From the North British Review. BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL.* FOUR faces among the portraits of modern | Robert Burns an honorable station among men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features: Shakspeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be in presence weak, in speech contemptible," hampered by some thorn in the flesh-to interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians, the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies, that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been given, might learn that soul is after all independent of matter, and not its creature and its slave. But, in the generality of cases, physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not, alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect. Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of them. Of Shakspeare's we do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns's be not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most loveablethe most like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be. Raffaelle-the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the fullface pencil sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford-though without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy, formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. His is a face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goethe, even in his earliest portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own will. There is a selfconscious power, and purpose, and self-restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which might win worship, and did, but not love, except as the child of enthusiasm or relationship. But Burns's face, to judge of it by the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was literally mobbed by the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets. The magic of that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may explain many a sad story. The features certainly are not as regular or well-proportioned as they might be; there is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal health in the outline or color; but the marks of intellectual beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling. The lips, ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the bones show thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh out upon you with boundless good humor and sweetness, with simple, eager, gentle surprise-a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth upon the wonder of a newborn world-altogether "A station like the herald Mercury, New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill." its criticism, was altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its ultimate and logical results. Criticism was outward, and of the form merely. The world was not believed to be already, and in itself, mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man who could see and proclaim that supernatural element. Before it was admired, it was to be raised above nature into the region of " the picturesque," or what not; and the poet was the man who gave it this factitious and superinduced beau Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence-a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life-a deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man --an instinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and unscientific, only not superstitious-turn him loose in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighty, by a certain "kompsologia" and " meteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope. And what an age in which to be turned loose--for loose he must go, to solve the problem of existence for himself. The grand simple old Scottish education which he got from his parents must prove narrow and unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not because it was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly all things necessary for his "salvation"-in every sense, all laws which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it contained so much of them as yet only implicitly; because it was not yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying the new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's. It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. But it had not done so then. And when Burns found himself gradually growing beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up his education at the point where it had been left unfinished? He saw around him in plenty animal goodnature and courage, barbaric honesty and hospitality-more, perhaps, than he would see now; for the upward progress into civilized excellences is sure to be balanced by some loss of savage ones-but all reckless, shallow, above all, drunken. It was a harddrinking, coarse, materialist age. The higher culture, of Scotland especially, was all but exclusively French-not a good kind, while Voltaire and Volney still remained unanswered, and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses were accepted by all young gentlemen, and a great many young ladies, who could read French, as the best account of the relation of the sexes. Besides, the philosophy of that day, like teoroepeia," called "poetic diction," now happily becoming extinct, mainly, we believe, under the influence of Burns, although he himself thought it his duty to bedizen his verses therewith, and though it was destined to flourish for many a year more in the temple of the father of lies, like a jar of paper flowers on a Popish altar. No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should receive not only no guidance, but no finer appreciation. True, he was admired, petted, flattered; for that the man was wonderful, no one could doubt. But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many as a writer of vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad muse of Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even in the eighteenth century itself-witness Auld Robin Gray. But who suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of all the second-hand French culture which seemed to her then the highest earthly attainment? The review of Burns in an early number of the Edinburgh Review, said to be from the pen of the late Lord Jeffrey, shows, as clearly as anything can, the utterly inconsistent and bewildered feeling with which the world must have regarded such a phenomenon. Alas! there was inconsistency and bewilderment enough in the phenomenon itself, but that only made confusion worse confounded; the confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have been the most deep-sighted. But no. The reviewer turns the strange thing over and over, and inside out-and some fifteen years after it has vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his mind 66 about in any clear or consistent way, and these days, are said to exist; we cannot say gets thoroughly cross with it, and calls it that we have as yet cared to read them. hard names, because it will not fit into any There are several other biographies, even established pigeonhole or drawer of the then more important, to