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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.