A History of English Literature

his life had combined 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing
moil of a galley slave.' His genius, however, like his exuberant spirit,
could not be crushed out. His mother had familiarized him from the
beginning with the songs and ballads of which the country was full, and
though he is said at first to have had so little ear for music that he
could scarcely distinguish one tune from another, he soon began to compose
songs (words) of his own as he followed the plough. In the greatness of his
later success his debt to the current body of song and music should not be
overlooked. He is only the last of a long succession of rural Scottish
song-writers; he composed his own songs to accompany popular airs; and many
of them are directly based on fragments of earlier songs. None the less his
work rises immeasurably above all that had gone before it.
The story of Burns' mature life is the pathetic one of a very vigorous
nature in which genius, essential manliness, and good impulses struggled
against and were finally overcome by violent passions, aggravated by the
bitterness of poverty and repeated disappointments. His first effort, at
eighteen, to better his condition, by the study of surveying at a
neighboring town, resulted chiefly in throwing him into contact with bad
companions; a venture in the business of flax-dressing ended in disaster;
and the same ill-fortune attended the several successive attempts which he
made at general farming. He became unfortunately embroiled also with the
Church, which (the Presbyterian denomination) exercised a very strict
control in Scotland. Compelled to do public penance for some of his
offenses, his keen wit could not fail to be struck by the inconsistency
between the rigid doctrines and the lives of some of the men who were
proceeding against him; and he commemorated the feud in his series of
overwhelming but painfully flippant satires.
His brief period of dazzling public success dawned suddenly out of the
darkest moment of his fortunes. At the age of twenty-seven, abandoning the
hope which he had already begun to cherish of becoming the national poet of
Scotland, he had determined in despair to emigrate to Jamaica to become an
overseer on a plantation. (That this chief poet of democracy, the author of
'A Man's a Man for a' That,' could have planned to become a slave-driver
suggests how closely the most genuine human sympathies are limited by habit
and circumstances.) To secure the money for his voyage Burns had published
his poems in a little volume. This won instantaneous and universal
popularity, and Burns, turning back at the last moment, responded to the
suggestion of some of the great people of Edinburgh that he should come to
that city and see what could be done for him. At first the experiment
seemed fortunate, for the natural good breeding with which this untrained
countryman bore himself for a winter as the petted lion of the society of
fashion and learning (the University) was remarkable. None the less the
situation was unnatural and necessarily temporary, and unluckily Burns
formed associations also with such boon companions of the lower sort as had
hitherto been his undoing. After a year Edinburgh dropped him, thus
supplying substantial fuel for his ingrained poor man's jealousy and rancor
at the privileged classes. Too near his goal to resume the idea of
emigrating, he returned to his native moors, rented another farm, and
married Jean Armour, one of the several heroines of his love-poems. The
only material outcome of his period of public favor was an appointment as
internal revenue collector, an unpopular and uncongenial office which he
accepted with reluctance and exercised with leniency. It required him to
occupy much of his time in riding about the country, and contributed to his
final failure as a farmer. After the latter event he removed to the
neighboring market-town of Dumfries, where he again renewed his
companionship with unworthy associates. At last prospects for promotion in
the revenue service began to open to him, but it was too late; his