H atljata, Wrm B«"^'< FROM THE BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY COLLECTED BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY Cornell University Library PR 4331.C97 Robert Burns: an address ... at the unvei 3 1924 013 447 267 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013447267 An Address, by George WUliam Qurtis, at the lihvdUng of the Statue of the P0et, ifi ^entral Park, 'Meik- York, Octo^r 2, iSSd, ROBERT BURNS AN ADDRESS GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS AT THE UNVEILING OF THE STATUE OF THE POET, IN CENTRAL PARK, NEW-YORK, OCTOBER 2, 1880. NEW-YORK FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION. 1880. /y ,5 ? 3i, M- 2 Press of Francis Hart & Co. New-York. ROBERT BURNS. THE year 1759 was a proud year for Great Britain. Two years before, amid universal disaster, Lord Chesterfield had exclaimed, "We are no longer a nation." But, meanwhile, Lord Chatham had restored to his country the sceptre of the seas and covered her name with the glory of continuous victory. The year 1 759 saw his greatest triumphs. It was the year of Minden, where the French army was routed ; of Quiberon, where the French fleet was destroyed ; of the heights of Abra- ham in Canada, where Wolfe died happy, and the dream of French supremacy upon the American continent vanished forever. The triumphant thunder of British guns was heard all around the world. Robert Clive was 4 Robert Burns. founding British dominion in India; Boscawen and his fellow-admirals were sweeping France from the ocean ; and, in America, Colonel George Washington had planted the British flag on the field of Braddock's defeat. "We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is," said Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one." But not only in politics and war was the genius of Great Britain illustrious. James Watt was testing the force of steam; Har- greaves was inventing the spinning-jenny, which ten years later Arkwright would com- plete ; and Wedgwood was making household ware beautiful. Fielding's "Tom Jones" had been ten years in print, and Gray's " Elegy " nine years. Dr. Johnson had lately published his dictionary, and Edmund Burke his essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. In the year 1759, Garrick was the first of actors and Sir Joshua Reynolds of painters. Gibbon dated in this year the preface of his first work ; Hume published the third and fourth volumes of his history of England ; Robertson his his- tory of Scotland ; and Sterne came to London Robert Burns. 5 to find a publisher for "Tristram Shandy." OHver Goldsmith, "unfriended, solitary," was toiling for the booksellers in his garret over Fleet Ditch ; but four years later, with Burke and Reynolds and Garrick and Johnson, he would found the most famous of literary clubs, and sell the "Vicar of Wakefield" to save himself from jail. It was a year of events decisive of the course of history, and of men whose fame is an illustrious national posses- sion. But among those events none is more memorable than the birth of a son in the poorest of Scotch homes ; and of all that renowned and resplendent throng of states- men, soldiers, and seamen, of philosophers, poets, and inventors, whose fame filled the world with acclamation, not one is more grate- fully and fondly remembered than the Ayrshire ploughman, Robert Burns. This great assembly is in large part com- posed of his countrymen. Most of you, fellow- citizens, were born in Scotland. There is no more beautiful country, and, as you stand here, memory and imagination recall your native land. Misty coasts and far-stretching splen- 6 Robert Burns. dors of summer sea ; solemn mountains and wind-swept moors ; singing streams and rocky glens and waterfalls ; lovely vales of Ayr and Yarrow, of Teviot and the Tweed ; crumbling ruins of ancient days, abbey and castle and tower ; legends of romance gilding burn and brae with "the light that never was on sea or land " ; every hill with its heroic tradition, every stream with its story, every valley with its song ; land of the harebell and the moun- tain daisy, land of the laverock and the cur- lew, land of braw youths and sonsie lasses, of a deep, strong, melancholy manhood, of a deep, true, tender womanhood, — this is your Scotland, this is your native land. And how could you so truly transport it to the home of your adoption, how interpret it to us be- yond the sea, so fully and so fitly, as by this memorial of the poet whose song is Scotland ? No wonder that you proudly bring his statue and place it here under the American sun, in the chief American city, side by side with that of the other great Scotchman whose genius and fame, like the air and the sun- shine, no local boundary can confine. In this Robert Burns. 