But how different is the case of Burns! So far from being an uncomplicated fact of literature, the works of this Poet were early immeshed in a very plexus of real life interest, commentary, adoption, misjudgment and enhancement, which is now an instant element of their connotation and almost a part of their substance. Across the singing voice of the Poet as we listen, and almost overbearing it, come the reverberated choruses of a million Burns Suppers and Commemorations, adding volume, but also confusion, to the song. Across the survey, in which we try to see his works with disinterested gaze, comes pointing the broad insistent finger of traditional emphasis upon what was of supreme interest to one body of readers long ago because the subject-matter was close to their own lives and _they_ knew all about it, and to another body of readers because it was curious information about a distant social world, and even more worthy of remark than a fly in amber. Nor is this all. For not only is the national estimation in which he is held become a part of his works, entering into the mental context and determining the bias of attention, but works and estimation alike are invaded, darkened, and perplexed by the cloud of moral prepossessions and agitations which have wreaked themselves upon the subject of his life. To view Burns with detachment, and yet with understanding, is impossible; to be certain that we are viewing him at all is by no means easy. For the effect of all the nationalising fervour which has made him its own, and of all the moralising impertinence which has failed to apprehend him and yet refused to let him go, is to keep before our eyes an approved subject for a certain kind of discourse (also, alas! approved), but not the poetry in its essential power, and not the Poet in the human integrity of his nature, in the true thought-and-feeling quality of his mortal days. In a case like this, therefore, history has another task to perform besides developing the values and relevancies implicit in a body of poetry. It has, as a condition precedent, to secure for that body of poetry the relative degree of detachment, of disencumbrance from real-life impositions and prejudgments, which belongs to every other supreme poetical bequest. It has to secure for the Poet and his poetry alike—since in this case the man and the singer, the singer and the song, are beyond all example one—such a deliverance from many things, beginning with the too engrossing spirit of locality, as would enable them to be seen in their true place and aspect among the universals of literature, unobscured at last by the falsifications of reflection and the crudities of accident.