 ality." They are flesh and blood. Their 
 emotions are human emotions, not super- 
 human nor transcendental ; pertaining to 
 the world of which they know rather 
 than to ethereal, imaginary worlds of 
 which they do not know the loves 
 and hates, and fears and joys, and 
 sorrows of common life, out of which 
 are materialised tragedy and comedy, and 
 laughter and tears, and song. These 
 things may not be described as spiritu- 
 ality in the esoteric sense. Yet they 
 are of the spirit : the spirit of humanity. 
 Burns trod the solid earth, and never at 
 
 any time had his head in the clouds, 
 
 H
 
 ii4 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 else he had been no poet of the common 
 people. He was no ecstatic dreamer of 
 dreams, losing himself in those realms of 
 poesy whose atmosphere is part specu- 
 lative philosophy and part mysticism. 
 Earth and sea and sky, and the heart 
 of man, these he saw vividly, nor sought 
 to penetrate beyond : 
 
 " Farewell, thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye 
 
 skies, 
 
 Now gay with the bright setting sun ; 
 Farewell, loves and friendships, ye dear, tender 
 
 ties, 
 Our race of existence is run." 
 
 These four lines encompass Burns' s entire 
 poetic theme. Life and death, and their 
 accessories. The world, and all that 
 therein is. This world, his own small 
 . corner of it, held enough of beauty and
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 115 
 
 pain and passion for him. He had no 
 need probably had not the power and 
 inspiration to build up fantastic other- 
 worlds and fill them with imaginary pains 
 and passions. Therein may lie, as Whit- 
 man says, " his mortal flaw and defect." 
 Yet, may it not be that in that same 
 "mortal flaw" rests the secret of his 
 immortal fame, the " touch of nature " 
 illumined with genius, which makes him 
 kin to the common people for all time. 
 
 And there are compensations. Burns 
 has that which is denied to some of the 
 poets so richly endowed with spirituality, 
 that which Whitman himself did not 
 possess, or at least did not reveal ; 
 that which was granted to Chaucer and 
 Shakespere and withheld from Shelley
 
 n6 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 and Keats. He had humour. I have 
 heard it conjectured that if to the in- 
 tensity and lofty imagination of Shelley 
 we could have had conjoined the humour 
 of Burns, the result would have been a 
 man of genius greater than Shakespere. 
 That, of course, is mere hypothetical 
 guesswork, which has no ending, and 
 leads nowhere. But there can be no 
 question that it is the possession of this 
 faculty of humour by Burns, combined 
 with his power of characterisation, which 
 has led some not incompetent critics to 
 classify his genius as Shakesperian. 
 
 I am making no such claim. I am 
 merely claiming that we have here a 
 more than adequate offset to the lack of 
 spirituality. There are, indeed, experts
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 117 
 
 in psychological hair-splitting who assert 
 that humour itself is a kind of spiritu- 
 ality, and along that line of reasoning 
 it might be maintained that " Tarn o' 
 Shanter" and "The Jolly Beggars" are 
 quite as mentally stimulating as " Epi- 
 pipsychidion " and " Endymion." 
 
 For my present purpose these differ- 
 entiations and comparisons do not matter. 
 Burns is Burns, and Shelley is Shelley, 
 and Keats is Keats. There is one 
 glory of the sun and another of the 
 stars, but which is which in the poetic 
 firmament is for most of us determined 
 by our point of view. I fancy that for 
 the common people Burns is the sun, 
 and these others are brilliant but rather 
 coldly-shining stars ; the reason being,
 
 n8 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 that he is nearer to them. They can feel 
 his warmth, and enjoy his light, and 
 they and he have certain attributes in 
 common, one of the chief of which is 
 this sense or faculty of humour. The 
 common people have not much leisure 
 for dreaming dreams or seeing visions, 
 but they can laugh, and they can make 
 laughter. They can make laughter some- 
 times even out of their own miseries and 
 misfortunes. 
 
