Chapter II: Part 2

It is not difficult to insist that his “A Woman Waits for Me” is a tremendous work, and as pure as nature’s generating power. Still perhaps few would dare to read it aloud in an assembly of men and women. If Whitman is right, the world is wrong. This poem, and others of its like, in plain words deals of the deepest, strongest, most persistent feelings that move the sentient world. In proportion as they are deeper and stronger than any other, they should the more be the subject of thought and art. And still ages of established convention have made the world pretend ignorance until no one dares defend his right to life but this brave and simple man.

In both England and America, narrow interpretations of morality have almost stifled art. As remarked by a leading novelist—“All our literature is addressed to the young school girl.” If it will not pass muster before her eyes, it has no right to live, and almost no English or American author has been great enough to rise above these narrow conventions and write the natural and true. The artists of continental Europe have been less fettered and have taken us over a broader range and a wider field. Still while these authors have told more of life, they have treated these tremendous subjects by drawing the curtain only a little way aside, and giving us a curious, perverted, half stolen look, as if they knew that the picture was unholy and therefore tempting to the gaze. But Walt Whitman approached the human body and the mysteries of life from an entirely different view.

If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful than the most beautiful face.

If Walt Whitman could have drawn the veil from the universe and shown us the living God in all his majesty and power, he would have approached his throne with no greater reverence than when he stripped the human body and pointed to its every part fresh and sacred from its Maker’s hand.

No true system of life and morals will exist until the holiest feelings and most potent and eternal power is openly recognized and discussed with neither jest nor shame.

Walt Whitman was the great bard of democracy and equality; not simply the vulgar democracy of political rights and promiscuous familiarity, but the deep, broad, fundamental democracy that looks at all of nature and feels the unity and kinship that makes the universe a whole.

To Walt Whitman there could be no thought of class or caste. Each one held his certificate of birth from the same infinite power that, through all the ages and all the false and criminal distinctions of man, has yet decreed that all shall enter helpless and naked through the same gateway of birth, and each alike must go back to the fundamental mother, shorn of every distinction that man in his vain-glorious pride has sought to make. Whitman placed the works of nature above the works of man. He had no faith in those laws and institutions which the world has ever made to defraud, and enslave, and deny the common brotherhood of all. He believed that every child that came upon the earth was legitimate, and had an equal right to land, and sea, and air, and all that nature made, and all that nature gave.

Each of us is inevitable, Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth, Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth, Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

Let this stanza speak to our conscience face to face—is it true or false? Can any but a blasphemer deny the divine right of every man upon the earth? And yet if this simple stanza is true, every law book should be burned and every court abolished and natural justice, unfettered and undenied, should be enthroned above the forms and conventions and laws, which, each and all, deny the integrity of the soul and the equal rights of man.

Through all the injustice and inequality of the world, the vision of democracy has still prevailed and ever must prevail as long as nature brings forth and takes back the master and the slave alike. But the aspiration for democracy is not always high and noble. It is easy to demand for ourselves the same rights enjoyed by our fellow men, but Whitman’s democracy was on a higher plane.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracys By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

These lines breathe the spirit of true humanity, the spirit that will one day remove all barriers and restrictions, and liberate the high and low alike. For nothing is truer in life or more inevitable in the economy of nature than this sage thought:

Whatever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

It is a sad mistake to believe that injustice and wrong can injure only the poor and the weak. Every mean word and narrow thought and selfish act degrades the aggressor, leaves its mark upon his soul and its penalty in his life. So, too, no good effort is really lost, however it may seem to be. The kind word may be spoken to the deaf, the righteous effort be wrongly directed, the alms unworthily bestowed, but the heart that feels and the soul that tries has grown greater by the act.

The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him, The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him, The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him, The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him, The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him, The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him,—it cannot fail,

The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress,
not to the audience,
And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or the
indication of his own.

Not alone in his theory of personal equality was Walt Whitman a democrat in the highest meaning of the term, but he distrusted the ease and effeminacy of modern life; he doubted and feared the polish and super-sensitiveness that precedes decay; he had no faith in hot-house plants, in pampered life, in luxury and repose. He believed in rugged, primeval nature, in the rocks and hills, the rivers and the pines; he loved the dumb and patient brute, and believed in stalwart men and strong women; in sunlight, rain and air.

