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CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 074 296 314 
 
PUBLISHED BV 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW 
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 UCMXVIII 
 
TWO ESSAYS 
 
 1. Don Quixote 
 
 2. The Politics of Burns 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PATON KER, LL.D. 
 
 GLASGOW 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS 
 
 PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 I918 
 
NOTE 
 
 The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow 
 has kindly given leave to reprint the essay on 
 Don fixate from the Proceedings of the Society. 
 The second essay, on The Politics of Bums, 
 was read to the Historical Society of the 
 University of Glasgow on the 22nd of 
 October, 19 15, and published in the Scottish 
 Historical Review, October, 19 17. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Don Quixote - - _ . i 
 
 The Politics of Burns - - - 25 
 
Don Quixote^ 
 
 I MAY be allowed to thank this Society for the 
 honour they have done me, and especially for the 
 opportunity of meeting some old friends, and of 
 acknowledging some old debts to my native town. 
 Before beginning on my proper subject, or speak- 
 ing directly of Don Quixote and his books of 
 chivalry, I should like to make mention of some 
 things that are commonly ignored or forgotten by 
 strangers in their estimate of Glasgow. Glasgow 
 has a larger share in romance and romantic tradi- 
 tion than most people recognise ; though they 
 have the salmon and the ring in the City Arms to 
 remind them. St. Kentigern, according to some 
 authorities, was the son of Owain ap Urien 
 Rheged, who is called Uwain by Malory ; son of 
 Urien, King of Gore, and of Morgan le Fay ; 
 Owain, the hero of the beautiful Welsh story The 
 Lady of the Fountain, the Iwain of Chrestien de 
 
 1 Read before the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 
 31st January, 1908. 
 
2 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 Troyes and Hartmann von Aue, and of the 
 English romance called Twain and Gawain. St. 
 Mungo is mentioned in one of the old French 
 chivalrous poems, the romance of Fergus, and the 
 same book tells how Sir Percival himself in his 
 wanderings came to the Forest of Glasgow.-"- 
 One of the chief documents for the life of Merlin 
 speaks of his appearance on the hill beyond the 
 Molendinar burn, uttering his prophecies to St. 
 Kentigern on this side of the stream.^ One must 
 not spend too much time in these reminiscences, 
 but before I leave them I would return to the 
 Molendinar valley, and ask whether any place has 
 been more honoured by romance than this, the 
 seat of St. Mungo. I am not thinking now of 
 Merlin, but of the High Kirk as Francis Osbal- 
 diston saw it, of the crypt on that Sunday, and of 
 the warning of Rob Roy. There is an imagina- 
 tive, a spiritual city of Glasgow to be found in the 
 books of different romancers and historians ; it 
 is not all vanity. 
 
 ^ La contree de Landemore 
 Trespasse tote sans arest, 
 Et puis s'en entre en la forest 
 De Glascou qui molt estoit grande. 
 — Fergus ed. Ernst Martin (Halle, 1872) 11. 182-185. 
 'c/.H.L. D. Ward, " Lailoken (or Merlin Silvester)," 
 Romania xxii. (1893) p. 516. 
 
DON QUIXOTE 3 
 
 In addressing a philosophical society one natur- 
 ally thinks of consulting the philosophers ; Hegel 
 has given his opinion about Don Quixote, and 
 with that I shall begin. It occurs in one of the 
 liveliest passages of his works, the discussion of 
 romanticism in the Msthetik. One must re- 
 member the vogue of the German romantic school 
 in Hegel's day, and also the strong foundation of 
 Hegel's mind in Greek literature. Like Goethe, 
 with whom he is in close sympathy, he is critical 
 of the romantic ideas, and though he feels their 
 attraction he is distinctly not of that party. 
 Shakespeare and Cervantes command his respect ; 
 Cervantes through his likeness to Shakespeare. 
 It is worth pointing out that the characters of 
 Shakespeare named by Hegel are not those we 
 should innocently expect from a philosopher. 
 Falstaff is there, but besides Falstaff, Hegel men- 
 tions Stephano, Trinculo and Pistol as examples 
 of Shakespeare's power. What he admires most 
 in Shakespeare is what he admires in Dante and 
 in Don Quixote ; the strength of the individual^ 
 character, the resistance of the character to all out- 
 ward pressure. Like the people in Dante, like . 
 Don Quixote, these are each an intelligence, not i 
 argumentative machines (says Hegel) like the 
 noble persons in classical French tragedy. 
 
4 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 Don Quixote, in those lectures on literature, 
 comes in after Ariosto ; Hegel is interested in the 
 exploding of medieval romance, and he is careful 
 to show that both Ariosto and Cervantes, in 
 making fun of chivab-y, preserve the chivalrous 
 essence under other forms. 
 
 " In spite of his comic aberration Don Quixote 
 
 retains what we praised in Shakespeare ; working 
 
 in the spirit of Shakespeare, Cervantes has^ made 
 
 his hero an essentially noble nature, endowed with 
 
 a variety of intellectual gifts, never uninteresting. 
 
 In his craziness he is always sure of himself, sure 
 
 I of his cause ; or rather it^sjust this sureness 
 
 which makes his craze. If we had not this 
 
 urureflectihg security as to his actions and their 
 
 consequences he would not be truly romantic, and 
 
 this self-confidence regarding his aims and ideas 
 
 is, all through, great and glorious with the finest 
 
 touches of character, (i) The whole work is 
 
 thus, on the one hand, a satire on romantic 
 
 chivalry, charged with irony through and through, 
 
 and thus different from Ariosto, whose pleasure in 
 
 the maze of adventure is in comparison light and 
 
 careless. (2) On the other hand, the adventures 
 
 of Don Quixote are only the thread on which in 
 
 the most charming way, a number of really 
 
 romantic tales are strung, as if to bring back in 
 
DON QUIXOTE 5 
 
 its true value what the rest of the story with its 
 comic spirit has dissolved." 
 
 — Hegel, .Msth. 11. p. 214. 
 
 I cannot find any other philosopher who speaks 
 better sense than this. Dr. Alexander Bain has 
 some remarks on Don Quixote not always easy to 
 understand, e.g. : — 
 
 " The ridiculous is clearly overdone in the 
 attack on the puppets ; but this passes as satire 
 due to the authors abhorrence of the Moors. 
 Otherwise, it is next thing to childish.''^ 
 
 Bain says of FalstafF that " the delineation 
 labours under a superfluity of grossness and 
 coarseness except for the lowest tastes." Perhaps 
 he meant this for Hegel .'' 
 
 Hegel, I think we may say, is more satisfactory 
 here than Bain, and more intelligible. He is also 
 in disagreement with Byron ; he does not believe 
 that Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away. 
 This is one of the falsities of Byron ; he some- 
 times spoke without thinking, and when he said 
 this about Don Quixote he was not thinking 
 about Cervantes ; he had a point to make. Let 
 us see how much value there is in it. It does not, 
 of course, mean that Cervantes put an end to the 
 old-fashioned chivalry ; the whole scheme of the 
 book implies that the old chivalry has gone ; even 
 
6 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 the Landlord, who, as Dorothea says, is very fit to 
 play second to Don Quixote in his love of 
 romances, even the Landlord recognises that there 
 are no real knight-errants now. It may be 
 remarked here that Don Quixote was only about 
 two hundred years too late ; the Knight in the 
 Canterbury Tales had been an knight-errant, as 
 we all know, and even very practical politicians, 
 like Henry Bolingbroke, may go out on adven- 
 tures against the infidel. But the fashion of the 
 fourteenth century, the time of Chaucer and 
 I Froissart, was not that of the sixteenth — the older 
 ^ chivabry, which was a much more real thing than 
 many people imagine, was gone, and the whole 
 plot of the book means that it is gone. 
 "' If you take chivalry in another sense to ntlSH*^ 
 simply high-flown notions of honour, then it is 
 equally untrue and absurd to say that chivalry was 
 (exploded by Don Quixote. The point of honour 
 Us more emphatic in the generation of Calderon 
 than it was before ; just as in England the cavalier 
 ideal of Montrose's time is in many respects finer 
 than the Elizabethan ; " the love of honour, the 
 honour of love " are wrought into a more piercing 
 flame of inspiration in the seventeenth century. ' 
 If chivalry means heroism, then I think we know 
 where to find some record of it in Spain after the 
 
DON QUIXOTE 7 
 
 death of Cervantes. The greatest heroic picture 
 in the world, I venture to think, is the Lances of 
 Velasquez, the picture of the Surrender of Breda, 
 in the Madrid museum. Velasquez is younger 
 by two generations ; and it is to him that we must 
 go, to a Spaniard of the decadent age, to see in a 
 picture, in the meeting of the conquering hero( 
 and his noble defeated adversary, what is meant ^ 
 by the poets when they speak of deliberate valour. 
 