 Burns did this, but he did more. He 
 made laughter out of their most serious 
 conventional beliefs, and revealed these 
 beliefs for what they really were super- 
 stitions. The humour of Burns when 
 expressed in satire almost amounts to 
 a kind of national introspection. The
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 119 
 
 Scottish people laughed and are laugh- 
 ing still at the grotesque conception of 
 religion as satirised by Burns, but when 
 they found that they were laughing at 
 themselves that grotesquerie was doomed. 
 Burns did what the great poets of spiritu- 
 ality could not do, because they had no 
 humour : he initiated a spiritual revolu- 
 tion. Milton made Satan a Titanic 
 rebel ; Burns made him a laughing- 
 stock. Dante made Hades magnificently 
 terrible; Burns abolished it. For who 
 would be terrified by so familiar a fiend 
 as "Auld Nickie-ben?" The everlast- 
 ing fire lost its terrors when it became 
 a " lowin' heugh," and with the removal 
 of the "fear o' hell," clarity of vision in 
 matters spiritual became possible. The
 
 120 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 humour of Burns was a freshening wind 
 lifting the theological mists and fogs 
 from the human mind, and thereby 
 opening out new and wider spiritual 
 horizons. 
 
 And it is withal a rare, versatile, 
 catholic humour, generous as well as 
 sarcastic, kindly as well as caustic, fit- 
 ting itself to all occasions and to every 
 shade of character. Everywhere it " mak's 
 itsel' at hame." At kirk or market, at 
 the plough tail or at the smiddy fire, 
 by the ingle-neuk or in the tavern. It 
 smites like Burnewin's forehammer, and 
 every stroke " comes on like death." It 
 jags like a Scotch thistle, caresses like 
 a mither's sang, or insinuates itself 
 persuasively like a soft-blowing westlan'
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 121 
 
 win'. It " dinner's wi' a lord," goes 
 wooin' with peasant lads and lasses, has 
 whimsical greetings for the world's new- 
 comers, and hobnobs in "twa-handed 
 crack" with the king of terrors him- 
 self. 
 
 And for all its free-flowing abandon 
 nay, because of that we know it for the 
 output of an artist, for the product of a 
 conscientious craftsman who, even while 
 he deprecatingly described his work as 
 "stringin' blethers up in rhyme," took 
 infinite pains with the workmanship and 
 pride in the result. His style, vocabu- 
 lary, rhymes and measures reflect his 
 themes and moods. His medium and 
 materials correspond to his purpose, 
 which is surely the essential thing in
 
 122 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 art. The words " come skelpin', rank 
 and file," the right, true, natural words 
 as they might have fallen shrewdly from 
 the lips of workaday men and women, 
 and have all the effect of spontaneity ; 
 as involuntary as laughter itself, and as 
 infectious. 
 
 This indeed is the impression pro- 
 duced by nearly all Burns's work spon- 
 taneity, involuntariness, freshness. There 
 may have been midnight oil, but you 
 can never feel the smell of it. Instead 
 there is the fragrance of the woods, the 
 smell of the earth, and let it be admitted 
 quite freely the aroma of Scotch whisky ; 
 but always natural simplicity of expres- 
 sion. It is this quality which makes 
 him the most tuneful of all the lyrists.
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 123 
 
 His melody is unforced. Like his humour 
 it seems to come easily, naturally, as the 
 song of a laverock, as the song of a 
 mother to her bairn, as the song of a 
 lover to his lass. That is really what 
 Burns's songs are. They are not merely 
 Burns's songs. They are the songs of 
 birds and streams and mothers and 
 lovers innumerable. They are musical 
 and natural because they have their 
 source in music and in nature. He has 
 himself given away his secret most 
 melodiously : 
 
 " On braes when we please then, 
 
 We'll sit an' sawth a tune ; 
 Syne rhyme till't, we'll time tilPt, 
 An' sing't when we hae dune." 
 
