Читать книгу The Real Robert Burns - James L. Hughes - Страница 7

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Many people still speak of Burns as an ‘uneducated man.’ Although a farmer, he was in reality a well-educated man. He was not a finished scholar in the accepted sense of the universities, but both in his poetry and in his unusually forceful and polished prose he was superior to most of the university men of his time. He had read many books, the best books that his intelligent father could buy, or that he could borrow from friends or from libraries. In addition to school-books, he names the following among those books read in his youth and young manhood—The Spectator, Pope’s Works, Shakespeare, Works on Agriculture, The Pantheon, Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, Justice’s British Gardener, Boyle Lectures, Allan Ramsay’s Works, Doctor Taylor’s Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, Hervey’s Meditations, Thomson’s Works, Shenstone’s Works, The Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s Reign, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Macpherson’s Ossian, two volumes of Pamela, and one novel by Smollett, Ferdinand, Count Fathom. In addition to these he had read some French and some Latin books, guided by one of the greatest teachers of his time, John Murdoch, who was so great that when he established a private school in London his fame spread to France, and some leading young men, notably Talleyrand, came to receive his training and inspiration.

William Burns read regularly at night to his two sons, Robert and Gilbert, and after the reading the three fellow-students discussed the matter that had been read, each from his own individual standpoint. As the boys grew older they read books during their meals, so earnest were they in their desire to become acquainted with the best thought of the world’s leaders, so far as it was available. David Sillar has stated that Robert generally carried a book with him when he was alone, that he might read and think. When Robert settled at Ellisland he aroused an interest among the people of the district, and succeeded in establishing a circulating library.

His father, though a labourer, was supremely desirous that his family should be educated and thoughtful. This desire prompted him to become a farmer, that he might keep his family at home. He was an independent thinker himself, and by example and experience he trained his sons to love reading and to think independently. Robert never thought he was thinking when he let other people’s thoughts run through his mind.

The result of the reading and thinking which their father led Robert and Gilbert to do was most gratifying. The influence on Robert’s mind must be recognised. He became not only a great writer in prose and in poetry, but a great orator as well. He stood modestly, but conscious of his power, and proved his superiority both in conversation and impromptu oratory to the leading university men of his time in Edinburgh. Gilbert, too, became an original thinker and a writer of clear and forceful English. In a long letter to Dr. Currie he discussed very profoundly and very independently some deep psychological ideas in excellent language. Few men of his time could have written more thoughtfully or more definitely. As illustrations of Robert’s learning, as well as of his independent thought in relating the books he read to each other and to human life, two instances are worth recording. First, in a letter to Dr. Moore,[1] of London, an author of some distinction, who had sent him a copy of one of his books, Burns said, 1790: ‘You were pleased to express a wish for my opinion of your work, which so flattered me that nothing less would serve my overweening fancy than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett in your different qualities and merits as novel writers. This, I own, betrays my ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear, but I am fond of the spirit young Elihu shows in the Book of Job—“And I said, I will also declare my opinion.” ’

To Mrs. Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘Dryden’s Virgil has delighted me. I do not know whether the critics will agree with me, but the Georgics are to me by far the best of Virgil. It is indeed a species of writing entirely new to me, and has filled my head with a thousand fancies of emulation. … I own I am disappointed in the Æneid. Faultless correctness may please, and does highly please, the letter critic; but to that awful character I have not the most distant pretensions. I do not know whether I do not hazard my pretensions to be a critic of any kind, when I say that I think Virgil, in many instances, a servile copier of Homer. If I had the Odyssey by me, I could parallel many passages where Virgil has evidently copied, but by no means improved, Homer. Nor can I think there is anything of this owing to the translators; for from everything I have seen of Dryden, I think him in genius and fluency of language Pope’s Master.’