 Byron had an incurable habit of preaching, and 
 allowed himself to be carried away by his moral 
 fervour at the expense of historical fact. The 
 author who, according to Byron, is guilty of his 
 land's perdition — smiling chivalry away, and all 
 the rest of it — ^was the author of a play called 
 Numancia, which was chosen to be acted in Sara- 
 gossa during the siege by reason of its patriotic 
 ardour. The experiment was successful in its 
 effect on the spirits of the town ; and the resistance 
 of Saragossa, though it may not prove that the 
 Numancia is a good play, at any rate shows that 
 Cervantes was not always a discourager. Byron 
 thinks Don Quixote was the saddest book. That 
 certainly was not the author's own opinion about 
 it. He thought it all very good fun. 
 
 Don Quixote, to begin with, is a literary bur- 
 lesque ; not a satire on chivalry, but a gibe at the 
 
8 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 ridiculous style and the poor common-place inven- 
 I tion of the degenerate prose romances. Some 
 people think of the book as if it were a modern 
 democratic assault on the gentle castles of 
 romance. It is not ; the books of chivalry are 
 the books of all the people; dear to the great heart 
 of it. Everyone reads them ; the curate knows 
 all about them before he delivers them to the 
 secular arm ; Dorothea reads them, and talks their 
 language when she is in the person of the Princess 
 Micomicona. They are the Tales of my Land- 
 lord, as we know well from that familiar passage 
 which has been more often printed than any other 
 Spanish sentence in the world ; and the books 
 which the host would not allow to be " heretical or 
 phlegmatic " were equally loved by his wife and 
 his daughter, and by Maritornes as well. The 
 first notable follower of Don Quixote, the English 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle, is composed in the 
 same fashion as his great original, and his chivalry 
 is the chivalry and the romance that are under- 
 stood by the Grocer's wife in London, and fitly 
 acted by Ralph the prentice. 
 
 The literary and critical views of Cervantes 
 have scarcely been enough appreciated, though he 
 gives them plenty of space in Don Quixote and 
 elsewhere. It is impossible to understand him 
 
DON QUIXOTE 9 
 
 without following his theory of. poetry and 
 prose, his opinions about the ideal and the 
 actual. When you have followed them you will 
 find that they leave you far short of the goal ; but 
 you cannot get on without them. Don Quixote 
 is one of the largest and roomiest books in the 
 world, a book that has been, to many readers, a 
 revelation of everything that is meant by imagi- 
 native freedom ; the delightful power of bringing 
 real people before the mind. Yet this book, so 
 much greater than any mere fine writing, was com- 
 posed by a maitjEho held strongly most of the 
 literary superstitions of his time, whose original 
 powers were in great part disabled, down to the 
 end of his days, by literary conventions and 
 formalities. What are the books on which he 
 prided himself? Don Quixote, no doubt ; but 
 even more the Galatea ; to the very last he kept 
 hoping for the second part of the Galatea, a thing 
 long promised, which he had never been able to 
 complete. Now the Galatea belongs to one. of 
 the most hopelessly artificial kinds of literature, 
 the Arcadian pastoral romance, compared with 
 which the crudest book of chivalry is amusing and 
 life-like. And his latest book, for which he wrote 
 the wonderful preface only a few days before his 
 death, is Persiles and Sigismunda, a romance of a 
 
lo DON QUIXOTE 
 
 kind that is only less artificial than the pastoral — 
 an imitation of those late Greek rhetorical novels 
 which had such an extraordinary influence on the 
 men of the Renaissance. If anything is contrary 
 to the spirit of Don Quixote, you would say it 
 was the formal abstract perfection which was the 
 ideal of the pa8t«fal- 3chool3, -thg"pure rhetorical 
 beauty that so often in different ways made ruin 
 of poetical originality after the revival of Learn- 
 ing. Yet those Idols were worshipped by Cer- 
 vantes, who did more than any man, except 
 Rabelais, to turn the opinion of Christendom 
 against the formalists of literature, more than any 
 man after Shakespeare to discredit the vanities of 
 rhetoric, in all business where men and women are 
 really interested. '' It is all very strange ; perhaps 
 one of the strangest paradoxes in history. It has 
 been pointed out that Cervantes in his literary 
 opinions is almost an echo of Sir Philip Sidney. 
 They speak in the same amusing way about the 
 popular drama of their time — one among many 
 examples of the curious sympathy, long before 
 there was any actual communication, between the 
 literatures of England and Spain. There is the 
 same chaffing of the popular dramatists, the same 
 regard for the unities, and censure of the easy- 
 going plays that paid no attention to the unities 
 
DON QUIXOTE ii 
 
 ^'Jsia on the one side and A f rick of the other,'* 
 said Sidney, " and so many other under Kingdoms 
 that the player when he commeth in must ever 
 begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will 
 not be conceived." 
 
 "What shall I say" (this is Cervantes in Don 
 Quixote, speaking in the person of the Canon of 
 Toledo, P.I. c. xlviii), " What shall I say of their 
 observance of time except that I have seen a play 
 which began the first act in Europe, the second in 
 Asia, and finished the third in Africa ; if there had 
 been a fourth it would have taken America." 
 The Canon speaks also, just like Sidney, of the 
 child in swaddling bands in the first act, reappear- 
 ing as a bearded man in the second. 
 
 Sidney and Cervantes have the same respect for 
 Heliodorus, the same conception of the perfect 
 prose romance, the heroic romance, with id eal 
 ^ur acters, full of edification, the epic poem in 
 pro se. Fielding picked up this idea (of the prose 
 epic) from Cervantes long afterwards, and was 
 fond of regarding his own works in this way ; but 
 Cervantes does not mean Don Quixote when he 
 speaks of the prose epic, he means something 
 much more like Persiles and Sigismunda ; a 
 dignified composition with ideal personages. 
 Sidney's Arcadia, with its mixture of pastoral ahd 
 
12 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 chivalrous romance, is a counterpart of both the 
 idealist works of Cervantes, the Galatea and Per- 
 siles, and anticipates the heroic French romance 
 of the seventeenth century. Sidney, it may be 
 remarked, though he did not write Don ^uixote^ 
 yet shows in some of his sonnets that he had a 
 sharp eye for literary vanity and false rhetoric; the 
 paradox and contradiction between the rhetorical 
 idealist and the ironical comic genius is not as 
 extreme as in the case of Cervantes, but it is there, 
 and of the same sort. 
 
 Sidney's essay on Poetry and its echo, the 
 discourse of the Canon of Toledo in Dow Quixote, 
 are among the evidences of the Renaissance — they 
 prove that there once was such a thing (or force, or 
 agency, or stream of tendency, or what not), and 
 they show how the humanist ideas worked at times. 
 to the detriment of literature. Little good in the 
 way of prose romances came from all this medita- 
 tion on Achilles and Ulysses and .ffineas, or from 
 the attempts to reduce them to the service of 
 modern novelists. The revival of learning meant 
 for many years, and for a large part of Europe, the 
 reign of empty and monotonous form ; and the 
 mutilation of many ingenuous minds through the 
 tyranny of the barren ideal.'^ When the young 
 
 '■ cf. Alfred Jeanroy " Quelques reflexious sur le Quattro- 
 cento," Bulletitt italien v. (1905) pp. 205-236. 
 
