The Man - Robert Bisripis 
 
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 Address of 
 Before %e 
 
 Boston iScottish Society 
 
 January 25th, 1913 
 
Address delivered before the 
 
 Boston Scottish Society 
 
 January 25th, 1913, by 
 
 Andrew Stewart 
 
 No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the 
 world more assurance of a Man. *' 
 
 — Andrew Lang. 
 
3i^ 
 
 // has been your peculiar fortune to capture the hearts 
 of a whole people — a people not usually prone to praise^ 
 but devoted with a personal and patriotic loyalty to you 
 and to your reputation. * ' 
 
 — Andrew Lang — Letters to Dead Authors. 
 
 Tran?"-- 
 
 Librara. 
 
 •CT 1 7 191^ 
 
THE MAN -ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Address of Andrew Stewart 
 January 25th, 1913 
 
 Members of the Boston Scottish Society and Friends: 
 
 Robert Burns, in 1786, when he was twenty-seven 
 years old, wrote from Edinburgh to his friend, Gavin 
 Hamilton, at Mauchline, in this half -facetious, half-satirical 
 manner : 
 
 ** For my own affairs I am in a fair way of 
 becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis 
 or John Bunyan ; and you may expect hence- 
 forth to see my birthday inserted among the 
 wonderful events in the poor Robin's and 
 Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black 
 Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge." 
 
 Knowing as we do now his deathless fame, nothing 
 about this prediction is so remarkable as its extreme 
 modesty. One hundred and twenty-seven years have 
 fled since then, and to-night throughout the world tens of 
 thousands of men and women are listening to words of 
 admiration and affection for Robert Burns, poet of Scot- 
 land, but more than that and much better than that, poet 
 of Humanity as no other is. 
 
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Few men have been more talked about, and yet, after 
 all the talk, more misunderstood. Often on one hand has 
 been unreasoning adulation and, on the other, unreasonable 
 criticism, with the result that people's minds are not clear 
 as to what manner of man he really was. 
 
 I have had just one desire as I have thought about what 
 I would best say here to-night, and that has been that it 
 might be something that would result in others' seeing this 
 man as I believe he was, truly and intrinsically. And so 
 I decided not to speak about him, but rather to have him 
 speak to you for himself. Surely you will listen to him 
 when you might not care to listen to me. Surely you will 
 believe him when you might consider me mistaken. 
 
 Now, to begin with, I should like to have you observe 
 what his attitude was toward his own shortcomings, and 
 also what it was toward the failings of others. 
 
 We find him writing to a friend in 1787 : 
 
 **I lie so miserably open to the inroads 
 and incursions of a mischievous, light armed, 
 well mounted banditti, under the banners of 
 imagination, whim, caprice and passion ; 
 and the heavy armed veteran regulars of 
 wisdom, prudence and fore-thought, move so 
 very very slow, that I am almost in a state of 
 perpetual warfare, and, alas frequent defeat." 
 
 Again he writes : 
 
 ** I have been this morning taking a peep 
 through, as Young finely says, * the dark 
 postern of time long elapsed ; ' 'twas a rueful 
 prospect ! My life reminded me of a ruined 
 temple. What strength, what proportion 
 
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in some parts, what unsightly gaps, what 
 prostrate ruins in others. I kneeled down 
 before the Father of Mercies and said, 
 * Father, I have sinned against Heaven and 
 in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be 
 called thy son.'" 
 
 Upon another occasion he said : 
 
 '* I have often observed in the course of 
 my experience of human life that every man, 
 even the worst, has something good about 
 him ; though very often nothing else than 
 a happy temperament of constitution inclin- 
 ing him to this or that virtue. For this 
 reason no man can say in what degree any 
 other person besides himself can be with 
 strict justice called wicked. Let any of the 
 strictest character for regularity of conduct 
 among us examine impartially how many 
 vices he has never been guilty of, not from 
 any care or vigilance but for want of oppor- 
 tunity, or some accidental circumstance in- 
 tervening ; how many of the weaknesses of 
 mankind he has escaped because he was out 
 of the line of such temptation ; and what 
 often, if not always, weighs more than all 
 the rest how much he is indebted to the 
 world's good opinion, because the world does 
 not know all ; I say any man who can thus 
 think, will scan the failings, nay, the faults 
 and crimes of mankind around him with a 
 brother's eye." 
 
