A large and lofty charity will forgive the shortcomings of
Robert Burns; we may even love that wild and misguided but essentially
noble man. That is well; yet we must not put Burns forward and offer our
adulation in such a way as to set him up for a model to young men. A man
may read--
The pale moon is setting beyont the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, oh!
The pathos will wring his heart; but he should not ask any youth to
imitate the conduct of the great poet. Carlyle said very profoundly that
new morality must be made before we can judge Mirabeau; but Carlyle
never put his hero's excesses in the foreground of his history, nor did
he try to apologize for them; he only said, "Here is a man whose stormy
passions overcame him and drove him down the steep to ruin! Think of him
at his best, pardon him, and imitate, in your weak human fashion, the
infinite Divine Mercy." That is good; and it is certainly very different
from the behaviour of writers who ask us to regard their heroes'
evil-doing as not only pardonable, but as being almost admirable.
This Shelley controversy raises several weighty issues. We forgive Burns
because he again and again offers us examples of splendid self-sacrifice
in the course of his broken life, and we are able to do so because the
balance is greatly on the good side; but we do not refrain from saying,
"In some respects Burns was a scamp.
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