ROBERT BURNS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20898, 13 June 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

ROBERT BURNS.

- THE SOUL OF SCOTLAND. BY ICOTAP.E. If is usually a good sign when established reputations are questioned. Not always of course. Sometimes the protest, conies not from the eternal spirit of man chafing under conventional judgments which it has become sacrilege to criticise, but from a cheap desire for notoriety. The easiest way to make one's own feeble pipe heard amid tho tumults and clamours of this noisy age is to assail the great of past generations. And many a man has won n passing renown, and incidentally feathered his own nest, by an outrageous attack on tho great figures whose reputations havo come to bo taken for granted. Any fool can throw mud, and somehow it ministers to a very ignoble element in us to see honoured names bespattered with cheap ridicule. It was inevitable that Robert Burns should suffer with tho rest. In fact ho presented a fairly easy mark for the mudthrower. He had become a national symbol. Ho had been praised for the wrong things. Ho had every year been snowed under with rapturous and often ill-judged rhetoric that would have been overdrawn if applie 1 to a combination of Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Milton. It was difficult to get at the man and poet behind tho fulsome trappings with which national prido and prejudice had decked him. Tho reaction was bound to come, and as is the way with reactions it was bound to go too far. The Poet Hero. But oven making all allowance for exaggerations of praise followed by exaggerations of censure, one must admit that thero is much more to bo said for tho champions of Burns than for his opponents. One of the mysteries of the modern criticism directed against the Burns cult is the contempt poured on a nation that has made a poet its national hero and symbol. Only one people of modern times has done that. It is the ono case in a materialistic age, when spiritual values strugglo feebly to maintain their frail existence in a world that despises them, of a 1 virilo peoplo setting tho poet on tho central shrine of its devotion. Ono would have expected that so surprising an assertion of spiritual values would have sent all who prizo them as humanity's richest possession on their way with a stouter heart and a lighter step. Hero was at least one bright star in tho gloomy heavens. The athlete, the soldier, tho financier, the statesman might compete for the first place in most nations' scalo of values; but all was not lost while one country put its national poet above them all. That would be tho natural attitude. But surprisingly the usual voice from this group of the intelligentsia is one of condescending mockery. The object is not worthy, we are told. Scotland is .worshipping the wrong poet If she chooses to be so eccentric as to put the poet in the first placo in tho nation s affections, she might at least seo that she puts her greatest man of loUers there. The Real Issue. It. is laughable, of course, ft is not merely Burns the poet that is honoured bv his countrymen. Scottish devotion to Burns is not a cold-blooded exercise of •i perfectly trained faculty of critical discrimination. It is not primarily a matter of literary criticism at all. Burns is today a living personal force in Scottish life. He is read and known find loved. He is still spoken of as if ho were the greatest contemporary Scotsman. He provides some of the brightest threads woven into the tapestrv of modern Scotland. I wonder when tho critics will get hold of that idea. He is not a book of poems; he is tho typical Scotsman moving down the years to the future in closest personal fellowship with his countrymen—very human, often erring, but focussing in himself and in the songs that poured molten from his burning heart all the essential elements of the Scottish character, raised by genius to their highest power and tension. , , Lord Roscbery in a famous speech at Dumfries summed up one aspect of Burns work that may perhaps explain to doubting critics some of Scotland's devotion to him "Burns exalted our race: ho hallowed Scotland and the Scottish tongue. Before his time wo had for a long period been scarcely recognised, we had been falling out of the recollection of the world. From the timo of tho union of the crowns, and still more from tho time of the legislative union, Scotland had lapsed into obscurity. Except for an occasional riot : and a Jacobite rising, her existence was ! almost forgotten. Tho Scottish dialect, as i Burns called it. was in danger of perishing. Burns seemed at this juncture to start to his feet and reassert Scotland s ; claim to national existence; his Scottish notes rang through tho world, and he \ thus preserved ihe Scottish language for i ever; for mankind will never allow to dio that idiom in which his songs and poems , are enshrined." Scotland's Debt. But Scotland's debt was much greater I than that. He loved her with a power of devotion almost inconceivable in these lukewarm times, when patriotic fervour is regarded as bad form and when all the 1 bouquets are being _ handed to a thin--1 Mooded internationalism. When lie found ' the urge of the poetic soul within him. "• ] IP decided to direct, it solely in the in- ' terests of his country. That ho often used ' his verse to pay off personal scores or to • enshrine his own vivid and intensely perr sonal emotional life does not lessen the ) fact tliat he wrote to Scotland and of Scotland and for Scotland. ? The songs that, had come floating down tho centuries and that were woven into the fabric of Scottish life were often cx- ' quisite in melody but incredibly coarse ' r.nd unclean. Moie than any other nation ' Scotland lives in and by its songs. Burns j found tho stream impure; ho left it the 1 noblest heritage of song any nation has p over possessed. "Ho captures the whole breath and finer spirit of a nation which more than all others is inconceivable without its songs. No' ono has ever donei tins 1 for England nor even for Ireland. I bus 1 he really became tho singing soul of his ' people." These aro no Burns Club 1 orator's unconsidered praises, but the calm ' judgment of Professor Elton, an liinglisn* " man and one of tho finest critics of out 1 time. c The songs of a peoplo aro closer to the , national life than any other forms of literarv expression. They live not in books ' and classrooms, but in the heart and on 1 the lips. Burns, by almost universal consent, one of tho supremo singers in the S world's literature, poured all that lie had ' felt,, and known, and suffered, and sinned, s if you like, into its final, perfect literary B form; he sent tho very essence of Scottisl , life and character singing down tho years " in tho hearts of his fellow countrymen. When Scotland ceases to give the first 3 place in its affections to Robert Burnf f something worth nil that is left will hav< , departed from the national Ife. Because 3 Scots realise that, they refuse, for all the critics can say, to bato ono jot of theil affection and esteem.