Part 1

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.

There is only one Footnote in this book. It has been moved to the end of the Introduction.

Contractions with ’s (is or was) and those with ’t (it) sometimes had a half-space, sometimes no space, in the original text. For consistency these contractions all have no space in this etext, for example, she’s (not she ’s); till’t (not till ’t).

A small number of other spaced contractions have been closed up and made consistent, such as she ’ll, thou ’rt and thou ’lt.

All other dialect spelling has been left unchanged to match the original printed text. No spelling corrections have been made.

The ‘List of Poem Titles’ was created by the transcriber and is granted to the public domain. It has been placed at the end of the book, after the ‘Index of First Lines’.

SONGS AND LYRICS OF ROBERT BURNS

[Illustration:

Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?]

SONGS AND LYRICS OF ROBERT BURNS

SELECTED AND EDITED BY WILLIAM MACDONALD, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. RUSSELL FLINT AND R. PURVES FLINT

[Illustration: (colophon)]

LONDON: PHILIP LEE WARNER 7 GRAFTON STREET, W. MDCCCCXI

Contents

[_Individual Poems may be referred to readily by means of the Index of First Lines, printed at the end of the volume._]

PAGE

INTRODUCTION ix

SONGS AND LYRICS 1

LONGER POEMS 172

GLOSSARY 209

INDEX OF FIRST LINES 217

Illustrations

YE BANKS AND BRAES _Frontispiece_

BLYTHE AND MERRY _Facing page_ 6

TO MARY IN HEAVEN ” ” 14

A WINTER NIGHT ” ” 24

TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY ” ” 44

ADDRESS TO EDINBURGH ” ” 70

OF A’ THE AIRTS ” ” 90

CA’ THE YOWES TO THE KNOWES ” ” 108

MY HEART’S IN THE HIGHLANDS ” ” 138

THE BRAES O’ BALLOCHMYLE ” ” 162

THE COTTER’S SATURDAY NIGHT ” ” 180

THE BRIGS OF AYR ” ” 190

Introduction

“Of Burns, the man and poet, what is there left to be said?” Thus, some forty years ago, the author of _Dreamthorp_. It was a question unworthy of so acute a mind. Of Burns, the man and poet, there is everything still to be said, for a double reason. First, because a great poet, as he stands for ever in the view of mankind, becomes in effect a part of nature as it exists for each succeeding generation: unremoved as the sun from the heavens, and, like the sun, an eternal subject for remark. What was said of the world or the weather yesterday was good; but to-day must speak for itself out of its own fullness, its own sense of being and receiving. Energy, beneficence, and beauty, in the natural and moral world alike, are a challenge essentially unprecedented wherever their presence is immediately felt; and there can be no lack of novelty—or, better still, no need for it—in the answer of the heart, if sincerely phrased, to whatever touches it with life.

But, beyond the fact that explicit appraisement is the indefeasible ritual of response to certain kinds of experience, there is another reason why there can be no finality in our estimate of the works or life of a great genius. In the subject of discourse itself there is no finality; and no fixity save a permanence of changing power. Here is a difference, advising us that we are in the presence of another order of reality than that to which the term “natural” can be usefully applied. For there is a sense in which we may say that the sun and moon are very old. The first day and night sufficed to reveal them, and they showed the same face to Adam that has been looked on by all his posterity. But great poets, those heavenly lights of the mental world, endure without this sameness, and emit to later generations rays and influences that were unsuspected by the earlier. A genius may be discovered—may be descried and acclaimed—in a day; but is hardly to be found out or estimated in a thousand years. The bequeathment of great poets is a text only to be elucidated by the whole experience of the race. Therefore the history of criticism in regard to them is the record not so much of a continuous approximation as of many diverse approaches to what is never quite reached and never can be. As the race goes on evolving through new conditions of consciousness or states of mind—approaching experience in each epoch with a new kind of make-up or adjustment of its faculties, a new system of prepossessions, sensations, tendencies, and therefore aptitudes for perception—the former outlines of things dissolve, and new values, gradually or suddenly, become apparent in the classics long since ranged and estimated.