I am enamour’d of growing out of doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out. I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them and long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman’s work is not of the old, time-worn sort. When he speaks of love it is the love of life, the love of reality, the strong love of men, the intense love of women, the honest love that nature made, the love that is; not the unhealthy, immoral, false, impossible love told in erotic prose and more erotic verse, and given to young girls and boys as the truth, to poison and corrupt with its false and vicious views of life.

But he sings of the common things, the democracy of every day; for it is the small affairs that make up life, and its true philosophy is to see the beauty and greatness and relation of these little things and not to pine for the seemingly momentous events, which can rarely come. The Alexanders, the Cæsars and the Napoleons are scattered only here and there in the great sea of human existence, and yet every life measured by just standards may be as great as these; and the soul that is conscious of its own integrity knows its own worth regardless of the world.

I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

Walt Whitman felt the music of the hammer and the axe as he felt the harmony of the symphonies of Beethoven, and he understood the art of the plough-boy in the field as well as the glorious creations of Millet.

The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me well, The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall take me with him all day, The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the sound of my voice, In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen and seamen and love them.

The soldier camp’d or upon the march is mine, On the night ere the pending battle may seek me, and I do not fail them, On that solemn night (it may be their last) those that know me seek me, My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket, The driver thinking of me does not mind the jolt of his wagon, The young mother and old mother comprehend me, The girl and the wife rest the needle a moment and forget where they are, They and all would resume what I have told them.

Walt Whitman’s democracy did not end with sex. Man is not always a logical animal. Most of the practical democracy of the world has stopped with men, and generally with white men at that. The political equality of woman has only barely been considered; the still more important question, her economic independence, is yet a far-off dream. But Walt Whitman knew no limit to equality. With him equality meant equality. It could mean nothing else.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

Probably Walt Whitman would not have raised his hat to a woman on the street, nor given her his seat in the car, simply because she was a woman. Both these may be well enough, but they grow from false ideas of women and of course through these false ideas women lose the most. Injustice and oppression can never be made up by chivalry and pretended courtesy. And the evil always is and must be the false relation which these create. Men expect to pay women for their political and economic freedom in theater tickets and by taking off their hats in public, and in the end women become willing to receive this paltry and debasing bribe.

“The Open Road,” one of Whitman’s masterpieces, is full of wholesome inclusive democracy.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Here the profound lessons of reception, nor preference nor denial, The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, The early market men, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass, I also pass, anything passes, none can be interdicted, None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

But Walt Whitman’s democracy was more inclusive still. It is almost becoming the fad to forgive the evil in others and to insist that, after all, their good qualities give them the right to kinship with ourselves, but this is only one side of true democracy. The felon is my brother, not alone because he has every element of good that I so well recognize in myself, but because I have every element of evil that I see in him. Walt Whitman was wise enough to see the feelings and passions that make others sin, and he was just enough and great enough to recognize all these feelings in himself.

You felons on trial in courts, You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain’d and handcuff’d with iron, Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison? Me, ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain’d with iron, or my ankles with iron?

You prostitutes flaunting over the pavements or obscene in your rooms, Who am I that I should call you more obscene than myself? O culpable! I acknowledge—I expose! (O admirers, praise not me—compliment not me—you make me wince, I see what you do not—I know what you do not.) Inside these breast-bones I lie smutch’d and choked, Beneath this face that appears so impassive hell’s tides continually run,

Lusts and wickedness are acceptable to me, I walk with delinquents with passionate love, I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?

These lines are not a burst of poetic feeling, they are the sincere utterances of a brave philosopher and poet, who tells the truth about himself and about you and me. Let us be honest about sin. How do you and I differ from the murderer on the gallows, the prostitute in the street or the burglar in the jail? How wide a breach is there between coveting the house or home or seal skin coat of your neighbor and taking it if you can? How great a difference between making a sharp trade with your neighbor, getting more from him than you give to him, and taking outright what he has? Yet one is business, the other larceny. What is the distance between hating your neighbor, and wishing him dead: how great a chasm between feeling relief at his death, and killing him yourself? So far as the man is concerned, it is not the act that is evil, but the heart that is evil. There is no difference between the committed and the uncommitted crime. Every feeling that makes every sort of crime is in the heart of each and every one. Nature has made the blood of some of us a little cooler, and has developed caution a little more, or fate has made the temptation a trifle less, and thus we have escaped,—that is, managed to conceal the real passion that boils and surges in our hearts. Until this is dead, evil is in our souls. Away with all this talk of superiority and differences. It is cant—pure, simple cant.