DON QUIXOTE 13 
 
 man thinks first of the form of his great work, 
 and goes looking about for stuff to put into it, we 
 know what the result will be. Who can number 
 the futile epics made according to receipt, the 
 tragedies in blank verse, the odes written to fill up 
 a pattern by weU educated young men? The 
 wind has carried them away. Does not one over- 
 hear the vulgar westland voice of Andrew Fair- 
 service saying : " Poet ! him a poet ! Twa lines 
 o' Davie Lyndsay wad ding a' he ever clerkit ! " 
 
 There are some, it is true, who have got 
 through with glory ; Milton, ~ all his life, was 
 haunted by the empty shadows of the perfect Epic 
 and the perfect Tragedy, like the ghosts craving 
 for a drink of blood in the Odyssey ; and Milton, 
 as we know, was not defeated. His Epic and 
 Tragedy had blood put into them, and they are 
 still alive. But there are some very queer things 
 in Milton's note-book, that seem to show how 
 near he was to the danger of fruitless ambition, 
 and his long list of possible subjects for a tragedy 
 is just the sort of thing that looks like pretentious 
 failure. 
 
 Cervantes also came through the ordeal, but in 
 a different way from Milton. The formal ghosts 
 never ceased to plague him ; they came about his 
 dying bed : " Where is that second part of the 
 
14 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 Galatea ? " They interrupt his happiest hours, 
 they pester his freest inventions ; but they do not 
 altogether gorgonise him. When he was not 
 thinking about them he began the story of Don 
 Quixote, and his greatest work escapes (not 
 altogether, as we shall see) from the blight of the 
 formalist ideal. 
 
 Don Quixote is one of the great chaotic books 
 of the early modern age ; it is not as reckless as 
 Rabelais, but just for that reason, just because it 
 is not consistently daring, it is more mixed and 
 incongruous than the book of Pantagruel. 
 Rabelais was quite untouched by those spectral 
 ideal forms that came across the path of 
 Cervantes ; Cervantes is much less secure, and 
 therefore perhaps more interesting. 
 
 Don Quixote is the t^si^reless great work in 
 the world. If it had come down flrom aniFquity 
 without a name or a date attached to it, it would 
 long ago have been hacked to pieces and distri- 
 buted by antiquarian,commentators, by theorists 
 on the growth of the prose epic, even as a piece of 
 bread is cut up and stowed away when you put it 
 down on an ant-hill. It might have a dozen 
 different authors, besides interpolator A and inter- 
 polator B ; and last of all the foolish Homer who 
 cobbles the pieces together into an immortal work. 
 
DON QUIXOTE 15 
 
 Consider, for example, the second half of the first 
 part ; the adventures of the Sierra Morena and 
 that which befel all Don Quixote's train in the 
 Inn — a quarter of the whole completed book. 
 
 First of all there is the„ip ^in actionj Don 
 Quixote's penance in imitation of Beltenebros 
 (Amadis of Gaul) — Sancho Panza's embassy to 
 Dulcinea — and the intervention of the Curate and 
 Barber to bring Don Quixote home again. 
 
 Then there is the story of Cardenio and 
 Lucinda, Don Fernando and Dorothea — a senti- 
 mental story with a definite plot, told partly in 
 narrative by Cardenio and Dorothea, partly by 
 Cervantes himself in the course of the day's work. 
 
 What is become of the play The History of 
 Cardenio, written (according to the record) by 
 Shakespeare and Fletcher? Did Shakespeare 
 read that wonderful encounter between the steady 
 logical madness of Don Quixote and the flighty 
 shaken wits of Cardenio .'' 
 
 Don Quixote as the champion of the Princess 
 Micomicona is brought back to the Inn which he 
 
 took for a castle. ^pvp jt I'g prarrply pnQsiblp tO 
 makp nnf- qny rhronology. — No on e go e o to bed 
 pvrppf- Dnn Qnivntp. ; who fights with the giant 
 in his sleep and cuts his head off, according to 
 Sancho Panza's evidence ; the landlord saw only 
 
1 6 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 his perforated wine-skins. This interrupts the 
 reading of the Impertinent Curiosity — one of 
 the Tales of my Landlord — with which the 
 Curate, the Barber, Dorothea and Cardenio 
 are engaged. The Impertinent Curiosity is 
 one of the best of the short stories of Cer- 
 vantes — a correct piece of writing, more Italian 
 than Spanish — one of the tragical cases or 
 problems which were a favourite theme for 
 casuists in fiction long before Browning or Ibsen. 
 Then, after this story is finished, appears Don 
 Fernando with Lucinda and his attendants — 
 a fair troop of guests : gaudeamus, says the land- 
 lord ; and now the scene is taken up with the 
 recognition of the unhappy lovers, and the for- 
 tunate conclusion of all their troubles ; after the 
 novel that is merely read, you have the novel that 
 is acted by Cardenio and Dorothea, Don Fernando 
 and Lucinda. There is not much difference in 
 style. When that affair is all settled, there are 
 still more visitors, more lovers, to come to that 
 well-frequented inn — the captive escaped from 
 Algiers and his Moorish lady. Th^en the cap- 
 tive's story, but not till Don Quixote has delivered 
 
 ViUnrnfir»ri--nrtr npnrifi g^- arm<! anri Uff-pj^ q Next 
 
 appears "the judge^an d his dau gIit£r,_CWa^nd the 
 judge turns out to be the captive's brother. And 
 
DON QUIXOTE 17 
 
 still they come. For even after the ladies have 
 gone to bed there is still no sleep, and Clara is 
 wakened up by Dorothea to listen to the singing 
 of the muleteer outside in the moonlight — the 
 muleteer who is the young man disguised, Donna 
 Clara's lover. And there are still the officers of 
 the Holy Brotherhood to be encountered, and the 
 other barber who had a claim upon Mambrino's 
 helmet, before Don Quixote can be brought 
 home. -^ 
 
 It is not merely a medlev o f pHvpntnrpS j if is 
 that and somethmg more ; it is a j;onfLisian_of 
 d^erent_stylea and„.iiterary^_ideals. No great 
 work was ever so. casual as this of Cervantes, 
 though there is something like the same accidental 
 origin for the work of Fielding, his English 
 follower and kinsman. A mischievous trick of 
 parody is the beginning of Joseph Andrews, " that 
 lewd and ungenerous engraftment," as Richard- 
 son called it, on Richardson's stock of moral 
 fiction. The difference between Fielding and 
 Cervantes is that Fielding had Cervantes before 
 him, and as his work grew under his hands into 
 something much more than he intended, he recog- 
 nised it for what it was, and named it, and gloried 
 in his relation to Cervantes. But Cervantes 
 never got his work so clearly detached in his own 
 
1 8 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 mind from its accidental origins. His genius 
 carried him far beyond his original joke, his quiz- 
 zing of the books of chivalry, but it did not get 
 him free from all the encumbrances of literary 
 formulas, the pastoral, the abstract novel, and so 
 forth. 
 
 If there is any difficulty in understanding Don 
 Quixote it is made by the author's genius, which 
 was like Chaucer and Shakespeare in variety of 
 mood. Cervantes was a humourist ; that is, he 
 could thinlc ot more than one thing at a time . 
 Many commentators are without this faculty, and 
 they are easily taken in and led to follow out one 
 single line of intention, when the author is really 
 working on a number of different lines all at once. 
 