 Such profound sorrow for one's own offences and such 
 generous charity for the sins of others I have not frequently 
 observed. 
 
 5 
 
I think you will agree with me that a man without a 
 sense of responsibility and obligation does not deserve 
 respect and should not have it. Where did Robert Burns 
 stand on this important matter ? Writing from Ellisland 
 to Miss Chalmers in 1788 about his marriage to Jean 
 Armour he said : 
 
 ** Shortly after my last return to Ayrshire 
 I married * my Jean.' This was not in conse- 
 quence of the attachment of romance perhaps, 
 but I had a much loved fellow creature's hap- 
 piness or misery in my determination, and I 
 durst not trifle with so important a deposit." 
 
 And in a letter to John Ballantine he wrote : 
 
 **I have still this favorable symptom of 
 grace, that when my conscience, as in the 
 case of this letter, tells me I am leaving 
 something undone that I ought to do, it 
 teazes me eternally till I do it." 
 
 In the attempt I have made to get at the heart of this 
 man, nothing I have found has appealed to me more than 
 his sympathy with the struggles of others. He wrote in 
 1790 to Crauford Tait of Edinburgh a letter of introduc- 
 tion for a young friend William Duncan by name, in which 
 he said : 
 
 ** You my dear Sir were born under kinder 
 stars, but your fraternal sympathy I well 
 know can enter into the feelings of the young 
 man who goes into life with the laudable am- 
 bition to do something, and to be something 
 among his fellow creatures, but whom the con- 
 sciousness of friendless obscurity presses to 
 6 
 
the earth and wounds to the soul ! What 
 pleasure is in the power of the fortunate and 
 the happy, by their notice and patronage to 
 brighten the countenance and glad the heart 
 of such depressed youth ! I am not so angry 
 with mankind for their deaf economy of the 
 purse : — the goods of this world cannot be 
 divided without being lessened — but why 
 be a niggard of that which bestows bliss on 
 a fellow-creature yet takes nothing from our 
 own means of enjoyment? We wrap our- 
 selves up in the cloak of our own better for- 
 tune, and turn away our eyes, lest the wants 
 and woes of our brother-mortals should dis- 
 turb the selfish apathy of our souls ! " 
 
 And to another he wrote : 
 
 ** I do not see that the turn of mind — of 
 one who spends the hours and thoughts which 
 the vocations of the day can spare, with 
 Ossian, Shakespeare, Thomson, Shenstone, 
 Sterne, etc. — I say I do not see that the 
 turn of mind and pursuits of such a one are 
 in the least more inimical to the sacred inter- 
 ests of piety and virtue than the even lawful 
 bustling and straining after the world's riches 
 and honors ; and I do not see but he may 
 gain heaven as well ; — as he who straining 
 straight forward and perhaps spattering all 
 about him gains some of life's little emi- 
 nences, where after all, he can only see and 
 be seen a little more conspicuously than what 
 in the pride of his heart he is apt to term the 
 poor indolent devil he has left behind him." 
 
 And in an immortal prayer which he has left us, — which 
 
 7 
 
in itself ought to have been enough to have kept him from 
 being misunderstood, — he said : 
 
 **Thou, Almighty Author of peace and 
 goodness and love ! do thou give me the 
 social heart that kindly tastes of every man's 
 cup. Is it a draught of joy? — warm and 
 open my heart to share it with cordial, un- 
 envying rejoicing. Is it the bitter potion of 
 sorrow? Melt my heart with sincerely sym- 
 pathetic woe ! Above all, do thou give me 
 the manly mind, that resolutely exemplifies, 
 in life and manners, those sentiments which 
 I would wish to possess." 
 
 Nothing about Burns was more Scottish than his aggres- 
 sive pride and independence. In respect to this he 
 asserted : 
 
 *'We ought, when we wish to be econo- 
 mists in happiness, we ought, in the first 
 place, to fix the standard of our own charac- 
 ter, and when on full examination, we know 
 where we stand and how much ground we 
 occupy, let us contend for it as property." 
 