But a small percentage of university graduates of his time could have written independent criticisms, wise or otherwise, of Homer and Virgil, or even of English writers, as clearly as Burns did. They could have told what the opinions of other people were in regard to Homer and Virgil; they could have told what they had been told. Burns had been trained to think by his father, and to express his own thoughts about the books he read; they had merely been informed. The advantage in real education was greatly in favour of Burns. Their memories had been stored with opinions of others; his mind had been trained to read carefully, to relate the thoughts of others to life, to decide as to their wisdom, and to think independently himself. His education from books was somewhat limited, but the development of his mind that came from discussions of the value of the matter read was vital, and helped him to relate himself to men, to nature around him, to the universe, and to God.

In schools Burns had not a very extended experience. When six years old he was sent to a small school beside the mill on the Doon at Alloway. His teacher gave up the school soon after Burns began to attend it. Mr. Burns secured the co-operation of several of his neighbours, and they engaged a young man named Murdoch to teach their children, agreeing to take him in turn as their guest, and to pay him a small salary. The fact that John Murdoch formed a high estimate of Mr. Burns is a proof of the ability and sincerity of the father of the poet.

When Burns was seven years old his father removed to Mount Oliphant farm, but Robert continued to attend the school of Mr. Murdoch, about two miles away, in Alloway. The books used were a spelling-book, the New Testament, the Bible, Mason’s Collection of Prose and Verse, and Fisher’s English Grammar.

Mr. Murdoch gave up his Alloway school when Burns was nine years old. After that time the teacher of his sons was their father. He taught them arithmetic, and bought them Salmon’s Geographical Grammar, Derham’s Physico- and Astro-Theology, Hay’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, and the History of the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. of England. Robert, when eleven years old, showed a deep interest in the study of grammar and language, and ‘excelled as a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles.’ In his twelfth year he was kindled in his patriotic spirit by the Life of Sir William Wallace. Wallace remained a hero to him throughout his life. In his thirty-fifth year he wrote the grandest call to the defence of liberty ever written, beginning:

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.

In his eleventh year, which seemed to be a kindling epoch in his mind, his mother’s brother gave him a collection of Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s Reign. He read them over and over again, greatly delighted by both their contents and their literary style. They had a distinct influence in forming his own prose style, as during his twelfth year he conducted an imaginary correspondence of quite an extensive character and in a stately style.

When he was thirteen the greatest kindler of his early powers, John Murdoch, became teacher of English in the Ayr High School. Robert was sent to board with him to study grammar and composition. He received instruction from Murdoch in French and in Latin. He continued the study of French in the evenings at home, as he had obtained a French dictionary and a French grammar.

His formal education, so far as it became an element in the cultivation of his mind and the development of his supreme powers, ended with the few weeks spent with John Murdoch in Ayr. They were epoch weeks to Burns; transforming weeks, because of the increased range of his learning, but made infinitely more richly transforming by the revelation of new visions of life, and by the culture gained by association with a man of rare ability and supreme kindling power, such as John Murdoch undoubtedly possessed. A genius like Burns, living with a great teacher like Murdoch, could in a month get many of the new revelations, the new visions, and the strong impulses that should come into a growing soul as the result of a university course.

Burns, in his seventeenth year, was sent to Kirkoswald to study mensuration and surveying. He intended to become a surveyor. Peggy Thomson lived next door to the school he attended. He met Peggy, loved her madly, and found it impossible to study longer. He afterwards wrote two beautiful poems to her. His school life for a brief period in Kirkoswald had little influence in the development of his power, except for the organisation of a debating society composed of a companion, William Niven, and himself. They met weekly to hold debates, and these debates were greatly enjoyed by Burns. His practice in debating societies afterwards organised by him in Tarbolton and in Mauchline not only developed in him his unusual oratorical ability, but at the same time gave him mental training of vital importance. Impromptu speaking surpasses any other known educational process in developing the human mind. However, Burns could neither study for Hugh Rodger nor debate with William Niven after he fell in love with Peggy Thomson, so, after a sleepless week, he went home.

Some may wonder, when they learn that for a time Burns took more interest in studying Euclid’s Elements of Geometry than in any other department of study in his home under his father’s guidance. When the Rev. Archibald Alison sent him his book, Essays on the Principles of Taste, Burns thanked him, and in his letter said: ‘In short, sir, except Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father’s fireside in the winter evenings of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added so much to my stock of ideas, as your Essays on the Principles of Taste.’

Burns evidently studied geometry at the time his mind was ripe for new development by that special study. All children and young people would be fortunate if they could be guided to the special study capable of arousing their deepest interest, and therefore capable of promoting their highest development, at the special period of their mental growth when that particular study will awaken their deepest and most productive interest.

Robert’s mind appears to have had a splendid power of adaptation to the books and studies which his father secured for his sons. Gilbert says: ‘Robert read all these with an avidity and industry scarcely to be equalled; and no book was so voluminous as to slacken his industry, or so antiquated as to damp his researches.’ Dr. Moore wrote to Burns in 1787: ‘I know very well you have a mind capable of attaining knowledge by a shorter process than is commonly used, and I am certain you are capable of making better use of it, when attained, than is generally done.’

This makes it easier to understand why Burns had a mind so well stored with so many kinds of knowledge; and knowledge classified by himself, and related to life, so well that he could use it readily when he required to do so. The university men in Edinburgh marvelled more at the vastness of his stores of different kinds of knowledge, when he met them with dignified calmness, than they did because of his wonderful gifts of poetic genius. Douglas says of Burns in Edinburgh: ‘Burns did not fail to mix by times with the eminent men of letters and philosophy, who then shed lustre on the name of Scotland.’

Lockhart wrote: ‘Burns’s poetry might have procured him access to these circles; but it was the extraordinary resources he displayed in conversation, the strong sagacity of his observations on life and manners, the splendour of his wit, and the glowing energy of his eloquence, that made him the serious object of admiration among these practised masters of the arts of talk. Even the stateliest of these philosophers had enough to do to maintain the attitude of equality when brought into contact with Burns’s gigantic understanding; and every one of them whose impressions on the subject have been recorded agrees in pronouncing his conversation to have been the most remarkable thing about him.’

Speaking of this, Chambers properly says: ‘We are thus left to understand that the best of Burns has not been, and was not of a nature to be, transmitted to posterity.’ Why was Burns, though a ploughman, able to meet a galaxy of leaders in different spheres of learning, and culture, and philosophy, and outshine any of them in his own special department? The answer is simple. He had two great teachers to kindle him and guide him in the development of his remarkable natural powers: his father, William Burns, and his teacher and friend, John Murdoch.

His father made it certain that he would possess a wide range of knowledge of the best available books on religious, ethical, and philosophical subjects—philosophy of science and philosophy of the mind; and, better than that, he trained him definitely by nightly practice to digest, and expound, and relate, and even dare to disbelieve, the opinions expressed in the books he read. In nightly discussions with his father and Gilbert his mind became keen and broad, and he became self-reliant. He had not merely stored knowledge in his mind, he had wrought the knowledge into his being, as an element of his growing power. Like great players of chess who sometimes meet several opposing players of eminence at the same time and vanquish them all at one period of play, Burns could meet the leaders of many departments of progress, culture, and philosophy at the same time, and stand calm and serene in glory with each leader on the crest of his own special mountain of knowledge.

From John Murdoch he received the inspiration of a vital comradeship, a fine training in English language—grammar, and a good introduction to literature—and visions of higher relationships to his fellow-men and to God.

However, great as Murdoch was as a kindler and a teacher, the education of Robert Burns was mainly due to his remarkable father. Alexander Smith, in his memoir of Burns, which Douglas claimed to be ‘the finest biography of its extent ever written,’ speaking of William Burns, says: ‘In his whole mental build and training he was superior to the people by whom he was surrounded. He had forefathers he could look back to; he had family traditions which he kept sacred. Hard-headed, industrious, religious, somewhat austere, he ruled his house with a despotism which affection and respect on the part of the ruled made light and easy. To the blood of the Burnses a love of knowledge was native, as valour in the old times was native to the blood of the Douglases.’

John Murdoch wrote of William Burns: ‘Although I cannot do justice to the character of this worthy man, yet you will perceive from what I have written what kind of person had the principal part in the education of the poet. He spoke the English language with more propriety, both with respect to diction and pronunciation, than any man I ever knew with no greater advantages; this had a very good effect on the boys, who talk and reason like men much sooner than their neighbours.’

These two quotations help us to understand William Burns as a great teacher of his sons, and his daughters, too, although he did not deem it quite so important to educate his daughters as his sons. It is perfectly clear that the paternal despotism spoken of by Mr. Smith, which indeed was supposed to be necessary one hundred and fifty years ago, was not the reason why his boys so early talked and reasoned like men. William Burns was the elderly friend of his sons, not a despot, when he trained them to love reading, and much better to speak freely their individual opinions about what they read. This naturally led his sons to speak like men early and fearlessly. Despotism on the part of the father would have had directly the opposite effect.

Gilbert Burns sums up his father’s estimate of early education and good training when he says: ‘My father laboured hard, and lived with the most rigid economy, that he might be able to keep his children at home, thereby having an opportunity of watching the progress of our young minds and forming in them early habits of piety and virtue; and from this motive alone did he engage in farming, the source of all his difficulties and distresses.’

Robert, after his father’s death, wrote to his cousin, and said his father was ‘the best of friends, and the ablest of instructors.’

In the sketch of his life sent to Dr. Moore, of London, he wrote: ‘My father, after many years of wanderings and sojournings, picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my pretensions to wisdom.’

An important element in the education of Burns was his love of Nature. His mind was specially susceptible to development by Nature in any of its forms of beauty or of majesty. A friend who was his guide through the grounds of Athole House, when he was making his tour through the Highlands, in a letter to Mr. Alex. Cunningham, wrote: ‘I had often, like others, experienced the pleasures which arise from the sublime or elegant landscape, but I never saw those feelings so intense as in Burns.’

Burns was born and spent his early life and young manhood in a district whose beauty has few equals anywhere. Its rivers—Ayr, Doon, Afton, Lugar, Fail, and Cessnock; all, except Afton, within easy walking distance of his homes in Ayrshire—with their beautifully wooded banks, were, in a very definite way, transforming agencies in the growth of his mind, and therefore most important elements in his highest education. The ‘winding Nith,’ which flowed within a few yards of the home he built on Ellisland farm, around the promontory on which stand the ruins of Lincluden Abbey, and on through Dumfries, continued during the last few years of his life the educational work of the rivers of his native Ayrshire.

The mind of Burns was brought into unity with spiritual ideals through the influence of Nature more productively than by any other agency. He walked in the gloaming, according to his own statement, by the riverside or in woodland paths when he was composing his poems. While residing in Dumfries he had a favourite walk up the Nith to Lincluden Abbey, amid whose ruins he sat in the gloaming, and on moonlight nights often till midnight, recording the visions that came to him in that sacred environment of wooded river and linn (waterfall).

There was much similarity between the most vital educational development of Burns and of Mrs. Browning. In Aurora Leigh, the record of her own growth, she describes her true education, although not her actual life’s history. Aurora loses her mother in her fifth year, and lives with her father for nine great years near Florence; she says:

So nine full years our days were hid with God

Among His mountains. I was just thirteen,

Still growing like a plant from unseen roots

In tongue-tied springs; and suddenly awoke

To full life, and life’s needs and agonies,

With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside

A stone-dead father. Life struck sharp on death

Makes awful lightning.

Her years till thirteen are spent mainly in her father’s fine library reading what she most loved of the treasuries of the world. Her own statement of her father’s educational guidance is:

My father taught me what he had learnt the best

Before he died, and left me—grief and love;

And seeing we had books among the hills,

Strong words of counselling souls, confederate

With vocal pines and waters, out of books

He taught me all the ignorance of men,

And how God laughs in heaven when any man

Says, ‘Here I’m learned; this I understand;

In that I’m never caught at fault or doubt.’

Like Burns she reads good books with joyous interest; like Burns she has a father deeply interested in her education who teaches her vital things; and like Burns she loves to learn from the ‘vocal pines and waters,’ and finds her richest revelations for her mind ‘with God among His mountains.’

The hills of Ayrshire, the rivers, and the river-glens, whose sides are covered with beautiful trees, were to Burns kindlers of high ideals, and revealers of God.