ROBERT BURNS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18912, 29 January 1927, Page 13

ROBERT BURNS.

SOME ANNIVERSARY REFLECTIONS. (SMCMIXT WRITTEN FOR THE PRESS.) [By "Anglicus."] On Tuesday night the Canterbury Caledonian Society solemnly drove an' other nail into the coffin of Burns, the poet and man. In every self-respecting city in the Empire, that same evening, the same impressive nonsense was being foisted on the bewildered English. For they shame us, these Scots, and will continue to do so ( until we can rediscover the date of Shakespeare's birth, and begin giving public readings of "Paradise Lost" on Milton's anniversary. It has, always appeared to me, however, that if Burns could have | attended a "Burns Nicht" during his lifetime he would have torn up his manuscripts and hastened back to the plough. The Scots carry their hero-worship a little too far; they have so plastered their with laurels that they have lost sight of him, and one consequently finds gentlemen like the Rev. Frank Eule making the discovery "that the underlying stratum and foundation of the man's thinking was profoundly religious," and that his biographers, through some strange omission, have failed to "enlarge upon the poet's religious life."! Nearly always, too, they instance "The Cottar's Saturday Night." . M <For a gentleman in Iris position, Mr Rule ought to know better than to confuse religious feeling and respect for religious feeling. The Cottar s Sa urday Night," which is one of the worst poems Burns wrote, certainly shows a deep reverence-for the simple "piety of the peasant, but it does not prove, or even suggest, that Burns was a religious man. One might as wel infer from the "Charge of the Light Brigade" that Tennyson would have made a good cavalry officer, or from the "Elegy" that Gray was an undertaker. Inde.i, it was probably the dark confusion of his own mind that made Burns appreciate and .perhaps envv the magnificent simplicity ana sufficiency of a peasant's creed, think it is Mr Philip Guedalla who calls attention to-the seeming anomaly that all true agnostics and atheists have a profound respect for religion, and who points to the fact that Anatole France, far from assailing the piety of the priests, _ who are among his "finest characters, is lost in admiration before it. Mr Guedalla concludes that a mind with 110 faith it can cling to realises what such a faith must mean to others, and respects it. Surely that is the case with lne Cottar's Saturday Night." There is little in the brief and terrible life story of Burns to suggest that he was n religious man in any accepted sense of the term, but one does get glimpses of recesses in his dark and' unquiet SDirit that the Rev. Frank Eule and the Canterbury Caledonian Society would perhaps be well advised not to investigate. If Burns's life is to be discussed it might as well be discussed fearlessly. Tho stark and unre-i'ieved tragedy of genius struggling to rise from the mire does not make pleasant reading, and one can only reflect that had the Scots taken a small part of the interest in Burns now that they lid then the story might have been a happier one. As it was. he died broken and defeated, overwhelmed with bewilderment and despair, and if religion gave him any comfort, there was no indication of the fact. His last utterance, "That damned rascal. Matthew Penn." a reference to a legal agent who was trying to have him imprisoned for debt, was a fair index to his mental condition. There is, of course, no good reason why the Scots should provoke us to drag up the details of the poet's life, except that they are not content to worship hiir. ns a poet, but must have him as the perfect man. Tf someone were to allege that Burns nU> peas off his knife, they would solemnly proceed to disprove it. It mislit be argued that do no harm their Burn 3 worship, and that it is best to leave them alone, but nnfortnnately this » sot th'o caj».

Had Burns begun life in an English viliagc and not written in a psuedoScots dialect borrowed from Allan Ramsay and his predecessors, he would have ranked far higher than he docs m>w. for the simple reason that no perfcrvid countryman would have converted him into a national joke. The lyric genius of Burns belongs to those remote heights where Shakespeare and Milton are enthroned, where creed and raco do not count, and where praise is merely impertinence. ''The very flame of a man," said C'arSyle. in a moment of coherence, "speaking as men have spoken only once or twice since the world began." It is a pity to drag him down from that Olympus, deck him out with tartan and heather, and enthrone him as a minor national deity.