PRIDE AND PASSION
  ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796




  PRIDE AND PASSION

  _Robert Burns_

  1759-1796

  BY

  DELANCEY FERGUSON

  ‘_My great constituent elements are Pride and Passion._’
  BURNS TO AGNES M’LEHOSE
  DECEMBER 28, 1787


  NEW YORK
  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
  1939




  Copyright, 1939, by Oxford University Press, New York, Inc.
  First Edition


  Printed in the United States of America




PREFACE


All witnesses agree that Robert Burns was a vivid and dynamic
personality. All readers of his poetry concur. Yet somehow the
personality which blazes in the poems and glows in the letters only
smoulders in the biographies. Why is it so hard to write a dull
life of, say, Byron, and so easy to write a dull one of Burns? For
one thing, there are too many biographies, all following the same
stereotyped outline of dividing the poet’s life according to the places
he lived in instead of according to the things he did and thought. Then
really graphic memorabilia are scarce, especially for the formative
years in Ayrshire. People keep saying that Burns was a brilliant
talker, but they seldom report his talk. Finally, too many biographers
have worked in the wrong mood, intent on moralizing or deprecating
rather than interpreting.

This book is not a biography, if that word connotes a narrative written
in straight time-sequence. It is, instead, my answer to the question,
subordinated or ignored by most chronological biographers, What sort
of a man was Robert Burns? I have therefore discarded time-sequence
in favour of the relationships of everyday life in which Burns
most clearly revealed his personality. The plan has at least the
advantage of passing quickly over his almost undocumented youth, and
concentrating attention upon his fully recorded manhood. The formal
biography, whether it be Mrs. Carswell’s romantic approach or Professor
Snyder’s scholarly one, suffers from the necessity of devoting more
space to the scantily reported twenty-seven years in Ayrshire than
to the five richly documented years in Dumfries. I have assumed that
Burns’s character can best be determined from the completest records.
Perhaps to himself John Syme and Maria Riddell were not so important
as Robert Muir and Margaret Chalmers, but the later friendships can be
studied at full length; the earlier ones cannot. Hence I have given
most space to the relationships in which guess-work can be kept to a
minimum.

So, too, I have deliberately limited myself to the best authenticated
sources--Burns’s own letters and poems, and the letters and other
records of his immediate contemporaries. Unsupported oral tradition
I have avoided as basic material. Though I use such anecdotes now
and again as secondary illustrations, it is always with a warning as
to their nature. I have likewise tried to make clear the distinction
between facts and the inferences I have drawn from them.

In one respect at least my preparation for writing about Burns is
unique. Most editors and biographers have either been bred in the
rosy mists of the Burns legend or have worked their way back to the
original records through a mass of secondary printed matter. Up to a
dozen years ago my knowledge of Burns and his times included little
beyond such reading of major works and standard criticism as one
does in preparation for the doctorate. In 1925 I undertook to edit
a reprint of Burns’s chief poems. Discovering in the course of that
job how unsatisfactory were all editions of his correspondence, I
thereupon plunged into the work of tracing and collating the original
holographs. Not until after thorough immersion in these primary sources
did I extend my studies to the letters and other records of Burns’s
contemporaries and to the Burns tradition embalmed in the biographies
and standard editions. When I started I had therefore everything to
learn, but nothing to unlearn, and my basic impression of the poet and
his work was founded on intimate acquaintance with his own words, and
not on what other people had said about him.

The large number of new documents which have turned up in recent years
replaces conjecture with certainty in many once disputed episodes in
Burns’s career. We need no longer depend on libellous Saunders Tait for
details of William Burnes’s troubles at Lochlie; the chronology of the
poet’s Edinburgh peccadillos is fairly clear; we know why Mrs. Dunlop
broke off her correspondence. The verification and completion of the
texts of more than three-fourths of Burns’s own letters is only a part
of the fresh material. Collateral documents ranging from Elizabeth
Paton’s discharge of her claim against Burns to the almost complete
correspondence of two of his most intimate friends are now available,
and I have used them freely. I have also drawn upon other sources
not fully utilized in the past. Most biographers, for instance, have
contemned the so-called ‘Train MS.’ in Edinburgh University library.
This collection of notes on Lockhart’s _Life of Burns_ consists mainly
of anecdotes deriving ultimately from the poet’s friend, John Richmond.
It has been repudiated _in toto_ for no better reason, seemingly, than
that Richmond told a story about one Mary Campbell which does not
tally with the romantic account of Highland Mary, and was mistaken
in the identity of a lady who once called at Burns’s lodgings in
Baxter’s Close. Against these two doubtful items I set the fact that
the author of the notes so accurately described unpublished letters and
verses which he had seen that every one of them since published can be
instantly identified. I base no major conclusions on this MS., but I
can see no justification for ignoring it.

I need not enumerate the volumes of biography, history, and memoirs
which have contributed background materials. They are listed in all the
standard bibliographies. The one great addition to the older lists is
the _Journals_ of James Boswell, which have furnished graphic details
of Scottish life. I hasten to add, however, that Chapter I is not
intended as a complete survey of eighteenth-century Scotland. Even had
completeness been possible in the space at my disposal, it would have
been useless to attempt to repeat what Professor H. W. Thompson has
so superbly done in _A Scottish Man of Feeling_. Hence I have limited
myself to those aspects of national life which bore directly upon
Burns, as I have also done in considering the influence of contemporary
literature. The eighteenth century was not all ‘elegance’, but it was
the elegant authors, and not Swift, Fielding, and Johnson, who appealed
to Burns.

Lest British readers charitably assume that I sin through ignorance,
I ought perhaps also to add that in writing of Burns’s world I have
not hesitated to equate some of its social and political aspects with
their twentieth-century American analogues. To describe a dead world in
dead terms seems a poor way of revivifying it. My omission of footnotes
is likewise deliberate. In a score of articles in various journals
during the past decade I have presented, and fully documented, the
evidence on many controversial points. The articles evoked an almost
passionate apathy; nevertheless they, and their footnotes, are there
if anyone cares to look them up. Furthermore, nearly all the source
documents I have used are now in print, despite the efforts of Burns’s
self-appointed literary executors to suppress certain of them. On two
points I recant some of my earlier statements: I know now that the
circumstances of Burns’s quarrel with the Riddells are not so clear as
I once thought them, and Mr. Stanley Cursiter of the Scottish National
Gallery has given me reason to doubt my identification of the miniature
portrait belonging to Mr. Oliver R. Barrett.

Transcripts of most of the unpublished documents I have used are
included in Mr. Robert T. Fitzhugh’s Cornell University dissertation,
‘Robert Burns as Seen by his Contemporaries’ (1935). I am deeply
indebted to Mr. Fitzhugh for the use of this material and of other
documents he has discovered more recently, chief among them the
letter in which Robert Ainslie described to Agnes M’Lehose his visit
to Ellisland in October, 1790. In addition to the Train MS., above
mentioned, Mr. Fitzhugh’s thesis includes numerous letters by Burns’s
contemporaries, of which the most important are the forty-one which
passed between John Syme and Alexander Cunningham from 1789 to 1797. On
publication in the _Burns Chronicle_ these letters were considerably
expurgated, the deletions including details of the Caledonian Hunt’s
revelry in Dumfries and the most graphic description which has yet come
to light in connection with Burns of a wet evening over the punchbowl.

Many other people have helped me in the work. My wife typed most of
it in its original form, clarified doubtful points by debating them,
and did her best to restrain the wilder excesses of Ph.D. diction.
My colleague, Winfield H. Rogers, read the manuscript, and made many
useful comments. A famous British firm gave me free permission to use
one of Burns’s bawdier letters, but after I published it they were
taken to task by one of the literary executors above mentioned. Since
they found it easier to repudiate a foreigner than to face the wrath
of a compatriot, I shall not embarrass them by repeating my thanks
here. I am indebted to Col. Sir John Murray, D.S.O., for use of the
original MS. of Burns’s journal of his Border tour. Mr. Davidson Cook,
Mr. George W. Shirley, and Mr. John M’Vie have all shared their Burns
discoveries with me, and Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, Mr. Gabriel Wells, and
the late Mr. Charles Sessler renewed my obligations to them by allowing
me to collate MSS. which came into their hands after my edition of the
_Letters_ was published. And finally, I owe a still deeper renewal of
gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, to whose
grant-in-aid this present volume owes its appearance.

                                                              DE L. F.

  _Western Reserve University
    20 August 1938_




CHRONOLOGY OF BURNS’S LIFE


I. AYRSHIRE

  1759. _Jan. 25._ Robert Burns born at Alloway; eldest son of William
        Burnes (1721-1784) and his wife Agnes Broun (1732-1820). The
        other children were Gilbert (1760-1827), Agnes (1762-1834),
        Anabella (1764-1832), William (1767-1790), John (1769-1785),
        and Isabella (1771-1858).

  1765. Robert and Gilbert sent to school to John Murdoch.

  1766. William Burnes rents Mt. Oliphant farm.

  1768. Murdoch gives up Alloway school. The _Titus Andronicus_
        incident.

  1772. Robert and Gilbert attend Dalrymple parish school, week about,
        during summer quarter.

  1773. Robert studies grammar and French with Murdoch for three weeks;
        writes his first song, ‘Handsome Nell’, for Nellie Kilpatrick.

  1774. Hard times begin at Mt. Oliphant.

  1775. Burns attends Hugh Rodger’s school at Kirkoswald.

  1777. At Whitsun William Burnes moves from Mt. Oliphant to Lochlie.

  1779. Burns joins a dancing class ‘in absolute defiance’ of his
        father’s commands.

  1780. The Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club organized.

  1781. Burns courts Alison Begbie. His father’s dispute with David
        M’Lure, his landlord, begins. Burns joins the Freemasons, and
        about midsummer goes to Irvine as a flax-dresser.

  1782. _Jan. 1._ The Irvine shop burnt out; soon after, Burns returns
        to Lochlie.

        _Sept. 24._ William Burnes’s dispute referred to arbiters.

  1783. _Jan._ Burns wins a £3 prize for flax-seed.

        _April._ Burns begins his Commonplace Book.

        _May 17._ M’Lure gets a writ of sequestration against William
        Burnes.

        _Aug. 18._ The ‘Oversman’ reports in Burnes’s favor.

        _Aug. 25._ Burnes makes first appeal to Court of Session.

        Autumn. Robert and Gilbert secretly arrange to rent Mossgiel.

  1784. _Jan. 27._ The Court of Session upholds William Burnes.

        _Feb. 13._ Death of William Burnes. The family moves to
        Mossgiel.

  1785. _May 22._ Birth of Elizabeth, the poet’s daughter by Elizabeth
        Paton.

        _Nov. 1._ Burial of John Burns, the poet’s youngest brother.
        During this year Burns began to write his satires, composed
        ‘The Jolly Beggars’, and in Oct. finished his first Commonplace
        Book. He also met Jean Armour.

  1786. _Jan._ (?). Burns plans migration to Jamaica.

        _April 3._ ‘Proposals’ for the Kilmarnock _Poems_ sent to press.

        _c. April 23._ James Armour repudiates Burns as a son-in-law.

        _May 12._ Supposed date of composing ‘The Court of Equity’.

        _May 14._ Supposed date of farewell to Highland Mary.

        _July 9._ Burns’s first penitential appearance in church.

        _July 22._ Burns transfers his share in Mossgiel to Gilbert.

        _July 30._ Burns in hiding from James Armour’s writ.

        _July 31._ The Kilmarnock _Poems_ published.

        _c. Sept. 1._ First postponement of Jamaica voyage.

        _Sept. 3._ Jean Armour bears twins, who are christened Robert
        and Jean.

        _c. Sept. 27._ Second postponement of Jamaica voyage.

        _Oct. 23._ Burns dines at Catrine House.

        End of _Oct._ Abandonment of Jamaica plans.

        _Nov. 27._ Burns sets out for Edinburgh.

        _Dec. 1._ Elizabeth Paton accepts Burns’s settlement of her
        claim.


II. EDINBURGH

  1786. _Nov. 29._ Burns arrives in Edinburgh.

        _Dec. 9._ Henry Mackenzie praises the Kilmarnock _Poems in The
        Lounger_.

        _Dec. 14._ William Creech issues subscription bills for the
        Edinburgh edition of the _Poems_.

  1787. _Jan. 13._ The Grand Lodge of Scotland toasts Burns as
        ‘Caledonia’s Bard’.

        _April 21._ Edinburgh _Poems_ published.

        _April 23._ Burns sells his copyright for 100 guineas.

        _May 5-June 1._ Burns tours the Border.

        End of _May_. VOL. I of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.

        _June 2._ Burns receives Meg Cameron’s appeal.

        _June 8._ Burns’s ‘_éclatant_ return to Mauchline’.

        End of _June_. Burns tours West Highlands as far as Inverary.

        _July 29._ Jean Armour ‘in for it again’.

        _Aug. 2._ Burns completes his autobiographical letter to Dr.
        John Moore.

        _Aug. 8._ Burns returns to Edinburgh.

        _Aug. 15._ Burns freed of Meg Cameron’s writ.

        _Aug. 25-Sept. 16._ Highland tour with William Nicol.

        _Oct. 4-20._ Tour in Stirlingshire.

        _Oct._ Death of poet’s daughter, Jean.

        _Nov._ Burns begins active work for the _Museum_.

        _Dec. 4._ Burns meets Agnes M’Lehose.

        _Dec. 7._ Burns dislocates his knee.

        _Dec. 8._ The Clarinda correspondence begins.

  1788. _Jan. 4._ Burns’s first visit to Clarinda.

        _Feb. 13-14._ Peak of the Clarinda correspondence: four letters
        in two days.

        _Feb. 18._ Burns leaves Edinburgh.

        _Feb. 23._ Burns returns to Mauchline; is ‘disgusted’ by Jean.

        _Feb. 27 (?)-Mar. 2._ Burns visits Ellisland with John Tennant.

        _Mar. 3._ Jean bears twin girls, of whom one dies on Mar. 10 and
        the other on Mar. 22.

        _c._ _Mar. 13._ Burns returns to Edinburgh.

        _Mar. 18._ Burns signs lease of Ellisland.

        _Mar. 24._ Burns leaves Edinburgh.

        _Mar._ VOL. II of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.

        Late _April_. Burns acknowledges Jean Armour as his wife.

        _April-May._ Burns receives Excise instructions at Mauchline.


III. DUMFRIESSHIRE

  1788. _June 11._ Burns settles at Ellisland.

        _July 14._ Burns’s Excise commission issued.

        _Nov. 5._ Centenary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

        _Nov._ Jenny Clow bears Burns a son.

        _Dec._ Jean joins Burns in borrowed quarters at the Isle.

  1789. _Feb. 16._ Burns goes to Edinburgh to close accounts with Creech
        and to settle Jenny Clow’s suit.

        _Feb. 28._ Burns returns to Ellisland.

        Summer. Burns meets Francis Grose.

        _Aug. 18._ Francis Wallace Burns born.

        _Sept. 1._ Burns begins duty as Excise officer.

        _Nov._ Burns ill with ‘malignant squinancy and low fever’.

  1790. _Jan. 27._ Burns’s name placed on list of those eligible for
        promotion as Examiners and Supervisors.

        _Feb._ VOL. III of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.

        _July._ Burns transferred to Dumfries 3d Division.

        _July 24._ Death of William Burns in London.

        _Dec. 1._ MS. of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ sent to Grose.

  1791. _Mar. 31._ Anne Park bears Burns a daughter, Elizabeth.

        _April 9._ William Nicol Burns born.

        _April._ ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ published in Grose’s _Antiquities of
        Scotland_ and in the March _Edinburgh Magazine_.

        _June 19-22._ Burns in Ayrshire to attend Gilbert’s wedding.

        _Aug. 25._ Auction of crops at Ellisland.

        _Sept. 10._ Formal renunciation of Ellisland lease signed.

        _Nov. 11._ Burns moves into Dumfries.

        _Nov. 29-Dec. 11._ Burns in Edinburgh. Farewell again to
        Agnes M’Lehose.

  1792. _Feb._ Burns promoted to Dumfries Port Division.

        _Feb. 29._ Capture of schooner _Rosamond_.

        _April 10._ Burns made honorary member of Royal Company of
        Archers, Edinburgh.

        _April 19._ Sale of the _Rosamond’s_ carronades.

        _Aug._ VOL. IV of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.

        _Sept. 16._ Burns begins work for Thomson’s _Select Collection_.

        _Nov. 13._ Burns subscribes for Edinburgh _Gazetteer_.

        _Nov. 21._ Birth of Elizabeth Riddell Burns.

        Mid-_Dec._ Burns’s last visit to Dunlop House.

       _Dec. 31._ Inquiry into Burns’s loyalty.

  1793. _Jan. 5._ Burns defends himself to Graham of Fintry.

        _Feb. 1._ France declares war against England.

        _Feb._ Second Edinburgh edition of _Poems_ published.

        _March._ Burns asks, and receives, burgess privileges in the
        Dumfries schools.

        _May 19._ Burns moves to house in Mill Vennel.

        _June._ First number of Thomson’s _Select Collection_ published.

        _c._ _July 30-Aug. 2._ First Galloway tour with Syme.

        _Aug._ The Edinburgh sedition trials.

        _c._ _Aug. 30._ ‘Bannockburn’ sent to Thomson.

        _c._ _Dec. 31._ Beginning of the Riddell quarrel.

  1794. _Jan. 12._ Final breach with Maria Riddell.

        _April 21._ Death of Robert Riddell.

        _c._ _May 1._ Burns declines a post on _Morning Chronicle_,
        London.

        _c._ _June 25-28._ Second Galloway tour with Syme.

        _Aug. 12._ Birth of James Glencairn Burns.

        _c._ _Dec. 22._ Burns appointed Acting Supervisor at Dumfries.

  1795. _Jan. 12._ Burns posts the letter which estranged Mrs. Dunlop.

        _Jan. 31._ Burns joins in organizing the Dumfries Volunteers.

        _Feb._ Reconciliation with Maria Riddell.

        _April._ The Reid miniature painted. Alexander Findlater resumes
        his duties as Supervisor at Dumfries.

        _Sept._ Death of Elizabeth Riddell Burns.

        _Dec.-Jan._ Burns ill with rheumatic fever.

  1796. _Mar. 12-14._ Food riots in Dumfries.

        _July 3-16._ Burns at the Brow Well.

        _July 18._ Burns writes his last letter.

        _July 21._ Death of Burns.

        _July 25._ Funeral of Burns, and birth of his son Maxwell.

        _Dec._ VOL. V of _Scots Musical Museum_ published.




CONTENTS


  PREFACE                                  v

  CHRONOLOGY OF BURNS’S LIFE            xiii

     I. SCOTLAND                           3

    II. EDUCATION                         34

   III. MEN                               79

    IV. WOMEN                            135

     V. LIVELIHOOD                       188

    VI. SONG                             234

   VII. THE SCOT                         278




PRIDE AND PASSION

ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796




PRIDE AND PASSION




I

SCOTLAND


A Scot in the eighteenth century was a poor relation, subject to the
slights and scorns of more prosperous kinfolk, and reared amid poverty,
theology, and filth. When Robert Burns was born, on January 25, 1759,
his native land was almost at the nadir of its independent existence.
Proud and warlike and desperately poor, Scotland had been still an
essentially feudal nation when King James VI was called from amid the
bickerings of his jealous nobles and intransigent clergy to become
James I of England. The permanent removal of the court to London left
the country more than ever the prey of contention among its nobles and
fanaticism among its ecclesiastics; governed by a parliament without
authority; torn at intervals by rebellion and civil strife; denied
commercial parity with England, and cut off from the old-time free
intercourse with France.

The Act of Union of 1707, by admitting Scotland to commercial
privileges formerly restricted to England, started the country
on the road to material prosperity, but promised to destroy the
last vestiges of national pride. It was ‘the end of an old song’.
Thenceforward the affairs of Scotland were entrusted to a handful of
representatives at Westminster, too small, in those days of patronage
and pocket-boroughs, to have enabled even a Scottish Parnell, had
there been one, to sway the balance of power. Scotland was no longer
Scotland; it was North Britain. And when the House of Hanover succeeded
to the English throne, the last vestige of Scottish influence in the
government seemed to have vanished. Ruled no longer by the Stuarts--her
own kings, even though absentee--but by ‘an insolent, beef-witted race
of foreigners’, Scotland turned more and more to the things of the
flesh. The last flicker of the ancient loyalties in the ’45 shed only
light enough to reveal their death. The Lowlands, though they could
not stomach the double treason of a man like Murray of Broughton,
acquiesced in the brutal destruction of the Highland clans. Most of the
comfortable merchants and landed gentry had viewed the uprising with
an apprehension even livelier than that felt by the German court four
hundred miles away; when the Highlands were crushed they rejoiced in
their own increased security, and showed their loyalty to the reigning
House by christening their daughters Charlotte and Wilhelmina, and
their new streets and squares Hanover and Brunswick and George.

By the middle of the century Scottish affairs had settled into an order
which might alter in degree, but would not alter in kind, for two
generations at least. Politically, the country was little more than
a conquered province. Economically it was beginning to emerge from
age-old poverty, but the new prosperity of the lucky few was widening
the gap between them and the poor and still further depressing the
latter. Religiously it was awakening from the nightmare of Calvinism
which had paralysed free thought and free action for two centuries.
Intellectually its literary life was being overwhelmed by the fashions
and standards of England, and its educated citizens were suffering from
an inferiority complex of national scope.

When Warren Hastings was impeached, Burns was angry because it was done
in the name of the Commons of England and not of Great Britain. Had
he expressed his opinion in public, instead of in a private letter,
it would have roused little sympathy among his more influential
countrymen. Most would have dismissed it as the rant of a fanatic; a
few would have held it downright treason. There was no money in being a
Scottish patriot. As in England, all things political went by favour.
The only difference was that in Scotland they went by favour of one
man--the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Bute, or Henry Dundas, as the case
might be. All power concentrated at last in the hands of the national
boss. He ‘suggested’ the choice of the sixteen Scottish peers who
were to represent their country in the House of Lords; he controlled
the election of the forty-five members of the Commons; his word was
law as to all appointive offices. Fifteen members of the Commons were
chosen by the burgh councils--self-perpetuating groups which in ‘the
taciturn regularity of ancient affairs’ allowed no outsider to intrude
on their privileges and their graft. The other thirty were chosen
by the counties, and in all Scotland there were fewer than three
thousand qualified electors, every man of whom was ticketed as to party
allegiance and family connection. Most of them also had their prices
plainly marked on their tickets. Of course the price need be nothing so
crude as cash. Every job, from a cadetship with the East India Company
to the governorship of a province, was obtainable by influence, and
by influence only; hence there were plenty of ways of swaying a man’s
vote, especially if he had a rising family of hungry younger sons,
without soiling his fingers with gold.

Everyone played the game, and took the rules for granted. Why wait
for merited promotion, if you could get it quicker by pulling wires?
The only man Sir Walter Scott ever deliberately cut was the one who
publicly criticized him for securing his brother’s appointment to a
post which he knew was soon to be abolished--with a pension for the
ousted incumbent. It was a comfortable system for those on the inside.
As for the others, they were expected to do their duty in that state of
life to which it had pleased God to call them.

But it was not merely in political jobs that the influential classes
were doing well for themselves. The Act of Union had admitted Scottish
merchants to the privileges of the colonial trade formerly open only to
the English. Throughout the eighteenth century the south of Scotland
experienced a whole series of industrial and real estate booms.
Though by twentieth-century standards of bankruptcy the booms were
small and local, they had all the familiar characteristics. Glasgow
and its neighbourhood, for instance, when once it had recovered from
the losses of the crazy Darien Expedition--as wild a speculation as
the later Mississippi Bubble in France and the South Sea madness in
England--throve soberly on its steadily increasing commerce with the
West Indies and the American Colonies. The passerby today, between the
Trongate and the Broomielaw, may read in Union Street and George Square
how mercantile Scotland felt towards the loss of its parliament, and
find Jamaica and Virginia Streets underscoring the reason; further
west, St. Vincent Street, Nile Street, Pitt Street, and Wellington
Street show the direction of Glaswegian sympathies in the long struggle
with Napoleon. And since commerce is by definition two-sided the ships
which brought back American cotton and tobacco and sugar took out
Scottish linens and woolens and shoes from steadily growing centres of
manufacture.

On the east coast, Edinburgh was not merely expanding; it was on the
way to transforming itself. Unable by its location to share directly in
the overseas trade, it throve on the legal business which grew out of
that trade, on the increasing demand for education which benefited both
the university and the printers and booksellers, and on the invested
profits of Scotsmen who had made money in the East or West Indies and
who settled in the capital when they retired. Until after the ’45 the
city was still packed along the ridge from Holyrood to the Castle,
its population crowded into the tall tenements which shut out the low
northern sun from the narrow wynds. Its first expansion was to the
south, in a development, near the present site of the University, on
which Burns’s father and uncle found work when they struck out for
themselves in 1750. To the north of the Old Town all was then open
country. At the foot of the Castle Rock, where the railway tracks now
run, the marshy Nor Loch still received whatever of the city’s garbage
did not remain in the streets. Burns was four years old when the
real growth of the modern city began with the building of the North
Bridge to connect the Old Town with the ridge which paralleled it to
northward. Each year thereafter saw new houses or new squares added,
but as late as 1800 the New Town still consisted only of Princes,
George, and Queen Streets from St. Andrew Square to Charlotte Square.

Until after Burns’s death the whole area, despite the Georgian dignity
and charm of its houses, retained many of the features of a new and raw
development. In particular, the valley was half choked by the hideous
Mound formed of the earth excavated in grading the New Town. The laying
out of the Princes Street Gardens and the crowning of the Mound with
the Scottish National Gallery were still far in the future--there was
even talk of a row of buildings on the south side of Princes Street
which would have blinded one of the finest city vistas in the world,
and have made the Gardens forever impossible. By 1786, when Burns
first saw Edinburgh, wealth and fashion had already deserted the Old
Town, and middle-class respectability was beginning to follow, but
the business life of the city still centred in the shops and taverns
which lined the High Street, crammed the narrow Luckenbooths which
congested traffic beside disfigured St. Giles’s, and overflowed into
all the adjacent courts and closes. Professional men transacted their
business in taverns in preference to their crowded living-quarters; all
Edinburgh was accustomed to gather at midday in the neighbourhood of
the Cross to arrange business and social appointments.

Sanitation did not exist. Water for cooking and such exiguous washing
as was done was carried by porters from the public wells to the
various flats in the tall ‘lands’; the day’s filth of the household
was collected in a tub on the landing of the stairs and at bedtime the
barefoot maid-servants emptied it out of the windows--theoretically to
be gathered up by the scavengers; actually, too often, to lie where it
fell until a rain washed it away. Even the hardy nostrils of Londoners
quailed before the marshalled stenches of Edinburgh, and travelling
Scotsmen gauged the smells of foreign cities like Lisbon by their nasal
memories of home. That children should die like flies was inevitable;
the marvel is that any survived. Deficiency diseases were as rife as
filth diseases. Rickets was taken for granted--a simile, humorous in
intent but ghastly in effect in one of Scott’s letters, gives a glimpse
of nurse-maids in Princes Street trying to compel unhappy rachitic
children to walk. Human life has always been Scotland’s cheapest
commodity. That a high degree of social and intellectual culture should
flourish amid this filth is merely another proof of human capacity for
ignoring what it is too indolent to correct.

Outside the cities, as well as in them, Scottish life was beginning
to change. Primitive agriculture in the northern kingdom, like the
sanitation of Edinburgh, seemed almost to be an effort to demonstrate
just how badly a thing could be done. The poorest sorts of oats and
barley, the scrubbiest of cattle, were raised by the worst methods. The
unfenced fields were divided by a system of ridges and ditches which
managed to combine the maximum of soil wastage with the minimum of
drainage. The ‘infield’, as this dyked portion of the farm was called,
was cultivated with ploughs so crude and awkward that they required
four horses and two men to handle them. The ‘outfield’, or pasture, was
never cultivated or manured; overrun with moss and weeds it yielded
even in summer only a scanty and unwholesome pasturage, with little if
any surplus to carry the cattle through the winter. All excess stock
was slaughtered in the fall, and for six months of the year the people
who could afford meat at all had to subsist like seamen on salt beef
and smoked mutton hams. The wretched beasts which were kept through the
winter were fed mainly on straw, and frequently by spring were so weak
and emaciated that they had to be carried to the pasture.

The owners of the cattle lived in a style which an Iroquois would have
thought primitive. Gilbert Burns resented the statement that his famous
brother was born in a hovel. The Alloway cottage, he declared, was
better than the houses then occupied by many substantial farmers. So it
was. It had a chimney, whereas in many a cottage and farmhouse, long
after Burns’s youth--Keats saw plenty of them in Ayrshire in 1818--such
of the smoke as did not enter the eyes and lungs of the tenants escaped
through the door. But even with a chimney the average farmhouse or
labourer’s cottage, with its walls of stone or rammed clay, its earthen
floor and thatched roof, and with the fire seldom built up except for
cooking, had a winter chill and dampness that bred tuberculosis in the
young and rheumatism in the old. As at Alloway, the stable was usually
under the same roof, and its reek mingled with the dampness and the
smell of unwashed humanity. An English proverb in the seventeenth
century asserted that the Scots had neither bellows, warming-pans, nor
houses of office; and that the proverb still held in the eighteenth is
proved alike by experiences of Johnson and Boswell in gentlemen’s homes
in the Highlands and by episodes in the chapbooks of Dugal Graham which
reveal the same use of the fireplace as Shakespeare records of the
inn at Rochester. Outside the door was the midden-dub or glaur-hole,
manure-heap of man and beast alike, often so surrounded with stagnant
water that the ‘rather pretty’ girl whom Keats saw standing at a
cow-house door in the Highlands, ‘fac’d all up to the ankles in
dirt’, would in the Lowlands a generation earlier have been a sight
too commonplace to excite remark. When the seepage from the midden-dub
reached the water-supply the cycle of filth and typhoid was complete.
Dead animals which could not be eaten were usually dumped into the
nearest stream, so that if the water-supply was not contaminated in one
way, it was pretty sure to be in another. But unless the animal were a
horse, it had to be very dead indeed not to be eaten. Sheep that had
died by accident or disease had a special name--‘braxies’--and were the
perquisite of the shepherds; the flesh of diseased cattle was sometimes
the only meat farm servants tasted; in Edinburgh young Henry Mackenzie
once observed two bakers of cheap ‘mutton pies’ suspiciously engaged
by night about the carcass of a horse on the bank at the back of the
Castle.

Within doors all domestic equipment was on the same primitive scale
as the housing. At meal-times the pot containing the thick oatmeal
porridge which was the staple food was placed in the centre of
the table, and each member of the family--servants included--fell
to work with his own spoon. Barley for broth was prepared on the
knocking-stone, counterpart of the Mexican _metate_. Pewter dishes
were a luxury, and crockery ones almost unknown. Wooden trenchers were
frequently used even by the clergy, and were the regular thing in
farmhouses; the milk was kept in wooden vessels so permeated with dirt
and bacteria that it soured in a few hours. The entire family lived
and ate and slept in two rooms, with sometimes a windowless loft above
as additional sleeping-quarters for the servants or some of the older
children. Every cottage had at least one box-bed built into the wall.
When the occupants retired and closed the sliding wooden doors they
enjoyed a practically airless seclusion amid their own effluvia. The
rest of the family slept on rough cots, or even straw pallets on the
floor. The popular saying, ‘The clartier [dirtier] the cosier’, was not
satire; it was just a matter-of-fact summary of rural living conditions.

In dwellings like these, where a large family was often augmented by
several servants, privacy was as impossible as in an army barrack.
Any conversation too intimate to be shouted above the uproar of
the children into the ears of a mixed audience had to be conducted
elsewhere than in the house--in the fields, if the weather permitted;
in the stable otherwise. Even so, of course, all the circumstances
leading up to the conversation were known to a large and intensely
interested group. Hence the young people, making a virtue of publicity,
took their cronies into their confidence and employed them to arrange
their trysts. Thus if James Smith beckoned Jean Armour or Betsy Miller
away from her giggling family it was fairly certain that he was making
an appointment for Rob Mossgiel and not for himself; if Burns waited
on Jenny Surgeoner it was in John Richmond’s interests and not in his
own. It was difficult to surprise, and impossible to shock by any of
the normal processes of nature, a people who lived in such conditions.
No one had to explain ‘the facts of life’ to the children of that
world; they witnessed them daily. It would almost seem that a belief in
original virtue, rather than original sin, was requisite to explain why
the moral status of the peasantry was often so much less squalid than
their physical surroundings.

As the century advanced, however, closer intercourse with England
roused ambitious landlords to attempt improvements. Trees were planted
on the hillsides and about the naked houses; the ‘infields’ were
levelled and enclosed. Yet nine-tenths of the fences in Ayrshire were
not built until after 1766, and as late as 1800 two-thirds of Fife was
still fenceless. Rotation of crops, better cultivation, artificial
grasses, more productive types of grain, were all experimented with.
Potatoes and turnips, regarded as garden luxuries in the early part
of the century, began to be grown on a large scale for human food and
stock feed respectively. John Wesley in 1780 noted that vegetables had
become as plentiful in Scotland as in England, though on his first
visit, in 1762, he had found none at all, even on noblemen’s tables.
Carts were introduced for farm work, to take the place of the ‘creels’
or panniers, in which manure had formerly been borne on horseback to
the fields, and of the rough sledges on which the sheaves had been
hauled from harvest field to stackyard. The wide use of carts, however,
had in many districts to await the improvement of the roads; in some
instances, when landlords first offered wheeled vehicles as gifts to
their tenants, they were refused because it seemed impossible to drag
them through the mud.

Some few of the improving landlords were actuated by disinterested zeal
to better living-conditions; their stubborn and superstitious peasants
were helped against their will. Many more landlords were motivated by
simple greed to improve their rent-rolls. By breaking up small holdings
occupied on short-term leases, and throwing several together, they made
more profitable farms which were rented for long terms. The consequent
evictions, however, produced an over-supply of would-be tenants whose
desperate need for land resulted in competitive bidding from those
willing to take a gambling chance on getting from the soil more than it
really had to give. If they succeeded, it was too often at the expense
of the health and strength of themselves, their children, and their
servants.

Nevertheless, so far as the improvements in methods increased the
productivity of the farms, the new developments were economically
sound. But the nation’s increasing foreign trade operated to inflate
land values. Merchants who had made money in the Indies wished to
retire, and the prestige of setting up as landed gentry combined with
the lack of sound corporate investments to bid up the value of land
in the more attractive parts of the kingdom to levels where a fair
return on the investment was possible only by rack-renting the tenants.
Burns himself, and his father before him, were victims of this
over-capitalization. They had to pay for marginal lands at rates which
would have been fair rentals for the best. And of course speculation
in land brought with it speculative banking. In Burns’s youth many of
the Ayrshire gentry were crippled or ruined outright by the failure of
the Douglas and Heron Bank, which, organized on a lavish scale, quickly
got into trouble through excessive loans on real estate. The ruined
gentry retired to the Continent, or to lodgings in Edinburgh, and their
estates were taken over by nabobs home from the Indies.

All this drama of political corruption and of social and economic
change was played against the background of the old religious life
of Scotland. Though the intellectual life of the country had never
been squalid like its physical life, it had at the beginning of the
eighteenth century become torpid. From the time of John Knox until
after the Act of Union the real government of Scotland, like that of
colonial Massachusetts, was a theocracy. The King and the powers of the
state were far off from the life of the average peasant or tradesman,
but the Kirk watched all his goings out and comings in. Not only did
it administer matters which in other times and other nations have
been regarded as spiritual concerns, but it also largely took the
place of magistrates and police. Critics of puritanism who have chosen
colonial New England as their dire example have made a mistake. They
should have chosen Scotland. Whatever the theory of church government
in New England may have been, in practice the man at odds with the
establishment suffered few real hardships beyond the loss of his vote
and a moderate amount of discriminatory taxation--provided he had
the discretion to mind his business and keep his mouth shut. But in
seventeenth-century Scotland estrangement from the church might mean
exile from the kingdom, under penalty of practical starvation if the
rebel tried to stick it out at home. Except that it lacked the power
to relax its heretics to the secular arm for mutilation or death, the
Scottish hierarchy was own brother to the Spanish Inquisition.

In every parish the Kirk Session was supposed to maintain a snooping
committee to investigate the conduct of the laity. The reckless
parishioner who desecrated the Sabbath by cooking a hot meal, by
puttering in his garden, or even by taking a walk, was haled before
the Session for discipline, and could be reinstated in the communion
only by confession of his sin and payment of a fine. For more serious
offences the penalties were proportionately heavier, unless one were
wealthy or powerful enough to cow the inquisitors. Burns had painfully
intimate knowledge of the cutty stool, or mourners’ bench, whereon
those guilty of fornication or other deadly sin had thrice to appear
before the congregation while the minister rebuked them at length and
with specific detail. Girls sometimes committed suicide or murdered
their children to escape the public shame, and the effect of the ordeal
on those who submitted was more likely to be hardening than chastening.
Many another youth besides Burns inwardly resolved thenceforth to live
up to the reputation thus fastened upon him.

The Kirk frowned upon, and tried to suppress, such secular amusements
as music and dancing. In spite of the ban, the custom of ‘penny
weddings’, whereby impecunious young couples in the rural districts
sought, by giving what was in effect a subscription ball, to raise
money enough to set them up in housekeeping, still persisted; but even
these gatherings had a slightly furtive quality, and in the stricter
homes all such things were taboo. The moral results of the policy of
repression were almost wholly bad. The older men, in default of other
relaxation, devoted themselves to drink; the younger, to the pleasures
that give its point to Burns’s simile, ‘as busy as an Edinburgh bawd on
a Sunday evening’.

Probably none but a native Scot can understand the finer points of
Scottish theology. Fortunately, however, such understanding is not
needed for a general grasp of church affairs in the eighteenth century.
Primitive Calvinism shares with Marxism the distinction of being the
most completely deterministic philosophy ever widely accepted in the
western world. All men were held to be equally sinful and equally
deserving of eternal damnation. ‘Adam as the federal representative of
the human race had determined its fate once and for all by violating
that unfortunate covenant which he and the Deity had contracted with
regard to the forbidden fruit. A vicarious sacrifice had indeed been
offered; but the power to avail themselves of this expiation was to
be communicated to only a few of the minority to whom it had been
made known; and these were to be saved to show that God was merciful,
as the rest were to be damned to show that He was just.’[1] This was
the creed of which Oliver Wendell Holmes said that any decent person
really holding it ought to go mad out of mere self-respect. And
like every other rigid system it had the effect of stultifying its
sincerest adherents. The most patriotic of historians are compelled
to recognize the general intellectual torpor of Scottish theological
and philosophical writing in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. The thinking of the clergy had been finished for them by
John Calvin and John Knox; all that remained for them to do was to
expound. No first-rate mind can subdue itself to the mere unquestioning
exposition of other men’s views without losing its edge, and few of
the parish clergy in Scotland had started with first-rate minds.
Their preaching was commonly a dreary reiteration of the doctrine of
the Four-Fold State of Man--first, Innocence or Primitive Integrity,
next Nature or Entire Depravation, then Grace or Begun Recovery, and
finally Consummate Happiness or Misery--brightened only by sadistic
imaginings of the details of eternal torment. As if these doctrinal
limitations were not sufficiently deadening, custom required that
one of the minister’s two discourses each Sunday should be preached
from his ‘ordinary’ text--which meant that he was expected to take
the same text week after week and torture it into new applications of
doctrine. If his invention failed under the strain, and he changed his
‘ordinary’ too often, zealous parishioners were likely to complain to
the Presbytery. Add to these handicaps the fact that few ministers had
money enough to buy books, even had they wished for books, and one
begins to realize why Scottish manses two hundred years ago contributed
no such leaders of national thought as were even then emerging from
English rectories.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] W. L. Mathieson: _Scotland and the Union_ (Glasgow, 1905), p. 225.

Nevertheless the tides of changing ideas stirred even the strongholds
of Calvinism. Before the seventeenth century ended Michael Wigglesworth
in Massachusetts had found himself compelled slightly to modify the
doctrine of infant damnation in the direction of human decency; in
Scotland the ‘common sense’ doctrines of the Deists penetrated during
the eighteenth century even among those who abhorred the name of Deism.
From 1729 until his death in 1746 Francis Hutcheson, as professor of
Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, expounded to steadily growing
classes his theory of the ‘moral sense’--an allegedly innate human
capacity for distinguishing right from wrong. This concept of innate
virtue as opposed to the idea of original sin rapidly gained ground
among the laity and the younger clergy of the cities, despite bitter
hostility on the part of the conservatives. Preaching began to stress
conduct rather than the will of a cruel and capricious god as the way
of salvation. A healthier and more prosperous nation was in fact
rebelling against a harsh and depressing philosophy, and the clergy
were following the lead of their congregations. By the third quarter
of the century the liberal faction, the Moderates or New Lights, were
in almost undisputed control in the metropolitan districts, though
the fundamentalists, or Old Lights, still flourished in the smaller
towns and in the rural parishes. The more rigorous extremes of kirk
discipline began to relax. Though in 1757 John Home was compelled to
resign his pulpit to escape the consequence of having written _The
Tragedy of Douglas_--to witness the early performances of which a
few of his more daring clerical brethren disguised themselves in the
garments of the laity--the ban on the theatre gradually sank into
desuetude. Even while the Edinburgh playhouse was still unlicensed,
and dramas had to be advertised as concerts of music between the parts
of which the play of the evening would be presented gratis, it became
possible for ministers to attend the performances openly.

But the warfare of New Lights versus Old was not conducted wholly in
the realm of ideas. The fact that the more influential laity were early
converts to the new doctrines brought into the struggle politics in
its most worldly form. In parishes where the local magnates exercised
the right of presenting the minister, New Light candidates had the
preference. Hence it was the New Lights’ interest to uphold the right
of patronage against the congregation’s democratic claim to elect its
own minister. The supporters of patronage triumphed in the election
of William Robertson as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1763; the
result made the church almost as much a part of the spoils system as
the government was, and gave its leadership into the hands of supple
ecclesiastical politicians. In consequence the spread of New Light
doctrine went hand in hand with a steady decline in the moral influence
of the clergy, while schisms and secessions sapped the organization.
Because the Kirk was morally as well as intellectually bankrupt the
laughter of Burns’s satires shook it to its foundations. To the
church of John Knox such ridicule would have meant no more than a
mosquito means to an elephant. Burns’s Edinburgh friends were right in
maintaining that the conduct and doctrines which he attacked would have
disappeared in another generation without his aid; what neither they
nor he could foresee was that in 1843 it would be the Old Light clergy
who would restore moral leadership to the ministry by daring to give up
their livings for conscience’ sake.

Behind the New Light doctrines expounded by Hutcheson and his
followers lay of course the ideas of such English Deists as Locke
and Shaftesbury. Strong convictions on philosophical and theological
questions were going out of fashion; like Franklin in America the New
Light Scots had persuaded themselves that enlightened self-interest,
sweet reasonableness and common sense, were attainable goals for
mankind at large, and could be trusted to solve problems of morals and
economics alike. And this English influence in the field of theology
and philosophy was typical of the entire range of literary expression
in Scotland. The national inferiority complex showed itself most
plainly of all in the realm of words.

Historically the Scottish language is to English what Provençal is
to French and Catalan to Spanish--an ancient and independent local
dialect which had developed its own literature at least as early as had
the more central region which afterwards took the lead. The speech of
Lowland Scotland was the direct descendant of that Northumbrian dialect
of Old English which Bede and Caedmon spoke. Throughout the Middle Ages
and the early Renaissance Scotland maintained amid her poverty as rich
a literary tradition as England did. In fact, from the death of Chaucer
until the beginning of the Elizabethan era the student of British
literature must look north of the Tweed to find, in the writings of
King James I, Robert Henryson, Gawain Douglas and William Dunbar,
anything worthy the name of poetry. The decay of Scots as a literary
language was started by the Reformation and finished by the Union. By
introducing the Geneva version of the English Bible the Reformation
made Southern English the language of the church, in idiom if not in
pronunciation. The accession of James VI to the English throne made
Southern English also the language of the court. King James himself
wrote in Scots; his subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote in
English. Drummond’s example was followed by all the prose writers and
most of the poets of Scotland from his day to ours. After the Union
even the poets who used Scots did so consciously and not because such
expression was wholly spontaneous.

Of these poets, Allan Ramsay, whose productive period covers roughly
the three decades from 1711 to 1740, was the most popular. And Scots
poetry, as practised by Ramsay and by his friend and contemporary
William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, tended more and more to what
Samuel Johnson would have described as the easy and vulgar, and
therefore the disgusting. Their work exhibits humour, and something
of the conversational quality of the familiar essay, but dignity
and deep poetic emotion are notably absent. Moreover, the dialect
in which they wrote tended more and more to become a synthetic and
standardized language, embodying words and idioms common to a large
section of southern Scotland but without firm roots in any one region.
The Aberdeenshire dialect used by Alexander Ross in his _Helenore_
is almost the last fresh transcription of the speech of a definite
section of the country. Written Scots was rapidly becoming what
nineteenth-century English and American authors made other dialects--a
semi-literary vernacular employed for humorous effect or for an
affectation of colloquial ease. Even Burns himself at times gave
artificial Scottish flavour to his verse by using English idioms in
Scottish spelling. Since the end of the eighteenth century no writer
of Scots verse has succeeded in introducing any new elements. At its
best, such writing sounds like imitations of Burns; at its worst, like
imitations of his imitators.

But when Burns came before the public even this conventionalized
literary Scots seemed on the point of extinction. Though Ramsay’s
_Tea-Table Miscellany_--which included many purely English verses--was
still popular as a song-book, the rest of his work was neglected.
Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s recension of Blind Harry’s _History of
Sir William Wallace_ was no more than a story-book for children. The
unhappy Robert Fergusson, starved and neglected, had ended his life
in a madhouse, and fashionable Edinburgh, glancing askance at his
satirical verses, said it served him right. Ramsay was a crude homespun
figure of the generation in which Thomson by writing _The Seasons_
had given his countrymen a poem which they could show to Englishmen
without blushing; ‘The Daft Days’ and the rest of Fergusson’s work was
little better than a national disgrace when set beside the beauties
of James Beattie’s _Minstrel_. Nevertheless there still underlay the
new fashions a literary tradition which most of the anglicizing gentry
scorned or ignored. An oral Scottish literature was still alive,
though it was soon to perish when its lovers smothered it by writing
it down. Percy’s _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_, which first
gave highbrow sanction to the popular ballads of Scotland and northern
England, were not published until Burns was six years old, and even
Percy only scratched the surface of this rich deposit. Throughout the
century scores of ballads still circulated by oral tradition which had
never been recorded in writing, and in these the genuine spirit of the
Scottish language flourished without concession to fashionable English.

Even more important than the ballads for the training of a poet like
Burns were the folk-songs. The Scots had always been a musical people,
and despite the opposition of the stricter clergy traditional songs
or airs for almost every human occasion were known to everyone, high
or low. The tradition, moreover, was still very much alive. Scottish
song gave the nation its revenge for the military humiliations of the
’45. The taunting lilt of ‘Hey, Johnie Cope, are ye waukin yet?’ could
be relied on to remind English garrisons of the inglorious conduct of
their fellow soldiers at Prestonpans, and all Scotland’s contempt for
the Hanoverian kings and their mistresses went into the ribaldry of
‘The Sow’s Tail to Geordie’. Even so, only a fraction of the popular
songs had any political bearing. More of them were convivial; many more
of them erotic. Every phase of sexual love from the crudest bawdry
to idyllic beauty found some expression in verse--the latter, it
must be confessed, more rarely and less effectively than the former.
Yet these crude songs, interesting mainly for the surprising variety
and ingenuity of their erotic symbolism, were the raw material--raw
in more than one sense--from which Burns wrought such lyrics as ‘My
Love is like a red red rose’, ‘John Anderson’, and ‘Coming thro’ the
rye’. While Burns was still a lad, David Herd, a retiring antiquary
in Edinburgh, began the systematic collection of this folk poetry on
so large a scale and with such a complete absence of prudery that it
was not until the twentieth century that the whole of his manuscript
collection was printed. He had himself published in 1776 two volumes of
what he considered the best work. At the same time musicians like James
Oswald and Neil Gow were collecting the airs of Highlands and Lowlands
alike. The singing of the old songs, with or without instrumental
accompaniment, was a favourite pastime in Scottish drawing rooms, and
even unliterary folk would frequently feel moved to compose new words
to some well-liked melody.

Alongside this honest love of native things, whether expressed in a
girl’s singing at her harpsichord or in David Herd’s careful recording
of old words, another literature was growing up of imitation, forgery,
and ‘improvement’. It had become a literary convention for every
composer of an imitation ballad to offer it to the public as a copy
from an ancient manuscript. Though a few of these imitations, like the
‘Hardyknute’ of Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, were close enough to the spirit
of folk literature to deceive even experts, the mass of them were so
mawkish and verbose as to bring the term ‘Scottish poetry’ to the verge
of contempt. Primacy in these qualities, as in popularity, belonged to
James Macpherson’s alleged translations of the poems of Ossian--a work
passionately defended by the Scots because it depicted their savage
ancestors as a trifle more chivalrous and vastly more sentimental than
Bayard or Sidney, admired on the Continent because it supported the
current delusion about the nobility of man in a state of nature, and
cherished by Napoleon Bonaparte as one of the simple pleasures which
appeal to the enterprising burglar in his hours of relaxation.

But the harm done to traditional literature by imitations and forgeries
was trivial compared with that inflicted by some of those people who
professed to admire it. In the latter part of the eighteenth century
the teaching of music in Edinburgh had passed largely into the hands
of foreigners. Names like Domenico Corri, Pietro Urbani, and Theodor
Schetki are as prevalent on title-pages as their owners were on the
concert stage, and under this Italianate influence many traditional
melodies were ‘harmonized’ and ‘improved’ until all their native vigour
was lost in empty flourishes. And as with the music, so with the
words. ‘Correct’ and sentimentalized lyrics were substituted for the
sturdy old words, remained in use long enough to push the latter into
oblivion, and then, their novelty gone, themselves sank into disuse and
dragged the music with them.

This effort to refine the national heritage of music was merely one
phase of the whole sense of provincial inferiority which afflicted
Scotland. Italian music and English literature, speech, and manners,
were the ideals towards which genteel Scots strained. National pride
in James Thomson and John Home exulted more in the fact that they
wrote English acceptable in England than in their use of Scottish
materials. Even the devastating scepticism of David Hume was forgiven
him because he had almost purified his language of Scotticisms. When
Johnson ridiculed Hume’s English Boswell writhed in agony, and was
correspondingly elated when the dictator praised Blair’s sermons and
was moved to tears by Beattie’s _Minstrel_.

When Thomas Sheridan came to Edinburgh in 1761 to give a course of
lectures on elocution, ‘he was patronized by the professors in the
College, by several of the clergy, by the most eminent among the
gentlemen at the bar, by the judges of the Court of Session, and by all
who at that time were the leaders of public taste’.

Thenceforward, ‘correct pronunciation and elegant reading’ were
reckoned ‘indispensable acquirements for people of fashion and for
public speakers’. In other words, these people of fashion, like Francis
Jeffrey on his return from Oxford, gave up the broad Scots in return
for the narrow English. In the very year of the Kilmarnock _Poems_, Sir
John Sinclair of Ulbster, one of the most public-spirited Scots of his
generation, brought out a two-hundred-page volume of _Observations on
the Scottish Dialect_. His purpose was not to preserve but to destroy
his native speech. His book is a comprehensive index expurgatorius
of all the words, phrases, and idioms a Scotsman must avoid--many
of them today a part of the standard speech of the United States,
and even of England. Thus, ‘best man’ is a Scotticism for ‘bride’s
man’; ‘hairdresser’ is to be preferred to ‘barber’; ‘sore eyes’ is
a vulgarism; ‘whisky’ should be called ‘usquebae’ or ‘aquavitae’.
‘Heather’ and ‘peat’ and ‘bracken’ are condemned along with ‘mittens’
and ‘kindling’; it betrays provincial origin to ask if a friend is in,
or if he has gone out walking. ‘It is, indeed, astonishing,’ says Sir
John, ‘how uncouth, and often how unintelligible, Scotch words and
phrases are to an inhabitant of London, and how much it exposes such
as make use of them, to the derision of those with whom they happen to
have any communication or intercourse.’ However, he adds, a Scot should
choose carefully even from the speech of London. ‘Cockney phrases a
Scotchman is very apt to get into when he makes his first appearance
in London. And when he can easily and fluently bring out, _this here
thing_, and _that there thing_, for _this_ or _that thing_; _I knode_,
for _I knew_; _on it_, for _of it_, as, _I heard on it_; _grass_, for
_asparagus_; _your’n_ and _his’n_, for _yours_ and _his_, he fancies
himself a complete Englishman.’

The anglicizing mania extended even to people’s names. David Malloch,
when he crossed the Border, changed his name to Mallet; John Murray
the publisher was originally M’Murray, as his predecessor, Millan,
had been Macmillan; William Almack, the proprietor of the famous
assembly-rooms in London, had started life as M’Caul. One of Burns’s
own friends, James M’Candlish, dropped the prefix when he entered
Glasgow University, and became simply Candlish. Even today, in spite
of Burns, the anglicizing process continues: the visitor in Ayr, for
instance, will find the street-signs pointing him to the ‘New Bridge’
and the ‘Old Bridge’.

By 1780 Scotland could afford to smile at Johnson’s dictum that her
northern lights were only farthing candles. In literature at least
she could face English competition on equal terms. James Thomson had
become a classic; Adam Smith and Hume and Robertson had demonstrated
that the north could more than hold its own with the south in history
and philosophy; Mackenzie’s lachrymose _Man of Feeling_ disputed with
_The Vicar of Wakefield_ the claim to be the most popular short novel
of the century. In Edinburgh a _Scots Magazine_ was emulating the
methods and materials of the English _Gentleman’s Magazine_, though
when Mackenzie and his friends tried, first in _The Mirror_ and later
in _The Lounger_, to produce a Scottish _Spectator_ they found the
city not metropolitan enough to support such an enterprise. Many
people took anything sharp in the way of satire as a personal attack,
but namby-pamby was not read, and so between poverty of material and
poverty of support the journals’ straw-fire flickered and went out.

But while the poor relations of England were thus looking forward
hopefully to the day when their speech and writing should no longer
betray their provincial origin, the social life of the country changed
more slowly. The gentry added silks and laces to their clothing, and
tea and other luxuries to their tables, but felt no special urgency for
greater cleanliness. George Dempster, fresh from a visit to Brussels
in 1756, was shocked to find that a baronet’s son of his acquaintance
had been calling on a lady of title ‘in a valet de chamber’s frock
and an unpowdered brown greezy head’. Even at the beginning of the
nineteenth century the inhabitants of a Highland mansion, though they
had got beyond the point where they were satisfied to give themselves
‘a “good wash” on Sundays, and make that do for the week’, found
their domestic routine upset by a guest who not only insisted on a
daily bath but refused to go to the river to take it. Servants in the
better houses were provided with shoes and stockings, but the general
standards of neatness were still so low as to make the cleanliness of
Holland a constant source of wonder to the visiting Scot.

But the aping of English manners had not yet undermined the traditional
Scottish democracy of intercourse. Though the barriers which divided
gentleman from commoner were fully as strong in Scotland as they were
in England, they were not so visible. If many of the gentry lacked
wealth, they did not lack pedigree, and a plebeian could rarely hope
to cross the boundary that excluded him from social equality. Nobles
married with nobles, and lairds with lairds. Yet until the end of
the century the sons of nobles, lairds, and ploughmen commonly began
their education together in the village school, where boy-fashion they
took each other at face-value without regard to rank. The result was
an almost total absence among the lower classes of that servility
which was bred into their compeers in England. Only as more and more
of the sons of gentlemen were sent to English public schools did the
old system decay, and some of the gentry begin to compensate for the
inferiority they had been made to feel in the presence of the English
by assuming a haughty air with their humbler countrymen.

In short, all that had distinguished Scotland as a nation was on the
way to oblivion. Literature, language, manners, and institutions
were being anglicized as fast as a people roused to uneasy
self-consciousness could manage it. In 1786 it seemed evident that
when the former things passed away it would be into the darkness in
which men and nations prefer to bury the ruder and more discreditable
features of their early days. That the memory of the discarded heritage
should be embalmed as a precious possession, and that the old world
should be forever surrounded by the romantic glory of a golden sunset
was due more to Robert Burns than to any other person. He made the
Scots conscious of the richness of their national tradition. He could
not restore it to life, but he taught his people to cherish its ruins.




II

EDUCATION


Robert Burns was nearly nine years old before anything revealing
his personality impressed his family enough to make them remember
it. Unreliable tradition has it that he was a puny infant; slightly
better evidence shows him as a nervous and temperamental child,
alternating between wild high spirits and moody sullenness. Once, it
is said, Robert hid in a cupboard when he and his schoolmates were
frolicking. The master in restoring order struck the door a resounding
blow with his tawse, and the nervous shock threw the child into such
uncontrollable hysterical sobs that he had to be sent home. But the
most devout worshipper would have trouble in discerning a future poet
in so undifferentiated an episode. It is easier to do so in Gilbert
Burns’s story of what happened at Mount Oliphant one evening in 1768.

John Murdoch the schoolmaster had got a better post, and was paying
a farewell visit to the parents of two of his promising pupils. As a
parting gift, he brought a copy of _Titus Andronicus_. Beginning to
read the play aloud, he soon came to the scene where her ravishers
taunt the mutilated Lavinia. The children, in an agony of tears,
implored him to read no more; whereupon their father dryly remarked
that in that case there was no use in Murdoch’s leaving the book.
Robert exclaimed fiercely that if it was left, he would burn it.
Murdoch warded off the father’s rebuke by commending the display of so
much sensibility, though he failed, then or later, to explain why he
considered _Titus Andronicus_ suitable reading for children. _The Man
of Feeling_ was not yet written, but ‘sensibility’ was already a word
of power, and Robert Burns was already displaying the stormy emotions
which were his to the grave.

Murdoch’s farewell marked the end of Burns’s elementary schooling, but
the education of a boy reared as he was cannot be appraised in terms
of mere schooling. If it could, the whole story might be told in a few
paragraphs. Burns’s real education came from his family, from what the
world taught him, and from what he taught himself. His schooling was
incidental.

The poet once had the curiosity to visit the Herald’s Office in
Edinburgh, only to discover that ‘Gules, Purpure, Argent, &c., quite
disowned’ him--no man of his name had ever borne coat armour. The
nearest he could come to it was ‘Burn’. Inquiry into his ancestry is
fruitless, because nothing in his ancestry explains Burns, any more
than the dull line of squires into which he was born can explain
Shelley, or a London livery-stable Keats. Burns’s family produced no
genius before him; it produced none after him. It is enough to record
that William Burnes, the poet’s father, came of peasant stock from the
eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The poet cherished the belief that some
of his forebears had been out in the ’Fifteen in the train of George
Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, but documentary proof is lacking. The
poet’s grandfather, Robert Burnes, farmed, apparently with indifferent
success, in Kincardineshire, first on the farm of Kinmonth, in
Glenbervie, and later at Clochnahill, Dunnottar. Robert Burnes’s second
farming venture having failed in 1747, his son William (born 1721) set
out in the following year with his younger brother, Robert, to seek
work.

William Burnes had had some training as a gardener, and found his
first employment in Edinburgh. By 1750, however, he was in Ayrshire,
where, after brief service on two other estates, he finally entered
the service of Provost William Fergusson, laird of Doonholm in Alloway
parish. These frequent moves were not wholly the result of unsettled
labour conditions. Pride and self-assertiveness handicap the man doomed
to subordination, and these traits William Burnes possessed in full
measure. ‘Stubborn, ungainly Integrity’, said Burns of his father, ‘and
headlong, ungovernable Irascibility are disqualifying circumstances’.
William Burnes needed to be his own master, and in 1757 managed to
‘feu’ (lease in perpetuity) seven acres of land a few hundred yards
north of the ruined old Kirk of Alloway.

Besides longing for a farm of his own, William Burnes wanted a wife
and a home. Seven acres of market-garden, supplemented by continued
part-time employment at Doonholm, made marriage possible. With his
own hands he raised the rammed-clay walls of a cottage on his land--a
cottage which his younger son declared, with more emphasis than the
timid Gilbert usually permitted himself, to be ‘such as no family of
the same rank, in the present improved style of living, would think
themselves ill lodged in’. From without, the whitewashed walls and
thatched roof of the ‘clay biggin’ were picturesque enough; within, it
was damp, dark, and narrow, and smelly withal, for the byre and stable
were under the same roof of rat-infested thatch. But such rural Scots
as lived to grow up in those days were inured to dampness, smells, and
vermin, and it was probably with unmixed pride that William Burnes and
his wife set up housekeeping in December, 1757.

The bridegroom was ‘advanced in life’; he was in fact almost as old
when he married as his famous son was when he died. His red-haired
bride, twelve years his junior, was Agnes Broun of Kirkoswald. The
daughter of a small farmer, she had been accustomed from childhood
to the life of toil which marriage intensified. Her girlhood as
housekeeper for her widowed father and manager of his younger children
had given plenty of domestic training, but formal education was too
great a luxury for girls; the mother of Scotland’s greatest poet was
never able to write her own name. She had, however, a sort of literary
education more valuable for her son than savouring at first hand the
dullness of Boston’s _Fourfold State_ could have been. Blessed with
a sense of humour, a retentive memory, and a keen ear, the girl had
stored her mind with a wealth of ballads, folk-songs, and country
sayings which later became an integral part of her son’s thought and
art. The seeds of the poet’s imagination and wit were his mother’s;
William Burnes’s most conspicuous contribution to his son’s character
was his fierce and prickly pride.

A little more than thirteen months after his parents’ marriage, on
January 25, 1759, Robert Burns was born. The Scottish winter was doing
its worst--‘a blast o’ Janwar’ win’ blew handsel in on Robin’. In other
words, a few days after the poet’s birth a wild Atlantic gale tore out
part of the clay gable of the cottage where it had settled unevenly
round the stone jambs of the chimney. Mother and baby had to be carried
through the storm to a neighbour’s house, where they sheltered until
the damage could be repaired. To Burns in later years the incident
seemed an augury of his own stormy life. The world had begun to
educate him to its harshness almost before he knew that he was in it.
Fortunately he had a father who was determined that his children should
also have an education in the more conventional sense.

Though Scotland theoretically provided a free school in every parish,
the usual gap separated theory and practice. Sometimes there was no
school at all; often the school was an unsanitary hovel presided over
by a master who was expected to live on a salary of perhaps ten or
fifteen pounds a year, and who therefore was constantly driven to
desperate shifts to provide for himself and his family. John Wilson of
Tarbolton, for instance, the victim of ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’, tried
to eke out his meagre earnings by starting a little grocery shop in his
cottage, and in 1790 was ready to undertake the drudgery of a legal
copyist in Edinburgh in order to better his condition. After the close
of the century, when every parish was ordered by Act of Parliament
to provide its schoolmaster with a house of at least two rooms, some
lairds objected to erecting ‘palaces for dominies’. And even when a
parish had a decent schoolhouse and a competent teacher, bad roads and
lack of conveyance often made it impossible for children from outlying
farms to reach it.

When William Burnes built his cottage at Alloway the fact that there
was no school nearer than Ayr would scarcely have worried him. His own
book-learning was sketchy, his writing cramped and laborious, though
his speech was more precise and ‘better English’ than that of most
of his neighbours. But he was devoutly religious, and cherished the
sound Presbyterian conviction that first-hand acquaintance with the
Scriptures was essential to knowledge in this world and salvation in
the next. By the time his eldest son was six years old the father,
conscious of his own inadequacy as a teacher, arranged with half a
dozen neighbours to hire a master of their own. Their choice fell on
John Murdoch, a solemn and pedantic youth of eighteen, who in mentality
somewhat resembled Ichabod Crane. For wages of about sixpence a day
and his board--which meant a share of the oatmeal and kail and part of
a bed in each crowded cottage in turn--Murdoch undertook to instruct
his charges, not without tears, in the three R’s and also in such
elementary music as would enable them to sing the Psalms of David in
metre at family worship.

In this latter accomplishment he found Robert Burns, who in manhood
was able to remember and distinguish in all their subtle variations
hundreds of folk melodies, an almost hopeless pupil with a harsh and
untuneable voice. At the task of beating into the future poet the
elements of spelling, grammar, and syntax he was more successful.
Instruction in reading was based largely on a volume of extracts
compiled by another Scottish schoolmaster named Arthur Masson--good
enough literature for the most part, but too declamatory to be really
within the grasp of a six- or seven-year-old intelligence. Robert’s
first conscious realization of poetic experience came from Addison’s
hymn, ‘How are Thy servants blest, O Lord’: he also memorized the ‘Fall
of Cardinal Wolsey’ and other set pieces so thoroughly that throughout
his life their phrases came unbidden from his pen. If Murdoch found
difficulty in making the children understand the poetic merits of
Hamlet’s soliloquies or of long passages from Home’s _Tragedy of
Douglas_, he at least convinced some of them that poetry had meaning.
One of his favourite exercises was making them paraphrase poetry
into straight-forward prose--a device which his most famous pupil
subsequently employed in exposing bad grammar in a female admirer’s
verses.

Murdoch was not the man to set a poetic child’s imagination on fire,
and since he applied the usual schoolmasterly standard of judging
the pupils according to their docility, it is hardly surprising that
he found the timid and gentle Gilbert a more promising lad than his
brother. In any case, Murdoch’s service was too brief to have much
permanent influence on Burns’s mind. Before the master had completed
his tenure of about two years and a half at Alloway, William Burnes
had removed to Mount Oliphant farm, separated from the school by two
miles of sodden road which must have made regular attendance difficult,
and sometimes impossible. Yet the master retained a sort of puzzled
affection for the boy whom he was too prosaic to understand, and Burns
reciprocated the feeling with real respect and esteem. Murdoch, in the
schoolroom and in the long evenings in what he called the argillaceous
fabric or mud domicile at Alloway, had at least impressed the lesson
that books had meaning and that words should be used with precision.
That Burns in later life never had any difficulty in saying precisely
what he meant, he probably owed at root to Murdoch’s severe drill; that
his style of saying it was frequently much too formal he likewise owed
to the dominie and to the prose selections of Arthur Masson.

The earliest stages of book education are seldom important in shaping
the maturity of the learner. They only furnish him with a few tools
which he may later apply in his own way to his own ends. But with
Burns the whole pressure of his formal education was all his life in
direct conflict with his instinctive preferences. For John Murdoch,
as for Arthur Masson, Scottish vernacular literature did not exist.
Scottish writers like James Thomson and John Home, who had made
reputations in England by writing in standard English, were admired
to the far side of idolatry, but for Scottish youths, as for English,
Pope was the model for poetry; the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ for prose.
Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden were the only writers earlier than 1700
who were widely read and unreservedly admired, though the beginnings of
romanticism were evoking some lip-service to Spenser. If Chaucer was
read at all, it was in the modernizations and imitations of Dryden,
Pope, and Prior; the Elizabethan and Caroline lyrists were safe sources
for newspaper poets to steal from, as Sterne stole from Burton. By
modern standards, the amount of native literature needed in order to
appear well-read was limited, but its very limitation intensified its
pressure. Poverty kept Burns from the influence, for good or ill, of
the classics; nothing could preserve anyone, who read at all, from the
influence of the neo-classics. Outside the door the rich vernacular
literature of Scotland was still vigorously alive, but no schoolmaster
in Burns’s boyhood would have dreamed of letting it in.

This literature, indeed, was being steadily thrust further out of the
cultivated world. Two years before the poet’s father was born, Lady
Elizabeth Wardlaw had written the ballad fragment of ‘Hardyknute’ with
genuine folk skill; in the next generation such interest as remained
was contaminated with literary sophistication. The gentlefolk of
William Burnes’s generation could no longer write true ballads, but
they could and did write true folk-songs, as witness Jean Elliot’s
‘Flowers of the Forest’, Alison Cockburn’s ‘I’ve seen the smiling
of Fortune beguiling’, and John Skinner’s ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John
o’ Badenyon’. The gentlefolk of Robert Burns’s generation had lost
this power too. Burns was six years old when Percy’s _Reliques_
inaugurated the serious study of popular literature and let loose the
spate of forgery and imitation of which Macpherson’s _Ossian_ was the
most brilliant success. The national will to believe in Macpherson’s
fabrication was proof alike against the scorn of Dr. Johnson and the
learning of antiquaries. To many Scots besides Burns Ossian was the
‘prince of poets’, to be read and admired as a patriotic duty, even if
few of his vague and turgid phrases could be remembered long enough to
quote. And what Macpherson did on the grand scale ballad ‘editors’ like
John Pinkerton were doing on a small one, debasing even their genuine
material with sentimental trash which blinded many readers to the
merits of a really honest and accurate editor like David Herd.

But all this activity, alike of forgery and of honest collecting,
never touched Burns in his formative years. In the boy’s world the
folk literature which David Herd was recording was still alive. It is
a favourite fallacy of the half-educated to identify book-learning
with education. The things which made the mind and the art of Burns
did not come from John Murdoch, but from people whom Murdoch no
doubt patronized in his most schoolmasterful style. Agnes Broun
was illiterate, but she was not ignorant. Like most intelligent
illiterates, she had cultivated her memory, storing it with the pithy
sayings which sum up generations of folk experience, and with the words
and music of scores of old songs and ballads. These simple rhythms,
sung as she went about her work, sank into her son’s mind without his
knowing it. Years afterwards some chance association would recall an
old line or stanza of his mother’s to supply the ‘starting note’ for
a song of his own. And her repertoire was powerfully supplemented by
old Betty Davidson’s, who ‘had the largest collection in the county of
tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches,
warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths,
apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other
trumpery’. To these tales, listened to with delighted shudders, he
ascribed the first awakening of his imagination, even though some
of them scared him so thoroughly that their effect stayed with him
into manhood. No doubt many a gentleman’s son heard similar stories
from nurses and servants, but formal classical education effectually
smothered any idea of putting them to literary use. Sir Walter
Scott was almost the first child of the upper ranks to realize his
folk-heritage, and probably he owed much of his freedom to do so to
the interruption of his scholastic training. Ill-health saved him from
formalism, as poverty saved Burns.

Burns’s acquaintance with popular and traditional literature was not,
however, limited to what he heard at home. The eighteenth century
was the heyday of the chapbook and the broadside--forms of popular
literature resulting from the spread of literacy among the middle and
lower classes, which were finally swept away by the newspaper. In
Burns’s childhood every peddler’s pack contained an assortment ranging
from topical songs and reports of the death and dying words of the
latest criminal to abridgements of old histories and romances. Even the
poorest labourer could afford the penny or two these publications cost,
and they passed from hand to hand until they were worn out. William
Hamilton of Gilbertfield’s modernization of Blind Harry’s _History of
Sir William Wallace_, which so roused Burns’s boyish patriotism, may
have reached the lad in chapbook form; the Life of Hannibal which he
also mentions was almost certainly a chapbook; he was familiar from his
earliest years with such ephemera as ‘The Aberdeen Almanac’ and ‘Six
Excellent New Songs’. But he nowhere mentions another group of writings
which he assuredly read.

Only a few years before Burns was born, Dugal Graham, the hunchbacked
bellman of Glasgow, began publishing a series of Scottish chapbooks.
Their popularity was enormous; total sales are alleged to have run
into the hundreds of thousands. The most pretentious of Graham’s
works was a metrical history of the ’45; the most characteristic were
the humorous prose tales such as ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, ‘The
Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman’, and ‘The Comical Sayings of
Paddy from Cork’. These chaps were made up of traditional anecdotes of
a broadly comic sort, loosely strung together but supplied by Graham
with the local colour of Scottish peasant life. Much of Graham’s
material had a long history; coarse jests which go back at least as
far as Chaucer; folk-tales of unquenchable vitality, such as the one
on which Synge long afterwards based _The Shadow of the Glen_; quaint
figures of speech and wild exaggerations, some of which crossed the
Atlantic to become the progenitors of the American ‘tall story’. The
peasant world as Graham depicted it was tough and crude and unlovely,
but full of a coarse vitality which enlivened even the baldest passages
of Graham’s prose and which at its best expressed itself in pungent
phrases remembered and used by Burns, probably long after he had
forgotten their source. The most indecorous stanza in ‘Holy Willie’s
Prayer’ is based on a phrase from ‘Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship’, as is
a similar stanza in ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook’.

But the peasant life of Scotland, however squalid its physical
circumstances as Dugal Graham portrayed them, had a variety of interest
unknown to the modern dweller in a city slum. When the technique of all
the varied crafts necessary to rural life had to be learned by example
and oral tradition, the whole process of living was an education.
Almost as soon as they were able to walk the children began to take
their part in the work of the farm. At the age of six or thereabouts
the boys would be helping to guide the four-horse team which dragged
the clumsy plough; not long afterwards they began to share in reaping,
threshing, and winnowing, besides doing the innumerable and endless
small chores of the farm. These tasks, with all their accompanying
observations of plants and animals, of weather and seasons, were
stronger influences on Burns than John Murdoch was. No poet has
revealed a closer or more accurate knowledge of nature; no poet, it
may be added, had less of romantic enthusiasm for pure scenery. Burns
knew nature as the peasant and the savage knows it, as something on
which his health and prosperity and his very life depend. Readers who
are surprised that Burns spent much of his youth in sight of the noble
peaks of Arran without ever mentioning them in his verse simply fail to
understand the realism of the peasant’s point of view. It was not the
dalesmen who won a hard living from valley farms or kept their sheep on
the bleak mountainsides who found the poetry in the Lake District. Had
Burns been reared on Loch Lomond or at Aberfoyle it would have made no
difference; he would have been too busy trying to wring a living from
the soil to note the scenery. That had to wait for Sir Walter Scott,
who had nothing to do but admire it. Even when he had won fame and had
consciously accepted his vocation as a national poet Burns paid only
lip-service to scenery as scenery. For him it was merely background
for human figures, preferably female. The spots which really stirred
his emotions were those with associations of history or song--Cawdor
Castle, the field of Bannockburn, Elibanks and Elibraes, the Bush aboon
Traquair. And the fact that so many of the folk-songs of Scotland
celebrate the streams whose valleys were the only fertile spots may
have fostered the love for running water repeatedly expressed in his
poetry, as it certainly roused him to do for the streams of Ayrshire
what his anonymous forerunners had done for the streams of the Border.

Not all the boy’s education, however, was thus casual and informal.
When his removal from Alloway to Mount Oliphant made it impossible for
his sons to continue regular schooling William Burnes procured a few
textbooks such as Guthrie’s _Geographical Grammar_ and Stackhouse’s
_History of the Bible_ for their instruction. Despite the burden of
farm work the father managed at times to set regular lessons to be
conned at evening by the light of the kitchen fire or a tallow dip.
Robert and Gilbert helped to teach their younger brothers and sisters
to read and write; their own lessons included the use of a brief
religious catechism which their father had himself prepared with
Murdoch’s help, for William Burnes was a devout man. Even in boyhood
Burns, said Gilbert, was a reader when he could get books. He read
whatever he could get his hands on, however dull or ponderous it might
be, from theology to poetry. His own lists in his autobiography, highly
selective though they are, are proof enough. His first knowledge of
classical mythology, for instance, came from Andrew Tooke’s _Pantheon_,
an appallingly dull and didactic outline of Greek and Roman religion.
He never had Keats’s good fortune in discovering the Elizabethans:
his Homer was Pope’s and not Chapman’s. But he reached manhood with a
working knowledge of history and geography, a keen interest in current
affairs, and an acquaintance with literature which, though spotty, was
the more detailed because of its relatively narrow limits.

William Burnes’s effort to educate his children at home was part of
a family struggle which became one of the strongest influences in
forming his son’s character. The usual destiny of the children in a
peasant family was to be hired out at the age of ten or twelve as farm
servants. This fate, with its breaking of ties, cessation of schooling,
and frequent moral danger, William Burnes was determined to avoid
if possible. He was a stern father, but an affectionate one. John
Murdoch remembered his wrath at a labourer’s ‘smutty innuendoes’, and
his children knew that carelessness in word or deed would be sharply
rebuked. But they likewise remembered many acts of wordless affection,
as when during a thunderstorm the father came to sit with his daughter
Agnes because he knew she would be frightened.

When it became evident that the few acres at Alloway could not continue
to support his growing family, William Burnes rented from his old
employer, Provost Fergusson, the larger farm of Mount Oliphant. Gilbert
Burns, who seldom used superlatives, declared that Mount Oliphant was
almost the poorest land he had ever seen in cultivation. Yet for its
seventy bleak and stony acres William Burnes undertook to pay £40 a
year for the first six years of his lease, and £45 for the next six.
It may not be too uncharitable to assume that the Provost saw in the
tenancy of the stubbornly independent Burnes a chance to get a poor
farm raised to a better level of cultivation. At any rate he showed
his confidence in his tenant by advancing a hundred pounds towards
stocking the place. Without this help the venture would probably have
been impossible; nevertheless it saddled the family with an additional
load of debt. The weight of the burden can be realized from the fact
that in the 1770’s in nearby Clydesdale twopence a dozen was a fair
price for eggs, and chickens sold for sixpence a pair. Despite all
handicaps, however, things went fairly well for the first half of the
lease. In 1771 the family failed to take advantage of their privilege
of relinquishing the farm, and accordingly were committed to another
six years at an increased rental. Then began the series of disasters
which ultimately killed William Burnes and permanently undermined the
health of his eldest son.

Just at the onset of these dark days William Burnes, vexed at his
children’s bad handwriting, managed to send Robert and Gilbert, turn
about, to Dalrymple parish school for instruction in penmanship and
grammar, that they might be better qualified to teach their brothers
and sisters. By the following summer (1773), John Murdoch had returned
to Ayr and Robert was spared from the farm for three weeks’ additional
tutoring. The lad clutched at the opportunity like a famished man at
food. He was with Murdoch ‘day and night, in school, at all meals, and
in all [his] walks’. At the end of the first week, Murdoch says, ‘I
told him, that as he was now pretty much master of the parts of speech,
&c., I should like to teach him something of French pronunciation;
... and immediately we attacked the French with great courage. Now,
there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the
conjugation of verbs, &c. When walking together, and even at meals, I
was constantly telling him the names of different objects, ... so that
he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases.
In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it
was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business;
and about the end of the second week of our study of the French, we
began to read a little of the _Adventures of Telemachus_ in Fénelon’s
own words.’ How much French Murdoch really knew is doubtful, though
he later undertook to teach it in London, and apparently secured
some pupils until the Revolution filled the city with refugees who
captured the market. Burns ultimately acquired a reading knowledge of
the language, but if his riming ‘_respectueuse_’ with ‘Susie’ is a
specimen of the pronunciation Murdoch taught he would scarcely have
made himself understood in Paris.

Murdoch was this time most favourably impressed by Robert’s ability,
and, in his own inimitable language, regretted that at the approach of
harvest ‘Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that
surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek
glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for
although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a
man.’ Murdoch had seen no signs of the qualities which Burns afterwards
declared made him as a child by no means a favourite with anybody;
in his eagerness for learning he displayed only the retentive memory
and the enthusiastic ardour which would have most endeared him to the
pedantic master. The ‘stubborn ungainly something’ which later ripened
into pride was filling him with smothered rebellion against his lot in
life; the weeks with Murdoch opened for a moment a door through which
it seemed that he might escape. He was becoming class-conscious, and
was developing a hatred of stupid wealth and power which never left
him. His earliest associations with the sons of the gentry had not been
unpleasant, for these lads had not yet acquired ‘a just sense of the
immense distance between them and their ragged Playfellows’. ‘My young
superiours’, he said, ‘never insulted the clouterly appearance of my
ploughboy carcass, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all
the inclemencies of all the seasons.’ They gave him stray volumes of
books; one lad even helped him with his French. Nevertheless, he could
remember in manhood how as a mere child he almost choked with rage in
church one Sunday at the sight of a pretty servant-lass being compelled
to leave her pew to make room for the stupid son of her employer.

About the time of his last association with Murdoch he began to have
occasions for rage without going to church for them. Provost Fergusson
died in 1771, and the administration of his property fell into the
hands of a steward or factor. Fergusson had probably been lenient if
his tenant could not make payment in full on each quarter-day, but
it was the factor’s business to get in the rents, and if they were
not paid he wrote threatening letters to demand them. It is always
difficult for a debtor to see things from the creditor’s point of
view; for Robert Burns it was impossible. For him the factor was a
scoundrel, and his dunning letters were deliberate efforts to humiliate
the unfortunates in his power. Not but what the Burnes family had
reason for feeling resentful. They were doing everything that was
humanly possible, and more than was wise, to meet the factor’s demands.
They lived very poorly, even by Scottish peasant standards; meat was
almost unknown on their table; they gave up all hired help. At the
age of fourteen, as Murdoch noted, Burns was doing a man’s work,
guiding the clumsy plough, flailing out grain by hand, and performing
all the other tasks at which brute strength had to serve not merely
instead of machinery but instead of well-made tools. His gait became
the clumsy tread of the ploughman; his young shoulders developed a
permanent stoop from handling the awkward plough-stilts. But the worst
physical effect was invisible. The adolescent boy doing a man’s work
on insufficient food was incurably injuring his heart. When the lesion
began to manifest itself in dizziness and faintness Robert was not
sent to a doctor. Probably it would have made no difference if he had
been, for the trouble could scarcely have been diagnosed without a
stethoscope. Instead he used heroic measures which must have aggravated
the ailment. At one time he kept a tub of water beside his bed, and
when faintness came on him in the night he would take a cold plunge.
All his life he was plagued with fits of depression which he described
by the fashionable term, hypochondria. His heart lesion intensified the
nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to
the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in
his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his
father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.

A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What
irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a
galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from
social intercourse. Burns may not have been wholly an extrovert, but
he needed society as an outlet for his high spirits and as a refuge
from his low ones. In his earlier boyhood he had found friends both
among schoolfellows of his own rank and among the sons of neighbouring
gentlemen. At Mount Oliphant he was cut off. Murdoch would come out
on his half-holidays, ‘with one or two persons more intelligent than
[himself], that good William Burnes might enjoy a mental feast’.
This conversation of ‘solid reason, sensible remark, and a moderate
seasoning of jocularity’ was not what the boy needed. Robert and
Gilbert ‘began to talk and reason like men, much sooner than their
neighbours’, but this precocious maturity only made the lad more
acutely conscious of his own lack of advantages. He envied the greater
ease and assurance of his more fortunate fellows, and out of this envy
and self-consciousness grew the aggressive manner upon which some of
the gentry later remarked with disfavour.

As William Burnes’s tenure at Mount Oliphant neared its end the clouds
opened a little. The father had never wholly abandoned his hope of
providing his eldest son with some sort of education, and in the
summer of 1775 managed to send him for a few weeks to learn ‘dialling
and mensuration’ at Kirkoswald. Superficially the venture seemed as
fruitless as the earlier effort to learn French in three weeks. The
master, Hugh Rodger, was as pedantic as Murdoch, but inclined to be
harsh and sarcastic where Murdoch was earnest and encouraging. Though
Burns acquired some practical mathematics which later proved useful in
his Excise work, he found the more vivid part of his education outside
the classroom. With William Niven, a classmate of his own age, he
indulged in spirited impromptu debates on such adolescent topics as
‘Whether is a great general or a respectable merchant the most valuable
member of society?’ With a girl named Peggy Thomson he fell in love
briefly, but so violently as to disorganize his work during his last
days at school. Above all, he got glimpses of a sort of life very
different from the seclusion of Mount Oliphant.

In the later eighteenth century smuggling rated as one of the major
British industries. An excise tax of twenty shillings a gallon on
spirits set an even higher premium on illicit dealing than prohibition
did in the United States in the 1920’s. Few of the ‘best people’ had
any more scruples about dealing with smugglers than Americans had about
dealing with bootleggers. Nor was smuggling confined to liquors. Tea,
French silks and laces, and other goods on which the tariff was high
were also run in in quantity. The coast near Kirkoswald was a centre
for landing goods intended for the Ayrshire and Glasgow markets because
it was almost the last point smuggling vessels could approach without
grave risk of being trapped by the revenue cutters in the narrow waters
of the Firth of Clyde. Samuel Brown, the uncle with whom Burns stayed
at Kirkoswald, probably had a quiet share in the business; at any
rate his nephew saw plenty of smugglers. In the taverns where these
men spent the profits of their successful ventures Burns witnessed
roistering of a wilder sort than market nights at Ayr exhibited. His
extremely limited means, however, make it improbable that he often
looked unconcernedly on a large tavern bill, though ten years later
he thought he had. More likely the awkward youth was a spectator,
as the poet was at Poosie Nansie’s in 1785. A Shakespearian delight
in the salty flavour of raw humanity was one of Burns’s life-long
characteristics which first found expression at Kirkoswald. In 1783 he
wrote to John Murdoch, ‘I seem to be one sent into the world, to see,
and observe; and I very easily compound with the knave who tricks me of
my money, if there be anything original about him which shews me human
nature in a different light from anything I have seen before.’ His
respectable friends often deplored what seemed to them a depraved taste
for low company, but, as his best friend in Dumfries explained, it was
not the lowness of the company that attracted him; his companions were
of ‘low ranks, but men of talent and humour’. It was the colour of such
company, its shrewdness, its reckless wit, and its unashamed gusto
for life that made Burns prefer it to the drab respectability of the
church-going bourgeoisie.

Crude humanity, however, was not the only thing Burns studied at
Kirkoswald. He encountered some new books as well. Thomson’s _Seasons_
introduced him to the chief Scottish poet of the century who had made
his reputation by writing in standard English; Shenstone’s ‘Elegies’
and ‘The Schoolmistress’ initiated him into the poetry of sentiment,
and the Spenserian stanza of the latter gave him the verse-form for
‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. In reading these poets, however, he was
merely extending an acquaintance already made through the specimens in
Arthur Masson. His prose reading opened a different world. Novels were
not to be found in the stricter Presbyterian homes, so _Pamela_, an odd
volume of _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, and above all Mackenzie’s _The Man
of Feeling_, were a vivid experience. Nothing in his previous training
had inoculated him against the virus of sentimentality; exposed to its
most extreme form, he was infected for life. This, the lad no doubt
said to himself, was the way persons of superior sensitivity looked
upon life; very well, he could prove that his sensibility was equal
to theirs. At the first opportunity he bought a copy of _The Man of
Feeling_ and carried it with him everywhere until he wore it out.

Had Burns known more of literature and of the world he would have been
able to take Mackenzie’s sentiment at the proper discount. Then the
book’s influence might have been good. It might gently have corrected
the harshness of his peasant background, as the literature of sentiment
in general ameliorated the brutality of the eighteenth-century world.
As it was, the book set up a preposterous ideal which divided Burns’s
energies and sometimes vitiated his work. The crudities of peasant
life needed softening and elevating, but sentimentalism made many of
his efforts in this direction mawkish instead of humane. The poet who
portrayed an old farmer’s affection for a faithful mare was revealing
sentiment in the best sense of that much-abused word; the poet who
moralized over a ploughed-under weed was pumping up emotions such as
no real farmer ever felt. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that the
foundations for the weakest elements in his work, as well as for the
magnificent zest of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, were laid
at Kirkoswald.

Burns was probably right in saying that he came home considerably
improved. But he was also discontented. Mount Oliphant seemed narrower
and drabber than ever after the colour of the smuggling village, and
he had become acutely conscious--thanks equally to Peggy Thomson and
to his tavern companions--of his own awkwardness. This consciousness
led him to his first overt act of rebellion. In ‘absolute defiance’ of
his father’s commands, he attended a country dancing school, to improve
his manners. William Burnes’s ‘Manual of Religious Belief’ indicates
a willingness to mitigate some of the sterner points of Presbyterian
theology, but he was in full agreement with the Kirk’s condemnation of
worldly amusements. Gilbert Burns, as well as some of his brother’s
biographers, tried to explain away the remark about defiance, and the
father may not have pressed the point too far when he saw that Robert’s
mind was made up. Undoubtedly, however, Burns was correctly describing
his own feelings at the time, and though the father sensibly accepted
the accomplished fact and later allowed his other children to learn
dancing he thenceforth regarded his eldest son’s conduct with suspicion
and concern.

On leaving Kirkoswald Burns had undertaken to carry on a literary
correspondence with some of his schoolfellows. He was bent on improving
his powers of expression and acquiring a literary style. But the
medium he selected was prose. Probably in retrospect he exaggerated
the actual extent of this correspondence--it is hard to believe that
‘every post’ brought him as many letters as if he had been a merchant,
or that he could have paid the postage if it had. The few surviving
specimens are quite enough. The poet’s uncle had once set out to buy
one of the manuals of letter-writing which supply models for most of
the imaginable contingencies of human life; he brought home instead
‘a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Ann’s reign’. The exact
volume has never been identified, though Burns’s subsequent quotations
show that it included letters of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. But the
eighteenth century, until Boswell taught it better, did not publish
really familiar letters. Such collections as Pope helped to bring out
were really composed of brief essays. Personal opinion was subdued;
personal news was deleted. The ‘unbridled effusions’ which make the
charm of familiar letters were suppressed. On such unfortunate models,
almost as stiff as Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Letters Moral and Entertaining’
which he had found in his Masson, Burns set to work. The result was
the same as when he encountered _The Man of Feeling_. A youth bred
among literate people would have realized intuitively that these models
showed only one side of letter-writing. Burns, with no other standards
to measure them by, took them as the whole of the law and prophets,
and shaped his epistolary style accordingly. His ear, attuned to the
subtlest modulations of poetry, remained always deaf to the quieter
graces of prose: when Dugald Stewart commended the simplicity of
Franklin’s writing, Burns could see nothing in it, ‘when compared with
the point, and antithesis, and quaintness of _Junius_.’

Those who have judged Burns adversely as a letter-writer would have
still more grounds for their criticism had more letters survived like
the few to William Niven and Thomas Orr. These country youths admired
Burns’s solemn analyses of Pride and Courage and his exhortations to
be content with poverty; so, unfortunately, did the better-educated
friends of his later life. The letters which he transcribed for Lady
Harriet Don in 1787 and for Robert Riddell in 1791-93 belonged to
the same school of prose as his earliest epistles to Niven. Burns
would never have thought of making, nor his friends of asking for,
transcripts of the admirable discussions of Scottish song which he sent
to George Thomson, nor of his easier letters to John Ballantine and
Mrs. Dunlop. No epistolary Robert Fergusson ever came into his hands to
show him the way to a conversational style. When he wrote easy prose it
was in spite of his models and because he had something to say which
really demanded saying.

When the family at last escaped from Mount Oliphant in 1777 Burns was
eighteen, the age at which Chatterton, seven years before, had taken
his own life. But Burns’s self-education was a much slower process than
Chatterton’s. At eighteen he was still an awkward rustic, with all
his intellectual and artistic powers still to find. The most positive
result of the long ordeal at Mount Oliphant--apart from its injuries
to his health--had been the building up of a strong sense of family
loyalty. William Burnes had made every sacrifice to keep his family
together, and the feeling that this was a primary obligation had been
deeply impressed on his son. For the moment their prospects seemed
hopeful. The father had managed to lease the larger farm of Lochlie
near Tarbolton, and had again obtained from his landlord a cash advance
for stock and improvements. But again Burnes was paying the penalty of
his desperately independent character. For Lochlie’s hundred and thirty
acres of sour clay--so sour that the lease provided for two separate
applications of lime at the rate of 400 bushels to an acre--its
putative owner, David M’Lure, set a rental of £130. It was a ruinous
bargain which broke William Burnes’s spirit, helped to kill him, and
gave his children some first-hand acquaintance with the chicanery of
the law.

On Burns the first effect of the removal to Lochlie was social. The
farm was within easy reach of Tarbolton village, where he found the
companionship his nature craved. Of his friends at Mount Oliphant
James Candlish’s is the only name that has not perished; those of the
Tarbolton cronies are enshrined in both verse and prose. For the first
couple of years the records are almost blank. By his own testimony,
and Gilbert’s, he was constantly falling tempestuously in love,
usually with girls of his own rank, or below it, for ‘he had always
a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who
had more consequence in life’. His imagination could always endow any
girl to whom he was attracted with a plentiful stock of charms which
bystanders often failed to perceive. His ready pen, moreover, was
constantly at the service of his less fluent friends who sought his aid
in composing their love-letters, and he ‘felt as much pleasure at being
in the secret of half the amours in the parish, as ever did Premier
at knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe.’ But Gilbert’s
testimony corroborates his own statement that none of these early
affairs passed the bounds of decorum. The fervours which he had first
experienced when reaping with Nellie Kilpatrick at the age of fifteen
were growing stronger and more clearly defined, but they were still
adolescent.

This adolescent Burns figures also in the proceedings of the Tarbolton
Bachelors’ Club, a social and debating society which he and a few
friends organized in the autumn of 1780. Its fragmentary records show
the youths arguing such windy topics as Burns had discussed with Niven
five years before, but with a more direct application to his own
walk of life. E. g., ‘Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a
civilized country, in the most happy situation?’ ‘Whether is a young
man of the lower ranks of life likeliest to be happy who has got a good
education, and his mind well informed, or he who has just the education
and information of those around him?’ ‘Whether between friends, who
have no reason to doubt each other’s friendship, there should be any
reserve?’ Such topics point to Burns as their propounder, as do some of
the Club’s rules. The one which barred religious topics was doubtless
in the interest of peace, but Burns’s hand is evident in the tenth and
last:

  ‘Every man proper for a member of this society must have a frank,
  honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean; and must be a
  professed lover of one or more of the female sex. No haughty,
  self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest
  of the club, and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose
  only will is to heap up money, shall on any pretence whatever be
  admitted....’

Indecorum of language was likewise barred, and clerical biographers
in discussing these rules have left the impression that the Club was
a kind of Y.M.C.A. From what we know of peasant life in Scotland and
of the adolescent male everywhere, it is possible that the biographers
were mistaken. Whatever his conduct in 1780, Burns was soon applying
the tenth rule in no platonic or idealistic sense.

Nevertheless the Club played an important part in developing his
powers. Besides giving him an audience for his ideas it showed him
that he could dominate his audience. Thenceforward Burns took the lead
in any social group where he was intimate; his companions, re-echoing
his wit, believed that they shared it and even convinced him that they
did. The roster of his friends includes many wholly commonplace people
like John Richmond and Robert Ainslie who shone only by reflected
light, but whose satellite nature Burns was quite unaware of at the
time. Moreover, the Club gave him almost his first experience of the
wine of applause, and he found it a heady vintage.

Among the Tarbolton Bachelors was David Sillar--not a charter member of
the Club, but admitted to it early in 1781. A year younger than Burns,
Sillar, under his friend’s inspiration, produced a few commonplace
poems which gave Burns the excuse for hailing him as brother poet.
Sillar had a certain gift for characterization in prose; he described
Tarbolton townsfolk as ‘uncontaminated by reading, conversation,
or reflection’, and left the most vivid extant picture of Burns on
the threshold of manhood. Burns was beginning to reveal the playboy
elements in his nature--that desire above all things to be conspicuous
which he shared with such very different geniuses as Sir Walter Scott,
Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Bernard Shaw. In a day when strict
Presbyterians still cropped their hair, after the fashion which in the
previous century had earned them the name of Roundheads, Burns let his
grow long and wore it in a queue--‘the only tied hair in the parish’.
When everyone else was wearing plaids of ordinary shepherd’s gray,
Burns sported one of dead-leaf colour. And since the uncontaminated
parishioners of Tarbolton were orthodox Old Lights Burns acquired easy
notoriety by setting up as a heretic.

Throughout his life Burns managed always to acquire a maximum of
ill-repute with a minimum of actual transgression. It was not so much
that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.
Sometimes the conspicuousness was mere ill-luck. A fair portion, for
instance, of the Edinburgh gossip which clung to his name may well have
originated in the fact that both the servant girls with whom he had
relations in the city brought legal action against him--a consequence
he could scarcely have foreseen. On the other hand, his desire to
startle the parish frequently bore fruit in suspicions and enmities
impossible to live down. G. K. Chesterton once advised the village
genius who wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically
hostile and also very strong, not to come up to London but to stay at
home and have a row with the rector. This was precisely what Burns did.
The New Light doctrines which soft-pedalled such Calvinistic dogmas as
predestination had already conquered Edinburgh and Glasgow and were
beginning to invade the provinces. In any case Burns’s saturation
in the sentimentalism of Mackenzie and Sterne would have made him
receptive to the New Light emphasis on Benevolence and the Moral Sense.
But when the congeniality of the new doctrines was joined with an
opportunity to startle his neighbours the combination was irresistible.
He began, he says, to debate theology with such heat and indiscretion
as to raise a cry of heresy which persisted in Tarbolton and Mauchline
as long as he remained there. An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, pictures
him in the kirkyard between services, expounding heretical doctrines
with such vigour as to elicit hisses and cries of ‘Shame!’ from his
auditors. At least the story is true in spirit. Burns was determined to
be conspicuous, even if it meant hisses instead of applause.

Masonic affiliations, which after his return from Irvine supplanted
the Bachelors’ Club, gave him still another chance to indulge both
his social instincts and his sympathies with liberal thought. A rural
lodge like St. James’s at Tarbolton was, to be sure, no such centre of
political liberalism as were the Masonic lodges of the Continent during
the later eighteenth century. The chief activity, in fact, of most of
the Scottish lodges seems to have been convivial, with the additional
feature, lacking in the ordinary social club, that the members were
pledged to help their fellows in sickness or distress. Nevertheless the
knowledge that brother Masons in England and abroad were disseminating
ideas which challenged absolutism in government and religion must have
reached even village youths in Tarbolton. In Scotland, moreover, the
ritual which dignified the childish thrill of membership in a secret
organization gave Freemasonry an emotional appeal which the drab
services of the Kirk and the narrow routine of every day lacked. From
the time when he joined St. James’s Lodge, about 1782, until after his
sojourn in Edinburgh, Burns took his Masonic duties with the utmost
seriousness. He helped to put the struggling and almost bankrupt lodge
on its feet; from 1784 to 1787 he was its Depute Master. In Edinburgh
he continued his affiliations, and perhaps the highest moment of all
his early triumphal progress in the capital came at the meeting of the
Grand Lodge of Scotland on January 13, 1787, when the Grand Master gave
the toast, ‘Caledonia, and Caledonia’s Bard, brother Burns!’ It is
idle to conjecture if the coolness which followed his first acclaim in
Edinburgh reached into Masonic circles; certainly the poet’s interest
in the craft waned in his later years. His letters from Ellisland
and Dumfries scarcely mention it, except when he was in trouble and
wanted Robert Graham to help him as a Mason as well as a friend. He
duly affiliated himself with the Dumfries lodge, and became its Senior
Warden, but if silence means anything the zest was gone.

The Masonic fellowship of course was male, but Burns was not
forgetting his obligations as a member of the Bachelors’ Club. His
own statements and Gilbert’s, already quoted, show a succession
of passing infatuations with various girls whose names, even, are
doubtful, and of whose personalities the most ardent legend-mongers
can scarcely summon up a wraith. By comparison with such shadows as
Anne Rankine and Mary Morison, even Nellie Kilpatrick who stirred the
poet’s blood for a single harvest, and Peggy Thomson, who overset his
trigonometry at Kirkoswald, are three-dimensional. The one figure who
half emerges from the shadows is Alison (or Ellison) Begbie. Burns met
her in 1780 or 1781, but understanding of the matter is not clarified
by the possibility that some of the five letters supposed to have
been addressed to her may really be drafts of the love-letters he
frequently wrote for his friends. Assuming them all to be Alison’s,
they prove mainly that Burns had not yet learned much about women. If
ever farm-lass was wooed in such stilted and temperate phrases it is
pretty certain that she was not in this humour won. Burns’s intentions
were serious; he wanted to marry Alison. Unfortunately the intentions
made him serious too. He seemed afraid to commit himself in writing.
A bystander is not surprised that Alison refused the man who told her
that her company never gave him those giddy raptures so much talked of
among lovers, and who announced that in his opinion married life was
only friendship in a more exalted degree. It did surprise Burns. Indeed
the shock of it led him subsequently to charge her with having jilted
him, a difficult feat when his own letters prove she had never accepted
him. No doubt she had merely employed the ancient technique of mild and
noncommittal encouragement while she was making up her mind. Burns had
prided himself on his skill in letter-writing and on his address with
women. To be flatly rejected the first time he made a serious proposal
upset him for several months. It also completed his sentimental
education. Thereafter, until he met Clarinda, he knew better than to do
his courting by post.

But friendships with men and women, though they helped him momentarily
to escape his blue devils, could not obscure the problem of his own
and his family’s future. He still lacked an aim. Conscious of more
than average powers in himself, he had no purpose to which to direct
them. Moreover, the years at Lochlie were bringing him for the first
time to a realization of the workings of the larger economic laws.
The American War was ruining the West of Scotland. Half its market
for manufactured goods was closed; its exports to the West Indies
were being raided by American privateers. Just before the war an
over-expanded bank had failed, dragging down with it half the gentlemen
in Ayrshire and leaving a trail of wreckage which was not wholly
obliterated for a couple of decades. Even the wartime demand for farm
produce was no help when multitudes of jobless artisans could not
pay the high prices which at best would scarcely have yielded a fair
return on the over-capitalized land. M’Lure, the landlord of Lochlie,
was heavily mortgaged to the defunct bank. Hard pressed for cash, he
tried to extort from his tenants more than was his due. William Burnes
resisted, and became involved in litigation which followed him to the
grave. In similar circumstances at Mount Oliphant Burns had seen merely
a personal situation in which a villainous factor was demanding more
rent than the family could pay. Now he began to realize that a man may
be frugal and diligent in his business, and yet be destroyed by forces
which he did not start and was powerless to control.

As early as 1780 Burns had experimented at growing flax of his own on
a few acres of land subleased from his father; later he won a prize
for his seed. His success led him in 1781 to go to Irvine to learn
the trade of flax-dressing. Some consequences of that venture belong
in the next chapter; educationally the results, like those of so many
youthful experiences, were mainly negative. His distaste for the work,
and its ill effect on his health, left him more aimless than before. He
concluded that he was unfit for the world of business, and where he had
formerly yearned for some chance of advancement he now decided that he
was destined to be only a looker-on at life. All that restrained him
from complete shiftlessness was his sense of responsibility for his
family.

Intellectually, that sense was keener and more insistent than ever,
but now for the first time it was in direct conflict with a storm of
emotions. Burns had come home empty-handed as the prodigal, to find
his father visibly sinking under the united effects of worry and
tuberculosis. It was plain that even if his contest with his landlord
should be decided in his favour he would never be fit to undertake
another farm. By the beginning of 1783 the whole family, including
William Burnes, realized that death was at best a matter of months.
M’Lure the landlord realized it too, and such scenes as had accompanied
the reading of the factor’s letters at Mount Oliphant were re-enacted
at Lochlie with triple poignance. The children were old enough this
time to understand the whole meaning of the affair; their father was a
broken man, and where the factor had merely threatened legal action,
M’Lure was taking it. The outcome of the case and the practical means
whereby Gavin Hamilton helped the family through the crisis will be
told later; its emotional impact on Burns himself, coming as it did on
the heels of his own failure at business, could hardly be overstated.
He saw his father’s lifetime of struggle for independence ending in
defeat and despair. Recollection of Mount Oliphant and Lochlie never
ceased to haunt his own ventures as a farmer, and helped to damn them.
Fear and hatred of one’s economic position are seldom the heralds of
success.

Burns’s whole nature, in fact, was beginning to cry out against the
life he was expected to lead. Not even the loyally accepted burden
laid upon him from his father’s weakening hands could hold him steady.
He had come back from Irvine, as before from Kirkoswald, incapable of
fitting again into the narrow pattern of the life he had lived before
his departure. He had outgrown his mould. The dying father noted with
concern that his son was spending longer hours with wilder companions,
and displaying a new aggressiveness and assurance in his manner of
speaking with women. Nevertheless the shadow of the old man’s authority
was still enough, when reinforced by the desperate need of securing
the future of the family, to inhibit the full expression of the new
tendencies. Gilbert’s testimony is explicit. At Lochlie he and Robert
were both allowed the usual labourer’s wage of £7 a year, against which
was charged the value of every piece of clothing manufactured at home.
Neither there nor at Mossgiel did Robert’s expenditures exceed this
frugal sum. It was extravagance of emotion, of speech and conduct, not
of expense, that beset the poet.

On his deathbed, on February 13, 1784, William Burnes muttered that
there was one member of his family for whose future conduct he feared,
and Robert, in tears, took the admonition to himself. Hardly was the
family settled at Mossgiel, after some strictly legal dodging which
must have increased the poet’s inward distaste for the whole business,
when the traits his father had dreaded began their full play. Though
he entered on his responsibilities as head of the family with the
best of resolutions, his heart was not in the undertaking. He read
farming books, calculated crops, and attended markets, but his mind
was elsewhere. According to his own account, he lost interest in the
work because of two successive crop-failures, the first owing to bad
seed and the second to a wet harvest. But this was an excuse, not
an explanation. The real reasons lay within himself. They were his
passions and his art.

His father’s death had removed the last check upon social indulgence.
Always shunning the solitude which produced brooding melancholy, he
had found in Mauchline a new and gayer set of cronies whose company
was more congenial than that of his family in the crowded cottage
at Mossgiel. More and more of his time was spent in the village
taverns--not for drunkenness, but for the pleasure of sharing the
hilarity of careless youths and the uninhibited wit of older ‘men
of talent and humour’ like his neighbour John Rankine. The rigidly
righteous began to frown on the young farmer whose reckless sallies
were sure to provoke the wildest outbursts of laughter. And even at
Mossgiel there were distractions from a sober and godly life. The
household included a young servant-lass named Betty Paton, whose
charms, like those of most of Burns’s sweethearts, were mainly
physical. Within a few months of his father’s death Betty became
Burns’s mistress, and in May, 1785, bore his first child amid all the
accompaniments of a public scandal in the parish.

Unpropitious though such beginnings were for a career as a tenant
farmer, they were relatively unimportant compared with the inner
compulsions arising from his discovery of his poetic vocation. Many
another young farmer had sowed his wild oats and then settled down to
rear a legitimate family and become an elder in the Kirk. For Burns
such a future had really ceased to be possible even before he left
Lochlie. In April, 1783, under the melancholy influence of his own
ill-health and his father’s dark prospects, he had begun to keep a
commonplace book with the avowed intention of some day showing the
world that a young ploughman, little indebted to scholastic education,
was nevertheless capable of rime and reason. When he started the book
his literary models were Shenstone, Mackenzie, and the folk-songs of
his country. At some time during the next year, however, the poems of
Robert Fergusson came into his hands. They roused him as Chapman’s
Homer roused Keats. For the first time he realized that the Scottish
dialect might be something more than a dying relic of the past. He
had been long acquainted with Allan Ramsay, but Ramsay belonged to
the primitive age before Scottish letters had been ennobled by such
geniuses as Henry Mackenzie, James Beattie, and John Home. Now he found
that Fergusson, only ten years older than himself, had returned to the
speech and the verse-forms of Ramsay. And Fergusson was no country
boy but an educated lawyer’s clerk bred in the Athens of the North.
Reading these poems Burns realized their vivid descriptions and their
wit--realized also that what Fergusson had done he could do as well, or
better. Mauchline parish offered as many themes for homely satire as
Edinburgh did.

The theme ready to hand was ecclesiastical controversy. The
neighbourhood was ululating with disputes between Old Lights and New
Lights, and the leaders on both sides were behaving with the lack of
charity peculiar to Christians on the war-path. Moreover, Burns’s
landlord and friend, Gavin Hamilton, was in the thick of it, standing
trial before the Kirk Session on a charge of Sabbath-breaking. Two
neighbouring Old Light ministers--John Russell of Kilmarnock and
Alexander Moodie of Riccarton--chose this time for a quarrel over
parish boundaries, and conducted their holy row with the heat and
personal invective of a heresy-hunt. Burns improved the occasion by
composing ‘The Twa Herds’. Copying the poem in a disguised hand he
showed it to Hamilton, remarking with studied gravity that he had no
idea who the author was, but that he thought it pretty clever. Hamilton
thought so too. Copies were passed from hand to hand; the New Lights,
clergy as well as laity, received it with roars of applause; the Old
Lights were correspondingly furious.

When Burns followed up ‘The Twa Herds’ with ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The
Ordination’, and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the applause redoubled, and so
did the enmity of the Old Lights. The man who challenges established
institutions to their face needs to be sure of his own position.
Burns’s indiscretion with Betty Paton not only left him wide open
to counter-attack but assured him of far more unpleasant notoriety
than ordinarily accompanied such lapses in peasant Scotland. It was
impossible to remain in the parish without submitting to the discipline
of the Kirk. Even at its mildest the ordeal of three successive
penitential appearances before Mauchline congregation would have been
intensely humiliating to a man as sensitively proud as Burns. But
a young bachelor’s slips from grace were not usually treated very
seriously except by the clergy and the Holy Willies. Had Burns been
otherwise in good standing in the community he would have been able to
go on much as before, but when the evidence of his breach of sexual
morality was augmented by his ill-fame as a derider of the church he
became, among all the more conservative members of the parish, little
better than an outcast.

He may not have realized the full bitterness of the feeling against
him until his repudiation by the Armours in the spring of 1786, but he
realized enough. His reaction was as inevitable as the community’s had
been. If he was to be an outcast he would live up to his reputation.
Many of his biographers since, as well as many of his neighbours at
the time, have taken at face value the blatant pride in his ill-repute
which marks such poems as the ‘Epistle to John Rankine’. But this
was not part of his real nature; he was simply brazening out his
humiliation. The unco guid had decided that he was a dog with a bad
name. He would show them that they had underestimated his capacity to
shock them. That in the process he would make the parish too hot to
hold him was a consideration not likely to occur to him in the full
tide of his resentment.

But if his conflict with the Kirk had brought him humiliation it had
also brought him the sense of power and the intoxication of applause.
He had long known that his conversational wit and fire could dominate
a knot of cronies. Now he had learned that he could write things which
stirred both the laughter and the deeper emotions of educated men as
well as of his social equals. The hostility of the Holy Willies was
even more inebriating than the applause of Gavin Hamilton and his
friends. Men do not hate unless they fear; the measure of his success
and power was the measure of the antagonism he had aroused. The youth
whose weakness it had always been to lack an aim had found one now.
His education was complete. Intimate observation and experience of a
small community had acquainted him with human nature, and had at last
roused him to realization of his own capacities and his true vocation.
His estimate of himself and his work, he later told John Moore, was
pretty nearly as high in 1785 as it was two years later, after all the
adulation of Edinburgh. All that he needed now was the opportunity to
display his talents on a larger stage.




III

MEN


Burns entered on his manhood at Irvine in 1781. Before his ill-starred
venture as a flax-dresser he was an aimless and inarticulately
rebellious youth; after it, though he was still aimless for a time,
his rebellion against the narrow world of his origin was overt and
vocal. Yet even under the stimulus of Irvine he was long in finding his
proper speech. When he wrote the earliest of his extant letters, Burns,
already a man in years, was still a boy in mind. His self-conscious
disquisitions on such high-resounding themes as Pride and Courage mark
him as less mature at twenty-one than Chatterton was at sixteen; he
had passed the age at which Keats died before he began to say anything
worth heeding. At twenty-two, his vague aspirations momentarily
focussed on the idea of establishing himself in business as a necessary
prelude to matrimony, he made his sole attempt at living according to
the standards of a working-day world. Materially, the attempt was an
abject failure; spiritually, it set him on the direct road to realizing
himself.

Knowledge of the material side of the Irvine partnership is limited
to what Burns himself told in his autobiographic letter, which is
not wholly reliable evidence. Not that Burns intentionally coloured
the facts. The safest rule in reading his letters is to take it for
granted that if he said a thing about himself it was true; if he
said a thing about someone else, he believed it to be true. But to
his passionate temperament and ‘skinless sensibility’ (the phrase is
his own) anyone through whom he suffered loss or humiliation became
almost automatically a villain of the blackest. Hence his charges that
Peacock, his Irvine partner, ‘was a scoundrel of the first water, who
made money by the mystery of thieving’, need not be taken literally.
Burns, a complete greenhorn at business, may possibly have been taken
in by an unscrupulous rascal, but it is equally possible that Burns
in retrospect blamed Peacock for a failure in which they were both
at fault. In any case, the business side of these months influenced
Burns’s future only as it convinced him of his unfitness for ‘the
little chicaning art of bargain-making’. What really mattered were the
new friends, and the new ideas of himself and his place in the world
inspired by these friends and by the introspection resulting from
ill-health.

Chief of the new friends was the sailor, Richard Brown, whom Burns
looked up to as a junior schoolboy looks to the athletic senior. Brown
was about the poet’s age, but had all the worldly experience Burns
lacked. He was better educated than most seamen of his day, though
perhaps his story of having been patronized by a wealthy man who
promised to set him up in life was only another sailor’s yarn. He had
at any rate abilities of a sort. An incompetent man could not have
become the master of a West Indiaman while still in his twenties. But
in 1781 that promotion was still to win. Brown just then was down on
his luck. His ship had recently been captured by an American privateer,
and he had been put ashore on the coast of Connaught with nothing but
his life and the clothes he wore. Nevertheless the friendship with
Burns probably began with something of patronage on Brown’s part.
The experienced, far-travelled, and distinctly hard-boiled sailor
was interested in the awkward, stoop-shouldered country lad who in
company alternated between sullen silence and--if he felt himself at
ease--unusually vivid and copious speech. Obviously Brown realized
that there was something in him; obviously also he took pleasure in
enlightening him as to the ways of the world. Burns saw in Brown ‘every
noble, manly virtue’ and strove to imitate him. Burns was already
proud; Brown taught his pride to flow in proper channels--whatever
that may mean. But Brown also was the only man the poet ever met who
was a bigger fool than himself where women were concerned. The various
goddesses by whom Burns’s tinder heart was continually lighted up still
roused a hobbledehoy calf-love, as adolescent as his hero-worship
of the sailor. Brown taught him that direct action might usually be
counted on to bring results, and here, as Burns later admitted, the
friendship did him a mischief.

Yet Brown was something more than a hard-boiled sailor initiating a
green youngster. One Sunday afternoon the pair took a walking trip to
Eglinton Wood, where under the inspiring influence of a spot associated
with the memory of Sir William Wallace Burns confided to his mentor
that he occasionally tried to write poetry. He was already poet enough
to have a copy in his pocket. Brown listened, and declared that verses
of such merit ought to be sent to a magazine. It was actually this,
Burns recorded long afterwards, that first gave him the idea that he
might amount to something as a poet. It was one thing to have one’s
verses praised by a rural maiden like Nellie Kilpatrick or by one’s own
admiring family; it was quite another to have them endorsed by a man of
the world. Unfortunately Burns failed to name the poem Brown commended.
At a guess it may well have been the two somewhat bawdy stanzas
beginning ‘I murder hate by field or flood’, Andrew Dunlop’s manuscript
of which was headed, ‘On the great Recruiting in the year 17-- during
the American war’. Burns had no motive for mystifying Dunlop; hence
the date of these stanzas can scarcely be later than 1781, and Brown
would have been more likely to applaud such lines than the conventional
religious pieces more or less contemporary with them.

The good as well as the ill of Brown’s friendship belongs to the six or
eight months at Irvine. If the friends met during the next four or five
years, no references to their intercourse survive. When the Kilmarnock
_Poems_ were published, Brown received the only inscribed presentation
copy on record, and in December, 1787, the two began a correspondence
which lasted for a couple of years in the intervals of Brown’s voyages.
Their only recorded meeting, however, was in Glasgow in February, 1788,
when the poet told Brown all about Jean Armour. Burns’s last letter,
in November, 1789, in reply to a complaint about his silence, is as
cordial as ever, yet the friendship ended. According to tradition,
Burns’s charge about Brown’s moral influence had reached the sailor,
now a married man with a steadily improving position to maintain and
far from eager to be reminded that he had heard the chimes at midnight.
After Brown’s death, the presentation copy was found hidden away in
the back of an old sideboard. The sailor was not the only friend who
in later years wanted to live down his associations with the poet.
The descendants of John Wilson concealed for more than a century the
fact that instead of resenting ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ he appealed to
Burns for help when his position as schoolmaster at Tarbolton became
intolerable. On the other hand, James Humphry of Mauchline continued
till his dying day to boast that he was ‘Burns’s bletherin’ bitch’.

During the same months in which Brown was stirring Burns to a new
self-confidence his health was producing opposite effects. Throughout
his life his diseased heart reacted unfavourably to nervous stress; the
Irvine experience was the first of many. Realization of his bad bargain
with Peacock combined with the unaccustomed strain of dusty indoor
labour to bring on a period of ‘hypochondria’--in other words, nervous
depression resulting from defective heart-action. Its tangible results
were such lachrymose verses as the ‘Prayer in the Prospect of Death’
and the letter to his father in which he announces that he is ‘quite
transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall
bid an eternal adiew to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes
of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it.’ The
letter is not merely morbid, it is adolescent; and Mrs. Carswell has
noted that the solemn announcement that ‘I am not formed for the bustle
of the busy nor the flutter of the Gay’ is cribbed verbatim from _The
Man of Feeling_. William Burnes, however, probably regarded it as
admirable proof that his son was beginning to take serious views of
religion and life. In any case it represents only a passing mood of
ill-health. The important fact about the Irvine days is that Burns was
considering seriously his own abilities and his future position.

The partnership had at least the merit of a dramatic and even
spectacular finish. A New Year’s Eve celebration, whatever it may have
done for Burns, brought his partner and his wife to such a state of
drunkenness that they knocked over a lamp and set fire to the shop.
The place was completely burned out, and after a month or two Burns
returned to Lochlie poorer than he went, but with a rich store of
experiences, a new outlook on life, and a mature confidence in himself
which he had never before possessed. But he still lacked an aim. For
another four years the pride which Brown had taught to flow in proper
channels was still to display itself mainly in obscure rebellion
against his lot in life, and in anything but obscure defiance of the
unco guid.

The situation confronting him at home would in any event have matured
him, but without Irvine it might have been in a different way. Firmly
convinced as always of his own justice and rectitude--a conviction
which he imparted with equal vigour to his eldest son--William Burnes
was closing his long series of misfortunes in a violent contest with
his landlord, David M’Lure. The dispute had begun in a difference
over their respective shares of the expenses of liming and fencing
the farm and erecting new buildings. Pending arbitration of the case,
William Burnes had held up payment of his rent. In September, 1782, the
matter was submitted to James Grieve of Boghead and Charles Norval of
Coilsfield--chosen respectively by M’Lure and Burnes--for adjudication.
When they were unable to agree, John Hamilton of Sundrum was chosen as
‘Oversman’ or referee. Not until August, 1783, did Hamilton complete
his analysis of the accounts and hand down his decision, which was that
of £775 claimed by M’Lure, £543 was offset by credits for improvements
made by Burnes, part payments on rent, and other items. But before this
decision was rendered M’Lure, whose estates were heavily mortgaged to
the defunct Douglas and Heron Bank, and who desperately needed cash,
had tried to force payment by entering a sequestration on the stock
and crops of Lochlie. By the time John Hamilton reported, M’Lure was so
deep in debt that it was uncertain whether the rent belonged to him or
to his creditors. Thereupon indomitable William Burnes carried the case
to the Court of Session at Edinburgh. His first petition being thrown
out on a technicality, he renewed it, and at last, on January 27, 1784,
less than three weeks before his death, won his case. He had had the
cash on hand to deposit with the court, when he made his appeal, the
whole amount due; the decision absolved him of further responsibility
in the matter, and summoned the various claimants to bring in their
claims for adjudication. William Burnes had vindicated himself; his
view of his obligations had been upheld by the highest court in the
land. All that it had cost him was the last of his money and the last
of his strength. He was not an old man, but the long struggle for
livelihood, culminating in the protracted lawsuit, made him the easier
prey to tuberculosis. His conviction of his own rightness, like his
irascibility, grew stronger as his body weakened, and mingled with his
wrath at M’Lure was anxiety, bluntly expressed, over Robert’s growing
defiance of Presbyterian decorum.

In calmer circumstances, his father’s displeasure would have weighed
heavily on the poet’s mind, but now he was looking beyond it. Watching
their father’s sinking health, the children were consulting with
each other about their future. The end of Lochlie could not be long
delayed: death would evict them, because after the litigation none
of the claimants to the property was likely to give them a renewal of
the lease. Though Robert subsequently gave Gilbert the credit of being
a full partner in the next undertaking, he probably was not. It is
difficult to imagine the timid and subservient Gilbert taking the lead
in anything. Not long after returning from Irvine Burns had made the
acquaintance of a prosperous Mauchline lawyer named Gavin Hamilton, who
may have been attracted to the young farmer by reports of his outspoken
ridicule of the Old Lights in the Kirk. Hamilton being also a Mason,
they doubtless met first in the fellowship of square and compass. The
lawyer, already in hot water with his more orthodox neighbours, may
also have realized the potential value of Burns’s wit in the impending
contests, but whatever his motives it was Hamilton who suggested to
William Burnes’s children a practical and legal way out of their
trouble.

Several years before, Hamilton had rented Mossgiel farm, about three
miles from Mauchline, and had rebuilt the cottage as a country retreat.
The plan of being gentleman farmer as well as lawyer had palled, and
Hamilton now offered to sublet Mossgiel to Robert and Gilbert at a
lower rental--£90 a year for 118 acres--than they were paying at
Lochlie. The lease was quietly signed at Martinmas, 1783, it being
apparent by that time that William Burnes had not many weeks to live.
Secrecy was necessary; the Court of Session had not yet rendered its
decision, and their action, if it became known, might be unfavourably
construed. Whatever small savings had not gone for legal expenses were
invested in the new enterprise, and Hamilton pointed out a loop-hole
through which the children might salvage something after their father’s
death. Robert and Gilbert were already credited with the regular wages
of labourers. Let the other children also get themselves ranked as
employees on the farm. Then they could enter claims for unpaid wages
against their father’s estate, thereby becoming preferred creditors
who must be paid in full before M’Lure or his mortgagors got anything.
The scheme worked. Enough was saved from the wreck to enable the
family, shaken and desperately poor--when the youngest boy, John, died
in November, 1785, they could not raise the few shillings to pay for
the best mortcloth at his funeral--to re-establish their household at
Mossgiel, intact except for its head.

The new head was Robert, and in the months that followed his father’s
death the full results of his Irvine lessons showed for the first
time. In the two intervening years he had been too much oppressed with
labour and anxiety to have time or inclination to show the new spirit
in all its fullness, though he had shown enough to disturb his father.
Now he was free, and the fruits of his freedom were varied and not
always edifying. The earnest young debater of the Tarbolton Bachelors’
Club and the self-conscious author of essay-letters gave place to Rab
Mossgiel. Burns became the focus for a group of reckless youngsters,
most of them younger than himself, who looked up to him much as he had
looked up to Richard Brown three years before. Foremost in the group
were John Richmond and James Smith, both of them full of the animal
high spirits which so often disguise the basic commonplaceness of
young minds. Along with Burns they set out to scandalize the orthodox,
and succeeded. By the end of 1785 Richmond and Smith, like Burns, had
mounted the cutty-stool for fornication, and Richmond had fled from the
turmoil to the comparative sanctuary of an Edinburgh lawyer’s office.

These cronies are chiefly noteworthy as evidence of Burns’s still
uncritical mind. As with Bob Ainslie later, there was really nothing
to them except youthful exuberance. Their laughter was the ready
chorus for Burns’s wit; his sparkle made them shine with a reflected
light to which they actually contributed little. By comparison the
poor poetaster, Davie Sillar of the Tarbolton Bachelors, was almost
a genius. In his characterization of Tarbolton townsfolk Sillar
left behind him at least one quotable phrase, which is more than
any of the Mauchline group did. They cannot be charged with leading
Burns astray--if any leading was needed Burns supplied it--and their
biographical importance is negligible except as they gave him an
outlet for confidences which might not otherwise have been recorded.
When Burns went to Edinburgh he lodged with Richmond during his first
winter; during the second winter Richmond was in Mauchline a good part
of the time. Burns’s last extant letters to him reveal some details
about Jean Armour and her children, but lack the enthusiasm of the ones
written in 1786. Smith left Mauchline to engage in calico-printing
at Linlithgow. Failing there, he fled to the West Indies and died
obscurely, as Burns came so near doing. Both friendships were spent
and empty before the correspondence closed. The contrast between the
mediocre abilities of the two men and the quality of the poetry they
evoked from Burns is even more remarkable than the disparity between
the illiterate farm-lasses of Tarbolton and Mauchline and the lyrics
Burns addressed to them.

By the time he was twenty-six Burns’s status among people of his
own rank was firmly established. He was the unquestioned leader of
the reckless young; the welcome companion of ribald and unorthodox
elders. The attitude toward him of the staid and sober ranged from sad
head-shaking to violent denunciation. With people of rank above his
own, however, he was still uneasy. Hamilton was probably the first man
of the professional class with whom he formed a genuine friendship.
John Mackenzie, the Mauchline surgeon who attended William Burnes in
his last illness, remembered that on first visiting Lochlie he found
Gilbert frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative, the father
revealing the remains of an able mind beneath the cloud of illness
and distress, and the mother quiet, sagacious, and self-possessed.
But Burns sat glowering in a dark corner, ‘distant, suspicious, and
without any wish to interest or please’; scrutinizing Mackenzie and
obviously prepared to resent any display of superiority or patronage.
As the doctor showed himself affable Burns gradually thawed. Though
the written records of the friendship are meagre, Burns plainly liked
and trusted Mackenzie, and Mackenzie reciprocated. From the time of
their first meeting, the doctor declared, ‘I took a lively interest in
Robert Burns, and, before I was acquainted with his poetical power, I
perceived that he possessed very great mental abilities, an uncommon,
fertile and lively imagination, a thorough acquaintance with many
of our Scottish poets, and an enthusiastic admiration of Ramsay and
Fergusson. I have always thought that no person could have a just idea
of the extent of Burns’s talents who had not an opportunity to hear him
converse. His discrimination of character was great beyond that of any
person I ever knew....’ The surgeon introduced Burns as a poet to his
own friend and patron, Sir John Whitefoord, who had previously known
of the young farmer only as an earnest member of St. James’s Lodge;
he also gave an introduction to Captain Andrew Erskine of Edinburgh,
Boswell’s friend, and claimed to have been the first to bring the
Kilmarnock _Poems_ to the attention of Hugh Blair. It was to Mackenzie
and not to Gavin Hamilton that Burns turned for very practical help in
the stormy weeks preceding his final acknowledgement of his marriage
to Jean Armour, and when Mackenzie provided Jean and her lover with
quarters in his own house he must have faced a weight of criticism
from the embattled saints and gossips of the village that would have
daunted many a man with a professional status to maintain.

The pride which Richard Brown had taught to flow in proper channels
was becoming all the more touchy as Burns’s confidence in himself
increased. Sure of himself now among his equals, he was still
resentfully helpless when superiors rubbed in their superiority. He had
come as far as he could in his merely social capacity; what carried
him the rest of the way was his poetry. Here Gavin Hamilton more or
less unwittingly took the lead in introducing Burns to a new world.
The Kirk Session of Mauchline, seeking to re-establish the old-time
rigours of the Scottish Sabbath, had decided for once to make an
example of a prominent citizen instead of an obscure one. Accordingly
in the summer of 1784 Hamilton was summoned to stand trial for various
ecclesiastical crimes such as absenting himself from church, habitually
neglecting family worship, and causing a servant to dig new potatoes on
a Sunday. On being convicted, Hamilton promptly appealed his case to
the Presbytery of Ayr, and ultimately won it. How Burns intervened with
‘The Twa Herds’ has already been told. His authorship of that poem and
its successors was soon avowed as the manuscripts passed from hand to
New Light hand amid roars of Homeric laughter. People and institutions
accustomed to taking themselves and being taken by others with the most
intense seriousness are helpless in the face of mirth. Burns had found
the one weapon which the orthodox could not withstand, though they
could, and did, revenge themselves on the author of their humiliation.
The fury generated by his satires did as much as, or more than, the
odium of his personal sins to make Mauchline so unbearable that by 1786
Burns was ready to flee to Jamaica.

But if his satires made the village too hot for him they were also the
direct means of enabling him to escape both from the village and from
the ranks of the peasantry. One of the first friends to whom Hamilton
showed ‘The Twa Herds’ was another lawyer, Robert Aiken of Ayr, who
conducted and won Hamilton’s case before the Presbytery. Hamilton,
apart from the conviviality almost inseparable from a man of his
profession in eighteenth-century Scotland, was cool and businesslike.
Aiken was emotional and enthusiastic, a good forensic reader and
speaker, and an easy prey to sentiment. Pathos, in life or in a poem,
suffused his eyes with tears and set the buttons popping on his tight
waistcoat. But, like the more famous Man of Feeling, Henry Mackenzie,
Aiken seldom in daily life permitted sentiment to overcloud common
sense. Along with his fellow townsman, John Ballantine the banker, the
lawyer soon became the poet’s confidant and chief literary adviser.
‘Orator Bob’ lost no opportunity of reading his young friend’s verses
aloud, with such expression that Burns later declared he had never
fully appreciated his own work until he heard Aiken read it. As the
poet’s troubles thickened in the early months of 1786 it was with Aiken
and Ballantine that he discussed both his plans for emigration and
his arrangements for publishing his poems, their decision as to what
ought to be included in the Kilmarnock volume apparently being final.
Though Aiken’s action, as James Armour’s legal adviser, in cancelling
whatever ‘lines’ Burns had given Jean, caused a momentary chill, the
lawyer soon proved that his professional conduct did not interfere
with his private friendships. He obtained 145 subscriptions for the
Kilmarnock _Poems_--nearly one-fourth of the entire edition. Even amid
the excitement of his first dazzling fame in Edinburgh Burns recalled
with a glow of affection the kindly patronage of Aiken and Ballantine,
and long after he had quitted Ayrshire forever he continued from time
to time to send them new poems which he thought they might like. As
late as 1791 he was still gratefully remembering Ballantine’s part
in handing him ‘up to the “Court of the Gentiles” in the temple of
Fame’--a figure of speech which combined neatness and literal accuracy.
It was only to the outer court--that of the bourgeoisie and minor
gentry--that Aiken and Ballantine were able to conduct him.

The association with Hamilton fared worse. Poetry, except in the form
of humour and satire, did not, it would seem, appeal to Hamilton as it
did to Aiken, and between him and Burns was always the barrier of their
business relation as landlord and tenant. Ultimately, indeed, a matter
of business estranged them. In the spring of 1788, nearly two years
after Gilbert Burns had become the sole lessee of Mossgiel, Hamilton
apparently asked Burns to become his brother’s surety. The poet, who
was lending Gilbert nearly half the proceeds of the Edinburgh _Poems_,
declined to commit himself any further:

  ‘The language of refusal is to me the most difficult language on
  earth, and you are the man of the world, excepting One of R^t
  Hon^{ble} designation [i. e., Lord Glencairn], to whom it gives me the
  greatest pain to hold such language.... I never wrote a letter which
  gave me so much pain in my life, as I know the unhappy consequences: I
  shall incur the displeasure of a Gentleman for whom I have the highest
  respect, and to whom I am deeply oblidged.’

The foreboding was justified. After that reluctant refusal, Burns’s
relations with his former landlord never regained their old cordiality.

In his contacts with Aiken, Ballantine, Hamilton, and certain of the
New Light clergy Burns had, by the spring of 1786, taken a further
step in the realization of his own capacities. He found himself quite
at ease, at least in male company, among members of the professional
class to whom as a lad he had looked up with awe. He was discovering,
moreover, that he was not their inferior in native ability. Though he
did not know it then, he had in fact reached as high a level as he was
ever to maintain in Scottish society. These lesser gentry not only
received him, but treated him as an equal. The higher gentry--people
of estates and pedigrees--the higher professional classes, and the
nobility, might receive him for a time, but always with a latent
condescension. Sooner or later, even with Mrs. Dunlop, even with
Robert Riddell, some incident would reveal that their feeling toward
him was after all _de haut en bas_. The friends whom he kept among men
of social and professional standing, from Aiken and Ballantine at the
beginning of his career to Alexander Findlater and John Syme at its
close, were gentlemen, were men of education, but they were not, in
Burns’s favourite capitalized phrase, Great People.

But in the summer and autumn of 1786 it seemed there might be no limit
to Burns’s social advancement. As he went about the country during
August and September, collecting the subscriptions for his poems, the
parish outcast of a few months earlier found himself everywhere courted
and applauded. New acquaintances and old united to draw him out, and
the bolder his remarks the better they liked them. But he was still
capable of awe. In October came an invitation to dine on the 23rd at
Catrine House, country home of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral
Philosophy in Edinburgh University. The company included Basil William,
Lord Daer, the flighty and consumptive but liberal-minded son and heir
of the Earl of Selkirk. In an amusing set of verses Burns described
how, at the prospect of meeting a peer for the first time, his knees
shook as he sidled into the Professor’s drawing-room, and he reverted
to his old trick of watching from a corner until he had taken the
measure of the company. The incident is worth mentioning because it was
probably the last time Burns was ever unsure of himself in society.
In later months and years he was often irritated and uncomfortable
when members of the upper classes emphasized their elevation, but
such feelings were the reverse of awe. Two months after the dinner at
Catrine he was meeting professors and peers by the dozen instead of
the brace, and was maintaining not merely self-possession but critical
appraisal.

Burns’s standards of social intercourse, as of so many other things,
were firmly established before the surviving records become full
enough for detailed study. They were as honest and straight-forward
as the rest of his dealings. Except for the brief embarrassment of a
first meeting, rank as such meant nothing to him. What he demanded,
and all he demanded, of any man was, in his own phrase, that he have
something to him. That something must be native; a matter of mind and
personality, not of social place. A Souter Johnie was better company
than a Hugh Blair, because the cobbler’s wit and wisdom were the
product of native shrewdness dealing with first-hand experience; the
professor’s attainments were ‘meerly an astonishing proof what industry
and application can do’. To his cultured friends, Burns seemed to have
a perverse taste for low company, whereas his real quest was genuine
company. His own unbridled wit and tempestuous emotions naturally made
him gravitate towards other similarly endowed people, who too often
were not pillars of society, but this was not his reason for choosing
them. When a pillar of society bore himself ‘to all the Actors, high
and low, in the drama of Life, simply as they merited in playing their
parts’, and excelled in telling a story--in other words, when the
pillar was Dugald Stewart--Burns enjoyed his company as much as John
Rankine’s or Willie Nicol’s. Nor was wit or waggishness necessarily
demanded. Grave wisdom Burns could relish as well as gay, though not
in every mood; what he could never endure was dullness, pomposity, or
conceit.

As the autumn of 1786 wore on, new friends and old agreed that the
success of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ should make Burns abandon his flight
to Jamaica. He ought to publish a second edition in Edinburgh and then
settle down, either on a farm of his own, or--as Aiken suggested--in
the Excise service. The poet would find plenty of friends to help
him win a hearing, and publishing in the capital would give him a
national instead of a local audience. Burns must have made up his mind
immediately after his dinner with Dugald Stewart. Among his new friends
was Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Renfrewshire estates of the Earl
of Glencairn. On November 1 Dalziel wrote to congratulate Burns on
abandoning the West Indian venture and to tell him that he had showed
the _Poems_ to the Earl himself. The Earl bought a copy, which he
had richly bound, and expressed warm interest in the poems and their
author.

Thus began Burns’s most successful acquaintance with a peer--the only
association of the sort which did not sooner or later end in apathy
on one side and humiliation on the other. Though the circumstances of
Burns’s earliest introduction to Edinburgh society are obscure, the
obscurity is lightened if we take at face value the poet’s repeated
statements that he owed everything to Glencairn--that the Earl, as he
put it, took him by the hand and led him up to fame. Burns afterwards
said that he went to the city without letters of introduction, but
that can have been true only in the narrowest sense. Dalziel certainly
apprised Glencairn of Burns’s plans, as Dr. Mackenzie apprised Sir John
Whitefoord and Andrew Erskine, and as the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun
apprised the blind poet, Thomas Blacklock. Dugald Stewart also must
have known of the decision. Within a week of his arrival, Burns was the
lion of the Edinburgh season. Many new friends must have contributed to
such immediate success, but the poet’s emphasis on Glencairn’s kindness
marks the Earl as the man who secured the patronage of the fashionable
Caledonian Hunt, and probably also as his sponsor in Masonic society.

All this the Earl succeeded in doing without offending the touchy poet
by condescension, though Burns’s pride sometimes suffered because of
Glencairn’s deference to people of superior rank. Once, indeed, Burns
was ‘within half a point’ of throwing down his ‘gage of contemptuous
defiance’ because the Earl was giving too much attention to a wealthy
dunderpate, but even then he was quickly reassured as to Glencairn’s
sincere good wishes. Touchiness aside, Burns’s position in Edinburgh
recalls Benjamin Franklin’s at Versailles a decade before. In each
place the fashionable world thought it had discovered a child of
nature; in each place the newcomer had really a shrewder mind and a
quicker penetration of character and motive than most of the _élite_
who patronized him. The contrast between Burns’s attitude toward
Glencairn and toward his fellow peer, the Earl of Buchan, shows how
thoroughly the poet had learned to take men’s measure regardless of
rank. Buchan also had professed great interest in Burns and was lavish
with advice, but Burns recognized the man as an egotistical windbag
and received his advice with an elaborate irony of compliment which
would have betrayed itself to anyone less conceited than the busybody
who once, when Sir Walter Scott lay ill, volunteered to arrange his
funeral, and who, when he himself had written some amazingly bad
verses, accepted as a tribute John Taylor’s publication of them in a
part of _The Scots Magazine_ ‘distinct from the mass of vulgar poetry’.

Nevertheless, Burns’s deference to Glencairn had unfortunate results.
In securing William Creech, his brother’s former tutor, as Burns’s
publisher, Glencairn thought he was doing the best possible good turn.
Yet the outcome was months of vexation and delay for the poet, and the
loss of all profits from later editions of his poems. Moreover, the
poet had soberly decided that his best hope for a livelihood lay in
securing an Excise post which would support him while he banked his
profits as a reserve fund for his children. But Glencairn, like Mrs.
Dunlop and other gentry whose knowledge of the lives of tenant farmers
was limited to the quarterly receipt of their rents, was all for the
poet’s investing his capital in a farm of his own. Disapproving of
the Excise scheme, Glencairn would do nothing to forward it, though
a word from him in the right place--that is, in the ears of Henry
Dundas--would have procured Burns the appointment he sought. As it
was, all hints fell dead, while meantime Patrick Miller dangled the
bait of Ellisland. When at last Burns interested a man willing to
help the Excise plan, the mischief was already done; he was committed
to the undertaking which swallowed all his little capital. The best
intentions of his would-be patrons kept turning to evil for Burns;
even Glencairn’s gift of a diamond-pointed pencil made trouble by
supplying the poet with the means of inscribing blazing indiscretions
on window-panes.

Burns observed the rest of the Edinburgh gentry and literati as closely
as he did Glencairn and Buchan. He was measuring himself and his
native ability against them, and was not inclined to award himself
second place. But he was not comfortable with most of them. Even if
they did not offend him by overt condescension he was fully aware that
they received him only because he was the fad of the moment. When the
novelty staled he could not hope to continue many friendships in
exalted quarters. The tide of popularity had swept him higher than he
could expect to remain; its ebb might leave him stranded far lower than
he deserved. It was not long, indeed, before his hosts began to find
things to criticize. Burns not only said what he thought, he said it
with an emphasis they found unbecoming in a man of peasant birth. The
great Doctor Johnson could be as gruff as he pleased with his Scottish
hosts because he was Johnson; Lord Braxfield could roar and Lord Kames
rave, both bawdy, in a gentleman’s home because they were Lords of
Session; for Burns to express emphatic opinions argued a lack of the
humility which beseemed a ploughman entertained by his betters.

The fact was that Burns lacked both the finesse which would have
enabled him neatly and inoffensively to deal with snubs, and the
insensitive egotism which could have ignored them. No one could snub
the Ettrick Shepherd, because his magnificent self-esteem made it
impossible for him to see any remark in anything but a complimentary
light. One did not safely snub Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, because
that wasp could sting. Burns’s pride, unfortunately, not only made
him sensitive; it made him aggressive and heavy-handed. When he
flaunted the blue-and-buff of the Whigs he was going out of his way
to assert his independence among people who were mostly Tories; when
he told a lady, who had not waited an introduction before inviting
him to her party, that he would come if she would also invite the
learned pig from the Grassmarket, he was making a show of himself in
one way in the very act of resenting being made a show in another.
The consciousness that he was acting a part--whether behaving like a
country bumpkin in Smellie’s printing-house, or posing as the Bard of
Nature in drawing-rooms--no doubt partly explains some of his more
violent outbursts. Thus when he demolished a clergyman, whose niggling
criticisms of Gray had goaded him beyond endurance, with the Johnsonian
thunderbolt, ‘Sir, I now perceive a man may be an excellent judge of
poetry by square and rule, and after all be a damned blockhead!’ the
victim was probably drawing all the electric tension which had been
accumulating in the poet’s nerves through a long series of irritations
and repressions. But such things did him no good in Edinburgh society.

It was not that his manners were worse than gentlemen’s. In some
respects they were probably better. ‘Swearing,’ Henry Cockburn dryly
records, ‘was thought the right, and the mark, of a gentleman. And,
tried by this test, nobody, who had not seen them, could now be made
to believe how many gentlemen there were.’ Boswell’s long-suffering
wife, Margaret Montgomerie, took her husband to task for his loud and
abusive manner of asserting himself in argument, and Boswell admitted
to his journal that she was right. Benjamin Franklin remarked that
Edinburgh was the only place he knew where violent disputatiousness was
not confined to lawyers and university men. But when a mere peasant
exhibited, in however mild a form, the traits of the gentry, he was
forgetting his place, and should be put back in it.

Moreover, Burns quickly realized that these gentry scorned the national
tradition which was his life-blood. If they did not all, like Dr. John
Moore, urge him henceforth to write in standard English, they at least
made it plain that a Scots poet could not aspire to literary equality
with Dr. Beattie and Dr. Blair. Robert Fergusson was a regrettable
scamp whom Edinburgh preferred to forget; Burns erected, at his own
expense, a monument to Fergusson, and insisted, in speech and writing,
on praising the dead poet and heaping scorn on the gentry who had let
him starve. The place where Burns, after the first few weeks, really
enjoyed himself in Edinburgh and where he made most of his intimate
and lasting friendships, was among the Crochallan Fencibles. This
was one of the numerous clubs in which lawyers and merchants carried
on the old convivial traditions of their city. Edinburgh clubs were
ancient institutions which arrayed bibulous functions in ceremonials
ranging from the harmless High Jinks described by Scott in _Guy
Mannering_ to almost psychopathic debauchery in such an organization
as the Wig Club. They were, in fact, along with the Freemasons, the
ancestors both of the American fraternal orders and of the Rotary and
Kiwanis Clubs. In the more elaborately organized groups each officer,
and sometimes every member, had a special title. Thus each member in
Allan Ramsay’s Easy Club took the name of an old Scottish writer; in
the Cape Club, to which Robert Fergusson belonged, each member was a
Knight Companion of the Cape, with tides like Sir Cape, Sir Brimstone,
Sir Precenter (Fergusson himself), Sir Nun and Abbess, and Sir Pope.
The Fencibles went in for military designations. William Smellie, the
gruff, slovenly, and erudite printer who was handling the Edinburgh
edition of the _Poems_, as Adjutant of the corps introduced the poet.
Burns’s publisher, Creech, proved a social disappointment as well as
a financial disaster; his printer was a man after his own heart, an
‘old Veteran in Genius, Wit and Bawdry’. Smellie, like Burns, concealed
an inward diffidence and sensitivity beneath an aggressive manner;
like Burns, too, he was self-educated. The poet was not far wrong in
describing him as ‘a man positively of the first abilities and greatest
strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits
that I have met with.’ He had displayed his intellectual power in his
_Philosophy of Natural History_, long regarded as a standard work, and
in writing large sections of the original _Encyclopædia Britannica_;
his wit he reserved for conversation, where, like Burns’s, it allowed
no considerations of reverence or prudery to stand in its way. Despite
his rough exterior, he was able to captivate an intelligent woman
of the world like Maria Riddell, as well as the ebullient poet. But
the records of this friendship were too much for Smellie’s squeamish
executors; his biographer piously relates that ‘many letters of Burns
to Mr. Smellie which remained, being totally unfit for publication,
and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable
people still in life, have been burnt.’

The records of another friendship which had its start among the
Edinburgh bookmen fared better. Peter Hill, five years the poet’s
senior, was in 1787 a clerk in Creech’s shop, but was soon to set up
in business for himself and prove a kindly and indulgent master to
an apprentice named Archibald Constable. Hill’s was one of the few
friendships Burns made in Edinburgh which suffered no abatement with
time. From the summer of 1787, when Hill was handling some of the
innumerable details of business relating to the Edinburgh _Poems_,
until the beginning of 1796, when Burns sent his ‘annual’ gift of a
kippered salmon from the Nith, their association was unclouded. Hill
supplied the poet with books, sent presents to his family, and took
care of miscellaneous business errands in the city. Burns secured
for Hill the book-orders, first of the Monkland Friendly Society and
later of the Dumfries Public Library, and interspersed his business
communications with hearty blasts of execration, broad humour, and
messages to all their common friends. Though the phraseology of the
letters often seems stilted, behind its stiffness glows a genuine
affection and esteem.

But the backbone of the Fencibles was the lawyers. Their Colonel,
William Dunbar, was a jolly little bachelor some years older than the
poet; their Major and Muster-Master General was Charles Hay, friend of
Boswell in the days when the latter was striving for distinction at the
Scottish bar, whose port-inflamed countenance blinks above his judicial
robes as Lord Newton in Raeburn’s superb portrait in the Scottish
National Gallery. More notable for ‘law, paunch, whist, claret, and
worth’ than for literary interests, Hay’s one poetic suggestion to
Burns had humiliating results. He was among those who urged the poet to
compose the unfortunate elegy ‘On the Death of Lord President Dundas’,
the complete ignoring of which by Dundas’s son inflicted on Burns’s
pride a wound which never healed.

Among the lawyer Fencibles the most congenial to Burns was Alexander
Cunningham, a distant and impoverished relative of Lord Glencairn.
Though Burns described him to his face as dissipated but not
debauched--a subtle distinction of which the exact import is probably
forever lost--Cunningham was diffident and retiring. Perhaps for this
reason, perhaps also because of his kinship to Glencairn, Burns never
sent him on such ticklish errands as he entrusted to Bob Ainslie, but
their literary and intellectual fellowship was sincere. Unlike Hay and
Ainslie, Cunningham had real fondness for the higher types of poetry,
though to offset this he had the anglicized Scotsman’s inability to
see anything but the ludicrous and the low in folk literature. Burns
felt that in offering ‘My Love is like a red red rose’ to Cunningham
he had to apologize for its simplicity; Popean imitations would have
been more in his line. The young lawyer, in short, belonged to the
generation which was trying to live down the national characteristics
that meant most to Burns. In Edinburgh the legal profession was the
last stronghold of the rich old gusto of Scottish life, the last group
of men unashamed of being ‘characters’. But even there such traits
belonged mainly to the generation passing or past which included
men like Braxfield, Monboddo, and Kames, or to the already mature
generation of Charles Hay and Henry Erskine. Cunningham belonged more
nearly to the generation of Henry Cockburn, without Cockburn’s relish
for the memories of traits which he did not share.

Within the limits imposed by his diffidence and his tastes, Cunningham
had no reason to complain of lack of sympathy or confidence from Burns.
When his first sweetheart jilted him with humiliating publicity,
Cunningham told his sorrow to Burns, who had previously supplied him
with a poor song in furtherance of his suit, and who now condoled in
terms which bore hard on the young lady. The poet’s letters ranged
from gay impromptu verses to the confession that as a result of the
fiasco of the elegy, ‘I never see the name, Dundas, in the column of a
newspaper, but my heart seems straitened for room in my bosom; & if I
am obliged to read aloud a paragraph relating to one of them, I feel
my forehead flush, & my nether lip quivers.’ On his part, Cunningham
obtained for Burns the last national honour which Edinburgh conferred
in his lifetime--election to membership in the socially exclusive Royal
Company of Archers. And at the end Cunningham received one of the
poet’s desperate appeals for help--not for money, but for intercession
with the Commissioners of Excise not to put him on half-pay during
his illness. Cunningham, moreover, shared with John Syme the credit
for setting on foot the subscription for Jean and the children after
Burns’s death, though his diffidence made him a poor collector of
funds. Through diffidence, also, he permitted George Thomson to prepare
for the newspapers the obituary he should have written himself, and by
this neglect did injury to his friend’s memory.

But the names of three other friends are associated with much more
damage to Burns’s reputation during his life and after his death. Only
one of the three was a Fencible--Robert Cleghorn, a jolly gentleman
farmer from Corstorphine. Cleghorn had what Cunningham lacked, a
strong relish for vernacular literature, publishable or unpublishable.
Thus he became the recipient of many choice bits of verse, sometimes
traditional and sometimes original, for his own and his friends’
edification. The correspondence harmed Burns’s reputation not through
its publication but through its long suppression. That remarkable
moralist, Lord Byron, read the Cleghorn letters in manuscript and
set down in his journal a highly-coloured summary of them as ‘full
of oaths and obscene songs’ which stimulated the imaginations of
several generations of readers. Now that the surviving letters can
be read in full, they produce no such revulsion as do some of the
things Burns wrote about Jean Armour and Maria Riddell. For readers
who do not relish broad humour they may be distasteful, but beneath
their coarseness is the record of a genuine friendship with an honest,
hearty, and generous man. One suspects that had Cunningham, for
instance, visited Burns at Ellisland or Dumfries, he would have felt
the same disillusionment at sight of the poet’s narrow and primitive
domestic life which the pettier Robert Ainslie recorded. Cleghorn made
such a visit in 1795, when Burns’s health and spirits were already
declining, and left behind him a warm glow of renewed and strengthened
friendship.

It is regrettable that Cleghorn’s name should be, for most readers of
Burns, associated with the poet’s collection of ‘cloaciniad’ verse. In
fact, Cleghorn received no more of such work than did a dozen other
friends, but John Allen, his stepson and heir, had ideas about the
treatment of a great poet’s manuscripts which differed from those of
William Smellie’s executors. Allen did not feel free, by mutilating
some of his most characteristic letters, to ‘protect the memory’ of
a poet who had never tried to disguise any side of his own nature.
And Cleghorn’s tastes were as catholic as David Herd’s, or as Burns’s
own. He measured the merit of a song by its singing quality, and not
by its suitability for use in a young ladies’ seminary. Burns sent
him the charming ‘O wat ye wha that lo’es me’ with the certainty
that it would please him as much as the broadest ribaldry. The male
who in male company does not occasionally relish crude humour is a
scarce creature in any age or nation; was perhaps unusually scarce in
eighteenth-century Scotland. The songs which went to Cleghorn went also
to Graham of Fintry and Provost Maxwell, to Collector Mitchell and John
M’Murdo and John Syme--in other words, to some of the best and most
loyal characters in Burns’s circle. Boswell’s journals are crammed with
proof that similar tastes prevailed in still higher ranks of society.

To avoid misunderstanding both Burns and his friends, a brief
digression is necessary regarding the book entitled _The Merry Muses of
Caledonia_. Burns was well aware that his own work, like the folk-songs
he collected, was divided into the publishable and the unpublishable.
But he did not draw the line where his later editors did. To him, ‘The
Jolly Beggars’, ‘A Poet’s Welcome’, and ‘Holy Willie’ were no fitter
for general circulation than were ‘When Princes and Prelates’ and
‘The Court of Equity’. They were _jeux d’esprit_ intended for private
circulation among a few intimates. His riotous imagination respected
no boundaries when it began to play; what distinguishes most of his
bawdry from the common sort is its wit. And this wit as frequently
saw how an improper folk-song could be made more brilliantly improper
as it saw how a halting one could be made lyric. Much of his folk
collection, together with ‘a very few’ of his own composition, was
written into a manuscript volume which he sometimes lent about, with
strict injunctions as to secrecy. According to tradition, that volume
fell after his death into unscrupulous hands and formed the basis of
the earliest of the various collections called _The Merry Muses_. The
tradition is almost certainly wrong. The ultimate source may have been
Burns, but not the immediate one. In all the editions the authentic
Burns verses are too garbled to have been printed from his own copies.
They bear every sign of oral transmission or hasty transcription at
several removes from the original. The real manuscript was probably
destroyed after Burns’s death; certainly it was never printed. It would
have been better for his reputation if it had, for he now stands father
or godfather to a garbled mass of Scottish, English, and Irish filth,
little of which he wrote, and some of which he never even saw.

Neither Robert Ainslie nor William Nicol needed the chance association
of their names with fescennine verse to bring discredit on Burns. Their
own conduct sufficed. Ainslie, like Cunningham, was a young lawyer,
but the two moved in different orbits, and were never brought together
even by their friendship for Burns. They appealed to different facets
of the poet’s nature, Ainslie’s relation to him being that of Smith
and Richmond in the days of the Fornicators’ Court. The son of a good
family in the Border village of Dunse, Ainslie was celebrating his
recent emancipation from parental government by sowing a plentiful crop
of wild oats. Full of the high spirits of twenty-one, he furnished the
same ready chorus of laughter the Mauchline cronies had provided, and
was rapidly qualifying himself to discuss with Burns the pleasing topic
of comparative bastardy. The most enjoyable part of the poet’s Border
tour in May, 1787, was his visit to Dunse; after Ainslie left him he
complained that he never had a mouthful of really hearty laughter on
the trip.

Even the mutilated letters which survive show that Burns freely
confided his past and present peccadillos to Ainslie; the sequel proves
the confidence to have been ill bestowed. At the end of the Border
tour, for instance, Burns found awaiting him in Dumfries post-office
a letter from Meg Cameron, an Edinburgh servant girl who was to
bear a child which she claimed was his. Ainslie was commissioned to
‘send for the wench and give her ten or twelve shillings’ against
the poet’s return to the city. In reply, Ainslie broke the news that
he had himself just become the father of an illegitimate son, and
received from his friend a roaring welcome to ‘the venerable Society
of Fathers’. Again in the following year Burns favored Ainslie with a
highly-coloured account of his final reconciliation with Jean Armour,
and early in 1789 instructed his young friend to locate Jenny Clow so
that Burns, on his arrival in Edinburgh, could settle the suit Jenny
had brought against him. More creditable matters also occupied the
correspondence. Some of Burns’s earliest doubts about Ellisland, some
of his deepest gloom about his own and his family’s future, were told
to Ainslie. But the friendship died before Burns did, and through
Ainslie’s fault.

On Friday, October 15, 1790, Ainslie came to Ellisland for the
week-end. On Monday he reported the visit to Agnes M’Lehose, with whom
he was by this time on confidential, and even flirtatious, terms. The
warmth of Burns’s welcome was gratifying, but the house, he noted,
was ‘ill contrived--and pretty Dirty, and _Hugry Mugry_’, and its
other inmates pleased him little. Jean was ‘Vulgar & Common-place in a
considerable degree--and pretty round & fat’, but ‘a kind Body in her
Own way, and the husband Tolerably Attentive to her’. Also present were
Burns’s sister and sister-in-law--‘common looking girls’--and ‘3 Male
and female cousins’ who had been helping with the harvest.

Burns rejoiced that his friend had arrived ‘upon his _Kirn_ night, when
he Expected some of his friends to help make merry’, but sight of the
guests deepened Ainslie’s depression, for they were ‘a Vulgar looking
Tavern keeper from Dumfries; and his Wife more Vulgar--Mr. Miller of
Dalswinton’s Gardener and his Wife--and said Wife’s sister--and a
little fellow from Dumfries, who had been a Clerk’. Burns and the rest
had a good time, ‘Dancing, and Kissing the Lasses at the End of every
dance’, while Ainslie shuddered to the depths of his paltry little
soul. Burns the peasant was enjoying himself in the world of his birth,
and the young snob from Edinburgh couldn’t understand him at all:

  ‘... Our Friend himself is as ingenious as ever, and Seems very happy
  with the Situation I have described--His Mind however now appears to
  me to be a great Mixture of the poet and the Excise Man--One day he
  sits down and Writes a Beautiful poem--and the Next he Seizes a cargo
  of Tobacco from some unfortunate Smuggler--or Roups out some poor
  Wretch for Selling liquors without a License. From his conversation he
  Seems to be frequently among the Great--but No Attention is paid by
  people of any rank to his wife....’

After such a letter--withheld from complete publication until 1938--it
is plain enough why the friendship went into a swift decline. For
another year or two Burns continued to write, gaily or confidentially,
but got small response. Ainslie’s last letter, early in 1794, ‘was so
dry, so distant, so like a card to one of his clients’, that the poet
‘could scarce bear to read it’, and never answered it. The lawyer was
already on his way, via the fashionable _Werther_ melancholy, back to
the orthodox piety which led him, early in the nineteenth century, to
compose a couple of devotional pamphlets. But neither piety nor loyalty
sufficed to make him protect the memory of the friend whose name has
kept his alive. Preserving the reckless letters Burns had written him,
he allowed them to pass into circulation, once at least accompanied
by a formal docket certifying that Burns was the author of a letter
signed with a humorous pen-name. The mutilations which so many of the
manuscripts have suffered were the work of later owners.

Ainslie’s chief injury to Burns’s fame was inflicted after the poet’s
death; William Nicol, Latin master in Edinburgh High School, harmed
him in life. A coarse, egotistical, drunken man of violent temper,
Nicol was also one of the foremost Latin scholars of his day. In his
bawdy violence of language Burns saw wit; his emphatic dislike of his
superiors Burns interpreted as proof of an independent spirit. No great
harm might have come of the friendship had it been confined to drinking
bouts in Edinburgh and to correspondence thereafter. Unfortunately
Burns took Nicol as his travelling companion on the tour of the
Highlands in September, 1787. This tour was Burns’s chance to meet
influential folk in their homes and to show himself at his best. Thanks
to Nicol he came near to showing himself at his worst. Among the people
from whom he had invitations were the Duke and Duchess of Athole.
Their reception of him at Blair Athole was all the touchy poet could
desire. The Duke and Duchess were cordiality itself; among the guests
was Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, whose friendship
and influence could be of the utmost importance to Burns; a still
more influential person, Henry Dundas, dispenser of patronage for all
Scotland, was expected next day on one of his periodical inspections
of his political fences. Everything seemed to be going well for Burns
when Nicol, the ‘most unprincipled savage’, intervened. The boorish
schoolmaster, finding himself neglected in favour of his companion,
decided to move on at once, and insisted on Burns’s going with him.
The poet’s pride made him guilty of outrageous bad manners. In reply
to Nicol’s insistence, Burns should have bidden him go to the devil
his own gait. But that might have been interpreted as subservience to
the Great. Through what can only be described as inverted snobbery,
Burns allowed Nicol to drag him away. The scene was repeated at Castle
Gordon, where the merry Duchess, who had declared in Edinburgh that
Burns swept her off her feet, pleaded in vain against Nicol’s urgings.
Though he afterwards wrote complimentary and apologetic letters, and
cursed the ‘obstinate son of Latin Prose’, Burns could not efface the
impression he had made. He never saw the Atholes or the Gordons again.

Throughout the trip Nicol’s conduct was the same; he even snatched
Burns away before breakfast from the home of his cousin, James Burness
of Montrose. The Highland tour, though he did not then realize it, was
Burns’s last opportunity to enlist the active friendship of people
whose influence might have changed his life. His failure was largely
Nicol’s fault. Reports of his abrupt and ungracious conduct undoubtedly
came back to Edinburgh and contributed to the comparative neglect he
suffered during his second winter in the city. Edinburgh was too small
a place for misconduct to hide in; every lawyer in the old Parliament
House would have heard that a servant girl had brought suit against the
Ayrshire Bard; the stories from the Highlands, losing nothing in the
telling, would add to the swelling tide of hostile gossip. The talk,
indeed, reached so far, and was believed so implicitly, that not even
death could alter Edinburgh opinion. Cunningham’s efforts to interest
prominent citizens in the subscription for Burns’s widow and children
met repeated snubs and refusals; to this day, despite the monument
on the Calton Hill, the city pays only a half-hearted tribute to his
memory.

Of course all blame for the hostile talk cannot be shifted to Nicol,
or even to Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow. Burns was indiscreet enough to
start plenty of tales without help. But his too long stay unfortunately
predisposed many people to believe the worst not only of his conduct
in the city but afterwards. Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart, for
instance, both accepted at face value the second-hand reports of
Burns’s alleged misdoings in Dumfries, and wrote him off their books.
For years anecdotes showing Burns in an absurd or discreditable light
circulated in Edinburgh. Some may have been true; others were malicious
distortions which point the direction taken by city opinion. Thus
Lockhart told how Hugh Blair had suggested, when a party of gentlemen
were discussing possible changes in the Kilmarnock _Poems_, that
‘tidings of salvation’ might advantageously be emended to ‘tidings of
damnation’. Thereupon the poet, according to Lockhart, embarrassed
the professor by asking permission to acknowledge his improvement in
a footnote. The basis of the story is truth; its details are not.
Blair did suggest the change; Burns did, in conversation with other
people, acknowledge his help. But Blair’s suggestion came in writing,
as a carefully veiled hint amid other criticisms of the poems. The
episode as Lockhart told it is city gossip intended to display Blair
as the urbane professor and patron and Burns as a clumsy rustic. Of
no importance in itself, the story is symptomatic of the attitude of
cultured Edinburgh after the first enthusiasm over Burns had waned.

But no realization of the trouble Nicol was helping to make, no
recognition of the schoolmaster’s real character, affected Burns. He
continued, after he left the city, to correspond with Nicol; when the
obstinate son of Latin Prose got into the row which finally led to his
resignation from the High School, Burns championed him against his
amiable principal, Dr. Alexander Adam. By christening one of his sons
William Nicol, Burns proclaimed his friendship to the world at large,
and during the years at Ellisland performed such services as getting
appraisals of a farm Nicol was buying, and maintaining a broken-down
mare which a horse-coper had passed off on the schoolmaster. The
friendship lasted until February, 1793, when Burns was suffering from
the rage and humiliation which followed the official inquiry into his
revolutionary sympathies. Some report of the matter having reached
Nicol, he undertook to rebuke Burns in a would-be facetious vein.
The poet was in no mood for rebuke or good advice, facetious or not,
and with his heavily satirical reply to Nicol their correspondence
ended--too late.

In any case Edinburgh friendships, good or bad, however much he might
try to maintain them by correspondence, could not supply companionship
when Burns moved to Ellisland. Though on his first visit to Dumfries
he had professed himself enchanted with the company he met, he was
lonely enough when he actually settled there. He made acquaintances, no
doubt ‘men of talent and humour’, among the tradesfolk and professional
men of the town, but people like Dr. James Mundell, Walter Auld the
saddler, Henry Clint of the King’s Arms, William Hyslop of the Globe
Inn, and Thomas Boyd, the contractor who built Ellisland, are names and
little more. Apart from his landlord, Patrick Miller, with whom his
relations were soon strained, the most congenial friend he had during
the three years on the farm was Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, whose
estate of Friars Carse marched with Ellisland.

Riddell was a country gentleman turned amateur antiquarian. He had
embellished his grounds with a ‘Druid Circle’ and a ‘Hermitage’; he
dabbled in numismatics and church architecture. These would scarcely
have interested Burns--though he remained in the hermitage long enough
to inscribe some verses on the window with Glencairn’s diamond-pointed
pencil--but Riddell was also a musician in a small way. Besides
composing a few commonplace airs of his own he professed great
interest in the traditional music of his country. Here Burns shared
his enthusiasm and far excelled his knowledge. The laird, perhaps at
Burns’s suggestion, subscribed for Johnson’s _Museum_ and had his set
bound with blank interleaves for notes on the songs, their authors,
and their history. The number of his annotations gives the measure
of his knowledge. Out of four hundred songs, one hundred and seventy
have notes. Of these, one hundred and fifty-two were written by Burns,
who must have spent many evenings at the task in his friend’s library;
eighteen were by Riddell himself or an amanuensis. Sir Walter Scott
summed up the laird’s prose writings as ‘truly the most extravagant
compositions that ever a poor Man abandoned by providence to the
imaginations of his own heart had the misfortune to devise.’

The company which sometimes came to Carse, including as it did men like
Joseph Farington the painter--who noted that ‘Mr. Burns the Scottish
Poet’ was ‘a middle-sized man, ... black complexioned, and his general
appearance that of a tradesman or mechanick’, had ‘a strong expressive
manner of delivering himself in conversation’, and knew no Latin--and
Francis Grose, the antiquary whose inspiring enthusiasm was the real
source of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, was more important than Riddell himself.
The laird’s real tastes and aptitudes were convivial. A man of powerful
physique and a rather overwhelming robustiousness of manner--William
Smellie spoke of ‘his immense fist and stentorian voice’--he succeeded,
like so many gentlemen of his day, in wrecking his health at an early
age. The notorious ‘Whistle’ contest, in which Riddell and his kinsmen
Sir Robert Laurie and Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch undertook
to drink each other under the table for the possession of a family
heirloom, was probably more typical of the laird’s true aptitudes
than the annotations were. Even at that, though, he was outdone by
Craigdarroch, who won the whistle by drinking ‘upds. of 5 Bottles of
Claret’. Burns, like most of the friends of the contestants, found the
incident vastly amusing; Burns’s biographers have argued the question
of his real presence at Friars Carse with an almost theological
fervour; nevertheless its only interest or value for posterity lies
in the light it sheds on Robert Riddell’s character. According to
biographical tradition, Robert Riddell was the staid member of the
family and his brother Walter the wild one; actually such distinction
between them seems as baseless as the kindred legend that Gilbert Burns
was a better farmer than his brother. But whether Glenriddell led or
followed in the events which for a time estranged the poet from the
whole Riddell family, the circumstances of the breach resemble with
painful clarity many other episodes in Burns’s contacts with the gentry.

The full story of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ is Maria Riddell’s more
than her brother-in-law’s, but Robert Riddell had a share in the
trouble. During 1792 and 1793, when Walter Riddell and his wife
Maria were occupying the estate of Goldielea or Woodley Park, family
relations were not always harmonious. At a guess, Walter wanted to
borrow from his elder brother the funds to complete payment for Woodley
Park; at a guess, the wives failed to charm each other. Whatever the
causes, by the autumn of 1792 Burns had to assure Maria that he
would listen to no stories about her from Glenriddell--and presumably
also from Glenriddell’s wife. Yet for another year or more the poet
managed to stay on good terms with both families. The year 1793 was,
poetically and flirtatiously, the highest point of Burns’s friendship
with Maria; the same year produced asseverations of friendship as
‘ardent & grateful’ on Burns’s part as Robert Riddell’s was ‘kind and
generous’. In leisure moments the poet was transcribing a collection
of his letters as a companion volume to the collection of unpublished
verse he had given the laird in 1791. On Christmas day he was still
transcribing. On January 12, 1794, his quarrel with Maria had reached
its climax. Somewhere between those two dates had occurred the
mysterious brawl in which Robert Riddell’s part is still a matter of
controversy.

If Robert Riddell was the host, who, by compelling Burns to drink more
than he wished to, reduced the poet to a state in which he insulted
his hostess, the laird’s conduct admits of small excuse; if, as
report has it, the scene occurred at Woodley Park and Robert Riddell
subsequently took up the quarrel, he is even less excusable. Whichever
version one accepts, Riddell was displaying innate snobbishness towards
a man he considered, after all, a social inferior. If he was the
host, realization of his own share in the matter should have made him
charitable; if his brother was the host, Glenriddell was indulging in
violent and uncalled-for partisanship. He held, it would seem, the same
theory of a gentleman’s privileges as was enunciated a few years later
by Sir John Graham Dalyell: ‘I am a gentleman, and I will be treated
as such; and if any person presumes to pervert my meaning in any way
whatever, if his rank is not equal to mine I will kick him; and if it
is equal I will shoot him.’ Burns, as a plebeian, was kicked. There is
a little satisfaction in knowing that the poet held to his resolution
not to apologize to his host. The ‘Remorseful Apology’ supposed to
have been addressed to a Riddell was really sent, early in 1796, to a
Mr. S. Mackenzie. Four months after the quarrel Glenriddell was dead,
still unreconciled to the poet who had done more for him than he could
ever have done for the poet. A loud blustering squire, a hollow and
unsubstantial mind; that was Robert Riddell.

For the last five years of his life Burns’s social world centred in
Dumfries. About it cluster dark stories and darker hints, in the
effort to refute which the poet’s defenders have sometimes been led
to dangerous extremities of special pleading. The truth is that Burns
in Dumfries was neither better nor worse than Burns in Tarbolton and
Mauchline. Such a report as James Gray’s of finding Burns reading
poetry with his children and hearing the older boys recite their
lessons does not refute the tales of boisterous revelry in taverns;
both are true. The sole difference is that Burns in Tarbolton was an
unimportant young man amid a group of other youths; in Edinburgh he was
partly lost in the crowds; in Dumfries he was a prominent figure whose
every action was noted. He did not degenerate in Dumfries, but neither
did he become a chocolate seraph.

Fortunately it is no longer necessary to rely on conjecture and
second-hand reports in studying Burns’s last years. The letters which
passed between two of his most intimate friends, John Syme of Dumfries
and Alexander Cunningham of Edinburgh, are now available to replace
guess-work with facts. Of all the friends of Burns’s last years, Syme
is now the one who emerges most clearly, and with most credit to
himself. A man of good education, a college friend of Dr. James Currie,
the poet’s first biographer, Syme regarded Dumfries as a place of exile
in which Burns’s society was almost the only redeeming feature. Having
lost his small paternal estate of Barncailzie near Kirkcudbright,
he had managed to recoup his fortunes by getting appointed to the
sinecure post of Collector of Stamps at Dumfries. He first met Burns
in 1788, but not until two years later did they become intimate. Syme
was a man of sentiment in the best tradition of Henry Mackenzie and
_The Sorrows of Werther_. He went into raptures over thunderstorms
and desolate scenery; he read Zimmermann’s _Treatise on Solitude_; he
thought Clarinda’s the finest love-letters ever written. Rhapsodic and
absent-minded, he was the sort who could set off on a long-planned
hunting-trip and find on arriving at his destination that he had
forgotten his dogs. Maria Riddell paid warm tribute to his good head
and excellent heart, but added that in matters of business he wanted
method: ‘He is always in a labyrinth of papers and accounts, and,
somewhat like the cuttlefish, he obscures himself altogether in a mist
of his own creating.’

Burns admired Syme’s education and literary taste; Syme thought the
poet ‘a noble fellow’, admired his wit and brilliant conversation, but
could not admire his wife. ‘Methinks he has exhibited his poetical
genius when he celebrated her’, he said to Cunningham after his first
sight of Jean. Before long Burns was submitting his new poems to Syme
and expressing implicit confidence in his judgement, though Syme avowed
that he scarcely dared to touch a line of them. Sometimes the two would
meet in a boisterous crowd at a tavern; again they would spend a quiet
evening over a single bottle of wine in the little croft of Ryedale
which Syme regarded as his refuge ‘from the frivolous and dissipated
society’ of Dumfries. Without Burns, said Syme, his life in the town
would be ‘a dreary blank’. Syme had set himself up as a clearing-house
for humorous and satirical verses written or collected by his friends,
and Burns quickly became the chief contributor to the hoard. Some of
the verses compelled caution in sharing them. Of the epigram on the
Loyal Natives Club, for instance, Syme told Cunningham that, though he
and Burns were ‘far from differing from them on sentiments of loyalty,
we differ on _sentiment_, abstractly considered. They scarcely know
the meaning of the word Sentiment, & their Society consists in roaring
& drinking.’ ‘Don’t,’ he added after quoting the epigram, ‘let any
Dumfries person see this, for one of the Savages, if he heard it,
might cut Robin’s pipe.’

Syme’s letters abundantly illustrate what he meant by ‘frivolous and
dissipated society’. When the Caledonian Hunt met at Dumfries in
November, 1794, ‘Baker, one of the knowing english Squires on the Turf,
made an elegant appearance by insulting in the grossest manner Squire
Walter Riddel of this place, who pursued him to Durham and made him
ask pardon, which is published in our papers of last week.’ On the
same occasion the Honourable Ramsay Maule of Panmure showed that for
once at least Burns was justified in the tone of a satirical epigram,
for Panmure and some drunken companions smeared a helpless underling’s
hair with mustard and stuck it full of toothpick quills, ‘by way of
hedgehogging him’. That Burns gnashed his teeth and passed by on the
other side when he encountered such members of the organization to
which he had dedicated his Edinburgh _Poems_, is no ground for wonder.
He had larded the Caledonian Hunt with flattery, and they were behaving
like cads and bullies.

But though Burns shrank from the Caledonian Hunt he did not always
avoid similar company. There were meetings at which he and Syme drank
bumpers out with wild Irishmen--such meetings as led Thomas Telford the
engineer jovially to warn Burns that if he went on ‘in his old way,
not even a _she Devil_ will be able to meet with a Milt in him.’ There
was a drunken brawl with one Captain Dods, who took hot exception to
the poet’s toast, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the
justice of our cause.’ That Burns escaped a duel only because he was
not the Captain’s social equal did not lessen his humiliation. Most
biographers have held that such a toast in the presence of gentlemen
holding the King’s commission was a huge breach of the proprieties,
and so it was--if Burns was not goaded into giving it. Nothing in the
record as it stands forbids belief that Dods, or some other officer
who knew that Burns was suspected of sympathy with the French, may
have called for a round of loyal toasts with the deliberate intention
of embarrassing the poet. In that case, nothing could have been neater
than Burns’s evasion, and since nothing came of the episode it is to
be presumed that Samuel Clarke succeeded in making the sobered Dods
realize what his objection to the sentiment implied.

But there were other similar episodes which cannot be so favourably
explained, and which multiply proof that Burns had never acquired
finesse, whether in toasting, flattering, or sinning. Whatever he did
was done so forthrightly that it attracted attention. And the moment he
attracted attention his companions recollected that after all he was a
peasant received on sufferance into gentle company. The outcome might
be expulsion from the house for conduct which a gentleman born need
not even have apologized for, it might be a verbal attack like Captain
Dods’s, or it might be merely a tacit resolve to drop him forthwith.
The Edinburgh experience repeated itself in Dumfries. Burns’s
ill-repute in certain quarters during his life and after his death was
not owing to his being a sinner above the other Caledonians, but simply
to his lack of the social standing which enabled Kames and Braxfield
and Boswell to misbehave without penalty, and which would have tempered
the sting of his satirical outbursts.

Occasional public drunken squabbles are not the only evidence that
during these last years Burns’s nerves were often exacerbated. The
loyal Syme once undertook to rebuke him for some of his wild doings
and sayings. His language was too strong--telling the story afterwards
he admitted, ‘I may have spoken daggers, but I meant none.’ The poet,
his face black with anger, fumbled with his sword-cane. Syme, half
laughing, half serious, exclaimed, ‘What! and in my own house, too!’
The conscience-stricken Burns flung away the cane, burst into tears,
and positively grovelled in contrition on the flagstone floor. It is
not a pleasant scene, and though the vividness with which it stayed in
Syme’s memory is indication enough that it was exceptional, it cannot
be ignored. No man, drunk or sober, whose nerves were normal could have
behaved so.

Fortunately the vividness of Syme’s memory is not the only proof that
such conduct was exceptional. Others besides Syme who were nearest to
Burns in his last years concur in their loyalty and affection. At the
end of 1790 Alexander Findlater reported to his official superior,
Supervisor Corbet, that Burns was ‘an active, faithful & zealous
officer’, gave ‘the most unremitting attention to the duties of his
office (which, by the bye is more than I at first looked for from
so eccentric a Genius)’, and might ‘be considered a credit to the
profession’. And the judgment which Findlater thus expressed at the
beginning of the poet’s Excise career he reaffirmed after his death.
Others testified to their regard in deeds as well as words. Though
Burns continued to display his life-long preference for the company
of extravagant and _outré_ sorts of people the best men in the Excise
were the ones who esteemed him most. John Lewars, for example, brother
of the Jessie of the songs, was a man of some education, and above
the level of the common riding-officer. His father had been Collector
at Dumfries, and thus a man of standing in the community. Burns
called Lewars ‘a young fellow of uncommon merit--indeed, by far the
cleverest fellow I have met with in this part of the world’, and Lewars
reciprocated the poet’s affection by service to him and his family
during his illness and after his death. And that Burns’s long absence
from duty did not bear more heavily on him was due to the kindness
of Adam Stobbie, a young expectant who throughout the spring of 1796
performed Burns’s rounds without pay, that the poet might continue to
draw his full salary.

Fortunately, too, Syme records bright passages as well as dark in the
last years. There were evenings at Ryedale when they consumed more
cups of tea than bottles of wine, and when ‘Robin’s confounding wit’
played as sharply as it ever did over a punchbowl. In 1793 and 1794
there were brief excursions with Burns into Kirkcudbright on which
the mercurial poet displayed every facet of his nature, bursting into
furious rage over a spoiled pair of boots, fulminating brilliantly
satirical epigrams against the Earl of Galloway, announcing that
he would dine nowhere where he could not ‘eat like a Turk, drink
like a fish and swear like the Devil’, and anon proving a decorous
and fascinating houseguest at St. Mary’s Isle, seat of the Earl of
Selkirk, whose son Lord Daer had given Burns his first glimpse of
the peerage. Burns still shrank from the ordeal of encountering such
exalted folk--‘I am indeed ill at ease whenever I approach your
Honorables & Right Honorables’--though now for a different reason. In
1786 the consciousness of his own rusticity had been uppermost; in
1794 he did not wish to be laid open either to a fresh snub or renewed
condescension. But his last recorded intercourse with the peerage was
as pleasant--and as dangerous--as his first. The Earl of Selkirk was
one of the few Scottish peers who were Whigs at a time when all power
belonged to the Tories; thus meeting Burns on congenial grounds he
helped to draw him into the last of his ill-advised meddlings with
politics by interesting him in the parliamentary campaign of Patrick
Heron of Heron. So to the last the peerage influenced Burns against
his own best interests. Nevertheless this visit to St. Mary’s Isle is
refutation enough of the charge that in his last years Burns had sunk
so low that gentlefolk shunned him. The man who so charmed the Earl’s
young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music
and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs
with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers
have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787
swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady
Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.

Despite their intimacy, it would be false to claim that Syme shared all
Burns’s interests. No one man could do that. The very topic on which
Burns and Lady Mary found common ground was outside Syme’s range. He
never could understand what Burns saw in the crude and half-literate
James Johnson, because he never understood the bond of fellowship
established by mutual devotion to Scottish folk-song. Nevertheless,
Syme was probably the closest to Burns of all his Dumfries friends, and
knew--as certain impassioned defenders like Anna Dorothea Benson could
not--the worst as well as the best in his later conduct. The man who
noted that ‘Robin’s temper is not cold and frugal’, and who did not
hesitate to record the sword-cane story and certain other episodes,
cannot be charged with allowing affection to obscure the full truth
about his friend. Hence Syme’s deeds and words at the time of Burns’s
death give as reliable a verdict on the poet’s last years as can now be
reached.

As Burns’s health failed in 1796 Syme watched him with increasing
anxiety. As long as he could he hoped for recovery, but when the poet
returned from the Brow Well his ‘cadaverous aspect and shaken frame’
told the truth which the doctors confirmed. On July 17 Syme wrote to
warn Cunningham and to urge him to press their friend’s petition to the
Commissioners of Excise that they continue his full salary. Two days
later, when Syme called at the little house in Mill Street, he saw the
hand of Death visibly fixed on Burns:

  ‘I cannot dwell on the scene. It overpowers me--yet gracious God were
  it thy will to recover him! He had life enough to acknowledge me, and
  Mrs. Burns said he had been calling on you and me continually. He
  made a wonderful exertion when I took him by the hand. With a strong
  voice he said, “I am much better today--I shall soon be well again,
  for I command my spirits & my mind. But yesterday I resigned myself to
  death.” Alas it will not do.’

Syme was already consulting with Patrick Miller, John M’Murdo, Dr.
Maxwell, and other Dumfries friends to set measures afoot for the
welfare of Jean and the children; when he wrote again on the 21st,
shaken by the ‘variety of distressful emotions’ stirred by Burns’s
death, he gave further details of their plans, and urged Cunningham to
launch a similar plan in Edinburgh and to see that a proper obituary
was prepared. Here Cunningham blundered. He entrusted the obituary to
George Thomson, and the latter’s remark that Burns’s ‘extraordinary
endowments were accompanied with frailties which rendered them useless
to himself and his family’ roused the Dumfries friends to indignation.
‘We were much hurt at this,’ said Syme, ‘& reckoned it indelicate, if
not unfeelingly superfluous on that occasion.’

These feelings were intensified by the appearance in the London
_Chronicle_ of a longer article, also by Thomson, which included
assertions that Burns’s ‘talents were often obscured and finally
impaired by excess,’ that ‘his conduct and his fate afford[ed] but too
melancholy proofs’ of his possessing the failings as well as the powers
of genius, and that, ‘like his predecessor Fergus[s]on, though he died
at an early age, his mind was previously exhausted.’ Thomson had never
been in Dumfries, and had never met Burns. The friends in Dumfries who
read his article did not concur. Syme’s comment was brief and pointed.
These statements were ‘d----d illiberal lies’. On that comment, by
the man who knew him best in his last years, the case for the defence
of Burns against the stories of his deterioration in Dumfries may be
allowed to rest.




IV

WOMEN


Burns was twenty-six before he ever entered the home of a woman
sufficiently well-to-do to have carpets on her floors. Though the last
ten years of his life included many friendships with ladies, his basic
ideas of the other sex were the fruit of the peasant environment he
was reared in. His sentiment and chivalry were literary by-products;
underneath them was always the crude realism of the Ayrshire
countryfolk. In moments of stress it was only too apt to come to the
surface.

The only subtlety the peasant women of Burns’s youth could claim was
that native to every daughter of Eve. Schooling was too expensive to
waste on girls. The majority, like Agnes Broun, could not write their
own names; many could not even spell out the Scriptures or the Psalms
of David in metre. Their fathers, their husbands, or the minister
could read the Bible to them, and thus they could obtain the light of
salvation at second hand. But this is not to say that they knew no
literature. In fact it was only among an illiterate population that the
songs and ballads of popular tradition were living realities. James
Hogg’s mother spoke for her whole class when she told Sir Walter Scott
that he had killed her ballads by writing them down. Learning to read
destroyed both the sense of reality in the traditional literature and
the retentiveness of memory which made its transmission possible. Had
Betty Davidson, Agnes Broun, and Jean Armour been literate women they
would not have furnished Burns with the mass of traditional literature
he owed to them.

A girl’s real education in rural Scotland was obtained in the kitchen,
the dairy, and the fields. Almost as soon as they could walk boys and
girls alike helped with the sheep and cattle and in all the work of
seedtime and harvest. As they grew older the girls were trained more
and more for the indoor duties of which cooking was the smallest part.
Most of the clothing was made at home, from the carding and spinning
of the wool and flax to the sewing of the finished webs into garments.
Itinerant tailors made the Sunday clothes of the men; all the rest was
the work of the women of the household. Add to these activities the
manifold duties of kitchen and dairy and poultry yard and no peasant
woman could have reason to complain of lack of occupation. At harvest
time men and women alike turned out into the fields, the men to mow
with scythe and sickle, the women and boys to bind and stack the
sheaves and to glean after the reapers.

It was from these barefooted illiterate lasses that Burns got his first
experiences in love and his whole simple theory of the relations of the
sexes. Woman as the peasant knows her, sharing his daily toil, is not
a superior being set apart for adoration. There is no mystery about
her except the endless mystery of sex. There may be companionship and
a more intimate sharing of the man’s interests than women of higher
rank attain. But the peasant woman cannot expect and does not get the
graces of deference. Burns’s attitude towards the girls of his class
differed in one respect only from that of any other possessive young
male. He was a poet, and from the very beginning poetry and sex were
inextricably mingled. When as a fifteen-year-old boy he helped Nellie
Kilpatrick to bind sheaves in the harvest field, and experienced the
primitive coquetry which sought his help in extracting nettle and
thistle stings from her fingers, his first impulses were those of any
adolescent just becoming conscious of desire. But the second impulse
was different. Unable to possess Nellie, he made a song about her.

As we have seen, courtship among the peasantry was no private matter.
Not only did everyone know who was courting whom, but the aid of
interested friends was habitually enlisted in arranging trysts.
While still in his teens Burns displayed a command of the written
word--insufferably turgid though the few surviving specimens of his
early love-letters seem to us--which made him the chosen secretary
for his less fluent cronies. He himself fell into love and out again
with ease and frequency. But his early sweethearts are, like Nellie
Kilpatrick, names and nothing more. Burns’s statement that his
relations with women were entirely innocent until after he met Richard
Brown in 1781 is countered by Brown’s charge that he was already fully
initiated. As Henley says, it is one man’s word against another’s;
since Burns was not in the habit of lying about his own conduct we may
believe him. Where, when, or with whom his initiation took place is
both uncertain and unimportant. His own assertion that he ‘commenced
a fornicator’ with Betty Paton is subject to the discount always to
be charged against poetical versions of prose facts. The certainty
is that the years following his return from Irvine were loaded with
emotional tension by three women--Elizabeth Paton, Mary Campbell, and
Jean Armour. Of the three the one who has received the most attention
probably deserves the least.

No glamour of romance shields Betty Paton. A servant of his mother’s at
Lochlie and Mossgiel, she succumbed willingly enough to the advances
of the young farmer whom his father’s death had just released from
tutelage, and in due course bore him a daughter in the spring of
1785. According to Gilbert Burns, Robert wanted to marry her, but was
dissuaded by his family, who feared that her coarseness would soon
disgust him. Perhaps so, but the only contemporary letter does not
include matrimonial desire among the feelings it hints at. After the
first embarrassment wore off and he and Betty had duly stood thrice
before the congregation of Mauchline Kirk to be admonished for their
sin, Burns brazened it out to the scandal of his stricter neighbours,
and Betty accepted it resignedly, knowing that such accidents would
happen and that they need not necessarily impair her future career.
Part of her resignation, however, may have been conviction that Robert
Burns had insufficient prospects to make marriage worth fighting for.
In the fall of 1786, when the Kilmarnock _Poems_ had supplied her
erstwhile lover with a little ready cash, Betty promptly demanded
maintenance for herself and her child. In settling the claim Burns
apparently had to pay over rather more than half his profits, besides
legally binding himself for the complete support and education of his
daughter. When on December 1, 1786, she signed with her mark the legal
discharge of her claim, Betty Paton disappeared from Burns’s life.
She was a merry lass; her lover had paid for his fun; the account
was closed--except for the black-eyed little girl being reared by a
long-suffering grandmother at Mossgiel.

Jean Armour’s case was different, though it commenced, like Betty’s,
in purely physical attraction. To begin with, the status of the girls
was different, even though both were red-knuckled, barefooted country
lasses. Betty was merely a farm servant whose family ties, whatever
they were, were already broken. Jean was the eighteen-year-old daughter
of James Armour, a well-to-do master-mason and contractor in Mauchline.
She was educated to the extent of being able to read the Bible and
write her own name. The story of her first meeting with Burns is
probably legend, yet in spirit the anecdote is at least partly true.
Burns at a village dance, embarrassed by a too-faithful collie which
followed him about the floor, remarked as he expelled the animal
that he wished he could find a lass to love him as well as his dog
did. Whether or not Jean actually asked him a few days later, when he
found her bleaching linen on the green, if he had yet found such a
lass, the fact was that he had. From that moment until his death Jean
lavished upon him a docile and much-enduring devotion which leaves
nothing derogatory in the comparison. She was playing with fire and
must have known it. The scandal of Betty Paton was still fresh; Burns
was a notorious man, glorying in the reputation of village Lothario
and writing verses to warn the Mauchline belles how devastating he
was. Experience had convinced him that all women are sisters under the
skin--a dangerous half-truth which made trouble for him when he met
women of another social level. They may all be sisters under the skin,
but not on it or outside it. The fascination exerted so successfully
over girls of his own class was in fact disastrous training for
subsequent encounters with ladies. A lady may yield to a lover like any
peasant lass, but she expects some finesse in his approach. But in the
summer and autumn of 1785 Burns seemed as likely to enter Edinburgh
drawing-rooms as to enter Parliament. He was merely an unsuccessful
tenant-farmer with a dangerous talent for writing satirical verse and a
dangerous light in his eye when an attractive young woman was in sight.

Between the tradition of his first meeting with Jean in 1785 and the
beginning of surviving references to the affair in February, 1786, its
history is a blank. On the surface Jean’s experience merely repeated
Betty Paton’s. She surrendered to Burns and in due course endured the
consequences. Yet on Burns’s side the cases were not alike. However
brazenly he may have begun his courtship he soon found that Jean roused
deeper emotions than Betty ever had. His first extant reference to the
affair, apart from verses in praise of Jean’s charms, was on February
17th, 1786, when he told John Richmond--who after a similar scrape
had fled to Edinburgh--that he had important news ‘not of the most
agreable’ with respect to himself. In other words, Jean had told him
she was pregnant. Entirely on his own initiative Burns undertook to do
the right thing he had successfully avoided, or been dissuaded from,
doing for Betty Paton. Sometime in March he gave Jean, if not marriage
lines, at least some written acknowledgement that she was or would be
his wife. That he acted in a certain glow of self-righteousness is
a fair deduction from the violence of his subsequent reaction. Rab
Mossgiel, the village Lothario, had behaved like a man of honour and
expected due recognition of his conduct.

The recognition he got was humiliating in the extreme. The details can
be reconstructed only by inference from the result. Apparently Jean’s
parents, suspecting her condition, began to question her. She produced
Burns’s written pledge. A domestic storm burst, not so much because
Jean was to bear Burns’s child as because he expected Jean to bear
his name. To James Armour an illegitimate grandchild was preferable to
such a son-in-law as Robert Burns. Jean meekly surrendered her lines to
her father--throughout her life she was usually passive in the hands
of male authority--and Armour carried the document to Burns’s patron
and friend, Robert Aiken, whom he persuaded to cut out the names. Not
the least extraordinary element in the affair is the apparent belief
of a successful lawyer that a contract could be voided merely by
mutilating the written evidence. Armour’s desire publicly to humiliate
Burns was greater than his desire to protect his daughter. He succeeded
admirably. In the same letter in which the poet told Gavin Hamilton
that the document was mutilated he declared he ‘had not a hope or
even a wish to make her mine after her damnable conduct’, yet amid
his execrations he paused to invoke a blessing on his ‘poor once-dear
misguided girl’. The letter was the first of a series of denunciations
and repudiations of Jean much too loud and too shrill to be convincing.
They suggest that Burns had to talk at the top of his voice to maintain
the degree of indifference which he felt self-respect called for.

Perhaps nothing in Burns’s whole life more completely demonstrates the
impossibility of judging him and the society in which he was reared
by the standards of nineteenth-century middle-class respectability.
When James Armour learned that the subscription for the Kilmarnock
_Poems_ was a success he showed that, though unwilling that his
daughter should bear Burns’s name, he was quite willing she should
share Burns’s money. Accordingly he sued out a writ _in meditatione
fugae_ to require Burns to guarantee the support of Jean’s expected
child. The news reached Burns, probably from Jean herself, and he acted
promptly. By formal deed of assignment he conveyed to Gilbert not only
his share in Mossgiel, but also the entire proceeds of his forthcoming
poems in consideration of Gilbert’s undertaking to provide for Betty
Paton’s child. Burns had checkmated James Armour, and so doing had
almost evened the honours for ungenerous conduct. By nineteenth-century
standards his conduct was caddish, but by the same standards Armour
could have done only one of two things--either expel his daughter from
his home, or protect her technical good name by insisting upon marriage
however distasteful the prospective son-in-law was. But even by his own
standards Burns was acting ignobly. The man who had written

    ‘But devil take the lousy loon
      Denies the bairn he got
    Or leaves the merry lass he lov’d
      To wear a ragged coat,’

and who less than six weeks after the deed of assignment eloquently
reproached John Richmond for neglecting his late mistress and future
wife and her baby daughter, was allowing spite to degrade him below the
standards of the class to which he belonged by birth, and much further
below the standards he had consciously set for himself. This was not
acting according to the example of Harley the Man of Feeling. If the
episode stood by itself it might be easier to condone. Unfortunately
it is merely the first conspicuous incident in a series which includes
his remarks about Jean to Clarinda and Bob Ainslie, his neglect of
Jenny Clow, his attack upon dead Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive, and his
lampoons of Maria Riddell, and which justifies Henley’s phrase that
such things ‘roused the cad’ in Burns. Where women were concerned, it
was always too easy for him to drop the thin cloak of acquired culture
and revert to his peasanthood.

Alongside the Armour quarrel runs the mystery of Mary Campbell. Burns
himself began the mystery by his curiously veiled allusions to the
affair, but the real work of obfuscation was done by biographers who
erected upon exiguous foundations of fact an ornate superstructure of
legend.

The exact date at which Burns composed the ‘Jolly Beggars’ is
uncertain--if it was really written after a slumming frolic with John
Richmond it must have been in 1785--but the closing episode is either
autobiography or prophecy. The Bard, whose sentiments in the closing
chorus are definitely Burns’s own, is depicted with a doxy upon either
arm. After the stormy spring and summer of 1786 Burns confessed
to Robert Aiken that he had plunged into all sorts of riot, Mason
meetings, and dissipation, to distract his mind from the humiliation
of the Armour affair. What form his dissipation took may reasonably
be guessed not only from Burns’s own temperament but from human nature
in general. Yet nothing about his relation with Mary Campbell is
free of doubt. All that can definitely be proved is that there was a
servant-lass of that name to whom Burns apparently addressed certain
lyrics and to whom he certainly gave a pair of Bibles bearing peculiar
inscriptions. It is useless to rehearse the endless controversy between
the romantics to whom Mary Campbell was a Lily Maid of Astolat and the
realists to whom she was just another girl who couldn’t say no. But
a few facts must be underscored. The critical analysis of the legend
made with caustic humour by Henley in 1896 and subsequently elaborated
by Professor Snyder has never been rebutted nor even answered. The
scripture texts Burns wrote on the fly-leaves of that Bible are such
as would have been chosen by a man to whom a frightened girl was
appealing for protection and who was impulsively promising it on his
word of honour as a man and a Mason. That he also sang Mary’s praises
as ‘Highland Lassie’ and in another lyric asked--for poetic effect
at least--if she would go to the Indies with him means little, if
anything. The enthusiasts prefer to forget that during the same summer
Burns said farewell to Eliza Miller in a lyric quite as fervid as any
of those addressed to Mary.

Out of the mass of legend and conjecture the only solid facts which
emerge are that during this spring of 1786 Burns was having some
sort of a love affair with Mary; that she left Ayrshire in May, and
that she died in the early autumn. Burns may have turned to her for
consolation after the breach with Jean; the affairs may have been
simultaneous. Most biographers incline to the sequel theory on the
naïve assumption that love affairs, unlike electric batteries, are
always mounted in series and never in parallel. In view of the social
attitude of the Ayrshire peasantry the question of whether or not Mary
was technically chaste is both metaphysical and irrelevant. Burns’s
attitude toward the other sex was direct; perhaps the strongest
argument for Mary’s chastity would be the complete lack of reference
to her in his contemporary letters, were it not for his subsequent
description of her as ‘as charming a girl as ever blessed a man with
generous love’. Burns ordinarily meant such expressions in the most
literal sense. Despite the evidence in the Bibles that he had tried
again to do the right thing it is hard to believe that in retrospect
Mary would have touched him any more deeply than Jenny Clow or Anne
Park later did had it not been for her untimely death. She certainly
meant little in May and June of 1786. In the same month in which he
gave her the Bible he composed the long and bawdy ‘Court of Equity’;
throughout the summer his letters to his intimates mingle execration,
devotion, and regret for Jean Armour in precisely the same tones he
had used in April. A man who had really found an adequate new love
might be supposed to speak of the old one as Burns had spoken of Peggy
Thomson in 1784. Resentment of the Armours’ conduct might explain
the execration, but hardly the regret and certainly not the devotion.
If Burns really intended to make a new start in Jamaica with Mary
Campbell, it is strange indeed that he never hinted of it to his
friends--unless we accept the tradition, reported at second hand from
John Richmond, that Mary was a light-skirts whose character Richmond
and some other friends exposed to the poet. In that case, he would have
had good reason for silence.

When in October he summed up his situation in a long letter to Robert
Aiken it was still Jean who was the cause of his secret wretchedness
and who was the source of ‘the pang of disappointment, the sting of
pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse’. The sole passage in
the letter which Snyder thought might apply to Mary--‘I have seen
something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted
head’--may now be interpreted as referring instead to the disconcerting
reappearance of Betty Paton as a claimant for support. The sole
evidence surviving from 1786, apart from Burns’s lyrics, is his
sister’s story, told many years after his death, that one day in
October he received a letter which he read with a look of agony and
then crushed into his pocket as he silently left the house. Connecting
this story with Burns’s later statement that ‘a malignant fever hurried
my dear girl to her grave before I could even hear of her illness’,
biographers have assumed that the painful letter bore the news of
Mary’s death. But this, even granting perfect reliability to Isabella
Begg’s memory, is pure assumption. Burns’s sole references to her
were written from three to five years after the supposed event. With
one exception they were intended for the mystification rather than the
enlightenment of Robert Riddell and George Thomson. That exception is
the composition of ‘Thou Lingering Star’ and the letter to Mrs. Dunlop
which accompanied it--both of them written in a neurotic state close to
complete nervous breakdown. The Highland Mary we know is the creation
of biographers, and should be suffered to abide in the Never-Never Land
of romance. The truth about the Burns of flesh and blood had better be
sought in his relations with flesh and blood women.

In these relations there were three main degrees. The foremost group
consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time
at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as
his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers,
Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged
his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did
not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne
Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on
either of these bases need not have been his mistress; in fact, only
three of those named ever yielded to him. But below these was a third
group, represented by Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow, who were mistresses
and nothing more--the mere conveniences of the moment. These last
never roused even a momentary spark of poetry in their lover. Judged
purely on the basis of literary by-product, Mary Campbell belongs in
the second group, but not in the first. Even her most ardent champion
might hesitate to assert that any lyric addressed to her is the equal
of ‘Ae fond kiss’ or ‘Of a’ the airts’. Jessie Lewars and Jean Lorimer
both inspired better songs than Mary ever did.

But Burns’s tenderness, even for the women who meant most to him, was
often of a peculiar sort. Though he told Deborah Davies that ‘Woman
is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency
among them, but let them all be sacred’, his practice was more
accurately summarized in what he said about love in confiding to George
Thomson his admiration for Jean Lorimer:

  ‘... I am a very Poet in my enthusiasm of the Passion.--The welfare
  & happiness of the beloved Object, is the _first & inviolate_
  sentiment that pervades my soul; & whatever pleasures I might wish
  for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if
  they interfere & clash with that _first_ principle, it is having
  these pleasures at a dishonest price; & Justice forbids, & Generosity
  disdains the purchase!--As to the herd of the Sex, who are good for
  little or nothing else, I have made no such agreement with myself; but
  where the Parties are capable of, & the Passion is, the true Divinity
  of love--the man who can act otherwise than as I have laid down, is a
  Villain!--’

One fears that Burns remained on these chivalrous heights only when
the woman was unattainable; should she yield to him, she would too
readily take her place among ‘the herd of the Sex’. Certainly he
freely discussed his loves not only among his male friends but with a
patroness like Mrs. Dunlop. When, for instance, after his conquering
hero’s return to Mauchline in June, 1787, the Armours bade him welcome
and Jean succumbed once more, he lost no time in reporting the victory
to Smith and Ainslie. To put it briefly, beneath the veneer of
sentiment, beneath even the poetic response, Burns’s attitude towards
women of his own age was the elemental possessiveness which regards sex
primarily as a ribald jest. His sincerest tenderness belonged to no
woman as deeply as it did to his children, however or wherever begotten.

Burns never revealed more truly his own feelings than in the ‘Poet’s
Welcome to his Bastart Wean’ which hailed the birth of his eldest
child, Betty Paton’s daughter. Its mixture of bawdry with affection, of
rollicking defiance of the unco guid with exultant pride in paternity,
may distress the tender-minded who prefer not to admit the existence
in parental relations of even a sublimated carnality, but it is the
very essence of Burns himself. His plainest expressions of his love
for his children occur not in letters to women but in letters to his
most intimate male friends, and often amid flagrant ribaldry. It was
not to Mrs. Dunlop that he wrote that Jean’s first twins ‘awakened a
thousand feelings that thrill, some with tender pleasure and some with
foreboding anguish, thro’ my soul’; it was to Robert Muir, companion
of his revels and recipient of broad jests. Robert Aiken was told that
the feelings of a father outweighed in Burns all the sound reasoning
and all the bitter memories that joined in urging him to carry through
the Jamaica project. ‘God bless them, poor little dears!’ he exclaimed
to John Richmond on reporting the birth of the twins. Such remarks to
men before whom he had no motive for acting a part, are more convincing
proof of real feelings than are the dissertations, garnished with
quotations from James Thomson’s dramas, on parental anxieties in his
letters to Mrs. Dunlop.

Especially notable is the letter he wrote to Bob Ainslie on August
1, 1787, in response to the latter’s announcement of the birth of an
illegitimate son. Beginning, ‘Give you joy, give you joy, my dear
brother!’ he goes on to say that he has ‘double health and spirits
at the news’, and to welcome Ainslie to ‘the society, the venerable
Society of Fathers’. There follow eight lines of the metrical version
of Psalm 127, obviously quoted with as much sincerity as when he later
used it, in quite different context, in writing to John M’Auley.
He continues, ‘My ailing child is got better, and the Mother is
certainly in for it again, and Peggy [Meg Cameron] will bring me a half
Highlandman’, and announces his intention of getting a farm, bringing
them all up in fear of the Lord and of a good oak stick, and of being
the happiest man alive. Then the letter shifts to snatches of bawdy
song, some quoted, others apparently impromptu. This primitive joy
in paternity, this exultation over the mere fact of birth, whether
the child was his own or another’s, was part of his heritage from the
Scottish soil. The same spirit shows three years later in his reply to
Mrs. Dunlop’s news that her widowed daughter Mrs. Henri had borne a
posthumous son:

  ‘... I literally, _jumped for joy_--how could such a mercurial
  creature as a Poet, lumpishly keep his seat on the receipt of the best
  news from his best Friend--I seized my gilt-headed Wangee rod, an
  instrument indispensably necessary in my left hand in the moment of
  Inspiration & Rapture--and stride--stride--quick & quicker--out skipt
  I among the broomy banks of Nith to muse over my joy by retail.’

Nor did his paternal emotions dissipate themselves in rejoicings over
birth. Testimony abounds of his devotion to his children, his concern
over their proper education, his anxiety for their futures. James Gray
on evening visits in Dumfries found him explaining poetry to the eldest
boy and hearing him recite his lessons; Maria Riddell was impressed
by his constant devotion to the children’s welfare. But towards their
mothers, once the fancy had passed, he was indifferent. ‘I am very
sorry for it, but what is done is done’, he said of Meg Cameron, and
though Clarinda’s rebuke stung him into something like remorse for
his treatment of Jenny Clow, even there his last thought was for his
son: ‘I would have taken my boy from her long ago, but she would never
consent.’ The one possible exception to his generalization was Jean
Armour, but Jean’s later history belongs elsewhere, beside Clarinda’s.

In brief, Burns’s experience among women up to his departure for
Edinburgh had made him the ‘magerfu’’ man Sentimental Tommy had
longed to be. His love-making might involve him in tangles which he
was neither astute nor callous enough to avoid, but he had found his
attraction enhanced by his reputation as a dangerous man. He had
learned the value of aggressiveness; he had not learned finesse. When
he met ladies his lack sooner or later became painfully evident.

Among women of the upper classes he was at his best in association with
those whose interest was motherly rather than actually or potentially
amorous. Before going to Edinburgh he had charmed middle-aged Mrs.
Stewart of Stair as well as mature Mrs. Lawrie, wife of the minister of
Loudoun, and had begun with Mrs. Dunlop a correspondence which ended
only on his deathbed. In its progress this friendship reveals much of
what was best in his relations with women; in the estrangement which
interrupted it it reveals also his shortcomings. Since, moreover,
it is the only one of his friendships in which both sides of the
correspondence have been preserved, no guess-work is required in
tracing its rise and decline.

Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop belonged by both birth and marriage to the
old landed gentry of Scotland, and claimed collateral descent from
Sir William Wallace. In the autumn of 1786 her mind was ‘in a state
which, had it long continued my only refuge would inevitably have been
a mad-house or a grave; nothing interested or amused me; all around
me served to probe a wound whose recent stab was mortal to my peace,
and had already ruined my health and benumbed my senses.’ Grief at
her husband’s recent death had something to do with it, but the chief
wound was her eldest son’s extravagance and marital scandals. About
the beginning of November a copy of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ reached her
and her reading of them--significantly enough it was ‘The Cotter’s
Saturday Night’ and other poems based on the genteel tradition of
eighteenth-century poetry that won her admiration--roused her to fresh
interest in life. ‘The poignancy of your expression’, as she put
it, ‘soothed my soul.’ To one reading her letters without reference
to her age she often sounds like a decrepit and almost dying woman.
Actually when she began writing to Burns she was only fifty-six, and
she outlived him by nineteen years. She opened the correspondence
with an order for six copies of the poems; the flattered poet could
scrape together only five, which he dispatched with a complimentary
letter that included the news that he was planning a second edition in
Edinburgh. Mrs. Dunlop immediately elected herself one of his chief
advisers, and among other things suggested that in revising his poems
he should avoid describing her great ancestor as ‘unhappy Wallace’ and
should make the Twa Dogs sit down more decorously. Later she offered
the two most inept of all the recorded plans for the poet’s future.
In February, 1787, she proposed that he should use the proceeds of
his Edinburgh subscription to buy a commission in the army. The man
who wrote ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ and whose dislike for
‘the lobster-coated puppies’ of the army more than once got him into
hot water would have cut a strange figure in any officers’ mess. On
April 1, 1789, she suggested his applying for the newly established
Professorship of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. The self-taught
peasant would have cut a still stranger figure as the colleague of
Robertson, Cullen, and Blair.

The history of the first few months of his friendship with Mrs. Dunlop
reveals how far Burns was from understanding the finer points of
etiquette. To begin with he ignored her suggestions for altering his
poems. True, he could do nothing else. Her advice was merely typical of
what genteel Scotland thought about his work. To accept all emendations
would have reduced his poems to namby-pamby; to accept some and reject
others would have doubly offended those whose criticism he ignored.
But he should have explained this to Mrs. Dunlop, and did not. Her
vexation at the discovery was intensified by an innocent blunder he
made in arranging for the delivery of copies she had ordered for her
stepmother, the dowager Lady Wallace of Craigie. The copies went
instead to the estranged wife of her eldest son, also a Lady Wallace
but regarded by her mother-in-law as the worst blemish the family tree
had ever suffered.

Their relations were first put on a really cordial basis when Burns
visited her at Dunlop House in July, 1787. Annoyance at his social
blunders evaporated before the charm of his personality, and thereafter
the correspondence on both sides took a new tone of affection and
esteem. Her interest in Burns was generous and motherly. She plied him
with good advice, which he generally ignored, and frequently added
substantial help with both money and influence. Towards her Burns seems
to have felt as many a man does towards his mother--she bored him but
he loved her. She often accused him, no doubt justly, of not reading
her letters. They were long, tedious, and wholly unpunctuated; he
probably glanced over them when they arrived and then laid them aside
for more careful reading at a leisure hour which never came. But though
he seldom answered her questions he took her unreservedly into his
confidence--or almost unreservedly. He never did more than hint about
Clarinda, but he told her everything about Jean. In fact he must have
told almost too much; it is hard otherwise to explain his embarrassment
over breaking the news that he had finally married the girl who had
borne him ‘twice twins in seventeen months’.

By the beginning of 1788 the friendship was so firmly established
as to survive a most humiliating incident. When he visited Dunlop
House on his way back from Edinburgh in February his reception was
warm and flattering. Mrs. Dunlop’s unmarried daughters were agog with
admiration. Miss Rachel was hard at work on a painting of his muse,
Coila, as to whose appearance she sought the poet’s expert advice. Miss
Keith discussed poetry with him and revealed the somewhat surprising
fact that she had never read Gray. Before he left he had promised to
lend the ladies his copy of Spenser, a recent gift from William Dunbar
of Edinburgh. When a few days later he fulfilled his promise he added
to the parcel a copy of Gray as a present for Miss Keith, only to learn
that a plebeian poet must not presume too far. Mrs. Dunlop replied that
she did not allow her daughter to receive presents from men who were
not members of her own family, and proposed either to return the whole
book or at most to permit Miss Keith to tear out the pages containing
the poems she liked best. That Burns continued in friendship with Mrs.
Dunlop after this rebuff is eloquent proof of the esteem in which he
held her; he had lampooned others of the gentry for less.

Not that this was the only time when Mrs. Dunlop made him conscious
of the difference in their ranks. Her occasional gift of a five-pound
note, though usually tactfully designated as for some special purpose
or occasion, always hurt his pride--the more so because he could not
deny that he needed the money. He silently drew the line, however,
when she proposed, in one of those fits of economy which sometimes
afflict the well-to-do, that he help to sell some decorative fringe
which she had been manufacturing. Over this as over others of his sins
of omission she displayed an irritability more like a schoolgirl’s
than a grandmother’s; most schoolgirlish in its evanescence. A thorough
scolding which sounded like a total breach of relations would be
countered by some new poems or new compliments from Burns, and her next
letter would contain a five-pound note for the latest baby.

Though as Burns became more heavily burdened with labour and
responsibility his letters grew shorter and fewer than at the peak
of the correspondence during the summer of 1788, no serious rift
appeared until December, 1792. When it came it was the result of
Burns’s pride working in combination with his want of tact. Among
the servants on Mrs. Dunlop’s estate was a milkmaid named Jenny
Little, whom Burns’s success had inspired to burst into rime. Burns
had already endured a good deal of her output, both from manuscripts
sent to him by Mrs. Dunlop and from a pilgrimage of adoration which
Jenny had made to Ellisland in 1790--an unsuccessful pilgrimage, for
she had found the poet laid up with a broken arm and in no mood for
entertaining an aspiring poetess. When Burns reached Dunlop in 1792 he
found his patroness’s interest in her protégée still unshaken. With
her assistance Jenny had recently printed her poems, and Mrs. Dunlop
produced the volume with the request that Burns give his opinion of
certain of the verses which she pointed out. He said, ‘Do I have to
read all those?’ in a tone which she afterwards described as the
equivalent of a slap in the face.

It was supreme tactlessness. Burns was bored and showed it. A more
politic man would have waded through the verses however much his jaw
might ache with suppressed yawns. But boredom was not the worst aspect
of the incident from Burns’s point of view: his pride was wounded. Of
all his patrons in the upper ranks of society Mrs. Dunlop alone had
kept up her interest in him and had appeared to treat him as an equal.
Now she unconsciously revealed that she saw no _essential_ difference
between his writing and Jenny Little’s. To her he was after all merely
a peasant poet with the accent on the adjective; the difference between
him and Jenny Little was a difference in degree and not in kind. Both
wrote in dialect; she failed to see that one wrote Scots poetry and the
other Scots twaddle.

The incident illustrates once more what Maria Riddell meant when she
described Burns as devoid in great measure of refinement and social
graces. The abrupt and masterful manner, successful with the girls of
his own original class, sooner or later annoyed other ladies besides
the Duchess of Gordon. Mrs. Dunlop, however, did not allow her vexation
to cause an immediate coolness; she contented herself with a lengthy
silence followed by an explanation of her reasons for being offended.
Yet when the real break came two years later Burns’s unbridled tongue
and pen were again at fault. Mrs. Dunlop heartily disapproved of his
sympathy with the French Revolution, and had warned him more than once
to drop the subject in his letters. Inasmuch as four of her sons and
one grandson were or had been in the army and two of her daughters
were married to French royalist refugees, Burns should have known that
her sympathies would be Tory. Yet in face of her warnings he wrote
in January, 1794, the most outspoken of all his political remarks,
describing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a perjured blockhead
and an unprincipled prostitute who had met their deserved fate at
the hangman’s hands, and adding a guarded hope that revolutionary
principles might have more scope in England. This time Mrs. Dunlop
broke off the correspondence. Though Burns made two attempts during
the next year to reopen it, she maintained dogged silence until his
pathetic letter of farewell, written on his deathbed, at last broke
down her reserve. Her letter of reconciliation was almost the last
message which reached him before his death. For a century charitable
biographers conjectured that the estrangement must have been due to the
lady’s hearing reports that Burns was living an evil life in Dumfries.
The recovery of the complete text of his letter of January, 1794,
revealed the simple truth that the breach resulted from nothing more
serious than a failure in tact. There, as always, his trouble came
because he had not taken heed to his ways, that he offend not with his
tongue.

The same trouble underlay his relations with other women of a rank
above his own--Margaret Chalmers, Agnes M’Lehose, and Maria Riddell,
though in different ways and different degrees. With Margaret Chalmers,
indeed, he maintained for a couple of years the nearest approach he
ever made to a non-flirtatious friendship with a woman of his own
age, but of the three just named this clever daughter of a gentleman
farmer in Ayrshire was the least removed in station from himself.
Unfortunately, only Burns’s side of the correspondence survives, and
that in fragments. Apparently it began, as usual, with love-making, but
when Margaret gently put a stop to that--probably by telling Burns that
she was already engaged to Lewis Hay, whom she married in 1788--their
relation ripened into a genuine friendship which produced what Cromek
rightly called some of the best letters Burns ever wrote. The poet took
her unreservedly into his confidence about his troubles with Creech
and his anxiety over his future, so that his three or four letters to
her during the height of his correspondence with Clarinda come like
a breath of bleak but pure air in that hothouse atmosphere. But the
friendship ended, apparently through Burns’s neglect. Two years after
her marriage he sent regards to her through another friend, and called
himself a wretch for not writing her, but seemingly he could not write
when he felt that his confidences might be shared with her husband. An
estranged husband would not have mattered, as his flirtation with Agnes
M’Lehose proved.

The Clarinda episode has more prominence in most accounts of Burns than
it deserves. In its beginning and growth it was in fact quite untypical
of the man--his one intensive effort to act a part not natural to
him. Its development in this way was mainly the result of the accident
which threw him back on letter-writing instead of speech in conducting
his suit. Agnes M’Lehose when Burns met her was a plump young matron
about his own age. Born Agnes Craig of Glasgow and a relative of one of
the Lords of Session, she had married in romantic haste at the age of
seventeen a young lawyer named James M’Lehose, and when Burns met her
had already had eleven years of leisure to repent. Her husband, after
abusing and neglecting her and getting into debt and disgrace, had
at last been exiled by indignant relatives to Jamaica--that tropical
refuge for Britons who had made their native climate too hot for
them. His wife, trying to rear three sickly children on a microscopic
annuity, had turned for consolation to literature and religion. In
the latter she had espoused under the dynamic preaching of the Rev.
John Kemp the strictest tenets of Calvinism; in the former she had
familiarized herself with the most elegant authors of the day and
had taken to versifying occasionally with the fluency and inaccuracy
prevalent among women poets prior to Christina Rossetti and Emily
Brontë. Like most of Edinburgh in 1787 she had been eager to meet
Burns. When at last she did so at a tea-party given by her friend, Miss
Erskine Nimmo, she and Burns became so visibly absorbed in each other
as to rouse the amusement of the other guests. The poet’s experiences
hitherto with young women of the upper classes had been disappointing.
They were polite and attentive, but reserved. Here at last was an
indubitable lady, and a young and attractive one at that, who displayed
something like the enthusiastic attention he had been accustomed to
receive from the belles of Mauchline. Before the tea was over Burns had
accepted Mrs. M’Lehose’s invitation to a party of her own. If ever a
woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was
not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in
the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he
had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism
and her social traditions.

The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not
chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and
dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several
weeks. His note explaining and deploring his inability to attend the
tea-party was answered by one offering sympathy and regret. Burns and
Mrs. M’Lehose both wielded free-flowing pens; their correspondence
rapidly gained momentum and fervour. By the third exchange of letters
she felt it her duty to remind him that she was a married woman. The
result may or may not have been what she intended. Assuring her that
his intentions were strictly honourable Burns seized the opportunity
to express far more ardent chivalry and devotion than he would
probably have ventured on had she been free. In reply she suggested
their writing under Arcadian pseudonyms--no doubt as evidence of
the strictly Platonic nature of their sentiments; displayed her
acquaintance with _The Spectator_ by calling herself Clarinda; and
suggested Sylvander for Burns. Having thus safely wrapped their
correspondence in asbestos they relaxed in a vapour-bath of emotion.

Less than three weeks after Burns’s accident he was assuring Clarinda
that she was a gloriously amiable fine woman and was promising
life-long devotion. But he was not admitting her as yet into his
inner doubts and perplexities. Margaret Chalmers was the only woman
who shared those. In fact both Sylvander and Clarinda seemed to have
reserved their more intimate communications for personal speech.
Apparently not until their long-deferred second meeting in January did
Burns tell her about Jean and his children and Clarinda give him the
whole tale of her unhappy marriage. She also sought in both speech and
writing to convert him to Mr. Kemp’s particular brand of Calvinism. But
here even at the height of his infatuation she failed. The most she got
was a partial recantation of his liking for the heroic qualities of
Milton’s Satan.

So long as communication was limited to pen and ink the affair for
Burns was little more than a literary exercise. After they began to
meet it became different and, in its effects on him, worse. Physical
nearness could not fail to stir a man of his temperament. Soon their
conversation was supplemented by caresses which Clarinda, however,
managed to keep within bounds. As a result, Burns left these interviews
with his blood at fever heat. A servant-girl named Jenny Clow,
successor to the Meg Cameron of the previous winter, provided the
consummation which Clarinda denied, and in due course added yet another
to his growing list of paternal, legal, and emotional perplexities.

Clarinda was of course unaware of Jenny’s existence, but she soon had
other reasons for being uncomfortable. Edinburgh was not a city in
which a gentlewoman could be indiscreet and get away with it. More
than a dozen years later Euphemia Boswell told Joseph Farington that
Edinburgh’s chief drawback was that everybody knew all his neighbours’
affairs. The poet’s visits to the Potterrow were freely discussed. Lord
Craig heard of them and was annoyed by his kinswoman’s indiscretion;
the Rev. Mr. Kemp heard of them and felt it his duty to admonish his
parishioner. When Clarinda confided these troubles to Burns they of
course roused him to new fervours of knight-errantry. Moreover, other
agitations were intensifying the emotional stress of the love affair.
A great lady named Mrs. Stewart who was expected to help his Excise
project chose to lecture him on the error of his ways; rumours were
afloat that William Creech was insolvent; above all there was bad
news from Mauchline. Jean’s parents had this time chosen the heavy
melodramatic role and had bidden their erring daughter not to darken
their doors again. She was being sheltered by friendly Mrs. Muir of
Tarbolton Mill, but her future was black. In these circumstances it is
unjust in the extreme to judge Burns’s conduct by the cool standards
of sobriety and sanity. The man was in such a state of frenzy that he
cannot be held accountable for his words nor even for all his actions.

What had begun as a flirtation and had continued, in part at least,
as a piece of play-acting had by the middle of February become an
imbroglio. Burns and Clarinda, both of them sentimentalists whose
roused emotions were stronger than their reason, had gone so far that
they could no longer regard their relations as simple friendship. By
the time Burns set out on the 18th for Mauchline by way of Glasgow he
had indulged in a perfect delirium of sentiment and rash vows. If he
had not actually pledged himself to wait until James M’Lehose should be
considerate enough to die and leave Clarinda free to marry Sylvander it
at least appears that she expected him to wait. Meanwhile they were to
write to each other every day.

The artificial and hothouse nature of the affair is fully demonstrated
by the change which came over Burns’s letters as soon as removal from
Edinburgh plunged him into the chilly air of everyday. The promise of
a daily letter was the first to fail. Burns reached Glasgow on the
evening of the 18th to find Richard Brown awaiting him at the Black
Bull Inn in the company of young William Burns, who had ridden up from
Mauchline with his brother’s horse. Before settling to a convivial
evening Burns managed to dispatch a hurried note to Clarinda, but it
was four days before he found time to write again. His next letter
shows how effectively those four days had brought him back from a
sentimental dream-world to crude reality. Doubtless William had brought
the latest bulletins about Jean, but no hint of them was passed on to
Clarinda. A feverish day of entertainment among the prosperous weavers
of Paisley was followed by two days of more decorous pleasure at
Dunlop House and then by another wild bout at Kilmarnock. The letter
from Kilmarnock is devoted mainly to a broadly humorous account of
his Paisley host’s troubles with a daughter who had been to boarding
school, a son who wanted a latchkey, and himself who thought it better
to re-marry than to burn. Not a word about Jean, scarcely a word about
worthy Mrs. Dunlop and none about artistic Miss Rachel and poetic Miss
Keith--in short, just such a letter as Burns might have written to
Bob Ainslie or Alexander Cunningham, and in comparison with all the
previous Clarinda correspondence as inappropriate as Falstaff in love.

But this letter jars on the reader only because it is wrong in its
context. Two which he wrote after his arrival at Mauchline on the
23rd jar for a different reason. Only one of these, however, was to
Clarinda. She had given him a couple of little shirts for Baby Robert,
who was being cared for at Mossgiel. As soon as he had delivered these
and seen his family, Burns set off to interview ‘a certain woman’ at
Tarbolton Mill. ‘I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her! I,
while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with
my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper
beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless
insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished
good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most
delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her and she with
me.’

Of the many things in Burns’s life which might better have been left
unsaid or undone this letter might claim first place were it not for
the one he wrote to Bob Ainslie ten days later. Here he describes his
reconciliation with Jean. What makes this letter revolting is not so
much its biological detail as the realization that the alleged events
which Burns describes occurred less than a fortnight before Jean’s
confinement. On March 3 she again bore her lover twins, who did not
live even long enough to be baptized. Still worse, if it is true, is
his assertion that he had sworn Jean ‘privately and solemnly never
to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should
persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my
life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl....’ Here,
however, it is more than possible that he was talking brazenly for
Ainslie’s edification; Henley’s doubt that Mrs. Armour could have been
reconciled to her daughter without a promise of marriage seems well
founded. Moreover the statement proves that by this time, whatever he
may have thought in 1786, Burns realized that the destruction of the
original marriage lines had not necessarily voided the contract.

Whatever he said or did at his first interview with Jean he must,
before he returned to Edinburgh in March, have made up his mind that
sooner or later he would acknowledge Jean as his wife. The letters to
Clarinda during the remaining two weeks of his absence were noticeably
lacking in fervour. They contained, however, more news about his
personal affairs, especially the doubts and uncertainties that still
kept him hesitating between farming and the Excise, than any of the
earlier ones did. An unsolved mystery in his life is the nature of his
relations with Clarinda during the fortnight he spent in Edinburgh
in March. To the modern reader with full knowledge of the facts the
fervour of his latest letters seems still more forced and artificial
than before, but it may be questioned if this truth was equally obvious
to Clarinda. Indeed their final meeting, at which Burns presented her
with a pair of drinking-glasses, a poem, and an inscribed copy of
Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, clearly had enough romantic intensity to
satisfy even Clarinda. Herein lies the mystery. The later developments
prove that Burns had told her nothing of his reconciliation with Jean,
yet Burns was not a man who could ordinarily act a part convincingly.
This time he must have tried. The results, combined with anxiety over
livelihood, are displayed in a letter of March 20, in which he told
Richard Brown that worry over his lease, ‘racking shop accounts’ with
Creech, ‘together with watching, fatigue, and a load of care almost too
heavy for my shoulders, have in some degree actually fever’d me....
These eight days, I have been positively crazed.’

He returned to Mauchline on the 22d to receive his six weeks of
Excise instructions, publicly to acknowledge Jean as his wife, and
incidentally to compose a formula whereby to explain his action to his
friends and patrons:

  ‘I had a long and much-loved fellow creature’s happiness or misery
  in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a
  deposite.’

This statement with only slight variations he used to half-a-dozen
different correspondents. Whether he used it to Clarinda or not is
uncertain; he may have entrusted Ainslie with the delicate task of
breaking the news. However the news reached her, it quite naturally
angered her. If Burns wrote it to her she destroyed the letter, and we
know that he destroyed her reply calling him a Villain and accusing him
of perfidious treachery. When he visited Edinburgh again in February,
1789, she refused to see him and told Ainslie that she intended to keep
away from her windows while he was in town lest she catch a glimpse of
him in the street.

In the fall of 1791, however, she had a chance to reopen the
correspondence. Jenny Clow in June, 1788, had undertaken some sort of
legal action against Burns and one purpose of his return to Edinburgh
in the following February had been to settle with her. Whatever the
nature of the settlement it had not helped much. When in 1791 Jenny
somehow communicated with Clarinda, the latter found the girl ill,
destitute, and friendless, in a miserable lodging. Clarinda’s discovery
of the means whereby Sylvander had managed to keep his courtship on
so lofty a plane must have been humiliating and disillusioning, but
she was woman enough to turn her discovery to account. Her letter to
Burns described Jenny’s condition briefly and effectively and suggested
that there was a striking contrast between his practice and the high
principles of generosity and humanity which he professed. She meant
her letter to sting, and it did. Burns begged her to relieve Jenny’s
immediate needs and promised personal action at the first opportunity.
At this point Jenny vanishes from the record. What Burns did, whether
Jenny lived or died, whether her son lived or died, if he lived what
became of him--all these are questions without answers.

Meanwhile Clarinda had been attempting to re-establish her own life.
Her husband had sought a reconciliation, and she was planning to
join him in Jamaica. When Burns made his last visit to Edinburgh in
November, 1791, her departure was already arranged. She was fully
reconciled to Sylvander now, and for the first time their relationship
revealed simple and genuine emotion. The Arcadian names vanished in
the correspondence; she became ‘my dearest Nancy’ instead of Clarinda,
and when Burns returned to Dumfries, fully convinced that he had said
farewell forever, he produced the one really first-rate lyric Clarinda
ever inspired--‘Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever’.

The sequel was the last of the anti-climaxes which marked the affair.
Clarinda reached Jamaica to find James M’Lehose’s disposition not
sweetened by time, and a brood of mulatto children proved that he had
not suffered by her absence. She returned to Scotland on the same
ship which took her out. For some time after her return she did not
communicate with Burns. When she did so it was in terms of cautious
esteem which inspired him to so bombastic a reply that he shortly
afterwards tried to disguise its date by describing a transcript of
it as ‘the fustian rant of enthusiastic youth’. The first part of the
description is accurate. For Burns the episode was closed, and closed,
as it had opened, in posturing affectation of emotion. But Clarinda
lived on it for the rest of her long life, exhibiting his letters to
her friends after his death until some of them were worn to tatters.
Her caution, however, equalled her vanity. After some of the letters
had been surreptitiously transcribed and published in 1802 she went
over the manuscripts, destroying the addresses, scoring out or clipping
away proper names and erasing some of the more ardent love-making, and
being reduced at last in senile old-age to selling some of them for a
few shillings each. Sylvander’s was the happier fate after all.

Meanwhile, whatever bombast or adoration her husband was addressing to
Clarinda, the ‘certain woman’ was lavishing on Burns the devotion he
had wished for at his first meeting. Various stories are told of how
and when he acknowledged Jean as his wife. The probability is that he
never did so, in the sense of going through a formal marriage service.
On April 28th he confided to James Smith that ‘Mrs. Burns’ was Jean’s
‘private designation’; a month later, in a letter to Ainslie, he avowed
the title ‘to the World’. By Scots law, avowal in the presence of
witnesses constituted a legal, though irregular, marriage; a peculiar
letter to Smith at the end of June suggests that Burns even evaded this
legal requirement:

  ‘I have waited on Mr. Auld about my Marriage affair, & stated that
  I was legally fined for an irregular marriage by a Justice of
  the Peace.--He says if I bring an attestation of this by the two
  witnesses, there shall be no more litigation about it.--As soon as
  this comes to hand, please write me in the way of familiar Epistle
  that, “Such things are.”’

In other words, he was asking Smith--who had not lived in Mauchline for
two years--to testify, but not on oath, that Burns had acknowledged the
marriage in his presence. Armed with Smith’s letter, and another, he
then presented himself again before the minister, who overlooked the
doubtful legality of the evidence as two years before he had allowed
Burns’s doubtful status as a bachelor. On August 5th Burns and Jean
made their formal appearance before the Kirk Session, avowed their
marriage as of 1786, and were readmitted to the communion after ‘Mr.
Burns gave a Guinea note for the behoof of the Poor.’

All this time Burns was alternating between Mauchline and Ellisland,
to the detriment of his interests in each place. A man absent from his
farm every other fortnight could scarcely expect work to go forward
quickly, but there were no living accommodations for Jean and young
Robert until in October a neighbour, moving into Dumfries for the
winter, offered Burns the use of his house. But the periods of absence
roused Burns once more to lyric fervour for Jean, and the man who six
months earlier had pledged undying devotion to Clarinda composed ‘Of a’
the airts’ in tribute to his wife.

But it was the last song that can with complete certainty be connected
with Jean. She sank before long to the status of a hard-working,
child-bearing domestic fixture, losing her good looks--at first sight
of her in 1790 John Syme concluded that Burns’s lyrics in her praise
were poetic licence--but keeping her equable temper and her devotion
to her husband. Of all the women who had loved Burns more or less, and
whom he, more or less, had loved, she alone had to live with him. And
yet she continued to love him, not weighing his merits, but pardoning
his offences. She had things to pardon, though when he married her
Burns thought he had shaken himself ‘loose of a very bad failing.’
Eighteen months after this announcement of reformation, Jean went home
to Ayrshire for a visit, and her husband strayed into the arms of Anne
Park at the Globe Inn. When the blonde barmaid in due course bore him
a child, and died in doing it, Jean took in the little girl and reared
her with ‘no distinction shown between that and the rest of their
children.’ Maria Riddell, whose words are just quoted, added that Burns
told her the story ‘with much sensibility’.

Burns could not take Jean into the society to which he was himself
admitted, so she remained unnoticed at home, tending the children and
keeping the house in slatternly Scots fashion, but with a sober Scots
thrift which probably accounted for her husband’s living within his
income and at last dying with little more than the debts incurred
during his final illness. Burns seldom spoke of her in his last years,
but when he did so it was ‘with a high tribute of respect and esteem’.
Maria Riddell--perhaps a prejudiced witness--states that ‘he did
not love her, but he was far from insensible to the indulgence and
patience, “the meekness with which she bore her faculties” on many
occasions very trying to the tempers of most individuals of our sex.’
One suspects, sometimes, that Burns would never have continued to love
any woman after he had won her; that no matter who she was, he might
still have summed up his marriage as he did to John Beugo:

  ‘Depend upon it, if you do not make some damned foolish choice,
  [marriage] will be a very great improvement on the Dish of Life.--I
  can speak from Experience, tho’ God knows my choice was random as
  Blind-man’s buff. I like the idea of an honest country Rake of my
  acquaintance, who, like myself, married lately.--Speaking to me of
  his late step, “L--d, man,” says he, “a body’s baith cheaper and
  better sair’t!”’--

Maria Riddell may have been one reason for Burns’s abrupt closure of
the correspondence with Clarinda in 1793. After Clarinda had refused
to continue it as an emotional communion he no longer needed it as an
intellectual one. He had found a woman friend who surpassed Clarinda as
much in intellect as she did in social position, and the only occasion
on which he reopened communications with Agnes M’Lehose was during his
subsequent estrangement from Mrs. Riddell--when he used the opportunity
to send Clarinda copies of the crude lampoons he had composed upon
Maria.

Walter Riddell, younger brother of Burns’s friend at Friars Carse,
had compressed a good deal of experience into the first twenty-eight
years of his life. After a short period in the army he had married
an heiress who within a year made him a widower and the owner of an
estate in Antigua. In 1790 he met at St. Kitts Maria Banks Woodley,
youngest daughter of the governor of the Leeward Islands, and after a
brief courtship married her when she still lacked two months of being
eighteen. Though Maria’s mother was a native of St. Kitts, the girl had
been born and educated in England and soon after their marriage the
young couple returned there.

According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns
in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit
at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that
‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Jun^r and your humble Servant,
to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under
her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor--‘a spoilt
Child with a Number of good Qualities’--whom its editor identifies as
Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an
extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother
lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert
Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until
1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut
Friars Carse to Grose.

If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an
inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure.
The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by
that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose
her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up.
By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England
in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for
an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of
seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative
of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced
her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest
compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments--if
it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always
correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of
Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship
between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more
decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the
latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest
in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite
printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had
brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.

In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea
near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up
as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on
the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum.
Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored
him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits
without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests,
and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost
total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than
even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and
poisonous-hearted.

In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion
in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to
raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley
Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time
Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest
of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and
it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love
‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring
of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell,
than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned
lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And
passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s
criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed
personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings
during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little
receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre.
These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On
at least one occasion Burns found an army officer--‘a lobster-coated
puppy’--already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing
himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him
formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied
with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda.

It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too
seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which
pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns
thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual
intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he
expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his
remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were
neither meant nor taken literally.

And then came the breach seemingly inevitable in Burns’s relations with
every woman of higher station. Its details are still obscure. Even its
exact date cannot be determined, though it must have been in Christmas
week of 1793. The traditional story is that Burns was dining at Woodley
Park and that the men’s talk over their wine somehow got round to the
Rape of the Sabines. It was drunkenly agreed that on returning to the
drawing-room the men should stage a burlesque of the episode. They did,
and Burns, singling out his hostess as his prey, put too much ardour
into the game. Mrs. Carswell interprets the thing as a deliberate rag
on the part of the other men to get Burns to make a fool of himself.
Such at any rate was the result. After a stormy scene during which some
of the other ladies present tried to intercede for the poet he was
ignominiously expelled. The next day he grovelled in contrition before
the offended lady in the painfully humiliating ‘letter from Hell’. She
refused to be placated and after two more abortive efforts on Burns’s
part the breach between them was complete.

This accepted story leaves unexplained several important details.
Foremost among them is the fact that in his apology Burns blames his
host for constraining him to drink more than he wished to. Maria
had told Smellie in November that Walter Riddell was in the West
Indies and was not expected back until spring. On January 12th, when
the breach with Burns had already occurred, she again mentioned her
husband’s absence. If these letters were correctly printed by Smellie’s
biographer, Walter Riddell could not have been the host; therefore
the scene could not have occurred at Woodley Park. The alternative
explanation is that it really happened at Friars Carse, with Robert and
Elizabeth Riddell in the roles usually assigned to Walter and Maria. In
this case Maria, hearing of Burns’s conduct, must have undertaken to
discipline him.

Whatever the circumstances, Burns’s subsequent conduct was inexcusable.
During the early spring of 1794 he wrote several epigrams on Maria
which are utterly caddish, lacking alike in wit and decent feeling. One
of them he even offered to a London newspaper, the editor of which had
sense enough to reject it. He also wrote the long, dull, and vulgar
parody of Pope which bears the title ‘Esopus to Maria’ and which
attacks everything about Mrs. Riddell from her hair to her morals.
This last was meant for the ‘quite private’ delectation of John Syme
and one or two other intimates, but even if Burns had published it his
conduct could not have appeared in much worse light. The epigrams and
the ‘Monody on a Lady Famed for Her Caprice’ are enough in themselves
to put it beyond condoning.

While Burns was thus exhibiting the worst side of his nature, his
victims’ circumstances were changing. Walter Riddell had returned from
the Indies without the money he had gone to raise, and in the course
of the spring Woodley Park was repossessed by its former owner, Walter
forfeiting his £1000 deposit on the purchase price as well as all that
he had laid out in improvements. On April 21st Robert Riddell died,
and Friars Carse was put on the market, the relations between the
two families being so uncordial that Elizabeth Riddell refused any
settlement which would leave her brother-in-law in possession of the
estate. Walter and Maria attempted the usual expedient of impoverished
gentry--a prolonged stay on the Continent--but found their way barred
by the armies of the French Revolution. Accordingly after a few
months in England they returned to the neighbourhood of Dumfries to
resume life on a much reduced scale. They settled at Tinwald House, a
tumble-down estate near Lochmaben, or rather Maria settled, for her
husband was absent most of the time. In May, 1795, they moved again,
this time to Halleaths, between Lochmaben and Lockerbie, where they
remained until they left Scotland forever in 1797. How much Maria had
heard of Burns’s conduct towards her no one but herself knew, and she
never told. When Currie published some of the letters referring to the
quarrel she affected complete ignorance of their relation to herself,
though it is hard to believe that some kind friend had not shown them
to her.

If Burns showed the worst side of his nature in the quarrel, Maria
showed the best of hers in the reconciliation. Early in 1795 she made
the first move by sending him a book she had heard he wished to read.
He replied in a formal note in the third person which nevertheless
welcomed the overture and opened the way for further intercourse. By
the beginning of May he was writing in his old vein of flirtatious
gaiety and even confiding to Maria about the mysterious Reid miniature
of himself--mysterious because no one knows for whom he had it painted,
nor why. The woman who quarrelled with Burns in 1794 may have been
capricious, and have pushed her rigour further than was wise in dealing
with a man of Burns’s temperament. After all, twenty-one is not
infallible even when feminine and married. But the woman who reinstated
Burns in her good graces in 1795, after his caddish attacks upon her,
was certainly not petty.

The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort
soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note
written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature
mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to
paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The
autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter,
and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his
grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine,
sincerely prays R B.’

And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate,
irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards
their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well
on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she
evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort.
On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until
she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was.

He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly
recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food
at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end
according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought
that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying
poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as
he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold
water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death
on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage,
and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But
the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always,
rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been
gay--after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the
other world?’--had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance
long enough to reply in kind.

As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his
present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly
prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or
others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence
of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about
the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink
of the grave--anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His
eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was
hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to
lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation--

  ‘He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise,
  and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to
  the injury of his future reputation: that letters and verses written
  with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished
  to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity
  or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them
  or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice or the insidious
  sarcasms of envy from pouring forth all their venom to blast his
  fame.’

Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have
deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family
would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour
could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary
fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the
cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about
his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away
the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication
of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his
soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie
should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over
passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies
eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their
relations with him--these things were to be expected. But that Bob
Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and
circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only
ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave,
rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last
years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come,
that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to
be false--all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But
it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who
would come before the world with a truthful account of his character,
extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria
Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless
had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day
until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and
the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from
the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted
friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted.




V

LIVELIHOOD


To Burns in the vigour of his early manhood the question of livelihood
seemed easily answered. He was a good enough ploughman to be assured
of the porridge and the few shillings a week which a skilled labourer
could earn on a Scottish farm. There was no degradation in such
service. The labourers, like the hired help on New England farms, ate
with the family and took whatever share in the conversation they were
capable of. Moreover, anyone, whatever his rank, who was capable of ‘a
sensible crack’ was sure of welcome in households which had either to
provide their own entertainment or go without. Not even the prospect of
dependent old age held any terrors. The tradition of the blue-gowns, or
licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past
work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place
by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of
this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in
several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it
in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as
spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age
as a sort of Edie Ochiltree.

Such a vision of course was adolescent. To fulfil it a man must have
no dependents. Burns seems to have imagined at first that if he could
help to keep the home together until his brothers and sisters were able
to establish themselves his responsibilities would end. The liberation
of his poetic talent entailed among other things a shrinking from the
burdens of marriage on narrow means. His rejected proposal to Alison
Begbie had come before his realization of his poetic calling; his
rejected offer to Jean Armour in 1786 was the result of sympathy for
her condition and not of a desire to settle down. But he soon learned
that he could not so simply escape responsibility. His children must be
provided for somehow even if he did not marry their mothers. Despite
the casualness with which he incurred paternity his parental feelings
were strong. ‘_Vive l’amour et vive la bagatelle_’ sounded well as
a motto until it was confronted by the actual problem of helpless
lives which owed their existence to him. As a Man of Feeling he could
not, even had he wished to, turn his back on them with Don Juan-like
callousness. Besides, the law might have something to say in the
matter--as Burns learned in the course of four suits or threatened
suits by four different women within two years. Unless he chose to flee
the country and repudiate his obligations he had to provide himself
with settled livelihood.

For a man of his rank and education the possible choices open in
1786 were limited. He could continue as a farmer; he could attempt
to support himself by writing, or he could seek a salaried position
at home or in the colonies. Each alternative had its drawbacks. By
the beginning of 1786 his reputation in the community was such that
he could scarcely continue the partnership at Mossgiel, but he lacked
the capital necessary for setting up independently elsewhere. The hope
of any large financial returns from his poetry seemed too fantastic
for consideration; he lacked the training for journalism or hackwork
when Grub Street was crowded with penniless university men. There
remained the chance of some salaried position. Yet even if he had been
temperamentally fitted for a commercial job he was by this time too
old. Merchants’ clerks began their apprenticeship as boys in their
teens. Burns was twenty-seven. A post in the Excise Service might be
feasible but was not easy to get. All government jobs went by favour,
and despite the unpopularity of the service among the people at large
the number of aspirants so far exceeded the available places that
the endorsement of some influential person was almost essential. The
same thing was true of India, where the East India Company’s monopoly
gave patronage as large a part as it had in the government services.
The United States, not yet united, were in economic chaos; Canada was
undeveloped. There remained the West Indies, then at the height of
a prosperity built on slave labour, where independent planters with
Scottish connexions were numerous enough to make it possible for a
Scotsman with the necessary introductions to secure some sort of work.
The story of Burns’s struggle for livelihood is the story of his
efforts in each of the four possibilities open to him.

The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual
trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which
Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made
up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he
obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and
overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he
published the Kilmarnock _Poems_ to pay his passage-money, but his own
contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had
already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and
deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print
the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death
sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian
climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of
white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his
poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland,
to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so
unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight.

Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John
Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the
subscription for the _Poems_ was well under way. Negotiations were then
almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the
ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he
explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port
Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was
to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between
Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with
Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was
planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the
troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s
references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part
of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock
to Savannah-la-Mar in the _Nancy_, sailing about September 1. Then
returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and
when the captain of the _Nancy_ notified him that the ship was about to
sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The _Nancy_ sailed
without him, and he transferred his booking to the _Bell_, which was to
sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.

The truth was that he was already wavering. The enthusiastic reception
of his poems, the interest which influential gentlemen began to take in
his welfare, were changing his opinion of himself and his prospects in
Scotland. Moreover, the Armours were calming down; friends had promised
to help him should Jean’s father renew the effort to execute his
warrant. Nevertheless he did not immediately abandon the Jamaica plan.
Though the _Bell_ in her turn sailed without him, he still watched the
shipping news as he collected his subscriptions and set his affairs
in order. Jean’s twins, born on September 3rd, increased the need for
settled livelihood, but increased also his reluctance to leave Scotland.

Most of his letters of the autumn of 1786 have perished. As late
as October he was still talking of emigration, though he had again
postponed it after actually packing his trunk and starting for Greenock
at the end of September. He still feared, he told Robert Aiken, that
‘the consequences of his follies’ might banish him; in other words,
Betty Paton was threatening to sue him. The Armour affair had already
been compromised by dividing the responsibility for the care of the
twins between the two families. When the extant correspondence resumes
a month later, Jamaica had been discarded. By November 1st the poet had
decided to try his luck in Edinburgh. For this reversal the Kilmarnock
volume was directly responsible.

When Burns had begun in April to solicit subscriptions for a volume
of his poems he had had no idea of making it a commercial success.
The book was intended as a memento of himself--a souvenir for his
friends and a final and unanswerable fling at his enemies. He probably
hoped for no more material return than would cover the expenses of
publication. Its success therefore was all the more intoxicating.
Six hundred and twelve copies were printed, of which about half were
subscribed for in advance, thanks mainly to Robert Aiken. When the
book came out at the beginning of August it furnished the first
literary sensation Ayrshire had ever known. The subscribers’ copies
were passed from reader to reader, creating such a demand that the
entire edition was sold within three months. When Mrs. Dunlop ordered
six copies in mid-November only five were left. At the end of July
Burns had been a fugitive with a warrant out against him, to escape
which he was shifting from one friend’s house to another. Two weeks
later he was a celebrity. His journeys through the country as he
collected his subscriptions became a sort of royal progress. The fact
that he was making a profit out of the book meant far less to him than
the applause of all sorts and conditions of men. People of influence
assured him that something could be done for him at home, though they
were vague as to precisely what. After the printer’s bills were paid
the volume showed a profit of more than £50, though forfeited deposits
on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his
net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry
for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was
his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood.

Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of
poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition,
John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second
without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that
the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform
Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in
Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns
thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of
the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated
the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a
favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three
different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had
sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock
had commended it warmly and had even promised--not so warmly--to bring
it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric,
Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another
eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country
home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the
poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement
to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage.

On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s
estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the
Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend
their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and
even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for
generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular
and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have
weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a
subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with
the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of
the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s
giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did
was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a
larger audience.

Undoubtedly Burns realized before he went to Edinburgh that he was
setting out on the old and painful quest of patronage--a quest which
had broken the hearts of more poets than it had ever freed from
penury. But it was still fame more than money that he looked for from
his poems. He continued to hope for some means of modest livelihood
independent of his writing; if his subscription brought a little
capital to help him on his way, so much the better. When he reached
Edinburgh he made no effort to appear more than he was; he even sought
deliberately to appear less. He dressed as a plain young farmer, and
finding that the metropolitan critics were praising his work as that
of an unlettered ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration he did his
best to act the part. When Robert Anderson pointed out in private
conversation some evidence of extensive knowledge of other poets Burns
readily admitted his indebtedness, but in public he would not permit
his claims to pure inspiration to be challenged. If an unlettered bard
was what his patrons wanted he would do his best to be one. Many
times, however, his role was trying, especially when stupider people
than himself condescended, and gave him good advice.

Undoubtedly there were matters in which he needed good advice, but he
did not get it even from the patrons who did not condescend. Among
all his new friends there was no one to take his part as Sir Walter
Scott later took Southey’s in seeing that he got a fair contract with
his publisher. Glencairn had been as good as his word in securing
fashionable subscriptions. The Countess of Eglinton made the Earl
subscribe ten guineas; the entire membership of the aristocratic
Caledonian Hunt put down their names, but altered the first proposal
that they give two guineas each to a mere subscription at the regular
price. But Glencairn knew nothing about the business end of publishing.
In introducing Burns to William Creech, his brother’s former tutor and
the best-known publisher in the city, Glencairn no doubt felt that
he had done his best. He had, up to that point, but at that point a
good contract lawyer was needed. Unfortunately Henry Mackenzie and the
other men of letters in the city still adhered to the convention of the
writing gentleman who was supposed to disdain pecuniary rewards. A few
years earlier, when David Hume was alive, Burns might have been secured
better terms; a few years later under the leadership of Scott he would
certainly have secured them. Burns’s perverse pride would not allow him
to haggle over a contract which in any case offered more ready money
than he had handled in all his previous life. What he needed and did
not have was a hard-boiled business friend to do his haggling for him.

As it was, Creech made an agreement which left Burns to bear all the
immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but
which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was
often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose
name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern
sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for
collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none
of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment
for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the
printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation
charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who
distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns,
wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service--Alexander
Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock--and
when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular
booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish
tax of 25 p^r Cent. by way of agency’.

The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings,
and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected
to printing the names of the subscribers--quite naturally, for the
thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the
vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of
literature--but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse
to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross
receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid
the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs.
Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement
to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for
the copyright.

That was the sum agreed on when, just as his book was ready for
delivery, Burns decided, ‘by advice of friends’ to dispose of his
copyright. Once more he had sought the advice of others, and once
more they told him the wrong thing. In this instance, the person
most at fault was Henry Mackenzie, to whom Burns and Creech referred
the question. Mackenzie was a lawyer, and ought to have warned Burns
against the absolute sale of his rights in a potentially valuable
piece of property. Instead Mackenzie contented himself with naming
one hundred guineas as his idea of a fair price. That was on April
17. Creech delayed his acceptance until the 23rd, on the pretence of
waiting to hear if Cadell and Davies would buy a share for their London
trade, but finally consented to ‘take the whole matter upon himself,
that Mr. Burns might be at no uncertainty in the matter.’ Thereupon
Creech left town, without either paying the money or giving his note
for it. A few days later Burns himself started on his Border tour,
still without any legal contract with Creech, but with his hands full
for the time being with the task of arranging deliveries, collecting
subscriptions, and paying the printer and the binder. Had not Peter
Hill, then Creech’s chief clerk, taken a good part of the burden on
himself, Burns would have been swamped under the worry of larger
transactions than he had known in all his life before.

In August Burns returned to Edinburgh, but Creech was either again
absent or again coy. Not until October 23 did the publisher at last
set his hand to a note promising to pay the sum ‘on demand’. How soon
Burns began to ask for payment is uncertain, but by January Creech
had delayed and evaded so often that Burns ‘broke measures with
[him], and ... wrote him a frosty keen letter. He replied in forms of
chastisement’, promised payment on a set date--and broke his promise.
To add to the poet’s anxiety, rumours were afloat. It was hinted
that Creech was on the verge of bankruptcy; it was also hinted that
he had cheated Burns by secretly printing additional copies of the
_Poems_, which he sold for his own profit. Burns bewailed his own fate
as a ‘poor, d-mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool’; two months
later ‘that arch-rascal Creech’ was still making promises, and still
reneguing. Not until May 30, more than seven months after he had agreed
to pay ‘on demand’, did Creech at last part with his hundred guineas.
And even then Burns’s troubles were not over. Still another visit to
Edinburgh, at the end of February, 1789, was necessary before Creech
paid over the final sums due the poet for subscription copies, so that
at last he could report to Jean: ‘I have settled matters greatly to
my satisfaction with Mr. Creech.--He is certainly not what he should
be nor has he given me what I should have, but I am better than I
expected.’

The estimate of Creech was temperate enough; indeed, it erred, like
Burns’s statement to John Moore that Creech had ‘been amicable
and fair’ with him, on the side of charity. It is easy to condone
Mackenzie’s blunder and Creech’s sharp bargain on the ground that
neither of them could guess the future value of the copyright, but it
is impossible to excuse Creech’s postponements of the day of reckoning.
Prompt settlement of accounts after the book was published would have
sent Burns back to the country with his pockets comfortably lined and
with some of the glowing enthusiasm of his first season in Edinburgh
still undimmed. By his paltry delays Creech kept the poet in the city
until the interest of his fashionable ‘patrons’ had waned, until all
the pleasure of publication and fame had evaporated in bitterness
and disgust, and until the mere necessities of living must have made
considerable inroads on his irreplaceable capital.

Indeed one of the extraordinary facts about Burns’s life in Edinburgh
is that he emerged from it without greater depletion of his capital.
Contemporary report calls him dissipated. Yet somehow Burns managed
to spend nearly a year and a half either in residence in Edinburgh or
in journeying to and fro, and still came out with about four hundred
and fifty pounds. So far as is known he had no income from July, 1786,
when he assigned his rights in Mossgiel to Gilbert, until he reaped
his harvest, such as it was, at Ellisland in the autumn of 1788. Even
then he netted little, for the outgoing tenant exacted a price of £72
for the standing crops. However great his experience in the distracting
‘task of the superlatively Damn’d--making one guinea do the business of
three’--his twenty pounds from the Kilmarnock volume cannot have lasted
long, and if there were any gifts except the Earl of Eglinton’s ten
guineas and the same sum from Patrick Miller he nowhere mentions them.
If Burns dissipated heavily he managed somehow to do it without heavy
expenditure, an art few people have ever learned.

The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed
of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the
other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant
difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh
in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John
Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription
money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The
letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so
far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns
to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because
he had already lent Gilbert £200--nearly half his receipts from the
Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part
of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after
the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the
legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore
that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum
which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the
final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged
that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should
continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that
Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able
to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the _Poems_ in
1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his
family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his
own venture at Ellisland.

Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s
responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood
and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He
appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served
at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of
1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh.
A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs
briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he
died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and
paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of
wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace
up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts--shoes and shirts and
waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist
was no sinecure.

While he was struggling with Creech and trying to keep Mossgiel afloat,
Burns was constantly harried by the problem of his own future. The only
two possibilities he could see were a farm of his own or a post in the
Excise, and for a long time there seemed little chance of achieving
either. He had no intention of trying again for public aid through his
writing. One subscription might be regarded as a public tribute; a
repetition would look like begging. Besides, his common sense told him
that a second subscription would have little hope of success unless it
came at a long interval after the first and for work of a different
character. He had not exhausted his talents, but he had exhausted his
novelty. For the rest of his life he steadfastly refused to accept
payment for anything he wrote and actually gave away poems which make
up two-thirds of the bulk of his collected works. His sole payment for
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was a dozen copies of the proof-sheets; his payment
for Creech’s second edition in 1793--which included ‘Tam’ and a score
of other new poems--was twenty presentation copies grudgingly allowed
him. His fondness for making gestures of gallant but unwise generosity
can hardly be better illustrated than by his dealings with Creech over
this edition. The publisher wrote to him in 1791, proposing a reissue
of the work and asking Burns to contribute some new poems to it, but
without suggesting payment for them. Burns told Cunningham that he had
taken a damned revenge of Creech by ignoring his letter. Yet a few
months later he relented, and after reminding Creech that the new poems
were his own absolute property, turned them over to him without asking
any payment except the twenty gift copies. Such a gesture might have
shamed some publishers, but Creech merely accepted it as his right. In
the same spirit Burns hotly resented George Thomson’s payment of £5 for
his contributions to the first number of the _Select Scotish Airs_,
and Thomson, like Creech, felt no compunction at accepting the poet’s
quixotic generosity.

On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for
journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and
duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London _Star_ are
all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to
get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck
off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the
only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he
managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government
employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety.
Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been
put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry
of the London _Chronicle_ to offer Burns what for those days was a
fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the
press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity
of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his
children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for
the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a
partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity,
as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the
kingdom.

But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support
himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned
the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went
to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh
patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns
was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only
definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs.
Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that
Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had
left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover
Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if
Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His
most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high
officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from
Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise,
was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.

Meanwhile an offer of another sort was being pressed upon him. He had
been in Edinburgh only a few weeks when the prosperous and enthusiastic
Patrick Miller sought his acquaintance. Miller, after a varied career,
at sea and as a banker, had retired from business with a comfortable
fortune and was devoting himself to miscellaneous experiments. He
was the sort of capitalist who is a godsend to struggling inventors,
for his enthusiastic imagination enabled him both to visualize the
inventor’s aims and to overlook all the practical details and delays
which intervene between a project and its fulfilment. His strongest
enthusiasm at the moment was the improvement of navigation, but his
interests also included agriculture. Not long before Burns came to
Edinburgh Miller had bought the run-down estate of Dalswinton near
Dumfries, and it was Ellisland, one of the farms on this estate, which
he urged upon Burns.

The poet was afraid of it from the start, and for good reason.
Miller, he said, was no judge of land, and what Miller thought was an
advantageous offer might ruin his tenant. Had Burns been gifted with
second-sight he could not have prophesied more accurately. Yet the
difficulty he always found in saying ‘No’ to people whose intentions
were friendly combined with his own inclinations to keep him from
refusing Miller’s offer outright. Farming was the business he knew
best, and a farmer’s life he held was the best of lives--if one could
live by it--but Mount Oliphant, Lochlie, and Mossgiel had been a triple
lesson on the fate of the tenant who undertook a lease without capital
enough to stock a farm profitably. Even if the Dalswinton farm were all
that Miller thought it, Burns doubted if his literary profits would
suffice to give him a start. However, he agreed to look at Ellisland
when he reached Dumfries at the end of his Border tour. When he did
so he could scarcely have been in the mood for a really critical
examination. The savage hospitality he had experienced for the past
three weeks had left him jaded and depressed, and the annoyance of
being greeted at Dumfries by Meg Cameron’s letter would not sharpen his
critical faculties. Even so he could see at a glance that the soil was
exhausted and would require long and careful nursing. In fact the only
thing to be said for Miller’s offer was that, recognizing the run-down
condition of the property, he was offering it at a low rental for the
first three years. Fifty pounds per annum for a farm of more than a
hundred acres contrasted favourably with the prices in East Lothian,
where landlords were asking as much as thirty shillings an acre. Burns
went home to Mossgiel without having made up his mind; if discussion
with the cautious Gilbert contributed to any decision it was a negative
one. Ellisland was too big a risk. He returned to Edinburgh in the
fall with his mind made up. He would renew his efforts to secure an
Excise commission and would bank the profits of his poems as a reserve
fund for the education and security of his children.

But Miller was not easily discouraged. He had evidently decided that
the poet as a tenant would be an asset to Dalswinton. Accordingly he
urged Burns to go down again and have a more critical look at the
place. A severe cold which confined him to the house enabled Burns
again to evade committing himself and not long afterwards came the
injury to his knee which laid him up for weeks and involved him in the
Clarinda affair. But meanwhile his endeavours for an Excise commission
were not prospering. Glencairn disapproved; Mrs. Dunlop disapproved;
apparently everyone who might have exerted the necessary influence
disapproved. In January Miss Nimmo sent him to a Mrs. Stewart who was
supposed to have influence with the commissioners. The interview was
not a success. Burns came away from it boiling with helpless rage. He
had been questioned like a child about his most private affairs and
Mrs. Stewart had further improved the occasion by rebuking him for
the Jacobite sentiments he had scratched on the window of the inn at
Stirling. If the quest for an Excise job was to expose him to this sort
of thing Burns was ready to throw up the whole project.

Just when the matter appeared most hopeless his chance came from an
unexpected quarter. The surgeon who had treated his injured knee was
Alexander Wood, better known to his fellow-citizens as Lang Sandy
Wood, who after a wild youth had become one of the most respectable
characters, in both senses of that word, in Edinburgh. Wood learned of
his patient’s desire and offered to do what Glencairn and the others
had refused or evaded--to bring Burns’s case directly and personally
before the Board. The result was that before he left Edinburgh Burns
found himself, ‘without any mortifying solicitation’ on his own part,
equipped with the official order for the six-weeks’ course of special
instructions which would entitle him to an Excise commission. It came
none too soon. One of the rules of the service was that no man could
enter it who was in debt, who was more than thirty years old, or who
had more than three children. Burns’s time for meeting these two latter
qualifications was getting very short indeed.

But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered
round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching
auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and
the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew
that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit
the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did
so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be
his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his
emotions swayed him in its favour. In an effort to strengthen his
judgement he invited his old friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, to
join the tour of inspection. Glenconner’s mind would not be biased by
any poetic considerations. It did not occur to Burns that even the most
experienced of farmers, looking at soil different from that he was
accustomed to, could scarcely gauge its productivity rightly at the
end of February. The rule-of-thumb farming which Glenconner and most
of his contemporaries practised required the sight of growing crops
for correct judgement. Tennant looked the place over and told Burns it
was a bargain at Miller’s price. The opinion astonished the poet, but
he failed to realize that it was merely a guess less accurate than the
opinion he himself had formed on seeing the place the previous June.
Burns frequently made mistakes, but his worst ones were made when he
relied on other people’s judgement. In March he signed Miller’s lease
and committed himself to three years of struggle and discouragement
which swallowed all the capital which had not already been poured into
the bottomless morass of Mossgiel.

Legend has it that Burns was offered his choice of two farms on the
Dalswinton estate and selected Ellisland because of its more attractive
location--‘a poet’s choice and not a farmer’s’. In fact Miller offered
no choice, and in drawing up the lease employed all the usual legal
technicalities with one or two additions of his own. The rent was to be
£50 a year for the first three years and £70 thereafter, and Miller’s
zeal for improvements was to have scope even while the tenant was in
possession. The landlord reserved the right to take over the riverbank,
a twenty-yard-wide belt along the Friars Carse boundary, and two
acres of other land at his own choice to plant with trees. He agreed,
however, to put money of his own into the place. It had not even a
farmhouse when Burns signed the lease, and Miller undertook to provide
adequate buildings. The contractor’s delay in constructing these caused
further needless anxiety and actual loss to Burns.

After the die was cast all Burns’s earlier doubts about Ellisland and
his own ability to handle it returned with redoubled force. His first
move was to make sure of his Excise appointment by taking the necessary
six weeks of special instructions from the officer at Mauchline, even
though this delayed his settlement until mid-June. Inasmuch as these
six weeks included also the emotional stress of the ending of the
Clarinda romance and his acknowledgement of Jean as his wife, his
nerves were overwrought when he finally reached his farm. The prospect
there might have discouraged a more phlegmatic man. The farmhouse was
not even started, and his only shelter was a leaky and chimneyless
labourer’s hovel. The sparse growth of the crops planted by his
predecessor confirmed the exhaustion of the soil, and he was confronted
as never before with the need for executive skill. That aspect of his
nature which led him to remark that somehow he could make himself
pretty generally beloved yet never could get the art of commanding
respect told heavily against him when he had both to keep his own
labourers at work and to bully or cajole the contractor into finishing
the farmhouse at the time agreed upon. When he was not present the
farmhands lay down on the job; when he was present they found it
altogether too easy to engage him in talk while the work suffered. The
friendship he formed with Thomas Boyd, the contractor, led among other
things to an acquaintance with Thomas Telford, the great engineer,
but it did not lead to the speedy completion of his house. As late as
March, 1789, he was still pleading with Boyd to get at least the shell
of it finished. Moreover he was too sympathetic with his workmen. The
margin of profit on such a farm was too small to permit indulgence
in humanitarian sentiments, but Burns knew too much of the lives of
the lower classes to have the necessary hardness. Two letters to
the owner of the neighbouring farm with whom Burns had cooperated
in digging a drain do credit to his feelings if not to his business
capacity. The labourer who undertook the job at seventeen pence a rood
had underestimated the time. In order to give him a fair wage for his
labour Burns added three-pence a rood to the contract price for his
share and asked the neighbour to do the same--with what result is not
recorded.

But there was a still deeper psychological hindrance to success at
Ellisland. Even had the soil been productive, even had he secured a
foreman who could have kept his hands at work, the Burns who undertook
Ellisland was not the Burns of Lochlie or even of Mossgiel. Though by
no means setting up as a gentleman farmer, he had become conscious of
having a position to maintain. Gilbert, he thought, might be able to
take over Ellisland and succeed with it; ‘as he can with propriety
do things that I _now_ cannot do.’ Physical debility was also to be
reckoned with, for he must have got out of training during almost two
years of exemption from regular labour, and his weakened heart would
prevent his easily recovering his lost tone. But in fact his mind was
filled with other matters and metres. That during his first summer
he spent alternate fortnights with Jean in Mauchline was a temporary
circumstance without relation to the success of the farm thereafter,
but that his work for Johnson’s _Museum_ was filling his mind was a
fact less easily discounted. In the middle of his first summer he had
a fiddler with him for at least two days playing over a collection of
Highland music in quest of lyric tunes for Johnson. It was a prelude to
his greatest period of lyric creativeness, but it was not an augury of
success in managing a poor farm on limited capital.

The first season’s harvest offered little encouragement. Wet weather
and scanty labour made it difficult to salvage whatever thin crop the
fields had produced. Before his lease was six months old Burns was
confiding to his friends that he was uncertain of his farm’s doing
well, but, as he told Ainslie, he had his Excise commission in his
pocket and did not care three skips of a cur dog for the gambols of
Fortune. The chance of obtaining the commission had made him willing
to undertake the farm; possession added still another psychological
handicap to its successful conduct. Embittered youthful memories of the
humiliations of a tenant farmer had been reinforced by the development
of his poetic vocation to clog whole-hearted effort. Now the existence
of his commission held always open a door of escape from any threatened
renewal of the old humiliation and thereby unconsciously slowed still
further the endeavours which were his only safeguard. He was defeated
at Ellisland before he began.

By the following spring he had begun to realize his defeat. The farm
and his family, including William, were swallowing the remains of his
capital so rapidly that it was doubtful if he could hold on without
more income than the farm was likely to yield. It occurred to him that
he might use his commission while he still held the farm. He had not
thought of this at first. The usual procedure for a beginner was to
be assigned to some district where a place was vacant, there to serve
several months’ apprenticeship without pay. When pay commenced, it had
until recently been at the rate of £35 a year, but about the time Burns
obtained his commission the initial stipend was raised to £50. Looking
about his own neighbourhood, Burns learned that the officer in charge
of the rural parishes to the north of Dumfries was a certain Leonard
Smith, who had recently inherited money and was not distinguishing
himself by activity in the service. Burns decided to play politics.

His commission had been obtained through Robert Graham of Fintry, one
of the chief Commissioners for Scotland. Fintry had expressed personal
interest in the poet’s welfare in terms which must have soothed his
bristling pride, for Burns had already addressed to him both a prose
letter of thanks and a poetic epistle in imitation of Pope. Though
Fintry never quite supplanted Lord Glencairn in Burns’s esteem, he
in fact became the poet’s second patron and in the long run did more
for him than even the Earl had done. Graham’s first favour had been
the commission itself; his second was the appointment to active duty.
Before his first harvest was over Burns coolly suggested that Smith
might be relieved from duty without serious loss to himself and perhaps
with a gain to the Service. On his visit to Edinburgh in February,
1789, Burns pressed the matter further. Graham promised to do what he
could, but pointed out that it was clean against regulations to start
a new man at full pay without a probationary period. Nevertheless he
undertook to investigate Smith’s conduct and by midsummer had found
cause for removing him, had given Burns the place, and had circumvented
the rule against starting a new man at full duty and on full pay. For
one who had always boasted his independence and had spoken scornfully
of the political quest for favours, Burns had done a neat and
successful job of wire-pulling.

Having once got his appointment, however, Burns had no intention of
treating it as a sinecure. His district covered twelve sparsely-settled
parishes and his tours of inspection required, to fulfil the letter of
the law, that he ride two hundred miles a week in all weathers and all
states of the uniformly bad roads. This meant that he could give little
of his time and less of his strength to Ellisland. To provide for the
farm he endeavoured to increase his dairy stock, which Jean could
supervise in the intervals of having babies and managing her household.
The cattle, too, might help in the slow task of rebuilding the worn-out
acres.

But the strain of his new duties soon took physical toll. In the late
fall of 1789, after less than two months of service, ‘a malignant
squinancy and low fever’ laid him up for six weeks. His handwriting
indicates that the illness was really serious; the letters written
during convalescence are in a hand almost as weak and straggling
as that of June and July, 1796. Nevertheless he had proved his
qualifications for the job. An official report on various subordinate
officers in the Excise bears after Burns’s name the notation ‘a
poet--never tried--turns out well.’ He had moreover established
friendly relations with his immediate superiors, Alexander Findlater,
the Supervisor, and John Mitchell, the Collector, of the Dumfries
district. With the latter, indeed, he was already on terms approaching
intimacy, sending him gifts of new-laid eggs from Ellisland and
accompanying them at least once with a poetic epistle so broadly
humorous that no editor has ever printed it all. Both men testified to
Burns’s fidelity by defending his character after his death and--what
is far more significant--by reporting favourably on him during his life.

He was giving reason for favourable reports. His predecessor had
been so slack that Burns was able to appear, at the first session of
court after he began duty, with an impressive array of cases of tax
evasion. In handling these he again displayed political astuteness.
The minor offenders, mostly poor men who could ill afford a fine, he
begged off with warnings or suspended sentences. This almost compelled
the magistrates to fine the larger offenders for whom he refused
to intercede, and inasmuch as Excise officers then, like American
customs inspectors today, received a percentage of these penalties,
Burns found his procedure remunerative in cash as well as in official
credit. He soon discovered, though, that zeal had its drawbacks.
Gentlemen of position, including some of the magistrates themselves,
had their favourite smugglers or home-brewers, and when Burns caught
one of these he started all the machinery of influence and political
pressure so familiar to Americans during the prohibition era. Once
he told Collector Mitchell, after a hard day’s riding in rounding up
witnesses in a case, that he expected for his pains to be clapped in
jail for annoying the friends of half the gentlemen in the county.
The grosser temptations of bribery, however, did not touch him. The
various legends, deriving from highly unreliable oral tradition, of
his leniency with small offenders mean no more, even if literally
true, than that Burns had learned the common sense of his profession.
A customs inspector knows that his job is not to penalize every
tourist who has failed to declare a dozen handkerchiefs but to catch
the large-scale smuggler. The same was true of the laws Burns had to
enforce, which imposed taxes on everything from whisky to candles. Not
but what he made ordinary human distinctions between his public and his
private capacities. William Lorimer, father of ‘Chloris’, was one of
the poet’s intimate friends. He was also a bootlegger whose ways were,
‘like the grace of G--, past all comprehension’. Seemingly Lorimer
maintained a moderate legal stock for inspection purposes, but once
when he was absent and his wife drunk something slipped in the working
of the gentlemen’s agreement, and Burns had to explain to Supervisor
Findlater. Another time he helped, as revenue officer, in a series of
raids on Dumfries haberdashers who had been selling smuggled French
gloves. A few days later, as private citizen, he supplied Maria Riddell
with similar gloves from a still unraided dealer’s stock. The problems
and conditions of law enforcement are among the few immutables in human
history.

After two years’ experience Burns reaffirmed that the Excise was
after all the business for him. He added, ‘I find no difficulty in
being an honest man in it; the work of itself, is easy; and it is a
devilish different affair, managing money matters where I care not a
damn whether the money is paid or not; from the long faces made to a
haughty Laird or still more haughty Factor, when rents are demanded,
and money, alas, not to be had!’ His position as tenant farmer was no
longer an irritation; it was an obsession. Ellisland, he told Gilbert,
had undone his enjoyment of himself. He looked forward with the same
desperate hope as his father’s at Mount Oliphant to the ‘freedom in his
lease’. The three-year period of the £50 rental ended in 1791. After
that, if he chose to stay, Ellisland would cost £70 a year. Naturally,
his discouragement and defeat on the farm had affected his relations
with his landlord. Miller’s kindness, he said, had been just such
another thing as Creech’s, and the fact that Mrs. Miller had failed to
appreciate one of his poorer contributions to Johnson’s _Museum_ did
not heighten his esteem for the family. He wanted no more to do with
landlords or anything that belonged to them.

His only good luck at Ellisland came at the end. The surrender of the
lease did not annoy Miller as Burns had expected, for a purchaser was
in the market, and Miller was glad enough to dispose of the farm which
the Nith separated from the rest of his estate. After sending Jean and
the children to Mauchline, Burns held an auction of his standing crops
and provided the lavish drinks expected by auction-goers. One result
was that the exhilarated bidders ran up the prices nearly a guinea an
acre beyond the market rates; another was that house and stable-yard
were strewn with helplessly drunk and retching neighbours. The sale
brought ready cash for the first time in two years, and Burns used
some of it to clear up a variety of small debts, including the four
pounds he owed his namesake, Robert Burn of Edinburgh, for erecting
Fergusson’s tombstone. He also celebrated his manumission by a brief
visit to Edinburgh to say farewell to Clarinda and to try to do
something for sick and penniless Jenny Clow.

While things had been going so badly on the farm his position in
the Excise had been improving. After less than a year and a half in
his laborious rural division he had wangled a transfer to a vacant
‘footwalk’, the ‘3d, or Tobacco, Division’, in Dumfries. This meant
lighter work, and enabled him to dispense with his horse--not too soon,
for his poor worn-out mare had given him several nasty falls on the
bad roads, bruising him severely and once breaking his arm. In town,
though, he had small opportunity for increasing his income through
fines and penalties as he had done in the rural division. When at
the end of 1791 he moved his family into Dumfries the best quarters
he could afford were a crowded and uncomfortable half-of-a-house in
the Stinking Vennel, near the river. He was still receiving only the
minimum salary of £50 a year, and though Jean said long afterwards that
they did not come empty-handed into Dumfries not much cash can have
remained after he had discharged his debts. As early as March, 1790,
he had estimated that he would be lucky if he did not lose more than
£100 out of an investment of little more than £200. Such anticipatory
estimates are oftener under the mark than over it; one suspects that if
Burns recovered as much as £50 of the money he had put into Ellisland,
he was lucky.

By comparison, his prospects in the Excise were roseate. The Port
Division in Dumfries, best paid of the subordinate posts, was vacant,
and Burns lobbied for it with William Corbet, general supervisor of
Excise, as he had done with Graham of Fintry for his first appointment.
Corbet was an old friend of Mrs. Dunlop’s, and her intercession was
effectively supplemented by a warm recommendation from Findlater, the
local supervisor. Burns got the job early in 1792. The salary was
£70 a year with various perquisites worth another £20. It scarcely
represented luxurious living, but it was a better income than most
Scottish schoolmasters or even ministers received in the eighteenth
century, and though ‘Robin’s temper was not cold and frugal’ he managed
to be fairly comfortable. After a year in the Stinking Vennel he moved
to a better house in what was then called Mill Street and is now Burns
Street--the last of his numerous abodes.

Even before he left Ellisland Burns’s name had been placed on the list
of those eligible for promotion to the rank of Supervisor. This was the
most laborious of the Excise posts, for the supervisors did most of the
real work of collection and administration. They received salaries
of from £200 to £400 a year, but their duties filled most of their
waking hours. So long as he was merely Port Officer Burns had time and
energy for reading and song-writing. He knew, however, that when in the
course of seniority he became a supervisor most of this would cease.
But he was already looking beyond. The next rank above Supervisor was
Collector, and the collectors held well-paid sinecures. In theory
at least supervisors were appointed by merit, but collectorships
admittedly went by favour, and Burns began to cultivate political
friendships which might in the future secure him the necessary
influence.

Not that he had any intention of soldiering on his job and trusting to
influence to lift him to a better one. He was taking an intelligent
interest in his work and sought the attention of his superiors by his
understanding of their business. Thus he had not been long in his Port
Division before he wrote to Provost Staig of Dumfries pointing out that
the town was losing revenue through failure to assess a tax on imported
ale, and backed his statement with an estimate of the sums involved
and some shrewd advice as to the best method of getting his chiefs to
enforce their collection. A year or so later he pointed out to Robert
Graham that one of the Dumfries divisions could be abolished and its
duties distributed among the other officers without overburdening them.
There cannot be many instances on record of a government employee’s
informing his superiors that he was underworked. On this occasion at
least Burns took an unusual way of drawing attention to himself. He was
also once more suggesting his own advancement at the expense of another
man, but admitted the fact and coupled his recommendation with a plea
that if the change were made the present incumbent, burdened with an
expensive family, be provided for elsewhere.

He would have been the last to claim that these suggestions were
free of any ulterior motive beside the general one of making himself
known as a thoughtful and efficient officer. He had other and more
immediate purposes. Not long after showing Provost Staig the revenue
possibilities of the ‘twa pennies’ tax on ale he had a petition to
make to the Burgh Council. When he first visited Dumfries in 1787
he had been made an honorary burgess; he now wanted that nominal
citizenship converted into a real one so far at least as concerned the
local schools. The sons of burgesses were entitled to free tuition at
Dumfries Academy, and the chance of getting his boys into a first-rate
school was not to be neglected. His petition set forth in detail
the help he had given to the local revenues. This may not have been
the reason why the Council at once granted his application, but it
certainly did not hamper it. Similarly his letters to Graham were
frankly motivated by a desire to get a post as acting supervisor at
the earliest possible moment and thereby to secure not only some small
immediate increase in income but the experience and reputation which
would count in his favour when a permanent position opened.

These were reasonable and legitimate efforts to gain prestige. He
indulged in others more ticklish and, in the perspective of history,
more futile. Burns lacked the right temperament for cultivating
politicians, but he could not help trying. He was once introduced, for
instance, to that very shady character, the Duke of Queensberry, whom
previously he had rated with some justice as a complete scoundrel.
At their meeting the Duke proved affable, and hearing that Burns had
written a song about the notorious ‘Whistle’ drinking bout mentioned
that he would like a copy. Burns sent it to him with a flattering
letter, no doubt hoping that at some future date the Duke’s influence
might be useful. There was nothing particularly dangerous in this,
for the Duke’s rank made him a public character irrespective of what
party was in power. But when Burns undertook to meddle in parliamentary
contests he was playing with fire. He had of course no vote himself,
but he wrote ballads in support of Whig candidates and continued to
do so until a few months before his death. From the viewpoint of 1792
something might have been said for this as good strategy, regardless of
the poet’s actual sympathies. Except for the brief Rockingham ministry
at the end of the American War the Tories had been in power for nearly
a generation and a reversal was overdue. When and if the Whigs came
in a man who had supported them in their time of adversity would be
entitled to special favours. Neither Burns nor anyone else in Britain
could foresee Napoleon and realize that Pitt’s ministry, which had
already been on the verge of disaster over the Regency Bill, would,
thanks to the Frenchman, remain in office until after Burns and most of
his parliamentary friends were in their graves. As things turned out,
silence would have been the better part for Burns, but he had no gift
for silence.

In the same year moreover in which Burns secured his Port Division
the effects of the upheaval in France were stirring both Burns and
Scotland. The cries of Liberty and Equality and Fraternity were
echoed in the North and enlisted as in England a motley collection of
supporters who ranged from poetic idealists, like Burns and Wordsworth,
through professional agitators like Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke to
unprincipled rabble. Burns’s first public gesture of sympathy with the
French Revolution came as a by-product of the most exciting episode
in his career as an Excise officer. In the early spring of 1792 a
smuggling schooner named the _Rosamond_ was caught in the Solway.
The ship was heavily armed and thanks to the active co-operation of
the coastwise folks, who staved in all their rowboats to keep the
Excise officers from using them, she landed her cargo. The _Rosamond_,
however, remained aground on the tidal flats and when an armed force
of dragoons and Excise officers--Burns among them--waded out to attack
her the crew fled after scuttling the ship. Salvaged and towed into
the Nith the _Rosamond_ with all her gear was confiscated and sold at
auction. Her armament included four carronades which Burns bought for
£4 and dispatched as a gift to the French Convention. Such at least
is the traditional story, and every detail of it, except the actual
dispatch of the carronades, is corroborated by documents found among
the Abbotsford papers. The tradition continues that the guns never
reached France, being seized by the customs officials at Dover; but
here again confirmation is lacking. Legally there was nothing wrong
in Burns’s action. France and England were still officially at peace,
though their relations were steadily growing tenser. Nevertheless,
from the practical viewpoint of a government employee with a dependent
family it was a gesture of almost criminal recklessness. The government
has never yet existed which looked benevolently upon manifestations of
revolutionary sympathies among its servants, and before many months had
passed Burns had good reason to be frightened.

The autumn of 1792 saw England ready to join the coalition against
revolutionary France, though war was not declared until February
1, 1793. To the privileged classes in England the war had all
the characteristics of a crusade except the obligation to take a
personal share. The Revolution threatened the very foundations of the
aristocratic social system, and the depth of the government’s fear is
measured by the violence alike of official denunciations of France and
of the suppression of dissenting opinion at home. Charges of sedition
were pressed not only against avowed revolutionary sympathizers but
against almost anyone who had advocated the slightest modification of
the existing order. It was not surprising that Burns, always unguarded
in speech and action, should face investigation of his conduct. The
details of the charges and their outcome belong in another chapter. For
a time Burns thought that all his hopes of advancement were blasted,
but the storm soon blew over, and even before he advertised his
loyalty by enlisting in the Dumfries Volunteers he had good reason to
anticipate that promotion would come in due course.

But though he escaped the storm of persecution he did not escape the
economic consequences of the war. It had the usual and inevitable
results of tight money and rising prices; a wave of bankruptcies swept
over Scotland; the monthly lists of failures in the _Scots Magazine_
increased from an average of half-a-dozen a month to forty-six in
July, 1793, and among the victims was Burns’s friend, Walter Auld
the saddler. The poet himself was not exempt. The war cut off the
greater part of the import trade and with it much of the income and
perquisites of Dumfries Port Division. Burns had just begun to extend
his expenditures in keeping with his increased income. The carronades
and his better house were only part of the expansion. He had backed
a friend’s note and had to pay it when the friend defaulted; he had
lent considerable sums to another friend, the schoolmaster at Moffat,
who was engaged in a long-drawn-out wrangle with the Earl of Hopetoun,
patron of the school; there were other smaller loans as well. Caught
thus with ready cash exhausted, income reduced, and prices rising,
Burns found himself once again in the grimly familiar position of
being unable to pay his landlord. That the landlord was a gentleman
and a personal friend who did not dun for his money made the situation
more painful. In January, 1795, Burns had actually to borrow three
guineas from his friend, William Stewart, in order to pay part of his
rent. Nevertheless even in these hard times he managed occasional
expenditures that came in the class of luxuries--a week’s tour in
Galloway with John Syme, the restoration of a Jacobite relic in form
of Lord Balmerino’s dirk, even a miniature portrait of himself. He and
his family never lacked for the necessaries of life, and though he was
somewhat in debt the accounting of his executors is proof that the
amount never passed reasonable bounds.

As soon as the excitement over the sedition charges subsided his
prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were
secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position,
but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December,
1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties.
The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if
Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable
experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse
criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his
final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one
of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the
list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or
two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh
friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process.

The prospect of promotion was becoming very real--so real that during
the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of
his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick
Heron of Heron--the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half
Ayrshire--was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright.
In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do
anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest
level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three
years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a
political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some
agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening
his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he
must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend
on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is
graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he
worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From
the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold
aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his
appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying
himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.

In any case his hopes were vain. His disease was gaining on him; he
experienced sharp twinges of pain which he and his doctors called
rheumatism, but which were probably angina pectoris. In June and
again in December, 1795, he had serious illnesses which left him weak
and shaken. In the face of his increasing weakness he had taken on
additional labour by enlisting in a volunteer company organized in
Dumfries in the early spring. The manual of arms and frequent drills
were dangerous medicine for a diseased heart, and to this physical
labour Burns added active participation in all the business affairs of
the corps. His final breakdown could not in any circumstances have been
long delayed, but the Dumfries Volunteers undoubtedly hastened it.

The winter of 1795-6 was a time of famine. Crops had been bad; trade
was dislocated by the war. Nearly one-fourth of the inhabitants of
Edinburgh were being fed by charity, and flour was so scarce that even
those who could afford it were asked to ration themselves to one loaf
of bread per capita a week. Conditions in the smaller towns were as
bad or worse; there were serious food riots in Dumfries in February
and March. With his health steadily declining Burns was exposed to
constant worry for the welfare of his family. Excise officers who were
unable over long periods to perform their duties because of illness
were reduced to half-pay, and as matters stood in the spring of 1796
half-pay would have meant almost starvation for his children. That
things did not come to this pass for Burns was due to the generosity
of Adam Stobbie, who handled his work for him and refused compensation
for the service. This relieved some of his immediate anxiety, but did
little to answer the main question of what would become of Jean and the
children if he died.

The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied
it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts.
The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved
expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers
now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began
to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed
that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow
of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness
in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent
money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and
James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave
grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but
too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate
words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him,
and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken
the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the
admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home
together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on
respectable careers.




VI

SONG


Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left
only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’.
Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so
definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his
poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own.

Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood
through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic
sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and
the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such
a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting
drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while
the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will
boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’
But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of
English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace
boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did
not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth
autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company
of Nelly Kilpatrick.

  ‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.--Indeed I did not well
  know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when
  returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice
  made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly,
  why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered
  over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.--Among
  her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas
  her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in
  rhyme.--I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses
  like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my
  girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country
  laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love;
  and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he
  had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’

‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far
separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects
save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But
that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric
fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together
in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that
ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl--namely,
a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked
from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed
its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully
to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which
evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the
libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of
composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead
of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as
illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes.

His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s
craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns
copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura
piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he
studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by
verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and
fustian.--I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as
it is.’ But these were _English_ songs, and their effect on his early
work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man
was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled,
‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in
music.

But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable
that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the
Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase
Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has
to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find
its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or
flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the
Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was
written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture
of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt
the alien materials of Restoration England.

Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send
some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty
stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague
his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly
giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better
understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his
early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace
Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after.
The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate
title-page:

  ‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness;
  a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping
  it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty,
  and unbounded good-will to every creature--rational or irrational.
  As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at
  a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his
  unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really
  _his own_, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of
  human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the
  pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and
  passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life,
  operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species.

   “There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a
   figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them
   upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same
   importance which they do to those which appear in print.”--Shenstone.

      “Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace,
      The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d.
      Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face!
      Such the soft image of our youthful mind.”

                                        Ibidem.’

Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was
in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own
health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of
himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of
humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at
third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth
shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as
good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone,
and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon
abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms
of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was
thinking in poetry.

Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was
that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace
Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for
print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal
emotion, social _jeux d’esprit_, or conventional exercises in
versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one;
the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the
world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive
the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself
on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of
his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined
in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring
himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The
Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing,
intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785.
Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own
first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth
in artistic competence.

Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their
evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed
in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of
composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas
to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he
failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes
he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long
afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for
Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the
disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns
drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English
verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different
sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in
1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at
an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a
subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the
original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals
similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition
was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric
stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer
than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the
great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once
said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish,
rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In
commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here
he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking.

Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit
of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion
expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no
longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest
songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he
composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of
1793:

   ‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as
   it is) I never can compose for it.--My way is: I consider the
   poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical
   expression; then chuse my theme; begin one stanza; when that is
   composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the
   business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in
   Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations
   of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & then the air
   with the verses I have framed: when I feel my Muse beginning to jade,
   I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, & there commit my
   effusions to paper; swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my
   elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as
   my pen goes on.--

   Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.--What damn’d
   Egotism!’

Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s
influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was
to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate
in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic
impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define
both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured
intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783
and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting,
self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’
of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to
‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end
of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to
whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following,
written in September, 1785, is adult:

  ‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a
  redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent
  and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in,
  most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For
  instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain
  prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other
  hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch
  Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most
  exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic,
  one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature,
  how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely
  methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving
  melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those
  airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of
  wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which
  are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people--a certain
  happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently,
  nothing, not even _like_ rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of
  the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might
  be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set
  compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of
  rhyme altogether....’

With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns
had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance
with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice
of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the
real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather
than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to
abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such
an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity.
Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical
syllables in _Christabel_ is timid conventionality. Blake alone among
Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work,
which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century
for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to
persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its
lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never
optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with
rime.

So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition,
Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to
fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like
Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many
poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began
in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in
his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told
Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it,
than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he
repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months _I shall be
quite in song_.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the
Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at
which creation was possible.

The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose
in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson
of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock
volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some
of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead
Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of
beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar:

    The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
    Till by himself he learn’d to wander
    Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
           An’ no think lang.

In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough,
lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to
this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a
Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that
this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of
composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its
significance:

  ‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made
  a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic
  exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought
  in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would
  then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding
  stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’

It suited with the role of inspired ploughman which Burns assumed among
the Edinburgh gentry to give the impression that the finished poem
also was spontaneous, but he knew better. His poetry was often born
under the open sky, with the physical rhythm of his farm-work supplying
the muscular accompaniment he later sought in strolls on the banks
of Nith, but it was matured and revised by concentrated study of the
implications of his theme. As the piper has to walk his measure, so
Burns’s body moved to the rhythm of the tune which was in his mind,
and the rhythm brought the words which expressed his mood.

It was only Scots music that saved Burns in the end from complete
subjection to the false elegance of his century. Though he was better
read than most of his ‘patrons’ ever realized, he had the self-educated
man’s diffidence in the face of established reputations. His ear, so
quick to distinguish ‘the true tender or sublime’ from ‘affectation
or fustian’ in a lyric, failed him in the reading of more pretentious
works. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is shot full of verbal echoes
of English poets; what is worse, it echoes their sentiments, in such
a passage as Stanza X, to an extent which divorces the thought from
all the realities of peasant life. He never acquired the degree of
sophistication which would have enabled him to use the current English
conventions freely and originally, yet he was too sophisticated to
use old folk conventions when they were not reinforced by music. Thus
he never--with the possible exception of ‘John Barleycorn’--wrote a
serious ballad. His political verses, and above all such an uproarious
parody as ‘The Ballad of Grizzel Grimme’, show that he had all the
ballad conventions at his tongue’s end; he had collected numerous old
ballad texts, of which Dr. Currie named more than a dozen to Sir Walter
Scott, though without thinking it worth while to preserve them; yet he
could employ the ballad only in satire or burlesque. Thanks to music,
he was able in all seriousness to sing a song in the old folk style,
but he could not tell a story.

Even his Scottish vocabulary was more literary and derivative than
his contemporaries realized. It was not so much a direct transcript
of Ayrshire speech as it was a generalized vernacular pieced together
from Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and the anonymous folk lyrists
and ballad writers. He was genuinely interested in the variations of
dialect--on his Border tour, for instance, he jotted down definitions
of local words which were new to him--but his poetic use of it
was chiefly due to its pithiness, its humour, and, above all, its
flexibility. This was what he had in mind when he admitted to Robert
Anderson ‘the advantages he enjoyed ... from the _copia verborum_, the
command of phraseology, which the knowledge and use of the English
and Scottish dialects afforded him’. He habitually alternated between
Scottish and English spellings of the same word, as the exigencies of
rime and measure required, thereby achieving a more flexible expression
than was possible in either dialect by itself. His vernacular
writing, in short, was nearer to Lowell’s New England speech or
Kipling’s Cockney than it was to Gawain Douglas’s or William Dunbar’s
single-minded expression in his native tongue. Even Robert Fergusson’s
dialect, with its strong infusion of Fifeshire elements, is closer than
Burns’s to being a direct transcript from life.

In one sense the poems in the Kilmarnock volume which were written
under Robert Fergusson’s influence are a divergence from Burns’s
deepest impulses, even though his method of composing them was
fundamentally the same as in his song-writing. Instead of a tune to
which he could set his own words Fergusson supplied a pattern or a
theme to be adapted to his own experience. The parallels between ‘The
Plane-stanes and the Causey’ and ‘The Brigs of Ayr’, between ‘The Daft
Days’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ or ‘The Holy Fair’, between ‘Caller Oysters’
and ‘Scotch Drink’ or ‘To a Haggis’ are too obvious and have been too
often mentioned to need reiteration. Burns borrowed, but he did not
copy; even borrowed phraseology he made his own. His imitations almost
invariably surpassed their originals both in poetic fire and in the
epigrammatic quality essential for quotability. Yet in these forms of
verse he showed no inventiveness. His own phrase that Fergusson had
roused him to _emulating_ vigour is literally true. That Fergusson’s
impetus failed to sweep Burns on to discover similar themes of his
own reveals him as after all on foreign ground. Nevertheless, by
demonstrating that poetry could still be written in the vernacular,
Fergusson had done inestimable service. Beyond that his influence
brought Burns to a dead end. The unhappy young lawyer’s clerk had no
music in his soul.

Allan Ramsay rather than Fergusson showed the way to the sort of poetry
without musical setting in which Burns found his genuine freedom and
inspiration. The imitations of Fergusson end with the lines ‘To a
Haggis’, written in December, 1786; Ramsay supplied the models for the
vernacular epistles which Burns never wholly ceased to write until a
few months before his death. And between the poetic epistle as Burns
wrote it and the dramatic monologue in which he also excelled there
is little basic difference. The writer of a poetic epistle is usually
dramatizing himself. Like the professional humorist, he assumes a
role which is a projection or exaggeration of one phase of his own
temperament, but which is not really himself as the working-day world
knows him. For Burns to pass from such self-dramatization as marks the
epistles to Lapraik, Simpson, Rankine, and Smith to the pure drama of
‘The Auld Farmer’ or even ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ involved merely an
extension of imaginative scope and not a different technique.

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.

Commentators from Henry Mackenzie onward have regretted that Burns
never carried out his plans for writing a drama. Yet his triumph in the
dramatic monologue is the best reason for believing that the attempt
would have failed. His numerous references to the drama and dramatic
writing never so much as hint that Burns had grasped the elements
of theatrical technique. For him a play was merely a vehicle for
declamatory speeches and the expression of ‘sentiments’ which would
make neat quotations; a cobbling together of purple patches and of
scattered episodes supposed to depict ‘originality of character’. If it
ever occurred to him that a good play is a unified structure in which
a single impression is built up through a series of artfully contrived
climaxes, he never put the idea on paper. But even had he understood
the technique he had not the right psychological approach for dramatic
writing, any more than Browning had. The true dramatist stands apart
from his characters and develops them from without; the writer of
dramatic monologues identifies himself for the moment with another
individual and develops the character from within. The two temperaments
are seldom united in one man, and Burns in turning away even from the
pastoral drama which Mackenzie had urged him to undertake was once
again instinctively following the bent of his own genius. In the light
of what he accomplished in his chosen forms, Mackenzie’s suggestion was
almost as inept as John Moore’s proposal that he try something like
Virgil’s Eclogues.

Before he went to Edinburgh Burns had explored his own capacities, but
had not yet realized more than half of them. Fergusson had shown him
how to write satires and descriptions in the vernacular; Ramsay had
revealed the possibilities of the poetic epistle. But his interest
in the folk-songs of which the words and melodies haunted him, still
seemed a rustic or even childish survival. So far as he knew, it was
like taking nursery rimes seriously as poetry. Though he must have
been aware that scholars of repute were beginning to collect old
ballads, he had not yet discovered that they were turning also to the
words and music of folk-songs. In this respect at least, his Edinburgh
sojourn was of incalculable benefit. Apparently he never met David
Herd, the greatest collector among his contemporaries, but he soon
became acquainted with Herd’s published work and learned that even
some university professors esteemed such things. Sending a couple
of songs, ‘the composition of two Ayrshire Mechanics’, to the Rev.
William Greenfield a few weeks after arriving in the city, he hailed
that eloquent but incontinent clergyman as ‘Professor of the Belles
lettres de la Nature’; in the following summer he told William Tytler
that he had once a great many fragments of traditional literature, but
as he had no idea that anybody cared for them, he had forgotten them.
And his next remark showed that he already possessed the essential
qualification of the collector: ‘I invariably hold it sacriledge to
add anything of my own to help out with the shatter’d wrecks of these
venerable old compositions; but they have many various readings.’ Yet
not even then, not even though the singing of old melodies was one
of the commonest amusements both in Edinburgh drawing rooms and at
convivial meetings at taverns, did he realize immediately the task and
the opportunity before him.

The convivial meetings at first meant much more to him than the
drawing-rooms. The jolly gentlemen who made up the Crochallan Fencibles
had probably as a group little interest in pure poetry, but they had
a very lively interest in brisk songs. If the songs happened to be
improper, that was no handicap among a club which included Charles
Hay and William Smellie and Robert Cleghorn, and to whom Alexander
Cunningham used to sing ‘charmingly’ one of the most indecent of Irish
ditties. Burns’s memory was already well stored with such gems, and
in this congenial company he added to his stock, enriched old songs
with new stanzas of his own, and occasionally composed original verses
of the same type, as he had often done at Mauchline. As a means of
enhancing the pleasures of male company over a bowl of punch such
song-writing amused him and delighted the Fencibles.

Not until after his Edinburgh _Poems_ were off the press did it begin
to dawn upon him that he might also win new fame in the drawing-room
and--what meant much more to him--do a patriotic service to Scotland.
In the last weeks of April, 1787, he made the acquaintance of an
engraver named James Johnson, who was just bringing out the first
volume of a work which he called _The Scots Musical Museum_. Johnson
was known to Smellie, Dunbar, and others of Burns’s friends, but he
cannot have been in the inner circle of the Crochallans, or Burns
would have met him sooner. He was almost illiterate--his picturesquely
bad spelling is notable even for the eighteenth century--but he was
an enthusiast for the collection and preservation of the traditional
music and songs of his country. He had invented a process for printing
music by stamping the notes on pewter plates instead of the steel or
copper engraving then generally employed. Though the result was a
mean and smudgy page, the process was much cheaper than the old one
and encouraged Johnson to try his hand at publishing. His enthusiasm,
however, far exceeded his knowledge. He had had difficulty in gathering
the hundred songs which made up his first volume, and had even eked it
out with a few English pieces. His meeting with Burns not only remade
the _Museum_, but, poetically considered, was the most important event
of the poet’s life in the capital.

Writing to Johnson on the eve of his Border tour Burns regretted that
they had not met sooner: ‘I have met with few people whose company &
conversation gave me more pleasure, because I have met with few whose
sentiments are so congenial to my own.’ But though he contributed a
song or two to the collection, the idea that he might take an active
part in the work was still far from his mind. The fantastic Earl of
Buchan, as early as February, had advised Burns to ‘fire [his] Muse at
Scottish story and Scottish scene.’ Burns had replied, in language even
more inflated than the Earl’s: ‘I wish for nothing more than to make a
leisurely Pilgrimage through my native country; to sit & muse on those
once hard-contended fields where Caledonia, rejoicing, saw her bloody
lion borne through broken ranks to victory and fame; and catching
the inspiration to pour the deathless Names in Song.’ Unfortunately,
added the poet, he had instead to go back to working for his living.
Nevertheless, the Border tour offered a chance to fulfil part of the
Earl’s suggestion--according to Burns’s real tastes, if not the Earl’s.
His greatest pleasures on the journey were not the civic receptions
and the elaborate hospitality of the gentry, but the sight of Gala
Water, Leader Haughs and Yarrow, the Bush aboon Traquair, Elibanks and
Elibraes, and other spots celebrated in song. It made no difference
whether the song was singable before ladies or before Crochallans, so
long as it was Scottish, and old.

The Highland tours added so effectively to his stock that in 1793 he
was able to say that he had made pilgrimages to every spot commemorated
in Scottish song except Lochaber and the Braes of Ballenden. Presumably
on his passages through Edinburgh in August and September he talked
with Johnson, but not until late October, after his return from
Ochtertyre, did he really begin to put his energies into the work.
Johnson obviously had solicited his help, and the poet’s first move was
to write to all his friends who possessed words or music which might be
usable. Nor did he confine himself to his own circle of acquaintance.
Learning to his chagrin that he had unwittingly passed near the home of
the Rev. John Skinner without calling to pay his respects to the author
of ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’, he seized the opportunity
given by receipt of a poetic epistle from Skinner to beg the venerable
clergyman’s support for Johnson’s enterprise. He soon started also to
fit words of his own to fine melodies which either lacked them or had
unsuitable ones--at first with a personal motive, in order to publish
the complimentary verses he had written to Margaret Chalmers and
Charlotte Hamilton, but soon with no purpose except that of supplying
his favourite music with words which could be sung. Moreover, he
commenced to gather all available publications of Scottish songs and
song music. How thoroughly he went into this search is revealed by his
quiet remark to George Thomson five years later: ‘Let me have a list of
your airs, with the first line of the verses you intend for them....
I say, the first line of the verses, because if they are verses that
have appeared in any of our Collections of songs, I know them & can
have recourse to them.’ He had in fact ranged so widely in the old
song books that even yet his editors have been unable to identify the
originals of some of the songs he altered and adapted for the _Museum_,
and later on for Thomson’s _Select Collection_. But though in 1787 he
realized better than Johnson did the magnitude of the task and the
opportunity before them, he was still unaware of its true scope. He
conjectured that there would be three volumes of a hundred songs each.
The completed work filled six.

From October, 1787, onwards Burns was in fact though not in name the
chief editor of the _Museum_. He collected words and music, wrote
prefaces for the successive volumes, and helped to enlist the aid of a
competent musician, Stephen Clarke, organist of the Episcopal chapel
in Edinburgh, in harmonizing the airs. Johnson willingly submitted to
the poet’s leadership, which he needed. The surviving correspondence
shows Burns carrying on a struggle which nothing except his enthusiasm
for the work could at times have made endurable. Johnson required
constant supervision even in such elementary matters as spelling;
Clarke’s carelessness and indolence were maddening. The work sold
slowly and Johnson, under the pressure of other affairs, inclined to
procrastinate. ‘Why,’ Burns asked in 1793, and the passage is typical
of many, ‘did you not send me those tunes & verses that Clarke & you
cannot make out? Let me have them as soon as possible, that, while he
is at hand, I may settle the matter with him.’ Clarke, ‘with his usual
indolence’, was worse. More than once he mislaid or lost whole sheafs
of songs which had been entrusted to him. ‘“The Lochmaben harper”’,
said the poet in 1795, ‘I fear I shall never recover; & it is a famous
old song.--The rest are, I doubt, irrecoverable.--I think it hard
that, after so much trouble in gathering these tunes, they should be
lost in this trifling way.--Clarke has been shamefully careless.’ Yet
Burns’s enthusiasm kept him going, however negligent or incompetent
the partners on whom he had to depend. The time-table of the work is
sufficient proof of his influence. Volume II, prepared while he was in
Edinburgh, was ready six months after Volume I; the next two volumes,
for which the poet’s contributions had to be made by correspondence,
took two years each. Volume V was prepared while Burns was working also
for George Thomson; it was four years on the stocks. The final volume,
prepared by Johnson’s unaided efforts, took six years, even though he
had still on hand a considerable quantity of Burns’s verse for which
space had been lacking in the earlier numbers.

Burns’s preface to the second volume, published in February, 1788,
in the very midst of the Clarinda imbroglio, shows how completely,
in the fifteen months since his first arrival in Edinburgh, the poet
had awakened to the literary importance of folk-song. ‘Ignorance and
Prejudice’, he wrote, ‘may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity
of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been
for ages the favourites of Nature’s Judges--the Common People, was
to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit....’ He was no longer
apologetic for his interest in popular literature. If the highbrows
could not appreciate it, so much the worse for the highbrows. He
was determined, moreover, that no poet of the people should lack
recognition if it were possible to give it. ‘Wherever the old words
could be recovered, they have been preserved; both as generally suiting
better the genius of the tunes, and to preserve the productions of
those earlier Sons of the Scottish Muses, some of whose names deserved
a better fate than has befallen them--“Buried ’mong the wreck of
things which were.” Of our more modern Songs, the Editor has inserted
the Authors’ names as far as he could ascertain them.’ The passage
is almost a direct transcript, even to the hackneyed quotation from
Blair’s _Grave_, of what Burns had written in the Commonplace Book two
and a half years before, when he added that it had given him ‘many a
heart-ake’ to reflect that the names of such glorious old Bards were
clean forgotten. No more of them should be forgotten if he could do
anything to prevent it. The ‘communal’ theory of ballad-composition
still slumbered in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land; Burns was sure that somewhere at
the source of every old song was an individual poet of like passions
with himself, and such as he himself might still be but for the
accident of print.

His one exception to the rule of publishing authors’ names was his own
contributions. He told Mrs. Dunlop that the songs signed ‘R’, ‘B’, or
‘X’ were his own, and those signed ‘Z’ were old songs he had altered
or enlarged. But no one can go through the volumes with this simple
key and identify all of Burns’s contributions. His own negligence and
Johnson’s omitted his initials from numerous songs unquestionably his
own, and the verses signed ‘Z’ have puzzled the ingenuity of editors
ever since. Burns admitted that ‘of a good many of them, little more
than the Chorus is ancient; tho’ there is no reason for telling every
body this piece of intelligence.’ Sometimes his own annotations or
the survival of earlier texts show the extent of his contributions,
ranging from eking out a too-brief song with an extra stanza of his own
to composing a whole lyric to fit a fragment of traditional chorus.
Public opinion unanimously credits Burns with ‘Auld Lang Syne’, yet he
never claimed it. He declared that it ‘had never been in print, nor
even in manuscript’, until he took it down from an old man’s singing.
Three different times, for people as unlike as Mrs. Dunlop, Robert
Riddell, and George Thomson, he wrote out the words without even an
indirect claim to their authorship. Nevertheless, no trace of the song
in anything like Burns’s form has ever been found in earlier records,
and the public has refused to believe that a poem of such appeal could
have been current without being noticed. On the other hand, every
stanza of ‘A Red Red Rose’ has been traced to some older poem; yet
Burns’s skill in selecting the one good image in a mass of commonplace
and weaving his cento of borrowings into a single compact and vivid
lyric makes the song his own, as _Macbeth_ is Shakespeare’s and not
Holinshed’s.

In such lyrics as these and scores of others Burns had achieved a sort
of dramatic impersonation which far surpassed even the best of his
earlier monologues and dramatic lyrics. Guided always by the spirit of
the music, he had so identified himself with the thoughts and feelings
of the anonymous and half-articulate folk poets whose songs he was
rescuing from oblivion that the most critical eye cannot be certain
where their work ends and Burns’s begins. Again and again he took
fragments of old work and not only reunited them into coherent wholes
but gave the restored poem the lyric elevation its original author had
felt but could not express. Emerson said that an institution was the
lengthened shadow of a single man: Scottish song as the world knows
it today is the lengthened shadow of Robert Burns. What he did not
actually write is so coloured by his influence that it could not exist
without him. With the exception of Lady Nairne’s, his was the last
poetry written in the old folk tradition. The romantic sentimentality
which tinges Burns’s songs at their weakest, overspreads many of Lady
Nairne’s; Scott’s masterpiece, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, is glorious, but it
is not a folk-song. Most of what has been written since 1800 is merely
imitation Burns.

The _Museum_ was Burns’s opportunity to combine his poetic inclinations
with his fervent patriotism. But it was more than that. By enlisting
the poet’s help in his enterprise, Johnson unwittingly furnished him
the means of sustaining his creative life amid his toil as farmer and
Exciseman. After 1788 extended composition was probably impossible
for Burns. He could scarcely hope to be revisited by the almost
continuous excitement under which he wrote the greater part of his
first volume, and without emotional excitement he could not create.
He had plenty of leisure for writing during his Edinburgh days, but
the urge was lacking. His whole sojourn there produced less poetry
than a single month at the beginning of 1786. Removal to Ellisland,
with all the strain of its ‘uncouth cares and anxieties’, brought his
creativeness to a still lower ebb. Repeatedly he complained that the
Muses had deserted him; during his first two years on the farm the
‘Lines in Friars Carse Hermitage’ were almost his only serious attempt
at non-musical composition, and in the revision of the poem he wavered
between versions in a manner wholly unlike the vigour of 1786. The
frequency, indeed, with which he circulated both versions among his
friends suggests at times a bankrupt’s clinging to the last relic of
his prosperity. But thanks to the _Museum_ he had work to do which
could be shaped to music as he followed his business, and be committed
to paper in his snatches of free time.

Meanwhile, under Burns’s leadership, the whole plan of the _Museum_
had been altered. The original scheme had been merely to collect the
existing songs. For this task--at least for all the songs that were
printable--Johnson’s first estimate of two volumes was not a serious
understatement. Burns, ransacking the collections of instrumental
music, and stealing time from his farm work to listen to a fiddler
playing over the pieces that had interested him, discovered, however,
that Scottish music was teeming with good tunes to which no words had
ever been set. The reels and strathspeys which fiddlers and pipers
played as dance tunes had just as much lilting charm as the airs
of traditional songs. His plan now was nothing more nor less than
supplying words to every cottage melody which was capable of vocal
interpretation. He was also making musical experiments in tempo,
finding that gay tunes played in slow time might be transformed into
‘the very language of pathos’. The name ‘Museum’ was growing steadily
more inappropriate; the work was becoming an experimental laboratory
in both poetry and music. Probably Burns never fully defined, even to
himself, the scope of the ambitious project he did not live to achieve,
but the more than three hundred songs he left are evidence that if
anyone could have achieved it, he could.

Not that all these songs are masterpieces. Burns had no illusions
on that score. His contention was always that the music was the
important thing, and that a good air might better have mediocre
words than none at all. Nevertheless when he was composing Scottish
words to tunes of his own choice the percentage of the commonplace
was small and the range of themes extraordinarily large. The critics
who read autobiography into every love poem pass lightly over the
fact that in some of the best love lyrics, such as ‘Tam Glen’, ‘An’
O for ane-and-twenty, Tam’, and ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you, my
lad’, the speaker is a woman, and that such wholly dramatic lyrics
as ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ and ‘John Anderson’ have a more sustained
intensity of emotion than the admittedly autobiographic ‘Ae fond
kiss’. When Burns’s lyrics were commonplace it was usually because
he was composing them to tunes not of his own choice; above all when
such assigned composition demanded English words. Music which worked
downward from the intellectual to the emotional centres could never
give the same creative release as when the engagement of the emotions
came first. Such was the case with the last of his major poetic
projects--supplying lyrics for George Thomson’s _Select Collection of
Scotish Airs_--but before turning to that work something must be said
of the last and finest of the poems which he did not write to music.

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is not only Burns’s greatest single poem but one
of the finest short poetic narratives in all literature. It is the
only one of Burns’s works of which it may truly be asserted that
he opened a new field wherein he never had the chance to reveal
the full range of his powers. In the satire and the epistle, as in
the lyric, he had abundantly displayed both his strength and his
limitations. In the versified folk-tale ‘Tam’ stands alone; it is, as
he said, his ‘standard performance in the Poetical line’. Though he
was doubtless right in concluding that it showed ‘a force of genius
& a finishing polish that I despair of ever excelling’, he might in
happier circumstances have equalled it. But here, as in the satires and
epistles, his inspiration came from without, and the stimulus was never
repeated.

The story of its composition is too familiar to need rehearsing in
detail. In 1789 Francis Grose the antiquary arrived at Friars Carse
in the course of a collecting tour. He had successfully published an
elaborately illustrated work on the antiquities of England and Wales,
and was now gathering material for a companion volume on Scotland.
The fat and jovial captain, whose encyclopædic knowledge ranged from
ancient arms and armour, costume, and ecclesiastical and military
architecture, to the ribald slang of his day, was as unlike Sir Walter
Scott’s bookish Jonathan Oldbuck as any man could well be. Beside his
vast erudition and ardent spirit the amateurish antiquarianism of
Robert Riddell faded away. Grose was one of the most stimulating men
Burns ever met, and the friendship which sprang up between them had
the double basis of community of interest and congeniality of spirit.
Burns saw in Grose’s projected book an opportunity to glorify his
own birthplace, and suggested that the ruins of Alloway Kirk were a
good subject for an illustration. Grose, no doubt mentally comparing
the scrubby little church with the glories of Melrose and Arbroath,
hesitated. Alloway had neither grandeur of architecture nor richness
of historical association. The latter, however, might be supplied.
Burns had been telling some of the tales of the supernatural which he
had heard in his boyhood, and Grose agreed to include the picture of
Alloway if Burns would furnish a witch-legend to accompany it. Thus
casually his greatest poem was born.

Burns’s qualifications for writing this tale of witchcraft were
analogous to his qualifications for writing folk-songs. In each
instance he belonged by education to a world where such things were no
longer alive. But his childhood and youth had been spent among people
to whom they were still real. Intellectually he had no more belief
in witchcraft than Benjamin Franklin had, but he knew the minds of
the people who did believe. Hence the blend of broad humour and real
terror which makes the poem unique. To an Elizabethan audience there
was nothing humorous about the witches in _Macbeth_; they were real
beings inspiring fear and hatred. To Washington Irving or Charles
Dickens a tale of the supernatural was purely an excursion into the
Land of Make-Believe. It is only when a belief is fading but not yet
dead that it can be handled with the mixture of humour and conviction
which Burns used. Ghost stories suffered the same fate about a century
later, as scepticism regarding personal immortality became more widely
prevalent. And ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is as perfect in structure as it is
unique in tone. Custom cannot stale it. To read it or hear it read
for the hundredth time is still to be swept along by the rush of the
narrative and to realize more clearly the artistry which balances each
increasingly wild episode with its introductory paragraph of humorous
philosophizing. A few of its early readers, Mrs. Dunlop among them,
thought the poem scandalously indecent; to the rest it was an artless
effusion of the Heaven-taught ploughman. If any early reader realized
that besides being a merry tale it was a consummate work of art the
opinion was not committed to print. In 1791 literary art still connoted
eighteenth-century ‘elegance’.

Could Burns have had more of the society of a man like Grose, had even
young Walter Scott of Edinburgh, who in the intervals of his legal
studies was already steeping himself in the ballads and legends of the
Border, thought it worth while occasionally to ride as far as Dumfries
to visit the man whom he had once seen in an Edinburgh drawing-room,
the world might have more poems like ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. But there was no
one in Dumfries to provide the necessary stimulus. Robert Riddell took
much but had little to give; his sister-in-law Maria belonged too much
to the world of fashion to have any enthusiasm for folk-tales; John
Syme’s taste ran more to satirical epigrams than to narrative poetry.
And these three represented the best intellectual companionship
Dumfries had to offer. As for Edinburgh, the influences dominating
the literary life of Scotland at the end of the century were better
represented by George Thomson than by Francis Grose.

In September, 1792, Burns received a letter from a friend of Alexander
Cunningham’s, asking aid in a poetical and musical venture. George
Thomson, clerk to the Board of Trustees in Edinburgh, was two years the
poet’s senior and possessed all the elegance of taste which Burns’s
education had protected him from. Thomson enjoyed Scottish music in
his ultra-refined way, but was irked by the crudity of the traditional
songs. Baldly stated, his proposal was to collect a hundred of the best
Scottish melodies, to get a professional musician to dress them in
all the frills necessary for concert performance, and to provide them
with tidy English lyrics which would disguise their provincial origin.
In writing to Burns, however, he did not express himself so bluntly.
After explaining that Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, ‘the most agreeable composer
living’, had been engaged to arrange the music, he continued:

  ‘To render this work perfect, we are desirous to have the poetry
  improved wherever it seems unworthy of the music; and that it is so,
  in many instances, is allowed by everyone conversant with our musical
  collections. The editors of these seem in general to have depended on
  the music proving an excuse for the verses; and hence some charming
  melodies are united to mere nonsense and doggerel, while others are
  accompanied with rhymes so loose and indelicate as cannot be sung in
  decent company. To remove this reproach would be an easy task to
  the author of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”.... It is superfluous to
  assure you that I have no intention to displace any of the sterling
  old Songs: those only will be removed which appear quite silly or
  absolutely indecent....’

The publication, in short, was to be a sort of Golden Treasury of Scots
music, and Burns’s share in the work was to be ‘writing twenty or
twenty-five songs, suitable to the particular melodies’ which Thomson
selected. The editor said nothing, in this first letter, about his
preference for English words.

No literary salesman ever received more enthusiastic response than
Thomson got from Burns. The poet promised whole-hearted co-operation,
but he had detected enough of Thomson’s temperament to make certain
reservations. In order of importance they were these. His share in
the work was to be a patriotic labour of love, and he would accept no
compensation. For the time being at least his participation was to be
anonymous--perhaps because he did not wish his official superiors to
think he was neglecting his Excise duties; perhaps because he feared
that Johnson might conclude that he was deserting the _Museum_. He was
not to be asked to compose unless he could do so spontaneously, and
Thomson was to have free editorial authority to take or reject his
contributions. Finally, ‘If you are for _English_ verses, there is,
on my part, an end of the matter.--Whether in the simplicity of _the
Ballad_, or the pathos of _the Song_, I can only hope to please myself
in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.’ English
verses were precisely what Thomson _was_ for, ‘because the English
becomes every year more and more the language of Scotland,’ but he
hastened to disavow any wish to confine the poet to English--preferring
to wait and argue it out later, poem by poem.

Greater enthusiasm, knowledge, and art were never enlisted under
more incompetent leadership than in Burns’s alliance with Thomson.
It did not take the poet long to discover that the elaborate plan
which Thomson had outlined in his first letters was really as vague
as an Edinburgh fog. The editor had not yet decided on the list of
airs he intended to include; he had not succeeded in getting the
co-operation of the English poetaster, John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’),
to write English songs; Pleyel, who was supposed to be handling the
music, soon departed on a visit to Germany and found his return route
to Britain closed by the armies of the French and the Allies. James
Beattie was to have been asked to furnish an introductory essay on
Scottish song, but Beattie was old and ill and not really interested in
the subject. In consequence of all this, Burns, who had begun on the
understanding that he was to furnish only a few lyrics, shortly found
himself saddled with the entire burden of the literary end of the work.
Even so his position, though laborious, would not have been difficult
had Thomson been merely muddle-headed. But as soon as the editor had
furnished the list of the twenty-five airs he meant to include in
the first number of his collection, and Burns had sent in his first
group of lyrics, Thomson revealed himself as a literary tinker. He was
constantly proposing amendments in phraseology--which always meant
substituting banal English expressions for racy Scots ones. At times
his niggling criticism was too much even for Burns’s enthusiasm and
good nature. One letter, for instance, began with the abrupt outburst,
‘That unlucky song “O poortith cauld,” &c. must stand as it stands--I
won’t put my hand to it again.’ In later years Thomson, to sustain his
pose as whole-hearted admirer of all Burns’s work, carefully inked
over that sentence in the manuscript. But he was guilty of worse than
that. Burns, as always, was steeping himself in the rhythms of the
airs to which he was composing; Thomson had to display his own musical
knowledge by suggesting that the proffered song be set to another tune.
The fact that to Burns the words and the tune were always inseparable
never penetrated his mind.

Occasionally Burns came forward with a lyric written to an air not on
Thomson’s list, and at such times the editor’s taste and tact were most
fully displayed. For instance, Lady Elizabeth Heron, wife of Patrick
Heron, from whom Burns hoped for political favours, had composed a
little tune called ‘Banks of Cree’ and asked Burns to supply it with
words. Burns told the lady he would like her permission to publish the
song, and sent the words to Thomson, saying that ‘the air I fear is
not worth your while,’ but evidently hoping that Thomson would ask for
it. Thomson instead proposed setting the words to an air on his own
list, ‘Young Jockey was the blithest lad’. Burns replied sharply: ‘My
English song, “Here is the glen & here the bower” cannot go to this
air; it was written on purpose for an original air composed by Mrs.
Heron of Heron.’ But after the poet’s death Thomson erased the vetoing
phrase and published the words to the tune, ‘The Flowers of Edinburgh’,
thereby leaving Burns under the imputation of having lied to Lady
Elizabeth in promising to publish her music.

Another time Burns found himself haunted by the old lilt of ‘Hey tutti
taitie’, which a wholly unreliable tradition declared to have been
Bruce’s march to Bannockburn. At the end of August, 1793, his impotent
fury over the Edinburgh sedition trials, combined with his enthusiasm
at the news of the French levy _en masse_ for the repulse of the Allied
invasion, found an outlet in composing ‘Scots wha hae’ to this air.
Historically the song is an anachronism. The ideas underlying it are
those of Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson and not of the feudal Middle
Ages; its very language is Scoticized English rather than the true
vernacular--Sir James Murray pointed out, for instance, that in real
Scots the opening phrase would be ‘Scots that has’. The song owes its
enduring popularity largely to the perfect union of the words with the
music they were composed to. But when Burns sent it to Thomson, that
worthy thought the music vulgar, and suggested that lengthening the
fourth line of each stanza would fit the words to another tune, ‘Lewis
Gordon’, which he liked better. This time Burns yielded, accepted
the silly changes, and thereafter circulated the song always in the
weakened version. Thomson published it in this form after the poet’s
death, but the appearance of the original version in Currie’s edition
showed the music-loving public the immense superiority of Burns’s
first thought. Thomson bowed to public opinion, and consigned his
‘improvements’ to the oblivion they deserved.

In most instances, however, the public had no chance of checking up on
Thomson’s disregard of Burns’s wishes, and by destroying his own end
of the correspondence, after furnishing Dr. Currie with some carefully
edited extracts from it, the editor sought to cover up the extent of
his nagging criticisms. Inasmuch as his vandalism stopped short of
destroying Burns’s letters the ultimate publication of their complete
texts exposed the nature of his fault-finding almost as clearly as
if he had preserved his own originals. He nevertheless inked out a
number of passages in which Burns was too outspoken in comment on his
taste, or seemed to deny his claim to the copyright of the poet’s
contributions. Thomson was intensely jealous of Johnson’s _Museum_,
disliked Johnson personally, and resented Burns’s continuing to help
the rival work. Again and again in the letters Burns would say that if
a song did not suit, Thomson was to return it, and Burns would send it
to the _Museum_. To keep the material out of Johnson’s hands, Thomson
never definitely rejected anything. He carefully docketed the letter
in which Burns said that he had given Johnson no permanent copyright
in his songs, but inked over passages which indicated that Burns was
contributing to the _Select Collection_ on precisely the same terms as
to the _Museum_.

When Burns’s health was failing in the spring of 1796 Thomson sought
to frighten him by a report that a pirated edition of the songs was
being planned, and enclosed for the poet’s signature a legal document
assigning him the whole copyright. Burns, ill though he was, and
careless as he had always been of his literary property, refused to
sign, and sent instead ‘a Certificate, which, though a little different
from Mr McKnight’s model, I suppose will amply answer the purpose,’
adding that ‘when your Publication is finished, I intend publishing a
Collection, on a cheap plan, of all the songs I have written for you,
the Museum, &c.--at least of all the songs of which I wish to be called
the Author.’ This was tantamount to telling Thomson that he had a claim
on the first serial rights only, and though Thomson later published two
different texts of what he alleged was Burns’s deed of assignment, he
never produced the original holograph, and it was not preserved among
his papers. In after years Thomson tried the same trick on Sir Walter
Scott and Sir Alexander Boswell. He had succeeded in making Burns’s
executors believe that he owned the copyrights and was generously
waiving them for the benefit of the subscription edition, but Scott
and Boswell were lawyers and saw to it that where their own work was
concerned he got no more than the serial rights.

Burns ought to have treated Thomson as Beethoven did in 1813, when
the editor demanded changes in the airs which the great musician had
undertaken to harmonize:

  ‘I regret that I am unable to oblige you. I am not accustomed to
  tinker my compositions. I have never done so, being convinced
  that every partial modification alters the whole character of the
  composition. I am grieved that you are out of pocket through this,
  but you cannot lay the blame on me, for it was your business to make
  me more fully acquainted with the taste of your country and the
  meagre abilities of your performers.’

But such blunt truth-telling was more than Burns was ever capable of to
a man who claimed taste and education. He said what he thought about
his songs, but said it gently and deferentially, and left them in
Thomson’s hand to be mangled or misapplied.

To go into such detail of Thomson’s misdoings would be pointless had
he been merely a thick-headed and thick-skinned editor who failed to
appreciate what Burns was doing for him. But Thomson was much more than
that. He represented the whole Anglicizing tendency of the Scottish
gentry and bourgeoisie who were seeking to destroy the language and
individuality of their country. ‘Now let me declare off from your
taste.--“Toddlin hame” is a song that to my taste is an exquisite
production of genius.--That very Stanza you dislike

    “My kimmer & I lay down to sleep”

is to me a piece of charming native humour.--What pleases me, as simple
& naive, disgusts you as ludicrous & low.--’ So said Burns in one of
the passages which Thomson tried to obliterate. But Thomson’s opinions
were shared by most of his educated countrymen, including some of
Burns’s most intimate friends. Where earlier criticism of the poet’s
vernacular work had failed to break down his Scotticism by the very
absurdity of such suggestions as imitating Virgil, Thomson tried to
accomplish it by the more insidious means of minor verbal changes which
individually seemed to amount to little but which in their cumulative
effect would emasculate the poetry. It is generally recognized that
Burns’s contributions to the _Select Collection_ include a much larger
percentage of the conventional and the commonplace than does his work
for the _Museum_; the marvel is that in the circumstances he achieved
so much that was not second-rate. He was composing to order, frequently
sending off by return of post the lines to a particular tune which
Thomson had asked for, and his efforts were constantly hampered by his
consciousness that certain themes and methods would never please the
silly editor’s taste. It was no wonder that many times he had to induce
a synthetic emotional thrill in himself--either by putting himself
through a course of admiration for a handsome woman, or by the help of
a bowl of punch--in order to be able to compose at all.

His power of poetic response to music and emotion nevertheless did not
fail with his failing health. A few weeks before his death he asked
Jessie Lewars, sister of one of his best friends among the Excise
officers of Dumfries, to play him her favourite tune. She responded
with the roguish little air, ‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest, and
keekit in, and keekit in’. Burns, humming the tune to himself and
altering the tempo, produced almost extemporaneously the beautiful ‘O
wert thou in the cauld blast’. From his earliest lyric to his latest,
music was the catalyst which transformed emotion into poetry. Yet for
more than a century after his death the dominating influence of music
on his art went almost unrecognized; and George Thomson, the man who of
all others among Burns’s contemporaries had had the best opportunity
to realize the nature and the power of his lyric expression, wrote an
obituary which, besides inaugurating the legend of mental and moral
deterioration in the last years at Dumfries, summed up its author’s
appreciation of the wit, critical acumen, and real erudition of Burns’s
letters by saying that probably the poet ‘was not qualified to fill
a superior station’ to the humble one he held in the Excise. Of all
the Holy Willies who eyed Burns askance during his life and after his
death, he would probably, had he realized his true character, have
despised Thomson most. The others were merely trying to blacken Burns’s
own character. Thomson was trying to destroy the vitality of Scottish
song.




VII

THE SCOT


Not merely in his struggle for livelihood and in the poetic art which
immortalized him was Burns a Scot of the Scots. He was equally so in
his religion, his politics, and, above all, his patriotism. Only in
this last was he untypical of his generation. Yet such statements are
misleadingly simple. All they can safely mean is that Burns, like
all men in all ages, was influenced in thought and conduct by the
environment in which he lived. Nevertheless, in a nation so small and
self-contained as Scotland in the eighteenth century the pressure
of environment was felt to a degree unrealized in larger and more
cosmopolitan communities. In England during Burns’s manhood the social
and literary worlds of Burke and Sheridan and Horace Walpole, of
Cowper, of John Wesley, of Godwin, of Blake, touched each other only
lightly and tangentially; in the rising generation of Wordsworth, Jane
Austen, Lamb, and Byron the separations would be even wider. Scotland
by comparison was all of a piece. Even her greatest philosophers, Adam
Smith and David Hume, even the much-travelled and Anglophile Boswell,
retained their national stamp.

Though in their final form Burns’s religious ideas differed little,
if at all, from the sentimental ‘common sense’ deism of England and
France, the process by which he reached them was Scottish. The rigidity
of the doctrines to which he was subjected in his youth determined the
vigour of his reaction from them. As David Hume would scarcely have
been so militantly sceptical if he had been reared in a milder faith,
so Burns might have been less sentimental. His earliest teachings, it
is true, did not stress the more rigorous themes in Scottish Calvinism.
The preaching of Dr. William Dalrymple of Ayr, whose church the Burnes
family attended during the years at Alloway and Mount Oliphant, was
notably mild and gentle; William Burnes’s own little ‘Manual of
Religious Belief’, though it gave a reasonably orthodox definition of
the Fall of Man, was silent on such doctrinal points as predestination
and the Four-Fold State. Undoubtedly, therefore, the Old Light tenets
of Daddy Auld of Mauchline made a deeper impression on Burns’s
eighteen-year-old mind than they would have done had he been exposed
to them from infancy. Yet Burns had encountered _The Man of Feeling_
before he left Mount Oliphant; the doctrines of sentiment and deism
were in the air he breathed; his emotional nature would have brought
him to them sooner or later, regardless of other stimuli. The most that
can be attributed to Auld is a little hastening and intensifying of the
process of revolt.

Despite his constant citing of Young’s exhortation, ‘On Reason build
Resolve’, Burns’s approach to life and ideas was always emotional
and not intellectual. When he described himself in 1786 as having
little of divinity ‘except a pretty large portion of honour and an
enthusiastic, incoherent Benevolence,’ his self-analysis had his
customary accuracy. To him, as to the New England Unitarians and to a
man like Mark Twain, escape from the orthodoxy of his youth had come as
a relief and not as a loss. Calvinism had erected a system of thought
as rigidly deductive as the science of geometry. Starting from certain
‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God,
the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had
created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had
been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but
the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority
for salvation--for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human
righteousness were filthy rags.

This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice,
as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. It seemed to him
that the New Lights were ‘squaring Religion by the rules of Common
Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and
a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’ But in
investing their deity with human benevolence and loving-kindness, the
New Lights were also, again like the New England Unitarians, more or
less unwittingly surrendering the supernatural sanctions of religion
and assimilating their ideas to those of the Deists. God was the
‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from
Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality
became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed
immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather
than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living
was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis
Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.

In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century
and a Scot of his century. The rigidity of the Kirk, so unlike the
comfortable looseness of Anglican theology, left him no place within
its pale, even though he never openly severed his connexion. As a
youth he had, along with most of his countrymen, read popular works
of divinity like Boston’s _Four-Fold State_, Fisher’s _Marrow of
Modern Divinity_, and Cole _On God’s Sovereignty_. In 1791, when his
rural neighbours of the Monkland Friendly Society insisted on adding
these and other books to their co-operative library, Burns obediently
ordered them from Peter Hill, and lumped them all together as ‘damned
trash’. Though he told James Candlish in 1787 that after having ‘in
the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring
path Spinoza trod”; ... experience of the weakness, not the strength,
of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion,’ it was
not the revelation of the Kirk. Not even his infatuation for Clarinda,
though it made him momentarily qualify his admiration for Milton’s
Satan, could compel him to bow the knee to Calvin. ‘Mine’, he told her
when she undertook to preach orthodoxy to him, ‘is the Religion of the
bosom.--I hate the very idea of controversial divinity; as I firmly
believe, that every honest, upright man, of whatever sect, will be
accepted of the Deity.--If your verses, as you seem to hint, contain
censure, except you want an occasion to break with me, don’t send
them.... “Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish
it.’

His fullest statement approximating to orthodoxy was written to Mrs.
Dunlop in 1789:

  ‘I have just heard Mr Kirkpatrick preach a sermon. He is a man
  famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but from such ideas of
  my Creator, good Lord, deliver me! Religion ... is surely a simple
  business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the
  poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensible Great Being, to
  whom I owe my existence; and that He must be intimately acquainted
  with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and
  consequent outward deportment, of this creature which He has made;
  these are, I think self-evident propositions. That there is a real
  and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and, consequently,
  that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of
  the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay,
  positive injustice, in the administration of affairs both in the
  natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of
  justice beyond the grave; must, I think, be allowed by every one who
  will give himself a moment’s reflection. I will go farther, and
  affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of His
  doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and
  learning of many preceding ages, though, _to appearance_, He Himself
  was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species--therefore Jesus
  Christ was from God....’

Another time he told the same lady, ‘We can no more live without
Religion, than we can live without air; but give me the Religion of
Sentiment & Reason.--You know John Hildebroad’s famous epitaph--

    “Here lies poor old John Hildebroad,
    Have mercy on his soul, Lord God,
    As he would do, were he Lord God,
    And thou wert poor John Hildebroad.”--

This speaks more to my heart, & has more of the genuine spirit of
Religion in it, than is to be found in whole wagon-loads of Divinity.’
This was the same mood in which he had told Clarinda, ‘My creed is
pretty nearly expressed in the last clause of Jamie Deans’s grace, an
honest weaver in Ayrshire; “Lord, grant that we may lead a gude life!
for a gude life maks a gude end; at least it helps weel!”’ Reason and
Sentiment, but with the sentiment much more powerful than the reason,
these were the dominant forces in Burns’s religious attitude.

Nevertheless Burns was more courageous than many of his contemporaries
in accepting the logical consequences of belief in universal
benevolence. No man knew more clearly the warfare between flesh and
spirit, but he was convinced that both were the gifts of God. The lines
which so shocked Wordsworth,

    ‘But yet the light that led astray
            Was light from Heaven’,

are his frankest summary of his experience. Whatever sufferings his
passions had brought upon him, the passions in themselves were noble.
Asceticism had no appeal for him. He took life as God made it, and saw
that it was good.

Taken by themselves, his utterances to Clarinda and Mrs. Dunlop might
not be above suspicion. Burns had every motive for wishing favourably
to impress both women, and might have feigned an interest which he did
not feel, or at least have overstated his belief and understated his
doubts. But here, as in his feelings towards his children, what he
said when he may have been on dress-parade is confirmed by his letters
to his intimates. In 1788 he wrote to Robert Muir, then dying of
tuberculosis:

  ‘... An honest man has nothing to fear.--If we lie down in the grave,
  the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods
  of the valley--be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care,
  woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the
  apparent destruction of the man--away with old-wife prejudices and
  tales!... A man, conscious of having acted an honest part among his
  fellow-creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at
  times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being
  who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him
  happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows
  their force.’

In the same tone he said six years later to Alexander Cunningham that
the two great pillars which bear us up, ‘amid the wreck of misfortune
and misery’, are the ‘certain noble, stubborn something ... known by
the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity’ and ‘those feelings and
sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them or the enthusiast
disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts
of the human soul; those _senses of the mind_ ... which connect us
with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities--an all-powerful
and equally beneficient God, and a world to come, beyond death and the
grave.’

The countryman of Francis Hutcheson could scarcely have indicated more
clearly his obligations to the Glasgow philosopher. Burns’s ‘senses of
the mind’ are merely Hutcheson’s Moral Sense a little expanded. Like
Channing and Emerson, having rejected the authority of the church, and
with it the supernatural sanctions of Christian doctrine, Burns fell
back on the authority of intuition to support concepts which he was
unwilling to abandon. The idea of the deity, and His relations with
mankind, which is embodied in these passages, he never deviated from;
what seemed to many of his readers shocking irreverence was aimed at
intolerance and hypocrisy, and not at religion. But he was not able in
all moods to convince himself of personal immortality.

At times he tried to argue himself into belief:

  ‘The most cordial believers in a Future State have ever been the
  Unfortunate.--This of itself; if God is Good, which is, I think, the
  most intuitive truth in Nature, ... is a very strong proof of the
  reality of its existence....’

and he went on to reason that since the ideas of ‘OUGHT, and OUGHT NOT’
are ‘first principles or component parts of the Human Mind’ and are
synonymous in our thinking with virtue and vice, the soul _must_ be
immortal because, ‘except our Existence _here_, have a reference to an
Existence _hereafter_, Virtue & Vice are words without meaning.’ Thus
he argued to Mrs. Dunlop, who had just told him that her daughter, Mrs.
Henri, was widowed after a few months of marriage. But not long before
he had said to Cunningham,

  ‘All my fears & cares are of this world: if there is another, an
  honest man has nothing to fear from it.--I hate a man that wishes to
  be a Deist, but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced Enquirer must in
  some degree be a Sceptic.--It is not that there are any very
  staggering arguments against the Immortality of Man; but, that like
  Electricity, Phlogiston, &c. the subject is so involved in darkness
  that we want Data to go upon.--One thing frightens me much: that we
  are to live forever, seems too good news to be true....’

An emotional man deprived of any authority except emotion on which he
could rely, Burns’s religious views are of a piece with his politics
and his patriotism. To get at the underlying emotions is to explain
what appear to be glaring contradictions in thought. John Ramsay of
Ochtertyre found Burns’s politics ‘abundantly motley’, for the poet
managed to combine strong sympathy for the exiled House of Stuart with
liberal if not republican views on contemporary affairs. To Ramsay
this seemed like being simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, whereas
it was only putting into words the unexpressed philosophy that had
swayed the popular mind of Scotland for close on a century. Burns
admired Lord Balmerino, noblest of the victims of the ’45; he also
admired John Wilkes. Between a devoted Jacobite like Balmerino and a
radical Whig like Wilkes, there was only one point in common: both were
anti-Hanoverian. That one point reconciles Burns’s divergent opinions.
The Stuarts embodied the ideal of Scotland as an independent nation;
even though from the accession of James to the death of Anne they had
governed Scotland from London they still commanded the loyalty of
their old kingdom. But the Georges were, as Burns said, ‘an obscure,
beef-witted, insolent race of foreigners whom a mere conjuncture
of circumstances kickt up into prominence and power.’ His phrase
summarizes in vigorous prose the spirit of the ribald satirical songs
by which Scotland had avenged herself for the humiliations following
the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Burns was far from maintaining
that the Stuarts were perfect, or that the Revolution of 1688 lacked
justification; what he did maintain was that the Hanoverian system was
not perfect either.

On the Fifth of November, 1788, Burns attended a special service
of thanksgiving held at Dunscore Kirk to celebrate the centenary
of the Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s remarks about ‘the
bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart’ sent the poet home to write
an open letter to his friend David Ramsay, editor of the Edinburgh
_Evening Courant_, in which he mingled unveiled satire with a sense
of historical perspective hardly to be looked for in an ‘unlettered
ploughman’. He went to church, he said, to give thanks for ‘the
consequent blessings of the Glorious Revolution. To that auspicious
event we owe no less than our liberties religious and civil--to it we
are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, the ruling features
of whose administration have ever been, mildness to the subject, and
tenderness of his rights.’ But, he continues, cannot we give thanks for
our present blessings ‘without, at the same time, cursing a few ruined
powerless exiles, who only harboured ideas, and made attempts, that
most of us would have done, had we been in their situation?’ ‘Were the
royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more mildly attentive to the rights
of man? Might not the epithets of “bloody and tyrannical” be with at
least equal justice, applied to the house of Tudor, of York, or any
other of their predecessors?’ In short, the Stuarts were only fighting
for prerogatives which former monarchs of England and contemporary
monarchs of France enjoyed unchallenged, and the poet disclaims ability
to determine whether their overthrow ‘was owing to the wisdom of
leading individuals, or to the justling of party.’ And then comes the
sting:

  ‘Man, Mr. Printer, is a strange, weak inconsistent being.--Who
  would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and
  refinement, ... a certain people, under our national protection,
  should complain, not against a Monarch and a few favourite advisers,
  but against our whole legislative body, of the very same imposition
  and oppression, the Romish religion not excepted, and almost in the
  very same terms as our forefathers did against the family of Stuart!
  I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare
  say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as
  able and enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the
  English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as
  sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.’

The concluding sentence of that peroration is paraphrased from a speech
John Wilkes had delivered in the House of Commons ten years before.
Manifestly Burns followed, closely and sympathetically, the utterances
of the English radicals and reformers; it is well known that ‘A Man’s a
Man’ is ‘two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme’
from the writings of a former Excise officer named Thomas Paine. Like
most European liberals, Burns admired the leaders of the American
Revolution--one of the toasts which gave offence in Dumfries is said
to have been his proposal of the health of George Washington as ‘a
better man’ than William Pitt--and his admiration would be intensified
by obvious parallels between the grievances of the Americans and the
Scots. His Jacobite sympathies were wholly emotional, and in part
conditioned by the fact that the Jacobites had written all the good
songs. One suspects that he would just as readily have taken the
Catholic view of the Reformation if Scottish Catholics had embalmed
their lost cause in poetry. When he looked at current affairs, his
reason backed his feelings. Politically, Scotland had almost as much
to complain of as the American colonies had had. In some respects,
indeed, she had more. American towns had been free to manage their
local affairs by a system of representative government; in Scotland the
municipalities, like the country’s representation in Parliament, were
self-perpetuating oligarchies. Burns, in common with thousands of men
of higher rank, had no vote even in the government of his own burgh.
Yet his dislike of the system and his contempt for most of its leaders
would probably have expressed itself only in occasional satires had it
not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution.

A movement for reform of both burgh and parliamentary government
was under way in Scotland. George Dempster, one of the few men of
independent mind among the Scottish representatives at Westminster,
advocated such measures of reform as would allow ‘the industrious
farmer and manufacturer [to] share at least in a privilege now
engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener
baillie.’ Country gentlemen of unimpeachable character took up the
agitation, and Burns’s letters to men like William Robertson of Lude,
John Francis Erskine of Mar, and Richard Oswald of Auchencruive, show
that he looked to such leadership as the hope of the country. When his
conduct was under inquiry Burns declared that he had, as a government
employee, taken no active part, either personally or as an author, in
the movement for reform, but that as a man he ‘would say that there
existed a system of corruption between the Executive Power & the
Representative part of the Legislature, which boded no good to our
glorious Constitution; & which every patriotic Briton must wish to see
amended.’

The early stages of the French Revolution roused the enthusiasm of
the more liberal-minded men of all classes in Scotland. A dinner in
Edinburgh to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille was attended by a group of university students which included
John Allen, stepson of the poet’s friend Robert Cleghorn, by numerous
country gentlemen like his friend Robert Riddell and his acquaintance
Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, and by Lord Daer. It seemed to men
like Craigdarroch and Daer that the popular interest in the principles
of the Revolution might be harnessed for the benefit of Scotland in
speeding measures for burgh and parliamentary reform. Actually the
brief alliance with French sympathizers delayed reform for forty years.
All the vested interests of Great Britain rallied to support Burke’s
condemnation of the revolutionary principles, and the counter-attack
swept away every attempt to alter in the slightest degree the existing
scheme of things.

The full weight of the counter-attack was not felt at once. Indeed,
it was a Scotsman, James Mackintosh, who published the fullest and
best-reasoned of the numerous replies to Burke. Besides seeking to
confute Burke, Mackintosh tried to rally his countrymen to the cause
of reform by citing their medieval reputation as lovers of liberty who
would die rather than surrender their freedom. Certain passages in
Mackintosh were probably as directly responsible for the composition of
‘Scots wha hae’ as _The Rights of Man_ was for ‘A Man’s a Man’. But as
the Revolution swept on with increasing bloodshed to the execution of
Louis XVI and as mobs in various parts of Scotland, including Edinburgh
itself, celebrated King George’s birthday by burning Henry Dundas in
effigy, the authorities became panicky. Scotland felt the heaviest
force of their fright. Long latent memories of the ’45 revived at
Whitehall, and to the dread of Scotland as a focal point for rebellion
was added the practical detail that repressive measures could be better
organized there than in England. England had a few constituencies,
like London and Westminster, in which enough people were enfranchised
to give a really popular vote, and a few members of Parliament whom
neither fear nor bribes could silence. Scotland had neither. Hence
the counter-revolutionary reign of terror struck first and hardest at
Scotland.

Early in 1793 several leaders of the Friends of the People, a society
organized to agitate for parliamentary reform, were arrested on
charges of treason. Lord Daer was a member of the society, too, but
the authorities, doubtless afraid that not even a packed jury could be
trusted to convict the son of a popular earl, made no move to seize
him. They contented themselves with lesser, but still conspicuous,
victims, and before the series of trials--conducted with such disregard
of justice as in Henry Cockburn’s opinion had not been seen in Britain
since Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes--was over Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer,
and several other reform leaders had been condemned to long terms of
penal transportation. All opposition was crushed in Scotland for a
generation. Henry Erskine, the one man who dared to raise his voice in
defence of justice and common sense, paid for his temerity by being
voted out of his office as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. One of
the last of Burns’s satirical ballads commemorates the event, in which
a young man just admitted to the bar, Walter Scott by name, voted
with the majority to punish Erskine for having the courage of his
convictions.

Such was the background against which Burns undertook to display
himself as a Friend of the People. He never, so far as can be learned,
actually joined any of the reforming organizations, but it was not in
Burns’s nature to conceal his opinions. From the time when he appeared
in Edinburgh drawing-rooms wearing a waistcoat of Foxite blue and buff,
and inscribed on a window-pane at Stirling verses about the successors
to the Stuarts being ‘an idiot race, to honor lost’, he was marked as
a character who would bear watching. The wonder is not so much that he
came near to losing his job in the Excise as that he ever succeeded in
getting it. If William Corbet and Graham of Fintry had not been the
generous and friendly souls they were, the poet’s service career would
have ended in 1793, and he might even have shared the fate of Muir and
Palmer.

To note some of Burns’s words and deeds during 1791 and 1792, and
realize that for every reckless phrase that reached paper there were
doubtless a score uttered over the punchbowl, is to marvel at the
poet’s escape. His phrase about the House of Hanover, already quoted,
was written in the privacy of Robert Riddell’s library, but it is hard
to believe that he did not say equally sharp things in more public
places. His most intimate friends in Dumfries were avowed sympathizers
with the Revolution. Dr. James Maxwell had witnessed the execution of
the king, cherished the handkerchief he had dipped in the royal blood,
and was well enough known to the authorities to have his revolutionary
connexions violently denounced by Burke on the floor of the House of
Commons. John Lewars was tainted with ‘D-m-cratic heresy’; Syme, after
enrolling, like Burns, in the Dumfries Volunteers, became heartily
disgusted with the whole wretched business; Maria Riddell was a parlour
revolutionist who on her visits to London associated ‘with a very
pleasant set of Sans-culottes’. Throughout 1792 Burns had let slip
few opportunities of proclaiming his own sympathies. In the spring he
bought the _Rosamond’s_ carronades and dispatched them as a present to
the French Convention; in the autumn, when Maria Riddell asked him to
suggest a programme for a benefit night in Dumfries theatre, he chose
from the repertory of the local company Mrs. Centlivre’s _The Wonder:
A Woman Keeps a Secret_ because it contained some platitudinous lines
about British liberty which could be given political significance by
well-timed applause. Either on this occasion or another the crowd
carried the matter further than Burns had anticipated.

When ‘God Save the King’ was called for, a group in the pit which
included some of Burns’s friends shouted for ‘Ça Ira’ instead. The
ensuing clamour came to the verge of a free-for-all fight. In his
defence Burns avowed that he never opened his lips ‘to hiss, or huzza,
that, or any other Political tune whatever’ because he looked on
himself ‘as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a
Riot; at the same time as a character of higher respectability, than
to yell in the howlings of a rabble.’ In other words, by sitting
still and not applauding the national anthem he made himself just
as conspicuous as if he had joined in the call for ‘Ça Ira’. He was
anything but the obscure individual he claimed to be, and it was
apparently his public conduct on this occasion that led to his being
reported to his superiors as a disaffected person.

Seemingly the idea that his opinions might get him into trouble had
never occurred to Burns. The threat of an official investigation threw
him into a humiliating panic, and must also have alarmed his friends
in the higher ranks of the Excise. It is difficult otherwise to
account for Supervisor Corbet’s coming in person to Dumfries to look
into the charges. An accusation brought against a minor officer in
the service was scarcely in ordinary routine a serious enough affair
to call in one of the highest officials; the inference is that Corbet
was rightly fearful of the results if Burns were investigated by an
unfriendly agent. Accordingly the Supervisor examined the poet across
a dinner-table in company with Findlater and Syme, and in that mellow
atmosphere found no ground for the charges ‘save some witty sayings’.
But even so, Corbet, in the name of the Board, had to admonish
Burns--so the poet reported to Erskine of Mar--‘that _my_ business was
to _act_, not to think; & that whatever might be Men or Measures, it
was for me to be silent and obedient.’

The hair-splitting particularity of Burns’s defence of his conduct
is in itself proof of the real basis of the charges against him. He
revered the King, he declared, in his public capacity as ‘the sacred
Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution’, but George’s ‘private worth,
it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate.’ (On
the report of the King’s first admitted insanity in 1788 he had said,
‘I am not sure whether he is not a gainer, by how much a Madman is a
more respectable character than a Fool.’) He had joined no party for
revolution or reform; his contributions to the radical _Edinburgh
Gazetteer_ had been only a couple of non-political verses. But he did
not mention that in subscribing to the _Gazetteer_ he had urged its
editor, William Johnston, to ‘lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady
hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft!’
and to ‘dare to draw in their native colours these “Calm, thinking
Villains whom no faith can fix”--whatever be the Shibboleth of their
pretended Party.’ Oddly enough, the _Rosamond’s_ carronades had not
been brought up against him. Hence he naturally did not mention them,
but he took occasion to avow that though he had been an enthusiastic
votary of France at the beginning, he had changed his sentiments since
the Revolution had embarked on a career of bloodshed and military
aggression.

Here Burns was making a Galileo recantation. On the same day on which
he thus denied to Robert Graham that he any longer supported the
Revolution he was using French in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop and adding
that he hoped it was correct, for ‘much would it go against my soul,
to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real
sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my letters to you.’
Despite her repeated warnings to drop the subject, he continued to talk
about his devotion to Liberty, his friendship with Dr. Maxwell, and his
approval of ‘the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled
Prostitute to the hands of the hangman’ until the offended lady broke
off the correspondence. Seething, as he had said of his feeling in
1788, with the impotent ‘madness of an enraged Scorpion shut up in a
thumb-phial’, Burns had to express himself to someone. He had lied
about his sentiments, and though the lie was to save his family rather
than himself, its taste was bitter in his mouth. Nor was he helped by
the realization that all Scotland was equally cowed and that if he had
not made his recantation he would have shared the fate of four other
citizens of Dumfries who were imprisoned for drinking seditious toasts.
Once before he had challenged authority in the shape of the temporal
power of the Kirk, and had come off not unscathed but undefeated. Now
he had challenged much less openly the State, and had learned the
difference in strength between a vital institution and a moribund one.
The realization of defeat shook his self-confidence as nothing else
had ever done, and helped to drive him to such unmanly conduct as that
which followed his quarrel with Maria Riddell. He who had refused to
sell his songs for money had sold his independence for bread. That it
was his children’s bread and not his own might salve his conscience,
but it could not heal his pride.

The Man of Feeling had bruised himself against a harsher reality
than anything Harley had found in London or Bedlam; the idealist in
politics had learned the substance of which politicians are made.
Brimming with New Light theories about the Moral Sense, convinced by
primitivists like Rousseau that ‘mankind are by nature benevolent
creatures’ whom mere stress of hunger and poverty makes selfish, Burns
had come naked to battle against the forces of alarmed conservatism
and privilege. Like thousands of others he had taken seriously the
slogans of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Rights of Man’, and had seen in the
French Revolution the signs that the world’s great age was beginning
anew. His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own
unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient
forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he
had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not
wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding
aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that
belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like
many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless
engaged in supporting it.

Though he dared no longer give direct utterance to revolutionary
sympathies, he could, and did, express his detestation of war in
a song like ‘Logan Braes’, and couple the ideas of his generation
with the patriotic tradition of medieval Scotland. The low estate
of contemporary Scottish liberty threw into more glorious relief
the traditions of Bannockburn and the lost cause of the Stuarts.
His patriotism accepted without question the legend that ‘Hey tutti
taitie’ had been Bruce’s battle-march, as it accepted the romantic
interpretation of Mary Queen of Scots. Burns might call himself an
unprejudiced inquirer and a sceptic, but his nature had no kinship
with the cool remorseless scepticism of a man like David Hume. Hume’s
was the keenest Scottish mind of his century; Burns, at least in the
height of his rebellion against the Kirk, might have been expected to
find the philosopher congenial. But Burns could endure destructive
criticism only of things he hated. Hume did not confine his scepticism
to religion, and when he brought his devastating intellect to bear on
the romantic traditions of his country Burns turned away in anger. He
might endorse Hume’s demolition of the supernatural sanctions of the
church, but he was disquieted by the application of the same scepticism
to the belief in immortality, and infuriated when it was turned upon
Queen Mary. Hume was mentally akin to Voltaire and Samuel Butler; Burns
to Rousseau and Dickens.

In repudiating Hume’s treatment of Mary, Burns was unconsciously
illustrating the force of Johnson’s ruthless dictum, which even the
loyal Sir Walter Scott could not wholly deny, that ‘a Scotchman must be
a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth:
He will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters
his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.’ Few men have
lived more honest than Burns. He would not willingly lie, nor endorse
a lie; but if offered choice between a romantic story which appealed
to his patriotism and an unromantic one which did not, his choice was
never in doubt. His own followers, in their hostility to anything like
dispassionate investigation of the picturesque legends surrounding
him, continue to illustrate the same attitude. Nor, indeed, have the
Burnsians monopolized this aversion to inquiry. It remained for an
Irishman and an American to set forth the true details of the life of
Allan Ramsay, and for another American to write the only complete and
scholarly study of Henry Mackenzie and his times.

Many Scotsmen besides Burns shared his passionate defence of Queen
Mary; not so many shared his general patriotism. Here Burns, very
Scot of very Scot, belonged to a generation which had passed, though
he prepared the way for one to come. He had much in common with
Claverhouse, Lochiel, or Fletcher of Saltoun; nothing in common with
Bute, Wedderburn, or Henry Dundas. In so far as the patriotism of Sir
John Sinclair sought the improvement of his country by collecting
and tabulating her resources, Burns was with him, but when Sinclair
tried to eradicate the national speech he struck at something Burns
held precious. True, Burns was like his contemporaries in snatching
at everything that seemed like proof that the Scots could equal or
surpass the English at their own games. He applauded the _Mirror_
and the _Lounger_ because they looked like successful rivals of the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; he admired Thomson and Beattie and Blair the
more because even the English had to admit that these men wrote well
in the southern tongue. But he deeply resented the willingness of his
countrymen to sink their national identity in the Union.

  ‘Alas! have I often said to myself,’ he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop in 1790,
  ‘what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the
  union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independance,
  and even her very name! I often repeat that couplet of my favorite
  poet, Goldsmith--

      “----States of native liberty possest,
      Tho’ very poor, may yet be very blest.”

  Nothing can reconcile me to the common terms, “English ambassador,
  English court,” &c. And I am out of all patience to see that
  equivocal character, Hastings, impeached by “the Commons of England.”
  Tell me, my friend, is this weak prejudice?’

Men like Boswell and Sinclair would have answered without hesitation
that it was. The Union had admitted Scotland to as much share as she
could grasp of the wealth of the British Empire; commerce and industry
were increasing year by year; the poor relation was beginning to live
like the prosperous branch of the family. For such profits, the change
of name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘North Britain’ seemed a small price. To
those who shared in the new prosperity, the suggestion of a nationalist
movement would have seemed rank folly or even downright treason. So
long as the prosperity continued, indeed, the ‘practical men’ had the
overwhelming majority of their countrymen with them. The emergence of
Scottish nationalism as a political force to be reckoned with had to
await the collapse of Scottish industry which followed the World War.
With the loss of material prosperity, the Scots have begun to question
the value of the system which transfers to Westminster the control of
their local affairs. Scottish poverty and Scottish pride are seemingly
interdependent. Removal of the one will make the nation more willing to
swallow the other.

Even if Burns had shared the material prosperity resulting from the
Union, instead of helping, as tenant of rack-rented land, to pay for
it, his feelings would have been the same. In every fibre of his
being he shared the spirit of those Scots who, in contradiction of
every proverbial association of pawky caution with their race, have
been among the greatest soldiers, explorers, and idealists of modern
history. Montrose and Livingstone, Admiral Duncan and Mungo Park,
expressed in action the national traits which he expressed in song. His
calling, consciously accepted, was that of national poet; his other
activities merely the ‘sweat, that the base machine might have its
oil’. He refused payment for his songs, because the task of supplying
words to national melodies was a patriotic service, embalming and
treasuring up these relics of his country’s spirit to a life beyond
life.

Without Burns’s share in the work of gathering old Jacobite songs,
for instance, and composing new ones, it may be questioned if such a
halo of romance would have surrounded, in the next generation, the
Rebellions of 1715 and 1745; without that halo, Sir Walter Scott would
have been less readily attracted to them; without Sir Walter, the
romantic vision of Scottish history would never have conquered the
world. No Scottish writer of the eighteenth century, except Burns,
passed on the torch of national pride. Without him, the fact that Hume
and Boswell were Scotsmen, that Thomson was born on Tweed instead of
Thames, would mean no more to the ordinary reader than does the fact
that Swift was born in Ireland or Wordsworth in Cumberland. Without
him, Ramsay and Fergusson would be forgotten minor poets who wrote in
a difficult and obsolete dialect. He gathered together in his own work
all that was vital in the work of his predecessors, infused it with the
fire of his own personality, and sent it out again to keep Scotland
alive.

Burns came at the last moment when a national poet could succeed in
his task. A few decades later, and the vernacular would have sunk too
low for preservation. Even as it was, he could only embalm it and
not renew it as poetic speech. Except for Lady Nairne’s, scarcely
any vernacular poetry written in Scotland since 1800 deserves higher
ranking than the _Barrack-Room Ballads_. As a poetic influence, Burns’s
work was weak. As a national influence, its force is not yet spent. He
revealed the richness and colour of Scottish life, and in revealing it
gave direction and vitality to the long and noble line of novelists
which began with Sir Walter Scott and John Galt, and continued through
Stevenson to John Buchan and the late Neil Munro. Through these men
the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more
enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries--a
nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible
loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. It is not Scott’s kings
and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like
Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont--in other
words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns
depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod
Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without
Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without
the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry
would be without the Cavaliers.

In tracing the continuing tradition of sentiment from Henry Mackenzie
through Burns himself to ‘Ian Maclaren’ and Sir James Barrie, Professor
Thompson made perforce a grave omission. The difference between
the dynamic romanticism of England at the beginning of the last
century--the romanticism of the young Wordsworth and of Shelley--and
the insipid prettiness of the same movement in America at the same
time, lies in the invigorating power of the French Revolution. By
giving a fighting edge to romance, the Revolution raised it above mere
fancifulness and sentimentality. His patriotism did the same thing
for the influence of Burns. Without it he might today be only a minor
Man of Feeling. Even as it is, he is neglected and misunderstood. The
strength, the humour, the fighting edge are there, but few people care
to find them.

He saved Scotland; himself he could not save. Five years after
his death a group of admirers in Greenock organized a Burns Club,
and Paisley and Kilmarnock quickly followed suit. The fashion
spread through Scotland, and among Scotsmen in the rest of the
English-speaking world, bringing in its train the erection of more, and
worse, statues and monuments than have been reared to the memory of any
other British individual with the possible exception of Albert, Prince
Consort. Soon the movement acquired the characteristics of a minor
religious cult, complete with ritual meals and a thriving traffic in
relics, genuine or spurious, of its hero.

In itself this establishment as hero of a national cult might be
harmless. After all, if any writer was to fill the role, Burns was
the inevitable candidate, for he alone of the great Scottish writers
was truly a man of the people. Not the existence of the cult, but
the direction it took, is the tragedy of Burns. The sentimentality
which lies, like the soft core of an over-ripe pear, at the heart of
writers like ‘Ian Maclaren’, Sir James Barrie, and A. A. Milne, is
widespread in Scotland. In the Burns cult this softness yearns to the
answering softness of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘To a Mouse’, and
‘To a Mountain Daisy’, extols its hero as the Bard of Humanity and
Democracy, and rejoices in the bathos of Clarinda and Highland Mary.
Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Jolly
Beggars’ is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and
dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of
more than three hundred songs, Burns’s most truly patriotic work, lies
almost untouched on the shelves. Radio and concert stage alike ignore
them. And choice of the few that are known to the public at large runs
true to the same form as with the longer poems. Probably a hundred
people know ‘Sweet Afton’ for one who knows ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ or
‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’.

The flattery of being a national hero would delight Burns. If his
followers were only mealy-mouthed where he was outspoken, they would
merely amuse him. He would not mind if they slobbered over his sins,
for the unco guid were old acquaintance of his. But at the thought of
his worshippers exalting his weakest work and ignoring his best, his
very soul would scunner. The real Burns was not the dropper of tears
over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours
for a kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who
sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy
earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and
old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir
of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk
literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led
astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. But his
worshippers are ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work.
And nobody else reads him at all.




INDEX


  Abbotsford, 227

  _Aberdeen Almanac_, 45

  Aberfoyle, 47

  Adam, Alexander, 119

  Addison, Joseph, 40, 234

  _Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman, The_, 46

  _Adventures of Telemachus_ (Fénelon), 51

  ‘Ae fond kiss,’ 149, 172, 264

  Agriculture in Scotland, 10-16, 188

  Agriculture, Professorship of, Edinburgh, 155

  Aiken, Robert, 93-96, 98, 142, 144, 147, 193, 194

  Ainslie, Robert, 65, 107, 110, 112-115, 144, 150, 151, 167, 168, 170,
    173, 186, 214

  Albert, Prince Consort, 306

  Allen, John, 110, 291

  Alloway, 11, 36-41, 48, 279

  Alloway Kirk, 36, 266

  Almack, William, 30

  ‘A Man’s a Man,’ 289, 292

  American Colonies. _See_ United States

  American Revolution, 70, 82, 225, 290

  Anderson, Robert, 196, 247

  Anne, Queen, 60, 287

  ‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam,’ 264

  Antigua, 176

  Arbroath, 266

  Archers, Royal Company of, 108

  Argyll, John, Duke of, 5

  Armour, James, 77, 94, 139, 142-143, 150, 165, 192

  Armour, Mrs. James, 168

  Armour, Jean. _See_ Burns, Jean Armour

  Army, Burns’s opinions of, 155, 179

  Arnot, John, 191

  Arran, 47

  Athole, Jane Cathcart, Duchess of, 116-117

  Athole, John, Duke of, 116-117

  Auchencruive, 144

  Auld Brig, Ayr, 31

  _Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation, The_, 58, 249, 250

  _Auld Lang Syne_, 260

  Auld, Walter, 120, 228

  Auld, William, 173, 279

  Austen, Jane, 278

  Aylmer, Rose, 250

  Ayr, 195, 279

  Ayr, Brigs of, 31

  Ayr, Presbytery of, 92-93


  Baker, --, 127

  Ballads, 25-27, 38, 43-44, 246, 252, 259, 269

  Ballantine, John, 61, 93-96, 202

  Ballenden, Braes of, 256

  Balmerino, Arthur Elphinstone, Baron, 229, 287

  _Banks of Cree_, 271

  Bannockburn, 48, 272, 300

  Barncailzie, 125

  _Barrack-Room Ballads_, 305

  Barrie, Sir James Matthew, 305, 307

  Bayard, 28

  Beattie, James, 25, 29, 75, 104, 270, 302

  Bede, 23

  Beethoven, Ludwig von, 275

  Begbie, Alison, 69-70, 189

  Begg, Isabella Burns, 147

  _Bell_, West-Indiaman, 192-193

  Benson, Anna Dorothea, 132

  Beugo, John, 175

  Bible, 23

  Black Bull Inn, Glasgow, 166

  Blacklock, Thomas, 99, 195

  Blair, Athole, 116-117, 207

  Blair, Hugh, 29, 97, 104, 118, 155, 195, 244, 302

  Blair, Sir James Hunter, 240

  Blair, Robert, 259

  Blake, William, 243, 278

  Bloody Assizes, 293

  Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 60

  _Bonnie Dundee_, 261-262

  Border tour, Burns’s, 113, 200, 208, 240, 247, 255

  Boston, Thomas, 19, 37, 281

  Boswell, Sir Alexander, 274

  Boswell, Euphemia, 165

  Boswell, James, 11, 29, 60, 91, 103, 107, 111, 129, 278, 302, 304

  Boyd, Thomas, 120, 213

  Brawne, Fanny, 250

  Braxfield, Robert M’Queen, Lord, 102, 108, 129

  Bremner, Robert, 242

  _Brigs of Ayr, The_, 248

  Broadsides, Scottish, 45

  Brontë, Emily, 162

  Brown, Richard, 80-83, 84, 89, 92, 137-138, 163, 166, 169, 237

  Brown, Samuel, 56

  Browning, Robert, 250, 251

  Brow Well, 133, 184-187

  Bruce, King Robert the, 272, 300

  Brussels, 32

  Buchan, David Stuart Erskine, Earl of, 100-101, 255

  Buchan, John, 305

  Burke, Edmund, 278, 292, 295

  Burn, Robert, 221

  Burnes, Agnes Broun (mother of the poet), 37-38, 44, 90, 135-136,
    138-139, 203

  Burnes, Robert (grandfather of the poet), 36

  Burnes, Robert (uncle of the poet), 36, 60

  Burnes, William (father of the poet), 8, 34, 35, 36-39, 41, 42-43, 48,
    49-50, 55, 59, 62, 70, 71-73, 84, 85-88, 90, 279

  Burness, James, 117, 232

  Burnet, Elizabeth, of Manboddo, 240

  Burns, Agnes (sister of the poet), 49

  Burns, Elizabeth Paton (daughter of the poet), 74, 138-139, 143, 150,
    203

  Burns, Elizabeth Riddell (daughter of the poet), 183-184

  Burns, Gilbert (brother of the poet), 11, 34, 37, 41, 48, 50, 55, 59,
    63, 68, 73, 87, 88, 90, 95, 122, 138, 143, 186, 202-203, 208, 214,
    220, 245

  Burns, Isabella (sister of the poet). _See_ Begg, Isabella Burns

  Burns, Jean Armour, 13, 83, 90, 91-92, 109, 110, 113, 114-115, 118,
    126, 133, 136, 138, 139-144, 146-148, 150, 153, 156, 164, 165,
    167-170, 172-176, 185, 187, 189, 192-193, 201, 212, 214, 217, 220,
    221, 232, 233

  Burns, John (brother of the poet), 88

  Burns, Robert, _Poems_. See _Poems_, Burns’s

  Burns, Robert, the poet, _passim_. Specific references are to be found
    in association with other persons, topics, or places.

  Burns, Robert (son of the poet), 167, 174, 185

  Burns, William (brother of the poet), 166, 203-204, 215

  Burns, William Nicol (son of the poet), 119

  Burns Clubs, 301, 306-308

  Burton, Robert, 42

  _Bush aboon Traquair, The_, 48, 255

  Bute, John Stuart, Earl of, 5, 301

  Butler, Samuel, 300

  Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord, 109, 278


  Cadell and Davies, 199

  Caedmon, 23

  _Ça Ira_, 295-296

  Caledonian Hunt, 99, 127, 197

  _Caller Oysters_, 248

  Calton Hill, 118

  Calvin, John, 19

  Calvinism, 5, 16-23, 66, 162, 163, 279-287

  Cameron, Meg, 113, 118, 148, 151, 152, 165, 208

  Campbell, Mary, 138, 144-149, 250, 307

  Canada, 190

  Candlish, James, 30, 62, 281

  Cape Club, Edinburgh, 105

  Caroline lyrics, 42

  Carronades, Burns’s purchase of, 227, 295, 297

  Carswell, Catherine, 84, 180

  Catalan, 23

  Catrine House, 96-97, 195

  Cawdor Castle, 48

  Centlivre, Susannah, 295

  Chalmers, Margaret, 148, 160-161, 164, 256

  Channing, William Eilery, 280, 285

  Chapbooks, Scottish, 45-46

  Chapman, George, 49, 75

  Chatterton, Thomas, 62, 79

  Chaucer, Geoffrey, 23, 42, 46

  Chesterton, G. K., 66

  Children, Burns’s feelings toward, 150-153

  Chloris. _See_ Lorimer, Jean.

  _Christabel_, 243

  _Chronicle_, London, 134, 206

  Clarinda. _See_ M’Lehose, Agnes.

  Clarke, Samuel, 128

  Clarke, Stephen, 257-258

  Class-consciousness, Burns’s, 52-53

  Claverhouse, John Graham of, Viscount Dundee, 301

  Cleghorn, Robert, 109-111, 253, 291

  Clint, Henry, 120

  Clochnahill, 36

  Clow, Jenny, 113, 118, 144, 146, 148, 152, 165, 170-171, 221

  Clydesdale, 50

  Cockburn, Alison, 43

  Cockburn, Henry, 103, 108, 293

  Cockney dialect, 30, 247

  Coila, 157

  Cole, Elisha, 281

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 243

  _Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork, The_, 46

  ‘Coming thro’ the rye,’ 26

  Commonplace Book, Burns’s, 236-239, 242-244, 259

  Composition, Burns’s methods of, 241-246

  Connaught, 81

  Constable, Archibald, 106

  Copyrights, Burns’s, 199-201, 274

  Corbet, William, 129, 294, 296

  Corri, Domenico, 28

  _Cotter’s Saturday Night, The_, 58, 154, 246, 269, 307

  _Court of Equity, The_, 111, 146

  Court of Session, 86

  Cowper, William, 278

  Craig, Lord, 162, 165

  Craigdarroch, 121

  Crane, Ichabod, 39

  Creech, William, 100, 105, 106, 161, 165, 169, 197-201, 204-205, 220

  Criffel, 187

  Crochallan Fencibles, 104-109, 253, 254, 255

  Cromek, Robert Hartley, 161

  Cullen, William, 155

  Cunningham, Alexander, 107-109, 110, 112, 118, 125, 126, 133-134, 167,
    205, 240, 253, 268, 285, 286

  Currie, James, 125, 182, 246, 273

  ‘Cutty stool,’ 17


  Daer, Basil William, Lord, 96, 131, 291, 293

  _Daft Days, The_, 25, 248

  Dalrymple, 51

  Dalrymple, William, 279

  Dalswinton, 114, 207-212

  Dalyell, Sir John Graham, 124

  Dalziel, Alexander, 98, 99, 195

  Darien Expedition, 7

  Davidson, Betty, 44, 136

  Davies, Deborah Duff, 149

  Deans, Jamie, 283

  Deans, Jeanie, 305

  _Death and Dr. Hornbook_, 39, 46, 83

  Death, Burns’s, 133

  Deists, 20, 22, 281, 286

  Democracy, Scottish, 32-33

  Dempster, George, 32, 290

  Dickens, Charles, 65, 266, 300

  Dinmont, Dandie, 305

  Dods, --, 127-128

  Dods, Meg, 305

  Don, Lady Harriet, 61, 132

  Doonholm, 36

  Douglas and Heron Bank, 16, 70, 85, 230

  Douglas, Charles, 192

  Douglas, Gawain, 23, 247

  Douglas, Lady Mary, 132

  _Douglas, Tragedy of_, 21, 40

  Douglas, William, 250

  Dover, 227

  Drama, Burns and the, 251-252

  Drama, in Edinburgh, 21

  Dramatic lyric, Burns’s use of, 250-251

  Dramatic monologue, Burns’s use of, 250-251

  Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 23

  Dryden, John, 42

  Dumfries, 68, 110, 113, 118, 124-134, 152, 160, 171, 177, 208, 219,
    221-233, 267, 294-297, 298

  Dumfries Academy, 224

  Dumfries Burgh Council, 224

  Dumfries Public Library, 106

  Dumfries Theatre, 179, 295-296

  Dumfries Volunteers, 228, 231, 232, 295, 299

  Dunbar, William (the poet), 23, 247

  Dunbar, William (Edinburgh), 106, 157, 254

  Duncan, Adam, 303

  Dundas, Henry, 5, 101, 108, 116, 207, 292, 301

  Dundas, Robert, 107, 108

  Dunlop, Andrew, 82

  Dunlop, Frances Anna Wallace, 61, 96, 101, 148, 150, 151, 152,
    153-160, 167, 194, 199, 206, 209, 240, 260, 267, 282-283, 284, 286,
    297-298, 302

  Dunlop House, 156, 167

  Dunlop, Keith, 157, 167

  Dunlop, Rachel, 156, 167

  Dunlop, Thomas, 154

  Dunnottar, 36

  Dunscore, 288

  Dunse, 112, 113

  Durham, 127


  East India Company, 6, 190

  East Lothian, 208

  Easy Club, Edinburgh, 105

  Eclogues, Virgil’s, 252

  Edinburgh, 7-10, 75, 78, 94, 99-119, 124, 153, 162-172, 195-202,
    209-210, 216, 221, 245, 252, 291-293, 294

  Edinburgh High School, 116, 119

  Edinburgh University, 8, 96

  Eglinton, Archibald Montgomerie, Earl of, 197, 202

  Eglinton, Countess of, 197

  Eglinton Wood, 82

  _Elegies_ (Shenstone), 57

  _Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair_, 240

  _Elibanks and Elibraes_, 48, 255

  Elizabethan lyrics, 42

  Elliot, Jean, 43

  Ellisland, 101, 110, 113-115, 119-122, 158, 174, 202, 203, 207-222,
    262

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 261, 280, 285

  _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 105

  _Epistle to John Rankine_, 77

  Erskine, Andrew, 91, 99

  Erskine, Henry, 108, 293

  Erskine, John Francis, of Mar, 291, 297

  _Esopus to Maria_, 181

  _Evening Courant_, Edinburgh, 288

  _Eve of St. Agnes, The_, 250

  Excise, 55, 98, 101, 109, 115, 116, 129-130, 133, 165, 169, 170, 190,
    206-207, 209-210, 212, 214-233, 262, 269, 277, 289, 294, 296


  Faculty of Advocates, 293

  Falstaff, 167

  Farington, Joseph, 121, 165

  Farming, Burns’s, 204, 210-222

  Fénelon, François, 51

  _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 58

  Fergusson, Alexander, of Craigdarroch, 121-122, 291

  Fergusson, Robert, 25, 61, 75, 91, 104, 105, 134, 221, 237, 241-242,
    247-248, 252, 304

  Fergusson, William, 36, 50, 53

  Ferrara, Duke of, 250

  Fifeshire, 247

  ’Fifteen, Rebellion of, 36, 287, 304

  Findlater, Alexander, 96, 129-130, 217, 219, 229, 296

  Fisher, Edward, 281

  Flax-dressing, Burns and, 71, 79-84

  Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 301

  _Flowers of Edinburgh, The_, 272

  _Flowers of the Forest, The_, 43

  Folk-songs, Scottish, 26-28, 38, 43-44, 75, 132, 252-263, 269

  Fornicators’ Court, 112

  ’Forty-five, Rebellion of, 4, 7, 26, 46, 287, 292, 304

  _Four-Fold State_ (Thomas Boston), 19, 37, 279, 281

  Fox, Charles James, 294

  Franklin, Benjamin, 22, 61, 100, 103, 266

  Freemasonry, 67-68, 87, 99, 104, 144, 145, 297

  French, Burns’s knowledge of, 51-52

  French Convention, 227, 295

  French Revolution, 51, 119, 128, 159-160, 182, 226-228, 270, 272,
    290-299, 306

  Friars Carse, 120, 176, 177, 181, 182, 212, 265

  _Friars Carse Hermitage, Written in_, 262

  Friends of the People, 293-294


  _Gala Water_, 255

  Galileo, 297

  Galloway, Burns’s tour in, 229

  Galloway, John Stewart, Earl of, 131

  Galt, John, 305

  _Gazetteer_, Edinburgh, 297

  _Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 31

  George III, 292, 296-297

  _Geographical Grammar_ (Guthrie), 48

  _Gillicrankie_, 237

  Glasgow, 7, 83, 166

  Glasgow University, 20, 30

  Glenbervie, 36

  Glencairn, Elizabeth M’Quire, Countess of, 132

  Glencairn, James, Earl of, 95, 98-101, 107, 120, 195-197, 209, 210,
    216, 240

  Glenconner, 211

  Globe Inn, Dumfries, 120, 174

  _God Save the King_, 295-296

  Godwin, William, 278

  Goldielea, 122, 178

  Goldsmith, Oliver, 31, 302

  Gordon Castle, 117

  Gordon, Jane, Duchess of, 117, 132, 159

  Gow, Neil, 27

  Graham, Dugal, 11, 45-46

  Graham, Robert, of Fintry, 68, 111, 116, 207, 216, 223, 224, 294, 297

  _Grave, The_ (Blair), 259

  Gray, James, 124, 152

  Gray, Thomas, 103, 157

  Greenfield, William, 252

  Greenock, 192-193, 306

  Grieve, James, 85

  _Grizzel Grimme, Ballad of_, 246

  Grose, Francis, 121, 176-177, 265, 268

  Guthrie, William, 48

  _Guy Mannering_, 104


  Halleaths, 182

  _Hallowe’en_, 248

  Hamilton, Charlotte, 256

  Hamilton, Gavin, 72, 76, 78, 87-88, 90, 92-93, 142, 202

  Hamilton, John, of Sundrum, 85-86

  Hamilton, William, of Gilbertfield, 24, 45

  _Hamlet_, 40

  Hampstead Heath, 244

  _Handsome Nell_, 236, 242

  Hannibal, 45, 234

  Hanover, House of, 4, 26, 287-289, 294

  _Hardyknute_, 27, 43

  Harry, Blind, 25, 45

  Hastings, Warren, 5, 302

  Hay, Charles (Lord Newton), 106-107, 108, 253

  Hay, Lewis, 161

  Health, Burns’s, 54, 83-84, 184-187, 217, 231-233

  _Helenore_ (Alexander Ross), 24

  Henley, William Ernest, 138, 144, 145, 168

  Henri, Susan Dunlop, 152, 286

  _Henry VIII_, 40

  Henryson, Robert, 23

  Herald’s Office, Edinburgh, 35

  Herd, David, 27, 43, 110, 252

  ‘Here is the glen and here the bower,’ 272

  Heron, Lady Elizabeth, 271-272

  Heron, Patrick, of Heron, 16, 131, 230, 271

  _Hey, Johnie Cope_, 26

  _Hey tutti taitie_, 272, 300

  Highland clans, suppression of, 4

  _Highland Lassie_, 145

  Highland Mary. _See_ Campbell, Mary

  Highland tours, Burns’s, 116-118, 256

  Hildebroad, John, 283

  Hill, Peter, 106, 200, 281

  _History of Sir William Wallace, The_, 234

  _History of the Bible_ (Stackhouse), 48

  Hogg, James, 102, 135

  Holinshed, Raphael, 261

  Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 19, 280

  _Holy Fair, The_, 76, 248

  _Holy Willie’s Prayer_, 46, 76, 111, 249, 250, 307

  Home, John, 21, 28, 40, 42, 75

  Homer, 49, 75

  Hopetoun, James Hope, Earl of, 228

  Horace, 236

  Housman, A. E., 244-245

  ‘How are Thy servants blest’ (Addison), 40

  Hume, David, 29, 31, 197, 278, 279, 300, 304

  Humphry, James, 83

  Hutcheson, Francis, 20, 22, 281, 285

  Hyslop, William, 120


  Immortality, Burns’s views on, 284-286

  ‘I murder hate,’ 82, 155, 237

  India, 190

  Inquisition, Spanish, 17

  Irvine, 67, 71, 72, 79-84, 87, 88

  Irving, Washington, 266

  ‘I’ve seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling,’ 43


  Jacobitism, Burns’s, 209, 229, 287-290, 304

  Jamaica, 93, 98, 147, 151, 162, 171, 172, 191-193, 206, 239

  James I, of Scotland, 23

  James VI, of Scotland, I of England, 3, 23, 287

  Jefferson, Thomas, 272

  Jeffrey, Francis, 29

  Jeffreys, George, 293

  _Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship_, 46

  _John Anderson_, 26, 264

  _John Barleycorn_, 246

  _John o’ Badenyon_, 43, 256

  Johnson, James, 120, 132, 214, 220, 254-264, 269, 273

  Johnson, Samuel, 11, 24, 29, 31, 43, 102, 300

  Johnston, William, 297

  _Jolly Beggars, The_, 59, 111, 144, 249, 307

  Journalism, Burns and, 205-206

  _Junius_, 61


  Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 102, 108, 129

  Keats, John, 11, 35, 49, 75, 79, 239, 250

  Kemp, John, 162, 164, 165

  Kilmarnock, 76, 167, 193-194, 198, 306

  Kilpatrick, Nellie, 63, 68, 82, 137, 234-235

  King’s Arms, Dumfries, 120

  Kinmonth, 36

  Kipling, Rudyard, 247, 305

  Kirk, Scottish, 16-23

  Kirkcudbright, 125, 131, 230

  Kirkoswald, 37, 55-60, 69, 72

  Kirkpatrick, Joseph, 282, 288

  Kiwanis Club, 104

  Knox, John, 16, 19, 22


  Lake District, 47

  Lamb, Charles, 278

  _Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn_, 240

  Landor, Walter Savage, 250

  Lapraik, John, 249

  Lapraik, Tod, 305

  Laurie, Annie, 250

  Laurie, Sir Robert, 121-122

  Lawrie, George, 99, 195

  Lawrie, Mrs. George, 153

  _Leader Haughs and Yarrow_, 255

  Leeward Islands, 176

  Lewars, Jessie, 130, 148, 149, 277

  Lewars, John, 130, 295

  _Lewis Gordon_, 272

  Letters, Burns’s, 60-61

  _Letters Moral and Entertaining_ (E. Rowe), 60

  Linlithgow, 90

  Lippo Lippi, Fra, 250

  Lisbon, 9

  Little, Jenny, 158-159

  Livingstone, David, 303

  Lochaber, 256

  Lochiel, Donald Cameron of, 301

  Lochlie, 62-63, 70, 72-73, 74, 84-88, 90, 138, 208, 214

  Lochmaben, 182

  _Lochmaben Harper, The_, 258

  Locke, John, 22

  Lockerbie, 182

  Lockhart, John Gibson, 118

  _Logan Braes_, 299

  Lomond, Loch, 47

  London, 204, 287, 293, 295

  Longtown, 204

  Lorimer, Jean, 148, 149, 219

  Lorimer, William, 219

  Loudoun, 99, 153, 195

  Louis XVI, 160, 292, 294, 298

  _Lounger, The_, 31, 302

  Lowell, James Russell, 247

  Loyal Natives Club, Dumfries, 126-127


  M’Auley, John, 151

  _Macbeth_, 261, 266

  Mackenzie, Henry, 12, 31, 58, 60, 66, 75, 84, 93, 118, 125, 197, 199,
    201, 251, 252, 301, 305

  Mackenzie, John, 90-92, 99

  Mackenzie, S. (Dumfries), 124

  Mackintosh, James, 292

  McKnight, --, 274

  ‘Maclaren, Ian.’ _See_ Watson, John

  M’Lehose, Agnes, 70, 114, 125, 144, 148, 152, 153, 156, 160-172, 174,
    176, 179, 209, 210, 212, 221, 251, 258, 281, 283, 284, 307

  M’Lehose, James, 162, 166, 171, 172

  M’Lure, David, 62, 70, 72, 85-88

  M’Murdo, John, 111, 133

  Macpherson, James, 27, 43

  _M’Pherson’s Farewell_, 264, 307

  Mallet, David, 30

  _Man of Feeling, The_, 31, 35, 58, 60, 84, 144, 189, 279, 299, 306

  _Man Was Made to Mourn_, 236

  Manners, Burns’s, 102-104, 144, 153-157

  _Manual of Religious Belief_ (William Burnes), 59, 279

  Marie Antoinette, 160, 298

  Marischal, George Keith, 10th Earl of, 36

  Marriage, Burns’s, 168-176, 189

  _Marrow of Modern Divinity, The_, 281

  Marxism, 18

  _Mary Morison_, 251

  Mary, Queen of Scots, 300-301

  Masons. _See_ Freemasonry

  Massachusetts, 16, 20

  Masson, Arthur, 40, 41-42, 58, 60

  Mathieson, W. L., quoted, 18-19

  Mauchline, 67, 75, 83, 89, 90, 93, 124, 138, 150, 165, 166, 170, 173,
    174, 195, 212

  _Mauchline Wedding, The_, 240

  Maule, Ramsay, of Panmure, 127

  Maxwell, James, 133, 294, 298

  Maxwell, Robert, 111

  Melrose, 266

  _Merry Muses of Caledonia, The_, 111-112, 253-254

  _Mill, Mill O, The_, 242

  Mill Street, Dumfries, 133, 222

  Millan, --, 30

  Miller, Eliza, 13, 145

  Miller, Patrick, 101, 114, 120, 133, 202, 207-212, 220

  Miller, Mrs. Patrick, 220

  Miller, Patrick, Jr., 206

  Milne, A. A., 307

  Milton, John, 42, 164, 244, 282

  _Minstrel, The_ (Beattie), 25, 29

  _Mirror, The_, 31, 302

  Mississippi Bubble, 7

  Mitchell, John, 111, 217, 218

  Moderates. _See_ New Lights

  Moffat, 228

  Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord, 108

  Monkland Friendly Society, 106, 281

  _Monody on a Lady Famed for her Caprice_, 181-182

  Montgomerie, Margaret, 103

  Montrose, 117

  Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of, 303

  Moodie, Alexander, 76

  Moore, John, 78, 104, 199, 201, 252

  Morison, Mary, 68

  Mossgiel, 13, 73-74, 87-88, 95, 138, 143, 167, 190, 202, 204, 208,
    211, 214

  Mound, Edinburgh, 8

  Mount Oliphant, 34, 41, 48, 50, 54-56, 59, 61-62, 70, 72, 208, 220,
    279

  Muir, Robert, 150, 198, 284

  Muir, Thomas, 293, 294

  Muir, Mrs. William, 165

  Mundell, James, 120

  Munro, Neil, 305

  Murdoch, John, 34-35, 39-43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51-55, 57, 204

  Murray, Sir James, 272

  Murray, John, of Broughton, 4, 30

  Murry, John Middleton, 250

  Music, Scottish, 26-28, 40, 120-121

  Music, influence on Burns, 236-237, 240-244, 246, 248

  ‘My father was a farmer,’ 236

  ‘My Love is like a red red rose,’ 26, 107, 261


  Nairne, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, Baroness, 261, 305

  _Nancy_, West-Indiaman, 192

  Napoleon, 7, 28, 225, 226

  Nationalism, Scottish, 303

  New Brig, Ayr, 31

  Newcastle, 204

  New England, 16-17, 247, 280

  New Lights, 21-23, 66-67, 75-78, 95, 280-287, 299

  Newton, Charles Hay, Lord. _See_ Hay

  Nicol, William, 98, 112, 115-119, 207

  _Night Thoughts_ (Young), 169

  Nimmo, Erskine, 162, 209

  Nith, River, 220, 226, 245

  Niven, William, 56, 61, 63

  Norval, Charles, 85


  _Observations on the Scottish Dialect_ (Sinclair), 29-30

  Ochiltree, 244

  Ochiltree, Edie, 188, 305

  Ochtertyre, 256, 287

  ‘Of a’ the airts,’ 149, 174

  Oldbuck, Jonathan, 265

  Old Lights, 21-23, 66-67, 75-78, 279-287

  _On God’s Sovereignty_, 281

  _On the Death of Lord President Dundas_, 107

  ‘O poortith cauld,’ 271

  _Ordination, The_, 76

  Orr, Thomas, 61

  _Ossian_ (Macpherson), 27, 43

  Oswald, James, 27

  Oswald, Mary Ramsay, of Auchencruive, 144

  Oswald, Richard, of Auchencruive, 291

  ‘O wat ye wha that lo’es me,’ 110

  ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast,’ 251, 277


  Paine, Thomas, 226, 290

  Paisley, 167, 198, 306

  Palmer, Thomas Fyshe, 293, 294

  _Pamela_, 58

  _Pantheon, The_ (Tooke), 49

  Park, Anne, 146, 148, 174

  Park, Mungo, 303

  Parliament, 3-4, 5-6, 289, 290-294, 295, 302

  Parnell, Charles Stuart, 4

  Paton, Elizabeth, 74, 76, 138-139, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 150, 193,
    194, 203

  Patriotism, Burns’s, 234, 278, 287-306

  Patronage, Kirk, 22

  Pattison, Alexander, 198

  Peacock, --, 80, 83

  _Peggy Bawn_, 236

  Percy, Thomas, 25, 43

  Perry, James, 206

  _Philosophy of Natural History_ (Smellie), 105

  ‘Pindar, Peter.’ _See_ Wolcot, John

  Pinkerton, John, 43

  Pitt, William, 226, 290

  _Plane-stanes and the Causey, The_, 248

  Pleyel, Ignaz Joseph, 268, 270

  _Poems_, Burns’s, Kilmarnock ed., 29, 82, 94, 98, 118, 139, 142, 154,
    191, 193-196, 202, 239, 244, 247-249

  _Poems_, Burns’s, 1st Edinburgh ed., 95, 98, 105, 106, 118, 127,
    195-201, 203, 254

  _Poems_, Burns’s, 2nd Edinburgh ed., 204-205

  _Poems_, Burns’s, Gilbert Burns’s ed., 203

  _Poet’s Progress, The_, 234

  _Poet’s Welcome to his Bastart Wean, A_, 111, 150

  Politics, Burns’s, 102, 131, 225-226, 230-231, 278, 287-299

  Poosie Nansie, 57

  Pope, Alexander, 42, 49, 60, 181, 216

  Port Antonio, 192

  Potterrow, Edinburgh, 165

  _Prayer in the Prospect of Death_, 84

  Preaching, Scottish, 19-20

  _Prelude_ (Wordsworth), 234

  Prestonpans, 26

  Prior, Matthew, 42

  Princes Street, Edinburgh, 8

  Provençal, 23

  _Psalms_, 40, 135, 151, 236

  Puritanism, 16-17


  Queensberry, William Douglas, Duke of, 225


  Raeburn, Sir Henry, 107

  Ramsay, Allan, 23-25, 75, 91, 104, 247, 248-249, 252, 301, 304

  Ramsay, David, 288

  Ramsay, John, 287

  Rankine, Anne, 68

  Rankine, John, 74, 77, 98, 249

  _Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin_, 307

  ‘Rape of the Sabines, The,’ 122, 180-181

  Reformation, Scottish, 23, 290

  Regency Bill, 226

  Reid, Alexander, 183, 229

  Religion, 59

  Religion, Burns’s, 278-287

  _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (Percy), 25, 43

  Revolution of 1688, 288-289

  Riccarton, 76

  Richardson, Samuel, 58

  Richmond, John, 13, 65, 89-90, 112, 141, 143, 144, 147, 151

  Riddell, Elizabeth Kennedy (Mrs. Robert), 177, 181, 182

  Riddell, Jean Fergusson, 177

  Riddell, Maria Banks Woodley, 105, 110, 122-123, 125, 144, 148, 152,
    175, 176-187, 219, 267, 295, 298

  Riddell, Robert, 61, 96, 120-124, 148, 176, 181, 182, 260, 265, 267,
    291, 294

  Riddell, Walter, 122, 127, 176-177, 178, 181, 182

  _Rights of Man, The_, 292, 299

  Robertson, William, 22, 31, 155

  Robertson, William, of Lude, 291

  Rochester, 11

  Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquis of, 225

  Rodger, Hugh, 55

  _Rosamond_, schooner, 226-227, 295, 297

  Ross, Alexander, 24

  Rossetti, Christina, 162

  Rotary Club, 104

  Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 272, 299, 300

  Rowe, Elizabeth, 60

  Russell, John, 76

  Ryedale, 126, 130


  Sabbath, Scottish, 17, 92

  St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, 9

  St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton, 67-68, 91

  St. Kitts, 176

  St. Mary’s Isle, 131-132

  Samothrace, Victory of, 250

  Sanitation, 9-13

  Satan, Milton’s, 164, 282

  Savannah-la-Mar, 192

  Schetki, Theodor, 28

  _Schoolmistress, The_ (Shenstone), 57

  Schools, Scottish, 38-42

  _Scotch Drink_, 248

  _Scotland and the Union_ (W. L. Mathieson), quoted, 18-19

  Scots language, 23-31, 75

  _Scots Magazine_, 31, 100, 228

  _Scots Musical Museum, The_, 120-121, 214, 220, 254-264, 269, 273-274,
    276

  ‘Scots wha hae,’ 272-273, 292, 300

  Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 9, 44, 47, 65, 100, 104, 121, 135, 197, 246,
    261, 265, 267, 274, 293, 300, 304, 305

  Scottish National Gallery, 8

  _Seasons, The_ (Thomson), 25, 57

  Sedition trials, 272

  _Select Collection of Scotish Airs_ (Thomson), 205, 257, 264, 268-277

  Selkirk, Dunbar Douglas, Earl of, 96, 131-132, 293

  Sentimentality, 58

  _Sentimental Tommy_, 153

  _Shadow of the Glen, The_ (Synge), 46

  Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 22

  Shakespeare, William, 11, 34-35, 42, 261

  Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick, 102

  Shaw, George Bernard, 65

  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35, 239, 306

  Shenstone, William, 57, 75, 238

  Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 278

  Sheridan, Thomas, 29

  Sidney, Sir Philip, 28

  Sillar, David, 65, 89

  Simpson, William, 244, 249

  Sinclair, Sir John, 29-30, 301, 302

  _Six Excellent New Songs_, 45

  Skinner, John, 43, 256

  Smellie, William, 103, 105-106, 110, 121, 177-178, 181, 253, 254

  Smith, Adam, 31, 206, 278

  Smith, James, 13, 89-90, 112, 150, 173, 249

  Smith, Leonard, 215, 216

  Smollett, Tobias, 58

  Smuggling, 56

  Snyder, Franklyn Bliss, 145, 147, 199

  Solway, 184-187, 226

  _Sorrows of Werther, The_, 115, 125

  Souter Johnie, 97

  South Sea Bubble, 7

  Southey, Robert, 197

  _Sow’s Tail to Geordie, The_, 26

  _Spectator, The_, 31, 42, 164, 302

  Spenser, Edmund, 42, 157

  Spenserian stanza, 57

  Spinoza, Baruch, 281

  Stackhouse, Thomas, 48

  Staig, David, 223, 224

  _Star_, London, 205

  Steenson, Steenie, 305

  Sterne, Laurence, 42, 66

  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 305

  Stewart, Catherine Gordon, of Stair, 153

  Stewart, Dugald, 61, 96-97, 98, 99, 118, 195

  Stewart, Mrs. --, 165, 209

  Stewart, William, 229

  Stinking Vennel, Dumfries, 221, 222

  Stirling, 209, 294

  Stobbie, Adam, 130, 232

  Stuart, House of, 4, 287-289, 294

  Stuart, Peter, 205

  Surgeoner, Jenny, 13, 143

  _Sweet Afton_, 307

  Swift, Jonathan, 60, 304

  Syme, John, 57, 96, 109, 111, 125-134, 174, 181, 203, 229, 267, 295,
    296

  Synge, John Millington, 46


  _Tam Glen_, 264

  _Tam o’ Shanter_, 59, 121, 204, 264-268, 305

  Tarbolton, 62-67, 89, 90, 124

  Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, 63-66, 88, 89

  Tarbolton Mill, 165, 167

  _Tatler, The_, 42, 302

  Taylor, John, 100

  _Tea-Table Miscellany_ (Ramsay), 25

  Telford, Thomas, 127, 213

  Tennant, John, 211

  ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor,’ 179

  ‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest,’ 277

  Thompson, Harold William, 305

  Thomson, George, 61, 109, 133-134, 148, 186, 205, 232, 241, 243, 244,
    249, 256, 258, 260, 264, 268-277

  Thomson, James, 25, 28, 31, 42, 57, 151, 302

  Thomson, Peggy, 56, 59, 69, 146

  ‘Thou Lingering Star,’ 148

  _Thrawn Janet_, 305

  Tinwald House, 182

  _Titus Andronicus_, 34-35

  _To a Haggis_, 248

  _To a Mountain Daisy_, 59, 307

  _To a Mouse_, 307

  _Toddlin hame_, 275

  ‘To Fanny fair could I impart,’ 242

  Tooke, Andrew, 49

  Tooke, John Horne, 226

  Tories, 225-226

  _Treatise on Solitude_ (Zimmermann), 125

  Tudor, House of, 288

  _Tullochgorum_, 43, 256

  _Twa Dogs, The_, 154

  _Twa Herds, The_, 76, 92-93

  Twain, Mark, 65, 280

  Tytler, William, 253


  Union, Act of, 3, 6, 16, 23, 302-303

  Unitarianism, 280

  United States, 7, 29, 190, 218, 289, 290

  Urbani, Pietro, 28


  Versailles, 100

  _Vicar of Wakefield, The_, 31

  Virgil, 252, 276

  Vocabulary, Burns’s, 247

  Voltaire, 300


  Wallace, Lady Antonia, of Craigie, 155

  Wallace, Lady Eglintoune Maxwell, 155

  _Wallace, Sir William, History of_ (Blind Harry), 25, 45

  Wallace, Sir William, 82, 153, 154, 234

  Walpole, Horace, 278

  Wardlaw, Lady Elizabeth, 27, 42-43

  Washington, George, 290

  Watson, John, 305, 307

  Wedderburn, Alexander, 301

  Wesley, John, 14, 278

  West Indies, 7

  Westminster, 293

  ‘When Princes and Prelates,’ 111

  Whigs, 102, 131, 225-226, 230-231, 287, 294

  _Whistle, The_, 121-122, 225

  ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,’ 264

  Whitefoord, Sir John, 91, 99

  Wig Club, Edinburgh, 104

  Wigglesworth, Michael, 20

  Wilkes, John, 287, 289

  Wilson, John (‘Dr. Hornbook’), 39, 83

  Wilson, John (Kilmarnock), 194

  Wolcot, John, 270

  Wolsey, Cardinal, 40

  Women, Burns’s views on, 149-150

  Women, education of, 37, 135-136

  _Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret_, The, 295

  Wood, Alexander, 210

  Woodley Park, 122-123, 178-179, 180, 182

  Wordsworth, William, 226, 234, 241, 278, 284, 304, 306

  World War, 303


  Young, Edward, 169, 279

  ‘Young Jocky was the blithest lad,’ 272

  York, House of, 288


  Zimmermann, Johann Georg von, 125

  *       *       *       *       *




  Transcriber’s note

  Spelling within quotations has been retained as published. Minor
  punctuation errors have been changed without notice. The following
  Printer errors have been changed.

  Page 8:   “ridge which parallelled it”    “ridge which paralleled it”
  Page 65:  “described Tarbolton townfolk”  “described Tarbolton
                                             townsfolk”
  Page 164: “was promising lifelong”        “was promising life-long”
  Page 166: “The artificial and hot-house”  “The artificial and
                                             hothouse”
  Page 180: “burlesque of the espisode”     “burlesque of the episode”
  Page 249: “as the workingday world”       “as the working-day world”
  Page 312: “Crane, Icabod”                 “Crane, Ichabod”
  Page 316: “Masons. _See_ Freemasons”      “Masons. _See_ Freemasonry”

  All other inconsistencies are as in the original.