31 OCTOBER 1931, Page 19

" Does Fairly Well "

2 vols. 30s.)

one of the dark corridors of the Custom House in Lower Thames Street, leading to the famous " Long Room " where Georgian desks and copper coal scuttles are still in use, there may be seen a glass cabinet containing an old "Character Book." The open page shows, in faded script, columns of names, and a brief comment on the merits of each officer. About half-way down occurs the name " Robert Burns," and against it is the legend, " The poet—does fairly well.",

" Does fairly well," though apparently lukewarm to an observer from the world of human beings, is high praise in the Service. It suggests that Burns had organizing and executive ability ; the necessary amount of tact, zeal, and power of application to duty. It does not corroborate the popular and sentimental conception of him as a naive rustic possessed by an unconscious genius that drove him alternately to poetry, drink, and women.

This sober official estimate has been upheld by expert research. N•o critic now would dare to pat Burns on the head and praise his ingenuous muse. Only a few years ago Sir James Crichton-Browne exposed the injustice of Burns' reputation as a drunkard, proving that the poet was a victim of a rheumatic fever early in life which had affected his heart and stomach, so that a drop of alcohol acted as poison, giving him temporary relief, but gradually killing him. As for his so-called licentiousness, we have only to remember that such a reputation grew up in a community of Covenanters, where the monstrous negations of Calvin stood at every cottage door, angels of darkness threatening, "Thou shalt not!" In addition, we have to remember also the man's sensitiveness, the craving of the artist for approbation and emotional encouragement, his worship for openness, freedom, beauty, and grace ; all of them qualities stimulated by and symbolized in each love affair that gripped him.

Now we have some seven hundred of his letters as further corroboration of the official view of this man who in normal daily life did as most other men do, " fairly well." The style of the letters is mannered in the extreme. A self-educated man, who during the formative years possessed only one or two books which he got almost by heart, he had to model himself on A Collection of Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne's Reign, and Letters Moral and Entertaining by Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe. He found the letters of Junius too late, and also those of the " dancing-master," Lord Chesterfield. The result was such that one has to confess to-day, in an age that uses the telephone and cannot patiently believe in the existence of an epistolary art, that Burns' letters make

laborious and stilted reading. They are florid, with elaborate cadenzas in which he enlarges on moral and quasi-philosophical abstractions, meanwhile holding up his love-making, hit friendly gossip, his business, until one is tempted to wonder how serious these purposes may be since they can so docilely halt during the displays of bravura. No wonder that Scott; Lockhart, and Carlyle felt that such artificiality reflected on the character of the man, damaging his claim to sincerity, at least in his human relationships. One can almost agree with that literary ogre, Jeffreys, who said that " Burns' letters seem to have been nearly all composed as exercises; and for digplay. There are few of them writ ten with simplicity or plainness ; and though natural enough as to the sentiment, they are generally very elaborate and strained in the expression. A very great proportion of them, too, relate neither to facts nor feelings peculiarly connected with the author or his correspondent, but are made up of general declamation, moral reflections, and vague discussions—all evidently com- posed for the sake of effect, and frequently introduced with long complaints of having nothing to say, and of the necessity and difficulty of letter-writing."

But in the act of condemning the man one pauses. There is something more to be considered. There is that early environment ; there is the waste of his vitality in the effort to escape ; there is the escape which proved to be as great a drain on his energy as that life from which he fled ; for we sec him in Edinburgh taken up by the professional and cultured few, who insisted still on patronizing him u.s the inspired rustic, and against whom his pride had to fight more fiercely and wastefully than ever in the effort to show them that he possessed a mind equally as sophisticated and ten thousand times more robust and creative than any of theirs.

The painstaking editor of those letters is to be congratulated for his courageous preface in which he fights so bravely to show Burns as Burns the sober realist knew himself to be. Let a man, and especially a poet whose vocation is to make a science of self-contemplation, speak for himself. WA° is to know him better ? The commentators, the professional and academic men of letters ? Are they to understand his genesis, the soil from which he sprang, the air be breathed ; the love, the hate, the common everyday-ness so unique and important to the individual, yet so unrecordab/e ? Mr. Ferguson has realized the absurdity, and while defending Burns, has borne in mind that behind this defensive preface come the letters written by the man himself ; letters which in spite of their literary tropes and provincial apeings at metropolitan manners, are the voice of a genius, and therefore of a being who looks at life and sees it as it is, and not as the

moralists pretend it to be. RICIIARD