To put it another way, Burns could either talk or he could sing. When he was not writing to music he was at his best only when he was speaking, either for himself as personified bard or humorous spectator, or as he identified his own personality with another’s. Nothing in the poems composed in 1786 more clearly shows his maturing artistic powers than does the dramatic character of ‘The Auld Farmer’ and ‘Holy Willie’ when contrasted with the lyrics of ‘The Jolly Beggars’, composed the year before. In these last, magnificent as they are, the reader can seldom forget that it is Burns who is speaking through the mouths of the vagabonds. The lyrics are only half dramatic, and perhaps it was realization of this that made the poet in 1793 tell George Thomson that none of the songs pleased him except the last--in which Burns himself is speaking as the ‘Bard of no regard’. In ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Auld Farmer’, on the other hand, the poet has identified himself with the character whom he is portraying as completely as Browning ever did with Fra Lippo Lippi or the Duke of Ferrara. Less than adequate notice has been taken of the fact that Burns had mastered the art of the dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue more than half a century before Browning gave the forms their names. His own statement that all his early lyrics had a personal basis has both led biographers on wild-goose chases after autobiographical elements in songs which possess none, and has been used to give false emphasis to many poems really based on personal experience. Such interpretations ignore the very foundation of creative art. That the impulse to write a lyric comes from personal emotion does not mean that the finished poem is literal history. Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne helped to make ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ what it is, but not even Mr. Middleton Murry has been fatuous enough to call Madeline a portrait of Fanny. Rose Aylmer was not necessarily as perfect as Landor’s elegy upon her; William Douglas may have had no real intention of laying him down and dying for Annie Laurie. Yet the whole Highland Mary legend, for instance, rests on precisely this sort of treatment of a handful of Burns’s songs, in obstinate disregard of the plain fact that the woman who inspires a love-lyric no more needs to be herself a lyric woman than the model for the Victory of Samothrace needed to be a woman with wings. Everyone has recognized Burns’s unsuccess in his effort to dramatize himself for Clarinda’s benefit as the pure man of sentiment; his true achievement could be better understood by recognition of his success in dramatizing his real self in many of his best ‘personal’ poems. From the ‘Mary Morison’ of his youth to the ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’ of his last illness, his best songs display not Burns himself but a dramatic projection of one aspect of his mind.