On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the
place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set
danced Jean Armour, the master-mason’s daughter, and our dark-eyed Don
Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame,
_caret quia vate sacro_), apparently sensible of some neglect, followed
his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful
comments followed; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner—or, as I
should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the company at large—that
“he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his
dog.” Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on Mauchline
green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog; and the
dog, “scouring in long excursion,” scampered with four black paws across
the linen. This brought the two into conversation; when Jean, with a
somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if “he had yet got any of the lasses
to like him as well as his dog?”
It is one of the misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour
forbids him to refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon
duty, or like the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns
accepted the provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl—pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
“battering himself into a warm affection;” and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life’s serious issues.
Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to expect was
marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest thoughts; she might
now be glad if she could get what she would never have chosen. As for
Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised that his voyage of
discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere—that he was not, and never
had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in the pressure of the
hour. “Against two things,” he writes, “I am as fixed as fate—staying at
home, and owning her conjugally. The first, by heaven, I will not
do!—the last, by hell, I will never do!” And then he adds, perhaps
already in a more relenting temper: “If you see Jean, tell her I will
meet her, so God help me in my hour of need.” They met accordingly; and
Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these heights of
independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of marriage. It is
the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually false
positions—relations in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it
is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a case.
Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be glad that
Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover that we can
be no longer true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he came away
from that interview not very content, but with a glorious conscience; and
as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, “How are Thy servants
blest, O Lord!” Jean, on the other hand, armed with her “lines,”
confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his wife.
Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves in their
farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do country lass;
and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his
daughter’s part. At least, he was not so much incensed by her slip from
virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to cover it. Of this
he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only
to appease her parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to
the poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction; and all parties
imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was thus dissolved. To a
proud man like Burns here was a crushing blow. The concession which had
been wrung from his pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth. The
Armour family preferred disgrace to his connection. Since the promise,
besides, he had doubtless been busy “battering himself” back again into
his affection for the girl; and the blow would not only take him in his
vanity, but wound him at the heart.
He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement. Jean’s marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding nature
of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the wandering
affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of a
superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy.
Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet’s life. His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment of
the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he was
under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his wife;
now, he had “orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard the
_Nancy_, Captain Smith;” now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:—
“The bursting tears my heart declare;
Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!”
But the great master dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to bring
up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success of the
book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the author’s
purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh and push
his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in these
series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for
Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change came over his
face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterwards, when the
story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then learned
the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no
reference to this passage of his life; it was an adventure of which, for
I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing
we may be glad: in after years he visited the poor girl’s mother, and
left her with the impression that he was “a real warm-hearted chield.”
Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for
Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter
was “agog with the ploughman poet.” Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair,
“Duchess Gordon and all the gay world,” were of his acquaintance. Such a
revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must
be remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since his early
boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement
seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the furrow
wielding “the thresher’s weary flingin’-tree;” and his education, his
diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman. Now he
stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned. We can see him as
he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat
striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy
ploughman’s figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of
sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and
his large dark eye “literally glowing” as he spoke. “I never saw such
another eye in a human head,” says Walter Scott, “though I have seen the
most distinguished men of my time.” With men, whether they were lords or
omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from
bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the social courage
to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not embarrassed in this
society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a
titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an
epigram. “These gentlemen,” said he, “remind me of some spinsters in my
country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor
woof.” Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce commander
of himself in their society; he was disqualified by his acquired nature
as a Don Juan; and he, who had been so much at his ease with country
lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of deference. One lady, who
met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanour.
“His manner was not prepossessing—scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural.
It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or _landertness_, so that when he
said the music was ‘bonnie, bonnie,’ it was like the expression of a
child.” These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight degree
of intimacy the affectation would grow less. And his talk to women had
always “a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the
attention particularly.”
The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well to
Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in
similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect
neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a
peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made
welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice,
helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as
soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the
elevation with perfect dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when
the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense
never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his Edinburgh
popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a day. He wrote a few
letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude; but in practice he
suffered no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he
never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he
was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the
acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise
similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an
admirable appearance on the stage of life—socially successful, intimately
self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.
In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we return
to Burns’s love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had seized
upon the opportunity of a flirtation, and had carried the “battering” so
far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal two days with this
anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of this affair may be
gathered from the song in which he commemorated its occurrence. “I love
the dear lassie,” he sings, “because she loves me;” or, in the tongue of
prose: “Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it, and
even now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to profit by it again.”
