Selections from Carlyle's Essay on Burns

Every poet writing in the English language must at some time come across the works of Robert Burns. To claim to be a knowledgeable poet and not be familiar with the Scottish bards poems is an admission that one may have only a superficial reading background in their chosen field. It is not necessary to know Burns to be a poet, but it is necessary to know what Burns knew. Which is, that the influence that comes from books, with standards of convention, and formal (even modern informal) style, are not what ultimately perfects the poet. A poet needs more than a room full of books and a refined writing style to be a passing player. The poet must, above all, be an honest person and an honest writer. Anything less leads to an affectation of learning. The singular task of the poet is to make a subject interesting, and it must come from conviction and experience. There was no sense of the theatrical in Burns makeup or in his writing. In his poems Burns comes to us without affectation. In his letters he often adopts a more elevated style; there is no one who is an altogether an unaffected writer. Avoiding affectation is a learned process. In essence a poet must have character.

The language of Burns, writing in the vigorous lowland Scotch tongue of the eighteenth century, may be too far removed from many modern poets understanding, and be hard going at that, but the life of Burns was something that everyone can understand. If a poet cannot learn to read Burns at least that poet could read about the life of Robert Burns and benefit from the endeavor just as well. His short, often tragic life has much to teach us about human nature, its ups, its downs, and its pitfalls. The farmer-poet, as Burns was known, communicated to the common people of his time "the rich commentary of his nature." The homeliness of Burns writing appeals to the Scottish people wherever they live, for he makes them feel that they belong to the land itself. His songs and the folklore of his poetry are the spirit of his genius. Poets owe much to Robert Burns. I encourage them to put aside the rude words of their times, and listen instead to the inward melodies that are ringing in their heads.

Anthologies, biographies and essays on Burns number in the thousands. It is not the place here to direct the interested reader to what I think are the best books on Burns for an education. What I intend is to pick from my own many books on the poet, one that I think deserves remembrance from times past, Thomas Carlyle's Essay on Burns. This edition is a small pocket-sized volume published in Boston by Allyn and Bacon in 1922., edited by Henry W. Boynton. With an Introduction on The Life and Work of Thomas Carlyle and of Robert Burns; Notes, Selections from the Poems; and a Glossary.

As Boynton points out about Carlyle, and for what he is probably best remembered: "Carlyle was a thinker at odds with his generation. He was a prophet with the soul of an idealist and the eye of a pessimist. He was a dreamer who could not make his dreams come true...He hated and endlessly denounced the shams, the cant, the materialism, and the social tyranny of his day. He was the champion of his own class. He stood for the people against the hereditary ruling class. This could be understood. But he was on the other hand, an ardent 'hero-worshipper.' " Not unlike many people today who have their idols that only they can champion more than others.

Carlyle was often accused of believing that might makes right because he believed, not in a strong government, but in the capable hands that held it. He was accused of being a radical. He was not so radical that he didn't demand constructive reform over revolution. He did not hold the philosophy, popular with radicals of his time, that the only way to reform was through the complete tearing away the fabric of existing institutions. These anarchist wool gatherers represented an equal tyranny to him as to what they were supposedly against.

Matthew Arnold warned readers of the time to be on their guard against the spread of "Carlylese"; for there could be no future for those who imitated his writing style. If we put aside his over-use of capitals, his long compounds, stretched paragraphs, the inversions of syntax with which he is so fond, we can find the merits in his writing. It was forceful, vivid and at times fantastic. He was a profound critic as well as having a great imagination. The literature of nineteenth century England would not be the same without Carlyle's pungent vision. To quote James Russell Lowell: "Though not the safest of guides in politics or practical philosophy, [Carlyle's] value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be overestimated."

Selections from Carlyle's Essay on Burns [Edinburgh Review, No. 96. 1828]:

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions; poured forth with little meditation; expressing by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted him to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strictest rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there is something in these poems, marred and defective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious student to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality they must have: for after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read; nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more extensively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, and truly unnatural class, who read little, and especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it.

...The ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is forever seeking in external circumstances the help which can only be found in himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: home is not poetical, but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conventional heroic world, that poetry resides for him; were he there and not here, were he thus and not so, it would be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality not on earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry.

...But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain preach to the poets, 'a sermon on the duty of staying at home.' Let them be sure sure that the heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler than our own, than simply because it is different; and even this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one; and have as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, and two centuries before he was born; or because he wrote what passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this: is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of other men,--they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so,--they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest.


to be continued...