7 Walhalla of our various nationality, it will be long before two fellow-countrymen are com- memorated whose genius is at once so char- acteristically national and so broadly universal, who speak so truly for their own countrymen and for all mankind, as Walter Scott and Robert Burns. This season of the reddening leaf, of sunny stillness and of roaring storm, especially befits this commemoration, because it was at this season that the poet was peculiarly inspired, and because the wild and tender, the wayward and golden-hearted autumn is the best sym- bol of his genius. The sculptor has imagined him in some hour of pensive and ennobling meditation, when his soul, amid the hush of evening, in the falling year, was exalted to an ecstasy of passionate yearning and regret ; and here, rapt into silence, just as the heavenly melody is murmuring from his lips, here he sits and will sit forever. It was in October that Highland Mary died. It was in October that the hymn to Mary in heaven was writ- ten. It was in October, ever afterward, that Burns was lost in melancholy musing as the 8 Robert Biirns. anniversary of her death drew near. Yet within a few days, while his soul might seem to have been still lifted in that sorrowful prayer, he wrote the most rollicking, resist- less, and immortal of drinking songs : " Oh, Willie brew'd a peck o' maut, And Rob and Allan cam to pree ; Three blither hearts that lee lang night Ye wadna find in Christendie." Here were the two strains of this marvellous genius, and the voices of the two spirits that went with him through life : " He raised a mortal to the skies, She drew an angel down." This was Burns. This was the blended poet and man. What, sweetness and grace ! What soft, pathetic, penetrating melody, as if all the sadness of shaggy Scotland had found a voice ! What whispering witchery of love ! What boisterous, jovial humor, excessive, daring, unbridled ! — satire of the kirk so scorching and scornful, that John Knox might have burst indignant from his grave, and shudder- ing ghosts of Covenanters have filled the Robert Burns. 9 mountains with a melancholy wail. A genius so masterful, a charm so universal, that it drew farmers from the field when his coming was known, and men from their tavern beds at midnight to listen delighted until dawn. It cannot be said of Burns that he "burst his birth's invidious bar." He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and he always felt his poverty to be a curse. He was fully conscious of himself and of his intellectual superiority. He disdained and resented the condescension of the great, and he defiantly asserted his independence. I do not say that he might not or ought not to have lived tranquilly and happily as a poor man. Per- haps, as Carlyle suggests, he should have divided his hours between poetry and vir- tuous industry. We only know that he did not. Like an untamable eagle he dashed against the bars he could not break, and his life was a restless, stormy alternation of low and lofty moods, of pure and exalted feeling, of mad revel and impotent regret. His pious mother crooned over his cradle snatches of old ballads and legends, of which her mind lo Robert Burns. was full. His father, silent, austere, inflexibly honest, taught him to read good books, books whose presence in his poor cottage helps to explain the sturdy mental vigor of the Scotch peasantry. But the ballads charmed the boy. He could not turn a tune, but driving the cart or ploughing or digging in the field, he was still saying the verses over and over, his heart answering like a shell the sea, until, when he was fifteen, he composed a song himself upon a lassie who drew his eye and heart ; and so, as he says, love and poetry began with him together. For ten years his life was a tale of fer- menting youth ; toiling and moiling, turning this way and that, to surveying and flax- dressing, in the vain hope of finding a fairer chance ; a lover of all the girls, and the mas- ter of the revels everywhere ; brightening the long day of peat-cutting with the rattling fire of wit that his comrades never forgot ; writing love-songs, and fascinated by the wild smug- gler boys of Kirkoswald ; led by them into bitter shame and self-reproach, but turning with all the truculence of heady youth upon Robert Burns. 1 1 his moral censors, and taunting them with immortal ridicule. At twenty-five, when his father was already laid in AUoway kirkyard, the seed of old national legend which his mother had dropped into his cradle began to shoot into patriotic feeling and verse, and Burns became conscious of distinct poetic ambition. For two years he followed the plough and wrote some of his noblest poems. But the farm which he tilled with his brother was unproductive, and at the very time that his genius was most affluent his conduct was most wayward. Distracted by poetry and poverty and passion, and. brought to public shame, he determined to leave the country, and in 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old. Burns published his poems by subscrip- tion, to get the money to pay his passage to America. Ah ! could that poor, desperate ploughman of Mossgiel have foreseen this day, could he have known that because of those poems — an abiding part of literature, familiar to every people, sung and repeated in American homes from sea to sea — his genius would be honored and his name blessed, and 12 Robert Burns. his statue raised with grateful pride to keep his memory in America green forever, per- haps the amazing vision might have nerved him to make his Hfe as noble as his genius ; perhaps the full sunshine of assured glory might have wrought upon that great, gener- ous, wilful soul to "tak' a thought an' men'." Burns's sudden fame stayed him and brought him to Edinburgh and its brilliant literary society. Hume was gone, but Adam Smith remained ; Robertson was there and Dugald Stewart. There, also, were Blacklock and Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison ; Fraser Tytler and Adam Ferguson and Henry Ers- kine. There, too, were the beautiful Duchess of Gordon and the truly noble Lord Glen- cairn. They welcomed Burns as a prodigy, but he would not be patronized. Glad of his fame, but proudly and aggressively indepen- dent, he wanders through the stately city, taking off his hat before the house of Allan Ramsay, and reverently kissing Robert Fer- guson's grave, — "his elder brother in misfor- Robert Burns. 