Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Short Talk Bulletin Vol 01 No 06
SHORT TALK BULLETIN - Vol.I June, 1923 No.6
ROBERT BURNS
by: Unknown
Freemasonry has no greater name than Robert Burns. If there are those who
question his investiture as Poet Laureate of the Canongate Kilwinning
Lodge, owing to the absence of certain documentary evidence, no one denies
that he was, and is, the greatest poet of Freemasonry, the singer alike of
its faith and its friendship, its philosophy and its fun, its passion and
its prophecy. Nay, more; he was the Laureate, of the hopes and dreams of
the lowly of every land.
Higher tribute there is none for any man than to say, justly, that the
world is gentler and more joyous for his having lived; and that may be
truly said of Robert Burns, whose very name is an emblem of pity, joy, and
the magnetism of Brotherly Love. It is therefore that men love Burns, as
much for his weakness as for his strength, and all the more because he was
such an unveneered human being. It is given to but few men thus to live in
the hearts of their fellows; and today, from Ayr to Sidney, from Chicago to
Calcutta, the memory of Burns is not only a fragrance, but a living force
uniting men of many lands into a fellowship of Liberty Justice and Charity.
"The Memory of Burns!" cried Emerson, "I am afraid Heaven and earth have
taken too good care of it to leave anything to say. The west winds are
murmuring it. Open the windows behind you and hearken to the incoming
tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching on the eaves of a stone
chapel opposite may know something about it. The Memory of Burns - every
man's, every boy's, every girl's head carries snatches of his songs, and
they say them by heart; and what is strangest of all, never learned them
from a book, but from mouth to mouth. They are the property and the solace
of mankind!"
In a tiny two-roomed cottage, clay-built and thatch-roofed, on the banks of
the Doon, in the district of Kyle, two miles south of the town of Ayr, in
Scotland, Robert Burns was born on January 25th, 1759. It was a peasant
home, such as he afterward described in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," in
which poverty was consecrated by piety, where the father was a priest of
faith and the mother a guardian angel of the holy things of life. So far
from as schools were concerned, his education was limited to grammar,
writing and arithmetic. Later he picked up a little Latin, a smattering of
French, and some knowledge of English and classic poets. But he knew the
Book of Nature, leaf by leaf, and the strange scroll of the Human Heart, as
only the swift insight of genius can read them.
At the age of twenty-two Burns was initiated into the Mysteries of
Freemasonry, in St. David's Lodge at Tarbolton, July 4th, 1781. Lockhart
says that he was introduced to the Lodge by John Rankine. The minute
recording his initiation reads: "Sederunt for July 4th. Robert Burns in
Lochly was entered an Apprentice. Jo Norman, Master." The second and
third degrees were conferred on the same evening, in the month of October
following his initiation. Six years later he was made a Knights Templar as
well as a Royal Arch Mason in Eyemouth, as under the old Regime the two
were always given together. By this time he had won some fame as a poet,
and the higher degrees were given him in token both of his fame as a poet
and his enthusiasm as a Mason.
On July 27th, 1784, Burns was elected Depute Master of St. James Lodge,
Tarbolton, a position which he held until St. John's Day, 1788.
He was made an honorary member of St. John Lodge No. 22, Kilmarnock, on
October 26th, 1786. Major William Parker, the Master of St. John Lodge,
became a great friend of Burns, and subscribed for thirty-five copies of
the first edition of his poems. He is the "Willie" in the song "Ye Sons of
Auld Killie" (a contraction of Kilmarnock) composed and sung by Burns on
the occasion of his admission as an honorary member of St. John Lodge:
"Ye Sons of Auld Killie, assembled by William,
To follow the noble vocation;
Your thrifty old mother has scarce such another,
To sit in that honored station.
I've little to say, but only to pray,
As praying's the ton of your fashion;
A prayer from the muse, you may well excuse,
"Tis seldom her favorite passion.
Ye powers who preside, o're the wind and the tide,
Who mark each element's border;
Who formed this frame with beneficent aim,
Whose sovereign statute is order;
Within this dear mansion may wayward contention,
Or withered envy ne're enter;
May secrecy round be the mystical bound,
And Brotherly Love be the center.
The minutes of this meeting concluded as follows:
"Robert Burns, Poet, from Mauchline, a member of St. James, Tarbolton, was
made an Honorary Member of this Lodge."
"(Sgd.) Will Parker.
This was the first Lodge to distinguish Burns with the designation "Poet,"
and to honor him with honorary membership.
Besides being a faithful and enthusiastic attendant upon the meetings of
his own Lodge, Burns was a frequent visitor at Lodge when away from home.
It is said that, with a very few exceptions, all his patrons and
acquaintances were members of the Fraternity.