 Writing in 1793 to Clarinda about the neglect of him by 
 his one-time closest friend, Robert Ainslie, he said : 
 
 *' I had a letter from my old friend a while 
 ago, but it was so dry, so distant, so like a 
 card to one of his clients, that I could scarce 
 bear to read it. He is a good honest fel- 
 low ; and can write a friendly letter, which 
 would do equal honor to his head and his 
 heart, as a whole sheaf of his letters I have 
 by me will witness ; and though fame does 
 8 
 
not blow her trumpet at my approach now, 
 as she did then, when he first honored me 
 with his friendship, yet I am as proud as 
 ever ; and when I am laid in my grave, I 
 wish to be stretched at my full length, that 
 I may occupy every inch of ground which 
 I have a right to." 
 
 Some one has said that ** gratitude is a lively sense of 
 favors to come." Often altogether too true ! But what a 
 splendid example of gratitude and loyalty did Burns set 
 us in his attitude toward his patron Lord Glencairn. He 
 writes : 
 
 ** I have found a worthy, warm friend in 
 Mr. Dalrymple of Orangefield, who intro- 
 duced me to Lord Glencairn, a man whose 
 worth and brotherly-kindness to me I shall 
 remember when time shall be no more." 
 
 In a letter to Lady Glencairn he said : 
 
 ** When I am tempted to do anything im- 
 proper, I dare not, because I look upon my- 
 self as accountable to Your Ladyship and 
 family. Now and then when I have the 
 honor to be called to the tables of the great, 
 if I happen to meet with any mortification 
 from the stately stupidity of self-sufficient 
 squires, or the luxurious indolence of upstart 
 nabobs, I get above the creatures by calling 
 to remembrance that I am patronized by the 
 noble house of Glencairn." 
 
 And how drenched in sadness and woe is the letter he 
 wrote to an oflScial of the Glencairn household at the time 
 of Lord Glen cairn's death : 
 
 9 
 
*' God knows what I have suffered, at the 
 loss of my best friend, my first, my dearest 
 patron and benefactor ; the man to whom I 
 owe all that I am and have ! I am gone 
 into mourning for him, and with more sin- 
 cerity of grief than I fear some will, who by 
 nature's ties ought to feel on the occasion. 
 
 ** I see that the honored remains of my 
 noble patron are designed to be brought to 
 the family burial place. Dare I trouble you 
 to let me know privately before the day of 
 interment, that I may cross the country and 
 steal among the crowd to pay a tear to the 
 last sight of my ever revered benefactor." 
 
 How any one with any real knowledge of Robert Burns 
 and at the same time any real conception of religion could 
 ever have considered him irreligious is simply beyond my 
 comprehension. In one of his numerous letters to Cla- 
 rinda he made this statement : 
 
 ** I will lay before you the outlines of my 
 belief. He who is our Author and Pre- 
 server, and will one day be our Judge, must 
 be (not for his sake in the way of duty, but 
 from the native impulse of our hearts) the 
 object of our reverential awe and grateful 
 adoration. He is almighty and all-bounteous ; 
 we are weak and dependent, hence prayer 
 and every other sort of devotion. * He is not 
 willing that any should perish but that all 
 should come to everlasting life,' conse- 
 quently it must be in everyone's power to 
 embrace his offer of ' everlasting life,' other- 
 wise he could not, in justice, condemn those 
 
 10 
 
who did not. A mind pervaded, actuated 
 and governed by purity, truth and charity, 
 though it does not merit heaven, yet is an 
 absolutely necessary prerequisite without 
 which heaven can neither be obtained nor 
 enjoyed ; and by divine promise such a mind 
 shall never fail of attaining * everlasting 
 life ' ; hence the impure, the deceiving and 
 the uncharitable exclude themselves from 
 eternal bliss by their unfitness for enjoying 
 it. The Supreme Being has put the imme- 
 diate administration of all this for wise and 
 good ends known to Himself into the hands 
 . of Jesus Christ, a great personage, whose re- 
 lation to Him we cannot comprehend, but 
 whose relation to us is a Guide and Saviour ; 
 and who except for our own obstinacy and 
 misconduct will bring us all through various 
 ways and by various means to bliss at last. 
 
 *'My creed is pretty nearly expressed in 
 the last clause of Jamie Dean^s grace, an 
 honest weaver in Ayrshire, * Lord, grant 
 that we may lead a gude life ; for a gude 
 life makes a gude end ; at least it helps 
 weel.'" 
 
