Essay on Burns

Summary

The Essay on Burns appeared in the Edinburgh Review in December 1828, nominally as a review of John Gibson Lockhart's new Life of Robert Burns, the sixth biography of a poet who had died thirty-two years earlier. Carlyle uses the occasion for an independent portrait of Burns as poet and as man. He begins with the paradox that a man of genius is often given a stone when he asks for bread: Burns lived in toil and poverty and died neglected in his thirty-seventh year, yet now has a mausoleum, a street named after him, and the highest writers among his admirers. Earlier biographers, especially the physician James Currie and Josiah Walker, condescended to Burns as a peasant to be excused; Lockhart, Carlyle says, avoids both condescension and flattery. Carlyle declares that Burns interests him chiefly as a man, whose life was a tragedy as deep as Napoleon's on St Helena, and whose gifts were wasted in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements. The first half of the essay is literary criticism. The chief excellence of Burns's poetry is sincerity: he writes from sight and experience, not hearsay, and so moves readers of every rank. He finds poetry in what lies near at hand, a mouse's nest or a ploughed daisy, rather than in distant romance. Carlyle praises the strength and tenderness of his feeling, the fierce indignation and broad humour, judges Tam o' Shanter sparkling rhetoric rather than true poetry, ranks The Jolly Beggars highly, and holds that the songs, now part of the mother-tongue wherever English is spoken, are Burns's lasting achievement and helped give Scottish literature a national character. The second half turns to the life. Burns, Carlyle argues, never left youth: he wavered between devotion to poetry and a meaner ambition for independence and esteem. His best years were in his devout father's cottage; at Irvine and in the religious quarrels of Ayrshire he lost his innocence and faith; the Kilmarnock poems were meant to fund an exile to Jamaica, but Edinburgh received him in 1786-87 with acclaim that left him richer in fame and poorer in contentment. His farm and excise post were a reasonable plan, but patrons, tourists and convivial admirers drew him into dissipation, and at Dumfries he faced coldness from the gentry. Carlyle concludes that his ruin came from within, from lack of unity of purpose and the absence of a religion that could govern his life, more than from poverty. He compares him with Byron, warns the rich against treating poets as hired entertainers, pleads that the world judges such men by deflections rather than by the size of their orbit, and ends by comparing Burns's work to a small, pure fountain beside the great rivers of Shakespeare and Milton.

Plot or Argument

• Genius rewarded with a mausoleum (pp. 1-8)

  The poet who asked for bread and received a stone; posthumous honours for a man who died neglected; the failure of Currie and Walker to see their true relation to their subject; Lockhart's book welcomed as free of both condescension and flattery.

• Burns as a man of tragic gifts (pp. 8-14)

  Carlyle's chief interest is the man rather than the poet. Burns's untaught genius, his early death, and the comparison with Napoleon at St Helena; his sympathy with nature and with his rustic fellows, from the daisy and the mouse to Winter's tempest.

• Sincerity and the poetry of the near at hand (pp. 14-30)

  Sincerity is the excellence of Burns's verse: it comes from experience, not hearsay, and so answers heart to heart. A true poet finds his subject at home; Burns makes the commonest scenes poetical. Carlyle discusses his clearness of sight, his strong and tender affections, his indignation, his humour, and his letters.

• Tam o' Shanter, The Jolly Beggars and the Songs (pp. 30-47)

  Carlyle judges many poems rhymed eloquence rather than poetry, finds Tam o' Shanter more rhetoric than imaginative re-creation, praises The Jolly Beggars, and ranks Burns first among song-writers. His songs have entered the language, and his example helped turn Scottish literature from a placeless cosmopolitanism toward nationality.

• One era only: the unfinished life (pp. 47-57)

  The life is the greater work and a broken one. Burns stays young to the end, divided between poetry and a desire for independence and regard. His godly father's household; the change at Irvine and in the New-Light religious controversies; remorse, scandal and the planned flight to Jamaica; the farewell to the banks of Ayr.

