When we remember Burns's obligations to his predecessors, we
must never forget his immense advances on them. They had
already "discovered" nature; but Burns discovered poetry - a
higher and more intense way of thinking of the things that go
to make up nature, a higher and more ideal key of words in
which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson excelled at
making a popular - or shall we say vulgar? - sort of society
verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in
taverns while a supper party waited for its laureate's word;
but on the appearance of Burns, this coarse and laughing
literature was touched to finer issues, and learned gravity
of thought and natural pathos.
What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct,
speaking style, and to walk on his own feet instead of on
academical stilts. There was never a man of letters with
more absolute command of his means; and we may say of him,
without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that
energy of epithet, so concise and telling, that a foreigner
is tempted to explain it by some special richness or aptitude
in the dialect he wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and
completeness of description which gives us the very
physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is.
Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best pieces,
which keeps him from any slip into the weariful trade of
word-painting, and presents everything, as everything should
be presented by the art of words, in a clear, continuous
medium of thought.
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