We say it is the result of a new way of looking at them, as though there were a particular virtue in our mental act, or we were better men than our fathers. But in this we partly deceive ourselves. We have little choice as to how we shall look at them; and might look at a billiard-ball a million different ways, or in as many moods, without adding to our knowledge. The truth is rather that the work of a great poet has from the first reserves of meaning and value to which almost no limit can be set. We may say ’tis because infinity, timelessness, and transcendence are of its very essence, making it inexhaustibly implicit; or because the incalculable intuition of the poet waives the accidents and amendments of common thinking and overleaps the slow process of experience to arrive at knowledge by the fiat of intelligence. Certain it is that the poet is always there in advance, waiting for the generations to come along and find him out a little further than has yet been done. But these reserves of meaning and value are not to be yielded up until the conditions for their effective appearance, for their proper play and functioning, have been instated. What history does, in relation to literature, is to instate these conditions. Then ensues, gradually or suddenly, our “new way of looking at the poet”—be it Homer or Dante, be it Shelley or Burns—which is but our recognition of the emergence of aspects, lineaments, virtues hitherto kept latent by the crowding of thoughts and prepossessions in us that could not co-exist with that particular way of perceiving the truth about these names, that particular compass of comprehension regarding them. The change may be more or less conscious and episodic, and may have a wider or narrower range. It may involve only an æsthetic difference, a difference in the sensations which the cultured of an age have in approaching a given poet; in the anticipative connotation or keying of the mind for that encounter. But also it may involve an entire re-reading of text and man; an intellectual reconstitution or re-orientation in which the Poet seems to be found afresh, or seen as it were for the first time—all prejudgments regarding him magically put away—in his proper being and loneliness _sub specie æternitatis_.

If this be so: if the total value and significance of the great poet is thus a changing function and goes on evolving through the generations out of the matrix of an unchanging text, then there is no poet to whom the observation can be more relevant than it must be to Burns. Manifestly, there are poets in whom the sheerly intellectual content to be exploited is greater and more various, and who, therefore, should have a longer course to run before they are overtaken by the uninspired mind in its pursuit of wisdom. Yet though their course be long, the track may, in a sense, be narrow. Their lives and works may present a simple issue, and lie within the placid marches of letters with a certain aloofness, a certain abstractness and destitution. Here, as so often, Shakespeare is the supreme example. His riches are infinite even in a numerical sense, and their appraisement may well be endless. Yet in their totality they are an uncomplicated fact of literature. There is nothing implicated in them of the scene and circumstances of their production; of the humanity of an historical man; of the tragedy of a life. Of the life of Shakespeare, indeed, nobody knows anything save his biographers, who have elaborated or created it for themselves by discussing in great detail and with exhaustive knowledge the prevailing absence of information on the subject. Therefore an estimate or interpretation of this Poet, which took cognizance of nothing outside of his works—which treated them as though they had been found in a dream, and barely assumed the historic fact of Christendom—would not at once appear to be leaving untouched any topic of pressing relevance, and might easily set the limits of our knowledge, our understanding of them and him, a little farther on.

But how different is the case of Burns! So far from being an uncomplicated fact of literature, the works of this Poet were early immeshed in a very plexus of real life interest, commentary, adoption, misjudgment and enhancement, which is now an instant element of their connotation and almost a part of their substance. Across the singing voice of the Poet as we listen, and almost overbearing it, come the reverberated choruses of a million Burns Suppers and Commemorations, adding volume, but also confusion, to the song. Across the survey, in which we try to see his works with disinterested gaze, comes pointing the broad insistent finger of traditional emphasis upon what was of supreme interest to one body of readers long ago because the subject-matter was close to their own lives and _they_ knew all about it, and to another body of readers because it was curious information about a distant social world, and even more worthy of remark than a fly in amber. Nor is this all. For not only is the national estimation in which he is held become a part of his works, entering into the mental context and determining the bias of attention, but works and estimation alike are invaded, darkened, and perplexed by the cloud of moral prepossessions and agitations which have wreaked themselves upon the subject of his life. To view Burns with detachment, and yet with understanding, is impossible; to be certain that we are viewing him at all is by no means easy. For the effect of all the nationalising fervour which has made him its own, and of all the moralising impertinence which has failed to apprehend him and yet refused to let him go, is to keep before our eyes an approved subject for a certain kind of discourse (also, alas! approved), but not the poetry in its essential power, and not the Poet in the human integrity of his nature, in the true thought-and-feeling quality of his mortal days. In a case like this, therefore, history has another task to perform besides developing the values and relevancies implicit in a body of poetry. It has, as a condition precedent, to secure for that body of poetry the relative degree of detachment, of disencumbrance from real-life impositions and prejudgments, which belongs to every other supreme poetical bequest. It has to secure for the Poet and his poetry alike—since in this case the man and the singer, the singer and the song, are beyond all example one—such a deliverance from many things, beginning with the too engrossing spirit of locality, as would enable them to be seen in their true place and aspect among the universals of literature, unobscured at last by the falsifications of reflection and the crudities of accident.