 Hegel saw this in Cervantes, saw hoig;.^i]ie 
 chivalry that was apparently burlesqued and 
 fl©«tedjscas-t-here-aH the- time ni the impregnable 
 character ot Uon Uuixote, how the hyperbolical 
 foniaiiLe Llral seeillecl to be driven out of the world 
 came back from infinity on the other side. There 
 is the same contradiction and harmony in one of 
 the finest of all the succession of Don Quixote, 
 in Miss Austen's Northanger Jbbey, a slighter 
 but a much more subtle and perfect work than 
 Don Quixote. That also, by the way, may have 
 been one of the accidental things that grow 
 
DON QUIXOTE 19 
 
 beyond the author's original purpose. North- 
 anger Ahhey is partly a reduction of Mrs. Rad- 
 clifFe's inventions, of the Mysteries of Udolpho, 
 to the conditions of real life, and Catharine Mor- 
 land is in difficulties, like Don Quixote, because 
 she takes her romances seriously. But there is 
 much more in the book than the one compara- 
 tively trivial plot, the argument of the difference 
 between Udolpho and an English county house 
 in the reign of King George III. And among 
 many other things there is romance, and even 
 a rather heightened and exaggerated sort of 
 romance, in the cruel treatment of the innocent 
 heroine, the malignity of General Tilney, the 
 appearance of his son as champion and defender. 
 Cervantes in like manner puts th f t^urlp.squ" 
 mmance of Don Quixote and Dulcinea, the 
 
 p enance of Be lt rnffhras . in the samp s c e n e w ulE 
 t he afflic tion of Cardenio ; and heex pects y qj. 
 ^ake Ca rdenio^s itOTy'^or tr^^ AthoSya W t h e w h ile 
 thrtt Dnn Qniy't? is ip^it3ti"g th^f ganif ^nr^nf 
 romantic themg 
 Iflve.c 
 
 Cervantes, like Shakespeare, plays fast and 
 loose with the old romantic motives, and tries to 
 make the best of both worlds. This comes out 
 in. some of his novels ; e.g., in La Gitanilla (the 
 
20 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 Spanish Gypsy, as we have learned to call her), 
 where a purely romantic story is strengthened by 
 means of notes taken from real life ; the gypsies 
 are not like the conventional shepherds of 
 Arcadia. So in As You Like It, Shakespeare gets 
 everything he wants out of the romaihce of the 
 green wood and the outlaws, the shepherd and 
 shepherdess, while all the time Touchstone is 
 there, and Rosalind finds the workaday world in 
 the Forest of Arden. Of course this suggestion 
 of reality, with Touchstone's criticism of the 
 pastoral life, is all mischief ; the poet is not fair ; 
 he g ives you unstinted pure romance at the sam e 
 time that he im poses on you these ironical refer- 
 e nces to the real world and its grossness, an d 
 pretends that hejsjajsalist. 
 
 There is one passage in Don Quixote, and a 
 very beautiful one, where Cervantes seems to be 
 playing the g^niedouble game' with regard to 
 Arcadia, the story ^oT the shepherdess Marcella. 
 Marcella comes forward as an opponent of the 
 conventional literary theory of the martyrs of 
 love : the desperate loveiskilled by the disdain of 
 the cruel beauty. S^^je justifies herself against all 
 reproaches, shejs^noLtp beblamed fottK^deathoF 
 the poor youth Chrysos\om. The amatory poets, 
 it is implied, are too ready to take for granted that 
 
DON QUIXOTE 21 
 
 the beauty they profess to worship can have no 
 mind, or will, or right to refiise their devotion. 
 But the mischief of Marcella's reasonable argu- 
 ment is that it belongs to an episode where the 
 pastoral conventions, instead of being exploded, 
 are used by Cervantes as thoroughly and with 
 infinitely greater effect than in his Galatea. In 
 the Arcadian literature of the Renaissance there 
 is no other scene so good, so distinctly remem- 
 bered. If the Arcadian convention is justified 
 anywhere it is here. 
 
 One cannot help feeling with Cervantes that 
 there is one strong mark of difference between 
 him and the other men of genius who have given 
 in their fiction a large and generous view of the 
 whole of life. He i s much less free than Chaucer, 
 not to speak of Shakespeare. ._ He is taken in by 
 the solemn pretences of the learned schools of 
 nteraTCTte ; h e believes in t he dignity of certain" 
 es tablished torms, the pastoral, the Gre ek prQ.se 
 romance. Th is is the true irony of Don Quixo te 
 an3 of the spirit of the age and of the world in 
 which Don Quixote was written. The author 
 sets out to mdlce _fun of the books 6t chivalry "; 
 '-and- girthe time he ^is himself in the grip of a 
 d elusion as absolute as that of his he ro — the 
 authority of the most vacant and pithTesi" 
 
22 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 clas sical superstitions, the phantoms of Arcadian^ 
 romance. You cannot imagine' Shakespeare or 
 Chaucer taken in like this by the literary prin- 
 ciples of Polonius. Sancho says — " Every man ! 
 is as God made him, and even worse very often." 
 Where Cervantes is worse, it is due^o the solemn 
 
 literary prescriptions in which he believed. ^ ^ 
 
 But this is not the way to end. The lecturer or 
 preacher is sometimes apt to forget, the true rela- 
 tion between himself and his text. There ought 
 to be no irreverence in pointing out what seem to 
 be defects or fallacies in a great writer, and to 
 understand Cervantes properly one has to accept 
 many things mu ch less amusi ng or profitable than 
 fh f rnnvprsatinn of Sancho Panza . Uut the sum 
 of the whole matter for this country is that Don 
 Quixote has been made an English book, and 
 adopted as no book has ever been, except the 
 Bible. It is as familiar as the Pilgrim's Progress, 
 and the country is known almost as well as Vanity 
 Fair and Doubting Castle. It is not quite as 
 clear to English readers as Christian's journey ; 
 one remembers different scenes as vividly, per- 
 haps, but the travelling directions are harder to 
 keep in mind. This, however, does not mean 
 much, for where was any country so thoroughly 
 comprehensible as Bunyan's? The scenery of 
 
DON QUIXOTE 23 
 
 Don Quixote is not the only picture that we have 
 in our minds from Spain ; no land, except perhaps 
 Greece or Palestine, has given more to that fanci- 
 ful geography which is pure happiness, attainable 
 luckily by people who were never " fiirth of this 
 realm." Spain, from the Rock in the South, 
 which is a pillar of Hercules, to the Pass in the 
 North, which is Roncesvalles, is full of the visions 
 of stories ; and of these there are none better 
 known than the places of Don Quixote's wander- 
 ings. The house of Don Quixote himself, or 
 rather of Alonso Quixano the Good, is easily 
 recognisable. We know the unhappy library, 
 and the courtyard where the books were burned ; 
 we know the windmills in the open country, and 
 the fulling-mills by the river. There is a very 
 strong light on the landscape where the sun beats 
 down on the shadowless grassless plain, and the 
 air is full of dazzling heat, and the dust rises — 
 that is Pentapolin of the Naked Arm. There 
 are mountain solitudes, and woods and brooks. 
 There are some eiFects of lamplight, as in the scene 
 where Don Quixote rose against the " Moorism " 
 of the puppet show. The Duke's house is rather 
 vague, but the meeting with the hunting party 
 and the Duchess, her falcon on her wrist, is vivid, 
 and we remember a pretty picture of Don Quixote 
 
24 DON QUIXOTE 
 
 entangled in the birding-nets, and helped out of 
 them by the two shepherdesses. There is little 
 need to refer to the last scene of all, Don Quixote's 
 farewell : — 
 
 " There are no birds of this year in last year's 
 nests, * * * and so let Master Notary proceed." 
 
 To think of those scenes and places is to bring 
 to mind the genius of Cervantes, better than by 
 any formal or studied praise. 
 
The Politics of Burns' 
 
 This discourse, whatever result it may come to, 
 is certainly not wrong in its choice of a subject. 
 To think of the politics of Robert Burns is not 
 like some of the idle and irrelevant enquiries 
 about the lives of poets. In every current 
 opinion about him, in every judgment passed on 
 him since the year 1786, he is taken as a repre- 
 sentative man, speaking for his nation, or for the 
 rank he belongs to, or for some new reviving 
 spirit of liberty, or for the old traditional Scottish 
 loyalty, or for these two together, as Jacobin- 
 Jacobite. 
 
