Robert Burns was born near Ayr, Scotland,
25th of January, 1759. He was the son of William
Burnes, or Burness, at the time of the poet’s
birth a nurseryman on the banks of the Doon in Ayrshire.
His father, though always extremely poor, attempted
to give his children a fair education, and Robert,
who was the eldest, went to school for three years
in a neighboring village, and later, for shorter periods,
to three other schools in the vicinity. But it
was to his father and to his own reading that he owed
the more important part of his education; and by the
time that he had reached manhood he had a good knowledge
of English, a reading knowledge of French, and a fairly
wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of English
literature from the time of Shakespeare to his own
day. In 1766 William Burness rented on borrowed
money the farm of Mount Oliphant, and in taking his
share in the effort to make this undertaking succeed,
the future poet seems to have seriously overstrained
his physique. In 1771 the family move to Lochlea,
and Burns went to the neighboring town of Irvine to
learn flax-dressing. The only result of this
experiment, however, was the formation of an acquaintance
with a dissipated sailor, whom he afterward blamed
as the prompter of his first licentious adventures.
His father died in 1784, and with his brother Gilbert
the poet rented the farm of Mossgiel; but this venture
was as unsuccessful as the others. He had meantime
formed an irregular intimacy with Jean Armour, for
which he was censured by the Kirk-session. As
a result of his farming misfortunes, and the attempts
of his father-in-law to overthrow his irregular marriage
with Jean, he resolved to emigrate; and in order to
raise money for the passage he published (Kilmarnock,
1786) a volume of the poems which he had been composing
from time to time for some years. This volume
was unexpectedly successful, so that, instead of sailing
for the West Indies, he went up to Edinburgh, and
during that winter he was the chief literary celebrity
of the season. An enlarged edition of his poems
was published there in 1787, and the money derived
from this enabled him to aid his brother in Mossgiel,
and to take and stock for himself the farm of Ellisland
in Dumfriesshire. His fame as poet had reconciled
the Armours to the connection, and having now regularly
married Jean, he brought her to Ellisland, and once
more tried farming for three years. Continued
ill-success, however, led him, in 1791, to abandon
Ellisland, and he moved to Dumfries, where he had
obtained a position in the Excise. But he was
now thoroughly discouraged; his work was mere drudgery;
his tendency to take his relaxation in debauchery
increased the weakness of a constitution early undermined;
and he died at Dumfries in his thirty-eighth year.
It is not necessary here to attempt
to disentangle or explain away the numerous amours
in which he was engaged through the greater part of
his life. It is evident that Burns was a man
of extremely passionate nature and fond of conviviality;
and the misfortunes of his lot combined with his natural
tendencies to drive him to frequent excesses of self-indulgence.
He was often remorseful, and he strove painfully, if
intermittently, after better things. But the story
of his life must be admitted to be in its externals
a painful and somewhat sordid chronicle. That
it contained, however, many moments of joy and exaltation
is proved by the poems here printed.
Burns’ poetry falls into two
main groups: English and Scottish. His English
poems are, for the most part, inferior specimens of
conventional eighteenth-century verse. But in
Scottish poetry he achieved triumphs of a quite extraordinary
kind. Since the time of the Reformation and the
union of the crowns of England and Scotland, the Scots
dialect had largely fallen into disuse as a medium
for dignified writing. Shortly before Burns’
time, however, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson had
been the leading figures in a revival of the vernacular,
and Burns received from them a national tradition
which he succeeded in carrying to its highest pitch,
becoming thereby, to an almost unique degree, the poet
of his people.
He first showed complete mastery of
verse in the field of satire. In “The Twa
Herds,” “Holy Willie’s Prayer,”
“Address to the Unco Guid,” “The
Holy Fair,” and others, he manifested sympathy
with the protest of the so-called “New Light”
party, which had sprung up in opposition to the extreme
Calvinism and intolerance of the dominant “Auld
Lichts.” The fact that Burns had personally
suffered from the discipline of the Kirk probably
added fire to his attacks, but the satires show more
than personal animus. The force of the invective,
the keenness of the wit, and the fervor of the imagination
which they displayed, rendered them an important force
in the theological liberation of Scotland.
The Kilmarnock volume contained, besides
satire, a number of poems like “The Twa Dogs”
and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,”
which are vividly descriptive of the Scots peasant
life with which he was most familiar; and a group
like “Puir Mailie” and “To a Mouse,”
which, in the tenderness of their treatment of animals,
revealed one of the most attractive sides of Burns’
personality. Many of his poems were never printed
during his lifetime, the most remarkable of these being
“The Jolly Beggars,” a piece in which,
by the intensity of his imaginative sympathy and the
brilliance of his technique, he renders a picture of
the lowest dregs of society in such a way as to raise
it into the realm of great poetry.
But the real national importance of
Burns is due chiefly to his songs. The Puritan
austerity of the centuries following the Reformation
had discouraged secular music, like other forms of
art, in Scotland; and as a result Scottish song had
become hopelessly degraded in point both of decency
and literary quality. From youth Burns had been
interested in collecting the fragments he had heard
sung or found printed, and he came to regard the rescuing
of this almost lost national inheritance in the light
of a vocation. About his song-making, two points
are especially noteworthy: first, that the greater
number of his lyrics sprang from actual emotional
experiences; second, that almost all were composed
to old melodies. While in Edinburgh he undertook
to supply material for Johnson’s “Musical
Museum,” and as few of the traditional songs
could appear in a respectable collection, Burns found
it necessary to make them over. Sometimes he
kept a stanza or two; sometimes only a line or chorus;
sometimes merely the name of the air; the rest was
his own. His method, as he has told us himself,
was to become familiar with the traditional melody,
to catch a suggestion from some fragment of the old
song, to fix upon an idea or situation for the new
poem; then, humming or whistling the tune as he went
about his work, he wrought out the new verses, going
into the house to write them down when the inspiration
began to flag. In this process is to be found
the explanation of much of the peculiar quality of
the songs of Burns. Scarcely any known author
has succeeded so brilliantly in combining his work
with folk material, or in carrying on with such continuity
of spirit the tradition of popular song. For
George Thomson’s collection of Scottish airs
he performed a function similar to that which he had
had in the “Museum”; and his poetical
activity during the last eight or nine years of his
life was chiefly devoted to these two publications.
In spite of the fact that he was constantly in severe
financial straits, he refused to accept any recompense
for this work, preferring to regard it as a patriotic
service. And it was, indeed, a patriotic service
of no small magnitude. By birth and temperament
he was singularly fitted for the task, and this fitness
is proved by the unique extent to which his productions
were accepted by his countrymen, and have passed into
the life and feeling of his race.