• Edinburgh, Ellisland and Dumfries (pp. 57-72)

  Burns's self-possessed appearance among the Edinburgh literati, with Walter Scott's recollection of meeting him; the fever of ambition the season left; the sound plan of farm and excise ruined by convivial patrons and tourists; the cold shoulder of Dumfries society; the songs written without pay; and the three gates of deliverance: poetry, madness, or death.

• The fault within; Burns and Byron (pp. 72-84)

  Carlyle refuses to blame patrons or poverty alone: the error was want of unity in Burns's aims and the attempt to unite the world's spirit with poetry's. Burns had no religion to steady him. Byron is a second example; poets cannot be the hired entertainers of the great without injury to both.

• Judgment and close (pp. 84-87)

  The world condemns men like Burns, Swift and Rousseau by the inches of their deviation, not by the size of their orbit. Carlyle asks for pity and wonder rather than blame and closes with the image of Burns's work as a Vaucluse fountain beside the great rivers of Shakespeare and Milton.

Characters

• Robert Burns, subject

  Ayrshire ploughman-poet (1759-1796), seen by Carlyle as a sincere genius whose life became a tragedy of divided aims.

• William Burnes, Burns's father

  A poor, devout and thoughtful tenant farmer whom Carlyle calls a complete and fully unfolded man, and whose household he sees as Burns's best school.

• John Gibson Lockhart, biographer under review

  Walter Scott's son-in-law, whose Life of Robert Burns (1828) occasioned the essay and which Carlyle praises for its manly tone.

• James Currie, earlier biographer

  Liverpool physician who edited Burns's works in 1800 for the poet's family; Carlyle thinks he loved Burns but wrote of him with condescension.

• Sir Walter Scott, witness

  Quoted recalling how, as a boy of fifteen in Edinburgh, he saw Burns moved to tears by a print of a dead soldier.

• Lord Byron, comparison

  Introduced as another gifted and unhappy poet who could not live as the companion of the great.

Lessons

• Sincerity as the root of poetic power

  Carlyle's central critical claim is that Burns moves every kind of reader because he writes what he has actually seen and felt: no fabulous woes, no wire-drawn refinements. He extends Horace's rule that a poet who wants to make others weep must first weep himself into a rule for every writer: be true, if you would be believed. Students can test the claim against To a Mouse or To a Mountain Daisy and ask whether sincerity alone makes poetry good, since Carlyle himself says many of Burns's pieces are rhymed eloquence rather than poems.

  • What does Carlyle mean by sincerity, and how does he distinguish it from mere feeling?
  • Why does he think the ordinary poet seeks his subjects far from home, and what does Burns do instead?
  • If sincerity is the poet's chief excellence, why does Carlyle rank Tam o' Shanter below The Jolly Beggars?

• Why Carlyle blames Burns and not his patrons

  Carlyle grants that the Edinburgh gentry and the convivial admirers who followed Burns to Ellisland did him harm, and that Dumfries society slighted him. Yet he insists that the decisive failure was within: a want of unity in his aims, the attempt to unite the spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, and the lack of a religion to govern his life. The argument is a moral one about vocation and self-command, made by a writer who was himself poor and unknown in 1828. Students should judge whether it is fair to the poet's real hardships.

  • What evidence does Carlyle give that Burns's ruin was a bankruptcy of the soul rather than of the purse?
  • Carlyle notes that Burns's own father met a harder fate without yielding. Is this a fair comparison?
  • Does the essay hold Burns responsible while still treating him with pity? Where do you see both at once?

• The size of the orbit and the inches of deflection

  In his final pages Carlyle argues that the world judges men like Burns, Swift and Rousseau like a court applying dead statutes, measuring the inches by which they deviate and not the breadth of their course. A pilot who has sailed round the globe with damaged tackle is not to be judged like one who has gone to Ramsgate. This is an argument about proportion in moral judgment, and it can be weighed against Scripture's insistence that sin is sin, as well as its warning against judging another's servant.

