SOURCE: "Robert Burns," in Naturalism in English Poetry, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1920, pp. 113-34.

[In the following essay Brooke praises Burns as the first writer to achieve naturalism in his Scottish poems, the restorer of passion to poetry, and the master of sincerity, pathos, and stinging satire.]

Robert Burns, of whom Scotland is justly proud, was the child of his own country, and his poetic ancestors were not English, but Scottish. When I say that—and I shall enlarge on it afterwards—I exclude the poetry he wrote in ordinary English, in which he did not use his native dialect. These poems, in verse, diction and manner, are full of English echoes, and derive from Shenstone, Gray and others of that time. The only distinctive element they have is that now and then the irrepressible genius of the man, his rustic, national individuality, bursts, like a sudden gush of clear water, for a line or two, out of the dull expanse of his imitative verse. He should have done, with all impulses on his own part to write in English, and with all requests from others to do so, what David did with Saul's armour, put it off when he had worn it once and said, "I cannot go with these—I have not proved them."

Poets should cling to their natural vehicle, to their native song. When Burns put on English dress, his singing robes slipped off him, his genius moved in fetters, he lost his distinction, his wit ran away, his passion was not natural; above all, the lovely charm of his words—their pleasant surprises, their delicate shades of expression, even their subtle melodies like the melodies of Nature herself, of the wind in the trees, of the brook over the pebbles, of the wild whispering of the sea, deserted him. It is wise to skip almost everything that he wrote in English, for there he was encumbered by alien traditions; and the traditions were those of the conventional poetry, and amazingly foreign to his genius.

There were two other elements in his poetry which were foreign to his fresh Naturalism, to his genius. The first of these was his tendency to personification. That smacked of the past poetry both English and Scottish. Dunbar, Lyndsay and Ramsay used this as much as Spenser or Gray. And Burns, though his poetry was like a new day, could not quite, any more than Coleridge, get rid of this remnant of yesterday.

The second thing was his habit of moralising in poetry, of drawing lessons for life not indirectly, but directly, from Nature, from human events. I cannot quite trace this habit to the previous Scottish poets. I believe it came to Burns from Gray. Sometimes it is as well done as it is by Gray, sometimes with even a greater freshness, as in the two admirable poems on turning up the nest of the field mouse with the plough, and on seeing a louse climbing a lady's bonnet in church. At other times, though the moralising is well expressed, it is not naturally expressed. It sounds as if he had taken it from some one else, as if it belonged to the old didactic strain, not to the new world of poetry, the gate of which he threw open. It is a reversion, not a creation of his own. And, as poetry, though not as a piece of sermon, it is somewhat wearying. We miss it in the freshness of the new wind which had begun to blow, and we miss the new Naturalism. At these two points Burns had clinging to him some of the rags of the past. At this last point he is rather the English than the Scottish poet. His greatest power, that which made him different from all the poets of his time, that which introduced into the time at which he wrote an element which revolutionised its lyric singing, was his absolute naturalness, the opposite and the enemy of convention in poetry. He bubbled up into poetry like a springing well into an arid plain, and the plain grew fertile as the well made itself into a stream and watered the desert. We have seen how Cowper began that in England in the natural quietudes of the "Task," and in a few deeply felt lyrics. But Cowper's character and circumstances forbade the unchastened naturalness of Burns, who immediately followed his own impulse without a thought of what the world would say; who flashed the impulse of the moment into verse; to whom everything was a subject, but who chose the last subject which occurred to him when he had a more eager impulse than usual; who never asked why or what he should sing;