13 tune," as Burns called him. He goes to the great houses, and, although they did not know it, he was the greatest guest they had ever entertained, the greatest poet that then or ever walked the streets of Edinburgh. His famous hosts were all Scotchmen, but he was the only Scotchman among them who had written in the dialect of his country, and who had become famous without ceasing to be Scotch. But one day there stole into the drawing-room where Burns stood a boy of fifteen, who was presently to eclipse all Scot- tish fame but that of Burns himself The poet was looking at an engraving of a soldier lying frozen in the snow, under which were some touching lines, and, as he read them. Burns, with his eyes full of tears, asked who wrote them. None of the distinguished com- pany could tell him, but the young boy, Walter Scott, timidly whispered the name of the author, and he never forgot that Burns turned upon him his full, dark, tearful eyes, — eyes which Scott called the most glorious imaginable, — and thanked him. Scott saw Burns no more. They parted in Scotland a 14 Robert Burns. hundred years ago ; but here, now, under this tender American sky, they meet again, face to face, amid the grateful benedictions of two worlds. The dazzling Edinburgh days were a glar- ing social contrast to the rest of his life. The brilliant society flattered him, but his brilliancy outshone its own. He was wiser than the learned, wittier than the gayest, and more courteous than the courtliest. His genius flashed and blazed like a torch among the tapers, and the well-ordered company, enthralled by the surprising guest, winced and wondered. If the host was condescending, the guest was never obsequious. But Burns did not love a lord, and he chafed indignantly at the subtle but invincible lines of social dis- tinction, feeling too surely that the realm of leisure and ease, a sphere in which he knew himself to be naturally master, must always float beyond, beyond — the alluring glimmer of a mirage. A thousand times wistfully watching this fascinating human figure amid the sharp vicissitudes of his life, from Poosie Nansie's ale-house in Mauchline to the stately Robert Burns. 15 drawing-room of Gordon castle, with all his royal manhood and magnificent capability en- tangled and confused, the heart longs, but longs in vain, to hear the one exulting and triumphant cry of the strong man coming to himself, " I will arise." But with all his gifts that was not given him. Burns left Edinburgh to wander about his bonnie Scotland, his mind full of its historic tradition and legendary lore, and be- ginning to overflow with songs born of the national melodies. He was to, see, and he wished to see, no other land. His heart beat toward it with affectionate fidelity, as if he felt that somehow its destiny were reflected in his own. At Coldstream, where the Tweed divides Scotland from England, he went across the river, but as he touched the English soil, he turned, fell upon his knees, stretched out his arms to Scotland, and prayed God to bless his native land. His wanderings ended. Burns settled, at twenty-nine, upon the pleasant farm of Ellis- land, in Nithsdale, over the hills from his native Ayrshire : 1 6 Robert Burns. " To make a happy fireside clime For weans and wife." Here his life began happily. He managed the farm, started a parish library, went to church, and was proud of the regard of his neighbors. He was honored and sought by travellers, and his genius was in perfect tune. "Tam O'Shanter," and "Bonnie Doon," the songs of Highland Mary, " John Anderson, my Joe," and "Auld Lang Syne," are all flowers of Ellisland. But he could not be farmer, ganger, poet, and prince of good fellows all at once. The cloud darkened that was never to be lifted. The pleasant farm at Ellisland failed, and Burns, selling all his stock and crop and tools, withdrew to Dumfries. It was the last change of his life, and melancholy were the days that followed, but radiant with the keen flashes and tender gleams of the highest poetic genius of the time. Writing exquisite songs, often lost in the unworthiest companionship, consumed with self-reproach, but regular in his official duties ; teaching his boy to love the great English poets, from Shakespeare to Gray ; seeking pleasure at any Robert Burns. 