 Surely this is the natural way of the
 
 124 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 maker of songs. The " sowthing," lilt- 
 ing, or humming of tunes is the in- 
 stinctive habit of all healthy 'human 
 beings. Wherever you find a healthy 
 man, woman, or child, there is a tune 
 -either on the lips or in the heart. The 
 mother " sowths " or " croons " to her 
 bairn, the workman to his task, the 
 lover to his sweetheart, and the whole 
 world of common folk "sowth" the 
 tunes that have come to them, they 
 know not how, like the air they breathe. 
 This they did at least in the age of 
 Robert Burns, until the factory system 
 came and we had to get our tunes 
 "sowthed" for us by machinery, by 
 barrel-organs and gramophones. Burns 
 sowthed and sowthed the old, old tunes
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 125 
 
 which were the common heritage of the 
 common people. The "mither tongue," 
 the inspired thought, and the cadences 
 of the familiar airs joined themselves 
 together, and in the threefold communion 
 we got that supreme achievement in 
 lyrical art, the songs of Robert Burns. 
 Burns is the folk-singer turned artist. 
 
 And because of that, because he is the 
 singer of the songs of common folk, his 
 appeal is of thei kind that is for ever 
 contemporaneous, not dependent for its 
 vitality upon its association with any 
 passing or past phase of history, or with 
 any particular school of culture ; not 
 dependent either upon the fact that it 
 reflects the habits and customs of a 
 given period, but upon the fact that it
 
 126 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 reflects the emotional instincts of the 
 common people at all periods. It is of 
 course of the highest value, from the 
 point of view of Scottish nationality, 
 that the national characteristics and 
 ways of life should have found poetic 
 expression just at the time when, in 
 obedience to the pressure of industrial 
 development, they were about to undergo 
 some measure of at least external 
 change, and it is of great importance 
 for the preservation of Scottish nation- 
 ality that the very spirit of the nation, 
 its love of independence and liberty, 
 should have been enshrined in never- 
 dying song. It is these services that 
 establish him in the mind of the whole 
 world as the national poet of Scotland.
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 127 
 
 But along with these there goes that 
 expression of those natural impulses 
 which are not determined by national 
 or local environment, which are common 
 to humanity everywhere, and have their 
 source in the universal human heart. 
 Artificialities, and fashions, and laws, 
 these may come and go and come 
 again ; but the way of a man with a 
 maid, the way of a mother with her 
 child, the way of a friend with his friend, 
 the companionship of man with man, the 
 companionship of man with nature, these 
 remain. The love-makings among the 
 Ayrshire " Rigs o' Barley,'* or on the 
 "Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon," 
 have their counterparts the wide world 
 over; and in every land, John Anderson
 
 128 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 and his jo spend canty days wi' ane 
 anither, and go hand in hand down the 
 hill of life. It is the rendering in song 
 of all these commonplace and because 
 commonplace, therefore sacred human 
 experiences which constitutes Burns, by 
 universal consent, the poet of humanity. 
 The poet of humanity, and something 
 more. For he was among the first to 
 bring the lower animals into the fellow- 
 ship. His sense of brotherhood was as 
 wide as that. It was not restricted to 
 the human species. In these days the 
 endowment with human attributes of 
 what we are pleased to call the brute 
 creation has become quite a familiar 
 phase in literature, and has been carried 
 by Maeterlinck and Rostand into the 

 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 129 
 region of the symbolical. It was Robert 
 Burns who led the way. It is con- 
 ceivable, for example, that " Rab and 
 his Friends" would never have found a 
 place in literature had they not been 
 preceded by "Luath" and "Caesar" and 
 their friends. If the birds of the air 
 and the beasts of the fields could find 
 articulate voice, or if we could imagine 
 them as capable of handing on bird 
 and beast traditions from generation to 
 generation, surely the most grateful of 
 their memories would have root in the 
 time when the ploughman poet walked 
 the Ayrshire fields. For ever since that 
 time there has been a growing tender- 
 ness on the part of human beings to- 
 wards the more helpless constituents in 
 
 i
 
 i 3 o ROBERT BURNS 
 
 the scheme of nature. In Burns the 
 predatory and primitive instincts of Man 
 the Hunter disappear, and are replaced 
 by the cultivated kindliness of Man the 
 Brother 
 