 **You see how I preach — I admire the 
 close of a letter Lord Bolingbroke writes 
 to Dean Swift, * Adieu, dear Swift ! with 
 all thy faults I love thee entirely ; make an 
 effort to love me with all mine.' " 
 
 At a time of extreme anxiety, when Burns was being 
 hounded by enemies and threatened with dismissal from 
 his office because he had dared to express his disapproval 
 of certain actions of the government, he wrote to John 
 
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Francis Erskine of Mar a letter in which he defines the 
 duty of citizenship as it has seldom been defined, and 
 which to-day, as then, sounds a trumpet call to duty. He 
 writes : 
 
 '*You have been misinformed as to my 
 final dismission from the Excise ; I am still 
 in the service, — indeed, but for the exertions 
 of a gentleman, Mr. Graham of Fintray, 
 who has ever been my warm and generous 
 friend, I had without so much as a hearing, 
 or the slightest previous intimation, been 
 turned adrift with my helpless family to all 
 the horrors of want. Had I had any other 
 resource probably I might have saved them 
 the trouble of a dismission ; but the little 
 money I gained by my publication is almost 
 every guinea embarked to save from ruin an 
 only brother, who, though one of the worthi- 
 est, is by no means one of the most fortunate 
 of men. Now, sir, to the business in which 
 I would more immediately interest you. The 
 partiality of my countrymen has brought me 
 forward as a man of genius and has given 
 me a character to support. In the poet I 
 have avowed manly and independent senti- 
 ments, which I trust will be found in the 
 man. Reasons of no less weight than the 
 support of a wife and family have pointed 
 out as the only eligible line of life for me 
 my present occupation. Still my honest 
 fame is my dearest concern, and a thousand 
 times have I trembled at the idea of those 
 degrading epithets that malice or misrepre- 
 sentation may affix to my name. 
 
 " In your illustrious hands, sir, permit me 
 12 
 
to lodge my disavowal and defiance of these 
 slanderous falsehoods." 
 
 ** Burns was a poor man from birth and an 
 exciseman from necessity, but — I will say it, 
 the sterling of his honest worth no poverty 
 could debase, and his independent British 
 mind, oppression might bend but could not 
 subdue. 
 
 ** I have three sons who I see already have 
 brought into the world souls ill qualified to 
 inhabit the bodies of slaves. Can I look 
 tamely on and see any machination to wrest 
 from them the birthright of my boys? No ! 
 I will not ! should my heart's blood stream 
 around my attempt to defend it. Does any 
 man tell me that my full efforts can be of no 
 service, and that it does not belong to my 
 humble station to meddle with the concern of 
 a nation? I can tell him that it is on such 
 individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both 
 for the hand of support and the eye of in- 
 telligence. *^The uninformed mob may swell 
 a nation's bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly 
 throng may be its feathered ornament, but 
 the number of those who are elevated enough 
 in life to reason and reflect, yet low enough 
 to keep clear of the venal contagion of a 
 court, these are a nation's strength." ^ 
 
 To do something to dissipate the mist gathered about 
 the personality of Robert Burns has been my earnest and 
 only wish to-night, for I know that the clearer the view 
 and the closer the inspection of him the more there will be 
 
 13 
 
found in him to admire, respect and love, and the more 
 certainly will not only the splendor of his genius be 
 revealed, but also the inherent strength and beauty of his 
 character. 
 
 ** I see amid the fields of Ayr, 
 A ploughman, who in foul and fair 
 
 Sings at his task. 
 So clear, we know not if it is 
 The laverock' s song we hear, or his. 
 
 Nor care to ask. 
 
 ** For him the ploughing of these fields 
 A more ethereal harvest yields 
 
 Than sheaves of grain. 
 Songs flush with purple bloom the rye, 
 The plover's call, the curlew's cry 
 
 Sing in his brain. 
 
 ** Touched by his hand the wayside weed 
 Becomes a flower; the lowliest reed 
 
 Beside the stream 
 Is clothed with beauty; gorse and grass 
 And heather, where his footsteps pass. 
 
 The brighter seem. 
 
 n 
 
 At moments wrestling with his fate, 
 His voice is harsh, but not with hate. 
 
 The brush-wood hung 
 Above the tavern door lets fall 
 Its bitter leaf, its drop of gall 
 
 Upon his tongue. 
 
 But still the music of his song 
 Rises o' er all elate and strong. 
 
 Its master chords 
 Are Manhood, Freedom, Brotherhood; 
 Its discords, but an interlude 
 
 Between the words." 
 
 — H. W. Longfellow. 
 
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