III

THE HISTORICAL RELATIONSHIPS OF BURNS

THE old conception of the Ayrshire ploughman-poet undoubtedly was that his poetry had no historical connection; that it stands apart as a unique phenomenon, entirely unconnected with the main stream of English poetry; that the peasant-poet owed every thing to nature, and nothing to books; that he was a high-priest of poetry, without literary father or mother, raised up by nature herself ab initio amidst the most disadvantageous circumstances, as if to put to shame man's feeble calculations of means to ends in literary culture. This was the old conception, people finding it difficult to understand how a ploughman could have trained himself to be a great poet. I do not know how far this conception still prevails; but as something very like it is to be found in the famous essay on Burns by another great Scotchman of genius, Thomas Carlyle, and as it harmonizes with our natural desire to have an element of the miraculous in our saints and heroes, it has probably survived all the plain facts set forth by the poet's biographers. There is in the conception this much obvious truth: that Burns owed little to school and nothing to college; but when it is said that nature, and nature only, was his school-master (unless the word is used in a sense sufficiently wide to include the works of man, and among them that work of man called literature), the theory does injustice to Burns as an artist, and is at variance with the plain facts of his life.

Supreme excellence in poetry is never attained by a sudden leap up from the level of common ideas and

common speech, whether a man's every-day neighbors are rustic, or men and women of art and fashion and culture. The world in which his imagination moves is never entirely of his own creation. The great poet must have had pioneers from whom he derived some of the ideas and resources of his craft-enough, at least, to feed and stimulate and direct his own inborn energy. Burns, in truth, was a self-taught genius only in the sense in which all great artists are so; those who see in the Ayrshire ploughman's mastery of the poetic art any rarer miracle than this are those only who attach an exaggerated importance to what schools and colleges can do in furthering the highest efforts of human genius. Beyond a certain point, as we all know, every man must be his own school-master; in this sense nature was the school-master of Burns. But, all the same, his poetry is not an isolated creation, entirely disconnected from the main body of literature. It has its own individuality, as the work of all great artists must have; but it had a literary origin, as much as the poetry of Chaucer or Shakespeare, or even Pope. When nature has done her work, and the unexpected has happened, it is generally easy to find something very natural in the means she has used to bring the unexpected to pass; and the very circumstances that seemed at first sight to be disadvantageous to Burns are now seen to have favored him in the fulfilment of his mission.

For a work of genius we require first of all a man of genius; but there are conditions that render the exercise of his genius possible, and there are influences that modify the character and the direction of his work. And in the case of literary work these conditions and influences are generally found in antecedent literature, though not necessarily in the literature of the language in which the artist works-literature having really an international unity. The course of literature is mainly self-contained; and, in reading its history, the impulse

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to great work in one generation may often be traced back to dimly conceived aims and blind and imperfect performances in a previous generation. Nature begins her preparations for the advent of a great man long before he makes his appearance.

It is interesting, and it strengthens our sense of the unity of literature from generation to generation, to trace back in this way the movement that culminated in the poetry of Burns to a very humble episode in the English poetry of Queen Anne's time-a passing fashion for writing what is called pastoral poetry, and a quarrel on the subject among the more celebrated wits of the day. The fashion had prevailed for some time before in France; in England the starting-point was Dryden's translation of Virgil's "Eclogues." To this translation was prefixed an elegant discourse on pastoral poetry in general by William Walsh, Esq., a gentleman of wit and fashion, who wrote in a very neat and pointed style, subjected the views of the Frenchman Fontenelle to delicate and polite ridicule, and submitted to the public with great spirit and elegance his own views of what pastoral poetry ought to be. Mr. Walsh's ideal was of the most artificial kind, his poetical shepherds being men of a golden age, when grazing was the chief industry, and shepherds were, as he put it, men of learning and refinement, and his chief rules being that an air of piety should pervade the pastoral poem, that the characters should represent the ancient innocent and unpractised plainness of the golden age, and that the scenery should be truly pastoral-a beautiful landscape, and shepherds, with their flocks round them, piping under wide-spreading beech-trees. Pastoral poetry, as conceived by Mr. Walsh, who spoke the taste of his age, was a species of elegant trifling, something like the recent fancy for old French forms of verse (ballades, roudeaus, villanelles, and so forth), and nothing might have come of it; but it so happened that Mr. Walsh

was the earliest literary friend and counsellor of young Mr. Pope, who was persuaded to make his first essay as a poet in pastorals, written in strict accordance with Walsh's principles, and of that came important consequences. Pope published in 1709, in a miscellany of Dodsley's; in the same volume appeared also pastorals from the pen of Ambrose Philips. Philips, known as Namby Pamby, belonged to the coterie of Addison and Steele. Between that coterie and Pope arose jealousy and strife; hence when, four years later, Pope produced his "Windsor Forest," there appeared in the Guardian, the organ of the coterie (April, 1713, is the date), a series of articles on pastoral poetry, in which Steele incidentally gave a roll to the log of friend Namby Pamby, who was named as the equal of Theocritus and Virgil, and ridiculed, by implication, in a polite Queen Anne manner, the pastoral poems of young Mr. Pope, without mentioning his name. This at least was the construction put upon the matter by Pope, who took a clever and amusing revenge of a kind to cause a great deal of talk about the Guardian articles. It was an amusing literary quarrel; but Steele's theory of pastoral poetry, thus occasionally produced, had more fruitful results. The numbers of the Guardian really set forth for the first time a fresh theory for that kind of composition, to the effect that in English pastoral poetry the characters should be not classical shepherds and shepherdesses, Corydon and Phyllis, Tityrus and Amaryllis, —but real English rustics; that the scenery should be real English scenery; and that the manners and superstitions should be such as are to be found in English rural life.

Nothing was done to realize this theory in England till the time of Crabbe and Wordsworth (Gay merely burlesqued it in his "Shepherd's Week"), but it so happened that it was taken seriously in Scotland. At the time when the Guardian articles appeared there was

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a social club in Edinburgh, named The Easy Club, which followed the literary movements of London with keen interest; and of this club Allan Ramsay was poetlaureate. Allan also wrote pastoral elegies à la mode, neither better nor worse than the artificial stuff then in fashion; but in a happy hour he thought of trying his hand at the real pastoral, as conceived by Steele, and produced "The Gentle Shepherd." Thus, out of a passing literary fashion and a literary quarrel came the original impulse to the composition of a work that must be numbered among the conditions that made the poetry of Burns possible. For no less honor than this can be claimed for Ramsay's pastoral comedy. Carlyle says somewhere that a man of genius is always impossible until he appears. This is quite true, but it is only a half truth; and the other half is that a man of genius must always be possible before he appears. Favorable conditions for the exercise of his genius will not produce the man; but if the favorable conditions are not there when he appears, his genius will be stifled, and he will remain mute and inglorious.

Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" became, in the generation before Burns, one of the most popular books among the peasantry of Scotland, finding a place, it is said, beside the Bible in every ploughman's cottage and shepherd's sheilling; and it may be said to have created the atmosphere in which the genius of Burns thrived and grew to such proportions. It did this by idealizing rural life in Scotland, by giving the ploughman a status in the world of the imagination. It enabled him, as it were, to hold his head higher among his fellow-creatures, and opened his eyes to the elements of poetry in his hard, earth-stained, and weather-beaten existence. "His rustic friend," Carlyle says, in speaking of Burns and the boundless love that was in him, "his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, to be ranked with the paragons of earth.”