, "Essay on Burns." Works, David Nutt.]

Stevenson in his essay on Burns remarks his readiness to use up the work
of others or take a large hint from it "as if he had some difficulty in
commencing." He omits to observe that the very same trait applies to
other great artists. There seem to be two orders of creative writers. On
the one hand are the innovators, the new men like Blake, Wordsworth,
Byron and Shelley, and later Browning. These men owe little to their
predecessors; they work on their own devices and construct their medium
afresh for themselves. Commonly their fame and acceptance is slow, for
they speak in an unfamiliar tongue and they have to educate a generation
to understand their work. The other order of artists have to be shown
the way. They have little fertility in construction or invention. You
have to say to them "Here is something that you could do too; go and do
it better," or "Here is a story to work on, or a refrain of a song; take
it and give it your subtlety, your music." The villainy you teach them
they will use and it will go hard with them if they do not better the
invention; but they do not invent for themselves. To this order of
artists Burns like Shakespeare, and among the lesser men Tennyson,
belongs. In all his plays Shakespeare is known to have invented only one
plot; in many he is using not only the structure but in many places the
words devised by an older author; his mode of treatment depends on the
conventions common in his day, on the tragedy of blood, and madness and
revenge, on the comedy of intrigue and disguises, on the romance with
its strange happenings and its reuniting of long parted friends. Burns
goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of
some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse
epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and
recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his
predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the
south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole verses, nearly always
the refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did was to pour into
these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and
brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a
personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and
correctness of his time. His use of familiar forms explains, more than
anything else, his immediate fame. His countr