  • Restate the planetary-orbit analogy in your own words. What does it claim and what does it not claim?
  • Does a greater gift make a man's faults more forgivable, or more blameworthy (Luke 12:48)?
  • How does Carlyle's closing image of the fountain answer the question of what Burns achieved?

• Songs that make a nation

  Carlyle quotes the saying of Fletcher of Saltoun, let me make the songs of a people and you shall make its laws, and argues that Burns's songs have entered the speech of Britain and of English-speaking peoples everywhere. He adds that Burns helped end a period when Scottish writers wrote as if from nowhere, and gave Scottish literature a national home-feeling that Scott continued. Students can ask how songs, rather than treatises, form the affections of a people.

  • Which Burns songs does Carlyle mention, and what range of feeling do they cover?
  • What does Carlyle mean by saying eighteenth-century writers like Gray wrote almost in vacuo?
  • Can a song shape a people's loves more than its laws do? Give an example from hymnody or national song.

Context

Burns died at Dumfries in July 1796, aged thirty-seven, and his reputation in the following decades was shaped by the physician James Currie's 1800 edition and memoir, which presented him as a peasant genius undone by drink, and by a growing Scottish cult of the poet: the Dumfries mausoleum was finished in 1815. Lockhart's Life of 1828 was more sympathetic. Carlyle, a Dumfriesshire peasant's son who had left the ministry and was turning his German studies into a philosophy of sincerity and work, wrote against both condescension and hero-worship. The essay also reflects the new reviewing of the Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, in which a review became an original essay.

Composition

Carlyle contracted with Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, in 1827, moved to Craigenputtock in 1828, and noted finishing the paper on Burns on 16 September 1828. According to Froude, Jeffrey cut the proof heavily; Carlyle restored the passages and said the paper might be cancelled but not mutilated, and Jeffrey gave way. It appeared in the December 1828 issue and was reprinted in Carlyle's Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1839). The library text is George R. Noyes's Riverside Literature Series school edition (Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), which follows Carlyle's last revised text and adds an introduction, a sketch of Burns's life and notes.

Reception

The essay was widely admired and became the standard nineteenth-century estimate of Burns, reprinted often as a school text in Britain and the United States, as this Riverside edition shows. Carlyle returned to Burns in the fifth lecture of On Heroes (1840), placing him with Johnson and Rousseau as the hero as man of letters. Later critics, including Matthew Arnold, qualified Carlyle's praise, and Burns scholars have since revised parts of the biographical picture, particularly the role of drink in his last illness.

Comparisons

• Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

  Read the essay with the poems Carlyle names open beside it: To a Mouse, To a Mountain Daisy, Tam o' Shanter, The Jolly Beggars, Scots Wha Hae and the songs. His judgments of each can then be tested line by line.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

  Lecture V of Heroes (1840) groups Burns with Johnson and Rousseau as the hero as man of letters. It repeats the essay's verdict of a great nature wasted by circumstance and divided aims, but in the language of hero-worship Carlyle had developed in the intervening twelve years.

• The Life of Friedrich Schiller

  Carlyle's Schiller biography (1825) portrays a poet who achieved unity of purpose and devoted himself wholly to his art; the Burns essay is in effect its negative, a study of genius that never found its single aim.

• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

  Carlyle pairs Burns with Byron, who died at thirty-six, as poets sent to be missionaries to their generation who could not live as companions of the great. Childe Harold shows the proud, unhappy self-display Carlyle thought insincere in Byron and absent in Burns.

• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

  Gray's Elegy imagines mute inglorious Miltons buried in a village churchyard; Burns is the ploughman who was not mute, yet Carlyle names Gray among the English poets who wrote as if in vacuo, without the local roots that Burns restored.

• The Life of Samuel Johnson

  Carlyle's complaint against Currie and Walker is that they did not know how such men should speak of such a man; Boswell, whose reverence for Johnson Carlyle later praised in his 1832 review of Croker's edition, is the classic case of a biographer who did. Johnson, like Burns, was a poor man of letters at odds with patrons.

