It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns; but
it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he
contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it was, as
I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to
break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. “God
knows,” he writes, “my choice was as random as blind man’s buff.” He
consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her; that she
“has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him;” that she has a
good figure; that she has a “wood-note wild,” “her voice rising with ease
to B natural,” no less. The effect on the reader is one of unmingled
pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in his own
words) could “enter into his favourite studies or relish his favourite
authors;” this was not even a wife, after the affair of the marriage
lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her manage a
farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long, she would
still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity rather
than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now be
forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching
degree; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown
herself worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away,
which could neither change her husband’s heart nor affect the inherent
destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had
no root in nature; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting
Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda in the warmest
language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. Riddel, and on terms unfortunately
beyond any question with Anne Park.
Alas! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been
idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging on
to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie
Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M’Lehose; and in this period the
radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his
habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical
biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first, he saw and
recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is “enervated to
an alarming degree” by idleness and dissipation; and again, “my mind has
been vitiated with idleness.” It never fairly recovered. To business he
could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty; but
he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that
superior effort of concentration which is required for serious literary
work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused
himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of masterpieces
in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for
any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature of the songs is
itself characteristic of these idle later years; for they are often as
polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and
colloquial; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for
a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The
change in manner coincides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he
had written the _Address to a Louse_, which may be taken as an extreme
instance of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come upon the
rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the
second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural
consequence of his great change in life; but it is not the less typical
of his loss of moral courage that he should have given up all larger
ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked
literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should
have spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones.
Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper; he had to join to it the salary of
an exciseman; at last he had to give it up, and rely altogether on the
latter resource. He was an active officer; and, though he sometimes
tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony oddly representing
the public feeling of the period, that, while “in everything else he was
a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything seizable he was no better
than any other gauger.”
There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which need
delay us: and that was the sudden interest in politics which arose from
his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political
feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less
respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George
Borrow has nicknamed the “Charlie over the water” Scotchmen. It was a
sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built
on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is
the more excusable, because he lay out of the way of active politics in
his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living,
practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm
of human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to
rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the
same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand
with the new popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation against
the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes: “I daresay the American Congress
in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the English
Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate the
centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do
ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart.”
As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even violent;
but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his hottest
excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in life; an
open road to success and distinction for all classes of men. It was in
the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the
parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent snatches
against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this verse:—
“Here’s freedom to him that wad read,
Here’s freedom to him that wad write;
There’s nane ever feared that the truth should be heard
But them wham the truth wad indite.”
Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom. Many
stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country
coteries; how he proposed Washington’s health as an amendment to Pitt’s,
gave as a toast “the last verse of the last chapter of Kings,” and
celebrated Dumouriez in a doggrel impromptu full of ridicule and hate.
Now his sympathies would inspire him with _Scots_, _wha hae_; now involve
him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies and
explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns’s stomach. Nor was this
the front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took part in the
capture of an armed smuggler, bought at the subsequent sale four
carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French Assembly.
Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials; there was
trouble for Burns with his superiors; he was reminded firmly, however
delicately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be
silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have
rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr. Erskine,
subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, to
a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had been
muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an
exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he wrote, he
looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this:
“Burns, notwithstanding the _fanfaronnade_ of independence to be found in
his works, and after having been held forth to view and to public
estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of resources
within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry
exciseman, and shrunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the
meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind.” And then on he
goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living indignation, to
declare his right to a political opinion, and his willingness to shed his
blood for the political birthright of his sons. Poor, perturbed spirit!
he was indeed exercised in vain; those who share and those who differ
from his sentiments about the Revolution, alike understand and sympathise
with him in this painful strait; for poetry and human manhood are lasting
like the race, and politics, which are but a wrongful striving after
right, pass and change from year to year and age to age. The _Twa Dogs_
has already outlasted the constitution of Siéyès and the policy of the
Whigs; and Burns is better known among English-speaking races than either
Pitt or Fox.
Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led
downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that the best was out of him; he
refused to make another volume, for he felt that it would be a
disappointment; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was sure
it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he would take nothing; they
were all that he could do; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series
of Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a fling of pain
and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a viking,
he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these last and
inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate abnegation rises at
times near to the height of madness; as when he pretended that he had not
written, but only found and published, his immortal _Auld Lang Syne_. In
the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist; he was doing so
little, he would fain do that little well; and about two months before
his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his manuscripts for revisal,
saying that he would rather write five songs to his taste than twice that
number otherwise. The battle of his life was lost; in forlorn efforts to
do well, in desperate submissions to evil, the last years flew by. His
temper is dark and explosive, launching epigrams, quarrelling with his
friends, jealous of young puppy officers. He tries to be a good father;
he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad, and jaded, he can refuse no
occasion of temporary pleasure, no opportunity to shine; and he who had
once refused the invitations of lords and ladies is now whistled to the
inn by any curious stranger. His death (July 21, 1796), in his
thirty-seventh year, was indeed a kindly dispensation. It is the fashion
to say he died of drink; many a man has drunk more and yet lived with
reputation, and reached a good age. That drink and debauchery helped to
destroy his constitution, and were the means of his unconscious suicide,
is doubtless true; but he had failed in life, had lost his power of work,
and was already married to the poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he
had shown his inclination to convivial nights, or at least before that
inclination had become dangerous either to his health or his
self-respect. He had trifled with life, and must pay the penalty. He
had chosen to be Don Juan, he had grasped at temporary pleasures, and
substantial happiness and solid industry had passed him by. He died of
being Robert Burns, and there is no levity in such a statement of the
case; for shall we not, one and all, deserve a similar epitaph?