صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني
[ocr errors]

with a reproachful sorrow, that much might | befriended him: patronage, unless once cursed, have been done for him; that by counsel, true needed not to have been twice so. At all events, affection, and friendly ministrations, he might the poor promotion he desired in his calling have been saved to himself and the world. might have been granted: it was his own We question whether there is not more tender- scheme, therefore, likelier than any other to be ness of heart than soundness of judgment in of service. All this it might have been a luxu these suggestions. It seems dubious to us ry, nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent done. No part of all this, however, did any of individual, could have lent Burns any effec- them do; or apparently attempt, or wish to do; tual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any so much is granted against them. But what one, he did not need; in his understanding, he then is the amount of their blame? Simply knew the right from the wrong, as well per- that they were men of the world, and walked haps as any man ever did; but the persuasion, by the principles of such men; that they treated which would have availed him, lies not so Burns, as other nobles and other commoners much in the head, as in the heart, where no had done other poets; as the English did argument or expostulation could have assisted Shakspeare; as King Charles and his cavamuch to implant it. As to money again, we liers did Butler, as King Philip and his Grando not really believe that this was his essen- dees did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of tial want; or well see how any private man thorns? or shall we cut down our thorns for could, even presupposing Burns's consent, have yielding only a fence, and haws? How, indeed, bestowed on him an independent fortune, with could the nobility and gentry of his native much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a land" hold out any help to this "Scottish Bard, mortifying truth, that two men in any rank of proud of his name and country?" Were the society could hardly be found virtuous enough nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to to give money, and to take it, as a necessary help themselves? Had they not their game to gift, without injury to the moral entireness of preserve; their borough interests to strengthen; one or both. But so stands the fact: Friend- dinners, therefore, of various kinds to ea and ship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no give? Were their means more than adequate longer exists; except in the cases of kindred to all this business, or less than adequate? or other legal affinity; it is in reality no longer Less than adequate in general: few of them in expected, or recognised as a virtue among reality were richer than Burns; many of them men. A close observer of manners has pro- were poorer; for sometimes they had to wring nounced " Patronage," that is, pecuniary or their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the other economic furtherance, to be "twice hard hand; and, in their need of guineas, to cursed;" cursing him that gives, and him that forget their duty of mercy; which Burns was takes! And thus, in regard to outward mat- never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive ters also, it has become the rule, as in regard them. The game they preserved and shot, the to inward it always was and must be the rule, dinners they ate and gave, the borough intethat no one shall look for effectual help to rests they strengthened, the little Babylons they another; but that each shall rest contented severally builded by the glory of their might, with what help he can afford himself. Such, are all melted, or melting back into the primewe say, is the principle of modern Honour; val Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavours naturally enough growing out of that senti- are fated to do: and here was an action exment of Pride, which we inculcate and en- tending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we courage as the basis of our whole social mo- may say, through all time; in virtue of its rality. Many a poet has been poorer than moral nature, beyond all time, being inmortal Burns; but no one was ever prouder: we may as the Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was question, whether, without great precautions, offered them to do, and light was not given even a pension from Royalty would not have them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. galled and encumbered, more than actually But, better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. assisted him. Human suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, "Love one another, bear one another's bur dens," given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity: but celestial natures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless and tuneless, is not the least wretched, but the most.

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that much was to be done for Burns; that many a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his bosom; many an entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and light and heat shed on him from high places, would have made his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart then breathing might have lived and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant further, and for Burns it is granting much, that with all his pride, he would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who had cordially

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns'. failure lies chiefly with the world. The worid, it seems to us, treated him with more, rather than with less kindness, than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, shown but small favour to its Teachers; hunger and nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the market-place it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to eð

lighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, belong to old days; but the world's Martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a mad-house, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so "persecuted they the Prophets," not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his age; that he has no right therefore to expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness; that Burns, in particular, experienced fully the usual proportion of the world's goodness; and that the blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world.

Where then does it lie? We are forced to answer: With himself; it is his inward, not his outward misfortunes, that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life morally wrecked, but the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength needful for its action and duration; least of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more can lie in the cup of human wo: yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it captive; converting its physical victory into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that their past life had achieved. What has been done, may be done again; nay, it is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons; for without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial, in all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be good.

in him ever sternly demanded its rights, its su premacy; he spent his life in endeavouring to reconcile these two; and lost it, as he must have lost it, without reconciling them here.