I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions? O you shunn’d persons, I at least do not shun you, I come forthwith in your midst, I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.

Has man the right to be less kind than nature is? Have we the right by word or deed to pass judgment on our fellow man? Can we not learn of love and charity and hope from the sun, the rain, the generous earth, and the pulsing, growing spring? Hear Walt Whitman’s word to a common prostitute:

Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature, Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

Neither was it the magnanimous soul of Whitman that was charitable and kind, but it was the truthful, honest man who saw his own goodness in the woman; and her sin, which after all was only an excess of kindness, in himself.

The regenerated world will be built upon the democracy Walt Whitman taught. It will know neither rich nor poor; neither high nor low; neither good nor bad; neither right nor wrong; but

I will establish *** in every city of these states inland and seaboard, In the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large, that dents the water, Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, The institution of the dear love of comrades.

Walt Whitman was always and at all times an optimist. He never struck a despairing note or voiced a doubting strain. His hope was not anchored in blind faith or narrow creed. His optimism was not that of the cowardly fanatic who stubbornly shuts his eyes to avoid an unpleasant view. He looked abroad at all the world and called it good.

Optimism and pessimism in their last analysis are questions of temperament. They depend upon the eye that looks out, not upon the object that it sees. The pessimist points to the sunset, casting its lengthening shadows on the earth, and tells of the night that is coming on; the optimist shows us the rosy dawn, the golden promise of a glorious day. The pessimist tells of winter, whose icy breath chills and deadens all the world; the optimist points to springtime with its ever recurring miracle of light and life. Is the pessimist right or is the optimist right—does the night precede the day, or the day precede the night? After all, are our calendars wrong—does the winter with its white shroud and cold face mark the ending of the year, or does the springtime with its budding life and its resurrecting power awaken the dead earth to joyous, pulsing life again?

Above the view of the optimist, who sees the morning and the spring, and the pessimist, who sees the evening and the closing year, stand a few serene souls, who look on both with clear eye and tranquil mind, and declare that all is good. The morning is right and the evening is right. It is beautiful to pass through the joyous gates of birth; it is good to be clasped in the peaceful arms of death. Rare Walt Whitman at thirty-seven, full of health and vigor and strength, with the world before him, and conscious of his genius and his power, sings in a burst of optimism:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.

Again at seventy, looking back on a life well spent, conscious that the last few sands are running out, a confirmed invalid with palsied limbs and failing strength, looking death squarely in the face and just before him; with the same sweet smile, the same lovely nature, the same all-embracing philosophy, sings once again his optimistic song:

Not from successful love alone, Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air,

As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, Then for the teeming, quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding, blissful halcyon days!

It must be that somewhere is a serene height where life triumphs over death. It must be that nature does not jar, and that the close of a lovely life is really as peaceful and as beautiful as the decline of a perfect day; that each day rightly lived and every year well spent, must bring the pilgrim more in harmony with his journey drawing to a close.

The world has ever shuddered at death—has stubbornly closed its eyes and refused to look at the great fact that nature places all about our path; has never tried to look in its face, to take its hand, to think of its peaceful, forgiving, soothing touch; has ever called it enemy and never thought to caress it as a friend. Walt Whitman was wiser than the rest. His philosophy made him know that death was equally good, whether the opening gateway to a freer, fuller life, or a restful couch for a weary soul.

Whitman had solved the eternal riddle; he had conquered death; he looked at her pale form and saluted her as he would welcome a new birth. No bard ever sang a more glorious hymn than Walt Whitman sang to death.

Come, lovely and soothing Death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate Death, Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise For the sure enwinding arms of cool, enfolding Death. Dark Mother, always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly, Approach, strong deliveress, When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death. From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee, And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night, The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well veil’d Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee,

Over the tree tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-packed cities all, and the teeming wharves, and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.