That the poetry of Burns, thus liberated, must have its career of evolving value—that it is even now entering upon its clearer stages—hardly admits of intelligent doubt. It would be strange indeed if a genius so autochthonous, if a personality so powerful and so perilously charged, so real and yet symbolic, were to abide always where the first bewildered essays of opinion placed them. In truth, they have abided there too long. The most interesting life in Scotland has hitherto found no sufficient biographer. Lockhart’s early sketch is still virtually unsuperseded, though it was historically impossible that Lockhart in 1828 could be more than provisionally excellent and honourably imperfect. In the way of interpretation nothing of any moment was done—nothing, that is, which did not leave the subject where it was before—till the appearance in 1896 of Henley’s highly disturbing _Essay on Burns_; a masterpiece loudly execrated by fools, but a homage none the less noble, and a service hardly the less great, for being a little warped in the rendering. And if it seem strange that the Peasant Poet (somewhat misleadingly so called) and the social rebel should be indebted to an Edinburgh lawyer and son of the manse for the most sympathetic and dignified telling of his life-story, it might seem stranger still that the patriotic and revolutionary spirit who wrote _Scots Wha Hae_ and _A Man’s a Man for a’ That_ should be indebted to an intransigeant Englishman (and no lover of democrats and levellers, perdy!) not only for the first illuminating study of his literary origins and personal achievement, but for the first full sympathetic perception of the tragedy presented by his over-worked, under-nourished, playless, joyless, prospectless adolescence, with all its inspiration mute and waiting. But in Henley the man was even more abounding than the Englishman, and the man-of-letters was equal to both; and he found in Burns such true matter, of humanity and literature, as all his head and heart delighted to take hold of. So his work has done more to de-provincialise Burns—to dissipate, I mean, the subtly limiting and obscuring presupposition of provincialism with which many even of the worthy were wont to approach him—than all the annual panegyrics of the Poet’s own countrymen, most of which, to be sure, have wrought to quite contrary effect. It off-sets with abundance the sad dereliction of Matthew Arnold, whose poor, pained, academic, and sniffy sensations in the presence of Burns and his world “of Scotch morals, Scotch religion and Scotch drink” is equalled, among the illustrious stupidities of great critics, only by Sainte-Beuve’s inability to see in Balzac anything more than a vulgar and voluminous writer of romances for the ruck of contemporary readers.

Only, the liberating process so powerfully initiated by Henley has farther to go. It is much to have Burns organically related to a vernacular literature centuries old, and shown as the destined, and in himself richly-endowed, heir of a great inheritance of song which was his to appropriate, re-express, glorify, and complete. It is much to have it established that while there was nothing accidental about his genius, save as all genius is an accident, so there was, in the final result and value, nothing local about his quality and work save as Pindar and Aristophanes were also local. But it still remains that for the aspirational, resistant, and prophetic spirit of Burns—for the positive forces of his thought and character, and for the moral, social, and political declarations laid up in his work—there should be effected a similar liberation from the prejudgments which localise, belittle, and obscure. It has yet to become a matter of common recognition that the appearance of Burns was more than an event in the history of Scottish national sentiment, or in the history of English literature; that it was an event of moment in the history of human ideals. The lad who was born in Kyle had a message for all Europe, and a message that must reach Cathay in time. So far from being local, he stands among the figures of literature, boldly and in a kind of isolation, as more than any other that ever lived and sang, the sheer Man. By his contact with the primeval occupation, by the splendour of his spirit and the courage of his heart, not least by the final ruin of his life, he is indeed the symbol of Man inhabitant of the earth, as we contrast him with the gods, as we oppose him to Destiny. Standing thus in the midst of Nature, yet with a clear inlook upon Society—as it were with one hand upon the plough and another on the pen—he saw that the supreme injustice of the world was not in its acts but its estimates; not in the inequalities of worldly fortune, but in the accumulations of arrogance and the distribution of contempt. He had himself been delivered only by the blossoming of his genius from the doom which would have consigned him to obscurity as one of “the common herd” whose qualities are of no consequence; and he resented the wrong for the sake of all those who have no genius to deliver them. He grudged no man his honours or his possessions. But he grudged that the exaltation of some should be made the debasement of many, and that worth in a poor man should be worth so little in the world’s view of him. Against the oceanic vulgar vice in which society welters, against the habitual easy refusal of respect, his heart was hot with generous protest, as against the spirit that denies and would make abject. And so his message is a claim, unique in its quality and power, that the man of independent mind is kingly in his degree, and that the man of good heart—“the heart compassionate and kind”—is the nearest image of God.