A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man. Meantime, early in
the winter, and only once, we find him regretting Jean in his
correspondence. “Because”—such is his reason—“because he does not think
he will ever meet so delicious an armful again;” and then, after a brief
excursion into verse, he goes straight on to describe a new episode in
the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a Lothian farmer for a
heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these references to his
future wife; they are essential to the comprehension of Burns’s character
and fate. In June, we find him back at Mauchline, a famous man. There,
the Armour family greeted him with a “mean, servile compliance,” which
increased his former disgust. Jean was not less compliant; a second time
the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not
love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a year ago;
and, though Burns took advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest
and most cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent. Judge
of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return—a letter to
my mind among the most degrading in the whole collection—a letter which
seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. “I am
afraid,” it goes, “I have almost ruined one source, the principal one,
indeed, of my former happiness—the eternal propensity I always had to
fall in love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture; I have no
paradisiacal evening interviews.” Even the process of “battering” has
failed him, you perceive. Still he had some one in his eye—a lady, if
you please, with a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had “seen the
politest quarters in Europe.” “I frequently visited her,” he writes,
“and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant
formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my
careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after
her return to —, I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my
remarks further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote
me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I had
to travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. But I am an
old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my
foot, like Corporal Trim’s hat.” I avow a carnal longing, after this
transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little
question that to this lady he must have repeated his addresses, and that
he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,
rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six months after
the date of this letter, Burns, back in Edinburgh, is served with a writ
_in meditatione fugæ_, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of
humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family.
About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in the story
of the poet’s random affections. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes
M’Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two
children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could
use her pen, and had read _Werther_ with attention. Sociable, and even
somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable,
but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers
refer to daintily as “her somewhat voluptuous style of beauty,” judging
from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas’s invaluable edition, the reader
will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in all, I
believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a fancy
for each other on the spot; Mrs. M’Lehose, in her turn, invited him to
tea; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a
_tête-à-tête_, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and
this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It was
begun in simple sport; they are already at their fifth or sixth exchange,
when Clarinda writes: “It is really curious so much _fun_ passing between
two persons who saw each other only _once_;” but it is hardly safe for a
man and woman in the flower of their years to write almost daily, and
sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms too plain, and
generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The exercise
partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be
apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of
this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps,
not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is
baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura
passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous
sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress
with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by
the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
“Oh, Clarinda,” writes Burns, “shall we not meet in a state—some yet
unknown state—of being, where the lavish hand of Plenty shall minister to
the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of
Prudence shall never blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?” The
design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a
Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to fancy they are not gravely
making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and
charming sensibility, are the current topics. “I am delighted, charming
Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion,” writes Burns; and
the pair entertained a fiction that this was their “favourite subject.”
“This is Sunday,” writes the lady, “and not a word on our favourite
subject. O fy ‘divine Clarinda!’” I suspect, although quite
unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemption,
they but used the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the
meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine
passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda’s
friends were hurt and suspicious; her clergyman interfered; she herself
had smart attacks of conscience, but her heart had gone from her control;
it was altogether his, and she “counted all things but loss—heaven
excepted—that she might win and keep him.” Burns himself was transported
while in her neighbourhood, but his transports somewhat rapidly declined
during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that, womanlike, he took on
the colour of his mistress’s feeling; that he could not but heat himself
at the fire of her unaffected passion; but that, like one who should
leave the hearth upon a winter’s night, his temperature soon fell when he
was out of sight, and in a word, though he could share the symptoms, that
he had never shared the disease. At the same time, amid the fustian of
the letters there are forcible and true expressions, and the love verses
that he wrote upon Clarinda are among the most moving in the language.
We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean, once more in the
family way, was turned out of doors by her family; and Burns had her
received and cared for in the house of a friend. For he remained to the
last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister
courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he
had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the
south-west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son.
They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late
for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not
have to wait. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful
simplicity: “I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday; and
there’s a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a
little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which
kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale—as
the lasses do at Hallowe’en—‘in to mysel’.’” Arrived at Mauchline, Burns
installed Jean Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour to
promise her help and countenance in the approaching confinement. This
was kind at least; but hear his expressions: “I have taken her a room; I
have taken her to my arms; I have given her a mahogany bed; I have given
her a guinea. . . . I swore her 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.” And then he took advantage
of the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: “I this morning called for a
certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her;” and he
accused her of “tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary
fawning.” This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he
was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: “Your hopes,
your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don’t mind them. I will
take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare
away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you.” Again, on the
21st: “Will you open, with satisfaction and delight, a letter from a man
who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death,
through death, and for ever. . . . How rich am I to have such a treasure
as you! . . . ‘The Lord God knoweth,’ and, perhaps, ‘Israel he shall
know,’ my love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember
you in my prayers.” By the 7th of April, seventeen days later he had
already decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife.
A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct
is seen, upon a nearer examination, to be grounded both in reason and in
kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career; he had
taken a farm; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart,
was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns, to
whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and self-respect.
This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect; but there is no
doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a sincere
determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a loan of
a hundred and eighty pounds; should he do nothing for the poor girl whom
he had ruined? It was true he could not do as he did without brutally
wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment of his bygone fault; he was,
as he truly says, “damned with a choice only of different species of
error and misconduct.” To be professional Don Juan, to accept the
provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead a
man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at
last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been
strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil; if he had
only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had
been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world; but a
man, alas! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts,
stands among changing events without foundation or resource. {71}