The Robert Burns Centenary
Lord Rosebery (1847-1929)
(1896)
Born in 1847;
educated at Oxford; succeeded to the Earldom in 1868; Under-Secretary of State
in 1881; first Commissioner of Works in 1884; Foreign Secretary in 1886 and
again in 1892; Prime Minister in 1894.
The
clue to Burns’ extraordinary hold on mankind is possibly a complicated one. It
has, perhaps, many developments. If so, we have no time to consider it to-night;
but I personally believe the causes are, like most great causes, simple, tho it
might take long to point out all the ways in which they operate. The secret, as
it seems to me, lies in two words—inspiration
and sympathy. 3
There
are two great forces which seem sheer inspiration and nothing else—I mean
Shakespeare and Burns. This is not the place or the time to speak of the
miracle called Shakespeare, but one must say a word of the miracle
called Burns. 4
Try
and reconstruct Burns as he was—a peasant born in a cottage that no sanitary
inspector in these days would tolerate for a moment; struggling with desperate
effort against pauperism, almost in vain; snatching at scraps of learning in
the intervals of toil, as it were, with his teeth; a heavy, silent lad, proud
of his plow. All of a sudden, without preface or warning, he breaks out into
exquisite song like a nightingale from the brushwood, and continues singing as
sweetly, in nightingale pauses, till he dies. The nightingale sings because he
can not help it; he can only sing exquisitely, because he knows no other. So it
was with Burns. What is this but inspiration? One can no more measure or reason
about it than measure or reason about
Amazing as it may
seem, all contemporary testimony is unanimous that the man
was far more
wonderful than his works. 5
If
his talents were universal, his sympathy was not less so. His tenderness was no
mere selfish tenderness for his own family, for he loved all mankind, except
the cruel and base—nay, we may go further and say that he placed all creation,
especially the suffering and depressed part. of it, under his protection. The
oppressor in every shape, even in the comparatively innocent embodiment of the
factor and the sportsman, he regarded with direct and personal hostility. But,
above all, he saw the charm of the home. He recognized it as the basis of all
society. He honored it in its humblest form, for he knew, as few know, how
sincerely the family
in the cottage is
welded by mutual love and esteem. 6
His
verses, then, go straight to the heart of every home; they appeal to every
father and mother; but that is only the beginning, perhaps the foundation, of
his sympathy. There is something for everybody in Burns. He has a heart even
for vermin; he has pity even for the arch-enemy of mankind.
And his
universality makes his poems a treasure-house in which all may find what they
want. Every wayfarer in the journey of life may pluck strength and courage from
it as he pauses. The sore, the weary, the wounded will all find something to
heal and soothe. For this great master is the universal Samaritan. Where the
priest and the Levite may have passed by in vain this
eternal heart
will still afford resource. 7
There
is an eternal controversy which it appears no didactic oil will ever assuage as
to Burns’ private life and morality. Some maintain that these have nothing to
do with his poems; some maintain that his life must be read in his works; and
again some think that his life damns his poems, while others aver that his
poems can not be fully appreciated without his life.
Another school
think that his vices have been exaggerated, while their opponents scarcely
think such exaggeration possible. It is impossible to avoid taking a side. I
walk on the ashes, knowing fire beneath and unable to avoid them, for the topic
is inevitable. I must confess myself, then, one of those who think that the
life of Burns doubles the interest of his poems, and I doubt whether the
failings of his life have been much exaggerated, for contemporary testimony on
that point is strong—tho a high and excellent authority, Mr. Wallace, has
recently taken the other side with much power and point. But the life of Burns,
which I love to read with his poems, does not consist in his vices. They lie
outside it. It is a life of work and truth and tenderness, and tho like all
lives it has its light and shade,
remember that we
know all the worst as well as the best. 8
His
was a soul bathed in crystal. He hurried to avow everything. There was no
reticence in him. The only obscure passage in his life is the love-passage with
Highland Mary, and as to that he was silent not from shame, but because it was
a sealed and sacred episode. “What a flattering idea,” he once wrote, “is a
world to come. There shall I with speechless agony or rapture recognize my
lost, my ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught with truth, honor, constancy
and love.” But he had, as the French say, the defects of his qualities. His
imagination was a supreme and celestial gift, but his imagination often led him
wrong and never more than with woman. The chivalry that made Don Quixote see
the heroic in all the common events of life made Burns (as his brother tells
us) see a goddess in every girl he approached; hence many love affairs, and
some guilty ones, but even these must be judged with reference to time and
circumstances. This much is certain: had he been devoid of genius they would
not have attracted attention. It is Burns’ pedestal that affords a target. And
why, one may ask, is not the same treatment measured out to Burns as to others?
The illegitimate children of great captains and statesmen and princes are
treated as historical and ornamental incidents. They strut the scene of
Shakespeare and ruffle it with the best. It is for the illegitimate children of
Burns, tho he and his wife cherished them as if born in wedlock, that the vails
of wrath are reserved. There were two brilliant figures both descended from the
Stuarts who were alive during Burns’ life. We occupy ourselves endlessly and
severely with the offenses of Burns; we heave an elegant sigh
over the hundred
lapses of Charles James Fox and Charles Edward Stuart. 9
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something)
I should
like to go a step further and affirm that we have something to be grateful for
even in the weaknesses of men like Burns. Mankind is helped in its progress
almost as much by the study of imperfection as by the contemplation of
perfection. Had we nothing before us in our futile and halting lives but saints
and the ideal, we might well fail altogether. We grope blindly along the
catacombs of the world, we climb the dark ladder of life, we feel our way to
futurity, but we can scarcely see an inch around or before us. We stumble and
falter and fall, our hands and knees are bruised and sore, and we look up for
light and guidance. Could we see nothing but distant, unapproachable
impeccability we might well sink prostrate in the hopelessness of emulation,
and the weariness of despair. Is it not then, when all seems blank and
lightless, when strength and courage flag, and when perfection seems remote as
a star, is it not then that imperfection helps us? When we see that the
greatest and choicest images of God have had their weaknesses like ours, their
temptations, their hour of darkness, their bloody sweat, are we not encouraged
by their lapses and catastrophes to find energy for one more effort, one more
struggle? Where they failed, we feel it a less dishonor to fail; their errors
and sorrows make, as it were, an
easier ascent
from infinite imperfection to infinite perfection. 12
Man,
after all, is not ripened by virtue alone. Were it so, this world were a
paradise of angels. No. Like the growth of the earth, he is the fruit of all
seasons, the accident of a thousand accidents, a living mystery moving through
the seen to the unseen; he is sown in dishonor; he is matured under all the
varieties of heat and cold, in mists and wrath, in snow and vapors, in the melancholy
of autumn, in the torpor of winter as well as in the rapture and fragrance of
summer, or the balmy affluence of spring, its breath, its sunshine; at the end
he is reaped, the product not of one climate but of all, not of good alone but
of sorrow, perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps stricken and withered and
sour. How, then, shall we judge anyone? How, at any rate, shall we judge a
giant, great in gifts and great in temptation; great in strength, and great in
weakness? Let us glory in his strength and be comforted in his weakness; and
when we thank heaven for the inestimable gift of Burns, we do not need to
remember wherein he was
imperfect: we can
not bring ourselves to regret that he was made of the same
clay as
ourselves. 13
Note 1. From an
address in the St. Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow, on July 21, 1896, on the occasion of
the Burns Centenary celebration.
from "The World's Great
Orations" ed. by William Jennings Bryan, 1906, published in full by
bartelsby.com