Museum of Johnson, a work which, amid many imperfections of taste and
arrangement, contains more of the true old music and genuine old songs
of Scotland, than any other collection with which I am acquainted.
Burns gathered oral airs, and fitted them with words of mirth or of
woe, of tenderness or of humour, with unexampled readiness and
felicity; he eked out old fragments and sobered down licentious
strains so much in the olden spirit and feeling, that the new cannot
be distinguished from the ancient; nay, he inserted lines and half
lines, with such skill and nicety, that antiquarians are perplexed to
settle which is genuine or which is simulated. Yet with all this he
abated not of the natural mirth or the racy humour of the lyric muse
of Scotland: he did not like her the less because she walked like some
of the maidens of her strains, high-kilted at times, and spoke with
the freedom of innocence. In these communications we observe how
little his border-jaunt among the fountains of ancient song
contributed either of sentiment or allusion, to his lyrics; and how
deeply his strains, whether of pity or of merriment, were coloured by
what he had seen, and heard, and felt in the Highlands. In truth, all
that lay beyond the Forth was an undiscovered land to him; while the
lowland districts were not only familiar to his mind and eye, but all
their more romantic vales and hills and streams were already musical
in songs of such excellence as induced him to dread failure rather
than hope triumph. Moreover, the Highlands teemed with jacobitical
feelings, and scenes hallowed by the blood or the sufferings of men
heroic, and perhaps misguided; and the poet, willingly yielding to an
impulse which was truly romantic, and believed by thousands to be
loyal, penned his songs on Drumossie, and Killiecrankie, as the
spirit of sorrow or of bitterness prevailed. Though accompanied,
during his northern excursions, by friends whose socialities and
conversation forbade deep thought, or even serious remark, it will be
seen by those who read his lyrics with care, that his wreath is
indebted for some of its fairest flowers to the Highlands.
The second winter of the poet's abode in Edinburgh had now arrived: it
opened, as might have been expected, with less rapturous welcomes and
with more of frosty civility than the first. It must be confessed,
that indulgence in prolonged socialities, and in company which, though
clever, could not be called select, contributed to this; nor must it
be forgotten that his love for the sweeter part of creation was now
and then carried beyond the limits of poetic respect, and the
delicacies of courtesy; tending to estrange the austere and to lessen
the admiration at first common to all. Other causes may be assigned
for this wane of popularity: he took no care to conceal his contempt
for all who depended on mere scholarship for eminence, and he had a
perilous knack in sketching with a sarcastic hand the characters of
the learned and the grave. Some indeed of the high literati of the
north--Home, the author of Douglas, was one of them--spoke of the poet
as a chance or an accident: and though they admitted that he was a
poet, yet he was not one of settled grandeur of soul, brightened by
study. Burns was probably aware of this; he takes occasion in some of
his letters to suggest, that the hour may be at hand when he shall be
accounted by scholars as a meteor, rather than a fixed light, and to
suspect that the praise bestowed on his genius was partly owing to the
humility of his condition. From his lingering so long about Edinburgh,
the nobility began to dread a second volume by subscription, the
learned to regard him as a fierce Theban, who resolved to carry all
the outworks to the temple of Fame without the labour of making
regular approaches; while a third party, and not the least numerous,
looked on him with distrust, as one who hovered between Jacobite and
Jacobin; who disliked the loyal-minded, and loved to lampoon the
reigning family. Besides, the marvel of the inspired ploughman had
begun to subside; the bright gloss of novelty was worn off, and his
fault lay in his unwillingness to see that he had made all the sport
which the Philistines expected, and was required to make room for some
"salvage" of the season, to paw, and roar, and shake the mane. The
doors of the titled, which at first opened spontaneous, like those in
Milton's heaven, were now unclosed for him with a tardy courtesy: he
was received with measured stateliness, and seldom requested to repeat
his visit. Of this changed aspect of things he complained to a friend:
but his real sorrows were mixed with those of the fancy:--he told Mrs.
Dunlop with what pangs of heart he was compelled to take shelter in a
corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should
mangle him in the mire. In this land of titles and wealth such
querulous sensibilities must have been frequently offended.
Burns, who had talked lightly hitherto of resuming the plough, began
now to think seriously about it, for he saw it must come to that at
last. Miller, of Dalswinton, a gentleman of scientific acquirements,
and who has the merit of applying the impulse of steam to navigation,
had offered the poet the choice of his farms, on a fair estate which
he had purchased on the Nith: aided by a westland farmer, he selected
Ellisland, a beautiful spot, fit alike for the steps of ploughman or
poet. On intimating this to the magnates of Edinburgh, no one lamented
that a genius so bright and original should be driven to win his bread
with the sweat of his brow: no one, with an indignant eye, ventured to
tell those to whom the patronage of this magnificent empire was
confided, that they were misusing the sacred trust, and that posterity
would curse them for their coldness or neglect: neither did any of the
rich nobles, whose tables he had adorned by his wit, offer to enable
him to toil free of rent, in a land of which he was to be a permanent
ornament;--all were silent--all were cold--the Earl of Glencairn
alone, aided by Alexander Wood, a gentleman who merits praise oftener
than he is named, did the little that was done or attempted to be done
for him: nor was that little done on the peer's part without
solicitation:--"I wish to go into the excise;" thus he wrote to
Glencairn; "and I am told your lordship's interest will easily procure
me the grant from the commissioners: and your lordship's patronage and
goodness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretchedness,
and exile, emboldens me to ask that interest. You have likewise put it
in my power to save the little tie of home that sheltered an aged
mother, two brothers, and three sisters from destruction. I am ill
qualified to dog the heels of greatness with the impertinence of
solicitation, and tremble nearly as much at the thought of the cold
promise as the cold denial." The farm and the excise exhibit the
poet's humble scheme of life: the money of the one, he thought, would
support the toil of the other, and in the fortunate management of
both, he looked for the rough abundance, if not the elegancies
suitable to a poet's condition.
While Scotland was disgraced by sordidly allowing her brightest genius
to descend to the plough and the excise, the poet hastened his
departure from a city which had witnessed both his triumph and his
shame: he bade farewell in a few well-chosen words to such of the
classic literati--the Blairs, the Stewarts, the Mackenzies, and the
Tytlers--as had welcomed the rustic bard and continued to countenance
him; while in softer accents he bade adieu to the Clarindas and
Chlorises of whose charms he had sung, and, having wrung a settlement
from Creech, he turned his steps towards Mossgiel and Mauchline. He
had several reasons, and all serious ones, for taking Ayrshire in his
way to the Nith: he desired to see his mother, his brothers and
sisters, who had partaken of his success, and were now raised from
pining penury to comparative affluence: he desired to see those who
had aided him in his early struggles into the upper air--perhaps
those, too, who had looked coldly on, and smiled at his outward
aspirations after fame or distinction; but more than all, he desired
to see one whom he once and still dearly loved, who had been a
sufferer for his sake, and whom he proposed to make mistress of his
fireside and the sharer of his fortunes. Even while whispering of love
to Charlotte Hamilton, on the banks of the Devon, or sighing out the
affected sentimentalities of platonic or pastoral love in the ear of
Clarinda, his thoughts wandered to her whom he had left bleaching her
webs among the daisies on Mauchline braes--she had still his heart,
and in spite of her own and her father's disclamation, she was his
wife. It was one of the delusions of this great poet, as well as of
those good people, the Armours, that the marriage had been dissolved
by the destruction of the marriage-lines, and that Robert Burns and
Jean Armour were as single as though they had neither vowed nor
written themselves man and wife. Be that as it may, the time was come
when all scruples and obstacles were to be removed which stood in the
way of their union: their hands were united by Gavin Hamilton,
according to law, in April, 1788: and even the Reverend Mr. Auld, so
mercilessly lampooned, smiled forgivingly as the poet satisfied a
church wisely scrupulous regarding the sacred ceremony of marriage.
Though Jean Armour was but a country lass of humble degree, she had
sense and intelligence, and personal charms sufficient not only to win
and fix the attentions of the poet, but to sanction the praise which
he showered on her in song. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, he thus
describes her: "The most placid good nature and sweetness of
disposition, a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to
love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the
best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think
in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a
page but the Scriptures, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than
a penny-pay wedding." To the accomplished Margaret Chalmers, of
Edinburgh, he adds, to complete the picture, "I have got the
handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and
kindest heart in the country: a certain late publication of Scots'
poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the land,
as she has the finest wood-note wild you ever heard." With his young
wife, a punch bowl of Scottish marble, and an eight-day clock, both
presents from Mr. Armour, now reconciled to his eminent son-in-law,
with a new plough, and a beautiful heifer, given by Mrs. Dunlop, with
about four hundred pounds in his pocket, a resolution to toil, and a
hope of success, Burns made his appearance on the banks of the Nith,
and set up his staff at Ellisland. This farm, now a classic spot, is
about six miles up the river from Dumfries; it extends to upwards of a
hundred acres: the soil is kindly; the holmland portion of it loamy
and rich, and it has at command fine walks on the river side, and
views of the Friar's Carse, Cowehill, and Dalswinton. For a while the
poet had to hide his head in a smoky hovel; till a house to his fancy,
and offices for his cattle and his crops were built, his accommodation
was sufficiently humble; and his mind taking its hue from his
situation, infused a bitterness into the letters in which he first
made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in
Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the
only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity
and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value
of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as
for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a
poet." "This is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims,
"it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it save in drink.
I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of the spinning-wheel: I
hear, but cannot see it, for it is hidden in the smoke which eddies
round and round me before it seeks to escape by window and door. I
have no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me: No kenned
face but that of my old mare, Jenny Geddes--my life is dwindled down
to mere existence."
When the poet's new house was built and plenished, and the atmosphere
of his mind began to clear, he found the land to be fruitful, and its
people intelligent and wise. In Riddel, of Friar's Carse, he found a
scholar and antiquarian; in Miller, of Dalswinton, a man conversant
with science as well as with the world; in M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, a
generous and accomplished gentleman; and in John Syme, of Ryedale, a
man much after his own heart, and a lover of the wit and socialities
of polished life. Of these gentlemen Riddel, who was his neighbour,
was the favourite: a door was made in the march-fence which separated
Ellisland from Friar's Carse, that the poet might indulge in the
retirement of the Carse hermitage, a little lodge in the wood, as
romantic as it was beautiful, while a pathway was cut through the
dwarf oaks and birches which fringed the river bank, to enable the
poet to saunter and muse without lot or interruption. This attention
was rewarded by an inscription for the hermitage, written with
elegance as well as feeling, and which was the first fruits of his
fancy in this unpoetic land. In a happier strain he remembered Matthew
Henderson: this is one of the sweetest as well as happiest of his
poetic compositions. He heard of his friend's death, and called on
nature animate and inanimate, to lament the loss of one who held the
patent of his honours from God alone, and who loved all that was pure
and lovely and good. "The Whistle" is another of his Ellisland
compositions: the contest which he has recorded with such spirit and
humour took place almost at his door: the heroes were Fergusson, of
Craigdarroch, Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelltown, and Riddel, of the
Friar's Carse: the poet was present, and drank bottle and bottle about
with the best, and when all was done he seemed much disposed, as an
old servant at Friar's Carse remembered, to take up the victor.
Burns had become fully reconciled to Nithsdale, and was on the most
intimate terms with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the
crowning glory of all his poems. For this marvellous tale we are
indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary,
happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the
total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly
intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was
mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of
the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a
poem to accompany it. Burns consented, and before he left the table,
the various traditions which belonged to the ruin were passing through
his mind. One of these was of a farmer, who, on a night wild with
wind and rain, on passing the old kirk was startled by a light
glimmering inside the walls; on drawing near he saw a caldron hung
over a fire, in which the heads and limbs of children were simmering:
there was neither witch nor fiend to guard it, so he unhooked the
caldron, turned out the contents, and carried it home as a trophy. A
second tradition was of a man of Kyle, who, having been on a market
night detained late in Ayr, on crossing the old bridge of Doon, on his
way home, saw a light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway
kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district witches
dancing merrily round their master, the devil, who kept them "louping
and flinging" to the sound of a bagpipe. He knew several of the old
crones, and smiled at their gambols, for they were dancing in their
smocks: but one of them, and she happened to be young and rosy, had on
a smock shorter than those of her companions by two spans at least,
which so moved the farmer that he exclaimed, "Weel luppan, Maggie wi'
the short sark!" Satan stopped his music, the light was extinguished,
and out rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop for
the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross a stream: he
escaped; but Maggie, who was foremost, seized his horse's tail at the
middle of the bridge, and pulled it off in her efforts to stay him.
This poem was the work of a single day: Burns walked out to his
favourite musing path, which runs towards the old tower of the Isle,
along Nithside, and was observed to walk hastily and mutter as he
went. His wife knew by these signs that he was engaged in composition,
and watched him from the window; at last wearying, and moreover
wondering at the unusual length of his meditations, she took her
children with her and went to meet him; but as he seemed not to see
her, she stept aside among the broom to allow him to pass, which he
did with a flushed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines
aloud:--
"Now Tam! O, Tum! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sacks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies!"
He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as from fancy:
along the road which Tam came on that eventful night his memory
supplied circumstances which prepared him for the strange sight at the
kirk of Alloway. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, in
the snow; a murdered child had been found by some early hunters; a
tippling farmer had fallen from his horse at the expense of his neck,
beside a "meikle stane"; and a melancholy old woman had hanged herself
at the bush aboon the well, as the poem relates: all these matters the
poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them with a skill
which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. A pert lawyer from
Dumfries objected to the language as obscure: "Obscure, sir!" said
Burns; "you know not the language of that great master of your own
art--the devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not be
able to manage her defence!"
He wrote few poems after his marriage, but he composed many songs: the
sweet voice of Mrs. Burns and the craving of Johnson's Museum will in
some measure account for the number, but not for their variety, which
is truly wonderful. In the history of that mournful strain, "Mary in
Heaven," we read the story of many of his lyrics, for they generally
sprang from his personal feelings: no poet has put more of himself
into his poetry than Burns, "Robert, though ill of a cold," said his
wife, "had been busy all day--a day of September, 1789, with the
shearers in the field, and as he had got most of the corn into the
stack-yard, was in good spirits; but when twilight came he grew sad
about something, and could not rest: he wandered first up the
waterside, and then went into the stack-yard: I followed, and begged
him to come into the house, as he was ill, and the air was sharp and
cold. He said, 'Ay, ay,' but did not come: he threw himself down on
some loose sheaves, and lay looking at the sky, and particularly at a
large, bright star, which shone like another moon. At last, but that
was long after I had left him, he came home--the song was already
composed." To the memory of Mary Campbell he dedicated that touching
ode; and he thus intimates the continuance of his early affection for
"The fair haired lass of the west," in a letter of that time to Mrs.
Dunlop. "If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the
benevolent, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering idea, then,
is a world to come! There shall I, with speechless agony of rapture,
again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught
with truth, honour, constancy, and love." These melancholy words gave
way in their turn to others of a nature lively and humorous: "Tam
Glen," in which the thoughts flow as freely as the waters of the Nith,
on whose banks he wrote it; "Findlay," with its quiet vein of sly
simplicity; "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," the first of social, and
"She's fair and fause," the first of sarcastic songs, with "The deil's
awa wi' the Exciseman," are all productions of this period--a period
which had besides its own fears and its own forebodings.
