Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the
influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes,
after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and,
like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own
hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near
prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill,
backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family,
he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On
his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more
result in theory than practice; and he had reflected upon many subjects
as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation; he
would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch; and Robert,
when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept
his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and
vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general,
and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper
schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense
and resolution with which he set himself to supply the deficiency by his
own influence. For many years he was their chief companion; he spoke
with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men; at
night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic; he borrowed books
for them on history, science, and theology; and he felt it his duty to
supplement this last—the trait is laughably Scottish—by a dialogue of his
own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly
represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield herding
cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or to sit by
her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family
tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of
theology—everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up a
popular Scotch type. If I mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it is
only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old Marshal
Loudon, to help out the reader’s comprehension by a popular but unworthy
instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and wise man
that his household became a school to itself, and neighbours who came
into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father, brothers,
and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a book in the
other. We are surprised at the prose style of Robert; that of Gilbert
need surprise us no less; even William writes a remarkable letter for a
young man of such slender opportunities. One anecdote marks the taste of
the family. Murdoch brought _Titus Andronicus_, and, with such dominie
elocution as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before this rustic
audience; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora insults
Lavinia, with one voice and “in an agony of distress” they refused to
hear it to an end. In such a father and with such a home, Robert had
already the making of an excellent education; and what Murdoch added,
although it may not have been much in amount, was in character the very
essence of a literary training. Schools and colleges, for one great man
whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen; the strong spirit can do well
upon more scanty fare.
Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his complete
character—a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy
of notice; in his own phrase “panting after distinction,” and in his
brother’s “cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or
of more consequence than himself:” with all this, he was emphatically of
the artist nature. Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton
church, with the only tied hair in the parish, “and his plaid, which was
of a particular colour, wrapped in a particular manner round his
shoulders.” Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family,
a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in
masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great-coat, and great Highland
broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is
the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter
students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter;
and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a
man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general attention and
remark. His father wrote the family name _Burnes_; Robert early adopted
the orthography _Burness_ from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his
twenty-eighth year changed it once more to _Burns_. It is plain that the
last transformation was not made without some qualm; for in addressing
his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number
two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his
appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom.
Again, he was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation. To
no other man’s have we the same conclusive testimony from different
sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a commonplace that the
best of his works was what he said in talk. Robertson the historian
“scarcely ever met any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour;”
the Duchess of Gordon declared that he “carried her off her feet;” and,
when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear
him talk. But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine
by any means. He made himself feared in the village for his tongue. He
would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps—for the statement
of Sillar is not absolute—say cutting things of his acquaintances behind
their back. At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his
religious views amid hisses. These details stamp the man. He had no
genteel timidities in the conduct of his life. He loved to force his
personality upon the world. He would please himself, and shine. Had he
lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can
conceive him writing _Jehan_ for _Jean_, swaggering in Gautier’s red
waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public café with paradox and
gasconnade.
A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in love.
_Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut_. His affections were often enough
touched, but perhaps never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of
discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he ever touched the
happy isle. A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and
even from childhood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital
malady. Burns was formed for love; he had passion, tenderness, and a
singular bent in the direction; he could foresee, with the intuition of
an artist, what love ought to be; and he could not conceive a worthy life
without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after
every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong
temperament, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost
the power of self-devotion before an opportunity occurred. The
circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the result.
For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day’s work was over and the
beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter
tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour
or two in courtship. Rule 10 of the Bachelors’ Club at Tarbolton
provides that “every man proper for a member of this Society must be a
professed lover of _one or more_ of the female sex.” The rich, as Burns
himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupations, but
these lads had nothing but their “cannie hour at e’en.” It was upon love
and flirtation that this rustic society was built; gallantry was the
essence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of
Versailles; and the days were distinguished from each other by
love-letters, meetings, tiffs, reconciliations, and expansions to the
chosen confidant, as in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for a man
of Burns’s indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his
voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs
by the way. He was “constantly the victim of some fair enslaver”—at
least, when it was not the other way about; and there were often
underplots and secondary fair enslavers in the background. Many—or may
we not say most?—of these affairs were entirely artificial. One, he
tells us, he began out of “a vanity of showing his parts in courtship,”
for he piqued himself on his ability at a love-letter. But, however they
began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end; and he
stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively without
a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of “battering himself into
a warm affection,”—a debilitating and futile exercise. Once he had
worked himself into the vein, “the agitations of his mind and body” were
an astonishment to all who knew him. Such a course as this, however
pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more
and more towards the professional Don Juan. With a leer of what the
French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his
seductions; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent
when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first bastard.
We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an
acquaintance with women: he would have conquering manners; he would bear
down upon his rustic game with the grace that comes of absolute
assurance—the Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet another manner
did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame. If he were great
as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a
passion; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old a
hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even string
a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch the
hesitating fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only his
“curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity” that recommended him for a
second in such affairs; it must have been a distinction to have the
assistance and advice of _Rab the Ranter_; and one who was in no way
formidable by himself might grow dangerous and attractive through the
fame of his associate.
I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough moorland
country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year, looked upon
with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best talker, the
best letter-writer, the most famous lover and confidant, the laureate
poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish. He says he
had then as high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can well
believe it. Among the youth he walked _facile princeps_, an apparent
god; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld should swoop
upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company with seven
others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the stool of
repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis,
in so conspicuous a shame? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more idolised
than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman most
acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn? Or, to take a simile from nearer
home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even corporal
punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly
school-master, against the influence and fame of the school’s hero?
And now we come to the culminating point of Burns’s early period. He
began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread
from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and began to reach the
ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part
from his lax views about religion; for at this time that old war of the
creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our
poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent
skirmish; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition party,—a
clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit enough to
appreciate the value of the poet’s help, and not sufficient taste to
moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their surprise
when _Holy Willie_ was put into their hand; like the amorous lads of
Tarbolton, they recognised in him the best of seconds. His satires began
to go the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, “read him
into fame;” he himself was soon welcome in many houses of a better sort,
where his admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct from his
Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a country dancing school,
completed what his poems had begun. We have a sight of him at his first
visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman’s shoes, coasting around the carpet
as though that were sacred ground. But he soon grew used to carpets and
their owners; and he was still the superior of all whom he encountered,
and ruled the roost in conversation. Such was the impression made, that
a young clergyman, himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused
when he saw Robert enter the church in which he was to preach. It is not
surprising that the poet determined to publish: he had now stood the test
of some publicity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six
winter months the bulk of his more important poems. Here was a young man
who, from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly; from the cynosure of
a parish, he had become the talk of a county; once the bard of rural
courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in the
world’s bookshops.
A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete the sketch. This
strong young plough-man, who feared no competitor with the flail,
suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours; he would fall
into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past
and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion,
but haunted by it; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before
God in what I can only call unmanly penitence. As he had aspirations
beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses
to match. He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a winter
tempest; he had a singular tenderness for animals; he carried a book with
him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this service two
copies of the _Man of Feeling_. With young people in the field at work
he was very long-suffering; and when his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to
them—“O man, ye are no for young folk,” he would say, and give the
defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts of the men whom he
met, he read as in a book; and, what is yet more rare, his knowledge of
himself equalled his knowledge of others. There are no truer things said
of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters. Country Don Juan
as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which values itself on what
it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness to a hair: he took
himself boldly for what he was, and, except in moments of hypochondria,
declared himself content.