Robert Fergusson, Scottish poet, was born at Edinburgh, 5th September 1750, and educated at Dundee and St. Andrews University, where he wrote verses. He removed to Edinburgh, and was employed in the office of the commissary clerk, contributing to Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine poems which gained him such local reputation as proved his ruin—convivial excesses permanently injured his health. Religious melancholy became complete insanity after an accidental injury to his head. He died 16th October, 1774, and was buried in Canongate churchyard, where fifteen years later Burns erected a stone over his grave. His poems were collected in 1773. There are editions by Ruddiman (1779), Irving (1800), Robert Chambers (1840), and A. B. Grosart (1851). Fergusson possessed vigour, fancy, fluency, and comic humour, but lacked imagination and passion.
| No sculptur’d Marble here, nor pompous lay, | |
| No storied Urn nor animated Bust; | |
| This simple stone directs pale Scotia’s way | |
| To pour her sorrow o’er the Poet’s dust…. | |
| She mourns, sweet tuneful youth, thy hapless fate: | |
| Tho’ all the powers of song thy fancy fir’d, | |
| Yet Luxury and Wealth lay by in State, | |
| And, thankless, starv’d what they so much admir’d. | |
| This humble tribute with a tear he gives, | |
| A brother Bard—he can no more bestow: | |
| But dear to fame thy Song immortal lives, | |
| A nobler monument than Art can show. |
He was about five feet six inches high, and well shaped. His complexion fair, but rather pale. His eyes full, black, and piercing. His nose long, his lips thin, his teeth well set and white. His neck long and well proportioned. His shoulders narrow, and his limbs long, but more sinewy than fleshy. His voice strong, clear, and melodious. Remarkably fond of old Scots songs, and the best singer of the “Birks of Invernay” I ever heard. When speaking, he was quick, forcible, and complaisant. In walking he appeared smart, erect, and unaffected.
An incident strikingly illustrative of the unhappy destiny of the young poet, and at the same time of the honorable esteem in which he was held by those who knew him, must not remain untold. Shortly after his death a letter came from India directed to him, enclosing a draft for £100, and inviting him thither, where a lucrative situation was promised him. The letter and draft were from an old and attached school-fellow, a Mr. Burnet, whose name deserves to be forever linked with Fergusson’s for this act of munificent, though fruitless, generosity.
The poor, high-soaring, deep-falling, gifted, and misguided young man.
The simple stone which “directs Pale Scotia’s way to pour her Sorrows o’er her Poet’s Dust” is on the west side of the church, not many steps from the gateway, and on the left as one enters the church-yard. It is always well cared for, and a royal Scottish thistle, planted by some devout hand, rises, as if defiantly, to guard the spot.
We are three Robins, who have touched the Scots lyre this last century. Well, the one is the world’s. He did it, he came off; he is for ever; but I, and the other, ah! what bonds we have! Born in the same city; both sickly; both vicious; both pestered—one nearly to madness and one to the madhouse—with a damnatory creed; both seeing the stars and the moon, and wearing shoe-leather on the same ancient stones, under the same pends (—courts), down the same closes, where our common ancestors clashed in their armour, rusty or bright…. He died in his acute, painful youth, and left the models of the great things that were to come; and the man who came after outlived his green-sickness, and has faintly tried to parody his finished work. If you will collect strays of Robert Fergusson, fish for material, collect any last re-echoing of gossip, command me to do what you prefer—to write the preface, to write the whole if you prefer; anything so that another monument (after Burns’s) be set up to my unhappy predecessor, on the causey of Auld Reekie. You will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is. I believe Fergusson lives in me. I do. But “tell it not in Gath.” Every man has these fanciful superstitions coming, going but yet enduring; only most men are so wise (or the poet in them so dead) that they keep their follies for themselves.
As for the man distinct in so far as he can be made distinct from the poet, I have failed indeed if I have not thrown off from him for ever the Irving-originated moralising, and won for him not blame but pity; not sentencing but sympathy; not judging him by lapses through stress of circumstance but by what was best in him; and it is my hope that every reader will rejoice with me that well-nigh a century and a quarter after his poor wasted body was borne to its last resting-place in Canongate Churchyard, there are still multitudes of “brither Scots” all the world over to whom his memory is dear and tender.
General
Is the author of two tolerably pretty love songs.
Robert Fergusson was the poet of Scottish city-life, or rather the laureate of Edinburgh. A happy talent in portraying the peculiarities of local manners, a keen perception of the ludicrous, a vein of original comic humour, and language at once copious and expressive, distinguished him as a poet. He had not the invention or picturesque fancy of Allan Ramsay, nor the energy and passion of Burns. His mind was a light warm soil, that threw up early its native products, sown by chance or little exertion; but it had not strength and tenacity to nurture any great or valuable production. A few short years, however, comprised his span of literature and of life; and criticism would be ill employed in scrutinising with severity any occasional poems of a youth of twenty-three, written from momentary feelings and impulses, amidst professional drudgery or midnight dissipation…. In one department—lyrical poetry, whence Burns draws so much of his glory—Fergusson does not seem, though a singer, to have made any efforts to excel. In English poetry he utterly failed; and if we consider him in reference to his countrymen, Falconer or Logan—he received the same education as the latter—his inferior rank as a general poet will be apparent.
Nothing can be more mawkish and vapid than Fergusson, when he makes Damon and Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals.
