LORD ROSEBERY ON BURNS.
THE least flattering of Lord Rosebery's critics has spoken of his speech before unveiling the statue of Burns as "marked by his usual felicity of touch, though marred a little by paradox." For our own parts, though hearty admirers of Lord Rosebery's political speeches, we cannot see in it any trace of his felicity of touch, while the paradox was, in one in- stance at least, obtained by the rather simple process of taking a commonplace truth and giving it a good slap in the face. In the first place, Lord Rosebery, in calling Burns the greatest Sc,otchman who ever lived, did very great injustice to Scotland. That he is Scotland's greatest poet nobody doubts. There is, as Lord Rosebery said, so much of pure genius in Burns, that he may well rank among the greatest poets of the world, and not far below the very highest. But it is quite another thing to call Barns the greatest Scotchman because he is the greatest Scotch poet. A great deal goes to the making of a man beyond what goes to the making of a poet. If anyone called Shakespeare the greatest Englishman who ever lived, we hope there would be plenty of people to say that we do not know half enough of Shakespeare as a man to say whether as a man, and apart from his poetry, he was great at all, still less to say, even if, as is probable, he were great also as a man, how great he was. But of Barns as a man we do know a great deal, and what we know is by no means evidence to prove that he was at all great as a man. For our own parts, we should not only claim John Knox and Sir Walter Scott—to whom Lord Rosebery referred—as vastly greater men than Burns, but many another in every chapter of the history of Scotland of which we have any thorough knowledge. Indeed, Lord Rosebery himself can hardly mean more than this, that Burns's greatness as a poet is sotranscendent that one thinks of nothing else except Burns the 'poet when one talks of Burns the man. Well, if that be under- stood, it was not saying separate things of Burns, but the same thing in two different ways, when Lord Rosebery first said what, unless it be explained away, is not true, that Burns is
the greatest Scotchman who ever lived, and then said what is true without being explained away, that he is the greatest poet Scotland ever produced. Only the first way of saying it was a slovenly way likely to mislead his hearers, and the second was an accurate way of saying it which could not mislead them. Exclude the wonderful poetry he wrote, and what sign of greatness as a man did Burns give us ? He wrote good and vivid letters, but hardly so good as Mrs. Carlyle. He wrote some good prose descriptions, but nothing to compare with the prose descrip- tions of Carlyle. He had large and kindly sympathies, but not larger or kindlier than Sir Walter Scott, and not half so discriminating. He was not ashamed of his order, and loved his country, but how few are the Scotch peasants of whom you could not say the same ! For the rest, Burns did not govern himself even so far as to prevent doing gross and cruel wrongs to those whom he pretended to love ; and though a care- ful critic of himself, and accustomed to measure shrewdly his own qualities and defects, it is impossible to deny that his conduct to his wife before his marriage, to say nothing of his conduct after it, deserved a sort of self-contempt and self-reproach of which he never seems to have had even the faintest inkling. When Lord Rosebery tells us that his were the generous faults of a generous mind, we should like to know what he finds generous in Barns's desertion of Jean Armour, whom he had professed to love so well, and whom, when he fell in with her again, he professed to love so well again that he deliberately repeated the kind of treachery against which his purest poems inveigh with so much indigna- tion. True, he married her in the end, and took enormous credit to himself for that scanty act of justice ; but whoever reads this episode in his life as indicating principally "the generous faults of a generous mind," does not seem to us to know how to distinguish generosity from gross and selfish passion.