As it came he took the world, as the moment came he made his poem. The circumstance of the moment flew into verse. He lived and wrote; loving and ranting, laughing and weeping, slashing his foes and flattering his friends, wooing and loving and sorrowing; praying and cursing; now with the Jolly Beggars, now with Mary in Heaven, in the alehouse, in the church, by the brookside in the summer, on the hills in the drifting snow, by the dark sea in storm; dancing and halfdrunk at the Holy Fair and Halloween, or sitting douce and grave in the religious quiet of the Cottar's Saturday Night. Everything seemed to suit his hand, and naturalness was at the root of all. He sang as the bird sings on the bough. The long struggle for Naturalism, which we have followed from the time of Pope till now, received its first complete realisation in the Scottish poetry of Burns. This, of course, is the same as saying that he was sincere. He had that great quality. No one can ever doubt, as he reads any poem of Burns, that he is saying in it exactly what he felt. Nothing is reconsidered; no mask is worn; there is no thought of what the world would say, no modifications on that account. We touch the very life of the man at the moment, the very truth—and, when we are weary of the quantity of insincere poetry which we read, or of poetry over-wrought by art, to read Burns is a mighty consolation. And, indeed, it is almost a lesson in the high moralities. We understand better what Truth means, what a loveliness, as of the ideal world, it bestows on work in which it shines. That is so true that it glorifies poems in Burns which the dainty Philistines think coarse.

But naturalness and sincerity do not make a poet. There are hundreds who possess these qualities who could not make a verse, nor sing them into a song. Along with them there must be the natural gift, the shaping power of imagination, the executive hand of the born artist. And I am not sure that any of our poets possessed this natural gift, i.e., within his range, which was not that of the greater poets, in richer fullness than Burns. Other poets begin with inferior work and somewhat slowly reach their excellence. They have to train their powers. Burns leaped at once into his proper excellence. His masterpieces were nearly all written in the first six months of his poetical life, and they were masterpieces in three or four different kinds of poetry. There was no need to correct or polish them, to recompose, or to lay them aside. They gushed out like a fountain, clear and full, from the living rock—their shaping, their melody, their passion, their subject-matter alive and natural, needing no work, no change, born like a flower of the field.

"Within his range," remember; and that range was limited. Were I not to guard what I have said by this phrase, I might seem to equal him with the greater poets who move on the higher planes of thought, and travel over larger lands towards infinite horizons. Burns cannot be classed with them, but, all the same, he is often more natural and sincere than they, and his natural gift, so far as it was capable of going, was more spontaneous than theirs. Theirs needed care and work to bring to excellence, his did not.

When we find naturalness and sincerity combined in a man, we find the testing-stones of his character. However other parts of his character or his circumstances may influence him, these two qualities will lead our judgments concerning him into rightness. For want of recognising these two qualities in him, Burns has been rudely or foolishly praised or blamed by men. His naturalness, left uncontrolled and hurried on into excess by the strength of his passions, led him astray into weakness; and with women into folly, vanity and sensuality. But his sincerity in all he did, even in wrong—his deep sincerity with himself, should lead us to judge him gently, and humbly as well as firmly, in wonder whether we should have done only half as well, had we had his nature and his genius. And so Wordsworth felt concerning him—Wordsworth who had almost a Puritan morality. No tenderer, humbler verses were ever written than he wrote about Burns. So also felt Carlyle, so felt R. L. Stevenson. Others have been more priggish in their judgments, but even they are fascinated. Fascination is the word. The weaknesses, the follies, the sins of Burns do not die; they must be felt and condemned; but they earn the pardon of some because of their passionate naturalness, and of others because of his rare and noble sincerity.

But I do not speak here of his character. Enough and to spare has been written about that. The critics who write about Burns cannot keep off that subject! They spend, like Carlyle, like Stevenson, like Professor Shairp, three-fourths of their essays on the moral and psychological questions which arise out of his career; and they shove the literature of the man into the background. It seems a wonderful novelty for them—living in the midst of a conventional society, and reading for the most part books which smack of the literary cliques, and of the temporary drifts of the time—to come across a man who lived as natural a life as we may suppose Adam lived, and felt like a child born on the original Aryan steppe—doing, thinking and feeling, even after he had been to Edinburgh, just exactly what his will urged him, at the moment, to do. There is a naïveté in the suppressed astonishment of the critics over this phenomenon which always amuses me. Carlyle makes a whole series of sermonettes about Burns. Even Stevenson preaches, with an air, it is true, of detachment, but with a judicial note, flavoured with a self-conceited legality, which offends me. As to Shairp and many others, their moralities are almost Pharisiac. None of them seems to feel, as he writes, that Burns was as far above them as a star is above the earth; and that, naughty as he was, he was, even through all his follies and weaknesses, wiser at heart than they.