Burns is described at this time as nearly five feet ten inches in height,
and of a form agile as well as strong; his high forehead shaded with black,
curling hair, his eyes large, dark, full of bright intelligence, his face
vividly expressive. His careless dress and untaught manners gave an
impression of coarseness at first, but this was forgotten in the charm of
his personality, and his face in repose had a calm thoughtfulness akin to
melancholy. Full of fun and fire, affable and the best of good company,
his superior mind did not make him supercilious, and he loved more than all
else, a festival that was half frolic and a feast where joy and good will
were guests.
Alas, drinking was a habit in the Scotland of those days, to a degree we
can hardly imagine, as much in the Church as in the Lodge; and it made the
bitter tragedy of Robert Burns. Truth obliges us to admit that his moral
failure was early and pitiful, due alike to his environment and to a fatal
frailty of which made him fitful, unstable, and a prey to every whim of
fancy and of passion. It is an awful risk to be endowed with the genius of
a Burns; it digs deep pitfalls for the man to whom it is given. Yet, if in
his later years he was a degraded man of genius, he was never a man of
degraded genius. The poison did not enter his song. Allan Cunningham was
right when he said: "Few men had so much of the Poet in them, and few
poets so much of the man; the man was probably less pure than he ought to
have been, but the poet was pure and bright to the end."
So, and naturally so, men are willing to hide with a veil of charity the
debris of character scattered along the starry path of Burns. On reading
his poems Byron exclaimed: "What an antithetical mind! Tenderness,
roughness, delicacy, coarseness, sentiments, sensuality; dirt and deity -
all mixed up in one compound of inspired clay!" But that might pass for a
description of mankind in general, and of Burns in particular. If Burns
was a sinner he was in that akin to ourselves, as God knows, a little good
and a little bad, a little weak and a little strong, foolish when he
thought he was wise, and wise, often, when he feared he was foolish. So we
may give Burns the charity which he prayed for others:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We can never adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.
By the same token, no great poet whose name is linked with our Craft ever
owed more to Freemasonry, or gave more to it. More intimately than any
other he was identified with its life, its genius and its ideals. Its
teachings moved his thought; its spirit inspired his song; its genius
nurtured that love of freedom and Fraternity which he set to everlasting
music. So much is this true, that it remains a marvel to this day how
Shairp could have written a biography of Burns without once mentioning his
membership in the Craft. In the gentle air of Freemasonry he found refuge
from hardship and heaviness of spirit; and its fellowship served to shelter
him from the poisoned arrows of petty bigots who were unworthy to untie his
shoes - men of a kind known in every age, whose hard-heartedness was clad
in unctuous hypocrisy.
Surely, if ever of any one, it can be said of Robert Burns, that his soul
goes marching on. He was the harbinger of the nineteenth century, the poet
of the rights and reign of the common people, whom, it has been said, God
must love because he made so many of them. The earth was fresh upon the
tomb of George Washington when that century was born; it discovered Lincoln
and buried him with infinite regret. But its triumphant melody first found
voice in the songs of Robert Burns, as the greek singer inspired Patriarch
with the fire which kindled the Revival of Learning, and out of the inertia
of the Middle Ages created modern times. So when Taine, the French critic,
came to account for that age he found that it's spirit "Broke First in the
Scotch Peasant, Robert Burns." - a man of all men most fitted to give it
voice, because "scarcely ever was seen together more of misery and of
talent."
There are those who dream of a vague blur of cosmopolitism, in which all
local loyalties, all heroic national genius shall be merged and forgotten.
Not so Robert Burns. He was distinctively a national poet, striking deep
roots in his native soil, and, for that reason, touching a chord so
haunting that it echoes forever. This at least is true; a man who is not
deeply rooted somewhere - to whom one spot on earth is not a little dearer,
and the sky over it a little bluer - will not be of much use anywhere.
When Burns appeared the spirit of Scotland was a low ebb. Her people were
crushed and her ancient fire almost quenched. Her scholars blushed if they
used her dialect. It was at such a time that a God-Endowed singer took up
his harp, inspired by the history of his people, the traditions of Wallace
and Bruce stirring him like a passion, his soul attuned to the old ballads
of love and daring, singing the simple life of his nation in its vivid and
picturesque language. He struck with a delicate but strong hand the deep
and noble feelings of his countrymen, and somewhere upon his variegated
robe of song will be found embroidered the life, the faith, the genius of
his people. No wonder the men loved a poet, and make his home at once a
throne of melody and a shrine of national glory.
Because he was so deeply rooted in the soil of his own land; because he was
so sweetly, sadly, joyously - yea, and even sinfully - human, his spirit
and appeal are universal, for the human heart beats everywhere the same,
and by loyalty to the genius of our own country we best serve our race.