be read first, when they existing anthropological museum. Burns is are written. Shakspeare has found as yet no "a literary prodigy," and yet it is "a dero- biographer; has not even left behind him gation to him to consider him as one. materials for a biography, such at least as are And that we find, not as we should have considered worth using. Indeed, we question expected, because he possessed genius whether such a biography would be of any which would have made success a mat- use whatever to the world; for the man who ter of course in any rank, but because cannot, by studying his dramas in some tolehe was so well educated-" having ac-rably accurate chronological order, and using quired a competent knowledge of French, as a running accompaniment and closet comtogether with the elements of Latin and mentary those awe-inspiring sonnets of his, Geometry;" and before he had composed a attain to some clear notion of what sort of single stanza, was far more intimately ac- life William Shakspeare must have led, would quainted with Pope, Shakspeare, and Thom- not see him much the clearer for many folios son, than nine-tenths of the youths who leave of anecdote. For after all, the best biography school for the University," &c., &c. ;-in of every sincere man is sure to be his own short, because he was so well educated, that works; here he has set down, "transferred his becoming Robert Burns, the immortal as in a figure," all that has happened to him, poet, was a matter of course and necessity. inward or outward, or rather, all which has And yet, a page or two on, the great reason formed him, produced a permanent effect why it was more easy for Robert Burns the upon his mind and heart; and knowing that, cottar to become an original and vigorous you know all you need know, and are conpoet, rather than for any one of "the herd tent, being glad to escape the personality of scholars and academical literati," who are and gossip of names and places, and of dates depressed and discouraged by "perusing the even, except in as far as they enable you to most celebrated writers, and conversing with place one step of his mental growth before the most intelligent judges," is found to be, or after another. Of the honest man this that "the literature and refinement of the age holds true always; and almost always of the does not exist for a rustic and illiterate indi- dishonest man, the man of cant, affectation, vidual; and consequently the present time is hypocrisy; for even if he pretend in his noto him what the rude times of old were to vel or his poem to be what he is not, he still the vigorous writers who adorned them." shows you thereby what he thinks he ought In short, the great reason of Robert Burns's to have been, or at least what he thinks that success was that he did not possess that the world thinks he ought to have been, and education, the possession of which proves confesses to you, in the most naive and conhim to be no prodigy, though the review be- fidential way, like one who talks in his sleep, gins by calling him one, and coupling him what learning he has or has not had; what with Stephen Duck and Thomas Dermody. society he has or has not seen, and that in the very act of trying to prove the contrary. Nay, the smaller the man or woman, and the less worth deciphering his biography, the more surely will he show you, if you have eyes to see and time to look, what sort of people offended him twenty years ago; what meanness he would have liked "to indulge in," if he had dared, when young, and for what other meanness he relinquished it, as he grew up; of what periodical he stood in awe when he took pen in hand, and so forth. Whether his books treat of love or political economy, theology or geology, it is there, the history of the man legibly printed, for those who care to read it. In these poems and letters of Burns, we apprehend, is to be found a truer history than any anecdote can supply, of the things which happened to himself, Now if the best critic of the age, writing ifteen years after Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilemma-which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the points, and form a complete circle of contradictions-what must have been the bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's very lifetime? what must, indeed, have been his own bewilderment at himself, however manfully he may have kept it down? No wonder that he was unguided, either by himself or by others. We do not blame them; him we must deeply blame; yet not as we ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in the least to those temptations under which Burns fell. Biographies of Burns, and those good ones, according to the standard of biographies in and moreover of the most notable things | Shakspeare's own; which even now asserts which went on in Scotland between 1759 and its force by a hundred little never-to-be-for1796. gotten phrases scattered through his poems, which stick, like barbed arrows, in the memory of every reader.-And as for his tenderness-the quality without which all other poetic excellence is barren-it gushes forth toward every creature, animate and inanimate, with one exception, namely, the hypocrite, ever alike "spiacente a Dio e ai nemici sui ;" and therefore intolerable to Robert Burns's honesty, whether he be fighting for or against the cause of right. Again we say, there are evidences of a versatile and manifold faculty in this man, which, with a stronger will and a larger education, might have placed him as an equal by the side of those great names which we mentioned together with his at the commencement of this article. This latter assertion may seem startling, when we consider that we find in these poems no mention whatsoever of the discoveries of steamboats and spinning-jennies, the rise of the great manufacturing cities, the revolution in Scottish agriculture, or even in Scottish metaphysics. But after all, the history of a nation is the history of the men, and not of the things thereof; and the history of those men is the history of their hearts, and not of their purses, or even of their heads; and the history of one man who has felt in himself the heart experiences of his generation, and anticipated many belonging to the next generation, is so far the collective history of that generation, and of much-no man can say how much of the next generation; and such a man, bearing within his single soul a generation and a half of working-men, we take Robert Burns to have been; and his poems, as such, a contemporaneous history of Scotland, the equal to which we are not likely to see written for this generation, or several to come. But one thing Burns wanted; and of that one thing his age helped to deprive him,the education which comes by reverence. Looking round in such a time, with his keen power of insight, his keen sense of humor, what was there to worship? Lord Jeffrey, or whosoever was the author of the review in the Edinburgh, says disparagingly, that Burns had as much education as Shakspeare. So he very probably had, if education mean book-learning. Nay, more, of the practical education of the fireside, the sober, industrious, God-fearing education, and "drawing Such a man, sent out into such an age, would naturally have a hard and a confused battle to fight, would probably, unless he fell under the guidance of some master mind, end se ipso minor, stunted and sadly deformed, as Burns did. His works are after all only the disjecta membra poeta; hints of a great might-out" of the manhood, by act and example, have-been. Hints of the keenest and most dramatic appreciation of human action and thought. Hints of an unbounded fancy, playing gracefully in the excess of its strength, with the vastest images, as in that robe of the Scottish muse, in which Deep lights and shades, bold mingling, threw And seem'd to my astonished view A well-known land." The image, and the next few stanzas which dilate it, might be a translation from Dante's Paradiso, so broad, terse, vivid, the painter's touch.