Whitman in his wheel chair, physically shattered and broken, but with a mind strong and serene, and at peace with all the world, waiting for the sun to set, is a lesson in optimism better than all the sermons ever preached. Without faith in any form of religion that the world has ever known, he had brought his life so in harmony with nature that he felt every beat of the great, universal heart, and with the confidence of certain knowledge he looked upon the fading earth and caroled a song as he sailed forth on that great unknown sea, which is hidden in perpetual night, from all but the few great souls, whose wisdom and insight have given them the confidence and trust of a little child.

Joy, shipmates, joy!
(Pleas’d to my soul at death I cry,)
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmates, joy.

Conscious of the integrity of his purpose, and the inherent righteousness of his life, moved and upheld by his broad philosophy and his patient, trustful soul, with no false modesty and with the same manly egoism that made him what he was—the kindest, gentlest, justest, broadest, manliest man—Walt Whitman asked the reward his life had earned.

Give me the pay I have served for, Give me to sing the song of the great Idea, take all the rest, I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches, I have given alms to every one that ask’d, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others, Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown, Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young, and with the mothers of families, Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees, stars, rivers, Dismiss’d whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body, Claim’d nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim’d for others on the same terms, Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every State, (Upon this breast has many a dying soldier lean’d to breathe his last, This arm, this hand, this voice, have nourish’d, rais’d, restor’d, To life recalling many a prostrate form;) I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself, Rejecting none, permitting all.

When man has grown simpler and saner and truer—when the fever of civilization has been subdued and the pestilence been cured; when man shall no longer deny and revile the universal mother who gave him birth, then Walt Whitman’s day will come. In the clear light of that regenerated time, when the world looks back to the doubt and mist and confusion of to-day, Walt Whitman will stand alone, the greatest, truest, noblest prophet of the age, a man untainted by artificial life and unmoved by the false standards of his time. In a sodden, commercial, money-getting age, he enjoyed all the beauty of the earth without the vulgar lust to own. In a world of privilege and caste, he felt and taught the brotherhood of man and the kinship of all living things. In an age of false modesty and perverted thought, he sang the sanctity of the body with the divinity of the soul. Against the agnostic and the Christian too, he defended every part and portion of the faultless work of the creative power. Above the doleful, doubting voice of men, through the dreariest day and darkest night, in the raging of the storm and the madness of the waves, his strong, optimistic, reassuring note was ever heard above the rest, proclaiming to the universe that all is well. He saw that in a wise economy and a great broad way, that the false was true, the evil good, the wrong was right, and that over all the universe, pervading all its teeming life, a power omnipotent, beneficent and wise, was working to uplift, conserve and purify the whole. The poor, the weak, the suffering, the outcast, the felon, all knew him for their comrade and their friend. His great, inclusive, universal heart left no soul outside, but all alike he knew, the life of all he felt, and one and all he loved. In his vocabulary were no words of bitterness and hate, and in his philosophy no right to censure or to blame. In his every deed and thought he seemed to say:

“So I be written in the book of love,
I have no care about that book above,
Erase my name, or write it as you please,
So I be written in the book of love.”

As the shadows lengthen and the daylight wanes—as the hair whitens and the passions cool, more and more do we learn that love is the true philosophy of life; more and more do we revise the sterner judgments of our earlier years; more and more do we see that pity should take the place of blame, forgiveness of punishment, charity of justice, and hatred be replaced by love. When old familiar faces awake the memories of bygone days, often and often again do we fear that our judgments were cruel and unjust, but every deed of mercy and every act of charity and every thought of pity is like the balm of Gilead to our souls. We may none of us be wise or great, fortune may elude us and fame may never come; but however poor or weak or humble, we yet may inscribe our names in the fairest, brightest book,—the book of love, and on its sacred pages, earned by the glorious truths he taught, by his infinite, ever present love of all, upon the foremost line will be inscribed Walt Whitman’s name.

ROBERT · BURNS

ROBERT BURNS.

