Robert Burns | Page 8

them shone
less in the pulpit, than at the festive board. (p. 019) With such men a
person in Burns's then state of mind would readily sympathize, and

they received him with open arms. Nothing could have been more
unfortunate than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen
into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men. They
were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarly education with
whom he had mingled freely. He amused them with the sallies of his
wit and sarcasm, and astonished them by his keen insight and vigorous
powers of reasoning. They abetted those very tendencies in his nature
which required to be checked. Their countenance, as clergymen, would
allay the scruples and misgivings he might otherwise have felt, and
stimulate to still wilder recklessness whatever profanity he might be
tempted to indulge in. When he had let loose his first shafts of satire
against their stricter brethren, those New Light ministers heartily
applauded him; and hounded him on to still more daring assaults. He
had not only his own quarrel with his parish minister and the stricter
clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin
Hamilton, a county lawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for
neglect of Church ordinances, and had been debarred from the
Communion. Burns espoused Gavin's cause with characteristic zeal,
and let fly new arrows one after another from his satirical quiver.
The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was The Twa
Herds, or the Holy Tulzie, written on a quarrel between two brother
clergymen. Then followed in quick succession Holy Willie's Prayer,
The Ordination, and The Holy Fair. His good mother and his brother
were pained by these performances, and remonstrated against them. But
Burns, though he generally gave ear to their counsel, in this (p. 020)
instance turned a deaf ear to it, and listened to other advisers. The love
of exercising his strong powers of satire and the applause of his
boon-companions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his
own better nature and the advice of his truest friends. Whatever may be
urged in defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannot but
think that those who have loved most what is best in Burns' poetry must
have regretted that these poems were ever written. Some have
commended them on the ground that they have exposed religious
pretence and Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this way is
perhaps doubtful. But the harm they have done in Scotland is not
doubtful, in that they have connected in the minds of the people so

many coarse and even profane thoughts with objects which they had
regarded till then with reverence. Even The Holy Fair, the poem in this
kind which is least offensive, turns on the abuses that then attended the
celebration of the Holy Communion in rural parishes, and with great
power portrays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. Yet, as
Lockhart has well remarked, those things were part of the same
religious system which produced the scenes which Burns has so
beautifully described in The Cotter's Saturday Night. Strange that the
same mind, almost at the same moment, should have conceived two
poems so different in spirit as The Cotter's Saturday Night and The
Holy Fair!
I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may not have
again to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn to the other
poems of the same period. Though Burns had entered on Mossgiel
resolved to do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered that it was not in
that way he was to attain success. The crops of 1784 and (p. 021) 1785
both failed, and their failure seems to have done something to drive
him in on his own internal resources. He then for the first time seems to
have awakened to the conviction that his destiny was to be a poet; and
he forthwith set himself, with more resolution than he ever showed
before or after, to fulfil that mission. Hitherto he had complained that
his life had been without an aim; now he determined that it should be
so no longer. The dawning hope began to gladden him that he might
take his place among the bards of Scotland, who, themselves mostly
unknown, have created that atmosphere of minstrelsy which envelopes
and glorifies their native country. This hope and aim is recorded in an
entry of his commonplace book, of the probable date of August,
1784:--
"However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly
the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent Fergusson, yet I am
hurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, and
haughs,