But to leave Lord Rosebery's moral estimate of Burns as a man, which seems to us paradoxical only if it be paradox to assert that for which there is not only nothing to be said on the surface, but less and less to be said, the more you go below the surface,—we fail to find, even in the intellectual part of the criticism, anything that is striking as well as just. It is, of course, perfectly true, and a remark of some weight, that Burns's poetry has a genuine flavour of the soil of Scotland in it ; that it is all the nobler for its close contact with the social life of the peasantry ; and that his genius, if transported to England, would have lost the conditions under which it flourished best. That is true and weighty ; but then it is so ob- vious that no man, however inferior to Lord Rosebery, could well have helped stumbling on it, in speaking of Burns at all. What does not strike us as either true or lucid, is the rather ambitious remark—which to our ear smacks of the ide'es Napoleoniennes —that Burns is Scotland's "man of destiny." We have not the slightest notion what Lord Rose- bery means by that. His own interpretation of his own meaning does not help us. "When I called him man of destiny,'" he says, "I spoke advisedly, for I think that when a country finds its greatest poet at the plough, untrained by art or educa- tion for the highest forms of intellectual exertion, and finds that man prepared to go forth as a prophet and a poet into all lands, she may say that destiny has found a man, and that that is her man of destiny." Has not that in it a little of the faufaronade of Mr. Disraeli's oracular utterances ? No doubt genius, overflowing genius, shows itself in breaking through the limitations of a peasant's narrow lot, and speaking to the world in poems which haunt the imagination of all ranks of life, from the highest to the lowest. But why does Lord Rosebery speak of that which shows Burns to be par excellence the man of genius, as showing him to be the man of destiny ? Is it more a destiny for genius to manifest itself than it is for stupidity to manifest itself? What is there more in genius than in dullness which betrays the hand of destiny ? Is it more the destiny of the balloon to rise than of the lead to sink ? Is it more the destiny of the poet to sing, than it is of the plodder to plod ? Destiny is in reality a pompous word that means very little. If we have great talents, it will probably be our destiny to show them. If we have no talents, it will certainly be our destiny to show none. But the latter destiny is even more inevitable than the former ; and it is in a, more accurate sense the destiny of a fluent preacher to rant, than it is the destiny of a great poet to make immortal poems. The former destiny is all but inevitable ; the latter destiny is more or less avoidable, and was even more evaded by Burns himself,—thanks to his too great love of social excitement, —than it ought to have been. But for his skill in evading the destiny which he might have accomplished so much more fully, we might well have had Barns ten years longer with us, and his poems crowned by the poetry of another decade of his maturest genius. If it was Burns's destiny in one sense to bring himself to a very early grave, it was a self-made destiny, not a destiny made for him by the necessary conditions of his life, any more than it was Lord Rosebery's destiny to make a bad speech on Burns after he had made so admirable a speech on the Reform Bill. If Lord Rosebery had taken the same pains to estimate Burns that he did to estimate Lord Cairns's amendment to the motion for the second reading of the Reform Bill, it would have been his destiny to make a good speech. And if Burns had taken the same pains to avoid whiskey and other social excitements which he took to perfect "Tam O'Shanter " or "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," it is most likely that he would bare lived to write us a great many more poems of the first order. We hope Lord Rosebery is not going to imitate Lord Beaconsfield in conjuring with such big words as "destiny," which certainly stand for much more of human ignorance than of human knowledge. Burns and Byron were no more men of destiny than Scott or Goethe, of whom no one could say that they drained life in great draughts and had done with it. Probably both of them did as much to transform the life of the people to whom they belonged, as Burns, and much more than Byron.
We heartily wish that Lord Rosebery had taken more pains, and then certainly with his brilliant talents he might have added something to the popular knowledge of Burns. To say that his poetry was full of the flavour of the soil he tilled is true, though, as-we have said, a very obvious truth. The frightened field-mouse, the broken daisy, the lass who wants to be advised to marry the man she loves, the farmer flying from the witches, the two ranting pastors, and above all perhaps the jolly beggars, these are the subjects which elicit the genius of Burns in its strongest light, and none of them could have been dealt with without the fullest knowledge of the life of the Scotch peasantry, and the fullest delight in it. But Burns has added to the knowledge of him which his poems and his life give us, sketches of himself of singular power, with which the public are less familiar. He spoke of himself as gifted with "a wild logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good-sense," a description which seems to us to contain the self- criticism of true genius, and one on which Lord Rosebery might have commented, not only effectively, but with brilliance. Again, Burns has told us his own estimate of himself, that when, as a very young man, he was about to try his fate in Jamaica,—" I had pretty nearly as high an idea of myself and of my works, as I have at this moment when the public has decided in their favour. It ever was my opinion that the mistakes and blunders, both in a rational and religions point of view, of which we see thousands daily guilty, are owing to their ignorance of themselves. To know myself had been all along my constant study. I weighed myself alone, I balanced myself with others, I watched every means of information to see how much ground I occupied as a man and as a poet. I studied assiduously Nature's design in my formation,—where the lights and the shades in my character were intended ;" and the result was, as he has told us, that he had estimated himself,—as a poet, at least,—long before the public knew anything of him, with singular accuracy, perhaps quite as truly as Carlyle estimated him long after his death. Surely these bold strokes of fine self- criticism would have given Lord Rosebery a far better and more fertile text than the empty and superstitious word which he borrowed from Scotland's traditional coronation-stone, or "stone of destiny," and applied to her most popular and most racy poet. Lord Rosebery's art consisted in throwing an imposing artificial shadow over a figure on which he might have cast a beam of pure and natural light.
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