 Of his loyalty to the house of Stuart there can 
 be no doubt, and there is no doubt that he was 
 affected by the spirit of the French Revolution. 
 But neither of these motives made the real 
 politics of Burns. The French Revolution 
 
 ^A paper read to the Historical Society of the University 
 of Glasgow. 
 
26 THE POLITICS 
 
 counted for very little in the poetry of Burns, 
 for the good reason that in 1786 the French 
 Revolution was not yet in sight, at any rate from 
 the horizon of Mauchline. It is not wonderful 
 that readers of the life of Burns (in any version 
 of it) should be struck by the story of his later 
 days, and the difficulties of the exciseman who 
 admired the French, and sent them those historical 
 carronades. 
 
 The difficulties are well described by Carlyle : 
 ' Meteors of French politics rise before him ; 
 is he not a well-wisher of the French Revolution, 
 a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty of 
 all?' ' These accusations ' (Carlyle goes on) • it 
 has since appeared, were false enough : but the 
 world hesitated little to credit them.' 
 
 And later, we may add, long after the sus- 
 picions and jealousies of Dumfries, when Burns's 
 opinions about France have little left in them to 
 irritate the most sensitive Tory, there is another 
 kind of exaggeration connecting Burns and the 
 French Revolution through the Spirit of the 
 Age. You will find this superstition in Matthew 
 Arnold's essay on Gray: 'If Gray, like Burns 
 had been just 30 when the French Revolution 
 broke out, he would have shown perhaps pro- 
 ductiveness and animation in plenty. ' 
 
OF BURNS 27 
 
 Now this means evidently that Burns lived 
 in a time of expansion, and had the advantage 
 of this expansion or explosion in his poetical 
 fertility, as contrasted with the small volume of 
 Gray's poems. It is true that Burns was born in 
 1759, and therefore was 30 in 1789; it is true 
 also that the explosion reached his mind. But 
 what had it to do with the Kilmarnock edition of 
 1786, or the Edinburgh of 1787? And how 
 much of Burns's poetry was written after the ex- 
 plosion of 1789? That sentence of Matthew 
 Arnold may, I think, be worth noting in an 
 historical society, as an example of one of the 
 Idols of the Theatre, one of the fallacies beset- 
 ting historical study, especially, I should say, the 
 history of literature. The Spirit of the Age is a 
 dangerous demon, and I cannot but think he has 
 imposed on Matthew Arnold in this reference to 
 Burns, The poems of Burns in which he gave 
 his rendering of Ayrshire life ; the poems which 
 made his fame at once, through all the length of 
 the Island of Britain, were published before the 
 French Revolution ; and further, they show no 
 signs of the coming expansion. The politics of 
 Burns are not, in 1786, affected by the great 
 things coming on ; if there is any high spirit in 
 his politics, and there is much, it is derived from 
 
28 THE POLITICS 
 
 the time of Gray ; the time of depression, as 
 Matthew Arnold counts it. If one is to borrow 
 metaphysical aid to interpret the poetical genius 
 of Burns, why not take the 'freits,' as we may 
 call them here, which will be interpreted 'omens,' 
 if this argument is ever repeated in South Britain, 
 why not take the freits from his birth year of 
 1759? 
 
 It is not less significant, that date, than 1789 ; 
 it is the 'wonderful year,' of 'Hearts of Oak,' 
 of Minden and Quebec and Quiberon. Burns 
 knew well enough what that year meant, and his 
 hero is William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and also, 
 for the father's sake chiefly, William Pitt, the 
 son : 
 
 ' An' Will's a true guid fallow's get, 
 A name not envy spairges.' 
 
 There you have the politics of Burns in 1786, 
 when he was at the height of his power. It is 
 obvious enough, but seems generally to lack 
 interest for readers of Burns. Yet surely there 
 is something worth considering in the fact, which 
 Scott is one author to note clearly, that Burns 
 for a time was a Pittite : 
 
 'You will see he plays high Jacobite . 
 though I imagine his Jacobitism, like my own 
 belonged rather to the fancy than the reason. 
 
OF BURNS 29 
 
 He was, however, a great Pittite down to a 
 certain period.' 
 
 Burns shows an extraordinary gift for finding 
 out all that he wants to know, and he must have 
 wanted to know everything about the Pitts, or 
 he could not have found out Boconnock in 
 Cornwall, the house of the Pitts — regarding 
 which I remember Mr, Phillimore spoke some 
 pleasant things some years ago on a 25th 
 of January — if the newspapers of the 26th are 
 to be trusted. I am sorry I was not there to 
 hear. 
 
 There are several points here all at once calling 
 for notice, and seldom getting it from friends of 
 the poet : 
 
 The extraordinary talent for history shown by 
 Robert Burns. 
 
 His attention to British History in prefer- 
 ence to Scottish. 
 
 The originality of his views. 
 
 He is not fascinated at this time by Charles 
 James Fox. At any rate in his political choice 
 and aims and admirations he refuses to be swayed 
 by the passionate eloquence or the liberal ideas of 
 the statesman with whom we should think he 
 might have had most sympathy. He celebrates 
 him later (1788), without illusion. 
 
30 THE POLITICS 
 
 Further, and this perhaps when one comes to 
 look into it is the strangest thing of all, his clear, 
 original and careful study of British politics is 
 carried on through the time when his poetical 
 studies are most closely limited to the country 
 he knows — not Scotland, but Ayrshire, and not 
 the whole of Ayrshire. 
 
 To understand the politics of Burns it is neces- 
 sary to think of his position with regard to the 
 scene and the substance of his poetry — the poetry 
 of 1786 and 1787, to which he never added 
 another volume of the same sort in the ten years 
 remaining, and scarcely a poem except Tarn 0' 
 Shunter. 
 
 How did Burns come to write the Kilmarnock 
 volume ? This problem may be hard to answer, 
 and it is possibly foolish. But there are some 
 misconceptions about his circumstances and edu- 
 cation, and his place in literature, which must be 
 cleared away. Carlyle gives his authority to 
 some of these in his review of Lockhart, and his 
 lecture on the Hero as Man of Letters : 
 
 * With no furtherance but such knowledge as 
 dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhymes of 
 a Fergusson or Ramsay for his standard of 
 beauty.' 
 
 Now we know that his standard of beauty 
 
OF BURNS 31 
 
 was formed in part upon the rhymes of Ramsay 
 and Fergusson, but we know that it was influ- 
 enced also by Pope and Steele and Beattie's work, 
 by Shakespeare and Milton, by Thomson, Shen- 
 stone, and Gray and Goldsmith. You can tell 
 a man by his quotations; he quotes Hamlet., 
 Othello, King Lear^ Troilus and Cressida. He 
 writes to Mrs. Dunlop of his recourse to the 
 dramas of Thomson. He quotes to Clarind 
 from Gray's Bard: 
 
 ' Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, 
 Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.' 
 
 Is not the standard of beauty there ? 
 
 Carlyle on Burns again, in Hero-Worship: — 
 
 'This Burns appeared under every disadvan- 
 tage; uninstructed, poor, born only to hard 
 manual toil ; and writing, when it came to that, 
 in a rustic special dialect, known only to a small 
 province of the country he lived in. Had he 
 written even what he did write in the general 
 language of England, I doubt but he had already 
 become universally recognised as being, or capable 
 to be, one of our greatest men.' 
 
 I am not quite sure what Carlyle means by a 
 rustic special dialect, known only to a small pro- 
 vince of the country he lived in. Of course the 
 
32 THE POLITICS 
 
 language of Kyle and Carrick has peculiarities of 
 its own. Burns does not write exactly the same 
 language as the Scottish poets of Lothian and 
 the Mearns; there are words and phrases in 
 Fergusson, and also let me say for the pleasure 
 of naming them, in Hamewith and in Horace of 
 the Ochils, that are not found in Burns. The 
 language of Ross of Lochleje, in Helenore, the 
 Fortunate Shepherdess (' Lindy and Nory '), must 
 have been strange to Burns, though probably 
 more familiar to his father and his Montrose 
 cousins, but it was no great hindrance to his 
 understanding and appreciation of 'Lindy and 
 Nory' ; and as for readers in the South, it was in 
 England that he found at once some oi his most 
 enthusiastic admirers, among some of the most 
 fastidious and most purely Southern in taste and 
 breeding. I mean particularly William Gilpin, 
 the careful and delightful student of the pictur- 
 esque, who, if any one, might have been offended 
 by Scotch drink, Scotch religion and Scotch 
 manners. Instead of which Gilpin, the refined 
 and elegant, chooses precisely from a poem on 
 Scotch drink a stanza for the death of a hero, 
 and he quotes it at Killiecrankie for an epitaph 
 on Dundee. Coleridge in the Friend makes a 
 similar use of the same context, without the parti- 
 
OF BURNS 33 
 
 cular reference, though decorously he omits the 
 line: 
 
 'Clap in his cheek a Highland gill.' 
 