17 cost, conscious of a pity and a censure at which he could not wonder, but conscious also of the inexpressible tragedy which pity and censure could not know nor comprehend, and, through evil report and good report, the same commanding and noble nature that we know. Burns in these last dark days of Dum- fries is like a stately ship in a tempest, with all her canvas spread, with far-flying stream- ers and glancing lights and music penetrat- ing the storm, drifting helpless on the cruel rocks of a lee shore. One summer even- ing toward the end, as a young man rode into Dumfries to attend a ball, he saw Burns loitering alone on one side of the street, while the other was thronged with gay gen- tlemen and ladies, not one of whom cared to greet the poet. The young man instantly dismounted, and, joining Burns, asked him to cross the street. "Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ; " and then in a low, soft, mournful voice Burns repeated the old ballad : " His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new, But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing. And casts himsell dowie upon the corn bing. 3 1 8 Robert Burns. " Oh, were we young as we ance hae been, We suld hae been galloping down on yon green. And linking it owre the lily-white lea. And werena my heart light it wad die." Five years of letting his life wear ony way it would hing and Burns's life was ended, in 1796, in his thirty-seventh year. There was an outburst of universal sorrow. A great multitude crowded the little town at his burial. Memorials, monuments, biogra- phies of every kind followed. Poets ever since have sung of him as of no other poet. The theme is always fresh and always capti- vating, and, within the year, our own American poet, beloved and honored in his beautiful and unwasted age, sings of Burns as he sees him in vision, as the world shall forever see him, an immortal youth cheerily singing at his toil in the bright spring morning. The personal feeling of Longfellow's poem is that which Burns always inspires. There is no great poet who is less of a mere name and abstraction. His grasp is so human that the heart insists upon knowing the story of his life, and ponders it with endless sympathy Robert Burns. 19 and wonder. It is not necessary to excuse or conceal. The key of Burns's life is the struggle of a shrinking will tossed between great extremes, — between poetic genius and sensibility, intellectual force, tenderness, con- science, and generous sympathies on one side, and tremendous passions upon the other. We cannot, indeed, know the power of the temptation. We cannot pretend to determine the limits of responsibility for infirmity of will. We only know that, however supreme and resistless the genius of a man may be, it does not absolve him from the moral obligation that binds us all. It would not have comforted Jeanie Deans, as she held the sorrowing Effie to her heart, to know that the " fause lover " who " staw " her rose was named Shakespeare or Burns. Nor is there any baser prostitution than that which would grace self-indulgence with an immortal name. If a boy is a dunce at school, it is a foolish parent who consoles himself with re- membering that Walter Scott was a dull school-boy. It was not Scott's dullness that made him the magician. It was not the rev- 20 Robert Burns. eling at Poosie Nansie's and the Globe Tav- ern, and the reckless life at Mauchline and Mossgiel, that endeared Robert Burns to mankind. Just there is the mournful tragedy of his story. Just there lies its pathetic ap- peal. The young man who would gild his dissipation with the celestial glamour of Burns's name, snatches the glory of a star to light him to destruction. But it is no less true, and in the deepest and fullest meaning of his own words : " What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted." " Except for grace," said Bunyan, " I should have been yonder sinner." "Granted," says Burns's brother man and brother Scot, Thomas Carlyle, in the noblest plea that one man of genius ever made for another, — " Granted the ship comes into harbor with shroud and tackle damaged, and the pilot is, therefore, blame- worthy, for he has not been all-wise and all- powerful, but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs." Robert Burns. 21 But we unveil to-day and set here for per- petual contemplation, not the monument of the citizen at whom respectable Dumfries looked askance, but the statue of a great poet. Once more we recognize that no gift is more divine than his, that no influence is more profound, that no human being is a truer benefactor of his kind. The spiritual power of poetry, indeed, like that of natural beauty, is immeasurable, and it is not easy to define and describe Burns's service to the world. But, without critical and careful detail of observation, it is plain, first of all, that he interpreted Scotland as no other country has been revealed by a kindred genius. Were Scotland suddenly submerged and her people swept away, the tale of her politics and kings and great events would survive in histories. But essential Scotland, the customs, legends, superstitions, language ; the grotesque humor, the keen sagacity, the simple, serious faith, the characteristic spirit of the national life, caught up and preserved in the sympathy of poetic genius, would live forever in the poet's verse. The sun of Scotland sparkles in it; the birds Robert Burns. 