I turn to him as a poet. He had, in his best poetry, no English ancestors. All his poetic ancestry was in Scotland. He was the culmination of a long line of poets who wrote in the Lowlands, and who derived more than half of their special qualities from the Celtic blood so largely infused into the whole country which lay between Edinburgh and Glasgow, between the Border and the valleys of the Forth and the Clyde. The characteristics which are distributed through James I., Barbour, Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas, Ramsay and Ferguson, appear also in Burns, and glorified. He was their climax. He inherited them, and they were Scottish, not English, and, for the most part, Celtic, not Teutonic—Celtic in their love of Nature, their rollicking humour, their hot, frank and satiric abuse, their nationality, their isolated individuality, their pathetic power, and their quick passion for women. At every one of these points English poetry is of a different temper, manner and tradition—and Burns is less an English poet than Theocritus or Catullus. He is outside of the tradition. That is the reason why, when he attempted to write in "the English," he made such a mess of it.

Being of this descent, he was not unworthy of it. He concentrated into his work all the qualities and excellences of the poets who preceded him. He was the flowering of this tree that, rooted in the Lowlands, had grown into a noble expansion through the summers and winters of four centuries. I might trace in Burns the elements of Henryson, Barbour, or Dunbar brought to their best shaping and life, were not that too long a criticism for this place; but take his closer predecessors, take Ramsay and Ferguson. Their work is fairly good here and there. Its elements are in a great part the elements of Burns. But there is as much difference between their shaping and his of these elements, and of the class of subjects into which they and he enter, as there is between the chatter of a sparrow and the song of the nightingale. He is the poet, the flowering of their song. Nothing so good was before him, and nothing so good after him, nothing half so sincere, half so natural or half so passionate.

As such he was, of couse, national. Carlyle, who ought to have known better, seems to think that the poetry of Scottish nationality was only born into a full life in Burns. Burns himself fell into that error. Scottish poetry, even when, as with the first James, it derived impulse from England, clung pertinaciously to its own country. The Chaucerian poems of Scotland reject the conventional landscape of Chaucer and insert that of their own land. Whatever English form the Scottish poets used they reanimated with the spirit of Scotland. The ballads are alive with national feeling. The greater Makers are no exception. Barbour is on fire with national feeling, he hates the English. Dunbar's "Golden Targe" thrills with it, and his "Thistle and the Rose" sings little of the Rose and much of the Thistle. Douglas paints hour by hour the landscape of his own low hills in May and winter. Not an expression, not a picture is even touched by England. Alexander Scott, like the others, personifies his native land with a steadfast and moral patriotism. Ramsay, Ferguson, before Burns—a shoal of inferior poets after him, bubble with nationality.

But Burns threw around it a passion and a beauty of imaginative words, a charm of personification, which it had never had before, and never has had since.

"The Poetic Genius of my country found me, as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha—at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me. She bade me sing the loves, the joys, the rural scenes and rural pleasures, in my native tongue. I tuned my wild, artless notes as she inspired."

He keeps himself throughout to the scenery, the subjects, the heroes, the warlike struggles, the rustic life, the women of his own land. His Muse is wholly untravelled. Carlyle said he had "a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling"—it is far too large a statement, but what there is of human feeling is all Scottish. The Muse of Scotland appears to him—let us read some of that vision. It well illustrates all I say; it is almost the best criticism of his own poetry.

The Muse tells how she loved him from his birth and listened to his

And then she sketches him as the poet, and all the elements of his genius:

Nor must we leave Burns without hearing some of the lines written to William Simpson; the last verse of which found a still nobler representation in "Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled," composed as he rode against the fierce wind and rain over the lonely moors of Galloway, silent and grim with patriotic passion. This is national enough:

On the other side, there is not unfrequently felt in his poetry the influence, like a perfume wafted from cultivated fields far away, which flits with the wind over a wild moorland, of the half-classical, half-courtly note of the Augustan school. Along with this there is also a touch of chivalrous sentiment such as might be derived from the Scottish sentiments for the Stuarts. These two elements steal strangely in among the rustic songs, and especially among the love-songs. To the first we owe the conventions of Sol and Phoebus, and others of the same kind. To it also we owe certain artificial love-poems which read as if they were written by the Caroline poets. Moreover, an element of reflective morality on life, and another of deistic religion, carried, at times, into a personal relation to God by the natural passion of Burns, seem to belong to this influence.

