Familiar Studies of Men Books | Page 5

the view to which all
criticism tended. Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the
profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied the man's
desperate efforts to do right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it
appeared to me that any thinking being should feel otherwise. The
complete letters shed, indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had
sunk in his character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to
have stated this more noisily I now see; but that any one should fail to

see it for himself, is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of
open scorn. If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be called
a bad man, I question very much whether either I or the writer in the
Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good one.
All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
about him, and - let us not blink the truth - hurries both him and them
into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is
to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.
Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what every one well
knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes." The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results that our demiurgeous Mrs.
Grundy smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said - I have
heard it with these ears - that drunkenness "may lead to vice." Now I
did not think it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard;
and I was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too
frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the
eyes of many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of
Burns's radical badness.
But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality so
greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must
never represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any
other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that Burns's
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the moral law.
Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had presumed too far
on his strength. One after another the lights of his life went out, and he
fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end. And
surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines out tenfold

more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort to do right, than if he had
turned on his heel with Worldly Wiseman, married a congenial spouse,
and lived orderly and died reputably an old man. It is his chief title that
he refrained from "the wrong that amendeth wrong." But the common,
trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any
word of an unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written and read; the
tower of Siloam fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we have still to
desire a little Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old,
Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded,
and was yet not shaken in its faith.
WALT WHITMAN. - This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to mediate
between the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly
indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been written on
this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to
praise or blame unduly. In the last case, they helped to blindfold our
fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by an excess of
unadulterated praise, they moved the more