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Gilbert, Burns was in straits. An ap-wise and tender estimate. M. Angel

pointment in the excise was offered and accepted; to undertake such work must have been no small sacrifice to the poet, and it is to be deplored that the post presented much temptation to excess in drinking. Poverty and illhealth assailed him, the farm was abandoned forever, and Burns and his family finally took up their abode at Dumfries. It was there that we get the first practical signs of his sympathy with the French Revolution. The particular way in which the event touched Burns is well put by his French critic: A remarkable circumstance! Here again, the uncultured obscure peasant, performing his lowly labors in the depths of Scotland, was in entire sympathy with the highest minds of his epoch. He possessed the supreme gift of poets, a comprehension of the particle of eternal justice that rolls through human anarchy. Like his brethren in poetry, Coleridge and Wordsworth, he had

discerned it. Their souls had also been

lier warns us that to judge a character we must, first of all, clearly recognize that the history of a character, like that of an organism or of a society, is not a clean page, a resting-place of purity, but an oscillating balance of life and death, a combat of good and evil, the difficult liberation of a little order from much disorder, the mingling of the light and shadows that fill the years, and in the midst of which the universe rolls on its course. No life, no epoch, realizes good. They fulfil their duty if they gain and leave behind them some progress; they are not to be judged by the point at which they stop, but by the amount of road they traversed. The true verdict on every man is that the good counterbalances or lessens the evil, that one fault, nay, many faults, do not destroy a soul that can point to effects towards the good; that a life is a whole, of which the general effect, the intention, the average, so to say, must be taken into account.

And then, it is so dangerous, so pretorn by the conflict between their love of How impossible a thing it is to know sumptuous, to judge harshly of others. country and their enthusiasm in the cause for certain the springs and motives of of humanity. They, too, had sacrificed the lesser sentiment to the greater.... But the men's actions! In the words of with Burns the pain could not take a purely Burns himself, intellectual form, or culminate in a deep, meditative sadness, as with Wordsworth, or pour itself out in lyric passion as with Coleridge. Cultivated men make of their minds a retired sanctuary where joys and sorrows are far removed from actual life, a

sanctuary to which they sometimes retreat to enjoy their pride or to conceal their disgust. Burns had no such refuge. Actual life was too close to his mind, he could not get away from it, and his thoughts found expression in his acts. The conflict did not produce in him, as in Wordsworth, a moral disturbance, sorrowful doubtless, but restricted to the speculative view of things. It caused in Burns a daily irritability.

Inexorable fate drew her meshes closer round him. Tortured by disease and by fears for the future of his children, for with all his faults he was a good father, he died before attaining his prime.

For the most part of them, Burns's biographers regard him as either angel or devil. Those who love justice and can sympathize with and pardon human weakness, will ever turn to Carlyle's

One point must still be greatly dark,

The moving why they do it.

M. Augellier sums up the character of Burns so ably and so eloquently that we cannot forbear quoting at some length. After stating that pride and the passions were the mainsprings and rulers of Burns's life, he thus continues:

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To moderate and direct such violent emotions, a solid moral discipline was needed. It was entirely wanting: he had neither doctrine nor will. He was ever the plaything of his passions. He never once turned on them to make head against them. He had no consolidation of character. His was a receptive nature, capable of energetic re action. His heart was a cross-road where the winds of all the climes passed, met, and fought together. The line of his life was

a broken track of a series of chances and accidents. The incomparable vivacity of actual sensation which is the great quality of his literary productions was the great vice of his conduct. He was seized, irresistibly carried away, by it. Emotions in passing through him took possession of

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think of his sincerity, his straightforwardness, his kindness to men and beasts, his disdain of all meannesses, his hatred of knavery, in itself an honor, his disinterestedness, his fine impulses, his lofty inspiration, the intense ideality necessary to keep his soul above his destiny; when we think that he experienced those generous sentiments to the point that they actually were his intellectual life, and that so ardently did he feel them that his soul was a furnace in which precious metals were smelted and came forth jewels, we say to ourselves that he was of the flower of mankind and of great goodness; . what he did not succeed in or what he did not undertake is