 " Avaunt, away ! the cruel sway, 
 
 Tyrannic man's dominion ; 
 The sportsman's joy, the murd'ring cry, 
 The flutt'ring, gory pinion ! " 
 
 Here again we have Burns in the 
 character of folk-singer. It is in the 
 comradeship of common folk that the 
 auld farmer's mare, and the ploughman's 
 collie, and the "pet yowe," and even 
 the field-mouse, enter into the songs of 
 Burns. And not only the domesticated 
 associates of the hearth and the stable 
 and the farm-steading, but the wild, 
 free " commoners of air," and the very
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 131 
 
 troutlings in the running streams, are 
 sharers in the kinship 
 
 " On ilka hand the burnies trot, 
 And meet below my theekit cot ; 
 The scented birk and hawthorn white 
 Across the pool their arms unite, 
 Alike to screen the birdie's nest 
 And little fishes' caller rest ; 
 The sun blinks kindly in the biel', 
 Where blythe I turn my spinnin'-wheel. 
 
 On lofty aiks the cushats wail, 
 And echo cons the doolfu' tale ; 
 The lintwhites in the hazel braes. 
 Delighted, rival ither's lays ; 
 The craik amang the claver hay, 
 The pai 'trick whirriri o'er the ley, 
 The swallow jinkin' round my shiel, 
 Amuse me at my spinnin'-wheel." 
 
 This is a true folk-song ; one of many 
 in which the peasant-world and the world 
 of nature intermingle and unify. Non- 
 sentient nature also comes into the 
 brotherhood : the woods and streams,
 
 i 3 2 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 and moors and mosses, and perfume- 
 laden winds, they too are fraternal, not 
 less than the "ourie cattle," the "jinkin' 
 hares," the "deep-toned plovers," and 
 " happin' wee things." With Burns, 
 nature is not a world apart and outside 
 of man 
 
 " O Nature ! a' thy shews an' forms 
 To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms ! 
 Whether the summer kindly warms, 
 
 Wi' life an' light, 
 Or winter howls wi' gusty storms, 
 
 The lang, dark night." 
 
 With Burns, nature is friendly, com- 
 panionable, intimate, familiar ; relating 
 itself continually to the moods and 
 passions and experiences of common 
 folk, either in association or in contrast 
 
 " How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
 And I sae weary > fit o' care 1 "
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 133 
 
 And hereat, I think, we get to the 
 very essence of Burns's genius. He 
 relates himself to the common people, 
 just as nature does. His genius is 
 nature song-embodied ; nature, as the 
 common people know it. He responds 
 and corresponds to their intuitions, im- 
 pulses, and feelings. His power and 
 strength and music ; his humour and 
 mirth and tenderness ; his occasional 
 grossness ; his directness and simplicity, 
 are reflections of the same qualities in 
 the common people. 
 
 In them these qualities are diffused, 
 distributed here and there. In him they 
 are fused, harmonised, and intensified. 
 He is a Representative Man, alike in 
 his nationalism and in his humanism.
 
 134 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 He is representative at once of the 
 spirit of the Scottish nation and of the 
 spirit of common humanity. This may 
 not be testing him by " highest stan- 
 dards," but it is testing him by standards 
 that are permanent. 
 
 The power and influence of Robert 
 Burns cannot die until the idea of 
 nationality has died out of the minds 
 of the Scottish people, nor until the 
 idea of Brotherhood has lost its hold 
 upon the human race. And as both 
 these ideas are imperishable, so also is 
 the power of Robert Burns. 
 
