MANY poems of Burns's first period embody the experience
of a rural community in a way that has rarely been
equalled in English. Ever since neolithic times, the
settled village has been, next to the family, the most funda-
mental unit of society; it has survived war and pestilence,
flood and famine, the fall of empires and the decline of civilisa-
tions. An art which successfully reflects the way of life of
such a community will tend to have a universality broader and
more general, though not necessarily deeper, than that of
any other sort; it will tend to mirror, not what the best
or the cleverest men have seen and felt, but what the over-
whelming majority of our species have met with during, let us
say, the last five thousand years. There is nothing more inter-
national than nationality, nothing more all-embracing than
locality.

Nevertheless, a writer like Burns is faced with certain pit-
falls; in his rendering of the life of the parish, he will often be
tempted to be too narrowly particular, too minutely realistic,
too restricted to the vernacular, too faithful to the customs and
idiosyncrasies of his district. If he wishes to reach a larger
audeince than the men of his own place and time, he must
concentrate on those aspects of the village which have the
largest relevance; he must paint the streaks of the tulip with-
out destroying the general form and shape of the flower. The
moon that rises over Cumnock hills must still be recognisably
the moon that shines over Fujiyama or the Urals.

Burns's development as a poet was from his immediate
surroundings outwards towards the nation and finally to all
mankind, but this movement was never simple and gradual; it
never followed a straight line. One might have expected him
to reproduce universal emotions in those poems, early or late,
where his aim was to "transcribe the various feelings, the loves,

-111-