Burns was born poor; and born also to continue poor, for he would not endeavour to be otherwise: this it had been well could he have once for all admitted, and considered as finally settled. He was poor, truly; but hundreds even of his own class and order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it: nay, his own Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was; and he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation; but so much the more precious was what little he had. In all these external respects his case was hard; but very far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor; and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding, sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease, when he composed Paradise Lost? Not only low, but fallen from a height; not only poor but im poverished; in darkness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier, and in prison? Nay, was not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without even the aid of paper; on scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare?

And what then had these men, which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true, religious principle of morals; and a single not a double aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers: but seekers and worshippers of something far better than Self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly We have already stated the error of Burns; Wisdom in one or the other form, ever hovered and mourned over it, rather than blamed it. before them; in which cause, they neither It was the want of unity in his purposes, of shrunk from suffering, nor called on the earth consistency in his aims; the hapless attempt to witness it as something wonderful; but to mingle in friendly union the common spirit patiently endured, counting it blessedness of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the of a far different and altogether irreconcilable "golden-calf of Self-love," however curiously nature. Burns was nothing wholly; and Burns carved, was not their Deity; but the Invisible could be nothing, no man formed as he was Goodness, which alone is man's reasonable' can be any thing, by halves. The heart, not service. This feeling was as a celestial founof a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, tain, whose streams refreshed into gladness or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, too desolate existence. In a word, they willed had been given him: and he fell in an age, not one thing, to which all other things were subof heroism and religion, but of skepticism, sel-ordinated, and made subservient; and therefore fishness, and triviality when true Nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to repel or resist; the better spirit that was with

they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing.

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age; in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or at least not yet dis believed in: but much of it likewise they

owed to themselves. With Burus again it | was different. His morality, in most of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or a coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no Religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light forms of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, "a great Perhaps."

earthly voices, and brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an Exciseman! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules of society; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run a-muck against them all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness but not in others; only in himself; He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart; least of all in simple increase of wealth and could he but have loved it purely, and with his worldly "respectability." We hope we have whole undivided heart, it had been well. For now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, another form of Wisdom, of Religion; is itself have we not seen another instance of it in Wisdom and Religion. But this also was de- these very days? Byron, a man of an endownied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, ment considerably less ethereal than that of which will not be extinguished within him, yet Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish rises not to be the true light of his path, but is ploughman, but of an English peer: the highoften a wildfire that misleads him. It was not est worldly honours, the fairest worldly career, necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to are his by inheritance: the richest harvest of seem, "independent;" but it was necessary for fame he soon reaps, in another province, by him to be at one with his own heart; to place his own hand. And what does all this avail what was highest in his nature, highest also in him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? his life; "to seek within himself for that con- Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards sistency and sequence, which external events the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels would for ever refuse him." He was born a that all this is but mounting to the house-top poet; poetry was the celestial element of his to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is only a being, and should have been the soul of his proud man; might like him have "purchased whole endeavours. Lifted into that serene a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character ether, whither he had wings given him to of Satan;" for Satan also is Byron's grand exmount, he would have needed no other eleva-emplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model tion: Poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, were a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture as a Poet, poverty, and much suffering for a season, were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. "I would not for much," says Jean Paul," that I had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: “The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had often only the latter." But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, "the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage."

A man like Burns might have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry; industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets, was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether

apparently of his conduct. As in Burns's case too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he must not be; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration; he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and now,we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, whicn, erelong, will fill itself with snow!

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer Truth: they had a message to deliver, which, left them no rest till it was accomplished; in dim throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within them; for they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. They are in the camp of the Unconverted. Yet not as high messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship, will they live there; they are first adulated, then perse cuted; they accomplish little for others; they find no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly

gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history,-twice told us in our own time! Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impressive significance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in this: "He who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life a heroic poem." If he cannot first so make his life, then let him hasten from this arena; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are for him. Let him dwindle into a modish ballad-monger; let him worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the time will not fail to reward him,-if, indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them; and better it was for them that they could not. For it is not in the favour of the great, or of the small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no such union be attempted! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of a Drayhorse? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites, from door to door?

But we must stop short in these considerations, which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something to say on the public moral character of Burns; but this also we must for bear. We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the

average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judg ments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance: It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is, or is not, done wrong. Not the few inches of reflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them. Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rous. seaus, which one never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds 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 round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.

With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither will his Works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of men. While the Shak speares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye: For this also is of Nature's own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full gush ing current, into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines!

