Address by George William Curtis

The year 1750 was a proud year for Great Britain.   Two years before, amid universal disaster, Lord Chesterfield had exclaimed, “We are no longer a nation.”   But, meanwhile Lord Chatham had restored to his country the sceptre of the seas and covered her name with the glory of continuous victory.  The year 1759 saw his greatest triumphs.   It was the year of Minden, where the French Army was routed; of Quiberon, where the French fleet was destroyed; of the Heights of Abraham in Canada, where Wolfe died happy, and the dream of French supremacy upon the American continent vanished forever.   The triumphant thunder of British guns was heard all around the world.  Robert Clive was founding British dominion in India; Boscawen and his fellow-admirals were sweeping the French from the ocean; and in America Colonel George Washington had planted the British flag on the field of Braddock’s defeat.   “We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is,” said Horace Walpole, “for fear of missing one.”

But not only in politics and war was the genius of Great Britain illustrious.   James Watt was testing the force of steam; Hargreaves was inventing the spinning –jenny, which ten years later Arkwright would complete, and Wedgwood was making household ware beautiful.   Fielding’s “ Tom Jones” had been ten years in print , and Grey’s  “Elegy” nine years.   Doctor Johnson had lately published his Dictionary and Edmund Burke his essay on the “Sublime and Beautiful.”   In the year 1759 Garrick was the first of actors, and Sir Joshua Reynolds of painters.   Gibbon dated in this year the preface of his first work; Hume published the third and fourth volumes of his history of England; Robertson his history of Scotland, and Sterne came to London to find a publisher for “Tristram Shandy.”   Oliver Goldsmith, ‘unfriended, solitary,’ was toiling  for the booksellers in his garret over Fleet Ditch; but four years later with Burke, and Reynolds,  and Garrick and Johnson, he would found the most famous of literary clubs and sell “The Vicar of Wakefield” to save himself from jail.   It was a year of events decisive in the course of history, and of men whose fame is an illustrious national possession.   But among those events none is more memorable than the birth of a son in the poorest of Scotch homes; and of all that renowned and resplendent throng of statesmen, soldiers and seamen; of philosophers, poets and inventors, whose fame filled the world with acclamation, not one is more gratefully and fondly remembered than the Ayrshire ploughman, Robert Burns.

This great assembly is in large part composed of his countrymen.   You fellow-citizens, were mostly born in Scotland.   There is no more beautiful country, and as you stand here in memory and imagination recall your native land.   Misty coasts and far-stretching splendours of Summer sea; solemn mountains and wind swept moors; singing streams and rocky glens and water falls; lovely vales of Ayr and Yarrow, of Teviot, and the Tweed; crumbling ruins of ancient days, abbey and castle and tower; legends of romance gilding burn and brae with “the light that never was on sea or land;” every hill with its heroic tradition , every stream with its story, every valley with its song; land of the harebell and the mountain daisy, land of the laverock and the curlew, land of braw youths and sonsie lasses, of deep strong, melancholy manhood, of deep true womanhood – this is your Scotland, this is your native land.   And how could you so truly transport it to the home of your adoption, how interpret it to us beyond the sea, so fully and so fitly, as by this memorial of the poet whose song is Scotland!   No wonder that you proudly bring his statue and place it here under the American sun, in the chief American city, side by side with that of the other great Scotchman, whose genius and fame, like the air and the sunshine, no local boundary can confine.   In this Walhalla of our various nationality it will be long before two fellow-countrymen are commemorated whose genius is at once so characteristically national and so broadly universal, who speak so truly for their own countrymen and for all mankind as Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

This season of reddening leaf, of sunny stillness and of roaring storm especially befits this commemoration, because it was at this season that the poet was peculiarly inspired and because the wild and tender, the wayward and golden-hearted Autumn is the best symbol of his genius.    The sculptor has imagined him in some hour of pensive and enobling meditation, when his soul, amid the hush of evening, in the falling year, was exalted to an ecstasy of passionate yearning and regret; and here, rapt into silence, just as the heavenly melody is murmuring from his lips, here he sits and will sit forever.   It was in October that Highland Mary died.   It was in October that the hymn to Mary in Heaven was written.   It was in October, ever afterward, that Burns was lost in melancholy musing as the anniversary of her death drew near.   Yet within a few days, while his soul might seem to have been still lifted in that sorrowful prayer, he wrote the most rollicking, resistless and immortal of drinking songs:

“ O Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut

And Rob and Allan came to pree

Three blither hearts that lee lang night

Ye wadna find in Christendie”

