The Letters of Robert Burns | Page 5

early as 1781 he wrote to
Alison Begbie--"Once you are convinced I am sincere, I am perfectly
certain you have too much goodness and humanity to allow an honest
man to languish in suspense only because he loves you too well."
Alison Begbie becomes Mary Morison, and the sentiment, so elegantly
turned in prose for her, is thus melodiously transmuted for the
lady-loves of all languishing lovers--
"O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace Wha for thy sake would gladly
dee, Or canst thou break that heart of his Wha's only faut is loving
thee?
If love for love thou wiltna gie, At least be pity on me shown: A thocht
ungentle canna be The thocht o' Mary Morison!"
Again, in the first month of 1783 he writes to Murdoch, the
schoolmaster--"I am quite indolent about those great concerns that set
the bustling busy sons of care agog; and if I have wherewith to answer
for the present hour, I am very easy with regard to anything further.
Even the last worst shift of the unfortunate and wretched does not

greatly terrify me." Just one year later this sentiment was sent current in
the well-known stanza concluding--
"But, Davie lad, ne'er fash your head Though we hae little gear; We're
fit to win our daily bread As lang's we're hale an' fier; Mair speer na,
nor fear na; Auld age ne'er mind a fig, The last o't, the warst o't, Is only
for to beg!"
Again, in the letter last referred to occurs the passage--"I am a strict
economist, not indeed for the sake of the money, but one of the
principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride, and I scorn to fear
the face of any man living. Above everything I abhor as hell the idea of
sneaking into a corner to avoid a dun." This is metrically rendered, in
May 1786, in the following lines:--
"To catch dame Fortune's golden smile, Assiduous wait upon her, And
gather gear by every wile That's justified by honour:-- Not for to hide it
in a hedge, Nor for a train attendant, But for the glorious privilege Of
being independent."
It would be easy to multiply examples: he is jostled in his letters by
market-men before he is "hog-shouthered and jundied" by them in his
verse; and the legends of Alloway Kirk are narrated in a letter to Grose
before the immortal tale of Tam o'Shanter is woven for The Antiquities
of Scotland.
There is nothing morbid or narrow in Burns's letters. They are frank
and healthy. You can spend a day over them, and feel at the end of it as
if you had been wandering at large through the freedom of nature. They
seem to have been written in the open air. The first condition necessary
to an appreciative understanding of them is to concern yourself with the
sentiment. And, indeed, the strength and sincerity of the sentiment
by-and-by draw you away to oblivion of the style, however much it
may at first strike you as redundant and affected. They are not the
letters of a literary man. They have nothing suggestive of the studious
chamber and the midnight lamp. There is often a narrowness of idea in
the merely literary man which limits his auditory to men of his peculiar
pattern. To this narrowness Burns, with all his faults of style, was a

stranger. His letters are the utterances of a man who refused to be
imprisoned in any single department of human thought. He was no
specialist, pinned to one standpoint, and making the width of the world
commensurate with the narrowness of his own horizon. He moved
about, he looked abroad; he had no pet subject, no restricted field of
study; nature and human nature in their multitudinous phases and many
retreats were his range, and he expressed his views as freely and
vigorously as he took them.
The general tone of the letters is high. The subject is not seldom of
supreme interest. Questions are discussed which are rarely discussed in
ordinary correspondence. The writer rises above creeds and formularies
and arbitrarily established rule. He speculates on a theology beyond the
bounds of Calvinism, on a philosophy of the soul above the dialectics
of the schoolmen, on a morality at variance with conventional law. He
interrogates the intuitions of the mind and the intimations of nature in
order that, if possible, he may learn something of the soul's origin,
destiny, and supremest duty. But let us hear himself:--
(a) "I have ever looked on mankind in the lump to be nothing better
than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking mob; and their
universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me.... I am
drawn by conviction like a Man, not by a halter like an