It is difficult to account for a genius like Robert Burns. His life and work seem to defy the laws of heredity and environment alike. The beasts of the field were scarcely bound closer to the soil than were the ancestors from which he sprang; and from his early infancy he was forced to follow the stony path his father trod before. As a mere child, he learned how hard it is to sustain life in the face of an unfriendly nature and a cruel, bitter world. He was early bred to toil; not the work that gives strength and health, but the hard, constant, manual labor that degrades and embitters, deforms and twists and stunts the body and the soul alike. Burns was denied even the brief years of childhood—those few, short years upon which most of us look back from our disappointments and cares as the one bright spot in a gray and level plain.

It is not alone by the works he has left us that Robert Burns is to be truly judged. Fortune endowed him with a wondrous brain and a still rarer and greater gift—a tender, loving, universal heart; but as if she grudged him these and sought to destroy or stunt their power, she cast his lot in a social and religious environment as hard and forbidding as the cold and sterile soil of his native land; and from these surroundings alone he was obliged to draw the warmth and color and sunshine that should have come from loving hearts, generous bounties, and bright, blue southern skies. In measuring the power and character of Robert Burns, we must remember the hard and cruel conditions of his life, and judge of his great achievements in the light of these.

The ways of destiny have ever been beyond the ken of man; now and then, at rare, long intervals, she descends upon the earth, and in her arms she bears disguised a precious gift, which she lavished upon a blind, unwilling world. She passes by the gorgeous palaces and beautiful abodes of men, and drops the treasure in a manger or a hut; she comes again to take it back from a world that knew it not and cast it out; and again, she seeks it not among the strong and great, but in the hovel of the poor, the prison pen, or perhaps upon the scaffold or the block.

Measured by the standards of our day and generation, the life of Robert Burns was a failure and mistake. He went back to the great common Mother as naked of all the gilded trappings and baubles, which men call wealth, as when she first placed the struggling infant on its mother’s breast.

Robert Burns was not a “business man”; he was not one of Dumfries’ “first citizens”—in the measure of that day and this; he was one of its last if not its worst. He had no stock in a corporation and no interest in a syndicate or trust. He had neither a bank nor bank account. He never endowed a library, a museum, or a university. He was a singer of songs,—a dreamer of dreams. He was poor, improvident, intemperate, and according to the Scottish creed, immoral and irreligious. In spite of his great intellect he was doubted, neglected and despised. He died in destitution and despair; but the great light of his genius, which his neighbors could not see or comprehend, has grown brighter and clearer as the years have rolled away. A beautiful mausoleum now holds his once neglected ashes; monuments have been reared to his memory wherever worth is known and fame preserved; while millions of men and women, the greatest and the humblest of the world alike, have felt their own heartstrings moved and stirred in unison with the music of this immortal bard, whose song was the breath of Nature,—the sweetest, tenderest melody that ever came from that rarest instrument—the devoted poet’s soul.

The great masterpieces of his genius were not created in the pleasant study of a home of refinement, luxury, and ease, but were born in the fields, the farm yard, the stable; while the “monarch peasant” was bending above the humblest tasks that men pursue for bread. Only the most ordinary education was within the reach of this child of toil, and the world’s great storehouses of learning, literature, and art were sealed forever from his sight; and yet, with only the rude peasants, with whom his life was spent, the narrow setting of bleak fields and grey hills, which was the small stage on which he moved, and the sterile Scotch dialect with which to paint, he stirred the hearts of men with the sweetest, highest, purest melody that has ever moved the human soul.

Olive Schreiner tells of an artist whose pictures shone with the richest, brightest glow. His admirers gazed upon the canvas and wondered where he found the colors—so much rarer than any they had ever seen before. Other artists searched the earth, but could find no tints like his; he died with the secret in his breast. And when they undressed him to put his grave-clothes on, they found an old wound, hard and jagged above his heart; and still they wondered where he found the coloring for his work. Robert Burns, perhaps more than any other man who ever lived, taught the great truth that poets are not made but born; that the richest literature, the brightest gems of art, even the most pleasing earthly prospects are less than one spark of the divine fire, which alone can kindle the true light. Robert Burns like all great artists, taught the world that the beauty of the landscape, and the grandeur and pathos of life depend, not upon the external objects that nature has chanced to place before our view, but upon the soul of the artist, which alone can really see and interpret the manifold works of the great author, beside which all human effort is so poor and weak.