-Hints, too, of a humor, which, like that of Shakspeare, rises at times by sheer depth of insight into the sublime; as when "Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch Just like a winking caudrons." Hints of a power of verbal wit, which, had it been sharpened in such a perpetual wordbattle as that amid which Shakspeare lived from the age of twenty, might have rivalled Burns may have had more under his good father than Shakspeare under his; though the family life of the small English burgher in Elizabeth's time would have generally presented, as we suspect, the very same aspect of staid manfulness and godliness which a Scotch farmer's did fifty years ago. But let that be as it may, Burns was not born into an Elizabethan age. He did not see around him Raleighs and Sidneys, Cecils and Hookers, Drakes and Frobishers, Spensers and Jonsons, Southamptons and Willoughbys, with an Elizabeth, guiding and moulding the great whole, a crowned Titaness, terrible, and strong, and wise—a woman who, whether right or wrong, bowed the proudest, if not to love, yet still to obey. That was the secret of Shakspeare's power. Heroic himself, he was born into an age of heroes. You see it in his works. Not a play but gives patent evidence that to him all forms of human magnanimity were common and way-side flowers-among the humors of men which he and Ben Jonson used to wander forth together to observe. And thus he could give living action and speech to the ancient noblenesses of Rome and the middle age; for he had walked and conversed with them, unchanged in everything but in the dress. Had he known Greek literature he could have recalled to enduring life such men as Cimon and Miltiades, Leonidas and Themistocles, such deeds as Marathon and Salamis. For had we not had our own Miltiades, our own Salamis, written within a few years of his birth; and were not the heroes of it still walking among men? It was surely this continual presence of "men of worship," this atmosphere of admiration and respect and trust, in which Shakspeare must have lived, which tamed down the wild self-will of the deer-stealing fugitive from Stratford, into the calm large-eyed philosopher, tolerant and loving, and full of faith in a species made in the likeness of God. Not so with Burns. One feels painfully in his poems the want of great characters; and still more painfully that he has not drawn them, simply because they were not there to draw. That he has a true eye for what is noble, when he sees it, let his "Lament for Glencairn" testify, and the stanzas in his " "Vision," in which, with a high-bred grace which many a courtly poet of his day might have envied, he alludes to one and another Scottish worthy of his time. There is no vein of saucy and envious "banausia in the man; even in his most graceless sneer, his fault if fault it be-is, that he cannot and will not pretend to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of respect. He sees around him and above him, as well as below him, an average of men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow, ridiculous by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not apply to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant for their realities. After all, he does but say what every one round him was feeling and thinking: but he said it; and hypocritical respectability shrank shrieking from the mirror of her own inner heart. But it was all the worse for him. In the sins of others he saw an excuse for his own. Losing respect for and faith in his brother men, he lost, as a matter of course, respect for himself, faith in himself. The hypocrisy which persecutes in the name of law, whether political or moral, while in private it transgresses the very law which is forever on its tongue, is turned by his passionate and sorely-tempted character into a too easy excuse for disbelieving in the obligation of any law whatsoever. He ceases to worship, and therefore to be himself woishipful, and we know the rest. "He might have still worshipped God?" He might, and surely amid all his sins, doubts, and confusions, the remembrance of the old faith learned at his parent's knee does haunt him still as a beautiful regretand sometimes in his bitterest hours, shine out before his poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, lighting him homewards after all. Whether he reached that home or not, none on earth can tell. But his writings show, if anything can, that the vestal-fire of conscience still burned within, though choked again and again with bitter ashes and foul smoke. Consider the time in which he lived, when it was "as with the people, so with the priest," and the grand old life-tree of the Scottish Church, now green and vigorous with fresh leaves and flowers, was all crusted with foul scurf and moss, and seemed to have ceased growing, and to be crumbling down into decay; consider the terrible contradiction between faith and practice which must have met the eyes of the man, before he could write with the same pen--and one as honestly as the other-"The Cottar's Saturday Night," and "Holy Willie's Prayer." But those times are past, and the men who acted in them gone to another tribunal. Let the dead bury their dead; and, in the meantime, instead of cursing the misguided genius, let us consider whether we have not also something for which to thank him; whether, as competent judges of him aver from their own experience, those very seeming blasphemies of his have not produced more good than evil; whether, though "a savor of death unto death," to conceited and rebellious spirits, they may not have helped to open the eyes of the wise to the extent to which the general eighteenth-century rottenness had infected Scotland, and to make intolerable a state of things which ought to have been intolerable even if Burns had never written. We are not attacking the reviewer, far less the Edinburgh Review, which some years after this not only made the amende honorable to Burns, but showed a frank impartiality only too rare in the reviews of these days, by publishing in its pages the noble article on Burns which has since appeared separately in Mr. Carlyle's Miscellanies; what we want to show from the reviewer's own words, is the element in which Burns had to work, the judges before whom he had to plead, and the change which, as we think, very much by the influence of his own poems, has |