He is
intuitive and affectionate, and just emerged or emerging from the
shackles of the kirk, from poverty, ignorance, and from his own
rank appetites--(out of which latter, however, he never extricated
himself.) It is to be said that amid not a little smoke and gas in his
poems, there is in almost every piece a spark of fire, and now and
then the real afflatus. He has been applauded as democratic, and with
some warrant; while Shakspere, and with the greatest warrant, has been
called monarchical or aristocratic (which he certainly is.) But the
splendid personalizations of Shakspere, formulated on the largest,
freest, most heroic, most artistic mould, are to me far dearer as
lessons, and more precious even as models for Democracy, than the
humdrum samples Burns presents. The motives of some of his effusions
are certainly discreditable personally--one or two of them markedly
so. He has, moreover, little or no spirituality. This last is his
mortal flaw and defect, tried by highest standards. The ideal he never
reach'd (and yet I think he leads the way to it.) He gives melodies,
and now and then the simplest and sweetest ones; but harmonies,
complications, oratorios in words, never. (I do not speak this in any
deprecatory sense. Blessed be the memory of the warm-hearted Scotchman
for what he has left us, just as it is!) He likewise did not know
himself, in more ways than one. Though so really fret and independent,
he prided himself in his songs on being a reactionist and a
Jacobite--on persistent sentimental adherency to the cause of the
Stuarts--the weakest, thinnest, most faithless, brainless dynasty that
ever held a throne.
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