His passion for liberty, his affirmation of the nobility of man, his sense
if dignity of labor, his pictures of the pathos and the hard lot of the
lowly, find response in every breast where beats the heart of a man. It is
thus that all men love Burns, for it was he who taught, as few have taught
since the Son of Man lodged with the fishermen by the sea, the brotherhood
of man and the kinship of all breathing things. Such singers live as long
as men love life, and their words become a part of the sacred scriptures of
the human heart.
This is no time to deal in literary criticism - a dreary business at best,
a dismal business at worst. It is by all agreed that Robert Burns was a
lyric poet of the first order, if not the greatest song writer of the
world. Draw a line from Shakespeare to Browning, and he is one of the few
minds tall enough to touch it. The qualities of Burns are simplicity,
naturalness, vividness, fire, sweet-toned pathos, and rollicking humor -
qualities rare enough, and still more rarelyblended. His fame rests upon
verses written swiftly, as men write letters, and upon songs as
spontaneous, as artless, as lovely as the songs of birds. He sang of
simple things, of the joys and woes and pieties of the common life, where
sin bewshadows virtue and the cup of death is pressed to the lips of love.
He saw the world as God made it, woven of good and ill, of light and
shadow, and his songs come home to rich and poor alike, a comfort and a
consecration.
No wonder Burns was the best beloved poet of Lincoln, as much for his
democracy as for his humor, his pathos, and his rich humanity. With him
social rank was but a guinea stamp, a bit of tawdry tinsel alongside the
native nobility of manhood. He honored a man for his worth, not for his
wealth. For the snob, for the fop, he had genuine contempt. If he flayed
the selfish pride of the rich, it was not from envy - just as truly did he
scorn the poor man who, instead of standing erect, only cringes and whines.
He told the poor man that it is no sin to be poor, but that it is a sin to
be ashamed of it. He taught that honest poverty is not only nobler, but
happier, than indolent or il-gotten wealth. The Cotter's dog and the
Laird's dog are very real dogs, as all admit, but their talk is something
more than dog-philosophy. It is the old, old story of the high and the
low, and it is like Burns to take the part of the under dog.
Still, had the Cotter's dog given way to self-pity, Burns would have been
the first to kick him. He hated fawning, as he hated sham, and he knew
that if toil is tragedy, labor is an honor and joy.
That which lives in Robert Burns, and will live while human nature is the
same, is his love of justice, of honesty, of reality, his touch of pathos
and melting sympathy, his demand for liberty, his faith in man and God -
all uttered with simple speech and the golden voice of song. His poems
were little jets of love and liberty and pity finding their way out through
the fissures in the granite-like theology of his day. They came fresh from
the heart of a man whom the death of a little bird set dreaming of the
meaning of the world wherein life is woven of beauty, mystery and sorrow.
A flower crushed in the budding, a field mouse turned out of his home by a
plowshare, a wounded hare limping along the road to dusty death, or the
memory of a tiny bird who sang for him in the days agone, touched him to
tears, and made him feel the old hurt and heartache of the world.
The poems of Burns did not grow; they awoke complete. He was a child of
the open air, and about all his songs there is an outdoor feeling - never a
smell of the lamp. He saw nature with the swift glances of a child - saw
beauty in the fold of clouds, in the slant of trees, in the lilt and glint
of flowing waters, in the immortal game of hide-and-seek played by sunbeams
and shadows, in the mists trailing over the hills. The sigh of the wind in
the forest filled him with a kind of wild, sad joy, and the tender face of
a mountain daisy was like the thought of one much loved and long dead. The
throb of his heart was warm in his words, and it was a heart in which he
carried an alabaster box of pity. He had a sad life and soul of fire, the
instincts of an angel in the midst of hard poverty; yet he lived with dash
and daring, sometimes with folly, and, we must add, - else we do not know
Burns - with a certain bubbling joyousness, despite his tragedy.
Such was the spirit of Robert Burns, a man passionate and piteous, compact
of light and flame and loveliness, capable of withering scorn of wrong,
quickly shifting from the ludicrous to the horrible in his fancy, poised
between laughter and tears - and if by some art se could send his soul into
all the dark places of the world, pity and joy would return to the common
ways of man. His feet may have been in the furrow, but the nobility of
manhood was in his heart, on his lips the voice of eternal melody, and in
his face the light of the morning star. Long live the spirit of Robert
Burns, Poet and Freeemason! May it grow and glow to the confounding of all
injustice, all unkindness!
He haunts his native land
As an immortal youth; his hand
Guides every plow.
His presence haunts this room tonight,
A form of mingled mist and light
From that far coast.
Copyright 1923 by the Masonic Service association of the United States.
The contents of this
Bulletin must not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without permission.