Millet looked at the French peasants standing in their wooden shoes, digging potatoes from the earth and pausing to bow reverently at the sounding of the Angelus, and saw in this simple life, so close to Nature’s heart, more beauty and pathos and poetry than all the glittering courts of Europe could produce. And Robert Burns, whose broad mind and sympathetic soul made him kin to all living things, had no need to see the splendor and gaiety of wealth and power, to visit foreign shores and unknown lands; but the flowers, the heather, the daisies, the bleak fields, the pelting rains, the singing birds, the lowing cattle, and above all, the simple country folk seen through his eyes, and felt by his soul, and held in his all-embracing heart, were covered with a beauty and a glory that all the artificial world could not create, and that his genius has endowed with immortal life. Robert Burns did not borrow his philosophy from the books, his humanity from the church, or his poetry from the schools. Luckily for us he escaped all these, and unfettered and untaught, went straight to the soul of Nature to learn from the great source, the harmony and beauty and unity that pervades the whole; and he painted these with colors drawn from his great human heart. His universal sympathy gave him an insight into life that students of science and philosophy can never reach. Contemplating Nature, and seeing her generous bounties lavished alike on all her children, he could not but contrast this with the selfishness and inhumanity of man, which crushes out the weak and helpless and builds up the great and strong. Burns was a natural leveler, and while men still believed in the “divine right of kings,” he preached that “man was the divine King of rights.” None knew better than he the injustice of the social life in which he lived, and in which we live to-day. Burns knew, as all men of intelligence understand, that worldly goods are not, and never have been given as a reward of either brains or merit.

It’s hardly in a body’s power
To keep at times, frae being sour,
To see how things are shared;
How best o’chiels are whiles in want
While coofs on countless thousands rant
And ken na how to wair’t.

The immortal singer of songs, and all his descendants, received infinitely less for all the works of his genius than an ordinary gambler often gets for one sale of something that he never owned, or one purchase of something that he never bought; and it is doubtful if all the masterpieces of the world in art, in literature, and in science, ever brought as much cash to those whose great, patient brains have carefully and honestly wrought that the earth might be richer and better and brighter, as has been often “made” by one inferior speculator upon a single issue of watered stock.

Living in the midst of aristocracy and privilege and caste, Burns was a democrat that believed in the equality of man. It required no books or professors, or theories to teach him the injustice of the social conditions under which the world has ever lived. Here, as elsewhere, he looked to the heart—a teacher infinitely more honest and reliable than the brain.

If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave,
By Nature’s law design’d;
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty, or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn?

Preachers and authors and teachers, judges and professors and lawyers, have been employed for ages to teach the justice of slavery and the folly and crime of equal rights; but through all quibbles and evasions, this question of Burns, straight from the heart, as well as the head, shows that all these excuses are but snares and cheats. The voice of the French Revolution could not fail to move a soul like that of Robert Burns. This great struggle for human liberty came upon the world with almost the suddenness of an earthquake, and with much of its terrors, too. Here the poor and the oppressed felt the first substantial hope for freedom that had pierced the long, dark centuries since history told the acts of men. To the oppressors and the powerful, who hated liberty then as they ever have, before and since, it was a wild, dread threat of destruction and ruin to their precious “rights.” When the struggle commenced, Burns was enjoying the munificent salary of Fifty pounds a year as a whisky gauger in the village of Dumfries. He had already spent a winter in Edinburgh, and had been feted and dined by the aristocracy and culture of Scotland’s capital without losing his head, although at no small risk. An acquaintance and entertainer of the nobility and an incumbent of a lucrative office, there was but one thing for Burns to do; this was to condemn the Revolution and lend his trenchant pen to the oppressor’s cause; but this course he flatly refused to take. He openly espoused the side of the people, and wrote the “Tree of Liberty,” one of his most stirring songs, in its defense.

Upon this tree there grows sic fruit,
Its virtues a’can tell man;
It raises man aboon the brute,
It mak’s him ken himsel’ man.
Gif ance the peasant taste a bit,
He’s greater than a lord man.

King Louis thought to cut it down
When it was unco sma’ man;
For this the watchman cracked his crown,
Cut aff his head an’ a’ man.