• Sartor Resartus

  Written at Craigenputtock soon after the Burns essay, Sartor turns the essay's concerns (sincerity, the need for belief, the hero's inward conflict) into Teufelsdröckh's spiritual autobiography, with its passage from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea that Burns, in Carlyle's view, never made.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening paradox of a mausoleum for a man who died neglected, and Carlyle's quarrel with Currie and Walker over how a biographer should speak of a peasant poet.
• The word sincerity on p. 14 and everything Carlyle hangs on it, including his advice to every writer to be true if he would be believed.
• The verdicts on single poems: Tam o' Shanter demoted, The Jolly Beggars praised, the Songs ranked first. Read at least one of each.
• The turn on p. 47 from the poems to the life, and Carlyle's claim that Burns had only one era, youth.
• The three gates of deliverance on p. 71 and the closing images of the ship, the planet's orbit and the fountain.

Key terms and names

Sincerity

Carlyle's chief critical word: writing from what one has truly seen and felt rather than from convention, which he calls the grand secret for finding readers and keeping them.

New Light and Old Light

The liberal (New Light) and strict (Old Light) parties in the eighteenth-century Church of Scotland. Burns satirized the Old Light clergy, and Carlyle thinks his alliance with the New Light men unsettled his faith.

Exciseman (gauger)

A collector of duties on goods such as malt and spirits. Burns took an excise post in 1789; Carlyle defends the choice against admirers who thought it beneath a poet.

Edinburgh Review

The Whig quarterly founded in 1802 and edited in 1828 by Francis Jeffrey, in which reviews became independent essays; Carlyle's piece is formally a review of Lockhart's Life.

Patronage

The support of artists by the rich and noble. Carlyle argues that a poet cannot be the hired entertainer of patrons without harm to both.

Mossgiel

The Ayrshire farm Burns worked with his brother Gilbert, where many of the Kilmarnock poems were written; Carlyle sets its clay soil against Burns's empyrean soul.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What fault does Carlyle find in the earlier biographers Currie and Walker, and why does he think Lockhart avoids it?
2. Comprehension What does Carlyle say happened to Burns at Irvine and in the religious controversies of his district?
3. Comprehension Why does Carlyle defend Burns's decision to take up farming and the excise after Edinburgh?
4. Interpretation Carlyle says Burns interests him less as a poet than as a man. How does that choice shape the structure and conclusions of the essay?
5. Interpretation Why does Carlyle think Burns's songs will outlast his longer poems, and is the claim persuasive?
6. Interpretation Carlyle concludes that Burns had no religion but only an anxious wish, a great Perhaps. What does he mean, and does the evidence of the poems he quotes support it?
7. Big Question When a gifted person's life is marred by his own faults, how should those who love his work speak of him, with blame, with pity, or with both?

Faith Connections

• Luke 12:48 (Scripture)

  To whom much is given, of him much shall be required. Carlyle's argument that Burns's great gift should be weighed against the inches of his deviation can be tested against this saying, which makes gifts a ground of greater accountability.

• James 1:8 (Scripture)

  A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. Carlyle's diagnosis of Burns, a life spent trying to reconcile the spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, is close to James's phrase.

• Matthew 7:9 (Scripture)

  Carlyle's opening sentence borrows Christ's image of a son who asks for bread and is given a stone, applied through Samuel Butler's fate to the neglect of a poet in his lifetime.

• Burns, The Cotter's Saturday Night (Great Conversation)

  Burns's own picture of a devout Ayrshire family at evening worship, modelled on his father's household, supports Carlyle's claim that the poet's best school was his father's cottage and shows the religion Carlyle thought he had lost.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Burns's poetry is great because it is sincere, drawn from his own sight and feeling of humble Scottish life; but his life, the greater work, was left unfinished because he never united his aims, divided between poetry and worldly independence and without a religion to govern him; patrons and poverty injured him but did not cause his ruin; therefore he deserves pity and wonder more than blame, and his songs will survive as a pure fountain beside the great rivers of English poetry.

