The Night of the Gospel. 157 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 savour 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 shewed 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 shew 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 passed upon the minds of men. How few are there who would pen now about him such a sentence as this-"He is," (that is, was, having gone to his account fifteen years before,) perpetually making a parade of his own inflammability and imprudence, and talking with much self-complacency and exultation of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct part of mankind," a very small part of mankind, one would have thought, in the British isles at least, about the end of the last century. But, it was the fashion then, as usual, to substitute the praise of virtues for the practice of them, and threebottle and ten-tumbler men had a very good right, of course, to admire sobriety and correctness, and denounce any two-bottle and six-tumbler man who was not ashamed to confess in print the weaknesses which they confessed only by word of mouth. Just, and yet not just. True, Burns does make a parade of his thoughtlessness, and worse-but, why? because he gloried in it? He must be a very skin-deep critic who cannot see, even in the most insolent of those blameworthy utterances, an inward shame and self-reproach, which if any man had ever felt in himself, he would be in no wise inclined to laugh at it in others. Why, it is the very shame which wrings those poems out of him. They are the attempt of the strong man fettered to laugh at his own consciousness of slavery-to deny the existence of his chains-to pretend to himself that he likes them. To us, some of those wildest, "Rob the Ranter" bursts of blackguardism are most deeply mournful, hardly needing that the sympathies which they stir up should be heightened by the little scraps of prayer and bitter repentance, which lie up and down among their uglier brethren, the disjecta membra of a great "De Profundis," perhaps not all unheard. These latter pieces are most significant. The very doggrel of them, the total absence of any attempt at ornament in diction or polish in metre, is proof complete of their deep heart-wrung sincerity. They are like the wail of a lost child, rather than the remorse of a Titan. The heart of the man was so young to the last; the boy-vein in him, as perhaps in all great poets, beating on through manhood for good and for evil. "No! there was parade there, as of the lost woman, who tries to hide her self-disgust by staring you out of countenance, but of complacency and exultation, none. On one point, namely politics, Burns's higher sympathies seem to have been awakened. It had been better for him, in a worldly point of view, that they had not. In an intellectual, and even in a moral point of view, far worse. A fellow-feeling with the French Revolution, in the mind of a young man of that day, was a sign of moral health, which we should have been sorry to miss in him. Unable to foresee the outcome of the great struggle, having lost faith in those everlasting truths, religious and political, which it was madly setting at nought, what could it appear to him but an awakening from the dead, a return to young and genial health, a purifying thunder-storm. Such was his dream, the dream of thousands more, and not so wrong a one after all. For that, since that fearful outburst of the nether pit, all Europe has arisen and awakened into manifold and beautiful new life, who can deny? We are not what we were, but better; or rather, with boundless means of being better if we will. We have entered a fresh era of time for good and evil; the fact is patent in every sermon we hear, in every book we read, in every invention, even the most paltry, which we see registered. Shall we think hardly of the man who saw the dawn of our own day, and welcomed it cheerfully and hopefully, even though he fancied the mist-spectres to be elements Scottish Life and Scottish Song. 159 of the true sunrise, and knew not-and who knows?-the purposes of Him whose paths are in the great deep, and His ways past finding out? At least, the greater part of his influence on the times which have followed him, is to be ascribed to that very "Radicalism" which in the eyes of the respectable around him, had sealed his doom, and consigned him to ignoble oblivion. It has been, with the working men who read him, a passport for the rest of his writings; it has allured them to listen to him, when he spoke of high and holy things, which but for him, they might have long ago tossed away as worthless, in the recklessness of ignorance and discontent. They could trust his "Cottar's Saturday Night;" they could believe that he spoke from his heart, when in deep anguish he cries to the God whom he had forgotten, while they would have turned with a distrustful sneer from the sermon of the sleek and comfortable minister, who in their eyes, however humbly