It
crops out a good deal in Burns's Letters, and even necessitated a
certain flunkeyism on occasions, through life. It probably, with its
requirements, (while it help'd in money and countenance) did as much
as any one cause in making that life a chafed and unhappy one, ended
by a premature and miserable death.
Yes, there is something about Burns peculiarly acceptable to the
concrete, human points of view. He poetizes work-a-day agricultural
labor and life, (whose spirit and sympathies, as well as
practicalities, are much the same everywhere,) and treats fresh, often
coarse, natural occurrences, loves, persons, not like many new and
some old poets in a genteel style of gilt and china, or at second or
third removes, but in their own born atmosphere, laughter, sweat,
unction. Perhaps no one ever sang "lads and lasses"--that universal
race, mainly the same, too, all ages, all lands--down on their own
plane, as he has. He exhibits no philosophy worth mentioning; his
morality is hardly more than parrot-talk--not bad or deficient, but
cheap, shopworn, the platitudes of old aunts and uncles to the
youngsters (be good boys and keep your noses clean.) Only when he
gets at Poosie Nansie's, celebrating the "barley bree," or among
tramps, or democratic bouts and drinking generally,
("Freedom and whiskey gang the gither.")
we have, in his own unmistakable color and warmth, those interiors
of rake-helly life and tavern fun--the cantabile of jolly beggars
in highest jinks--lights and groupings of rank glee and brawny
amorousness, outvying the best painted pictures of the Dutch school,
or any school.
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