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And who can say, that in the lives of men like Burns, as in those of Rousseau, Byron, Musset, George Sand, if we knew more of them—in those of Shakespeare or Molière there may not be a profound usefulness even in their weakness? They fulfil a different function from those of Dante, Milton, and Corneille, but one equally indispensable. Those lives offer an

As his personality was strong and powerful, submission to the exigencies of his instincts and imagination often led him into the greatest error of his life- egoism. He was a generous egoist, a man of disinterested tendencies but of selfish conduct. He lacked forgetfulness of self, the sense, we do not say of sacrifice or even of effacement of self, but of subordination of self. He could never yield up even his most triv-nothing by the side of what he accomial and transient desires to the vital and plished. enduring interests of others. There was no common measure between him and them. And that want of consideration for others, the suffering inflicted by him on others, is what weighs heaviest on his memory. A hermit, a Stylites, can detach himself from his fellows, and live isolated in his cave or on his pillar. A man living in the midst of men cannot do so. And by reason of the influence he exercised over austere model and a noble vindication of those with whom he came in contact, Burns could do so less than others. He who had the objectivity of intellect that enabled him to create beings, had none of heart; in certain decisive cases he was almost unconscious of existences outside his own. Indeed it must be said that he sacrificed the pain and sadness of others to his need for poetry, and nourished the dreams of which he formed his works on human tears. If we look closely, few poets are exempt from such cruelty; perhaps few men are. But they scarcely turn the pain they create to so rare a use, or change the tears they cause to flow into pearls of which they later form diadems and necklaces for those who shed them. He was the first of the line of modern poets who made love the sole occupation of their life. He was also the first to make passion the excuse for his bad actions; and we are not speaking here of literary influence or inspiration, but only of moral condition. There again he anticipated Byron and the school of Continental poets who imitated him, down to Musset and George Sand.

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Weigh his errors, his faults, as heavily as you like, the scale containing the pure gold outbalances that containing the base lead. Admiration increases in proportion as you examine his fine qualities. When you

duty. But the others offer perhaps more human sentiments: the knowledge of the failings of the best of us, a powerlessness to refuse them pardon, and as a result the practice of pity. How great a loss, not in beauty and artistic charm, but in necessary goodness, it would be to the soul of the human race if those men had not by their fascination compelled it to feel pity for their suffering! . . . It is to them that humanity in part owes its compassionate heart.

...

No one contributed more than Burns to the sacred work. Thus, in spite of the severity called up by some of his actions, the verdict of mankind will be merciful.

Difficult as it is in translation and in more or less disjointed quotations to give an adequate idea of M. Angellier's vivacity and of his warm sympathy with his subject, it will perhaps be patent that M. Angellier is a powerful and eloquent counsel, and that his point of view is psychologically interesting. But we are not sure that the pleading was necessary. The poetry of Burns holds an uncontested place in the literature of the world—his songs are on the lips and in the hearts of high

and low alike; and had his life or his | too well known to need repetition here. Great as are Béranger and Heine, Burns is greater, and to find his peers we must go back to the great Elizabethans.

temperament been other than it was, it is possible that art might have been the poorer.

II.

WHILE desiring to express a sense of the interest and of the excellent workmanship, to say nothing of the literary charm, of the biography, it is perhaps the second volume of the work, consisting of a careful and elaborate critical estimate of Burns's poetry, that will give M. Angellier's book its greatest value in the eyes of its British readers.

He, at the outset, disclaims any attempt at scientific criticism, and by way of illustration takes the opportunity to point out the faults of M. Taine's critical methods. M. Angellier prefers the aesthetic criticism, and declares that:

After an elaborate disquisition on the literary origins of Burns, and on Scottish popular poetry, dealing of course with the immediate poetical ancestors of Burns, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, M. Angellier comes to the wise conclusion that whatever may have been his debt to them, Burns owed more to the spectacle of life, to his own passions, to the thousand aspects of nature, than to books. He then proceeds to discuss human life in Burns, and observes with absolute truth that what chiefly strikes us in reading Burns is a feeling of intense and eager life, almost turbulent in its tumult and movement. His subjects