Rhetorical device: extended analogy. On p. 86 Carlyle compares moral judgment to measuring an orbit: the world counts the inches of deflection but not the diameter, as if a planet's course and a gin-horse's circle could be judged by the same inches.

Debate: Resolved: Carlyle is right that Burns's failure was internal rather than the fault of his patrons and circumstances.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Carlyle divides his essay between the poetry and the life and says the life matters more. Using his discussions of sincerity (pp. 14-16), the Edinburgh season (pp. 56-63) and the fault within (pp. 76-80), argue whether the two halves support one conclusion or pull against each other.

Comparison with On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History: Read the section on Burns in Lecture V of On Heroes and compare it with the 1828 essay. Argue what changed in Carlyle's judgment of Burns over twelve years, attending especially to the word hero and to the question of religion.

Medical Lens

The essay is moral biography, not medical history, but it is a primary document in the long argument about why Burns died at thirty-seven. Carlyle writes as a layman and says so (he is not medically informed whether Burns could have lived longer), and he speaks of physical causes beginning to be concerned without naming them. He describes the poet's mental states in the moral and religious vocabulary of his time: remorse, desperation, moodiness, the fever and disease of ambition, rather than in clinical terms, and he names madness as one possible outcome he thinks unlikely because Burns's mind was clear and firm. The essay also shows the influence of the physician James Currie, whose 1800 memoir shaped the image of Burns as ruined by drink; Carlyle softens that picture but does not reject it. Twentieth-century physicians proposed rheumatic heart disease as the cause of death; that is a later retrospective reading, and diagnoses of Burns's mood (for example as melancholia) remain interpretations.

• pp. 3-5 (former biographers)

  Carlyle judges that Dr. Currie, the physician who edited Burns in 1800, loved the poet but wrote of him with a patronizing reserve.

  Physicians Doctors
• pp. 54-56 (Irvine and the religious quarrels)

  Doubt, scandal and remorse bring Burns to what Carlyle calls the blackest desperation, broken by red lightnings of remorse, before he plans exile to Jamaica.

  Melancholia Depression Mind Body
• p. 63 (after the Edinburgh season)

  Carlyle describes Burns's heart as maddened by the fever of worldly ambition, a disease that will rack him for years, a moral metaphor in medical dress.

  Mind Body
• pp. 66-68 (Ellisland and Dumfries)

  Tourists and convivial patrons draw Burns into dissipation; at Dumfries he becomes moody and indignant amid the coldness of local society.

  Alcohol Melancholia Depression
• pp. 70-71 (the crisis)

  Carlyle admits he is not medically informed about Burns's prospects, notes that physical causes were concerned, and names poetry, madness or death as the three gates open to him.

  Death Dying Madness Psychosis
• pp. 82-84 (Byron)

  Byron is offered as a second gifted poet who was the most wretched of men, an example Carlyle uses to argue that unhappiness springs from divided aims rather than from fortune.

  Melancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Make a two-column chart of every judgment Carlyle passes on a named Burns poem or song, then read three of those poems and write your own verdict beside his.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation at the Edinburgh dinner of 1787 between Burns, the young Walter Scott and an elderly professor, drawing on Scott's recollection quoted in the essay.

• Essay

  Carlyle argues that Burns's ruin was a failure of internal, not external, means. Defend or challenge this using the essay's own evidence about patrons, the excise and Dumfries society.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem in plain English about something close at hand that you have actually seen this week, following Carlyle's account of how Burns made the mouse and the daisy into poetry.

Further Reading

• Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Robert Burns

  The Kilmarnock volume of 1786 that made Burns famous.

• Life of Robert Burns, John Gibson Lockhart

  The 1828 biography Carlyle was reviewing.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle

  Lecture V returns to Burns as the hero as man of letters.

• Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle

  Written soon after at Craigenputtock; develops the essay's themes of sincerity and belief.

• Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of His Life, James Anthony Froude

  Source for the Jeffrey episode and Carlyle's years at Craigenputtock.