Even these words are not strong enough to express his love for natural liberty and his distrust of those forms and institutions which over and over again have crushed the priceless gem they pretend to protect.

A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,
Churches built to please the priest.

Even higher and broader was Burns’ view of equality and right. He stood on a serene height, where he looked upon all the strife and contention of individuals and states, and dreamed of a perfect harmony and universal order, where men and Nations alike should be at peace, and the world united in one grand common brotherhood, where the fondest wish of each should be the highest good of all. These beautiful, prophetic lines seem to speak of a day as distant now as when Burns wrote them down a hundred years ago. But still, all men that love the human race will ever hope, and work, and say with him:

Then let us pray that come it may,
As come it will for a’ that,
That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth
May bear the gree, and a’ that;
For a’ that, and a’ that,
It’s coming yet, for a’ that,
That man to man, the warld o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.

It is perhaps as a singer of songs that the literary fame of Burns will longest be preserved. No other poet has ever breathed such music from his soul. His melodies are as sweet and pure as the bubbling spring; and as natural and spontaneous as ever came from the throat of the nightingale or lark. These songs could not be made. The feeling and passion that left his soul bore this music as naturally as the zephyr that has fanned the strings of the Æolian harp. The meter of these songs was not learned by scanning Latin verse, or studying the dry rules that govern literary art, but it was born of the regular pulse beats, which in the heart of Nature’s poets are as smooth and unstudied as the rippling laughter of her purling brooks.

John Anderson, my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonnie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snow;
But blessing on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill tegither,
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither;
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep tegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.

Although a plough boy and surrounded by the grime and dirt that come from contact with the soil, still even here Burns found material for music and poetry that will live as long as human hearts endure; for, though the sky may be warmer and bluer on the Mediterranean shore than where it domes the Scottish hills and crags, still the same heaven bends above them both, and the same infinite mysteries are hidden in their unfathomed depths. The tragedy of death is alike, whether defying the power of a Prince, or entering the home of the humblest peasant to bring the first moments of relief and rest. The miracle of life, whether wrought by Nature on the rich couch of the Queen or the unwatched pallet of the peasant, is the same mystery, ever new, ever old, appealing ever to the heart of man. The affections and passions,—those profound feelings that Nature planted deep in the being of all sentient things, and on whose strength all life depends,—these are the deepest and purest as we leave the conventions and trappings of the artificial world, and draw nearer to the heart of the great Universal power. With the sky above, the fields around, and all Nature throbbing and teeming with pulsing life, but one thing more was needed to make harmony and music, and that was Robert Burns.

The old story of human love was sung by him a thousand times and in a thousand varying moods, as never love was sung before. It mattered not that his melodies breathed of rustic scenes, of country maids, and of plain untutored hearts that beat as Nature made them feel, unfettered by the restraints and cords of an artificial life. Transport his Mary to a gorgeous palace, and deck her fair form with the richest treasures of the earth and bring to her side the proudest noble that ever paid homage to a princess, and no singer,—not even Burns himself,—could make a melody like the matchless music that he sung to Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloom’d the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom;
As underneath their fragrant shade,
I clasp’d her to my bosom!

The golden hours, on angel wings,
Flew o’er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.

All the conventions and baubles and spangles which fashion and custom use to adorn the fair could only have cheapened and made vulgar the rustic maiden that moved Burns’ soul to song.

These sweet lines could never have been written of any but a simple country lass, whose natural charms had moved a susceptible human heart:

I see her in the dewy flowers,
I see her sweet and fair;
I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,
I hear her charm the air;

There’s not a bonnie flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green,
There’s not a bonnie bird that sings,
But minds me o’ my Jean.