are the outcome of reality, penetrated Critics, to whatever branch of art they with the facts of real life. There is no He was placed by destiny in a devote themselves, are merely kneaders of repose. dough and distributors of the consecrated position excellently calculated to debread. It is their task to reveal the beauti-velop that particular bent of his genius. ful, to divide it into parts, to bring it within He took his happy and novel metathe reach of him who, launched in action phors from his daily toil, and in earning or fully taken up by labor, has no time to his bread learned his language. He seek it himself; yet he demands it, in order described the life immediately round to give to his ambitions or his desires a him, and as in some senses a purely brilliance and a setting, or a refuge and a national, nay, a purely local poet. A consolation. small village is often better for the obM. Angellier divides Burns's liter-servation of men than a big city. In ary production into two classes. First, the latter, individuality becomes rapthe pieces written before his visit to idly obscured; while in the former, Edinburgh, comprising the familiar men keep their native imprint. It epistles and short descriptive poems; they are the longest of his works, were all inspired by actual occurrences, and make Burns the best painter of the manners of his country. Second, the poems written after the visit to Edinburgh, consisting mainly of songs, relating not to particular acts, but to feelings that are simple and common to most. By these poems, the critic finds that Burns is the chief song-writer of his land, and one of the chief song-ger. writers of all lands. "It may be said The humor of Burns is characterized that each of his songs had its birth in as merry and gay, his raillery as witha melody; "music and verse were in-out ill temper; he is no moralist, but a deed born together. Carlyle's estimate purely picturesque painter like Teniers of Burns's influence as a song-writer is and Ostade. In the forcibleness and

must also be remembered that Burns, like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bunyan, and Dickens, among the great English painters of reality, received no literary education, had no literary ideal. Such men do not strive after literary perfection, but after truth. Burns's characters are not, M. Angellier points out, poetical peasants, as in the pastorals of George Sand; nor are they philosophic vagabonds, as in the songs of Béran

realism of words, he resembles Villon, | aspect of society, although not, per

Rabelais, and Regnier. His humor is haps, in the manner of Spenser, Keats, so natural that the fun seems part of or Tennyson, of Shakespeare or Brownthe things themselves, and so true that ing. Burns possessed, however, a it never disfigures reality or savors of feeling for color, for brilliant detail, a caricature. The French critic declares taste for gracefulness of movement and that it reminds him of French gaiety, for harmonious sounds, and his appreof the joviality that lurks in French ciation of the beauty of women is bewines, and also of the wit and merri-yond dispute. The poet who pleaded ment of many French writers. Neither so eloquently for liberty and equality does he forget that tears and true hu- cannot be denied a feeling for what is mor are never far apart.

On the roads in Ayr you may often meet

merry, laughing girls. They walk in short petticoats, with animated gestures. They are smaller, less poetical than English girls, but better proportioned and more lively. Their limbs are more delicately formed, their step lighter, more alert. If a fat farmer, sitting his horse awkwardly, passes, they jeer at him and laugh consumedly. But if they see a little wounded bird, tears come into their eyes before the merriment

has had time to fade from their countenances. The humor of Burns resembles them.

great and noble in life. Wordsworth and Coleridge were affected by similar feelings, but they regarded equality from the standpoint of historical philosophers; they saw it as a promise for the future, they had the optimism of the ideal. Burns was more terrestrial; he hated inequality, and demanded immediate relief.

It is not surprising that M. Angellier should find Burns one of the most charming, and perhaps the most varied, of love poets. He grows eloquent on the subject:

M. Angellier devotes some pages to All phases of love are included and deproving that Burns possessed the qualscribed. Early bashfulness, chaste confesities that go to the making of a drama-sions, transient dreams, felicity, anguish, tist, and that, under more favorable reproaches, despair, the pain of parting, the eager, passionate joy of secret and rare circumstances, he would very likely possession, the heavy intoxication of comhave followed in the footsteps of monplace possession, declarations thrown Shakespeare. We confess to a certain out in passing as if by a hurried traveller, distrust of criticism of the might-have- memories long carried in the heart's blood, been order. To our mind the best professions of inconstancy and oaths of proof that Burns would never have fidelity, humility and revolt in the face of made a dramatist, great or small, lies disdain, the worship inspired by the soul in the fact that he did not become one. and that inspired by the body, the delight Poets and others have written trage- of the beginning and the bitterness of the dies in their youth, but have failed end of love, chaste reveries and burning nevertheless to become great drama- desires, friendship that is almost love, and love that is on the highroad to friendship, tists in their prime. Like Chaucer, the ecstasies, the trials, every shade of a like Browning, Burns had a strong dramatic sense; he makes his characters speak to us themselves. But the possession of such a sense, very highly developed, did not make Browning's plays a success on the stage. We conclude that therein lies the true test of a drama's excellence.

