EPISTLE TO A YOUNG FRIEND

                             — Robert Burns (1786) 

                                              — Comments —

Alex writes from England:

If you know anything about Burns’ personal failings, you will appreciate the gnomic measure of self-knowledge in the final lines:

And may ye better reck the rede,
Than ever did the’ adviser !

Laura writes:

Burns died at the age of 37 after a dental extraction. His wife, Jean, gave birth to nine children, three of whom survived infancy. He is believed to have fallen in love with Mary Campbell while he was married. Mary died of typhus at the age of 23.

Burns supported the French Revolution and was wildly popular in the Soviet Union. He remains popular in Russia today.

Walter Scott, according to Wikipedia, said of Burns’ face:

I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits … there was a strong expression of shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.

Grateful Reader writes:

As regards the love of the poetry of Robbie Burns, you are in good company.  George MacDonald, too, knew of ‘weel-plac’d love;’ he weel kent beautiful words and The Word. He also shows great sympathy for Burns, the man. This passage praising Burns requires some build-up, but the loveliness of MacDonal’s prose is worthy while waiting.   In his magnificent novel Sir Gibbie, MacDonald writes:

The first opportunity Donal had, he questioned Fergus as to his share in the ill-usage of Gibbie. Fergus treated the inquiry as an impertinent interference, and mounted his high horse at once. What right had his father’s herd-boy to questions him as to his conduct? He put it so to him and in nearly just as many words. Thereupon answered Donal–
 
“It’s this, ye see, Fergus: ye hae been unco guid to me, an’ I’m mair obligatit till ye nor I can say. But it wad be a scunnerfu’ thing to tak the len’ o’ buiks frae ye, an’ spier quest’ons at ye ‘at I canna mak oot mysel’, an’ syne gang awa despisin’ ye i’ my hert for cruelty an’ wrang. What was the cratur [Gibbie] punished for? Tell me that. Accordin’ till yer aunt’s ain accoont, he had taen naething, an’ had dune naething but guid.”
 
…
 
With a cold spot in his heart where once had dwealt some genuine regard for Donal, Fergus went back to college. Donal went on herding the cattle and reading what books he could lay hands on: there was no supply through Fergus any more, alas! The year before, ere he took his leave, he had been careful to see Donal provided with at least books for study; but this time he left him to shift for himself. He was small because he was proud, spiteful because he was conceited. He would let Donal know what it was to have lost his favour!  But Donal did not suffer much, except in the loss of the friendship itself. He managed to get the loan of a copy of Burns–better meat for a strong spirit than the poetry of Byron or even Scott.   An innate cleanliness of soul rendered the occasional coarseness to him harmless, and the mighty torrent of the man’s life, broken by occasional pools reflecting the stars; its headlong hatred of hypocrisy and false religion; its generosity, and struggling conscientiousness; its failures and its repentances, roused much in the heart of Donal. Happily the copy he had borrowed, had in it a tolerable biography; and that, read along with the man’s work, enabled him, young as he was, to see something of where and how he had failed, and to shadow out to himself, not altogether vaguely, the perils to which the greatest must be exposed who cannot rule his own spirit, but , like a mere child, reels from one mood into another–at the will of–what?
 
From reading Burns, Donal learned also not a little of the capabilities of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and country and mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that language, soft as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and wild as that of the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at once of bards and fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region, lingering only here and there in the hollow pools of emories, that Donal had never learned it; and the lowland Scotch, and ancient branch of English, dry and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old age, had become instead, his mother-tongue; and the man who loves the antique speech, or even the mere patois, of his childhood, and knows how to use it, possesses therein a certain kind of power over the hearts of men, which the most refined and perfect of languages cannot give, inasmuch as it has travelled farther from the original sources of laughter and tears. But the old Scotish itself is, alas! rapidly vanishing before a poor, shabby imitation of modern English–itself a weaker language in sound, however enriched in words, since the days of Shakespeare, when it was far more like Scotch in its utterance than it is now.
 
My mother-tongue, how sweet thy tone!
    How near to good allied!
Were even my heart of steel or stone,
    Thou wouldst drive out the pride.
 
So sings Klaus Groth, in and concerning his own Plattdeutsch–so nearly akin to the English.
 
To a poet especially is it an inestimable advantage to be able to employ such a language for his purposes. Not only was it the speech of his childhood, when he saw everything with fresh, true eyes, but it is itself a child-speech; and the child way of saying must always lie nearer the child way of seeing, which is the poetic way. Therefore, as the poetic faculty was now slowly asserting itself in Donal, it was of vast importance that he should know what the genius of Scotland had been able to do with his homely mother-tongue, for through that tongue alone, could what poetry he had in him have thoroughly fair play, and in turn do its best towards his development–which is the first and greatest use of poetry.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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