THE LIFE OF HEYNE.*

[FOREIGN REVIEW, 1828.]

THE labours and merits of Heyne being better known, and more justly appreciated in England, than those of almost any other German, whether scholar, poet, or philosopher, we cannot but believe that some notice of his life may be acceptable to most readers. Accordingly, we here mean to give a short abstract of this volume, a miniature copy of the "biographical portrait," but must first say a few words on the portrait itself, and the limner by whom it has been drawn.

woven, ultimately and properly, indeed, by the wit of man, yet immediately, and in the meanwhile, by the mere aid of time and steam.

But our Professor's mode of speculation is little less intensely academic than his mode of writing. We fear he is something of what the Germans call a Kleinstädier;—mentally as well as bodily, a "dweller in a little town." He speaks at great length, and with undue fondness, of the "Georgia Augusta," which, after all, is but the University of Göttingen, an earthly, and no celestial institution: it is nearly in vain that he tries to contemplate Heyne as a European personage, or even as a German one; beyond the precincts of the Georgia Augusta, his view seems to grow feeble and soon die away into vague inanity; so we have not Heyne, the man and scholar, but Heyne, the Göttingen Professor. But neither is this habit of mind any strange or crying sin, or at all peculiar to Gottingen; as, indeed, most parishes of England can produce more than one example to show. And yet it is pitiful, when an establishment for universal science, which ought to be a watch-tower where a man might see all the kingdoms of the world, converts itself into a workshop, whence he sees nothing but his toolbox and bench, and the world, in broken glimpses, through one patched and highly discoloured pane!

Professor Heeren is a man of learning, and known far out of his own Hanoverian circle,indeed, more or less to all students of history, —by his researches on Ancient Commerce, a voluminous account of which from his hand enjoys considerable reputation. He is evidently a man of sense and natural talent, as well as learning; and his gifts seem to lie round him in quiet arrangement, and very much at his own command. Nevertheless, we cannot admire him as a writer; we do not even reckon that such endowments as he has are adequately represented in his books. His style both of diction and thought is thin, cold, formal, without force or character, and painfully reminds us of college lectures. He can work rapidly, but with no freedom, and, as it were, only in one attitude, and at one sort of labour. Not that we particularly blame Professor Heeren for this, but that we think he Sometimes, indeed, our worthy friend rises might have been something better: These into a region of the moral sublime, in which it "fellows in buckram," very numerous in cer- is difficult for a foreigner to follow him. Thus tain walks of literature, are an unfortunate, he says, on one occasion, speaking of Heyne: rather than a guilty class of men; they have "Immortal are his merits in regard to the catafallen, perhaps unwillingly, into the plan of logues"-of the Göttingen library. And, to writing by pattern, and can now do no other; cite no other instance, except the last and best for, in their minds, the beautiful comes at last one, we are informed, that, when Heyne died, to be simply synonymous with the neat. Every "the guardian angels of the Georgia Augusta sentence bears a family-likeness to its precur-waited in that higher world to meet him with sor; most probably it has a set number of clauses; (three is a favourite number, as in Gibbon, for "the muses delight in odds;") has also a given rhythm, a known and foreseen music, simple but limited enough, like that of ill-bred fingers drumming on a table. And then it is strange how soon the outward rhythm carries the inward along with it; and the thought moves with the same stinted, hamstrung rub-a-dub as the words. In a state of perfection, this species of writing comes to resemble power-loom weaving: it is not the mind that is at work, but some scholastic machinery which the mind has of old constructed, and is from afar observing. Shot follows shot from the unwearied shuttle; and so the web is

• Christian Gottlob Heyne, biographisch dargestellt von Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren. (Christian Gottlob Heyne, biographically portrayed by Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren.) Göttingen.

blessings." By day and night! There is no such guardian angel, that we know of, for the University of Gottingen; neither does it need one, being a good solid seminary of itself, with handsome stipends from Government. We had imagined, too, that if anybody welcomed peo ple into heaven, it would be St. Peter, or at least some angel of old standing, and not a mere mushroom, as this of Göttingen must be, created since the year 1739.

But we are growing very ungrateful to the good Heeren, who meant no harm by these flourishes of rhetoric, and, indeed, does not often indulge in them. The grand questions with us here are, Did he know the truth in this matter? and was he disposed to tell it honestly? To both of which questions we can answer without reserve, that all appearances are in his favour. He was Heyne's pupil, colleague, son-in-law, and so knew him intimately for

« السابقةمتابعة »