Besides his gift of humor and of keen observation, M. Angellier finds in Burns the gift of seeing the nobleness of things, the beauty that there is in life. He was sensible of the artistic

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deep passion in its transports and delicacy, a mingling and confusion of everything poetic, refined, and brutal with which love can inspire the human heart. Betrothals, desertions, separations through death or distance, farewells, returns, absences that redden the woman's eyes, lawful love, adultery, the birth of children that cause joy in the home, the advent of those no home will recognize, all the dangers, the follies, in which strong passion involves

men.

The finest of the love poems are un

doubtedly those addressed to "Highland Mary," who, from a standpoint of literary consequences, deserves to rauk, so M. Angellier declares, with Laura and Graziella. The love that Burns celebrates in song is the frankest, most impersonal, most general that has ever existed. It is made of pure emotion, of unalloyed passion. It is the love of everybody, accessible to all, the most universal ever yet sung by a poet. He restored ardent, passionate love to English literature.

He will remain the poet of young, frank, fresh, sincere love, happy or unhappy in itself, love that is only love, the love of sweet-and-twenty, in which, according to Shakespeare, it is always May.

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Others have attempted to relate their sorrows and their joys; they have sung the poor. Here it is the poor themselves who sing. They speak on their own behalf. They lift their heads; they proclaim themselves prouder and happier than others. They claim the right of being fully men,

often better men than those above them.
Wordsworth spoke of them like a virtuous
optimistic pastor; Crabbe, like a far-sighted
and pessimistic physician. However serene
or deep their sympathy, their counsel and
Burns
pity have a touch of condescension.
was a peasant. If in poignant accents he
sung of their distress, he is also the poet of
their pride, their efforts, and their loves.

A long chapter is devoted to Burns's feeling for nature, and certain fallacies that have grown up concerning it are corrected. To state briefly the conclusions arrived at, we may say that Burns turned the feelings of a peasant into works of art. He not only contemplated nature, but he toiled at her. This rapid sketch in no way claims Fine as are his landscapes, reminding to be an exhaustive account of M. Auus of Millet's paintings, and deeply as gellier's able and sympathetic criticism his poems are penetrated with nature, of Burns. We have only roughly indihe regarded her chiefly as a background cated its lines and endeavored to emfor human activity, and thus differs phasize those parts of it likely to prove considerably from Wordsworth, Shel- attractive to British readers. For realey, and Keats, of whom he is often sons stated before, we have carefully regarded as a forerunner. In his love kept ourselves in the background, and for animals he stands alone. He knew have attempted nothing more than to them well, rejoiced with them in their set before our readers as clearly as may happiness and sorrowed with them in be the point of view of the French their pain. Perhaps it is to the deep critic. The work must have cost him tenderness, the pity, the compassion, considerable care and trouble; a most and affection for all animated things formidable list of volumes, English, that Burns owes his originality in re- French, and German, consulted in the gard to nature. Wordsworth was too course of its preparation, is appended. serene, too far removed from particular Sometimes it would seem that the latest phenomena. Shelley possessed tender- editions and most trustworthy biograness, but it was vague, impersonal, phies of English writers have been elementary, applying itself rather to overlooked, but that is perhaps inevatmospheric forces than to animated itable when one is not on the spot. beings. Cowper approaches nearest Neither can we call to mind any poem Burns in this particular. Burns has by Tennyson on Mary Stuart. Can also nothing in common with the feel- M. Angellier know the drama " Queen ing for nature of our modern poets. Mary" by its title only? But where He never occupies himself with nature so much is excellent, to carp at trifles for her own sake, the characteristic is little-minded indeed; and all lovers note of modern poetry; he regards her of poetry owe sincere gratitude to M.

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