His chief characteristics as a poet are—a keen sense of the ludicrous, a strong vein of original comic humour, a talent for describing the peculiarities of local manners, and a copious command of expressive language. He wrote poems both in English and Scotch; his Scotch pieces, however, are most esteemed.
At the early age of twenty-four, sung of the Tweed in his poem “The Rivers of Scotland.” Fine genius as he was, he has but caught some echoes of the theme, and his whole description is vague and characterless. But in “Hame Content,” a satire, he has touched the true soul of Scottish scenery and music, and done much greater justice to Bangour than Hogg did.
His range of subjects is narrowed by the narrow space of a career which began at twenty-four. He had a keen enjoyment of city life, with its clubs for a little dissipation, and its bailies and its “black banditti” for a constant occasion of laughter. Still more keen on his part was that enjoyment of the country, the pleasures of which he seldom tasted except in imagination, but which supplies the inspiration of some of his most touching verses, as well as some of his mock heroics. We alternate in his verse between these two sets of themes, and in his treatments of both we meet with the same vein of pure pathos, and its almost unfailing accompaniment of genuine humour.
Some people are inclined to ask—Are we quite sure that we are worshipping the right poet? It is true that there are many poets, and I sometimes yield so far to the suggestion as to think that we might worship some of them a little more than we do. There is FERGUSSON, Burns’s master, who died at twenty-four, a true poet, but so unfortunate after death as in life, that I doubt if we have a proper critical edition of Fergusson, and certainly we have not such an account of his life as might well be written.
There have been considerable differences of judgment as to Fergusson’s position among the poets; but on the whole the drift of political opinion has been against him. A much lower place is commonly assigned to him now than would once have been claimed. Perhaps this is due partly to a certain impatience of the more than generous praise of Burns, who habitually speaks of Fergusson as his own equal, and sometimes as more than his equal, and who proves the sincerity of his regard by imitating Fergusson more frequently than any other poet…. Fergusson, in his poetry as in his life, is less sane and sensible than Ramsay, in some respects perhaps less strong; but he is infinitely finer, he gives promise of things of which there is no hint from beginning to end in Ramsay; and in the course of a career which closed ere it had well begun, he displays a fervour and an elevation which the author of “The Gentle Shepherd” could never rival. Ramsay was acute and solid; but Fergusson was a genius…. All the verse he ever wrote can be contained within the covers of a small volume, and only a few of his pieces are of high merit. But some of those pieces bear the stamp of genius, immature indeed, but real, and justify the belief that had he lived even a few years longer his position as the inferior only of Burns would have been beyond dispute.
This knack of making auld-warld wardies clack in hamespun rhyme Fergusson possessed in the highest degree. His vocabulary has a strength, a fulness, and a vigour about it which secure instant recognition. Fergusson wields the brave utterance of Scotia as the potter wields and moulds the finest clay. Like all noble and well-chosen speech, Fergusson’s commended itself to every sort and condition of men, and readers of all classes instinctively recognised that a new magician had arisen; that in these thoroughly original and unique Scots poems it was indeed true of the words, in the fullest sense, that
| ilk ane at his billy’s back | |
| Kept guid Scots time. |
Apart from the fact that he struck the keynote, which was afterwards accentuated by the Ayrshire poet, of all the modern vernacular verse of Scotland, he remains, by reason both of his genius and of his tragic story, one of the three most interesting figures of eighteenth century Scottish poetic annals…. In Fergusson’s case it is unnecessary to make allowance for his youth: he was but twenty-three when he died. Had he lived longer, it is true, his genius might have developed higher imaginative power, and experience might have given him more artistic resource. But the fact remains that in the field of Scottish poetry which he essayed he has been surpassed only by two or three competitors. “Leith Races” and “Hallowfair” present pictures almost as racy and realistic, if indeed not so boisterous, as their great prototypes, King James’s “Christ’s Kirk on the Green” and “Peblis to the Play.” The same pieces, with “The Election” and “The Setting of the Session,” afford the most graphic impression extant of the Edinburgh life of his day. His “Elegies,” “Braid Claith,” “Hame Content,” and “Tron Kirk Bell” were masterpieces in a rich vein of satiric humour. And his “Gowdspink” with his “Farmer’s Ingle” depicted fields of homely charm in which Fergusson has been improved upon only by Burns himself…. The same commendation cannot be given to Fergusson’s English poems, which comprise more than half his work. These are written for the most part in the affected and conventional taste of much of the Scoto-English verse of the time. But his pieces in the rich Lowland-Scottish dialect—pieces which were eagerly read by the common people everywhere in his own day—remain enough to furnish reputations for half a dozen poets.
Has been a good deal over-praised, though he has no small merit, especially in some Edinburgh pieces and in “The Gowdspink.”
My claim, therefore for Robert Fergusson, as I have all along stated, is a modest but a definite one. He is to be gratefully remembered for what his vernacular poems did for Robert Burns; for what he did in the nick of time in asserting the worth and dignity and potentiality of his and our mother-tongue; for his naturalness, directness, veracity, simplicity, raciness, humour, sweetness, melody; for his felicitous packing into lines and couplets sound common sense; for his penetrative perception that the man and not “braid claith” or wealth is “the man for a’ that;” for his patriotic love of country and civil and religious freedom; and for the perfectness—with only superficial scratches rather than material flaws—of at least thirteen of his vernacular poems, and for sustaining the proud tradition and continuity of Scottish song.