To the second, to the Cavalier element (and Burns read the Cavalier songs), we may owe a few of the finest of his songs, not especially about the Stuarts—his Jacobite songs are commonplace—but about those Scots who carried their love of fighting, their hatred of England and their sword into a foreign service. The best of these I quote, and nothing better was ever done in this way. The gathering night, the wet wind on the sea, the lonely spirit of the exile, his cavalier spirit, his passionate love, his battle-courage, his presentment of death, are all woven together into a lyric whole:

These are the modifications of his dominant nationality.

Next, right down from the Celtic spirit, comes the ranting, roaring wit of Burns, and secondly, the savage brilliancy of his satire—what the old Scottish poets called "flyting." Of the first there is no finer example in the language than "The Jolly Beggars." Villon never did anything more real, more vital, more keenly in the subject. It never flags for a moment. Every man and woman in it is alive to the last rag on their bodies; and coarse as they are, it is impossible, so vivid is their humanity, to help feeling kindly to them, even to regret not being with them for a time. Their jollity seems to redeem their naughtiness. It is a masterpiece. So is, in a less reckless society, "Tam O' Shanter." Every one knows that poem. Its mirth, its philosophy, its strange touches of moral sentiment, its spiritualisation of drunkenness, its visions of the invisible, its happy turns of wit, its admirable phrases, its amazing dash and rush from end to end, all mingled into harmony, linked easily together, the changes never seeming out of place, the style always right, make it one of the joys of literature. Wit has seldom been more gay, the force of life has seldom been so unbroken; it races in full tide through every line.

He was capable, however, of a more delicate humour, which chiefly played round the quips and cranks and wiles of love affairs. The best example of this, having, beyond the event, to do with a common, almost a universal element in human nature, is "Duncan Gray cam' here to woo,"—a thing shaped as well as a lyric girl, nothing in it which ought to be out, nothing out which ought to be in. Other poems of the same happy, lively, soft humour, play like children through his book of songs. He was a kindly creature; his heart was open to all humanity. He loved the world; and nowhere is this wide affectionateness shown more than in his gay poems of humour. I think it was this affectionateness in the man, this universal love, which made his humour so natural, so unforced, so unwearying. We never hear a laboured or a conventional note in it. It is as fresh as his passion. However, he was splendidly capable of savage satiric wit. And on this side he descends from the Celtic spirit. "The Holy Fair," "The Ordination," the "Address to the Unco' Guid," "Holy Willie's Prayer," "Death and Doctor Horn-brook," are scathing, outspoken, unsparing slaughters in verse. They are, perhaps, the things in his poetry which most display his intellectual genius. In satire of this kind—the fierce, stinging, witty, merciless satire, the naked mockery, the indignant lash—he stands alone. No one has ever done the same kind of thing so well—and those who felt the whip deserved it. But these satirical poems are not to be compared, as poetry, to the songs. They are first in their own class, but their class is not a high one. They seem also to be exceptions to his general kindliness. But they are partly modified by the laughing wit that runs through them; and what they attack was the only thing that Christ spoke harshly of—want of love, cruelty, condemnation of the weak, combined with hypocrisy. Just indignation was at the root of his satire, the indignation of loving kindness with a religion and a morality of damnation.

It is said that humour and pathos are closely connected, that the true humorist is capable of the most pathetic expression. However that may be, Burns, when he felt deeply, was a master of pathos. He had, like the Celt, the sorrow of his wit and the wit of his sorrow. His melancholy was as profound as his flashing humour was bright; and he passed in a moment from one to the other. This was the Celtic nature in him. It is strange to turn from "The Jolly Beggars" to "Mary Morison," from "The Holy Fair" to "Mary in Heaven," from "Duncan Gray" to "The Banks of Doon." Their contrasts illustrate the range of Burns, but the contrasts are very great.