Here were the two strains of this marvellous genius, and the voices of the two spirits that went with him through his life:

“He raised a mortal to the skies,

She drew an angel down,”

This was Burns. This was the blended poet and man.  What sweetness and grace!  What soft pathetic, penetrating melody as if all the sadness of shaggy Scotland had found a voice! What whispering witchery of love!   What boisterous, jovial humour, excessive, daring, unbridled satire of the Kirk, so scorching and scornful that John Knox might have burst indignant from his grave, and shuddering ghosts of Covenanters have filled the mountains with a melancholy wail.   A genius so masterful , a charm so universal, that it drew farmers from the fields when his coming was known, and men from their tavern beds at midnight to listen delighted until dawn.

It cannot be said of Burns that he “burst his birth’s invidious bar.”  He was born poor, he lived poor, he died poor, and he always felt his poverty to be a curse.   He was fully conscious of himself and of his intellectual superiority.   He disdained and resented the condescension of the great and he defiantly asserted his independence. I do not say that he might not or ought not to have lived tranquilly and happily as a poor man.   Perhaps, as Carlyle suggests, he should have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry.   We only know that he did not.   Like an untameable eagle he dashed against the bars he could not break, and his life was a restless stormy alternation of low and lofty moods, of pure and exalted feeling, of mad revel and impotent regret.    His pious mother crooned over his cradle snatches of old ballads and legends of which her mind was full.   His father, silent, austere inflexibly honest, taught him to read good books, books whose presence in his poor cottage helps to explain the sturdy mental vigour of the Scots peasantry.   But the ballads charmed the boy.  He could not turn a tune but driving the cart or ploughing or digging  in the field, he was still saying the verses over and over, his heart answering like a shell the sea, until when he was fifteen he composed a song himself upon a lassie who drew his eye and heart; and so, as he says, love and poetry began with him together.

For ten years his life was a tale of fermenting youth: toiling and moiling, turning this way and that, to surveying and flax dressing, in the vain hope of finding a fairer chance; a lover of all the girls and the master of the revels everywhere; brightening the long day of peat-cutting with the rattling fire of wit that his comrades never forgot; writing love-songs and fascinated by the wild smuggler boys of Kirkcoswald; led by them into bitter shame and self-reproach, but turning with all the truculence of heady youth upon his moral censors and taunting them with immortal ridicule.   At twenty-five, when his father was already laid in Alloway kirkyard, the seed of national legend which his mother had dropped into his cradle began to shoot into patriotic feeling and verse, and Burns became conscious of distinct poetic ambition.  For two years he followed the plough and wrote some of his noblest poems.   But the farm which he tilled with his brother was unproductive, and at the very time that his genius was most affluent his conduct was most wayward.   Distracted by poetry and poverty, and passion, and brought to public shame, he determined to leave the country, and in 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old, Burns published his poems by subscription to get the money to pay his passage to America.   Ah! Could that poor, desperate ploughman of Mossgiel have foreseen this day, could have known that because of those   poems, abiding part of literature, familiar to every people, sung and repeated in American homes from sea to sea , his genius would be honoured and his name blessed and his statue raised with grateful pride to keep his memory in America green forever, perhaps the amazing vision might have nerved him to make his life as noble as his genius, perhaps the full sunshine of assured glory might have wrought upon that great, generous, wilful soul to

“Tak a thought an men.”

Burns’ sudden fame stayed with him and brought him to Edinburgh and its brilliant literary society.   Hume was gone, but Adam Smith remained; Robertson was there and Dugald Stewart.   There also, were Blacklock and Hugh Blair and Archibald Alison; Fraser Tyler and Adam Ferguson and Henry Erskine.   There too were the beautiful Duchess of Gordon and the truly noble Lord Glencairn.   They welcomed Burns as a prodigy but he would not be patronised.   Glad of his fame, but proudly and aggressively independent, he wanders through the stately city, taking off his hat before the house of Allan Ramsay and reverently kissing Robert Ferguson’s grave, his “elder brother in misfortune,” as Burns called him.   He goes to the great houses, and although they did not know it, he was the greatest guest they entertained, the greatest poet that then or ever walked the streets of Edinburgh.    His famous hosts were all Scotsmen but he was the only Scotsman among them who had written in the dialect of his country, and who had become famous without ceasing to be Scots.   But one day there stole into a drawing-room where Burns stood a boy of fifteen who was presently to eclipse all Scottish fame but that of Burns himself.   The poet was looking at an engraving of a soldier lying frozen in the snow under which were some touching lines, and as he read them, Burns, with his eyes full of tears asked who wrote them.   None of the distinguished company could tell him, but the young boy, Walter Scott, timidly whispered the name of the author, and he never forgot that Burns turned upon him his full, dark, tearful eyes – eyes which Scott called the most glorious imaginable and thanked him.   Scott never saw Burns again.