For a while Burns seemed to prosper in his farm: he held the plough
with his own hand, he guided the harrows, he distributed the seed-corn
equally among the furrows, and he reaped the crop in its season, and
saw it safely covered in from the storms of winter with "thack and
rape;" his wife, too, superintended the dairy with a skill which she
had brought from Kyle, and as the harvest, for a season or two, was
abundant, and the dairy yielded butter and cheese for the market, it
seemed that "the luckless star" which ruled his lot had relented, and
now shone unboding and benignly. But much more is required than toil
of hand to make a successful farmer, nor will the attention bestowed
only by fits and starts, compensate for carelessness or oversight:
frugality, not in one thing but in all, is demanded, in small matters
as well as in great, while a careful mind and a vigilant eye must
superintend the labours of servants, and the whole system of in-door
and out-door economy. Now, during the three years which Burns stayed
in Ellisland, he neither wrought with that constant diligence which
farming demands, nor did he bestow upon it the unremitting attention
of eye and mind which such a farm required: besides his skill in
husbandry was but moderate--the rent, though of his own fixing, was
too high for him and for the times; the ground, though good, was not
so excellent as he might have had on the same estate--he employed more
servants than the number of acres demanded, and spread for them a
richer board than common: when we have said this we need not add the
expensive tastes induced by poetry, to keep readers from starting,
when they are told that Burns, at the close of the third year of
occupation, resigned his lease to the landlord, and bade farewell for
ever to the plough. He was not, however, quite desolate; he had for a
year or more been appointed on the excise, and had superintended a
district extending to ten large parishes, with applause; indeed, it
has been assigned as the chief reason for failure in his farm, that
when the plough or the sickle summoned him to the field, he was to be
found, either pursuing the defaulters of the revenue, among the
valleys of Dumfrieshire, or measuring out pastoral verse to the
beauties of the land. He retired to a house in the Bank-vennel of
Dumfries, and commenced a town-life: he commenced it with an empty
pocket, for Ellisland had swallowed up all the profits of his poems:
he had now neither a barn to produce meal nor barley, a barn-yard to
yield a fat hen, a field to which he could go at Martinmas for a mart,
nor a dairy to supply milk and cheese and butter to the table--he had,
in short, all to buy and little to buy with. He regarded it as a
compensation that he had no farm-rent to provide, no bankruptcies to
dread, no horse to keep, for his excise duties were now confined to
Dumfries, and that the burthen of a barren farm was removed from his
mind, and his muse at liberty to renew her unsolicited strains.
But from the day of his departure from "the barren" Ellisland, the
downward course of Burns may be dated. The cold neglect of his country
had driven him back indignantly to the plough, and he hoped to gain
from the furrowed field that independence which it was the duty of
Scotland to have provided: but he did not resume the plough with all
the advantages he possessed when he first forsook it: he had revelled
in the luxuries of polished life--his tastes had been rendered
expensive as well as pure: he had witnessed, and he hoped for the
pleasures of literary retirement, while the hands which had led
jewelled dames over scented carpets to supper tables leaded with
silver took hold of the hilts of the plough with more of reluctance
than good-will. Edinburgh, with its lords and its ladies, its delights
and its hopes, spoiled him for farming. Nor were his new labours more
acceptable to his haughty spirit than those of the plough: the excise
for a century had been a word of opprobrium or of hatred in the
north: the duties which it imposed were regarded, not by peasants
alone, as a serious encroachment upon the ancient rights of the
nation, and to mislead a gauger, or resist him, even to blood, was
considered by few as a fault. That the brightest genius of the
nation--one whose tastes and sensibilities were so peculiarly its
own--should be, as a reward, set to look after run-rum and smuggled
tobacco, and to gauge ale-wife's barrels, was a regret and a marvel to
many, and a source of bitter merriment to Burns himself.