A History of English Literature

naturally robust constitution had given way to over-work and dissipation,
and he died in 1796 at the age of thirty-seven.
Burns' place among poets is perfectly clear. It is chiefly that of a
song-writer, perhaps the greatest songwriter of the world. At work in the
fields or in his garret or kitchen after the long day's work was done, he
composed songs because he could not help it, because his emotion was
irresistibly stirred by the beauty and life of the birds and flowers, the
snatch of a melody which kept running through his mind, or the memory of
the girl with whom he had last talked. And his feelings expressed
themselves with spontaneous simplicity, genuineness, and ease. He is a
thoroughly romantic poet, though wholly by the grace of nature, not at all
from any conscious intention--he wrote as the inspiration moved him, not in
accordance with any theory of art. The range of his subjects and emotions
is nearly or quite complete--love; comradeship; married affection, as in
'John Anderson, My Jo'; reflective sentiment; feeling for nature; sympathy
with animals; vigorous patriotism, as in 'Scots Wha Hae' (and Burns did
much to revive the feeling of Scots for Scotland); deep tragedy and pathos;
instinctive happiness; delightful humor; and the others. It should be
clearly recognized, however, that this achievement, supreme as it is in its
own way, does not suffice to place Burns among the greatest poets. The
brief lyrical outbreaks of the song-writer are no more to be compared with
the sustained creative power and knowledge of life and character which make
the great dramatist or narrative poet than the bird's song is to be
compared with an opera of Wagner. But such comparisons need not be pressed;
and the song of bird or poet appeals instantly to every normal hearer,
while the drama or narrative poem requires at least some special
accessories and training. Burns' significant production, also, is not
altogether limited to songs. 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' (in Spenser's
stanza) is one of the perfect descriptive poems of lyrical sentiment; and
some of Burns' meditative poems and poetical epistles to acquaintances are
delightful in a free-and-easy fashion. The exuberant power in the religious
satires and the narrative 'Tam o' Shanter' is undeniable, but they belong
to a lower order of work.
Many of Burns' poems are in the Lowland Scots dialect; a few are wholly in
ordinary English; and some combine the two idioms. It is an interesting
question whether Burns wins distinctly greater success in one than in the
other. In spite of his prevailing literary honesty, it may be observed, his
English shows some slight traces of the effort to imitate Pope and the
feeling that the pseudo-classical style with its elegance was really the
highest--a feeling which renders some of his letters painfully affected.
[Footnote: For the sake of brevity the sternly realistic poet George Crabbe
is here omitted.]
THE NOVEL. We have traced the literary production of the eighteenth century
in many different forms, but it still remains to speak of one of the most
important, the novel, which in the modern meaning of the word had its
origin not long before 1750. Springing at that time into apparently sudden
popularity, it replaced the drama as the predominant form of literature and
has continued such ever since. The reasons are not hard to discover. The
drama is naturally the most popular literary form in periods like the
Elizabethan when the ability (or inclination) to read is not general, when
men are dominated by the zest for action, and when cities have become
sufficiently large to keep the theaters well filled. It is also the natural
form in such a period as that of the Restoration, when literary life
centers about a frivolous upper class who demand an easy and social form of
entertainment. But the condition is very different when, as in the
eighteenth and still more in the nineteenth century, the habit of reading,