 "The poet," says Emerson, "is the 
 eternal man." I should say that the 
 genius of Burns typifies the eternal com- 
 mon man, he himself being, just because
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 135 
 
 of that, one of the most uncommon of 
 men, radiating in streams of poetic light 
 all those varied emotional qualities which 
 he has derived through his intuitive sym- 
 pathy with ordinary human nature. With 
 him the commonplace becomes poetic, 
 and therefore no longer commonplace. 
 Burns, not less than the transcenden- 
 talists, is a seer of visions terrestrial, 
 if you will, not celestial visions of 
 the possibilities of man as a social" being. 
 His conception of the poet's mission, as 
 he himself describes it, is to preserve, 
 with soul erect, "the dignity of man." 
 I do not know that Art has ever yet 
 set itself any more ennobling vision or 
 truer purpose than that. 
 
 That he was a great artist as well as
 
 136 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 a great poet that is to say, great in 
 execution as well as in conception needs 
 not now to be argued. But the source 
 of his artistic instinct has been for the 
 most part overlooked. He was an artist 
 just as every conscientious workman is 
 potentially an artist. Not the least of 
 the evils arising out of modern indus- 
 trialism is the tendency to make all pro- 
 duction a question of mechanics rather 
 than of craftsmanship, and the workman 
 himself a machine rather than a crafts- 
 man. Burns took pride in the artistry 
 of his songs, just as, we may be sure, 
 he took pride in ploughing his furrows 
 straight ; and the quality and quantity 
 of the workmanship, either of songs or 
 furrows, was never conditioned by the
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 137 
 
 nature of the reward. It is impossible 
 to think of Burns as measuring the value 
 of his poetic output by so many shillings 
 or guineas per stanza, as some modern 
 poets are said to do. He never wrote 
 a line for money, or for the prospect of 
 money. He got some little money out 
 of the published editions of his works, 
 and was glad to get it, but it was not 
 for that he wrote. Publishing was an 
 afterthought. Literature as a profession, 
 as a means of living, was no part of his 
 personal scheme of life. He was willing 
 always to earn his living in other ways, 
 that he might keep his muse unsubser- 
 vient to the despotism of natural neces- 
 sity. He held to this ideal to the very 
 last, and when he had settled down to
 
 138 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 the work of reclaiming and purifying the 
 ancient folk-songs of Scotland, resented 
 the bare suggestion of money-payment. 
 " Foolish and quixotic ! " we say. But 
 while we say it, we are proud and glad 
 that Burns acted so ; that here was one 
 man whose devotion to Art was pure and 
 disinterested. " The labourer is worthy 
 of his hire." Yes ; but here is where 
 Burns stands out. He was a labourer 
 in Poesy's vineyard ; but a hireling 
 never. His genius was not for sale. 
 He gave it freely to his country and to 
 humanity. There probably never was 
 any true artist who did not, in his soul, 
 wish that he could go and do likewise. 
 ^For the high service which this Scottish 
 peasant rendered to Art and to Humanity
 
 A REPRESENTATIVE MAN 139 
 
 his memory deserves to be held in 
 honour, whether by sculptured monu- 
 ments or by annual 25th of January 
 sacraments. But most of all by striv- 
 ing to give reality to his ideals. To 
 drink to his memory is nothing, to write 
 orations about him is nothing, to write 
 books about him is nothing, unless along 
 with these we in our own day and genera- 
 tion, with what talents and opportunities 
 we are possessed, and with the help of 
 his inspiration and that of other teachers, 
 and in co-operation with all who are like- 
 minded, seek for the ways and means to 
 abolish poverty and establish Liberty and 
 Brotherhood, not for some men, but for 
 all mankind. 
 
 A poet's dream ! If you say so, then
 
 140 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 it is a dream -for you. It is because we 
 have held it for a dream that it remains 
 unrealised. If it be a dream, then 
 Robert Burns and all the world's poets 
 have lived in vain. 
 
 To doubt that Liberty and Brother- 
 hood are attainable is the most damnable 
 heresy. It is high treason to the race, 
 and amongst the multitude of modern 
 infidelities is the only infidelity that 
 matters. 
 
 "For a' that, and a' that, 
 It's comin' yet for a' that, 
 When man to man, the world o'er, 
 Shall brothers be for a' that!" 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON 6* Co. 
 Edinburgh &* London
 
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