The complete letters shed,
indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had sunk in his
character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That
I ought to have stated this more noisily I now see; but that
any one should fail to see it for himself, is to me a thing
both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn. If Burns, on
the facts dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad
man, I question very much whether either I or the writer in
the Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to
call a good one. All have some fault. The fault of each
grinds down the hearts of those about him, and - let us not
blink the truth - hurries both him and them into the grave.
And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault, as
all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by
its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite
biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep with
Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.
Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised
in many quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what
every one well knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal
consequences of his marriage.
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