 Wordsworth, speaking of the death of Dundee 
 
 in one of his early poems, shows that he had read 
 
 Gilpin, and had read Burns as quoted by Gilpin, 
 
 and did not disapprove : 
 
 'And glad Dundee in 'faint huzzas ' expired.' 
 
 It is curious. 
 
 There are selections from Burns in the Annual 
 Register, as soon as may be after the Edinburgh 
 edition. 
 
 Scottish poetry had been regularly within the 
 knowledge of Southern readers for two or three 
 generations before Burns — we may say perhaps 
 ever since Chrisfs Kirk on the Green was published 
 at Oxford by Edmund Gibson. A good example 
 and proof of this is the list of subscribers to 
 Orpheus Caledonius, London, 1733 ; there are 
 many English names among them, more English 
 than Scotch, I should say, guessing roughly — the 
 Rt. Hon. William Pulteney, Esq., Thomas Pitt, 
 Esq., Mrs. Pitt, George Venables Vernon, Esq, 
 (6 sets). Lady Robert Walpole. 1 believe that 
 Horace Wajpole read his mother's copy. 
 
 Burns wrote in the language of Kyle, because 
 that was his natural language. But he had not to 
 
34 THE POLITICS 
 
 choose between that and English. Any page of 
 Burns will show that his language is not to be 
 described simply as a special dialect ; it has all 
 manner of variations between the pure verna- 
 cular and the book-English. It is not, I think, 
 commonly recognised how much an affair of art^ 
 an assumed and artificial style, was the Scottish 
 poetry of the eighteenth century ; how different 
 in its condition from the poetry of the old 
 'makaris,' Dunbar and Douglas and the rest. 
 Beattie writes a poem to Ross of Lochlee, an 
 occasional diversion, in the familiar stanza : 
 
 ' O Ross, thou wale o' hearty cocks, 
 Sae crouse and canty wi' thy jokes, 
 Thy hamely auld warld muse provokes 
 
 Me for a while 
 To ape our guid plain country folks 
 In verse and style. 
 
 O bonny are our green sward hows 
 Where: through the birks the burny rows, 
 And the bee bums, and the ox lows. 
 
 And saft winds rusle. 
 And shepherd-lads on sunny knows 
 
 Blaw the blythe fusle.' 
 
 He passes this off as a tour deforce^ a literary 
 joke, and such indeed it was. And so are the 
 
OF BURNS 25 
 
 -Scots verses of Stevenson and of Hugh Hali- 
 burton and the author of Hamewith, obviously. 
 And so are the Scots verses of Robert Burns and 
 of Allan Ramsay and of Robert Fergusson before 
 him. Burns adopts a literary convention in 
 the same way, though more consistently and 
 thoroughly than Beattie. None of his forms are 
 invented ; all are taken from the tradition which 
 had been founded in the seventeenth century by 
 the Elegy on Habbie Simson, piper of Kilbarchan, 
 developed and confirmed by Allan Ramsay. The 
 readers of Burns, his rhyming friends and com- 
 petitors, all understood this. It is all a game of 
 language, ' crambo-clink,' with rules andipatterns 
 of its own, used for fun by men who wrote their 
 serious business letters in English, and exacted 
 the catechism in English from their children and 
 servants, and sang in English the metrical version 
 of the Psalms by Mr. Francis Rous of Truro, 
 sometime Provost of Eton. 
 
 Now when this" is understood it will be found, 
 I think, to have some bearing upon the politics of 
 Burns, though possibly I may seem to have 
 wandered away from the proper field of the 
 Historical Society over the borders into philology, 
 if not into mere rhetoric and belles lettres. 
 
 It is a great thing for an artist to inherit a 
 
36 THE POLITICS 
 
 strong tradition, to belong to a school. It means 
 that he has all the strength of his own and the 
 last generation to draw upon ; he does not waste 
 his time in solitary adventures ; he Is not left to 
 himself; he is saved from caprice and melancholy, 
 from the fate of Chatterton. Think of the 
 difference between the art of Burns, his secure 
 command of all his arguments and all his forms 
 on the one hand, and the poetry of his contem- 
 porary Blake on the other — in so many ways 
 miraculous, yet at what an expense of thought 
 and care in finding out the new ways. The 
 poems of Fergusson, as Dr. John Service ex- 
 pressed it, in a true conceit, are the juvenilia 
 of Burns ; and Fergusson himself worked in a 
 traditional way. 
 
 The security of Burns as a poet with the 
 inherited forms and examples of Ramsay and 
 Fergusson goes along with security and con- 
 fidence in the choice of themes. His poetry, for 
 all its rustic character and language, has the dis- 
 tinctive mark of aristocratic literature. It is self- 
 possessed, at ease and sure of itself; classical. It 
 is not restless, or self-conscious or anxious or 
 experimental or arriviste. It has the true dignity, 
 like that of the man who knows he is master in 
 his own house, and is accustomed to converse 
 
OF BURNS 37 
 
 with his equals, and has no reason to go craving 
 for what he has not got. 
 
 When Keats came up by Glen App, and so by 
 Ballantrae and Girvan and Maybole to Alloway, 
 thinking rightly about Burns, more than most 
 men, he saw Arran over the sea, and wondered 
 why the vision of the island had never passed 
 into Burns's poetry. Arran had been before him 
 all his days, and there is no word of it anywhere, 
 in any of his prose or rhyme. For this disregard 
 there was probably good reason. Burns has left 
 out of his poetry many other things which must 
 have been equally within his knowledge, and 
 might have been wrought into the fabric of his 
 verse. He was thought by some to be indifferent 
 to the beauties of nature. He was certainly 
 irresponsive when people gave utterance to their 
 hearts of sensibility : — 
 
 ' He disliked to be tutored in matters of taste, 
 and could not endure that one should run shouting 
 before him whenever any fine object appeared.' 
 (Cunningham, Chambers II. I56n.) Andrew 
 Lang, in a sonnet written under the influence of 
 Wordsworth, has uttered the same complaint of 
 those who shout 
 
 ' To me, to me the poet, O look there ! ' 
 
 But it is not only in matters of this sort that 
 
38 THE POLITICS 
 
 Burns is economical and reticent. The Kilmar- 
 nock volume, which expresses so much of the life 
 of Ayrshire, leaves out a great deal. Burns keeps 
 to the region he knows ; neighbouring provinces 
 are left unnoticed, though he might easily have 
 touched upon them, and brought back profitable 
 things. Why does he go down to the sea, and 
 no further ? Why does he make nothing of the 
 contraband trade with which he came to be 
 acquainted at Kirkoswald ? If he was too proud 
 to speak of the Arran hills which did not belong 
 to him, might he not have gone sailing with fisher- 
 men of Girvan or Ayr, Dunure or Turnberry.'' 
 No, they were not his own people ; his own people 
 are the farmers or their cotters, and it was not his 
 business to go looking for subjects. The fisher- 
 men are left out. So on the other side the further 
 moorlands and their shepherds are left out. He 
 takes the Doon where it comes near him ; he does 
 not wander up to talk with the lonely shepherds 
 on the Galloway border ; Loch Doon he never 
 thinks about, nor the wild uplands where his river 
 comes down from the granite of Loch Enoch, and 
 houses are far between. 
 