                The dazzling Edinburgh days were a glaring social contrast to the rest of his life.   The brilliant society flattered him, but his brilliancy outshone its own.  He was wiser than the learned, wittier than the gayest, and more courteous than the courtiest.   His genius flashed and blazed like a torch among the tapers, and the well-ordered company, enthralled by the surprising guest, winced and wondered.   If the host was condescending, the guest was never obsequious.    But, Burns did not love a lord, and he chaffed indignantly at the subtle but invincible lines of social distinction, feeling too surely that the realm of leisure and ease; a sphere in which he knew himself to be naturally master, must always float beyond, beyond – the alluring glimmer of a mirage.   A thousand times wistfully watching this fascinating human figure amid the sharp vicissitudes of his life, from Nansie Poosie’s ale-house in Mauchline to the stately drawing-room of Gordon Castle, with all his royal manhood and magnificent capability entangled and confused, the heart longs, but longs in vain to hear the one exulting and triumphant cry of the strong man coming to himself, “I will arise.”

But with all his gifts, that was not given to him.   Burns left Edinburgh to wander  about his bonnie Scotland, his mind full of its historic tradition and legendary lore, and beginning to overflow with songs born of the national melodies.   He was to see, and he wished to see no other land.   His heart beat toward it with affectionate fidelity, as if he felt that somehow its destiny were reflected in his own.   At Coldstream, where the Tweed divides Scotland from England he went across the river but as he touched English soil he turned fell upon his knees and stretched out his arms to Scotland and prayed God to bless his native land.

His wanderings ended.   Burns, at twenty-nine settled upon the pleasant farm of Ellisland in Nithsdale, over the hills from his native Ayrshire,

“ To make a happy fireside clime

For weans and wife.”

Here his life began happily.   He managed the farm, started a parish library, went to church and was proud of the regard of his neighbours.   He was honoured and sought by travellers, and his genius was in perfect tune.  ‘Tam O’ Shanter’ and ‘Bonnie Doon’ the songs of ‘Highland Mary,’ ‘John Anderson My Jo’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ were all flowers of Ellisland.    But, he could not be a farmer, gauger, poet and prince of good fellows all at once.   The cloud darkened that was never to be lifted.    The pleasant farm at Ellisland failed, and Burns, selling all his stock and crop and tools withdrew to Dumfries.  It was the last change in his life, and melancholy were the days that followed, but radiant with the keen flashes and tender gleams of the highest poetic genius of the time.   Writing exquisite songs, often lost in the unworthiest companionship, consumed with self-reproach, but regular in his official duties; teaching his boy to love the great English poets from Shakespeare to Gray, seeking pleasure at any cost, conscious of a pity and a censure at which he could, not wonder, but conscious also of the inexpressible tragedy which pity and censure could not know nor comprehend and through evil report and good report the same commanding and noble nature that we know, Burns in these last dark days of Dumfries is like a stately ship in a tempest with all her canvas spread, with far flying streamers and glancing lights and music penetrating the storm, drifting helpless on the cruel rocks of a lee shore. One Summer evening toward the end, as a young man rode into Dumfries to attend a ball, he saw Burns loitering alone on one side of the street, while the other was thronged with gay gentlemen and ladies, not one of whom cared to greet the poet.   The young man instantly dismounted and joining Burns, asked him to cross the street.   “Nay, nay my young friend that’s all over now;” and then in a low, soft, mournful voice Burns repeated the old ballad:

“His bonnet stood ance fu’ fair on his brow,

His auldane looked better than mony ane’s new,

But now he let’s wear ony way it will hing

And casts himself dowie upon the corn bing

O were we young as we ance ha been

We could hae been galloping down on yon green,

And linking it o’er the lily-white lea

And werna’ ma heart licht I wad dee

Five years of letting his life “wear ony way it wad hing” and Burns life ended in 1796, in his thirty-seventh year.    There was an outburst of universal sorrow.   A great multitude crowded the little town at his burial.   Memorials, monuments, biographies of every kind followed.   Poets ever since have sung of him  as of no other poet.   The theme is always fresh and always captivating, and within the year our own American poet, beloved and honoured in his beautiful and unwasted age sings of Burns as he sees him in vision, as the world shall forever see him an immortal youth cheerily singing at his toil in the bright Spring morning.