born, had deserted his class, and gone over to the camp of the enemy, and the flesh-pots of Egypt. After the time of Burns, as was to be expected, Scottish song multiplies itself tenfold. The nation becomes awakened to the treasures of its own old literature, and attempts, what after all, alas is but a revival; and like most revivals, not altogether a successful one. Of the twelve hundred songs contained in Mr. Whitelaw's excellent collection, whereof more than a hundred and fifty are either wholly or partly Burns's, the small proportion written before him are decidedly far superior in value to those written after him; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been arising, during the last half-century. True song requires for its atmosphere a state rather of careless arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and pardonable regret for a dying past; and in that state the mind of the masses, throughout North-Britain, has been weltering confusedly for the last few years. The new and more complex era into which we are passing has not yet sufficiently opened itself to be sung about; men hardly know what it is, much less what it will be; and while they are hard at work creating it, they have no breath to spare in talking of it: one thing they do see and feel, painfully enough at times, namely, that the old Scottish pastoral life is passing away, before the combined influence of manufactures and the large-farm system, to be replaced, doubtless, hereafter by something better, but in the meanwhile dragging down with it in its decay but too much that can ill be spared of that old society which inspired Ramsay and Burns. Hence the later Scottish song writers seldom really sing; their proses want the unconscious lilt and flash of their old models; 66 they will hardly go (the true test of a song) without music— the true test, we say, of a song. Who needs music, however fitting and beautiful the accustomed air may happen to be, to Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch," or "The bride cam' out o' the byre," or either of the casts of "The Flowers of the Forest," or to Auld Lang Syne" itself? They bubble right up out of the heart, and by virtue of their inner and unconscious melody, which all that is true to the heart has in it, shape themselves into a song, and are not shaped by any notes whatsoever. So with many, most indeed, of Burns's and a few of Allan Cunningham's; the "Wet sheet and a flowing sail," for instance. But the great majority of these later songs seem, if the truth is to be spoken, inspirations at second hand, of people writing about things which they would like to feel, and which they ought to feel, because others used to feel them in old times, but which they do not feel as their forefathers felt-a sort of poetical Tractarianism, in short. Their metre betrays them, as well as their words; in both they are continually wandering, unconsciously to themselves, into the elegiac-except when on one subject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first hand, and from the depths of her heart-namely, alas! the barley bree! and yet never, even on this beloved theme, has she risen again to the height of Burns's bacchanalian songs. But when sober, there is a sadness about the Scottish muse nowa-days-as perhaps there ought to be-and the utterances of hers which ring the truest are laments. We question whether in all Mr. Whitelaw's collection there is a single modern poem, (placing Burns as the transition point between the old and new,) which rises so high, or pierces so deep, with all its pastoral simplicity, as Smibert's "Widow's Lament." "Afore the Lammas tide Had dun'd the birken tree, In a' our water side, Nae wife was blest like me: A kind gudeman, and twa Sweet bairns were round me here; But they're a' ta'en awa' Sin' the fa' o' the year. "Sair trouble cam' our gate, And made me, when it cam', A bird without a mate, A ewe without a lamb. Our hay was yet to maw, And our corn was yet to shear; When they a' dwined awa' In the fa' o' the year. Smibert's Widow's Lament. "I daurna look a-field, For aye I trow to see, The form that was a bield To my wee bairns and me; "Aft on the hill at e'ens I see him 'mang the ferns, The lover o' my teens, The father o' my bairns: As gloamin' aye drew near- But Sin' the fa' o' the year. "Our bonnie rigs theirsel', And whae our sheep will shear, In the fa' o' the year? "My heart is growing cauld, And sair, sair in the fauld, Will be the winter's chill; For peats were yet to ca', Our sheep they were to smear, When my a' dwined awa', In the fa' o' the year. "I ettle whiles to spin, But wee wee patterin' feet Come rinnin' out and in, And then I first maun greet: I ken its fancy a', And faster rows the tear, That my a' dwined awa' In the fa' o' the year. "Be kind, O heav'n abune! To ane sae wae and lane, An' tak' her hamewards sune, Lang ere the March winds blaw, Meet them a' that's awa', Sin' the fa' o' the year." VOL. XVI. NO. XXXI. L 161 |