I do not care to criticise or dwell upon the beauty of these pathetic things. It is best to read them, to leave them to make their own impression.

To read these poems is to realise how passionately he could love and enshrine his love; and Burns, in that progress of Naturalism of which we have been speaking, restored to our poetry, after a long interval, the passionate love-poem. It can scarcely be said to have existed since the days of Dryden. But now, like a Princess that had slept a hundred years, it woke up at the kiss of a Prince of Poetry, and broke out into singing and sang a hundred songs about herself, and her whims and vagaries, her joys and sorrows, her gaiety and melancholy, her profound happiness and exaltation in passionate feeling. It was like a naked tree bursting into a million leaves—a grey meadow suddenly starred with a multitude of flowers.

And this sprang out of the heart of a peasant, as I may well call Burns, though he was a small farmer's son. It was underived from other poets, though we can trace its rise in Ramsay and Ferguson. It was pure Scotland, for Burns had not read the Elizabethan songs. It was unassisted by any literary class, for the best of the love-lyrics were made before he went to Edinburgh; not was there a soul in Edinburgh capable of writing one of them. It rose fresh from the natural earth and the life of those who lived by the earth; born while the poet drove the plough and reaped the corn and milked the cow and watched the sheep. The Muse was tired of didactic philosophy and satire, of refined and classic verse, of faded sentiment; she had enough of Crabbe's stern miseries, of Cowper's unimpassioned softness, of the slow river and the stately grove, of the sandy shore and the grey waves. She wanted something fresh, living, intense in feeling; she wanted frank natural passion, and scenery to match its wildness and its strength, the dashing torrent and the lonely moor, the dark lake and the long-ridged hills, the larks singing in the solitudes, the chasing clouds and sunlight on the mountain side, the birches rustling in the glen, the wild storm that drifted the deep snow. And she made Burns and gave him the passion of Nature and man:

And the love-poetry was not of cavalier and lady, of gentlefolk in society or in the settled life of English counties, but of the poor in their cottages, and in the scattered huts upon the moor:

Love hath he found in huts where poor men lie.

He sings the old man and his wife going down life's hill together to the far-off land beyond death, the merryhearted girls who meets her lover at the fair, the lovers trysting by the mill-stream and where the cornrigs are bonny; where the rye stands tall, and where the hazels grow by the stream in the meadows, where at even the sheep are called home, where broom and the gowan and the bluebell are listening to the linnet, everywhere within that wild soft Lowland country, where, among its crossing glens, Nith and Callawater stray, till all Nature as she lives in this pastoral country is closely interwoven with the love of maid and man. He sings the lighter forms of love, its moments, its fleeting passion. He sings the love of a lifetime, its steadiness, its honour and its serious passion. He sings the passion of the sorrows of love, its partings, its misfortunes, its despairs, its rapture. Almost every note is touched, and for the most part with an honest sincerity and manliness which is enchanting. Read "The Birks of Aberfeldy," read "I love my Jean," read:

And read, for joy and nature and delight in loving, "O Saw ye Bonnie Lesly," and then, for the pity and passion of pitiful love, listen to "Highland Mary"—the love that might have saved him and that fate denied him.

I have said that he wove together Nature and lovers. His way with Nature was to weave her into the life of man. She is not loved for her own sake only, as Wordsworth and Shelley loved her. She is loved, but along with man and woman, as Gray and Collins loved her, but far more than they. The love of Nature has grown up to fuller stature since their time. It is almost as fresh, as natural in Burns as it is in Wordsworth, but it has no philosophy, and Nature in it has no separate life of her own. The love of Nature is gathered in Burns solely around the scenery of the dales and low flowing hills and meadows and clear streams and birch and hazel and thorn of the Lowland valleys—a scenery which has, in its half wild, half cultivated aspect, a special sentiment of its own—curiously and charmingly special. To visit it and know its spirit would be to enjoy better the poetry of Burns, for the spirit of its life breathes from poem to poem like an ethereal force. I can feel that, though I have never lived among its soft appeals. It caught the childish heart of Burns. Its natural charm moved the first impulses of his art, till he passed from Nature and the emotion she awakened, to the life of the human heart. Nature was the threshold, man was the temple:

Always Nature was second, humanity first—the background, sometimes used like a theatrical property, for the human act and passion he sung. But for the most part, the scenery comes naturally into the piece and is harmonised with its humanity. And always when the love and sorrow and joy are most deep, the landscape is most delightful and true. But it is never touched with the deep spirit of ideal beauty; it is never alive with a life of its own; it never has a soul that speaks to us. That was to come. It had not yet been born.

