FALSE JUDGMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21716, 3 February 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

FALSE JUDGMENTS

BY KOTARE

THE CASE OF BURNS

A lie takes a lot of catching. Give it a start and it may survive to the crack of doom. For one thing, it is usually more picturesque than the simple truth, and in the mass mankind is more interested in the colour and spiciness of a tale than in its conformity to actual fact. We usually believe what we want to believe. What is truth, anyway? Historical research, or rather, the historical imagination, has dedicated itself increasingly in recent years to the revaluation of historical characters. It is not that new facts havo come to light that have demanded a reconstruction of former estimates. That happens sometimes. Often the only justification for rewriting the lives of the great is a new angle of approach to the facts that have long been known and assessed. It is the newness, the originality, that chiefly matters. So novelty becomes the supreme end of the historian's striving; that, and the interest of the presentation. A clever advocate is always able to demonstrate that black is simply an unusual shade of white. The followers of Macaulay, in making the dry bones of history live and decking them with colourful raiment, have certainly popularised history in a fashion undreamt of even by their great master. Strachey, Guedalla, and the rest, have applied to history the technique of the stage. They must have a vivid picture. They simplify by judicious elimination, they intensify to their maximum the high lights. Everything sweeps past in a flood of radiance like a competent stage performance. The characters are clearly defined, the situations have the last ounce of dramatic quality squeezed out of them, and the action moves 011 irresistibly to its perfect climax. It is fine art in its own field, this dramatic interpretation of history. It is workmanlike, with no loose ends, or unaccounted or irrelevant fragments, left lying about. The only trouble is that human beings are not, and do not act like the figures in a well-made play, and life never unfolds so neatly and v tidily as the dramatist is compelled to assume for the purposes of effective stage presentation. Revaluations Still, this reassessment of, famous characters, where it is not simply an exercise in mental agility, an attempt to be startling and different, is an inevitable and commendable feature of the modern mind. Recent psychology has led us into some queer and unpleasant bypaths; but it has opened many new trails into the jungle of the human soul. We are not so ready either to commend or to condemn as our ancestors were. We cannot accept the obvious face-value. Acts and words are not the expression of complete goodness or complete badness, easily determined as such. They stand at the end of lengthy complex processes, whose starting point in the personality can be found and estimated only after the most careful analysis. Yet most of the conventional judgments of famous men and women havo been formed by generations that accepted only face-values, or what conformed with their own. prejudices. The modern mind simply must revaluate in the light of present day knowledge. It was once sufficient to damn Cromwell without further investigation by labelling him regicide. Only a man of inconceivable baseness would dare to lay hands on the Lord's anointed. There was no need to probe any deeper. A life of Cromwell was merely a demonstration of his vileness. He was corrupt throughout, an unscrupulous bigot, a hypocrite, masking his personal ambitions beneath the show of piety, and so on. It needed Carlyle to reveal him as one of the greatest of. Englishmen. In the reaction men went too far in the opposite direction. As he was not a devil, he must be an archangel. Burns Cromwell suffered because all his early biographers of any eminence happened to belong to the political party that strongly opposed him. They could not find anything admirable in him without endangering, as they believed, some cardinal element in their political creed. So false values seized the public mind and became part of the faith of the Englishman. That tyranny of the false estimate over the opinions of men is perfectly displayed in the case of Robert Burns, the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of whose birth has just been fittingly commemorated wherever Scotsmen foregather. Burns was a convivial soul, who dearly loved company, and whose social gifts made him a popular member of any lively group. He, in his epistle to Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, took occasion to refer mockingly to the character of a certain stickit minister of his acquaintance, Heron, the name of him. Heroil wrote one of the earliest lives of Burns, and retaliated by picturing him as a hopeless drunkard during his later years. Currie, the first editor of Burns, was a Liverpool physician, obsessed with the value of cold water both ( for external and internal treatment. The conviviality of Burns became a degrading vice in the eyes of this fervent temperance advocate. He took everv opportunity to use Burns as a dreadful example in his temperance propaganda. So the story started, and was accepted as the trutii by every biographer down to our own times. Burns was incessantly drunk in his later years, and in the end drank himself to death.

New Light But recent research has proved the whole story the product of malignity and injudicious enthusiasm for temperance reform. At the very time when Burns was supposed to be a helpless dipsomaniac, he was producing some of his finest verses; he was the leading spirit in the organisation of the Dumfries Volunteer Company, which was drilling two hours a day for two days a week, and which by special regulation excluded from its ranks any man of drunken habits (the records show that Burns never missed a parade); and in addition he was occupied all day and every day in the exacting work ol an exciseman, fulfilling all I)is duties to the complete satisfaction of exacting superiors. Sir James Crichton Brown, the eminent physician, published a few years ago the results of his investigation into the medical history of Burns. Ho finds that ho strained himself in his youth by doing a man's work while he was still a boy. Ho suffered from rheumatic fever, and ho died of heart complications induced by his rheumatism. Most emphatically he did not drink • himself to death. "It will not, I think, be disputed that Burns died of rheumatic endocarditis, with the origin of which alcohol had nothing to do. It 1 lie had had the advantage of the guidance which modern medical science and practice afford in cardiac disease, his lifo might have been freed from many disquietudes and considerably prolonged. He and his fair fame wore to a large extent the victims of a faulty « medical diagnosis. Ho has been hold ] up to obloquy as a confirmed drunkard, - when all the time he was truly a pain- ' ful example of the neglect of .rheu- 1 matism in early life. It was his own } ardent spirit, not ardent spirits, that I burnt him to a cinder." 1