                The personal feeling of Longfellow’s poem is that which Burns always inspires.   There is no great poet who is less of a mere name and abstraction.   His grasp is so human that the heart insists upon knowing the story of his life, and ponders it with endless sympathy and wonder.   It is not necessary to excuse or conceal.   The key of Burns’ life is the struggle of shrinking will tossed between great extremes, between poetic genius and sensibility, intellectual force, tenderness, conscience, and generous sympathies on one side and tremendous passions on the other.   We cannot, indeed, know the power of temptation.   We cannot pretend to determine the limits of responsibility for infirmity of will.   We can only know that however supreme and restless the genius of a man may be it does not absolve him from the moral obligation that binds us all.    It would not have comforted Jeanie Deans as she held the sorrowing Effie to her heart to know that that the “fause lover” who “staw” her rose was named Shakespeare or Burns.    Nor is there any baser prostitution than that which would grace self-indulgence with an immortal name.    If a boy is a dunce at school it is a foolish parent who consols himself with remembering that Walter Scott was a dull school-boy.    It was not Scott’s dullness that made him the magician.   It was not the revelling at Poosie Nancy’s and the Globe Tavern, and the reckless life at Mauchline and Mossgiel that endeared Robert Burns to mankind.   Just there is the mournful tragedy of his story.   Just there lies the pathetic appeal.  The young man who would gild his dissipation with the celestial glamour of Burns’ name snatches the glory of a star to light him to destruction.     But it is no less true in the deepest and fullest meaning of his own words,

“What’s done we partly may compute

But no not what’s resisted.”

“Except for grace,” said Bunyan, “I should have been yonder sinner.”   “Granted,” says Burns’ brother man and brother Scot, Thomas Carlyle in the noblest plea that one man of genius ever made for another “Granted the ship comes into harbour with shroud and tackle damaged, and the pilot is therefore blameworthy, for he has not been all-wise and all-powerful, but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been around the globe or only from Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”

But we unveil today and set here for perpetual contemplation, not the monument of the citizen at whom respectable Dumfries looked askance, but the statue of a great poet.    Once more we recognise that no gift is more divine than his, and that no influence is more profound, that no human being is a truer benefactor of his kind.   The spiritual power of poetry, indeed like natural beauty, is immeasurable, and it is not easy to define and describe Burns’ service to the world. But without critical and careful detail of observation, it is plain, first of all, that he interpreted Scotland as no other country has been revealed by a kindred genius.   Were Scotland suddenly submerged and her people swept away, the tale of her politics and Kings and great events would survive in histories.    But essential Scotland, the customs, legends, superstitions, language; the grotesque humour, the keen sagacity, the simple serious faith, the characteristic spirit of national life caught up and preserved in the sympathy of poetic genius, would live forever in the poet’s verse.   The Sun of Scotland sparkles in it; the birds of Scotland sing; its breezes rustle, its waters murmur.    Each ‘timorous wee beastie,” the “ourie cattle” and the “silly sheep” are softly penned and gathered in the all embracing fold of song.   Over the dauntless battle hymn of ‘Scots Wha Hae wi’ Wallace bled’ rises the solemn music of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night.’  Through the weird witch romance of ‘Tam O’ Shanter’ breathes the scent of the wild rose of Alloway, and the daring and astounding babble of the ‘Jolly Beggars’ is penetrated by the heart breaking sigh to Jessie:

“Although thou maun never be mine,

Although even hope is dented

‘Tis sweeter for thee despairing

Than aught in the world beside”

The poet touches every scene and sound and thought and feeling but the refrain is all Scotland. To what other man was it ever given so to transfigure the country of his birth and love.    Every bird and flower, every hill and dale and river, whisper and repeat his name, and the word “Scotland” is sweeter because of Robert Burns.   