 While he thus restricted himself in his choice 
 of Ayrshire themes, he was attending to contem- 
 porary history. He must have read the news- 
 
OF BURNS 39 
 
 papers and probably also the Scots Magazine 
 with extraordinary care. And he does not read 
 under the influence of that Scottish prejudice 
 which he was proud to confess in the well 
 known and often quoted words : ' the spirit of 
 Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my 
 veins, which will boil along there till the flood- 
 gates of life shut in eternal rest.' 
 
 He is not particularly good at Scottish history. 
 His Scottish politics are determined by Scotch 
 drink. But the politics of the United Kingdom 
 of Great Britain in his own lifetime were noted 
 with a diligence which the biographers and 
 commentators of Burns have passed over very 
 lightly. 
 
 This historical study comes out in two poems 
 particularly : the birthday poem to the King and 
 the historical fragment on the American war and 
 the parliamentary vicissitudes following — 'When 
 Guilford good our pilot stood.' His carefulness 
 is proved through one of the conventions of that 
 sort of lyrical satire. The rule is that persons 
 are not to be named by their right names, if 
 another name can be provided. It is that rule 
 (together with the need for a rhyme to winnock 
 2Li\6.bannock and Nanse Tinnock) that puts Boconnock 
 for Pitt or Chatham. Hence Guilford and not 
 
40 THE POLITICS 
 
 Lord North, Montague for Lord Sandwich, Gren- 
 vilk for the statesman commonly called Lord 
 Temple. The Duke of York is Right Reverend 
 Osnabrug (of course there are other obvious 
 motives here). Lord George Germaine appears 
 under his other name oi Sackville. A note in the 
 Centenary Edition, from an autograph manuscript 
 seen by the editors, shows that Burns originally 
 wrote Germaine : 
 
 * And bauld G ne wham Minden's plain 
 
 To fame will ever blaw, man.' 
 
 Altered : 
 
 ' And Sackville doure, wha stood the stoure 
 The German chief to thraw, man.' 
 
 I believe that Burns thought of changing it 
 because Germaine was the right name, and there- 
 fore the wrong name for his purpose. 
 
 It does not look as if he were working with an 
 index or a peerage at his side. He knows the 
 names and titles of these persons of quality 
 because he is interested in British history. 
 Boconnock comes to his mind because he has 
 found out some time before what he wants 
 to know about the family of Pitt; just as he 
 does not need a file of newspapers, or a set 
 of the Scots Magazine, or the Annual Register, 
 
OF BURNS 41 
 
 when he finds his old soldier among the Jolly 
 Beggars : 
 
 ' My prenticeship was past where my leader breathed 
 
 his last, 
 When the bloody die was cast on the heights of 
 
 Abram ; 
 I served out my trade when the gallant game was 
 
 played, 
 And the Moro low was laid at the sound of the drum. 
 
 I lastly was with Curtis among the floating batteries. 
 And there I left for witness an arm and a limb. 
 Yet let my country need me, with Elliot to lead me,. 
 I'll clatter on my stumps at the sound of a drum.' 
 
 The fragment ' When Guilford good ' looks 
 at first like a rigmarole of mere annals turned into 
 burlesque rhyme. But it works up to a climax, 
 and it is not a fragment; it is the war-song of 
 William Pitt, the young hero. It turns into that, 
 whatever Burns may have first intended, or even 
 if he intended nothing in particular when he 
 began. And he certainly had the whole history 
 in his mind when he began, and also his judg- 
 ment on the characters. You may notice that his 
 alteration of Germaine proves this. It is not 
 merely a conventional vague illusion to Lord 
 George Sackville's notorious cowardice at Min- 
 den. It is so, in the first version ; but the second. 
 
42 THE POLITICS 
 
 the authorised version, shows that Burns knew 
 what happened at Minden, and he has put this 
 into a phrase so mischievous that the point of it 
 may easily escape notice and Sackville be mis- 
 taken for a hero : 
 
 ' wha stood the stoure 
 The German chief to thraw, man.' 
 
 It looks at first like heroic resistance; till you 
 remember that the German chief, Ferdinand of 
 Brunswick, was Lord George Sackville's com- 
 mander, that the stoure means the repeated order 
 to charge, with a prophetic allusion to the trial 
 that followed. 'The German chief to thraw' is 
 not to confound the enemy, but to disappoint 
 his own general. 
 
 Burns's politics at this time are clear enough. 
 Chatham is his great hero because he knows 
 about Minden and Quebec, and the taking of 
 Havana, 'when the Moro low was laid.' And 
 William Pitt the younger has his regard partly 
 for his father's sake, and partly for his own 
 courage and his resistance to the coalition of Fox 
 and North, which Burns could not stand because 
 it was meanness and knavery. He does not 
 object to Fox because of his tinkler jaw or 
 dicing box and sporting lady. Fox's gambling 
 
OF BURNS 43 
 
 was merely a good thing for a satirical poet, as 
 in the address to the Prince of Wales in the 
 
 Dream : 
 
 ' That e'er ye brak Diana's pales, 
 Or rattl'd dice wi' Charlie.' 
 
 But he seriously did not like ' yon mixtie maxtie 
 queer hotch potch, the Coalition,' and he seriously 
 regarded Pitt as a high-spirited young man break- 
 ing through the intrigues of party politics and 
 likely to go further. And this is what he puts 
 into his rhyme of the American war and Rocking- 
 ham and Shelburne and the Coalition, and Fox's 
 India Bill, and Temple's message from the King, 
 ' a secret word or twa, man,' and Pitt's courageous 
 adventure — a long way from Mauchline, but 
 touched off with the same intensity as Black 
 Russell and Moodie and Peebles from the Water- 
 foot: 
 
 'But word an' blow, North, Fox, and Co. 
 
 GowfPd Willie like a ba', man, 
 Till Suthron raise an' coost their claise 
 
 Behind him in a raw, man : 
 An' Caledon threw by the drone. 
 
 An' did her whittle draw, man ; 
 An' swoor fu' rude, thro' dirt an' bluid, 
 
 To mak it guid in law, man.' 
 
 The Dream of the 4th of June, 1786, is the 
 
44 THE POLITICS 
 
 other example of Burns's interest in the history 
 of his country, which is not politically Scotland, 
 but Great Britain. Also of the quickness and 
 readiness with which he followed the news from 
 London. The Dream is suggested by Thomas 
 Warton's periodical birthday ode published in the 
 newspapers. It is worth mentioning that while 
 the ode of 1786 prompted Burns's poem, the ode 
 of the previous year was the occasion of the 
 notorious burlesque Probationary Odes, the 
 sequel of the Rolliad. So that Burns here again 
 had his eye on the same sort of things as attracted 
 the wits of London. He has nothing much to 
 learn from them in the art of satirical poetry. 
 Here again, though here only by the way, Pitt 
 comes in as the statesman to be respected ; and 
 Burns appears as the champion of the Navy 
 against retrenchment in a passage which may 
 possibly have been quoted, though I have never 
 noticed it, in speeches of knights and squires who 
 represent our burghs and shires : 
 
 ' I'm no mistrusting Willie Pitt, 
 
 When taxes he enlarges, 
 (An' Will's a true guid fallow's get, 
 
 A name not envy spairges), 
 That he intends to pay your debt, 
 
 An' lessen a' your charges; 
 
OF BURNS 45 
 
 But, God sake! let nae saving fit 
 Abridge your bonie barges 
 
 An' boats this day.' 
 