Yet, as he mingled together Nature and man, and especially the animal life of Nature, he illustrated his thoughts of human life by what he saw in Nature; and transferred to flowers and birds the deep affection he had for mankind. A sudden tenderness wakens in him for the life of flower or animal, because their pain images the pain of man, their morning joy his joy. When his plough crushes the daisy, he speaks of it as if he had crushed a child:

There he slips out of this close intimacy with pure Nature into human life, and compares the daisy's fate with helpless maid and luckless bard, and finally with his own fate. It never is Nature for herself alone.

As quick and tender is his love for animals. The birds sing in every song. Nothing can be more wisely doggish than the characters of Caesar and Luath in "The Twa Dogs," that close, vital piece of rustic life, where the cottar's life and dwelling and homely phrases and pains are painted with intense and joyous reality. "The Death of Mailie" lives in the life of the sheep; nor is the "Farmer's Salutation to his Old Mare" less kindly, less alive, less sympathetic. The man and his animal comrade have been together like John Anderson and his wife:

This was the pleasant fashion in which, like Cowper, he re-introduced, with the sincerest feeling, the affection of man for the animal world and the comradeship between them, as a subject for poetry; and none of all the poets who followed him in this has done it with more naturalness. When his coulter turns up the nest of the field mouse, he talks to it as to a hurt child. He has harmed a fellow creature:

That will be the note of a really civilised society. It is not the note of our half-barbarous condition.

The last quality of his poetry which I instance is its strong personal note. I said that Cowper brought back, in this new Naturalism, personal revelation into English poetry. Burns did the same thing in Scotland. He paints himself just as he is, with the finest sincerity, with no dressing up for public. The lectures the critics give him for his aimless and uncontrolled life he gives to himself; and in far clearer and better words than they use. If a poet, recognised to be a quite true person, describes his character and its faults as they are, and draws quite justly and sternly the moral of them, the public might let him alone and the moralist critics might cease to preach. They only weary the publicans and sinners, and double the conceit of the Pharisees. There is no need for their long-winded dissertations. We know Burns through and through from himself, and I sometimes wish he were now alive in order to satirise these gentlemen who make him the text of their sermons. If you want to see and feel the man—if you want to take a moral warning from his life—or to learn from him how to live apart from the world and wisely—collect his personal statements—read them together—and the very living, thinking, loving, failing, noble creature will stand by your side, exactly, minutely, as he was in the centre of his spirit.

He painted other men as clearly as he painted himself, whenever he cared to do this work. He had a wonderful, keen eye for the outside of all the types of men he met, he had just as keen an eye for their souls whether they were bad or good. And the words, the fiery phrases with which he described what he saw, were as vital, as lucid, as sharp as his sight. The execution was as clear as the conception. Words were his servants. He said to them: "Do this," and they did it. We know the whole of his society, their houses, their way of life, their dress, their pleasures, their amusements at the fair, on the farm, at the meeting-house; when they preach and drink and dance, and read the evening prayer, and wander with their sweethearts by the river. We can build all the different types, and the full type also itself of that society into our mind. No poetry is more individualising. But beyond the range of the society he knew his poetry does not travel. His range as a poet is then limited. The greater world of thoughts and passions was not for him; nor its mightier doings. Even in his own world of lyric poetry, he is almost entirely limited to the love-lyric. Into that far wider world of the lyric, whither we have been led by the poets that followed him, he did not come. His circle as a poet was then small, but within it he was excellent. And one thing was the source of his excellence. It was the deep charity of his nature. No one ever loved his fellows, and the natural world with them, better than he. He lives not only by his style, as some have said, but because the spirit of his style was Love, and the master of his imagination was Love: