John Gibson Lockhart was born, a son of the manse, at
Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire, on July 14, 1794. Receiving his
early education in Glasgow, he went, at sixteen, with a
scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1816 he was called
to the Scottish Bar; but literature occupied him more than
law, and as early as 1819 he wrote the once popular "Peter's
Letters to his Kinsfolk." Next year he married Scott's eldest
daughter, Sophia. Lockhart was a leading contributor to the
early "Blackwood," where his fine translations of Spanish
ballads first appeared, and he edited the "Quarterly Review"
from 1825 to 1853. He died at Abbotsford on November 25, 1854,
and was buried at Scott's feet in Dryburgh Abbey. Lockhart's
forte was biography, and his "Life of Scott" ranks beside
Boswell's "Johnson." The "Life of Burns" was published first
in Constable's "Miscellany" in 1828, when the whole impression
was exhausted in six weeks. It passed through five editions
before the author's death. Though many lives of Burns have
appeared since, with details unknown to Lockhart, his
biography is in many respects the best we possess, and is
never likely to be superseded. Even Mr. Henley is "glad to
agree with Lockhart." It is this book that is the subject of
Carlyle's famous essay on Burns.
_I.--The Poet in the Making_
Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay cottage at Alloway,
two miles south of Ayr, and near the "auld brig o' Doon." His father,
William Burnes, or Burness--for so he spelt his name--was from
Kincardineshire. When Robert was born he had the lease of a seven-acre
croft, and had intended to establish himself as a nurseryman. He was a
man of notable character and individuality, immortalised by his son as
"the saint, the father, and the husband" of "The Cottar's Saturday
Night." "I have met with few," said Burns, "who understood men, their
manners, and their ways, equal to my father." Agnes Brown, the poet's
mother, is described as a very sagacious woman, with an inexhaustible
store of ballads and traditionary tales, upon which she nourished
Robert's infant imagination, while her husband attended to "the
weightier matters of the law."
When Burns was between six and seven, his father removed to the farm of
Mount Oliphant, two miles from the Brig o' Doon. But the soil was poor,
and the factor--afterwards pictured in "The Twa Dogs"--so harsh and
unreasonable, that the tenant was glad to quit. In 1777 he removed about
ten miles to the larger and better farm of Lochlea, in the parish of
Tarbolton. Here, after a short interval of prosperity, some trouble
arose about the conditions of the lease. The dispute involved William
Burnes in ruin, and he died broken-hearted in February, 1784.
Meanwhile, at the age of six, Robert, with his brother Gilbert, was
learning to read, write, and sum under the direction of John Murdoch, an
itinerant teacher, who has left an interesting description of his pupil.
"Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination,"
says Murdoch, "and to be more of the wit, than Robert. I attempted to
teach them a little church-music. Here they were left far behind by all
the rest of the school. Robert's ear, in particular, was remarkably
dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to
distinguish one tune from another. Robert's countenance was generally
grave and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind.
Gilbert's face said, 'Mirth, with thee I mean to live;' and, certainly,
if any person who knew the two boys had been asked which of them was the
more likely to court the muses, he would never have guessed that Robert
had a propensity of that kind."
When Murdoch left the district, the father himself continued to instruct
the boys; but when Robert was about thirteen he and Gilbert were sent,
"week about, during a summer quarter," to the parish school of
Dalrymple. The good man could not pay two fees, or his two boys could
not be spared at the same time from the farm!
"We lived very poorly," says the poet. "I was a dexterous ploughman for
my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother [Gilbert], who could
drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A
novel-writer might perhaps have viewed these scenes with some
satisfaction, but so did not I." Burns's person, inured to daily toil,
and continually exposed to every variety of weather, presented, before
the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He
says himself that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural
exertion; and Gilbert, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds that
neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to him,
either in the cornfield or on the thrashing-floor.
Before his sixteenth year Burns had read a large amount of literature.
But a collection of songs, he says significantly, "was my _vade mecum_.
I pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song,
verse by verse; carefully noticing the true, tender, or sublime from
affectation or fustian." It was about this date that he "first committed
the sin of rhyme." The subject was a "bewitching creature," a partner in
the harvest field, and the song was that beginning "Once I loved a
bonnie lass."
After this, though much occupied with labour and love, he found leisure
occasionally to clothe the various moods of his mind in verse. It was as
early as seventeen that he wrote the stanzas which open beautifully, "I
dream'd I lay where flowers were springing," and also the ballad, "My
father was a farmer upon the Carrick border," which, years afterwards,
he used to con over with delight, because of the faithfulness with which
it recalled to him the circumstances and feelings of his opening
manhood. These are the only two of his very early productions in which
there is nothing expressly about love. The rest were composed to
celebrate the charms of those rustic beauties who followed each other in
the domain of his fancy, or shared the capacious throne between them.
The excursions of the rural lover form the theme of almost all the songs
which Burns is known to have produced about this period; and such of
these juvenile performances as have been preserved are beautiful. They
show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural
minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught
the secret of its charm.
In 1781, despairing of farming, he went to Irvine to learn flax-dressing
with a relative. He was diligent at first, but misfortune soon overtook
him. The shop where he was engaged caught fire, and he "was left, like a
true poet, not worth a sixpence." Gilbert Burns dates a serious change
in his character and conduct from this six months' residence in the
seaport town. "He contracted," he says, "some acquaintance of a freer
manner of thinking than he had been accustomed to, whose society
prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue which had
hitherto restrained him."
He had certainly not come unscathed out of the society of those persons
of "liberal opinions" with whom he consorted in Irvine; and he expressly
attributes to their lessons the scrape into which he fell soon after "he
put his hand to plough again." He was compelled, according to the then
all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in
church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an
illegitimate child. But not the amours, or the tavern, or drudging
manual labour could keep him long from his true calling. "Rhyme," he
says, "I had given up [on going to Irvine], but meeting with Fergusson's
'Scottish Poems,' I strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating
vigour." It was probably this accidental meeting with Fergusson that in
a great measure finally determined the Scottish character of his poetry.
_II.--The Loves of a Peasant Poet_
Just before their father's death, Robert and Gilbert took the cold and
ungrateful farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline, to which the
family now removed. The four years of Burns's connection with this place
were the most important of his life. It was then that his genius
developed its highest energies; on the works produced in these years his
fame was first established, and must ever continue mainly to rest; it
was then also that his personal character came out in all its brightest
lights, and in all but its darkest shadows; and indeed from the
commencement of this period the history of the man may be traced, step
by step, in his own immortal writings.
Burns now began to know that Nature had meant him for a poet; and
diligently, though as yet in secret, he laboured in what he felt to be
his destined vocation. He was never more productive than at this time,
when he wrote such skits on the kirk and its associates as "The Twa
Herds" (pastors), "Holy Willie's Prayer," "The Holy Fair," and "The
Ordination." "Hallowe'en," a descriptive poem, perhaps even more
exquisitely wrought than "The Holy Fair," also belongs to the Mossgiel
period, as does an even more notable effort.
Burns had often remarked to his brother that there was something
peculiarly venerable in the phrase, "Let us worship God," used by a
decent, sober head of a family introducing family worship. To this
sentiment we are indebted for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," the hint of
the plan and title of which were taken from Fergusson's "Farmer's
Ingle." It is, perhaps, of all Burns's pieces, the one whose exclusion
from the collection, were such a thing possible nowadays, would be the
most injurious, if not to the genius, at least to the character of the
man. In spite of many feeble lines and some heavy stanzas, it appears to
me that even his genius would suffer more in estimation by being
contemplated in the absence of this poem than of any other single
performance he has left us. Loftier flights he certainly has made, but
in these he remained but a short while on the wing, and effort is too
often perceptible; here the motion is easy, gentle, placidly undulating.
Burns's art had now reached its climax; but it is time to revert more
particularly to his personal history. In this his loves very nearly
occupy the chief place. That they were many, his songs prove; for in
those days he wrote no love-songs on imaginary heroines. "Mary Morison,"
"Behind yon hills where Lugar flows," and "On Cessnock banks there lives
a lass," belong to this date; and there are three or four inspired by
Mary Campbell--"Highland Mary"--the object of by far the deepest passion
Burns ever knew, a passion which he has immortalised in the noblest of
his elegiacs, "To Mary in Heaven."
Farming had, of course, to engage his attention as well as love-making,
but he was less successful in the one than in the other. The first year
of Mossgiel, from buying bad seed, the second from a late harvest, he
lost half his crops. In these circumstances, he thought of proceeding to
the West Indies. Presently he had further cause for contemplating an
escape from his native land. Among his "flames" was one Jean Armour, the
daughter of a mason in Mauchline, where she was the reigning toast. Jean
found herself "as ladies wish to be that love their lords." Burns's
worldly circumstances were in a most miserable state when he was
informed of her condition, and he was staggered. He saw nothing for it
but to fly the country at once.
Meanwhile, meeting Jean, he yielded to her tears, and gave her a written
acknowledgment of marriage, valid according to Scottish law. Her
father's wrath was not appeased thereby. Burns, confessing himself
unequal to the support of a family, proposed to go immediately to
Jamaica in search of better fortunes. He offered, if this were rejected,
to abandon his farm, already a hopeless concern, and earn at least bread
for his wife and children as a day labourer at home. But nothing would
satisfy Armour, who, in his indignation, made his daughter destroy the
written evidence of her "marriage."
_III.--Burns at His Zenith_
Such was his poverty that he could not satisfy the parish officers; and
the only alternative that presented itself to him was America or a gaol.
A situation was obtained for him in Jamaica, but he had no money to pay
his passage. It occurred to him that the money might be raised by
publishing his poems; and a first edition, printed at Kilmarnock in
1786, brought him nearly £20, out of which he paid for a steerage
passage from the Clyde. "My chest was on the road to Greenock," he
tells; "I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia,
'The gloomy night is gathering fast,' when a letter from Dr. Blacklock
to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects
to my poetic ambition."
Blacklock, the blind divine upon whom Johnson "looked with reverence,"
had read the newly published poems, and it was his praise of them that
directly prevented Burns from expatriating himself. "His opinion that I
would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh fired me so much that away I
posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter
of introduction. The baneful star that had so long shed its blasting
influence in my zenith for once made a revolution to the nadir." In
Edinburgh, which Burns reached in November, 1786, he was introduced by
Blacklock to all the _literati_, and within a fortnight he was writing
to a friend: "I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas à
Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect to see my birthday inscribed
among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks,
along with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge."
But he bore his honours in a manner worthy of himself. "The attentions
he received," says Dugald Stewart, "from all ranks and descriptions of
persons were such as would have turned any head but his own. I cannot
say that I could perceive any unfavourable effect which they left on his
mind." Scott, then a lad of fifteen, met him, and wrote a vivid
description of his appearance:
"His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a
sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its
effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His
features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture, but to me it conveys
the idea that they are diminished as if seen in perspective. I think his
countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I
would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very
sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school--_i.e._, none of your
modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the
_douce gudeman_ who held his own plough. There was a strong expression
of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think,
indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a
dark cast, which glowed (I say literally _glowed_) when he spoke with
feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head,
though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His
conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest
presumption. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the
laird. I do not speak in _malam partem_ when I say I never saw a man in
company with his superiors in station and information more perfectly
free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was
told that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always
with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their
attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark
this."
It needs no effort of imagination to conceive what the sensations of an
isolated set of scholars, almost all either clergymen or professors,
must have been in the presence of this big-boned, brawny stranger, with
his great flashing eyes, who had forced his way among them from the
plough-tail at a single stride; and it will always be a reflection in
their honour that they suffered no pedantic prejudices to interfere with
their reception of the poet.
Shortly after his arrival he arranged with Creech, the chief bookseller
in Edinburgh, to undertake a second edition of his poems. This was
published in March, 1787, the subscribers numbering over 1,500. Out of
money thus derived, he provided a tombstone for the neglected grave of
Robert Fergusson, his "elder brother in the muses," in the Canongate
churchyard. Then he decided to visit some of the classic scenes of
Scottish history and romance. He had as yet seen but a small part of his
own country, and this by no means among the most interesting, until,
indeed, his own poetry made it equal, on that score, to any other.
Various tours were, in fact, undertaken, the chief being, however, in
the Border district and in the Highlands. Usually he returned to
Edinburgh, partly to be near his jovial intimates, and partly because,
after the excitement attending his first appearance in the capital, he
found himself incapable of settling down contentedly in the humble
circle at Mossgiel.
_IV.--The Clarinda Romance_
During the winter of 1787--1788, he had a little romance with Mrs.
McLehose, the beautiful widow to whom he addressed the song, "Clarinda,
mistress of my soul," and a series of letters which present more
instances of bad taste, bombastic language, and fulsome sentiment than
could be produced from all his writings besides. It was the same lady
who inspired the lines which furnished Byron with a motto, and Scott
declared to be "worth a thousand romances ":
Had we never loved so kindly
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
At this time the publication of Johnson's "Scots Musical Museum" was
going on in Edinburgh; and Burns, being enlisted as a contributor,
furnished many of his best songs to that work. From his youth upwards he
had been an enthusiastic lover of the old minstrelsy and music of his
country; but he now studied both subjects with better opportunities and
appliances than he could have commanded previously; and it is from this
time that we must date his ambition to transmit his own poetry to
posterity, in eternal association with those exquisite airs which had
hitherto, in far too many instances, been married to verses that did not
deserve to be immortal. Later, beginning in 1792, he wrote about sixty
songs for George Thomson's collection, many of which, like "Auld Lang
Syne" and "Scots Wha Hae," are in the front rank of popularity. The
letters he addressed to Thomson are full of interesting detail of
various kinds. In one he writes:
"Until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing, such as it is,
I can never compose for it. My way is this. I consider the poetic
sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression--then
choose my theme--compose one stanza. When that is composed, which is
generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down
now and then, look out for objects in Nature round me that are in unison
or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom,
humming every now and 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, and 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. Seriously this, at home, is almost
invariably my way."
But to return. During his second winter in Edinburgh, Burns met with a
hackney coach accident which kept him to the house for six weeks. While
in this state he learned from Mauchline that his intimacy with Jean
Armour had again exposed her to the reproaches of her family. The father
sternly turned her out of doors, and Burns had to arrange about a
shelter for her and his children in a friend's house. In the meantime,
through the influence of some sympathisers, he had been appointed an
officer of excise. "I have chosen this," he wrote, "after mature
deliberation. It is immediate bread, and, though poor in comparison of
the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison of
all my preceding life." However, when he settled finally with Creech
about his poems, he found himself with between £500 and £600; and he
retained his excise commission as a _dernier ressort_, to be used only
if a reverse of fortune rendered it necessary.
He decided now to exchange Mossgiel for Ellisland farm, about six miles
from Dumfries. As soon as he was able to leave Edinburgh, he had hurried
to Mossgiel and gone through a justice-of-peace marriage with Jean
Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited
man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make
her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or
that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet.
Some months later he writes that his marriage "was not, perhaps, in
consequence of the attachment of romance, but I have no cause to repent
it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable
dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of
boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the
sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the
country." It was during the honeymoon, as he calls it, that he wrote the
beautiful "O a' the airts the wind can blaw." He used to say that the
happiest period of his life was the first winter at Ellisland, with wife
and children around him. It was then that he wrote, among other songs,
"John Anderson, my Jo," "Tarn Glen," "My heart's in the Highlands," "Go
fetch to me a pint of wine," and "Willie brewed a peck o' maut."
But the "golden days" of Ellisland were short. Burns's farming
speculations once more failed, and he had to take up his excise
commission. "I am now," says he, "a poor rascally gauger, condemned to
gallop two hundred miles every week to inspect dirty ponds and yeasty
barrels." Both in prose and verse he has recorded the feelings with
which he first followed his new vocation, and his jests on the subject
are uniformly bitter. It was a vocation which exposed him to temptations
of the kind he was least likely to resist. His extraordinary
conversational powers led him into peril wherever he went. If he entered
an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his
arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes
had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the
ingle; the largest punch-bowl was produced; and "Be ours this night--who
knows what comes to-morrow?" was the language of every eye in the circle
that welcomed him.
At home, too, lion-gazers from all quarters beset him; they ate and
drank at his cost, and often went away to criticise him and his fare, as
if they had done Burns and his black bowl great honour in condescending
to be entertained for a single evening with such company. Among others
who called on him was Captain Grose, the antiquary, and it is to this
acquaintance that we owe "Tam o' Shanter," which Burns believed to be
the best of all his productions.
_V.--Closing Years of the Poet's Life_
Towards the close of 1791 he gave up his farm, and procuring an excise
appointment to the Dumfries division, removed to the county town. His
moral course from this time was downwards. "In Dumfries," says Heron,
speaking from personal knowledge, "his dissipation became still more
deeply habitual. He was here exposed more than in the country to be
solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and idle." His intemperance
was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations were occasional, not
systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in
the retrospect; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was
never deadened, of one who encountered more temptations from without and
from within than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to
contend against, are even able to imagine; of one, finally, who prayed
for pardon, where alone effectual pardon could be found.
In how far the "thoughtless follies" of the poet did actually hasten his
end, it is needless to conjecture. They had their share, unquestionably,
along with other influences which it would be inhuman to characterise as
mere follies. In these closing years of his life he had to struggle
constantly with pecuniary difficulties, than which nothing could have
been more likely to pour bitterness intolerable into the cup of his
existence. His lively imagination exaggerated to itself every real evil;
and this among, and perhaps above, all the rest; at least, in many of
his letters we find him alluding to the probability of his being
arrested for debts, which we now know to have been of very trivial
amount.
In 1795 he was greatly upset by the death, in his absence, of his
youngest child. Writing in January, 1796, he says: "I had scarcely begun
to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most
severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful, until, after
many weeks of a sick-bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am
beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my
own door in the street."
But a few days after this Burns was so imprudent as to join a festive
circle at a tavern dinner, where he remained till about three in the
morning. The weather was severe, and he, being too much intoxicated,
took no precaution in thus exposing his debilitated frame to its
influence. It has been said that he fell asleep upon the snow on his way
home. The result was an acute return of his rheumatism, and his health
gradually got worse. He went to the Solway for sea-bathing, but came
back to Dumfries "visibly changed in his looks, being with difficulty
able to stand upright and reach his own door."
It soon became known that he was dying, and the anxiety, not of the rich
and the learned only, but of the mechanics and peasants, exceeded all
belief. Wherever two or three people stood together their talk was
solely of Burns. His good humour was unruffled, and his wit never
forsook him; but he repressed with a smile the hopes of his friends, and
told them he had lived long enough. The fever increased, and his
strength diminished, and he died on July 21, 1796. His funeral, attended
by ten or twelve thousand people, was an impressive and mournful sight.
The grave was at first covered by a plain tombstone; but a costly
mausoleum was subsequently erected on the most elevated site which the
churchyard presented. Thither the remains of the poet were solemnly
transferred on June 5, 1815.
It requires a graver audacity of hypocrisy than falls to the share of
most men to declaim against Burns's sensibility to the tangible cares
and toils of his earthly condition; there are more who venture on broad
denunciations of his sympathy with the joys of sense and passion.
That some men in every age will comfort themselves in the practice of
certain vices, by reference to particular passages both in the history
and in the poetry of Burns, there is all reason to fear; but surely the
general influence of both is calculated, and has been found, to produce
far different effects. The universal popularity which his writings have
all along enjoyed among one of the most virtuous of nations is of itself
a decisive circumstance.
On one point there can be no controversy; the poetry of Burns has had
most powerful influence in reviving and strengthening the national
feelings of his countrymen. Amidst penury and labour his youth fed on
the old minstrelsy and traditional glories of his nation, and his genius
divined that what he felt so deeply must belong to a spirit that might
lie smothered around him, but could not be extinguished. Burns "knew his
own worth, and reverenced the lyre." But he ever announced himself, as a
peasant, the representative of his class, the painter of their manners,
inspired by the same influences which ruled their bosoms; and whosoever
sympathised with his verse had his soul opened for the moment to the
whole family of man.
Short and painful as were his years, Burns has left behind him a volume
in which there is inspiration for every fancy and music for every mood;
which lives, and will live in strength and vigour, "to soothe," as a
generous lover of genius has said, "the sorrows of how many a lover, to
inflame the patriotism of how many a soldier, to fan the fires of how
many a genius, to disperse the gloom of solitude, appease the agonies of
pain, encourage virtue, and show vice its ugliness." In this volume,
centuries hence as now, wherever a Scotsman may wander he will find the
dearest consolation of his exile.
* * * * *