Who was this Burns that sang these sweet songs and whose musical soul was stirred by every breeze and moved to poetry by every lovely face and form that came within his view? Biographers and critics and admirers have praised the genius and begged excuses for the man. Without asking charity for this illustrious singer, let us view him in the light of justice, exactly as he was. It is not difficult to understand the character of Robert Burns. His heart was generous and warm and kind; his mind was open as the day, and his soul was sensitive to every breath that stirred the air. These qualities have made the poet loved in every land on earth, and brought more pilgrims to his grave than were ever drawn to the tomb of any other poet or author that has ever lived and died. And yet the short-sighted, carping, moralizing world, with solemn voice and wisdom ill-assumed, has ever told how much better and holier he could have been and should have been. Poor, silly, idle world, can you never learn that the qualities that make us strong must also make us weak; that the heart that melts at suffering and pain is made of clay so sensitive and fine as to be moved and swayed by all the emotions of the soul? Would you serve the weak, the suffering and the poor—would you calm their fears and dry their eyes and feel with them the cruel woes of life—you must wear your heart upon your sleeve, and then of course the daws will peck it into bits. Would you keep it safely hidden from the daws, you must hide it in a breast of stone or ice and keep it only for yourself. Perhaps we may admire the man that walks with steady step along a straight and narrow path, unmoved by all the world outside. He never feels and never errs. But we cannot ask of either man the virtues that belong to both, and when our choice is made we must take the strength and weakness too.

We look at the mountain top, lifting its snow-crowned head high into the everlasting blue, and are moved with wonder and with awe. Above is the endless sky; below, the world with all its bickering and strife, the clouds, the lightning and the storm, but the mountain, cold, impassive, changeless, unmoved by all the world, looks ever upward to the eternal heavens above. Again we gaze on the peaceful, fertile lowlands, rich with their generous harvests yet unborn—beautiful with their winding streams and grassy fields, ever ready to bestow bounteously on all that ask, demanding little and lavishly returning all; and we love the quiet, rustic, generous beauty of the scene. The mountain is majestic and sublime, and the yielding, generous lowlands are beautiful and pleasing too. We love them both, but we cannot have them both at once and both in one.

Robert Burns, and all men like him that ever lived, were always giving from their generous souls. In the cold judgment of the world, Burns wasted many a gem upon the thoughtless, worthless crowd, who consumed a life he should have spent for nobler things. But the flower that never wastes its fragrance has no perfume to give out. If it is truly sweet, its strength is borne away on every idle wind that blows. Robert Burns with lavish bounty shed his life and fragrance on every soul he met. He loved them all and loved them well: his sensitive, harmonious soul vibrated to every touch, and moved in perfect harmony with every heart that came within his reach. The lives of men like him are one long harmony; but as they pass along the stage of life, they leave a trail of disappointed hopes, and broken hearts, and vain regrets. But of all the tragedies great and small that mark their path, the greatest far and most pathetic is the sad and hopeless wreck that ever surely falls upon the exhausted artist’s life.

The life of Burns was filled with wrecks—with promises made and broken, with hopes aroused, and then dashed to earth again. It was filled with these because one man cannot give himself personally to all the world. The vices of Robert Burns perhaps like those of all the rest that ever lived, were virtues carried to excess. Of course, the world could not understand it then, and cannot understand it now, and perhaps it never will, for slander and malice and envy, like death, always love a shinning mark. The life of Burns and the life of each is the old Greek fable told again. Achilles’ mother would make him invulnerable by dipping him in the river Styx. She held him by the heel, which remained unwashed and vulnerable, and finally brought him to his death. To whatever dizzy height we climb, and however invulnerable we seek to be, there still remains with all the untouched heel that binds us to the earth. And after all, this weak and human spot, is the truest bond of kinship that unites the world.

I look back at Robert Burns, at the poor human life that went out a hundred years ago, and study its works to know the man. I care not what his neighbors thought; I care not for the idle gossip of an idle hour. I know that his immortal songs were not born of his wondrous brain alone, but of the gentlest, trust, tenderest heart that ever felt another’s pain. I know full well that the love songs of Robert Burns could have come from no one else than Robert Burns. I know that even the Infinite could not have changed the man and left the songs. Burns, like all true poets, told us what he felt and saw, and it is not for me to ask excuses for this or that; but rather reverently to bow my head in the presence of this great memory, and thank the infinite source of life for blessing us with Robert Burns exactly as he was.

It is difficult to understand our own being; it is impossible to know our fellow man’s, but I have faith to think that all life is but a portion of one great inclusive power, and that all is good and none is bad. The true standard for judging Burns and all other men is given by Carlyle, and I cannot refrain from borrowing and adopting what he says: