Address by Colonel Alexander MP – Kilmarnock

It is, I think scarcely necessary to enquire what were the reasons which induced you to assign me an office the duties of which I discharge with so much pleasure and satisfaction, and to confer upon me the honour, as great as it is unmerited, of unveiling the statue of a man so pre-eminent among his contemporaries that in his own particular sphere it is no exaggeration to say “None but himself can be his parallel.”  I think I can find – at any rate I am glad to find – a reason for your favour, in the circumstances that I dwell in a spot hallowed by the genius and consecrated by the muse of Robert Burns, amid scenes acquiring a daily increasing historic interest because inseparably connected in our imagination with some of the most interesting episodes of his brilliant poetic career.   Beginning in Mauchline, who does not remember that there he found her who was to be his “rainbow to the storms of life;” while we pass to Mossgiel, “Where-er-we-tread-tis-haunted-holy-ground.”    There, as has been beautifully by an English enthusiast in his praise, the poet “cultivated at the same time his fields and the glorious soil of his intellect,” there he sowed the corn “with the handsomest cant of the hand” Allan Cunningham’ father ever saw “in a furrowed field,” and there as he himself tells us he made a song while he was stoking.    While every step of the road between Mossgiel and Kilmarnock irristibly reminds us of the daily walk which brought to this town the proofs of those glorious poems soon to burst upon a dazzled and astonished world.

“Poetic fields encompass us around

And still we seem to tread on classic ground”

Yes – Kilmarnock may reflect with pardonable pride that to the prescience and discernment of her citizens is due to the circumstance that Burns “…awoke one morning to find himself famous” and acquired for himself not a fleeting and ephemeral popularity, but an enduring and everlasting name.   Gentlemen, I congratulate you – I congratulate in your name the artist who has faithfully reproduced and perpetuated in marble the lineaments of the poet in the act of addressing “the wee modest crimson tipped flower,” “the unassuming common-place of nature.”   Although the genius of Burns needs no statue, although

“He in our wonder and astonishment

Has built himself a long lived monument”

it is surely right that Kilmarnock – Auld Killie, as he affectionately termed her – should raise this tribute of veneration in perpetual remembrance of the interesting connection thus early established between the poet and herself..   Burns is “not of an age but for all time,” his poetry

“…..is a joy forever

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness”

It speaks to us today as sweetly as persuasively as it spoke to our forefathers nearly a century ago, as it will speak to our descendants a hundred years hence.   Gentlemen – what is the secret of this magical spell and fascination which Burns exercises over the minds of his countrymen?   It was Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun , I think, who said he “once knew a very wise man who believed that, if a man was permitted to make all of the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation,” and certainly the songs of Burns possess a weight and authority in Scotland second only to that of the Bible itself.   It may be profitable and interesting to ask today, what are the foundations on which this influence and authority are based.   Not the beauty of his verse, transcendently beautiful as it unquestionably is, not the intense ardour of his patriotism prompting his prophetic soul to desire to “sing a song for Scotland’s sake.”   It is something above and beyond all this, it is the majesty with which he invests Man, the latest and best, the halo of glory which he throws around “the honest man,” as the noblest work of the Divine Creator.

“An honest man’s the noblest work of God”

he exclaims with all the fervour of his enthusiastic nature and thus exercising the spirit of self-deprecation and infusing a feeling of self-respect and self-esteem, he encourages his brother man with “heaven erected face” to contemplate and at an infinite distance to imitate the perfections of that glorious Being in whose image and after whose likeness he is made.   But, gentlemen, in reading the noble poem in which Burns gives expression to this idea, I have sometimes thought, and I am sure you will excuse me for giving utterance to my thought, that its words are now and then wrested from their true meaning and a construction put upon them which in my humble judgment Burns never intended them to bear.   Because Burns deprecated the deference offered to rank he did not meant to imply any special merit in the absence of it.   Because he showed that a man was still a man without “the guinea stamp” he did not thereby declare that might not equally well be a man with it, or, if you like, in spite of it.   Burns was too ambitious, too aspiring, too noble to give utterance to sentiments flattering it may be to a class but utterly repressive of all energy and exertion in the individuals composing that class.   If it might be right to avoid undue laudation of the upper, it is equally important to guard against unwholesome and extravagant adulation of the lower classes of society.   Although it is true that

“Prodigious actions may as well be done

By weaver’s lass as prince’s son,”

it is also true that prodigious efforts are quite as necessary for their performance on the part of the weaver as of the prince.   Depend upon it, no class has any monopoly of virtue.

“The nobleman is he whose noble mind

Is filled with inborn worth.”                           

Burns addresses not this or that class but all the units composing every class of society, and in “words that burn” exhorts them to

“Gather gear by every wile

That’s justified by honour”

Not to serve any mean or ignoble purpose, not to gratify a desire for conscientious display,

“But for the glorious privilege

Of being independent”

These words ought to sink deep into our hearts, ought to inspire us with the belief that there is not one among us who cannot contribute, in however humble a degree, to make the age and epoch in which he lives in every respect better and wiser than the last.   We must not fold our hands and say “We are not better than our fathers.”   We are, or at least ought to be a great deal better than they, unless we have failed to profit by their precept and example.  Neither should we rest content with being better than our fathers; we should educate our children to be better than ourselves.   There must be progression.   Stagnation implies retrogression and decay.  On us, of this generation, in great measure, depends on whether our children see the further progress or the decline, it may even be – which God avert - the fall of our country.   If we grasp the true meaning and spirit of the poetry of Burns; if we feel that it speaks not to Scotsmen collectively but to Scotsmen individually, stimulating and inciting them to performance of high and noble actions; if in this sense we teach it diligently to our children then I have no fear for the future of our land.   Then, indeed they may say of Scotland, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”   Now, gentlemen one word as to the character of Robert Burns which, as you may be aware, is often and vigorously, sometimes even savagely, assailed.  Burns, it is said, did not practice what he preached.   He freely admits the charge, and by his candor disarms censure and reproof.  He even sets himself up as a beacon of warning in the advice which he gave to a young friend –

“And may you better reck the rede

Than ever did the adviser”

Again it is objected that he fell immeasurably below the high standard and ideal which had erected for himself.   Unquestionably he did, but what is that but to say he was human with all the faults and failings of man –

“Video mellors proboque

                   Detiora sequor -

When I do good evil is present with me”

has been the despairing, and yet not altogether despairing, cry of every Christian, from the great apostle until now.   Burns it is said was irreligious and immoral.  If his advice to

“Still the preaching cant forbear

And even the rigid feature,”

is evidence of irreligion, then he was certainly irreligious, but you must not, I contend, take isolated passages and found upon them charges of irreligion and immorality; you must read his works as a whole and see if they justify wholesale disparagement and diatribe.   I for one refuse to believe in the irreligion of a man who feels and avows that

“A correspondence with heaven

Is surely a noble anchor.”

Then as to the charge of immorality.   Burns sinned and confessed his sin –

“Misled by fancy’s meteor ray

By passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray

Was light from heaven”

The vivid sensibility which gave Burns the power and a capacity for poetry, exposed him to temptations from which ordinary and commonplace mortals are comparatively free –

“What’s done we partly may compute

We know not what’s resisted”

If we must place many sins to the debit side of our poet’s account, we must credit him with many redeeming virtues.   He was endowed with true Christian charity, the charity which hopeth all good things, which thinketh no evil things, and which feeds the lines –

“Then gently scan thy brother man,

Still gentler sister woman”

lines which ought to be in the mouth, and not only the mouth, but in every heart of every man, still more of every woman in the land.   Above all Burns was the very seal of honour –

“Where you feel your honour grip

Let that be your border,”

a border he was never tempted to overstep or transgress.   Then although Burns wrote of life that it was –

“A galling load

A long rough road,”

- and deplored that

“Man’s inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn.”

-         he was endowed with the delicacy of perception which enabled him to see that in the economy of  Divine Providence is provided a glorious compensation, that affections are but “mercies in disguise,” calling forth and setting out in bright relief the nobler and better qualities of human nature –

“Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress

A brother to relieve how exquisite the bliss,”

Gentlemen, how true is it that “Man’s evil manners live in brass, their virtues we write in water,” but it be equally true, and I believe it true that the best of men are molded out of their faults,” we may humbly hope that “the accusing spirit which flew up to Heaven’s Chancery with the poet’s sin, blushed as he gave it in, and the recording Angel as he wrote it down dropped a tear on the word blotted out forever.”

Provost and Magistrates of Kilmarnock, we now commit to your keeping the statue of Robert Burns in the confident belief that, faithful to the trust reposed in you, you and your successors will jealously guard, may I say, reverently and affectionately cherish this memorial of a man –

“who, take him for all

We’ll ne’er see his like again.”