Those two affirmations are unique in their quality and power because they are unadulterated and underived; and because his whole life, in other respects so casually conducted, maintained an unwavering simple loyalty to their spirit from beginning to end. His assertion of the sovereignty of free manhood, though made in vindication of the poor, was inspired by no ignoble envy of the rich; nor was it conveyed from anybody’s scheme of political thinking. It was the natural forthright consequence of his own vivid intuition of what it was to be a man, and of what were the inalienable moral properties that must go with that estate. Thus it had a broader groundwork of reason than philosophy can compass, and was a deliverance of truth not from an accumulation of examples, but from the very centre of mind. So, too, with his exaltation of the Kind Heart above all the crowd of formal virtues. It was no mere reaction from the religious teaching of his place and day, which scowled so darkly upon human nature and made merit in the sight of God—goodness it could hardly be called—consist in a preservative acidulation of the soul and a sacred lack of sympathy with sinners. It was a protest also against the moral system and judgments of society at large; which set a high value on the qualities by which a man gets and keeps, but leave out of estimate and precept alike the qualities in which humanity fulfils itself. From this it continually follows, and is everywhere to be seen, that the “respected citizen” may be a man in whom there is very little to respect and still less to like; nor is it for any other reason than this that the word respectability has come to mean a destitution of passions, sympathies and ideals, the salted dead-sea level of social safety and acceptance. But Burns, with his lot cast among simple people, stood where he could see the _primordia rerum_ of the moral and social qualities at work in their essential character and aspect, and could judge more securely than the world judges of their worth and drift. Therefore it is with the observation of a peasant and the authority of a poet—of one, that is, whose sonship to Nature is an immediate reality, importing a command of secret sources and an added intellectual power—that he confronts the religious and the worldly wise alike to tell them that neither in what the one chiefly inculcates nor in what the other chiefly rewards, but just in the primal kindness of heart that may be found among the simple and even among sinners, lies the superlative attribute and exercise of human nature: that in which it continues Nature’s own beneficence: that in which it approaches the Divine: that without which it falls short of being human, for all its virtues.

By the valiance of those two thoughts animating, even when only implicitly presented, the whole body of his work—and by the convincing tragic token of a life which, whatever its confusions and faults, was always starkly independent and compassionately kind—Burns has made a contribution distinctly his own to the world’s wealth of ideals, and of the memories that keep them alive. What makes the power of this ideal, and its distinctness as an historical event, is that it was so utterly personal and of the Poet himself: therefore, so inspired and authoritative. The message which he conveys comes to him with the sweep of his genius and the certainty of his imperishable song, and in its delivery he speaks as a chosen son of Nature for and to all mankind. In this sense he speaks as no other poet in the world has spoken. Standing in the new-ploughed earth, or following the occupations of seedtime or harvest, he seems to be at the beginning and at the centre; and has a consciousness of universal man, of the labours and seedtimes and harvests of the ages and the climes, denied to the poets, however great, for whom the world is primarily a scene of cities, and not of earth and sky and man, alone in the fields with the primal curse and solace. In this regard he stands nearer to Millet than any other name in Art or Poetry. Therefore it was fitting that one who was so much and potently and generously a man should have written, near the close of his life and in a time of repression and alarm, that vindication—_A Man’s a Man for a’ That_—which (_pace_ Mr. Henley) has been not inaptly called “the Marseillaise of Humanity.” Fitting also that he should have written, again near the close of his life, that song of human friendship and recollected childhood—_Auld Lang Syne_—which seems destined to become the common possession of the nations, as it is already the one thing in our literature which draws the hearts of all English-speaking people throughout the world, and not seldom their tears.