 'Burns was a great Pittite down to a certain 
 period,' and that period was the end of his free, 
 unimpeded work as a poet. He is a poet for the 
 rest of his life, but never again with that irresis- 
 tible command of his art, that certainty in all his 
 various themes and moods which went with the 
 volume of poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect. 
 After that he is distracted. His work in the 
 songs, as we watch it in his correspondence with 
 Johnson and Thomson is of a different sort, often 
 painful and laborious. He wastes his time think- 
 ing about impossible plans for Scottish drama and 
 Scottish opera. And his political opinions change. 
 His important Whig friends make him unsure of 
 himself ; he has to ask Henry Erskine whether 
 it will do to print ' When Guilford good our pilot 
 stood.' He takes to wearing the buff and blue, 
 and owes allegiance to Mr. Fox. At the same 
 time he makes more than in early days of his 
 Jacobite sentiment ; he writes his worst verse in 
 a poem on the name of Stuart : 
 • Though something h'ke moisture conglobes in my eye.' 
 To make up for that — 
 
 ' It was a' for our rightfu' king.' 
 
46 THE POLITICS 
 
 But before he had forgotten his earlier studies and 
 interests he wrote a deliberate argument which 
 may be quoted here. 
 
 I cannot see anything wrong in Burns's letter 
 to the Star, Nov. 8, 1788, protesting against some 
 of the Whig rhetoric over the centenary of the 
 glorious Revolution ; it seems to me right in 
 history and right in sentiment^ with a shrewd 
 stroke at the orators who blamed the tyranny of 
 the Stuart kings and ignored the tyranny of 
 parliaments. 
 
 To THE Editor of 'The Star.' 
 
 Nov. 8th, 1788. 
 
 Sir, — Notwithstanding the opprobrious epithets with 
 which some of our philosophers and gloomy sectarians 
 have branded our nature — the principle of universal 
 selfishness, the proneness to all evil, they have given 
 us; still, the detestation in which inhumanity to the 
 distressed, and insolence to the fallen, are held by all 
 mankind, shows that they are not natives of the 
 human heart. Even the unhappy partner of our kind 
 who is undone — the bitter consequence of his follies or 
 his crimes — who but sympathizes with the miseries of 
 this ruined profligate brother ? We forget the injuries, 
 and feel for the man. 
 
 I went, last Wednesday, to my parish church, most 
 cordially to join in grateful acknowledgment to the 
 
OF BURNS 47 
 
 AUTHOR OF ALL GOOD, for the Consequent blessings of 
 the glorious Revolution. To that auspicious event we 
 owe no less than our liberties, civil and religious ; to it 
 we are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, 
 the ruling features of whose administration have ever 
 been mildness to the subject, and tenderness of his 
 rights. 
 
 . Bred and educated in revolution principles, the prin- 
 ciples of reason and common sense, it could not be any 
 silly political prejudice which made my heart revolt at 
 the harsh abusive manner in which the reverend gentle- 
 man mentioned the house of Stuart, and which, I am 
 afraid, was too much the language of the day. We 
 may rejoice sufficiently in our deliverance from past 
 evils, without cruelly raking up the ashes of those whose 
 misfortune it was, perhaps as much as their crime, to be 
 the authors of those evils, and we may bless God for 
 all his goodness to us as a nation, without at the same 
 time cursing a few ruined, powerless exiles, who only 
 harboured ideas, and made attempts, that most of us 
 would have done, had we been in their situation. 
 
 The 'bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart,' may be 
 said with propriety and justice, when compared with 
 the present royal family, and the sentiments of our days; 
 but is there no allowance to be made for the manners 
 of the times? Were the royal contemporaries of the 
 Stuarts more attentive to their subjects' rights ? Might 
 not the epithets of 'bloody and tyrannical' be, with at 
 least equal justice, applied to the House of Tudor, of 
 York, or any other of their predecessors ? 
 
48 THE POLITICS 
 
 The simple state of the case, Sir, seems to be this : — 
 At that period, the science of government, the know- 
 ledge of the true relation between king and subject, 
 was like other sciences and other knowledge, just in its 
 infancy, emerging from dark ages of ignorance and 
 barbarity. 
 
 The Stuarts only contended for prerogatives which 
 they knew their predecessors enjoyed, and which they 
 saw their contemporaries enjoying ; but these preroga- 
 tives were inimical to the happiness of a nation and the 
 rights of subjects. 
 
 In this contest between prince and people, the con- 
 sequence of that light of science which had lately dawned 
 over Europe, the monarch of France, for example, was 
 victorious over the struggling liberties of his people ; 
 with us, luckily, the monarch failed, and his unwarrant- 
 able pretentions fell a sacrifice to our rights and happi- 
 ness. Whether it was owing to the wisdom of leading 
 individuals, or to the justling of parties, I cannot pretend 
 to determine ; but, likewise happily for us, the kingly 
 power was shifted into another branch of the family, 
 who, as they owed the throne solely to the call of a 
 free people, could claim nothing inconsistent with the 
 covenanted terms which placed them there. 
 
 The Stuarts have been condemned and laughed at 
 for the folly and impracticability of their attempts in 
 1715 and 1745. That they failed, I bless God : but 
 cannot join in the ridicule against them. Who does not 
 know that the abilities or defects of leaders and com- 
 manders are often hidden until put to the touchstone 
 
OF BURNS 49 
 
 of exigency ; and that there is a caprice of fortune, an 
 omnipotence in particular accidents and conjectures of 
 circumstances, which exalt us as heroes, or brand us as 
 madmen, just as they are for or against us? 
 
 Man, Mr. Publisher, is a strange, weak, inconsistent 
 being : who would believe. Sir, that in this our Augustan 
 age of liberality and refinement, while we seem so justly 
 sensible and jealous of our rights and liberties, and 
 animated with such indignation against the very memory 
 of those who would have subverted them — that a certain 
 people under our national protection should complain, 
 not against our monarch and a few favorite advisers, but 
 against our whole legislative body, for similar oppres- 
 sion, and almost in the very same terms, as our fore- 
 fathers did of the House of Stuart ! I will not, I cannot, 
 enter into the merits of the cause ; but I dare say the 
 American Congress, of 1776, will be allowed to have 
 been as able and enlightened as the English Convention 
 was in 1688 ; and that their posterity will celebrate the 
 centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and 
 sincerely as we do ours from the oppressive measures of 
 the wrong-headed House of Stuart 
 
 To conclude, Sir, let every man who has a tear for 
 the many miseries incident to humanity, feel for a 
 family, illustrious as any in Europe, and unfortunate 
 beyond historic precedent; and let every Briton (and 
 particularly every Scotsman), who ever looked with 
 reverential pity on the dotage of a parent, cast a veil 
 over the fatal mistakes of the kings of his forefathers. 
 
 R. B. 
 
50 THE POLITICS 
 
 Burns's opinions about the French Revolution 
 have nothing dishonourable in them, and nothing 
 very difficult to understand. They are like 
 Wordsworth's, but of course without Words- 
 worth's intimate knowledge of France, and with 
 sympathies less intense. He hates the invaders 
 of France, and there is deadly contempt in his 
 rude rhyme : 
 
 * You're welcome to Despots, Dumourier ! ' 
 But, like Wordsworth, he turns to think of his 
 own country when his country is in danger. 
 There is no discord or contradiction between 
 •A man's a man for a' that,' Jan. 1795 ('two or 
 three good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme'), 
 and the song for the Dumfries Volunteers 
 {Dumfries Journal, May 5th, 1795). 
 
 ' Be Britain still to Britain true 
 
 Amang oursels united, 
 
 For never but by British hands 
 
 Maun British wrangs be righted ! 
 * * ^ 
 
 The wretch that would a tyrant own, 
 
 And the wretch, his true-born brother, 
 Who'd set the mob above the throne, 
 
 May they be damn'd together ! 
 Who will not sing God save the King! 
 
 Shall hang as high's the steeple ; 
 But while we sing God save the King! 
 
 We'll not forget the people ! ' 
 
OF BURNS 51 
 
 Whatever may be the value of his later 
 thoughts in prose or rhyme, they have not the 
 significance or the force of the miraculous volume 
 of 1786, with the other poems written but not 
 printed at that time. Burns as a poet is to be 
 judged by the work of those years ; the more this 
 is studied the clearer is the relation between his 
 command of the world of Mauchline and Ayr, 
 and his political understanding of what is meant 
 by Great Britain. 
 
 Glasgow: Printed at the University Press by Robert MacLehose and Co. Ltd.