                But in thus casting a poetic spell upon everything distinctively Scots, Burns fostered a patriotism which has become proverbial.    The latest historian of England says that at the time of Burns’ birth England was mad with hatred of the Scots.   But when Burns died there was not a Scotsman who was not proud of being a Scotsman.   A Scots ploughman singing of his fellow peasants and their lives and loves in their own language, had given them in their own eyes a dignity they had never known:

“A Man’s a Man for A’ That”         

And America is trying to make the ploughman’s words true.   Great poets before and after Burns have been honoured by their countries and by the world; but is there any greater poet of any time or country who has so taken the heart of what our Abraham Lincoln, himself one of them, called the plain people, that, as was lately seen in Edinburgh, when he had been dead nearly a hundred years, workmen going home from work begged to look upon this statue for the love and honour they bore to Robbie Burns?    They love him for their land’s sake, and they are better Scotsmen because of him.  England does not love Shakespeare, nor Italy Dante, nor Germany Goethe, with the passionate ardour with which Scotland loves Burns.   It is no wonder, for here is Auld Scotia’s thistle bloomed out into flower so fair that its beauty and perfume fill the world with joy.

                But power thus to depict national life and character and thus to kindle imperishable patriotism cannot be limited by any nationality or country.   In setting words to Scots melodies Burns turns to music the emotions common to humanity, and so he passes from the exclusive love of Scotland into the reverence of the world.   Burns died at the same age as Raphael; and Mozart who was his contemporary, died only four years before him.   Raphael and Mozart are the two men of lyrical genius in kindred arts who impress us as most exquisitely refined by careful cultivation; and although Burns was of all great poets the most unschooled, he belongs in poetry with Raphael in painting and Mozart in music and there is no fourth.   An indescribable richness and flower-like quality, a melodious grace and completeness and delicacy, belong to them all.   Looking upon a beautiful human Madonna of Raphael we seem to hear the rippling cadence of Mozart and the tender true song of Burns.    They are all the voices of the whole world speaking in the accent of a native land.    Here are Italy and Germany and Scotland distinct, individual, perfectly recognisable, but the Sun that reveals and illuminates their separate charm, that is not Italian or German or Scots is the Sun of universal human nature.    This is the singer whom this statue commemorates, the singer of songs immortal as love, pure as the dew in the morning, and sweet as its breath; songs with which the lover wooes his bride and the mother soothes her child, and the hearts of the people beats with patriotic exultation: songs that cheer human endeavour and console human sorrow and exalt human life.  We cannot find out the secrets of their power.   Until we know why the rose is sweet, or the dewdrop pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of humanity.   Whether because he reveals us to ourselves, or because he touches the soul with the fervour of divine aspiration, whether because in a world of sordid and restless anxiety he fills us with serene joy, or puts into rhythmic and permanent form the best thoughts and hopes of man – who shall say?   But none the less the heart’s instinctive loyalty to the poet the proof of its consciousness that he does all these things, that he is the harmoniser, strengthener and consoler.   How the faith of Christendom has been staid for centuries upon the mighty words of the old Hebrew bards and prophets, and how the vast and inexpressible mystery of divine love and power and purpose has been best breathed in parable and poem!   If we were forced to surrender every expression of human genius but one surely we would retain poetry: and if we were called to lose from the vast accumulation of literature all but a score of books, among that choice and perfect remainder would be the songs of Burns.

                How fitly, then, among the memorials of great men, of those who in different countries and times and ways have been leaders of mankind, we raise this statue of the poet whose genius is an unconscious but sweet and elevating influence in out national life.   It is not a power dramatic, obvious, imposing, immediate, like that of a statesman, the warrior, and the inventor, but it is as deep and strong and abiding.  The soldier fights for his native land, but the poet touches that land with the charm that makes it worth fighting for, and fires the warrior’s heart with the fierce energy that makes his blow invincible.   The statesman enlarges and orders liberty in the State, but the poet fosters the love of liberty in the heart of the citizen.   The inventor multiplies the facilities of life but the poet makes life better worth living.   Here then among the trees and flowers and waters; here upon the green sward and under the open sky; here where birds carol, and children play, and lovers whisper, and the various stream of human life flows by – we raise the statue of Robert Burns.  While the human heart beats that name will be music in human ears.   He knew better than we the pathos of human life.    We know better than he the infinite pathos of his own.   Ah! Robert Burns, Robert Burns, whoever lingers here as he passes and muses upon your statue will see in imagination a solitary mountain in your own beautiful Scotland, heaven soaring, wrapped in impenetratable clouds.   Suddenly the mists part and there are the heather, the brier-rose, and the gowan fine, there are the

“Burnies, wimplin’ down your glens

Wi’ toddling din,

Or foaming strang wi’ hasty stens

Frae lin to lin”

The cushat is moaning; the curlew is calling; the plover is singing; the red deer is bounding; and look! the clouds roll utterly away and the clear summit is touched with the tender glory of sunshine, heaven’s own benediction.