23 But in thus casting a poetic spell upon everything distinctively Scotch, Burns fostered a patriotism which has become proverbial. The latest historian of England says that at the time of Burns's birth England was mad with hatred of the Scots. But when Burns died there was not a Scotchman who was not proud of being a Scotchman. A Scotch ploughman, singing of his fellow-peasants and their lives and loves in their own language, had given them in their own eyes a dignity they had never known : " A man's a man for a' that." And America is but the sublime endeavor to make the ploughman's words true. Great poets before and after Burns have been honored by their countries and by the world ; but is there any great poet of any time or country who has so taken the heart of what our Abraham Lincoln, himself one of them, called the plain people, that, as was lately seen in Edinburgh, when he had been dead nearly a hundred years, workmen going home from work beg- ged to look upon this statue for the love and 24 Robert Burns. honor they bore to Robbie Burns ? They love him for their land's sake, and they are better Scotchmen because of him. England does not love Shakespeare, nor Italy Dante, nor" Ger- many Goethe, with the passionate ardor with which Scotland loves Burns. It is no won- der, for here is Auld Scotia's thistle bloomed out into a flower so fair that its beauty and perfume fill the world with joy. But the power thus to depict national life and character, and thus to kindle an im- perishable patriotism, cannot be limited by any nationality or country. In setting words to Scotch melodies Burns turns to music the emotions common to humanity, and so he passes from the exclusive love of Scotland into the reverence of the world. Burns died at the same age with Raphael ; and Mozart, who was his contemporary, died only four years before him. Raphael and Mozart are the two men of lyrical genius in kindred arts who impress us as most exquisitely refined by careful cultivation ; and, although Burns was of all great poets the most un- schooled, he belongs in poetry with Raphael Robert Burns. 25 in painting and Mozart in music, and there is no fourth. An indescribable richness and flower-Hke quaUty, a melodious grace and completeness and delicacy, belong to them all. Looking upon a beautiful human Madonna of Raphael, we seem to hear the rippling cadence of Mozart and the tender and true song of Burns. They are all voices of the whole world speaking in the accent of a na- tive land. Here are Italy and Germany and Scotland, distinct, individual, perfectly rec- ognizable, but the sun that reveals and illu- minates their separate charm, that is not Italian or German or Scotch, it is the sun of universal nature. This is the singer whom this statue commemorates, the singer of songs immortal as love, pure as the dew of the morning, and sweet as its breath ; songs with which the lover wooes his bride, and the mother soothes her child, and the heart of a people beats with patriotic exul- tation ; songs that cheer human endeavor, and console human sorrow, and exalt human life. We cannot find out the secret of their power. Until we know why the rose is 4 26 Robert Burns. sweet, or the dew-drop pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of humanity. Whether because he reveals us to ourselves, or be- cause he touches the soul with the fervor of divine aspiration, whether because in a world of sordid and restless anxiety he fills us with serene joy, or puts into rhythmic and permanent form the best thoughts and hopes of man, — who shall say ? But none the less is the heart's instinctive loyalty to the poet the proof of its consciousness that he does all these things, that he is the harmonizer, strength- ener, and consoler. How the faith of Chris- tendom has been stayed for centuries upon the mighty words of the old Hebrew bards and prophets, and how the vast and inex- pressible mystery of divine love and power and purpose has been best breathed in par- able and poem ! If we were forced to sur- render every expression of human genius but one, surely we should retain poetry; and if we were called to lose from the vast accu- mulation of literature all but a score of books, among that choice and perfect re- mainder would be the songs of Burns. Robert Burns. 27 How fitly, then, among the memorials of great men, of those who in different coun- tries and times and ways have been leaders of mankind, we raise this statue of the poet whose genius is an unconscious but sweet and elevating influence in our national life. It is not a power dramatic, obvious, impos- fng, immediate, like that of the statesman, the warrior, and the inventor, but it is as deep and strong and abiding. The soldier fights for his native land, but the poet touches that land with the charm that makes it worth fighting for, and fires the warrior's heart with the fierce energy that makes his blow invincible. The statesman enlarges and orders liberty in the state, but the poet fos- ters the love of liberty in the heart of the citizen. The inventor multiplies the facilities of life, but the poet makes life better worth living. Here, then, among trees and flowers and waters ; here upon the greensward and under the open sky ; here where birds carol, and children play, and lovers whisper, and the various stream of human life flows by — we raise the statue of Robert Burns. While the human heart beats, that name will be 28 Robert Burns. music in human ears. He knew better than we the pathos of human life. We know bet- ter than he the infinite pathos of his own. Ah ! Robert Burns, Robert Burns ! whoever hngers here as he passes and muses upon your statue will see in imagination a solitary mountain in your own beautiful Scotland, heaven-soaring, wrapped in impenetrable' clouds. Suddenly the mists part, and there are the heather, the brier-rose, and the gowan fine ; there are the " Burnies, wirnplin' down your glens Wi' toddlin' din, Or foaming Strang wi' hasty stens Frae lin to lin " ; the cushat is moaning ; the curlew is calling ; the plover is singing ; the red deer is bound- ing ; and look ! the clouds roll utterly away, and the clear summit is touched with the tender glory of sunshine, heaven's own bene- diction !